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 3

by Block, Geoffrey


  The 1936 Anything Goes adaptation may have cut or mutilated much of Porter, but it does give audiences a chance to see the original Ethel Merman in her prime and fine film portrayals of Billy Crocker by the young Bing Crosby, and the character of Moon by Charlie Ruggles. It also delivers a surprising amount of the original Broadway libretto, which is much funnier than later revisionists give it credit for. Most of the films that adapted Broadway shows did something right, and we will gain a better understanding about the films, their sources, and ourselves from watching them—as long as we do not rest our evaluation solely on their fidelity to the stage works we hold dear.

  Film adaptations of the Golden Age musicals, most of which were released about a decade after their Broadway debuts, tend to be more faithful to their original plots, scripts, and songs, and despite some deleted and rearranged dialogue and song cuts, the new songs (e.g., in the Kiss Me, Kate and Guys and Dolls adaptations) are almost invariably those of the Broadway songwriters. In addition to discussing their relative fidelity and completeness, the film chapters will address the practice of voice dubbing and various less noticeable technological changes that manipulate and transform live theater into the deceptively more realistic film medium. Some of these films have exerted a profound effect on how audiences have come to appreciate the stage originals, and these chapters will address this historical legacy as well.

  Sources on West Side Story (to conclude with a particularly well-known example) seldom neglect to mention that it was the film version rather than the stage version that catapulted this show into universal popular consciousness. Indeed, the 1961 film, co-directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, came within one award of a clean Academy Awards sweep, winning ten out of a possible eleven awards. Despite a few conspicuous changes in the song order, all the original West Side Story songs are present and accounted for (unlike virtually every preceding film adaptation of a musical). Also in marked contrast to most Hollywood film adaptations of Broadway from the 1930s to the 1950s, no songs were added, either by studio composers on contract or by Leonard Bernstein, the composer. Although Robbins, the original director and choreographer of the stage version, was fired from the film after directing the Prologue for his inability to maintain a financially sound production schedule, most of the choreography that appears on screen is faithful to Robbins’s vision and that of original and film co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

  The love versus hate theme of Romeo and Juliet carries over into the contrasting reactions this (and other) film adaptations inspire. Some film critics loved the Robbins-Wise translation from stage to screen. Arthur Knight, in the Saturday Review, considered it “a triumphant work of art”; Stanley Kauffmann went even further when he proclaimed the adaptation “the best film musical ever made.”19 On the other hand, an uncharacteristically grumpy Pauline Kael did not even like the dancing and asked, “How can so many critics have fallen for all this frenzied hokum.”20 Love it or hate it, the film remains one of the most memorable film adaptations of a Broadway show.

  Enchanted Evenings: A Textbook Example?

  In the Preface to the First Edition I relate what brought me to write Enchanted Evenings. I described the role musicals played in my childhood and adolescence, my rejection of musicals as unworthy of my love, and my return to the fold after completing a dissertation on the genesis and compositional process of Beethoven’s early piano concertos. I also explain how this book was the first to combine traditional musicological practices, such as the study of primary manuscripts, with a serious discussion of how musicals took shape in the minds of their creators and how the music in musicals dramatically enhances words and stories. My goal was to write a book that I wanted to write and at the same time a book that corresponded to what I wanted to teach in my course, The Broadway Musical. Although most of the musicals I chose to write about would generally be classified among the usual suspects, others (e.g., The Cradle Will Rock, One Touch of Venus, and The Most Happy Fella) might be considered idiosyncratic. Even when dealing with such an essential component as Rodgers and Hammerstein, I felt free to include Rodgers’s personal favorite, simply because it also interested and moved me more than, say, Oklahoma! The book was my party, and I could cry over Carousel if I wanted to.

  Increasingly, however, the first edition seemed in need of some updating to better serve a general audience. It also constituted an incomplete reflection of what I covered in my course in a given semester. Long before Johnny Depp came along, a Broadway course without Sweeney Todd seemed unthinkable. For years I have also spent a week on The Phantom of the Opera, now included prominently in the second edition. Although I rarely fail to single out Engel’s runner-up Cabaret in my course, unfortunately space did not permit me to give this show or the important career of John Kander and Fred Ebb (almost, but not quite brought to a halt by the death of Ebb in 2004) the attention they merit.21

  In preparing a second edition, I soon realized I would need to neglect other major shows by those who followed the composers and lyricists who starred in the first edition, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Marc Blitzstein, Kurt Weill, Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederic Loewe, and Leonard Bernstein, and in the process featured roles by major directors and choreographers, including George Abbott, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, Rouben Mamoulian, and Jerome Robbins. Nearly fifty years have gone by since the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation passed the torch to a new generation starting in the late 1950s with Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and then moving into the early 1960s with Cy Coleman, Jerry Herman, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Stephen Sondheim, and Charles Strouse; the 1970s with Marvin Hamlisch, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Stephen Schwartz; the 1980s with Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, William Finn, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, and Maury Yeston; the 1990s and 2000s with Jason Robert Brown, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChuisa, Jonathan Larson, and Jeanine Tesori. The above list is by no means exhaustive.

