Ep 14: The Golden Age of Broadway, Part 1

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:05][music] >> Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artists invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong and I call this episode The Golden Age of Broadway Part 1. In my last episode, we explored how the one-two punch of Oklahoma and Carousel created a groundbreaking, game-changing disruption that would change forever the form, style, and content of the Broadway musical and usher in what is called the Golden Age of Broadway, which in my estimation begins on the opening night of Oklahoma and continues through most of the 1960s.

[00:00:53]However, not all of the credit can be given to Hammerstein and Rodgers for inspiring this revolution. There were two other very significant musicals that played on Broadway simultaneously with Oklahoma. Both of them were major hits that ran for more than 450 performances, although admittedly that's only 1/5 as long as Oklahoma ran, and both of these shows contributed greatly to the sea change in the way that musicals would be created from that point on.

[00:01:23]The first of these shows was Lady in the Dark, which was unlike any Broadway musical before or even since. The book was by Moss Hart, who was obsessed with Freudian psychoanalysis, which was very trendy but still controversial and mysterious at the time. He had had a nervous breakdown and credited psychoanalysis with his recovery. He went to a therapy session every day for much of his life in an effort to work out his issues, especially his acceptance of or at times his rejection of his homosexuality. With its dominance in his life, it was probably inevitable that he would want to write a show about a character who was undergoing analysis.

[00:02:01]The leading character of Lady in the Dark is Liza Elliott, a high-powered editor of a fashion magazine called Allure. The music was by Kurt Weill. In Berlin in the late 1920s, Weill had become world-famous through his collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, especially their musical The Threepenny Opera. He was another son of a cantor like Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen, and Weill came to New York in 1935 along with many other Jewish leftist refugees from Hitler's Germany, including his wife and muse, the actress and singer Lotte Lenya.

[00:02:35]Lenya had starred in most of the Brecht-Weill works in Germany and would later have a role created especially for her in the original production of Cabaret on Broadway. When he arrived in America, Kurt Weill was determined to reinvent himself as a Broadway composer.

[00:02:51]He had two minor hits with the anti-war parable Johnny Johnson and the political satire Knickerbocker Holiday, but he failed to establish himself very strongly on Broadway or in Hollywood, where producers told him that he wasn't American enough. He would respond to this by saying, "The most American composer is Irving Berlin, and he's a Russian Jew. I'm a German Jew. That's the only difference." After the success of Lady in the Dark, Hollywood would be much more receptive to him. The rest of the creative team of Lady in the Dark was first-class. Ira Gershwin did the lyrics, Hassard Short the staging, and Albertina Rasch the choreography. The show that they created actually went in the opposite direction of integrating all of the elements of a musical. It separated them entirely. Half of Lady in the Dark is basically a straight play without music, during which we see Liza working at Allure magazine and dealing with the many pressures of her personal and professional life. These office scenes alternate with therapy sessions in in psychiatrist's office, where together they work through her emotional issues. In each of these, she is encouraged by the psychiatrist to remember her dreams, which then come to life in three elaborate and surreal mini musicals. During these extended expressionistic musical sequences, the significant people in her real life reappear as manifestations and reflections of her subconscious feelings, conflicts, and desires.

[00:04:16]Virtually all of the music in Lady in the Dark is contained in these three dream sequences. In the penultimate dream sequence, Liza is put on trial for not being able to make up her mind, but surreally, this entire sequence is also set in a circus world with Liza as the lion tamer.

[00:04:34]But I have told the court I find Jenny is them all and has a bearing on this case. As for instance?

[00:04:43]Well, for instance, Jenny made her mind up when she was three. She herself was going to trim the Christmas tree. Christmas Eve she lit the candles, washed the tables away.

[00:04:57]Little Jenny [music] was an orphan on Christmas day.

[00:05:02]Poor [music and singing] Jenny, bright as a penny, her equal would be hard to find.

[00:05:09]>> [music and singing] >> She lost one dad, mother, a sister, and a brother, but she would [music] make up her mind.

[00:05:20]This use of dreams to dramatize the psychological conflicts of the leading character would certainly influence Agnes de Mille's dream ballet in Oklahoma two years later. And interestingly, that ballet had originally been conceived by Rodgers and Hammerstein as a circus dream and was ultimately titled "Laurie Makes Up Her Mind." Moss Hart wrote the role of Liza Elliott for the British superstar Gertrude Lawrence. Legend has it that it is the only show in the history of Broadway to be entirely sold out at every single performance during its run.

