Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39238 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-10-12
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Color, Dolby, Widescreen, Box set, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 3
• Running time: 360 minutes

Amazon.com
Like its fellow PBS series Ken Burns' Jazz, Broadway: The American Musical is an ambitious and absorbing exploration of a unique American art form that has always been best experienced in live performance. Hosted and narrated by Julie Andrews, the six-part, six-hour documentary traces the history of musical theater from its roots in vaudeville, operetta, and minstrel shows, to the dawn of what would become the modern American musical, Show Boat, and on through many changes that seemed to reflect those in American culture itself. Significant creators discussed include Florenz Ziegfeld, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Bob Fosse, and David Merrick, and notable shows (Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Company, Cats, and recent hit Wicked, among others) are analyzed through performance clips and interviews with songwriters, stars, directors, producers, critics, and historians.

The series' most obvious weakness is its use of only brief excerpts of the performances--no song is heard in full. The sheer scope of the series no doubt played a part in that, as well as complicated rights issues, but the core problem is that musical theater has always been a live medium, rarely documented and even more rarely released to the general public. The documentary's producers make do with audio recordings, still photographs, and bits of footage, often in grainy black and white. Thankfully, they resist over-relying on feature-film musicals--which look much better and are sometimes excellent (but more often mediocre) translations--and when used such footage is clearly identified. That makes it all the more frustrating, however, that almost all of the other footage is not identified, because that is what fans are less familiar with and would be most interested in. The 1950s footage looks to be mostly from TV programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show; by the 1960s we have live footage from the Tony Awards (easily identifiable by the backdrops); and the newest shows might have been shot on stage. But early Ethel Merman and other random clips are mysteries, perhaps even to the producers themselves.

Because the series is designed to appeal to a general audience (again like Jazz), a lot of the information won't be new to diehard Broadway fans, but they should be especially pleased by the DVDs' bonus features, which include additional performances and about four more hours of interviews. Stephen Sondheim fans should be fascinated by footage of the composer-lyricist discussing "Someone in a Tree" at the piano, and then running through the song with original cast members of Pacific Overtures, as well as interviews of him talking about his own shows and songs (e.g., listing the songwriters he pastiched in Follies) and reminiscing about mentor Oscar Hammerstein II. Other bonus performances include vaudeville films from the Library of Congress, original-cast television performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "If I Loved You" (from Carousel, unfolding over 12 minutes) and "Some Enchanted Evening" (the reprise version from South Pacific), Rent's Jonathan Larson spoofing Sondheim, and two behind-the-scenes looks at Wicked. --David Horiuchi

Customer Reviews

Timeline of Broadway Theatre
'Broadway - The Amercian Musical' is a PBS series which tries to tell the story of Broadway in several chapters. More than being a focus on any one show or even time period, this documentary tries to tell the narrative of Broadway.

Julie Andrews hosts and narrates the special, and then we are presented with footage and photos of historical Broadway images, songs, and shows accompanied by interviews with people associated with Broadway. Stephen Sondheim is a notable interviewee who contributes first-hand to the PBS special to tell the story of Broadway. Either way, it works.

The story starts with the 'Ziegfeld Follies' and in Ziegfeld, presents the important role of producer in making Broadway musicals come to life. The 'Ziegfeld Follies' was a series of theatrical reviews which featured songs, dance, and the "Ziegfield girl," an often attractive female employed to be an actor or dancer in the show, establishing this stereotype.

It goes on to chronicle the contributions of the major composers of the Broadway stage; namely, Gershwin, Berlin, Kern, Rodgers, Porter, Bernstein, and Sondheim, among others. It also celebrates the giants of the Broadway stage, like singer Ethel Merman who could hold a note 'forever'. The documentary will often turn its focus to a particular musical or song within in order to illustrate a larger point about the Broadway narrative.

Equally included in the story of Broadway are contemporary musicals, like 'Rent' and 'The Lion King.' It is this continuous, ubiquitous nature of the Broadway tradition that draws me in to this documentary. Watching 'Broadway - The American Musical' is both a fun and educational experience. So, take your pick. You can watch it to learn or you can watch it just to enjoy.

Broadway for Dummies.
...and being a self-professed "dummy" on the American Musical Theater I found this sort of "Broadway History 101" to be at best an entertaining starting point. I believe director Michael Kantor was handicapped from the start since the whole history of the "Great White Way" encompasses such a huge array of giants and geniuses (Ziegfeld, Jolson, Gershwin...) that at a mere six hours, the documentary feels like being on a bus tour speeding at 90 miles an hour. That odd feeling is magnified with Episode Four: "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'(1943-1960), the single most important gem in the chest. As been noted elsewhere, that golden era of the fabulous "Book Musicals" which produced an unmatchable run of landmark classics like "Oklahoma" and "My Fair Lady" could have alone been given a six hour treatment instead of the rushed, caffeinated hour presented here. Clearly, that episode in Brodway parlance "lays an egg," compromising this projects overall quality.

Still, there is fun to be had here and the filmmakers manage to skirt PBS' tendency to turn a giddy subject into a glum funeral march. Julie Andrews is an exquisite host and I disagree with criticism about the high amount of movie clips used in episodes One through Three. Movies of the 1930's in particular the early "talkies" appropriated so much of Broadway's luster and lore it seems only natural to use them. I also loved the novel use of a song's lyrics by showing the words playfully dancing in an about a sheet of music or a photograph. And best of all, the "talking heads" used here all have something interesting to say with humor and clarity- a key element missing in, say, Ken Burn's "Jazz."

Reasonably good for an incredibly ambitious project
Any effort to survey the whole history of the Broadway musical theatre inevitably involves difficult choices of what to include and what to omit, plus the scarcity of earliest material. On the whole, the six-episode documentary works....I don't know how many factual errors were made or how many errors were picked up by other reviewers, but as a major fan of Jimmy Durante and the author of what is the most comprehensive coverage of his career (JIMMY DURANTE: HIS SHOW BUSINESS CAREER, McFarland & Company, 1995, still in print), I was startled to see in the "musical comedies" section of episode two, just before the Jolson segment, that a brief clip from an unidentified movie claimed it showed, left to right, (Lou) Clayton, (Jimmy) Durante, and (Eddie) Jackson. In fact the people were Rudy Vallee, Jimmy Durante, and Cliff ("Ukelele Ike") Edwards, from the Fox film GEORGE WHITE'S SCANDALS (1934), not the famous vaudeville team of Clayton, Jackson and Durante. That team appeared in only one film, ROADHOUSE NIGHTS (Paramount, 1930), together with Helen Morgan. Neither Durante nor his early partners ever appeared in any of George White's theatre productions.