Jun 19, 2026

The Middlebrow Musical

Between Broadway and Opera in 1940s America

James O'Leary

Hosted by Kristen Turner

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Summary

The premiere of Oklahoma! in 1943 is commonly called a “turning point” in the history of the Broadway musical. Often characterized as the first integrated musical―meaning that the songs and other elements of the show are integrated into the story―James O’Leary offers a different interpretation of Oklahoma! and other musicals at the beginning of Broadway’s Golden Age in The Middlebrow Musical: Between Broadway and Opera in 1940s America (Oxford University Press, 2025). Contextualizing his discussion within debates among US critics, O’Leary argues that the negotiation between operatic and popular music, and between frothy comedy and more serious themes mark the musicals he analyzes as examples of the middlebrow. Through detailed archival work, O’Leary uncovers the crucial critical networks that originally theorized a middlebrow approach to culture, beginning in the literary circles of Van Wyck Brooks and Archibald MacLeish, and radiating outward to major theater and music critics including Brooks Atkinson and Olin Downes. These writers believed American culture had splintered into factions, which in turn divided American audiences: highbrow art, which they regarded as obscure and elitist; folk art, which they found provincial and alienating; and popular culture, which they considered merely commercial. Blending these kinds of art, they argued, could draw together a fractured society into mutual understanding (if not necessarily agreement) by situating the most sophisticated ideas within longstanding expressive traditions, accessible to all. O’Leary finds in Oklahoma!, Beggar’s Holiday, and Street Scene a new kind of musical comedy that embraced American politics and weighty stories in ways not seen before 1943.

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Kristen Turner

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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