Broadway: The American Musical.(Video recording review)

Broadway: The American Musical. DVD. Directed by Michael Kantor. [United States]: PBS Home Video, 2005. 88571. $59.99.

Have you ever wondered what made George M. Cohan's Little Johnny Jones so incredibly attractive to theatre goers in 1904? Perhaps you would be interested to see Bill Robinson's performance in Harlem Is Heaven (1932) with the Cotton Club dancers, or a performance of Stephen Sondheim's "Someone in a Tree" from Anatomy of a Song (1976). Have you been curious about what the New Amsterdam Theatre and the rooftop supper club were originally like, before their costly renovation and reopening in the 1990s? Have you ever wished you could have seen true novelty acts--such as women boxing on stage, trick elephants, contortionists, ballroom dance couples roller skating, late nineteenth-century physical comedy--as they graced the vaudeville circuits? Have you ever seen casual film footage of songwriters Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg, George Gershwin, and Ira Gershwin? These are some of the examples of historic video preserved and now available through this marvelous set of DVDs through PBS Home Video.

This enjoyable documentary (in six parts) by Michael Kantor, hosted and narrated by Julie Andrews, takes the viewer on a 100-year chronological journey down Broadway, from late nineteenth-century minstrelsy through contemporary musicals. Indeed, "[t]he optimistic dreams of a nation gave rise to a uniquely American art form: the Broadway musical."

Within this film, the viewer is offered indepth explanation of American musical theater's developmental evolution as related to cultural phenomena and historic events, including World War I, the Ziegfeld Follies, Prohibition, the 1929 Stock Market crash, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), World War II, Hair and the 1960s, A Chorus ...