Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (review)

During the past few years, Stacy Wolf, David Savran, and D. A. Miller have been influential in elevating musical theatre scholarship by applying new historiographical approaches to the form. In her first book, Making Americans, Andrea Most uses a literary criticism/cultural studies methodology to weave the story of the mid-century Broadway musical with the history of Jewish assimilation during the melting pot. She argues that Jewish writers and performers constructed their own narrative of what it meant to be American; in the process, they did much to shape perceived notions of American identity from the 1920s through the early 1950s.

In assessing why Jews played such a vigorous role in the development of the musical, Most begins with a shrewd discussion of doubleness. Jews behaved differently toward gentiles from the way they did toward each other. As such, their everyday life was a theatrical performance. The author argues that it was not a large leap from the teaming ghettos of New York to the Broadway stage, which was run on the basis of a meritocracy in which the best and most talented succeeded. After outlining the theoretical underpinnings of the book—including her theory that melting pot musicals exhibited an "assimilationist effect" as opposed to Brecht's alienation effect—Most examines seven musicals in depth, showing how they reflected the ongoing story of Jewish assimilation in terms of shifting cultural moments: Whoopee! (1928), Girl Crazy (1930), Babes in Arms (1937), Oklahoma! (1943), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), South Pacific (1949), and The King and I (1951). She distinguishes between the presentational, vaudeville elements inherent in the first two and the character-driven quality of the post-Oklahoma! shows. South Pacific becomes a strategy for negotiating Jewish liberalism during the McCarthy era. The King and I historicizes the story of Jewish immigration as the Westernization of the East. It is the King, unable to break through his racial Otherness, who "like Moses, with whom he is obsessed—must die without ever seeing the Promised Land" (184). Most sees Babes in Arms as a transition piece; the by now clichéd play-within-a-play framework becomes not only an act of resistance but also a statement about the social purpose of theatre in 1930s America.

All this is fresh, new, and insightful. Of the seven musicals she discusses, however, three are by Rodgers and Hammerstein, one by Rodgers and Hart, and one produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein. This is hardly a compelling cross-section of Jewish contributors. Moreover, the libretti for the remaining two are by gentiles: William Anthony McGuire, Jack McGowan, and Guy Bolton, none of whom Most acknowledges. This is troubling in a book that basically relies on close textual readings of seven scripts (and stage directions), rather than on performance and reception. Bolton, in collaboration with P. G. Wodehouse and the Jewish composer Jerome Kern, was the librettist for the Princess Theatre shows, usually considered forerunners of modern musical comedy but ignored here. In claiming that Jews created musical comedy in the late 1920s, Most seems to be stacking the evidence.

McGuire was one of the most prolific librettists/directors of 1920s musical comedy. His omission signals another problem. Jews developed, rather than invented, musical comedy, and they continued an already existing tradition of comic ethnoracial appropriation that was introduced to the musical comedy stage as far back as the late 1870s by Irish performer/writers such as Harrigan and Hart. Most differentiates between the "new" assimilationist strategies of Eddie Cantor and Willie Howard and Jewish blackface in The Jazz Singer. As partial evidence, she inexplicably and incorrectly dismisses Al Jolson's career as "largely over by the time The Jazz Singer was produced" (32). The multidisguises, masks, and fluid comic impersonations of Cantor and Howard date back to vaudeville and minstrelsy. Certainly, she gives Jolson short shrift by completely ignoring his pre-film Broadway career as "Gus" in the Winter Garden shows, in which he constantly appropriated a variety...