Transcription
The year was 1927, and the New York theater district called "Broadway" was entering what would be its greatest season in history. More than 264 shows were going to open that year, and as many as eleven would open on a single night. You had Fred and Adele Astaire doing the songs of George Gershwin in Funny Face. You had Rodgers and Hart with their first great, great hit show. You had the Marx Brothers doing Animal Crackers. You had Mae West doing a comedy she wrote herself called Sex. You had the Ziegfeld Follies, the George White Scandals. You had it all during that period.
Every new production was an overflowing of talent that was expressly American. In the years following World War One, America’s identity came into sharp focus, and it did so on the Broadway stage. Broadway really calls the tune to this era. It is the Jazz Age. It’s the Roaring 20s. And the Broadway Musical reflects it, sets the pace. People learn to say funny, witty things from Broadway shows. Like, “Marriage is a wonderful institution. Yeah, but who wants to spend your life in an institution?” It was on Broadway where choreographers like George White introduced new dance steps to America, and where composers like George M. Cohan celebrated America in song. It was on Broadway where the lives of America’s new immigrants were acted out for audiences who might otherwise have known little about them. Different people come together and they teach each other their songs, and they imitate each other and that simple, simple thing is what has created the music of this country, the dance, the art, and the culture. Broadway was the entertainment capital of the nation, a place where diverse lives were celebrated, and reflected back onto society. On Broadway, America was taking center stage.
Simple entertainment had existed in New York since it’s founding, but what we now know as Broadway didn’t’ begin to take shape until early in the 20th Century. At the time, people lived in neighborhoods that were ethnically segregated. Their entertainment was also isolated, with Italians playing to Italians, and Jews to Jews. But all that changed in 1904 when the subway was created, connecting neighborhoods, and zigzagging right trough Broadway. And that opened up what had previously been a kind of no-man’s land. Nobody dared go north of 42nd Street. It was full of brothels and stables and high crime, but now everybody could get there from across the city and it opened up cheap real estate, and what do you do with cheap real estate? You build a theater on it. Enterprising theater owners began building new theaters around Times Square, named for the city’s newspaper, and it was in one of those theaters where Broadway’s founding father got his big break. George M. Cohan was from an Irish family that toured the country on the Vaudeville circuit, the theatrical side-show that was Broadway’s precursor. Vaudeville acts traveled the country, and included just about everything, from sketch comedy to animal acts. It was Cohan’s experience on the road that inspired him to create a dramatic style that would serve all audiences. Cohan realized maybe the thing to do was to create an American style, something that would appeal to people no matter what city you were in. And he brought that to Broadway in 1904, when he wrote and starred in a show called Little Johnny Jones, which has two great songs in the American canon: Give My Regards to Broadway and I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy. "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy A Yankee Doodle, do or die."
George M. Cohan was the musical equivalent of Teddy Roosevelt. In other words, spreading the American spirit in a gutsy, positive, very, very upbeat way. In more than 40 shows, Cohan captured the essence of what it meant to be an American. And what Cohan was able to do was say, you know what? My family is from Ireland, maybe my audience is from Italy, and maybe someone else in the third row came up from the Lower East Side to see my show, but we’re all Americans and we’re all in New York and let’s celebrate that fact. Cohan’s productions portrayed an idealized America, but it would be up to a first-generation German American to shine a light on all walks of American life. Florenz Ziegfeld launched a variety show in 1907 that was a unique blend of music, dancing, comedy, and drama. Ziegfeld had this magic eye to put it all together so it looked beautiful, it was classy, it was something people wanted to spend their two dollars and 20 cents to see. And in doing that he elevated the entire tone of popular entertainment on Broadway. Today there are more people producing the show than in the show. In Ziegfeld’s era, his name stood alone. He assembled the talent. He decided how long the acts should be in the show. He worked with his directors and his set people and costume people and his comedians and his songwriters and he tried to put together a blend. Ziegfeld‘s grand pageants were a hit. The Ziegfeld Follies dazzled audiences with whatever was new in American society, and by the 1920’s the thing that was changing the fastest was the new American woman. She’s physically freer, off with the corsets, down with the hair, cut it off as a bob, and speed, speed, speed, youth, youth, youth is the motto of the 1920s, and probably no single figure exhibits that freedom and the thrill of that freedom and the sexiness of that freedom more than the chorus girl on Broadway. The cumulative power of one woman, and then two women, and then ten women, and then 20 women all doing the same dance number became this kind of electrical force in the 1920s. and so it’s like a thousand-watt light that just sort of illuminates the whole cultural scene of America during this time. During the many years that I’ve been identified with American theatre, I have glorified many beautiful girls. I take great pleasure in presenting Miss Grace Moore of the present Follies. To be hand-picked by Ziegfeld, which was how he selected his showgirls, was to die and go to Broadway heaven.
