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

by Block, Geoffrey

  34. Perhaps the least known of their adaptations, Pipe Dream (1955), based on John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, ended up as their major disappointment; despite an enthusiastic review from Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times, it ran only 246 performances, less than either Allegro (315) or Me and Juliet (358). Their final musicals, both adaptations, produced one modest success, Flower Drum Song in 1958 (600 performances), and their fifth major hit, The Sound of Music in 1959, at 1,443 performances the second longest running musical of the 1950s (after My Fair Lady) and the fourth longest running show before 1960. In addition to these stage shows Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote Cinderella, a ninety-minute musical for television starring Julie Andrews broadcast on March 31, 1957; during Rodgers’s lifetime a remake starring Lesley Ann Warren was broadcast on February 22, 1965, and a third televised remake starring Brandy Norwood followed on November 2, 1997.

  Chapter 10: Kiss Me, Kate

  1. According to Steven Suskin’s “Broadway Scorecard,” Kiss Me, Kate received eight “raves” and one “favorable” review and no reviews in the lower categories (“mixed,” “unfavorable,” and “pan”). See Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 367. Of the musicals surveyed in this book only Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady would receive no reviews lower than a “rave.”

  2. Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy, 156. The first sentence of the Porter quotation appears in Richard G. Hubler, The Cole Porter Story, 90; in the annotated Hubler interview Porter goes on to say without further explanation that Rodgers and Hammerstein “are, let us say, more musicianly.”

  3. The only known commodity in the Kiss Me, Kate cast was Alfred Drake (Fred Graham/ Petruchio), who had earlier achieved stardom as the original Curley in Oklahoma!

  4. George Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 279.

  5. The Porter Collection also contains sketch material, the May libretto, and copies of the discarded songs.

  6. Kiss Me, Kate, “Unfinished Lyrics” (“Bianca”), in the Cole Porter Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress. See also Stephen Citron, Noel and Cole, 218.

  7. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 239.

  8. This book will be referred to as the Spewack libretto draft or the May libretto.

  9. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 248–49.

  10. Stephen Citron cites additional borrowings “from native Italian dances, especially the Venetian boat song, and the canzones [canzonas] of Sorrento” in “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” Joseph P. Swain mentions the use of the modal flat seventh degree, a typical melodic figure in Renaissance music (e.g., B in the key of C) rather than the more tonal B that marks most European music after 1600). See Citron, Noel & Cole, 307, and Swain, The Broadway Musical, 133–34.

  11. Citron notes another possible musical pun in the verse of “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?”: “And one cannot overlook Porter’s use of the Neapolitan sixth chord 3 bars before the verse’s end. Was Cole pulling our leg?” Stephen Citron, Noel & Cole, 309. Unfortunately, the Verdian orchestral tag at the end of “We Open in Venice” (shown in Example 9.1) vanished in the 1999 Broadway revival and recording.

  12. According to Swain, the Baltimore songs “have no structural consistency, and show instead Porter’s vaunted and bewildering eclecticism.” Swain, The Broadway Musical, 138.

  13. Perfect fourths also begin nearly every musical phrase in “Tom, Dick or Harry” and appear prominently in the finale to act I (see the vocal score published by Tams-Witmark, 118–20).

  14. Among Porter’s drafts are a “minuet” version labeled “Bianca’s Theme,” an eighteenth-century dance that would soon give way to Lois’s song “Why Can’t You Behave?” in act I and its transformation into a Renaissance pavane for Bianca in act II (Example 10.4). Several labeled drafts in piano score also reveal that Porter abandoned an earlier idea to characterize Petruchio and Katherine with musical signatures.

  15. “I Sing of Love” was excluded from both the original cast album issued in 1949 and its stereo re-recording (with most of the original principals) ten years later. See Discography and Filmography in the online website.

  16. In the act II finale Porter returns to a guitar-like accompaniment (rather than a lute-like accompaniment as befits the Renaissance) that is similar to his first serenade to Kate in “Were Thine That Special Face,” now altered to triple meter.

