Music, that great mood-enhancer, has been used onstage and on screens of all shapes and sizes (as soon as technology allowed) in support of setting an atmosphere and helping tell the story. Here's your chance to wallow in classic, if not perhaps strictly classical music ... 'classics of their kind', certainly!
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But of course!
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This song is from Annie, Get Your Gun (by Irving Berlin, but set in a comparable environment ~ understandably for a North American musical ~ and hence quite easily confused).
Oklahoma!'s opening number (Answer 1) is O what a beautiful mornin' |
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Apparently one waggish commentator, obviously on a similar cultural wavelength, likened the G & S partnership to the career of Moses ~ insofar as that it had been 'nurtured among the Reeds'!
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Each of the others is known to have collaborated; Wodehouse's song Bill was added into Kern's Show Boat, for instance
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Guys and Dolls, though a splendidly 'fun show' with many wonderful numbers in it, does not have the gravitas of the others, and has never quite been regarded as tantamount to opera in the same league as them (e.g. to have been recorded in one or another medium with classically trained singers in the lead roles).
You might equally fairly have argued for Porgy and Bess as being ground-breakingly centred in Afro-American culture, and for its fusion of classical and jazz music; West Side Story as being an updated 'take' on the Romeo and Juliet narrative, with then-contemporary social commentary built into it along with the gang choreography sequences; or Sweeney Todd as the only story set East of the Atlantic. But at least this Question may have encouraged you to recognise that Musicals are 'not all froth'! |
Sun Products Corp. was not founded until 1975, and originally under another name; the front three Answers are all given as genuine. Apart from limited-pressing souvenir records given to employees, most evidence of the shows has disappeared into oblivion, but we can well imagine the Americans (particularly) developing the idea of the 'corporate anthem' onto as big a scale as they could which would be both glitzy and heart-warming (and even informative) for their staff. 1957's Chevrolet in-house musical allegedly cost six times as much to stage as the iconic public musical My Fair Lady in the same year. Taste and technology have since moved on and these shows have given way to IT-based presentations on screens in front of the employee's nose; whether this represents progress of civilisation, is probably not for us to judge!
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Hay Fever was a comedy with no music; this number comes from Private Lives (1930)
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Paganini is not the Fiddler in this show!
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The factory-based shows (in order) are Bizet's Carmen (a fully-fledged opera, but it counts in this context as a 'stage musical'!), Matchgirls (Owen & Russell, London, 1966: about Annie Besant and the Bryant & May 'phossy-jaw' strike) and The Pajama Game (Adler & Ross, 1954).
Work-based issues are obviously central to most people's lives, but it takes some talent to turn these successfully into engaging entertainment; these shows suggest the effort can be worthwhile |
There were over 4,000 performances, but not as many as 5,000, over just beyond 10 years; all the other technical, artistic and historical-coincidental details offered are valid
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