(An excerpt from a sample chapter that I wrote several years back for a proposed book on the history of the Broadway musical for Japanese publication. I hadn’t planned to release this in English, but here it is in slightly revised form.)

History of the Broadway Musical: Intro

Birth of the musical

Nothing springs from nothing, and there was plenty of musical entertainment in the pre-modern age. The first musical more or less in the modern sense, however, is said to be The Black Crook of 1866. As the story has it, the manager of New York’s 3,200-seat Niblo’s Garden had booked a melodrama about an evil count who, coveting a beautiful woman, sends her lover to a black magic master looking for new souls to feed the devil. On the way, the lover frees a dove, which turns out to be a Fairy Queen who rescues him and saves the day. Burdened with that story, the manager was looking for musical material when a fire destroyed another major theater nearby, leaving a Parisian ballet troupe and some huge sets without a home. The two sides threw their shows together and unwittingly gave rise to a new art form.

While the legend smells suspiciously like a bit of creative PR, the show was very real, though it would be unrecognizable as what we call a musical today. For one thing, it was a Kabuki-length five-and-a-half hours long. Also, the inconsequential plot was padded with irrelevant songs, lavish sets and costumes, spectacular stage effects and, most importantly, dozens of scantily clad ballerinas. The parade of beautiful semi-dressed women caused a scandal, which naturally made the show a sensation. At a time when other shows were lucky to last a month, The Black Crook ran a year and made a fortune. It was revived in New York eight times and spawned countless imitations, making musical theater a permanent part of the landscape. It can thus fairly be called the first musical smash.

End of war made new entertainment possible

One thing to notice is the date: 1866 is the year after the end of America’s Civil War. That is, life was back to normal after a hugely destructive nationwide conflict, and women in particular were a new key audience (though they reportedly went to the scandalous The Black Crook in veils). The birth of the musical, as with Kabuki in Japan two centuries earlier, was in good part a function of a new era of peace and prosperity, as common citizens wanted entertainment and now had the economic means to pay for it.

G&S make lyrics key part of musical development

Another big influence on American musical theater came a decade later from England. The team of William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan wrote satirical operettas parodying English politics and society. The shows were filled with quirky humor, erudite light verse and memorable melodies. The shows were wildly popular in the US, where productions, authorized and otherwise, swept the nation. Repeated copyright violations, particularly with the hit H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), led the British producer to open The Pirates of Penzance (1880) simultaneously in the US and UK to lock down the rights in each, and the ensuing legal battles contributed significantly to the establishment of copyright law. Their mix of witty lyrics with tongue-in-cheek British humor established a new path for musical theater, one which had a profound effect on the American musical. Unlike opera (or operetta), the shows made intelligent lyrics an essential part of the musical picture, and Gilbert became a model for the great American lyricists of the next generation.

G&S’s other hits included Patience (1881), which parodied the cult of Oscar Wilde (who came to America to promote the show), and especially The Mikado (1885), a show ostensibly about Japan (a highly fashionable subject in Europe after the opening of the country in the Meiji Era) but really a lampoon of the British government. Despite the vast evolution in styles of music since that time, the G&S shows are still produced today, a testament to their sophisticated humor and style.

Rise of operetta

Many other forms of musical entertainment followed. The Viennese operetta The Merry Widow (1905) became a massive hit in New York, as it did everywhere in the world, sparking an operetta craze lasting for decades. The US quickly developed home-grown operettas in response, though most were based in exotic climes like the desert or fairy-tale kingdoms, and many of the composers were either immigrants or children of immigrants (this was a period of huge waves of immigration, especially from Europe), bringing a European sensibility.

Vaudeville was a type of variety show throwing together disparate art forms – musicians, comedians, magicians, jugglers, dancers – into a single spectacle. A related form was burlesque, a much racier type of vaudeville for men. The legendary Florenz Ziegfeld pushed the format to greater heights with an annual variety series starting in 1907 known as the Ziegfeld Follies, offering satirical skits, huge production numbers and lots of beautiful women.

Jerome Kern: father of modern musical

But the most lasting contribution to the future of the musical was by New York composer Jerome Kern. Though active since 1904, he made his mark in a big way in 1914 with his song “They Didn’t Believe Me,” considered a landmark in the history of musical theater. This was one of several of his numbers that were interpolated into the New York production of a silly British import, The Girl From Utah, about an American girl in London on the run from a many-wived Mormon suitor. But it was this song that made history.

