What Works
Michael Friedman: The embarrassing cousin, 31 March 2005
The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity
by Raymond Knapp.
Princeton, 361 pp., £22.95, December 2004,0 691 11864 7 Show More
by Raymond Knapp.
Princeton, 361 pp., £22.95, December 2004,
“... making the book seem like padding. Musicals that don’t manage this, like most of those by Jerome Kern or Andrew Lloyd Webber, end up as song cycles barely held together by text. When they do pull it off – Oklahoma!, Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man – they can make for extraordinarily powerful theatrical ... ”