Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater by Larry Stempel (review)

A curious time warp operates in Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater, Larry Stempel's magisterial 685-page saga. As he relates, he began it in the late 1970s, and the book's approach, along with its ambitious scope, reflects the needs of what was then an embryonic subdiscipline beneath the concerns of serious scholarship. Had Showtime appeared in the late 1990s, its solid research and gracefully coherent interweaving of Broadway's various narratives would have heightened interest in the musical and allowed Showtime to become the textbook of choice for college courses.

However, the study of musicals is embryonic no more. Although still only a fledgling, it has established secure habitats in several fields over the past decade, as musicals have attracted the attention of insightful scholars working across the academy and beyond. The musical is now seen as central to American culture, not only in the conventional sense, but also because of its decades-long negotiations between high and low culture, which many find emblematic of the United States itself. The wide variety of creative enterprises that the musical depends on has been partly mirrored in scholarly attention from related academic disciplines, as well as from disciplines that study culture more generally. For many, musicals have proven fascinating for their negotiations among constituent components: between speech and song, for example, or between song and dance, or dance and other dramatic modes. And, as counterpoint to the musical's mainstream importance, much recent work probes the ways musicals have served (or sometimes ill-served) populations who have been disdained, discounted, or simply ignored by mainstream America because of racial or ethnic difference, gender bias, or enduring prejudices attached to sexual orientation.

Showtime evinces but little trace of this recent work. While Stempel acknowledges its existence early on (8-9, 12-13) and occasionally cites it, he does not take its full measure, and fails even to mention several important books, including Bruce Kirle's Unfinished Show Business (2005), Scott McMillin's The Musical as Drama (2006), D. A. Miller's Place for Us (1998), David Savran's A Queer Sort of Materialism (2003) and Highbrow/Lowdown (2009), and Stacy Wolf's A Problem Like Maria (2002).¹ These are scarcely obscure; McMillin and Savran (Highbrow/ Lowdown) won major awards, and all five are widely cited and offer perspectives on the genre that might have enhanced many discussions in Showtime.

On one hand, then, this is a richly researched historical study of the Broadway musical, beautifully presented and organized, and, on the whole, well written. But on the other, it only scantly acknowledges the growing community of scholars with whom Stempel should be in real conversation, but whose work he seems to have only browsed, judging by how thinly he cites them.² The problem is not just that this recent work is not given its due, but also that many of the perspectives these authors bring to the subject should be vibrantly present in any book that in 2010 seeks to provide a history suitable for use in a college course on the musical.

My metaphor of a "time warp," then, has three points of reference. First, it refers to the book's amplification to the point of rupture of a problem all academic authors face in accommodating relevant scholarship that emerges between a book's conception and its appearance in print. Second, it describes the oddness of so old-fashioned a history as Showtime—up to date historically but not in terms of its emphases—appearing at a time when issues of diversity have become increasingly integrated within college curricula and courses, as part of revisionist and minority histories, women's studies, or LGBT studies, each often augmented by cultural studies and performance studies. Such perspectives richly inform the history of the Broadway musical, yet when Stempel brings them up, they are made to seem like interesting back stories...