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Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black artists invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process.

I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode "Agnes DeMille and the Women Who InventedBroadway Part 2."

In a previous episode, we explored how three late 19th-century comedy teams, the Irish Americans Harrigan and Hart, the Jewish Americans Weber and Fields, and the African Americans Williams and Walker, all simultaneously created shows that were early, embryonic, not quite yet musicals.

But prior to all of them was a woman named Lydia Thompson, who would be equally instrumental in inspiring this new, soon-to-be art form.

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Lydia Thompson was an English dancer, singer, actress, director, and producer who formed her own troupe of performers that she called “Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes.” When she first brought them to New York in 1863, she and her troupe quickly became a sensation.

The shows that she presented were burlesques in the original form of that term. Irreverent spoofs of popular, serious, high-culture novels, plays, poems, operas, myths, and legends such as Faust, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, St. George and the Dragon, and Robin Hood. All of them were presented in ridiculous versions, filled with puns, wordplay, slapstick comedy, songs, dances, and general nonsense.

And Lydia smartly added a heavy dollop of sex to the mix. Her shows were quite racy for the time, including sexual innuendo and dozens of women who often played the male roles wearing skimpy costumes and displaying their legs in tights.

You have to keep in mind that this was still the Victorian era when proper women went to great lengths to hide their bodies under bustles, hoops, and layers of fabric, and when even the legs of tables and pianos were draped so that they would appear less provocative. So the idea of young ladies appearing onstage in form-fitting costumes was truly shocking.

The eventual evolution of satirical burlesques shows into sexy girly shows began here with Lydia, but it would be decades later before the striptease acts that became synonymous with the term burlesque were introduced.

According to all reports, Lydia was a highly skilled and wonderfully captivating performer. One critic described her like this. "Ms. Thompson breathes life into everything she does. She's charming to look at, a good singer, a really clever dancer, and the life and soul of every scene."

Lydia specialized in playing the leading male roles: the swashbuckling, romantic heroes of legendary tales, and often her entire troupe of British blondes would follow her into battle dressed as sexy soldiers and marching in military drills.

This seems to have given birth to the now-classic showbiz concept of chorus lines of girls dressed in tights and executing precision choreography. There'd be no Rockettes without Lydia.

The music in her shows was a pre-copyright era hodgepodge of tunes borrowed from classical music operas and operettas, folk songs, popular songs, and marches. The ‘Top 40’ of its day, and often fitted out with new lyrics created specifically for the story at hand.

As one critic of the day noted, "The music is taken from all quarters. Often Bach’s lively airs are liberally used, and the latest popular songs are introduced freely. The dances, especially one that resembles very much the walk-around of the Negro Minstrels, are all comical and the ensembles delightfully absurd."

Her unique combination of comedy, parody, satire, improvisation, song and dance, cross-dressing, extravagant stage effects, risque jokes, and saucy costumes took New York by storm.

It also inspired fierce criticism from the conservative establishment, who condemned her for going far beyond what they considered to be the boundaries of decency.

Others were more disturbed by the presumption of a woman who had the audacity to swagger boldly about the stage, acting like a man. The historian John Kenrick described the effect ofLydia's shows like this:

“Underdressed women, playing sexual aggressors, combining good looks within pertinent comedy and in a production written and managed by a woman, unthinkable. No wonder men and adventurous wives turned out in droves, making Thompson and her British Blondes the hottest thing in American show business.”

Thompson's first season in New York played to standing room only and grossed over $370,000.Over the next five years between 1868 and 1873, Lydia and her troupe brought 17 productions to Broadway. Many of them produced by, directed by and starring Lydia herself.

In between, she took her troupe on cross-country tours of America, going as far as Seattle. Everywhere they went, they were met with the same enthusiastic reception, as well as a lot of fierce disapproval.

After all, Lydia Thompson represented a new kind of independent woman that had seldom been seen before.

Lydia's shows were, of course, only precursors to the musical, but they had a huge influence on this emerging form and the other powerful women who would help to invent it.

