Dramaturgy: Something Rotten!

In the interest of squeezing SOME value out of my B.A. in Renaissance literature, I appointed myself the unofficial dramaturg of Theatre Cedar Rapids' 2024 production of Something Rotten!, the narrative of which occurs toward the end of the English Renaissance. I posted occasional bits of historical/contextual information on our cast/crew Facebook page, but since I put all that damn work into researching and writing I decided it would be nice to have it all seen by more than 42 people. So I'm posting the entirety of my musings here. They often reference inside jokes and details from the script and score, so if anything here confuses you you’ll just have to get tickets to the nearest production of the brilliant Something Rotten! you can find. You won't be disappointed.

GOD, I LOVE CONTEXT!

To start off our adventures in learning, here’s a brief(ish) timeline of events and lives relevant to the Something Rotten! narrative:

500ish–1450ish: The Middle Ages in Europe (also called the Dark Ages or the Medieval period)

1347–1351: The first wave of the Black Death in Europe (also called the Plague, the Pestilence or the Great Mortality)

1360–1667: Many, many recurring (but far less destructive) waves of the Black Death in Europe

1436: Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press

1450ish–1650ish: The European Renaissance

1492: Christopher Columbus lands in what is now San Salvador in the Bahamas

1503–1566: The life of Nostradamus (born Michel de Nostredame)

1533–1630: The Puritan movement in England

1558–1603: The reign of Queen Elizabeth I

1564–1616: The life of William Shakespeare (born Gulielmus Shakspere)

1595: Nick Bottom writes Omelette

1599ish: William Shakespeare writes Hamlet

1925: Grant Wood (yes, that Grant Wood) produces a play called Cardboard Moon in his 5 Turner Alley studio in Cedar Rapids and launches what will eventually become Theatre Cedar Rapids

2015: Something Rotten! gets ten Tony nominations (and wins only one: Christian Borle [Shakespeare] for Best Featured Actor in a Musical)

2024: We put on some snazzy pants, do some jazzy hands and make a star-lit, won’t-quit, big hit musicaaaaaal!


THAT PESKY LITTLE PESTILENCE THAT’S KILLING HALF OF EUROPE

The Black Death (also called the Plague, the Pestilence or the Great Mortality) made its first recorded appearance in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. Italian dockworkers entered the ships to begin unloading but were met with a horrifying surprise: Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those still alive were gravely ill and covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus.

Their mysterious, terrifying disease spread through the local population at alarming speed and soon spread farther along trade routes that ran both inland and along the coasts. It also followed people to neighboring cities as they tried to escape but unknowingly brought the disease with them.

Modern epidemiologists have traced Black Death outbreaks to regions of China as far back as 600 BCE. The Medieval outbreak appears to have started in the same regions and traveled northwest across Asia to ports in Constantinople and then through the Mediterranean Sea to its first European appearance in Messina (which is right where the Italian boot makes contact with the Sicilian football, for those of you who visualize shapes in land masses). From there it spread roughly clockwise along the Mediterranean border and up the continental interior until it hit England in June 1348. (247 years later, Nick Bottom wrote a merry little Black Death showtune with a derivative medley and frankly it was TOO SOON.)

From England, the Black Death spread further north into Scandinavia, where it hit water, had nowhere else to go and finally died out in 1351, after a four-year European rampage that killed an estimated 25 million people—which was somewhere between 40% and 60% of the total European population.

Fun fact: Ports along the Mediterranean started making trade ships wait 40 days offshore before docking to help prevent the Black Death from reaching land. The Latin word for 40 is “quadraginta,” which eventually evolved to the modern word “quarantine.”

One more fun fact: The “Ring Around the Rosie” nursery rhyme may or may not (depending on your school of etymological thought) trace back to the details of the Black Death: Rosie rings represented bubonic lumps on the body, people carried posies and other flowers to mask the smell of rotting corpses, bodies were burned to ashes in an attempt to kill off the mysterious illness, and falling down was because people were really clumsy back then. Or they were dropping dead from the plague. It was probably the latter, but I wasn’t there and I hate to make assumptions.


WHAT’S THAT COMING UP THE SILK ROAD?

The Silk Road (a name that wasn’t coined until the 19th century) was a collection of trade routes linking Medieval China and the Mediterranean between the 3rd and 16th centuries. Named (obvs) for the transport of Chinese silks and other textiles, the Silk Road also saw the transport of spices, salt (which at the time was most importantly a preservative and often a form of currency), precious metals, gunpowder, cultural artifacts, ideas and education, missionaries of many religions, and—the least lucrative from an economics standpoint—the Black Death.

Look for it on a map. It was VERY LONG. And there were very few hotels with complimentary shampoos and continental breakfasts along the way. But there were plenty of bandits along its 4,000-mile route to help you lighten your load.

Did you catch that 4,000-mile part? People traveled the Silk Road in camelpower caravans, and a full-length one-way trip could last an entire year.

Trade and transportation along the Silk Road lasted until 1453—a full century after the first Black Death outbreak in Europe—when the Ottoman Empire (which at the height of its power and territorial control engulfed everything around the Mediterranean Sea except modern Italy and the northernmost coasts) boycotted trade with China and closed the route. (142 years later, Nick Bottom wrote a merry little Black Death showtune with a derivative medley and frankly it was TOO SOON.)

Remnants of the Silk Road survive today in the form of a paved highway connecting Pakistan and the Xinjiang region of China. The Silk Road also survives as a metaphor for the exchange of sketchy goods and services on the Dark Web, which is something that hack Nostradamus clearly didn’t see in humanity’s economic future.


WELCOME TO THE RENAISSANCE!

Now that we have our Middle Ages backstory out of the way, let’s join the historical narrative of our merry little play. (And my advance apologies: I totally geeked out researching and writing this so it’s way longer than I intended. I promise to be less overwhelming in the future.)

Renaissance—as our opening number helpfully explains—means “rebirth.” The Black Death had killed roughly a third of the entire European population, which—among mega-many other consequences—gave serfs (the lower working class) bargaining power for their agricultural labor. It decimated the longstanding feudal system, caused a seismic redistribution of wealth, and spawned the rise of a middle-ish merchant class that had newfound money, leisure and upward mobility through commerce and education.

It was against this socioeconomic upheaval that a confluence of events across the continent stirred and boiled over into the aforementioned rebirth that underpins two full centuries of cultural development, artistic exploration, scientific discovery, social restructuring and political reform:

GEOPOLITICAL: The 1453 fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul) (not Constantinople) (this is a joke for the They Might Be Giants fans among us) brought a brutal end to the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine scholars fled mostly to Italy with their collections of Greek and Roman books and manuscripts, which inspired a widespread revival in the studies of philosophy, science and art.

EDUCATION: These Classical Greek and Roman texts fostered a more rational, scientific approach to theology, the natural world and the arts. Human beings and nature became subjects worthy of study.

PHILOSOPHY: The texts also shifted the philosophical zeitgeist from the longstanding Medieval philosophy of scholasticism—which demanded a strict adherence to religious theology, doctrine and dogma—to a newfound exploration of humanism, a rational outlook that emphasized the potential value, goodness and morality of humans and looked for rational ways to solve human problems. This transition sent our very own Brother Jeremiah through paroxysms of existential crises, and Paroxysms of Existential Crises would make an objectively terrible band name. Which is exactly why we mock him.

SCIENCE: Humanism’s emphasis on rationality, empirical observations and mathematical knowledge challenged generally accepted scientific theories and led to what we now call the Scientific Revolution. In 1534, Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which placed the sun—not the Earth—at the center of the solar system. It upended centuries of scientific thinking and inspired scientists across Europe to approach the natural world from a multitude of innovative perspectives. (Of course, that one guy on YouTube has since proven that the earth is flat, so we know today that all that Copernicus stuff is just silly.)

ART: Artists adopted the rational elements of Classical learning—such as anatomy and aerial perspective—and strove to achieve newfound levels of perfection in their representations of humans, animals and nature. (Once that perfection ideal had been achieved, however, artists had nowhere else upward to go and over the centuries started to deconstruct the content and representation in their work to eventually bring about movements like Abstraction, Impressionism, Cubism and the sad little stick figures I’m barely able to draw because I have zero artistic talent.)

PATRONAGE: Most of the Renaissance’s rich artistic achievements would not have been possible without the funding of wealthy patrons. Perhaps the most famous of these patrons were the Medicis, an art-loving family of bankers (and three popes) who commissioned enormous quantities of paintings, sculptures and architecture for their palaces and family tomb. Their most immediate legacy, of course, was the lofty ambitions of our very own dyspeptic Lord Clapham and awkwardly earnest Shylock as they struggled to usher Nick Bottom to the literary pantheon of fame and glory.

LITERATURE: The artistic achievements of the Renaissance also extended from the visual arts to the worlds of literature and theater (otherwise we wouldn’t be rehearsing all these songs and tap numbers). Inspired by humanism’s emphasis on emotions and morality, the literature of the Renaissance broke free from stringent religious dogma and began exploring the struggles and triumphs of human protagonists from history, folktales, Biblical narratives and other familiar sources. In addition to dramatic comedies like Omelette and dramatic tragedies like Hamlet, the Renaissance also saw a flourishing of the poetry that brings our very own star-crossed Nigel and Portia together in awkwardly adorkable love.

I think we can all agree, though, the the most important aftermath of this dramatic rebirth in literary thinking and writing was the day in the late 1980s that a befuddled Iowa college student realized he was NOT cut out for a career in engineering, biology, music, dance or journalism and finally declared his sixth major: English, with an emphasis on Renaissance literature—which he accomplished in three short but overwhelming semesters. And then he waited 33 damn years for this opportunity to use it. He deserves an omelette.


