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

by Block, Geoffrey

  When discussing West Side Story (chapter 13) the point argued is not simply that the Broadway collaboration more closely approximates the spirit of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet than earlier operatic adaptations (or some films) that retain the Bard’s namesakes and setting, but that Bernstein—with considerable help from Sondheim (lyrics), Arthur Laurents (libretto), and Jerome Robbins (choreography and conception)—found a musical solution to convey the dramatic meaning of Shakespeare through the use of leitmotivs and their transformations in combination with a jazz and Hispanic American vernacular.

  The present survey will only occasionally emphasize social history. That is another book that very much needs to be written. Nevertheless, the study of a musical most often leads to political and cultural issues, even if it was the expressed intent of its creators to escape from meaning. For many of the musicals discussed in act I especially, the changes that went into their revivals over the decades offer a valuable tool to measure changing social as well as artistic concerns. Some musicals, such as Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, and West Side Story are overtly concerned with racial conflicts; others, such as Anything Goes, On Your Toes, One Touch of Venus, and My Fair Lady, explore class differences. All musicals discussed here either directly or inadvertently make powerful statements about what James Thurber called The War between Men and Women.14

  The Cradle Will Rock serves as a worthy representative to show both the wisdom and futility of the didactic political musical. Two songs from this “avant-garde” musical will be discussed from this perspective. The first is “Croon–Spoon,” which satirizes the vapidity of ephemeral popular music, and the second is “Art for Art’s Sake,” which from Marc Blitzstein’s perspective indicts the equally vapid messages of so-called high art, the purposes to which art is used, and the blatant hypocrisy of some artists.

  Not surprisingly, few musicals measure up to evolving sensibilities. The disparity between these shows and feminist values will be given special attention in interpreting Anything Goes, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, Carousel, Kiss Me, Kate, Guys and Dolls, and My Fair Lady, all of which provide gender issues of unusual interest. Some musicals fare better than others from the vantage point of the future, but no musical surveyed here can fully escape the assumptions and collective values of their era.

  Why These Musicals?

  The present selection makes an effort to include representative musicals from Show Boat to The Phantom of the Opera that pose intriguing critical, analytical, aesthetic, and political issues as well as musicals that engage the enthusiasm of the selector. No attempt was made either to be comprehensive or to discuss only the very most popular musicals of the era, but the lists of “Long Runs” and “The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway” in the online website will provide useful reference points for measuring and interpreting the degree of popularity these musicals enjoyed. Despite the above disclaimer, a few words should be said about the degree to which popularity governed the present selections.

  Ten of the fourteen Broadway musicals receiving top billing here (not including those by Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber) were also among the most popular of their respective decades. Show Boat was the third longest running musical of the 1920s, Anything Goes and On Your Toes ranked second and eighth, respectively, among book shows in the 1930s—the two longest running 1930s shows, Hellzapoppin’ and Pins and Needles were revues—and in the 1940s and ’50s Kiss Me, Kate, Carousel, One Touch of Venus, My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, and The Most Happy Fella all fall within the top fifteen longest runs. Eight of these musicals are among the top thirty-eight musicals spanning these four decades; three rank among the top nine book shows.15

  While one measure of a show’s popularity and its even more important correlate, commercial success, is the length of its initial run, the revivability of a show arguably constitutes a more compelling measure of its success. Many musicals, even blockbusters of their day, never manage to regain their hit status and acquire a place in the Broadway repertory despite rigorous marketing or a lustrous star. For example, despite its many merits, Of Thee I Sing (1931), the longest running book musical of the 1930s and the recipient of the first Pulitzer Prize for drama, has disappeared as a staged work on Broadway after its disappointing seventy-two performance revival in 1952. Two of the musicals under scrutiny here, Lady in the Dark (1941) and One Touch of Venus (1943), both enormous hits in their time, still await a fully staged New York revival. The chapter devoted to these last mentioned shows (chapter 7) will offer the view that the absence of One Touch of Venus is especially lamentable.

  The remaining twelve musicals have resurfaced in at least one popular Broadway, Off-Broadway, or other prominent New York revival from 1980 to the present (if the prestigious New City Center’s Encores! counts as a prominent performance, all fourteen shows would be accounted for).16 By 1960, New York audiences had had the opportunity to see Show Boat 1,344 times, a total that more than doubled its original run and was surpassed only by five continuously running book musicals in the top forty before 1960 (“The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959” in the online website). The Cradle Will Rock, something of a cult musical, admittedly remains an idiosyncratic choice for a selective survey. Nevertheless, this controversial and sometimes alienating show has been revived in New York City no less than four times since its original short but historic runs in 1937 and 1938. Although these Cradle revivals may have been generated out of political sympathy, the present study will make a case for the work’s still unacknowledged and unappreciated artistic merits.

