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

by Block, Geoffrey

  2. See especially Ronald Sanders’s interpretation of Lady in the Dark’s genesis in The Days Grow Short, 292–309, and Matthew Scott, “Weill in America: The Problem of Revival.” Less judgmental in this respect is Jürgen Schebera, Kurt Weill.

  3. David Drew, “Weill, Kurt (Julian).” The ensuing quotations from this article are found on pp. 305 and 307–8; for a more recent assessment by Drew see Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 45–47.

  4. Scott, “Weill in America: The Problem of Revival.”

  5. Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater, 61.

  6. Robert Garland, “Mary Martin, John Boles, Kenny Baker Head Cast of New Comedy,” New York Journal-American, October 8, 1943; quoted in Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 525; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 4, 264.

  7. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, February 27, 1944, Music Division, Library of Congress.

  8. Kurt Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of Street Scene (Columbia OL 4139).

  9. Ibid. See also Larry Stempel, “Street Scene,” 321–41.

  10. Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of Street Scene.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, April 13, 1944, Music Division, Library of Congress. Gerald Mast also perceives second-act weaknesses in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. See Mast, Can’t Help Singin,’ 204–05.

  13. Letter to Ira Gershwin, April 13, 1944.

  14. Malcolm Goldstein, George S. Kaufman: His Life, His Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 343.

  15. See Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book, 142, 144, and 146 on Ginger Rogers’s film roles as women who cannot make up their minds (including the 1944 Paramount film version of Lady in the Dark). The idea of a future Mr. Right being able to complete a “dream” song is at least as old as Victor Herbert’s “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” from Naughty Marietta (1910).

  16. F. Anstey, Humour & Fantasy (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 288–468.

  17. Cheryl Crawford credits stage designer Aline Bernstein, who remains un-indexed in the standard biographies of Weill; Ronald Sanders (who used Crawford as his major source for the genesis of One Touch of Venus) attributes this suggestion to Lady in the Dark costume designer Irene Sharaff. Both Crawford and Sanders offer a date, the former in June 1942 and the latter November 1941. David Drew writes that “in February 1942 The Tinted Venus headed a list of fifteen possibilities he [Weill] was considering for Cheryl Crawford.” Cheryl Crawford, One Naked Individual, 116; Sanders, The Days Grow Short, 322; and Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 328. See also Dorothy Herrmann, S. J. Perelman: A Life (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1986), 147.

  18. Perelman had, however, contributed sketches to other Broadway revues beginning in 1931. Douglas Fowler, S. J. Perelman (Boston: Twayne, 1983).

  19. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 121.

  20. The role of Venus, originally intended for Marlene Dietrich, was Mary Martin’s first starring Broadway role. After answering more than tentatively in the affirmative, Dietrich backed down from playing the sexy Venus, allegedly for the sake of her impressionable nineteen-year-old daughter. Martin, now mainly known from later roles as the wholesome Nellie Forbush (South Pacific) and Maria Rainer (The Sound of Music), earlier in her career had proven her sexual allure in Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Leave It to Me (1938).

  21. Crawford and Kazan had also worked together on Weill’s Johnny Johnson as producer and actor, respectively. Crawford continued to produce musicals, most notably Lerner and Weill’s Love Life and Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon (also with de Mille) and Paint Your Wagon; Kazan left musicals for theater and films after directing Venus and Love Life. According to Gerald Bordman, Kazan “was the most important American director of the late 1940s and the 1950s.” Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, 2nd ed., 394.

  22. Virgil Thomson, “Plays with Music,” New York Herald Tribune, February 23, 1941. Barlow writes the following about Lady in the Dark: “In this long score, there are not three minutes of the true Weill. And in this new medium, this new life, this new success, the promise has been buried under a branch of expensive but imitation laurel.” Samuel L. M. Barlow, “In the Theatre,” Modern Music 8/3 (March–April 1941): 189–93.

  23. The Lady in the Dark playbill also included other highly distinguished collaborators: Sam H. Harris, who had earlier produced fifteen Cohan musicals, seven Berlin shows, the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing, Porter’s Jubilee, and Rodgers and Hart’s I’d Rather Be Right; Hassard Short, director of production, lighting, and musical sequences, who had designed illustrious shows for two decades, including The Band Wagon, Roberta, and Jubilee; and Albertina Rasch, the choreographer of The Band Wagon, The Cat and the Fiddle, and Jubilee.

  24. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 135.

  25. Ibid., 138.

  26. See bruce mcclung, “Psicosi per musica.” I am grateful to the author for sharing a typescript of this essay prior to its publication. See also mcclung, “American Dreams: Analyzing Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, and Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark” (Ph.D. dissertation, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 1994) and, more recently, mcclung’s thorough and excellent “Lady in the Dark”: Biography of a Musical.

  27. Also much later, Whitelaw Savory would sing the beautiful “Love in a Mist” in the place later reserved for “Westwind.” “Love in a Mist” can be heard in Ben Bagley’s Kurt Weill Revisited Vol. II (Painted Smiles PSCD 109).

  28. Another song, “Who Am I?,” which Savory sang in his bedroom early in act II before being surprised by the angry Anatolian Zuvetli, was also dropped after Weill had orchestrated it.

  29. A typescript of I Am Listening is located at the State Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin. The Weill-Gershwin correspondence and other Ira Gershwin documents are housed in the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and Weill’s musical manuscripts are housed at Yale University. Copies of all Hart, Gershwin, and Weill materials for Lady in the Dark are available for study at the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York. I am grateful to all of the above institutions for making these materials accessible to me, especially Harold L. Miller (State Historical Society), Raymond A. White (Library of Congress), Victor Cardell and Kendall Crilly (Yale), and David Farneth (Kurt Weill Foundation). Thanks are also due to Tom Briggs of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Theatre Library for enabling me to examine the full orchestral score of Lady in the Dark.

  30. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, September 2, 1940, Music Division, Library of Congress.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, September 14, 1940, Music Division, Library of Congress. Since they had cut the Hollywood Dream (but not the Hollywood sequence) and Randy Curtis now had nothing to sing in the second act, all concerned were eager to have this character sing something. The problems with all of Curtis’s music, however, stemmed from the disturbing discovery about the man they had cast in this role, Victor Mature. As Ira Gershwin expressed it in Lyrics on Several Occasions, “when handsome ‘hunk of man’ Mature sang, his heart and the correct key weren’t in it” (144).

  33. Ira Gershwin annotations (September 1967) to “The Third Dream Sequence Section 1,” Music Division, Library of Congress; and Lyrics on Several Occasions, 207–8; reprinted in Robert Kimball, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin, 291–92.

  34. Gershwin annotations to “The Third Dream Sequence Section 2.”

  35. Ibid. In his annotations of November 3, 1967, appended to the texts for “Three Discarded Songs,” Gershwin briefly explains their originally intended place in the show. “Unforgettable,” recorded as “You Are Unforgettable” on Ben Bagley’s Kurt Weill Revisited (Painted Smiles PSCD 108) and “It’s Never Too Late to Mendelssohn” were deleted from the second dream (some of the lyrics of the latter were retained). “Bats about You” “was written for a flash-back scene and supposedly was a song of the late Twenties, sung at a Maplet
on High School graduation Dance.” In Kurt Weill: A Handbook, Drew lists “Bats about You” and “You Are Unforgettable” under unlocated songs.

  36. Ira Gershwin, Lyrics on Several Occasions, 187. Arthur and Francis were the given names of George and Ira’s lesser known younger siblings. The conclusion of the Wedding Dream (including the Mendelssohn Endelssohn and Lohengrin and Bear It material) is borrowed from another wedding song, “Bride and Groom,” in the act I finale of Ira’s collaboration with his brother George, Oh, Kay! (1926), starring Lawrence as Lady Kay.

  37. Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 274. See also Drew, “Reflections,” especially 243–48.

  38. Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 220.

  39. Michael Morley offers a possible “common denominator” between “In der Jugend Gold’nem Schimmer” and its reincarnations in Marie Galante and One Touch of Venus. See Morley, “‘I Cannot/Will Not Sing the Old Songs Now’: Some Observations on Weill’s Adaptation of Popular Song Forms,” in Kim H. Kowalke and Horst Edler, eds., A Stranger Here Myself, 221.

  40. Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, 117.

  41. Originally published as “Über den gestischen Charakter der Musik.” Weill’s article is translated by Kim H. Kowalke in Kurt Weill in Europe, 491–93 (the quotations in this paragraph are found on p. 493).

  42. Ibid., 493.

  43. Ibid., 494. The remaining quotations from Weill’s essay are also found on this page.

  44. Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, 113–23.

  45. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music defines the doctrine of affections as “the belief, widely held in the 17th and early 18th centuries, that the principal aim of music is to arouse the passions or affections (love, hate, joy, anger, fear, etc., conceived as rationalized, discrete, and relatively static states).” Don Randel, ed., The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 16.

  46. bruce d. mcclung, “Psicosi per musica,” 53–54.

  47. Weill’s self-borrowings parallel the controversial self-borrowings of Handel. See George J. Buelow, “The Case for Handel’s Borrowings: The Judgment of Three Centuries,” in Handel: Tercentenary Collection, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987), 61–82.

  48. Lewis Nichols, “‘One Touch of Venus,’ Which Makes the Whole World Kin, Opens at the Imperial,” New York Times, October 8, 1943; review excerpted in Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 526; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 4, 264.

  49. “September Song” from Knickerbocker Holiday, “My Ship” from Lady in the Dark, “Speak Low” from One Touch of Venus, “Green-Up Time” from Love Life, and the title song from Lost in the Stars are perhaps the best known song legacies from Weill’s otherwise currently little-known Broadway shows.

  50. Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of Street Scene.

  51. Ibid.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Rodgers explains his ideas about dramatic unity in Chee-Chee (1928) in his autobiography, Musical Stages, 118 (see also chapter 5, p. 85). Larry Stempel notes Rodgers’s early attempt at an integrated musical and adds Hammerstein’s Rose-Marie (1924) to the short list of integrated 1920s musicals (see Stempel, “Street Scene,” 324).

  54. William G. King, “Music and Musicians.”

  55. In Bob Fosse’s 1972 popular film adaptation of the Weill-influenced Cabaret (1966), for example, the songs that took place outside the Kit Kat Club on Broadway were mostly removed, an artistic decision that deprived the central male character the inalienable right of any central character in a musical: the right to sing.

  56. Lady in the Dark (Chappell, 1941). Hart dates his remarks March 18, 1941.

  57. mcclung, “Psicosi per musica,” 242–45.

  58. Ibid., 250–63.

  59. Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune, October 17, 1943, wrote that Venus was “the first integrated and joyous entertainment of the current theatrical semester.”

  60. Stanley Richards, ed., Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1 (Radnor, Penn.: Chilton, 1973), 128.

  61. The subject of quarter-note (and half-note) triplets is introduced in the musical discussion of Anything Goes (see chapter 3, pp. 54–55).

  62. Richards, Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1, 129.

  63. Thanks to Robert M. Stevenson, professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, for this inspired simile.

  64. Richards, Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1, 158.

  65. Richards, ed., Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 2 (Radnor, Penn.: Chilton, 1976), 98.

  66. Ibid., 82.

  67. Ibid., 79.

  68. When Danny Kaye left the show and his role as Russell Paxton, his replacement proved difficult. Within two weeks after Gershwin wrote Weill that Rex O’Malley “is too lady-like for the lady-like characters and may make the character far too realistic,” the production staff bought out his contract. See the letter from Ira Gershwin to Kurt Weill, August 23, 1941, Music Division, Library of Congress.

  69. Richards, Great Musicals of the Musical Theatre, Volume 1, 157.

  Chapter 8: Stage versus Screen (1): Before Rodgers and Hammerstein

  1. Kim Kowalke, Review essay, 693.

  2. The dancing in “Night and Day” only lasted 4 ½ minutes. “The Continental,” composed by Con Conrad and Herb Magidson, also accomplished what the music by Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Youmans did not: It won the Oscar for best song.

  3. The 1955 film Hit the Deck used seven of Youmans’s ten songs, but set the songs to a new book.

  4. Three Fred and Ginger films later, Kern and Fields would team up to contribute the complete score to Swing Time.

  5. Charles Winninger (Cap’n Andy), Helen Morgan (Julie), and Sammy White (Frank) appeared in the original production and 1932 revival, Paul Robeson played Joe in the 1928 London production and the 1932 revival, and both Irene Dunne (Magnolia) and Allan Jones (Ravenal) had appeared in these roles in other Show Boat performances between 1927 and 1936.

  6. Both “Ah Still Suits Me” and “I Have the Room above Her” appeared in the 1971 London revival and the latter in the 1994 Broadway revival directed by Hal Prince.

  7. Although shot in color, the Preminger Porgy and Bess, withdrawn from circulation by the Gershwin Estate, is also difficult to obtain.

  8. Not included in these eighteen minutes is an overture that lasts about fifty-five seconds, which presents an athematic buzz followed by the first phrase of “Ol’ Man River” and opening snippets of “I Have the Room above Her” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.”

  9. The stage version opens with the ominous Vallon theme, which in the absence of Vallon appears more generically as a darker force on the river before audiences can make the connection between the theme and Vallon himself. The film waits to introduce Vallon’s theme until we meet Vallon, thirteen minutes into the scene.

  10. This is the waltz that begins with “Your pardon I pray,” brings Magnolia into the song, and returns as underscoring when the song is completed. When this theme finally makes its appearance thirty-four minutes into the film it is used to accompany Julie’s departure from the show boat and thus bears no connection with the principal couple. Back to “Make Believe,” the return of the main chorus offers only the first and last lyrics (a reduction from 32 measures to 16).

  11. Caryl Flynn, Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 69.

  12. Ruggles can be seen earlier as an aristocrat in Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and later as a hunter in the Katharine Hepburn–Cary Grant classic Bringing Up Baby (1938).

  13. In an essay on the films of Bing Crosby, Gary Giddins offers a characteristically erudite summary assessment of this unjustifiably little known film (Giddins, Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006], 113). Giddins also briefly discusses the film ad
aptation of Anything Goes in Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years 1903–1940 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 391–93.

  14. Era Bell, “Why Negroes Don’t Like ‘Porgy and Bess,’” Ebony 14/12 (October 1959): 50–52, 54 (quoted in Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess,” 279). Bell’s view was widely held in the black community, but Gwynne Kuhner Brown notes the varied range of African-American (and white) critical responses to the opera in Problems of Race and Genre in the Critical Reception of “Porgy and Bess.”