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The Star-Spangled Consciousness: Musical Theatre Anthems of Unity and the PAllisonerf B.o Gibbesrmance of National Identity

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COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS

THE STAR-SPANGLED CONSCIOUSNESS:

MUSICAL THEATRE ANTHEMS OF UNITY AND

THE PERFORMANCE OF NATIONAL IDENTITY

By

ALLISON B. GIBBES

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2019 Allison B. Gibbes defended this dissertation on April 10, 2019. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Elizabeth A. Osborne Professor Directing Dissertation

Nancy Rogers University Representative

Mary Karen Dahl Committee Member

Aaron C. Thomas Committee Member

Stuart J. Hecht Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii

Dedicated to the memory of John A. Degen

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I want to express my deepest appreciation and thanks to my advisor and chair Beth

Osborne, for her wisdom, expertise, persistence, and patience. I am extremely grateful to have had her for a mentor both on this project and in the larger sense of scholarship, teaching, and life.

This process has been difficult and often tedious, but always joyful, and I am so happy to have had the chance to work with Dr. Osborne. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee,

Mary Karen Dahl, Stuart J. Hecht, Nancy Rogers, and Aaron C. Thomas. I have learned so much from each of them, through their courses, scholarship, feedback, and advice, and I feel privileged to have had the support of such a brilliant group of scholars. Dr. Dahl’s insight and advice over the course of this program has been invaluable, and I will always be thankful for our chats.

Additionally, thank you to Patrick McKelvey for his work on the early days of my committee and for notes that I was still discovering and taking to heart a year later.

I wish to thank my family, who supported me through many, many years of graduate school. I sincerely could not have made it through without their help. I appreciate their constant encouragement and reassurance, and the pride and interest they have expressed in everything I do. Thank you to the many friends and colleagues who have given their time and support over the years. There are too many to name, but I would like to recognize Samer Al-Saber, Deb

Kochman, Tony Gunn, Jenna Tamisea-Elser, Elizabeth Sickerman, and Jeff Paden. And to my group chat: Shelby Lunderman, Marisa Andrews, Nick Richardson, and Sean Bartley, thank you for always being there when I needed a sounding board, an ear, or a voice of reason and especially: “thank you for being a friend!”

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... vii Abstract ...... ix

1. INTRODUCTION: THE STAR-SPANGLED CONSCIOUSNESS ...... 1

Deconstructing the Star-Spangled Consciousness ...... 4 National Identity and the Formulation of the Outsider ...... 6 Musical Theatre and the Construction of National Identity ...... 9 Approaching National Identity and the Musical Theatre Anthem ...... 14 A Road Map Through the Star-Spangled Consciousness ...... 16 Coda: Why Anthems of Unity in Musical Theatre? ...... 20

2. “OKLAHOMA”: MYTHOLOGY, AMERICANNESS, AND BELONGING TO THE LAND IN OKLAHOMA! ...... 22

Overview: Oklahoma! and a Divided Nation ...... 25 Cultural Context: A Crisis of (National) Identity at Wartime ...... 29 Dramaturgical Breakdown: Identifying “Furriners” in Oklahoma Territory ...... 35 Musical Analysis: “Oklahoma” and the Musical Construction of American Essentialism ...... 43 Coda: A Musical of Mythical Proportions ...... 52

3. “MY TEXAS”: GIANT AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF MYTHOS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST ...... 55

Overview: Everything’s Bigger in Texas ...... 57 Cultural Context: Don’t Mess with Texas ...... 60 Dramaturgical Breakdown: The Line in the Sand ...... 68 Musical Analysis: Leslie’s Texas ...... 74 Coda: Excessive Patriotism and Musical Intervention ...... 85

4. “SOUTHERN DAYS”: THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS AND RESISTING THE NATIONALIST NARRATIVE ...... 89

Overview: Repurposing History and Staging the Scottsboro Nine ...... 91 Cultural Context: Blackness and Progress in American Racial Politics ...... 95 Dramaturgical Breakdown: Minstrelsy as a Liminal Space ...... 103 Musical Analysis: Small Acts of Rebellion in an Anthem to the Antebellum South ...... 109 Coda: Making Audiences Uncomfortable ...... 117

5. “ANOTHER NATIONAL ANTHEM”: REINVENTING THE OUTSIDER IN ASSASSINS ...... 121

Overview: Assembling a Fragmented History ...... 122 Cultural Context: The Voice of the People ...... 127

v Dramaturgical Breakdown: The Assassination of Popular Memory ...... 132 Musical Analysis: The March of the Assassins ...... 140 Coda: Neurology and Musicalizing a National Tragedy ...... 148

6. OUTRO: MUSIC AND POPULAR MEMORY ...... 153

Bibliography ...... 157

Biographical Sketch ...... 167

vi

LIST OF FIGURES

1 “Oklahoma,” measures 1-16 from the score of Oklahoma! ...... 46

2 “Oklahoma,” measures 166-173 from the score of Oklahoma! ...... 49

3 “Oklahoma,” measures 41-45 from the score of Oklahoma! ...... 50

4 “Your Texas,” measures 3-6 from the piano/vocal score of Giant...... 76

5 “Your Texas,” measures 17-22 from the piano/vocal score of Giant...... 77

6 “Your Texas,” measures 37-41 from the piano/vocal score of Giant...... 78

7 “My Texas,” measures 49-54 from the piano/vocal score of Giant...... 81

8 “My Texas,” measures 117-120 from the piano/vocal score of Giant...... 82

9 “My Texas,” measures 126-129 from the piano/vocal score of Giant...... 83

10 “Your Texas,” measures 20-22 from the piano/vocal score of Giant...... 84

11 “Your Texas (reprise),” measures 143-145 from the piano/vocal score of Giant...... 85

12 “Southern Days,” measures 1-5 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys...... 112

13 “Southern Days,” measures 14-19 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys...... 114

14 “Southern Days,” measures 20-22 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys...... 114

15 “Southern Days,” measures 40-47 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys ...... 116

16 “Southern Days,” measures 48-51 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys ...... 116

17 “Southern Days,” measures 52-55 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys ...... 116

18 “Hail to the Chief” from the Assassins vocal score...... 143

19 “Another National Anthem,” measures 37-39 from the Assassins vocal score...... 144

20 “Another National Anthem,” measures 138-140 from Assassins vocal score...... 145

21 Another National Anthem,” measures 149-150 from the Assassins: vocal score ...... 146

22 Another National Anthem,” measures 144-145 from the Assassins: vocal score ...... 147

vii

23 Another National Anthem,” measures 62-64 from the Assassins: vocal score ...... 147

viii

ABSTRACT

Musical theatre scholars agree that as popular culture, musical theatre has had a profound effect on the development of national identity in the United States. In particular, the genre reaches audiences both inside and outside the theatre through the dissemination of cast recordings, sheet music, and other media. In early incarnations of musical theatre such as the works of George Gershwin and George M. Cohan, musicals typically included overt nationalist anthems designed to inspire and unite the audience in the name of America. With “Oklahoma,” the title song of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943), and the subsequent Golden Age of musical theatre, the convention of the anthem shifted to express nationalism through the lens of a community within the fictional world of the musical. These anthems serve as models for patriotic unity. In the decades following the Golden Age, some works of musical theatre challenged nationalism, and the anthems in these pieces reflect that sense of questioning. This project considers anthems of unity in musical theatre and the way they formulate identity through musical structures and conventions. I investigate four musical theatre anthems: “Oklahoma” from Oklahoma! (1943), “My Texas” from Giant (2012), “Southern Days” from The Scottsboro

Boys (2010), and “Another National Anthem” from Assassins (1991).

By analyzing the way that each anthem constructs group identity, I consider the way these constructions speak to national identity within both the musical and the historical context of the original production. Each anthem approaches national identity and nationalism in a different way by using and/or distorting musical conventions that hold cultural meaning in specific time periods. Additionally, I consider the way the anthem functions in conversation with the way the musical constructs history and popular memory, and how these formulations work together to create communities of insiders and outsiders through national identity and

ix nationalism. I argue that each anthem operates dramaturgically, musically, and within a specific historical moment to address and reify or subvert constructions of mainstream national identity.

This dissertation asks: what is the role of anthem-singing in US national identity? How does national identity create constructions of belonging and otherness? And how might we reconsider the way musical theatre as a genre is particularly effective site for conversations about the ramifications of othering

x CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: THE STAR-SPANGLED CONSCIOUSNESS

“Music can do what the greatest performer does at the height of his playing: it can win over the spectator with passion, it can create an exalted mood which makes the poet’s fantasy so much simpler to follow and accept.” - Kurt Weill “The Alchemy of Music”1

“Music has often been considered a dangerous substance, an agent of moral ambiguity always in danger of bestowing deviant status upon its practitioners.” - Philip Brett “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet”2

In April of 1968, Hair: The American Tribal Love Rock Musical scandalized theatregoers when the cast got naked. Never before had audiences seen nudity on Broadway, and at the tail end (my apologies for the pun) of the wild sixties, Hair became iconic for both its rock(ish) score and the brief naked tableau at the end of Act I in which the hippies of the ensemble, known as the Tribe, froze in place as their genitals swung in the breeze.3 At first many members of the original cast were reluctant to show off their birthday suits at the height of the “Be-In,” a song/scene modeled after a 1967 protest event in San Francisco, but most ultimately gave into the spirit of the show.

The show’s revolutionary spirit seemed to inspire equally revolutionary actions. Some audience members were moved to fling away their clothing and join the actors—both uninvited during the “Be-In” and at the end of the show, when the cast summoned the audience to dance with them.4 Even some celebrities made their way onstage with the performers. At Hair’s

1 Kurt Weill, “The Alchemy of Music,” Stage 14, no. 2 (November 1936), 63-64, http://www.kwf.org/pages/wt-the- alchemy-of-music.html. 2 Philip Brett, “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Mythology, 2nd Ed., ed. by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2006), 11. (9- 26). 3 The cast stood in a tableau because New York statutes allowed the performers to be nude but considered moving with the music while disrobed to be obscene. 4 Barbara Lee Horn, The Age of Hair: Evolution and Impact of Broadway’s First Rock Musical (New York: Greenwood, 1991), 78. 1 London premiere, Zsa Zsa Gabor “cavorted with the singers and dancers […] to a roar of applause.” Later, having regathered her wits, she expressed coolly that although she enjoyed the music, she did not approve of the nudity and expected that the show would likely only attract

“homosexuals and women without a man.”5 England’s Princess Anne (at age 18) defied decorum and “shocked elderly theatre-going dowagers by rushing on to the stage when the cast […] invited volunteers from the audience to join in a song and dance act.”6

But although nudity on Broadway was certainly a novelty in 1968, it was the music that made Hair scandalous. In order to make this argument, we must first consider the cultural context of the original production. Hair premiered in 1968—a year the nation was situated in a particular ethical divide in terms of American national identity and the country’s role as an interventionist in foreign conflict. Anti-war protestors, “ordinary citizens, armed mainly with only their bodies and minds, who actively opposed their government’s military intervention in

Vietnam,” clashed with the US government and conservatives who believed that dissenting with the US military and policies was tantamount to anti-patriotism and anti-Americanism.7 Hair actively addresses the cultural moment by fostering empathy for the anti-war counterculture;

Claude, a young hippie and pacifist, cedes to parental and patriotic pressure to enlist when drafted and then dies in Vietnam.

Next, we must discuss the dramaturgy of Hair and the “Be-In” specifically, in terms of the way the musical formulates community and otherness. The “Be-In” functions as a political antinational “anthem of unity,” solidifying the Tribe as a unified anti-war entity. The song brings

5 Associated Press, “Zsa Zsa Cuts Up in Hair,” Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY), September 30, 1968, 8D. https://www.newspapers.com/image/136596495. 6 Associated Press, “Anne,” Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY), August 31, 1969, H1. https://www.newspapers.com/image/136648144. 7 Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (New York: Open Road, 2016), 18. 2 the Tribe into a cohesive frenzy in which the group pushes the men to burn their draft cards, an antinationalist and legally dangerous act. When Claude, in this moment, makes the decision not to burn his draft card, he removes himself from the group and sets in motion the events that will lead to his tragic demise. This raises the stakes of belonging to become a matter of life and death.

Hair identifies the members of the Tribe as part of a counterculture, addressing the ways that they have been excluded from mainstream US/American national identity through racism, resistance to enforced sexual/gender norms, religious and spiritual beliefs, and defiantly pacifist values.

This is where many excellent analyses of musical theatre stop. To take the next step, I bring the cultural context and dramaturgical analysis together to inform the way that the music in the “Be-In” functions in the creation of community. Musically, the “Be-In” urges audience members to join the Tribe, to “enact a vision of that culture as community […] involving all the disparate disenfranchised elements represented in the show.”8 Strong, infectious rhythms encourage the audience to embody the music. The song begins with a strong, repetitive beat emphasized by prominent percussion. This unvarying pulse continues for about a minute.9 When the beat doesn’t vary, the body begins to anticipate it. Halfway through the section, the song begins to add layers of rhythms on top of the unchanging beat.10 The song’s base rhythm and tempo have been even for so many measures as to be almost hypnotic, which builds up until the sudden shift in tempo feels like a release. As the rhythm peaks and the men of the Tribe burn their draft cards, the affective power of music produces palpable excitement.11 The frenzy swells,

8 Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 156. 9 This translates to approximately fifty measures (after a brief intro), or about half of the track on the original Broadway cast recording. 10 Galt MacDermot, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado, Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical Piano/Conductor’s Score (New York: Tams-Witmark, 1995), 86-93. 11 “Be-In (Hare Krishna),” written by Galt MacDermot, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado, track 20 on Hair: Original 3 with the Tribe landing on a minor chord as they (and some particularly invested audience members) tear off their clothing in a physical release that, after all, mirrors that of the music.

As the line between the audience and the performers blurred for a moment, communion with the music morphed into identification with society’s outcasts and othersathe draft dodgers, the race warriors, the narcotic spiritualists, and the free lovers. In Hair, the connection through music, however brief, encouraged empathy between those who felt compelled to adhere to the rules of the establishment and countercultural outcasts who frequently faced violence, tear gas, and ostracization for their beliefs. Accounts of audience participation in this moment highlight the ways that the song bring listeners together, in instances which Marie Thompson and Ian

Biddle call “‘utopian’ moments on the dance floor, where the sound and rhythm become an effective glue, bringing together dancing bodies.”12 Those audience members who had not yet subscribed to hippie culture might, as Raymond Knapp describes in The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, “thereby see a version of themselves, freed of inhibitions and joyously forging new relationships and embracing new ideas and behaviors.”13

Deconstructing the Star-Spangled Consciousness

In this work, I focus on a specific type of anthem that appears in musical theatre and discuss the ways that those anthems musically construct Americanness as a formulation of inclusivity and exclusivity. Though he does not explore the idea, Knapp coins the enticing phrase

“anthems of unity,” a type of song in which a group declares its allegiance to a greater community, and which he calls “ubiquitous to the Broadway stage.”14 Knapp cites examples

Broadway Cast Recording, RCA Victor, 1988. 12 Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle, “Introduction: Somewhere between the signifying and the sublime,” in Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, eds. Ian Biddle and Marie Thompson (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 11. 13 Knapp, 156. 14 Knapp, 171. 4 such as “76 Trombones” from The Music Man (1956) and the title song of Guys and Dolls

(1950).15 But while Knapp’s examples represent nationalist anthems that celebrate and reify the dominant culture, I expand this term to include anthems that not only affirm constructions of national identity but alternately challenge or counter them. In my analysis, I consider anthems in their dramaturgical function, as songs that are identified within the show with a particular group or movement and that bring that group together, operating similarly to national anthems. As in my analysis of Hair, I approach each anthem in terms of cultural context, dramaturgy, and musical analysis in order to determine how each song constructs national identity in a specific cultural moment utilizing signs and symbols from recognizable and culturally-significant musical idioms. At the heart of this research, I ask three questions: first, how do anthems of unity in musical theatre construct nationalist, antinationalist, or counternationalist communities that speak directly to the cultural and historical context of the show’s original audience? Second, how does the dramaturgical structure of the musical generate critique or support of the anthem’s construction of community, either through purposeful intervention or omission and erasure? And third, how does the anthem convey community musically through structure, adherence to or subversion of musical conventions, and the use of musical signs and symbols that reference idioms of culturally significant musical styles and genres?

In order to address these questions, I have selected four musical theatre anthems of unity that offer different formulations of US/American national identity: “Oklahoma” (Oklahoma!,

1943), “My Texas” (Giant, 2012), “Southern Days” (The Scottsboro Boys, 2010), and “Another

National Anthem” (Assassins, 1991). Each example provides a depiction of a US/American historical moment that has been reinterpreted and reimagined as a parable for its contemporary

15 Knapp, 171. 5 audience. Through these anthems, I investigate the ways that exclusion is embedded in national identity and how that exclusion is expressed musically. These four anthems construct communities in ways that either deconstruct or reify mainstream U.S. national identity by defining certain communities as marginalized. By examining the cultural context of each anthem,

I ascertain the stakes of national identity within its historical moment. In this project, I argue that in musical theatre, anthems of unity serve to demarcate and delineate communities that serve as stand-ins—whether explicitly, metaphorically, or synecdochally—for the larger community of the United States. By default, then, they also demarcate those positioned outside of that normalized community as it is redefined in each piece. I am particularly interested in those moments in which anthems appear to denote unity, but actually subvert it through a disconnect between the action, lyrics, and/or music. In other words, anthems of unity become a metaphorical battleground within one of America’s most popular theatrical forms, demonstrating the different perspectives, power structures, and ideologies at work in a given moment.

National Identity and the Formulation of the Outsider

This project concerns the role of representation in musical theatre in the fluid construction of US/American national identity and the material ramifications of nation-based community formation. In the simplest terms, national identity refers to, as Anthony Smith defines it, “a sense of community based on history and culture.”16 However, as Smith elaborates, this “sense of community” constitutes a powerful force, creating a citizenship (or near- citizenship) that is willing to kill or die in the name of its country. National identity intertwines with personal identity, emphasizing “the need for identification with a community in order to achieve individual identity and self-respect.”17 In fact, as Benedict Anderson asserts, national

16 Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1988), 14. 17 Smith, Ethnic Origins, 14. 6 identity in the modern world has become as essentialized as concepts of gender. And while a percentage of individuals may identify as transnational (or transgender), “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.”18 In particular, my study of

US/American national identity and musical theatre parses the concept of national unity in terms of the ways that “the sense of self is viewed through the prism of symbols and mythologies of the community’s heritage.”19 In other words, how do historical narratives create a cultural mythology, and how do those mythologies interact with patriotic symbols and rituals to constantly renew and reify what it means to be an American on both a personal and cultural level?

Additionally, I consider the oppressive nature of nationalism and national identity.

National identity creates the illusion of cohesiveness, a generalized belief among those who subscribe to it that said identity comes with a certain sameness. This illusion of sameness exists within the national imaginary, the ever-changing repository of widely-held beliefs about a nation’s history and culture that is repeatedly renewed through educational trends, representations in popular media, and oral transmission. The construction of nationness in the national imaginary typically ignores, tempers, or justifies narratives of inequality and nation- perpetrated atrocities, often framing these instances as necessary for the greater good. Michel

Foucault refers to these histories “that have been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systemizations” as “subjugated knowledges.”20 The national narrative at the root of national identity results from a mixture of both unconsciously selected and carefully curated histories, creating a dominant culture. The advancement of dominant culture requires the

18 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 3. 19 Smith, Ethnic Origins, 14. 20 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France (New York: Picador, 2003), 7. 7 repetition and canonization of histories and mythologies that favor those with the most social and political power. In the United States, for instance, the Founding Father narrative mythologizes white (and whitewashed) men as central and essential to the generative history of the country, mitigating and erasing the contributions by and oppression of women and people of color. The privileging of certain demographic groups creates hierarchies in which those with the most power exemplify the image of that which epitomizes national identity and, in this case,

“Americanness.”

At the heart of nationness lies the struggle between those who belong and have power and those who fight to belong and empower themselves. Anderson describes nations as “limited because even the largest of them […] has finite, if elastic, boundaries beyond which lie other nations.”21 As I discuss issues of belonging and not belonging, using terms such as outsider and otherness, I am defining belonging as a matter of power and agency. In other words, those in positions of power determine the parameters of belonging and those who belong, unlike those who do not, have both power and agency. Although the approval or denial of legal citizenship functions as one facet of belonging in nationness, I am conceiving nationality broadly in terms of those who claim the United States as their home, regardless of citizenship status. The image of the ideal American, which varies depending on geographical and temporal location, creates an unstable set of qualities that set the bar for belonging. Most commonly, this ideal American is, among other things, white, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual, wealthy, and a legal citizen. The level to which a person belongs and possesses power and agency depends on the level to which one possesses these qualities. The further one is removed from the ideal, the more disenfranchised one becomes. Foucault describes the ongoing struggle for equal power and

21 Anderson, 7. 8 agency as a continuous war, suggesting, “We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions.”22

Nationalism, or national pride, forms the cornerstone of national identity. In order to belong to the nation, one must believe in the nation—or at least perform belief convincingly.

Although there are different ways to perform nationalism, such as pledging allegiance, willingly displaying venerated patriotic icons, and the repetition of nation-based aphorisms, music is a particularly effective site for unification, and this project focuses on the singing of anthems.

Since my discussion of national identity emphasizes the power-based struggle of belonging, I consider anthems that both reinscribe and protest against constructions of nationalism. An

“anthem” is a musical emblem that encourages group unification and identification. Nationalist anthems, which reify citizenship-based formulations of identity and belonging, only represent a subset of the anthem genre. Antinationalist or counternationalist anthems represent groups that function against or separately from mainstream nationalist identity. Rhetorically, anthems tend to reinforce group values and ethos through declarations of fealty and/or retellings of generative cultural mythology. I am using the term “anthems of unity” to describe these songs that alternately represent both mainstream formulations of dominant national identity and the identities of those who exist on the fringes of US/American society.

Musical Theatre and the Construction of National Identity

By studying performances of national identity in musical theatre, this project considers the way representation in popular culture creates resonating ideas of Americanness. Many musical theatre scholars, such as Raymond Knapp, David Savran, and Stacy Wolf, have argued that musical theatre, like any popular medium, has had profound effects on the formation of

22 Foucault, 16.

9 American national identity. In terms of fulfilling the “need to define and re-define what precisely it meant to be American,” Knapp explains:

Musicals eventually proved to be a particularly effective place to do that, since what

happened on stage not only brought a specific community together within a constructed

community, but also sent that audience out into a larger community armed with songs to

be shared, providing at least some basis for achieving a sense of unity among the

increasingly varied peoples of a country expanding rampantly both geographically and

through immigration.23

Often cited as one of only three home-grown American art forms (along with jazz and American film), “The American Musical is almost always concerned, on some level, with constructions of

America.”24 As popular culture, the musical reaches across demographics, addressing far wider audiences than any other form of theatre.

My intervention specifically concerns the use of music in the formulation of national identity. The influence of musical theatre reaches far beyond an ephemeral performance in New

York City. Even people who have never set foot in New York can view iterations of Broadway productions through touring companies all over the country. But audiences don’t just see musicals. They download cast albums, attend local and touring productions, buy and play sheet music, reimagine the show in each new venue. In doing so, they re-consume and recreate the music over and over through repeated listenings. In some instances, certain musicals attract cult- like followings by extreme fans, such as the Rentheads or the Hamiltonians, who spend large amounts of money, time, and energy to see the show over and over on Broadway or on tour.

Even when a fan sees a show in the theatre only once—or even not at all—the material of

23 Knapp, 8. 24 Knapp, 103. 10 musicals reaches a massive audience through multiple media.

In “Toward a Historiography of the Popular,” David Savran notes that theatre scholars and historians have, in the past, largely ignored musical theatre, deeming it popular culture rather than highbrow or “learned culture,” and therefore unworthy as an object of academic interest. He cites Oscar Brockett and Robert Findlay’s 1973 tome Century of Innovation which, over the course of 780 pages, concedes a mere two paragraphs to musical theatre (while admitting that it

“represents ‘the most popular form’ of theatre”).25 Before the 1990s, the bulk of publications on the subject consisted mainly of what Geoffrey Block calls “a useful and entertaining mixture of facts, gossip, and criticism.”26

In the first decade of the 21st century, scholars began to produce works that analyze musical theatre texts in terms of issue-based social implications. Raymond Knapp’s 2001 monograph The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, which I referenced earlier in this section, provides a thorough historical survey that investigates the evolution of musical theatre, highlighting examples of influential musicals in terms of their depictions of

Americanness, national mythologies, counter-mythologies, and otherness. Some scholars have

25 David Savran, “Toward a Historiography of the Popular,” Theatre Survey 45, no. 2 (2004): 211-217. https://doi.org/10.1017/S004055740400016X. 26 Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (New York: Oxford, 2009), 213. See also: Marc Bauch, The American Musical, Marburg: Tectum, 2003. Hollis Alpert, Broadway!: 125 Years of Musical Theatre, New York: Arcade, 1991.; Lamb, Andrew, 150 Years of Popular Musical Theatre, New Haven: Yale, 2000.; David H. Lewis, Broadway Musicals: A Hundred Year History, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2002.; Richard C. Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theatre, New York: Oxford, 2002.; Scott Miller, Strike Up The Band: A New History of Musical Theatre, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007.; John Kenrick, Musical Theatre: A History, New York: Bloomsbury, 2008.; Larry Stempel, Showtime: a history of the Broadway Musical, New York: W.W. Norton, 2011; Ethan Mordden, Opera in the Twentieth Century: Sacred, Profane, Godot, Bridgewater, NJ: Replica Books, 2000; Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business; Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s, New York: Oxford, 1997; Sing for Your Supper: The Broadway Musical of the 1930s, New York: St. Martin’s, 2005; Beautiful Mornin’: The Broadway Musical in the 1940s, New York: Oxford, 1999; Coming Up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 1950s, New York: Oxford, 1998; Rodgers and Hammerstein, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999; Open a New Window: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s, New York: Palgrave, 2015; One More Kiss: The Broadway Musical in the 1970s, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015; The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five years of the Broadway Musical, New York: Palgrave, 2004.and Development, Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 2013. 11 focused their works on the way the musical formulates national belonging and otherness. In

Transposing Broadway, Stuart Hecht describes the Broadway musical as a site where primarily

Jewish writers and composers have taught primarily Jewish immigrants how to assimilate. 27

Andrea Most considers the role of Jewishness and immigration in Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical.28 Warren Hoffman, in The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway

Musical, explores the way that musical theatre throughout history has tokenized and omitted people of color.29

Although musical theatre has recently received a blossoming of scholarly interest, most musical theatre scholars have focused on cultural and historical analysis rather than seriously discussing musical composition. Some musicologists, including Raymond Knapp, have addressed musical theatre music, but, as in theatre scholarship, musical theatre has been largely dismissed by music scholars as popular culture. And despite the potential fruitful crossover between musicology and musical theatre dramaturgical analysis, the two fields rarely meet.

Joseph Swain’s The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey serves as an early outlier by analyzing dramatic structure with an emphasis on the scores. Swain, who cites Joseph

Kerman’s study of opera as a basis for his methodological framework, selects specific notable

27 Stuart Hecht, Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical (New York: Palgrave, 2011). 28 Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 29 Warren Hoffman, The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2014). See Also: John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Waltham: Brandeis, 2003); Susan Smith, The Musical: Race, Gender, and Performance (New York: Wallflower, 2005); Elizabeth Wollman, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (New York: Oxford, 2013) and The Theatre Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2013); D.A. Miller, Place For Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1998); John M. Clum, Something for the Boys: Musical Theatre and Gay Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999); Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2002) and Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (New York: Oxford, 2011) 12 works to apply music theory-based analysis of music’s dramatic function.30 The majority of musicology-based studies of musical theatre works offer detailed analyses of the score with very little attention to dramatic structure.31

This project works to bridge the gap between musicological and musical theatre scholarship by addressing a major barrier between the two fields: the prevalence of discipline- specific language. For most theatre scholars, even the relatively few texts that treat musical theatre in terms of musical analysis remain out of reach without formal musical training.

Therefore, this work attempts to use musical analysis as a facet of dramaturgical analysis in language that is accessible to non-musicians. To this end, I build upon the work of Raymond

Knapp and his in-depth study establishing the connection between musical theatre and the construction of US/American national identity. I focus on specific musical theatre anthems of unity and, through a dramaturgical analysis of the music, investigate the ways these anthems function musically to define the parameters of belonging within a community and, whether deliberately or by default, designate those who don’t fit as society’s outsiders. As Joseph Swain asserts, music is undeniably “a powerful and subtle analogue to the emotional and psychological action.”32 This project asks: how does music function dramaturgically in terms of musical theatre and the creation of national identity? What are the larger implications for musical theatre as a vehicle for social change?

Approaching National Identity and the Musical Theatre Anthem

30 Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (New York: Vintage Books, 1956); Joseph Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2002). 31 See also: Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2006); Mark Eden Horowitz and Stephen Sondheim, Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010); Paul Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theatre: A Consideration (New York: Macmillan, 1967). 32 Swain, 2. 13 In order to explore these questions, I study four different anthems of unity. While hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of musical theatre anthems of unity exist, I focus on these four case studies rather than a survey of all or even the most significant or well-known examples. As previously noted, I treat the anthem as both a dramaturgical and musical concept. The four pieces that I have selected are, in some cases, musically non-traditional as anthems. But as I will discuss more fully in each chapter, these anthems represent moments of unification. In the chapters that follow I will examine how this unification functions both dramaturgically and musically, and explore the ways that unification is redefined around and through the outsider. By developing this methodology, my goal is to create a model for approaching music in musical theatre that can then be applied on a broader scale to address different types of songs and a multiplicity of issues.

Since the connection between US/American national identity and musical theatre has been well- established by theatre scholars, the work of those scholars provides a solid springboard from which to study how music functions to create meaning in terms of social issues. I have divided my methodological approach to each anthem into three parts: 1) cultural context, 2) dramaturgical analysis, and 3) musical analysis. Examining each anthem in this way provides a socio-historical framework for studying the way the music functions.

