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For my last ever padlet post, it would be a crime for me to post about anyone else other than my favorite person in history- ADAH ISAACS MENKEN. This is a picture with an amazing quote that she said that is still very relevant. I genuinely feel very connected to Adah Isaacs Menken and think she is a total badass. Also, this quote totally encompasses the way she lived her life, I think. Overall, I just think it is great to see people make spaces for themselves to be creative and authentic. Adah Isaacs Menken did that.

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This is a mini documentary on The Pansy Craze. I wrote an essay on this topic in high school and this video was a really helpful resource for me. I hunted it down because I want to remember it as a crash course of the people and performances of the Pansy Craze. Basically, I have so much more studying that I want to do on the history of LGBTQ people in theatre. This is truly my peak interest in regards to theatre history.

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New York's queer cultures gained remarkable visibility on the city's stages in the 1920 and 1930s. Broadway producers and nightclub owners put on plays and acts exploring gay and lesbian themes. They launched a popular "Panzy Craze," where minorities where accepted. This period lasted until the mid-1930s when morals and ethics changed because of right-wing pressure.

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A Rare Appearance of Female Impersonator Jean Malin

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A Rare Appearance of Female Impersonator Jean Malin

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This is a clip of Jean Malin. I am not sure what it is from, as it does not say in the description, but I assume it is from a movie or something? Either way, Jean Malin is so fascinating to watch. Also, the video clip mentions him being a "female impersonator", which is what we discussed in class.

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A Rare Appearance of Female Impersonator Jean Malin

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This is a compilation of clips of Anita Berber in  ‘Unheimliche Geschichten' ['Eerie Tales'] (1919) and 'Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler' (1922). She is such a good dancer! John Hall, who posts a ton of videos of the German cabaret scene, is super informative in the video descriptions as well.

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Anita Berber, Epitome of 1920s Weimar Republic Excess - Two Sequences of Her Dancing on Film

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I am trying to find this entire movie, but I don't even know where to search. This is the exact type of wacky, surrealist shit that I love! Brigitte Helm is the dancer here. She was there at the Weimar Republic at the same time as Sebastian Droste and Anita Berber. I am SO INTERESTED in the cabaret scene of this time period!!!!

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Wiemar Republic Dance Sequence from 'Metropolis' (1927)

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Meet Anita Berber" The 'Priestess of Debauchery' 

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Meet Anita Berber" The 'Priestess of Debauchery' 

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I AM OBSESSED WITH THIS WOMAN- adding her to the list (with Ada Isaacs Menken, Marc Blitzstein and Peggy Fears). This entire website is a great resource to learn about interesting people in history that are overlooked, but this article is especially great. My favorite part is the portrait of her at the bottom, which was confiscated by Nazis and identified as contraband.

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Meet Anita Berber: The 'Priestess of Debauchery' who scandalized Weimar Berlin

The woman with the shock of dyed red hair, her body wrapped in a fur coat, and a pet monkey grinning and holding tight to her neck was Anita Berber. She danced across the foyer of the Adlon Hotel opened her sable coat and revealed her lustrous naked body underneath. Men leered, goggle-eyed. Women giggled or turned their heads in shock and embarrassment.

Anita Berber didn't care. She liked to shock. She liked the attention. If she didn't get it, she would shout and throw empty bottles or glasses on the floor. Smash! Berber was a dancer, an actor, a writer, and a model. She was called the "Goddess of the Night," the "Priestess of Debauchery," the very symbol of Weimar decadence, and a drug-addled degenerate. She was all these things and more. And during her brief life, Berber utterly scandalized Berlin during the 1920s. Not an easy task!

The daughter of two musicians, Anita Berber was born in Dresden in 1899. Her parents divorced when she was young, Berber was then raised by her grandmother. By sixteen, she quit the family home for the unpredictable life as a dancer in cabaret shows. The First World War was at its bloodiest height. The daily reports of casualties and death meant people were reckless with their passions. It was then that Berber started a series of relationships and dangerous habits that became her life.

After the War, Berber began her career as a movie actor-starring opposite Conrad Veidt in The Story of Dida Ibsen in 1918 and then in Prostitution and Around the World in Eighty Days the following year. While Veidt went onto become a major movie star with a career in Hollywood, Berber's career stalled and she became best known for her performances as a dancer, a sultry temptress or a drug-addled prostitute. With her dark bobbed hair and androgynous good looks, Berber created a style that was copied by Marlene Dietrich (who basically stole her act), Leni Riefenstahl who idolized Berber, was her understudy and had a brief intense relationship with her, and Louise Brooks, whose seductive image in Pandora's Box was a copy of Berber's. She had relationships with both men and women, seeing no difference in taking pleasures from either sex. Berber married in 1919, then left her husband-a man called Nathusius-for a woman called Susi Wanowski. The couple became a fixture of Berlin's growing lesbian scene.

Berber enjoyed opium, hashish, heroin, and cocaine-which she kept secreted in a silver locket around her neck. She also had a strong predilection for ether and chloroform mixed together in a small china bowl, into which she scattered white rose petals. Once these were sufficiently marinated in this heady concoction, she ate the petals one by one until she fell into a delicious sleep.

Berber's louche lifestyle coupled with her fame as a movie star and dancer meant she was the subject of gossip and cafe tittle-tattle. It was said over black sweet coffee she was once kept as a sex slave by a married woman and her fifteen-year-old daughter. It was claimed between mouthfuls of chocolate cake that she wandered through casinos and hotels flashing her naked body. While in the bars, it was overheard that she exhausted her lovers with her insatiable demands for sex.

Some of these tales were false. Most were true. But all of them kept Anita Berber fixed in the public's imagination.

In 1921, she met and fell in love with the Sebastian Droste, a bisexual dancer who was known as a performer in Berlin's gay bars and clubs. They became lovers and married in 1922. They formed a scandalous dance partnership choreographing and performing together in Expressionist "fantasias" like Suicide, Morphium, and Mad House. They also collaborated on a book of poetry and photographs called Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase ( Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy). A typical routine went something like this:

In the dance, "Menschen," or, "People," we find,

Only two people

Two naked people

Man

Woman

And both in a cage

Hard stiff horrible cages

The two king's children sang songs

But with tears

The man smashes his cage

Tradition

Society

Convention he spits out.

Which is the kind of nonsense we nowadays associate with the overly pretentious rather than the naturally gifted... but at the time... You can imagine: shock, horror, and spilled sherry.

Berber's and Groste's relationship was intense, passionate, and drug-fueled. Because of her considerable use of cocaine, Berber often hurled champagne bottles at the audience if they failed to appreciate her genius. It was inevitable their marriage would not last long and they separated in 1923.

By the time Otto Dix painted his famous portrait of Berber in 1925, the years of drug abuse, frenetic lifestyle, and lack of nutrition was plain to see. The painting looks more like a woman in her fifties than a twenty-five-year-old. The woman who once scandalized Berlin with her androgynous looks, her erotic and seductive dances and her sultry on-screen appearance was no longer so appealing. Berber was out of favor as a younger generation of ingenues took over. She began touring her dance shows. During one such tour in Damascus, Berber became fatally ill with tuberculosis. She returned home to Berlin where she died "surrounded by empty morphine syringes" on November 10th, 1928. Anita Berber was twenty-nine. She was buried in a pauper's grave and may have been long forgotten had it not been for Dix's portrait that kept her legend alive.

Berber with her lover Susi Wanowski.

The legendary partnership with gay dancer Sebastian Droste that shocked Berlin's nightlife.

Otto Dix's portrait of the dancer Anita Berber, which was confiscated by the Nazis as "degenerate art" but survived its intended destruction to be reunited with the artist after the Second World War.

H/T Cabaret Berlin, Action Yes, and From the Bygone.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Mata Hari: Sexy photographs of the original femme fatale
Photographs of the 'supreme Beatnik chick' who inspired Patti Smith (NSFW)

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Meet Anita Berber: The 'Priestess of Debauchery' who scandalized Weimar Berlin

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The woman with the shock of dyed red hair, her body wrapped in a fur coat, and a pet monkey grinning and holding tight to her neck was Anita Berber. She danced across the foyer of the Adlon Hotel opened her sable coat and revealed her lustrous naked body underneath.

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This has been one of my favorite songs since it came out when I was in middle school. I was singing along to it today and FINALLY understood one of the references because of what we learned in class. The lyric is "wish I could be just a little less dramatic like a Kennedy when Camelot went down in flames". I never knew what this meant until know and my soul feels complete.

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Miranda Lambert - Mama's Broken Heart (Official Video)

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This video may seem a little unimportant and biased, but I love to hear his explanations behind his picks. Also, all of his videos are genuinely great quality. He explains the idea of Sondheim using numbers instead of classifying them as songs, using the song "Opening Doors" from Merrily We Roll Along. His theory on the lyric "attend the tale of Sweeney Todd" is something I had never thought about.

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Katherine Steele- The Worst Songs in Broadway Musicals

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Katherine Steele- The Worst Songs in Broadway Musicals

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I really appreciate Katherine Steele's immense hatred towards "This Was A Real Nice Clambake" from Carousel. In this video, she goes on a huge rant about this song (along with others, but this one is the longest) and how it does nothing for the plot but remind the audience that the clambake happened right before act 2.

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The Worst Songs in Broadway Musicals | *nerdy rant warning*

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I just had to post this scene from 30 Rock in which Jack (Alec Baldwin) and his mother, played by ELAINE STRITCH sing a Christmas duet together. I never put together that she was the mom in this show, which is crazy because I have seen it so much.

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Harold Prince on George Abbott and His Early Career

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Harold Prince on George Abbott and His Early Career

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Hal Prince telling the story of how he got his first ever job with George Abbot straight out of college is CRAZY. So many things have changed since then. Prince also says that Abbott's number one priority was always to entertain, which was not the biggest priority of Prince himself or of most people at the time. This makes sense because at that point, Abbott was nearing the end of his life and from a completely different generation- the 1920's, in which entertainment and spectacle was super important.

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Harold Prince - on George Abbott and His Early Career

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George Abbott Remembered on Charlie Rose

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George Abbott Remembered on Charlie Rose

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George Abbott lived for 107 YEARS! What the hell! In this clip of Charlie Rose, Mary Rodgers, Frank Rich, and his wife Joy look back on the life and works of George Abbott. According to Frank Rich, Abbott invented the fast, "sitcom-based" pace of musicals, which then was translated to television.

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George Abbott remembered on Charlie Rose, 02/01/1995

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This is the real life event that the Documentary Now episode was based off of. This video stresses me out so much. Stephen Sondheim literally called her performance "flaccid". Yikes. I think this is the biggest nightmare of an actor- not being able to figure out how to take the notes of the director.

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ELAINE STRITCH SINGS "HERE'S TO THE LADIES WHO LUNCH"

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I think of this episode EVERY TIME I think of Ladies Who Lunch. The instrumental of this song is so 70's and the lyrics to this parody song honestly sound like something Sondheim would write. Also, John Mulaney's sideburns make the whole episode even more worthwhile.

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"I Gotta Go" 10:13PM - 9:14AM ft. John Mulaney & Taran Killam | Documentary Now!

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Disney signed a contract with the indigenous Sámi people in order to make sure that their culture represented appropriately. I have heard many people say that this is just an attempt to stay "woke" since that kind of thing is trendy right now. I do not care if that is the case though, because they are at least doing the right thing. They should have done this for the first movie, but I understand that maybe the need was not as dire in the first one.

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The animated Disney film Frozen opened with a tribal-sounding choral chant that, for many in North America, sounded completely out of place.

The 2013 movie was about blond-haired, blue-eyed sisters Elsa and Anna, who reign over the Norwegian kingdom of Arendelle. Elsa's show-stopping Broadway-worthy anthem Let It Go was a far cry from that puzzling opening chant.

However, Sámi people - the Indigenous communities in Scandinavian regions - recognized the tune right away. It turns out the context behind that music was subject to erasure.

The song is Vuelie and it was written for the film by South Sámi musician and composer Frode Fjellheim, who adapted it from one of his earlier songs, Eatnemen Vuelie (Song Of The Earth). His music draws on joik, an ancient vocal tradition that was outlawed when Nordic Indigenous communities were Christianized (like what Canada did with the Potlatch ban).

The selective use of Sámi culture in Frozen led to debate on social media about appropriation and whitewashing, and not just because of the joiking. The character Kristoff (voiced by Jonathan Groff) has a wardrobe that resembles what Sámi reindeer herders would wear, but he looks very Norwegian. To be fair, Sámi people can have blond hair and blue eyes - the result of forced assimilation and ethnic cleansing for over a century.

To make sure cultural erasure didn't happen in Frozen II, Sámi leaders entered into a contract with Disney that affirms ownership of their culture.

This time, filmmakers Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck and producer Peter Del Vecho sought out expert advice on how to respectfully portray Indigenous culture, which is heavily and intricately featured in the film and its reconciliation plot.

The sequel finds Elsa summoned by a mysterious siren, a melodic voice calling from a far off land that holds buried secrets about Arendelle's past. The ensuing story enriches and expands the mythology behind its characters. It turns out Elsa and a fictional community called Northuldra (who are inspired by the Sámi) have a shared history. The film acknowledges the erasure of the Northuldra and their absence from the original film in dramatic terms.

After finding out that their culture would play an even more significant role in the Frozen sequel, the Sámi parliaments of Norway, Sweden and Finland, along with the Saami Council (a non-governmental organization of the Sámi people), reached out to the movie's producers to collaborate. The filmmakers were on board, and the Sámi groups rounded up a group of experts (called Verddet) to act as cultural consultants for the animation team.

Among the group was Anne Lájla Utsi, managing director at the International Sámi Film Institute, who shared with NOW the ceremonial non-confidential version of a contract drawn up between Walt Disney Animation Studios and the Sámi people.

The contract, signed by Del Vecho and the Sámi parliament reps, is printed to look like a hand-written document. It outlines the studio's "desire to collaborate with the Sámi in an effort to ensure that the content of Frozen 2 is culturally sensitive, appropriate and respectful of the Sámi and their culture."

In exchange for the Sámi people's input, Disney agreed it would also produce a dubbed version of Frozen II in one Sámi language (similar to the Maori-language, Tahitian and Hawaiian dubs of Moana) and participate in cross-learning initiatives that contribute to Indigenous communities in Scandinavia.

"We have been approached by many outside filmmakers who are interested in Sámi stories," says Utsi, who is appreciative of Disney's collaboration and hopes others follow the studio's lead when it comes to telling Sámi stories.

"This is a good example of how a big, international company like Disney acknowledges the fact that we own our own culture and stories. It hasn't happened before."

Jesse Wente, director of Canada's Indigenous Screen Office, says he has never seen an agreement like this before, but is enthusiastic about its possibilities.

"It's a treaty," says Wente. "It's in keeping with how Indigenous nations have tended to negotiate with other entities in the past. I think it's a great precedent for how Indigenous nations might deal with a corporation the size of Walt Disney, as well as governments and other agencies, around the use of their cultural and intellectual property in popular entertainment.

"This is an optimistic moment to show us what could potentially be done here in Canada with a similar studio," he adds.

In Frozen II, Fjellheim's Vuelie gets an encore recital, but this time it is sung by the Northuldra characters, a nod to their Sámi-inspired heritage. Other elements in Frozen II inspired by Sámi culture include spirits that represent earth, wind and fire (the Sámi connection to the land is not unlike Indigenous communities in Canada).

There's also the Northuldra dress, which Utsi explains was a sensitive area. Indigenous communities across the globe have to be wary of how their traditional garments are used considering how they are often appropriated for mascots or Halloween costumes.

"We felt good about them," says Utsi about the white fur garments worn by Northuldra characters, as well as their traditional use of reindeer and guksi cups.

Disney's efforts to be culturally sensitive in Frozen II come as the studio makes its vault available on the streaming service Disney+. Several old titles like The Jungle Book and Peter Pan have disclaimers warning viewers of "outdated cultural depictions." (The 1946 live action/hybrid Song Of The South is not on Disney+.)

The warnings show the company is willing to acknowledge its legacy of racist stereotypes, but advocacy groups believe the disclaimer should be extended to more films, including 1992's Aladdin, in which a lyric makes Middle-Eastern characters sound savage.

"We have to push corporations to change, including the ones that have a problematic history," says Wente, who cites Disney's 1995 animated film Pocahontas as a movie that has caused harm.

Disney's collaboration with the Sámi helps ensure they won't have to add a disclaimer to Frozen II.

"Disney's team really wanted to make it right," says Utsi. "They didn't want to make any mistakes or hurt anybody. We felt that they took it seriously. And the film shows that. We in Verddet are truly proud of this collaboration."
@justsayrad

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Disney signed a contract with Indigenous people before making Frozen II

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The animated Disney film Frozen opened with a tribal-sounding choral chant that, for many in North America, sounded completely out of place. The 2013 movie was about blond-haired, blue-eyed sisters Elsa and Anna, who reign over the Norwegian kingdom of Arendelle. Elsa's show-stopping Broadway-worthy anthem Let It Go was a far cry from that puzzling opening chant.

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Glynis Johns was the original actress that inspired the song "Send In the Clowns" from A Little Night Music. I completely get why Sondheim wrote this for her. She definitely is a good actress and I think the fact that she was not a singer does not limit the emotional speech of the song, which is the sign of a well written song in my opinion. A song should not have to rely on the talent of the singer to be good, and "Send in the Clowns" does not do that.

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This is the full movie of Smiles of A Summer Night, written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. This film is so dramatic and I totally see why Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim wanted to adapt it into a musical. I think it works much better that way because these characters need an additional format to express their thoughts and feelings.

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Dies Irae- The Nightmare Before Christmas

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Dies Irae- The Nightmare Before Christmas

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This connection was pointed out in class, but the extent of the usage of the Dies Irae motif is much more intense than I originally intended. This article gives examples of the motif in many more songs than the original one "This Is Halloween" that we discussed in class.

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Friday the 13th just before Halloween - a good day for this repeat of my favorite post on my favorite musical score.
It's the spooky season, but it's also the fun season. Before Winter wraps its embrace around us there is Halloween, the last chance to have some fun. It's a challenge to the eerie creep of darkness we're still adjusting to, still resisting at least one last time.

No movie captures the season for me quite like " The Nightmare Before Christmas," the epic Tim Burton classic of stop-motion animation from the old school. Released in 1993, it was immediately recognized as a great classic movie for the holidays - Halloween, for the fun of it, and Christmas for the cynically twisted reaction to what it has become.

What makes this movie, however, isn't just the great story and animation. The score by Danny Elfman is pure genius - and belongs in the repertoire of classical greats.

The story is far from simple. Holidays are created in "towns" that put them on, and there is trouble in Halloween Town. Jack Skellington, the creative force behind Halloween, is bored. Every year is the same, every year is just as ghoulish as the last. Fear just isn't as frightful as it should be. Sally, who secretly loves him, decides to watch his anguish from a distance.

He takes a long walk through the night and arrives in the glitter of Christmas Town. Enthralled, he eventually plans to take over Christmas by kidnapping Santa Claus. Sally, who knows better, is powerless to stop it all. The result is such a mess that he has to confess his disaster, but in the end realizes how wonderful Sally is.

Yes, it is ultimately a love story.

The plot aside, the score for this movie is simply brilliant. Each scene has its own song, and every song has a central theme. They are all tied together by the Gregorian Chant "Dies Irae," or "Day of Wrath". The first four notes of this are shown below in Medieval notation - basically treble clef, with the F# that signifies the key of E minor noted with a simple mark at the top.

These four notes, and variations on them, wraps the whole movie together.

Here is the first long song, "Jack's Lament," which culminates in a beautifully animated sigh of despair:

In this song, "Dies Irae" is put into a strange Waltz. The theme is developed in 3/4 time with a pickup quarter into a half on the downbeat. It opens with a small variation on "Dies Irae", up a minor third, and then develops with a little motion. Then, "Dies Irae" itself is repeated twice to fill out the theme. Here is the score, reduced to piano and vocal, with annotation:

One other time "Dies Irae" is put in the forefront is in the song "Making Christmas". In this one, Halloween Town is put to work crafting the presents and decorations as a ghoulish elven workshop. In all of the movie, "Day of Wrath" is never more appropriate - and it is simply hammered home with a brilliant orchestration by Elfman:

These are not the only songs which contain clear references to "Dies Irae". The despair of Sally, who thinks she is not good enough to reveal her love for Jack, is lamented in "Sally's Song" - based on an inversion of "Dies Irae" in part - it rises where it should fall:

In total, the score is as much of a masterpiece as anything written by the great masters of the past. Danny Elfman is a great composer who has scored many films and also wrote the theme for "The Simpsons." Nightmare, however, is clearly his masterpiece.

I have dreamed of a suite of the tunes reduced for violin solo. Are you reading, Josh Bell and Rachel Barton Pine?

This movie of twisted fun is a lot more than just a "Day of Wrath," of course. When Jack finally realizes what is missing from his life and right in front of him is Sally the movie quickly wraps up with "Jack and Sally's Song". Though the entire score is in a minor key, carefully exploring the many moods of minor, it has a surprise at the end. Just as Jack and Sally embrace we have the only major chord in the whole score - the very last chord, save the denouement with flowing strings that accompany the pan-out into happily ever after.

"The Nightmare Before Christmas" is more than a holiday movie in many ways. It is a small opera for our times, ultimately a comic opera that forgives you for laughing at the twisted fun. Nothing captures the spirit of Halloween better than this masterpiece.

Central to it all is Danny Elfman's truly brilliant and inspiring score. Listen to it and you'll have many tunes to hum as you stomp through the leaves. The "Day of Wrath" was never more fun and uplifting!
Reduced scores for piano and vocals for Jack's Lament and Sally's Song in pdf form can be found in these links.

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Friday the 13th just before Halloween - a good day for this repeat of my favorite post on my favorite musical score. It's the spooky season, but it's also the fun season. Before Winter wraps its embrace around us there is Halloween, the last chance to have some fun.

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Pacific Overtures- 1976 Original Broadway Cast

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Pacific Overtures- 1976 Original Broadway Cast

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This is the ORIGINAL BROADWAY CAST of Pacific Overtures! I watched the entire show and I have a lot of thoughts. I think this show drastically differs in representation than Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song. You can tell that actual effort was put into the music sounding like it was from China, whereas Flower Drum Song's seems like it is a fabricated idea of Chinese music based off of stereotypes developed by Americans.

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Pacific Overtures - 1976 Original Broadway Cast

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Sweeney Todd: In The Theater and the Cinema

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Sweeney Todd: In The Theater and the Cinema

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This article compares and contrasts Sweeney Todd as a movie and as a musical in regards to hypertextuality. Hypertextuality is described as "the in depth comparison of an original work such as a novel, film, or theater production with an adaptation of that original." Personally, I think the Sweeney Todd movie is alright, but only as a separate entity away from the stage musical, which is infinitely better in comparison.

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Hypertexuality is a concept that can be described as the in depth comparison of an original work such as a novel, film, or theater production with an adaptation of that original. The process of hypertexuality allows the film adaptation of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street to be analyzed in relation to the original theatrical production (McGill, "Sweeney Todd"). The hypertexual relationship between Sweeney Todd as a play and as a film can be examined through comparing many aspects; specifically, the elimination of certain songs in the film adaptation that were originally in the play takes away from the score's role of guiding the audience towards certain messages and often changes overall tones of the film. This removal of some of the songs, in turn, leaves many of the film's themes up to interpretation, as audience members are left much more speculation as to what is really going on in certain scenes.

There is a negative stigma associated with the film adapted from some other original source (Riley). Tim Burton faced this challenge with the production of the Sweeney Todd film, but he tried to successfully transform every scene from a theatrical aspect to a cinematic aspect. In aspects such as the score of the film in comparison to the play, the theatrical production had a much m ore dramatic orchestra, highlighting the intensity of the dark themes (McGill, "It Might Have Been Sophisticated Film Music"). The film, on the other hand, resorted to songs that were much less obvious and were occasionally merely background music. This method was used because films are able to use lighting, camera angles, and other editable sounds in order to obtain a certain tone or mood (McGill, "It Might Have Been Sophisticated Film Music"). Another reason for cutting or changing versions of certain songs is that a suspenseful mood is more easily achieved in the making of a film than a theatrical production because of the mass amounts of editing techniques at hand. The play used songs such as 'Kiss Me' and 'Ladies in their sensitivities' as a form of suspense for their respective scenes, but they were deemed unnecessary in the film since that tone was established through cinematic methods (McGill, "Sweeney Todd").

With his film, Tim Burton wanted to create something that was dark, dreadful, and horrific. Some of the songs in the play had a much more light-hearted tone and often added to the oddly formed dark humor at some points of the production (Philpotts). Also, the audience in the theater tends to clap after songs are over, which also lightens the mood. Burton wanted to stray away from any chance of a light mood - he preferred that his audience get the full experience of a realistic horror film. For this reason, he omitted any songs that would stray away from his ideal atmosphere in the film. This gave the film a directly ominous theme, while in the play the theme is more complicated but is guided by the songs.

One of the main affects of removing certain songs from the score in the film is that it lowers the anticipation of what will happen next. In the theater production, there are many songs that strictly state what will follow that musical number. This guides the audience to expect a certain scene, theme, or mood to proceed the song. In the film, on the other hand, there are many songs that have been omitted or changed, leaving the audience surprised in some moments or given a chance to interpret the scene in a different way than they would have if there was a song to influence their perception. For example, Stephen Sondheim, the musical composer of the theatrical production, used a method called 'Mickey Mousing.' This was the technique of synchronizing the actions in the scene to the words in the song that described those actions (McGill, "It Might Have Been Sophisticated Film Music"). This, in turn, gave the audience a direct description of what was going on, a method that was not used in the film.

The differences in the score between the film and the play change the overall meaning of some of the scenes. They are interpreted differently because the songs are giving the audience a tone off of which to base their ideas of the scene, whereas in the film, audience members must pay attention to other aspects such as character behavior in order to gain reference for the tone or the theme being portrayed. Some of the themes such as socio-political corruption are demonstrated through many aspects such as set design, characterization, but also through the songs of the play. Again, the themes are left up to interpretation for the audience of the film because they are focusing on things that the camera forces them to focus on, such as a character's expression or the set of a particular scene.

Audiences of both the film and the play can understand the dark and corrupt themes, even though they are portrayed in two different ways. The score of a play can be used to display these messages in a much more dramatic and obvious way, whereas the music in the film is more of an aid towards the mood or the tone, which can then be interpreted as an overall message or theme. The outcome of this difference between the film and the play is a different meaning being understood by audiences of the two productions.

