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Home , Alfred Uhry, Arthur Laurents, Donna McKechnie, Hugh Wheeler, John Cameron Mitchell, Pacific Overtures

DR 33: THE AMERICAN MUSICAL

H+ Block, Tuesday & Thursday 1:30-2:45, Tisch 316

Sunday Screenings: 7:30-10:30, Tisch 316

Professor Barbara W. Grossman

Office: Aidekman 207 (on the second floor of Aidekman, just past the door on the

RIGHT side of Cohen balcony)

Phone:

Email:

Office Hours: T & TH 4-5 and by appointment

Teaching Assistants: Virginia Anderson, Jenna Kubly,

Office hours by appointment.

Course Description

An introduction to a vibrant art form, this course will explore the American musical in all its variety and vitality. On stage and screen from The Black Crook (1866) to (2001), (1966) to Caroline, or Change (2004), (1927) to (2005), we will focus on outstanding productions and the composers, lyricists, librettists, directors, designers, choreographers, performers, and producers who created them. Using films, images, and sound recordings (original cast and revivals), we will consider the musical as a reflection of American popular culture: the expression of fantasy and nostalgia, sentimentalism and chauvinism, and sexism, social protest and enduring optimism. At a time when roughly three out of every four Broadway musicals ends in economic failure, we will examine the fundamental tension between the art of creating musicals and the business of , between artistic achievement and commercial success.

We will consider the American musical from at least three different perspectives[1]:

1. As a work of art with unique conventions of aesthetics and form. To this end, we will ask: How do the different elements of the musical – script, blocking (stage movement), casting, acting (characterization, gesture, voice), music, lyrics, choreography, and design – work together to create a performance? What are the conventions of the musical and how did they develop over the course of the 20th century?

2. As an entertainment media that shaped and was shaped by its historical and cultural context. To this end, we will ask: Why have musicals been an

important part of U.S. culture? What is their relationship to other entertainment media?

st 3. As a viable performance form for the 21 century. To this end, we will ask: Why do musicals continue to be popular? What is significant about their popularity? How do they function as a form of art, culture, and entertainment today? Which musicals should be revived and performed, and why, and how?

Goals of the course include:

1. Understanding musicals as texts and as performances, which include music, lyrics, script, staging, design, and dance.

2. Describing the development of the musical as an important element of American culture.

3. Identifying the contributions of significant creators of musicals. 4. Theorizing the significance of a given musical as a form of art and entertainment in its cultural context.

5. Considering the musical as contemporary-historical performance.

Required and Recommended Texts

The following books are available at the Tufts Bookstore. They are also on reserve for this class in the Music Library, located on the basement level of the Aidekman Arts Center (underneath Cohen Auditorium):

Required (in order of use):

1. Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 2. and , (: TCG, 1991). 3. Arthur Laurents, , and Stephen Sondheim, in and West Side Story (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1965). 4. Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, (New York: TCG, 1994). 5. Stephen Sondheim and , (New York: Applause, 1991). 6. The New American Musical, ed. Wiley Hausam (New York: TCG, 2003). 7. and Jeanine Tesori, Caroline, or Change (New York: TCG, 2004). 8. Steven Adler, On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). 9. COURSE READER available in the DRAMA OFFICE, which is just off Cohen Lobby on the left and is open M-F from 9-4.

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Recommended:

10. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On backorder, due in late September.

Required Performance:

Torn Ticket II’s production of The Wild Party, December 1-3, Balch Arena Theater. Tickets will be available at the Arena Box Office later in the semester.

Other productions of interest this fall in Boston:

· , September 3-October 8, American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, www.amrep.org

· , September 9-October 15, Lyric Stage, Boston, www.lyricstage.com

· Pulp, September 29-October 15, Boston Theatre Works, Boston Center for the Arts, www.bostontheatreworks.com

· , October 4-16, House, Boston, www.broadwayinboston.com

· Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Colonial Theatre, Boston, www.broadwayinboston.com

If you know of others, please share the information!

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

1. ATTENDANCE AND PARTICIPATION (10% of course grade) Although this is a large class, your attendance matters. More than 3 absences without a valid excuse will lower your grade for the semester. I welcome your participation in class, whenever possible, and recommend that you attend the Sunday evening film screenings which Ginny Anderson and Jenna Kubly will conduct. If you have to miss a screening, make sure to watch the film on your own, preferably before the class for which it is assigned.

I may occasionally ask you to respond on Blackboard to a question that arises in class.

