Description: Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, primarily historical in focus, and will occasionally be controversial.
Today's selection -- from Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of The Musical by Laurie Winer. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music was one of the most successful musicals of all time:
"Middle-class Americans growing up in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, … had no choice but to know much of [ The Sound of Music ] by heart. While critics were busy detesting the film, it always held its child audience rapt, followed by their offspring, and then theirs. To critics, questions like 'How do you keep a wave upon the sand?' and 'How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?' seemed treacly metaphors that revealed more about the author's sentimentality than they did about the uncontainable curiosity of yout
"Starting in the late 1960s, The Sound of Music fulfilled a purpose unforeseen by Rodgers or Hammerstein: as a balm to the children of what we now call 'blended families' (or those about to go in the blender). Partly because of the no-fault divorce laws of the 1970s, divorce rates more than doubled from 1960 to 1980. Approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s were eventually told it was 'not their fault.'
INTERNATIONAL INDEPENDENT ARTS COUNCIL - The Future Is Present