History of Broadway

Summary

Podcast Summary: You're Dead to Me – "History of Broadway"

Introduction

In the September 13, 2024 episode of "You're Dead to Me", hosted by Greg Jenner on BBC Radio 4, listeners are treated to an insightful exploration of the History of Broadway. Combining humor with scholarly analysis, Jenner brings together Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins, an associate professor in popular music and director of the Black Studies department at the University of Nottingham, and Desiree Birch, a seasoned comedian and frequent guest on the podcast. The episode delves into the evolution of Broadway musicals, highlighting significant milestones, influential figures, and the interplay of race and gender within the theatrical landscape.

Defining the Broadway Musical

The episode begins with a fundamental discussion on what constitutes a Broadway musical. Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins provides a comprehensive definition:

[06:15] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "A Broadway musical is a play that has not only words, but songs in it that people perform on Broadway, which is in New York City, circa 42nd Street. But, you know, go to the 50s and there's theaters all around. It needs to have a million dollars just to turn on a light in the theater... It needs to have enough commercial appeal that they think they can play that for years and tour it around the world."

This definition underscores the commercial and geographic significance of Broadway, differentiating it from other theatrical hubs like London's West End.

Early Broadway and the Inclusion of Black Productions

The conversation transitions to the early 20th century, highlighting Broadway's origins and the pivotal role of black creatives. Desiree Birch and Dr. Robbins discuss seminal productions such as "Into Homey" (1903) and "Shuffle Along" (1921), which were groundbreaking for their predominantly black casts and creative teams.

[16:28] Greg Jenner: "Because this is 1903. So this is really early."

[17:35] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "So there's a balance of the two. I think Indahomie is complicated because it does have elements of minstrelsy in it. There were no white performers. All of the cast were black."

"Shuffle Along", in particular, is lauded as the "Hamilton of its time", launching the careers of legends like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. The production not only entertained but also challenged racial stereotypes, contributing to a gradual shift in Broadway's cultural dynamics.

The Formation of Unions and Copyright Laws

The establishment of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1914 marked a significant turning point in protecting intellectual property and establishing a royalties system for creators.

[21:34] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "Yes, I am."

[21:39] Greg Jenner: "Yeah. I thought because you do so much acting work. So I was like, surely you're a member do you know what?"

[20:46] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "Well, who gets credit for a musical and who the rights belong to is one of the most contentious topics in musical theatre history."

These developments empowered composers and lyricists, granting them greater agency over their creations and paving the way for more sophisticated and integrated musical productions.

The Golden Age of Broadway: Rodgers and Hammerstein

The mid-20th century is heralded as the Golden Age of Broadway, dominated by the influential duo Rodgers and Hammerstein. Their collaboration birthed revolutionary works such as "Oklahoma!" (1943), which exemplified the integrated musical—a seamless blend of plot, songs, and choreography.

[28:59] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "So they're really interesting because they're kind of both. And I think that's the heart of their success."

[28:45] Greg Jenner: "They're driving the actual plot."

"Oklahoma!" is celebrated for its narrative cohesion, where every song and dance sequence propels the story forward, setting a new standard for musical theatre.

Evolution into Mega-Musicals

The conversation then shifts to the rise of mega-musicals, particularly the contributions of Andrew Lloyd Webber. These productions are characterized by their grand scale, elaborate special effects, and standardized productions that can be replicated worldwide.

[44:21] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "But it to, like, standardize something, to make it highly commercial."

Musicals such as "Phantom of the Opera", "Cats", and "Miss Saigon" exemplify this trend, becoming global phenomena that draw audiences with their spectacle and technical prowess.

Challenges and Changes in Modern Broadway

Moving into the late 20th and early 21st centuries, "You're Dead to Me" examines Broadway's adaptation to changing cultural and economic landscapes. The advent of jukebox musicals, such as "Jersey Boys", and the infusion of contemporary genres, exemplified by "Hamilton", illustrate Broadway's ongoing evolution.

[50:05] Unknown: "So Wicked. But Wicked is a great example of taking what was an adult book and pitching it for teenagers."

[51:33] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "It's an amazing balance of old and new. And that's the reason that it is so successful..."

"Hamilton" is spotlighted as a revolutionary work that blends traditional Broadway elements with modern musical styles like hip-hop and rap, resonating with diverse audiences and reflecting America's contemporary socio-political milieu.

Conclusion

The episode concludes with reflections on the intricate balance Broadway maintains between honoring its rich historical legacy and embracing innovative artistic expressions. Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins emphasizes the importance of understanding the "vocabulary" of musicals—techniques and narrative shortcuts developed over decades—that make them accessible and engaging to broad audiences.

[55:28] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "...the creative efforts of lots of people over decades and centuries who've made the musical what it is can become invisible in this product that we think is a very simple thing to make."

Final Thoughts

Desiree Birch and Dr. Robbins both express a newfound appreciation for the complexities and historical significance of Broadway, acknowledging its role as a microcosm of societal changes and artistic innovation.

[56:28] Unknown: "It does."

[56:25] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "There's something really amazing about this because there is a microcosm for, like, how things could work..."

This episode serves as both an entertaining and educational journey through Broadway's storied history, offering listeners a deeper understanding of the art form's impact on culture and society.

Notable Quotes

• [06:15] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "A Broadway musical is a play that has not only words, but songs in it that people perform on Broadway..."

• [21:34] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "Who gets credit for a musical and who the rights belong to is one of the most contentious topics in musical theatre history."

• [28:59] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "So they're really interesting because they're kind of both. And I think that's the heart of their success."

• [44:21] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "But it to, like, standardize something, to make it highly commercial."

• [51:33] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "It's an amazing balance of old and new. And that's the reason that it is so successful."

• [55:28] Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins: "...the creative efforts of lots of people over decades and centuries who've made the musical what it is can become invisible in this product that we think is a very simple thing to make."

Conclusion

"You're Dead to Me" successfully intertwines comedy with in-depth historical analysis, making the rich tapestry of Broadway's history both accessible and engaging. Through expert insights and lively banter, the episode not only chronicles Broadway's evolution but also invites listeners to appreciate the intricate artistry behind each musical production.

Transcript

[Greg Jenner]

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[Desiree Birch]

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[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

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[Unknown]

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[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

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[Desiree Birch]

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[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Open your free iHeart app and search.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing wildlife and start start listening.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

BBC.

[Unknown]

Sounds music radio podcasts.

[Greg Jenner]

Hello and welcome to youo're Dead To Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are collecting our costumes and can canning into the chorus line as we learn all about the history of Broadway. And to help us, we have two very special theatrical stars in History Corner. They're an associate professor in popular music and the director of the Black Studies department at the University of Nottingham. They're an expert on musical theatre and research race and gender identity in popular culture. They've published on everything from the wizard of Oz to Hamilton and my favourite, Frozen. No, you let it go. It's Dr. Hannah to Risingham Robbins. Welcome.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Hello.

[Unknown]

Thank you for having me.

[Greg Jenner]

Delighted to have you here. And in Comedy Corner. She needs no introduction on this show, but I do still have to do one. So she's a comedian, actor, writer. You'll have seen her on all the telly Taskmaster Frankie Boyle' World Order, the Horn Section TV show. Netflix is too hot to handle various other things. And you'll know her from our many, many episodes of this very podcast, including recent highlights, the Columbian exchange and Pythagoras. What a dude he was. It's your Dead to me's leading lady, Desiree Birch. Welcome back, Desiree.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

What a dude. You said you had to do one. Do I get to host the podcast now?

