An armchair critic
Sheridan Morley
ENCHANTED EVENINGS: THE BROADWAY MUSICAL FROM SHOW BOAT TO SONDHEIM by Geoffrey Block OUP, £25, pp. 410 With Show Boat, the Broadway musical which launched the genre in 1927, about to sail back into the West End for the first time in 20 years and the still wide- open debate about a seismic shift of power back towards America after years of British domination from Cats to Sunset Boulevard, this is as good a moment as any for Geoffrey Block's very detailed if somewhat academic study of 14 classics of the genre.
The book effectively ends with West Side Story in 1957, though Block does give us a final chapter on Sondheim since then, as if aware that, albeit only in 20 pages, something has to be said about the last 40 years. Fully a third of the rest of this musi- cological treatise is taken up with notes, plot synopses, discographies and 20 appen- dices, so it is not exactly a light read, and may well be of more interest to those teaching musical theatre than those more directly involved in rehearsing it.
Nevertheless, Block is clearly an addict, and he comes up with a useful mix of the scholarly and the journalistic; we get very detailed accounts of how his selected shows came together and were first received, as well as a glance at their afterlife, though he seldom bothers to build London or Hollywood into the pattern. This is a very Broadway-centric study, admirably illustrated by the great Al Hirschfeld, and there is already something very faintly dusty about it. Already, since Sondheim, a great deal has happened to the American musical at home and abroad, and the enchanted evenings really did not stop dead in the middle 1950s.
But from then on the framework certainly fragmented, and few subsequent shows could withstand Block's massively detailed study of books and lyrics, often written as much for an arranger/orchestrator as for a casual theatre-goer. In essence his book tells us what made shows like Porgy and Bess and Carousel and Kiss Me, Kate and My Fair Lady work from line to line and from quaver to quaver to semi-crotchet, often with sheet-music illustrations and a rather uninspiring selection of grainy black- and-white stills.
But all too often he is picking, and some- times nitpicking, over museum pieces; some of these classics, notably Anything Goes and The Most Happy Fella, have had to be drastically reconsidered and reworked for contemporary audiences, while the implication here is that major theatre-going also stopped somewhere around the late 1950s.
Inevitably his most interesting chapters are those on the shows we know least over here, like The Cradle Will Rock and One Touch of Venus, but I get the feeling that each of these roughly self-contained essays might once have been a lecture or an essay in its own right; we don't get much of an overview here, nor does Block really succeed in pulling his story together, even over the very tight time-frame he has set himself.
The author is clearly expert on what makes a musical work on the page and in the pit; he is less happy with what actually happens on the stage, and by iso- lating his hit shows from the others of their time he makes them seem curiously freaky instead of at the centre of a current Broadway climate.
Better at describing a syncopation than a star, this work is one for the American college circuit rather than the backstage bookstore; but as the art of the musical is increasingly taught and studied thousands of miles away from anywhere it actually happens, Enchanted Evenings is an academic fan book of considerable expertise and even some warmth. I seldom get the feeling of the author out there in the audience, and if he was, then he often seems to have had his head buried in the score; performances are seldom discussed in any detail, even though they were always what made or broke these shows. Block's `enchanted evenings' seem, unlike those of Rodgers and Hammerstein, to have been spent at home studying the musicals rather than watching them in action.
Hey Mr Producer: The Musicals of Cameron Mackintosh by Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leon will be published in September by Weidenfeld.
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