(See Cover)
A thousand years hence, when historians gravely chronicle the 20th Century U. S. theatre, diving now & then into their glossaries for light on "strip-tease" or "meat show," they may wonder why, for a time, the theatre harped on human frailties— Follies, Vanities, Scandals—and then suddenly ceased to harp. They may perhaps write learned, ingenious essays describing the rise and fall of the morality play on Broadway, never dreaming that what they chronicled was the rise and fall of the musical show.
Post-War Broadway blazed with such names-in-lights as Ziegfeld, George White, Dillingham, Hammerstein, Carroll. Of a warm summer night buyers from the corn-belt flocked with their women to the New Amsterdam roof; winter after winter the Music Box ground out its medley of tunes.
It was an age of Ann Pennington and Marilyn Miller, Jerome Kern and Vincent Youmans, "When It's Moonlight in Ka-lu-a," "Rose-Marie, I Love You." In the season 1924-1925, to pick a sample year, there were 46 musical shows on Broadway.
Then the radio went on the air and the cinemusical on the screen. Tastes changed, repetition cloyed, purses flattened. Gradually the number of musicomedies on Broadway dwindled. Last year there were six.
Of those six, the two biggest hits carried the names of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Indeed, during the past three years they have continuously—except for one lone week—had a smash hit on Broadway. Last week, their / Married An Angel, entering its fifth month, grossed over $28,681—a new high—and averaged 80 standees a performance. This week, road-show rehearsals start on I'd Rather Be Right after its summer holiday. A week or two hence rehearsals will start on a third Rodgers & Hart show, The Boys from Syracuse, which they are doing with Playwright-Producer George Abbott. Their tunes are whistled in the street, clunked out by hurdy-gurdies on the curb. The press, fumbling for a phrase to describe them, invariably ends with one that is glib but nevertheless significant: the U. S. Gilbert & Sullivan.
Their services to musicomedy can be exaggerated, but hardly their success. That success rests on a commercial instinct that most of their rivals have apparently ignored. As Rodgers & Hart see it, what was killing musicomedy was its sameness, its tameness, its eternal rhyming of June with moon. They decided it was not enough just to be good at the job; they had to be constantly different also. The one possible formula was: Don't have a formula; the one rule for success: Don't follow it up. Their last five shows explain what they mean. Jumbo was circus set to music, On Your Toes a spoof at ballet, Babes in Arms about kids in a depression world, I'd Rather Be Right a rubdown of F. D. R., I Married An Angel a pure extravaganza that started in Heaven and ended in Radio City.