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Welcome to the very first episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black artists invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process.

I'm David Armstrong and I call this episode "Yearning to Breathe Free: The Immigrants Who Invented Broadway.”

The Broadway musical was born around the turn of the last century, and it emerged out of what we used to call the melting pot, that simmering confluence of cultures and races that were packed into the teeming tenement neighborhoods of New York City.

To an enormous extent, the Broadway musical can be called an immigrant art form.

It certainly was originated almost entirely by men and women from outside the mainstream of society.

What they created was something totally new, a popular, democratic kind of music theater that, like most great American inventions, was inspired by both a strong desire to express oneself and a strong necessity to put food on the table.

The concept of the melting pot has lost favor with some historians today, but it still remains a very apt description of how various multicultural artistic traditions blended together to create the American musical.

Between 1820 and 1920, over 30 million immigrants came to the United States. Almost all of them were escaping famine, oppression, or both in their home countries, and they arrived on our shores desperately poor. Many in the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment regarded these newcomers as a threat to their American way of life, in spite of their own immigrant roots. They accused these newcomers of being dirty, dangerous, diseased, written foreigners who practiced alien religions. They said they would bring drugs and violent crime with them and take jobs away from Americans. These immigrants that the establishment denounced so fiercely, came from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Eastern Europe.

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Nearly four and a half million Irish immigrants arrived. Most of them fleeing the potato famine of 1848. By 1910, more people of Irish ancestry lived in New York City than in Dublin.

The prejudice that they faced was not subtle. They were unskilled and illiterate, but worst of all, they were Roman Catholics, that some feared had been sent by the Pope to subvert American democracy. Help wanted ads and rooms for rent signs stated it outright and plainly: “No Irish Need Apply.”

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Nearly six million Germans emigrated to the United States between 1820 and the First World War. They too were escaping economic hardship, political revolution and unrest, but unlike the Irish, many Germans had just enough money to journey to the Midwest in search of farmland and employment. Because of this, significant German populations grew up in Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, but millions stayed right where they landed in New York City. They too faced prejudice. Many Germans were also Catholic and many were Jewish.

Soon they were followed by another two million Jewish immigrants who came from Russia and Eastern Europe in search of the golden land.

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These immigrants took the most menial, dangerous, and low-paying jobs, work that Americans wouldn't do. They dug canals, constructed railroads, cleaned houses, slaved in textile mills, and sweatshop garment factories. However, there was another field of work emerging at this time. It was called the show business.

As had been the case throughout most of world history, actors, singers, dancers, comedians, playwrights, and songwriters were seen by the establishment culture as low-class and disreputable. Only a small step away from vagabonds and prostitutes. But in this new simmering pot of cultures, the show business was gathering steam. Theaters were being built throughout New York City, especially on that street called Broadway. The nationwide Vaudeville circuits were taking shape, and sheet music and phonograph records were soon to become major industries. And since Irish, German, Russian, and Jewish cultures all had rich musical and theatrical traditions, the show business was one of the best possible ways for an immigrant to escape the slums and ghettos. This combination of circumstances set the stage for the birth of the musical.

The first theatrical artists to create what were at least embryonic versions of the musical were three comedy teams: the Irish American duo of Harrigan and Hart, the Polish-Jewish-American duo of Weber and Fields, and the African American duo of Williams and Walker.

Now to help me provide some insight into the contributions of these first great pioneers of the musical, I want to bring my friend and colleague Albert Evans into the discussion. Welcome, Albert.

Hello, David.

So glad you're here. Tell us a little bit about Harrigan and Hart.

Well, Harrigan and Hart began their 14-year partnership in 1871. They became headline variety stars by performing comic skits in which Harrigan served as the straight man to Hart’s outrageous clowning and his exceptional talent for female impersonation.

Eventually they got booked into New York's ‘Theatre Comique’ where they became such a hit that they took over management of the theater and began creating full-length versions of their signature routines.

Harrigan produced, directed, and co-starred in 40 full-length plays with songs. They weren't quite musicals, and he peopled them with ethnic characters from the neighborhood: Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, and Blacks. He put the melting pot on stage, and all of it was set in a fictional tenement block called Mulligan Alley. They mounted a new show every few months, putting what had become beloved characters into new variations, with titles like The Mulligan Guard Picnic, The Mulligan Guard Christmas, The Mulligan Guard Ball, much like the episodes of a television sitcom.

