Summary: Garrick Gaieties
Assignment 2, Article Summary by Nigel Tangredi
- Cantu, Maya. “ ‘Gilding the Guild’: Art Theatre, The Broadway Revue and Cultural Parody in The Garrick Gaieties (1925–1930).” Studies in Musical Theatre 7, no. 1 (2013): 45-60
The musical revue Garrick Gaieties helped developed the style of "sophisticate revue” that flourished in the 1920's and established up-and-coming musical composers such as Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, creators of the 1925 and 1926 shows for the Garrick Theater. The musical revue is a “theatrical production of a collection of songs, dances, and other entertainments, often humorous, often organized around a theme but usually without plot” (Harvard Dictionary of Music p.721). Through her research Maya Cantu, of the Yale School of Drama, read the reviews, librettos and historical accounts of the Garrick Gaieties to gain insight to the lasting effect that the musical revue in the 1920's had on later musicals including those of the Golden Age (mid-1940s to early-1960s).
The Garrick Gaieties, The Ziegfeld Follies and The Winter Garden Passing Shows blended a very eclectic variety of highbrow and lowbrow source material including ballet along with the sung/spoken theater. According to Cantu the Garrick Gaieties in particular were an outlet for satire of musical theater, art theater of the 1920’s, the "Golden Age American musical [and] its long-supposed antithesis: the theatrical modernist avant-garde." The revue allowed for collaboration and learning between composers and "bridged anxieties about cultural production and hierarchies" in the musical theater community. This established a better relationship between all the stakeholders in musical theater as industry. The Theater Guild (highbrow) and the Little Theater (lowbrow) would collaborate in the production. Each would parody themselves and the other at the same time, blending highbrow and lowbrow and exposing the blended audience to each style. Actors would go as far as to “roast” high-status figures in the musical industry. The Garrick Gaieties propelled the development of the musical theater genre into the blend of highbrow and lowbrow form that audiences saw in the Golden Age.
Cantu says that the Gaieties’ parody, as a critique of theater, influenced the development of the musical play realized in Roger and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, which was premiered by the highbrow Theater Guild. The formal tone on the musical play with the at times lowbrow entertainment within the musical’s setting combined the "contrasting attitudes to the Theatre Guild’s cultural capital" into middlebrow. Rogers and Hammerstein would later go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for South Pacific writing in this middlebrow musical play form.
The Garrick Gaieties changed the course of musicals and the Broadway revue, and was the father of "The Band Wagon (1931) ...often considered the greatest of all revues." However the Great Depression canceled the more luxurious forms of the revue form (Ziegfeld Follies) for more streamlined shows.