2. MIDTERM PAPER (20% of course grade)

Instead of an in-class midterm exam, there will be a paper (5-7 pages) due on Thursday, October 20.

A detailed explanation of this assignment and a list of possible topics will follow shortly.

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3. FINAL PAPER OR PROJECT (30% of course grade)

You have three options for this assignment:

· a paper (10-12 pages) due on Thursday, December 8

· a design project due on Thursday, December 8 · a performance project to be presented in the Arena on Tuesday or Thursday, December 6 and 8 (and possibly on Sunday, December 4, depending on the number of projects)

A detailed explanation of each of these options will follow shortly.

All written work for this class should be:

· Typed in 12-pt font

· Double-spaced

· Proofread for grammar, spelling, and coherence

· Stapled together.

In addition, make sure that you leave 1” margins all around, number your pages and put your name on each one.

4. FINAL EXAMINATION (40% of course grade)

There will be an in-class final exam on Wednesday, December 14, from 3:30-5:30pm in the time slot reserved for H+ Block classes in the University exam schedule. ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY, so please make your travel plans accordingly. Do NOT plan to leave campus for vacation until AFTER this exam.

You will get more detailed instructions about this exam, which will cover the entire semester’s work, later on.

Additional Information: · There is a site for this course on Blackboard: http://blackboard.tufts.edu

· There are MANY books on reserve for this course in the Music Library. Librarian Abigail Al-Doory will be happy to help you.

· There are MANY films on reserve in the Tisch Media Center. See either Richard Fleischer or Stacy Howe for assistance if you need it.

[Hard copies of both reserve lists will follow shortly.]

COURSE CALENDAR

“Musicals played a formative role in our collective myth-making for nearly a century, giving us the words and music for the American Dream…But the American Dream has come under rigorous scrutiny in the last forty years…as America’s dream becomes increasingly threadbare, so has the art form that best promoted it. In this, at least, the musical remains the perfect metaphor for the time.”

n , author and critic

“Musical theatre is the ultimate collaboration. In the best of all possible worlds, it starts from the top, when you pick people who can fulfill a creative obligation, using their own particular talent. If you pick the right people, not just on stage but behind the scenes, the boundaries of who does what move and out of each other and wonderful things begin to happen.”

n Donna McKechnie, performer

“I’m often asked where I think the musical theatre is heading. It’s one question I always try to dodge because I don’t think it’s heading anywhere until it’s already been there. One night a show opens and suddenly there’s a whole new concept. But it isn’t the result of a trend; it’s because one, two, three people sat down and sweated over an idea that somehow clicked and broke loose. It can be about anything and take off in any direction, and when it works, there’s your present and your future.”

n , composer

“You have two kinds of shows on Broadway – revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles…It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture.”

n Stephen Sondheim, composer, lyricist

“Musicals are just songs and a narrative onstage. And there can be all kinds. The tradition is sturdy enough. I don’t think there’s anything bad about this. The only bad thing is if they’re done badly. Ultimately, it’s taste I’m more worried about.”

n John , creator and star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch

“No one expects a Broadway musical comedy to be in the vanguard of what is bohemian, raunchy, folkloric, academic or aggressively experimental. That is not its job. Its job is to synthesize musical and social traditions with high-styled vivacity, especially those that dwell on different sides of the tracks in real life. The highbrow meets the lowbrow; sweet meets hot; uptown, downtown, all around the town.”

n Margo Jefferson, critic

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Week 1: Preliminaries

#1 Tuesday, September 6: “Getting to Know You” (and Me)

Introduction and Course Overview.

Pick up readings (Fuchs, LaChiusa, McKinley, Savran) and questionnaire to complete for Thursday’s class.

#2 Thursday, September 8: Issues in Musical Theatre

Raymond Knapp, Chapter 1: “Contexts and Strategies,” The American Musical and the

Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3-18. Please note: AUDIO EXAMPLES for this book are available online at http://epub.library.ucla.edu/knapp/americanmusical/. (See the explanatory note in the book, just before the Preface.) That’s one of the reasons I chose this text. Please make sure you listen to them when you read each chapter!

Elinor Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” Theater,

Volume 34, Number 2, Summer 2004: 5-9.

Michael John LaChiusa, “The Great Gray Way,” Opera News, August 2005: 30-35.

Jesse McKinley, “Hey, Let’s Not Put On a Show!,” , 21 August

2005. Recommended: David Savran, “Toward a Historiography of the Popular,” Theatre Survey 45:2 (November 2004): 211-217.

Week 2: European and American Influences

Sunday, September 11: H.M.S. Pinafore

#3 Tuesday, September 13: 19 th -Century European Roots: W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore (1878)

Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore. Read the play and related articles online: http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/ (The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive).