Bibliography

McGill, Craig M. "It Might Have Been Sophisticated Film Music: The Role of the Orchestra in Stage and Screen Versions of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street." Studies in Musical Theatre 8.1 (2014): 5-26. IngentaConnect. Web.

-. "Sweeney Todd: Hypertexuality, Intermediality and Adaptation." Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 7.1 (2013): 41-63. EBSCOhost. Web.

Philpotts, Kim. "'Sweeney Todd': His Dark Material." The Sondheim Review Summer 2008: 15. Print.

Riley, Brian Patrick. "'It's Man Devouring Man, My Dear': Adapting Sweeney Todd for the Screen." Literature/Film Quarterly 38.3 (2010): 205-216. Print.

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Sweeney Todd: In the Theater and the Cinema

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Hypertexuality is a concept that can be described as the in depth comparison of an original work such as a novel, film, or theater production with an adaptation of that original. The process of hypertexuality allows the film adaptation of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street to be analyzed in relation to the original theatrical production (McGill, "Sweeney Todd").

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Company is one of my all time favorite musicals so I've seen so many different videos of productions. This is my favorite version of "Barcelona" because I think Christina Hendricks absolutely KILLS IT as April. She is definitely the person I would love to chat with if I ever ended up playing April (a dream role of mine for sure).

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Christina Hendricks singing in her underwear  "Company"

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"You Could Drive A Person Crazy"- Miscast Gala

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"You Could Drive A Person Crazy"- Miscast Gala

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This is by far my favorite version of "You Could Drive A Person Crazy" from Company! Gavin Lee, Ethan Slater, and Wesley Taylor really kill this song through the choreography and their chemistry.

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Gavin Lee, Ethan Slater, and Wesley Taylor perform "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" from COMPANY

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Judy Collins sings "Send In The Clowns" in this 1976 concert. I totally see what Sondheim's thought process was when writing this song (even though it was not originally written for her). She can clearly get the point across through her acting, so who cares if the song isn't a high belting spectacle? All that matters is that she can evoke the emotion that her character feels, and "Send In The Clowns" helps her to do that.

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JUDY COLLINS - "Send In The Clowns" with Boston Pops  1976

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This musical is described as being about “a young overweight-to-obese homosexual and/or gay and/or queer, cisgender male, able-bodied university-and-graduate-school educated, musical theater writing, Disney Ushering, broke-ass middle-class far left-leaning black-identified and classified American descendant of slaves full of self-conscious femme energy and who thinks he’s probably a vers bottom but not totally certain of that obsessing over the latest draft of his self-referential musical ‘A Strange Loop’!”. And it is AWESOME. I am so glad we talked about it in class because I think it definitely deserves more notoriety.

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Michael R. Jackson's gutsy, exasperated musical is set within the mind of a black, queer man who's writing a musical about a black, queer man who's writing a musical ...

Larry Owens, center, as Usher, the main character (and in some ways the only character) in Michael R. Jackson's musical "A Strange Loop." Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

A Strange Loop

NYT Critic's Pick

Off Broadway, Musical

Closing Date:

Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St.

212-279-4200

More Information

Navel-gazing becomes a highly invasive procedure - a full-on laparoscopy of the heart, soul and loins - in Michael R. Jackson's "A Strange Loop," which opened on Monday at Playwrights Horizons. This jubilantly anguished musical burrows so deep into the shadows of its hero's tormented mind that you wonder if it will ever emerge into the light.

Spoiler alert: It doesn't.

Mr. Jackson, a young playwright and composer whose considerable talent is evidently matched by feelings of endless frustration, has created a show that would appear to be all about him, and it's anything but a valentine. But let's allow Usher (a commandingly centered Larry Owens), the work's central (and arguably only) character, to describe it himself:

"It's about a black, queer man writing a musical about a black, queer man who's writing a musical about a black queer man who's writing a musical about a black queer man, etc."

Or to locate the subject more specifically (and bear with me here), he's "a young overweight-to-obese homosexual and/or gay and/or queer, cisgender male, able-bodied university-and-graduate-school educated, musical theater writing, Disney Ushering, broke-ass middle-class far left-leaning black-identified and classified American descendant of slaves full of self-conscious femme energy and who thinks he's probably a vers bottom but not totally certain of that obsessing over the latest draft of his self-referential musical 'A Strange Loop'!"

Whether you are delighted, appalled or annoyed by the resulting production - and the odds are you will experience all of these responses - you can't deny that it is uncompromisingly, exactly what it claims to be. Directed with admirable clarity by Stephen Brackett, with fabulously inventive choreography by Raja Feather Kelly, "A Strange Loop" is a self-portrait in an endless hall of mirrors that dares to forbid closure, escape or redemption to the artistically thwarted being at its center.

And it's all set to a bouncy Broadway beat, with an assortment of the kind of infectious, richly harmonic melodies that would have your grandparents leaving the theater humming. That is, if they hadn't walked out before.

Introspection has a very physical dimension here. Or, as we are warned during the first few minutes, "There will be ..." (and you may finish that sentence with your own phrase of choice for anal intercourse). Once again, the show makes good on its promise.

Like Mr. Jackson, Usher shares a name with a famous African-American pop star. This name is also an accurate job description, since Usher earns much-needed money working the aisles of a theater occupied by Disney's "The Lion King."

It is in his professional uniform that we meet Usher, played with confrontational charm and energetic weariness by Mr. Owens. It is even suggested that everything we watch in the succeeding 100 minutes or so occurs in Usher's mind during the intermission of "The Lion King."

That mind is a crowded place, inhabited by a throng of nagging, nasty thoughts. Or rather Thoughts, since they are the other characters in the show. They are portrayed with transformative glee by a cast of deliciously assorted shapes, sizes and countenances: L Morgan Lee, James Jackson Jr., John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey and Antwayn Hopper.

This supporting cast embodies figures and figments that are distinctly nonsupporting. They include a naysayer called Your Daily Self Loathing; his agent, Fairweather; and a spectrum of potential, derisive dates on hookup apps. (Though Usher refers frequently to his Inner White Girl, she regrettably never makes an appearance.)

Most damning of all are Usher's Mom and Dad (his family members, by the way, have the names of characters from "The Lion King"), who really, really don't approve of his sexuality or his chosen profession. Mom wishes Usher would write a wholesome, God-fearing show in the tradition of those touring productions by the entertainment mogul Tyler Perry. "God sent Tyler on earth to be our voice, along with Barack," she says.

Imagine Usher's consternation when Agent Fairweather offers him the job of ghostwriting a Tyler Perry play, a parody of which is performed with scathing disgust by Usher and his Thoughts. Perry Land merges into Usher's Family Land in a sequence near the end, a hostile gospel rant against men who would lie with men, overseen by the specter of H.I.V.

I probably would have admired that latter vignette more if I hadn't felt that it was under- and overscoring what had already come before. And there you have the central problem of "A Strange Loop," which is produced in association with Page 73. Usher's mind, like many minds, runs on an obsessive and circular track.

And despite some nifty visual surprises in the set (Arnulfo Maldonado), costumes (Montana Levi Blanco) and lighting (Jen Schriever), the show can't altogether forestall the tedium that comes with running in place. In this sense, "A Strange Loop," would seem to refer to a cinematic time loop.

In fact, the title is taken from a concept by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter in which the self (to use Usher's words) " is just a set of meaningless symbols in your brain pushing up or down through one level of abstraction to another but always winding up right back where they started."

More particularly, Mr. Jackson is considering the constructs of black and queer identity that paralyze somebody like Usher, whose thoughts often take the form of shrill cultural stereotypes. A similar sense of sociological self-consciousness within the black artist has been explored with more indirection and sophistication by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, especially in his "An Octoroon."

That Mr. Jackson - a very deft composer and lyricist, thank heavens - is working in the medium of musical comedy gives him another layer of self-consciousness to play with. The theatrical and musical references here are sly and manifold, memorably including "The Color Purple" and, implicitly, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's "Company."

That 1970 show could be said to be the genesis of the contemporary musical of self-consciousness. Mr. Jackson's reinvention of this solipsistic form ultimately stalls against the dead-end wall that is built into its structure. At an intermission-free hour and 45 minutes, the show feels overstretched.

There are plenty of pleasures within this hermetic environment, though. I loved the apparition of a parade of reproving black ancestors (who include James Baldwin, a character named "Twelve Years a Slave" and, oh bliss, Whitney), and the scene in which Usher flirts with a man on the subway who seems almost too good to be true.

"Do you live in Queens?" Usher asks this dream boat. The answer: "No, in your imagination." Even if it's a limited landscape, Usher's imagination is a borough worth visiting.
A Strange Loop
Through July 7 at the Mainstage Theater of Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; 212-564-1235, playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

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Review: 'A Strange Loop' Is a Self-Portrait in a Hall of Mirrors

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Michael R. Jackson's gutsy, exasperated musical is set within the mind of a black, queer man who's writing a musical about a black, queer man who's writing a musical ... A Strange Loop NYT Critic's Pick Off Broadway, Musical Closing Date: Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St.

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This is a full video of the 2004 Broadway production of Assassins. The quality is not that great, but it is fully subtitled and it is probably the only full version I will see for a while so I'll take what I can get. People might disagree with me on this, but I think bootlegs are a great way for everyone to see theatre and to combat the elitism of theatre itself.

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Sondheim Teaches 'Not Getting Married' from Company

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Sondheim Teaches 'Not Getting Married' from Company

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I have seen this video a million times and I think it is so cool. His proud dad looks are so funny, like when the students at the masterclass perfectly take his direction. I would be so scared to sing this song (or really any song) in front of Sondheim.

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Sondheim teaches 'Not Getting Married' from Company

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I really enjoy hearing about Sondheim's thoughts on the assassins featured in the musical. I agree with his statement that the American public often pushes away these people as "un-American freaks", which makes the idea of a musical about these people even more interesting. However, I wonder if this musical would do as well if it were written this year, in the midst of immense gun control tension and school shootings.

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Getting Away With Murder- Stephen Sondheim

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Getting Away With Murder- Stephen Sondheim

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I mentioned this play in class because it is the only play that Sondheim ever wrote. Jeremiah and I did a scene from it (part of which is shown in this video). It was only on Broadway for a little less than a year and it is an absurdist dark comedy about the seven deadly sins who meet at a therapy support group. The best part is that there is also a big murder mystery theme within the play. I wonder if it maybe would have been more successful if it was a musical rather than a play. Regardless, I really love it (you can find it at the library, by the way).

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Matthew Gardiner, director of "Passion" at the Signature Theatre in Washington D.C. gives his perspective on the show and the qualities given to it by Sondheim and Lapine that make it so special. One really interesting thing that he said in this interview was that "Passion" is the most emotional Sondheim musical by far because it was written as Sondheim was falling in love for the first time. I was unaware that he had ever fallen in love and I can definitely see how that would shift his perspective on love in his musicals.

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No one can put music and lyrics together the way Stephen Sondheim has done - astonishingly - for decades, since the mid-1950's. In my interview with Matthew Gardiner, who is directing a new production of Passion for Signature Theatre, I asked him not only about where he thinks the musical sits in the Sondheim canon but about his journey opening up this complicated, emotionally-charged, and spell-binding work.
Susan Galbraith: In a London Review of Books 2010 article, David Thompson wrote that Sondheim is "America's master of musical theatre" then adds, "as long as we are prepared for the work to be brilliant but not relaxed." Do you agree with "America's master?" And what do you make of "brilliant but not relaxed?"
Matthew Gardiner: He is definitely America's master for me. As somebody who has directed a lot of musicals and a lover of musical theater, there is no one who even comes close to Stephen Sondheim when it come to the depth of his writing. It's beautiful and stunning and rich.

And interestingly, but I'm not quite sure what the quote means, "Interesting but not relaxed." I think maybe it suggests that Sondheim is never taking the easy route, he is always approaching a new subject or topic and that is nowhere more apparent than what he does with Passion and the tropes he and James Lapine (Book) took on in following this love story. Certainly, he is also challenging his audiences.
Eric Schaeffer has made Signature Theatre's name in great part because of its re-tooling of Stephen Sondheim works and finding what I'll call their 'inner heartbeats." What have you and Eric shared about approaching Sondheim in general?
The biggest thing that Eric says to me is the importance of trusting the material. So often when I have seen Sondheim not work for me, I sense they're not trusting the writers. Theater for me is never about being overly conceptual or trying to make my voice more important than the writer's. When you have a writer like Stephen and a writer like James Lapine (who, it is important to note, not only wrote the book for this as well as Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods, but was trusted to direct all three shows by Sondheim for Broadway,) you're in good hands. If you trust it, if you believe in what they've written, then it unfolds naturally and you find the heart of the show and you find what is deeply, deeply personal about every one of his shows.

When he was first writing, perhaps less so now, some people viewed him as overly intellectual and pretentious. I think his writing is so far from that. His works are more human and more real than any other musicals than have ever been written.

Certainly Passion is arguably the most emotional of his works, coming during a period of his life when, he wrote somewhere, he was falling fully in love for the first time. For those of us who love this musical - as you've just said it's "so human" and "so real"- the emotional journeys in Passion, even its emotional messiness, is part of its glory. What, in your mind, are the unique strengths and challenges of this Sondheim musical?

The challenge of the musical is to understand the journeys that Giorgio and Fosca make. I think there have been a lot of misconceptions around the piece. Maybe because of bad marketing in some situations, or maybe because of the original film, it has become known as the piece about the crazy, obsessive woman who stalks a man. Someone said to me the other day, "I don't like that musical because it seems to be Sondheim suggesting that in order to love someone you have to want to claw out their eyeballs and climb inside of them." I found that statement both ridiculous and hilarious. At the same time it is so not what the musical is. There is a misconception that the show is about Giorgio becoming more like Fosca or that Fosca's way of loving is the ultimate way of loving and that what is being argued for is that abandon and relentlessness is the only way to love.

That isn't what the show is about either. The show is about two people who meet somewhere in the middle on this journey. Fosca may begin in a relentless manner because she is sick, because she is dying. She has never felt love or the way love should be experienced. She has never experienced life the way she wants to, and through the course of the show, while she cracks something open in Giorgio, he teaches her something. There's a beautiful moment in the train scene when he says, "It is because of your relentlessness that I can't have feelings for you" (and not her looks.) Then she responds, " No one has ever taught me how to love." There is this beautiful exchange that happens after that in the journey of the show where we watch her temper herself.

It is very easy to approach the show and have Giorgio standoffish and push her away, and think she is a crazy woman. Then at the end of the show, he is supposed to fall in love with her. It doesn't work. The audience is going, "Where did that come from?" The challenge of the show is to balance their journeys, and then the arc of it is understood by both actors and ultimately by the audience.

Perhaps some audience members won't go for it. Perhaps for them, it doesn't fit into the way a love story should go. It doesn't fit into their tropes of a love story. What I have said in response and to challenge those people is by asking, "Why do you think this is unacceptable yet we are able to accept the love story of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Note Dame, or The Phantom of the Opera, or Beauty and the Beast? Why are we willing to accept the beautiful woman falling in love with the less than desirable man? There are a lot of expectations and cultural assumptions that we place on love stories and expectations and values we place on women when they are not beautiful.
But that is so interesting. Could that explain why its original production on Broadway, despite winning the Tony for Best Musical, had such a short run? Was it also timing of a work, especially coming to Sondheim, that it felt too spare and exposing?
Well the original production had its flaws and its challenges. I also think Sondheim in general is one step ahead of us. We seem to appreciate him only later. His brilliance always seems to go unnoticed in its first viewing.

When I saw the original show on Broadway, I loved it and I came away with the idea that maybe all three of the characters involved in the love triangle are really one and the same, that I followed myself or maybe Sondheim and that we were witnessing the fracturing of personality through love and that in some situations or life stages we can be any and all of these characters. In particular mightn't we find ourselves so lost in love at some point, we become desperate and even pathetically unattractive?

Yes, I would certainly agree with that. The piece shows us about what we look for in love and what we experience in love. At the same time, I don't think the show intends to dictate what love is. It is opening up the idea of what love can be.

I don't know if you have ever seen the Charlie Rose interview with Sondheim that happened when Passion came to Broadway, and Sondheim was very resistant to the comparisons to his personal life. But obviously you bring whatever of yourself to whatever you do. I bring myself to this. Claybourne (Claybourne Elder) and Natascia (Natascia Diaz) bring themselves to it. Everyone involved, cast and crew bring themselves to this in doing the show. The past four weeks have been transformative because you enter into this with certain ideas and expectations and thoughts about what love is. This show really challenges that.

You used the word "transformative," w ould you say something more about your personal journey with this work and what have you found in exploring the work in rehearsal?

A lot of it has been about my preconceived notions about the journeys of Giorgio and Fosca. Just from being in the room with those too actors and exploring this text, I've done a 180 about how the piece unfolds. It's also transformative because it's a hard piece, a hard piece to be in rehearsal with eight hours a day. It's relentless. It's all consuming. It asks so much of everyone in the room to be vulnerable and open. In those situations you learn a lot about yourself. You have to. That's the way it works. To be vulnerable is the way we get to the heart of the piece and the core of Sondheim's writing.
And you are asking the same of your audience too, I suspect. The story concerns a love triangle, but it's the character of Fosca that has been most hotly debated. In your work with actress Natascia Diaz, is she a woman willing to risk all in love or a neurotic vampire woman? Is there anything you particularly want people to take away about the character?
First and foremost, the show is Giorgio's story. But it's curious, yes, people want to talk to the actress playing Fosca. She's like Richard III in that respect, the difficult character that asks an actress to be less than desirable. So, there's always something interesting in that. But the journey is really Giorgio's.

But having said that, Natascia has given so much heart and so much of herself to the role. We want all the roles to be sympathetic, and Natascia is the only actress to do the role at this moment with me and she is making really thrilling choices and being honest.
Did you choose to direct this?
[Watch for our interview with Natascia Diaz later this week.]

I did not choose to direct it. But it was certainly high up on my list. Eric said, "We're going to do Passion and I want you to direct this time. I've directed it enough." But in terms of my wish list of shows, there's probably ten Sondheim shows. I want to direct all of them. Anytime you get to work on a Stephen Sondheim musical, it's a gift.

You know, Passion was one of the first productions I saw as a fully professional production. I had seen several things in video form or in community theaters. I saw Eric's production of Passion at the Sondheim Celebration. It was hugely inspirational and a defining moment for me as an artist. It was the moment I turned to my brother and said, "I have to meet Eric Schaeffer."
Anything else you would like to add?
The piece is important in my life. So when he presented this gift, well, moments like that don't come that often. So you rise to that challenge, and it's thrilling. There is simply nothing better than being in a room directing a Sondheim musical.

Our production is in this 277-seat theater but we are not skimping in any way. It has the full original orchestration and cast size. We never want to try and figure out how to do something on a significantly smaller scale with reduced manpower. This is a big production and it deserves that. At the same time it's a smaller space, and I think that's the way to do this story for all of us to be as close as possible to these characters and be forced to experience the story in an intimate way.

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On the intimacy of Stephen Sondheim's Passion, Signature director Matthew Gardiner - DC Theatre Scene

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No one can put music and lyrics together the way Stephen Sondheim has done - astonishingly - for decades, since the mid-1950's. In my interview with Matthew Gardiner, who is directing a new production of Passion for Signature Theatre, I asked him not only about where he thinks the musical sits in the Sondheim canon but about his journey opening up this complicated, emotionally-charged, and spell-binding work.

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A Little Night Music- Laura Benanti and Kristen Bell

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A Little Night Music- Laura Benanti and Kristen Bell

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These are two of my all time favorite actresses and I had no idea they were in this show together! They sound great together and I would have loved to see this production.

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This is so fascinating to me! I would KILL to be taught by Sondheim! This girl sounds beautiful, but I think this is a weird song for her to be coached on because it is typically sung by much older women. Regardless of that, Sondheim knows what he wants and I think he makes his notes very clear.

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"Flooded With Justice"- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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"Flooded With Justice"- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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This song is one of the most obvious parodies in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, being based off of "Do You Hear The People Sing?" from Les Miserables. The comedic style of this song in particular is also reminiscent of Les Mis parodies in shows like Urinetown and Something Rotten.

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Flooded with Justice - "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

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"This Session Is Going To Be Different" vs. "Maybe This Tine"

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"This Session Is Going To Be Different" vs. "Maybe This Tine"

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This song sung by Michael Hyatt as Dr. Akopian from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is very clearly based off of "Maybe This Time" from Cabaret. She even says "maybe this time" before the song starts. This song is perfect to parody Cabaret because both songs evoke the same melancholy feelings.

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This Session Is Going To Be Different (Explicit) - feat. Michael Hyatt - 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend''

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I was really hoping we would talk about this musical in class so I could post about this TV show! This musical is the PERFECT choice for this show because it parallels the characters in the show so well. For example, the article states that "A villain never thinks he's a villain—he is the hero of his own story," the director tells the cast. How appropriate, considering at this point it's very unclear which category Payton falls under. Ricardo is perfect for the character of Booth, as well because him getting the role furthers the plot of the show expertly.

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[Warning: spoilers for The Politician, ahead]
Congratulations, you've made it far enough into The Politician on Netflix to see it turn into Glee. Just kidding...but not really. In episodes six and seven of your new favorite Ryan Murphy fever dream, the kids of whatever-fancy-California-high-school are putting on a musical! Payton (Ben Platt) is fresh off his presidential victory, but he just found out he actually lost after Astrid (Lucy Boynton) already dropped out. Maybe putting on Assassins, a musical literally about famous killers will take his mind off it? Probably not, considering there are two attempts on his life over the course of the production.

Here, everything you need to know about the very real musical.

So, what's Assassins about?

A group of successful-and not too successful-presidential assassins share their stories. For example, in The Politician, Payton takes on the role of John Hinckley, Jr., who attempted assassin of President Ronald Reagan. In March of 1981, managed to hit Reagan in the chest with a ricocheted bullet, also wounding members of Reagan's security detail and his Press Secretary James Brady, who died years later as a result of his injuries. As we see in the show, Payton watches the shooting over and over on his laptop...for research?

Infinity Jackson (Zoey Deutch) plays Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, who also failed to assassinate her target, President Gerald Ford. The only main character on The Politician to be cast as a successful murderer is Ricardo (Benjamin Barrett), who plays John Wilkes Booth, infamous for killing President Abraham Lincoln. It's kind of ironic, seeing as he tries to follow in Booth's footsteps by killing Payton (in a very bizarre way), but fails.

It's by the Stephen Sondheim

You know, the music and lyrics are by Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, Company, the list goes on and on. It originally ran Off-Broadway in 1990, but was revived for the big time in 2004 on the Studio 54 stage.

The ~Music~

The Politician kids performed "Unworthy of Your Love" and a truly disturbing rendition of "The Ballad of Booth." Take a listen to the entire soundtrack on Spotify, here.

"A villain never thinks he's a villain-he is the hero of his own story," the director tells the cast. How appropriate, considering at this point it's very unclear which category Payton falls under.

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I Need to Talk to You About the 'Assassins' Musical in 'The Politician'

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Warning: spoilers for The Politician, ahead] Congratulations, you've made it far enough into The Politician on Netflix to see it turn into Glee. Just kidding...but not really. In episodes six and seven of your new favorite Ryan Murphy fever dream, the kids of whatever-fancy-California-high-school are putting on a musical!

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This dude makes some of the best musical theatre content on Youtube, in my opinion. In this video, he defines the term "concept musical" and why the form and structure of Company is classified as one. I also like how he mentions the vaudevillian roots of Company, as that is something that I had never really considered.

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This is a list of all of Sondheim's musicals that were introduced. This includes his musical version of Mary Poppins and his first ever original musical, Climb High.

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High Tor

Stage musical [unproduced]
Adaptation of the play by Maxwell Anderson

Musical Numbers

The Wonder of You

High Tor

List a While, Lady

[No recordings known. "The Wonder of You" is the only song included in the collected lyrics volumes.]

Mary Poppins

Stage musical [abandoned]
Adaptation of the stories by P. L. Travers

Musical Numbers

[No recordings known]

Climb High

Stage musical (1953) [abandoned]

Musical Numbers

(according to Ken Bloom)

All Year Long

Climb High

Christabel

Nice Town

Rodgers and Hammerstein

School of Hard Knocks

Yoo Hoo, Hi There

Musical Numbers

(according to Stephen Banfield)

Advice

Bright Star

Chris and David I (Stars Give Light) [cut song]

Chris and David II (No Star of Night) [cut song]

Climb High

Cocktail Party [cut song]

Delta Iota Mu [cut song]

Have You Been Waiting Long

I Don't Want to Fall in Love With You

I'm in Love With a Boy

In a Year from Now

In the Tradition (Greek) [title of a proposed song; not written]

The Lay of a Gay Young Man

The New York Follies

Nice Town, But--

Not for Children

Party, Party

Pavement Pounding Sequence

A Song for Humming

This is Show Biz [cut song]

Waltz

When I Get Famous

Where Do I Belong

Yoo Hoo

Recordings

The Man with the Squeaky Shoes

Television spy mystery [unproduced]
Teleplay by Stephen Sondheim
Copyrighted April, 1953

The Clock

Stage musical (1953) [abandoned]
Based on the film of the same name

Musical Number

New York [recorded as "New York Song"]

Recordings

The Legendary Mizners

Stage musical (1953) [abandoned]
Based on the biography by Alva Johnston
[This was to later become the basis for Bounce (Wise Guys)]

Musical Number

[No recordings known]

The Lady or the Tiger?

Television musical (1954) [abandoned]
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and Mary Rodgers
Based on the story by Frank Stockton

Musical Numbers

Another World

Crime Doesn't Pay

Fair Lady

Fanfare and Arena Sequence

I Wonder Why

I'm Above All That

King and Queen Sequence

Lovely Ladies

Opening

Recordings

I Believe In You

Television play (1956) [unproduced]
Written by Elaine Carrington
Song by Stephen Sondheim

Musical Number

They Ask Me Why I Believe in You

Recordings

They Ask Me Why I Believe in You

The Last Resorts

Stage musical (1956) [abandoned]
Songs by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Jean Kerr

Musical Numbers

High Life [also known as On the River]

I Wouldn't Change a Thing

I've Known You All My Life [title of a proposed song; not written]

Pour Le Sport

Recordings

Ring Around the Moon

Stage musical (1957) [abandoned]
Adaptation of the play by Jean Anouilh

Musical Number

[No recordings known]

The Jet-Propelled Couch

Television musical (1958) [abandoned]
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Stanley Richards
Adaptation of the book by Robert Lindner

Musical Numbers

Doctor [title of a proposed song; not written]

Nobody Reads Books

Yes [music used for Salon at the Claridge #1 in

[No recordings known]

Happily Ever After

Television musical (1959) [abandoned]
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Joseph Stein

Musical Numbers

I Wouldn't Change a Thing

[No recordings known]

Do You Hear a Waltz?

