Knickerbocker Holiday

Infobox Musical
name= Knickerbocker Holiday
subtitle=


caption=
music= Kurt Weill
lyrics= Maxwell Anderson
book= Maxwell Anderson
basis= Washington Irving's
"Father Kninckerbocker's Stories"
productions= 1939 Broadway
1944 Film
awards=

"Knickerbocker Holiday" is a Broadway musical written by Kurt Weill (music) and Maxwell Anderson (book and lyrics); it was directed by Joshua Logan. It opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on October 19 1938 and closed on March 11 1939 after 168 performances. The original production starred Walter Huston, Jeanne Madden, and Ray Middleton. Among the songs introduced in the show was the "September Song", now considered a pop standard."Knickerbocker Holiday "is both a romantic comedy and a thinly veiled allegory equating the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whose ancestor is one of the characters on the corrupt town council) with fascism. As is apparent from the preface he wrote for the play, as well as the play and the songs themselves, Maxwell Anderson was a pacifist and an individualist anarchist. He saw the New Deal as another example of the corporatism and concentration of political power which had given rise to Nazism and Stalinism. His animus toward the state is more soberly revealed in one of his two tragedies about the Sacco and Vanzetti execution, "Winterset". This play, coincidentally, starred Burgess Meredith, the same actor who was originally to star in Knickerbocker Holiday (Burgess, a friend of Weill's, who was to play the romantic young lead Brom Broek, left when he saw the villainous Stuyvessant character growing into a more a more lovable and important role, upstaging him). The setting of the musical is New Amsterdam. It is narrated by Washington Irving, who wrote the source material for the musical, "Father Knickerbocker's Stories". It begins shortly before the arrival of the new Governor, Peter Stuyvessant (played by Walter Huston in the Broadway show). Broek, an American individualist, cannot take orders. If ever anyone gives him an order, he assaults them. This has made it difficult to court his beloved, Tina Tienhoven, the daughter of the head of the town council.

Stuyvessant arrives just in time to rescue Broek from a hanging engineered by his beloved's father, in order to get the impoverished ne'er do well to make way for the wealthy and powerful Stuyvessant himself as a suitor for the fair Tina. Naturally Broek is grateful: until Stuyvessant quickly asserts what is for all intents and purposes a fascist dictatorship.

ongs

;Act I
* Clackety-Clack - Washington Irving and Girls
* It's a Law - Tienhoven and Council
* There's Nowhere to Go But Up - Brom Broeck, Tenpin and Ensemble
* It Never Was You - Brom Broeck and Tina Tienhoven
* How Can You Tell an American? - Brom Broeck and Washington Irving
* Will You Remember Me? - Brom Broeck, Tina Tienhoven and Ensemble
* One Touch of Alchemy - Pieter Stuyvesant and Ensemble
* The One Indispensable Man - Pieter Stuyvesant and Tienhoven
* Young People Think About Love - Tienhoven, Brom Broeck and Ensemble
* September Song - Pieter Stuyvesant;Act II
* Ballad of the Robbers - Washington Irving
* We Are Cut in Twain - Brom Broeck and Tina Tienhoven
* There's Nowhere to Go But Up (Reprise) - Washington Irving
* To War! - Pieter Stuyvesant, Council and Male Ensemble
* Our Ancient Liberties - Tienhoven, Anthony Corlear and Council
* Romance and Musketeer - Ensemble
* The Scars - Pieter Stuyvesant and Ensemble
* Dirge for a Soldier - Ensemble
* Ve Vouldn't Gonto Do It - Ensemble

The 1944 film version, starring Nelson Eddy as Broeck, Constance Dowling as Tina, and Charles Coburn as Stuyvesant, not only removed most of the songs and added new ones not by Weill and Anderson, but watered down the political allegory considerably, despite being released during World War II.

External links

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* [http://imdb.com/title/tt0036988 Internet Movie Database Listing]