The American Broadway Musical
The first Broadway theater opened in 1829. It had 3,000 seats and presented all sorts of entertainment, including musicals. On September 12, 1866, the show The Black Crook opened and is considered to be the first piece for theater that set the stage for the musical. Then in 1868, a small theatrical troupe came from London, adapting burlesques for the New York middle-class audience. (The West End is London's Broadway.) Their show had the element of the dancing chorus line and became the most popular show running. It was these two shows that ushered in the modern American musical.
The first example of the modern American musical was Show Boat which premiered on December 27, 1927. This musical had a book and score and was made up of dramatic themes told through music and dialogue, along with setting and movement. It ran on Broadway for a total of 572 performances, and was the first Broadway musical that became a movie hit. But it was the musical Oklahoma, which premiered in 1943, that cemented the format of the concept of the American musical. This blockbuster musical ran for a total of 2,212 performances and was the first musical Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote together.
What were the show elements that made Oklahoma so groundbreaking and crowd-pleasing? It was the first real book musical in which the songs and dances were completely integrated into the plot, featuring themes or motifs that recur throughout the piece, adding drama and drive. The story itself was based on a moment in American history set in 1906 about the bad blood between the settlers and cowboys who lost their free ranges in Oklahoma Territory when farmers were given plots and money by the government to till the land and produce something other than cattle. During this time, America was establishing its dance identity through the American ballets of folk music set to orchestrated arrangements by Aaron Copland and choreographed by Agnes de Mille and Martha Graham. Rogers and Hammerstein decided to incorporate this popular dance style in Oklahoma by hiring Agnes de Mille to choreograph the show and gave her a segment of the plot to be told entirely through dance. Again, this was a first in the establishment of the elements of the American musical.
Comedy was also important to the show as a comedic character was created in the role of Ado Annie whose sole purpose was to bring into every scene, her desire to always be kissing guys, whether they were farmers or cowboys: her lips were not prejudiced. This comedic element set the stage for the American musical to also be referred to as the American musical comedy.
In 1949, four years after the end of World War II, Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical South Pacific, which followed Oklahoma, again changed the American musical theater. African Americans who had been integrated into the war efforts came home to America to face the Jim Crow laws prevalent in the South, while some white soldiers came home with Japanese wives who were denied the process of becoming American citizens. South Pacific took on the role of sending a strong progressive message on racism to the theater-going audience. Their questioning of cultural and social norms was evident in the highly controversial song “You've Got to Be Carefully Taught:”
You've got to be taught\nTo hate and fear,\nYou've got to be taught\nFrom year to year,\nIt's got to be drummed\nIn your dear little ear\nYou've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid\nOf people whose eyes are oddly made,\nAnd people whose skin is a different shade,\nYou've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late,\nBefore you are six or seven or eight,\nTo hate all the people your relatives hate,\nYou've got to be carefully taught.
This song alone may have been the reason that South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950.
The writing duo of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein created 11 musicals together. They are as follows: Oklahoma, Carousel, State Fair, Allegro, South Pacific, The King and I, Me and Juliet, Pipe Dream, Cinderella, Flower Drum Song, and A Grand Night for Singing.
The blueprint for the American musical was somewhat set by the musical Oklahoma but it was firmly established with South Pacific. The American musical had found its path: romance joined to social issues, sex, love, politics, and place in society. It questioned American attitudes while promoting American values, and it gave us a musical score for courtship and moral authority in equal measure. It proclaimed tolerance, promoted dizzy passion, endorsed personal responsibility, and ultimately told us that although we might have been carefully taught to hate and fear, we still had the capacity to overcome, to love and embrace. The musical format continued evolving along this circuitously entertaining route securely and confidently until the 1960s, and somewhat less steadily until the end of the 1970s. But then the path began to splinter.
Changing musical styles in America accounts for some of the evolution away from the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein blueprint. Hammerstein died in 1960, by which time Rodgers was ready to end his writing career. But the twin causes of the demise of the classical American musical were, in some senses, social and racial. The small victories of the civil rights movement, combined with the failures of the Vietnam War, along with President John F. Kennedy's assassination caused Americans as a whole to discard the naïve optimism, that had fueled the spirit of Broadway musicals, even the most serious of them, since the triumphs of World War II. America's leadership and especially American entertainment had projected until this point in time a harmonious, can-do national attitude. And then that conviction was gone.
There had been other dark periods in American history but by the '60s, we were able to watch it all on television as it unfolded, and that changed everything. But when we saw dogs attacking black children protesting in Birmingham on the nightly news in 1963, a new America entered our consciousness. At the same time, the emerging record business had for several years been steadily drawing the best young writers away from Broadway to the rock-and-roll revolution. Americans were thirsty for new music, a new means of communication, and a new approach to what they were feeling as the Eisenhower years plodded onward with no end in sight. But at the same time a new American sound was emerging from Detroit from the African-American community, which had once been segregated in a separate record chart called the “Race" or, later, the R&B chart was integrated into the regular pop charts. That music exploded in popularity and created a brilliant new American music genre and it had nothing to do with Broadway.