Television musical (1960) [unproduced]
Based on the play Time of the Cuckoos by Arthur Laurents
[later developed as a stage musical with music by Richard Rodgers, retitled Do I Hear a Waltz?]

Musical Number

Do I Hear a Waltz?

Recordings
[Note: first performed in the 1998 Los Angeles production of Putting It Together and the subsequent Broadway production]

A Pray by Blecht

[At various stages of development also known as The Race to Urga and The Exception and the Rule]

Stage musical (1968) [unproduced]
Music by Leonard Bernstein
Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by John Guare
Based on the play The Exception and the Rule by Bertolt Brecht
Produced by Stuart Ostrow
Directed by Jerome Robbins

Musical Numbers
[Sondheim contributions only] According to some sources, these songs had lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. He says these are titles only, the songs having never been written.

Urga

Give Me the Open Air

Merchants' March

Merchants' March [Frantic]

Take Break Blues

Greek Dances

Folk Dances

The Trial

According to some sources, these songs had music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. He says these are titles only, the songs having never been written.

Don't Give It a Thought

The Year of the...

[No recordings known]

The Thing of It Is...

Film (1969) [unproduced]
Screenplay by William Goldman, based on his 1967 novel
Song by Stephen Sondheim

Recordings

Singing Out Loud

Film musical (1992) [unproduced]
Screenplay by William Goldman
Songs by Stephen Sondheim
[Rob Reiner was slated to be the film's director]

Musical Numbers

Recordings

Publications

Water Under the Bridge
Secaucus NJ: Warner Bros. Publications VS6208, 1993; 14 pp.

Muscle

One-act stage musical (1993) [abandoned]
Book by James Lapine, based on the memoir by Samuel Fussell

[Originally intended to run with as an evening of two one-act musicals; as developed Sondheim abandoned work on Muscle. It was later developed by Lapine with music by William Finn and lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh. That version has been workshopped, but never produced.]

Musical Numbers
[Sondheim contributions only]

Opening Sequence (Poses)

No Problem

[No recordings known]

Into the Woods

Film musical (1995) [unproduced]
Film version of the original stage musical

[In October 1994, a reading of a script (written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel) was held at the home of director Penny Marshall. The cast included Robin Williams (the Baker), Goldie Hawn (the Baker's Wife), Cher (the Witch), Steve Martin (the Wolf), Danny DeVito (the Giant), Elijah Wood (Jack), Roseanne (Jack's mother), Bebe Neuwirth (Cinderella's stepmother), Mayim Bialik (Little Red Riding Hood), Samantha Mathis (Rapunzel), Brendan Fraser (Rapunzel's prince), Moira Kelly (Cinderella), Kyle MacLachlan (Cinderella's prince) and Michael Jeter (Cinderella's father)]

Musical Numbers
(New songs only)
Recordings

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a funny thing happened on the way to the forum

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Stage musical [unproduced] Adaptation of the play by Maxwell Anderson The Wonder of You High Tor List a While, Lady [No recordings known. "The Wonder of You" is the only song included in the collected lyrics volumes.] Stage musical [abandoned] Adaptation of the stories by P. L.

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Stephen Sondheim - 1994 Actor's Studio Interview 

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Stephen Sondheim - 1994 Actor's Studio Interview 

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In this interview, Stephen Sondheim roasts Oscar Hammerstein for his lyrics that "do not work without the music". He gives Hammerstein a million backhanded compliments, which is interesting because it makes it clear that he respects Hammerstein's art, but disagrees with his fundamental "naievete". Also, Sondheim explains the course Hammerstein assigned him at the beginning of his work with him.

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Stephen Sondheim - 1994 Actor's Studio Interview  - Liz Callaway

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In Lady Bird, the school is casting a production of Merrily We Roll Along, which leads to some great (and very funny) auditions from Into The Woods, Anyone Can Whistle, and Merrily We Roll Along. Saoirse Ronan as Lady Bird's audition of "Everybody Says Don't" is my favorite personally.

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In the 2003 movie Camp, Anna Kendrick sings "Ladies Who Lunch". She was around 16 in this movie, so for her age, I think this is a really good and fun attempt at this song. This song is hard because it has a reputation of being sung by famous women, but also because it is made for women much older than her, so she was already at a disadvantage.

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Anna Kendrick - Ladies Who Lunch (Camp, 2003)

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Etta King on Adah Isaacs Menken's Last Performance

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Etta King on Adah Isaacs Menken's Last Performance

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Adah Isaacs Menken is an absolute badass and this clip of Etta King discussing her famous performance in Mazeppa definitely proves that.

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Etta King on Adah Isaacs Menken's last performance

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I have been listening to this audiobook for a while and it is SO GOOD!!! I really recommend it to understand more of Adah Isaacs Menken's life and creative works. I think she is a great writer and I do not understand why no one else thought so at the time. She definitely has a borderline cheesy and dramatic writing style, but it is so descriptive and fun to listen to.

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INFELICIA, by Adah Isaacs Menken - FULL AUDIOBOOK

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So it turns out that I am still OBSESSED with Ada Isaacs Menken!!! Here is a clip from a podcast in which Michael Foster discusses the life and times of Ada Isaacs Menken. It is so cool to hear about her and the people that she inspired, such as Walt Whitman and Sir Conan Doyle. She also was not always beloved in the public eye because she was viewed as risqué, but the fact that she didn't let that stop her is awesome.

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"Strip Away My Conscience"- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 

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"Strip Away My Conscience"- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 

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This song is super Fosse based when it comes to choreography and it definitely uses Chicago as a reference. This song has the sexual nature of Chicago, combined with the aggression of characters like Velma Kelly. Also, the underscoring sounds very similar to "Roxie" from Chicago. In general, it is a confirmed BOP as well.

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Strip Away My Conscience - feat Rachel Bloom - "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

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"There's No Bathroom"- Crazy Ex Girlfriend

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"There's No Bathroom"- Crazy Ex Girlfriend

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This is a reprise to Tovah Feldshuh's "Where's the Bathroom?" in which Weird Al explains that Greg and Rebecca cannot poop in the hot air balloon. This song is highly based off of the original through the stereotypical "Jewish" sound of this song. It sounds even more stereotypical with this song, which I think is on purpose, especially because Weird Al is not Jewish.

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There's No Bathroom - feat. "Weird Al" Yankovic - "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

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When we discussed seders in class, I realized that I actually knew what that was because of this scene from GLOW, in which Melrose gives a seder for the team while on a camping trip. I think you will find this episode interesting because it grapples with the bond between African Americans and Jews, which we talk about in class frequently. There is also a similar conversation between Melrose and Jenny- an Asian immigrant. Jackie John (playing Melrose) actually included a story of her own aunt in this scene! I bet that was so cool for her.

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In the sixth episode of the newly released third season of GLOW, there's an unconventional seder in the Nevadan desert. It's led by Melrose - played by Jackie Tohn - the Jewish party girl who talks the group through the 10 plagues, the four children, and the entire story of Passover.

Towards the end, Jenny (played by Ellen Wong) gets up from the campfire and criticizes Melrose, saying, "You're just talking about yourself, and pretending it relates to everyone else." Melrose responds, "No, I'm not, it's a parable." They then get into a discussion about the meaning of Passover (on Netflix! In 2019! What a world!). Someone mentions how Jews in slavery happened "a bajillion years ago." Jackie says it's still very recent, referencing the Holocaust. When folks get uncomfortable, she snaps back: "Why, you'd rather I just joke around? Just jokes, huh? Not really get into the trauma that's behind all the shit we don't want to talk about? How my Aunt Pessel and her eight children died in Treblinka? Or how my dad, my dad, won't live in a house without a basement or an attic in case we have to hide again?" Jenny then says quietly chimes in about how her family fled the the Cambodian Killing Fields. "I understand what it's like to survive a genocide, and not want to talk about it all the time," she tells Jackie.

This scene was remarkable: a conversation about shared trauma, Jewish history, and how the story of Passover is still deeply relevant and applicable today. And, it's made all the more powerful by the fact it was based on the real lives of Ellen Wong (Jenny) and Jackie Tohn (Melrose).

We chatted with Jackie about that seder scene, playing Melrose in general, and her role as Gilda Radner in another Netflix production.
Okay, let's talk about *that* seder scene in episode six.
It's a crazy thing. Who gets to do that? It's unreal. It's so rare for an actor - a Jewish actor - to get to honor and memorialize her family in that way. I mean, it's unheard of. And, to get to do that in a time where history is repeating itself, a little bit, on our soil is powerful and shocking and terrifying all at the same time. It's a heavy thing that I got to talk about my family's history and inherited trauma from the Holocaust on television. It's making me tear up right now. It's an honor.

It happened at a perfect time in my life, too. Cause I think if I was younger, I'd [hesitate]: I don't know, this is heavy, I'm a comic, can I just be funny?! As I've gotten older I'm sort of shedding that mask of I've got to be funny all the time. I think Melrose and I have a lot in common: We're funny 'cause of the pain.
Can you talk about the origin of the seder scene?
It came from me and Ellen Wong actually discovering that [connection] in real life. We weren't at the same seder. We were just talking about Passover, and the seders we went to. I was saying, it's heavy being a second-generation survivor. And then Ellen was talking about the Cambodian genocide and her family, and we were shocked.

Sascha Rothchild - one of our writers/executive producers who created Melrose, and who Melrose is based on - was moved by mine and Ellen's story. As they do on GLOW often, [they] write our truths into our script. So in episode six, our writers were talking about the similarities between Jenny and Melrose. These [are] two best friends who have very different backgrounds but shocking inherited trauma in common that they didn't know about.

What was reading the script like?
I was so shaken and moved. I called my mom and said, "Do you think it would be okay if I asked our writers if we could memorialize your Aunt Pessel?"

Aunt Pessel was the only child in my grandma's family who was killed by the Nazis. My great-grandparents and my great-aunt Pessel did not leave Poland in the late '30s, and they were all killed. The rest of the kids in the family ran anywhere they could, and somehow survived. Many of them [survived] concentration camps, staying one step ahead of the Nazis.

You know the stories. Being in a bread line, and a Nazi coming up to my grandpa, saying, "Hey, why are you in the Jew line?" My grandpa spoke perfect German and said, "Oh, my mistake," and went to the German line. And that's one of a hundred stories, how he wasn't just murdered on the spot.

Anyway, I asked my mom if she thought that would be okay, and she liked the idea, and I asked the writers, and they were like, absolutely. So we changed the name to my actual aunt's name.
What has the reaction to this scene been like for you? In some Jewish Facebook groups I'm in, people are posting, "Did you see the seder scene in GLOW?" I think it's really resonating with an audience.
It has been overwhelming. My mom's cousin Bracha - whose mother is one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors in the world, let alone in our family - texted me yesterday. She said, "Good morning Jackie, we are so proud of you. In the name of all the Levental offspring, thank you... We Jews were not eliminated and we second generation are blooming and multiplying. Look at your cousin in Canada; they have seven great-grandchildren and another on the way. L'chaim. "
Melrose is a key part of Jewish representation on TV. And you know, a lot of people have feelings about how only Jewish actors should play Jewish characters. What do you think about this?
I think so, too. It's just so extra special. Especially how ragtag they do [the seder], popping the hubcaps off the limo. It's so heartwarming. And character-wise, aside from how powerful the message is, and how meaningful it is to me to be a Jewish woman getting to talk about Jewish history, it's so nice to see Melrose grow and not just be this sort of snarky wiseass. Which she still is, because Jews are!
How did you get cast in GLOW?
The representation debates are interesting, because I myself want to be able to play a character that goes to church. Like, of course I want to do that. I'm an actor! I want to be able to play that role. But I think, for myself as an actor, it's quadruply meaningful when I get to play someone whose story lines up with my family's story. That's obviously going to be more meaningful to me. But it's funny, because I feel like when I see someone playing a very Jewish character, and they're not Jewish, I can tell.

It's a pretty cool story. Before GLOW, I was not very busy as an actor. It was a really exceedingly slow time in my acting career. They had seen everyone in the whole city to play Gilda Radner for this David Wain Netflix movie [A Futile and Stupid Gesture]. Gilda's my hero, and we have very similar speaking voices, both Jewish lady comics, the whole thing.

I overdid it on the Gilda audition; I had multiple costume changes, I brought a guitar, I wrote a song. I went in. And it could have gone either way. They could have been like, "Oh, that's embarrassing, that girl just tried way too hard," or it could have gone how it went, which they were like, "Whoa, where's this girl been hiding?!" And I'm like, in my apartment with no opportunities! I can't remember the last time I had worked before the Gilda thing.
So how did you end up as Melrose?
Anyway, I only bring up the Gilda story because Allison Jones cast that movie, and her protégé, who she brought up in casting, is this woman Jen Euston who casted GLOW. When Allison saw me for Gilda, she sent my tape to Jen. And then, when Jen was casting GLOW, she was like, "I'm bringing in that girl that played Gilda, and we're getting her on GLOW." I got into a global audition; I read Ruth a bunch, I read a little bit of Sheila, a little bit of Jenny.
So after they cast you, they decided to write her Jewishness into the story?
I think for Melrose, they initially wanted a more classic party girl - blonde hair, blue eyes, Paris Hilton, that whole thing. And then I brought this little tilt to it. You'll love this, being from the publication you are from, as much as I do: When I tried out, the character's name was Melrose and that was short for Melanie Rose. Once they [cast me], they made Melrose short for Melanie Rosen. They were like, "Uhhh, she's Jewish. Let's talk about it!"
Okay, but, back to Gilda. What was it like playing her?
Yes, 100%.

It's one of the stories that I feel like people read in a magazine and they're like, yeah right. But [as a kid] I played the Gilda Greatest Hits on SNL VHS until it broke, and I wasn't able to get it again until eBay was invented. And that's just a true story from my childhood. I was definitely watching it younger than I should have, but a lot of the stuff she was doing was obviously over my head in that debaucherous '70s comedy way.

With Gilda, the movie takes place before she was on SNL. They [told me], you can do some of the characters from SNL just to show us that you can, but it's not going to be in the movie. But, I did every character for the audition. It's funny because as much as I idolized her, I never tried to do the characters, they just came right out of my face. And it shocked even me!

Gilda and I have similar speaking voices to start with - we're both raspy, slightly nasal-y Jews - except she has a slight, slight lisp, and it's more in the back of her throat. [Switches to Gilda Radner voice] I'm Gilda Radner. Live from New York, it's Saturday Night! It's in the back of her throat.
Okay, you also played Fran Drescher's cousin on The Nanny. What was that like?
But: I love Gilda. My heroes are Bette Milder, Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner, and Howard Stern. When I got that audition, I never wanted something so bad in my whole career. It's really rare when you get an opportunity, and in your brain, you go: "They may not cast me, but this one is mine." Even with GLOW, I didn't necessarily feel that at the very beginning, because I had to make Melrose mine. Now, she's so clearly me and so clearly the things I say and do and our writers and creators are so incredible at catering to our strengths. They make us look incredible.

I'm keeping on brand! I auditioned to play a mini Fran in the mid to late '90s on The Nanny. I sent my tape in from New York, and I was like [Fran Drescher voice] "Mr. Sheffield..." I was very little. I was 12.

The Nanny: Melrose's GLOW prequel. pic.twitter.com/2X4cUSej6d

- Courtney Enlow (@courtenlow) September 6, 2018

Okay, last but not least: What's your ideal bagel order?
Then a bunch of years later, they called me again, and [said], "We need someone to play a young Fran." And I was like, "The same role!?" And they said no. So I said, "Let's go."
This interview has been lightly edited. Image of Jackie Tohn in header by Sela Shiloni.
Oh, God bless. It depends... it's hard because I'm very plain with my bagel. Here are my three orders: a fresh, out of the oven, burnt plain bagel with nothing. It's already hot, it's right out of the oven, it's super fresh, it's a little burnt, maybe there's a bubble. Then, a toasted sesame with butter, or a toasted everything with various cream cheeses. I love a veggie cream cheese, I love a chive cream cheese, I love a plain cream cheese. Listen - I love a Tofutti whatever cream cheese! But I'm not so crazy when we get nuts with the bagel.

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Jackie Tohn Tells Us All About That Seder Scene in 'GLOW'

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In the sixth episode of the newly released third season of GLOW, there's an unconventional seder in the Nevadan desert. It's led by Melrose - played by Jackie Tohn - the Jewish party girl who talks the group through the 10 plagues, the four children, and the entire story of Passover.

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"What's Your Story?" vs. "Cell Block Tango" 

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"What's Your Story?" vs. "Cell Block Tango" 

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I forgot to mention that this song from Crazy Ex Girlfriend is based off of Cell Block Tango from Chicago. I love this song so much because it elaborates on the fantasy of the women in "Cell Block Tango" being arrested for sexy, dramatic reasons. The twist here is that these women in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are actually wronged by the system and/or led really hard lives.

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What's Your Story? feat. Rachel Bloom - "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

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Sweeney Todd- "Epiphany"- Stephen Sondheim

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Sweeney Todd- "Epiphany"- Stephen Sondheim

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This is original footage of Stephen Sondheim directing the song "Epiphany" from Sweeney Todd. There is also an interview of Stephen Sondheim discussing Sweeney Todd and the songs in the show. This interview is so cool because it seems really intimate.

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Epiphany Sweeney Todd Sondheim at the Piano

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Stephen Sondheim on "Sweeney Todd" and His Process For Writing A Musical

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Stephen Sondheim on "Sweeney Todd" and His Process For Writing A Musical

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In this clip, Stephen Sondheim discusses "the myth of the unified score" in musical theatre, stating that there cannot be a unified score because the dialogue breaks up the score. I agree with him completely, but I do understand the idea of the unified score. It makes sense to strive for a unified score, but maybe it is not always realistic in execution.

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Stephen Sondheim on “Sweeney Todd” and His Process for Writing a Musical –New Yorker Festival

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Stephen Sondheim sings "The Glamorous Life"

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Stephen Sondheim sings "The Glamorous Life"

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This is a super cool audio recording of Stephen Sondheim singing "The Glamorous Life" from A Little Night Music. I did not know that he was such a good singer and it is so cool to hear him sing and play at the same time.

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Stephen Sondheim sings "The Glamorous Life"

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This is my favorite ever version of The Glamorous Life from A Little Night Music. I am obsessed with Audra McDonald and I think she performs this song with so many nuances.

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Real estate agent J. Lucky Henry explains the concept of blockbusting in a modern context. He gives actual examples of blockbusting in Boston, as well. I think he does a really great job of explaining this complicated concept in a way that is easy to understand. He also discusses the Fair Housing Act and the way that this form of government intervention has helped to prevent blockbusting.

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What Is Blockbusting? [Actual Example] || Real Estate Explained #154

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Here is another Looney Tunes reference to Carmen Miranda. I did not know about this one, but I am not surprised that it exists, considering the fact that Carmen Miranda was hugely popular. Also, the big fruit hat is pretty easy to make fun of.

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Besides the Chiquita banana commercials, this is what I always think of when I hear about Carmen Miranda. My Brazilian uncle showed me this when I was little and learning a little bit of Portuguese! Carmen Miranda actually was brought in to voice this role, which is pretty cool.

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A Scene from Slick Hare - Carmen Miranda

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I found the full movie of Cabin in the Sky! I really want to watch this soon because I have not seen Lena Horne in anything besides Stormy Weather.

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This article includes some of the photos that we discussed in class, but it gives more context as to how redlining actually happened. Also, it gives modern examples of the manifestation of redlining, specifically, which is important- especially because this seems like a topic that people might think was only in the past.

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Field Guide for Redlining a City | SqueezeBoxCity

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Redlining, Black History, Real Estate, J.C. Nichols, Racism, Troost Avenue, Segregation, KCMO, Hyde Park, White Flight, New Deal, Troost Avenue, National Housing Act of 1934 Why don't black and white Americans live together? asks a story published by the BBC in early 2016.

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Chicago: The Female Lament Behind the Vaudeville

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Chicago: The Female Lament Behind the Vaudeville

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This article debates the feminist agenda of Chicago. I completely get the debate here because while at first sight it definitely feels very feminist, maybe the structure in which the characters are set up is fighting against that agenda. Of course, these women live unconventional lives, but I think it is kind of because they had no other choice. I am genuinely unsure of the extent to which this musical is classified as feminist, but I do applaud it for depicting women in ways that are not characteristic of the time period- loud, angry, sexual, independent women. I think regardless of the show's agenda, that is a good change to see in musical theatre.

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Despite the supposedly light, vaudeville style of Chicago, Kander, Ebb and Fosse's adaptation (which takes inspiration from Maurine Dallas Watkin's play of the same name) draws purposeful parallels between the legal system and the culture of celebrity and sensation journalism. The comparison, though satirical, strikes a rather serious chord under all the cabaret, cursing and relentless sarcasm. Whether intentionally or not, it brings to light some salient truths about the treatment of women by systems of power.

In 2002, Catherine Zeta Jones and Renée Zellweger starred in the movie adaptation, which positions each musical number as though it were happening in Roxie's (Zellweger) imagination. Through the character's naïve faith in the glitz of fame, coupled with lawyer Billy Flynn's (Richard Gere) impressive courtroom tap dancing (and casual objectification of women), the film makes a clear comparison between showbiz and the legal system. It draws upon the societal obsession with celebrity criminals and scandal journalism that characterised the era and remains relevant in 2018.

The film has budget on its side, and you would be forgiven for buying into the razzle dazzle; but the comparative shabbiness of the show currently running at the Phoenix Theatre, London, undermines the audience's ability to suspend their disbelief. The all-black costumes (think of your GCSE drama class performances) and disappointingly simple set (they manage to rustle up some confetti for Duncan James' rendition of 'Razzle Dazzle', but that's about as fun as it gets) unintentionally reveals the fragile illusion of glamour that the characters of Chicago have consumed.

What is stark in both versions is the limited power that these women actually have. The villainy of the six Cook County Jail murderesses, as told through 'Cell Block Tango', is temptingly redemptive as we hear the list of their murdered partners' "crimes" against them. These are women who are repeatedly manipulated, cheated on, dismissed and abused by the men in their lives. Naturally we don't condone murder at Harpy Mag (no, not even of your awful ex, sorry...), but as this dynamic sextet protest "how could you tell me that I was wrong?", the various stabbings, shootings and poisonings seem almost justified. When a murdering heiress steals Roxie's limelight, a vignette of the crime shows a cheating husband yelling at his outraged wife: "Are you gonna believe what you see, or what I tell ya?!", thus including him in the swelling ranks of 1920's gaslighters.

One number that's left out of the 2002 movie is 'My Own Best Friend', which Alexandra Burke and Josefina Gabrielle bring to life on stage at the Phoenix. Though we hear lyrics of independence and self-sufficiency, the song feels like a lament. Velma and Roxie have learned the hard way that not even fellow women will support them in an individualistic age, in which women's success depends on fierce competitiveness for the limelight. In reality, their beauty and the fleeting fascination of the tabloids is all the chips these women have to play. When public attention fades, even Duncan from Blue (sorry, their lawyer, Billy Flynn) seems to lose interest in their cases.

The musical's commentary on the way the public become the jury in high profile crimes remains relevant today, as time and again the public are accused of unfairly meting out justice (often via Twitter) and taking part in so called 'witch hunts'. Despite the uncomfortable way in which our social media punitive system can manifest (thanks to the brevity of public attention and tendency to accept headlines as representative of a whole), one thing remains true: we cannot rely on the system for justice, particularly when it comes to holding men accountable for their treatment of women.

What's the one comforting factor in all this? I think it's female friendship. Real friendship between women barely exists in Chicago, and the main characters scheme against each other and refuse to make connections that aren't based on personal gain. And yet, Mama Morton (Mazz Murray) and Velma (Josefina Gabrielle) share excellent chemistry and steal the show at the Phoenix when they team up for a rendition of 'Class'. On both stage and screen, Roxie and Velma salvage their meagre existence after prison when they come together, putting aside their instincts to compete with each other in order to dazzle twice as much as a double act.

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Chicago: The Female Lament behind the Vaudeville - Harpy.

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There's something alluring about the irreverent way female jazz performances reclaim feminine sexuality and play a part in the subversive culture of jazz and metropolitan life. Chicago is a musical that tells women's stories predominantly through performances by female characters, so it&a

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This interview compares and contrasts the movie version of Cabaret with the stage version. I completely agree with the statement that "The Cabaret film is a paradox: it's a truly great movie adapted from truly great source material, but it achieves most of its greatness by thoroughly gutting and re-imagining that source." Personally, I think that this movie musical is different from most others because of its "re-imagining" of the source material.

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TIM: I'd like to thank Zev Valancy for his contribution to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser & Review Auction, which in his case wasn't simply a run-of-the-mill review; for his money, he wanted to have to do some work. So his request was that he and I join forces for one of our semi-regular conversations about the thorny matter of stage-to-screen adaptations.

In the past, we've looked at such palpable misfires as Rob Marshall's unholy Nine and Julie Taymor's disastrous The Tempest, so when we came to Marshall's merely pedestrian Into the Woods it was a fairly dramatic step up in quality. But that wasn't enough for Zev, who has requested that we turn our attention now to an actual top-notch, masterpiece-level movie musical in the form of 1972's Cabaret, adapted by director Bob Fosse and screenwriter Jay Presson Allen from the 1966 stage musical with songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb and book by Joe Masteroff.

The Cabaret film is a paradox: it's a truly great movie adapted from truly great source material, but it achieves most of its greatness by thoroughly gutting and re-imagining that source. It's the reason I couldn't bear to put it on my list of the best stage-to-screen musical adaptations ever, even though it's easily better as cinema and mostly better as a musical than any of the ten films that made that list. We're going to get to the reasons that could possibly be true in a moment here, but first I'm going to hand the microphone over to Zev, for the necessary background about the stage Cabaret, why it's so gosh-damned important, and why virtually nobody under the age of 60 has ever seen it in the incarnation that premiered in '66.

ZEV: Thanks, Tim, for having me, as always, for the pleasure of talking about the world of theatre to film adaptations. And if you're interested in adaptation, there are few works more fruitful to explore than Cabaret.

By the time the musical reached the Broadway stage in 1966, it had already gone through several incarnations: novelist Christopher Isherwood drew on his own time in Weimar Berlin to write The Berlin Stories, published in 1945, (which combined the novellas Mr. Norris Changes Trains, from 1935, and Goodbye to Berlin, from 1939). That novel (mostly the Goodbye to Berlin portion) inspired John Van Druten's 1951 play I Am A Camera, which won Tony Awards for Julie Harris, playing Sally Bowles (her first of five Best Actress in a Play awards) and Marian Winters (Featured Actress), and was adapted into a 1955 film.

