Results by title

3 books match the query 'Bernstein, Leonard'

cover of A Place for Us: “West Side Story” and New York

A Place for Us

“West Side Story” and New York

Julia L. Foulkes

University of Chicago Press, 2016

From its Broadway debut to the Oscar-winning film to countless amateur productions, West Side Story is nothing less than an American touchstone—an updating of Shakespeare vividly realized in a rapidly changing postwar New York.

That vision of postwar New York is at the heart of Julia L. Foulkes’s A Place for Us. A lifelong fan of the show, Foulkes became interested in its history when she made an unexpected discovery: scenes for the iconic film version were shot on the demolition site destined to become part of the Lincoln Center redevelopment area—a crowning jewel of postwar urban renewal. Foulkes interweaves the story of the creation of the musical and film with the remaking of the Upper West Side and the larger tale of New York’s postwar aspirations. Making unprecedented use of director and choreographer Jerome Robbins’s revelatory papers, she shows the crucial role played by the political commitments of Robbins and his fellow gay, Jewish collaborators, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents. Their determination to evoke life in New York as it was actually lived helped give West Side Story its unshakable sense of place even as it put forward a vision of a new, vigorous, determinedly multicultural American city.

Beautifully written and full of surprises for even the most dedicated West Side Story fan, A Place for Us is a revelatory new exploration of an American classic.
 
[more]
cover of Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets, and a Classic American Musical

Deaf Side Story

Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets, and a Classic American Musical

Mark Rigney

Gallaudet University Press, 2003

The 1957 classic American musical West Side Story has been staged by countless community and school theater groups, but none more ambitious than the 2000 production by MacMurray College, a small school in Jacksonville, Illinois. Diane Brewer, the new drama head at the college, determined to add an extra element to the usual demands of putting on a show by having deaf students perform half of the parts. Deaf Side Story presents a fascinating narrative of Brewer and the cast’s efforts to mount this challenging play.

       Brewer turned to the Illinois School for the Deaf (ISD) to cast the Sharks, the Puerto Rican gang at odds with the Anglo Jets in this musical version of Romeo and Juliet set in the slums of New York. Hearing performers auditioned to be the Jets, and once Brewer had cast her hearing Tony and deaf Maria, then came the challenge of teaching them all to sing/sign and dance the riveting show numbers for which the musical is renowned. She also had to manage a series of sensitive issues, from ensuring the seamless incorporation of American Sign Language into the play to reassuring ISD administrators and students that the production would not be symbolic of any conflict between Deaf and hearing people.

       Author Mark Rigney portrays superbly the progress of the production, including the frustrations and triumphs of the leads, the labyrinthine campus and community politics, and the inevitable clashes between the deaf high school cast members and their hearing college counterparts. His representations of the many individuals involved are real and distinguished. The ultimate success of the MacMurray production reverberates in Deaf Side Story as a keen depiction of how several distinct individuals from as many cultures could cooperate to perform a classic American art form brilliantly together.

[more]
cover of Leonard Bernstein and the Language of Jazz

Leonard Bernstein and the Language of Jazz

Katherine Baber

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Leonard Bernstein's gifts for drama and connecting with popular audiences made him a central figure in twentieth century American music. Though a Bernstein work might reference anything from modernism to cartoon ditties, jazz permeated every part of his musical identity as a performer, educator, and intellectual. Katherine Baber investigates how jazz in its many styles served Bernstein as a flexible, indeed protean, musical idea. As she shows, Bernstein used jazz to signify American identity with all its tensions and contradictions and to articulate community and conflict, irony and parody, and timely issues of race and gender. Baber provides a thoughtful look at how Bernstein's use of jazz grew out of his belief in the primacy of tonality, music's value as a unique form of human communication, and the formation of national identity in music. She also offers in-depth analyses of On the Town, West Side Story, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and other works to explore fascinating links between Bernstein's art and issues like eclecticism, music's relationship to social engagement, black-Jewish relations, and his own musical identity.
[more]