1.
Irving Berlin
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Irving Berlin was an American composer and lyricist, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history. His music forms a part of the Great American Songbook. Born in Imperial Russia, Berlin arrived in the United States at the age of five. He published his first song, Marie from Sunny Italy, in 1907, receiving 33 cents for the publishing rights and he also was an owner of the Music Box Theatre on Broadway. Alexanders Ragtime Band sparked a dance craze in places as far away as Berlins native Russia. In doing so, said Walter Cronkite, at Berlins 100th birthday tribute, he helped write the story of country, capturing the best of who we are. He wrote hundreds of songs, many becoming major hits, which him a legend before he turned thirty. During his 60-year career he wrote an estimated 1,500 songs, including the scores for 19 Broadway shows and 18 Hollywood films, with his songs nominated eight times for Academy Awards. Many songs became popular themes and anthems, including Easter Parade, White Christmas, Happy Holiday, This Is the Army, Mr. Jones, and Theres No Business Like Show Business. His Broadway musical and 1942 film, This is the Army, Celine Dion recorded it as a tribute, making it no.1 on the charts after the September 11 attacks in 2001. In 2015, pianist and composer Hershey Felder began touring nationwide as a show, portraying Berlin. Composer George Gershwin called him the greatest songwriter that has ever lived, Berlin was born on May 11,1888, in Tolochin, Russian Empire. He was one of eight children of Moses and Lena Lipkin Beilin and his father, a cantor in a synagogue, uprooted the family to America, as did many other Jewish families in the late 19th century. In 1893 they settled in New York City, as of the 1900 census, the name Beilin had changed to Baline. By daylight the house was in ashes, as an adult, Berlin said he was unaware of being raised in abject poverty since he knew no other life. Tsar Alexander III of Russia and then Tsar Nicholas II, his son, had revived with utmost brutality the anti-Jewish pogroms, which created the spontaneous mass exodus to America. When they reached Ellis Island, Israel was put in a pen with his brother and his Yiddish-speaking family eventually settled on Cherry Street, a windowless cold-water basement flat in the Theater District of the Lower East Side. His father, unable to find work as a cantor in New York, took a job at a kosher meat market and gave Hebrew lessons on the side
2.
Moss Hart
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Moss Hart was an American playwright and theatre director. Hart was born in New York City and grew up in poverty with his English-born Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx and in Sea Gate. Early on he had a relationship with his Aunt Kate. She piqued his interest in the theater and took him to see performances often, Hart even went so far as to create an alternate ending to her life in his book Act One. He writes that she died while he was working on out-of-town tryouts for The Beloved Bandit, later, Kate became eccentric and then disturbed, vandalizing Harts home, writing threatening letters and setting fires backstage during rehearsals for Jubilee. But his relationship with her was formative and he learned that the theater made possible the art of being somebody else… not a scrawny boy with bad teeth, a funny name… and a mother who was a distant drudge. The play was written in collaboration with Broadway veteran George S. Kaufman, during the next decade, Kaufman and Hart teamed on a string of successes, including You Cant Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Though Kaufman had hits with others, Hart is generally conceded to be his most important collaborator and you Cant Take It With You, the story of an eccentric family and how they live during the Depression, won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for drama. When director Frank Capra and writer Robert Riskin adapted it for the screen in 1938, the Man Who Came To Dinner is about the caustic Sheridan Whiteside who, after injuring himself slipping on ice, must stay in a Midwestern familys house. The character was based on Kaufman and Harts friend, critic Alexander Woollcott, other characters in the play are based on Noël Coward, Harpo Marx and Gertrude Lawrence. However, he became best known during this period as a director, among the Broadway hits he staged were Junior Miss, Dear Ruth and Anniversary Waltz. By far his biggest hit was the musical My Fair Lady, adapted from George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, the show ran over seven years and won a Tony Award for Best Musical. Hart picked up the Tony for Best Director, Hart also wrote some screenplays, including Gentlemans Agreement – for which he received an Oscar nomination – Hans Christian Andersen and A Star Is Born. He wrote a memoir, Act One, An Autobiography by Moss Hart and it was adapted to film in 1963, with George Hamilton portraying Hart. The last show Hart directed was the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot, during a troubled out-of-town tryout, Hart had a heart attack. The show opened before he recovered, but he and Lerner reworked it after the opening. That, along with huge pre-sales and a cast performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in 1972,11 years after his death, Moss Hart was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. He was one of 23 people to be selected into the Hall of Fames first ever induction class that year, Hart married Kitty Carlisle on August 10,1946, they had two children
3.
