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

by Block, Geoffrey

  The distribution between Magnolia and Ravenal during this return of the main tune underwent several changes between the tryouts and the New York premiere, and there remains some lingering ambiguity about who should sing what after the first two lines (invariably given to Magnolia). For example, according to the libretto typescript in the Library of Congress’s Jerome Kern Collection (see “Manuscript Sources” no. 1 in the online website), Kern and Hammerstein had once indicated that Magnolia alone should sing the next lines (“Others find peace of mind in pretending—/ Couldn’t you, / Couldn’t I? / Couldn’t we?”) before they conclude their duet. The evolution of the final line is especially intricate.

  Hammerstein remained unsatisfied by his decision to have both principals sing the last line (“For, to tell the truth,—I do”). Was Magnolia ready to admit the truth of her love to Ravenal? In a penciled change Hammerstein has Ravenal sing the “I do” without Magnolia. In the New York Public Library libretto typescript (see “Manuscript Sources” no. 2 in the online website) the entire last line is given to Ravenal alone but placed in brackets. In the New York production libretto published with the McGlinn recording (no. 3) Ravenal sings the final line (without brackets), and this version is preserved in the published London libretto of 1934 (no. 4), the 1936 screenplay (no. 5), and the 1946 New York revival (no. 6).61 Further contributing to the ambiguity and confusion is the lack of correspondence between these text versions and the piano-vocal drafts and published scores, none of which specifies that Ravenal profess his love alone until the Welk score (which corresponds to the 1946 production), where Magnolia’s “For, to tell the truth,—I do” is placed in brackets.62

  Perhaps most revelatory about these manuscripts are Kern and Hammerstein’s gradual realization that this portion of the scene needed to focus more exclusively on Ravenal and Magnolia. The New York Public Library and Library of Congress typescripts, for example, present two versions of a conversation between Ellie and Frank that would be discarded by the December premiere.63 Hammerstein eventually concluded that this exchange slowed down the action and distracted audiences from their focus on Ravenal.64

  A second interruption, also eventually discarded, occurred after the B section of Ravenal’s song “Where’s the Mate for Me?” (based on Magnolia’s piano theme, Example 2.4). Both the Library of Congress and New York Public Library typescripts present some dialogue and stage action during the twenty-six measures of underscoring that have survived in Draft 2: Parthy’s theme (Example 2.3), Cap’n Andy’s theme minus its six opening measures (Example 2.2c), and Ravenal’s theme (Example 2.5).65 Moments later Parthy intrudes once again, shouting “Nola!,” and Hammerstein provides the following comment: “Magnolia looks down on this splendid fellow, Ravenal. Her maidenly heart flutters. She really should go in and answer mother—but she stays.”66

  Like the brief dialogue between Ellie and Frank that intrudes on this moment in the 1936 film, the appearance of Parthy here and after the B section of “Where’s the Mate for Me?” interrupts the focus on the soonto-be-lovers. Parthy, while always unwelcome, is also unnecessary during this portion of the scene, particularly since she had made a prominent exit shortly before we met Ravenal. Wisely, Kern and Hammerstein in 1927 allowed Parthy’s music to prompt Magnolia to tell Ravenal she “must go now” and avoided the reality of Parthy’s intrusion on the young couple’s private moment before “Make Believe.”67

  After Show Boat Kern and Hammerstein would collaborate on three of the composer’s remaining five Broadway shows, two with respectable runs, Sweet Adeline (1929) and Music in the Air (1932), and a disappointing Very Warm for May (1939). Despite their considerable merits, none of these shows have entered the repertory (although Music in the Air was chosen for New York City Center’s Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert in the 2008–09 season). Less than a year after Show Boat Hammerstein collaborated with Romberg on The New Moon, a show that went on for an impressive 509 performances. Then, despite the success of individual songs, including “All the Things You Are” from his final collaboration with Kern, Hammerstein’s series of unwise choices (both in dramatic material and collaborators) and hurried work resulted in eleven years of Broadway failures before he rose from the ashes with Oklahoma!