[Greg Jenner]

I think you've done enough episodes now.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

That maybe I'm joining my British slang. I'm doing well, guys. Is this under the test? Thank you so much for having me back. This is really exciting to learn the history of a place that I never made it.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, would you have wanted to?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah. I started as an actor. That would have been amazing. But I don't sing, so you kind of have to be famous first if you just want to act or you need to dance, sing, and, you know, like, be really hot and make out at 20. And none of those things were ever going to be my thing. I mean, I know there's more to Broadway than that, but, like, it's a lot. It's a lot.

[Greg Jenner]

Because you studied at Yale.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I did, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

You did theater studies?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I did, yes.

[Greg Jenner]

So you know your stuff.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I mean, I know some stuff. We did a sort of pan history of theater, and there was all kinds of experimental. You know, for my senior thesis, I got naked because what other thing does a university student want to do on stage but get naked? So I got it out of the way so that the world could be spared because it's all people want to do between 17 and 23.

[Greg Jenner]

Great. I mean, the obvious question, Desiree, are you a fan of musical theater? Obviously, you know your theater. You know your theater history. Are you a fan of musical theater? Do you go to, you know, Broadway when you're maybe back home and to the West End? Okay, are we about to hear something?

[Desiree Birch]

No.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I mean, look, I love theater. I love seeing incredible acting. For me, it is always about the acting above everything else.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Musical theater, it really does need to be, for the most part, singing first if you're going to enjoy it. Sometimes it feels like it needs to be singing, then acting and then movement. And I wish it were two and one were inverted.

[Greg Jenner]

Gotcha.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Although I've seen musicals on Broadway where they couldn't sing or act. And I was just like, well, what are we doing here? Except for a jukebox revival? But, yeah, I mean, every so often, it is done really well. But there's always a point in a musical where you're like, I get it. Fall in love. Like, I want. I need to catch a train. Like, make it end.

[Greg Jenner]

So what do you know? This is where I have A go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And we've all watched a musical, haven't we? Whether it's a classic like west side Story or My Fair Lady, a Lloyd Webber wonderpiece like Phantom of the Opera, a modern smash like Wicked or Hamilton, most of us have seen a stage musical at some point. Plus there are the film adaptations as well. Kathleen Cedar Jones in Chicago, you might have swooned over Hugh Jackman in Les Mis. You might have laughed hysterically at the trailer for Cats with the digitally removed feline anuses that the whole Internet's just loved. What a great deal of us laughed.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Hysterically after having purchased a ticket to see the film in the cinema.

[Greg Jenner]

You saw it?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, yes. I went with my good friend, and we had a great time with two other people. Only in the cinema with us.

[Greg Jenner]

It was a disaster.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

It was a wonderful disaster. And I'd do it again.

[Unknown]

The last film I saw before the Pandemic.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, there we go.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Worth it.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, but what about the history of the mega popular art form that we call Broadway? How have Broadway shows changed over the years? And just who was Imogen the cow? Let's find out, shall we? Right. Desiree, word of warning. I'm gonna try and sneak in as many Broadway show titles into this episode as possible. I'm gonna do them as puns. You're welcome to join me.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

But I'm gonna start with the basic question. Desiree Burch, what is a Broadway musical?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

A Broadway musical is a play that has not only words, but songs in it that people perform on Broadway, which is in New York City, circa 42nd Street. But, you know, go to the 50s and there's theaters all around. It needs to have a million dollars just to turn on a light in the theater. So that I do know. So it needs to have enough commercial appeal that they think they can play that for years and tour it around the world.

[Greg Jenner]

That's a very comprehensive answer, Hannah.

[Unknown]

It is.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Is it remotely close to accurate, though?

[Unknown]

Oh, yeah, 100%. I think it's kind of interesting that you said it's a play, because there are lots of musicals that don't really have conventional plots. So, like, for me, I guess a musical is a combination of singing and drama, I would say more balanced than perhaps you think. And spectacle. Sometimes there'll be lots of exciting sets. Sometimes there'll be costumes. Sometimes there'll be amazing lighting, you know, lots of additional theatre craft. But I think, particularly going backwards, it's this really interesting hybrid of influences smushed into one performance form. And I guess the way to tell if you're engaging with a musical is that, like, the singing uses different storytelling and also kind of a different vocal style than we might expect if we're listening to popular music. So I guess the mashup of genres and the emphasis of communicating the content of a song, rather than communicating through song, which is opera, are the clues that we're listening to a track from a musical and not a song from something else?

[Greg Jenner]

Is the West End just Broadway but in London, or is that a different thing?

[Unknown]

Controversial. We look at Broadway as kind of the geographic home and the spiritual home of the musical, even though it's actually genuinely a global phenomenon at this point and belongs to lots of places. I think one of the reasons the West End has become kind of Broadway be, if you like, is because of how the press covered musicals in the early history. So they would often premiere in America and then come to London. They transfer over, but they were transferring to loads of places. It's just that the dialogue between the American and British press was particularly strong. So that's kind of where that's come from.

[Greg Jenner]

Fascinating. And in terms of the physical space of Broadway, Desiree, you've already said 42nd street, so this is a Manhattan story, not a West side story. Clang. What is the history of this street, this little locus of theatre?

[Unknown]

The commercial theatre district in Manhattan sort of runs roughly between 42nd and 46th and 7th Avenue. So it's kind of a hodgepodge of different theatres, but it's also places where you can eat. So they built a lot of theatre sort of at the end of the 1800s. We're talking sort of 1880s, but by the time we hit the early 1900s, we've got about 30 theatres in the area. And the thing you were asking earlier about what constitutes a Broadway musical versus not a Broadway musical, and it's actually to do with the capacity of a theater. So it's 500 seats and a certain geography over 500 seats.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I definitely know what half off and Broadway are, where all of my theater career output.

[Unknown]

But actually there are lots of theaters in New York that are not covered by the term Broadway. Technically. There's definitely a complexity about what Broadway stands for, but the thing that I think we can't debate is that it's originally an American, American art form. There is a little bit of that creeping into the discourse at the moment that musicals are not American. And that's one of those that I won't stand for, oh, push down moment.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. This American theatrical tradition, I mean, there are words that I sort of. I want to chuck at you. Vaudeville, burlesque theater, musical minstrel shows. How do we. Are those all the same thing?

[Unknown]

I think one of the distinguishing factors of American theatre is that there is a lot of blurred boundaries between genre that we're not so keen on in UK and actually in European theater more broadly. Using the ones that you sort of pulled together. We have what are referred to as melodramas that have come over from France and they used music, and particularly songs to, like, accent really emotionally volatile moments in what was otherwise just a perform text. Vaudeville was lots of often sketches. It could be songs, it might be comedy, it might be dance sequences. But one of the sort of defining factors of vaudeville is that it took place in places that sold alcohol. And so you could tap in and out of the entertainment while it was taking place.

[Greg Jenner]

Quite literally. Tap in and out.

