Golden Age of Broadway Series
Jerome Kern might be best remembered for Showboat, his epoch-launching 1927 musical, or for “almost” writing the music for Porgy and Bess and Annie Get Your Gun. The irascible Dorothy Parker (“And, oh how I do like Jerome Kern’s music!”) knew him as an enlightened Jazz Age tunesmith and fourteen-year-old Richard Rodgers queued at the Standard Theatre on upper Broadway over a dozen times to be enchanted by Kern’s Very Special Eddie.
You will be guided through Kern’s life in New York and California, sixty years that produced over 700 songs in more than 100 works for stage and film. Delight in some of his immortal tunes—"A Fine Romance," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," "All the Things You Are," "The Way You Look Tonight"—and enjoy samplings of live piano performance, personal correspondence, film clips and recordings of the masterworks which established Jerome Kern as the musical giant who laid the cornerstone for American musical theatre.
When Columbia University staged Fly with Me as their Varsity Show in 1920, freshman Richard Rodgers and his newly-acquired chum and Columbia dropout,Lorenz Hart, quickly churned out a bevy of songs to fuel the satirical book on undergraduate life on a Soviet island. They had met the previous year and Rodgers remembered that “I was enchanted by this little man and his ideas. Neither of us mentioned it, but we evidently knew we would work together and I left Hart’s house, having acquired in one afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend and a constant source of irritation.”
For the next twenty-two years the team of Rodgers and Hart spangled the Jazz Age and the Great Depression with wit, sophistication and an engaging sense of youthful splendor that defined them as standard bearers in a field already crowded with songwriting behemoths. They eventually tucked into their portfolios twenty-eight stage musicals, four films and over five hundred songs that began with the hit tune "Manhattan" and opened to classics like “Thou Swell,” “With a Song in My Heart,” “Blue Moon",” “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady is a Tramp” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”
For sixteen years the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar
Hammerstein II produced a novel brand of musical play which wove book,
music, lyrics and dance into a seamless tapestry of near-perfect theater
art. Hit after hit flowed from their collective genius between Oklahoma! in
1943 and Hammerstein's death in 1960: Carousel, State Fair, South
Pacific, The King and I, Cinderella, The Flower
Drum Song and, finally, The Sound of Music.
Through original cast recordings, film clips, interviews, correspondence,
and other primary materials furnished by The Library of Congress, The New
York Public Library and The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, learn
about the lives of these two icons of the American musical, experience
their great productions, and listen to their music which has kept the American
public hopeful through wars, recessions, natural disasters, and political
intrigue.
His energy was unparalleled, his charisma addictive and the monikers
inevitably attached to his name — dilettante, hedonist, snob — were simply
tossed off with an impish smile and a shrug while the tunes continued to spin
magically from his fingertips. For whatever Cole Porter was as a person, his
reputation as a quintessential creative genius has never been questioned.
Walk through Porter's life on Broadway and in Hollywood, 40 years that
produced 33 stage shows and almost 20 films. Rare archival film clips and recordings
of original cast members, including Ethel Merman, Fred Astaire, Patricia Morison,
Gertrude Lawrence, Mary Martin, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, are featured
along with Porter himself singing and playing “You're the Top,” which
he was.
They were a musical dream team: Ira, known as “the jeweler,” was
a songsmith with exquisite skills; his brother George was said to have tunes
drip from his fingers when he sat at the piano. From their first hit tune in
1918, “The Real American Folk Song
(Is a Rag),” through immortal songs like “I
Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You,” and “The Man I
Love,”
to “Love Is Here
to Stay” in 1937 (when George died at age 38) their legacy of more
than two dozen scores for Broadway and Hollywood helped establish musical
comedy as an American art form.
The tightly knit brothers combined their talents and sparked a distinctive
style of music that propelled a generation through the Jazz Age and later
helped it cope during the Great Depression. Review the lives of these two
icons from their simple roots, through their Tin Pan Alley apprenticeship,
to the glory years. Through original cast recordings, film clips, interviews,
home movies, and other primary sources, learn about the Gershwins and listen
to music that can only be described one way: “ 'S wonderful, 's marvelous.”
In temperament, personality and background, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick
Loewe were perhaps the most dissimilar of all of the great songwriting teams.
Yet together they penned some of the most original and successful musicals
written during the Golden Age of Broadway, hits beginning with Brigadoon in
1947 and ending with Gigi in 1973. Between those bookends fell Paint
Your Wagon, the blockbuster My Fair Lady which
made Julie Andrews an over-night sensation, and Camelot, pairing
Ms. Andrews with
a young Richard Burton. Often at odds with each other personally,
their resulting music was both inspired and enduring.
Learn the origins of immortal songs like “Almost Like Being in Love,” "Thank
Heaven for Little Girls,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “If
Ever I Would Leave You,” and “They Call the Wind Mariah,”
explore their film adaptations, while delving into the personal lives of
the songwriting team, underscored with correspondence, testimonials and
film footage.
It was truly a “ragtime to riches” path chosen by the
immigrant Russian Jew Israel Baline. A teenaged waif slumming an existence
in the Bowery during the earliest years of the twentieth-century, Irving
Berlin, as he was later known, began writing songs without knowing
how to read music. A self-taught and rather pathetic pianist, he morphed
into a genuine musical icon by the age of 23 and remained the standard
bearer for all songwriters until his death at the age of 101.
Reminisce while listening to songs that people enjoy humming, masterworks
like “Alexander’s
Ragtime Band,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “All
Alone,” “Blue Skies,” “How Deep Is the Ocean” and
many more. You will walk through Berlin’s extraordinary life spanning a
half-century of musical achievement, years that produced hit songs for Tin Pan
Alley, the Broadway stage, radio, television, film and a worldwide military audience.
Select Contact for more information or to book
a performance.
