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

by Block, Geoffrey

  In any event, Bernstein’s motive clearly serves as a central unifying element. Although no one has speculated on its possible connection with Berg’s sonata, its appearance (in nearly every musical number of the show) was recognized as early as Jack Gottlieb’s 1964 dissertation; the motive has been discussed in varying detail since then by Peter Gradenwitz, Larry Stempel, and Swain.78 Gottlieb prefaces his discussion of the “hate” motive with the following statement:

  It was in WEST SIDE STORY that the fullest expression of the interval as a progenitor of musical development came into effect. Unlike WONDERFUL TOWN (perfect fifth)79 and CANDIDE (minor seventh),80 the interval here was not used for melodic purposes only, but as a harmonic force also. The interval in question is the tritone (augmented fourth), the famous Diabolus in Musica, certainly an appropriate symbolism for this tragic musical drama.81

  A summary of how Bernstein uses the “hate” motive for dramatic purposes follows.

  Example 13.8. “Procession” motive in “I Have a Love” and Wagner’s Ring

  (a) “Procession” motive

  (b) “I Have a Love” (“Procession” motive)

  (c) Redemption motive in Wagner’s Die Walküre

  Bernstein introduces the definitive form of the “hate” motive in the Prologue shortly after the stage directions “Bernardo enters.”82 Once Bernstein associates his unresolved tritone motive with the hate-filled Jets, he positions himself to convey dramatic meanings through its resolution or attempted resolution. An example of the latter occurs in Promenade, when the social worker Glad Hand attempts to get the Sharks and Jets to mix amiably at the Settlement dance. Here the accented tritone dissonances in the bass (now spelled C-G), symbolically demonstrate the underlying tensions and resulting futility of attempts to resolve the animosity between the gangs. The drama reinforces this musical point when Promenade is interrupted by the Mambo, and Bernardo and Riff circumvent their intended partners and heed Anita’s subsequent dictum to associate exclusively with “their own kind.”

  As the song instructs, the Jets in “Cool” attempt to achieve a degree of calm prior to The Rumble (or after The Rumble in the film version).83 The main tune of “Cool” consists of a tritone (spelled C-F) followed almost invariably by its upward resolution to the perfect fifth (G) (Example 13.9c). Underneath the main tune the definitive “hate” (or “gang”) motive appears as an accompaniment, and tritones also provide a harmonic foundation. One might interpret the upward resolution as an easing of tension, a perfect fifth as a metaphor for a more perfect world. If so, the Jets’ attempt to compose themselves in this song, like their attempts to mix at the Settlement dance, are also destined for musical failure, a failure borne out dramatically by the subsequent deaths of Riff and Bernardo.

  Example 13.9. “Hate” in West Side Story

  (a) “Hate” motive (Prologue)

  (b) “Hate” motive in Berg’s Piano Sonata

  (c) “Hate” motive in “Cool” (attempted resolution)

  (d) Resolution of the “Hate” motive in “Something’s Coming”

  (e) Tony’s resolution of the tritone and Maria’s name as resolution of the “Hate” motive in The Dance at the Gym

  Only the characters who represent the triumph of love over hate, Tony and Maria, can unambiguously and convincingly resolve the tritone tension embodied in the gang’s signature motive. This happens as early as Tony’s first song, “Something’s Coming” (Example 13.9d). Tony’s first words, “Could be!,” outline a perfect descending fourth (D-A), and his next question, “Who knows?,” establishes a second perfect fourth after an eighth-note digression to the tritone (D-G-A). By this immediate resolution Bernstein lets his audiences know, at least subliminally, that Tony, an ex-Jet, is a man capable of assuaging the tensions of his former gang as his musical line resolves its tritones. Throughout the entire first portion of “Something’s Coming,” the orchestral accompaniment, which consists entirely of perfect fourths—in contrast to the alternating perfect fourths and tritones in the bass of Promenade—supports this important dramatic point: that Tony is a man who wants peace.