Clearly following in the dancing footsteps of Lydia Thompson are three early inventors of the Broadway musical: Aida Overton Walker, Gertrude Hoffman, and Albertina Rausch.

I profiled Aida Overton Walker in my episode on the African American Creators, but it's important to acknowledge her here as well. Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1880, her family moved to New York during her childhood, where she received considerable musical training and education.

While still a teenager, she joined Black Patti's Troubadours, where she met her soon-to-be husband, George Walker.

She became an acclaimed actress, singer, and especially dancer, often billed as the queen of the cakewalk. And most importantly for our purposes, she was also a gifted choreographer.

She created innovative dances for Williams and Walker's hit Vaudeville act and became Broadway's first female African American choreographer when she created the dances for the musicals In Dahomey, Abyssinia, and Bandana Land.

It is said that her original dances broke away from the traditions of the minstrel show and offered a new and more positive view of Black people.

Tragically, she died of kidney failure in 1914 when she was only 34 years old.

Gertrude Hoffman designed the dances for 15 Broadway shows between 1903 and 1927.

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She was born in San Francisco in 1883, the daughter of Irish immigrants. She danced in Vaudeville and created her own scandalous controversy with a sexy dance called “A Vision of Salome,” in which she portrayed the biblical temptress. After a performance at Hammerstein's Victoria, she was arrested for offending public decency, but the judge threw the case out based on Hoffman's very reasonable defense that she had already performed the dance over 400 times previously without being arrested.

After dancing in several early Broadway musicals, she formed her own troupe, the Gertrude Hoffman Girls, who performed her very athletic, acrobatic choreography, including leaps, kicks, and even aerial gymnastics in shows around the world, including the sexy Shubert Brothers revues, Artist and Models, A Night in Paris, and A Night in Spain.

The amazing Albertina Rausch was an Austrian Jewish immigrant who choreographed 33 Broadway shows, including many of the biggest hits of the 1920s and 30s.

Born in Vienna in 1891 to a Polish Jewish mother and a Russian father, she began studying at Vienna's Imperial Ballet when she was just seven years old, and she joined the company as a professional dancer while she was still in her teens.

She was brought to New York in 1909 when she was just 18 years old to be a leading dancer at the gigantic Hippodrome Theatre, which, with 5,000 seats, was purported to be the largest theater in the world and was known for its spectacular productions.

After dancing for various companies and shows in New York and across Europe, she opened the Albertina Rausch Dance Studio in 1923, offering private and group lessons in ballet and interpretive dance, including a strict regimen of body alignment and breathing exercises that set her students apart from the typical Vaudeville and Broadway dancers of the day.

The studio became wildly successful and led to the formation of her own troupe, the Albertina Rausch Dancers. By 1925, 150 dancers were performing under her name on Vaudeville stages across America.

She created a new style of dance that she named New World Ballet. It was a hybrid of classical ballet and modern American jazz dance styles and music, and it became her signature.

She said that she believed instead of traditional realism, Americans preferred dynamic surprises, action, and syncopated sensations.

Her Broadway career began when 20 of her dancers appeared in George White's Scandals of 1924. Then in 1927, she choreographed five Broadway musicals, including three ballets for the Ziegfeld Follies, McCarthy and Tierney's hit Rio Rita, Victor Herbert's Mademoiselle Modiste, and the Gershwins’ Showgirl, which included a ballet set to “An American in Paris” 20 years before the Gene Kelly movie.

Among her most notable achievements was her work on three Dietz and Schwartz musical revues, Three’s a Crowd, Flying Colors, and The Bandwagon, which starred Fred and AdeleAstaire.

Her work on those shows included the production numbers “Dancing in the Dark and “Body and Soul,” which was described as a choreographic feast.

Albertina Rausch frequently collaborated with master stagers, Hassard Short and Moss Hart, who I profiled in our episodes on the queer creators of Broadway.

Their collaborations included Irving Berlin's Face the Music, Cole Porter's Jubilee, where shec reated the choreography for "Begin the Beguine," and the landmark musical Lady in the Dark.She also had a vibrant career in Hollywood where she choreographed more than a dozen films.