[00:05:52]The show also featured what appears to be the first openly queer character in a Broadway musical played by Danny Kaye.

[00:05:59]He played a lure magazine's flamboyant photographer Russell Paxton.

[00:06:04]As brilliant as Lady in the Dark was and it has a spectacular musical score, it is unfortunately seldom revived today and this is primarily because at the climax of the show this high-powered female executive Liza Elliott makes a decision that is almost impossible for modern audiences to accept or understand and this sort of pulls the rug out from under the entire musical and all of the brilliant writing of the rest of the show. I wonder how this ending might have been different if the show had been written only a year later when during World War II working women were celebrated and admired.

[00:06:39]Come on, GABEY. HURRY UP.

[00:06:41]24 HOURS. HEY, WHY DON'T YOU LOOK WHERE YOU'RE GOING? YOU THINK IT WAS YOUR FIRST TIME IN NEW YORK? IT IS.

[00:06:51]>> [music] >> NEW YORK, NEW YORK. NEW YORK, NEW YORK.

[00:06:56]IT'S A HELL OF A TOWN.

[00:07:00]WE'VE GOT ONE DAY HERE AND NOT ANOTHER minute to see the famous sights. We'll find [music] the romance and danger waiting in it beneath the Broadway lights.

[00:07:09]>> But we pair up our chances to what we like the best of our nights.

[00:07:13]Sight, sight, sight. New York, New York, a hell of a town. The Bronx is up and the Battery's down. The people ride in a hole in the ground. New York, New York.

[00:07:23]It's a hell of a town.

[00:07:25]The second show was On the Town. It was directed by the venerable Mr. Abbott, but the other four members of the creative team were all under 25 and were all making their Broadway debuts, but they would each go on to have lasting impact on the Broadway musical. All four were Jewish and two of them were queer.

[00:07:43]The musical was inspired by the success of a short ballet called Fancy Free that had launched the careers of two very talented, very young men, choreographer Jerome Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein. American Ballet Theatre premiered the work in 1943.

[00:07:59]The musical On the Town would expand on the basic premise of the ballet, three sailors with only 24 hours leave in New York before they ship off to fight in World [music] War II. The book and lyrics were by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. We talked a lot about Betty in a previous episode. Adolph was born in New York in 1914. His parents were Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Prior to On the Town, his biggest success was in a foursome called The Revuers, which Betty was also a part of. They played small Greenwich Village nightclubs performing satiric songs and sketches that they had written themselves.

[00:08:33]In these days of hurly-burly, everyone must hurry.

[00:08:38]There's no time for reading books, but you don't have to worry. You may not have the time, but perhaps you'll learn to take [music] your culture in a capsule.

[00:08:50]For though the field of literature's immense, there's a magazine that knows how to condense.

[00:08:58]>> [music] >> Don't sweat for weeks and weeks over just one book. The Reader's Digest gives [music] it to you in one look.

[00:09:07]Gone with the Wind.

[00:09:09]Scarlett O'Hara's a spoiled pet. She wants everything that she can get.

[00:09:13][music] The one thing she can't get IS RHETT. THE END. Romeo and Juliet. Juliet loved her Romeo. [music] Romeo loved his Juliet so.

[00:09:23]>> They both got killed. That's all you have to know.

[00:09:25]>> [music] >> The end.

[00:09:27]Les Miserables.

[00:09:29]Jean Valjean, no evildoer, stole [music] some bread cuz he was poor. A detective chased him through a sewer. The end.

[00:09:36]That's all you have to know the Reader's [music] Digest.

[00:09:40]Call >> [singing] >> us all.

[00:09:44]Their occasional pianist, who had been Adolph Green's good friend from summer camp, was Leonard Bernstein.

[00:09:50]On the Town is a wild, sexy, madcap mashup of musical comedy gags, catchy swinging tunes, and long sections of angular, even edgy, Bernstein-style modern classical music to accompany sequences in which long sections of the story are told only through dance.

