[September 12th
marked the 150th anniversary of the first performance of The Black Crook, generally considered the first stage musical
(although opinions
vary). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy both Crook and other exemplary stage musicals—and will ask you to share
your solos and choruses for a crowd-pleasing weekend post that’s sure to garner
a standing O!]
Historical
stereotypes and revisions in three of the uber-talented duo’s most famous
musicals.
1)
Oklahoma! (1943): The first collaboration between the established and
successful composer Richard Rodgers and the equally accomplished lyricist Oscar
Hammerstein II, Oklahoma! is best
known for its significant role in advancing theatrical history: the musical is considered
a pioneering “book musical,” one of the first to truly center a serious
(rather than comedic) plot and story on the songs and musical numbers, building
on but extending further the starting points provided by yesterday’s subject The Black Crook and other prior works
like Show
Boat (1927). But as a hugely popular cowboy Western, Oklahoma! contributed a great deal to
the resurgence of that genre ahead of its cultural heyday in the late
1940s and 1950s. And like so many of those popular Westerns, Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s forgoes nearly all the region’s historical and cultural
complexities, in favor of a stereotypical story of laconic cowboys, innocent
farmgirls, feisty cowgirls, and their star-crossed but ultimately idealized
romances.
2)
Carousel (1945): For their
much-anticipated follow-up to Oklahoma!,
Rodgers and Hammerstein started with a well-known Hungarian play (Ferenc Molnár’s
1909 Liliom) and transplanted its
story to the Maine coast in the 1870s. They kept the central plot, that of a
neer-do-well carnival barker who falls in love with and impregnates a working
class girl, turns to robbery in a desperate and failed attempt to support their
family, but is able to redeem himself before a semi-tragic but romantic
conclusion. But because the setting has been shifted to late 19th century
New England, Carousel is able to
engage with some key historical issues and communities, from industrialization
(heroine Julie Jordan and her friend Carrie Pipperridge both work in the town’s
mills) to rising inequality (the relationship between the incipient Gilded Age
and the desperation of Julie, Carrie, tragic hero Billy Bigelow, Carrie’s
fisherman beau Enoch, and others). Here, that is, the star-crossed romances and
the characters’ resulting fates serve a more complex and revisionist historical
purpose than they do in Oklahoma!
3)
South Pacific (1949): The duo’s third stage musical (after they
co-wrote the 1945 musical film State Fair) was technically still
historical but set in a much more contemporary period: the Pacific
Theater of World War II, as depicted in James Michener’s Pulitzer-winning short
story collection Tales of
the South Pacific (1947). Yet South
Pacific differs widely from overtly, simplistically patriotic musicals like
the film Yankee
Doodle Dandy (1942), choosing to focus instead on themes of racial
conflict and understanding across multiple cultures, including an American
nurse and serviceman but also their respective lovers, a French plantation
owner with mixed-race children and a Tonkinese (from a region of Vietnam, in the era’s
parlance) young woman. The musical is not without its stereotypes in portraying
these identities and relationships, but for its immediate post-war moment (and
really for any period’s popular culture) it also features a surprisingly
progressive vision of race and community. Within a six-year period, then, these
titans of musical theater had themselves progressed quite a bit in their
depictions of American and world history.
Next musical
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other musicals you’d highlight and analyze?
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