[Unknown]

Yeah, literally. Pun. Burlesque is interesting because in the 19th century, it was actually more of a satire form. It was a much more traditional type of theater than we would expect. And the striptease component actually comes in much later. Alongside this, we then have the, like, peaks and troughs of minstrelsy. So minstrelsy sort of solidifies itself sort of mid-80s, 1900s, has a sort of a peak and a trough and then another peak in a trough in the early 20th century. And that is a performance form that generally involved white men or white presenting men wearing black makeup and doing comedy skits and songs. Comedy and inverted commas there, but based on racist principles of attitudes to black life.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

So was minstrel Z just like, hey, we want to do vaudeville, but with more racism? Like, was it because it's like a sketch, sort of like variety type of show, but they're like, we really want to do this blackface thing?

[Unknown]

It depends on who you ask, but really, I would say blackface came. The blackface tradition in minstrelsy comes first. Vaudeville is kind of. It's kind of a hybrid of lots of different blackface, but, yeah, 100%. But this was also something that happened in lots of other performance forms. The thing that what minstrelsy did was basically make an industry out of something that was already happening in most of the other theater spaces already. What they were like was, oh, this is something that gets laughed. Let me try and commercialize it. And then through the progress of minstrelsy, it then becomes a way for black performers to make money. And that's a challenging bit of history. Particularly in the turn of the 20th century. Lots of undercurrents happening, but as you will have heard from my descriptions, also lots of blurred boundaries between what these different forms were.

[Greg Jenner]

Let's get into the 20th century. Let's get to 1902, when Broadway gets going, I think Desiree. And one of the first productions was the wizard of Oz.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Nice.

[Greg Jenner]

Quite an unusual musical. Do you know why?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Because of all the dead people involved. Was that just the movie? It's like the lore of it. I mean, a quiet and unusual. It seems so canon to me that I can't think of why. I mean, there's so many versions of it that I've seen. The Wiz and Wicked and all these other versions of that. What's weird about it?

[Greg Jenner]

No songs.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Okay, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

No music. I mean, or some music, but not a score.

[Unknown]

So. Some music, but not a score. So this is like an interesting example of a work deliberately blending lots of different things together. So this was kind of burlesque, it was pantomime, as we would understand it in the uk. And also, like, lots of fantasy elements were immersed into this version of the wizard of Oz. The reason it's a landmark is because it was one of the first big productions that sold tickets out in advance, so you couldn't just turn up and buy a ticket at the door. And it kind of reformed what the commercial model for these kind of shows could be. But in terms of the score, what happened, and this still happens in musicals, lots of people aren't aware, is that there were optional songs and you could switch them in and out.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

It's a real comedy set where you're like, oh, they're not warm enough for that one yet. Let's take that one out and do.

[Greg Jenner]

A couple of things. We won't do that bit.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah, kind of. Yeah, yeah.

[Unknown]

It's also about the performers that you've got. Like, if you've got an alto in and you've got a soprano song and you haven't got someone who can transpose the song at speed, which often the music director could do.

[Greg Jenner]

So if your piano player can't figure out how to play it in C9.

[Unknown]

Album, potentially, or if your singer can't get that top note and you can't sort of make that work, then you're like, well, swap this. Well, we've got another. We've got another song about. And it's also worth saying, I should say at this period, the songs are not particularly connected to the plot. You would be having a, you know, a conversation about Having a cup of tea. And then there would be a song about, isn't it nice, the sun is shining. And then you would.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

There's a fantasy element.

[Greg Jenner]

So the wizard of Oz opened in Chicago in 1902. Chicago. Clang again. They gave him the old razzle dazzle. The production also changed a couple of other things about the wizard of Oz. Desiree. They changed a major character from the book and the later famous film. Do you want to guess which character did not appear in 1902's Dorothy? That'd be amazing. It's just some bloke called Rob just like, hello.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

And they were like, let's get a gal in there. We need to sell these tickets.

[Greg Jenner]

No, Toto the dog was replaced by Imogen the cow.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, there we go.

[Greg Jenner]

There we go.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

So she had a cow. She just was walking around with a.

[Greg Jenner]

Cow, played by an acrobat bent over wearing a cow suit.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, but then they're an acrobat, so every so often, you know, it's the tornado and they can do backwards.

[Greg Jenner]

Exactly, yeah. If you've got an acrobat, you know. So they go. A very moving performance from Imogen the Curb. There you go. Sorry. Right, let's talk about the development of increased visibility of these black performers. You said, because Minstrel Sea, obviously racist and an unfortunate problematic history, but it created perhaps a culture whereby black performers could get work.

[Unknown]

Yeah, for sure. And I think one of the things that we don't necessarily know so much about the early days of Broadway is that there were lots of. Of black creatives writing work, producing work, touring work at sort of the turn of the 20th century. So we're talking the early 1900s. Perhaps the most famous example of that is the musical Into Homey, which was a musical mainly set in Florida. It was written by two African American performers who were already an established double act called Williams and Walker. And they created this musical which was about two characters trying to persuade another person to collect a reward in order for them to spend lots of money. And the character actually finds a pot of gold and he decides to take all of his friends to Dahomey in West Africa to see their homeland. So this is an interesting example and it's a particularly famous one because it was very successful in America and it had a big touring life. But it also came to the UK and was one of the first times that a black authored production, particularly a black authored musical, had been played in lots of. Of London and British theatres.

[Greg Jenner]

Because this is 1903. So this is really early.

[Unknown]

Yes, 19 oh, three. So it's really early. And the challenge of Indahomi is that because these two performers had kind of come from minstrelsy practices, there were stereotyping issues, there was jungle humor, some primitivism material in Indahomi, which has limited the way some people want to talk about it. But Indahomey actually opened the possibility of lots of actors and creatives being able to produce their own musicals. And so we have a number of shows becoming really popular through the 1900s into the 1910s. One example was about the first black battalion to be formed in the American army. And that was produced in 1916, and it made lots of money. The thing to say about this is that the audiences for these shows were predominantly white, but the creators were interested in the disruption of the audience, audience membership too. And so these plays were often about black history, about black excellence, or about sort of issues to do with black liberation.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Were black people able to see this in segregated places or who was witnessing this work?

[Unknown]

So there's a balance of the two. I think Indahomie is complicated because it does have elements of minstrelsy in it. There were no white performers. All of the cast were black. Right. But there were black actors using blackface and using anti black stereotypes that were direct derived from minstrelsy that formed kind of the first two halves. The reason that Indahome is actually interesting is because they have a moment of dialogue where they talk about cultural displacement and what we would now call diaspora, but was not particularly a term use then that connected specifically with any black audience that was in. That would normally have been maybe 10, 20% of the audience. There were performances that were majority black audiences or exclusively black audiences, though not specifically on Broadway, if we distinguish the name and majority for a minute. And I think an interesting example of that then is the sort of smash hit musical people like to turn to, which is Shuffle along, which opened in 1921. And shuffle along changed the game because it ran for an extraordinary amount of performances for the time around 500 performances. The audiences flocking in, were so excited to see it that they actually had to make. I think it's 63rd Street, a one way thoroughfare, because it was impossible for the police to manage the traffic. It was the Hamilton of its time.

[Greg Jenner]

They blocked traffic.

