Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater

Stempel, an associate professor of music at Fordham University, was a member of Lehman Engel's BMI Musical Theater Workshop in the late 1970s, where he first set out on his 25 years of research to compile this comprehensive survey of Broadway musicals. Spanning more than 150 years, the hefty history is divided into three sections: "Out of the 19th Century," "Into the 20th Century," and "Toward the New Millennium." He opens with the 1853 musical adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the aerial ballerinas of The Black Crook (1867), followed by the Gilded Age, with its minstrels, vaudeville, and comic operas. As George M. Cohan expanded his skits into "plays with music," writing 500 songs, the turn-of-the-century rise of Tin Pan Alley coincided with the relocation of New York's entertainment district to Times Square, placing Al Jolson at center stage. Covering musical milestones from Irving Berlin and Florenz Ziegfeld to Oklahoma!, Sondheim, and Fosse, Stempel shows how generic songs could be "shoehorned into a story" and details the antagonistic tensions that arose between performers, lyricists, and librettists. Throughout, as Stempel traces the evolution with exhaustive archival research, he offers a penetrating and illuminating analysis of various musical forms and influences. Many of the 105 carefully selected b&w illustrations are surprising and revelatory. Theater buffs will be delighted to find that this scholarly, definitive work is also a hugely entertaining read. 16 color pages. (Sept. 6)