About Rough Crossing

• a note from the artistic director
• Found in Translation: Ferenc MolnÁr and Tom Stoppard
• DIRE STRAITS: 1930s IMPRESARIOS ON THE BRINK
• CASTLES ON THE SEA: LUXURY OCEAN LINERS OF THE 1930s
• STOPPARD'S SCREWBALLS
• Not-so-Private (Backstage) Lives
  (on the Silver Screen)

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DIRE STRAITS:
1930s IMPRESARIOS ON THE BRINK

 

In the 1930s, Broadway struggled through rough waters churned by the stock market crash of 1929 and the even more calamitous success of those new-fangled “talkies.” The Depression caused a loss of over 25,000 theatre jobs, the majority in New York. The burgeoning film business not only poached actors who could speak well (as some of the silent stars could not) but also patrons who would rather pay five cents than three dollars for their entertainment. In 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt won his first presidential election, half of New York’s theatres were dark.

The stakes were painfully high for producers, who often found themselves in extremis as their plays failed, sometimes after only a single performance. It was not uncommon for producers to go on the lam from creditors—producer Vinton Freedley got the idea for Anything Goes (1934) while hiding on a boat. Sometimes they became the stuff of comedies themselves—the Marx Brothers’s Room Service (1937) depicts desperate producer Gordon Miller stashing his nineteen hungry actors in a hotel ballroom.

While there were socially conscious dramas which resounded with the day-to-day hardships of the era, such as Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing (1935), the economic troubles motivated many producers to dedicate themselves to laughter, brightness, and excitement: a communal yearning to forget the hardship, even temporarily. Many shows were built around light entertainment and, accordingly, profit. Some producers bet their money on rehashing popular elements from the 1920s musicals, emphasizing memorable songs set in superfluous plots (like Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” from 1932’s Gay Divorce), and performances of superb comedians like Jimmy Durante and the Marx Brothers in contrived situations. For variety, flashy chorus girls danced in preludes and interludes that had no connection to the main performance.

Others fought against the crisis with their creativity. The groundbreaking success of Show Boat in 1927 confirmed that a coherent blend of high-quality songs, a tight story line, and well-grounded characters could generate an exceptional Broadway hit. In 1931—against no less a heavyweight than Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra—George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and George and Ira Gershwin won the first Pulitzer bestowed upon a musical for Of Thee I Sing, a mordant political satire on presidential politics. And though not as successful commercially, the Gershwins’ staggeringly original collaboration with DuBose Heyward, Porgy and Bess (1935), stood the test of time and, in 1985, became the first Broadway musical to enter the repertory of The Metropolitan Opera Company.

The struggling theatre market also benefited from foreign talent that sailed into New York harbor, either as immigrants like Kurt Weill and Max Reinhardt, or touring artists such as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. So though the floor may have fallen out of the business as it had the stock market (233 new productions were mounted in New York in 1929; there were only 98 in 1939), Broadway survived by cultivating fruits of sometimes commercial, sometimes artistic flavor.

–WALTER BYONGSOK CHON
Production Dramaturg