A boy from one immigrant group and a girl from another are in love, much to the ire of their respective families. Two rival ethnic groups go to a dance at a local hall, and tensions are high. While these scenarios sound as if they belong to West Side Story, they are actually plot points from The Mulligan Guard Ball, a musical comedy from 1879. The similarity between the scenarios leads to the idea of palimpsests, where echoes of earlier works appear in later ones. According to the Chicago School of Media Theory at the University of Chicago, a palimpsest is
a parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing. In other words, a palimpsest is a ‘multi-layered record.’1
This notion helps us understand how various themes continue to appear and reappear in the American musical. The musical theatre is a gigantic palimpsest of multiple historical and stylistic layers, various folds where things get hidden, and typographical features such as venues, creators, and performers. Some subjects seem to permeate musicals for a time, then disappear, only to return decades later, while others seem to have a fairly solid presence. Among those that maintain a continual presence is the broad notion of social relevance. Following Bruce Kirle’s now commonplace thesis, musicals are products of the time and place of their creation.2 Therefore a significant part of any musical’s identity rests within its contemporary social–cultural relevance. This chapter explores how a handful of socially relevant topics – immigrant experiences, race, knife violence, politics, and the allure of Latin America – were performed on Broadway musical stages before West Side Story’s appearance in 1957. Traces of these earlier shows in West Side Story reveal that the subject of this Companion resides in a continuum of musical theatre productions in which various palimpsests concerning social relevance can be discerned.
Immigrant Experiences
A vibrant musical theatre existed in and for various immigrant communities throughout the United States from the nineteenth century through World War II.3 Performances in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Yiddish were common occurrences on ethnic stages across the country. Many of the shows that appeared on these stages concerned the immigrant experience – after all, the target audience for these productions consisted of immigrants.
One of the most significant figures in New York’s German American theatrical scene was Adolf Philipp (1864–1936), an actor–singer–composer–playwright–impresario whose immigrant-themed works include Der Corner Grocer aus der Avenue A (1893), Der Pawnbroker von der Eastside (1894), and Der Butcher aus der Erste Avenue (1895). Philipp typically starred in his own productions. For example, in Der Corner Grocer aus der Avenue A, he played Hein Snut (translated as Henry (Big) Mouth), the title character who brings about the comeuppance of a former barber who lives beyond his means.4 While most characters in the tale are German, the cast did include one Irishman, ‘Herr’ McGinty, who speaks Irish-affected German.5 Philipp’s music is direct in appeal and sentiment, with diatonic harmonies, regular periodic phrase structure, syllabic text setting (making the words easy to understand), and an abundance of waltz refrains. Such musical style befits the background of his central European immigrant characters and audiences.
German and Irish immigrants also feature in Edward Harrigan’s The Mulligan Guard Ball (1879, revised 1883 and 1892, music by David Braham).6 Harrigan created the character of the Irish immigrant Dan Mulligan in 1873, and played him in a series of ‘Mulligan’ musical comedies through the 1890s. In The Mulligan Guard Ball, Dan’s son, Tommy, wants to marry Kitty,7 the daughter of the German butcher Gustavus Lochmuller. Dan is very much against the idea and thinks his son should marry an Irish girl. To complicate matters, Kitty’s mother, Bridget, is Irish and does not want her daughter to make the same mistake she did by marrying a German boy. Interethnic marriage is discouraged, as it is in West Side Story.
Central to the storyline of The Mulligan Guard Ball is the relationship between Irish immigrants and African Americans. From the 1850s, Irish immigrants and blacks were living in the same districts8 and, though the Irish supported abolition, tensions arose as Irish immigrants began taking over the jobs of free blacks by offering to work at a lower wage.9 The Irish, who had been what David R. Roediger terms one of the ‘in-between peoples,’10 since they were Northern Europeans but not Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were able to become white by aligning themselves with white groups, which they did. Drawing on the writings of James Baldwin, Roediger asserts, ‘Joining in acts of racism against people of color made immigrants white over time.’11 The Polish immigrants in West Side Story, Tony’s community, would have also participated in this process of becoming white.
