Journal of American Drama and Theatre 8 (Spring 1996)
The American Musical Stage
Experiments on the American Musical Stage
in the Twenties
.JULIAN MATES
Marc Connelly once wrote, "The New York Theatre never saw
palmier days than in the 1920s. Seldom could one find any of the city's
more than one hundred theatres tenantless.,,1 And Stanley Green points
out that at no time did the number of musical shows drop below thirty-
seven per season.2 With so much going on it would be unusual not to
find a number of experiments in our musical theatre. Before looking at
the surprising number of these new ideas, it may prove useful to glance
briefly at the slow development of our musical theatre, before the 1920s
brought an explosion of ideas and ushered in a new era on the American
stage.
The musical had been a large part of America's repertory from the
first companies to arrive here in the eighteenth century. The Beggar's
Opera not only introduced ballad opera to American audiences but was
itself produced all over the colonies in every year in the eighteenth
century by the first troupes to arrive. Soon after pasticcios and comic
operas were imported, we began to create our own. The same was true
for pantomimes and melodramas, with their extensive use of music to set
the mood, underscore and accompany specific actions, and provide a
substitute for dialogue. Even the acting of melodrama was closer to
TMarc Connelly, "Once Upon the Palmy 1920s, The Dramatists Guild Was
Born," The Dramatists Guild Quarterly (Spring 1976), 8.
2Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy (Do Capo Press reprint of 4th ed.,
San Diego: A.S. Barnes & Co., Inc., 1980), 131.
3Anne Dhu Shapiro points out that the ways music was used in melodrama
"were transferred very directly into music for the early silent film," thus providing a
continuum with o'ur early musical theatre. Anne Dhu Shapiro, "Action Music in
American Pantomime and Melodrama, 1730-1913,', American Music, Vol. 2 No. 4,
(Winter 1984), 66.
13
dance than to traditional stage movement.4 Dance, whether on a slack
wire or in pantomimes, became an important part of our repertory.
The nineteenth century displayed all these forms created by
Americans in addition to imports from England, France, and Germany.
Out" major contribution was, of course, the minstrel show. At first, the
form utilized well-known songs, as the ballad opera had; soon, however,
American composers--Stephen Foster and Dan Emmett, for exam-
pie--wrote original music for minstrel shows, and by the end of the
century, Black minstrels and Black composers had found an outlet for
their abilities (James Bland comes to mind, with his "O Dem Golden
Slippers" and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny").
Extravaganzas, with elaborate scenery, little dialogue, and lots of
music, were popular as soon as technological development permitted
lighting and stage effects--from Cherry and Fair Star to The Black Crook.
The Mose plays (Mose was a Bowery fireman) added music and songs to
stories about characters with whom the audience could easily identify
and carried the comic opera past the 1840s. "Farce-comedies" tied
variety acts together strung on a very thin clothesline ("a day in the
country," for example). The form began with Nathan Salsbury's The
Brook in 1875 and lasted many years, eventually surfacing again with the
intimate revue. Fritz, Our German Cousin led to a series of "Fritz" plays
well into the 1880s, and all provided spots for performers to interpolate
songs.
The Harrigan and Hart Mulligan Guard plays made a leap toward the
twentieth century with musicals depicting life in and around Corlear's
Hook in Manhattan. It is worth noting that Harrigan and Hart's
background was in the minstrel show and their Mulligan plays were a
strong influence on George M. Cohan. Cohan's brash musicals with their
super-patriotism ("Can you write without the flag?" he was asked; "1 can
write without anything but a pencil," he replied) and realistic language
were one strong element in this country and operetta was the other (the
latter usually taking place in a never-never land, with unreal people and
situations and music closer to opera than to popular song). The Princess
Theatre shows (1915-1919) began the process of integrating book and
music.
In dance, the major revolution came with Isadora Duncan, but when
she died she left no school, no legacy of modern dance. The twenties
would complete the revolution and in addition bring modern dance into
the popular musical theatre.
4See Alan S. Downer, "Players and Painted Stage, Nineteenth Century Acting,"
PMLA, Vol. 61, No. 2, (June 1946).

