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

by Block, Geoffrey

  Before the historic collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein was launched in 1943, both Berlin and Porter had achieved universal recognition as songwriters. Even today, as many of their shows drift into oblivion, these illustrious composer-lyricists unquestionably remain the most widely known and revered of their generation. After four decades of composing currently under-appreciated revues and musical comedies, Berlin was persuaded in 1945, after the sudden and unanticipated death of the intended composer Kern, to compose a full-fledged book show that to some extent paralleled the new objectives established in Oklahoma! and Carousel. Soon Porter attempted his first own “integrated” musical. The results, Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948) remain the only musicals by these great songwriters that occupy a firm position in the Broadway repertory (albeit with some book and song changes mainly in the case of Annie). Abandoned by his supporters and forced to sell his new work in degrading auditions, Porter celebrated his resurrection by creating one of the most highly regarded and popular musicals of all time.1

  Shortly before his death in 1964 Porter publicly acknowledged the difficulty posed by the intimidating example of Rodgers and Hammerstein: “The librettos are much better, and the scores are much closer to the librettos than they used to be. Those two [Rodgers and Hammerstein] made it much harder for everybody else.”2 The specter of “those two” would haunt Porter for his remaining creative years. To add injury to insult they even managed to partially overshadow Kiss Me, Kate by depriving Porter of Mary Martin (the rising star of Porter’s Leave It to Me ten years earlier and, more recently, the star of One Touch of Venus), who had auditioned for the lead but instead accepted the role of Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, which opened three months after Porter’s classic.3

  In a New York Times interview that he gave during the composition of CanCan in 1953, Porter reveals that Rodgers and Hammerstein remained under his skin: “They [the songs] didn’t come out of the book so much as now. Really, until Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you needed to change a scene, a girl could come out in front of the curtain and sing or dance or anything. But with Can-Can, I have worked since last June.”4

  Additional evidence that Porter suffered anxiety from the influence of Oklahoma! and Carousel appears amid the extensive unpublished manuscript material for Kiss Me, Kate housed in the Music Division of the Library of Congress in a packet labeled “Unfinished Lyrics.”5 Although some of these lyrics are in fact unfinished and others only barely begun, including one tantalizing title, “To Be or Not to Be,” most lyrics in this packet are alternate versions of known Kiss Me, Kate songs. One such draft belongs with the song “Bianca,” a late addition to the show. In the staged (and published) verse of this song Bill Calhoun the Baltimorean and, as Lucentio, the Shakespearean suitor of Lois Lane/Bianca, sings the following lyric: “While rehearsing with Bianca, / (She’s the darling I adore), / Offstage I found / She’s been around / But I love her more and more; / So I’ve written her a love song / Though I’m just an amateur. / I’ll sing it through / For all of you / To see if it’s worthy of her. / Are yuh list’nin’?”

  In the “Unfinished Lyrics” the private Porter can be observed working with an alternate idea: Bill Calhoun himself as an aspiring Broadway lyricist. Porter’s surrogate lyricist, however, is not merely a suitor for the fair Lois/Bianca in this version. Porter has given his still-anonymous poet additional importance as “the dog who writes incog” for the great Berlin. In this alternative scenario, “Bianca” is one of the songs Bill has composed on behalf of Mr. Berlin.

  Despite this subterfuge, Porter’s draft labeled “Bianca 2nd Verse” on the second page arguably reveals more about Porter than it does about Bill Calhoun: “Ev’ry night I write for Irving [Berlin] / ’Til I nearly bust my bean / ’Cause Irving fears / Two rival peers / Known as Rodgers and Hammer-stein. / I shall now repeat my ballad / Then I’ll rush to Irving quick / And if he thinks / My ballad stinks / He’ll sell it to Oscar [Hammerstein II] and Dick [Richard Rodgers] / Are you list’nin? (repeat refrain).”6

  All available witnesses corroborate the story that it was not an easy task for Bella Spewack, herself only a recent convert to the somewhat heretical notion of setting Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew musically, to convince her former collaborator on Leave It to Me that a Shakespeare musical would not be “too esoteric, too high-brow for the commercial stage.”7 In contrast to his modus operandi in Anything Goes and his other pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals in which an often tenuous relationship existed between the songs and the librettos, the extant manuscript evidence reveals that from the time he began work on Kiss Me, Kate Porter was greatly concerned with creating a musical that integrated music with the book.

