1935–1939

In 1935 there were seven new British musicals in the West End, including the ‘sporting farce’ of Twenty to One (music by Billy Mayerl), Love Laughs – !, (music by Noel Gay) and Please Teacher! (music by Jack Waller and Joseph Tunbridge). However, the show that made 1935 a significant year for British musical theatre was Glamorous Night, the first of a series of musicals by Ivor Novello (1893–1951). Novello dominated British musical theatre of the 1930s and 1940s with an extraordinary series of popular stage works that had huge national appeal and yet almost never travelled beyond Britain. At the time of his sudden death in 1951, he was one of the most loved figures of British theatre and a household name. Half a century later he is largely forgotten.

Plate 9 Programme cover from original production of Twenty to One (12 November 1935, Coliseum).

Photograph from private programme collection of John Snelson

Born David Ivor Davies, Ivor Novello formed his professional name from his own middle name and that of his mother, Clara Novello Davies; he changed his name formally to Ivor Novello by deed poll in 1927. Novello first came to public prominence with his music for the song ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, which fast became an anthem of World War I. In 1916 he was co-composer with Jerome Kern on Theodore & Co; in contemporary British terms Novello was the big name and Kern the newcomer. Novello wrote a series of musical shows and revues in the rest of that decade, but his contributions to such works in the 1920s were increasingly subject to his diversions into silent film as a romantic actor. After becoming the country’s foremost matinée idol on film, he began to develop a similar presence in the theatre in the early 1930s. When the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, needed something spectacular to revive its fortunes in 1935, Novello’s combination of musical, theatrical and performing skills made him the ideal choice to create a big new work.

The resulting show, Glamorous Night, was an imaginative concoction of operetta, musical comedy and ballet, with a plot that combined old and new in the romance of a Ruritanian princess and a television inventor. But it was most notable for its scale. Everything about it was indulgent: lines of royal guards, a horse-drawn carriage and a gypsy wedding made the show spectacular. Most strikingly, through the hydraulics of the huge Drury Lane stage, the sinking of a passenger liner was simulated, and photographs of the show reveal how like film was the whole approach. And this is where Novello innovated: he brought the visual, geographical and temporal potential of film to the stage. He followed Glamorous Night with Careless Rapture (1936), Crest of the Wave (1937) and The Dancing Years (1939), which reinforced the image of a ‘Novello’ show as overtly emotive in music, romantically idealised in plot and rich in visual impact.

Today, the reputation of Novello stands in sharp contrast to his contemporary Noël Coward (1899–1973). In many ways their careers are similar. Both occupied the roles of playwright, film and stage actor, composer and (though to a limited extent with Novello) lyricist. They were both icons of their time, with Coward as the urbane sophisticate and Novello as the male romantic ideal. Yet any discussion of British musical theatre keeps returning to Novello as a pivotal figure, while Coward is largely incidental, in opposition to their more general theatrical reputations. Novello’s eight shows were produced consistently between 1935 and 1951, with a common identifiable quality that allows his name to be used as an adjective for that style. Coward’s musical theatre output in the same period constantly changed direction, through Operette (1938), Pacific 1860 (1946), Ace of Clubs (1950) and After the Ball (1954) but continually failed to regain the public appeal of his first ‘operette’ Bitter Sweet (1929). While individual songs, often comic, from Coward’s shows have found a life in cabaret, the lack of a common identity through his diverse stage works has left no sense of a distinct Coward musical theatre style. Coward now has an international profile whereas Novello is barely remembered nationally, although professional revivals of the musicals of both men are almost completely unknown. Despite the temporary boost to Novello’s reputation through his (historically questionable) portrayal in Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park (2001), it is only the British music industry’s annual Ivor Novello Awards that now give his name any significant public prominence.

Today, however, the most widely known British musical of the 1930s, through a modern reworking, is not by either Novello or Coward. Me and My Girl (1937) became an immediate success through both its accessible, tuneful score and a storyline designed to showcase the performer Lupino Lane. The central character of Bill Snibson, a working-class cockney, was developed for the musical Twenty to One (1935), with music by Billy Mayerl (1902–59), who is now best remembered for his syncopated piano style and accompanying piano schools.² Me and My Girl was written to capitalise on the success of the Snibson character as performed by Lane, and with Gay’s score became a success with hit songs. Of its numbers, ‘Leaning on a Lamp-post’ is characteristic of Gay’s ability to write simple, instantly appealing melodies while the success of the cockney strut ‘The Lambeth Walk’, complete with dance steps, gave the name to the film of the show (1939) and achieved remarkable fame. The show ran for 1,646 performances at the Victoria Palace, successfully toured and had West End revivals in 1941, 1945 and 1949. It was a much less sophisticated style of show than that of the Novello romances, relying on a farcical plot, slapstick humour, specialty dances, even audience vocal participation in ‘The Lambeth Walk’, all of which reveal links with the peculiarly British form of the pantomime, whose influence on the British understanding of the musical has generally been neglected.

Novello’s best-remembered and most performed show is The Dancing Years, which opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in March 1939. In the plot the composer Rudi Kleber (the leading male role, played, as usual, by Novello himself) is in love with the opera singer Maria Ziegler (Mary Ellis), but their affair is thwarted through misunderstandings. It was also a political musical, despite the operetta naivety of much of the onstage world, as Novello made his central character an Austrian Jew in order to bring in overt criticism of the Nazi regime. While much of this theme was included in the production, the management tried to remove it on the grounds that it was inappropriate for a musical. It proved to be all too appropriate for the time: as Coward had used the comparison of different ages and their ideals of love in Bitter Sweet, so Novello used a similar chronological contrast between the romantic Austria of operetta and the real effects of German political aspirations of the 1930s.

The music of the show is some of Novello’s finest and includes a number of stylistic references that root the work in European operetta while incorporating the later American developments of the 1920s. Viennese operetta is referenced in the waltzes (the song ‘Waltz of My Heart’ remains one of his most frequently performed and best-known songs) and through many deliberate allusions to Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow), which, in its original London production, had been a formative influence on Novello. In The Dancing Years, for example, the opening section of the concerted number ‘Lorelei’ is based on an inversion of the melody and an exact repetition of the rhythm of the opening chorus of the first act of Lehár’s classic operetta. The solos ‘My Heart Belongs to You’, ‘I Can Give You the Starlight’ and ‘My Dearest Dear’ are expansive 4/4 melodies that show the later influence of Romberg, while the pastiche ‘Primrose’, in the style of an Edwardian musical comedy number, is an acknowledgement of the musical theatre of Novello’s youth. The shifting time periods of the plot, the range of musical influences and the references to contemporary European politics provided a broad base for audience appeal. Yet a cursory glance at listings of long-running shows does not fully indicate the popularity of The Dancing Years. Special circumstances conspired to make Novello’s most long-lived show the least successful if viewed only from the evidence of such raw statistics. Its initial London production ran for only 187 performances, closing on 1 September 1939.

Wartime

When war was declared in September 1939, West End theatres shut in anticipation of immediate bombing and more pressing priorities. Within a few weeks they opened again. In fact, throughout the war, the theatre benefitted from something of a revival of fortunes. There was a high demand for live entertainment to raise morale, and the number of professional actors consequently swelled considerably, so much so that, after war’s end, British Actors’ Equity felt obliged to discuss methods of regulating entry into the profession in order to counter this influx of inadequately trained performers. Not surprisingly there were very few new musicals in the first years of the war, and the revivals included many operetta-style works. These included such comforting favourites as The Desert Song, Chu Chin Chow (which began its initial record-breaking run during World War I), Maid of the Mountains, Rose-Marie, Show Boat and The Merry Widow. Musical comedy revivals included Twenty to One and Me and My Girl. In 1943, however, two West End successes were the new shows Old Chelsea, with music by the singer Richard Tauber, and The Lisbon Story, with music by Harry Parr Davies (1914–1955), more familiar at that time as Gracie Fields’s regular accompanist. The latter show involved British spies and the French resistance and had its heroine killed on stage at the end. It was tuneful, indulgently dramatic and just sufficiently removed in location and events to tread a fine line between reflecting wartime concerns and providing a diversion from them. Novello had one of his few near misses in 1943 with Arc de Triomphe, a biographical musical based on the life of Mary Garden, but reworked as the story of an imaginary French singer, Marie Forêt. For other West End composers it would have been considered a fair run, but 222 performances for Novello was well below his usual expectations. Yet an omnipresent feature of musical theatre around the whole country and in the West End during the war was his earlier show The Dancing Years. It had been deprived of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, at the start of the war when the theatre was taken over as the headquarters of ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association). There was no other sufficiently large theatre available in the West End to which it could move. After a year’s delay, it was launched as a national tour in September 1940, finally returning to the Adelphi in the West End in March 1942 and playing there until July 1944. It was revived again in 1947, filmed in 1950 and entered the amateur dramatic repertory, where it still receives the occasional airing. A television version was broadcast in 1981, which was a rare honour indeed for a British musical. Its presence in the musical theatre world was consequently much greater than the length of its short initial run in London would indicate.

In April 1945, just before peace was declared in Europe, Novello launched his next show at the Hippodrome. Drury Lane was still occupied by ENSA and the association of Novello with that theatre was broken in practice if not in the mind of the public. Perchance to Dream followed an affair through reincarnations of the lovers over three eras: Regency (1818), Victorian (1843) and contemporary (‘193–?’). Novello was able to revel in period costumes, and romantic figures such as the masked highwayman, familiar to audiences through the style of films from the Gainsborough Studio and from the novels of Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier. The show was further decorated with a ‘singing ballet’ called ‘The Triumphs of Spring’, while the music included the waltzes ‘Love Is My Reason’ and ‘Highwayman Love’, and a hugely popular pastiche of a Victorian parlour ballad, ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’.

It was Noël Coward who relaunched Drury Lane after the war, perhaps remembering his great success in that theatre at the start of the 1930s with the celebratory pageant Cavalcade. The resulting work, Pacific 1860, which opened on 19 December 1946, is remembered as something of a disaster, set against a background of an unready and unheated theatre in the middle of a fearsome winter aggravated by fuel shortages and dominated by the miscasting of Mary Martin in the leading role of Elena Salvador. (Serious miscasting also blighted Coward’s 1954 show, After the Ball, in which his nostalgic remembrance of Mary Ellis’s singing proved as out-of-date as the show itself.) As Coward represented an important strand of British theatrical continuity across the divide of World War II, the faltering of such a high-profile work as Pacific 1860 in London’s leading theatre for musicals made it a symbol of perceived British musical theatre decline. In retrospect the judgements of the time on Pacific 1860 seem harsh. There is some wonderfully luxurious music in the score which, although not seeming as much of a whole as Bitter Sweet, still showed Coward to be inventive, and the work is no more indulgent or old-fashioned than the first American show that had opened in London after the war in March 1946, Song of Norway.

1947 and the ‘American Invasion’

The war changed the content and perception of West End musical theatre. A wartime combination of revivals of shows from up to thirty-five years previously with an absence of newer Broadway shows had held British musical theatre in a time warp of its own. London saw few new American musicals between 1939 and 1946, and contemporary Broadway was thus principally represented by Cole Porter (Let’s Face It and DuBarry Was a Lady, both 1942, and Panama Hattie, 1943). The first new American shows to be produced after the end of the war were the contrasting demotic comedy of Follow the Girls (1945), led in his own distinctive performing style by British comedian Arthur Askey, and Song of Norway (1946), whose subject matter, musical style, geographical setting, operetta influences and British casting made it seem anything but an American show. Consequently the impact of the first distinctively American show after the war – Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! in 1947, some four years after Broadway – was significantly heightened. The British public, worn down by years of war and deprivation, principally responded to the escapist image of vigorous youth, but at the same time incorporated other qualities of Oklahoma! to form the notion of a ‘post-Oklahoma!’ musical, a phrase much used at the time but never explicitly defined. Opening shortly after Oklahoma! was Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, with Dolores Gray in the role created on Broadway by Ethel Merman. Again it was rapturously received as the new type of American show and, as with Oklahoma!, the energy and style of performance were emphasised in reviews. In terms of construction and staging these two American shows were far apart: Berlin’s show was an old-fashioned star vehicle using front cloths for scene changes and a ball in Act 2 that is reminiscent of a British pantomime walk-down finale; Rodgers and Hammerstein’s work was more evenly balanced and tightly structured. Crucially in the West End, Oklahoma! began with an almost exclusively American cast with the perceived authentic spirit of youthful America. As the long run progressed, the casting gradually shifted to British performers but with no detriment to the show. Annie Get Your Gun only had two American performers from the start, Dolores Gray as Annie Oakley and Bill Johnson as Frank Butler. So, the performing energy may have been American in spirit but was very much British in execution.

