I grew up in the 1960s and '70s watching all the great musicals.
They did have an impact on my imagination, creativity, and love for music.
That is a Golden Age as we like to say in retrospect.
Historian John Steel Gordon helps us to look back at that unique time and what it means to our culture even today.
Video from Hillsdale College
Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Golden Age of the American Musical -John Steele Gordon
"Watch the full speech at https://freedomlibrary.hillsdale.edu/... “Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Golden Age of the American Musical” John Steele Gordon Author, Historian, and Nephew of Oscar Hammerstein II This speech was given on March 4, 2024, during a Hillsdale College CCA seminar, “The American Musical.” from the video introduction
How Rodgers and Hammerstein transformed Broadway—and American culture
"Adversity can be inadvertently revealing, exposing sides of ourselves we might otherwise never have expressed so baldly. When the playwright and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II was faced with spurious accusations of disloyalty to the United States during the Red Scare of the early 1950s because of his associations with left and liberal causes in the ’30s and ’40s, he initially responded with defiant dismissiveness. But then he realized the potential consequences to a career that was going full steam with his writing partner, the composer Richard Rodgers. Their musicals “South Pacific” and “The King and I” were both running to capacity on Broadway and in London, which required, among other things, frequent trans-Atlantic travel, hence a functioning passport.
And so, as Todd S. Purdum describes in detail in his involving new book Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution, in 1953 Hammerstein drafted a 30-page statement to the State Department not only disavowing any former association with Communist-affiliated organizations but expressing support for the current “police action” in Korea and stating, in a plaintive self-assertion that is humbling to read, “I have helped write many of the songs of this nation.”
Indeed he had. With Rodgers, Hammerstein did as much to create mid-20th-century American culture as anyone (Ed Sullivan? Leonard Bernstein? Arthur Miller? Lucille Ball?). In a handful of towering musicals, they captured the nation’s broad-shouldered postwar confidence as well as its perennial mix of idealism and nostalgia. Nearly all their most enduring shows are period pieces, and a few do not take place in the United States or feature American characters at all. But whether set in the 19th-century Thai court or the verdant hills of Nazi-era Austria, the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein are unmistakable products of 1950s America, with its ebullience and conformism, its consumerist abundance and neo-Victorian prudery..." from the article: How Rodgers and Hammerstein transformed Broadway—and American culture
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