Red Pepper (musical): History and Key Facts

Red Pepper is a musical in two acts with music by Albert Gumble and Owen Murphy, lyrics by Howard Emmett Rogers, and a book by Edgar Smith and Emily Young. Staged on Broadway in 1922 after a premiere in Baltimore in 1921, the musical was created for the comedy duo of McIntyre and Heath, who were famous for their performances in blackface.

Set at a racetrack in Havana, Cuba, and in the Southern United States, Red Pepper takes its title from a race horse who is featured in the musical's storyline. It was one of the earliest musicals to use a musical score rooted in jazz, marking a shift away from operetta and ragtime which had dominated the musical theatre landscape previously in the 1910s and into the early 1920s.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Red Pepper (musical) by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.