Musical Theater and
Social Protest
Feminism and Racism According to Broadway
My Thesis…
 Since musical theater is a social document, sexism
and racism can be examined in musicals in the context
of their times – from the era of Rodgers and
Hammerstein to the popular, more contemporary
Wicked. Exploring how sexism and racism are
exposed, perpetuated, and protested illuminates how
theater is a vehicle not just to reflect, but also to
transform, society.
“Our Musicals, Ourselves”
 When I began writing for musical theatre, I firmly believed that
what I chose to put onstage had the potential of changing
people’s lives. I wrote from the belief that plays and musicals
can foster in their audiences a feeling of shared community,
thereby combating personal isolation and fear. In theatrical
settings, people become receptive, and important lessons
about life can be genially imparted from the stage (Jones 1)”
 Musicals help us understand the context of our time and our history
 They are deliberately made to
appeal to the broadest possible
segment of the population SO
they tell us a lot about ourselves
and our culture
BUT…
 What about musicals that only entertain/
amuse
patrons?
 EVEN they reveal a social/political slice of life
 ALL contain assumptions, biases, aspirations, and
racial/sexual attitudes when first written and staged
 Musicals are…
 Social documents that reveal deeply-held cultural
attitudes and beliefs
 Theatrical vehicles to TRANSFORM (not just report) the
times
Who’s the Broadway Audience?
 Generally white/middle class
 20th century – not yet extremely affluent
 After WWII – Skyrocketing ticket prices = Broadway as
elitist
Who’s Broadway For?
 Result of rising ticket prices?
 “Audiences have become wealthier and older. With
fewer young people exposed to musicals, the
potential audience for musical theatre has begun to
shrink. Furthermore, African Americans only
comprise a significant portion of Broadway musical
audiences for black-oriented shows, whether by
black, white, or mixed-race creative teams” (Jones
3).
SO…
 Socially relevant shows mirrored concerns and
lifestyles of middle-class white Americans (the primary
audience)
 WHY?
 Even if the show is brilliant, if it doesn’t entertain its
audience it won’t survive to make back its investment
Examples
 Rodgers and Hammerstein’s:
 South Pacific
 Annie Get Your Gun
 West Side Story
 The Wiz
 Wicked
Revisionism
 New York Times article, in response to “Annie Get Your
Gun” revision…
 “When today’s audiences pay to gaze at the past, they
want a lot more than golden memories; they want to feel
as if a tried-and-true form speaks to the contemporary
world”
 “Musicals – perhaps because they are essentially period
pieces tied more closely to the pop music and cultural
and commercial trends of a given moment – usually do
not prove as elastic”
1999 Revised
“Annie Get Your Gun”
 From New York Times …
 How much can you alter “Annie Get Your Gun” before it is no
longer “Annie Get Your Gun”? Does a politically corrected
Indian character make it a better musical, or simply more
palatable to a wider audience? Is the process of
reconfiguration a refinement or a whitewash?
 “Revision craze” = “purging of material involving racial and
sexual stereotypes, an ethnic cleansing of an earlier era’s
biases
 Both “Peter Pan” and “Annie Get Your Gun” revivals got rid of
nonsensical Indian dialogues
 All dependent on time – “What one generation views as cutting
edge becomes the next generation’s tired convention.” And
many revised shows will become revised.
“Annie Get Your Gun” Music
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzrOMXOJwjE
 (I’m an Indian, Too”)
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B_SxndVzyw
 (The Girl That I Marry)
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGB7yTZEZE4
 (You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun)
South Pacific

“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” – not written as a
message song BUT most explicit statement of concern about
learned biases

ALSO the potential interracial marriage could not be
completed because the male died at the end – did he die only
to satisfy censors?

According to John Bush Jones
 “In 1949 it was one thing for a Broadway show to advocate in
theory for interracial harmony and even relationships, but it
would have been quite another to let the latter actually
happen” (152)

WAS the integrity of his vision compromised for the sake of
commercial success?

