The Racial Politics of Bernstein’s On the Town (1944)

Lecture I: An Integrated Cast in a Segregated AmericaThursday, April 7, 4 p.m., Karl Geiringer Hall (Music 1250)
On the Town (1944) was the first Broadway show of Leonard Bernstein (music), Betty Comden and Adolph Green (book and lyrics), and Jerome Robbins (choreography). It featured three sailors enjoying a one-day leave in New York City, and it did so in the midst of WWII, when the U.S. military remained firmly but contentiously segregated. A number of African Americans performed in the show’s otherwise all-white cast. Black male dancers donned sailor uniforms, and black women danced hand-in-hand with white men. This lecture explores the transgressive message and silent-but-powerful political back-story of this now-forgotten racial landmark.

Lecture II: A Japanese-American Star on Broadway during WWII
Friday, April 8, 4 p.m., Karl Geiringer Hall (Music 1250)
At the same time as On the Town contributed a chapter to the Long Civil Rights movement, it also challenged the virtual exclusion of Asians from Broadway by hiring the dancer Sono Osato as the show’s star. On the day after Pearl Harbor, Osato’s father had been arrested as an “alien enemy” and he remained on parole in Chicago when the show opened. This lecture explores the cultural complexities of Osato’s presence in On the Town .

Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard and on the faculty of its Program in the History of American Civilization. Her Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s won the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. Other titles include Copland and his World (co-edited with Judith Tick) and Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds . She is past-president of the Society for American Music, and she is completing a book tentatively titled Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War .

These lectures are sponsored by the UCSB Department of Music.

jwil 28.iii.2011