Our Grand Finale concert will focus on three American writers -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), John O'Hara (1905-70), and Damon Runyon (1880-1945). In the case of Fitzgerald, we'll show how he constantly referenced song titles and lyrics, in both his short stories and novels, in a way that they became almost a literary version of a film score, and used these songs, and their associations, to augment and further his characters and plots. There are over seventy instances of popular songs mentioned in his books, and that's not counting his own "made-up" titles and lyrics...
With O'Hara and Runyon, we'll turn the tables and show the influence their writing had on popular composers, with excerpts from Rodgers & Hart's 1940 Pal Joey, which was based a series O'Hara short stories published by The New Yorker in the late 1930s, and Frank Loesser's 1950 masterpiece Guys And Dolls, which was based on several Damon Runyon short stories: "The Idyll of Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure" and "Pick The Winner", all from his 1932 collection, Guys And Dolls.
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| Event Personnel |
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Julie Alsin, vocalsShirley Andress, vocalsClairdee, vocalsBob Cross, vocalsWilliam Mark Hulings, vocalsIan Whitcomb, vocalsDan Barrett, tromboneJesse Cloninger, reedsRod Fleeman, guitarDoug Miller, bassChuck Redd, drums |
| SET I -- F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| Tender Is The Night (1941) |
| |  | Hindustan (1918) Oliver Wallace, Harold Weeks (w/m) |
| | Smiles (1917) The Passing Show of 1918 J. Will Callahan (w) Lee S. Roberts (m) |
| |  | Poor Butterfly (1916) The Big Show John Golden (w) Raymond Hubbell (m) |
| SET II -- John O'Hara & Damon Runyon |
| John O'Hara - Pal Joey (1940) |
| Damon Runyon - Guys and Dolls (1950) |