Making Americans : Jews and the Broadway Musical

by Most, Andrea

• ISBN13: 9780674011656
• ISBN10: 0674011651
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-17
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

From 1925 to 1951--three chaotic decades of depression, war, and social upheaval--Jewish writers brought to the musical stage a powerfully appealing vision of America fashioned through song and dance. It was an optimistic, meritocratic, selectively inclusive America in which Jews could at once lose and find themselves--assimilation enacted onstage and off, as Andrea Most shows. This book examines two interwoven narratives crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century American culture: the stories of Jewish acculturation and of the development of the American musical. Here we delve into the work of the most influential artists of the genre during the years surrounding World War II--Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Dorothy and Herbert Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, and Richard Rodgers--and encounter new interpretations of classics such as The Jazz Singer, Whoopee, Girl Crazy, Babes in Arms, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific, and The King and I. Most's analysis reveals how these brilliant composers, librettists, and performers transformed the experience of New York Jews into the grand, even sacred acts of being American. Read in the context of memoirs, correspondence, production designs, photographs, and newspaper clippings, the Broadway musical clearly emerges as a form by which Jewish artists negotiated their entrance into secular American society. In this book we see how the communities these musicals invented and the anthems they popularized constructed a vision of America that fostered self-understanding as the nation became a global power.

Author Biography

Andrea Most is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Overture	1	(12)
Acting American
Jews, Theatricality, and Modernity	12	(20)
Cantors' Sons, Jazz Singers, and Indian Chiefs
The Invention of Ethnicity on the Musical Comedy Stage	32	(34)
Babes in Arms
The Politics of Theatricality during the Great Depression	66	(35)
``We Know We Belong to the Land''
The Theatricality of Assimilation in Oklahoma!	101	(18)
The Apprenticeship of Annie Oakley
Or, ``Doin' What Comes Natur'lly''	119	(34)
``You've Got to Be Carefully Taught''
The Politics of Race in South Pacific	153	(30)
Coda ``I Whistle a Happy Tune''	183	(20)
Notes	203	(38)
Credits	241	(6)
Index	247