  It is crucially significant that Maria’s name (Example 13.2b) resolves the tritone and thus simply but powerfully embodies the musical antithesis of the unresolved “hate” motive, a “love” theme. As with the first and third “Somewhere” motives, Bernstein foreshadows Maria’s motive orchestrally before fully establishing her identity vocally. Reasonably attentive listeners can hear her motive for the first time at the outset of “The Dance at the Gym” (the introduction to Blues) following Maria’s explanation to her brother that “tonight” marks her debut “as a young lady of America!,” where its upward resolution appears simultaneously with Tony’s downward tritone (Example 13.9e). More obviously, Bernstein foreshadows the entire Maria tune in the Cha-Cha and brings it back appropriately as underscoring for her Meeting Scene with Tony. The first ascending three notes of the song “Cool” are the same as “Maria” (a tritone followed by a minor second), but instead of lingering on the tritone resolution, “Cool” focuses on the tritone, for example the tritone ascent on “crazy” followed by a tritone descent on “Boy.” (The “cool fugue” dance after the song alternates between statement of the hate motive in its pure Jet gang form and the first three notes of “Somewhere” [“There’s a place”] with interjections from the two-note “someday, somewhere” motive.)

  The Maria motive or “love motive” of course dominates the song “Maria,” where each repetition of the heroine’s name conveys the message that Maria, to an even greater extent than her romantic counterpart, can resolve dramatic tensions. Maria’s motive returns at other timely occasions during the remainder of the musical: throughout the orchestral underscoring that introduces the Balcony Scene that encompasses “Tonight”; in “Under Dialogue” as a cha-cha (a rare omission in Bernstein’s “complete” 1985 recording); in the underscoring that marks the moment Tony and Maria declare themselves married directly prior to “One Hand, One Heart”; and at various other places in the orchestral accompaniment to this last-mentioned song and the Ballet Sequence. Thereafter, the full three-note Maria motive becomes displaced by its dramatic (and musical) associate, the third “Somewhere” motive (c3 in Example 13.4), which presents a readily apparent rhythmic association with the last two syllables of Maria’s name.

  The drama concludes with a “real” death procession (in contrast to the dream procession earlier in the Ballet Sequence of the second act). In the final moments Bernstein presents three statements of the third “Somewhere” motive (c2) with its customary rising whole-step (Example 13.10a). In the first two statements the bass answer to this C-major triadic resolution in the melody (C-E-G) is none other than the note that will complete the sinister tritone against C (F) for two statements. In the third and final statement, Bernstein allows an undiluted C major to stand alone.84 Certainly it is possible to interpret the absence of a third F as an optimistic ending, or at least more positive than if Bernstein had chosen to state the tritone the third time as well.

  The screen version of West Side Story adds a third tritone to accompany the end credits. The original movie soundtrack album, however, departs both from the Broadway and the film ending in its musical resolution of the drama. As shown in Example 13.10b it abandons tritones altogether for all three statements of the “Somewhere” motive.85 Why did the soundtrack do this? Here is one possible explanation. Despite the fact that the film omitted the Dream Ballet Sequence (based on “Somewhere”), except as underscoring at the beginning of act II, scene 3, the producers of the soundtrack wanted to find a place for the song “Somewhere.” When first released, the soundtrack therefore used the dream version of this song, but now sung by the principals rather than an off-screen “Girl,” to conclude the recording. For this reason the original soundtrack concluded with an unambiguously positive major ending that avoids tritones entirely.86

  Example 13.10. “Finale” and “Procession and Nightmare” (conclus
ions)

  (a) Broadway ending (“Finale”)

  (b) Conclusion of “Procession and Nightmare” and the film soundtrack

  To better depict an age when gang warfare is still rampant and exponentially more violent than it was on the West Side in 1957 or 1961, Bernstein, in his operatic recorded reinterpretation of the score he conducted in 1985, departs from his Broadway ending. This time he has the orchestra follow the third statement of the “Somewhere” motive with a third tritone as in the “End Credits” that followed the drama in the film. But even in the 1985 recording Bernstein allows a hopeful glimmer of C major to sound when he instructs the orchestra to quickly release the third tritone.

