Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Nineteeth century English and American drama »

The opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man has baffled many. What does an unsettling tale of an encounter with what may or may not be a dybbuk, set in the mid-nineteenth century in a Polish shtetl, and played out entirely in Yiddish, have to do with the story of a Jewish professor of physics and his family in suburban Minnesota in the summer of 1967, related in English? Is the scene to be viewed as a warm-up of sorts before the main attraction, akin, if you will, to the short-subject films—newsreels, animated cartoons, and live-action comedies and documentaries—that movie houses of old used to play before the main feature? If so, what is the significance of presenting an odd Yiddish scene to an American audience notorious for turning a cold shoulder to non-English-speaking cinema? Or is the scene to be viewed as a prologue to the movie? If so, in what sense could it be said to impart to the audience either the “state of suspense of the plot produced by the previous history” or, alternatively, the argument of the drama?

As we all know, there are certain differences between female and male in physiology and psychology, but for a long time, the language characteristics and differences between female and male have been rarely known. Until the rise of the American women's Liberation Movement in the last century, linguists began to pay more attention to the differences in language between different genders. In this paper, the author selects 22 episodes of the first season of the American drama How I Met Your Mother and arranges the conversations among them. Then the author studies the language differences of female and male from five aspects: adjectives, hedges, interrogative sentences and exclamatory sentences and topics. The author hopes that this study can provide empirical help for the study of language differences between female and male.

Girish Karnad is not only India's leading playwright, and a practitioner across the performing arts in all that nation's media, but the first contemporary Indian writer to have achieved a major production in a regional American theatre – Naga-Mandala, seen at the Guthrie Theatre in July 1993. The following interview was recorded on the occasion of that production, and ranges widely not only over Karnad's own work and its circumstances, but the situation and problems of the Indian theatre today, and its ambivalent relationship alike to its classical and its colonial past, and to the contemporary problems of its society. The interviewer, Aparna Dharwadker, is Assistant Professor of Drama and Eighteenth-Century British Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her essays and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Modern Drama, and The Sourcebook of Post-Colonial English Literatures and Cultural Theory (Greenwood, 1995). She has also published collaborative translations of modern Hindi poetry in major anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994), and is currently completing a book-length study of the politics of comic and historical forms in late seventeenth-century drama.

Featuring hybridity, transgression, and improvisation, New Concept Kun Opera refers to experimental performances by Ke Jun and other Kun Opera performers since the beginning of the twenty-first century. From telling the ancient stories to expressing the modern self, this new form marks the awakening of the performer’s subjectivity and develops a contemporary outlook by rebuilding close connections between Kun Opera and modern life. A synthetic use of intermedial resources contributes to its appeal to today’s audiences. Its experimentation succeeds in maintaining the most traditional while exploring the most pioneering, thus providing Kun Opera with the potential for renewal, as well as an alternative future for Chinese opera in general. Chengzhou He is a Yangtze River Distinguished Professor of English and Drama at the School of Foreign Studies and the School of Arts at Nanjing University. He has published widely on Western drama, intercultural theatre, and critical theory in both Chinese and English. Currently, he is the principal investigator for a national key-research project, ‘Theories in European and American Theatre and Performance Studies’.

Starting with a survey of historical and ideological reasons for the unprecedented rise of Western interest in Russia after 1917 and especially after the Great Depression, the paper focuses on the travel books widely read on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s. The decade saw the blooming of travel prose in the English-speaking world, as well as the peak of enthusiasm for Russia during the XXth century. The paper attempts a closer look at the travel books on Soviet Russia, usually dismissed by critics as lacking in the quality of writing, too ideological. First the model of stereotypical book based on short Intourist tour is described (motive structure, prevailing parroting of Soviet propaganda clichés). Next follow the books produced by Western residents in the USSR, or persons who escaped Intourist surveillance and experienced some direct contact with Soviet people. They certainly look at Russia under the Western eye, but are able (to a different degree) to empathize with the drama and tragedy of Stalin’s Russia. From half-hearted account of “fellow-traveller” M. Hindus, the paper proceeds to fundamental “Assignment in Utopia” by E. Lyons, who turned from ardent Communist into highly argumentative critic of Soviet Russia, and to the unique project of writing a comic book about kolkhoz by E.M. Delafield, that resulted in a witty critique of Soviet aims and ways. In finding their way not just around Stalin’s Russia, but in providing the reader with the road to the authors’ inner selves, these books are still relevant today