Knapp, Chapter 2: “Nineteenth-Century European Roots,” 19-46.

#4 Thursday, September 15: 19 th -Century American Popular Entertainment

Knapp, Chapter 3: “Early American Developments: Minstrelsy, Extravaganza,

Pantomime, Burlesque,” 47-66, and beginning of Chapter 4: “American Song

through Tin Pan Alley,” 67-70.

Eric Lott, “ and Blackness: The in American Culture,” Inside

The Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed.

Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/UPNE, 1996), 3-31, in Course Reader (abbreviated

after this as R).

Charles Townsend, “Negro Minstrels,” Inside the Minstrel Mask, 121-125, R.

“Speech on Women’s Rights” (1879) from “Dick’s Ethiopian Scenes, Variety

Sketches, and Stump Speeches,” Inside the Minstrel Mask, 135-137, R.

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Recommended: Watch Stephen Foster: America’s First Great Songwriter [on BB or on

reserve].

Listen to Foster’s music and/or songs from the early minstrel show

[Music Library].

Watch ’s Bamboozled (2001).

Week 3: “Give My Regards to Broadway”

Sunday, September 18: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

#5 Tuesday and #6 Thursday, September 20 and 22: Cohan, Herbert, Ziegfeld, Berlin Knapp, Chapter 4: “American Song through Tin Pan Alley,” 70-82 only; Chapter 5:

“Whose (Who’s) America?,” 103-109.

Orly Krasner, “Birth pangs, growing pains, and sibling rivalry: musical theatre in

New York, 1900-1920,” The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. William A.

Everett and Paul R. Laird (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002),

29-46.

John Lahr, “Revolutionary Rag: How ’s Joyous Impertinence Changed

American Music,” , 8 March 1999, 77- 83, R.

WATCH Broadway: The American Musical, Episode One: “Give My Regards to

Broadway (1893-1927),” tracks 1-9 (includes Ziegfeld, Cohan, Williams, Berlin, Brice) on reserve at Tisch, or READ Chapter 1: “A Real Live Nephew of My Uncle Sam’s (1893-1919) in Laurence Maslon’s Broadway: The American Musical (New York & Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2004), 2-63, on reserve in the Music Library.

Recommended: Watch Irving Berlin: An American Song [on BB or on reserve].

For Berlin, also Broadway: The American Musical, Episode Three, track 12 (This Is the Army) and Episode Four, track 5 ( Get Your Gun).

Listen to Berlin’s music (including Annie Get Your Gun) in the Music

Library.

Week 4: Beyond the Jazz Age

Sunday, September 25: Show Boat (1936)

#7 Tuesday, September 27: and Oscar Hammerstein II, Show Boat (1927), George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and , (1935)

Gershwin, Heyward, and Gershwin, Porgy and Bess, Ten Great Musicals of the American

Theatre, ed. Stanley Richards (Radnor, PA: Chilton Book , 1973), 75-

113, R.

Knapp, Chapter 8: “Race and Ethnicity,”on Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, 181-204, and

Chapter 4, 82-85 on Gershwin.

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Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Jazzbo: Why we still listen to Gershwin,” The New Yorker, 10

January 2005, R.

Recommended: Read John Graziano, “Images of : African-

American musical theatre, Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), 63-76.

Watch Broadway: The American Musical, Episode One, track 10 (Show

Boat); Episode Two: “Syncopated City (1919-1933),” tracks 6-10

(Shuffle Along, The Charleston, The Gershwins, “Swanee,”

“Fascinating Rhythm”); and Episode Three: “I Got Plenty O’Nuttin’ (1930-1942),” track 9 (Porgy and Bess).

Watch George Gershwin Remembered and Porgy and Bess: An American

Voice [on BB or on reserve].

Listen to more Gershwin and/or Kern in the Music Library.

#8 Thursday, September 29: Cole Porter, (1934), Rodgers and Hart,

Pal Joey (1940)

Midterm paper topic statements due today.

Knapp, Chapter 4, 85-99.

Geoffrey Block, “ANYTHING GOES: Songs Ten, Book Three,” The Broadway Musical

From SHOW BOAT to Sondheim (New York: Oxford UP, 1997), 41-59, R.

