Representations of Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Prior to 1915, plots of American musicals were largely empty excuses to get

from one musical number or sketch to another; everything took a back seat to

spectacle. Musicals of this time had: Lavish painted backdrops usually by master

scenic painters, huge casts of 80, 90 or even over 100 performers and spectacular

costumes, headdresses, lavish bead and feather work, and the display of as much

female flesh as possible.

The most successful book musicals were imported European operettas such

as Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow (1907), and their American imitators like Victor

Herbert’s Naughty Marietta (1910). These operettas were about Counts and

Countesses, Princesses and Pirates and took place in Grand Duchies, tropic Isles, or

other mythic or exotic locales.

In 1915, producer Ray Comstock and literary agent Elisabeth Marbury had

scheduled a production of a play, Mr. Popple of Ippleton in the tiny Princess

Theatre. As rehearsals neared, they cancelled production of the terrible play, and

needing a show to fill the theatre, they hired Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern to write a

musical using the sets and costumes already under construction. With only 299

seats in the theatre, expenses had to be kept to a minimum, stripping Bolton and

Kern of the essential element that defined a musical in the 1910’s, spectacle. There

was neither money in the budget, nor space on the stage for a large cast. There was

only one setting for each act, and the costumes were mostly contemporary street
Nathan Hurwitz 2

clothes. At a time of large orchestras, neither the budget nor the pit could

accommodate more than a chamber ensemble.

Kern and Bolton struck upon the idea of a “musical play” as opposed to a

“musical spectacle.” Nobody Home (the show’s title), was peopled with recognizable

characters from everyday life, and the musical ‘s driving mechanism was the plot –

revolutionary at the time. Marbury and Comstock, advertised, “there is a real story

and a real plot, which does not get lost during the course of the entertainment … this

particular offering seems especially appropriate to an intimate playhouse of the

character of the Princess.”i And Nobody Home was a great success,

Plot-driven musicals with recognizable characters, in recognizable locales

and situations, followed in the Princess, and in other theatres who clamored

emulate their success. Simultaneously, importing European musicals became

impossible, due to limited transatlantic access after the sinking of the Lusitania.

America abandoned exotic musicals set amongst European aristocracy, in favor of

seeing their own lives on musical stages. Contemporary characters in contemporary

situations, led naturally led to portraying other aspects of their lives, including many

of their leisure-time pursuits, their games and play.

As the country roared towards the 1920’s, the audience demographic shifted;

a substantial middle class had emerged, who had the time, money and inclination to

attend the theatre. With disposable time and income, the middle class also took up a

host of leisure-time activities. Golf; football; horse racing; boxing; bicycle, auto and

aviation races, among others, were popular sports, and provided subject matter,

locales and topical references for American musicals of the 1920’s.

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 3

Many musicals between 1915 and 1929 were set in and around: golf courses,

football fields, boxing rings and all manner of other “play-related” venues. But in the

1930’s, with the Great Depression, those who could afford theatre tickets did not

want to see their lives onstage, they wanted escapist fantasy; so in the 1930’s

musicals about high society were in – duchesses, madcap heiresses and rich

divorcees and such – while leisure-time musicals went by the wayside.

By the end of the Depression, references to leisure-time activities in musicals

reappeared, they had become a part of the national mythos, but in these later

incarnations, they satirized these activities rather than glorifying them.

Many different leisure-time activities became popular in the 1920’s. We had

won the “war to end all wars,” and the economy seemed great; it was a time to

celebrate and be silly. Many fads were associated with the 1920’s, like: Mahjong,

crossword puzzles, record-setting attempts in activities like; flag-pole-sitting, non-

stop kissing, talking, laughing, eating, drinking and rocking-chair rocking. The Miss

America Pageant in Atlantic City was created in 1921 by the Business Association of

Atlantic City in an attempt to extend the season past Labor Day. Dance crazes swept

the nation including the jitterbug, the Charleston, the tango, the lindy-hop, the fox

trot, the shimmy, the camel walk, the Baltimore Buzz, the Black Bottom, and

hundreds, if not thousands more. These dance crazes ran their courses quickly –

some too quickly to have been documented. Many sports also gained popularity

throughout the 1920s.

