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

by Block, Geoffrey

  Weill’s musical manuscripts add credence to the letters and Gershwin’s annotations and reveal that when most of the Circus Dream nearly reached its final form, “The Saga of Jenny” was just taking shape. It is ironic that Gertrude Lawrence’s final number and Danny Kaye’s patter show stopper that directly preceded it were the only musical portions originally written for this dream. All the other musical material—with the exception of some recitative—was borrowed from earlier shows. Even the lyrics to “Tschaikovsky” were borrowed unchanged from a 1924 poem published in “the then pre-pictorial, humorous weekly Life” that Ira published under the pseudonym Arthur Francis.36

  Weill’s 1935 London box office debacle, A Kingdom for a Cow, served as an important musical link between the German Weill and the American Weill. In his Handbook, Drew lists thirteen major instances of Weill’s recycling ideas from this most recent European venture into every American stage work from Johnny Johnson and Knickerbocker Holiday (two borrowings each) to The Firebrand of Florence.37 The two Kingdom for a Cow borrowings in Lady in the Dark both occur in the Circus Dream: the opening circus march, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” and “The Best Years of His Life.” The single borrowing in One Touch of Venus occurs more obliquely in “Very, Very, Very.”

  Of the Kingdom for a Cow borrowings in Lady and Venus “The Best Years of His Life” comes closest to quotation. In fact, Kendall Nesbitt’s melody in Lady is identical to the choral melody in the first act finale of Kingdom, and the rhythmic alterations are insubstantial. Weill takes significant transformational liberties, however, in adapting “Very, Very, Very” from Kingdom to Venus (where it is sung by Savory’s assistant, Molly). On this occasion Weill uses two recognizable but highly disguised melodic fragments of “Madame Odette’s Waltz” from the second act finale of Kingdom.

  Weill’s remaining borrowing falls between these extremes. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” the rousing march that opens the Circus Dream, borrows significantly from the melody, rhythm, and dissonant harmonic underpinning of the refrain of Kingdom’s “Auftrittslied des General.” When drafting his melody in its new context and new meter, Weill began by retaining the rhythmic gestus (to be discussed shortly) and symmetrical phrasing of its predecessor, altering only the pitch. By the time Weill completed his transformation, he had added a new syncopation at the ends of phrases and reinforced the sense of disarray by concluding his phrase one measure earlier than expected. In real (and especially military) life, marches contain symmetrical four-measure phrases; in Liza’s confused dream message a seven-measure phrase makes more sense.

  Partisans of Brecht may be disconcerted to hear the choral refrain “In der Jugend gold’nem Schimmer” from Happy End (1929) set to Nash’s words in the opening verses of “The Trouble with Women.” At the time Weill recast Brecht, he had abandoned the possibility of a staged revival of this show, although he had tried in 1932 to interest his publisher in “a kind of Songspiel with short spoken scenes.”38 Perhaps his sense that all was lost with Happy End prompted Weill to recycle no less than three numbers from this German show in his Parisian collaboration with Jacques Déval, Marie Galante (1934). One of these reincarnations is once again “In der Jugend gold’nem Schimmer,” this time altered from triple to duple meter in the refrain of “Les filles de Bordeaux.” Despite some modest melodic changes at the opening and closing and the metrical change from the German and American waltzes to the French fox trot, the two—or three—Weills are here much closer to one.39

  The process by which A Kingdom for a Cow, Happy End, and Marie Galante would reemerge in Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus suggests a deeper than generally acknowledged connection between the aesthetic and working methods of the European and the American Weills. The connecting link is embodied in the concept of gestus, a term that eludes precise identification. According to Kim Kowalke, “the crucial aspect of gestus was the translation of dramatic emotion and individual characterization into a typical, reproducible physical realization.”40 In any event, the principle of a gestic music based on rhythm is demonstrable in the aesthetic framework and the compositional process of Weill’s music in America as well as in Europe.