[Unknown]

It was the Hamilton of its time. It launched so many careers. So, for example, a teenage Josephine Baker was in Shuffle Along, I was gonna say, and a young Paul Robeson was also in Shuffle Along. But there were other people like Florence Mills, a BBC in the UK Favorite called Adelaide hall, who would star in kiss me Kate 20 years later in 1948. So it was launching careers on every level of the creative process.

[Greg Jenner]

And, Desiree, you've done. You did the Josephine Baker episode and the Paul Robeson episode. So it's almost like we designed it this way.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Homecoming. I mean, you know, I do have lots of plots and plans. This is so wonderful.

[Greg Jenner]

But the Robeson voice. Do you remember we played you that clip of Robeson singing?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah. Was that when he was in Wales? No. Oh, okay.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, yeah, we played you one in Wales. Very good. But we played also, I think, Old Man River.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And I just wanted to. We can't play it to you now for legal reasons. So I'm going to ask you to remember that voice. How do you think that carried in a theater?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

You know, I mean, incredibly well, I would imagine. I feel like it would live inside of the wood that makes up this. I don't know, it just seems like it would reach and wrap around every part of that space because it just. Either that or it got entirely absorbed. But I can't imagine that would ever happen. It already feels like a very lingering voice that would be. Well, resonated in whatever the theater was made of. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And we'll talk about voices later, Hannah. But Robeson, being an early star, is a really interesting one because this is a man who could really sing to the rafters with such a beautiful deep baritone voice. But we need to move on to talk about the reason I can't play you in Eclipse, Desiree, is the success of international copyright law. I want to ask Hannah, when does copyright law kick off? And also, when does this stuff get professionalized? Where lawyers go, hang on a second.

[Unknown]

Well, who gets credit for a musical and who the rights belong to is one of the most contentious topics in musical theatre history. From Day Dot, the first really significant point of action is that in 1914, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers was established, and it aimed to protect the intellectual property of its members and to establish a royalties system. So by 1917, all American venues had to get a license to stage a piece that was either published by or written by a member of this organization. And that definitely prefaced a series of business maneuvers, particularly at the end of the 1940s and 1950s in terms of thinking about who gets to earn money.

[Greg Jenner]

From musicals and the Actors Union Equity. Are you a member, Desiree?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yes, I am.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. I thought because you do so much acting work. So I was like, surely you're a member do you know what? I guess when they were founded.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, when the union was founded. Let's see.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, if composing at the meeting said, do you sing it?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yes, exactly. No, I mean, my tendency. This was 1914, you said, for ASCAP. Right. So it feels like way later. So I would guess something like the 30s would be a real weird time, wouldn't it? I don't know. Let's say the 1940s.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, that's a fair guess. It's actually 1913, which I was quite surprised at. Hannah. It's earlier than the composers.

[Unknown]

It happens first. But that's because of the strike action.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Ah, yes. We're working out.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, we've had an actor strike recently in Hollywood, so I think we're all familiar with that.

[Unknown]

Yeah. And also I think we forget that the theater owners, and this is particularly true of film, held a lot more power over the things that were being staged in the early development of theater. So it's only after these unions are formed that composers and lyricists are able to sort of create agency over their own materials. So actually, actors were more visible than the creative staff at the sort of beginning of the American theater process.

[Greg Jenner]

But it was just white actors who were allowed in Equity, Is that right? Initially, yes. Yeah. I mean, you know, all good ideas aren't always perfect, let's be honest. So there we go. Equity making sure actors could earn and pay their rent.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Sorry, no, well referenced. That was. That was beautiful.

[Greg Jenner]

Thank you. But obviously later on, black performers were also allowed to join Equity, which obviously is very important. So it's thanks to copyright laws, I cannot play you any music whatsoever. When we namecheck stuff. Go listen to it. Because the Dahomey music is gorgeous that we talked about earlier. I loved it.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Wait, like, they were literally fantasizing about what it would be like to go back.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Like, this is the sort of Back to Africa.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

There were several musicals after Indahome, specifically thinking about returning to the continent and what that would mean. And showboats are really. You mentioned. Old man river is a really interesting example of this because Old man river was extremely controversial in black organizing circles because it used racist language in the lyrics, and it also musicalized and for some, romanticized black struggle, and for others, it was sort of an anthem of resistance. And so black unions, particularly in the 1930s, had considerable debate about whether this was an appropriate song to be associated with organizing. Is this something we should be using in resistance? And that's particularly significant as Paul Robeson, as your listeners will probably know, was so involved in political organizing. And this was actually almost an Achilles heel for him at some point.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, that's right. We've got to fly through the 20th century, so best way to deal with it. In the 1920s, there was a new entertainment phenomenon that showed up. Desiree, what happened in Hollywood in 1927 that had a major impact on Broadway.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

All I can think of is racism and then Technicolor. There's definitely something in between.

[Greg Jenner]

There's a third thing in the middle.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

In the middle to triangulate that. What happened in. I mean, the actual. Sound like that's it. Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got the coming of the talkies.

[Desiree Birch]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

And it's the Jazz Singer, which is the first talky. Which actually really brings us back to Broadway, doesn't it? It's a musical. And this hurt the popularity of theatre simply because, I guess cinema was offering a brand new experience. Right. You could go for a much cheaper ticket to go and listen to songs, listen to dialogue. You don't need to go to the theatre.

[Unknown]

Initially, there was some concern. Some people were actually frightened of the talkies and the notion of people being able to speak through the screen. So the initial peak wasn't as extreme as we might have expected. But after that, the number of new theater productions of all kinds drops across America. And this does coincide as important, say, with the Great Depression. But so you have a sort of a decline from maybe 200 new productions a season to somewhere nearer 100 new productions a season. Really, it's just a financial question. The fact that lots of the theaters were owned by the same people as well. So when the financial depression hits, their ability to hold onto their property and to take financial risks is very different. But actually the ability to work without really having any income, for example, while writing a musical ceases to be viable. And it's important to say that Broadway was perhaps one of the less hard hit industries during the Great Depression, but there was a significant drop off. And that's also one of the reasons that musicals become, in lots of ways, the popular music, because shows lived or died by covers of songs from musicals becoming the popular music.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So the 1940s is where American. The American economy is sort of supercharged by World War II. And by the 50s, you obviously, it becomes the kind of dominant superpower. And that's also where we get the golden age inverted commas of the Broadway musical. Desiree, do you know who the famous writing duo were who kind of dominated that decade?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Is it Rodgers and Hammerstein?

[Greg Jenner]

It is, yeah. Very good. Yeah.

[Unknown]

One of the bits of the Oscar, the. Sorry, the Rodgers and Hammerstein story that gets missed is that they were already influential figures in Broadway by the time they came together. So Oscar Hammerstein's big break was writing the book and lyrics for Showboat. And Richard Rogers had a working relationship with a lyricist called Lorenz Hart. And they wrote a number of hit musicals through the 1920s and the 1930s. You know, songs like My Funny Valentine and the lady is a Tramp come from their shows. But Roger's relationship with Hart starts to falter because Hart's health is declining and he was also an alcoholic. So he formalized this working relationship with Hammerstein, who he'd actually written some songs with before. And they come together to produce this musical no one's ever heard of called Oklahoma. And this is 1943, and Oklahoma. Becomes this overnight sensation. After Shuffle along and Showboat, it's the next sort of major landmark. It expanded the sort of creative understanding of what a musical could be because it combined plot, songs, dance and music sort of seamlessly. It's what's sometimes referred to as an integrated musical, which, as a critical race scholar, I think is hilarious. That actually refers to the dramatic elements of the show. Oklahoma. Ran for about 2,000 performances, so over five years. When you consider that the longest running musical in the 1930s ran for about 500 performances. That gives you a sense of the sort of impact.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, 43, middle of the war, America, you know, it's sort of feel good.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

It's like America's great guys. Remember?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Oh, what a beautiful morning. Yep, yep. This is where we're getting the characters singing their feelings.

