About Us
Cast & Crew
Contact Us
|
Years ago, while teaching college courses in the History of American Musical Theatre, my research exposed numerous instances of innovation in the art form (“this was the first time…”) as theatrical technologies, along with musical styles and forms, evolved. I began to “collect” such phrases, which later included people, theatrical venues and other occasional oddities, into the collection and organized the data chronologically. |
|
At this site, we focus on historical firsts. Innovation creates history, and this is a collection of innovative events, decisions and inventions. Among other things, the collection includes initial appearances of popular shows, songs and performers. Here, you’ll find descriptions of theatrical firsts in America from 1665 to 2000. Each “historical first” appears in bold type. |
|
Generally, the New York opening is considered the finished form of any work (even if subsequent changes occur during the New York run). For the sake of maintaining some historical perspective, this site covers events through the 1999-2000 season. |
|
Ongoing additions to the site include textual entries and pictures of people and theatrical venues. One project will soon offer links to audio files of songs in the public domain; other improvements may occur as they are invented or suggested. |
|
We owe much to those who have assisted in the development and presentation of this material. Please see our “Cast & Crew” page. To everyone who appears there, I offer my deepest thanks. |
|
Perhaps you will find something here that will initiate your own research. You might want to have an item considered for inclusion at the site (if so, please contact me). You might wish to correct an error that you find here (if so, by all means contact me). You may even find items that will pique your curiosity and motivate you to seek answers. We hope that this site will bring you closer to the theatrical art form that has proven time and again to be our most beloved: the musical. |
|
Wayne Hamilton, MFA 2009 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
Thank you for visiting FirstOnStage.com, a web site that was literally decades in the making. We hope you find the information here useful in your classes, in your research or in exercising your intellectual curiosity. If so, we hope you’ll make a donation to help support FirstOnStage. This information comes to you quickly and easily without the cost of expensive textbooks or hours of searching for the proverbial needle in the digital haystack. Your gift will enable site developers to provide ongoing enhancements, including additional textual content, pictures and audio files. PayPal will safely and securely process the transaction. Thanks for your interest and your generous support! |
|
Visitor Count: |
000078851 |
|
After a one-year road trip, A Trip to Chinatown first appeared in New York City on November 9, 1891. With a 657-performance run, it was so popular that 30 years passed before another musical, Irene, had a longer run. The show offered at least two standards from its score. The libretto and lyrics were by Charles Hoyt and the music was by Percy Gaunt (1852 - 1896). They wrote "After The Ball," which appeared in the show at inception. Their popular song "The Bowery" was added during out-of-town tours after the New York City run. When Jerome Kern was creating the music for Show Boat in the late 1920s, he decided to use "period" songs in the show, which was partially set around the turn of the century. The songs he used were "After The Ball" and "Goodbye My Lady Love" by Chicagoan Joe Howard (1867 - 1961), which Howard wrote in 1904. Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (1867 - 1931) produced his first Broadway effort, a revival of A Parlor Match, in September of 1896. The show reunited comedy greats Charles Evans and William Hoey and featured the beautiful Anna Held, whom Ziegfeld had discovered in London. The production featured the song "Daisy Bell," also known as "A Bicycle Built For Two," written by Harry Dacre. Flo Ziegfeld was one of Broadway's best-known producers and most intriguing characters. Perhaps best known as the producer of Jerome Kern's Show Boat and the long-running Follies revue series, Ziegfeld spared no expense in making his shows into glittering extravaganzas. Born in Chicago, he started early, charging schoolmates to see a school of "invisible fish," which was just a glass bowl filled with water. Later, he heated the bottoms of ducks' webbed feet and billed the resulting show as "the Dancing Ducks" until the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) stopped him. Ziegfeld began working professionally in show business in the Midwest in 1889, promoting and touring with Eugene Sandow, "the world's strongest man." From 1907 until 1925, Ziegfeld staged an annual musical revue first produced as the Follies and then, beginning in 1911, as the Ziegfeld Follies. After he died, the Ziegfeld Follies lived on, primarily produced by the Shubert Brothers. An English piece, Mr. Wix of Wickham, opened at The Bijou Theatre in New York on September 19, 1904. It is important because it included five new songs for its Broadway opening written by a young man destined to become one of