17 Popular musical theatre (and film)
Spaces and genres
From Buxton to Ballarat, Manchester to Manaus, the London Coliseum to Central City, Colorado, the world is full of imposing opera houses built one hundred or more years ago that cause one to wonder just how much opera has gone on inside them. As architectural spaces, they have one and all catered for a mass public’s aspirations towards plush velvet seating, regal insignia, the boudoir gilt, livery and privileged partial view (both in and out) found alike in private box and private coach, and the magical illusion of the proscenium stage. Theatrical magic is essentially that of a show, of the dazzle of a star, the virtuosity of a spectacle or the tension of a tragic or comic surprise; music adds magic of its own with the wondrous sounds proceeding from the star’s mouth and, unseen or at least unobserved, from the orchestra pit. Some of the musical sounds and shows inhabiting such theatres have constituted opera proper; many of them have not. The dressing rooms, stages and musical cues have been prepared similarly for performing dogs and divas; from the tired businessman in the stalls to the gold prospector or Japanese tourist in the gallery, the men in the audience have ogled Melba, Mary Martin or a potential mistress, the women their men, their matinée idol or their neighbour’s jewellery.
Those theatrical spaces, dedicated to lavish, alluring and clever multidisciplinary entertainment, have not changed much through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Nor perhaps has the range of upward and downward cultural – hence generic – pressures to which their types of entertainment are perennially subject, pressures basically towards high or low, serious or comic, clean or dirty. There remains a generic continuum between the sealed, concentrated world of sung melodrama that is opera and the serial entertainments of the variety show, and there remain supple exchanges between the two. But some time before 1900 a new audience contract had been drawn up when, as in late Victorian England, the rowdy critics of the pit and gallery were turned into respectable stallholders, and it was probably this that sealed once and for all the decorum of seriousness in opera. Spoken dialogue is not the issue, but no-one on stage smiles in Bizet’s Carmen , and no-one in the audience applauds or laughs out loud to disturb the musical continuum in Verdi’s Falstaff or Wagner’s Meistersinger , which is where they differ from Rossini’s Barber of Seville . Opera, in short, lost its wit, the comedy in Puccini notwithstanding. Theatrical presentation in the lower genres retained it, together with a vital ingredient of bodily allure, erotic or athletic in varying proportions, both continuing to sanction audible audience response – to language and to spectacle. Yet if opera, at least before minimalism, ceased to reach down, popular musical theatre kept reaching up, and to understand its styles one is obliged to identify the operatic dimension – the warbling heroine, the through-composed finale – until with rock opera and the mega-musical it becomes apparent that the vernacular succumbed to a patina of melodramatic amplification thrown over the entire production in more senses than one.
Is this a story of Americanization? Yes, up to a point, for popular musical theatre is above all commercial; and first Broadway, then Hollywood, and now what is simply known as the music industry have increasingly commanded our responses to it, as they have to popular music overall. And it could be said that the reaching out towards opera represents the survival of some kind of dignity, of an operetta tradition, in the face of the hype and merchandizing that affect everything in the popular theatre from the souvenir programme to the endlessly reprised hit song. Perhaps the best musicals manage to resist shipwreck on the rocks of commercial success on the one hand, subsidized cultural approval on the other, keeping away from both. Show Boat , West Side Story , Sweeney Todd and Jesus Christ Superstar would all fit that description. Conversely, only one work, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), appears large enough to bridge the gulf. Gershwin called it a folk opera, and its score is bigger, its musical demands greater, its style more intricate than those of any musical.
Even the American musical comedy had to become Americanized, for there is not much stylistic difference between, say, André Messager’s Véronique (1898) and Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta (1910). Both composers traded in common-practice tonal models but gave way to younger practitioners drawing on new music, dance and language from below. Thus the story is less one of national schools becoming submerged than of cosmopolitan urbanity giving way to folk signifiers. Or, to take a longer view, it was (in music) the gradual, sometimes sudden ousting of long-domesticated folk, parade and stage archetypes from central Europe – waltzes, polkas, country dances, marches and the daintiness of ballet – in favour of a new set of sounds and sights based on the great diasporas of the time. The white and black Atlantic were represented by gradually increasing modality of melody and parallelism of harmony on the one hand, sudden injections of ragtime, jazz and blues on the other, and the invention of ‘belting’ as folk-singing by reference to both. The Latin world made a greater contribution than is generally recognized with its sultry beguine rhythms and slow melodic triplets. The Jews changed male performance practice for ever with the influence of cantorial singing, backed up by more overtly emotional harmonic rhetoric.
