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

Enchanted Evenings: A Textbook Example?

In the Preface to the First Edition I relate what brought me to write Enchanted Evenings. I described the role musicals played in my childhood and adolescence, my rejection of musicals as unworthy of my love, and my return to the fold after completing a dissertation on the genesis and compositional process of Beethoven’s early piano concertos. I also explain how this book was the first to combine traditional musicological practices, such as the study of primary manuscripts, with a serious discussion of how musicals took shape in the minds of their creators and how the music in musicals dramatically enhances words and stories. My goal was to write a book that I wanted to write and at the same time a book that corresponded to what I wanted to teach in my course, The Broadway Musical. Although most of the musicals I chose to write about would generally be classified among the usual suspects, others (e.g., The Cradle Will Rock, One Touch of Venus, and The Most Happy Fella) might be considered idiosyncratic. Even when dealing with such an essential component as Rodgers and Hammerstein, I felt free to include Rodgers’s personal favorite, simply because it also interested and moved me more than, say, Oklahoma! The book was my party, and I could cry over Carousel if I wanted to.

Increasingly, however, the first edition seemed in need of some updating to better serve a general audience. It also constituted an incomplete reflection of what I covered in my course in a given semester. Long before Johnny Depp came along, a Broadway course without Sweeney Todd seemed unthinkable. For years I have also spent a week on The Phantom of the Opera, now included prominently in the second edition. Although I rarely fail to single out Engel’s runner-up Cabaret in my course, unfortunately space did not permit me to give this show or the important career of John Kander and Fred Ebb (almost, but not quite brought to a halt by the death of Ebb in 2004) the attention they merit.21

In preparing a second edition, I soon realized I would need to neglect other major shows by those who followed the composers and lyricists who starred in the first edition, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Marc Blitzstein, Kurt Weill, Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederic Loewe, and Leonard Bernstein, and in the process featured roles by major directors and choreographers, including George Abbott, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, Rouben Mamoulian, and Jerome Robbins. Nearly fifty years have gone by since the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation passed the torch to a new generation starting in the late 1950s with Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and then moving into the early 1960s with Cy Coleman, Jerry Herman, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Stephen Sondheim, and Charles Strouse; the 1970s with Marvin Hamlisch, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Stephen Schwartz; the 1980s with Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, William Finn, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, and Maury Yeston; the 1990s and 2000s with Jason Robert Brown, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChuisa, Jonathan Larson, and Jeanine Tesori. The above list is by no means exhaustive.

With the exception of the Sondheim–Lloyd Webber Epilogue and some attention to Hal Prince (who as the director of both Sweeney Todd and The Phantom of the Opera successfully bridged the divide between these central musical figures) and James Lapine, the second edition leaves most of the lacunae unfilled. Nevertheless, my intention and hope is that this new edition will serve readers at least a little more adequately and usefully. For those who arrived on Broadway through Hollywood (and for those who want to know thine enemy), the two new chapters on film adaptations and the discussions of the Sweeney Todd and Phantom of the Opera films in the greatly expanded Sondheim and entirely new Lloyd Webber chapters could perhaps provide a point of access and lead to greater understanding and appreciation of both stage and screen musicals.

When Enchanted Evenings appeared in 1997, Lloyd Webber’s Cats, directed by Trevor Nunn, was on the verge of surpassing Michael Bennett and Marvin Hamlisch’s A Chorus Line as Broadway’s longest running show, and Phantom stood in fourth place behind the then still running Les Misérables, Cats, and A Chorus Line on the all-time Broadway Hit Parade. Other shows by the popular French and British invaders, Les Misérables and Miss Saigon (lyrics by Boublil, music by Schönberg, and produced by Cameron Mackintosh), Phantom (Lloyd Webber, also produced by Mackintosh), and Sunset Boulevard (Lloyd Webber, directed by Nunn) were in the process of extending their runs, in some cases for more than a decade.

As I write this new preface, Phantom stands alone as the reigning champion, followed by Cats, “Les Miz,” Chorus Line, and two shows new to the Broadway scene twelve years ago, the Chicago revival and The Lion King. Musicals that arrived about the time of Enchanted Evening’s first edition or since have both begun and ended some of the longest runs in Broadway history (see “The Top Forty Greatest Hit Musicals from 1920 to 2008 in the online website www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings—the numbers in parentheses refer to their current place in this list): Beauty and the Beast (5), Rent (6), Hairspray (16), The Producers (17), Cabaret (Revival) (18), Smokey Joe’s Café (24), Aida (28), Monty Python’s Spamalot (35), Jekyll & Hyde (37), and 42nd Street (Revival) (38). Another trio of megahit shows that opened after Enchanted Evenings are still running, one or more of which may reach the Top Broadway 10 by the time they eventually close their curtains: Mamma Mia! (13), Avenue Q (22), and Wicked (23).

While these shows have attracted large audiences, Sondheim’s shows continued to enjoy greater critical prestige. In 1993, Sondheim became the subject of the first major