History of Broadway

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today, we are collecting our costumes and can-canning into the chorus line as we learn all about the history of Broadway.

And to help us, we have two very special theatrical stars.

In History Corner, they're an associate professor in popular music and the director of the Black Studies Department at the University of Nottingham.

They're an expert on musical theatre and research race and gender identity in popular culture.

They've published on everything from The Wizard of Oz to Tamilton and my favourite, Frozen.

No, you let it go.

It's Dr.

Hannah Terisingham-Robbins.

Welcome.

Hello, thank you for having me.

Delighted to have you here.

And in Comedy Corner, she needs no introduction on this show, but I do still have to do one.

So she's a comedian, actor, writer.

You'll have seen her on all the telly, Taskmaster, Frankie Boyle's New World Order, the Horn Section TV show, Netflix is Too Hot to Handle, various other things.

And you'll know her from our many, many episodes of this very podcast, including recent highlights, The Columbian Exchange, and Pythagoras.

What a dude he was.

It's your Dead to Me's leading lady, Desiree Birch.

Welcome back, Desiree.

What a dude.

You said you had to do one.

Do I get to host the podcast now?

I think you've done enough episodes now that.

I'm learning my British slang.

I'm doing well, guys.

Is this onto the test?

Um, thank you so much for having me back.

This is really exciting to learn the history of a place that I never made it to.

Oh, which you want to do?

Yeah, I started as an actor.

That would have been amazing, but I don't sing, so you kind of have to be famous first if you just want to act, or you need to dance, sing, and you know, like be really hot and make out at 20.

And none of those things were ever going to be my thing.

I mean, I know there's more to Broadway than that, but like it's a lot.

It's a lot

because you studied at Yale.

I did, you did theater studies.

I did, yes.

So you know your stuff.

I mean, I know some stuff.

We did, you know, a sort of pan history of theater, and there was all kinds of experimental, you know, for my senior thesis, I got naked because what other thing does a university student want to do on stage but get naked?

So I got it out of the way so that the world could be spared because it's all people want to do between 17 and 23.

Great.

I mean, the obvious question, Desiree, are you a fan of musical theater?

Obviously, you know your theater, you know your theater history.

Are you a fan of musical theater?

Do you go to Broadway when you're maybe back home and to the West End?

Okay.

Are we about to hear something?

No, I mean, look, I love theater.

I love seeing incredible acting.

For me, it is always about the acting above everything else.

For musical theater, it really does need to be, for the most part, singing first if you're going to enjoy it.

Sometimes it feels like it needs to be singing, then acting, and then movement.

And I wish it were two and one were inverted.

Gotcha.

Although I've seen musicals on Broadway where they couldn't sing or act.

It's just like, well, what are we doing here except for a jukebox revival?

But yeah, I mean, every so often it is done really well, but there's always a point in a musical where you're like, I get it, fall in love.

Like, I want, I need to catch a train, like, make it end.

So, what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subjects.

And we've all watched a musical, haven't we?

Whether it's a classic like Westside Story or My Fair Lady, a Lloyd Webber wonderpiece like Phantom of the Opera, a Modern Smash like Wicked or Hamilton.

Most of us have seen a stage musical at some point.

Plus, there are the film adaptations as well.

Catherine Cita Jones in Chicago, you might have swooned over Hugh Jackman in Le Mise.

You might have laughed hysterically at the trailer for cats with the digitally removed feline anuses that the whole whole internet just loved.

What a crazy thing.

Some of us laughed hysterically after having purchased a ticket to see the film in the cinema.

Oh, yes, I went with my good friend, and we had a great time with two other people only in the cinema with us.

It was a disaster.

It was a wonderful disaster.

Oh, my, and I do it again.

That's the last film I saw before the pandemic.

Yeah, there we go.

It's worth it.

Okay.

But what about the history of the mega-popular art form that we call Broadway?

How have Broadway shows changed over the years?

And just who was Imogen the Cow?

Let's find out, shall we?

Right, Desiree, word of warning.

I'm going to try and sneak in as many Broadway show titles into this episode as possible.

I'm going to do this puns.

You're welcome to join me.

Okay.

But I'm going to start with the basic question.

Desiree Birch, what is a Broadway musical?

A Broadway musical is

a

play that has not only words but songs in it that people perform on Broadway, which is in New York City, circa 42nd Street, but you know, goes up into the 50s and there's theaters all around.

It needs to have a million dollars just to turn on a light in the theater.

So that I do know.

So it needs to have enough commercial appeal that they think they can play that for years and tour it around the world.

That's a very comprehensive answer, Hannah.

It is.

Is it remotely close to accurate, though?

Oh, yeah, 100%.

I think it's kind of interesting that you said it's a play because there are lots of musicals that don't really have conventional plots.

So like for me, I guess a musical is a combination of singing and drama.

I would say more balanced than perhaps you think.

And spectacles.

Sometimes there'll be lots of exciting sets, sometimes there'll be costumes, sometimes there'll be amazing lighting, you know, lots of additional theatre craft.

But I think particularly going backwards, it's this really interesting like hybrid of influences smushed into one performance form.

And I guess the way to tell if you're engaging with a musical is that like the singing uses different storytelling and also kind of a different vocal style than we might expect if we're listening to popular music.

So I guess the mashup of genres and the emphasis of like communicating the content of a song rather than communicating through song, which is opera, are the clues that we're listening to attract from a musical and not a song from something else.

Is the West End just Broadway, but in London, or is that a different thing?

Controversial.

We look at Broadway as kind of the geographic home and the spiritual home of the musical, even though it's actually genuinely a global phenomenon at this point and belongs to lots of places.

I think one of the reasons the West End has become kind of Broadway B, if you like, is because of how the press covered musicals in the early history.

So they would often premiere in America and then come to London later.

Transfer over.

But they were transferring to loads of places.

It's just that the dialogue between the American and British press was particularly strong.

So that's kind of where that's going from.

Fascinating.

And in terms of the physical space of Broadway, Desiree, you've already said 42nd Street.

So this is a Manhattan story, not a Westside story.

Klang.

What is the history of this street,

this little locus of theatre?

