Sequins and Songs on the Small Screen

By the late sixties, television was America’s medium and, just as it had with stage and film musicals in the decades prior, it embraced the increasingly legitimized musical style of Vegas. Whether through Mitzi Gaynor’s string of television specials; the repackaging of Sonny and Cher’s Vegas shtick, glitz, and musical tributes; or The Carol Burnett Show’s Bob Mackie–clad musical extravaganzas, Vegas/Broadway hybrids filled the small screen. This fusion of old-school and, to a lesser degree, contemporary musicals with the popularized pizzazz and glamour of Vegas brought the television musical comfortably in line with the cheeky sexiness of 1970s network programming. Highlighting the ongoing symbiosis among various musical platforms, this chapter explores the rise of a hybridized Broadway-Vegas style on television, or what the author terms “BroadVegas,” in the context of changing generic norms across stages and screens, heightened inter-network competition and branding, and emergent visual, generic, and promotional styles.