Fifty Key Stage Musicals

Robert W. Schneider, Shannon Agnew, Robert W. Schneider, Shannon Agnew

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000555189
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Theatre

This volume in the Routledge Key Guides series provides a round-up of the fifty musicals whose creations were seminal in altering the landscape of musical theater discourse in the English-speaking world.

Each entry summarises a show, including a full synopsis, discussion of the creators' process, show's critical reception, and its impact on the landscape of musical theater.

This is the ideal primer for students of musical theater – its performance, history, and place in the modern theatrical world – as well as fans and lovers of musicals.

1 The Black Crook

Sebastian Trainor

DOI: 10.4324/9781003009726-2

OPENING DATE: September 12, 1866

SYNOPSIS: The duplicitous Count Wolfenstein has his eyes on Amina, but she is betrothed to Rodolphe. To steal Amina Wolfenstein has Hertzog, a sorcerer who annually brings a fresh soul to the Devil, sacrifice Rodolphe. When The Fairy Queen of the Golden Realm meets Rodolphe she is determined to bring the young lovers back together and defeat Wolfenstein.

On September 12, 1866 The Black Crook—a show billed as a “Grand Magical Spectacular Drama in Four Acts”—premiered in New York City at Niblo’s Garden, a fashionable 3200-seat theatre that stood at the northeast corner of Broadway and Prince Street. (The venue was demolished in 1895; a twelve-story commercial building is on the site now.) Traditionally, the first performance of this piece is celebrated as the birth of the American musical, making The Black Crook the perfect case study to launch an exploration of key works in the history of musical theatre.

Yet even before The Black Crook there had already been a full century of American theatrical shows combining drama, music, songs, and dancing. Notable earlier achievements include The Disappointment (1767), The Archers (1796), Norman Leslie (1836), and The Naiad Queen (1841). Several musical theatre historians make cases that either one or another of these works is a better candidate for the title “first musical”—not only because they came beforehand chronologically, but also because they blended the various performance elements (drama, song, dance) in a more unified manner than The Black Crook, making them more obvious structural ancestors for what would eventually evolve into the fully integrated musicals of the Golden Age (1943’s Oklahoma!) being the archetypal example, where the book, song lyrics, and choreography all play a deliberate and collaborative role in moving the dramatic action forward).

Since the songs and dances of The Black Crook have little to do with furthering the plot, the naysayers have a good point. On stage the piece ran like an elaborate variety show. Nonetheless, this disunified spectacular extravaganza lays claim to the “first” prize because it achieved one important thing that none of its predecessors did: overwhelming financial success. In an era when a show was a smash hit if it ran for four weeks, The Black Crook managed to run for sixteen months. No one at the time, not even the producers, suspected that such longevity in a production was possible. Equally astonishing was the amount of money it earned: six hundred and sixty thousand dollars (the 1866 equivalent of ten million dollars) in little more than a year. This was the first blockbuster of the American musical stage. It therefore set the pattern for what a “perfect” musical ought to be in this age of nineteenth-century robber barons: dazzling to behold, uncritical of anything, excessively grand, titillating, long-running, and, above all, lucrative.

The show had a rather unusual origin. Its monumental success was the result of an accident, for the celebrated debut production of The Black Crook started out as two separate entertainments that only came to be combined by a quirk of fate. The title came from one of them: an unoriginal melodrama written by B-list American actor Charles M. Barras. In 1857, Barras had attended a performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera The Marksman, and, thinking its story would make a good play, he appropriated it wholesale as a basis for a piece that he claimed as his own. He then complicated the tale with some plot situations and characters recognizably copied from other popular works of the era, … notably Goethe’s Faust (the scholar’s demonic pact), Lotzing’s Ondine (the intrigues of the masked ball), and Wallace’s Lurline (the scenes of the underwater fairy kingdom).

