You're Dead to Me - History of Broadway (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Greg Jenner is joined in 20th-century New York by Dr Hannah Thuraisingam Robbins and comedian Desiree Burch to learn about the history of Broadway.Most of us are familiar with at least one Broadway musical, from classics like My Fair Lady and the Sound of Music to new favourites Hamilton and Wicked. In the last couple of decades, high-profile film adaptations of shows like Chicago, Cats and Les Misérables have brought musical theatre to a bigger audience than ever before. But whether or not you know your Rodgers & Hammerstein from your Lloyd Webber, the history of Broadway is perhaps more of a mystery.This episode explores all aspects of musical theatre, from its origins in the early years of the 20th century, to the ‘Golden Age’ in the 50s and the rise of the megamusical in the 80s. Along the way, Greg and his guests learn about the racial and class dynamics of Broadway, uncover musical flops and triumphs, and find out exactly what ‘cheating out’ is.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Hannah Campbell Hewson, Annabel Storr and Anna McCully Stewart Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. and cancanning 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 Hamilton and my favourite, Frozen. No, you let it go! It's Dr. Hannah Turisingham-Robbins favourite, Frozen. No, you let it go. It's Dr. Hanata Reisingham 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

and you'll know her from our many, many episodes of this very podcast, including recent highlights, the Columbian Exchange and Pythagoras. It's Your Dead to Me's leading lady, Desiree Burch. 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 maybe... I'm learning my British slang. I'm doing well, guys. Is this under the test? Are you a fan of musical theatre? Do you go to Broadway when you're maybe back home and to the West End? Uh...

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. It feels like it needs to be singing, then acting, and then movement. And I wish it were two and one were inverted. Although I've seen musicals on Broadway where they couldn't sing or act. I was 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 West Side 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 film adaptations as well. Catherine T. Jones in Chicago, you might have swooned over Hugh Jackman in Les Mis. 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. But I'm gonna start with the basic question. What is a Broadway musical? So like for me, I guess a musical is a combination of singing and drama and spectacle. Sometimes there'll be lots of exciting sets. Sometimes there'll be spectacle. Sometimes there'll be lots of exciting sets,

sometimes there'll be costumes, sometimes there'll be amazing lighting, you know, lots of additional theater 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 the singing uses different storytelling

and also kind of a different vocal style than we might expect if we're listening to popular music. 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. The commercial theatre district in Manhattan sort of runs roughly between 42nd and 46th and 7th Avenue. So it's kind of a hodgepodge of different theaters but it's also places where you can eat.

So they built a lot of theaters sort of at the end of the 1800s, 1880s. But by the time we hit the early 1900s, we've got about 30 theaters. Is the West End just Broadway but in London or is that a different thing? Oh 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 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, there are words I want to chuck at you. Vaudeville, burlesque, theatre, musical minstrel shows, are those all the same thing? 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 Vaudville 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. Pun. Burlesque is interesting because in the 19th century, it was actually more of a satire form. It was the striptease component actually comes in much later. Alongside this, minstrelsy sort of solidifies itself. Mid 1800s has a sort of a peak and a trough and then another peak and a trough in the early 20th century 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 invert commas there but based on racist principles. 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? I mean, there's so many versions of it that I've seen, The Wiz and Wicked and all these other versions of that. What's weird about it?

No songs. Okay, yeah. No music? I mean, or some music, but not a score. So some music, but not a score. So this is 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. 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. It's a real comedy set where you're like oh they're not warm enough for that one yeah let's take that one out and do a couple of the gimmie ones. Yeah kind of. 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 film do you want to guess which character did not appear in 1902s. Dorothy. That'd be amazing. It's just some bloke called

Rob. And they were like, ah, let's get a gal 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. Let's talk about the development of increased visibility of these black performers, you said. Minstrelsy, obviously racist and an 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 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 Indahomey, 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. 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 it's really early. Yes, 1903, so it's really early.

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 Indahomey 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 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 audience is flocking and was 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. Yeah, they blocked traffic. We've got to fly through the 20th century. 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 men technicolor. There's definitely something in between. There's a third thing in the middle. In the middle to triangulate that. What happened in the actual sound? That's it. Yeah, yeah. You've got the coming of the talkies. 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 heard 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 near a hundred new productions a season. 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. Yeah. So the 1940s is where American, the American economy is sort of supercharged by World War Two 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? Is it Rodgers and Hammerstein? It is, yeah, very good, yeah. One of the bits of Rodgers and Hammerstein's story that gets missed is that they were already influential figures in Broadway by the time they came together. And they come together to produce this musical no one's ever heard of called Oklahoma. 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. Yeah. Actually refers to the dramatic elements of the show. Oklahoma ran for about 2000 performances 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 impact. And Oklahoma, 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.

