The title of Jake Johnson’s latest book—Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America—is more than a bit jarring.
It’s that part about “Musicals and Mourning” that seems so odd. After all, musicals, in “Midcentury America,” tended to be upbeat, rousing affairs with wide smiles and happy tears. Indeed, Johnson, a musicology professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of other books looking at the link between American entertainment and culture, acknowledges that musicals of the 1960s “seem to have so little to say about grief.” And he goes on:
And what they do have to say about suffering or chaos or pain may appear to us on the whole as unhelpfully tidy. The musicals common to film and television of this time are often characterized as escapist fantasies, ebullient apologists for happy endings. Musicals show us how to keep grief at bay. Don’t they?
Well, no, it turns out. When you know what to look for in these musicals—as Johnson does—you can find dark and profound grief, operating just below the surface.
And, although these musicals date from half a century ago, Johnson argues they have much to say about the present moment in American culture.
In his book, published by the University of Illinois Press, Johnson frames five chapters around the five stages of grief identified by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her landmark 1969 book On Death and Dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
The musicals Johnson looks at are those he identifies as “unstaged” musicals—that is, ones that weren’t written originally for the stage. These were produced directly for the theater screen or the television screen. They weren't like a Broadway play in which the audience and the actors are in the same place at the same time. In unstaged musicals, as Johnson defines them, the viewer is more distant from the actors in terms of time and geography and, through the camera, right up in the midst of the action.
Whether screened in movie houses or broadcast through televisions into living rooms across America, screen musicals of this era capture the often-unspoken sadness of watching history steal away the world as it is and waiting in anticipation for whatever new beast was slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. They grieve the end of a world.
This was the moment in American history when the can-do spirit of confidence and optimism that had gotten the nation through the '40s and '50s—through World War II and the postwar period—was to run out of steam.
Or, better put, to be pushed aside by the revolution of youth power, consumerism, guiltless sex, civil rights, feminism and individualism. Or, even better put, blown to smithereens as all the certainties on which American life had seemed to be based became a kind of psychic shrapnel.
This was the moment in American history when the can-do spirit of confidence and optimism that had gotten the nation through the forties and fifties — through World War II and the Post-War period — was to run out of steam.
Five Films
Each of Johnson’s chapters has one unstaged musical as a focus and as a jumping-off point to other theatrical productions, art works and historical events:
- First stage: Denial and Isolation—Chapter 1, “Frozen Figures,” is centered on Stephen Sondheim’s one-night-only television musical Evening Primrose (November 16, 1966) in which “a community of social nihilists…live in a department store by night and hide in plain sight as mannequins by day.” Seeking to escape a world in the midst of great change, the central figure, a poet named Charles Snell, “wants to build a new one by recreating the old one.”
- Second stage: Anger—Chapter 2, “Sobbin’ Men,” hinges on the theatrical movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), a modern take on the Roman legend of the Rape of the Sabine Women. Ostracized by the town, six unmarried brothers abduct and hold—in a separate building (it is the 50s after all)—six young women through a long winter. The seventh brother is already married. “The inability of the townspeople to recognize their role in making the brothers estranged and lonely,” writes Johnson, “turns the tables on the story and makes them the villains.” It is a story of outsiders in an American culture that pretends there is no one marginalized.
- Third stage: Bargaining—Chapter 3, “Dead God,” is focused on the film musical The Singing Nun (1966), based on the life of Jeannine Deckers, a religious sister whose folk-singing won her international acclaim. At the end of the musical, starring Debbie Reynolds, Sister Ann bargains with God, promising to give up her musical career in order to save the life of a boy named Dominic. Arriving the same year as the Time magazine cover “Is God Dead?” this musical tries to find a way to bridge the growing gap between a world in which religious faith was a pillar and one in which faith in anything is suspect.
- Fourth Stage: Depression—Chapter 4, “Good Grief,” revolves around the 1962 remake of State Fair, the only Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II musical written directly for film (1945). Behind the movie’s “gossamer and thin lace of rural nostalgia,” Johnson finds “a deeply philosophical and existential question: What sadness awaits us when we get everything we want?” In the 1960s, the United States, still full of pride and swagger for leading the victory in World War II, was the dominant nation and culture in the world. And yet….
