The Great White Way

Warren Hoffman

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780813563343
• eBook ISBN: 9780813571300
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: American Drama

Broadway musicals are one of America’s most beloved art forms and play to millions of people each year. But what do these shows, which are often thought to be just frothy entertainment, really have to say about our country and who we are as a nation?

The Great White Way is the first book to reveal the racial politics, content, and subtexts that have haunted musicals for almost one hundred years from Show Boat (1927) to The Scottsboro Boys (2011). Musicals mirror their time periods and reflect the political and social issues of their day. Warren Hoffman investigates the thematic content of the Broadway musical and considers how musicals work on a structural level, allowing them to simultaneously present and hide their racial agendas in plain view of their audiences. While the musical is informed by the cultural contributions of African Americans and Jewish immigrants, Hoffman argues that ultimately the history of the American musical is the history of white identity in the United States.

Presented chronologically, The Great White Way shows how perceptions of race altered over time and how musicals dealt with those changes. Hoffman focuses first on shows leading up to and comprising the Golden Age of Broadway (1927–1960s), then turns his attention to the revivals and nostalgic vehicles that defined the final quarter of the twentieth century. He offers entirely new and surprising takes on shows from the American musical canon— Show Boat (1927), Oklahoma! (1943), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), The Music Man (1957), West Side Story (1957), A Chorus Line (1975), and 42nd Street (1980), among others.New archival research on the creators who produced and wrote these shows, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Edward Kleban, will have theater fans and scholars rethinking forever how they view this popular American entertainment.

Index

42nd Street, 1, 2, 150–151, 172, 174–183; choreography, 179

—“Dames,” 1; “Forty-Second Street,” 178, 180–181; “I Only Have Eyes for You,” 231n22; “Lullaby of Broadway,” 181; “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” 1, 178; “We’re in the Money,” 1; “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” 178

42nd Street, revival (2001), 231n22

42nd Street [film], 150, 174, 177

Abbott, George, 127

Abie’s Irish Rose, 85, 206

Actors’ Equity, 122, 188

actors of color, in U.S., 114

The Addams Family, 207

Adler, Richard, 127

affirmative action, 181–184, 188

African American: actors, 52, 55, 116, 132, 138, 188, 209, 234n9; experience, onstage, 139, 213n6, 234n7; musical theater, 115, 213n6, 216n42; press, 138. See also black

African heritage, onstage, 137

African “savage” as role, 52

Ain’t Misbehavin’, 116, 233n67

Albee, Edward, 232–233n61

Aldredge, Theoni, 149

all-black productions, and white audiences, 130–135, 138

Allegro, revisal (2004), 233n66

Allen, Sandra, 198

Americana, nostalgia for, 94, 190

American Dream, 6; ideology, 187; and musical theater, 180–184; myth, 152, 166; onstage representations, 144, 148, 164

American identity, 192; for immigrants, 64; performing, 75; and racial identity, 33; and whiteness, 11, 100

American Indian Community House, 190

American Jews, and Native Americans, 220–221n40

American musicals: history, 3; and race, 3–5, 25, 1...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Overture: All Singin’! All Dancin’! All White People?
• Act One: 1927–1957
• Act Two: 1967–2012
• Exit Music
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Permissions
• Index
• About the Author