Because of its increasing economic and cultural dominance, these changes were most noticeable and influential in the American musical, and (what is often not recognized) in many respects (for instance, singing styles) most influential after it had taken to film. Thus Jerome Kern incorporated ragtime into his songs, Gershwin highly syncopated rhythms, Cole Porter the eroticism of Latin dance, Richard Rodgers and Irving Berlin the cowboy inflections of an idealized past (in Oklahoma ! and Annie Get Your Gun ), Leonard Bernstein big-band jazz and something of the panache of rock ’n’ roll in West Side Story .
European countries had nevertheless already made bargains with their folk traditions or with their musical ‘Other’ in order to establish a bourgeois musical theatre in the first place. Hence the gypsy element in Johann Strauss, highly symbolic of the Dual Monarchy in Austro-Hungary after 1866, and the satirical couplets in Offenbach, redolent of the café-concert with which opéra bouffe rubbed shoulders on the Champs-Elysées in the 1850s. Hence also the Cockney music-hall infusion on the West End musical stage hard on the heels of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic-opera restraint once that partnership had run its course. The very invention of musical comedy in the 1890s at the hands of impresario George Edwardes and with the help of his staff composers Lionel Monckton, Howard Talbot, Paul Rubens and Ivan Caryll operated to this formulaic blend, which at the start of The Arcadians (Monckton and Talbot, 1909) occasions a delicate, yearning chorus fit for ballet sylphs while by its end the audience is no doubt clapping if not singing along to ‘All down Piccadilly’ sung by a vulgar dandy. It could be argued that German operetta went further in the 1920s and brutalized its emotions from above rather than from below with modernist venom in the work of Weill and Brecht, its impetus the political challenge of cabaret rather than the liberal accommodation of vaudeville, but even when transplanted to the USA in Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (1937), this was never the dominant voice of entertainment.
French, Austro-German, British and American traditions each had their social insignia. Doubtless so did the musical theatre of the Spanish world (including Latin America), Russia and possibly one or two other cultural units. But there was a good deal of interchange too. Austro-German operetta wasted no time in Americanizing (there is a cakewalk in Lehár’s Merry Widow , 1905), as did British musical comedy – Coward’s Bitter Sweet (1929), with a double whammy, turns a Viennese waltz into a foxtrot. Gilbert and Sullivan had refashioned French couplets as patter songs, Gershwin echoed British music hall with his rattling 6/8 rhythms, and gypsy topics survive on the New York stage in Anything Goes and indeed as late as She Loves Me (1963), set in Budapest. The world’s major cities have long had their stock exchanges; the major centres of vernacular musical theatre traded similarly in commodities for export and import, be they stylistic elements, the actual audiences (what proportion of these was native even one hundred years ago?) or entire repertoires when great shows went round the world.
The operetta formula
So much for operetta’s mating habits. It is not difficult to identify it by its plumage, call and habitat as well, and the description will apply generally to operetta, comic opera, musical comedy and its outgrowth the musical before further distinctions need be made. Popular musical theatre, as implied at the start of this chapter, was and still is performed in metropolitan auditoria built and managed like opera houses, though on the principle of the ‘run’ rather than ‘repertory’ – that is, the same show will play night after night until failure makes it commercially unviable. Theoretically, a show can run for ever, which Cats looked as though it might.
A show is a whole evening’s entertainment, divided into two or three acts: two became more or less standard, to proportions already fixed in Gilbert and Sullivan, entailing a longer first act which ends with the most substantial musical unit, a musically continuous finale. A medley overture begins the proceedings, and the audience talks through it, as they do through the instrumental entr’acte after the interval. The first-act curtain goes up on an extended chorus introducing the more or less choreographed mass beauties, the setting and one or two of the characters. Thereafter spoken dialogue, always in the audience’s own language, alternates with songs until the finale; there is a repeated trajectory of spoken lines giving way to sung conversation in the ‘verse’ section of a song followed by more lyrical or soliloquizing poetry in its sung refrain, then a short dance refrain or coda without singing before applause marks off the next dialogue segment. Songs are most commonly solos and duets, though ensembles also occur and the chorus often supports an individual or couple. Until the 1920s there was generally one stage setting per act and the libretto was specially written or adapted from a recent play (often from another country – perhaps for copyright reasons); the operetta end of the spectrum could be more ambitious in its settings and starting with Show Boat (New York, 1927) began to turn novels into musicals and depict history rather than focus on the up-to-date; this could involve up to twenty scene changes within one show and tended to separate out the texture into ‘book scenes’ played before a backdrop while the set was being changed and more visually and musically driven ‘production’ numbers. Humour might similarly be more exploited in such book scenes, which can still run to complex vaudeville routines in some shows (the antics of Frosch the gaoler and Frank the prison governor in Act III of Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus provide venerable examples).
