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

by Block, Geoffrey

  Guys and Dolls, 1955 film. Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) and Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons) dancing in Havana.

  Goldwyn was famous for discovering and signing talent. In the case of Guys and Dolls it was mostly the latter. To complement Loesser and his great hit, Goldwyn turned to Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993), who not long before had gained distinction as the first to win a double pair of Academy Awards for both directing and screenwriting in two successive years A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). Mankiewicz, who had never directed or written a musical, wanted to convert Abe Burrows’s libretto into more of a play. In preparation for the transfer from stage to film Mankiewicz even wrote a new script that could stand alone without music. He made his goals and intentions clear in a letter to Goldwyn: “My primary, almost only, objective in this writing has been to tell the story as warmly and humanly as possible—and to characterize our four principals as fully as if their story were going to be told in purely dramatic terms.”12 Although Mankiewicz tried to flesh out Sarah Brown’s character, especially in the extended scene in Havana, Cuba, the movie ultimately falls short because the experienced screenwriter, but musical theater novice, failed to grasp how the subtleties of music, at least in Loesser’s songs, effectively removed the need to transform a musical into a play. Joseph Kerman’s famous principle that “the music is the drama” was not a concept that Mankiewicz believed or understood.

  When Gene Kelly proved unavailable, Mankiewicz and Goldwyn turned to a, or perhaps the, major film star of the day, Marlon Brando (1924–2004), who like Mankiewicz had never participated in a musical. Within a few years after his powerful stage performance in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Brando had earned a string of four Best Actor nominations, including one for the film adaptation of Streetcar (1951) and one for the role of Mark Anthony in a film version of Julius Caesar (1953), directed and adapted for the screen by Mankiewicz. One year before Guys and Dolls, Brando won the award for On the Waterfront. Although Guys and Dolls proved to be Brando’s last as well as first foray into musical film, he worked diligently under Loesser’s coaching and performed the songs creditably. He even managed to master the basic dance steps of the Cuba interlude with some grace. For his leading lady, Goldwyn tried unsuccessfully to acquire Grace Kelly, another recent Academy Award-winning star. The third choice for Sarah Brown, after Kelly and Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons (b. 1929), yet another star with no experience in musicals, proved to be surprisingly effective, both as a singer and as an actress.13 Unlike Brando, Simmons returned to musical theater when in 1975 she played the lead in the London production of A Little Night Music.

  In addition to these newcomers to musicals, Goldwyn and Mankiewicz brought back several key figures associated with the Broadway production, even if the original Adelaide, Vivian Blaine, was another second choice after Betty Grable declined the role. Another notable singer actor reassigned to the film was Stubby Kaye, who played a major role in the success of the stage versions as Nicely-Nicely Johnson. According to the young Stephen (or in this early case, Steve) Sondheim, who reviewed the Goldwyn extravaganza in 1955 for Films in Review, Kaye was “the real hero of the picture,” who helped make “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” “one of the most memorable numbers in musical-comedy history.”14 For Sondheim, Kaye “sets the tone of every scene in which he appears: when he is singing ‘Fugue for Tinhorns’ and ‘Guys and Dolls’ he does more to create the atmosphere of Runyon’s New York than all the scenery lumped together (which it often seems to be).”15

  A major benefit of the film version of Guys and Dolls is the opportunity to see the original athletic and amusing choreography of Michael Kidd (1919–2007), who recreated the impressive original Runyonland opening and the sewer dance scene to the music of “Luck Be a Lady” much as audiences had seen these numbers onstage five years earlier. Many critics, including Sondheim, lamented scene designer Oliver Smith’s sets in which realism and stylization clashed infelicitously, but Kidd created a convincing ambiance through the movements of his eccentric and cartoonish but developed characters, both major and minor. Kaye leading the trio of tinhorns in “Fugue for Tinhorns” near the beginning of the film and the gambling sinners in his rendition of “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” near the end are indeed two of the great translations from Broadway to film. Although Vivian Blaine’s dramatic stage delivery is less suitable than Kaye’s for the more intimate framework of film, it is still a treat to hear her repeat her stage performance of “Adelaide’s Lament” (with the sole visual addition of a medicine cabinet). In addition to its entertainment value, the recreation of Kidd’s choreography and the roles of Nicely-Nicely and Adelaide make the film an invaluable historical document.

