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

by Block, Geoffrey

  Rodgers prefaces his remarks concerning the ill-fated musical about castration, Chee-Chee, a musical that received an all-time Rodgers and Hart low of thirty-one performances in 1928, with the suggestion that long before Pal Joey (1940) and Oklahoma! (1943), Rodgers with Hart “had long been firm believers in the close unity of song and story.”5Chee-Chee provided their first opportunity “to put our theories into practice,” as Rodgers explains:

  To avoid the eternal problem of the story coming to a halt as the songs take over, we decided to use a number of short pieces of from four to sixteen bars each, with no more than six songs of traditional form and length in the entire scene. In this way the music would be an essential part of the structure of the story rather than an appendage to the action. The concept was so unusual, in fact, that we even called attention to it with the following notice in the program: NOTE: The musical numbers, some of them very short, are so interwoven with the story that it would be confusing for the audience to peruse a complete list.6

  On Your Toes

  By the time Rodgers and Hart returned from Hollywood in 1935, their desire to create innovative musicals reached a new level. One year later they wrote On Your Toes. The genesis of the show can be traced to the Hollywood years, however, when Rodgers and Hart conceived the idea of a movie musical about a vaudeville hoofer (to be played by Fred Astaire) who becomes involved with a Russian ballet company.7 Astaire, then busy with his series of films with Ginger Rogers, declined the role and Hollywood rejected their scenario. Soon, however, Broadway bought the idea as a vehicle for a new dancing sensation, Ray Bolger, the scarecrow in Hollywood’s The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and the star of Rodgers and Hart’s final Broadway show, By Jupiter, in 1942 and Frank Loesser’s first Broadway triumph, Where’s Charley? in 1948. Boston tryouts took place between March 21 and April 8, 1936, and On Your Toes opened at the Imperial Theatre three days later. When it concluded its run at the Majestic Theatre the following January 23, the hit show had been performed 315 times.

  On Your Toes. Ray Bolger and Tamara Geva (1936). Photograph: White Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

  The history of On Your Toes after its initial critically and popularly acclaimed run differs markedly from the history of its more popular predecessor, Porter’s Anything Goes (discussed in chapter 3). The first major revival of Anything Goes in 1962 offered a new book and many interpolated songs, and made a respectable Off-Broadway run of 239 performances; the first revival of On Your Toes in 1954, with one interpolation and several other modest alterations, folded after only sixty-four showings. More incriminatingly, the work itself, not the production, was considered the principal reason for its failure.

  In 1936 Brooks Atkinson had written that “if the word ‘sophisticated’ is not too unpalatable, let it serve as a description of the mocking book which Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and George Abbott have scribbled.”8 By 1954, the integrated musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and even Rodgers and Hart’s recently revived Pal Joey—which Atkinson had reviewed disparagingly in 1940 before extolling its virtues in 1952—had created new criteria that musicals such as On Your Toes did not match. Thus eighteen years after his initially positive assessment Atkinson attacked as “labored, mechanical and verbose” the book he formerly had deemed sophisticated. For Atkinson and his public “the mood of the day,” which had recently caught up to Pal Joey, had “passed beyond” On Your Toes. The “long and enervating” road to the still-worthy “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet at the end of the second act simply was not worth the wait.9

  In the 1936 On Your Toes Rodgers and Hart attempted an integration of music and drama that went beyond their successful innovations in Peggy-Ann and their unsuccessful ones in Chee-Chee. In Musical Stages Rodgers discusses his ambitious new artistic intentions:

  One of the great innovations of On Your Toes, the angle that had initially made us think of it as a vehicle for Fred Astaire, was that for the first time ballet was being incorporated into a musical-comedy book. To be sure, Albertina Rasch had made a specialty of creating Broadway ballets [for example, The Band Wagon of 1931], but these were usually in revues and were not part of a story line. We made our main ballet [“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”] an integral part of the action; without it, there was no conclusion to our story.10