  Maria lives, but Bernstein, despite numerous attempts, was unable to create an operatic aria for her that rang true. Thus in her most Wagnerian moment Maria does not sing. In an opera, Maria, albeit “skinny—but pretty” and “delicate-boned” in contrast to the “fat lady” of operatic legend, would have no choice but to sing in order to inform audiences that the evening was over. Despite this conspicuous departure from operatic expectations, even requirements, West Side Story has been said to achieve genuine tragedy because “for the first time in a musical the hero sings while dying.”87 Perhaps more significantly, when Tony is carried off, the music of West Side Story has, metaphorically speaking, the last word. Audiences unaware of the musical relationships between death (“Procession”) and love (“I Have a Love”) and their mutual source in Wagner’s “redemption” motive (Example 13.8a–c) nevertheless cannot fail to understand that the love of Tony and Maria, like that of Siegmund and Sieglinde, Brünnhilde and Siegfried, and of course Romeo and Juliet, has redeemed the tragedy of youthful death.

  After West Side Story Bernstein failed to succeed on Broadway with a completely new musical, but a considerably revamped Candide directed by Hal Prince (which included Sondheim’s newly created “Life Is Happiness Indeed,” a reworded “Venice Gavotte”), triumphed in 1974. Two years later Bernstein produced a musical with librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Although this promising but problematic show vanished after only seven Broadway performances, Bernstein managed to salvage portions of its score in his last compositions, and after his death it was reworked by Charlie Harmon and Sid Ramin into A White House Cantata: Scenes from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One song, the anthem “Take Care of This House” (originally sung by Abigail Adams in the White House), has since served as a talisman to protect many buildings, from houses of worship to the Kennedy Center. In 1983, Bernstein, who by then was focusing most of his creative energies on conducting, completed his final work for the musical stage, the opera A Quiet Place. A sequel to Trouble in Tahiti three decades later, A Quiet Place also recycled the former work (as a flashback) for a middle act.

  Two years after West Side Story, Robbins, Laurents, and Sondheim would again collaborate successfully on a new musical, Gypsy, with music by Styne. Without Robbins, Laurents and Sondheim worked together on two unsuccessful musicals in the next decade before they went on to work with other partners: Anyone Can Whistle (1964), a show without a literary source, and Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), an adaptation of Laurents’s own The Time of the Cuckoo (an unhappy collaboration with Rodgers). Meanwhile, Robbins and his new creative associates, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock, would direct and choreograph his greatest popular triumph, Fiddler on the Roof, in 1964. After Fiddler, Robbins virtually abandoned commercial theater. Laurents, without Sondheim, returned to Broadway in subsequent decades to direct Harold Rome’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962), a Tony-nominated Gypsy (1975), the Harvey Fierstein–Jerry Herman Tony Award–winning La Cage aux Folles (1983), and new Broadway productions of Gypsy (2008) and West Side Story (2009). Without Laurents in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Sondheim, the subject of another chapter in this survey, would, like the descendant of painter Georges Seurat in act II of Sunday in the Park with George, continue to “move on” and in the process launch a new era in the Broadway musical.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  STAGE VERSUS SCREEN (2)

  After Oklahoma!

  Adapting to Broadway

  In contrast to most of the films discussed in “Stage versus Screen (1),” the five films explored in this chapter—Carousel (1956), Kiss Me, Kate (1953), Guys and Dolls (1955), My Fair Lady (1964), and West Side Story (1961)—are widely known. All are accessible on DVDs that contain absorbing “Bonus” or “Special” Features that include one or more of the following: interviews with the creators of the show, interviews with members of the film cast, commentaries by various experts, documentaries about the making of the film, documentaries on film restoration, behind the scene notes, alternate vocal versions, a deleted scene or song, vintage featurettes and archival footage, historical background, storyboards, original intermission music, and trailers. Most of these films were popular in their time and several remain so in ours. Most made money. Within a three-year span of time West Side Story and My Fair Lady took home the big Academy Award prize for Best Picture, among numerous other awards.

