OSHER AT JHU, CARNEGIE : TUESDAY MORNINGS, FEBRUARY 18 TO MAY 6, 2025

ARTIST BIOS        SYLLABUS (flat)     SYLLABUS (foldable)
CLASSES:    [1]    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]    [6]    [7]    [8]    [9]    [10]    [11]    [12]

 
The Birth of Broadway: from European Fantasy to American Realism

Fantasy, romance, and spectacle have long been part of the Broadway musical theater experience. At the turn of the century, these were often supplied by European imports, whether the British satire of Gilbert and Sullivan or the continental operetta of Offenbach, Lehar, and their compatriots. But in the first decades of the twentieth century, Broadway came to rely less on imported shows than on European immigrant composers who would write new shows specifically for American audiences.

Not that the operetta tradition was dead, by any means. Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg was essentially German operetta sung in English. Yet Romberg could also write a number like “It,” which captured flapper-era mores with uncanny accuracy. And Jerome Kern’s Show Boat of 1924 inserted a variety of such numbers within a plot that was a serious treatment of race and hardship. Hence my subtitle, from European Fantasy to American Realism.

Many later Broadway hits fit straight into the romantic operetta tradition; think My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, or even The Phantom of the Opera. It would be wrong to exclude such blockbusters from this course entirely. But my emphasis will be on shows that depict some aspect of contemporary America, and do so by increasingly realistic means. So forgive me if your favorites are not here; many of mine don't feature either. Although a couple of classes are devoted to a single work, most of them use excerpts from several shows to explore a particular theme, such as the musical theater's treatment of backstage life or its handling of the sister arts opera and ballet. While this is by no means a balanced history, the classes do follow a chronologial time-line from roughly 1900 to 1970.

My focus is less on specific productions than on the shows themselves—living works that can be presented again and again. preferably on the stage of a live theatre. It would be lovely to play videos of the original stage productions, but for most of the period these simply do not exist. Hence, as you will gather from the pictures below, I have to rely on movies and modern revivals, even if not on Broadway itself. While many films have become more iconic than the stage shows that spawned them, the movie musical is essentially a different form, and more than one class will address the differences between the two media. Do note, however, that this course is still a work in progress: the number and choice of shows may change, and the productions pictured below are not necessarily the ones I shall show in class. Roger Brunyate.

As further materials on each class become available, the class number above and the RESOURCES tab under the appropriate image below will become active links. Clicking on one of these before class will bring up the PDF handout, bios, and other relevant information. Clicking on the same links after the class will give you the script, all the images shown, and links to the relevant videos where available.

	February 18
A Scene from The Merry Widow (Metropolitan Opera, 2015)	RESOURCES

1. European Visitors

The big Broadway hit of 1907 was Franz Lehar's operetta The Merry Widow, which played for a then-astounding run of 416 performances. In previous decades, other European works had taken New York by storm, among them the absurd comedies of Gilbert and Sullivan and the Parisian romps of Jacques Offenbach. Although American composers were already trying to match these imported successes, this first class will look at European light opera in the later 19th century, as the background against which the Broadway musical was to emerge.

	February 25
Some musicals by immigrant composers	RESOURCES

2. Americans Old and New

In the first decades of the Twentieth Century, a number of composers came over from Europe to write shows in America that often continued the operetta tradition from their home countries. So Victor Herbert came from Britain by way of Germany, Sigmund Romberg from Hungary, and Rudolf Friml from Czechoslovakia; their works held the New York stage on either side of the First World War. But there was a Broadway before they arrived, from loosely-connected revues to musical plays that told a real story; our first hour will demonstrate something of that range. Or attempt to: as none of these early shows were filmed onstage, we can explore them only through Hollywood films and later reconstructions, all of which impose their own esthetic on material that originally lit the lights on the Great White Way.

	March 4
Original sheet music and a later souvenir program for Show Boat	RESOURCES

3. A Watershed Work

Show Boat, the 1927 by first-generation Americans Jerome Kern and Oscar Hamerstein II, was the show that had everything. Its romantic plot awakened memories of turn-of-the-century Southern charm, then took the audience to the seedy realities of contemporary Chicago. Its riverboat setting made it the granddaddy of all those Broadway musicals about show business itself. And most importantly, its fidelity to the book by Edna Ferber propelled the action from beginning to end, dealing with some quite sensitive racial and social issues slong the way. As a prelude, we look briefly at some early musicals created by African Americans themselves.

	March 11
Sutton Foster in the London revival of Anything Goes (2021)	RESOURCES

4. Anti-Depressants

For the most part, the Great Depression was not reflected on Broadway. Instead, the Great White Way featured upbeat shows such as the continuing sequence of Ziegfeld Follies or feel-good musicals like Cole Porter's Anything Goes (1934), which will be the featured work in the second hour of the class. In that same year, however, George S. Kaufman and the Gershwin brothers tackled contemporary politics in the satire Of Thee I Sing, and four years later another political satire, Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, came head-to-head with real politics when Federal authorities shuttered the theater in which it was to be performed.

