To Broadway, To Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick

by Lambert, Philip

• ISBN13: 9780195390070
• ISBN10: 0195390075
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-12-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In fourteen years of collaboration, composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick wrote seven of Broadway's most beloved and memorable musicals together, most famously Fiddler on the Roof (1964), but also the enduring audience favorite She Loves Me (1963), and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Fiorello! (1959). With their charm, humor, and boundless musical invention, their musicals have won eighteen Tony Awards and continue to capture the imaginations of millions around the world. To Broadway, To Life!: The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick is the first complete book about these creative figures, one of Broadway's most important songwriting teams. Drawing from extensive archival sources, and from personal interviews and communications with Bock and Harnick themselves and their most important collaborators, author Philip Lambert explores the essence of a Bock-Harnick show-how it is put together, and what makes it work. The book includes discussion of songs such as "Sunrise, Sunset" and "If I Were a Rich Man" that have long been favorites in the public consciousness, and it also explores a vast catalogue of lesser-known songs from their many other shows and works, including a musical puppet show on Broadway, music for the 1964 World's Fair, and a made-for-television musical. Here too is the first look at the little-known youthful professional beginnings of Bock and Harnick in revues and television shows and summer retreats in the 1950s, and the careers they have forged for themselves with new collaborators in the decades since their partnership dissolved in 1970. The musicals of Bock and Harnick came at a transitional time in Broadway history, when the traditions of Rodgers and Hammerstein were starting to give way to the concept musical, the rock musical, and eventually the mega-musical. To Broadway, To Life! combines exhaustive research, close musical investigation, and interpretive critical analysis to place Bock and Harnick in the context of these times, and helps establish their place in the history of the American musical theater.

Author Biography

Philip Lambert has published widely on twentieth-century music of diverse styles and traditions. His previous books are The Music of Charles Ives (1997), Ives Studies (1997), and Inside the Music of Brian Wilson (2007). He is Professor of Music at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Series Editor	p. vii
Preface, with a Note on Sources and Acknowledgments	p. xi
Suave Young Men: Creative Stirrings from Childhood through College	p. 1
Wonders of Manhattan: Professional Beginnings in New York in the 1950s	p. 16
Politics and Poker: The Body Beautiful and Fiorello! and the Late 1950s	p. 49
Little Old New York: Tenderloin and the Early 1960s	p. 87
To Broadway with Love: She Loves Me and the 1964 World's Fair	p. 108
Tradition: Fiddler on the Roof	p. 138
Here in Eden: The Mid-1960s and The Apple Tree	p. 182
Have You Ever Seen a Prettier Little Congress?: The Late 1960s and The Rothschilds	p. 213
Topsy-Turvy: Separate Paths Since the Early 1970s	p. 239
Chronology of Bock and Harnick on Broadway	p. 271
Selected Media Resources	p. 277
Notes	p. 289
Selected Bibliography	p. 323
Index	p. 339
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