Each study starts with an exploration of cultural context in order to determine how the anthem is formulating national identity, nationalism, and otherness within a specific historical moment. In this section, I ask: how is the anthem situated in relation to the specific constructions of national identity to which it is responding? This requires a threefold approach. First, I consider the cultural context surrounding the musical. In order to delimit what could potentially be an endlessly extensive study, I emphasize the original official production of each musical (in these particular case studies, these are either in Broadway or off-Broadway venues) and consider the

14 cultural context that it was written to address. This requires the use of critical reviews, memoirs, and historical accounts in order to reconstruct the circumstances that would have potentially influenced original audience members. Second, I investigate the source material of the musical and the way it both spoke to its own historical moment and the leftover associations that might influence audience responses. Third, I conduct a historiographic investigation of the anthem’s narrative. Since each of the anthems I have selected occurs in a musical that utilizes historical narrative to address social issues, this step requires analysis of the events depicted or referenced in the text, and the way those events have been constructed in the national imaginary. In addition, I consider the ways that the writers have taken creative license in leveraging history as theatre.

Next, I build a dramaturgical analysis of the anthem and the ways it creates formulations of national belonging and otherness. In this project, I define dramaturgical analysis as a close reading of the text and staging. In this section, I ask: how does the anthem express national identity by creating or affirming constructions of national belonging and otherness? Using librettos, archival and unofficial video footage (when available), cast recordings, and critical reviews, I work to reconstruct a narrative of each anthem’s original performance, including staging, actor body language, text, and audience reactions. This analysis situates the dramatic function of the anthem within the larger text of the musical and, building upon the previous section, within the musical’s original cultural context. Additionally, this section considers the way the text and the anthem in particular repurpose and appropriate historical narratives as historical myths and parables designed to illustrate lessons about the nature of nationalism and national identity.

Finally, I analyze the anthem musically, using the first two sections as a foundation in

15 order to ask: how does each anthem formulate national identity and otherness through music?

Modeled after practices in the field of music semiotics, in which scholars conduct musical analyses based on signs and symbols within the score, my methodology considers musical gestures and the cultural significance of musical genre. While music semiology has been growing as a field since the 1970s, the majority of semiologists write about music composed before the nineteenth century with nearly no scholarship about the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, in which the American musical began to flourish. Therefore, I approach these anthems from a genre-based perspective. Since musical theatre composers tend to use idioms of popular musical styles, my analysis considers the socio-historical implications of different types of music within cultural context, and the ways that the composers of these anthems have upheld or undermined convention for the sake of musical dramaturgy. While musicologists and music semioticians employ theory-heavy language geared toward specialists, I strive to interpret and explain musical structure as dramaturgy in a way that is also accessible to the non-musician reader. Using musical scores and cast recordings, I provide examples of musical moments that illustrate my argument.

A Road Map Through “The Star-Spangled Consciousness”

In The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton explains that while studying history, “the perception of […] distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation, for anthropologists have found that the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be the most opaque.”33 Similarly, in the study of nationalism, the way that time might render an anthem vapid that once moved audiences to tears can illustrate the cumulative nature of subtle and continuous shifts in national identity. Music’s power to evoke deep

33 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 78. 16 responses from listeners can be ephemeral, based on time and circumstance, and therefore its ability to affect a listener’s consciousness and unconsciousness cannot be considered in a vacuum. In “The Star-Spangled Consciousness,” I address four musical theatre anthems of unity by positioning musical analysis within cultural, historical, and dramaturgical context. This first chapter lays the groundwork for this discussion by outlining the ways that this dissertation builds upon and intervenes in existing scholarly conversation surrounding musical theatre and

US/American national identity. Each subsequent chapter investigates and analyzes a different anthem of unity in US/American musical theatre. These anthems appear not in temporal order of their source musicals’ original productions, but in order of progressive deconstruction and repurposing of the anthem form.

Chapter Two begins this study with the song “Oklahoma” from Richard Rodgers and

Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) as a pro-nationalist anthem of unity, sung sincerely and without critique. As Oklahoma! is often credited as the work that solidified the musical theatre genre, “Oklahoma” represents a generative example of the patriotic anthem of unity trope that quickly became pervasive during the Golden Age of musical theatre—a convention that the majority of subsequent musicals in the United States either reaffirm or deconstruct. Oklahoma! serves as a paradigm for what I will refer to as the traditional American musical, a model which includes, among other things, a chronological two-act storyline arc, an integrated score, and a neatly-resolved conflict based on a central love story. As an anthem, “Oklahoma” addressed a quintessential stage in the definition of US/American national identity onstage during the patriotic surge of World War II-era United States. Oklahoma! defines Americanness by casting a nostalgic glance back at life on the frontier, reminding audiences that the United States can survive the trauma of war by virtue of its frontier fortitude if its citizens can only come together

17 for the common good. Through the depiction of a quaint Oklahoma Territory community on the cusp of joining the union and becoming a state, Oklahoma! promised audiences that, at heart, the people of the United States were basically good and deserving of victory. In this chapter I argue that the title song, an ode to statehood, community, and manifest destiny, serves as a patriotic

US/American anthem, reifying utopian constructions of US/American nationalism that foreground whiteness as dominant.

The third chapter examines “My Texas” from Michael John LaChiusa’s Giant (2012) as an anthem that presents an unironically performed, intact declaration of regional and national pride. However, the musical deconstructs that declaration largely through context and dramaturgical intervention by those who are not taking part in the anthem’s performance. Based on Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel of the same title, the 2012 musical repurposes Ferber’s depiction of xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiment in Texas during the first half of the 20th century to address current tensions about the role of immigration in US/American identity. Giant employs structural and dramaturgical conventions of traditional musical theatre, but begins to unravel those conventions while reinserting the subjugated Mexican people into the nationalist historical record. “My Texas,” an anthem of allegiance to the state, presents a romanticized narrative of the siege at the Alamo by vilifying the Mexican people and valorizing the Texans who died there.

Stylistically, the anthem, as well as the musical as a whole, employs conventions made popular by Golden Age musical theatre and by Oklahoma! in particular. I contend that by imitating and then disrupting the familiar style of the patriotic musical theatre anthem, “My Texas” critiques the racism embedded in constructions of US/American identity that have been repeatedly reinscribed on the Broadway stage.

The fourth chapter discusses “Southern Days” from John Kander and Fred Ebb’s The

18 Scottsboro Boys (2010) as an anthem in which the singers begin to dismantle the otherwise intact song, critiquing the anthem as a compulsory performance of patriotism. The musical uses conventions of minstrelsy ironically to tell the true story of the Scottsboro Nine, a group of black teenagers who, in 1932, were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. Through the minstrel show aesthetic, The Scottsboro Boys subverts the traditional musical structure while highlighting some of the more spectacular elements of traditional musical theatre and their historical basis in minstrelsy. “Southern Days,” an anthem praising and romanticizing the antebellum South, requires the nine young men to perform allegiance and love for a system as it actively subjugates them. The musical collapses multiple eras in US/American history to show that the issue of systemic racism remained as pertinent to the construction of Americanness in

2010 as it was at other watershed moments in United States history. In “Southern Days,” the singers perform rebellion against the exclusion of African Americans in US/American identity by claiming agency and seizing control of the song, turning an anthem to southern American pride into an emblem that unifies the nine young men against racist social structures. In this chapter, I assert that “Southern Days” criticizes the anthem of unity convention within both social practice and musical theatre as a homogenizing force that erases counternarratives and stifles the voices of the oppressed.

The final chapter probes “Another National Anthem” from Stephen Sondheim’s

Assassins (1991), in which the disenfranchised reject mainstream US/American nationalism altogether by manifesting a counter-nationalist anthem to represent a deliberate outsider community. As a concept musical, Assassins dismantles the traditional musical theatre structure, giving voice to nine people throughout US/American history who have assassinated (or attempted to assassinate) a United States president. “Another National Anthem” uses and distorts

19 the musical structure of the patriotic march, marking the moment in which the nine assassins come together in a temporally and spatially impossible community. By highlighting history’s

“villains,” Assassins presents alternative angles to the mainstream historical narrative and the construction of Americanness in the national imaginary. The musical shows that history and historiography are a matter of perspective despite the illusion of cohesiveness created by dominant culture. Within a liminal, magical space, Assassins invents new narratives of history and then embodies them onstage, questioning the foundational role of historical mythology in the renewal and reification of Americanness. I argue that “Another National Anthem” utilizes and warps familiar nationalist musical conventions in order to unsettle and protest the exclusionary nature of dominant US/American identity.

Coda: Why Anthems of Unity in Musical Theatre?

Music is a potent force. Our favorite songs evoke emotions, trigger memories, and hold powerful associations. We attribute deep meaning to music as a part of personal identity, even becoming offended or combative if someone insults our preferred genres. Music unifies countries, movements, and disparate people. The singing of anthems—particularly nationalist anthems—symbolize shared identity, allowing us to recognize aspects of ourselves in others and create commonality. They can be the mark of conformity or of rebellion, a signal to each other that we are on the same side. In musical theatre, anthems combine with dramatic action as well as textual and visual stimuli to create multiple meanings, mixing our responses to the narrative and characters with the way the anthem resonates with how we understand and identify ourselves. They provide models for forming community and resisting oppressive structures.

As a popular form, musical theatre dominates the Broadway stage each season. In fact,

20 Playbill Online’s current list of the 31 longest-running Broadway shows only features three non- musicals.34 Additionally, musical theatre works enter the realm of cross-media consumption much more than their non-musical counterparts through the release of cast recordings, videos

(both legally and illegally shot and distributed), touring productions, and reperformances by both professionals and hobbyists. Therefore, through transmedial saturation, the effects of musical theatre extend beyond a limited live audience to reach across many different demographics. The sense of unity called forth by the musical theatre anthem stretches past geographic lines, class divisions, and racial and gender divides.

In Hair, the “Be-In” became a communal experience that encouraged audience members to find their inner hippies and empathize with the characters and, in a broader sense, with those young people whose lives were being threatened by the draft. Even long after the Vietnam War ended, reperformances and reinterpretations of Hair have created new associations and use the music to address different cultural contexts. Knapp suggests that the experience of musical theatre brings disparate people together, and this particularly occurs through the sharing and mutual enjoyment of the music.35 This work explores the potential power of musical theatre not only to reinscribe visions sameness in national identity but also to question and destabilize these formulations by reaching audiences through music.

34 Hannah Vine, “31 Longest Running Broadway Shows,” Playbill Online, 7 January 2017. http://www.playbill.com/article/31-longest-running-broadway-shows 35 Knapp, 8. 21 CHAPTER 2

“OKLAHOMA”: MYTHOLOGY, AMERICANNESS, AND BELONGING TO THE LAND IN OKLAHOMA!

“The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can.” - John L. O’Sullivan “The Great Nation of Futurity”1

“Communal cohesiveness is equated in the play with maturity. Oklahoma cannot become a state and join the Union until the members of the community have learned to get along.” - Andrea Most “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’”2

“No tits, no jokes, no chance!” was Broadway producer Mike Todd’s assessment of

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Away We Go! (1943)—the early title of

Oklahoma!—during an out-of-town tryout in New Haven.3 Rose Bigman, the long-time assistant to widely-syndicated theatre critic Walter Winchell, overheard Todd make the statement as she ducked out at intermission. For his column, Winchell sanitized Todd’s review as the now- legendary dismissal: “No legs, no jokes, no chance!” concurring with many who saw Oklahoma! in its earliest incarnations under the title Away We Go! and expected it to fail.4 Oklahoma! veered away from the usual Broadway musical comedy fare of the time in a number of ways.

Oklahoma! was based on Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), a play by Lynn Riggs that failed when it went to New York, so the producers had little confidence in the story itself and were hesitant to

1 John L. O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” The United States Democratic Review 6, no. 23, (1839): 426- 430. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001717837. 2 Andrea Most, “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!” PMLA 113, no. 1 (January 1998): 77-89. https://www.jstor.org/stable/463410. 3 Oklahoma! was orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett, a seasoned composer and orchestrator who also worked with George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin, among many others, over the course of his career. 4 Sheldon Patinkin, “No Legs, No Jokes, No Chance”: A History of the American Musical Theater (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 18. 22 finance the musical.5 Reportedly, “one potential backer refused to invest because he didn’t like plays about farmhands.”6 Rather than focusing on major chorus numbers or a flock of scantily- clad chorus girls, Oklahoma! began with a solo singing cowboy. It explored serious themes in serious ways, with a lengthy ballet suggesting sexual assault and the ultimate death of the antagonist in a scene that implicated the protagonist.7

In addition to the show itself, the artistic team, which comprised people who have since become household names, did not seem like an auspicious crew. Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein’s track record on Broadway was, in 1943, littered with failed musicals. Composer Richard Rodgers

“had rarely trafficked in nonurban, non-contemporary subject matter or styles, and he hadn’t written songs with anyone but [Lorenz] Hart in the twenty-plus years of their partnership.”8

Choreographer Agnes De Mille, “having been fired from her first two jobs,” had no successful credits as a Broadway choreographer.9 Director Rouben Mamoulian had only directed one musical, Porgy and Bess, which was “a financial failure” and also “really an opera, not a musical.”10 The cast featured a host of then-obscure performers such as Alfred Drake, Joan

Roberts, and Celeste Holm.11 Additionally, the Theatre Guild, which produced the show and had been a driving artistic force in the 1930s, was in dire financial straits. Because of this, the staging of Oklahoma! was less extravagant than most shows, which was “disconcerting in an era that liked its musicals big.”12

5 Ethan Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’: The Broadway Musical in the 1940s, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 70. 6 Patinkin, 18. 7 Joseph Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2002), 81. 8 Patinkin, 17. 9 Patinkin, 17. 10 Patinkin, 18. 11 Although investors were hesitant to support a largely untried creative team, its members would go on to become major figures in theatre history. Porgy and Bess, dismissed in its time as a financial failure, has been recognized as one of the most influential works in US/American musical theatre. 12 Ethan Mordden, “The Work That Changed the Form,” in The Richard Rodgers Reader, ed. Geoffrey Block (New 23 But Oklahoma! didn’t fail. When the show transferred to Broadway on March 31, 1943, just over a year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, choreographer Agnes De Mille remembers rows of uniformed soldiers in the theatre, “the men standing there watching this folksy show, happy, light, with the tears streaming down their cheeks because it symbolized home and what they were going to die for.”13 In the eighteen months following Pearl Harbor, about thirty plays debuted on Broadway that, unlike Oklahoma!, spoke directly about World War II.14 In fact, for all of Oklahoma!’s homespun simplistic innocence and seeming avoidance of the war, it reached wartime audiences in a way that those thirty plays did not. Celeste Holm, who originated the role of Ado Annie, declared:

Young people were going out to fight and perhaps to die for this country. What better

time to be reminded of the unselfconscious courage of those folks who settled the West?

People in uniform were always in the audience. People have told me it was the last show

they saw before they went overseas and how proud it made them feel to be an

American.15

These assertions suggest that Oklahoma! spoke to wartime audiences in a profound way. It certainly defied the odds, playing on Broadway for five years (2,212 performances) with a

“national tour […that] lasted so long that it got back to New York in 1953, after ten years on the road, as Oklahoma!’s first revival.”16 In 1944, Rodgers and Hammerstein won a special Pulitzer

Prize for the musical and, although the original production predates the Tony awards, subsequent revivals have garnered Tonys, Drama Desk Awards, and Olivier Awards. Additionally,

York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 107. 13 Agnes De Mille, “Agnes De Mille Talks About Oklahoma!,” interview by Sylvia Fine, Musical Comedy Tonight, PBS, October 1, 1979, video, 2:52. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=iW35nQUZdk4. 14 Only eight of the thirty plays about the war achieved financial success. 15 Richard Goldstein, Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II (New York: Free Press, 2010), 185. 16 Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’, 78. 24 Oklahoma! has earned a prominent place in the history of US/American musical theatre and

“[t]he very title of the show has become a summoning term for ‘The work that changed the form.’”17

Overview: Oklahoma! and a Divided Nation

As Agnes De Mille describes, “The plot of Oklahoma! is simply, well, a girl has to make up her mind whether she’ll take this boy or that boy to a picnic. This is a situation that has been faced before.”18 The musical takes place in 1906, in Oklahoma Territory just before the region became the state of Oklahoma. Laurey, a stubborn farm girl who lives under the guardianship of her matronly Aunt Eller, refuses to admit that she loves Curly, an equally obstinate and cocksure cowboy. In order to punish Curly’s overconfidence, Laurey agrees to attend the box social picnic with Jud, a brooding and dangerous farmhand who lusts after Laurey. In what would become typical Rodgers and Hammerstein fashion, the main couple is shadowed by a secondary comic couple: Will Parker and Ado Annie.19 Just as Jud threatens Curly and Laurey’s union, Ali

Hakim, a Persian salesman who has been trying to bed all of the unmarried farm girls in

Oklahoma Territory, intrudes upon Will and Ado Annie’s courtship.20 Ultimately, Hakim yields to a shotgun marriage with another farm girl freeing Ado Annie and Will to wed. Laurey decisively rejects Jud and marries Curly, but Jud crashes their wedding party. Wielding a knife,

Jud lunges at Curly and in the ensuing struggle, Curly throws Jud and causes him to land on his own knife. Loath to ruin the couple’s wedding night over Jud’s death, a guest who also happens

17 Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’, 78. 18 De Mille, 1:26. 19 Stuart J. Hecht, Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 27. 20 As the first collaboration by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Oklahoma! (1943) began a two-decade partnership that produced nine stage musicals and two screen musicals. The use of a primary serious couple and a comic secondary couple is a common convention in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals as well as musicals of the Golden Age that followed Oklahoma!’s structural formula. 25 to be a judge exonerates Curly.21 Jud is forgotten as the couple rides out on a swanky carriage into the sunset, their new life, and the promise of a new state.

Oklahoma! constructs a version of American identity that emphasizes unification. In the midst of US involvement in World War II, in 1943, the musical reaches back to a historical moment in which the nation had yet to see either world war or the Great Depression. Through the microcosm of a small frontier town, Oklahoma! suggests to audiences that US statehood, and thereby nationhood, is based on the ability to resolve differences and come together. The show promises that 1943-era US/Americans, despite conflicts over and hardships created by the war, can do the same. Oklahoma! uses a supposedly simpler moment in the country’s history as a parable espousing unification with an emphasis on communal benefit and the prospect that

Americans are essentially good and right. This depiction of unity in Oklahoma! reaches its pinnacle in the title song. Utilizing musical representations of land and community, the song

“Oklahoma” establishes the nature of national identity in the United States by defining those who unite under its musical banner as belonging and ostracizing those who don’t.

I selected “Oklahoma” as a starting point for this study because it marks a change in the way musical theatre anthems functioned. Tin Pan Alley-style musicals from the decades before

Oklahoma! are littered with explicitly patriotic anthems. Many of these patriotic anthems, such as George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Boy,” written for the musical Little Johnny Jones

(1904), and Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which appeared in This is the Army (1943), remain recognizable as overtly American patriotic anthems.22 These anthems express unity in

American identity by defining what is American (those who romanticize America “From the

21 Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Lynn Riggs, Oklahoma!: Libretto (New York: Rodgers & Hammerstein Theatricals, 1943), 62. 22 Kathleen E.R. Smith, God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2003), 21. 26 mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam” in “God Bless America”) and what is not (the mocked British fop in “Yankee Doodle Boy”). Characters would often sing together in big chorus numbers that celebrate a particular kind of Americanness: the patriotic willingness to sacrifice, the valorization of the military, and the belief in the greater good. In Oklahoma!, the title song promotes national unity through a semi-fictional stand-in: the community of a small town in Oklahoma Territory. “Oklahoma” marks the moment in the musical when this community changes, shifting its identification from territory folk to statehood and part of a larger union. In this chapter, I argue that as an anthem of unity, “Oklahoma” challenges a country in the midst of a unique moment of crisis to reconstruct US/American identity as communal and worthy of personal sacrifice for the greater good.

The first section, “Contextualizing a Crisis of (National) Identity at Wartime,” situates

Oklahoma! within the cultural context of World War II-era United States and discusses the title song as an anthem addressing a divided nation. Although the musical depicts a historical moment that occurred nearly forty years before it opened, Oklahoma! uses the frontier narrative to instruct audiences in how to find a quintessential American national identity and come together as a united nation. Often credited as the musical that changed the face of musical theatre,

Oklahoma! stands out in both subject matter and form. Although Oklahoma! was different from what Broadway audiences expected, the production was extremely successful and quickly became a national (and then international) phenomenon. By contextualizing the musical and the anthem with a brief cultural history of the United States in the 1940s, I argue that Oklahoma! spoke to Americanness and national identity in a particular way and that “Oklahoma” functioned as a much-needed anthem of unity during a moment of national crisis.

27 Section two, “The Dramaturgy of ‘Furriners’ in Oklahoma Territory,” discusses

“Oklahoma” dramaturgically by exploring how the anthem works to both exclude and include within a territory that is about to become an official state. Curly, the cowboy archetype of western masculinity, serves as a model for belonging and rises as a leader in both the community and the title anthem. The musical’s two outsiders, Jud Fry and Ali Hakim, follow different paths in terms of acceptance within the forming society. Fry, who cannot (or will not) control his sexually aggressive violent nature represents a threat to the community that can only be mitigated through elimination and is therefore excluded from joining in to sing “Oklahoma.” In contrast, Hakim, initially an outsider, demonstrates his ability to assimilate. His inclusion in the anthem thus reaffirms his legitimacy as a citizen. I contend that through these three men, Curly,

Jud Fry, and Ali Hakim, Oklahoma! rethinks the nature of citizenship and national identity as a combination of innate worthiness based on an ability to connect to the land and the choice to make personal sacrifices for the good of the community.23

The third section, “‘Oklahoma’ and the Musical Construction of American Essentialism” examines the title song of “Oklahoma” and how it functions musically as an anthem. The number, which operates as Laurey and Curly’s wedding song, defines nationalism and national belonging through regional identity at the moment before a territory becomes a state. As an anthem, “Oklahoma” marks who belongs to the newly-formed civic society and who is left as an outsider. The anthem unifies the ensemble as a singular community that supersedes individual

23 Although a full discussion of the topic is outside the purview of this chapter, it is important to note that the idea of belonging to the land as a faction of identity is a particularly Native American concept. Lynn Riggs, who wrote Green Grow the Lilacs, was part-Cherokee and his play was about mixed Cherokee identity in Oklahoma Territory. Since Rodgers and Hammerstein left the majority of the play’s text intact (despite whitewashing the characters), remnants of this emphasis persist throughout the musical. For further reading on the way Native American themes in Green Grow the Lilacs connects to the musical, I recommend Alfred Borowitz’s “‘Pore Jud is Daid’: Violence and Lawlessness in the Plays of Lynn Riggs,” published in Legal Studies Forum 27, no. 1 (2003): 157-184. 28 identities and disagreements that seemed to stand in the way of unification. The structure of the song illustrates nationalism by musically describing the land. Its memorable and repetitive melody lends itself to internalization and, with it, the internalization of Oklahoma!’s formulation of US/American identity. Through musical analysis linked to my earlier discussions of

Oklahoma!’s dramaturgy and cultural context, I assert that as an anthem, “Oklahoma” creates a site for defining national identity, belonging, and exclusion.

Cultural Context: A Crisis of (National) Identity at Wartime

As noted in the introduction, Oklahoma! was different from works that had previously appeared on Broadway, both in subject matter and in form. Prior to Oklahoma!, Depression-era economics “had all but banned the daring or even mildly unusual show,” so works of musical theatre tended to follow a formula.24 Ethan Mordden explains that most musicals tended to “start with hot performers, add a hot score and hot choreography, and glue it all together with as much humor as possible. What this format didn’t have was a story, characters, realism, irony, point.”25

Writers usually constructed shows to be topical and popular rather than lasting. The scores were comprised of interchangeable pop songs, and producers often swapped out tired radio hits for new ones. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote Oklahoma! as a cohesive work, designed to remain intact, borrowing conventions from opera and operetta. In spite of the fact that many of the conventions that Rodgers and Hammerstein “pioneered” in Oklahoma! can be traced back to earlier musicals, they assembled those conventions in a new way and often receive credit for reformulating the genre. Just as these conventions move plot and character development forward—a convention that would characterize the classic integrated or book musical—they also configure and emphasize an embodied myth of intrinsic Americanness. By contextualizing

24 Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’, 4. 25 Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’, 4. 29 Oklahoma!’s Broadway premiere within the ethos of the era surrounding World War II, I assert that these dramaturgical conventions resonated with audiences in a particular way and

“Oklahoma” filled the country’s need for a unifying anthem.

Oklahoma! premiered for a nation that was in the midst of a watershed moment in the country’s history and development of identity. A year and a half after the bombing of Pearl

Harbor and the entry of the United States into the war, the country faced a crisis of manpower and resources, of ethics in war, and of national identity. On the home front, citizens endured the rationing of food and supplies while struggling to compensate for the gap in the workforce created by sixteen million people serving overseas, most of whom were draftees. By 1943, the war had begun to turn in favor of the Allied forces, who “started to gain ground, from China and the South Pacific to the Soviet Union and Sicily.”26 Before the United States joined the war, its inhabitants stood fiercely divided in their sympathies between the Allies and the Central Powers, and also fighting about whether the US ought to remain neutral or take a side. When the country declared war on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, “the government adopted a broad policy of aggressive Americanization, primarily because of fear that its diverse citizens and residents might place their loyalties elsewhere.”27 After the bombing at

Pearl Harbor, the US government forced Japanese-Americans, many of whom were US citizens, into internment camps and compelled them to perform patriotism and allegiance to the U.S. government.28 In the name of deliberate national identification, the United States “pushed

English and citizenship classes, loyalty leagues, and crackdowns on speaking German, all with

26 Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States During World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2. 27 Thomas Bruscino, A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010), 4. 28 Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 97. 30 the intent of breaking its newest citizens from their Old World cultures.”29 This push for unification effectively solidified the country in “a wave of patriotic fervor that swept the nation.”30

Oklahoma! rode this wave of patriotic sentiment by presenting a depiction of the

American frontier through a lens of nationalist idealism to instruct audience members in reunification as a country. American nationalism and identity dramatized particularly high stakes in 1943 as they served to justify the war. Oklahoma! reassured audiences that the United States was the product of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is “the conviction that American territorial expansion was inevitable, that the nation’s providential destiny […] decreed an extension of the ideals of its founding charter throughout the entire continent.”31 In other words, the nation is divinely ordained and its citizenry is worthy of expansion, even by violent or oppressive means. Additionally, Oklahoma! admits that killing is sometimes necessary for the preservation of community and nationhood. In a war that resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 50 and 80 million people worldwide, belief in the United States of America as an institution worth preserving was necessary for the public support of drafting civilians into the military and sending them overseas. According to Gerald Mast, “Oklahoma! developed the moral argument for sending American boys overseas.”32 Mast points toward the elimination of Jud as a patriotic act, suggesting, “When the Federal Marshal pronounces Curly’s killing a justifiable act of self-defense, Hammerstein invokes the very rationale for sending American men from states like Oklahoma overseas to kill the Jud Frys of the world, in 1943 called Nazis.”33 Oklahoma!’

29 Bruscino, 5. 30 Fauser, 1. 31 Robert Walter Johannsen, Sam W. Haynes, and Christopher Morris, Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 3. 32 Gerald Mast, “As Corny as Kansas in August, As Restless as a Willow in a Windstorm,” in The Richard Rodgers Reader, ed. Geoffrey Block (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 95. 33 Mast, 94. 31 depicts “‘frontier brinkmanship’: its ability to […] negotiate the transition from wilderness to civilization, from lawless to law-abiding, from frontier to community, from territory to state, from fledgling nation to world power.” Through this “frontier brinkmanship,” the musical asserts that one must do whatever is necessary to protect the union.34

Beyond its popularity with live audiences, Oklahoma! contributed to rising nationalism through radio broadcast as the radio began to take a central role in the war effort. On

December 8, 1941, US residents listened intently as radio programs announced Japan’s deadly attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Immediately, the radio became the country’s source of emergency information, serving as a medium for President Franklin D. Roosevelt to address the nation and offer news about the war. After Pearl Harbor, “Music on the radio, which had provided chiefly entertainment before the attack, also began to march to a different drummer.

Now it added a new beat: morale boosting on the battlefield and on the home front.”35 Renditions of favorite numbers from Oklahoma!, including the title song, rocketed to the top thirty most- played songs on the airwaves before the cast album was even recorded—in spite of Hammerstein trying to keep the songs off the radio in order to preserve the integrity of the score as an integrated whole. The music spread through the sale of sheet music, including the release of the entire vocal score by the end of 1943, and the 1943 recording, which “was essentially the first cast album to feature cast, chorus, and orchestra as heard in the theater,” brought one of the most popular musicals in Broadway history into the homes and repertoires of its fans.36 In the mid-

1940s, “there seems to have been a first attempt in the Oklahoma legislature” to designate

34 Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 123. 35 Smith, God Bless America, 8. 36 George Reddick, “The Evolution of the Original Cast Album,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, eds. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 183. 32 “Oklahoma” as the state’s official anthem, an effort that was initially “scuppered by a female member who claimed that [the lyric] ‘Every night my honey lamb and I’ was indecorous,” but would eventually come to fruition in 1953.37 In fact, during World War II the US Office of War

Information instigated the search for the Great American War Song by challenging musicians

(especially Tin Pan Alley composers) to create an “American” song that could rally American citizens in the same way that “The Star-Spangled Banner” had during the War of 1812 or “Battle

Hymn of the Republic” during the Civil War.38 Rodgers and Hammerstein certainly did not embed standard Tin Pan Alley pop hits within Oklahoma!’s score, but the ways in which fans seized control of the music and took ownership of reperformances of the songs suggest that music as a cultural phenomenon is difficult to control and that the dissemination of a patriotic anthem cannot be overtly forced by government agencies. Nationalism and national identity, while fabricated, must feel innate and organic. As Benedict Anderson describes, national identity feels like “something to which one is naturally tied,” that is “unchosen.”39 While the Office of

War Information was ultimately unsuccessful in naming a Great American War Song,

“Oklahoma” fulfilled their need by expressing the patriotic sentiment of regional/national belonging through a history and idealism that precedes and outlasts wartime strife.

Incidentally, the out-of-town version of Oklahoma! that had “no tits, no jokes, no chance!” also had no title song. Originally, Laurey and Curly’s wedding near the end of Act II featured a reprise of “People Will Say We’re in Love,” the couple’s unconventional duet that begins as an “I hate you” song in the first act and morphs throughout the score until it becomes their love song. Mamoulian, who saw the need to “lift the show’s energy as high as possible

37 Tim Carter, Oklahoma!: The Making of an American Musical (New Haven: Yale University, 2007), 226-229. 38 Smith, God Bless America, ix. 39 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 143. 33 before going into the final dramatic scene,” asked Rodgers and Hammerstein to pen a more exciting number.40 According to musical theatre legend, they supposedly returned thirty minutes later with “Oklahoma!” fully staged and orchestrated, and Mamoulian inserted it into that evening’s show. The new song drew “an explicit parallel between personal relationships and the dream of statehood.”41 Sheldon Patinkin refers to the song as “a tribute to the future in […]

Hammerstein’s poetry of the ordinary.”42 Accounts of the title song’s origin story vary widely, and this particular myth about the genesis of “Oklahoma” is perhaps the most outlandish version.

