Peerless: Rouben Mamoulian, Hollywood, and Broadway

Jensen debuts with a scrupulously researched portrait of Armenian director Rouben Mamoulian (1897–1987), whose wide-ranging career boasted 16 films and 17 Broadway productions, including Oklahoma!. Born in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), Georgia, to a banker father and actor mother, Mamoulian and his family fled the Russian Revolution of 1905 for Paris. As an adult he immigrated to London, where a series of chance encounters landed him a job as director of the experimental play Porgy, which debuted in 1927 and paved the way for an eclectic career that included the films Applause (1929) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), which used such cutting-edge techniques as spinning cameras and colored filters. In 1932 he directed the romantic musical comedy Love Me Tonight in collaboration with Richard Rodgers, forging a partnership that would redefine his career when the two—along with Oscar Hammerstein—collaborated for the wildly successful Oklahoma!, which, Jensen argues, cast off “long-accepted tropes of musical comedy” to pioneer the “integrated” musical, in which “songs and choreography advance the plot.” Sifting through a wealth of production notes, diaries, and letters, Jensen weaves together a biography that gives equal due to Mamoulian’s stylistic innovations, wide-ranging artistic legacy, and uncompromising vision that was buttressed by egotistical self-confidence (Mamoulian sometimes claimed “to be the Zeus from whose brow all talkie innovations sprung,” according to film historian Scott Eyman). Musical theater buffs will be riveted. (May)