14 MATES
Vaudeville, burlesque and revues flourished before the twenties, but
their very popularity allowed them to experiment with song and dance
during the twenties. In fact, new forms constantly appeared and new
experiments were tried, but, as Margaret Knapp writes, in some of our
musical stage forms "such as burlesque and comic opera, the book was
an important aspect of the production, while in forms such as extrava-
ganza and minstrel shows, the book was secondary to music, dance,
comedy and spectacle." And the twenties, particularly, included comic
opera, operetta, burlesque (both in its original meaning and in its later
guise), extravaganza, and the revue. "By permitting these numerous
forms"--she omits opera, dance, and vaudeville--"to flourish side by
side, the musical theatre of this era literally offered something for
everyone.''s
In fact, audiences were willing to accept experiments in part because
of the long tradition of musical theatre mentioned earlier, going back to
the eighteenth century. The ballad opera, the pasticcio, and the comic
opera dominated the repertory and the musical theatre became our
longest-standing tradition.6 Americans were not only used to musical
theatre but were willing to go along with experiments.
If, for example, the twenties saw an extraordinary concern with
commercialism and business, the musical stage was quick to reflect this.
Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller's The American Stage notes the appearance
of benevolent men at the top of business in Letty Pepper (1922) which
clearly demonstrates that success in business and love are designed to
journey hand in hand.z Helen of Troy, NY (1923) was concerned with
advertising and big business in a musical comedy. The musical Clinging
Vine (1922) dealt with gender conflict in business. Plays heavy with
music--Processional, for example--attacked the entire capitalist system.
It was largely in the twenties that women found careers in the theatre
other than acting. Anne Caldwell enjoyed success as a playwright and
librettist, Rida Johnson Young wrote nearly thirty plays and musicals, and
Fanny Todd Mitchell wrote twenty-six plays and musicals, many in the
twenties and many starring Jeannette McDonald and Archibald Leach
5Margaret M. Knapp, "Integration of Elements as a Viable Standard for Judging
Musical Theatre," in Henry F. Salerno, ed., Focus on Popular Theatre in America,
Bowling Green, Ohio: Journal of Popular Culture, 114.
6See Oscar G. Sonneck, Early Opera in America, (New York, London, Boston:
Library of Congress, 1915), and Julian Mates, The American Musical Stage Before
1800 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962).
7Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller, eds., The American Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 175-189.
The American Musical Stage 15
(who would later change his name to Can/Grant). Mitchell's A Wonder
ful Night in 1929 utilized what may have been the first revolving stage
in America. One of the most successful musical collaborations was that
of Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnell; she wrote the book and
lyrics for, among other works, Blossom Time in 1921 and The Student
Prince in 1924. And Dorothy Fields began her illustrious career by
writing the lyrics for Blackbirds of 1928, the longest running all-Black
review in Broadway history.8
Women helped the dance world throw off its stodgy image. "The
earliest date usually set for the modern dance is the beginning of the
twentieth century, when [Isadora] Duncan with her natural movement
and Den ishawn with its exoticism broke with the forms of conventional
ballet.''9 Duncan danced for the last time in the United States in 1923,
but her autobiography of 1927 gave a key to what was happening: "Why
should our children bend the knee in that fastidious and servile dance,
the Minuet, or twirl in the mazes of false sentimentality of the Waltz?
Rather let them come forth with great strides, leaps and bounds.., to
dance the language of our Pioneers .... ,,0
Others insist that the origin of modern dance does not go any further
back than the expressionism of Martha Graham that emerged in the
twenties.]] Her work helped to provide a popular audience for dance.
She had been teaching and studying at Denishawn when, in 1923, John
Murray Anderson saw her and engaged her for an edition of the
Greenwich Village Follies. Graham's continued search, her experiments,
her programs of 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929 displayed what one
biographer called "a new form and style in dancing" in such dances as
Desir (1926) and Adolescence (1929).2 Whether one credits Duncan or
8See Felicia Hardison Londr6, "Money without glory: turn-of-the-century
America's women playwrights," Chapter 9 in Engle and Miller. Also see William A.
Everett, "Barbara Frietchie and My Maryland: The Civil War Comes to Operetta," The
Passing Show, Newsletter of the Shubert Archive, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2-8; and, in the
same issue, Priscilla Cunningham's, "Fanny Todd Mitchell," 8-17.
9Selma Jean Cohan, Next Week, Swan Lake (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan
University Press, 1982), 128. The Denishawn company and school, formed by Ruth
St. Denis and Ted Shawn in 1915, pioneered the use of primitive and ethnic dance,
often with religious themes, as sources for serious theatre.
lsadora Duncan, My Life (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 343.
USee Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham (New.York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce,
1941), 141,142.
2George Beiswanger, "Martha Graham: A Perspective," in Morgan, 142.

