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date: 14 December 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This essay examines the history of musical theater in the United States during the period from 1870 to 1945. It explains that while The Black Crook from 1866 may be considered as the first modern-style musical, the fully integrated musical did not arise until sometime later, which set in motion a period frequently referred to as the “golden age” of musical drama. It considers several musicals in the 1940s, including Show Boat, Oklahoma!, and Carousel. This essay also argues that while the musical is rarely considered realistic, most of the musicals in the 1940s engaged in an integrated fashion with something approximating real life.

Keywords: musical theater, The Black Crook, Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, integrated musical

Thomas S. Hischak

Thomas S. Hischak is an internationally recognized author and teacher in the performing arts. He is the author of twenty-four nonfiction books about theatre, film, and popular music, including The Oxford Companion to the American Musical, The Rodgers and Hammerstein Encyclopedia, Through the Screen Door, The Tin Pan Alley Encyclopedia, Off-Broadway Musicals Since 1919, The Disney Song Encyclopedia, The Jerome Kern Encyclopedia, American Literature on Stage and Screen, Theatre as Human Action, and The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (with Gerald Bordman). He is also the author of thirty-three published plays which are performed in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. Hischak is a Fulbright scholar who has taught and directed in Greece and Lithuania. Since 1983 he has been professor of theatre at the State University of New York at Cortland where he has received such honors as the 2004 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity and the 2010 SUNY Outstanding Achievement in Research Award.

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