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Two 1950s classics by Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls (1950) and The Most Happy Fella (1956), remain the toast of Broadway in the 1990s. Even those who love to hate Broadway musicals make an exception for Guys and Dolls and consider this show one of the most entertaining and perfect ever. The Most Happy Fella continues to boast the longest initial run, 678 performances, of any Broadway work prior to the 1980s that might claim an operatic rubric.

This chapter examines the female duet in the formally integrated musical that was typical in the 1950s: West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, and Wonderful Town. In the 1950s, most musicals used the format of a “book musical,” where the story, which typically followed a heterosexual romance (or two) to marriage, organized the musical. The songs essentially mapped the emotional journey of the musical, introduced characters, developed relationships, and conveyed the place, time, and tone of the show. This chapter argues that two women singing together, which occurs in most classic musicals, undermines the powerful heterosexual romance that propels traditional Broadway musicals. In a decade that was extremely conservative about gender roles, where marriage then motherhood was the unquestioned route for most white and middle-class women, the female duet offers a different form of intimacy and connection and alternative, proto-feminist roles for the singers.

Damon Runyon, a sportswriter, all-around journalist, and short-fiction retailer of the gamblers, girlfriends, crooks, freaks, and other denizens of the Broadway Tenderloin, became one of the leading mouthpieces of hot-town New York from the 1920s to the 1940s. When the early talkie crime melodramas began to give way to comic or pathetic crime dramas, there were a number of Hollywood adaptations of Runyon's tales. Yet they were all B-budget programmers, as if the movies didn't get Runyon's uniqueness and mistook him for a conventional yarnspinner. In the late 1940s, Broadway producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin, looking for a successor to their first and very successful effort, Frank Loesser's Where's Charley? (1948), chose Runyon's “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,” planning it not as a funny show but as a dark romance. This eventually resulted in the musical, Guys and Dolls, with not one but two exactly matched couples, their two stories ingeniously intertwined.

Joe Mankiewicz makes legendary films such as All About Eve, Julius Caesar, and Guys and Dolls during the 1950s. Tom's family moves to New York where Tom attends a private school on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Tom has his first drink at eleven with Humphrey Bogart on a film set. Joe finishes the decade with Suddenly, Last Summer while Tom attends Exeter then Yale. His mother's mental problems continue culminating in her suicide.

This chapter turns to Miami and discusses the role of Cubans and Cuban popular culture in the city. It examines the social clubs Círculo Cubano and Juventud Cubana, and the nightclubs Tropicana and Barra Guys and Dolls, whose events and activities illustrate the early emergence of “Cuban Miami” in the context of the ideology and racialized practices of Pan-Americanism, and against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution. Through the Spanish-language press, the Cuban groups in the city also demonstrated an early instance of pan-Lantino/a unity in the struggle for social justice. During their stay in Miami, many black Cuban artists found themselves in a Jim Crow city that was protective of its black-white model of racial classification but inconsistent in its treatment and categorization of Cubans and Latino/as of color.

This chapter focuses on the musicals of the 1950s. The era was marked by the death of the revue with the advent of television; the collaborations between Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green; the expansion of musical power and juggling of the formal conventions; and classic musicals that are infinitely revivable without revision such as Guys and Dolls (1950), My Fair Lady (1956), and West Side Story (1957).

The chapter starts with an examination of the performers in musical films—the successes, surprises, and failures. It considers this from the ego of Al Jolson to the generous partnering of Fred Astaire. It also looks at the tense magnetism of Judy Garland and the deceptive sunniness of Doris Day. This chapter looks at the stars of “vehicles”—Bing Crosby, Betty Grable, Elvis Presley and the failures of Kate Smith and Mariah Carey, and the frustrations of Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, and Kate Smith. Guys and Dolls (1955) as an example of four varieties of musical performance: stardom (Brando), miscasting (Sinatra), unspontaneous professionalism (Blaine), unexpected glory (Simmons).

This chapter traces the history of the 1952 revival of Pal Joey, from the Starlight Operetta production in Dallas (1949), to a successful summer-stock tour, to the revival. Particular attention will be paid to records, recording technology, and the works-oriented model in cast recordings, which helped make these stage productions viable. The main creative forces behind the revival, in addition to Rodgers and O’Hara, were Jule Styne, producer, and Robert Alton, who supervised the production, as well as the boyish Harold Lang, who danced in the shadow of Gene Kelly as Joey. The critical reaction to the revival was, arguably, what made Pal Joey a subsequently canonic show. It also revealed a good deal about the current fidelities of the musical theater, and how the discourse surrounding it reflected larger concerns about art during the period.

This chapter focuses on Hollywood's treatment of Broadway musicals. Hollywood initially purchased stage properties with the express intention of altering them in various ways. Then, suddenly, it launched a cycle of stage shows filmed with respect—Annie Get Your Gun (1950), Call Me Madam (1953), Kiss Me, Kate (1953), and Guys and Dolls (1955). As Hollywood pursued this semi-purist approach, it developed a set of Commandments for adaptations from the stage, adhered to more often than not: I: Thou shalt cast by talent rather than by fame, if practical with the original Broadway star. II: Thou shalt retain the original narrative structure and all or most of the score, without interpolations. III: Thou mayest interpolate, but thou shalt let the original creators make the new numbers.