INTRODUCTION
Setting the Stage
The central subjects in acts I and II of this book are fourteen “book” musicals that premiered on Broadway between the late 1920s and the late 1950s, beginning with Show Boat (1927) and ending with West Side Story (1957).1 All of these shows, and the Sondheim and Lloyd Webber shows discussed in the Epilogue—most for several generations—have demonstrated a measure of popularity and critical approbation. They also offer an array of fascinating critical, analytical, social, and historical issues. Perhaps more important, the musicals surveyed here continue to move us to applaud and cheer (and sometimes hiss), to sing their songs, follow their stories, and make us laugh and cry. In short, they entertain us. Forty, fifty, sixty, even eighty years later we eagerly revisit these shows, not only on Broadway, but in high school and college productions and amateur and professional regional theaters of all shapes and sizes, artistic aims, audiences, and budgets.
In this selective (and to some degree idiosyncratic) survey I do not presume to develop a theory of permanent or ephemeral values or to unravel the mysteries of either artistic merit or popular success. I do, however, attempt to establish a critical and analytical framework that might contribute to an understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the selected musicals. The purpose of this introduction is to present recurring topics and issues, to encapsulate the approach to the subject this book will take, and to explain—and sometimes defend—the choices.
Why start with Show Boat? Certainly, other American musicals that premiered before December 27, 1927, are still successfully revived. Nevertheless, although the choice of where to begin a survey of Broadway is by nature somewhat arbitrary and destined to generate controversy, Broadway historians and critics with surprising unanimity subscribe to the view espoused by the admittedly biased judgment of Show Boat enthusiast Miles Kreuger: “The history of the American Musical Theatre, quite simply, is divided into two eras—everything before Show Boat and everything after Show Boat.”2Show Boat not only opened up a world of possibilities for what an ambitious American musical on an American theme could accomplish; it remains firmly anchored as the first made-in-America musical to achieve a secure place in the core repertory of Broadway musicals.
Before Show Boat the Broadway shows that created their greatest initial and most lasting imprints were often British and Viennese imports such as William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore (1879) and Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow (1907), respectively. Earlier shows that displayed unequivocally American themes—for example, the so-called Mulligan shows of Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart between 1879 and 1883, Percy Gaunt and Charles H. Hoyt’s phenomenally successful A Trip to Chinatown in 1891 (657 performances), and George M. Cohan’s Little Johnny Jones in 1904—are today remembered for their songs.3 The latter show is perhaps best known from its partly staged reincarnation in film (the 1942 classic film biography of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring James Cagney) or the musical biography George M! (1968), which features a potpourri of memorable Cohan songs. Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta (1910), Jerome Kern’s so-called Princess Theatre Shows (1915–1918) with books and lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton (especially Very Good Eddie and Leave It to Jane), Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy’s Irene (1919), Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince in Heidelberg (1924), Vincent Youmans’s and Irving Caesar’s No, No, Nanette (1925), and The Desert Song (1926) (music by Romberg, lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein 2nd) are occasionally revived and singled out as outstanding exponents of the American musical before Show Boat.4 But unlike Gilbert and Sullivan and Lehár’s imported classics, these stageworthy as well as melodious operettas and musical comedies are not widely known, and the Herbert and Romberg operettas are mainly familiar to the Broadway-attending public primarily in greatly altered MGM film versions.5 The unfairly neglected musicals before Show Boat certainly merit a book of their own.
By 1927, the early masters of the American Broadway musical, Herbert, Cohan, Romberg, and Rudolf Friml, either had completed or were nearing the end of their numerous, lucrative, and—for their era—long-lived Broadway runs. Joining Kern, a new generation of Broadway composers and lyricists—Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and, in Germany, Kurt Weill—all but Hammerstein and Weill are featured in Al Hirschfeld’s drawing “American Popular Song: Great American Songwriters”—had already launched their Broadway careers by 1927.6
But despite their auspicious opening salvos, the greatest triumphs for this illustrious list, with the exception of Kern’s, would arrive after Show Boat in the 1930s and 1940s.
“American Popular Song: Great American Songwriters” (clockwise from left): Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. 1983. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM
Critical Issues
Although the present survey will offer biographical profiles of the composers, lyricists, librettists, and other key players in order to place their careers in the context of a particular musical, critical and analytical concerns will receive primary attention. In fact, each of the fourteen musicals explored in the main body of the text and the Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals in chapters 15 and 16 demonstrate critical issues of enduring interest. Two issues in particular emerge as central themes and will occur repeatedly throughout this survey: the tension between two ideological approaches—song and dance versus integrated—to the Broadway musical, and the alleged conflict between temporal popularity and lasting value and the selling out, again alleged, not of tickets but of artistic integrity.
