Customer Reviews

The Voodoo That They Did So Well: The Wizards Who Invented the New York Stage

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

 

 

Though one would be hard put to discover it from the cover or jacket copy, "Voodoo" is not an history of the N.Y. stage, but a collection of 8 separate articles, mostly for the "City Journal", that are tied to one degree or another with the Broadway theater. Nonetheless, each article is so well done and so entertaining that one is tempted to forgive this minor deceit... and one readily succumbs to the temptation. So, if we realize that it's more than a bit of a stretch tying in reminiscences of Vaudville or the Yiddish theater ( subject of Mr. Kanfer's "Stardust Lost") with mini-bios of Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, Rodgers, Sondheim, etc., we forgive it. Likewise, if we note that Kanfer has confused Betty Grable with Ginger Rogers in "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim", we're tempted to shrug and say: "Oh, well, one blond conservative is pretty much like the next!" And, once again, readily succumb to the temptation. In short, if you take this for what it IS, and not what it's publishers might wish you to THINK it is, you'll have a marvelous time.

Stefan Kanfer is beginning to get a reputation for appalling errors in his would-be authoritative overviews (see Amazon reviews of his book on Yiddish theatre). With this one, he claims that Cole Porter's grandfather "was one of the richest men in Ohio" (Ohio, Indiana -- ahh, what's the difference?) and that Ginger Rogers starred in the charming movie musical "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim" when, of course, he means Betty Grable.

Worse than these mistakes of scholarship, however, are his judgments. When he cites Ira Gershwin's lyric "I'm a Poached Egg," written for the Billy Wilder-I.A.L. Diamond comedy "Kiss Me, Stupid," Kanfer does a rant against current pop music, ending with "We're all poached eggs now." What he doesn't seem to have recognized, in his hurry to appropriate the phrase, is that Gershwin was writing a deliberately bad number for two characters in the movie, aspirant tunesmiths who write perfectly dreadful songs.

Then there's the matter of Stephen Sondheim. Granted that each of us must perforce have a license to see things in our own fashion and through the prism of personal taste, how is one to take seriously a critic who can write a line like, "[...] it is unlikely that fifty years from now popular entertainers will sing his songs"? Kanfer is, additionally, so high on the vastly overrated Ira Gershwin -- how I loathe that overworked phrase "The Jeweler" -- he can only excoriate Sondheim for his (quite accurate) description of Ira as "self-conscious." Gershwin's rhymes aren't generally as convoluted as Larry Hart's, but they run a close second.

This is a very bad book, and a nearly useless one. It merely re-treads ground that others -- critics, theatre historians, biographers -- have trampled more than abundantly. Aside from a moderately illuminating chapter on Lorenzo Da Ponte, there is nothing here that couldn't be gleaned elsewhere, and in books written with far greater acumen, not to mention accuracy.

THE VOODOO THAT THEY DID SO WELL: THE WIZARDS WHO INVENTED THE NEW YORK STAGE is a top pick for any serious Broadway or musical theatre collection: it surveys Manhattan's musical theater history, bringing to life the major names of the industry and the stars of New York's Yiddish theater and placing their lives and achievements in context of a broader survey of Manhattan theatre history. An outstanding, lively history, this will appeal to any collection strong in Broadway history and analysis.