ABSTRACT
The standard Broadway musical stage, as opposed to these aberrant efforts, pursued an increasingly cautious course as the Depression deepened and lengthened. The theatre industry had received not one body blow but two at the end of the 1920s. Precisely when abundant free money for production all but disappeared, the motion-picture screen developed a voice. By the beginning of the 1930s it was clear that the flesh-and-blood theatre would henceforth occupy a far more restricted corner of the entertainment field than it had in the past. The musical stage was especially hard hit by the perfection of the rival medium, for the first all-talking picture, Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, made use of music; and the host of cinema musical comedies and extravaganzas that followed this first experiment took away from the living musical stage a large audience that never came back.
