The Middlebrow Musical

Situating the Broadway musical of the 1940s in the context of Van Wyck Brooks's 'middlebrow modernism,' Jamie O'Leary's lively The Middlebrow Musical considers how the amalgamation of 'folk art, high art, and popular culture' in Oklahoma! reverberated in three notable musicals produced later in the decade: Beggar's Holiday, Street Scene, and Finian's Rainbow. This thoughtful and ingenious a study marks an important contribution to our understanding not only of the aesthetics of the mid-century Broadway musical but of the time's larger cultural landscape. * Howard Pollack, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Music at the University of Houston, author of George Gershwin: His Life and Work and The Ballad of John Latouche: An American Lyricist's Life and Work. * For returning our attention to vital matters of cultural hierarchy, O'Leary's book, like the satisfying revival of a Broadway musical, deserves a standing ovation. Its analysis of critics, composers, and lyricists-some unjustly forgotten, others so familiar that they demand fresh perspective-unsettles fixed categories, demonstrating the dynamic relationships between high art and popular expression. As he contributes a new definition of the quest for 'integration' his protagonists pursued, O'Leary himself integrates archival research and textual analysis, institutional theory and compelling evidence, while exhibiting the sensitivities of both the musicologist and the cultural historian to his subjects' democratic hopes. * Joan Shelley Rubin, Dexter Perkins Professor of History at the University of Rochester, author of The Making of Middlebrow Culture. * Few studies of the musical conceptually reframe their subject in a way that makes you rethink what you thought you knew about it. Count The Middlebrow Musical among them. Rather than following tradition and looking inward at a moment in the genre's formal history, this study looks refreshingly outward to the history of ideas: it analyzes key musicals of the 1940s in terms of the era's social, political, and esthetic controversies as these informed not just the reception of such musicals but also the Jarger critical debates over why, how, and whether so popular a form of entertainment might now legitimately embrace a new and heightened sense of cultural purpose. * Larry Stempel, Author of Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater *