Making Broadway Dance by Liza Gennaro, and: Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance and The Choreographing of Broadway Musical Theatre by Phoebe Rumsey (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Making Broadway Dance by Liza Gennaro, and: Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance and The Choreographing of Broadway Musical Theatre by Phoebe Rumsey
• Ray Miller

MAKING BROADWAY DANCE. By Liza Gennaro. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022; pp. 239. EMBODIED NOSTALGIA: EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIAL DANCE AND THE CHOREOGRAPHING OF BROADWAY MUSICAL THEATRE. By Phoebe Rumsey. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies Series. London: Roudedge, 2024; pp. 241.

While there has been an increasing number of excellent articles on aspects of musical theatre dance in recent years, there are few overall histories on dance in the US American musical, let alone histories that interrogate the dances themselves in substantive ways. The first was Richard Kislan's Hoofing on Broadway: A History of Show Dancing (1987), then Robert Emmet Long's Broadway, the Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors, 1940 to the Present (2001), and now, Liza Gennaro's Making Broadway Dance has arrived some twenty years later. Throughout this same period, there have been excellent overview musical theatre histories written by historians from Gerald Bordman and Ethan Mordden to Sheldon Patinkin and Larry Stempel. Many other scholars have offered in-depth critiques and theorizations of musical theatre, such as Scott Miller, Scott McMillin, Jack Viertel, Raymond Knapp, John Bush Jones, and Bruce Kirle. In other words, there is hardly a paucity of musical theatre history scholarship generally.

Since the 1980s, there have been numerous articles on dance in specific musicals and on the work of selected choreographers in publications like Studies in Musical Theatre, Theatre Journal, and Dance Research Journal. There have also been important book-length examinations on the work of selected choreographers like Glenn Loney's Unsung Genius: The Passion of Dancer-Choreographer Jack Cole (1984), Deborah Jowitt's Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (2004), John Anthony Gilvey's Before the Parade Passes By: Gower Champion and the Glorious American Musical (2005), Kara Anne Gardner's Agnes De Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance (2016), and Kevin Winkler's Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical (2018). While not as frequent, there are also examples of dancer-choreographers writing their own autobiographies, including Agnes de Mille's landmark Dance to the Piper (1951), Tommy Tune's Footnotes: A Memoir (1997), Donald McKayle's Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life (2002), and Bob Avian and Tom Santopietro's Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer's Journey (2020). However, there have been few book-length examinations that offer a broader perspective on the contributions of dance to the US American musical. Liza Gennaro is one of the few "to illuminate the role of the choreographer and choreography in Broadway musicals" (8).

Beginning with the work of choreographers and dance directors of the 1920s like Ned Wayburn, Sammy Lee, and Seymour Felix, Gennaro proceeds to tell a 100-year story of dance in musical theatre that takes us up to the work of Andy Blankenbuehler, Steven Hoggett, and Camille A. Brown, just before the Broadway productions closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Gennaro does not attempt an exhaustive history on the subject; rather, she carefully selects the work of choreographers who profoundly influenced the development of musical theatre dance, such as Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins. She juxtaposes the unique contributions of these more seminal artists with those who either challenged or extended their work, such as Bob Fosse, Donald McKayle, Graciela Daniele, and Bill T. Jones.

Gennaro selects particular dance works from musicals to detail how a specific choreographer came to create that piece. While the obligatory dissection of the dream ballet in Oklahoma! is included, it is her examination and contextualization of the "The Civil War Ballet" from Bloomer Girl that not [End Page 579] only provides a look into the construction of this unique dance by de Mille but also foreshadows an approach that would continue to influence choreographers up to today.

Although her analysis of Bloomer Girl is indicative of the real strengths of the volume, Making Broadway Dance is not without its shortcomings. Her chapters on the work of Jerome Robbins are exhaustive, yet there is only one chapter, for example, devoted...