Taking the 5th: David Armstrong’s Argument for the Broadway Musical

The dominant brand of theater in Seattle, touted once as a major drama town, has been name-brand musicals. Musicals have long fueled Broadway’s box office, but the economics have become increasingly problematic, with only about 10 percent breaking even last season. Disney formulas rule Broadway and touring shows. In Seattle, the three theaters doing musicals (Paramount, 5th Ave, and Issaquah’s Village Theater) are now two, with the acquisitive Paramount team coming to the rescue of the long-troubled 5th Ave. 

A key person in this story has been David Armstrong, for 20 years the producing director of 5th Ave. When Armstrong stepped down in 2018, after a 47-year career in theater, he taught Broadway musicals in a popular course at the UW. Now he has turned that experience and his research into a comprehensive and fascinating new book, Broadway Nation, published by Metheun. (An excerpt appeared earlier in Post Alley.)

Armstrong’s book exhibits a massive amount of research and is a handy compendium for the genre of musical theater. It also has a strong, Trump-defying thesis, that Broadway musicals are “created almost entirely by people who were marginalized — immigrants, Jewish, Queer, Black,…and women.”

As such, the book is one long argument, with many convincing examples for taking seriously the American musical, often dismissed as trivial and too commercial but in fact a “uniquely American art form.” Some regard the shows as dated assimilationist sagas, particularly stories such as Oklahoma!. But Armstrong argues that the best of these musicals reflect diverse, rich, and inclusive contemporary culture in meaningful and deep ways.

The book divides Broadway musicals into four distinct periods: The Genesis (1890-1920); the Silver Age (featuring songwriters, 1920-43); the Golden Age (starting with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s lyric-rich Oklahoma! in 1943, to Hair in 1967); and lastly the Modern Era (anchored by choreography, Hamilton, and Stephen Sondheim from 1967 to today).

How did this dominant American art form happen? The main cause was the surge of immigration (with 30 million migrants overwhelming 100 million native stock from 1880-1930). Armstrong traces the important European traditions among these immigrants, particularly operetta (mostly by Jewish composers such as Offenbach), burlesque, and vaudeville (important for Black musicians and dancers).

These heritages gave rise to Tin Pan Alley (28th St. in New York and the age of sheet music), Yiddish Theater (Second Ave. in the lower East Side), ragtime (underground folk music of Midwestern Blacks), and today’s rock music. Most of all, show business provided employment for struggling migrants who wanted to keep alive their European cultures.

The polyglot tradition found a rewarding outlet in broadly popular (because the costs of producing were so high) Broadway musicals, with their mixture of witty lyrics, memorable tunes, stars, and dancing. George M. Cohan, an Irish Catholic song-and-dance man, and Irish-born and classically trained Victor Herbert were the inventors of the musical comedy.

One of the moving aspects of the book traces the linkage of these important artists, as when the 16-year-old George Gershwin first heard at his aunt’s wedding reception Jerome Kern’s “They Didn’t Believe Me” and asked “Who wrote that?” and resolved to be a Broadway tunesmith. Thus was created an American-born art form that was to sweep the world.

Interviewing the author about his book, I asked if that tradition had run dry in this age of spectacle and over-amplified music. Not so, he said, though Broadway is in deep trouble and cities like London (with the economic advantage of government-funded health care) may be the new Broadway. Lower-cost cities like Baltimore are emerging as tryout towns, much as Seattle’s 5th Ave was.

With most of the sure-box-office musicals locked up by the Paramount, 5th Ave Theatre had to reinvent itself as a producing (as well as presenting) theater, which was why Armstrong was hired. For a time, 5th Ave had 30,000 subscribers, a dominating record for the town’s arts, but that number is now much reduced after the covid pandemic and the sour reputation of downtown Seattle.

As part of its agreement with the 5th, Seattle Theatre Group, which runs the Paramount, has access to the 5th’s stage to book shows. Armstrong’s longtime husband, Bill Berry, succeeded Armstrong as artistic director for the 5th Ave.

The Chinese fantasy architecture of the 5th Ave opened as a vaudeville house in 1926, and is built into the UW-owned Skinner Building at 5th Ave. and University St. It was originally intended to anchor the city’s thriving theater district, home to at least eight major live theatre venues in the early 1900s. The University of Washington, born in the downtown district, has a soft spot for the area and helped fund frequent renovations of the old theater.

The major restoration of the 5th in the building we know today (in 1979–80) was funded by a coalition of local business leaders and arts patrons, organized through the non-profit 5th Avenue Theatre Association, which underwrote a $2.6 million loan to save the theatre. This invaluable David Armstrong book makes it come back alive.