Such distinctions matter. The arrival of Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun created a sense of an ‘American invasion’, and the term is increasingly applied in the late 1940s as indicative of successful, integrated, modern musicals from America driving out of the West End the old-fashioned and feeble British shows. In fact it was not until 1953 that the production of new British musicals collapsed, principally because of the increasing lack of confidence of West End producers who preferred proven Broadway shows to the financial risks of unknown British ones. The idea that ‘British = old’ and ‘American = new’ was given a further spur into being by the long presence in the West End of a British work that had opened just a few weeks before Annie Get Your Gun. Bless the Bride, with book and lyrics by A. P. Herbert and music by Vivian Ellis (1904–96), was hugely successful and challenged the notion of an ‘American invasion’; equally and paradoxically it probably also helped form the concept.

In one sense Bless the Bride seems to reinforce the idea that British musicals in the mid-1940s were old-fashioned. It tells the story of a young English girl, Lucy, in the Victorian England of 1870–71, during the lead-up to and outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. She falls in love with a dashing Frenchman, Pierre, and elopes with him on the morning of her intended marriage to a stereotypical upper-class Englishman, the Honourable Thomas Trout. At the outbreak of the war Pierre joins the French army and Lucy returns to England, distraught. In the last act Pierre, previously thought lost in action, returns and they are reunited. The show capitalised on the period costumes and imagery of its Victorian setting, while Vivian Ellis’s music adopts a Gilbert and Sullivan idiom, considerably more ‘old-fashioned’ than his work for shows before the war, but appropriate to the setting. The show dealt with the consequences of war, but through a sufficiently distant time to dilute the pain of the all-too-recent events, yet contemporary relevance was expressed through, for example, the maiden swept away by the foreign stranger (for which could be read GI), a song to Lucy from her nanny on the eve of her wedding that has more in common with the words of a mother to her son leaving for war, suspicion of foreigners and the eventual return from the dead of a loved one lost in action. Its concerns were specifically (but not exclusively) British, and A. P. Herbert made much of the ambiguous relationship between England and France in witty asides and exaggerated posturing in the script.

Vivian Ellis supported the themes of Herbert’s libretto through music that built up its own patterns of national identity. The English are portrayed in foursquare rhythms and four-part harmony, suggesting a communal and socially rigid character, while the French are given freer melismatic lines in dance rhythms suggesting individuality and freedom. Two examples illustrate the point. The opening of the first act presents a croquet game on the lawn, set as a 6/8 pastorale, but the following introduction of the foreign game of ‘tennis’ (with licentious implications for the prudish British) is set to the equally foreign dance form of the polka. Later, when Pierre seduces Lucy in the shrubbery it is to another continental dance form, that of the waltz in the song ‘I Was Never Kissed Before’, again with sexually charged overtones, and contrasts strongly with the preceding constraint in Lucy’s observations on her own engagement to Thomas Trout. With Trout she acts out of duty and the music is formal and restrained; with Pierre she is driven by emotion and her vocal line becomes increasingly free as the waltz number progresses under the encouragement of Pierre. Such contrasts throughout the work play subtly on British self-image and confidence in the face of Europe and the world. On the surface the show appears to be extremely dated, yet it had strong contemporary undercurrents for a British audience. If West End taste had shifted substantially towards American shows, then Bless the Bride should have failed quickly. Instead, it was hugely popular; but the production was taken off after more than two years while still playing to capacity houses because the theatre impresario C. B. Cochran wanted to try something new with the same creative team of Herbert, Ellis and director Wendy Toye. The subsequent work, Tough at the Top, was not the success for which Cochran had hoped.

The contrast of the plot, musical style and period design of Bless the Bride with those of Annie Get Your Gun and Oklahoma! was striking and reinforced the notion of ‘English = old’ and ‘American = new’. Yet the appeal of the American works in the West End was escapist, while that of the British ones was a subtle reflection of matters still very close to the public psyche. Bless the Bride would have had more limited resonances on Broadway and so never transferred; the concerns of the show are those on an axis between Britain and Europe, not Britain and the United States. To juxtapose Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun with Bless the Bride is thus to compare shows that were through subtext not intended to be on the same continent. However, the received reputation of Bless the Bride from some sixty years on is that of a ‘Victorian’ show failing to reach the length of run of the American import through its dated style and content. A London fringe revival in 1999 was rewritten and restructured by an American director to make the work more accessible. In fact, it removed precisely those elements which gave the work its initial appeal and dramatic motivation. The context of the show is both its strength as a theatrical work and its weakness in entering a contemporary active repertory.

The biggest indication that the West End and Broadway markets were not the same, and that there was a peculiarly British tradition of musical theatre, received its best expression immediately after the war in King’s Rhapsody (1949), the last of Novello’s musical romances. It included everything that was against the spirit of the ‘American invasion’ yet was a great success. Set in the Ruritanian country of ‘Krasnia’, it concerned princes, kings, marriages, mistresses and abdications. The music was lush, with ‘Someday My Heart Will Awake’ in the best Novello waltz-song tradition, and the set pieces included a dramatic coronation scene as the finale of the show. Importantly, it concerned one dominating feature of the British social structure, a focal point at the time of war and an institution that provided a sense of national unity: royalty. Central to King’s Rhapsody is the prince with the foreign mistress who gives up his throne rather than lose her, and the abdication of Edward VIII was a recent memory in the late 1940s. In addition, reference to living people was restricted under the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of the stage at the time, while the portrayal of royalty of the past couple of centuries was forbidden. Consequently, the use of the royal settings of European operetta had become one of the ways in which the British could see expressed on stage issues relating to royalty, and anything that presented the emotions and personal lives of these revered and distant figures was thus tantalising.³ This aspect of the show’s appeal is peculiarly British, and it is hardly surprising from this perspective that one of the great West End successes of the immediate post-war years was never considered a candidate for Broadway.

Plates 10–13

(10) Programme cover from the 1945 revival at the Victoria Palace of Me and My Girl (original premiere 16 December 1937, Victoria Palace). The design is the same as the original cover and Lupino Lane starred in both productions.

Photograph from private programme collection of John Snelson

(11) Programme cover from the original production of Bless the Bride (26 April 1947, Adelphi Theatre).

Photograph from private programme collection of John Snelson

(12) Programme cover from the original production of Gay’s the Word (16 February 1951, Saville Theatre).

Photograph from private programme collection of John Snelson

(13) Programme cover from Expresso Bongo (23 April 1958, Saville Theatre).

Photograph from private programme collection of John Snelson

King’s Rhapsody maintained its popularity throughout its two-and-a-half-year run, with Novello playing the central character of Prince Nikki up until his sudden death from a heart attack just hours after his performance on Monday, 5 March 1951. Obviously the presence of Novello in the cast was a huge draw, but it ran for a further seven months after Novello’s death with his role played by another West End legend, Jack Buchanan. At the time of the show’s eventual closure, box-office receipts confirm that a steady public interest had been maintained at near capacity despite this substitution in the central role. The show could have run in the West End for much longer, but it went on tour from October 1951 until June 1952, still to great acclaim. A film was made in 1955 with Errol Flynn, past his best, in the Novello role. The music was altered so that no number was heard in full and the dubious talents of Anna Neagle did little for the role of the mistress. To compare this with the remarkably faithful and painstaking adaptation to screen of Oklahoma!, released in the same year, is to appreciate how much the British repertory has suffered through an ongoing inaccessibility as a result of a lack of good – or indeed any – significant screen adaptations until those of Half a Sixpence (1967) and Oliver! (1968). While key works of the American repertory are available today on video there is no similar access to British works of the same period.

In the 1940s and 1950s America represented to the British the escapist, the optimistic, the future, all in strong contrast to the daily bleak reality of the after-effects of the war. Not surprisingly British writers of musicals addressed their home audience through the home concerns of the day, particularly those of post-war recovery and sometimes the perceived lack of it. This introversion not only accounts for the impenetrability of some shows at the time to foreign visitors but also explains their increasing irrelevance to more modern generations. Such domestic concerns, although present as subtext (e.g. Bless the Bride), were also presented explicitly. In 1949 Cicely Courtneidge starred in the musical play Her Excellency as a woman ambassador to a South American country, whose main purpose was to secure a meat supply contract for Britain. In many respects the plot foreshadows that of Call Me Madam, but whereas a British audience could understand many of the topical references to American financial imperialism towards Europe in Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse’s American book, the British topical references in Archie Menzies and Harold Purcell’s book defeated American understanding.

The subplot of Her Excellency involves the selling of British furniture to Latin America as part of the British export drive, while the main plot revolves around the British ambassador beating the American ambassador in securing the beef supply contract. Some of the jokes are still funny, but much of the script was concerned with topical references that cannot be understood outside the context of food rationing, which had been introduced soon after the start of the war and was only completely discontinued in 1954.⁴ The particular circumstances of 1947–48 inspired the context of the show as the meat ration hit its lowest level since the start of wartime rationing. The direct supply of beef to Britain from Argentina and not via the canning factories of the United States (as a part of Lend-Lease) was thus a theme of strong practical and symbolic value to a British audience in 1949. The language of the show also invokes symbols of England, with the song ‘Sunday Morning in England’ evoking a national image that played on both a strong and proud past and a tired and run-down present. A crisis of confidence in the country comes through in many British shows of the period as they seek to address the long-term effects of World War II, particularly in the patriotic bolstering of national spirit. For example, Tough at the Top portrays a European princess enamoured of all things English (especially an attractive boxer) and who sings that ‘England Is a Lovely Place’; in 1954 Harry Parr Davies’s setting and Christopher Hassall’s lyrics emote ‘I Leave My Heart in an English Garden’ (Dear Miss Phoebe, 1954). While these expressions of patriotism were hardly new – Ivor Novello’s ‘Rose of England’ from Crest of the Wave is perhaps the best example of all – the grim aftermath of the war required an additional dose of them.

Such nationalistic sentiment does not chime well with a modern audience, set against the tainting of patriotism with the racist and bigoted overtones of recent decades and the increasingly ambiguous position of the United Kingdom in relation to mainland Europe. Again, the contemporary strength of these works has proved a latter-day handicap. Generally the judgement of West End musicals after World War II has been viewed from a Broadway-led agenda which has denied these British shows their own home character, yet it is precisely this character that explains why British shows such as Bless the Bride, Her Excellency and King’s Rhapsody could be successful despite being apparently so out of step with the prevailing notion of a modern ‘post-Oklahoma!’ musical.

The 1950s

Any retrospective look at the West End musical in the first half of the 1950s makes for uncomfortable reading from a British perspective. Contrasted with the American imports of Carousel, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific, Call Me Madam, Guys and Dolls, The King and I and Pal Joey, Wonderful Town and Kismet are indigenous shows such as Ace of Clubs (Coward), Golden City (John Toré), Dear Miss Phoebe (Harry Parr Davies), Gay’s the Word (Novello), Zip Goes a Million (George Posford), Wild Thyme (Donald Swann), The Water Gipsies (Vivian Ellis) and A Girl Called Jo (John Pritchett). Nothing of this British repertory has survived, while the American imports are mostly ‘classics’.