Usually an antagonist is person – BUT was no longer an
actual person, but rather ingrained prejudice and racial bias
within characters
South Pacific Music
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgzvTHsOxSQ
 (There Ain’t Nothing Like a Dame)
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzu8ZxBHMWk
 (Gonna Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair)
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAZ8yOFFbAc
 (You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught)
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZSt1pgjQdk
 Barbara Streisand – You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught AND
Children Will Listen (1:16)
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwn1QOWWCtg
 Westboro Baptist Church example
West Side Story (1957)
 “West Side Story” is important since it achieves
relevant statements through “Musical’s dramatic
action and an occasional line or two of lyrics or
dialogue, with no overt preaching”
 First musical to seriously question universality of the
American Dream (claimed for BOTH sides it was more of
a nightmare)
 AND showed the prejudice/acceptance motif
BUT…in West Side Story…
 Early stage versions and film have mainly non-Latino actors
in Hispanic roles
 Updated versions have all-Latino actors and songs sung in
Spanish
 According to NPR, original stage director Jerry
Robbins:
 Brought Method-acting technique to the show
 “Deliberately tried to foment animosity, antagonism, between the
two opposing gangs, both on stage and off stage. They weren’t
allowed to eat together. They weren’t supposed to socialize”
West Side Story’s Importance
 As mainstream pop culture, the show brought
awareness, to “huge movement of social change”
 At first no one would back it since it was:




Too depressing
Too advanced
Too many tritones
Too many words in the lyrics
 Musically, it is this “tritone” quality that indicates
indicates instability, restlessness, and
tension
West Side Story Music
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhSKk-cvblc
 (America – film version)
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxfOncYiag
 (A Boy Like That – film version)
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BQMgCy-n6U
 (Somewhere)
Civil Rights Era on Broadway
 At first Civil Rights were absent from Broadway…
 BUT in the early ‘70s there were primarily black shows
 The Wiz


Completely black mainstream musical in the 1970s
Reinventing “The Wizard of Oz” to access the popularity of “Motown, Soul Train,
Afrocentric fashion, and black urban movies”
 At first…mostly white audience critical/apathetic
 BUT bypassed traditional press campaign to TV commercial getting black
children to ask parents to “ease on down the road” called Broadway
 SO word of mouth got the black community there and “The Wiz” ran 1,672
performances and then a national tour
 NOW there was a black audience for Broadway shows that before had not been
present
The Wiz’s Impact
 The Wiz motivated the formation and enactment of a
community of black theatergoers and critics who defied
the hegemony of white critics and whose resistance
underlined the white perspective of mainstream papers
and negated
the presumption that a
white
perspective is objective or
universal” (Wolf, 115)
The Wiz Music
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUrsfrBTbZc
 Original “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFwAqYBDr2A
 (Ease on Down the Road)
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVIHBdTuVGc
 (The Wiz Live trailer)
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAx-y__4n7w
 (Can’t You Feel the Brand New Day – political)
Wicked…Subversive?
 Can shows as popular as “Wicked” also be considered
“protest” while still appealing to such a wide variety of
people
 Oz
 Women as rulers of
AND bad societies
 Women chose political
over love/getting
plot
good
activism
the guy/romantic
Wicked
Wizard – where I’m from, we believe all sorts of things
that aren’t true. We call it…history.
 (One of the comments was – you could call that
politics)
 A man’s called a traitor or a liberator
 A rich man’s a thief or philanthropist
 Is one a crusader or ruthless invader?
Wicked Music
 “Popular” – social commentary on how to behave so
others like you
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4rpG-dipYA
 “Wonderful” – commentary on what “history” says
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c4JuzT_X5E
 “Defying Gravity” – feminist anthem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g4ekwTd6Ig
Works Cited

John Bush Jones, Our musicals, ourselves : a social history of the American musical theater


Wolf, Stacy “Changed For Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical”


“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”: Reflections on War, Imperialism, and Patriotism in America’s South Pacific

http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4811&context=etd


“Civil Rights Era on Broadway”

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/essays/civil-rights-era-on-broadway/


New York Times – “Theater; Rewrite a Classic Musical? Whatever Works, Goes”

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/24/theater/theater-rewrite-a-classic-musical-whatever-works-goes.html?pagewanted=all
Questions
 Can music be a form of social protest/social
commentary?
 If Broadway shows are trying to make money and
appeal to a wide variety of audiences, can shows ever
truly push the boundaries of social convention?
 Can a musical’s songs have life outside the context of
the show itself?