The Mikado to Matilda: British Musicals on the New York Stage

355 Pages·2020·8.525 MB·English

by  Thomas S. Hischak

The Mikado to Matilda
OTHER ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD BOOKS BY THOMAS S. HISCHAK
Boy Loses Girl: Broadway’s Librettists
The Disney Song Encyclopedia, with Mark A. Robinson
The Encyclopedia of Film Composers
Enter the Players: New York Actors in the Twentieth Century
Enter the Playmakers: Directors and Choreographers on the New York Stage
The Jerome Kern Encyclopedia
1939: Hollywood’s Greatest Year
1927: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the the Jazz Age’s Greatest Year
Noel, Tallulah, Cole, and Me: A Memoir of Broadway’s Golden Age by John C. Wilson,
co-edited with Jack Macauley
Off-Broadway Musicals since 1919: From Greenwich Village Follies to The Toxic
Avenger
The 100 Greatest American and British Animated Feature Films
The 100 Greatest American Plays
Theatre as Human Action: An Introduction to Theatre Arts
Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical When It Went to
Hollywood
The Woody Allen Encyclopedia
The Mikado to Matilda
British Musicals on the
New York Stage
Thomas S. Hischak
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hischak, Thomas S., 1951– author.
Title: The Mikado to Matilda : British musicals on the New York stage / Thomas S.
Hischak.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references
and index. | Summary: “In The Mikado to Matilda: British Musicals on the New York
Stage, Thomas Hischak provides an overview of British musicals that made their
way to Broadway, covering their entire history up to the present day”— Provided by
publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019049304 (print) | LCCN 2019049305 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538126066
(cloth) | ISBN 9781538126073 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Musicals—Great Britain—History and criticism. | Musicals—
Performances—New York (State)—New York—History.
Classification: LCC ML1731 .H57 2020 (print) | LCC ML1731 (ebook) | DDC
792.6/45097471—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049304
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049305
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
For Kurt Gänzl,
whose decades of research and writing about
British musicals made this book possible

Contents
Preface: Andrew Lloyd Who? ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Chronological List of Musicals xv
A Brief History of the British Musical on the New York Stage xix
THE MUSICALS, A–Z 1
Guide to Recordings, Films, and Videos 295
Bibliography 315
Index 319
About the Author 331
vii

Preface
Andrew Lloyd Who?
Consider this fairy tale:
Once upon a time there was no such thing as the musical theatre until the
Americans invented it. In the late 1800s and the early 1900s there were lots of
old-fashioned musicals with old-fashioned songs, but audiences didn’t know
any better and enjoyed them. Then Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, and
other musical geniuses wrote better songs, but their musicals are hardly ever done
anymore, except Anything Goes and Annie Get Your Gun. Then along came Rodgers
and Hammerstein, who brought a lot of class and a lot of serious stuff to the musi-
cal, but that was all right because there were still musical comedies like Guys and
Dolls and Damn Yankees, so the musical was doing fine. By the end of the 1960s and
into the 1970s, some musicals started getting really serious, but that was mostly
Stephen Sondheim’s fault, and at least there was Annie and La Cage aux Folles.
Then a weird thing happened: the British starting making good musicals. And
they were very popular on Broadway, which was more than a little upsetting, be-
cause it was like the British showing up at Lexington and Concord all over again.
Suddenly, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera were the biggest hits on Broadway,
which didn’t seem kosher. And some of these British musicals weren’t really Brit-
ish, like the French-British Miss Saigon or the Scandinavian-British Momma Mia!
Luckily, this invasion lost steam, because even Andrew Lloyd Webber ran out of
hit musicals. By the turn of the new century, there were fewer London musicals.
The Producers and Wicked opened, and the big hits were American once again. By
the second decade of the twenty-first century, there was the occasional Billy Elliot
and such, but most of the shows were American, and some were even hip-hop
and rap, but that was okay because it reflected America’s national diversity. The
musical theatre was saved. And it lived happily ever after.
While there is hardly any truth to this fairy tale, it is the scenario that many
American theatregoers actually believe. It would take several books to untangle
all the inaccuracies in such a fable, but this book aims to clear up one widely held
misconception: the role of the British musical in the American theatre.
Just as the only theatre in the colonies was British theatre, so too, just about
all of the musicals seen on Broadway for many years were from London. Ballad
operas, comic operettas, and musical comedies from Great Britain filled the New
York theatres for decades in the nineteenth century and continued to do so up
through World War One.
ix