Norman Dello Joio / Grand Hotel

On this day in classical music: American composer Norman Dello Joio was born in New York City in 1913. Trained as an organist, Dello Joio eventually studied composition at The Juilliard School and subsequently became one of the mid-20th century’s best-known composers. He wrote a large body of orchestral, band and choral music. Dello Joio won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his “Meditations on Ecclesiastes” and an Emmy Award for his score to the 1964 television documentary “The Louvre.” Dello Joio taught at Sarah Lawrence College and the Mannes College of Music. He also served as professor and dean at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts. Listen to Jack Stamp and the Keystone Wind Ensemble perform Dello Joio’s “From Every Horizon.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA93DHHYbs8

On this day in the musical theatre: Author Vicki Baum was born in Vienna in 1888. Her 1929 novel “Menschen im Hotel,” better known as “Grand Hotel,” became her first international success. Baum was invited to write the screenplay for the film version of “Grand Hotel,” which became a classic and won an Academy Award as Best Picture. Nearly 30 years after her death in 1960, “Grand Hotel” became a hit musical that featured direction and choreography by Tommy Tune. The musical, which ran for 2½ years, won five Tony Awards. Watch Brent Barrett (Baron Felix von Gaigern) and Tony Award winner Michael Jeter (Otto Kringelein) and company perform the showstopping “We’ll Take a Glass Together” on the 1990 Tony Awards broadcast. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QUCt4t92Zs

Musical musings: The director and choreographer Tommy Tune may have the most extravagant imagination in the American musical theater right now, and there isn’t a moment, or a square inch of stage space, that escapes its reach in “Grand Hotel.” The musical at the Martin Beck Theater is an uninterrupted two hours of continuous movement, all dedicated to creating the tumultuous atmosphere of the setting: an opulent way station at a distant crossroads of history in Berlin — that of 1928. Think of a three-dimensional collage — or a giant Joseph Cornell box two tall stories high — filled with the smoky light, faded gilt fixtures, dirty secrets, lost mementos and ghostly people of its time and place. Then imagine someone shaking the whole thing up as if waves were tossing around the Titanic. That’s Mr. Tune’s “Grand Hotel.” Mr. Tune’s restless manipulation of these resources is often inspired. In the opening number — a directorial tour de force to match the equivalent prologue, “Wilkommen,” in Harold Prince’s Weimar Berlin musical “Cabaret” — phalanxes of performers crisscross the stage in ever-changing configurations, the characters individually singing of their lots, until finally the audience sees the panorama of lives, upstairs and down, intersecting throughout the vast hotel. Though the effect is that of cinematic crosscutting, there’s never an intrusion of scenic machinery to yank the characters about. “Grand Hotel” finds its kaleidoscopic activity and churning pace in the constant rearrangement of the dozens of straight-backed chairs that are the set’s dominant furnishing, or in the sudden appearance of a quartet of desperate phone callers in a cacophonous downstage tableau, or in the hallucinatory fragments of period dance steps along the shadowy periphery of main events. As in Mr. Tune’s “Nine,” the large cast is omnipresent and usually on the run. So dense is the atmosphere that finally it can be stilled only by eradication — an effect Mr. Tune accomplishes in the coup de theatre that brings the evening to a close. – Frank Rich in The New York Times

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