Barnes & Noble
The Broadway musical is one of the authentic artistic contributions that our country has made to world culture. The five-CD set Broadway: The American Musical -- a companion piece to the PBS documentary -- celebrates the genre in grand style, throwing light on the illustrious composers and performers who have made theatrical history on the Great White Way. From the early days of the musical to the blockbuster era of today, Broadway gives us a taste of a great many of the legendary figures who exemplify the art form. The exhilarating beginnings of the 1920s are represented by such stalwarts as Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Bert Williams, Eddie Cantor, Gertrude Lawrence, and Paul Robeson; the glory days of the '30s, '40s and '50s get their due from celebrated names like Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, Fred Astaire, Alfred Drake, Ray Bolger, Robert Alda, Julie Andrews, and Barbara Cook. The '60s and '70s find Dick Van Dyke, Zero Mostel, Barbra Streisand, Joel Grey, and other talents entering the picture, while contemporary musicals are marked by defining performances from Betty Buckley, Bernadette Peters, Michael Crawford, Matthew Broderick, and Hugh Jackman. And the songs! Landmark tune follows landmark tune from such musical icons as Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Kurt Weill, Frank Loesser, Jerry Herman, Stephen Sondheim, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Among the multitude of shows touched upon are Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Mame, Fiddler on the Roof, Chicago, Movin' Out, Wicked, and The Boy from Oz. As a sweeping overview of a glorious national treasure, this gem of a box set is essential for both Broadway aficionados and newcomers to the musical.
William Pearl
All Music Guide
This five-CD box set, containing 106 tracks and running six-and-one-third-hours, is an audio companion to the six-part PBS documentary series Broadway: The American Musical, but not the soundtrack to that series. Rather, it is a sampler covering 84 years of recordings and 99 years of show tunes. One song has been chosen from each of 102 musicals. (There are also two shows that get two songs each, the landmark musical Show Boat and, oddly, Ziegfeld Follies of 1919.) This restriction actually gives the collection a broader reach than the TV series, which focuses attention on particularly significant shows, songwriters, and performers, but it also gives the set less depth, since great shows tend to have more than one great song in them. As with the series, the compilers give greatest emphasis to the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, decades that contribute 50 of the tracks here. This is in part by necessity; the original Broadway cast album only came into vogue in the '40s, and show music from before that period is not as well represented on record, at least as performed by the stage stars. For example, there are no recordings from the cast of the 1932 revue Americana, which forced the compilers to include a recording of the show's hit song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" as sung by Bing Crosby, who did not include Broadway shows among his credits. In part, too, however, the de-emphasis on music from before the 1940s comes from the compilers' decision to ignore operetta; there are no compositions here by Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg, or Rudolf Friml, for instance. Instead, this is the history of the Tin Pan Alley-style 32-bar song as perfected by Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin, among others. Drawing from the major record labels that recorded original Broadway cast albums from the '40s on, the compilers hit their stride by the end of the first disc, and from then to the beginning of the fourth disc they present one memorable song from a memorable show after another. A true show music fan might have quibbles about what's left out (no Yul Brynner or Rex Harrison, nothing from House of Flowers or Peter Pan), but the choices are solid for the most part. By the '70s and '80s, however, things begin to seem more questionable, and the selection falls apart completely in the '90s and 2000s, from which only 13 tracks are featured. The compilers, who include songs from nine shows still running in New York as of the album's release date (early 2005), seem only too willing to abandon Broadway for pop/rock anthology shows like Mamma Mia! and Movin' Out. In fact, of those 13 tracks, only seven come from newly written scores of the '90s/'00s. Meanwhile, however, the Tony Award-winning scores to such shows of the period as The Will Rogers Follies, Falsettos, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Passion, Titanic, Ragtime, Parade, Aida, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and Avenue Q have been ignored. Clearly, the compilers are historians with a much better sense of the distant past than of the near-present. The collection contains a 56-page booklet dominated by brief comments on the shows from which the songs came. These notes would have benefited from a proofreader, who might have known how to spell Meredith Willson's last name, and a fact-checker, who might have known that Dave Kapp, not Jack Kapp, produced Guys and Dolls and that Tim Rice did not co-produce Cats. William Ruhlmann
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