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JEWS ON BROADWAY : AN HISTORICAL SURVEY OF PERFORMERS , PLAYWRIGHTS, COMPOSERS, LYRICISTS AND PRODUCERS. By Stewart F. Lane. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011; pp. 232.
TRANSPOSING BROADWAY : JEWS, ASSIMILATION, AND THE AMERICAN MUSICAL. By Stuart J. Hecht. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; pp. 240.
Two recent titles contribute to the exponential growth of scholarship in Jewish cultural studies and musical theatre history. Both academic areas, previously peripheral to other disciplines, converge in the books Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers by producer Stewart Lane and Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical (part of the Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History series) by historian Stuart Hecht. While the scope of Lane's book goes beyond the genre of musical theatre, its focus is primarily on the Jewishness of Broadway's composers, choreographers, performers, and hit-makers. The two books often overlap in terms of content, but the methods employed by the authors are fundamentally different. Lane provides a spiraling history comprised of anecdotes and brief summaries, while Hecht's cultural/ historical analysis is grounded in dramaturgy and draws from theories in performance studies, sociology, and literary analysis.
Lane's enthusiasm in Jews on Broadway is palpable: the author's voice is out of breath, and his sentences are packed tightly with names, numbers, and dates. Theatre history is an account of collaboration, full of various people and interactions, but the book does not provide a focused through-line in its synthesis of research other than a broadly constructed "Jewish" trail. Instead of describing the development of an ethnic voice in Broadway theatres and what that voice might mean, Lane provides multiple narratives, references to his own award-winning career as a producer, and unreliable anecdotes (his own and others').
One of the strengths of Jews on Broadway, however, is the book's centralization of the disparate accounts of the Jewish performers, playwrights, composers, lyricists, and producers who lefta legacy to Broadway. In the last three decades, US filmmakers have created hundreds of documentaries about and fictionalizations of industry subjects discussed in the books by Lane and Hecht. PBS created an entire series titled "American Masters," which features...