Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre
*Starred Review* One of the two most American contributions to world art, the musical springs (as does the other, jazz) from immigrant stock. Its grand progenitor, Mordden says, is John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a socially satirical parody of the Italian operas that then dominated London theater. Gay’s wildly popular “ballad opera,” consisting of popular tunes given new words, inspired imitations that gradually shifted from existing to newly composed music, eventuating in Gilbert and Sullivan’s concoctions in England and Offenbach’s confections in Paris. Late nineteenth-century America enthusiastically imported those shows and started mixing their ingredients with those of native musical entertainment, especially the minstrel show and burlesque (and while the former was performed in blackface, the latter didn’t consist of strippers and blue humor). That’s the musical’s beginnings, and its subsequent life is an evolutionary history of varying forms right down to the present. Mordden brightly differentiates those forms, citing hundreds and analyzing dozens of examples of them in a sweeping narrative that, with plenty of sass and tang, wit and even a little snark, not to mention scholarly precision, is obviously the best-ever history of the musical and likely to remain so for a very long time. Individual shows and even numbers leap to life in Mordden’s colorful prose, both in the main text and the hefty bibliographical and discographical essays that propel the volume to a hilarious final bon mot. --Ray Olson