Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

242 Chapter 9 The American Musical Theatre
Sydney are currently hot competitors. Over the past two
decades, as much as 80 percent of Broadway’s box-office
income has been derived from musical theatre alone.
Several musicals (Phantom of the Opera, Chicago, The
Lion King, Mamma Mia, and Wicked among them) seem
all but permanently installed in the theatres where they
play eight times a week. And another twenty-four musicals
are, at the current time of writing, being performed
on other Broadway stages, with many more being performed
off-Broadway and in America’s regional and
touring and university theatres.
The American musical theatre, in particular, has
also become a staple of major theatres abroad, including
government-subsidized houses such as the National
Theatre of England, which in the past three decades has
become a major producer of American musicals (Guys
and Dolls, Carousel, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, South
Pacific, and Anything Goes). Up to a third of the main
theatres in Berlin, Budapest, London, Tokyo, Sydney,
and Stockholm are at any given time hosting engagements
of such world-popular American musicals as
Rent, Chicago, Jersey Boys, Miss Saigon, The Book of
Mormon, The Lion King, and The Sound of Music. Such
musical theatre engagements can form the commercial
backbone of an entire theatre community’s offerings.
But commercial appeal is hardly the sum of the
American musical theatre’s international importance.
Such theatre is a dramatic form of great variety, vitality,
and—on many occasions—creative significance.
The Pulitzer Prize has been awarded to nine American
musicals to date (Of Thee I Sing, South Pacific, Fiorello!,
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, A
Chorus Line, Sunday in the Park with George, Rent, and
the 2010 Next to Normal). Using techniques as old as
Greek tragedy and as inspired as those of Mozart and
Wagner, musical theatre authors and artists have created
both artistic innovations and social impact through brilliantly
integrated disciplines of melody, cadence, choreography,
and rhyme.
The Broadway Musical:
America’s Great Contribution
to the Theatre
What we now know as the Broadway musical has roots
deep in the nineteenth century, beginning with singing
and dancing shows known as extravaganzas—such as
The Seven Sisters, marketed as a “Grand Operatic, Spectacular,
Musical, Terpsichorean, Diabolical, Farcical
Burletta” when it premiered in 1860 at the fabled Niblo’s
Garden in downtown New York City. Such lavish extravaganzas
were soon joined by increasingly popular vaudeville
entertainments (collections of musical and variety
acts, originally performed in brothels and drinking parlors
but becoming more public and widely performed)
and burlesques (broadly comedic parodies of serious
musical works). All of these led to a rapidly growing profession
of musical performers adept at singing, dancing,
acting, and comedy.
Burlesque and vaudeville lasted well into the twentieth
century. Florenz Ziegfeld became one of America’s great
showmen with his annual Ziegfeld Follies—a musical
review dedicated to “Glorifying the American Girl” that
made stars of vaudevillian comics W. C. Fields, Eddie
Cantor, Will Rogers, and Fanny Brice. But the play that
we now regard as America’s first true musical would
open in 1866 at Niblo’s Garden. This play, The Black
Crook, is a rather ordinary melodrama, but when producers
added a French dance company, stranded in the city,
to the show to give it some extra spice, Crook became a
sexy spectacle, with dances, songs, and a bevy of scantily
clad young women.
The popularity of staged musical entertainments grew
by leaps during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Challenging the old custom of white actors performing
in blackface (in which a white actor embodies a
racist stereotype of a black person by darkening his face
with burnt-cork makeup) for minstrel shows, a new black
musical comedy arose, employing the emerging ragtime
musical styles of earlier black vaudeville reviews. Bob
Cole’s 1898 A Trip to Coontown (“coon” was, at the time,
the common though highly derogatory term for a black
actor who played stereotyped black characters) was one
of the most successful: a full-length black musical comedy
written and performed by African Americans (some
in whiteface), it played to large mixed-race audiences in
New York. Though an unapologetic farce—with coarse
ethnic humor, erotically charged dance numbers, and
semi-operatic interludes—Cole’s play included at least
one song of direct social protest: “No Coons Allowed!”
tells of a young man unable to bring his date to the “swellest
place in town” because of the club’s racist policy.
By the end of the nineteenth century, New York also
proved a hospitable site for sophisticated musical theatre
works from abroad. The highly witty and still-popular
satirical light operas of the English duo W. S. Gilbert
and Arthur Sullivan (HMS Pinafore, The Mikado, and
The Pirates of Penzance, which even premiered there),
plus the opéra bouffe (satirical comic opera) of French