  With the exception of the Sondheim–Lloyd Webber Epilogue and some attention to Hal Prince (who as the director of both Sweeney Todd and The Phantom of the Opera successfully bridged the divide between these central musical figures) and James Lapine, the second edition leaves most of the lacunae unfilled. Nevertheless, my intention and hope is that this new edition will serve readers at least a little more adequately and usefully. For those who arrived on Broadway through Hollywood (and for those who want to know thine enemy), the two new chapters on film adaptations and the discussions of the Sweeney Todd and Phantom of the Opera films in the greatly expanded Sondheim and entirely new Lloyd Webber chapters could perhaps provide a point of access and lead to greater understanding and appreciation of both stage and screen musicals.

  When Enchanted Evenings appeared in 1997, Lloyd Webber’s Cats, directed by Trevor Nunn, was on the verge of surpassing Michael Bennett and Marvin Hamlisch’s A Chorus Line as Broadway’s longest running show, and Phantom stood in fourth place behind the then still running Les Misérables, Cats, and A Chorus Line on the all-time Broadway Hit Parade. Other shows by the popular French and British invaders, Les Misérables and Miss Saigon (lyrics by Boublil, music by Schönberg, and produced by Cameron Mackintosh), Phantom (Lloyd Webber, also produced by Mackintosh), and Sunset Boulevard (Lloyd Webber, directed by Nunn) were in the process of extending their runs, in some cases for more than a decade.

  As I write this new preface, Phantom stands alone as the reigning champion, followed by Cats, “Les Miz,” Chorus Line, and two shows new to the Broadway scene twelve years ago, the Chicago revival and The Lion King. Musicals that arrived about the time of Enchanted Evening’s first edition or since have both begun and ended some of the longest runs in Broadway history (see “The Top Forty Greatest Hit Musicals from 1920 to 2008 in the online website www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings—the numbers in parentheses refer to their current place in this list): Beauty and the Beast (5), Rent (6), Hai
rspray (16), The Producers (17), Cabaret (Revival) (18), Smokey Joe’s Café (24), Aida (28), Monty Python’s Spamalot (35), Jekyll & Hyde (37), and 42nd Street (Revival) (38). Another trio of megahit shows that opened after Enchanted Evenings are still running, one or more of which may reach the Top Broadway 10 by the time they eventually close their curtains: Mamma Mia! (13), Avenue Q (22), and Wicked (23).

  While these shows have attracted large audiences, Sondheim’s shows continued to enjoy greater critical prestige. In 1993, Sondheim became the subject of the first major musicological study of a Broadway composer, Stephen Banfield’s Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals. Five years later the American Musicological Society national meeting in Boston devoted a special evening session to Sondheim. Lloyd Webber’s musicals have gradually attracted theater scholars and musicologists as well, albeit far fewer than the legions of literary and dramatic critics, cultural historians, and sociologists in addition to the many musicologists attracted to the work of Sondheim. The chapters on Sondheim and Lloyd Webber will try to shed light on why there exists such a deep chasm between the ways audiences, critics, and theater historians have assessed these two major contributors to the American musical.

  Audiences did not know it at the time but by 1997 both Sondheim and Lloyd Webber had completed most of their Broadway work.22 Their most recent New York successes, Sondheim and Lapine’s Passion and Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, both arriving in 1994, had also recently closed. It turns out that the years since the first edition of Enchanted Evenings marked the beginning of the Post-Sondheim and Post–Lloyd Webber Era, a subject for future books by future authors. Meanwhile, the contrasting achievements and reputations of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber and the issues these important Broadway figures raise (e.g., tradition vs. modernity and popularity vs. critical acclaim) will serve in this second edition of Enchanted Evenings as worthy representatives of the Broadway story beyond West Side Story.

  To quote Cinderella’s opening and closing lines in Into the Woods, “I wish.”

  Tacoma, Wash.

  G. B.

  January 2009

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Without more than a little help from parents, family, friends, teachers and professors, colleagues, students, readers and editors, librarians and archivists and the collections they serve, and copyright owners and their assistants and lawyers, this book could not have been written. I am glad for this opportunity to thank some of the institutions and people that contributed to this collaborative process.

  Collections in the New York Public Library (Loesser), Yale University (Porter, Weill), the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Blitzstein, Moss Hart, Sondheim), the Kurt Weill Foundation (Weill), and the Library of Congress (Gershwin, Kern, Loewe, Porter, Rodgers, and Weill) were indispensable in my research. Of the many who facilitated my use of these priceless holdings I would like to thank individually Harold L. Miller of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, David Farneth and Joanna C. Lee of The Kurt Weill Foundation, Victor Cardell and Kendall Crilly of Yale University, and especially Raymond A. White of the Library of Congress, for sharing his time and knowledge so generously.

