Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber
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Banfield, sympathetic to a subject (Sondheim) who is rarely “trying to challenge opera on its own territory,” argues that in musicals, in contrast to operas that are through-sung, music “can often not just move in and out of the drama but in and out of itself, and is more dramatically agile … than in most opera.”11 For Banfield, West Side Story keeps faith with Bernstein’s desire to avoid “falling into the ‘operatic trap,’” and Maria’s final speech works perfectly.12
Among other juicy bones of contention are the conflicts between popularity and critical acclaim, authenticity and accessibility, opulent adornment and textual realism, artistic autonomy and social and political contextuality, and nonintegrated versus integrated musical ideals. This preface has introduced some of these issues and critical quagmires that will be reintroduced in chapter 1 and developed in subsequent chapters. Neutrality is neither always possible nor always desirable to achieve, especially on the subject of critical relationships between music and text and music and drama. My general intent, however, is to articulate the merits as well as the flaws of opposing arguments. In the court of free intellectual inquiry, more frequently than not, at least two sides are competent to withstand scrutiny and trial.
Tacoma, Wash.
G. B.
January 1997
A NEW PREFACE
Broadway’s “Golden Age”
Still popular with audiences young and old, the musicals explored in Enchanted Evenings have not vanished from our stages or our consciousness. In fact, the situation is just the reverse. Judging by the frequency and perennial popularity of revivals (the practice of restaging favorite musicals from the past) and the competitiveness of the revival category at the annual Tony Awards (Broadway’s Oscars), the Broadway musical has evolved into one of America’s greatest and most distinctive cultural institutions as well as an opportunity for new work. Increasingly, classic musicals have received serious critical scrutiny by directors with wide-ranging visions, and audiences from all over the world flock to see and experience this unique American (and sometimes British) contribution to popular culture. If there is a Broadway Museum, and I think there is, the musicals you will read about in Enchanted Evenings occupy a major wing. In fact, in the years immediately prior to, during, and since the period I wrote Enchanted Evenings all of the shows I discussed continued to receive attention in high-profile revivals, the vast majority on Broadway as well as elsewhere. In addition, revival recordings and reissues with new and original casts or other recordings in meticulous scholarly reconstructions for some of the older models were also made for most of these shows.
Here are some highlights of the stage resurrections since 1980 of shows featured in the first edition of Enchanted Evenings arranged chronologically by show. No show from this edition is absent from the list.1
• Show Boat: The acclaimed (and controversial) Broadway revival staged by Harold Prince (1994)
• Anything Goes: Broadway revival at the Vivian Beaumont (1987); London revival (1989); Royal National Theatre revival in London (2003); London revival (2005)
• Porgy and Bess: Glyndebourne Opera staged by Trevor Nunn (1986); New York City Opera (2000 and 2002); Los Angeles Opera (2007)
• The Cradle Will Rock: Off-Broadway production directed by John Houseman and starring Patti Lupone (1983); feature film about the making of the show against the backdrop of other turbulent events in art and politics in the 1930s, directed by Tim Robbins (1999)
• On Your Toes: Broadway revival directed by George Abbott (1983)
• Pal Joey: New York City Center’s Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert (1995); Broadway run at Studio 54, with a rewritten book and added songs from other Rodgers and Hart shows (2008)
• Lady in the Dark: New York City Center’s Encores! (1994); London premiere (1997) followed by major performances in Japan and Philadelphia
• One Touch of Venus: Goodspeed Opera House (1987); New York City Center’s Encores! (1995); three productions mounted by Discovering Lost Musicals Charitable Trust (1992–2000); BBC broadcast (1995); London premiere at The King’s Head Theatre in 2001 (a production that failed to go beyond the workshop stage for a New York performance two weeks after September 11); Opera North in Leeds (2004); 42nd Street Moon staging in San Francisco (2007)
• Kiss Me, Kate: Broadway revival directed by Michael Blakemore (881 performances) (1999–2003); London revival (2001); Italian version in Bologna (2007)
