The history of the world is made up of stories. When told by enough people, these stories take on an air of inalienable truth: they become mythologies. These mythologies —and the stories we tell that use them—are as important as they are dangerous. As Roland Barthes once said, the mythologies that arise from commonly rehearsed stories allow a particular historical reality to emerge, whether or not that reality is true or accurate (2000, p. 142). Nevertheless, the imperative to tell stories as a way of making meaning from experience is a fundamental facet of the human condition; even neuroscience suggests that storytelling is embedded within human biology .1 It is also a fundamental part of this book.
This book is made up of stories. These stories intertwine, inform each other , contradict one another, and together, create a rich narrative that allows a particular historical reality to emerge. In seeking to tell the story of early British musical comedy as a cultural phenomenon that reflected, commented upon, and critiqued British society, the chapters in this book all tell slightly different stories. There are seven stories altogether: ‘A History of British Musical Theatre’, ‘Britishness (According to the English)’, ‘Knowing One’s Place’, ‘Nation’, ‘Personal Identity’, ‘Empire’, and ‘Nostalgia’. Three of them begin in this chapter. This is the first.
A (Very Brief) History of British Musical Theatre
In his potted history of British musical theatre, Stephen Banfield suggests that after the success of the Savoy comic operas created by Arthur Sullivan and William Schwenk Gilbert between the years 1875 and 1889, ‘a riot of “gaiety” overtook the West End , as befitted the “naughty nineties” and the frivolous, heartlessly capitalist Edwardian era that followed’ (Banfield, 2017, p. 117). This ‘riot of “gaiety”’ was led by impresario George Edwardes and a roll call of talented writers, directors, and artistes whose names are, today, hardly remembered. ‘The cuckoo in the nest was Broadway , first importing British musical comedies [and then] by the 1920s exporting its own to the West End’ thereby ushering in an era of ‘American superiority coupled with the built-in generic obsolescence of topical musical comedy’ which saw ‘gaiety’ effectively disappear, and with it an entire era of shows that have been long since forgotten, full of ‘tunes no longer hummed or even remembered except in tiny pockets of cultural nostalgia ’ (Banfield, 2017, p. 117) .
This story—as recounted by Banfield —offers a sweeping summary of musical theatre in Britain from 1875 to the mid-1920s. It ends on a somewhat bitter note, suggesting that this form, synonymous with frivolity, reached ‘obsolescence’ sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. As Banfield observes, this narrative necessitates ‘cross-examination’ because at its zenith British musical comedy was vital, modern, and nothing short of a ‘cultural phenomenon’ (2017, p. 118). However, the sense of obsolescence and the easy attribution of frivolous modernity means that a large, formative part of British musical theatre history—indeed, musical theatre history at large—has routinely been overlooked in scholarship, receiving ‘precious little sustained’ critical or cultural analysis (Banfield, 2017, p. 118) .
While Banfield is right to note the scarcity of scholarship on musical comedy, it is nevertheless the case that—along with a few general-interest publications by journalists and enthusiasts—there have been a number of works published that have considered discrete aspects of this story.2 These are often disparate, compartmentalised, or removed from a sense of broad cultural context, but together they do provide compelling evidence that musical comedy is worthy of the detailed attention Banfield champions. For example, Tracy C. Davis ’ Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (1991) re-evaluated the social position of women as working actresses during the fin de siècle , while Erika Diane Rappaport’s (2001) more recent study of women in London in the 1890s articulates the ascent of actresses in musical comedies, within a broader context of a growing consumer culture and the rise of the (sub)urban middle classes. Elsewhere, Brian Singleton (2004) and Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon (2007) have published collections that include considerations of musical comedy as a popular cultural product of the British Empire, examining strategies employed to anglicise ‘Otherness ’ in the music, production values, narratives, and performances of these shows. Jacky Bratton (1986) and Peter Bailey (1994, 1996) have explored connections between the class and gender politics of music hall and the growth of musical comedy into a respectable art form.3 In addition, far from the genre’s representing some kind of frivolous stopgap between Gilbert and Sullivan’s last collaboration in 1899 and the predominance of the American musical in the early 1940s, the resonance of musical comedy was felt on an international scale, with many productions successfully transferring from London to America, Australia, Europe, India, and elsewhere; Len Platt, David Linton, and Tobias Becker (2014) curated a collection of essays that demonstrate some surprising Anglo-German interactions between 1890 and 1939.4
While these various histories offer evidence of the rich and diverse nature of early British musical comedy, none offer a full overview of the subject thematically or chronologically. In fact, until now Len Platt’s Musical Comedy on the West End Stage 1890–1939 has represented the only sustained and full-length study of the form. Platt tells the story of a culture preoccupied with capitalist modernity and imperialism, and asserts that modernity —characterised socially by a rejection of tradition, increased secularisation, the growth of the free market, urbanisation , and nationalism—was inextricably linked with the cultural phenomenon of musical comedy; a phenomenon that ‘lasted for a very long time and included a large number of texts’ (2004, p. 2). He acknowledges the cultural impact of the form arises from the fact that ‘musical comedies, like all cultural products, are constitutive and have an explicitly reflexive relationship with the societies from which they stem’ (2004, p. 19), and suggests that—to the contemporary eye and ear—the popular successes of the late Victorian and Edwardian period may now seem ‘quaint, small-scale and “British” in a stereotypical way’ (Platt, 2004, p. 3).
At the time, of course, this was far from being the case. As the studies listed above demonstrate—and as Platt and Banfield have shown—musical comedy was seen as complex, contemporary and metropolitan ; it was a transatlantic genre that dominated the international stage for decades. For example, Florodora was the first musical to be produced for gramophone record in 1900, acting as a forerunner of the modern-day cast recording. As a popular phenomenon in its own right, Florodora enjoyed success worldwide, including a number of performances in 1936 at Randall’s Island Municipal Stadium, New York, which held up to 10,000 spectators, in an early iteration of some contemporary arena performances of musical theatre. Elsewhere, the wartime musical Chu Chin Chow set a world record for the longest run when it played at His Majesty’s Theatre, London, for 2238 continuous performances between 1916 and 1921. While he does not refer to these two examples, Platt’s story similarly demonstrates and celebrates the sheer scale of such a phenomenon.
However, while challenging contemporary ideas of the quaint or the small-scale, one part of Platt’s statement is left largely undefined, demanding further examination. Beyond the a...