This article describes and analyzes Barry Kyle's production of The Dillen, a community project staged by the RSC in 1983, in which The Other Place became no more than a base from which the play, its actors, and its audiences set out into the streets, fields and river in Stratford, to re-enact the life of a working-class Stratford man, George Hewins, born around a century earlier. In addition to placing the play in its social, political, and local context, the authors raise questions about the implications of the production for the RSC and the people of Stratford today. The kernel of this article was part of an English M.A. dissertation by Catherine Prentice at the University of Warwick in Summer 1998, supervised by Tony Howard. Catherine Prentice and Helena Leongamornlert, a University of Warwick graduate in English and American Literature, have collaborated in further research and interviews to present the version which follows, and both plan further work on community drama. The authors extend their grateful thanks to Tony Howard for his support and advice.

Stanislavsky's first production of The Seagull is well documented in English, in The Seagull Produced by Stanislavsky, edited by S. D. Balukhaty in 1952. But little is known of his exploratory work on an intended second production almost two decades later amidst the turmoil of the revolutionary period, and the rehearsal notes made by Stanislavsky's assistant Pyotr Sharov remained unpublished even in Russian until 1987. Here, Laurence Senelick provides the first English translation of these notes, contextualizing them with an account of the difficulties under which Stanislavsky and the Art Theatre were working at the time. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, and a long-time contributor to TQ and NTQ, which published his articles on the Craig–Stanislavsky Hamlet, serf theatre in Russia, and Wedekind and Lenin at the music hall. His last book, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre, won the George Jean Nathan award as the best work of dramatic criticism of 2000–01, and his previous book, The Chekhov Theatre: a Century of Plays in Production, won the Barnard Hewitt award of the American Society of Theatre Research. He is currently translating and editing the complete plays and dramatic fragments of Anton Chekhov for Norton Publishers.

Most of humanity’s recorded history has been indelibly marked by armed conflicts in various places around the world, yet the scale and effect of the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century were unprecedented. Both wars remapped the geography, politics, economies, and consciousness of prior realities, and echoed deafeningly throughout the modern works of literature of diverse nations. Anglophone literature overtly portrays wartime atrocities and human ordeals, and concurrently raises awareness of, and agitates against, the savagery of warfare. It does so through its poignant Trench Poetry, the anti-war novels of the Lost Generation, dramas of the Holocaust, and theater of genocide, among others. Another, relatively recent, a subgenre of Anglophone drama also addresses the subject of armed conflicts and their consequences, although its critics and reviewers mostly focus on identity politics, minority and ethnic studies, and the mix of ideas and images that are features of Asian-American theater. Within it researchers can find arresting examples of how an English-speaking theater represents conflict-induced displacement and migration and other repercussions of the Second World War, while dealing with one of the most discomfiting events in recent US history. This paper examines Wakako Yamauchi’s representation of the state-controlled relocation of Asian-American citizens and their consequent experiences, in her play 12-1-A; and Velina Hasu Houston’s portrayal of the Second World War’s ideological and socio-economic repercussions in the Japanese community, in Asa Ga Kimashita (Morning Has Broken).

As a translingual American writer, Julien Green (1900-1998) wrote a wide variety of novels, plays, short stories, and essays, as well as one of the longest recorded journals of the twentieth century. Among his bilingual texts Green published an important homoerotic play, Sud (1953), which he later translated into English as South (1959) in collaboration with his sister, Anne Green. Although the homoerotic nature of the characters of Green’s novels has been examined in certain critical texts, the evolution of this homoeroticism in Green’s self-translated play, Sud / South, has not yet been studied in detail. This article will, therefore, show how Green radically transformed the drama of homosexual love from his first play, Sud (1953), in his self-translation, South (1959), and the effects of these linguistic changes on the reader. More specifically, this critical analysis will demonstrate how Green used a translative approach of the moins-dit in order to conceal a substantial portion of his original French play’s central intrigue. Because of multiple omissions, revisions, and additions in self-translation, Ian Wiczewski’s love for the young Erik Mac Clure, as well as Édouard Broderick’s homosexual orientation, are less visible in South than in Sud. Consequently, Sud and South appear as two very disparate versions of the same text.

