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Besides its role as a narrative agent, music has been featured in television to pleasure its audience, creating what Carolyn Abbate would call a “drastic” experience. However, the pleasures of television music are often highly mediated and restrained, permitting the audience to derive culturally based pleasure (what Barthes would call plaisir) from the music but not a more visceral, primordial pleasure (jouissance). This chapter surveys the musical variety show and situation comedies that employ music. While musical variety shows have served as promotional vehicles for artists whom TV audiences find amenable (Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Andy Williams), throughout television's history many situation comedies have been presented as mini‐musicals in which the narrative action of the program is interrupted by a musical presentation on‐screen. Programs produced by Desilu Studios in the 1950s and 1960s, such as I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Andy Griffith Show, often imitated the Hollywood film musical by featuring musical presentations of a show‐within‐a‐show to showcase musical talent. Such scenes would interrupt the narrative flow of the episode, and so some narrative pretense would be made to accommodate the musical interruption.

This chapter begins with the tap challenge between Baby Laurence Jackson and Freddie James in Harlem. It then launches into the 1930s in which “tap was everywhere.” The decade that saw more tap dance acts than any other in the twentieth century was also the most segregated. Thirty years after the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had ruled for “separate but equal” status for black Americans in public transportation, the Jim Crow laws had become an institutionalized and codified practice. This chapter looks at the segregated arenas for tap in the 1930s—at the Lafayette and Apollo Theaters and the Cotton Club, which featured such black musical artists as the Nicholas Brothers, Buck and Bubbles, and Cora LaRedd; within Hollywood musicals starring, among others, Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell; and in sites of interracial performance in Hollywood musicals.

This chapter provides a revisionist history of the postclassical musical that makes room for early hip hop-oriented cinema, and significantly alters theories about the trajectory of the generic development of American musical film. It argues that hip hop culture made its biggest entrance into mainstream media through the narrative format of the musical. These productions envisioned a progressive postclassical “music man” who appropriated city spaces (and in some cases enacted important social transformations) through the various performative outlets of hip hop culture. This is a crucial development to bring to light since classical-era Hollywood musicals have habitually denied African American performers and other people of color the transcendent abilities of the “music man” embodied by hoofers such as Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.

Shakespeare’s comedies of love are much more dependent on musical effects than nowadays meets the eye, since the texts make brief references to many popular songs that would, in the performances, have been rendered. This changes the tone of his romantic comedies significantly, as they come to depend as much on interpolated music as verbal exchanges. This was another facet of the structure of his genre that fed into the Hollywood musical, either in its ‘backstage’ version or musical comedy. A wide range of musicals are analysed to develop the argument of this influence.

Chapter 11 examines the aesthetic value of novelty in a genre’s evolution by tracing the history of the convention that characters in Hollywood musicals spontaneously burst into song without realistic motivation. The convention emerged in 1929 and largely vanished by the end of the 1950s. The chapter studies how studio-era filmmakers developed novel conventions that exploited the aesthetic possibilities of song in cinema. The eventual loss of the convention created new constraints on the uses of song, but it also enabled new aesthetic possibilities. Post-studio-era filmmakers transformed the convention, exposed it, and reclaimed it in ways that added novelty to spectators’ aesthetic experience.

This chapter focuses on some of the earliest Hollywood musicals. It details the stories and people behind films such as The Jazz Singer (1927), The Singing Fool (1928), The Broadway Melody (1929), The Dance of Life (1929), King of Jazz (1930), and Viennese Nights (1930). It highlights two trends paramount in the movie musical's first few years. One trend favors “performance” numbers. The other trend held the Harms group of Broadway's style setters in suspicion. They were experimental to a fault—and experience had taught Hollywood that experiments tend to fail. Another group of songwriters, the composers and lyricists of Tin Pan Alley, were much more agreeable. Their works had mass appeal, from the jaded first audience in the cultural capitals to the third audience in small towns, suspicious of any attempt to change their lives by artistic means.

This chapter analyzes some of the more recent Hollywood musicals, including Grease (1978), Hair (1979), Annie (1982), Fantasticks (1995) The Phantom of the Opera (2004), Les Misérables (2012), and Into the Woods (2014). It then addresses the following questions: How well did the Harms group colonize Hollywood to exploit the unique advantage of the camera? Did any of the Broadway songwriters in this study create a movie career as distinguished as their stage career? And has a Hollywood version of a stage show ever improved on the original? It argues that not a single one of the Broadway songwriters conquered Hollywood in any real sense, because movies are not a writer's medium the way theatre is. The American musical—at least from something like 1925 on—was written for New York, with the strong possibility of a post-Broadway tour to first- and second-audience towns.