It's the commercial theatre district in Manhattan, sort of runs roughly between 42nd and 46th and 7th Avenue.

So it's kind of a hotchpotch of different theatres, but it's also places where you can eat.

So they built a lot of theatres sort of at the end of the 1800s.

We're talking sort of 1880s.

But by the time we hit the early 1900s, we've got about 30 theatres in the area.

And the thing you were asking earlier about what constitutes constitutes a Broadway musical versus not a Broadway musical, and it's actually to do with the capacity of a theatre.

So it's 500 seats and a certain geographic.

I definitely know what off-off and off-off-off Broadway are, where all of my theatre career happened.

But actually, there are lots of theatres in New York that are not covered by the term Broadway, technically.

There's definitely a complexity about what Broadway stands for.

But the thing that I think we can't debate is that it is originally an American art form.

There is a little bit of that creeping into the discourse at the moment that musicals are not American and that's one of those that I won't stand for.

Oh

push down moment.

Okay.

This American theatrical tradition I mean there are there are words that I sort of want to chuck at you.

Vaudeville, burlesque, theatre,

you know, musical minstrel shows.

How do we are those all the same thing?

I think one of the distinguishing factors of American theatre is that there is a lot of blurred boundaries between genre that we're not so keen on in UK and actually in European theatre more broadly.

Using the ones that you sort of pulled together we have what are referred to as melodramas that have come over from France and they used music and particularly songs to like accent really emotionally volatile moments in what was otherwise just a perform text.

Vaudeville was lots of often sketches, it could be songs, it might be comedy, it might be dance sequences but one of the sort of defining factors of vaudeville is that it took place in places that sold alcohol.

And so you could tap in and out of the entertainment while it was taking place.

Quite literally, tap in and out, yeah.

Literally.

Pun.

Burlesque is interesting because in the 19th century, it was actually more of a satire form.

It was a much more traditional type of theatre.

than we would expect and the striptease component actually comes in much later.

Alongside this, we then have the like peaks and troughs of minstrelsy.

So minstrelsy sort of solidifies itself sort of mid-1800s, has a sort of a peak and a trough and then another peak and a trough in the early 20th century.

And that is a performance form that generally involved white men or white presenting men wearing black makeup and doing comedy skits and songs, comedy and inverted commas there, but based on racist principles of attitudes to the black life.

So was minstrelsy just like, hey, we want to do vaudeville, but with more racism?

Like, was it?

Because it's like a sketch, sort of like variety type of show, but they're like, we really want to do this blackface thing.

It depends on who you ask, but really, I would say blackface came, the blackface tradition in Minstrelsy comes first.

Vaudeville is kind of, it's, it's kind of a hybrid of lots of different ones.

But yeah, 100%.

But this was also something that happened in lots of other performance forms.

The thing that what Minstrelsey did was basically make an industry out of something that was already happening in most of the other theatre spaces already.

What they were like was, oh, this is is something that gets laughs.

Let me try and commercialize it.

And then through the progress of minstrelsy, it then becomes a way for black performers to make money.

And that's a challenging bit of history, particularly in the turn of the 20th century.

Lots of undercurrents happening, but as you will have heard from my descriptions, also lots of blurred boundaries between what these different forms were.

Let's get into the 20th century.

Let's get to 1902.

when Broadway gets going, I think, Desiree.

And one of the first productions was The Wizard of Oz.

Nice.

Quite an unusual musical.

do you know why because of all the dead people involved is that just the movie

that's like the lore of it i mean quite an unusual it seems so canon to me that i can't think of why i mean there's so many versions of it that i've seen the whiz and wicked and all these other versions of that it's what what's weird about it no songs okay yeah no music i mean or or some music but not not a score so some music but not a score so this is a like an interesting example of a work deliberately blending lots of different things together.

So this was kind of burlesque, it was pantomime as we would understand it in the UK.

And also like lots of fantasy elements were immersed into this version of The Wizard of Oz.

The reason it's a landmark is because it was one of the first big productions that sold tickets out in advance.

So you couldn't just turn up and buy a ticket at the door and it kind of reformed what the commercial model for these kind of shows could be.

But in terms of the score, what happened, and this still happens in musicals, lots of people aren't aware, is that there were optional songs and you could switch them in and out a real comedy set where you're like oh they're not warm enough for that one yet let's check that one out

yeah kind of yeah yeah it's also about the performance that you've got like if you've got an alto in and you've got a soprano song and you haven't got someone who can transpose the song at speed which often the music directors could do so if your piano player can't figure out how to play it in scene right potentially or or if your singer can't get that top note but and you can't sort of make that work then you're like well swap this well we've got another, we've got another song about, and it's also worth saying, I should say, at this period, the songs are not particularly connected to the plot.

You would be having a, you know, a conversation about having a cup of tea, and then there would be a song about, isn't it nice the sun is shining?

And then you would get a seat Elmer.

So The Wizard of Oz opened in Chicago in 1902.

Chicago clang, again, a lot of musical.

They gave him the old Razzle Dazzle.

The production also changed a couple of other things about The Wizard of Oz, Desiree.

They changed a major character from the book and the later famous famous film.

Do you want to guess which character did not appear in 1902's?

Dorothy.

That'd be amazing.

It's just some bloke called Rob.

Hello.

And they were like, let's get a cow in there.

We need to sell these tickets.

No, Toto the dog was replaced by Imogen the Cow.

Oh, there we go.

There we go.

So she had a cow.

She just was walking around with a cow.

Played by an acrobat, bent over, wearing a cow suit.

Oh, but then they're an acrobat, so every so often, you know, it's the tornado and they can do battle rings.

They They can do baller reactions.

Exactly, yeah, if you've got a acrobat, you know.

So there you go.

A very moving performance from the image in the car.

There you go, sorry.

Right, let's talk about the development of increased visibility of these black performers, you said, because minstrelsy obviously racist and unfortunate problematic history, but it created perhaps a culture whereby black performers could get work.

Yeah, for sure.

And I think one of the things that we don't necessarily know so much about the early days of Broadway is that there were lots of black creatives writing work, producing work, touring work at the sort of the turn of the 20th century.