Acute manifestations of the latter conflict have been attributed to the careers of Gershwin, Rodgers, Weill, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, and Sondheim. The former issue is embodied in (but by no means confined to) the differences between the Rodgers and Hart and the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows; the career of Porter, who, after a string of hits (and then some flops) in musicals modeled after Anything Goes, responded in Kiss Me, Kate to the “anxiety of influence” generated by Rodgers and Hammerstein; and the controversial but frequently alleged schism between the European and the American musicals of Weill.7 At the risk of giving away the plot, the view espoused here is that the song and dance musical comedies that prevailed in the 1920s and ’30s and the integrated musicals that became more influential in the 1940s and ’50s both allow a meaningful dramatic relationship between songs and their shows. A subtext of the ensuing discussion is that selling tickets does not necessarily mean selling out artistic integrity.
In each chapter readers will hear again from opening-night theater (and occasionally music) critics. These critics were usually the first to offer prophetic pontifications for Broadway audiences eager to discover whether or not they should feel smug or inadequate in their appreciation or rejection of a show. The critics (again, mostly theater critics) can be reviled but they cannot be ignored, especially since, despite their lack of specialized musical training, they have consistently demonstrated remarkable precognition (or inspired self-fulfilling prophecies) regarding the critical as well as the popular fate of Broadway shows. Although they must produce their work under enormous pressure and seemingly against all odds, receiving little sympathy in the process, opening-night critics frequently call attention to issues that will reappear to haunt a show. Such early perceived problems and issues as Show Boat’s second act or the jarring stylistic heterogeneity of Porgy and Bess or The Most Happy Fella do not go away but remain to be reassessed and reinterpreted by future generations.
The degree to which the stage works we love should be performed in authentic versions—to the often questionable extent this is possible—has been a source of debate in America for more than two centuries. Writing about ni
neteenth-century American approaches to European opera, Richard Crawford defines accessibility as “the tailoring of the music to suit particular audiences and circumstances” and authenticity “as an ideal countering the marketplace’s devotion to accessibility.”8 According to Crawford, accessibility “privileges occasions over works” and “invests ultimate authority in the present-day audiences.” “Authenticity privileges works over occasions” and “invests ultimate authority in works and the traditions within which they are composed.” The desirability of—or resistance to—establishing an authentic musical and literary text for a show and the struggle between authenticity and accessibility will loom as a major issue in several chapters of this survey, in particular those on Show Boat, Anything Goes, On Your Toes, Porgy and Bess, and the James Goldman-Stephen Sondheim-Hal Prince-Michael Bennett Follies.9 Kern and Hammerstein, the principal creators of Show Boat, themselves produced a second “authentic” version that would be more “accessible” to audiences desiring the newer Rodgers and Hammerstein model. Anything Goes revivals in 1962 and 1987 would be equipped with a new book and many songs interpolated from other Porter shows. The 1983 On Your Toes would match a new book with the original score (albeit somewhat rearranged).
The original “operatic” sung form (emphasizing authenticity) of Porgy and Bess has clearly prevailed in recent years over its “Broadway” form with spoken dialogue (emphasizing accessibility). Nevertheless, considerable debate continues to rage over what constitutes an authentic text for this work. Charles Hamm has argued that the cuts made by the creators in its original Theatre Guild production are justifiable for artistic as well as for commercial reasons and that the current urge to restore these cuts creates a historically and aesthetically untenable reconstruction.10 With the purpose of shedding some light on this heated subject, the chapter on Porgy and Bess will treat at length the historical background and aesthetic problems posed by one such cut, the “Buzzard Song.”
The starting point for contemplating the “text” of a musical is almost invariably a vocal score rather than a full orchestral score, and later—after the release of Oklahoma! in 1943—the cast recording in various states of completion. It is therefore not surprising that Broadway musicals as a genre have been unusually susceptible to identity crises. Although some musicals after Oklahoma! were considerably reworked in future productions, musicals prior to this landmark show typically have been treated as less fixed and therefore more subject to revision and interpolation. The first part of this survey will trace how several shows have evolved in response to the competing interests of accessibility or authenticity and what these responses tell us about changing social and aesthetic tastes and values.
Analytical Issues
The principal analytical question raised in this survey is how music and lyrics serve, ignore, or contradict dramatic themes and ideas, both in specific scenes and in the shows as a whole. Although this study will only infrequently treat music autonomously, a major factor behind the selection of the shows surveyed is the widely appreciated musical richness and enduring appeal of their scores. In contrast to most previous surveys, in which music is neglected beyond unhelpful generalities about its power to convey mood, music in this study will emerge as an equal (and occasionally more than equal) partner to the other components of a show, including lyrics, librettos, choreography, and stage direction.
