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The Broadway Musical: A trip through American theater history

 

The Broadway Musical is one of New York City’s greatest inventions, over 150 years in the making! It’s one of the truly American art forms, fueling one of the city’s most vibrant entertainment businesses and defining its most popular tourist attraction — Times Square.

 But why Broadway, exactly? Why not the Bowery or Fifth Avenue? And how did our fair city go from simple vaudeville and minstrel shows to Shuffle Along, Irene and Show Boat, surely the most influential musical of the Jazz Age?

This podcast is an epic, a wild musical adventure in itself, full of musical interludes, zipping through the evolution of musical entertainment in New York City, as it races up the ‘main seam’ of Manhattan — the avenue of Broadway.

We are proud to present a tour up New York City’s most famous street, past some of the greatest theaters and shows that have ever won acclaim here, from the wacky (and highly copied) imports of Gilbert & Sullivan to the dancing girls and singing sensations of the Ziegfeld revue tradition.

CO-STARRING: Well, some of the biggest names in songwriting, composing and singing. And even a dog who talks in German!  At right: Billie Burke from a latter-year Follies. (NYPL)

This show, originally recorded in 2013, has been re-edited, remastered and even includes extra material which was cut from the original episode.

LISTEN NOW: THE BIRTH OF THE BROADWAY MUSICAL

A few images from Greg’s trip to the Museum of Broadway at 145 West 45th Street.

The Black Crook
Ziegfeld Follies
Showboat
Rent
The Phantom of the Opera

The original grid plan from 1811. As you can see, Broadway was not meant to extend further than the Parade Ground, the largest planned plaza from the Commissioner’s Plan. Years later, the Parade Ground was reduced (becoming Madison Square) and Broadway was allowed to break the grid, creating plazas conducive for transportation and public gathering. (NYPL)

New York Public Library

One of dozens of knock-off productions of HMS Pinafore, this one featuring children:

The facade of the Fifth Avenue Theater, once located at 1185 Broadway. Why was it called the Fifth Avenue Theater then? Possibly to just make the society ladies feel at home here!  This was home to three Gilbert & Sullivan original productions, including the premiere of The Pirates of Penzance.

The Florodora girls, from the hugely successful 1900 musical comedy which debuted at the Casino Theater. (NYPL)

The Casino Theatre at West 39th Street and Broadway.

One of the more fantastic creatures from Victor Herbert’s Babes In Toyland, which made its debut in Columbus Circle’s Majectic Theater. You can read my article here on the musical which inspired Herbert’s show, the musical version of The Wizard of Oz. (NYPL)

New York Public Library

George M Cohan singing “Over There”

Video of a Ziegfeld Follies from 1929, a bit past their heyday, actually. They would only last until 1931:

Sheet music from 1921 of one of the most famous songs from Shuffle Along (NYPL):

Dancing girls during the Actors Strike of 1919, which galvanized the industry and gave regular New Yorkers a window into the tough conditions faced by many background performers. (NYPL)

So the number ‘After The Ball’ — a huge hit song that made its stage debut in A Trip To Chinatown — made a return appearance to Broadway in 1927’s Show Boat!

Musical cues from this week’s show:
Give My Regards To Broadway and After the Ball performed by Billy Murray
A version of Make Believe recorded by Bing Crosby, and Ol Man River, performed by Paul Robeson, from a 1932 cast recording, featuring Victor Young and His Orchestra
Love Will Find A Way, from a 1921 recording by Eubie Blake
Selection from HMS Pinafore, from a 1914 recording by the Victory Light Opera Chorus

 And finally, a clip from the film version of ‘Show Boat’, featuring an iconic performance by Paul Robeson.
 

‘White Christmas’ roots in the Lower East Side


It’s 1943, and Irving Berlin’s pouring himself a cocktail (photo by Peter Stackpole, courtesy LIFE)

HOW NEW YORK SAVED CHRISTMAS Throughout the month I’ll spotlight several events in New York history that actually helped establish the standard Christmas traditions many Americans celebrate today. Not just New York-centric events like the Rockefeller Christmas Tree or the Rockettes, but actual components of the holiday festivities that are practiced in people’s homes today.

Irving Berlin, the most prolific of Tin Pan Alley music men, composed “White Christmas” in 1937 during a trip to California. Dwell upon that statement for a moment. Berlin, the product of Russian Jewish immigrants, wrote one of the most beloved Christmas classics in an area of the world almost entirely devoid of white Christmases.

Although he wrote the song over 25 years after the ‘real’ Tin Pan Alley on 28th Street dissolved into a loose assemblage of businesses throughout midtown, Berlin did get his start on that very street, learning the trade under the employ of Harry von Tilzer’s publishing company and cranking out his own tunes; his first song, written in 1907 at age 19, was the Marie of Sunny Italy. Because of this connection, “White Christmas” is often considered the “most famous, most-recorded Tin Pan Alley song of all time.”

Irving arrived in Ellis Island in 1893 and his family settled first with a relative on Monroe Street, then later on the third floor of a tenement at 330 Cherry Street, just a few steps away from Corlears Hook.

Although new ethnic groups in New York naturally cluster together at this time, Cherry Street was considered one of the most dense blocks in the city, and it would have been impossible to avoid the foreign traditions of others, especially if you were a curious child like Irving. His experiences of Christmas were almost entirely based on Irish friends and neighbors who lived on this ultra-crowded block. The traditions would have had little religious context for him. Although it’s probably overstating to say that his displacement had a hand in the secular nature of ‘White Christmas’, Irving would have had only non-religious experiences upon which to inspire the song’s overwhelming glow of nostalgia.

Or Philip Roth famously says of Irving Berlin’s ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ in his classic Operation Shylock: “The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ — the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity — and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.”

“White Christmas,” debuted in the 1942 film Holiday Inn and within a couple years became the melancholy holiday anthem for a country in the middle of World War II. More importantly, it kicked off a flurry of secular Christmas classics, as songwriters rushed to find a suitable successor. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” debuts a year later, with “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” coming a year after that.