Broadway, Baby

Larry Stempel's Showtime is a comprehensive look at the Broadway musical.  Including notes and index, it's over 800 pages, so it better be.  Yet, it left me feeling unsatisfied.

It's not bad.  In fact, I'd recommend it for someone who wants a grand overview.  And the early chapters about the 1800s cover ground in greater detail than you usually get.  But the book is a bit stiff, describing numerous shows and artists without quite communicating the joy or excitement of the best Broadway offerings.

Worse, though the book follows a general chronological scheme, it keeps doubling back.  For instance, there are four chapters that deal with the golden age of the integrated musical, from the 40s through the 60s.  But each chapter starts at the beginning (or earlier) of the era and goes through the same years from a different angle.  One chapter deals with how the book became important, the second gives examples of the great creators of musical plays (Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Bock and Harnick), the third discusses opera on Broadway and the fourth the adaptation of musical comedy to a new age by artists such as George Abbott, E. Y. Harburg, Frank Loesser, and Comden and Green.  And though Stempel chooses to emphasize certain artists in certain chapters, we meet them elsewhere (for example, Loesser wrote his own opera, The Most Happy Fella), so we often seem to be getting the story piecemeal.