Broadway theatre
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Along with Londons West End theatres, Broadway theatres are widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. The Theater District is a popular tourist attraction in New York City, the great majority of Broadway shows are musicals. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggars Opera, in 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice, the company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, by the 1840s, P. T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in lower Manhattan. In 1829, at Broadway and Prince Street, Niblos Garden opened, the 3, 000-seat theatre presented all sorts of musical and non-musical entertainments. In 1844, Palmos Opera House opened and presented opera for four seasons before bankruptcy led to its rebranding as a venue for plays under the name Burtons Theatre. The Astor Opera House opened in 1847, booth played the role for a famous 100 consecutive performances at the Winter Garden Theatre in 1865, and would later revive the role at his own Booths Theatre. Other renowned Shakespeareans who appeared in New York in this era were Henry Irving, Tommaso Salvini, Fanny Davenport, lydia Thompson came to America in 1868 heading a small theatrical troupe, adapting popular English burlesques for middle-class New York audiences. Thompsons troupe called the British Blondes, was the most popular entertainment in New York during the 1868–1869 theatrical season, the six-month tour ran for almost six extremely profitable years. Theatre in New York moved from downtown gradually to midtown beginning around 1850, in 1870, the heart of Broadway was in Union Square, and by the end of the century, many theatres were near Madison Square. Broadways first long-run musical was a 50-performance hit called The Elves in 1857, New York runs continued to lag far behind those in London, but Laura Keenes musical burletta The Seven Sisters shattered previous New York records with a run of 253 performances. It was at a performance by Keenes troupe of Our American Cousin in Washington, the production was a staggering five-and-a-half hours long, but despite its length, it ran for a record-breaking 474 performances. The same year, The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post was the first show to call itself a musical comedy, Tony Pastor opened the first vaudeville theatre one block east of Union Square in 1881, where Lillian Russell performed. Comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart produced and starred in musicals on Broadway between 1878 and 1890, with book and lyrics by Harrigan and music by his father-in-law David Braham. They starred high quality singers, instead of the women of repute who had starred in earlier musical forms. Plays could run longer and still draw in the audiences, leading to better profits, as in England, during the latter half of the century, the theatre began to be cleaned up, with less prostitution hindering the attendance of the theatre by women
4.
Musical theatre
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Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through the words, music, movement, since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals. These were followed by the numerous Edwardian musical comedies and the theatre works of American creators like George M. Cohan. Musicals are performed around the world and they may be presented in large venues, such as big-budget Broadway or West End productions in New York City or London. Alternatively, musicals may be staged in smaller fringe theatre, Off-Broadway or regional theatre productions, musicals are often presented by amateur and school groups in churches, schools and other performance spaces. In addition to the United States and Britain, there are vibrant musical theatre scenes in continental Europe, Asia, Australasia, Canada, the three main components of a book musical are its music, lyrics and book. The interpretation of a musical is the responsibility of its team, which includes a director. A musicals production is also characterized by technical aspects, such as set design, costumes, stage properties, lighting. The creative team, designs and interpretations generally change from the production to succeeding productions. Some production elements, however, may be retained from the production, for example. There is no fixed length for a musical, while it can range from a short one-act entertainment to several acts and several hours in length, most musicals range from one and a half to three hours. Musicals are usually presented in two acts, with one intermission, and the first act is frequently longer than the second. A book musical is usually built four to six main theme tunes that are reprised later in the show. Several shorter musicals on Broadway and in the West End have been presented in one act in recent decades, moments of greatest dramatic intensity in a book musical are often performed in song. Proverbially, when the emotion becomes too strong for speech, you sing, typically, many fewer words are sung in a five-minute song than are spoken in a five-minute block of dialogue. Therefore, there is time to develop drama in a musical than in a straight play of equivalent length. Within the compressed nature of a musical, the writers must develop the characters, the material presented in a musical may be original, or it may be adapted from novels, plays, classic legends, historical events or films. On the other hand, many musical theatre works have been adapted for musical films, such as West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Oliver
5.
