That's pretty much my day. As to the TOD, I've got the following on my reading table:
The new Annotated Pride & Prejudice
Christopher Plummer's autobiography
The new biography of my friend Vito Russo
The Terror: The Shadow of the Guillotine, France 1792-1794
DR elmore and/or other DRs - Have you come across this book?
Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater by Richard Stempel
A friend of mine is taking a college course this summer, and that will be his text book.
It's got good moments, but like every musical theatre "historian" dealing with the period between 1890 and SHOW BOAT, which is where American musical theatre seems to become logical to many (it's Hammerstein, dontcha know and he taught Sondheim!), the author knows and appreciates too little. There are two reasons for this, I believe:
1. scripts and scores are hard to come by unless you know where to search
2. too few recordings of these things as "shows," not simply popular songs from them, exist
Also, the blurring in that period between musical comedy, vaudeville, operetta, extravaganza, and comic opera is vast, and this vague
je ne sais quoi atmosphere is murky to clear through things. Because there was no tv and little film, live theatre flourished and it was a bustling, thriving atmosphere for commercial theatrical ventures with every Broadway show going out on tour when it closed and lots of touring theatrical companies that played regions of the USA and never came into New York. Since the documentation for all of this is not easy to collect, and since a lot of these shows, by contemporary musical theatre standards, are silly bits of fluff, it's easier to dismiss them than to become interested in them.