Since white immigrants took over jobs that paid wages, displaced blacks had to turn to self-employment and trades such as chimneysweeps and bootblacks.12 These work-related tensions infuse The Mulligan Guard Ball. Dan Mulligan works at a gas factory, and Gustavus Lochmuller is a butcher. They both have stable incomes. By contrast, Simpson Primrose, one of the main black characters, is a self-employed barber. Significant in terms of performance, Primrose, along with the chaplain Palestine Puter, were played in blackface by ‘Negro impersonators’ Billy Gray and Johnny Wild.13 The blacks resent the Irish in The Mulligan Guard Ball. Their ‘Order of Full Moons,’ which Puter calls a ‘secret colored society to prevent de Irish from riding on horse cars,’14 points back at groups who kept blacks from using public transportation.
The Irish Mulligan Guard and the black Skidmore Guard plan balls for the same evening. When the hall where the Skidmore Guards planned their ball is closed, they end up being moved to the Harp and Shamrock Hall, which had already been booked for the Mulligan Guard Ball. The Harp and Shamrock is a place, says Puter, where a Full Moon cannot go ‘widout trouble.’15 When the Skidmore Guard arrive, after fearing an ambush, they leave their muskets in the hat rack, but carry razors to protect themselves from the Irish, who Puter describes in strongly racist terms. The Mulligans and the Skidmores come to an agreement: the Skidmores will go upstairs and the Mulligans will take the ground floor. During the balls, the ceiling gives way, causing mayhem when the Skidmores fall through and land on top of the Mulligans. Racial tensions on both sides live at the surface of The Mulligan Guard Ball, as they do in West Side Story.
In 1947, almost seventy years after the first incarnation of The Mulligan Guard Ball, two musicals concerning immigrant experiences and relationships between races opened on successive evenings: Street Scene on 9 January (book by Elmer Rice, music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Langston Hughes) and Finian’s Rainbow on 10 January (book by E. Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy, music by Burton Lane, lyrics by Harburg). Street Scene includes immigrants from various European countries, while Finian’s Rainbow features only an Irish father, daughter, and leprechaun.
Among Street Scene’s New York tenement dwellers are immigrants from Italy, Sweden, Ireland, and Germany. Playing into racist stereotypes, there’s also a Jewish intellectual (Sam Kaplan, the romantic lead, a tenor) and a black janitor (Henry Davis, a baritone). The sundry cast of characters ‘finds an analogue for its ethnic diversity in its musical diversity,’ writes Stephen Hinton.16 When it comes to musical depictions of immigrant groups, the ‘Ice Cream Sextet’ evokes the spirit of Neapolitan song not only through its fast-paced sections in 6/8 but also by being led by a quintessential Italian tenor, Lippo Florentino. Henry’s ‘I Got a Marble and a Star,’ the second number in the show, likewise bears a strong blues influence, its style functioning as a racial signifier for African Americans.
Whiteness is performed through operatic-sounding music. The Maurrants – husband/father Frank, wife/mother Anna, and children Rose and Willie – are the generationally established white American family. Frank yearns for the ‘safe and sound’ world before the ‘lousy foreigners’ arrived. The Maurrants’ music, as well as that of Rose’s beloved, Sam, sets them – and their tragedies – apart from the other characters in the story. Musical style is not wholly segregated, for blues elements feature in the show’s opening number, ‘Ain’t it awful, the heat?’ and in Sam’s aria, ‘Lonely House.’
Finian’s Rainbow, which its authors called ‘a musical satire,’ concerns Finian McLonergan and his daughter Sharon, who arrive in Rainbow Valley in the mythical state of Missitucky (a fusion of Mississippi and Kentucky) from Ireland with a pot of gold stolen from the leprechaun Og. Whereas Street Scene operates under the tenets of realism, Finian’s Rainbow is a fable, rich in elements of fantasy. Unlike Senator Billboard Rawkins and his cronies, the sharecroppers who live in Rainbow Valley welcome Finian and Sharon. Rawkins remarks at one point, ‘My whole family’s been havin’ trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country [emphasis in original]!’17 Rawkins’s anti-immigrant, white supremacist attitude causes Sharon to wish, over the pot of gold, that he become black. Her wish comes true, and Rawkins experiences the racist slurs and treatment he so willfully lashed onto others. The Irish characters – Finian, Sharon, and Og – generally come across as the ones promoting antiracism, offering lessons to all the residents of Rainbow Valley. Likewise, it is their music, such as ‘How are Things in Glocca Morra?,’ ‘Look to the Rainbow,’ and ‘Old Devil Moon,’ that remain the most endearing songs from the show.
