Shakespeare and the American Musical (review)

{ 128 } BOOK REV IEwS I have two small quibbles with this otherwise superb book. I wish there were actual snippets of music on the page to illustrate Savran’s clear and sophisticated parsing of composition and scoring. Such quotes function the same way as pictures and excerpts from plays and surely belong in a study that investigates them with such nuance. Second, I wished Savran had situated himself and his readers in the audience population (or rather its direct descendants) he constructs . Surely it is not possible to shed one’s “most dearly held assumptions,” which here may still be that there is a kind of theatre (off-Broadway? off-offBroadway ?) that eschews the close embrace of uplift and commerce. No matter. The fact that this book neither pulls punches nor flattens the terrain in mapping the heady route from old to“new middle class” in the American theatre makes it unique and indispensable. —DOROTHY CHANSKY Texas Tech University \ Shakespeare and the American Musical. By Irene G. Dash. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 248 pp. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. In the opening paragraphs of her introduction to Shakespeare and the American Musical, Irene G. Dash suggests that“Sometimes Shakespeare scared people, especially those writing about the American musical. . . . Despite Shakespeare’s texts being in the forefront of the development of the organic musical and being popular, these adaptations were basically overlooked. But they shouldn’t have been. Right from the start, from the time that Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart decided to turn to a Shakespeare play rather than write their own story, his works were central” (1). With this statement, Dash begins to address what she sees as a “gap” in musical theatre scholarship by arguing for the centrality of five important musical productions adapted from Shakespeare between 1938 and 1971 to the development of the American “organic” or “integrated” musical form. These works are The Boys from Syracuse (The Comedy of Errors), Kiss Me, Kate (Taming of the Shrew), West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet), Your Own Thing (Twelfth Night), and Two Gentlemen of Verona (a rock musical adaptation). As revealed in the quote above, Dash makes several assumptions about musical theatre history and scholarship that contribute to the breakdown of her primary argument (the first being that these works have been “ignored” by musical theatre scholarship—an interesting case to make in the light of the pub- { 129 } BOOK REV IEwS lished scholarship on her first three examples, very little of which can be found in Dash’s bibliography). Dash’s secondary goal is to demonstrate “how American culture transmuted these Renaissance plays into a vibrant new experience in the modern theater” (9), and this objective is accomplished with some success . The book is divided into an introduction, five chapters (each looking at one of the musical adaptations indicated above), and a brief coda. In order to demonstrate her example productions’ centrality to the development of the“organic”or“integrated”American musical form, Dash attempts to position musical Shakespeare adaptations as a series of innovations, many times as “firsts” in musical theatre history, which create trends in musical theatre history and form development. Unfortunately, Dash provides little evidence for these kinds of claims, nor does she reference contemporary productions or other scholars’ work that would challenge her ideas. For example, she tries to position The Boys from Syracuse as the first “organic” musical without reference to other possible claimants (except for a brief mention of Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes, which she dismisses based on a quote by Ethan Mordden stating that the production’s ballet did not move the plot forward; however, Mordden, in Sing for Your Supper [which Dash cites in the same paragraph] argues for the musical’s “integrated” status). Further, Dash positions many of her examples as pioneering innovative voices for “political and social change in the twentieth century”(186). For example, she claims that the rock musical adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971) was the first “completely racially mixed cast,” but her explanation of this statement (that the casting reflected the racial mix of the city) is simplistic and poorly defined, leading readers to wonder if this...