THIS BOTTOM’S GONNA BE TOPPED WITH A DONKEY HEAD

Many characters in our merry little play get their names from characters in Shakespeare’s plays.

Nick Bottom, for example, is a buffoon who alternates between being a character in and a narrator of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’s a member of a mediocre acting troupe (sound familiar?) who, in the middle of rehearsing a play for the amusement of Oberon, the King of the Fairies, gets transformed by the mischievous Puck, a minion of Oberon, to have the head of a donkey. (Are you still with me?) But it gets weirder. (If you can believe it.) You see, the Fairy Queen Titania, wife of Oberon, gets put under a spell that makes her fall in love (and totally make out) with the donkey-headed Nick Bottom (as one does). Other stuff happens, and long story short Titania eventually gets unspelled and Nick Bottom gets his human head back and ends up thinking the whole thing has been a dream in the night in the middle of summer (hence the title).

But there’s more! The mediocre acting troupe eventually (and very poorly) performs for Oberon a rife-with-subtext play called Pyramus and Thisbe (which are objectively cool pet names), which ends with Nick Bottom performing a melodramatic death scene that’s cringier than the entirety of the Cats movie.

And, scene.

It’s worth noting that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream after the narrative of our merry little play, implying by our authors that he continued mocking his rival after poor Nick Bottom got exiled to America. Because Shakespeare is kind of a dick.


THE MAN WHO PUT THE "I AM" IN IAMBIC PENTAMETER!

The above lyric kinda flies by as Shakespeare gets introduced at the beginning of "Will Power." But it’s actually a pretty important and defining aspect of the way he wrote.

Iambic pentameter—for those of you who slept through British Lit as we nerds took fascinated and copious notes—is a type of metric line built on standardized syllables and patterns.

It’s broken into iambic feet of two syllables with the emphasis on the second syllable (“da DUM”) strung together in sets of five (“penta-”), like so:

Da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

And Shakespeare—being a total word nerd—almost exclusively followed this pattern for a whopping 884,647 words in 118,406 lines of plays and sonnets. No wonder the other kids kept beating him up on the playground and taking his lunch money.

But it ended up bringing a unifying lilt to everything he wrote:

But SOFT! What LIGHT through YONder WINDow BREAKS?

If MUsic BE the FRUIT of LOVE, play ON.

Two HOUSEholds, BOTH aLIKE in DIGniTY.

Of course, Shakespeare—being the talentless, no-future hack that he was—didn’t always nail it. Some lines ended up with extra syllables:

To BE, or NOT to BE: that IS the QUES(tion)

And some ended up playing fast and loose with standard cadences and speech patterns:

Friends, ROmans, COUNtry MEN, lend ME your EARS.

But it’s the occasional fast-and-loose line that prevents his dialogue from getting sing-songy and that gives his actors room to breathe and bring natural inflections and interpretations to their lines.

For those of you looking to pad your trivia-night knowledge base, iambic pentameter is part of a wide and diverse meter family. Here are just a few of its siblings and their weird feet:

FEET:

Iambic: da DUM
Trochaic: DA dum
Anapestic: da da DUM

METERS:

Trimeter: three iambic/trochaic/etc feet
Tetrameter: four iambic/trochaic/etc feet
Pentameter: five iambic/trochaic/etc feet

Now pair them up any way you like and write poetry like a sixteenth-century badass. Or don’t. This won’t be on the test.


INTELLECTUAL ICONS IN PUFFY PANTS AND POINTY LEATHER BOOTS

Here are some CV basics about every local celebrity mentioned in our opening number, in the order their appear:

Francis Bacon (1561–1626): English philosopher, statesman (under the name Lord Verulam) and scientist. Considered the father of empiricism—a scientific philosophy that emphasizes sensory experience and evidence (often derived from experiments) over intuition, skepticism or rational thinking—he became a martyr to his own scientific method when he stuffed a dead chicken with snow to see if freezing temperatures could preserve the meat and in the process he developed fatal pneumonia from his prolonged exposure to the cold.

Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552–1618): English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. With Queen Elizabeth’s patronage, he commissioned and financed expeditions to what is now North America and helped establish the Roanoke colony that soon disappeared under mysterious—and still not definitively resolved—circumstances. Raleigh never personally set foot on the continent, but he did bring potatoes and tobacco to England from what is now South America. In 1617, Raleigh violated a Spanish peace treaty in his search for the mythical “City of Gold” riches of the mythical city of El Dorado in present-day Venezuela, for which he was imprisoned and eventually beheaded by King James.

Thomas Dekker (1572–1632): English writer, dramatist and pamphleteer. He was known primarily for the lively descriptions of English life he published in pamphlets, which were unbound booklets circulated to spread humor, op-ed commentary and political propaganda. While he was also a prolific playwright, he was not regarded as worthy of the pantheon of masters like Shakespeare, Johnson, Marlowe and Middleton. Heck—he wasn’t even regarded as worthy of getting a first name in our lyrics.

John Webster (c. 1578–c. 1632): English dramatist. While he collaborated with many leading playwrights, he is best known for his intricate, subtle, brooding tragedies. The two most famous of these tragedies—The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi—are still studied, revered and performed to this day.

Ben Johnson (1572–1637): English playwright, satirist and poet. Generally regarded as the second most important dramatist after William Shakespeare, he popularized the character-driven comedy-of-humors genre that directly combatted Shakespeare’s signature emotion-, adventure- and fate-driven romantic-comedy genre. Though intellectual rivals in writing style and worldview, Johnson and Shakespeare had great respect for each other and Johnson called Shakespeare the “Sweet Swan of Avon” in tribute of the publication of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays seven years after his death.

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593): Arguably the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights and poets outside of Shakespeare. The first English author to receive critical fame using blank verse—unrhymed poetry written in a consistent meter and thought to more closely mimic natural human speech and inflections—Marlowe had a profound influence on Shakespeare, who quoted his work and referenced his existence in Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth and many other plays. Marlowe died relatively young (age 39) under mysterious circumstances variously attributed to a violent bar fight, blasphemous libel against the church, homosexual intrigue, betrayal by another playwright and assassination due to espionage.

Thomas Kyd (1558–1594): English playwright. His play The Spanish Tragedy (along with a Hamlet precursor often attributed to him) created the Elizabethan revenge-play genre. The genre established tropes like the vengeful ghost and the play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer, both of which drive narratives in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and some of his later works.

Thomas Middleton (1580–1627): English poet and one of the most successful and prolific playwrights of the Jacobean period, which immediately followed the Renaissance. Named for King James I and marked by intense conflicts and threats of civil wars between Protestant and Catholic states, the Jacobean era saw a literary focus on tragedy, revenge, cynicism, satire and human evil. Though Middleton was skilled in writing across all genres, he wrote something literally called The Revenger’s Tragedy and he may have collaborated with Shakespeare on Timon of Athens, Macbeth and All’s Well that Ends Well.

Thomas Moore (1478–1535): English author, lawyer, judge, philosopher, statesman and humanist. Eventually declared the patron saint of statesmen and politicians, his staunch Catholicism made him a vociferous opponent of the Protestant Reformation, the theology of Martin Luther and Henry VII’s separation from the church to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. After refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy to Henry VIII—which was required of everyone taking public or church office—he was executed for treason.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616): Hack “writer” and total nobody who’s completely lost to the ages. If he even existed, he’d probably be one of those obsessive fans of Cats. It’s silly to even include him in this list. God, let’s hate him.


IT’S HARD TO BE THE BARD

But it’s easy to tell you what a bard is. Or was.

Outside of Shakespeare hogging the bardness title to himself for all eternity, a bard in the traditional Renaissance sense was one or any combination of the following:

• A poet
• Someone who recites poetry to an audience (poetry readings were a popular form of entertainment back in the days before Golden Girls reruns)
• A writer, composer, singer or orator who recounts epic tales or impassioned narratives using lyrical, poetic language

“Bard” isn’t a formal title; it’s more of a descriptor for an avocation, like pianist or painter or gymnast or cat lady. It comes from a pre-Renaissance Celtic tradition where a wealthy patron would hire someone to tell stories, compose music and lyrics, act as an oral historian and genealogist, and generally shower the patron with praise for his sophistication and benevolence.

By the late English Renaissance, a bard did what Shakespeare and Nick and Nigel Bottom were doing: writing poetry and epic narratives about kings and supernatural beings and good-cholesterol breakfast comestibles.

But Shakespeare wasn’t called The Bard—at least not in a way that took in the public vernacular—until 150 years after his death. The designation is attributed to David Garrick, an English actor, playwright, poet and theater owner, in a 1769 poem he wrote about Shakespeare.

So when Nick Bottom complains about Shakespeare being called The Bard in our merry little play, it’s a bit of an anachronism—but thankfully it’s the only anachronistic cultural reference in our entire show.


A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Many—but not all—characters in the Somethingrottenverse share names with characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Here’s some background (or not) on the more prominent folks:

Bea: A feisty, sharp-witted protofeminist (full name: Beatrice) in Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice is tricked into falling in love with a soldier named Benedick, with whom she has a will-they-or-won’t-they “merry war.” (Spoiler alert: they do.)

Nigel: The only principal character in Something Rotten! not based on a character from a Shakespeare play. To add insult to injury, Nigel had a brilliant song called “I Suck” that was cut from the show before it got to Broadway.

Portia: A wealthy heiress in The Merchant of Venice. Written as a wise woman ostensibly modeled after Queen Elizabeth I, Portia disguises herself as a lawyer to circumvent the lottery her father established in his will to find her a husband.

Shylock: A greedy Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice. Characterized with rather appalling stereotypes from our modern perspective, he contractually establishes—and tries to literally collect—”a pound of flesh” as payment on a defaulted loan to a Christian. Even more appallingly, his “redemption” arc ends with his conversion to Christianity at the end of the play.

