[PDF] As Thousands Cheer eBook

Author : Laurence Bergreen
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 706 pages
File Size : 33,56 MB
Release : 1996-03-22
Category : Music
ISBN : 0786752521

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Irving Berlin (1888–1989) was unable to read or write music and could only play the piano in the key of F-sharp major; yet, for the first half of the twentieth century he was America's most successful and most representative songwriter, composing such hits as "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Cheek to Cheek," "Let's Face the Music and Dance," "Puttin' on the Ritz," "White Christmas," "Anything You Can Do," "There's No Business Like Show Business," and "God Bless America." As Thousands Cheer, winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, explores with precision and sensitivity Berlin's long, prolific career; his self-doubt and late-blooming misanthropy; and the tyrannical control he exerted over his legacy of song. From his immigrant beginnings through Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood to his reclusive and bitter final years, this definitive biography reveals the man who wrote 1500 songs but could never quash the fear that, for all his success, he wasn't quite good enough.

Author :
Publisher :
Page : 1 pages
File Size : 41,42 MB
Release : 1935
Category :
ISBN :

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National Theatre, direction A.L. Erlanger Realty Corporation, management S.E. Cochran, Sam H. Harris presents Dorothy Stone, Ethel Waters in the music box sensation "As Thousands Cheer," with Porter Hall, Margaret Irving, Jerome Cowan, Hal Forde, Albert Carroll, Dave Fitzgibbons, by Irving Berlin and Moss Hart, staged and lighted by Hassard Short, dances arranged by Charles Weidman, setting designed by Albert Johnson, orchestra under the direction of Harry S. Levant.

Author : Will Rogers
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 724 pages
File Size : 25,5 MB
Release : 2006-10-31
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780806137681

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This fifth and final volume of The Papers of Will Rogers traces the career of Oklahoma’s beloved entertainer during his most popular years and extends beyond his death in 1935. By 1928, the Oklahoma humorist and commentator had reached national prominence through his newspaper columns, silent films, sound recordings, books, philanthropic endeavors, and lecture tours. His fame, fortune, and influence, however, had yet to crest. This volume showcases a wide variety of documents, including correspondence with some of the most significant figures of the day, revealing Rogers’s rise to fame as the nation’s leading social and political commentator and as a hugely popular star of radio, stage, and film. Rogers’s multifaceted career ended abruptly when he and the famous aviator Wylie Post died in an airplane crash in northernmost Alaska. This documentary history of his final years includes transcripts of radio broadcasts, contracts, and business documents, as well as nearly two hundred telegrams and letters to family, friends, and notable public figures—the majority of which have never before been published. It also covers the aftermath of his fatal airplane accident: the certificate of death, a first-person account of his funeral, settlement of his estate, efforts to pay tribute to his memory, and unauthorized attempts to capitalize on his fame.

Author : Jack Viertel
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 36,91 MB
Release : 2016-03-01
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0374711259

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A New York Times Bestseller For almost a century, Americans have been losing their hearts and losing their minds in an insatiable love affair with the American musical. It often begins in childhood in a darkened theater, grows into something more serious for high school actors, and reaches its passionate zenith when it comes time for love, marriage, and children, who will start the cycle all over again. Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical? In The Secret Life of the American Musical, Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, marvels at their unflagging inventiveness, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he invites us to fall in love all over again by showing us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate audiences, and how one landmark show leads to the next—by design or by accident, by emulation or by rebellion—from Oklahoma! to Hamilton and onward. Structured like a musical, The Secret Life of the American Musical begins with an overture and concludes with a curtain call, with stops in between for “I Want” songs, “conditional” love songs, production numbers, star turns, and finales. The ultimate insider, Viertel has spent three decades on Broadway, working on dozens of shows old and new as a conceiver, producer, dramaturg, and general creative force; he has his own unique way of looking at the process and at the people who collaborate to make musicals a reality. He shows us patterns in the architecture of classic shows and charts the inevitable evolution that has taken place in musical theater as America itself has evolved socially and politically. The Secret Life of the American Musical makes you feel as though you’ve been there in the rehearsal room, in the front row of the theater, and in the working offices of theater owners and producers as they pursue their own love affair with that rare and elusive beast—the Broadway hit.

Author : Philip Furia
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 48,16 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Music
ISBN : 0415972469

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First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author : Mary Ellin Barrett
Publisher : Amadeus Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 26,84 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :

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"God Bless America", "White Christmas", and "There's No Business Like Show Business" are just some of the more than 1,000 songs written by Irving Berlin. Here is an affectionate, intimate, frank memoir of America's most famous and enduring songwriter of this century by his daughter. Photos.

Author : Jeffrey Melnick
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 14,27 MB
Release : 2001-03-16
Category : Music
ISBN : 0674040902

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All too often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination, thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of discussion follows, but little in the way of progress or enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we radically revise the way we think about the complex interactions between African Americans and Jews. A Right to Sing the Blues offers just such a revision. Black-Jewish relations, Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made Black music in the first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their natural affinity for producing Black music as a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to define Blackness. Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.

Author : Stephen J. Whitfield
Publisher : UPNE
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 45,3 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781584651710

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A leading cultural historian explores the complex interactions of Jewish and American cultures.