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

by Block, Geoffrey

  In her final session with Dr. Brooks, Liza manages to recall the entire song as she formerly sang it to a boy named Ben. Ben, the Handsomest Boy at Mapleton High, many years earlier had abandoned the teenage Liza, the Most Popular Girl, to return to the Most Beautiful Girl. While she waits for Ben to return, another boy asks to take Liza to dinner (Liza prefers to wait). The boy’s name is Charles, yet another clue that someday a prince named Charley will come. In the final scene, Charley Johnson offers more substantive evidence that he is indeed Mr. Right for Liza Elliott: he knows “My Ship” and will sing it with her as their ship sails off into the golden sunset.

  The central unifying musical element of Lady in the Dark is certainly “My Ship,” the opening portion of which appears in various harmonizations in each dream before Liza manages to sing it completely in the otherwise musically silent Childhood Dream.58 The musical material of the three main dreams is internally “unified” around a characteristic rhythm (a rumba for the Glamour Dream, a bolero for the Wedding Dream, and a march for the Circus Dream). The Glamour dream contains the greatest use of internal thematic transformation. Beyond the reuse and development of “My Ship,” however, organic unity is not especially prominent from one dream to the next.

  In One Touch of Venus the use of song to musically interrupt rather than continue the action may be a characteristic shared with the non-integrated musicals of Porter before Kiss Me, Kate. It also suggests a return structurally, if not ideologically, to Weill’s epic creations with Brecht (Threepenny Opera, Happy End, and Mahagonny). Venus’s final song, “That’s Him,” is representative of Weill’s earlier ideal by distancing the singer from the object and providing a commentary on love rather than an experience of it. Venus even speaks of her love object in the third person.

  Dramatic unity in One Touch of Venus, outwardly more conventional than the intricate continuous dream scenes in Lady in the Dark, nevertheless corresponds closely to the contemporary Oklahoma! model based on such devices as thematic transformation in narrative ballets and the use of strong rhythmic profiles to reflect character.59 These two techniques converge in Weill’s recasting of Venus’s (Mary Martin’s) jazzy and uninhibited opening song, “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” moments later in the ballet “Forty Minutes for Lunch,” described in the libretto as “a series of formalized dance patterns parodying the tension of metropolitan life.”60

  Like the composers of Anything Goes, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, and West Side Story, Weill uses quarter-note triplets when he wants to show his characters moving emotionally beyond their metrical boundaries.61 Weill uses the quarter-note triplet most prominently in Whitelaw Savory’s love song “Westwind” (Example 7.2a), previously noted as based, appropriately enough as it turns out, on Venus’s Entrance Music. Even Rodney Hatch, when serenading his fiancée Gloria Kramer in his characteristically rhythmically square fashion, manages a few quarter-note triplets in the release of his “How Much I Love You” when he sings “I love you” and “I yearn for you.” But by the time he sings of his “Wooden Wedding” near the end of the show, quarter-note triplets have vanished, and Venus will soon follow.

  Venus herself, who tells Savory at their first meeting that “love isn’t the dying moan of a distant violin—it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring,” generally prefers swing rhythms, but quarter-note triplets remain a prominent part of her musical character (as well as of the Venus Theme).62 She sings them prominently in the swinging and highly syncopated “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” and even opens the verse of the waltz “Foolish Heart” with a quarter-note triplet group. By the time Venus sings “Speak Low” with Rodney, every phrase of both the main portion and the release includes quarter-note triplets (Example 7.2b), and her characteristic swinging rhythms are submerged in the accompaniment.

  Example 7.2. Quarter-note triplets in One Touch of Venus

  (a) “Westwind”

  (b) “Speak Low”

  In the spoken dialogue that prepares for her final song Venus confesses that while the ring brought the statue to life, it was not responsible for making her love him. Nevertheless, Venus wastes no time in asking Rodney to part his hair on the other side. The song itself, “That’s Him,” lyrically and musically captures Venus’s ambiguity toward Rodney. On one hand, Venus literally compares her potential mate to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, she could “pick him out” from the millions of men in the world, and she concludes her A sections by singing “wonderful world, wonderful you.” On the other hand, despite his endearing qualitites, Rodney remains an unlikely romantic partner, especially for a Venus. He is “simple,” “not arty,” “satisfactory,” and appreciated primarily for his functionality, “like a plumber when you need a plumber” and “comforting as woolens in the winter.”