  Also in contrast to Anything Goes, whose second act was barely a gleam in the eyes of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse at the time of their first rehearsal and with deletions and substitutions continuing into the Broadway run, Kiss Me, Kate could boast a completed book by the end of May 1948 before auditions would begin the following month.8 Although much would be altered during auditions and rehearsals (between May and November), by the Philadelphia tryouts on December 2, Kiss Me, Kate as we know it today was nearly set. As Spewack reports:

  I knew Cole had come through brilliantly. I knew what I had done and what Sam [co-librettist and spouse Samuel Spewack] had done was right. We had nothing to change. I knew it so I didn’t have to be superstitious. In the history of American musicals this is the only one where they didn’t have to touch a scene or a song. In rehearsals, changes were made. I wrote three versions, but I knew eventually we’d go back to the first one—and we did. There were disagreements over “Why Can’t You Behave?” and over “Bianca,” but the disagreements were all ironed out before we left town.9

  After four weeks to “rehearse and rehearse,” Kiss Me, Kate opened at the New Century Theatre on December 30, 1948, with nearly unequivocal endorsements from New York City reviewers.

  When discussing the dramatic merits of Anything Goes (chapter 3) it was proposed that since Sir Evelyn Oakleigh does not sing, he does not deserve a woman like Reno Sweeney (Ethel Merman) who sings such hits as “I Get a Kick out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Anything Goes,” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” At the very least, Sir Evelyn’s non-singing status created a dramatic problem that future revivals tried to assuage. In Kiss Me, Kate the musically silent character does not get the girl. Fred Graham’s rival, the powerful Washington diplomat Harrison Howell who, like Sir Evelyn, remains songless, gets caught napping and ends up barefoot on Fred’s wedding day. Petruchio/Fred, who sings more songs than Kate/Lilli Vanessi, not only deserves to get a tamed Katherine at the end of the Shrew play, but he also gets a reformed spouse in real life.

  It was also previously noted that Porter attempted to convey character musically in Anything Goes. Not only does Porter characterize his star Reno (Merman) with catchy syncopations and uncomplicated harmonies but he also conveys her spunky disregard for convention by having her sing triplets that clash with her duple meter, first and most consistently in “I Get a Kick Out of You” and later in “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” Once he makes this association, Porter then demonstrates how Hope Harcourt becomes more like the star when she adopts Reno’s rhythmic signature in her own “Gypsy in Me.”

  Not surprisingly, in the wake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and Carousel Porter made a still greater effort in Kiss Me, Kate to channel music’s power to establish character. He does this most noticeably by distinguishing the Shrew players from the Baltimore players. The former are given musical characteristics loosely associated with music of the Italian Renaissance. Bianca and her suitors are given an a cappella pseudo-madrigal in “Tom, Dick or Harry,” the bluesy “Why Can’t You Behave?” is transformed into a Renaissance dance (the pavane), and several of the Shrew songs display the long-short-short figure () characteristic of the sixteenth-century Italian canzona.10

  Example 10.1. “We Open in Venice” (cl
osing orchestral tag) and “Miserere” from Verdi‘s Il Trovatore (act 4)

  (a) “We Open in Venice” (closing orchestral tag)

  (b) “Miserere” from Verdi‘s Il Trovatore (act 4)

  Porter’s Italian evocations are not confined to the Renaissance. One nineteenth-century appropriation occurs in the orchestral tag to “We Open in Venice” (Example 10.1), where he quotes the opening of the “Miserere” from Verdi’s Il Trovatore (act 4). Perhaps Porter intended a musical pun (the “misery” of an endless road tour and its associations with Verdi’s fourteenth-century Spanish troubadour, Manrico) or perhaps he simply wanted to link a classic playwright with a classic Italian opera composer.11 Porter adopts a more contemporary Italian flavor in “I Sing of Love” and “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” and a more generalized Latin beguine character in “Were Thine That Special Face,” again to distinguish the Shrew numbers from the more recognizably American Baltimore numbers. Representative American vernacular characteristics include the show biz and jazzy quality of “Another Op’nin,’ Another Show,” the jazzy “Too Darn Hot,” the satire of Bowery waltzes in “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” and the thirty-two-bar song form of a popularly styled ballad, “So in Love.”