We probably don't need to recap the plot, but: all of the versions focus on the relationship between an expatriate aspiring novelist (named Christopher Isherwood in the novel and play, Clifford Bradshaw in the musical, and Brian Roberts in the film), with fellow expat Sally Bowles, a minimally-talented nightclub performer, seductive dynamo, and deeply immature woman, in the years before Hitler's rise. The nationalities of the central characters shift from medium to medium, as do the sexuality of the Isherwood stand-in and the identities and subplots of every other characters.

Harold Prince (legendary director and producer, winner of a staggering 21 Tony Awards, an essential figure in the development of the musical theatre, let's not talk about his ), acquired the rights to I Am a Camera, and hired book writer Joe Masteroff, composer John Kander, and lyricist Fred Ebb to transform it into a musical. Cabaret was only Kander and Ebb's second musical to be produced on Broadway, after a quick flop called Flora, the Red Menace, the Broadway debut of a 19-year-old Liza Minnelli (fun fact: Minnelli has only originated roles in three Broadway musicals, and all of them were written by Kander and Ebb). Prince directed, as well as producing, and Ronald Field choreographed. Jill Haworth played Sally (her reviews were mixed, and this was her first and last Broadway show), Bert Convy was Cliff, the legendary Lotte Lenya (widow of Kurt Weill and living embodiment of the spirit of Weimar Berlin) was landlady Fräulein Schneider, Jack Gilford was Herr Schultz, the Jewish fruit-seller with whom Schneider has a doomed romance, and Joel Grey was the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Club, where Sally performs.

The musical that they created did something that was truly startling: about two thirds of it was a relatively conventional book musical, with characters interacting in scenes and singing songs that express their emotions when mere words are not enough. It's a bit more frank in terms of politics and sex than most shows of the era, but nothing too extreme. But the opening and closing, along with several numbers in the middle, belong to Grey's Emcee, and the world of the cabaret: they seem to be numbers as part of the floor show, but they also comment on the political situation and the lives of the characters. It wasn't the first musical to include songs that commented on the action, rather than being a part of the main plot - the tradition goes back at least to Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1947 misfire Allegro (Come at me, Allegro fans. Its revolutionary status does not make it any less clunky or self-righteous.) - but it was the first one that really worked. The club is seductive, the Nazis are all too easy to ignore, and the ending packs a sickening punch.

The musical was a major success - it ran nearly three years, won eight Tonys, spun off a national tour and a London transfer (It starred Judi Dench, not yet a Dame, as Sally. Look up some clips some time.), and was turned into a movie. That version was directed by Bob Fosse, legendary Broadway director-choreographer and one of the only directors to do great work in both theatre and film. The changes he made to the original musical were drastic: the American Cliff is changed to the English Brian (Michael York), Sally is changed from English to American (Liza Minnelli, who is far more talented than the character, but who would object to that? More on her later.), Fräulein Schneider is reduced to bit part, and Herr Schultz is gone entirely. The older lovers are replaced by Maximilian and Natalia (Helmut Griem and Marisa Berenson), a much younger, equally doomed, couple.

But the biggest change Fosse made was the wholesale removal of all of the book songs. All songs in the film are diegetic - recognized as songs by the characters. Most happen within the cabaret, performed by Grey and Minnelli, with the exception of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me", the poisonously catchy Nazi anthem, sung in a beer garden. In addition, several of the cabaret songs were replaced with new songs that fit Minnelli's talents, so in the end, the musical and the film only have five songs (plus the finale, a reprise) in common. (In a nice touch, many of the cut songs are heard coming out of radios or gramophones.) The Emcee and the Kit Kat Club are still agents of commentary and disruption, but rather than commenting on a Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical, they're commenting on a costume drama.

TIM: "Commenting on a costume drama" is a smart way to put it, but I want to add to that. I think it's worth keeping in mind the context of the movie musical at the time the film version of Cabaret was made. The 1960s were a period of much saggy bloat in the American studio movie, and nothing was more bloated or saggy than the mega-musicals that came out throughout that decade. The last big, unqualified hit was 1965's The Sound of Music, which gave hope to another half-decade of failed behemoths like 1967's Doctor Dolittle (which was an original piece), or that dread pair from 1969, Hello, Dolly! (which was adapted from a play) and Paint Your Wagon (an adaptation that's functionally an original piece). Fosse's own debut film, 1969's Sweet Charity, was a huge money pit that very nearly bankrupted Universal.

So part of what needed to happen with Cabaret was to make a deliberately small-scale musical, that backed off on the spectacle and replaced it with something little and gritty. Not to mention that the late 1960s/early 1970s were the height of politicised filmmaking in all of the major European/North American film countries (the U.S., France, Italy, even the U.K. in its own fashion). So I think it was exactly the right time for a musical that killed off all of its book numbers and told a story about the rise of Nazism in the face of a contented, self-indulgent culture. After all, what could have been more contented and self-indulgent than 1960s Hollywood?

That, anyway, is my theory for why Cabaret is so disinterested in being a book musical. It aspires to a level of psychological realism that audiences in 1972 would never have associated with a musical that didn't strictly ground its singing and dancing in a realistic context (but then, I think that's always been a bigger hang-up for movie audience s than theater audiences). And quite a strong piece of realism Cabaret does turn out to be, in certain important ways: the great cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth uses a great many of the techniques characteristic of the New Hollywood Cinema, including natural lighting and rough, documentary-style camera movements. With the help of a terrific al-German production design team headed up by Rolf Zehetbauer, Cabaret became American cinema's first really great, in-depth depiction of Weimar Berlin - being shot in Berlin helped, of course - at a time when movies about the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism were enjoying an international vogue.

But there's absolutely no way we can simply say "oh, it's all about realism", and be done with it. The musical numbers, no matter how realistically motivated in the plot, still shift the energy of the film dramatically away from naturalism. It's the way they're staged, the way the audience sits unblinking and unmoving, like a bunch of wax sculptures, and the way the interior of the Kit Kat Club is framed: this is a heavily alien, unreal space. Do we ever even see doors leading in or out of the club? It's like a place that simply exists out of space, always present, impossible to leave or enter. Especially given the way Fosse and company treat the camera lens like a character - the way that Grey keeps staring right into the camera lens with a sly, insinuating look is sufficient all by itself to break all of the rules of cinematic realism. The design and staging of the cabaret interiors feel like we're watching the Expressionist id of Weimar Germany interrupting the straightforward early-'70s naturalism of the rest of the scenes, and the extreme disruption of saving the musical numbers for those moments, and only those moments, adds to the feeling of the cabaret as some essentially other place, narratively and aesthetically. Which adds a great deal to those sequences' ability to comment on the narrative.

At least, that's my take. What do you think is going on with how Cabaret-the-movie is different from Cabaret-the-show? And I know you're itching to talk about that Minnelli performance...

ZEV: Another important factor in how the film differs from the play is that the stage version was directed by Harold Prince, who generally had a strong directorial vision in his shows but was also a consummate collaborator. (Just ask Stephen Sondheim.) Fosse, on the other hand, was just about the closest thing to an auteur that mainstream American musical theatre has ever had. (Michael Bennett, of A Chorus Line, was the other contender for that title.) While auteur directors aren't uncommon in the world of high-brow international theatre-a Peter Brook here, an Ariane Mnouchkine there, with Robert Wilson droning on in the background-it is much harder for a director to impose a singular vision in Broadway musicals, which are by their nature more prone to competing artistic visions and commercial concerns, and generally work best when several strong-willed creators fuse their visions into a greater whole.

By the time of Cabaret, though, Fosse was losing patience with the very notion of collaboration. Pippin, which premiered later in 1972, had a rehearsal period marked by Fosse locking the composer/lyricist out of the room, and the only two stage productions from the last decade of his life were Dancin', a plotless revue of his own dances, set mostly to extant music or pieces commissioned for the show, and Big Deal, an ill-fated adaptation of Big Deal on Madonna Street, for which Fosse wrote his own book and which once again used extant music. So perhaps part of the explanation for Cabaret 's wholesale disjunction from its source material is simply Fosse's desire to flex his muscles in the far more director-friendly world of film?

But leave aside the history and theory, and you have the film. Tim has already covered the way the design and cinematography help to create an impressively lived-in "real world" and terrifyingly alien Kit Kat Club, but a film about a cabaret wouldn't work without performances, and this one has a couple of corkers.

First of all: yes, Liza Minnelli. She's been a punchline for a long time now, and it's hard to deny that her shameless mannerisms and naked thirst for an audience's love can make her a lot to take sometimes. But to revisit this film is to remind oneself that when she was at her peak, she was utterly magnetic. Her singing and dancing are superb, of course-her musical numbers are the reason that the word "sensational" was invented. But what I'd forgotten before re-watching the film was how well she acts in the book scenes: there's an emotional transparency, a vulnerability, a sense of a woman spiraling out of control, that make for a really gorgeous all-around performance. (The film is fascinating in that, while York plays the nominal protagonist-and does quite creditable work-I think it would be hard to argue that anyone other than Minnelli is the film's center).

And then there's Joel Grey's Emcee. He won both a Tony and and Oscar for the part, and what's most fascinating to me is how well he scales his performance to film. It's still a "theatrical" performance-there's not a trace of realism in the unblinking eyes, the darting snake's tongue, or the inhuman laugh. But it never feels like he's playing to the second balcony-this is the alien force that whispers in your ear, not the one that dazzles you from the stage. I can't say I'm surprised that his film career fizzled out afterwards - Who could figure out what to do with him? - but I'm disappointed that he never got the chance to give another film performance at this level.

What about you, Tim? Anything else to say about the performances or the rest of the film?

TIM: Well, with all due respect to an outstanding cast all in all - I am particularly fond of Marisa Berenson's slightly dumb-until-she's-not Natalia (a strange, but somehow perfect precursor to her tragic character in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon) - there's no real doubt that Minnelli and Grey are the two dominant forces in the movie, and you've done a great job talking about what I'd have touched on, particularly with Grey. So I'll avoid talking any more about the performances.

But jeez, how have we gotten this many words in and said so little about the choreography. Shit, you've got Fosse directing a movie musical, I'm a little thunderstruck that wasn't the first thing out of my mouth. Because the numbers in Cabaret are simply extraordinary, some of the best film dancing ever. The thing that I believe is particularly important to note about these dances is that they are staged with an eye towards the camera; even though he was working with a literal stage show in the reality of the story, Fosse was thinking entirely cinematically. This is most clear in "Mein Herr", a song written by Kander & Ebb for the movie (and I think it's no accident, as a result, that it's such a blazingly visual piece): the geometric positioning of Minnelli, and the shape of their moves, are designed to be seen from a very specific perspective, that of the camera lens. And on top of that, the scene is so crisply edited to drive home certain beats of the music. It is very much designed for the film viewer, not for anybody sitting in the Kit Kat Club, nor does it particularly care about the sanctity of the theatrical space, hopping around the stage as needed to get the right shot.

It's quite enough that the resulting number is so dazzling to look at - on top of everything, I do think it has the most satisfyingly sinuous choreography in the whole show, and the costumes are superbly iconic - but what really matters most, deep down, is that Fosse is making a film for us. Which sounds obvious and straightforward, but it's all in keeping with the way that the film breaks down the fourth wall and attacks us. We've both talked about how Grey's Emcee feels like he's targeting us specifically, and that gives a distinct sense of queasy discombobulation that successfully argues for the sense of moral rot that the material depicts. And insofar as this is a movie about the rise of Nazism, feeling grossed-out and rotten is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, an important effect that the material needs to have on the audience.

On the flipside, the whole point is that the cabaret is an enticement: it needs to be alluring and appealing, it needs to seduce us. There's no point to the cabaret or to Cabaret if it's an obvious hell; that part needs to creep up and catch us off guard. And the best way Fosse can ensure that happens is by creating such rich, gorgeously accomplished - and undeniably sexual - visual pleasures. You can only show us so many desperate people and incipient Nazis and fill us with a nauseous feeling about the perilous state of Berlin. If you're actually going to tell a proper story of this period and its politics, there needs to be something exciting and arousing, and the musical performances are it, I think. That, to me, is why it matters so much that Minnelli be allowed to open up and attack the material with guns blazing.

That, to me, is the great strength of Cabaret: it's a terribly exciting, fun movie to watch. Everything is horrible, and suffering is widespread, and we know what a miserable end this real-world story had, but it's such an intoxication! It's just like how that damned "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" is so legitimately rousing and catchy, even as we realise that it's catchy in service of pure evil. I think if Cabaret didn't hook us so hard, it wouldn't be able to have nearly the same power at the end, when it abruptly and cruelly jams on the brakes and leaves us to wallow in the sordidness all around us.

Anyway I love it to hell, and I could talk about it for another 10,000 words, but this is where I'm cutting myself off. What final thoughts do you have? Anything you desperately need to address that I left out?

ZEV: What I'm left with is a feeling that more film and stage directors need to learn Cabaret's lesson. Far too often, film adaptations of stage musicals (and increasingly, stage musicals based on film sources) try to ape their source material in structure, staging, and intended effect. (Watch a stage version of Cabaret that lifts the film choreography. It's not just the lack of Liza Minnelli that makes it feel a pale imitation.) A little more originality and attention to what makes the medium would make for a lot of way better art.

So there's the prescription: adapt a masterpiece, have complete confidence in your vision, and be a genius in multiple media. Cabaret, at least, makes it look easy.

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TIM: I'd like to thank Zev Valancy for his contribution to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser & Review Auction, which in his case wasn't simply a run-of-the-mill review; for his money, he wanted to have to do some work. So his request was that he and I join forces for one of ...

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I think one of the coolest things about Cabaret is that the context of the show stays the same throughout the years, but the connotation of the show is constantly shifting. This is true with many older musicals, but Cabaret seems more adaptable. This article supports this theory.

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Cabaret
Directed by Sam Mendes
Roundabout Theatre Company, New York City

IF YOU ONLY KNOW the musical Cabaret from the iconic Bob Fosse film starring Liza Minnelli and Michael York, then you know a version of the Christopher Isherwood "Sally Bowles" story that is no more or less true to its literary source than is the 1966 Broadway musical. In the original story, a rather callow young Englishman comes to Berlin on the eve of the Nazis' ascension, meets an eccentric girl who sings at a seedy nightclub, moves in with her, and over time discovers the political and moral rottenness of the up-and-coming Nazi Party.

First presented on the New York stage by legendary director and producer Hal Prince with a book by Joe Masteroff and music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb, the brilliant conceit of that production was to locate the story inside a Berlin Cabaret called the Kit Kat Klub, a name that appeared no-where in Isherwood's story but one that conveyed the raffishness of Berlin night life in the waning days of the Weimar Republic. Outside the Cabaret 's doors, Nazis might be screaming invective at Jews or stomping on their Communist enemies, but inside the Klub, "life is beautiful!"

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Cabaret Directed by Sam Mendes Roundabout Theatre Company, New York City IF YOU ONLY KNOW the musical Cabaret from the iconic Bob Fosse film starring Liza Minnelli and Michael York, then you know a version of the Christopher Isherwood "Sally Bowles" story that is no more or less true to its literary source than is the 1966 Broadway musical.

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This article states that "We can track America’s attitude toward homosexuality, for example, through the progressive outing of the “Cabaret” male lead, from reluctant straight man back in 1966 to unambiguous — if closeted — gay man today." I think this is proof that the audience projects their own ideas onto the characters in musicals, which can completely change the context of the original production.

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The musical "Cabaret" will turn 50 this year, and its latest incarnation opens Wednesday at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre. It comes with a slightly complicated provenance: This "Cabaret" is the national tour of Roundabout Theater Company's 2014 Broadway revival, which itself was a remounting of Roundabout's Tony-winning 1998 Broadway revival. (More on that later.) The salient fact is that nearly 50 years have passed since Joel Grey first sang "Willkommen" in 1966.

Fifty years, in the scope of theatrical history, is an eye blink - "Cabaret" is a baby next to, say, Greek tragedy - but the pace of progress has sped up since 1966. Harold Prince, who conceived and directed the original production, created a startlingly innovative piece of theater that also, inevitably, was a product of its time. Successive interpretations of "Cabaret" followed suit, with each new iteration both reflecting and disrupting a distinct cultural moment. As a result, the musical's evolution can be seen as a mirror of American society over the last half-century: what has changed and what hasn't.

We can track America's attitude toward homosexuality, for example, through the progressive outing of the "Cabaret" male lead, from reluctant straight man back in 1966 to unambiguous - if closeted - gay man today.

The English writer Christopher Isherwood published "The Berlin Stories," the semi-autobiographical collection that served as the source for "Cabaret," in 1945. His narrator, a thinly veiled stand-in for the author, is an expatriate writer in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It's the last gasp of the permissive, decadent Weimar Republic; the Nazis are consolidating power, but nobody is paying attention. The offbeat vagabonds the narrator meets are lost in hedonistic pursuits, oblivious to the horror massing on the horizon: "There was a cabaret and there was a master of ceremonies and there was a city called Berlin in a country called Germany," the narrator writes. "It was the end of the world ... and I was dancing with Sally Bowles and we were both fast asleep."

Sally, although she plays a relatively minor role in "The Berlin Stories," seized readers' imagination from the outset. Needy, untalented, reckless, manipulative - but highly entertaining - she may be the model for the movie stereotype film critic Nathan Rabin dubbed the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Isherwood was gay, but while he was writing "The Berlin Stories" in 1930s and 1940s he couldn't very well admit that. He disguised the truth in a murkily doomed romance between the narrator and Sally.

Prince's first production, which named the male lead Cliff Bradshaw, left him in the closet. In Bob Fosse's 1972 film, the lead's name is Brian, and he's a bi-curious Englishman. By Prince's first Broadway revival in 1987, Cliff had gone back to being American but was bisexual. And ever since 1998, when Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall co-directed the influential revival that eventually led to this current tour, he's been a gay man gathering the courage to express himself in a brief window of freedom before fascism sets in.

In 1966, the musical was risqué for Broadway. "It was very sexy," recalls Joe Masteroff, now 96, who wrote the book. "There were girls out in nightclub clothes. One thing I will never forget: When the show opened in Boston, there were a lot of walkouts. Once the reviews came out, the public came back."

By 1998, the costumes Patricia Zipprodt had designed for the original had come to seem tame.

"It was incredibly shocking in 1966 that women were wearing stockings," Marshall says. "So Sam and I thought, 'Let's just go a step further, and let's show ripped stockings. Let's show the track marks on the arms, so we understand the drug use in the clubs. Let's show an even seedier side.' We were working to shock."

Prince's Emcee, Joel Grey, had been an androgynous fellow in a natty suit and white face - a living marionette. But Mendes' and Marshall's Emcee, a then-unknown young British actor named Alan Cumming, played the role shirtless, with rouged nipples and suspenders in unexpected places. But as lubricious as William Ivey Long's costumes were for their time, they've grown familiar, even sweet, to modern audiences.

That's just how things work in theater, says composer John Kander, 89.

"The original production was looked on as unbelievably innovative, but then 20 years later, a lot of those innovations were sort of acceptable, so some of the alterations that were made for the production in the 1980s were, again, very innovative," he says. "And when Sam and Robby did theirs, it was innovative again - but for its period, for the attitudes of its audience. And I suspect that if the piece is still around in 15 or 20 years, this version will probably look kind of tame as well. We revive pieces of theater not to go back but to present something pertinent to the world we live in."

One of the technical innovations of Prince's production was its set, which featured a large mirror that reflected the audience.

"You wouldn't see the stage; you'd see yourselves," Kander recalls.

This strategy pervaded theater so thoroughly that it lost its impact, but its initial effect - the way it brought the audience into the cabaret - inspired later directors to come up with new ways to break the fourth wall.

In 1993, Mendes set the show inside a nightclub-style space at Donmar Warehouse in London. Masteroff saw it and recommended it to his friend Todd Haimes, the artistic director of New York's Roundabout Theatre Company. (Masteroff also wrote the book for "She Loves Me," which was Roundabout's first musical revival.)

Haimes recalls phoning Mendes and asking if he would be interested in staging the show in New York.

Mendes replied: "I'd love to do it in New York, but there are two requirements. One, you have to find a cabaret space that's no more than 500 seats, and two, you have to use Alan Cumming."

Like "Cabaret," Roundabout celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It's a coincidence: The company and the musical were born separately and spent their early lives apart, but when they finally came together, the pairing proved exceptionally fruitful, launching careers, winning awards, bringing accounts into the black. But in the early 1990s, things didn't look very propitious.

"It was complete insanity," says Haimes, who relates the travails he endured to produce "Cabaret" with humor and relish. "It took years. We had to get Alan a green card. We tried finding a 500-seat cabaret space in Manhattan. It couldn't have any poles or anything in the audience. It had to be unobstructed. It's almost impossible. And we looked for years, and Sam went on to other things."

After Mendes bowed out, Haimes asked Marshall, who had choreographed Roundabout's "She Loves Me," to direct and choreograph the production; he agreed. Then Mendes became available again. Instead of clashing, the two directors decided to work together.

"We turned to each other and said, 'It seems like it's fate, why don't we co-direct this and bring both of our sensibilities,'" Marshall says. "Sam had never done a show on Broadway; I was directing for the first time on Broadway. So we did it together. And it was this wonderful, unique collaboration, which turned out to be a great experience for both of us. We took Sam's idea and expanded on it. The whole place became a cabaret, with a whole world and life happening simultaneously."

Haimes finally located a space, in the former Henry Miller's Theatre on 43rd Street. Today it's the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, but in the 1990s, it was a disco, Club Expo.

"The real estate developer Douglas Durst, the nightclub people were his tenants," Haimes says. "He said, 'Maybe you could do it at the nightclub during the 8-to-10 period, and they can convert it back into a nightclub afterward.' When I think about it, it was total insanity."

They made a deal to stage "Cabaret" every night at 8, and then at 11 they would strike the set and turn the space back into a nightclub.

"At 11 o'clock at night you'd walk out of the theater and see, like, lines of people for the nightclub," Haimes says.

He describes the production as an "artistic quest" that had "nothing to do with money," and that was good because despite its popularity the show was "negative money," he says. Running it in a 500-seat theater was simply not penciling out.

Then, by sheer coincidence, Studio 54 became available for rent.

"Cabaret" transferred to Studio 54 and played there for five years; Roundabout used the proceeds to buy the former disco, now one of five stages the company owns. Roundabout grew into the largest not-for-profit theater in the country. Cumming rocketed to stardom. Mendes and Marshall went on to direct movies and win Oscars - Mendes for "American Beauty," Marshall for "Chicago" - and they haven't stopped working since.

So there's the happy ending, but not quite. It turns out that Haimes wasn't ready to say goodbye to "Cabaret." In 2014, he persuaded Cumming to reprise his turn as the Emcee nearly 20 years after winning the Tony for the role. Haimes also lured Mendes and Marshall back to the helm as co-directors. Roundabout remounted the 1998 production all over again at Studio 54.

Why a remount? Why not start afresh, with a new interpretation for this new generation?

"I thought Alan Cumming's performance was one of the greatest, most seminal performances of all times," Haimes says. "I really thought that another generation should see it. I thought it was like ... I don't know what the best example would be. Maybe Yul Brenner in 'The King and I'? I thought it was a performance that should be seen again."

Ticket sales were brisk for the yearlong revival; critical reception proved slightly cooler the second time around. The national tour has also provoked some cynical mutterings. It's billed as the Mendes and Marshall production, although B.T. McNicholl has taken over the direction. And it has some significant omissions: Studio 54 and Cumming. Like many of the theaters where the tour is stopping, the Pantages isn't a nightclub setting but a large, traditional proscenium house. Randy Harrison (best known for TV's "Queer as Folk") is playing the Emcee.

But the consensus among the creators remains positive. "I'm shockingly happy with it," Haimes says. "The young guy playing the Emcee is fantastic."

Harrison, speaking from San Francisco before traveling to L.A., says his job would be easier in a smaller space, "in that so much of what we're trying to do is break down the fourth wall and make the audience feel like they're not at a theater but they're in a cabaret, that we're sort of enmeshed with them, that they are us and we are them."

But he still goes out into the audience every night to banter and dance with theatergoers.

"I saw Alan [Cumming] recently. He was like, 'Are you getting bored with it yet?' I said, 'No,' and he said, 'Yeah, I never got bored with it either, because the audience is your scene partner, and it's always different.'"

Theatrical devices inevitably pall, but a powerful message ensures longevity. Though the history of "Cabaret" indicates some progress toward understanding and acceptance, the musical's warning about the temptations of fascism, nationalism and prejudice - the way they can sneak up on you when you're having fun - has never seemed dated or irrelevant.

"It's such an important piece, in what it says about the world, how quickly it can change," Marshall says. "It's kind of a warning, and a wake-up call, that things can change so quickly without you knowing, and then all of a sudden you're in a scary world."

Says Andrea Goss, who stars in the national tour as Sally: "Sadly, it's still extremely relevant. I think the younger generation can relate to it because of what is happening in our world today. Young people especially nowadays need to see pieces of theater like this, because it's going to be their job to change what is happening, so that someday maybe pieces like this won't be so relevant."

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Fifty years of "Cabaret": Some milestones

1945: Christopher Isherwood publishes "The Berlin Stories," writings inspired by his life in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

1951: The play "I Am a Camera," John Van Druten's adaptation of Isherwood's work, opens at Broadway's Empire Theatre starring Julie Harris as Sally and William Prince as Isherwood. "Me no Leica," quips critic Walter Kerr in one of history's shortest reviews. But Harris' career takes off.

1966: "Cabaret," a musical loosely based on "I Am a Camera" and "The Berlin Stories," opens at the Broadhurst Theatre, directed by Harold Prince with a book by Joe Masteroff, music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb. The romance between American expatriate Cliff Bradshaw (Bert Convy) and the cabaret singer Sally Bowles (Jill Haworth) is contrasted with the equally doomed affair of their landlady, Frau Schneider (Lotte Lenya), and a Jewish fruit peddler, Herr Schultz (Jack Gilford). Both stories are intercut with scenes at the seedy Kit Kat Klub where Sally performs. Its host is an androgynous Emcee (Joel Grey) who welcomes viewers to enjoy the show's risqué choreography (by Ronald Field) and lurid costumes (by Patricia Zipprodt). The production wins eight Tony Awards.

1972: A film adaptation of "Cabaret," directed by Bob Fosse, wins eight Academy Awards, including director, lead actress (Liza Minnelli) and supporting actor (Grey).

1987: The first Broadway revival, produced by Prince and choreographed by Field, gives Grey's Emcee an even more central role and presents Cliff's bisexuality more directly.

