Center Dance Ensemble in Phoenix recently commissioned me to write a brief history of the American musical theater in connection with a program of new dance works performed to excerpts from musicals.
The challenge was to convey the origins, the growth, the dynamism, the foibles and the potential of the musical in the form of a mini-history. The result was printed in the program for Center Dance's concert, and is reprinted below.
THE MUSICAL: An Overview
Opera sprang into existence overnight in Italy around 1600, when composers decided to emulate what they mistakenly thought was the through-sung mode of ancient Greek drama. American musical theater, on the other hand, grew up over decades in ragtag style, taking influences from every corner of the immigrant country of its origin.
The American musical was officially born Sept. 12, 1866, at Niblo’s Garden, a 3200-seat theater at the corner of Broadway and Prince in lower Manhattan. That night saw the opening of The Black Crook, a hodge-podge of story, songs, and ballet. Producer William Wheatley had acquired the rights to an uninspired melodrama by Charles M. Barras. Wheatley tossed in some songs to dress up Barras’ obvious and derivative plot about the struggle between Stalacta, Fairy Queen of the Golden Realms, and Hertzog, a crook-backed black magician, for the soul of young Rodolphe. When another New York theater that was supposed to present a Parisian ballet troupe burned to the ground, Wheatley invited the dancers to Niblo’s and simply stuck them – and the sets they were touring with – into the show. The first musical was essentially a mistake, an inadvertent combination of unrelated singing, dancing and storytelling, replete with spectacular sets and half-clad women.
New York loved it. The Black Crook ran for over a year and was revived eight times before the end of the century. Shows like it sprang up overnight. In theaters on and around Broadway, newly affluent, post-Civil War New Yorkers took in the form eagerly. It didn’t matter that story, song and dance failed to relate, only that the hunger for show-biz glitz was fulfilled. Ticket-buyers got their moneys’ worth with shows that lasted five-plus hours.
Musicals from the last half of the 19th century are now forgotten, as are the songs written for them. It took a feisty son of Irish immigrants to galvanize musical comedy songwriting and pen the first enduring Broadway show tunes. George M. Cohan was born to a family of entertainers who traveled America’s rugged touring-show circuits. As one of the Four Cohans, young George longed to leave the road behind and hit Broadway. After several near-misses, Cohan hit huge in 1904 with Little Johnny Jones, a show that boasted two of his biggest hits: “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Unlike the patchworks that had gone before, Little Johnny Jones at least tried to make story, song and dance cohere. Even so, a great deal of the dialogue depended on Vaudeville bits Cohan had picked up on tour.
The integration of book (script), music and lyrics (and sometimes dance) took a very long time to happen. The next step came with the Princess Theatre shows of Jerome Kern, intimate musicals written between 1915 and 1920 for the tiny Princess Theatre. The Princess’ size made impossible the big sets and technical effects so popular in other shows, forcing Kern and lyric writer Guy Bolton to concentrate on believable stories, memorable tunes and witty lyrics. Except, however, for Very Good, Eddie (1915), none of the Princess shows has ever had an effective contemporary revival, owing to dated story lines. The music had an impact, though, bringing a more sophisticated sound onto the Broadway stage. One of Kern’s early songs, “They Didn’t Believe Me,” is today considered the first modern love ballad.
Broadway and popular music were synonymous in the early 20th century and would remain so until the 1960s, when rock ‘n’ roll forced the two apart. In the 1920s through the 1950s, “Tin Pan Alley” produced songwriters who provided both songs for public consumption and songs for the stage. Sometimes a songwriter penned both music and lyrics, but more often songwriting involved a composer-lyricist team. Among the great songwriting teams that fed both the theater and the burgeoning recording and radio industries was that of George and Ira Gershwin. George Gershwin (1898-1937) evinced a natural talent that burst on the scene with his first hit song, “Swanee” (lyric by Irving Caesar). Older brother Ira soon joined him as lyricist for a string of shows that climaxed with the Romantic comedy Girl Crazy (1930), featuring the mega-hit number, “I Got Rhythm”; and the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize, the political satire Of Thee I Sing (1931). Gershwin’s masterpiece, Porgy and Bess, premiered in 1935. Though its composer intended it as grand opera, Porgy has also been staged as a musical.
The post-Cohan sound that emerged in Broadway songs from the 1920s and ‘30s, and which would set the style for decades to come, was due in large part to the influence of Yiddish theater and Jewish liturgical music. Kern and Gershwin came from Jewish families, as did the most popular of the era’s Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Irving Berlin. In his book, Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish, author Jack Gottlieb chronicles the effect this heritage had on American popular song and on Broadway. A second influence came from the popular operettas of the day, which imitated their European forebears. The Hungarian-born composer Sigmund Romberg gave a slight American twist to the popular work of Vienna’s Franz Lehar and came up with three hit Broadway operettas: The Student Prince (1924); The Desert Song (1926); and The New Moon (1929). His collaborator for the last two was the young scion of a prominent New York theater family, Oscar Hammerstein II.
