MUSICALS

With its origins in popular operetta, the musical is a distinctly American art form. Despite recent imports from Britain’s Andrew LLOYD WEBBER and France’s Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, New York’s Broadway remains the place where musicals are made.

In modern terms, the first musical was Show Boat, which opened at Broadway’s Ziegfeld Theater at the end of 1927. With music by the already established Jerome KERN and lyrics by the relative newcomer Oscar HAMMERSTEIN II, it was the first show where songs, music, and dancing numbers were all integrated into the plot. It was also the first operettabased show to tackle themes that were considered daring for the time. Although the setting was nostalgic— a Mississippi riverboat carrying a troupe of travelling entertainers—the plot dealt with the difficulties of marriage, the evils of gambling, and the insidiousness of racism. These were sensitive topics in America in 1927, but the pill was sweetened with touches of comedy and unforgettable melodies.

Other modern musicals soon followed that year— A Connecticut Yankee by Lorenz Hart and Richard RODGERS, and Funny Face by Ira and George GERSHWIN (featuring the brother-sister duo of Fred and Adele Astaire)—but they limited themselves to much flimsier, traditional plots in the tradition of musical comedy that continued into the next decade. The importance of this older form of musical theatre should not be overlooked, however. Whatever its shortcomings, it provided easily accessible entertainment and—particularly in talented hands such as those of Rodgers and Hart, and the Gershwins—gave the world many classic songs, including “My Heart Stood Still” (from A Connecticut Yankee) and “S’Wonderful” (from Funny Face).

SOPHISTICATION AND WIT

Two other masters of musical theatre who worked on Broadway during the Great Depression were Cole PORTER and Englishman Noel COWARD. Their sophisticated and sometimes ribald wit helped audiences forget their economic woes for a while. Older Broadway veteran Irving BERLIN helped evolve the musical as satire with Face the Music (1932), which was followed up by the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing. But these still had to compete with the old-style variety showcases—which often featured the terms “follies,” “vanities,” or “new faces” in their titles— produced by Florenz Ziegfeld’s widow Billie Burke, and featuring stars such as Fanny Brice, Imogene Coca, and the young Henry Fonda.

When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933 and began tackling the Great Depression, there was a heightening of social consciousness. In this spirit, the Gershwins left musical comedy to create Porgy and Bess (with DuBose Heyward, after his novel). Although it has been presented in opera houses in recent decades, Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway in 1935 with an all-African-American cast. And in 1938, Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, originally a project of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), took union activism as its theme. It was directed by Orson Welles.

THE GREAT MUSICAL COLLABORATORS

German composer Kurt WEILL, sometime collaborator with playwright Bertolt Brecht, came to New York in 1935 to flee the Nazi regime and ended up co-writing several musicals, of which 1949’s Lost in the Stars was the most political. Weill’s Knickerbocker Holiday (with book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson) became, in 1938, the first musical to view contemporary concerns through a historical perspective (in this case, that of 17th-century New York), and is remembered for the classic tune “September Song.”

Rodgers and Hart continued to turn out a string of hit shows, including The Boys from Syracuse, in 1938, (based on Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors) and the contemporary Pal Joey, in 1940, which gave Gene Kelly his only major Broadway role. However, Hart’s drinking soon got the best of him, and his partner was forced to look for a new lyricist.

In 1943, Rodgers teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II for the adaptation of an earlier play that reached the musical stage as Oklahoma! This collaboration brought together Rodgers' lushly arranged music and Hammerstein’s earthy and heartfelt lyrics. Oklahoma! was not only the first collaboration of a classic Broadway team, it also engaged audiences with several innovations. For example, there was no opening chorus line. Instead, a cowboy expressed his sentiments to a middle-aged woman who was hanging out laundry. Other innovations included a serious ballet sequence and a killing in the second act. As with Show Boat all the elements were skillfully interwoven. The result managed to break previous Broadway box office records and the show toured successfully around the world.

A year after Oklahoma! opened, Rodgers and Hammerstein began work on another adaptation, Carousel, which was set on the picturesque coast of Maine. Again it pushed further the boundaries of the Broadway musical, opening with a fascinating standalone number (the “Carousel Waltz”) rather than a medley overture. It also boasted a deeply disturbed protagonist, a killing, a ballet, and a spiritual ending, rather than one based on an amorous resolution.

