Aficionados of 1950s comedy LPs may remember a 1959 album, by the British actor Peter Sellers, with a sketch entitled “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” in which he plays a haughty Indian entrepreneur determined to produce Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady on the subcontinent. When asked how he thinks he can find an adequate cast, he replies loftily that he himself is of excellent caste.
I thought of Sellers’ routine recently when a friend told me he would be spending several weeks in Mumbai, teaching American musical theater. No doubt My Fair Lady long ago made its way to South Asia, along with such untraditionally Indian works as Oklahoma! and Guys and Dolls. If music, as we’ve often been told, is the universal language, the Broadway musical seems at present to offer that language one of its broadest reaches. Mumbai is only one stop on my friend’s international itinerary, and he is only one of dozens I know or know of who are busily instructing the youth of Shanghai, Osaka, Seoul, Bratislava, Ankara, and Bucharest in the art of the time step and how to hit the money note.
It seems ironically right, as well as faintly absurd, that the musical should be exerting its power to span the globe just now, when America has shrunk to the state of an over-armed third-rate power politically, and has been supplanted or internationalized in so many other cultural realms. Yet the musical was here, and a part of American life, long before many of those other modes, and its strength stemmed in part from its polyglot heritage: its ability to draw, as America itself drew, on influences from all over. Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants shaped the American musical; African Americans migrating from the South infused it with the vitality of their distinctive musical forms. Even the more genteel strains imported from Europe that taught the musical breeding and diction were immigrant strains: Jacques Offenbach and Arthur Sullivan were cultural invaders in their own countries as well as influential visitors here.
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The musical quickly evolved as a form. It learned wit and topicality from its comic-opera models; from the Russian ballet it learned to integrate dance dramatically into its action; from the colloquial dance modes popularized by African-American syncopated orchestras, it learned to focus on the solo or duo artistry of dance virtuosos. And it learned comedy, as every theatrical genre does, from wherever it could grab a laugh. Artists of color had to fight to gain and hold their rightful place in the musical as elsewhere, but the gain came earlier than in other areas, and held its place more firmly. By the 1930s, the challenge to racism had become a part of the musical’s dramatic substance: Ethel Waters grieved over the tragedies wrought by lynching in Irving Berlin’s As Thousands Cheer (1933); the plot of Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms (1937) is partly predicated on the struggle to make sure the Nicholas Brothers are not kept from being part of the show-within-a-show. As bigotry, especially in the Deep South, persisted, so did musical theater’s struggle with it. Between 1945 and 1965, no fewer than four notable Broadway musicals provoked walkouts and racist hate mail by bringing down their first-act curtains on an interracial kiss: Beggar’s Holiday, Kwamina, No Strings, and Golden Boy.
All through this, the musical evolved its own style of songwriting, next door to Tin Pan Alley but striving to be a cut above in quality, with more sharply crafted lyrics and more harmonically inventive tunes. Its creators still aimed for popularity, and hunted for ways to make their songs both propel the dramatic action forward and be easily sung outside of its context. They tended to be careful about matching songs to character and situation—much more careful than you would guess from most late-20th-century and early-21st-century “revisals.” The notion that Rodgers and Hammerstein were the first to endow the musical with substantive dramatic meaning—like the notion that they were the first to give the form a social conscience—is a misunderstanding. The British producer C.B. Cochran, in one of his books of reminiscences, describes how, working on the London musical Evergreen, Lorenz Hart came to London several weeks ahead of Rodgers, to sit down for daily conferences with playwright Benn W. Levy, who had never previously written a musical-comedy book, “spotting” the songs and showing Levy how to build the scenes for maximum musical effect.
It is true that Evergreen (1930), which involves an ingenue attempting to pass herself off as her own grandmother, is silly. Most of the musicals of the 1920–1950 era are silly. But their silliness is built to hold water dramaturgically; the better-crafted ones rarely lapse into incoherence. Fun, not morality, was the point of the enterprise. What Rodgers and Hammerstein did was bring the moral sobriety of one genre of European operetta into the 1940s musical, where its collision with new stylistic approaches, in the moral beleaguerment and stress of wartime, made it seem startlingly fresh. Dressed in exotic period costumes, the formula worked extremely well. It only faltered when Hammerstein strove to turn it into a comment on everyday postwar life (Allegro, Me and Juliet, Pipe Dream). But by that time Rodgers and Hammerstein’s reformulating had gained so much ground that many others were crowding the field they had been exploring. The musical had become, semiofficially, something a little more like opera.
