The sentence that best explains the rewards and excuses (most of) the frustrations of reading Ethan Mordden’s Anything Goes: A History of the American Musical Theatre appears in tiny type in an appendix on page 281: “… no topic has as many sheer details as the musical.” As an observation in a book crammed full of superlatives and often breathless, if unchallengeable, hyperbole, it is refreshing for its understatement. Mordden remains an undisputed heavyweight in his field; his output is impressively comprehensive and his enthusiasm inexhaustible.

With a background as a musician and sometime musical director that provided him a unique perch from which to collect anecdotes and an ability to analyze scores, Mordden has anatomized this American contribution to world culture through books with titles taken from the great songs the form produced in its Golden Age, including Beautiful Mornin’: The Broadway Musical in the 1940s (1999), Coming up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 1950s (1998) and Open a New Window: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s (2001). Of these, Anything Goes is far and away the most comprehensive.

Beginning in the early 18th century, Mordden locates the genesis of the musical in John Gay’s 1728 runaway hit, “The Beggar’s Opera.” Having set new lyrics to popular melodies of the period, Gay created a new form, the ballad opera. Even “Greensleeves” makes an appearance. The play with music, produced by Christopher Rich, and known as the work that made Gay rich and Rich gay, was a revelatory innovation that was only occasionally successfully imitated.

Still, this is the beginning of “the first stage” in the musical’s history. As Mordden reckons things, there are four such stages, a neat and fairly logical system with a simplicity that for the general reader has more advantages than drawbacks. The signature moment of the first stage is the rise of Jacques Offenbach, particularly his “Tales of Hoffmann"in 1881. Offenbach’s whimsy and musicality are the very foundation of the American musical in Mordden’s view.

The second stage stars Victor Herbert, who gets his own chapter, and the coming of age of the operetta as it evolved from the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan to the “Indian Love Call” of “Rose-Marie.” Mordden calls Herbert, a “grammarian, innovator, and debate-club coach” of the musical. (I will address the cringe-inducing flights of fancy and mordant bitchery in Mordden’s prose typified by that last epithet later.) For readers who aren’t familiar with Herbert’s work, patience and persistence pay off when they get to sentences like those on pages 80 and 81 that state clearly and concisely, “Herbert preceded Oscar Hammerstein in favoring the tempestuous heroine who truly believes in something,” and “Herbert is the animating figure who urged the Kerns and Berlins to launch their own reinventions, to turn musical storytelling into something realistic, intricate, vivid.”

It is in the third stage, most often referred to as the Golden Age, that Mordden hits his stride. This is clearly his comfort zone, and here finally he will stop pelting the reader with factoids — technically persnickety and outrageously speculative by turns — to get down to some good old-fashioned exegesis. And his comfort finally puts us at ease. His analysis of shows like “Camelot"and “My Fair Lady” marries insight with accessibility. The Rodgers and Hammerstein “rule book” he offers is useful, a bit playful and only occasionally reductive. Sondheim, of course, is a colossus who bestrides the old and the new worlds, the third and the fourth stages. Like Herbert he gets his own chapter, with some very nice connections forged between the better and the lesser known works with only the occasional reverential obeisance that tips over into cloying adoration. This adulation, however, is vastly preferable to the vicious and casual cruelty visited upon performers (”… it’s better than Mandy Patinkin’s singing forty hours of Yiddish folk songs with the theatre’s doors locked, to name another self-indulgent performer …”), “idiotic” critics and occasionally his readers.

This brings me to my single greatest disappointment in Anything Goes: time seems to have stopped for his literary imagination in the same Golden Age he adores. He refers to the figure of a banker in a top hat — twice. References to “Saturday Night Live,” “The Legend of Zelda” and TV Guide(!) strain to proclaim hipness. While it is as clear as it is irritating that Mordden knows everything about the things he knows anything about, his prose is a bit like a dying dowager’s boudoir. Though its furnishings are stuffily elegant, they clash with the clinical accoutrements acquired to keep its fading mistress comfortable, or even just to keep the lady alive. In this case, instead of IV stands and handrails on the Chippendale bedstead, we have terms like “quodlibet” and “tinta” deployed in otherwise plainly eloquent statements,over and over. 

And, like that aforementioned airless, cheerless chamber, short on chairs for the heirs who crowd in waiting for her to die, Mordden’s book cannot or will not accommodate his own hopeful heirs. Mordden barely acknowledges the new study that has been done in the field. American musical comedy has always been well represented in the coffee-table-book genre, but in the last couple decades it has also emerged as a rich field of academic inquiry. Still, the young lions of the form get no look-in here until the small print of the “Further Reading” appendix. Even then, Mordden mentions only three works of true scholarship, favoring trade books on single figures and generalist surveys. This deep discounting is perhaps most damaging in the critical area of race, which gets very little attention at all and none of substance. For anyone who wants real insight into the importance of an art form that Mordden justly identifies as a matter of national pride, this is a serious limitation.

The staggering lack of almost any citation in Anything Goes might lead a reader to assume that everything has been heard first hand, that Victor Herbert and a young acolyte named Ethan had whiled away many a night talking shop. Of course, untroubled by sources, this history of American musical theatre has the strengths and weaknesses of a meandering tale told by an obsessive. It’s all in there ... somewhere. So, though he is (decidedly) not a great romancer, I have decided that the best answer when Ethan Mordden proposes Anything Goes is “Yes, but…”

Catherine Sheehy is Chair of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama and Resident Dramaturg at Yale Rep. Formerly she was associate editor of American Theatre magazine and managing editor of Theater magazine.

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