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{ 237 } Book Reviews \ \ Women in Ameri­ can Musical Theatre. Edited by Bud Coleman and Judith A. Sebesta. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. 282 pp. $45.00 paper. Bud Coleman and Judith Sebesta collected and edited eleven essays regarding a group of women who have shaped and contributed to the Ameri­ can theatre. The goal of the editors was to “remedy the still-­ existent paucity of information on the Ameri­ can women who helped create” musical theatre today (4). Focusing on the “less-­ celebrated” members of the creative team (as opposed to female performers), Coleman and Sebesta have succeeded in creating an anthology that is unique and worthwhile. The authors (coincidentally, mostly women) run or work in theatre and dance departments at universities and colleges across the country and have published in notable periodicals including the New York Times and Ameri­ can Theatre. The essays deal with a myriad of topics, ranging from designers to composers , lyricists to librettists, and producers to choreographers and directors, focusing on the work of the chosen few who actually have been written about, have won awards, or have been critically panned or praised for their artistic contributions between the turn of the twentieth century and its end. From those artists still living while the collection was written, many personal interviews (though some of them more than ten years old) were garnered. This grounds the book in a relatively current reality. Perhaps the most difficult task for Coleman and Sebesta was choosing what to include in such a collection from the breadth of existing information. Though the face of Susan Stroman and an image from her Broadway success The Pro­ ducers is on the front cover, she gets very little attention (as compared to the magnitude of work she has done—and given what has been written about her in the past fifteen years) in the pages that follow. And, though Stroman does get mention in the “11 o’clock number,” more time is given in earlier essays to directors whose work has had less impact on the state of the musical theatre­ today. The first essay, “‘Will You Remember?’ Female Lyricists of Operetta and Musical Comedy,” by Korey R. Rothman—a finely honed story about some of the earliest artists mentioned in the collection—brings up a historical truth: women have often been defined by their personal lives, physical attributes, and sexual orientation rather than by the art they created. Ironically, the next essay , “Hallie Flanagan and Cheryl Crawford: Women Pioneer Producers of the { 238 } Book Reviews 1930s,” by Barbara Means Fraser, does exactly what Rothman says writers in the past have done to women, giving an inordinate amount of attention to her subjects ’ personal lives and physical attributes. Thankfully, Fraser’s essay also sheds much light on their contributions to the art form in the 1930s. Anna Wheeler Gentry’s “Twentieth-­ Century Women Choreographers: Refining and Redefining the Showgirl Image” highlights the unique contributions of Anna Held, Albertina Rasch, Katherine Dunham, Hanya Holm, and June Taylor to early Ameri­ can musical theatre. Jennifer Jones Cavenaugh’s “A Composer in Her Own Right: Arrangers, Musical Directors and Conductors”is relevant , current, and fascinating. Cavenaugh depicts the life and contributions of Trude Rittman in such a way that a clear understanding of the woman and her artistic contributions resonates well beyond the length of the essay. Gary Konas’s “Working with the Boys: Women Who Wrote Musicals in the Golden Ages”is another standout in its exploration of the past in relation to the present. Konas includes select lyrics to demonstrate how innovative the writers were and details about the characters who sang those lyrics to aid the reader in understanding the diverse talents of the celebrated Dorothy Fields, Betty Comden , Carolyn Leigh, and Mary Rodgers. His essay is almost twice as long as the others and offers some of the most astute perspectives on his subjects. Tish Dace’s essay,“Designing Women,” surveys the top musical theatre designers up to the late twentieth century. Although Dace provides valuable information on designers prior to 1999, it’s a shame that this essay does not include the triumphs for female designers in the early twenty-­ first century...

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