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The Voice ofBel Canto

BOOK REVIEW: The Oxford Handbookof the British Musical

Edited by Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin

Review by Brian Manternach

What are the most important criteria upon which works of agiven genre should be evaluated? Is it sufficient to consider thetime period in which the pieces are written, or should equal orgreater emphasis be given to the nationality of the creators andthe intended audiences for whom the pieces are written?

Consider, for example, Claude Debussy’s La Mer; GustavMahler’s eighth symphony, the “Symphony of a Thousand;”and Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. All three are orchestralworks (The Rite of Spring is considered a ballet as well as anorchestral concert work) that had their debuts within eightyears of each other. The works, however, use vastly differentmusical language, which is almost certainly influenced byeach composer’s country of origin.

The question of nationalistic influence is at the heart of thecollection of essays found within The Oxford Handbook of TheBritish Musical. As editors Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubinargue, British musicals are not fairly evaluated if one onlyconsiders the success they achieve once they are producedin the United States. As they explain in the Introduction,“Popular entertainment grows from the soil that produces it,which is why it is reductive and extremely misleading to viewBritish musicals merely within a perspective provided byBroadway.” The handbook is, therefore, published to providea British context as a lens through which British musicals maybe viewed. It is also published to intentionally promoteacademic research on British musical theater, of which theeditors believe there is a paucity of resources.

Originally published in 2016 by Oxford University Press,the book was released in a paperback edition in 2019.Twenty-eight contributing authors provide as many chaptersin this nearly 800-page tome. Gordon and Jubin, who alsoauthor individual chapters, have arranged the volume intosix parts.

Part One, Britannia Rules: The Early British Musical andSociety, includes five essays that explore musical forms (balladopera, comic opera, English musical comedy, etc.) rangingchronologically from the 1700s to the years immediatelyfollowing the First World War.

Robert Gordon Olaf Jubin

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Part Two, British or American: Artistic Differences, begins todelineate nationalistic traits as found in musical comedy in the1920s and 1930s and English operetta from 1917 to 1951. Thesection further provides an alternative perspective on what hasbeen dubbed the “American Invasion” of West End theater.Specifically, Dominic Symonds challenges the notion that thesuccess of Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun in London causeda thirty-year dormancy of the British musical, which endedonly with the rise of the megamusical. Symonds makes thiscase in part by noting the comparatively equal statisticalsuccess of many British shows during that same period.

Part Three, New Approaches to Form and Subject Matter,examines how British theater changed as a result of theinfluence of shows like Look Back in Anger and Oliver! and theconcept musicals of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse. Italso explores the relationship between the pop-music industryand the British musical, in part by investigating the rockoperas Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar.

Part Four, “The British are Coming!” delves into the “epic”aspects of Les Misérables and examines how scenographycontributes to the “spectacular” qualities of musicals like Catsand Lord of the Rings: The Musical. Meanwhile, Part Five,Trailblazers, profiles seminal figures in British musical theater,including writer-composers Noël Coward and Lionel Bart,lyricist Tim Rice, and producer Cameron Mackintosh. DavidChandler’s concluding chapter on Andrew Lloyd Webberdetails the composer’s tremendous success with The Phantomof the Opera, his “badly judged sequel,” Love Never Dies, andhis “unprecedented international appeal,” all while writingmusicals that are the product of “a distinctively Britishsensibility.”

Finally, Part Six, The Art of the Possible: AlternativeApproaches to Musical Theatre Aesthetics, provides essaysthat highlight the lasting influence of John Gay’s The Beggar’sOpera, the aesthetics of 21st-century jukebox musicals likeMamma Mia!, and the draw of cross-generational musicals thatappeal to the family market, among other topics.

The editors and authors of The Oxford Handbook of The BritishMusical reveal the inherent bias at play when Americanaudiences insist that British musicals meet Broadwaystandards without factoring in whether or not it was the intentof British creators to emulate those standards. A clear exampleis Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express, which ran on Broadway foronly 761 performances but was the West End’s second-longest-running musical after Cats (another Lloyd Webber show).In fact, assuming that every creator of a show that opens onthe West End hopes for an eventual move to Broadway revealsan American bias that, at the same time, reduces the London

Brian Manternach, tenor, amember of the voice facultyof the University of Utah’sDepartment of Theater, maintainsa private studio, and serves asUtah District Governor for theNational Association of Teachersof Singing (NATS) and WesternGovernor for the Pan AmericanVocology Association (PAVA).His students have been cast inprofessional productions in theUS and abroad and have earnedtop honors in vocal competitionsfrom the local to internationallevels. A recipient of the NATSVoice Pedagogy Award, hehas given national/internationalpresentations for the VoiceFoundation, the Voice and SpeechTrainers Association, PAVA, theNational Center for Voice andSpeech, the University ofUtah Voice Disorders Center,TEDxSaltLakeCity, and NATSat chapter, regional, and nationalconferences.An associate editor of the Journalof Singing, he also authors “TheSinger’s Library” book reviewcolumn for Classical Singermagazine. Manternach hasmade solo appearances with theMilwaukee Symphony, ClevelandChamber Symphony, and SinfoniaSalt Lake, among others, and hisstage credits range from Eisen-stein in Die Fledermaus

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theater scene to a stepping stone to New York City. Thisnegates—or at minimum, ignores—the consideration thatmany British composers may actually prefer to premiere theirshows in their home country.

Definitions are most useful when they are able to define whatsomething is and not simply what it is not. The essays thatmake up The Oxford Handbook of The British Musical offer astrong case that, regardless of what is happening on the GreatWhite Way, British musicals constitute a relevant, stand-alonegenre that deserves to be evaluated as such.

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to Miles Gloriosus in A FunnyThing Happened on the Wayto the Forum to Belmonte in DieEntführung aus dem Serail.For two seasons, he served asapprentice-artist at the SkylightOpera Theater in Milwaukee.

Originally from Iowa, his degreesin voice performance include a BAfrom St. John’s University/Collegeof St. Benedict of Minnesota,an MM from the University ofWisconsin-Milwaukee, and aDM from the Indiana UniversityJacobs School of Music. He hascompleted additional training atthe CCM Vocal PedagogyInstitute at Shenandoah Con-servatory and the SummerVocology Institute.

Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproductionprohibited without permission.