However, the impossibly fast turnaround, followed by the rechristening of Away We Go! as

Oklahoma! (which Hammerstein called “a good, honest title”) contributes to the song’s narrative of American identity as inherent.43 The supposed completion of the song in thirty minutes—one of the most well-known versions of the myth—suggests a feat that could only be accomplished by divine inspiration. This anthem, thereby ordained and “unchosen,” refocuses the musical on national feeling rather than a mundane love story. While it would be difficult to pinpoint the addition of the anthem as the reason for the show’s redirection toward success, the centralization of statehood as a hopeful journey toward American futurity certainly spoke the language of national optimism to a country that desperately needed it.

By formulating national identity as “unchosen,” “Oklahoma” presents the nation as what

Anderson calls “interestless. [And j]ust for that reason, it can ask for sacrifices.”44 As the singers repeat multiple times in the song, “I know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand.”45 In the United States during World War II, the concept of belonging carried deep

40 Patinkin, 15. 41 Patinkin, 15. 42 Patinkin, 15. 43 Carter, 166. 44 Anderson, 144. 45 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Libretto, 58. 34 significance in terms of national strife over the place of immigrants within the makeup of

US/American identity. If the farmers and the cowmen can all become Oklahomans and

Americans, despite their long-standing divided history, a nation of immigrants can come together as essentially American regardless of countries of origin. But this unification both requires and justifies sacrifice, whether through the sacrifice of luxuries and leisure on the homefront or the sacrifice of human lives abroad. For young soldiers preparing to ship out, Oklahoma! reaffirmed

US/American identity as simple and wholesome, justifying the unpleasant necessity of dispatching those who threaten the nation’s cohesiveness and ability to progress. The anthem promises that Oklahoma, as a sample of American idealism, is worth the fight.

Dramaturgical Breakdown: Identifying “Furriners” in Oklahoma Territory

When Richard Rodgers finished writing the book for Oklahoma!, he reflected, “It’s a long time since any musical has had such an American flavor as this one.”46 And certainly, the musical defines Americanness and American identity in specific and intentional ways. As the show’s title suggests, the land in Oklahoma! serves as a foundation for cultural unity and national identity. Throughout the musical, images of the physical land and of the metaphorical brand-new state repeat, reifying an idea of Americanness. The stage directions at the beginning of the show describe:

A radiant summer morning several years ago, the kind of morning which, enveloping the

shapes of earth men, cattle in meadow, blades of the young corn, streams makes them

seem to exist now for the first time, their images giving off a golden emanation that is

partly true and partly a trick of the imagination, focusing to keep alive a loveliness that

may pass away.47

46 William George Hyland, Richard Rodgers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 141. 47 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Libretto, 1. 35 This description frames the land as both new and painfully impermanent. For audiences in 1943,

Oklahoma! offered idealized America to “wartime New Yorkers jaded by brownouts and food rationing,” presenting wide open spaces to city dwellers “with little space to ‘dig for victory’ in backyard vegetable plots.”48 However, although “Oklahoma” ties citizenship and belonging to the land, the musical asserts that one’s claim to the land results not from birth within specific geospatial borders, but a collection of qualities and actions that make one worthy of connection to the land.

The title song marks the moment, after Curly and Laurey’s wedding, when the community comes together as a single entity to profess their devotion to the land both as a pure, pre-state entity and as a site for constructing America as an ethos and political structure. Curly represents the paradigm for the quintessential American citizen. In order to create a specific vision of America onstage, Oklahoma! “drew on American archetypes: the frontier, a land to be settled through common ideals; the folk, a community of citizens who uphold justice; the hero, who fights hard and wins the girl; and the future, full of endless and bountiful possibilities.”49 As a cowboy, Curly stands as the community’s latent leader and must come into his own by overcoming his biggest obstacle—his ego—before he can take his rightful place. Much like the wild frontier, Curly must be tamed and civilized while he simultaneously tames and civilizes

Laurey, representing a compromise between the values of the farmers and the cowmen and settling both groups as different aspects of the same America. Marrying a farmgirl like Laurey requires Curly to forgo his wandering cowboy life in order to settle down, taking ownership of

Laurey and Aunt Eller’s land as the newly-installed patriarch.

48 Carter, 192. 49 Bruce D. McClung, Lady in the Dark: Biography of a Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 158. 36 By taming his own flaws, Curly models Americanness as a process, a whittling away of bad habits to reach a core of essentially American values. Curly’s connection with the land shines through from the first moments in the show when he sings “Oh What A Beautiful

Mornin’,” a love song to Oklahoma at the birth of a new day. Curly communes with the countryside and the friendly animals, noting that “the sounds of the earth are like music” and nodding to the cattle who are “standin’ like statues” aside from “a little brown mav’rick” who “is winkin’ her eye.”50 He personifies the land, beautifying it with his presence and singing that even the weeping willow “is laughin’ at [him].”51 As a cowboy, Curly has no legal ownership of the land, but he expresses a spiritual ownership and sense of belonging that transcends legalities.52

With his marriage to Laurey, positioning himself to legally inherit her family farm from Aunt

Eller, Curly’s metaphysical ownership of the land becomes literal. Additionally, Curly willingly sacrifices his own individual freedom (seen in his ability to roam the frontier as a cowboy) in order to serve the greater good of a community that needs him to bring them together. Curly represents Americanness by embodying both the innate, divinely-driven doctrine of Manifest

Destiny through exploration of the land and the bootstrap-tugging narrative of the American

Dream as he conquers both external and internal barriers in order to step into his role as a community leader so he can work hard to cultivate the land.

Curly’s place of leadership solidifies in the title anthem, as does the concept of what it means to belong within the Oklahoma community and the burgeoning United States. In the introduction to the number, Aunt Eller and some senior members of Oklahoma Territory pass the torch to the new couple, bequeathing the land and site of “a brand new state” to the next

50 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Libretto, 1-2. 51 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Libretto, 2. 52 Curly’s spiritual connection to the land, which Rodgers and Hammerstein amplify through music, certainly originates in the character’s Cherokee heritage in Green Grow the Lilacs. 37 generation. Curly leads the song, the only soloist in an anthem that unites the community, previously made up of discrete individuals, into a conglomerate. In that moment, regardless of each character’s distinct journey or their fights and disagreements, the members of the community are defined by those who can melt into the ensemble and sing, “We know we belong to the land.”53 This construction of inclusion overshadows the silence of the unincluded, implying that belonging to the community is much more complicated than Oklahoma! would suggest. In the rest of this section, I will elaborate on the ways that the anthem, within the dramaturgy of the musical, creates and mitigates outsiderness as a necessary faction of community. First, the concept of “belong[ing] to the land” erases the preexistence of the Native

Americans on the frontier, as native people do not seem to exist within the world of the musical.54 Second, the lustful and dangerously violent farm hand Jud Fry, who is notably unincluded in “Oklahoma,” stands in for those who pose a threat to the developing country and therefore its future stability. And third, Ali Hakim, the Persian peddler, models the process by which an immigrant can opt to become a nearly-equal member of the community.

In “Oklahoma,” the lyric “We know we belong to the land” implies an essentialized connection between the musical’s mostly-white characters and the geographic landscape of the territory. Although the musical takes place on the frontier, the narrative omits Native Americans from its constructed history. The source material, Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs’s Green

Grows the Lilacs, takes place in 1900 Indian Territory, seven years before the territory became the state of Oklahoma. The play differentiates between “territory folks” and the union. In Lilacs, after Jud dies in his altercation with Curly, Aunt Eller defends the cowboy, addressing the

53 Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Lynn Riggs, Oklahoma!:Vocal Score (New York: Williamson Music, 1943), 191. 54 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Libretto, 58. 38 wedding guests (who are all part Cherokee) by exclaiming, “Why, we’re territory folks—we ort to hang together. I don’t mean hang—I mean stick. Whut’s the United States? It’s jist a furrin country to me. And you supportin’ it! Just dirty ole furriners, ever last one of you!”55 The crowd grumbles back, asserting that they have Cherokee blood and therefore are not foreigners. In

Lilacs, the United States represents imposed law and order on a free territory. If the characters are all part Cherokee, then Americans become the interlopers. Lilacs, offering the perspective of its part-Cherokee playwright, is decidedly suspicious about the prospect of becoming a state and articulates a sentiment that directly opposes the whole-hearted commitment to the union that

“Oklahoma” expresses. The musical revises the setting to near-statehood Oklahoma in 1907, omitting the narrative of the Native Americans altogether (along with the brutally violent history of Native American genocide embedded in the country’s foundation) and thereby redefining foreignness in the United States. What Rodgers and Hammerstein don’t omit are the multitude of references to the land and land ownership that originate in Green Grow the Lilacs specifically as a Native American issue.

Amidst the changing geopolitical landscape of the United States during the process of unification, foreignness and unAmericanness become matters threatening the safety of its citizens and the sanctity of its values. Jud Fry, who epitomizes the threat of the outsider in the musical, arises from inside the community. Despite his position as one who was presumably born in the territory, Jud either cannot or will not compromise his personal desires for the sake of the community’s shared goals and ideals. Jud has an innate darkness that bars his inclusion in the lightness of the community’s spiritual unanimity. He cannot connect to the land, as evidenced in his aria “Lonely Room.” The song, a beautiful, stylistic sore thumb against the rest of the score,

55 Lynn Riggs, Green Grow the Lilacs (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2006), 98. 39 highlights his disconnect in contrast to Curly’s easy relationship with the land and its floral and faunal inhabitants. For Jud, plagued by cobwebs and “a fieldmouse a-nibblin’ on a broom,” the land and its intrusion upon his living space is less than friendly.56 As a farmhand, Jud can offer his labor to the land but cannot own it. Jud’s exclusion from “Oklahoma,” which is Laurey and

Curly’s wedding song, makes dramaturgical sense considering his violent opposition to their union. However, the rejection of Jud from the number not only marks his exclusion from the newly-forming society of Oklahoma as a state but ties his unwillingness to accept the marriage to a refusal of social unity. Raymond Knapp refers to Jud as “America’s id.”57 If the id is

(according to Freud) the most basic, instinctual, and animalistic part of the psyche, Jud represents the uncontrollable dark underside of American identity through his aggression, possessiveness, and sexual greed. By killing Jud, Curly kills America’s id, ostensibly freeing the community from its baser instincts. The ambiguous nature of Jud’s death raises the question as to whether Curly killed Jud or Jud dies by accident. The immediate assumption by Curly and the wedding guests that Curly is legally accountable suggests that throwing Jud onto his knife (even accidentally) counts as killing within the community. The end result, Jud’s death and removal from the community, is necessary, and Curly achieves this by responding to aggression rather than expressing his own aggression. Within the social constructs of World War II, the justification of Jud’s death extends to justify the neutralization of those who were perceived enemies of America and the American way of life. This reframes the killing of Nazis as necessary for the self-defense of the nation.

Notably, Jud’s analog in Green Grow the Lilacs, Jeeter Fry, is, like the rest of the community, part-Cherokee. Due to the sheer volume of text that Rodgers and Hammerstein lifted

56 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Libretto, 34. 57 Knapp, 127. 40 unchanged from the play, the script uses language that racializes Jud, despite the fact that

Howard Da Silva, who originated the role on Broadway, was white and the character has traditionally been cast using white actors. For instance, Curly describes Jud as a “bullet-colored growly man.”58 When Curly visits Jud in the smokehouse to convince him to stay away from

Laurey, he expresses his horror at Jud’s collection of pornographic photos and attempts to persuade him to commit suicide instead, spying a meat hook and suggesting, “You could hang yerself on that, Jud.”59 In the ensuing song, “Pore Jud is Daid,” the original script describes Jud as “repeating Curly’s pronouncements […] ‘reverently, like a Negro at a revivalist meeting,’”60

Curly’s joking references to lynching, when connected to the style of a black spiritual would have resonated with an audience in 1943 America, when lynchings still occurred regularly without legal intervention. This racialization, whether deliberate or inadvertent, reinforces the concept of Oklahoma and the larger United States as a white utopia.

Although the musical identifies and rejects Jud, Oklahoma! welcomes outsiders who are willing to assimilate. Ali Hakim, the Persian peddler, begins the musical as a hyper-sexual foreign threat, interfering in the inevitable marriage between Ado Annie and Will Parker, but finishes by joining the ensemble in the title anthem to declare, like everyone else, “I know we belong to the land.”61 As xenophobia and anxieties about immigration surged during World War

II, so did antisemitism. Ali Hakim, who represents the outsider who manages to become an

American, may be Persian in name, but he is coded as Jewish. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the

Broadway musical incorporated many characters coded as Jewish to combat anti-Semitist sentiments associated with anti-immigrant bigotry. With a vast majority of Jewish artists writing

58 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Libretto, 10. 59 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Libretto, 29. 60 Carter, 203. 61 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Libretto, 46. 41 and composing, World War I and II-era musical theatre becomes what Stuart Hecht refers to as a

“cultural Ellis Island,” working to instruct the immigrant or Jewish outsider in terms of how to assimilate and the general audience in how to accept them.62 As Andrea Most asserts, the theatre became a place where “Jews described their own vision of an idealized America and subtly wrote themselves into that scenario as accepted members of the white American community.”63

In Oklahoma!, Hakim’s assimilation is a form of sacrifice as he, like Curly, gives up his freedom to travel, bed local farm girls, and leave town before facing any consequences. Rather than run away again, Hakim agrees to marry Gertie, a less-desirable town daughter who he is caught seducing (due to her obnoxious laugh). Although Hakim’s wedding and assimilation occur at the end of a gun barrel, his marriage and sacrifice function to legitimize his place in the community.

In this way, even as an immigrant, Hakim can fit in and embody US/American national identity, regardless of his body’s national origin.

The anthem centers US/American national identity on wholesome pillars of value that support the continued generation of community and social order, such as marriage, family, land, and a cooperative relationship with the creatures and vegetation that live on the land. The song solidifies Curly’s stature within the community as a married farmer, extending this status as protection when Curly is immediately legally exonerated after Jud’s death. The lightheartedness with which Oklahoma! treats Jud’s death immediately after the ensemble sings “Oklahoma” serves to emphasize the insider/outsider dichotomy that the anthem formalizes. Notably, the

Curly of Green Grow the Lilacs does not receive the same immunity and, unlike the musical’s protagonist, finishes the play en route to spending his wedding night in jail. The musical admits

62 Hecht, 5. 63 Andrea Most, “We Know We Belong to the Land”: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (January 1998): 77, https://www.jstor.org/stable/463410. 42 that the transition into nationhood and national unity can be painful and, at times, violent, but asserts that this violence can be both necessary and permissible when enacted for the community’s greater good. Ultimately, as the musical argues, land and the state must be protected at all costs.

Musical Analysis: “Oklahoma” and the Musical Construction of American Essentialism

As I have argued thus far, the ideology put forth by both the musical and its title anthem centers on the idea of unity. This sense of unity permeates the structure of Oklahoma! through the integration of music, text, and production elements, a convention borrowed from classical music, opera, and operetta. While most popular musical theatre composers before Oklahoma! wrote scores comprising interchangeable radio hits that did little or nothing to further the action of the play, the songs in Oklahoma! function as musicalized dialogue rather than individual showstoppers. In his autobiography, Richard Rodgers asserts, “In a great musical, the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look. [Oklahoma!] was a work created by many that gave the impression of having been created by one.”64 The score serves the drama rather than dictating it. Unlike his collaborations with Lorenz Hart in which the music came first, Richard

Rodgers wrote music to fit Hammerstein’s lyrics. Rodgers reminisces, “When Oscar handed

[‘Oh What A Beautiful Mornin’’] to me and I read it for the first time, I was a little sick with joy because it was so lovely and so right. When you’re given words like ‘the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,’ you’ve got something to say musically.”65 The integration of the score allows the work to function similarly to classical opera in its ability to develop musical themes dramatically to a larger degree than is possible in a short stand-alone song. This has the effect of

64 Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2002), Loc. 3205, Kindle. 65 Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy: The Story of the American Musical Stage as Told Through the Careers of its Foremost Composers and Lyricists (South Brunswick, NJ: A.S. Barnes and Co, 1968), 268. 43 creating a self-contained musical world of the play. Furthermore, unlike most Broadway composers who typically wrote in popular idioms such as jazz or big band, Rodgers and

Hammerstein opted to give the music a “naturalist” aesthetic—one in which the songs sound like they ought to be sung by farmers and cowboys. Through this aesthetic, Oklahoma!’s score and title anthem musically connect essentialized elements of regional and national identity to the land, nature, and manifest destiny.66

Stylistically, “Oklahoma” functions as a patriotic anthem without resorting to musical tropes typically associated with patriotism. For instance, George M. Cohan’s “Over There,” which “had sparked the imagination and spirit of the country during World War I,” is a march, explicitly evoking images of the military and wartime nationalism.67 Rodgers and Hammerstein avoid the solemn hymnal style of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” (1918) and the grand patriotic structures of Francis Scott Key and John Stafford Smith’s notoriously difficult-to-sing

“Star-Spangled Banner” (1814). Instead, “Oklahoma” associates patriotic unity with the country twang of the common folk. Oklahoma! utilizes a musical idiom that would become ubiquitous in musical theatre, one which Joseph Swain identifies “at its core [as] a rather simplified nineteenth-century Romanticism,” a style that provides a basis for incorporating elements of popular musical styles while supporting dramatic clarity and emotional expression.68 In the case of Oklahoma!, the mix of Romanticism with a country-western cowboy aesthetic allows

“Oklahoma” to serve a dual purpose as an anthem.69 It valorizes the concept of a national

66 Knapp, 127. 67 Smith, God Bless America, 3. 68 Swain, 10. 69 Songs in the simplified Romantic style Swain describes tend to adhere to common conventions of western music. They usually have a clearly established tonal center or key signature and emphasize melody as a vehicle for emotional expression and narrative. Melodic phrases usually move up and down in small steps, and they primarily utilize notes that function together in ways that are pleasing to the ear within the expectations of western music. The conventions of the simplified Romantic style include the expectation of variations on these rules, such as notes that occur outside of the key signature, the occasional leap between notes, or the 44 identity based on patriotic unity for wartime audiences while also existing innocuously within the narrative with seemingly no political agenda. In the Office of War Information’s search for a

World War II anthem, Kathleen E.R. Smith explains, “success depended on joining a memorable melody with lyrics that would convince listeners to follow their leaders loyally.”70 As an anthem,

“Oklahoma” idealizes the state and its citizens’ decision to follow the forty-five prior states who joined the union. Its lyrics reassure audiences that Oklahoma, and by extension the United States, is “doin’ fine.”71 And the melody, full of repetition, encourages listeners to memorize and repeatedly sing along to the tune.

The anthem represents the generational transition of leadership that aligns with the territory’s transition into statehood, fulfilling the unspoken potentiality that Curly, through his marriage to Laurey, will inherit Aunt Eller’s land and lead the now-tamed frontier into a new plane of belonging and identity. In the introduction, Aunt Eller and several other older farmers

(Ike, Fred, Cord Elam, and Andrew Carnes) perform this generational transaction, offering that the couple “couldn’t pick a better time to start in life! It ain’t too early and it ain’t too late.”72

Musically, the introduction shows the stylistic tension between Aunt Eller’s generation and

Curly’s. Aunt Eller’s section has a simple melody that stays within the range of an octave. With dotted eighth notes, as shown in Figure 1, the melody in the introduction lingers and feels contained, musically describing a generation with no more forward momentum. Laurey repeats

Aunt Eller’s melody and rhythm, joining the older generation in passing control of the land to her new husband, who is “startin’ as a farmer with a brand new wife.”73

combinations of notes that sound unstable for the sake of emphasis and variety. 70 Smith, God Bless America, 8-9. 71 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Vocal Score, 187. 72 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Vocal Score, 183. 73 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Vocal Score, 183. 45

Figure 1: “Oklahoma,” measures 1-16 from the score of Oklahoma!

At the end of Curly’s first line in the song, beginning in measure nine, he begins to change the musical landscape put forth by the previous generation. First, he mimics the stationary melodic and rhythmic structure of the first eight measures and then he breaks out of it, landing on a high D and expressing a sense of optimism and forthcoming transformation. With this held note, Curly defies convention. He becomes an instant leader, inspiring the chorus to repeat him and build upon his assertion that Oklahoma as a “brand new state” is “gonna treat you great!”74 In the accompaniment, the rhythm doubles in tempo, collectively moving in eighth

74 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Vocal Score, 183. 46 notes rather than quarter notes, which gives the song more movement and excitement.75 As the chorus finishes the phrase “Gonna treat you great,” the vocals counter the enclosed feeling created by the first eight measures by squaring the rhythm. In other words, Curly sets the chorus in motion, thrusting the song into a forward momentum that emphasizes an optimistic sense of

American futurity and the hopeful horizons ahead. The soaring last note at the end of the phrase suddenly makes the song feel expansive with the now-rolling rhythm of the accompaniment. The intro continues to build up anticipation by repeating the same melody from the first section, but this time with a faster tempo and galloping accompaniment.

The anthem provides a site for the people of Oklahoma Territory—ranchers and cowmen—to come together as a single ensemble working toward a common goal. To this end, the characters and chorus melt together into Curly-led homogeneity during the first verse of the song as all (except Curly) become anonymous and de-emphasize their individual traits. Curly sets forth his ode to the state, which will become the lyrical and musical basis for the rest of the number:

Oklahoma where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain,

And the wavin’ wheat can sure smell sweet,

When the wind comes right behind the rain.

Oklahoma, every night my honey lamb and I,

Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk

Making lazy circles in the sky.

We know we belong to the land,

And the land we belong to is grand!

75 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Vocal Score, 183. 47 And when we say: Ee-ee-ow! A-yip-i-o-ee-ay!

We’re only sayin’ “You’re doin’ fine, Oklahoma!

Oklahoma, O.K.!”76

During the intro and the first part of the song, the ensemble sings in unison. Then, the ensemble mimics Curly’s verse with the same rhythmic and melodic structure but diversifying into harmony that alternates between two and four parts and adding the texture of semi-individuality back into the anthem. The chorus then begins to fragment the song, pulling the pieces apart and putting them back together. Figure 2 shows the moment when the choral line devolves into simply chanting the word “Oklahoma,” distilling the song down its most important element—the proper political name of their brand new soon-to-be state, the word that defines their new state of being. The fragmentation demonstrates the ability of disparate people to function as a single entity made up of a variety of voices. The ensemble reconstructs the fragmented song at the end of the number, first breaking it down further into individual letters to spell out the state name and then finishing with, “Oklahoma! Yeow!”77 and showing that even if the community breaks apart, it always has the ability to reunify.

76 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Vocal Score, 185-187. 77 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Vocal Score, 197. 48

Figure 2: “Oklahoma,” measures 166-173 from the score of Oklahoma!

“Oklahoma” not only provides a space for singers to unite in the name of the land, but also musically describes the land as a romanticized, sprawling entity. At the end of the introduction, the key shifts down from D-major to B♭-major. This sets the song up for the body of the anthem to counter that dip with upward motion in the form of a two-octave B♭-major scale that runs into Curly’s held note on the first syllable of “Oklahoma,” as shown in Figure 3. Curly immediately counters the double octave run up the scale by skipping down the D♭-major scale, covering the musical expanses of verse. Shifting down tonally creates anticipation for the convention of shifting back up, building momentum like a discus thrower who rears back before releasing. The run up the two-octave scale, which would become a common feature in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s scores, is not only musically exciting but its wideness also depicts the frontier, matching the vast fields and wide blue sky of Lemuel Ayers’s famous backdrop for the original production. Ayers’s pastoral scene, which persists as perhaps the show’s most iconic image, speaks to the seemingly endless expanses of land that represent the country that resulted from Manifest Destiny. Most subsequent productions, including the 2003 Broadway revival with 49 Patrick Wilson and the 1998 National Theatre of Great Britain production with Hugh Jackman

(filmed for television in 1999), use the familiar land and clouds backdrop both in the set and in publicity materials. “Oklahoma” manifests these images of rolling land through musical imagery.

Figure 3: “Oklahoma,” measures 41-45 from the score of Oklahoma!

Structurally, “Oklahoma” further represents the “spatial expanse of the territory’s ‘wide open spaces’” by employing and altering the traditional AABA format used by Tin Pan Alley songs. 78 Typically, Tin Pan Alley composers structured their popular hits in thirty-two measures.

The first two eight-bar A segments follow the same or similar melodic structure and rhyme scheme. The eight-bar B section, or the bridge, contrasts the A sections. The final A section returns to the same or similar structure as the first two A sections. In “Oklahoma,” the first two A sections are sixteen bars each. As Raymond Knapp explains:

Each A is double the traditional length of eight bars [which] creates the signature

expansive effect of the song, a single note held for more than three bars on a single

syllable, growing to the breaking point. The device adds an audible dimension to the

description given in the final words of the preceding verse, which links expansive

geography to an interior landscape of endurance and optimism.79

78 Knapp, 132. 79 Knapp, 132. 50 This representation of the land offers the musical illusion of an enormous, open countryside. The audience may be watching the show in New York, where the closely-set buildings barely leave space for vegetation or listening to the music in a tiny house or apartment, but “Oklahoma” centers the physical construction of America on land that stands for endless, undeveloped potential. The frontier in Oklahoma! is simultaneously tamed and open for interpretation.

Although the anthem emphasizes the connection between the land and the geopolitical entity of Oklahoma statehood, “Oklahoma” presents the land as seemingly apolitical. The musical unabashedly conflates Laurey and Curly’s marriage with the larger issues of statehood and social/cultural unification. With what Raymond Knapp calls “almost comic obviousness,”

“Oklahoma” celebrates the wedding by singing about the state. The marriage, like the union, is inevitable and necessary and their marriage represents the state’s, and therefore the country’s, divine and pre-political right to name and inhabit the land. In the 1955 film, based on the original

Broadway production, the ensemble’s first verse even doubles as the couple’s first dance.80

However, although the musical as a whole is designed to accommodate large dance numbers, courtesy of choreographer Agnes De Mille in the original production, “Oklahoma” is not. The anthem has no instrumental dance break, and in the 1955 film, which features adaptations of

Agnes De Mille’s choreography, the ensemble does little more than sway and move into tableaux.81 Similarly, in the 1999 West End production starring Hugh Jackman and featuring choreography by Susan Stroman, the cast largely stands and sings in formation.82 This suggests that patriotic identity in the anthem rests particularly on its music.

80 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma!, dir. Fred Zinnemann, dances staged by Agnes De Mille. (Burbank, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1955), DVD, 145 min. 81 Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, 1955 film. 82 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, dir. by Trevor Nunn, choreo. by Susan Stroman, feat. Hugh Jackman (Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2003), DVD, 180 min. 51 Coda: A Musical of Mythical Proportions

As a musical, Oklahoma! trafficked in cultural mythology, not only in its subject matter but in the mythical proportions of the show’s success. The show presented a nostalgic, rosy- colored narrative of frontier America to bolster the spirits and faith in nationalism of an audience enduring sacrifice in war. Additionally, it was different from the works that Broadway audiences were accustomed to consuming in structure, style, and subject matter. The show earned historical distinction through widespread recognition as the first book musical with the first integrated score, and it ushered in the Golden Age of musical theatre.83 It was a folk operetta, a work that

“aim[ed …] to grant the genre something of the status of high art.”84 While most patriotic musicals of the era addressed the war directly, Oklahoma! broached the emotional patriotism and focus on national identity that was at the forefront of US/American culture. The title anthem serves as the event that solidifies the show’s nationalistic message, finally declaring that the show, which alludes throughout to issues of national progress and statehood, is actually about

America and what it means to be an American for an audience living through a moment of crisis.

Given the virtual flood of patriotic culture that occurred during the era, what exactly made

Oklahoma! so popular? Why has the musical endured through multiple decades and eras after it opened? Why has the anthem survived as a symbol of patriotism and an official icon of the state of Oklahoma?

First, I suggest that the musical’s mythological status results from the original audience’s captivation with the music. Although Rodgers and Hammerstein did not fill the show with

83 Oklahoma!’s claim to these titles, such as the first book musical and the first musical with an integrated score, has been debated among musical theatre scholars who bring up titles such as Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat (1927) and Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark (1941). While Oklahoma! may not have been quite as innovative as credited, it nonetheless reached a mythicized status in musical theatre history as the starting point for the Golden Age of musical theatre, and through this prominence, the work has been influential in molding the form. 84 Carter, 208. 52 standard Tin Pan Alley radio hits, the 1943 recording was immensely well-received, saturating popular musical culture in a way that no other work of musical theatre had before.85 The title anthem and the rest of the score were wildly popular outside of the spectacle and context of the show, and continue be well-loved and endlessly reperformed. The vast popularity of Oklahoma! and its title anthem gave the score a highly influential place in a long history of musical theatre’s involvement “in creating, developing, or in some cases merely exploiting a variety of American mythologies.”86 Earlier in this chapter, I recounted an anecdote in which Agnes De Mille remembers rows of uniformed soldiers weeping at the show’s conclusion because “it symbolized home and what they were going to die for.”87 This raises the question: how did Oklahoma! evoke such powerful emotional responses?

Consider the role of the music, integrated into the structure of the show. As Joseph Swain explains, “American popular songs are simple in form and are generally quite short. These features limit not so much what can be expressed, but to what degree it can be conveyed.”88 For instance, in large musical works such as classical operas or symphonies, “Mozart can prepare a climactic finale for twenty minutes, and Wagner for an entire act, but a theater song must make its point and quit within a very few minutes.”89 The integration of the score allows the work to function similarly to classical opera in its ability to develop musical themes dramatically to a larger degree than is possible in a short stand-alone song. It creates an immersive musical world of the play, simultaneously referencing and romanticizing a foundational version of American identity with the added layer of dramaturgical context to infuse the songs with deeper meaning.

85 Although there were many musical works that received similar (or greater) attention and adoration from the public, I am referring specifically to musical theatre and not opera or operetta. 86 Knapp, 119. 87 De Mille, 2:52. 88 Swain, 10. 89 Swain, 10. 53 Oklahoma! was not only surprising and different in form and content, it approached the war and nationalism from an unexpected angle. The anthems that roused the country during the first World War were different from the music that the public demanded during World War II.

