Ten performers who filled the theaters of the 1940s to 1960s with unaided voice and turned the American musical into Broadway’s golden age.

Something changed on Broadway in 1943, the year Rodgers and Hammerstein opened Oklahoma! and proved that song, story, and dance could pull in one direction instead of interrupting each other. For roughly the next two decades, the American musical became the most confident popular art form in the country, and the theater song became the national songbook. This was the era before body microphones were standard, when a leading player was expected to reach the back row of a 1,500-seat house on breath alone, eight times a week. The star was not a special effect layered over the show. The star was the show, and audiences bought tickets to be in the same room as a specific voice.

Choosing ten from that crowded stage meant favoring influence over billing: everyone here changed what a Broadway performer could be, not merely how many tickets they sold. The list crosses the brassy belter and the trained soprano, the dancing star and the character comedian, the homegrown Texan and the opera bass who walked out of the Metropolitan to try something new. A couple of names should be discoveries even for readers who know the cast albums. They appear in no particular order, because these were not rivals climbing one ladder. Together they are the reason we still call it a golden age.

1. Ethel Merman

1908-1984

Merman was the reason the word belt entered the theater vocabulary: a brass section of a voice, pitch-perfect and clarion clear, that never needed a microphone and reportedly never took a lesson. She announced herself in 1930 by holding a single high note through an entire chorus of “I Got Rhythm,” and composers spent the next thirty years writing shows around that instrument, most famously Annie Get Your Gun in 1946 and her towering Rose in Gypsy in 1959. Berlin and Sondheim alike trusted her to land a lyric at the back of the house without losing a syllable. Start with the original cast recording of Gypsy, where the comic force of her earlier roles finally meets a part with a broken heart underneath it.

2. Mary Martin

1913-1990

If Merman was the era’s force, Martin was its warmth, a Texan with an easy radiance who originated three of the century’s most beloved heroines. She was Nellie Forbush in South Pacific in 1949, washing a man right out of her hair on stage at every performance, then flew as Peter Pan in the 1954 production that NBC broadcast to tens of millions, winning her an Emmy for a role she had already conquered live. In 1959 she created Maria in The Sound of Music, sending its songs into homes that had never bought a theater ticket. Start with the South Pacific cast album, where her plainspoken charm makes an Arkansas nurse feel like someone you already know.

3. Alfred Drake

1914-1992

Drake was the golden age’s model leading man, the baritone who set the template every romantic male lead would follow. He sang the very first “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” as Curly when Oklahoma! opened in 1943, then brought a Shakespearean actor’s intelligence to the role of Fred Graham in Kiss Me, Kate in 1948, matching Cole Porter’s wit line for line. His swaggering Hajj in Kismet won him the Tony for best actor in a musical in 1954. That he is less remembered today than the shows he launched is one of the era’s quiet injustices. Start with the Kiss Me, Kate cast recording, where “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” shows off a leading man who could act a song as well as sing it.

4. Gwen Verdon

1925-2000

Verdon proved that a dancer could carry a musical as its star, not decorate it as a specialty act, and she won four Tony Awards doing it. A flame-haired redhead with impeccable comic timing, she stopped Can-Can cold in 1953 and then became the definitive Fosse muse, originating Lola in Damn Yankees and the wide-eyed Charity in Sweet Charity. Her partnership with choreographer Bob Fosse shaped the modern look of Broadway dance, all angled hips and isolated hands, and she quietly coached his style long after they separated. Start with Damn Yankees and “Whatever Lola Wants,” a seduction played for laughs by a dancer who knew exactly how funny precision could be.

5. Robert Preston

1918-1987

Preston had spent years as a reliable Hollywood second lead, playing villains and heroes’ friends, when he took the role no bigger star wanted and made theater history with it. As the con man Harold Hill in The Music Man in 1957, he turned patter into music, half-talking “Ya Got Trouble” at a tempo that should have been impossible and marching “Seventy-Six Trombones” straight into the American memory. He won the Tony and, rare for the era, was allowed to reprise the part in the 1962 film so the whole country could see what Broadway had. Start with that film, or the cast album, and marvel that anyone ever doubted the casting.

