Book Review: Ever After: 40 years of Musical Theatre and Beyond 1977-2020 – Barry Singer

EVER AFTER: 40 years of Musical Theatre and Beyond 1977-2020 – Barry Singer (Applause Books)

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

The title of this long and immensely detailed book is slightly misleading. This is a 50 chapter history of Broadway musical theatre, not musical theatre in general.

Barry Singer wrote about musical theatre for The New York Times until 2003 when he first published this book. Since then he has written for the Huffington Post and he blogs.

The new edition adds the years 2003-2020 and uses Rent as a pivot from the book’s first half into the second. Singer is interesting on its evolution and the talent of Jonathan Larson whose untimely death was a great loss to musical theatre.

Immensely knowledgeable, Singer mentions almost every musical – success or failure – which has played on Broadway with a heavy focus on the work developed at Playwrights Horizons under Ira Weitzman – one of the many people Singer often quotes.

He regards A Chorus Line as a catalyst while regretting that Broadway musicals  are “firstly enterprises of commerce”. He also writes at length about William Finn’s March of the Falsettos which he commends as marking the journey from heterosexual love to gay love at a time when Broadway was dominated by “dead composer shows”.

Of course musicals from outside America get to Broadway and Singer is sharply dismissive of most of them. He refers, for example to the “infernally repetitive Lloyd Webber bombast” and deems his style “definitively dysfunctional”. The Phantom of the Opera is “a juggernaut of clichés” which is “diabolically conceived to please the most undiscriminating of listeners”.

The word “patronising” springs to mind.

Boublil and Schönberg fare no better. Singer writes off Les Misérables as a “sycophantic knock out of the Lloyd Webber musical model” while Miss Saigon is a “majestically bloated Asian pot boiler”. He certainly knows how to write excoriation.

The 2012-13 season brought Matilda and Kinky Boots to Broadway. He finds the former “inspirationally self-flagellatory” and the latter “inspirationally self congratulatory”. He comments laconically that “self congratulatory usually wins”.

Meanwhile he toils, year by year, through all the work he approves of which includes Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked and Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or Change.

It’s fairly entertaining  to read because Singer’s lofty, uncompromising tone holds the attention but I’m afraid he isn’t always accurate.

Singer tells us that Andrew Lloyd Webber is Oxford educated (as if that were a point against him) and that Tim Rice is too. In fact Lloyd Webber did one term at Oxford before deciding it wasn’t for him and Rice eschewed university completely. And that makes me wonder whether the rest of Singer’s “facts” are all that they should be.

Susan Elkin