  Compared with the films of “Stage versus Screen (1),” these five films are for the most part far more faithful to their stage sources than the films we looked at in act I (the exception is Trevor Nunn’s virtually complete televised 1993 film of Porgy and Bess). Also in contrast to the earlier films, three of the films discussed in this chapter even approximate the amount of stage time offered by their predecessors. None follow their stage sources to the letter, however. In fact, only George Cukor’s My Fair Lady comes close to what was seen and heard on Broadway. Robert Wise’s relatively faithful and relatively complete West Side Story takes significant liberties with song order and removes the second act ballet. Samuel Goldwyn and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Guys and Dolls and George Sidney’s Kiss Me, Kate subtract and add songs, but in the former the songs were newly written by the composer-lyricist Frank Loesser especially for the film and in the latter the new song was written by the show’s rightful creative owner, Cole Porter. Henry King’s Carousel film deletes but does not add songs.

  Despite their commercial successes (the exception here is Carousel), the film versions of the musicals treated in act II have generated controversies over their artistic success as adaptations. Critics have taken issue with their direction, scenic design, and cinematography, and perhaps most vociferously over casting issues and the pros and cons of vocal dubbing. Two of the films, Carousel and Kiss Me, Kate, feature mainly singers. Guys and Dolls combines singers and non-singers but even the latter sang for themselves. In contrast, most of the principals in the My Fair Lady and West Side Story adaptations are dubbed by professional singers. Even Rita Moreno, herself an accomplished professional singer and recording artist, had her voice replaced.1 Less obvious but arguably even more radical aspects of sonic technological change—orchestral augmentations, selective mixing via multiple-track recording, combining alternate takes via editing, the effects of microphone placement—have slipped past underneath most critics’ notice. For those who have grown accustomed in recent years to the expectation that voices we hear on the soundtrack belong to the faces of those we see in the picture (e.g., Chicago, Dreamgirls, Hairspray, Rent, The Phantom of the Opera, and Sweeney Todd), the knowledge that Marni Nixon is the voice of Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood might be disconcerting. These musical adaptations may come across today as faithful to their theatrical origins to the point of being labored and unfaithful to their new medium. At the same time they allow us to imagine their stage counterparts and for the most part will satisfactorily see us through until something better comes along, such as a new Broadway revival or a community theater or high school production.

  Carousel (1956)

  Not long after the release of Oklahoma! in October 1955, The King and I and Carousel followed in quick succession in February and March of the next year. Unlike the popular successes of Oklahoma! and The King and I, the third Rodgers and Hammerstein film adaptation to appear within six
months, Carousel failed at the box office in its own time and has not enjoyed much critical approbation in the decades since its debut—even though it brought back from Oklahoma! the winning partnership of Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones. Although spared the acrimony heaved at Joshua Logan and those disturbing colored filters he will always be blamed for in the next 20th Century-Fox Rodgers and Hammerstein film adaptation, South Pacific in 1958—which Gerald Mast found almost unrivaled “for sheer bad taste”—for Mast and many others Carousel remains unequivocally “the worst of the lot.”2

  Carousel, 1956 film. Carrie Pipperidge (Barbara Ruick) and Julie Jordan (Shirley Jones) (foreground left) watch Billy Bigelow (Gordon MacRae) (right) at The carousel.

  Only two songs from the stage version were cut, however, “Geraniums in the Winder” (also missing from the original Broadway cast album) and “The Highest Judge of All.” The screenplay also retains much of Hammerstein’s libretto. Nevertheless, Thomas Hischak, who normally demonstrates equanimity in his assessments of film adaptations in Through the Screen Door, describes the Carousel adaptation, directed by Henry King, as “unfaithful, incompetent, and certainly uninspired” and “the most unsatisfying film treatment of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.”3 For a minority report one can turn to an essay by Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans in which the authors describe the dream ballets of Carousel as well as Oklahoma! as works in which “the greater surrealist possibilities of the cinema [are] used to their fullest advantage” and other “ways in which the film is as moving today as when it was made.”4