Our Musicals, Ourselves—A Social History of the American Musical Theatre

Our Musicals, Ourselves-A Social History of the American Musical Theatre John Bush Jones. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2003. There are several factual misstatements in John Bush Jones's Our Musicals, Ourselves-A Social History of the American Musical Theatre. On page 159, Bush Jones alleges that Lindsay and Grouse were the authors of Arsenic and Old Lace. Joseph Kesselring wrote Arsenic and Old Lace. On page 153, he declares that Jerome Robbins both directed and choreographed the original Broadway production of The King and I. Robbins only did the choreography for the show. On page 162, Bush Jones states that the 1950s television shows Studio One and Playhouse 90 put on productions of Broadway plays. Studio One and Playhouse 90 did original programming, with Playhouse 90's most celebrated production perhaps being The Plot to Kill Stalin, a play that so rankled the government of the Soviet Union that it kicked the CBS correspondent out of Moscow. Such factual errors cast hardly a blemish on Bush Jones's exhaustively researched, richly detailed social history of the American musical. Bush Jones begins at the beginning, with an account of what happened to the ill-fated, aptly titled show The Disappointment, the first musical comedy written in America. He then jumps ahead to a discussion of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore., whose American productions influenced the plotlines of American musicals for decades afterward. Bush Jones writes about the melodramatic musicals of the turn of the century and of the "techno-pride" musicals of the very early twentieth century, in which cars often figured prominently in the plot. He writes about the revues of Florenz Ziegfield, whose shows, while purposing the glorification of "the American girl," also revealed a concern for contemporary news items such as the opening of the Panama Canal. He writes about the patriotic musicals of the multitalented George M. Cohan, of the racist, anti-Asian "gunboat musicals" that were put on prior to World War I, and of the development of the black musical. He shows how the musicals of the twenties glorified the prosperity and the consumer values of the decade. Bush Jones informs us that the "Cinderella shows" and the "leisure-time musicals" of the 1920s persisted into the 1930s because these shows, while no longer mirroring what was going on in society, provided escapism for audiences eager to forget about the Depression. He points out, however, that the Depression also gave rise to the satiric musicals of the 1930s, shows like Strike Up the Band, Of Thee I Sing, and The Cradle Will Rock. He explains why World War II virtually destroyed topicality on Broadway. He discusses the Rogers and Hammerstein musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, which launched a revolution in the American musical by showing that integrated musicals that dealt with social issues and promoted tolerance could be hits. Bush Jones talks about the increasingly liberal attitudes present in American musicals after the war, devotes a full chapter to the black and Jewish musicals of the 1960s, and describes the "issue-driven" musicals of the 1960s and 1970s, which grew up in response to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War agitation of those two decades. Bush Jones goes on to draw a correlation between the political scandals and the economic hard times of the 1970s, the disenchantment many Americans experienced with the government, and the inward-looking, "fragmented" musicals that came on the scene in the 1970s and persisted into the 1980s and 1990s. He talks about the nostalgic musicals, like Grease, that grew up in the 1970s and have persisted to the present day as an expression of longing for an earlier, supposedly more innocent time. He discusses the "techno-musicals" of the 1980s and 1990s that relied for their appeal on technical effects rather than on plot or character. Bush Jones concludes his book with a consideration of contemporary musicals that have dealt with women's issues, homosexuality, and the decadence and divisiveness of American society. …