Today’s “Saturday List” year, 1953, was full of events that populate history books around the globe. March marked the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, while Tenzing Norgay conquered Mount Everest with Edmund Hilary in tow in May. Days later, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain was crowned. The month after the coronation saw the end of the Korean War, with Korean Armistice Agreement being signed. And a month after that, the USSR exploded a hydrogen bomb. At the movies, two musicals, one animated and one live-action, would appear in the list of the year’s top-grossing films: Peter Pan and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. When it came to pop music, Patti Page sang about “The Doggie in the Window,” but 1953’s most significant release catapulted a wilder canine, “Hound Dog,” to fame, with Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton having recorded the song the previous year. To wit, the word “frenemy” was first coined by Walter Winchell in 1953 as a proposed way of describing the relationship between the Americans and the Russians.  

1. The Award Winners for Best Musical

1953 is one of those years that yielded two Tony Award winners for what was then called the year’s “Outstanding Musical.” At the seventh Tony Awards, Wonderful Town took home the prize, with Kismet following in its footsteps the next year. When Michael Ball appeared in the latter in a 2007 revival for the English National Opera, he said, “It was like being in a cross between Springtime for Hitler and Carry on Camel.” While this perhaps spoke more to the production than the show itself, Kismet is very much a show of its time rather than one for the ages. So let’s move swiftly onwards to discuss it as the most overrated musical of the year.

2. Most Overrated

People probably talk about Kismet less than they should. For the most part, it is accepted for what it is: a spectacular operetta from the 1950s with some fine music, remembered fondly by many who have performed in it and by a certain type of musical theatre fan. The questions about what it isn’t, an authentic depiction of Islamic culture in the so-called Islamic Golden Age, aren’t asked often enough. And when they are, that certain type of musical theatre fan springs to the show’s defence, more often than not using the context in which the musical was made as the basis for their argument, all the while forgetting that a new theatre production of Kismet would not be playing the Ziegfeld Theatre seven decades ago. Based on a 1911 play by Edward Knoblock, the book of the musical was crafted by Charles Lederer and Luther Davis, with George Forrest and Robert Wright setting lyrics to music they had adapted from Alexander Borodin. In the way that Kismet is peopled, the audience is presented with a homogenous community, which consequently doesn’t undermine any racial, religious or cultural identity from a narrative standpoint. The problem is that this community could really exist anywhere in the world. What specificities of race, religion or culture are present are simply functions of the setting. Consider, for example, how simply everything was transposed to Timbuktu! in the 1970s, an adaptation of Kismet set in Mali rather than Iraq. Kismet is an example of pure Orientalism, an aesthetic imitation of – in this case – the Middle East for a Western audience by Western artists. Taking Kismet at face value is like giving Antoine Galland credit for The Arabian Nights rather than acknowledging the expansive, rich and complex cultural history in which One Thousand and One Nights was created.

3. Most Underrated

1953 is full of musicals with a couple of great songs that are otherwise largely forgettable. There’s Hazel Flagg, in which Jule Styne showcases a few jaunty tunes set to lyrics by Bob Hilliard in a book by James H. Street, and Can-Can, a long-running show with a much-maligned Cole Porter score and a dull book by Abe Burrows. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein churned out Me and Juliet in the hope of producing a musical comedy throwback to the days of Rodgers’s collaboration with Lorenz Hart, while Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Burke and Preston Sturges turned a delicate French pâtisserie into some kind of heavy American cake when creating Carnival in Flanders. It seems almost ridiculous to name the show of 1953 that ran longer than any other Broadway musical that debuted that season, but that’s where we are with Can-Can. The success of Can-Can was largely attributed to two people: Michael Kidd, the choreographer, and Gwen Verdon, who played Can-Can dancer Claudine, both of whom took home Tony Awards for their work on the show. Certainly, his steps and her performance were by all accounts the strongest elements in an otherwise mediocre affair, with Burrows drawing criticism for his dated book and Porter taking hits for songs that fell short of his usual brilliance. But hindsight is 20/20 and even this rather pedestrian show stands out when measured against its peers. It may not be a great show, but it is a solid one. Sometimes, all you have to be is the best of the rest.

4. Hidden Gem 

Well, it’s not Hazel Flagg. For me, the hidden gem of the year is John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, a revue that closed out the year on Broadway. There is something absolutely charming about this collection of sketches and songs, some of which were written by the team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross who would go on to create back-to-back hits in the following two years with The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. The show had a fantastic cast, including Hermione Gingold – whose delivery of “Which Witch” might alone have been worth the price of admission – as well as Harry Belafonte – who wrote some additional material for the show in addition to taking great strides forward in establishing his career. Throw in a couple of delightful ditties like “When Am I Going to Meet Your Mother?” and “You’re So Much a Part of Me” and you’re home free.

5. Show of the Year

My heart says The Boy Friend, which premiered in the United Kingdom in 1953, but my head says Wonderful Town. On the one hand, Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend is a perfectly crafted show that knows exactly what it is. On the other, Joseph A. Fields, Jerome Chodorov, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town is an ambitious and sprawling piece that aims for the stars. Each has its joys. The Boy Friend is best when it stays true to its size and style. Any attempt to pump it up into a big flashy production is doomed to fail. The show just buckles under that kind of aesthetic distortion. Every song is joyous and the book wittily careers from situation to situation. It looks backwards, with love and joy. Wonderful Town looks forward, pulsating with the energy of its New York setting. Like the city itself, there is a lot of noise which the score’s gorgeously structured character pieces cut through. Was plaintiveness ever as appealing as in “Ohio?” Was there ever a love song as enveloping as “A Little Bit in Love?” And that’s before we even unpack the joys of “What a Waste” or “Conversation Piece.” It’s a giddy joy from start to finish.

Looking back at 1953, it’s clear that this was no great year for musicals. There are really only two shows that have stood the test of time, a third that has endured despite itself, and a host of shows that struggled to fulfil the visions of their respective creators. Are we in any better a position 70 years later? Looking back at last month’s Tony Awards and at what is planned to open in the next few months, perhaps not. In time, we may find that the musicals of 2023 feel very much the same to us as those considered in this column today.