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Polite Gaiety: Cultural Hierarchy and Musical Comedy, 1893-1904

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Michael Newbury
Michael Newbury
Affiliation:
Middlebury College
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Extract

In 1903, Alan Dale, the theater critic for the New York American and Journal, when contemplating the state of the American stage, came to the conclusion that “the only national theatre I can find, after severe cogitation, is that beautiful, flip, and classic commodity known as musical comedy.” Dale pointed out that musical comedy's exorbitant popularity was a recent development, emerging only in the previous five or ten years, and that his anointing of the form as the national theater would not sit well with more serious-minded devotees of drama. “Well read gentlemen with heavy minds,” wrote Dale, would prefer different sorts of productions, plays that “mere commercial managers don't want to stage and mere amusement seekers don't want to see.” Seeking an improbable bridge over this cultural divide, Dale suggested that “[Henrik] Ibsen might air his neat little views on heredity in happy verse set to music…[His] favorite subject of maggots on the brain” could feature a “chorus of pretty girls disguised as maggots.”

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , October 2005 , pp. 381 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2005

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References

1 Dale, Alan, “Has Musical Comedy Become Our National Drama?” New York American and Journal (Sunday, May 17, 1903)Google Scholar , Alan Dale Scrapbook, Robinson Locke Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

2 Archer, William, “The Blight on the Drama” The Living Age (March 6, 1897): 643–46Google Scholar ; Theatre (March 1903): 60Google Scholar .

3 Levine, Lawrence, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 60, 156-62Google Scholar .

4 See for example , Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 227Google Scholar ; Dimaggio, Paul, “Cultural Entrpreneurship in 19th-century Boston,” Media, Culture, and Society: A Critical Reader, Collins, Richard et al. (Beverly Hills, 1986), 208–09Google Scholar .

5 Rubin, Joan Shelley, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, 1992), 11-15, 105–07Google Scholar . Sheets, Kevin B., “Antiquity Bound: The Loeb Classical Library as Middlebrow Culture in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4 (April 2005): 149–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Radway, Janice, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill, 1997), 94–110Google Scholar . Radway in particular emphasizes that the phrase and idea of the “middlebrow” only came into popular usage in the 1920s to signify an historically specific marriage between high cultural ideals and and the machinery of mass-cultural production. Using the term with reference to earlier periods is, she believes “anachronistic” (366-67). Some decades later, by the 1950s, after the musical comedy form had changed significantly, observers routinely thought of it as “middlebrow.” See Klein, Christina, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar ; MacDonald, Dwight, “Masscult and Midcult,” Against the American Grain (New York, 1962), 39Google Scholar . MacDonald's screed attacks the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein, “the folk-fakery of Oklahoma! and the orotund sentimentalities of South Pacific.”

6 Frith, Simon, “The Good, The Bad, and The Indifferent: Defending Popular Culture from the Populists,” Diacritics 21 (Winter 1991): 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

7 The cover of playbills at the Casino in the years around 1900 dubbed that theater either “The Home of Polite Gaiety” or “The Home of Refined Musical Comedy.” Program for A Chinese Honeymoon, Week Commencing Monday Evening, Aug. 25,1902,” Dartmouth College Theatre Collection; Program for Florodora, “Eighteenth regular Winter Season, week beginning Monday evening, December 31, 1900,” Dartmouth College Theatre Collection. Promotional materials for vaudeville tended to be, but were not always, more sensationalist in design. I know of none that so openly seeks this vision of aristocratic elegance.

8 For more on Edwardes and the origins of “musical comedy,” see these standard sources: Green, Stanley, Encyclopedia of the Musical Theatre (New York, 1976), 110Google Scholar ; Ganzl, Kurt, The Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (New York, 2001), 562–63Google Scholar . Cecil Smith and Glenn Litton, Musical Comedy in America, rpt. ed. (New York, 1991), 66; Lamb, Andrew, 150 Years of Popular Musical Theatre (New Haven, 2000), 113–24Google Scholar .

9 Augustin Daly is quoted in “A Famous American Manager” Munsey's Magazine, 1A2-45, undated clipping, Augustin Daly clippings file, Dartmouth College Theatre Collection.

10 Daly, Joseph Francis, The Life of Augustin Daly (New York, 1917), 578Google Scholar ; Felheim, Marvin, The Theater of Augustin Daly (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 264–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Joseph Horowitz notes that similar mixings and crossings between the high and the middle seem to have been frequent in the world of classical music. , Horowitz, “Music and the Gilded Age: Social Control and Sacrilization Revisited,” Journal of the GildedAge and Progressive Era 3 (2004): 236–37Google Scholar .

