ABSTRACT
Operettas and Cohan-style musical comedies continued to dominate Broadway theaters well into the second decade of the twentieth century, and each had its followers as well as its detractors. In 1915, however, a new kind of show made a quiet debut in the Princess Theatre, a small venue located at 39th Street and 6th Avenue in New York. The show was Nobody Home, and the composer was a thirty-year-old Jerome Kern. Kern went a long way toward achieving his conviction with the successive Princess productions, which is why the Princess Shows are often called "integrated"—this does not refer to any racial balance in the cast, but describes the interconnections between songs and plot. Of course, as Stephen Banfield observes, the Princess Shows almost always addressed three issues likely to interest the public: marriage, mistaken identity, and money. Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse worked together once more, on what many scholars call the "last" Princess Show: Sitting Pretty.
