Entries tagged with “Broadway” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York
Here are three reasons New York history buffs should be rejoicing that Metropolitan Playhouse is reviving Augustin Daly's sensational melodrama Under the Gaslight (1867):
1. It's the play that defined "sensation" for the New York stage. The debut run, at the Worrell Sisters' New York Theatre, Broadway at Waverly Place, saw 47 performances. The signal moment -- the original train-tracks rescue -- originally aimed for extraordinary realism. In "sensation plays" from the Victorian era, audiences hoped to be transfixed by a single, sublime moment on stage: a fire scene, a shipwreck, a volcano erupting. I'm eager to see how this defining element of the genre translates into the Metropolitan's much more intimate space. I doubt we'll see a train rush by; I'm hoping to be caught up in the moment nonetheless.
Plus a train-tracks bonus: in this protoype for the melodramatic rescue scene, it's a worthy, lower-class man tied to the tracks, only to be rescued by our heroine, who appears lower-class but is really of aristocratic blood. And virtuous! (Probably because she thinks she's low-born.)
2. It's a great "City on Stage" play, one I write about in my chapter in our Cambridge Companion (forthcoming next spring, as we've reminded our readers repeatedly). Daly was a major figure in 19c New York theater (and eventually in London) -- both as a playwright and as a manager. Gaslight offers a terrific look at class-issues in the years just following the Civil War. Its settings include Delmonico's and country estates on Long Island, and though it never questions the equation of money and virtue -- the truly virtuous are those most deserving of wealth -- it does seem to target the brutality of the upper classes, suggesting that not everyone born into wealth deserves it. Upper-class society is compared, by one character, to a pack of Siberian wolves. It's kind of Gossip Girl for the nineteenth-century stage; the heroine would be the equivalent of Dan Humphrey in drag. That is, the play both revels in the lavish life of the upper-classes and offers a set of qualified critiques.
3. Fans of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) will remember that the heroine got her start on stage in a community production of this play, out in the mid-western hinterlands of Chicago. The narrator refers to it as "Augustin Daly's famous production, which had worn from a great public success down to an amateur theatrical favourite, with many of the troublesome accessories cut out and the dramatis personae reduced to the smallest possible number." The Metropolitan's version, then, may be more akin to the regional production Carrie starred in than to Daly's original (with all the "accessories"), but I'm confident the crew the Metropolitan has assembled, including Amanda Jones (who sparkled in The Contrast), will outstrip a late-nineteenth-century Chicago Elk's Lodge by miles.
The play is in previews at the Metropolitan through the end of this week; opening night's the 28th. It runs through December 10. Cyrus and I (and our colleague Tom Augst) have tickets for Sunday afternoon, Dec. 6, if you'd like to join us. I'll be sure to report back, though by that point only a few performances will remain.
1. It's the play that defined "sensation" for the New York stage. The debut run, at the Worrell Sisters' New York Theatre, Broadway at Waverly Place, saw 47 performances. The signal moment -- the original train-tracks rescue -- originally aimed for extraordinary realism. In "sensation plays" from the Victorian era, audiences hoped to be transfixed by a single, sublime moment on stage: a fire scene, a shipwreck, a volcano erupting. I'm eager to see how this defining element of the genre translates into the Metropolitan's much more intimate space. I doubt we'll see a train rush by; I'm hoping to be caught up in the moment nonetheless.
Plus a train-tracks bonus: in this protoype for the melodramatic rescue scene, it's a worthy, lower-class man tied to the tracks, only to be rescued by our heroine, who appears lower-class but is really of aristocratic blood. And virtuous! (Probably because she thinks she's low-born.)2. It's a great "City on Stage" play, one I write about in my chapter in our Cambridge Companion (forthcoming next spring, as we've reminded our readers repeatedly). Daly was a major figure in 19c New York theater (and eventually in London) -- both as a playwright and as a manager. Gaslight offers a terrific look at class-issues in the years just following the Civil War. Its settings include Delmonico's and country estates on Long Island, and though it never questions the equation of money and virtue -- the truly virtuous are those most deserving of wealth -- it does seem to target the brutality of the upper classes, suggesting that not everyone born into wealth deserves it. Upper-class society is compared, by one character, to a pack of Siberian wolves. It's kind of Gossip Girl for the nineteenth-century stage; the heroine would be the equivalent of Dan Humphrey in drag. That is, the play both revels in the lavish life of the upper-classes and offers a set of qualified critiques.