Great Depression
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The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place during the 1930s. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, in most countries it started in 1929 and it was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how far the economy can decline. The depression originated in the United States, after a fall in stock prices that began around September 4,1929. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide GDP fell by an estimated 15%, by comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s, however, in many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II. The Great Depression had devastating effects in both rich and poor. Personal income, tax revenue, profits and prices dropped, while international trade plunged by more than 50%, unemployment in the U. S. rose to 25% and in some countries rose as high as 33%. Cities all around the world were hit hard, especially dependent on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted in many countries, farming communities and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by about 60%. Facing plummeting demand with few sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as mining and logging suffered the most. Even after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 optimism persisted for some time, john D. Rockefeller said These are days when many are discouraged. In the 93 years of my life, depressions have come, prosperity has always returned and will again. The stock market turned upward in early 1930, returning to early 1929 levels by April and this was still almost 30% below the peak of September 1929. Together, government and business spent more in the first half of 1930 than in the period of the previous year. On the other hand, consumers, many of whom had suffered losses in the stock market the previous year. In addition, beginning in the mid-1930s, a severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland of the U. S, by mid-1930, interest rates had dropped to low levels, but expected deflation and the continuing reluctance of people to borrow meant that consumer spending and investment were depressed. By May 1930, automobile sales had declined to below the levels of 1928, prices in general began to decline, although wages held steady in 1930
6.
New Amsterdam Theatre
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The New Amsterdam Theatre is a Broadway theatre located at 214 West 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in the Theater District of Manhattan, New York City, off of Times Square. The remainder of the building was utilized for offices, from 1913 to 1927, the theatre was the home of the Ziegfeld Follies, whose producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. maintained an office in the building, and operated a nightclub on the roof. George Whites Scandals and Eva LeGalliennes Civic Repertory Theatre were subsequent tenants, both the Beaux-Arts exterior and the Art Nouveau interior of the building are New York City landmarks, having been designated in 1979. In addition, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, along with the Hudson and Lyceum Theatres, also built in 1903, the New Amsterdam is one of the oldest surviving Broadway venues. L. Erlanger and Marcus Klaw, and was designed by architects Herts & Tallant, at the time of construction, it was the largest theatre in New York, with a seating capacity of 1,702. The theatre opened October 23,1903 with a production of Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream, for many years, it hosted the Ziegfeld Follies, showcasing such talents as Fanny Brice, Eaton siblings and silent film star Olive Thomas whose ghost supposedly haunts the theatre. A racier sister show of the Follies, the Midnight Frolics, but the theatre also hosted serious productions, and in June 1927 Basil Rathbone appeared there as Cassius in Julius Caesar. The premiere of Jerome Kerns Roberta with Bob Hope opened at the New Amsterdam in November 1933, the Great Depression did great damage to the live theatre business, and in 1936 the New Amsterdam closed. It reopened on a basis in 1937 but was soon converted to a movie theatre. The Nederlander Organization purchased the property in 1982, but it would not begin rehabilitation for another eight years. In 1990, after a battle, the State and City of New York assumed ownership of the New Amsterdam. Disney Theatrical Productions signed a 49-year revenue based lease for the property in May 1995, the roof garden remained closed when it was discovered that it could not meet modern building codes. The New Amsterdam was officially reopened on April 2,1997, in November 1997, after the premiere of the film Hercules and a limited engagement of a concert version of King David, Disneys stage version of The Lion King opened. On June 4,2006, The Lion King closed in The New Amsterdam Theatre, Mary Poppins began previews at the New Amsterdam Theatre on October 16,2006 and opened on November 16,2006, where it continued to run until March 3,2013. The theatre was renovated to accommodate Disneys Aladdin, which was mounted in the theatre in 2014, Aladdin broke the house record at the New Amsterdam Theatre for the week ending August 10,2014, with a gross of $1,602,785.00. The previous record of $1,587,992.50 was set by Mary Poppins for the week ending December 30,2007. The New Amsterdam has also hosted events benefitting Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, including the annual Easter Bonnet Competition, the New Amsterdam is now home to BC/EFAs annual Gypsy of the Year Competition, the fall/winter sister event to the Easter Bonnet. In recent years, the honored guest has been centenarian Doris Eaton Travis
