Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time
The first photo you see upon opening the book says it all: Sandra Church, pale, elegant, and clad in dark green, stands arm in arm with Ethel Merman, who’s wearing a purple dress and a long black fur, her left hand outstretched and her fingers spread as if she’s reaching — or waving. Is she waving goodbye to the theater, as her character of Rose in Gypsy would be doing? Or is she greeting the reader, who’s about to embark on an odyssey unlike any other imaginable?
Whatever the case, the photo is a glorious opening to what proves to be an essential addition to the library of any musical theater lover: Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 336 pp., $34.95). Written and compiled by Ken Bloom and Frank Vlastnik, the coffee-table-sized volume has more to offer the connoisseur of this art form than anything short of the discovery of a full-length color and sound film of the original production of Follies or a closing notice for Mamma Mia! Not recommended for the beginner, on whom many of its charms will be lost, the book is truly amazing in terms of the photos it contains.
It’s not just the content of those photos that offers such ecstatic pleasure but the fact that a majority of them are in full color. Theater photographs, except those from the last couple of decades, are almost always reproduced in black and white. Yet, as this book demonstrates, stunning color shots of major shows were taken as far back as the early 1940s. If you’ve never seen color photos of the original productions of Bells Are Ringing, Cabaret, Candide, Fiddler on the Roof, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Guys and Dolls, The Pajama Game, Pal Joey, and West Side Story, you’re in for an enormous treat. But that’s not the half of it. The evocative romance of a Brigadoon photo depicting David Brooks and Marion Bell singing before an Oliver Smith landscape is contrasted with shots of Lidija Franklin’s funeral dance and Brooks and George Keane lost in the Scottish highlands. Three photos from One Touch of Venus, two of them featuring Mary Martin at her most resplendent, are remarkable for their detail and clarity. And on and on it goes.
Because of the singular nature of so many of the images chosen, the book’s text is overshadowed. That’s not to say that a great deal of it isn’t well written or engaging; in tackling the shows in alphabetical order, Bloom and Vlastnik provide a solid mix of factual data (where and when a show played, major members of the cast and creative team, song lists) and flavorful opinions. There are a number of factual errors and omissions: the Bernadette Peters revival of Annie Get Your Gun is described as opening in both 2000 and 2001, though it actually opened in 1999, and some of the people in the some of the photos are unidentified. Also, a few of the editorial choices are odd: There are five photos of No, No, Nanette yet only one is from the original 1925 production; the rest are from the 1971 revival.
But even when you find yourself disagreeing with some of Bloom’s and Vlastnik’s opinions of what are the greatest shows of all time (Bloomer Girl? Do Re Mi? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?), it’s hard to take issue with their methodology. As the two men write in their introduction, “The only real ground rule we set for ourselves in selecting the shows was that we wouldn’t include any musical whose score was originally composed for another project (a film, for example).”
This ensures that theater is the book’s sole focus from beginning to end; its flaws seem insignificant when compared to the treasure trove of riches that it provides. Full-color photos of Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera in Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Martin in The Sound of Music, Gwen Verdon in Sweet Charity, and Rosalind Russell and Edith Adams in Wonderful Town are sure to put an ear-to-ear grin on your face. That alone would make Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time a steal at twice the price.