  Example 10.2. “Tom, Dick or Harry”

  (a) minor mode

  (b) major mode

  In his analysis of Kiss Me, Kate, Joseph P. Swain notes Porter’s technique of moving from the major mode to the minor mode or vice versa to distinguish the Padua songs from their Baltimore counterparts.12 Indeed, with one exception (“I’m Ashamed That Women Are So Simple”) the texted songs sung in Padua juxtapose major and minor in dramatically purposeful ways. In “Tom, Dick or Harry” Porter distinguishes each suitor’s past accomplishments from their rosy description of Bianca’s future if she were to marry one of them by the simple juxtaposition of minor and major mode (Example 10.2). Similarly, Petruchio at the conclusion of “Were Thine That Special Face” moves from the minor to the major mode to capture the optimism of “then you’ll be mine, all mine” that concludes the song. In Petruchio’s “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” Porter contrasts the life of the carefree bachelor in the main chorus (major mode) with a mixture of minor and major modes that conveys his bittersweet nostalgia for the women he must now relinquish as a married man. Thus, in the slower second portion of the song Momo and Rebecca stir memories in the minor mode and Alice and Lucretia in the major, while memories of Carolina and Fedora contain elements of the two.

  Example 10.3. “We Open in Venice”

  (a) minor mode

  (b) major mode

  Porter lessens the dramatic contrast between Padua and Baltimore, however, when he contrasts major and minor modes in the latter songs as well. In fact, it might be said that this device—widely and effectively used by Schubert—not only serves as Porter’s way of demonstrating parallels between the Shrew numbers and the Baltimore numbers. In the end, it functions primarily as a unifying musical device that shapes a musically integrated score. The Paduan “We Open in Venice,” for example, was certainly intended to parallel “Another Op’nin,’ Another Show” in Baltimore. In the Padua excerpts (Example 10.3) the players sing in the minor mode when describing themselves and in the major mode when they relate their circular itinerary. Conversely, “Another Op’nin’” opens in the major mode (E major) and moves to G minor in the release (the B section) to convey the anxiety of the four weeks that lead to this opening (“Four weeks you rehearse and rehearse / Three weeks and it couldn’t be worse”). Even a song as far removed from the drama as “Too Darn Hot” demonstrates a prominent move from minor (the “too darn hot” portion) to major (the “Kinsey report” portion).

  Although the degree to which Kiss Me, Kate employs the major-minor juxtapositions is perhaps unprecedented in a Porter show, the roots of this idea can be found in Porter’s pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Anything Goes (and many other songs; see, for example its continuous presence in “Night and Day”). We have already observed that the verse of the title song in his earlier musical (Example 3.2, p. 56) clearly contrasts the past (minor mode) with the present (major mode). In another example, the sea chantey “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair” juxtaposes the modes to distinguish the hardships of a sailor’s life in the verse (minor mode) from the fair ladies waiting on land (major mode). The intimidation by Rodgers and Hammerstein may have inspired Porter to explore additional and increasingly subtle ways to capture nuances in his characters and in their texts, but he did not suddenly discover textual realism or the dramatic potential of music after attending a production of Oklahoma!