There was an awareness at the time of a difference in style between British and American musicals and two British shows in particular adapted American models in response. In Golden City (1950) John Toré wrote a work that was essentially a copy of Oklahoma!, adapted to suit the different cultural resonances of a London audience. In the place of the Oklahoman frontier was that of South Africa; instead of farmers and cowboys there were the opposing groups of farmers and miners; the rustic dance of ‘The Farmer and the Cowman’ became the communal barbecue of ‘Braavleis’. The music also used the features of contemporary American shows: ‘It’s Love, My Darling, It’s Love’ is a clear copy of the ideas and style of Oklahoma!’s ‘People Will Say We’re In Love’, Annie Get Your Gun’s ‘The Girl That I Marry’ was transmuted into ‘The Prettiest Girl in the Town’, while the ‘Oklahoma!’ chorus itself became ‘It’s a Great Occasion’, complete with high sustained chords for the women’s voices, and the chanting of ‘trekkin’, ridin” to match the now familiar rhythmic ‘Ok-la-ho-ma’ of that title song’s arrangement. In Gay’s the Word (1951) Novello changed direction by writing for Cicely Courtneidge rather than himself (he was still performing in King’s Rhapsody), and this provided an opportunity to adopt a different style, one through which he made the perceived contrasts between British and American shows the substance of the show itself. His ultimate conclusion as presented in Gay’s the Word was that a confident style of presentation and energy in performance were lacking in British musical theatre at the time, a state further aggravated by a lack of respect for the individuality of British theatrical history. These were far more significant concerns than any notion of changing content. By creating for Courtneidge the character of Gay Daventry, a middle-aged musical comedy star, he was able to juxtapose images of bad old shows and good new shows as part of the dramatic construction. He also surprised his audiences through music that adopted a more popular American idiom, so much so that distinct models can be found for most of the numbers: the show’s theme song ‘Vitality’ is clearly related to ‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show’, the romantic ballad ‘If Only He’d Looked My Way’ shares crucial similarities of melody and harmony with ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, while the Novello waltz ‘A Matter of Minutes’ is not the expected broad sweeping melody but adopts a fast, short-phrased and repetitive structure indebted to Richard Rodgers. As with the theme of rationing in Her Excellency, the subject matter of Gay’s the Word was not suited to export. While a battle between indigenous British musicals and imported American ones became a topic of some heat in the West End, it was an irrelevance for Broadway at that time. In addition to the show’s strictly contemporary theme, its reliance on the skills of one unique comic performer and the current ambiguity of the title have contributed to the difficulties for any attempt at revival.

In 1953, however, the effects of an ‘American invasion’ were felt most strongly, with only two new British shows, one a disaster called Happy as a King, led by the much-loved comedian Fred Emney, and a musical pageant The Glorious Days which capitalised on the fervour of the coronation year by having Anna Neagle play Nell Gwynn and Queen Victoria (both young and old). The Lord Chamberlain was sympathetic towards a slight relaxation of the conventions governing the presentation of royal personages on stage in the year that Elizabeth II became queen and justified Neagle’s portrayals in this show on the grounds that the drama took place in the imagination of a girl who had been knocked out during an air raid, and so was an imagined not actual portrayal of the queen!⁵ The American productions that opened in the same year were Paint Your Wagon, Guys and Dolls, The King and I and Wish You Were Here, although most of their leading performers were British, in contrast to the position of some five years before. Only Guys and Dolls relied on leading American performers, with Isobel Bigley, Sam Levene and Stubby Kaye recreating their Broadway roles.

The effect of censorship on British writers is shown indirectly by comparison through the response of the Lord Chamberlain’s office to the production of the American show Wish You Were Here and in a lesser way to Call Me Madam. The reader for the Lord Chamberlain completely missed the point of the social setting of the former work by Harold Rome, Arthur Kobler and Joshua Logan, equating it with the British family holiday camp of Butlins rather than an exclusive setting for priapic American youth. The only change required by the Lord Chamberlain was the replacement of a reference to the Duke of Windsor. The need to remove his name was simply because of its existence. There was nothing in its context that was in any way offensive; it was, if anything, complimentary to the duke by including him in a list of famous and influential world figures. Four months after the show opened a single complaint from a member of the public over its supposed decadent nature prompted a visit from a representative of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, whose report makes for humorous reading today as each piece of dubious or suggestive movement is described in excessive detail.⁶ The presentation of the show was subsequently toned down by order. In Call Me Madam a reference to Princess Margaret Rose had to be removed (simply because it existed) while the representation in the show of the real American congressman Dean Acheson was allowed on the grounds that it had not been objected to in America. In Britain the representation of real people was often prohibited, especially where offence could be taken by foreign powers, and such restrictions provided a challenge to the development of satire. By effectively banning the presentation of a real monarchy, political figures and any sense of sex (as opposed to idealised romance), the British musicals were inevitably behind the times when compared with the American ones whose censorship in London was more limited through a lack of understanding (as with Wish You Were Here) or a bending of rules.⁷ American writers for the musical stage were more free to represent contemporary life than British counterparts who existed in a long-established culture of compliance in which rules of censorship were subconsciously learned or actively considered at an early stage of writing. The play, rather than the musical, was generally the battleground for contentious matters. It was only after the challenges to the Lord Chamberlain through straight theatre in the second half of the 1950s that the British musical began to escape this self-censorship, and with Expresso Bongo (discussed later) jumped forward decades in a single show.

What was perceived as a strike back at the American repertory began in 1954 with The Boy Friend (Sandy Wilson, 1924–2014) and Salad Days (music by Julian Slade, 1930–2006; book and lyrics by Slade and Dorothy Reynolds). Both musicals were conceived as small-scale works for the specific companies of the Players’ Theatre and the Bristol Old Vic respectively. In their different ways they present a particular sense of archetypal Britishness. In the case of The Boy Friend, although primarily a tribute to musical comedies of the 1920s, finishing schools, debutantes, aristocrats in disguise all played to notions of class, particularly upper-class, behaviour. Salad Days drew on the rarefied idyll of a Cambridge college, the select world of undergraduates and family connections that extended to Whitehall. Both shows are also sexless, although sexuality through the codified language of a gay subculture casts a subtle shade. While Wish You Were Here was overtly displaying a cast of mostly sexually rampant semi-clad youths, the British response was to summarise romantic relations with a chaste kiss or two. One of the most well-known songs in Salad Days declares that ‘We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back’, yet it is gently ironic in that the reminder not to be nostalgic prompts in the lyrics exactly that which it aspires to eschew. This duality of view, the present as interpreted through the past, is a common strand in British musicals, and Salad Days and The Boy Friend did look back in both musical and dramatic ways. Salad Days was conceived as an entertaining, ephemeral diversion, at the heart of which is a nostalgic innocence conjuring up an affectionate cartoon of certain English stereotypes. Whereas the passion of West Side Story invokes death, the ‘romance’ of Salad Days remains chaste. The lyrics of Salad Days are equally one dimensional while its music is inoffensive, with diatonic (often pentatonic) melodies, simple harmony and the most straightforward of verse–refrain structures.

The Boy Friend was revised and extended from an original one-act version and eventually entered a mainstream West End theatre at Wyndhams in January 1954, running there for a month over five years; Salad Days went into the Vaudeville in August 1954 and stayed there until 1960. Consequently, for the second half of the 1950s, the most enduring image of the British musical was of something with the parochial virtues of the village hall in Salad Days or the over-refined, nostalgic atmosphere of a fictitious and glamorised 1920s in The Boy Friend. For an American audience on Broadway in the mid-1950s – or, for that matter, all through the United States by virtue of extensive touring – The Boy Friend represented the only contact with contemporary British musical theatre and so reinforced the perception of a dated and retrospective British style. These two musicals are about all that remains active today of the British musical theatre repertory of the 1950s. Their continuing popularity is partly accounted for by their dramatic lightness, adaptability for performance and inoffensive natures, making them safe for school productions and amateurs. Both have received very occasional professional revivals, but only The Boy Friend has achieved an international dimension to its fame.

That The Boy Friend has been taken to be a leading example of the British musical in the 1950s is, however, in one sense particularly apt. The music of the show is derivative, using – albeit most skilfully – older styles. This approach is a constant of British musical theatre. Novello consciously borrowed from a range of sources including classical music, Viennese operetta and certain characteristics of Richard Rodgers. Vivian Ellis’s later works adopted period styles appropriate to their dramatic settings, while Coward relied strongly on Victorian parlour music and music hall styles throughout his works. No specific sound characterised the West End. The search for that distinctive voice brought about the chameleon-like shifts of Coward and the last change of direction (or return to his musical youth in one sense) for Novello.

Despite the impression given by the longest-running British musicals, the second half of the 1950s was a lively period for British theatre as a whole. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956) has become a symbol for the beginning of a move towards greater realism in theatre, although subject to some of the same over-stressed importance that Oklahoma! has received. The inoffensive styles of Slade and Wilson in their first big successes contrasted with the increasingly serious intent of other contemporary theatre works, especially those of the more politically driven theatre as characterised by Joan Littlewood’s theatre company at Stratford East whose demotic show of 1959 (note that Salad Days ran until 1960), Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, contrasted an East End working class complete with resident prostitute with Salad Days’s middle-class ‘niceness’. Yet for all the supposed realism of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, it shared with the Slade and Wilson shows a common naivety towards characters (as with the camp interior designer) and a certain predictability in the music. Fings extended the reputation of the up-and-coming songwriter Lionel Bart (1930–99) and only shortly preceded his international success Oliver! in 1960. Julian Slade followed up Salad Days with another escapist work, Free as Air (1957), but the conditions that had made inconsequential escapism a surprise hit in 1954 were sufficient only to sustain an existing reputation, not to support a new one. Wilson’s attempt to adapt the novellas of Ronald Firbank as Valmouth (1959) became a cult success, although the baroque excesses of Firbank’s characters proved too strange for a wider audience.

A further contemporary antidote to any British nostalgia was provided by Grab Me a Gondola (1956; with music by James Gilbert), whose central character was based on the British ‘sex-bomb’ Diana Dors. More significantly David Heneker and Monty Norman’s Expresso Bongo (1958) laid into the world of the pop singer and teenage heart-throb, bringing contemporary pop styles into the theatre along with the first electric guitar in a West End pit orchestra. (Amplified acoustic guitars had been in use at least since 1950.) Expresso Bongo is remarkable for the cynicism of its characterisations, which include the pelvis-thrusting singer ‘Bongo’ Herbert, ‘Me’ who is a crooked agent ripping off Bongo’s strictly limited talent and a predatory older actress keen to boost her own flagging career through some fame by association. One number proclaims that ‘There’s nothing wrong with British youth today’, while comprehensively listing all the problems created in the world (most notably the atom bomb) caused by their own parents. It was compared to Pal Joey in the unpleasant range of its characters and hailed as the show in which the British musical grew up. The film version (1959) had Cliff Richard in the role of the pop idol, but the plot and style were so diluted as to undermine the thrust of the whole show, and the most punchy of the musical numbers were cut from the film’s release. Again, the future was deprived of a suitable advocate for an innovative show. The Lord Chamberlain’s office teased out every innuendo it could from the book and lyrics but failed to dilute the central message. The sexual puns in Pal Joey had not been censored for the West End in 1954, but four years later Expresso Bongo had to fight over many lines. Deference to the Lord Chamberlain was fast being replaced by cheeky rebellion, such that the alternative suggested by the authors to the censored line ‘Go and stuff herself’ was ‘Go and screw herself’. They settled on ‘Get lost’.

Expresso Bongo opened in the West End in the same year as My Fair Lady. It did not run as long and it has hardly been seen since, but its gritty cynicism, contemporary setting and pop score gained it many fans. It was voted Best British Musical of the Year in a Variety annual survey of shows on the London stage, with a ballot result far ahead of My Fair Lady, and was referred to in general as ‘the other musical’ to distinguish it from Lerner and Loewe’s work. A London view of the musical in 1958 reverses the usual historical assumption in that the new American success was a costume and period work whereas the new British success was utterly contemporary in its characters, setting, plot, language and music.

The 1960s

The energy and confidence of the new wave of musical theatre writers that emerged in the late 1950s carried through to the 1960s, as three British musicals gained both UK and US success. Bart’s adaptation of Dickens in Oliver! ran for just over six years in the West End (June 1961–September 1966) and for more than a year and a half on Broadway (January 1963–September 1964). The show was set almost a century before the 1920s of The Boy Friend, but it felt theatrically contemporary in contrast to Wilson’s period recreation. Importantly, Bart’s background as a writer of pop songs brought a musical style that enabled the number ‘As long as he needs me’ to become a popular standard, covered by such performers as Judy Garland, Sarah Vaughan, Shirley Bassey and Liberace. The small-scale revue echoed the trend. Anthony Newley (1931–99) wrote and headed the cast for Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, which provided the contemporary hit songs ‘What kind of fool am I’ and ‘The Joker’. The show ran in London (July 1961–November 1962) before transferring to Broadway (October 1962–September 1963). Completing this transatlantic trio is Half a Sixpence, whose lead role was played both in London (March 1963–October 1964) and on Broadway (April 1965–July 1966) by British rock ’n’ roll idol Tommy Steele. Half a Sixpence came from the same creative stable as Expresso Bongo, with music and lyrics by David Heneker. These shows emphasise a decisive shift in British musical theatre towards a generation culturally post-war, rooted in the emerging youth culture of the 1950s.

