Jake Johnson, “Good Grief: The Sadness of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair”

Part of the Hollander Musicology Lecture Series.

An oddity in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s oeuvre, State Fair (1945) was originally designed to be a film, what I call an unstaged musical. It’s also seemingly simple—a rural family takes their annual trip to the state fair and everyone has a good time. But this presentation on the 1962 remake of State Fair pulls back the gossamer and thin lace of rural nostalgia and sees the musical engaged in a deeply philosophical and existential question: What sadness awaits us when we get everything we want? Constantly skirting depression, characters in State Fair symbolize a concern for the unmet wish and attempt to name the heaviness of purposelessness weighing down modern communities. Here I place the musical in conversation with work by Andrew Wyeth, television shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, and events like the assassination of John F. Kennedy to show the sadness underneath midcentury values of both rural and urban America.

Jake Johnson is a writer, pianist, vocal coach, and faculty at the University of Oklahoma. His latest book, Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America, will be published in February by University of Illinois Press. See his full profile on the University of Oklahoma website.