Broadway to Hollywood: Part Two

By 1950, the relationship between Hollywood and Broadway had changed radically from the early days of talkies when Broadway material was digested by an uncertain Hollywood, eager for dialogue and musical material for the new medium. In the late 20s and early 30s, Hollywood not only bought Broadway product, but regularly brought Broadway talent to the West Coast, attempting to capitalize on the skills of performers already experienced in speaking, singing, and dancing, as well as using seasoned dialogue writers, composers, and lyricists. Some performers like Fred Astaire left Broadway for Hollywood, never to return. Others like Irving Berlin made money but went back to the theatre. Still others were burned by their Hollywood adventure and quickly went back to New York.

During this period, a Hollywood tendency developed to use Broadway material as little more than the merest skeleton on which to build a movie. Some composing teams like Rodgers & Hart routinely saw their musicals filmed minus the vast majority of their songs, and often sporting new ones by other Hollywood writers.

There were exceptions, and in fact many straight plays found their way to Hollywood in surprisingly faithful adaptations, but these will be discussed later. Particularly as Hollywood looked to Broadway musicals for material in the early days, a certain disregard for the material seems notable. Broadway musicals were not taken particularly seriously as entities, and as such it was deemed appropriate to significantly revise or even overhaul the material for the movies.

The fact that Hollywood, in its early days, was so largely unfaithful to the Broadway material it chose to adapt, has meant that today, we remain at a remove from what the majority of those Broadway shows were. Like the preceding centuries of theatrical history, these ephemeral works dissipate with time, leaving behind only fragmented, skeletal indications of how they originally appeared. However, technological developments that would come into play in the next two decades would forever alter the lasting impression Broadway was able to make on the world, and in Hollywood.

The 1940s. Revolutions on Broadway.

The new style of acting that became known as "Method Acting" had deep roots. Though the term as it came to be known was developed first at The Group Theatre in the 1930s, the idea of a more "realistic" acting style had developed over centuries of stage performance. The experimental group of actors that made up The Group Theatre worked together until 1941 when the war led to the dissipation of the group. However, Lee Strasberg continued to teach and develop this style of acting which had its nominal basis in Stanislavki's turn-of-the-century work at The Moscow Art Theatre.

Coinciding with the foundation of The Actor's Studio in New York were the premiere works of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller who would each collaborate with director Elia Kazan and designer Jo Mielziner on productions which remain, today, some of the most famous in all American theatre history. Perhaps Marlon Brando's 1947 appearance as Stanley Kowlaski in the most famous Williams work, A Streetcar Named Desire, can be seen as the moment when an actor trained in "The Method" came to national prominence in a starring role first on Broadway and then on film.

All this was also in development just as Rodgers and Hammerstein's new brand of "musical play" was forever changing what the American musical would be. It is not likely a coincidence that this is also the period in which two important technological advances would significantly alter the reach of Broadway, particularly Broadway musicals.

In 1943, Oklahoma! made technological history with its highly influential cast album. The idea of the Original Cast Recording had been developing over the previous four decades as recording technology developed. Various musical stage works had left behind recordings of sorts, but prior to Oklahoma! only a handful of Broadway scores had been recorded in full with their original stage casts, orchestras, and arrangements.

As Oklahoma! was preparing for Broadway, a ban on recording new music was in effect. Musicians had been on strike from new recordings since the summer of 1942. While negotiations had continued with the various record labels, Jack Kapp at Decca Records, who had made several Broadway-related albums prior to that time, came to one of the earliest agreements allowing recording to resume, and soon produced the original cast recording of Oklahoma!. The recording was actually two volumes--two sets of albums. Several 78s were bound together in a book, the first volume comprising the majority of the score and major songs from the show, the second volume, appearing several months later, included the few remaining songs from the score not heard on the original volume. The two combined volumes created a comprehensive account of the entire set of songs from the musical as performed in the show by their original singers.

Oklahoma! was a Broadway phenomenon, becoming one of the longest-running musicals ever to play Broadway at that time. The appearance of the album allowed theatre-goers to take home and relive the theatre experience and it allowed those not lucky enough to obtain tickets to the sold-out show a representation of what they were missing in the theatre.

After Oklahoma!'s success on records, Decca, soon followed by the other record labels, began to regularly turn out Original Cast Recordings of Broadway shows, both hits and flops. This development has a two-fold impact on the history of the development of musical theatre.

Firstly, the reach of the records made of Broadway musicals was greater than any stage show could be. While every show was limited to the few hundred people a night who could experience the show in the theatre, a recording could go anywhere and be played at any time. In 1948, the premiere of the Long-Playing record at Columbia further revolutionized the music-listening experience of the average American. Now rather than a bulky album of heavy 78s, a single disc in a light-weight package could encompass close to an hour of music, perfect for the average length of a Broadway score. The Original Cast Recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific in 1949 was one of the new format's earliest successes. Now average Americans, most of them far away from New York and Broadway could actually hear what new Broadway scores sounded like as sung by their original New York stars years before a road company might play near enough to their town to see the show themselves.

Secondly, the cast recording serves a historical purpose for it allows us, today, to experience first hand a little of what these ephemeral musicals were like when they first appeared. In order to study the difference between what a Broadway musical was like on stage and what it was like when adapted to film, we must attempt to understand what that stage form actually was. One of the pitfalls of studying film adaptations of Broadway properties is to mistake the movie's representation of the material for the material itself. Lacking any other concrete representation of the stage work, the film becomes a substitute, which is often most misleading.

As the LP was making waves in the average American's experience of music-listening in the late 1940s, the revolution being created by the development and sudden overwhelming popularity of television also increased the national visibility of Broadway.

By the early 1950s, millions of American households had televisions. In that decade, much popular television was filmed and broadcast from New York and made use of New York writers, directors, and performers. Classical and contemporary theatre works were regularly performed on television, often with major New York stars (albeit, usually in highly abridged adaptations), and many New York playwrights created works specifically form the new medium.

Also on television, variety shows, particularly Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town and later The Ed Sullivan Show regularly brought performances from Broadway plays and musicals into the living rooms of millions of Americans. In 1954, when General Foods celebrated their own twenty-fifth anniversary with a Rodgers and Hammerstein tenth anniversary special, all three networks broadcast the show which included performances by original cast members and new performers from each of the duo's major stage works up to that time--and this was before any of the R&H titles had appeared on film. The staggering ratings the special brought in reflected an American culture for which the Broadway musical had become a center of popular culture.

Though this would perhaps be the zenith of the Broadway musical's cultural centrality, never again to be enjoyed after its slow dissipation in the 1960s, the many live stage performances as performed on television that survive today afford the historian the opportunity to witness many original stage productions as they appeared, in part, on Broadway with their original performers. Often these performances can be directly compared to the later film adaptations of the works they represented.

Still, it is important to recognize that theatre is an experience-based medium. Film and records can be replayed over and over, and though the physical material on which they are printed may deteriorate, the performances that are recorded are forever caught in that one moment captured. To experience any work in a theatre is to be part of a unique experience that will never happen again. Even a long-running Broadway musical which appears nightly over and over will be different each night. Even a single performance of a theatre work can be a vastly different experience for two different spectators, depending on where in the theatre he or she sits.

So whatever analysis I may do of Broadway works and their filmic representations, we must first recognize that in most cases, I will not be discussing a stage work that I personally witnessed. Whenever possible, I have studied performance footage, recordings, photographs, and reviews to help create a sense of what a show might actually have felt like, but the theatre remains an elusive ghost, forever disappearing.