The plot is drawn from Roman new comedy and represents the triumph of youth and beauty over impediments to a marriage laid down by age, authority or economics: parents, previous partners, criminals, difference of class or nationality, career expectations and monetary loss can all play their part in spinning out the plot. Mistaken identity causes humorous complications as frequently as the exchange of some object or sum of money, and these will come to a head in the first-act finale and probably once again just before the rapid final denouement in Act II. (Kay’s emergence from the bedroom as the maid Jane in Gershwin’s Oh, Kay ! (1926) is an obvious reconstitution of Susanna’s similar moment in Mozart’s Marriage of faro .) In a genre where singing grates against the primacy of speech unless somehow justified, certain topics recur, often with the aim of making the music ‘diegetic’, that is, music that the characters know they are hearing or singing. A ball or restaurant scene (Die Fledermaus , Hello, Dolly !) is an obvious ploy, a show about putting on a show another, its heroine a star rising from obscurity à la Cinderella (Sally , 42nd Street , Gypsy ). Psychological questing and fulfilment can be signalled by the solo ballad (‘Someone to watch over me’ in Oh, Kay !), often reprised in a finale or finaletto (‘Bill’ in Oh, Lady! Lady !!), or the tune which cannot be completed (‘Ah, sweet mystery of life’ in Naughty Marietta , ‘My ship’ in Lady in the Dark ); or the opposite, reflection, nostalgia and loss, can equally be indicated by song (finale reprises once again, inarticulate with anger in the case of Danilo in The Merry Widow ; the tune refashioned over time in Bitter Sweet and Show Boat ).
Musical contrasts are important, and they operate on various axes as analogues to dramatic conflict. In The Merry Widow , Act I is set in diplomatic Paris, with fast, witty, urbane music to match, while Act II romanticizes Hanna’s Balkan homeland in absentia with all-purpose Eastern folk topics in slow ballad and languid dance . Gilbert and Sullivan patented the contrapuntal double chorus – of lovesick maidens versus dragoons in Patience , peers versus fairies in Iolanthe – and this topic survives as late as West Side Story with the Jets and the Sharks. West Side Story is told very much from the point of view of the Jets, with the Sharks as musical Other (sultry hemiola dance rhythms in ‘America’). In the dominant tradition, the Other will normally be somewhere farther East or South, the haunts of Mediterranean bandits being one favourite location (The Maid of the Mountains ), Old England another (A Damsel in Distress , Anything Goes ), Latin America a third (El Capitán , the Havana scene in Guys and Dolls , and Rio or Buenos Aires sequences or settings in countless musical films, most notably Flying Down to Rio ). And when centre and periphery are reversed? Accounts of zarzuela (Spanish operetta) suggest that various Others, within and without the homeland, were enlisted to provide local or exotic colour (see Lamb 2000 , 242–9). One wonders whether Soviet Russia ever co-opted the West in this role.
Overall setting and colour take these issues further. In certain periods (most obviously, New York in the 1920s) there are two types of narrative musical show (with non-narrative revue as a third): operetta and musical comedy. Musical comedy celebrates the here and now – Fred Astaire in white tie and tails, his sister Adele (or Ginger Rogers in the later musical films) in a fashionable gown – while operetta explores costume drama, set in a romanticized past or on distant geographical location. Show Boat , already mentioned, has precursors in the picaresque comic opera (German’s Tom Jones , based on Fielding), and London witnessed a flood of musical comedies set in the East ( The Mikado , 1885; The Geisha , 1896; San Toy , Florodora , The Cingalee and many more) prior to operetta’s triumphant fusion with pantomime in Chu Chin Chow (1916), based on the Arabian Nights. Later Austro-German operettas likewise trade in exoticism ( Lehár, The Land of Smiles , 1929; Abraham, Victoria and Her Hussar , 1930), American ones too: the Canadian Rockies in Rose Marie , Algeria of the Riffs in The Desert Song (1924 and 1926). This cunning amalgamation of exoticism and contemporaneity finds its classic expression in Ruritania, a generic name for the archetypal Balkan republic threatened by fascism (Novello’s Glamorous Night , 1935) with its exiled or abdicating royal families (Sally , Roberta , King’s Rhapsody ), fairy-tale castles and hunting lodges (Love Me Tonight , a 1932 film musical actually set in France with a train hold-up as in any western), and glittering military uniforms. Novello even wrote a song called ‘Uniform’ for The Dancing Years (1939), and it ends with the words ‘. . . let’s be gay!’ Brigadoon has it all ways with a double exoticism of time and place, seventeenth-century Scotland and modern New York.