Race
Whiteness and racism run rampant throughout the history and legacy of the American musical. This is strongly evident in West Side Story, with Tony’s immigrant Polish community having become white, something that is not possible for the Puerto Ricans, many of whom would have sub-Saharan ancestry as a result of the Spanish slave trade.
Minstrelsy, which consisted of performances by whites in blackface of imagined black experiences with overt racist language and mannerisms, flourished on American stages in the nineteenth century. Blacks also appeared in minstrelsy, donning the requisite blackface. In the African American musicals that began to appear with greater frequency around the turn of the twentieth century, John Graziano asserts that ‘minstrelsy and racial pride coexist uncomfortably.’18 A corollary exists in West Side Story with its juxtaposition of performed racial stereotypes amidst a quest for betterment among the Puerto Rican immigrants.
The team of Bert Williams (1876–1922) and George Walker (1872–1911) starred in a series of musical comedies about black experiences that included In Dahomey (1903, book by Jesse A. Shipp, lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar, music by Will Marion Cook) and Abyssinia (1906, book and lyrics by Shipp and Alexander Rogers; music by Cook and Bert Williams). In the former, a group of African Americans living in Florida journey to Dahomey as part of a colonization society, where they are imprisoned and sentenced to death before being rescued by the Williams and Walker characters.19 In Dahomey, with its depiction of rule and order in Dahomey as being ‘uncivilized,’ endorses Ibram X. Kendi’s remarks on the founding of the American Colonialization Society in 1817, ‘Africans in America had received their knowledge of Africa and their racist ideas from White Americans.’20 The African Americans in In Dahomey certainly saw themselves as superior to the ‘savages’ of Dahomey. They performed on stage what W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed in 1900 at the First Pan-African Conference, ‘To be sure, the darker races are today the least advanced in culture according to European standards.’21 Du Bois, following assimilationist racist thought, advocated for gradual decolonization since in his estimation African nations were not yet advanced enough for independence. His words echoed those of his contemporaries who were saying the same thing about the colonies that the USA acquired after winning the Spanish-American War, places such as Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and, relevant to West Side Story, Puerto Rico.22
The inappropriately heavy punishments for minor offenses from In Dahomey continued in Abyssinia. In the latter show, however, the Abyssinians are viewed as culturally superior to their African American visitors by speaking a stilted parody of ‘King’s English,’ while the speech of the African Americans evoked the demeaning sounds of minstrelsy.23 The show opened in February 1906, three months before Franz Boaz gave his famous commencement address at Atlanta University. The noted anthropologist recalled the glories of precolonial West African kingdoms, telling the assembly: ‘To those who stoutly maintain a material inferiority of the negro race, the past history of your race does not sustain [that] statement.’24 Abyssinia played on a combination of these conflicting notions of racial pride and gradual decolonization, as would West Side Story.
Before Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) became ‘Rodgers and Hammerstein,’ they each created works that dealt with race. Hammerstein’s lyrics and libretti explored relationships between whites and various peoples of colour: indigenous nations in Rose-Marie (1924, music by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart), Moroccans under French colonial rule in The Desert Song (1926, music by Sigmund Romberg), and African Americans in Show Boat (1927, music by Jerome Kern). In Show Boat Hammerstein and Kern offered a serious portrayal and interrogation of issues facing African Americans, especially during the miscegenation scene, when Julie’s mixed-race heritage is revealed.25 In Rodgers’s case, the show was Babes in Arms (1937, book by Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, music by Rodgers, lyrics by Hart). To avoid being sent to a work farm as public charges after their parents go on the vaudeville circuit, Val and Marshall convince the sheriff that they can earn money by putting on a show. Among those who want to join the production are the African American siblings Irving and Ivory De Quincy. The wealthy white guy Lee Calhoun, who is underwriting the show and therefore is its producer, refuses to let the De Quincys perform on racist grounds. Val smacks him and sends the pair on stage for the show-within-a-show’s dance-heavy finale, ‘Johnny One-Note Ballet.’ (Lee ends up pulling his financing, which drives Val and his friends to the work farm, but everything works out at the end. It is a musical comedy, after all.)
