Essay Instructions: NO BOOK sources- CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THESE MOVIES ONLY
No exact sources except the Musical on Broadway or the movies for Dreamgirls and A Chorus LIne and Every little step. Need to come up with something based off of what is seen in these movies - no outside sources needed.
This class is the history of Dance so basically How did Michael bennett contribute to the History of Dance.
This is to be a reflective process mainly on Michael bennett and what made him so unique. What did he do to change broadway. How was his style different from others. I do not want a biography- I dont want to know what others thought about him. I have plenty of that. I need a fresh perspective on what made him unique. Professor suggested watching the movies or the musical (which obviously can't do that) but to see what his personal qualities were and style that allowed him to be creative and set a new standard for broadway. I have all his awards, which plays he did, backstage musical, concept musical, comparisons to Robbins and Fosse. I just need a critical review of this man and his unique talent that led to the reinvigoration of broadway.
FRESH PERSPECTIVE not based on what others have said.
I really need a writer familiar with the arts and choreographer directors musical theater ect...This class is the history of Dance so basically How did Michael bennett contribute to the History of Dance. What did he do that no one else thouht of.
full integration of all elements of musical theatre: acting, singing, dancing, character, emotions and concept
Use of dancers and or actors standing still like beginning of A Chorus line where they stand with their pictures above them.
Dancers and singers combined and able to multi task
No scrip, no music, no choreography- bennett collaborated with others to take long involved monologues and create a cohesive script. one cannot separate the script from a book from a score, from the staging. Hid plays were totally integrated
A Chorus Line was also conceptual ??" no interval, a bare stage except for a painted white line; Zach speaking with God-like invisibility from the stalls. It was stripped of sets and costume changes ??" anything else that might stop you from believing you are actually at the audition
'It’s about really, really wanting something and whether or not you can get it. And actually everybody has sort of wanted something at some point inI ask Bob Avian if he ever gets bored with A Chorus Line. He shakes his head. 'The show is about the anonymous kid in the chorus, the guy who works on the assembly line, the clerk in the store. They are everyone. It’s not bigger than life: it is life their lives.’
This was the original kind. And -- reality show on stage you were getting inside look at what it's like. To be a performer and theater and go through that process. Was this the 1970s. Version of American Idol. If almost seventeen dancers trying desperately. To get over all in the chorus of a Broadway Show. Just deport. Any more. I. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- The whole idea came from a workshop for the early 1970s. With actors and dancers telling their life stories. I don't auto homeowner and I am a -- bearing their -- really stories. And sometimes raw. -- The legendary director and choreographer Michael Bennett -- these stories. Crafting a chorus line. To illustrate that metaphorical line between desperation. And hope. Composer Marvin Hamlisch. One day. Michael took -- piece that you -- to put a large. At the rehearsal hall -- -- this is the line this precarious shipped between desperation. And you
Yet, for all those peaks, when I wrote about the premiere for the London Times all those years ago, this is what I concluded: “The most thrilling breakthrough of the extraordinary show is that whereas in A Chorus Line Michael Bennett choreographed the cast, in Dreamgirls he has choreographed the set.”
Four towers with Plexiglas veils and kliegs, enhanced by bridges that descended on the action, amounted to an apparently simple architectural set by its brilliant designer, Robin Wagner. The towers could turn 360 degrees with ease. But it was Bennett’s use of them that was revolutionary. The towers moved to create constantly changing perspectives and space, like an automated ballet. They created stages within stages. They energized the action, driving it forcefully along. It’s why there were no set-piece dance routines in the show: Dance and movement were organic to the entire action. But Bennett had made the mechanical set his dancers.
Within the glittering commercial Dreamgirls could be found the link to Meyerhold’s early experiments. Like Bennett, Meyerhold had been a dancer. But whereas Meyerhold’s radical departure in design and stage movement seemed to me like man’s early attempts to fly, Dreamgirls was like a space rocket. Bennett’s musical was the first theater piece to merge technology successfully with art. In its showbiz way, it was a work of genius.
When Michael Bennett??"the street kid from Buffalo??"read my review of Dreamgirls, he was impressed at being hailed as a genius in The Times of London. He invited me to dinner at his chic penthouse, which looked like a stage set overlooking Central Park. I soon learned that he’d never heard of Meyerhold: “Who’s this guy Shmeyerhold?” he asked me happily. Also at the dinner were Donna McKechnie of A Chorus Line, Henry Krieger and Robin Wagner. When I congratulated Mr. Wagner on his amazing Meyerholdian set, this unpretentious man said to me sweetly, “Well, maybe. But have you ever been to Studio 54?”
So much for theater intellectuals. The set was inspired by a Manhattan disco!
At dinner that night, Bennett said that for him the best moment of Dreamgirls came when he first heard Jennifer Holliday sing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” He played a recording of her singing the marathon song in rehearsal??"as I recall, she was accompanied only by a piano. Even that rough tape was enough to blow us all away. Bennett said he’d played it often before Dreamgirls opened: It reminded him of the exact moment when he knew he had a show.
He told me, too, that just as he was going into the Dreamgirls opening-night party at Tavern on the Green, his father had said, “It’s great, but not as good as A Chorus Line.” Those were the devastating words he dreaded hearing for the rest of his short life. Bennett was a man who was destined always to compete with his own shadow.