So we're talking the early 1900s.

Perhaps the most famous example of that is the musical Interhomy, which was a musical mainly set in Florida.

It was written by two African-American performers who were already an established double act called Williams and Walker.

And they created this musical, which was about two characters trying to persuade another person to collect a reward in order for them to spend lots of money.

And the character actually finds a pot of gold and he decides to take all of his friends to Dahomey in West Africa to see their homeland.

So, this is an interesting example, and it's a particularly famous one because it was very successful in America and it had a big touring life, but it also came to the UK and was one of the first times that a black-authored production, particularly a black-authored musical, had been played in lots of London and British theatres.

Because this is 1903, so really early.

1903, so it's really early.

And the challenge of Indohomi is that because these two performers had kind of come from minstrelsy practices, there were stereotyping issues, there was jungle humour, some primitivism material in Indohomi, which has limited the way some people want to talk about it.

But Indohomi actually opened the possibility of lots of actors and creatives being able to produce their own musicals.

And so we have a number of shows becoming really popular through the 1900s into the 1910s.

One example was about the first black battalion to be formed in the American army.

And that was produced in 1916 and it made lots of money.

The thing to say about this is that the audiences for these shows were predominantly white, but the creators were interested in the disruption of the audience membership too.

And so these plays were often about black history, about black excellence, or about sort of issues to do with black liberation.

Were black people able to see this in segregated places, or who was witnessing this work?

So there's a balance of the two.

I think Indohomie is complicated because it does have elements of minstrelsy in it.

There were no white performers.

All of the cast were black.

But there were black actors using blackface and using anti-black stereotypes that were derived from minstrelsy

that formed kind of the first two halves.

The reason that Indohomi is actually interesting is because they have a moment of dialogue where they talk about cultural displacement and what we would now call diaspora, but was not particularly a term used then, that connected specifically with any black audience that was in.

That would normally have been maybe 10-20% of the audience.

There were performances that were majority black audiences or exclusively black audiences, though not specifically on Broadway, if we distinguish the name and the geography

for a minute.

And I think an interesting example of that then is the sort of smash hit musical people like to turn to, which is Shuffle Along, which opened in 1921.

And Shuffle Along changed the game because it ran for an extraordinary amount of performances for the time, around 500 performances.

The audiences flocking and were so excited to see it that they actually had to make, I think it's 63rd Street, a one-way thoroughfare because it was impossible for the police to manage the traffic.

It was the Hamilton of its time.

It It was the Hamilton of its time.

They blocked traffic.

It was the Hamilton of its time.

It launched so many careers.

So, for example, a teenage Josephine Baker was in Shuffle along

and a young Paul Robeson was also in Shuffle along.

But there were other people like Florence Mills, a BBC in the UK favourite called Adelaide Hall, who would star in Kiss Me Kate 20 years later in, you know, 1948.

So it was launching careers on every level of the creative process.

And Desiree, you've done you did the Josephine Baker episode and the Paul Robeson episode.

So it's almost like we designed it this way.

Homecoming.

I mean, you know, I do have lots of plots and plans.

This is so wonderful.

But the Robeson voice, do you remember we played you that clip of Robeson singing?

Yeah, was that when he was in Wales?

No, oh, okay.

Well, yeah, we played you one in Wales.

I remember,

but we played also, I think, Old Man River.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I just wanted to, we can't play it to you now for legal reasons, so I'm going to ask you to remember.

Yes.

That voice, how do you think that carried in the theater?

You know, that's I mean, incredibly well, I would imagine.

I feel like it would live inside of the wood that makes up this.

I don't know.

It just seems like it would reach and wrap around every part of that space because it just either that or it got entirely absorbed.

But I can't imagine that would ever happen.

It already feels like a very lingering voice that would be well resonated in whatever the theater was made of.

Yeah.

And we'll talk about voices later, Hanan, but Robeson being an early star is a really interesting one because this is a man who could really sing to the rafters with such a beautiful, deep, baritone voice.

But we need to move on to talk about the reason I can't play you in Eclipse, Desiree,

is the success of international copyright law.

I want to ask Hannah, when does copyright law kick off?

And also, when does this stuff get professionalised?

Where lawyers go, hang on a second.

Well, who gets credit for a musical and who the rights belong to is one of the most contentious topics in musical theatre history from Day Dot.

The first really significant point of action is that in 1914, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers was established.

And it aimed to protect the intellectual property of its members and to establish a royalties system.

So by 1917, all American venues had to get a license to stage a piece that was either published by or written by a member of this organisation.

And that definitely prefaced a series of business manoeuvres, particularly at the end of the 1940s and the 1950s, in terms of thinking about who gets to earn money from musicals.

And the actors' union, Equity.

Are you a member, Desiree?

Yes, I am.

Yeah, I thought

you do so much acting work, so I was like, sure, you're a member.

Did you want to guess when they were founded?

Oh, when the union was founded.

Let's see.

I mean, if you're sitting on the side of the business.

You can sing it at the meetings.

Do you sing it?

Do you go?

Wait, hold my hands around.

Yes, exactly.

No,

I mean,

my tendency, this was 1914, you said for ASCAP, right?

So it feels like way later.

So I would guess something like the 30s would be a real weird time.

Wouldn't it?

I don't know.

Let's say, let's say the 1940s, something.

I mean, that's a fair guess.

It's actually 1913, which I was quite surprised at, Hannah.

It's not early.

It's earlier than the composers.

It happens first, but that's because of the strike action.

Ah, yes.

We're working out.

I mean, we've had an actor strike recently in Hollywood, so I think we're all familiar with that.

Yeah, and also, I think we forget that the theatre owners and this is particularly true of film held a lot more power over the things that were being staged in the early development of theatre so it's only after these unions are formed that composers and lyricists are able to sort of create agency over their own materials.

So actually actors were more visible than the creative staff at the sort of beginning of the American theatre process.

But it was just white actors who were allowed in equity, is that right initially?

Yes.

Yeah, I mean, you know, all good ideas aren't always perfect, let's be honest.

So, there we go.