  In order to musically express less exalted feelings for her conventional barber, Venus must be deprived of the musical identity she has established for herself in her other songs. Weill conveys this underlying conflict when he does not allow the accompaniment, significantly filled with Venus’s characteristic swinging rhythms, to share the implied harmony of Venus’s melody. Additionally, although Venus’s melodic line contains several telling vocal leaps, it mainly consists of stepwise motion, again in contrast to her previously established melodically disjunct character portrayed in “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” and “Speak Low.” Only at the end of the A’ sections—the song forms an unusual arch, A-A’-B-A-A’ rather than A-A-B-A—do melody and harmony resolve to the C major that Weill has Venus avoid so assiduously for thirty-three measures. Although throughout this B section Venus returns to her jazzy swing rhythms, she will abandon her unrealistic dream of an unambiguous C major existence with Rodney after three measures. Venus may be in love with a wonderful guy, but a marriage with Rodney would be like Pegasus pulling a milk truck.63

  At the end of the song, the delusion can no longer be sustained. When Rodney finishes singing his description of their “Wooden Wedding” with its “trip to Gimbel’s basement, / Or a double feature [pronounced fee’-tcha] with Don Ameche,” Venus must say, “Rodney, I hope I’ll be the right kind of wife for you.”64 Venus’s nightmarish vision of herself as a conventional “housewife” in the concluding ballet, “Venus in Ozone Heights,” finally convinces her to rejoin the gods.

  One Touch of Venus, act I, scene 4. Mary Martin in the center behind the dressing screen (1943). Photograph: Vandamm Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

  The Possibility of Revival

  We have previously noted that in contrast to the other musicals discussed in this survey, Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus have yet to receive fully staged Broadway revivals. Although both musicals have enjoyed a number of regional performances in America and in Great Britain, they remain shortchanged and underappreciated. Do they need revised books or more Weill hit songs to succeed like Porter and Rodgers and Hart revivals? The final section of this chapter will address the problems and possibilities of revival.

  The first of several alleged problems with Lady in the Dark is its dependence on a star. After exhibiting indecisiveness equal to Liza Elliott, the versatile Gertrude Lawrence consulted with her friend and oracle Noël Coward as well as her astrological charts and accepted the demanding title role. When Lawrence left for the summer the show closed, and, unlike most shows, including Mary Martin’s Venus, Lawrence’s Lady never went on the road. A second problem is expense. Three revolving sets and the attendant costs of the three dream ballets do not travel cheaply.

  But certainly these red herrings mask deeper problems. When Hart wrote the libretto to Lady, for example, psychiatry was still a relatively novel subject for a musical, and the endless series of obligatory dream ballets in musicals were mostly in the future. Nevertheless, even by the standards of the early 1940s, Hart’s treatment of psychiatry is simplistic and predictable.

  More problematic than the dated treatment of psychiatry are the increasingly volatile subjects of sexism and sexual harass
ment. To be sure, the sexism in Lady in the Dark is rather unpalatable, especially as displayed in the character of Liza’s eventual Mr. Right, the fanny-pinching, male-chauvinist Charley Johnson, who tries to give Maggie “a wet kiss” against her will. When Johnson accuses Liza of having “magazines instead of babies and a father instead of a husband,” he may be telling it like it was (or how he saw things), but his remarks were not destined to please modern Broadway audiences.65 Instead of getting the girl, Johnson today might be obtaining the services of an attorney who specializes in sexual harassment suits; he certainly does not deserve a woman like Liza. The non-singing Kendall Nesbitt hardly seems a better alternative: “Somehow—I don’t know why—it’s different for a man, but a woman can have no sense of fulfillment—no real peace and serenity as a woman, living out her life this way.”66 In a later era, the story of a bright, successful, and powerful woman whose achievement comes at the expense of her feminine identity does not bode well for a box office bonanza, even with Madonna in the title role.