While “the war news and war-related activities day after day weighed heavily on people’s minds, music could give them much-needed relief.”90 Oklahoma! offered an escape to what the musical constructed as a less complicated time. As an anthem, “Oklahoma” simplified the relationship between citizens and their country. Reframing divisive issues such as racism, war, and foreign policy, “Oklahoma” affirms, “We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand.”91 Through sentimentality and escapism, the musical manages to broach serious issues of nationalism. Combined with the lyrics and dramaturgy, the music describes the land that they are going to fight for as endless, hopeful expanses of territory and a site of American futurity. And as soldiers wept in the face of an idealized America, patriotism and national pride became central to American national identity.

90 Smith, God Bless America, 10. 91 Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Riggs, Oklahoma!: Vocal Score, 186. 54 CHAPTER 3

“MY TEXAS”: GIANT AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF MYTHOS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST

“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. […] For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, […] Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America.” - John Steinbeck Travels with Charley: In Search of America1

“You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.” - Davy Crockett2

In a 2013 Playbill Online spotlight article on composer Michael John LaChiusa, he quips,

“I figure if you can make it through one of my scores and still have half a brain left, you are one talented motherfucker.”3 And indeed, LaChiusa’s compositional style tends toward the unconventional. When LaChiusa’s musical Giant, based on Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel by the same title, first opened at the Signature Theatre in Virginia in 2009, reviewer Paul Harris claimed that “like a spicy Texas chili, this ‘Giant’ is not for everyone. Along with its overly aggressive reach, there’s LaChiusa’s defiantly non-commercial style, which is something of an acquired taste.”4 However, Harris also refers to the score as “far more accessible” than some of

LaChiusa’s other, more esoteric works.5 If not exactly conventional, Giant mimics and distorts dramatic and musical conventions that became solidified along with the genre during the

US/American Golden Age of musical theatre. Musically and structurally, Giant references and repurposes common tropes that were popularized by Oklahoma! and standardized during the

1 John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America (New York: Penguin, 1962), 229. 2 Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 22 3 Andrew Gans, “Their Favorite Things: Giant Composer Michael John LaChiusa Shares His Theatregoing Experiences,” Playbill Online, June 12, 2013, http://www.playbill.com/article/their-favorite-things-giant- composer-michael-john-lachiusa-shares-his-theatregoing-experiences-com-206517. 4 Paul Harris, “‘Giant’-sized Ambition,” Variety 415, no. 1 (May 18-24 2009): 34-35. 5 Harris, “‘Giant’-sized Ambition.” 55 ensuing decades.6 By revising and repurposing these tropes, LaChiusa and librettist Sybille

Pearson confront the racism and misogyny embedded in both the mythos of the US/American southwest and the musical theatre, highlighting the role of both in the construction of popular historical narrative, the national imaginary, and national identity.

The language of Harris’s review—the “spicy Texas chili” in Giant—betrays the anxieties of a primarily white audience viewing a work of a usually primarily white art form that criticizes

European colonization in the Americas and the subjugated history of racialized violence beneath

US/American nationalism. Musical theatre, like many popular art forms, has had a difficult relationship with racial representation, typically exotifying, stereotyping, or altogether erasing people of color and presenting whiteness as a non-racialized default. Or, as Warren Hoffman asserts, “Plainly put, the history of the American musical is the history of white identity onstage.”7 Giant works to make people of color visible and expose the systemic racism that lingers and thrives in southwestern border states. Ferber believed that the novel’s “value lay in its exposure of racial prejudice against Mexican-Americans in Texas.”8 In a 1954 letter to director

George Stevens, who was mid-production of the film adaptation, Ferber wrote that the novel’s racial themes had become “more vital, more prevalent today in the United States than […] when

I began to write the novel.”9 The novel, which served as the basis for a popular 1956 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, critiques the state’s violent history and

6 Giant was orchestrated by Bruce Coughlin, who received a 2013 Drama Desk Award for his work on the show. Larry Hochman, who also orchestrated The Scottsboro Boys (2010) provided additional material. 7 Warren Hoffman, The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 3. 8 J.E. Smyth, Edna Ferber’s Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History (Austin: University of Texas, 2010), 191. 9 Smyth, 191. 56 origins, its treatment of displaced Mexican people, and the very notion of Texas pride and identity.10

Overview: Everything’s Bigger in Texas

When Julie Gilbert first approached LaChiusa to adapt her great aunt Edna Ferber’s novel

Giant into a musical, LaChiusa responded, “No. […] It’s too big.”11 A few years later, LaChiusa reconsidered and composed a musical that, like its source material, is undeniably giant in scope.

The musical’s central plotline focuses on the story of Leslie Lynnton, a young, liberal, and educated woman from Virginia who in 1925 meets and impulsively marries cowboy Jordan

“Bick” Benedict, the heir to Reata, a million-and-a-half-acre cattle ranch in Texas. Through flashbacks and flashforwards, the musical shows their marriage over the course of twenty-seven years. Stunned by her new home, Leslie discovers that her new family and home are entrenched in the racist history of Texas land appropriation and the subjugation of Mexican workers. Leslie, outspoken and determined, fights to improve conditions for Mexican workers. Leslie and Bick raise two children, a girl named Lil’ Luz who is a born cattlewoman and takes after her headstrong father, and a boy named Jordy who, like his mother, values social justice over ranching and familial property. Meanwhile, Bick, beholden to tradition and conservativism, resists the changing cultural landscape as his son, Jordy, falls in love with and marries Juana, a young Mexican American woman. On New Year’s Eve, 1952, after nearly three decades of marriage, Bick and Leslie come together to admit that they don’t fit with one another, leaving the future of their marriage ambiguous. But the end of the musical offers optimism in the form of

10 Portions of this chapter were published in the 2018 edition of Texas Theatre Journal in “‘This Is My Texas’: Land Ownership and the Mythos of the American Southwest in Michael John LaChiusa’s Giant and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!” See bibliography for full citation. 11 Harry Huan, “Michael John LaChiusa Takes a Giant Step, Musicalizing an Iconic Tale,” Playbill Online, October 26, 2012, http://www.playbill.com/article/michael-john-lachiusa-takes-a-giant-step-musicalizing-an-iconic- tale-com-199112. 57 Jordy and Juana’s soon-to-be-born mixed-race baby, placing hope for the future in a hybridized utopia.

Like the novel, the musical exposes racism at the root of nationalist pride. This is most apparent in “My Texas,” an anthem to Texan pride. At the end of the first act, the Benedicts’ family and friends gather for a celebration at the Dallas Hotel in honor of Bick, who has been named the 1941 “Cattleman of the Year.” When Lesley’s sister, Lady Karfrey, who expatriated and married into British nobility, refers flippantly to William Barrett Travis, the Commander of the Alamo, as “gaga from drinking mercury, a treatment for venereal disease” and Sam Houston, a major leader in the Texas Revolution as “an opium addict” who “wore a girdle,” Bick intercedes.12 Amid irate reactions from the Texans present, Bick leads his fellow countrymen in

“My Texas,” an anthem to Texas pride and belonging that centers on a mythologized, revisionist history of the state’s formation and the siege at the Alamo. In what Bick describes as “the first song we learned in school,” he and his Texan dinner party guests pledge their love and fealty to their state through an account of the battle at the Alamo that privileges the dead (mostly white)

Texans as victims of Mexican aggression.13 Friction arises between father and son when Jordy interjects to correct the song’s biased construction of history, but the anthem continues undeterred. The song, a rousing climax to the first act that echoes the style and spirit of

Oklahoma!’s “The Farmer and the Cowman,” affirms Texan identity, and therefore American national identity, as a matter to be settled between white men.

I chose to explore “My Texas” as the second object of this study because it contains an anthem that expresses unity in a way that is very similar to “Oklahoma.” But while “Oklahoma”

12 Sybille Pearson and Michael John LaChiusa, Giant: Libretto/Vocal Book (Los Angeles: Fiddleback Music Publishing, 2012), 58. 13 Pearson and LaChiusa, 59. 58 presents and advocates for mainstream patriotic nationalism uncritically, the anthems I address in chapters three through five work to dismantle dominant American national identity. As in

“Oklahoma,” “My Texas” formulates a unified state identity that stands in for American national identity. The anthem follows musical and rhetorical conventions of Golden Age musical theatre anthems. However, in Giant, “My Texas” is situated within dramaturgical and musical structures that begin to unravel its nationalist sentiment. In this chapter, I argue that “My Texas” mimics and then deconstructs the pervasive trope of the patriotic musical theatre anthem historically, dramaturgically, and musically in order to critique homogenized white narratives of history on the Broadway stage.

The first section considers how the musical connects Ferber’s construction and critique of nationalism and US/American national identity to the socio-political context of the country sixty years later. In both 1952 and 2012, Giant addresses the ways that otherness is embedded in constructions of US/American nationalism through white supremacy, xenophobia, sexism, and anti-intellectualism. With “My Texas,” Giant complicates the way the history of the Alamo and the War for Texas Independence has been romanticized and repurposed in order to situate and construct Texan-American identity. Through an exploration of the way romanticized history interacts with popular memory, I contend that Giant challenges the way Texan identity, as a subset of American identity, revises history for the sake of reaffirming ideas of American exceptionalism.

In the second section, I discuss the dramaturgy and construction of the outsider in Giant, and how “My Texas” works as an anthem to create communities of inclusion and exclusion. By valorizing this particular version of the Alamo, Bick and his fellow countrymen reify a construction of Texan identity that places themselves as the paradigms. This formulation of

59 Texanness is based on land ownership, embodiment, and unquestioning allegiance to the state.

The anthem’s version of belonging favors white male landowners who work on their land. While the anthem itself presents this ideology unironically, Giant balances this insular perspective with that of an outsider, Leslie. An educated woman, Leslie becomes an activist who fights for the rights of the Mexican workers and asserts her own agency. Without the context of the musical, the anthem functions unironically as a pro-nationalist anthem that would be virtually indistinguishable from other patriotic musical theatre anthems, but within the musical, dramaturgical interventions challenge the way nationalism creates outsiders.

Section three analyzes the musical construction of patriotic identity within the anthem as well as the disruption created by dramaturgical interventions. In order to do this, I place the anthem in the center of a three-song arc. First, Leslie sings “Your Texas” when she meets Bick, dreaming about a Texas that she has never seen. Second, Bick leads his fellow Texans in “My

Texas” while attending a party in his honor. And third, Leslie responds angrily to “My Texas” by singing “Your Texas (reprise).” “My Texas” employs conventions of country music, patriotic anthems, and anthems of musical theatre within an otherwise unconventional score. I suggest that this arc musically deconstructs the Texan mythos, using familiar musical genres to create the

Texan identity, then shifting musically to dismantle that romanticized identity, and ultimately closing with musical disillusionment.

Cultural Context: Don’t Mess with Texas

Edna Ferber’s novel Giant ruffled some Texan feathers. She writes of receiving a phone call in a hotel restaurant one day and getting paged for a phone call. A man lounging face-down by the pool “uncoiled like a python.”14 Recognizing the name of the writer who penned the novel

14 Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography (New York: First Vintage Books, 2014), Kindle Loc 4385. 60 Giant, the enormous Texan leapt to his feet, drawling, “Who’s that he said? I’ll kill her! Where is she? I’ll kill her!”15 Ferber’s portrait of Texas invoked what she described as a “blast of insult, vituperation, [and a] published scatological and libelous outpouring.”16 In her autobiography, she describes Texas newspapers that call for her to be “caught and hanged here in Texas” and

“dropped through a sheet of glass below the scaffold so that she’ll be cut into hamburgers when she falls.”17 No stranger to controversy, Ferber received similar backlash with her earlier novel

Show Boat (1926), the source material for the 1927 musical for addressing racism in the United

States. With Show Boat, critics began to draw connections between the themes in Ferber’s novels and Harriet Beecher Stowe, although when she wrote Giant, “many irate Texans used Stowe’s name as a curse rather than a compliment.”18 The angry responses from offended Texans illustrate a sacrosanct understanding of state history that mirrors the nationalist approach to US history and generative mythology. As Bick asserts, “All ‘Texians’ call their state their country,” thereby acknowledging a uniquely Texan conflation of national and regional identity.19

Therefore, by critiquing the mythologizing of Texan history as a component of Texas identity,

Giant also challenges the construction of American exceptionalism that guides historical narratives and formulates American national identity.

In 2009, when the first iteration of LaChiusa’s Giant premiered at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, the United States had reached a moment in which the issue of immigration as it pertained to national identity was in question. The tumult of this time provides a backdrop for the musical. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign promised

15 Ferber, Kind of Magic, Loc 4385. 16 Ferber, Kind of Magic, Loc 2819. 17 Ferber, Kind of Magic, Loc 2868. 18 Smyth, 24. 19 Pearson and LaChiusa, 7. 61 comprehensive immigration reform, garnering “the largest margin of support among Latino voters since Bill Clinton was re-elected in 2006.”20 In his first term, Obama met staunch resistance from congress and was unable to pass legislation regarding immigration. He proposed the DREAM Act in 2010, which offered avenues for immigrant minors to achieve citizenship, but the bill was defeated.21 Throughout Obama’s two-term presidency, his administration negotiated the terms of immigration and reintroduced the DREAM Act. By 2012, when Giant opened in New York at the Public Theatre, Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

(DACA) policy had begun to accept applications.22 But although DACA provided the opportunity for citizenship to about 1.8 million undocumented youths, this was a fraction of the

11 million undocumented immigrants who were living in the United States.23

In 2012, Giant addressed the resistance to humane immigration reform that stymied the

Obama administration attempts to pass legislation. In particular, the musical speaks to attitudes like those belonging to members of “Congress and the electorate [who] saw undocumented immigrants as law-breakers who were morally unworthy of legalization.”24 Giant dissects the way these perceptions have been formed through constructions of history and popular memory.

By repurposing the narrative that Ferber wrote in 1952, LaChiusa and Pearson stage a history that reframes Mexican immigrants as the native inhabitants of land that was colonized by white immigrants. The musical probes the construction of whiteness within Texan identity and the use of cultural mythology to valorize the white colonizers and justify the subjugation of the native people.

20 John D. Skrentny and Jane Lilly Lopez, “Obama’s Immigration Reform: The Triumph of Executive Action,” Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality 2, no. 1 (2013), 64. 21 The acronym DREAM stands for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors. 22 Skrentny and Lopez, 75. 23 Skrentny and Lopez, 75. 24 Skrentny and Lopez, 65. 62 “My Texas” demonstrates the impact of the Alamo within popular memory. Bick and his peers have been submerged in a particular formulation of Texas history since childhood—a construction that conflates criticism against those who fought at the Alamo with criticism of

Texan identity and, by extension, American identity. As Pinkie, a Texan ranch hand, points out to Lady Karfrey, Leslie’s émigré sister, “The Alamo, ma’am, with no disrespect, ma’am, is

American history not English.”25 Pinkie’s (polite) dismissal of Lady Karfrey, who was presumably born and raised in the United States, as English rather than American, associates US identity with not only birthright but the choice to adopt uncritically the national/regional culture and historical mythology. This mythology, as Bick demonstrates, ties much more deeply to a certain ethos than to historical evidence, ignoring and erasing the existence of multi-perspective accounts in favor of a story that feeds a pro-nationalistic narrative.

The description of the Alamo in “My Texas” produces and reifies an idealized version of

Texas as a “great nation ‘born in blood’” and an image of rugged Texas masculinity that “centers around the Alamo and its defenders.”26 Although the Texans in Giant venerate this construction of cowboy masculinity as essential to Texan identity, their version of the events at the Alamo are, as Jordy accuses, “full of lies,” or at least full of embellishments.27 On February 23, 1836,

General Santa Anna led between one and two thousand Mexican troops in an attack on the

Alamo, a former Catholic mission in San Antonio. Fewer than two hundred Texans were present to fight Santa Anna’s forces, and by the end of a thirteen-day standoff, nearly all of the Texans were dead.28 According to unsubstantiated legend, when the Texans found themselves cornered,

25 Pearson and LaChiusa, 59. 26 Laura Lyons McLemore, Inventing Texas: Early Historians of the Lone Star State (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 94. 27 Pearson and LaChiusa, 61. 28 James E. Crisp, Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 179. 63 Commander William Barret Travis drew a line in the sand and “then asked all those willing to fight to the death to cross it.”29 The siege at the Alamo became an instant parable, serving the

Texans in their revolution more as a romanticized narrative than as a tactical event within the war. Superseding the embodied realities of their slaughtered countrymen, the story became a metaphor for Texan obstinance, spurring the Texan rebels to victory seven weeks later at the

Battle of San Jacinto. There, led by Sam Houston, they defeated Santa Anna’s men while repeating the battle cry, “Remember the Alamo!”30 Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserts that with that battle cry, “they doubly made history. As actors, they captured Santa Anna and neutralized his forces. As narrators, they gave the Alamo story a new meaning.”31

“My Texas” presents the Texas of cultural memory, a perspective of state history that was established by mid-nineteenth century Texas historians and reified through the public educational system and popular culture. Bick and the Texan ensemble recount the story of the

Alamo as “the first song we learned in school,” indicating that this history has been instilled from a young age.32 As cultural historian Laura Lyons McLemore argues, the earliest Texan historians “were given to hyperbole, drama, and hero-making” and by the end of the nineteenth century, their romanticized narratives dominated the first Texas history textbooks.33 In one widely used 1954 middle-school textbook, The History of Texas, writers Emma Mae Brotze and

A.E. Lehmberg—both of whom were junior high school principals, not historians—refer to “the brave defenders of the Alamo,” inscribing the likely fabricated story of Travis’s “line on the ground” as a matter of historical record.34 The text incorporates artistic renderings of historical

29 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 2015), 9. 30 Trouillot, 2. 31 Trouillot, 2. 32 Pearson and LaChiusa, 59. 33 McLemore, 6. 34 Emma Mae Brotze and A.E. Lehmberg, The History of Texas, (Dallas: Noble and Noble, 1954), 81. 64 events and stills from popular films alongside archival photographs of prominent landmarks with captions that offer no distinction between the two, thereby melding creative interpretation and works of entertainment as a part of the regional and national imaginary. The Alamo site itself, dubbed the “Shrine of Texas Liberty” and advertised with the tagline “the mission, the battle, the legend,” has become a tourist attraction, a “hallowed ground,” and a space to remember and reaffirm the inspiring Texas of storybooks (and textbooks).35

Bick’s musical retelling of the Alamo puts forth the image of this fabled Texas, illustrating the shape of a regional and national imaginary. The deification of Texan historical figures feeds into a culture of performed patriotism in which schoolchildren have, since 1933, been required to pledge allegiance to the Texan flag in addition to the American flag. Their recitation, “Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible,” echoes the language of the national pledge of allegiance.36 The employment of similar rhetoric elevates Texas from state to country while confounding the way the state is situated as part of a larger union, as if the state might decide to secede at any moment. This sacred history is both preserved as Texan and enveloped into the larger arc of American history.

While Texas was not yet a state in 1836, the narratives of the Texas revolution, including the valorization of the Alamo, became a part of the US/American canon of history when Texas joined the union in 1845. The story of the Alamo reverberates alongside other similarly embellished parables such as the Boston Tea Party, the first Thanksgiving, and Paul Revere’s midnight ride as an enduring example of American exceptionalism. When Jordy interrupts and criticizes “My Texas,” Bick’s irate response seems cruel and irrationally histrionic. But within

35 “Home,” The Alamo, accessed March 16, 2019, http://www.thealamo.org/index.html. 36 “Pledge of Allegiance to the State Flag,” Texas State Library and Archives Commission, last modified June 6, 2016, https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/flagpledge.html 65 the practice of patriotic Texan fervor, “retelling this narrative becomes an evangelical act, spreading the gospel of Texas” and denying it becomes sacrilege.37

Within the world of Giant, the stakes of performing Texas allegiance and reverence for the Alamo are tied to life and livelihood. Cohen describes the “reverberation between story and situation, between narrative and a contemporary historical condition that prompt[s] those living in it to attach special meaning to that narrative.”38 The scene surrounding “My Texas” takes place in the summer of 1941, mere months before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United

States’s entry into World War II. With war looming, a myth that shapes the nation as a breeding ground for courageous masculinity would likely resonate with readers similarly to the way it did for Texan rebels at the Battle of San Jacinto. A central mythology of martyrdom and sacrifice imposes parameters on Texan (and therefore American) identity, preparing its men to fulfill their masculine duty to kill or die for the sake of the country and the ambiguous cause of freedom. If being killed while fighting for one’s country is morally right, then the lens of the Alamo offers a way to justify and even admire those who fight and die defending their country in war. Within this constructed history of the Texas Revolution, Texans fight and prove their worthiness, extending that worthiness decades later to men like Bick.

Ultimately, in the narrative of Giant, “My Texas” and the story of the Alamo divide

Mexico and Texas along racial lines and demonize the Mexican people, delineating citizenship along lines that coincide with white anxieties about Mexican American immigrants that had been building in the United States since the beginning of the 20th century.39 Pinkie prefaces “My

37 Mike Milford, “The Rhetorical Evolution of the Alamo,” Communication Quarterly 61, no. 1 (January-March 2013): 118. 38 Cohen, 14. 39 Joseph L. Locke, “The Heathen at Our Door: Missionaries, Moral Reformers, and the Making of the ‘Mexican Problem,’” The Western Historical Quarterly 49 (Summer 2018), 127. 66 Texas” by referring to Mexicans as the “cruelest people history’s ever known.”40 The anthem emphasizes a dichotomy between Texans and Mexicans, despite the involvement of both

Mexican and European rebels in the Texan secession from Mexico. Thus, although Mexican ranch hands and domestic help are ubiquitous on Reata, they remain separate from the white ranchers. Erasing native Mexican people from the central myth in the genesis of Texan identity effectively reinforces white supremacy as established through European colonialism. And if, as

Jordy argues, the Texas Revolution was actually a “land grab” and “The Mexicans didn’t come here as immigrants. It was their land. We came as immigrants,” this assertion delegitimizes the

Benedict family’s claim to their enormous ranch.41 Regardless of the Mexican people’s claim to

Texas as natives, colonization redefined them as foreigners. The dead men at the Alamo have come to represent a sacrificial offering that validates and pays for Texan control of the land, and the way the brutality of their martyrdom is imagined rationalizes the exploitation and oppression of the Mexican people.

Nearly six decades after the publication of Ferber’s novel, LaChiusa’s Giant spoke to a nation that had once again reached a watershed moment in terms of national identity in relation to immigrants and indigenous people. Ferber’s novel explored Texas as a site for mythmaking, and Giant identifies how these myths endure through ongoing metamorphoses, since, as Cohen posits, “ordinary folks (that is to say non-historians) […] are likely to be more emotionally drawn to a past that fits their preconceptions—a past they feel comfortable and identify with— than to a past that is ‘true’ in some more objective sense.”42 Superficially, the musical follows the rocky marriage of Bick and Leslie as they raise children and navigate their ineffable

40 Pearson and LaChiusa, 59. 41 Pearson and LaChiusa, 60. 42 Cohen, 19. 67 differences, but on a macro level it speaks to a society that asks in 2010 just as it did during

World War II: should the United States embrace non-citizens in need or reserve aid, land, and employment for citizens? In the face of increasing anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States,

Giant critiques the distortion by which the dominant culture creates revisionist histories to maintain the status quo and justify social hierarchies.

Dramaturgical Breakdown: The Line in the Sand

If observed outside of the musical’s context, “My Texas” could double as a typical patriotic anthem from the Golden Age of musical theatre. The style and staging of the song reference that of “Oklahoma.” Like “Oklahoma,” “My Texas” occurs amid a gathering of family and friends who are celebrating Bick’s Cattleman of the Year award just as the guests in

Oklahoma! are honoring Curly and Laurey’s marriage. Both songs express passionate and uncritical declarations of regional pride as a microcosm of nationalism. In Giant, the group of

Texans joyfully educate their non-Texan friends about their beloved state’s proud history, swearing, “This is my Texas! My dearest Texas! And I promise to love her till I die.”43 In

Chapter Two, I discussed the way the title anthem of Oklahoma! creates a narrative of inclusion and exclusion through participation in the song. But while “Oklahoma” omits its outsiders without commentary, “My Texas” makes erasure and ostracization visible. This occurs not within the song itself, but through dramaturgical interventions surrounding the song. I contend that although, as an anthem, “My Texas” centers belonging and citizenship on land ownership, embodiment, and unquestioning belief in the state, dramaturgical commentary challenges this assertion within the context of the musical.

43 Pearson and LaChiusa, 59. 68 As discussed in the previous section, “My Texas” idealizes Texan-American identity as white, ruggedly masculine, and land-owning, modelled after the mythical construction of the men who died at the Alamo, heroically and stoically giving their lives so that their compatriots could possess the Texan land. Bick declares, “The story of the Alamo is the history of ordinary men, who given a choice, chose to give their lives for Texas.”44 Bick, described repeatedly in

Ferber’s novel (along with the rest of the Benedict family) as Texas “royalty,” leads the song as a paradigm of Texan power, masculinity, and identity.45 The song and the story exist to valorize

Bick and men like him, although no one else can quite measure up. Bick runs the Benedict empire. His relationship with the Mexican ranchers and domestic workers is friendly, but decidedly unequal. As the Benedict patriarch, Bick maintains—or fails to maintain—the eponymous town of Benedict, where the Mexican workers of Reata live in squalor on Benedict property. Bick epitomizes belonging in the terms presented by the anthem. He doesn’t just own some land in Texas; he owns a million-and-a-half acres. Ideologically, Bick believes wholeheartedly in Texas, the product of lifelong inculcation and grooming as its royal heir. In terms of embodiment, Bick not only exemplifies whiteness and maleness but sacrifices his body to the land through manual labor, regardless of his wealth and status. This illustrates the paradox of embodiment in which the white, landowning male can only maintain Texas status through a sense of authenticity brought about by physically working the land.

Immediate dramaturgical intervention occurs through those who occupy a liminal space in terms of Texas identity. These people are present at the event where the anthem takes place, but do not participate in the singing. Leslie, for instance, after living in Texas for over fifteen years, still does not subscribe to Texan identity. Although she is more privileged than most as a

44 Pearson and LaChiusa, 59. 45 Edna Ferber, Giant (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 509. 69 white woman and the wife of Texas royalty, Leslie has no substantial agency outside of that which she borrows from men such as her father and husband. To drive this point home, ranch hand Jett Rink meets Leslie shortly after she arrives in Texas and refers to her as Bick’s “private property.”46 At first, as a new denizen of the state, Leslie lacks agency both as a woman and as a person who can interact with the land, a condition that she demonstrates by nearly fainting and requiring rescue when she insists upon going for a walk in the Texas heat. In “My Texas,” Leslie illustrates the contingency of her belonging upon Bick by remaining quiet and refraining from participating in her husband’s performance until she finally intervenes for the benefit of the audience to express her impotence and frustration at the anthem’s swaggering display of white masculine bravado. But by the end of the musical, Leslie grows bolder and begins to demand privilege and agency from Bick and to change the misogynist and racist structures embedded in

Texan identity and culture.

In contrast, Jordy, the heir apparent of the Benedict kingdom, should theoretically be a model for Texas manhood and identity. In many ways, Jordy does not fit the criteria defined within the archetype of Texanness. Like his mother, he prefers books to ranch work and is uninterested in engaging in the physical labor required to run Reata. Ideologically, Jordy refuses to uncritically accept the Texan identity proposed in the anthem. And so, while Jordy has the ability to participate due to his heritage and racial status, he opts to reject belonging under the current terms. However, in a way that aligns with the ideals of the Alamo, Jordy proves his ability to sacrifice himself and his body for what matters to him, even if what matters is not the construction of Texan identity. When Jordy interrupts “My Texas,” he risks that ability to belong since challenging his father could result in disownership and disinheritance. He places his white

46 Pearson and LaChiusa, 16. 70 Benedict privilege on the line again when he marries Juana, and he endangers his own body when he is beaten for defending Juana against racist rhetoric. In this way, Jordy stands for a different Texas, but his willingness to sacrifice for that ideal remains.

When Bick sings “My Texas,” he performs the song as a sincere anthem of unity, and without Leslie and Jordy’s dramaturgical interventions, the ideology in the anthem would go unchallenged. Leslie and Jordy’s interventions shine a light on those who are pointedly excluded from “My Texas”: the Mexican and Mexican-American people who live in Texas. The absence of Mexican characters in the scene performs a dramaturgical intervention by highlighting their exclusion from Texan-American identity and their unflattering reconfiguration in generative state mythology. The absence of their physical presence onstage mimics the erasure of Native

American outsiders in the performance of “Oklahoma,” but in Giant, the ubiquity of Mexican people in the rest of the musical makes their invisibility during the anthem visible. When Pinkie refers to Mexicans as the “cruelest people history’s ever known,”47 his language allows the vilification of historical Mexican people to bleed into the characterization of the Mexican workers who surround them in the present day. Bick and the other white ranchers treat the vaqueros (Mexican cowboys) as equals in terms of their skill at roping cattle and maintaining livestock but refuse to extend equal rights or privileges, exploiting their connection to and knowledge of the land that was once theirs.

If Texan identity rests on land, willingness to sacrifice, and acceptance of ideology, the

Mexican people in Giant are denied access to these things and therefore unable to achieve belonging. Within Giant, an old vaquero named El Polo characterizes the cultural mourning surrounding the loss of the land. El Polo opens the musical, tuning his guitar and then singing the

47 Pearson and LaChiusa, 59. 71 first notes. Opening the musical with a solo singing cowboy references Curly’s solo entrance at the beginning of Oklahoma!, except Curly’s song greets a land that will soon be his and El Polo mourns the land that he has lost. El Polo sings the song in Spanish, beginning the show by demonstrating Mexican culture as inaccessible to those who don’t speak the language and creating a defiant community of inclusion and exclusion. The song, “Aurelia Dolores” (which translates literally as “Aurelia Aches”), personifies the land, describing it as a woman who has been stolen by another man:

Fuiste la tierra, Aurelia Dolores

(You were the land, Aurelia Dolores.)

La tierra de la angustia, absoluta.

(The land of absolute heartbreak.)

Entonces un día perdí.

(Then one day, I lost you.)

Un nuevo hombre te robo lejos de mí…

(Another man stole you away from me.)

¿No sabe el que nadie te puede poseer?