Equity,

making sure actors could earn and pay their rent.

Sorry.

No, no, well referenced.

That was beautiful.

But obviously, later on, black performers were also allowed to join equity, which obviously is very important.

So it's thanks to copyright laws that I cannot play you any music whatsoever.

When we name check stuff, go listen to it.

Because

the the Dahomey music is gorgeous that we talked about earlier.

I loved it.

Wait, like they were literally fantasizing about what it would be like to go back.

Yes, they were.

This is the sort of back to Africa.

Yeah.

There were several musicals after Indahomey specifically thinking about returning to the continent and what that would mean.

And Showboats are really you mentioned Old Man River is a really interesting example of this because Old Man River was extremely controversial in black organizing circles because it used racist language in the lyrics and it also musicalized and for some romanticized black struggle and for others it was sort of an anthem of resistance and so black unions particularly in the 1930s had considerable debate about whether this was an appropriate song to be associated with organizing is this something we should be using in resistance and that's particularly significant as paul robes and as your listeners will probably know was so involved in political organizing and this was actually almost an achilles heel for him at some point yeah that's right we've got to fly through the 20th century.

So

best way to deal with it.

In the 1920s, there was a new entertainment phenomenon that showed up.

Desiree, what happened in Hollywood in 1927 that had a major impact on Broadway?

All I can think of is racism and then technical.

There's definitely something in the middle.

There's a third thing in the middle.

In the middle to triangulate that.

What happened in, I mean, the actual sound?

That's it?

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

You've got the coming of the talkies.

Yes.

And it's the jazz singer, which is the first talkie, which actually really brings us back to Broadway, doesn't it?

It's a musical, and this hurt the popularity of theatre simply because, I guess, cinema was offering a brand new experience, right?

You could go for a much cheaper ticket to go and listen to songs, listen to dialogue.

You don't need to go to the theatre.

Initially, there was some concern.

Some people were actually frightened of the talkies and the notion of people being able to speak through the screen.

So, the initial peak wasn't as extreme as we might have expected.

But after that, the number of new theatre productions of all kinds drops across America.

And this does coincide, it's important to say, with the Great Depression.

But so you have a sort of a decline from maybe 200 new productions a season to somewhere nearer 100 new productions a season.

Really, it's just a financial question.

The fact that lots of the theatres were owned by the same people as well.

So when the financial depression hits, their ability to hold onto their property and to take financial risks is very different.

But actually, the ability to work without really having any income, for example, while writing a musical, ceases to be viable.

And it's important to say that Broadway was perhaps one of the less hard-hit industries during the Great Depression, but there was a significant drop-off.

And that's also one of the reasons that musicals become, in lots of ways, the popular music, because shows lived or died by covers of songs from musicals becoming the popular music.

So the 1940s is where

the American economy is sort of supercharged by World War II, and by the 50s, obviously it becomes the kind of dominant superpower.

And that's also where we get the golden age inverted commas of the Broadway musical Desiree do you know who the famous writing duo were who kind of dominated that decade trying to is it Rogers and Harrison it is yeah very good yeah one of the bits of the Oscar and the sorry the Rogers and Hammerstein story that gets missed is that they were already influential figures in Broadway by the time they came together so Oscar Hammerstein's big break was writing the book and lyrics for showboat and Richard Rogers had a working relationship with a lyricist called Lorenz Hart and they wrote a number of hit musicals through the 1920s and the 1930s.

You know, songs like My Funny Valentine and The Lady is a Tramp come from their shows.

But Roger's relationship with Hart starts to falter because Hart's health is declining and he was also an alcoholic.

So he formalized this working relationship with Hammerstein, who he'd actually written some songs with before.

And they come together to produce this musical no one's ever heard of called Oklahoma.

And this is 1943.

And Oklahoma becomes this overnight sensation.

After Shuffle Along and Showboat, it's the next sort of major landmark.

It expanded the sort of creative understanding of what a musical could be because it combined plot, songs, dance, and music sort of seamlessly.

It's what's sometimes referred to as an integrated musical, which as a critical race scholar, I think is hilarious.

actually refers to the dramatic elements of the show.

Oklahoma ran for about 2,000 performances, so over five years.

When you consider that the longest-running musical in the 1930s ran for about 500 performances, that gives you a sense of the sort of impact.

I mean, 43, middle of the war, America, you know, it's sort of feel-good.

It's like, America's great, guys, remember.

Oh, what a beautiful morning.

Yeah.

This is where we're getting the characters singing their feelings.

Yeah, a little bit.

It's about the songs needing to progress the plot in some way or give us a sense of place, or they become about expressions of internal thought and feeling.

Oklahoma is really deemed to be the first example where you can't just chop and change songs, they're really significant to where they fall driving the actual plot.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like the I want song or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the obvious question is: are Rogers and Hammerstein giving America kind of soothing balm where everything's fine, entertainment, or are they sort of quietly radical?

So they're really interesting because they're kind of both, and I think that's the heart of their success.

So it's really important to say that they took lots of creative risks that paid off, but they might not have been.

It's a dream ballet in that music.

And I was like, oh, and then we've got to stage the dream ballet.

We did it in high school, and I had to play a boy because I could flip girls over like this.

So I remember, oh, we got to rehearse the dream ballet.

And the rest of us were like, yeah, peace, we don't have to do that.

So Oklahoma has a balance of sort of a romantic depiction of rural America, this sort of idle and the sort of ins and outs of a relationship.

But it actually has some sort of quite big topics and dark themes.

So we sort of deal with nation making, should Oklahoma join the United States?

We have industrial threats to rural life.

And we also have the issues of dealing with outsiders, quote unquote, in small communities and the notions of sort of predatory behavior towards women.

So it's not a simple musical and it definitely does deal with some difficult things, but it balances that with spectacle.

You have a character singing offstage, but in a musical theatre voice.

You have a barn dance, and as you say, you've got this historic dream ballet, so there's a real sort of balance of the two.

But it facilitated other nostalgic musicals and musicals that took risks.

