History of the Broadway Musical

Ask Americans to name their favorite song from a Broadway musical and it’s a good bet that many will recall George M. Cohan’s Give My Regards to Broadway. Cohan wrote the song for his first Broadway musical, the 1904 production of Little Johnny Jones. The show had an initial run of fifty-two performances. It was revived in 1905 and again in 1907. All together Give My Regards to Broadway was heard about four hundred times on a Broadway stage. Yet this century-old song is deeply entrenched in American culture.

Musical theater implants melodies and lyrics into popular culture in a transgenerational manner that has no peer among the arts. Give My Regards to Broadway is as recognizable to a nonagenarian as it is to a twenty-something. Those not yet born by World War II can remember songs from the musical South Pacific such as I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair. We may not live in the fantasy world of Phantom of the Opera, but the aria Music of the Night is loved by many, even those who never saw the musical.

Musical theater of the occidental tradition has its roots in ancient Greece. Both Sophocles and Aeschylus were known to have written songs for their plays. The structure of most Greek plays reveals that the Greek chorus sang songs commenting on the actions of the principal players.

The Romans expanded the Greek musical tradition to include dance routines. In order for the audience to better hear the dance steps, Romans attached sabilla, metal plates, to their sandals. The Romans may not have invented tap dancing as we know it, but they did invent the tap shoe.

Traveling musical theater and liturgical drama were mainstays of medieval and renaissance culture. By 1600 liturgical dialogs evolved into fully staged and sung musical theater. Roving performance troupes gave popular songs and slapstick comedy to audiences throughout the era. Louis XIV demanded that entertainments performed for him in the late 1500’s include dance and song.

American musical theater has many traditions and roots. The minstrel show appeared in the 1840s. Burlesque shows followed soon thereafter. The word “burlesque” is derived form the Spanish word burla meaning joke.

Vaudeville Theater appeared in the late nineteenth century. It can be dated to 1883 when two impresarios, who made fortunes staging unauthorized productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, built a string of musical theaters in the northeast. They called the multiple, daily musical performances in these theaters, vaudeville. The term may have come from the French slang voix de ville meaning “songs of the town.”

The Broadway musical was born in New York City on September 12, 1866 in Niblo’s Garden, a 3,200 seat auditorium on the corner of Broadway and Prince Streets. Charles Wheatley, owner of Niblo’s Garden, held the rights to a bland melodrama and songs written by various composers. But he had no performers, no sets and nothing booked for Niblo’s Garden. A fire had just destroyed New York’s most elegant theater, The Academy of Music, and thereby marooned a Parisian ballet troupe with elaborate sets. Wheatley put all of this together to produce The Black Crook.

The show was a five-and-one-half-hour extravaganza very loosely based upon Goethe’s Faust and several other well-known works of the time. The production ran longer than a year and grossed more than $1million. Most New York shows of the time lasted only two or three weeks.

The Black Crook was quickly emulated in various productions called “extravaganzas.” What followed were full-length burlesque musicals in which the comedy was more risqué and base. From these post-Civil War beginnings, the America musical has an unbroken line to thirty-two shows playing this weekend on Broadway stages.

“Give my regards to Broadway?” Maybe not this weekend. But you can give your regards to Robert Reed Park in downtown Chincoteague on Saturday, June 14, 2008 at 3 p.m and enjoy the century-and-a-half old tradition of the American musical when Salisbury Brasswerkes performs a concert of light classical music and Broadway hits. The concert is made possible by grants from the Town of Chincoteague and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

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Bill Troxler is Music Coordinator for the Chincoteague Cultural Alliance. He produced and performed on the Chincoteague Island Library’s CD Music To Read By. He teaches courses in musicianship, music theory, arranging and how to listen to music.