Now the songs in their shows were almost always what academics would call "diegetic" and that I prefer to call "acknowledged songs," meaning they’re songs that the characters within the story acknowledge as being songs. For example, in the musical Guys and Dolls, when Adelaide is on stage performing “Bushel and A Peck” at the Hot Box Night Club, everyone understands that she is performing a song that is a song. But then a few minutes later, she's alone in the nightclub and sings “Adelaide's Lament,” a song that is an expression of her inner thoughts and that comes from the character and comes from the story, and I would call that an “unacknowledged” song. As previously stated, in Harrigan and Hart shows, almost all of the songs were acknowledged songs. For example, this marching song that became quite a hit.

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Ned Harrigan wrote the lyrics to all of these songs, and they had music by his father-in-law David Braham. Now nobody remembers these songs today except theater historians and oddballs like me and David, but they were international sensations in their time.

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Joe Weber and Lew Field's met as children when they were both growing up in extreme poverty on the lower east side of New York. By the age of nine, they were already performing a knock-about comedy act in the beer gardens and smoky dives of the rough and tumble working-class entertainment district called the Bowery. Sporting Derby hats, checkered suits, and fake beards, they portrayed a pair of German immigrants, one of them a wise guy and the other a greenhorn just off the boat. Weber and Fields became so popular that just like Harrigan and Hart, they eventually gained control of their own Broadway theater, and they expanded their skits into full length shows, shows that had titles like "Whirly Gig", "Fiddlydee Dee", "Hoity-Toity" and "Twirly Whirly". All with a company of 50 performers, headed by Weber and Fields of course, and half a dozen other stars, including the biggest female star of the day, Lillian Russell.

Their shows were Burlesques, and I mean that in the original meaning of the word; they made fun of popular plays or novels of the day, much like the musical Spamalot or those great movie parodies that Carol Burnett used to do on her show like the “Gone with the Wind” sketch.

This kind of satire and parody would continue as one of the flavors of the musical comedy right up to today. Here's a rare clip of an actual Weber and Fields song.

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It strikes me that that song is remarkably like the song from Spamalot: “You Won't Succeed on Broadway if You Don't Have Any Jews.”

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The first song was from the Weber and Field’s show, Hokey Pokey, in 1912, and the second song was from Spamalot, written a century later.

In addition to satire, Weber and Field shows featured the kind of elaborate visual displays that we now associate with musicals in general: spectacular sets, colorful costumes, special effects, dynamic choreography, and elaborate production numbers showcasing full chorus lines of dancers. From their time on, musicals have always included a feast for the eyes as well as for the ears.

But perhaps their greatest contribution to the development of the musical was that Lew Fields was the father of Herbert and Joe Fields, two of the most prolific book writers in the entire history of the musical theater, and also the father of their sister Dorothy, an amazing lyricist who had over a 40-year career.

We're going to save the team of Williams and Walker for our upcoming episode about the African-American influence on the musical. But what I find so interesting is that all three of these teams were doing the same thing at pretty much the exact same time: expanding their successful song and dance acts into full-length entertainments.

And although none of these added up to an actual musical as we know it, they did point the way to what was about to happen.

It would take two other and very different Irish songwriters to bring the musical into a form that we would recognize today. They were Victor Herbert and George M. Cohan.

George M. Cohan was the grandson of Irish immigrants. His father Jerry had changed the family name from Keohane to Cohan, and along with his wife, daughter, and son, they became the Four Cohans, a leading Vaudeville song-and-dance team at the end of the 19th century. But that wasn't enough for young George. Inspired by Harrigan and Hart, he set his sights on Broadway, and he burst onto the scene by writing the book, music, lyrics, and starring in a show called Little Johnny Jones.

Cohan said that his goal was to bring actual living characters from the street to the stage. But I think his real achievement was to put those characters into dramatically plausible stories.

Compared to anything that had come before him, he really upped the stakes by combining melodrama with farce and mixing in vaudeville style comedy and rapid-fire action and dialogue.

