Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre

J.B.J.

Introduction

It all started in Philadelphia. In 1767, David Douglass’s seasoned American Company tried to present The Disappointment , the first known musical written on these shores. But four days prior to the opening, the Philadelphia city fathers informed the good citizens of the town that the show would not go on, since it contained personal reflections, [and] is unfit for the stage (Bordman 2; Brockett 263). Thus began, if a bit ignominiously, a centuries-long, multidimensional relationship between musical theatre and American society. To be sure, censorship such as this is just one way in which American public life has interfaced with American musical theatre, but such clashes of values have also been particularly visible and dramatic, as in the events surrounding the first production of The Cradle Will Rock and the legal battles of Hair .

Most often, however, this book concerns a more subtle interchange: that between social and political values and their expression on the musical stage. As a form of popular entertainment for fairly broadbased audiences, throughout the twentieth century musicals variously dramatized, mirrored, or challenged our deeply-held cultural attitudes and beliefs. And those musical plays that sought not just to entertain but also to advocate a point of view hoped to move the audience to see things their way. In a very real sense, then, this social history of the musical stage examines musicals both in history and as history during the twentieth century—as theatrical vehicles that intended to transform, not just report, the tenor of the times. Even shows that contain little content of social relevance—those I call diversionary musicals, which have always comprised the majority of all professionally produced musicals in the United States—these too are important, if only to raise the question of why certain decades delivered more mindless fluff than others.

Any book about musicals that isn’t merely a chronology is likely to leave some popular favorites out. Because this is a social history of musicals, I focus almost exclusively on shows that in some way spoke to the issues, achievements, and, often, the anxieties of their particular era. By and large, I restricted my selection to musicals that seem to have been consciously intended to have contemporary social relevance. I spend more time with lesser-known musicals like I’d Rather Be Right and Lost in the Stars than with blockbusters like My Fair Lady, Hello, Dolly!, or 42nd Street. The appendices catalogue the most popular diversionary musicals by their periods in order to provide the broader musical theatre context for the socially conscious musicals I discuss.

Unlike movies, radio, and television, the musical stage as an institution and the shows written and produced for it have not been fully examined in their historical context. Prior chronological booklength studies of musical theatre have almost exclusively focused on the development of the shows themselves, with little or no reference to their social setting. The single exception is Gerald Bordman’s monumental and in many ways invaluable American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, with its occasional historical notes preceding the year-by-year cataloging of the shows themselves. But given Bordman’s stated goal of inclusiveness, his capsule discussions of the shows are rarely long enough to contain in-depth historical analysis. Other chronological surveys of Broadway (and sometimes off-Broadway) musicals, from Cecil Smith’s early Musical Comedy in America (1950) to Denny Martin Flinn’s Musical!: A Grand Tour and Kurt Gänzl’s The Musical: A Concise History (both 1997) and beyond, tend to be slick and/or highly selective. Other than such chronological histories and biographies or critical studies of individual composers, authors, lyricists, and directors, there are primarily two sorts of books on musicals: those that are show specific and those largely ordered by topics or a special subject rather than chronology. In recent years, show-specific volumes have proliferated to include, among many others, three different books on the making of A Chorus Line, Max Wilk’s fiftieth-anniversary tribute to Oklahoma!, and coffee table picture books about shows like Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, and Titanic. Representative of books on musicals that are topic- or special subject-oriented are Richard Kislan’s The Musical, Ken Mandelbaum’s delightful treatment of flops Not Since Carrie, Mark Steyn’s recent Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now, and, for me the most valuable of all, Stanley Green’s composer-by-composer The World of Musical Comedy. Informed, literate, and humane, Green’s reasoned and judicious insights are as valuable today as when he wrote them.

I use the term musical here to refer to both book shows (musicals with a plot or story) and revues (anthologies of separate and usually unrelated songs, dance numbers, and comedy routines). Also, too, I use show only as synonymous with musical (never with play). Finally, musicals here refers only to those shows professionally mounted for commercial production in New York both on and off Broadway (and, in the early decades of the century, Chicago). Excluded are American operas, except those such as Porgy and Bess and some by Gian-Carlo Menotti and others that were written specifically for Broadway production and Broadway audiences. Also, with few exceptions, British and other imported musicals that played on Broadway are not treated here. Mainly, I deal with musicals by American composers, lyricists, and book writers. Although this history is essentially chronological, I disrupt strict chronology to discuss the musicals according to themes, genres, subject matter, ethnicity, and other logical groupings that reflect how related shows in each period interfaced with the world beyond the theatre.

