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Post by scarlet on Feb 14, 2009 19:18:33 GMT -5
I'm trying to figure out what the first Juke Box Musical is. Listening to Forever Plaid, I'm thinking that's it. Anyone have any thoughts?
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Post by Nene on Feb 14, 2009 19:45:05 GMT -5
I'm trying to figure out what the first Juke Box Musical is. Listening to Forever Plaid, I'm thinking that's it. Anyone have any thoughts? Possibly, what year is that from again? The earliest I can think of is Smokey Joe's Cafe, but I don't think that was the first. I'm sure there's early stuff that none of us will probably even think of.
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Post by scarlet on Feb 14, 2009 19:50:29 GMT -5
Forever Plaid's CD came out in 1990 and Smokey Joe was 1995.
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Post by IchBinRory on Feb 14, 2009 20:24:19 GMT -5
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Post by Nene on Feb 16, 2009 13:15:27 GMT -5
I'm going to say it's reliable here. Wiki tends to be more accurate than people give it credit for. People just need to read the articles intelligently and not use them as paper sources! Anyways, I forgot about Leader of the Pack. I knew there was something in the 80s. I have never heard of The Night That Made America Famous. Has anyone here? It's mention of Beggar's Opera wants to make me say technically we can date the jukebox to then.
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Post by exedore on Feb 18, 2009 13:24:16 GMT -5
The Night That Made America Famous had a fair amount of original material and Harry Chapin himself performed in it every night in addition to writing the thing so it doesn't quite count - it was more like a big concert than a traditional musical.
The earliest jukebox musicals would in fact be from the 20's and 30's when people went to see stars vs. shows and it wasn't uncommon to take some current hits and slap a generic around them to make a quick and easy vehicle.
EDIT to add that Return to the Forbidden Planet predates Plaid by a longshot.
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Post by Nene on Feb 18, 2009 13:53:10 GMT -5
Do they actually term the musicals from the 20's and 30's as juxebox? I'm not sure what the theatre historians are encompassing as a juxebox. I always saw those old shows as an entirely separate genre. The current hits were written for those stars for the musicals they put them in. There was plenty of reusing of songs from show to show, but they wrote original stuff too. So I am not sure it is a juxebox in the same sense that we use it now.
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Post by Valjean87 on Feb 18, 2009 14:08:13 GMT -5
The earliest jukebox musicals would in fact be from the 20's and 30's when people went to see stars vs. shows and it wasn't uncommon to take some current hits and slap a generic around them to make a quick and easy vehicle. I have to agree there, as one may look back into the era of Tin-Pan Alley in which popular songs were just slapped in for shows(remember this is way before the MGM 1939 film "Wizard of Oz" and the 1943 Broadway premiere of "Oklahoma!" that musicals actually had a plot to flow with the songs to make sense).
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