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

by Block, Geoffrey

  PEGGY: Waiting for Lefsky!24

  Theater audiences in 1936 would not have had any trouble relating this reference to Clifford Odets’s then widely known union play produced the previous year, Waiting for Lefty, in which members of a taxi drivers’ union are waiting in vain for their leader, who has been killed.

  The Classroom Scene

  A comparison between the 1936 and 1983 versions of the first classroom scene, act I, scene 3, further demonstrates evolving social attitudes. In 1936 Junior not only derogates as “cheap” the musical ditty Frankie has composed, but he also displays a favoritism toward his “serious” jazz (and, not incidentally, male) student composer Sidney Cohn. In fact, he is so engrossed in his protégé that he is oblivious to Frankie’s feelings. Although Frankie is still the one who will return to apologize for leaving so abruptly, by 1983 Junior has learned something from the feminist movement of the intervening years. At least he realizes that he has hurt her feelings.

  Gone from both the lyrics and the vocal score of “The Three B’s” in 1983 are Hart’s virtuosic and delectably absurd rhymes in 1936 that called attention to their brilliance: “Who are the three ‘B’s’ of music? / Name the holy trinity / Whose true divinity / Goes stretching to infinity / No asininity / In this vicinity / Who are the three “B’s” of music?”25

  In 1983 Junior offers the following interpretation of romantic lieder: “And thus we note the painless transition into the next phase. The early 19th century brought forth a renaissance of what we could term singing composers. The great music of that period was idealized folk song. Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and, last but not least, Franz Schubert.”26

  The following dialogue from 1936 (abandoned in 1983) introduces “The Three B’s” from quite a different perspective:

  JUNIOR: You will notice I am careful of the pronunciation, Schu-bert, not Shubert [a reference to the organization which, then as now, owned a considerable number of Broadway theaters]. (Walks to piano) Let us take this lovely melody. (He plays the Ständchen and sings) “Dein ist mein Herz” which means “Yours is my heart.” We are all familiar with that melody but I wonder is there anyone who can tell me what life force may have inspired Franz Schubert? (Hands are raised by some of the class) Yes, Miss Wasservogel?

  MISS WASSERVOGEL: A beautiful girl.

  JUNIOR: Miss Frayne?

  FRANKIE: A handsome young man.

  SEVERAL STUDENTS: A girl—a girl.

  OTHERS: A boy.

  JUNIOR: No—a pork chop, a glass of beer and liverwurst; Schubert should be very close to our hearts here for he was born poor with no W.P.A.27

  Abbott’s 1936 dialogue lets audiences know unequivocally that Frankie—a contemporary Schubert—is the one inspired by “a handsome young man.”28 Also in 1936, with a remark that would mean more to Depression audiences, Junior disregards love as a motive and attributes Schubert’s inspiration to a good meal. “The Three B’s” in the 1936 version (renamed “Questions and Answers” in 1983) also demonstrates the essence of the conflict between classical music and jazz so central to On Your Toes. Classical music, with its “charms of Orpheus,” throws lovers of popular music “right into the arms of Morpheus.” Although the scholarly establishment would not lower itself in 1936 (or even a 1983 version of 1936) to explain the artistic merits of jazz in a university classroom, classical music is characterized as boring for all its artistic pretensions while jazz, a “cheap” (or “derivative”) pseudo-art, provides much greater entertainment.

  Throughout “The Three B’s” the jazz-loving W.P.A. Extension University class unabashedly reveals its ignorance of and derision for art music. To the strains of the Symphony in D Minor and Les Préludes they mispronounce César Franck’s name as Seezer Frank and convert Liszt’s popular classic into a drinking song (Example 5.2).29 Next they add ignorance to sacrilege when they confuse Shostakovich’s recently banned opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, with celebrity stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s burlesque house Minskys, and reach a “new low” (to rhyme with “Von Bülow”) when they assert that Puccini wrote the popular song classic “Poor Butterfly” instead of Madame Butterfly. In exclaiming in the chorus of “Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms” that “two of them wrote symphonies and one wrote psalms,” they add the sin of a weak rhyme “Brahms/psalms” to a tenuous historical claim (Bach wrote chorales, after all, not psalms). But the students show that they are not complete dunces when they place “the man who wrote Sari”—the now-obscure Emmerich Kálmán (1882–1953)—on a par with Bernardino Molinari (1880–1952).30 To paraphrase a line from Pal Joey’s “Zip,” “Who the hell is Molinari?”