(Does he know that no one can possess you?)48

The appropriation of the land equals a denial of belonging and a loss of identity. El Polo can still live and work on the land, watching another man love her, but he can no longer have her. As the years progress in the musical, El Polo ages and develops Alzheimer’s disease. Juana, who is his granddaughter, cares for him, and when Jordy comments that Polo, who taught him how to rope, no longer knows him, Juana replies, “I don’t know what he knows any more. He walks to this

48 Michael John LaChiusa, “Aurelia Delores,” Giant: Original Cast Recording, feat. Brian D’Arcy James, Kate Baldwin, Raul Aranas, and Miguel Cervantes, New York: Ghostlight Records, 2013. 72 tree every morning. He doesn’t speak. He still sings. But only one song.”49 “Aurelia Dolores” becomes the last vestige of Polo’s identity. When all of his memory and sense of self is stripped away, all he has is his lost connection to the land.

Like the land, the narrative of martyrdom is inaccessible to Mexican-Americans in Giant.

Although Bick’s language at the beginning of “My Texas”—“The story of the Alamo is the history of ordinary men, who given a choice, chose to give their lives for Texas” —purports that

Texas identity through sacrifice is a choice, the ability to gain citizenship and belonging through martyrdom is not possible for everyone.50 Such is the case of Angel Obregon, Jr., a Mexican-

American teen who is a contemporary of Jordy and Lil’ Luz. Angel voluntarily enlists in the military and dies heroically overseas in World War II while saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. Although he receives a posthumous Medal of Honor, his non-white body is refused burial in the whites-only cemetery and his widow must drive three hours to visit his grave.

Barring Angel from the cemetery means denying him the opportunity to return to the land that once belonged to his family. Even in death, his body is ostracized as other. Similarly, for the historical martyrs who died at the Alamo—the epitome of Texan identity—the Mexican men among cannot achieve historical recognition as ideal Texans with their Mexican bodies and must therefore undergo historical whitewashing.

Juana represents the rejection of this exclusionary Texas ideology. From her childhood,

Juana remembers teachers who would hit children and tie their hands down if they spoke Spanish instead of English. As an adult, Juana becomes a schoolteacher, positioning herself to repair this broken ideology for future generations. At the end of the musical, Jordy takes Juana, pregnant with his child, aside and shows her a spot on the horizon. He identifies it as Aurelia Dolores, her

49 Pearson and LaChiusa, 80. 50 Pearson and LaChiusa, 59. 73 family’s land, which he has located for her. He then reprises “Aurelia Dolores,” which he has translated into English. In the novel, Juana gives birth to a boy and in a particularly famous scene, Leslie stops at a roadside diner with her daughter, daughter-in-law, and little Jordan

Benedict IV. The proprietor denies them service, exposing the child to his first dose of anti-

Mexican racism. In the musical, Jordy and Juana’s child remains unborn and unknown. The baby, who will be mixed-race, bridges Mexican and white Texan heritage as a hopeful futurity.

With his reprisal of “Aurelia Dolores,” Jordy, who admits to Juana that he loves Reata and plans to stay to continue cultivating it, gives the implicit promise that the land will one day be metaphorically shared by Mexicans and Texans through the eventual inheritance of their fetal heir apparent.

Musical Analysis: Leslie’s Texas

As I have argued to this point, “My Texas” functions as an anthem of unity that defines

Texan-American identity through the cultural mythology of the Alamo. The anthem is, in and of itself, an unironic declaration of Texas allegiance and critiques that construction of allegiance by intervening in that declaration dramaturgically. In order to discuss that intervention musically, I must step back and place “My Texas” within the continuum of a three-song arc. The first song,

“Your Texas,” occurs early in the first act when Leslie meets and falls for Bick at her father’s home in Virginia. The second, “Your Texas,” happens near the end of the first act. And the third,

“Your Texas (reprise),” is Leslie’s response immediately after “My Texas.” This arc charts

Leslie’s experience of and progressive disillusionment with Texan identity. Out of context, the anthem professes a construction of national identity that contradicts the overall musical, so investigating “My Texas” within the bookends of these two songs provides a more complete picture of the musical intervention surrounding the anthem itself. In this section, I argue that

74 “My Texas” constructs patriotic Americanness through specifically nationalist musical conventions that are deconstructed by the rest of the score.

In “Your Texas,” the first iteration of the “Your Texas”/“My Texas” theme, Leslie sings about the excitement of a state that she has read about but never seen.51 Her concept of the state is completely constructed by others, based on books and the snippets she learns from Bick, removed entirely from her own experience. Leslie identifies Texas as an adventure, a “great unknown just waiting there for those who wish to dream and dare.”52 Musically, the song sounds romantic, open, and uninhibited with lush orchestrations. The song begins safely, or as the score directs, “gently, simply.”53 In the first verse the melody, which becomes Leslie’s theme and repeats throughout the musical, starts timidly and repetitively, barely straying out of a four-note range as she describes the average, domestic life she does not want:

Somebody else may spend her life,

In search of the perfect butter knife,

To pair with the proper fork and proper spoon.54

Then she sings:

Don’t laugh but I’d rather read Rousseau

And Emerson, Carlyle, and Thoreau

Right here in my father’s chair I’ve read

the sort of ideas that cloud my head with daydreams.55

On “and Thoreau,” she breaks out of the pattern by jumping up a fifth, and by the time she

51 Pearson and LaChiusa, 7. 52 Pearson and LaChiusa, 8. 53 Michael John LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, (Los Angeles: Fiddleback Music Publishing, 2012), 19. 54 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 19. 55 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 20. 75 reaches “cloud my head with daydreams,” the melody has begun to rise. When she sings, “Your

Texas. Now I don’t know your Texas,” the melody begins to sound wild and unpredictable. As is often the case with Leslie’s music, the melody and instrumentals sound erratic, illustrating the fast-paced, stream-of-consciousness nature of her fantasies through racing triplets in the accompaniment. The tempo speeds up as she imagines Texas as a place “that a man can be more independent, wild and free,” describing the state as “the last frontier.”56 For comparison, Figure 4 shows the her first tentative lines and Figure 5 shows the wildness of her later lines.

Figure 4: “Your Texas,” measures 3-6 from the piano/vocal score of Giant.

56 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 22. 76

Figure 5: “Your Texas,” measures 17-22 from the piano/vocal score of Giant.

When Bick joins in to feed her fantasy, he changes the song. Bick describes the vastness of the state in his own musical terms. Leslie’s music wanders in both melody and tempo, moving more freely than Bick’s. The tempo begins slowly and then speeds up, gaining momentum. This wandering makes the song feel alternately like searching and revelation. When Bick joins in he introduces a much steadier, more rigid pulse and his melody sounds purposeful rather than wandering. As shown in Figure 6, his section begins simply, restricted similarly to Leslie’s first lines. But as Leslie becomes caught up in the excitement and joins in, the accompaniment becomes more frenetic. For a few lines, Leslie allows her melody to melt into his, falling into his simpler melody as her line appears in the accompaniment. However, at the end, she shows that she will not be easily led by taking back the song. Leslie reverts to the phrases from the

77 beginning of the song about domestic life, which she cuts off with a quietly soaring “Not I.”57

Initially, Leslie identifies herself as a woman who does not fit in Virginia. Her unpredictable musical style reflects her inability or unwillingness to be shaped or compromised. Despite Bick’s more predictable style, Leslie stubbornly imagines Texas musically as “wild and free,” a “great unknown” that might match her own inner wildness and where she might finally belong.58

Figure 6: “Your Texas,” measures 37-41 from the piano/vocal score of Giant.

Sixteen years pass between “Your Texas” and “My Texas.” Although Leslie’s musical style becomes less wandering as she matures away from her naïve optimism within the realities of Texas, she never musically assimilates. In “My Texas,” Bick finally answers the unasked question implicit in “Your Texas”: what exactly does it mean to be a Texan? Musically, Texan identity equals adherence to convention. The melody adopts a strict, predictable beat that

57 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 27. 58 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 23. 78 encourages audience members to tap their toes. “My Texas” stands out as the most conventional number in the score, particularly when compared to “Your Texas.” While “Your Texas” has a loose, unpredictable structure, “My Texas” follows an ABCAA structure.59 The A and B segments of the song constitute the characters’ consciously-sung anthem to Texas. Although this is not quite the same as the AABA structure of Tin Pan Alley songs, the repetition of the A segments offers a similar sense of predictability. In the A section, Bick declares the pledge to

Texas: “This is my Texas, my dearest Texas, and I promise to love her till I die. I remember those days of glory. I’ll live to tell the story of mighty Texas and the joys of days gone by.”60

Section B elaborates on “those days of glory” by describing the Alamo siege. In Section C,

Pinkie and Vashti sing about the anthem and the sacredness of their myths, explaining, “We got stories, sacred symbols we can’t let go of.”61 And the two repeated A sections at the end reiterate and reaffirm their anthem pledge, which I will discuss in more detail later in this section.62

In “My Texas,” the score calls for a “Texas country feel,” suggesting a musical idiom that invokes a particular construction of American identity. In Rednecks, Queers, and Country

Music, Nadine Hubbs describes country music as a “cultural symbol” that “not only sonically evokes a certain type of social persona—usually figured as working class, white, and provincial—but often stands as proxy for that persona.”63 As the Texan elite, Bick, Vashti, and

Pinkie can, through country music, take on the guise of the working class, further identifying

59 The AABA song structure refers to the way the verse/chorus of a song repeats, shifts into the bridge, and then back to the original verse/chorus structure. In “My Texas,” the AABCA structure is similar, but adds a second shift after the B section. 60 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 145. 61 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 142. 62 Although Leslie’s reprise of “Your Texas,” the third song in this arc, technically falls under the title “My Texas” in the score, it functions dramaturgically as a separate song that cuts the anthem off so I am treating it as such. 63 Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 34. 79 themselves with the “ordinary men” who died at the Alamo.64 As I asserted in the previous section, Texas identity requires the wealthy, landowning white body to maintain authenticity through the practice of physical labor on the land. The country music style associates the singers with the common folk and the genre’s claims of southern American authenticity despite their extreme wealth. Like the Texan mythology described in “My Texas,” country music creates larger-than-life figures out of everyday people while emphasizing their claim to a classless authenticity.

The performance of authenticity in the anthem complements the performance of storytelling and the way the music reflects the narrative’s melodrama through tempo and key changes. This manipulation of tension and drama in the musical storytelling suggests that their performance is well-rehearsed and purposefully theatrical. For instance, when telling the story of the Alamo, Vashti and Pinkie describe William Barret Travis’s fabled line in the sand, an enduring symbol of the line between Texan and non-Texan:

So Travis draws a line in the sand, “Says choose which side you’re on!

Are you with us or against us? Victory or Death!”

And come that chilly dawn, after givin’ ’em a choice to stay or leave,

Travis beheld a wondrous sight: not one Texan chose to leave.

Not one Texan chose not to fight!

As they build anticipation by elongating the story, they also create musical tension through chromaticism, or the compositional technique of using notes outside of the key signature, as shown in Figure 7. Chromaticism is common in music as the interspersing of notes outside of the key signature helps a composition to feel varied and interesting. The conspicuous chromaticism

64 Pearson and LaChiusa, 59. 80 in measures 50-51 makes the music exciting, begging for the resolution that finally comes when

Pinkie and Vashti slow the tempo, drawing out the moment before revealing that “not one Texan chose not to fight.”65

Figure 7: “My Texas,” measures 49-54 from the piano/vocal score of Giant.

In the larger structure of the song, key signature changes between sections signal varying tactics and the buildup of momentum. For example, after Bick, followed by Pinkie, Vashti, and the rest of the Texas ensemble open the song with their pledge to Texas in the key of F-major,

Vashti and Pinkie shift down to the key of D♭ to describe the Alamo. In Chapter Two, I discussed the way “Oklahoma” begins in the key of D-major, shifts down to D♭-major, and then back up to D-major. This makes the shift back up into the original key feel exciting. When

65 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 140. 81 Pinkie and Vashti follow up the narrative with “We got stories,” the song shifts back up to F- major, and it feels like a release of tension.66 However, Jordy’s interruption derails this momentum and briefly stops the song. There is abrupt silence, punctuated by a harmonic interval that prompts Bick to ask, “Weren’t we singin’ our song?”67 When Bick begins the anthem again, as shown in Figure 8, he sings a capella and moves the key up yet again to G-major, starting slowly and solemnly and building again as the rest of the Texans join in. This moment shows their fervor and commitment to the historical narrative as the characters treat Jordy’s assertions as something to overcome in order to prove their resilience.

Figure 8: “My Texas,” measures 117-120 from the piano/vocal score of Giant.

In the last section of “My Texas,” the aesthetic changes from storytelling to declaration of allegiance, becoming more “more march-like, strident,” as opposed to its prior “Texas country feel.”68 The song shifts up again to C-major. With almost no accidentals, the sound seems solid and without the tension of unpredictability. The ensemble stands together, transforming the song into a choral number in four-part harmony and evoking the reverence with which church choirs or choruses tend to approach anthem-singing (Figure 9). The strong central beat makes the

66 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 142. 67 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 142. 68 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 142. 82 anthem feel robust and unwavering. The style shift reveals similarities with Texas’s real official anthem, “Texas, Our Texas.” The lyrics echo those of “Texas, Our Texas” in both sentiment and valorizing language:

Texas, our Texas! All hail the mighty state!

Texas, our Texas! So wonderful, so great! […]

Emblem of freedom, it sets our hearts aglow,

With thoughts of San Jacinto and glorious Alamo.69

What began in “My Texas” as excited storytelling morphs into a pledge of loyalty and veneration for the state of Texas and Texan identity.

Figure 9: “My Texas,” measures 126-129 from the piano/vocal score of Giant.

69 “Texas State Song,” Texas State Library and Archives Commission, last modified May 12, 2016, https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/statesong.html 83 The last verse of “My Texas” promises a musically spectacular finish, but Leslie—in a moment that eliminates the audience’s pleasure in that finish—cuts the song off before the

Texans can sing the final word. After Bick sends Jordy away, Leslie retakes the narrative and sings the third song of the “Your Texas”/“My Texas” arc: “Your Texas (reprise).” Although she sings the reprise as an aside and does not confront Bick or the other characters directly, she then denies the audience the satisfaction of expected musical resolve in her line as well. Leslie’s reprise of “Your Texas” bookends her first “Your Texas,” with revised melody, structure, and lyrics to reflect Leslie’s disillusionment with Texanness after nearly two decades in the state.

Figures 10 and 11 show two moments for comparison. In Figure 10, she sings the phrase “Now I don’t know your Texas” when she meets Bick, dreaming of a romantic version of Texas. The second shows nearly the same phrase, “I don’t want your Texas,” with essentially the same melody but a dissonant accompaniment. In Figure 11 (the reprise), the key changes twice over fifteen measures, making the song sound frenetic and frenzied, less decisive than in “Your

Texas.” Leslie criticizes “My Texas,” swearing: “I’ll never learn to sing about your land and all your values and your bigotry and narrow minds; Lying to yourselves about your Texas.”70

Figure 10: “Your Texas,” measures 20-22 from the piano/vocal score of Giant.

70 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 150-151. 84

Figure 11: “Your Texas (reprise),” measures 143-145 from the piano/vocal score of Giant.

The thematic connection between “Your Texas” and “My Texas” is lyrical rather than musical because musical connection in Giant tends to indicate cohesion or agreement.

Throughout the score, Leslie and Bick nearly always sing together by singing separate songs.

They don’t harmonize in the score, a compositional choice that contradicts the conventions by which most musicals depict couples in love. Their inability to reconcile musically mimics the incompatibility of Texas conservatism with Leslie’s progressive ideals. Just as Bick and Leslie cannot compromise in their marriage, the Benedict family cannot simultaneously hold onto their land, values, and Texan identity and restore rights to the Mexican people in this historical moment. By mimicking patriotic anthems of musical theatre, “My Texas” invites audiences to join in the celebration of Texan identity. But “My Texas” disrupts this celebration musically by imposing Leslie’s perspective, reminding audiences how easy it is to unite under an attractive musical icon and to be lulled by an appealing ideology, and encouraging audiences to think more critically about these important questions.

Coda: Excessive Patriotism and Musical Intervention

Why is it notable that “My Texas” is the most conventional song in Giant? How does the anthem use the style to comment on patriotism and regional/national identity? I suggest that the anthem creates an idea of Americanness by employing recognizable musical conventions. 85 LaChiusa wrote “My Texas” using musical idioms of Golden Age musical theatre anthems in contrast to the rest of the score, which tends to be more complex and less formulaic. The familiar style, as well as the placement near the end of Act One, makes the anthem particularly memorable. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley comments, “I even heard several guys whistling the first-act curtain number in the men’s room during intermission.”71 Situated in a score that, in typical LaChiusa fashion, comprises music that tends to be unpredictable and difficult to hum, the anthem provides a structure that is recognizable and easily processed by the listener who has been immersed in western music and musical theatre.

The musical, however, also unsettles that process dramaturgically. With “My Texas,”

LaChiusa adheres to the conventions of simplified Romanticism that are ubiquitous in the musical theatre compositional style. These simplified Romantic songs tend to have clearly established tonal centers. They highlight melody as a vehicle for emotional expression. Melodic phrases usually move up and down in small steps, and they primarily utilize notes that function together in ways that favor consonance, combinations of notes that sound more stable, or as if they fit together.72 The conventions of the simplified Romantic style include the use of variations on these rules, such as notes that occur outside of the key signature, the occasional leap between notes, or the combinations of notes that are dissonant, sounds that seem unstable or unsettling, for the sake of emphasis and variety. When considered as a stand-alone number, “My Texas” follows these rules; its predictability makes the song particularly digestible, which in turn makes the anthem’s message seem similarly attractive and easy to absorb. But the larger context of

71 Ben Brantley, “A Texas Tale Too Big for a Lone Star,” The New York Times, November 15, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/theater/reviews/giant-with-brian-darcy-james-at-the-public- theater.html 72 Consonance is the opposite of dissonance, which results from combinations of notes that tend to sound more unstable. 86 Giant disrupts the anthem as Jordy and Leslie interrupt “My Texas” both musically and dramaturgically.

In “My Texas,” Jordy attempts to redirect the anthem, but his dissent seems to galvanize

Bick, inspiring him to declare his love for Texas even more adamantly. Jordy’s failure to derail the anthem only reasserts the song’s strength and inviolability. But Leslie manages to end the anthem, if only for the audience and not the singers. The final phrase of “My Texas” builds toward a grand resolution with “I’ll live to tell the story of mighty Texas and the joys of days gone,” but Leslie cuts the Texans off before they can sing “by,” the last word.73 Her “Your Texas

(reprise)” changes keys unpredictably and at illogical moments, strays frequently outside of the key signature, and is full of unresolved dissonance. The sudden disruption of the anthem’s predictable structure is unexpected, and leaves the audience with no satisfying resolution to an anthem that, like most conventional musical theatre anthems, promised a stable ending.

Theoretically, the sudden shift from a predictable musical structure to an unpredictable one should surprise and unsettle listeners. Leslie’s musical interruption with the “Your Texas” reprise should cast a pall over the conventional climactic musical pleasure of “My Texas.” If, as

Brantley says, “several guys [were] whistling the first-act curtain number in the men’s room during intermission,” one wonders whose Texas they repeated: Bick’s or Leslie’s.74 But if audience members whistle the song in the men’s room at intermission is the musical critique successful in relaying its message? Although Brantley does not explicitly identify the whistled tune by name in the article describing this phenomenon, “My Texas” provides a musical toehold for ears that are accustomed to simpler and more predictable musical constructions. For a listener

73 LaChiusa, Giant: Piano/Vocal Score, 147. 74 Brantley, “A Texas Tale”

87 who is a fan of musical theatre, conventions of Golden Age musicals might invoke well-loved traditions that have been repeatedly reinscribed through revivals, touring companies, amateur performances, and memorization of cast recordings. Perhaps these associations are simply too powerful to allow Leslie’s brief critique in “Your Texas” to cancel out audience enjoyment of the number. Or perhaps part of the purpose of this conventional structure is to catch those audience members who find themselves humming “My Texas” at intermission, and to make them think twice about the associations that they have made and the fact that this particular song—out of all the songs in the first act—is the one that has stuck in their minds. Certainly, within the context of the musical as a whole, “Your Texas” confirms Giant’s clear criticism of nationalist pride as a force for unification through separation and categorization. While “Your

Texas” may not fully dismantle “My Texas,” it should surprise audiences and remind them to consider the underlying issues of racism and sexism and to remember those who are silenced and erased in nationalist narratives.

88 CHAPTER 4

“SOUTHERN DAYS”: THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS AND RESISTING THE NATIONALIST NARRATIVE

“Do not quibble over the evidence. Say to yourselves we’re tired of this job and put it behind you. Get it done quick and protect the fair womanhood of this state.” - Prosecutor Melvin Hutson Addressing the Jury in Haywood Patterson’s Third Trial1

“The courtroom was one big smiling white face.” - Haywood Patterson Defendant in the Scottsboro Trial2

“The Scottsboro Boys ain’t no minstrel show! Shut ’em down, they got to go!” chanted about thirty demonstrators from the Freedom Party of New York outside the Lyceum Theatre, where John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical The Scottsboro Boys (2010) had opened a month earlier.3 The musical uses a minstrel show aesthetic to tell the story of the Scottsboro Nine, a group of young black men who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in

1931.4 In a video of the demonstration, activist Omowale Clay addresses the crowd, exclaiming,

“We came today to say to Broadway that Black history is not for sale!”5 Freedom Party co-chair

Viola Plummer adds, “We can never allow the tragedy of our existence to be trivialized—no matter what they say and how they say it. […] Our culture is the only weapon that we have and we can never let it be trivialized and stamped on [...] for no reason.”6 Patricia Cohen of The New

York Times, who reached out to director Susan Stroman about the protest, explained that Stroman

1 F. Raymond Daniell, “Scottsboro Case Goes to Jury,” The New York Times (January 23, 1936), https://www.famous-trials.com/scottsboroboys/1596-nyarticles1936 2 James E. Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: First Vintage Books, 1994), 6. 3 “‘Scottsboro Boys’—Freedom Party Protest—‘Shut it Down,’” Filmed November 6, 2010 in New York, YouTube video, 3:40, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5kDIWijYnc. 4 The Freedom Party of New York was a short-lived black progressive political party. It was formed in 2010 by Charles Barron, a New York City councilman and former member of the Black Panthers and put forth its last candidate in 2013. It should not be confused with the other Freedom Party of New York, a right-wing organization formed by Republican conservative former New York governor George Pataki. 5 Omowale Clay, comment on “‘Scottsboro Boys’—Freedom Party Protest.” 6 Violet Plummer, comment on “‘Scottsboro Boys’—Freedom Party Protest.” 89 “was disappointed that people who probably had not seen the musical misunderstood that the creators were not celebrating the minstrel tradition but rather using it to reveal the evils of the system.”7 Stroman told Cohen, “The trials were treated as if the boys were in a minstrel show.

[…] The actors actually deconstruct the device in front of the audience.”8

The Freedom Party protested The Scottsboro Boys again at the Tony Awards, and although the musical was nominated for twelve awards—including Best Musical—it took home none. The Scottsboro Boys clearly made audiences uncomfortable. By the time the cast performed at the Tony Awards, the show had been closed for six months. In fact, including two weeks of preview performances, The Scottsboro Boys only ran for about two months. Critics returned mixed reviews about the show and the decision to use minstrelsy as a device. In

American Theatre, Marshall Jones III chides, “With all due respect to the creators of The

Scottsboro Boys, the use of minstrelsy as a storytelling device ultimately demonstrates a lack of empathy with the tragic events the show depicts.”9

The Scottsboro Boys was Kander and Ebb’s last collaboration, since lyricist Fred Ebb died in 2004. Over the course of their forty-five-year partnership, the team experimented with aesthetics and dramatic structure, often treating serious subjects such as murder (Chicago, 1975) and the rise of the Third Reich (Cabaret, 1966) with stylized, distancing techniques that seem designed to circumvent sentimentality. When contrasted with other musicals about similarly unfortunate historical subjects such as Ragtime (1998) or Parade (1998), The Scottsboro Boys offers less poignancy by interspersing cheerful music and irreverent gallows humor. The musical

7 Patricia Cohen, “‘Scottsboro Boys’ is Focus of Protest,” The New York Times, November 7, 2010, https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/scottsboro-boys-is-focus-of-protest/ 8 Cohen, “‘Scottsboro Boys’ is Focus of Protest.” 9 Marshall Jones III, “The Last Minstrel Show?: Telling the tragic tale of The Scottsboro Boys with happy-go-lucky minstrelsy may show audacity, but it lacks empathy,” American Theatre 29, no. 3 (March 2012), 54. 90 certainly remains controversial, but it has seen more receptive audiences in its transfer to the

West End and through subsequent regional theatre productions. In 2013, for instance, The

Observer in London raved, “Sweet home Alabama: Bigotry is transformed into glorious song.”10

Overview: Repurposing History and Staging the Scottsboro Nine

The Scottsboro Boys stages the lesser-known history of nine black teenagers, aged twelve to nineteen, who boarded a train in Chattanooga in 1931 as strangers but found themselves unwillingly and inextricably connected.11 When two white women who were also riding the rails,

Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, falsely accuse them of rape, they were remanded into police custody and imprisoned in Scottsboro, Alabama. At the conclusion of their first trial, the judge found them guilty and sentenced them to death. A white northern lawyer, hired by the

International Labor Defense (the legal department of the Communist Party), took their case and filed appeal after appeal. For seven years, the nine young men remained in jail. They endured eight trials in which they were repeatedly found guilty and sentenced to death, even after Ruby

Bates recanted her testimony and admitted that she and Price lied. Finally, the state struck a deal to release four of the young men if they would cease their appeals. In the musical, their lawyer arranges a parole hearing for Haywood Patterson, who becomes the leader of the nine young men. But the only way Haywood can be awarded parole is if he confesses to a crime he didn’t commit. Near the end of the show, when Patterson enters the hearing, he plans to give his false

10 “The New Review: Critics Theatre: Sweet Home Alabama: Bigotry is Transformed into Glorious Song as Broadway Hit The Scottsboro Boys Reaches London,” The Observer (London, England), November 23, 2013. https://login.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgis&A N=edsgcl.348175374&site=eds-live&scope=site. 11 The Scottsboro Nine included eighteen-year-olds Clarence Norris, Charlie Weems, and Olen Montgomery, nineteen-year-olds Haywood Patterson and Andy Wright, fifteen-year-old Ozie Powell, fourteen-year-old Willie Roberson, thirteen-year-old Eugene Williams, and twelve-year-old Roy Wright. However, although the musical does not specify all of their ages, only Eugene is cast as a child and identified as twelve years old. The rest appear to be young men in their late teens and early twenties. 91 confession in exchange for release but cannot force himself to follow through and instead returns to jail.

The musical uses conventions of the minstrel show, a racist form of entertainment that was extremely popular in the United States during the nineteenth century. White performers (and later black performers as well) would paint their faces with burned cork in mocking caricatures of blackness. Minstrelsy was a precursor to American musical theatre, and its influences persist in popular culture today. The use of minstrel show aesthetics, structure, musical style, and character tropes in The Scottsboro Boys functions meta-theatrically in order to expose racism both in the justice system and in popular musical theatre. The interlocuter, a standard minstrel show character type who is played by the musical’s only white performer, serves as the controlling force in the narrative. He dictates the action of the show, aided by Mr. Tambo and

Mr. Bones (also common minstrel characters and played by black actors), two nightmarish clowns who enforce the interlocuter’s bidding and take on various roles as authority figures within the story. As the Scottsboro Nine are forced to perform, the nine young men switch between their superficial, exaggerated, minstrel show personas and their complex real selves.

Throughout the show, a silent woman watches the action, sometimes quietly offering aid or comfort to the boys. At the end of the musical, the woman is revealed to be Rosa Parks, who in

1931 demonstrated with the NAACP against the Scottsboro Nine’s incarceration and cited the experience as formative in her role as a civil rights activist. As in real life, the fate of the nine young men in the musical is left unresolved, to reflect the reality that these men never received justice in their lifetimes.

With the interlocuter as their “master” and his henchmen Tambo and Bones at the ready, participation in the minstrel show numbers is mandatory. The boys are singing and dancing for

92 their lives. This becomes particularly apparent in the song “Southern Days,” an anthem romanticizing plantation life in the Deep South and the interlocuter’s “favorite song.”12 The anthem, in which the men sing sweet-sounding barbershop quartet harmonies, features lyrics that praise the pre-emancipation southern United States and profess nostalgia for the days of slavery.

Although the young men comply, they also begin to subvert this narrative by interjecting lyrics about lynching and burning crosses, exposing the horrors of racism that the anthem erases in its picture of plantation life. As an anthem of unity, “Southern Days” demands that the nine young men perform patriotism and regional pride even as they withstand marginalization from state authorities that clearly designate them as outsiders who are criminalized for the color of their skin.

Although a barbershop quartet is not a traditional musical format for an anthem, I selected “Southern Days” because of the way it functions as an anthem dramaturgically. The song begins as a forced anthem to the South. As in the previous two chapters, the region stands in for the nation and praise of the South extends to its place in the greater union. However, over the course of the song, the nine singers take control, exerting their collective will and making the song their own. At the beginning of the musical, they are strangers who have been tossed together because their common skin color marks them as suspicious. They argue, implicate one another, and nearly come to blows. But “Southern Days” offers a moment for them to come together—musically and dramaturgically—for a unified purpose: rebellion. The nine young men move and act in unison and sing in perfect harmony. They not only challenge the construction of

Americanness within the song but begin to form their own counter-national community. In this chapter, I argue that “Southern Days” exposes the practice of compulsory anthem-singing in the

12 John Kander, Fred Ebb, and David Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 2010, Music Theatre International, New York, 76. 93 United States as a method of homogenizing American national identity and silencing subjugated voices.

The first section explores the cultural context surrounding the musical, investigating how

The Scottsboro Boys addresses an Obama-era United States by challenging assumptions that the election of a black president indicates a post-racial America. The musical collapses time and cultural contexts, constructing a timeless view of the society that demands the nine young men perform for and pledge their allegiance to a nation that denies their fundamental humanity. By presenting multiple historical moments at once, the musical shows how racism is embedded in

US/American culture and challenges the enforced patriotism that requires subjugated people to provide unquestioning performances of nationalism. The Scottsboro Boys confronts the progress narrative of racial politics in the United States and uses the minstrel show format to expose white power structures in the production of black lives and the cultural construction of blackness.

Second, I investigate the dramaturgical construction of belonging that the anthem represents within the minstrel show structure, and the ways in which the nine boys perform resistance. When they are arrested, the young men find themselves entrapped in a liminal space, forced to perform as minstrels. The real Scottsboro Nine became a spectacle, shoved into the spotlight as entertainment, attracting thousands of white spectators who traveled to the Alabama town to demand their execution. With the world watching, the trial developed into a performance of law and order, purporting justice while using the legal system to rationalize racism in a state with “the worst record of any state in the country on human and civil liberties and certainly one of the most wretched records in the annals of Western democracy.”13 As an anthem, “Southern

13 Glenn Feldman, Politics, Society and the Klan in Alabama (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 220.

94 Days” requires the nine young men to romanticize the construction of US/American identity that mistreats them as outsiders.