Who were the audiences for Broadway shows in the twentieth century? While such demographics are difficult to plot, twentieth-century audiences for New York musicals were generally white and middle class, though not necessarily extremely affluent until late in the century and after. Skyrocketing ticket prices have made Broadway audiences much more elitist than in previous decades. From the turn of the century through World War II, most musicals priced some seats at some performances low enough so that even people of modest means could afford to attend—and attend regularly. After the war ticket prices escalated, doubling between 1945 and 1960. In 2001, The Producers set a new precedent by regularly charging $100 for orchestra seats. Even the TKTS half price booth in Times Square doesn’t provide much relief; half price of a $100 ticket is still $50.

One result of these soaring prices is that audiences have become wealthier and older. With fewer young people exposed to musicals (see chapter 5), the potential audience for musical theatre has begun to shrink. Furthermore, African Americans only comprise a significant portion of Broadway musical audiences for black-oriented shows, whether by black, white, or mixed-race creative teams. Therefore, with certain ethnic and radical exceptions (such as Hair), socially relevant shows have mirrored the concerns and lifestyles of middle Americans, their primary audience. The reality of commercial theatre dictates that, no matter how brilliant or artistic, if a show doesn’t interest or entertain its audiences, it won’t run long enough to make back its investment.

In this history, however, I generally discount such financial concerns when evaluating the success or failure of shows. Instead, I judge the success of musicals on audience appeal alone, usually as indicated by the length of their runs. In many cases (Milk and Honey and Follies, to name just two), musicals have had impressively long runs, entertained many thousands of spectators, and still lost money. Generally speaking, to be considered a success a Broadway musical needs to play far more performances than an off-Broadway one, although prior to World War I and for sometime thereafter, hit status was generally accorded to Broadway shows that played but a hundred times.

Generally speaking, what makes a musical succeed is simple (if vague) enough: something about a show captures the public imagination, and people swarm to see it. It’s harder to say why a show fails. I sometimes think it all comes down to what my father, a pragmatic Chicago theatre owner, once told me. In my early teens I asked him why a show I really liked had bombed. To my seemingly naive question, Dad gave what for him was the obvious answer: Nobody bought tickets. Still, as a work of historical analysis this book does speculate about the failure of a number of musicals. There are a few documented cases of external factors forcing musicals to close, such as a newspaper strike preventing enough advertising and publicity to keep a show open; the departure of a star that audiences particularly came to see (Liza Minnelli in The Act); or the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, which caused a sharp drop in New York tourism. But such demonstrable extrinsic causes are rare. More often something intrinsic to the show makes it flop. Sometimes a musical simply isn’t very good or very well performed, but some creditable shows with very talented casts also fail (Let ’Em Eat Cake, the 1956 Candide, and Pacific Overtures, among many others). The reasons for musicals failing are complex and varied, some historically grounded, others coming down to simply a matter of taste.

Of course, American musical theatre and Americans’ taste for it were not born fullblown at the turn of the twentieth century. But in the 1800s, and with few exceptions such as the minstrel show (see chapter 1), most musical entertainments on the American stage were either imports or imitations of British and European comic opera, operetta, or rudimentary musical comedy, and they had little influence on musicals after 1900. These shows, beyond the scope of this history, have been treated extensively elsewhere (see, for example, Bordman 1–170). Nonetheless, one nineteenth-century import virtually alone laid the groundwork for the twentieth-century American musical: Gilbert and Sullivan’s H. M. S. Pinafore.

Pinafore Fever

For years after its arrival here in 1878, Pinafore achieved a nationwide popularity for a musical unprecedented up to that time. That popularity fostered an American audience for musical theatre, while the show itself became a model for the form, content, and even intention of American musicals ever since, especially socially relevant musicals.

Pinafore was the third collaboration of British comic opera writers W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan in conjunction with producer Richard D’Oyly Carte, then lessee of London’s Opéra Comique theatre. The story, an example of what we will come to know and love as the boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back formula, was hardly innovative. Ralph Rackstraw, a common sailor, is in love with Josephine, daughter of the Pinafore’s Captain Corcoran (and she’s in love with Ralph). But Josephine’s father has arranged for her to marry Sir Joseph Porter, First Lord of the Admiralty. All seems hopeless when, into this formula, Gilbert injects his trademark devices of deliciously inverted logic and love of the absurd. He resolves the conventional plot through one-time nursemaid Little Buttercup’s revelation that she accidentally switched Ralph and Corcoran as babies, so that (nonsensically, of course) Ralph is now the Captain (and a suitable match for Josephine), while Corcoran is demoted to the rank of common seaman.