These shows do not bring the British narrative back into the comfortable musical theatre mainstream and thus reassert a familiar Broadway-centred hegemony. Instead, each has a partner work that suggests otherwise through the lack of correlation between West End and Broadway success. During the long London run of Oliver! Bart’s large-scale musical Blitz! ran for 568 performances (May 1962–September 1953). For similar concurrent success for a composer at this scale in British West End musical theatre, we have to look back to Ivor Novello or forward to Andrew Lloyd Webber. But the title alone helps explain why there was no likelihood of an American production. The story is set during the bombing of London in World War II and portrays the indomitable community spirit engendered by ‘the Blitz’. It engaged the memories of many of the London audience through the safe nostalgia of a shared crisis survived. As with the shows of Ellis and Novello, the attraction and appeal in London was inextricably tied to a particular British experience that did not make for easy export.

David Heneker, in collaboration with John Taylor, wrote the score for Charlie Girl, which ran for 2,202 performances (December 1965–March 1971). The score has all the catchiness of Half a Sixpence, but with updated jazz and swing idioms, and a rousing title song that could give Jerry Herman’s ‘Hello, Dolly’ a run for its money. It has a mix of vaudeville-inspired novelty numbers, popular lyricism and chorus punch, orchestrated in a manner such that the score draws parallels with Herman’s near-contemporary Broadway show. But the story is an updated amalgam of Me and My Girl and the Cinderella trope, throwing together contemporary youth culture and a heavily contrasting parental generation, with love across social class juxtaposing the aristocratic and the low brow. Joe Brown, a young pop singer who became famous with hits in the late 1950s, took the lovable cockney role, which included a number aping musical hall sing-a-long – as with ‘Oom Pah Pah’ in Oliver! and ‘Flash-Bang-Wallop’ in Half a Sixpence – this time praising the British dietary institution of ‘Fish ’n Chips’. The inclusion in the cast of British stage and film legend Anna Neagle added to the show’s appeal to a broad audience. But the combination of cultural resonances and references in Charlie Girl that played so strongly to the West End public offered little easy resonance with an American audience beyond the generic romance of the plot and any general appeal of a song and dance format. Indeed, the American lothario of the plot is set up for a fall. Assertion of Britishness over American values is part of the show’s identity and as such portrays similar stances towards national identity as had Zip Goes a Million.

Newley’s follow up to Stop the World – I Want to Get Off was another small-scale, revue-style show, The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. It opened on Broadway for a short run of 232 performances with Newley’s heading of the cast in May 1963 a significant factor in it reaching New York. The show had closed in Britain during the out-of-town try-outs, during which film star and comedian Norman Wisdom had played the lead role.

Other shows reinforce the London–New York differences. Robert and Elizabeth (music by Ron Grainer, 1922–81; book and lyrics by Ronald Miller), based on the true-life romance of poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, was a musical-operetta hybrid, with coloratura soprano heroine whose triumphant number ‘Woman and Man’ is a showstopper. Following popularity with London audiences, plans began for a New York transfer but were dashed by the prospect of legal complications: the West End presence was notable, the Broadway presence was nonexistent. The Dickensian theme of Oliver! found further expression in Pickwick, lyrics by Bricusse, this time working with composer Cyril Ornadel (1924–2011). It yielded the successful song ‘If I ruled the world’ and achieved almost 700 performances in the West End (July 1963–February 1965). Popular British comedian Harry Secombe brought his operatic-styled tenor voice to the title role and also led the cast in its lacklustre Broadway run of just 56 performances in 1965. The cultural nostalgia of Dickens and the caricature figures in an inevitably episodic work (as the nature of Dickens’s novel The Pickwick Papers invites) generated some interest on Broadway, but the strengths of Oliver! in script, production and performance invited criticism through comparison. As the fame of the star personality heading the cast had been founded on anarchic radio comedy in Britain, this brought no friendly audience recognition abroad.

The last work here to highlight the different expectations between West End and Broadway audiences, Canterbury Tales, came in 1968 with the unlikely combination of poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer and a score by Richard Hill and John Hawkins which combined contemporary rock and pop elements with medieval music qualities. (Literary scholar Neville Coghill with Martin Starkie dramatised the medieval source.) A transatlantic comparison makes the point: 2,080 performances in London, but just 122 on Broadway in 1969.

Conclusion

World War II interrupted the development of British musical theatre and led to a postwar dichotomy between the need to take up again and develop the interrupted past as an assertion of continuity and the need to embrace change in a world that could not be the same again. In musical theatre the British writers understandably tended to address the former need, while the imported American shows addressed for a British audience the latter. The focus of America was on America; the focus of Britain was on Britain. Not surprisingly the traffic in shows across the Atlantic was almost exclusively one way as the British works had social and political dimensions aligned to a national mood that was neither interesting nor comprehensible to an American audience. Furthermore, the different aspirations of homegrown and imported West End shows were judged by the same criteria as their American counterparts, although fulfilling different functions. The consequence of this approach towards their contemporary and subsequent interpretation and comparison has been seen in a reinforcement of an American-led musical theatre canon in Britain. In 1956 Vivian Ellis was moved to head an article for Plays and Players ‘Give Us a Chance’, which was ‘an eloquent plea for the British composer, who is generally denied all the opportunities open to his American rival’.⁸ In addition, the repertory has remained inaccessible owing to a lack of quality films of British stage shows and to a more limited representation on record than American ones; subsequent transfers from 78 to LP have been negligible, and CD releases followed only in the mid-2000s as copyrights expired. This lack of exposure has prevented the development of an easy familiarity with some of the best works, and the resulting lack of opportunity to learn the canon has in turn reinforced its undeserved obscurity. The British shows of the 1960s that also had US productions have achieved wider recognition. However, taking such transatlantic status as an arbiter of West End significance distorts, distracts and detracts from both national and genre narratives.

There are distinctive British characteristics that run through the musicals from pre-war to post-war and even into the much-shifted cultural landscape of the 1960s. Retrospection plays a part in plots as well as through the remnants of music-hall and revue styles. Popular music hall sing-along provided hit numbers even into the 1950s and 1960s, for Bart and Heneker in particular. Coward’s tendency towards allusion and clever lyrics often comes to the fore in British musicals, most directly in the works of Sandy Wilson. Novello’s thumbprints continue through to shows by Andrew Lloyd Webber, often with the large-scale and the visual as strong components within an overt theatricality. Musically both fit into a broader continuum of adaptable musical styles that draw on the contemporary alongside a trait for nostalgia, especially in the tendencies of the ‘big tunes’ – ‘Rose of England’ and ‘Someday My Heart Will Awake’ for Novello, ‘She’s too Far above Me’ for Heneker’, ‘I Know Now’ for Grainer or ‘Music of the Night’ for Lloyd Webber.

Knowledge of the past is important to the understanding of both the content and the appeal of the British musical mid-century, and the reassertion of its individuality as distinct from Broadway is a revealing consequence of this. Although ‘we said we wouldn’t look back’, in the case of this particular repertory, we should.

The 1940s

Musical theatre in the 1940s faced enormous difficulties, but there was also a resurgence of creative energy. Despite the economic challenges of getting new productions on stage during the 1930s and the resulting exodus of Broadway’s best composers to Hollywood’s more financially rewarding film opportunities, Broadway began to recover from the Great Depression by the late 1930s and early 1940s. Along with the old-guard writers Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, and Harold Arlen, a new generation of composers and lyricists either appeared on Broadway for the first time or produced their first important shows, including writers such as Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Jule Styne, Robert Wright and George Forrest, and Frank Loesser. The extraordinary efforts of America to mobilise for the war effort and the concurrent welling up of patriotic feeling throughout the country may have provided some impetus for the material of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, and the wartime atmosphere certainly created a climate in which a show about the American frontier spirit was welcomed and could remain a hit for years to come. While the social and technological changes spurred by the war created an open atmosphere for new ideas and experimentation, the acceptance of innovation in theatrical works was balanced by an appreciation of American life and history, both present and past. Revues, shows exploring the usual romantic relationships (e.g. Wright and Forrest’s Song of Norway, 1944, or Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, 1948) and shows based on fantasy (Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon and Harburg and Lane’s Finian’s Rainbow, both opening in 1947) appeared during the 1940s; and an astonishing number of shows centred on Americans’ experiences at home and abroad and around American military life opened on Broadway in the 1940s and 1950s (Berlin’s This Is the Army, 1942; Bernstein’s On the Town, 1944; Harold Rome’s Call Me Mister, 1946). With an almost uncanny understanding of the public’s state of mind, Rodgers and Hammerstein combined the nostalgia for early American rural life with dramatic innovation to produce Oklahoma!, the biggest hit and most influential show of the 1940s.

The initial impact of Oklahoma! was felt almost immediately with the E. Y. Harburg/Harold Arlen show Bloomer Girl in 1944, featuring the story of the Civil War crusader for comfortable women’s clothing, Amelia (‘Dolly’) Bloomer. Set safely in the colourful past, with a dance choreographed by Agnes de Mille focussing on women’s personal anguish as the men go off to war – a transparent reference to the ongoing world war – and introducing the subject of slavery into the plot, Bloomer Girl captured in song and story many elements from the Rodgers and Hammerstein prototype, even using its star dancer, Joan McCracken, and its comic singer, Celeste Holm, who had played Ado Annie. Although Herzig and Saidy’s libretto was less seamless than Hammerstein’s, Arlen’s music is undeservedly neglected. A romantic duet, ‘Right as the Rain’; the character Jefferson Calhoun’s song to his love, ‘Evelina’; and the black servant’s plea for racial harmony, ‘The Eagle and Me’, make a good effect. The show has seldom been revived; although it emphasised the most important social issues of the Civil War period, the book came across as ‘superficial and somewhat silly’, and certainly not comparable to Oklahoma!’s ‘artistic cohesiveness’.²

Arlen’s second show, this time with lyricist Johnny Mercer, was St Louis Woman (1946), with an all-black cast featuring such well-known artists as the Nicholas Brothers (Harold and Fayard), Pearl Bailey, Rex Ingram and Juanita Hall. Although the score contained some beautiful songs, such as ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ and ‘I Had Myself a True Love’, the weak libretto foretold a brief run. The writer, Countee Cullen, died before the show made it to New York. Not even the extensive revisions of the replacement director, Rouben Mamoulian, who had directed the original productions of both Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, could sustain the show beyond 113 performances, but the original cast album made later in 1946 eventually led to the critical recognition the fine score deserves. St Louis Woman was in many ways a worthy successor to some striking stage works focussing on African American life and culture during the 1930s and early 1940s, among them The Green Pastures (1930), Porgy and Bess, Cabin in the Sky (1940) and Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones (1943). Both of Arlen’s first two Broadway shows reflected his long-standing interest in African American music and his understanding of the issues facing African Americans in the United States. Having written arrangements for Fletcher Henderson’s band and music for Cotton Club Revues from 1930 to 1934, Arlen had thoroughly absorbed the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements of black music, particularly the blues form. His ability to synthesise blues, jazz and Tin Pan Alley styles in popular song form gave his music a strong individual stamp as well as an unmistakably American identity, but his score has been lost for posterity because of the poor book. St Louis Woman never returned to Broadway, but the music later appeared in an operatic version in Amsterdam (1959) and Paris (1960).

If one way to define the Rodgers and Hammerstein formula was simply operetta plus Americana, Up in Central Park (1945) fitted the bill perfectly, with a book by the experienced brother and sister team Herbert and Dorothy Fields, and music by the veteran operetta composer Sigmund Romberg. Complete with an American hero in the form of a journalist battling the corrupt politician Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, it is set well back from modern times in New York of the 1870s. Although critical opinion of this show suggests that it failed to live up to the highest standards of its creators, its relatively lengthy run of 504 performances (and later preservation on film in 1947 with Deanna Durbin and Dick Haymes) implies that the writers and composer were giving the public what it wanted. A sumptuous production by Mike Todd and choreography by the emerging Helen Tamiris, who would later go on to stage the dances for the revival of Show Boat in 1946 and the original production of Annie Get Your Gun (1948), also helped to guarantee its warm reception, but the show is little known today.

Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946) did not seek to imitate Rodgers and Hammerstein in its details, although the team produced the show. The third-longest-running musical of the 1940s, it demonstrated that even after Oklahoma! and Carousel, good songs well performed could still make for a Broadway smash hit. The liveliness of the historical title character played by the triumphant Ethel Merman helped as well. Herbert and Dorothy Fields’s book, while not strictly adhering to the facts of sharpshooter Annie Oakley’s life, at least avoided the hackneyed melodrama of days gone by, and if Berlin’s melodies are easily extractable from the show, they are no less worthy for that. The perennial creator of American popular song produced a string of superb numbers for the show, such as ‘Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly’, ‘Anything You Can Do’, and ‘They Say It’s Wonderful’. The classic ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’, which entices Annie to join Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, simply brings down the curtain better than any other song ever written for Broadway. The show has played in many countries and its revival on Broadway in the late 1990s with Bernadette Peters – succeeded in the role by actors such as Cheryl Ladd, Reba McEntire and Crystal Bernard – demonstrates its continuing popularity.

