‘Ah, Sweet Mystery’: Rediscovering Three Female Lyricists of the Early Twentieth-Century American Musical Theater

Abstract

Critics and historians of American musical theater have often hailed certain key figures as heroes in the development of the musical while overlooking the innovations of musical theater writers who came before them. Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, and others have been studied, analyzed, and revered as the pioneers of the modern musical. As a result, a misconception is perpetuated that nothing of real importance came before Show Boat, and early twentieth-century musical theater forms like operetta and revue have been virtually dismissed as simplistic. But those responsible for such works as Show Boat and Oklahoma! were actually following the lead of the writers who came before them. One such group of nearly forgotten writers were three female lyricists of the early twentieth century: Rida Johnson Young, Dorothy Donnelly, and Anne Caldwell. Despite their enormous successes, contributions, and notoriety in their own day, these women have been largely ignored in the history books, their names only mentioned in passing next to the title of the show, while the focus is primarily on the show's composers. This article explores the careers of these women and analyzes a few of the songs for which they are still known in an effort to situate them in the musical theater canon and evaluate them as artists.

Notes

1. See, for example, Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 3.

2. Edward N. Waters, Victor Herbert: A Life in Music (New York: MacMillan, 1955), p. 355.

3. Gerald Bordman: American Operetta: From H. M. S. Pinafore to Sweeney Todd (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

4. John Franceschina's biography of Smith, Harry B. Smith: Dean of American Librettists (New York: Routledge, 2003) relates how critics would often turn Smith's name into a verb: ‘“Harry-B-Smithing” meant filling a play with tired jokes, colloquialisms, hackneyed plots, improbable characterizations, and overripe puns’, p. 252.

5. Andrew Lamb, 150 Years of Popular Musical Theater (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).

6. ‘Anne Caldwell, 60, Librettist, is Dead’, New York Times, 24 October 1936, p. 17.

7. See Dorothy M. Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987) and Margaret Gibbons Wilson, The American Woman in Transition: The Urban Influence, 1870–1920 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979).

8. Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 6.

9. Helen Ten Broek, ‘Rida Young – Dramatist and Garden Expert', The Theatre, April 1917, p. 202.

10. Ada Patterson, ‘Wealth Not a Bar to Playwriting’, Theater Magazine, May 1918, pp. 296–97.

14. Clara Bloodgood, ‘The Stage as a Career for Young Women’, The Theatre, December 1904, p. 304.

11. Oscar Hammerstein II, Show Boat, vocal score (New York: B. T. Harms, 1927), p. 86.

12. Albert Auster, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theater, 1890–1920 (New York: Praeger, 1984), p. 49.

13. Ibid., p. 50.

15. William A. Everett, Sigmund Romberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 29.

16. The standard format for New York Times reviews of this period was to give the title, type of show (musical comedy, operetta, etc.) the lyricist/librettist, then the composer.

17. Hugh Fordin, Getting to Know Him: A Biography of Oscar Hammerstein II (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 55.

19. ‘Vote of Thanks to Rida Johnson Young’, New York Dramatic Mirror, 21 July 1917, p. 6.

18. Carl Wilmore, ‘American Operetta and its Possibilities’, New York Dramatic Mirror, 10 March 1917, n. p.

20. Ibid.

22. Rida Johnson Young, Naughty Marietta, vocal score (New York: M. Witmark and Sons, 1910), pp. 185–86.

21. This device would be used to great effect most notably in Lady in the Dark (1941, Weill/I. Gershwin/M. Hart) with ‘My Ship’. See also Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 116.

23. Ibid., pp. 175–77.

24. Bennett, ‘The Woman Who Wrote “Mother Machree”’, p. 34.

25. Ibid., p. 185.

26. Thomas Hischak, Boy Loses Girl: Broadway's Librettists (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2002), p. 64.

27. Ada Patterson, ‘A Morning's Chat with Candida’, The Theater, July 1904, p. 172.

28. Lorraine Arnal McLean, Dorothy Donnelly: A Life in the Theater (London: McFarland & Co., 1999), p. 42.

29. McLean, Dorothy Donnelly, p. 135.

30. Ada Patterson, ‘The Only Woman Librettist in America’, The Theatre, June 1915, p. 305.

31. Anne Caldwell, Chin-Chin, vocal score (New York: Chappell & Co., 1914), p. 134.

32. Anne Caldwell, reprinted in Reading Lyrics, ed. by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000), p. 3.

33. Patterson, ‘The Only Woman Librettist’, p. 306.

34. Virginia L. Grattan, American Women Songwriters: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), p. 60.

35. New York Sunday Herald, 14 March 1920, n. p. (clipping found in Billy Rose Theater Collection, New York Public Library).

36. Thomas S. Hischak, Word Crazy: Broadway Lyricists from Cohan to Sondheim (New York: Praeger, 1991), p. 188.

37. I would like to thank Dr. Jeffrey Magee at the University of Illinois for his assistance in shaping this article.