1993: The director Sam Mendes revives "Cabaret" at London's Donmar Warehouse. The production captures critical interest with its bold choices, including a startling new take on the Emcee by Alan Cumming.

1998: Roundabout Theater Company opens "Cabaret," co-directed by Mendes and Rob Marshall, choreographed by Marshall and starring Cumming and Natasha Richardson. It plays in the former Henry Miller's Theatre on 43rd Street, sharing the space with a working nightclub called Club Expo. A few months later it transfers to Studio 54. It later wins the Tony Awards for revival of a musical as well as Tonys for Cumming, Richardson and Ron Rifkin. It runs for five and a half years. Emcees include Neil Patrick Harris, Raul Esparza and Michael C. Hall.

2014: Roundabout revives its 1998 production of "Cabaret" at Studio 54, enticing Cumming to reprise his role opposite a series of Sallys: Michelle Williams, Emma Stone and Sienna Miller. Mendes and Marshall co-direct once again.

2016: Roundabout launches a national "Cabaret" tour, with B.T. McNicholl re-creating Mendes and Marshall's direction for the road.

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"Cabaret"
In Hollywood: Through Aug. 7 at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles. Tickets from $29. (800) 982-2787, hollywoodpantages.com

In Costa Mesa: Aug. 9-21 at Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive. Tickets from $29. (714) 556-2787, www.scfta.org

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (including intermission)
MORE FROM ARTS & CULTURE David Greenspan's 'Go Back to Where You Are': charmingly offbeat and yet off by a beat Teflon minimalism: The surprisingly sleek architecture of the GOP convention With $500,000 grant, what's next for downtown L.A.'s Latino Theater Company?

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50 years of 'Cabaret': How the 1966 musical keeps sharpening its edges for modern times

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"Cabaret," which turns 50 years old this year, was meant to be played in intimate venues that evoked a cabaret -- which makes staging it in the huge Hollywood Pantages such a challenge.

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I did not know that Bernadette Peters was in this show! I wonder why this show was not very popular, especially because Bernadette Peters was the star. I feel like that would typically draw a big audience because of her popularity.

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This website is really cool because it highlights the histories of every famous cast of Hello, Dolly!- specifically, every single famous woman who ever played Dolly. For example, on Pearl Bailey's page, it says that the all black cast was actually infamous producer David Merrick's idea. He thought of this because after many years, ticket sales were starting to decrease and he needed a new way to intrigue the masses.

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One of the peak experiences that I've had in theatre-going was to see Pearl Bailey in Hello, Dolly!
John Lahr

1967, Bailey and Cab Calloway headlined an all-black cast version of Hello, Dolly! The touring version was so successful, producer David Merrick took it to Broadway where it played to sold-out houses and revitalized the long-running musical. Bailey was given a special Tony Award for her role and RCA Victor made a second original cast album. That is the only recording of the score to have an overture which was written especially for that recording. Bailey opened on November 12, 1967. (Source: Wikipedia)

In his New York Times review, Clive Barnes wrote, "For Miss Bailey, this was a Broadway triumph for the history books. She had no trouble at all in stopping the show-her problem was getting it started again. On her entrance, the audience wouldn't even let her begin.

After about a minute's applause, she cleared her throat, grinned amiably and...murmured: 'I've got a few more words to say in this show'...Bailey took the whole musical in her hands and swung it around her neck as easily as if it were a feather boa." Mr. Barnes also noted the "polished" and "stylish" Mr. Calloway and that seated "center front" was Miss Channing, "a blaze of platinum hair."

The Broadway production ran for two years before Bailey's health problems forced it to close. She toured with the show after her recovery, and again in the mid-1970s.

According to Ernestine Jackson. Bailey was notorious for missing shows. It made the columns that Merrick bought her a diamond bracelet just saying "and you'll watch your attendance." So, we don't know when she formally left and Thelma/Bibi started sharing. Likely, Pearl had no smash closing on a Saturday night-but missed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then it was acknowledged that Merrick was looking for Dolly number six.
Cab's daughter Chris Calloway was also in this production. Another wonderful talent has gone too soon.

From the Broadway Masterwork's Website: Flamboyant Broadway producer David Merrick never was at a loss to find the right publicity stunt that would save or prolong the life of his shows. Even though Hello, Dolly! had been hugely successful since it first opened on January 16, 1964, when receipts began to sag at the box office three years later he decided the musical needed a shot in the arm. His answer to the problem - a Black version with no less than Pearl Bailey as Dolly and Cab Calloway as Horace Vandergelder, in this musicalization of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker by Jerry Herman. With Emily Yancy as Irene Molloy and Winston DeWitt Hemsley as Barnaby also in the cast, it officially opened to rapturous reviews on November 12, 1967 at the St. James Theatre, where the previous incarnation, starring Betty Grable, had closed three days before. This new version closed on December 27, 1970, bringing the total cumulative Broadway run to 2,844 performances. Click HERE for MORE

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Pearl Bailey One of the peak experiences that I've had in theatre-going was to see Pearl Bailey in Hello, Dolly! John Lahr 1967, Bailey and Cab Calloway headlined an all-black cast version of Hello, Dolly! The touring version was so successful, producer David Merrick took it to Broadway where it played to sold-out houses and revitalized the long-running musical.

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How Bernstein's 'On The Town' Paved the Way For 'West Side Story'

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How Bernstein's 'On The Town' Paved the Way For 'West Side Story'

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My personal favorite part of this article is hearing about the fact that Jerome Robbins went to Bernstein and demanded that he do the composition for Fancy Free because he was so unhappy with it. This is not surprising to me because Jerome Robbins was known as a grumpy man that was hard to work with. That being said, I find that little story to be so funny.

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Over the last 18 months, the world has been honoring the Bernstein centennial, which, by and large, has been a re-evaluation of Bernstein the composer. That has meant abundant performances of his symphonies, choral works, chamber works, song cycles, ballets and the like.

Bernstein's Broadway shows, however, are in no need of reassessment, because works such as West Side Story and Candide have never fallen fully out of fashion. (Conductor David Newman leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on July 12 a live-to-picture presentation of the 1961 Oscar-winning movie, while The Knights, led by Eric Jacobsen, and guest vocalists will perform a full production of Candide on Aug. 28 at Ravinia.)

Those works did the reassessing, breaking the boundaries of the form, particularly in terms of how elaborate and through-composed much of the music was and the extraordinary demands they made on the artists performing them.

Given that West Side Story is often considered the greatest musical ever written, it's curious that its 1944 predecessor On the Town, the first show to unite choreographer Jerome Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein, is performed so infrequently.

Part of the reason is that the seamless line between music and drama achieved in West Side Story was still a work in progress when Bernstein was creating On the Town, the concept of which originated from the ballet Fancy Free. (That work was conceived by Robbins, who was so unhappy with its original composer that he simply showed up unannounced at Bernstein's dressing-room door in 1943 and managed to persuade him to compose the music.) That pedigree is never far from the surface of the show, as dance tends to intrude on the narrative, such as it is, and often for its own sake.

The score is meticulously well-crafted, but Bernstein was still in search of his own stage style, with the music often coming off as Gershwin-meets-Shostakovich. When MGM made the film version, most of Bernstein's score was gutted as being too "operatic" and replaced with new material by the studio's house tunesmiths. Given the popular success of that film with its Frank Sinatra-Gene Kelly pairing, people often expect to hear the non-Bernstein movie tunes in stage productions.

On the Town, as it was originally conceived 75 years ago, was a wartime view of how to cram a lifetime of experiences into a 24-hour shore leave. Three sailors meet three women in "New York, New York," of course, but time is the enemy as everyone knows that the guys will all be sailing off to God knows where, perhaps never to return, in less than a day. Instead of that being dealt with in a serious manner, Betty Comden and Adolph Green - whom Bernstein insisted be involved with the show - give us vaudeville-like comedy in the book and lyrics that were quite risqué for 1944: women flirting with men quite openly and sailors who have barely left home trying to grow up in a hurry while experiencing the Big Apple, all with the clock ticking. It was remarkably contemporary and effective in its day as a diversion from World War II, but it instantly became a period piece at the end of the war; sailors were still on leave, to be sure, but they were no longer heading off into a life and death struggle.

Wonderful Town followed a similar theme nine years later, as two sisters from "Oh, why oh, why oh, did I leave Ohio" decamp to New York in search of fame and fortune. As in On the Town, dance is a central element in Wonderful Town, with Bernstein's music increasingly eclectic, adaptable and central to the drama. There is even an explicit Latin jaunt that foreshadows West Side Story in "Conga" in a dance with Brazilian cadets.

Note: This is an excerpt from an article published in the Ravinia magazine. To read the full version, click here.
Award-winning journalist, critic, author, broadcaster and educator Dennis Polkow has been covering Chicago-based cultural institutions across local, national, and international media for more than 35 years.

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How Bernstein's 'On the Town' paved the way for 'West Side Story' - CSO Sounds & Stories

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Over the last 18 months, the world has been honoring the Bernstein centennial, which, by and large, has been a re-evaluation of Bernstein the composer. That has meant abundant performances of his symphonies, choral works, chamber works, song cycles, ballets and the like.

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Fascinating Insights Into Bernstein's On The Town: "Three Dance Episodes"

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Fascinating Insights Into Bernstein's On The Town: "Three Dance Episodes"

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Here are direct quotes of Bernstein explaining the three dance episodes!

“In the Dance of the Great Lover, Gaby, the romantic sailor in search of the glamorous Miss Turnstiles, falls asleep in the subway and dreams of his prowess in sweeping Miss Turnstiles off her feet.

“In the Pas de Deux, Gaby watches a scene, both tender and sinister, in which a sensitive high-school girl in Central Park is lured and then cast off by a worldly sailor.

“The Times Square Ballet is a more panoramic sequence in which all the sailors in New York congregate in Times Square for their night of fun. There is communal dancing, a scene in a souvenir arcade, and a scene in the Roseland Dance Palace.”

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I. The Great Lover Displays Himself
II. Lonely Town: Pas de deux
III. Times Square: 1944

Composed 1944.
First performance: February 13, 1946, San Francisco. Leonard Bernstein, conductor.
The tragedies and triumphs of war have inspired composers to some of their greatest work. Some pieces are an immediate response to their experiences, such as Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Haydn's Mass in Time of War, Berg's Wozzeck, or Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony. Other pieces are tributes to heroes or victims of the past, such as Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture or Britten's War Requiem. In World War II, the birth of modern media caused governments to realize that artists could be more useful to the war effort in their trained discipline than as conscripted soldiers, and composers were encouraged to produce work that supported national morale and education of the public.

As the first major war in the age of cinema, World War II offered a wholly new medium by which art could contribute to the war effort. The full resources of the American and British film industries were thrown into the creation of war movies ranging from newsreels and documentaries to dramas, romances, and comedies set in the conflict. Music from these films often managed to gain a life of its own, both on the radio and in the concert hall.

In 1941, British audiences were treated to "Dangerous Moonlight", the story of a Polish pianist caught up in the destruction of his homeland. Throughout the film, which is told largely in flashbacks, he is haunted by the strains of the Warsaw Concerto - his great masterpiece whose composition was interrupted by the German invasion. The concerto's evolution in the film parallels the hero's recovery from injuries sustained during an air battle, with tragedies and triumphs reflected in the unfolding themes of the piece.

Brian Desmond Hurst, the director, originally intended to use Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto in the film. However, when the rights were too expensive, he asked Richard Addinsell to write a piece in a similar vein. Though a program seen in the film's concert sequence lists a three movement concerto, Addinsell actually composed a single nine-minute movement from which themes could be drawn throughout the movie. The piece is never heard in its entirety in the film, revealing itself in bits and pieces as the story progresses.

Released as "Suicide Squadron" in the United States, "Dangerous Moonlight" was a box office success, and the concerto itself sold millions of copies when released on record. The popularity of the work resulted in a trend of so-called "tabloid concertos" that appeared in movies such as "Love Story" and "Hangover Square" across the next several years, and the Polish government-in-exile awarded Addinsell the Silver Cross of Merit "for outstanding service to Poland in the field of music."

A year after "Dangerous Moonlight", Leslie Howard's "The First of the Few" told the story of aeronautical engineer R.J. Mitchell's creation of the Supermarine Spitfire fighter plane in the years leading up to the war. Like "Dangerous Moonlight", the film is structured in a series of flashbacks, with Mitchell's friend telling the story as he and his fellow pilots prepare to fly into combat during the Battle of Britain.

"The First of the Few" was scored by William Walton. Dubbed "the head prefect of English music" by Benjamin Britten, Walton was widely regarded as the successor to Edward Elgar, having come to public attention with the success of his Crown Imperial march for the coronation of George VI. Upon the outbreak of war, the government exempted him from military service on the condition that he compose music for propaganda films. He eventually scored six films during the war-four in 1942 alone.

Shortly after the film's premiere, Walton excerpted parts of the score to create the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue for concert performance. The prelude plays over the opening credits and is in the grand tradition of English marches with which Walton showed such skill. The fugue is derived from a sequence showing the assembly of the first Spitfire, with interwoven lines and counterpoint musically describing the intricate interaction of the mechanical parts as they come together. After a lyrical violin solo portraying the exhaustion of the plane's creator, the march and fugue unite to accompany the completed plane's triumphant launch.

Cinema didn't hold a monopoly on wartime entertainment, of course. During the war, the Broadway stage was transformed by a new generation of composers and lyricists led by artists such as Rodgers and Hammerstein (whose Oklahoma! opened in 1943) and the New York Philharmonic's young assistant conductor, Leonard Bernstein.

In April 1944, Jerome Robbins' Fancy Free premiered at New York's Ballet Theatre with music by Bernstein. The ballet, which tells the story of three U.S. Navy sailors on leave for a single day in New York City, was an enormous success, and the creative team became convinced that it could be expanded into a hit musical. Betty Comden and Adolph Green joined as lyricists, and opened a mere eight months later.

Leonard Bernstein extracted three scenes from the musical for concert performance, explaining:

"In the Dance of the Great Lover, Gaby, the romantic sailor in search of the glamorous Miss Turnstiles, falls asleep in the subway and dreams of his prowess in sweeping Miss Turnstiles off her feet.

"In the Pas de Deux, Gaby watches a scene, both tender and sinister, in which a sensitive high-school girl in Central Park is lured and then cast off by a worldly sailor.

"The Times Square Ballet is a more panoramic sequence in which all the sailors in New York congregate in Times Square for their night of fun. There is communal dancing, a scene in a souvenir arcade, and a scene in the Roseland Dance Palace."

Musicians in the concert hall also strove to do their part. In 1941, Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, contacted composers and asked them to write fanfares for concerts in the 1942-43 season. Eighteen new works resulted, written by composers including Walter Piston, Darius Milhaud, Henry Cowell, Morton Gould, William Grant Still, and Howard Hanson. The works' titles were indicative of the national mood: "A Fanfare for the Fighting French", "A Fanfare for Paratroopers", "A Fanfare for American Heroes", "Fanfare for Freedom". But one work stands out as unique, both because of its title and as the only work on the list to have remained in the standard repertoire.

Aaron Copland considered several titles for his contribution, but his imagination was captured by a May 1942 speech in which Vice-President Henry Wallace declared, "Some have spoken of the 'American Century.' I say that the century on which we are entering - The century which will come out of this war - can be and must be the century of the common man."

On receiving Copland's piece, Goosens informed Copland that it would be premiered on March 12, 1943. Copland later remarked, "I was all for honoring the common man at income tax time." Fanfare for the Common Man was an instant success, and Copland later expanded it into one of the principal themes of his Symphony No. 3.

After the war, historians had their hands full assessing the conflict. In 1947, U.S. Navy Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison began work on his 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. His research assistant, Henry Salomon, was overwhelmed by the huge amount of film footage that had been collected during the course of the war, and he felt that books could not do the material justice. Salomon proposed to NBC a television series using this footage to tell the Navy's story. The network approved the project, and Salomon assembled a team to edit over eleven thousand hours of film down to fit twenty-six half-hour episodes. Victory at Sea was an enormous critical and popular success, winning both Emmy and Peabody awards.

Richard Rodgers, fresh from the success of The King and I, composed the music for the series. Rather than create the entire score, Rodgers wrote a dozen short themes which were expanded and developed extensively by Robert Russell Bennett, the orchestrator of Rodgers' Broadway musicals. Bennett also composed a number of his own themes when none of Rodgers' material seemed appropriate. The resulting score was very popular, and Perry Como took the "Beneath the Southern Cross" theme to the top of the charts in 1953 as "No Other Love," with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.

A generation later, a young film director became fascinated with the story of a German industrialist's attempt to save thousands of Jews from the Nazi concentration camps. As "Schindler's List" went into development, Steven Spielberg asked his longtime collaborator John Williams to write the music. Williams approached Itzhak Perlman, a native of Israel and the son of two Polish Jews, to perform the violin solos in the film.

Spielberg and Williams returned to the war in a tribute to the D-Day landings. In "Saving Private Ryan", John Williams took a less intimate approach than the folk song textures of "Schindler's List". The Hymn to the Fallen is an elegiac theme of noble elegance evoking a somber atmosphere of tribute to those who, in the words of Vice President Wallace, "spoke for the common man in terms of blood on the battlefield" to ensure that he continues "on the march toward even fuller freedom than the most fortunate peoples of the earth have hitherto enjoyed."
Copyright © 2013 Chris Myers. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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Fascinating Insights into BERNSTEIN's On the Town: Three Dance Episodes

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I. The Great Lover Displays Himself II. Lonely Town: Pas de deux III. Times Square: 1944 Composed 1944. First performance: February 13, 1946, San Francisco. Leonard Bernstein, conductor. The tragedies and triumphs of war have inspired composers to some of their greatest work.

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This video is super cool because this is a recording of On The Town from an original 1945 record. This means that the quality is really authentic and the audio is genuinely good, for being that old.

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Bernstein conducts Bernstein - On the Town (Ballet Music)

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In this article celebrating the life of Leonard Bernstein, New York Philharmonic archivist Barbara Haws says "Sometimes when you watch Bernstein conduct, and he's so involved and he's so into it — you know, it's his own expression. It's not even trying to communicate something specific to the orchestra. It's his own involvement and enthusiasm at that moment, his own kind of oneness with the work." I think this is a great explanation of what makes his work so great.

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Aug. 25, 2018 marks the centennial of Leonard Bernstein's birth. He was a singular American talent and one of the great orchestra conductors of his generation. He was also a composer of symphonies, ballets and hit musicals, a teacher, a television personality and a complicated man with a complicated personal life.

If there was one moment when Leonard Bernstein became Leonard Bernstein, at least to the general public, it was at a concert by the New York Philharmonic on Nov. 14, 1943 at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. The conductor, Bruno Walter, called in sick. The 25-year-old Bernstein stepped in with only a few hours' notice and without a single rehearsal.

"When my father climbed up on that podium in Carnegie Hall and conducted the New York Philharmonic on a national radio broadcast that Sunday afternoon, that was why it was front page news the next day. Like, 'Local boy makes good,'" says Jamie Bernstein, the late conductor's daughter.

In just the following year alone, Bernstein premiered his first symphony, Jeremiah, his first ballet, Fancy Free and his first Broadway musical, On the Town.

Bernstein grew up outside of Boston, born to Russian immigrant parents. His father, Sam, had every expectation that his son would follow him into the hair and beauty products business, to the point that he wouldn't pay for young Leonard's piano lessons. Nevertheless, Bernstein studied at Harvard and the Curtis Institute of Music, and spent summers at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's seasonal home in the Berkshires. It was there that Bernstein came under the influence of conductor Serge Koussevitzky and composer Aaron Copland. The two of them had grand plans for their protégé, says Nigel Simeone, who edited a volume of Bernstein's letters.

" ' I don't know whether they think of me as a conductor or a composer, you know. Maybe they want me to be a conductor so that I can play their music and they don't want me to be a composer so that I'm not kind of competition for them,' " Simeone says, reading from one of Bernstein's letters. "I don't think Copland saw it that way, at all. But I think he did see in Bernstein somebody who could be, you know, a really stunning advocate of his music and of other people's music."

Whether to be a conductor or a composer was one of the big conflicts of Bernstein's life. Yet he was good at expressing those feelings in the music to his orchestras, according to New York Philharmonic archivist Barbara Haws.

"Sometimes when you watch Bernstein conduct, and he's so involved and he's so into it - you know, it's his own expression," Haws says. "It's not even trying to communicate something specific to the orchestra. It's his own involvement and enthusiasm at that moment, his own kind of oneness with the work."

And communicating that enthusiasm to audiences led to, perhaps, one of Leonard Bernstein's greatest contributions. His nationally televised Young People's Concerts not only helped introduce classical music to children, but also popularized it with their parents.

Some of those TV scripts were worked out at home with his kids, Jamie Bernstein says. But she notes that her father had to turn off that public persona to compose. "A composer is solitary and contemplative and turned inward," she says. "They have to work all by themselves, which was not a thing my father liked to do. He hated being all alone."

This may explain why, for many, some of Bernstein's greatest compositions were for either the ballet or the theater, where he was able to collaborate in the same room with artists such as choreographer Jerome Robbins or lyricist Stephen Sondheim, as they did for West Side Story in 1957. Jazz pianist Bill Charlap says Bernstein's music for the theater was as serious as his music for the concert hall. "It's real through-composed music, all the way from the bottom to the top," he says.

Bernstein's personal life was complex as well. As a young man, he had many gay affairs, but he married Felicia Montealegre, a Chilean-born actress, and raised a family. And while their family life was loving, Jamie Bernstein has revealed some less savory aspects of her father's behavior in her recently published memoir, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein. She recallsunwanted kissing of men and women, and of herself.

"He prided himself on being governed by his whims, in a way in a way that's just not really adult," says Anne Midgette, the Washington Post music critic who has written about the #MeToo movement in classical music and about Bernstein. "For a long time, our society has embraced this view of artists as people who were to be indulged. Bernstein kind of epitomizes that. And I feel like we, as a society, are moving past that."

Still, Midgette sees Bernstein as a crucial figure in classical music, as does Barbara Haws. "We're still trying to find the next Leonard Bernstein," Haws says. "He set that bar so high that it's very difficult for symphony orchestras to kind of recover and move on, because you only have one of those, probably, once in a century, if you're lucky."

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The Complex Life Of Leonard Bernstein, A Once-In-A-Century Talent

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Aug. 25, 2018 marks the centennial of Leonard Bernstein's birth. He was a singular American talent and one of the great orchestra conductors of his generation. He was also a composer of symphonies, ballets and hit musicals, a teacher, a television personality and a complicated man with a complicated personal life.

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Leonard Bernstein- "What Is American Music?"

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Leonard Bernstein- "What Is American Music?"

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Leonard Bernstein's website is such a great resource. It has everything from archived pictures and letters to transcripts of his speeches and interviews. On this page in particular, Bernstein discusses what makes "American music" actually American, using An American In Paris as an example.

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The Television Journey

by Schuyler G. Chapin

In a tribute essay marking the Museum of Broadcasting's 1985 Bernstein television celebration, critic Robert S. Clark wrote: "Some of the gifted among us are twice blessed: they yoke arresting talents to historic coincidences that enable them to make the most of their gifts. Leonard Bernstein was one of these: it was his-and our-good fortune that he and American television grew to maturity together."

Bernstein's television activities fell into three distinct but interconnected areas. The first were programs, like Omnibus, where he acted as teacher/interlocutor for music of many different kinds-mainstream classical, contemporary classical, jazz, musical comedy and rock. Seond were programs of his work as a composer, including his symphonies and some of his stage works- MASS, Trouble in Tahiti, Wonderful Town, and Candide, among many. Third were the over 70 programs of his appearances as a conductor, with orchestras that include the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Israel Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and, especially, the Vienna Philharmonic.

Omnibus began in 1952 as the TV/Radio Workshop of the Ford Foundation. It was the first commercial television outlet for experimentation in the arts and from the beginning the program's approach was fresh and unusual. It clearly demonstrated the series' determination to make the arts come alive on television. Its most slam-bang music program took off with Bernstien on November 14, 1954, his first appearance on television, in which the then 35-year-old Maestro discussed the structure of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Bernstein knew how to convey the intellectual and emotional passion of his art in a way that was accessible and stimulating to all types of viewers. His style met the middlebrow on his or her own level, without stooping. More than any musician before (or since), he understood television's potential to unlock the mysteries of music and make the home audiences care as deeply as he di dabout the glories of its expressive language.

In 1957, CBS decided to feature his talents on a more regular basis by televising the New York Philharmonic's Young People's Concerts. Bernstein and director Roger Englander devised the format for the first broadcast on January 18, 1958. Recognizing that few people could match the Maestro's attention-holding powers, Englander knew it was equally important to use soe of the medium's unique resources to enhance and underscore each concert's primary theme. Not only was camerawork carefully planned in advance to coordinate with the music being played, but special visual material was inserted to illustrate key points.

Bernstein's magic with the audience at Carnegie Hall, and later at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, and his fervor in discussing the first concert's topic of "What Does Music Mean?" came across with such effectiveness that two more Young People's broadcasts aired in the months that followed, and their successes, in turn, persuaded CBS to keep the series going.

In 1968, Bernstein stepped down as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic (but continued the Young People's Concerts until 1972.) That same year, he and I decided to create a small production company in anticipation of major technological changes in television and home video. Roger Stevens, the distinguished Broadway producer, underwrote our first venture, a video recording of Verdi's Requiem made in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, with the London Symphony Orchestra and chorus and soloists Martina Arroyo, Josephine Vesey, Placido Domingo and Ruggiero Raimondi.

Our second project was financed by CBS-a 90-minute special to celebrate Beethoven's 200th birthday. It was shortly after these successes that Unitel Film & Television Company in Munich approached us with an almost irresistable offer: to film the nine symphonies of Gustav Mahler, the four symphonies of Brahms and other works Bernstein might select with whatever orchestras he wished.

It was a fabulous and timely moment, and over the years, that association produced over 70 different musical programs that have been seen all over the world, many on PBS in the United States.

It has been said often enough that even had television not existed, Bernstein's career would still have been the most remarkable ever for a classically trained musician in America. Yet to him-and to me-it seems unarguable that his creative and recreative work remains indivisible from its television manifestations.

This article was originally published in the Spring 1992 issue of Prelude, Fugue & Riffs.

Schuyler G. Chapin, an executor and trustee of the estate of Leonard Bernstein, is currently Vice President of Worldwide Concert and Artist Activities for Steinway & Sons. He is Dean Emeritus of Columbia University's School of the Arts and former General Manager of The Metropolitan Opera.

