Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

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Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 1

by Block, Geoffrey




  ENCHANTED EVENINGS

  ENCHANTED

  EVENINGS

  The Broadway Musical from

  Show Boat to Sondheim

  and Lloyd Webber

  SECOND EDITION

  Geoffrey Block

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  Copyright © 1997, 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Block, Geoffrey Holden, 1948–

  Enchanted evenings: the Broadway musical from Show Boat

  to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber / Geoffrey Block.—2nd ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-19-538400-0 (pbk.)

  1. Musicals—New York (State)—New York—History and criticism. I. Title.

  ML1711.8.N3B56 2009

  782.1′4097471—dc22 2009003980

  Visit the companion website at: www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  First Edition

  To the beloved memory of

  JOHN EASTBURN BOSWELL (“JEB”), 1947–1994

  Best friend, best man,

  Godfather to Jessamyn and (in spirit) to Eliza

  Second Edition

  To the memory of my beloved parents

  RUTH BLOCK (1913–2007) AND

  STANLEY BLOCK (1906–2008)

  Devoted wife and husband to each other, in-laws to Jacqueline,

  and grandparents to Jessamyn and Eliza

  CONTENTS

  Preface to the First Edition

  A New Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Using the Enchanted Evenings Website www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings

  Overture

  1. Introduction: Setting the Stage

  Act I: Before Rodgers and Hammerstein

  2. Show Boat: In the Beginning

  3. Anything Goes: Songs Ten, Book Three

  4. Porgy and Bess: Broadway Opera

  5. On Your Toes and Pal Joey: Dance Gets into the Act and “Sweet Water from a Foul Well”

  6. The Cradle Will Rock: A Labor Musical for Art’s Sake

  7. Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus: The Broadway Stranger and His American Dreams

  8. Stage versus Screen (1): Before Rodgers and Hammerstein

  Act II: The Broadway Musical after Oklahoma!

  9. Carousel: The Invasion of the Integrated Musical

  10. Kiss Me, Kate: The Taming of Cole Porter

  11. Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella: The Greater Loesser

  12. My Fair Lady: From Pygmalion to Cinderella

  13. West Side Story: The Very Model of a Major Musical

  14. Stage versus Screen (2): After Oklahoma!

  Epilogue: The Age of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

  15. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Sunday in the Park with George: Happily Ever After West Side Story with Sondheim

  16. The Phantom of the Opera: The Reigning Champion of Broadway

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Available online at www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings

  Synopses

  Discography and Filmography: Selected Original, Revival, Film, and Studio Casts

  Appendix A: Sources, Published Librettos, and Vocal Scores

  Appendix B: Long Runs: Decade by Decade 1920s–2000s

  Appendix C: The Forty Longest-Running Musicals on Broadway

  1920–1959 and 1920–2008

  Appendix D: Show Boat: 1927–1994

  Broadway 1927

  Principal Changes in Selected Stage Productions and Films (1928–1994)

  Manuscript Sources for Ravenal’s Entrance and Meeting with Magnolia

  Appendix E: Anything Goes: 1934, 1962, and 1987

  Broadway 1934

  Off-Broadway Revival 1962

  Vivian Beaumont Revival 1987

  Appendix F: Porgy and Bess: Songs, Arias, and Themes (1935)

  Appendix G: On Your Toes: Broadway 1936 and Broadway Revival 1983

  Appendix H: Pal Joey: Broadway 1940 and Broadway Revival 1952

  Appendix I: The Cradle Will Rock (1937)

  Appendix J: Lady in the Dark (1941)

  Appendix K: One Touch of Venus (1943)

  Appendix L: Carousel (1945)

  Appendix M: Kiss Me, Kate (1948)

  Spewack Libretto Draft (May 28, 1948)

  Appendix N: Guys and Dolls (1950)

  Appendix O: The Most Happy Fella (1956)

  Appendix P: My Fair Lady (1956)

  Appendix Q: West Side Story (1957)

  Libretto Drafts 1 (January 1956) and 2 (Spring 1956)

  Appendix R: Follies: Broadway 1971 and London Revival 1987

  Broadway 1971

  London Revival 1987

  Appendix S: Sweeney Todd (1979)

  Thematic Reminiscences in Sweeney Todd Final Sequence Beginning with “City of Fire!”

