MUSICAL a concise history.

506 Pages·2022·11.171 MB·English

by  KURT GANZL

THE MUSICAL,
A CONCISE HISTORY
Second Edition
Julia Mackenzie is Lily Garland in On the Twentieth Century. British Musical
Theatre Collection, photo by Reg Wilson.
THE MUSICAL,
A CONCISE HISTORY
Second Edition
Kurt Gänzl
With a New Final Chapter by
Jamie Findlay
Cover credit: INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2022 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gänzl, Kurt, author. | Findlay, Jamie, author.
Title: The musical : a concise history / Kurt Gänzl ; with a new final chapter by Jamie Findlay.
Description: Second edition. | Albany : State University of New York Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021040583 (print) | LCCN 2021040584 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438487519
(pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438487526 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Musical theater—History. | Musicals—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML1700 .G322 2022 (print) | LCC ML1700 (ebook) | DDC 782.1/409—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040583
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040584
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction to the Second Edition xiii
Chapter 1: The Early Days: 1700–1849 1
The Musical Stage before 1850 4
Popular Entertainments of the Early Eighteenth Century 5
Operatic Entertainments of the Early Eighteenth Century 11
The Rise of the Original Musical Play 12
The Rise of the Romantic 17
Some Notable Musicals: 1700–1849 22
Chapter 2: Opéra-Bouffe: 1850–1869 29
Some Notable Musicals: 1850–1869 43
Chapter 3: That First Fine Flowering: 1870–1889 48
Post the Prussians 50
Operette 66
The New Era of the English Musical Stage 80
America Awakens 89
The New Burlesque 92
Some Notable Musicals: 1870–1889 94
Chapter 4: Novelties of the Nineties 101
The Gaiety of the Nations 102
America Awakened 119
“Musical Comedy” Par Excellence 122
Some Notable Musicals: 1890–1899 125
Chapter 5: Into the Twentieth Century: 1900–1914 129
The Musical with a Backbone 131
Enter the Widow 142
Some Notable Musicals: 1900–1914 153
FIRST CATCH YOUR FRENCH PLAY 159
vi Contents
Chapter 6: Those Magnificent Madcap Years: 1915–1929 163
IT’S TIME TO DANCE 165
Les Années Jazz! 166
The Jazz Age in English 174
THE INTERNATIONAL HIT PARADE OF AMERICAN MUSICAL
COMEDIES OF 1910–1930 191
The Romantic Musical 192
AN INTERNATIONAL HIT PARADE OF ENGLISH ROMANTIC
MUSICALS OF THE 1920S 203
Operette for All 203
Some Notable Musicals: 1915–1929 220
Chapter 7: Whither Go You, Musical Theater? 227
The Merry Minnows over the “Other Side” 244
Some Notable Musicals: 1930–1940 254
Chapter 8: After the War Was Over: The 1940s 257
Some Notable Musicals: 1941–1950 287
OPERETTA HIT PARADE 289
Chapter 9: When Broadway Really Ruled the Stage: The 1950s 291
The Merry Minnows Still over the Other Side 310
Some Notable Musicals: 1951–1959 318
Chapter 10: The Soaring Sixties 321
Some Notable Musicals: 1960–1969 346
AMERICAN MUSICALS IN THE WEST END: 1945–1970 348
Chapter 11: New Departures: From Rock Opera to Party Musical 350
Some Notable Musicals: 1970–1980 391
Chapter 12: Monumental Musicals 393
Some Notable Musicals: 1980–1994 438
Chapter 13: On the Twenty-First Century (by Jamie Findlay) 440
Some Notable Musicals: 1995–Today 472
Index 475
PREFACE
The musical theater: it’s an endless source of fascination and enjoyment
for those of us who work in it, who watch it, or who even just listen
to it. But the musical theater isn’t, of course, just those few shows that
we work in, watch, and listen to today, in the twenty-first century. It’s
all those other thousands and thousands of variegated entertainments
that have sung and danced their way across thousands and thousands
of stages, all round the world, for hundreds of years. They’ve been a
dazzling and disparate lot, those entertainments, and the story of how,
where, when, and why they won their hours or years of glory in the
theater is an equally dazzling and disparate one. And it’s the story that
I’m going to try to tell you—concisely (as my subtitle says)—here.
Over recent years, as the hugely popular body of entertainments that
we call musical theater has become a more and more popular subject for
scholarly and (hyper?)academic study, and as an awareness and knowledge
of the shows of earlier years, their music, and their texts has become
more widespread, a number of substantial studies of the musical stage
in various countries and cities have appeared: Florian Bruyas’s L’Histoire
de l’opérette en France, dealing with the great days (and the not so great
ones) of the mostly Parisian musical theater; Otto Schneidereit’s chatty
tales of the musical entertainments of the Berlin stage; Anton Bauer’s
careful listings of Viennese musical productions through the centuries;
Gerry Bordman’s classic chronicle of the New York musical stage, The
