ABSTRACT
As the revue wore out its welcome, musical comedy moved back into a dominating position on Broadway. But these were still the mad 1920s, and an exclusive diet of moonlight-and-honeysuckle themes was not to the liking of an increasingly hysterical generation. Obviously musical comedy, which had been gradually catching up with the times for a decade or so, would have to complete the process if it hoped to recapture the attention of the audience that had been kept up to the minute by the satiric sketches of the revues. After all, there was no binding reason for avoiding current topics and fads as subject matter for musical comedies, merely because most (though, as we have seen, not quite all) past examples of the form had dealt chiefly in romantic intrigues. Accordingly, the topical musical comedy became one of the standard types of the late 1920s, and as time went on it tended to become the ruling type.
