Welcome to the Musicals Thread, the Avocado’s space for anything and everything related to musical theatre! Every month I’ll post a discussion prompt, but please feel free to comment on other topics, from new discoveries to old favorites. If you have ideas for future prompts or would like to write a feature for the thread, let me know!
Perhaps the peak of the musical’s cultural power. Even as the medium’s format was finalized less than a decade ago, the 1950’s turned out classic after classic as musical creators continued to innovate. Many a show – Once Upon a Mattress (1959), The Music Man (1959) – featured a plucky protagonist in an unfamiliar setting, winning over all (or at least most) around them with their kindness, cleverness, or both. Guys and Dolls (1950) and West Side Story (1957) broke ground with less fanciful, urban characters, settings, and language. West Side Story also made new strides in storytelling through dance and movement throughout the show, not just contained within a dream ballet.
The decade’s big hit was My Fair Lady (1956). Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had given up on making a musical out of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, about flower seller Eliza Doolittle who climbs the social ladder through the power of “proper” pronunciation. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s final product, however, wound up running for six years, one year longer than Rodgers and Hammerstein’s record-setting Oklahoma!. Perhaps not that surprising – like many notable shows of the 50’s, it utilizes clever lyrics, soaring melodies, a pair of leads that spend the bulk of the show in conflict but realize tenderer feelings near the end, and, as the original Eliza herself Julie Andrews notes in PBS’s Broadway: The American Musical, a narrative of triumph through goodness, perseverance, and “a little bit of luck”.
What are your favorite/the most memorable examples of musical theatre from the 1950’s? If you’re not very familiar with this period, are you interested in changing that? Why or why not?
There are multiple shows from the 50’s I’d still like to check out, from The Pajama Game to Bells Are Ringing (Joan O’Brien gave a fabulous performance of “Just in Time” as a guest star on The Dick Van Dyke Show). I’ll be shocked, though, if I end up preferring any of them to West Side Story, which won my heart when I was in my sophomore year of high school, performing the “Four Dances” (“Scherzo”, “Mambo”, “Cha-cha”, and “Cool”) with the school band.
Best Musical Tony winners:
1950 – Guys and Dolls
1951 – The King and I
1953 – Wonderful Town*
1953 – Kismet*
1954 – The Pajama Game
1955 – Damn Yankees
1956 – My Fair Lady
1957 – The Music Man
1959 – Redhead*
1959 – A tie! Fiorello! and The Sound of Music*
*Here I thought it would make more sense to list the shows with their premiere dates (e.g., the best musical of 1959) rather than the year of the ceremonies, but sometimes the winners of consecutive seasons (ex: 1958-59 and 1959-60) debuted in the same calendar year. Do any of you have a preference? Does it matter?