For Love of Broadway

By the early years of the 20th century, the theaters strung along Broadway were providing the words and music to the American Dream. George M. Cohan, the child of Irish immigrants, sang that he was a “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (1904). Russian-born Irving Berlin captured the syncopated city’s pulse in an instrumental vaudeville number that became a hit on Broadway after he added lyrics: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911). Audience demand for “owning” the Broadway experience went beyond live performance, and shops in the theater district sprang up to sell sheet music so people could sing and play show tunes at home.

Laurence Maslon is a Broadway historian and the host of a weekly radio program called Broadway to Main Street—also the title of his new book exploring how musical theater became America’s voice. “The pioneers of Tin Pan Alley,” Maslon writes, “set up shop in New York City, the logical epicenter for the popular music publishing business.” Not only was their new habitat the site of flourishing music halls, vaudeville and burlesque houses, and nickelodeons, it was the home of the ancillary industries of performance—the managers, booking agents, and costumers who sent musical tours from New York “into the front parlors of Appleton, Wisconsin, or Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”

Maslon goes on to examine chronologically the effects of the technologies that brought Broadway to ever-bigger audiences. When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 he conceived only of its business applications; it took other companies—especially Victor and Columbia—to move records and record players into the mainstream. In 1902, Victor hired the great tenor Enrico Caruso to record opera arias; Caruso’s recordings over the next two decades made him “the medium’s first commercial superstar and name celebrity” and established recordings as a prototypical consumer industry of contemporary life. In 1921, the year Caruso died, the U.S. recording industry sold more than 100 million records.

In the 1920s, recording stars like Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson popularized Broadway tunes and a new generation of songwriters—Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart—arrived on the scene. Maslon credits big bands like Paul Whiteman’s with boosting the popularity of Broadway music; Whiteman’s crooner Bing Crosby sparked his career singing hits from such musicals as Show Boat.

But the recording boom didn’t last; Maslon notes that in 1926, fewer than 60 million records were sold. Commercial radio was gobbling up market share from the record industry. Radio programming, which often spotlighted show tunes, gave consumers a whole new Broadway experience—“and they didn’t have to venture outside to hear it or purchase it.”

The recording industry began its real comeback after World War II. Maslon’s account of the rise of LPs—“long-playing” records—is riveting. He describes how Goddard Lieberson, an executive at Columbia, embraced LPs to make the company an iconic Broadway industry. LPs proved to be an excellent medium for cast albums, and Lieberson saw Columbia LPs “as a way of reclaiming a national musical heritage” of Broadway productions from the 1920s, ’30s, and early ’40s that had been ill served by extant recording technology.

Of course, Lieberson’s focus was not only on neglected Broadway classics; he was also a master of recording cast albums of current shows. My Fair Lady was his greatest achievement: The show was a smash hit when it opened on March 15, 1956, and Lieberson produced a cast album within 10 days. This album was “Fort Knox on wax,” Variety reported at the time, and became the fastest to sell one million copies; by 1965 it was the most successful album of all time; by 1976 it had racked up eight million copies.

Lieberson continued to produce successful cast albums of such shows as Flower Drum Song, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music, but by the 1960s Broadway’s heyday was ending. Maslon describes how television kept Broadway before a national audience via such programs as The Ed Sullivan Show—broadcast from studios on Broadway—which had a Sunday-night audience of between 40 and 50 million people. But by 1971, The Ed Sullivan Show was over and musical theater was being ushered to the cultural exit. “Broadway and Main Street were no longer singing from the same hymnal,” Maslon writes. When the cast album for Hair disappeared from the charts in October 1969, it was “the last time any cast album would ever appear in the Top 10 for the next five decades.” Not even the big Broadway spectacles of the 1980s—Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables—had that distinction.

You can probably guess what show brought Broadway to its greatest point of mainstream cultural relevance since the 1960s. Lin-Manuel Miranda began writing Hamilton in 2009; it was partly rooted, he has said, in “that holy trinity: Les Miz, Cats, Phantom” from the 1980s, but also in the hip-hop music that has captivated new generations. When the cast album for Hamilton was released in 2015 shortly after the show’s Broadway premiere, “It debuted at No. 12, the highest debut for a cast recording since the original Broadway cast recording of Camelot debuted at No. 4 in January 1961,” Maslon writes. Moreover, Hamilton also “hit an unprecedented trifecta”: landing near the top of Billboard’s cast-album chart, hip-hop chart, and overall album chart.

The ubiquity of technology for listening to and sharing music has allowed Broadway tunes to “go anywhere,” Maslon concludes. But Maslon fails to take the point further—to recall that Broadway is not just about listening to recordings but about the theatrical experience as well, and that, too, is an important part of the “Main Street” story he wants to tell. Much as earlier Broadway classics like Oklahoma! and The Music Man are still performed by American theater companies big and small, Hamilton is rapidly becoming a performance favorite and creating new audiences. It is playing indefinitely on Broadway and in Chicago and there are two touring companies in the United States—and the show is finding its way into classrooms as well.

Maslon’s emphasis on technology and sales means that his interpretation of social developments is sometimes dry and that his book misses out on much of the drama of creativity and personality present in other books about Broadway. But it is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the rise and importance of Broadway in American culture. And it’s more than just a book: Notations scattered throughout the text direct readers to visit a companion website that includes performances by artists from Jolson to Jay-Z. Anyone interested in American popular culture will be able to appreciate Maslon’s virtual libretto for giving our regards to Broadway.