Lehman Engel
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A. Lehman Engel (September 14, 1910, Jackson, Mississippi – August 29, 1982, New York City) was an American composer and conductor of Broadway musicals, television and film.
Work in theatre, television and films
Engel worked in a variety of positions on television specials. He was composer and conductor of the music for the famed 1954 television production of
starring the same two actors.He was conductor of the first (and so far, the only) television version of
Engel also composed the music for the 1939 Broadway revival of Hamlet, starring Maurice Evans; the original 1948 stage production of Maxwell Anderson's Anne of the Thousand Days, starring Rex Harrison and Joyce Redman; and for the 1960 play, There Was a Little Girl, starring Jane Fonda and Dean Jones.[4]
In 1965, he served as the musical director for the Broadway production of La Grosse Valise (composer Gérard Calvi, lyrics by Harold Rome)
The BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop
Engel founded the
Lehman Engel worked as
Recordings
Engel also conducted the first 3-LP version of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess, a 1951 Columbia Masterworks Records album which was highly acclaimed, but did not, as advertised, really feature the complete opera. The mono recording, starring Lawrence Winters and Camilla Williams, was eventually released on CD. It was the longest Porgy and Bess album made up to that time (129 minutes), and would remain so for many years, until it was superseded in the 1970s by two complete recordings of the opera which both won Grammys.
Between the late 1940s and early 1950s, under the supervision of Columbia Records executive Goddard Lieberson, Engel conducted what were then the most complete recordings of several classic Broadway musicals of the past, many of which were appearing as albums for the first time - among them Girl Crazy (with Mary Martin performing both Ginger Rogers and Ethel Merman's old stage roles), Oh, Kay! (with Barbara Ruick as Kay and Jack Cassidy as Jimmy de Winter), Babes in Arms (again featuring Cassidy and Mary Martin), and Pal Joey (with Harold Lang in the title role and Vivienne Segal repeating her original 1940 stage role as Vera Simpson). All of these were studio recordings, not original cast albums. The Pal Joey recording was so successful that it actually led to a major, long-running revival of the show in 1952, with the same two stars who had appeared on the album, Vivienne Segal (who had also starred in the original 1940 stage production) and Harold Lang.
He also conducted what was then the most complete recording of The Student Prince (with Robert Rounseville as the Prince and Dorothy Kirsten as the barmaid Kathie) in 1952, as well as what was then the most complete recording of Oklahoma! that same year. The Oklahoma! album used Robert Russell Bennett's original orchestrations and starred Nelson Eddy as the cowboy Curly.[5]
For
All of these recordings were eventually issued on CD and were milestones in their time for their completeness.
As author
Engel also wrote several books on musical theatre. One of them, The American Musical Theatre: A Consideration, was perhaps the very first book to discuss in detail the writing of a Broadway musical, the elements that went into it, and the art of adapting "straight" plays into musicals.[6]
Engel was close friends with
References
- IMDb
- ^ "Li'l Abner (1959)". IMDb. June 15, 1961. Retrieved August 1, 2015.
- ^ Mantle, Burns (ed.) The Best Plays of 1959–1960, Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1960, p. 299.
- ^ Mantle, p. 324.
- ^ "Cast Album Database". Retrieved August 27, 2016.
- ^ Engel, Lehman, "The American Musical Theater, a Consideration", distributed by The Macmillan Company, New York, 1967
- ISBN 0472098586. Retrieved August 1, 2015.