Vanessa Rebeil
Latina Equity Stage Manager
Paint Your Wagon
December 1951 - July 1952
Book & Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner
Music by Frederick Loewe
Directed by Daniel Mann
Choreographed by Agnes de Mille
Stage Managed by Ward Bishop & Stone Widney
On the Page
The show itself truly graces over its racial issues, even its sexist issues for that matter. It focuses mostly on the life of the father, Ben Rumson, and his struggles as the mining town, he’s grown to establish himself highly in, runs dry. The show is structured with Ben as the main character and his daughter Jennifer and Julio as a B story. But there isn’t much to Ben other than he was rich and then suddenly he isn’t. The musical tries to get us to sympathize with this old white man, but due to his racist comments about Julio and the sexist way in which he bids for a wife and ships his daughter off to school make it hard to do so. It “...is of its time, doubly stained by the sexism of both its 1850s setting and the 1950s when it was written” (Love, The Guardian.) Its weak plot aside, it’s clear that the reason this show is still talked about is Loewe and Lerner’s music. This musical theater genius duo knew how to write music that spoke to the character’s emotions and create a gorgeous score that almost speaks the emotions itself. Unfortunately, the music alone can’t hold up a musical for long. The show had a decent run for its time, but its lack of revival shows its lack of structure crumbling. As Love said in The Guardian, “It’s an image of a lost world, with many features – misogyny, racism, intolerance – that are best left in the wilderness.”
The World Outside the Rehearsal Room
Paint Your Wagon, a Gold Rush musical following the lives of a miner and his daughter. It is almost absurd that this would be included in the list of stories about the hispanic community seeing as only one character falls in this category. But research shows that Julio Valveras was one of the first and few leads of color at the time. Though his character isn’t truly respected by the community of the show, he is written with dignity. Showing qualities of hardwork and commitment, and in the little we see of him the audience falls for him wanting badly for him to succeed and get the girl.
During the Gold Rush, Mexicans were hardly tolerated. California went from being their land, their place of citizenship, to being the land of the greedy whites naming them foreigners in their own land. They were exiled from the towns closest to the mines and forced to live miles away in tents for homes. And they were to pay fees of $20 a month for them to mine the land that was once free.
This show was produced long after the Gold Rush but racial tension with Mexicans and people of color in general were still raging. In 1951 when this show opened, the US was on the brink of the Civil Rights Movement. There was extreme segregation in the country including its audiences. On stage they were telling the story of a mixed race love affair and out in the, then modern, world two people like them could not even sit next to each other.
In the Rehearsal Room
I imagine that ignorance of our industry at the time made it easy to overlook the heaviness of the subject matters in this show. I could not find out whether the actor who played Julio was of hispanic descent, but if he was I could not imagine it was an easy role for him. Both he and his character marginalized and segregated just for being hispanic. On the other hand, if the actor was white then that just proves how ignorant we really were. It’s hard to imagine what it was like to be in that room as the stage manager. Trying to bring a company together that is so naturally divided by society outside of the room.