Scott Miller, “Pal Joey,” Rebels with Applause: Broadway’s Groundbreaking Musicals

(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001), 18-30. Recommended: Watch Broadway: The American Musical, Episode Two, track 12 Rodgers and Hart); Episode Three, track 3 (), 6

(Cole Porter), 7 (Anything Goes), 10 (The Cradle Will Rock), 11 (Pal Joey). For Porter, see also Episode Four, track 6 (Kiss Me, Kate).

Watch You’re the Top: The Cole Porter Story and/or The Rodgers

and Hart Story [on BB or on reserve].

Listen to Anything Goes and/or Pal Joey in the Music Library.

Listen to more Porter (including Kiss Me, Kate) and/or Rodgers and

and Hart in the Music Library.

[See BWG if you would like to read Anything Goes or Pal Joey. I have both scripts.]

Week 5: In the American Grain

Sunday, October 1: Oklahoma! (1999 film version of Sir ’s 1998

Revival)

Tuesday, October 4: NO CLASS – ROSH HASHANAH

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#9 Thursday, October 6: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma! (1943)

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, Six Plays by (New

York: Random House, 1953), 7-84, R.

Knapp, Chapter Six: “American Mythologies,” 119-134.

Andrea Most, “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of

Assimilation in Oklahoma!,” Making Americans: and the Broadway Musical

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 101- 118, R.

Recommended: Read Ann Sears, “The coming of the musical play: Rodgers and

Hammerstein,” The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 120-136

(opening pages especially).

Watch Broadway: The American Musical, Episode Four: “Oh, What a

Beautiful Mornin’ (1943- 1960),” tracks 1 and 2 (Introduction,

WWII/Oklahoma!).

Watch Richard Rodgers [on BB or on reserve].

Week 6: Intermission – Use the time to work on your midterm papers!

Sunday, October 9: NO SCREENING – COLUMBUS DAY WEEKEND

Tuesday, October 11: NO CLASS – TUFTS MONDAY

Thursday, October 13: NO CLASS – YOM KIPPUR

Week 7: “Exoticism” or Cultural Appropriation?

Sunday, October 16: (1956)

#10 Tuesday, October 18: Rodgers and Hammerstein, The King and I (1951)

Rodgers and Hammerstein, The King and I, Six Plays by Rodgers and

Hammerstein, 371-449, R.

Knapp, Chapter 10: “Exoticism,” 249-250 and 261-268.

Bruce A. McConachie, “The ‘Oriental’ Musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and

the U.S. War in Southeast Asia,” Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 385-398, R.

#11 Thursday, October 20: Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, Pacific Overtures (1976)

MIDTERM PAPERS DUE TODAY.

Sondheim and Weidman, Pacific Overtures (New York: TCG, 1991).

Knapp, Chapter 10, 268-281.

Recommended: Read Leonard Fleischer, “‘More Beautiful than True’ or ‘Never Mind Small Disaster’: The Art of Illusion in Pacific Overtures,” Stephen

Sondheim: A Casebook, ed. Joanne Gordon (New York: Garland

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Publishing, 1997), 107-124, R.

Watch Broadway: The American Musical, Episode Five: “Tradition

(1957-1979), tracks 7 (Company) and 11 (Stephen Sondheim).

Week 8: “Something’s Coming…up Roses”

Sunday, October 23, West Side Story (1961)

#12 Tuesday, October 25, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and , West Side Story (1957) Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim, West Side Story in Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1965), 131-224.

Knapp, Chapter 8, 204-215.

David Denby, “The Trouble with Lenny: Why we are still taking the measure of

Leonard Bernstein’s protean gifts,” The New Yorker, 17 August 1998, 42-53, R.

Recommended: Read excerpts from Readings on WEST SIDE STORY, ed. Mary E.

Williams (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001), 39-65, 110-140,

156-162, R.

Watch Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note (on BB or on reserve).

Watch Broadway: The American Musical, Episode Five: track 2 (West

Side Story).

#13 Thursday, October 27, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and Jule Styne, Gypsy (1959)

Laurents, Sondheim, and Styne, Gypsy (New York: TCG, 1994).

Scott Miller, “Gypsy,” From to WEST SIDE STORY: The Director’s

Guide to Musical Theatre (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996), 84-94, R.

Recommended: Read Stacy Wolf, “Ethel Merman,” A Problem Like Maria: Gender and

Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002), 89- 130 (on reserve in Music Library).

Week 9: Nazis and Cannibals on Broadway

Sunday, October 30, Cabaret (1972)

#14 Tuesday, November 1, John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Joe Masteroff, Cabaret (1966)

Kander, Ebb, and Masteroff, Cabaret.

