Books

SONG & DANCE: The Complete Story of Stage Musicals by Kurt Gånzl does a very good job starting with what Gånzl holds are the proto-musicals, the opera-bouffes of the 19th century (“Not a burlesque of opera, an opera burlesque.”)—and follows the genre through the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, Strauss’s Viennese concoctions, the French sex-farce musicals of the 1920s (a great fan of these, Gånzl acutely regrets that they were so bowdlerized in translation they never got an audience outside France) and the birth of the Broadway musical before ending at Beauty and the Beast.While covering general trends, Gånzl also highlights both the big successes, major songs (though surprisingly in discussing Chess he doesn’t mention One Night in Bangkok), the shows and creators that redefine the genre (Webber and Sondheim, for instance) and the various shows’ success in revivals, tours and international productions (though frequently scratching his head at what does and doesn’t become a hit away from its native land). While dismayed by some current trends (he condemns Miss Saigon for taking Spectacle to the limit then leaping across the limit) he’s not at all fazed by how much musicals have changed over the years (“If musicals stuck with tradition, we’d still be listening to opera bouffes.”). A very good job.
STRIPPERS, SHOWGIRLS AND SHARKS: A Very Opinionated History of the Broadway Musicals That Did Not Win the Tony Award by theater critic Peter Filichia starts out with the She Was Robbed category (he can understand Gypsy losing to The Sound of Music but not coming in third behind Fiorello! which tied for Best Musical ), then moves on to shows that closed before the awards (so the voters may have preferred a play that could still use the award boost), losses that may have been spite votes against their producer (David Merrick, it seems, was something of a jerk), fatally flawed shows, shows that won in revival (Chicago), shows that might have won in a different year (“Drowsy Chaperone never stood a chance against The Jersey Boys.”) and so on. A duller read than Song and Dance but it does cover some truly off-the-wall shows I’d never heard of, such as musicals based on the Scottsboro Boys, the Leo Franks murder case and the My Lai massacre.
PRICELESS: On Knowing the Cost of Everything and the Value of Nothing by Frank Ackerman and Lisa Neinzerling is a critique of cost-benefit analyses in health and environmental regulation, which the authors see as a right-wing effort to gut regulation by setting the cost to business against the gains (which the authors argue is inherently a bad idea—how do you measure the value of preserving an old-growth forest?). The authors show that even if you buy the cost-benefit premise, the execution is dubious, whether in counting the loss of seniors’ lives as less valuable than children (“We don’t base our punishment of murder on how many years the victim had to live.”), and outright distortion (one influential study of regulatory costs included several regulations the EPA never imposed because of the cost)) and the practical problems of trying to set the worth of someone’s life. Good, though obviously one that fits my own biases.
The Trojan War has been interpreted through the light of imperial politics, PTSD, international trade and in THE WAR THAT KILLED ACHILLES: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War, Caroline Alexander concludes that despite all the battles and martial prowess, the real message is that war is both hell and a poor substitute for a happy peaceful life (as Achilles himself acknowledges in expressing a frequent wish to go home). Interesting as far as it goes, but I don’t feel inclined to brand it as definitive.