  Example 5.2. “Questions and Answers (The Three B’s)”

  (a) with Franck’s Symphony in D Minor and Liszt’s Les Préludes borrowings

  (b) Liszt’s Les Préludes

  The dramatic context of the song “It’s Got to Be Love” in act I, scene 3, is a pretext for Frankie to sing the song she wrote (with Junior in mind). Here is the exchange that leads to it in 1936:

  JUNIOR: Well, I seem to remember that primarily you wanted to talk about the song of yours.

  FRANKIE (cross to desk): Oh, no, not really. It’s so unimportant. Just look at the title, “It’s Got to Be Love”—that’s unimportant to start with, isn’t it?

  JUNIOR: I wish I knew.

  FRANKIE: What?

  JUNIOR: I mean, well, perhaps if you play it for me a few times, I’ll change my mind.31

  Following a five-measure introduction and a tuneful verse of twenty-three measures, which provides a smooth musical transition between spoken dialogue and a song hit—Frankie has indeed composed a hit worthy of Rodgers—Frankie and Junior sing two thirty-two-bar choruses. The melody of the first chorus (the first A of an A-A form) is shown in Example 5.3.

  Example 5.3. “It’s Got to Be Love” (chorus, mm. 1–18)

  A

  a

  [It’s] got to be love! [upbeats in brackets]

  It couldn’t be tonsillitis;

  It feels like neuritis,

  But nevertheless it’s love.

  (8 measures, mm. 1–8)

  b

  [Don’t] tell me the pickles and pie à la mode

  (2 measures, mm. 9–10)

  á

  [They] served me

  Unnerved me,

  And made my heart a broken down pump!

  (6 measures, mm. 11–16)

  The first eight measures start off conventionally enough and present what anyone familiar with the standard popular song form would interpret as the beginning of an A section. Instead of the more conventional repeat of A, however, the words that continue the song, “Don’t tell me the pickles and pie à la mode” during the next two measures, inaugurate something new, which in retrospect we can call b’ (we can call the first part of A, “a”). More surprisingly, two measures later, beginning with “served me,” Rodgers interrupts b’ and returns to a new version of a (more accurately a’), a version much transformed through condensation. Probably relatively few listeners would recognize that a’ (mm. 11–16) is fundamentally the same as a (mm. 1–8), albeit stripped of all but the bare essential notes of the earlier phrase. Together a, b, and a’ make up the sixteen measures of the first A.

  After the first eight measures of the second A (a), Rodgers offers another surprise when he returns to b, ‘but doubles its length from two measures to four (mm. 25–28, not shown). The added measures (mm. 27–28), for which Hart wrote the words “sinking feeling,” stand out from the rest of the song as the only occasion (other than the ends of phrases) where a note is held longer than a single beat. Hart understood that the descending melodic line of these measures, D-C-B-B, aptly fits the sentiment of the lyric here, just as in the previous line he set the melody that turns around the note E to capture the feeling of “spinning around above” (m. 23). When he arrives at the phrase that inspired Hart’s “sinking feeling,” Rodgers also presents a harmonic rhythm dramatically altered from everything that came b
efore in the song. Instead of allowing several melody notes for each chord, he now allots one note per chord.32 The final a” (mm. 29–32) starts off like a before returning to the opening lyrical idea and a new concluding musical phrase, “But nevertheless it’s only love!,” to conclude the song.

