Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War

by Carol J. Oja

Overview

Winner of the 2015 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society

When Leonard Bernstein first arrived in New York City, he was an unknown artist working with other brilliant twentysomethings, notably Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. By the end of the 1940s, these artists were world famous. Their collaborations defied artistic boundaries and subtly pushed a progressive political agenda, altering the landscape of musical theater, ballet, and nightclub comedy. In Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, award-winning author and scholar Carol J. Oja examines the early days of Bernstein's career during World War II, centering around the debut in 1944 of the Broadway musical On the Town and the ballet Fancy Free. As a composer and conductor, Bernstein experienced a meteoric rise to fame, thanks in no small part to his visionary colleagues. Together, they focused on urban contemporary life and popular culture, featuring as heroes the itinerant sailors who bore the brunt of military service. They were provocative both artistically and politically. In a time of race riots and Japanese internment camps, Bernstein and his collaborators featured African American performers and a Japanese American ballerina, staging a model of racial integration. Rather than accepting traditional distinctions between high and low art, Bernstein's music was wide-open, inspired by everything from opera and jazz to cartoons. Oja shapes a wide-ranging cultural history that captures a tumultuous moment in time. Bernstein Meets Broadway is an indispensable work for fans of Broadway musicals, dance, and American performance history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199862092
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/22/2014
Series:	Broadway Legacies
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music and American Studies at Harvard University. She is author of Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (2000), winner of the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Section I: Ballet, Nightclubs, Broadway
1.Youthful Celebrity and Progressive Visions: Breaking Out with Fancy Free
2. From Nightclubs to Broadway: The Revuers, Comedy Skits, and Progressive Politics
3. Creating a Broadway Musical: The Conception and Debut of On the Town

Section II: Staging Racial Politics
4. A Japanese American Star on Broadway: Sono Osato and "Exotic Ivy Smith"
5. Desegregating Broadway: On the Town and Race
6. Biographies on Stage: On the Town's Black Conductor, Dancers, and Singers

Section III: Musical Style
7. Crossover Composition: The Musical Styles of On the Town
8. On the Town After Dark: The Nightclub Scene

Section IV: Epilogue

Appendices
A. Discography and Videography of Fancy Free, On the Town, and The Revuers
B. Scenario for Fancy Free
C. Cast List for On the Town on Opening Night

Index

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2015 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society

"Oja (Harvard) gives a full history of the musical, from its source in the Jerome Robbins/Bernstein ballet Fancy Free and the cabaret skits of the Revuers, a group led by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Oja covers the Broadway and road engagements, revivals, and the film version. Recommended." --Choice

"Carol Oja has given us a vivid portrait of four superbly talented young artists trying not only to create an exciting work for the musical theater but, while they were at it, using their art to 'help make a better world'. A valuable and illuminating book." --Sheldon Harnick

"This adventurously conceived, meticulously researched, elegantly argued book offers a completely new perspective on Bernstein's remarkable artistic partnerships as meetings of extraordinary creativity, progressive politics, and spirited determination. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, this is American musical theatre history at its very best." --Stacy Wolf, Professor of Theater, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University and author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011)

"Carol J. Oja is an established and important scholar, and Bernstein Meets Broadway reflects her characteristic thoroughness, insight, and clear writing. On the Town is a groundbreaking show obviously worthy of this excellent book-length study." --Larry Starr, Ruth Sutton Waters Endowed Professor, University of Washington

"Bernstein Meets Broadway is an outstanding exemplar of integrated humanistic arts scholarship. Grounded in exhaustive archival research, it offers bracing new insights on an important stage work and its creators. It's also liberal in the best traditional sense of the term: tolerant and generous and questioning, skeptical of conventional wisdom and ideological platitudes." --Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin's Musical Theater

"This is a book full of the rare joy of artistic creation and collaboration. In recounting the making of On the Town Carol Oja weaves wartime history, social mores, gender, racial politics, dance, comedy and music into a fascinating and immensely entertaining narrative that percolates with the brashness and brilliance of the show's creators, Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden and Adoph Green. 'We were all 25 years old,' Bernstein later said about it, 'we were nothing but energy then.'" -- John Adams, composer

"Throughout this book Oja demonstrates clarity of thought, precision of enquiry and meticulous research."--Studies in Theatre and Performance

"An expert synthesis of traditionally disparate musicological frameworks. Her text is at once a superlative narrative-one that weaves together the untold stories and broad cultural contexts of a seminal work of American musical theatre, On the Town, and its antecedent, the ballet, Fancy Free-and a thoroughgoing analytical study in American history, informed by extensive ethnography, archival research, and the author's keen music-theoretical sensibility."--American Music Review

From the Publisher