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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BROADWAY MUSICAL. By Mark N. Grant. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004; pp. x + 365. $40.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Like many studies of American musical theatre, Grant's book argues that the genre found its apotheosis in the mid-twentieth century and that it was all downhill from there. From Kern and Hammerstein's Show Boat (1927) until the late 1950s, the artists of the form-composers, lyricists, directors, choreographers, designers, and performers-collaborated to create a total artwork that spoke to audiences in musical theatre's unique conjunction of romance and realism. Before 1927 and after 1960, the story goes, the musical lacked integration among its parts: in the early days, it was a haphazard puzzle of entertainments; in the past forty-six years, it has devolved into a competition for the audience's attention between lackluster, monotonous songs and stunning but vapid visual effects. Worst of all, the exorbitant cost of producing a musical requires that marketing and potential profitability dominate the art-making from the start.
While Grant's argument is not new, his evidence is wide-ranging and unusual, detailed and persuasive. The book surveys all of musical theatre's many components, but focuses primarily on the history of music and sound on the Broadway stage. In the first two chapters-"Before" and "After the Microphone"-Grant documents how early twentiethcentury US musical performance, which featured trained, "legitimate" voices singing mostly choral numbers, was transformed by Irish-American music theatre (Harrigan and Hart, for example), Bert Williams, Al Jolson, and composers Herbert, Friml, and Romburg, among others, into the irresistibly catchy tunes of musical theatre's "speechified song."
Songwriters created dramatic, character-driven songs with audible,...