An illuminating account of Broadway’s multiracial history.
How African American participation made musical theater the United States’ most distinctive art form.
Composer/conductor Mauceri sees the evolution of the Broadway musical as an example of America’s “collective, messy, raucous story.” It’s a view echoed and deepened by his coauthor, critic and linguist McWhorter, whose interspersed chapters zoom in on seven significant productions, including Porgy and Bess and Fats Waller’s Great Day. The proto-musical that emerged after the Civil War was, Mauceri acknowledges, “frankly, uninteresting” until the Black rhythms of ragtime, followed by jazz, galvanized the form in the early decades of the 20th century. The “dazzling cauldron of influences” that shaped the genre also included minstrelsy shows, vaudeville, and operettas, but the narrative rightly emphasizes the preeminent role of Black music and artists. “What began as a strange, fitfully advancing hybrid of white and Black has now become simply American,” writes McWhorter, and the emphasis by both authors is on how Broadway musicals, from Show Boat and In Dahomey to The Lion King and Hamilton, “taught by entertaining.” They advanced the cause of racial equality, not just by bringing Black music to white audiences, but by normalizing the presence of Black performers—eventually, in integrated casts—and by making anti-racist statements in shows such as South Pacific and (by inference) Wicked. Much of this material will be familiar to musical-theater buffs, but Mauceri and McWhorter give it a sharp focus and offer fresh insights, such as the observation that as the Civil Rights Movement progressed after World War II, activists became increasingly sensitive to anything that smacked of racial stereotypes. (A funny monologue by a character in Langston Hughes’ Simply Heaven warns, “Lord have mercy, honey, do-don’t like no black-eyed peas and rice!”) In today’s polarized climate, it may be hard to share the authors’ belief in art as a force for social justice, but it’s easy to be moved by their passion for it.
An illuminating account of Broadway’s multiracial history.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781324110927
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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