Lord Clapham: The only prominent supporting character in Something Rotten! not based on a character from a Shakespeare play. But he’s happy and he knows it, so clap your hams.

Toby Belch: The pseudonym Shakespeare uses when he infiltrates Nick Bottom’s acting troupe, Sir Toby Belch is originally ingénue Olivia’s boisterous drunk uncle in Twelfth Night. Though he mostly provides comic relief and a few insightful observations throughout the narrative of the play, he also exhibits a cruel streak toward some of the more vulnerable characters.


AWW, SHE’S BEDAZZLED!

Shakespeare isn’t kidding at his party when he brags about making up words. Of the 20,000 words in his plays and poems, he invented more than 1,700 that are still in use today. Here’s an alphabetical sample, except for a sample for X because Elon Musk hadn’t been invented yet:

Alligator: Romeo and Juliet, Act 5 Scene 1

Bedroom:  A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 2 Scene 2

Critic: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 3 Scene 1

Downstairs: Henry IV Part 1, Act 2 Scene 4

Eyeball: Henry VI Part 1, Act 4 Scene 7

Fashionable: Troilus and Cressida, Act 3 Scene 3

Gossip: The Comedy of Errors, Act 5 Scene 1

Hurry: The Comedy of Errors, Act 5 Scene 1

Inaudible: All's Well That Ends Well, Act 5 Scene 3

Jaded: Henry VI Part 2, Act 4 Scene 1

Kissing: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 5 Scene 2

Lonely: Coriolanus, Act 4 Scene 1

Manager: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 1 Scene 2

Nervy: Coriolanus, Act 2 Scene 1

Obscene: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 1 Scene 1

Puppy dog: King John, Act 2 Scene 1

Questioning: As You Like It, Act 5 Scene 4

Rant: Hamlet, Act 5 Scene 1

Skim milk: Henry IV Part 1, Act 2 Scene 3

Traditional: Richard III, Act 3 Scene 1

Undress: The Taming of the Shrew, Induction Scene 2

Varied: Titus Andronicus, Act 3 Scene 1

Worthless: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 4 Scene 2

Yelping: Henry VI Part 1, Act 4 Scene 2

Zany: Love's Labour's Lost, Act 5 Scene 2

THOMAS NOSTRADAMUS? I PROMISE!

Michel de Nostredame (1503–1566), usually Latinized as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary and reputed soothsayer who is best known for his 1555 book Les Prophéties, a collection of 942 poetic quatrains—none of which involved the discussion of gyrating one’s ass—allegedly predicting future events.

Les Prophéties was by no definition a work of scholarly merit; it was filled with anagrams and references to mythology and astrology, and it very vaguely predicted (inevitable) natural disasters (Beware! It will rain someday in the future!). And Nostradamus wrote it in his own hybrid of French, Greek and Latin—most likely to stay vague enough to avoid being persecuted for heresy during the Holy Inquisition.

Soothsayers, seers and oracles—a list that is objectively more fun to say than “lions, tigers and bears”—were people (or sometimes just things) revered for their ability (?) not only to predict the future but to provide insight and counsel to everyone from royalty to lazy playwrights with giggly last names. Their powers (?) were said to come from both deities and the occult. And they were almost never named Greg.

You’ve probably already figured this out, but since the real Nostradamus died 29 years before the events of our merry little play, the Something Rotten! writers invented his ass-gyrating nephew Thomas to help drive our narrative. You might say they tapped him for the job. But please don’t. Nobody should ever say that.


THE MOST LAMENTABLE COMEDY

The men in Nick Bottom’s terrible acting troupe are named for the men in a terrible acting troupe made up of menial laborers from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Midsummer, the troupe barely holds it together enough to very poorly perform a version of a Greek tragedy they call The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe at a wedding celebration. Here’s a bit about each of them:

Francis Flute: A young, over-excited actor and a bellows-mender by trade, Francis Flute is forced to play the female role of Thisbe, who talks to her lover Pyramus (played by Nick Bottom) through a gap in a wall.

Tom Snout: A tinker (a name for a tinsmith) by trade, Tom Snout plays the aforementioned wall, holding two fingers of one hand open to be the aforementioned gap. He even has two lines as The Wall.

Peter Quince: An amateur playwright, Peter Quince is the author of The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe. He and the troupe perform it at a wedding celebration for Theseus (the Duke of Athens) and Hyppolyta (the Queen of the Amazons).

Snug: A joiner who literally joins wood for a living, Snug plays a lion who indirectly causes the deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe. Though The Lion was only supposed to roar, Snug was worried he’d forget his lines. In the end, Peter Quince gave The Lion a few lines explaining that he’s not a real lion so the audience shouldn’t be scared of him.

Robin Starveling: A tailor by trade, Robin Starveling plays the role of Moonshine in the play. He makes a fool of himself using a lantern to create moonlight, and he’s thoroughly derided by the audience for it.

BONUS CHARACTER!
Sir John Falstaff: In our play, Shakespeare calls the Master of the Justice “Lord Falstaff.” It’s not a withering insult, but it’s not necessarily a compliment either. Falstaff was actually a recurring character in three of Shakespeare’s plays: Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Shakespeare eventually killed him off with casual mention in Henry V. (All four plays were written after the events of our narrative, so it could be said that Shakespeare invented the character in our courtroom.)

Falstaff was mostly a comic figure: a vain, boastful drinker who hung out with petty criminals and lived off of stolen money. While he certainly led people into trouble, he’s generally regarded as being a jolly, debauched figure, and he’s lived on in other works by Giuseppi Verdi, Ralph Vaughn Williams, Edward Elgar (whom you know for writing Pomp and Circumstance) and even Kenneth Branagh.


THE STUPIDEST THING THAT I HAVE EVER HEARD!

The characters in our merry little play break into song in two separate worlds: the one they live in and the one they create onstage.

And there’s a very cool—and rarely useful—word for the world-they-live-in singing: diegesis (say it: die a JEE sis)

Diegetic (say it: die a JET ik) songs are songs sung between characters who in the backs of their minds keep wondering WHY AREN’T THEY TALKING? The songs in almost all musicals are diegetic—or, more specifically, the songs that characters sing to each other are diegetic. The songs that characters sing to themselves or about themselves to the audience are diegetic-adjacent, which is objectively a terrible name for a puppy.

On the flip side, songs in a show that are sung as performances by the characters in the show are mimetic (say it: meh MET ik).

Memesis (say it: meh MEE sis) has a number of contextual meanings in theater—and a bunch more in the various disciplines of science—but for the sake of this already-too-long explanation, they’re play-within-a-play or stage-upon-a-stage songs performed for a scripted audience.

So in our merry little play, “God, I Hate Shakespeare” and “A Musical” are diegetic because the characters sing them to each other instead of talking like normal people. And “The Black Death” and “Omelette” are memetic because they’re being intentionally performed.

“Bottom’s Gonna Be on Top” and “Hard to Be the Bard” are the aforementioned diegetic-adjacent soliloquies that the characters sing to themselves or directly to the audience. And “To Thine Own Self be True” and “We See the Light” muddy the diegetic-adjacent waters even further because it’s not always 100% clear to whom they’re specifically being sung.

Finally: If your cholesterol’s high, you’re probably diegetic. Or not. In either case, you should definitely get it checked out.


NOTHING RHYMES WITH AMERICA!

What did the Bottom brothers and their merry band of misfits encounter when they reached the New World?

Our narrative takes place entirely in 1595 and the average transatlantic travel at the time took two months, so it’s safe to assume Nick et al. had arrived on the first ship to the New World by 1596.

But Hamlet was written between 1599 and 1601 and transatlantic travel wasn’t a terribly regular occurrence at the time, so let’s assume word of the play’s success wouldn’t have reached the New World until 1602.

Sir Walter Raleigh had founded the Roanoke Colony in what is now North Carolina in 1585. Virginia Dare, the first known English child born on the North American continent, was born in 1587. But the Roanoke Colony disappeared under mysterious and never yet fully resolved circumstances in 1590. So it’s safe to say there wasn’t much of an English-expat welcoming party—or even an audience—for the brothers and their epic tale of leaving Cornwall when they arrived.

Kinda-lost-to-history explorer and privateer Bartholomew Gosnold was the first Englishman to land on the New England coast—exploring and naming Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard—in 1602. But if he was the first person (and potential audience member) in the area, it’s unlikely that the Bottoms were in their dressing rooms waiting for anyone to call places as soon as their New England house was full.

Another Bartholomew—Bartholomew Gilbert—landed in the Chesapeake Bay in 1603, but he was killed by Native Americans as soon as he came ashore. And his season tickets were probably non-refundable, so his seats sat empty during any possible performances.

BUT! The American social landscape wasn’t completely barren. There were Native American settlements all along the Atlantic coast—though their insatiable hunger for ponderous, derivative musicals about British perseverance in the Renaissance was debatable.

BUT AGAIN! All was not lost. The Pilgrims arrived in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. An offshoot of the Puritans—their main difference involved the Pilgrims’ belief in some degree of separation between church and state—the Pilgrims’ hunger for bawdy musical theater was also dubious. But I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure.

A pilgrim is just a person who journeys—and the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived two decades after the Bottoms—so history is very unclear about who might have been on Shylock’s Pilgrim Productions Board of Directors.

In any case, our adventures at Theatre Cedar Rapids come to a close today, just as the Bottoms’ adventures in England eventually came to a close in 1595. And I’m gonna put a stake in the ground and say we had waaaay better—and more attractive—American audiences.

Land of opportunity indeed!

