British Musical Theatre since 1950

Robert Gordon, Olaf Jubin, Millie Taylor

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781472584380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This critical introduction to British musical theatre since 1950 is the first book to discuss its post-war developments from the perspective of British – as opposed to American – popular culture. The genre is situated within the historical context of post-war British society in order to explore the range of forms through which significant sociocultural moments are represented. Introductory chapters analyse the way British musicals have responded to social change, the forms of popular theatre and music from which they have developed and their originality in elaborating new narrative strategies since the seventies. A key feature of the book is its close readings of twelve key works, from Salad Days (1954) and Oliver! (1960) to global smash hits such as Les Misérables (1985) and The Phantom of the Opera (1986) and beyond, including the latest critical and box-office success Matilda (2011). Also analysed are British favourites ( Blood Brothers, 1983), cult shows ( The Rocky Horror Show, 1975) and musicals with a pre-existing fan-base, such as Mamma Mia! (1999).

PART I

MUSICALS AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Robert Gordon

---

1.1 BRITISH THEATRE AND SOCIETY AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

In 1950 Britain was an exhausted nation. Having stood alone in 1940 against the might of German military forces, Britain had, seemingly against all the odds, survived the nightly terrors of the Blitz to achieve, with the help of the Allies, a remarkable victory over the Nazis in the Second World War.¹ Military triumph, however, was accompanied by what appeared to be economic defeat: the enormous cost of a six-year war had utterly depleted Britain’s financial reserves and the country was by 1950 not only bankrupt but being forced to dismantle the largest Empire since that of the Romans.² British people were psychologically confronting the loss of their reputation as the twentieth century’s most powerful and influential nation,³ a loss that on a personal level would undermine the confident mentality that had promoted the innate sense of superiority manifest in the imperial project from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.⁴

The rationing of food and ‘luxury’ goods introduced during the war continued until 1954. Britain had in 1939 entered an age of austerity for possibly the first time in its history.⁵ Obviously popular culture was profoundly affected by the great transformation in the nation’s fortunes, and this can clearly be seen in the changes in the form and style of British musicals that occurred between 1945 and 1954. The stunning impact of both Oklahoma! (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane) and Annie Get Your Gun (Coliseum) in 1947 led to the transfer of a succession of Broadway hits in the 1950s and 1960s. Obviously London’s war-weary West End could not compete with the ebullience of Broadway theatre in originating and popularizing a certain type of musical.

In their fulsome laudation of these two colourful and rumbustious American musicals, reviewers unfortunately promoted a corresponding view that British musicals were genteel and old-fashioned, clinging to pre-war manners and ideals and attempting to compensate in charm for their lack of energy. American male dancers appeared virile and strong; their British counterparts seemed by comparison effete and effeminate.⁶ Although the most popular British musicals in fact ran longer in the West End than most of the Broadway shows,⁷ British producers and writers lacked the imagination and drive to create English equivalents to the American blockbusters and continued instead to exploit pre-war conventions of operetta and musical comedy.

Paradoxically, the form of the Broadway musical was eventually challenged by a very different type of English musical, but this form only served to enhance the myth that British musicals were second-rate entertainments born of an inspired amateurism and dedicated to nostalgic recreations of Edwardian grandeur or naive celebrations of community spirit, while Broadway shows were, by contrast, well crafted, inventively choreographed and vividly designed affirmations of the American dream. It is a truism that popular culture involves a spontaneous response to and projection of the common-sense expectations, tensions and contradictions that constitute the individual’s social experience. In challenging the notion that British musicals were inferior, one must ask why they held greater appeal than their more critically valued American counterparts in order to comprehend how they reflected the society and expressed the culture that produced them.

