A TENDER THING
by Emily Neuberger
A stage-struck Wisconsin farm girl discovers that musical theater is no refuge from real-world problems.
When Eleanor O'Hanlon hears that her favorite Broadway composer, Don Mannheim, is having an open-call audition to replace the star in his current hit, she cashes in the war bonds her parents have been saving for her wedding day to pay for a train ticket to New York. “I’m not some girl who wants to be on Broadway for the fame or glamour,” she tells Mannheim when someone else gets the part. “I understand this. I understand you….This is my life.” Intrigued, he hires her instead for the lead in his musical work in progress, A Tender Thing. An interracial love story is daring stuff for Broadway in 1958, and Eleanor is thrilled by the chance to work with her idol. Debut author Neuberger, who studied musical theater and writing at NYU, clearly knows the world she’s depicting; she brings to life with nice historical detail the rehearsal milieu, complete with a martinet director, unabashedly gay chorus boys, and a production taking shape with daily rewrites and new songs. Eleanor, who knows everything about musical theater and not much about real life, may be the only person in the company who doesn’t get why Don takes a special interest in her creatively and displays no interest in her increasingly open romantic overtures. She also doesn’t really think about what the public—let alone her parents—might think about Don’s deliberately button-pushing subject matter until scarily hostile protests erupt during Boston previews, although her savvy African American co-star, Charles Lawrence, has warned her. Charles is among the novel’s many sensitive characterizations, most notable of which is brilliant, conflicted Don: desperately lonely but coldly making use of others’ lives to feed his artistic needs. It’s Eleanor and Charles who show him the realistic finale his musical demands, and Eleanor’s happy ending is a highly qualified one suggesting that she, like Don, will find her deepest relationships in art.
Smart, savvy, atmospheric work from a promising new talent.