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

by Philip Lambert

Overview

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. The book draws from personal interviews with Bock and Harnick themselves to offer an in-depth exploration their shows, including Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me, and Fiorello!, and their greater place in musical theater history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199826711
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/17/2010
Series:	Broadway Legacies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

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

Preface, with a Note on Sources and Acknowledgements
1. Suave Young Men: Creative Stirrings from Childhood through College
2. Wonders of Manhattan: Professional Beginnings in New York in the 1950s
3. Politics and Poker: The Body Beautiful and Fiorello! and the Late 1950s
4. Little Old New York: Tenderloin and the Early 1960s
5. To Broadway with Love: She Loves Me and the 1964 World's Fair
6. Tradition: Fiddler on the Roof
7. Here in Eden: The Mid-1960s and The Apple Tree
8. Have You Ever Seen a Prettier Little Congress?: The Late 1960s and The Rothschilds
9. Topsy Turvy: Separate Paths Since the Early 1970s
Appendix A: Chronology of Bock and Harnick on Broadway
Appendix B: Selected Media Resources
Endnotes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Never before has the biographer of a great songwriting team enjoyed the full cooperation of both his subjects. As a result, Philip Lambert's To Broadway, To Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick teems with rich detail, wonderful anecdotes, and astute insights into that most fascinating of artistic endeavors—the creation of a Broadway musical." —Philip Furia, University of North Carolina - Wilmington, and author of The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Greatest Lyricsts

"Philip Lambert's book offers fascinating insights into Bock and Harnick's musical creations, their geneses, inner workings, reception histories, and revivals. An important contribution to American musical theater scholarship."—William Everett, University of Missouri-Kansas City, contributing co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Musical

"Lambert eloquently reminds us that Bock and Harnick were much more than a single-hit sensation. This long overdue study gives their all-too-brief collaboration the serious treatment it deserves and in the process enriches our understanding of the traditional book musical during its last hurrah. Lambert helps us to contextualize Fiddler on the Roof within Bock and Harnick's career, which includes the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Fiorello and She Loves Me, the musical that other Broadway composers wished they had written." —James Leve, Northern Arizona University, and author of Kander and Ebb

"A valuable account...Recommended." —Choice

"Well written and well documented...This volume is as valuable as a resource on Broadway history as it is on the subjects themselves...It advances the scholarship on the musical during one of its most crucial periods." —Notes

"[Lambert] not only provides a vivid portrait of one of Broadway's most important and beloved teams, he also brings to life the process of constructing a score for the integrated book musicals of mid-century. To Broadway, To Life! is one more way the vital new Oxford University Press series, Broadway Legacies, is enlarging the field of musical theater studies." —Musica Judaica Online Reviews

From the Publisher