While the United States had replaced Britain as the world’s leading superpower after the war, Britain was a nation in retreat from Empire, struggling to forge new social images and identities in the crippling aftermath of that conflict.⁸ Both countries were heavily invested in the notion of a Cold War between the communist Soviet Empire and the capitalist West, but while the United States had the will and resources to wage a series of wars against the rise of communist regimes in Asia and South America, Britain carefully calculated the cost of the break-up of Empire, granting independence to each of its former colonies in turn, and gradually transforming the British Empire into the Commonwealth – a loose federation of nations that attempted to sustain British influence in the former colonies without maintaining colonial power and responsibility. At the deepest and most personal level, the disintegration of the Empire between 1945 and 1967 was a profound shock to the British psyche, reinforcing the sense that having won the war, the country had lost the peace.⁹ Having built the most extensive Empire in history, Britain was now a small, relatively poor nation without any serious influence in the world.¹⁰

Yet the war did bring its victories. Working-class men had closely observed and interacted with upper-middle-class and upper-class officers; women had assumed traditionally ‘masculine’ jobs on farms, in factories and in the armed forces.¹¹ The general election at the end of the war swept the Labour party to a landslide victory, which was to have a profound effect on British society and politics until the 1980s.¹² The new Labour Government set out to create a Welfare State, establishing both the principle and foundations of the National Health Service, free secondary and higher education and social welfare for the infirm, the disabled and the elderly.¹³ This represented a huge advance towards a genuine social democracy in the UK in line with developments in other Western European countries, and initiated an era of consensus politics that remained in place until it was challenged by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s.

As part of the culture produced by society, all forms of theatre reflect, both directly and indirectly, the historical conditions and social circumstances of any given era. The relationship between popular entertainment and the society that produces it can be quite complex to comprehend because forms of entertainment usually disguise their economic aim (i.e. to make profit) through obscuring the ideological bias that constitutes their true meaning. By pretending to be ‘only entertainment’¹⁴ musicals disguise their underlying meanings by offering all kinds of pleasures to their audiences that may on the surface appear to have a very different import to their real significance. Most often the ‘common-sense’ meaning of a popular musical does not coincide with its true function as a commercial product. Creators of popular entertainment will seek to ‘give the public what they want’ in order to maximize profit. Marketing and audience research or simply a producer’s hunch may have created the awareness that certain subjects and styles of performance will be popular, so musicals are created according to ‘recipes’ for the production of what it is believed the theatregoing public will enjoy. But theatre production is not an exact science and producers fail to capture the imagination or satisfy the taste of the public more often than they succeed.¹⁵

As with Hollywood films, producers of popular musicals therefore tend to be conservative in following trends that have proved commercially successful: Broadway producers invariably try to imitate a formula that has proved popular with minor variations that create an illusion of offering something new. Changing social conditions eventually result in changes in what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’,¹⁶ accounting for major shifts in taste from one period to another. One of the most obvious recent examples is the way in which the trauma of the destruction of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on 9/11 brought to an end the epoch of bombastic musicals that deployed melodrama and spectacle to thrill and divert audiences with a rollercoaster of emotions and moods. Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002) may have been the first Broadway show to reflect the new zeitgeist, together with The Producers (2001), ushering in a period of retro musical comedy that continues to dominate Broadway musical theatre today.¹⁷ Some musicals establish new trends largely because they are genuinely original – Lionel Bart’s Oliver! is a show that in 1960 transformed the model of what a British musical could be. At its best, theatre can both reflect and challenge the predominant values of its time, so that although the industry does not necessarily provide an incentive for writers to do so, some musicals have done both.

The development of British musical theatre after the Second World War has clearly reflected changes in the sociocultural landscape. Before the war, Noel Coward and Ivor Novello were famous as directors for the extravagance and good taste of their staging; cast sizes were, by contemporary standards, enormous, and spectacle was if anything much grander than audiences are accusto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I: Musicals and Social Change
• Part II: British Popular Culture and Musical Theatre
• Part III: Narrative and Story-Telling in the British Musical since 1970
• Conclusion
• Timeline
• Notes
• Selective Bibliography
• Discography
• Filmography
• Index
• Copyright