So, in the 40s, we have Brigadoon and Annie Get Your Gun, but we also have a psychoanalytical musical called Lady in the Dark, in which a woman goes through

all of her concerns about what all of her worries and she sort of it switches between her being with a therapist and what's going on in her psychology and this was one of the hip musicals of the world.

She said therapy in the 40s.

Yeah, yeah.

Talking about her issues as a woman.

Dr.

Freud will see you now.

Absolutely.

It was written by Kurt Veillo.

Oh, is it?

Okay, all right.

It makes a lot of sense.

But it's a really interesting example of sort of the polarity of yay entertainment.

And here's a really complicated topic that we're going to explore through tap dancing.

It's very interesting you mentioned the kind of the Americana of Oklahoma and Annie Get Your Gun and so on because obviously later on in the 80s you get the the English invasion.

As an American living in London, can you reverse the polarity and imagine how American Broadway producers felt when English people showed up with their song and dancing?

I mean it's so weird because when American things, everyone's like, come right this way and welcome.

We want all of this cash.

Like, you know, but and growing up in the 80s, you know, I mean, Andrew Lloyd Weber was canon.

Like every year, Andrew Lloyd Weber is putting out something.

That was what Broadway was.

So to know that before it was that, it was like, ah, get the hell out of here.

You know, but I mean,

really.

I mean, but also like, we're happy to make all of our big fat American dollars based on your musical about whatever, but we're still get out of here.

And the interesting thing.

Actually, you've just been looking at some of the other hits of that sort of era, that so-called golden age, a carousel, sure.

But South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of music, these aren't American stories, really.

No.

Well, yes, and

they are, they are, but you know what I mean.

They're kind of, there's a sort of exotic internationalism here.

Yeah, absolutely.

Rogers and Hammerstein were concerned about colonialism, not necessarily in a way that we would recognise now, but South Pacific was specifically.

South Pacific was specifically.

South Pacific, specifically Pacific.

South Pacific handled material about GIs coming to foreign climbs and then leaving.

And some of the prophets from South Pacific went to deal with orphans who were left.

Oh, really?

As a result, the king and I, there's an interesting sort of dimension to the king and I because they were not looking to make Anna, the main character who's this British governess who goes to look after the children of the king of Siam.

super sympathetic.

They were interested in showing her having forms of bigotry and prejudice and her and the king working out this tension between them.

And in some of the cut music from The King and I, they really press on that, but it didn't make it.

Yeah, I was going to say the test audience didn't like that so much.

It didn't make it.

And I think in lots of ways, the softness we might have expected in the 40s and 30s comes.

in musicals in the 50s once the form is a little bit more settled and Rogers and Hamstein are, you know, this dominant force.

But at the same time, you have things like Guys and Dolls, which opens in 1950.

You have Westside Story.

Westside Story was actually overshadowed by the music man that's recently been on Broadway.

And right up to Fiddler on the Roof, which is the first musical to pass 3,000 performances.

So if you think in the 20s, we're overwhelmed by something that runs 400 performances.

By the sort of mid-60s, we're at 3,000 performances.

Phantom of the Opera has run 14,000 performances on Broadway.

Surely the castle are just going, can we just sing anything else?

Yeah, and My Fair Lady's another one to shout out, which is Lerner and Low, isn't it?

So we've got other double acts coming in, we've got other creative teams.

Westside Story is Bernstein and Sondheim,

who are both giants.

Yes.

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We've got the musical, the sound of music.

Let's talk about the actual sound being made because we get the arrival of microphones and amplification.

But prior to the mics, how are these performers getting through a two-hour show and hitting the back rows with their vocal techniques?

And how many shows a week are they able to?

Yeah.

Yeah, so I mean, we are in the sort of five to seven shows a week.

Amplification comes into musicals really slowly.

So they are starting to dabble with it towards the end of the 1930s, the beginning of Oklahoma.

Oh, what a beautiful morning.

The person singing off stage is actually using a microphone in 1943.

But there aren't mics on stage.

So that's also something that comes up quite a lot in reviews of the time, where voices will pass from the acoustic environment to a microphone and back.

So there were comments about that not working, which I think is part of where the resistance to amplification sort of comes from.

If we listen to musical theatre performers really from the pre-60s, we are listening to a much rounder, broader sound in general.

Often, we're listening to operatically trained performers or a balance of singers.

We also have techniques, which I'm sure you'll be aware of, Dazira, of like cheating front.

So, you don't actually look at a performer because the directionality of where your voice is going is really important.

So, you're standing at the front of the stage singing to the audience even though you're talking to your colleague on stage who sticks to your side.

And you might notice actually even now when you go and see musicals that characters are often standing on a right angle from each other.

So the person who's doing most of the singing will be facing the front but it looks like they're being addressed in some way.

So there's a balance of technique of learning to throw your voice and project.

Sometimes that was because you came from an operatic background or it's because you came from a musical background where you might be not only singing in a large space but over people drinking and chatting.

And we see that actually really well immortalized in lots of musical theater films where actors have to struggle as part of their character building to be soprano.

So people were just stronger and better back then.

Didn't need microphones.

What different vocal techniques or styles are you aware of?

You're definitely going to need a soprano in your show because that's what everybody's coming to hear.

And most of the women sing, way the hell up in their nose and their forehead and speak that way all of the time.

So I feel like that's usually a centerpiece of a lot of things.

Do you like the phrase belting?

Yes, of course.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How do you understand that?

I mean, that, like, you know, using your diet, like, just let a rip.

Like, really, you know, there's, yeah, just really like, I mean, it's, it's a way of you really need to train, otherwise you're going to shred your voice, but you really are just sort of like from your diaphragm, just like slamming that song out.

Yeah.

I mean, Idina Menzel is sort of the famous one I'm aware of in the modern, you know, again, Frozen.

My daughter loves Frozen, so I hear it a lot.

Yeah.

What is a belter from a technical point of view, Hannah?

I think lots of people think belting is about volume and it's actually about intensity.

It's about creating this round, full, bright sound.

And it's exactly what you're describing about completely relaxing, throwing your voice as far as possible.

And I think a great example of this is Ethel Merman, who was particularly famous for her ability to sing in full voice in every song for every performance.

