'Music and girls are the soul of musical comedy,' one critic wrote, early in the 1940s. But this was the age that wanted more than melody and kickline form its musical shows. The form had been ...running on empty for too long, as a formula for the assembly of spare parts-star comics, generic loves songs, rumba dancers, Ethel Merman. If Rodgers and Hammerstein hadn't existed, Broadway would have had to invent them; and Oklahoma! and Carousel came along just in time to
announce the New Formula for Writing Musicals: Don't have a formula.
Instead, start with strong characters and atmosphere: Oklahoma!'s murderous romantic triangle set against a frontier society that has to learn what democracy is in order to deserve it; or Carousel's dysfunctional family seen in the context of class and gender war.
With the vitality and occasionally outrageous humour that Ethan Mordden's readers take for granted, the author ranges through the decade's classics-Pal Joey, Lady in the Dark, On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Finian's Rainbow, Brigadoon, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific. He also covers illuminating trivia-the spy thriller The Lady Comes Across, whose star got so into her role that she suffered paranoid hallucinations and had to be hospitalized; the smutty Follow the
Girls, damned as 'burlesque with a playbill' yet closing as the longest-run musical in Broadway history; Lute Song, in which Mary Martin and Nancy Reagan were Chinese; and the first 'concept' musicals, Allegro and Love Life. Amid the fun, something revolutionary occurs. The 1920s created the musical and the 1930s gave it
politics. In the 1940s, it found its soul.
Money Jungle Chesluk, Benjamin
2007, 20070911, 2007-09-11, 20080101
eBook
Description: For more than a century, Times Square has mesmerized the world with the spectacle of its dazzling supersigns, its theaters, and its often-seedy nightlife. New York City's iconic ...crossroads has drawn crowds of revelers, thrill-seekers, and other urban denizens, not to mention lavish outpourings of advertising and development money.
This book contains a collection of never-before-published lectures touching on the topics of aesthetic education, imagination and transformation, educational renewal and reform, excellence, ...standards, and cultural diversity. The lectures in the book were given over a 25-year period of the educator's/author's self discovery and continuing efforts to move a diversity of teachers to discover new dimensions of themselves. Following "Introduction: Maxine Greene and Lincoln Center Institute: Setting the Context" (Scott Noppe-Brandon; Madeleine F. Holzer), the book is divided into five parts: (1) "Defining Aesthetic Education"; (2) "Imagination and Transformation"; (3) "Excellence, Standards, School Renewal and Reform"; (4) "Cultural Diversity and Community"; and (5) "Spreading the Word." (BT)
The High Line, an innovative promenade created on a disused elevated railway in Manhattan, is one of the world's most iconic new urban landmarks. Since the opening of its first section in 2009, this ...unique greenway has exceeded all expectations in terms of attracting visitors, investment, and property development to Manhattan's West Side. Frequently celebrated as a monument to community-led activism, adaptive re-use of urban infrastructure, and innovative ecological design, the High Line is being used as a model for numerous urban redevelopment plans proliferating worldwide.Deconstructing the High Lineis the first book to analyze the High Line from multiple perspectives, critically assessing its aesthetic, economic, ecological, symbolic, and social impacts. Including several essays by planners and architects directly involved in the High Line's design, this volume also brings together a diverse range of scholars from the fields of urban studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. Together, they offer insights into the project's remarkable success, while also giving serious consideration to the critical charge that the High Line is "Disney World on the Hudson," a project that has merely greened, sanitized, and gentrified an urban neighborhood while displacing longstanding residents and businesses.Deconstructing the High Lineis not just for New Yorkers, but for anyone interested in larger issues of public space, neoliberal redevelopment, creative design practice, and urban renewal.
Masculinity in Contemporary New York Fiction is an interdisciplinary study that presents masculinity as a key thematic concern in contemporary New York fiction. This study argues that New York ...authors do not simply depict masculinity as a social and historical construction but seek to challenge the archetypal ideals of masculinity by writing counter-hegemonic narratives.
Gendering canonical New York writers, namely Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, and Don DeLillo, illustrates how explorations of masculinity are tied into the principal themes that have defined the American novel from its very beginning. The themes that feature in this study include the role of the novel in American society; the individual and (urban) society; the journey from innocence to awareness (of masculinity); the archetypal image of the absent and/or patriarchal father; the impact of homosocial relations on the everyday performance of masculinity; male sexuality; and the male individual and globalization.
What connects these contemporary New York writers is their employment of the one of the great figures in the history of literature: the flâneur. These authors take the flâneur from the shadows of the Manhattan streets and elevate this figure to the role of self-reflexive agent of male subjectivity through which they write counter-hegemonic narratives of masculinity. This book is an essential reference for those with an interest in gender studies and contemporary American fiction.
In this revealing book, Lance Freeman sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: how does gentrification actually affect residents of neighborhoods in transition? To find out, Freeman does what ...no scholar before him has done. He interviews the indigenous residents of two predominantly black neighborhoods that are in the process of gentrification: Harlem and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. By listening closely to what people tell him, he creates a more nuanced picture of the impacts of gentrification on the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of the people who stay in their neighborhoods. Freeman describes the theoretical and planning/policy implications of his findings, both for New York City and for any gentrifying urban area. There Goes the 'Hood provides a more complete, and complicated, understanding of the gentrification process, highlighting the reactions of long-term residents. It suggests new ways of limiting gentrification's negative effects and of creating more positive experiences for newcomers and natives alike.
