Looking back on his 1940 hit with Lorenz Hart, Pal Joey, the composer Richard Rodgers judged that this was the work that “forced the entire musical comedy theater to wear long pants for the first time.” Is that really true? The standard historical line has it that the American musical started with pure froth and frivolity in the 1920s (Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, the Gershwins, Vincent Youmans, etc.), interpolated more sophisticated material during the course of the 1940s (Pal Joey, South Pacific, etc.), and finally came of age with Stephen Sondheim’s dark, ambivalent, thoroughly adult mid-career works such as Company and Follies.

This potted history is an extreme simplification, and only partly correct. Early musicals were never quite as silly as they are made out to be, and contemporary ones are not all that sophisticated. Musicals after all have been dealing with “serious” material since before Sondheim was born: Kern and Hammerstein’s classic Show Boat (1927) highlighted racial prejudice and miscegenation (though South Pacific is widely credited with introducing those themes to the Broadway musical); The Jazz Singer (also 1927), the first Hollywood musical, brought the lure of popular culture to bear against the opposed values of Jewish tradition. A look at the new musicals on Broadway today should put paid to the notion that the genre is much more sophisticated now than it ever was: In the Heights, Jersey Boys, Billy Elliott, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid