Customer Reviews

Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre: The Composers and Lyricists

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I had high hopes for this book when I bought it. But the old adage about not judging a book by its cover is true. The photos, layout, and table of contents were all so inviting. As much as I looked forward to reading this book, I could not make it past the middle of the second chapter. The writing is high school level at best. Simple sentences are strung together without much variety, flow, or cohesion. Many paragraphs are just a sentence or two long, touching on an aspect or work of a composer before abruptly dropping the matter and moving on to the next. The book is filled with unsubstantiated claims ("Life in Hollywood was free and easy. The people in the movie industry wandered in and out of each others' homes") and amateurish pseudo-psycho-analysis ("[Sondheim's] emotions were mangled as child and he spent most of his life fighting against any emotional attachments that would hurt him once again.") This book literally gave me a headache. I will think twice before buying another book from the editors at Applause Books.

While this book is filled with enthusiasm and much interesting personal information about the "geniuses", the author's understanding of Musical Theatre is minimal and each chapter is full of incorrect information. Also, to include Hoagy Carnichael and Duke Ellington as geniuses of the Musical Theatre and to have omitted Bock and Harnick (among many others) is a sign of the lack of any serious knowledge about Musical Theatre. This author needed far more than the four years of research he did for this book and was in serious need of having facts checked by an acknowledged Musical Theatre historian. It is unfortunate that some people will quote this book in future years, unaware that this author has made many errors. This author has had a successful career in the medical profession, but one hopes that he approached his duties as a Doctor with much more skill and expertise than he has shown in this seriously flawed book. Not worth your money or your time.

Herbert Keyser's Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre is a beauifully bound collection of interesting photographs and a so-so text. I received this book as a Christmas present and couldn't wait to dig in. Sadly, after reading two chapters, one on Sondheim and the other on Comden and Green, I was turned off to Keyser's simple and unimanginative text. Much of it reads like those Hollywood studio books from the seventies which list facts without any feeling or nuance. Perhaps the best thing about this book is just that though; just the facts ma'm and nothing else. Time will only tell if this book proves to be a resourseful book on musical theatre but meanwhile, it will be placed on my bookself without further reading unless, by some remote chance, I really need to read some dry tidbit about geniuses who truly deserve more than this dribble.

This book has not only the fairly well known stories of the best known songwriters like Berlin, Gershwin, etc, but also tells the story of many of the less famous writers in a cogent fashion. The formula for each bio is similar to the point of being predictable, but the information is priceless to those few of us who are deeply interested in American songwriting of that era.

This is obviously a labor of love. It has a lot of good anecdotes about the songs and their authors, including the authors' problems with booze and women. But take some of the anecdotes with a grain of salt: The ones that survive are the ones that make the best stories, not necessarily the true ones.

This is an excellent tool for me in support of my radio programme broadcasting Broadway and Hollywood musicals (as well as British musicals) although I have a broad knowledge of musicals and their composers this book fills me in on details I more than likely would not have found elsewhere.