A breathless delight!
Soup to nuts, the folks over at PBS pulled it off. They've condensed the history of the American Broadway musical into six hours, and it feels about right.
Yes yes yes, there will be hordes of folks who quibble that their "all-time most important" musical didn't make it, but that's missing the point.
You will feel as if you have a serious grasp of the development of the American musical after seeing this film. Period. Mission accomplished.
The first segments of the documentary, hosted by the ageless Julie Andrews, begin with Flo Ziegfeld, and the "Follies". One thing that hasn't been mentioned (yet) is the nice concomitant history lesson you get regarding New York, Times Square and American popular culture while absorbing this mini-series. The influence of opera (or more properly, operetta), vaudeville and minstrel shows are made abundantly clear, and are fascinating to someone like me who really had no exposure to this sort of material.
As...
For the Broadway lover
One year for my birthday I received a trio of products based on Michael Kantor's documentary "Broadway: the American Musical." I received the book, the 5 CD set, and the DVD set as well.
I absolutely love them.
I've been doing theatre for over twenty years and I have both Bachelors and Masters degrees in theatre. I have a special love for the musical. This film goes into detail from the earliest days of Broadway, hitting the highlights from Ziegfeld and Cohen to Wicked. The story moves chronologically, but also finds themes: the commercialization of Broadway, the difficulty of mounting new productions, and the evolution of the artistic form.
Hosted by Julie Andrews, it shows a lot of archival footage, especially in the later chapters, juxtaposed with recent interviews. It's wonderful to see Jerry Orbach in the original Chicago and then hear his memories of the play in an interview taped before his death. There are very few films from those old days,...
Fantastic! The definitive lullaby of Broadway.
I saw a press copy of the series and was absolutely awestruck. It covers the history of the Broadway musical from its origins to present day, and manages to tell both the big stories and the little-known gems of performers, composers etc whose names have since faded from popular memory. It's very PBS-like to use something so inherently American (the Broadway musical) to tell the story of our cultural history, as they did with the Baseball series, the Jazz series etc. But it works beautifully, and the series is much more than just a collection of performance clips (if that's all you want, there are plenty of greatest-hits packages on the market). The PBS series is the real deal.
One thing that really impressed me is the amount of film footage the filmmakers managed to find of original shows (some of the old stuff in color - amazing!). Many thanks to whoever had the foresight to film this stuff and save it for posterity, and congrats to the filmmakers for hunting it down...
Click to Editorial Reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment