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

by Block, Geoffrey

  49. For example, in O’Hara’s Broadway typescript Joey does not sing the opening song, “Chicago,” the first song of 1952. Similarly, Joey’s audition number is nowhere to be found in the earlier script, only the words, “Joey has just finished singing.” When it appears later in the show, slightly altered as “Morocco,” it is sung by Michael Moore. See Hart and Kimball, The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart, 271. I am grateful to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre for allowing me to see the unpublished typescripts of O’Hara’s 1940s Broadway libretto and the preliminary script.

  50. Gone from “Take Him” (act II, scene 4) in 1952 are both Linda’s and Vera’s verses. Vera’s verses appear in the O’Hara Broadway typescript. See also Hart and Kimball, The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart, 275.

  Revisions in the 1952 book are more modest than those for the lyrics, although the absence of a reprise of “I Could Write a Book” from O’Hara’s 1940 Broadway transcript must be considered a significant change. The dialogue that separates the refrains in “You Mustn’t Kick It Around” was not present in 1940, and the transition lines to “Plant You Now” and “Do It the Hard Way” would later exclude Lowell. Perhaps the most substantial change in the 1952 book is the deletion of a page of dialogue between Joey and the manager of the apartment house, who dispassionately informs the anti-hero that he has until 6:00 P.M. to leave the building. Other changes in the 1952 book: Vera is now “over twenty-one” instead of “thirty-six,” Gladys’s interpretation of Lowell’s brand of humor is an old lady hit by a trolley car (rather than a truck), and Joey no longer gets a good meal at the home of Linda’s sister.

  51. Abbott, “Mister Abbott,” 194–95.

  52. In O’Hara’s early typescript Joey meets Linda English, generically named Girl, at Mike Spears’s club where she performs as a singer. Like other performers at the club, Linda is initially repelled by Joey and what he stands for. In the final 1940 libretto, where Joey wins her over in front of the pet store with his fictitious story of his childhood dog Skippy, Linda acquired more sweetness. She also acquired more dialogue as a guest rather than a performer in Mike Spear’s joint in act I, scene 3, and in a telephone exchange in scene 4.

  Some additional distinctions: In O’Hara’s original draft Lowell and Gladys actively solicit Linda’s help in their plan to blackmail Vera, which in the later libretto Linda merely overhears. In both versions the generous Linda warns her rival. Nevertheless, the earlier and tougher Vera thwarts the blackmail attempt without the help of Police Deputy Commissioner O’Brien when she reproduces a photograph that shows her husband and Gladys in flagrante delicto. Not present in the earlier typescript are the angry final words between Joey and Vera following Vera’s lie (that Joey frightened away the blackmailers), an exchange that credibly prepares Vera’s reprise of “Bewitched.”

  In the preliminary typescript Vera was nine years older (Joey found Vera’s name in the 1910 rather than the 1919 social register; see note 50). Lowell’s racket is more clearly explained, and Lowell participates in the song “Plant You Now, Dig You Later.” The typescript also contains some additional dialogue for Joey, Mike, and Melba to create a smoother transition for “Zip.” Following “Zip,” Melba takes a costume away from a show girl and poses for photographs with Joey and another chorus girl for her newspaper. This scene is based on Joey’s thirteenth letter to his successful bandleader friend Ted, “A Bit of a Shock.” Finally, the preliminary typescript contained several pages of dialogue in which Joey is fitted for additional clothes and purchases an automobile before Linda arrives to warn Vera about the blackmail attempt.

  53. Abbott, “Mister Abbott,” 195.

  54. Rodgers biographer Frederick Nolan writes that “Larry Hart chortled with delight when he read those lines [“I love it / Because the laugh’s on me”] over the phone to Joshua Logan and explained with glee that they meant Joey was actually on Vera Simpson.” Frederick Nolan, The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: Walker, 1978), 112–13 [2002 ed., 139]. When the song was broadcast, these lyrics were changed to “the laugh’s about me.”

  55. Rodgers, Musical Stages, 45. Although Goetschius does not discuss this particular point, his Exercises in Melody-Writing (first published in 1900) offers a systematic approach to a subject of great interest to Rodgers. Percy Goetschius, Exercises in Melody-Writing (New York: G. Schirmer, 1928).

  56. Stephen Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 84–85.

  57. The half step also appears conspicuously in “Talking to My Pal,” dropped during the out-of-town tryouts. Its presence, however, in “Plant You Now, Dig You Later,” a duet between Gladys and gangster agent Ludlow Lowell in the 1940 version, places a considerable strain on the theory that Rodgers is making a dramatic statement or creating subtle associations through a musical interval.

  58. Alec Wilder, American Popular Song. Several decades later, important books by Allen Forte and Steven E. Gilbert appeared, all of which discuss popular song with more analytical rigor (and more selectively) than Wilder. Allen Forte’s first study, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950 (1995), offers detailed and insightful analytical discussions of selected songs by Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen (roughly a half dozen songs for each songwriter); his more accessible Listening to Classic American Popular Songs (2001) examines a total of twenty-three songs by these composers and a few others written between the 1920s and the 1940s. Steven E. Gilbert offers a more specialized analytical study of Gershwin’s songs in The Music of Gershwin (1995).

