{PRETITLE} Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre {POSTTITLE}

Rating: (6 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Ethan Mordden Page
ISBN : 0199892830
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*Starred Review* One of the two most American contributions to world art, the musical springs (as does the other, jazz) from immigrant stock. Its grand progenitor, Mordden says, is John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a socially satirical parody of the Italian operas that then dominated London theater. Gay’s wildly popular “ballad opera,” consisting of popular tunes given new words, inspired imitations that gradually shifted from existing to newly composed music, eventuating in Gilbert and Sullivan’s concoctions in England and Offenbach’s confections in Paris. Late nineteenth-century America enthusiastically imported those shows and started mixing their ingredients with those of native musical entertainment, especially the minstrel show and burlesque (and while the former was performed in blackface, the latter didn’t consist of strippers and blue humor). That’s the musical’s beginnings, and its subsequent life is an evolutionary history of varying forms right down to the present. Mordden brightly differentiates those forms, citing hundreds and analyzing dozens of examples of them in a sweeping narrative that, with plenty of sass and tang, wit and even a little snark, not to mention scholarly precision, is obviously the best-ever history of the musical and likely to remain so for a very long time. Individual shows and even numbers leap to life in Mordden’s colorful prose, both in the main text and the hefty bibliographical and discographical essays that propel the volume to a hilarious final bon mot. --Ray Olson

Review

"[T]he book takes us to present day, Mr. Mordden has a lot of ground to cover, but his high-energy style carries us along amiably, and it soon becomes obvious that he hasn't set out to write a reference work but... a survey of an art form seen through the eyes of a breathless and opinionated host." --The Wall Street Journal

"More journalistic than academic, Anything Goes has a relaxed spryness. ("Oklahoma!" in Mordden memorable formulation, "is a musical comedy undergoing psychoanalysis.") It's the work of an expert who is also an unabashed fan, an inveterate theatergoer who can deconstruct a score and reel off sparking backstage anecdotes all in the same paragraph." --Los Angeles Times

"Mordden remains an undisputed heavyweight in his field; his output is impressively comprehensive and his enthusiasm inexhaustible." --Washington Independent Review of Books

"[O]bviously the best-ever history of the musical and likely to remain so for a very long time. Individual shows and even numbers leap to life in Mordden's colorful prose, both in the main text and the hefty bibliographical and discographical essays that propel the volume to a hilarious final bon mot." --Booklist (starred review)

"For four decades he has been entertaining and enlightening readers with mind-boggling regularity and with perspective, perspicacity, and pizzazz. Now with Anything Goes Mordden miraculously manages to stylishly convey in an indispensable single volume, the uncanny and encyclopedic breadth of his knowledge-and the complexity of this enchanted American art form."--Geoffrey Block, author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from "Show Boat" to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, and Series Editor of Oxford's Broadway Legacies

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 5, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199892830
• ISBN-13: 978-0199892839
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

{PRETITLE} Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre {POSTTITLE}

First off, I have to admit to being a fan of Ethan Mordden, and I have read every book on the musical theatre that he has written. This new publication is as its subtitle suggests a history of this most famous of art forms, so we start at the early birthing of the Beggar's Opera in 1728, and travel headlong through Gilbert & Sullivan, Burlesque, Variety Shows, 1920's Operetta and the development of the Musical Play, to land finally at the contemporary blockbuster of Stephen Schwartz's musical: Wicked.

The author has already produced a series of books on the 20/21st century decades of Musical Theatre, so this one is more than just a distillation of them. This new work has an entirely new text and covers areas of the origins previously unexplored. Mordden sees musical history as divided into four ages (the Golden Age being the third) and notices a form of devolution occurring after the achievements of Stephen Sondheim. This opinion is subjective of course, but I do tend to agree with him. He traces the evolution of the influence of director/choreographer to the art form, and acknowledges that integration of the varied constituents of song/story were already utilised long before the Show Boat of 1927. Mordden also corrects the myth that The Black Crook of 1866 was the first musical. On examination, he discovers that this unknown work does not truly share any of the elements that make a musical a musical.
He always brings an astute intelligence to his opinions and I can think of no one writing about Broadway as expert. I only wish he hadn't titled the book: Anything Goes, as that has too many associations with the Cole Porter classic musical, and I half expected this 346 paged hardback to be exclusively about the creation of that monument before I bought this publication.