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Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War

Online ISBN:
9780199379989
Print ISBN:
9780199862092
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War

Carol Oja
Carol Oja

William Powell Mason Professor of Music

Harvard University
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Published online:
20 November 2014
Published in print:
22 August 2014
Online ISBN:
9780199379989
Print ISBN:
9780199862092
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book constructs a wide-ranging cultural history to explore the earliest stage works of Leonard Bernstein, written during World War II: the Broadway musical On the Town, the ballet Fancy Free, and a nightclub comedy act called The Revuers. Bernstein and his collaborators—including the choreographer Jerome Robbins and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green—crossed artistic, political, ethnic, and racial boundaries with abandon. With the zeal of youth, these emerging artists infused their work with progressive political ideals. On the Town focused on sailors enjoying a day of shore leave, and its first production featured a mixed-race cast, contributing an important chapter to the racial desegregation of American performance. It projected an equitable inter-racial urban vision in an era when racial segregation was being enforced contentiously in the U.S. military. The show starred the dancer Sono Osato, even as her father was interned together with so many Japanese Americans. Fancy Free amiably encoded its own dissenting narratives. Based on a controversial painting by Paul Cadmus, it grew out of a complex web of gay relationships. The book explores cross fertilizations across art forms and high-low divides, drawing on intensive archival research, FBI files, interviews with surviving cast members, and previously untapped criticism in African American newspapers.

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