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What Makes Shakespeare Musicals "American" |
Excerpted from Irene G. Dash, "Shakespeare and the American Musical," Shakespeare in American Life exhibition catalog. Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007.
Shakespeare musicals borrowed plots, characters, and situations from England's best-known poet, they remained essentially "American." For George Balanchine, choreographer of The Boys From Syracuse, the dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers epitomized his ideal of "American." Balanchine, as ballet master of the Metropolitan Opera, not only introduced ballet into his choreography but also integrated it with tap. In one dance, for example, the two forms were combined as two dancers, one on point in ballet, the other in tap shoes, seem to be vying for the attention of the male character. Hanya Holm, who designed the dances for Kiss Me, Kate, also broke from her training—in her case German Expressionist dance—and found freedom of movement and expression to epitomize American dance. She believed that anyone can dance, and brought a sense of the democratization of dance to her choreography.
A different kind of reference to "American" appears in a review of Jerome Robbins' early dancing in a Russian ballet. Edwin Denby, the dance critic for the New York Herald Tribune in 1943, described Robbins's way of moving as American. While praising Robbins's skill as a dancer, Denby noted that "where everyone else dances with a particular vivacity, he moves with an American deliberateness. The difference," he observed, "is as striking as it used to be in peacetime abroad, when a stray American youth appeared in a bustling French street, and the slow rhythm of his walk gave the effect of a sovereign unconcern."1 For Denby, the man who was later to choreograph and direct the first Shakespeare tragedy adapted into a musical—West Side Story (1957)—walked and moved with an American unconcern. In that musical, the tragic conflict between two warring street gangs leads to the death of the Romeo character. One gang is Puerto Rican, the other claims to be "American." Ironically it is the young Puerto Rican women who sing "I like to be in America, / OK by me in America," comparing America to life on the island of Puerto Rico, with its "tropical diseases," "hurricanes blowing, and population growing."2
1 This Denby reference appeared in Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance by Deborah Jowitt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 66.
Poster for the original Broadway production of West Side Story, 1957. Library of Congress.
Cole Porter and Bella Spewack in 1948, at the time of the stage production of Kiss Me, Kate. Photofest.