Two interesting side notes to her career, she was married to the legendary Dimitri Tiomkin, one of the greatest film composers in the history of Hollywood, and she was involved in launching the famed New York restaurant, The Russian Tea Room, which for several years was called The Albertina Rausch Russian Tea Room.

This brings us to arguably the most important woman in the history of Broadway.

In 1943, the ballet and modern dance influenced work of Agnes DeMille ushered in a new age for Broadway choreography.

With her work on Oklahoma!, DeMille pioneered a dramatic, story-based approach to choreography that delved deeply into the emotions and psychology of the characters.

Here's DeMille being interviewed by Sylvia Fine-Kaye, regarding her work on that landmark show.

"There's something I've always wanted very much to know. Who thought of putting the ballet

that kind of ballet into Oklahoma?"

"Me, I did. It's me."

"Why was the dancing so important to Oklahoma and really to the whole American theater after that?"

"Well, it was new. It was new because it had a lot of emotional impact and content, and because all the people in the dances were people and they were characters in the play. They kept their characters right through the play and all their gestures and all their style, belonged to that play and couldn't possibly be used in any other musical, not possibly, and the the, for instance, the thelead, Curly and Laurie, the two leads have dancing counterparts as a dancing lover and a dancing Curly and they're interchangeable and we could continue the plot during the dances and during the ballads.

Let me tell you about the plot. You know the plot of Oklahoma is simply, well, a girl has to make up her mind whether she'll take this boy or that boy to a picnic. This is a situation that has been faced before.

But in this case, in this case, she was very deeply in love with one boy and terrified of the other.Well, if she was frightened, then why didn’t she send him packing. Because there was a strange,dark, hold over her. I think he rather attracted her in a sinister way, but she makes up her mind in the ballet during the ballet. She makes up her mind and at the end of the ballet, she has decided to go with him.

And so, the second act is totally different and rather more somber and serious than it would otherwise have been.

“Now tell me something, why do you think Oklahoma was such a great success?”

“It was good. Oh, that was good.

I would not believe that was such a success. The time it was done.”

“Yes.”

“It was done during the war. And New York was the biggest staging area in the whole United States. And everybody who came to that show, all the soldiers, went overseas for the duration. And I remember so well at the St. James Theatre, that triple row of uniforms at the back. The man standing there watching this folksy show, happy, light with a tears streaming down their cheeks because it symbolized home and what they were going to die for.

And then after the war, when the war was over, we took it to London. London had been woelfully hurt. It was terribly damaged. And the beautiful Drury Lane Theatre had been torn up through, it had been torn open, but they mended it and they put it back.

And they asked Oklahoma to come and all the audience dressed up in gala and went there for the first time they were dressed since London went into the war in '39 and the blitzes started.

And they encored every single song and at the end they all stood, joined hands and sang the whole score with the cast standing, singing on stage. It will never, never be forgotten.”

“Well they tore the roof off the theatre again.”

Agnes DeMille’s 16 Broadway musicals included Oklahoma!, Carousel, Bloomer Girl, Brigadoon and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

At one point in 1945, she had four hit Broadway musicals all running at the same time and was featured on the cover of Life Magazine.

With Rogers and Hammerstein's musical Allegro, she became the first woman to both direct and choreograph a Broadway musical. Although the show's limited success proved to be a setback for her career and soured her relationship with Rogers and Hammerstein.

Even so, she is without a doubt one of the most significant Broadway creators of all time.

DeMille was closely followed by three of her colleagues from the dance world, Helen Tamiris, Hanya Holm and Onna White.

Helen Tamiris was a pioneer of American modern dance. She was born Helen Becker in 1902 in New York City to Jewish parents who had fled Russia and emigrated to the United States. She would eventually go on to choreograph 13 Broadway musicals including Up in Central Park,Annie Get Your Gun, Plain and Fancy and Fanny.

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Holm, who is considered to be one of the founding mothers of modern dance, also choreographed 10 Broadway musicals, including the legendary hits Kiss Me Kate, My Fair Lady, and Camelot.