And what's really interesting about her is she would perfect an interpretation of a song and then deliver it the same each night because that was one of the ways in which she protected her voice.

If you listen to her singing, There's No Business Like Show Business from Annie Get Your Gun or Everything's Coming Up Roses from Gypsy, these songs are written in a register, so in a key and in a place in her voice to make this easy for her.

These are sort of in the middle of her voice because this is a chest voice technique.

Another brilliant singer we have to mention quickly would be Ethel Waters, who's from a much earlier tradition, sort of 20s, 30s, 40s, but she was also a Broadway star.

And her singing style, was was it belting?

I would describe Ethel Waters as the legitimate performer who sort of inspired belting in lots of ways.

It's important to say that belting sort of comes from a racist tradition connected with minstrelsy, in which actors would mimic early gospel and blues and swing sounds and try to throw their voices, but in exaggerated and derogatory ways.

By contrast, Ethel Waters, who was an African-American blues singer who then became a film actor and later an evangelist, was an interpreter of songs who would balance really intimate storytelling with the ability to let this voice pour forth.

So I think Walter's a really good example of someone who was able to harness this skill, but actually use it in a creative way well before her time.

And we see this in sort of mirrored in songs like As Long as He Needs Me from Oliver or I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miz, that she was, you know, 40 years, 50 years.

years before we start hearing this actually become tenable because of amplification.

In the 60s personally, firstly, we get in, as you say, electrified instruments, so guitars and drums.

But that also means that kids are listening to rock and roll now.

They don't want to go to the theatre, they want to listen to the stones.

So, does the theatre change again?

Yeah, the 60s is kind of a watershed.

Musical theatre ceases to be the popular music.

It becomes old-fashioned in comparison to what's happening both in popular music and in film.

Part of this is sort of triggered by Elvis Presley's film musicals and his transition from his sort of more quote-unquote clean identity into his rock star figures.

But there are also

shortcomings, I guess, to

what this leads to.

Not everybody was able to write a successful rock musical because actually lots of rock songs were not intended to tell stories.

Jesus Christ Superstar is an outlier in someone doing it very successfully early, and Hair would be another.

There are some duds, Hannah.

Oh, yeah.

Nice.

I want to hear about these.

I'm trying to do that.

If I say to you, 1972's classic Via Galactica.

Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing.

What do you think happens in that?

Via Galactica.

I don't know.

I mean, it sounds like space lasers and, you know, I mean, because I'm trying hard not to think of things that were a thing, like Xanadu, which is just, or is it?

Or is Xanadu one of them?

No, I'm thinking of Starlight Express that's all on roller skates.

Yeah.

What else could it be on?

All on snowboards or something?

Like

with laser guns.

You're doing really good.

Anna, do you want to tell Desiree what the technology was?

Well, so they wanted to mimic zero gravity.

Yes.

So all of their...

Oh my god, yes.

All of their actors bouncing on trampolines for the entire musical.

Bring it back, that's what I say.

It's not really anti-gravity.

It's like very gravity.

So you can really feel the gravity.

They're like, bang, bang.

Saying that, I would love to.

If anyone would like to produce the Van Halen musical, jump with me.

I know where to get some trampolines.

Let's do this.

The 1970s was a time of a bit of crisis in New York.

A lot of crime, a lot of, you know,

you mean the good times that everybody talked about when I was there in the early 2000s?

You should have been here before when there were heroin needles in everyone's eyes.

It was great.

It's not great.

So there were sort of big campaigns to try and get New York up and running again, bring Broadway back.

Then you do get the kind of tourists flocking in after various tourist campaigns, but also you then get the arrival of Andrew Lloyd Weber and the mega musicals.

What do you think of us as a mega musical in your head?

I just imagine a lot of people and I guess a chandelier crashing.

I mean, a lot of people and spectacle.

I mean,

in my head, musicals are pretty mega, like as far as my modern understanding of them.

It's like, oh, someone's getting hoisted up and like, you know, someone's flying out over the audience or you've got to have like something.

like that.

But I don't know that you would have.

Stunts.

Yeah, stunts and like huge, you know, and an entire army of people coming onto stage, or like a helicopter lands in before the act breaks.

So obviously, you've got Lemiz, Miss Igon, Starlight Express, cats with bum holes.

I don't know.

We get Lloyd Webber coming in and fixing the show.

Nothing changes.

You can perform it a thousand times in every city in the world.

It's never going to be different.

The seeds of this are sown in the 70s with Greece and Chicago and the Rocky Horror Show and The Wiz and a chorus line, which is another sort of massive hit.

But what Lloyd Weber does is he combines technology, a score, musical choices, lighting, production components all together to create a product that could be recreated in lots of different spaces.

And what that means is that these musicals, specifically mega musicals, become destination performances.

You go to Broadway to see the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway.

It allows considerable special effects.

So we have extensive revolving stages and extra complicated folding scenery like in Les Miz.

We have a helicopter seeming to land in the middle of a scene in Miss Saigon.

We've got magic tricks and all sorts of illusion work, for example.

In Phantom Cats, we have this amazing immersive set, but the people are actually climbing over the audience to get to their performance marks.

So it becomes immersive in a different kind of way, but it also pushes the boundaries of all the things one might expect when going to see a musical.

And the standardization is really important because it means that if you've seen one of these shows in theory in one place in the world and you go to see it somewhere else, you actually know what you're getting, and that was very different.

It's so weird that we had a British person come in to do that because it's a very American thing to do.

Isn't it quite an American tradition?

Well, I mean, I don't want to speak on behalf of America, but it does to like standardize something to make it highly commercial.

Exactly.

He's the reason why my suburban friends fly halfway around the world, you know, once a year to be like, we're going to the Broadway to see this show.

Yeah.

okay exactly and i mean it's called show business right and i mean ticket prices soar in this time don't they they show he's the reason they're all 400 yeah yeah so i mean i wouldn't want to blame him entirely and the reason i wouldn't want to blame him entirely is that one of the tensions in musicals the whole way through is the balance of the shows that sell an amazing amount and the shows that are critically acclaimed but don't sell a massive amount.

