The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (with Paul R. Laird, 3rd edition, 2017) and currently edits the series Cambridge Elements in Musical Theatre.
Everett applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre, and reported the following:
Page 99 forms part of the discussion on the musical comedy Sitting Pretty, which in 1924 reunited the writing team of Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse, who had achieved tremendous fame during the previous decade with their series of so-called “Princess Theatre Musicals.” Sitting Pretty exemplifies one of the book’s main through-lines: creators and stars of the past were returning to Broadway and West End musical stages, as well as those in continental Europe, in an effort to rekindle their earlier successes.Learn more about The Year that Made the Musical at the Cambridge University Press website.
In addition to such re-appearances from past celebrities (and continuations of long, unbroken careers of others), a new generation of creators and performers were cementing their collective and individual star status in 1924, such as the siblings George and Ira Gershwin (1924’s Lady, Be Good! was the first show for which the brothers wrote the complete score). In addition to this dovetailing of the remembered and the yet-to-be-remembered, musical theatre in 1924 was very much a transnational enterprise. Different English-language versions of the Berlin blockbuster Madame Pompadour were playing in London (huge hit) and New York (massive flop) that year, in addition to an Italian-language version that opened in Milan. Zarzuelas that opened in Madrid transferred to Buenos Aires, and an English-language revision of a well-known zarzuela opened in London as The First Kiss. New management at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna ushered in Emmerich Kálmán’s Gräfin Mariza (Countess Maritza), with productions taking place later that year in Berlin, Warsaw, Venice, Budapest, and elsewhere. Confluences of the past and the present were thus coupled with all sorts of geographical mobilities, not to mention the continued permeability and osmosis between genres such as operetta, revue, and musical comedy. The overall result was a highly variated tapestry held together through an innate sense of glamour. Page 99 of The Year that Made the Musical: 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre, which explores Sitting Pretty, provides a closer look at one of these threads.
--Marshal Zeringue
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