[00:10:09]On the surface, it's all youthful joy and exuberant hijinks, but with a heartbreaking subtext. Although it is never stated, the audience understands that one or all three of our heroes may never come back from the war. And as is typical of the period, the women in the show are all strong, dynamic, working women, a scientist, a dancer, and a taxi cab driver.

[00:10:34]How to save me, you?

[00:10:39]MY FATHER TOLD ME, "CHIP, MY BOY, there'll come a time when you leave home. If you should ever hit New York, be sure to see the Hippodrome."

[00:10:45]>> The Hippodrome? The Hippodrome.

[00:10:49]Did I hear right? Did you say the Hippodrome? Yes, you heard right. Yes, I said the Hipp- Hey, what did you stop [singing] for?

[00:11:00]It ain't there anymore.

[00:11:03]I >> [music] >> ate a sandwich and blew the place away. Aw, I wanted to see the Hippodrome. I'll give you a chance, kid.

[00:11:11]I haven't got 5,000 seats, but the one I have is a honey. Let's go to my place.

[00:11:16]Let's go to Cleopatra's Needle. Let's go to my place.

[00:11:19]Let's see Wanamaker's store. LET'S GO TO MY PLACE. Let's go to Lindy's. Go to Luchow's. Go to my place. Let's [music] see Radio City and Herald Square.

[00:11:28]Let's go to my place. Go to my place.

[00:11:31][music] Go to my place.

[00:11:33]Go to my place. Go to my place.

[00:11:39]>> [music] >> All three of these shows, On the Town, Lady in the Dark, and Oklahoma have something in common. They all take the audience deeply inside the subconscious mind of a leading character.

[00:11:54]Two years after the premiere of Oklahoma, Rodgers and Hammerstein opened their second collaboration, Carousel, based on a very dark play called Liliom by the great Hungarian Jewish playwright Ferenc Molnár. This was not at all an obvious or safe choice on which to base a musical, but that was the challenge that Rodgers and Hammerstein were excited to take on. The idea actually came from Theresa Helburn, the dynamic [clears throat] Jewish-American producer of more than 50 Broadway plays and musicals, who had also suggested that they turn Grow the Lilacs into Oklahoma.

[00:12:27]Carousel would significantly increase the level of seamless integration of book, music, lyrics, and choreography far beyond what they had achieved in Oklahoma.

[00:12:37]For almost two years, Oklahoma and Carousel played on Broadway across the street from one another, and this solidified that there was no possibility of turning back to shows like those of the Silver Age. This was now what audiences and critics expected.

[00:12:53]The first major team to follow in Rodgers and Hammerstein's footsteps and rival their achievements was Lerner and Loewe.

[00:13:00]Frederick Loewe was born in Berlin in 1901, but both his parents were Viennese. His father was a famous operetta tenor, and the family home was filled with music and art. Young Fritz, as he was called, was a musical prodigy, and at age 13, he became the youngest piano soloist ever to appear with the Berlin Philharmonic. And just two years later, he wrote the music for a song called Katharine, which sold more than 2 million copies of sheet music. The Lowe family was comfortable and relatively prosperous until World War I when the family fortunes simply evaporated, including one supposes the royalties from Kathrine. With inflation rising to unimaginable heights, money became worthless, and Fritz and his family, along with most other Berliners, suffered poverty and hunger for several years. In 1924, Fritz's father got an offer to sing in New York City, and Fritz, now in his early 20s, went with him, determined to stay and establish himself as a Broadway composer. But, because of cultural and language barriers, it would take quite a few years before he was able to break into the world of theater. First as a piano player in Broadway orchestras, and then placing a few songs in various, but not very successful, shows. Meanwhile, Alan Jay Lerner was growing up in New York City. Born in 1918, 17 years younger than his future partner, he was the grandson of Russian and German Jewish immigrants, whose three sons had become the founders and board chairman of the Lerner shops, a national chain of women's dress stores, which is still operating under the name of New York & Company. Alan Jay Lerner was raised in a 17-room apartment on Park Avenue and educated at all the best schools, including Choate in New Hampshire, where he co-edited the yearbook with future president John F. Kennedy. He then went on to Harvard, where he wrote several Hasty Pudding shows, and during the summers he studied musical composition at Juilliard. Lerner and Lowe met and began their collaboration in 1943.

