theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Board members and play selection committees, consider Terry Teachout’s Top 15 pre-1970 (pre-Company) American musical comedies.
As far as most theatergoers are concerned, modern musical comedy starts with Oklahoma! [Rogers and Hammerstein, 1943] It’s effective to the point of infallibility—even amateurs can make it work—though the 1955 wide-screen film version is more than a little bit overblown. If you know only the movie, you’ll be surprised by how much more touching Oklahoma! is on stage.
Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of undeviating rows, and the stranger who sweatily trudges the corn-walled roads is lost and nervous with the sense of merciless growth.
Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.
With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no less brisk. There is one large hotel to compete with the dozen in Zenith, but that one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly modern as its owner can make it. The only authentic difference between Nautilus and Zenith is that in both cases all the streets look alike but in Nautilus they do not look alike for so many miles.
—Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, chap. 19