In the third section, I analyze “Southern Days” as a compulsory anthem and a site of resistance. As a barbershop quartet, “Southern Days” references an appropriated musical form that originated among slaves on plantations and became a popular activity in black barbershops in the nineteenth century before being integrated as a minstrel show staple. The song obliges the nine accused young men to sing lyrics that wax poetic about southern plantation life, reinforcing the stereotype of the cheerful, musical slave. “Southern Days” functions as an anthem of unity as the nine teens, forced to participate, come together against the interlocuter through their small acts of rebellion.

Cultural Context: Blackness and Progress in American Racial Politics

In 2008, the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States brought to the forefront discourse about whether or not installing a black president meant that the country had entered a post-racial era, a time when “race was no longer a division in US politics and possibly even that racism no longer existed.”14 Even without taking up the position that Obama’s election marked the end of racism, this milestone in American racial politics “was celebrated around the world as evidence of racial progress.”15 In the decade since the election, racism in the

United States has proven to be an ever-present force, ebbing and flowing in its prominence rather than simply diminishing over time. The Scottsboro Boys challenges the progressive narrative of post-racial politics by collapsing four different historical moments. It uses minstrelsy, a

14 Bridget Byrne, “Post-race? Nation, Inheritance and the Contradictory Performativity of Race in Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union’ Speech,” thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory and culture 10, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 2. 15 Victor Erik Ray, Antonia Randolph, Megan Underhill, and David Luke, “Critical Race Theory, Afro-Pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 3, no. 2 (2017): 147. 95 performance style popular in the nineteenth century to dramatize a history that took place in

1931, within a 1955 Civil Rights framework, for a 2010 audience. Through the minstrel show aesthetic, and particularly in the anthem “Southern Days,” The Scottsboro Boys shows that

“progress” often entails the mandatory assimilation and silencing of subjugated groups and that beneath assertions of progress lie widely held attitudes and prejudices that remain largely unchanged.

The Scottsboro Boys addresses Americans in the moments leading up to the Black Lives

Matter movement, which began in 2013 as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a white civilian patrolling on neighborhood watch, who shot and killed unarmed black teen

Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, in 2012.16 Far from post-racial, tensions rose in the United

States near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century as “Obama’s candidacy and election unleashed a tide of unbridled hatred from America’s underbelly.”17 This hatred showed itself with a surge of racial violence, both actual and threatened. Anti-Obama factions “used increasingly violent and incendiary imagery, encouraging threats against Obama and his allies.

Blacks in Congress were called ‘niggers,’ spat upon,” and Obama himself was lynched in effigy.18 In 2010, the musical’s use of the minstrel show format as a representation of racism in the justice system resonated is a way that paralleled the symbolic and literal racial violence in its contemporary moment and echoed the actions of the Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s. Across the span of US history, racist tropes in entertainment

16 Garrett Chase, “The Early History of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Implications Thereof,” Nevada Law Journal 18 (Spring 2018), 1092-1093. 17 John Wright, Obama-Haters: Behind the Right-Wing Campaign of Lies, Innuendo and Racism (Washington: Potomac Books, 2011), xvi. 18 Wright, xviii. 96 feed public perceptions of blackness, and these perceptions manifest for actual people of color in real, deadly ways.

By addressing American racism across four different time periods simultaneously, The

Scottsboro Boys shows racial politics in the United States as an enduring issue rather than one that improves progressively over time. Structures of racism in the United States have no clear beginning or end but are always in the process of renewal and reification as they shift over time.

Michelle Alexander discusses this phenomenon in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the

Age of Colorblindness, in which she identifies the mass incarceration of black men as the latest incarnation of legalized discrimination and white control over people of color. Alexander argues that by removing the right to vote and permitting the overwhelming number of incarcerated black men to be “confined to the margins of mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream economy,” the prison and justice systems function in a way that parallels the institution of slavery until 1863 and the system of Jim Crow laws until the 1950s Civil Rights movement.19

For audiences of The Scottsboro Boys, the case of the Scottsboro Nine and their discriminatory treatment by the criminal justice system resonated in 2010, when “black non-Hispanic males had an imprisonment rate (3,074 per 100,000 U.S. black male residents) that was nearly 7 times higher than white non-Hispanic males (459 per 100,000).”20 In 2019, black men continue to make up a disproportionate number of incarcerated people in the United States. As of February

23, 2019, 37% of prisoners in the United States are black even though African Americans only make up 13.4% of the American population.21

19 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012), 4. 20 Paul Guerino, Paige M. Harrison, and William J. Sabol, “Prisoners in 2010,” U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p10.pdf. 21 “Inmate Race,” Inmate Statistics, Federal Bureau of Prisons, last updated February 23, 2019, https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp; “QuickFacts, United States,” United States Census Bureau, accessed March 16, 2019, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045218. 97 Minstrelsy as a mode of performance in the musical represents white control over the performance and production of blackness in the United States. The rhetoric of nineteenth-century minstrel show advertisements “promulgated a strong belief among both its white and black audiences that its songs, dances, and comic routines were authentically black.”22 When T.D.

Rice, known as the “father of American minstrelsy,” created his widely-imitated Jim Crow act in

1828, he supposedly received his inspiration upon spotting a black beggar in Pittsburgh.

According to cultural mythology, Rice ordered the vagrant to strip naked so that he could don his clothing and perform an impression of the man for delighted audiences.23 Early white minstrel performers visited southern plantations in order to appropriate and adapt slave songs and dances, in an attempt to replicate and produce what they marketed as authentic performances of blackness. Even with the rise of black minstrel troupes after the Civil War, “black minstrels were not imitating the plantation—they were imitating the white minstrel shows’ version of the plantation.”24 Black minstrel performers would “black up,” painting their faces with burnt cork and putting on the same stereotypes of blackness as white minstrels. Therefore, even performances of blackness by black bodies were ultimately produced by white people. Within the context of US/American national identity, blackness has been shaped as contingent upon and lesser than whiteness.

In minstrelsy, the performance of blackness, created by whites, encompassed character tropes and caricatures that “not only came to be known as an accurate representation of black people but also defined and constructed blackness itself.”25 These tropes represented a forced

22 Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 51. 23 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19. 24 Taylor and Austen, 72-73. 25 Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin, “Lessons in Blackbody Minstrelsy: Old Plantation and the Manufacture of Black Authenticity,” The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 104. 98 assimilation in which white people produced versions of black identity that fit a specific narrative of white superiority within national identity and then relegated black bodies to those types. Some of these characters, like the lazy and emasculated Sambo who was prone to lies, and the competition of incompetence between the northern “dandy” and the southern “darky,” created tropes that spawned racial stereotypes. Other stories and performances presented the characters of “Nat” and “Jack,” who were significantly more insidious.26 Jack was a lazy opportunist who avoided responsibility but was willing to rebel if it seemed as if it would benefit him. Nat exemplified the angry, violent, and rebellious black man. He wanted to “burn down the plantation, […] rape white women, and kill white men.”27 By purporting these characters to be

“authentic,” minstrel shows fed into the demonization of black men as violent and hyper- sexualized, undermining any defense that framed accused black men as innocent, since even a defendant who did not commit the alleged crime is fundamentally guilty of a supposed innate aggression.

The use of minstrelsy in The Scottsboro Boys shows how the trials of the nine young men functioned as a performance that fueled the cultural narrative of white supremacy. When the first trial began on April 6th, 1931, ten thousand spectators flocked to Scottsboro, requiring the town to enlist the services of the National Guard to maintain order while the onlookers awaited the verdict. The public perception of the nine young men arose from biased emotion and prejudice rather than evidence. As Dan T. Carter explains in Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South,

“A fair trial under the circumstances was impossible. The nine Negro boys had already been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death by the news media.”28 The trial was simply a show

26 The name Nat was likely a reference to Nat Turner, a slave who led a two-day rebellion in 1831. 27 Christopher B. Booker, “I Will Wear No Chain!”: A Social History of African American Males (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 21. 28 Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State 99 designed to validate presumptions of black guilt. The defendants’ attorney, Stephen Roddy, arrived at the courthouse intoxicated and “told the judge he was not there as employed counsel, but merely as an adviser. He admitted he was not prepared for the trial and was unfamiliar with

Alabama law.”29 In all but Roy Wright’s case, the men faced the death penalty. Wright was tried separately because he was only twelve years old, so the state sought life imprisonment in his case rather than execution. April 9, 1931, an entirely white jury found each of the nine men was guilty. Eight were sentenced to die by the electric chair.30 One of the nine, Clarence Norris, remembers the celebrations of the townspeople: “I never saw so many happy white folks. They went wild. Cheers went up all over town. They were rejoicing over our fate. There was dancing in the streets. The bands played ‘There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.’”31

In The Scottsboro Boys, the interlocuter orders the nine defendants to sing “Southern

Days” as a passive-aggressive punishment for their justified discontentment with the way they have been treated in Alabama. At this point in the show, they await the verdict for their second trial, in which Ruby Bates has just recanted her original testimony and asserted that the story of the Scottsboro Boys raping her and Victoria Price was false. The boys are optimistic and discuss their desire to escape the South once their ordeal is through. The interlocuter hastily interjects, insisting that they don’t really feel that way, claiming, “We take care of you down here!” and orders them to “sing that song ‘bout home we love so much!”32 Though they resist, he exercises his authority—“Sing it!”—and they are left with no choice.33 For speaking against the South,

University Press), 1979. 29 Michael Maher, “The Case of the Scottsboro Boys,” in The Press on Trial: Crimes and Trials as Media Events, ed. Lloyd Chiasson, Jr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 105. 30 Maher, 105 31 Clarence Norris and Sybil D. Washington, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979), 24. 32 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 70. 33 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 71. 100 they must perform nationalism and regional pride as a way of negating their own voices and experiences. Their performance references the popular myths about happy slaves that pervade

US/American cultural memory as a mitigating force in the appalling history of slavery as a foundational event in the formation of the United States. The lyrics describe a specifically white experience of the antebellum south, such as “the taste of julep sippin’ as you while that day away,” forcing the singers to claim this experience as if it is their own.34 Although the anthem references slaves (in a rather picturesque way) by describing “Mammy” who is “in the kitchen

[…] pullin’ pork, bakin’ ribs, shuckin’ corn” and remembering listening to the “sound of darkies hummin’,” the performance of this song by black bodies forces them to claim this privileged history as their own, denying their embodied connection to slavery—a trauma that, by 1931, was less than 70 years in the past.

The Scottsboro Boys critiques the compulsory performance of nationalism and patriotism that is pointedly required for those who are subjugated and deemed as outsiders in order to justify their own citizenship. When NFL player Colin Kaepernick first challenged this obligation in 2016 by kneeling during the national anthem at football games in order to protest police brutality against people of color, he received death threats.35 Many detractors of the movement, which gained momentum when other professional athletes began to follow suit, argued against the continuous nature of racism in the United States. Within the progress narrative, racism began to end with emancipation and must therefore be nearly eradicated by the twenty-first century.

In 2013, three years after The Scottsboro Boys opened and closed on Broadway, the last three Scottsboro boys, Haywood Patterson, Andy Wright, and Charles Weems, finally received

34 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 76. 35 Macguire, Eoghan, Colin Kaepernick: Quareterback says he has received death threats,” CNN, September 22, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/21/sport/colin-kaepernick-death-threats/index.html. 101 absolution when the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted a posthumous pardon. This occurred eight decades after their arrest and twenty-four years after Clarence Norris, the last living Scottsboro defendant, died, in 1989. According to Alan Blinder of the New York Times, the reason for the pardon was to close the book on an event that had “continued to hang over

Alabama as an enduring mark of its tainted past.”36 While this may have allowed the state of

Alabama some closure about an embarrassing historical moment, the purely ceremonial gesture offered no reparation to the few remaining family members as well as little reflection on current issues of racism in the southern United States.37 The Scottsboro Boys highlights the persistence of racial hierarchies in American identity and the role that the anthem plays in silencing voices that question racial injustice.

The musical uses minstrelsy to make audiences uneasy, challenging predominantly white viewers to look at systemic racism without exonerating themselves as participants in said system.

Consuming a minstrel show—laughing at jokes, applauding impressive dance numbers, and unconsciously tapping one’s foot to the infectious rhythm—makes the audience complicit in the production of a genre that has been relegated to the closet of shameful moments in US/American history. But minstrel shows were popular because they were enjoyable. The Scottsboro Boys reproduces that enjoyment through high-quality artistic and production values, thrilling

36 Alan Blinder, “Alabama Partons Three ‘Scottsboro Boys’ after 80 Years,” The New York Times, November 21, 2013, accessed March 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/us/with-last-3-pardons-alabama- hopes-to-put-infamous-scottsboro-boys-case-to-rest.html. 37 In 1982, Clarence Norris, who was pardoned by Governor George Wallace in 1976, petitioned the state of Alabama for reparations for wrongful incarceration and was denied. In 2014, his descendants attempted to apply for reparations again upon discovering legislation changes, but were again denied based on statute of limitation laws. The application for reparations and the correspondence between the State of Alabama and the attorneys for the Norris family can be viewed online: http://ftpcontent4.worldnow.com/waff/WAFFClarenceNorrisPetition.PDF. Furthermore, since the last three Scottsboro boys were pardoned after death, their families are not eligible to apply for reparations. (“In The Name of the Father,” The Life of The Law Podcast, October 7, 2014, https://www.lifeofthelaw.org/2014/10/inthenameofthefather/.) 102 choreography, and exhilarating music. The musical places audiences into the perspective of the many who patronized and enjoyed minstrel shows in the nineteenth century, in spite of the fact that most twenty-first century audiences recognize the inherent racism embedded in the form. It also positions viewers to take the place of the thousands of ordinary people who were so entertained by the trial that they traveled to a small town in Alabama to watch it unfold. This puts audiences in the uncomfortable place of enjoying outstanding choreography, comic bits, and performances in a seductive form they know they should not enjoy; it is a production that is designed to force audiences to reckon with their own experience of the show, often as they are watching it. They should be uneasy.

Dramaturgical Breakdown: Minstrelsy as a Liminal Space

Dramaturgically, the minstrel show in the musical functions as a liminal space, a nightmarish purgatory in which the nine accused remain trapped in a system that forces them perpetually to perform and reperform their story. The nine young men are not minstrels. The state of Alabama is simply treating them like minstrels. The boys are eternally in limbo, enacting this story over and over in a never-ending, perpetual performance, reflecting the unsatisfactory conclusion of the real Scottsboro Nine who did not receive justice in their lifetimes for their undeserved incarceration. Some of the men were arbitrarily paroled and others were not, as depicted in the musical when the judge agrees illogically to parole four of the men as long as

Leibowitz will stop filing appeals. And “although they eventually trickled to freedom, through parole or escape or legal maneuvering, the Scottsboro boys never established their innocence.

Even this lack of closure is Kafkaesque: Only Clarence Norris lived to see his own official pardon, forty-five years after his alleged crime.”38 The Scottsboro Boys depicts the hopelessness

38 Maher, 114 103 of nine black men who have been caught by a system that refuses to consider their innocence, even when presented with exonerating evidence. “Southern Days,” however, occurs at a deceptively hopeful moment in the show. Emboldened by their second trial and the confidence that Ruby’s admission will set them free, the nine young men begin to perform resistance.

Through their resistance, the Scottsboro boys unify, seizing control to speak through an anthem designed to silence them.

In “Southern Days,” the nine boys use body language, as indicated by the text and enacted in the original Broadway production, to remind audiences that their participation in the minstrel show is non-consensual. The interlocuter pushes them to conform and sing the anthem, but for the first time in the show, they refuse automatically to embody the minstrel show’s construction of blackness. They resist singing an anthem that praises the nationalist power structures that keep them incarcerated, staring silently at first when the interlocuter asks them to begin. The interlocuter shapes them into a pleasing formation, and when he suggests to the blank-faced men that, “It wouldn’t hurt if you smiled a bit,” the boys reward him with nine exaggerated and emotionless rictuses.39 These moments of non-complicity, however subtle, serve repeatedly to remind audiences that their entertainment for the evening is recreating the exploitation of minstrelsy. They urge the audience to critique their own visceral enjoyment rather than losing themselves in the spectacle. The nine young men stand together to stage a passive protest, quietly demonstrating that the anthem does not speak for them even as they sing it and allowing the audience to see their inner rebellion.

Despite critical complaints that, as Megan Stahl suggests, The Scottsboro Boys “lacks empathy for the gravity of the subject it addresses,” the minstrel show centers the Scottsboro

39 John Kander, Fred Ebb, and David Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys, DVD, Billy Rose Collection, New York Public Library, 2013. 104 Nine as complex characters amid a sea of caricatures.40 The rest of the historical and fictional figures receive exaggerated performances as part of the minstrel show-within-a-show, leaving no ambiguity as to the innocence of the nine accused or the intended locus of audience empathy. As an additional act of anti-racist rebellion, Tambo, Bones, and the nine young men play the rest of the cast, flipping the minstrel script with their cartoonish portrayals of mainly white characters.

Two of the boys, Charlie Weems and Ozie Powell, depict Ruby and Victoria as crass, stupid, and humorously ridiculous, discrediting the women’s accusations by staging their loudly whispered conspiring about lying to the police. Before singing “Alabama Ladies” in which the they describe their alleged rape, Victoria tells Ruby, “Follow me. Do exactly what I do. And don’t fuck up.”41 Although the show certainly frames the nine young men as outsiders, both in the

Scottsboro community that they are simply trying to pass through and in the minstrel show that forces them to perform, they are outsiders in an ugly, distorted funhouse of a society.

The parodic treatment of white characters speaks to white audience members who might imagine themselves to have achieved post-racial sensibilities. Although Terry Teachout of The

Wall Street Journal refers to the show as “a nightly act of collective self-congratulation in which the right-thinking members of the audience preen themselves complacently at the thought of their own enlightenment,” those who do respond with such “smugness” have missed the point— that even white people who consider themselves to be socially aware do not get a pass.42 Samuel

Leibowitz, the white Jewish lawyer who the Communist Party sends from New York to represent the boys, stands in for the well-meaning white saviors whom Leibowitz (played by Mr. Tambo)

40 Megan Stahl, “Too big for Broadway?: The limits of historical and theatrical empathy in Parade and The Scottsboro Boys,” Studies in Musical Theatre 10, no. 1 (March 2016), 76. 41 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 17. 42 Terry Teachout, “A Perilous Page of History to Turn,” The Wall Street Journal, 1 November, 2010. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703708404575586251585621096?ns=prod/accounts-wsj 105 describes when he enters the scene, trumpeting, “Boys, I am here to tell you that the world is on your side! […] Why, did you know that you are—ya’ll are—making a lot of people up north feel very happy about doing good.”43 Although Leibowitz is an outsider in Alabama (at the trial,

Victoria exclaims that she cannot comprehend his rapid New York speech) he is an outsider with the privilege to return to a home where he is not. The musical highlights the lived experience of blackness in the United States, what Frantz Fanon refers to as “the weight of his melanin” beneath the white gaze.44

The spectacle of minstrelsy by black bodies demonstrates the difference between blackness and the performance of blackness. As Eric Lott suggests in Love and Theft: Blackface

Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, minstrelsy allowed white performers to try on blackness, as “the black mask offered a way to play with collective fears of a degraded and threatening—and male—Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them.”45 In fact, performers would often remove their gloves for the audience in order to demonstrate that their skin was actually white underneath, definitively separating themselves from the materiality of blackness while exploiting painted-on dark skin for entertainment.46 As minstrel performers, the nine young men perform and “put on” blackness, but their legal situation highlights their inability to remove it. Their skin color marks them, not as individual lawbreakers or even as those accused in this particular case, but as presumed aggressors who are interchangeable and ripe for scapegoating and persecution. At the end of the musical, the libretto describes the original production in which the men perform the finale, “The Scottsboro Boys,” in

43 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 62. 44 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 128. 45 Lott, 25. 46 John Kenrick, Musical Theatre: A History, (New York: Continuum International, 2008), 54. 106 “traditional minstrel blackface.”47 Then, they take it off before the audience, demonstrating that their skin color cannot be removed.

By staging resistance on behalf of the Scottsboro Nine, the musical grants fictional agency to subjugated historical figures. This culminates at the end of the show when the interlocuter orders the nine young men to “be seated,” and they ignore him and leave the stage.48

This moment breaks the minstrel show cycle as the interlocuter dons a cap and becomes a bus driver, directing Rosa Parks to the back of the bus and prompting her refusal, implying that the unresolved finish to the Scottsboro boys’ story is actually a beginning. While the trial certainly served as one impetus for the Civil Rights movement (and for Rosa Parks’s involvement in particular), this moment in the show recasts and repurposes what was a horrific and irredeemable ordeal for the actual historical figures whose lives were ruined by false accusations. With Rosa

Parks’s iconic action on the bus, the narrative is suddenly tinged with the bad taste of justification. If the trial was an inciting incident for Rosa Parks’s decision to sit down on that bus in one of the most prominent and influential events of the Civil Rights movement (at least in the national imaginary), then the nine young men become martyrs. Their suffering serves the greater good. And when the all-white creative team chooses to make this statement from behind the face of a well-known Civil Rights hero, it gives the impression that the justification is coming from a black voice.

The danger of the nine men’s fictional performance of resistance lies in the disconnect between the performers’ ability to abandon the minstrel show and the nine historical teenagers who did not choose to sacrifice their youth and freedom as inspiration for the Civil Rights movement. This is compounded by the lack of diversity on the creative team that bestows this

47 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 98. 48 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 102. 107 fictional agency upon these nine now-dead men. This performance of history demonstrates what

Rebecca Schneider calls “the longstanding US investment in ‘the living’ as proper site and substance of a past always explicitly unfinished.”49 Reaching backward in time to give meaning to meaningless suffering may make the living feel better, but it does so by mitigating the horrors of the past. However, at the risk of justifying this unfortunate justification, the Scottsboro Nine’s onstage rebellion can serve to model resistance for a primarily white Broadway audience. When faced with the consumption of black lives as entertainment, whether in the news or through stereotyped portrayals in the media and popular culture, the proper response is to refuse patronage and simply walk out, as the Scottsboro Nine do at the end of the show. It is necessary, especially when reenacting injustice that cannot be retroactively rectified, to draw visible lines between historical evidence and dramatic performances of history.

The minstrel show stages an environment that holds the nine teens hostage, threatening them both ambiguously and unambiguously. As defendants in a rape trial who are being held in jail, they must comply with orders and work within the system under the very clear menace of execution. But the minstrel show also represents the less defined danger of the society around them. In a community that has already condemned them, their singing and dancing function to theoretically redefine their image as obedient and harmless. In “Southern Days,” the interlocuter does not explicitly state that the stakes of their performance extend to potential execution in the electric chair, but his emphatic insistence that they “sing it” implies that there will be punishment for lack of complicity.50 The interlocuter forces them to claim “Southern Days” as an anthem and profess love and nostalgia for a system that oppresses them. It is never clear, of course, what

49 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 21. 50 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 76. 108 specific means the interlocuter has to impose punishment if they do not obey, since their coerced performance seems to have no bearing on the constant threat of execution. For most of the musical, the nine boys simply fall in line when commanded by a vaguely threatening white man.

Theoretically, as a facet of their incarceration, the nine accused must perform good behavior if they ever hope to achieve parole. Their only hope for release rests upon proving that if paroled, they will continue to perform subordination and deference. In this sense, their act of defiance at the end of the musical illustrates the moment that they—the nine characters conflated with nine actors conflated with nine historical figures—discover that these events are finished. Deference is futile; all they can do is stop performing.

Musical Analysis: Small Acts of Musical Rebellion in an Anthem to the Antebellum South

As a barbershop quartet, “Southern Days” evokes a specific image in the US/American national imaginary. As Lynn Abbot describes, “Barbershop harmony is one of the great

American inventions. The contemporary image of barbershop harmony is couched in a romanticized perception of the ‘Gay Nineties,’ with dapper, white, middle-American barbers and their patrons posed next to barber poles in attitudes of harmonizing.”51 While the genre has been associated with whiteness,52 the origins of the barbershop quartet do not support this image. In fact, the barbershop format, which was a popular style in minstrel show entertainment, was primarily a black form. The term “barbershop quartet” refers to a style based on close harmony, in which four vocal parts harmonize on chords comprised of notes in close proximity to one another, typically within an octave. As Abbot describes, “The basic idea was to improvise, linger

51 Lynn Abbot, “‘Play That Barber Shop Chord’: A Case for the African-American Origin of Barbershop Harmony,” American Music 10, no. 3 (1992), 289. 52 For musical theatre aficionados, the image that Abbot describes from the late nineteenth century is reflected in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man (1957), which, set in the early twentieth century, features a comically conflicted barbershop quartet of white men. 109 on, and bask in the immediate warmth of hair-raisingly unusual close-harmony chords.”53 While barbershop harmony has been applied to any number of musical genres—including anthems— minstrel shows helped to popularize the practice, which minstrel performers appropriated after observing slaves singing in close harmony in what came to be called plantation songs. The title of the genre “bears witness to the black American barbershop’s extended role as a fraternity hall and general social institution as well as a center for musical rehearsal and performance.”54 By performing rebellion in the song “Southern Days,” the boys are seizing control of an appropriated genre, recontextualizing the anthem in order to challenge its representation of life and US/American identity in the southern United States.

Resistance in “Southern Days” occurs through juxtapositions. “Southern Days” professes nostalgia for southern life and the life of a slave, pairing sweet barbershop harmony with lyrics that romanticize life in the South as “lovable” and evoking idealistic southern imagery such as

“willows drippin’ on a balmy southern day.”55 Within the particularly tranquil and aesthetically pleasing sound of barbershop harmony, the nine young men subtly express their discontent. This is a particularly fitting reappropriation of the genre, since during slavery, white observers saw the performance of plantation songs as evidence of “the belief that enslaved blacks could endure any degree of personal trauma and hardship by happily singing.”56 In “Southern Days,” the interlocuter imposes control, effectively gentrifying an essentially black art form. He attempts to mold the nine boys and literally manipulates their bodies by placing them in a formation, creating a contradictory image as their sloped postures and downturned faces work against the

53 Abbot, 290. 54 Abbot, 290. 55 John Kander, Fred Ebb, and David Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Score (New York: Music Theatre International, 2004), 142. 56 Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Ring, Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 166. 110 orderliness of the form. At the end of the song, the boys begin to rebel overtly, disrupting the image of false cheerfulness that the interlocuter demands by injecting lyrics that describe “my daddy hanging from a tree” and “the fire that made those crosses burn” as part of their

“reminiscences.”57

Since barbershop quartets started as an improvised genre—a practice in which singers would get together to “crack up a chord”—they typically start when “a single note is sung and then a chord is formed around that note by the other voices.”58 In nineteenth-century black communities, barbershop quartets typically had four members, one to sing each part, since more singers would make improvisation more difficult.59 In “Southern Days,” however, the interlocuter suggests that this is a song that they have performed multiple times, urging the boys to “sing that song ’bout home we love so much!”60 Rather than beginning on one note and then filling in harmonies, Willie plays three notes on his harmonica and the nine young men start the song with the chord he plays, as illustrated in Figure 12. Although the score directs the musicians to sing “freely,” the song’s tight structure does not encourage or allow for improvisation as a typical barbershop number might. Musically, the singers remain stiff, shifting deftly through complex harmonies with precision. Under the interlocuter’s direction, every note and move has been carefully scripted, recreating the sound of the harmony in the plantation song but taking away the spontaneity that would arise when a barbershop number is sung with agency. The word

“freely” becomes paradoxical, requiring the actors to perform musical freedom while historically and dramaturgically incarcerated. It directs them to imitate freedom, just as they are imitating

57 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 77. 58 Vic Hobson, “Plantation Song: Delius, Barbershop, and the Blues,” American Music 31, no. 3 (Fall 2013), 319. 59 It’s important to note that barbershop singers did not invent four-part harmony. But in the United States, the practice of coming together in a casual setting, such as a barbershop, to improvise close harmony was a popular activity in black communities before it was appropriated in white communities and minstrelsy. 60 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 76. 111 improvisation. Although the interlocuter uses language that implies that the young men also love the song, and the lyrics require the singers to adopt the perspective of one who misses life on the plantation, the closely controlled music and staging emphasizes that this anthem is a performance for the benefit of the interlocuter.

Figure 12: “Southern Days,” measures 1-5 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys.

By staging their protest during “Southern Days,” the nine boys are attacking a monolith in the production of southernness in U.S. national identity. In minstrel shows, plantation songs like “Southern Days” epitomized the overarching theme of “happy, singing, and dancing slaves” that was popular even with northern audiences who believed in both abolition and the myth of the cheerful slave.61 As Katrina Dyonne Thompson illuminates in Ring, Shout, Wheel About: The

Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery, songs that idealized the southern plantation “became regional anthems infused in the American identity. The distinctive cultural construction of the United States became intertwined in the popular theater productions that continually presented façades of black life as authentic.”62 They contributed to the construction

61 Thompson, Ring, Shout, Wheel, 174. 62 Thompson, Ring, Shout, Wheel, 176. 112 of the deep south in the US/American national imaginary as a warm, inviting place where one can spend leisurely hours “julep sippin’ as you while that day away.”63 These constructions, especially when placed as testimony from a person of color, imagine a history in which these men (who are actually languishing in jail) might also be languishing on a plantation. The forced labor of black bodies that enables said leisure becomes romanticized as a part of the revised historical narrative.

By carefully adhering to each note, dynamic shift, and rhythmic movement, the singers perform subtle resistance in a song that requires emotional connection and warmth.

The central melody of “Southern Days” is simple and repetitive, lulling the listener into the expectation of predictability. The song maintains particularly tight, unmoving harmony, beginning when Willie plays three notes on his harmonica and prompts the nine young men to start with an inverted A-major chord. They sing chords that maintain almost constant contact with the A, which is the tonic, or the first note of the scale, as illustrated in Figure 13. By building nearly every chord around the A and cadencing firmly on the tonic, the melody gives the impression of heavy near-stillness. Even when the singers perform the sound of a banjo simultaneously with the melody after the key changes to D major (as demonstrated in Figure 14), the strict anchoring around the D makes a moment that ought to be whimsical feel dense and regulated. Their cold, mechanical performance complies with the letter of the interlocuter’s order to sing without adopting or owning the message of the song or performing the passion that an anthem requires.