Theater Program Notes: Million Dollar Quartet

 Published February 24, 2023, for Revival Theatre Company's production of Million Dollar Quartet

A Million to Two

Sam Phillips broke two formidable barriers on his way to the Million Dollar Quartet

By Jake Stigers

By the time the events of the fabled Million Dollar Quartet occurred, producer Sam Phillips had made an indelible name for himself as a recording impresario, a discoverer of future music legends … and a progressive thinker who effected remarkable changes in an industry, a culture and even a nation that were largely locked in a white-Christian-male hegemony.

When Phillips introduces himself at the beginning of the Million Dollar Quartet musical, he admits he “prob’ly could’a been a big wheel here. But there’s a cussedness ‘bout me.” That “here” was Memphis, TN, where in 1950 he’d opened the Memphis Recording Service—a cheap, hardly-any-frills storefront recording studio. Under the slogan “We Record Anything-Anywhere-Anytime,” he gave literally anyone who walked in off the street the opportunity to make an acetate recording of a song or a special message for a loved one.

But Phillips’ long game extended far beyond capturing endless renditions of “Happy Birthday” for people’s grandmothers.

In 1939, Phillips and his brother took a road trip that passed through Memphis, where he became enamored with the music of Beale Street. Yet-to-be blues and jazz legends like Louis Armstrong and B.B. King were helping define Beale Street as a vibrant, robust music scene celebrating and nurturing music by black artists … music that captured Phillips’ heart and forever defined his musical tastes and sensibilities.

Having grown up farming with his family in Alabama, Phillips was already deeply familiar with the gospel music he heard reverberating from black churches and with the songs he heard black sharecroppers sing as he worked alongside them. The world of Beale Street cemented his lifelong fascination with—and keen ear for—the music created and performed by black amateurs and artists alike.

Phillips started his career in the early 1940s as a deejay and radio engineer at station WLAY in Alabama. Unlike the prevailing standard that dictated stations restrict their programming to music only by black artists or only by white artists, WLAY employed an uncommon “open format” that at night broadcast a mix of music by both white and black artists—a practice that inspired Phillips to hammer at that artificial race barrier the rest of his career.

He moved to Memphis—home of his beloved Beale Street music scene—in 1945 to command the airwaves as an announcer and sound engineer for WREC, which gave him a bigger audience and broader access to the music, musicians and—most importantly—fellow deejays he’d work closely with as he established and built his recording empire.

By the time he left radio and opened his Memphis Recording Service studio, he’d amassed a network of industry connections and become a beacon for struggling artists—especially black artists—who wanted to get their work recorded and hopefully broadcast across the airwaves. To help facilitate this goal, Phillips launched his own label in 1952: The Sun Record Company.

In addition to creating the recording studio’s bread-and-butter “Anything-Anywhere-Anytime” recordings, Phillips and Sun Records slowly built a roster of music up-and-comers like Junior Parker, Howlin’ Wolf, and a 19-year-old songwriter and music impresario named Ike Turner.

A genuine fan of the black Beale Street artists and the music they created—particularly the blues—Phillips had hoped to both preserve their work and eventually push through restrictive race barriers to get their songs played on white radio stations instead of just black-only stations and late-night open-format programming.

But he couldn’t get anything he recorded to be played on the white stations—even with a decade of industry connections. “There were a LOTTA years when dee-jays wouldn’t play none a’my records. Back then I’d PAY ‘em, but they still wouldn’t play ‘em,” he explains in the Million Dollar Quartet musical.

So he devised a workaround.

Again, a quote from one of his fourth-wall monologues in the musical: “How would it be if I could find me a white kid who could light a fire under a song like the great Negro singers?”

Sam Phillips wasn’t the first person to put black music in the hands of white artists. And while there are endless discussions to be had about white artists appropriating black music, culture and their attendant successes, the narrative can honestly be parsed to allow that Sam Phillips was among an early few who were more interested in getting the music he loved to wider audiences and navigating a racist culture and industry to the best of his ability to make that happen. He saw music as a mechanism of democracy, and he wasn’t above tinkering with elections to give the people what he knew they wanted.

“As Sam saw it,” biographer Peter Guralnick writes, “what he was doing was to help open doors through which black artists and white artists alike—poor people deprived of education and opportunity but possessed of innate wisdom, talent, and imagination—might someday pass.” He brought to Sun an underpinned mission to make recordings that “would help knock down the wall between black and white musicians and markets” and contribute to the fall of racial segregation.

And despite deeply established racial barriers, Phillips’ philosophy and business model worked. In its 16-year run, Sun Records produced more rock-and-roll records—including an impressive 226 singles—than any other record label of its time. He slowly changed opinions, broke down barriers and got black artists to the table … and on the white airwaves.

The white singers and musicians Phillips discovered and promoted through Sun Records are a veritable who’s-who of 1950s icons including Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, Sonny Burgess and the four men he assembled on a fateful December night in 1956: Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and a fresh-faced Jerry Lee Lewis.

Not content with using black voices and music to disrupt current radio standards—and flush with cash from recently selling Elvis Presley to RCA Records—Phillips broke through another radio barrier in 1955 when he launched an all-female radio station with the delightful call letters WHER.

Radio stations weren’t entirely devoid of women’s voices at the time—many stations had one female announcer to cover homemaking, society events and other things traditionally seen as of interest only to women—but an all-women-all-the-time format was truly transformative and profoundly groundbreaking.

Staffed entirely with women both on-air and off, WHER was both progressive for its time and now very cringey from our modern perspective. The station broadcast from a studio he patronizingly called The Doll Bin in the nation’s third-ever Holiday Inn. (Phillips was one of the original investors in this innovative hotel-franchise concept, and it eventually earned him a fortune.) But—again from our modern perspective—the misogyny gets worse: He painted the studio pink and purple and decorated it with bras and panties hanging from a clothesline. I wish I were making that up.

To round out the cringe, he managed to objectify the invisible faces behind the radio voices with the slogan “1000 Beautiful Watts.”

But still: Women. On the radio. In the South. In the 1950s, when women weren’t even allowed to open bank accounts in their own names. Phillips was incredibly progressive, incredibly brave and—if you’ll excuse the gratuitously gendered expression—incredibly ballsy.

WHER was such a hit that it quickly inspired women-only stations to pop up around the country. It broadcast continuously from 1955 until 1973, two years after the National Press Club opened its membership to women and started making the concept of women-only radio less and less remarkable.

The Million Dollar events of December 4, 1956, propelled Phillips and Sun Records into a heyday that lasted through the end of the decade. But as rock and roll slowly disappeared under the waves of pop, funk, folk, psychedelic and the other rock genres that defined the 1960s, Phillips quietly disappeared from the public eye. The artists he discovered and launched into stardom continued to produce iconic music—and the race and gender barriers he challenged continued to crumble—but Phillips turned his attention to other broadcasting, investment and development interests.

And the music he loved and the industry he changed continue to rock and roll forward as his million-dollar legacy.

Jake Stigers is a frequent contributor to theater programs in the Corridor and can often be seen on stages in the Cedar Rapids area. His program notes and essays on art, history, mental illness and anything else he finds interesting are archived on TheOneWhoMumbles.blogspot.com

Theater Program Notes: Titanic

The RMS Titanic: At once a triumph of engineering and a metaphor for the the hubris of an era sailing at full speed
By Jake Stigers

The RMS Titanic was already a legend when it unmoored from terra firma and embarked on its storied first–and last–voyage across the Atlantic in 1912.

Weighing 46,328 tons, towering 104 feet high and built to accommodate 3,547 people–though only an estimated 2,224 people sailed on its maiden voyage–it was “the largest moving object in the world,” as chief naval architect Thomas Andrews declares with pride and an unmistakable air of hubris in his soliloquy prologue to the musical Titanic.

The second of the White Star Line’s three Olympic-class liners (the eponymous Olympic had launched in 1911 and the Britannic was just beginning construction with an eventual 1915 launch), Titanic represented an apotheosis of human achievement and pride: “At once a poem, and the perfection of physical engineering,” as Andrews boasts at the beginning of the musical and eventually the ship’s entire passenger manifest laments from a grim new perspective at the end.

Titanic and her Olympic-class sisters also represented a triumph in White Star Line’s luxury-liner race with rival Cunard, builders of the now dwarfed RMS Lusitania and RMS Mauretania.

But size, human achievement and Titanic’s catastrophic, conviction-defying demise–White Star Line never officially declared the ship to be unsinkable, but owner J. Bruce Ismay had reportedly declared that Titanic was so safe that it was its own lifeboat–weren’t the only catalysts that launched the ship and its wreck into the pantheon of disaster mythology. The culture that built it–and in many ways went down with it–also played a conspicuous role.

In 2004, the satirical newspaper The Onion published a wry, tongue-in-cheek special edition devoted to deconstructing the mythology and legend surrounding the Titanic sinking. It smartly–if not callously–summarized its perspective under a banner headline and multiple subheads that pulled no punches 90 years after the fact:

WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICE-BERG

Titanic, Representation of Man’s Hubris, Sinks in North Atlantic

1,500 Dead in Symbolic Tragedy

Well-to-Do Dowager Gets Hair Disheveled for First Time

Stewards Kindly Ask Third-Class Passengers to Drown

The seeds of Titanic’s hubris were planted two centuries before she set sail

The first Industrial Revolution began around 1760 with the discovery of new, more efficient, more affordable manufacturing processes for everything from producing textiles to generating power from steam. It slowly but surely transformed economies and population centers in Britain, throughout Europe and across the Atlantic in the newly established United States. Along the way, it raised the standard of living across almost all populations and demographics … while it also laid foundations for an eventual explosive growth of capitalist wealth and economic disparity that very measurably thrives to this day.

New discoveries and inventions for streamlining the mass manufacturing of steel in the 1850s kick-started what is now considered the second Industrial Revolution in Europe and America. This more efficient production of steel vastly improved developments in railroads, shipping and manufacturing and eventually spread to the developments of the electricity, chemical and petroleum industries. It continued to transform the ways people lived and businesses operated … but it also continued to broaden the growing chasm between wealth and poverty.