During this period of the '60s and '70s, little attention was given to Broadway with the exception of the opening and long-running musical Hello Dolly which followed the musical blueprint established by Rodgers and Hammerstein. But then Hair, a rock musical, opened in 1967 and it fell face-forward into the hippie counterculture and sexual revolution of the late 1960s. Hair tells the story of the “tribe,” a group of politically active, long-haired hippies living a bohemian life in New York City and fighting against the Vietnam war draft. The characters struggle to balance their young lives, loves, and sexual revolution with their rebellion against the war and their conservative parents and society. As this rebellious hippie counterculture was emerging so was another counterculture speaking a fresh religious perspective and this movement was known as the Jesus People. Two rock opera-style musicals opened in 1971 to reflect the values of this movement, Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. And to everyone's surprise, several songs from these musicals became mainstream pop chart-topping singles and the American musical had emerged again as a relevant art form.
The 1970s saw a remarkable shift in the American musical caused by a set of startlingly innovative musicals directed by Harold Prince and written by Stephen Sondheim. It started in 1970 with the show Company and followed in 1971 with the show Follies. Both had the temerity to ask what happens when your dreams don't come true, when you wake up to realize that they may never come true, and that you aren't who you thought you were. In addition to Company and Follies, the Prince-Sondheim team went on to create A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along, all in a little over ten years. It was quickly clear these musicals had changed the form and content rules forever.
Other than the musicals already mentioned, Stephen Sondheim also wrote the following: West Side Story, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Anyone Can Whistle, Do You Hear a Waltz, The Frogs, Assassins, Passion, and Bounce.
It seemed by the mid-'80s, the American musical had lost its appeal, even as some individual shows continued to succeed and break ground. It was the English musical that had invaded Broadway with large-scale opera-style musicals that were both a musical and design spectacle. The American musical theatergoers embraced these musicals like Cats, Les Misérables, and Phantom of the Opera flocking to them in record numbers. The writer of these opera style musicals was Andrew Lloyd Webber. The following are his contributions to the musical theater genre: The Likes of Us, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Jeeves, Evita, Tell Me on a Sunday, Cats, Song and Dance, Starlight Express, The Phantom of the Opera, Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard, Whistle Down the Wind, The Beautiful Game, The Woman in White, Love Never Dies, The Wizard of Oz, Stephen Ward the Music, School of Rock, and Cinderella.
During the '80s the American musical was floundering. That is except for the musical Dreamgirls which opened in 1981. Dreamgirls married a rock-Motown-Gospel score with a fully realized narrative. Its strength lay in a memorable protagonist, the inevitable challenges of a changing era, the satisfaction of a fully told story with a moving conclusion. But the wild success of Dreamgirls was not realized by the other shows that were produced during this time. Shows like Sunday in the Park with George may have drawn an audience and won a Tony but their run on Broadway was limited. Other shows, Nine, Starmites, Into the Light, and Carrie drew even less of an audience. Then a controversial show for its time opened: La Cage aux Folles, which married a daring story of a gay romance to a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical blueprint formula. Even this musical did not draw the audience it had anticipated.
But in the '90s, as the British Invasion wound down, a resurrection of the American musical was taking place with fresh ideas and overall design craftsmanship. Urinetown, a genuine satire about a ruined world where people have to pay to pee, featured a book that actually had shape, and a smart score that took its cue from the Threepenny Opera with a modern musical kick. The turn of the century brought both The Producers and The Full Monty, each having an ingeniously shaped comic yarn, with appealing musical scores. Both took advantage of all the structural elements of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical blueprint while giving it a whimsical, almost profane twist. Hairspray followed, and The Book of Mormon, also using the classic American musical blueprint while telling a rude yet sentimental tale in defense of faith no matter how unlikely or illogical its tenets may be. The Book of Mormon demonstrated that, even as America becomes more jaded, there's something inherent in an effective structure with a traditional song plot that taps into every person's fundamental human journey. And then came Wicked, and for a myriad of reasons, it just worked and is still working.
The show that broke the mold again, in early 2015, was Hamilton. Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, it is a hip-hop-influenced retelling of the life of Alexander Hamilton. Its Revolutionary War heroes seemed completely contemporary, reimagined as smart, angry, unpredictably high-spirited rappers, and, within moments, it was almost impossible not to begin imagining the members of Public Enemy, or Jay-Z, Nas, and Ice Cube, as the natural offspring of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, destructive feuds and all. Revolution is revolution, whenever — and messy, too.
In a rich and varied score full of jazz and rock influences, Hamilton uses rap sparingly, but when it does, the urgency is palpable. Unlike rock, rap is a narrative form by nature, and Hamilton has a huge story to tell with it, as the very first iteration of the American landscape is built right before our eyes. Clearly more influenced by Les Misérables than by Rodgers and Hammerstein, it nonetheless follows the American musical blueprint in a number of fascinating ways, and always to its advantage.
So, the American musical is alive and well. Admittedly, it has been through both challenging and rewarding iterations but it has, and is emerging, and even sometimes following the classical Rodgers and Hammerstein blueprint, finding its place as a truly American art form.