His shows were both funny and dramatic. And his catchy, rhythmic, Tin Pan Alley-type songs were, at least loosely, tied into the storylines.

Little Johnny Jones introduced two unforgettable tunes. “I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and a song that is still Broadway's anthem: “Give My Regards to Broadway.” Both songs were performed by Cohan himself in his own, indelible trademark style. He strutted across the front of the stage with his hat cocked down over his eyes in a manner that would be copied by everyone from Gene Kelly to Bob Fosse and would come to epitomize Broadway.

Audiences adored Cohan, but the critics at the time were almost unanimous in their disdain.

One of them went so far as to call him:

"A vulgar, cheap, blatant, ill-mannered, flashily dressed, insolent smart aleck, who for some reason unexplainable, appeals to the imagination and apparent approval of large American audiences."

Ouch!

Now any kind of art that is too popular is often looked down on by critics, but there was probably another kind of prejudice motivating this negative reaction. We have to consider what it meant for an Irishman in 1904 to stand on a stage and sing "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy."

Right. The days of “No Irish Need Apply” signs were not very long in the past, and anti-Catholic sentiment would remain strong even into the 1920s. So, waving the flag and declaring that he was a real-live nephew of his Uncle Sam was very much a political statement.

He was saying, "I'm an American too. We Irish, are America. We immigrants are America."

And you know, that's remarkably similar to the statement that Lin Manuel Miranda is making today with Hamilton, in having people of color portray America's founding mothers and fathers.

I don't think it's overstating to say that Cohan invented the musical comedy as we know it, and that's not just because Albert and I wrote a musical about George M. Cohan that makes that very case.

I really do think it's true, and virtually every musical that came after was built on the patterns that he established.

So it seems entirely appropriate that Cohan is the only Broadway figure in history to have a statue in Times Square. During his long career, Cohan would create 20 musicals and more than 500 songs, a surprising number of which still have currency today.

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Now let's turn our attention to Victor Herbert.

He was born in Dublin, but he studied in Germany to be a classical cellist.

In 1886, at the age of 27, he came to the United States to play in the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, no less. He achieved success as a cellist, composer, and conductor of classical music, but he yearned for a larger audience.

“Is it a crime to be popular? I believe that which is not popular is not of much use to the world.”

Herbert had been captivated by Harrigan and Hart, and his original intention was to create a similar kind of folk theater, but his training and technique led him first to create a series of European style operettas, featuring lyrical music and stories that took place in exotic settings, like Venice, India, Persia, Egypt, and most exotic of all, the Land of Mother Goose for his wildly successful fantasy extravaganza: Babes in Toyland.

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He followed that with three immensely popular shows, Mademoiselle Modiste in 1905, The Red Mill in 1906, and Naughty Marietta in 1910. And with these shows Herbert found his way to a new American version of operetta that combined classical music with ragtime rhythms, Bowery waltzes, and other pop music forms of the day.

Now the stories of these shows still usually took place in far away Europe, but the time periods were now contemporary, and the plots hinged on modern Americans who, while traveling abroad, helped the locals sort out their problems.

Wasn't that nice of them?

Indeed.

Most importantly, the music and lyrics related closely to the plot, and were often woven into extended musical sequences that moved the story forward.

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The last song in that medley was sung by a very young Frank Sinatra. So, it's clear that even though Victor Herbert died in 1924, his songs remained immensely popular throughout the entire 20th century.

With Victor Herbert and George M. Cohan, the two main genres of the Broadway musical had now been established: the musical comedy and the operetta. Eventually, these two forms would be fused into what Rodgers and Hammerstein would call the musical play, and that today, we just call a musical.

On the next episode of Broadway Nation, a desperately poor, illiterate, six-year-old Russian-Jewish immigrant named Israel Beilin will arrive in America and become another of the principal inventors of the musical when he reinvents himself as Irving Berlin.

Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong.

My co-host on this episode was the wonderful Albert Evans. Our recording technician is the indispensable Nick Tarabini and special thanks to preeminent voice actor Jeff Hoyt and to the entire team at the Voice of Vashon, 101.9 KVSH on beautiful Vashon Island, Washington.