When Broadway Went to Hollywood

Mordden, the doyen of American musical history who previously has published such seminal titles as Anything Goes; Broadway Babies; Sondheim, and his six-volume, decade-by-decade examination of the Broadway musical (1920s–60s), now adds to an impressive oeuvre with this trenchant analysis of the alternately symbiotic, contentious, cooperative, and antagonistic historical relationship between Broadway and Hollywood musicals. "This is a book," writes Mordden in the introduction, "about the work of primarily Broadway-identified songwriters in Hollywood." Beginning with Tin Pan Alley, New York City was the locus of popular songwriting talent, and individual chapters are devoted to all the usual suspects: Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Harold Arlen, and, of course, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, along with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Additional sections are given to the role of operetta and both first and last Hollywood musicals.