Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2013

This editorial introduces issue 7.1 of Studies in Musical Theatre, a special issue focusing on the musical revue. The editorial considers the treatment of the revue in scholarship, noting the lack of attention given to the genre. A chronological timeline is suggested for thinking about how the revue changed over a period of time, and the author notes areas in which historians might consider doing research in the future.

Focusing on the revue 8d a Mile (1913), this study looks at how London West End revue constituted a particular response to mounting social, political and cultural insecurities over Britain’s status and position at the beginning of the twentieth century. Just as musical comedy had in many ways reflected Britain at its zenith, revue by comparison captured a feeling of decline. In revue’s shapeless and haphazard version of modernity, anxieties about degeneration and the condition and character of modern England became deeply problematized, providing a cultural expression of a fragile and changing social and political order.

This brief examination of the 1924 Broadway revue I’ll Say She Is! describes the process of constructing it, analyses its contents, and addresses the importance of the show in the careers of its stars, the Marx Brothers. This show is an example of the revue as a composite structure, constructed out of a combination of new and recycled material to feature three expected types of entertainment: music, comedy and spectacle. Resembling both a musical and a vaudeville bill, this revue is held together by the unifying construct of a plot. The most important sources in this examination are the unpublished diaries of the show’s writer, Will B. Johnstone. These diaries contain details of the construction process of a revue that add to our store of knowledge on the revue in the 1920s.

The legendary Garrick Gaieties revues of the mid-1920s are credited with launching the Broadway careers of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, with developing the style of the ‘sophisticated revue’ and with establishing Rodgers’ collaboration with the Theatre Guild, which later produced Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945). Beyond these more familiar innovations, The Garrick Gaieties invites closer scrutiny for the series’ complex relationship with the Little Theatre and art theatre movements of the 1920s, as represented by the Theatre Guild. Through cultural parody satirizing both the Theatre Guild and Broadway commercialism, the creators of The Garrick Gaieties of 1925, 1926 and 1930 not only used the revue form to destabilize cultural hierarchies and address tensions concerning art and commerce, but to bridge the distinct traditions of the Broadway musical and art theatre during the culturally dynamic years of the 1920s.

Pins and Needles, a revue produced and performed by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in 1937, is frequently compared with another leftist revue of the Great Depression, Parade, produced by the Theater Guild in 1935. Parade presented satirical sketches entirely from the liberal perspective, which apparently did not satisfy audiences, because the show closed in only five weeks. Pins and Needles, on the other hand, ran for three years, although it, too, was born out of a socially progressive culture. Why, then, did it succeed? The following study will illuminate Pins and Needles’ balanced content, which was achieved by introducing skits that featured the tempered political viewpoints and socially progressive ideals of the union from which it came. Through the careful construction of content, and the decisions made by the show’s creative team, which included theatre professionals and union leadership who answered to the cast of ILGWU members, Pins and Needles’ enjoyed wide-ranging and long-lasting appeal.

On the 1920s revue stage, dance director Busby Berkeley created ‘broken’ chorus numbers in which dancers performed rhythms that contradicted the metrical structure of the musical arrangement. This musico-choreographic aesthetic was influential in the filming and editing of Berkeley’s subsequent Hollywood musical numbers. I demonstrate how his numbers in Whoopee! (1930) retain characteristics from his stage routines and examine how those elements shaped the way he filmed and edited tap choreography in the distinctly cinematic numbers from 42nd Street (1933) and Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935). Berkeley’s cinematography is notable not just for its innovative camera angles but for continuity editing initiated by movement and music.

The focus of this article is the relationship between Broadway and television in the early 1950s, a time when most US television production was still based in New York City. To demonstrate how television appropriated the revue format, the article analyses two works: first, Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952, which some historians of the American musical claim to have been the last great Broadway revue. Some of its stars (Robert Clary, Paul Lynde, Alice Ghostley) went on to long, distinguished careers in television. While New Faces of 1952 ran on Broadway, Max Liebman’s Your Show of Shows dominated Saturday night television. Its popularity was one of the causes for the death of the Broadway revue. The article explores two issues, asking what did Your Show of Shows take from the Broadway revue and how did it differ from a show like New Faces of 1952 and why was the television revue, as exemplified by Your Show of Shows such a short-lived phenomenon?

A SHIP WITHOUT A SAIL: THE LIFE OF LORENZ HART, GARY MARMORSTEIN (2012) New York: Simon and Shuster, 527 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4165-9425-3, h/bk, $19.80

SEX, DRUGS, ROCK & ROLL AND MUSICALS, SCOTT MILLER (2011) Lebanon and New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 281pp., ISBN: 978-155553-743-2, p/bk, £19.35

OPERA INDIGENE: RE/PRESENTING FIRST NATIONS AND INDIGENOUS CULTURES, PAMELA KARANTONIS AND DYLAN ROBINSON (EDS) (2011) Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 357pp., ISBN: 978-0-754-66989-0, h/bk, $119.95, ISBN: 978-1-409-42406-2, e/bk