Rise Up!: Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton

Description

Penned by one of America’s best-known daily theatre critics and organized chronologically, this lively and readable book tells the story of Broadway’s renaissance from the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, via the disaster that was Spiderman: Turn off the Dark through the unparalleled financial, artistic and political success of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. It is the story of the embrace of risk and substance. In so doing, Chris Jones makes the point that the theatre thrived by finally figuring out how to embrace the bold statement and insert itself into the national conversation - only to find out in 2016 that a hefty sector of the American public had not been listening to what it had to say. Chris Jones was in the theatres when and where it mattered. He takes readers from the moment when Tony Kushner’s angel crashed (quite literally) through the ceiling of prejudice and religious intolerance to the triumph of Hamilton, with the coda of the Broadway cast addressing a new Republican vice-president from the stage. That complex performance - at once indicative of the theatre’s new clout and its inability to fully change American society for the better - is the final scene of the book. Cover Contents Acknowledgments 2016: Prologue 1 1993: An Angel Lands 2 1994: The Emergent Power of the Solo Voice 3 1996: Fighting Urban Gentrification and Paying Rent 4 1997: The Lion King Roars and the Family Returns to Broadway 5 1999: A Short-Order Cook with a Long Path to Broadway 6 2001: Grief, Metamorphoses, and Transformation 7 2002: The Pull of Las Vegas and the Rise of the Meta 8 2002: Edward Albee, the Love of a Goat, and the Death of Off-Broadway 9 2007: A Recession Thwarted by an Ironic Blast from Chicago 10 2010: A Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Awakened 11 2010: Bloody Bloody Wiki Wiki Self-Awareness 12 2011: Unlucky: Spider-Man and the Great Broadway Overreach 13 2014: A Dream, No Longer Deferred 14 2016: Love Is Love Is Love Is Love Is Love Is Love Is Love Is Love Notes Index