Book review: When Broadway Went to Hollywood by Ethan Mordden

The eighth book I read in 2017 was When Broadway Went to Hollywood by Ethan Mordden.  Its subject is movie musicals from The Jazz Singer to Chicago, although the author stipulates in the introduction that his subject is not so much Hollywood musicals as the experience of Broadway songwriters in Hollywood. 

The early musicals felt they had to explain where the music was coming from and why people were singing; as such, they were usually about people putting on shows.  (Al Jolson was, in fact, a jazz singer, after all.)  Mordden amusingly reduces these early musicals to three basic plots and then refers to various movie musicals in shorthand as A, B, or C. 

PLOT A: Two women love the same man as they all put on the show.
PLOT B: A male star on the rise gets ego fever and deserts his true love, to reconcile with her after various hardships as they all put on the show.
PLOT C: The woman star becomes indisposed and her understudy wows the public as they all put on the show.

After this, Mordden advances through various songwriters who took their turn in Hollywood: De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson; Irving Berlin; George and Ira Gershwin; Rodgers and Hart; Jerome Kern; Cole Porter; Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, and Harold Arlen; Rodgers and Hammerstein; and Lerner and Loewe.  Interspersed are two digressions, one on operetta, and another on shows "direct from Broadway," that is, filmed in a manner faithful to the Broadway staging rather than adapted and altered from their original versions.  He concludes with what he calls "the last Hollywood musicals," unsuccessful movies including Annie and Mame, that spent lots of money and cast huge names rather than worry about whether or not the actors could sing. 

Overall, I found this book a little too technical for my grasp, and I didn't always agree with Mordden's conclusions.