All this musical colour is supported by a standard theatre orchestra or some variant thereon: two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two trumpets, horn, trombone, strings and percussion. Commercial pits – or rather, in most cases until the 1950s or later, the curtained space in front of the stage – support unionized totals of between 20 and 30 players in the commercial centres, fewer as time goes on, though often more in the subsidized operetta houses. Mordden says ( 1997 , 37) that you can tell an operetta from a musical comedy when there is a harp in the orchestra; conversely, pit pianos, especially two together playing ‘novelty’ syncopation in the entr’acte , increasingly characterize the ‘rhythm’ section of a musical comedy band in New York after the First World War. But the most important musical distinctions are between vocal types, and these correspond to the axes between humour and earnestness, allure and resourcefulness.
The basic contract in the operetta tradition involves virginal women romanced by worldly men, the virginity represented by a high, pure, trained singing voice and stiff acting, the worldliness the province of bluff humour, quick action and resourceful words. At its most extreme, this entails a soprano who can sing, a parlando baritone who can’t (Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady , Adele and Fred Astaire with less extreme contrast). Operetta’s greatest departure from opera is in its audiences’ cultural suspicion of singing men, all exoticized in one way or another (Alfred the philandering tenor in Die Fledermaus , Georges Guétary a Frenchman introducing the Victorians to sex in Bless the Bride , Nelson Eddy the revolutionary pony-tailed aristocrat opposite Jeanette MacDonald in The New Moon , Richard Tauber perhaps the exception proving the rule). Instead, it highlights the singing (or croaking) actor, from George Grossmith senior, Rutland Barrington and Alexander Girardi, creators of the great comic roles in Gilbert and Sullivan and Johann Strauss, to latter-day beacons of reliable masculinity such as Topol, Yul Brynner and Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof , The King and I and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum . Admittedly Girardi was a tenor, but Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Curly in Oklahoma ! and Billy Bigelow in Carousel already push male vocal allure ‘just about as far as it can go’ as baritones – and a real opera singer in South Pacific was cast as a Frenchman (see Clum 1999 , 124–31). George Hearn honours the contract in La Cage aux Folles and Sweeney Todd by singing his heart out respectively as a transvestite and a serial murderer.
The music is basically a succession of quadratic (e.g. thirty-two bar) units, songs and dances with ‘oompah’ accompaniments of one kind or another (the second ‘oom’ missing in a beguine, for example), and it retains simple tonal plans permitting every word and witty rhyme to be heard, most commonly at the speed of speech, selectively elongated though it may be. The musical works wonders with such restrictions through the art of arrangement (Robert Russell Bennett the world’s most prolific orchestrator of other people’s musical comedy scores, though Weill orchestrated his own), stylistic updates (often a matter of harmonic ‘moments’ such as the blue chord) and a much more intimate reflexivity between word and tune, note and syllable, than in opera .
Changes
As the above makes clear, popular musical theatre inherited a strong set of archetypes from the nineteenth century and retained them wholesale or in part through two world wars and into the 1960s and beyond. Nevertheless, certain massive and signal changes are the most interesting and culturally indicative part of the story. There were perhaps four: the impact of jazz, the arrival of sound film, the achievement of United States hegemony with the Second World War, and the rock revolution in the 1950s. Two of these, Hollywood and rock, involved vocal amplification, the biggest single factor in generic transformation.
Jazz, as shorthand for three stylistic features of African-American origin – syncopation, blue-note inflections and minstrel-band orchestration – was a liberating force and secured for posterity the primacy of the
New York stage’s appeal, sealed as fast, loud, witty and soulful.
