Mark Amory has written the Bookend column in this week’s magazine. Here it is as a blog exclusive
In the Christmas issue of The Spectator there was a review of Showtime: A History of Broadway Musicals, a book which ran to 785 pages. Ruth Leon, in The Sound of Musicals, deals with the whole lot, well perhaps 20 in practice, in 128 much smaller ones; so she has to be selective. The top three, in her view, select themselves: Guys and Dolls (1950), My Fair Lady (1954) and West Side Story (1957) – ‘almost everyone agrees on this’. She finds respectable reasons for her enthusiasm: Guys and Dolls has an extraordinary sense of place, My Fair Lady deals with ‘social injustice, and the struggle for personal freedom’ and West Side Story is about ‘alienation and belonging’. While not exactly untrue, these phrases rather miss the point, the fun.
Much more enjoyable are the asides about disasters, rows and, often present, talented shits.
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