  Similarly, Hammerstein’s Hollywood years in the 1930s and early 1940s yielded no original musical films of lasting acclaim, although here, too, a considerable number of songs with Hammerstein lyrics have become standards.68 Hammerstein also adapted the screenplay for the penultimate Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939).69 In the next decade Hammerstein began his historic collaboration with Rodgers, and by the time Show Boat was revived in 1946, they had already written two of their five major hit musicals, Oklahoma! and Carousel (the latter the subject of chapter 9).70

  In addition to his subsequent work with Hammerstein, Kern created two successful musicals with Harbach, the unfortunately overlooked The Cat and the Fiddle (1931) and Roberta (1933), the latter best known in its greatly altered 1935 film version. In fact, most of Kern’s career after Show Boat was occupied with the creation of twenty-two full or partial film scores—thirteen original and nine adapted from Broadway—including several with lyrics by Hammerstein and the Astaire and Rogers classic Swing Time (1936), with lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Unfortunately, Kern never had the opportunity even to begin a new musical in the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, since he died shortly after Rodgers, who was producing a musical based on the life of Annie Oakley, had asked him to write the music.71

  Kern and Hammerstein’s inability to produce another Show Boat in the 1930s enhances the significance of their earlier achievement. Although its ending did not embrace Ferber’s darker version, Show Boat, “the first truly, totally American operetta” had dared to present an American epic with a credible story, three-dimensional characters, a convincing use of American vernacular appropriate to the changing world (including the African-Americanization of culture) from the late 1880s to 1927, and a sensitive portrayal of race relations that ranged from the plight of the black underclass to miscegenation.72 As the first Broadway musical to keep rolling along in the repertory from its time to ours, while at the same time enjoying the critical respect of musical-theater historians for more than seventy years, Show Boat, the musical “that demanded a new maturity from musical theatre and from its audience,”73 has long since earned its coveted historical position as the foundation of the modern American musical.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ANYTHING GOES

  Songs Ten, Book Three

  Before the curtain rose on the 1987 revival of Anything Goes at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, audiences heard the strains of Cole Porter’s own rendition of the title song recorded in 1934. At the conclusion of this critically well-received and popularly successful show a large silkscreen photograph of Porter (1891–1964) appeared behind a scrim to cast a literal as well as metaphoric shadow over the cast. More than fifty years after its premiere the message was clear: the real star of Anything Goes was its composer-lyricist, the creator of such timeless song classics as “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” “All Through the Night,” “Easy to Love,” “Friendship,” “It’s De-Lovely,” and the title song. Readers familiar with Anything Goes from various amateur and semi-professional productions over the past thirty years may scarcely notice that the last three songs named were taken from other Porter shows.

  Anything Goes, after the Gershwins’ Pulitzer Prize–winning Of Thee I Sing the longest running book musical of the 1930s and almost certainly the most frequently revived musical of its time (in one form or another), was Porter’s first major hit. Otherwise virtually forgotten, each of Porter’s five musicals preceding Anything Goes introduced at least one song that would rank a ten in almost anyone’s book: “What Is This Thing Called Love?” in Wake Up and Dream (1929), “You Do Something to Me” in Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), “Love for Sale” in The New
Yorkers (1930), and “Night and Day” in Gay Divorce (1932). The Porter shows that debuted in the years between Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate (1948) are similarly remembered mainly because they contain one or more hit songs.

  Anything Goes, act II, finale (1987). Photograph: Brigitte Lacombe.

  In the unlikely Midwestern town of Peru, Indiana, Porter’s mother, appropriately named Kate, arranged to have Cole’s first song published at her own expense in 1902 (he was eleven at the time). Three years later Porter entered the exclusive Worcester Academy in Massachusetts. Upon his graduation from Yale in 1913, where he had delighted his fellow students with fraternity shows and football songs, Porter endured an unhappy year at Harvard Law School. Against his grandfather’s wishes and in spite of financial threats, Porter enrolled in Harvard’s music department for the 1914–1915 academic year. In 1917 he furthered his musical training with private studies in New York City with Pietro Yon, the musical director and organist at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral; in 1919–1920 the future Broadway composer continued his studies in composition, counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration with Vincent D’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris.

