Ethan Mordden

Ethan Mordden (born 1947) is an American author and musical theater scholar.

Early life and education Mordden was born in Pennsylvania and raised in Venice, Italy, and Long Island, New York. He is a graduate of Friends Academy and the University of Pennsylvania. He worked as a music director off-Broadway and in regional theater and enrolled in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.

As both composer and lyricist, Mordden wrote musicals based on William Shakespeare's Measure For Measure and on Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, but he ultimately ended up working mainly as a prose writer.

His stories, novels, essays, and non-fiction books cover multiple topics including American musical theater, opera, and film. In his fiction, he wrote about the emergence and development of contemporary American gay culture in New York City. He has also written for The New Yorker, including three works of fiction; Critic At Large pieces on Cole Porter, Judy Garland, and the musical Show Boat; and reviews of a biography of the Barrymores and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus. He later became a book reviewer for The Wall Street Journal.

His best-known fictional works are the interrelated series of stories known collectively as the "Buddies" cycle. In book form, these began with 1985's I have a Feeling We're not in Kansas Anymore. The fifth in the series, 2005's How's Your Romance?, is subtitled Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle. Together, the stories follow a close-knit friend group of men as they grow older. Another one of Mordden's works of fiction, The Venice Adriana (1998), is loosely based around the life of soprano Maria Callas.

In 2012, Mordden published his first volume of gay fiction in eight years, The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man; in the form of a novella and four short stories, the book explores relationships in which one man dominates another. In 2015, Mordden returned to writing historical fiction with One Day in France, set in Limoges and Oradour-Sur-Glane when the latter is destroyed and its inhabitants brutally murdered by a squad of the Nazi Schutzstaffel. In 2021, Mordden published another novel, You Can't Be Too Young or Too Pretty, a black comedy about a murder cult preying on college students in an unnamed American town.

Mordden's nonfiction includes seven volumes detailing the history of the Broadway musical from the 1920s through the early 2000s, guides to orchestral music and operatic recordings, and a cultural history of the American 1920s entitled That Jazz. He has also published Demented, an examination of the operatic diva, and a coffee table book book on the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein. His 2012 book Love Song is a dual biography chronicling the romance and professional collaboration of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, and in 2013 he published Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre. He has written a number of books on film,

Selected bibliography Buddies series I Have a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore: Tales from Gay Manhattan, 1985 Buddies, 1986 Everybody Loves You: Further Adventures in Gay Manhattan, 1988 Some Men Are Lookers, 1997 How's Your Romance?, 2005 Works on Broadway Make Believe: the Broadway musical in the 1920s, 1997 Sing For Your Supper: the Broadway musical in the 1930s, 2005 Beautiful Mornin': the Broadway musical in the 1940s, 1999 Coming Up Roses: the Broadway musical in the 1950s, 1998 Open a New Window: the Broadway musical in the 1960s, 2001 One More Kiss: the Broadway musical in the 1970s, 2003 The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical, 2004 All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway 1919–1959, 2007 Gays on Broadway, 2023 Other works on musical theater The American Theatre, 1967 Better Foot Forward: The History of American Musical Theater, 1976 That Jazz!: An Idiosyncratic Social History of the American Twenties, 1978 The Hollywood Musical, 1981 Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical, 1983 The Fireside Companion to the Theatre, 1988 Rodgers & Hammerstein, 1999 Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business, 2008 Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre, 2013 On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide, 2015 When Broadway Went to Hollywood, 2016 All That Jazz: The Life and Times of the Musical Chicago, 2018 On Streisand: An Opinionated Guide, 2019 Broadway Musicals On CD: A Conversational Guide, 2022 Works on opera and classical music Opera in the Twentieth Century: Sacred, Profane, Godot, 1978 A Guide to Opera Recordings, 1980 A Guide to Orchestral Music, the Handbook for Non-Musicians, 1980 The Splendid Art of Opera: A Concise History, 1980 Demented: The World of the Opera Diva, 1984 Opera Anecdotes, 1988 The New Book of Opera Anecdotes, 2020 Works on Hollywood Movie Star: A Look at the Women Who Made Hollywood, 1983 The Hollywood Studios, 1988

Other published works Smarts, the Cultural I.Q. Test, 1984 Pooh's Workout Book, 1984 How Long Has This Been Going On?, 1995 The Venice Adriana, 1998 The Jewcatcher, 2008 The Guest List: How Manhattan Defined American Sophistication---from the Algonquin Round Table to Truman Capote's Ball, 2010 Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, 2012 The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man, 2013 One Day in France, 2015 You Can't Be Too Young or Too Pretty, 2021 The Blacksmith, 2024 The Gay Toy Shop, 2025