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Freedom
(1794), a farce with music. Via this work, set on the Barbary Coast of what is now Libya and involving American sailors captured and enslaved by Muslim pirates, Rowson became—on June 30, 1794—the first female playwright to be produced professionally in America, and “the mother of the American musical.” (The musical’s events were based on real-life ones.The pirates sent a demand for ransom to Congress; the US refused, and finally American forces headed “to the shores of Tripoli.”)
    Susanna Haswell Rowson died in Boston in 1824, her theatrical successes long past, but her personally unprofitable novels still widely read. Sadly, her pioneering and musicals had never been held in high esteem; rather than being reviewed on their own merits they’d been treated as novelties, remarkable chiefly because of their distaff authorship
    P.S. The first American actor to go into politics was, of course, a stage actor. John Howard Payne had also been a prolific playwright and was one of the first American actors to star in England, as Hamlet (age twenty-two). His play
The Fall of Algiers
was inspired by an incident in Susanna Rowson’s
Slaves in Algiers
, but he’s best remembered for the song “Home, Sweet Home,” from his play
Clari, the Maid of Milan
. Payne became American consul to Tripoli once it re-established diplomatic relations with the USA.
    Q : Since
Chicago
was based on a real story, why wasn’t this musical done sooner, especially since there had been a movie starring Ginger Rogers as
Roxie Hart
in 1942?
    A : The antics of two murderesses inspired a 1920s Broadway comedy and the ’40s film—not one of Rogers’s big hits—but wasn’t generally viewed as the stuff of musical comedy, which until
Cabaret
(1966) was a typically light and fluffy genre. Besides, rights to redo
Chicago
were held by
Chicago Tribune
reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, whose headline had read “Woman Plays Air Jazz as Victim Dies.” After she became a fundamentalist Christian she refused anyone seeking to resurrect her play,
Chicago
, which she felt glamorized and trivialized murder. When Watkins died a recluse worth $2 million in 1969, she had so faded from memory that the
New York Times
ran no obituary.
    Of course the perfect composer-lyricist team to bring
Chicago
to Broadway in the 1970s was Kander and Ebb, who’d done the dark and acclaimed
Cabaret. Chicago’s
initial reviews during its out-of-town Philadelphia run were negative, but Philly audiences liked it, and it became a bigger hit after returning to the Great White Way in 1996—it’s currently the longest-running revival in Broadway history. (The film version won the Best Picture Academy Award in 2003.)
    Q : Do all composers accept that it goes with the territory when a song is dropped from a musical prior to its New York opening?
    A : Songs are routinely dropped. Some composers protest, most are resigned to it, and some seem to comply sweetly, like Jerry Herman. But some object vigorously, no one more so than lyricist Carolyn Leigh. She and composer Cy Coleman did the music for
Little Me
(1962), based on Patrick Dennis’s post—
Auntie Mame
novel. Coleman decided during a Philadelphia tryout to drop a song, whereupon the enraged Leigh left the theater, found the nearestpoliceman, and dragged him backstage, where she demanded he arrest Coleman. (This, during a performance.) It was Coleman and Leigh’s last show together.
    Q : What was the oddest musical ever?
    A : Oddity is in the mind of the beholder, but
Lieutenant
is surely a contender. The 1975 rock opera focused on the massacre by American forces at My Lai during the Vietnam War. Its songs included “Kill” and “Massacre.” It lasted nine performances.
    Q : Who “invented” musical comedy?
    A : The consensus is Jacques Offenbach. Before he left his native Cologne for Paris in 1833, musical theater was usually opera or its imitators, or carnival playlets performed with new lyrics on traditional