  Sexual stereotyping is not reserved for the heterosexual members of the Lady in the Dark cast. Russell Paxton, the “mildly-effeminate-in-a-rather-charming-fashion” photographer for Liza’s fashion magazine, Allure, is introduced as “hysterical, as usual.” He also freely acknowledges his physical admiration for male beauty when he describes Randy Curtis: “He’s got a face that would melt in your mouth…. He’s heaven.”67 Although some mystery will remain as to which of Liza’s suitors (Curtis, Nesbitt, or Johnson) will eventually win out, Paxton is removed at the outset as a romantic contender.68

  The reasons for the demise of One Touch of Venus are less explicable. The premise of a cultural alien examining America from another perspective has proven remarkably durable in numerous films over the past two decades and includes aliens from another country (Moscow on the Hudson) and extraterrestrial aliens (E.T.) in its wide orbit. A genuine and liberated sex goddess adrift amid overly romantic types like Whitelaw Savory and prosaic practical types like Rodney Hatch provide for a potentially engaging story, a story wittily realized by Perelman, Nash, and Weill.

  While Weill is criticized for abandoning his social conscience in his Broadway musicals, Venus manages to effectively satirize a host of American values. We know from the first song that Savory is more than a little eccentric because, in contrast with nearly anyone who loves popular musicals, he firmly believes that (with the notable exception of the classical Anatolian Venus) “New Art Is True Art”: “Old art is cold art, / The new art is bold art; / The best of ancient Greece, / It was centuries behind Matisse, / Who has carried us beyond Renoir, / Till our bosoms are tri-an-gu-lar.”

  The largest target of the Perelman-Nash satire is the contrasting moral values of the very, very rich and the common folk. The loose morals of the wealthy are comically portrayed in the song “Very, Very, Very,” when Molly explains that “It’s a minor peccadillo / To patronize the wrong pillow, / When you’re very, very, very rich.” It was previously noted that Venus dismisses Savory’s idealistic and bourgeois love by favoring the twang of a bedspring over the moan of a violin. In contrast, Venus’s earthbound inamorata, Hatch, expresses his love for his fiancée Gloria through a series of negative prosaic images, for example, “I love you more than a wasp can sting, / And more than a hangnail hurts.” Although Venus helps Hatch to rid himself of his shrewish intended—“sic transit Gloria Kramer”—the simple barber retains his desire to live in Ozone Heights, where “every bungalow’s just the same” and each has “a radio that looks like a fireplace—and a fireplace that looks like a radio.”69

  If Street Scene is the American Weill stage work that posterity has voted retrospectively most likely to succeed, One Touch of Venus, the most Broadway-like of any Weill show, may turn out to be the most revivable—the sleeper musical of the 1940s. In short, Venus is a first-rate traditional Broadway show, packed with an unprecedented number of song hits and other fine songs by Weill, lyrics that reveal the idiosyncratic Nash at his cleverest, and engaging dialogue by Perelman.

  After Venus, Nash would abandon Broadway and go back to the more intimate world of comic verse. Perelman’s next (and last) musical, three years after Venus, closed out of town; he would take time off from his prolific output of comic literary fiction on one more occasion to write the script for Porter’s last effort, the television musical Aladdin (1958). Hart ended his distinguished Broadway career with a successful play, Light Up the Sky (1948), and as the director of My Fair Lady and Camelot. Between Light Up the Sky and My Fair Lady he also wrote distinguished musical screenplays for Hans Christian Andersen (lyrics and music by Loesser) and A Star Is Born (lyrics by Ira Gershwin and music by Harold Arlen). One year after his failed collaboration with Weill, The Firebrand of Florence, Gershwin completed his Broadway career with the poorly received Park Avenue (music by Arthur Schwartz). He concluded his career by writing lyrics to several successful films, most notably A Star Is Born, then spent three decades in creative retirement as the guardian of his famous brother’s legacy. After Venus and Florence, Weill would compose the music to Street Scene, Love Life, and Lost in the Stars, dying before he could realize his next American dream with Maxwell Anderson (his lyricist-librettist on Knickerbocker Holiday and Lost in the Stars), a musical based on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  STAGE VERSUS SCREEN (1)

