Preview
Identifier
Revue Program_Page_21
Creation Date
4-23-2021
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Theatre and Performance Studies
Description
DRAMATURGY - “A BUSHEL AND A PECK”
“A Bushel and a Peck” comes from the famous Broadway musical, Guys and Dolls, which made its first appearance on Broadway in 1950.The music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, and the book written by Jo Sterling and Abe Burrows. Guys and Dolls was an adaptation based on the short stories by Damon Runyon. Runyon’s stories were written in the 1920s and 1930s and contained gangsters, gamblers and many other characters in New York City. In his stories, he used formal language as well as slang making his dialect unique during this time. Guys and Dolls immediately took off and has since won many Tony awards including best musical, best choreography and best direction of a musical to name a few.
The song, “A Bushel and a Peck” was so popular that it was moved from the second act to the first act to appease the audience. The saying “A Bushel and a Peck” means “a lot of something” or “a great amount” which is symbolic because when Adelaide, a club singer, performs the song, her fiancé Nathan, the facilitator of illegal gambling in town, is at the club watching her. Nathan keeps telling Adelaide they will get married, “sometime in the future” but after 14 years of being engaged Adelaide is beginning to get restless.
In 1950, “A Bushel and a Peck” reached #5 on Cash Box magazines best-selling charts and is still widely known and popular to this day. Guys and Dolls was eventually made into a movie in 1955 but despite the song’s popularity, “A Bushel and a Peck” was omitted from the movie and was replaced with a song titled, “Pet me Poppa.”
Publisher
Arkansas State University
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Theatre Program
Keywords
musical, compliation, retrospective, medley
