Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays 1960 to 2005

It's interesting to read these Mordden histories together, as I have been doing. The '30s one, "Sing for Your Supper," is downbeat. That era, which we tend to think of as a golden time on Broadway, is for Mordden one of wasted opportunity. The '40s and the '50s are, as you can imagine, when he's in clover. And I thought this one, on the '60s, would again fall back into despair. But to my delight, he unearths gems I was... Read Full Review

I discovered Ethan Mordden through his books on movies. I enjoyed his style and then started reading his books on Broadway Musicals.I am not an expert on musicals by any stretch of the imagination. However, I found "Open a New Window" very readable and interesting. I was continually surprised to find people in musicals that I never would have imagined. (Vincent Price starring in a Broadway musical in 1968? My universe... Read Full Review

Ethan Mordden's Open a New Window (The Broadway Musical in the 1960's) continues his series looking at the development of musical theatre in New York decade by decade. This book has the burden of describing a decade that will more than likely be a great deal familiar to his readers, certainly more so than previous books. This is more than compensated for by just how personal the author makes the book. The volume interjects... Read Full Review

As someone can't resist a book, no matter how bad, on musicals past, I feel like I've found a new best friend in Ethan Mordden. He knows his subject, thinks for himself and writes extraordinarily well. He's quick to confute the common memory - pointing out the unremembered virtues of Camelot, Funny Girl and even The Unsinkable Molly Brown, yet perceptively skewering Hair, Dear World and Zorba. His identification of trends... Read Full Review

In this installment of Ethan Mordden's decade-by-decade series of books about the Broadway (and off-Broadway) musical, Mordden covers the 1960s. Perhaps because I know this decade's shows more intimately than I know most of the shows in the earlier decades Mordden has covered, I was surprised to discover a rather large number of factual errors in this one. And every once in a while in this book Mordden writes something... Read Full Review