'Babes in Arms': A Study in Depression-Era Childhood

Julianne Lindberg is an Associate Professor of Musicology in the Department of Music at the University of Nevada, Reno, whose research interests include American musical theater, musical modernism, and children's musical cultures, with a focus on musical and theatrical articulations of gender, race, age and class in musicals of the pre-WWII era. She recently completed a short-term fellowship at the Library for the Performing Arts researching the Broadway musical Babes in Arms as part of her ongoing research for a scholarly article.

Anyone with a love for Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s songbook should be familiar with their score from Babes in Arms from 1937—featuring hits like “My Funny Valentine,” “Where or When,” and “The Lady is a Tramp”—although the specifics of the original script have been largely forgotten. While a few members of the cast went on to lead successful careers on Broadway and beyond (including Mitzi Green, Alfred Drake, and The Nicholas Brothers), most of the cast remains relatively unknown. NYPL’s holdings, however, bring to life a vibrant production best-known for its fresh-faced, youthful exuberance. I accessed the Library for the Performing Arts’ invaluable scripts, photos, production materials, and interviews related to the original production of Babes in Arms, and other materials to better understand the impact children had on Broadway during the 1930s.

The Library’s Dwight Deere Wiman Papers in the Billy Rose Theatre Division were particularly insightful and include production files for each of the shows he produced. Wiman worked with Rodgers and Hart on On Your Toes (1936), and after Babes in Arms would go on to produce I Married an Angel (1938), Higher and Higher (1940), and By Jupiter (1942). The file for Babes in Arms includes a mimeographed script of the show (authored by Rodgers and Hart), production stills, published sheet music, press releases, and press books. The clippings contained in Wiman’s papers were useful in reconstructing the casting process: the original chorus call required that applicants be 20 or under and proficient in tap or ballet, the two dance modes featured in the show. Rodgers and Hart purportedly auditioned over 2,000 hopefuls and selected young people of various performance backgrounds, including work in radio, vaudeville, and summer stock productions.

Since the original script was never published, the script contained in Wiman’s papers is a particularly important resource, especially as more readily available adaptations of the show (including the 1939 film featuring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney) radically alter the original script. The original production’s political critique has been largely forgotten and directly relates to how Rodgers and Hart saw childhood and adolescence as a kind of society in miniature. 

Take a passage, for instance, from the original script. In Act I, Scene III, the kids, who have been left to fend for themselves after their vaudevillian parents temporarily abandon them at an artist’s colony, debate how they should govern themselves in the absence of adults. The character Peter advocates for a communist system where “nobody should own anything.” The character Lee, the “son of a rich Southern Colonel,” advocates for an oligarchy of wealthy elites. Gus (“a forceful friend of the sheriff’s”) advocates for a fascist dictatorship. Our lead male character Val—the closest proxy to a New Deal liberal and the obvious stand-in for Rodgers and Hart’s own beliefs— proposes that each system has its merits and becomes the de facto leader of the group. 

The script also highlights a secondary plot featuring the DeQuincy brothers, two African American adolescents who are friends with the bigoted Lee Calhoun’s younger brother Beauregarde. The DeQuincy brothers were played by Fayard and Harold Nicholas—known professionally as the Nicholas Brothers, and were added to the cast only after the Boston tryouts in March of 1937. The Jerome Robbins Dance Division’s Popular Balanchine Dossiers include transcripts of an interview with Fayard Nicholas (as well as transcripts of oral history interviews with Georgia Hiden and Marjorie Jane, both cast members in the original production). 

As Nicholas tells it, George Balanchine—who was choreographing his second show with Rodgers and Hart, after the success of On Your Toes—asked that Leroy James and Kenneth Wilkins, two young African American boys, be replaced by the Nicholas Brothers. James and Wilkins remained in the show, but their parts were greatly reduced. By all accounts, the Nicholas Brothers added spectacular virtuosity to the show. Their parts were also central to the show’s progressive ethos—the main conflict of the show concerns whether or not the brothers will be allowed to perform in the show, against the wishes of the racist kid-producer Lee Calhoun. 

The Nicholas Brothers' specialty dance number was titled "All Dark People is Light on Their Feet." This song, though a showstopper, angered many members of the Nicholas family. Fayard recalled that he "hated it […] with all those wonderful songs in the show, that one got nowhere.” The boys’ mother, Viola Nicholas, was particularly upset at "the grammatical construction of the line 'All dark people is,' because it fed the conception" of Black people "as ignorant and unable to speak proper English." According to Nicholas, their mother "never allowed us to use dialect in movies or onstage." The number was, however, a hit. Their featured part in the "Johnny One Note" production number (with Wynn Murray on lead vocals) also proved to be popular—Balanchine had imagined it as an Egyptian ballet with DIY costumes, including mops as headpieces. 

Both of these scenarios were cut from the much more available rewrite of the script by George Oppenheimer in 1959, which eliminates most of the Depression-era political critique of the original. The Theatre Division holds the George Oppenheimer writings, which include a copy of the script with Oppenheimer’s annotations. A penciled note on the first page of Act I, Scene I reveals just how much Oppenheimer wanted to avoid any political overtones in his version of the show (which, incidentally, Rodgers supervised): "No longhair descript. of kids—time of innocence—no demonstrations or hippies or yuppies—they [sic] only thing they blew up were balloons.

One of the more surprising—and rewarding—aspects of my time at the Library was the discovery of other collections and materials dealing with children and childhood on Broadway in the 1930s. A felicitous find of a line from the above-mentioned interview with Marjorie Jane, who was one of the dancers in the original production of Babes in Arms, led me down a rabbit hole to collections previously unknown to me.

Jane mentions that during the run of the show, she completed schoolwork by correspondence with The Professional Children’s School, a still-active school that catered to children involved in the arts and other fields whose schedules prohibit attendance during regular school hours. The Library holds a file of clippings and other assorted material related to the Professional Children’s School, which led me to an abundance of material related to child actors and the stage. These collections include the King-Coit School and Children’s Theatre papers, a clippings file on Children as Actors, and three archival collections concerning the performing careers (and in the case of the first, the child labor advocacy activities) of Francis Wilson, John Grattan, and Jackie Kelk. 

These sources have helped me form a clearer picture of what it was like to be a child on stage when ideas about children and childhood had begun to shift. This shift was brought on in part by compulsory schooling, established in the 1910s and more widely enforced by the 1930s, and the cultural impact of decades-long efforts to establish and enforce child labor practices and eventually laws (Francis Wilson, mentioned above, was a strong voice in favor of child actors being exempt from such labor laws). 

Beyond an in-depth exploration of production materials from Babes in Arms, my time at the Library for the Performing Arts has helped me better understand the complexities between notions of work and play, industry and entertainment, and the liminal space between the categories of "adult" and "child" operating in and around Depression-era Broadway.