[Unknown]

Yeah, a little bit. It's about the songs needing to progress the plot in some way or give us a sense of place, or they become about expressions of internal thought and feeling. Oklahoma is really deemed to be the first example where you can't just chop and change songs. They're really significant to where they fall.

[Greg Jenner]

They're driving the actual plot.

[Unknown]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Greg Jenner]

I want song or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the obvious question is, are Rodgers and Hammerstein giving America kind of soothing balm where everything's fine entertainment, or are they sort of quietly radical?

[Unknown]

So they're really interesting because they're kind of both. And I think that's the heart of their success. So it's really important to say that they took lots of creative risks that paid off, but they might not have.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Done ballet and that music is a.

[Unknown]

Dream ballet, but everyone's like, oh, and.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Then we've got to stage the dream ballet. We did it in high school and I had to play a. Because I could flip girls over like this.

[Greg Jenner]

Nice.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

That's what I did. So I remember, oh, we gotta rehearse the dream Ballet. And the rest of us were like, yeah, peace. We don't have to do this.

[Unknown]

So Oklahoma. Has a balance of sort of a romantic depiction of rural America, this sort of idyll and the sort of ins and outs of a relationship. But it actually has some sort of quite big topics and dark themes. So we sort of deal with nation making. Should Oklahoma join the United States? We have industrial threats to rural life. And we also have the issues of dealing with outsiders, quote, unquote, in small communities and the notions of sort of predatory behavior towards women. So it's not a simple musical, and it definitely does deal with some difficult things, but it balances that with spectacle. You have a character singing off stage, but in a musical theater voice you have a barn dance. And as you say, you've got this historic dream ballet. So there's a real sort of balance of the two, but it facilitated other nostalgic musicals and musicals that took risks. So in the 40s, we have Brigadoon and Annie get yout Gun, but we also have a psychoanalytical musical called lady in the Dark, in which a woman goes through all of her concerns about what all of her worries, and she sort of. It switches between her being with a therapist and what's going on in her psychology. And this was one of the hit musicals.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Wait, in therapy in the 40s? Yeah.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

It's talking about her issues as a woman.

[Greg Jenner]

Dr. Freud will see you now.

[Unknown]

Absolutely. It was written by Kurt Weil.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, is it okay?

[Unknown]

It makes a lot of sense, but it's a really interesting example of sort of the polarity of yay entertainment. And here's a really complicated topic that we're going to explore through tap dancing.

[Greg Jenner]

It's very interesting. You mentioned kind of the Americana of Oklahoma. And Annie get yout Gun and so on, because obviously later on in the 80s, you get the English invasion. As an American living in London, can you reverse the polarity and imagine how American Broadway producers felt when English people showed up with their song and dance numbers?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I mean, it's so weird because when American things, everyone's like, come right this way. Welcome. We want all of this cash. Like, you know, but. And growing up in the 80s, you know, I mean, Andrew Lloyd Webber was canon. Like, every year, Andrew Lloyd Webber's putting Out something that was what Broadway was. So to know that before it was that it was like, ah, get the hell outta here. You know. But I mean. Yeah, really. I mean, but also like we'll happy to make all of our big fat American dollars based on your musical about whatever. But we're still. Get out here.

[Greg Jenner]

An interesting thing actually, just looking at some of the other hits of that sort of era. That so called Golden Age Carousel.

[Unknown]

Sure.

[Greg Jenner]

But South Pacific, the King and I, the Sound of Music. These aren't American stories.

[Unknown]

Stories, no. Well, yes and no.

[Greg Jenner]

But you know what I mean, they're kind of. There's a sort of exotic internationalism here.

[Unknown]

Yeah, absolutely. Rogers and Hammerstein were concerned about colonialism. Not necessarily in a way that we would recognize now, but South Pacific was specifically. South Pacific was specifically.

[Greg Jenner]

That's a tongue twister.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Getting ready.

[Greg Jenner]

Pacific. Yeah.

[Unknown]

South Pacific handled material about GIs coming to foreign climes and then leaving. And some of the prophets from South Pacific went to deal with orphans who were left.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, really?

[Unknown]

As a result, the King and I. There's an interesting sort of dimension to the King and I because they were not looking to make Anna the main character, who's this British governess who goes to look after the children of the King of Siamese. Super sympathetic. They were interested in showing her having forms of bigotry and prejudice and her and the king working out this tension between them. And in some of the cup music from the King and I, they really press on that. But it didn't make it.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah, I was gonna say the test audience didn't like that so much.

[Unknown]

Didn't make it. And I think in lots of ways the softness we might have expected in the 40s and 30s comes in musicals in the 50s, once the form is a little bit more settled and Rogers and Hammerstein are, you know, dominant force. But at the same time you have things like Guys and Dolls, which opens in 1950, you have west side Story. West side Story was actually overshadowed by the Music man that's recently been on Broadway and right up to Fiddler on the Roof, which is the first musical to pass 3,000 performances. So if you think in the 20s we're overwhelmed by something that runs 400 performances, by the sort of mid-60s we're at 3,000 performances. Phantom of the Opera has run 14 performances on Broadway.

[Greg Jenner]

Surely, surely the cast are just going, gah, can we just sing anything else? Yeah, and My Fair Lady's another one to shout out, which is Lerner and Low, isn't it? So we've got other double acts coming in. We've got other creative teams. West side Story is Bernstein and Sondheim, who are both giants.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yes.

[Desiree Birch]

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[Greg Jenner]

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[Unknown]

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[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Giant pandas and their habitat are unique and beautiful and extraordinary representation of the natural world. And if you get that opportunity to sit and watch a panda eat bamboo, you will be mesmerized.

[Desiree Birch]

Listen to amazing wildlife on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Open your free iHeart app and search.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing Wildlife and start listening. We've got the music or the sound of Music. Let's talk about the actual sound being made because we get the arrival of microphones and amplification but Prior to the mics. How are these performers getting through a two hour show and hitting the back rows with their vocal techniques?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

And how many shows a week are they able to. Yeah, yeah.

[Unknown]

So I mean, we are in the sort of five to seven shows a week. Amplification comes into musicals really slowly. So they are starting to dabble with it. Towards the end of the 1930s, the beginning of Oklahoma, oh, what a Beautiful Morning. The person singing off stage is actually using a microphone in 1943.

[Greg Jenner]

Interesting.

[Unknown]

But there aren't mics on stage. So that's also something that comes up quite a lot in reviews of the time where voices will pass from the acoustic environment to a microphone and back. So there were comments about that not working, which I think is part of where the resistors to amplification sort of comes from. If we listen to musical theater performers, really from the pre 60s, we are listening to a much rounder, broader sound in general. Often we're listening to operatically trained performers or a balance of singers. We also have techniques which I'm sure you'll be aware of, Desiree, of like, of cheating front. So you don't actually look at a performer because the directionality of where your voice is going is really important.

