American Musical Theater:

1
American Musical Theater

• a century of production

2
Making of an Exhibit

• Red, Hot Blue
• In research production seven years
• Natl Portrait Gallery/American History
• Sought to infuse museum w/ musical life
• Not just flat portraiture
• Posters, playbills, set design
• 3D costumes, props, ruby slippers
• Multi-media Time Warner video
• www.npg.si.edu/exh/rhb

3
Street Scene, 1866-1906

• Bowery 1880s
• Minstrelsy still popular
• Variety shows bawdy pastiche
• Played in saloons
• Catered to illiterate audiences
• Exaggerated skits and parodies
• Spectacle appealed to non-English speakers
• Limited appeal because of reputation
• Tony Pastor catered to middle class
• Cleaned up variety shows
• Appealed to a wider audience . . .

4
Street Scene 1880s

• Vaudeville 1890s
• Derived from minstrelsy and circus
• Olio (series) of specialty acts/skits
• Marketed as family entertainment
• New York Herald rowdyish and troublesome
  elements eliminated
• From Bowery to Broadway
• Pastor architect of popularity
• Featured tightrope acts, Magic Flute, and
  everything in between

5
Vaudeville Ellis Island

• Popular acts immigration pattern
• Blackface -gt Irish -gt Dutch (German)
• Harrigan Hart Irish
• Acts relied on parodies of Bowery life
• Mimicked countrymen others
• Weber Fields Polish Jews
• Slapstick, parody
• Rooted in everyday experience
• Williams Walker cakewalk
• In Dahomey performed for Queen

6
Tin Pan Alley early 1900s

• Named for cacophony of song plugs
• Before 1900 plugging by minstrels
• Oliver Ditson Co. also sold choral music,
  sacred music, chamber music
• From old-school gents to Bohemian
• Witmark, Stern followed profits
• Published coon songs and ragtime
• Song pluggers travelled to music halls, jockeying
  for position
• Composers a licentious group

7
Larger Marketplace

• Producers send shows on tours
• August theater owners went to NYC to lure show
  direct from Broadway
• Agents combine into Syndicate
• Network of 700 theaters
• Centralization NYC popularity
• Little attention to local tastes

8
Vaudeville Operetta to Musical

• Craze for light opera
• Lillian Russell
• Retained European flair
• Victor Herbert
• Made music central, not just enhancement
• Integrated music and story
• Babes in Toyland, Naughty Marietta
• George M. Cohan
• Could carry a show
• Lent coherence to form
• Give My Regards to Broadway
• Vaudeville grad. becoming mainstream

9
Rise of the Impresario, 1907-1927

• Ziegfeld Follies 1907 - 1943
• Professional staff
• Joseph Urban
• Lavish settings, costumes
• More attention to staging
• Topical comedy
• Feminine - er, appeal
• Narrative loosely tied acts together
• Stars Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor
• Produced Showboat 1927

10
Rise of the Impresario, cont.

• Messrs Shubert
• Lee and J.J. Shubert
• Imitated Ziegfeld style
• Did not aspire to art
• Theater machine that
• makes dollars
• Encouraged individual (often native) performance
  styles in entertainers
• Shubert Alley 44th/45th St., national
• Al Jolson

11
Jerome Kerns Show Boat

• Equal importance to story, music, and character
• All-star production team
• Lyrics-libretto Hammerstein
• Produced by Flo Ziegfeld
• Designed by Joseph Urban
• American sentiments in an American idiom
• Ol Man River
• Descendants 10 years later
• Depression escapism

12
B-way Hollywood, 1927-1942

• Jazz Singer talkies musicals
• Berkeley Warner Bros film director
• Elevated dance to critical acclaim
• In movies, camera determines gaze
• Shot and edited with one camera
• Used fountains, elaborate costuming, cast of
  thousands, girlsgirlsgirls
• RKO Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers
• Each dance ought to spring somehow out of
  character or situation, otherwise it is simply a
  vaudeville act.

13
Fair and Balanced Biography

• Biographical conventions
• 1800s
• Sing the subjects praises
• No unwarranted private information
• 1900s
• Tell it like it is
• More smarmy details
• A.S. Byatt
• Biography should give factual information, make
  no inference

14
George Gershwin 1898-1937

• Straddled popular and classical genres
• Tin Pan Alley song plugger
• Studied harmony composition
• Musical theater 24 scores, enduring songs
  popular today
• Orchestral/instrumental works
• Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, Three Preludes
  for Piano, An American in Paris
• www.gershwin.com

15
George and Ira
Collaborated on two dozen scores together Ira
later collaborated with Kurt Weill, Burton Lane,
Harold Arlen

• Fascinatin Rhythm retrofitted lyrics
• Unusual rhymes Im bidin my time,
• Cuz thats the kinda guy Im . . .
• Word Play Love is Sweeping the Country
• Waves are hugging the shore . . .