  Appendix T: Sunday in the Park with George (1984)

  Appendix U: The Phantom of the Opera (1988)

  Outline of The Phantom of the Opera, Act I, Scenes 5 and 6

  Outline of The Phantom of the Opera, Act II, Scene 7

  Notes

  PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

  In many ways the preparation of this book brings me back to my childhood, where Rodgers and Hammerstein as well as Bach and Beethoven were frequent and compatible visitors. I cannot remember a time when my father, a professional jazz violinist and part-time lawyer (before he metamorphosed into a full-time attorney and part-time classical violinist), was not playing Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” on the piano, invariably in the key of E . Like many Americans in the 1950s, our family record library included the heavy shellac 78 R.P.M. boxed album of South Pacific with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza and the lighter 33 R.P.M. cast album of Carousel with Jan Clayton and John Raitt. A major event was the arrival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and South Pacific in their newly released film versions. Keeping in tune with Rodgers and Hammerstein mania, I played every note and memorized many words of the songs contained in The Rodgers and Hammerstein Song Book and read Hammerstein’s librettos in the (then) readily obtainable Modern Library edition of Six Plays by Rodgers & Hammerstein.1

  My family was one of the eighteen million to purchase the cast al
bum of My Fair Lady, and my sister quickly mastered the dialect and memorized the lyrics for all the roles. With the dawn of the stereo era in the late 1950s, we purchased The Music Man to test out our new portable KLH record player.2 My parents, transplanted New Yorkers who settled near San Francisco, would see the traveling versions of Broadway shows, and by the early 1960s they began to take their offspring along.

  Musicals created before the era of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe were less known. Only Gilbert and Sullivan and the occasional 1920s operetta were presented as dramatic entities. The songs, however, of many musicals from the 1920s and ′30s were heard and played regularly in our community as well as in our home, especially those from Porgy and Bess. A memorable event occurred in the sixth grade when a dear family friend from Boston came to visit, sang and played Kern and Hammerstein’s “Make Believe,” and assisted me in my efforts to compose a small musical of three songs as a creative arts project. Earlier that year I had written a short term paper, “Rodgers and Hammerstein II with Lorenz Hart.”

  By the time I entered high school I had churlishly abandoned Broadway in favor of Bach, Beethoven, and Ives. As a sophomore I somewhat grudgingly served as rehearsal pianist for South Pacific and the following year still more grudgingly played the saxophone and clarinet in the Guys and Dolls pit band. Soon even Gershwin was suspect. I had not yet read the philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno and the highly acclaimed but decidedly unpopular composer Arnold Schoenberg, both of whom vigorously championed and successfully promoted the view that great art was rightfully destined to be unpopular. Only in retrospect did I realize that an ideological and elitist component was somehow connected to my genuine love of classical or “serious” music. Disdain for the music of the masses followed, including hit Broadway musicals, until and unless this repertory could earn endorsements from respectable sources, such as when Leonard Bernstein compared the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home” from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band favorably with Schubert.

  In the early 1970s graduate students in historical musicology in many programs were strongly discouraged from studying American music of any kind. Instead, my colleagues and I at Harvard dutifully learned to decipher medieval notation and researched such topics as the life and works of King Henry VIII’s Flemish-born court composer Philip van Wilder, Haydn’s opera seria, and what really happened at the first performance of Rite of Spring. A research paper on the chronology and compositional process of Beethoven’s piano concertos evolved into a dissertation and inaugurated my lifetime desire to understand how compositions of all types initially take shape and the practical as well as artistic reasons behind their revision.

  These activities did not prevent me from stumbling on a free ticket to Kiss Me, Kate, which to my surprise I enjoyed immensely, despite a negative predisposition. My dormant love for Broadway musicals would receive additional rekindling when, several years later, I found myself the musical director in a private secondary school in Ojai, California, selecting a musical to produce and choosing Kiss Me, Kate to everyone’s enjoyment and delight, including mine. In my second year at The Thacher School I anticipated Crazy for You, the 1992 musical based on Girl Crazy, with my own assemblage of freely interpolated Gershwin songs mixed with songs from the “dated” 1930 show—a triumph of accessibility over authenticity. By the end of that year I completed my doctorate, a milestone that somehow liberated me to explore American popular music of all types.

  By then I had witnessed a broadcast in which Stephen Sondheim and conductor André Previn conversed with extraordinary articulateness about what a musical can accomplish.3 Increasingly, stage and film musicals of both recent and ancient vintage occupied a major and passionate role in my life. After teaching a sequence of one-month “winterim” courses on American musical theater at the University of Puget Sound, including one in which students collaborated to create an original musical, I began to teach a Survey of American Musical Theater course first during alternate years and later annually. When faced with the dearth of usable textbooks, I began writing one of my own in the late 1980s. The book would, of course, correspond to what I had been teaching, a musical-by-musical study beginning with Show Boat that focused on the so-called Golden Era from the 1930s to the late 1950s, with a survey of Sondheim to round out the semester. You are now holding this book.