Miss Liberty, Robert Sherwood and Irving Berlin’s show of 1949 (with director Moss Hart and choreographer Jerome Robbins), once again invoked a patriotic theme, this time about the search for a girl to pose as the model for the Statue of Liberty, and an old-fashioned setting from 1885. Because of advance sales, the show played for over 300 performances; however, the tuneless score and heavy-handed libretto with its shocking failure to provide a final love interest for the ‘girl next door’ character put off audiences from the outset. Even with its all-star production team, the only memorable number from the show is the final hymn-like setting of the popular poem inscribed on the statue’s base, ‘Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor’.

Jule Styne (1905–94) had received classical training, made a success of himself in Hollywood song writing and was a practised vocal arranger. Long before he reached Broadway in 1947, Styne had collaborated successfully with good lyricists such as Frank Loesser and Sammy Cahn on scores for over fifty films. He mixed writing and producing all through his career, and at his peak (1959–67) wrote music for television and the live stage, as well as popular songs. Over the years it became apparent that he possessed a discerning eye for talented women and was adept at making vehicles for them. (Styne also boosted Ethel Merman, Barbra Streisand and Mary Martin, and he had even coached Shirley Temple and Alice Faye years before.) Carol Channing became a star after her first important Broadway role in Styne’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), where ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ became her anthem. Like many American musicals, the show enjoyed runs in London and Germany as well. It was revived as Lorelei in 1973, again with Channing as the star, a production that reached Broadway the following year. The importance of a star like her in the show is underscored by the short-lived revival at the Lyceum in 1995.

High Button Shoes (1947) was Styne’s first foray onto Broadway after working in Hollywood. He was assisted by Sammy Cahn’s lyric writing and considerable rewriting by the noted director George Abbott. The book is formulaic and all the specialties (separate acts featuring the talents of individual performers but not contributing to a plot) of the show collectively make up its main attraction. These included the fresh comedy of Phil Silvers, the duo dancing of Nanette Fabray and Jack McCauley in ‘Papa, Won’t You Dance with Me’ and an elaborate chase scene/ballet, choreographed by Jerome Robbins. Styne and Cahn’s score was well liked and the sum total of these parts spelled a hit even as Rodgers and Hammerstein were experimenting with one of their least successful vehicles, Allegro. (Allegro opened on the day after High Button Shoes but enjoyed fewer than half as many performances on Broadway – 315 versus 727.) Both shows avoided colourful features of American history or operetta. Further versions of High Button Shoes have included two for American television in 1956 and 1966 and several regional productions. Styne’s Broadway career was only beginning, but it was taking off at a time when the standard expectations for both song lyrics and quality of book were reaching an extraordinarily high level. With the clever literary texts of Lorenz Hart or Ira Gershwin fresh in people’s minds, along with the production savvy of the Rodgers and Hammerstein team, a young musical newcomer like Styne could only benefit from close observation of the shows around him.

In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949) the true genius of Jule Styne began to emerge. Rarely has a musician been more perfectly attuned to a medium than Styne was to the Broadway stage. He understood the larger-than-life quality of live theatre, the flair required to put over a song, the graphic gestures needed to make comedy convincing and the visible tear to evoke sympathy. Speaking in purely musical terms, Styne melodically derives from Irving Berlin, who always demanded a radically simple match between tune and text. Styne’s love of show business razzle-dazzle and his ability to bring filmic intensity to the live stage mirrored the widespread passion of Broadway denizens in his time. Just as so many Hollywood musicals are really about the process of making a show, so Styne’s Broadway creations reflect the obsessions connected with the experience of putting a story with music and dance on stage. Styne was also involved in producing musicals, and until the late 1950s occupied himself with directing the revival of Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey (1952) and Jerry Bock’s Mr Wonderful (1956), a vehicle designed to introduce Sammy Davis Jr to the musical theatre stage.

With Brigadoon (1947), their third show and first hit together, Alan Jay Lerner (1918–86) and Frederick Loewe (1901–88) easily established themselves as the heirs apparent to the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition. Although Lerner and Loewe had written two earlier musicals, in Brigadoon they settled on a style which followed Rodgers and Hammerstein in its combination of a well-written book with elements of operetta, for example, an exotic location, operetta-influenced music which demanded well-trained voices and the incorporation of ballet. Loewe further reflected Rodgers’s influence in writing idiomatically for the voice and effectively capturing the flavour of the faraway locale in music. Like Rodgers and Hammerstein, they had a series of hit shows produced during a partnership over a decade long (Paint Your Wagon, 1951; My Fair Lady, 1956; Camelot, 1960; and the film Gigi, 1958). Also like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe wrote in a ‘words first, music second’ fashion. After extensive discussions about the book, character development and placement of songs, Lerner sketched lyrics that Loewe then set to music. Revisions were done in a collaborative fashion, often working together. Brigadoon ran for 581 performances, a successful show in comparison to other shows on Broadway that year, even though it was not quite an Oklahoma!. Set in the misty Scottish Highlands, the story concerns two American tourists who happen on a town that only awakens every hundred years. It begins rather simply, again recalling Oklahoma!. As the plot unfolds, three love stories must work themselves out, and the visitors must decide whether to remain in the enchanted village or return to New York. Lerner’s eloquent lyrics and Loewe’s music were complemented by the brilliant choreography of Agnes de Mille. The reviews exceeded Lerner and Loewe’s wildest hopes: Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times praised their work as a ‘major achievement on the musical stage’, noting that ‘it is impossible to say where the music and dancing leave off and the story begins in this beautifully orchestrated Scottish idyll’.³ With such acclaim, Lerner and Loewe were well launched on their Broadway careers, and if they did not quite overturn Rodgers and Hammerstein’s domination of American musical theatre, they did loom large over most of their contemporaries during the late 1940s and 1950s. As authors of three shows that have had frequent revivals, Lerner and Loewe remain one of Broadway’s most important creative teams.

Burton Lane and E. Y. ‘Yip’ Harburg’s Finian’s Rainbow (1947) opened shortly before Brigadoon. It was the third of Burton Lane’s stage musicals written in the 1940s, interspersed among his highly successful assignments for the Hollywood films that were the primary focus of his career from 1933 to 1954. Academy Award nominations for Best Song for ‘How About You’ from Babes on Broadway (1941) and ‘Too Late Now’ from Royal Wedding (1951; starring Fred Astaire) indicated Lane’s standing in film music, but musical theatre was his real interest, and he returned to New York in 1955 to concentrate on Broadway productions. Like Brigadoon, Finian’s Rainbow was based on a fantasy story and featured a lush score. Its 725-performance run outlasted Brigadoon, but in any case both shows proved that when well done, fantastic and imaginative settings were viable topics for Broadway. Finian’s Rainbow’s bittersweet ending did not detract, and the gems in the score carried the show, for example, ‘How Are Things in Glocca Morra’, ‘Look to the Rainbow’ and ‘Old Devil Moon’. The show has been revived several times, including at the City Center in 1955, 1960 and 1967. The 1960 production was moved to the 46th Street Theatre, but it folded after twelve performances.

Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948) is considered by many to be the masterwork of his output. Similar to Kern’s and Gershwin’s experience, Porter’s career began in 1915 writing songs for interpolation into musicals. His first success with a complete score came with Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), followed by The Gay Divorce (1932; starring Fred Astaire) and Anything Goes (1934) and Panama Hattie (1940) with Ethel Merman. By the 1940s he had a firmly established reputation. The seven shows Porter wrote in the 1940s encountered mixed success, but Kiss Me, Kate opened to rave reviews and ran for 1,070 performances. Based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, with a brilliant book by Samuel and Bella Spewack, the story of Kiss Me, Kate cleverly paralleled the lives of Shakespeare’s characters Petruchio and Katharine with the lives of a pair of divorced actors who play their parts in the show-within-the-show. As the Shakespeare play proceeds with the feuding divorced couple reciting Shakespeare’s lines, the actors make up, just as do Petruchio and Kate, and they are reunited in the end. A secondary actor/actress couple also work out their difficulties throughout the show. As usual, Porter wrote both his own lyrics and the music. Porter’s sophisticated lyrics matched the ebullience of Shakespeare’s play, and the elegance of the entire production assured that it became the fourth-longest-running musical of the 1940s, quite a record considering that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! swept all attendance records for the entire decade. Furthermore, Porter’s show has remained popular, as is shown in the important productions in both New York and London in 2000 and 2001. It has also played in Australia, Germany, Austria and France, among other countries. Kiss Me, Kate was a departure from the musical comedies Porter wrote earlier in his career, proving that he too had learned important lessons from such shows as Oklahoma! and Carousel. The theatre historian Gerald Bordman notes that in Kiss Me, Kate, ‘All the ideals that musical plays had been striving for were triumphantly realized.’ He points to the ‘remarkably lifelike, believable protagonists, with every character having a sensible and important bearing on the plot, with every song perfectly related to the action and more often than not advancing it’, and lyrics and dialogue ‘that remained literate and witty or touching throughout’.⁴ Many songs from Kiss Me, Kate became popular, including ‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show’, another actors’ anthem, much in the spirit of Irving Berlin’s ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’; ‘Wunderbar’, a waltz that even Richard Rodgers might have been proud of and a brief echo of the operetta tradition; and ‘So in Love’, a slow but passionate ballad.

The 1950s

Irving Berlin’s next show, Call Me Madam (1950), was a far cry from Rodgers and Hammerstein in its tone of parody, and its wit and music kept it running on Broadway for well over a year. Similar in attitude to political shows of the 1930s, it managed to be both modern and old-fashioned. Its plot arose directly from President Harry Truman’s decision at the time to appoint Washington hostess Perle Mesta as ambassador to Luxembourg. In the musical, the socialite Sally Adams, played by the ever-popular Ethel Merman, is the new minister to the mythical country of Lichtenburg. Love interests and complications ensue. American gaucherie is played off against European sophistication, reminiscent of operetta situations a half-century before. Berlin’s songs were hailed and a movie, also starring Merman, was made in 1953. The show has seen a few revivals, including one at the Victoria Palace in London in 1983.

Call Me Madam was directed by the legendary George Abbott (1887–1995), who was as essential as anyone in creating what is often described as the ‘Rodgers and Hammerstein type’ of musical. His first musical was Rodgers and Hart’s circus show Jumbo (1935), with the score realised by Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. Having a great deal of experience from the legitimate theatre and film arenas in the 1920s and 1930s, Abbott was highly regarded on Broadway by mid-century. He believed in well-constructed plots, attentive actors who gave clear and crisp line delivery and well-planned stage movement, rather than improvised business. His method was formulaic but extremely effective and required a high degree of precision. While he demanded efficiency and eschewed excess, he was not afraid of innovation, especially when it came to twists in theme, plot or choreography. He made his mark permanently on the acting style of the genre. From the 1940s until nearly the end of his long life, Abbott wrote, produced and directed shows with many of the greatest composers and lyricists of American musical theatre, including Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Comden and Green, Jule Styne, Frank Loesser, Arthur Schwartz, Adler and Ross, Bob Merrill, Jerry Bock and Stephen Sondheim. The title ‘show doctor’ is perhaps more appropriately applied to him than almost any other figure in recent Broadway history.

Frank Loesser (1910–69), like Jule Styne, had extensive experience in writing songs for motion pictures before arriving on Broadway, although almost all of that experience came with writing only lyrics. Doing both words and music for his wartime hit ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’ inspired him to expand his horizons, and he joined George Abbott, who wrote the book and directed, to rework the classic English farce Charley’s Aunt into the musical Where’s Charley? The first of Loesser’s five complete Broadway scores, the show was a slow starter, but ultimately became a successful vehicle for dancer Ray Bolger, who returned to Broadway in 1951 for forty-eight performances and appeared in the 1952 film version.