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Onna White choreographed 16 Broadway shows, including The Music Man and Mame , and she also choreographed many musical films, including the Academy Award-winning Best Picture , Oliver.

Even more prolific is Patricia Birch who started as a dancer in Martha Graham's company and went on to choreograph 21 Broadway musicals including A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Candide, and the long-running blockbuster Grease. She later recreated and adapted her Broadway dances for the movie of Grease as well as directing the film Grease 2.

Still active is the wonderful Graciela Daniele, who was born in Argentina and has choreographed 13 Broadway shows over the last 40 years, including the original productions of Ragtime and Once on This Island , which she also directed.

Two female choreographers have dominated Broadway with 30 shows between them over the last 30 years.

Five-time Tony Award winner Susan Stroman's 15 shows include Crazy for You, Contact, and The Producers and Kathleen Marshall's 15 shows include acclaimed revivals of Kiss Me Kate,Wonderful Town, The Pajama Game, and Anything Goes and in addition to choreographing, Marshall and Stroman have also directed many of those productions which leads us right up to today where we are experiencing a landmark season for female directors on Broadway.

As I record this in December of 2025, there are currently six shows running on Broadway directed by women, including Hadestown, The Outsiders, Six, The Lion King, and the revivals of Mamma Mia! and Ragtime.

I think Lydia Thompson would be very proud of these remarkable women who have followed in her amazing footsteps.

As you might expect from the earliest days of the musical, there have been many great female costume designers, including Lucinda Ballard, Irene Sharaff, Patricia Zipprodt, Florence Klotz, Theony Aldredge, Willa Kim, Catherine Zuber, Anne Hould-Ward, and the unusual female design group known as Motley, to name only a few. And there have also been a handful of women set designers, especially in recent years.

However, what you might not expect is that the names of two queer women dominate the history of Broadway lighting design: Jean Rosenthal and Tharon Musser.

Jean Rosenthal largely invented what we know today as stage lighting design. In the early 20th century, the lighting of a play or musical was the responsibility of the theater's electrician, who tried as best he could to fulfill the vision of a set designer and the director. Rosenthal developed lighting into its own design element. She turned a technical craft into an art form.

Born in 1912 in New York City the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, she studied acting and dance and became a technical assistant to modern dance pioneer Martha Graham. She later took design classes while studying at Yale and then went on to become a technical assistant of the Federal Theater Project, working with Orson Welles.

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Between her first show in 1942 and her death in 1969, Rosenthal designed 85 Broadway musicals: most notably West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof , and Cabaret.

Rosenthal didn't just create the profession. She also advanced its technology and its artistic potential. She added new elements, such as saturated color washes of back and side light, to the lighting designer's vocabulary. In the middle of her career, she became the mentor of another woman who would go on to further define the profession.

Tharon Musser was born in 1925 in Virginia, went to college in Kentucky where she got interested in working in the theater, and then went on to Yale where she got interested in lighting design.

After working as Rosenthal’s assistant, she moved off on her own career.

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And between 1956 and 2006, she designed an incredible 122 Broadway shows, including A Chorus Line, Dream Girls, and Follies.

She also brought groundbreaking technological and artistic contributions to the field. She was the first designer to use a computerized electronic lighting board on Broadway. This was for A Chorus Line in 1975, and by 1981, every Broadway show used one.

Rosenthal died in 1969, and Musser passed away in 2009, but they have been followed by many outstanding female lighting designers: Jennifer Tipton, Marcia Madeira, Peggy Clark, Peggy Eisenhauer, Beverly Emmons, and Natasha Katz, to name only a few. The contribution of these talented women to the Broadway musical has been tremendous, and there are many more that I hope to highlight in future episodes , including, of course, the incredible female performers that have always been Broadway's greatest stars.

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Broadway Nation is produced and written by me, David Armstrong. Our production engineer is Nick Tarrabini, and special thanks to Alan Fitzpatrick for his voice-acting contributions. I also want to thank everyone at KVSH 101.9 FM, the voice of beautiful Vashon Island, Washington, and especially everyone at the Broadway podcast network.

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