Kern, according to Carl Engel (
1922
, 185), started a new era when he tinted ‘The magic melody’, a song in Nobody Home
(1915), with the blue chord IV
7
, but had already been exploiting ragtime syncopation, as had countless ‘two-step’ popular songs, as a way of turning text-setting colloquial with its casual cross-rhythms of three over two. (In ‘You’re here and I’m here, so what do we care’, from The Marriage Market
(1914), the last four words of this title line create a melodic rhythm of 3/8 atop the continuing 2/4 oompah accompaniment.)
Gershwin took these techniques further in his 1920s shows, perhaps influenced by the vitality of the black musical Shuffle Along
(1921), though one would be hard pressed to separate out the ethnographic factors in, say, ‘The man I love’ as black, Jewish or Russian, since a symbiosis of all three was at work. Theatre orchestration was slow to jazz up, the banjo in Show Boat
no answer to the wholesale rearrangement of showstoppers in dance-band recordings of the 1920s. Swing-band sonorities (specifically, close-harmony chorus work from wind and brass) can be heard in musicals from Gershwin’s
Girl Crazy
(1930) onwards as saxophones, three or four types of brass mute and drum kit enter the pit and ‘reed’ players begin to double on two, three or four instruments so that, for instance, a quartet of clarinets can accompany a certain song or section.
Radio, the technological craze of the mid-1920s, had already begun to change notions of vocal intimacy by inventing the male crooner before sound film faced its famous challenge (immortalized in Singin’ in the Rain , 1952) of presenting its female silent stars’ voices to their public. As any habitué of opera with spoken dialogue knows, female singers project their speech in a low register and sing in a higher one, the two blended (if one is lucky) by richness of sung tone. Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain has a grating high-pitched speaking voice to match her singing screech. Both have to be drastically lowered to convey the confidentiality of romance, and Kathy Selden dubs her singing an octave lower. This draws on the chest-voice ‘belting’ that child stars and ‘coon shouter’ comediennes such as May Irwin had long utilized in vaudeville but which Adele Astaire, for example, would have found difficult to recover on the adult soundstage had she followed her brother to Hollywood in 1933 rather than retired to marry a British aristocrat. Ginger Rogers, by contrast, epitomizes the new, tough, chest-voiced female lead singing in film with no gear change from speech in a contralto register that remains relaxed on its high notes because of the microphone. Thus the emblematic transition would henceforth be Judy Garland’s, from child vaudevillian to young adult belter. The note a1 (A above middle C) is the peak of her register and in (for example) ‘The trolley song’ from Meet Me in St Louis (1944) sounds a good deal higher than it is. Ethel Merman’s apex was c2 , achieved on the stage in Girl Crazy without amplification but clearly (from her autobiography) after a good deal of soul-searching about resisting ‘proper training’ as a soprano (Merman 1955 , 56).
The male crooner, a high baritone, was sexually subversive because erotically privileged (by the microphone’s nuances) without the corresponding heroism of a tenor register (see McCracken 1999 ); his sound was accordingly blended in musical films with the more publicly persuasive emotionality of the Jewish cantor, made familiar above all by Al Jolson on stage and early sound screen (The Jazz Singer , 1927). Film singers such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra resulted in the USA, while from Europe the cabaret and variety stage supplied corresponding models of new vocal allure, all with a flexible parlando as their amplified speech-to-song instrument: for example, Marlene Dietrich, Lotte Lenya, Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier and Vera Lynn. Chevalier, however, still played opposite a real soprano in the ‘boudoir operettas’ of film director Ernst Lubitsch, and the stage was similarly reluctant to trade operatic vocality for amplification in their entirety in the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows. These form a considerable portion of the Broadway canon, were later filmed, and showcase the virile baritone (Howard Keel, John Raitt, Alfred Drake) and the singing actress of soprano or mezzo range (Julie Andrews, Gertrude Lawrence, Shirley Jones) as well as the belter (Celeste Holm, Juanita Hall) in that canon’s most fruitful compromise between the enchantment of operetta and the immediacy of film.
