The 1950s Broadway Musical

Broadway musicals were a major part of American popular culture in the 1950s. Every season, new musicals of the 1950s sent songs to the top of the charts. Public demand, a booming economy and abundant creative talent kept Broadway alive hopping. In the 1950s Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein remained the musical theater’s most potent creative team. At one time they had four musicals running simultaneously on Broadway and film versions of their musicals Oklahoma, Carousel and South Pacific grossed millions of dollars worldwide. To this day, shows of the 1950s form the core of the musical theatre repertory (Kenrick).

Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe (Lerner and Lowe) are known primarily for the music and lyrics of some of Broadway's

They sought Rex Harrington and began writing songs for the non-singing actor. They discovered Julie Andrews in 1954 and secured her to play Eliza Doolittle. The musical development of My Fair Lady was based around the voices and talents of the actors Lerner and Lowe had selected. My Fair Lady received stellar reviews and at one time was called the best Broadway musical ever written. It was the longest running musical of

Sondheim is known for the complexity of his lyricism and music. Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930 in New York City and began playing piano and organ at a young age as he was already practicing songwriting at the George School. He moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania in 1942 and befriended the son of Broadway lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II, who became his mentor and acted as a surrogate father to Sondheim during his parent’s tumultuous divorce.

In the early 1950s, after moving back to New York City after a time in Los Angeles writing for television, Sondheim met Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins who were looking for a lyricist for a new musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Sondheim wrote the song lyrics for West Side Story, which opened in 1957, and thus became part of one of Broadway’s most successful productions of all time. Chita Rivera, Larry Kert, Carol Lawrence and David Winters starred in the original production.

Sondheim’s next project was also high profile. He teamed up with composer Jule Styne to write the lyrics for Gypsy, which opened in 1959 with Ethel Murman as its star. The musical was based on the memoirs of famed burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, however it focuses more on Gypsy’s showbiz-obsessed mother, Rose Hovick. “The