4. Anti-Depressants. How did Broadway handle the Great Depression? For the most part, it simply ignored it. The Ziegfeld Follies, epitome of extravagant frivolity, continued into the Thirties. Cole Porter's shipboard farce Anything Goes set sail in 1934. The same deacade also saw the premiere of George and Ira Gershwin's Washington spoof Of Thee I Sing. Audiences needed comedy, and comedy was the name of the game.

Yet events in the outside world still managed to sneak in. For all its absurdity, Of Thee I Sing skewered Washington incompetence in ways that strike a chord even today. The original book by PG Wodehouse and Guy Bolton for Anything Goes culminated in a comic shipwreck—but when a real liner sank in the Atlantic, the producers quickly hired two other writers to come up with a new one. The ability to take a group of musical numbers are shuffle them to suit changing circumstance is typical of Broadway in those years, as we shall see in the second hour when we look at the major numbers in the first act of Anything Goes half of which were written for other shows.

There is one Broadway show of the period that tackles the Depression head-on: Marc Blitzstein's left-wing tribute to the labor movement, The Cradle Will Rock. Actually not a Broadway show; on the day of the premiere, federal agents shuttered the Manhattan theater where it was scheduled to perform, so producers John Houseman and Orson Welles led the audience in a march up to Harlem, where the composer played the piano onstage while members of the cast sang their numbers from their places in the auditorium. You can't get more political than that! rb.

 
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