All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 [Hardcover]

Ethan Mordden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2007

From the late 1920s to late 1950s, the Broadway theatre was America's cultural epicenter. Television didn't exist and movies were novelties. Entertainment took the form of literature, music, and theatre. During this golden age of Broadway, actors and actresses became legends and starred in now classic plays. Laurence Olivier, Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontaine were names to remember, etching plays into memory as they brought the words of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill to life. Joseph Cotton romanced Katherine Hepburn in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story while Laurette Taylor became The Glass Menagerie's Amanda Wingfield.  Frederic March, Florence Eldridge, Jason Robards Jr. and Bradford Dillman showed us life among the ruins in Long Day's Journey Into Night. In All That Glittered, Ethan Mordden, long one of Broadway's best chroniclers, recreates the fascinating lost world of its golden age.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Acclaimed for his sprightly histories of the Broadway musical, the author turns to nonmusical theater in this scintillating survey. Mordden considers New York theater the wellspring of mid-century American culture, especially during the 1930s, when the advent of talkies forced a Hollywood desperate for material to ransack Broadway for scripts—and the talent that could bring their dialogue to life. Thus, he contends, "West-Central Manhattan" remade America in its own image—urban, sophisticated and racy, presided over by the wisecracking reporter and "that ubiquitous 1930s character, the Unmarried Sarcastic Woman," and tinged with an ironic gay sensibility. Mordden brings out his themes in an anecdote-strewn tour of significant (and some not so significant) productions, pausing now and again for set-piece drama criticism—comparing O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, for example, with Rachel Crothers's comedy Susan and God—and perpetually tossing off witty asides (the sublimely square actor Ralph Bellamy, he observes, "brings the Clueless Hetero to a completion so absolute that [he] creates something never before thought possible or even necessary: the opposite of Kabuki"). Erudite, but casual and conversational, and full of fresh perceptions, Mordden is a charmingly insightful raconteur who condenses 40 years' worth of opening nights into a single engrossing montage. Photos. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Having chronicled the Broadway musical from its 1920s first flowering (Make Believe, 1997) to its current lackluster state (The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen, 2004), Mordden turns to nonmusical theater on the same Manhattan street during much the same period. He admits to cutting a large swath, from George M. Cohan to Tennessee Williams, yet the book doesn't feel rushed or shallow, thanks largely to his witty, compulsively readable style and knack for finding the right figures to focus on in each era. Mordden is a master at revealing the web of aesthetic and business connections just beneath the surface of developments. His discussion of powerful columnist Walter Winchell, for example, begins as a rather routine sketch of one man and ends in a fascinating group portrait of the rogues, saints, and others who populated Broadway--and Damon Runyan's prose. Expectedly, perhaps, all roads lead back to the musical. When discussing 1920s theater, Mordden pays special attention to Sweeney Todd and Chicago, plays known today only because of their transformations into noteworthy musicals. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (April 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312338988
• ISBN-13: 978-0312338985
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #952,045 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mordden Does It Again, September 29, 2007

By 

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (Hardcover)

Ethan Mordden has written many books on the topic of Broadway, although generally they have been about the musical stage. This time he writes about plays, (mostly) without music, and rather arbitrarily defines, perhaps for purposes of symmetry, its golden age as the period between 1919 and 1959 (although he can't help himself and goes on into the 1960s a bit). As usual one is amazed at his encyclopedic knowledge of Broadway history; one can imagine him spending weeks and months, perhaps even years, in dusty libraries reading all those old copies of Variety, Playbill and the New York newspapers. His all-but-copyrighted bitchiness is much in evidence and gave me more than a few chuckles. His penchant for pointing who was gay among the actors, authors and directors, and for finding gay themes where they aren't obvious, is prominent.

He chronicles the Broadway spoken play by decade and finds something characteristic about each period. I found his writing, always sparkling, becomes more so when he gets to the 1940s and beyond, perhaps because those plays and the people who made them are within living memory for many people. Clearly Mordden (who is right at sixty, although his glamorous never-changing dustjacket picture hasn't changed in at least two decades) has had personal contact with many of the people mentioned in those latter years and he has some tales to tell.

Included are some pretty obscure plays and we are all the more informed for that. He writes much about the important actors, writers, producers and directors and we pick up a lot of theater lore as a result. His writing style is dense with fact and sometimes hermetic but it always dances along. I had difficulty putting the book down.

Another valuable book by Mordden, possibly primarily for specialists but assimilable by the casual reader with even a modicum of interest in the subject.

Scott Morrison

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Play Time, April 6, 2007

By 

S. Berner (Cocoa, Fl USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (Hardcover)

Ethan Mordden is probably best known for three things: the impossibility of remembering how to spell his last name; the width and depth of his subject matter; and his encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater. To all this, we can now add a fourth; an almost equally deep knowledge of "straight" (in the theatrical sense) drama. While it is arguable as to whether the golden age began in 1919 and ended in 1959, Mordden's treatment of this span is as exciting and insightful as any of his other critical studies and that, as his readers know, is saying a lot! (Aside to Mr. Mordden: The title "Beggar on Horseback" may be more closely related to the saying, "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride."... just a thought). Oh, and the only reason for 4 instead of 5 stars is to have somewhere to go for the next time.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating retrospective on the role of Broadway in American culture, June 24, 2007

By 

Elkhart (Moscow, Russia) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (Hardcover)

I love theatre history, but Mordden is such a fine writer that I will read his "History of Plumbing" should he write one.

Unlike his essential seven-volume chronicle of the musical, this is not a show-by-show description. Instead, Mordden takes a thematic approach, insightfully linking the development of the Broadway play to broader cultural developments. The shift from rural to urban humor, the relationship between Broadway and Hollywood, and the role of theatre as educator to the unsophisticated are among his compelling through-lines. Despite my unfamiliarity with most of the titles referenced, this is a great read.