  In his 1929 essay on this subject, “Concerning the Gestic Character of Music,” Weill, after explaining that “the gestus is expressed in a rhythmic fixing of the text,” makes a case for the primacy of rhythm.41 Once a composer has located the “proper” gestus, “even the melody is stamped by the gestus of the action that is to be represented.” Weill acknowledges the possibility of more than one rhythmic interpretation of a text (and, one might add, the possibility of more than one text for a given gestus). He also argues that “the rhythmic restriction imposed by the text is no more severe a fetter for the operatic composer than, for example, the formal schemes of the fugue, sonata, or rondo were for the classic master” and that “within the framework of such rhythmically predetermined music, all methods of melodic elaboration and of harmonic and rhythmic differentiation are possible, if only the musical spans of accent conform to the gestic proceeding.”

  Weill concludes his discussion of gestic music by citing an example from Brecht’s version of the “Alabama-Song,” in which “a basic gestus has been defined in the most primitive form.”42 While Brecht assigns pitches to his gestus—which may explain why he tried to assume the credit for composing Weill’s music—Weill considers Brecht’s attempt “nothing more than an inventory of the speech-rhythm and cannot be used as music.”43 Weill explains that he retains “the same basic gestus” but that he “composed” this gestus “with the much freer means of the musician.” Weill’s tune “extends much farther afield melodically, and even has a totally different rhythmic foundation as a result of the pattern of the accompaniment—but the gestic character has been preserved, although it occurs in a completely different outward form.” Several compositional drafts and self-borrowings reveal that in America as well as in Germany, Weill, like Loesser to follow, continued to establish a rhythmic gestus before he worked out his songs melodically.

  Kowalke suggests that eighteenth-century Baroque opera seria served as the aesthetic model for Brecht and Weill’s music drama of alienation widely known as epic opera.44 Kowalke goes on to describe more specific stylistic similarities, including the relationship between the Baroque doctrine of affections and Weill’s interchangeable song types based on a related gestus.45 An especially applicable example can be found in the genesis of “My Ship” from Lady in the Dark. Both the opening of the second sketch draft and the final version feature a rising diminished seventh, F-A-C-E (a resemblance noted by bruce d. mcclung).46 It is also clear that Weill had established a gestus, if not the melodic working out, by the time he drafted this second draft of five eventual versions.

  Just as “Surabaya Johnny” (Happy End) constitutes a trope of the “Moritat” (“The Ballad of Mack the Knife”) from Die Dreigroschenoper, the borrowed songs in Lady and Venus may be considered tropes from Weill’s European output. Weill’s practice of salvaging material from failed shows closely parallels the practice of other Broadway as well as European operatic composers as far back as Handel in the Baroque era.47 What makes such salvaging possible for Weill is a shared gestus that might, like the Baroque affections, serve several dramatic situations with equal conviction. Weill would continue to develop this particular brand of transformation within his American works. Lady and Venus exhibit an especially notable example as shown in Example 7.1. Even the theater reviewer, Lewis Nichols, remarked after a single hearing in his opening night review of Venus that at the conclusion of act I, Savory “sings the sad story of ‘Dr. Crippen’ in a mood and a tune not unlike that of Mr. Weill’s celebrated ‘Saga of Jenny.’”48

  Example 7.1. “The Saga of Jenny” and “Dr. Crippen”

  (a) “The Saga of Jenny” (Lady in the Dark)

  (b) “Dr. Crippen” (One Touch of Venus)

  Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus as Integrated Musicals

  Despite his ca
reful selection of librettists and lyricists and his devotion to theatrical integrity, Weill’s Broadway offerings for the most part share the posthumous fate of such popular contemporaries as Kern, Porter, and Rodgers and Hart who are similarly remembered more for their hit songs in most of their shows.49 Even in the case of The Threepenny Opera, an extraordinarily popular musical in its Off-Broadway reincarnation, “The Ballad of Mack the Knife,” remains by far its most remembered feature.