6. Carol Channing

1921-2019

Channing built an entire style out of the huge eyes, the wide grin, and the throaty voice that could turn a single word into an event. She introduced “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1949, then created the role that defined her, the matchmaker Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!, winning the 1964 Tony over Barbra Streisand in a legendary race. Hollywood handed the film of Dolly to Streisand anyway, but the stage was always Channing’s home, and she played the part more than four thousand times across the decades. Start with the original Hello, Dolly! cast album and hear a performer greet an audience like a long-lost friend.

7. Zero Mostel

1915-1977

Mostel was the era’s great clown and its great survivor, a mountainous physical comedian who had been blacklisted in the 1950s for refusing to name names before the House committee. He came roaring back to win three Tony Awards in five years, first in the play Rhinoceros, then as the scheming slave Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962. In 1964 he created Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, grounding a show about a vanishing world in warmth, argument, and grief so that its comedy never turned to cartoon. Start with the Fiddler cast album and “If I Were a Rich Man,” where he turns a poor man’s daydream into a whole philosophy.

8. Yul Brynner

1920-1985

Few performers have ever been as completely fused with a single role as Brynner was with the King of Siam. When The King and I opened in 1951 he shaved his head, planted his feet, and created a figure of such magnetism that he owned it for the rest of his life, playing it more than four thousand times between then and his final bow in 1985. He won the Tony as a featured actor and then the 1956 Academy Award for the film, one of the rare stage stars Hollywood let keep his own creation. Start with “A Puzzlement” or “Shall We Dance?” from the original production, where a fearsome monarch is undone, delightfully, by an English governess.

9. Ezio Pinza

The opera bass who crossed over

For twenty-two seasons Pinza was the Metropolitan Opera’s leading bass, a giant of the Italian repertory, when at fifty-seven he did the unthinkable and walked onto Broadway. Cast as the French planter Émile de Becque in South Pacific in 1949, he sang “Some Enchanted Evening” with an operatic warmth no theater audience had heard from a leading man, and won the Tony for it. His crossover proved that the musical could carry real vocal grandeur, and he later marveled that one night on Broadway made him more famous than twenty years of grand opera. Start with “Some Enchanted Evening” on the South Pacific cast album, a bridge between the opera house and the show tune. For more on the singers he left behind at the Met, our opera coverage picks up the thread.

10. Barbara Cook

1927-2017

The genuine discovery here for many readers, Cook was the golden age’s purest lyric soprano, the voice you reach for when you want to hear exactly how these songs were meant to sound. She dazzled as Cunegonde in Candide in 1956, tossing off the coloratura fireworks of “Glitter and Be Gay,” then won the Tony as Marian the librarian in The Music Man in 1957 and created Amalia in the exquisite She Loves Me in 1963. When her leading-lady years ended she reinvented herself as a concert and cabaret artist, becoming one of the great interpreters of Sondheim and keeping the era’s repertoire alive for another forty years. Start with “Till There Was You” from The Music Man, a masterclass in doing more by doing less.

Final thoughts

What unites these ten is not a single sound but a shared job description that has since almost disappeared: to stand on a stage without amplification and hold a crowd of strangers with nothing but craft. Between the 1940s and the 1960s they made the Broadway performer the center of American popular music, the person who introduced the songs that Sinatra and Fitzgerald would later record. They also stretched what the job could hold, from Merman’s brass to Cook’s crystal, from Verdon’s dancing to Mostel’s grief, and in doing so they built a repertoire that every music-theater student still studies today. The golden age was a commercial machine, but in their voices it became an art.

Any list this short leaves greatness in the wings. Chita Rivera, who electrified West Side Story and Bye Bye Birdie and became one of Broadway’s most enduring dancing stars, could easily have claimed a place, and so could Julie Andrews, whose Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady set a standard for the era’s ingenue before Hollywood claimed her. Consider them the encore. If these voices have caught your ear, CreARTivity’s explorations of pop culture and of opera are the natural next step, because the golden age of Broadway sits exactly where the two meet.