When it comes to Rodgers and Hammerstein as a team, race is central to three of their musicals: South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and Flower Drum Song (1958), the latter appearing on the heels of West Side Story. While all three have been heavily criticized for their racist portrayals of Asian and Pacific cultures, they nonetheless perform ways in which different cultures interact, something that is central to West Side Story. White colonial attitudes dominate, even in South Pacific’s socially progressive dictate, ‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.’
Opening the same year as South Pacific, Lost in the Stars (1949, book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, music by Weill) took place in apartheid South Africa and concerned a young black man, Absalom Kumalo, accused of killing a white man during a botched robbery. Called a ‘musical tragedy,’ the work reflects the experiences of the black community, embodied by the chorus that occupies the work’s musical (and therefore dramatic) center, and Absalom’s father, the preacher Stephen Kumalo.26 Among the musical’s most poignant moments is the choral anthem ‘Cry, the Beloved Country’ (its title taken from the Alan Paton novel on which the musical is based), sung immediately after the white judge sentences Absalom to death. The antiphonal effects of black and white choruses in ‘Fear!’ is a harrowing manifestation of the anxieties caused by white-against-black violence. Weill’s idea of race-based choruses as characters is prescient of Bernstein’s treatment of the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story.
Two musicals by white creators that offered images of African American cultures became important touchstones for such representations: the Broadway opera Porgy and Bess (1935, libretto by DuBose Heyward, music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Heyward and Ira Gershwin) and Oscar Hammerstein II’s adaptation of George Bizet’s opera Carmen, Carmen Jones (1943, orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett; film version 1954). Both feature entirely black casts (with the exception of small speaking parts for law enforcement characters in Porgy and Bess), and both have been interrogated for their staging of negative black stereotypes.27 The rhapsodic score of the former and vibrant re-fashionings of Bizet’s music in the latter have kept both works in the public consciousness. Similar remarks could be made about West Side Story, its racist depictions of Puerto Ricans, and its captivating music.
Knife Violence
The intense rage associated with knife violence, the close proximity of bodies, and the physical force required make this type of killing intensely personal and terrifyingly visceral.28 When Tony stabs Bernardo in West Side Story, the scene becomes part of a stage legacy dating back to antiquity. In terms of the operatic stage, some of the most famous on-stage knifings include Don José’s stabbing of the title character at the end of Bizet’s Carmen (1875), Canio’s double murder of Nedda and Silvio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892), Tosca’s slaying of Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca (1899, first performed 1900), and the eponymous character’s slaughtering of Marie under a blood red moon in Berg’s Wozzeck (1914–1922, first performed 1925).29
Knifings also occur in the plots of Broadway musicals in the first half of the twentieth century, though not with the frequency they do in the second half. Two of the most famous (or infamous) occur in Rose-Marie (1924) and Oklahoma! (1943, book and lyrics by Hammerstein, music by Richard Rodgers). In Rose-Marie, Wanda stabs her husband, the aggressive drunkard Blackeagle. According to the libretto, the scene is played behind a stage gauze, something that removes its intense directness while also offering the possibility to literally magnify the crime – and its horror – through lighting and shadows. As in Rose-Marie, a character marked with violent tendencies dies by the knife in Oklahoma! Here it is Jud Fry, who falls on his own blade during a fight with Curly.
Other types of violence appear in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. For example, there’s Billy’s horrific spousal abuse of Julie in Carousel (1945) and in The King and I, the king’s threatened beating of Tuptim and the brutal off-stage killing of her lover, Lun Tha. In the case of The King and I, the violence is linked to race in highly troubling ways, as it is in West Side Story.
Politics
A string of musicals from the 1930s employed satire as a way of addressing contemporary political and politicized issues. West Side Story’s ‘Gee, Officer Krupke,’ with its burlesque treatment of issues facing youth set to fast-paced razzmatazz music, has clear precedents in these shows.
