Editing Musical theatre (section)

==== 1940s ====
The 1940s began with more hits from Porter, [[Irving Berlin]], Rodgers and Hart, Weill and Gershwin, some with runs over 500 performances as the economy rebounded, but artistic change was in the air. [[Rodgers and Hammerstein]]'s ''[[Oklahoma!]]'' (1943) completed the revolution begun by ''[[Show Boat]]'', by tightly integrating all the aspects of musical theatre, with a cohesive plot, songs that furthered the action of the story, and featured dream ballets and other dances that advanced the plot and developed the characters, rather than using dance as an excuse to parade scantily clad women across the stage.<ref name=Rubin438/> Rodgers and Hammerstein hired ballet choreographer [[Agnes de Mille]], who used everyday motions to help the characters express their ideas. It defied musical conventions by raising its first act curtain not on a bevy of chorus girls, but rather on a woman churning butter, with an off-stage voice singing the opening lines of ''[[Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin']]'' unaccompanied. It drew rave reviews, set off a box-office frenzy and received a [[Pulitzer Prize]].<ref>[http://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/260 Special Awards and Citations – 1944], The Pulitzer Prizes, accessed January 7, 2018</ref> [[Brooks Atkinson]] wrote in ''The New York Times'' that the show's opening number changed the history of musical theatre: "After a verse like that, sung to a buoyant melody, the banalities of the old musical stage became intolerable."<ref name=Heritage>[[John Steele Gordon|Gordon, John Steele]]. [http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1993/1/1993_1_58.shtml ''Oklahoma!''] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100804175330/http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1993/1/1993_1_58.shtml |date=2010-08-04 }}. Retrieved June 13, 2010</ref> It was the first "blockbuster" Broadway show, running a total of 2,212 performances, and was made into a hit film. It remains one of the most frequently produced of the team's projects. William A. Everett and [[Paul R. Laird]] wrote that this was a "show, that, like ''Show Boat'', became a milestone, so that later historians writing about important moments in twentieth-century theatre would begin to identify eras according to their relationship to ''Oklahoma!''".<ref>Everett and Laird, p. 124</ref>

[[File:Mary Martin 1.jpg|thumb|left|upright|alt=Portrait of a woman in her mid-thirties, with long curly hair and wearing an old-fashioned blouse with string tie|[[Mary Martin]] starred in several Broadway hits of this era]]
"After ''Oklahoma!'', Rodgers and Hammerstein were the most important contributors to the musical-play form... The examples they set in creating vital plays, often rich with social thought, provided the necessary encouragement for other gifted writers to create musical plays of their own".<ref name=history/> The two collaborators created an extraordinary collection of some of musical theatre's best loved and most enduring classics, including ''[[Carousel (musical)|Carousel]]'' (1945), ''[[South Pacific (musical)|South Pacific]]'' (1949), ''[[The King and I]]'' (1951) and ''[[The Sound of Music]]'' (1959). Some of these musicals treat more serious subject matter than most earlier shows: the villain in ''Oklahoma!'' is a suspected murderer and psychopath; ''Carousel'' deals with spousal abuse, thievery, suicide and the afterlife; ''South Pacific'' explores miscegenation even more thoroughly than ''Show Boat''; the hero of ''The King and I'' dies onstage; and the backdrop of ''The Sound of Music'' is the [[Anschluss|annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938]].

The show's creativity stimulated Rodgers and Hammerstein's contemporaries and ushered in the "Golden Age" of American musical theatre.<ref name=Heritage/> Americana was displayed on Broadway during the "Golden Age", as the wartime cycle of shows began to arrive. An example of this is ''[[On the Town (musical)|On the Town]]'' (1944), written by [[Betty Comden]] and [[Adolph Green]], composed by [[Leonard Bernstein]] and choreographed by [[Jerome Robbins]]. The story is set during wartime and concerns three sailors who are on a 24-hour shore leave in New York City, during which each falls in love. The show also gives the impression of a country with an uncertain future, as the sailors and their women also have. [[Irving Berlin]] used sharpshooter [[Annie Oakley]]'s career as a basis for his ''[[Annie Get Your Gun (musical)|Annie Get Your Gun]]'' (1946, 1,147 performances); [[Burton Lane]], [[E. Y. Harburg]] and [[Fred Saidy]] combined political satire with Irish whimsy for their fantasy ''[[Finian's Rainbow]]'' (1947, 725 performances); and Cole Porter found inspiration in [[William Shakespeare]]'s ''[[The Taming of the Shrew]]'' for ''[[Kiss Me, Kate]]'' (1948, 1,077 performances). The American musicals overwhelmed the old-fashioned British Coward/Novello-style shows, one of the last big successes of which was Novello's ''[[Perchance to Dream (musical)|Perchance to Dream]]'' (1945, 1,021 performances).<ref name=h1598/> The formula for the Golden Age musicals reflected one or more of four widely held perceptions of the "American dream": That stability and worth derives from a love relationship sanctioned and restricted by Protestant ideals of marriage; that a married couple should make a moral home with children away from the city in a suburb or small town; that the woman's function was as homemaker and mother; and that Americans incorporate an independent and pioneering spirit or that their success is self-made.<ref>Rubin and Solórzano, pp. 439–440</ref>