  17. The consistency with which Porter tried to create musical linkages among the songs is further demonstrated in at least four songs that were removed before the Broadway opening. In “It Was Great Fun the First Time” Porter presents a melody that will anticipate the distinctive melodic figure with its turn to minor that will appear in “I Sing of Love” and “Where Is the Life?”; another phrase in the song foreshadows the verse of “Bianca” (at that point probably unwritten). “We Shall Never Be Younger” exhibits an emphasis on perfect fourths suggestive of “Another Op’nin” and “Why Can’t You Behave?,” and a phrase in “A Woman’s Career” closely resembles a phrase in “Too Darn Hot” without any particular dramatic justification. Finally, the discarded “What Does Your Servant Dream About?,” also with many perfect fourths, opens with a vamp that is nearly identical to the conclusion of “I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua.”

  18. Bella Spewack, “How to Write a Musical Comedy,” xiii.

  19. Ibid., xiii–xiv.

  20. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 248.

  21. “Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger Discuss the Deleted Songs July 5, 1990,” Notes to Kiss Me, Kate, conducted by John McGlinn (EMI/Angel CDS 54033–2), 15.

  22. Neither Spewack nor Eells has anything to say about the history of the two other songs that Porter added between June and November: “So in Love” and “I Hate Men.” The only dated typescript of “I Hate Men” shows the late date November 18.

  23. These Shakespeare passages can be found in the final scene of the May libretto, act II, scene 7.

  24. Morison had the following recollection: “In the scripts that were given to me by Bella Spewack, the song [“A Woman’s Career”] is performed by a character named Angela Temple, a friend and confidant of Lilli Vanessi” (Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger, “Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger Discuss the Deleted Songs,” 15). In the May Spewack libretto, however, “A Woman’s Career” was to be sung by Fred Graham to conclude act II, scene 5.

  25. May libretto, act II, scene 6.

  26. Morison and Kreuger, “Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger Discuss the Deleted Songs,” 5. Robert Kimball writes that “‘So in Love’ appears to have been composed as late as September 1948.” Kimball, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, 399.

  27. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 244.

  28. In addition to “It Was Great Fun the First Time” and “We Shall Never Be Younger,” the May libretto included two other songs that would be dropped: “If Ever Married I’m” (sung by Bianca in act I, scene 7), and “A Woman’s Career” (sung by Fred in act II, scene 5). Another two songs, also discarded before the Philadelphia tryouts, were probably introduced after the May libretto.

  The first of these, “What Does Your Servant Dream About?” can be placed quite accurately, since Porter’s draft indicated “Opening Act 2, Scene 3,” and “Curtis and Lackeys.” No such indication occurs in the May libretto, although Curtis and other servants do appear in the opening of the scene to the accompaniment of “Where Is the Life?” A Porter lyric typescript for “What Does Your Servant Dream About?” is dated July 10.

  The chronology and placement of the other later addition (also soon to be deleted), “I’m Afraid, Sweetheart, I Love You,” is less clear, since neither Porter nor the Spewacks offer clues as to who should be singing this song and where. Presumably this song, too, came and went between June and November, perhaps around the time of Porter’s August 7 typescript copy.

  Lyrics to all of these songs are reprinted in The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter and are included in John McGlinn’s first complete recording of Kiss Me, Kate issu
ed in 1990. Unfortunately, several of Morison’s recollections (for example, that “It Was Great Fun the First Time” and “If Ever Married I’m” were replaced by “Wunderbar” and “Tom, Dick or Harry,” respectively) are at odds with the information provided by the May libretto. See note 17 for a summary of the musical similarities between the discarded songs and those retained.

  29. The reprise of “E lucevan le stelle” in act III of Puccini’s Tosca, an opera notoriously described by Kerman as a “shabby little shocker,” offers a more publicized example of a similar problem. As Kerman wrote: “Tosca leaps, and the orchestra screams the first thing that comes into its head, ‘E lucevan le stelle.’ How pointless this is, compared with the return of the music for the kiss at the analogous place in Otello, which makes Verdi’s dramatic point with a consummate sense of dramatic form…. ‘E lucevan le stelle’ is all about self-pity; Tosca herself never heard it.” Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, 15.