So this is a tension, for example, between all the classic Son-Time shows that we know and love now that weren't particularly commercially successful when they originally opened.

But the other thing that happens with this standardization is the sort of future-proofing of musicals that got bad reviews.

People wanted to go see the spectacle and see what had not worked, for example.

Yeah, absolutely.

There was a little bit of that.

Well, you went to see Katz the movie at the cinema.

The 90s obviously is where we get the Disney Corporation saying, well, you've got some musicals.

Let's see.

We like money.

Let's see what we can do here.

Spectacle, you got it.

You've got your huge hits, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King, obviously mega smashes again.

But then, of course, you know, the 21st century, the millennium, brings the horrors of 9-11, of course, but also kind of a different era.

Again, how is Broadway adapting to that 20 years ago or so?

Yeah, we have this really interesting balance of excitement that the musical is kind of having a revival.

The Disney animated musicals have been a massive hit.

The Broadway versions have then been a massive hit.

We then have Mulam Rouge and Chicago that come out pretty close together in the cinema, which had massive box office success.

And then we have the producers opening around 9-11 in the States, which won a record number of Tony Awards, had immense audience engagement.

And at the same time, we also have jukebox musicals having a new resurgence.

I mean, jukebox musicals have been part of musical theatre since the 1930s.

That's really interesting because I think people often assume they're kind of very cynical, modern cash cows for musical artists like ABBA or whatever, where you're just cashing in on your back catalogue.

Yeah, they were musical, cynical cash cows when you had in-house writers.

It's Labor Imogen.

It's kind of an interesting thing because if you already owned the rights to the songs from a musical you already produced, why would you not reuse them again?

So you mentioned, I think you said Singing in the Rain is one of your favourite movies of all time.

And all those songs are reused.

Yeah, like Good Morning debuted in a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland film.

So, you know, this is not, this is not a new phenomenon.

But we have ABBA and we have Queen, The Who musical is back around.

Later on, we have Jersey Boys bringing people who are not necessarily excited.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's like the green day, music.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, for the punk rock kids.

Aye, nice.

There's loads of it.

Alanis Morissette more recently.

But what's important about that is that it brings people who are maybe not excited by what they think of as musical theatre music into musicals.

But we have a real diversity of material.

We have things like Spring Awakening, Lim Rando's first musical in the Heights, which was a surprise success.

And an interesting example of theatre that was subsidised in the States where most theatre is commercially funded.

Things like the Book of Mormon and Avenue Cube pressing the boundaries of what is irreverent and what isn't.

But we also have this massive wind of films that did not have musical theatre elements becoming musical.

So Billie Elliott is the obvious example for the UK audience, but Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, there's a lot, the American Psycho is an interesting outlier.

So there's lots of this

going on.

Drownhog Day.

Drowned Hog musical.

Yeah, Dr.

Levy was a lot of fun.

Yeah, I did mention that's great.

And then obviously, Wicked is a massive hit as well.

Yes, absolutely.

So, Wicked, I think it's fascinating that The Wizard of Oz is peppered the whole way through the musical theatre history.

I was just going to say, 1902, we started.

We started in 1902.

We then have the switch to Technicolor, which leads to Disney then making Snow White and kicks off all of our animated musicals.

We have The Wiz, which is a really significant landmark in black-authored musicals post-civil rights, and the film becomes really significant.

And then we move forwards uh into wicked and interestingly then andrew lloyd weber's reality tv shows where we hunt for dorothy yeah so there is this sort of massive miss that wow not not hunting her like

that'd be amazing like the running man but with dorothy

the musical theatre expector

okay

but it's really interesting so wicked but wicked is a great example of taking what was an adult book and pitching it for teenagers there was a definite attempt a bit like in the 60s, to bring in new young family audiences back in the success of the Disney musical to other musicals.

So we have Wicked, which is very traditional in lots of ways, and that prefaces the success of something like Hamilton.

And Hamilton takes us kind of full circle as a musical that not only transcends sort of the social political context of musicals, but also goes back into popular music and you know becomes the first cast album to reach number one on the Billboard rap chart.

Yeah, I mean Hamilton is beyond phenomenon.

In many ways it felt new, but in a lot of ways what you've been talking about, it feels like it's borrowing on a long tradition.

It's an amazing balance of old and new and that's the reason that it is so successful is that we are getting a conventional, what we would call a book musical in the style of Oklahoma with a sort of a beginning and a middle and an end and lots of characters and lots of action, but at the same time

moving musical theatre forwards in terms of the kind of genres that are heard in what I'm going to refer to as mainstream theatres because there was definitely touching on hip-hop and rap in other musicals before this point.

But he really popularized it and he was very lucky in the timing because it aligned beautifully with the Obama's agendas.

So, Desiree, final thoughts on, do you send your regards to Broadway?

Have we convinced you of the joys of singing?

Please remember me to Herald Square.

Particularly that Macy's.

This has been amazing.

Thank you so much for teaching me about stuff that I now miss because I didn't understand it the first time.

And now letting me know I can't whinge about a jukebox musical because they are basically the backbone of musicals throughout the entire commercial practice.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's nothing new under the sun.

Often on this show, we're always like, yeah, history, we've done it before.

Yeah, the best thing I learned was that actors used to have a lot more power, and that makes me really, really happy, and also sad and longing for the old days.

The nuance window!

Okay, well, it's time now for the nuance window.

This is where Desiree and I enjoy our intermission ice creams, and Dr.

Hannah gets two minutes on stage to sing us something we need to know.

Take it away, Dr.

Hannah.

Okay, something I think we haven't covered is that musicals rely on communicating plot and character really quickly, so they work in shortcuts.

And because of the number of elements that most musicals contain, musical theatre creators have kind of developed a vocabulary to tell us what we need to know simply and succinctly.

So the company might pause on stage and a spotlit actor will appear in a contrasting colour, probably covered in sequins.

The action is paused.

We know that this is our main character, and we don't have to process where they fit into the story any further.

On the same basis, we have things like dance sequences that reveal dreams and introspections, but in musicals from Brigadoon in the 1940s through to like the Lion King, choreography also covers action that's really hard to stage and chase scenes.

