What is America’s greatest contribution to the arts? Time was when many, perhaps most, people would have pointed to the Broadway musical as the likeliest candidate for admission to the pantheon. Theatergoers around the world have long rejoiced in the delights of the genre, including some whom one might well have thought too snobbish to admit its excellence. (Evelyn Waugh, who had next to no use for anything made in America, saw the London production of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate a half-dozen times, pronouncing it, according to one biographer, “ingenious and admirable.”) But big-budget musical comedy has been in increasingly steep decline since the 1970s, and 10 long years have gone by since The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the last homegrown musical to be wholeheartedly embraced by audiences and critics alike, made it to Broadway.
Since then, we’ve seen a parade of what I call “commodity musicals,” the slavishly literal throwaway stage versions of hit movies that now dominate Broadway, as well as a number of highly imaginative small-scale musicals that, to date, have failed to draw large-scale crowds. But the old-fashioned school of Oklahoma! family musical appears to be all but gone for good, killed off by the disintegration of the common culture that made it possible in the first place. Now that Broadway-minded songwriters no longer have a universal musical language on which to draw, it isn’t possible to write a show with genuine broad-gauge audience appeal. It says everything about the desperate state of the American musical that the last theatrical song to become an enduringly popular hit, Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” was written in 1973.
That’s what makes the publication of American Musicals so timely. These two volumes contain the unabridged scripts of 16 “classic” shows written between 1927 and 1969, the period now usually regarded as the “golden age” of the Broadway musical. The table of contents is itself a capsule history of the genre at its peak: Show Boat (1927), As Thousands Cheer (1933), Pal Joey (1940), Oklahoma! (1943), On the Town (1944), Finian’s Rainbow (1947), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), The Pajama Game (1954), My Fair Lady (1956), Gypsy (1959), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Cabaret (1966), and 1776 (1969). Unlike their successors, these shows have retained their popularity. Twelve have returned to Broadway in the past decade, and two are playing there as I write. If there is a core musical-comedy repertory, this is it.
Laurence Maslon, the editor of American Musicals, has chosen the contents sensibly and well, and he has also supplied much useful supplementary material in his extensive endnotes. To be sure, one can quibble with certain of his selections, just as connoisseurs will doubtless wish that the notes had contained a bit more in the way of arcana (where is the sheet-music verse for “Lonely Town”?). For the most part, though, Maslon offers a representative snapshot—or, rather, a silent movie, since the music of these 16 shows is not reprinted here. That’s not a minor omission. But it’s also true that, except for Irving Berlin’s As Thousands Cheer, their scores have been recorded and are easily available on CD or online, meaning that it isn’t necessary to read American Musicals in silence. If you do, though, you’ll likely come away with a new understanding of how and why Broadway musicals work.
The first thing that attentive readers will notice is that most of the shows included here were adapted from previously existing source material, all of which would have been familiar to their original Broadway audiences. This reliance on preexisting material is, however, entirely different from that of the commodity musical. None of these 16 shows is a literal adaptation of its source material. In most cases, the material is extensively, often quite radically, transformed; and even when the musical sticks fairly close to its source, it treats that source with creative freedom. You don’t go to see My Fair Lady because it reminds you of Pygmalion, but because it is so imaginative a reconception of George Bernard Shaw’s play that it has a fully independent expressive life of its own.
And that life is specifically theatrical. While all but one of the shows included in American Musicals were later turned into commercially successful Hollywood movies, most of the film versions are unsatisfyingly overblown, and, except for 1776, none gives the viewer anything more than a general sense of how the shows “work” on stage. Almost without exception, the best movie musicals have been written directly for the screen, which demands a kind of inward-focused naturalism that is alien to the extroverted genius of the Broadway musical, whose “presentational” put-it-across-the-footlights style presupposes the actual physical presence of the performers.
As for the shows themselves, they are almost always sunny in tone. Even when the lives of the characters are touched by heartbreak and death, as in Fiddler on the Roof and South Pacific, the curtain invariably falls on a hopeful resolution of the dramatic conflicts that have driven its plot. This is a crucial part of what sets the golden-age Broadway musical apart from the 19th-century European opera of which it is a direct descendant: It reflects the fundamental optimism of the American national character, which does much to explain its enduring popularity.
Younger musical-comedy fans, however, are likely to be startled by certain features of the scripts reprinted in American Musicals, which are (as Maslon explains in his introduction) “presented in versions as close as possible to the form of each show as presented to its audience on its opening night.” That’s a much bigger distinction than is commonly realized. The vast majority of golden-age musicals, including many of these 16 shows, are now customarily performed on and off Broadway in altered versions, with books that have been extensively cut and occasionally sanitized (the first word heard in the 1927 version of Show Boat is “niggers”). On occasion, as in the cases of the most recent Broadway revivals of Pal Joey and Porgy and Bess, they are totally rewritten by other hands. Not surprisingly, most of these changes sharply diminish the effect of the original shows, but they usually go unnoticed and unremarked on since the original books are often difficult to find and are, in any case, unknown to younger viewers. Hence, the value of these two volumes to critics and scholars is enormous.
But what about everybody else? How much is the layman likely to get out of reading American Musicals in cold blood? Maslon appears to have his doubts, although he takes care to hedge his bets:
And do they? Only up to a point. Scarcely any of these shows could be performed without their songs and have any value at all. But then, that’s true of operas as well—and you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of operas whose arias have memorable texts. Not so American musicals, in which music and lyrics are of virtually equal importance. And while there’s never been a truly popular musical in which the lyrics were significantly better than the music, the best musical-comedy lyrics do come close to having an expressive life of their own. To flip through the pages of American Musicals is to be startled by how often you run across couplets that you already know by heart:
I got to love one man till I die.
He’s a laugh, but I love it
Because the laugh’s on me.
My time of day is the dark time,
A couple of deals before dawn.
I don’t remember growing older.
When did they?
How many modern American poets have written lines half so memorable—and well-remembered—as these?
Therein lies the real value of American Musicals: It gives us a fuller appreciation of the brilliantly crafted dramatic contexts from which those quotable lines are uprooted whenever a musical comedy song is performed on its own. It goes without saying that if you really want to appreciate the brilliance of those lyrics, you should go see the shows from which they come, the best of which are as vital today as they were a half-century ago. But failing that, you can always resort to reading American Musicals with an original-cast album playing in the background. It isn’t perfect, but it isn’t bad.
Terry Teachout is drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and critic-at-large of Commentary. His play Satchmo at the Waldorf will be performed in May at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills.
