Michael Riedel is to be congratulated on this great history of Broadway. It’s a riveting read for any fan of musical theatre on the Great White Way. It brings all of the players in the great Broadway drama to life and regales the readers with those fabulous anecdotes and memories that true fans of Broadway die for.
The book is laid out like a sorta-score. There is an Overture, large chapters which form ‘the key changes of (Bricusse’s) life’ – from A Minor to G Undiminished and a Coda. The sense of musicality is all pervading, as it should be for the man responsible for tunes such as Goldfinger, The Candy Man, Feeling Good and Talk To The Animals. As Elton John puts it in one of 6 Superstar forewords: “Anyone who has written What Kind Of Fool Am I? and My Old Man’s A Dustman should be revered forever.”
