On your toes

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On Your Toes is a musical with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart . The book was created in a collaboration between Rodgers and Hart and George Abbott . The premiere took place on April 11, 1936 at the Imperial Theater in New York .
The first performance in London's West End took place on February 5, 1937 at the Palace Theater. The West German premiere took place in English on September 16, 1990 in the Theater im Forum in Ludwigsburg by the Stuttgart Ballet .

Emergence

With On Your Toes, Rodgers and Hart attempted for the first time in the history of the “ book musical ” to use ballet as the main part of the play. The play comedically thematizes the relationship between high and popular culture. Allusions to the New York theater genres vaudeville and burlesque are combined into a musical comedy with a continuous plot. As for stage dance, the ballet La Princesse Zenobia , which parodies the conservative Russian school, is juxtaposed with the jazz ballet Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, understood as a modern American form of stage dance .
Rodgers and Hart won George Balanchine, who came to the United States in 1933, for the choreography . The joint work continued with the musicals Babes in Arms (1937), I Married an Angel (1938) and The Boys from Syracuse (1938). Balanchine as the founder of neoclassicism was also attacked for this extremely successful parody of classical ballet. The success of On Your Toes initiated the development of a further integration of artistic dance into the musical. Choreographers such as Jerome Robbins , Agnes de Mille , Katherine Dunham , and Jack Cole were hired on Broadway in the years that followed and gained notoriety through their work there.

action

Phil "Junior" Dolan is without suspicion and conceit and has no fear of contact. Coming from a showman family, he made it to a professorship for "serious music" at Knickerbocker University. His passion is dance.
The young people like jazz; one of his students composed the jazz ballet "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" - Junior is enthusiastic. Frankie Frayne is one of his students and in love with him. Frankie has connections, she knows Peggy Porterfield, the patroness and manager of a Russian dance company. After Peggy is convinced, the jazz ballet performance becomes a joint venture.
Sergei Alexandrowitsch, the director of the ballet troupe, can of course not do anything with jazz and modern dance, but: Peggy is the financier. Prima ballerina Vera Baranova likes things like that, she likes to play double games. She uses Junior to make her love and dance partner Konstantin Morrosine jealous. Alexandrovitch wipes her out too, she invites Junior to dance in the current piece “La Princesse Zenobia”. Fortunately, the audience and the press consider the performance to be a successful parody.
Junior can't believe his luck, now he also loves two women: Frankie and Vera. But it gets even better; When Alexandrowitsch Junior sees the jazz ballet dance, he hires him as a dance partner for Vera. With Konstantin Morrosine that finally brings the barrel to overflowing - he hires killers to shoot Junior on the premiere evening ...

Well-known music numbers

  •   There's a small hotel
  •   Glad to Be Unhappy
  •   Slaughter on Tenth Avenue ( Ballet )

Film adaptations

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Geoffrey Block: Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim . Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 90.
  2. ^ Thomas Siedhoff: Das Handbuch des Musicals , 1st edition, Schott, Mainz 2007, ISBN 3-79-570154-6 , p. 433.
  3. ↑ History of Occidental Music: Musical ( Memento of the original dated November 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jadu.de
  4. ^ Paul R. Laird / William A. Everett: The Cambridge Companion to the Musical . Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 198.