We have types of song.

You mentioned earlier, the I Want song, the Love Duet, and these tell us about the characters' emotions and motivations.

We also have these establishing numbers that explain the musical's location and their plot, and they prevent us from having to think about specifics while we're enjoying all the other things musicals have to offer.

Wicked and Hamilton are really interesting examples because they begin by telling you how the story ends, and then they also introduce key characters and narrative.

So we are kind of wrapped up in comfort five minutes in.

We know who the characters are, we know what the key content is, we can just enjoy what we are consuming.

All of that makes musicals really exceptionally accessible to a broad audience, and that is one of the things that musical theatre has in comparison to other art forms.

It accesses all walks of life.

It also means that musicals that are successful tend to be written by people who are in musicals in other parts of their career, are connected to musical theatre history, and know this vocabulary before they get into the process of writing.

The complexity of this vocabulary then is that the amalgamation of ideas leads to musicals trading in stereotypes, and it can also allow us to have a limited imagination about how we stage things and what musicals might sound like.

The challenge, I suppose, then is that the creative efforts of lots of people over decades and centuries who've made the musical what it is can become invisible in this product that we think is a very simple thing to make.

Lovely, thank you so much.

Desiree, any thoughts on that?

There's something really amazing about this because there is a microcosm for how things could work, where it's like in theater, the bottom line is that the show must go on.

Everyone's got to find the most creative, cost-effective way to make the thing come together and happen.

But also, hearing your argument about you do need to do it quickly economically also means that the things that get cut are often some of the most sort of like damaging things that we probably needed to explore in the first place.

I can't even get over the belting part from earlier because I was just like, oh, I thought that came directly from gospel.

But it was like, no, it was a mimicking of gospel that turned into an appropriation.

Or

my head is still spinning around about that one.

But it is a really great metaphor for how we could sort of do life in capitalism.

But then it does involve a lot of nepotism.

So maybe not.

Maybe not.

Working theory.

Get back to me.

Come back to you next year.

So, what do you know now?

Well, it's time now for this.

So, what do you know now?

This is our quickfire quiz for Desiree to see how much she has learned.

Ah, man.

I have every confidence in you.

I've got 10 questions for you.

Here we go.

So, question one.

What was the first Black Broadway production in 1903 with scenes set in Africa?

Oh, in Dahomey.

It was very good.

Good.

Question two.

What was the name of the actors' union formed in 1913

oh equity yeah exactly yeah

i almost tricked myself out of answering an obvious question

out of your own wallet yeah question three what was controversial about the song old man river in black organizing spaces

A lot of black people felt, or organizers felt that it was drawing upon stereotype or reinforcing those, I mean, essentially.

And it was complicated because Paul Roweson was singing it and it was, you know, also about lifting up a tradition.

so it was very yeah I think that's a very good summation yes reinforcement and also racist language was used in it yes yes yes yeah question four can you name two musicals by Rogers and Hammerstein okay well Oklahoma's one

there's so many why can't I think of a single one pink GIs South Pacific?

Yes, South Pacific.

Well done.

Well we got there.

We got there.

Question five.

What is the technique known as cheating out?

It's like you don't face the person you were talking to, you face the audience.

Very like open up like this and go, I'm talking to you, Greg.

Can everybody see that?

Yeah, so your voice carries.

Very good.

Can you all see that through the medium of podcasts?

Question six: Which musical theatre star was renowned as a belter in the days before artificial amplification and sang, there's no business like show business?

Ethel Merman.

It was Ethel Merman.

Question seven: Who is most associated with the rise of the mega musical?

Oh, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Of course it is.

Question eight: Which character replaced Toto the Dog in the 1902 musical version of The Wizard of Oz?

Wait, replace Toto the Dog?

I thought Image in the Cow.

Well, it's Image in the Cow, but I thought it was in reverse.

No, very good.

Yeah, okay, fine.

You still got it right.

Yeah, no, no, that's fine.

Question nine, describe the staging for the 1972 musical Via Galactica.

Oh, wait, is this the one with the trampolines?

This is so amazing.

Why are there not revivals of this right now?

I think

it's time.

Bring it back.

And this for Perfect 10, of course, Question 10.

The cast album for which musical became the first to reach number one on the Billboard rap charts.

Oh, Hamilton.

10 out of 10, never in doubt.

Desiree Birch.

I wish it were the sound of music, though.

That'd be amazing enough.

That would be so great.

Just Jay-Z's version of The Hills Were Alive.

It'd be amazing.

10 out of 10, well done, Desiree.

Thank you, Dr.

Hannah, for a wonderful lesson.

Listener, for more musical chat with Desiree, check out our episodes on Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and also Pythagoras, because we talked briefly about

his octave stuff.

For a rousing encore on black American culture, we've got a lovely episode on the Harlem Renaissance, which I really enjoyed.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave us a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode.

But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests.

In History Corner, we have the wonderful Dr.

Hannah Terisingham Robbins from the University of Nottingham.

Thank you, Hannah.

Thanks so much for having me.

And in Comedy Corner, we have the brilliant Desiree Birch.

Thank you, Desiree.

Surely you should ask your listeners to leave you a musical review if they like this episode.

Hey, if people want to sing their reviews, I'm open to it.

Just remember, it needs to be an I Want song.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we stage a revival of another forgotten historical masterpiece.

But for now, I'm off to go and perform a one-man version of Frozen in My Garden shirt until the Disney lawyer shut me down.

Bye!

This episode of Your Dead to Me was researched by Anna McCully Stewart, Hannah Campbell Hewson and Annabelle Storr.

It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Nagoos and me.

The audio producer was Steve Hankey and our production coordinator was Ben Hollins.

It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Nagoos.

Our executive editor was James Cook.

You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

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But with Little Dude Wipes, you can keep your kid's keister clean without the burn and debris toilet paper can leave behind on their behinds.

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No irritation, no dingleberries, just the confident clean you get from Little Dude Wipes.

Made from 100% plant-based natural fibers.

Tiny hands, big wipe, clean butt.

Available exclusively at Walmart nationwide.