the great American musical theatre composers: Jerome Kern (1885 - 1945). This show was also the first appearance in a book musical by Julian Eltinge, a well-known female impersonator. Finally, Mr. Wix of Wickham was the last show mounted by producer, director and author, E.E. Rice, who served this production as director. The Earl and the Girl, which opened in November of 1905, featured the first commercially successful song by Jerome Kern: "How'd You Like To Spoon With Me?" The song was an interpolation; the creative staff of the show included Ivan Caryll (music), Seymour Hicks (book), and Percy Greenbank (lyrics). The Red Petticoat, produced by the Shuberts in November of 1913, was the first show with a complete score by Jerome Kern. Until that time, Kern's music had only been heard as interpolations. Almost from the beginning, popular musical entertainments included songs by a variety of composers, thrown together with largely weak stories to tie them together. Weak or not, the libretti were simply excuses for stringing together not only songs, but virtually any variety or vaudeville act or comedian that could help the show sell more tickets. Even the popular and usually imported Viennese operettas, typically written by a single composer, were not immune to having a song added by an American "star" who would virtually stop the show to perform a song or monologue that was popular with American audiences. It made no difference to the performers, the producers or the audience that these interpolated interruptions had nothing to do with the furtherance of the plot. Musical theatre star Marilyn Miller's first appearance in a legitimate New York show came with The Passing Show of 1914. Miller (1898 - 1936), who had begun performing at age six in her family's act, was one of the most famous "dance stars" in the musical productions of her day, having a great deal of skill as a tap dancer. Her dance teacher was none other than Ned Wayburn. She introduced such classic songs as Jerome Kern's "Look For The Silver Lining" and "Who." Married three times, Miller, ever the trouper, performed the same day her husband was killed in a car accident. Like many of her Broadway contemporaries, she also appeared in films. The first time three hit musicals opened in the same month of the same season occurred in December of 1915. Katinka and Very Good Eddie both opened on the 23rd; Stop! Look! Listen! opened on Christmas day. Katinka, composed by Rudolf Friml, was the least influential of the three; however, it solidly established Friml as a theatrical composer. The composer of most of the music in Very Good Eddie was Jerome Kern, but the lyrics were by a variety of providers, including Ring Lardner ("Old Bill Baker"). What was notable about this show was that the characters were not comics, princes or potentates, but regular people in everyday situations. Moreover, the songs were easy to sing if not entirely memorable. As a result, the smooth flow of Very Good Eddie established a model that was followed for decades thereafter. Irving Berlin's Stop! Look! Listen! had a recognizable plot and memorable music, including his "Girl On The Magazine Cover" and "I Love A Piano," each performed for the first time by Harry Fox. Like Kern's show, Berlin's was about everyday people, though it employed the old-style interpolations of songs and unrelated acts being performed willy-nilly. Although not all of these three shows gave hints of the future, all were solid hits. In June of 1916, a new composer was introduced in The Passing Show of 1916. Eighteen-year-old George Gershwin's first song in a Broadway musical, which was later interpolated into the Sigmund Romberg score, was "The Making Of A Girl." George Gershwin (1898 - 1937) was a lifelong admirer of Jerome Kern. However, he turned his own acquired knowledge and musical taste into an unmatched composing career, writing for the movies as well as for the Broadway stage. His first big hit was "Swanee," which Al Jolson sang in the Broadway musical Sinbad. Gershwin wrote his first complete score for a musical called La, La Lucille, which had little success. From 1920 to 1924 he wrote music for the George White Scandals and had other songs interpolated into various Broadway productions. During these years his songs included "Stairway to Paradise," "Do It Again," "Somebody Loves Me," and "Innocent Ingenue Baby." His efforts to bring sophistication to popular music resulted in Rhapsody in Blue, which made him both famous and rich. Later similar works included An American in Paris and Porgy and Bess. Meanwhile, Gershwin continued to write for the stage and for movies, churning out some of this country's most memorable songs until his death from a brain disorder at age 38. Miss Springtime, which opened in September of 1916, was the first American show with lyrics by P.G. Wodehouse (the initials stand for Pelham Grenville). Wodehouse, an Englishman, had some success in his home country, contributing lyrics to music written for British shows by the famous American Anglophile Jerome Kern. After coming to America to write for magazines, Wodehouse and Kern joined forces again. The pair contributed three songs to Miss Springtime. Although Jerome Kern would compose scores for five shows in 