The MasterVoices Podcast

Preparing Gershwin's 'Strike Up the Band': A Journey Through History, Humor, and Music

• MasterVoices • Season 1 • Episode 1

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 What was life like in the 1927? What changed by 1930? And how was it all reflected on stage? 

For over half a century, Strike Up the Band has been one of the great mysteries of the American musical theater - lovingly reconstructed and reworked by teams of theater makers, historians, and archivists. For the past year, Maestro Ted Sperling and theater historian Laurence Maslon have been crafting a new version that brings out the best of the original 1927 and 1930 scripts and scores. Listen as they discuss their process with John McWhorter- and share some great anecdotes. 

  • no broccoli, no pizza, no talkies 
  • slackers and hacks and chaff, oh my! 
  • business with cigar… continued business with cigar…
  • everyone pays attention to the way a note begins, not so much to how it ends.
  • Larry Hart had a brother, Teddy
  • ...and who is George Spelvin? 

ARTIST BIOS
JOHN MCWHORTER teaches linguistics at Columbia University, as well as Western Civilization and music history. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and elsewhere, and has been a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, and other books, including Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast, and has written a weekly newsletter for the New York Times since August 2021.

LAURENCE MASLON is a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and associate chair of the Graduate Acting Program. He is the host and producer of the radio series, Broadway to Main Street, on the local NPR-affiliate station WPPB-FM, which won the 2019 ASCAP Foundation/Deems Taylor Award for Radio Broadcast. Books include a companion volume to the PBS series Broadway: The American Musical, and Broadway to Main Street (Oxford University Press, 2018).  Editing work includes the two-volume set American Musicals (1927-1969) and Kaufman & Co., an anthology of Broadway comedies by George S. Kaufman, both published by the Library of America.

TED SPERLING is a music director, conductor, orchestrator, singer, pianist, violinist and violist. He is the Artistic Director of MasterVoices and was Music Director of the recent Broadway productions of My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, and The King and I. He has led the NY Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Boston Pops, and BBC Concert Orchestra, among many others, as well as the orchestras of New York City Opera and Houston Grand Opera. A graduate of Yale University and The Juilliard School, he appeared as Steve Allen in the Season Two finale of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” tedsperling.net
 
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The MasterVoices Podcast is a project of the New York City nonprofit MasterVoices (previously The Collegiate Chorale), whose mission is using the human voice to connect, inspire, and unite. Founded in 1941 by Robert Shaw, the Chorale was one of the first integrated choruses in the United States.

Learn more at www.mastervoices.org.