Background. Choral work of American composers of the second half of the XX century is characterized by new qualities that have appeared because of not only musical but also non-musical factors generated by the system of cultural, historical and social conditions. Despite of a serious amount of scientific literature on the history of American music, the choral layer of American music remains partially unexplored, especially, in Ukrainian musical science, that bespeaks the science and practical novelty of the research results. The purpose of this study is to discover and to analyze the peculiarities of the historical formation and identity of American choral art of the second half of the twentieth century using the the works of famous American artists as examples. The research methodology is based on theoretical, historical and analytical methods, generalization and specification. Results. The general picture of the development of American composers’ practice in the genre of choral music is characterized by genre and style diversity. In our research we present portraits of iconic figures of American choral music in the period under consideration. So, the choral works of William Dawson (1899–1990), one of the most famous African-American composers, are characterized by the richness of the choral texture, intense sonority and demonstration of his great understanding of the vocal potential of the choir. Dawson was remembered, especially, for the numerous arrangements of spirituals, which do not lose their popularity. Aaron Copland (1899–1990), which was called “the Dean of American Composers”, was one of the founder of American music “classical” style, whose name associated with the America image in music. Despite the fact that the composer tends to atonalism, impressionism, jazz, constantly uses in his choral opuses sharp dissonant sounds and timbre contrasts, his choral works associated with folk traditions, written in a style that the composer himself called “vernacular”, which is characterized by a clearer and more melodic language. Among Copland’s famous choral works are “At The River”, “Four Motets”, “In the Beginning”, “Lark”, “The Promise of Living”; “Stomp Your Foot” (from “The Tender Land”), “Simple Gifts”, “Zion’s Walls” and others. Dominick Argento’s (1927–2019) style is close to the style of an Italian composer G. C. Menotti. Argento’s musical style, first of all, distinguishes the dominance of melody, so he is a leading composer in the genre of lyrical opera. Argento’s choral works are distinguished by a variety of performers’ stuff: from a cappella choral pieces – “A Nation of Cowslips”, “Easter Day” for mixed choir – to large-scale works accompanied by various instruments: “Apollo in Cambridge”, “Odi et Amo”, “Jonah and the Whale”, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”, “Te Deum”, “Tria Carmina Paschalia”, “Walden Pond”. For the choir and percussion, Argento created “Odi et Amo” (“I Hate and I Love”), 1981, based on the texts of the ancient Roman poet Catullus, which testifies to the sophistication of the composer’s literary taste and his skill in reproducing complex psychological states. The most famous from Argento’s spiritual compositions is “Te Deum” (1988), where the Latin text is combined with medieval English folk poetry, was recorded and nominated for a Grammy Award. Among the works of Samuel Barber’s (1910–1981) vocal and choral music were dominating. His cantata “Prayers of Kierkegaard”, based on the lyrics of four prayers by this Danish philosopher and theologian, for solo soprano, mixed choir and symphony orchestra is an example of an eclectic trend. Chapter I “Thou Who art unchangeable” traces the imitation of a traditional Gregorian male choral singing a cappella. Chapter II “Lord Jesus Christ, Who suffered all lifelong” for solo soprano accompanied by oboe solo is an example of minimalism. Chapter III “Father in Heaven, well we know that it is Thou” reflects the traditions of Russian choral writing. William Schumann (1910–1992) stands among the most honorable and prominent American composers. In 1943, he received the first Pulitzer Prize for Music for Cantata No 2 “A Free Song”, based on lyrics from the poems by Walt Whitman. In his choral works, Schumann emphasized the lyrics of American poetry. Norman Luboff (1917–1987), the founder and conductor of one of the leading American choirs in the 1950–1970s, is one of the great American musicians who dared to dedicate most of their lives to the popular media cultures of the time. Holiday albums of Christmas Songs with the Norman Luboff Choir have been bestselling for many years. In 