Broadway Hit Research Articles

Education Must Capture Student Enthusiasm

The success of the play Copenhagen demonstrates once again the public’s potential enthusiasm for physics and related societal topics.Now cut to physics education, where introductory courses dwell on classical mechanics and electromagnetism with at most a superficial introduction to special relativity and “old” (pre-1925) quantum physics. We seldom hint that Newton’s laws are only low-energy approximations to the quantum-relativistic principles that seem to describe the universe, that Newtonian mechanics is not valid for most phenomena, and that an enormous conceptual gulf exists between a Newtonian clockwork mechanism and contemporary physics. Do physics students experience the depth and excitement elicited by Copenhagen? I think not. Do they sense the wonder of the uncertainty principle, or do they, at best, merely run through yet another formulaic calculation involving symbols called delta-x and delta-p? Do they ever hear anything about, say, quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that has perplexed physicists since the 1930s, that is comparable in significance to quantum uncertainty, and about which significant new results have appeared regularly since the 1960s? Even in courses for nonscientists, in which there is no constraint to cover the encyclopedic minutia of Newtonian mechanics, we fill our students’ brains with watered-down versions of the “real” physics courses that are based on the manipulation of classical formulas.We are living in what should be the golden age of physics education. Physics has never been so exciting. We’ve been given the Big Bang, dark matter, quantum entanglement, and much more. A smash Broadway hit is even based on the subtleties of physics, and of its social implications. We are not required to throw this excitement away when we enter the classroom. Small enrollments, student antipathy to anything titled “physics,” and lukewarm public support need not be our fate. By replacing formulaic manipulation with conceptual understanding, and above all by focusing on modern concepts and societal connections, teachers can capture the latent enthusiasm for ideas that is so evident in the success of Copenhagen. © 2001 American Institute of Physics.

The Journey to Find the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings: Keynote Speech to the Sixth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 13, 1999

The Journey to Find the 1869 Cincinnati Red StockingsKeynote Speech to the Sixth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 13, 1999 Daryl Brock (bio) In the summer of 1985 I set out on a two-month, 12,000-mile odyssey around the U.S. following the tour routes of the 1969 Cincinnati Red Stockings. My intention was to visit the twenty-six cities and towns where they played. I managed to get to all but Fort Wayne, which still remains on my to-do list. Why was I doing this in the first place? Well, it began with my reading Douglas Wallop's Baseball: An Informal History. Wallop, you may remember, wrote The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the Broadway hit "Damn Yankees." I was intrigued by Wallop's charming descriptions of the first ballplayers to come out in the open and say they were playing a boy's game for money. Their salaries were guaranteed by contracts, and the amounts were even published in newspapers. (By the way, the day after tomorrow, Monday, is the 130th anniversary of the start of those contracts: March 15th, 1869; they ran eight months, expiring on November 15th.) Wallop recounted how opponents called player-manager Harry Wright a "bearded boy in bloomers" and "captain of the bloody calves" because of the team's new knickerbocker-style uniform. Wallop also told of them riding across plains and prairies to play in San Francisco—which meant they had ridden the new transcontinental railroad in the very first months of its existence. Who were those guys? I wondered. What was it like to be a twenty-two-year-old playing baseball only four years after the end of the Civil War and seven years before the Custer massacre, when the West was still wild? What was society like? What was baseball like? This was hardly a new pattern. As a boy I would read, say, Robin Hood and then probe its "reality" by delving into a general history or perhaps a biography of Richard the Lion-Hearted. In college I was a double major—literature and history—and taught those subjects later along with psychology—the very elements of novel making. By spring of 1985 I had done enough research on post-Civil War matters to become fascinated by them and also to realize that little in the way of commercial entertainment had employed that era as a setting. Most of it had been focused [End Page 23] in the South, such as KKK-related stories during Reconstruction. Nothing had been set in the North except the old TV program "Wild Wild West," which I think took place during Grant's second administration. The year 1869 seemed a fabulous backdrop for some kind of story. Consequently, on Sunday, May 5th, 1985, I prepared to set out from Seattle, where my wife, Lura, was then employed as an actress. We loaded gear into my truck—Lura had purchased a camper shell as a setting-out gift. Is she a great wife, or what?—and in jumped our beagle-mix, Missy. The scouting report on Missy read: "Best position shortstop. Great natural instincts, speed, and range; can get her teeth around almost anything ever turned out at the Louisville bat factory." She would be my traveling companion in the weeks to come. We left Seattle at 6 A.M. and set out across the Cascades, passing through Ritzville and St. Regis and Saltese; through Spokane and Couer d'Alene and Missoula. By nightfall we'd gone 704 miles and found a KOA campground to our liking outside of Bozeman Hot Springs, Montana. Next morning I breakfasted at theCowboy Café in downtown Bozeman, where I caught snippets of dialogue (more accurately, intersecting monologues) that went: "Hey, Craig . . . [long silence] . . . Ah sold thet roll a bob wahr. . . ." and the uninflected response: " . . . Huh . . ."On the TV in the corner was coverage of historians combing the Little Bighorn site with metal detectors, attempting to track the 1876 battlefield movements by means of ballistic tests on shell casings. The commentary in the Cowboy Café went: "Why the hell they wanna spend money finding out what happened to Custer? He...

