Broadway
Musicals, 1943-2004
John Stewart |
Published 2005
1039 Pages,
No illustrations
Indexed by individuals and songs
McFarland & Company, Publishers
www.mcfarlandpub.com
List price $195 |
Click here to buy this book
 |
If you or someone on your gift list happens to be the kind of person who simply
has to know that Marvin Roth was one of four reed players in the pit when
A Chorus Line opened at the Shubert on October 19, 1975, that rehearsals
for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying began on August
3, 1961, that Dorothy Aull understudied Carol Burnett in the original
Once Upon A Mattress or that the original Damn Yankees returned 263 percent on
its investment, here's a book for you. It isn't exactly light reading (in
its sturdy library binding it weighs in at nearly five pounds). However, it
can be both the settler of numerous arguments and a source of
enjoyment in browsing for obscure but intriguing facts. Most fanatical fans
of musical theater will use it, however, to look up a specific show before
attending a new production, listening to a new recording or trying to
remember a fact that escapes them for the moment. Non-fanatical fans will,
on the other hand, wonder just why anyone would be fanatical enough to pay
$195 for such a tome. |
Contents: Reference
entries for every Broadway musical since Oklahoma! provide a synopsis
of the plot, the scenes and songs (in the order performed on opening night),
a discussion of how the show got to Broadway, its Broadway run and important
productions subsequent to its closing on Broadway. Complete cast (including
replacements) and creative team credits and even the musicians in the pit
are listed as well. This amounts to 772 shows. For another two thousand
shows that for one reason or another didn't meet the author's criteria for
being a bona fide "Broadway Musical" but which the author believes
constitute a significant part of the heritage of the musical theater, an
appendix offers abbreviated entries.There
are fun tidbits sprinkled throughout the volume (the entry on that original
Damn Yankees also tells you that the character of the catcher was
based on Yogi Berra). As fun as those tidbits are, however, it will be the
systematic listing of data that, over the years, will make the volume
valuable to serious students of the art form. I know it will have a
prominent place on my desk-side bookcase right next to Gerald Bordman's
chronicle American Musical Theatre, Ken Bloom's American Song,
Michael Portrantiere's TheaterMania Guide to Musical Theater Recordings
and Steven Suskin's two volume critical quote book Opening Nights on
Broadway.
A sampling of the facts in the listings reveals a high
level of accuracy where they can be compared to material in my own files or
to other sources. However, these listings go beyond much of what is
otherwise available and it will probably take a while before a consensus
emerges as to the reliability of this data. If frequent users don't come up
with frequent differences between this and other sources deemed reliable,
this volume will gain a reputation as a reliable source. In the meantime, it
is in the less objective portions of each entry that most of the
difficulties seem to lodge. In the author's preface he has a discussion of
shows that were "purely dance shows" in which he includes Kat and the
Kings (saying "who says a musical has to have a libretto?"). He must have
been thinking of some other show, for Kat and the Kings was no dance
show and certainly had a libretto. Among the tidbits in the less
data-driven section of the entries he includes a couple of clunkers such as
the success of Damn Yankees being an exception to the rule that
"plays about baseball don't work ... never have, never will." (He
hadn't heard about the successful baseball play Take Me Out?)
Harold Prince, in his four paragraph foreword for
which he gets credit on the cover almost as prominent as the author's name,
raises precisely the question that struck me when I read the biographical
sketch of the author, John Stewart - "who is John Stewart?" Unfortunately
neither Prince nor the biographical sketch gives much of an answer. Stewart
authored a number of other reference works for this publisher, but none on
theater. The closest he got to theater was a who's who of Italian movies.
The others ranged from the rulers of African states to Antarctica, and from
the moons of the solar system to the holdings of British royalty. How it
came to be that he has produced a thousand pages of otherwise hard to find
data on a subject of such interest to musical theater mavens is - to quote
Oscar Hammerstein III - "a puzzlement!" |