In 1873, American writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today to satirize the greed and political corruption wrought from a century of Industrial Revolution spoils in post-Civil War America. It shone harsh light and judgment on the nation’s deeply entrenched graft, materialism, and obsession with money and power. But perhaps more memorably, it gave a name for this period of dramatic, arguably obscene stratification between rich and poor.

Across the pond, Britain’s Victorian Era and France’s Belle Époque mirrored the Gilded Age’s remarkable innovations in technology, manufacturing, science, medicine and even the arts–all with improvements in the standards of living for many populations. And all without remedying the staggering economic disparities between the wealthy and the impoverished.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, the Edwardians–named for her successor, King Edward VII–started relaxing the social strictures and pieties of Victoria’s influence and ushered in what American author Samuel Hynes eventually described as “a leisurely time when women wore picture hats and did not vote, when the rich were not ashamed to live conspicuously, and the sun really never set on the British flag.”


Titanic brought this Zeitgeist to life in bold, statement scale

It was in this spirit of financial, cultural and social hubris that the massive ship Titanic was conceived of and born.

Taking inspiration from London’s 5-Star Ritz Hotel, Titanic’s designers finished First and Second Class staterooms and public spaces in a range of fashionable styles from Empire stateliness to the florid indulgences of Louis XV. A squash court, a Turkish bath and 24-hour telegraph service offered novel diversions.

Thomas Andrews even added a relatively unnecessary fourth smokestack to give the ship a more grand, imposing profile.

And into the good ship Titanic strode three stratifications of passenger ready to traverse the Atlantic in the circumstances their money–or lack of it–had made them accustomed:

First Class
Titanic’s First Class manifest was a venerable Who’s Who of Edwardian society and the keepers of the Western Hemisphere’s wealth and influence. At least a generation out from the Gilded Age forebears who built their family wealth and social status, the Titanic First Class passengers enjoyed lives of privilege and leisure tempered only by intricate and often labyrinthine social rituals that demonstrated good breeding, old money and civilized superiority to the lower, more vulgar classes.

That is not to say this population did nothing beyond living off the passive income of generational wealth. Many family patriarchs–and sometimes widowed matriarchs–still kept their businesses running efficiently and profitably, but they were also actively involved in exploiting the working classes, fighting unions, building monopolies, and heavily influencing the political and financial systems that kept their family dynasties in wealth and power.

It is certainly fair to say that these families and icons of business also contributed immense amounts of money to build museums, libraries, concert halls and other civic amenities, but not without preserving the wealth and privilege they and were accustomed to enjoying.

The men of First Class gleefully clarify this perpetuation of wealth and power in a lyric sung early in the Titanic musical: “Remarkable U.S. Steel is splitting shares at five to four! Monopoly makes the industry far better than before!”

Second Class
While the demarcations between Edwardian First Class and Second Class were absolute when buying tickets on a luxury ocean liner, they were far more fluid in the real world.

Titanic’s Second Class passengers still spent a great deal of money and expected a great deal of opulence and privilege on their voyage. But for reasons extending from budget constraints to a modest lack of interest in the conspicuous pomp and circumstance of First Class, these passengers still enjoyed extravagant accommodations without extravagant costs–and still without encountering passengers of the Third Class.

That is not to say there weren’t curious lookie-loos and brazen social climbers peering around the metaphorical–and physical–walls dividing First from Second Class.

In a clever bit of narrative construction, the Titanic musical embodies this Second Class ambition in the character of Alice Beane. Based loosely on the actual passenger Ethel Beane, Alice breathlessly and without a trace of shame bombards her beleaguered husband with facts and gossip she’s memorized about the First Class passengers as they board the ship.

It’s a neat writing trick for a number of reasons: It very clearly illustrates the tacky social-climbing aspirations that many Second Class passengers had, it comically delineates the Second Class climbers from the First class noblesse, and it introduces a lot of information about a lot of passengers to the audience without forced or ponderous exposition.

And if Alice Beane’s brazen antics don’t fully establish this demarcation in the first act, John Jacob Astor IV spells it out explicitly in the second act: “A few too many climbers. … Lately I’ve noticed that anyone with a few million dollars considers himself rich.”

Third Class
While First and Second Class passengers traveled with varying degrees of conspicuous privilege and wealth, Third Class passengers traveled with a more urgent sense of purpose: escaping lives of poverty, crime and hopelessness in Europe (and beyond) and emigrating to experience the storied opportunities and dreams of living in America.

These European immigrants were traveling at the end of what historians now call the New Immigration wave, which started in the late 19th Century when President Benjamin Harrison designated Ellis Island in New York Harbor as a federal immigration station.

Earlier immigration waves established a cross-cultural tradition of coming to America to establish new lives, housing and income sources–usually in Irish, German, Jewish and other ethnic enclaves–and then summoning remaining family members to cross the Atlantic to reunite in the New World. With Ellis Island protocols and record-keeping in place, immigration became more efficient, and the numbers of reuniting family members surged well into the 20th Century.

Despite the dangers of tenement life and the poverty wages of Industrial Revolution employment, the spirit of American opportunity still lived in these immigrants’ hearts and imaginations. But as the decades around the turn of the century saw a growing establishment of business owners, professionals and even politicians rising from these enclaves, the lure of legitimate American opportunity became stronger and stronger, drawing more and more people through Ellis Island and driving the exponentially explosive growth of New York City and other urban centers.

And while the White Star Line built its reputation and socioeconomic iconography on the opulent accommodations it provided its high-profile, high-wealth passengers, its primary source of revenue was actually from its Third Class passengers. These passengers were far more economical to house and feed, and their accommodations were designed to maximize the number of people who could occupy any given amount of space.

That’s not to say they were in any way unlivable. To attract Third Class passengers away from competitors who also used this business model, the White Star Line outfitted Titanic and its Olympic-class sister ships with sleeping, eating and public accommodations that had never been seen or experienced by most of its passengers. There were flushing toilets, warm running water, steady meals, comfortable beds and even bathtubs–though the entirety of Third Class had literally two bathtubs: one for all the women to share and one for all the men to share.

Titanic’s Third Class passengers encapsulate this mix of excitement, awe and wonder in a moving set of lyrics as they board the ship at the beginning of the show:

Get me aboard
Call out my name
It’s to America we aim
To find a better life
We prayed to make this trip!

Let all our children’s children know
That this day long ago
We dreamt of them
And came aboard this ship!

These are the cultural waters–both metaphoric and literal–that Titanic navigated as she headed west into the Atlantic

History has given us an understanding of the mechanics and enormity of Titanic’s demise through newspaper accounts, books, movies, YouTube channels and devoted internet sites.

Titanic the musical takes us on a more introspective journey with the ship and its passengers and explores the very human side of the tragedy through a prism of privilege and want, hubris and awe, and shared dreams of a future that’s both collective and jarringly unequal.

SIDEBAR: Why do we use female pronouns for ships?

Throughout recorded history, people have referred to ships as she and her and grouped them with sister ships and sent them on maiden voyages and led flotillas on mother ships … but why?

The short answer is there is no clear answer. Or at least there are many possible answers, including these:

For centuries and millennia, sailors have traditionally been men who’ve often named ships after important women in their lives as a way to keep them symbolically close on long voyages.

Sailors have dedicated ships to goddesses and mother figures (like Christopher Columbus’ La Santa María and the now-retired RMS Queen Mary) to petition for safe passage on journeys.

Ships have been seen as metaphoric mothers caring for the sailor in her womb.

The Latin word for ship is navis, whose linguistic feminine gendering eventually translated to a more literal interpretation of seeing ships as feminine.

SIDEBAR: Cedar Rapids’ Brucemore Historic Site has a Titanic connection

George and Irene Douglas, who lived in Brucemore from 1906 to 1937, have a tragic connection to the Titanic sinking: George’s brother and sister-in-law, Walter and Mahala Douglas, and Mahala’s maid, Bertha LeRoy, were sailing home on Titanic after a three-month trip to Europe to celebrate George’s retirement and to buy furnishings for their Minnesota home.

Mahala and Bertha survived the sinking, but Walter–feeling an obligation to be a gentleman and not board a lifeboat–did not. His body was recovered (and identified by the monograms on his shirt and cigarette case), and he and Mahala are now entombed in the Douglas family vault in Cedar Rapids’ Oak Hill Cemetery.

Jake Stigers is a frequent contributor to theater programs in the Corridor and can often be seen on stages in the Cedar Rapids area. His longtime fascination with the Titanic disaster and with Gilded Age-era history made the opportunity to write program notes for this production especially thrilling for him.

Theater program notes: End of the Rainbow

Judy Garland and a lifetime of chasing rainbows
by Jake Stigers

By December 1968, Judy Garland’s personal and professional résumé had amassed 30+ movies, hundreds of singles and albums, two Academy Award nominations, one Academy Juvenile Award, two Golden Globes, one Grammy, one Special Tony Award, two canceled studio contracts, four (and about to be five) husbands, three children, a lifetime addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates, multiple stints in rehab, crushing debt, and more highs and lows and crashes and comebacks than one lifetime can reasonably be expected to hold.

End of the Rainbow offers a theatrical take—and is there honestly any way other than theatrical to document Judy Garland’s life?—on the events surrounding what ended up being her final comeback attempt in a series of 1969 concerts at London’s Talk of the Town nightclub.


Once in a lullaby

Born Frances Ethel Gumm in 1922 to parents who had openly not welcomed their unexpected pregnancy, the future Judy Garland got her first enticing taste of performing at age 2 when she sang “Jingle Bells” on the stage of her family’s Minnesota theater. She and her two older siblings soon formed an act they called the Gumm Sisters, and they found a respectable amount of success touring the vaudeville circuit and even appearing in MGM movie shorts.

