The Megamusical

Notes

387 Notes Introduction 1. For musicological examples of defining the subgenres of musical theater, see Edith Boroff, “Origin of Species: Conflicting Views of American Musical Theater History,” American Music 2, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 101–11; Paul Wittke, “The American Musical Theater (with an Aside on Popular Music),” Musical Quarterly 68, no. 2 (April 1982): 274–86; and Larry Stempel, “The Musical Play Expands,” American Music 10, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 136–69. For an example of a canon and its justification, see Geoffrey Block, “The Broadway Canon from Show Boat to West Side Story and the European Operatic Ideal,” Journal of Musicology 11, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 525–44. Block’s book, Enchanted Evenings, offers a nice start toward a methodology of evaluating musicals. Had he carried it through to musicals of recent years, the megamusical would have been addressed, probably with great success. Instead, he canonizes fourteen shows before 1970, and then devotes a chapter to Sondheim. He describes Lloyd Webber as “probably underrated, certainly underestimated and understudied” (275), yet devotes no attention to him. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 2. I attended a panel at the meeting of the Society for American Music in March 2000 that drove this point home: my colleague Professor Paul Laird presented a canon of one hundred musicals to be used for teaching, the first canon I had seen which included megamusicals. Virtually the only shows that came under any sort of fire for their inclusion were Lloyd Webber’s. Some of my colleagues do not deny the financial success of megamusicals , nor even their influence on shows that have followed; they just resent them. I must say, though, that when I presented a paper on Cats at this same meeting, it was received with great warmth by these very people (and a rather large crowd of scholars in other areas)—my investigation into Cats as a phenomenon, and even as a show and a score, was taken as valuable. Scholars remain conflicted, apparently. Professor Laird, with William A. Everett, recently included the megamusical (even using this term) as a chapter in their Cambridge Companion to the Musical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Despite the book devoting only nineteen pages to the megamusical (a perfectly reasonable number given the book’s breadth of material), and despite the fact that Cats merits far less discussion than most other musicals in the chapter, a large photo from Cats adorns the cover; as we see in chapter 3, Cats sells. 3. Michael Walsh, Andrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works, updated and enlarged ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 256. 388 Notes to Pages 9–12 1. “Why’d You Choose Such a Backward Time and Such a Strange Land?” 1. Sheridan Morley, Spread a Little Happiness: The First Hundred Years of the British Musical (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 176, 181. 2. For more on the 1940s and 1950s, see Richard Kislan, The Musical: A Look at the American Musical Theater, rev. ed. (New York: Applause, 1995); Kurt Gänzl, The Musical: A Concise History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997); Denny Martin Flinn, Musical! A Grand Tour: The Rise, Glory, and Fall of an American Institution (New York: Schirmer, 1997); and Hans Heinsheimer, “Splendour and Misery of the American Musical,” The World of Music 12, no. 2 (1970): 44–56. For more on defining genres of musical theater and the integrated musical, see Geoffrey Block, “Gershwin’s Buzzard and Other Mythological Creatures,” Opera Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1990): 74–82; Geoffrey Block, “The Broadway Canon from Show Boat to West Side Story and the European Operatic Ideal,” Journal of Musicology 11, no. 4 (1993): 525–44; Larry Stempel, “The Musical Play Expands,” American Music 10, no. 2 (1992): 136–69; Edith Boroff, “Origin of Species: Conflicting Views of American Musical Theater History,” American Music 2, no. 4 (1984): 101–11; Paul Wittke, “The American Musical Theater (with an Aside on Popular Music),” Musical Quarterly 67, no. 2 (1982): 274–86; Wilfrid Mellers, “Are Musicals Musical?” Musical Times 132, no. 1782 (1991): 380. 3. Gerald Bordman, for example, calls Fiddler “the last of the great masterworks of the era,” in American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 693. 4. For more on the troubled 1960s, see especially Heinsheimer, “Splendour and Misery,” as well as the general histories listed above. 5. Ibid., 53. 6. Morley, Spread a Little Happiness...