  Although Kerman’s overall assessment of Tosca’s artistic worth has not gone unchallenged, even sympathetic Puccini scholars such as Roger Parker and Mosco Carner understand Kerman’s “exasperation.” Like Kerman, Parker concludes that “the theme is that of Cavaradossi’s soliloquy earlier in the third act; Tosca has had no opportunity to hear it; what we see and what we hear seem out of joint.” Roger Parker, “Analysis: act I in perspective,” in Mosco Carner, Giacomo Puccini: “Tosca” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 138.

  30. The terms “theatrical truth” and “literal truth” are used by Sondheim in his assessment in 1985 of the most effective placement of “Gee, Officer Krupke” in West Side Story. Otis, L. Guernsey Jr., ed., Broadway Song & Story, 50.

  31. In adopting Shakespeare, Porter first uses the eight lines that begin with “I am ashamed that women are so simple” and ends with “should well agree with our external parts.” He then replaces Shakespeare’s “Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, / And place your hands below your husband’s foot” with “So wife, hold your temper and meekly put / Your hand ‘neath the sole of your husband’s foot.” Porter’s final two lines agree with Shakespeare’s external rhymes (although the composer adds a second “ready” in the last line).

  32. Bernard Shaw, Dramatic Opinions and Essays with an Apology (New York: Brentano’s, 1928), vol. 2, 364.

  33. Robert B. Heilman, “The Taming Untamed, or the Return of the Shrew,” Modern Language Quarterly 27 (June 1966): 159.

  34. “The Remaking of the Canon,” Partisan Review 58 (1991): 380.

  35. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 206. More recently, Harold Bloom offers a thoughtful and spirited defense of Kiss Me, Kate on social grounds, for example: “One would have to be tone deaf (or ideologically crazed) not to hear in this [Act V, scene 1, lines 130–38] a subtly exquisite music of marriage at its happiest” (Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 28–35; quotation on 33).

  36. Martha Andresen-Thom, “Shrew-taming and Other Rituals of Aggression: Baiting and Bonding on the Stage and in the Wild,” in Women’s Studies 9 (1982): 121–43; quotation on 141.

  37. I am indebted to my colleague Peter Greenfield, professor of English at the University of Puget Sound, for pointing out the “play” interpretation.

  38. See, for example, Catherine Clément’s feminist indictment of the operatic tradition, Opera, or the Undoing of Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), and Susan McClary, Feminine Endings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

  Chapter 11: Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella

  1. This last Broadway revival of The Most Happy Fella was again upstaged in the Best Revival category by the splashier and fully orchestrated revival of Guys and Dolls (the Fella revival offered only two pianos).

  2. See Geoffrey Block, “Frank Loesser’s Sketchbooks”; Larry Stempel, “The Musical Play Expands”; and Thomas L. Riis, Frank Loesser, 117–66.

  3. For profiles of Loesser’s early career see Arthur Loesser, “My Brother Frank,” Notes 7 (March 1950): 217–39, David Ewen, “He Passes the Ammunition for Hits,” and Thomas L. Riis, Frank Loesser, 1–49.

  4. Styne’s High Button Shoes (1947) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949) and Lane’s Finian’s Rainbow (1947) were the earliest successes of these prominent Broadway composers.

  5. Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 275.

  6. In his notes to the 1958 original London cast recording of Where’s Charley?, Stanley Green noted that “at the time of its closing, its 792 performances made it the tenth longest-running musical in Broadway history” (Monmouth-Evergreen MES/7029). See also Riis, 50–73.

  7. Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 275.

  8. John McClain, “The Best Thing since ‘Pal Joey,’” New York Journal-American, November 25, 1950; quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 274; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 11, 186.