The next step was one Rodgers and Hammerstein could hardly have anticipated, and it came as part of a multiple evolution. The post-R&H Broadway musical, searching for ways to vary what was becoming a dangerously rigid and sentimental approach, found itself branching off in three directions. Two of them, the immaculately constructed private worlds of Stephen Sondheim and the frame-breaking wise-guy cynicism of Kander and Ebb, drew on the Broadway songwriting tradition in which their creators had grown up; both were affiliated with producer-director Hal Prince, who had likewise grown up in that tradition. The third stream, however, began with Hair (1967), the James Rado–Gerome Ragni–Galt MacDermot salute to the generation for which Broadway—and its musical tradition—were simply additional items on the long list of middle-class institutions to be dropped out of. Pop music had over three R&H decades gotten further and further from the conventions of Broadway songwriting, and Hair celebrated that divergence, as did other musicals which followed—including MacDermot and John Guare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971), which, like Hair, had begun at the New York Shakespeare Festival.
Not every young songwriter turned his back so squarely on the Broadway tradition: Part of the success of Jonathan Larson’s Rent (1996), for instance, surely came from its ability to look in both directions at once, mixing varieties of pop and rock with salutes to the old Broadway song forms—including one which, as part of its praise of East Village bohemian life, praises Sondheim.
But the musical’s next major phase, which fused Rodgers and Hammerstein’s dramatically integrated approach with the pop-rock idioms that had enlivened Hair, drew on no native strains. Like the operetta a century earlier, it came from abroad, and the banner of its popularity was the literary prestige of a pre-marketed title, either of a best-selling pop album (Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita) or a standard literary work (Cats, Les Misérables). This was very different from Broadway’s usual approach to source material. Green Grow the Lilacs and Liliom were interesting plays that some well-versed theatergoers might remember, but neither was a school reading-list chore on the order of Les Misérables or a professorial diversion in the manner of T.S. Eliot’s cat poems. The combination of heavy meaning with a heavy beat, both softened for the carriage trade, made these new musicals seem like plodding dinosaurs to the critically minded; it also made them enormous successes worldwide. Cameron Mackintosh, who produced many of the key specimens, developed a skill at formatting and franchising that gave the audience reassurance: The show they saw as tourists in Berlin or Hong Kong was the one they had seen, or at least heard about, in London or New York.
Broadway was naturally delighted to take credit for the new genre, with the shaping of which it had actually had almost nothing to do (though Hal Prince, a pure Broadway product himself, played a significant role in the shaping of Lloyd Webber’s Evita and The Phantom of the Opera). But as a marketing tool, the concept Broadway turned out to have unexampled power, far above that of Victor Hugo or T.S. Eliot—or even that of a reconceived hipster Jesus. It was because all these franchised works were Broadway shows that people suddenly wanted to see them. Disney turning its feature-length animated cartoons into touring spectacles exploited the same image, as did the new succession of musicals based on the popular films of a quarter-century ago.
So the steady stream of Broadway musicals rains on, some having a little to do with Broadway as it once was, and some almost nothing. Eager for their chance in the spotlight, the children of all the continents sign up for classes and line up for auditions. The musical, and the teaching of it, have become corporate forms—far, far from the world in which Ethel Merman once proclaimed that she had rhythm and Ray Bolger teased the audience into singing along as he declared his love for Amy. The musical’s new world—loud, streamlined, somewhat metallic, and depersonalized—is very far from any of its previous incarnations. Yet I can’t help hoping that some of those starstruck children, studying the history of the form they so greedily love, will pause to wonder why the humanity, the musicality, the sauce, and the delicacy that once were part of the musical might be brought back into it.
