by Ethan Mordden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2013
Mordden rambles some, as is his habit, but he’s a formidably well-informed and bracingly opinionated guide to a...
Prolific entertainment historian Mordden (Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, 2012, etc.) tracks the musical from its European origins to its current offerings on and off Broadway.
The author has written a previous survey of the history of musical theater, but there have been a lot of developments since Better Foot Forward was published in 1976. Here, the author assesses the changes in the final three chapters. “The Sondheim Handbook” covers not just the late-20th-century musical theater’s most influential artist, but also such fellow innovators as Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett and Tommy Tune. “Devolution” critically chronicles Broadway’s increasing reliance on revivals (which “in effect admit that worthy new work has become…hard to find”) and on jukebox musicals that use pre-existing songs. Yet “That Is the State of the Art” is a generally positive wrap-up, with enthusiastic comments on recent shows ranging from commercial hits (Wicked, The Book of Mormon) to more austere works staged in the noncommercial theater (Marie Christine, Parade). All but the most serious students of musical theater will likely be daunted by the book’s opening 100 pages, devoted to the formative history that runs from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in 1728 through Victor Herbert and the Ziegfeld Follies of the 1910s. Yet Mordden makes a strong case for the crucial roles these relatively obscure works played in shaping the genre that came to full maturity in the art’s golden age (1920–1980). Chapters covering that period will sound a tad familiar at times to those who have read Mordden’s multivolume, decade-by-decade history, but they are nonetheless informative and enjoyable. An excellent discography and suggestions for further reading complete this stimulating survey.
Mordden rambles some, as is his habit, but he’s a formidably well-informed and bracingly opinionated guide to a quintessentially American art form.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-989283-9
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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