16
Political Operettas

• Strike up the Band 1928
• Commercial, but not critical success
• Of Thee I Sing 1930
• Wintergreen runs for Pres on platform of love
  contest for fiancee
• Pokes good-natured fun at electorate
• Won Pulitzer Prize
• Let Em Eat Cake 1933
• Commercial flop
• Too sardonic for Depression audiences

17

• Schoenberg
• Many musicians do not consider George Gershwin a
  serious composer. But they should understand
  that, serious or not, he is a composerthat is, a
  man who lives in music and expresses everything,
  serious or not, sound or superficial, by means of
  music, because it is his native language. There
  are a number of composers, serious (as they
  believe) or not (as I know), who learned to add
  notes together. But they are only serious on
  account of a perfect lack of humor and soul.

18
Gershwin jazz composer?

• Regarded as such in his lifetime
• Jazz emerging, not clearly defined
• Deems Taylor Gershwin a link between the jazz
  camp and the intellectuals
• Gershwin on jazz

19
Porgy Bess

• African American cast, set in South
• Blue motives urban/rural
• Four characters recurring motifs
• Connections, musical foreshadowing
• Armitage In PG is a promise of a future
  Gershwin opera in which he might have been able
  to eliminate even the aria.

20
Curtain

• Died at age 38 from brain tumor
• Oscar Hammerstein
• Our friend wrote music
• And in that mould he created
• Gaiety and sweetness and beauty
• And twenty-four hours after he had gone
• His music filled the air
• And in triumphant accents
• Proclaimed to this world of men
• That gaiety and sweetness and beauty
• Do not die . . .

21
Broadway Hollywood

• Golden Era of musicals
• Oklahoma, Wizard of Oz, Carousel, South Pacific,
  Sound of Music, King I, My Fair Lady, Meet Me
  in St. Louis, Music Man
• Composers/Lyricists
• Lerner Loewe, Rodgers Hammerstein, Bernstein
  Sondheim, Comden Green, Frank Loesser,
  Meredith Willson
• Choreographers
• Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins
• Designers Harold Prince, Oliver Smith

22
Oklahoma - 1943

• Ran on Broadway 2,248 performances
• 10 years touring
• Most successful to date
• RH worked forward from setting story
• No show stopping
• Opening/Act I Finale this will be different!
• Agnes de Mille choreo
• Wartime optimism, open air spirit

Live and in person! Oklahoma, Cabaret, Jason
Robert Brown
23
West Side Story

• Recasting of Romeo Juliet in NYC
• Shows constraints of art. difficulty
• Needed dancers who could handle Robbins choreo
• Didnt get real singers
• Arthur Laurents insisted no opera!
• Bernstein recorded w/opera singers and symphonic
  players
• Opportunity to explore rehearsal process

DVD 1, 8, 10
24
Redefinition (1960-)

• Boundary-pushing
• Hair, Pippin, Cabaret sex, drugs
• Godspell Jesus as . . . game show host?
• Tommy rock music
• Cabaret Nazi Germany
• RENT AIDS
• New forms of musical
• Twyla Tharpe/Billy Joel dance-ical
• Twist on familiar story Wizard of Oz
• The Wiz (African American retake)
• Wicked (told from Witches POV)

25
Different forms of revival

• Disney animated musicals
• Little Mermaid, Aladdin, BB, Lion King
• Many are revivals of familiar stories
• Use popular composers for theme song
• Chicago, Moulin Rouge, RENT, Phantom of the
  Opera, Annie
• Revivals of popular musicals
• Stage versions of opera
• Aida, RENT (Boheme), M. Butterfly

26
New compositions

• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Dave Zabriskie video games/slots
• Musical version of traditional story
• Premiered Oct. 29, 2004
• Croswell Opera House
• Lyricist looked online for composers
• Only five pieces written when booked
• Still being written during rehearsal!
• DVD recorded for marketing purposes
• Ichabod Crane and composer to NYC

26 DVD
27
References

• Armitage, M. (1938). George Gershwin. New York
  Longmans, Green Co.
• Crawford, R. (2001). An introduction to
  Americas music. New York W.W. Norton Co.
• Ewen, D. (1970). George Gershwin, his journey to
  greatness. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice Hall,
  Inc.
• Gershwin, G. (1926). Does jazz belong to art? In
  G. Suriano (Ed.), Gershwin in his time. New York
  Gramercy Books.
• Henderson, A. Blocker Bowers, D. (1996). Red,
  hot blue a Smithsonian Salute to the American
  Musical. Washington, DC Smithsonian Press.
• Jablonski, E. Stewart, L.D. The Gershwin years.
  New York Doubleday Co.
• Peyser, J. (1993). The memory of all that. New
  York Simon Schuster.