But Ziegfeld also had an eye for more than just beauty alone. He peppered his follies with comedy routines. And for one of those coveted slots, Ziegfeld spotted a rare talent, in a young comic actress from New York’s Lower East Side, Fanny Brice. Fanny Brice was the least likely person to become a major star, back in this period. If you look at pictures of what’s considered conventional beauty or conventional star magnitude, you see these beautiful pictures of hour glass figures, porcelain skin, blue eyes, the complete American ideal of beauty, and into the room walks Fanny Brice. She’s a short Jewish girl who has this outrageous comic profile. She can’t really dance, she can’t really sing. But she could make people laugh. I’m Sasha, the Passion of the Pasha, And though he’s an old shlemiel, still he’s got sex appeal.... Brice was the child of Jewish immigrants, whose language and customs were off putting to others. She’s this comedienne and brings so obviously an ethnic Jewish background to the stage. But what she does with it is so magical and so charming and so winning that she wins over audiences who probably frankly couldn’t be less interested in meeting a Jewish person out on the street or in real life. And that amount of goodwill among different classes in society that Fanny Bryce helps create is inestimable and in many subtle ways, changes the fabric of American society. [Sings "Becky is Back in the Ballet"] Along with Fanny Brice, actors from all walks of life brought their brands of comedy to the Ziegfeld Follies. Will Rogers, a part Cherokee cowboy from Oklahoma, turned his rope-trick act into a folksy, everyman comment on American society. W.C. Fields cultivated his semi-inebriated buffoonery into a national hit. Comedian Ed Wynn would later parlay his Broadway act into an on-screen personality. But one of Ziegfeld’s biggest stars wouldn’t make it beyond the footlights of the Follies theater, even though he broke box office records. Bert Williams was born in the West Indies in 1874, and emigrated to the U.S. when he was 11. He developed an act on the segregated Black vaudeville circuit, and by 1903 he was headlining in the cast of a musical called In Dahomey. It was the first full-length Broadway musical to be written and performed by Blacks. Williams caught Florenz Ziegfeld’s eye for talent, and he was asked to join the Follies. And in 1910 that was not a radical act, that was a revolutionary act, to ask a Black man to appear on stage in a show that had 42 other performers who were all white. And in fact, when Williams first joined the Follies in 1910, supposedly the cast rebelled and said that they didn't really want to share a stage with a Black man. They didn't want to even share a dressing room with a Black man. And Ziegfeld said, "Great, then you can all go, because Bert Williams is the only one of you that I can't replace."
One of William’s signature songs was called “Nobody,” an outsider’s lament at having no-one that he could count-on. “When life seems full of clouds and rain and I am full of nothing and pain who soothes my thumping bumping brain, nobody....” He talked a little bit about what might be going on behind his skin and in his mind and in his life, and giving it to white audiences in just small enough doses that they could probably take it. He really expressed the pathos, what he called the pathos of his race. W.C. Fields described Williams as "the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.” He was a headliner with Ziegfeld, but he couldn't go by himself to many of the places in New York. You had to go with a white patron or you weren't allowed in. There's a story that he went into a bar and asked the bartender to make a drink for him. You know, scotch and soda or something. And the bartender made the drink and said, "That'll be $50." And Bert Williams looked at him, reached in his pocket, took out $500, put it on the bar and said, "Make me ten." Bert Williams never lived to see the day when Black actors would enjoy the benefits of civil rights. In 1922, at the age of 46, he died after collapsing on stage. People like Bert Williams and Fanny Brice, under the guidance of the vision of Florenz Ziegfeld, were not only pioneers in entertainment, but I would say pioneers in American society. Because they brought people together who had previously been so segregated in American society.