  59. Wilder, American Popular Song, 216. In the essay cited above Sondheim clarifies why he is “down on” Hart. His principal objection was that the pyrotechnic lyricist created lyrics “so wrenching that the listener loses the sense of the line.” Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 83.

  60. Wilder, American Popular Song, 164.

  Chapter 6: The Cradle Will Rock

  1. Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music, 538.

  2. Martin Esslin, Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 80. As late as the 1990s, the Kurt Weill Foundation, still considered the Blitzstein version the only singable version of this work in English. After the 1976 Lincoln Center revival, the Foundation no longer permitted Ralph Manheim’s and John Willett’s harder edged, more literal translation to be staged. On the relative merits of the Blitzstein and Manheim-Willett productions see Kim H. Kowalke, “‘The Threepenny Opera’ in America,” Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera, ed. Stephen Hinton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78–119.

  3. See, for example, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 225–27, and Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater, 146–50.

  4. Aaron Copland, The New Music 1900–1960 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 139–44.

  5. Wilfrid Mellers, Music and Society (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950), 211–20.

  6. Mellers, Music in a New Found Land, 415–28.

  7. Gordon, Mark the Music. Despite its length, Gordon’s study does not include an analytical component. See also the following: John O. Hunter, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock”; Robert James Dietz, “The Operatic Style of Marc Blitzstein”; John D. Shout, “The Musical Theater of Marc Blitzstein”; and Carol J. Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock. Since the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, the length of Gordon’s volume (603 pages) has been surpassed by at least two biographies of American composers, both by Howard Pollack: Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1999) [690 pages] and George Gershwin [884 pages].

  8. Gordon, Mark the Music, 141–46. Blitzstein’s account of the premiere was recorded on Marc Blitzstein Discusses His Theater Compositions, published as “Out of the Cradle,” and reprinted posthumously in the New York Times. For other eye-witness accounts of the events surrounding the first performance, see Archibald MacLeish, Introduction to The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Random House, 1938), Howard Da S
ilva’s jacket notes for The Cradle Will Rock, MGM SE 4289–2–0C (1964), and especially John Houseman, Run-Through, 255–79.

  9. John Houseman notes the irony of Blitzstein’s troubles with Musicians’ Local #802, which demanded that an orchestra be paid to remain silent during Cradle’s run at the Windsor, a commercial Broadway theater. As Houseman explains, “For thirteen weeks, eight times a week, twelve union musicians with their instruments and a contractor-conductor with his baton arrived at the theater half an hour before curtain time, signed in and descended to the basement where they remained, engrossed in card games and the reading of newspapers, while their composer colleague exhausted himself at the piano upstairs.” Run-Through, 336.

  10. The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Random House, 1938) and The Best Short Plays of the Social Theatre, ed. William Kozlenko (New York: Random House, 1939), 113–67. A microfilm of the original Random House publication is included in the Blitzstein Papers of the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

  11. The Cradle Will Rock, Musicraft, album 18 (recorded April 1938) (reissued in a limited edition on American Legacy Records, T 1001 [December 1964]) and “Mark Blitzstein Musical Theatre Premières,” Pearl Gems 0009, 2 CDs (1998).

  12. Virgil Thomson, “In the Theatre,” 113. The deus ex machina ending, so clearly reminiscent of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, may have further prompted Weill to ask, “Have you seen my new opera?” See Minna Lederman, “Memories of Marc Blitzstein, Music’s Angry Man,” Show (June 1964): 18+.

  13. Brooks Atkinson, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ Officially Opens at the Mercury Theatre,” New York Times, December 6, 1937, 19.

  14. Edith J. R. Isaacs, “An Industry without a Product—Broadway in Review,” Theatre Arts Monthly 22 (February 1938): 99.

  15. George Jean Nathan, “Theater,” Scribner’s Magazine 103 (March 1938): 71.

  16. That’s Entertainment Records ZC TED 1105.

  17. In citing the German premiere in Recklinghausen (1984), the first Cradle performance in continental Europe, Gordon notes that Gershon Kinsley, the director and pianist of the 1964 production and recording, “rescored it for chamber ensemble, including synthesizer.” Gordon, Mark the Music, 539.

  18. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music,” 27.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music, II,” 29.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Blitzstein, “New York Medley, Winter, 1935,” Modern Music 13/2 (January–February 1936): 36–37.

  23. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music, II,” 29.

  24. Minna Lederman, The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (Modern Music, 1924–1946), I. S. A. M. Monograph, no. 18 (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1983), 67.

  25. Its published text and original conception called for the ten scenes to form an unbroken chain. Despite this, it became traditional to divide the work into two acts with a break after scene 6, a division observed in the Tams-Witmark Music Library rental score.

  26. Blitzstein, “Author of ‘The Cradle,’” 7.

  27. The quotation is taken from Brecht’s essay “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre.” See Bertolt Brecht, in Brecht on Theatre, John Willett, ed. and trans., 85.

