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Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War
Carol J. Oja
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Description for Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War
Paperback. With an innovative historical framework, Carol J. Oja explores the emergence during World War II of Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. Series: Broadway Legacies. Num Pages: 416 pages, 50 photographs. BIC Classification: 1KBB; 3JJH; 3JJPG; ASDL; AVGM; AVH; JFC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 236 x 157 x 22. Weight in Grams: 580.
When Leonard Bernstein first arrived in New York City, he was an unknown artist working with other brilliant twentysomethings, notably Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. By the end of the 1940s, these artists were world famous. Their collaborations defied artistic boundaries and subtly pushed a progressive political agenda, altering the landscape of musical theater, ballet, and nightclub comedy. In Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, award-winning author and scholar Carol J. Oja examines the early days of Bernstein's career during World War II, centering around the debut in 1944 of the Broadway musical On the Town and the ballet Fancy Free. As a composer and conductor, Bernstein experienced a meteoric rise to fame, thanks in no small part to his visionary colleagues. Together, they focused on urban contemporary life and popular culture, featuring as heroes the itinerant sailors who bore the brunt of military service. They were provocative both artistically and politically. In a time of race riots and Japanese internment camps, Bernstein and his collaborators featured African American performers and a Japanese American ballerina, staging a model of racial integration. Rather than accepting traditional distinctions between high and low art, Bernstein's music was wide-open, inspired by everything from opera and jazz to cartoons. Oja shapes a wide-ranging cultural history that captures a tumultuous moment in time. Bernstein Meets Broadway is an indispensable work for fans of Broadway musicals, dance, and American performance history.
Product Details
Publisher
Oxford University Press Inc
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2016
Series
Broadway Legacies
Condition
New
Weight
580g
Number of Pages
416
Place of Publication
New York, United States
ISBN
9780190467586
SKU
V9780190467586
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-24
About Carol J. Oja
Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music and American Studies at Harvard University. She is author of Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (2000), winner of the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music.
Reviews for Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War
This is a book full of the rare joy of artistic creation and collaboration. In recounting the making of On the Town Carol Oja weaves wartime history, social mores, gender, racial politics, dance, comedy and music into a fascinating and immensely entertaining narrative that percolates with the brashness and brilliance of the show's creators, Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden and Adoph Green. 'We were all 25 years old,' Bernstein later said about it, 'we were nothing but energy then.'
John Adams, composer
Bernstein Meets Broadway is an outstanding exemplar of integrated humanistic arts scholarship. Grounded in exhaustive archival research, it offers bracing new insights on an important stage work and its creators. It's also liberal in the best traditional sense of the term: tolerant and generous and questioning, skeptical of conventional wisdom and ideological platitudes.
Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin's Musical Theater
Carol J. Oja is an established and important scholar, and Bernstein Meets Broadway reflects her characteristic thoroughness, insight, and clear writing. On the Town is a groundbreaking show obviously worthy of this excellent book-length study.
Larry Starr, Ruth Sutton Waters Endowed Professor, University of Washington
This adventurously conceived, meticulously researched, elegantly argued book offers a completely new perspective on Bernstein's remarkable artistic partnerships as meetings of extraordinary creativity, progressive politics, and spirited determination. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, this is American musical theatre history at its very best.
Stacy Wolf, Professor of Theater, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University and author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011)
Carol Oja has given us a vivid portrait of four superbly talented young artists trying not only to create an exciting work for the musical theater but, while they were at it, using their art to 'help make a better world'. A valuable and illuminating book.
Sheldon Harnick
John Adams, composer
Bernstein Meets Broadway is an outstanding exemplar of integrated humanistic arts scholarship. Grounded in exhaustive archival research, it offers bracing new insights on an important stage work and its creators. It's also liberal in the best traditional sense of the term: tolerant and generous and questioning, skeptical of conventional wisdom and ideological platitudes.
Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin's Musical Theater
Carol J. Oja is an established and important scholar, and Bernstein Meets Broadway reflects her characteristic thoroughness, insight, and clear writing. On the Town is a groundbreaking show obviously worthy of this excellent book-length study.
Larry Starr, Ruth Sutton Waters Endowed Professor, University of Washington
This adventurously conceived, meticulously researched, elegantly argued book offers a completely new perspective on Bernstein's remarkable artistic partnerships as meetings of extraordinary creativity, progressive politics, and spirited determination. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, this is American musical theatre history at its very best.
Stacy Wolf, Professor of Theater, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University and author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011)
Carol Oja has given us a vivid portrait of four superbly talented young artists trying not only to create an exciting work for the musical theater but, while they were at it, using their art to 'help make a better world'. A valuable and illuminating book.
Sheldon Harnick