Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical

By Andrea Most

From 1925 to 1951--three chaotic decades of depression, war, and social upheaval--Jewish writers brought to the musical stage a powerfully appealing vision of America fashioned through song and dance. It was an optimistic, meritocratic, selectively inclusive America in which Jews could at once lose and find themselves--assimilation enacted onstage and off, as Andrea Most shows. This book examines two interwoven narratives crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century American culture: the stories of Jewish acculturation and of the development of the American musical. Here we delve into the work of the most influential artists of the genre during the years surrounding World War II--Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Dorothy and Herbert Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, and Richard Rodgers--and encounter new interpretations of classics such as The Jazz Singer , Whoopee , Girl Crazy , Babes in Arms , Oklahoma! , Annie Get Your Gun , South Pacific, and The King and I . Most's analysis reveals how these brilliant composers, librettists, and performers transformed the experience of New York Jews into the grand, even sacred acts of being American. Read in the context of memoirs, correspondence, production designs, photographs, and newspaper clippings, the Broadway musical clearly emerges as a form by which Jewish artists negotiated their entrance into secular American society. In this book we see how the communities these musicals invented and the anthems they popularized constructed a vision of America that fostered self-understanding as the nation became a global power.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674011651
• ISBN13: 9780674011656
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

On the outside, looking in

I really enjoyed it. It's not too dense or difficult. I imagine anyone interested in show music would be able to profit from the book. She really has a treasurehouse of new ideas about what the makers of Broadway musicals might have had in mind, subconsciously or otherwise. I had never really thought about BABES IN ARMS, for example, and the way she deconstructs the lyrics shows that somebody, somewhere was doing a bit of overdetermination considerating the ostensibly slight plot of the show--and yet the lyrics insist that a "war" is going on. Professor Most writes clearly and firmly, and yet she is intuitive enough to gently squeeze the meanings out of the most opaque surfaces. I thought I knew OKLAHOMA, and yet I had never really looked at the way the main (white) characters are a bit smug when compared to the "racially different" characters like Ali Hakim, and yet how much Hakim and say Jud, and even Aunt Eller, yearn to be like the better integrated characters (Curley, Laurey, etc). It might be because the Jewish writers of the show were composing an elaborate allegory about assimiliation and difference. ANNIE GET YOUR GUN I didn't expect to find a chapter about. And yet, it makes perfect sense when you consider that Annie herself is a radical outsider, not even knowing how to read, knowing really only one thing (how to shoot), she's almost the "wild child" of legend. Her contrajuxtaposition vis a vis the native peoples ("I'm an Indian Too") for the first time doesn't seem racist, just makes sense. All in all, a book which will give you something new to think about on every page.

The sum of its parts

In "Making Americans", Andrea Most has crafted a fascinating, if flawed, treatise based on the premise that the Jewish influence on Broadway Musicals was also a major force in the creation of the American way of life in the 20th century. Since it is, first and formeost, an academic work, some of the flaws are inherent in the genre (e.g. a highly repetitive introduction; little of the "razzle-dazzle" that fans of the musical have come to expect from books on the subject; a selective use of sources to prove her point-and a bit of stretching at times to make the selection do its duty, etc.). While I find it difficult to subscribe to the totality of her argument, and have serious questions about whether a given interpretation of facts is, indeed, the most correct (or even intended)one the authors she discusses had in mind, I cannot fault her over-all premise as a POSSIBLE one. What sets the work apart, however, is NOT the whole, but the sum of its parts. Within the over-view, Most presents detailed examinations of a handful of theater works that often offer new insights to these works AS WORKS, whether or not one feels they ratify the over-riding concept. It is for these insights that I recommend the work to any lover of the Musical theater, regardless of race, creed, or religion.