UPBEAT AMERICA

Cole Porter, who wrote several hit musicals in the early 1930s, including Anything Goes (1932), scored a couple of flops in the mid-1940s. He triumphantly regained his form with the 1948 show Kiss Me Kate. Using Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew as a play within a play, he pioneered the device of using two separate kinds of song—one for the Padua setting of The Shrew and one for Baltimore where his story of a contemporary production of The Shrew was located. It worked wonderfully well, perfectly matching the upbeat spirit of post-World War II America. Rodgers and Hammerstein attempted to explore the country’s feelings about the war with their 1949 musical, South Pacific. Set in an island occupied by U.S. soldiers but under the threat of a Japanese invasion, it dealt with the themes of loss and racial bigotry.

Among the other songwriting talents to emerge after World War II were Burton Lane, Yip Harburg, Jule STYNE, Sammy Cahn, and the team of Frederick LOEWE and Alan Jay Lerner, who created the whimsical Brigadoon in 1947, based on Scottish folklore. A writer who displayed an uncanny ear for contemporary American vernacular, Frank LOESSER created (with Abe Burrows) 1950’s Guys and Dolls, based on Damon Runyon’s picaresque short stories.

In the 1950s, the musical entered what many considered to be a golden age, with shows such as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I in 1951. Now in a position to act as their own producers, the team engaged Jerome Robbins as choreographer, who expanded the role of dance in musicals.

Eddie Knoblock’s musical Kismet, which opened on Broadway in 1953, managed a clever updating of the classical music of 19th-century Russian composer Alexander Borodin (mostly taken from his opera Prince Igor). The Pajama Game by Jerry Ross and Richard Adler, which hit Broadway the following year, introduced another influential choreographer, Bob Fosse, and explored the theme of labourmanagement relations during the contemporary Eisenhower era. Also in 1954, The Boy Friend, composed by Englishman Sandy Wilson, took a nostalgic look back at the 1920s.

By the mid-1950s, film remakes of Broadway shows and recordings of their soundtracks on the newly introduced long-playing records became vital elements in the financial success of musicals. From the years 1955 and 1956 alone came several stage-tomovie musicals. Among the most notable were Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings, Ross and Adler’s Damn Yankees, Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, Jule Styne’s Bells Are Ringing, and Johnny MERCER and Gene de Paul’s Li’l Abner. Of these, My Fair Lady was the biggest success and probably the most conventional in its musical structure. Based on Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, it took a wry look at English social mores. This was unusual for an era when America generally preferred a light-hearted examination of its own conventions, regional attitudes, and street language.

Then in 1957 came West Side Story, which teamed director and choreographer Jerome Robbins with playwright Arthur Laurents, classical composer Leonard BERNSTEIN, and a young lyricist named Stephen SONDHEIM. It set Shakespeare’s Romeo and fuliet among the teenage gangs who were fighting it out on the streets of New York. However that year it shared the Broadway plaudits with the successful but far less dramatic and sophisticated The Music Man, by Meredith Wilson.

Sondheim returned to Broadway in 1959, with the legendary Ethel Merman starring in Gypsy, one of the first musicals based on a real-life show business biography—in this case that of striptease pioneer Gypsy Rose Lee. That same year saw Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last and arguably most successful Broadway show, The Sound of Music. It was based on the life story of the Trapp Family Singers, and when transferred to the silver screen it became one of the most famous films of all time.

BROADWAY MATURES

The 1960s opened with Bye Bye Birdie, a send-up of the teenage obsession with ROCK'N'ROLL. The Fantasticks has had a seemingly endless run (though technically off-Broadway), with an impressionistic, almost mystical tale of love and growing up penned by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones. Spunky women were celebrated in Irma La Douce and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. But then more serious stories of aging and infidelity were themes of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, based on the legend of King Arthur. Climbing the corporate ladder was the subject of Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Richard Rodgers went solo with the inter-racial romance No Strings.

In 1963, Lionel BART’S Oliver! based on the Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, stood out from the crowd, partly because it became one of the first successful exports to the U.S. since the 1920s.

In 1964, Jerry HERMAN had a Broadway hit with Hello, Dolly! which he quickly followed with the musical Mame. Also in 1964 came Fiddler on the Roof. Written by Jerry BOCK and Sheldon HARNICK, it was one of the first productions by Broadway magnate-to-be Harold Prince. Based on stories by Sholom Aleichem about the Jewish community in Russia at the turn of the century, it incorporated the flavour of traditional Semitic music, and turned out to be one of Broadway’s biggest international successes. The musical is also remarkable in its embrace of the deep issues of tradition and prejudice, and of the joy and tragedy of an entire race of people.