“It only stands to reason, then, that 1920’s musicals periodically celebrated the

lifestyles not just of the rich and famous, or even just the rich, but also of the newly

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 4

affluent and reasonably prosperous kinds of people who made up a large part of these

shows’ audiences. That some of these celebratory musicals rank among the biggest

hits of the 1920s is ample indication that their audiences loved to watch themselves at

play.”ii

As audiences grew, so did the number of productions and the average length

of a run. Roughly 17 new Broadway musicals opened each year in the early 1910’s;

25 in the 1915; 37 in 1918, 46 in 1921, and every season thereafter stayed above 33

until 1930. Half of the 48 new musicals in 1927 made it beyond the 100-

performance mark, 13 ran more than 200 performances. 1928 saw 51 new

Broadway musicals. 1929 dropped to 40, and with the Depression, the number took

a nose-dive from which it never recovered.

In 1908, the introduction of pari-mutuel betting for the Kentucky Derby

signaled a surge of interst in horse racing. Tracks opened as states legalized betting,

hoping for a share of the wagers. At the end of World War I, prosperity and horses

like Man o’ War brought people flocking to racetracks. Horse-race musicals were

very popular through the decade; here are four.

In Honey Girl, 1920, David Graham (“Checkers”) can’t keep away from the

racetrack. He falls for Honey Parker, whose father won’t consent to their marriage

unless Graham is worth $25,000.00. Graham makes the money by betting on a run-

down nag called Honey Girl. This was the first of a spate of racing musicals; races

and the habitués of racetrack quickly became staples of the American musical.

Red Pepper, 1922, told the story of Jimpson Weed and Juniper Berry (played

by James MacIntyre and Thomas Heath) who follow the horse “Red Pepper” from

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 5

race to race, hoping to get rich. The New York Times wrote, “The race horse doesn’t

figure much in the proceedings and the production isn’t about anything in

particular. It’s just an opportunity for the black face comedy of Messrs. McIntyre

and Heath and a number of specialities by various members of the company.” iii

Nobel Sissle and Eubie Blake’s 1924 The Chocolate Dandies was about Mose

Washington, who owns a racehorse named Dumb Luck. Mose falls asleep before the

big race and dreams that Dumb Luck has won a small fortune; he becomes president

of the Bamville Bank (Bamville was “a folk expression, the equivelant of “podonk”).

The dream turns into a nightmare, and a run starts on the bank, but Mose wakes, up

to discover it was a dream, Dumb Luck loses the race to Rarin’-To-Go. The race was

run live on stage using three horses and a treadmill.

Big Boy, 1925, featured Al Jolson as Gus, a stable boy at the Bedfords. A

group of “sharpers” try to get Gus replaced with a famous English jockey, but Gus

rides the Derby and wins the race on Big Boy. The race was performed live onstage

with real horses on a treadmill. The Herald-Tribune exclaimed the race in Big Boy

made “’Ben Hur’ look like a country affair.”iv Big Boy opened to rave reviews and

ran for just shy of 200 performances.

Many of the musicals of the 1910’s, placed the “boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl,

boy-gets-girl” trope in some sort of outing. Day trips, or weekend trips were very

popular in the 1910’s and 1920’s.

Very Good Eddie, the second Princess musical took place on a; day cruises up

the Hudson River. Newlyweds Eddie and Georgina, cruising to Poughkeepsie on the

Hudson River Day Line, wind up mismatched and cross-mated that night at

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 6

Poughkeepsie’s Honeymoon Inn. In the morning all is put right and all happily set

sail for home. Very Good Eddie provided a model for many musicals that took place

on various outings. In 1920’s Night Boat, Bob White has told his wife and mother-

in-law that he is the Captain of the Albany night boat in order to get out of the house

and philander, much of the action takes place on the night boat.

Bringing Up Father By The Seashore was on Broadway in 1920 and 1925

telling told the story of Maggie and Jiggs aboard a yacht. The Two Little Girls In

Blue were twins who could only afford one ticket on a trans-Atlantic liner requiring

one at a time to stow away, while romantic complications ensue. Acts II and III of

No, No Nannette, take place in Atlantic City, at the Chickadee Cottage and on the

beach. 1921’s The O’Brien Girl told the story of a wacky Adirondack vacation.

Variations on this theme have been set at all manner of beaches and resorts.

The 1910’s and 1920’s saw a land boom in Florida, since affordable land, saw

more and more middle class Florida homeowners. This trend was reflected by a

series of “Florida” musicals like The Florida Girl, the Gershwin’s Tip-Toes and the

Marx Brothers The Cocoanuts, are examples of this trend.

