My first piece in this series, entitled simply Historical Musicals, ranks as one of my most popular blog postings ever. By that I mean I heard from three people who said they very much enjoyed the piece. So… as I explained at the beginning of Historical Musicals, one of my hobbies is leafing through the massive one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia (I can barely lift the thing) and finding entries I think would make successful Broadway musicals now that Hamilton has made historical musicals popular again.
Here are three more excellent candidates.
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[Insull, Samuel 1859-1938, American public utilities financier, b. London. He arrived in the United States in 1881 and was employed by Thomas A. Edison as a secretary. He later became prominent in the management of the Edison industrial holdings. By 1907 he overcame competing pubic utilities companies in Chicago and soon controlled the city’s transit system. After numerous mergers he expanded his operations throughout Illinois and into neighboring states. He formed (1912) a mammoth interlocking directorate that operated over 300 steam plants, 200 hydroelectric generating plants, and numerous other power plants throughout the United States. Insull’s public utilities empire, at its height worth more than $3 billion, collapsed in 1932. Insull went to Greece and later to Turkey. He was extradited (1934) to the United States, faced charges (1934-35) of using the mails to defraud investors and embezzlement, but he was acquitted.]
That little blurb is dry pith compared to the juicy Wikipedia article about Insull, which includes tantalizing info about Insull’s much younger wife, a popular Broadway ingénue named Gladys Wallis. The musical version of Insull’s life is called Let There Be Light. The show features maddeningly repetitive synth pop melodies and kicks off with Insull, a handsome British stenographer, typing his way to the top of the British secretarial pool before coming to America to take the helm as Thomas Edison’s personal secretary.
The opening song, Type Your Way To The Top, features dancers dancing on the keys of a giant typewriter, with Insull singing and dancing his way around and over other typists to reach the top of the typewriter from where he walks onto the deck of the ocean liner taking him to America.
Type Your Way To The Top is soon topped by the show’s title song Let There Be Light, a touching duet sung by Insull and Edison as they share the moment the first light bulb goes on. Their happy pas de deux, however, is quickly followed by Edison’s lament He Stabbed Me In The Back when Insull leaves Edison and goes off to conquer Chicago. The songs You Ride You Pay Me and Your Money Or Your Light chronicle Insull’s ruthless exploitation of the electrification and light-bulbing of America.
Oops Went Too Far is a comic-tragic tune and dance number about the collapse of Insull’s vast utilities empire during the Great Depression, with the fast-paced Greece and Turkey Here We Come adding a bit of levity to Insull’s flight abroad.
The show closes with the heart-breaking song sung by Insull’s gorgeous widow He Died In the Paris Subway.
He once owned all Chicago and most of the greater Midwest.
When it came to suits and ties and shoes, he always wore the best.
But nothing was ever enough for him, and eventually he went too far.
He died in the Paris subway, the former electricity czar.
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[Grassman, Hermann Gunther, 1809-77, German mathematician and Sanskrit scholar, educated in Berlin. He invented a new algebra of vectors (somewhat similar to quarternions), presented in his book Die Ausehnungslehre (1844). He composed a translation of the Rig-Veda (1876-77). The linguistic law reformulated (and named for him) holds that in Indo-European bases, especially in Sanskrit and Greek, successive syllables may not begin with aspirates.]
What are aspirates, you ask? “In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents.” As I’m sure you know, an obstruent is a fricative or plosive speech sound. Ah linguistics.
And what better title for the opening song of the hit rap musical Grassman than the bouncy Ah Linguistics sung by young Hermann to his perplexed parents.
Nobody knows what I’m talking about,
which is how I want it to be.
Linguistics is just plosive poo,
oh Mama can’t you see?
Fricative speech is my ticket
to big time fame and renown.
I’ll take those ivory towers by storm
and be the incomprehensible talk of the town.
Other hits from this mind-warping rap opera are built around Grassman’s fathering of eleven children while writing thousands of pages of unintelligible nonsense. Who could ever forget such hit songs as Advanced Tongue Roots, Conjunctive Illocutionary Acts, Deviational Affix, Hierarchical Lexical Relation, and the controversial Homophora Intensifier, with perhaps the best known lyric from the show being the oft-imitated What I didn’t know didn’t matter because matter didn’t know what mattered to not know what didn’t?
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And speaking of sexually suggestive shows, how about another Hamilton? In this case, Lady Emma Hamilton.
[Hamilton, Emma, Lady 1765?-1815, mistress of the British naval hero Horatio Nelson. Born Emma Lyon, she became the mistress of Charles Greville, then of Sir William Hamilton, ambassador to Naples, whom she married (1791). She gained enormous influence with Neapolitan Queen Marie Caroline. Her intimacy with Nelson began in 1798, and after returning to England with him, she bore him a daughter, Horatia, in 1801. Although she received legacies from both her husband and Nelson, Emma died in debt and obscurity. Portraits of her were painted by many of the famous artists of her day, especially George Romney.]
Further research reveals that Emma was more than a renowned beauty. She was a brilliant woman who used her sexual appeal to rise from extreme poverty and illiteracy in England to become a charming erudite hostess occupying the heights of British and European society. Along her way, she transformed herself into a cultural icon and invented a performance art form called Attitudes, in which she posed for audiences as the subject of a classic painting. She lived the high life as long as her wealthy (much older) husband and lover were alive, but when Nelson and Hamilton died, their heirs and friends turned on Emma, and her fall from grace into poverty and drug addiction was swift and tragic.
With songs suspiciously reminiscent of hundreds of other Broadway musical songs, the long-running Lady Emma Hamilton has it all. Gorgeous young British girl uses sex to escape poverty and opens the show with the boffo torch song If You Got It, Use It.
Whilst mistress to a series of wealthy men—recounted in the tell-it-all song Knowing What They Want And Giving It To Them—famous artists paint provocative portraits of Emma to capture her awesome beauty and sex appeal, with the artist George Romney singing the beguiling rhapsody Oh What A Face and the Body That Face Is Attached To.
Emma then moves to Naples to live with soon-to-be-her-hubby Sir William Hamilton, and quickly becomes bosom buddies with Neapolitan Queen Marie Caroline, their sexy duet Daughters of Venus now a ubiquitous erotic feminist anthem. In Naples, Emma becomes renowned as the inventor of the performance form known as Attitudes, and her performing career climaxes with the way-too-sexy Hold That Pose. Thereafter, she hooks up with Horatio Nelson, their love affair summed up by Emma in the show-stopping I’ve Always Liked Men Who Sail (Especially Boats With Guns).
Upon her return to England, Emma has a beautiful daughter and lives a fabulous life until her tragic end, the final song in the show the painfully eloquent Beauty Fades.
When I was young my beauty opened every door
to fame and wealth and love galore.
But beauty fades, believe you me,
hence the word contingency.
Alas I did not save enough for all these rainy days.
And now the piper’s at the door, he’s come to get his pay.
But I am out of beauty, to spend instead of cash.
So he will take the rest of me, and soon I will be ash.
fin