From Broadway To 52nd Street
It was just seven days before the panic began leading to the crash an ambitious new musical appeared on October 17, 1929 on the stage of the Cosmopolitan Theatre by the title of Great Day. Music composed by Billy Rose and Vincent Youmans,however the show only experienced a run of only thirty-six performances due to the Crash, one good thing came out of the experience is the composition More Than You Know that went on to become a jazz standard.
The Story: Set in Louisiana on the Randolph Plantation, the Spanish Casino, the Mississippi river and the Levee.
Broadway History: By 1929 as the Roaring Twenties was coming to a close, the country was still reeling in widespread euphoria during this period of peace and great prosperity fueled by increased industrialization and new technologies, such as the radio, the automobile, even had air flight becoming widespread. Millionaires were made overnight as they mortgaged homes and sank life savings into hot stocks like Ford and RCA. Little did they know what lied beneath the horizon. The Fed had raised interest rates several times to cool down the overheated stock market and on October 24th panic selling occurred as investors realized the stock boom had been an over-inflated bubble. Millionaire margin investors were decimated and became bankrupt immediately as the stock market crashed on October 28th and 29th.
At the end of 1929, sixteen billion dollars had been shaved off stock capitalization, 140 billion of depositor money disappeared and 10,000 banks failed ushering in the Great Depression that would last till the mid 1930’s. Though the country would suffer financially, Broadway still mounted plays and entertained audiences.
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