“From Flatbush to Fun Home: Broadway’s Cozy Cottage Trope”
In the final scene of George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner’s 1929 comedy June Moon, two songwriters create a number about an innocent young couple settling “In a bungalow for two, / Where we can bill and coo—.” The playwrights punctuate this final line with the stage direction: “Mercifully, the curtain is down.” June Moon’s final jab makes it clear that by 1929 such a lyric was already cliché, and its appearance at the end gives it pride of place in the play’s send-up of Tin Pan Alley. Broadway regulars would have recognized the song type. Indeed, no musical comedy would have seemed complete without the members of its primary couple picturing the modest little home where they would settle down in domestic bliss after the final curtain. The architects of American musical theater would go on to build many such little homes, and what we might call the cozy cottage trope continued to resonate for decades to come. If we recognize the trope’s various inflections across a century of Broadway history, explore the way it constructs an image of the audience and the theater, and consider its possible roots and one of its most recent manifestations, we have a rich perspective from which to understand what is distinctively American about the American musical.