The field of musicology has seen many books that have redefined important subareas within the discipline. A fine example is Gustave Reese's epochal Music in the Renaissance, first published in 1954 by W. W. Norton, which so successfully encapsulated previous scholarship in that area that one could still observe decades later how detailed and varied the work of Renaissance scholars appeared in comparison to colleagues working in some other periods.Footnote 1 W. W. Norton has enjoyed a similar coup with Larry Stempel's Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater, probably the most important overall history of the Broadway musical yet to appear, and winner of the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music and the Kurt Weill Book Prize. Stempel's book does not compete with Reese in dealing with detailed minutiae (few music histories do!), but it has a similar feeling of magisterial breadth. Stempel worked on this project for many years, and it has been worth the wait.
A scholar's responsibility in writing such a history is enormous. The author must master the stories of many different creators, trends, and subgenres, and present a distinctive narrative that is both accessible to the neophyte and satisfying to the specialist. For the most part, Stempel has accomplished all of this remarkably well. One can always quibble about details, but it is difficult to find significant fault with Stempel's overall product. He has organized a chaotic field with great understanding and has chosen fine examples for detailed commentary. One who wants to read about Broadway history, from the student to the most knowledgeable historian of the genre, will relish curling up in a chair with this book and seeing what the author has to say. Stempel's mastery of musical, theatrical, and historical details is impressive, and his deep love for the genre shines through on every page. The author is also a felicitous and talented writer. One of the wonderful things about musical theater is the blazing wit of such wordsmiths as Alan Jay Lerner and Stephen Sondheim—therefore, we hardly want to read a ponderous history of the musical. Fortunately, there is no cause for concern here. Stempel's prose is remarkable for its incisiveness and geniality. The text also includes many useful summaries, especially at the beginnings of chapters where the author shows his expert grasp of such concepts as the various genres of musical theater and revivals.
One might question the way that Stempel organized his study, but his solutions work for the most part. His substantial coverage of the nineteenth century (often neglected in previous histories) appears over the course of three chapters: “Transitional States,” on musical versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin and productions that point towards what the musical theater became, such as The Black Crook; “Variety Stages,” on minstrelsy and vaudeville and important creators of shows like Harrigan and Hart; and “A Transatlantic Music,” which involves European exports such as Gilbert and Sullivan and American operettas before 1900. Stempel makes brief mention of some shows that other historians have considered significant, such as Evangeline (78), but his consideration of the nineteenth century emphasizes important trends and prepares the reader for what is to come.
Stempel's march through the twentieth century includes chapters that describe a particular trend or subgenre, with each overall idea divided into related sub-sections. Each chapter includes a set of featured shows that are announced on the title page and its verso. Chapter 4, “The Native Wit,” is a summary of musical comedy in the century's first two decades, covering George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, Tin Pan Alley, and the Princess Theater shows of Jerome Kern and his collaborators. “The Cult of Romance,” chapter 5, addresses operetta through the 1920s and Show Boat, combining the expectations of operetta with what was new about Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's masterpiece. Chapter 6, “A Shadow of Vulgarity,” includes the revue of the 1920s and some musical comedies, juxtaposing such varied shows as Ziegfeld Follies, the African American Shuffle Along, and confections like Good News. Details that Stempel provides on other shows, like The Band Wagon and As Thousands Cheer, provide a textured, nuanced picture, the likes of which are not easy to come by outside of archives. The challenges of organizing such material become clear when considering how Stempel approaches the role of jazz in chapters 6 and 7. The former discusses the jazz idiom in various shows (especially Shuffle Along), but George Gershwin does not appear in any detail until the latter, “Broadway Songbook,” which also covers the shows of Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter. This chapter includes useful descriptions of songs (that do not rely on heavy analytical techniques) and interesting details on individual shows.
“The Script Angle,” chapter 8, covers several shows in the 1940s when musical plays and comedies, including Lady in the Dark, Oklahoma!, Bloomer Girl, Annie Get Your Gun, and Kiss Me, Kate, moved towards the ideal of the “literate play.” Stempel waits until chapter 9, “Musical Theater: The New Art,” to devote fuller coverage of the Rodgers and Hammerstein legacy, which shares space with Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Fiorello!, Camelot, and Fiddler on the Roof. This chapter foregrounds the important fact that the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein were directly contemporary with many of the creators that they influenced. Stempel finds their works following The King and I to be lesser achievements. His analyses of My Fair Lady and Fiddler on the Roof, which constitute most of the chapter's remainder, are excellent.
The contents of chapter 10, “Opera, In Our Own Way,” are more problematic. Featured works are Porgy and Bess, Carmen Jones, Street Scene, The Consul, and West Side Story. Stempel's distinction between “Opera on Broadway” and “Broadway Opera” (373) is not completely convincing. The concluding consideration of West Side Story states that the show is not an opera, even though it is covered in this chapter, and one of the concluding remarks here is that West Side Story was the end of the line for a genre that started with Porgy and Bess. West Side Story has little in common with Gershwin's opera, and Jerome Robbins's masterpiece situates more comfortably as an epochal musical play that helps tie together such works as South Pacific and later musical plays such as Fiddler on the Roof and many of Sondheim's shows.