The Ziegfeld Follies of 1914 – featured Bert Williams singing “Darktown

Poker Club” and performing his one man card game, in which he mimed an entire

game of poker by himself, a routine he performed for the rest of his career.

Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue 1923-1924 featured a sketch called “If Men

Played Cards as Women Do.” by George S. Kaufman, in which four men “sit down to

a friendly game of bridge. John, the host, and Bob, the first player to arrive, gush

over a new hatband on Bob’s year-old Knox. The two talk cattily about George, only

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 7

to do a smiling about face when George appears. Their backbiting then shifts to

absent friends. The fourth player, Marc, stops the game briefly to preen himself,

placing a pocket mirror on the card table, shaving a rough spot on his chin, and

slicking down his hair. The skit ends with the startling revelation that one of the

men’s friends, somebody named Sid, will become a father in April – though he only

married in January.’”v

Many revues sketches referenced popular activities. The Passing Show of

1924 included a skit about mahjong, which had become popular in 1921. A 1923

song, “Since Ma Is Playin’ Mah Jong,” had achieved some success in the hit musical

Kid Boots. The fad was overshadowed by crossword puzzles later that year. The

1926 book musical, Queen High hinges on a poker game between two partners in

the Eureka Novelty Company; the winner will run the company, while the loser will

become the winner’s butler.

In 1914, The Dancing Duchess celebrated the latest dance crazes. When the

Duke of Darmia banishes modern dancing and his wife the Duchess, runs away to

enter a tango contest. The show’s opening, “The Tango Breakfast,” and its closing

“The Ragtime Whirl” offered the latest dance crazes. The Dancing Duchess lasted

for 13 performances. The New York Times review of The Dancing Duchess read

ITS BOOK IS VERY DULL, but the Dances are Gay and Many.” Many musicals of the

1920’s took the opportunity of exploiting the latest dance crazes.

In 1900 a yearly auto race from Paris to Lyon began; in 1904 the first

American auto race, the Vanderbilt Cup began; in 1907, eleven drivers raced from

Paris to Peking, across two continents and “over deserts and through swamps.” The

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 8

New York Hippodrome, was the largest theatre of its day, 5,300 seats. It housed

massive spectacles. One Hippodrome show, The Auto Race, featured a real car race

onstage; three cars raced to a finish line at the footlights (at one performance a car

overshot, and landed in the orchestra pit). Sporting Days, opened on “a baseball

field, a game is in progress. [The audience got a full] inning of ball playing with a

story of love and hate woven into the runs and put-outs.” vi Another, featured

Harvard winning the Henley Regatta and “feats of strength and feats of agility.”

In Betty Lee, 1924, two drifters, Wallingford Speed and Lawrence Glass,

pretend to be a famous racer and his trainer, who have been expected at the Chaplin

Estate. A race is arranged and Speed manages to win, cheered on by Betty Lee.

In Rodgers and Hart’s The Girl Friend (1926) Leonard Silver trains for a bike

race by attaching the wheel of his bike to the churn in back of his family’s dairy farm.

His girlfriend/coach is daughter of a professional cyclist. Silver overcomes obstacles

to win both the race and the girl. The Girl Friend ran for 301 performances.

The NCAA was formed in 1910 to make college football safer, 330 college

players had died between 1890 and 1905. By the 1920’s college ball was extremely

popular, thanks to players like George “The Gipp” Gipper and Red Grange and

coaches like Knute Rockne. The Notre Dame Fighting Irish became a national

powerhouse during the 1920′s.  The renowned four horsemen played 30 games

together as a backfield unit, losing only twice. In 1920, the owners of four Ohio

League teams met to form a professional football league; Jim Thorpe was its

president. In 1922 the league became the National Football League, the NFL.

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 9

The Passing Show of 1917 featured the female ensemble dressed as college

students at the Yale Bowl, which had been built just three years earlier.

Leave It To Jane (8/28/17) was the first in a slew of very popular college

football musicals. In this case, Jane, the college widow, is sent to vamp and recruit

super-star Billy Bolton to play for Atwater University. In the end Billy wins the big

game and Jane’s hand.

Although the plots of these musicals were tediously similar, they played well

for contemporary audiences. Similar “big games” were enacted in musicals, set on

the fields of Tait, Pottawatomie, and Midwestern State Colleges, Winsocki High,

Notre Dame, the University of Minnesota, the Southern Baptist Institute of

Technology, Rutgers and more.

