![]() ![]() ""In Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist, historian Harriet Hyman Alonso relates the story of Isidore Hochberg, who was born in New York, of Russian-Jewish origin, and acquired the nickname 'Yip' in his youth. Finally, but most importantly, Harburg shares his commitment to human rights and the ways it affected his writing and his career path."" He tells of his early childhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, his public school education, how the Great Depression opened the way to writing lyrics, and his work on Broadway and Hollywood, including his blacklisting during the McCarthy era. Harriet Hyman Alonso enables Harburg to talk about his life and work. I'd suggest Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist. ""There are several excellent books about Harburg. "In this detailed, entertaining account, Alonso gives life to a courageous man and artist who risked it all for some simple human truth." Includes an appendix with Harburg's key musicals, songs, and films. Finally, but most importantly, Harburg shares his commitment to human rights and the ways it affected his writing and his career path. Interweaving close to fifty interviews (most of them previously unpublished), over forty lyrics, and a number of Harburg's poems, Harriet Hyman Alonso enables Harburg to talk about his life and work. Harburg (1896–1981) wrote the lyrics to the standards, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?," "April in Paris," and "It's Only a Paper Moon," as well as all of the songs in The Wizard of Oz, including "Over the Rainbow." Harburg always included a strong social and political component to his work, fighting racism, poverty, and war. Known as "Broadway's social conscience," E. From the last years of the 1990s to the early years of this decade, New York theater companies were abuzz with the popularity of revivals.A new interview-based biography of The Wizard of Oz lyricist They began instead fueling demand for revivals of Broadway's Old Guard. The pendulum swung so much in the other direction that theater-goers lost interest in the Sondheim Sound. In "Cats," there's just a thin web of allegorical narrative laden with song and dance numbers about Spandex-loving cats. ![]() ![]() Instead of songs serving the story, the story was hardly present at all. With Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's "Cats," Sondheim's organic sensibility saw its highest realization. In 1983, he wrote the Tony Award-winning "La Cage aux Folles," a story set in a drag cabaret featuring songs that sounded like they'd be sung in a drag cabaret.īut Herman still sounded like Herman, partly because he still believed in the power of the song and partly because Broadway had by then been taken over by British invaders in thrall to the school of Sondheim. He recognized that there might be several approaches." But at the same time, he tried the seamless approach. "He said he liked his formula approach, that he liked that were you tapping and singing his tunes. "He started to set up songs so there was a reason for these people to start singing," Coleman said. By the 1960s, he'd written "Mame," a turning away from the old style. The evolution of Broadway styles, in fact, is contained in his work: In the '50s, he wrote "Hello, Dolly," very much of the story-song-story tradition. Musical scores became more organic and complex, and much more idiosyncratic.Ī savvy businessman, Jerry Herman sensed the winds of change. Composers started using music to underscore the story's drama, conflict and action. Characters stopped singing just because it seemed like the right time to break into song. After Sondheim, it was no longer vogue to write story-song-story, just as in rock music, the verse-chorus-verse format became passé.Īfter Sondheim, story and song were integrated. That fizzy decade saw young and ambitious composers, like Stephen Sondheim, reject the Old Guard's compartmentalized approach to musical theater. ![]()
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