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The songwriters’ row was full of grizzled street-smart types. When George Gershwin first popped up on Tin Pan Alley, he instantly stood out. The blowout Act II finale, “Ragtime Opera Medley,” drove the point home: “Aida / We’re gonna chop up your meter / We’re getting tired of you and so / Here’s where we’re going to / Hurdy-gurdy Mister Verdi.” -J.R. It was also, in its polite way, a generational gauntlet-notice served that American popular music had arrived to lay waste to fusty old-world sounds. The show was a smash, launching Berlin’s Broadway career, which would continue into the 1960s. At the center of it all was the superstar husband-and-wife team of Vernon and Irene Castle, who gentrified saucy dance steps like the Grizzly Bear and the Turkey Trot for mainstream consumption. A critic in the New York Dramatic Mirror called Watch Your Step “the noisiest affair I have ever attended” the New York World praised the show for introducing “cow bells, tin pans, squawkers, rattles, and other election-night musical instruments into the modern dance orchestra.” The score showcased Berlin’s range: There were love ballads, minstrel-show numbers, comic novelty songs, and, of course, a lot of dance music. The songwriter’s monster 1911 hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” established ragtime as America’s pop-music lingua franca and earned Berlin the title of “Ragtime King.” Watch Your Step, accordingly, was billed as a “syncopated musical,” a show that brought the rhythms-the racket-that had ignited dance halls across the country to the august Broadway stage. But with Watch Your Step, Berlin sought not only to write New York songs but to represent the city sonically: to make music that sounded like the clangorous, cacophonous metropolis of 1914. Of course, there had been countless shows staged in the city before Broadway had been synonymous with musical theater since the 1830s.
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It was also, you might say, the first New York City musical.
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Watch Your Step was the first musical comedy fully scored by Irving Berlin, the archetypal New York City songwriter. Jolson confessed that he liked to shake his head so that his perspiration doused theatergoers in their seats. -Jody Rosen Jolson’s trademark move-dropping to his knees with arms spread wide-was pure Broadway hokum, but it was also an erotic gesture and a supplication: an attempt to collapse distance, to smash the fourth wall, to literally reach the audience. He bragged to reporters that he ran the equivalent of a marathon in a typical performance. His vocal athleticism was matched by a feverish physical presence. But Jolson also specialized in vocal effects: slurred phrases, sobs, stretched vowels, horselike whinnying, and abrupt changes in register, moving manically from full-throated belting to talk-singing and back again. His style was about volume and intensity first in those days before the microphone, you had to project to reach the cheap seats. His art expressed itself in extremes: high decibels, outsize gestures, madcap comedy, grotesque gesticulations, torrents of schmaltz. Jolson was a dynamo like few performers before or since. Today, we rightly recoil from blackface-but our aversion to the minstrelsy should not cause us to mistake the genius of this minstrel. The Winter Garden was a “classy” uptown venue-but, as usual, Jolson brought the house down with an act that retained the grit and funk of the downtown Rialto, singing fanatically sentimental songs behind a mask of garish burned cork. Sinbad was the Al Jolson Show, and in 1918, Jolson was at the height of his superstardom, the most popular singer on the planet. The plot, the staging-none of it really mattered. That year, the vehicle was Sinbad, a dopey musical retelling of the Arabian Nights that involved Long Island socialites, a crystal ball, and a bunch of elaborately Orientalist song-and-dance numbers. Jolson had been making box-office-breaking runs at the venue for nearly a decade. and Lee Shubert, installed a ramp that ran down the center of the aisle so he could get right next to the audience. In 1918, when Al Jolson was booked to perform at the Winter Garden on Broadway between 50th and 51st Streets, the theater’s owners, J.