In Good News (1927), the quintessential college football musical, coed

Connie Lane tutors football star Tom Marlowe, so that he can get a good enough

grade to be allowed to play in the big game. In the game, Tom, who is falling in love

with Connie, loses his concentration, but the comic male, Bobby Randall recovers

Tom’s fumble and wins the game. Good News was a smash with an initial run of 557

performances. John Bush Jones points out that the show mirrors the world the

audience lived in, not satirizing or parodying it. Good News provided the latest

dance craze, the Varsity Drag – a Charleston variation. DeSylva, Brown and

Henderson had written the pervious season’s dance craze, the Black Bottom, for

George White’s Scandals of 1926.

Boxing dates back to 688 B.C. Greece. “Before World War I, boxing in the U.S.

had been [considered] disreputable, practiced by rough characters in saloons and

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 10

attracting unsavory spectators. After the war many laws banning boxing were lifted,

and boxing spread throughout the country, becoming popular with privileged and

common men. Throughout all weight divisions, the 1920s produced splendid

boxers, including heavyweight Jack Dempsey and light-weight Benny Leonard.” vii

The 1917 revue Odds and Ends was stolen by comedian Harry Watson as a

prizefighter. Watson, had begun developing this character in the Ziegfeld Follies of

1908;but in Odds and Ends his boxing sketch, “The Young Kid Battling Dugan” stole

the show and became the routine on which he based much of the rest of his career.

In Girl o’ Mine (1918) an American prizefighter and his wife, unsuccessfully

own a bar in Paris and are running out of money. They help a struggling American,

search for the long lost uncle she has never met. Girl o’ Mine had a cogent and

coherent plot that drove the musical from beginning to end.

In 1919 and 1921, Jack Dempsey beat Jess Willard in Toledo, and Carpentier

in Jersey City “the battle of the century,” and enthusiasm for Dempsey and boxing

raged. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1921, featured a prizefight sketch with two female

comediennes, Ray Dooley and Fanny Brice, impersonating Dempsey and Carpentier.

Sun Shower, in the spring of 1923, was a musical love story about a

prizefighter and a poet, which played at the Astor Theatre.

In 1923’s The Battling Buttler, Charles Ruggles, played Alfred Buttler, a

dead ringer for the welterweight champion, known as Battling Buttler. He has

convinced his wife that he is the champ and has to go to training camp several weeks

each year in order to get out of the house. Through a series of plot machinations he

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 11

and the champ wind up trading places and he fights a championship bout. The

Battling Buttler ran an impressive 313 performances.

Bonnie Brown grows up from street urchin to star of the London musical

comedy stage, but gives it all up and bypasses all the English nobles pursuing her for

Jack Harriman, an American boxer, in 1924’s Paradise Alley.

The same year, in Plain Jane the son of a doll manufacturer wins enough

money as a prizefighter to marry and the girl he loves, and set himself up with a

company in competition with his father. The show’s high point was the prize-fight

scene, which was reported to have been superbly staged.

Comedian Bobby Clark played a prizefighter in a sketch called “The Kids First

Fight and Last FIght,” in The Music Box Revue of 1924

DeSylva, Brown and Henderson’s 1928 prize-fighting musical, Hold

Everything, ran for 409 performances and made a star of Bert Lahr, as the punch-

drunk fighter, Gink Schiner. “Lahr staggered around the stage, crinkling his face,

crossing his eyes and gargling a nasal outcry something like “gnong, gnong, gnong.”

Demonstrating his ring prowess he landed a knockout punch on his own jaw. The

morning after the opening he found himself a star.viii

1929’s Messin’ Around, followed two characters to a southern carnival and

then a Harlem nightclub. Along the way they encountered a boxing match featuring

two girls. “The girls went at their business with abandon, clouting each other so

lustily they brought down the house.”ix

Golf became very popular in the 1920’s. The number of weekend golfers

doubled between 1916 and 1920 to one-half million. “Golf before 1920's was […]

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 12

widely recognized as the sport of the upper classes. But in the 1920's, that started to

change. More and more people were golfing no matter what class they were.” x By

1920 the New York Times reported that there were now 2,000,000 golfers in the

U.S. who had spent $1,319,000,000 in one year on the sport.

The Ziegfeld Follies of 1918 offered W.C. Fields performing a comic sketch

on a putting green, much as he had performed a routine on a billiard table in 1915.