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Television Scripts | Lectures/Scripts/Writings | Leonard Bernstein

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by Schuyler G. Chapin In a tribute essay marking the Museum of Broadcasting's 1985 Bernstein television celebration, critic Robert S. Clark wrote: "Some of the gifted among us are twice blessed: they yoke arresting talents to historic coincidences that enable them to make the most of their gifts.

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This is an hour long radio documentary about Leonard Bernstein's activism and vision for America. I listened to it and I think it is very well done and interesting. Terrance McKnight delves into West Side Story as well, which is really cool.

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TMAC: Hello I'm Terrance McKnight, and today, as we approach the centennial of his birth, we're talking about Leonard Bernstein.

Bernstein was a great conductor, educator, he was a great composer and pianist. But he was also a lifelong activist of civil rights and social justice... He worked tirelessly to incorporate that universality directly into his music-including, the sound of Black America .

CHARLES IVES - THE UNANSWERED QUESTION

Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question

TMAC: So in the '70s Leonard Bernstein gave a series of lectures at Harvard called "The Unanswered Question." It was really based on a composition by Charles Ives.

TMAC: And, the most fascinating thing to come out of these lectures, for me ... I think the thing that really caught my ear, was just his tenacity, his determination to find a way to get us all on the same page, us as human beings, regardless of our walk of life. You got the sense that he was trying to get us all on the same page.

TMAC: He's building a case, in this lecture, to show that we're more alike than different. If there's a universal speech, then perhaps there's a universal sound that we all respond to. Because you have to keep in mind, man, that when Bernstein was born there was scientific trying to state that some people were inferior to others. And I think he wanted his music to just do a little something to change that, to fix that, to make that right. That's what I took away from those lectures.

The Berlin Celebration Concert: Beethoven Symphony No 9 - Bernstein 1989

TMAC: So I was listening today, to one of the Harvard lectures, and he was talking about the universality of music, he was like, we always hear that music is universal, but let's like, really dig into it.

LB: Music is supposed to be a metaphorical phenomenon, some kind of mysterious symbolization of our innermost affective existence. Even so great a scientist as Einstein said that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.

TMAC: And so he's started talking about how sounds were universal, like ...

LB: I tried to imagine myself a hominid, and tried to feel what a very, very ancient ancestor of mine might have felt and might have been impelled to express verbally.

TMAC: That like, you know, if you're a baby, you may make the sound-

LB: And then I got hungry. Mmm. Mmm! Calling my mother's attention to my hunger. And as I opened my mouth to receive the nipple-"Mmah!"-lo' I had invented a primal word: "Mah," "mother."

LB: Now this has got to be one of the first proto-words ever uttered by man. Still to do this day most languages have a word for mother that employs that root, "mah," or some phonetic variant of it: [foreign language], the Germanic "mutter," "[foreign language]," the Slavic "[foreign language]," and the Hebrew "[Hebrew]"-even Navajo: "[Navajo]."

ANDRE WATTS

So, the reason I took this on was because, for me personally ... I grew up taking trumpet lessons in fourth or fifth grade. My siblings were taking clarinet, guitar. And so I probably showed some talent when I was about 9 years old. Bernstein was doing these pieces on Young People's Concerts that would come on television.

From Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center, home of the world's greatest musical events, the Shell Oil Company brings you the New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts under the musical direction of Leonard Bernstein.

TMAC: And I just remember my mother would always call me to the television: "Come watch this man talking about music." And I would watch this guy talking about whatever he was talking about on television. And, "Look at these instruments." She would ask me to identify the instruments and stuff like that.

TMAC: Bernstein had this interesting kind of way about him. He had an interesting accent.

LB: My dear young friends, as you may know, we devote one Young People's program every year to presenting young performers to you, young people who are so gifted and so well-developed [crosstalk] real artist-

TMAC: But I do remember feeling a little ostracized from that program, and I felt ostracized because I didn't see a bunch of brown people in the audience, so it seemed like it was something that may not be for me. And it terrified me a little bit because I thought if I become good at this trumpet thing then that becomes my world-and I don't really know people in this world, I don't know that world is like. It's a little bit different. So as I grew up and learned more about him by staying in music I wanted to see what made him tick.

LB: And now we come to a young man who is so remarkable that I am tempted to give him a tremendous buildup, but I'd almost rather not so that you may have the same unexpected shock of pleasure and wonderment that I had when I first heard him play. He was just another in a long procession of pianists who were auditioning for us one afternoon, and out he came, a sensitive-faced 16-year old boy from Philadelphia, looking rather like a young Persian prince, who sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped.

LB: He is named Andre Watts.

TMAC: When I really got serious about music in college I identified with this guy, a pianist named Andre Watts. He's the one pianist of African descent that you see out there concertizing, and he's been doing it since the year I was born.

TMAC: He got an opportunity to play on the Young People's Concert. Bernstein brought him in to play. He was 16 years old.

TMAC: So that catapulted him into a career that I was able to follow as a young pianist, looking at Andre Watts as sort of a model, as sort of a mentor for me as a young pianist, and thanks to Leonard Bernstein, who gave him that opportunity back in 1963.

LB: I love that kind of story. Because I admire his playing so much I am going to be selfish and take the pleasure of conducting for him myself.

LB: Let us welcome with warmth and pride Andre Watts.

TMAC: Here's a taste of Andre Watts playing the first piano concerto by Franz Liszt, and this is Bernstein conducting.

[Leonard Bernstein Conducting Andre Watts live on TV - Young People's Concerts Vol 2. Young Performers No. 4] [in clear 2:00]

DUKE ELLINGTON

TMAC: So, Bernstein was born in '18, man, so this was like ... first jazz records, first blues records were made around this period, around 1918, 1920.

TMAC: When he's 10 years old, Duke Ellington is on the radio on CBS being heard every Friday night or Saturday night. There are these big bands.

He was very influenced by that music.

TMAC: And he really talked about jazz being authentically American, and the goal of the composer was to absorb that authentic American sound.

REPORTER: Mr. Ellington, how do you feel on the same point?

TMAC: Here's Duke Ellington and Bernstein meeting together in Wisconsin, in 1966.

Duke: It's American music, I would say-the stuff that we're in, anyway. And it's getting to the point now where the modern contemporary composer and the guy who's supposedly a modern jazz composer, they all come out of the same conservatories.

Duke: And it's very difficult to find a place to draw the line.

LB: Well, you are certainly one of the pioneers in that.

Duke: Oh, yeah, but I didn't come out of the conservatory.

LB: No, but you were one of the first people who wrote so-called "symphonic jazz."

Duke: I had a conservatory in the Capitol Theater.

Duke: Sit there and listen to the symphony before the picture.

LB: Well maybe that's really the difference between us, that you wrote symphonic jazz and I wrote jazz symphonies.

TMAC: Listening to those guys man, two strong personalities, who now we see as two of the most influential American composers of the 20th century, standing side by side, drinking coffee, at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in this country-powerful.

Duke Ellington - Symphony in Black continues [in clear 0:15]

AARON COPLAND

Aaron Copland - Copland playing Piano Concerto [0:10]

TMAC: Bernstein had a sister who was very musical-she was into theater-and so they would just make up music and improvise on what they heard on the radio. And he would play parties, and by the time he got to Harvard that music was still a part of his consciousness.

TMAC: He was going to concerts. His father was taking him to concerts as a young man.

TMAC: But when he got to college and became aware of Aaron Copland,
STUDS: Aaron Copland, so many facets to your musical life. In the early days were you interested in jazz elements going way back?
TMAC: Bernstein wrote a paper in 1939, his senior thesis, called "The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music ." And so I think what turned him on about Copland was that Copland was doing that. When I listen to his Piano Concerto, there are sections where I think, "Oh, if my grandfather walked in the concert hall he would feel like, 'Oh, they're talking about me.'"

TMAC: Here's Aaron Copland again.

TMAC: You hear the absorption of those race elements in music.

TMAC: For example, he sets it up with these two big chords.

[Music Demonstration]

TMAC: Interesting harmony.

TMAC: Then he goes into this little stride kind of feel.

[Music Demonstration]

TMAC: It almost sounds very Gershwin-esque.

[Piano segues into orchestral recording]

TMAC: -So there, when you hear it in context, you really feel like you're right in the center of American culture, New York City, New Orleans, wherever, Chicago. You just sense it. It couldn't be anywhere else. It's not Vienna. You know, it's not Prague. It's not, you know, Palestine. It is the heart of American culture.

TMAC: Copland put it into this music and I think ... and I know that's what attracted Bernstein to him. They were up to the same thing, bringing all the people, all the sounds of the people, into the concert hall.

Aaron Copland - Copland playing Piano Concerto [0:15]

TMAC: This is the second movement of Aaron Copland's Piano Concerto.

TMAC: Typically a second movement is slow and lyrical, but he does something interesting. It's almost like a drunk stumbling down the street.

TMAC: I mean, he asks for a moderate tempo, but very rubato. So if I play it straight ... In straight time it's in three.

TMAC: Right? But that's not what he asked for. He wants something just a little more belligerent, and to me it's like somebody had a little too much to drink last night.

TMAC: Whatever these notes are, but the feeling is ...

TMAC: And that's very Prokofiev, or is very New York City, Saturday night, you know.

HARVARD LETTER

Copland Piano Variations

LB: Every bar I ever wrote I would bring to Aaron Copland. He would say, well, that's sort of warmed over Scriabin or that's second hand something, throw it away. These two bars are fresh, they're you. Work on those, develop those. That sort of criticism. I revere and worship Aaron Copland for what he taught me.

TMAC: And then ... when he was in school-he was at Harvard-he wrote Aaron Copland a letter-

LB: I had just turned 19. I was a junior at Harvard.

TMAC: ... saying, "Why are we playing Chopin? Why are we even playing your music? Why are we playing your Variations when this music doesn't seem to be moving the hearts of the people?"

LB: [crosstalk] and, "Wait till you hear this."

TMAC: Like, "We're playing all this elevated music and people are acting like animals."

CBS: The applause reached the Fuhrer, who had just arrived in the Court Opera House to address the Reichstag, which has been called an extraordinary session. They are expecting [crosstalk]-

TMAC: They're letting this moron march across borders. This is when Hitler invaded Austria.

Translator: "From now on, bomb will be met by bomb."

TMAC: And Bernstein was just like ... He starts the letter like, " God damn it, Aaron! Why are we playing Chopin? Why are we even playing your Variations? Because the music apparently isn't making people more humane."

TMAC: So then he started questioning ... like, what kind of music ... what is the purpose of art if it's not changing the hearts of people?

CAFE SOCIETY

TMAC: So as fascism is on the march across Europe, at the same time here in New York's Greenwich Village this new club opens at the end of 1938. Cafe Society was America's' first integrated night club. And it was known as the wrong place for the right people, and all the right people showed up there. Including Bernstein.

You know, the black intellectuals, the white progressives, and these people were commingling. White folks didn't get first billing at tables, and that was radical.

So Bernstein is going here, he's a young man, and Hazel Scott is playing there. She used to call him Skinny Lenny.

Man: Just a minute, who do you wanna see?

Man: Oh Miss Scott! Yes, they're waiting for you, go right in...

TMAC: He would hang out with Hazel, and Adam Clayton Powell,

Adam Clayton Powell: After all I'm a negro baptist preacher, you know? [Laughter] Nobody can control a negro baptist preacher, even God sometimes can't!

TMAC: Langston Hughes was there, all of these black intellectuals-so a lot of the black thought that became prevalent in the 20th century came out of cafe society and the folks who were coming there. And so this is what influenced Bernstein.

Some nights you might see Art Tatum playing Dvorak.

And Bernstein would go there late at night, 4am. And what made it special, was the talent, and the fact that it was integrated, a unique experience. It didn't matter who you were, you just came, got a table and enjoyed the show.

Art Tatum plays Dvorak [in clear 0:24]

ON THE TOWN

TMAC: And so if we fast forward a little bit, in On the Town, that Broadway musical,

Bernstein and Jerome Robbins.

I think they were really trying to paint a picture of what America be, certainly what our armed forces could be, because at the time, it was segregated.

So, In On the Town, the cast was integrated. So you've got black men dancing with white women on stage, holding hands, dude that was scandalous!

Bernstein conducts Bernstein - On the Town (Ballet Music) [in clear 1:00]

TMAC: Another thing in On the Town was the hiring of Everett Lee. Everett Lee was a black conductor who was from Cleveland, and he was a violinist as well, so he was playing in the string section for On the Town. And during the production Bernstein brought him up to conduct. So he became the first black man to conduct an integrated orchestra on Broadway. But that was something, that was a big deal to have a black man leading an integrated orchestra on Broadway in 1944. It was a huge deal for Everett Lee and for our country.

[music continues]

TMAC: And then I think in ... He wrote Billie Holiday into something. I think it was Fancy Free. He wrote a song for her. It's a song called Big Stuff.

Big Stuff [in clear 2:30]

PAUL ROBESON

Paul Robeson: Now I was born on the edge of Robeson County.

TMAC: Okay. Paul Robeson was-

Paul Robeson: ... a negro boy born in Princeton, New Jersey, in a college town where the students mainly came from the Deep South, you know, Princeton -

TMAC: Now here's a man whose father, similar to Bernstein-

Paul Robeson: ... so, and my father was a minister -

TMAC: ... and was very religious.

Paul Robeson: I was shaped against that background.

TMAC: But he had a great voice.

Music: "Purest kind of a guy"

TMAC: His connection to Bernstein was-he was all about trying to uplift the working class around the world. And, like Bernstein, he encountered resistance to his political beliefs.

TMAC: Robeson became controversial because of his connection to Communism, because of his connections outside of the state, because of his travel to Russia. People were rioting, people were actually cheering him on, because they knew that he couldn't travel because of his passport issue.

Reporter: Here's a group of young boys here, yelling at the people, stopping their cars.

Crowd: [crosstalk] Go back to Russia! [crosstalk]!

TMAC: The whole McCarthy era put a lot of pressure on those guys in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

TMAC: Bernstein never actually testified.

TMAC: But his close friends like Aaron Copland and Paul Robeson did...

TMAC: Robeson was very vocal about the ills of America.

I mean, at this time, during his lifetime, blacks were fighting in a war that was segregated, or they were fighting in armed forces that were segregated. You would have black soldiers who would board trains with prisoners of war, and if these prisoners of war were white, these black soldiers had to relinquish their seats and give their seats to prisoners of war.

TMAC: We've been listening to some of Bernstein's first symphony written in 1942. It's titled "Jeremiah" after the Hebrew prophet who warned that the people's sins would lead to disaster.

Bernstein - Jeremiah Symphony #1, Prophecy [in clear 2:25]

PRELUDE FUGUE & RIFFS

TMAC: Okay, so I've been looking at this Bernstein composition, Prelude Fugue & Riffs.

He wrote this for Woody Herman back in the 40's, in 1949 and he played it and talked about on this program Omnibus.

LB: In one way or another, it uses all the elements we've been discussing during this time.

TMAC: Right? On this program called What is Jazz.

LB: I hope you will feel in it the special beauty of jazz that I felt when i was writing the piece. We're going to play it for you now.

TMAC: SO I'm looking at this piece and I'm listening to it, and I'm hearing all these things that sound like blues and that sounds like jazz and these harmonies. And then, I'm looking the middle of the score and I see something that looks a little bit familiar.

There's a old Hymn, O come O come Emmanuel...

[Music: O come, O come Emmanuel]

Right? The words are, o come o come emmanuel and, ransom captive israel.

[Music continues]

Right? So it's about some sort of salvation. Listen to what Bernstein sticks in here. He sticks this little motive...

[TMAC Music demo]

And I think he's saying, [singing] Emmanuel... and then he changes it, changes the note.

[TMAC Music demo]

And this is the theme of his fugue, so listen to the full theme of his fugue:

Prelude, Fugue and Riffs [in clear 1:10]

TMAC: It's a great early example of how Bernstein blended the sacred and the secular. And he'd continue to search for that universal sound the rest of his life.

WEST SIDE STORY

TMAC: You can hear some of those same characteristics from Prelude Fugue & Riffs, in Bernstein's original Broadway score for West Side Story in 1957.

West Side Story: Prologue [in clear 0:42]

TMAC: Leonard Bernstein said, "I guess the best known musical that I have done, West Side Story, is one long protest against racial discrimination.

West Side Story: America [in clear 0:25]

TMAC: And by the time we get to west side story, he's really deal with our own prejudices, deal with our own blind spots, you know, the folks we don't see, the folks who we think do not matter, and he puts them on stage, he puts the spanish language on stage and it may not seem like a huge deal now, but if you think about it 60, 70 years ago, it was a huge deal.

TMAC: I mean, just saying that name, perhaps makes you think about someone who doesn't look like you. He could have called her Mary but he didn't.

West Side Story: Maria [in clear 1:10]

TMAC: So Bernstein here in the late 50s, early 60s is on a musical high. And his ideas about racial equality and social justice seem to be gaining traction as part of the Civil Rights movement.

But there are also dark days ahead.

That's in a minute when we continue Leonard Bernstein's Black America.
BREAK [39:58]
JFK DIES

TMAC: Hi I'm Terrance McKnight and this is Leonard Bernstein's Black America.

News: From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 PM Central Standard Time, two o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.

Jamie LB: It was the day the shadow came down-

TMAC: This is Jamie, Leonard Bernstein's daughter.

Jamie B: President Kennedy was assassinated, and I watched my parents and all their friends crying.

Jamie B: And then all of a sudden Martin Luther King was assassinated, and then Bobby Kennedy-another Kennedy-was assassinated. And then this war. So there was this sense of non-stop travail, and I really do think that my father spent the rest of my life processing this grief, and through his own works.

TMAC: So Bernstein was very close to JFK. Just a few weeks after he was killed, Bernstein dedicated his new symphony to the fallen president at the world premiere. It's based on a Jewish prayer of mourning. It's called Kaddish.

Kaddish [in clear 1:25]

BLACK PANTHERS

TMAC: Bernstein was a member of The Council of African Affairs and The National Negro Congress, he was on The National Council of American-Soviet Friendship.

Bernstein Symphony No. 1 - Jeremiah, Israel Philharmonic

TMAC: So Leonard Bernstein, Here's someone who had marched in Selma with Harry Belafonte. And then Dr. King died in '68. And so the very next year, Bernstein is hosting a party, to raise money for the Black Panthers.
Black Panther: The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general...
TMAC: So Bernstein and his wife had invited members of the Black Panthers to their apartment. It was a fundraiser. The Black Panthers were about protecting the neighborhood, fighting against police violence, police brutality.
Black Panther: Racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of Black people.
TMAC: They were armed. They were particularly armed after the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

TMAC: Bernstein went to his next concert and folks were picketing. He was booed. One of the musicians said ... He remembers it distinctly, the surprise and shock that Bernstein faced, and he said he huddled the band up, huddled the orchestra up before the show to talk about what was happening out in the hall.

Black Panther: . ..Everyone who went in to exercise a constitutional right to bear arms in a public place.

BOMB SCARE

TMAC: Remember the 70s Harvard lecture series we heard at the beginning? At the very first lecture, somebody called in a bomb threat.

LB: This performance of the Mozart symphony was interrupted in the middle of the first movement by a bomb scare.
[Beethoven's 9th]
And we all had to go out into the street, nobody knowing whether we were going to come back and resume or not, and wait for almost an hour until we had word that the police had cleared the whole theater.

LB: And during that wait I must say that I was sick at heart and overcome by despair, because why had I been talking my guts out for an hour and a half on human brotherhood and universality only to have this kind of despicable disproof of human brotherhood thrown in our faces?

TMAC: So, he was trying to make music that responded to that. And that's why said himself, "You know what? I'm going to take some time off from conducting because I to write music." He felt that he needed to write.

Bernstein - Mass - Simple Song [in clear 3:48]

This is Simple Song from Bernstein's Mass.

BEETHOVEN

Beethoven 6th Symphony - Pastoral

TMAC: It seems like Lenny liked getting his way, and he liked being the center of attention, he liked being a leader. He liked being a loudmouth. He felt like he had something to say.

He could be very controversial and very contentious. I think he liked debate. He liked argument, he liked resolution. And so he had this thing where he had to be seen and had to be heard... I think that's why he was so fond of Beethoven.

LB: It's the form. No composer ever had that-even Mozart-to that degree, where everything is so unpredictable and yet so right. It all checks. It all works out. You can rely on it. You know the next note has to be the next note and the only next note that could come, and that makes him form perfect.

TMAC: Beethoven was an outsider. You know, he got to Vienna which was the capital city from a small town, Bahn.

LB: He never left his rooms, he went crazy...

TMAC: He had brown skin, very short and um, maybe had some acne issues, hair was all over the place, and so Beethoven had a terrible outsider complex, coming into a fancy city. He was a little bit rough, you know,

LB: He moved all the time, he couldn't find a place that was right.

TMAC: Oh, and early in his career he started to lose his hearing, and so that made him even of an outsider.

LB: That's what's so incredible. But he wrecked himself and his whole life trying to do this, trying to achieve this very inevitability. Every note that comes is inevitable.

TMAC: Bernstein's talking about Beethoven but it sounds like he's talking about himself. I mean, here are two guys, who had this deep spirituality, this deep faith. Staying up late, taking interest in social causes? That was Beethoven, but it's also Bernstein.

MASS

Bernstein Mass - XIII - Lord's Prayer [in clear 0:48]

MUSIC: Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespases, as we....

TMAC: Bernstein ... So much of his life he dealt with or wrestled with this idea of faith, and he felt like we as a country and as humanity wrestle with an idea of faith. So when he composed Mass he wanted to wrestle with that question. He wanted us to think about our faith and how we actualize that.

TMAC: So Jacqueline Kennedy asked Bernstein to write a piece for the opening of the Kennedy Center. Now this request was made right after Robert Kennedy was killed.

TMAC: And so when he composed MASS, he wanted to wrestle with that question. He wanted us to think about our faith and how we actualize that.

TMAC: And I think ... was so significant about that is this, is that he took to Washington, DC. This was like a statement to our nation. Of course Nixon ends up boycotting the thing. He wasn't a fan of Bernstein's politics, and you can hear him on one of the infamous White House tapes trying to come up with a cover story for why he didn't go.
NIXON: Why don't we get Buchannon to get on the mic saying that the President didn't go because he thought it was a sacrilegious kind of a thing?
TMAC: Nixon was coloring it as a sacrilegious thing, a disgrace, to deter people from going to it. His aide wanted the headlines to read like "Mass seen as abuse of spirit."

TMAC: So in this composition, he requires so much of what is American culture to make this thing happen. And he says that it doesn't have to happen in a concert hall, this piece could be played in a barn, that's what Bernstein's says. And he goes on to say, that this is really his first composition.

TMAC: And I saw it, man. When I first came here they did it up in the Bronx. Marin Alsop conducted.

Marin Alsop: It was a-revelation, on every level, and I become a complete convert so to speak.

TMAC And I walked in and I was like, "Damn," I was like, "All these kids, all these different peoples, you know, different-looking people." I'm like, "Where all these people come from? These brown people in the concert hall." And that was an important slice of America that he wanted to see represented.

TMAC: And I walked into that hall in the Bronx, and saw all those kids and all those young mothers with babies!

Here he is educating the nation, about our music, about our culture. He wrote them into the music-so if you write the kids into the music, their parents are going to show up, the grandparents are going to show up, their little brothers and sisters even if those parent's can't get a babysitter that day, they brought them into that hall to see Bernstein's music. Every slice of America, was in the Bronx that day. Felt like a huge party. I was blown away. In that moment I understood, that Bernstein has etched us into history

Through his music.

CREDITS

Leonard Bernstein's Black America was produced by Terrance McKnight and Curtis Macdonald, who also did the sound design.

Our editor was Derek John and our Executive Producer is Alex Ambrose.

Special thanks to Mike Shobe at WQXR and WNYC's Program Director Jacquelin Cincotta.

Thank you for listening to Leonard Bernstein's Black America.

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Leonard Bernstein's Black America | WQXR Features | WQXR

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TMAC: Hello I'm Terrance McKnight, and today, as we approach the centennial of his birth, we're talking about Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein was a great conductor, educator, he was a great composer and pianist. But he was also a lifelong activist of civil rights and social justice...

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How Straight Actors 'Playing Gay' Can Hurt the LGBTQ Community

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How Straight Actors 'Playing Gay' Can Hurt the LGBTQ Community

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This question is very similar to the question asked in class about whether or not non-Jewish actors should be in Fiddler On The Roof. I am still very conflicted about this and I think about it all of the time. I think on one hand, if the actor does a good job of telling the story of the LGBTQ character, then maybe it doesn't matter. However, I personally think that there are more talented queer actors probably at any given time who could actually tell these stories .

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"It's complicated," sighs Peppermint. "Talented actors, casting directors, and everyone involved in the making of art should feel free to create in the way they see fit. In a perfect world, anyone would be able to play anything."

I'm talking to Peppermint-the first transgender woman to create a major role in a Broadway musical, Head Over Heels-because, once again, the question of cis/straight actors taking LGBTQ parts has hit the headlines, this time sparked by English comedian Jack Whitehall reportedly being cast in Jungle Cruise (which apparently isn't a gay porno). He's set to play Disney's first major gay character, despite being a heterosexual man.

It's not the first time such a decision has been made by Hollywood: Just last month it was reported that Scarlett Johansson was set to star in the upcoming film Rub & Tug, playing a trans man (she later dropped out of the project). Nearly all the lead gay characters in 2008 movie Milk-a biopic of legendary gay rights activist Harvey Milk-were played by straight men. In The Danish Girl, Eddie Redmayne played the lead, a trans woman. The list continues.

There's often outrage from queer folk when such announcements are made, but to outsiders, the reason for the upset is not always so obvious. Acting, by definition, is about transforming into a character; it's not about who you actually are. Polling from YouGov this week confirms that many share this view, with 70 percent of the British public seeing no issue with a straight person taking the first leading gay role in a Disney blockbuster.

"I do really think, ideally, anyone should be able to play a perfect part for them," Peppermint continues, "but right now, gay, trans, and queer people need to participate in the telling of their own stories. Hollywood has a terrible history of creating movies and making money off the experiences of marginalized people, without letting them have any input in the process."

To Peppermint, it's firstly a question of authenticity, not just in who gets to play a queer part, but how that part is written, developed, presented, and performed: "We need to recognize that art plays a role in how marginalized people are treated and viewed by society. A lot of the time, Hollywood makes these stories about queer, trans, and minority folks and they get it wrong: there's offensive material, tragic storylines, one-dimensional, stereotypical characters with little depth." (See 2015 flop Stonewall for evidence.)