3. Fans of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) will remember that the heroine got her start on stage in a community production of this play, out in the mid-western hinterlands of Chicago. The narrator refers to it as "Augustin Daly's famous production, which had worn from a great public success down to an amateur theatrical favourite, with many of the troublesome accessories cut out and the dramatis personae reduced to the smallest possible number." The Metropolitan's version, then, may be more akin to the regional production Carrie starred in than to Daly's original (with all the "accessories"), but I'm confident the crew the Metropolitan has assembled, including Amanda Jones (who sparkled in The Contrast), will outstrip a late-nineteenth-century Chicago Elk's Lodge by miles.
The play is in previews at the Metropolitan through the end of this week; opening night's the 28th. It runs through December 10. Cyrus and I (and our colleague Tom Augst) have tickets for Sunday afternoon, Dec. 6, if you'd like to join us. I'll be sure to report back, though by that point only a few performances will remain.
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It's been a while since I checked in on NY1's "Today in NYC History" feature. Here's what I found today:
For good measure, here's Ray Charles doing "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" in 1982; I have another version on a fantastic CD called Standards that was released sometime in the late 90s, though the track had been recorded, I think, in the 70s. This is the song my mother woke us up with every morning. You'd think that would be grounds to hate it, but I absolutely love this song:
Like Jonathan Schwartz, I think it's fair to say Rodgers tunes probably populate my unconscious more than just about anything else -- even more than the Bizet or Grieg or Prokofiev tunes so omnipresent in Warner Bros. cartoons.
Anyway: Richard Rodgers. So there. Sometimes I wish I knew more about the history of Broadway.
On this date in...1893...President Grover Cleveland secretly undergoes surgery aboard a yacht sailing up the East River. The successful operation removes a cancerous growth from his mouth.
1898...New Yorker Teddy Roosevelt and his "Rough Riders" capture San Juan Hill in Cuba in one of the most important battles of the Spanish-American War.
1946..."Oklahoma" becomes the longest-running Broadway musical of its day, with its 1,105th performance.
1948...Straphangers face the first fare hike, as the subway's original five-cent price is jacked up to 10 cents.
1956...A young Elvis Presley appears on the "Steve Allen Show" at NBC Studios, singing "Hound Dog" to a hound.
1970...The nation's most liberal abortion law goes into effect in New York.
2000...Actor Walter Matthau, a product of the Lower East Side, dies at age 79.
The detail about Oklahoma! reminded me that I'd wanted to write an appreciation for Richard Rodgers sometime this week. Sunday was the anniversary of his birth, in Queens, in 1902. Jonathan Schwartz played a special commemorative set during his Sunday Show on WNYC, during which I learned a couple interesting facts. "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," from Oklahoma! (1943), was the first song Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote together; "Edelweiss," from Sound of Music (1959), was their last. Schwartz also claimed that Rodgers is the most performed composer of all time, beating out Mozart and Beethoven.
Sometime last year, looking for the track "Manhattan" on iTunes or Amazon, I ended up purchasing a hefty anthology of tunes Rodgers wrote with his prior lyricist, Lorenz Hart, which I've thoroughly enjoyed having on my iPod. My current favorite from that compilation -- though everything's great -- is a version of "Where Or When," from Babes In Arms (1951), performed by Lena Horne. It's a little brisker than the version recorded here:
For good measure, here's Ray Charles doing "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" in 1982; I have another version on a fantastic CD called Standards that was released sometime in the late 90s, though the track had been recorded, I think, in the 70s. This is the song my mother woke us up with every morning. You'd think that would be grounds to hate it, but I absolutely love this song:
Like Jonathan Schwartz, I think it's fair to say Rodgers tunes probably populate my unconscious more than just about anything else -- even more than the Bizet or Grieg or Prokofiev tunes so omnipresent in Warner Bros. cartoons.
Anyway: Richard Rodgers. So there. Sometimes I wish I knew more about the history of Broadway.
So I looked back at last year's Angels post, which I linked to earlier today, and noticed the link had been disabled to the Godspell number "Prepare Ye": an earlier Broadway/Hollywood use of Bethesda Fountain.
