Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America by Laurence Maslon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America by Laurence Maslon Lara E. Housez Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America. By Laurence Maslon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. [xix, 252 p. ISBN 9780199832538 (hardcover), $34.95; also available as e-book, ISBN and price varies.] Illustrations, bibliography, index, companion website. For many of us, our first experience listening to a Broadway musical does not happen in a theater; it happens in our homes. For me, it was the rec room in my parents' basement, where my mother played vinyl recordings of film adaptations of musicals by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. For Laurence Maslon, it was his parents' living room and the 1958 Columbia original cast recording of Jay Livingston and Ray Evan's Oh Captain! He reflects on these early experiences listening to recordings of musicals in his latest publication, Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America. Maslon has an extensive list of publications to his credit, including the lavish companion volume to Broadway: The American Musical, the Emmywinning PBS documentary series (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2004), and an edition of librettos called American Musicals, 1927–1969: The Complete Book and Lyrics of Eight Broadway Classics (New York: Library of America, 2014). Readers may be more likely to know Maslon as the host and producer of a weekly radio program and podcast on the NPR affiliate WPPB-FM. This program shares not only its main title with Maslon's new publication but also its warm, accessible tone. His listeners and other fans of American musical theater and popular music likely make up the majority of readers for whom this new volume is written. In fourteen chapters, Broadway to Main Street traces the dissemination of treasured show tunes through a variety of technologies and media. Many histories of Broadway's recorded sound kick off with Jack Kapp's 1943 original cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!. Maslon, however, looks back to the 1890s, when listeners first fell under the spell of "After the Ball." Unfolding a broad chronology across the twentieth century and up to such twenty-first century hits as Hamilton and SpongeBob SquarePants, he explains the roles that sheet music, original cast albums, popular "cover" recordings, radio, movies, television, LPs, compact discs, and digital streaming have played in bringing show tunes into American living rooms—and, by extension, into the hearts of Americans. Broadway to Main Street is more than a biographical sketch of Broadway's most beloved music. Maslon demonstrates how extensively recorded show tunes, particularly original cast albums, have pervaded the lives of Americans. He convincingly argues that the popularity of these albums has been largely unrecognized, underestimated, and undervalued. In his discussion of original cast albums in the decades coinciding with the so-called "golden" age of the musical, Maslon examines Billboard charts [End Page 115] to demonstrate America's seemingly insatiable appetite for the music of Broadway: Between 1949 and 1969—twenty-five of the most fertile and febrile years in popular music—thirteen different original cast albums hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts for at least one week—not on the "Cast Albums" chart (which didn't even exist as a separate category during those decades), but on the charts that reflected all the albums in every genre of popular music. Taken together, those thirteen original cast albums—not only My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, but lesser-known titles such as Flower Drum Song and Carnival—tallied more weeks at No. 1 than all of the albums, during those same years, by Frank Sinatra and The Beatles put together. If one factors in the soundtrack albums directly derived from Broadway scores during those same decades (Oklahoma!, West Side Story, etc.), the number of weeks at No. 1 for albums of Broadway-originated material surpasses all the weeks at No. 1 of albums by The Beatles, Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, and The Monkees combined. (p. 5) With statistics like these, the cultural impact of original cast albums seems hard to ignore and an obvious choice for the focus of a book. Readers may wonder about Broadway musicals...