There’s a delightful theater legend that a Chicago playbill had misspelled their act as The Glum Sisters, which was the impetus for the girls to find a more glamorous stage name. The source of the name Garland has been attributed to everything from the character Lily Garland in Twentieth Century to drama critic Robert Garland to a casual comparison of the girls’ beauty to a garland of flowers. In any case, The Garland Sisters they became. And the future Judy went even farther by adopting a glamorous new first name from a popular Hoagy Carmichael song.

The trio broke up in 1934 when the eldest Garland-née-Gumm sister eloped to Nevada with a musician and the rising-star Judy Garland found herself invited to audition for Louis B. Mayer in California. She belted her way through “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart!” and—as the stories go—was immediately offered an MGM contract without a screen test.

Judy was 13 years old, 4 feet 11 inches tall (which she’d be for the rest of her life) and immediately made to be aware that she was nowhere near as beautiful or glamorous as the other up-and-coming movie stars—like Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor—with whom she shared an MGM classroom. She was the cute girl next door with little in the way of major movie-star potential except for one thing: her voice. The cherubic, pint-sized teen had an impressive set of pipes and a natural aptitude for emotional performance that made her seem wiser and more worldly than her years every time she opened her mouth.

But to Mayer, her looks—specifically her weight—made her a hard sell to a movie-going public (he called her “my little hunchback”), and his studio put her on near-starvation diets of soup and lettuce to slim her down. And once young Judy had earned enough public adoration to make her a bankable star, MGM pumped her full of amphetamines to keep her awake long enough to work her to death and barbiturates to give her short fits of sleep at night.

In the process, they also gave her a lifetime of drug addictions and crippling self-esteem issues.


The dreams that you dare to dream

In 1939, Garland was catapulted from bankable child star to mega-bankable movie star by playing Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz and—more specifically—by singing “Over the Rainbow,” a simple, soaring soliloquy inspired by Dorothy’s Auntie Em telling her to “find yourself a place where you won't get into any trouble.” The song became a breakout hit and a personal anthem of both hope and introspection for Garland that kept finding newer—sometimes profound, oftentimes heartbreaking—shades of meaning as her life and career careened through endless cycles of soaring successes, epic crashes and triumphant comebacks.

The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms—both released in 1939—earned Garland an Academy Juvenile Award, which surprisingly ended up being the only Oscar she ever won. But her star skyrocketed from there through iconic pairings with Mickey Rooney; iconic movies like Meet Me in St. Louis; and iconic affairs with other stars both single and married including Johnny Mercer, Tyrone Power and Orson Welles.

But her escalating problems with addiction and, later, mental illness eventually made her so unreliable and expensively absent from filmings that she was fired from three high-profile movies in pretty rapid succession: 1949’s The Barkleys of Broadway (replaced by Ginger Rogers), 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun (replaced by Betty Hutton) and 1951’s Royal Wedding (replaced by Jane Powell). And in 1950, she was unceremoniously kicked out of MGM.


Troubles melt like lemon drops

Over the next two decades, Garland’s life and career raced up one mountain and careened down the next:

She headlined sold-out concerts and tours in London’s Palladium, Manhattan’s Palace Theatre, Las Vegas’s New Frontier Hotel and Carnegie Hall—the last of which produced a two-record album that spent 13 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart and won four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and Best Female Vocal of the Year.

She survived a number of suicide attempts, committed herself to repeated stays in mental hospitals, and developed acute hepatitis that threatened to leave her an invalid who would never sing again.

She made a grand comeback with her 1954 remake of A Star is Born, which earned her an Academy Award nomination. She was thought to be such a shoo-in that even though she was recovering from the birth of her son Joey, television crews set up cameras in her hospital room to televise her acceptance speech the night of the ceremony. They reported packed up and left her alone in her room before the surprise winner—Grace Kelly, for The Country Girl—even got to the stage to accept her trophy.

She signed a contract with Random House to write an autobiography with the working title The Judy Garland Story but was unable to stay focused and on-task to finish it in the nine years until her death.

She launched a successful TV variety show on CBS called The Judy Garland Show that received critical acclaim but was canceled due to poor ratings (it was slotted against NBC’s juggernaut Bonanza) and industry politics. While introducing a young Barbra Streisand to the nation on her show, she candidly told Streisand “Don’t let them do to you what they did to me. … Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a blizzard. An absolute blizzard.”

She was cast as the desperately aging, shamelessly man-hungry Helen Lawson in the 1967 movie Valley of the Dolls, but her alcoholism and unreliability—compounded by her cruel treatment by director Mark Robson, who saw her only as a source of scandal-inspired publicity—got her fired soon after production began.

She found herself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that she could never resurface from thanks to failed investments in movie projects, unscrupulous managers, gambling husbands, skyrocketing interest on back taxes and her own failures at managing her money. She even had to sell her Brentwood home at a loss to help dig herself out of it.


Happy little bluebirds fly

Garland’s lifetime quest for approval, love and stability also led to five marriages and four divorces with musician David Rose (she was 19; he was 31), director Vincente Minnelli (with whom she had daughter Liza), tour manager and producer Sidney Luft (with whom she had daughter Lorna and son Joey), actor Mark Herron (they both accused each other of domestic abuse and the marriage ended within six months), and disco manager and opportunist Mickey Deans (whom she married a month after her Talk of the Town concerts).


When all the world is a hopeless jumble …

So Garland approached her five-week concert engagement at London’s Talk of the Town—which inspired the narrative of End of the Rainbow—as a triumphant return to the adoring audiences of her 1951 Palladium concerts, as a yet-again comeback that proved she still had it … and as a source of desperately needed income to finally extricate herself from her crippling debt and start a new life with her children.

The concerts were—as End of the Rainbow playwright Peter Quilter describes it—an “emotional car crash.” She staggered and slurred—often in the sequined orange brocade suit she kept from Valley of the Dolls—through her performances. The sold-out audiences often threw food at her to show their anger over her on-stage messiness and infuriating lateness.

And the reviewers did not hold back. The Guardian said the shows seemed “like her 93rd comeback” and stated that “she evokes pity and sorrow like no other superstar. … In her we see the broken remnant of a gaudy age of showbiz which believed that glamour was a good enough substitute for genius.” Time called the performances more “seance” than “concert” and wrote a year later in her obituary that they “turned out to be the biggest flop of her life” and that she looked like a “walking casualty.”


And the raindrops tumble all around …

End of the Rainbow—though now based on the Talk of the Town concerts—didn’t start out about Judy Garland at all. Playwright Peter Quilter had written a 2001 play called Last Song of the Nightingale about a past-her-prime diva inspired by an alcoholic cruise-ship performer he had known. It starred Tracie Bennett, who said her character felt like a roman à clef for Garland in her Talk of the Town performances. Quilter reworked the play, and End of the Rainbow premiered at the Sydney Opera House in 2005. It won Caroline O’Connor three Best Actress awards for her portrayal of Garland. Bennett took over the role in 2010 when it came home to London, where the show won four Olivier Awards, including Best Actress and Best New Play. Bennett also received a Tony nomination when she brought the show to Broadway in 2012.

End of the Rainbow also inspired the 2019 movie Judy, which won Renée Zellweger a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Garland. While End of the Rainbow underscores Garland’s emotional and professional claustrophobia at this point in her life by confining the off-stage narrative to her Ritz Hotel suite, Judy builds Garland’s journey to catastrophe in slow claps with flashbacks to cruel adults, exhausting schedules, and a calculated, inevitable addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates.


When all the clouds darken up the skyway …

Garland made her final concert appearance on March 25, 1969—ten days after marrying fifth husband Mickey Deans—in Copenhagen, and she performed there with the same display of disorientation, collapse and horror she’d exhibited in London.

Three months later, on June 22, 1969, Deans discovered Garland dead in the bathroom of their run-down London rental. The death was ruled an accidental overdose of barbiturates. She was just 12 days past her 47th birthday.


There's a rainbow highway to be found …

Garland’s funeral was on June 27 in New York City, and an estimated 20,000 people showed up to pay their respects. That night, New York’s Stonewall Inn—a gay bar run by the mafia—was raided by police. Raids of gay bars were commonplace, and patrons always meekly and with shame let themselves be arrested and humiliated in the next day’s papers.

But this time the patrons fought back, throwing bricks and bottles, trapping the police in the bar, and effectively starting the march toward equality for LGBTQ+ people across the country.

Garland—in her personal story arc from fabulous screen ingénue to fierce survivor—had been an icon to gay men, who often used “friend of Dorothy” in reference to her Wizard of Oz character as code to clandistinely identify themselves to each other in public. Whether her funeral was an impetus for the Stonewall rising or just coincidentally on the same day is still passionately debated among historians and devotees, but it is nevertheless tied to the uprising in the minds and hearts of gay people to this day.


There’s a place behind the sun …

Of Garland’s endurance and resilience in the public’s—and not just gay people’s—hearts and minds, Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann once declared “I think Judy will always come back. She kids about making a lot of comebacks, but I think Judy has a kind of a thing where she has to get to the bottom of the rope and things have to get very, very rough for her. Then with an amazing inner strength that only comes of a certain genius, she comes back bigger than ever.”


There’s a place beyond the rain …

Of the profound endurance of the song “Over the Rainbow,” Judy star Renée Zellweger told Vanity Fair that people “have nostalgic feelings from childhood attached to that song, but in Judy’s life, it’s something different. She weathered so many insurmountable challenges in her life, and it’s about her maintaining hope. In spite of all her difficulties, she still carried on.”


Jake Stigers regularly writes about the arts for theaters in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City and often makes his own triumphant comebacks on their stages.

Theater program notes: Oklahoma!

Published November 21, 2019, for Revival Theatre Company's production of Oklahoma!