Actor Nick Westrate agrees: "There's such a wealth of behavior, cultural history, and experiences that, as a queer person, you just know. As a straight person, there's so much you might miss, which years of research won't ever prepare you for." Gay people grow up learning how to assume straight characteristics, says Nick, as for them, code-switching is often a means of survival. "Our entire lives are sometimes premeditated on playing a straight person," he tells me. "Straight people playing gay might well do their research and watch Ru Paul's Drag Race, but they just can't access the same depth of knowledge."

There's clearly a worry about the way queer characters are portrayed on stage or screen, but each actor I speak to makes it clear their concerns extend beyond just making great art: LGBTQ characters are often some of the only queer people visible in media, and with that platform comes great responsibility.

When Rebecca Root was cast as the lead in BBC Two sitcom Boy Meets Girl, both she and the show made history. When it debuted, in 2015, it was the first comedy/drama series on British TV with such a major role for a transgender character played by a trans actor. "I know the idea of being a role model doesn't always sit comfortably with everyone," Rebecca tells me, "but I'm not unhappy with that label. It's just about being seen-saying, 'That's me, and you too can do what I do.' Real representation isn't just about seeing a character you can relate to; it's about seeing real people working at the highest of level of the industry."

"Most people have never met a trans person, and many kids won't have knowingly met a gay person," says Peppermint. "There's immeasurable value in inspiring youth when you feel ostracized, outcast, or different. Seeing people like yourself thriving is huge, both for queer people, but also their friends and family." And, Peppermint adds, a cis man playing a trans woman, who then takes the wig off and appears at a premiere as a guy with a beard, only reinforces the dangerous narrative that trans women are men, not women.

A gay actor could use the platform of a Disney movie to speak about their own experiences, advance LGBTQ equality and be a visible queer figure for so many young people. Jack Whitehall, through no fault of his own, just can't do that.

While there's clearly rationale in casting queer for queer parts, there are practical realities of the industry to consider too. Casting directors are under pressure to hire who they see as the best fit for a part, and asking someone about their sexuality when they walk into an audition hardly seems a sign of progress. "My job is very much to get the right person for the right role," explains Amanda Tabak, a casting director based in London. "We would never ask someone's sexuality when they walk in the door-it's not relevant."

Amanda is clear that if there's a part for a Chinese person, putting up someone who isn't Chinese would be pointless (although whoever cast Scarlett Johansson as a Japanese character in Ghost in the Shell clearly didn't see this as such a problem). "People's sexualities aren't written on their chest," Amanda says. "It's not that which dictates whether you're getting a job or not."

It's a perspective that actor Giovanni Bienne-the chair of acting union Equity's LGBT+ committee-can only half-sympathize with. Giovanni feels expectations of LGBTQ actors in auditions are different to those of their cis, straight counterparts. "I don't go out for a straight romantic love interests a lot, but my agent said they thought it would help-if I were to-for me to stay in character during the chat afterward," he says, adding that he's heard that casting directors like his readings, but ask if could he keep "it" up? "That just doesn't happen to straight actors. Sean Penn didn't audition for Milk, but if he had, they wouldn't have him blow the casting team away, and then be told that he couldn't keep the 'gay' up afterward."

Giovanni accepts that with lesser-known actors their sexuality might not be known to whoever is casting, but non-LGBTQ actors can, too, help level the playing field. "A friend of mine called me recently saying he was being seen for a gay part, but it didn't feel right," he says. "I said go out for it, this is how it is, it's about whether we get the same opportunities. In the end, in an effort to support us, he decided not to."

Another point raised time and time again by those struggling to comprehend the Whitehall rage is that, ultimately, entertainment is a business. "A-list actors playing LGBTQ roles brings awareness, but they also get people though the doors to see a film," says Amanda Tabak. But after a generation of gay actors were lost to the AIDS crisis, maybe the industry has a responsibility to help make those new stars in the first place, and to make Hollywood a less hostile place to be openly gay. "If we hear a straight person gets a queer part because someone is a bankable star, we've just lost another chance for that person to make a name as a queer person," says Nick. "It's simple."

Clearly, the casting of Jack Whitehall as Disney's first gay character isn't in and of itself the problem, however much of a missed opportunity, or a lazy choice, it might at first seem. The problems are that in casting straight actors in gay roles we're not benefitting from the experience that queer people bring to queer parts, we're not letting queer people tell their own stories, and we're contributing to the woeful lack of IRL Hollywood LGBTQ visibility.

Not one actor I spoke to thinks only non-straight people should play LGBTQ parts, or vice versa, but that a conscious effort needs to be made by all to help level the playing field. That means accepting that some queer people get written off for straight parts in a way that is imbalanced. It means understanding that LGBTQ people are a minority who need role models. It means not simply saying there isn't a queer star to take a part, but making one. And it means that if Disney is going to make a big deal about creating a gay character, they probably need to make a big deal about casting a gay actor, too.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily. Follow Michael Segalov on Twitter.

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How Straight Actors 'Playing Gay' Can Hurt the LGBTQ Community

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK . "It's complicated," sighs Peppermint. "Talented actors, casting directors, and everyone involved in the making of art should feel free to create in the way they see fit. In a perfect world, anyone would be able to play anything."

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This is a clip of Pearl Bailey singing "Before the Parade Passes By" from Hello, Dolly!. I am so captivated by Peal Bailey and I completely get why many people consider her to be the best Dolly. I love her speech based singing because I think it really seems fitting for the character.

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Pearl Bailey - Before the Parade Passes By - Hello Dolly

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Carol Channing introduced the all black cast of Hello, Dolly! in 1968. This  performance is SO good and Pearl Bailey's award acceptance speech is so lovely. The best part is the introduction of Pearl Bailey, in which Jack Benny told the audience that when he was offered to be on Johnny Carson's show, he said he would come on any day except for when Pearl Bailey is performing. Then, he hugs and kisses her on the cheek. That is so nice and it makes me happy. Pearl Bailey deserved all of his appreciation and more.

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Hello Dolly! Pearl Bailey 1968 Tony Awards

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So I found an answer to my question! There WERE male taxi dancers. This article says Male taxi dancers were also a available. One well-known etiquette guide from 1952 suggests that no woman should be ashamed of employing paid dancers when she is traveling- provided it’s only dancing! Amy Vanderbilt’s New Complete Book of Etiquette advises the following on hiring male taxi dancers: “For unaccompanied women to employ these dancing partners in public places is correct, but for them to put the arrangement on any kind of personal plane is begging for trouble.”

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Picture a young soldier with a night of leave and an extra dollar in his pocket. He goes to a dance hall, cutting a rug with the taxi dancers before going off to fight in WWII, taking with him memories of a night of great dancing and no rejected dance offers. Though the trend is rarely discussed these days, back then it was a way of offering everyone an opportunity to dance, of practicing your moves, and of having a good time on the cheap.

Back when dancing was the backbone of nightlife in every city, dancing was so important that no one could stand to be without a partner for the evening. And few people wanted to venture to a club only to sit by the sidelines on a rare night out. As a response to the many dances being invented and the newly-minted jazz scene, pay-per-dance partners were an ideal solution for many and became very popular in the years between the World Wars.

Anyone could have a dance partner for a fee at dance halls where taxi dancers were employed. Paid dance partners started to appear in dance halls as early as 1913 and often the customer would buy tickets for a dime a piece and then relinquish one ticket each dance to the taxi dancer or dance hostess, as they were also called. The taxi dancer cashed in her tickets to the house at the end of the night and usually received around 5 cents per dance. Some dance halls used a time punch clock for each dance to determine how much of the dancer's time was spent actually dancing and so figure her rate for the evening.

Taxi dance halls were often well-chaperoned in order to avoid scandalous goings-on between the single young women in the hall's employ and the droves of men lining up to dance. We can envision this job as arduous for the down-on-her-luck girl or as ideal for a light-hearted chatterbox who loves to dance.

They were sometimes called "dime-a-dance" girls and songs about them conveyed empathy for their perceived plight. Films like Lured (1947) with Lucille Ball depicted at-risk dance hostesses being preyed upon by lecherous men who saw the girls as easy pickings. At the same time, paid dancers were sometimes viewed as money-hungry and seeking illicit after-hours employment. The wonderful taxi dance scene below from Once, Over Light (1931) with George and Gracie Allen gives us another angle: dance hostess as flirty, bawdy, and with an "anything goes" attitude.

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Male taxi dancers were also a available. One well-known etiquette guide from 1952 suggests that no woman should be ashamed of employing paid dancers when she is traveling- provided it's only dancing! Amy Vanderbilt's New Complete Book of Etiquette advises the following on hiring male taxi dancers: "For unaccompanied women to employ these dancing partners in public places is correct, but for them to put the arrangement on any kind of personal plane is begging for trouble."

Taxi dance halls continued to be in operation in the U.S. into the '90s, albeit with a much seedier twist. In modern times the standard payment has been by-the-minute, often with an expected tip at the end. The practice has almost entirely fallen by the wayside in the U.S. as most forms of partner dancing are on the decline. But, in parts of Europe and South America the tradition is still alive and well.

Though taxi dancing has not been a common cultural reference for many decades, it served as key as a key plot device in such films as The Taxi Dancer (1927) with Joan Crawford and Ten Cents a Dance (1931) with Barbara Stanwyck. Whether it seems like good clean fun or an unsavory transaction, there's no doubt that for previous generations getting to dance was the most crucial part. It was only because of the importance of partner dances like the tango that taxi dancers were required at all, something few people today even know how to do.

Check out some iconic images of how dancing used to be right here!

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Forgotten Dance Hall Taxi Dancers - A Dime a Dance!

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Picture a young soldier with a night of leave and an extra dollar in his pocket. He goes to a dance hall, cutting a rug with the taxi dancers before going off to fight in WWII, taking with him memories of a night of great dancing and no rejected dance offers.

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I did not know that this was still happening! It is such a weird concept that I thought would have died out by now in favor for more intense forms of work verging on sex work. Apparently, taxi dancing is still popular with "Latin or Kizomba festivals". I guess this makes sense, since Latin festivals are known to be filled with dancing. My biggest question about taxi dancing overall is: were there male taxi dancers? I would assume so, but I doubt there were as many.

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I don't think it was until I was attending kizomba festivals in Europe a few years ago that my current notion of what a taxi dancer is really took hold. While I had previously encountered some similar practices in many different dance scenes, they often had different names and particularities. Yet at this point it seems so normal to me that I'm surprised every time I speak with a long-time dancer who has no idea what the term "taxi dancer" means.
What is a taxi dancer?
The first time I set down my understanding of taxi dancers in writing was in a 2015 article here on LDC about building your dance community:
"Taxi dancers are responsible for dancing with everyone - not only saying "yes" to everyone, but seeking out wallflowers and livening up the party. They are usually higher level dancers that receive a free pass or even some compensation for their role. [...] Taxi dancers may wear a special shirt, hat, button, or wristband to make them easy to find. Taxi dancers are more common in big cities or at large events, and they help fill in the gaps - whether by offsetting a gender/role imbalance, attracting other higher level dancers, or being where the organizers/teachers don't have time to be."

Historically, the term taxi dancers referred to women who would dance with men in the American dance-halls of a century ago, collecting paid tickets at a dime each in order to earn a commission from the venue. Also called hostesses, they kept the male patrons entertained while earning money based on the time they spent with each customer - much like a taxi driver does. You can get a pretty good picture from these two clips from the 1931 film "Ten Cents a Dance."

Ballroom dance schools picked up on the idea, and I think it was in fact at a local ballroom studio that I first encountered the idea of paying for a partner (a studio teacher) at a social. At lindy hop and blues events I realized after a while that some of the best or most popular dancers who weren't teachers would sometimes attend an event for free, with the understanding that they would pull in more people to attend. Often great dancers were asked to come participate in the beginner class or balance the roles in a workshop. When I lived in Philadelphia back in 2012, they were calling them "cherubs." Today lots of different dance scenes have a similar practice; I've also seen it in salsa, bachata, tango, West Coast swing and even Ceroc. An informal Facebook survey I did turned up the terms "salsa ambassador," "dance angel," "party starter," and "limo dancer" as alternatives to "taxi dancer."

Whatever the name, taxi dancers seem to fall into three main categories: volunteers, a paid individual partner, and individuals or dedicated teams who receive passes or monetary compensation at festivals. At swing and blues socials, there are often designated volunteers who spend a certain period of time going around and dancing with newcomers and beginners, sometimes introducing them to other dancers to help them get going. Argentine tango is the most famous for having professionals for hire: you can contract with a taxi dancer for a night of social dancing, a festival weekend, or even for a multiple-night stay on your trip to Buenos Aires. It's not uncommon outside tango, though; I have friends who hired ballroom and salsa teachers for an evening and I heard about some popular guys who were being paid by individual kizomba dancers to attend a festival with them. I myself once agreed to go to a social with a student of mine; he paid for me to dance with him for a minimum of one hour over the course of the night.
What does it take to be a taxi dancer?
The first requirement most people think of for taxi dancers is having a good level in your dance. There is no absolute standard, though; you simply must be good enough that your intended partner(s) enjoy dancing with you. The standard for volunteers will understandably be less stringent than for paid dancers. When people hire a taxi dancer as an individual, usually they are looking for someone who dances well, knows the local dance culture, and is reasonably genial. If you are a taxi dancer at a social or larger event, you should care most of all about getting everyone up and dancing. The number one criticism of taxi dancers (especially paid teams) is that they sometimes fail to behave professionally, choosing to dance only with other high-level dancers, attractive people, or even "groupies" that follow their team to different festivals. As a taxi dancer you should also pay attention to and be sensitive to each partner, adapting your dancing to suit their skill level and comfort. Unfortunately some taxi dancers are known to treat each dance as an opportunity to show off, sometimes leaving partners feeling ignored or ill-used. A great taxi dancer will leave each partner feeling pleased and ready to find their next dance.

In theory anyone who invests in their dancing and their scene could become a taxi dancer, but realistically there are often some other factors that matter. You're less likely to be invited as a taxi dancer if you don't live in a major metropolitan area, no matter how good you are, and teams are usually formed in big cities. In terms of festival invitations, it makes a big difference who you know and how much you promote yourself. And it's pretty obvious that when it comes to Latin or kizomba festivals, being a young attractive man is a huge advantage.
Why bother with taxi dancers?
You might never even think about hiring someone to dance with you if you're an amateur dancer; perhaps you just enjoy the social opportunity afforded by going out to dance with many different people. If you are eager to increase your level rapidly, though, having concentrated practice at a social with your teacher or another high-level dancer could make for a helpful boost. For the shy or socially awkward, having a guaranteed partner can make you bolder in asking others to dance as well. When you're ready to invest in a trip to a far-off country to focus on your dancing for a weekend or more, the additional expense of a local taxi dancer could prove well worth it in terms of navigating the local scene, finding the best spots to dance, and having someone ready to show you off on the dance floor. There is one caution I would offer, though: be discreet. There can be some stigma attached to having hired a taxi dancer. It's wise to arrive separately, handle payment away from the venue, and endeavor to dance with other people as well.

As an organizer, there are some clear benefits to inviting or employing taxi dancers. If you want the regular attendance at your local social to grow, having volunteers who are focused on integrating beginners and newcomers will have a serious impact on your retention. Promising to have a team of taxi dancers at your festival has created a measurable boost in attendance for many larger events. Assuming the taxi dancers have done their job, you'll also have lots of satisfied dancers recommending your event to their friends.

However, you might want to think about what kind of oversight you will want to have over your taxi dancers in order to ensure your attendees are getting the full benefit of their presence. Check that the level of the taxi dancers is in fact appropriate; you don't want to join the ranks of organizers accused of taking just anyone in order to claim "WITH TAXI DANCERS!" on the flyer. Require your taxi dancers to be clearly identifiable. Taxi dancer team t-shirts are popular, but they're not always visible in a venue with low-lighting and they may soon be removed by less worthy taxi dancers. "I didn't want to make people dance with me in a sweaty shirt" may provide the perfect excuse to abandon their duties and choose their partners as they please. A popular alternative is using some kind of lit wearable like a glowing wristband, lapel pin, or shoe tie. Moreover, there should be consequences for taxi dancers failing to live up to the standard of their role, whether it's withholding future invitations or more publicly offering feedback on their services. You might also consider offering a bonus to the taxi dancers who are most present and active during the socials.
Sincere Appreciation for Taxi Dancers
Taxi dancers can help dance communities and events to grow and flourish, offering memorable experiences to all attendees. There are so many wonderful people who fill this role today, inviting hesitant dancers onto the floor with a welcoming smile or pulling people off the couches at 2:30 AM to keep the party going strong. Thank you to all the taxi dancers who work hard to show us a good time!

Let me know in the comments about your own experience related to taxi dancers; give a shout-out, explain how it works in your scene, or just give your opinion!
Featured image by Devon Rowland Photography.

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I don't think it was until I was attending kizomba festivals in Europe a few years ago that my current notion of what a taxi dancer is really took hold. While I had previously encountered some similar practices in many different dance scenes, they often had different names and particularities.

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Marvelous Ms. Maisel- "Jewish, Just For Us"

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Marvelous Ms. Maisel- "Jewish, Just For Us"

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I can't believe I haven't made a single post about this AMAZING show! This article discusses many things about the show, but what is the most fascinating to me is the idea of it being "Jewish, Just For Us", which is an idea of being Jewish in a way that is highlighted as important, but it is not used as a trope to follow some sort of agenda. I think that is awesome. The list of other shows that do this, such as my two favorites- Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend- made me realize how much of my favorite content is made by or surrounds Jewish women. Also, there is a prediction that Sid Caesar will be showcased in the upcoming season, which is really cool considering his popularity at the time of the show.

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'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' Isn't Just "Jewish 'Gilmore Girls'"- It's Better

The new comedy is "all Jewish, all the time."

By Shiran Lugashi / March 23, 2017

If you're Jewish and you write about TV, there's a type of show you've likely gotten to expect. It's the show that's obviously Jewy to you, but not as obvious to a non-Jewish audience. This is the category shows like and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fall into - Jews have good reason to love their consistent references to Jewish life, but broader TV criticism doesn't talk it up as their defining trait. "Jewish, Just For Us" is the loving term I've come up with for them.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel , Amy Sherman-Palladino's new Amazon pilot, is not that show. It's "Jewish For Everyone." It's all Jewish, all the time.

The Gilmore Girls creator's new series explores charming housewife Midge Maisel's journey into stand-up comedy in 1950s New York, and it brims with joyous Semitism from the very first minute - literally. The show gets just 50 seconds in before its first jokey reference to the Holocaust, when Midge - soaking in the spotlight at her own wedding reception - mimics her dad's reaction to wedding prices: "Do the caterers have any idea what the Jews just went through a few years ago?" Minutes later, she causes a panic by joking there's shrimp in the egg rolls. The words "rabbi," "brisket," and "latkes" are repeated so many times in the episode it's impossible to keep count. Marriage advice is framed in terms of finding the person who would hide you in their attic. And while it's bad enough Midge's schmuck husband leaves her midway through the episode, it's even worse that he does it on Yom Kippur. A shonda if there ever was one.

Disappointingly, the show does suffer from the lack of ethnic diversity that's sadly become signature in Palladino's work. And for such a vibrantly Jewy show, it's a little ironic to see so few members of the tribe in the main cast. Thankfully, Gilmore Girls alum Alex Borstein seems primed to correct that and take on a more central role in future episodes. But those reservations aside, the show develops into a true celebration of Jewish-American culture and a time when Jewish women specifically occupied a vibrant, brassy space in pop-culture.

Comedy nerds will likely be excited at the prospect of examining this iconic time in when Borscht Belt comedians started to define the art form, and those nerds won't be disappointed. Lenny Bruce plays a key role in Midge's transformation, Mort Sahl and Don Rickles get shout outs, and Midge herself is basically Joan Rivers reenacted.

This first episode was released as part of Amazon's Pilot Season , which lets viewers vote to tell Amazon which of its new shows it should produce more episodes of. With the general buzz and glowing reviews the show is getting, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel seems likely to get picked up to series, which means we'll probably see even more references to Jewish comedy greats in future episodes.

Who might we see next? Seeing a young Woody Allen seems likely; Rodney Dangerfield would be better. My vote goes for Sid Caesar or Carl Reiner. But with this era in Jewish history, let's face it: it's hard to go wrong.
Image by Sarah Shatz/Amazon Video

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'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' Isn't Just "Jewish 'Gilmore Girls'"- It's Better - Jewcy

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The new comedy is "all Jewish, all the time." By Shiran Lugashi / March 23, 2017 If you're Jewish and you write about TV, there's a type of show you've likely gotten to expect. It's the show that's obviously Jewy to you, but not as obvious to a non-Jewish audience.

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I HAVE BEEN WAITING ALL SEMESTER FOR US TO GET TO CHICAGO SO I COULD TALK ABOUT THIS MASTERPIECE!!!! This is Trina's performance of her one woman show, She-Cago, which is direct spoof of Chicago. I SPENT MY ENTIRE CHILDHOOD THINKING THIS WAS THE CHICAGO THAT EVERYONE WAS TALKING ABOUT, so when I found out this was just on Victorious, I was so surprised. This is the biggest example of TV and musical theatre intertwining in my head. I did not realize this as a topic was so interesting to me, but through this padlet I have realized that it really is for some reason.

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Here is a compilation of 2 of Michelle's audition nightmares- one in which she sings "Me and My Baby" from Chicago, and the other in which she sings "Maybe This Time" from Cabaret. This is great for the audience because that means we get to see Sutton Foster do more musical theatre. On top of that, these two songs are a culmination of Michelle's failures as both a person and an actress, so they are perfect choices for these dream sequences. Amy Sherman Palladino and her team of writers are pure genius.

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"Its A Perfect Relationship" in Bunheads

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"Its A Perfect Relationship" in Bunheads

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We get a double musical theatre reference in this episode of Bunheads! As Ginny sings "Its A Perfect Relationship" from Bells Are Ringing", Michelle (Sutton Foster) tells her to "sing out, Louise!".

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"It's a Perfect Relationship" - Bunheads 1x16

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"If My Friends Could See Me Now" in Bunheads

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"If My Friends Could See Me Now" in Bunheads

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In an episode of my absolute favorite TV flop, Bunheads, Sutton Foster (as Michelle Simms) sings "If My Friends Could See Me Now" from Sweet Charity. This is funny because Sutton actually played this part years before. Also, this song has a great parallel to Michelle's life. Her friends would not believe it if they could see her now, but not in the way that the song typically depicts, since she is at one of the lowest points in her life. I think this song was a great choice for the audition in this show, in regards to the progression of the plot.

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Bunheads Michelle's Audition: If My Friends Could See Me Now

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"The Impossible Dream" in Grace and Frankie 

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"The Impossible Dream" in Grace and Frankie 

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In the latest season of Grace and Frankie, Robert sings "The Impossible Dream" from Man of La Mancha and I just think it is such a great song for Martin Sheen. This song is the peak of his character arc development. He really does such a great job in this number (it made me cry a lot) and the coolest part was that it made me want to go and listen to the musical, which I had never heard before. Also, catch the quick Gypsy reference- "Sing out, Louise" from one of his kids in the audience. He also plays Sancho momentarily, singing the song "I, Don Quixote", but I can't find a clip from it.

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To reach the unreachable star 🚀🌟 (Grace & Frankie - Robert sings Don Quichot)

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In an early episode of Grace and Frankie, Robert (Martin Sheen) plays Harold Hill at a community theatre and it's really a great time. There isn't much to say about this, but I really enjoy picking out all of the musical theatre moments from my favorite TV shows, since both of these forms of content are important to me.

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Grace and Frankie - Robert's Musical Performance

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In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca's therapist, Dr.Akopian sings this song about being dream ghosts with a few other dream ghosts. This song is definitely based off of Dreamgirls, especially when it gets to the chorus. The title song from Dreamgirls specifically is the reference here.

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Dream Ghost (feat. Michael Hyatt, Amber Riley and Ricki Lake) - "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

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It's Not Bad Being Out of College / Anything and Everything

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It's Not Bad Being Out of College / Anything and Everything

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This is a recording of Richard Caplan singing a song from Anything and Everything. I am so fascinated by this musical because it seems like an absolute flop that the creators thought would be the next biggest thing. Also, this was written before Bye Bye, Birdie, so I wonder what this was recorded on- especially because this one is a modern recording now that we can listen to.

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According to this guy, Ted Nelson, him and his friend Richard Caplan wrote the first rock musical ever in college, called Anything and Everything. I think this is interesting because it shows that there is always something that preceded the big things in history. I guess in this case, Anything and Everything preceded Bye Bye, Birdie but no one knew because it did not do well. I am sure that there were other rock musicals before that one that no one else even knew about. This makes history complicated. I think Bye Bye Birdie is regarded as the first rock musical because it was the first rock musical that a large population had actually heard about and/or seen.

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"Anything & Everything" appears to have been the world's first rock musical, with book and lyrics by Ted Nelson and music by Richard L. Caplan.

I have seen no indication that there was any earlier rock musical-- meaning a show with rock'n'roll songs, scenes, characters and a plot. (As distinct from a rock concert.)
Why would anyone have heard of it? It ran as scheduled for two nights as scheduled at Swarthmore College on November 21 and 22, 1957. The well-known rock musicals began with "Bye Bye Birdie" (1960) and went on to "Hair", "Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat," "Tommy" and "Jesus Christ Superstar."

MP3s for you from "Anything & Everything," the world's first rock musical, 1957--
"It's Not Bad Being Out of College." Vocalist: Richard L. Caplan.
"Song of Significance." Vocalists: Bob Caplan, Dave Tucker, Ted Nelson, Richard L. Caplan, Chorus.

I was a junior. I explicitly wanted to write the world's first rock musical. "Oh, rock and roll won't last," I was told by many fellow students. "It will," I would reply, echoing the sentiment of the song "Rock and Roll is Here to Stay."
Caplan was a freshman whom I recruited. He proved very talented at providing exactly the music I wanted.

I had been deeply moved the previous year by Brecht and Weill's bitter Dreigroschenoper (the Blitzstein translation to English, "Threepenny Opera," was a big hit off Broadway in '56). Threepenny Opera was very anti-middle-class. I asked Caplan to write rock tunes and arrangements that sounded like Threepenny Opera, and so he did. (The Second Act Finale, entitled "Song of Significance," is explicitly based on the very harsh Threepenny song "Ihr Herrn die uns lehrt wie Mann brav leben," translated by Blitzstein as "O those among you full of highest teaching.")

The first two acts were a satire on Swarthmore (called in the show "Wrathsome"), and the unfortunate third act added a plot about spies on campus. It was much too long, and the size of cast, crew and orchestra (some seventy people) outnumbered the audience.