  “It’s Got to Be Love” contains a characteristic Hartian sentiment about love as an unwelcome malady and its negative effect on the body and spirit. Two years later in The Boys from Syracuse, Rodgers and Hart composed a sequel, “This Can’t Be Love.” Why not? Because Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse “feel so well—no sobs, no sorrows, no sighs … no dizzy spell.” In the earlier lament from On Your Toes Rodgers and Hart present a love song composed by a woman so smitten that her lover’s hair, even if it “couldn’t possibly be duller,” would be perceived as pure gold. Since at this stage in the show Frankie cannot admit that Junior is the reason her heart has become “a broken down pump,” the jazzy tune, like the lyrics (with the exception of “that sinking feeling”), creates a surface lightness that masks the underlying truth: Frankie is literally as well as figuratively lovesick. Perhaps even more ingeniously than in Vera Simpson’s open admission of her obsession with Joey in “Bewitched,” discussed later in this chapter (Example 5.6), “It’s Got to Be Love” displays a descending two-note figure in alternate measures (for example, m. 1, A-B; m. 3, G-A; m. 5, F-G; m. 7, E-F) that subtly but surely betrays Frankie’s obsession with her teacher Junior.

  Organicism in On Your Toes

  In his notes to the 1983 revival, recording conductor John Mauceri writes tantalizingly of musical organicism in On Your Toes: “The score is full of musical ‘cross-references’” like the theme of the pas de deux in ‘Princesse Zenobia’ having the same rhythmic structure as ‘There’s a Small Hotel’ [Example 5.4]. The great composers of the American musical theater were not merely tunesmiths but composers of songs, ensembles and occasionally larger structures, like Schumann, Mendelssohn and Schubert a century before them.”33

  Example 5.4. “There’s a Small Hotel” and “La Princesse Zenobia” Ballet

  (a) “There’s a Small Hotel,” original song

  (b) transformation in “La Princesse Zenobia” ballet

  Mauceri’s message is that great works of theatrical art such as On Your Toes possess unity and structural integrity not usually associated with musical comedy—and, by implication, that large works are more worthy of praise than “mere” tunes. And certainly “There’s a Small Hotel” and “Princesse Zenobia” have much in common melodically as well as rhythmically. Since this song has previously served as the love duet between Junior and Frankie, it is dramatically convincing when Rodgers uses a transformed version of this song for a pas de deux (the balletic equivalent of a love song) that depicts the love between the Beggar (Morrosine) and the Princesse (Vera).

  Additional examples of organicism include the rhythmic and sometimes melodic connections between the release or B section of “There’s a Small Hotel” (which, unlike “It’s Got to Be Love,” displays the more usual A-A-B-A thirty-two-bar form with each letter representing eight measures) and the first phrase of “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye” (also A-A-B-A) shown in Example 5.5. Mauceri might have noted that Rodgers reuses the dotted rhythmic accompaniment of “Small Hotel” to accompany the main theme of “Slaughter” for the jazzy duet between Junior (who knows the tune pretty well by now) and the stripper Vera. He might also have mentioned that the accompaniment of the second half of the verse, beginning with the words “see … looks gold to me” of “It’s Got to Be Love” also anticipates the rhythmic accompaniment throughout “There’s a Small Hotel” and the pas de deux between Junior and Vera in “Slaughter.” Nevertheless, in contrast to the vast network of connections previously observed in Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, examples of organicism in On Your Toes are comparatively rare. More important, Rodgers, although he does employ the musical device of foreshadowing for dramatic purposes, especially of his second ballet, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” for the most part does not exploit the dramatic potential of his musical connections as he would later with Hammerstein.34

  Example 5.5. “There’s a Small Hotel” and “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye”

  (a) “There’s a Small Hotel” (B section, or release)

  (b) “The Heart is Quicker Than the Eye” (opening of chorus)

  Musical comedies before Oklahoma! and Carousel are almost invariably criticized for their awkward transitions from dialogue into music. The segue into “There’s a Small Hotel” (act I, scene 6), a big hit song in the original production, provides a representative example by its absence of any references in the dialogue that lead plausibly, much less naturally or inevitably, to the song. In his 1983 revision Abbott tries to remedy this:

  FRANKIE: Oh, Junior, I wish we were far away from all this.

  JUNIOR: Yes, so do I. With no complications in our lives.

  FRANKIE: Yes.