  Before the 1990s, books on Broadway musicals were almost without exception written by theater historians and critics. For the most part these journalistic accounts typically covered a large number of musicals somewhat briefly and offered a useful and entertaining mixture of facts, gossip, and criticism. What they did not try to do is address what happens musically or how songs interact with lyrics within a dramatic context.4

  Most books on the Broadway musical provided biographical profiles of principal composers and lyricists and plot summaries of popular musicals or those judged artistically significant. Some authors went considerably beyond these parameters, for example, Gerald Bordman by his comprehensiveness and Lehman Engel by focusing more selectively on critical topics and other issues such as adaptation of literary sources.5 Two of the musicals surveyed in the present volume, Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, have inspired book-length monographs, and several musicals and their creators have received rigorously thoughtful scholarly, bibliographic, and critical attention. The fruits of this activity will be duly acknowledged in what follows.6

  With few exceptions the musicological community studiously ignored the Broadway terrain. In the 1990s two important books emphasized (or “privileged”) music for the first time: Joseph P. Swain’s The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (1990), a study of selected musicals from Show Boat to Sweeney Todd, and Stephen Banfield’s more specialized study, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (1993).7 Swain’s valuable survey contains a great deal of perceptive musical and dramatic criticism and analysis. Nevertheless, Swain only rarely tries to place the discussion in a historical, social, or political context, he presents virtually no documentary history of a musical, and he does not address the questions of how and why musicals evolved as they did, either before opening night or in revival. Most general readers will also find Swain’s analysis, which deals primarily with harmony, too technical to be easily understood. In contrast to Swain, Banfield, who focuses on a body of work by one significant composer-lyricist, does address compositional history and offers a multivalent and less autonomous approach; additionally, his sophisticated and frequently dense musical and dramatic analysis successfully incorporates techniques borrowed from literary criticism. Building on the solid edifices constructed by Swain and Banfield, the present book attempts to offer a musical and dramatic discussion more accessible to readers unfamiliar with analytical terminology.

  Two important books on European opera have influenced the ensuing discussion of American musicals and merit special mention and gratitude here: Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama and Paul Robinson’s Opera & Ideas.8 Kerman’s unflinching insistence on music’s primary role in defining character, generating action, and establishing atmosphere results in a somewhat sparse assemblage of canonic masterpieces. However, his brilliant overview of opera with its powerful guiding principle, “the dramatist is the composer,” can be fruitfully applied to Broadway, even to those works that resolutely reject Kerman’s model of a major operatic musical masterpiece. Robinson’s accessible yet subtle survey of six operas (one each by Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, and Strauss) and of dramatic meaning in the two Schubert song cycles offers imaginative and convincing insights on the power of texted music to express emotional and intellectual nuance. Both studies display a standard of excellence that might serve and inspire nearly any serious study of dramatic music, including the Broadway musical.

  A third book on opera, Peter Kivy’s Osmin’s Rage, supplies valuable philosophical underpinning for a discussion on music and text.9 Kivy’s distinctions between the opposite principles of “textual realism” (music that “sets mean
ings, not words”) and “opulent adornment” (music that “sets words, not meanings”) are particularly helpful. The tensions between these two principles are embodied in the “song and dance” musicals (composed mainly but by no means exclusively in the 1920s and ’30s) that feature “opulent adornment,” and the so-called integrated musicals, the Rodgers and Hammerstein models of “textual realism” that gained commercial success, critical stature, and cultural hegemony beginning in the 1940s.

  In the recent past intense ideological differences have been solidified. In one camp are those who argue that musicals are at their best when fully integrated and aspiring toward nineteenth-century European tragic opera; in another are those who relish nonintegrated and nonoperatic musical comedies. The contrasting perspectives of Swain and Banfield offer strong advocates for each side. Swain, who claims to disparage the taxonomic differences between opera and Broadway shows, nonetheless invariably places the latter, especially musicals that eschew their tragic potential, on a lower echelon. Thus for Swain, “though a number of its best plots have offered opportunities for tragic composition,” the Broadway musical provides a litany of “missed chances and unanswered challenges.”10 Even West Side Story, the only musical that Swain unhesitatingly designates a masterpiece (in part because a central character achieves the heights of tragedy when he dies singing), falls short of operatic tragedy when Maria speaks rather than sings her response to the death of her beloved Tony.

 

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