R.I.P. Gerald Bordman

[Reza]

Gerald Bordman, theater scholar, author

By Sally A. Downey

Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer
Gerald Bordman, 79, of Bala Cynwyd, a former businessman and scholar
who wrote more than a dozen books about American theater, died of
cancer Monday, May 9, at Saunders House in Wynnewood.

In 1978, four years after selling his family's mothball business, Mr.
Bordman published The American Musical Theater. The work, which
covered 200 years of stage history, was written with "enthusiasm and
affection," according to an Inquirer review. It included a
season-by-season rundown of almost every Broadway musical, related
the plot, and gave a sense of production that enabled readers to
imagine what it must have been like to be there, the reviewer said.

Mr. Bordman's other books included the encyclopedic The Oxford
Companion to the American Theater, American Musical Comedy, American
Musical Revue, and biographies of Jerome Kern and Vincent Youmans, a
songwriter who wrote such hits as "Tea for Two," "The Carioca," and
"Rise 'n' Shine."

Mr. Bordman, who was charming and persuasive enough to secure
interviews with Fred Astaire and Irene Dunne for the Kern biography,
was a curmudgeon on the subject of the modern-day musical.

He told an Inquirer theater critic in 1978, "I was a tired
businessman myself for 20 years. I want to see pretty girls dancing
and listen to someone singing a Jerome Kern song."

"I've stopped going to the theater. I don't like profanity, which is
used gratuitously in the theater now, or the working-class slum
settings and radical sentiments," he told the Philadelphia Daily News
in 1982. "Where are the zany, delightful musicals, the airy farces,
the lovely operettas?"

Mr. Bordman also complained that productions were amplified. "I would
rather buy an original cast album," he said. "In Vienna, in Budapest,
in Paris, nothing is miked. I still travel around the world and see
great theater."

In 1989, Mr. Bordman was one of the backers of a New York production
of Sitting Pretty, a 1924 musical Kern wrote with Guy Bolton and P.G.
Wodehouse.

An Inquirer theater critic said that the show had charm and a hit
number, "Till the Clouds Roll By," but that its "arbitrarily
complicated plot" was not for contemporary taste.

Growing up in Wynnefield, Mr. Bordman accompanied his mother, Anna,
to the theater in Center City every week. The first Broadway show he
saw was Banjo Eyes with Eddie Cantor in 1941.

He graduated from Central High School and earned a bachelor's degree
from Lafayette College. Later, he earned a master's and doctorate in
medieval literature from the University of Pennsylvania.

Though Mr. Bordman trained to be an academic, he was a dutiful son
and went to work for his father, Morris, said longtime friend Jacques
Kelly. The family firms in Manayunk - Excell Chemical Products Co.
and Marbex Co. - manufactured mothballs, air fresheners, and
household deodorants.

For 25 years, Mr. Bordman lived in a home he renovated in Kirks
Mills, Lancaster County. He moved to Bala in 1999.

He was an accomplished cook, relished fine dining, and once was a
partner in a Center City restaurant.

He could be persuaded to see productions of Shakespeare or the
classics in local theaters without amplification and enjoyed
listening to his extensive collection of recorded plays, Kelly said.

Mr. Bordman had no immediate survivors.

A graveside service will be at 11 a.m. Friday, May 13, at Montefiore
Cemetery, 600 Church Rd., Jenkintown.