1961, Norman Luboff Choir received the Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Chorus. Luboff’s productive work on folk song arrangements, which helped to preserve these popular melodies from generation to generation, is considered to be his main heritage. The choral work by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) – a great musician – composer, pianist, brilliant conductor – is represented by such works as “Chichester Psalms”, “Hashkiveinu”, “Kaddish” Symphony No 3)”,”The Lark (French & Latin Choruses)”, “Make Our Garden Grow (from Candide)”, “Mass”. “Chichester Psalms”, where the choir sings lyrics in Hebrew, became Bernstein’s most famous choral work and one of the most successfully performed choral masterpieces in America. An equally popular composition by Bernstein is “Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers”, which was dedicated to the memory of John F. Kennedy, the stage drama written in the style of a musical about American youth in searching of the Lord. More than 200 singers, actors, dancers, musicians of two orchestras, three choirs are involved in the performance of “Mass”: a four-part mixed “street” choir, a four-part mixed academic choir and a two-part boys’ choir. The eclecticism of the music in the “Mass” shows the versatility of the composer’s work. The composer skillfully mixes Latin texts with English poetry, Broadway musical with rock, jazz and avant-garde music. Choral cycles by Conrad Susa (1935–2013), whose entire creative life was focused on vocal and dramatic music, are written along a story line or related thematically. Bright examples of his work are “Landscapes and Silly Songs” and “Hymns for the Amusement of Children”; the last cycle is an fascinating staging of Christopher Smart’s poetry (the18 century). The composer’s music is based on a synthesis of tonal basis, baroque counterpoint, polyphony and many modern techniques and idioms drawn from popular music. The cycle “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, created by a composer and a pianist William Bolcom (b. 1938) on the similar-titled poems by W. Blake, represents musical styles from romantic to modern, from country to rock. More than 200 vocalists take part in the performance of this work, in academic choruses (mixed, children’s choirs) and as soloists; as well as country, rock and folk singers, and the orchestral musicians. This composition successfully synthesizes an impressive range of musical styles: reggae, classical music, western, rock, opera and other styles. Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) was named “American Choral Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts (2006). The musical language of Lauridsen’s compositions is very diverse: in his Latin sacred works, such as “Lux Aeterna” and “Motets”, he often refers to Gregorian chant, polyphonic techniques of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and mixes them with modern sound. Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna” is a striking example of the organic synthesis of the old and the new traditions, or more precisely, the presentation of the old in a new way. At the same time, his other compositions, such as “Madrigali” and “Cuatro Canciones”, are chromatic or atonal, addressing us to the technique of the Renaissance and the style of postmodernism. Conclusions. Analysis of the choral work of American composers proves the idea of moving the meaningful centers of professional choral music, the gradual disappearance of the contrast, which had previously existed between consumer audiences, the convergence of positions of “third direction” music and professional choral music. In the context of globalization of society and media culture, genre and stylistic content, spiritual meanings of choral works gradually tend to acquire new features such as interaction of ancient and modern musical systems, traditional and new, modified folklore and pop. There is a tendency to use pop instruments or some stylistic components of jazz, such as rhythm and intonation formula, in choral compositions. Innovative processes, metamorphosis and transformations in modern American choral music reveal its integration specificity, which is defined by meta-language, which is formed basing on interaction and dialogue of different types of thinking and musical systems, expansion of the musical sound environment, enrichment of acoustic possibilities of choral music, globalization intentions. Thus, the actualization of new cultural dominants and the synthesis of various stylistic origins determine the specificity of American choral music.