T he Merchant Power Plant "Rag"

" Ragtime," the musical abou t the converging lives of people w ithdiffer ent back grounds but essentially similar aspirations, at the turn ofthe last c entur y, wa s a rec ent Broadway hit. M erchant P ower Plant de-velopm ent is the ragtime of our coming millenniaI decade. Th is art icle,by focu sing on three chara cters in the musical (and how their per sp ec-tive s-l evitati on , s yncopati on and calculation ) pro vid es in si ght s onmer chant pow er plant pro spects. The concepts are ba sed on per sonalexperi en ce.

Toronto Playwrights Union of Canada and Playwrights Canada Press: A Profile

In the late 1960s, Canada’s regional theatres – those established by the federal government to celebrate the 1967 Centennial – had a general reputation for offering few opportunities for Canadian work to appear. Artistic directors of these houses tended to be primarily European-born – Christopher Newton at Theatre Calgary and Heiner Piller at Neptune Theatre, for example – and were inclined to produce remounted Broadway hits and musicals or popular foreign-stage classics. Theatre companies like Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, Winnipeg’s Manitoba Theatre Centre and Nova Scotia’s Neptune Theatre were ostensibly created to present Canadian theatre, but the repertories broadened and playbills often told a different story, listing productions by Shaw, Miller, Wilde, Chekhov and Shakespeare with the rare Canadian play. As a result, there was virtually no space on our regional stages for new Canadian works and little interest on the part of Artistic Directors to actively search out and develop this genre.

Vaudeville Philosophers: "The Killers"

Kenneth S. Lynn's biography of Hemingway states that behind Killers lay some obvious influences: Hemingway's firsthand acquaintance with petty criminals in Kansas City, his close observation of men entering back room in Venice Cafe, and steady attention he paid in 20s to journalistic accounts, in European as well as in American newspapers, of blood-drenched careers of Chicago hoodlums. (112). Behind story also is Hemingway's acquaintance by 1926 with and with idea of vaudeville. The connection has long been noted: in 1959, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren mentioned vaudeville team of Max and Al, and gag and dialogue that remind reader of their unreal and theatrical quality.(1) The essay is, however, only briefest of sketches on subject. By mid-1920s, entertainment had become part of visual and literary art. Music hall scores echoed in work of T. S. Eliot; lyrics of Broadway hits were reprinted in pages of E Scott Fitzgerald; and revues and Follies were described in fascinating detail in essays of Edmund Wilson. The expression the seven lively coined by Gilbert Seldes, was meant to include comics, dancers, and Krazy Kat - and to displace such bourgeois delights as grand opera. It was fate of one of those lively arts, vaudeville, to wax and wane with modernism. To be useful to Hemingway as a subject in 1926, two things had had to happen to vaudeville: first was its permeation of social world, second its recognition by intellectual world. We know that first of these happened because from W. C. Fields to Eddie Cantor and even to Ed Sullivan, vaudevillians not only dominated Palace and Ziegfeld Follies - hence imagination of much of New York - but also went on to radio and movies. The second happening was a consequence of first. A brief chronology: in 1922, became Great American Art for New Republic, in which Mary Cass Canfield wrote that it need not apologize for comparisons with Robinson and Frost, Masters and Sandburg. In fact, she thought it held its own with work of Mark Twain as a kind of artistic reaction to our native social repressiveness: Grotesque or not, represents a throwing away of self-consciousness, of Plymouth Rock caution, devoutly to be wished for. Here we countenance extreme, we encourage idiosyncrasy. The dancer or comedian is, sometimes literally, egged on to develop originality; he is adored, never crucified for difference. Miss Fannie Brice and Sir Harry Lauder are examples of performers who have been hailed, joyfully and rightfully, as vessels containing sacred fire, and who have been encouraged into self-emphasis by their audiences. . . . (225) Equally important was fact of universal intellectual acceptance: Darius Milhaud, George Auric and others write ballets and symphonies in which may be heard irresponsible cancan of ragtime. John Alden Carpenter, perhaps most vivid talent among our own composers, will occasionally shift from cooly subtle disharmonies, illustrating poetic or lyric subjects, to write a Krazy Kat Ballet. (226) Vaudeville was for intellectual world equal to other forms of artistic composition. And it seemed to gain meaning when it was compared to modes of modernism. Throughout 1923, Edmund Wilson produced a barrage of pieces on ideas and personalities, and on meaning of dance, jazz, comic scripts, and revues. He identified some of leading comics and mimes, among them Bert Savoy, Johnny Hudgins, and Bert Williams. He speculated on satire of and especially on its urban modernist meanings. Wilson thought that Ziegfeld Follies were inherently part of his and Fitzgerald's literary world: Among those green peacocks and gilded panels, in luxurious haze of New Amsterdam, there is realized a glittering vision which rises straight out of soul of New York. …

