The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
A New York Times Bestseller
For almost a century, Americans have been losing their hearts and losing their minds in an insatiable love affair with the American musical. It often begins in childhood in a darkened theater, grows into something more serious for high school actors, and reaches its passionate zenith when it comes time for love, marriage, and children, who will start the cycle all over again. Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical?
In The Secret Life of the American Musical, Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, marvels at their unflagging inventiveness, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he invites us to fall in love all over again by showing us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate audiences, and how one landmark show leads to the next—by design or by accident, by emulation or by rebellion—from Oklahoma! to Hamilton and onward.
Structured like a musical, The Secret Life of the American Musical begins with an overture and concludes with a curtain call, with stops in between for "I Want" songs, "conditional" love songs, production numbers, star turns, and finales. The ultimate insider, Viertel has spent three decades on Broadway, working on dozens of shows old and new as a conceiver, producer, dramaturg, and general creative force; he has his own unique way of looking at the process and at the people who collaborate to make musicals a reality. He shows us patterns in the architecture of classic shows and charts the inevitable evolution that has taken place in musical theater as America itself has evolved socially and politically.
The Secret Life of the American Musical makes you feel as though you've been there in the rehearsal room, in the front row of the theater, and in the working offices of theater owners and producers as they pursue their own love affair with that rare and elusive beast—the Broadway hit.
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Jack Viertel. (2016). The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Jack Viertel. 2016. The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Jack Viertel, The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
MLA Citation (style guide)Jack Viertel. The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
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- bioText: 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 Cafe 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.
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A New York Times Bestseller
For almost a century, Americans have been losing their hearts and losing their minds in an insatiable love affair with the American musical. It often begins in childhood in a darkened theater, grows into something more serious for high school actors, and reaches its passionate zenith when it comes time for love, marriage, and children, who will start the cycle all over again. Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical?
In The Secret Life of the American Musical, Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, marvels at their unflagging inventiveness, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he invites us to fall in love all over again by showing us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate audiences, and how one landmark show leads to the next—by design or by accident, by emulation or by rebellion—from Oklahoma! to Hamilton and onward.
Structured like a musical, The Secret Life of the American Musical begins with an overture and concludes with a curtain call, with stops in between for "I Want" songs, "conditional" love songs, production numbers, star turns, and finales. The ultimate insider, Viertel has spent three decades on Broadway, working on dozens of shows old and new as a conceiver, producer, dramaturg, and general creative force; he has his own unique way of looking at the process and at the people who collaborate to make musicals a reality. He shows us patterns in the architecture of classic shows and charts the inevitable evolution that has taken place in musical theater as America itself has evolved socially and politically.
The Secret Life of the American Musical makes you feel as though you've been there in the rehearsal room, in the front row of the theater, and in the working offices of theater owners and producers as they pursue their own love affair with that rare and elusive beast—the Broadway hit.- reviews
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- source: The New York Times Book Review
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"Both revelatory and entertaining. Viertel combines a scholarly approach with a light touch that enables us to see anew familiar songs and musical theater moments we'd long taken for granted."
- premium: False
- source: The Washington Post
- content: "Viertel's knowledgeable, engaging blueprint of [the] Broadway musical framework is instructive fun for cognoscenti and general readers alike."
- premium: False
- source: The Wall Street Journal
- content: "A lively manual for writers and public alike on how the songs suit the story and how the story needs the songs."
- premium: False
- source: The Charlotte Observer
- content: "The best general-audience analysis of musical theater I have read in many years."
- premium: False
- source: The Dallas Morning News
- content: "Jack Viertel changed my theater-going life, and he might change yours . . . The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built is a delightful, accessible guide to why your favorite productions work. It's a little bit history, a little bit memoir, a little bit criticism and, for any theater fan, a whole lot of fun."
- premium: False
- source: Kirkus Reviews
- content: "Viertel is well-steeped in Broadway culture, lore and productions . . . An enlightening trip for lovers of musicals."
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- source: Publishers Weekly
- content: "A valuable addition to the theater lover's bookshelf."
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November 9, 2015
Viertel’s friendly scrutiny of Broadway is a valuable addition to the theater lover’s bookshelf. Viertel, senior v-p of Jujamcyn Theaters (owner of five Broadway houses) and artistic director of New York City Center’s Encores! series, writes from authority and experience, having had a hand in such Broadway hits as Hairspray and The Book of Mormon. As a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, he began to offer critical courses on Broadway musicals. This book emerged out of those classes. It uses iconic shows such as Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, and South Pacific to explain and explore the patterns underlying much of musical theater. Viertel shares unvarnished opinions—for example, he declares that the bench scene from Carousel (when “If I Loved You” is sung) is “arguably the most perfect scene ever written in a musical”—as he takes readers from overture to the “11 o’clock number,” or final star turn. It’s a shame that Viertel doesn’t acknowledge a debt to legendary Broadway musical director Lehman Engel, whose Words with Music set the bar. In the end, theater fans will appreciate the dips into memoir and Viertel’s takes on original cast albums.
