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11 | Yip’s Case Study of Finian’s Rainbow After Bloomer Girl opened, there was a lull in Yip Harburg’s musical career as compared with the previous years. Besides his political work, he wrote songs for the 1944 films Hollywood Canteen and Can’t Help Singing, the 1945 stage revue Blue Holiday, and the 1946 film Centennial Summer. But most important was his 1946 collaboration with colibrettist Fred Saidy and composer Burton Lane on Finian’s Rainbow. The musical opened on Broadway on January 10, 1947, and ran for 725 performances, closing on October 2, 1948. It won the first Tony Awards ever given for choreography (Michael Kidd) and acting (David Wayne), and six Donaldson Awards (established in honor of W. H. Donaldson, the founder of Billboard), including Best Musical and Best Book (Yip and Saidy). It is noteworthy that at the time, Finian’s Rainbow was one of those rare new musicals not based on a book or film. Finian’s Rainbow is a fun musical with serious human rights messages about people’s desire for wealth—whether it be gold, property, material goods, or even power—and the idiocy of racist ideologies and practices. The first theme, that of the quest for wealth, involves the story of Finian McLonergan, an Irishman with an ingenious idea about how to get the riches he has desired but never had. He decides to steal the leprechauns’ crock of gold, and with his daughter Sharon in tow, to flee to the US state of “Missitucky” and plant the crock near Fort Knox, where it will certainly reproduce itself. An extra bonus is the three wishes that come with the crock. Once settled in Rainbow Valley, Missitucky, where Finian obtains a small plot of land, he and Sharon become embroiled in the town’s affairs. Sharon falls in love with sharecropper and would-be organizer Woody Mahoney, and, with Finian’s help, immediately starts planning her life with him. In the meantime, Og, a leprechaun, pursues Finian in order to recapture the crock before its magic disappears and Og becomes mortal. The second theme in this complex, yet amazingly easy-to-follow plot involves racist senator Billboard Rawkins, who wants to obtain Finian’s land because government geologists report there is gold on it. Case Study of Finian’s Rainbow | 143 Rawkins is inadvertently turned into a black man when Sharon, unknowingly standing over the ground where the crock is buried, wishes that he could understand what it’s like to be black in the racist South of 1947. To add to this, the report that gold has been discovered in Rainbow Valley leads the businessmen of the great mail-order company “Shears-Robust” to offer unlimited credit to the sharecroppers, who use the money for tools to farm tobacco and for useless luxuries. With many twists and turns, funny dialogue, and hummable tunes, Finian’s Rainbow ends happily except that Finian himself moves on in search of his next rainbow, leaving Sharon behind. Yip told Max Wilk that he “really loved” Finian’s Rainbow. “I was so wrapped up in it. The whole thing had come to me as two separate ideas which somehow worked together. I’d wanted to do a show about a fellow who turns black, down South; and I’d always loved the idea about a leprechaun with a pot of gold. And when Saidy and I had written it all—bang, it was there. It was right. No rewrites. Just the way I’d always wanted it to be.”1 (Actually, there was constant rewriting during the creation and production process.) To an audience at Northwood Institute in Dallas, Texas, Yip went into more detail: “It was written in Roosevelt’s time. For the first time, the black man was being given some recognition. So it occurred to me to do a show about [Senator Theodore] Bilbo and [Representative John] Rankin [of Mississippi]. The only way I could assuage my outrage against their bigotry was to have one of them turn black and live under his own [Jim Crow] laws and see how he felt about it. I was making a point to every white person: ‘Look—we use the word reincarnation . You might come back as a black, and here’s how you’ll be treated if you do. How do you like it?’ I said to myself, ‘Gee, this is a great idea; how can I make it into a musical?’ Well, it was...

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