11 “Music and Drama, Hollis Street Theatre: ‘The Lady Slavey”’; “At the Theatres, Casino: ‘The Lady Slavey.’” Both articles are in The Lady Slavey clippingsfile, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

12 On the emergence of the safety bicycle and fashionable “wheelwomen” see particular-y l Gruber-Garvey, Ellen, “Reframing the Bicycle: Advertising-Supported Magazines and Scorching Women,” American Quarterly 47 (1995): 66–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

13 Stewart is quoted in Lamb, Andrew, Leslie Stuart: Composer of Florodora (New York, 2002)Google Scholar ; “At the Theatres—The Lady Slavey” Lady Slavey clippingsfile, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

14 Lederer, George, “The Evolution of Musical Comedy,” The Green Book Album (December 1909): 1189Google Scholar ; Anderson, John, “George Lederer,” George Lederer Envelope, Robinson Locke Collection, New York Library for the Performing Arts, 22Google Scholar .

15 Allen, Robert, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1991), 138Google Scholar ; Toll, Robert, On With the Shorn' The First Century of Show Business in America (New York, 1976), 216–20Google Scholar . Dudden, Faye, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870 (New Haven, 1994)Google Scholar . Toll and Dudden see less subversion in burlesque's performances, emphasizing that “women's bodies [were their] major feature and their figures, not their talents, the major requirements” (Toll, 216).

16 , Smith and , Litton, Musical Comedy, 11–19Google Scholar ; , Toll, On with the Show!, 222Google Scholar .

17 Glenn, Susan, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 156Google Scholar ; Banner, Lois, American Beauty (New York, 1983), 179–82Google Scholar .

18 , Anderson, “George Lederer,” 22Google Scholar .

19 See, for example, “Fan Gavotte” from Ludwig Englander and Harry Bache Smith, The Strollers, promptbook and vocal score in Tams-Witmark Collection, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The song is a series of verses on the cross-cultural history of the fan as the flirtatious woman's fashion accessory:

In every age in every clime

Since girls to flirt began

The poet's page of pretty rhyme

Has sung the praises of the fan…

20 Englander, Ludwig and Smith, Harry B., The Rich Mr. Hoggenheimer (Library of Congress Copyright Deposits, reel 204, 1906), 9–11Google Scholar ; Sidney Jones et al., A Gaiety Girl, promptbook in Tams-Witmark Collection, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

21 My phrasing borrows from Bailey, Peter, “Naughty but Nice: Musical Comedy and the Rhetoric of the Girl,” The Edwardian Theatre, ed. Booth, Michael and Kaplan, Joel (New York, 1996), 48–52Google Scholar .

22 Snyder, Robert, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York, 1989), 137–38Google Scholar . Weber and Fields are quoted in Jenkins, Henry, What Made Pistachio Nuts: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York, 1992), 35Google Scholar .

23 Dale, Alan, “Enter the New School of Comic Opera Humor” New York American and journal, Jan. 11, 1903, 22Google Scholar , Alan Dale Scrapbook, Robinson Locke Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Other comments on the need for more refined humor in musical comedy can be found in “The Jewel of Asia,” New York Dramatic Mirror (Feb 28, 1903): 16Google Scholar : ”James T. Powers has all the clever lines…[T]he humor is always refined and clean. Never does the librettist descend to the barroom for a glass of somewhat spoiled and ill-smelling jokes, as has been the case in…several other productions.” A review of Fantana in Boston praised Jefferson De Angelis, the comic star of that performance, by emphasizing, “He is less the buffoon, less strenuously acrobatic than he used to be, and both these improvements in his deportment are to be heartily commended. A certain all-round cleverness and a capacity for constant hard work are really his stock in trade.” “Boston Theatre: ‘Fantana,’” Fantana clippings file, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

24 On the male world of sociability and license extending into the late 1800s see Gilfoyle, Timothy J., City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialisation of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York, 1992), 224–32Google Scholar ; Chudacoff, Howard, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, 1999), 133–34Google Scholar . On the efforts of vaudeville theaters to draw women as proof of their respectability, see Kibler, M. Alison, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill, 1999), 30–31Google Scholar .

25 , Dale, “Enter the New School of Comic Opera Humor,” 22Google Scholar .

26 , Kibler, Rank Ladies, 30–31Google Scholar .

27 Sidney Jones, Owen Hall, Harry Greenbank, et al., The Geisha, vocal score in Tams-Witmark Collection, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

28 “A Talk with Jefferson De Angelis on Comic Opera,” Chicago American, Oct. 6, 1901Google Scholar , De Angelis clippings file, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

29 , Dale, “Enter the New School of Comic Opera Humor,” 22Google Scholar ; Pierce, L. Frank, “George Ade Talks of His Stage Ideals,” Theatre (November 1904): 287–88Google Scholar

30 Belasco, David, The Theatre Through its Stage Door (New York, 1919), 226Google Scholar ; Belasco, David, “How I Stage My Plays” Theatre (December 1902): 31Google Scholar .