• Carousel: Directed for London and Broadway by Nicholas Hytner (1994); London revival (2008)
• Guys and Dolls: Long-running Broadway revival (1,143 performances) starring Nathan Lane, not coincidentally named for its star comic Nathan Detroit (1992–94); long-running London revival (2005–07); Broadway revival (2009)
• The Most Happy Fella: Broadway revival (1992); New York City Opera (2006)
• My Fair Lady: Broadway revival (1981); Broadway revival (1993); London revival (2001)
• West Side Story: Broadway revival (1980); London revival (1998); Hong Kong production (with lyrics in Cantonese) (2000); Bregenz Festival, Austria (in German) (2003 and 2004); London revival (2008); Montreal revival (in French) (2008); Philippine production (2008); Broadway revival directed by Arthur Laurents which includes significant dialogue and singing in Spanish (2009)
Today the American musical also thrives as a burgeoning subdiscipline in musicology and a significant topic of study across disciplinary boundaries. This is a relatively new phenomenon. When I embarked on Enchanted Evenings in the early 1990s, historical musicology had not yet found the Broadway musical a fertile grazing land. Musical theater historians Gerald Bordman (in a series of Oxford volumes), and the conductor and influential musical theater workshop director Lehman Engel wrote knowledgeably and engagingly about musicals, although neither seriously engaged their musical component.2 In The American Musical Theater, first published in 1967, Engel also offered a paradigm of “workable principles” that reveal what made certain shows “models of excellence.”3 In Engel’s view, nearly all great musicals were a product of a “Golden Age” that started with Pal Joey (1940) and ended with Fiddler on the Roof (1964). For the 1975 second edition, Engel found two worthy Sondheim shows to add to the list, Company (1970) and A Little Night Music (1973). Although Cabaret (1966) did not make the cut, Engel singled out this work for distinction as his sole “strong runner-up to the list of ‘best’ shows.”4
The booming cultural canon wars of the 1990s brought about the breakdown of classical canons in literature and the arts. It also led to the formation of new ones, albeit under various pseudonyms and disguises. Despite the increasing postmodern discontent among scholars and even some musical-theater lovers with the idea of a prescribed list of canonic “masterpieces,” Broadway surveys, including scholarly ones such as Joseph P. Swain’s The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (Oxford, 1990), generally followed Engel and without apparent collusion favored the same small group of shows.5 Whatever its intentions, the overlapping between one list and another gave the appearance that a Broadway canon had emerged, despite protestations to the contrary and however unwelcome. Enchanted Evenings focused on a representative few of the usual canonic suspects, starting with Show Boat (outside Engel’s list but the starting point for many others) and ending with West Side Story. As an epilogue, I added one post–West Side Story chapter, a survey of Sondheim that touched on Follies and Sunday in the Park with George.
New Broadway Scholarship
Aside from correcting some errors—such as the perpetuation of the unfounded rumor that Carousel’s “A Real Nice Clambake” was derived from an unused Oklahoma! song “A Real Nice Hayride”—and other minor updating and clarifications, I have left chapters 1–12 of the first edition largely unchanged. Were I writing these chapters for the first time, no doubt I would do some things differently. For example, the controversy over the two Kurt Weills, the German Weill versus the American Weill, of pressing concern in the early 1990s and a divi
sion partially reconciled in the first edition, is now a nonissue. Just as Germany gradually became unified in the 1990s, so did Weill. On the other hand, the notion of the “integrated” musical has become so questionable and contentious that the new protocol is to problematize the term or at least to place it in quotation marks (what Richard Taruskin calls scare quotes) to mark the increasing discomfort with the term. Since I did already problematize the idea of the integrated musical to some extent in the first edition and since I later addressed the issue in a separate essay, I decided not to dig up these bones of contention further.6 By letting these now wide-awake dogs lie in the first edition chapters, I am acknowledging that in these instances musical theater historians, like the musicals they study, reflect their own time in their efforts to serve our understanding of the past.
