Christopher Bray
Singing for Their Supper
We’ll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers & Hart
By Dominic Symonds
Oxford University Press 360pp £22.99 order from our bookshop
What we might call the Whig theory of Broadway history holds that it was only when Richard Rodgers abandoned the increasingly drunken Lorenz Hart to write blockbusters with Oscar Hammerstein II that the musical became a coherent whole. After Oklahoma! (1943) it was impossible to write mere song-and-dance spectacles. Musicals were now unified fields: numbers weren’t just sprinkled incontinently over some feeble yarn; now they grew organically out of a meaningful narrative. This, argues Dominic Symonds in We’ll Have Manhattan, is nonsense. Right from the jump, he says, Rodgers and Hart sought to render story and song indivisible.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Don't forget to enter the competition to win a year's @royalacademy membership and a year's subscription to Literary Review.
Entries close on the 18th December.
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/page/ra-competition-literary-review-2019
'Together the Marcoses established a new style of deluxe autocracy, one characterised by glitz and kleptomaniac graft.'
Peter Conrad on Lauren Greenfield's new documentary about Imelda Marcos, 'The Kingmaker'.
http://ow.ly/FFSg50xsH7D
Thrillers by @sophiehannahCB1, @ccmacdwriter, Rebecca Wait, @deborah_masson, @helensedgwick, Chris Hammer, @stephycha, @McCrumMark, @LesleyKara and @BarryForshaw3.
PLUS, @NJCooper_crime picks her favourite crime novels of 2019.
http://ow.ly/YjiP50xrsnl