mark.waltz Recent musicals come and go with quick closings (the very original and outstanding "The Last Ship" and a wonderful revisal of "Side Show"), and it is in looking back at the more than 150 years of New York musical theater that reflects on its rocky road from the days of Longacre Square to today's tourist trap. This documentary focuses not on the earlier days of New York's musical theater (skipping over "The Black Crook", the first long running show) but pretty much starting with the years of the "Ziegfeld Follies" and focusing on early Broadway celeb's as George M. Cohan, Al Jolson, Marilyn Miller, Fanny Brice, and quite sadly, black icons like Bert Williams and Ethel Waters who made good in spite of prejudices and earlier tragedies.From there, the songwriters take over, Jerome Kern ("Sunny", "Show Boat", the first serious musical play), Rodgers and Hart with their complexly written words and music, George Gershwin taking us down into rhapsodies in blue, and Cole Porter with his wit and urbane sophistication. Political and issue themed shows like "The Cradle Will Rock" and "Porgy and Bess" (giving white audiences a chance to see what squalor free black Americans were forced to live in) and jazzy musicals with Ethel Merman pre-dated "Oklahoma!" which began the golden age, leading to a series of never to be forgotten Rodgers and Hammerstein shows and other groundbreaking musicals which lead to the Sondheim era and a string of Jerry Herman hits. Sondheim gets more attention here, with only passing mention of "Hello, Dolly!" and one brief shot of the groundbreaking "La Cage Aux Folles". But in only 6 hours, there's only so much you can cover.While the musical pretty much goes up to the early days of the triumph "Wicked", it does also cover such memorable Broadway figures as producer David Merrick, choreographer/directors Bob Fosse, Gower Champion and Michael Bennett, the legendary Harold Prince (and his collaboration with Sondheim) and features some rare footage from not only the Tony's and the Ed Sullivan show but from other rare kinescopes as well. Broadway certainly has gone farther in building back up audiences since where the story ends here and shows no signs of stopping. Political history mixed with music appreciation make this fascinating not only for musical theater fans but also as a study of sociology. So let's here it also for the missing shows from here, including "Kiss Me Kate", "Mame", "Follies", "Annie", "Grand Hotel", "Aida" and those made after-my favorites being "Monty Python's Spamelot", "The Color Purple", and "Kinky Boots".Now if we could only get a documentary on Broadway's flops and why they didn't succeed, that would be great as well!

Jay Harris Greetings from California:In your excellent review questioned why John Lahr did not mention is father Bert Lahr (Cowardly Lion in Wizard of Oz) In the 1950's I was friendly with John's brother and was told that only he was not overly close to his father, John was raised by his mother (not my friends Mother) & was a good deal younger than John, He hardly ever saw John & John hardly ever saw his father.A closely knit family this was not.John Lahr has written a book as well on his fathers life & times. I have forgotten the title, however.

Loring Ivanick I have just watched the first segment of Broadway: The American Musical on DVD. I just received the DVD today and right now it is one a.m., so I won't be watching any more tonight. Here I am, a Broadway musical fan watching it on my DVD player some 8,000 miles away from the Great White Way on November 29, 2004. According to the notes and the PBS website, this series ran on American TV just a few weeks ago. Whether the series meets every one of my expectations or not (though watching an, as always, perfectly-coifed over-90 Kitty Carlisle Hart remind herself of how irked she was about following a wet and messy seal act in vaudeville 70 or 75 years ago was worth the price of the DVD set in itself), the fact that PBS has chosen not to make us wait five or ten years, but barely a couple of weeks to be able to own this series and watch all or part of it any time we want deserves all my plaudits. Bravo. I look forward to the rest of the marvelous history, the marvelous singing, dancing, sets, and costumes in the segments that remain for me to view.