In the two new chapters on film adaptation (chapters 8 and 14) and the Epilogue chapters (chapter 15 and 16), however, I have called attention to some of the exciting new scholarship that has appeared since the mid-1990s. In the Epilogue, for example, I revisit the notion of the integrated musical as it evolves into what has become known as the concept musical (another controversial notion also commonly placed in quotation marks) and the still-more problematic, but less discussed, “totally integrated” approach common to the megamusical. Since the quality and quantity of bibliographic, scholarly, and critical material on the Broadway musical has grown impressively, even exponentially, over the last decade, I was not able to take full advantage of the new research and thinking on the musicals discussed in the first edition. The expanded Bibliography, which includes some of this unincorporated literature, will point the way to new directions and possibilities.
As in the past, much of this new work emphasizes biography, social history, and the librettos of musicals without addressing how the music works with words and stories. I have addressed some of the negative ramifications of this trend in a review essay published in 2004.7 In contrast to the isolated exceptions that precede the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, however, many studies do now seriously engage with music and music’s interaction with lyrics and narratives.8
Another noticeable trend among the many books that have appeared since the mid-1990s is the relative absence of attention, or sympathy, to musicals that arrived after the end of the so-called Golden Age in the mid-1960s. In an “Omnibus Review” of five significant books in the field published between 2003 and 2005, for example, Charles Hamm notes “an almost complete absence in these books of meaningful commentary on American musicals of the past three decades.”9 When books do not ignore the musicals of the last generation (other than Sondheim), the tone frequently changes from respect to disdain, with special xenophobic antipathy reserved for the imported megamusicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber (Cats, Phantom), the team of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg (Les Misérables and Miss Saigon), and the Godfather who produced this quartet of box office juggernauts, Cameron Macintosh.10 Another assumption governing many Broadway surveys and other recent scholarship is that anything backed by Disney cannot be good, despite the fact that Beauty and the Beast (1994) and the still-running The Lion King (1997), directed and designed by Julie Taymor, currently stand as the fifth and eighth most popular Broadway musicals of all time.
Among the many new books in the field published during the past decade or so, major work has been published on several of the musicals featured in the first edition of Enchanted Evenings. Biographies, autobiographies, critical studies, publications of letters and lyrics, and other important books and essays have appeared to inform and enlighten the life and work of many major figures and shows and offer new information and ideas to those introduced in acts I and II.11 Here are a few samples:
• Show Boat: Stephen Banfield includes an important analytical and critical study of Show Boat in his book, Jerome Kern, and Todd Decker has begun to publish the fruits of his archival work on Show Boat.12
• Porgy and Bess: Howard Pollack’s monumental life and works study of George Gershwin devotes nearly one hundred pages to multiple aspects of this important work from its genesis and production history to revivals, recordings, and films. I have also had the privilege of reading Larry Starr’s insightful chapter on this work that will soon be readily available.13
• Lady in the Dark and Oklahoma!: In 2007, Oxford University Press published bruce d. mcclung’s award-winning “biography” of Lady in the Dark, published by Oxford University Press, a study that expands and offers new insights on the research of earlier articles I was able to use in the first edition. Although I have chosen to focus on Carousel rather than Oklahoma!, I would be remiss if I did not single out Tim Carter’s exceptionally well-researched archival study of Oklahoma! published by Yale University Press, also in 2007.14 Both books are models for future studies of individual musicals.