These two influences came together in arguably the most important musical prior to the 1940s, Showboat (1927). With music by Kern and book and lyrics by Hammerstein, Showboat took a giant step toward blending the musical styles of operetta and American popular song that would dominate the coming “Golden Era” of the American musical. In songs such as “Old Man River,” Kern and Hammerstein moved into the realm of dramatic expression through musical means. But Showboat spawned no progeny, and the musical remained largely a vehicle for hit songs and showy dance routines.
Starting the late 1920s, Broadway songwriting got a shot of sophistication from Cole Porter, an independently wealthy, Yale-educated composer who turned to the theater as an outlet for his witty lyrics and sensuous melodies. His more provocative songs included “Let’s Do It” and “Love For Sale.” His 1934 show, Anything Goes, which featured one of Porter’s biggest hits, “I Get a Kick Out of You,” is one of only a handful of pre-1940 musicals still produced regularly. In the 1930s, Porter’s elegance balanced Berlin’s directness in such hits as “Always,” “Heat Wave” and “God Bless America.” In their Broadway shows, Berlin and Porter concentrated on writing hits rather than on dramatic expression. In 1940, the form was poised to transform into a viable musico-dramatic form. The man who at last pushed the musical into a place where all elements worked toward a single dramatic end was the middle class son of a New York physician, a composer with a gift for writing engaging melodies and a vision of the Broadway musical as a legitimate art form.
The career of composer Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) encompassed three distinct stages in the history of 20th century musical theater. From 1922 to 1942, Rodgers worked with lyricist Lorenz Hart on traditional, variety entertainment-oriented shows; from 1942 to 1960, he partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II, sparking the musical’s Golden Age; and from 1960 on, Rodgers worked with a variety of lyricists in an atmosphere that found the musical theater in decline. Rodgers and Hart composed musicals that moved the form slowly from loosely linked musical numbers toward integrated musical plays in which both song and dance served the story. Along the way, Rodgers and Hart contributed to the American popular song catalogue with such hits as “Manhattan,” “Where or When,” “Johnny One Note,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” For their the 1936 show, On Your Toes, Rodgers composed a freestanding ballet that was an integral part of the plotline: Slaughter on Tenth Avenue went on to become a standard of the ballet repertoire, and a favorite subject for choreographers throughout the decades.
By 1942, Hart’s health, exacerbated by alcohol, was playing played havoc with the team’s ability to write. Rodgers was restless to expand and deepen the form of the musical, to weld book, music and lyrics into a single, integrated work of stage art, and Hart wasn’t the man for the job. Rodgers’ favorite composer, Jerome Kern, had made the boldest move so far in the direction of an integrated show when he and Oscar Hammerstein wrote Showboat in 1927. Naturally enough, Rodgers sought out Hammerstein as his new collaborator, and Hammerstein, coming off an 11-year string of flops, eagerly said yes.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first show together did more to change the direction of American musical theater than any other in history. Oklahoma! (1943) blew down the doors that held the musical back from legitimacy. Nothing was put into the script and score that didn’t serve the end of relating story, character and theme. Instead of opening with a big chorus number with showgirls doing high kicks – typical for shows of the time – Oklahoma! opened with the silhouette of a woman churning butter and the sound of a cowboy singing about what a beautiful morning it was. A newspaper review during the show’s out-of-town tryouts was headlined “No Girls, No Gags, No Chance.” But when the curtain rang up March 31, 1943, at the St. James Theatre, the entire history of the musical was transformed. Popular and critical reception was glowing, and Oklahoma! set new artistic standards for the form.
It also started a torrent of new work. The next 20-plus years were a golden era of Broadway musicals. Rodgers and Hammerstein went on to write Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), Flower Drum Song (1958) and The Sound of Music (1959). In 1944, America’s most spectacular young musical talent, Leonard Bernstein, made his Broadway composing debut with On The Town. Working with a range of lyricists, Bernstein went on to compose three more distinctive and important shows: Wonderful Town (1953), Candide (1956) and one of the form’s most important works, West Side Story (1957). The team of book writer/lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe enjoyed success paralleling that of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Lerner and Loewe gave Broadway Brigadoon (1947), Paint Your Wagon (1951), My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960).
