From Broadway To 52nd Street

I Married An Angel opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theater on May 11, 1938. Running for three hundred and thirty-eight performances, the musical starred Dennis King, Audrie Christie, Vera Zorina and Vivienne Segal. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart composed the score from which emerged Spring Is Here as another jazz standard.

The Story: The musical tells the story of a banker and ladies man who breaks off his engagement, swearing he will marry an angel. A real angel promptly flies into his life and he marries her. But her angelic honesty causes no end to problems for him until his sister teaches the angel the way of the cynical world. His sister also bribes a cab driver to delay creditors until a way is found to save her brother’s bank.

Jazz History: On the Street of Jazz musicians, jazz lovers, college students and big businessmen—everybody knew that this was “The Street that Never Slept,” the street where every night was New Year’s Eve. Here, for the price of a drink or two, you could walk through the whole history of jazz. Hot jazz was born and raised on The Street, as were the big swing bands of the thirties and the modern “cool” jazz combos of the forties. Comics like Alan King and Joey Adams got their start here, as did musicians like Erroll Garner, Jack Teagarden, and Coleman Hawkins.

Bessie Smith performed on the Street, as did Count Basie, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Sarah Vaughn, the Dorsey Brothers, Artie Shaw, and other jazz greats. The Street gave birth in Prohibition-era speakeasies, where musicians jammed for gin or just for the fun of it and its post-Repeal blossoming as the center of the jazz universe. The Street lined up and down on both sides with tiny, smoke-filled rooms where black and white musicians played to capacity crowds long before its postwar decline to become a tawdry tenderloin of strip and clip joints.

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