Billy Bishop Goes to War Front Cover

Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9780889221963
Pages: 104
Pub. Date: January 1 1982
Dimensions: 8.5" x 5.5" x 0.25"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Fiction / FIC014040

  • DRAMA / Canadian
  • HISTORY / Wars & Conflicts / World War I
  • HISTORY / Military / Aviation & Space
  • FICTION / Historical / 20th Century / World War I

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Billy Bishop Goes to War

By John MacLachlan Gray
With Eric Peterson

Billy Bishop Goes to War ranks as one of Canada’s most successful and endearing musical dramas in history. The Governor General’s Award-winning musical documents the glorious World War I exploits of Canadian flying ace Billy Bishop.

"Billy Bishop is a high-flying ace of a show, capturing the humour, the hellfire and the derring-do of an extraordinary career … The score is filled with vintage replicas of the kind of songs that sent men rushing in—and out—of battle. There are martial airs, barracksroom ditties, Kiplingesque tunes of glory, Gilbert and Sullivan-like patter songs and also a bitter brew of Brecht-Weill.”
New York Times

Billy Bishop Goes to War is a delightful—and cunningly wrought—work of art.”
New Yorker

“A landmark of the Canadian theatre … John Gray’s success with Billy Bishop lies in the universality of the human individual—a universality that works precisely because Gray has kept the show on one-individual terms. He creates and deflates the hero myth in the same gesture.”
Vancouver Sun