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Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater , and: The Irving Berlin Reader (review)

2012; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2012.a494467

1086-332X

Todd Decker,

Music History and Culture

Reviewed by: Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater, and: The Irving Berlin Reader Todd Decker Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater. By Jeffrey Magee. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012; pp. 408. The Irving Berlin Reader. Edited by Benjamin Sears. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012; pp. 232. Jeffrey Magee’s exhaustively researched study of Irving Berlin’s career as a Broadway songwriter and show-maker offers a unique perspective on the history of American musical theatre from World War I to the early 1960s, and presents an immensely valuable portrait of a major creative figure whose pre–World War II shows have proven difficult to insert into the established narratives of pre– Rodgers and Hammerstein musical theatre. Magee balances analyses of songs (written by Berlin alone) with shows (on which Berlin collaborated with the likes of George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, and Dorothy Fields); the book is equal parts popular song and musical theatre history. After providing an overview of Berlin’s career, style, and creative approach in chapter 1, Magee considers each of Berlin’s Broadway shows (excluding the 1948 flop Miss Liberty) in chronological order, from Watch Your Step (1914) to Mr. President (1962). The only show among those covered that will be widely familiar to readers is Annie Get Your Gun (1946). Archival information gleaned from the massive collection of Berlin’s papers at the Library of Congress allows Magee to add musical and historical dimensions to earlier readings of the show. He provides new information about the making of Annie Get Your Gun, highlighting the formative contributions of Berlin’s collaborator, the woman who conceived of Annie as a musical comedy character, librettist Fields. As Magee documents, Fields, working with her brother Herbert on the book, drew upon her knowledge of early-twentieth-century entertainment, absorbed from her Jewish theatrical family, to create the role for Ethel Merman. For her part, Merman praised Berlin’s music and lyrics for “[making] a lady out of me” (236). In a close reading of the role, Magee pinpoints how Berlin did this. Typical of the entire book, the depth of specific archival information, coupled with Magee’s comprehensive knowledge of popular music and the commercial stage, gives his conclusions a solidity that makes his work foundational for scholars across disciplines. Bringing similar archival research to less familiar shows, Magee re-creates unrevivable Broadway shows from the mid-1910s to the mid-1940s, among them the historically important Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, Berlin’s own series of Music Box Revues, As Thousands Cheer (which included the anti-lynching lament “Supper Time”), and the World War II troop-show This Is the Army, which Berlin “considered . . . to be his greatest achievement” (7). Magee describes in great detail the musical, dramatic, and visual content of these lost shows. A highlight is his reconstruction of the “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” sequence in the 1919 Ziegfeld Follies. Magee shows how Berlin alternated his own tune with familiar classical melodies for which Berlin wrote comical new lyrics (rediscovered by Magee) that tell tales of the male singer’s romantic misadventures. Thus “a scene usually understood as an earnest hymn to feminine pulchritude had an unmistakably comic element,” balancing the well-known song with vignettes portraying “each ‘girl’ as an active, even transgressive, agent in her romantic destiny” (94). Magee leaves it to scholars of gender to draw further conclusions. Berlin’s voice is heard throughout the book, many times culled from obscure sources. For example, in establishing song types in Berlin’s work, Magee expands upon the standard dichotomy of ballad and rhythm tune to add a third type taken from Berlin himself. In a 1913 interview that Magee found in a scrapbook at the Library of Congress, Berlin claimed to have invented the “syncopated ballad”—a hybrid form drawing upon the rhythms of ragtime. Magee uses the category of syncopated ballads to far-reaching ends, informing the full run of Berlin’s career. From his vantage point as a musicologist, specifically, a scholar of jazz and popular music, Magee connects Berlin’s musical choices to style shifts in popular music—from ragtime to jazz to swing— hence further rooting his...