For nine years Barras searched for someone to produce this script. He had no success. Finally, in 1866, he decided to try producing it himself. As an actor he had appeared in regional productions of several plays mounted only because they were reputed to have been popular in New York. This gave him the (already time-honored) idea that, if he were to subsidize the first production of his play at a well-known New York theatre, it might allow him to create profitable regional productions of the piece later. The difficulty with the plan was that Barras had very little money. Nonetheless, in spring of that year he approached the manager of Niblo’s Garden William Wheatley, with a scheme to share the cost of mounting the most basic production of The Black Crook that the complicated story would allow. The specific details of their arrangement are lost, but it is known that the two signed a contract to co-produce the piece in the fall.

Meanwhile, two other New York producers, Henry Jarrett and Harry Palmer, were planning an entirely different sort of entertainment. They were not even in the city, but in Europe, seeking high-class novelties to bring to the Academy of Music on 14th Street. Their idea was to spend lavishly to import a level of theatrical luxuriousness and mechanical innovation that American producers had not yet achieved on their own. In London they found part of what they wanted: a spectacular transformation scene (a gradual scene change that happens in full view of an audience, relying on stage machinery and lighting effects for its impact). They purchased it, together with the devices that made it work, and arranged for everything to be shipped to New York during the summer. They did not stop there. To make the transformation even more sensational, they hired a large ballet company from Paris to serve as alluring decoration for the illusion. Their scant costumes—and the aura of class that came with the idea of European ballet—suggested to Jarrett that this was a good investment. Mission completed, the producers took passage back to New York at the start of June, planning, on arrival, to hire the up-and-coming playwright Augustin Daly to write a scenario to bring the components together. When they got home, they discovered the Academy of Music had burned down.

The only other New York venue then in existence that might handle their state-of-the-art machinery was Niblo’s Garden. So, the pair took their working models to Wheatley, telling him of the ballet, and inviting him to join in producing their extravaganza by making a home for it at his theatre. Wheatley recognized their production concept as a goldmine. High-quality imported spectacle would be expensive to present, to be sure, but the current appetite in New York for innovative stage trickery was such that the novelty had potential for huge profit. He was interested, but Niblo’s Garden already had a contract with Barras for the fall. Yet Jarrett and Palmer were still lacking a script. Wheatley revolved the dilemma in his mind. He soon realized that Barras’ evil-sorcerer-versus-good-fairies melodrama could easily be stretched to include Jarret and Palmer’s ballet, and it could make use of a cutting-edge European transformation scene. As he saw it, the play would serve as “a clothes-line, as it were, on which to hang the pretty dresses” (Whitton, 10). Within a week the three producers decided to combine their forces.

As reconceived, Niblo’s new-and-improved fall production of The Black Crook (with added dance and spectacle) would be well beyond Barras’ meager financial means as a neophyte shoestring producer. Wheatley contacted him to renegotiate. The veteran theatre manager now wished to assume all the producing burdens for the show, along with all the artistic control. Instead of co-producing, he offered to pay Barras a royalty for use of the play. The author readily agreed; it is, after all, what he had wanted in the first place.

After this, the new team of producers immediately began to create a powerful buzz by advertising their expenses for The Black Crook as though these were its main attraction. This show, they ballyhooed, would be “the most RESPLENDENT, GRAND, AND COSTLY production ever presented on this continent.” Their publicity proclaimed “the gorgeous and brilliant new scenery,” “THE DAZZLING TRANSFORMATION SCENE,” “THE NEW STAGE AND MACHINERY,” specifying the exact cost of each item, clinching with: “the whole involving an outlay of FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS” (Whitton, 30–31). That translates to approximately eight hundred thousand dollars in today’s money (barely one-tenth of what a typical Broadway musical would cost now), but in 1866 it was a truly mind-boggling sum—approximately double the amount that any producer had previously spent to mount any New York production.