  Although his first success, Paris, would not arrive for another twelve years, Porter had already produced a musical on Broadway, See America First (1916), before Gershwin or Rodgers had begun their Broadway careers and only one year after Kern had inaugurated his series of distinctive musicals at the Princess Theatre. The years between the failure of his Broadway debut after fifteen performances (inspiring the famous quip from Variety, “See America First last!”) and the success of Irene Bordoni’s singing “Let’s Do It” in Paris were largely dormant ones for Porter. In fact, the sum total of his Broadway work other than See America First was one song interpolation for Kern’s Miss Information in 1915 and approximately ten songs each in Hitchy-Koo of 1919 and the Greenwich Village Follies in 1924. During these years the already wealthy Porter—despite his profligacy an heir to his grandfather’s fortune—grew still wealthier when he married the socialite and famous beauty Linda Lee Thomas in 1919. In 1924 the Porters moved to Italy where they would soon launch three years of lavish party-throwing and party-going in their Venetian palazzos. On numerous such occasions the expatriate songwriter would entertain his friends with his witty lyrics and melodies. Near the end of this partying, Porter in 1927 auditioned unsuccessfully for Vinton Freedley and Alex Aarons, the producers of several Gershwin hit musicals and the future producers of four Porter shows starting with Anything Goes. When the following year Rodgers and Hart were preoccupied with A Connecticut Yankee, Porter was easily persuaded to leave Europe and bring Paris to New York. Anything Goes would arrive six years and many perennial song favorites later.

  The Changing Times of Anything Goes

  Most accounts of the genesis of Anything Goes attribute the disastrous fire that took between 125 and 180 passengers’ lives on the pleasure ship Morro Castle off the coast at Asbury Park, New Jersey, on September 8, 1934, as the catalyst that led to the revised book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. According to conventional wisdom, the earlier libretto about a shipwreck could not be used any more than Porter could use his line about Mrs. Lindbergh in “I Get a Kick Out of You” after the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby.1 But at least two sources, George Eells’s biography of Porter and Miles Kreuger’s introductory notes to conductor John McGlinn’s reconstructed recording, report that producer Freedley was dissatisfied by the Guy Bolton–P. G. Wodehouse book when he received it on August 15 and that the Morro disaster served mainly as a convenient explanation.

  According to Eells, Freedley thought there was “a tastelessness about this piece of work that no amount of rewriting would eradicate,” a view echoed by both Kreuger and Bolton-Wodehouse biographer Lee Davis. Kreuger writes, “Freedley was fearful that the rather derisive attitude toward Hollywood might ruin chances of a film sale.” Davis goes further: “The first script was rejected by Freedley for its Hollywood treatment, not its similarity to the tragic fire at sea of the liner Morro Castle, as has been historically accepted. Nor would he blanch at the second version because of its continued treatment of a catastrophe at sea. It would be because the second version was a hopeless mess.”2

  In an interview with Richard Hubler published in 1965, one year after Porter’s death, the composer-lyricist anticipated the future conclusions of Eells, Kreuger, and Davis. Porter recalled that the Morro Castle tragedy provided an excuse to scrap a Wodehouse-Bolton book whose quality was “so bad that it was obvious that the work was completely inadequate.”3 The synopsis included in this book is of course based on the revised Anything Goes book by Lindsay and Crouse, based in part on the rejected and now presumed lost second draft by Bolton and Wodehouse and Bolton’s original scenario from early 1934, currently housed at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (which includes some dialogue for “Gaxton” and “Ethel” and “Moore”).

  Since it is possible that Lindsay and Crouse retained relatively little of the Bolton-Wodehouse second draft—although the new book may have contained more than an alleged five lines—it is not surprising that the inexperienced collaborators would be able to complete only a few scenes from act I and nothing of act II before rehearsals began on October 8. In contrast to the painstaking work and lengthy gestation period of most of the musicals surveyed in this volume, Anything Goes was hastily, perhaps even frantically, put together.

  But Freedley, Lindsay, Crouse, and Porter had other objectives than to create an epic book musical along the lines of Show Boat. Their central concern was to produce a comic hit and to provide dramatic and musical opportunities to suit their outstanding preassembled cast. In particular, they needed a vehicle to display William Gaxton’s (Billy) proven flair for multifarious disguises and to exploit the inspired silliness of comedian Victor Moore’s incongruous casting as a notorious gangster (Moon). The result was enough to prompt Brooks Atkinson to exclaim that “comedy is the most satisfying invention of the human race.”4 Atkinson could not ask anything more of a show that exuded such refreshing topicality and personality, a show for the moment, if not for the ages. If one or two songs stuck around for awhile, so much the better.