16
Graham with originating modern dance, one of its most fascinating
aspects was its appeal to popular audiences as it made its way into revues
and, later, musical comedy.
Still another experiment influenced both audience and production,
and that came with the resurgence of Black theatre, especially with Sissle
and Blake's Shuffle Along, in 1921. There had been many "greats" in
Black theatre before the 1920s. Bob Cole and Billy Johnson's A Trip to
Coontown (1898) was the first musical written, directed and performed
by Black artists. George Walker and Bert Williams had starred in several
Broadway shows by 1910 and had enjoyed phenomenal success with In
Dahomey in 1903. Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson had written songs for
Broadway musicals. Ernest Hogan had set up a touring company for
Black musicals. Allen Woll, in his Black Musical Theatre, points out
how difficult it is to establish a historical continuity for Black theatre,
"since the creation, evolution, and shape of the Black musical has
changed so abruptly and so often since the turn of the century.''13
These early examples of Black musical theatre notwithstanding, it is
still true that the major breakthrough for Black theatre came with Shuffle
Along in 1921. Not only was the cast assured of future starring roles but
the show made the Black musical legitimate; managers and producers
realized that audiences would pay to see a Black show, and "Black
musicals became a Broadway staple.''14 Langston Hughes felt the show
launched the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that spread to books,
sculpture, music and dancing.
Eubie Blake wrote the music and Noble Sissle the lyrics for Shuffle
Along. Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, collaborators since their
student days at Fisk University, wrote the book and also starred in the
show.]s The plot is skimpy but allows plenty of room for the performers
to use vaudeville sketches they knew. The minstrel show's influence was
displayed in dialect, slapstick, and what Robert Toll calls the "empty-
headed, convoluted use of words.'"6 The jazzy score ("Love Will Find
A Way" and "i'm Just Wild About Harry" were two of many hits in the
3AIlen Woll, Black Musical Theatre (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1989), xiii.
Wbid., 60.
'SNathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, /
1971), 288.
'6Robert C. Toll, On With the Show (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976),
134.
4
MATES The American Musical Stage 17
show) and the dances, steps that had been featured in the Black vaude-
ville circuit--time-steps, buck and wing, soft shoe and others--made the
deepest impression. Toll writes: "With its foot-tapping music, its wacky
comedy, and its dazzling dances, the show literally burst with explosive
energy. Shuffle Along revitalized musical comedy in the twenties .... ,,17
Shuffle Along made other innovations. Not only did the show find
a Black audience, but the rigid barriers of segregated seating in the
theatre also broke down. Blacks were no longer restricted to balcony
seats. With each succeeding Black show on Broadway during the
twenties, segregated seating for Blacks became less common. The stars
and replacements of Shuffle Along--Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, and
Paul Robeson among others--helped form a talent pool for the many
Black shows to follow. Woll says that Shuffle Along legitimized Black
musical theatre on Broadway. In three years, New Yorkers saw nine
musicals written by and starring Black performers. Black composers
wrote the songs for three shows with white casts. "Shuffle Along was a
milestone in the development of the Black musical, and it became the
model by which all Black musicals were judged until well into the
1930s.,,18
If Shuffle Along was the most important Black theatrical enterprise in
the 1920s, it was the music and dance that gave the production its
power.19 Most of the routines showed a direct descent from the minstrel
show and vaudeville. Robert Toll points out that most popular dances of
the period emerged from Black theatre--dances like the Charleston,
truckin', the shimmy, the black bottom, and the Lindy hop--dances "that
symbolize the twenties.''2 They were all featured in the Black musicals
following in the success of Shuffle Along. Lewis Erenberg points out that
"the source of dances like the Charleston and the black bottom lay in
Black culture, and they found wide introduction in New York after the
popularity of Shuffle Along.''21
Gradually, the book tended to disappear in Black shows, and the