[00:15:05]Like Hammerstein, Lerner wrote both the book and the lyrics. Over the next four years, they would write three musicals, all written in the musical comedy style of the Silver Age, and all flops. But, in 1947, following the example of Oklahoma and Carousel, they adopted the musical play format. The result was Brigadoon, >> [music] >> a romantic fantasy about a disillusioned ex-serviceman who finds love and peace in a magical Scottish village that appears only once every 100 years.

[00:15:43]The show was a hit, not one of the very biggest, but a substantial success that would be revived again and again on Broadway and in London's West End. It had charm and atmosphere all its own, and it spun off several major song hits.

[00:15:58]All the music of life [music] seems to be >> [singing] >> like a bell that is ringing for me.

[00:16:08]>> [music and singing] >> And for all the way that I feel when that bell [music] starts to feel, I would swear I was falling. I could swear I was falling. [music] It's [singing] almost like being in love.

[00:16:29]>> [music] [singing] >> In 1956, they had their biggest hit, My Fair Lady, one of the most successful and acclaimed musicals of all time. The show was an immediate success, hailed as {quote} the world's greatest musical, the show of the century, and the perfect musical play.

[00:16:50]Many theatergoers still regard it as one of the best musicals of all time, an unsurpassable model of drama, melody, elegance, and wit. Like most great musicals, it seemed at first to be a very unlikely and bad idea.

[00:17:05]It was adapted from the 1913 play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw's intellectual comedy that was written, as most of Shaw's plays were, to prove a thesis, that class differences were based entirely on superficial elements such as manners, deportment, and above all, speech.

[00:17:23]In Shaw's witty version, Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, makes a wager that he can pass off a lowly flower girl as a duchess simply by teaching her upper-class speech and behavior. He wins his bet, but his creation, Eliza Doolittle, proves not nearly as grateful as he had expected. Throughout his life, Shaw had turned down all proposals to musicalize Pygmalion. He did write the screenplay for a hit movie version in 1938, which opened up the action to include scenes only spoken about in the play, and even adding or at least allowing a hint of romance in the final scene. When Shaw died in 1950, his estate became receptive to the idea of a musical Pygmalion. Several writers were approached, including Cole Porter, Noël Coward, and Rodgers and Hammerstein, but all of them were defeated by the challenges of turning this play into a musical. In 1952, the project was offered to Lerner and Loewe, but they too struggled to find a reason to make the characters sing. There was no romance, and almost all of the action took place entirely in small rooms. How could they work in a singing and dancing chorus, which was felt to be a necessary part of any mid-century musical? Lerner and Loewe abandoned the project, but then returned to it a couple years later.

[00:18:42]Lerner had had two revelations. Number one, the play had already been opened up in Shaw's own screenplay, which added the scenes between the scenes, as he called them, the Ascot races, the Embassy Ball, and so on. And number two, instead of adapting Shaw to the conventions of the musical, why not adapt the musical to Shaw?

[00:19:04]If there's no principal love couple or secondary comic duo, so what? So be it.

[00:19:10]Shaw's play had enchanted audiences for decades, why not trust it?

[00:19:16]My Fair Lady directed by Moss Hart opened in 1956 to rapturous reviews. It was the Hamilton of its day, sold out for months. It would have the longest run of any musical in history up to that point, a record that it would hold on to for nearly a decade. And with its hit-filled score, the unprecedented success of the original cast album would make the show known to everyone, even those who had never set foot inside a theater.

[00:19:44]>> [singing] [singing] [music] [singing] [music] [music] [singing] [music and singing] >> That original cast album was for many years the best-selling album of all time.

[00:20:19]>> [singing] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Lerner and Loewe's final show, Camelot, was based on an enormous fantasy novel called The Once and Future King, that was made up of four separate books. The events of the first book, The Sword in the Stone, about King Arthur's youth, were only referred to in Camelot, but would be musicalized by Disney years later in their animated film. The book for Camelot encapsulated the remaining three books, but they are so packed with characters, incident locations, battles, and supernatural events that bringing the story down to a manageable size for the stage proved to be a daunting and not ever fully accomplished task. At its out-of-town opening, Camelot ran nearly 5 hours long, which prompted Noel Coward to quip, "It's longer than the Ring cycle and not nearly as funny." Clearly, there was much work to be done before the show could go to Broadway, and it was a very bad time Alan Jay Lerner and Moss Hart to end up in the hospital.