They're driving the actual plot. Yeah, absolutely. The I want song or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. 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 Rodgers and Hammerstein are, you know, this dominant force. But at the same time, you have things like Guys and Dolls, which opens in 1950, you have West Side Story. West Side 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. They must be so bored of it by now. Surely. Yeah, and My Fair Lady is another one to shout out, which is Lerner and Lowe, isn't it? So we've got other double acts coming in. We've got other creative teams. West Side Story is Bernstein and Sonheim, who are both giants. 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 do? 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.

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 Desiree of 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's stood to your side. In the 60s, firstly, we get electrified instruments, so guitars and drums, that 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 If I say to you 1972s classic Via Galactica. Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing. What do you think happens in that? I'm at vehicle. I don't know. It sounds like space lasers You know, I mean cuz I'm trying hard not to think of things that were that thing like Xanadu which is this or is it? Or is Xanadu one of them? No, I'm thinking of Starlight Express. It's all on roller skates Yeah, what else could it be on all on snowboards or something like laser guns aliens you're doing really doing good hannah do you want to tell desiree what the uh technology was well so they wanted to mimic

zero gravity yes so all of 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. Yes, you can really feel the gravity. Bang, bang. Yes. 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. It's not great. There was sort of big campaigns to try and get New York up and running again, bring Broadway back. But also you then get the arrival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and the mega musical.

What do you think of 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 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. So wire work, stunts. Yeah, stunts and like huge, you know, and an entire army of people coming on to stage or like a helicopter lands in before the act break. So obviously you've got Lemmys, Miss Saigon, Starlight Express, Cats. 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 Webber 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 Mis, we have a helicopter seeming to land in the middle of a scene in Miss Saigon. 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. It is, isn't it? It is 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.

OK. Exactly. I mean, it's called show business. And I mean, ticket prices soar in this time, don't they? They show. Yeah, okay. Exactly. 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. This is is a tension for example between all the classics on time shows that we know and love now

that weren't particularly commercially successful when they originally opened. The 90s obviously is where we get the Disney corporation saying, well you've got some musicals, let's... And 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 20th, 21st century rather, 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 Moulin Rouge in Chicago that come out pretty close together in the cinema, which had massive box office success. 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. Remember 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? But what's important about that is that it brings people who are maybe not excited by what they think of as musical theater music into musicals, but we have a real diversity of material. We have things like Spring Awakening, Lamar Miranda's first musical in The Heights, which was a surprise success, and an interesting example of theater that was subsidized in the states where most theater is

commercially funded, things like the Book of Mormon and Avenue Q 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 musicals. So Billy Elliot is the obvious example for the UK audience, but Legally Blonde, Mean Girls. There's a lot, American Psycho is an interesting outlier. So there's lots of us going on. Groundhog Day. 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 musical theatre history.

I was 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 into Wicked and interestingly then Andrew Lloyd Webber's reality TV shows where we hunt for Dorothy. So there is this sort of massive... I missed that.

Not hunting her like literally. No, yeah, like, oh, yes. That'd be amazing. Like the Running Man, but with Dorothy. Yes, the musical theater X Factor. What? Okay. But it's really interesting.

So 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 this 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. So Desiree, final thoughts. You send your regards to Broadway. Have we convinced you of the joys of singing? Yes, yes. Please remember me to Harold Squam. 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 Jukebox Musical because they are basically the backbone of musicals throughout the entire commercial practice. Yeah, there's nothing new under the sun. Often on this show we're always like, yeah, history, we've done it before. The Nuance Window! ["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 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 spotlight actor will appear in a contrasting colour, probably covered in sequence, 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 songs. 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 theater 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 like 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. 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. 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 Sound 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 Toreisingham Robbins from the University of Nottingham. Thank you, Hannah.

Thanks so much for having me. And in Comedy Corner, we have the brilliant Desiree Burch. 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. And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we stage 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 shed until the Disney lawyers shut me down. Bye. garden shed until the Disney lawyer shut's amazing. The new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage. Science with funny bits. Science with bits. Funny science plus bits.

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