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

by Block, Geoffrey

  Guys and Dolls, Crap game in the sewer in act II. Robert Alda throwing the dice, Stubby Kaye kneeling to the left, Sam Levene to the right (1950). Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

  Even though Loesser does not produce a real fugue, he does offer a degree of real counterpoint that is unusual in a Broadway musical, especially a musical comedy. In fact, the only substantial use of counterpoint among earlier musicals surveyed in this volume occurs, not surprisingly, in Porgy and Bess (a technique also demonstrated in earlier Gershwin shows not discussed here, perhaps most notably in “Mine” from Let ’Em Eat Cake). Prominent but relatively isolated additional examples can be found in Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (scene 10) and Bernstein’s Candide (“The Venice Gavotte”) and West Side Story (the “Tonight” quintet). After 1970 this device would become more prominent in Sondheim (e.g., the combination of “Now,” “Later,” and “Soon” in A Little Night Music). Even straightforward harmonization between two principals is exceptional in the musicals of Kern, Rodgers, Porter, and Loewe. Interestingly, the only Broadway composer to rival Loesser at the counterpoint game was Berlin, another lyricist-composer with less formal musical training than the other composers discussed in the present survey, Loesser included. In songs that ranged throughout his career, most famously “Play a Simple Melody” from Watch Your Step (1914), “You’re Just in Love” from Call Me Madam (1950), and his final hurrah as a composer, “An Old-Fashioned Wedding” from the 1966 revival of Annie Get Your Gun, Berlin created extraordinary pairs of melodies that could be sung simultaneously.

  Example 11.2. “Fugue for Tinhorns” (one complete statement of three-part round)

  Loesser’s predilection for counterpoint or overlapping musical lines can be observed as early as “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” In Where’s Charley? Loesser used counterpoint prominently in “Make a Miracle,” and he would continue to present simultaneous melodies in ingenious new ways in more than a few songs in Hans Christian Andersen, The Most Happy Fella, and How to Succeed. Since it is usually hard to sing simultaneous melodic lines (or even harmony), actor-oriented musicals, especially those inhabiting musical comedy stages, use counterpoint relatively rarely, at least before Sondheim.

  After the unison cadence that concludes “Fugue for Tinhorns,” the orchestra is instructed to hold their final D until the “Mission Band starts playing on Stage” one half-step lower on C major. In this next number, “Follow the Fold” (Example 11.3), the Save-a-Soul Mission Band and a quartet of missionaries led by Sarah provide a rhythmic and textural contrast to “Fugue for Tinhorns” that could hardly be more extreme. The tinhorns inhabit a world of syncopation, counterpoint, and lots of sharps and flats, while one jarring halfstep lower the missionaries occupy a rhythmically unsyncopated, homophonic, C-majorish musical realm. The only conspicuous common denominator between these contrasting musical worlds is a shared underlying harmonic simplicity. In the fugue a measure of dominant harmony alternates with a measure of tonic harmony; the mission march also employs these two basic harmonies exclusively.17 “Follow the Fold” also illustrates a rare “appropriate” use of a hymn-like style in Loesser’s work. The concluding a cappella harmonies of the next song, “The Oldest Established,” is far more typical of Loesser’s predilection to translate the religious fervor of secular emotions with mock musical religiosity: gambling as a religious experience. In Where’s Charley? Loesser had inserted a cadence (marked “religioso”) in several places to mark the miracle in “Make a Miracle.” Later, in How to Succeed, J. Pierre-pont Finch’s faith in himself would inspire Loesser to musical religiosity and prayer at the punch line of “I Believe in You.” The revival-tune quality of the concluding “Brotherhood of Man” in this show is designated “a la Holy Rollers.” In all stages of his career Loesser would revisit the secular religiosity of his first hit, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

  Example 11.3. “Follow the Fold” (opening)

