The Mikado to Matilda OTHER ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD BOOKS BY THOMAS S. HISCHAK Boy Loses Girl: Broadway’s Librettists The Disney Song Encyclopedia, with Mark A. Robinson The Encyclopedia of Film Composers Enter the Players: New York Actors in the Twentieth Century Enter the Playmakers: Directors and Choreographers on the New York Stage The Jerome Kern Encyclopedia 1939: Hollywood’s Greatest Year 1927: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the the Jazz Age’s Greatest Year Noel, Tallulah, Cole, and Me: A Memoir of Broadway’s Golden Age by John C. Wilson, co-edited with Jack Macauley Off-Broadway Musicals since 1919: From Greenwich Village Follies to The Toxic Avenger The 100 Greatest American and British Animated Feature Films The 100 Greatest American Plays Theatre as Human Action: An Introduction to Theatre Arts Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical When It Went to Hollywood The Woody Allen Encyclopedia The Mikado to Matilda British Musicals on the New York Stage Thomas S. Hischak ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hischak, Thomas S., 1951– author. Title: The Mikado to Matilda : British musicals on the New York stage / Thomas S. Hischak. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “In The Mikado to Matilda: British Musicals on the New York Stage, Thomas Hischak provides an overview of British musicals that made their way to Broadway, covering their entire history up to the present day”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019049304 (print) | LCCN 2019049305 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538126066 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538126073 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Musicals—Great Britain—History and criticism. | Musicals— Performances—New York (State)—New York—History. Classification: LCC ML1731 .H57 2020 (print) | LCC ML1731 (ebook) | DDC 792.6/45097471—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049304 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049305 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. For Kurt Gänzl, whose decades of research and writing about British musicals made this book possible Contents Preface: Andrew Lloyd Who? ix Acknowledgments xiii Chronological List of Musicals xv A Brief History of the British Musical on the New York Stage xix THE MUSICALS, A–Z 1 Guide to Recordings, Films, and Videos 295 Bibliography 315 Index 319 About the Author 331 vii Preface Andrew Lloyd Who? Consider this fairy tale: Once upon a time there was no such thing as the musical theatre until the Americans invented it. In the late 1800s and the early 1900s there were lots of old-fashioned musicals with old-fashioned songs, but audiences didn’t know any better and enjoyed them. Then Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, and other musical geniuses wrote better songs, but their musicals are hardly ever done anymore, except Anything Goes and Annie Get Your Gun. Then along came Rodgers and Hammerstein, who brought a lot of class and a lot of serious stuff to the musi- cal, but that was all right because there were still musical comedies like Guys and Dolls and Damn Yankees, so the musical was doing fine. By the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, some musicals started getting really serious, but that was mostly Stephen Sondheim’s fault, and at least there was Annie and La Cage aux Folles. Then a weird thing happened: the British starting making good musicals. And they were very popular on Broadway, which was more than a little upsetting, be- cause it was like the British showing up at Lexington and Concord all over again. Suddenly, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera were the biggest hits on Broadway, which didn’t seem kosher. And some of these British musicals weren’t really Brit- ish, like the French-British Miss Saigon or the Scandinavian-British Momma Mia! Luckily, this invasion lost steam, because even Andrew Lloyd Webber ran out of hit musicals. By the turn of the new century, there were fewer London musicals. The Producers and Wicked opened, and the big hits were American once again. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, there was the occasional Billy Elliot and such, but most of the shows were American, and some were even hip-hop and rap, but that was okay because it reflected America’s national diversity. The musical theatre was saved. And it lived happily ever after. While there is hardly any truth to this fairy tale, it is the scenario that many American theatregoers actually believe. It would take several books to untangle all the inaccuracies in such a fable, but this book aims to clear up one widely held misconception: the role of the British musical in the American theatre. Just as the only theatre in the colonies was British theatre, so too, just about all of the musicals seen on Broadway for many years were from London. Ballad operas, comic operettas, and musical comedies from Great Britain filled the New York theatres for decades in the nineteenth century and continued to do so up through World War One. ix