  If popularity in absolute numbers is the ticket for admittance, what then are Pal Joey (1940), Lady in the Dark (1941), and Porgy and Bess (1935), three shows that were neither in the top forty nor among the top ten or fifteen musicals of their decades, doing in a survey of popular Broadway musicals? To answer this question, it might be helpful to consider a musical’s popularity by the standards of its immediate predecessors. Although it may not have enjoyed a major New York revival in more than sixty years, at 467 performances Lady in the Dark would surpass even the longest running book musical of the 1930s, Of Thee I Sing.17Pal Joey (374 performances) would rank as the fifth longest running book show of the 1930s had it premiered one year earlier.18 More significantly, in contrast to nearly every other musical comedy before Guys and Dolls, including Anything Goes and On Your Toes, revivals of Pal Joey for the most part retain the original book without fear of ridicule or loss of accessibility.

  The inclusion of Porgy and Bess on popular grounds requires some spin control. Because it lost money, it is fair to judge its initial total of 124 performances as a relatively poor showing—even in a decade when two hundred performances could constitute a hit. As a musical in the commercial marketplace, Porgy and Bess failed; as an opera, arguably a more accurate taxonomic classification, it can be interpreted as a phenomenal success. No other American opera of its (or any) generation comes close.19 Of course it helps that it is also an acknowledged American classic.

  In contrast to his musical comedies and operettas, Gershwin’s only Broadway opera returned a few years later in 1942, albeit more like a conventional musical with spoken dialogue replacing sung recitative—favoring accessibility over authenticity—and became a modest commercial success at 286 performances. Within seven years New York audiences thus were able to see Gershwin’s opera (or a reasonable facsimile) 410 times before the arrival of Oklahoma!, thirty performances fewer than Of Thee I Sing, the biggest hit of the 1930s and of Gershwin’s career. And in contrast to Gershwin shows that, in revival, have been transformed into barely recognizable but highly accessible and commercially successful adaptations (My One and Only [1983], Oh, Kay! [1990], and Crazy for You [1992]), revivals of Porgy and Bess, at least since the mid-1970s, often go to great lengths to restore Gershwin’s opera to prevailing notions of authenticity.

  The willingness to eschew comprehensiveness leads to inevitable omissions. In addition to Jule Styne�
��s four top forty musicals, the most conspicuous absentees are Berlin, whose Annie Get Your Gun (ranked eighth among book shows) has for many years earned an enduring place in the core repertory (and major New York revivals in 1966 and 1999), and the team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, the composer-lyricists who in 1954 and 1955 produced two of the most successful book musicals before 1960, Pajama Game (tenth) and Damn Yankees (eleventh), before Ross’s premature death in 1955 at the age of twenty-nine. Some readers may lament the absence of lyricist E. Y. (“Yip”) Harburg’s collaborations with composers Harold Arlen and Burton Lane, or of composer-lyricists Harold Rome and Robert Wright and George Forrest.20

  Despite these omissions, the present representative survey includes at least one musical selected from the work of those composers, lyricists, and librettists responsible for many of the top forty musicals shown in the online website (“The Forty Longest … 1920–1959”). The most popular creators of each decade are also well represented. In the 1920s, six of the eleven longest runs had either a score by Kern or lyrics or a libretto by Hammerstein. In the 1930s, only two book musicals of the twelve longest runs did not feature a score by Rodgers and Hart, Kern, Porter, or the Gershwins (who provided four, three, two, and one, respectively), and one of these consisted of recycled music by Johann Strauss Jr. By the 1940s and ’50s, Rodgers, now teamed with Hammerstein, dominated the musical marketplace with no less than five of the ten longest runs of those years.21

  Coda

  In The American Musical Theater noted Broadway conductor and educator Lehman Engel offered the following list of fifteen Broadway “models of excellence” that “represent that theater in its most complete and mature state”: Pal Joey; Oklahoma!; Carousel; Annie Get Your Gun; Brigadoon; Kiss Me, Kate; South Pacific; Guys and Dolls; The King and I; My Fair Lady; West Side Story; Gypsy; Fiddler on the Roof; Company; and A Little Night Music.22 The first twelve of Engel’s list fall within the central focus period of this study (acts I and II), and six of these will be explored. In his pioneering volume Engel is primarily concerned with the “working principles” that govern “excellent” musicals. In another chapter he singles out four “Broadway operas” that also embody these principles—Porgy and Bess, The Cradle Will Rock, The Consul (Gian-Carlo Menotti), and The Most Happy Fella. Three of these will be featured in the present volume.

  All the musicals in Engel’s list of fifteen turned a profit and nearly all had long runs, including seven of the ten longest runs between Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music. Engel’s most conspicuous omission is without a doubt Show Boat, a musical almost invariably honored by subsequent list-makers and Broadway historians and critics as the first major musical on a uniquely American theme, one of the first to thoroughly integrate music and drama, and the first American musical to firmly enter the Broadway repertory. Although subsequent lists added a few scattered musical comedies from the 1930s and the musicals of Weill, all of which Engel excludes, the spirit of Engel’s list is echoed in nearly all those that followed.23 With virtually no exceptions the musicals on these lists enjoyed long initial runs and critical acclaim and usually received one or more major New York revivals.24

  Within a few years after West Side Story, the age of Porter, Lerner and Loewe, Loesser, Bernstein, Blitzstein, Berlin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein was over. These classical Broadway masters of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s had generally enjoyed a combination of popularity and critical acclaim analogous to that of their nineteenth-century operatic and instrumental predecessors in Europe. After 1970, irreconcilable differences between this incompatible pair of attributes began to surface, exemplified by the contrasting trajectories of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, and few musicals by either of these two emblematic artists would readily receive the combination of love and respect enjoyed by the most popular and critically acclaimed musicals of the 1940s and ’50s.