  It is additionally ironic that the ideal of Weill’s most successful musical deliberately disregards the principle of the so-called integrated model popularized by Rodgers and Hammerstein, a principle that would hold center stage (with some exceptions) at least until the mid-1960s. In Europe, the apparent interchangeability of arias (providing the proper affects were preserved) in opera seria gave way to the increasingly integrated, albeit occasionally heterogeneous, operas of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, and Berg. Many Broadway shows before Rodgers and Hammerstein (and some thereafter), like their Baroque opera counterparts, emphasized great individual songs, stars, and stagecraft more than broader dramatic themes and treated their books and music as autonomous rather than integrated elements.

  After Oklahoma! and Carousel the aesthetic goals of Broadway shifted. Two years after the disastrous Firebrand of Florence in 1945 (43 performances), Weill too composed an integrated dramatic work, Street Scene (148 performances), that would eventually achieve a commercial success roughly commensurate with its critical acclaim. The dream that Weill shared on his notes to the cast album of this Broadway opera, a “dream of a special brand of musical theatre which would completely integrate drama and music, spoken word, song and movement,” was also the dream of his chief Broadway rival in the 1940s, Rodgers, who was composing Oklahoma!, Carousel, Allegro, and South Pacific during these years.50

  In his notes to Street Scene, Weill acknowledges that he and his earlier collaborator Brecht “deliberately stopped the action during the songs which were written to illustrate the ‘philosophy,’ the inner meaning of the play.”51 It was not until Street Scene, however, that Weill achieved “a real blending of drama and music, in which the singing continues naturally where the speaking stops and the spoken word as well as the dramatic action are embedded in overall musical structure.”52 Three years before he completed his long and productive theater career, Weill appeared to repudiate the aesthetic he had worked out with Brecht and achieved his integrated American opera.

  Thus Weill, by now a wayward branch from the German stem, did not begin his serious attempt to integrate drama and music until after he ceased collaborating with Brecht. On the other hand, Rodgers, in America, as early as Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, was already somewhat paradoxically striving to compose integrated musicals in a marketplace somewhat indifferent to this aesthetic.53 Weill’s contemporary and posthumous success with Threepenny Opera, both its German production in the late 1920s and its Broadway adaptation by Blitzstein in the middle and late 1950s, rests in part in the alienation between and separation of music and story. Even those who remain impervious to the quality and charm of Weill’s many other works acknowledge the artistic merits of Threepenny Opera and usually grant it masterpiece status.

  Shortly before the debut of Lady in the Dark Weill informed William King in the New York Sun that in contrast to Schoenberg, who “has said he is writing for a time fifty years after his death,” Weill wrote “for today” and did not “give a damn about writing for posterity.”54 Between the extremes of his two posthumous success stories, Threepenny Opera and, to a lesser degree, Street Scene, lie Weill’s two greatest and—if posterity be damned—most meaningful hits. Both Lady and Venus exhibit integrative as well as non-integrative traits. On one level, Lady in the Dark might be considered the least integrated of any book show by any Broadway composer, since the play portions and the musical portions are unprecedentedly segregated. In this respect Lady shares much in common with film adaptations of musicals that remove the “nonrealistic” portions of their Broadway source.55

  With the exception of “My Ship,” virtually all the music of the show appears in three separate dream sequences that comprise half of the show—the Glamour Dream and the Wedding Dream in act I and the Circus Dream in act II—and nowhere else. In each of these dreams virtually everything is sung or underscored by continuous music, while the other half is composed entirely of spoken dialogue. Hart’s original intent, evident in his draft of the play I Am Listening, was to have a play with a small amount of musical interjections rather than “three little one-act operas.”

  Once Hart had decided to create a play that could accommodate Weill’s music, he fully embraced the integrated ideal (for the dreams) that within a few years would dominate Broadway. In his prefatory remarks to the published vocal score, Hart expressed the desire for himself and his collaborators not only to avoid “the tight little formula of the musical comedy stage” but to create a show “in which the music carried forward the essential story.” “For the first time … the music and lyrics of a musical ‘show’ are part and parcel of the basic structure of the play.”56

  With due respect to Hart, the music in Lady in the Dark might more accurately be described as a conscious interruption of a play. But since an important component of the story is the disparity between Liza Elliott’s drab quotidian existence and the colorful pizzazz of her dream world, it makes sense for her to speak only in her waking life and reserve music for her dreams. The dream pretext also allows Weill to present the interruptions within the discontinuity of a dream, since, after all, audiences should not expect dreams to be totally logical. Dreams, as Weill wrote in his thoughts on dreams that he typed out in preparation for Lady in the Dark, “are, at the moment of the dreaming, very realistic and don’t have at all the mysterious, shadowy quality of the usual dream sequences in plays or novels.”

