Open a New Window: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s

Rating:
Summary: Musical theater history as good as it gets
Review: As someone can't resist a book, no matter bad, on musicals past, I feel like I've found a new best friend in Ethan Mordden. He knows his subject, thinks for himself and writes extraordinarily well. He's quick to confute the common memory - pointing out the unremembered virtues of Camelot, Funny Girl and even The Unsinkable Molly Brown, yet perceptively skewering Hair, Dear World and Zorba. His identification of trends and repeating patterns is brilliant, and at the same time he gave me several good belly laughs, notably when he referred to Ilya Darling as the culmination of 3000 years of Greek culture. A treasure of a book. I'm ready for the 70s, Mr. Mordden.

Rating:
Summary: Another Fine and More Personal Addition to the Series
Review: Ethan Mordden's Open a New Window (The Broadway Musical in the 1960's) continues his series looking at the development of musical theatre in New York decade by decade. This book has the burden of describing a decade that will more than likely be a great deal familiar to his readers, certainly more so than previous books. This is more than compensated for by just how personal the author makes the book. The volume interjects opinion into fact (on occasion, blending the two). This element is often quite enjoyable particularly in such juicy (and necessary) asides as George Abbott being taken down a couple of notches. This book is actually more fun as a read than previous volumes while still being consistently sharp in its analysis. A fine addition to this worthy series.

Rating:
Summary: Another Fine and More Personal Addition to the Series
Review: Ethan Mordden's Open a New Window (The Broadway Musical in the 1960's) continues his series looking at the development of musical theatre in New York decade by decade. This book has the burden of describing a decade that will more than likely be a great deal familiar to his readers, certainly more so than previous books. This is more than compensated for by just how personal the author makes the book. The volume interjects opinion into fact (on occasion, blending the two). This element is often quite enjoyable particularly in such juicy (and necessary) asides as George Abbott being taken down a couple of notches. This book is actually more fun as a read than previous volumes while still being consistently sharp in its analysis. A fine addition to this worthy series.

Rating:
Summary: An Accessible and Enjoyable Book
Review: I discovered Ethan Mordden through his books on movies. I enjoyed his style and then started reading his books on Broadway Musicals.

I am not an expert on musicals by any stretch of the imagination. However, I found "Open a New Window" very readable and interesting. I was continually surprised to find people in musicals that I never would have imagined. (Vincent Price starring in a Broadway musical in 1968? My universe is still reeling.) To someone who knows "Funny Girl" and "Cabaret" as films, it was revealing and useful to read about the plays they started as.

As for complaints that Mordden overlooks the big picture in the development of the musical, I would disagree. Granted, I am no expert, but to me he kept referring to the social changes going on and kept emphasizing how the subject matter of musicals kept becoming darker.

"Open a New Window" isn't a heavy, scholarly tome, but it is fun and accessible to readers who are curious about Broadway musicals while not obsessed with the subject.

Rating:
Summary: An Accessible and Enjoyable Book
Review: I discovered Ethan Mordden through his books on movies. I enjoyed his style and then started reading his books on Broadway Musicals.

I am not an expert on musicals by any stretch of the imagination. However, I found "Open a New Window" very readable and interesting. I was continually surprised to find people in musicals that I never would have imagined. (Vincent Price starring in a Broadway musical in 1968? My universe is still reeling.) To someone who knows "Funny Girl" and "Cabaret" as films, it was revealing and useful to read about the plays they started as.

As for complaints that Mordden overlooks the big picture in the development of the musical, I would disagree. Granted, I am no expert, but to me he kept referring to the social changes going on and kept emphasizing how the subject matter of musicals kept becoming darker.

"Open a New Window" isn't a heavy, scholarly tome, but it is fun and accessible to readers who are curious about Broadway musicals while not obsessed with the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Another entertaining entry in this series
Review: In this installment of Ethan Mordden's decade-by-decade series of books about the Broadway (and off-Broadway) musical, Mordden covers the 1960s.