Coined in 1992 by composer/saxophonist John Zorn, "Radical Jewish Culture," or RJC, became the banner under which many artists in Zorn's circle performed, produced, and circulated their music. New ...York's downtown music scene, part of the once-grungy Lower East Side, has long been the site of cultural innovation. It is within this environment that Zorn and his circle sought to combine, as a form of social and cultural critique, the unconventional, uncategorizable nature of downtown music with sounds that were recognizably Jewish. Out of this movement arose bands, like Hasidic New Wave and Hanukkah Bush, whose eclectic styles encompassed neo-klezmer, hardcore and acid rock, neo-Yiddish cabaret, free verse, free jazz, and electronica. Though relatively fleeting in rock history, the "RJC moment" produced a six-year burst of conversations, writing, and music-including festivals, international concerts, and nearly two hundred new recordings. During a decade of research, Tamar Barzel became a frequent visitor at clubs, post-club hangouts, musicians' dining rooms, coffee shops, and archives. Her book describes the way RJC forged a new vision of Jewish identity in the contemporary world, one that sought to restore the bond between past and present, to interrogate the limits of racial and gender categories, and to display the tensions between secularism and observance, traditional values and contemporary concerns.
The only neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to New York City's largest borough, from the award-winning author of The New York Nobody Knows
Bill Helmreich walked every block of New York City—some ...six-thousand miles—to write the award-winning The New York Nobody Knows . Later, he re-walked most of Queens—1,012 miles in all—to create this one-of-a-kind walking guide to the city's largest borough, from hauntingly beautiful parks to hidden parts of Flushing's Chinese community. Drawing on hundreds of conversations he had with residents during his block-by-block journey through this fascinating, diverse, and underexplored borough, Helmreich highlights hundreds of facts and points of interest that you won't find in any other guide.
In Bellerose, you'll explore a museum filled with soul-searing artwork created by people with mental illness. In Douglaston, you'll gaze up in awe at the city's tallest tree. In Corona, you'll discover the former synagogue where Madonna lived when she first came to New York. In St. Albans, you'll see the former homes of jazz greats, including Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday. In Woodhaven, you'll walk a block where recent immigrants from Mexico, Guyana, and China all proudly fly the American flag. And much, much more.
An unforgettably vivid chronicle of today's Queens, the book can be enjoyed without ever leaving home—but it's almost guaranteed to inspire you to get out and explore this captivating borough.
Covers every one of Queens's neighborhoods, providing a colorful portrait of their most interesting, unusual, and unfamiliar people, places, and things
Each neighborhood section features a brief overview and history; a detailed, user-friendly map keyed to the text; photographs; and a lively guided walking tour
Draws on the author's 1,012-mile walk through every Queens neighborhood
Includes insights from conversations with hundreds of residents
Drawing on a decade of research into the community that proposed the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque," this book refutes the idea that current demands for Muslim moderation have primarily arisen in ...response to the events of 9/11, or to the violence often depicted in the media as unique to Muslims. Instead, it looks at a century of pressures on religious minorities to conform to dominant American frameworks for race, gender, and political economy. These include the encouraging of community groups to provide social services to the dispossessed in compensation for the government's lack of welfare provisions in an aggressively capitalist environment. Calls for Muslim moderation in particular are also colored by racist and orientalist stereotypes about the inherent pacifism of Sufis with respect to other groups. The first investigation of the assumptions behind moderate Islam in our country, Making Moderate Islam is also the first to look closely at the history, lives, and ambitions of the those involved in Manhattan's contested project for an Islamic community center.
The flood hazard in New York City depends on both storm surges and rising sea levels. We combine modeled storm surges with probabilistic sea-level rise projections to assess future coastal inundation ...in New York City from the preindustrial era through 2300 CE. The storm surges are derived from large sets of synthetic tropical cyclones, downscaled from RCP8.5 simulations from three CMIP5 models. The sea-level rise projections account for potential partial collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet in assessing future coastal inundation. CMIP5 models indicate that there will be minimal change in storm-surge heights from 2010 to 2100 or 2300, because the predicted strengthening of the strongest storms will be compensated by storm tracks moving offshore at the latitude of New York City. However, projected sea-level rise causes overall flood heights associated with tropical cyclones in New York City in coming centuries to increase greatly compared with preindustrial or modern flood heights. For the various sea-level rise scenarios we consider, the 1-in-500-y flood event increases from 3.4 m above mean tidal level during 1970–2005 to 4.0–5.1 m above mean tidal level by 2080–2100 and ranges from 5.0–15.4 m above mean tidal level by 2280–2300. Further, we find that the return period of a 2.25-m flood has decreased from ∼500 y before 1800 to ∼25 y during 1970–2005 and further decreases to ∼5 y by 2030–2045 in 95% of our simulations. The 2.25-m flood height is permanently exceeded by 2280–2300 for scenarios that include Antarctica’s potential partial collapse.
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