![]() ![]() (Each was the youngest ever graduate of his university at that point.) They were rich and spoiled by their parents. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were two brilliant rich kids who had both graduated from top-notch Midwest universities in their teens. One of the biggest of these stories was that of Leopold and Loeb, which did not really need a lot of sensationalising. The newspapers, journals and radio would pick up on some interesting crime and sensationalise it beyond its own power to shock. So they made heroes - near-gods really - out of a shy pilot who happened to fly the Atlantic solo, athletes who were a cut or two above the average, flagpole-sitters, flappers, goldfish swallowers…anyone who dared to be slightly outrageous and thus newsworthy.īut criminals, real criminals, were the aristocracy of that last grouping. To battle the competition and sell more of their product, journalists had to come up with exciting stories. The number of newspapers and magazines mushroomed in that decade as a burgeoning readership emerged in the US. ![]() Jazz was actually born in New Orleans a quarter of a century before the 20's got started, but it was radio and the phonograph which helped spread this music around the country to white youths who enthusiastically adopted it as the anthem for their rebellion against the world they had inherited.īut an even bigger role in creating and shaping the Roaring Twenties was the print media. These two helped spread the musical form that gave the period its other nickname - The Jazz Age. This mass media included the newly invented phenomenon of radio as well as the phonograph and the cumbersome records played on it. The 'Roaring Twenties' was very much an invention of the mass media. The Roaring Twenties element was lacking here. Within the theatre, I had much more the feel of being back in our own young century. Most of the 20's atmosphere for this production was provided in the foyer before the show by a squad of women dressed as flappers, selling programmes and such. The first of these was Never The Sinner by John Logan, which takes up the case of Leopold and Loeb, two notorious thrill killers from the 1920's, put up by The Stage Club. Interestingly, the two plays dealt with sensational American criminal cases of eighty years apart. In a quarter marked not just by a dearth in plays of intellectual challenge but by a shortage of English-language plays overall, two of the biggest draws in Singapore theatre were works by Irish-American playwrights perhaps better known for their Oscar-winning or nominated scripts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |