Our Musicals, Ourselves

A Social History of the American Musical Theatre

John Bush Jones

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781611682236
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Our Musicals, Ourselves is the first full-scale social history of the American musical theater from the imported Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas of the late nineteenth century to such recent musicals as The Producers and Urinetown. While many aficionados of the Broadway musical associate it with wonderful, diversionary shows like The Music Man or My Fair Lady, John Bush Jones instead selects musicals for their social relevance and the extent to which they engage, directly or metaphorically, contemporary politics and culture. Organized chronologically, with some liberties taken to keep together similarly themed musicals, Jones examines dozens of Broadway shows from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present that demonstrate numerous links between what played on Broadway and what played on newspapers' front pages across our nation. He reviews the productions, lyrics, staging, and casts from the lesser-known early musicals (the "gunboat" musicals of the Teddy Roosevelt era and the "Cinderella shows" and "leisure time musicals" of the 1920s) and continues his analysis with better-known shows including Showboat, Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma, South Pacific, West Side Story, Cabaret, Hair, Company, A Chorus Line, and many others. While most examinations of the American musical focus on specific shows or emphasize the development of the musical as an art form, Jones's book uses musicals as a way of illuminating broader social and cultural themes of the times. With six appendixes detailing the long-running diversionary musicals and a foreword by Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof, Jones's comprehensive social history will appeal to both students and fans of Broadway.

1

Patriotism, Xenophobia, and World War I

“The Good Years”

December 31, 1899: It was New Year’s Eve, a small but gala evening of theatre in Manhattan. Lillian Russell dazzled a packed house in Weber and Fields’s Whirl-i-gig at their newly renovated Music Hall. Audiences heard Victor Herbert’s music in both The Singing Girl at the Casino and The Ameer at Wallack’s—not yet his great scores of later decades, but better than anything else Broadway had to offer. At the Manhattan Theatre, the electrifying Anna Held stopped the show singing “I Wish I Really Weren’t, But I Am” in Papa’s Wife, an amalgamation of two French musicals commissioned and produced by her young husband Florenz Ziegfeld. And over at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the Boston Cadets presented Three Little Lambs, the second show they had brought down to New York. Lambs was the 1898 musical The Queen of the Ballet rewritten to have the hero travel to Puerto Rico, a territory acquired by the United States following the Spanish-American War in that year. These five shows—all with respectable runs—were the total of Broadway’s musical offerings.

At midnight, countless Americans welcomed the new century. Of course they were a year early. The new century wouldn’t turn “twentieth” until the first day of 1901. A New York Tribune editorial for January 2, 1900, remarked, “No new century began yesterday. Avoid all delusions on that head. But those who had to date anything . . . ‘1900,’ . . . felt something momentous had happened to the calendar” (qtd. in Lord 2).

A year later, Broadway had less to offer than in 1899. True, there were seven musicals playing on New Year’s Eve 1900, but most were fairly inconsequential and had quite short runs. The only two long-running American-made hits were essentially musical revues, not book musicals—Fiddle-dee-dee, the annual Weber and Fields offering, and something called The Giddy Throng. While the English import Florodora (11/12/00) had yet to catch fire as the runaway hit it would become, the New York production eventually outstripped its original London engagement (which was unusual for British shows early in the century). With its run of 505 performances, it became just the second musical in American history to top the 500-performance mark; the first had been A Trip to Chinatown (11/9/91), with a then-remarkable run of 657 performances.

Florodora’s story is typical of the melodramatic musical plots of the day. A young woman named Dolores owns Florodora, an island in the Philippines, along with the proprietary rights to the perfume produced there. A dastardly entrepreneur named Gilfain tries to wrest from her the rights, but Dolores, aided by her fiance Frank and his comic sidekick Tweedlepunch, foils him. Not the stuff of a hit show in itself, which is why most writers on musical theatre credit the American success of Florodora first to the enormous popularity of a single song, “Tell Me Pretty Maiden,” and second to its singers, the “Florodora Girls”—a female sextet with each member “weighing 130 pounds to an ounce, five feet four inches tall, long-waisted, willowy, and either brunette or redheaded” (Smith 78). A matching sextet of young men got much less attention. Attractive showgirls aside, the popularity of this English show may be partly attributed to its setting in the Philippines, which, along with Puerto Rico, became a U.S. possession after the Spanish-American War.

