(A sample chapter that I wrote for a planned book on the Broadway musical intended 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: Oklahoma! (1943)

In 1943, as America was fighting on both sides of the water in WWII, Broadway saw the debut of perhaps the most influential show in American musical theater history. Oklahoma! not only become one of the most successful musicals ever written but single-handedly transformed the landscape of Broadway.

Musicals of the 1920s and 1930s had been mostly light entertainment, designed as showcases for singing and dancing – the genre itself, in fact, was known more commonly as “musical comedy”. (Operetta was a separate genre with a more European influence.) Songs were written for specific performers or general situations – love song, dance song, chorus song, etc. – and the stories were forgettable fun. Al Jolson, one of the biggest entertainers of the era (best known today as the star of the first sound film, The Jazz Singer), would sometimes halt his shows midway, summarize the rest of the plot for the audience, and simply sing his greatest hits. The music was king, and the plots were an excuse to sing. That’s not necessarily a bad thing given that the musicians were George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and others, the greatest collection of musical geniuses that America has ever produced. Indeed, those decades, while perhaps not a Golden Age of American Musicals, were a Golden Age of American Music, an era that has never been surpassed. But that’s another book.

As a result, unlike the songs themselves, few of the shows from that era are revivable unless heavily rewritten, like the Japanese favorites Anything Goes (1934, revived 1987) and Crazy for You (originally named Girl Crazy, 1930, revived 1992), which have new scripts and songs. Also, the songs tended to have a distinct New York sensibility regardless of where the show was nominally set, with polished lyrics and an urban jazzy sound. Crazy For You, for example, takes place in a lazy mining town in the western US, but its heart is back on the dynamic East Coast with a jazzy Gershwin score. In another famous case, the producer took a musical set in Budapest and inserted a number he liked about New York’s Radio City Music Hall, which didn’t hurt the show’s success one bit. The composer in that case was Richard Rodgers, who only five years later, in Oklahoma!, would make this entire notion archaic.

Rodgers already had a nearly 25-year career as a successful composer with his college acquaintance, the brilliant lyricist Lorenz Hart, producing a string of popular songs (e.g. “My Funny Valentine”, “Blue Moon”, “My Romance”) that remain among the goldest of gold standards. But Hart, who struggled with alcoholism and various insecurities, was ill and wanted a rest, so Rodgers turned to another of their college friends, Oscar Hammerstein II. Hammerstein, who wrote both books and lyrics for musicals, was a major figure in musical theater back in the 1920s with his involvement in some of the era’s best-known operettas and the seminal Showboat. However, he had since fallen into a long slump. He and his old friend had coincidentally both taken an interest in a fairly obscure play about a farming town in the Midwest called Green Grows the Lilacs, and Hammerstein was supposed to write only the book to a Rodgers and Hart score. However, with Hart’s blessing, he agreed to write the lyrics as well.

Oklahoma! had no stars, no spectacle, no comedians, no choruses of beautiful women. (One critic famously wired when the show was still in previews: “No girls, no gags, no chance.”) Financing was extremely difficult to secure, which is understandable: the source play was not a big success, Hammerstein seemed washed up after more than a decade of six consecutive failures, Rodgers was working for the first time without his long-term partner, neither the director nor choreographer had worked on a financially successful musical, there were no stars (Mary Martin had turned them down). Moreover, by the standards of the day, the story was hardly compelling. Set around 1900, when the territory of Oklahoma was still being settled and not yet an official state, the plot is about little more than whether a handsome cowboy or scary ranch-hand will take a pretty young girl to the town picnic.

