Musicals on Television

Abstract

American musical theater and film have been crossing over into television since the mid-20th century. In the early days of American television, the proximity of Broadway and the headquarters of the television industry made a union between the popular musical form and the new living room medium a no-brainer. By 1944 the DuMont network had premiered the first musical made specifically for US television, The Boys from Boise, and within the next decade and a half, dozens of new and adapted musicals had made their way to the small screen and into homes across the country. In addition to musicals in their entirety, television embraced popular songs of the stage via variety series and specials. The works of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had already transcended the stage and screen, finding themselves on the Billboard charts and on people’s phonographs. Such ubiquity quickly translated to television, with Broadway singers and popular crooners alike performing across series. Over the next decades, full-length musical plays waned on television, but variety series and specials featuring the likes of Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Carol Channing, Liza Minnelli, and Bing Crosby flooded the airways. Shows like The Carol Burnett Show and The Muppet Show featured and parodied decades of musical theater and film, providing a musical education to unwitting viewers. By the eighties, the rise of cable television had opened up new spaces for high and low culture, with musical theater peppering the new (and quickly floundering) cultural cable channels and popular dance musicals selling themselves via music video on the phenomenally successful new youth-oriented channel MTV. Over the decades, US television would continue to dabble in the musical in the form of musical series, one-off musical episodes, a resurgence of live-musical broadcasts, and new Internet-based and streaming platforms that forced viewers to reconsider just what constituted television and breathed new life into the cross-platform musical television experience. Although almost wholly focusing on the musical’s foray into TV within a US context, this article also touches briefly on global settings, including musical theater reality TV in Canada, gender and musical television in Israel, and the musical dramas of the United Kingdom.