  On the debit side, although the three new songs added to the film are all by Loesser, they do not make up in either quality or quantity for the five songs deleted from the show. The first new song, “Pet Me Poppa,” replaced “A Bushel and a Peck” for Adelaide and the Hot Box Girls for the simple reason that Goldwyn didn’t like it. Seeing dancers precociously impersonating cats nearly thirty years before Lloyd Webber made this a must-see musical theater experience does not make up for the song switch. The second new song was written to give Frank Sinatra, then at the peak of his stardom as a recording artist and fresh from winning the best supporting actor Oscar for From Here to Eternity (1953), an expanded singing role as Nathan Detroit. We may recall from chapter 11 that his non-singing stage predecessor Sam Levene gradually observed his singing requirements dwindle down to a line or two in the verse of “Oldest Established” in act I and a few more lines in his duet with Adelaide, “Sue Me,” in act II. In what corresponds to act I in the film Nathan gets more to sing in “Oldest Established” in the opening scene and replaces one of the tinhorns in the title song about an hour into the film. Another fifteen minutes later he sings a new song expressly written for Sinatra, “Adelaide,” a song that Nathan sings to Lieutenant Brannigan to convince him that the gamblers are holding an engagement party rather than a meeting to decide where to hold the floating crap game.

  The third and final new song, the lyrical “A Woman in Love” arguably receives more air time than any song in the film. Introduced after the title song in the Overture, the song dominates the musical ambiance of the dinner date in Havana, Cuba, where Sky has taken Sarah on a bet. For twelve minutes of movie time (roughly from 77 to 89 minutes into the film), we hear it as a serenade in the café, as background music in the restaurant, and finally sung over a Latin accompaniment over dinner. After Sarah sings “If I Were a Bell” in a state of drunkenness and the couple returns to New York, “My Time of Day,” the song in which Sky bares his soul and reveals his biblical name (Obediah), is reduced to underscoring. Instead he sings a reprise of “A Woman in Love.”

  “Pet Me Poppa” was a matter of one Hot Box Tune replacing another, but the deletion of “My Time of Day” seriously defeats Mankiewicz’s stated purpose of character development. In contrast to “Adelaide’s Lament,” which reveals so much about this character, the song “Adelaide” may be an opportunity for Sinatra but does little to enhance Nathan’s character or the dramatic situation. Before the film is over, three more songs from the show would disappear. The first is “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” a genuine love duet between Sky and Sarah directly following Sky’s intimate revelations in “My Time of Day,” and arguably the great ballad of a rich theater score. The second casualty is “More I Cannot Wish You,” another of Loesser’s most lyrical ballads and the only chance Arvide Abernathy, Sarah’s gentle Salvation Army mentor, gets to sing in the show. The last song to end up on the cutting room floor is the cynical duet between Sarah and Adelaide in which they each share their goal to “Marry the Man Today” “and change his ways tomorrow.” The song was honest in its day, but its message would cast pallor on the romantic double wedding that ends the film and is the least missed of the five discarded numbers.

  My Fair Lady (1964)


  Not only did the film version of My Fair Lady, which arrived two years after the show completed its unsurpassed six-year Broadway run, present all the songs from its stage source, it also retained nearly all of the dialogue and most of the original running order. At nearly three hours, Lady is the most faithful adaptation in our group of films. As an added bonus, film audiences got a chance to see stage stars Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins and Stanley Holloway as Alfred P. Doolittle repeating their roles. Cecil Beaton returned as costume and set designer.16

  My Fair Lady, 1964 film. Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) and Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) (“In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.”) For a stage photo of this scene see p. 271.

  My Fair Lady on film enjoyed some financial success, despite its then stratospheric production costs of $17 million. It also received more than its share of critical acclaim. Nominated for twelve Oscars, it won in no less than eight categories: cinematography (Harry Stradling), sound (George R. Groves), musical scoring (André Previn), art direction (Gene Allen, Cecil Beaton, and George James Hopkins), costume design (Beaton), and major awards for Best Actor (Harrison), Director (George Cukor), and Best Picture. The film also received Golden Globe awards in these last three categories. In the American Film Institute rankings of the Top Twenty-Five Movie Musicals of All Time created in 2006, My Fair Lady placed eighth, the fourth highest ranking among adaptations of Broadway musicals (the others in the top eight are original musical films).