1917, this year of his career is probably best remembered for his first masterpiece, Oh, Boy! The show opened in February, with lyrics provided by P.G. Wodehouse. The hit song from Oh Boy! was "Till The Clouds Roll By." The first Broadway musical with a book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II was Always You, which opened in January of 1920. At the time, Hammerstein was 24. The music was by Herbert Stothart. Oscar Hammerstein II (1895 - 1960) was born in New York City. His father William, a theatre manager, named his son after his own father, Oscar Hammerstein, a famous opera impresario. Hammerstein started writing lyrics for Columbia University Varsity shows while he was a law student. Some of his early efforts were written with an undergraduate named Richard Rodgers and the young Lorenz Hart. Hammerstein eventually left law school to accept a job with his uncle, Arthur Hammerstein, a Broadway producer who hired him as an assistant stage manager. Although Hammerstein first tried writing a non-musical play, it was not successful. So he focused on writing both lyrics and libretti for musicals. He worked with some of the greatest composers of his era, including Otto Harbach, Vincent Youmans, Herbert Stothart, Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg and George Gershwin. Hammerstein also wrote eight musicals with Jerome Kern before beginning his partnership with Richard Rodgers. In December of 1920 Sally opened. Produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, with sets by Joseph Urban, a book by Guy Bolton, ballet music by Victor Herbert and score by Jerome Kern, the piece was one of the most popular musicals in the history of the lyric stage. The role of Sally firmly established Marilyn Miller as the reigning queen of musical comedy. The songs were a hodgepodge collection of rejections and leave-behinds from other musicals. They included "Look For The Silver Lining," and "Whip-poor-will." The latter tune had its first public performances in Sally. The show ran for 570 performances. Although Jeanette MacDonald had made minor appearances in Broadway musicals beginning three years earlier, A Fantastic Fricasee in September of 1922 was the first show for which she received the well-deserved attention from the press that gave her young career a jump start. Jeanette MacDonald (1903 - 1965) worked her way up to the leading roles that made her famous with some of the greatest names in show business. She was in the chorus of a Ned Wayburn show in 1919 and a Jerome Kern show in 1920. She played her first leading role in 1927; by 1929 she was a stage star, but left the theatre in March of that year to spend the rest of her career working in movies and, for a short while, television. Musical theatre historian Gerald Bordman calls the week that began on September 16, 1925 "possibly the most remarkable seven days in the history of the American Musical Theatre." During that week, four excellent shows opened: No, No Nanette! (September 16), Dearest Enemy (September 18), The Vagabond King (September 21) and Sunny (September 22). Vincent Youmans' score for No, No Nanette! included two hits, "Tea For Two" and "I Want To Be Happy." Those songs were not heard first in New York, however; the show had a shaky premiere in Detroit, then played Chicago for a year and sent out several road companies before opening New York. With music by Youmans, lyrics by Irving Caesar and Otto Harbach and libretto by Lew Fields' son Herbert Fields, contemporaries most often compared the works of Gilbert and Sullivan to Dearest Enemy's style. The score contributed "Here In My Arms" and "Bye and Bye" to popular American music. Rudolf Friml's score for The Vagabond King gave us songs like "Love For Sale," "Only A Rose," "Some Day" and "Love Me To-night." The show was based on a play titled If I Were King by Justin Huntly McCarthy, which had been popular nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Finally, Sunny boasted some of America's best theatrical talent in its mounting, both on and off the stage. For the first time, Jerome Kern's music was coupled with the lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II. Despite its popularity with contemporaries, Sunny is best remembered today because of this collaboration. In late December of 1927, Show Boat first appeared on the musical stage in New York. In a time when the musical form was dominated by revues and stage stories that were little more than excuses to string songs together, Show Boat was remarkable for its music's relevance to the book. While not every song helped further the plot, it was a quantum evolutionary leap for musical theatre, resulting from a marvelous co-joining of the talents of Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics). The piece did not suffer from contributions made by other important figures: Florenz Ziegfeld produced the show, typically sparing no expense; Joseph Urban provided sets and John Harkrider costumes. The excellence of this show served as a pattern for blending dance, songs and dialogue to tell a serious story. It is probably the most-revived piece of its era. Even if its development of form had not occurred, Show Boat would be remembered for having introduced several hits into