To Broadway, To Life: The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick.

Wells, Elizabeth A.

To Broadway, To Life: The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick. BY Philip Lambert. (Broadway Legacies.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xvi. 361 p. ISBN 9780195390070. S351. Music examples. illustrations, bibliography, appendices, index.

This recent installment in Oxford's Broadway Legacies series (six volumes at last count) has taken over some of the territory formerly covered by the Yale Broadway Masters series. The latter produced eight volumes between 2004 and 2011 (with something of a hiatus recently) that focused primarily on the most successful and prolific composers and lyricists from Broadway history. The Legacies series has a broader sweep, with vol times on creators (Dorothy Fields and the volume under discussion, on the team of Bock and Harnick) as well as on individual works (Show Boat and South Pacific, with a projected volume on My Fair Lady). With few exceptions, volumes in both series come from authors who specialize in musical theatre or the specific musicals themselves, lending both series a strong imprimatur; these are foundational texts and often the first full-length studies of their subjects, written by the top experts in the field. As such, volumes in this series typically survey the important. biographical and musical elements of the composer's and lyricist's styles, present in-depth studies of some or their more mous musicals. and introduce readers to lesser-known works in their repertoires.

Indeed. the trajectory of volumes in both series serves as a kind of canon-building exercise. in which the major works in the repertoire are shored up by scholarship that also allows for new works up be introduced into that canon. A corollary to this scholarship is the -Encores!" series o1 concerts that has taken place in New York; since the mid-1990s. This series presents in a concert setting ratrely-heard or less-frequently-produced musicals to audiences access to some of the treasttres of the Broadway repertoire without the burden of their production costs. Lesser-known works like St. Louis Woman (Arlen and Mercer) stand along more famous works like On the Town (Bernstein and Comden/Green) and these pared-down revivals provide an alternative to the often commercial and ephemeral offerings on Broadway today while allowing a glimpse into the past.

For Bock and Harnick, the subject of the present volume, the series editor Geoffrey Block mentions specifically the Encores! presentation of She Loves Me and the performance of Kirsten Chenoweth as an indication that a study of the creators is timely and their works worthy of revisiting. Philip Lambert, the author of the volume itself, situates his subjects not only within their own oeuvre, but within Broadway history in general, which is another important function of books such as these. The output of Bock and Harnick falls into one of the most interesting and fraught periods in musical theatre historiography, the end of the Golden Age and the ascendancy of the concept musical and the director-choreographer. As such, the author can provide commentary on il ir period and the way in which changes in the creative process reflect some of the changing means of production and focus ot Broadway musicals. Lambert particularly wants to portray the team as adhering to the highest ideals of what is called the "integrated" musical (a term that has been applied to many of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, but which is fraught with modernist ideology and indeed has been applied to many works before and after the Golden Age heyday). His emphasis is, then, on how the authors valued dramatic integrity over sheer craftsmanship:

  If there is a thread of consistency in their mature work
  it is their acute sensitivity to drama; they wrote for
  specific dramatic circumstances and characters, in
  the best tradition of the integrated musical. They also
 created little musical dramas within the substance of
  their scores--dramas of themes, motives, chord types,
  harmonic progressions, and the like, that interact
  artfully with the unfolding developments of story
  And character. They were, in short, a team of expert
  craftsmen who were more than just great songwriters,
  whose reputation in the musical theater should rest
  on a broad range of achievements and contributions,
  featuring but not limited to their own groundbreaking
  success. (pp. xi-xii)

Using as a starting point the ideas put forth in Mark Grant's oft-cited The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), Lambert seeks to situate the authors in a progress narrative that sees them moving ever closer to the realization of the integrated musical. As troubling as that construct may be to some, it does underlie a great deal of musical theatre scholarship, and understandably Lambert aligns himself with some of the most prevalent thinking in the field through this approach.

Lambert's book is well written and well documented, with musical analysis appropriate both in depth and quantity to illuminate the characteristics of Bock's style. Fiddler on the Roof stands as trguably their most successful and well-known work, and so a healthy portion of this study by Philip Lambert focuses on its creation and reception. The central chapter naturally addresses Fiddler in some detail, with a long analysis and history of the work. However, the chapter on She Loves Me makes the case that this is indeed one of the creators' best shows, and extensive discussion of the work, its musical details. reception. and revivals situates it as just as important as the more famous Fiddler. Fur all the works discussed in detail, the author provides helpful song lists and plot synopses to acquaint the reader with more obscure works in the repertoire. and the index and appendices provide solid information that will make this book the primary source on its subject. Particularly refreshing is the author's approach to commercially unsuccessful shows. He does not try to sugarcoat these failures, but instead offers a frank assessment of the shows' weaknesses; this helps to explain how Broadway works, and what its values and processes are. As a result, this volume is as valuable is a resource on Broadway history as it is on the subjects themselves:

The author had full access to the creators, a rare opportunity and one which could have been taken further. Although there are a number of quotes from Bock and Harnick, as well as a review of the work they have done since their writing partnership ended, one longs to hear more of their assessment of their own work in their own words. One thinks of the gem that is Mark Horowitz's Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003) to see how revealing detailed interviews of a composer and lyricist on specific works can be.

One interesting aspect that comes up repeatedly in his analysis is Lambert's reference to the similarity of many of the creators' works to those of Gilbert and Sullivan. Although at first blush one would not make this connection (and certainly Gilbert and Sullivan's works are not cited as prime exemplars of "integration"), it is an intriguing one given the way in which Bock and Harnick have traditionally been viewed and one wishes that the author had teased Out this comparison even further.

Books like this and Thomas Riis's volume on Frank Loesser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) both take composers most famous 161 one or two works and shed tight on some of their lesser-known but more historically important works (for Loesset, Most Happy Fella; for Bock and Harnick. She Loves Me and The Apple Tree). So although the present volume is titled To Broadway, To Life, it offers much more than a glimpse into Fiddler on the Roof. It advances the scholarship on the musical during one of its most crucial periods.

ELIZABETH A. WELLS

Mount Allison University