Smithsonian's 'Red, Hot & Blue' sends its regards to Broadway

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 20, 1997 | by Stephen Goode

The National Portrait Gailerys retrospective of American musicals covers 100 years of singing and dancing on stage and screen, from Shuffle Along to Show Boat to Sunday in the Park With George.

Most Americans would recognize the tunes and many would be able to sing the words that go along with them, even old standards such as "I'm Just Wild About Harry" and "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby" - survivors of long-forgotten shows with titles such as Shuffle Along and Sinbad.

The 100-plus-year history of the American musical is the subject of a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Aptly named "Red, Hot A Bluel," after a 1936 Cole Porter extravaganza, the show examines the contributions of stars such as Ethel Merman and Gene Kery as well as lesser lights, including impresario Tony Pastor and the duo of Weber and Fields, who wowed Americans in the late 19th century.

It's a big exhibit, with photographs, Broadway posters and costumes from the musicals themselves. And because the show celebrates theater, there are films and recordings of performers such as George M. Cohan singing "l Want to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune" and, of course, Al Jolson performing "Mammy" from the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer.

It's the thesis of this exhibition that American musicals evolved from a wide variety of ancestors, including Irish and German theater brought to these shores by musical immigrants.

These influences came together in Show Boat, the 1927 musical produced by Florenz Ziegfield (score by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, a "breakthrough" and "trailblazing" show that prepared the way for the flowering of a truly American musical theater in the following decades. These years produced stars such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and, more recently, Bernadette Peters in the 1984 Steven Sondheim show, Sunday in the Park With George.

It probably is unnecessary and rather lead-footed) to say, a alogue does, that "musicals played a formative role in our collective myth-making for nearly a century, giving us the words and music for the American dream." More to the point are the the comments of Hammerstein (who also teamed up with Richard Rodgers to write Oklahoma!, and other classics, see sidebar) on the greatness of George M. Cohan, author of songs such as "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Give My Regards to Broadway." Cohan, Hammerstein held could "say simply what everybody was subconsciously feeling."

Come to think of it, that's probably a good explanation for the popularity American musicals have enjoyed over the years. The slightly jaded New York drama critic Brooks Atkinson, who loved musicals, described them as "the one department of the theater in which Broadway excelled. In pace, skill, variety and zest it was unrivaled. Occasionally it was also art."

The National Portrait Gallery's "Red, Hot & Blue" closes July 6.