Sing for Your Supper: The Broadway Musical in the 1930s.(book)(Book Review)

Sing for Your Supper: The Broadway Musical in the 1930s

by Ethan Mordden

Palgrave Macmillan, 280 pp. $26.95

Wouldn't you figure that the 1930s made up a platinum decade in that golden era of Broadway musicals? Think of all those tunes from Rodgers & Hart, the Gershwins and Cole Porter, with performers such as Ethel Merman belting them out and Fred Astaire dancing to them. Surely it was a defining epoch. Not so, historian Ethan Mordden tells us in his encyclopedic Sing for Your Supper." The Broadway Musical in the 1930s, the last volume in his decade-by-decade chronicle of the American musical theater. Apparently Mordden put off writing the current tome because the 1930s was the "least enterprising decade" in the musical's Golden Age. There was no slew of serious book-shows following 1928's Show Boat. No revolution, he tells us. But then Mordden describes all those great performers and all those wonderful songs.

Mordden knows just when a direct quote delivers the goods, as in Virgil Thomson's appraisal of Porgy and Bess: "a piquant but highly unsavory stirring tip together of Israel, Africa, and the Gaelic ...