Loesser’s masterpiece, Guys and Dolls (1950), reflects a debt to Rodgers and Hammerstein in its recognition of the essentially collaborative nature of modern musical theatre. The team coordination brought about by Loesser, who wrote music and lyrics, and Abe Burrows, the bookwriter who developed the script from Damon Runyon’s tales of New York City’s underworld, tells much about how to do it right. The producers, Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin, were inspired by the unusual love interest represented by Nellie and Emile in South Pacific. In light of that show’s success, the unlikely pairing of the earnestly evangelical Sarah Brown and the high-rolling sportsman Sky Masterson in Runyon’s ‘The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown’ seemed at least plausible in a popular musical context. However, Loesser and Burrows put their own stamp on Guys and Dolls only after realising that they needed to deviate from the serious emphasis of South Pacific and give the comic aspect of the story free play in both dialogue and situation. Since Loesser had already written the songs, Burrows was presented with the unique challenge of writing a comic script to surround fully composed music. Unburdened by previous experience in writing for Broadway, Burrows succeeded brilliantly. Guys and Dolls was a perfect blend of romantic fun and funny romance. Even better, the floating crap game and the Save-a-Soul Mission were both located in the heart of the city, close to Broadway itself, that most American of thoroughfares. George M. Cohan would have loved it, and audiences have continued to applaud the show, one of the most frequently revived from the period. It has done very well in English-speaking countries, but has proved less popular elsewhere.

Guys and Dolls together with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, South Pacific and The King and I represent especially well the new blend of moods possible within the well-written script of the time. Both romance and comedy not only coexisted in different characters and situations but also could be expressed – along with a generally wider range of emotions – at times by the same character. The music placed characters in a new realm outside the spoken play and hence could express what was otherwise unsayable within the typical serious drama. The inarticulate, abusive Billy Bigelow could be a touching optimist as he soliloquised about his unborn child. The brutal and arbitrary King of Siam can express ‘A Puzzlement’ and vulnerability in song when confronting the equally formidable but tenderhearted Anna.

Loesser’s other Broadway hits did not equal his triumph with Guys and Dolls, but they represent a continuing willingness to deviate from stock dramatic scenarios filled with besotted but otherwise uninteresting young lovers. In The Most Happy Fella (1956) in particular, the ageing winemaker Tony, betrothed to the ultimately unfaithful but realistically frustrated and passionate waitress Rosabella, is reminiscent again of the ages and personal issues that divide South Pacific’s Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque. The Most Happy Fella also represents a vote for musical integrity and seriousness but without reverting to operetta in the old style or trying to appeal to an audience beyond a typical Broadway crowd. Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961) as a parody of corporate climbing and opportunism was about as far from a Rodgers and Hammerstein theme as could be imagined. Yet the quality of its book, only the fourth ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama – the previous winners had been Of Thee I Sing (1931), South Pacific (1949) and Fiorello! (1959) – indicated that the creative team, essentially the group that had confected Guys and Dolls, all subscribed to Lehman Engel’s dictum that great musicals begin with great books, a principle Engel had derived from his observations of and participation in the shows of Rodgers and Hammerstein from the conductor’s podium. How to Succeed in Business became a successful film, played well in other English-speaking countries and reappeared in a successful Broadway production in the 1990s with Matthew Broderick as the star.

Lerner and Loewe’s first Broadway offering of the decade was Paint Your Wagon (1951), a Gold Rush story inspired by Lerner’s reading of Bret Harte’s rough-and-ready frontier tales. The show was beset with problems from its very beginning: Loewe had to be coaxed to work on it; the production team argued over casting choices; and by Lerner’s own admission, he struggled to create a coherent musical play that combined the realism of actual frontier life and robust entertainment. Despite the contributions of the experienced producer Cheryl Crawford and the choreographer Agnes de Mille, the popularity of several memorable songs (e.g. ‘I Talk to the Trees’ and ‘They Call the Wind Maria’) and a run of 289 performances, the show lost money. Indicating Rodgers and Hammerstein’s continued sway over Broadway, critics described Lerner’s lyrics in contrast to Hammerstein’s (they lacked his ‘honest sentiment’); and they compared Loewe to Rodgers as well as Loesser (Loewe had written the ‘most accomplished music Broadway had fallen heir to since The King and I and Guys and Dolls’).⁵ Paint Your Wagon and its ambivalent reviews in no way prepared either audiences or critics for Lerner and Loewe’s next production, My Fair Lady, which became their biggest success, while Paint Your Wagon has fallen into relative obscurity.

My Fair Lady (1956) began as the brainchild of film producer Gabriel Pascal, who originally approached Rodgers and Hammerstein to write the musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Unable to solve the problems presented by Shaw’s insistence that Pygmalion was not a love story, Hammerstein withdrew from the project.⁶ Interested by the story, Lerner and Loewe began working on the book, and Pascal signed an agreement for production with the Theatre Guild. After a few months, Lerner and Loewe admitted defeat as had Rodgers and Hammerstein; Pascal was subsequently refused by Noël Coward, Cole Porter, Schwartz and Dietz, and Fred Saidy and E. Y. Harburg. After half-hearted efforts on a number of new show possibilities and writing the screenplay for the successful film of Brigadoon (1954), Lerner read in the newspaper that Pascal had died, leaving a complicated estate that included the rights to Pygmalion. Lerner and Loewe went to work, resolved to ‘do Pygmalion simply by doing Pygmalion’,⁷ while their attorney sorted out the legalities. The musical was a very faithful adaptation, changing little of the play except the addition of three scenes, including the Ascot Racetrack scene and the ending: in the original play, Eliza walks out on Higgins but in a postlude Shaw suggests that she might have married young Freddie; in the musical, she returns to the irascible Higgins. Lerner retained as much of the dialogue as he could, blending his own dialogue and lyrics almost flawlessly with Shaw’s own words. He and Loewe aimed to ‘musicalise’ the play with ‘fresh expressions’ of the conventions of ‘the balance of the score, the proper distribution of solos, ensemble singing, and choreography’, so the ‘characters arrive at the emotional moment that demands the right kind of music to balance the score’.⁸ Loewe’s charming music, if redolent of the operetta of an earlier day, added to the lavish, stunning period costumes designed by Cecil Beaton. A superb cast, headed by Rex Harrison as Higgins, included a young, radiant Julie Andrews as Eliza and veteran character actor Stanley Holloway as Eliza’s father. The night of the opening in New Haven, Connecticut, a blizzard struck, and nervous about his foray into musical theatre, Rex Harrison announced that he was not yet ready to appear in the role. Yet, after a few changes in New Haven and a second try-out period in Philadelphia, My Fair Lady opened in New York to unanimously glowing reviews, one of which said, ‘Don’t bother reading this review now. You’d better sit right down and send for those tickets to My Fair Lady. First things first.’⁹ Acknowledging that the Shavian story was an atypical Broadway approach to romance, critics praised the thoughtful use of Shaw’s original play, the brilliance of the lyrics, and Loewe’s well-integrated score. Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times that ‘in taste, intelligence, skill and delight, My Fair Lady is the finest musical play in years’. My Fair Lady was undoubtedly the ‘most influential musical of the Fifties’.¹⁰ The cast album was a bestseller, and the 1964 film starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director. Even with the memory of distinctive performances of the original cast, the show has remained a favourite in revivals in many countries, including anniversary productions on Broadway in 1976 and 1981, the latter again starring Rex Harrison. Like all the important Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, My Fair Lady succeeded partially because it was based on an original literary work of the highest quality. Lerner and Loewe’s smash hit further harked back to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s latest big show The King and I in its half-sung/half-spoken part for the hero, more overtones of romance between the leading couple than in the source material, and Loewe’s operetta-flavoured music. Apparently, the Rodgers and Hammerstein formula still provided a framework for artistic and commercial success.

As Rodgers and Hammerstein continued their march across musical theatre history and the careers of Lerner and Loewe peaked, something of an era ended when Cole Porter returned to Broadway in the 1950s for his last two musicals, Can-Can (1953) and Silk Stockings (1955), his fifth and sixth musicals with French settings. Can-Can is set in Paris in 1893, telling two stories side by side. A young judge investigates the scandalous can-can dancing at a café, but he falls in love with the café owner and then helps legalise the dance. One of the dancers is pursued by a sculptor and an art critic, who attacks the sculptor’s work. Of course, all ends happily. Like many of Porter’s scores, Can-Can was poorly received initially, but became a hit with five new standards, among them ‘I Love Paris’. The show was helped along by the sizzling dancing of the young Gwen Verdon in her first major Broadway role. It was revived at the City Center in 1962, but critics found the book dated in a 1982 production at the Minskoff, despite Abe Burrows’s revision of his original text. Silk Stockings was inspired by the 1939 film Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo. The story is about Ninotchka, a beautiful but icy Russian woman official seduced both by the luxuries of Western culture and by a talent scout who wants a Soviet composer to write the score for a movie version of War and Peace. When the composer opts to stay in Paris, Ninotchka is sent to bring him home. Pursued to Russia by the talent scout, she returns with him to the West. Full of clever allusions to the ongoing Cold War, the lyrics are Porter’s usual polished, topical, erudite work; and the score of Silk Stockings contains some of his favoured Latin-influenced, beguine-like melodies. The show has rarely been revived, and the story remains best known in the original film version.

Among the most conventional of successful musicals in the post-Oklahoma! decade was Kismet, which had its premiere on 3 December 1953 at the Ziegfeld Theatre and ran for nearly 600 performances. The secret of its success lay in the use of thoroughly romantic and exotic music by the Russian composer Alexander Borodin (1833–87) matched to a gaudy story of magic and adventure set in ancient Baghdad. Robert Wright and George Forrest added the lyrics for ‘Stranger in Paradise’ and ‘Baubles, Bangles, and Beads’ to Borodin’s instrumental works (‘Polovtsian Dances’ from his opera Prince Igor and the second string quartet, respectively). Charles Lederer and Luther Davis rewrote the play based on the 1911 Oriental chestnut by Edward Knoblock. The make-believe operetta world that Kismet inhabits is seldom absent from Broadway for long – one can see traces at least as far back as The Black Crook of 1866. But the show’s appeal, during an otherwise unremarkable Broadway season, underscored the basic need for both musical and dramatic solidity within an idiom that audiences readily understood. The classical music was put together with the same building blocks that Rodgers and others used so well in their songs. Kismet remains among the shows from the period that have been revived, playing in New York in 1962, 1965 and 1976. The 1976 production appeared in London the following year.

The appropriateness of Borodin’s music, with a vocabulary that serves the tonal world of much nineteenth-century classical music as well as Tin Pan Alley, begs a further comment on Rodgers’s stylistic legacy, which claims both a classical and a popular resonance. Rodgers was nothing if not flexible, and his ability to generate and maintain an overall sound was crucial to his success in so many shows with his principal collaborators, Hart and Hammerstein. In South Pacific, The King and I and Flower Drum Song, despite the harmony or instrumentation of a vaguely or superficially Asian nature, the main tunes come unmistakably from Rodgers’s pen, using the song formulas that he uses in the other non-ethnic shows as well. The most talented musicians who created scores for shows between 1945 and 1970, such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Kurt Weill, Leonard Bernstein, Harold Arlen, Frank Loesser, Jule Styne, Frederick Loewe and Charles Strouse, were similarly adaptable.

A host of neophytes led by the Broadway giant George Abbott created The Pajama Game in 1954. With a little bit of politics blended with the required romantic story, a healthy dose of comedy and several good songs, the vehicle ran efficiently for over a thousand performances at the St James Theatre before hitting the road. Richard Adler and Jerry Ross wrote their first songs for a book show, including ‘Hey, There, You With the Stars in Your Eyes’, ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ and ‘There Once Was a Man’. Co-director with Abbott was the young Jerome Robbins. The cast included the veterans John Raitt, Janis Paige and Eddie Foy Jr, as well as the newcomer Shirley MacLaine. Hal Prince, Frederick Brisson and Robert Griffith produced their first major show. The twenty-six-year-old choreographer Bob Fosse created his first big Broadway dance for ‘Steam Heat’, rich with the jazzy and angular gestures that would become his signature moves.

In 1955 virtually the same creative team followed up on The Pajama Game with the equally successful Damn Yankees, this time featuring the lithe and youthful Gwen Verdon (as Lola, the devil’s assistant who typically gets what she wants). Ray Walston played the Tempter himself, the character called Mr Applegate, who transforms a middle-aged baseball fan into the youthful sports star Joe Hardy, played by Stephen Douglass, in exchange for his soul. Since devils and seductive temptresses had been appearing on stage since the Middle Ages, a certain sense of familiarity was inevitable, but the baseball-centred theme and Fosse’s choreography added zip to the whole Faustian affair. Ross’s death from leukaemia in 1955 (at the age of twenty-nine) ended what would undoubtedly have been a far more extended career on Broadway. Both of his musicals have been revived, including The Pajama Game in New York in 1973 and 2006 and at the New York City Opera in 1989, and both often play in regional theatres.