  In addition to the touches inspired by Kaufman, the casting of the show also led to considerable changes of emphasis. This was not new. Earlier it was noted that the will of a star, Ethel Merman, led to the rejection of one song and a reprise of another in Anything Goes. Within the next five years, some of the songs of My Fair Lady would be composed after the non-singing Rex Harrison had been cast, and written accordingly. Strangely enough, with Guys and Dolls it was not discovered until casting Sam Levene as Nathan Detroit that the creative team had cast a star who would make Harrison sound like Ezio Pinza.18

  Guys and Dolls follows the Rodgers and Hammerstein integrated model with the careful insertion of a comic subplot, in Loesser’s show the fourteen-year engagement of Nathan and Adelaide and the debilitating psychosomatic symptoms brought about by this delay (described in “Adelaide’s Lament”). Indeed, Nathan’s role is truly a large one. Even much of “The Oldest Established [Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York]” is sung in his praises: “Why it’s good old reliable Nathan, / Nathan, Nathan, Nathan Detroit.—/ If you’re looking for action he’ll furnish the spot.—/ Even when the heat is on it’s never too hot, / Not for good old reliable Nathan.”

  But all that the musically unreliable Nathan is given to sing in act I is a speech-like chant in the verse to this song, rhythmically set almost exclusively to quarter-note triplets and virtually monotonal (all but three pitches are Cs): “And they’ve now got a lock on the door—/ Of the gym at Public School Eighty-four” and a couple of lines later, “And things being how they are, / The back of the Police Station is out.” Later in act I, Levene as Nathan was not only deprived of leading the title song, but he was specifically instructed not to sing along.

  In act II Nathan is finally—in number twenty-seven out of the thirty-two numbered selections in the vocal score—allowed to “sing” his waltz of love, “Sue me, Sue me, / What can you do me? / I love you.” But before Kaufman & Co. discovered that Levene had meant what he said when he told them he could not sing, Nathan had also been designated to lead the song “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” at the prayer meeting.19 Although this challenging song came to be indelibly associated with Stubby Kaye on stage and film in the expanded role of Nicely-Nicely Johnson, the reassignment of Nathan’s music on the surface lessens his dramatic stature as well as his credibility as a romantic lead.

  In any event, Nathan’s romance with Adelaide certainly has a less comic side. How often must a major character undergo the indignity of a fourteen-year engagement (and fourteen years of a psychosomatic cold) and engage in a perpetual series of lies to her mother about her alleged husband’s promotions and their inexorably growing family? To add insult to illness, on the one occasion she is aroused to anger, Adelaide remains the last to know that Nathan is for once telling the truth. Her fiancé is indeed on his way to attend a prayer meeting, Sky having successfully gambled to obtain his presence. After he reluctantly agrees to accept the inevitable deprivation of his freedom and mobility and marry Adelaide (now of course cured), Nathan expresses his feelings about this turn of events by appropriating his fiancée’s former symptoms. Thus, after Adelaide describes the new Nathan “sitting there, beside me, every single night,” he discharges an “enormous sneeze.”

  Adelaide and even Sarah are not above deceit and pretense. In the song that precedes Nathan’s sneeze, “Marry the Man Today,” the conniving pair reveal themselves as “dolls” who desire to change (in midstream) their chosen horses. A conspicuous and dramatically suitable resemblance to the pseudofugue tinhorn trio that opened the show is readily evident in the simple and static counterpoint of the following lines: “Marry the man today / Rather than sigh and sorrow, / Marry the man today / And change his ways tomorrow.”

  As we have observed, future book doctors of Anything Goes rightly questioned the 1934 premise in which a non-singing Sir Evelyn Oakleigh gets the girl. Their solution in the 1962 and 1987 revivals was to interpolate songs from other Porter shows. But Nathan’s inability to sing as extensively as other se
condary leads in other musicals (especially in the first act) should not be cause for alarm. Fortunately, by the end of the evening and faced with the imminent loss of Adelaide (no longer willing to be taken for granted), Nathan can and does finally demonstrate his love for his long-suffering fiancée when he breaks into song (“Sue Me”). In the Runyon story, “Pick the Winner,” Cutie Singleton, a nom de plume for Adelaide, leaves Nathan for Professor Woodhead after a ten-year engagement and lives happily ever after with her new beau in their country house. By the simple but powerful act of singing, Nathan convinces us that Loesser’s Adelaide need not have followed Cutie’s example.