Most influential Broadway song ever written

The melody stood out for its effortless sound – “as natural as walking,” says song critic Alex Wilder – shunning the European-style waltz for a four-beat time more suitable to American dance fads like the fox trot. It also benefited from lyrics (by British lyricist Herbert Reynolds) that were closer to normal speech than the usual wooden language of stage song. The number quickly swept the nation, instantly establishing Kern’s reputation and setting a pattern for American song that lasted basically until the rock era. Its importance to both the American musical and American music cannot be overstated: its huge success established the 4/4 32-bar ballad as the principal mode for popular song, and the Broadway stage as the key place for this new innovative sound. George Gershwin specifically cites this song as his inspiration for becoming a stage rather than pop composer. It immediately inspired imitations, and from this time, Broadway became a prime source of American musical standards. Thus, the number has a fair claim as the most important song ever written for Broadway.

Kern went on to cement his reputation from 1915 with his innovative Princess Theater musicals along with two British partners, librettist Guy Bolton and lyricist and humorist P.G. Wodehouse. The size of the theater, with only 299 seats, did not allow for large casts or elaborate sets, and put the audience very close to the performers. The creators thus relied instead on wit, intelligent lyrics, stories and subjects that were close to the audience’s experience, a naturalistic style of performance, and above all Kern’s graceful melodies. Though farcical and light, the plot and characterizations were basically realistic, ensuring that the jokes and songs all arose naturally from the story. Those shows are considered old-fashioned now and rarely revived, but they were a key step in the development of the musical as an art form, making Kern in some ways the father of the modern musical.

Composers displace producers as driving force behind musicals

Musical theater gained momentum after WWI ended in 1918, and the 1920s proved what is still the busiest musical decade in Broadway history, with as many as 50 new offerings a year. This was the jazz age, when America found its voice, and the epicenter for most of America’s greatest songwriters was the New York stage. Composers had grown in reputation and gained greater power over producers, especially with the formation of ASCAP in 1924. They could prevent producers from inserting random songs by other composers, ensuring that shows would have a single voice. From this time, it is possible to talk of a “Gershwin musical”, “Cole Porter musical”, etc. The musical stories themselves were ephemeral fun, basically tailored to the needs of the stars or whatever songs were available. The flimsy books make these shows almost impossible to revive unless heavily rewritten.

That pattern continued in the 1930s. Competition began to come from the movies, where the first sound picture was itself a musical, The Jazz Singer (1927). Musical movies initially seemed to have difficulty with the Broadway style where characters burst out into song; the first attempts were almost always about singers or dancers, where songs were performed in the context of a show or nightclub or such. (One of those, 42nd Street (1933), was crafted into a huge Broadway hit in the 1980s.) As the genre developed into more sophisticated fare, all the great composers were lured to Hollywood at some point, especially as the Depression took its toll on stage shows. But even the biggest Broadway songwriters had little influence in Hollywood, and the movie world’s cavalier treatment of their music sent most of them in the end back to Broadway, where they had creative control.

Despite scattered efforts, main musical aim is escapism

Broadway did see some ambitious pieces in the 1930s, such as political satire (Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, Rodgers & Hart’s I’d Rather Be Right, Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, etc), adult-themed shows (Rodgers & Hart’s Pal Joey), and opera (Gershwin’s epic Porgy and Bess). And the songs in general remained at an extremely high level that even Broadway itself has rarely since exceeded. But by and large, the musical was a showpiece for specific performers or composers loosely tied together by a comical story. There was no attempt to match the style of the songs to the show’s nominal setting, and certain elements, such as the love ballad and big chorus number, were expected regardless of the story. The aim was pure wonderful escapism.

Golden Age begins

That continued into the war years of the 1940s. The year 1943 opened with the wacky Something For The Boys, the latest success by the great songwriter Cole Porter and the big belting star Ethel Merman about a woman in Texas whose tooth fillings picked up radio signals from the enemy. But it was another show a few months later, set coincidentally in the neighboring state, Oklahoma, that proved not only the breakout hit of the season but a landmark in Broadway history, marking the beginning of the Golden Age of the American Musical. The story of that show, Oklahoma!, is told below.