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Bruce D. McClung: Lady in the Dark: Biography of a Musical. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, 274 pages.
Lady in the Dark: Biography of a Musical by Bruce D. McClung is very promising from the outset. The book offers us a 'virtual ticket' to the shortlived history of a prominent American musical in relation to its wider social, cultural and political frameworks.
McClung's exceptionally engaging and confident style of writing succeeds in taking the reader back to the opening night of Lady in the Dark on 23 January 1941. We meet the producer and script-writer Moss Hart, the lyricist Ira Gershwin, the 'émigré composer' Kurt Weill, the ensemble with its rising star Danny Kaye and leading ladyin-the-dark Gertrude Lawrence (playing Liza Elliot). The book gives us an opportunity to witness and re-experience the show as if sitting "in the front row". McClung concurrently brings to life a plethora of historical data, facts and figures about the production, its genesis, its developments on Broadway and on tour, and its later adaptations for radio and television. Throughout the chapters, however, our attention is drawn to offstage political events; readings of Weill's musical score with an eye on its growing importance for the American musical theatre; references to the social struggles of women in the war effort in contrast to the musical's theme of a patronizing Freudian psychoanalysis of the 1940s and 50s. In this way, the book aims to give different perspectives on a keystone musical that has sadly been overshadowed by its contemporaries such as Oklahoma! but that shines as new through McClung's historiographie lens.
Despite of the book's promising aspirations and McClung's nineteen dedicated years of research guided by copious interviews and historical documents, it occurred to me while reading that this biography has its methodological problems: not so much due to its bulking exhaustiveness but due to its claims of historical accuracy. I appreciate McClung's keen eye for detail a great deal but he constandy mixes self-acclaimed accurate evidence with fiction in his apparent efforts to give a 'true' account. For...