National enthusiasm for the Broadway musical meant that touring companies took all these and other hit shows from New York to the far reaches of the 50 states. It also drew songwriters from Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley to New York to work in the new form. Hollywood songwriter Frank Loesser contributed Guys and Dolls (1950), The Most Happy Fella (1956) and How To Success in Business Without Really Trying (1961). Jule Styne, another Hollywood veteran and one of Frank Sinatra’s favorite “saloon song” writers, moved to New York and penned the music for Bells Are Ringing (1956) and Gypsy (1959). Meredith Willson, a former member of John Philip Sousa’s famous band and a sometime Tin Pan Alley songsmith, wrote music and lyrics for one mega-hit, The Music Man (1957). The young songwriting team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross turned out two hits back-to-back -- 1954’s Pajama Game and 1955’s Damn Yankees -- before Ross died suddenly, only months after Damn Yankees opened.
It seemed the musical had just hit its stride and that the hits and the excitement around them would go on forever. But American culture was changing, and with that change, musical theater’s Golden Age would come to an end. After Hammerstein’s death in 1960, and especially following the rise of rock as the dominant popular music in the next decade, the musical took on a different character. The age of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, and Frank Loesser exited to make way for The Beatles, Hendrix, and The Doors. As late as 1961, the best-selling album of the year was a Broadway cast album (Camelot). After that, shows and hit songs started to go their separate ways. The big Broadway hits of the mid-1960s were a last gasp of the old form: Hello, Dolly! (1964; music and lyrics by Jerry Herman); Fiddler on the Roof (1964, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick); Funny Girl (1964, music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill), The Man of La Mancha (1965, music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion) and Cabaret (1966, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb).
In 1967, an attempt was made to graft the new popular sound onto the Broadway stage in Hair. Though it enjoyed good box office and a long run, Hair failed to remarry popular music and the musical. Meanwhile, two songwriters who would become Broadway’s major players were just beginning. As Oscar Hammerstein’s protégé, Stephen Sondheim had a leg up in the business. At age 27, he wrote the lyrics for Bernstein’s West Side Story, followed tow years later by the lyrics for Styne’s Gypsy. But Sondheim was also trained as a composer, and at last in 1962 he made his debut as composer (as well as lyricist) with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The rest of the ‘60s were largely dormant for him, but in 1970, Sondheim and book writer George Furth wrote Company, the first of what would be called “concept musicals,” or shows in which songs and dialogue are hung around the framework of a theme or concept, rather than a plotline.
Sondheim followed with Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976) and Sweeney Todd (1979), plus many others. He continues to write today. Sondheim writes both “concept” musicals and book shows with plots: Sweeney was a book show, while in Pacific Overtures, the concept of Japan becoming Westernized served as a framework. The concept musical that would prove to be the biggest hit, however, was not Sondheim’s. A Chorus Line (1975, music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban) broke box office records of the time, running for 6,137 performances. The concept of A Chorus Line didn’t originate with a writer, but with the show’s choreographer, Michael Bennett.
Across the Atlantic, the American musical had taken hold and grown its own fans and practitioners. Noel Coward, England’s Cole Porter, scored musicals, and the English team of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse combined the musical with English music hall to come up with Stop The World, I Want to Get Off (1961). But Andrew Lloyd Webber virtually ransomed the musical comedy for England, causing a tidal wave of English musicals transplanted to Broadway that some have called the “second British invasion” (the first was the Beatles and Rolling Stones in the ‘60s). Starting in the 1970s with Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita (both with lyrics by Tim Rice), Lloyd Webber created a series of musicals that at first pushed back the form’s musical boundaries and later retracted them. His two biggest hits so far are Cats (lyrics adapted from the poetry of T.S. Eliot, 1981) and The Phantom of the Opera (Lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, 1988). Phantom is still running on Broadway as of January, 2008.
In 1996, composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson re-introduced the language of rock to the Broadway musical with the hugely popular Rent. Rock remains rare on Broadway, with the 2007 hit Spring Awakening a major exception. Soul and gospel music is equally hard to find in the musical; exceptions include Dreamgirls (Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen, 1981) and The Color Purple (Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, 2005).
Musicals since the year 2000 have been dominated by “Jukebox” fare, in which pre-written songs are strung into a show, such as Mamma Mia, based on the songs of the pop group Abba; and musicals based on popular movies, including Hairspray (2002, music by Marc Shaiman, lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Wittman) and Mel Brooks’ The Producers (2001). Some songwriters continue to write outside those limitations, however, including composer-lyricists Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, 2003), Jason Robert Brown (The Last Five Years, Off-Broadway 2002), William Finn (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, 2005) and Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza, 2004); and the team of composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens (Ragtime, 1998 and Seussical The Musical, 2000).
The musical today is at a crossroads. Jukebox shows are easier sells than original work, and songwriters are fighting to maintain a distinct style in the face of ever-cheapening popular music. But at 142 years old, the American musical is, as theatrical forms go, still young. Anything could happen.
- Kenneth LaFave
