Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber by Block, Geoffrey (good story books to read .TXT) 📕

and critical material on the Broadway musical has grown impressively, even exponentially, over the last decade, I was not able to take full advantage of the new research and thinking on the musicals discussed in the first edition. The expanded Bibliography, which includes some of this unincorporated literature, will point the way to new directions and possibilities.

As in the past, much of this new work emphasizes biography, social history, and the librettos of musicals without addressing how the music works with words and stories. I have addressed some of the negative ramifications of this trend in a review essay published in 2004.7 In contrast to the isolated exceptions that precede the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, however, many studies do now seriously engage with music and music’s interaction with lyrics and narratives.8

Another noticeable trend among the many books that have appeared since the mid-1990s is the relative absence of attention, or sympathy, to musicals that arrived after the end of the so-called Golden Age in the mid-1960s. In an “Omnibus Review” of five significant books in the field published between 2003 and 2005, for example, Charles Hamm notes “an almost complete absence in these books of meaningful commentary on American musicals of the past three decades.”9 When books do not ignore the musicals of the last generation (other than Sondheim), the tone frequently changes from respect to disdain, with special xenophobic antipathy reserved for the imported megamusicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber (Cats, Phantom), the team of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg (Les Misérables and Miss Saigon), and the Godfather who produced this quartet of box office juggernauts, Cameron Macintosh.10 Another assumption governing many Broadway surveys and other recent scholarship is that anything backed by Disney cannot be good, despite the fact that Beauty and the Beast (1994) and the still-running The Lion King (1997), directed and designed by Julie Taymor, currently stand as the fifth and eighth most popular Broadway musicals of all time.

Among the many new books in the field published during the past decade or so, major work has been published on several of the musicals featured in the first edition of Enchanted Evenings. Biographies, autobiographies, critical studies, publications of letters and lyrics, and other important books and essays have appeared to inform and enlighten the life and work of many major figures and shows and offer new information and ideas to those introduced in acts I and II.11 Here are a few samples:

• Show Boat: Stephen Banfield includes an important analytical and critical study of Show Boat in his book, Jerome Kern, and Todd Decker has begun to publish the fruits of his archival work on Show Boat.12

• Porgy and Bess: Howard Pollack’s monumental life and works study of George Gershwin devotes nearly one hundred pages to multiple aspects of this important work from its genesis and production history to revivals, recordings, and films. I have also had the privilege of reading Larry Starr’s insightful chapter on this work that will soon be readily available.13

• Lady in the Dark and Oklahoma!: In 2007, Oxford University Press published bruce d. mcclung’s award-winning “biography” of Lady in the Dark, published by Oxford University Press, a study that expands and offers new insights on the research of earlier articles I was able to use in the first edition. Although I have chosen to focus on Carousel rather than Oklahoma!, I would be remiss if I did not single out Tim Carter’s exceptionally well-researched archival study of Oklahoma! published by Yale University Press, also in 2007.14 Both books are models for future studies of individual musicals.

• Thomas L. Riis has added considerably to our knowledge of Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella in his recent book on Frank Loesser.15

• Scott Miller’s three volumes containing thirty-four essays on musicals (1996–2001), Raymond Knapp’s two-volume collection of essays on thirty-eight individual stage musicals, ten musical films, and one television musical (2005–2006), and Joseph P. Swain’s 1990 survey of sixteen musicals (which includes a new chapter on Les Misérables and a new concluding essay in its second edition published in 2002) also complement and expand on many of the shows discussed in the two editions of Enchanted Evenings among other shows.16

Stage versus Screen

For good or ill, many first experience Broadway musicals through film adaptations, which, no matter how faithful to their stage sources (not always a plus), remain distinct and even contradictory entities. The congruities and distinctions between stage and screen versions of the shows we love merit close study. In the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, however, I did not devote much attention to these film adaptations. I have tried to fill in this lacuna in the second edition with two new chapters on the film adaptations of musicals featured in act I and act II, a discussion of the 2007 Tim Burton Sweeney Todd with Johnny Depp in the greatly expanded Sondheim chapter, and a discussion of Joel Schumacher’s Phantom of the Opera film adaptation in 2004 in the newly written chapter on Lloyd Webber. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, nearly all the stage musicals featured in the first edition have suffered (and occasionally enjoyed) a musical film adaptation, and in these new film chapters and portions of other chapters I write about most of them. Existing material on these films tend to focus on behind-the-scene stories and casting gossip rather than on how these adaptations altered or added to the stage shows. These surveys also rarely discuss how the nature of film media—and surrounding ideologies—moved directors and producers to treat the stage originals in some cases as expendable and in others as sacrosanct. The second edition of Enchanted Evenings will engage these neglected issues.

Some of the film adaptations discussed in chapter 8 are difficult to obtain. One of these is the 1936 film version of Anything Goes with rising film star Bing Crosby and its already risen stage star, Ethel Merman. Another is Samuel Goldwyn’s unfairly maligned eightieth and final film of 1959, Porgy and Bess, directed by Otto Preminger