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

Theatre 243
composer Jacques Offenbach (La Périchole, La Belle
Hélène, Orpheus in the Underworld), and the Viennese
operetta of Franz Lehar (The Merry Widow) all demonstrated
to New York theatergoers that musical theatre
could tell a story in a delightfully appealing way. Audiences
flocked to these musicals, and American writers
and composers emerged to create homegrown products
that could compete with these imports. Irish-born Victor
Herbert, an émigré to the United States at twentyseven,
became America’s first great composer for the
stage. Herbert’s major hits, Babes in Toyland (1903) and
Naughty Marietta (1910), proved immensely successful.
American composers and lyricists quickly joined in
the action when Rhode Island–born vaudevillian George
M. Cohan’s Little Johnny Jones (1904), in which Cohan
also starred, provided what became his—and some of
his country’s—signature songs: “I’m a Yankee Doodle
Dandy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” By the
first decade of the new century, American musical theatre
was becoming the world leader in a newly defined
theatrical form: musical comedy.
MUSICAL COMEDY: GERSHWIN, KERN,
DARKTOWN FOLLIES, AND RODGERS
AND HART
The first third of the twentieth century was the great age
of musical comedy—a genre that emphasized comedy
as well as singing but also portrayed youthful romance.
It featured sexy (and lightly clad) girl choruses, liberal
doses of patriotic jingoism, and, in response to the “dance
craze” of the early 1900s, spectacular dancing— including
the show-offy “tap”—to a jazzy or ragtime beat.
By the 1920s and 1930s, American musical comedy
had dozens of starring composers, lyricists, and performers.
Tourists from all over the country flocked to
midtown Manhattan to see such musical works as the
brothers George (music) and Ira (lyrics) Gershwin’s
Lady Be Good, Oh, Kay!, Funny Face, and Girl Crazy;
Vincent Youmans’s sweetly romantic Hit the Deck and
No, No, Nanette (with “Tea for Two”); Jerome Kern’s
bouncy Very Good Eddie and Sunny; Cole Porter’s
witty Anything Goes and DuBarry Was a Lady; and a
series of especially droll and delightful musical comedies
by Richard Rodgers (music) and Lorenz Hart (lyrics),
including A Connecticut Yankee, On Your Toes, and
Babes in Arms. What all these works had in common
were a simple plot, a cast composed of romantic and
comedic characters, a wholly unchallenging theme, lots
of revealing costumes, and abundantly cheerful singing
and dancing that had little or no connection to the plot.
And although these works were often silly, the music
transcended the flimsiness of the drama. The Gershwin
songs (“Embraceable You,” “But Not for Me,” and
“Bidin’ My Time”) and those of Rodgers and Hart (“The
Lady Is a Tramp,” “Small Hotel,” and “Bewitched, Bothered
and Bewildered”) and the shows they came from
have been regularly revived; the songs themselves have
become a staple of the repertories of countless jazz singers
and musicians.
Up in Harlem, meanwhile, Bert Williams and
J. Leubrie Hill drew large mixed-race audiences for their
Darktown Follies of 1914 (introducing the hit number
“After the Ball”). And in 1921 a black musical dominated
a full Broadway season for the first time: composer
Eubie Blake and lyricist Noble Sissle’s wildly successful
Shuffle Along ran more than five hundred performances
and introduced such songs as “In Honeysuckle Time”
and “I’m Just Wild about Harry.” Popular high-stepping,
side-slapping “black-bottom” dancing was a feature of
many black musicals of the 1920s, as was the Charleston,
an epoch-defining dance. Introduced in the 1923 black
musical How Come? (composed by Maceo Pinkard), the
Charleston started a national craze in the hit show Runnin’
Wild (by James P. Johnson and Cecil Mack) later
that year.
A GOLDEN AGE
By 1925 the American musical was beginning to dominate
New York’s cultural life—and that of the country.
That September, four great musicals opened on Broadway
in four days: Youmans’s No, No, Nanette, Rudolf
Friml’s The Vagabond King, Jerome Kern and Oscar
Hammerstein II’s Sunny, and Rodgers and Hart’s Dearest
Enemy. Each of these shows was wildly popular and went
on to run for hundreds of performances and well into the
following year. What is widely considered a “golden age
of musicals” had begun.
The golden age ushered in a new genre—musical
drama—characterized by increasingly serious books
(spoken texts) and sophisticated musical treatments.
Show Boat, written by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar
Hammerstein II (book and lyrics) in 1927, was an early
masterpiece of musical drama. It represents one of the
great pieces of fully acted—and not just sung—vocal
literature in the American theatre. Adapted from a
gritty novel by Edna Ferber, Show Boat has a complex
plot that is carried by the music and dancing as well
as by the work’s spoken dialogue; the musical touches