The effervescence of musical comedy permeates a trio of works with songs by George and Ira Gershwin that played early in the decade: Strike Up the Band (1930, revised from 1927), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and its sequel, Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933). All three shows lampoon aspects of American political life at the time.
Morrie Ryskind’s book for Strike Up the Band offers a satirical look at the motivations for war. In George S. Kaufman’s scenario, the owner of a Connecticut-based cheese company underwrites a war between the USA and Switzerland in response to the Swiss protesting a US-imposed 50 percent tariff on imported cheese. As Howard Pollack asserts, the musical focused not on the absurdity of the war itself but rather on ‘the intolerance, paranoia, hypocrisy, self-serving moralizing, and exaggerated patriotism on the home front.’30 These qualities are clearly evident in the show’s march-like title song.
Of Thee I Sing, with a book by Kaufman and Ryskind, includes the impeachment trial of a sitting US president, something considered remarkable at the time, since the only one to have taken place to date was of Andrew Johnson in 1868, and he was not convicted. In Of Thee I Sing, President John P. Wintergreen, who was elected on a platform of love, chose to marry a campaign worker, Mary Turner, who bakes delicious corn muffins, rather than Diana Devereaux, who won the beauty contest tied to his campaign. Diana vows revenge, causing bad publicity. Wintergreen’s advisors suggest he resign to quell the public relations crisis, and when he refuses to do so, they impeach him. As the Senate is about to deliver its verdict, Mary enters and tells everyone that she is pregnant. The vice president, Alexander Throttlebottom, declares that there’s no precedent for impeaching an ‘expectant father,’ and the case evaporates. Larry Starr succinctly describes the basic message of the show: ‘American politics are haphazard, unburdened by principle, and readily swayed on the spur of the moment.’31 Gershwin’s music matches the dramatic need at any given point in the show, whether it’s the campaign march ‘Wintergreen for President,’ the jaunty title song, the slightly syncopated love song ‘Who Cares,’ or the extended musical-dramatic sequences such as the Act 1 finale. Just as Bernstein will do in his indictment of social issues in West Side Story, music here serves specific dramatic purposes.
Let ’Em Eat Cake, as a sequel to Of Thee I Sing, features Wintergreen, Mary, and Throttlebottom, all played by the same actors who created the roles. Wintergreen has lost his bid for reelection to John P. Tweedledee, and when the Supreme Court denies the incumbent’s request to overturn the landslide vote, he and his followers enter the garment industry and start a blue-shirt revolution, modeled on Hitler’s brown shirts and Mussolini’s black shirts. They stage a coup and Wintergreen becomes ‘dictator of the proletariat’ and turns the White House into the Blue House, after the colour of his revolution. When the League of Nations beats the US Supreme Court in a baseball game to settle war debts, Wintergreen and his cohort are sentenced to death by guillotine, only to be saved when Mary and the other wives enter wearing new fashions from Paris instead of the state-mandated blue blouses. Wintergreen ends up entering the dress-making business, Tweedledee becomes president of Cuba, and Throttlebottom becomes US president. The innate plot absurdities were perfect means to address the worsening economic depression, the ineptitude of government officials, and the rise of fascism in Europe. The show’s only hit song was the counterpoint song ‘Mine,’ in which Wintergreen declares his steadfast commitment to Mary.32 A much more famous counterpoint song, the ‘Tonight’ (Quintet), will feature prominently in West Side Story.
While the clothing industry was central to the satire in Let ’Em Eat Cake it was the lifeblood of Pins and Needles (1937), a revue featuring left-leaning sketches by Marc Blitzstein, among others, and music and lyrics by Harold Rome. Labor Stage, Inc. produced the show under the sponsorship of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), with members of the union appearing on stage. According to Trudi Wright, a large part of the show’s success came from its tempered political perspective.33 Though still decidedly pro-worker and anti-fascist, it avoided overly radical sentiments, even with such progressively titled songs as ‘Sing Us a Song with Social Significance,’ ‘Doin’ the Reactionary,’ and ‘Four Little Angels of Peace Are We.’