One of the big hits of the decade, Kid Boots ran for well over a year starring

Eddie Cantor as a less-than-honest caddy who sells crooked balls and illegal booze.

The club champion mistakenly uses one of the “bad” balls to play the big club match

of the year. In anticipation of its arrival, the New York Times wrote, “Kid Boots

concerns itself mainly with golf, which the theatre has touched but lightly hitherto,

despite its popularity.”xi The highlight of the evening was Cantor giving a golf lesson

to Jobyna Howland, as Dr. Josephine Fitch.

1924’s Top-Hole was about, a rich golfer-playboy who is the son of a judge.

He is ordered out of his father’s house and told not to return until his has made

$1,000 on his own, which he does as a golf instructor and golf tournament winner.

1929’s Follow Thru, the third leisure-time musical in a row by DeSylva,

Brown and Henderson, called itself “a musical slice of country club life.” It took place

in and around the Bound Brook Country Club and dealt with the rivalry for the

women’s championship. Follow Thru ran for 401 performances

The stock market crashed in 1929 leaving the Broadway musical, and every

other commercial enterprise, reeling. The number of productions plummeted

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 13

almost immediately. A few new musicals that had already been planned opened, but

most new shows did not do well, especially compared to 1920’s standards.

Top Speed – (1929), set in a Thousand Islands resort, included fishing and

other outdoor activities. Opening two months after the stock market crashed it

barely managed to run for 104 performances.

Flying High, the final DeSylva, Brown and Henderson collaboration, brought

flying to the stage, dual stories of a flashy mail pilot, Todd Addison and Bert Lahr,

who played Rusty Krause, an inept airplane mechanic who accidentally breaks a

flight endurance record because he doesn’t know how to land. The 1920’s had

inspired interest in aviators, thanks to Lindberg, Byrd, Earhart and others. Despite a

libretto that was cobbled together in rehearsal, Flying High was the hit of the 1929-

1930 season, and ran for 355 performances.

During the Depression, those who could afford an evening of theatre did not

want to see everyday life. 1930’s musicals were escapist entertainment. Forays into

the worlds of the wealthy became the primary model for 1930’s musicals. Broadway

audiences sought refuge from their lives, rather than looking to see them celebrated

onstage. In addition, many of Broadway’s greatest talents, writers, performers,

directors, choreographers, and musicians –headed west, looking for employment in

Hollywood.

Gerald Bordman calls 1933 “one of the most disastrous stretches in the

history of the American Musical Theatre. The number of productions plummeted

during the Depression, with very little money for producers to produce shows or

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 14

patrons to buy tickets. With so much at risk, a couple of tried and true formulas

defined most of the musicals of the decade.

Backstage stories were very popular in the 1930’s; stories of eager, energetic

“kids,” who make it in “show biz” based on their talent, their stick-to-it-tive-ness and

luck – which translated to the audience, “hang in there and believe in yourself;

anything is possible.” Meanwhile, the large, spectacle-based revues were replaced

by more intimate revues. Although Ray Bolger contributed his interpretation of the

Max Bear – Primo Carnera fight in Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), most of the revue

material of the 1930’s had little to do with leisure-time activities.

Popular musicals of the 1930’s tended to be set in the heady world of the

wealthy; set amongst the sparkling and sophisticated American upper classes –

making champagne toasts and scampering off on mad escapades on yachts and

palatial estates. 1930’s musicals show the super-rich, in playgrounds that most

people could only imagine.

The most successful composers on Broadway in the 1930’s were Richard

Rodgers (with his first partner, Lorenz Hart) and Cole Porter. Many of Cole Porter’s

depression era shows partake of this paradigm; some of these include:

 Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), Peter Forbes, a young American millionaire,

journeys to Paris and bets his friends that he can live without his money for a

month and, while doing so, get engaged to a young woman he adores.

 The New Yorkers (1930), a wealthy New York socialite Alice Wentworth has a

romantic interlude with Al Spanish, a nightclub owner and bootlegger.

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 15

 The Gay Divorce (1932), Guy Holden, a wealthy American writer in England,

falls madly in love with a woman who disappears after their first encounter.

 Red, Hot and Blue! (1936) - Nails O'Reilly Duquesne a newly wealthy young

widow. Nails, a former manicurist organizes a benefit for her favorite cause,

the rehabilitation of ex-convicts.