Oklahoma! brings a genre—and a country—up to date
by Jake Stigers

When the curtain rose for the first performance of Oklahoma! on March 31, 1943, neither the creative team and actors nor the audience members knew they were literally at a new frontier—if I may grab an obvious metaphor from the source material—of American musical theater. Until then, musicals as the American public knew them were little more than collections of songs, skits, dances and Vaudeville acts assembled loosely around a generic theme—like love, patriotism or beautiful girls with their legs showing—or sometimes no theme at all.

Sixteen years earlier, Florenz Ziegfeld had launched Show Boat, a musical with a defined narrative and loosely contextualized songs by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern. It was a radical departure from the entertainment frippery that audiences were used to, and it was well-received enough that it ran for a year and a half. But the songs were written to be catchy and popular more than to drive the narrative, and some even got changed out for new songs that were better suited to new actors over time.

With Oklahoma!, Hammerstein—now working with composer Richard Rodgers—brought this concept to its full fruition; the show’s music and lyrics were fully integrated into the story, and instead of stopping the narrative for the sake of entertainment they advanced the plot, defined the characters and established context. And while some of the show’s musical elements seem quaint or ponderous to modern audiences, the concept at the time was nothing short of an artistic revelation.

Oklahoma! takes place in 1908, sixteen years after Oklahoma was declared a United States territory and one year before it was to become our 46th state. Inspired by Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1930 play that was in turn inspired by a folk song of the same name, Oklahoma! is at its core the story of farm girl Laurie Williams and the two suitors vying for her affections. And while through modern eyes the narrative is problematic in its attitudinal subtexts about women, race and the mentally ill, the story’s overall themes of community, potential and the excitement of destiny will seemingly always resonate with its audiences.

In addition to its blockbuster redefinition of an entire genre, Oklahoma! marked a number of other notable firsts:

It was the first collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein. Rodgers’ longtime collaborator Lorenz Hart had fallen into a state of alcoholism and unreliability, and Hammerstein was looking desperately to redeem himself after six consecutive Broadway flops. Theirs ended up being a particularly symbiotic collaboration as well—Hammerstein preferred to write lyrics before any music was composed so he could create the story he wanted, and Rodgers preferred to craft music to fit both the structure and sentiment of completed lyrics—and the two went on to create many iconic musicals together including South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music.

It was the first musical-by-any-definition choreographed by Agnes de Mille. Her ballet Rodeo, choreographed the previous year to music by Aaron Copland, had pulled her from relative obscurity and brought her to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s attention. She’d constructed Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, an international company that had moved to the United States to compete with the rival company Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), and the American-cowboy movement vocabulary she’d created for these classically trained international dancers became a useful foundation for her creation of Oklahoma! De Mille went on to choreograph decades of iconic Broadway musicals, most notably Brigadoon, for which she won the first-ever Tony Award for choreography when the awards premiered in 1947

The show had no stars. In keeping with their revolutionary idea to focus on telling a complete, holistic story through their fully integrated material, Rodgers and Hammersein took a bold step in hiring singers and actors who were dramatically appropriate for the roles instead of bringing in marquee names and bankable stars whose fame could be a distraction from the story’s rural, anonymous, hardscrabble setting.

Oklahoma!—originally titled Away We Go!—had done reasonably well with audiences in its New Haven and Boston tryouts, though producer Mike Todd famously walked out of a performance after the first act and predicted its failure with the words “No legs, no jokes, no chance.” But it was an immediate and overwhelming success on Broadway and ran for 2,212 performances and then toured the country for another ten years. Interestingly, Florence Henderson—the eventual ’70s TV mom Carol Brady—played the ingénue Laurie in the last company on the tour. When she was also cast to play Laurie opposite Gordon MacRae in a 1954 TV tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein, she was considered a shoe-in to play Laurie opposite MacRae in the 1955 movie. But she lost out to Shirley Jones, the eventual ’70s TV mom Shirley Partridge.

Oklahoma! premiered fifteen months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged our country from a neutrality to an active participant in World War II. Nobody knew at the time that the war would be over in a year and a half, but the tide had turned for the Allies by the show’s 1943 premiere—and if the country wasn’t feeling completely optimistic, it enthusiastically embraced this musical that was bursting at the seams with the promise of new life and new opportunity and new hope told through the lens of a small town in a territory on the verge of becoming an American state.

Like the theatrical genre telling the story, our country was in the throes of mighty change. And Curly McLain, one of Laurie’s Oklahoma! suitors, sums up the shared Zeitgeist in a particularly joyous speech he makes to her in Act II as he contemplates all the exciting possibilities:

“Oh, things is changin’ right and left! Buy up mowin’ machines, cut down the prairies! Shoe yer horses, drag them plows under the sod! They’re gonna make a state out of this territory, they gonna put it in the Union! Country’s a-changin’, got to change with it!”

Theater program notes: Hello, Dolly!

Dolly Gallagher Levi may very well have played matchmaker for your great-great-great grandparents
by Jake Stigers

Dolly Levi’s meddling, matchmaking story in Hello, Dolly! has origins so old that they predate the Victorian Era by two years: The 1964 musical was inspired by the 1955 play The Matchmaker, which was in turn inspired by the 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers. Both were written by Thornton Wilder, who is perhaps best known for his Pulitzer-winning play Our Town.

But Dolly’s genealogy doesn’t stop there. Wilder took his ideas from a play written almost a century earlier: the 1842 mega-titled Einen Jux will er sich machen (He Will Go on a Spree or He'll Have Himself a Good Time), which found Dolly’s original inspiration in A Day Well Spent, an English one-act written in 1835.

Though the Dolly we know and love today didn’t arrive fully formed at the dawn of this literary journey, her universally relatable joy, optimism, determination—and perhaps her employment of a little manipulation in the pursuit of love—have kept her in our hearts for 55 years … and have given her a Billboard-topping cast album, Oscar-winning movie and now four Broadway revivals along the way.

Hello, Dolly! was originally written for the brassy Broadway beltress Ethel Merman, who turned it down but six years later took over the role and played Dolly until the show closed in 1970. Mary Martin—star of South Pacific, Peter Pan and The Sound of Music—also turned down Dolly and then ended up playing her in London.

So it fell to Carol Channing, a lesser-known veteran of Broadway shows including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Wonderful Town, to bring our Dolly Gallagher Levi to life through Jerry Herman’s glorious music, Gower Champion’s direction (also not a first choice; he got the job after Hal Prince and Jerome Robbins turned it down), and what would become an iconic jewel-drenched red dress and matching feathered halo. The show ended up railroading past Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl that season to win a whopping 10 Tony Awards, a tie with 1949’s South Pacific that wouldn’t be broken until The Producers racked up 12 Tony Awards 37 years later.

The original Broadway production ran six years and 2,844 performances and saw its first revival—with an all-black cast led by Pearl Bailey—only five years after it closed. Dolly has been played by a pantheon of stars since then including Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, Yvonne De Carlo, Betty White, Bernadette Peters, and (of course) Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler. And she’s clearly listened to her eponymous song, because she doesn’t ever go away … and clearly nobody wants her to.

From her humble, generations-old origins to her enduring blockbuster musical, which was originally titled—and I am not making this up—Dolly, A Damned Exasperating Woman, Dolly Gallagher Levi looks to continue bringing hearts together and audiences to their feet for generations to come.


It’s worth noting that Thornton Wilder loved Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! so much that he promised to rewrite his Pulitzer-winning play The Skin of Our Teeth for her so she could play both female leads. He died before he finished the rewrite, but you as Theatre Cedar Rapids audience members will soon have the opportunity to see The Skin of Our Teeth in its original form in our downstairs Grandon Theatre. It runs April 3-19, 2020, so please don’t go away until you’ve gotten your tickets.

Theater program notes: Les Misérables

Published December 4, 2018, for the Broadway national tour of Les Misérables at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium.

Europe and America in the time of Les Misérables:
Hearing the people sing beyond the world of Jean Valjean
By Jake Stigers

Quick: When in history did the events of Les Misérables happen?

The farther we get away from the past, the easier it can be for us to file stories about—for instance—the Black Plague, Michelangelo, Les Misérables, the Civil War or the Titanic into a singular Olden Times mental folder and not fully understand any larger historical context that might shape or define our understanding of those events.

(Before you reach for your phones to google all that: The Black Plague wiped out up to 60% of Europe’s total population around 1350. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was one of the defining artists of the Italian Renaissance in the early 1500s. We’ll get to Les Misérables in a minute, but for the sake of this rough timeline remember that it took place in France in the early 1800s. The American Civil War prevented the Confederate southern states from seceding over the issue of slavery when it ended in 1865. And the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage between Southampton and New York City just over 100 years ago in 1912.)

For the masterful way the musical Les Misérables telescopes the events and the settings of the book Les Misérables into 49 songs in two sung-through acts, an understanding of a more global context can meaningfully enhance any appreciation of it—if for no other reason than to triangulate it into the broader timeline of history.

It’s understandably impossible to cover every aspect of the history and culture surrounding the protagonist Jean Valjean’s journey through Les Misérables, and this essay in no way tries to do so. Instead, it touches on a range of events from the epic to the merely interesting that can hopefully offer useful context for understanding the world in which Les Misérables unfolds:


1796: Preamble: Jean Valjean is sentenced to prison in the Bagne of Toulon

Nineteen years before the story of Les Misérables begins, the peasant Jean Valjean is sentenced as prisoner number 24601 to serve time in the notorious Bagne of Toulon for stealing bread to feed his starving sister. During his almost two decades of incarceration, France and the entire Western Hemisphere undergo a chain reaction of revolutions and wars that radically alter the course of modern global history. But first, let’s back up a bit more ...