  Liza’s dreams differ no more from her daily life than escapist musicals of the late 1930s differed from the daily lives of their audiences.57 The musical and dramatic non sequitur that launches “Tschaikowsky” may be equally abrupt as the opening gambits in 1930s musical comedies, for example, “There’s a Small Hotel” in On Your Toes. After Liza, accompanied by a chorus, concludes her musical defense—“Tra-la—I never gave my word”—in the breach of promise suit for failing to marry Nesbitt (clearly reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury), the music comes to a halt with a soft cymbal. The Ringmaster (Allure photographer Randy Paxton in real life) then breaks the silence with “Charming, charming, who wrote that music?”; the Jury answers, “Tschaikowsky!,” and the Ringmaster says, “Tschaikowsky? I love Russian composers!” Part of the joke, of course, is that Tchaikovsky did not compose “The Best Years of His Life” (Weill himself had composed this song several years earlier in Kingdom for a Cow). Moreover, in the slightly askew chronology of dreamland, the exchange between the Ringmaster and the Jury actually anticipates a real, albeit small, dose of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony (third movement).

  While a major theme of Lady in the Dark is the disparity between Liza Elliott’s real and dream worlds (although she retains her name in her dreams), her co-workers often appear in her dreams as metaphors for their roles in Liza’s waking life. The metaphors also become increasingly obvious as Liza comes to understand the meaning of her dreams. Of the four men in her life, the “mildly effeminate” Paxton (Danny Kaye) plays a neutral role in Liza’s romantic life and serves the dreaming Liza with equal neutrality (a chauffeur in the Glamour Dream and the ringmaster in the Circus Dream). Nesbitt (Bert Lytell), who “waits” for Liza in real life, plays the role of a head waiter in a night club in the Glamour Dream and the real-life role of Liza’s expectant groom in the Wedding Dream before appearing as the first witness for the prosecution in the Circus Dream. The glamorous movie star Randy Curtis (Victor Mature), who appreciates and defends Liza’s lack of glamour, naturally appears as Liza’s defense attorney in the Circus Dream.

  Similarly, Hart c
aptures the complexity of Liza’s relationship with her obnoxious advertising manager, Charley Johnson (MacDonald Carey). In the Glamour Dream Johnson plays the marine who paints Liza’s portrait for the two-cent stamp, not as Liza sees herself in the dream but as others see her in real life. Already in the first dream he has established himself as firmly grounded in reality and the person who truly sees Liza for what she is (significantly, Johnson’s realism is bound to speech and he never sings in the dreams, although he will eventually sing “My Ship” for Liza). In the Wedding Dream Johnson appears twice, first as the salesman who offers a dagger instead of a ring and then as the minister who, merely by asking the standard question, “If there be any who know why these two [Liza and Nesbitt] should not be joined in holy wedlock let him speak now or forever hold his peace,” prompts a truthful response from his congregation that exposes the wedding as a sham: “This woman knows she does not love this man.”

  In the Circus Dream, Johnson acts as the prosecuting attorney and as a surrogate for Dr. Brooks when he repeats the psychiatrist’s diagnosis nearly word for word, adding a new accusatory tone at the end of the dream: “You’re afraid. You’re hiding something. You’re afraid of that music aren’t you? Just as you’re afraid to compete as a woman—afraid to marry Kendall Nesbitt—afraid to be the woman you want to be—afraid—afraid—afraid!” “That music” is of course the song “My Ship,” or rather the opening portion of this song that either leads to dreams (Glamour and Wedding Dreams) or makes a dream come to a stop (the Circus Dream).