Enchanted evenings - Geoffrey Holden Block

The classic musicals of Broadway can provide enchanted evenings, but while many can hum the music and even recount the plot from memory, we are often much less knowledgeable about how these great shows were put together. What was the inspiration for Rodgers and Hart's "Pal Joey", or Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel"? Why is Maria's impassioned final speech in "West Side Story" spoken, rather than sung? In this volume, the author offers theatre lovers a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the best loved, most admired and most enduring musicals of Broadway's golden era. Readers will find studies of such favourites as "Show Boat", "Anything Goes", "Porgy and Bess", "Carousel", "Kiss Me, Kate", "Guys and Dolls", "The Most Happy Fella", "My Fair Lady", and "West Side Story". Block provides a documentary history of 14 musicals in all - plus an epilogue exploring the plays of Stephen Sondheim - showing how each work took shape and revealing, production by production, how the American musical evolved from the 1920s to the early 1960s and beyond.