But the show is much more than that. It is set in untamed land in the middle of a vast continent, an unknown terrain of ever-potential danger but unlimited possibilities where settlers can invent new societies and reinvent themselves in the process – cowboys, farmers, housewives, pioneers, all starting with nothing but soil and pluck. The makeshift court scene toward the show’s end, when Curly appears before a provisional judge, shows a community in the process of creation, forming its laws and standards practically as it goes along. The story encompasses young love and community spirit but also a violent death in both the first act (in Laurey’s dream) and the second, a reminder of the looming darkness amid the light. Nevertheless, the show takes place against a backdrop of immense optimism for the future. In other words, the show, while hugely entertaining in its own right – it was the longest-running musical in Broadway history until My Fair Lady as well as a highly lucrative film – had much more on its mind than just singing and dancing.

Moreover, the music in those songs was not New York jazz, but a less showy and simpler (on the surface) sound that approximated the robust straightforwardness of the new unsettled land. In a first for both sides, Hammerstein wrote the lyrics first alongside the book, and Rodgers composed the music later; that is, Rodgers was not just composing random songs but setting an entire story in music. The musical numbers were tailored not to certain stars – the show had none – but to the sounds of the individual characters, so that the romantic Laurey has lilting waltzes while her flirty friend Ado Annie has a comic sound, and the hero Curly has a buoyant and confident tone while the villain Jud Fry has more brooding numbers in minor key. Laurey sings about “the hush of falling shadows”, while Ado Annie bemoans earthily that “I cain’t say no”; Curly sings robustly “We know we belong to the land/And the land we belong to is grand”, while Jud broods, “I sit by myself/Like a cobweb on the shelf/By myself in a lonely room.” Each sings in words and melodies tailored to their specific characters. In an example of art becoming life, the rousing title number was actually adopted by Oklahoma as its state song. The show was closer in spirit to opera, where the music is determined by, and enhances, the story.

The show notably opens not with the typical exuberant chorus of beautiful women, but with an old lady on a quiet stage. An a capella voice from offstage sings straightforwardly, “Oh, what a beautiful morning, / Oh, what a beautiful day”, and a cowboy strolls onto stage. The cowboy is not being ironic or funny but openly sentimental, apparently a big shock in its day. This could never have been written by even the greatest of the earlier songwriters such as Cole Porter or Rodgers’ previous partner Lorenz Hart, who were more concerned with the workings of the song itself than its setting – they were selling the song, not the show. It is still one of the American musical’s most effective opening numbers. For urban audiences in New York, who were used to the supreme champagne fare of the great jazz composers, this simple innocence took them instantly to a land of romance in an America just a generation or two earlier, a land that was still creating itself. The show’s timing at the height of a global war might have been lucky, as its frankly homespun sentiment was a reminder of everything America was fighting for.

Not everything was sung: the musical’s core scene is a tense contest, entirely spoken, where the hero Curly and villain Jud bid against each other for the right to take the heroine Laurey to the picnic. The authors chose their musical moments wisely, adding songs – i.e., poetry –when dialogue alone was insufficient. For example, in “People Will Say We’re In Love”, the hero and heroine pretend not to want each other – “Don’t laugh at my jokes too much”, “Don’t stand in the rain with me”, “Don’t dance all night with me / Till the stars fade from above” – while obviously hinting at just the opposite. Laurey dreams of love with an imaginary partner in idealistic terms that are only vaguely expressed – “Out of my dreams and into your arms I long to fly” – but made clear in the gloriously romantic music that accompanies them. The title song is a vivid expression of the robust optimism that drives the young pioneers forward: “We know we belong to the land / And the land we belong to is grand!” The songs are inseparable from the story and the characters; that is, the show cannot exist without them. They take the story to a different level.