  The Most Happy Fella: “A Musical with a Lot of Music”

  During the long Guys and Dolls run, Samuel Goldwyn persuaded Loesser to compose the music for Hans Christian Andersen (1952), a Goldwyn-produced film starring Danny Kaye. In addition to its tuneful score, the movie is notable for its screenplay by Kaufman’s former collaborator, Moss Hart. After his second consecutive Broadway success, Loesser was otherwise free to grow at his own pace and in his own way and to pursue his ambitious new Broadway show.

  By the end of 1952 Loesser was simultaneously drafting sketches for his libretto, lyrics, and music in the first of sixteen sketchbooks of The Most Happy Fella. For more than the next three years he would work single-mindedly on his “musical with a lot of music” (calling it an opera would be the kiss of death).20 His only other major creative project during these years was the composition of three new songs for the film version of Guys and Dolls (1955), also produced by Goldwyn (discussed in chapter 14).21

  In contrast to the sparse documentary evidence for the compositional process of Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella offers a cornucopia of dated and labeled material, all housed in the Music Division of the New York Public Library. These manuscripts shed some light on the embryonic mysteries and gestation of nearly every portion of the finished musical.22 The sketchbooks tell us that Loesser had begun most of the major songs (i.e., the twenty-one musical numbers in the published vocal score and libretto (indicated by small capital letters in the online website) before September 1954. Most of these numbers would require additional work during the next fifteen months. In a striking demonstration of creative economy, Loesser managed to use nearly every scrap of sketchbook material—more than one hundred entries—usually in the final score, but at least in the longer version that opened in Boston.

  From the sketchbooks we learn that Loesser’s initial vision of the work allowed for even less spoken dialogue than the approximately fifteen minutes that would remain in the finished work. By far the most dramatically important material replaced by dialogue is the dramatic and climactic confrontation near the beginning of act III, when Rosabella tells Tony, the man she had come to love in act II, that she was willing to be seduced by his hired hand, Joe, at the end of act I. Relatively late in the compositional process (September and December 1955), in sketches marked “Angry Tony,” Loesser revealed that the dialogue of this scene initially contained powerful and dissonant underscoring.23

  The sketches also show that Loesser’s titles for musical numbers, both large and small, were the generating force for the music to follow and that these titles generated rhythms (often indicated by X’s) before the rhythms led to melodies. Those who admire Loesser’s impeccable declamation of titles with strong profiles such as “The New Ashmolean Marching Society and Students’ Conservatory Band” in Where’s Charley? and “The Oldest Established” (the abbreviated title of “The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York”) in Guys And Dolls can observe firsthand how the melody of a song such as “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance” evolved from sketches that share the rhythmic rather than the melodic profiles of the finished product.

  Without the sketchbooks, the process by which Loesser expanded arioso passages into full-scale arias would go undetected, nor would we understand how simple sequential musical patterns served Loesser as essential starting points of so many of the songs in this show. The sketchbooks reveal the creative effort that went into such nuances as the important elongated emphasis on the word “full” in Tony and Rosabella’s big love duet, “My Heart Is So Full of You,” after numerous compositional digressions over a ten-month period. The sketchbooks also help to identify one of the striking unifying musical features in The Most Happy Fella: Loesser’s ubiquitous use of the melodic sequence, that is, short melodic phrases of symmetrical lengths repeated a step higher or lower. In Guys and Dolls, melodic sequences are noticeable in several songs, including the title song, “I’ll Know,” “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” “Take Back Your Mink,” and “Marry the Man Today”; in Fella, sequences appear even more prominently and in nearly every song. The first three phrases of “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance” (Example 11.4), for example, open with Rosabella’s thrice-ascending melodic sequence.

