Musical Theater

Musical Theater. Although imported ballad operas and romantic light operas alongside native musical burlesques and occasional spectacles lit American stages from the early eighteenth century onward, The Black Crook (1866), which ran for over a year in New York, with its darkly romantic plot and line of beautiful chorus girls in flesh‐colored tights, is often cited as the beginning of modern American musical theater. Other contenders are Jacques Offenbach's better plotted and musically more sophisticated La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) and the even wittier and equally well scored H.M.S. Pinafore (1879), by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. This comic opera, with its wholesome lyrics, opened many American stages, hitherto regularly denied to often risqué lyric entertainments, to song‐and‐dance mountings. Soon playgoers were applauding native operettas by composers such as Reginald De Koven and Victor Herbert (1859–1924), and librettist Harry B. Smith.

In the same season that Pinafore appeared, Ned Harrigan's and Tony Hart's raucous, song‐filled plays of New York City life launched a loosely structured genre known as farce‐comedy, which allowed performers to do their stuff within the confines of a flimsy book. Charles Hoyt and George M. Cohan (1878–1942) were early masters in this field. A third major, if short‐lived, genre, the revue, first delighted audiences in The Passing Show (1894). Florenz Ziegfeld (1869–1932) and his annual Follies, beginning in 1907, represented the apogee of this sort of frolic.

The World War I Era saw the emergence of a brilliant group of creative artists—composers Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml, George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, and lyricists and librettists P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, Oscar Hammerstein II, Lorenz Hart, and Dorothy Fields. These and others helped make the 1920s the heyday of the musical as pure, melodic fun.

The Depression of the 1930s and sound films ended that heyday, and following the path of the pioneering Show Boat (1927), musicals during and after World War II became more serious, proclaiming their “integration” of song, story, and dance, ignoring how well these elements had been integrated as far back as Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II led the way with Oklahoma! (1943). Their subsequent masterpieces, along with such works as Leonard Bernstein's and Stephen Sondheim's West Side Story (1957) and Alan Jay Lerner's and Frederick Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956), marked a second glorious era of American musicals that lasted until the mid‐1960s. Thereafter, amid a wave of hugely successful importations from Great Britain, the lone major, uniquely American voice was that of Sondheim (1930–), whose musicals, marked by complex wordplay and unconventional, sometimes distasteful subject matter, carried the venerable tradition of musical theater into new territory.
See also Drama; Music: Popular Music; Popular Culture; Theater.

Bibliography

Gerald Bordman , American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, 3d ed., 2000.
Kurt Gänzl , Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre, 2d ed., 2000.

Gerald Bordman