  Porter’s efforts to demonstrate even more thematic unity for the purposes of dramatic credibility, however, do distinguish Kiss Me, Kate from his pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, including Anything Goes. It also arguably surpasses Oklahoma!, if not Carousel, in this respect. Some musical material such as the reappearance of the repeated fourth that marks the opening of the main tune of “Another Op’nin’” as the vamp in the following “Why Can’t You Behave?” (Example 10.4a, mm. 5–6), helps to create a smooth musical linkage between the first two numbers without conveying a comparable dramatic meaning.13 But most connections do serve dramatic purposes. Bill and Lois, for example, share improper behavior. Bill is a shiftless yet likably dishonest gambler who signs an I.O.U. with Fred Graham’s name; Lois is a shameless and fickle (and equally endearing) flirt who, in the role of Bianca, will mate with any Tom, Dick, or Harry and, as herself, date any man who asks her out for “something wet.” It therefore makes sense that the verse of “Why Can’t You Behave?” returns in “Always True To You in My Fashion.” The transformation of “Why Can’t You Behave?” (Example 10.4a) from the first act, when it is sung by Lois to Bill, into an orchestral pavane in act II (Example 10.4b) reinforces the commonality between Lois and Bill. At the same time it further identifies Lois and Bianca as the same character and clarifies the usurpation of the “Behave” theme in “Fashion.”14

  Example 10.4. “Why Can’t You Behave?” transformed in the Pavane

  (a) “Why Can’t You Behave?”

  (b) Pavane

  Another musical figure that links several songs first occurs in “I Sing of Love.”15 Not only does this song display a 6/8 meter that evokes popular Italian tarantellas such as “Funiculi, Funiculà,” it also presents a melodic and harmonic shift from C major to F minor (on the words “We sing of [C major] love” [F minor]) that will resurface in two songs from act II (a progression anticipated in “What Is This Thing Called Love?” from 1920). With only insignificant alterations this exotic, pseudo-Renaissance juxtaposition of major and minor harmonic shifts returns in the verse of “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” (also in 6/8 meter). Here Petruchio describes the awakening of his desire and occasionally love for the opposite sex many years before (“Since I reached the charming age of [C major] puberty” [F minor]). In “Bianca” the progression appears in reverse, F minor to C major, when Bill as Poet expresses his love for Bianca in the verse of the song that bears her name (“While rehearsing with Bianca, / She’s the darling I a- [F minor] dore” [C major]). In each case, love underlies the harmony and links the musical material.

  Kiss Me, Kate, act I, finale. Patricia Morison and Alfred Drake in the center (1948). Photograph: Eileen Darby. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

  Also dramatically motivated are the thematic recurrences between the finales of act I and act II. At the end of act I Petruchio, accompanied by “all singing principals (except Hattie) and chorus,” serenades his shrewish new bride, who shrieks “No! Go! Nay! Away!” before breaking character and shouting “Fred!” The verbal battle between Kate/Lilli and Petruchio/ Fred that ensues is supported appropriately enough by a military march with dotted rhythms of a martial nature (Example 10.5a) before Kate sings a “quasi cadenza angrily” and the chorus concludes the act with a syncopated variant of “Another Op’nin.’”

  Example 10.5. Transformati
on of act I finale into act II finale

  (a) March

  (b) Waltz

  Porter signifies his intent to parallel this ending when, at the outset of the second-act finale, he offers an unmistakable melodic transformation in triple meter of Petruchio’s act I duple-metered serenade. Instead of insults, Kate/Lilli now interjects various terms of endearment in Italian. Petruchio’s words, like Petruchio himself, remain unchanged from one act finale to the other, while Kate’s dramatically contrasting response reinforces the significant change she had revealed moments before in her final song, “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple.”16 Finally, the second melody of the act I finale (the march, Example 10.5a) returns transformed into a waltz, the dance of love (Example 10.5b). The transformation from a militaristic march to a romantic waltz succeeds simply but effectively in establishing musical equivalences for the dramatic changes that have taken place in the dynamics between Kate/Petruchio and Lilli/Fred.17

  Act II: Shakespeare

  After Rodgers and Hammerstein, the second tough act for Porter and his collaborators Bella and Sam Spewack to follow was “the bard of Stratford-on-Avon” himself, Shakespeare. As Bella Spewack writes in the introduction to the published libretto, “We hated to cut Shakespeare.”18 But when she received an unexpected and unwelcome new song from Porter, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” both Spewacks acknowledged that they would have to adjust to the unpleasant idea that Shakespeare would be playing second fiddle to the demands of Broadway. Bella tells it this way in her introduction to the published libretto: