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Ethan Mordden | |
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| Born | 1947 (age 76–77) Pennsylvania, U.S. |
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| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Friends Academy University of Pennsylvania |
Ethan Mordden (born 1947) [1] is an American author and musical theater researcher.
Mordden was born in Pennsylvania and raised in Venice, Italy, and Long Island, New York. He is a graduate of Friends Academy and the University of Pennsylvania. He first sought a career in show business, working as a music director on off-Broadway and in regional theatre, and enrolling in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop run by Lehman Engel. As both composer and lyricist, Mordden wrote musicals based on William Shakespeare's Measure For Measure and on Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson , but he ultimately ended up earning his living as a writer of English prose. In the 1970s, he was assistant editor to Dorothy Woolfolk on DC Comics such as The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love .
His stories, novels, essays, and non-fiction books cover multiple topics including American musical theater, opera, film. In his fiction, he wrote about the emergence and development of contemporary American gay culture as manifested in New York City. He has also written for The New Yorker , including three works of fiction, Critic At Large pieces on Cole Porter, Judy Garland, and the musical Show Boat , [2] and reviews of a biography of the Barrymores and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus.[ citation needed ] He later became a book reviewer for The Wall Street Journal .
His best-known fictional works are the interrelated series of stories known collectively as the "Buddies" cycle. In book form, these began with 1985's I have a Feeling We're not in Kansas Anymore. The fifth in the series, 2005's How's Your Romance?, is subtitled Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle. Together, the stories chronicle the times, loves, and losses of a close-knit group of friends, men who cope with the challenges of growing up and growing older.
Mordden’s 1995 novel How Long Has This Been Going On? follows the lives of a diverse group of men and women from 1949 to 1991 while moving from Los Angeles to the Midwest, then from San Francisco to the Northeast. All but one of the principal characters are gay or lesbian. Another one of Mordden's works of fiction, The Venice Adriana (1998), is built around the life and art of the opera soprano Maria Callas. Mordden's A Bad Man Is Easy To Find, published in 1989 under the pseudonym of M. J. Verlaine is a series of interrelated short stories about the lives of women, and has only one minor gay character. In 2008, Mordden published The Jewcatcher , a surrealistic novel set in Berlin from the end of the Weimar Republic to the last day of the European war. The many principal characters are a combination of Mordden's inventions and real-life figures such as Adolf Hitler, Marlene Dietrich, Raoul Wallenberg, Claus von Stauffenberg, and President Paul von Hindenburg. In 2012, Mordden published his first volume of gay fiction in eight years, The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man. In the form of a novella and four short stories, the book explores relationships in which one man dominates another. In 2015, Mordden returned to writing historical fiction with One Day in France, set in Limoges and Oradour-Sur-Glane when the latter, a peaceful village, was destroyed and its inhabitants brutally murdered by a squad of the Nazi Schutzstaffel. In 2021, Mordden published another novel, You Can't Be Too Young or Too Pretty , a black comedy about a murder cult preying on college students in an unnamed American town.
Mordden's nonfiction includes seven volumes detailing the history of the Broadway musical from the 1920s through the 1970s (followed by an eighth volume going up to 2003 in a different style from the seven-title series), guides to orchestral music and operatic recordings, and a cultural history of the American 1920s entitled That Jazz . He has also published Demented , an examination of the phenomenon of the operatic diva, and a coffee-table book on the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein. His 2012 book Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya is a dual biography chronicling the romance and professional collaboration of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, and in 2013 he published Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre . [3] He has written a number of books on film, including analyses of the influence of Hollywood studios and of the role of female film stars.
The New York Times spoke of Mordden as being among a group of "ruminators on popular culture" animated by "the gun-moll gesticulations of Pauline Kael, for whom responsiveness was everything." [4]
The Threepenny Opera is a German "play with music" by Bertolt Brecht, adapted from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay's 18th-century English ballad opera, The Beggar's Opera, and four ballads by François Villon, with music by Kurt Weill. Although there is debate as to how much, if any, contribution Hauptmann might have made to the text, Brecht is usually listed as sole author.
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall and a number of works on Jewish themes. He became a United States citizen in 1943.
Lotte Lenya was an Austrian-American singer, diseuse, and actress, long based in the United States. In the German-speaking and classical music world, she is best remembered for her performances of the songs of her first husband, Kurt Weill. In English-language cinema, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as a jaded aristocrat in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961). She also played the murderous and sadistic Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love (1963).
Harold Smith Prince, commonly known as Hal Prince, was an American theatre director and producer known for his work in musical theatre.
Lost in the Stars is a musical with book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson and music by Kurt Weill, based on the novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) by Alan Paton. The musical premiered on Broadway in 1949; it was the composer's last work for the stage before he died the following year.
High Button Shoes is a 1947 musical with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn and book by George Abbott and Stephen Longstreet. It was based on the semi-autobiographical 1946 novel The Sisters Liked Them Handsome by Stephen Longstreet. The story concerns the comic entanglements of the Longstreet family with two con men in Atlantic City.
Johnny Johnson is a musical with a book and lyrics by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill. It premiered in 1936 on Broadway.
Alfred Fox Uhry is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has received an Academy Award, two Tony Awards and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for dramatic writing for Driving Miss Daisy. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Paul Eliot Green was an American playwright whose work includes historical dramas of life in North Carolina during the first decades of the twentieth century. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1927 play, In Abraham's Bosom, which was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1926-1927.
"Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" is the opening song from the musical Oklahoma!, which premiered on Broadway in 1943. It was written by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist/librettist Oscar Hammerstein II. The leading male character in Oklahoma!, Curly McLain, sings the song at the beginning of the first scene of the musical. The refrain runs: "Oh, what a beautiful mornin'! / Oh, what a beautiful day! / I've got a beautiful feelin' / Ev'rythin's goin' my way." Curly's "brimming optimism is perfectly captured by Rodgers' ebullient music and Hammerstein's buoyant pastoral lyrics."
Henry Martyn Blossom Jr. was an American writer, playwright, novelist, opera librettist, and lyricist. He first gained wide attention for his second novel, Checkers: A Hard Luck Story (1896), which was successfully adapted by Blossom into a 1903 Broadway play, Checkers. It was Blossom's first stage work and his first critical success in the theatre. The play in turn was adapted by others creatives into two silent films, one in 1913 and the other in 1919, and the play was the basis for the 1920 Broadway musical Honey Girl. Checkers was soon followed by Blossom's first critical success as a lyricist, the comic opera The Yankee Consul (1903), on which he collaborated with fellow Saint Louis resident and composer Alfred G. Robyn. This work was also adapted into a silent film in 1921. He later collaborated with Robyn again; writing the book and lyrics for their 1912 musical All for the Ladies.
LoveMusik is a musical written by Alfred Uhry, using a selection of music by Kurt Weill. The story explores the romance and lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, based on Speak Low : The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, edited and translated by Lys Symonette and Kim H. Kowalke. Harold Prince had read Speak Low and suggested the idea for a musical to Uhry. Uhry and Prince worked on LoveMusik for four years to develop it into a stage work. The story spans over 25 years, from the first meeting of Lenya and Weill as struggling young artists, to their popularity in Europe and America, to Weill's death from a heart attack at age 50.
Der Zar lässt sich photographieren is an opera buffa in one act by Kurt Weill, op. 21. The German libretto was written by Georg Kaiser, and Weill composed the music in 1927. It is a Zeitoper, a genre of music theatre which used contemporary settings and characters, satiric plots which often include technology and machinery. Musically the Zeitoper genre tends to be eclectic and borrow from Jazz. The genre has practically disappeared from the world's opera houses. Historically the Zeitoper came to an abrupt end with the Nazi period, and after the war the cultural institutions were perhaps hesitant to return to the lighter, often decadent and comic operas written before the holocaust changed the artistic perspective. This conjecture is supported by the statistical fact that of all of Weill's, Schönberg's, Hindemith's and Krenek's works – it is these very shorter, satirical Zeitoper works that are no longer performed.
20th Century Blues is a live 1996 album by English singer Marianne Faithfull, in collaboration with pianist Paul Trueblood.
Pine Brook Country Club is a private lake association in Nichols, Connecticut, a village within the Town of Trumbull. It began when Benjamin Plotkin purchased Pinewood Lake and the surrounding countryside on Mischa Hill. Plotkin built an auditorium with a revolving stage and forty rustic cabins and incorporated as the Pine Brook Country Club in 1930. Plotkin's dream was to market the rural lakeside club as a summer resort for people to stay and enjoy theatrical productions. The Club remained in existence until productions were disrupted by World War II, and was reorganized as a private lake association in 1944.
Lauren Tolbert Worsham is an American actress and singer known for her work in the opera and musical theatre. She received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her role in A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder. She is also known for being the lead singer of the band Sky-Pony, which has released two albums with original songs titled "Say You Love Me Like You Mean It" and "Raptured Live".
Lauren Jelencovich is an American singer.
A Princess in Berlin is a 1980 historical novel by Arthur R.G. Solmssen.
Bertlies "Lys" Symonette was a German-American pianist, chorus singer and musical stage performer. In 1945 she took a job as rehearsal pianist, coach, understudy or multi-tasking "swing-girl" for The Firebrand of Florence, a Kurt Weill musical making its Broadway debut. This proved to be the start of a new career as Weill's musical assistant: from that point a principal focus of her professional life was on the composer and, more particularly after his early death in 1950, the career of his widow, the stage performer Lotte Lenya. When Lenya died, in 1981, Lys Symonette was appointed vice-president of the Kurt Weill Foundation, also serving as its "musical executive". When she died her friend and frequent collaborator, Prof. Kim H. Kowalke, published an affectionate tribute in which he described her as "the last and irreplaceable link to the inner artistic circle of Weill and Lenya".
"J'attends un navire", also known as "I Am Waiting for a Ship", is a song written in 1934 by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Jacques Deval. The song was written for the musical Marie Galante but later became an unofficial anthem of the French Resistance.
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