text: I was really looking forward to reading "Ever After" when I saw the favorable quote on the back cover by  Larry Gelbart. But the book turned out to be a VERY cursory glance at the past 25 years of musical theater with remarkably little insight. Here are the three things I learned from this book: (1) Mega-musicals are almost always artistically corrupt; (2) Andrew Lloyd Webber is the anti-Christ; (3) The only innovative musicals to arrive in the past 25 years started Off-Broadway (mostly at Playwrights Horizons and Lincoln Center). Most of the hundreds of shows mentioned in this book get one paragraph each, with very few illuminating details. Here's what the author says about "Carrie," perhaps the most famous recent Broadway musical flop: "Carrie, of course, was an instant classic, a monument in the pantheon of failed Broadway musicals. Adapated by Michael Gore (music) and Don Pitchford (lyrics) from the notorious Stephen King novel (and even more notorious film), this $7 million musical celebration of prom vengeance and bad taste materialized at the Virginia Theater on the 12th of May, 1988 and was gone by the 15th, touching all who saw it with a timeless reverence for its indelible, monumental ineptitude." Does that really tell us very much about this musical? Did Barry Singer even see the show? You sure wouldn't know it from this description. And just what, I wonder, makes King's novel "notorious" or the movie "even more notorious"? Almost every show in this book rates that brief a mention, but somehow Singer finds time for an entire chapter of Lloyd Webber-bashing where Sir Andrew invites the author to a cocktail party to show off his newest female singing discovery. The chapter sticks out like a sore thumb, if only because it has nothing to do with the rest of the book, but also because it's one of the few times that Singer goes into any detail. Aside from a few interesting Sondheim quotes, this book is a waste of time.
  