	March 18
Eric Owens and Angel Blue as Porgy and Bess (Metropolitan Opera, 2020)	RESOURCES

5. Opera on Broadway

Porgy, the 1927 play by Dorothy and Du Bose Heyward, broke Broadway norms by being cast entirely by Black actors, representing the people of an African-American fishing community near Charleston. In making his musical version in 1935, George Gershwin encased musical numbers in sung dialogue, creating a work that is now more often performed by opera companies. So what is the difference between the two media? We make two comparisons to help us find out: setting Oscar Hammerstein's 1943 musical Carmen Jones against the Bizet opera on which it was based, and comparing a recent operatic performance of Porgy and Bess with the 2012 revival specifically reimagined for the Broadway stage.

	March 25
Stephen Hanna and Jenna McClintock in Oklahoma! (Chicago Lric Opera, 2013)	RESOURCES

6. Ballet on Broadway

Most musicals contain choreographed production numbers featuring spectacular dancing along with the singing. But Rodgers and Hammerstein's first great hits, Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945), went one further by including "dream ballets" which explore the inner conflicts of a character in balletic terms; Carousel also begins with an extended wordless pantomime. In between came Fancy Free, the standalone ballet by Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein, and the musical that grew out of it, On the Town (both 1944). The close conjunction of these four works is our cue to look more deeply at the function of dance on the Broadway stage.

	April 1
Brent Barrett and Rachel York in the 1999 revival of Kiss Me, Kate	RESOURCES

7. Stage and Screen

Yes, another Cole Porter musical! But besides being one of the highestpeaks in the Broadway range, Kiss Me, Kate (1948) offers a chance to address a question that has been lurking in the background of this course all along: the differences between a Hollywood film, which is the only way we can get to know some of these earlier shows, and the original as presented on a live stage. For once, we have a high-quality film of an excellent and utterly faithful stage production (by Michael Blakemore in London in 1999) to set against the iconic movie of 1953, which is also comparatively faithful to the material but tells the story in its own terms. The comparison should apply to much more than this particular show.

	April 8
Larry Cook as The Music Man at Virginia Rep, 2013	RESOURCES

8. Middle America

The European operetta tradition reveled in exotic environments that few could experience in real life. Later American writers responded with urban settings that were all too real to many, but equally unknown for audiences who could afford a Broadway ticket. Then in the Fifties came along two shows that found charm in Iowa settings featuring middle-class Americans in Middle American towns. And both centered on the American preoccupation with business. The Pajama Game (1954), by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, is set in a world of efficiency experts and worker's unions, and is probably the only musical to include a duet with a Dictaphone. The Music Man (1957), with music and lyrics by Meredith Wilson, opens with a bunch of traveling salesman arguing in a railroad car, and the chief character is a salesman extraordinaire with a winsome charm.

	April 15
Scenes from the 1961 and 2021 films of West Side Story	RESOURCES

9. Two Views of the West Side

It was choreographer Jerome Robbins' idea to rewrite Romeo and Juliet in the context of gang wars between Italian and Puerto Rican immigrants in New York, and given Leonard Bernstein's music and Robbins' choreography, West Side Story sizzled in 1957 and has continued to light up stages ever since. This class, however, will focus on the two films made of the show: by Robbins himself in 1961 and by Steven Spielberg in 2021. Both shift the implied realism of the stage setting to the actual reality of New York City, but each does so in a way that relates to its own time.

	April 22
Lara Pulver and Imelda Staunton in Gypsy (London, 2015)	RESOURCES

10. Show-Biz

As we have seen from Show Boat and Kiss Me Kate, Broadway has long been fascinated by its own profession: the turmoils, successes, and backstage life of stage performers, high or low. Today's class features two musicals by Jule Styne. Gypsy (1959) is based on the memoirs of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, but the main character is her mother, Rose, who has been described variously as "the ultimate show business mother" and "Broadway's own brassy, unlikely answer to King Lear." Funny Girl (1964) follows the career of comedienne Fanny Brice; it launched Barbra Streisand to Broadway stardom.

	April 29
Topol as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof	RESOURCES

11. Europe Back When

The overall move from fantasy to realism did not necessarily leave Europe behind; it was, after all, the cradle from which most Americans had sprung. The two sixties musicals in today's class address dark periods of history in utterly different ways. Fiddler on the Roof (1964) by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick meticulously recreates Eastern European shtetl life from the stories of Sholem Aleichem, using a remote setting for a universal human story. By contrast, Cabaret (1966) by John Kander and Fred Ebb uses the familiar show-biz trope to present a Berlin night club and keep the audience roaring with laughter while the Nazi party comes into power outside.

	May 6
Hair on Broadway in 2009	RESOURCES

12. Two Concept Shows

The later 1960s saw a gradual shift away from the traditional "book musical" towards a form in which the action is driven by the development of an idea rather than following a linear narrative. One of the earliest of these "concept musicals" was Hair (1968), billed as "the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical." This portrayed previously taboo behavior—sex, drugs, and draft-dodging—but was rewarded by a run of 1,750 performances. Stephen Sondheim's Company (1970) is a total contrast but equally a concept show, connecting a number of vignettes about New York marriages, played out in the mind of the leading character, a bachelor looking for meaning in his own life.

 
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