Irving Berlin's American Musical Theatre. By Jeffrey Magee.

Abstract

The last decade has seen a much-needed movement in scholarship on American musical theatre in favour of exploring the archival evidence of shows and their creators from the so-called ‘golden age’ of Broadway and before, and Jeffrey Magee’s contribution on Irving Berlin’s Broadway career is a welcome addition to Oxford’s Broadway Legacies series in that vein. Drawing on relatively newly available material from the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, Magee is the first to produce a book-length study of the composer that draws on the rich archival legacy he left behind. The result is a careful and thought-provoking excavation not just of Irving Berlin’s contributions to the Broadway stage from 1914 to the early 1960s, but also of the larger trends in American theatre history in the early and mid-twentieth century. Magee shows Berlin’s career to be both indicative of, and exceptional to, the Broadway stage of his time.