American Musical Theater; supplemented by Richard Norton’s impecca-
bly detailed volumes of credits and song listings and my own hefty two
volumes on the thousand or so original shows produced in the last 150
years in The British Musical Theatre. Each of us, however, dealt almost
entirely with the product of the country about which we were writing
and, although we—or some of us—tried to put our area of musical the-
ater history a little into a general, wider, and even wholly international
context, the accent of each of our works was, naturally, very firmly on
its declared subject and area.
But, of course, the history of the musical theater—as opposed to
“the history of the musical theater in New York, in Britain, in Vienna”
or whatever—is no one-nation or one-center affair. It is a history that’s
knitted together from strands drawn from hither and yon, in a rich,
crazy-quilt kind of pattern of languages and theatrical or musical styles
vii
viii Preface
whose diversity only helps to give it its own wonderful diversity. To
chronicle that whole history in its fullest details would be a five- or
ten-volume effort—large volumes, too. Someday, perhaps, some brave
person may get down to the monumental lifetime of work that would be
needed to complete such an opus in such a way. But I am going to be,
as my subtitle says, “concise” . . . even though those of you who know
my other books on this subject might find this a little hard to believe.
So, what I have tried to do here is to pull together all the main
strands which go to make up the history of what we nowadays call “the
musical” and combine them in one all-in history of the musical stage.
Not the history of the musical theater “in” or “from” any-one-where, but
just plain “the history of the musical theater”—in the world, if you like.
Someone called it “the Big Picture.” Someone else, taking the novelist’s
phrase, referred to it as “the eye of God technique.” Anyway, what I’ve
tried to do is stand outside and away from any one central place (not
so difficult for someone who comes from New Zealand!) and tell the
roller-coaster story of the musical stage of the past centuries, down to
Figure 1. Les Misérables.
Source: Photo by Michael Le
Poer Trench.
Preface ix
today, in such a way as to place the major chronicles which I referred
to in their proper positions on the full stage, and in their context in the
whole of history—musical theater history, that is.
Anyone dealing with “musical theater” has, of course, first to state
his definition of what he understands by that term. I can only repeat
what I said in the preface to my Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre:
I have chosen to stick with what I know about. I deal only with
the book musical. That is to say, I cover the original musical
play in all its shapes, forms and sizes—any original piece with
a continuous libretto, lyrics and music, whether it be a sung-
through five-act romantic operetta, a Germanic Posse with a
half-dozen numbers, or a little farcical piece illustrated by some
tap-dancing high-jinks and a tiny bookful of squeaked-out
excuses for songs. I draw my line around that area, and in
doing so I regretfully—but necessarily—exclude from my sur-
vey all such contiguous and/or related forms of musico-theatre
entertainment as opera, pantomime (in both the original and
the Anglo-Christmas senses of the word), revue, minstrelsy,
compilation shows, paste-up-musicals (mostly), dance shows,
concerts, musical hall/variety/vaudeville and so forth, as well
as musical film and television. This doesn’t mean there is no
mention of these areas in the book. They just aren’t the subject
of the book . . .
I’ll actually take that a bit further on this occasion. Here, I have stuck
not only with the book musical but with the successful book musical. The
(hi)story that I tell in these pages is the history of that part of the genre
that has entertained most of the people most of the time, in most places
where musical theater is played: musicals for all. Is “mainstream” the right
word? This means that we will encounter together here only those musicals
bred and boarded in the four areas which have, at various times, been the
most effective purveyors of such shows to the international stage: France,
Britain, America, and the Austria/Hungary/Germany area of Central Europe.
Such mainly for-home-consumption traditions as the zarzuela of Spain, or
the operetta of Italy, and such barely traveling musicals as the products
of Russia, New Zealand, or South America, which never belonged to the
successful mainstream, must be left aside. Similarly, it means that—as we
follow the straight(ish) and narrow(ish) path taken through the years by
the great hit entertainments—there will be no delving into the side streets
inhabited by those “special interest” groups of musicals which have become
favorite and fashionable areas of study in our own divisive and divided