This chapter focuses on the Hollywood musicals of composer and lyricist Irving Berlin. When Berlin began his association with Hollywood, he was not just a writer of (countless) song hits but a maker of musicals. And he took an active interest in every aspect of production, from the concept to the casting. The chapter considers films such as Warner Brothers' Mammy (1930) and United Artists' Puttin' On the Ritz (1930). In Mammy Berlin created a generic Al Jolson number, “Let Me Sing and I'm Happy.” Puttin' On the Ritz gave Berlin more of a showcase, though he contributed only three numbers and had to contend with egocentric star, Harry Richman. Berlin also wrote three Astaire-Rogers films: Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Carefree (1938).

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.

This chapter focuses on the musicals of songwriting teams Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Loewe. Rodgers and Hammerstein's influence on Broadway was immense. Their format of “musical play” was all the rage at one point, and even daffy musical comedy became rationalized. Some shows seemed to be their work in all but name; Loewe and Lerner's Brigadoon (1947) was the main one, with its powerful sense of community, its long first act and short second, its Agnes de Mille choreography, and its thematic richness—all elements of Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. The remainder of the chapter details the stories behind the making of Rodgers and Hammerstein's State Fair (1945), Oklahoma! (1955), Carousel (1956), The King and I (1956), South Pacific (1958), The Sound of Music (1965); and Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon (1947), Gigi (1958), and My Fair Lady (1964).

This chapter focuses on the Hollywood musicals of Jerome Kern. From about 1915 to his death in 1945, Kern was the Harms Group's artistic leader. For youngsters like Gershwin and Rodgers, Kern was also the great begetter: of melody, yes, but also of extended musical scenes; of tiny orchestral bits between vocal phrases to soothe or excite a tune; and an extensive use of the major seventh interval in the vocal line, unheard of at the time in popular music. Hollywood's first sound adaptation of a Kern was Sally (1929). His other movie credits include Fox's Music in the Air (1934), MGM's The Cat and the Fiddle (1934), Warner Bros.' Sweet Adeline (1935), and RKO's Roberta (1935).

This chapter focuses on the Hollywood musicals of Cole Porter. Porter's homosexuality made him perfect for sexy, crazy musical comedy. A composer-lyricist, he wrote with the clear-eyed perspective of the outsider who learned to imitate the “normal” folk in order to survive, giving him comprehension of their ways that they themselves could not understand. Porter came from a wealthy Midwestern family with access to the fabled elite. He lived a post-Yale youth largely in Europe. He also had some classical training, was ambitious and artistic, and wanted popular success above all. The chapter considers films such as Anything Goes (1936), Born To Dance (1936), Broadway Melody (1940), Something To Shout About (1943), and High Society (1956).

This chapter introduces the central question in this book: what does it mean to entertain an audience? In order to set up this issue, it focuses on two influential Hollywood backstage musicals - Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953) - in order to understand how vaudeville performers arrived at sense of the legitimacy of their art, and the managers developed their vision of an all-encompassing form of entertainment that spoke to audiences everywhere. Drawing on a range of cultural theorists,including Robert Snyder, Rick Altman, and Jacques Ranciere, the chapter then goes on to explore the ways in which vaudeville transformed concepts of entertainment and redefined the possibilities open to performers in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American culture.

This chapter focuses on the work of songwriting team Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Rodgers and Hart arrived in Hollywood in 1930 and—with intervals to do shows in New York and London—worked for a number of studios from that point and into 1934. Thereafter, they repatriated themselves as New Yorkers, thus dividing their stage output into two halves, before the Hollywood stay and after the Hollywood stay. Most of their films are all but unknown. The Hot Heiress (1930), Fools For Scandal (1938), and They Met in Argentina (1941) are the sort of fare Turner Classic Movies runs once a century at four o'clock in the morning. In his autobiography, Rodgers wrote that “studio moguls always seemed to have a certain antipathy toward people from the Broadway theatre. They used us when they had to, but they were never really happy about our being there”.

This chapter focuses on Hollywood's operettas. These include MGM's Naughty Marietta (1935), which featured soprano Jeanette MacDonald and baritone Nelson Eddy. The film was a tremendous hit, prompting MGM to follow up with Rose Marie (1936), Maytime (1937), and The Firefly (1937). Sweethearts (1938) allowed MGM to revel in operetta's exotic costuming and swelling choruses while constantly stepping back from them in a modern-dress Technicolor comedy about big-city characters. By the 1950s, Hollywood's interest in operettas had already waned, but the phenomenal success of The Sound of Music in 1965 inspired Andrew L. Stone to attempt two imitations that tilted toward operetta: Song of Norway (1970) and The Great Waltz (1972).