  Despite such claims, the degree to which co-authors Rodgers and Hart and Abbott succeeded in their attempt to integrate dance, especially “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” has been questioned by Ethan Mordden:

  Much has been made of “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”’s importance as a book-integrated ballet, but it was, in fact, a ballet-within-a-play … not a part of the story told in choreographic terms. Only towards the ballet’s end did plot collide with set piece when the hoofer learned that two gangsters were planning to gun him down from a box in the theatre at the end of the number. Exhausted, terrified, he must keep dancing to save his life until help comes, and thus a ballet sequence in On Your Toes turned into the On Your Toes plot.11

  Mordden’s challenge does not obscure the fact that On Your Toes treats a vexing artistic issue: the conflict and reconciliation between classical and popular art. Much of the plot and the comedy in On Your Toes evolves from the tensions between the cultivated and the vernacular, between highbrow and lowbrow art. Even the barest outlines of the scenario reveal this.

  When in act I, scene 3, we meet Phil Dolan III (“Junior”) as an adult, he is employed as a music professor at a W.P.A. [Work Projects Administration] Extension University, having renounced his career as a famous vaudeville hoofer sixteen years earlier at the insistence of his parents (scenes 1 and 2). His student and eventual romantic partner, Frankie Frayne, writes “cheap” (1936) or “derivative” (1983) popular songs, including “It’s Got to Be Love,” “On Your Toes,” and “Glad to Be Unhappy”; another student, Sidney Cohn, who supposedly possesses greater talent (to match his pretensions and ambition), has composed “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” which will be performed by the Russian Ballet in act II.

  The Cat and the Fiddle, a 1931 hit with lyrics by Otto Harbach and music by Kern, had explored the tensions and eventual accommodation of classical and popular music in a European setting in which a “serious” Romanian male composer and a jazzy American female composer—at the beginning of the show she is already well known as the composer of “She Didn’t Say Yes”—eventually produce a harmonious hybrid. On Your Toes contrasted the cultivated and vernacular traditions through dance, two full-length ballets, both choreographed by the revered George Balanchine (1904–1983), who in the previous decade starred in Diaghilev’s ballet company: a classical ballet to conclude act I (“La Princesse Zenobia”) and a jazz ballet (“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”) as a climax for act II. In the title song, tap dancing and classical ballet alternate and compete for audience approbation in the same number. Further, the Russian prima ballerina (Vera Baranova) and her partner (Konstantine Morrosine) have important dramatic (albeit non-singing) parts as well as their star dance turns. By contrast, in the dream ballet that concludes act I of Oklahoma!—the musical which almost invariably receives the credit for integrating dance into the book—the dancing roles of Laurey and Curley are played by separate and mute dancers.

  That On Your Toes is a musical about Art is frequently evident in the dialogue, especially its original 1936 manifestation. For example, in her efforts to convince the Russian ballet director, Sergei Alexandrovitch, that Sidney Cohn’s ballet is worthy of his company, manager and principal benefactress Peggy Porterfield explains the case for branching out: “Your public is tired of Schéhérazade, La Spectre de la Rose—they’ve seen all those Russian turkeys at the Capital for 40 cents—this is something different—it’s a jazz ballet—they can’t understand the music without the story and nobody can understand the story—they’ll say it’s art.”12 Vera considers herself “a great artist” because she has convinced Junior that her “dancing [has] a virginal charm.”13 And when Morrosine tells a gan
gster that he “must wait till he [Junior] stops dancing” before shooting him, Art takes precedence over jealousy and revenge.14

  The libretto also explores conflicting attitudes on the relative merits of classical and jazz dance. Frankie questions Junior’s priorities in giving up his potential as “a headliner in vaudeville” to be a supernumerary in the Russian ballet.15 In the 1936 libretto Morrosine’s infidelities and obnoxious behavior toward his partner and paramour Vera are acceptable, but he is denied the lead role in the jazz ballet for artistic reasons: “he does not understand American Jazz Rhythm” and “does not know how to dance on the off beat.”16