With a steady parade of talented actors, the Ziegfeld Follies packed the house for more than 20 years. But half-way through its monumental run, Ziegfeld’s lavish productions began to look dated to some. In 1919, a Follies dancer named George White imagined something more than Ziegfeld’s grand pageant. White could see a modern production with more zip in its step. He figured he couldn't compete with Ziegfeld, 'cause Ziegfeld had all the money and all the glamour and all the décor. What he could do was maybe concentrate on something that only he could do particularly well, and that was dancing. George White featured the hottest new dance steps in his revues, annual shows that he called The Scandals. New dance styles like the Charleston or the Black Bottom would appear in one of the numbers, and then like wildfire, they would get picked up and be done in dance halls and gradually these things took over the entire country. Certainly most of the great dances of the 1920s began in some manner, shape or form on Broadway. Not only did George White introduce new dance steps into his revues and to all of America, he also taught America to hum the same tune. He did that by hiring a single composer to write the music for an entire show. Instead of borrowing a song from Joe Blow and a song from this guy across the street, as Ziegfeld had done, he would get one person to write all the songs in his show. And that young man he picked was George Gershwin. "Have you heard the latest Scandal it’s the talk of the town...it's a dance of renown...." George Gershwin wrote the complete scores for the George White Scandals from 1920 to 1924, catapulting both the shows and Gershwin to stardom. Gershwin’s irresistible melodies captured the excitement of the new metropolis, and were influenced by the new music of the day... jazz. Jazz had come up from the south, and found its way to Harlem. There, it was part of a flowering of African American music, art, and poetry called The Harlem Renaissance. And downtown in the theater district, the white commercial ticket buyers were so fascinated by this new culture coming out of the Harlem Renaissance that they brought Black talent down to Broadway.
Some of the new Harlem talent that braved Broadway was the composer-lyricist team of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Heaven, Heaven, Heaven...everybody’s talking bout heaven, ain’t going there. Heaven, Heaven, Heaven...I’m gonna walk all over God’s Heaven.... Walk, I say. Walk it, walk it! Sissle and Blake wrote an all-Black musical called “Shuffle Along,” and despite huge financial obstacles, managed to get the show up and on its feet. The Black shows couldn't afford showgirls and dancers and singers. So they combined them. They made them one: the chorus girl who could sing, dance, act and was attractive. This new notion of a multi-talented performer, which now we take totally for granted, was a real innovation from Shuffle Along. Shuffle Along had a simple plot, but its jazz melodies, hot dance numbers, and sizzling new energy lit up Broadway like never before. Yet the authors of Shuffle Along had more than razzle-dazzle in mind. In the years before their show, Blacks had been portrayed onstage as thieves or buffoons, a tradition begun during minstrelsy, when first white and then later Black actors donned blackface, and parodied the lives of African Americans. Nothing approaching an honest relationship had ever been attempted onstage. Now, for the first time on Broadway, Sissle and Blake included a tender love song between an African American man and woman, a tune called “Love Will Find A Way.” “Come Dear and don’t let our pain weaken. Let’s keep our love fires burning bright.” In American racist theatrical tradition, if Blacks sang a love song it had to be a comic love song, because the thought of serious passion between Blacks was taboo. Not in Shuffle Along. That was a serious love song and the performers were actually scared. They thought they’d be pelted with tomatoes and oranges. “Love will find a way.” But after the song was sung there was a silence, and then applause, and they had to encore the song. Sissle and Blake, much later they said, "You know, we were ready to run out of the theater in case something happened, we were glad it went well." Perhaps even more groundbreaking than anything onstage was what happened in the audience. It was the first time on Broadway that African Americans were allowed to sit in the orchestra section, previously whites only. Shuffle Along played for 504 performances – nearly two years. Other producers admired Shuffle Along’s success, and within three years there were nine Black musicals running on Broadway. The reviewers said, "You know, white shows take notice. This is what the shows on Broadway should be like. They should have this kind of pep and verve." And so producers like Ziegfeld and George White hired the chorus girls to teach their girls the steps.
