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This chapter surveys the early professional careers of Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock in New York during the 1950s. Harnick wrote music for television and for cabaret singers. His earliest songs for Broadway appeared in the revues New Faces of 1952 (1952), Two’s Company (1952), and John Murray Anderson’s Almanac (1953). He wrote lyrics for his first book show, Horatio (1954), with composer David Baker and librettist Ira Wallach. He was also on the creative staff of Green Mansions, an arts-oriented resort in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Bock and his lyricist-partner Larry Holofcener wrote music for television in the early 1950s, notably Sid Caesar’s Admiral Broadway Revue and Your Show of Shows. During summers they were on the songwriting staff of Camp Tamiment in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Bock made his Broadway debut with three songs in the revue Catch a Star! (1955), then wrote his first Broadway show, Mr. Wonderful (1956), with Larry Holofcener and George David Weiss.

This chapter follows the careers of Bock and Harnick through the early 1960s, when they collaborated with writer Joseph Masteroff and director Harold Prince on an adaptation of Ernst Lubitsch’s film The Shop Around the Corner. The resulting Broadway musical, She Loves Me, was a box office failure but a critical success, recognized for the warmth and ingenuity of its songs and its artful integration of music and drama. The show has grown in stature, especially among the theatrical community, since the 1963 premiere and was revived on Broadway in 1993. Bock and Harnick also wrote seven songs during this period for To Broadway With Love, a musical extravaganza produced at the 1964 World’s Fair.

This chapter focuses on the show business career of Dorothy's father Lew Fields. Fields and childhood friend Joe Weber first developed was a patchwork of entertaining bits—songs, dances, and humor, both verbal and physical. For five years, until 1889, they moved around the country as members of assorted traveling variety shows. In 1890, when they were twenty-three, Weber and Fields felt ready to produce and manage their own traveling show. By May 1896, Weber and Fields were playing at the Olympia Theater on Broadway between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth Streets. Their success was a reaffirmation of the belief that the team could entertain audiences not only on the Lower East Side where they had spent their childhood or touring across the nation where they had spent much of their adolescence, but also on Broadway.

This chapter focuses on Fields' and McHugh's Broadway career. The person who launched McHugh and Fields on Broadway was Lew Leslie, who hired them to write the score for Blackbirds of 1928. Between 1928 and 1930, McHugh and Fields supplied songs for several other revues. Ziegfeld's Midnite Frolic had “stars from the Ziegfeld shows and Paul Whiteman and his entire orchestra,” according to one advertisement. Ben Marden's Palais Royale Revue starred Ethel Waters. They also wrote for a revue for Ben Marden's Riviera. None of the songs for these revues became standards. Nevertheless, McHugh and Fields became a songwriting team to reckon with.

This chapter focuses on the changes in Dorothy's life and career in the late 1930s. In 1938, Dorothy Fields returned to New York. With this move, she was not only changing place of residence and career orientation; she was also changing her marital status. On July 14, 1938, one day before her thirty-fourth birthday, Dorothy Fields married Eli Lahm. From a position of greater independence and greater sense of self, she was able to begin a new stage of her life, one that would play out on Broadway and bring forth some of her most enduring successes.

This chapter focuses on Dorothy's return to Broadway. The Broadway to which Dorothy Fields returned in 1939 had not yet bottomed out financially. Every year in that decade saw fewer productions on Broadway than did the year before. Producers of shows in 1939 had hoped that with the increased number of visitors to New York to see the World's Fair, ticket sales on Broadway would go up, but in fact they went down. Nevertheless, many composers and lyricists who had tasted what Hollywood had to offer in the first half of the 1930s found themselves carried on a return current to New York.

This chapter focuses on the changes in Dorothy Fields's career and personal life in the late 1930s and early 1940s. After her marriage, the first major change in Dorothy's personal life was the birth of her son, David Lahm on December 12, 1940. The next change in Dorothy's life, equal and opposite one might say, was the death of her father. On October 29, 1941, Let's Face It opened on Broadway; this was Dorothy's debut as a Broadway librettist. By 1943, Joseph, Herbert, and Dorothy Fields collectively had five shows running on Broadway—My Sister Eileen, Let's Face It, Junior Miss, The Doughgirls, and Herbert and Dorothy's new work with Cole Porter, Something for the Boys.

This chapter focuses on Dorothy's return to writing lyrics via the new musical, Up in Central Park. She and Herb wrote the libretto together, as they had for their previous three shows. The composer was an old friend but a new collaborator: Sigmund Romberg. Up in Central Park is a mixture of fact and fiction. Similar to stage and screen biographies—musical or otherwise — its story was essentially fiction with an anchor in history. In this it differs from Oklahoma! or Carousel, which are also set in the past, but without characters who had actually made news in their time.