Here's another link to the same clip:
And, for good measure, because I know you love cities -- especially this one -- and that you also have a hankering for kitschy religious musicals, I give you another terrific number from the same film adaptation:
Here's another link to the same clip:
And, for good measure, because I know you love cities -- especially this one -- and that you also have a hankering for kitschy religious musicals, I give you another terrific number from the same film adaptation:
Earlier this week Mayor Bloomberg announced a major makeover for a good stretch of Broadway (between Herald Square and Columbus Circle), designed to offer more pedestrian space and safer biking. From Transportation Alternatives' StreetBeat:Broadway and the great public squares that it joins will be reclaimed as pedestrian space. What was once the Wickquasgeck Trail will once again become New York City's great walking street. The pilot project will be implemented by the DOT this spring, transforming sections of Broadway in Times Square and Herald Square into pedestrian zones. The stretches of Broadway between Columbus Circle and Times Square, and between Times Square and Herald Square, will be endowed with protected bike lanes, increased pedestrian space, and local traffic-only vehicle access.Will people start strutting in their Sunday best?
Previously on AHNY.
And elsewhere.
Oh, and one more for good measure.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
I'm thinking about emblematic images or moments to use in my account of emergent contemporary New York writing for Bryan's and my forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City.
Here's one from Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights. Asked by the Gothamist last February to describe one experience that struck him as a classic New York moment, Miranda said this:
When I was writing the first draft of In the Heights during my winter break I would go for walks when I got stuck for inspiration I would take a walk around. I think I was on 181st Street walking around. I always tell people Washington Heights is full of music and they sort of think it's just a line I use to plug the show. But I swear to God when I was writing the first draft I was walking around and I saw a Chinese delivery guy riding his bike with a boom box strapped to the front of his bike. It wasn't a little radio; it was a two speaker boom box blasting music. It was like Pimp My Ride but with a two wheeler. I always thought that was a classic New York thing: Of course the Chinese delivery guy has got a subwoofer on his bike!It's an image of the confluence of cultures that's just what I'm trying to portray in my piece for the Companion. You can read the full interview with Miranda here. I'll be posting more suggestive moments in the days to come as a finish up the piece.
The renaming of the Triborough Bridge and a recent outing with a group of students to see the Broadway musical In the Heights got me thinking about the bridge that I saw everyday growing up : the George Washington Bridge. My parents lived near Columbia University on Riverside Drive facing the Hudson River, and you could see the GWB from their window. Even as a child, I knew that there was something unmistakable about that bridge, something distinctive about its look. After college, I worked at IBM in White Plains before embarking on a long trip in February of 1984. I was living with my parents, and I remember looking forward to the sight of the bridge as I drove home during late fall and early winter evenings, backlit by the reddish glow of the sun setting behind the Palisades. The light would shine through the criss-crossed bracings of the bridge, and I would drive directly under it on my way to Riverside Drive.In fact, it's precisely those bracings that give the George Washington Bridge its distinctive look. Here's what I just learned: they weren't intended to be left exposed. The bridge was begun in 1927, and the original plans called for the towers to be encased in granite and concrete. But financial concerns and the fact that many people simply liked the way the exposed steel looked led to a change in plans.
When it opened in 1931, the bridge had one deck and four lines. Two more lanes were added in 1946, and in 1962 the lower deck was opened. People referred to it as "Martha."
The set of In the Heights features a representation of the bridge as part of its central backdrop. The musical takes place in and around 183rd Street.
If you're interested in my thoughts on the musical, take a look at this post from The Common Room, the blog of NYU's University Hall.[Photo from the New York Times.]
Bravo to Mayor Bloomberg for his Broadway Boulevard plan! According to The New York Times, work has begun "without formal annoucement" on an "esplanade" that will run from 42nd Street to Herald Square, "chang[ing] that section of Broadway from a four-lane to a two-lane street." It's scheduled to open in mid-August. Stymied by Albany in his effort to reduce traffic in Manhattan through "congestion pricing," Bloomberg is looking for ways to take reclaim areas of the borough for pedestrians.
Jane Jacobs would be proud! You can read more about the project here.
Jane Jacobs would be proud! You can read more about the project here.