Within just months of its London opening on May 25, 1878, at the Opéra Comique, Pinafore became the musical theatre rage of the English-speaking world, but its beginnings did not seem so auspicious. Pinafore opened with two strikes against it. First, in the euphemistic words of Gilbert and Sullivan scholar Leslie Baily, reviews in the London daily press ranged from very kind to the Daily Telegraph’s hostile A frothy production destined soon to subside into nothingness. Second, a rare spring heat wave in London kept audiences away from the Opéra Comique, a stuffy, ill-ventilated old wreck of a theatre. The stifling heat made sitting through Pinafore enough of an ordeal that nightly receipts quickly dropped below £100 and, by July, down to £40 and less (Baily 131).

The innovative Carte rescued Pinafore, at the same time convincing increasing numbers of middle-class Londoners that attending the theatre was not disreputable, as many believed it to be. (The family show quality of Gilbert and Sullivan’s musicals would have much the same effect in the United States toward removing the taint of theatregoing.) Carte persuaded Sullivan to add Hamilton Clarke’s "brilliant arrangement of Pinafore selections to the programs of more serious" music he would conduct for the Promenade Concert series at Covent Garden Opera House (Baily 134; Goldberg 214). Encored twice at its first performance, the Pinafore medley was repeated nightly throughout the Promenade series. Long before radio and TV talk shows to hype one’s work, Carte’s ploy of getting respectable concertgoers to hear Pinafore’s tunes proved effective in getting them into the theatre as well. By the end of August every performance was selling out. Ultimately Pinafore played at the Opéra Comique a full seven hundred times. Moreover, in the days when people made their own music around the parlor piano, music shops sold 10,000 copies of the piano score in one day (Baily 134).

On November 25, 1878—exactly six months after Pinafore’s London premiere—the Boston Museum offered Americans their first stateside glimpse of Gilbert and Sullivan’s nautical opera. To say the response was enthusiastic would be an understatement. Productions of Pinafore spread literally across the country in no time at all, to San Francisco by December 23 and to Philadelphia by the first week of 1879 (Bordman 46). New York was a bit slow on the uptake; the Standard Theatre presented its version on January 15, 1879. It is customary to refer to these and the many other American Pinafores as pirated productions, since none of them remunerated Gilbert, Sullivan, or Carte with as much as a shilling. But before international copyright, these lucrative productions weren’t actually piracies—opportunistic, perhaps, but not illegal. (Years later, Gilbert—an attorney himself—would argue for international copyright protection for dramatic authors.)

Loose copyright laws also allowed the bizarre practice of competing productions of Pinafore to run simultaneously in a single city. Such productions often resorted to gimmicks to bring in an audience. Not more than a week after the Standard opened its rendition of the show, the Lyceum premiered what has since been called "the transvestite Pinafore," with a nautically clad young woman as Ralph Rackstraw and six-foot-plus George K. Fortescue in drag as a more than usually massive Little Buttercup.

If novelty was one goal, authenticity was another. Although Americans could buy the libretto and piano-vocal score in London (and not long after in the United States as well), Sullivan’s orchestrations and the London costume and set designs remained the exclusive property of the composer and of Carte’s Comedy Opera Company. It was not, therefore, uncommon for American producers to send the theatrical equivalent of industrial spies to London to sit night after night at Pinafore, surreptitiously sketching the designs or transcribing orchestral parts. American impresarios went to almost any length to capitalize on the Pinafore craze.

As the craze mounted, so did the number of productions. Depending on one’s source, at one time or other between three and eight Pinafores competed in New York City (Bordman 46; Baily 146). (Try to envision modern-day Broadway peppered up and down with rival showings of Phantom of the Opera!) The Dramatic Mirror for May 3, 1879, noted that since January 15, Pinafore had played in eleven major houses—Wallack’s, the Fifth Avenue, the Standard, the Globe, the Olympic, Niblo’s, the Lyceum, the Academy of Music, Tony Pastor’s, the Germania, and the Windsor (Bordman 46). Soon there was an all-black Pinafore, an all-children’s company, and German, Yiddish, and other foreign-language productions in ethnic and immigrant enclaves around the country. "Pinafore Fever spread nationwide. One San Francisco company toured at least as far as Tombstone, Arizona. In the summer of 1879, Providence, Rhode Island applauded an outdoor performance on a mock-up ship anchored offshore in a lake, to which Sir Joseph, his sisters, cousins, and aunts were actually rowed for their first entrance. In fact, before Gilbert, Sullivan, and Carte arrived in New York on November 5, 1879, to mount their authorized" Pinafore at the Fifth Avenue Theatre on December 1, over one hundred fifty separate productions had played in the United States since the first American Pinafore less than a year before.

