I didn’t know what a bunny hug is, nor its place in musical theater history, and I couldn’t precisely describe a surrey, before I browsed Thomas S. Hischak’s “Broadway Decoded: Musical Theatre’s Forgotten References” (Applause Books, 314 pages.) The book, with a seductive if somewhat misleadingly grandiose title, is a selective glossary for fifty of the most-revived American musicals, ranging chronologically from ‘Show Boat” (1927, with sixteen entries, including “Chicago World’s Fair” and “demi-mondy role”) to “Shrek” (2010, also sixteen entries, from “Angela’s Ashes” to “yin and yang…Sturm und Drang… Eng and Chang”), although the book is arranged alphabetically, from “Annie” (37 entries) to “Wonderful Town” (51!)
Hischak, an author of more than forty books on theater, film and popular music, chooses to define in each musical what he apparently surmises the average theatergoer is least likely to know. But what theatergoer would need, for example, the entries on Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon and Franklin Roosevelt in the chapter on “Assassins”?
And did the precise description of a surrey — “a light, four-wheeled carriage with two seats facing forward” that was first made in Surrey, England, etc. –really increase my enjoyment of the song “A Surrey with a Fringe on Top” from “Oklahoma!”
Yet, if it’s not clear how useful “Broadway Decoded” is, it can be entertaining.
“Bunny hug” is a 1920s dance to ragtime music that the author describes at some length – and repeatedly, since it’s featured in three different musicals, ‘Mame,” “Wonderful Town” and ‘Chicago”
And, if I already knew what “yin and yang” and “Sturm und Drang” meant, I didn’t remember that Eng and Chang were the names of the famous conjoined “Siamese twins,” and I hadn’t registered the lyrics of the Shrek song “Don’t Let Me Go,” in which Donkey sings to Shrek “You and me, we belong together….Like yin and yang, Sturm und Drung, Eng and Chang, attached at the hip.”
Given that “Chicago” is the only one of the musicals in the book that’s currently on Broadway, here is the list that the author selected to explain (three of which I didn’t know already or couldn’t figure out)
Bunny hug
Cellophane
Deuce
Father Dip (a nickname for trumpeter Louis Armstrong)
Finagle
Flasks
Flim flam flummox (mixing two slang expressions – flim flam is a swindle, flummox is to confuse)
Garters break…shimmy shake
Jazzing
Lavaliere
Leopold and Loeb
Lucky Lindy
Marshall Field
Matron
Methuselah
Packard cars
Palace
Princeton crew
Ragout
Silk cravats…ruby studs…satin spats
Sob sister
Sophie Tucker
United Drug
Vanderbilt
Vaudeville
William Morris
The chapter on “Cabaret,“ a revival of which is opening on Broadway in April, has only a dozen entries used in the show, but these include some German and Yiddish words I didn’t know.
And, amid all those entries in “Annie,” there is a description of Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood in midtown Manhattan that was originally called Hale’s Kitchen, after a restaurant there, because this poor neighborhood was where the very rich Warbucks grew up. It is now the name of a new musical by Alicia Keys, also opening on Broadway in April, because that’s where she grew up