Rodgers and Hammerstein commanded a pivotal moment in twentieth-century culture when the vernacular enlisted tamed modernism for the expression of folk optimism. Ballet was the catalyst in the USA, and behind Copland’s Appalachian Spring (1944) lie the liberal artistic policies of the New Deal conveniently perpetuating themselves in the nationalism of the Second World War. In other words, the nation needed artists to express its moment of community and artists both commercial and subsidized felt encouraged to do so. That moment was a delicate and sometimes contradictory balance of images rural and urban, past and present, culturally high and low, authoritarian and liberal, and Hammerstein has taken plenty of criticism for his exploitation of it in the musical, starting with the triumphant Oklahoma ! (1943). Other countries had their own versions of this – symphonies in Soviet Russia, instrumental light music in Britain, for example – but where popular musical theatre is concerned, it sealed the international triumph of the American musical. Rodgers toned down his foxtrot rhythms and added folk signifiers: fiddling to open Oklahoma !, an unaccompanied mixolydian cowboy song at curtain up, oompahs, melodic repeated notes and country dances somehow more redolent of the barnyard and horses’ hooves than urban frills and quadrilles in ‘The surrey with the fringe on top’; even the waltz took on a new lease of country life under his pen . But he and Hammerstein attached this style to a bourgeois emotional manipulation that was at bottom what the ‘integrated’ musical meant: scenes and songs of sentimentally persuasive harmony to self-expressive, sincere (as opposed to witty) vernacular lyrics or prose that could wring your heart. When Hammerstein tried it in a weak father’s reconciliation scene in Three Sisters in 1934 it was laughed off the London stage; a decade later, with American forces risking their lives in two hemispheres, what the public wanted from a musical had radically changed, and ‘You’ll never walk alone’ ( Carousel , 1945) was set to become a folk anthem .
Bourgeois realism, swing orchestration, belting and crooning and a good deal of residual operetta and musical-comedy technique in song forms, vocal types, dancing, humour and plot sustained the classic musical through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and beyond. Stephen Sondheim is perhaps its last great exponent. This applied not just in the USA but also with what little revival of fortunes Britain enjoyed through its Dickensian musicals (Oliver !, 1960; Pickwick , 1963) and their distant relations (Half a Sixpence , 1963; Billy , 1974). But the fourth change was more of a usurpation than a graft: the language of rock.
It was inevitable that youth would reassert itself in the Anglophone musical theatre. It had done so before – with the Princess Theatre shows at the time of the First World War, host to the Kern, Bolton and Wodehouse model of intimate musical comedy, and again with Babes in Arms (1937), featuring new actors still in their teens. But the youngsters in Babes in Arms are still members of a family community, indeed a theatrical community. Rock, by contrast, shifted teenage rebellion from the sociable conversation in the kitchen or on the back porch to the lonely guitar or transistor radio in the bedroom. Its depiction, indeed its essence, was as much a matter of inarticulacy, musical as well as verbal, often through class deprivation, as the essence of early jazz had been mockery. This would not generate eloquent, well-made musical plays, and most of the well-mannered tonal vocabulary, though not its song forms, was jettisoned, with modal tunes, chord progressions (including the reversed cycle of fifths) and primitivist traits (parallel triads, drones, ostinati) being substituted. What did fit was a heightened mode of presentation that prolonged the melodramatic stance of the rock concert number, and ‘rock opera’ eventually came into being with Hair (Galt MacDermot, 1968), The Rocky Horror Show (Richard O’Brien, 1973) and, as all-sung musical drama, Jesus Christ Superstar (Lloyd Webber, 1970) a decade or so after the musical films of Elvis Presley, the Beatles and others. The extraordinary anger and agility of the influential West Side Story had doubtless prepared the way; curiously, so had education, as school music bowed to fashion and supplied all-sung Biblical cantatas for young people. Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968) sprang from this movement, an attempt by Christian authority to regain youth in the terminally secular 1960s. Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell and maybe Bernstein’s Mass (both 1971) need placing here, though the extreme emotionality of soul singing, supercharging the already amplified techniques of Broadway vocalists in Jesus Christ Superstar and taking male chest registers stratospherically high, betokened no religious revival. There was both showbiz and urgency in Jesus Christ Superstar , but already in Evita Che’s sardonic heckling and Eva Perón’s callous ambition feel like poor substitutes for the dramatic tension between Christ and Judas and the travesty cynicism of Herod. In later Lloyd Webber the show voice and its bodged fix between registers and harmonic styles, lyricism and drama, rock , modernism and romantic opera (epitomized by Christine and the Phantom) sounds arch and stale; similarly, the desperate earnestness of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon is a far cry from the lightness of operetta.