The New York Herald called America’s nearly faddish love affair with Pinafore the greatest craze—or lunacy. As with twentieth-century entertainment fads from rock bands to blockbuster films, in the wake of the good ship Pinafore came parodies, spin-offs, advertising slogans, and what much later would be called licensing merchandise. At the theatre that bore his name, impresario Tony Pastor mounted, along with the actual Pinafore, the parody T. P. S. [Tony Pastor’s Ship] Canal Boat Pinafore; and, while the musical was running at Philadelphia’s Broad Street Theatre, audiences could also catch the spoof Shadboat Pinafore at the 11th Street Opera House a few blocks away (Bordman 47). Not to be outdone, the enterprising San Francisco Minstrels mounted His Mud Scow Pinafore, peopled with such characters as Captain Cork-onion and Little Buttertub. Printing presses in Boston, New York, and Chicago spewed out staggering quantities of the complete piano-vocal score as well as sheet music of the show’s most popular songs and arrangements for dancing. Meanwhile, on urban sidewalks street musicians cranked their barrel organs, endlessly churning out tunes from Pinafore to the delight or aggravation of passersby.

Pinafore products abounded. Just as modern Americans can purchase posters of favorite movie stars, models, and rock idols, once Pinafore came to Manhattan fans could buy photographs of performers (in costume) from nearly any of the competing productions. Not long after, products expanded from souvenirs to include items of leisuretime or practical utility. A Pinafore card game sported color drawings of the characters and was played rather like Old Maid. Girls owned Little Buttercup dolls, and their mothers wore dresses depicting scenes from the show. Housewives could accessorize their dining tables with handsome cut-glass celery glasses and other tableware featuring the musical’s characters in relief. And in the world of commerce, Pinafore’s catchphrases as well as characters graced newspaper ads and fullcolor trade cards (like baseball cards but advertising a product). In short, H. M. S. Pinafore launched the first media blitz in the United States, long before radio, television, and the Internet.

Why did Pinafore so capture the hearts of Americans, and how did it influence future American musicals? The immediate answer to the first question is simple: Pinafore is rattling good entertainment. In its own day Pinafore was arguably the most all-around satisfying piece of musical theatre entertainment the United States had yet seen, homegrown or imported. It had (and its continuing popularity confirms it still has) everything a musical-theatregoer could ask for. An engaging and even relatively suspenseful story is populated with varied and well-drawn characters who speak and sing witty, literate, and often outrageously funny dialogue and lyrics. Also, Pinafore has a musical score that, no matter how operatic in places, has plenty of tunes for the audience to go away humming, not to mention its colorfully romantic set and costumes.

Yet Pinafore’s mass appeal in the United States arose equally from a kind of cultural misunderstanding. Even more than British parliamentary politics and some absurd aspects of British naval life, Gilbert’s main target of satire was the tradition of English classbound marriages. In Victorian England it was socially acceptable only for men and women within the same class to marry. Or, if class lines were to be crossed, a man could properly marry a woman beneath his class, but a woman could not marry beneath hers. While the phrase love levels all ranks is uttered repeatedly in Pinafore, that was not Gilbert’s own position or belief. In nearly all his comic operas Gilbert was a fairly conservative satirist, in the sense that he ultimately advocated maintaining the status quo. With brilliant irony, in Pinafore Gilbert’s spokesman for preserving class propriety is the repulsive Dick Dead-eye, the apparent villain of the piece. Against all others, Dick argues against a common seaman like Ralph marrying his Captain’s daughter. And yet Ralph does, seemingly proving (if one isn’t quite awake) that love indeed levels all ranks. But it doesn’t. In the deliciously phony logic of Gilbert’s legalistic mind, the union becomes acceptable only through the absurd second-act revelation of Buttercup’s inadvertent switching of the infants who grew up to be Captain Corcoran and Ralph Rackstraw. Now, as adults, that switch effectively (if preposterously) makes Ralph the Captain of the Pinafore and demotes Corcoran to lowly deckhand—as if their status in adulthood was preconditioned by their babyhood. Now that Ralph’s social class is higher than Josephine’s, there is no impropriety about their marrying, British class distinctions are preserved, and, as Gilbert set out to show, love definitely does not level all ranks.