  On Your Toes in 1936 and 1983

  In 1983, nearly thirty years after it had previously stumbled in its first Broadway revival, On Your Toes was again revived, this time with a new book from nonagenarian Abbott, the principal contributor to the original book. Echoing Atkinson’s condemnation of the earlier production, Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote that the 1954 failure “was no fluke” and that “its few assets as entertainment are scattered like sweet and frail rose petals on a stagnant pond.”17 With the exception of Rich, the new production received mostly favorable reviews and ran 505 performances, after the 1952 revival of Pal Joey (542 performances) the second longest running Rodgers and Hart production and, like Porgy and Bess, Pal Joey, Candide, and in the 1990s, Guys and Dolls, Cabaret, and the still-running Chicago, one of the relatively few musical revivals to surpass its initial run.

  What made the 1983 On Your Toes revival especially newsworthy was the approach of the revivalists. In contrast to the drastic book revisions and interpolated songs of the 1962 and 1987 revivals of Anything Goes, the 1983 On Your Toes in most respects closely followed its 1936 model. And unlike the 1954 revival, which had contained the interpolated “You Took Advantage of Me” (originally heard in Present Arms of 1928) in act II, scene 3, and dropped the first number, “Two a Day for Keith,” soon after opening night, no interpolations or deletions in 1983 disturbed the “authenticity” of the original. That the 1983 production attempted to offer a faithful reenactment of the 1936 show is evident also in the reinstatement of the original dance and vocal arrangements, for the most part uncut and unedited, and the resuscitation of Hans Spialek’s 1936 orchestrations. Although some of the original choreography was lost, “Donald Saddler, who restaged the non-ballet numbers, took care to use only movements that belong to the dance of the time.”18

  The considerable success of the 1983 revival prompted the publication of the first complete vocal score two years later with the following introductory remarks from Theodore S. Chapin, President of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization:

  This score corresponds to the 1983 production of ON YOUR TOES which used the orchestrations and arrangements created for the original production in 1936. A few slight changes were necessary and were made by Hans Spialek, the man who orchestrated the show forty-seven years earlier. Therefore, what you have in your hands is a record of a 1936 Rodgers and Hart score as it sounded when first presented to the public, as well as a documentation of a successful revival. That a score of this nature could be presented as its creators intended, and that those intentions could seem as vital today as they were in 1936, is a testament not only to the timelessness of Rodgers and Hart, but to the dedication and affection lavished on the 1983 production.19

  Chapin neglects to mention that the vocal score issued in 1985 by Chappell does not entirely preserve the original order of these authentic 1936 orchestrations and arrangements. The brackets and other emendations in the lists of scenes and songs from the 1936 Broadway production and 1983 revival in the online website reveal, for example, that “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye” (sung in 1936 by Peggy and Junior in act I, scene 6) has been transferred to the first scene of the second act to replace “Quiet Night” so that Ms. Porterfield would have something to sing in both acts. “Quiet Night” in 1936 opens act II, sung by a character identified only as Crooner; in 1983 “Quiet Night” is sung one scene later by a named nonentity (Hank J. Smith) and a female trio and reprised in scene 4 by the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Alexandrovitch and an offstage chorus.

  Gone also is the act II reprise by Sergei and Peggy of Junior’s and Frankie’s “There’s a Small Hotel.” Even if one refrained from asking how Sergei and Peggy came to know this song, its second act appearance in 1936 seemed somewhat gratuitous. In 1983 Sergei and Peggy sing a reprise of “Quiet Night” instead. Both productions allow everyone to learn “There’s a Small Hotel” well enough to sing it at the end of the show.

  The 1983 version also changed the locale of a few scenes. For example, the schoolroom scene in act I, scene 5, originally took place in Central Park at night, a setting for “There’s a Small Hotel” that even the staunchest advocates of authenticity might consider laughable in 1983. But these changes do not contradict Chapin’s assertion that for the most part Abbott & Co. as well as Chappell & Co. remained faithful to their musical source to a degree that was remarkable for a 1980s revival of a 1930s musical.