• Thomas L. Riis has added considerably to our knowledge of Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella in his recent book on Frank Loesser.15
• Scott Miller’s three volumes containing thirty-four essays on musicals (1996–2001), Raymond Knapp’s two-volume collection of essays on thirty-eight individual stage musicals, ten musical films, and one television musical (2005–2006), and Joseph P. Swain’s 1990 survey of sixteen musicals (which includes a new chapter on Les Misérables and a new concluding essay in its second edition published in 2002) also complement and expand on many of the shows discussed in the two editions of Enchanted Evenings among other shows.16
Stage versus Screen
For good or ill, many first experience Broadway musicals through film adaptations, which, no matter how faithful to their stage sources (not always a plus), remain distinct and even contradictory entities. The congruities and distinctions between stage and screen versions of the shows we love merit close study. In the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, however, I did not devote much attention to these film adaptations. I have tried to fill in this lacuna in the second edition with two new chapters on the film adaptations of musicals featured in act I and act II, a discussion of the 2007 Tim Burton Sweeney Todd with Johnny Depp in the greatly expanded Sondheim chapter, and a discussion of Joel Schumacher’s Phantom of the Opera film adaptation in 2004 in the newly written chapter on Lloyd Webber. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, nearly all the stage musicals featured in the first edition have suffered (and occasionally enjoyed) a musical film adaptation, and in these new film chapters and portions of other chapters I write about most of them. Existing material on these films tend to focus on behind-the-scene stories and casting gossip rather than on how these adaptations altered or added to the stage shows. These surveys also rarely discuss how the nature of film media—and surrounding ideologies—moved directors and producers to treat the stage originals in some cases as expendable and in others as sacrosanct. The second edition of Enchanted Evenings will engage these neglected issues.
Some of the film adaptations discussed in chapter 8 are difficult to obtain. One of these is the 1936 film version of Anything Goes with rising film star Bing Crosby and its already risen stage star, Ethel Merman. Another is Samuel Goldwyn’s unfairly maligned eightieth and final film of 1959, Porgy and Bess, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge in the title roles. Despite numerous infelicities and distortions, both films are well worth the effort it might take to locate them. In contrast, some of the film adaptations discussed in chapter 14 are probably better known than their stage versions. Prime specimens in this category include the Academy Award–winning musical film adaptations of My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Broadway’s original Henry Higgins, Rex Harrison, and West Side Story, a frequent visitor to high schools all over America to complement the study of Romeo and Juliet. What are we seeing (and hearing) when we see these films? What are we missing?
The film chapters and remarks on the Sweeney Todd and The Phantom of the Opera film adaptations will address these and other questions, including how the plots, scripts, songs, and Broadway casts ha
ve been altered, what was cut, what was retained, and why. Some of the films explored, while not without controversy, were financially and critically successful in their own day and remain well known and loved in ours. Until the 1950s, the producers who controlled the studios and their contracted stars and songwriters preferred infidelity over allegiance to Broadway stage sources. From the 1930s through the 1950s all films were also subject to the Hays Production Code, which enforced a stricter view than Broadway censors of what was proper for a song lyric or a plot. This alternative universe explains the expurgations of Cole Porter’s famously adult lyrics in the film adaptations of both Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate and the disposal of Vera Simpson’s husband from the plot so that her affair with Pal Joey would not be an adulterous one. Nearly twenty years earlier Broadway audiences were already free to experience and relish this unsavory material. Before the 1960s had ended, Hollywood had achieved parity with Broadway on the degree of unsavoriness permitted.
Despite the liberties they often take with their stage sources (Kim Kowalke refers to most film adaptations as “generic deformation”), the films do not invariably suffer by comparison.17 Take the 1936 Show Boat, in which, unusually, the authors were able to exert some creative control, including the use of a screenplay by Hammerstein. Here, the new songs were all by Hammerstein and Kern and the creators of these songs were the same people who helped make the thoughtful and imaginative changes necessary to adhere to the unofficial but binding “two hour” rule operative from the 1930s through the 1950s. Arriving a few years after the 1932 New York revival, the film featured timeless performances by Charles Winninger and Helen Morgan, reprising their stage roles of Cap’n Andy and Julie LaVerne, and Paul Robeson, the actor originally intended to play Joe. The result was a film that inspired Kern scholar Stephen Banfield to make the case that the film’s dramatic structure constitutes an improvement of the problematic original Broadway second act.18