Just three years before Valjean entered prison, the former King Louis XVI of France and his wife Marie Antoinette were convicted of high treason and guillotined at the Place de la Révolution in Paris as a thousand-plus years of French monarchy fell and the French Revolution began. The ensuing French Revolutionary Wars raged from 1792 to 1802, first pitting the French Republic against monarchies in Europe and then spreading as far as Egypt and North America. Their end segued almost directly into the era of Napoleonic Wars that carried over unresolved disputes between Napoleon’s French Empire and a fluctuating array of European coalitions. A total of seven wars in all, they ended when the European Allies finally defeated Napoleon in the one-day Battle of Waterloo near what is now Belgium in 1815.

Aside from the expected cataclysmic destruction wrought by two decades of prolonged combat, these wars also brought explosive revolutions in European social structures, redefined international borders and relationships, and radically transformed the ways future wars would be strategized and fought to this day.

Partly to fund his eponymous wars, Napoleon Bonaparte sold France’s Louisiana Territory in North America to President Thomas Jefferson of the fledgling United States in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase, as the acquisition of this territory came to be called, stretched from present-day Louisiana to what is now Montana on land that would eventually be partitioned into 15 states—including Iowa—and parts of two Canadian provinces. It more than doubled the existing square mileage of the United States and fueled what our growing country would declare to be our Manifest Destiny: a continued and often ruthless expansion all the way west across the continent to the Pacific Ocean that involved annexing and conquering land from Mexico, Britain and the continent’s Native Americans.

Back in Europe, Ludwig van Beethoven composed his now-iconic dum-dum-dum-DUMMM Symphony No. 5 in 1808 that would help define a burgeoning era of Romanticism in music, art and literature. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—the quintessential composer of the Classical period in music—had died seventeen years earlier, at the early pre-dawn of this new Romantic period that would begin to shape almost a century of culture in both Europe and America. Romanticism was a bold new paradigm that shed the Classical era’s emphasis on structure and melody in favor of exploring emotion, imagination and the free expression of feeling—all of which spilled over into the worlds of art and literature. Case in point: Les Misérables and Valjean’s operatic journey through morality, love, sacrifice, penance and ultimately grace.

Here are a few more interesting milestones that Jean Valjean missed during his incarceration: After observing that milkmaids who had caught cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, Edward Jenner introduced the first successful smallpox vaccine—actually the first ever vaccine—in England in 1796. French soldiers fighting under Napoleon in the Ottoman territories of Egypt and Syria discovered the Rosetta Stone—a decree from Egypt’s 300 BC Ptolemaic dynasty that was inscribed in three languages and unlocked the mysteries of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs—in 1799. The Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merged to become the United Kingdom in 1801. The world population officially reached one billion people in 1804. And the Industrial Revolution hit its peak, radically transforming the way we produced everything from textiles to energy to physical and social infrastructure.

So the narrative of Les Misérables opens in a radically new world from the one Jean Valjean knew when his theft of a loaf of bread landed him in prison 19 years earlier. And, as worlds have a way of doing, his just keeps changing ...


1815: Jean Valjean is released from the Bagne of Toulon

Valjean is released and left homeless in the commune-city of Digne-les-Bains in the early years of France’s Bourbon Restoration, a new constitutional monarchy set in place after the fall of Napoleon. Under the new King Louis XVIII, France restored relationships with longtime allies, centralized its government in Paris and moved forward with relative stability under a Revolution-inspired motto: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Across the pond, the War of 1812 had ended and America was experiencing what is still called the Era of Good Feelings marked by a decline in partisan politics and a sense of nationalist identity thanks to a series of Supreme Court opinions supporting a more centralized government here. A year earlier, a lawyer and amateur poet named Francis Scott Key saw the American flag flying over Fort McHenry after an all-night bombardment by British forces near the end of the war. The sight inspired him to write “Defence of Fort M'Henry,” a poem that soon became the lyrics to our National Anthem: “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Three years after Valjean’s release, twenty-year-old Mary Shelley published, initially anonymously, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in England. This gothic novel is considered to be the first work of modern science fiction for its premise that employs a deliberate use of science and technology to create a creature of fantasy and imagination. Not to be outdone in the genre of gothic literature, American author Washington Irving killed off—or did he?—poor Ichabod Crane after a terrifying encounter with the Headless Horseman in his 1820 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

And in a slight detour from this essay’s stated narrative about Europe and America in the time of Les Misérables, it’s interesting to note that in January of 1820, German explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Russian explorer Mikhail Lazarev were the first to see and officially discover Antarctica.


1823: John Valjean, under the alias Monsieur Madeleine, is now a wealthy factory owner and mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer

France’s Bourbon Restoration period lasted until the 1830-32 uprisings depicted later in Les Misérables, but by 1823 the constitutional monarchy had been slowly disassembled by hard-right ultra-royalists, and with the rise of King Charles X in 1824 it lurched even farther right with severe restrictions on the press and a campaign to compensate the families of nobles whose property had been taken during the Revolution.

Here in America, we’d carved the state of Missouri out of the Louisiana Purchase territory in 1821, bringing our state count—and the number of stars on our growing flag—to 24. To assert our independence and declare our neutrality in any future European conflicts, President James Monroe introduced the Monroe Doctrine in his 1823 State of the Union address, declaring that any European attempt to re-colonize the Americas would be considered a hostile act toward the United States. And three years later on July 4, 1826—the 50th anniversary of the approval of our Declaration of Independence—both former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died.

To modern historians, the Classical era in music had officially ended by 1820, leaving Romanticism as the dominant voice in Western music, art and literature. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Symphony No. 9 in 1824 thunderously marked the occasion, as did many iconic works of art, including Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People), which depicted the goddess Liberty bearing the flag of France in its brilliant red and blue as she guides the triumphant citizenry forward over the pro-royalist bodies who fell in the victorious July Revolution of 1830.

1823 ended on a visions-of-sugar-plums note with the anonymous publication of A Visit from St. Nicholas (later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore), which introduced America to the Santa Claus we celebrate to this day with his like-a-cherry nose and bowl-full-of-jelly laugh.


1832: The Paris June Rebellion

The June Rebellion—also called the Paris Uprising—depicted in Les Misérables was an actual historical event. The last of a two-year series of violent anti-monarchist outbreaks in Paris, this battle was inspired by the cholera death of French Parliamentarian Jean Maximilien Lamarque, a popular anti-royalist and champion of the poor. The uprising lasted only two days: June 5-6, 1832.

The song “The ABC Café - Red and Black” that student revolutionaries Marius and Enjrolas sing in Les Misérables to stir the passions of their fellow students into battle has a coincidental—albeit not specific—relationship to the French novel The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le Noir) that had been published two years earlier by Stendhal (a pen name of French novelist Marie-Henri Beyle). While the Red and the Black in the Les Misérables uprising represent “the blood of angry men” fighting on behalf of the poor who have been long oppressed by “the dark of ages past,” the novel tells the story of a poor man’s ultimately futile attempts to rise above his station in life through hard work, talent, and eventually deception and hypocrisy.

Speaking of revolutionary insurrections, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (he used this name to distinguish himself from a number of similarly named relatives), the longest-lived and last surviving signatory of America’s Declaration of Independence, died on November 14 of 1832, 56 years after the document was signed. He was 95.

But the revolutions of the era weren’t tied entirely to politics. The British sloop HMS Beagle had set sail a year before the rebellion on a five-year expedition to chart the coasts of South America, and it carried as a passenger a young English biologist named Charles Darwin. Darwin published The Voyage of the Beagle in 1839 as both a travel memoir and a scientific journal documenting the discoveries in biology, geology and anthropology he made on the trip. These discoveries inspired additional expeditions and research that supported his theories of evolutionary biology that he eventually published in his 1859 On the Origins of the Species.


1833: Marius and Cosette make their final reconciliation with Valjean

The French Charter of 1830 had overthrown the conservative government of King Charles X and signaled the beginning of the 18-year July Monarchy, where the ascending Louis Philippe conspicuously proclaimed himself Roi des Français (“King of the French”) instead of the imperialistic “King of France” and pledged to follow the juste milieu—the middle of the road that avoided radical political extremes.

As Valjean reconciles with his past at the end of Les Misérables and finally understands that “to love another person is to see the face of God,” Romanticism is at its peak celebration of both emotional life and the unknown afterlife, nature and the supernatural, the Medieval past and the infinite future. Its brave-new-cultural-world outlook mirrors his final resolution from guilt to atonement … and it indeed allows him a new “life about to start / when tomorrow comes.”

An interesting side note: After spending four years studying American representative democracy from the wide-reaching perspectives of our Constitution, economics, separation of church and state, and societal attitudes toward women, French diplomat and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville published in 1835 De La Démocratie en Amérique, which is commonly translated to Democracy in America. Tocqueville was interested in examining the successes and failings of our democratic revolution in comparison to the aftermath of the revolution in France—in particular the fall of the aristocratic class and the rise of the concept of equality. Among his conclusions: While democracy carries with it the danger of a tyranny of the majority and a loss of governmental control by the people, the promise of equality at its foundation was one of the greatest political and social ideas of his era … and the United States at the time was the quintessence of successful democratic equality.

Four years after the narrative of Les Misérables ends, Queen Victoria ascended the English throne at the age of 18 and ushered in a 63-year period of cultural influence and British expansion that lasted until the very dawn of the 20th century. While her reign saw both cataclysmic wars and monumental advances in technology, we can all agree here that the two defining landmarks of her monarchy were these: Iowa became the 29th of the United States in 1846; and in 1862, Victor Hugo introduced the world to Jean Valjean and his immortal journey through sacrifice, morality, love, penance and ultimately grace when he published Les Misérables.


Jake Stigers is a writer, singer, actor and incurable history buff living in Cedar Rapids. He hates to brag, but he saw the original production of Les Misérables in London.