This incarnation veered from the original source material, was set in present-day Rome and featured new characters unfamiliar to fans of the film, novel, and play. The initial musical adaptation, with a book by Luther Davis and music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest, took the stage in 1958 and was titled At the Grand. The novel turned stage play was adapted for the silver screen in the 1932 Academy Award-winning film, Grand Hotel.
Based on Vicki Baum's 1929 novel and play People in a Hotel (Menschen Im Hotel), the musical follows the intertwining desires and tragedies of an extravagant hotel's complex guests in 1928 Berlin. Grand Hotel: The Musical's journey to Broadway success proved as intricate and layered as the tangled stories of the characters inhabiting its fabled walls. Grand Hotel took its final Broadway bow on April 25, 1992, having played a total of 1,017 performances! The production was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won five, including two for Tommy Tune (Best Direction and Best Choreography). The sumptuous show, with its sweeping score and richly designed set, transported audiences to the bygone era of 1920s Berlin. Watching GRAND HOTEL with a sense of what was about to happen in Germany, one sees not so much a sophisticated soap-opera as a macabre meditation on the genteel side of a very dark phase in history.On November 12, 1989, Broadway was lavished in a bit more luxury as audience members were welcomed to the opening splendor of Grand Hotel: The Musical. An American audience in 1932 would merely have seen him as a fat-cat, but, in the Weimar Republic, particularly just before the Nazis took power, such a stereotype was provocative.
Wallace Beery's character, a corrupt industrialist, was, in 1932, a staple of German art and theatre. GRAND HOTEL, based on a work by Vicki Baum, who wrote for a German readership, is less a story of the idle rich and the poor who serve them than an observation of the quiet rage stealing over a society whose war wounds only seem to deepen as time passes.
The most pointed remark runs something like "we won battle after battle, only to be told we'd lost the war.") At the time this film was made, Hitler was about a year and a half away from becoming Chancellor. There are several moments (during scenes with the disfigured doctor in particular) when characters refer to their sacrifices in the First World War. GRAND HOTEL, filmed in 1932, is set in a luxury hotel in contemporary Berlin. Setting aside the fact that this is a landmark in the history of Hollywood, it has an unintended effect of foreshadowing the Second World War.
0 kommentar(er)
