The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (47 page)
Read The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built Online
Authors: Jack Viertel
Tags: #Arts & Photography, #Music, #Musical Genres, #Musicals, #Performing Arts, #Theater, #Broadway & Musicals, #Humor & Entertainment, #Literature & Fiction, #History & Criticism, #Genres & Styles, #Drama, #Criticism & Theory
Jack Viertel
is the senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns and operates five Broadway theaters. He has been involved in dozens of productions presented by Jujamcyn since 1987, including multiple Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winners, from
City of Angels
to
Angels in America
. He has also helped shepherd six of August Wilson’s plays to Broadway. He is the artistic director of New York City Center’s acclaimed Encores! series, which presents three musical productions every season. In that capacity he has overseen fifty shows, for some of which he adapted the scripts. He conceived the long-running
Smokey Joe’s Café
and the critically acclaimed
After Midnight
and has been a creative consultant on many shows, including
Hairspray
,
A Christmas Story
, and
Dear Evan Hansen
. He was the Mark Taper Forum’s dramaturg and the drama critic and arts editor of the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
, and he has spent a decade teaching musical theater at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. You can sign up for email updates
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Contents
Tuning Up: or, How I Came to Write This Book
A Note About the Shows Discussed—and a Few Other Matters
2. Curtain Up, Light the Lights: Opening Numbers
3. The Wizard and I: The “I Want” Song
4. If I Loved You: Conditional Love Songs
5. Put On Your Sunday Clothes: The Noise
6. Bushwhacking 1: Second Couples
8. Bushwhacking 3: The Multiplot, and How It Thickens
11. La Vie Bohème: Curtain: Act 1
13. Clambake: Curtain Up: Act 2
14. Suddenly Seymour: The Candy Dish
15. All er Nothin’: Beginning to Pack
16. The Small House of Joseph Smith, the American Moses: The Main Event
17. I Thought You Did It for Me, Momma: The Next-to-Last Scene
18. You Can’t Stop the Beat: The End
19. Curtain Call: How Woody Guthrie—of All People—Changed Broadway Musicals Forever
Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2016 by Jack Viertel
All rights reserved
First edition, 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Viertel, Jack.
The secret life of the American musical: how Broadway shows are built / Jack Viertel. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-374-25692-0 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-71125-2 (e-book)
1. Musicals—United States—History and criticism. 2. Musicals—United States—Analysis, appreciation. I. Title.
ML1711 .V37 2016
792.60973—dc23
2015023713
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