  9. Abe Burrows, “The Making of Guys & Dolls.” For additional material on the genesis of Guys and Dolls see Arthur Martin Mann, “The Musicals of Frank Loesser,” 67–87, and Riis, 74–82.

  10. Burrows, “The Making of Guys & Dolls,” 41.

  11. On June 29, 1994, this production became the longest running revival in Broadway history up to that time.

  12. William Kennedy, “The Runyonland Express Is Back in Town,” New York Times, April 12, 1992, sec. 2, 1 and 26, and Jo Swerling Jr., “Abe Burrows: Undue Credit?,” New York Times, May 3, 1992, sec. 2, 4 (with a response from William Kennedy). Those familiar with the machinations of Hollywood screenplays will recognize the terms of Swerling’s contract that allowed him to receive primary credit as the libretto’s author, even if none of his work was used. It is difficult to credit the notion espoused by Swerling’s son that Feuer, Martin, and stage manager Henri Caubisens conspired with Burrows to diminish Swerling’s role in the Guys and Dolls drama. Burrows’s account is also corroborated in Susan Loesser, A Most Remarkable Fella, 101–02.

  13. Burrows, “The Making of Guys & Dolls,” 44.

  14. Ibid, 47.

  15. The quasi-triplets created by two groups of three eighth notes (in 6/8 time) also pervade Adelaide’s admonishment of Nathan in “Sue Me.”

  16. Late in the show when Sarah sings her duet with Adelaide, “Marry the Man Today,” her evolution is complete and triplets (albeit of the common eighth-note variety) become the dominant rhythm.

  17. Tonic (4 measures), dominant (2 measures), tonic (6 measures), dominant (2 measures), and tonic (1 measure).

  18. A leading Italian bass at La Scala (1921–24) and the Metropolitan Opera (1926–1948), Pinza was introduced in chapter 9 as the first internationally known opera singer to star on Broadway (South Pacific [1949]).

  19. Another song intended to feature Nathan and Sky, “Travelin’ Light,” was one of several songs dropped from the show. It is included in An Evening with Frank Loesser: Frank Loesser Performs Songs from His Hit Shows (DRG 5169).

  20. Frank Loesser, “Some Notes on a Musical.”

  21. Ironically, one of these new songs, “Adelaide,” was given to Nathan, played by Frank Sinatra.

  22. Block, “Frank Loesser’s Sketchbooks.”

  23. Loesser Collection, Music Division, New York Public Library, 3129–30.

  24. Ibid., 2842. This undated sketch page is found sandwiched between other pages dated December 1953.

  25. “Abbondanza” sketches (first sketched as “The Helps”), unlike the sketches for “Lovers in the Lane,” were dated precisely by Loesser in December 1953. Ibid., 2851 and 2859–62.

  26. Ibid., 3006–07.

  27. Loesser, “Some Loesser Thoughts on ‘The Most Happy Fella.’”

  28. Ibid. Loesser expresses the same sentiment in “Some Notes on a Musical.”

  29. Loesser, “Some Loesser Thoughts on ‘The Most Happy Fella.’”

  30. Abe Burrows, “Frank Loesser 1910–1969,” New York Times, August 10, 1969, sec. 2, 3.

  31. The
phrase “Greater Loesser” in the present chapter title is borrowed from a New York Times Magazine profile by Gilbert Millstein, May 20, 1956.

  32. Robert Coleman, “‘Most Happy Fella’ Is a Masterpiece,” Daily Mirror, May 4, 1956; review excerpted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 455; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 17, 310.

  33. John McClain, “This Musical Is Great,” New York Journal-American, May 4, 1956; review excerpted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 455–56; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 17, 310.

  34. Walter F. Kerr, “‘The Most Happy Fella,’” New York Herald Tribune, May 4, 1956; quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 455; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 17, 308. Kerr’s lack of appreciation for shows most take for granted as rich in music is also evident in his responses to Candide and West Side Story.

  35. Richard Watts Jr., “Arrival of ‘The Most Happy Fella,’” New York Post, May 4, 1956; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 17, 308.