31 Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 5–7, 54Google Scholar . My discussion here owes a debt to Jenkins, who also cites Bourdieu in positioning Belasco's realism against vaudeville's aesthetics. , Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts, 43-45, 67Google Scholar .

32 Eaton, Walter Pritchard, “The Tired Businessman,” The Green Book Album (June 1910): 1293–94Google Scholar ; Butsch, Richard, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television (New York, 2000), 114CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; on the range of audiences and ticket prices for vaudeville, also see , Kibler, Rank Ladies, 25–27Google Scholar .

33 , Lederer, “The Evolution of Musical Comedy,” 1194Google Scholar . All of the above quotations appear i n these articles in the George Lederer envelope, Robinson Locke Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: “George W Lederer—Here He is Again!” New York Sunday Telegraph, May 22, 1904Google Scholar ; “In the Realm of Light Opera—George W Lederer Maintains that Public Demands Better Musical Productions than Ever Before”; “Lederer in Audience Learns Good Lesson.”

34 Savage, Henry, “American Managers and Players,” Harper's Weekly, Dec. 3, 1904, 1847Google Scholar .

35 In emphasizing early musical comedy's actively anti-realist character, I mean to point to the nearly complete inability of surveys and scholarly treatments of the form to grasp the cultural contingencies of value within which it operated. Typically, these early productions are dismissed as failures for their failure to integrate song with narrative and to “rise” to naturalistic standards. So, for example, Smith, Cecil sees Kern's, JeromeShow Boat, staged in 1927Google Scholar , as the first “masterpiece” of musical comedy because it emphasized “dramatic verisimilitude comparable to that of the speaking stage.” Gerald Bordman agrees that Showhoat “presented possibly the most important breakthrough in the history of our musical stage…[I]t was the first real ‘musical play’: a lyric piece…about essentially everyday people.” , Bordman, American Musical Theater, 435Google Scholar ; , Smith and , Litton, Musical Comedy in America, 158Google Scholar .

36 Poggi, John, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870-1976 (Ithaca, 1966), 3-7, 26–27Google Scholar ; Bernheim, Alfred, The Business of the Theatre (1932, repr. New York, 1964), 31–34Google Scholar .

37 , Poggi, Theater in America 27Google Scholar ; , Bernheim, Business of the Theatre, 31Google Scholar ; Minnie Ashley scrap book, Robinson Locke Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; “It Cost Money to Play Fantana” Fantana clippings file, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; “Gay Colors Riot in New Opera ‘Fantana”’ Fantana clippings file, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. For more comments on the expense of producing musical comedy see, for example, , Archer, The Blight on the Drama, 643Google Scholar ; Gaites, Joseph M., “The Theatrical Producer,” The Green Book Album (June 1911): 1309Google Scholar .

38 Fiske, Minnie Maddern, “Ibsen vs. ‘Humpty Dumpty,’” Harper's Weekly, Feb. 4, 1905, 60–61Google Scholar . , Fiske, “Art vs. Commercialism,” Theatre (October 1903): 236Google Scholar .

39 Marks, Edward, They All Sang: From Tony Pastor to Rudy Valee (New York, 1934), 3Google Scholar .

40 , Marks, They All Sang, 114–15Google Scholar .

41 , Lamb, Leslie Stuart, 171–72Google Scholar . Also see Lamb's notes to the Hyperion recording of the Geisha issued in 1999Google Scholar .

42 The corporate revision of shows to meet audience tastes extended well beyond the score to all aspects of the show: costuming, the book, performers, etc. For more on this convention see Winslow, Philip, “The Man Behind the ‘Book,’” The Green Book Album (October 1911): 855–56Google Scholar ; Davis, Colin, “The Musical Comedy Doctor,” The Green Book Album (April 1909): 870Google Scholar . Davis writes, “[The musical comedy doctor] is usually called in the morning after the first performance and the librettist and the composer hold themselves by main force as he unfeelingly overhauls their offspring.”

43 Florodora program, Dartmouth College Theatre Collection.

44 Rappaport, Erika, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton, 2000), 184Google Scholar ; also see, , Bailey, “Naughty but Nice,” 42Google Scholar .

45 Englander and Smith, The Rich Mr Hoggenheimer.

46 The Casino Girl, Tams-Witmark Collection.

47 The New York Dramatic Mirror, Sept 10, 1904Google Scholar .