Another crucial innovation was the use of ballet not as a simple diversion but to augment the story – as the old saying goes, when words are not enough, sing; when songs are not enough, dance. Rodgers himself had introduced a ballet into one of his musicals several years earlier (On Your Toes, which came to Japan in a 1990s revival), but that was a show about a ballet teacher. This time, choreographer Agnes de Mille, well-known in the world of serious dance but a virtual novice on Broadway, created dances that sprang from the unspoken emotions of the characters. The most notable example is the famous “dream ballet”, when Laurey dreams of who she will accompany to the town social. Trying to make Curly jealous, she has accepted an invitation from the creepy farmhand Jud, but immediately regrets her decision. Unable to verbalize or even understand her own feelings, she dreams in dance: her vision of married life with Curly becomes a nightmare when Jud appears and kills Curly. Book writer Hammerstein had reportedly envisioned a circus setting, but de Mille wanted sex, retorting, “Girls don’t dream about the circus. They dream about horrors. And they dream dirty dreams.” These were thoughts that even Laurey herself wasn’t consciously aware of, so that the ballet highlighted an emotional point that was impossible for the text itself to capture. This again brought the musical closer to opera than light entertainment. The style of the ballet, along with all the other dances in the show, was pure Americana, tailored closely to the setting of the book and music.

All that said, no musical can survive on art alone. Oklahoma! boasts some of the most tuneful songs on the American stage, a collection of wonderful characters (including a secondary love story, which became a R&H trademark), boisterous dances, and plenty of great comedy, romance, drama and suspense. It had so many hit songs that it spawned the industry’s first original cast album, creating an entirely new genre. Its art is disguised skillfully as entertainment. With its archetypal portrait of America’s past and its unadorned sentiment, it is a family favorite and remains one of the most produced musicals in America.

Furthermore, it decisively changed the look of the American musical. The core of the musical shifted from the songs to the book. That is, the story became the driving force, and songs emerged from the situation and characters – for example, a love song was not a universal ballad, but a number reflecting a specific character’s feelings for another person in a specific context, which can be quite complex. The roles remain the same regardless of the actor/actress, who must adapt to the character rather than the other way around. Moreover, everything in the show – music, lyrics, dances, costumes, sets – had to work together. In this case, for example, the setting is cowboy territory, so all the elements had to reflect this. As Rodgers pithily put it, “In a successful show, the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look.” The style of Oklahoma! appears typical now, but this is the show that set the style – it was daring and innovative in its day, and the prototype for all the major Golden Age musicals that followed.

Though the show had plenty of empty seats on its opening night, that quickly changed as word caught on, and Broadway was never the same. There is still debate over when the Golden Age of the Musical ended, but there is no doubt as to when it began. Whereas the frothy concoctions of the 20s and 30s are rarely seen nowadays, Oklahoma! remains extremely popular to exactly the same script presented in 1943 – a production in London by the National Theatre in 1998, starring an unknown Hugh Jackman, set box office records. It transformed audience expectations of the musical and paved the way for a more comprehensive experience. Musicals no longer existed just to sell songs, but were works of art in their own right. It was also far more lucrative for the creators, of course, since their work can be revived for generations; this show continues to churn out millions of dollars for the surviving family each year, with the copyright not due to expire until 2049. It is a show that justifies the exclamation point in its title.

In a way, Chikamatsu Monzaemon brought a similar change to Kabuki when he began writing puppet plays in the early 18th century. That is, in order to bring the puppets to life, he had to shift the focus from the idiosyncrasies of individual actors to more interesting stories and characters. When those shows were adapted into Kabuki versions, they seem to have helped prompt a shift in audience tastes away from spectacle towards a deeper art; the actors had to act rather than simply perform. This paralleled what happened on Broadway over two centuries later.

This is effectively the legacy of Oklahoma! With the death of Rodgers’ first partner Hart just a few months later, the show marked the start of the Rodgers and Hammerstein team as the most successful in Broadway history, including the mega-hits Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. (Oddly, Oklahoma! is the only one of those works that has not had a full production in Japan outside of the all-female Takarazuka group. Is it too American and idealistic?) More importantly, it marked a change in the musical itself, creating a new genre. That genre has faced several challenges in the past several decades and may have reached the end of the line. But it remains one of America’s most brilliant cultural achievements, and Oklahoma!, fittingly, given its setting and theme, is the unquestioned pioneer.