Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (review)

As anyone who works in the field of musical theatre knows, the current scholarship on the topic is bleak, to say the least. Musical theatre is often treated like the wayward child of theatre studies, not worthy of real scholarship presumably due to its middlebrow song and dance components. The majority of works on the Broadway musical are typically historical in nature, tracing the genre's origins in opera or operetta up through the 1980s British invasion of the megamusical.

John Bush Jones's new book attempts to alter this trajectory by focusing on the social elements underlying the creation of this American art form. Sadly, though, Jones's book falls into some of the same traps as its predecessors, giving us a work that, while providing a strong thematic overview of certain social themes in the American musical, neither probes the depths or implications of these thematic motifs nor strongly deviates from the traditional "chronological" paradigm of writing musical theatre history.

Jones's text is divided into ten chapters, each basically focusing on a different historical decade (e.g., 1920s, 1930s) or a thematic topic (e.g., Black and Jewish musicals, fragmented musicals [a.k.a. the concept musical]). Jones does a good job of contextualizing each work within the historical period in which it was created; while this is productive in explaining why certain shows and trends emerged when they did, the broad overview doesn't lend itself to examining the subtleties of such creations. If a show has Jewish themes or characters (Fiddler on the Roof, for example), Jones notes that it reflects a Jewish social milieu, but that is about the extent of his analysis. Though his themed groupings are helpful in getting an overall sense of certain trends within a particular period of time (e.g., war-themed shows during WWII, black musicals during the civil rights movement), Jones's narrative tends to be additive, giving examples of shows as opposed to thoroughly analyzing them.

What is particularly egregious is Jones's lack of rigorous new or original scholarship into this topic. Instead, his work is unabashedly a rehash and condensation of Gerald Bordman's outstanding American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (2nd ed., 1992). Bordman's massive tome continues to be a valuable reference source for scholars, providing a fairly comprehensive show-by-show history of the American musical. Though Jones often provides lengthier plot summaries than Bordman does, he supplies his readers with much of the same information such as opening date statistics, that one can find in Bordman. Similarly, when discussing black musicals, Jones cites with regularity from Allen Woll's wonderful Black Musical Theatre (1989), but doesn't bring much new to the table. Our Musicals only touches upon reviews and other primary archival materials surrounding the productions themselves that might shed light on the social context in which these shows were produced and received. This primary source material, particularly in the earlier chapters, takes a backseat to his recycling of other secondary sources. How did writers and critics at the time of these productions understand, if at all, the social significance of these works? Such a question is worth asking; failing to do so is a major shortcoming of the book.

Jones's musical synopses, some of which are extremely detailed for the most obscure musicals, rarely analyze the plot elements that he sets up, as if telling the plot transparently reveals the social history of the piece. He also unfailingly gives the reader the number of performances that each show ran. The repeated nature of providing the exact same types of information for each show unfortunately makes for a tedious read.

What is also notable about Jones's book are the shows he chooses to write about. Some of the most obscure shows are given copious amounts of space (Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock is allotted an unbelievable nine pages) while all...