This thesis explores the status of a specific subset of absent characters within twentieth century American drama. By borrowing the term “proximate cause” from tort law and illuminating its intricacies through David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, this thesis re-appropriates proximate cause for literary studies. Rather than focus on characters whose existence remains the subject of critical debate, this set of absent characters presumably exists but never appear onstage. Despite their non-appearance onstage, however, these absent characters nonetheless have a profound effect upon the action that occurs during their respective plays. Highlighting the various ways in which these characters serve as the proximate cause for the onstage action of a given play will expand the realm of drama and literary studies in myriad ways.

This project examines rape culture in American literature and society, exploring factors of rape culture through the narratives of literary protagonists and current women alike. Each chapter is grounded in a work of literature, which serves as a lens through which to analyze a factor of rape culture, and is then broadened in scope to incorporate recent court cases that have had significant sociocultural impacts. The introduction includes a critical review of rape in feminist theory, from Susan Brownmiller to Ann J. Cahill. The first chapter treats the rape of Dolores Haze and victim blaming in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita, and the 2010 Cleveland, Texas gang rapes of an eleven-year-old girl, who was cast as a “Lolita” by her community and the media. The second chapter discusses the rape of women with disabilities in Elmer Harris’s 1940 Johnny Belinda, and two 2012 cases in California and Connecticut involving the rapes of women with disabilities and the issue of consent, both of which influenced legislation. The third chapter focuses on the use of mass rape as a weapon of war in Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Ruined, and the narratives and testimonies of rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where nearly 2 million women have been raped since 1998. As the literature illustrates, when rape functions as an instrument of power and control certain similarities arise, such as victim blaming, consent, and the use of rape to demoralize and subjugate women, all of which are primary features of rape culture.

"Poetry 'n Acts: The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century American Poets' Theater," focuses on the disciplinary blind spot that obscures the productive overlap between poetry and dramatic theater and prevents us from seeing the cultural work that this combination can perform. Why did 2100 people turn out in 1968 to see a play in which most of the characters speak only in such apparently nonsensical phrases as "Red hus the beat trim doing going" and "Achtung swachtung"? And why would an Obie award-winning playwright move to New Jersey to write such a play in the first place? What led to the founding in 1978 of the San Francisco Poets Theatre by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, and why have those plays and performers been virtually ignored by critics despite the admitted centrality of performance to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing's textual politics? Why would the renowned Yale Repertory Theatre produce in the 1990s the poetic, plotless plays of a theater newcomer twice in as many years--even when audiences walked out? What vision for the future of theater could possibly involve episodic drama with footnotes? In each example, part of the story is missing. This dissertation begins to fill in that gap. Attending to often overlooked aspects of theater language, this dissertation examines theatrical performances that use poetic devices to intervene in narratives of cultural oppression, often by questioning the very suitability of narrative as a primary means of social exchange. While Gertrude Stein must be seen as a forerunner to contemporary poets' theater, chapter one argues that the Living Theatre's late 1950s and early 1960s anti-authoritarian theater demonstrates key alliances between poetry and theater at mid-century. The remaining chapters closely examine particular instances of poets' theater by Amiri Baraka (known equally as poet and playwright), Carla Harryman (associated with West Coast poetry), and Suzan-Lori Parks (a critically acclaimed playwright). These productions put poetic theater on the backs of tractors in Harlem streets, in open gallery spaces, and in more conventional black box and proscenium architectures, and each case develops the importance of performance contexts and production histories in determining plays' cultural effects.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007.
Title from file title page. Matthew C. Roudane, committee chair; Pearl McHaney, Nancy Chase, committee members. Electronic text (208 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Feb. 28, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 192-208).

Abstract Any notions that the new season could repeat the brilliance of the preceding one were brutally disabused early on. Continually inflating production costs so discouraged producers from gambling on an always risky Broadway reception that the number of new plays crashed by nearly 30 percent-a wrenching drop. Fewer than thirty new plays came before the footlights. Moreover, not even half of these were original American works. The others were either English pieces, adaptations from the French, or dramatizations of novels. (The total of new plays, revivals, and musicals was fiftyseven-far and away the lowest figure thus far in the century.)

Shortly after the Boston publisher Little, Brown and Company issued Jeremiah Curtin’s English translation of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis: A Tale of the Time of Nero, it was soon compared in American newspapers to Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The plot of Wallace’s novel, published in 1880 and by 1896 the most commercially successful American novel of its generation, concluded before the reign of Nero, so Sienkiewicz’s novel was widely perceived as a chronological sequel or historical comparandum to Ben-Hur. Comparisons ranged from publication announcements to advertising to literary analyses in contemporary newspapers. Similarly, when large-budget dramatic adaptations of both Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur were in development and production during the first decade of the twentieth century, there was a perceived head-to-head competition. This chapter reviews the contrasting backgrounds of the authors—Wallace being an American evangelical, Sienkiewicz a Polish Catholic—and the parallel successes of Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur during this period (mostly before the American premier of Guazzoni’s film) in the arenas of literature, drama, film, and business commerce. Its source material consists mostly of reviews, advertising, and analyses published in contemporary American newspapers.