  Although John McGlinn later proclaimed the 1934 Anything Goes as “one of the most perfect farces ever written,” most producers and directors for the past forty years have been trying to solve the perceived disparity in quality between the book and the songs by altering the former and interpolating more of the latter.5 The 1987 revival at the Vivian Beaumont was not the first time audiences found themselves leaving a production of Anything Goes humming or whistling songs from other Porter shows. In the 1962 revival, the only version distributed by Tams-Witmark for the next twentyfive years, still other songs from other Porter shows had been interpolated. The lyricist-composer’s own reputed cavalier attitude toward his books and song interpolations prompted Broadway and Hollywood historian Gerald Mast to state erroneously that Porter’s last will and testament “granted explicit permission to take any Porter song from any Porter show and use it in any other.”6 Unfortunately, the relative commercial success of McGlinn’s recorded enterprise has not encouraged most producers and directors to revive the 1934 Anything Goes.

  The online website presents an outline of the scenes and songs of the Anything Goes that audiences would have heard during most of the initial run of the show that opened on November 21, 1934 (as well the scenes and songs seen and heard in the Off-Broadway Revival of 1962 and the Vivian Beaumont Revival of 1987). As in the case of most musicals from any period (and many eighteenth-century operas), additional songs were tried and then discarded during tryouts or during the early weeks of the first New York run. In act I, scene 2, “Bon Voyage” was originally juxtaposed, then ingeniously combined, with another song, “There’s No Cure like Travel,” a song that interestingly contains the main musical material of “Bon Voyage.”7 Just as Mozart composed the easier-to-sing aria “Dalla sua pace” to accommodate the Viennese singer
in Don Giovanni who was unable to negotiate the demands of the aria from the original Prague production (“Il mio tesoro”), Porter composed “All through the Night” in this scene for Gaxton (Billy Crocker) to replace the difficult-to-sing “Easy to Love.”

  Another song intended for this scene, “Kate the Great,” was, according to the recollection of Anything Goes orchestrator Hans Spialek, rejected by Ethel Merman who “vouldn’t sing it” because it was a “durr-ty song!”8 A song planned as a tongue-in-cheek romantic duet in act I, scene 6, between Hope and Billy, “Waltz down the Aisle” (which bears striking melodic and rhythmic similarities as well as a similar dramatic purpose to “Wunderbar” from Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate) was also dropped from Anything Goes. A song for Hope in act II, scene 1, “What a Joy to Be Young,” was deleted before the Broadway premiere.9

  One song in the beginning of the Broadway run, “Buddie, Beware,” was replaced by a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You” within a few weeks. In order to understand the artistic implications of this change it is necessary to recall Porter’s original motivation. Composers of musicals before (or after) the Rodgers and Hammerstein era could not, of course, always predict which song would become a hit. Nevertheless, they almost invariably tried to place their best bets after an opening number, usually for chorus. In Anything Goes Porter tried something more unusual. Instead of opening with a chorus, Porter decided to begin less conventionally with a potential hit song for Ethel Merman five minutes into the show, “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

  Porter’s reasons for beginning with what he felt would be the hit of the show may have been somewhat perverse. According to Kreuger, Porter’s “society friends thought it was amusing to drift into the theatre fifteen or twenty minutes after the curtain had gone up, so that all their friends could observe what they were wearing.”10 Porter therefore “warned his friends for weeks before the opening that they had better arrive on time or they would miss the big song.”11 There is no record that Merman objected to “Buddie, Beware” in act II, scene 2, for the same reason she objected to a song about the sexual exploits of Catherine (Kate) the Great. Her objections in this case were practical rather than moral: the show needed a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You” “for the benefit of those who had arrived late!”12 If this undocumented anecdote is to be believed, Porter, who had earlier agreed to cut “Kate the Great,” was again willing to accommodate his star and cut “Buddie, Beware.”13