The Kids Are Alright: Post-Fifties Musicals and the Rise of Youth Culture

1/31/10 to 2/28/10

These are not your parents' musicals-or maybe they are, if your parents were teenagers in the sixties. Sing along to the sounds of the widening generation gap, from 1961's West Side Story to 2008's Fruit Fly.

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  • West Side Story, February 13

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Paint Your Wagon

    Sunday, January 31 3:00 pm
    Joshua Logan (U.S., 1969). Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, and Jean Seberg are unlikely musical comedy stars, but here they are, belting out the Lerner and Loewe tunes as they form a frontier threesome in Gold Rush–era California. (166 mins)
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  • The Music Man

    Saturday, February 6 5:30 pm
    Morton Da Costa (U.S., 1962). Huckster Robert Preston prescribes a musical cure for teenage “trouble” in this classic piece of Americana, its sweet Iowa corn laced with commercial con. (151 mins)
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  • Pennies from Heaven

    Sunday, February 7 3:00 pm
    Herbert Ross (U.S., 1981). In the American adaptation of the classic Dennis Potter serial, Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters take refuge from Depression-era Chicago in the magical realm of pop culture. (108 mins)
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  • West Side Story

    Saturday, February 13 4:00 pm
    Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins (U.S., 1961). When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way: the vibrant Leonard Bernstein/Jerome Robbins musical reinvents the Romeo and Juliet story for New York City. (155 mins)
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  • Absolute Beginners

    Sunday, February 14 4:15 pm
    Julien Temple (U.K., 1986). Temple's look back at budding British youth culture circa 1958 audaciously melds sixties mod mania and eighties punk aggression. With performances by David Bowie, Ray Davies, and others. (108 mins)
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  • Bye Bye Birdie

    Friday, February 19 8:30 pm
    George Sidney (U.S., 1963). An Elvis-esque singer, about to join the army, visits a small town to bestow a “last kiss” on one lucky girl-the nubile Ann-Margret-in this boisterous showbiz sendup. (112 mins)
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  • Hair

    Sunday, February 21 5:30 pm
    Milos Forman (U.S., 1979). Made a decade after the original play opened on Broadway, this adaptation is a full-tressed tribute to the spiritual transcendence of late-sixties counterculture. (121 mins)
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  • Pink Floyd The Wall

    Thursday, February 25 8:35 pm
    Alan Parker (U.K., 1982). Bob Geldof's burned-out rocker inhabits a lurid fantasia of grim memories, psychic torments, and fascist ecstasies in this full-on audiovisual adaptation of the chart-topping LP. (95 mins)
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  • True Stories

    Saturday, February 27 20:35
    David Byrne (U.S., 1986). Byrne offers an affectionate musical tour of the mythical town of Virgil, Texas, home to an array of American eccentrics played by John Goodman, Swoosie Kurtz, Spalding Gray, and others. (88 mins)
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  • Fruit Fly

    Sunday, February 28 5:30 pm
    H. P. Mendoza (U.S., 2008). H. P. Mendoza in person. A Filipina performance artist tries to make it on the San Francisco scene in an infectious, unstoppable film by the writer and star of Colma: The Musical. (95 mins)
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