| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Reviews

Broadway: The American Musical. Prod. and dir. by Michael Kantor. Ghost Light Films and Thirteen/WNET New York, NHK, and BBC in association with Carlton International, 2004. 6 hours. (PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314-1698; 800-344- 3337; <shop@pbs.org>; <http://shop.pbs.org/education/> [Sept. 12, 2005])
The production of a historical document for the commercial media invariably requires the fulfillment of a variety of criteria. When the broadcast venue for the material is PBS, those criteria take on a particularly potent dimension, as the public financing of the channel's activities has led, time and again, to the alteration of content in the hope of avoiding undue controversy. Certain subjects possess greater volatility than others, and the strengths and weaknesses of Broadway: The American Musical illustrate how much of a procrustean bed the public airwaves can be for the examination of cultural history.	1
Over the course of six episodes, this lavishly produced and largely entertaining document travels the continuum from the heyday of the Ziegfeld Follies to the ascendance of the Disney Corporation to a place of prominence on the Great White Way. The narration draws upon an evolutionary perspective, for it argues that the genre transformed from a simple and undemanding format into one that could integrate potentially controversial themes and sophisticated musical forms. It begins by characterizing the early material of figures such as George M. Cohan as emotionally and ideologically facile yet chock full of entertainment value. The legendary duos of the 1920s and 1930s, including the Gershwin brothers, Richard Rodgers and Larry Hart, and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, subsequently brought both a compositional complexity to the stage and a willingness to tackle more challenging subject matter. This process culminated in 1927 with the turning point of Kern and Hammerstein's Show Boat, which integrated Florenz Ziegfeld's affinity for spectacle with a blunt approach to the hazards of racism.	. . .

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