The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (review)

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical Stacy Wolf The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical. By Mark N. Grant. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004; pp. x + 365. $40.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Like many studies of American musical theatre, Grant's book argues that the genre found its apotheosis in the mid-twentieth century and that it was all downhill from there. From Kern and Hammerstein's Show Boat (1927) until the late 1950s, the artists of the form—composers, lyricists, directors, choreographers, designers, and performers—collaborated to create a total artwork that spoke to audiences in musical theatre's unique conjunction of romance and realism. Before 1927 and after 1960, the story goes, the musical lacked integration among its parts: in the early days, it was a haphazard puzzle of entertainments; in the past forty-six years, it has devolved into a competition for the audience's attention between lackluster, monotonous songs and stunning but vapid visual effects. Worst of all, the exorbitant cost of producing a musical requires that marketing and potential profitability dominate the art-making from the start. While Grant's argument is not new, his evidence is wide-ranging and unusual, detailed and persuasive. The book surveys all of musical theatre's many components, but focuses primarily on the history of music and sound on the Broadway stage. In the first two chapters—"Before" and "After the Microphone"—Grant documents how early twentieth-century US musical performance, which featured trained, "legitimate" voices singing mostly choral numbers, was transformed by Irish-American music theatre (Harrigan and Hart, for example), Bert Williams, Al Jolson, and composers Herbert, Friml, and Romburg, among others, into the irresistibly catchy tunes of musical theatre's "speechified song." Songwriters created dramatic, character-driven songs with audible, clever lyrics. They limited and lowered the vocal range, repeated lines of melody for easy memorization, linked the songs to a coherent story, and reprised them for a unified whole. Concomitantly, successful performers in this style like Ethel Merman who could project every word unamplified into a theatre "advanced the writing of musicals." Sadly, Grant explains, microphones soon became the norm, and Bing Crosby's crooning and Robert Johnson's emotive deformation of lyrics came to dominate singing onstage. Musical theatre's complex melodies devolved into boring "riff patterns" with "static," "blocklike" harmonies and imprecise, inaudible lyrics. This was the death of the Broadway musical. Grant then traces the development of the mid-century or "Golden Age" musical of Kern, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Loesser, and others, exploring how the book (libretto), the lyrics, and the music each supported the other elements in the production to form an integrated whole. Here Grant discusses the work not only of the usual suspects (Harburg, Bernstein, Sondheim, and others) but also credits less familiar contributors like conductor and author Lehman Engel, Mark Blitzstein, Latouche and Moross (who originated the sung-through, dance-narrated musical with The Golden Apple in 1954), to name only a few. Although the argument in this three-chapter section is familiar, much of Grant's material is new and all of it compelling. In the next three chapters, Grant traces the progress and demise of the musical's form. Chapter 3 concerns the history of musical theatre's use of rhythm. In the first era, songwriters relied on the march. Dance then entered the performance lexicon, and composers used the fox-trot to create "dancified song," which was beat-driven and catchy and allowed a clear, contagious expression of ideas and emotion. With the invention of electronics and the dominance of drums, though, the "rock groove" forced a backbeat onto musical theatre's rhythms. It became impossible to hear lyrics (the cornerstone of great musical theatre), every song sounded the same, and the performance of a song was extracted from the dramatic action of the show and turned into an egotistical showstopping exercise. [End Page 513] The next chapter moves into the seldom studied, rarely acknowledged contributions of orchestrators and sound designers. Grant ties technological changes to singers' stylistic shifts, asserting that performers lost the ability to handle substantial musical range and lyrical complexity and to project without a microphone

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