Immediately after boring Jo Nesbø I needed something that would lift me up from all that norwegian doom & gloom full of unhappy people suffering the summer heat (like Oslo is in the middle of some tropical land) so I grabbed a book about Broadway legend Ethel Merman and it was a joy.
I was just faintly familiar with Merman,knowing that she had some great success in the musical theatre ages ago but didn't know much about her.
Author Brian Kellow did some great research and explained circumstances in which Merman grew up,why she became who she became and how important it is to understand she was product of particular time & place,for example that she continued the line of classic musical theatre performers who burned on the stage but could not cross over to the movies (where big gestures did not work) and the flame of their professional genius burned people close to them in private lives. Kellow is intelligent enough not to shy away from Merman's less desirable character qualities but also tries to explain and portrait her as a human being. It would have been too easy to simply describe Merman as a theatre goddess and leave it at that,but Kellow shows hard-working woman faithful to her inner circle and suspicious towards the rest of the world,full of humor and passion for theatre. Curiously enough,she knew instinctively what works best on the stage but made fatal judgements towards husbands and often with disastrous results. Never a big thinker or too intellectual (Stephen Sondheim describes her working technique as a "talking dog" who simply learned her lines and belted them out) she apparently was a child deep inside and singer Margaret Whiting said "One look at that Christmas Three she kept on the hall table, and I knew exactly who she was". The book inspired me to listen some original cast albums with Merman (she played many important roles in what now are known as Broadway classics) and to check out her turn in "The Muppet Show" where she was elderly but still adorable,she truly was happy as a child surrounded with Muppets.
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