Beautiful Mornin': The Broadway Musical in the 1940s
Ethan Mordden
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0195128516
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Music and girls are the soul of musical comedy," one critic wrote, early in the 1940s. But this was the age that wanted more than melody and kickline form its musical shows. The form had been running on empty for too long, as a formula for the assembly of spare parts--star comics, generic love songs, rumba dancers, Ethel Merman. If Rodgers and Hammerstein hadn't existed, Broadway would have had to invent them; and Oklahoma! and Carousel came along just in time to announce the New Formula for Writing Musicals: Don't have a formula.
Instead, start with strong characters and atmosphere: Oklahoma!'s murderous romantic triangle set against a frontier society that has to learn what democracy is in order to deserve it; or Carousel's dysfunctional family seen in the context of class and gender war.
With the vitality and occasionally outrageous humor that Ethan Mordden's readers take for granted, the author ranges through the decade's classics--Pal Joey, Lady in the Dark, On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Phinian's Rainbow, Brigadoon, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific. He also covers illuminating trivia--the spy thriller The Lady Comes Across, whose star got so into her role that she suffered paranoid hallucinations and had to be hospitalized; the smutty Follow the Girls, damned as "burlesque with a playbill" yet closing as the longest-run musical in Broadway history; Lute Song, in which Mary Martin and Nancy Reagan were Chinese; and the first "concept" musicals, Allegro and Love Life. Amid the fun, something revolutionary occurs. The 1920s created the musical and the 1930s gave it politics. In the 1940s, it found its soul.
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one last bit, the highschool graduation. And then, of course, the story's center seems to lie in "You'll Never Walk Alone." The tension between what the first song tells us and how the later song corrects it gives the whole a moral ambiguity. Compound the fantasy with the ascetically religious nature of the finale, whose sense of sorrow and ecstasy has the air of a church service, and Carousel takes on the format of a parable. We expect such intelligence of the musical play; it is deceptive,
longer than the Broadway original and at a much larger theatre, the Coliseum (where the English National Opera now plays). It's that the so nostalgically American Annie turned out to be far more universal in appeal than Oklahoma! and especially Carousel in Europe, South America, and even the Far East. Of course, the two earlier shows are bound up in national folkways, while Annie relates very loosely to its setting. Flow is a public to appreciate Oklahoma! without comprehension of the thesis
the Girls (and for that matter By Jupiter) had few males on view who weren't playing soldiers. But until On the Town (1944) there had not been a musical to define America's wartime in its subject matter.11' The previous chapter's trove of Americana was metaphorical: what America means. On the Town, a contemporary servicemen's tale, was realistic and self-explanatory: how Americans feel right now. It was set designer Oliver Smith's idea. With composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome
thereafter till 1981; Wright and Forrest did not use anything in it. 154 BEAUTIFUL MORNIN' the concerto and about a minute more of the work, whereupon the curtain would rise, prematurely as it were (just as Carousel's was to do later that same season), thus hurling the audience into the action. But what odd action. We see a group of young people—kids, adolescents, and Rikard—scaling the summit of the Hill of Trolls. It's a haunted place. Here is where North Wind imprisoned beautiful young
wonderful character writer, as in the barber's "(Waiting for our) Wooden Wedding," so patient, willing, innocent. One contrasts that with "That's Him": sated and knowing. He knew people, Weill—something you'd never guess from the cardboard icons that Brecht was always throwing at him. Better, he was the most imaginative of all composers, forever doing something for the first time that would then become cliche in others' hands, such as those shuffling footsteps that form part of the "Forty Minutes