It wasn’t only dance steps and music that were changing on Broadway. Stories themselves were about to be transformed. Before the First World War, the Operetta, or opera-light, was the most popular brand of musical theater in America. World War One came along, and a lot of these Operettas that were usually set in Germany or Austria, filled with Viennese schmaltz, suddenly when we were at war with the Germans and Austrians, that didn’t go over too well in America. And you began getting fewer and fewer operettas. By 1918 there was not a single operetta on Broadway. And that opened the door for a much more American kind of musical. Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II was all ears in 1926 when composer Jerome Kern told him that he wanted to take a new step, and adapt a quintessentially American story into a Broadway musical. Like many before him, Kern tapped into popular culture for his material. But now, the source of his inspiration was a literary work, a novel about a Mississippi showboat. It was a huge commercial risk. Never before had a musical been adapted from a serious novel. It had tragedy in it, it had alcoholism in it, and probably most complicated, it had a mixed racial cast. And it had not only white performers and black performers, it had issues about race at its core. The team turned to a producer who had more experience than anyone in town at mounting a successful show and breaking down barriers, Florenz Ziegfeld. And to his eternal credit, he said yes. I see what this can be. This can make my reputation as a showman. Ziegfeld had nothing to prove to anybody. He was one of the greats. But he probably realized too that it was time to ratchet it up a bit and make something more serious that would connect with a larger audience in America. With Ziegfeld behind them, Kern and Hammerstein created the first serious musical on Broadway, in which the characters and plot, or “book” were advanced through the lyrics of the song. Their musical was called “Showboat” and Hammerstein chose to set its key turning point during one of the show’s most memorable songs. As Julie, the central character sings an innocent song from her youth, “Can’t Help Lovin Dat Man,” her past is slowly revealed to the other characters, and to the audience. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, I gotta love one man till I die. Can’t help lovin dat of mine. And the Black cook says, “How did you know that song? It’s funny that you would know that song." And she says, “Well it’s just a song I know, what’s so funny about that?” And she said, “The only people I know who know that song are colored folk.” Julie’s song reveals the startling fact that she is bi-racial, her father was white and her mother was Black, and it sets the stage for an ominous end to Julie’s otherwise happy life. The next time we see Julie, she’s an alcoholic singing in a bar in Chicago, deserted by the man who stood by her when she was thrown off the Showboat. So it has a kind of tragic dark side to it. And that was completely unheard of. “Lovin that man of mine.” Showboat was a hit. Critics loved it, and audiences lined up around the block. It marked the birth of the modern Broadway musical, and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein would go down in history as its architects.
Florenz Ziegfeld had successfully reinvented himself. But no amount of inventiveness could match the entertainment bombshell that would land smack in the heart of Broadway. The first talking picture, The Jazz Singer opened in October of 1927. And one of Broadway’s own, Al Jolson, appeared as the 20-foot-high star of the new silver screen. Jolson was everything that Broadway represented. So not only did his personality fill the screen and then some, it all was almost like Robert E. Lee joining the Union Army or something, he had crossed over to the other side, the big gun crossed over and that was a lot of the appeal of the movie. When Jolson turned to speak to his mother, it was the first time in movie history that an actor’s voice accompanied his picture. You like that Momma? Yes. I’m glad of it. I’d rather please you than anybody I know of. Entertainment was changed forever, but one thing remained the same, and that was Jolson’s outdated act in blackface. Jolson could galvanize an audience with or without the makeup. In some ways, you think about it and you say to yourself, how did he do it with the makeup, that you would think people would’ve been offended in greater numbers earlier than they were. Alas, they weren’t. Even so, Jolson's celluloid performance was a hit, and the theatre had to screen the film round-the-clock to keep up with audience demand. The nationwide shift away from live theatre had begun. With every new season, more talking films were released and fewer Broadway shows were launched. Have a good day? Yes, and you? Good. Anything new? No, with you? Nothing. Good, well I'll see you later. Actors joined those who worked behind the curtain and headed out West. The playwrights go and the composers and lyricists go, and there isn’t a team worth their salt who doesn’t go to Hollywood during this period and try their hand. Why? Maybe they’re doing a show every two years now on Broadway. How are they gonna pay their bills, let’s go to Hollywood, write a couple of songs, how bad can it be? You did that very well, my friend, very well.
If movies were the upper cut to Broadway, the blow that sent it down for the count was the Stock Market crash two years later in 1929. You couldn’t write a better script. This wild, heady, exotic, unconventional era comes to a crash, almost at the end of the decade. And America starts, basically, sobering up in the 1930’s. It makes for like a good first act finale to the era. “Give my regards to broadway....” After a dry spell, Broadway revived itself, attracting more brilliant playwrights, actors, composers and lyricists. But it would never have the same impact as it had in the 20s, when it had helped to define America. The American musical is really the essence of American culture. It really hits all of the levels of what are the stories we’re telling, who are we as a people, how do we form and connect our identity? In the 1950s and 60s television began to assume that role, but the Broadway musical remains one of the few uniquely American art forms. “Whisper of how I’m yearning to mingle with the old time throng. Give my regards to old Broadway, and say that I’ll be there e’er long.”