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Polite Gaiety: Cultural Hierarchy and Musical Comedy, 1893–1904
by Michael Newbury, Middlebury College
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In 1903, Alan Dale, the theater critic for the New York American and Journal, when contemplating the state of the American stage, came to the conclusion that "the only national theatre I can find, after severe cogitation, is that beautiful, flip, and classic commodity known as musical comedy." Dale pointed out that musical comedy's exorbitant popularity was a recent development, emerging only in the previous five or ten years, and that his anointing of the form as the national theater would not sit well with more seriousminded devotees of drama. "Well read gentlemen with heavy minds," wrote Dale, would prefer different sorts of productions, plays that "mere commercial managers don't want to stage and mere amusement seekers don't want to see." Seeking an improbable bridge over this cultural divide, Dale suggested that "[Henrik] Ibsen might air his neat little views on heredity in happy verse set to music....[His] favorite subject of maggots on the brain" could feature a "chorus of pretty girls disguised as maggots."1 |
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Dale had critical company when he observed that musical comedy was taking over the legitimate stage, pushing intellectually ambitious drama to the margins. William Archer, an influential British critic, lamented the "flowing tide," "exorbitant vogue," and "invasion" of musical comedy, and saw the form as a "blight on the drama." Theatre magazine observed, "The growing popularity of that formless, vacuous kind of stage entertainment known as 'musical comedy' is one of the most discouraging signs of the theatrical times, and a serious difficulty that promoters of the legitimate drama have to contend with."2 |
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If these critics saw in musical comedy a "vacuous" form threatening high culture from the commercial netherlands, producers of and audiences for musical comedy largely shared that vision. Alan Dale's proposed chorus of maggot-girls dancing their way through Ibsen suggests the irreverence with which musical comedy treated the highbrow. The realist theater's intense engagement with the social and psycho-sexual dilemmas of the day had no place in musical comedy. Nothing in the form or audiences' experience of it suggests any concern to educate, improve, or enlighten. Rather, musical comedy insisted proudly on its intellectual frivolousness, its display of fashion and sexual allure, its knowing puns and double entendres. |
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But if musical comedy readily ceded the sacred ground of turn-of-thecentury highbrow culture to other theatrical forms, producers also insisted on musical comedy's distinction from the variety stage and other sorts of potentially "coarse" pastimes. If, as Lawrence Levine has argued, the midto-late nineteenth century witnessed a radical "bifurcation" of culture into the high and the low, then musical comedy claimed a peculiarly prideful middle ground. It scorned the pretensions of realist drama above and insisted on its distinction from vulgar forms of variety below.3 |
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Early musical comedy, then, with its simultaneous rejection of the high and the low, ought to prompt rethinking about late-nineteenth-century cultural hierarchy, about the nature and periodization of a mass cultural middle zone's emergence. The form suggests not only that "bifurcation" offers an inadequate paradigm at a time when a cultural middle region was so clearly being formed, it also suggests that categories of "high" and "low" were fluid as much as fixed and subject to renegotiation by audiences and producers. Distinctions of rank, as we shall see, could be asserted on the basis of what in retrospect appear to be uncertain formal differences, and audiences for musical comedy clearly overlapped to some extent with those for both "serious" theater and the supposedly "lower" forms of variety. Indeed, vaudeville impresarios such as B. F. Keith made pronounced efforts to purge blue material and establish codes of audience conduct in pursuit of the same audience courted by musical comedy, even as the latter form insisted on its fundamental distinctiveness. |
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