The Gershwins in Britain

Overwhelmingly, the British reputation of George Gershwin is as a ‘serious’ composer: but this is liable to obscure not only the contributions he and his brother Ira made to the popular music theatre in Britain, but also, conversely, the British influences upon this seemingly all-American pair. George was profoundly influenced by that pre-eminent American Anglophile of his time, Jerome Kern, while British influences upon the semi-scholarly Ira extended far beyond W. S. Gilbert and P. G. Wodehouse. After ‘Swanee’ swept Britain in 1920, and George had honed his art and craft by writing the score for the West End revue, The Rainbow (1923), came the musical comedy, Primrose (1924) – its score his first to be published, and including some of his earliest orchestrations. A prototype of the frivolous comedies of the era, Primrose marked the first time the brothers were billed together as the Gershwins, since Ira had earlier written as ‘Arthur Francis’: it was also the immediate precursor of their first great Broadway hit, Lady, Be Good! Finally, in 1928, Ira collaborated, without George, on the London show That's a Good Girl – though Damsel in Distress, the brothers' last film musical, was a valedictory to the British-American musical comedy of the era. James Moore's earlier transatlantic study, of Cole Porter in Britain, appeared in NTQ30 (1992), and his Radio Two programme on the revue producer André Charlot was broadcast in October 1993.

Harpers Ferry:An Examination of the Theory of “Objective Conflict” in the Plays of Barrie Stavis

Barrie Stavis is not your run of the mill playwright. Some consider him the only playwright today writing serious plays embodying a social, political and historical awareness. And yet, respected as he is by those who have come in contact with his work, he remains something of a forgotten artist, unknown to the public, even theater-goers. As Arthur H. Ballet says in his remarks on Stavis in Contemporary Dramatists, He is a 'pro.' Methodical, organized, enthusiastic, and almost pristinely professional as he is, there is a double irony in the fact that he has never really had a hit on Broadway.' Of course, a Broadway hit is not the only way to establish a successful career as a playwright. There is, however, a discrepancy between Stavis' lack of impact on the general theater-going public and the respect that his work receives from a number of thoughtful critics. This is particularly noteworthy in light of Ballet's assertion that, To non-Americans ... Stavis represents the clearest and 'most' American voice of the time. As perhaps is still true of O'Neill, Stavis seems most American to those who are least American, and he seems most 'universal' to his American audiences.2

A life of William Inge: the strains of triumph

This book is a biography of Willian Inge, the American playwright who committed suicide in 1973. By 1962 he had written an unprecedented string of Broadway hits Picnic, Bus Stop, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Come Baack, Little Sheba. All four plays had become successful films featuring top Hollywood stars. Inge had received a Pulitzer Prize for Picnic and an Academy Award for his screenplay, Splendour in the Grass. Even his long-time friend and mentor, Tennesse Williams, was envious of his success. Privately, Inge was miserable. His long struggle with alcoholism and profound shame over his homosexuality plagued him before, during and after his decade of great success. As criticism of his work intensified, Inge responded with increasingly frantic attempts to please by modernizing his writing. He abandoned the small town characters and settings he knew in favour of more lurid, urban subject matter. In the end, his characters lost their authentic voices, and neither critics nor audiences found his later work believable. In this first book-length literary biography of Inge, Ralph Voss aims to peel back the veneer of public success and lay bare the private pain and isolation of the man who was called America's first authentic midwestern playwright. He draws upon interviews, memoirs, and unpublished manuscripts, letters, and papers to show how Inge's unhappy life fueled the struggles his plays depicted.