Canons
The repertoires to which these conditions and (sometimes) changes apply are as extensive as they are today elusive because of the commercial, vernacular and multidisciplinary nature of their materials (scripts and scores unpublished; only the songs, not the extensive dialogue, recorded; theatre repertoires tied to their national language; screen versions radically different from stage versions). An overview would begin scarcely past the mid-nineteenth century with Hervé and Offenbach on a French/Austro-German axis, taking care to consider the latter’s farcical, sometimes surreal one-act works (Ba-ta-clan , 1855; M Choufleuri , 1861) alongside the full-length ones such as Orpheus in the Underworld (1858), La Belle Hélène (1864), La Vie Parisienne (1866) and La Grande Duchesse (1867). Johann Strauss II entered the picture with Die Fledermaus (1874) and a series of less successful works including Der Zigeunerbaron (1885). Gilbert and Sullivan achieved the thirteen Savoy operas in the West End, Iolanthe (1882) and The Mikado (1885) their peak, the earlier HMS Pinafore (1878) their breakthrough to American markets, shortly after the triumphs of Offenbach and Strauss.
This was a tale of three capital cities – Paris, Vienna and London – though zarzuela had flourished in Madrid since the 1850s. A subsequent increase in metropolitan venues embraced Berlin (with Paul Lincke’s Frau Luna ) from 1899 and New York around the same time with Sousa, Kerker and Herbert. This was at first accompanied by a notable flourishing of international operetta trade. Late Victorian and Edwardian musical comedies travelled with ease to New York (Florodora , 1900), and Sidney Jones’s The Geisha (1896) was popular until the Second World War in Paris and as far afield as Russia. Messager for a while lived and worked in London, as did Kern during part of his long apprenticeship of interpolating hit songs into other people’s scores; in fact a list of the composers with whom Kern was thus associated spans almost the entirety of those active in three languages, English, German and French. Zarzuela was soon transplanted to Latin America; North American shows reached London (The Belle of New York , 1898), or their tunes became known (Sousa’s El Capitán , 1895). Hungarians (Emmerich Kálmán) and Czechs (Rudolf Friml) contributed to German-language operetta, which remained vital until the 1930s (Leo Fall, Paul Abraham, Ralph Benatzky, Oscar Straus), while the French tradition after Offenbach produced exportable successors (Charles Lecocq, Robert Planquette, Edmond Audran) for a while only.
But the First World War strangled such international trade, for the established early twentieth-century repertoires then retreated within national boundaries and in many cases (as with Edwardian musical comedy) became lost even to the national canon. There were exceptions both old (The Merry Widow ) and new (Benatzky’s White Horse Inn , 1930), but even the American shows of the 1920s and 1930s (Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers and Hart), whose songs and, in many cases, productions conquered London and to a lesser extent the continental capitals, did not form an ongoing canon, with the wholesale exception of Show Boat and partial ones such as No, No, Nanette (Vincent Youmans, 1924), Girl Crazy (altered in revival) and Anything Goes (Porter, 1934, rather flexible in contents). Other countries found it yet more difficult to compete.
After its victory in the Second World War, America’s new musicals triumphed internationally while forming a nationalist canon. Rodgers and Hammerstein led the way between 1943 and Hammerstein’s death in 1960, their later successes being South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951) and The Sound of Music (1959); Lerner and Loewe formed a similar kind of team with Brigadoon (1947), Paint Your Wagon (1951), My Fair Lady (1956), Camelot (1960) and one notable film, Gigi (1958). Other masters included Jule Styne (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , 1949; Gypsy , 1959), the still active Irving Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun , 1946) and Cole Porter, whose Kiss Me, Kate (1948) entered the central European operetta repertoire. Two crossover figures, Weill and Bernstein, emerged in the USA. They composed both opera and musicals, presenting audiences with stylistic and generic challenges where verismo depiction of New York was concerned (Street Scene , 1947; West Side Story , 1957), though Weill exchanged once and for all his European modernism (The Threepenny Opera , 1928; Mahagonny , 1930) for the common-practice tonality of Broadway (Lady in the Dark , 1941; One Touch of Venus , 1943; The Firebrand of Florence , 1945; Love Life , 1948; Lost in the Stars , 1949) while Bernstein moved back and forth between the two or sojourned in the middle (Candide , 1956) . Other American practitioners included Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof , 1964), Cy Coleman (Sweet Charity , 1966; City of Angels , 1989), George Forrest and Robert Wright (Kismet , 1953; Grand Hotel , 1989), Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line , 1975), Jerry Herman (Hello, Dolly !, 1964; Mame , 1966; La Cage aux Folles , 1983), John Kander and Fred Ebb (Cabaret , 1966; Chicago , 1975; Kiss of the Spider Woman , 1990), Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls , 1950; The Most Happy Fella , 1956) and Meredith Willson (The Music Man , 1957). Book and lyric writers not part of a regular team included Dorothy Fields, active from the 1930s, while directors (pre-eminently George Abbott and Harold Prince) and choreographer/directors such as Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett reached fame on a flood tide of dance and staging, often at the expense of plotting in the ‘concept’ musical of the 1970s and often premissed on harsher musical idioms, including rock.