That was what Gilbert intended but apparently not what Americans saw. American audiences likely missed the irony implicit in the baby switching that actually preserved class distinctions, instead reading in Pinafore an affirmation of the allegedly American classless democratic society in which a common sailor actually marries a woman of higher social rank. I would further suggest that audiences in 1878 and the years following were primed to see the ending of Pinafore that way through their familiarity with Horatio Alger’s boys’ books, currently in vogue. Alger’s heroes rise to wealth, status, and the right girl not through their diligent application of the American work ethic alone. Also abetting the hero is a fair bit of luck, twists of fortune, and plain old coincidences. Granted, the turn of luck in Pinafore happens preposterously faster than in Alger’s stories, but the two are alike in kind if not in duration, since each, in the eyes of American audiences, appeared to be a confirmation of American classless democracy in action.

Speaking of ironies, Gilbert and Sullivan wrote Pinafore in part as a defense of the British class system, but the show became this country’s first nationwide hit musical partly because Americans saw it as a love story advocating for classless egalitarian marriages. Pinafore also demonstrated that a musical can treat significant social issues and still be eminently entertaining. Ever since Pinafore, numerous American musicals have dealt with contemporary social issues, whether comically or seriously, and most without sacrificing their entertainment value. Playwright Albert Innaurato observes the ties between social relevance and American musical theatre in the decades just following Pinafore: Featuring stock characters straight out of American mythology, satirizing class difference and full of song-and-dance numbers, the earliest lighthearted musicals emerged at the turn of the century . . . a very tumultuous moment in American history. Theater must be a paradox to succeed, and this was ferocious fluff, deadly uproarious political theater that was also tons of fun (27).

In addition to creating a taste for musical theatre in the United States, Pinafore also influenced the writing of subsequent American musicals. Because of its unparalleled success, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera format had its American imitators, most notably, of all people, John Philip Sousa, best known for his marches. His early comic opera The Smugglers (1879) owed a great deal of its structure and content to Pinafore, which Sousa had conducted for a New England tour (Bordman 65). Less well-known now, but in his own day a prolific and popular writer of Gilbert and Sullivan–style comic operas, Philadelphia’s Willard Spenser capitalized on things Japanese in The Little Tycoon (1886), opening shortly after the American success of The Mikado. The Little Tycoon had a healthy run in Philadelphia before doing nearly as well in New York (Bordman 85–86). Only one other of his comic operas ever reached Manhattan, but Spenser’s shows had extravagantly long runs in Philly and were staples of touring companies until about 1912 (86).

Far more important is Gilbert and Sullivan’s enduring impact on the content and shape of twentieth-century American musicals. Gilbert used the ancient romantic plot formula (see chapter 1) of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back in all but two of his musicals with Sullivan (Utopia, Limited, and Princess Ida), regardless of each show’s satiric thrust. With few exceptions but as many variations as librettists could dream up, this formula became the nearly universal plot of all American book musicals until about 1960 and even beyond. And, too, the tremendous audience appeal of Gilbert’s satire gave later American writers the green light to include socially conscious material in their shows—at least those writers of more than purely diversionary entertainment.

Pinafore’s other influence on American musicals over time had to do with form and structure. In reference to the rash of Pinafore productions from 1878 to 1880, Gerald Bordman rightly observes that American theatregoers were exposed to a rare, but not new, kind of musical theatre in which book, lyrics, and music combined to form an integral whole (47), or what today we generally call the integrated musical. What is hard to explain, however, is why this demonstrably popular model was largely ignored by American musical theatre writers and composers during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first two or three of the twentieth. Instead, most writers just churned out slapdash shows in which the songs had little to do with story and characters; group song and dance was just an excuse for splashy production numbers; and much of the humor was so gratuitous it seemed as if some vaudeville comics had just wandered onto the stage.

There is no question that the model of Gilbert’s libretti and Sullivan’s scores influenced the American writers who developed this kind of integrated show. It is patently evident in Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton’s Princess Theatre Shows (see chapter 1), in Kern and Oscar Hammerstein 2nd’s Show Boat (chapter 2), and even, though in more veiled ways, in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (chapter 4). The G&S model is most explicitly apparent in George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind’s deliberate modeling of Of Thee I Sing and Let ’Em Eat Cake on the minute particulars of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera plots, characters, and incidents, not to mention the inherent satire (chapter 3); Kaufman and Ryskind’s direct Americanization of Gilbert and Sullivan had no successors. No matter how late in coming, there is little doubt that the pioneers of the American integrated musical had in mind (even if at the back of it) Gilbert and Sullivan’s methods for making script, score, and production elements form an integrated whole. If they accomplished nothing else in America but providing a model for integrated musicals and demonstrating that musicals can address contemporary social and political issues without sacrificing entertainment value, these two lasting influences qualify Gilbert and Sullivan as the primary progenitors of the twentieth-century American