All tagged Rose-Marie
Last week, I wrote a piece on Broadway musicals that were hits in the United States, but that just didn’t have the staying power in London. This week, I thought I would look at the musicals that were hits on Broadway, but ran even longer on the West End. Obviously, musicals like 1776 and Fiorello! were going to have a limited appeal with British audiences due to their inherently American themes, but just what shows did outrun their American productions when they crossed the ocean?
We left off with our epic journey through the history of musical theatre having just explored British composing team Gilbert and Sullivan’s influence on the evolution of the art form. Their popular operettas crossed the Atlantic and took America by storm. It wasn’t long before American composers got on board with this trend and began churning out their own operettas, a trend that would hold on for decades, well into the 1930s. In the early part of the 20th Century there were several homegrown operettas entertaining the Broadway audiences. The Wizard of Oz (1902) and Babes in Toyland (1903) were both enormous successes on Broadway, on the road, and overseas. The family-friendly nature of their plots, as well as the popularity of the sheet music in conjunction with lavish spectacle soon made operetta a hot ticket.
