ABSTRACT
Musical theatre historians have long posited that the gold standard upon which the ideals of Broadway's Golden Age rest is the complete integration of book and score (Block, 1997), but our current conception of the historiography of integrated musicals leaves us no room to acknowledge the relationship between book and music in earlier shows. This chapter explores this issue by examining the Princess Theatre shows of Jerome Kern, P.G. Wodehouse, and Guy Bolton (produced between 1915 and 1918). These musicals provide key insights into the maturation of American musical theatre formal structures that still govern the genre in the twenty-first century.
This chapter draws on the existing scholarship defining a Princess Theatre aesthetic as well as on the history of the farce genre to argue that classifying the Princess musicals as farces is problematic. Instead, it demonstrates how Kern imparted depth of realism through his songs. I argue that because these songs participated in the operetta tradition while the drama participated in the farce tradition, Kern's integration of music and text represents a unique innovation in Broadway history: the intimate musical comedy. The chapter concludes with close readings of three representative songs from Very Good Eddie (1915), Oh, Boy! (1917), and Leave It to Jane (1917). Each of these songs functions as a particular song-type common to operetta and acts upon the scene in which it is set such that they enhance the psychological realism of an otherwise conventional farce. These examinations demonstrate that the Princess Theatre shows served as a crucial link between operetta and musical comedy, thus filling the gap in the historiography of integrated musical theatre.