The same night that the politically tempered Pins and Needles opened at the Labor Stage, 27 November, an overtly leftist work, this one entirely the creation of Marc Blitzstein, began playing at the Mercury Theatre. Audiences at The Cradle Will Rock experienced an ‘oratorio version’ of the work that featured Blitzstein at the piano and the principals, in street clothes, seated on a raised platform with the chorus on another platform behind them.34 In Blitzstein’s story, Larry Foreman, a mill foreman in Steeltown USA, organizes his fellow workers and gains the support of the town’s underclass, including the prostitute Moll, against the capitalist Mister family (Mr. Mister, Mrs. Mister, Sister Mister, and Brother Mister) and Mr. Mister’s anti-union Liberty Committee. Blitzstein’s highly sophisticated score played at the banalities of much of the era’s popular music, as in ‘Honolulu,’ while the show’s leftist message came through in its polystylistic and austere-sounding numbers such as the title song, ‘The Freedom of the Press,’ ‘Art for Art’s Sake,’ and ‘The Nickel under Your Foot.’ The show addressed numerous social issues of the time beyond unions and the intimidation of union organizers, including imperialist fantasy, student militia groups, hypermasculinity, and even the preciousness of classical artistes.35 Blitzstein himself remarked that the show concerned the plight of the middle class and its need to look to the future, not the past.36
The tale of the work’s first public performance on 16 June 1937 has become at least as famous as its content. With its genesis in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theater Project, the show’s unapologetic political content in terms of the New Deal and labor unions brought about an injunction against the performance, causing the theatre where it was scheduled to play (the Maxine Elliott) to be padlocked. A theatre broker for producer John Houseman and director Orson Welles found the Venice Theatre empty, booked it, and the troupe performed the decidedly pro-union show with Blitzstein alone on stage at a piano and the cast singing and speaking their lines from the audience, since their union prohibited them from performing on stage.37
Three weeks before Pins and Needles and The Cradle Will Rock began their Broadway runs, a show of a completely different ilk about New Deal policies opened. I’d Rather Be Right (1937, book by Kaufman and Moss Hart, music by Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart) concerns a young couple, Phil and Peggy, who want to marry. However, they do not think it prudent unless Phil gets a pay raise, something that won’t happen until Roosevelt balances the federal budget. In a dream sequence, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (played by George M. Cohan) tries all sorts of absurd ways to balance the budget, but, in the end, he is unable to do so and encourages the young couple to marry anyway, adding that he needs another term in office in order to balance the budget and restore the country’s happiness. Most reviews deemed it a kindhearted attempt at political satire, with Roosevelt portrayed as, according to Garrett Eisler, ‘a well-meaning grandfatherly figure surrounded by dubious advisors.’38 The script sharply targeted various aspects of the New Deal – for example, the high taxes directed at the wealthy, Social Security, the Federal Theatre Project, and organized labor – to the point where numerous scholars, including Eisler, deem it essentially right wing.39 The show includes Roosevelt’s press conference number ‘Off the Record,’ performed in a style reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan as the creators jabbed at ineffective or unqualified government officials.
The New Deal also figures in the plot of Knickerbocker Holiday (1938, book by Anderson, lyrics by Anderson and Weill, music by Weill), which relates the story of Pieter Stuyvesant, the tyrannical governor of Manhattan in the seventeenth century.40 Based on Washington Irving’s satire, The History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), it takes a pre-existent text and infuses it with contemporary references, not completely unrelated to what Arthur Laurents did when transforming Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into West Side Story. Among the many politically charged songs in the show is ‘How Can You Tell an American?’, a duet for Washington Irving, who functions as the show’s narrator and brings about a happy denouement, and Brom Broeck, the show’s anti-Stuyvesant rabble rouser. Through sprightly music and clever list-song lyrics, the pair define an American as someone who cannot take orders (is defiant) and hates corruption (promotes justice). Other politically infused songs include the anthem-like ‘One Touch of Alchemy,’ in which Stuyvesant’s democratic reform appears to be indistinguishable from tyranny, and the buoyant ‘Ballad of the Robbers,’ the Act 2 opening in which Irving observes that the real criminals run free while the good guys (Brom) are locked behind bars.
