Content area
Full Text
OUR MUSICALS, OURSELVES: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE. By John Bush Jones. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003; pp. xiii + 411. $29.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
As anyone who works in the field of musical theatre knows, the current scholarship on the topic is bleak, to say the least. Musical theatre is often treated like the wayward child of theatre studies, not worthy of real scholarship presumably due to its middlebrow song and dance components. The majority of works on the Broadway musical are typically historical in nature, tracing the genre's origins in opera or operetta up through the 1980s British invasion of the megamusical.
John Bush Jones's new book attempts to alter this trajectory by focusing on the social elements underlying the creation of this American art form. Sadly, though, Jones's book falls into some of the same traps as its predecessors, giving us a work that, while providing a strong thematic overview of certain social themes in the American musical, neither probes the depths or implications of these thematic motifs nor strongly deviates from the traditional "chronological" paradigm of writing musical theatre history.
Jones's text is divided into ten chapters, each basically focusing on a different historical decade (e.g., 1920s, 1930s) or a thematic topic (e.g., Black and Jewish musicals, fragmented musicals [a.k.a. the concept musical]). Jones does a good job of contextualizing each work within the historical period in which it was created; while this is productive in explaining why certain shows and...