Harold Arlen appeared on Broadway in his last musical theatre endeavours in the 1950s, beginning with House of Flowers (1954). Based on Truman Capote’s short story about a bordello in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (which he himself had frequented), it tells the story of two competing houses of pleasure. The House of Flowers run by Madame Fleur features employees with flower names; the rival house is run by Madame Tango. When sailors bring a mumps epidemic and consequent financial ruin to the House of Flowers, Madame Fleur contemplates selling her employee ‘Violet’, but Violet prefers to marry her sweetheart. Despite a kidnapping plot, the sweethearts are married, but the House of Flowers survives when Madame Tango’s entire establishment sails away on a world cruise. The high points of the show were the beautiful sets by Oliver Messel and Arlen’s wonderfully atmospheric score. The sets and score did not carry the show, however, and it ran for a barely respectable 165 performances.

Arlen’s ‘Caribbean companion’ to House of Flowers was Jamaica (1957). Koli, a poor fisherman on an island off the coast of Jamaica, loves the ravishing Savannah, who wants to live in New York. She is tempted by a city-slicker pearl broker, but after Koli saves her little brother’s life, she chooses to remain with the simple fisherman. In a clear reference to Oklahoma!, she visits New York in a ‘dream ballet’. Lena Horne’s appearance in the leading role and in eleven of the twenty-one numbers of the show guaranteed the show a remunerative run of 558 performances, but critics agreed that the score was derivative at best.¹¹ Saratoga (1959), Arlen’s final show of the 1950s, was a period piece adapted from Edna Ferber’s novel of the same name, and closed after only ten weeks. Despite stage and revue successes and the many popular songs from those efforts, and a thorough biography available, Arlen remains most famous for his work in musical films, especially the ubiquitous The Wizard of Oz (1939). Although his musical style is innovative and original, and the catalogue of his works extensive, Arlen’s lack of name recognition even now indicates that he has not yet found his rightful place in American musical theatre history.¹² None of his Broadway shows remains in the popular consciousness.

Bells Are Ringing (1956) marked the first full-blown musical of Betty Comden and Adolph Green with Jule Styne. It also became their longest-running collaborative effort, with over 900 performances at the Shubert Theatre. (The team had made the composer’s professional acquaintance during their work together on Peter Pan and worked with him on eight shows in all.) The story, a modern romance between a telephone switchboard operator and a playwright, was intended as a vehicle for Comden and Green’s friend and earlier performing partner Judy Holliday. Two great songs, ‘Just in Time’ and ‘The Party’s Over’, along with spirited dancing, snappy list-making lyrics, a New York setting and the personal charisma of Holliday gave this show an old-fashioned, but well-made quality. The show is still sometimes seen, for example, in the 2001 Broadway revival starring Faith Prince, but it is now overshadowed by a number of more famous musicals from the decade. It has played in several foreign countries.

Styne’s magnum opus was Gypsy (1959). Key to its success was the coming together of many phenomenal talents – lyricist Stephen Sondheim, choreographer Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents as author of the book (just two years after all three helped create the classic West Side Story), together with David Merrick and Leland Hayward to produce and Ethel Merman at her brassy, belting best. Merman insisted that someone more experienced than the young Sondheim create the music. Enter Jule Styne. It was immediately obvious from its opening that the show was a vehicle for the player of Mama Rose (rather than the title role, Gypsy Rose Lee), and in revival Gypsy has enjoyed success with good actors, including Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone in that part. However, Gypsy is one of those rare shows in Broadway history whose quality in the eyes of critics has changed for the better over time, chiefly because of the surprising durability of both Laurents’s book, with its concentration on the inner turmoil of a middle-aged mother, and Styne’s enhancing music. The prospects for future revivals are high, especially as burlesque, the genre in which Gypsy Rose Lee perfected her striptease entertainments, becomes more and more distant, a quaint rather than lurid bit of our theatrical past.

Meredith Willson’s The Music Man (1957) – set in the genteel Midwest of 1912 – was a startling contrast to the other big hit show of the year, West Side Story (see pp. 240 and 269). A charismatic con man plans to sell musical instruments to schoolchildren and then skip town, but he is found out by, and enamoured of, the town librarian. Forced to stay in River City, Iowa, and teach the children, although he cannot read music himself, Hill leads the climactic parade. Though a dreadful din, it sounds wonderful to the loving parents and enthusiastic townspeople. Willson, who had grown up in Iowa, authentically captured the nostalgia and sentimental sweetness of a bygone era. Several appealing songs from the show became popular (‘Seventy-Six Trombones’, ‘Good-Night, My Someone’, and ‘Till There Was You’), and the show ran for almost twice as long as the gritty, realistic West Side Story. It remains popular for revivals in summer stock and schools, and has played in many other countries as well.

Jerry Bock’s Fiorello! (1959) was based on a ten-year period of the colourful New York politician Fiorello La Guardia’s life before he became mayor of New York City. Covering such events as La Guardia’s election to Congress before World War I, his joining the Air Force, his first race for mayor against the seemingly invincible James J. Walker, the death of his first wife, a financial scandal and preparations for the successful 1933 campaign, the show included various styles of music. Fiorello!’s Pulitzer Prize award inevitably invited comparison with George and Ira Gershwin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning political satire, Of Thee I Sing (1931); however, Fiorello! did not quite measure up to the humour, wit and unity of the earlier musical. The Pulitzer Prize notwithstanding, Fiorello! has hardly been seen since its original production. Bock would create his most important work a few years later with Fiddler on the Roof.

The 1960s

Most Americans of the 1960s, certainly the vast majority of Broadway habitués, intuitively understood the Rodgers and Hammerstein synthesis, at least in its broadest strokes, and they took it for granted. In 1967 the conductor and composer Lehman Engel hailed the arrival of the modern musical, which he linked to Pal Joey and Oklahoma!, for representing models of dramatic maturity, formal integrity and artistic excellence.¹³ (He then expanded on his thesis by discussing eleven shows in detail, including three others by Rodgers and Hammerstein.) Any would-be achievers on Broadway in this period had to begin with what Rodgers and Hammerstein had done. As always, young newcomers could seek to introduce further innovations of the proven formulas, but the basic template was clear.

Bye Bye Birdie (1960), with book by Michael Stewart, choreography by Gower Champion, music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Lee Adams, was a hit in the year of Oscar Hammerstein’s death, and perhaps symbolically it represents a passing of the torch to a new generation. Bye Bye Birdie is unquestionably a show of its era, an observation that could be taken as either a compliment or a criticism. Its talky-teens-in-middle-America theme guaranteed instant identification across the land. Birdie was the first full Broadway show by its young creative team. Strouse wrote many excellent tunes (‘Put On a Happy Face’, ‘A Lot of Livin’ to Do’, ‘Kids’), an uproarious ‘Shriners’ Ballet’ and a charming love ballad (‘Baby, Talk to Me’). The show ran for over 600 performances, and several of its stars – Dick Van Dyke, Paul Lynde, Kay Medford, Michael Pollard, Chita Rivera – went on to more exciting careers as a result of their exposure here. The parodic quality of Bye Bye Birdie, however, while never flagging in sharpness and energy, imparted a second-hand feeling to the show, whose intensity will likely increase over time. The show’s use of teenagers and its youthful spirit have made it a favourite for high school productions, and in 1991 a major touring production starred Tommy Tune and Ann Reinking.

Because of its subject matter, the imminent departure of a rock star for the military (a spoof on the early rock icon Elvis Presley), Birdie was widely sold as a rock ’n’ roll musical. In fact, the musical idiom is traditional Broadway through and through. Conrad Birdie only appears as the image of Elvis, not as the real thing. Attempted revivals have not been especially successful, and the show has travelled poorly outside the United States. In retrospect Bye Bye Birdie closely resembles the ubiquitous college-kid musicals of the 1920s, blessed with charming melodies, a few clever lyrics, a dose of inventive dance and staging, with teens on the telephone in ‘The Telephone Hour’, and a harmless and relatively fast-moving plot. Strouse, of course, went on to write several more shows, but only Applause (1970) and Annie (1977) had the drawing power of Bye Bye Birdie. Like Frank Loesser, with whom he worked in the 1950s, Charles Strouse possesses prodigious musical gifts, showing a technical command of musical language that allows him to recreate nearly any period style or sound. Trained by several greats of the classical world, including Aaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger and David Diamond, he has written many songs for television and the movies, as well as live theatre, without always being recognised as an individual voice.

Strouse and Adams’s only other major show of the 1960s was Golden Boy (1964), a remake of the Clifford Odets play of 1937, with one inspired twist sanctioned by the author, namely changing the name and race of the main character, a conflicted and doomed prizefighter, from that of an Italian American to an African American. A considerable amount of the plot of the original script was deleted when the show was made into a musical. Strouse’s songs were unexceptional, but with Sammy Davis Jr in the main role, the show ran for a year and a half at the Majestic Theatre. By creating a musical play focused on a substantial social issue, albeit with a certain amount of character complexity removed, Strouse and Adams once again invoked the spirit of Rodgers and Hammerstein. The jazzy score did not much resemble Rodgers in style, but Donald McKayle’s choreography – especially in the final concluding boxing match – was widely hailed for its poetic appropriateness, a distant echo of Agnes de Mille in Oklahoma! and Carousel. Golden Boy has never been revived on Broadway, but a revised version played in Brooklyn, Florida and Connecticut in 1985 and 1991.

The Fantasticks also premiered in 1960, the year after The Sound of Music triumph. Probably no musical could be less like a Rodgers and Hammerstein show on the surface – with simple sets and a virtual annihilation of local colour – yet its perennial popularity can be linked to the values of Hammerstein in particular. The first act features an old-fashioned love story of thwarted meetings between two naifs and idealistic marriage triumphant. There is plenty of worldly wise comedy provided by the fathers of the two lovers who at first obstruct, then engineer their children’s romance. This obvious manipulation is carried off with great charm and sweet music. In the second act, reality sets in. Only in boring lives, filled with unrealised potential, do things ever proceed ‘happily ever after’. The Candide-like moral, ‘without a hurt the heart is hollow’, confirms what we suspect all along, that new life and strength can only come out of pain and experience with the wider world. The mask of tragedy does not cover up a clearly optimistic tone that still manages to avoid strident preaching or rosy unreality. The barebones nature of the sets and costumes for The Fantasticks, the most obviously unspectacular feature of the show, is precisely the thing that maintained its appeal for off-Broadway audiences, not to mention innumerable high school, college and community productions.

The music is fully up to the standards of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and there is a kind of simplicity and universality about The Fantasticks that has aided its popularity in tens of thousands of performances in thousands of productions in dozens of countries. The direct appeal of a romantic situation bound up with issues of families experiencing seasonal changes of the sort that occur everywhere is close to the centre of The Fantasticks’ incomparable success. Its humour wears well also. This kind of appeal can be found in many Rodgers and Hammerstein vehicles, most obviously in Carousel and The Sound of Music. Because of the restraint required in production of The Fantasticks, the warmly emotional text and tune of ‘Try to Remember’, for example, does not tumble into an embarrassing or cloying sentimentality. Harvey Schmidt’s music matches Tom Jones’s lyrics in much the same way that Rodgers was able efficiently and delicately to complement Hammerstein’s poetry.

Lerner and Loewe’s last collaboration, Camelot, opened late in 1960, almost as a last gasp of the Rodgers and Hammerstein type of musical play. Anxiously awaited by theatregoers and critics alike, it was Lerner and Loewe’s first show since My Fair Lady. Based on T. H. White’s novel, The Once and Future King, Camelot told the story of the medieval King Arthur, his marriage to fair Guenevere, the creation of the idealistic Round Table, Guenevere’s romance with Lancelot and the villain Mordred’s revelation of the illicit affair in order to provoke the destruction of Arthur’s dream. With his Round Table in shambles and war raging in France, Arthur charges the young boy Tom to flee the battle, but always to remember and work to rebuild the ideals of Camelot. The king’s final ringing soliloquy reminded many of the young, inspirational President Kennedy (elected in 1960) and his glamorous wife, Jacqueline. The public’s willingness to associate a new Broadway show with a contemporary presidency reveals the extent to which America was attuned to New York’s theatrical life in its heyday. Much of the group that assured My Fair Lady’s immense success joined Lerner and Loewe for Camelot, including Julie Andrews (leading actress), Moss Hart (director) and Oliver Smith (designer). Rex Harrison’s leading-man counterpart in Camelot was the British actor Richard Burton, noted for dramatic roles. Opulent sets, elegant costuming and Lerner and Loewe’s lyrics and music made a splendid vehicle, and several hit songs became very popular, especially ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’. However, despite its 873-performance run, a successful touring company and at least three New York revivals, for most critics, Camelot was a disappointment after the delights of My Fair Lady, which was the pinnacle of Lerner and Loewe’s work together. It was ironic that both the Lerner and Loewe collaboration and the Rodgers and Hammerstein creative and business partnership ended the same year, one pair having essentially begun the move towards the integrated musical play and the second pair having helped close that chapter of American musical theatre history.

