You'll be glad you did all those bicep curls when you pick up The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies (Oxford University Press; cloth, $127.38; paper, $50). It's weighty in size at 580 pages, and weighty in scholarly content. This isn't a coffee-table book, and it's certainly not a fanzine. If your interest in the art of Broadway consists of wanting to know what tirade Patti-Lou Pone hurled at her audience this week, you'd best skip it. I found some of it impenetrable due to academic jargon and a few hare-brained theories, some of it rigorous reading, and most of it fascinating, revealing, provocative.
I can't represent the book's 27 essays in a one-sentence overview. The essays aren't biographical, but offer a thorough overview of all the Sondheim shows and films, with a particular emphasis on the many ways Sondheim challenged the parameters of musical theatre with ceaseless innovation.
The essay "Queer Sondheim" was a highlight for me. "And One for Mahler" is subtitled "An Opera Director's Reflections on Sondheim in the Subsidized Theatre," and ponders the effect of Sweeney Todd in its many opera-house incursions. It's pretty hot stuff if you've got tix for the SF Opera production.
Then there are those legendary shows you can no longer get tix to, the Ziegfeld Follies. A new biography of Flo by twins Cynthia and Sara Brideson, Ziegfeld and His Follies (University Press of Kentucky, $40) is the most encompassing book about Flo, if not the most engrossing. It's true, I was amazed to read so much dirt on ostensibly lily-white Marilyn Miller, and was saddened at the protracted detailing of Flo's downfall. But the authors' only passable prose cannot convey the excitement of Flo's career, and they seem mostly interested in the clothes worn by Flo's three wives. So while the book surpasses previous bios with its amount of domestic detail, it seems to me it scants the actual Follies (yet is generous with photographs). For a very show-bizzy bio of Flo and his productions, read Ethan Mordden's Ziegfeld �" The Man Who Invented Show Business . And for the actual content of Flo's shows �" the punchlines, the songs, the content of the sketches and the staging of the spectacles �" the authority remains The Ziegfeld Touch, a glamorous coffee-table showpiece of a book. Still, this book has the facts if not the frolic of the Follies.
Follies of a different sort �" delusions, drugs, betrayal, and extraordinarily bad behavior �" are on parade in the most fun memoir I've read in ages, Stevie Phillips' Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me (St. Martin's Press, $25.99). An agent to the stars and producer of films and B'way shows, Phillips began her career when, green as they come at 21, she became nursemaid to Judy Garland during the years of the star's worst behavior in the 1960s. Phillips was there when Judy did those awful things, and it was Phillips who put Judy back together again. Phillips' true tales surpass any other book of Garland-mongering in their horror, and her grasp of psychology will provoke pity. The book's second half is hardly less fascinating, as Phillips reads her own beads on her career in Hollywood and Broadway.