  We have noted that between the mid-1950s and early 1970s, roughly between The King and I and Carousel films of 1956 and Fiddler on the Roof in 1972, film musical adaptations of Broadway shows tended to be far more faithful and more complete than the films we have looked at between Show Boat and Guys and Dolls (with Pal Joey from 1957 and Porgy and Bess from 1959, not coincidentally shows created between 1935 and 1940, proving the exceptions). While some cuts, additions, and other changes can be expected, the film adaptations of Broadway musicals that debuted in the 1940s and 1950s more often than not attempted to recapture the spirit and more than occasionally the letter of their stage sources. Before the 1950s producers and studios ruled the roost. After that the creators took over. As producers, Rodgers and Hammerstein had acquired the control of their own films; Lerner and Loewe did the same for Gigi. After decades of Broadway films redesigned to serve the needs and values of Hollywood, Gigi (1958), an original musical film made by Broadway creators, served a new master. In Mast’s astute epiphany, Gigi, which won an Academy Award for best picture, “is the best Broadway musical ever written for the screen.”17

  Countering the predilection toward greater fidelity to Broadway sources, Hollywood values, in particular the desire to sign movie stars with strong box office appeal, gradually led to casting decisions based more on popular appeal than on singing experience and talent. But even those first cast on Broadway as the King in The King and I (Yul Brynner) and Higgins in My Fair Lady (Harrison) were in roles conceived for dramatic actors without vocal credentials. Interestingly, there was an attempt to bypass Harrison in favor of a bigger film star—Cary Grant turned down the role and Peter O’Toole demanded unreasonably high contractual terms—but after Harrison was chosen there was no need to replace his voice with that of a more polished singer. Goldwyn, too, in casting Guys and Dolls, also wanted to attract big box office draws such as Gene Kelly and (no relation) Grace Kelly for Sky and Sarah, and his final choices, Brando and Simmons, fit this profile. Once cast, however, Brando and Simmons were expected to lend their own voices to the film and both proved adequate (or better) as singers.

  Soon this would change. The film adaptation of The Music Man took a chance that paid off in casting the original stage lead, Robert Preston, who had little proven box office traction, but Jack Warner and Cukor were not eager to take a similar chance and allow Julie Andrews to repeat her stage role as Eliza Doolittle. In replacing Andrews, the goal was to find a star more likely to help Warner recoup the $5.5 million dollars he paid for the screen rights. The gorgeous and glamorous Audrey Hepburn, a box office tested movie star, fit this description, while Andrews, the luminous star of My Fair Lady on the stage but as yet an untested movie personality, did not.18 Working under the assumption that she would be the voice of Eliza in the film, Hepburn made demos of at least two songs, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and “Show Me,” both of which can be seen and heard as a special feature in the two-disc DVD Special Edition. There is little question that Hepburn did not possess the voice quality either of Andrews, whom she replaced, or of Hepburn’s vocal double Marni Nixon, who had dubbed the role of Anna Leonowens for Deborah Kerr in The King and I.

  On the other hand, the demos reveal a voice roughly comparable in quality to that of Jean Simmons. By this standard, Hepburn arguably made a plausible candidate to sing her role, especially when playing a character who was more guttersnipe than lady. In his autobiography, Lerner praises Leslie Caron (Gigi) for her dancing and acting but thought her singing abilities were “not up to scratch, or, if you will, too much up to scratch.”19 Later in the same paragraph he places Hepburn in the same category as an actress with “the gift for auditory illusion” who when hearing her “sadly inadequate singing voice” in a control room imagines that she is hearing Joan Sutherland.20 The fact that Harrison only sings a fraction of the actual notes in “You Did It” and about the same amount of “Hymn to Him” shows that double standards were alive and well when it came to casting Higgins and Eliza. Considering the widespread criticism Hepburn received for lacking the coarseness necessary to capture the guttersnipe Eliza before she became a lady, it seems a shame that Hepburn was not allowed to sing the songs her character sings prior to her transformation in order to create a vocal transformation to match the social one. To its credit, however, in its released version, just as we see the beauty of Hepburn underneath the dirt, thanks to the subterfuge of Marni Nixon we hear her beauty long before she emerges triumphant at the Embassy Ball.