Stempel returns to the musical comedy in chapter 11, “The Great American Showshop,” opening with a useful comparison between the expectations and structures of musical comedies and musical plays. He looks effectively at contributions by director George Abbott, and shows associated with such creators as Yip Harburg (Finian's Rainbow), Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls), and Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and finally Jules Styne, where Stempel emphasizes Gypsy and its ambiguous place between genres.
Chapter 12, “Away from Broadway,” is a grab bag in which Stempel covers off-Broadway shows, alternative musicals, and their frequent social commentary. The featured musicals range over a thirty-year period and represent a number of different approaches and levels of historical importance: The Cradle Will Rock, Pins and Needles, The Threepenny Opera, The Golden Apple, The Fantasticks, Man of La Mancha, and Hair. Coverage of shows away from the bright lights of Broadway is necessary, but this chapter is the book's most idiosyncratic. These varied shows force Stempel far and wide in terms of topics and focus, and it is strange to combine in the same chapter the likes of Blitzstein's agit-prop The Cradle Will Rock and the mainstream Broadway success Man of La Mancha.
Stempel is on much firmer ground in chapter 13, “The Metaphor Angle,” a brilliant consideration of the concept musical. Starting with perhaps the best definition and description of the genre available, he traverses a wide swath through Cabaret and the directorial work of Hal Prince, as well as Stephen Sondheim's entire career. The latter includes a good balance of general and detailed coverage that captures the essence of this artist's distinctive work, such as the fascinating irony of his many shows that had mixed success in their first runs on Broadway but that have had “significant Broadway afterlives” (551), and that as a group constitute some of the most artistically worthwhile musicals.
The growing importance of choreography in the postwar Broadway musical and the appearance of the choreographer/director is the topic of chapter 14, “A Dancing Place.” The topic again pushes Stempel across a wide chronological range from Allegro (1947) to Grand Hotel (1989), but he bridges it effectively with a sharp focus on the choreographers who forged this trend, including useful information on what these men and women actually did and how the art of musical staging developed.
“Distancing Effects” is the enigmatic title of Stempel's fifteenth chapter, an essay on the megamusical and European invasion of Broadway. He opens with compelling descriptions of the new era of corporate producers and Broadway's slow and unsteady embrace of changing tastes in popular music and the youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s. His informative trip through Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Beauty and the Beast, and The Producers includes excellent coverage of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, the influence of rock, Cameron Mackintosh, Disney's presence on Broadway, as well as more recent developments in the megamusical.
Stempel openly admits the difficulty he had writing his last chapter, “Another Broadway . . . Another Show,” noting “A final chapter ought to conclude” (645). With Broadway now at a vibrant moment in its history, however, this history can have no end. Instead, Stempel provides an informative catalog of important developments since the 1990s, covering the growth of Broadway revivals and their inevitable effect on new shows, “antimusicals” outside of the cultural mainstream (such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Falsettoland), and works by “Sondheim's children” (such as Rent and Floyd Collins). He also briefly mentions new popular blockbusters like Wicked. However, Stempel chooses his focus carefully, providing subtle commentary on what he seems to believe constitutes the more artistically satisfying areas of the genre.
Comparisons of Stempel's Showtime with other texts are difficult because there is little else like it. Showtime is newer in its treatment than Andrew Lamb's 150 Years of Popular Musical Theatre;Footnote 2 different in coverage and more consistent in tone than The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (which also covers the British musical), written as it was by its many authors;Footnote 3 and widely contrasting in style and contents to textbooks like Alyson McLamore's Musical Theater: An Appreciation Footnote 4 and Sheldon Patinkin's “No Legs, No Jokes, No Chance”: A History of the American Musical Theater (designed for a two-semester course, a luxury many of us do not enjoy).Footnote 5 Given its scope and depth, Showtime would seem to be headed down the same path as Reese's Music in the Renaissance, which the author surely conceived as a textbook (though its practicality in one-semester classes proved illusory because it included so much more material than could be covered). Howard Mayer Brown's later survey, also titled Music in the Renaissance, was successful because it distilled the period into an appropriate textbook length.Footnote 6 Unlike Reese, Stempel has not tried to cover every figure of major and minor importance, but there is still a great deal here, including detailed consideration of far more shows than one can fit into a single-semester class. A teacher certainly will want students to know about the book and sections should appear on the reading list, but it might prove a difficult mountain to climb as a textbook, especially in a class for non-majors.
A delightful read stuffed with carefully arranged information and expert commentary on musical, textual, theatrical, and commercial matters, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater takes its place as the leading encyclopedic history of the genre. Any respectful disagreements about content or focus aside, when one stands back for the long view of Stempel's outstanding accomplishment, a very satisfying panorama emerges.