  Before Rodgers and Hammerstein

  Adapting to Hollywood

  Show Boat marks one possible starting point for a study of the modern Broadway musical. Fortuitously, its arrival in December 1927 closely followed the opening of a landmark in the history of one of the quintessential modern media of the twentieth century, The Jazz Singer, the first American feature film with sound. Although most of this historic film was still “silent”—accompanied by a live pit band—Al Jolson’s songs were reproduced via a recorded soundtrack, tube amplifiers, and loudspeakers placed behind the movie screen at selected theaters. Seemingly traveling at the speed of sound, if not light, talking and singing film adaptations of popular Broadway stage works soon became rapidly, abundantly, and relatively cheaply available to national then worldwide audiences. Masses of movie enthusiasts could view film adaptations of major and minor works that until the end of the 1920s were accessible only on Broadway stages and in touring productions. Audiences could also view a large body of original film musicals not based on a stage work.

  During the early decades of sound film, musical film adaptations were usually remote from their stage sources, and it would often be a challenge to discern the difference between an adaptation and an original musical film without prior knowledge. Before the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, film adaptations tended to be footloose and fancy free and at times unrecognizable vis-à-vis their stage counterparts. The musical films highlighted in later chapters of this study tend to be relatively faithful, perhaps too respectful, of their Broadway origins.

  In any event, the two film “Stage versus Screen” chapters at the end of acts I and II in this Broadway survey work from the premise that it is intrinsically unfair to value a film adaptation in direct or indirect proportion to its fidelity to what audiences saw and heard onstage—the musical theater scholar’s own version of the early and traditional music “authenticity” and “historically informed performance” debates. An Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller roughly based on a novel or short story might be considered an improvement over its source or at least an excellent film in its own right. At the same time, readers of a survey on the Broadway musical deserve to know the connection between what they see on the silver screen and what they are likely to see on a stage. Film adaptations such as The Gay Divorcée, On the Town, and Funny Face may be worthy exponents of the film genre, but students of musical theater should know that these films only imperfectly approximate their stage counterparts.

  One of the central purposes of the two “Stage versus Screen” chapters will be to inform fans of Broadway shows what they are gettin
g into when they rent or purchase a film adaptation of a show they have seen on a stage or heard on a cast album. Just as quoting obscenity is not the same thing as being obscene, those who study musical film adaptations, and even those who occasionally shout vive la différence should not be accused of wantonly sleeping with the enemy or other acts of traitorous activity. While some, erroneously, treat stage and screen versions of Broadway shows as interchangeable, other musical theater advocates regard even the act of adaptation with suspicion, if not disdain. One articulate adversary of the film musical adaptation, Kim Kowalke, encapsulated this position: “The generic deformation inherent in adapting stage musicals as movies left few intact and most virtually unrecognizable, except for title, some songs, and perhaps a few actors in common.”1 Even if Kowalke’s blanket indictment is read as hyperbolic, the term “generic deformation” unfortunately more than occasionally applies.

  There are many subtle cultural dimensions to the transition from live to recorded performance with which any musician familiar with a real-life performing tradition will be familiar. Creeping in on little cat feet, media craft workers and modern-minded audiences have revolutionized performances and their reception. The result, as Kowalke implies, is a change in the genre, or kind of a musical theater work—or, to use his carefully chosen term, a deformed genre. To return to the more straightforward structural dimensions of book and score, film adaptations of musicals from Show Boat to Oklahoma! generally, but by no means invariably, do retain recognizable story lines and more than just “some songs.”