This chapter focuses on the remaking of Dorothy and Herb Fields' Broadway musicals into films. The same year Universal released Mexican Hayride, it released Up in Central Park. As far as one can infer from the advertising trailer, the success of the stage version was the basis for marketing the film: after “over 1,000 performances,” here was a “picture everybody can enjoy.” In fact, Up in Central Park played on Broadway for 504 performances; the “over 1,000” may have been standard Hollywood inflation, or perhaps it counted regional performances as well. Annie Get Your Gun triumphed as one of the most popular films of 1950. Although its production budget was enormous — around $3 million — it still made money for MGM. Starting in 1951, Dorothy Fields wrote lyrics for several films that were not remakes of Broadway plays.

This chapter focuses on Dorothy's life and career in the early 1950s. Between 1950 and 1954, in addition to writing lyrics for four movies, she worked on three Broadway musicals. Arms and the Girl (1950), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951), and By the Beautiful Sea (1954) were all set between fifty and two hundred years in the past. That is, all of these musicals continue in the Americana tradition of the Fieldses' two previous musicals, Up in Central Park and Annie Get Your Gun.

This chapter begins with a tap challenge between Gregory Hines and veteran hoofers Sammy Davis Jr., Jimmy Slyde, Harold Nicholas, Arthur Duncan, and Sandman Sims in the 1989 film Tap. The movie culminated the decade in which tap dance came back with a rhythm-cutting vengeance—on Broadway, in the movies, on television, and on festival and concert stages. If tap had “died” in the 1950s and 1960s, then the sheer number of 1980s tap-dancing musicals, and musicals with tap-dancing stars, on and off Broadway, was staggering proof of tap’s resurrection. The 1980s saw the meteoric rise of Gregory Hines as rhythm tap’s most venerable star who would carry the tradition forward as an artist, producer, promoter, and ambassador of this American vernacular dance form. Newly emerging women in tap organized festivals, founded and directed companies, choreographed new tap works, codified techniques, and brought more women onto the concert stage.

This introductory chapter considers the 2008 Broadway revival of South Pacific (created by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II). The enthusiastic reception of this production suggests the show’s unabated ability to entertain as well as its continued relevance to problematic issues in American culture. Further, this production has reinstated much material cut from the original production before it opened in 1949 and thus provides an example of a musical as an “open text,” or a text that has changing content and meaning due to its not having a definitive version. This in turn invites consideration of earlier forms of the show during its developmental period and in subsequent productions, and it supports the investigation of drafts and sketches for the show that were rejected for various reasons. After stating the purpose of the book, which is to investigate the musical’s thematic concerns and how they were developed or altered, the chapter concludes with a summary of subsequent chapters.

This concluding chapter features a discussion of productions of South Pacific subsequent to the original Broadway run. Several of the productions, including a national tour starring Erin Dilly and Michael Nouri that was in rehearsal during the events of 9/11, reveal aspects of the show previously unobserved, and the latest revival, which Bartlett Sher directed for Lincoln Center and which is the first Broadway production since the original, is extremely relevant to current events. The chapter concludes with an assessment of South Pacific as a musical from its era and as an ongoing cultural document that continues to shed light on issues of race, gender, and foreign relations in postwar American culture.

This chapter begins with the “Jimtown Fisticuffs” challenge dance between Flournoy E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles in the 1921 Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle black musical comedy Shuffle Along, which launched the Jazz Age and black rhythm tap dancing on the Broadway stage. Jazz dancing was the driving engine of Shuffle Along, the source of visual, visceral, and aural excitement, especially as executed by the all-female chorus of Jazz Jasmines, who were consistently lauded for their unison dancing and rhythmic precision. Jazz tap dancing continued to ignite the rhythmic revolution in the 1920s with such black musicals as Put and Take, Strut Miss Lizzie, Runnin’ Wild, Dixie to Broadway, and Blackbirds of 1928, with its inventive and complex manipulations of time—and time stepping.

Broadway musicals were a ready source for the early musicals, and RKO's smash Rio Rita led the way. Some of the adaptations were close, while others strayed wildly from the originals. Among the Broadway stars repeating their stage roles were Irene Bordoni in Paris, and Ziegfeld diva Marilyn Miller in Sally. Such films as No, No Nanette bore less resemblance to the stage success than it did to the thriving backstage genre. Composers DeSylva, Brown and Henderson found their works transferred more successfully than did Rodgers and Hart or Cole Porter. By the time of the most lavish Broadway adaptation, Whoopee!, musicals were in decline, yet with Eddie Cantor, Busby Berkeley, and Technicolor it scored a notable success.