In the 1944 film "Meet Me in St. Louis," young Tootie builds snowmen of her family members, then smashes them to pieces when she learns her family is moving away. That jarring shift from joy to destruction captures something unexpected about American musicals: beneath their sparkly, optimistic surface lies profound grief. Assistant professor of musicology Jake Johnson explores this paradox in his new book "Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America," arguing that the supposedly light-hearted musical genre actually functioned as a sophisticated emotional container for some of the darkest anxieties of the 1950s and 1960s. As Johnson explains, "the American musical is an unsuspecting, squeaky-clean surface" that "cleverly holds back grief... a skin, a covering, a hide for deeper, darker, bigger feelings."

The midcentury era that produced some of Broadway and Hollywood's most beloved musicals was also a time of unprecedented national trauma and uncertainty. The generation creating these shows had survived World War II, and now faced the terrifying prospect of nuclear war during the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement exposed deep social divisions, and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 shattered ideals of American progress. Television brought images of social upheaval directly into living rooms. Yet during this exact period, audiences flocked to musicals by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein ("Oklahoma!" and "The Sound of Music"), Rodgers and others, suggesting that people sought escape through entertainment. But Johnson's research reveals a more complex truth: these musicals weren't actually escaping grief at all; they were processing it.

Johnson's analytical approach draws on Swiss-American psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's famous five stages of grief from her 1969 book "On Death and Dying," which identified denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as the emotional arc people typically experience when facing loss. By applying this framework to both live stage productions and television musicals of the era, Johnson demonstrates that grief and mourning weren't accidental or incidental to these shows but rather deeply embedded in their structures and themes. He supports his arguments with references to other midcentury cultural figures like John Lennon, Mark Rothko, and Edward Hopper, showing that processing collective trauma through art was a widespread cultural phenomenon. The seemingly frivolous song-and-dance numbers and romantic plots actually performed crucial psychological work, allowing audiences to feel and process emotions that were too overwhelming to confront directly.

The 1950s and 1960s marked a turning point in American musical theater. Traditional musicals with their emphasis on spectacle, traditional values, and broad appeal began giving way to more experimental forms, including Andrew Lloyd Webber's and Stephen Schwartz's rock operas and Stephen Sondheim's concept musicals, which abandoned straightforward narratives for more fragmented storytelling. Yet the emotional and artistic strategies these musicals pioneered never disappeared. In recent decades, shows like "La La Land," "Mary Poppins Returns," and "Wicked" have revived and reimagined the conventions of midcentury musicals, suggesting that audiences still turn to this format during times of uncertainty and change. Johnson's work reveals that the musical form itself possesses a unique capacity to contain and express grief: the music allows emotions to exist without requiring explicit acknowledgment, the spectacle creates distance from painful content, and the narrative arc toward resolution (even if incomplete) offers a kind of hope. Understanding musicals as vehicles for processing hidden grief transforms how we interpret these seemingly simple entertainments, revealing them as profound cultural documents that express what society struggles to say directly.