Vintage Broadway: Orchestral Selections

Description

Vintage BroadwayCole Porter Rodgers and Hammerstein II Jule Styne Burton LaneThe Broadway musical has a tradition traceable to theNew York premi?¿re of John Gay's Beggar's Opera atthe Nassau Theater, Manhattan Island in 1751. By 1900the commercially-inspired modern musical hadevolved, via American burlesque and Negro minstrelsy,with imported European conventions added, into thetuneful, stylish, 'native American' bourgeois operettasof Kerker and Victor Herbert. During the twentiethcentury more than 2,000 productions were staged inBroadway theatres, all of which owed something to thetime-honoured traditions of pantomime, ballet,Viennese operetta and English comic-opera, vaudevilleand farce, although only fifty or so of these musicalsenjoyed initial runs of over five hundred performancesand far fewer exceeded one thousand or wereblockbusters on a par with (to cite a few obviousexamples) Show Boat (1927 - the first truly modernmusical in its marriage of music to a realistic storyline),Oklahoma! (1947), South Pacific (1949), My Fair Lady(1956), West Side Story and The Music Man (both 1957)and The Sound Of Music (1959), as well as Kiss Me,Kate (1948) and Funny Girl (1964), two more megamusicalsincluded here alongside several others lessfamous, but which nonetheless qualify as light classicsand, being now half a century or more old, have earnedthe tag 'vintage'.With sophistication and elegance his keynotes, ColePorter (1891-1964) was a major figure of the twentiethcenturyscreen and stage musical. For many years avirtual synonym for Broadway, the Peru (Indiana)-borncomposer-lyricist who wrote over twenty shows for theGolden Mile is represented here by arrangements fromthree of his mature efforts. The most durable of these,the monumental Kiss Me, Kate, opened in New York inDecember 1948, with Alfred Drake and PatriciaMorison taking the leads. Running for an initial 1,077performances, it won a first Tony 'best musical' awardand two citations (best book, best score). With scoreranking among Porter's finest and with libretto by Sam(1899-1971) and Bella Spewack (1899-1990), this wittyplay-within-a-play paraphrase of Shakespeare's Tamingof the Shrew like its model traces family feud andreconciliation. Staged by Jack Hylton in March 1951 inLondon (501 performances) it was subsequentlyrevived at various international locations over the nextforty years and memorably filmed by MGM in 1953,starring Howard Keel and Katherine Grayson.Can-Can, with libretto by Abe Burrows (aliasBorowitz, 1910-1985) and produced by conductor CyFeuer and Ernest Martin, opened in New York in May,1953. A typically Parisian piece of froth, with somewell-honed numbers, at 892 performances its Broadwaysojourn was Porter's second longest, and although itnever won the international acclaim of Kiss Me, Kate, itenjoyed creditable New York revivals, in 1959, 1962and 1981. In London it ran for 394 performances (fromOctober 1954) but is now best remembered through theheavily adapted 1960 filming