Since at least the 1990s, Translation Studies theorists have advocated greater respect for alterity in literary translation. With the advent of Naturalist theatre and, later, the predominance of free-verse poetry in the 20th century, renderings of both poetry and verse drama in the English-speaking world have favoured assimilation with target-culture values. “Organic form”, described by James S. Holmes as the methodology with which a translator renders a source text primarily for its meaning, has been the prevalent strategy for translating works such as Spanish Golden Age dramas for approximately a century now. A return to the methodology of “analogical form”, with which a translator seeks to render the source text using correlatives to its form and function in the source culture, would do much to recognise the Other by avoiding both de-historicisation and de-poeticisation through less domesticated target texts. Examples of these competing methodologies will be examined in a few American translations of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño.

Abstract New York’s significance for jazz history lies in its open embrace of all things theatrical and seemingly all life forms with a dramatic or dramatizable element. Because the city possesses a long history of hospitality to the marginalized of the world-not merely twentieth-century immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, but Dutch sailors in the seventeenth century, English loyalists during the American Revolution, Atlantic pirates in search of safe haven, and all manner of scoundrels, scalawags, traders, and freebooters over the last several hundred years-its openness to unusual custom, indeed its flamboyant penchant for self-promotion, has conduced to the process of creating characters in costume, storytellers, and other citizens who work at being visible, striking, and larger than life. Of course there was black music and drama in New York long before jazz. Musical interpolations were part and parcel of the African Grove Theatre productions in Five Points dating as far back as 1821. In the same decade free blacks “danced for eels” in Catherine Market. At the nearby Chatham Theatre such dance customs were immortalized in the landmark play New York as It Is twenty years later.

Abstract The disdain of city people for their country cousins is an ancient story that reoccurs in every urbanizing society. The perennial drama was played out in the century and a half from the emergence of the early industrial city in the United States, through its evolution into a metropolis in the decades around 1900, its maturing after 1920, and its decentralization after the late 1940s down to the present time. The cultural and political conflict between the City of New York and upstate is a classic case in point. The cultural conflict between the center and the periphery arising from these changes was widely reflected in literature and folklore, including the slang of the day. City people expressed their contempt for rural and small-town people and places with more than a hundred pejorative names. Some of the oldest terms are borrowed from British English and were given new turns of meaning in the American urban setting.

Abstract The twentieth century began with American musical theatre dominated by European operettas—English, German, and Austrian. This held firm until 1914, when the Great War quickly ended popularity of things foreign. Jerome Kern, a practiced hand at “Americanizing” imports, finally had a chance to explore his own style; the result was the “modern musical comedy” form (actually, the first of many “modern musical comedy” forms). Irving Berlin, already known along Broadway for pop song hits, tried his hand at complete scores; he was less adventurous than Kern, but highly successful. The postwar years brought three young Kern protégés: George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans, and Richard Rodgers. They surpassed the master with a newer “modern musical comedy” built on dance rhythms; Kern, meanwhile, began development of “musical drama.” Cole Porter, of the Kern/Berlin generation, was next to make his mark on Broadway after a long, unapplied apprenticeship. Then came Arthur Schwartz, establishing himself in the months just before the stock market crash. The year 1930 saw the entrance of three talented Gershwin protégés: Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, and Burton Lane. But the worsening depression brought Broadway musical opportunity to a near halt. Broadway’s top composers spent most of the bleak depression in Hollywood. The only important new voices of the 1930s were introduced, fittingly, in politically slanted propaganda musicals. The already renowned Kurt Weill arrived on Broadway in 1936, exiled from Germany (where his work had been radical both musically and politically). Marc Blitzstein was even more outspoken, arriving on Broadway amidst a swirl of controversy. Harold Rome, on the other hand, used comedy and charm to make similar points for the proletariat; not surprisingly, he met with greater popular success than Weill or Blitzstein.