[Greg Jenner]

So you're standing at the front of the stage singing to the audience, even though you're talking to your colleague on stage who stood to your side.

[Unknown]

And you might notice actually even now when you go and see musicals, that characters are often standing on a right angle from each other. So the person who's doing most of the singing will be facing the front, but looks like they're being addressed in some way. So there's a balance of technique, of learning to throw your voice and project. Sometimes that was because you came from an operatic background, or it's because you came from a musical background where you might be not only singing in a large space, but over people drinking and chatting. And we see that actually really well immortalized in lots of musical theater films where actors have to struggle as part of their character building to be helped.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

So people were just stronger and better back then. Didn't need microphones.

[Greg Jenner]

What different vocal techniques or styles are you aware of?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

You're definitely going to need a soprano in your show because that's what everybody's coming to hear. And most of the women sing way the hell up in their nose and their forehead and speak that way all of the time. So I feel like that's usually a centerpiece of a lot of things.

[Greg Jenner]

You like the phrase belting?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yes, of Course, yeah. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

How do you understand that?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I mean, that, like, you know, using your. Like, just let a rip. Like, really. You know, there's. Yeah, just really, like. I mean, it's a way of. You really need to train, otherwise you're going to shred your voice. But you really are just sort of like from your diaphragm, just, like, slamming that song out.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. I mean, Idina Menzel is sort of the famous one I'm aware of in the modern. You know, again, Frozen. My daughter loves Frozen, so I hear it a lot. What is a belter from a technical point of view? Hannah?

[Unknown]

I think lots of people think belting is about volume, and it's actually about intensity. It's about creating this round, full, bright sound. And it's exactly what you're describing about completely relaxing, throwing your voice as far as possible. And I think a great example of this is Ethel Merman, who was particularly famous for her ability to sing in full voice in every song, for every performance. And what's really interesting about her is she would perfect an interpretation of a song and then deliver it the same each night, because that was one of the ways in which she protected her voice. If you listen to her singing, there's no business like Show Business from Annie get yout Gun or Everything's Coming Up Roses from Gypsy. These songs are written in a register, so in a key and in a place in her voice to make this easy for her. These are sort of in the middle of her voice because this is a chest voice technique.

[Greg Jenner]

Another brilliant singer we have to mention quickly would be Ethel Waters, who's from a much earlier tradition, sort of 20s, 30s, 40s, but she was also Broadway star. And her singing style, was it belting?

[Unknown]

I would describe Ethel Waters as the legitimate performer who sort of inspired Belting in lots of ways. It's important to say that belting sort of comes from a racist tradition connected with minstrelsy, in which actors would mimic early gospel and blues and swing sounds and try to throw their voices, but in exaggerated and derogatory ways. By contrast, Ethel, who was an African American blues singer who then became a film actor and later an evangelist, was an interpreter of songs who would balance really intimate storytelling with the ability to let this voice pour forth. So I think Waters, a really good example of someone who was able to harness this skill, but actually use it in a creative way well before her time. And we see this in sort of mirrored in songs like as Long As He Needs Me from Oliver or I Dreamed a Dream from Les Is that she was, you know, 40 years, 50 years before we start hearing this actually become tenable because of amplification in the 60s.

[Greg Jenner]

Firstly, we get in, as you say, electrified instruments, so guitars and drums. But that also means that kids are listening to rock and roll now. They don't want to go to the theater. They want to listen to the Stones. So does the theater change again?

[Unknown]

Yeah, the 60s is kind of a watershed. Musical theater ceases to be the popular music. It becomes old fashioned in comparison to what's happening happening both in popular music and in film. Part of this is sort of triggered by Elvis Presley's film musicals and his transition from his sort of more quote unquote clean identity into his rock star figures. But there are also shortcomings, I guess, to what this leads to. Not everybody was able to write a successful rock musical because actually, lots of rock songs were not intended to tell stories. Jesus Christ Superstar is an outlier in someone doing it very successfully. Early and Hair would be another.

[Greg Jenner]

There are some duds. Hannah. Oh, yeah, nice.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I want to hear about these.

[Greg Jenner]

If I say to you 1972's classic Via Galactica.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, my gosh, that sounds amazing.

[Greg Jenner]

What do you think happens in that?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I'm Via Gal. I don't know. I mean, it sounds like space lasers. And, you know, I mean, because I'm trying hard not to think of things that were a thing like Xanadu, which is just. Or is it. Or is Xanadu one of them? No, I'm thinking of Starlight Express. That's all on roller skates. Yeah. What else could it be on? All on snowboards or something like with.

[Unknown]

Laser guns doing millions.

[Greg Jenner]

You're doing really good, Hannah. Do you want to tell Desiree what the technology was?

[Unknown]

Well, so they wanted to mimic zero gravity.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yes.

[Unknown]

So all of. Oh, my God, yes. All of their actors bouncing on trampolines for the entire musical.

[Greg Jenner]

Bring it back. That's what I say.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

It's not really anti grand gravity. It's like very gravity.

[Greg Jenner]

You can really feel the gravity. Like, bang, bang. Saying that I would love to. If anyone would like to produce the Van Halen musical Jump with me. I know where to get some trampolines. Let's. Let's do this. The 1970s was a time of a bit of crisis in New York. A lot of. A lot of crime. A lot of.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

You know, I was gonna say, you mean the good times that everybody talked about when I was there in the early 2000s. You should have been here before when there were heroin needles and everyone's it was great.

[Greg Jenner]

It's not great. So there were sort of big campaigns to try and get New York up and running again, bring Broadway back. Then you do get the kind of tourist flocking in after various tourist campaigns. But also you then get the arrival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and the mega musical. What do you think of us as a mega musical in your head?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I just imagine a lot of people and I guess a chandelier crashing. I mean, a lot of people and spectacle. I mean, in my head, musicals are pretty mega. Like, as far as my modern understanding of them, it's like, oh, oh, someone's getting hoisted up and like, you know, someone's flying out over the audience. Or you've gotta have, like, something like that.

[Greg Jenner]

So one of stunts.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah, stunts. And like huge, you know, and an entire army of people coming onto stage. Or like a helicopter lands in before the act breaks.

[Greg Jenner]

So obviously you've got Lemmis, Miss Saigon, Starlight Express, Cats with Bumholes. I don't know. We get Lloyd Webber coming in and fixing the show. Nothing changes. You can perform it a thousand times in every city in the world, world. It's never going to be different.

[Unknown]

The seeds of this are sown in the 70s with grease and Chicago and the Rocky Horror show and the Wiz and A Chorus Line, which is another sort of massive hit. But what Lloyd Webber does is he combines technology, a score, musical choices, lighting, production components all together to create a product that could be recreated in lots of different. Different spaces. And what that means is that these musicals, specifically mega musicals, become destination performances. You go to Broadway to see the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, it allows considerable special effects. So we have extensive revolving stages and extra complicated folding scenery. Like in Les Mis, we have helicopter seeming to land in the middle of a scene. In Miss Saigon, we've got magic tricks and all sorts of illusion work. For example, in Phantom Cats, we. We have this amazing immersive set, but the people are actually climbing over the audience to get to their performance marks. So it becomes immersive in a different kind of way. But it also pushes the boundaries of all the things one might expect when going to see a musical. And the standardization is really important because it means that if you've seen one of these shows, in theory, in one place in the world, and you go to see it somewhere else, you actually know what you're getting. And that was very different.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

It's so weird that we had a British person come in to do that, because it's a very American thing.

