York U
American Musicals & Race - Flower Drum Song, Carmen Jones, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Sweet Charity
DANC 1500 – The Dance Experience
Dr. Bridget Cauthery
Lecture Notes - November 2nd, 2011
History of Musical Theatre
• Musicals grew out of the musical comedy acts of vaudeville.
• Instead of short skits, musicals are full evening shows.
• Musicals are characterized by dialogue interspersed with songs.
• Musical theatre is closely related to opera.
• The 20th century "book musical" has been defined as a musical play where the songs and dances are fully integrated into a well-made story, with serious dramatic goals, that are able to evoke genuine emotions other than laughter.
What makes a musical?
• The three main components of a musical are the music, the lyrics, and the book.
• The book refers to the "play" or story of the show
• The music and lyrics together form the score of the musical.
• When the emotion becomes too strong for speech you sing; when it becomes too strong for song, you dance.
• The creative team for a musical includes a director, a musical director and usually a choreographer.
The Golden Age of Broadway Musicals
• The Golden Age of the Broadway musical is generally considered to have begun with Oklahoma! (1943) and to have ended with Hair (1968).
• Musicals in this period sought to emulate a utopian ideal.
Dyer’s Five Categories for Creating Utopia in Musicals
• Abundance
• Energy
• Transparency
• Community
• Intensity
Integrated Musicals
• Some producers of musicals aimed to integrate white and non-white performers (eg. Stormy Weather).
• Others chose to portray wholesale conceptions of race – black musicals for black folks, white musicals for white folks, etc.
• This was simultaneously a reflection of marketing and prejudice.
American Musicals & Race
• Carmen Jones is a 1943 Broadway musical, later made into a 1954 musical film.
• It is an updating of the Georges Bizet opera Carmen in an African-American setting.
• The Broadway musical was produced by Billy Rose, using an all-black cast.
• Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a musical film released in 1954 about the settling of the American (white) West.
• The film is particularly known for the choreography by Michael Kidd, who made dance numbers out of such mundane frontier pursuits as chopping wood and barn-raising.
• Flower Drum Song (1961) is the first all-Asian musical.
• Written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, it is based on the 1957 novel of the same name by Chinese American author C. Y. Lee.
• The musical focuses on the issues of cultural conflict and the generation gap.
• Sweet Charity (1966)
• Music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields and book by Neil Simon. It was directed and choreographed for Broadway by Bob Fosse.
• Charity Hope Valentine is a taxi dancer at a dance hall called the Fandango Ballroom in New York City.
• The musical portrays three dancers each from different ethnic/cultural backgrounds wanting to rise above their lower, working class status.
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