  Despite its fidelity, the film did make a few changes worth noting. “With a Little Bit of Luck” is delayed from act I, scene 2, to scene 4, where it had been reprised onstage. Now the song is both introduced and reprised in the same scene. Also in act I, scenes 6 and 7 are reversed and some dialogue of the former moved to the latter after the “Ascot Gavotte.” The film contains other reordering and some new dialogue here and there that does not effect the placement of songs. The brief exchange between Higgins and his mother that follows Ascot, for example, is new in the film. Between what corresponds to act I, scenes 8 and 9, the film also offers a short scene in which Pickering cancels his bet six weeks before the Embassy Ball.

  When Eliza returns to Covent Garden after leaving Higgins, her reprise of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” is sung as both a voice-over and a flashback. Not only are these techniques cinematically useful, but they also effectively demonstrate the extent of Eliza’s transformation. Perhaps now that she is a lady she doesn’t want to wake up her former neighbors so early in the morning. For the most part, however, the film does not take advantage of the possibilities cinema offers to “open up” the show onto a wider “stage” via quick-yet-elaborate scene changes and location settings. One modest exception is the short scene in which we discreetly observe the undressing and bathing of Eliza by Mrs. Pearce and other servants, an offstage event in the theater. The most obvious lost opportunity for cinematic extravagance is the “theatrical” Ascot scene. Although visually interesting with its suitably colorless black and white costuming for the rigid and lifeless upper crust of society—Eliza gets a conspicuous touch of red in her hat to match her inappropriate but refreshing enthusiasm for the event—we hear but do not see the horses actually racing. Perhaps we might conclude that the film adaptation works so well because of moments like this one, where cinematic excess is avoided in favor of a consistent, theatrical focus on the principal players and their interactions. At this and many other moments, we are reminded that we are seeing a film of
a play rather than an original film—and this is a good thing.

  In an effective cinematic juxtaposition, the shot of Higgins’s laughter at the ball when he hears about Karpathy’s erroneous conclusion regarding Eliza’s national identity merges seamlessly with the continuation of this same laughter now shot in Higgins’s study after the ball. When it ran in theaters the film included an intermission after the stunningly beautiful Hepburn descends the staircase in Higgins’s apartment before they leave for the ball (about 100 minutes into the film). On Broadway, the act I curtain closes at the Embassy Ball with the suspense of whether Eliza will be able to fool the wily Karpathy. Theater audiences would have to wait to learn whether Higgins’s former student would expose Eliza’s lowly origins. Since the film intermission had taken place before the ball, Higgins’s laughter provides a welcome linkage between Eliza’s triumph at the ball and “You Did It,” in which Higgins and Pickering insensitively and undeservedly appropriate all the credit for her achievement.

  Despite the iconic stature of Cukor’s My Fair Lady, Comingsoon.net announced in 2008 that Duncan Kenworthy, who “has produced three of the most successful British films of all time, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love Actually,” all starring Hugh Grant, together with Cameron Mackintosh, the phenomenally successful stage producer who brought Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, and The Phantom of the Opera from London to New York, have cleared the rights with Columbia Pictures and CBS Films to produce a new version of Lerner and Loewe’s classic. Discussions have begun with their chosen lady, the very fair Keira Knightly, in significant contrast to the casting process in both the stage and earlier film versions, in which the starting point was Higgins. While respectful of Cukor’s treatment, Kenworthy and Mackintosh are confident they can improve on the 1964 original by shooting on location. In their press release Doug Belgrad, a president of Columbia Pictures, espoused the view that “by drawing additional material from Pygmalion” Mackintosh would create an updated version that “will preserve the magic of the musical while fleshing out the characters and bringing 1912 London to life in an authentic and exciting way for contemporary audiences.”21 To reach this lofty prediction Mackintosh will need more than just a little bit of luck.