  Thirty years earlier, as a result of his dissatisfaction with director Dwight Wiman, Abbott left for Palm Beach before rehearsals had begun in February, returning after Rodgers reminded him that as co-(de facto principal) author Abbott had an “obligation to come and protect it.”20 In his autobiography Abbott explains his reaction and solution:

  Arriving in Boston, where On Your Toes was playing its final week, I found things in better shape than I had expected. Ray Bolger was sensational in the lead, and “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” remains in my memory as one of the best numbers I’ve ever seen in the theatre, both musically and choreographically. The book, however, was a mess; the story line had been destroyed by experimenting, and the actors were out of hand. I behaved ruthlessly to the cast to force them to play parts instead of fighting for material, and I straightened the book out by the simple device of putting it back the way I had written it in the first place.21

  When he returned to the script in 1983, Abbott (now ninety-five) had had time to rethink and reinterpret his responses and actions of 1936. He now recalled the situation somewhat differently than in both his and Rodgers’s published autobiographies: “I respected Rodgers and Hart so much in that field … I didn’t do as much as I should have done…. I threw out three sets…. In the old days, if they wanted to sing a song, they set it in Central park or the Palladium. What for? To sing a song like ‘Quiet Night’? I made ‘Quiet Night’ part of the plot.”22

  In order to further integrate plot and music as well as to establish greater credibility (and, of course, accessibility) for a 1980s audience, Abbott altered his original libretto. In 1936 Sergei and Vera had been several times married; in 1983 Sergei is given some romantic potential with Peggy (as revealed in their reprise of “Quiet Night,” now “part of the plot”) and Vera and Konstantine are lovers both on and off the stage. Also in 1983 the original meeting between Junior and Peggy is made more understandable; Frankie now knows a friend of Peggy’s uncle who can introduce them.

  The main changes between the 1936 and 1983 books, however, deal less with plot than with language. The earlier version is more sexually suggestive and, still more surprisingly, perhaps even funnier. Here, for example, is what 1936 audiences heard in the dialogue that precedes Vera’s meeting with Junior in act I, scene 4:

  PEGGY: You’re to be a strip tease girl in a burlesque show.

  VERA: Well, if he’s got ideas like that, why should I bother to dress?

  PEGGY: Darling, he thinks you are an actress. He doesn’t know we are casting to type.

  In 1983 Vera is cast as a primmer prima ballerina who has the potential to play a striptease character when given time to consider such an outrageous thought. Abbott is clearly no longer casting to type:

  PEGGY: You’re going to love the part—it’s a striptease girl in a burlesque show. It will shock the dance world. It will show us as the progressive ballet company I want us to be.

  VERA: W
hat about Sergei Alexandrovitch? He will say no.

  PEGGY: First you have to like it. This young man who is coming will play the music and tell you all about it.

  VERA (Begins to play the part): Sure, a striptease girl—why not?

  As a sexually liberated goddess of the ballet world, the original Vera is allowed to conclude the scene in her apartment with a risqué punch line that indicates her desire to see more of Junior. After the foreplay of dancing to the “Zenobia” ballet with Junior, they climb on her bed and she takes his glasses off. When Junior tells Vera his real name and his nickname, Vera replies with a line that could have been stolen from a Mae West film: “But I’ll call you Phillip. I can’t call you Junior. For very soon you will be a great big boy.”23

  The original book of On Your Toes had fewer Groucho Marx–Margaret Dumont–type exchanges than the 1934 Anything Goes, but those that remained were carefully expurgated. Thus in Abbott’s 1983 revised book (act 1, scene 6) Sergei learns of the glitch that will pave the way for Junior to escape from his role as a supernumerary to become a star of the “Zenobia” ballet: the dancer Leftsky has been detained in jail. This change obscures the politically topical nature of the 1936 version which finds Lefsky (less obviously named than his 1983 counterpart) in a hospital.

  SERGEI: He got in fight with union delegates—All afternoon we are waiting and waiting for him—