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Musical Comedy

Musical comedy is a theatrical entertainment that emerged in the 1890s and flourished through the 1940s. Musical comedies contain alternating passages of dialogue and song in a variety of styles, but the music is always light in character and simple in construction, in other words non-operatic, allowing for performance by singers without classical vocal training. The plots tend to be set in present-day (at the time of the plots' writing) New York City and are predominantly light vehicles for star performers. Stars' onstage personas, comedy routines, and song and dance acts, often derived from vaudeville, are loosely interwoven with insignificant and frivolous narratives. Musical comedy is therefore more diversionary entertainment than serious drama. Although it faded in popularity in the mid-20th century, its theatrical style and techniques influenced the more serious musical play that became the dominant form of popular musical theater in the 1940s, and, to a lesser degree, the musical comedy continues to influence popular theater today.

Origins

London producer George Edwardes introduced the term musical comedy in 1893 to distinguish A Gaiety Girl from shows with complex plots and music. Edwardes brought A Gaiety Girl to New York City in 1894 and, after its success, proceeded to export similar shows in the following years. To claim that musical comedy originated solely in London, however, would be to overlook important developments in America, where shows resembling the form had appeared intermittently since The Black Crook (1866) and some vaudeville performers were extending their acts into longer shows. In the 1870s Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart developed their comic Irish immigrant routine, which was influenced by blackface minstrelsy’s stereotypes and racial jokes and became a mainstay on the vaudeville circuit. They introduced a song in 1873 that was soon expanded into a short skit, then a 40-minute “play” in 1878, and finally a full-length play with musical numbers, called The Mulligan Guard Ball, in 1879. Joe Weber and Lew Fields similarly expanded their Dutch act of Mike and Meyer, and after the duo separated in 1904, Fields worked some of their routines and his immigrant character into musical comedies such as It Happened in Nordland (1904). American musical comedy was therefore both an import from England and an outgrowth of the American popular theater.

The first two works by George M. Cohan, Little Johnny Jones (1904) and George Washington, Jr. (1906), exemplify early musical comedy. They are comprised of simple plots, and their music is dominated by the march and influenced by the then-popular style of ragtime; these traits are evident in Cohan’s hit songs “The Yankee Doodle Boy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” This theatrical style thrived until the New York premiere of Franz Lehár’s Viennese operetta The Merry Widow in 1907, two years after its European debut. For the next decade, musical comedy was overshadowed by operettas with classical singing, waltzes and marches, and richly developed plots taking place in historical and exotic settings.

The Peak of Musical Comedy

Author Guy Bolton, lyricist P. G. Wodehouse, and composer Jerome Kern helped to revitalize musical comedy during World War I, writing a series of shows referred to as the Princess Musicals (Very Good Eddie, 1915; Oh, Boy! 1917; Leave It to Jane, 1917; Oh, Lady! Lady!! 1918), named after the Princess Theater where most of them were performed. Perhaps their greatest innovation was Kern’s embrace of the foxtrot, which ballroom dancers like Vernon and Irene Castle were popularizing in the 1910s. Initially the only music to which dancers could foxtrot were blues songs, which replaced the triple meter of the waltz and the fast duple meter of the march with a moderately paced meter of four beats. Kern’s foxtrots such as “Till the Clouds Roll By” (from Oh, Boy!) were not in the style of the blues but were love songs that took advantage of the expressive potential of this meter and tempo. By the early 1920s, the foxtrot love song was established as the definitive song style of musical comedy, initiating the theater’s alignment with ballroom dance music that would continue through the 1960s.

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