About the work
Grand Hotel is a musical based on Vicki Baum's novel "Menschen im Hotel" ("Grand Hotel"), with music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest, additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, and a book by Luther Davis. Its 1989 Broadway premiere, in Tommy Tune's flowing, intermissionless direction and choreography, won five Tony Awards. The work weaves the fates of several hotel guests into an elegant, melancholy round.
Plot
Berlin, 1928: in the lobby of a fashionable luxury hotel, the paths of very different guests cross over a few days. An ageing, lonely prima ballerina searches for new will to live; an impoverished, charming baron scrapes by as a hotel thief; a terminally ill bookkeeper wants to spend his last days in luxury; a young typist dreams of Hollywood; and an unscrupulous industrialist fights for his crumbling empire. As love, despair, betrayal and death collide, life in the hotel turns on regardless – "always the same" and yet a turning point for each.
Cultural significance
Grand Hotel is regarded as a triumph of Tommy Tune's directorial art, binding the interlocking episodes into an unbroken flow of images without scene-change pauses. With numbers such as the rousing "We'll Take a Glass Together" and the ballad "Love Can't Happen", the score combines Charleston elegance and Weimar decadence. The show is a prime example of the through-choreographed "concept musical" of the late 1980s and of the fascination with the vanishing world of the Weimar Republic.