Read Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber for Free Online

a secure place in the core repertory of Broadway musicals.
    Before
Show Boat
the Broadway shows that created their greatest initial and most lasting imprints were often British and Viennese imports such as William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s
H.M.S. Pinafore
(1879) and Franz Lehár’s
The Merry Widow
(1907), respectively. Earlier shows that displayed unequivocally American themes—for example, the so-called Mulligan shows of Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart between 1879 and 1883, Percy Gaunt and Charles H. Hoyt’s phenomenally successful
A Trip to Chinatown
in 1891 (657 performances), and George M. Cohan’s
Little Johnny Jones
in 1904—are today remembered for their songs. 3 The latter show is perhaps best known from its partly staged reincarnation in film (the 1942 classic film biography of Cohan,
Yankee Doodle Dandy
, starring James Cagney) or the musical biography
George M!
(1968), which features a potpourri of memorable Cohan songs. Victor Herbert’s
Naughty Marietta
(1910), Jerome Kern’s so-called Princess Theatre Shows (1915–1918) with books and lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton (especially
Very Good Eddie
and
Leave It to Jane
), Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy’s
Irene
(1919), Sigmund Romberg’s
The Student Prince in Heidelberg
(1924), Vincent Youmans’s and Irving Caesar’s
No, No, Nanette
(1925), and
The Desert Song
(1926) (music by Romberg, lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein 2nd) are occasionally revived and singled out as outstanding exponents of the American musical before
Show Boat
. 4 But unlike Gilbert and Sullivan and Lehár’s imported classics, these stageworthy as well as melodious operettas and musical comedies are not widely known, and the Herbert and Romberg operettas are mainly familiar to the Broadway-attending public primarily in greatly altered MGM film versions. 5 The unfairly neglected musicals before
Show Boat
certainly merit a book of their own.
    By 1927, the early masters of the American Broadway musical, Herbert, Cohan, Romberg, and Rudolf Friml, either had completed or were nearing the end of their numerous, lucrative, and—for their era—long-lived Broadway runs. Joining Kern, a new generation of Broadway composersand lyricists—Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and, in Germany, Kurt Weill—all but Hammerstein and Weill are featured in Al Hirschfeld’s drawing “American Popular Song: Great American Songwriters”—had already launched their Broadway careers by 1927. 6
    But despite their auspicious opening salvos, the greatest triumphs for this illustrious list, with the exception of Kern’s, would arrive after
Show Boat
in the 1930s and 1940s.

     
    “American Popular Song: Great American Songwriters” (clockwise from left): Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. 1983. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM
     
Critical Issues
     
    Although the present survey will offer biographical profiles of the composers, lyricists, librettists, and other key players in order to place their careers in the context of a particular musical, critical and analytical concerns will receive primary attention. In fact, each of the fourteen musicals explored in the main body of the text and the Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals in chapters 15 and 16 demonstrate critical issues of enduring interest. Two issues in particular emerge as central themes and will occur repeatedly throughout this survey: the tension between two ideological approaches—song and dance versus integrated—to the Broadway musical, and the alleged conflict between temporal popularity and lasting value and the selling out, again alleged, not of tickets but of