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

Theatre 245
Many serious musicals followed. Marc Blitztein’s
The Cradle Will Rock (1938), which concerns the struggle
to organize a union of steelworkers in “Steel-town”
against the opposition of Mr. Mister, the town’s leading
capitalist, was canceled an hour before its New York
opening by U.S. government officials who objected to
the play’s “left-wing propaganda” (the government provided
funding for the sponsoring theatre). The play was
performed later that night at another theatre, without
scenery or costumes, to tremendous enthusiasm—as
memorialized in Tim Robbins’s 1999 film Cradle Will
Rock. Lady in the Dark (1941)—with a book by dramatist
Moss Hart, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and music
by Kurt Weill (Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator, who, like
Brecht, had fled to America from Nazi Germany)—
concerns itself with psychology, dream analysis, and
the perilous situation of a career woman (Liza Elliott)
in a world dominated by old-fashioned ideas of marriage
and women’s roles. Lady’s musical numbers all
took place within Liza’s dream sequences. Oklahoma!
(1943), with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by
Oscar Hammerstein II, deals with social and sexual tensions
in the opening of the western states. Dispensing
with the accepted convention of decorative dancers,
Oklahoma! featured balletic choreography by Agnes
de Mille that advanced the plot and treated its historical
subject—which included an onstage killing and the
quick dispensing of frontier justice—with romantic passion
and a new level of social intensity.
By the end of the Second World War, seriously themed
Broadway musicals dominated the commercial American
theatre. Rodgers and Hammerstein followed Oklahoma!
with one success after another: Carousel (dealing with
spousal abuse), South Pacific (racial prejudice), The King
and I (gender prejudice and ethnocentricity), Flower Drum
Song (the tensions associated with East-West assimilation),
and The Sound of Music (the rise of Nazism), all marked
with social and intercultural conflict, richly romantic settings
and songs, beautiful solo numbers and love duets, and
thrilling performance ensembles. Leonard Bernstein, one
of America’s leading orchestral conductors and composers,
left a considerable mark on the musical’s golden age
with his On the Town, about World War II sailors on leave
in Manhattan, and West Side Story (with lyrics by Stephen
Sondheim), a powerfully emotional retelling of the Romeo
and Juliet story with a contemporary Polish American
(Tony) as Romeo and a Puerto Rican American (Maria)
as Juliet. And Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick conveyed
a profoundly moving version of Jewish shtetl life in tsarist
Russia with Fiddler on the Roof.
Not all musicals were deeply sober and serious, of
course. More-lighthearted and satirical musicals of the
1940s and 1950s—first-rate works that still featured
well-integrated plots, characters, themes, and musical
styles—included Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls,
based on the urban stories of Damon Runyon; Cole Porter’s
Kiss Me Kate, based on a backstage romance during
a tour of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew;
and Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, based on the
life of American folk heroine Annie Oakley. Richard
Adler and Jerry Ross’s Pajama Game (about union
organizing in a pajama factory) and Damn Yankees (a
tale about baseball and the Devil) featured superlative
jazz dancing choreographed by Bob Fosse. Alan
Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe
(music) first successfully collaborated on the fantasy
Brigadoon, about a mythical Scottish village, and then
followed up with My Fair Lady, a brilliant musical revision
of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion that wittily
explores the heroine Eliza Doolittle’s entrance into high
British society.
The hits of Broadway’s “golden age” were commercially
successful beyond anything in theatre’s previous
history. Successful plays ran not for weeks or months,
as before, but for years. They were, indeed, more than
just plays; they were world-renowned cultural phenomena.
For the first time, theatre tickets were sold as far as
six months in advance, and business travelers returning
from Manhattan were expected to provide a full report
on the latest musicals in town. Touring companies
brought the best of these shows to the rest of the country:
first-class national tours, with the Broadway stars
intact, and, subsequently, “bus and truck” tours, with
less-familiar performers filling in, traveled around the
nation. It is likely that most Americans during these
years first experienced live theatre in the form of a
road version of a Broadway musical. Songs from the
best musicals—and even from some mediocre ones—
routinely made the radio “hit parade” (forerunner of
the “top forty” listings of today) and gained an instant
national audience. Film versions of many musicals—
Oklahoma!, Carousel, My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls,
The Sound of Music—became widely popular. For a
couple of decades, at least, it seemed as if everyone
in America was whistling the latest creation from the
tunesmiths of Broadway. And the stars of Broadway
Golden Age musicals—Jimmy Durante, Eddie Cantor,
Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Julie Andrews, Carol
Channing, Pearl Bailey, Bob Hope, and John Raitt—
achieved national celebrity status; many becoming the
pioneer performers on America’s new entertainment
medium, television. It is certain that the theatre had
never played such a central role in American popular
culture before.