  28. Brecht explores these ideas in “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre (Notes to the Opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny).” See Brecht, in Brecht on Theatre, John Willett, ed. and trans., 33–42.

  29. The “Croon–Spoon” portion of Scene Four is found in The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Random House, 1938), 52–58 (the piano-vocal score for this song is included) and Kozlenko, The Best Short Plays, 132–33.

  30. The word “nerts,” another expression for “nuts” (as in “crazy”) was, like spoon, also used in the early 1900s. The New Dictionary of American Slang, ed. Robert L. Chapman (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 298.

  31. In the event that devotees of Bing Crosby (1901–1977), perhaps the best-remembered and best-loved crooner, are reading this note, it should be mentioned that Crosby (and many other crooners) did not share Junior’s poor sense of pitch. Blitzstein might be indicting the content of Crosby’s songs and the legion of Crosby epigones, but not crooners in general or Crosby in particular. In fact, Gordon notes that Blitzstein had considered Crosby for the film Night Shift (1942) and that several years later he gladly worked with the crooner on the American Broadcasting Station in Europe. Gordon, Mark the Music, 216, 250, 274.

  32. At the risk of further complicating this analysis, it should be noted that the F center of Mister Mister’s melody in the A sections (harmonized by a D-minor seventh) is neither major nor minor but in the Lydian mode (F major with a raised fourth degree of the scale or B instead of B).

  33. The harmony here begins by alternating between E major (the key in which Daily began his second B section) and D minor. After the considerable harmonic maneuvering described in the text, this section ends up with a strong cadence back to D minor and circles back to the vamp that introduced Mr. Mister’s first a section.

  34. Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 226–27. The rocking “Hawaiian guitar” accompaniment also serves as a relaxed and understated version of the accompaniment heard earlier in “Let’s Do Something.”

  35. Cradle, 87–96, and Kozlenko, The Best Short Plays, 141–46.

  36. Max Unger, Notes to Beethoven’s Overture to Goethe’s “Egmont” (New York: Eulenburg, 1936), ii (with a musical illustration for this measure). It is tempting to speculate that Blitzstein had Thayer’s interpretation (reiterated in Unger’s notes) fresh on his mind. In any event the popular Eulenburg edition appeared the same year that Blitzstein wrote his Cradle.

  37. Cradle, 96, and Kozlenko, The Best Short Plays, 145–46.

  38. In his survey of Blitzstein’s theatrical work through 1941, Robert Dietz notes three recurring ideas in the midst of Cradle’s otherwise autonomous ten scenes: the multiple appearance of the Moll’s music (scenes 1, 2, 7, and 10); the reprise of the title song, first sung in scene 7, to conclude the work three scenes later; and an ominous three-chord motive in the orchestra. This last motive first appears in scene 5 to underscore Bugs’s explanation to Harry Druggist how an explosion will kill Gus and Sadie, and reappears in scene 9 when Mr. Mister explains to Dr. Specialist that Joe Hammer’s “accident” was due to drunkenness. Dietz, “The Operatic Style of Marc Blitzstein,” 297–98.

  39. Only the Moll, however, will sing the musical line first given to dreams in scene 7 (and repeated with new words to conclude the next two stanzas): “Oh, you can dream and scheme / and happily put and take, take and put … / But first be sure / The nickel’s under your foot.”

  40. Quotation in Daniel Kingman, American Music, 458. For other examples of negative criticism based at least in part on Blitzstein’s political agenda see Samuel Lipman, Arguing for Music—Arguing for Culture (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990), 157–63, and Terry Teachout, “Cradle of Lies.”

  41. In his memorial tribute Copland wrote that “the taxi driver, the panhandler, the corner druggist were given voice for the first time in the context of serious musical drama …. No small accomplishment, for without it no truly indigenous opera is conceivable.” Copland, “In Memory of Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964),” Perspectives of New Music 2/2 (Spring–Summer 1964): 6.

  42. Perhaps alone among recent assessments is Hitchcock’s, that “it was not so much the message as the music that was significant in Blitzstein’s art.” Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 227.

  Chapter 7: Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus

  1. To cite two examples out of many, Gerald Mast, in his otherwise comprehensive Can’t Help Singin’ (1987), offers neither an explanation nor an apology for his conspicuous neglect of Weill, while Joseph P. Swain in The Broadway Musical (1990), a more selective study of sixteen musicals, remains similarly silent about Weill’s American works. In the years after the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, Raymond Knapp made Lady in the Dark one o
f his thirty-eight focus musicals in the second volume of his two-volume study (Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, 266–73). Ethan Mordden treats Weill appreciatively and at relative length in Beautiful Mornin,’ devoting attention to Lady in the Dark, 59–69; One Touch of Venus, 159–62; The Firebrand of Florence, 144–48; Street Scene 148–50; Love Life, 223–228; and Lost in the Stars, 229–35. Mordden considers Weill the most versatile of Broadway practitioners, “the absolute forties composer, running though all the available genres except revue” and even makes the refreshing argument on “the superiority of Weill’s Broadway over his German output” (Mordden, 163).