  The Most Happy Fella, act I, scene 2. Jo Sullivan and Robert Weede (1956). Photograph: Vandamm Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

  Example 11.4. Melodic sequence and counterpoint in “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance”

  Not surprisingly, the sketchbooks reveal something about the process by which Loesser worked out ways to combine melodies. What is seemingly less explicable is that Loesser took the trouble early in his compositional work to notate the familiar English round, “Hey Ho, Nobody Home” on a sketch entry labeled “Lovers in the Lane” (“Hi-ho lovers in the lane” is how Loesser’s text opens).24 In the duet portions of “How Beautiful the Days,” Tony and Rosabella alternate entrances of the same melody much as Charley and Amy shared their tune in “Make a Miracle” and the would-be lovers in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” When it came to “Abbondanza,” the trio in which Tony’s servants take stock of the wedding feast, Loesser could not decide whether he wanted exact melodic imitation in triple meter (3/4 time) or a freer melodic counterpoint in duple meter (2/4 time).25 Eventually he opted for the freer counterpoint and triple meter found in the published vocal score.

  Loesser also included several songs that featured two simultaneous statements of independent but equally important melodies à la Berlin (non-imitative counterpoint). As “I Like Ev’rybody” for Herman and Cleo attests, Loesser did not reserve such contrapuntal complexity for his central romantic characters. When the song is introduced in act II, scene 4, Cleo starts it off with her tune. Then Herman sings the “main” tune against Cleo’s tune, now moved to the bass, where it was located in Loesser’s sketchbook.26 At the reprise of the song late in the show (act III, scene 1), the now-compatible Herman and Cleo simultaneously sing their compatible melodic lines (Example 11.5).

  In a short essay printed in the Imperial Theatre playbill Loesser described his initial resistance to the idea of adapting Howard’s play They Knew What They Wanted.27 Before long, however, he realized that he could delete “the topical stuff about the labor situation in the 1920’s, the discussion of religion, etc.”28 Loesser continues: “What was left seemed to me to be a very warm simple love story, happy ending and all, and dying to be sung and danced.”29Throughout his compositional work Loesser never lost sight of this central dramatic focus: the developing love and eventual fulfillment between the central protagonists, Tony and Rosabella.

  Example 11.5. Two-part counterpoint in “I Like Ev’rybody”

  In keeping with the generally warmer and fuzzier expectations of a Broadway musical, Loesser added Cleo, Rosabella’s partner in waitressing drudgery in San Francisco, who receives a sitting job in Tony’s Napa Valley to rest her tired waitressing feet. He also gives Cleo a partner not found in Howard’s play, Herman, the likable hired hand who will win Cleo when he learns to make a fist. Cleo and Herman, like their obvious prototypes, Ado Annie and Will Parker in Oklahoma!, serve their function faithfully (in contrast to Adelaide and the relatively unsung Nathan in Guys and Dolls). They also make admirable comic lightweights (albeit with sophisticated counterpoint) to contrast with the romantic heavyweights, T
ony and Rosabella.

  Gone from the musical are not only the lengthy discussions about religion, but even the character of Father McGee, the loquacious priest who opposes the marriage between Tony and Amy (in the play Tony is in love with Amy rather than Rosabella). In Howard’s play, Father McGee shows no apparent concern about their age differences, nor is he motivated by the jealousy that motivates his newly created counterpart in the musical, Marie, Tony’s younger sister. Howard’s Father McGee responds negatively to the marriage for religious reasons: Tony’s mail-order bride is not a Catholic.

  Other differences between the musical and the somewhat darker play might be briefly noted. Howard has Tony seek a mate outside his Napa Valley Community because all the single women have slept with Joe, and he attributes Tony’s accident to drunkenness rather than fear of rejection. In the play, but not the musical, we learn that Tony’s fortune in the grape business stemmed from illegal earnings acquired during Prohibition. The play also contains a striking politically incorrect plot discrepancy. Only after the doctor tells Joe first that Amy (Rosabella) is pregnant does Joe tell Amy. In Howard’s play Joe offers to marry Amy and take her out of the Napa Valley; in Loesser’s adaptation Joe and Rosabella sing their private thoughts in the beginning of act II, but they never sing (or speak) directly after act I, and Joe leaves the community without knowing Rosabella’s condition.