the musical theatre lexicon: "Ol' Man River," "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," "Make Believe" and "You Are Love." "Bill" was also popular; P.G. Wodehouse wrote that song with Kern for a revue in 1917. According to Gerald Bordman, Show Boat "was the first real 'musical play.'" November of 1932 saw the Broadway musical debut of Vivian Vance, who later starred on television as Lucille Ball's sidekick, Ethel Mertz, in the TV show I Love Lucy. She had come to New York from Kansas to study with Eva LeGallienne. The show was Music In The Air by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Another famous name in this production was future film star Marjorie Main in her lyric stage debut; she had acted in straight plays since 1928 and started performing in movies in 1931. Music In The Air had "a cast of thousands" (89 actors) that included Al Shean and Walter Slezak. Shean was by then a well-known comedian, having been half of the Gallagher and Shean comedy team; Shean was also uncle to the Marx Brothers. Slezak was a film actor in Germany for ten years before coming to America, where he worked concurrently in film and theatre; Music In The Air was his second New York musical. A cast of this size would also include the famous "George Spelvin" (or Georgette Spelvin), a fictitious name often used by actors who wish to remain anonymous. Perhaps the person using that stage name was famous, perhaps not; but we'll never know. Jerome Kern opened one of his last musicals in November of 1933: Roberta. With Bob Hope in the comic lead, the show saw the introduction of Kern's "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," performed for the first time by an actress known simply as Tamara. The 1935 film version of the show replaced Bob Hope with none other than Fred Astaire, who, along with Ginger Rogers, added some popular tunes and stylish dance numbers to the show. In addition, other hit songs of the day were inserted and "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" was sung by Irene Dunne, who played opposite Randolph Scott as the romantic leads. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II joined forces to create Very Warm For May in November of 1939. With the help of director Vincente Minnelli, the book was revised during tryouts by Max Gordon; perhaps this was part of the reason the show did not enjoy a long run. However, one song was embraced by the public at its debut: "All The Things You Are." Although Kern continued to write for films in Hollywood, Very Warm For May was his last Broadway score. Future film star June Allyson, who had first performed on Broadway in a musical revue called Sing Out the News in 1938, claimed her first appearance in a book musical with Very Warm for May. Rodgers and Hammerstein were doing so well just three years after they began working together that they began producing shows by others. In May of 1946, they opened Annie Get Your Gun. The idea for the show came from Dorothy Fields, who wanted to create a show for her friend Ethel Merman. Fields and her brother Herbert wrote the book for the show. Rodgers and Hammerstein selected Jerome Kern to write the music, but Kern died before he began work on the project. His replacement was more than adequate, since the score was provided by Irving Berlin. Some of Berlin's greatest hits were introduced in this show, including "The Girl That I Marry," "(There's No Business Like) Show Business" and "Anything You Can Do." The show also further ensconced Merman in the role of "Queen of the Musicals." In January of 1986, a four-singer musical-cum-concert called Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood opened. One of the singers was Elisabeth Welch (1904 - 2003). Welch was then appearing in her third Broadway Musical. It had been 58 years since her debut in Blackbirds of 1928 and 55 years since she closed in another revue called The New Yorkers. Her appearance in Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood earned her a Tony nomination as Best Featured Actress in a Musical. The first professional compositions for the theatre by Jerome Kern were “Wine, Wine” and “To the End of the World Together”. Both songs were interpolated into two productions of An English Daisy, the first at the Globe Theatre in Boston during December of 1903 and later in a Joe Weber and Lew Fields New York City presentation of the same show in January of 1904.
|
After a one-year road trip, A Trip to Chinatown first appeared in New York City on November 9, 1891. With a 657-performance run, it was so popular that 30 years passed before another musical, Irene, had a longer run. The show offered at least two standards from its score. The libretto and lyrics were by Charles Hoyt and the music was by Percy Gaunt (1852 - 1896). They wrote "After The Ball," which appeared in the show at inception. Their popular song "The Bowery" was added during out-of-town tours after the New York City run. When Jerome Kern was creating the music for Show Boat in the late 1920s, he decided to use "period" songs in the show, which was partially set around the turn of the century. The songs he used were "After The Ball" and "Goodbye My Lady Love" by Chicagoan Joe Howard (1867 - 1961), which Howard wrote in 1904.