revue format took over (revues, thanks to Ziegfeid and others, were the
lqbid., 136.
laWoll, 75.
19Huggins, 288.
2Toll, On With the Show, 133; also see Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out, New
York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture 1890-1930 (Westport, CN:
Greenwood Press, 1981), 151.
2'Erenberg, 250.
 The American Musical Stage 19
1 8 MATES
cause, of burlesque's demise.26 But for a few years in the twenties, not
rage on Broadway). The revue capitalized on the most popular elements
only was burlesque popular with a wide range of audiences, but it also
of the Black musical show and blurred the line between nightclub and
served as a training ground for singers, dancers, and comedians who
theatre. Tryout performances were also less expensive for revues, and the
went on to the revue and to musical comedy.
focus was on the talent. After Shuffle Along's conquest, a large number
Vaudeville also frequently served as a training ground, though more
of Black revues had success on Broadway.2 Shuffle Along had provided
often it was an end in itself. It was able to attract a heterogeneous
fresh entertainment for the audience and an outlet for Black talent
audience with an incredible variety of performers and material, "from
unknown before the 1920s.
trained animals to opera singers, from sexual impersonators to ballet
The theatre of the twenties provided other groups with a means of dancers, from ethnic humor to production numbers.''2z It drew material
achieving success, of escaping the slums. It is worth taking a brief glance
from and gave material to musical comedy, burlesque, drama, the
at burlesque and vaudeville. Charles Hamm, in Music in the New
minstrel show, and the circus. Lewis Erenberg suggests that in the 1910s
World, points out that "songs were an essential element in vaudeville"
and 1920s, most of the stars were of recent immigrant origins, especially
as indeed they were in burlesque.23 Ballad singers offering popular songs
the dancers and singers.28 John Dimegiio writes that vaudevillians were
of the day, singers in blackface, dialect singers, juvenile singers, character America in microcosm. He finds that vaudeville refused to experiment
singers--all were featured. They reflected the audience even as they
with successful acts, but that until success was achieved vaudeville
appealed to it, and again we see that experiments in the twenties are
allowed performers to experiment freely.29 Vaudeville probably reached
important to the history of American musical theatre.
its peak in the twenties, but thereafter its life was brief: Radio and movies
Burlesque had long waged a battle between "clean" and "dirty"
signaled its demise in the thirties.
shows (the clean derived from the original meaning of a travesty or satire,
A large part of the experimenting in the twenties on the musical stage
and the dirty derived from the earnest desire to display as much female
was in the revue. True, Ziegfeld had started the vogue in 1907, but it was
flesh as possible). By the twenties the "dirty" had won out, and the
in the twenties that revues were created constantly and that experiments
shows had achieved a kind of sameness that threatened to kill the form.
were tried whose effects are still felt today. Robert Baral says that over
William Green points out that the Minskys in the early twenties instituted
one hundred revues opened in New York in the twenties and thirties.3
a variety of innovations in the basic format; they "threw out the
The Ziegfeld Follies featured several of the revue's most glorious editions,
traditional three-part structure which had rigidly compartmentalized
and one could attend George White's Scandals, the Earl Carroll Vanities,
where in the production the comedy, musical and specialty acts could
Artists and Models (the Shubert entries), the Greenwich Village Follies,
come.''24 The Minskys included a musical director on the permanent
the Grand Street Follies, the Music Box Revues (Irving Berlin's shows),
staff. They installed a runway so the dancers could be in closer proximity
the Garrick Gaieties (here is where Rodgers and Hart joined forces), the
to the audience. Yes, the comedy acts were essential, but the added
Blackbird Revues, the Ed Wynn Revues, the Passing Shows (another
stress on music and dance had audiences flocking to Minsky burlesque.
Shubert entry), and on and on. George M. Cohan created revues in 1916
A further experiment included placing "serious dramatic sketches in the
midst of the cooch dancing and rowdy comedy.''2 In the mid-1920s the
striptease came into being and this was the last stage, and possibly the

26Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness, Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel

Hill: The Uniyersity of North Carolina Press, 1991), 243.

22Wo11, 95. 27To11, On With the Show, 276.

23Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2BErenberg, 187.
1983), 258.
,/ 29John E. Dimeglio, Vaudeville, U.S.A. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green
24William Green, "The Audiences of the American Burlesque Show of the University Popular Press, 1973), 2.
Minsky Era (CA. 1920-1940)," Dos Theater und sein Publikum, 1977, 229.
3Robert Baral, Revue (New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1962), 14.
251bid., 232.

20 MATES
5
and 1918 with much satire and with no book, and these had a strong
effect on what went into revues of the twenties.
When the big, elaborate shows began to go out of style, a smaller,
intimate revue began to take its place. Where vaudeville was a series of
individual acts, the musical revue was "planned, designed, scored and
directed with an eye for a unified final product.'']1 The 49ers (1922)
introduced the American experimental intimate revue while the English
contributed Chariot's Revue (1924). Audiences quickly accepted the new
form (note especially The Little Shows).32 Both the large and intimate
revues have continued their careers on the American musical stage,
though perhaps with not so lush a quality as in the twenties.
Among the positive developments resulting from the twenties
experiments with the revue form, one must include the opportunity for
young composers to try their wings on the musical stage--Rodgers and
Hart, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields,
for example--without having to compose a complete score for a full-
length musical. Established composers, too, found a place in the revue;
the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921 featured music by Jerome Kern, Rudolf Frimt
and Victor Herbert.33 One of the more interesting experiments took place
in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1922 with the ballet of Oscar Wilde's
The Nightingale and the Rose. These ballet ballads became a regular part
of the series.34 Years later, when Agnes DeMille and Jerome Robbins and
others worked on popular Broadway musicals, their audiences had been
thoroughly prepared. The "personality revue," a vehicle for a single star
(though surrounded with singers and dancers in minor roles), was
launched in the twenties with Elsie Janis leading the way followed soon
after by Ed Wynn's Carnival.
John Murray Anderson points out that many technical innovations
were introduced during the twenties, including drapes and draw curtains
31Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2nd ed., 1992), 574-575.
32Thomas S. Hischak, Stage It With Music (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press,
1993), 212.
33Baral, 268.
34Gerald Bordman, American Musical Revue (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), 59.
The American Musical Stage 2t
of exquisite materials and design, the moving platform, and, especially,
projected scenery, allowing for faster pacing,as
The Garrick Gaieties spoofed operetta; the Grand Street Follies
twitted Broadway. The fact is, revues of all kinds flourished in the
twenties and all sorts of experiments were attempted. Especially
noteworthy was George Gershwin's jazz opera, Blue Monday Blues,
inserted into the 1922 edition of George White's Scandals. The real
attraction of this series was the jazz-age tone established by the dancing
and the music. The Music Box Revues proved that audiences of the
revue were no less interested in spectacle than in song. The revue of the
twenties "emerged as the superstructure of Broadway musicals," and it
is to the musical we must look for still more experiments and
innovations.36
Gerald Bordman found that "an almost incredible array of brilliant,
adventuresome young composers" plus "a few brilliant, adventuresome
young lyricists" accounted for much of the era's--and the twen-
ties'--greatness.37 Even though operetta's days were numbered (to a large
extent the form died in the thirties), some of the best American operettas
were written in the twenties (for ey, ample, The Vagabond King, The
Desert Song, The Student Prince, The New Moon) and their experiments
affected the musicals to come. Rudolf Friml's Rose-Marie (1924) tried the
Canadian Rockies as a setting, experimented with murder as an important
part of the story, and made a serious attempt to integrate music and plot.
In fact, the program refused to identify individual songs.8
The musical comedy, however, was where most experiments took
place. Almost everyone who writes about the American musical has a
candidate for exciting experimentation in the twenties. John Lahr, for
example, is partial to George and Ira Gershwin's Lady, Be Good! (1924).
"Gershwin shortened the musical line, added blue notes, and brought the
musical up to speed with the Metropolis." He quotes Gershwin as saying
"we are living in an age of staccato, not legato.''39 Experiments and
innovations included a thematic danced opening, songs that helped to
3Cited in Bordman, American Musical Revue 6061.
