The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen.(Book Review)

by Ethan Mordden Palgrave Macmillan, 320pp. $ 26.95

Ethan Mordden, OPERA NEWS contributor and author of a multivolume series on the Broadway musical in the twentieth century, has just completed his ambitious survey of the genre's past quarter-century. Fans of his frothy, didactic style, his Paleolithic conservative taste, his insider's-insider's accumulation of Shubert Alley dish, will feel right at home with his most recent work: a mordant Mordden jeremiad on the sorry state of American musical theater, which he decries as debased by "The New Stupidity."

Unfortunately, Mordden never satisfactorily identifies "The Great Tradition" that he mourns as irretrievably lost. He ticks off "the traditional musical's humanitarian liberalism," Golden Age lyricists who "routinely widened one's knowledge with impish allusions to lit and history and ontological wisdoms veiled in bon mots," and states, "The form sometimes tilts toward opera, but more often it balances book and score with Higher Dance." He finds such qualities, for example, in the 1992 musical comedy Crazy For You--a show Mordden's readers well may have caught (and enjoyed). But all too often his analyses of the lost "Great Tradition" are filled with ephemera and flops. Who even remembers clinkers such as Thou Shah Not, Raggedy Ann or Carrie? Mordden's focus on such Great White Way roadkill may enlighten musicologists and Broadway trivia junkies, but most readers will be deprived, occasionally, of a frame of ...