Bernstein, Blitzstein, and Weill
The socially conscious musicals from the 1930s certainly resonated with Bernstein. On 27 May 1939, while a senior at Harvard, he led the greater Boston premiere of The Cradle Will Rock at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre with the support of the Harvard Student Union and several faculty sponsors.41 Following Blitzstein’s model, Bernstein played the piano on-stage (and from memory), announced the scenes, and played some bit parts. The production sparked controversy from a local politician, while the critics praised it.
On 14 June 1952, while on the faculty at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, Bernstein conducted a concert performance of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera as part of the university’s Festival of the Creative Arts (which Bernstein founded). Blitzstein prepared the translation of the team’s Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) and also served as the performance’s narrator, echoing his role in the early performances of The Cradle Will Rock. This concert was the impetus for a ‘Weill renaissance’ in the 1950s that included a production of The Threepenny Opera at the Theater de Lys in Greenwich Village that ran 2,611 performances.42
The Allure of Latin America
In his 1933 inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated himself and his administration to a ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ intended to improve relations between the USA and the nations of Central and South America. He emphasized cooperation and trade as the means to maintain this relationship, rather than military intervention. The plan kept Latin American nations aligned with the USA during World War II but began to unravel in the 1940s as the USA began to intervene in domestic affairs in Argentina, then elsewhere. Because of the Good Neighbor Policy, celebratory images of Latin America infused popular entertainment in the USA during the 1930s and 1940s, including Broadway musicals.
One instance was the football-themed campus musical comedy Too Many Girls (1939, book by George Marion, Jr., lyrics by Lorenz Hart, music by Rodgers). The story concerns a scandal-prone East Coast heiress, Consuelo Casey (despite her name, she’s white), whose father sends her to his alma mater, Pottawatomie College in Stop Gap, New Mexico, to keep her out of trouble. He hires four bodyguards to watch over her, all of whom are college-age football players. Of course, she falls in love with one of them. In his breakout role, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz (1917–1986) played Manuelito, an Argentine star of prep-school American football (not soccer). Manuelito’s love interest is Pepe, a student from Mexico. The Puerto Rican-born entertainer Diosa Costello (1913–2013) played Pepe, and in doing so, became known as the first Latina to appear on Broadway.43 Manuelito and Pepe’s race-based romantic segregation, along with the show’s avoidance of interracial romance, leads to a racist idea of ‘exotic but equal’ when it comes to romantic couples in Too Many Girls. Individually and together, Pepe and Manuelito performed several cringeworthy-titled songs that reflected a collective Latin American identity which erases cultural distinctions. After all, a Cuban actor is playing an Argentine character who performs the idea of Mexican music.
Feting South America was central to the revue Sons o’ Fun (1943), which extolled the comic antics of the team Olsen and Johnson (vaudevillians Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson). Extravagant production numbers such as ‘Thank You, South America’ and ‘Manuelo’ featured dynamic performances by the Spanish-born flamenco team of Rosario and Antonio (also known as Los Chevalillos) and the future Hollywood icon, Brazilian Carmen Miranda.
References to Latin America continued to appear in musicals during the early 1950s. In Guys and Dolls (1950, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows), Sky Masterson takes Sarah Brown to Havana, where after drinking a ‘Cuban milkshake,’ which unbeknownst to her includes rum, she kisses Sky and sings ‘If I Were a Bell.’ The first act of Bernstein’s Wonderful Town (1953, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov) ends with the high-energy ‘Conga,’ which begins with Ruth, a recent New York arrival, and a group of Brazilian naval cadets. Before the number ends, all of Christopher Street, where Ruth lives with her sister, have joined in the celebration.
* * *
West Side Story rests on a dynamic array of palimpsests, as this chapter demonstrates. The Broadway musical encompasses a rich heritage of shows concerning immigrant experiences, race, knife violence, politics, and the allure of Latin America. Building on performances of immigrant lives and race relations in The Mulligan Guard Ball through political satires in the 1930s to the nascent presence of Latinx actors and music in light of the Good Neighbor Policy, West Side Story forms an important part of the American musical theatre’s ongoing legacy of social relevance.