Perhaps because I know this decade's shows more intimately than I know most of the shows in the earlier decades Mordden has covered, I was surprised to discover a rather large number of factual errors in this one.

And every once in a while in this book Mordden writes something truly bizarre, like his comment that the title song of "Cabaret" comments on "not voting when democrats oppose communazis in elections." Huh? Or his citing of the fact that "Hallelujah, Baby!" lost money even though it won the Tony for Best Musical, which is true but rather misleading if you don't also mention that it had already closed when it won the Tony.

As always, Mordden is a very entertaining writer. He is not shy about stating his opinions, but even when I disagree with him, I almost always enjoy reading him.

This is probably not a book for someone who doesn't already know the subject fairly well. I suspect most musical-comedy addicts will find it hard to put down, as you greedily wait to see what Mordden will say about every show. There are a few shows that Mordden doesn't cover (among them, "Billy" and "Something More"), probably for lack of space. This book definitely could have been a bit longer. But that is my main complaint, except for those factual errors and the several truly bizarre statements.

Isn't it great to want a book to be longer than it is?

Rating:
Summary: Another entertaining entry in this series
Review: In this installment of Ethan Mordden's decade-by-decade series of books about the Broadway (and off-Broadway) musical, Mordden covers the 1960s.

Perhaps because I know this decade's shows more intimately than I know most of the shows in the earlier decades Mordden has covered, I was surprised to discover a rather large number of factual errors in this one.

And every once in a while in this book Mordden writes something truly bizarre, like his comment that the title song of "Cabaret" comments on "not voting when democrats oppose communazis in elections." Huh? Or his citing of the fact that "Hallelujah, Baby!" lost money even though it won the Tony for Best Musical, which is true but rather misleading if you don't also mention that it had already closed when it won the Tony.

As always, Mordden is a very entertaining writer. He is not shy about stating his opinions, but even when I disagree with him, I almost always enjoy reading him.

This is probably not a book for someone who doesn't already know the subject fairly well. I suspect most musical-comedy addicts will find this it to put down, as you greedily wait to see what Mordden will say about every show. There are a few shows that Mordden doesn't cover (among them, "Billy" and "Something More"), probably for lack of space. This book definitely could have been a bit longer. But except for those surprising factual errors, that is my main complaint. Isn't it great to want a book to be longer than it is?

Rating:
Summary: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s!
Review: Mordden, a knowledgeable and entertaining writer, adds a new volume to his decade-by-decade history of the American musical theater. The first three covered the 1920s (Make Believe, 1997), 1950s (Coming Up Roses, 1998), and 1940s (Beautiful Mornin', CH, Feb'00). The author takes a chronological approach but does introduce some thematic chapters, one on English musicals in the US (pre-Lloyd Webber) and another on off-Broadway musicals. He finds no one overall theme to the decade of the 1960s but emphasizes the most important (in his judgment) shows: Cabaret was "the essential sixties musical"; Camelot was a show with "serious issues [and an] outsized score." Hello, Dolly! and Fiddler on the Roof were "not only excellent compositions but excellent stagings." What gives this volume special attraction are Mordden's anecdotes about the production history of the musicals and his detailed consideration of many now-forgotten shows (e.g., Ben Franklin in Paris) and major failures (Breakfast at Tiffany's). Readers will want to have the recording of each show. A section of photographs gives a sense of the decade's flavor. A good read and a fine acquisition for large academic collections serving upper-division readers through faculty, for performing arts libraries, and for popular collections.

Rating:
Summary: Mordden's first slip
Review: No one writes about musical theatre better than Ethan Mordden, and I anxiously await his every book on the subject. This fourth in his new series, however, is a surprisingly disappointing entry.

1960s witnessed the implosion of the Golden Age musical theatre format, as one show after another tanked trying to recapitulate the old formulas. New practitioners were blowing new life into the game with the "concept musical"; meanwhile, the countercultural revolution and the incursion of rock were eating away at the very space that musicals once occupied in the culture.

