Bøker av Geoffrey Block

A Fine Romance: Adapting Broadway to Hollywood in the Studio System Era explores the symbiotic relationship between a dozen Broadway musicals and their Hollywood film adaptations, including some of the best loved, most admired, and most enduring works in their respective genres. Beginning with the stage version of Show Boat and ending with Bob Fosse's cinematic re-envisioning of Cabaret, Geoffrey Block explores twelve stage shows and their film adaptations spanning nearly a half century (1927-1972). A Fine Romance engages with aesthetic and critical concerns while also considering social issues, including race and ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual identity.

Richard Rodgers was an icon of the musical theater, a prolific composer whose career spanned six decades and who wrote more than a thousand songs and forty shows for the American stage. In this absorbing book, Geoffrey Block examines Rodgers’s entire career, providing rich details about the creation, staging, and critical reception of some of his most popular musicals.Block traces Rodgers’s musical education, early work, and the development of his musical and dramatic language. He focuses on two shows by Rodgers and Hart (A Connecticut Yankee and The Boys from Syracuse) and two by Rodgers and Hammerstein (South Pacific and Cinderella), offering new insights into each one. He concludes with the first serious look at the five neglected and often maligned musicals that Rodgers composed in the 1960s and 1970s, after the death of Hammerstein.

Designed for those unversed in composition or music theory, this book places Beethoven's compositions within the context of his personal and professional life and social and cultural milieu. This volume offers readers an enhanced experience of key works by exploring Beethoven's lyricism, heroic style, and unwaveringly idealistic musical vision.