1 - American musical theatre before the twentieth century

Summary

The history of musical comedy begins in confusion.

edith borroff

Most histories of American musical theatre give short shrift – at best – to the ‘origin of the species’, to use Edith Borroff's apt phrase. Despite lofty ambitions (titles that claim coverage ‘from the beginning to the present’), most authors are content to offer a brief essay about the antecedents of musical comedy, usually including definitive identification of ‘the first American musical’ (The Black Crook, Little Johnny Jones, Evangeline, Show Boat, The Beggar's Opera, The Wizard of the Nile or any number of other works), before turning, with an almost discernible sigh of relief, to musical theatre of the twentieth century. The reasons for the brevity and for the disagreement on the ‘first’ musical become readily apparent as soon as one attempts to sort out the myriad different types of musical theatrical forms that materialised, metamorphosed, became popular, disappeared, re-emerged and cross-fertilised prior to the twentieth century. To put it simply, for the scholar in search of a clear lineage to the forms of the twentieth century, musical theatre in the eighteenth – and even more so in the nineteenth – century was a tangled, chaotic mess. This was not the impression at the time, of course. To the contrary, a nineteenth-century American, especially the resident of a large city like New York, found musical theatrical life during the time to be gloriously rich, varied and ever-changing; it was a world that was entertaining, interesting, exciting and innovative to an extent that should elicit a twinge of envy from the modern reader. But the job of the historian is to clarify and attempt to put into some kind of order the messiness of a bygone era. And the richness of that period makes the job both difficult and important.