Rodgers and Hart’s 1930’s musicals, while not always set in the world of the

upper-class elites, tended to just as distant from the average theatregoers lives:

 Heads Up (1929) - Lt. Jack Mason of the United States Coast Guard is

convinced that the yacht owned by society doyen Mrs. Martha Trumbell is

being used for "rum-running". Jack's right, but Mrs. Trumbell is innocent.

 America’s Sweetheart (1931) satirized Hollywood and the talking movie

industry.

 On Your Toes (1935) – is the backstage story of the mounting of a jazz ballet

 Babes in Arms (1937) – A group of teenagers whose parents are out of work

vaudeville performers put on a show to avoid being sent to a work farm.

 Too Many Girls (1939) was the one Rodgers and Hart 1930’s musical that

focused on leisure-time activities. It was a college football musical, in which -

Mr. Casey disguises four bodyguards for his coed daughter Connie at

Pottawatomie College. The college is in financial trouble, so her bodyguards

use their salary for the college. The football players join the college team, and

so the team becomes one of the best.

But the big shift is that originally the story was told in earnest, while Too

Many Girls, played the story with tongue in cheek, as a nostalgic bow to the musicals

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 16

of ten to twenty years earlier. Too Many Girls was the first successful sports related

musicals since the Depression, but it also marked the shift from earnest to gentle

mocking. The trope shifted and the characters had “types.”

Satirical musicals, both socially and politically found success in the 1930s, led

by shows like the Gershwin’s Strike up the Band (1930), Of Thee I Sing (1931) and

Let ‘em Eat Cake (1933). The Gershwins and librettists Kaufman and Ryskind

reference many leisure-time activities in these shows, always in satirical ways. At

the political convention where Wintergreen is chosen as Presidential candidate, a

wrestling match is going on just below the speaker’s platform, choreographed to

reflect and comment on the goings-on. Of Thee I Sing also mocks the Miss American

Pageant; with no platform, the party decides to run Wintergreen on a platform of

“love,” and holds a national beauty contest, to begin in Atlantic City, to select his first

lady. The nine members of the Supreme Court are equated with the nine players on

a baseball team. Of Thee I Sing was the first musical with a consistently satirical

tone,” and it was the first to win the Pulitzer Prize. It established one of the major

paradigms for musicals for the next 12 years.

Through the 1930’s and the first third of the 1940’s, this was the rule. Most

musicals did not deal with leisure-time activities; but when they did, the references

were usually satirical. Everything changed in 1943 with Oklahoma!, when,

overnight, psychological realism was adopted as the reigning paradigm.

To recap, as the middle class prospered and had disposable time and money,

they developed leisure-time activities. Through the 1920’s, those activities were

what audiences enjoyed watching onstage in musicals. As the Depression hit, and

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

Nathan Hurwitz 17

the number of musicals declined, those people who could afford to go to the theatre

did not want to see “real” life on the stage, they were living through “real” life and it

was tough enough. By the latter part of 1930’s, many of these activities found

themselves back up on the stages of the musical theatre, but this time as objects of

satire. This mode continued through the middle of the 1940’s, by which time

Oklahoma! had changed the face of the musical theatre. The musical drama; serious

stories with serious topics and not a whole lot of room for play, leisure-time

activities or satire by and large, displaced the musical comedy.

Play and Sport in the American Musical Theatre of the 1920’s

i
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, p. 305
ii
Jones, John Bush, Our Musicals Ourselves, p. 61.
iii
New York Times, online. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?
res=F00A10F6385D14738DDDA90B94DD405B828EF1D3, originally published May 30, 1992,
viewed online June 7, 2013.
iv
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, p. 399.
v
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, p. 381.
vi
The New York Times online, September 11, 1908, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?res=F50717FA385A17738DDDA80994D1405B888CF1D3 viewed June 4, 2013.
vii
American Decades: 1920-1929, ©1995 Gale Cengage., http://www.enotes.com/1920-sports-
american-decades/boxing , viewed 5/19/13.
viii
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, p. 443.
ix
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, p. 449.
x
http://ushistory20.wikispaces.com/1920s+golf, viewed June 1, 2013
xi
The New York Times, “Gossip of the Rialto: Managerial Chicanery—Many Plays Ahead—Mr.
Hammerstein’s Drama—More Pirandello—Hamlet and the Ghost”, November 18, 1923, viewed
online at http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?
res=FB0917F73D5C16738DDDA10994D9415B838EF1D3, viewed June 7, 2013.