Pride in these territorial acquisitions was just one index of the optimistic mood of the United States from the turn of the century to World War I (Cooper xiv)—and with good reason. In 1900, only Russia and Canada were larger geographically, and the U.S. economy was the most vital in the world. American steel production was over ten million tons, and 167,000 miles of railroad tracks crisscrossed the country. Per capita income at the turn of the century was estimated at $569, far outstripping second-place Britain (Cooper 3).

The possibilities of U.S. industry seemed limitless. The airplane and the skyscraper appeared in rapid succession, prompting newspapers and magazines “to devote much of their space to accounts of inventions, massive construction projects, and faster, more comfortable travel” (Cooper 137). Most of all, the swift development of mass production made the automobile—formerly the plaything of the rich—affordable to middle-class Americans. The popular press pointed with pride to how the new technologies, and especially the motorcar, were the tangible symbols of America’s expanding economy and its corresponding rise as a world power.

Techno-Pride

The automobile, in fact, took center stage in musical theatre productions. Woodrow Wilson’s odd 1905 public pronouncement notwithstanding—that motorcars represented “a picture of arrogance of wealth” to farmers and the working class (qtd. in Lord 117)—cars on stage were never intended to denigrate people who could afford such wondrous technology. Instead, audiences were meant to marvel at the ingeniousness of the autos themselves, and, when cars figured large in the plots of book musicals, to delight in how these French/German-invented but American-perfected contraptions helped the hero or heroine foil the villain and win the prize.

Of all Broadway producers, Florenz Ziegfeld gained a singular reputation not just for his “glorification of the American girl” but for featuring in his annual revues and other shows the latest inventions, fashions, and news items. In Papa’s Wife (11/13/99), he had the spectacular singing sensation Anna Held make an equally spectacular exit in an 1899 model motorcar. By 1908, taxis were already ubiquitous on the streets of New York, so his 1908 Follies contained a taxicab number, with twelve showgirls dressed as cabs, sporting lighted signs, meters, and headlights. A year later Ziegfeld moved to airplanes. Celebrating the Wright Brothers and their successors, Ziegfeld’s 1909 edition featured Lillian Lorraine, “the Follies’ first incontestable dazzler,” singing “Up, Up in My Aeroplane” while circling above the audience in a miniaturized aircraft—mercifully secured to a sort of monorail track (Bordman 250). For the opening of the Panama Canal, Ziegfeld and his designers created an elaborate production number in 1913. While José Collins sang “Panama” surrounded by showgirls, a mock-up warship was raised in the newly completed canal locks—an obvious tribute both to America’s technology and to the United States as a power in world affairs.

Not just single numbers in revues but full-length book musicals sometimes celebrated motorcars (and motorboats!). Between January 1906 and September 1910, five such shows opened—four in New York, one in Chicago. Based on the Vanderbilt family’s offer of a cup to auto race winners in 1904 and 1905, The Vanderbilt Cup (1/16/06) was an immediate hit, with a run of 143 performances. The Auto Race (11/25/07), with its spectacular staging in the mammoth 5000-seat Hippodrome, ran 312 times. The Girl at the Helm (9/5/08)—obviously the motorboat show—held its own for five months in Chicago but never played New York, while The Motor Girl (6/ 15/09), with the Paris race as its setting, managed only ninety-five laps on Broadway. But The International Cup (9/3/10), which fictionalized the New York to Paris auto race and threw in a yachting race for good measure, packed the vast Hippodrome 333 times.

The essentials of all these shows are the same. In each, an American race driver—twice a man, three times a woman—wins the race, its prize, and her or his true-blue American sweetheart while thwarting the dastardly doings of a (sometimes foreign) villain. The shows all featured real motorcars (or boats) on stage in simulated races, with the passing scenery zipping by to the extent allowed by theatrical technology of the day. Still, what drew audiences to the auto and motorboat musicals was not the machines alone but the marriage of man or woman and machine triumphing over adversity, thereby scoring not only a personal victory in competitive sport (and love) but also a symbolic victory for American pluck, sportsmanship, and technology.

America’s Boosters: Teddy Roosevelt and George M. Cohan

Pre–World War I America boasted a remarkable number of strong personalities. In politics, there were “The Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryan and Wisconsin Senator “Fighting Bob” LaFollette; in jurisprudence, Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes; in manufacturing, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford; in finance, J. Pierpont Morgan; in what we now call social activism, Jane Addams and Carry Nation; in journalism, H. L. Mencken and William Randolph Hearst; and in the theatre, those pioneering producers David Belasco and Florenz Ziegfeld. This impressive roster also includes president/politician Theodore Roosevelt and writer/performer/director George M. Cohan, two men surprisingly similar despite vast differences in family background. More than the others, TR and George M (their frequent sobriquets) captured the public imagination as embodiments of the spirit of the age.