- Fifth Stage: Acceptance—Chapter 5, “Deus Ex Machina,” looks closely at Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), a “likable musical about enchanted cars, lonely fathers, and the shaky line between who we are and what we might become.” Johnson notes that, like the much more somber and sober To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and the warm-hearted The Sound of Music (1965), Chitty is one of many films of the era about a father grieving the loss of his wife, even if this loss is often buried deep in the background. In Chitty, though, it’s a magical machine that substitutes for the wife and brings the father out of his mourning. It is a message that seems to say: In the increasingly mechanized world, embrace the new machines rather than fear them.
It’s important to note that Johnson doesn’t use the Kübler-Ross stages of grief in any hard-and-fast fashion. Indeed, he notes in an introduction that he has approached this book with rigorous scholarship but also in the spirit of poetry:
The spill and spread of ideas in this book occupy an immense and wild territory that I had to learn how to navigate using unusual and unproven tools and that you, in turn, are invited to pick up and handle and make a thing from yourself.
Most Plaintive Moment
Unstaged Grief is a book that flows from one subject to another, from one idea to another.
For instance, before getting to the magic car as savior in Chitty, Johnson looks at two machines fueling cultural dread in the 1960s. One is the renegade computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the other, it's thermonuclear war as illustrated in what's called the "Daisy" commercial. This was the famous 1964 election-eve television ad by the Democrats showing a young girl in a garden of daisies, picking petals off a stem. Suddenly, the camera zooms in to her iris which is filled with an exploding mushroom cloud, a suggestion that Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater would be likely to start a nuclear war.
Johnson’s discussion of the six outcast brothers notes how their plight echoes the experience of Korean War veterans who, returning to the US, found a nation and a culture that wanted to forget the conflict—and those who fought in it. His examination of State Fair brings in the 1962 television series The Beverly Hillbillies and the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Perhaps the most plaintive moment in this plaintive book comes in Johnson’s discussion of State Fair and the yearning, uncertain, dissatisfied Frakes family at the center of it—father, mother, son and daughter.
In the 1945 original, Melissa Frake, the mother and winner of state fair blue ribbons for her cooking for years, is given a special plaque for her mincemeat and says to a friend: “I’ve got the most a woman can get in life, Margy. If I think any more about it, I’ll cry.”
It is a sad situation, indeed, to be living a life of great success, yet great emptiness as well.
The Frakes are unsettled. They have everything they want and yet want something more. The grief of having everything you could ever need to want feels like the unnamed grief slouching the shoulders of so many Americans today. If you think more about it, you might cry too.
“The Unnamed Grief of So Many Americans Today”
Those sentences go to the heart of Johnson’s book. This is a look back at the 1960s when great changes were underway and great sadness was felt but unexpressed.
This is also a book that raises questions about the mourning at the heart of our present age when the nation is undergoing a massive realignment, a profound reorganization, a head-spinning redefinition.
This is also a book that raises questions about the mourning at the heart of our present age when the nation is undergoing a massive realignment, a profound reorganization, a head-spinning redefinition.
“If there was ever a time when unstaged musicals of the midcentury mattered, that time may be now, at the end of the world as we once believed it to be,” Johnson writes. And, in the final pages of the book, he goes on:
Look around you. The chaos and confusion sure to come at the end of a world can so easily breed nihilism, cynicism, irony, and disbelief. It’s a wonder any of us, let alone musicals, survive such a harsh climate.
Yet, musicals are thriving. And Johnson notes that Kubler-Ross focused her final chapter on hope: “Hope has no stage in the grieving process because it’s there all along—unstaged, you might say.” And he concludes:
Musicals are shows about hope because they are also shows about grief….How lucky a life to have reason to hope, and how rich a world that can witness hope in places both staged and unstaged.
Our story ends, then, with an invitation that musicals offer us all: a chance to fold both grief and hope into a shape we can call a new world.
Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America is available at bookstores and through the University of Illinois Press website.
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