  For special kindnesses I would like to identify and thank the following: Louis H. Aborn, President, Tams-Witmark; Tom Briggs, Director, The Rodgers and Hammerstein Theatre Library; Tom Creamer, Dramaturg, The Goodman Theater; Marty Jacobs and Marguerite Lavin of the Museum of the City of New York; David Leopold, Al Hirschfeld’s representative at the Margo Feiden Galleries; and Roberta Staats and Robert H. Montgomery of the Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trusts. A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1990 enabled me to research and draft several chapters, and the University of Puget Sound provided generous financial and other assistance at several stages over the past decade. I am also grateful for the expertise and helpfulness of Oxford University Press, especially my editor, Maribeth Payne, her assistant, Soo Mee Kwon, production editor Joellyn M. Ausanka, and copy editor Paul Schlotthauer.

  Jacqueline Block, Andrew Buchman, and Richard Lewis read portions of various early drafts, offered useful advice and encouragement, and helped me to consolidate central ideas as well as many details. In later stages several reviewers offered valuable suggestions both large and small that I was able to incorporate into the final draft. Throughout I was guided by the wise counsel of my friend, colleague, and “ideal reader” (i.e., intelligent, curious, and challenging, but not necessarily a musician), Michael Veseth, Professor of Economics.

  The following people also provided much-needed information, services, or support: Marcie Bates, Ronald L. Blanc, Abba Bogin, John E. Boswell, J. Peter Burkholder, Theodore S. Chapin, Tara Corcoran, Christopher Davis, Lee Davis, Denise Dumke, Sarah Dunlop, Arthur Elias, Hugh Fordin, April Franks, Peter P. Mc.N. Gates, Rosemarie Gawelko, Peter Greenfield, David Grossberg, John L Hughes, Judy Hulbert, Autumn Inglin, Caroline Kane, Andrew King, Al Kohn, Frank Korach, Deann Kreutzer, Arthur Laurents, Florence Leeds, bruce d. mcclung, Anne McCormick, Judith McCulloh, Kathy McCullough, Paul McKibbins, Zoraya Mendez, Betty Kern Miller, Jeremy Nussbaum, Leonard Pailet, Harriet F. Pilpel, Mitchell Salem, Evelyn Sasko, Joan Schulman, Larry Starr, Jo Sullivan, Hope H. Taylor, Andrea N. Van Kampen, and Robin Walton.

  Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends. My parents and my sister, Norma, introduced me to the joy of musicals when I was a child, and the senior Blocks have unceasingly nurtured my intellectual and aesthetic growth ever since. My friends shared and profoundly enriched my processes of discovery. My wife, Jacqueline, was my friendliest and most helpful critic. My daughters, Jessamyn and Eliza, not only inspired me to organize my time more efficiently but gave perspective and meaning to this and all my other work.

  The second edition of Enchanted Evenings was born and nurtured from inception to fruition through the generosity and wisdom of my editor at Oxford University Press, Norm Hirschy. Throughout every stage of the process, including an insightful reading of the new chapters, Norm offered the full range of his punctual, thoughtful, nuanced, and always kind and enthusiastic editorial expertise, guidance, and support. I can’t thank him enough. Thanks also to Oxford’s Senior Production Editor Joellyn Ausanka for honoring me by requesting this book and then ably guiding it through the production process as she did with the first edition and with The Richard Rodgers Reader. I would also like to thank Patterson Lamb for her unobtrusive and helpful copy editing and Katharine Boone and Madelyn Sutton for their administrative assistance.

  For this, as with every project I have undertaken, the library and music office staff at the University of Puget Sound was invariably friendly and helpful. In addition, Media Consultant Stephen Philbrook and his student assistant Kyle Cramer provided indispensable assistance through the complicated task of locating and processing the new film photos. I am also grateful to my students for keeping me in touch with what is happening on Broadway (and in general for that matter) and for sharing their perceptive thoughts, observations, and reactions.

  Michael Veseth, the “ideal reader” of the first edition, was always available to demonstrate his problem-solving acumen and to help me figure out what I was trying to accomplish. Andrew Buchman offered thorough, knowledgeable, and helpful comments on the expanded Sondheim chapter and the three new chapters and provided an invaluable sounding board and an endless source of enthusiasm and encouragement at every stage.

  As with the first edition, my wife, Jacqueline, and daughters, Jessamyn and Eliza, provided a family ambiance of love and encouragement, blessings that were deeply appreciated and especially meaningful at a time of loss and mourning. My mother died in August 2007, not long after Norm first proposed my doing an expanded second edition of Enchanted Evenings, and my dad died while I was writing the new chapters last October. I dedicate this second edition to their inspiring example and beloved memory.

  USING THE ENCHANTED EVENINGS WEBSITE

  Oxford has created a companion website, www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings, to accompany En
chanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, and the reader is encouraged to take full advantage of it. Among its contents, the website offers plot synopses, a discography and filmography, appendices of Sources, Published Librettos, and Vocal Scores, Long Runs: Decade by Decade 1920s–2000s, The Forty Longest-Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959 and 1920–2008, and additional useful and extensive appendices listing scenes and songs for the opening night Broadway versions of all of the principal shows discussed in the main text. In addition, the website offers outlines of scenes and songs from pre-Broadway tryouts, Broadway revivals, and other source material to assist the reader’s understanding and comprehension of the discussions. The phrase “online website” will appear at the mention of these appendices in the main text.

  OVERTURE

  CHAPTER ONE

 

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