[00:21:38]Lerner with a bleeding ulcer and Hart with his second heart attack. At least 2 hours of material would be hacked out of the show by opening night on Broadway.

[00:21:47]Reviews the next day were mixed, but just a few weeks after the opening extended segments of the show would be presented on Ed Sullivan's Sunday night television program.

[00:21:57]>> Now, here's one of the greatest thrills we've ever had on our stage, the famous Welsh motion picture and Shakespearean star Richard Burton as King Arthur.

[00:22:05]>> [applause] [cheering] >> It's true.

[00:22:10]It's true.

[00:22:11]The crown has made [music] it clear the climate must be perfect all the year.

[00:22:19]A law was made a distant moon ago here.

[00:22:24]July and August cannot be too hot.

[00:22:28]And [music] there's a legal limit to the snow here in Camelot.

[00:22:33]>> In [music] that format, Camelot looked like the most dazzling show ever.

[00:22:37]>> is forbidden till [music] December and exits March the 2nd on the dot.

[00:22:45]By order, summer lingers [music and singing] through September.

[00:22:49]The next day, ticket sales soared, [music] and soon the box office achieved an unprecedented advance sale of 3 and 1/2 million dollars.

[00:22:57]>> I know it sounds [music] a bit bizarre, but in Camelot, Camelot, [music] that's how conditions are.

[00:23:09]After the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy revealed that the original cast album of Camelot had been favorite bedtime listening at the White House, and that the president's favorite lyrics were in the final number about the one brief shining moment known as Camelot. This little bit of personal information brought tremendous attention to the show and would forever link the name of the show, Camelot, with the Kennedy administration.

[00:23:37]Where once it never rained till after sundown, by 8:00 a.m. the morning fog had flown.

[00:23:48]Don't let it [music] be forgot that once there was a spot for one brief shining moment.

[00:23:58]That [singing] was known as Camelot.

[00:24:08]>> [music] [music] >> This revolutionary new way of writing musicals did not just apply to musical plays like Brigadoon, Camelot, and My Fair Lady. It also transformed the musical comedy as well. Even musicals whose sole reason to exist was to make the audience laugh and be delighted by great performers strutting their stuff and belting out hit tunes, these shows too would now have to have well-structured plots and music and lyrics that helped to tell that story, and in the process create three-dimensional captivating characters. In fact, the Golden Age is the era of dynamic, unforgettable characters that seem to live above and beyond the musicals that contained them.

[00:24:58]This was new, and I believe it's one of the defining achievements of the Golden Age. In the previous eras, very few characters from musicals had any currency beyond the stars who had originally played them. Audiences remembered the personalities of the performers, but not the characters.

[00:25:15]However, in the Golden Age, every hit show introduced specific, memorable, full-fledged individuals. These include both relatively realistic ones such as Curly, Laurie, Aunt Eller, Julie, and Billy, as well as overtly comic creations such as Will Parker and Ado Annie. I'm just a girl who can't say no.

[00:25:35][singing and music] I'm in a terrible fix.

[00:25:39]I always say, "Come on, let's go."

[00:25:42][singing and music] Just when I ought to say, "Nix." Songs like this made these characters unforgettable, the kinds of characters that become icons that represent and encapsulate a show.

[00:25:53]>> soon [singing] as someone kisses me, I somehow sort of want to kiss him back.

[00:25:58]>> [screaming] >> This means the audience then emotionally participates in and experiences the characters' challenges and choices.

[00:26:06][music] And this vastly deepened and improved the musical comedy and made them funnier as well.

[00:26:13]I can't say no.

[00:26:17]>> [singing] >> In the next episode of Broadway Nation, two of the least likely suspects, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, will pioneer this new phase of the Golden Age revolution, and in the process give us two of the greatest comeback stories in theater history.

[00:26:35]I'm just a gal who can't say no.

[00:26:38][singing] >> [music] >> Can't seem to say it at all.

[00:26:43]I hate to disappoint [music] a boy. Broadway Nation is produced and written by me, David Armstrong, with indispensable writing help from Albert Evans. I'd like to thank everyone at KVSH 101.9 The Voice of Beautiful Vashon Island, Washington, and especially everyone at the Broadway Podcast Network.

[00:27:06]>> [music] [music] [music]