One would expect, then, that a chronicle of musicals in the 1960s would hold these developments front and center -- chapter headings might include "The Concept Musical", "The Rock Revolution", "The Countercultural Revolution", "The New Ethnicity", etc. But in OPEN A NEW WINDOW the new America musicals existed in hovers far in the background -- when these changes were, after all, the REASON the form had to change the way it did.

Instead, Mordden basically takes the occasion to dish and do post-mortems on almost every show that hit the boards from 1960 to 1969, dividing the shows into butterfly-collection subsets like "flops", "English shows", "dark shows", "three shows of 1969" that he just happens to find particularly interesting, etc.

Of course, his descriptions of and opinions on the shows are razor-sharp as always, and often laugh-out-loud funny. By the 1960s, Mordden was old enough to actually see all of these shows in their original performances, and this lends especial vividness to his tour.

But ultimately it's just a tour, or more precisely, an excuse to gab about the subject at book-length, getting his particular impressions on each show between two covers. And in a book by Mordden, this by itself is a let-down. Mordden specializes in taking whole swatches of theatre history and identifying dominating themes within them, rendering that theme in almost novelistic prose. Even when you can see that he has carefully fashioned his outline to allow him to hang every single show on it at some point, the result is still caviar.

His survey of the 1920s, MAKE BELIEVE, is also a tad too "taxonomic", but he gets away with it because he emphasizes theme overall, and describing the shows requires an archeological virtuosity that Mordden never ceases to dazzle me with. The 1940s and 1950s volumes are masterful in keeping larger points front and center, even when at times he has to shoehorn some shows into thematic points that they do not really quite fit.

But in OPEN A NEW WINDOW, archaeological smarts are largely beside the point; these shows are well-recorded and recent memories. And then Mordden's interest in theme here is for some reason weaker than in any of his other books. He covers the concept musical -- but sprinkled throughout. He gives little more than a page to the place of rock in musicals, in contrast to his articulate discussion of that issue re film in his THE HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL. The emerging black presence is something we largely must glean here and there, and it really won't do for HALLELUJAH, BABY! to get half a page while the misbegotten MATA HARI gets three.

Discrepancies like this do not follow from anything inherent to charting how the sixties musical developed, and reveal the problem with the book. HALLELUJAH, BABY was an attempt to engage the times, was written by top pros, won a Tony, had something of a run, and contained some fine performances. MATA HARI was just business as usual, written by semi-talents, no one really shined in it, and it didn't even make it to New York! The only reason to dwell lovingly on MATA HARI and rush past HALLELUJAH BABY is that MATA HARI fascinates in its obscurity (Mordden's archaeological bent again). The choice is natural for a few hundred die-hard show buffs, but it's questionable historiography. As the events themselves proceeded, MATA HARI was an ignominious, passing mistake. And yet we get loving, even musicological rundowns of some of its numbers, while HALLELUJAH BABY gets a polite nod.

The result is a book whose audience is a little unclear. People who don't know the shows are going to get winded with the endless procession of descriptions, ticking off of key songs, etc., especially in, say, a chapter on Off-Broadway musicals few people even noticed when they were running. A particular problem here is that there were an awful lot of weak shows in the 1960s; in the 1940s and 1950s books one reads about one gem after another, but how much will most people want to read about how magnificently inept one show after another was? Certain show buffs cherish campy dishing about "Flops", but that little joke does not travel far beyond this little set. Most people want to read about good work.

But then the small coterie of people who know the shows well and have all of their recordings -- who I suspect are Mordden's main audience -- do not need the listings, and do not need to be apprised of the existence of each and every musical. Or if we must have this, it must be cast in readable form, where we have a REASON to follow Mordden through several dozen productions.

I imagine people like us are supposed to just enjoy reading Mordden's opinions. And we do. But a sort of show-by-show reference book would do just fine here. This book barely needed to be cast in prose. OPEN A NEW WINDOW, as much as I hate to say it, left me a little bored about halfway through -- for the first time in twenty years of reading Mordden.

Mordden will always be God when it comes to chronicling musicals, and anything he writes is worth reading and re-reading. But in the end, the 1960s throws him a bit.