  JUNIOR (Goes to her): Oh yes … very far away … Paris maybe.35

  If the revised dialogue constitutes an improvement over the Central Park setting of the 1936 original, where “There’s a Small Hotel” almost literally comes out of nowhere, it does not fully solve the problem of how a librettist or an imaginative director can successfully introduce a song like “There’s a Small Hotel.” “It’s Got to Be Love” may subtly reflect Frankie’s disguised obsession with veiled descending melodic sequences, but not even with all the wisdom of his advancing years could a genius such as Abbott make these songs grow seamlessly out of the dramatic action. But perhaps the point is that if we think of the song and its performance as the show rather than an interruption that “stops” the show, so-called integrated dramatic solutions are less necessary?

  Pal Joey

  Several days before Pal Joey’s 1952 revival, Rodgers wrote in the New York Times that “Nobody like Joey had ever been on the musical comedy stage before.”36 In his autobiography Rodgers concluded that of the twenty-five musicals he wrote with Hart, Pal Joey remained his favorite, an opinion also shared by his lyricist.37 Porter’s Anything Goes may be more frequently revived. Several Rodgers and Hart shows, including A Connecticut Yankee (1927) in its revised 1943 version, Babes in Arms (1937), and The Boys from Syracuse (1938) can boast as many or even more hits. The scintillating On Your Toes can claim two full-length ballets and an organic unity unusual in musical comedies. Despite all this, only Pal Joey has proven that it can be successfully revived without substantial changes in its book or reordering of its songs.

  The genesis of the musical Pal Joey, based on John O’Hara’s collection of stories in epistolary form, can be traced to 1938 when a single O’Hara short story, “Pal Joey,” was published in the New Yorker. By early 1940, shortly after Rodgers had received O’Hara’s letter suggesting a collaboration on a musical based on his collection, an additional eleven Joey stories (out of a total of thirteen) had appeared.38 A normal five-week rehearsal schedule began on November 11 and tryouts took place in Philadelphia between December 16 and 22. Directed by Abbott and starring Gene Kelly as Joey and Vivienne Segal as Vera Simpson, the musical made its Broadway premiere at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Christmas Day and closed 374 performances later at the St. James Theatre on November 29, 1941.39

  In his now-infamous review New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson found Pal Joey “entertaining” but “odious.” Referring to the disturbing subject matter, including adultery, sexual exploitation, blackmail, the somewhat unwholesome moral character of the principals, and a realistic and unflattering depiction of the seamy side of Chicago night life, Atkinson concluded his review with the question, “Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”40 Other critics greeted Pal Joey as a major “advance” in the form. Burns Mantle, for example, compared it favorably with the legitimate plays of the season and expressed his delight “that there are signs of new life in the musicals.”41 And in Musical Stages Rodgers proudly quotes Wolcott Gibbs
’s New Yorker review as an antidote to Atkinson: “I am not optimistic by nature but it seems to me just possible that the idea of equipping a song-and-dance production with a few living, three-dimensional figures, talking and behaving like human beings, may no longer strike the boys in the business as merely fantastic.”42 Some reviewers noted weaknesses in the second act, but most praised O’Hara for producing a fine book. John Mason Brown described the work as “novel and imaginative.”43 Sidney B. Whipple lauded the “rich characterizations” and concluded that it was “the first musical comedy book in a long time that has been worth the bother.”44

  Pal Joey appeared several years before the era of cast recordings, but in September 1950, ten years after its Broadway stage debut, a successful recording was issued with Vivienne Segal, the original Vera Simpson, and with Harold Lang as a new Joey. The recording generated considerable interest in the work and soon led to a revival on January 3, 1952, a sequence of events that foreshadowed the trajectories of several Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals of the 1970s and 1980s that were introduced as record albums and later evolved into stage productions. The 1952 Pal Joey became the second major revival (after Cheryl Crawford’s 1942 revival of Porgy and Bess) to surpass its original run, and at 542 performances remains the longest running production of any Rodgers and Hart musical, original or revival. Even Atkinson, while not exactly admitting that he had erred in his 1940 assessment, lavishly praised the work as well as the production in 1952, including “the terseness of the writing, the liveliness and versatility of the score, and the easy perfection of the lyrics.”45