[Greg Jenner]

It is, isn't it? It is kind of American tradition. Well, I mean, I don't want to, you know, speak on behalf of America.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

But it to, like, standardize something, to make it highly commercial.

[Greg Jenner]

Exactly.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

He's the reason why my suburban friends fly halfway around the world, you know, once a year to be like, we're going to the Broadway to see this show.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, okay, Exactly. I mean, it's called show business.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Right.

[Greg Jenner]

And I mean, ticket prices soar in this time, don't they? They.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, he's the reason they're all 400.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, yeah.

[Unknown]

So, I mean, I wouldn't want to blame him entirely. And the reason I wouldn't want to blame him entirely is that one of the tensions in musicals the whole way through is the balance of the shows that sell an amazing amount and the shows that are critically acclaimed but don't sell a massive amount. So this is a tension, for example, between all the classic Sondheim shows that we know and love now that weren't particularly commercially successful when they originally opened. But the other thing that happens with this standardization is the sort of future proofing of musicals that got bad reviews. People wanted to go see the spectacle and see what had not worked, for example. Yeah, absolutely. There was a little bit of that.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, you went to see Cats, the movie at the cinema. The 90s, obviously, is where we get the Disney Corporation saying, we've got some musicals, we like money.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Let's see what we can do here. Spectacle. You got it.

[Greg Jenner]

You've got your huge hits. Beauty and the Beast and the Lion King, obviously. Mega smashes against again. But then, of course, you know, the 21st century, the millennium brings the horrors of 9 11, of course, but also kind of a different era again. How is Broadway adapting to that 20 years ago or so?

[Unknown]

Yeah, we have this really interesting balance of excitement that the musical is kind of having a revival. The Disney animated musicals have been a massive hit. The Broadway versions have then been a massive hit. We then have Moulin Rouge and Chicago that come out pretty close together in the cinema, which had massive box office success. And then we have the producers opening around 911 in the states, which won a record number of Tony Awards, had immense audience engagement. And at the same time, we also have jukebox musicals having a new resurgence. I mean, jukebox musicals have been part of musical theatre since the 1930s.

[Greg Jenner]

That's really interesting because I think people often assume they're kind of very cynical, modern cash cows for musical artists like ABBA or whatever, where you're just cashing in on your back catalogue.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

They were musical, cynical cash cows when you had in house writers in a cash cow.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Remember, Imogen?

[Unknown]

It's kind of an interesting thing because if you already owned the rights to the songs from a musical you already produced, why would you not reuse them again? So you mentioned. I think you said Singing in the Rain is one of your favorites.

[Greg Jenner]

That's my favorite movie of all time. And that all the songs are reused.

[Unknown]

Yeah. Like Good Morning debuted in a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland film. So you know that this is not. This is not a new phenomenon. But we have ABBA and we have Queen. The who musical is back around. Later on, we have Jersey Boys bringing people who are not necessarily excited. Yeah, absolutely.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Green Day music.

[Unknown]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

For the punk rock kids.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

All right, nice.

[Unknown]

There's loads of it. Alanis Morissette more recently. But what's important about that is that it brings people who are maybe not excited by what they think of as musical theatre music into musicals. But we have a real diversity of material. We have things like Spring Awakening, Le Mamma Round, first musical in the Heights, which was a surprise success and an interesting example of theater that was subsidized in the States where most theater is commercially funded. Things like the Book of Mormon and Avenue Q. Pressing the boundaries of what is irreverent and what isn't. But we also have this massive wind of films that did not have musical theater elements becoming musical. So Billy Elliot is the obvious example for the UK audience, but Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, there's a lot. The American Psycho is an interesting outlier, so there's lots of us.

[Greg Jenner]

I've not even heard of that.

[Unknown]

Groundhog Day.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Groundhog Day's a lovely one. Yeah. Tim Minchin. That's great.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And then obviously Wicked is a massive hit as well.

[Unknown]

Yes, absolutely. So wicked. I think it's fascinating that the wizard of Oz is peppered the whole way through the musical theater history.

[Greg Jenner]

What can I say? 1902, we started.

[Unknown]

We started in 1902. We then have the switch to Technicolor, which leads to Disney then making Snow White and kicks off all of our animated musicals. We have the Wiz, which is a really significant land market in black authored musicals post civil rights. And the film becomes really significant. And then we move forwards into Wicked. And interestingly then, Andrew Lloyd Webber's reality TV shows where we hunt for Dorothy. So there is this sort of massive.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I miss that.

[Greg Jenner]

Not hunting her, like literally, I like her. That'd be amazing. Like the Running man, but with Dorothy.

[Unknown]

The musical theater. Okay, so tense, but it's really interesting. So Wicked. But Wicked is a great example of taking what was an adult book and pitching it for teenagers. There was a definite attempt, a bit like in the 60s, to bring in new young family audiences back in the success of the Disney musical to other musicals. So we have Wicked, which is very traditional in lots of ways. And that prefaces the success of something like Hamilton. And Hamilton takes us kind of full circle as a musical that not only transcends sort of the social, political context of musicals, but also goes back into popular music and, you know, becomes the first cast album to reach number one on the Billboard rap chart.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, I mean, Hamilton is beyond phenomenon in many ways. It felt new, but in a lot of ways, what you've been talking about, it feels like it's borrowing on a long tradition.

[Unknown]

It's an amazing balance of old and new. And that's the reason that it is so successful, is that we are getting a conventional, what we would call a book musical in the style of Oklahoma. With a sort of a beginning and a middle and an end and lots of characters and lots of action, but at the same time moving musical theater forwards in terms of the kind of genres that are heard in what I'm going to refer to as mainstream theaters. Because there was definitely touching on hip hop and rap in other musicals before this point, but he really popularized it and he was very lucky in the timing because it aligned beautifully with the Obama's agendas.

[Greg Jenner]

So, Desiree, final thoughts on. Do you send your regards to Broadway? Have we convinced you of the joys of singing?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Please remember me to herald Squam. Particularly that Macy's. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for teaching me about stuff that I now miss because I didn't understand it the first time. And now letting me know I can't whinge about a jukebox musical because they are basically the backbone of musicals throughout the entire commercial practice.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, there's nothing new under the sun. Often on this show, we're always like, yeah, history. We've done it before.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

The best thing I learned was that actors used to have a lot more power. And that makes me really, really happy and also sad and longing for the old days.

[Greg Jenner]

The nuance window. Okay, well, it's time now for the Nuance Window. This is where Desiree and I enjoy our intermission ice creams. And Dr. Hannah gets two minutes on stage to sing us something we need to know. Take it away, Dr. Hannah.

