Content area
Full Text
At first glance, the 1930s movie musicals directed and choreographed by Busby Berkeley have little in common with the popular theater of the nineteenth century. His armies of chorus dancers, whirling through kaleidoscopic formations in elegant settings to the "Lullaby of Broadway," seem to be all Hollywood--the antithesis of the vigorous, spontaneous variety shows presented in Bowery music halls.
But in Showstoppers, Martin Rubin imaginatively and persuasively analyzes Berkeley not as a pioneer of movie musicals who departed from the conventions of the stage, but as a cinematic interpreter of older traditions rooted in nineteenth-century theater. Specifically, Rubin sees Berkeley as the perpetuator of a "Tradition of Spectacle" derived from circuses, dime museum shows, vaudeville, minstrelsy, burlesque, Wild West shows, and revues. This...