The last show to open on Broadway in 1960 (on 26 December) was Garson Kanin’s music industry satire about the selling of jukeboxes, Do Re Mi. Comden and Green provided the lyrics with Jule Styne’s music, and the show enjoyed a good run of 400 performances, owing primarily to its clownish stars, Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker, and the beautiful tunes of Styne, especially ‘Make Someone Happy’.

By the 1960s the time was ripe for new ideas. The final proof of the power of the status quo was the vehemence with which newcomers struggled to break from patterns that Rodgers and Hammerstein had relied on so often. One example of interesting innovation was Bob Merrill’s Carnival (1961), based on a current film about Lili, an orphan who joins a carnival, falls in love with the magician Marco the Magnificent and ends up with the carnival’s crippled, bitter puppeteer. Forgoing the use of any stage curtain and having performers entering and exiting through aisles, the director and choreographer Gower Champion staged some of the most exciting dances Broadway had seen in years. Carnival swept theatre awards that year, ran for 700 performances and was revived by the City Center in 1968.

Apparently unstoppable, Richard Rodgers continued to work after the death of Oscar Hammerstein, writing both music and lyrics for No Strings (1962). He created a show about Barbara Woodruff, an African American fashion model, and David Jordan, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author from Maine, who meet in Paris and fall in love. They travel to exotic locales together, but part when the writer decides to return to Maine in order to resume writing. Barbara declines to accompany him, aware of the prejudice they would meet. They part, their time together having been spent with ‘no strings attached’. Rodgers’s work was innovative: the orchestra sat backstage, musicians accompanied singers onstage, principals moved scenery and props in view of the audience and the orchestra contained no string instruments. Although Rodgers was admitted to be ‘still a magician of the musical theatre’ and his score full of ‘enchanted music’,¹⁴ No Strings received mixed reviews. Nonetheless, the show ran for 580 performances and enjoyed both successful tours and a London production in 1963. Rodgers continued his efforts with Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), this time leaving the lyric writing to Stephen Sondheim. Since Sondheim had been a protégé of Oscar Hammerstein, many in the theatrical world had assumed that Rodgers and Sondheim might work together at some point. The bleak story concerns American spinster Leona Samish, who has an intense but hopeless affair with a married merchant in Venice. Sondheim’s lyrics, described by Gerald Bordman as ‘competent’,¹⁵ the gloomy plot and a slow-moving production limited the run of Do I Hear a Waltz? to 220 performances, the shortest run of a Rodgers show during the entire decade.

Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones’s 110 in the Shade (1963), based on the successful play by N. Richard Nash, The Rainmaker (1954), played for a creditable 330 performances on Broadway, but its songs never caught on once removed from the stage production. Despite a superficial resemblance to Oklahoma! in the show’s Western setting, use of a shady character (the rainmaker Starbuck) and focus on the romantic dreams of a young woman, the show sets its own tone. Starbuck, a far cry from Oklahoma!’s Jud, is saved from exposure by the miraculous arrival of rain, but heroine Lizzie Curry still resolves her wanderlust by opting for her dependable boyfriend, Sheriff Fife, rather than the handsome stranger.

The ability of many of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs to fly on their own was, of course, harder to imitate than their stage conventions. If it was difficult to write a new show that would succeed like Oklahoma! at a time when everyone alive knew the formula, it has always been challenging to write a great popular song that could stand on its own. 110 in the Shade had no such song, and Schmidt and Jones’s final collaboration of the sixties, I Do! I Do!, had only one. Produced by David Merrick and Gower Champion, and starring Robert Preston and Mary Martin, I Do! I Do! is a monothematic play tracing the fifty years of married life of the two characters. A work of taste, charm and sweet sentiment, it looked more towards the concept shows of the years to come. The show’s intimacy and small staging demands have encouraged later productions in England, Australia and Germany.

Bob Merrill and Jule Styne’s Funny Girl ran for 1,348 performances at the Winter Garden starting on 26 March 1964. The ‘funny girl’ referred to in the title was the vaudevillian, film and radio comedienne and torch singer Fanny Brice (1891–1951). The show illustrates some of the problems associated with using a historical figure in the relatively recent past as a focus, as opposed to merely a period setting. Life and art sometimes conflict, and audiences notice. Stanley Green reports several changes of production personnel and no fewer than forty rewrites of the final scene required before the show was deemed ready for an official premiere. On the other hand, Funny Girl benefitted from the quite conscious parallels attempted with Styne’s earlier woman-centred show, Gypsy. Funny Girl was also the show that made Barbra Streisand’s stage career. The song ‘People’ became a runaway hit even before the opening. (Sondheim was first approached to write the story of Fanny Brice, but turned it down.) The show became a worthwhile film, and it has remained in the popular consciousness, playing regularly in regional theatres in several English-speaking countries.

Jerry Bock’s most spectacular show, Fiddler on the Roof (1964), was his greatest success and became the first Broadway musical to run for more than 3,000 performances.¹⁶ The theatre historian Gerald Bordman has described the show as the ‘last of the great masterworks of the era’.¹⁷ Based on Sholom Aleichem’s short stories, ‘Tevye and His Daughters’, it relates the experiences of a Jewish family in Russia around 1905 trying to survive poverty and religious persecution in a too quickly changing world. The story entwined issues of family relationships with romantic love interests to create a plot that appealed to a wide and diverse audience. The title and the fiddler who plays off and on throughout the show were inspired by the Russian artist Marc Chagall’s painting ‘The Green Violinist’, in which a fiddler appears to be dancing on the roofs of a village.¹⁸ Although the plot, lyrics and music are at times overwhelmingly sentimental and nostalgic, the realisation that the story mirrored genuine experiences of Jewish immigrants from the shtetls of the Ukraine gave the production unique credibility and power. Several songs from the show became standards almost overnight (such as ‘Tradition’, ‘Matchmaker, Matchmaker’, ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ and ‘Sunrise, Sunset’). An impressive production team assembled the show: Hal Prince produced; Jerome Robbins directed and choreographed; and Zero Mostel, who played Tevye, displayed a phenomenal range of acting ability from the poignant to the comic. Fiddler on the Roof exhibits much of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s recipe for success: a compelling, original literary source; a well-written libretto with intelligent theatrical pacing; beautifully written songs, many of which spring naturally from the action and contribute to character development; and sentiment that is natural and genuine enough to convince the audience this show is well worth seeing again. It is still produced in various types of venues throughout the world.

Jerry Herman’s first Broadway show, Milk and Honey (1961), was set in Israel and told the story of American tourists and their desert romance. The show ends with the married but separated man aiming for a divorce in order to marry his new love. The song ‘Shalom’ became a hit, and Herman won a Tony Award, but even better times were ahead for him when Hello, Dolly! opened in 1964, ran for 2,844 performances and won ten Tony Awards. The title song, recorded by Louis Armstrong, was a staple on the song charts that year, greatly adding to the popularity of the show. The story had a long history, first appearing on the London stage in 1835, and eventually appearing as Thornton Wilder’s play The Matchmaker. The plot centres on Dolly Levi, an 1890s New York matchmaker who sets her cap for her client Horace Vandergelder and entraps him for herself with some high jinks along the way, including a riotous evening at the Harmonia Gardens restaurant where she is welcomed by the staff (‘Hello, Dolly!’). Neither innovative nor unusual in any way, it succeeded as a brilliant spectacle. Direction by the gifted Gower Champion and tasteful, turn-of-the-century-influenced sets provided a backdrop against which a long list of Broadway’s most glamorous leading ladies played Dolly. Carol Channing made the role very much her own, and she was succeeded by the likes of Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, Phyllis Diller and even the redoubtable Ethel Merman, who had turned down the invitation to create the role. Channing returned to the part several times during her career, and remains closely identified with both the character and the title song. It is no surprise that Hello, Dolly! remains exceedingly popular with the theatregoing public and has been produced in several languages. Herman scored another coup with Mame (1966), which received the Tony as best musical of the year and ran for 1,508 performances. The story of zany Auntie Mame and the adventures of her nephew as she raises him (amid the stock-market crash, an attempt to break into musical theatre, subsequent marriage to a rich man who is killed while climbing the Alps, and then helping her nephew find the proper mate) gave Angela Lansbury the same kind of opportunity Hello, Dolly! had given Carol Channing, and she too became an important Broadway star through a Herman show. However, a revival of Mame with Lansbury in the summer of 1983 failed.

Plate 15 Carol Channing in the 1977 production of Hello, Dolly! at Starlight Theatre, Kansas City, Missouri.

Photograph courtesy of Starlight Theatre, Kansas City, Missouri

Several other significant shows opened in the mid-1960s. Mitch Leigh’s only big hit, Man of La Mancha (1965), resembled Herman’s two big shows of the 1960s in that it depended on the leading character for much of its energy. Man of La Mancha was a show-within-a-show production, where the novelist Cervantes is imprisoned for debts during the Spanish Inquisition and tells his fellow prisoners the story of Don Quixote, his faithful servant Sancho Panza and Aldonza, a servant girl whom Quixote sees as an idealistic ‘Dulcinea’ and for whom he is willing to fight any battle. By the end of the show, Aldonza/Dulcinea believes in Quixote’s ‘The Impossible Dream’, too. The show is still produced often around the world and has been revived on Broadway.

Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner collaborated to write On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965), from which the title song became a long-remembered favourite, but the libretto was loosely constructed and the fantasy theme involving extrasensory perception proved awkward. The title song is still well known, but the seldom seen show is far better recognised from the 1970 film featuring Barbra Streisand.

A few other important collaborators also contributed their most important work to Broadway during the 1960s. Bricusse and Newley’s Stop the World – I Want to Get Off (1962) and The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd (1965) and Sherman Edwards’s 1776 (1969) enjoyed successful runs. The latter has proven most popular in regional and community theatres, especially around 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial, but its appeal outside the United States has been limited. One of the most important new partnerships of the 1960s was formed by John Kander and Fred Ebb, whose first musical, Flora, the Red Menace (1965), provided Liza Minnelli with her first Broadway role. Their second show, Cabaret (1966), was set in the Kit Kat Klub of Berlin during the Nazis’ rise to power. The love relationship between the American actress Sally Bowles and the aspiring young American writer Clifford Bradshaw, and Cliff’s doomed friendship with the German Ernst Ludwig, who befriends Cliff and smuggles to help the Nazi cause, unfold amid conflicts related to anti-Semitism, social justice, personal freedom and abortion. The ironic, Brecht-Weill–influenced score, the clever unifying use of the Master of Ceremonies character, brilliantly played by Joel Grey, and the bitter undercurrents of the story made Cabaret an unusually powerful theatrical piece. It remains an utterly convincing show, although revivals are hampered by the strong identification of Joel Grey’s masterly delineation of decadence captured in the well-adapted film version. Liza Minnelli’s Sally is undoubtedly her best work on film.

A considerable part of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s constructive legacy extends to the choice and formation of books, although here the point is one of general procedure on the road to achieving a script rather than the use of specific themes or techniques. As Lehman Engel and others have observed, nearly all successful musicals written between Pal Joey and A Chorus Line originated in a previous form, whether dramatic, literary or filmic. The challenge of developing a completely ‘original’ libretto has been met occasionally in a concept musical, such as Company (see p. 250), and even in an old-fashioned book show like Bye Bye Birdie. However, beginning with someone else’s play, poem, short story or biography seems to be the surer road to success. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ill-fated Allegro of 1947 and the successful but flawed Me and Juliet in 1953, coming amidst so many other successes for the team, seem to prove the rule.

The achievements of the major Broadway artists working between 1943 and 1970 transformed virtually all elements that make up what is known today as the American musical. Rodgers and Hammerstein led the way in the deft construction of plots, the invention of brilliantly singable poetry, the provision of consistently attractive music and the devising of stylised choreography for an entire evening’s entertainment. Besides calculating the balance of forces and combining all elements to evoke a deep emotional response from a large and diverse audience in individual shows, they also paved the way for an era. Most remarkably, they succeeded in navigating the zone in which one could create with artistic integrity without sacrificing accessibility and popular appeal.