Broadway’s artistic maturity also showed itself in the work of John KANDER and Fred EBB. Their 1966 hit, Cabaret, based on the writings of Christopher Isherwood, was set in 1930s Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. Two years later, the somewhat less sophisticated aspirations of the hippy generation arrived on Broadway with Hair—lyrics by Germone Ragni and James Rado, and music by Gait MacDermot. The musical was the first to feature onstage nudity.

In 1970, Stephen Sondheim finally realised his long-held goal of writing both the score and the lyrics for a musical. The result was Company, directed and produced by Hal Prince. In the process, Sondheim turned the musical in a new direction, using it as a vehicle to examine the psychological reality of domestic relationships.

THE STRUGGLES AND SUCCESSES OF THE 1970s

The early 1970s saw religious themes receiving the musical treatment with 1971’s Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. The latter musical marked the Broadway debut of British wunderkind composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, with lyricist Tim Rice. They had already written Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, another musical of Biblical origin, which was later exported to the U.S.

Patti LuPone (left) and Kevin Anderson in a scene from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, at the Adelphi Theatre, London, in 1993. The musical tells the story of a silent movie star’s return to the big screen

Devotees of Broadway’s golden age saw the gimmicky Broadway productions of the 1970s as a symptom of the musical’s decline. The number of productions certainly lessened during the decade, but this was due as much to rising costs as the shortage of creative talent.

Nevertheless, Sondheim continued to experiment with musical and dramatic forms in A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976), and Sweeney Todd (1979). But the biggest hit musical of the mid-1970s was A Chorus Line (1975), by Marvin HAMLISCH and Edward Kleban. The musical is a riveting examination of the making and breaking of supporting players auditioning for a show on the Great White Way. Kander and Ebb’s Chicago (1975) took a lighthearted look at murder, due process, and vaudeville in the 1920s, while Annie, by Martin Charnin and Charles STROUSE, based on a popular comic strip, triumphed in London, and proved in 1977 that Broadway audiences, despite attempts at sophistication, were still vulnerable to cuteness and sentimentality.

Audiences also seemed eager for the lavish productions pioneered by producer Cameron Mackintosh and the lush musical arrangements of the prolific Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose Evita, based on the life of Argentine political icon Eva Peron, was a success in London, and opened on Broadway in 1979. Lloyd Webber’s next show, Cats, drew its inspiration from the work of poet T. S. Eliot. It was followed by Phantom of the Opera in 1988. The latter two musicals became long-running success stories throughout the world.

REVIVALS AND NOSTALGIA

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Broadway was dominated by revivals. These included Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s 42nd Street, originally a 1933 movie musical, Sunset Boulevard (scored by Lloyd Webber, but not one of his most successful), The King and I, Hello Dolly, Bye Bye, Birdie, and even Show Boat Some, like Hair, seemed not to have stood the test of time; others, such as Chicago, fared even better the second time around. Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978) and Sophisticated Ladies (1981), based on the jazz legacies of Fats WALLER and Duke ELLINGTON respectively, also took a look backwards.

Despite his restless experimentation and contemporary psychological concerns, Sondheim has remained the theatrical heir to Oscar Hammerstein II and the guardian of certain Broadway traditions, including that of the well-integrated show, as was evident in his Sunday in the Park with George (1984) and Into the Woods (1987). However, some producers seem to feel that the best way to get a show across, regardless of its dramatic and musical merit, is to dress it up with expensive costumes, elaborate set designs, and jazzy special effects. Sometimes, if the show also has true artistic worth, this works. One long-running example is Boublil and Schönberg’s adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which debuted in London in 1985.

In their search for new source material, Broadway producers have been casting their nets wider. Recent Broadway adaptations of Walt Disney cartoon features The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, with songs by Elton JOHN, have been critically lauded. A new Broadway generation has also attempted to create musicals based on trends in pop music and contemporary social realities. Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk, with lyrics by Reg Gaines and music by Daryl Waters, Zane Mark, and Ann Duquesnay, used blues, rap, and tap dance to tell the story of slavery and its consequences. And Jonathan Larson’s Rent reset the story of Giacomo PUCCINI’S La bohème in New York’s AIDS-stricken, rock-loving East Village. But whether these newcomers can keep the musical evolving to new heights still remains to be seen.

Jeff Kaliss