On opening night, the seats and standing room were sold out. William Winter, theatre critic for the New York Tribune, summarized the evening: “the scenery is magnificent; the drama is rubbish” (Freedley, 6). He recognized the hackneyed plot and derivative characters as stolen from a dozen other works, as though their elements were all “put into an intellectual bag and vigorously shaken together” (Freedley, 8). But even though The Black Crook’s clichéd story took five and a half hours to perform, hardly anyone seemed to mind. Its spectacle was that good. In one scene a “hurricane of gauze” made a mountain pass impassable. In another, the underwater crystal grotto of the fairy queen, Stalacta, rose out of the floor with dozens of her semi-aquatic denizens posed all around, lit with shimmering effects. “Gorgeous beyond anything ever witnessed in America,” another critic described (Twain, 85–86). And then there was the ballet, proclaimed as “the success of the night” by The New York Times, though the fact that the dancers “wear no clothes to speak of” was emphasized as a main factor in the triumph (Freedley, 10). Overall, there were more than eighty barely dressed women in the show—fairies, amazons, demons, nymphs—displaying a larger number of scandalously exposed legs than American audiences had ever seen in a respectable theatre. (In truth, all limbs were covered by flesh-colored tights, but even simulated bareness was incredibly provocative in 1866.)

Ballet was unfamiliar to most Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Among New York’s six major newspapers a controversy raged over whether The Black Crook’s use of it constituted art or pornography. Five endorsed the former, while making jocular comments on the fairies’ apparel. The dissenter was The New York Herald. This paper did not review the show, but instead, every week, its editor James Gordon Bennett, published a new editorial denouncing it. “In Sodom and Gomorrah,” he thundered, just such a spectacle as The Black Crook existed “on the Broadway of those doomed cities,” but in New York “respectable citizens should cry it down, and the police should arrest all engaged in such a violation of public decency and morality” (Whitton, 24–25). Bennett’s opinions were shared by many clergy, who composed sermons condemning the show. In vivid detail they decried the slight clothing of the dancers, and their orgiastic heathen movements. In the end, the fuss only inspired the right-minded public to buy tickets and examine the abomination for themselves. When they did, what they most noted was the concluding thirteen-minute transformation scene, whose “lavish richness and barbaric splendor” are captured in the Tribune:

All that gold, silver, and gems and lights and women’s beauty can contribute to fascinate the eye and charm the senses is gathered up in this gorgeous spectacle. Its luster grows as we gaze, and deepens and widens, till the effect is almost painful. One by one, curtains of mist ascend and drift away. Silver couches, on which the fairies loll in negligent grace, ascend and descend amid a silver whirl. From the clouds droop gilded chariots and the White forms of angels. It is a very beautiful pageant.

(Freedley, 8)

In the view of history, whether The Black Crook was ultimately “beautiful pageant” or “violation of public decency,” its 1866 production was foundational for the later American musical theatre in at least three ways. One was the lasting effect of its splendor. The piece established a new standard for production value (which all later would-be blockbusters would have to meet) by demonstrating what the stage could accomplish if pushed to the limit of a producers’ resources. It pioneered the idea of overwhelming viewers with expensive state-of-the-art technical sensations, making the audience’s experience of theatrical effects a main reason for purchasing a ticket. In this way The Black Crook set musical theatre on a path that leads directly to such marvels as Cats (1982), Starlight Express (1987), Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2011), and King Kong (2018). Like The Black Crook, all these incredibly expensive-to-produce shows feature design and technical innovation as a main attraction, with the story and music in a supporting role. Theirs is the philosophy of “eye candy” in action.

A second enduring legacy from The Black Crook is its controversial display of women. “Legs are staple articles,” as one of the producers explained, “and will never go out of fashion while the world lasts” (Whitton, 5). The notion is foundational to sexist exploitation in the theatre. In essence, the producers of The Black Crook had taken a well-established disreputable practice from lower-caste entertainment venues, exposure of limb, and made it appealing to a refined audience by presenting “leg-show” in the form of a high-class European ballet—one that helped reinforce a melodrama’s traditional message of the victory of virtue over wickedness. It created a balance in the show between eroticism, morality, and art, which was, as historian Robert C. Toll observed, “the first big step toward making the chorus girl a fixture on the American musical stage” (Toll, 216).

