The Drowsy Chaperone Study Guide - Theatre Under The Stars

“Imagine, if you will, it’s November, 1928.
You’ve just arrived at the doors of the
Morosco Theatre in New York. It doesn’t
exist anymore, it was torn down in 1982,
and replaced with an enormous hotel. It’s
awful. Unforgivable. Anyway, it’s very cold
and a heavy grey sleet is falling from the
sky but you don’t care because you’re going
to see a Broadway show! Listen!”
12
Man in Chair, from The Drowsy Chaperone
Sometimes after a great shock or sorrow,
you just want to have a party. That’s what
the 1920s were: one long, fabulous, roaring
party of a decade after years of horror
and war. World War I had brought the
world so much death; tens of thousands of young men had been
lost. The old ways of behaving, the old moralities, seemed oldfashioned.
People had had enough of reality – they wanted
spectacle and romance, fun and frivolity. Solemnity and seriousness
were out – fun and spectacle were in. The American people
wanted a new way of looking at the world, a new perspective.
And they got it, in their music, their clothes, their architecture, and
especially in their theatre.
Jazz was the soundtrack of this wild new era, and musical theatre
artists did not hesitate to use this uniquely American sound in their
shows. If America broke its political ties with Europe in 1776, it finally
broke away theatrically during the 20s. During the 19th century,
the European operetta had been the model for American theatre,
but, like all of American culture, something new was needed. As
Prince Dorough says in Popular-Music Culture in America, “The
1920s musicals ...avoided the sentimentality and slightly aristocratic
tone that came from Viennese operetta. American musical
comedies were brassy and brash, lively and spicy, colloquial and
earthy. They employed more of the elements of dance and music
that were identifiably American, and they accurately reflected
the optimism and hedonism, the frenetic energy, and the
abandoned, carefree attitudes of the postwar-boom era.” This is
the joyous passion that The Drowsy Chaperone celebrates.