Even when a musical is seemingly distinguished more by self-contained rather than integrated songs, the relationship of music and lyrics and music’s power to express dramatic themes will be a central aesthetic issue for each musical. While some admiration will be reserved for those musicals that approximate Joseph Kerman’s criteria for European operatic excellence, using music to define character and generate action as espoused in his Opera as Drama, other musicals considered with equal favor here do not accomplish this at all.11
The philosophical distinctions regarding text setting expressed by Peter Kivy apply also to the disparate approaches of Broadway musicals. As noted in the Preface to the First Edition, Kivy contrasts “the principle of textual realism,” in which the meanings of words are “interpreted” musically, “with another approach to the setting of texts … the principle of opulent adornment,” in which texts are set like precious jewels “hindered neither by the meaning nor the intelligibility of what he [the composer] ‘sets.’”12 The contrasting careers of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein represent these different approaches. Comparisons might suggest that something was lost as well as gained by the abandonment of cleverness, wit, and autonomous memorable tunes (Kivy’s “opulent adornment” of words) in favor of integrated and more operatically constructed musicals filled with such techniques such as leitmotivs, foreshadowing, thematic transformation, and classical borrowings, however convincingly employed for various dramatic purposes (Kivy’s “textual realism”).
The language of the analysis is intended to be accessible to readers unversed in musical vocabulary. For this reason harmonic details will receive less emphasis than melodic and rhythmic aspects. Some of the shows discussed here adopt techniques analogous to those practiced in the operas of Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner, and the book is based on the premises that for some musicals, melodic and rhythmic connections and imaginative use of classical borrowings (for striking examples of the latter see West Side Story) audibly enrich the dramatic fabric, and that some knowledge of these connections might contribute to the appreciation and enjoyment of these works.
For readers who neither read music nor profess any musical discernment beyond knowledge of what they like, the intent here is that the lyrics that accompany most of the musical examples will provide an aid in figuring out the point and purpose of the analytical discussion without undue discomfort. Since for many, negotiating musical terminology of any kind is an ordeal, occasionally even rudimentary concepts, including intervals, rhythmic note values, and the idea of central and hierarchical key relationships, will need to be explained. Although the attempt to create a text suitable for a “Broadway audience” unaccustomed to musical terminology may inevitably lead to some oversimplification from the perspective of theorists and musicologists, it is nevertheless the goal that something meaningful and new can be gained for this audience as well. In nearly all cases the focus will be on those musical features that can actually be heard, and on the musical expression of dramatic meanings and dramatic context.
The Making of a Musical, Adaptation, and Social Issues
How is a musical created and how does knowledge of compositional process, including the revisions made during out-of-town tryouts, lead to a better understanding and appreciation of the works we see and hear today? How were the composers, lyricists, and librettists, our principal subjects, influenced by directors, choreographers, producers, and audiences? How did the creators of these shows achieve a balance between artistic and commercial control of their work?
Although a knowledge of a musical’s compositional process can provide partial answers to these questions, the study of how a musical evolves from pre-compositional discussions, early sketches, and drafts to opening night and subsequent revivals has not been widely explored in the literature on Broadway.13 In fact, this book is the first to do so over a broad spectrum of the field. Sometimes the creative problems posed by musicals seem to find solutions by opening night or shortly thereafter; other problems remain for the life (and afterlife) of the show. When source materials permit this type of an inquiry—and some musicals were selected for this survey in part because they left conspicuous paper trails—the present study will examine how unpublished compositional materials (such as early libretto and lyric drafts, musical sketches, and letters) support or contradict more widely available published memoirs, interviews, and retrospective panels of creative participants.
One common denominator that links most of the musicals discussed in this survey is the practice, ubiquitous after Oklahoma!, of adapting a literary source for the musical stage (see “Sources, Published L
ibrettos, and Vocal Scores” in the online website). Three adaptations that contend with formidable antecedents are explored at some length. The chapters on these shows will examine how and why these famous plays were adapted for new audiences in a new medium and how they preserved (Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story) or distorted (My Fair Lady) the fundamental dramatic meanings of their sources in their musical reincarnations. The two new chapters that conclude acts I and II (chapters 8 and 14) and the expanded Sondheim and new Lloyd Webber chapters (chapters 15 and 16) will also examine what happened in the next step of the adaptation process experienced by most Broadway musicals, the conversion to film, and how partisans of stage performances might handle the realities of an interloping medium.
When comparing stage musicals with their literary origins, the chapter on Kiss Me, Kate (chapter 10) will discuss how Sam and Bella Spewack’s original libretto differs from the final Broadway version as well as with Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and in the process suggest that Porter may have learned as much from his own Anything Goes as he did from Rodgers and Hammerstein about how to relate music to character. In My Fair Lady (chapter 12) Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe departed significantly from Shaw’s ending to Pygmalion. After giving the mean-spirited Professor Henry Higgins a more humane face (intentionally denied by Shaw) by the end of act I, the Broadway team, in their second act, made explicit, mainly through the songs, what Shaw implies or omits. Ironically, although they romanticized—and thereby misrepresented—Shaw’s intentions, Lerner and Loewe managed to convey Eliza Doolittle’s metamorphosis as Higgins’s equal, through both Lerner’s lyrics and Loewe’s reversal of their musical roles, more clearly than either Shaw’s play or director Gabriel Pascal’s 1938 film, upon which My Fair Lady was based.
Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 4