63 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 76. 113

Figure 13: “Southern Days,” measures 14-19 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys.

Figure 14: “Southern Days,” measures 20-22 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys.

Their rebellion becomes more forceful after the first verse, when the interlocuter gives a monologue about his youth, “sitting on the porch, hearing [the song] at twilight, rising up from

114 the cotton fields,”64 emphasizing the meaning that the song professes. He adds, “It wouldn’t hurt you to smile a bit,” and the singers retaliate by shifting suddenly from piano to forte (Figure 15).

The unexpected change in volume and intensity is both jarring and consistent with the barbershop quartet style, in which part of the aesthetic appeal is the ability of a group of singers to execute shifts in rhythm, tone, and dynamics as if they are one voice. Their harmony becomes suddenly wider, spanning two octaves as shown in Figure 16. For a moment, the sound is broader, moving forcefully away from the way they have held tightly to the tonic. Then, they abruptly shift back into a repetition of their earlier tight, controlled harmonies. In Figure 17, they insert the changed lyrics, which are especially startling when juxtaposed with the music, which sounds precise, evenly-measured, and passionless. In the archival footage of the Broadway production, the performers match this music with deadpan expressions. With the line “like my

Daddy hangin’ from a tree,” the harmonies break down and the young men sing in unison, momentarily giving up all pretense of the barbershop harmony and singing as a united force.65

This draws attention to the line because, although the melody is the same as the first part of the song, the sudden lack of harmony is surprising. Then, they build up into four-part harmony for

“or the fire that made those crosses burn” and shift immediately back into their tight harmonies for the next phrase, ending the song with “Don’t you wish that we could just return to those languid and limpid and listless and indolent lovable southern days.”66 This final harmony is a return to the song they were tasked to sing, almost as if their interjections never happened.

64 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Score, 145. 65 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Score, 147. 66 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Score, 147-148. 115

Figure 15: “Southern Days,” measures 40-47 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys.

Figure 16: “Southern Days,” measures 48-51 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys.

Figure 17: “Southern Days,” measures 52-55 from the piano score of The Scottsboro Boys.

Their unexpected shift for the altered lyrics—as evidenced by the interlocuter’s befuddled, “Here now, wait a minute—I don’t remember that part of the song” —and the quick shift back into the anthem’s proper lyrics makes their rebellion both understated and surprising.67

This subtlety emphasizes their discontent while also highlighting the stakes of resistance. They step outside of the strictly controlled parameters of the anthem performance and then quickly

67 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Score, 147. 116 return, continuing as if nothing out of the ordinary occurred. They maintain the exaggerated smiles that the interlocuter directed them to plaster across their faces. However, “at the end of the song, the smiles drop immediately” and the young men refuse to continue the minstrel performance any longer than necessary.68 Immediately after the song ends, the interlocuter addresses the jury. While the boys watch through the window, reminding each other that Ruby’s testimony should exonerate them, the interlocuter delivers their guilty verdict. Their performance of resistance, actually occurring nearly eighty years after the events of the play, cannot change history. But their resistance suggests to audiences that obligatory anthem singing is only a performance of patriotic nationalism, and performances can be coerced.

Coda: Making Audiences Uncomfortable

Just as The Scottsboro Boys uses the minstrel show format, so too does it works to disrupt it as a vehicle for entertainment by constantly reminding audiences of the shameful historical narratives of both the real Scottsboro Nine and of racism embedded in the production of US national identity. For instance, at the beginning of the show, the interlocuter informs Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones that they will be performing the story of the Scottsboro Boys and Mr. Tambo retorts, “Oh, dat’s a funny story!” then campily shakes his head and adds, “Not really.”69 Within their minstrel show personas, the men make jokes that are offensive yet witty, as in Tambo’s quip about Haywood’s stint in solitary confinement, calling him “a right regular ‘black in the box.’”70 The silly wordplay and the rhythm of the text tells the audience that this is a joke, prompting autonomous laughter, but the content is quite serious. In order to avoid laughing at these jokes, the listener must consciously intervene and remember the serious issues at stake in

68 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 77. 69 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: DVD 70 Kander, Ebb, and Thompson, The Scottsboro Boys: Libretto, 50. 117 the jokes. In archival footage of the original Broadway production, the audience displays a range of responses, from uncomfortable laughter to unabashed applause or silence. The musical rarely gives clear clues as to what an appropriate response might be. Even the curtain call, usually a raucous musical celebration in musical theatre, is silent, denying musical cues to the audience. In a show that dramatizes the uncertain fates of the nine real black men who stood accused of a crime they didn’t commit, were convicted multiple times in trials that demonstrate institutional failures at the most fundamental levels, and ultimately trickled out of the legal system on technicalities, parole, or pardons decades later, this refusal to provide a clear-cut ending leaves audience members with some small sense of the lack of closure that the Scottsboro boys themselves likely experienced.

The Scottsboro Boys tackles not only the obvious material ramifications of racism in the

United States but the danger of producing even seemingly harmless stereotypical representations of people of color. Although Marshall Jones III asserts that “the minstrel show as a theatrical genre was long dead by the 1930s,” resurrecting the unadulterated minstrel form does not simply

“reopen the many wounds this particular format created in its day.”71 First, while it was certainly significantly diminished, at least some minstrel shows endured through the 1930s; the Federal

Theatre Project produced minstrel shows using performers trained in the form as late as 1936.

Second, minstrelsy’s influence extends well beyond active production and into popular culture through the stereotypes that it created and perpetuated, and by virtue of its role in the history of the American musical. The Scottsboro Boys uses this popular, comic historical form to stage the stereotyped representations it is best known for alongside moments that jolt the audience into remembering the horrific injustice underneath. It shows minstrelsy as degrading, humiliating,

71 Jones, “The Last Minstrel Show?” 53. 118 and dehumanizing while simultaneously showcasing acts of performance that are immensely entertaining. For example, in the song “Electric Chair,” Eugene, the youngest of the nine, performs an impressive shuffle-and-tap as Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones sing nightmarishly about executing him. Watching the young actor’s acrobatic performance in conjunction with Tambo and Bones’s jeering and offensive jokes leaves the audience stuck as they find themselves enjoying the virtuoso physical performance even as the verbal mockery suggests that this scene is anything but enjoyable. How, then, should the audience respond?

“Southern Days” jolts the audience by juxtaposing pleasant-sounding harmony with staging and lyrics that undermine the tranquility of the music. The sudden interjection of lyrics about acts of violent racism is unsettling and surprising. Additionally, the song does not address or resolve the sudden inclusion of unexpected lyrics but simply switches modes in a choice that forces audiences to reckon with their own lack of action in the face of racist acts that they witness and that remain unresolved. By making audiences uncomfortable, the musical challenges white viewers to look at unabashed systemic racism without exonerating themselves as participants in said system. The show speaks to any white liberal audience members who believe that attending the theatre to watching black actors perform a historical narrative that exposes racism constitutes sufficient action toward social justice. Consuming a minstrel show—laughing at jokes, applauding impressive dance numbers, and unconsciously tapping one’s foot to the infectious rhythm—makes the audience complicit in the production of a genre that has been relegated to the closet of shameful moments in American history. By urging the audience to confront their own racism, the music pushes spectators to take action outside of the theatre rather than simply watching.

119 In his New York Times review, Charles Isherwood refers to the show’s “neo-Brechtian style and aggressively satiric tone,” which forces the audience to maintain distance rather than connect to the characters emotionally.72 Despite the “zesty” score, the witty (if horrifying) humor, and the spectacular physical and vocal acrobatics the show demands of the performers,

Isherwood continues, “The laughs should curdle in your throat, unless you simply choose to disengage with the underlying story completely. […] The pleasures of a jaunty ragtime melody and a clever lyric are hard to savor when they are presented in such an unavoidably grim context.”73 The Scottsboro Boys refuses audiences the cathartic pleasure of consuming a tragic story, weeping, and leaving the theatre with the feeling that the story is finished. Instead, settling those unsettled reactions requires a response outside of the theatre. The use of minstrelsy comments on the commodification of minority stories by a system that has historically refused to give minorities equal access. The musical challenges those audience members who think critically about the way they enjoy the show and question the ways that they consciously and unconsciously perpetuate racism. They become guilty of allowing themselves to be drawn into racist entertainment. Not only does The Scottsboro Boys remind audiences that musical theatre arose from minstrelsy, but it shows Broadway audiences the ease with which white viewers consumed and enjoyed the form as popular entertainment, and suggests that contemporary audiences may not reject such an enjoyable form as quickly as they might hope they would.

72 Charles Isherwood, “Revisiting an Outrage With Gallows Humor,” The New York Times, November 1, 2010, http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=tall85761&id=GALE%7CA240945845&v =2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco. 73 Isherwood, “Revisiting an Outrage.” 120 CHAPTER 5

“ANOTHER NATIONAL ANTHEM”: REINVENTING THE OUTSIDER IN ASSASSINS

“To live is to live in history. And history as we know it consists of a series of threats.” - Freddie Rokem Performing History1

“I have too great a soul to die like a criminal.” - John Wilkes Booth Personal Diary2

Journalist Peter Filichia felt a shockwave rippling through the audience during the final scene of Stephen Sondheim’s new musical Assassins (1991) when the lights rose to reveal Lee

Harvey Oswald (well, an actor who resembled him) manically pacing the floor of what appeared to be the now-infamous Texas School Book Depository. Filichia, who harbors his own vivid and visceral memories of the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, responded with horror, admitting that he only remained in his seat to honor his commitment to write a review of the show. As Filichia describes, the audience “sat in profound silence as the scene unfolded [….]

And when Oswald actually took the shot, I can still see in the row in front of me and a bit to the left, actor Thom Sesma’s hands involuntarily leap up to cover his face from the horror. And he wasn’t the only one.”3 In the moment, Filichia asked himself, “Good Lord, is there anything that

Stephen Sondheim won’t musicalize?”4

Filichia’s immediate, emotionally charged reaction to seeing Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate John F. Kennedy onstage (and in a musical, no less!) illustrates the way historical

1 Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2000), x. 2 Booth, John Wilkes, “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me”: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth (Chigago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 155. 3 Peter Filichia. “Assassins: The World’s Most Controversial Musical,” Filichia Features. November 23, 2012, https://www.mtishows.com/news/filichia-features-assassins-the-worlds-most-controversial-musical. 4 Peter Filichia. “Assassins.” 121 narratives and figures become saturated with cultural meaning. Filichia certainly did not know

Kennedy personally, but expresses a sense of personal loss based on an image of the president within the national imaginary. He admonishes Sondheim not just for staging the event but for staging it in a musical, in spite of the fact that most of the action of this particular scene occurs with no music. What makes the genre of the American musical an irreverent place to depict a site of cultural trauma? In this project, I have addressed the way that musical theatre composers have used anthems of unity to approach issues of national identity and the way that some particularly difficult issues are embedded in American conceptualizations of national belonging, and these musicals have had varying receptions by critics and the general public. In 1991, Assassins generated appalled critical responses to its first Off-Broadway production. It closed after 73 performances rather than making its anticipated transfer to Broadway. However, the unpredictable mix of subsequent successful and unsuccessful productions, including its critically adored 2004 Broadway revival, shows how representations of popular history and cultural mythology can create different meanings in different historical moments.

Overview: Assembling a Fragmented History

Assassins, a concept musical, forgoes a chronological story arc and fragments American history by foregrounding nine people who have assassinated or attempted to assassinate a US president. The musical reaches across time and space to assemble a temporally and spatially impossible community by collapsing multiple time periods and collecting a specific group of history’s outsiders. Composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim and book writer John Weidman use historical figures and events, but manipulate them into a fictional unity of time and space—a warping of history. A character called the balladeer functions as the voice of popular memory and history, serving as a narrator and the voice of patriotic national identity. Assassins disrupts

122 the concept of history as a finished product that is separate from the present by juxtaposing events that have passed out of living memory, such as the assassinations of Presidents James

Garfield (1881) and William McKinley (1901), with more recent moments, like John Hinckley’s

1981 attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life and Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of President

Kennedy (1963). By connecting events that are still steeped in the emotional associations of living memory with those that are not, Assassins shows how emotional bias colors the preservation and retelling of history. The show focuses on those moments in which a person on the fringe of society has emerged to assert his or her impact on history, questioning the efficacy of a linear, dominant historical narrative and its role in the formation of national belonging and identity.

Assassins identifies the parallels and commonalities among nine assassins who each express their own disidentification with American national belonging as a product of their dashed American Dreams. Their broken dreams range from the reasonable, as in Giuseppe

Zangara, an Italian immigrant who attempted to assassinate President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in

1933 to protest the poor conditions for laborers, to the delusional, such as Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901 because he wanted to be the ambassador to France. At the beginning of the musical, the proprietor of an ethereal shooting gallery hands each assassin a gun and suggests that they step right up and “kill a president.”5 The proprietor promises a prize if they succeed because, while “Some guys think they can’t be winners, first prize often goes to rank beginners.”6 Although they take their disenfranchisement to extreme ends, the assassins stand in for every US citizen who has felt isolated and excluded from the promise that, with hard work and national pride, any American can pull him or herself

5 Stephen Sondheim, Assassins: Score, (Milwaukee: Rilting Music, 1992), 6. 6 Sondheim, Assassins: Score, 7-8. 123 up by the bootstraps. Assassins brings the fragmented and forgotten together, allowing them to emerge from isolation. Placing these nine killers (or would-be killers) in a line invites the audience not to feel pity for these malcontents but to question the ways in which the propagation of national belonging produces an underclass of desperate outsiders.

In previous chapters, I have addressed the way constructions of history and popular memory serve as a foundation for the illusion that American national identity is cohesive rather than subjective and ephemeral. The application of popular historical mythos to pressing current crises suggests a continuum of American fortitude and a centralization of values. If the settlers of

Oklahoma Territory can tame the frontier, for instance, their descendants can certainly keep the home front together during World War II. For a country in crisis, the process of locating the

“right story” and “presenting a model of the world that incorporate[s] a favorable outcome for the crisis,” as Paul Cohen asserts, promises “a more hopeful future.”7 But the understanding of this ideal “model of the world” means that some people will not fit within its parameters, as I have discussed at length in the first four chapters of this project. For example, Giant and The

Scottsboro Boys show that there are always multiple sides to every story. Assassins challenges the notion of an intact narrative of history further by suggesting that there are endless sides and perspectives. To this end, the musical breaks down the notions of a unified historical narrative and national belonging altogether, depicting singular-narrative popular history as fabricated.

The three anthems that I have discussed thus far each represent a battle between a history based in popular memory and an erased or subjugated history that does not fit the overarching narrative of US national identity. This chapter investigates “Another National Anthem,” the musical emblem through which the assassins create an alternate community and identity based

7 Paul Cohen, History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 1. 124 on their own perspectives of history. The anthem occurs near the end of the show as a musical struggle between the assassins and the balladeer in which the assassins emerge victorious, ousting the balladeer and rejecting his one-sided constructions of history and identity.

Stylistically, the song places the balladeer’s folk music style in competition with the assassins’ anthem, which incorporates and warps idioms of the march, a musical genre steeped in American nationalism.

I selected this anthem as the final object in the progression of this study because it simultaneously illustrates a separation from the nation and an expression of unity. As I argued in the previous three chapters, “Oklahoma” upholds mainstream national identity, “My Texas” critiques that mainstream identity as based in faulty mythology, and “Southern Days” counters it by offering a way that those without power might resist those who would humiliate and disempower them. “Another National Anthem” moves a step further and dismantles and rejects

American nationalism. The assassins, angered by a national ethos that makes them feel excluded and other, unite to step outside of it. By using and twisting a musical form associated with

American patriotism, Sondheim creates a musical banner under which the disenfranchised form a new community—one that is as dysfunctional as its anthem. In this chapter, I argue that the appropriation and distortion of patriotic musical styles in “Another National Anthem” challenge and unsettle deeply rooted constructions of jingoistic national identity that are founded upon distorted constructions of history and popular memory.

The first section considers the cultural context surrounding the musical’s original production and the social climate of a country that rejected Assassins. The show’s cynicism, spouted from the mouths of history’s villains, failed to attract audiences in the early nineties. The assassins’ vitriol comes to a head in “Another National Anthem,” when the assassins come

125 together as a troubling community by confronting and removing the balladeer. The balladeer, modelled after folk singer Woody Guthrie, embodies a fantasy of idealized American identity while representing the voice of popular memory and history. The defeat of the balladeer is tantamount to the defeat of the audience. In this section, I explore the cultural meaning of the folk aesthetic, and I argue that the balladeer’s folk persona has deep signification within the historical context of the original production that frames him specifically as a point of identification for the audience.

The second section investigates how the musical simultaneously creates alternative histories as it destroys a single, dominant narrative. As the assassins tell their stories, they are constantly at odds with the balladeer as a voice of history that either overwrites or neglects their version of the narratives. Rather than accepting their proscribed places as historical pariahs, they show that they too can construct their own separate, exclusionary histories and identities. All of the assassins, in their own ways, committed their crimes as ways to subvert the national narrative. I argue that “Another National Anthem” functions as an anti-nationalist anthem, working to dismantle and reject national belonging as fabricated upon biased notions of history.

In the third section, I analyze “Another National Anthem” musically with particular attention to how Sondheim uses conventions of the march both in the song and in the score as a whole. Since the march is closely associated with the military and patriotic nationalism, it holds an honored place in the national imaginary. Throughout the musical, Sondheim uses pre-existing patriotic marches in various ways, with some instances remaining musically intact while others are altered or distorted. In “Another National Anthem,” the assassins create a march that defies genre conventions in unsettling ways. I argue that by distorting the conventions of the march, the anthem challenges the idea of national belonging through patriotism.

126 Cultural Context: The Voice of the People

When Assassins opened Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 1991, the United

States was embroiled in the Persian Gulf War, “its first war in almost twenty years.”8 Diana

Calderazzo describes a “reigning sense of patriotism evident in the early 1990s.”9 In the middle of a surge of wartime nationalism, most critics responded to Assassins with distaste. In his lukewarm review, Frank Rich of the New York Times begrudgingly offers, “This is not a message that audiences necessarily want to hear at any time, and during the relatively jingoistic time of war in which this production happens to find itself, some may regard such sentiments as incendiary. But Mr. Sondheim has real guts.”10 Assassins challenges nationalism in a particularly patriotic moment. This patriotism manifested, as it often does, in widespread support and positive perceptions of the military. The assassins sing their anthem as a grotesque march, perverting a traditionally patriotic form in the American cultural lexicon. By countering the assassins in the number, the balladeer attempts to intervene in their attack on patriotic America.

In this section, I argue that the cultural meaning surrounding the balladeer’s folk music aesthetic and musical style encourages audience identification with the balladeer, making his defeat at the end of “Another National Anthem” particularly unsettling.

In terms of audience identification, the centralization of nine historically maligned killers presents a challenge. André Bishop, who was the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons when the organization produced the original Off-Broadway version of Assassins, remembers observing audience reactions to the show. He describes, “At the end of one of the performances, an

8 Diana Calderazzo, “Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins and the Wartime Political Climate,” Theatre Symposium (2006: 14), 140. 9 Calderazzo, 140. 10 Frank Rich, “Review/Theatre; Sondheim and Those Who Would Kill,” The New York Times, January 28, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/28/theater/review-theater-sondheim-and-those-who-would- kill.html?auth=login-smartlock. 127 audience member said to his companion, ‘I liked it, but who are you supposed to feel for?’”11

Although the musical affords the assassins the critical generosity of humanization and an airing of their grievances, it does not go so far as to ask audiences to identify with or even forgive history’s misfits. Throughout the musical, the assassins defy audience identification as they each vacillate in their representations between sympathetic and repulsive. The assassins set themselves apart by uniting against a common enemy: mainstream American society, with the president as its figurehead. Their anthem breaks down the simplified dichotomy of those who mourn presidents and those who kill. And while the assassins invite anyone who has ever felt disenfranchised to become one of them, these nine loners are not particularly adept at winning people over. They dominate the narrative and confront the audience, often aggressively and defensively—even aiming their guns at playgoers. Only the character of the balladeer welcomes the audience in on their own terms.

The balladeer adopts the style of songwriters such as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan from the resurgence of popular folk music that occurred in the United States between the 1930s and

1960s. While the march speaks of militancy and governmental enforcement, the folk music revival emerged from a populist sentiment. The two genres represent dual approaches to the formulation of national identity. While the military effects change by force, “folk music was particularly helpful in rallying the nation under a banner of democracy because it was a participatory, grassroots cultural form.”12 In Sondheim on Music, the composer describes the balladeer as modeled after real-life American balladeer Woody Guthrie.13 Guthrie, an “integral

11 Andre Bishop, “Preface,” Assassins: Libretto (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991), vii. 12 Rachel Clare Donaldson, “I Hear America Singing”: Folk Music and National Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 57. 13 Mark Eden Horowitz and Stephen Sondheim, Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions, (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 69. 128 part of the politicized folk song movement,” was a “committed popularist and socialist [who] lived through the Depression and felt a great deal of animosity toward the capitalist system that seemed to offer much and deliver little.”14 For the key demographic of aging baby boomers in the audience, the folk music aesthetic would hold significance.15 Those who experienced and formed varying cultural associations with the 1960s folk music resurgence in their teens or twenties would be in their forties or fifties when the show premiered in 1991 and in their fifties or sixties for the 2004 Broadway revival. For many, folk music represents pluralism within an idealized version of a multicultural US democracy.

Musically and visually, the balladeer is an everyman, allowing audiences to place themselves in his shoes. He is anonymous, only denoted by his title in the text and never named in performance. He uses a popular rather than elite musical style and incorporates vernacular into his songs. In the original Off-Broadway production, costume designer William Ivey Long dressed Patrick Cassidy, who debuted the role of the balladeer, as a Great Depression-era railroad worker in denim overalls, a work belt, a newsboy cap, and a harmonica in his pocket.

For the 2004 Broadway revival, Susan Hilferty costumed Neil Patrick Harris as the image of

Woody Guthrie in blue jeans and a plaid button-down shirt, calling forth a specific cultural ghost. The formulation of this ghost informs the way the balladeer invites audience identification since, as Marvin Carlson suggests, “All reception is deeply involved with memory, because it is memory that supplies the codes and strategies that shape reception, and, as cultural and social moments change, so do the parameters within which reception operates.”16 For a generation that

14 Kip Lornell, Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 253-254. 15 The title “baby boomer” refers to the generation that was born between 1946 and 1964. 16 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as a Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 5. 129 adopted the motto “never trust anyone over thirty,” the balladeer is ageless, traveling through the century as an eternally young man.17 An audience of baby boomers, well past the age of thirty, can look at the balladeer and see their most idealized selves. The balladeer maintains the image of youth associated with the generation’s most revolutionary moment. He is Woody Guthrie,

Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger in their unending prime—the manifestation of a genuine, real-folk

America.

The balladeer’s claim to authenticity, however, is deceptive, much like the aura of authenticity at the heart of the folk music movement. In the 1940s, after the United States had joined World War II, the folk movement was co-opted by government propagandists. At this point, folk music became repurposed as “a cultural weapon that could unite Americans, secure citizens’ commitment to the democratic way of life, raise morale, and ultimately help defeat the enemy.”18 By the 1960s, when folk music peaked in popularity, the genre that started as a grassroots movement had become a mixture of co-opted commercialization and sincere political activism. The evolution of Woody Guthrie’s most famous song, “This Land is Your Land,” epitomizes this shift. Guthrie wrote the song as an alternative populist American anthem in response to the “smug piety” of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which received endless radio play during World War II.19 In light of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, “This

Land is Your Land” addresses class issues and poverty. Guthrie’s anthem, which has been covered endlessly, asserts that America should belong to everyone. But the lyrics changed over the decades after Guthrie wrote it. “This Land is Your Land” entered “America’s cultural blood

17 Paul Kleyman, “The Age of Anti-Aging: Media Hype and the Myth of the Ageless Baby Boomer,” Generations 41, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 42. 18 Donaldson, 60-61. 19 Jim Cullen, Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 43. 130 stream” and became popularized while “the protest verses were mostly forgotten.”20 What was once a protest song has become sanitized as a mainstream patriotic anthem. In Assassins, the balladeer’s cultural memory has become similarly sanitized. He glosses over the rough, ambiguous, unsavory bits of history that the assassins represent, guiding his narrative along nationalist lines.

The balladeer’s overarching message of faith in the United States as a national structure reflects the shifting attitudes of revolutionaries who have grown up and out of their protest days and into a New York theatre seat, holding an expensive ticket to the latest Sondheim musical.

Music critic John Strausbaugh, who identifies himself as a “white middle-class American male, born in 1951 in Baltimore, Maryland” suggests that “the revolutionaries of 1968 grew up, grew fat, grew complacent, withdrew from the world, and beguiled themselves with their own trivia.

We went from Be Here Now to Remember When. This is not the revolution we thought we were going to make.”21 The balladeer criticizes the assassins who are, in varying degrees, taking extreme and revolutionary measures, however ill-advised or rightfully maligned. He presents as a revolutionary, provoking nostalgia without requiring revolutionary action. The folk music aesthetic references the roots of the movement, the yearning for a diverse utopia of equality, and the illusion that this sentiment is inherent in the cultural construction of Americanness. In his

1967 article “Why Folk Music?” singer Pete Seeger links the renewed enthusiasm for folk songs in the 1960s to Americans who “were curious to rediscover their roots, to learn about their own country’s heritage.”22 The balladeer presents that heritage through the master narrative, devoid of

20 Mark Allan Jackson, Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 33. 21 John Strausbaugh, Rock Til You Drop: The Decline from Rebellion to Nostalgia (New York: Verso, 2002), 15. 22 Pete Seeger, “Why Folk Music?” in In His Own Words, eds. Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal (New York: Routledge, 2016), 72. 131 individualism or pluralist perspectives. Next to the balladeer, the assassins become an affront to the acquired inertia into which the baby boomer generation settled. The assassins might be murderers, but they are actively resisting, offering their lives in service of their beliefs.

The balladeer sells the promise of the American Dream, and when the assassins oust the balladeer in “Another National Anthem,” they are dismantling the American Dream—a notion that would likely be distasteful to an audience member swept up in the nationalist rhetoric of a country at war. But the balladeer offers empty promises, touting a distorted version of the

American Dream by identifying people who “won the lottery” or became “a rock star” as

American success stories.23 The truth of the American Dream is the implicit understanding that, in a capitalist system, some people must fail so that others can succeed. Similarly, in the telling of historical mythology, one must have villains in order to have heroes. Although American popular memory designates these assassins as enemies and outliers, historical acts only receive value through hindsight. If the assassination fails to start a revolution or enact social change, it enters cultural memory as a horrific, senseless, evil act. The assassins ultimately cannot change this dominant historical narrative because the structure of the country can only be maintained if it shames and discourages those who would actively fight against it.

Dramaturgical Breakdown: The Assassination of Popular Memory

“Another National Anthem” occurs after eight of the nine assassins, having told their individual stories, find that they are still dissatisfied, still disenfranchised, and still have not changed their places in the historical record. They each express their discontent and why they each “deserve a fucking prize” for their efforts.24 The balladeer interjects, suggesting that

23 Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, Assassins: Libretto (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991), 82. 24 Sondheim and Weidman, Assassins: Libretto, 80. 132 although their violent acts failed to alter the course of history, America is a place where “you can choose what to be, from a mailman to a president” so they should keep hoping and trying instead of giving up.25 The assassins, beginning to realize that this promise is a lie, fight back. After a musical back-and-forth, the assassins defeat the balladeer. Their victory over the entity that has controlled the historical narrative represents an attempt to destroy popular memory and the way their histories have been configured. Not only does Assassins give voice to America’s

“enemies,” it allows them the space to protest that title and their place in popular memory. The assassins blame their actions on a society that marginalized them and the false promise of the

American Dream. In “Another National Anthem,” the assassins locate themselves outside of the mainstream, patriotic formulation of Americanness. Although the anthem seems merely to be the declaration of a group of indignant killers, it stands as a musical emblem for the disenfranchised.

I contend that the ejection of the balladeer in their new anthem signifies an attempt to kill the singular narrative of history and reformulate national identity based on a multi-perspective history that allows them agency over their own stories.

Dramaturgically, the balladeer’s removal in this scene functioned differently in the two major US productions, making different statements about the role of history in national identity.

In the original 1991 Off-Broadway production, the assassins merely force the balladeer offstage.

But in the 2004 Broadway revival, directed by Joe Mantello, the balladeer doesn’t simply leave.

He becomes Lee Harvey Oswald. In the subsequent scene, entitled “November 22, 1963,” the assassins crowd into the sixth-floor space of the Texas Book Depository and convince Oswald to kill Kennedy. In Mantello’s revival, once the balladeer/Oswald (played by Neil Patrick Harris) takes the fateful shot, he turns to face the audience so the now-famous Zapruder film of

25 Sondheim and Weidman, Assassins: Libretto, 82. 133 Kennedy’s assassination can be projected on the balladeer/Oswald’s white tee-shirt as a slowed- down version of “Hail to the Chief” swells in the background.26 While the dismissal of the balladeer in the original production reflects the victory of the marginalized villains in a coup against the gatekeepers of history, Mantello’s repurposing of the balladeer as Oswald suggests a darker message. Suddenly, the assassins are no longer historical aberrations. They are the expressions of the frustrated, silenced masses. This moment says that anyone can become a killer under the right circumstances. In a show that has, thus far, allowed the audience to identify with the balladeer rather than the assassins, the balladeer’s shift suddenly forces the assassins’ perspective to the front. The balladeer’s transformation points out that the reality of US history doesn’t conform neatly to nationalistic narratives, and that even those who seem most invested in the dominant narratives of the nation are vulnerable. This dramaturgical change suggests that everyone in the audience, no matter how much they may distance themselves from the assassins, could become outsiders too.

The musical presents the assassins’ narratives of history in three hierarchical tiers. In the first tier, the assassins tell their own stories. These versions of history tend to be stylized or fanciful, often intermingling the assassins’ storylines in historically impossible ways. For instance, both Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme attempted to kill President Gerald Ford.

Although the real women acted independently and at different times, the musical allows them to meet and plot their attempt together. The majority of the assassins are relegated to these first-tier

26 The now-famous Zapruder film, a home movie shot by a private citizen named Abraham Zapruder, captured Kennedy’s motorcade traversing Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Widely believed to be the most complete record of the incident, the film shows Kennedy’s limo as shots are fired, the president is wounded, and the chaotic aftermath. In the Broadway revival, the section of the film projected onto Oswald’s chest features Jacqueline Kennedy crawling across the car to reach her dying husband. 134 histories because their unsuccessful attempts have obscured their historical legacy. They are either faded historical footnotes or erased altogether, largely forgotten within popular memory.