- premium: True
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October 15, 2015
From overture to final curtain, a close look at how musicals work. As a screenwriter and drama critic, senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five Broadway venues, and artistic director of City Center's Encores! revivals, Viertel is well-steeped in Broadway culture, lore, and productions. He adores musicals, which, he writes, deserve the same kind of attention that literary scholars give to Shakespeare: a scene-by-scene examination, "trying to piece out why every line of dialogue was there, what every lyric accomplished, and how music supported whatever the fundamental idea of the show was." That's the project he brings to his class at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, focusing on four musicals from Broadway's golden age, from Oklahoma! in 1943 to A Chorus Line in 1975. After that, he claims, "formal rigor and craft" faded. This copious book could well serve as his text. Besides the four iconic shows--Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, and South Pacific--Viertel adds others, including The Music Man, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Fiddler on the Roof, The Producers, West Side Story, Carousel, and The King and I. He also deconstructs more recent fare, including, among other productions, The Book of Mormon, Wicked, and even the current hip-hop musical Hamilton. Viertel is lively, deeply informed, and irrepressibly enthusiastic, but the problem with translating his analysis into a book is that readers may not know the musicals as well as his students do--students who likely have scripts, lyrics, cast recordings (he offers a list of his favorites), or videos. Nevertheless, he offers discerning insights about structure: the "I want" song that sets out the protagonist's hopes, the "conditional love song" that starts a romance, energetic interludes known as "the noise," subplots, next-to-last scenes, star turns, and resolutions. He examines, too, a good show's "happily unpredictable" qualities. An enlightening trip for lovers of musicals.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from December 1, 2015
Writer, critic, musician, former dramaturg, and current senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns and operates five Broadway venues, Viertel knows his way around the American musical block. Inspired by the Grecian ruins of Delos and the meticulously comprehensive and analytical approach to William Shakespeare's plays employed by his wife's uncle, Harvard comparative literature professor Harry Levin, Viertel has written what will become a classic textbook on the architecture and construction of the American musical. Beginning with the overture, the author methodically wends his way through the musical by devoting a chapter to each constituent part. Opening numbers, "I Want" songs, conditional love songs, "the Noise," secondary romantic couples, all the way sequentially through the finale are expertly explicated with spot-on examples from a plethora of productions that fluidly illustrate Viertel's analysis. Ever the shrewd theater executive, he even provides an intermission chapter in which he illuminates his own experiences and introduces us to Jujamcyn impresarios Rocco Landesman and Jordan Roth. An appendix, "Listening to Broadway," provides a chapter-by-chapter list of Viertel's thoughts and comments on the cast soundtrack for each musical cited in the text. VERDICT What Harold Bloom did for Shakespearean exegesis and Peter Drucker for management, Viertel has done for theater: written a definitive work by raising the curtain and laying bare the work of playwrights, composers, librettists, choreographers, and directors. [See Prepub Alert, 8/10/15.]--Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- premium: True
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September 1, 2015
Senior VP of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five Broadway houses, and artistic director of New York City Center's Encores! Series, Viertel gives American musicals the line-by-line analysis he feels should not be reserved for Shakespeare.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
December 1, 2015
Writer, critic, musician, former dramaturg, and current senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns and operates five Broadway venues, Viertel knows his way around the American musical block. Inspired by the Grecian ruins of Delos and the meticulously comprehensive and analytical approach to William Shakespeare's plays employed by his wife's uncle, Harvard comparative literature professor Harry Levin, Viertel has written what will become a classic textbook on the architecture and construction of the American musical. Beginning with the overture, the author methodically wends his way through the musical by devoting a chapter to each constituent part. Opening numbers, "I Want" songs, conditional love songs, "the Noise," secondary romantic couples, all the way sequentially through the finale are expertly explicated with spot-on examples from a plethora of productions that fluidly illustrate Viertel's analysis. Ever the shrewd theater executive, he even provides an intermission chapter in which he illuminates his own experiences and introduces us to Jujamcyn impresarios Rocco Landesman and Jordan Roth. An appendix, "Listening to Broadway," provides a chapter-by-chapter list of Viertel's thoughts and comments on the cast soundtrack for each musical cited in the text. VERDICT What Harold Bloom did for Shakespearean exegesis and Peter Drucker for management, Viertel has done for theater: written a definitive work by raising the curtain and laying bare the work of playwrights, composers, librettists, choreographers, and directors. [See Prepub Alert, 8/10/15.]--Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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A New York Times Bestseller
For almost a century, Americans have been losing their hearts and losing their minds in an insatiable love affair with the American musical. It often begins in childhood in a darkened theater, grows into something more serious for high school actors, and reaches its passionate zenith when it comes time for love, marriage, and children, who will start the cycle all over again. Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical?
In The Secret Life of the American Musical, Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, marvels at their unflagging inventiveness, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he invites us to fall in love all over again by showing us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate audiences, and how one landmark show leads to the next—by design...- sortTitle
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