[Unknown]

Okay. Something I think we haven't covered is musicals rely on communicating plot and character really quickly, so they work in shortcuts. And because of the number of elements that most musicals contain, musical theatre creators have kind of developed a vocabulary to tell us what we need to know simply and succinctly. So the company might pause on stage and a spotlight actor will appear in a contrasting color, probably covered in sequins. The action is paused. We know that this is our main character, and we don't have to process where they fit into the story any further. On the same basis, we have things like dance sequences that reveal dreams and introspections. But in musicals from Brigadoon in the 1940s through to, like, the Lion King, choreography also covers action that's really hard to stage and chase scenes. We have types of song you mentioned earlier, the I Want song, the Love Duet, and these tell us about the character's emotions and motivations. We also have these establishing numbers that explain the musical's location and their plot. And they prevent us from having to think about specifics while we're enjoying all the other things, things musicals have to offer. Wicked and Hamilton are really interesting examples because they begin by telling you how the story ends, and then they also introduce key characters and narrative. So we are kind of wrapped up in comfort. Five minutes in, we know who the characters are, we know what the key content is. We can just enjoy what we are consuming. All of that makes musicals really exceptionally accessible to a broad audience. And that is one of the things that musical theatre has in comparison to other art forms. It accesses all walks of life. It also means that musicals that are successful tend to be written by people who are in musicals in other parts of their career, are connected to musical theatre history, and know this vocabulary before they get into the process of writing. The complexity of this vocabulary, then, is that the amalgamation of ideas leads to musicals trading in stereotypes. And it can also allow us to have a limited imagination about how we stage things and what musicals might sound like. The challenge, I suppose, then, is that the creative efforts of lots of people over decades and centuries who've made the musical what it is can become invisible in this product that we think is a very simple thing to make.

[Greg Jenner]

Lovely. Thank you so much. Desiree, any thoughts on that?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

There's something really amazing about this because there is a microcosm for, like, how things could work where it's like in theater. The bottom line is that the show must go on. Everyone's gotta find the most creative, cost effective way to make the thing come together. And happen. But also hearing your argument about you do need to do it quickly economically also means that the things that get cut are often some of the most sort of, like, damaging things that we probably needed to explore in the first place. I can't even get over the belting part from earlier because I was just like, oh, I thought that came directly from gospel, but it was like, no, it was a mimicking of gospel that turned into an appropriation, or I'm. My head is still spinning around about that one. But it is a really great metaphor for how we could sort of do life in capitalism. But then it does involve a lot of nepotism.

[Unknown]

It does.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

So maybe not. Maybe not. Working theory. I'll get back to me.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. Come back to you next year. So what do you know now? Well, it's time now for the Saudi know now. This is our quickfire quiz for Desiree to see how much she has learned.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Nah, man.

[Greg Jenner]

I have every confidence in you. I got 10 questions. Here we go. So question one. What was the first black Broadway production in 1903 with scenes set in Africa?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, in Dahme.

[Greg Jenner]

It was very good. Question 2. What was the name of the actors union formed in 1913?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, equity.

[Unknown]

Yeah. It is Equity.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I almost tricked myself out of answering an obvious question.

[Greg Jenner]

Take the card out your own wallet. Yeah. Question three. What was controversial about the song Old man river in black organizing spaces?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

A lot of black people felt. Organizers felt that it was drawing upon stereotype or reinforcing those. I mean, essentially. And it was complicated because Paul Robeson was singing it, and it was, you know, also about lifting up a tradition. So it was very.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, I think that's a very good summation.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And also racist language was used in it.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Question four. Can you name two musicals by Rodgers and Hammerstein?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Okay. Well, Oklahoma's one. There's so many. Why can't I think of a single one?

[Greg Jenner]

Big gis.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

South Pacific.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, South Pacific. Well done. We got there. We got there. Question 5. What is the technique known as cheating out?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

It's like you don't face the person you're talking to. You face the audience.

[Greg Jenner]

Very good.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Open up like this and go, I'm talking to you, Greg. Can everybody see that?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So your voice carries.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Can you all see that through the medium podcast?

[Greg Jenner]

Question 6. Which musical theater star was renowned as a belter in the days before artificial amplification and sang there's no business like show business?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Ethel Merman.

[Greg Jenner]

It was ethel merman. Question 7. Who is most associated with the rise of the mega musical.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

[Greg Jenner]

Of course it is. Question 8. Which character replaced Toto the dog in the 1902 musical version of the Wizard?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Wait, replace Toto the dog? I thought Imogen the cow. Well, it's Imogen the cow, but I thought it was in reverse.

[Greg Jenner]

No, very good.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Okay, fine.

[Greg Jenner]

You still got it right.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Yeah, no, no, that's fine.

[Greg Jenner]

Question 9. Describe the staging for the 1972 musical Via Galactica.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, wait, is this the one with the trampolines? This is so amazing. Why can. Why are there not revivals of this right now? I think it's time.

[Greg Jenner]

I agree. Bring it back. And this for perfect. 10 of. Of course. Question 10. The cast album for which musical became the first to reach number one on the Billboard rap charts?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, Hamilton.

[Greg Jenner]

Ten out of ten. Never in doubt. Desiree Burch.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

I wish it were the Sound of Music, though, somehow.

[Greg Jenner]

That'd be amazing, wouldn't it?

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

That would be so great.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, just Jay Z's version of the Hills Are Alive. It'd be amazing. 10 out of 10. Well done, Desiree. And thank you, Dr. Hannah, for a wonderful lesson listener. For more musical chat with Desiree, check out our episodes on Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and also Pythagoras, because we talked briefly about.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Oh, it was fantastic stuff.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes. For a rousing encore on black American culture, we've got a lovely episode on the Harlem Renaissance, which I really enjoyed and remember. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave us a review. Share the show with your friends. Subscribe to youo Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode, but I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the wonderful Dr. Hannah to Risingham Robbins from the University of Nottingham. Thank you, Hannah.

[Unknown]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Greg Jenner]

And in Comedy Corner, we had the brilliant Desiree Burch. Thank you, Desiree.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Surely you shouldn't ask your listeners to leave you a musical review if they like this episode.

[Greg Jenner]

Hey, if people want to sing their reviews, I'm open to it. Just remember it needs to be an I Want song. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we stage revival of another forgotten historical masterpiece. But for now, I'm off to go and perform a one man version of Frozen in My Garden Shirt until the Disney lawyers shut me down.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Bye.

[Greg Jenner]

This episode of you, you're Dead to Me was researched by Anna Macaulay Stewart, Hannah Campbell Hewson and Annabelle Storr. It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Negus and me. The audio producer was Steve Hanke and our production coordinator was Ben Hollands. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and Senior Producer Emma Negus. Our Executive editor was James Cook. You're Dead to ME is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio.

[Unknown]

From BBC Radio 4 comes DOE examining the business behind profitable everyday products and.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

What they might be like in the future.

[Unknown]

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[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Hearing firsthand from people who make them.

[Unknown]

We still make products with DVD player built in. You would be very surprised how many we sell. Then our expert guests choose their favorite game changing innovations which shape the products.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

In the past before we follow the.

[Unknown]

Money to where they're going next.

[Greg Jenner]

Think of the TV.

[Unknown]

98 inch or 100 inch dough makes the mundane marvelous again. Listen on BBC Sounds.

[Desiree Birch]

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[Unknown]

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[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Giant pandas and their habitat are unique and beautiful and extraordinary representation of the natural world. And if you get that opportunity to sit and watch a panda eat bamboo, you will be mesmerized.

[Desiree Birch]

Listen to Amazing Wildlife on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.

[Dr. Hannah Risingham Robbins]

Open your free iHeart app and search.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing Wildlife and start listening.