36Baral, 10.
37Gerald Bordman, American Musical Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1982), 128.
38Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy, 36.
39John Lahr, "City Slickers," The New Yorker (22 and 29 August 1994), 110-112.
 22
MATES
tell the story, and two pianos in the orchestra. The city's feverish pace is
first dramatized here, says Lahr, and the myth of modern urban life begins
:t
to take shape. Bordman says the date when jazz became an established
and even welcome musical idiom was 1 December 1924--the date when
Lady, Be Good./opened.4 Another book finds "one of the first and most
potent symbols of the Jazz Age--the Charleston--came in the 1923-24
season in the Black musical Runnin" Wild"--it bridged the gap between
exhibition and public dancing-- "and announced that jazz was indis-
pensable for truly chic and up-to-date Broadway entertainments.,,4
With Morrie Ryskind and George S. Kaufman writing the book, and
the Gershwins writing music and lyrics, Strike Up the Band (1927)
experimented with politics as theme with a cynical point of view,
satirizing militarism and big business. The experiment proved successful
enough that others in the genre followed, notably Irving Berlin's Face the
Music and As Thousands Cheer. And of course, Of Thee I Sing, a direct
outgrowth of experiments in the twenties, was the first musical to win a
Pulitzer Prize.
The Cinderella theme, claims Bordman, so dominated Broadway that
for three seasons, from 1921-1924, of the one hundred and twenty
musicals that showed up on Broadway, fully half the operettas and
revues and twenty-one of the fifty-eight musicals centered on a Cinderella
figure.42 Musically, these shows gave their audiences songs, with dancing
an important, though mostly irrelevant, element (precision dancing in
particular was tried and accepted). What Cinderella shows did was
provide a venue for American composers and lyricists to come to the
fore. Stanley Green said, "If ever a period of musical comedy belonged
to its composers and lyricists it was the decade between 1920 and
1930." 43
Vincent Youmans was one of the most popular composers of the
period with some of the biggest hits on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks
to a large assortment of touring companies. If his shows had few
innovations, they served to combine many of the experiments of others,
including the quickening of pace and the new stress on urban back-
4Bordman, American Musical Comedy, 121.
4Armond Fields and L. Marc Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway, Lew Fields
and the Roots of American Popular Theater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
439.
/
42Bordman, American Musical Comedy, 107.
43Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy, 101.
The American Musical Stage 23
ground (witness No, No, Nanette). In Rainbow (1928), Youmans
experimented with realistic situations (a novelty) and three-dimensional
characters. Music was somewhat relevant to the plot. Here, at least,
Youmans's experiments advanced the cause of musical comedy.
Rodgers and Hart's The Girl Friend kept the spirit of the Princess
Theatre's shows alive, and their Peggy Ann (1926) used a dream as the
entire story.44 They had three shows on Broadway in 1928, though only
Chee-Chee attempted to experiment, with all songs sticking close to the
story line and pushing the plot forward.
Buddy De Sylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson took up-to-date
topics with current language phrases and made hits of them in such
shows 'as Good News.! (1927) and three others before the end of the
decade. The topical musical comedy "became one of the standard types
of the late 1920s, and as time went on it tended to become the ruling
type.''45
Some strange productions probably should be mentioned, though
whether they were spectacles or pageants or extravaganzas is hard to
say. Such shows as Aphrodite (1919-1920), with Henri Fvrier and
Anself Goetzl's music, Michel Fokine's choreography, and Lon Bakst's
costumes, seem to represent some strange musical stage experi-
ments-Aphrodite's climax, for example, was set to the music of
Moussorgsky and the bacchanalian ballet was danced on a floor of rose
leaves.46 Mecca (1920) had music by Percy Fletcher, with Fokine and
Bakst again designing the choreography and costumes, respectively.
Several other musical shows experimented with staging and lighting, and
though the shows have disappeared, the technology (drapery, lighting,
elevators) was passed on and remains an important part of today's
musicals.
Probably the most important experiments came near the end of the
twenties when Jerome Kern's Show Boat (1927) set new standards for the
American musical.47 The plot was unusually serious for the musical stage
of the twenties, involving among other things desertion and miscegena-
tion. The opening with Black wharf hands instead of chorus girls was
441bid., 117.
45Cecil Smith, Musical Comedy in America (New York: Theatre Arts Books,
1950), 151.
461bid., 13 6.
47Robert C. Toll, The Entertainment Machine, American Show Business in the
Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 134.
 The American Musical Stage 25
24 MATES

