Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Read Online Free PDF Page A

Beast
(5),
Rent
(6),
Hairspray
(16),
The Producers
(17),
Cabaret
(Revival) (18),
Smokey Joe’s Café
(24),
Aida
(28),
Monty Python’s Spamalot
(35),
Jekyll & Hyde
(37), and
42nd Street
(Revival) (38). Another trio of megahit shows that opened after
Enchanted Evenings
are still running, one or more of which may reach the Top Broadway 10 by the time they eventually close their curtains:
Mamma Mia!
(13),
Avenue Q
(22), and
Wicked
(23).
    While these shows have attracted large audiences, Sondheim’s shows continued to enjoy greater critical prestige. In 1993, Sondheim became the subject of the first major musicological study of a Broadway composer, Stephen Banfield’s
Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals
. Five years later the American Musicological Society national meeting in Boston devoted a special evening session to Sondheim. Lloyd Webber’s musicals have gradually attracted theater scholars and musicologists as well, albeit far fewer than the legions of literary and dramatic critics, cultural historians, and sociologists in addition to the many musicologists attracted to the work of Sondheim. The chapters on Sondheim and Lloyd Webber will try to shed light on why there exists such a deep chasm between the ways audiences, critics, and theater historians have assessed these two major contributors to the American musical.
    Audiences did not know it at the time but by 1997 both Sondheim and Lloyd Webber had completed most of their Broadway work. 22 Their most recent New York successes, Sondheim and Lapine’s
Passion
and Lloyd Webber’s
Sunset Boulevard
, both arriving in 1994, had also recently closed. It turns out that the years since the first edition of
Enchanted Evenings
marked the beginning of the Post-Sondheim and Post–Lloyd Webber Era, a subject for future books by future authors. Meanwhile, the contrasting achievements and reputations of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber and the issues these important Broadway figures raise (e.g., tradition vs. modernity and popularity vs. critical acclaim) will serve in this second edition of
Enchanted Evenings
as worthy representatives of the Broadway story beyond
West Side Story
.
    To quote Cinderella’s opening and closing lines in
Into the Woods
, “I wish.”
Tacoma, Wash
.
G. B.
January 2009
 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
     
    W ithout more than a little help from parents, family, friends, teachers and professors, colleagues, students, readers and editors, librarians and archivists and the collections they serve, and copyright owners and their assistants and lawyers, this book could not have been written. I am glad for this opportunity to thank some of the institutions and people that contributed to this collaborative process.
    Collections in the New York Public Library (Loesser), Yale University (Porter, Weill), the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Blitzstein, Moss Hart, Sondheim), the Kurt Weill Foundation (Weill), and the Library of Congress (Gershwin, Kern, Loewe, Porter, Rodgers, and Weill) were indispensable in my research. Of the many who facilitated my use of these priceless holdings I would like to thank individually Harold L. Miller of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, David Farneth and Joanna C. Lee of The Kurt Weill Foundation, Victor Cardell and Kendall Crilly of Yale University, and especially Raymond A. White of the Library of Congress, for sharing his time and knowledge so generously.
    For special kindnesses I would like to identify and thank the following: Louis H. Aborn, President, Tams-Witmark; Tom Briggs, Director, The Rodgers and Hammerstein Theatre Library; Tom Creamer, Dramaturg, The Goodman Theater; Marty Jacobs and Marguerite Lavin of the Museum of the City of New York; David Leopold, Al Hirschfeld’s representative at the Margo Feiden Galleries; and Roberta Staats and Robert H. Montgomeryof the Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trusts. A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1990 enabled me to research and draft several chapters,