The second tier is reserved for those three assassins who successfully killed their targets outside of living memory. These assassins are rewarded with a story ballad sung by a character known simply as “the balladeer”: John Wilkes Booth, who killed Abraham Lincoln in 1865

(“The Ballad of Booth”); Charles Guiteau, who assassinated James Garfield in 1881 (“The

Ballad of Guiteau”); and Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated William McKinley in 1901 (“The

Ballad of Czolgosz”). The history that the balladeer offers is both selective and biased. As he commits their stories to historical memory, he editorializes and changes their words, ignoring any valid motives they present. In “The Ballad of Booth,” for instance, the balladeer sings over

John Wilkes Booth as he attempts to declare his reasons for assassinating Lincoln, repeatedly asking, “Why did you do it, Johnny?” while ignoring Booth’s response to the question.27

The third tier, a reenactment that reflects both the fullness of a detailed historical record and the massively scrutinized mystery of events that remain unknown, is reserved for Lee

Harvey Oswald. Without a narrator to provide a complete—if vague and biased—rendition of the assassination, the reenactment offers as many questions as answers. The scene’s full emotional impact relies on an audience with flashbulb memories of learning that Kennedy had been shot on

November 22, 1963. Filichia, the critic quoted at the beginning of the chapter, admits that this moment reached him in a way that the prior representations of historical assassinations in the show had not. Bridging this gap between a fresh (relatively speaking) national tragedy and those that occurred outside of living memory led an uncomfortable Filichia to question the irreverence and grotesqueness of representing these events in a musical.28 After the play ended, Filichia

27 Sondheim, Assassins: Score, 26. 28 Filichia, “Assassins.” 135 adds, “I vowed that I would never again put myself through that scene as long as I lived.”29

Ultimately unable to fulfill that promise to himself, Filichia notes that his emotional investment in the Kennedy assassination affected his ability to assess it objectively in 1991. In the decades since, the number of historical witnesses to the effect of Kennedy’s death on the United States has dwindled, partially relegating the event to those prior assassinations that live on only through evidence and the record of popular memory. Even if audience members eventually no longer associate the Kennedy assassination with personal mourning, the song serves to add a sense of human compassion and perspective that the show otherwise largely avoids.

As they compose their anthem, the assassins assert their materiality and their place in the national imaginary as more than the villains of history and worthy of more flattering remembrance. The interplay between the balladeer and the assassins mimics the way popular memory interprets the assassins’ acts of violence through the broad lens of historical hindsight.

In other words, his ballads and historical retellings are slanted by the knowledge that the stories, even as they are enacted, are already finished and the assassins will be maligned in the dominant narrative. In his role as the historian, the balladeer is all-powerful over the production of historical narrative. “Another National Anthem” speaks for the “losers” who have become eclipsed by a much larger history that is written and preserved by the “winners.” Throughout the musical, the balladeer sings about the assassins in the past tense despite their active presence in the show. Even as they are committing their crimes, he commits them to historical narrative.

Raymond Williams refers to the “habitual past tense” in which descriptions of culture and history are subject to “immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products.”30 This

29 Filichia, “Assassins.” 30 Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128. 136 constructs history as episodic, creating a gap between then and now. These conversions give way to generalizations, allowing people and objects to be molded into an overarching historical narrative and used as mythology. But as Williams asserts, “Perhaps the dead can be reduced to fixed forms, though their surviving records are against it. But the living will not be reduced, at least in the first person.”31 Allowing these assassins to live and speak for themselves gives them an imaginary voice to protest the fixity of their own narrative, to reopen a closed chapter of history for reinterpretation. Of course, the fanciful dramatizations of history in the musical make no pretense toward truth or accuracy. In this sense, the assassins are not simply offering their perspective, but reinventing themselves historically.

The assassins change history by centering themselves and their perspectives in narratives that have turned them into flat, two-dimensional dramatic devices. They replace their own claims to marginalization with the marginalization of dominant voices. Historical figures from outside the group of assassins—people who were on the “right side of history”—appear in the show, but they are relegated to the periphery and flit in and out of the story solely to facilitate as the assassins tell their stories. They are witnesses and recorders, mostly played by ensemble members who revolve in and out of different tangential roles. For instance, David Herold, an accomplice of John Wilkes Booth, only appears in one scene, “The Battle of Booth,” in which

Booth orders Herold to record his side of the Lincoln assassination. The bystanders who sing

“How I Saved Roosevelt” report for the journalistic record on their versions of the events in which Giuseppe Zangara attempted to shoot Franklin D. Roosevelt. In “The Ballad of Czolgosz,” the crowd of fairgoers join in with the balladeer to, in superficial terms, describe the atmosphere they witnessed on the day that Leon Czolgosz assassinated William McKinley at the Pan-

31 Williams, 129 137 American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. While the show endows the assassins with complex identities, the characters on the border lack depth. They represent the archival remnants of history, as indicated when Charles Guiteau assassinates President Garfield, and Garfield freezes with Secretary of State James Blaine to mimic “a nineteenth-century engraving of the assassination which is projected behind them.”32 These representatives of dominant society are canned, shallow, and incomplete.

The decentering of the dominant voice occurs in “Another National Anthem” at the beginning of the number when they overpower and silence the distant, abstracted sound of the public response to their actions. The number begins with a pre-taped chorus of “ahhs,” which

Sondheim identifies as a “disembodied lament” —the sounds of national mourning.”33 In the original 1991 production, this is the only moment in the show that represents the pain and suffering that these assassinations caused (or would have caused, in the case of those who failed). “Another National Anthem” leads to Oswald assassinating Kennedy and the musical finishes with the wry rationalization in the closing number, “Everybody’s Got the Right.” But when the show moved to the West End in 1992, Sondheim rectified this seemingly deliberate lack of empathy by adding the song “Something Just Broke.” The song, inserted after the

Kennedy assassination, reprises the “ahhs” from “Another National Anthem, but this time elaborates and allows the mourning public their moment.

“Something Just Broke” counters “Another National Anthem” and the balladeer’s claim that nothing they did mattered. Like the rest of the musical, the song collapses multiple time periods to place disparate voices of mourners, played by the ensemble, not the assassins, next to each other, but in this case highlights the voices of US/American citizens across time and space

32 Sondheim and Weidman, Assassins: Libretto, 64. 33 Horowitz and Sondheim, 75-76. 138 as they learn that their respective presidents have been killed. Sondheim explains that he intended to include the song when the original production transferred to Broadway, but the show closed too quickly. Although time buries the pain caused by national tragedy, Sondheim explains:

[T]he trains carrying the bodies of the presidents were greeted with just as much weeping

and wailing in the case of two minor presidents as in the case of Lincoln. It’s a constant

when the country goes into a convulsion like that, and that’s what the number’s about—

the country’s convulsion.34

The “ahhs” work to resurrect a historically abstracted emotional wave, the human responses that cannot be preserved in the historical record. Linguistically, the “ahhs” are insubstantial. When the assassins begin to articulate their motives for committing violence, the mourners can’t argue back. They aren’t even physically present. Much like the assassinations (and attempted assassinations) themselves, the nation can only react. “Something Just Broke” reaches beyond historical evidence to locate the reason that these events became tragedies in the national narrative.

Perhaps the inclusion of “Something Just Broke” was the reason that audiences began to find Assassins palatable and even praiseworthy. The assassins themselves may provide fleeting moments in which they seem sympathetic, but Sondheim and Weidman create them as essentially unlikeable characters too laden with historical baggage to engender much compassion. For audience members who remember and felt affected by the Kennedy assassination or Hinckley’s attempt to kill Reagan, these moments don’t feel like history in the distant, finished sense. “Something Just Broke” mitigates the coldness with which the musical

34 Horowitz and Sondheim, 76. 139 otherwise treats the assassinations, acknowledging the pain that resulted. The song also reminds any audience member who may have begun to root for any of the assassins that acts of violence, even those that seem righteously motivated, have material ramifications. Politically motivated killers are still killers who leave mourning and human suffering in their wake. And while the singular historical narrative can and should be complicated to incorporate diverse perspectives and viewpoints, understanding intent frequently does not temper historical consequences.

Musical Analysis: The March of the Assassins

Musically, Assassins reflects the show’s overarching temporal fragmentation by juxtaposing a patchwork of styles and musical references from across different eras of US history. Each assassin brings popular musical styles from his or her cultural moment and situation. For example, Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian immigrant who shot at Roosevelt in 1933, sings a tarantella, an Italian folk dance. Charles Guiteau, a minister, sings a church hymn on the hangman’s platform in 1882. In his review of the original Off-Broadway production, Robert

Brustein accuses Sondheim’s score of comprising “songs [that], for the most part, could be detached from their context and handed to disc jockeys, arousing the disquieting impression that these aberrant historical figures have been resurrected partly for the sake of selling platinum records. The assassins of Assassins are lurking in Tin Pan Alley.”35 While amusing, Brustein’s implication that the disconnect in the score equals something akin to the pop hits of early

Broadway—such as George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy (1930) or the patriotic works of George M.

Cohan—is erroneous. The jumble of musical styles in the score works to weave together different historical eras into the single distorted landscape of the self-made outsider. This landscape crystallizes both musically and dramatically in the song “Another National Anthem.” I

35 Robert Brustein, “Assassins,” New Republic 204 (March 18, 1991): 34. 140 suggest that the repurposing and distortion of the march as the basis for the assassins’ anthem violates and reformulates expected musical frameworks in uncomfortable ways by revising and reimagining music that is closely associated with Americanness and nationalism.

Although much of the score consists of disparate numbers that do not repeat as motifs

(Sondheim refers to the score as a “collection of songs”), the use and distortion of pre-existing patriotic marches recurs as a major theme in the music.36 For instance, the musical begins with a warped version of “Hail to the Chief,” the presidential anthem of the United States, rearranged into a sinister carnival calliope that becomes the beginning of “Everybody’s Got the Right.”

Sondheim’s arrangement breaks down the typical square 4/4 time signature of the march into a lopsided, syncopated waltz. The march reappears in its traditional form to announce Abraham

Lincoln’s arrival (offstage) at Ford’s Theatre. And “Hail to the Chief” occurs once again near the end of the musical, slowed down and in the same time signature as the calliope version, but firmly on the beat rather than syncopated. The score also quotes two of John Philip Sousa’s patriotic marches, “El Capitan” and “Washington Post,” to accompany the bystanders in “How I

Saved Roosevelt” as they obnoxiously and humorously clamor for attention and historical posterity. In instances where the score utilizes preexisting marches in their intact forms, they sound bright and parade-ready, full of brass and percussion. When Sondheim warps “Hail to the

Chief,” a shift in meter and rhythm renders the march virtually unrecognizable while remaining eerily familiar.

The march carries a deep significance in terms of the development of national identity in the United States. Historically the march is, of course, intertwined with military music. The style alludes to nationalistic heroism and triumph. Of the genre’s importance in western culture,

36 Horowitz and Sondheim, 65. 141 Raymond Monelle explains, “The image of a band on foot, playing for a squadron of troops marching in step, is our idea of the march. The march tells of heroism and victory.”37 The march is at the heart of all military music and is particularly recognizable due to its ubiquity in

US/American patriotic culture. Although public attitudes toward and approval of the military in the United States have ebbed and flowed based on a shifting political climate, in the early 1990s,

“American sentiments of nationalism and patriotism soared, and the thought of critically evaluating the social structure of a leading world power in a theatrical venue became more distasteful as American military personnel fought abroad.”38 Since the distortion of the march in

“Another National Anthem,” in which the assassins assemble as a sort of motley army, appears antagonistic, widespread positive perception of the military informs the potential audience response to the anthem and the emotional stakes of destabilizing the march.

A conventional march signifies military drills, and although many march compositions since the eighteenth century have been purely ornamental, a march designed to accompany the act of marching requires a compatible rhythm and tempo. While “a 3/2 measure would infuriatingly wrong-foot any marching troops,” a duple or quadruple time signature such as 4/4,

6/8, or 2/2 is much more conducive to a functional march.39 Additionally, in order to dictate synchronized movements, a practical march needs dominant, austere percussion; anything that interferes with clarity of the rhythm, such as extreme syncopation or echoing, muddles a drill march.40 For instance, the unadulterated version of “Hail to the Chief,” which precedes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln near the beginning of the musical, maintains a distinct 4/4 rhythm, with

37 Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 128. 38 Calderazzo, 140. 39 Monelle, 115. 40 Monelle, 116. 142 little ornamentation to complicate or distract from the beat. Figure 18 shows how the treble and the bass line both emphasize the march’s meter, as the treble and bass line play almost entirely in unison. This provides a standard version of a march as a baseline of comparison for the instances in which the score twists conventions of the march.

Figure 18: “Hail to the Chief” from the Assassins vocal score.

Structurally, “Another National Anthem” is, as Sondheim describes, “one continuous piece, interrupted by the balladeer.”41 The anthem of the title is the song that the assassins are constructing as they unify, a distortion of a patriotic march that comes together over the course of the number, and this coming together of the march, piece by piece, signifies the assassins coming together. In their march, the assassins corrupt the conventions of the genre, showing the dysfunction at the heart of their new community. While most marches, including the others that appear in the score, begin boldly and assertively, the assassins’ march creeps in. The initial signifiers of the march appear sporadically in the first two sections. For instance, faint snare drum occurs at the end of the first section, just as the assassins sing in unison for the first time. In

Figure 19, the snare drum begins “poco a poco,” or “little by little.” Prior to this moment, which occurs near the end of the assassins’ first section, the assassins only speak and sing disjointedly.

The snare drum brings them together briefly, but the balladeer interrupts them. The march does not begin to come together again until the assassins’ third section, which denotes the rhythm as

41 Horowitz and Sondheim, 73. 143 “alla marcia,” or “as a march.” A march rhythm typically stresses the downbeat, which achieves the neat, even rhythm that supports the act of marching. In Figure 19, the bass line maintains the march meter while the vocal line distorts it. The assassins’ attempt at the march in the first part of the third section is repeatedly disrupted by their individual interjections, unable to gain momentum. Their recurring attempts to speak over each other thwart their ability to organize, suggesting that the strength of their individual ambitions remains more important than the needs of the collective. In a capitalist society, individual success relies on a working class that cannot progress. Their individual goals—necessities in a society that says that everyone must work toward attaining the American Dream—require them to compete with one another rather than unify. They do so until the snare drum returns, in full force this time, leading them musically to become a cohesive unit. This cohesive unit, however, continually spins apart and back together over the course of the number.

Figure 19: “Another National Anthem,” measures 37-39 from the Assassins vocal score.

Whereas a military march tends to be predictable, the assassins’ march constantly upsets expectation. As in the third section, the bassline in section ten maintains a regular rhythm accompanied by the snare drum while the treble accompaniment and the vocal line continue to 144 be slightly off-beat. The tactus, or “the basic beat that forms the most salient periodic pulse evident in a musical passage,” informs the listener’s rhythmic expectations.42 When additional rhythms are added on top of the tactus, they can interfere with the ability to process and predict the central pulse of the song. Expectations arise not only from within the piece itself but from cultural associations and a familiarity with the conventions of the march form, creating a rhythmic expectation that the vocal line in “Another National Anthem” defies and muddles. In

Figure 20, the dotted eighth notes in the vocal line add texture and variation to the clear central pulse of the song. Nine measures later, as is shown in Figure 21, the assassins separate again into two groups. While the bass line continues to maintain the central pulse with an even beat, the two separate groups layer additional rhythmic patterns on top. This further divides the central march beat and makes it even more difficult for an untrained listener to isolate the march tempo.

When compared to “Hail to the Chief” in Figure 18, Figure 21 shows how the assassins have taken their own liberties with the rhythmic conventions of the march. Although the genre of the march represents an extremely wide category of music with many variations across different cultures and centuries, Sondheim’s use of “Hail to the Chief” and the Sousa marches earlier in the score sets up a clear baseline for comparison.

Figure 20: “Another National Anthem,” measures 138-140 from the Assassins vocal score.

42 David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge: MIT, 2006), 176. 145

Figure 21: “Another National Anthem,” measures 149-150 from the Assassins vocal score.

Melodically, the assassins’ march flouts the conventions of western music. More specifically, it violates the tendency in music—not only in western culture but around the globe—to use a majority of adjacent pitches.43 The assassins alternate between following and defying this convention. For instance, the main repeated refrain of their anthem, beginning with the phrase, “There’s another national anthem playing,” alternates between phrasing that uses smaller intervals and phrasing made of up larger intervals. However, in section five of the assassins’ march, the phrase “If you can’t do what you want to, then you do the things you can” consists entirely of intervals that are larger than seconds. The notes are chromatic, or outside of the key. Because the western ear is more attuned to smaller intervals and music without such prominent chromaticism, these intervals sound unconventional and almost off-pitch. As shown in

Figure 22, the intervals largely alternate between major thirds and perfect fifths, but Sondheim breaks the pattern by inserting a perfect fourth on “want to” and minor sixths on “you do,” “the things,” and “you can.”44 The phrasing mimics the arc of an arpeggio, which the balladeer

43 Huron, 93. 44 Sondheim, Assassins: Score, 133. 146 demonstrates in his verses, as in Figure 23. An arpeggio, made up of thirds, is the notes of a chord sung melodically. With “I just heard,” “on the news,” and “where the mail-,” the balladeer sings arpeggios, which he repeats throughout the number. The assassins’ intervals in Figure 22 attempt to imitate the arpeggio, but the thirds spin off into other, unexpected intervals. To the untrained ear, there is no discernable pattern, which makes them seem strange and unpredictable, but nearly familiar in proximity to the arpeggio. The balladeer is an established mainstream voice, and his melodies adhere to western convention. As the assassins compose their version of an anthem, but it is clearly different than the balladeer’s. The practice of writing and composing their anthem—particularly when it demonstrates their otherness from the balladeer—is essential to the process of creating their own community.

Figure 22: “Another National Anthem,” measures 144-145 from the Assassins: vocal score.

Figure 23: “Another National Anthem,” measures 62-64 from the Assassins vocal score.

147 By challenging and deconstructing the march, Sondheim uses music to parallel the larger dramaturgical and thematic issues of the single-narrative US/American story as well as the efficacy of the American Dream. The assassins may not be particularly sympathetic characters, but they do, quite convincingly, ask why some dreams or goals are considered more valid than others, and why history remembers certain people as heroes and others as villains. Each assassin killed (or tried to kill) a president to achieve something that he or she identified as otherwise unachievable. The march serves as a metaphor for conforming, and the assassins show through their march that they are not willing or able to conform. While most would likely agree that following one’s dream to kill someone is a moral problem, the assassins ask an important question: if everybody’s got the right to the pursuit of happiness, why should some people’s happiness matter more than others’? In “Another National Anthem,” they respond by literally and figuratively marching to a different beat, forming their own community of outsiders in a society that does not value them.

Coda: Musicalizing National Tragedy

Since Assassins premiered in 1991, critical and public reception of the musical has swung wildly. Critics despised it when it opened Off-Broadway in 1991, finding the show offensive amid the nationalistic zeal engendered by the first Persian Gulf War. The show again found itself in a watershed moment of US/American patriotism in 2001 when, two days after September 11th, the Roundabout cancelled its Broadway revival of the musical. Sondheim and book-writer John

Weidman released a statement explaining:

Assassins is a show which asks audiences to think critically about various aspects of the

American experience. In light of Tuesday’s murderous assault on our nation and on the

most fundamental things in which we all believe, we, the Roundabout, and director Joe

148 Mantello believe this is not an appropriate time to present a show which makes such a

demand.45

Had the Roundabout gone ahead with the revival in the days following 9/11, the musical’s challenge to nationalism would likely have elicited more criticism than the original production.

While the country was in mourning many turned to nationalist sentiment for comfort or to express outrage, and many viewers would likely have found questioning or challenging that ideology to be offensive. In particular, a musical that featured Samuel Byck’s discussion of his plan to hijack a plane and fly it into the White House to assassinate President Richard Nixon would certainly have been considered in poor taste, and might have invited protests or even reprisal.

But in 2004, when the displaced Roundabout production opened on Broadway, it received rave reviews from some of the same critics who panned it in 1991 and garnered five

Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Musical. The musical’s commentary reached audiences on a visceral level, alternately horrifying and delighting audiences depending on immediate cultural context. Peter Filichia—the same critic who was horrified by the portrayal of

Kennedy’s assassination in the original production—remembers a 1994 production at the

Cincinnati Conservatory of Music:

As the excellent cast was singing “Another National Anthem,” in the middle of Row D

four women decided that they couldn’t take these madmen up there one second longer.

They got up and began to leave. When Mickey Fisher, playing Sam Byck, saw them start

to leave, he marched closer to the footlights to confront them while singing. His

castmates joined him, played directly to them, increased their volume, intensified their

45 Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, qtd. in “Assassins B’way bow delayed,” Variety (September 13, 2001), https://variety.com/2001/legit/news/assassins-b-way-bow-delayed-1117852643/. 149 craziness, stared them down and matched the ladies step for step until the poor souls

stumbled onto the aisle, a ribbon of escape to their cars in the parking lot.46

While this direct response to the audience may seem extreme, the show is similarly aggressive in its use of music to convey its challenge to US/American national identity and nationalism.

As Filichia demonstrates, for the musical’s detractors, the song—and the show—is unsettling. “Another National Anthem” continually violates expectations that are established through western musical conventions. Assassins places nine individuals who went down in infamy front and center, asking audiences to reconsider their place in history as violent anomalies. Through the unsettling of musical conventions, the show calls into question the nature of patriotism and unconfronted complacency. The voices of the assassins represent discord and instability, even as they come together. At the end of each of the assassins’ sections of “Another National Anthem,” they finish with unresolved dissonances. For instance, at the end of section three, the phrase “Where’s my prize?” lands on multiple dissonant intervals, including an augmented fourth (in this case, between E♭ and A). The augmented fourth, also known as a tritone, is so dissonant that it became known in the medieval era as “diabolus in musica” (the devil in music) and was banned by the Catholic church.47 Although the tritone has been repurposed and re-legitimized in western music (at least in term of demonic overtones) and tritones in certain contexts sound can sound unremarkable to twenty-first century ears, those in

“Another National Anthem,” are particularly harsh. Not only does Sondheim’s use of dissonance at the end of each section incorporate tritones, it fails to resolve into satisfying or harmonious consonance with a major or minor triad.48 The resolution of dissonance into consonance is a

46 Filichia, “Assassins.” 47 Willi Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 884. 48 Consonance, the opposite of dissonance, is a quality that describes an interval that generally sounds stable to most listeners. 150 common and expected convention of western music, and the lack of resolution at the end of each section is unsettling, unexpected, and defies the conventions of western music. At the end of the song, the assassins triumph, finishing the number with yet another unresolved dissonance and fading rather than transitioning into the next scene. Although they unify as a group, they are a group that continually returns to a place of musical instability and dissonance.

Assassins destabilizes the patriotic mythos that maintains the belief of America as essentially good, showing that the unified popular narrative of Manifest Destiny, the American

Revolution, and the development of the United States neglects to mention those who are trampled: those for whom the American Dream is never actually in reach. In fact, for the assassins, who have attempted to fight back, the American Dream requires such trampling; it pins the success of the few on the failure of most. André Bishop, the artistic director of

Playwrights Horizons during the original production of Assassins, states, “These murderers and would-be murderers are generally dismissed as maniacs and misfits who have little in common with each other and nothing in common with the rest of us. Assassins suggests otherwise.

Assassins suggests that while these individuals are, to say the least, peculiar—taken as a group, they are peculiarly American.”49 Perhaps most would agree that the assassins took their pursuit of the American Dream too far by inciting violence, although such violence has historically been permissible when in the service of successful revolutions like the American Revolution and the

Civil War. However, by allowing the lone wolves of history to unite, Assassins reveals the dirty secret of the American Dream: underneath the promise lies the desperation and angst of the many who are denied advancement. If those who are downtrodden were to realize the fallacy of the American Dream—if the disenfranchised discover collectively that the narrative of pulling

49 Bishop, vii. 151 oneself up by one’s bootstraps only applies to a small percentage of Americans—they would destroy the notion that sustains the United States as a symbol. If the American Dream is dismantled, how can the idea of America as a free nation be sustained?

152 CHAPTER 6

OUTRO: MUSIC AND POPULAR MEMORY

“Then that flag goes by, and you think ‘that’s why: cause of that idea, that incredible idea.’ What you want to do is brag, ‘I’m a part of that. Yeah, I know it’s just a flag. Okay, but still…” - “The Flag Song” Cut from Assassins1

“Don’t worry, John—the history books will clean it up.” - Benjamin Franklin 17762

In 2017, producer Michael Butler announced the fiftieth anniversary revival tour of Hair beginning in April of 2018. Butler, who also produced the original Broadway production (1968) and the 1977 revival, called Hair “the Oklahoma! of its time. It was as though all of Broadway stopped in its tracks as we were able to define relevancy, not just for a theatre audience, but for an entire generation.”3 The production’s director, Michael Arabian, states, “The timing of this revival could not be better, as we are experiencing once again social activism very much like the

60’s. Fighting for human rights, love and peace, pro-environment, anti-war, freedom of religion, race and general equality—all proving that the themes of Hair are still relevant.”4 Arabian adds,

“This production will be as much a movement for social awareness as it is a musical event.”5 The tour’s website emphasizes the production not as a piece of “nostalgia, but of new hope and possibility.”6 As a work, Hair is particularly situated in the 1960s. The text is full of specific

1 Stephen Sondheim, Look I Made A Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes, and Miscellany (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 117. 2 Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards, 1776: Libretto (New York: Music Theatre International, 1969), 61. 3 Andrew Gans, “50th Anniversary of Hair Will Be Celebrated With National Tour,” Playbill Online, November 15, 2017, http://www.playbill.com/article/50th-anniversary-of-hair-will-be-celebrated-with-national-tour. 4 Gans, “50th Anniversary.” 5 Gans, “50th Anniversary.” 6 “About,” Hair Gold: 50th anniversary celebration production, tour and documentary film, accessed March 19, 2019, https://hair50th.com/. 153 cultural references, some of which are inscrutable to most people who did not live during the era.

Over the years since the original Broadway iteration of the musical, the script has shifted and changed, but the music has not.

In this project, I have discussed how musical theatre anthems function within their original historical moments. The way that Hair’s score has endured for half a century illustrates the way that music can transcend cultural context. In my study of the “Be-In” at the start of

Chapter One, I considered the anthem and the way musical and cultural references might have resonated in New York in 1968. But over the decades since Hair premiered on Broadway, it has seen many successful revivals, attracting new fans who become more and more removed from the original production and its social and historical context each year. If the context and audience members are perpetually changing and the songs are remaining the same, this raises the question: how do these songs stay relevant? Although I have focused on anthems for the purposes of delimiting this work, this question applies to any number of musical theatre songs. What is it about these works that continues to bring people together?

Like the narratives of history in each of the musicals I have explored, music can be recontextualized and reapplied to new situations. The musical theatre narratives of history that I discussed in the previous chapters have all been fictionalized for the stage even as they critique and dismantle the dominant historical narratives that they represent, most of which have at least some basis in history. Paul Cohen describes “the mysterious power that people in the present draw from stories,” often ones that are far removed from the present. These stories, Cohen continues, usually “recount events that, although making claims to historical accuracy, have been substantially reworked over time and have only the thinnest basis in an actual historical past.”7

7 Paul A. Cohen, History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), XIII. 154 These historical narratives, like anthems, tend to be the cultural property of certain groups and nationalities. They often “prove” that the people of a geographic or imagined area have possessed certain qualities, generating an image of the type of person who belongs in that space.

Identifying, when able, is a method of belonging.

In a similar way, music creates unity, and anthems in particular connect music with belonging. Benedict Anderson describes the experience of singing national anthems:

No matter how banal the words and mediocre the tunes, there is in the singing an

experience of simultaneity. At precisely such moments, people wholly unknown to each

other utter the same verses to the same melody. […] How selfless this unisonance feels!

If we are aware that others are singing these songs precisely when and as we are, we have

no idea who they may be, or even where, out of earshot, they are singing. Nothing

connects us all but imagined sound.8

Singing an anthem is a group activity. Whether the singer occupies the same physical space as other singers, embodying the song draws a connection to the history of the song and all of its previous performances. While most vocal music reaches toward personal identity or experience in some way, anthems declare group ideologies and allegiance. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that nationalists tend to become disturbed when hearing their nation’s anthem performed disrespectfully.

Musical theatre brings the unifying properties of music and popular memory together.

Even works that don’t purport to depict historical narratives create fictional histories onstage, usually situated in some way within a recognizable construction of space and time. Jill Dolan suggests that “live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and

8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 145. 155 passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world.”9 In musical theatre, the audiences leave those “fleeting intimations” with their consciousnesses teeming with psychic artifacts—the music that sticks in your brain, often reinforced by the desire to listen to the songs over and over. And that music comes with associations—conscious and subconscious—with the utopias (or dystopias) presented onstage. Understanding how music helps to create meaning and significations for an audience can help musical theatre artists design utopias that are inclusive and socially aware.

9 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 2. 156 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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166 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Allison Gibbes received her MA in English Literature in 2012 from the University of South

Florida and her BA in Theatre from Florida State University in 2004. While pursuing her doctoral degree in Theatre Studies at Florida State University, Allison received the 2018 university-wide Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Program for Instructional

Excellence and the 2018 Best Scholarly Essay Award from her department. She was also a 2017

Rosemarie K. Bank Fellow for the American Theatre and Drama Society. Prior to graduate school, she taught English, Reading, and Journalism at Lake Gibson Senior High School in

Lakeland, Florida.

Allison’s research interests include musical theatre and the performances of history and national identity, documentary theatre, and theatre and violence. She published “‘This is My

Texas”: Land Ownership and the Mythos of the American Southwest in Michael John

LaChiusa’s Giant and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!” in the 2018 edition of Texas

Theatre Journal, and her article “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Institutional Racism?:

Producing The Wiz in Hostile Territory” appeared in the 2018 Theatre/Practice. She has shared work at the conferences for Southern Atlantic MLA, MATC, ASTR, ATHE, and Comparative

Drama, and published a review in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

Allison is also a professional dramaturg and has an ongoing relationship with GLOW

Lyric Theatre in Greenville, South Carolina, a musical theatre and light opera company with a bent toward social justice, as both a dramaturg and assistant director since 2014. At Florida State, she has dramaturged academically, mentored student dramaturgs and directors, and participated in the development of new works.

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