“I
’MTELLINGYOU, theonly times I really
feel thepresenceofGodarewhen I’mhav-
ingsex, andduringagreatBroadwaymusi-
cal,” a hyper-sexed Father Dan reveals to
the title character Jeffrey inPaulRudnick’s
1993comedyabout gay lifeat theheight of
theAIDSepidemic. Evenashebrazenlyattempts toseduce the
emotionallyconfused stranger in the confessional, the strategi-
cally blasphemous priest warns him
that Satan is real: “
Phantom
.
Starlight
Express
.
Miss Saigon
! Know ye the
signs of the devil: overmiking, smoke
machines, troublewithEquity.”
Although novelist and theater his-
torian Ethan Mordden invariably
writes in a more judicious andmeas-
ured style of argument, he shareswith
Rudnick’s flamboyant Father Dan a
reverence for the life-affirming prop-
erties ofAmericanmusical theater. In
the “Confessions of a Theatregoer”
chapter in
Buddies
(the second of the
five volumes that make up his “Tales
fromGayManhattan” series), Mord-
denspeculates that “gayculture is city
culture. It thriveson the sophistication
and vitally needs the tolerance that
cities develop. So being taken to the
theatre is not the passive act it may
seem. One invites it, wills it,
chooses
the event—or would a show choose
you, put itsnameonyour [
sic
] through
anenchantingposterdesign, astartling
song title, a performer of note?”
In that same essay, he reveals that
from an early age he studied the the-
ater pages of
TheNewYorkTimes
and
found his intellectual curiosity stimu-
lated by an arresting logo or by a
provocative title: “somehowI compre-
hended that the theatrewasgoing tobe
my education.” Indeed, his obsession
withmusicals allowed him to escape
the limits imposed on the imagination by family, church, and
school, limits that his straight peers seemed tohavehadnodif-
ficultyaccepting. “Musicalsaren’t a fetish,”heconcludes, “they
are the stimulationof the cultivated.”
ESSAY
Asking theMusicalQuestions
R
AYMOND
-J
EAN
F
RONTAIN
Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English at the University of
Central Arkansas.
The extent towhichmusical theater has proven a lifelong
stimulus forMordden isondisplay inhisnewone-volumehis-
tory of themusical stage.Mordden has beenwriting both in-
formatively and entertainingly on this topic for nearly forty
years, beginningwith
Better Foot Forward
(1976), his initial
attempt at a one-volume history, continuing through
Broad-
way Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical
(1995) and critical biographies of particular “Broadway ba-
bies” (namely Florenz Ziegfeld, Kurt
Weill and Lotte Lenya, and Richard
Rodgers andOscar Hammerstein II),
and concluding with a magisterial
seven-volume history that proceeds
decadebydecade from
MakeBelieve:
The Broadway Musical in the 1920s
(1997) to
The Happiest Corpse I’ve
EverSeen:TheLast Twenty-fiveYears
of the Broadway Musical
(2004). In
theprocesshehas establishedhimself
as the singlemost authoritative histo-
rian ofAmericanmusical theater.
His latest book,
Anything Goes
,
far frombeingmerely a rehashof his
earlier works, offers the surest de-
scription todateof the roots andevo-
lution of themusical, and represents
Mordden’s own revised conclusions
after almost forty years of consid-
ering these issues. Whereas
Better
Foot Forward
opens with the sen-
tence “It really begins with
Show
Boat
[1927],”
AnythingGoes
situates
the start ofmusical theaterwith John
Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera
(1728)
and explores the kaleidoscopicways
inwhich a host of radically different
forms of entertainment—the ballad
opera, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy
Operas, Offenbach’s
opéra bouffe
,
theAmericanminstrel show, the bur-
lesque revue, pantomime, Florenz
Ziegfeld’s extravaganzas, and musi-
cal farce—morphed into musical
comedy and operetta and eventually into the musical play.
Mordden focusesupon the relationshipbetween the scoreand
thebook fromtheearlydays—when lyricsofferedonlya slim
pretext for themusical numbers anddependedprimarilyupon
the vocal style of the billed performers or the size of the
singing and dancing choruses—to the moment when libret-
tist-lyricists likeHarryB. Smith andOscar Hammerstein ef-
May–June 2014
13
EthanMordden
