Let’s get on with the show!
Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution by Todd S. Purdum: Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II became two of the most recognizable names in musical theater (at least) by helping redefine musical theater in their time and every time since, with their partnership producing hits such as Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music, South Pacific, and many more. Purdum opens the curtain on a setting of a musical theater world largely devoid of the serious drama intermingling with dance and musical skill on the same stage—and how two men, each having cracked convention with their own individual achievements thus far, would together rewrite the then-conventional script. The character profiles the book creates reveal two very similar yet notably different people: both came from musical families (the first Oscar Hammerstein was a famous theater producer; the Rodgers’ family was “passionately musical”), they graduated from Columbia University (where they met), and they both had made successful waves in the theater world before they joined forces. Hammerstein was a pragmatic dreamer who was described once as “a businessman-poet”; Rodgers was nicknamed by his first partner as the “General” and the “Professor” who became jubilant in moments of success. And after their first collaboration, Oklahoma!, which fully displayed (for starters) Rodgers’ unadorned music perfect harmonization with Hammerstein’s sincerity in lyrics, the stage was never the same. It says a lot about how much Rodgers & Hammerstein changed that musicals that were once called daring would eventually be considered conventional themselves. But shows as good as R&H were able to create—like a book as thorough and full of admiration as Something Wonderful, especially when its title already proclaims its quality as a read—will always keep audiences coming back for more!
Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way by Caseen Gaines. “The Great White Way”, aka the Theater District of Broadway, got its nickname from the electric illumination of marquees and billboards rather than its cast and crew. But the history of ethnic diversity on the Broadway stage is not a long or generally-known one: musicals meant to be cast with entirely or almost-entirely POC performers like The Wiz or Hamilton are few and far in between, and musicals with a larger “designated” POC casting like West Side Story or Hairspray tend to still have their stories and stages principally dominated by the White performers and characters. But even in the less-remembered days of the American theater, artists began to pave the way for the future. Gaines takes readers to the vivid days of the Harlem Renaissance, when the lives of Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Flournoy Miller, and Aubrey Lyles all intersected as they created the musical Shuffle Along, a landmark in musical theater featuring an all-Black cast. With more jazzy styles of music as an alternative to the tried-and-conventional prior Broadway tunes, a romance plot communicated and taken seriously, and all without much money to get it started, its crowd-pleasing success (it ended up running for over 500 performances) was truly remarkable. The signs of its era still show in ways that are at best uncomfortable to those learning about the show, largely in its usage of blackface (even if it was by Black actors). But the significance of the precedent the show helped in setting should not be forgotten, and Gaines through a well-executed Footnotes makes sure that readers won’t forget.
Gays on Broadway by Ethan Mordden: The affiliation of the LGBTQA+ community with theater (especially musical theater) is basically stereotypical in its strength, its…well, flamboyance…and its long-standing nature. Mordden makes that affiliation clear with the book formatted to fit a timeline, the first chapter starting in the 1910s-1920s, the second in the 1930s, and so on. The more subtle beginnings, more prologue than full narrative, come in the form of on-stage cross-dressing and actors who made names for themselves by doing so, and then largely subtext through side characters. Eventually, the subtext comes out of the closet with productions such as Tea and Sympathy and the brief run of The Immoralist in the early 1950s, and the bolder Staircase and The Boys in the Band (the latter especially plain-spoken and successful) in the late 1960s. The culture that emerged after the Stonewall riots in the 1970s provided increased representation of LGBTQ+ individuals on a national scale. However, much of this representation relied on “fabulous” stereotypes. Many of the narratives presented during this time forced audiences to confront the harsh realities of different forms of homophobia. The sadly-true drama of AIDS became center stage productions with the likes of The Normal Heart (fact told as fiction), Falsettos (a trilogy of individual works eventually condensed into one larger show), Angels in America (a two-part epic), and more. But more humor and heart came onto the stage as well as the years went on, whether in subplots in Avenue Q or the graphic novel memoir-turned-musical Fun Home, and the book reaches the present. And all throughout, there are the queer writers and performers bringing stories to the page and to life, some more fictional than others. This book is as entertaining as it is educational, just like the stories it recounts, and worth reading for both reasons (and more).
Theater Kid by Jeffrey Seller. The origins of a man who would later produce the musicals Rent and Hamilton were, as Jeffrey Seller makes clear in his memoir, humble: an adopted kid growing up in a dysfunctional family residing in a poor neighborhood near Detroit. Theater provided an outlet early on, an outlet made more necessary by his confusion on his sexuality, and that would lead him to the Big Apple to make and tell Big Stories. His life is vividly illustrated—literally at multiple points with side drawings. Some of the most affecting parts are his recollections of Jonathan Larson—how he quickly connected to the sentiments expressed in Larson’s early tick, tick…BOOM! (for him, mentally, “Johnny Can’t Decide” became “Jeffrey Can’t Decide”), the collaborations when trying to turn what became RENT into a complete production, the tragedy of losing a friend with so much potential before it could truly begin awakening. But there’s humor in there too, even within the turmoil of adolescence, like when recounting the crusade to get Avenue Q the Tony over Wicked (and it did). Maybe it’s a feeble hope for the “theater kids” of the world to make something of themselves in the stage world—and Seller never hides the twists-and-turns, hard work and coincidences, and so much more that allowed him to make it. Sometimes, feeble dreams lead to something greater—almost as great as this book.
By Grace Dietz
