Transposing Broadway is a landmark survey of the impact of twentieth-century American-Jewish immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren on the development of the Broadway musical. Hecht's lucid and engaging account of this phenomenon is impressively broad, including nearly a century of American musical theater within its scope, while still remaining firmly grounded in close readings of key moments in Broadway theater history.
Hecht is by no means the first scholar to investigate the close relationship between American Jews and the Broadway musical. Most notably, Andrea Most's Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge University Press, 2004) argued that the Broadway book musical was a crucial pathway for Jewish immigrants and their children to develop their identity as Americans. Yet where Most's book covered eight musicals produced between 1925 and 1951 (with a particular emphasis on the “Golden Age” musicals of the 1940s and '50s), Hecht's study considers dozens of...