Rock, dance and concept proved shaky foundations for narrative musical theatre in the 1970s not least because of the expense of their often spectacle-oriented presentation and correspondingly long runs. Four directions seemed to emerge. The ‘yuppy revue’ was often small-scale and played ‘off Broadway’ (Finn’s Falsettos trilogy, 1979–90; Maltby and Shire’s Baby , 1983, and Closer Than Ever , 1989). The all-sung mega-musical, at the opposite extreme, included Lloyd Webber’s Evita (1978), Cats (1981), Starlight Express (1984) and Phantom of the Opera (1986); Boublil’s and Schönberg’s Les Misérables (1985), Miss Saigon (1989) and Martin Guerre (1996); and Abba’s Chess (1986). Here Tim Rice was recurrent lyricist, Cameron Mackintosh recurrent producer. A third genre, the compilation show, ranged from pop (Buddy , 1989) and jazz (Ain’t Misbehavin’ , 1978) to earlier Broadway (Gershwin’s Crazy for You , 1992; Kern’s Never Gonna Dance , 2003). Finally, there was Sondheim, who wrote his yuppy revue with Company (1970) and has steered a lifelong course between saluting traditional Broadway styles and genres and subverting them in a dazzlingly intelligent but often resisted output that includes Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd (1979), Sunday in the Park With George (1983), Into the Woods (1987), Assassins (1991), Passion (1994) and Bounce (2003) . A fifth trend characterized the 1990s: Disney stagings of their earlier cartoon films (Beauty and the Beast , 1994; The Lion King , 1997). Like Sondheim, these had a knowing, retrospective stylistic range where music, lyrics and production images are concerned but took in a broader spectrum of idioms, including pop in The Lion King (already used in its unstaged film precursor, The Jungle Book of 1967). Alan Mencken and Howard Ashman deserve mention as composer and lyricist for Beauty and the Beast .
Reports of the death of Broadway have been circulating since the 1930s, but from the 1990s onwards there was probably real cause to wonder whether a genre was reaching the end of its life. Lloyd Webber’s popularity, never matched by respect, was waning after Sunset Boulevard (1993) with Whistle Down the Wind (1998) and The Beautiful Game (2000). London showed little desire to import the latest New York shows (Yeston’s Titanic , Flaherty’s Ragtime , both 1997), though the rock musical had an extraordinary new lease of life with Rent (1996), the latest bid for a new, young audience occurring every thirty years or so. Jonathan Larson, composer of Rent , died as it went into production. Might he have been the new Lloyd Webber? No-one has obviously followed Sondheim, though Adam Guettel, Rodgers’s grandson and clearly master of a new generic mix (Floyd Collins , 1996), is liable to discussion in those terms. Or are we looking in the wrong place? Broadway and West End mega-musicals have long been imported to northern Europe, especially Germany, which has its own magazine literature on the genre (Munich’s Musicals: Das Musicalmagazin ) but not yet, it seems, its own renewed creative tradition. Ruritania, however, is back in the picture as theatres in ex-Communist countries have lost their subsidies and turn to ways of making money. Croatia is creating musicals. Russia and East Germany, which during the Soviet years developed their own generic take on the classic musical film, may yet draw on such traditions. But the occasional travesty of an American musical that appears in programmes of TV trash from around the world, be it Egypt or Japan, is unlikely to herald additions to the canon. The real question is whether the canon is now fixed as a twentieth-century one. If it is, that would be convenient for the historian but bad for the propensity of agile wit of word and tone to appeal to a broad but, at its best, intelligent and critical public which wants to see its foibles reflected and its feelings articulated in a happy night out at the theatre watching and listening to something new . Musicals flourished when opera ceased to supply that need. If they now die, a sense of community will be lost, for opera has occupied the high ground for far too long to know how to reclaim the lower .