"Music and girls are the soul of musical comedy," one critic wrote, early in the 1940s. But this was the age that wanted more than melody and kickline form its musical shows. The form had been running on empty for too long, as a formula for the assembly of spare parts--star comics, generic love songs, rumba dancers, Ethel Merman. If Rodgers and Hammerstein hadn't existed, Broadway would have had to invent them; and Oklahoma and Carousel came along just in time to announce the New Formula for Writing Musicals: Don't have a formula. Instead, start with strong characters and atmosphere: Oklahoma 's murderous romantic triangle set against a frontier society that has to learn what democracy is in order to deserve it; or Carousel's dysfunctional family seen in the context of class and gender war. With the vitality and occasionally outrageous humor that Ethan Mordden's readers take for granted, the author ranges through the decade's classics--Pal Joey, Lady in the Dark, On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Phinian's Rainbow, Brigadoon, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific. He also covers illuminating trivia--the spy thriller The Lady Comes Across, whose star got so into her role that she suffered paranoid hallucinations and had to be hospitalized; the smutty Follow the Girls, damned as "burlesque with a playbill" yet closing as the longest-run musical in Broadway history; Lute Song, in which Mary Martin and Nancy Reagan were Chinese; and the first "concept" musicals, Allegro and Love Life. Amid the fun, something revolutionary occurs. The 1920s created the musical and the 1930s gave it politics. In the 1940s, it found its soul.
Ethan Mordden is my favorite author of all time -- his breadth and depth of knowledge and critical acumen are utterly unsurpassed among writers on vintage American popular culture. In this book as in all of his others, the way he can, in a few quick, masterful strokes, make you feel like you are at an obscure, unrecorded musical which now exists only as yellowing files in a few libraries is nothing less than astounding. His combination of erudtion, wit and insight never fail to take my breath away. The decade-by-decade series of which this book is the third helps make life worth living, this one helping make sense of a particularly challenging ten years in musicals' history. Near the end, Mordden does indulge in some nervy speculations that could use some more backup, though. Was homophobia really the reason WHERE'S CHARLEY didn't get a cast album? If Porter's music for KISS ME, KATE was so good because he knew the score would be preserved on a record, then why didn't he keep writing at this level afterwards? Since SOUTH PACIFIC came at the end of the decade, we'd like it to be an apotheosis of the developments over that time, but would we really say that of this fine but chunky piece of work if it had come along in 1945? If the invention of the cast album was really why shows started running longer, then why have runs continued getting even longer since? Yet Mordden is such a treasure that one simply takes these as questions you wish you could take up with the master. Overall, no one writing in his bailiwick even approaches him; this book, like all of his work, is a national treasure.
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