What’s important to the history of the musical theater is that the Princess musicals were among the first to have a legitimate story, nonsense though it may have been. Their offerings didn’t do well until the producer asked young composers and librettists to write intimate pieces that matched the space. The Princess was a very small theater on West 39th Street. Raised by upwardly mobile parents in the late 1800s, Kern’s first notable American works were sixteen musicals for the Princess Theater. Wodehouse ( Jeeves and Wooster) and Oscar Hammerstein II (much more about him later) have led to such standards as “A Fine Romance,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “All the Things You Are,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Long Ago and Far Away,” “Who” and “Lovely to Look at.” His life was celebrated by MGM in the film Till the Clouds Roll By, yet much of his work is seldom produced, and deserves examination and serious attention. He collaborated with several lyricists, but his work with P.G.

He’s also one of the most elusive, because writing about him requires volumes, not pages.

You can delight in seeing Hattie MacDaniel ( Gone With the Wind) as Queenie, though her song, “Tell Him,” isn’t included, and enjoy Allan Jones’ marvelous vocals as Gaylord Ravenal.īut even beyond Show Boat, with over 100 musical scores, Jerome Kern is one of the greatest composers of American Musical Theater. This is the better of the two films, not only for the delightful performance of Irene Dunne as Magnolia, but because it preserves the stage performances of Charlie Winninger as Captain Andy, Helen Morgan as Julie and Paul Robson as Joe.

The 1936 version, directed by James Whale ( Bride of Frankenstein) is available on dvd. The 1951 MGM version can be found on YouTube. I won’t go into it here, because if you don’t know about it, you can easily find out. This story has been told several different ways, but for its score alone, Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern’s Show Boat is one of the milestones of American musical Theater. Eva Kern was telling someone that her husband wrote “Ol’ Man River,” and Dorothy Hammerstein corrected her by saying, “Your husband wrote ‘da-da-dum-da,’ ” and hummed the tune. There’s a story about an encounter between the wives of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.

Goodspeed opera house auditions 2016