Drama

As America's toastmaster general of the old millennium, George Jessel, philosophically reflected fifty years ago, nothing is more permanent than change. In the near future AmLS may need a chapter on film since films/movies are now as prominent in scholarship and in the classroom as theatrical "drama." In Daniel Brown's comparative piece "Wilde and Wilder" (PMLA 119: 1216–30) the Wilde is Oscar Wilde's Salome, but the Wilder is not Thornton but Billy Wilder's film Sunset Boulevard. University presses reel: note such titles as Home in Hollywood from Columbia; New Queer Cinema, The War Film, The Horror Film, and An Eye for Hitchcock from Rutgers; Vision's Immanence: Faulkner, Film and the Popular Imagination from Johns Hopkins; and Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture from NYU, among others. The times they are a-changin'.

i Theater History

Richard Christiansen's Theater of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago (Northwestern) starts in 1837, with a troupe of traveling actors including Joseph Jefferson staging the first legitimate theater performance in Chicago the year it was incorporated as a city, and moves more or less chronologically to the present. Christiansen began as an arts journalist in 1956, joined the Chicago Tribune in 1978, and was its chief critic until his retirement in 2002; this is not a case of parochial pride, however, but a volume for general readers who may have no connection to Chicago. Christiansen's tour includes the Jane Addams Center of Hull House, the Chicago Little Theatre, the Federal Theatre Project, Second City, dozens of now famous actors, the Tony Award-winning Goodman Theatre, Victory Gardens, and Gary Sinise and Steppenwolf. And yes, there is a chapter, "It's Good Writing," devoted to native son David Mamet. The volume recounts those magical 1,001 nights in 317 pages and is copiously illustrated with 202 sketches, maps, and black-and-white photographs. If one were odious enough to compare Christiansen's book to Laurence Maslon's Broadway: The American Musical (Bulfinch), based on Michael Kantor's documentary film series for PBS, it would be apparent why A. J. Liebling in the January 1952 New Yorker magazine forever locked the sobriquet of "The Second City" on Chicago, Carl Sandburg's city of the big shoulders. Christiansen's is a big book; Maslon's is even bigger—470 pages on paper stock giving new meaning to the word glossy, photographs in stunning color, and seven pounds of coffee-table-book heft. Maslon employs brief biographies and commentaries, apt quotations, and a valuable narration to form this history of the American musical. The volume, divided into six chapters arranged chronologically, beginning with the period 1893–1919 and concluding with 1980–2004, accounts for 712 productions, including revivals, from Victor Herbert's 1903 hit Babes in Toyland to Stephen Schwartz's 2003 Wicked. And since America is a melting pot, Maslon does not neglect Cameron Mackintosh and the British invasion, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, Trevor Nunn, Elton John, or the French team of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg.

John Bush Jones's Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Brandeis, 2003) concerns a subtle interchange between social and political values and their expression on the musical stage. British and other imports are not treated; the volume is limited to works by American composers, lyricists, and book writers. Distinguishing between popular diversionary musicals and socially conscious works, Jones focuses almost exclusively on shows that spoke to the issues, achievements, and anxieties of their particular era, musicals that consciously intended to have a contemporary social relevance. Thus, more attention is given to lesser-known works like I'd Rather Be Right and Lost in the Stars than My Fair Lady or Hello, Dolly. Although it disrupts strict chronology to discuss musicals according to themes, genres, subject matter, and ethnicity, this history is essentially chronological. It opens with chapters on patriotism, xenophobia, and World War I; the Roaring Twenties; and the Depression. It continues down to and including women's issues, gay relationships, diversity of the 1990s, and Rent...