Broadway Musicals

BTEC in Music Practise (Year 1)

MUSIC HISTORY ASSIGNMENT

BROADWAY MUSICALS

Broadway Musicals

When we are talking about the Broadway Musicals, we would think about the theatre music. In the very early 20th Century in America, the theatre music was booming, there were thirty-three legitimate Broadway theatres in New York, over 3,000 professional theatres across the United States, and more was going to be built to meet the audience demand. The famous actor was Al Jolson, a ‘charismatic performer’ in Broadway. His performance saved Warner Bros. from bankruptcy. The Singing Fool which made the gross income of $5.5m, a biggest income only to be exceeded by Gone With The Wind eleven years later.

Following the Wall Street crash in 1929, many New York theatres were closed, stage stars such as Fred & Adele Astaire, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Maurice Chevalier, Marilyn Miller, Helen Morgan, Nelson Eddy & Jeanette MacDonald, followed Al Jolson to Hollywood. Since then Hollywood started to make musical films, for example, Whoopee, Dames, Top Hat, 42nd Street, Walt Disney's Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs, and The Wizard of Oz, which they were all made before the 1950s.

In the 1950s, Musicals almost reached a high note, with Irving Berlin's ‘Annie Get Your Gun’, ‘Call Me Madam’ Cole Porter's ‘Kiss Me Kate’ and ‘Silk Stockings’, and Richard Rodgers' Oklahoma!, Carousel, The King & I and South Pacific, all four written with his new partner, librettist and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. The songwriter Frank Loesser’s Guys & Dolls; other musicals included Singin' In The Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Calamity Jane, High Society, An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, The Great Caruso and Royal Wedding.

The Most Influential Composers

There are also some influential composers and lyricists working on Broadway in the 1950s – Irving Berlin; Cole Porter; Frank Loesser; Harold Rome; Meredith Willson; Lerner & Loewe; Leonard Bernstein, and of course Rogers and... [continues]

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