Xanadu: The Marco Polo Musical is an original musical written and produced in 1953 by Seventh Army Special Services in Germany, the first of the numerous stage musicals, film musicals and songs inspired in part by the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, Kubla Khan with its familiar opening lines:
- In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
- A stately pleasure-dome decree
- Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
- Through caverns measureless to man
- Down to a sunless sea.
The score was written by a songwriting team, William P. Perry and William S. Wheeling, both of whom had been drawn into the Armed Forces shortly after their graduation from Harvard University. The cast and other members of the creative team were transferred from military units all over the world, and in spite of frequent cast changes as draftees were returned home, the show ran for five years and played both civilian and military theatres throughout Europe.
Read more about Xanadu: The Marco Polo Musical: History of The Show, Scenes and Music
Famous quotes containing the word musical:
“There was something refreshingly and wildly musical to my ears in the very name of the white man’s canoe, reminding me of Charlevoix and Canadian Voyageurs. The batteau is a sort of mongrel between the canoe and the boat, a fur-trader’s boat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)