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre 'Broadway: The American Musical' is a six-part series that's just what it claims to be: a documentary history of the American musical (although it doesn't start anywhere near the beginning: 'The Black Crook' in the 1860s). The basic structure is chronological, though there are a few odd deviations: 'Bye Bye Birdie' comes before 'My Fair Lady', 'The Pyjama Game' doesn't show up until the 1980s, and flamboyant showman David Merrick isn't mentioned until the 1990s.Of course, the real fun of a show like this is the chance to see rare clips of performers and obscure shows. Necessarily, documentarian Michael Kantor is limited by the fact that most stage performances were not preserved. We see silent-film footage of Bert Williams while the soundtrack plays one of his gramophone recordings; the image and soundtrack don't match, because Williams never made a talking movie. Yet, within the available material, Kantor makes some bizarre choices. We see silent footage (taken with a home-movie camera) of George M Cohan singing and dancing on Broadway in 'I'd Rather Be Right'. After a brief tantalising glimpse of this rare footage, Kantor cuts to a long excerpt of James Cagney in the movie 'Yankee Doodle Dandy', which we can get at any video shop. We see a brief clip of Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson doing his famous stair dance ... but after a few delightful seconds, the documentary cuts to footage of a generic jazz band. We see clips from a couple of MGM movie musicals (not film versions of stage musicals) containing songs ABOUT Broadway.I was delighted by one clever sequence: an audio recording of Fred and Adele Astaire singing 'Fascinating Rhythm' is played over animated cut-outs of the dancing Astaire siblings. Also delightful is new footage of former Ziegfeld chorus girl Doris Eaton, singing and dancing one of her old songs from memory, shortly before her 100th birthday! We also see rare kinescope footage of some major Broadway musical performances: Gertrude Lawrence from 'The King and I', Jill Haworth from the original Broadway cast of 'Cabaret', Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison from 'Kiss Me Kate'. What pleasures! One non-Broadway clip that I welcomed was a brief sequence of Michael Bennett and Donna McKechnie dancing on a 1964 TV show, long before they collaborated on 'A Chorus Line'. I was also pleased by home-movie footage of the original staging of 'Porgy and Bess', along with new interviews of the performers who played the title roles in that production.Various talking heads weigh in with their opinions. Oddly, this documentary makes no attempt to offer the credentials of these people. John Lahr states that his mother was a Ziegfeld chorus girl, yet never mentions that his father was a major Broadway comedian. George C Wolfe comments on the 1944 production of 'On the Town' (which closed long before Wolfe was born), yet never mentions that he directed an acclaimed revival of this same show. Betty Comden and Adolph Green were in that original 1944 cast of 'On the Town' (in addition to writing the book and lyrics), so I was amused here when they sing one of that show's songs ... and get the words wrong! Other errors here are less happy. Cole Porter's Broadway musical for Fred Astaire was titled 'The Gay Divorce', NOT 'The Gay Divorcée' (that was the movie version). A narrator mispronounces the name of Cole Porter's home town. Mary Rodgers gets the title wrong for one of her father's songs. (Maybe because he only wrote the tune, not the words.)Regrettably, much of this documentary caters for what audiences will find familiar rather than trying to interest them in the unfamilar. We get a clip of the Marx Brothers in the movie version of 'Animal Crackers'. The Marxes were giants of film comedy, but their importance to Broadway's history is negligible. We are told absolutely nothing about Busby Berkeley's work on Broadway, but we get a clip from one of his Warner Brothers movies about a 'Broadway' musical that couldn't possibly be staged in a Broadway theatre. And did we need to be told for the 21,937th time that Mary Martin was from Weatherford, Texas?This documentary intelligently reveals how the musical theatre was affected by the arrival of the subway in 1904, by Prohibition, by World War Two, by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and by the arrival of Aids. The most moving sequence here is a tribute to Broadway figures who died of Aids ... not the obvious big names, but those whom one talking head calls 'the guys in the trenches': the talented minor figures who never got their chance at stardom. Less inspiring is a film clip of Gerald Schoenfeld of the Shubert Organisation: his two sound bites about the Times Square district seem to be addressed solely to its viability as real estate. A long tribute to the Disney corporation's efforts on Broadway seems to be intended more as corporate back-scratching than anything else. Fittingly, the series ends with an elaborate tribute to Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist who documented Broadway's best for more than seven decades!Despite some nitpicks, I deeply enjoyed this documentary and I learnt quite a bit from it. Anyone who wants to learn about the Great White Way will get a solid grounding in the American theatre's history from these six episodes. And anyone who just wants a good time watching some enjoyable musical numbers will get plenty of that pleasure here. I rate 'Broadway: The American Musical' a full 10 out of 10. Bravo!