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Urban Space and the Origins of the Musical

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New York City and the Hollywood Musical

Part of the book series: Screening Spaces ((SCSP))

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Abstract

This chapter examines the relationship between early Hollywood musicals and New York City, with case studies including Sunnyside Up, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, Swing Time and On the Avenue. Shearer argues firstly that the musical emphasized New York’s iconicity and desirability, which served to rationalize the city’s prominence in the genre. Secondly, she situates the musical’s representation of New York in the 1930s in the context of the impact of the Depression on both the city and Hollywood. She argues that after a brief fall from favour in the early 1930s, the musical re-emerged as a form dedicated to negotiating anxieties about the Depression’s spatial disruptions, representing New York as ordered, rational, harmonious and beautiful.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I discuss the relationship between Broadway and the Hollywood musical in the late 1920s and, especially, the 1930s in detail in Chapter 5.

  2. 2.

    Many German Americans had settled there from Kleindeutschland east of the Bowery, moving in the wake of the devastation of the General Slocum boating disaster in 1904, when numerous residents of Kleindeutschland had lost their lives.

  3. 3.

    Cross-class romances were common in 1930s Hollywood cinema (Sharot 2013, 2015), but the musical placed particular emphasis on the role of performance in class boundary crossings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College London, London, UK

    Martha Shearer

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  1. Martha Shearer
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Shearer, M. (2016). Urban Space and the Origins of the Musical. In: New York City and the Hollywood Musical. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56937-0_2

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