  The penultimate chapter of this survey will take a look at the career of Sondheim, the lyricist-composer generally recognized as a central artistic figure on Broadway after 1960. The position taken here is that Sondheim’s modernism and postmodernism can be viewed as an extension and reinterpretation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein model rather than a rebellion from it. It will also be argued that although Sondheim has vigorously denied autobiographical elements in his shows, the pressure to compromise faced by his characters is markedly similar to that faced by Sondheim himself as he creates their songs and faces the demands of commercial theater.

  After exploring the issue on an impersonal fictive level, Sondheim, in his first two shows of the 1980s, Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday in the Park with George, directly confronted the issue of artistic compromise in his own work. Such conflicts had been faced more obliquely by several of his spiritual Broadway ancestors surveyed here who experienced similar creative crises in their effort to simultaneously transcend the conventions of their genre and retain their audiences. The Sondheim chapter will acknowledge his attempt to move beyond the integrated action model to the concept (or thematic) musical and his ability to convey the nuances of his increasingly complex characters and musically capture the meaning of his dramatic subjects. It will additionally emphasize how Sondheim’s musicals can be viewed as the proud inheritance of the great traditional musicals from Show Boat to West Side Story.

  As revivals continue to demonstrate, many musicals between Show Boat and Gypsy (1927–1959), as well as another group created in the 1960s by several relatively new Broadway artists (perhaps most notably Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s Fiddler on the Roof [1964] and John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Cabaret [1966]), have not simply disappeared. Although the verdict for these more recent musicals is still inconclusive, it is not too soon to notice the spectacularly long runs and endless tours of Lloyd Webber musicals and the revivals of Sondheim’s earlier shows in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Even if one hesitates to speak openly of a Broadway canon, few would deny the presence of a core repertory of Broadway musicals for the period of this study and considerably beyond. While the term “core repertory” avoids cultural bias and has the benefit of inclusiveness—in the core repertory there is a place somewhere for both Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (the subject of a new final chapter in this second edition)—the idea of a canon, a nucleus of works within a genre perceived as models of excellence or, more simply, the musicals audiences want to see over and over again, remains a useful if somewhat unpalatable construct. In any event, it is ironic that the deconstruction and even demolition of canons, including the venerable and unassailable eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European classical repertory, has become fashionable just as a firm foundation for canonization has begun to emerge in the genre of Broadway musicals.

  While it is still permissible to say that some musicals are more popular than others, most critics and historians are loath to argue that some are actually more worthy of canonical status.25 Northrop Frye, perhaps wisely (or least safely), chastised advocates of both “popular” and “art for art’s sake” camps when he wrote in his Anatomy of Criticism that “the fallacy common to both attitudes is that a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other.”26

  The stance of the present volume is that “popularity” and “art for art’s sake” are not mutually exclusive values, that writing for a commercial market can lead to inspiration as well as compromise. Perhaps we cannot explain or tell why this is so, but we can nonetheless revel in the many enchanted evenings (and some matinees) that these musicals continue to provide.

  • ACT I •

  BEFORE RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHOW BOAT

  In the Beginning

  The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians informed its readers in 1980 without exaggeration or understatement that Show Boat is “perhaps the most successful and influential Broadway musical play ever written.”1 For the authors of New Grove, the impact of Show Boat has be
en “inestimable, particularly in that it impelled composers of Broadway musicals to concern themselves with the whole production as opposed to writing Tin Pan Alley songs for interpolation.”2 For the many who judge a show by how many songs they can hum or whistle when they leave (or enter) the theater, Show Boat offered “at least” an unprecedented six song hits for the ages; moreover, nearly all of these songs, according to Grove, “are integral to the characterization and story.” And the many who place opera on a more elevated plane than Broadway musicals could be impressed by the knowledge that Show Boat, when it entered the repertory of the New York City Opera in 1954, was the first Broadway show to attain operatic stature.3 By virtually any criteria, Show Boat marks a major milestone in the history of the American musical and has long since become the first Broadway show to be enshrined in the musical theater museum.

  Show Boat gained recognition in the scholarly world too when in 1977 it became the first Broadway musical to receive book-length attention in Miles Kreuger’s thorough and authoritative “Show Boat”: The Story of a Classic American Musical.4 Five years later, manuscript material for the musical numbers discarded during the tryout months prior to the December 1927 premiere was discovered in the Warner Brothers Warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey.5 By April 1983 the Houston Opera Company—which had in the late 1970s presented and recorded a Porgy and Bess that restored material cut from its pre-Broadway tryouts—arrived in New York with a version of Show Boat that used Robert Russell Bennett’s original orchestrations (rediscovered in 1978) and most of the previously discarded tryout material.