Teddy Roosevelt was president of the United States from 1901 to 1909. According to historian Francis Russell, “Roosevelt at the end of his first term could claim to be the most popular man in the country. . . . [His] new term would make him not only the most dynamically popular president since Andrew Jackson but the most conspicuous public figure in the world” (348, 358). Yet TR’s popularity—and strong personal influence on crafting the upbeat mood of America—began long before his presidency. Prior to becoming William McKinley’s running mate and then succeeding him to the presidency upon McKinley’s assassination, Roosevelt’s political service had included stints as a New York state assemblyman, New York City police commissioner, assistant secretary of the Navy, and governor of New York. In each public office, TR cultivated his reputation for outspokenness, for handling problems swiftly, and for emphasizing the moral basis of whatever decisions he made. In addition to his political career, two other ventures established Roosevelt in the public imagination. In 1883, he bought a Wyoming ranch, working it so effectively that he overcame the hostility of the local “cowboys,” who had distrusted him as a bespectacled Eastern tenderfoot. Then, during the Spanish-American War, TR recruited that ill-assorted cavalry troop known then and ever after as the “Rough Riders,” so called for their daring, if reckless, charge up San Juan Hill. The troop consisted of those selfsame cattlemen, along with Teddy’s Ivy League cronies from his college days. This foolhardy but publicity-rich gambit elevated TR to the stature of a national hero.

TR’s popularity and public image of aggressive self-confidence escalated throughout his presidency. His words became household expressions. He coined the term “muckraker” for a ruthlessly thorough investigative reporter, and, best-known of all, he often quoted a West African saying that embodied his approach to problem solving: “Speak softly and carry a big stick, and you will go far” (see Lord 82, Cooper 50).

Following his own advice, Roosevelt usually got the job done. Whether he was initiating the government’s series of successful antitrust suits against railroads and other monopolies in 1902, intervening to end the 1907 bank panic, brokering the Russian-Japanese peace agreement in 1905 and the Moroccan crisis the following year, or negotiating the treaty that gave the United States the right to build and control the Panama Canal, what the public saw in TR’s actions was not just a reflection of American accomplishments but an impressive incarnation of American manhood in action.

Still, whatever TR achieved, “so overwhelming was Roosevelt’s personality that it tended to dwarf his accomplishments” (Russell 338). His larger-than-life bravura, along with his singular appearance, made him the inevitable subject of countless political cartoons caricaturing his features—the thick, round glasses, the droopy moustache, the incredibly toothy grin. Even in political cartoons, TR was caricatured as a Wyoming cowboy, a Rough Rider, or a big-game hunter (another of his pastimes). Given the often vituperative nature of the genre, these cartoons are remarkable for their affectionate good humor; clearly, much of the popular press shared the public’s admiration for TR.

This good-humored treatment of Teddy extended to the popular musical stage. While TR was never the starring president in a full-length musical—for that, the world would have to wait until 1937, when George M. Cohan starred as FDR in I’d Rather Be Right—Teddy was nevertheless the subject of a number of songs and sketches in the revues and musicals of his day. The first of these was in The Duke of Duluth (1905). The musical was mostly a showcase for the comic skills and outlandish costumes of Nat M. Wills, a popular singing comedian. The Roosevelt routine was a song called “Strenuous,” based on TR’s admonition that Americans lead a strenuous physical, mental, and moral life. Wills, on horseback (it’s not clear if this was a stage horse or a real one), costumed and made up to look like Roosevelt right down to the teeth, sang a rather inflated encomium of TR’s personality and accomplishments, to wit: “Let our Teddy bite the Isthmus: He can cut it through by Christmas” (Bordman 212), referring to the just-concluded Panama Canal treaty.

Ziegfeld first put TR on stage in his third Follies (6/14/09). Out of office for several months, Roosevelt was still in the public eye. On a year-long African safari with his son, the great conservation president, who created more national parks and monuments than all presidents before him combined, killed some three thousand animals (Russell 373). Ziegfeld, always looking for a current event worth staging, created a hunting number. Harry Kelly impersonated Roosevelt while the showgirls paraded in cute animal suits, so eager to be bagged by this illustrious hunter that “[a]n amiable lion allowed the President to shoot at him, accommodatingly holding a large target between his paws” (Smith 91–92).