The LP was offered under the Truly Zorch label (another early innovation-- the silly record company name). Some of the songs are still pretty good, though the record itself-- done with very little rehearsal-- has its unfortunate aspects.

We plan to sell the few remaining LPs of "Anything & Everything," one at a time, on Ebay, if and when we have time. (They will be sent from California by our assistant Litta Rascal.)
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"Anything & Everything" appears to have been the world's first rock musical, with book and lyrics by Ted Nelson and music by Richard L. Caplan. I have seen no indication that there was any earlier rock musical-- meaning a show with rock'n'roll songs, scenes, characters and a plot.

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The Life is one of my favorite musicals ever and this song might be my favorite show tune EVER, and for good reason. Jerry Herman did such a great job writing a song that is still relevant today. The lyrics, "It's my body and my body ain't nobody's business but my own" is really liberating to me. I wish more people did this show because I can imagine that people today would still relate to the struggles of these women- especially sex workers. Also, the cast of this show is so diverse in every way and the song is so important in regards to women having autonomy over their bodies. It is SO COOL to see a bunch of women of color and different sizes sing about their freedom!!!!! I just really love this show so much. The end.

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This is a funny little interview about Robert Morse's Mad Men audition, many years after starring in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. Mad Men is one of my favorite shows, so the origin story of Robert Morse being in it after H2$ is so cool to me.

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Mad Men - Robert Morse's Audition (Paley Center)

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I might be overthinking this song, as I tend to do with most things, but I feel like this song is about white people assimilating to the popular funk/soul music of the time. I wonder if this song actually led more white people to listen to this kind of music. The lyrics "Now first it wasn't easy
Changin' Rock and Roll and minds and things were getting shaky
I thought I'd have to leave it behind
But now its so much better" seem especially indicative of this potential narrative. Regardless of the meaning, the song is definitely a classic.

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Wild Cherry - Play that Funky Music White Boy

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In an episode of Crazy-Ex Girlfriend, Rebecca and Valencia go to a hippy dippy yoga retreat and accidentally drink some drugged juice. As they begin to trip, they say together "woahhh, a dream ballet!", leading to what is called "The Triceratops Ballet". This ballet is so absurd, including a medley of a bunch of songs in the show, but the dialogue and the way the girls interact with Josh is a definite reference to the dream ballets of the Golden Age.

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Triceratops Ballet (Medley) - "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

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In the final episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca Bunch uses the 11:00 clock number to her advantage in what is the #1 BEST SHOW IN THE WHOLE SHOW. After this song, she discovers the way that she uses musical theatre to cope with her issues and I think that is genuinely fascinating because it seems as if so many creatives do the same (whether it is healthy or not, I do not know, but I do know that it happens).

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Eleven O'Clock - feat. Rachel Bloom - "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

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This musical is so cool to me. I had no idea that the amazing Tyne Daly was in it! I would have loved to see that. This is a little trailer for the show, in which Tyne Daly briefly discusses the plot of the show.

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Here is another pop music connection that is pretty obvious. Gwen Stefani's "Rich Girl" is very clearly based on "If I Were A Rich Man" from Fiddler On The Roof. I think this is such a strange connection, but it worked out pretty well, since this song is a major bop.

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Gwen Stefani - Rich Girl (Official Music Video) ft. Eve

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This is very obvious, but I thought I should put it in here anyway. "7 Rings" by Ariana Grande has a build up to the chorus that is very clearly based on "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music". I am very interested in the crossover between musical theatre and pop music, especially with connections to classic musicals.

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Ariana Grande - 7 rings (Official Video)

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This is a clip of Tony Yazbeck, Christian Borle, and the company of the revival of Little Me. I did not realize that "I've Got Your Number" was from this show. That song is very popular and I wonder if that helped make this show more popular in turn.

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I am so fascinated by this weird little show and I think it would be so fun to be in. In this clip of the 1999 Tony Awards, Martin Short sings "Boom Boom". I completely get why this song was so taboo when it came out, because it is definitely filled with innuendos.

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Untucking the Queer History of the Colorful Hanky Code

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Untucking the Queer History of the Colorful Hanky Code

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As a gay person, I have known about this for years, but I was surprised as to how many people in class did not know about it. Overall, I think they probably did not because most people in America are able to be out to the point where this system became obsolete. Regardless, I think it is very cool to learn about how the people before me made their sexual orientation known in a way that felt safe for them.

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Untucking the Queer History of the Colorful Hanky Code

First popularized in the '70s, the Hanky Code began as a sly way to showcase sexual preferences for a community still largely in the closet. Black, blue, red, purple, and many other colors of hankies found their way into the back pockets of the LGBTQ community. This was a rich tradition that helped bring people together during one of the darkest periods in our history and yet, the Hanky Code's legacy has been largely forgotten by today's young queers who find sex with a tap, click, and "send location."

Now, queer artist and activist Andy Simmonds, of Hey Rooney is pledging to bring back the historic queer tradition and pay homage to the rainbow of hankies through his new 12-part illustration series.
Related | Need to Know: Andy Simmonds
"Connecting to my queer heritage is crucial," Simmonds told OUT. "It is a terrible tragedy that there is an entire generation of LGBT people wiped out from HIV/AIDS who are not around now to impart their wisdom or help bridge the generational gap. I think a lot of us are feeling that disconnect, and we are finding ways to access our history. It's about more than sex. It's about sex positivity. It's about the ingenuity of queer people of other generations to navigate a climate where they could not live openly. It highlights our use of code, and causes us to consider the ways we use code today. If nothing else, it's an aesthetic treasure trove."

Click through Simmonds' illustrations to find the hanky that best reflects your sexual desires:
Light Blue: Oral Hunter Green: Daddy/Daddy Chaser Light Pink: Dildo Fucking Silver Lamé: Star/Starfucker Red Gingam: Park Sex Yellow: Watersports/Piss Play Red: Fisting White: J/O Lime Green: Looking for Dinner/Will Buy Dinner Black: S&M Lavender: Drag Queen/Drag Queen Chaser

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Untucking the Queer History of the Colorful Hanky Code

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Untucking the Queer History of the Colorful Hanky Code First popularized in the '70s, the Hanky Code began as a sly way to showcase sexual preferences for a community still largely in the closet. Black, blue, red, purple, and many other colors of hankies found their way into the back pockets of the LGBTQ community.

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The Particularly Jewish Humor of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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The Particularly Jewish Humor of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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This article goes into depth about everything that I have been saying. I think it is so cool to hear about how Rachel Bloom (my favorite person ever maybe) and Aline Brosh McKenna incorporated their lives into the show through musical theatre.

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is a breath of fresh air. Going into its fourth and final season, co-creators Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna have successfully maintained the momentum that allowed this show to beat the odds and make it onto mainstream television in the first place. Led by Bloom's character, Rebecca Bunch, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's cast of quirky characters have survived three seasons of romance, comedy, and workplace drama - with the help of a few well-placed musical theater breaks. The series is also frankly Jewish, which makes sense given that both Bloom and McKenna come from Jewish families.

Much like the rest of her identity, Rebecca's relationship to her Judaism is, to quote the theme song, "a lot more nuanced" than the casual viewer might assume. From Rebecca's stereotypically Jewish mother to her tendency to unabashedly detail every inappropriate exploit, she appears to have all of the meshuga of a modern-day Jerry Seinfeld.

Yet Rebecca often jokes about being Jewish in a way that, on the surface, appears to diminish her pride in her heritage. In Season 2, Episode 10, "Will Scarsdale Like Josh's Shayna Punim?" the rabbi (played by Patti LuPone) asks Rebecca whether she has found a synagogue in West Covina yet. "Well, I don't believe in God, so no, it didn't make my to-do list," Rebecca replies. This dialogue touches on the much larger conversation surrounding what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century, and whether there really is a difference between those who categorize themselves as "cultural," "spiritual," or "religious" Jews.

In the same episode, the iconic JAP rap battle takes place between Rebecca and her frenemy, Audra Levine. The song's lyrics refer to the two women as "daughters of privilege," and explain that for those who "find that term offensive," that's "too bad, yo!" The tune is a reclamation of the historically offensive term, in essence because its content speaks to the modern Jewish woman herself. When Audra raps, "I'm really not sure which one's the bigger shanda," Rebecca continues, "That means 'disgrace,' I'm translating for the goys." The firing off of Jewish references with little explanation allows the Jewish viewer - so often the outsider, the butt of the joke - to become part of the "in" group. This is reappropriation at its best.

Some critics don't see Rebecca's jokes about her Jewishness as a distancing from her identity, but rather an embrace of it. Her Jewish jokes subvert Jewish stereotypes. "She is someone for whom her Jewish identity is important," Dr. Jennifer Caplan, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Towson University, explains. "From the very first episode, when we first meet Darryl and Rebecca is taken aback by his casual anti-Semitism, the viewer gets a sense of Rebecca as a Jewish woman, whose interactions with the world are frequently colored or influenced by her Jewishness."

This can be seen in her relationship with her mother, Naomi, played by Tovah Feldshuh. Naomi's character is almost a caricature-like depiction of the neurotic Jewish mother stereotype, but Tovah Feldshuh's hyperbolic performance manages to be extremely relatable at the same time.

Dr. Sarah Emanuel, Faculty Fellow of Religious Studies at Colby College, notes the use of hyperbole in Rebecca and Naomi's conversations. "[It] certainly adds a layer to Rebecca's relationship with her Jewishness," says Dr. Emanuel. "It's an old (and problematic) adage that Jewish mothers [have] strained relationships with their daughters, often centered around criticism. 'Loud' criticism, if that makes sense: loud in volume, loud in absurdity, loud in frequency, loud in harshness, loud in absurdity once more."

But while other TV comedies that utilize the Jewish mother trope (Mrs. Wolowitz on the Big Bang Theory, Estelle Costanza on Seinfeld) aim to get a laugh from the audience, Naomi's commentary is often cringe-worthy, even to the point of being cruel. By giving Naomi traits beyond those usually assigned to the doting Jewish mother, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend works to subvert that stereotype. "Naomi does love Rebecca. Even if she does not on paper, Tovah Feldshuh is such an incredibly talented actor that depth and nuance come across in the relationship despite the dialogue being spoken," says Dr. Emanuel. The show "recalls for many of us, with humorous exaggeration that maintains a sense of realness, the hard moments in which we are the targets of our mother's critiques, and the equally hard yet also embarrassing moments in which the soup at the restaurant is sent back by our mothers five times for being too cold," she says. "It is ridiculous. We know it is ridiculous. Thus, we try to laugh, together."

And managing to laugh in spite of adversity is an innately Jewish trait. "It is inarguable that Jewish history ... contains a great deal of tragedy and trauma, and at least for the last 150 years or so humor has been one of the ways Jews have combated that," says Dr. Caplan. She mentions the JAP stereotype as an example. "It is interesting the way Jews have taken the things people have tried to use against them and repurposed them as sort of sideways badges of honor," Dr. Caplan explains. "Jews have perhaps perfected the art of self-satire, especially using the tools of oppression."

She continues: "What is, perhaps, a bit different about Jewish storytelling in that regard is that the stereotypes being used, especially today, are reinterpretations of external and very negative stereotypes used against Jews historically."

This can be seen in Season 1, Episode 16, when Rebecca delivers this jam-packed line: "I helped my client, Moshe, through a very complicated subdivision deal, and he said he could hook me up with non-blood diamonds at a discount. And never pass up a good discount, right? I know what you're thinking - like, diamonds, discounts, those are some like classic Jew moves, you know?"

And coming back to Season 2, Episode 10, it's impossible to forget the song "Remember That We Suffered," which is a discussion about the Holocaust set to lively hora music.

The self-deprecating aspect of Jewish humor is often justified by the explanation that Jews make fun of themselves and their culture because they know someone else eventually will, and they're trying to do it first. This defense mechanism may be valid, but the rationalization works to simplify and even excuse the very real problem of anti-Semitism.

"Those who persecute or attack Jews are not playground bullies, and they're not fighting with mean jokes. Jews use self-deprecating humor not as a way to forestall attacks, but as a way to show that the attacks don't matter," says Dr. Caplan. "Jews can take what is thrown at them and persevere, and while negative stereotypes of Jews were and are damaging and hurtful, many Jews have also proven adept at reimagining them into self-deprecating humor, especially the sort of self-deprecating humor that is really more of a trenchant satire of those who hold negative opinions of Jews, rather than of Jews themselves."

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has also been applauded for its frank and honest discussion of mental illness. This, too, ties back to the show's subversion of Jewish stereotypes. " Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is capitalizing on the fact that one of the stereotypes of Jews is that, much more than their WASP neighbors, Jews do talk about their physical ailments, and it is extending that to mental health as well," says Dr. Caplan. "The show's portrayal of not only Rebecca's struggle, but the struggle of all her friends, is important and humanizing and real. One of the hallmarks of Jewish humor created by millennials is a refusal to accept that some things can't be joked about, and we see that with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend working mental illness, suicide, medications, etc. into a comedy show."

For a network comedy to successfully take on these types of heavy topics, both the writing and the actors' execution need to be precise. Thankfully, Rachel Bloom knows a thing or two about nuance.
Header image via WCCB Charlotte

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The Particularly Jewish Humor of 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend'

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Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a breath of fresh air. Going into its fourth and final season, co-creators Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna have successfully maintained the momentum that allowed this show to beat the odds and make it onto mainstream television in the first place. Led by Bloom's character

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Where's The Bathroom?- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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Where's The Bathroom?- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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I am sorry for all of the CXG posts, but I have a lot to say about it. This song seems like an opposition to the homely Jewish mother stereotype. Rebecca's mom, Naomi (played by the amazing Tovah Feldshuh) is condescending, stuck up and prissy from the start. This is especially so because this is the FIRST TIME she is ever introduced in the show. Also, this song sounds so stereotypically Jewish in regards to the score, which I think is stylistically fitting.

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Where's the Bathroom? (feat. Tovah Feldshuh) - "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

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JAP Battle (Reprise)- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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JAP Battle (Reprise)- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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This is the reprise to JAP Battle, which I honestly prefer because it is a compliment battle. I think that says a lot about these two characters and the way their relationship evolves. Also, more about Jewish stereotypes.

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JAP Battle (Reprise) - feat. Rachel Bloom & Rachel Grate - "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

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This is another Crazy Ex-Girlfriend song about being Jewish, but this one in particular tackles the stereotype of being a Jewish American Princess. It is also a pun because it is a rap battle between two well-to-do Jewish women.

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JAP Battle (EXPLICIT) - "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"

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This is a video of the iconic Sean Gunn as Kirk singing Do You Love Me? from Fiddler On The Roof with a little girl (it makes sense in the show, I promise). This was how I originally knew all of the words to this song and I think that is very strange and funny.

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Looking On the Bright Side with  Broadway Icon Jerry Herman

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Looking On the Bright Side with  Broadway Icon Jerry Herman

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I am so obsessed with Jerry Herman and I think his contribution to the AIDS crisis is SO important!! I also love to read his words, and this interview is no different. In regards to his favorite work he ever did, Mack and Mabel, being revived after lukewarm reviews, he said "Reprise- it's my favorite word in the theater". I think that is beautiful.

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In 1984, Broadway songwriter Jerry Herman learned he was HIV-positive. The news, he says, had the ashen taste of "a death sentence." His seven-year companion Marty Finkelstein was already dead, an AIDS casualty.

"I was prepared," he says now, by phone from his Beverly Hills home, "to say goodbye to everybody."

Nearly two decades later, through dark hours and brighter ones, Herman is far healthier than he was at the time of the diagnosis. Fate, to quote a a favorite Herman lyric from "Mame," has opened a new window.

The man who wrote the scores for "Hello, Dolly!" and "Mame" and "La Cage aux Folles," featuring such optimistic anthems as "Before the Parade Passes By," "We Need a Little Christmas" and "The Best of Times," has always done well looking on the bright side.

In Broadway's pantheon, 70-year-old Herman is the chin-up guy, the Good Humor Man. He has been lauded, as well as needled (usually with affection), and hummed and hummed and hummed, thanks to his favored Tin Pan Alley-bred brand of show tune. The "ta-da!" title numbers from "Dolly!" and "Mame" capture that style. If one or both of the proposed television remakes come to pass--"Dolly!" possibly with Bette Midler, "Mame" with Cher--whatever the results, let the humming commence.

The Jersey City native, son of public school teachers Harry (who owned a children's camp) and Ruth (who once sang and played piano on New York City radio), arrives for a Chicago visit this week. Wednesday morning, in the DePaul University Student Center, the composer-lyricist will lead a seminar in the ASCAP Foundation Jerry Herman Legacy Series, involving a baker's dozen of area high schools and colleges.

Thursday night, Herman and his seminar cohorts--seasoned Broadway talents Jason Graae, Karen Morrow and Paige O'Hara, along with musical director Don Pippin, a frequent Herman collaborator--perform the revue "Hello, Jerry!" at DePaul's downtown Merle Reskin Theatre, as a benefit for the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Herman is also meeting with the American Theatre Critics Association, in town for a convention. And he's upbeat about that, even.

"He is totally out to please," says longtime friend Angela Lansbury, originator of Mame in "Mame." "Jerry wants to please his audience. He's warm, tremendously outgoing and interested. I love the fact he's working with youngsters, and prepared to go on the road with such a good group of singers, to illustrate how he has built his career. And to encourage these young people to do the same.

"It's marvelous, especially given what he's come through."

A healthy outlook

Herman knows he is fortunate. "I really don't mind talking about it, because I want other people in my situation to realize it's possible to live a normal life with this disease. I know that everybody has different genetics and different strains of the HIV, but in my case I'm healthier now than I was when I was diagnosed. It's all because of the new drugs and my initial willingness to be a guinea pig."

From the beginning, he says, Herman enjoyed a supportive family and a natural ear for melody. He recalls coming home as a teenager from Irving Berlin's "Annie Get Your Gun" and pounding out "There's No Business Like Show Business" on the family piano. Likewise, after seeing Hitchcock's "Spellbound," he hit the keyboard and played the overripe Miklos Rozsa theme from memory.

Herman's mother arranged a fateful meeting, "through the friend of a friend of a hairdresser, or something like that," with the great "Guys and Dolls" composer-lyricist Frank Loesser.

The 1953 meeting took place in Loesser's Manhattan Brill building office.

"He made me play everything I'd ever written," Herman recalls, "most of which I really believed was sort of sophomoric and not particularly worthy of that kind of audition. But he saw something in the work, because he called my parents and said: `I just want you to know that I believe your son can make it in this business.'

"The fact that he believed in me meant more than anything."

Herman's first Greenwich Village revue, "Nitecap," enjoyed a two-year run. As a club pianist gigging around Manhattan in the '50s, Herman got better and better at the keyboard and, crucially, at doping out popular tastes.

`Parade' starts it off

"For a few years there," Herman says, "nothing much happened." But another small-cast Herman revue, "Parade" (1960), led to his first Broadway assignment, "Milk and Honey," a solid hit. And then came "Hello, Dolly!" in 1964, followed two years later by "Mame."

"Those two shows were major, major events, and to have them back to back was amazing," says musical theater historian Ken Mandelbaum, whose book "Not Since Carrie" deals with Herman's disappointing later shows, "Dear World," "Mack and Mabel" and "The Grand Tour."

This week, a new Jerry Herman score hits the stores--new, with an asterisk. "Miss Spectacular," recorded in 1999, was commissioned (though not produced) as a Las Vegas revue. It may yet find its way to a full staging. It's the first new Herman score since the original 1996 tele-musical "Mrs. Santa Claus," starring Lansbury.

Meantime, "Mame" is being developed for ABC by the Disney corporation, with Cher in mind for the lead, though even the famously upbeat Herman mutters something about Disney's "reputation preceding them . . . they don't want to produce the product they optioned; they want to rewrite everything, so we're having our problems."

"Dolly!" may land at NBC, and Herman (among others) would love to see Bette Midler in it. "She's the right persona, the right everything," he says.

Herman considers "Mack and Mabel," his bittersweet treatment of silent movie mogul Mack Sennett and star Mabel Normand, his finest achievement. The show's indifferent reception has nagged at him for decades. Various revisions, featuring various tweaked librettos, have nudged it closer to its potential. The latest version opens later this year in Houston.

Later this month, a chamber-size edition of "Dear World," based on the French comedy "The Madwoman of Chaillot," debuts at the Sundance theater laboratory in Park City, Utah.

"It's wonderful, really," he says, brightly. "You don't often get a second pass in this business.

"Reprise," he says. "It's my favorite word in the theater."

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"Hello, Jerry!" a benefit revue for the Chicago Humanities Festival and the ASCAP Foundation, features Jerry Herman, Jason Graae, Karen Morrow, Paige O'Hara and musical director Don Pippin. The performance is at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the DePaul Merle Reskin Theatre, 60 E. Balbo Dr. Tickets are $60-$150 at 312-661-1028, ext. 32.

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Michael Phillips, Tribune theater critic

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Looking on the bright side with Broadway icon Jerry Herman

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In 1984, Broadway songwriter Jerry Herman learned he was HIV-positive. The news, he says, had the ashen taste of "a death sentence." His seven-year companion Marty Finkelstein was already dead, an AIDS casualty. "I was prepared," he says now, by phone from his Beverly Hills home, "to say goodbye to everybody."

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Why Fiddler on the Roof is the Opposite of a Jewish Musical

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Why Fiddler on the Roof is the Opposite of a Jewish Musical

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This is a very interesting perspective on this musical. I never would have thought that Jewish people would avoid this musical, but it makes sense because they are likely expected to know it and it is probably thrown around constantly as something non-Jewish people can relate to. Because of this, I can see the pushback. I think every kind of culture has hallmark pieces of content that other people who do not belong to that culture use to try to relate (for me, being queer, people talk to me about Blue Is The Warmest Color all the time and it really gets on my nerves).

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In "Changing Places," a terrific academic novel by David Lodge, a professor and his colleagues play a literary parlor game called "Humiliation." In the game, the players attempt to one-up each other in admissions of ignorance by confessing the most inexcusable examples of books they haven't read. When Professor Howard Ringbaum admits he never read "Hamlet," he wins "Humiliation" and promptly gets himself fired.

Therefore, it's with a bit of trepidation that I confess that until the other night, I had never seen "Fiddler on the Roof." Not on Broadway, not in a touring production, not in the version that was performed in college my senior year. I never even saw the movie. So, if it turns out that I'm never allowed to write for this publication again, you'll know why.

One of the reasons I skipped "Fiddler" is because, when I was a kid, my parents seemed uninterested. My maternal grandmother had grown up in a town much like Anatevka, in the same general region where Sholem Aleichem was born, about a half-day's drive away, in fact, from the town of Pereyaslav. Why would I want to see a musical about the place I came to America to escape, seemed to be her general attitude.

Besides, in the words of my mother, it was "not a happy story."

The other reason is that, even without having seen it, I sensed that I already knew it by heart anyway. It was a staple of every other Bar Mitzvah and wedding I attended. I still remember cringing one time in Chicago's near north suburbs when a Bar Mitzvah boy was called upon to serenade his guests with a song sung to the tune of "If I Were a Rich Man" - "This is my Bar Mitzvah/Die-dee-Die-dee-die-dee-duh-huh-die-dee-die-dee-die-dee-dum/I hope you like the bagels and the lox/We got 'em fresh, they don't come from a box/Deedle-deedle-deedle-dee."

The musical seemed as if it would be "too nudge-y," in the words of my mother.

Or, as Jackie Mason once said on a different topic, "too Jewish."

The other night, though, I decided that I finally had to see the show for myself - after all, I'm a father, and taking a kid to "Fiddler" seemed like an easier introduction to Jewish education than Hebrew school. As it turns out, the new Broadway production directed by Bartlett Sher and starring Danny Burstein in the role of Tevye the Dairyman is totally delightful. But what struck me most about it is that, in some ways, it's almost exactly the opposite of a Jewish musical.

Like so many classic Broadway shows, "Fiddler" makes a strong argument for the inevitability of assimilation and conversion, not to Christianity per se, but into the mainstream. Like Fraulein Maria leaving the nunnery for familial bliss in "A Sound of Music," Maria and Tony abandoning their Sharks vs. Jets upbringing for love in "West Side Story" or isolated Japan ultimately embracing American imperialism in "Pacific Overtures," one by one, Tevye's daughters leave behind their Jewish shtetl existence in search of a more contemporary and western ideal.

A couple of lines from the 1957 musical "Candide" come to mind: "These days you have to be in the majority... I am so easily assimilated."

In 1964, when "Fiddler" premiered on Broadway, the show may have conjured up painful memories for people of my grandparents' generation, but at the same time, the message of inevitability was probably reassuring for those who had left the old world behind and were experiencing some sort of survivors' guilt. In the beginning of the musical, abandoning the old ways is a matter of choice; by the end, in the face of an impending pogrom, it has become necessary for survival. As Chava tells her father Tevye, "the world is changing, Papa."

More than fifty years later, the world that Anatevka represented is no longer changing; it has changed irrevocably. As the musical predicted, the old traditions - at least for the audience at the Broadway Theatre - are gone. In fact, if there is a new tradition, it is "Fiddler on the Roof" itself, which seemed so familiar to the audience that it had the aspect of scripture. A man in front of us in the rear mezzanine claimed to have seen the show eighteen times; the woman seated next to us mouthed all the words of Yenta the Matchmaker, a role she will be playing in an upcoming community theater production.

Issues that may have seemed unsettled when "Fiddler" premiered seem to have been more or less decided by now. When Tevye sings, "If I Were a Rich Man," the song may be aspirational for him, but for the audience it serves as confirmation and approval - after all, there aren't a lot of cheap seats in the house where we've purchased our tickets. In comparison to Tevye, we are all rich men and women now.

The result may give the audience the sensation of having traveled in a time machine; we are, in essence, the sequel to "Fiddler on the Roof"; we are what Tevye and Anatevka have become. While we watch him, he is imagining us. We have created our own world with its own traditions - a blend of the old world and new, and, if we wonder about whether the road our ancestors took was the right one, the musical absolves us by telling us that there was no other choice. We can confess and "Fiddler on the Roof" will forgive us.

I attended the show with my ten-year-old daughter who had never seen the show before either. She loved the music and the performances, loved seeing the world that her great-grandparents came from. The following morning, she blasted the soundtrack on Spotify until we told her to turn it down.

And then, in the early afternoon, we went out to buy a tree.
Adam Langer is the Forward's culture editor.

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Why Fiddler on the Roof Is the Opposite of a Jewish Musical

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In "Changing Places," a terrific academic novel by David Lodge, a professor and his colleagues play a literary parlor game called "Humiliation." In the game, the players attempt to one-up each other in admissions of ignorance by confessing the most inexcusable examples of books they haven't read.