During Sunday’s Monadnock Summer Lyceum at Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church, professor Douglas Anderson spoke about some of the best-loved musicals in the history of American theater, including “Showboat,” “South Pacific” and “Man of La Mancha.”
“There is a conception that musicals are just light, just for entertainment. But if you look at the history there is an actually a strong legacy of social consciousness,” Anderson said during “Musicals That Matter: From ‘Showboat’ to ‘Hamilton.’” “Musicals were always engaging with what the nation was worrying about and fighting about dealing with inequality on a whole host of issues, often in very courageous ways.”
Anderson, an actor, playwright and teacher who has taught at Middlebury College, Amherst College and the University of Illinois, discussed social commentary on race in some of the best-known American musicals. Anderson began his talk by explaining the roots of vaudeville, which in turn evolved out of the 19th-century minstrel show.
“When we’re talking about the history of musicals, we have to start in a very racist place, which is the the minstrel show,” Anderson said. “The American minstrel show is so bizarre that you could not make it up. A minstrel show was white people acting like slaves to entertain other white people.”
Anderson said that minstrel shows were a result of “the ‘advantage’ of two cultures being forced together.”
“These two cultures where white American culture and African culture,” he said. “In the era of slavery, white people literally looked out the window and saw and heard things they couldn’t quite believe. They heard African music, which has a completely different harmonics scale, what we now call the jazz scale.”
Anderson said the African musical tradition also introduced the call-and-response, which was unknown in the European tradition.
“The other thing the white people saw was African dance. At the time, in the 1840s, if you were a white person who attended church, dance was considered demonic. White women wore 35 pounds of clothing. But the slaves danced and moved their bodies in a way that white people had never seen, with this compulsive, rhythmic music that made you want to dance,” Anderson said.
Anderson went on to say that at the time, theaters could not have Black people as performers, or in the audience, as “people would have burned the theater down.”
“But performers desperately wanted to do that kind of dancing and sing that kind of music, so they invented ‘blackface,’ and did it themselves, and the minstrel show was born,” Anderson said. “They took America by storm, much like The Beatles in the 1960s.”
According to Anderson, genocide in another part of the world inspired the first musical with an overt social message, when “Showboat,” produced by Florence Ziegfeld and adapted for the stage by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, came to the stage in 1927.
“Broadway was totally dominated by Jewish entertainers. Between 1880 and 1920, 8 million Jews emigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine, Poland, Germany, because of pogroms, and they were not allowed to work in most industries or in business, so they worked in entertainment,” Anderson said. “‘Showboat’ is about miscegenation. The main character, Julia, has a Black mother, which she has to hide, and eventually she is arrested and thrown in jail.”
Anderson added, “The arrest scene reminds me of ICE arrests.”
Broadway’s most-famous writers and producers, including Hammerstein, Kern and Irving Berlin, went on to produce shows like “South Pacific,” which also deals with race.
“All of Hammertein’s shows have the message tolerance is better than prejudice,” Anderson said. “That love is better than hatred. And we are still trying to get that message across today.” ”
Kathy Manfre served as moderator, and UpGray’d Quartet provided music before Anderson’s presentation. The series continues Aug. 10 at 11 a.m. with Nora Fiffer presenting “Making Room for the Audience: A Conversation with a Theatre and Film Director.” Volkert Volkersz will perform at 10:30 a.m., and Michele Steckler will be moderator.
