I don’t know how many rap music fans will be in the audience for the upcoming run of The Music Man, but maybe they should be.
The Meredith Willson show, being produced at the Palladium by St. Petersburg Opera, earns some street cred for the being the first Broadway show to feature a “rap” song. The year was 1957, before Lin Manuel Miranda was even born.
You can read the full Wall Street Journal article by following this link or read an excerpt, below. And you can get your tickets to The Music Man, which runs June 29 – July 8, from the opera company on their website or by calling 727-823-2040. Tickets will be available from the Palladium box office starting Thursday afternoon.
Here’s the lowdown on 1950s “rap,” along with some insights about West Side Story, My Fair Lady and Porgy and Bess.
By Jane Levere/Wall Street Journal
What “Hamilton” fans may not know is that rapping was featured in a Broadway musical almost 50 years ago, in “Ya Got Trouble”, one of the first songs performed in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. In it, a con artist, Professor Harold Hill—portrayed by Robert Preston both on Broadway and in the musical’s 1962 film version—tries to convince parents of an Iowa town that he can teach their children how to play musical instruments.
Willson’s ground-breaking composition was noted by Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim in a recent conversation with cognitive scientist and author Steven Pinker at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. Calling “Ya Got Trouble” “the first rap,” Sondheim described it as “a dazzling piece in service of telling a story.”
Prompted by Pinker, Sondheim also discussed the birth of his lyrics for the song, “Gee, Officer Krupke” from West Side Story, whose music was written by Leonard Bernstein.
Sondheim said that Arthur Laurents, author of West Side Story, wanted the musical to be the first on Broadway to “say **** you” on stage; Sondheim said Burl Ives previously had said “bull****” on Broadway in the drama, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Sondheim, Bernstein and Laurents were told that if a record were made of the score of West Side Story that contained the lyric Laurents sought, it could not be shipped across state lines.
Bernstein thus “came up with Krupke. There is no other four-letter word in the script. It’s much better to have a silly word than a four-letter word,” Sondheim said.
Pinker noted that Eliza Doolittle, speaking in the George Bernard Shaw play, Pygmalion—which later became the basis of the musical, My Fair Lady—scandalized audiences in England when she announced at a tea party that she was “not bloody likely to take a taxi,” and told someone at the Ascot racecourse to “move your bloomin’ arse.”
“I had no idea bloody was a dirty word, it has no weight in the United States,” Sondheim said.
For his part, Sondheim said he liked listening to the music of Radiohead, which he finds “harmonically interesting.” He also said he considers “a lot of rap lyrics interesting,” though he feels there is an “overuse of imagery in most popular music I hear.”
He said his favorite set of lyrics is DuBose Heyward’s for “My Man’s Gone Now”, from Porgy and Bess; the music is by George Gershwin. “If I could write that, I would retire,” he said.
Sondheim, who was raised, in part, by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, said that when he was young he wrote a song featuring “birds and skies.” Hammerstein urged him to “write what you feel,” which, at the time, was not “birds and skies.” “Ever since, I’ve written what I feel. That’s the most valuable lesson any young writer can get,” he explained.
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