evolved from earlier forms but because these forms coexisted on the New
another risky experiment. The songs expressed the feelings of the
York stage "and productions that were conveniently labeled musical
characters and were not dropped into the show willy-nilly Part of the
comedies actually covered a spectrum that included comic opera,
experimentation involved a "blending of the most antagonistic elements
operetta, burlesque, musical farce, satire, and extravaganza.''s3 Add the
of musicals comedy and operetta.''48 Even the use of a serious novel (by
different kinds of revue and grand opera, and the musical stage offered
Edna Ferber) was startling in the twenties, as was a story that stretched far
something for everyone. The credit for drawing a heterogeneous
over time and place. Where interpolations were standard fare in
audience and for passing on new traditions to the American musical stage
musicals, here they helped to set time and place--in short, they were
largely goes to the wonderful range of experiments of the 1920s.
relevant. The use of the leitmotiv throughout was innovative in a
musical. Arthur Jackson claims that Show Boat was a new departure in
the world of musicals, "a blend of music, lyrics and libretto that would
serve as a guidepost for the future and an object lesson for all aspiring
show writers.''49 And Miles Kreuger, in an entire book on Show Boat,
says that for Kern and Hammerstein "this was to be a tightly written
musical play with devotion to character development, with songs that
grew meaningfully out of the plot, with spectacle and dance only when
spectacle and dance seemed appropriate to the story." s0
Ethan Mordden writes about the forcing of the issue of social
integration through the musical.51 And Robert Toll notes:

[L]ike America itself, musical comedy was a blend. From

extravaganzas it got lavish costumes and production numbers;
from burlesque it took satire and chorus girls;.., from operettas
it drew beautiful melodies and glamor; and from vaudeville it
borrowed popular dance, music, comedy, and stars, along with
a breakneck performance speed. But the full integration of these
diverse elements.., took decades of experimentation on the
nation's stages,s2

There is no question that as a result of the experiments of the

twenties, America's musical stage changed--not necessarily because it

48Ethan Mordden, "Show Boat Crosses Over," The New Yorker (3 July 1989), 79.

49Arthur Jackson, The Best Musicals from Show Boat to A Chorus Line (New
York: Crown Publishers, inc., 1977), 32.

5Miles Kreuger, Show Boat, The Story of a Classic American Musical (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 26.
s/
SEthan Mordden, Broadway Babies, the People Who Made the Broadway
Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 33.

S3Knapp, 115.
5Toll, The Entertainment Machine, 132.