This same edition of the Follies included a more extensive and serious tribute to TR. Called “The Greatest Navy in the World,” the pageant featured a harbor backdrop “variously interpreted as New York and Hampton Roads [Virginia]” (Smith 92), in front of which paraded the Ziegfeld showgirls, dressed to represent the various states. Each wore on her head a miniature replica of one of the battleships in the U.S. fleet. When the stage lights were dimmed, the ladies threw switches concealed in their costumes, thereby lighting up the portholes and “searching spotlights” in their nautical headgear. The overall effect suggested that the entire fleet had appeared on stage (Baral 47). Nothing here overtly says “Theodore Roosevelt,” but contemporary audiences surely knew they were viewing Ziegfeld’s spectacular tribute to what Edward Wagenknecht calls the “most spectacular gesture of his administration,” sending the sixteen battleships of the Great White Fleet around the world (329). TR himself had watched the ships steam out of Hampton Roads on December 16, 1907, embarking on a noncombative mission variously interpreted as a goodwill cruise and a display of U.S. naval power. After circumnavigating the globe, the Great White Fleet—their hulls literally painted white—returned to the United States on February 22, 1909, just under four months before Ziegfeld’s theatrical tribute. Twice more Ziegfeld featured Roosevelt-related segments in his Follies. In 1910, the showgirls “paraded as Rough Riders” to welcome Roosevelt back from his safari. Then, in 1912, TR and incumbent President Taft appeared in a sketch to joke about “income tax, trusts, the Philippines, tariff reform, and Cuba” (Ziegfeld 48, 239).

A. E. Campbell describes Roosevelt as “cocky, pugnacious, forthright, physically active, morally courageous—and not, perhaps, over-sensitive” (8). These adjectives apply equally to George M. Cohan, in many ways TR’s musical-theatre equivalent, whose career flourished during the same years as Roosevelt’s. Cohan was a phenomenon—granted, thanks to his temperament, sometimes a less than popular one, but still a phenomenon. He acted, he sang, he danced. He wrote, directed, and starred in numerous musicals (and plays), which he usually produced or co-produced with his partner Sam Harris. Short of stage design, George M did it all. And he did it very well. Even critics who objected to the brash, slangy style of his shows admired his skill. According to the Dramatic Mirror in 1906, “Perhaps the true secret of Mr. Cohan’s unprecedented success, too permanent for mere theatrical luck, consists in his admirable stagecraft. In the art of presenting musical comedy, Mr. Cohan is apparently without a peer” (qtd. in Smith 86).

According to the scant and ambiguous historical records, George Michael Cohan was born to Irish-American parents in Providence, Rhode Island, on either July 3 or July 4, 1878. Cohan himself chose to believe he had been born on Independence Day, a belief that both shaped his sentiments about the United States and deeply influenced his musicals. In the words of one (very appreciative) Cohan biographer:

There was a mystique, a self-created mystique, in which he identified himself indelibly with everything elemental to American life. This he could not have done in quite the way he did had he known he was born on the 3rd of July. From his earliest days he was, he said, profoundly “impressed with the fact that I had been born under the Stars and Stripes, and that has had a great deal to do with everything I have written. If it had not been for the glorious symbol of Independence, I might have fallen into the habit of writing problem plays, or romantic drama, or questionable farce. Yes, the American flag is in my heart, and it has done everything for me.” (McCabe 2)

There’s a good bit of the showman in Cohan’s words, but they do describe his approach to playwriting and songwriting. As musical theatre historian Stanley Green wryly put it, “Everything that Cohan had written before 1906 had featured only himself, his family, and the American flag” (24). Cohan’s family consisted of father Jerry, mother Nellie, sister Josie, and George himself, who toured the vaudeville circuits as The Four Cohans. And, as Green pointed out, once George discovered his abilities as a playwright and tune-smith, he tailor-made his early shows as vehicles for the Cohan clan.

Cohan also tailor-made his musicals for an audience looking for something fresh, vigorous, and celebratory of America. Most book musicals were still either European imports or American-written clones of British musical comedy or continental comic opera and operetta. George M pioneered what became the essentials of the form, tone, and national character of American musical comedy for decades to come. Between 1901 and 1911, Cohan wrote and opened eleven musicals on Broadway: The Governor’s Son (2/25/01), Running for Office (4/27/03), Little Johnny Jones (11/7/04), Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway (1/1/06), George Washington, Jr. (2/12/06), The Talk of New York (12/3/07), Fifty Miles from Boston (2/3/08), The Yankee...