Toll’s larger point is that The Black Crook began a lineage of mainstream musical theatre works that take “sex sells” as a basic dramaturgical principle. One noteworthy progeny was the Ziegfeld Follies, a lavishly presented variety show (produced annually from 1907 to 1931) structured entirely around its elegant packaging of scores of alluringly costumed showgirls. After that milestone, each decade brought an increasingly risqué display to Broadway. The “tired businessman” musicals of the mid-twentieth century, for instance—shows such as Damn Yankees (1955), Let it Ride! (1961), I Had a Ball (1964), and How Now, Dow Jones (1967)—featured partial striptease, belly dancing, and high-kicking chorus lines. These musicals were racier than anything that their 1866 ancestor could have dared, but they seem restrained and conservative when compared to later inheritors such as Oh! Calcutta! (1969), which featured extensive nude scenes and overtly sexual subject matter, or Naked Boys Singing (1999), whose title is self-explanatory (what you read is what you get).

Yet far more important than either the opulent scenery or the underdressed ensemble was the impact The Black Crook had on the business of show business itself. Its debut engagement lasted from September 1866 through January 1868 (475 performances), making it the longest running theatre production up to that point in world history. And there was still more to come. The Black Crook saw fifteen New York revivals between 1870 and 1895. More to the point, the show’s popularity happened to coincide with the post-Civil War expansion of the American railroads—a piece of good fortune that brought fundamental change to way future impresarios would think about a show’s commercial potential.

Thanks to the new railroads, travel on an industrial scale had just become possible. Moreover, the country was hungry to witness entertainments featuring the mechanical marvels created by modern tech...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chronological list of contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Fifty key stage musicals
• 2. HMS Pinafore; Or, the Lass Who Loved a Sailor by Richard and Rupert Holmes
• 3. The Merry Widow by Andrew Child
• 4. Shuffle Along by Jerrell L. Henderson
• 5. Show Boat by Benjamin Nissen
• 6. Of Thee I Sing by Laura Frankos
• 7. Anything Goes by Scott Miller
• 8. Porgy and Bess by Isaiah Matthew Wooden
• 9. The Cradle Will Rock by Johanna Pinzler
• 10. Pal Joey by Laurence Maslon
• 11. Oklahoma by Kevin David Thomas
• 12. Guys and Dolls by Thomas S. Hischak
• 13. The Threepenny Opera by Lauren T. Mack
• 14. My Fair Lady by Peter Filichia
• 15. West Side Story by Jennifer Delac
• 16. Gypsy by Robert W. Schneider
• 17. The Fantasticks by David Arthur
• 18. Hello Dolly by Phillip Fazio
• 19. Fiddler on the Roof by Beth Burrier
• 20. Cabaret by Bruce Kimmel
• 21. Hair by Wes Drummond
• 22. Promises, Promises by David Spencer
• 23. Company by Rick Pender
• 24. No, No Nanette (1971) by Robert W. Schneider
• 25. The Wiz by David Ward and Jerrell L. Henderson
• 26. A Chorus Line by Ron Fassler
• 27. Annie by Charles Kirsch
• 28. Ain’t Misbehavin’ by Richard Dueñez Morrison
• 29. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Alison Morooney
• 30. Dreamgirls by Bill Russell
• 31. Cats by Stephen Mo Hanan
• 32. La Cage Aux Folles by Robert W. Schneider
• 33. Les Misérables by Robert Meffe
• 34. The Phantom of the Opera by Susan B. Russell
• 35. Miss Saigon by Jeanmarie Higgins
• 36. The Secret Garden by Elizabeth Bonjean
• 37. Falsettos by Jack Lechner
• 38. Beauty and the Beast by Eden Hildebrand
• 39. Grease (1994) by Mark Madama
• 40. Rent by Jordan Dragutsky
• 41. Seussical by Nathan Brewer
• 42. The Producers by Kasey R.T. Graham
• 43. Mamma Mia by Malcolm Womack
• 44. Wicked by Lauren Haughton Gillis
• 45. Jersey Boys by Jamie Buxton
• 46. In The Heights by Devon Hunt
• 47. Next to Normal by Joe Dziemianowicz
• 48. Fun Home by Courtney Laine Self
• 49. Hamilton by W. Jerome Stevenson
• 50. Dear Evan Hansen by Frederick D. Miller
• Index