Read it online at: http://libretto.musicals.ru/text.php? textid=529&language=1

Knapp, Chapter 9: “Dealing with the Second World War,” 239-248.

Scott Miller, “Cabaret,” From ASSASSINS to WEST SIDE STORY, 27- 41, R.

Joan Acocella, “Dancing and the Dark: The king of sequins and sleaze is still very

much with us,” The New Yorker, 21 December 1998, 100-108, R.

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Recommended: Read Thomas L. Riis and Ann Sears with William A. Everett, “The Successors of Rodgers and Hammerstein from the 1940s to the

1960s,” The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 137-166.

Watch Broadway: The American Musical, Episode Five, tracks 5

(Cabaret) and 9 ().

#15 Thursday, November 3, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, Sweeney Todd (1979)

Sondheim and Wheeler, Sweeney Todd (New York: Applause, 1991).

Week 10: The Razor’s Edge

Sunday, November 6, Sweeney Todd

#15 Tuesday, November 8, Sweeney Todd continued

Final paper/project plans due.

Judith Schlesinger, “Psychology, Evil, and SWEENEY TODD, or ‘Don’t I Know

You, Mister?,’” Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook, 127- 141, R.

Frank Rich, “Conversations with Sondheim: On his 70th birthday, the Broadway

musical’s last great artist takes measure of the theater and of himself,” The

New York Times Magazine, 12 March 2000, 38-43, 60- 61, 88-89. Stephen Holden, “Stephen Sondheim: A Contrarian Who Raised the Level of

Musicals’ I.Q.,” The New York Times, 5 May 2002.

Recommended: Read Jim Lovensheimer, “Stephen Sondheim and the musical of the

outsider,” The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 181-196.

#16 Thursday, November 10: Guest Lecture by Dr. Iris Fanger on Dance in the American Musical

Paul R. Laird, “Choreographers, directors and the fully integrated musical,” The

Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 197-211.

Week 11: The Megamusical and Beyond

Sunday, November 13, The Phantom of the Opera (2004)

#17 Tuesday, November 15, , The Phantom of the Opera (1988)

Read it online at http://www.theatre- musical.com/phantom/libretto.html or

http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Stage/1425/libretto.html

Recommended: Read Paul Prece and William A. Everett, “The megamusical and

Beyond: the creation, internationalization and impact of a genre,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 246-265.

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#18 Thursday, November 17, , (1996)

Larson, Rent, The New American Musical: An Anthology from the End of the Century,

ed. Wiley Hausam (New York: TCG, 2003), 99-228.

David Savran, “Paying the Rent,” A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing

American Theater (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003),

34-46.

Recommended: Read Scott Warfield, “From to Rent: is ‘rock’ a four-letter word

on Broadway?,” The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 231-245.

Week 12: “Gotta Sing, Gotta…Lynch?

Sunday, November 20: (Tufts 2004)

#19 Tuesday, November 22, and , Parade (1998).

Brown and Uhry, Parade, The New American Musical, 229-352.

Thursday, November 24: NO CLASS --- THANKSGIVING

Week 13: New Directions, New Challenges

Sunday, November 27: NO SCREENING (THANKSGIVING WEEKEND)

#20 Tuesday, November 29, Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori, Caroline, or Change

(2004)

Kushner and Tesori, Caroline, or Change (New York: TCG, 2004).

David Savran, “Policing the Cultural Hierarchy,” A Queer Sort of Materialism, 47-55.

Ben Brantley, “How Broadway Lost Its Voice to American Idol,” The New York

Times, 27 March 2005.

#21 Thursday, December 1, “The Money Song”

Steven Adler, On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way (Carbondale:

Southern Illinois University Press, 2004).

See Torn Ticket II’s The Wild Party tonight, Friday or Saturday, December 1-3, Arena Theater.

Week 14: PROJECT PRESENTATIONS

Sunday, December 4: TBA.

Depending on how many performance projects there are, we may have to use this screening block (7:30-10:30pm). If we do, attendance will be mandatory. Please save the date!

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#22 Tuesday, December 6: PROJECT PRESENTATIONS, Arena Theater.

#23 Thursday, December 8: PROJECT PRESENTATIONS, Arena Theater.

FINAL PAPERS AND PROJECTS DUE.

Reading Period: December 12 and 13.

FINAL EXAM: Wednesday, December 14, 3:30-5:30 (location TBA)

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Please come see me or me at any time if you have questions, concerns, suggestions or comments. I look forward to spending the semester with you!

[1] With thanks to Professor Stacy Wolf (University of , Austin) for sharing her thoughtful categories and questions.