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By Root 658 0

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, arrived trailing glorious clouds of scandal, opened in June 1963 at the Rivoli Theatre, on 49th Street between Broadway and Seventh, with ten thousand fans straining at police barricades. “As each celebrity-bearing limousine arrived,” a reporter noted, “the people at the curb, their necks craning and their cameras ready, stood on tiptoe and leaned over at such an extreme angle that at times it seemed they would fall on the cars.” It was the crowd—the kind of crowd available only in the pulsing, borderline-lunatic world of Times Square—that proved the movie’s mass appeal. The Times Square of the middle of the century retained tremendous power as a symbol not of refined consumption, but of all-American fantasies and preferences.

ONE SPECIES OF THEATER still exercised a tight grip on the American imagination: the Broadway musical. Here is a very brief list of musicals from the 1940s alone: Pal Joey, 1940; Oklahoma!, 1943; On the Town, 1944; Carousel, 1945; Annie Get Your Gun, 1946; Brigadoon and Finian’s Rainbow, 1947; Kiss Me, Kate, 1948; South Pacific, 1949. The shows were incredibly popular; Oklahoma! ran for 2,212 performances. And of course every single one was made into a movie, usually within a few years, and then seen by ten or twenty times as many people. But musicals bulked large in American life not simply because they were more popular than straight plays but because they provided Americans with a common idiom: the show tune. This was the era before the rise of folk or rock music; pop music meant, to an extraordinary degree, tunes written for musicals. These were the songs heard on the radio, the songs the leading vocalists sang, the songs people played on the piano at parties. Think of just a few of the songs from the shows listed above: “Beautiful Mornin’,” “June Is Busting Out All Over,” “Too Darn Hot,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “A Wonderful Guy,” “Old Devil Moon,” “Almost Like Being in Love.”

Only a few musicals took anything like the thematic risks associated with serious Broadway theater. Most of them were fantasies designed to reaffirm the conventional world of the viewer. Beautiful girls walk around unwed until the right man comes along, at which point the two fall in love instantly; the greatest tragedy, from which one is providentially saved at the last moment, is choosing the wrong spouse; and, as they say in Brigadoon, “If you love someone deeply enough, anything can happen”— including suspending the laws of nature under which the hamlet of Brigadoon operates. Virtually all musicals drive their way relentlessly to marriage; the obstacles along the way tend to be fashioned from balsa wood. A work like South Pacific is exceptional not only because it involves yearnings that summon a man away from duty—the siren song of Bali Ha’i—but because something terribly serious—unexamined, bone-deep racism—must be faced and overcome before the marriage rites can be enacted.

But who went to a musical for the story? The story was the framework upon which the songs were hung. Many musicals featured a song that had virtually no relation to the action or the characters, but had been shoehorned in because it was just too wonderful to exclude, like “Too Darn Hot” in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate. Indeed, Ethan Mordden, an indefatigable student of the musical, writes that “Kiss Me, Kate is a show we love not despite its sloppy realism and irrelevant hunks of Shakespeare”—it is a Broadway retelling of The Taming of the Shrew—“but because the score is so good that the rest doesn’t matter.” The score, by the way, includes “Why Can’t You Behave?”; “So in Love”; “Always True to You (In My Fashion)”; “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?”; and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”

Perhaps the prototypical musical—not the best or the most innovative—is Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun. It is worth pausing over the fact that this was the same Irving Berlin who had begun plugging tunes in Tony Pastor’s in the first years of the century. When he wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911,