THEATER: MUSICALS TAKE CENTER STAGE

A New Theatrical Form

During the 1910s what is now recognized as the American musical was beginning to take shape in Broadway theaters. (It became fully formed with Show Boat in 1927.) Musical theater of the 1910s tended to take one of two forms: the musical, a usually thinly plotted play set to music; and the revue, a series of separate musical acts linked by a common theme and ending in a big production number featuring the entire company. Most producers, singers, dancers, and songwriters of the day were involved in both sorts of productions.

Beautiful Girls—and More

The 1910s were the peak decade for the epitome of the musical revue, the annual Ziegfeld Follies, which ran from 1907 to 1931. The Follies became famous for presenting a stage full of tall, beautifully dressed women, otherwise known as Ziegfeld Girls. Florenz Ziegfeld had a knack for choosing talent as well as beauty. Many of the names connected with his early shows—either his Follies or his other revues—later became famous. Among them were Fanny Brice, Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Irene Castle, and Billie Burke (Ziegfeld's second wife), as well as song-writers George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern. Ziegfeld and the Shuberts—whose annual Passing Shows, begun in 1912, gave the Ziegfeld Follies their stiffest competition—were responsible for the increased popularity of musical revues during the 1910s. The shows became "upscale" entertainment in theaters where seats cost as much as two dollars.

The Tin Pan Alley Connection

Other popular song-writers of the day also wrote for musical theater. Irving Berlin wrote the score for Watch Your Step (1914), which featured, among other numbers, Vernon and Irene Castle dancing to his "Syncopated Walk." A year later Berlin wrote the score for Stop! Look! Listen!, a. show that introduced his "Everything in America Is Ragtime" and "I Love a Piano." George Gershwin wrote his first full musical score for La, La, Lucille in 1919, when he was only twenty-one. The most famous songwriter of the first decade of the century, George M. Cohan, was still creating hits, though in the 1910s he was directing, producing, and acting in plays as well as musicals. His work was not always successful with the critics: in 1911 a reviewer for the humor magazine Life called him "the creator of the Star-Spangled drama, the inculcator of the chewing-gum standard of good taste." But Cohan's songs and shows were unqualified commercial successes. During the 1910s he proved why he had been dubbed "The Man Who Owns Broadway" (a sobriquet derived from the title and title song of his 1909 musical)—and why he earned __BODY__.5 million a year. He wrote, directed, produced, and/or acted in seven plays; two new musicals, The Little Millionaire (1911) and Hello Broadway (1914); a 1912 revival of his 1906 musical Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway; and two musical revues, The Cohan Revue of 1916 and The Cohan Revue of 1918.

The Operetta Connection

Broadway fare included more sophisticated offerings as well. Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg, both born and trained in Europe, wrote operettas with songs that became nationwide hits. Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910), which features the popular song "Sweet Mystery of Life," ran for 136 performances at the New York Theatre. Romberg's The Blue Paradise (1915) and Maytime (1917) were also popular. Another European operetta composer, Rudolph Friml, wrote the scores for the Broadway shows High Jinks (1913), You re in Love (1917), and Sometime (1918). The popularity of such fare led George M. Cohan to try his hand at a comic opera, The Royal Vagabond (1919).

The Princess Shows

Equally as sophisticated as operetta were the so-called Princess Shows, created during the second half of the decade by the team of Jerome Kern (music), Guy Bolton (book), and P. G. Wodehouse (lyrics). The British Wodehouse, who lived in New York City and served as the drama critic for Vanity Fair magazine, imparted a sophisticated wit to these spare and satirical musicals, which took their name from the intimate three-hundred-seat Princess Theater where they were staged. Among these shows were Nobody Home (1915), Very Good, Eddie (1915), Oh, Boy! (1917), Oh, Lady! Lady! (1918), and Oh, My Dear! (1918). The Princess Shows produced such enduring songs as "Babes in the Wood" (1915) and "'Till the Clouds Roll By" (1917).

THE REAL "FUNNY GIRL"

Ayon e who has seen the movie Funny Girl (1968), starring Barbra Streisand, is familiar with the story of Fanny Brice (1891-1951). When Brice was a sixteen-year-old chorus girl, George M. Cohan fired her, telling her she would never make it on Broadway. So she went into burlesque, where she performed a comic imitation of Eva Tanguay's sultry Salome act—with a Yiddish accent. Her rendition of "Sadie Salome" (1909), written by Irving Berlin, impressed an associate of Florenz Ziegfeld, who invited her to join the 1910 Ziegfeld Follies, Brice was a woman doing comedy without a partner, unusual in the 1910s and for years afterward. She was thin and unattractive at a time when most women on the stage were hired for their figures and faces. The daughter of Jewish immigrants, she brought ethnic humor into the mainstream, first through the Follies, then through film and radio. She combined motherhood with a career, surviving three unhappy marriages. Her marriage to gambler Julius "Nick" Arnstein inspired her performance of one of her few serious songs, "My Man." During the 1930s she began a twenty-year stint as "Baby Snooks" on the radio. On 29 May 1951, while planning her memoirs, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age fifty-nine.

Source:

Herbert G. Goldman, Fanny Brice: The Original Funny Girl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Sources:

David Ewen, The Story of America's Musicai Theater (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1961);

Marjorie Farnsworth, The Ziegfeld Follies (New York: Bonanza, 1956);

Ward Morehouse, George M. Cohan: Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1943);

Robert C. Toll, On with the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).