The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller

greatest American dramatist of our age (Evening Standard) The twenty-three essays and three interviews collected here give us Miller's views on theatre including such topics as origins of modern drama, nature of tragedy, what makes plays endure, theatre in Russia and at home - on Broadway and at New York's Lincoln Center. Above all, they give eloquent expression of his belief in the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.In reading this definitive collection of playwright's pieces, covering some thirty years, and subjects ranging from Willy Loman's fall to AFTER THE FALL, from Ibsen to O'Neill, from commercial hit-flop approach to subsidised theatre, you are exhileratingly aware of a social critic, as well as playwright, who knows what he's about. (Studs Terkel, Chicago Tribune) Arthur Miller understands that serious writing is a social act as well as an aesthetic one, that political involvement comes with territory. A writer's work and his actions should be of same cloth, after all. HIs plays and his conscience are a cold burning force. (Edward Albee) Miller was born in New York City in 1915. After graduating from University of Michigan, he began work with Federal Theatre Project. His first Broadway hit was All My Sons, closely followed by Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from Bridge and The Price. His works of fiction include novella Plain Girl and a collection of short stories, I Don't Need You Any More. His non-fiction includes In Russia, Chinese Encounters, 'Salesman' in Beijing and his autobiography, Timebends. Widely acknowledged as one of greatest playwrights of twentieth century, Miller died in 2005.

The Madrigal in the Garden

Small ironies are the particular delight of those newspaper columns that deal in news and gossip about Broadway and its theatrical ventures; so it was natural that the most piquant tidbit of the 1955-56 season should have been the fact that Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, a play which managed at least the success of a five-month run in New York, had been turned down by every major London management before Irene Mayer Selznick decided to produce it here. The real surprise, however, was that Miss Bagnold’s lovely play should have been a success at all, even in a season unusual enough to list Giraudoux and Anouilh among its hit playwrights. The Chalk Garden is too many things that a Broadway hit is not. It is, first of all, primarily verbal, using language with a delight and a delicacy that is foreign to even our most serious playwrights.

TV Opens the Screen to New Playwrights

OLD MOVIES on television have been a theme of gag writers since the early days of the new medium, but accuracy now demands that audiences listen to jokes about old television plays appearing as movies. The logic for this anastrophe lies in the sale of nearly fifty original television plays to producers of feature motion pictures. The success of the Hecht-Lancaster production of Paddy Chayefsky's TV original Marty, culminating in the Academy award, has made Hollywood acutely conscious of the value of video plays. This new source of film properties may prove to be television's most important lasting effect on the film industry. It certainly is already proving to be a boon to the playwrights who have found an audience through TV. A competent dramatist who has not yet won success on Broadway need no longer despair of having his work considered by the movies. The studios, as every writer knows, buy unproduced stories mainly for the cheaper pictures, and they pay accordingly. Hollywood prefers Broadway hits, novels, and short stories. With Broadway producing only about sixty plays a season, this showcase for potential film properties has been of little benefit to most writers; and consideration of novels and short stories doesn't help the playwrights. But the omnivorous appetite of television demands well over 1,200 new plays each year, and it is a growing hunger. How closely these plays are watched by both major and independent film makers is indicated by the fact that some 50 have been bought in the past six months, and are on their way to the screen. E337 1

The Ryukyu Islands: Pawn of the Pacific

The first territory to be returned to Japan by the United States since the 1945 surrender is a group of the Ryukyu Islands. This fact focuses attention on this strategically important archipelago extending from southernmost Japan to Formosa, although the Ryukyus have been at least on the periphery of Western attention for two centuries. The chief compulsions for American popular interest in the islands have been the Battle of Okinawa of World War II and, more recently, the best selling novel and Broadway hit, The Teahouse of the August Moon.This transitory and popular interest will undoubtedly give way to wider international attention in the next few years as the Japanese become more articulate in their criticism of the questionable grounds on which these islands were stripped from Japan Proper at the end of the war. Of further significance to political science is the fact that Okinawa, major island of the group, is (excepting only the Bonins) the last area of the world to remain under complete American military government control. The character of this nearly ten-year rule by the United States and its impact on a million people who have continually demanded “reversion” to Japan must inevitably be the subject of study of those interested in the confluence of cultures under conditions of sustained military government.