On the other hand, with distressing frequency, departures and alterations from Broadway story lines result in the elimination of half or more than half of the songs people heard when they saw the show on the stage. To cite one extreme but not unique example, the musical film of George and Ira Gershwin’s Strike Up the Band managed to salvage only the title tune from this wonderful score. In another frequent practice that we will witness shortly in the 1936 film adaptation of Show Boat, the original composer and lyricist will add one or more songs expressly for the show’s new incarnation. Perhaps because only new songs are eligible for Best Song Academy Awards, this practice has continued until the present day, even if the new song is not heard until the final credits, as happens in the case of The Phantom of the Opera in the 2004 film version. Another common scenario is the practice of interpolating songs into a show from different shows by the original composer-lyricists, a practice that parallels the distortions we have come to expect in stage revivals (for example, in the revivals of Anything Goes on Broadway in 1962 and 1987). The 1957 film of Pal Joey exemplifies this widespread approach.
Before the Rodgers and Hammerstein era it was also a common practice to bring in new composers and lyricists who were under contract with the studio producing the film as collaborators after the fact. The 1936 film adaptation of Anything Goes provides a good example of this scenario. Another adaptation type is the 1937 film version of the show Rosalie, which has an entirely new score. The original double story (the Lindbergh flight and a visit from the Queen of Romania) was preserved, but the double compositional duties between George Gershwin and Sigmund Romberg were instead relegated solely to Cole Porter, a composer who was not even remotely involved in the Broadway version of 1928. Not until the 1950s did Broadway composers and lyricists begin to exert the kind of creative control over films they had begun to show decades earlier on Broadway. Since then, composers and lyricists have usually exerted the right to share their opinion about which songs to cut—although they can be overridden as we will see in producer Samuel Goldwyn’s version of Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls. Songwriters also gained the frequent privilege of contributing their own new songs.
A large percentage of Broadway shows were adapted into films. Among the highlights of the adaptation subgenre are Ernst Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow (MGM 1934), the series of eight freely adapted operettas (and the occasional musical comedy) with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy from 1935 to 1942, and On the Town (produced by Arthur Freed for MGM in 1949), not all of which are cherished for their fidelity to their stage sources. The most consistently memorable musical films to appear in the era between Show Boat and Oklahoma!, however, were original film musicals. A short list in this latter category would be remiss if it did not include the following: The Love Parade (1929); Love Me Tonight (1932); 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade (1933); The Great Ziegfeld and Born to Dance (1936); Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937); Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938); The Wizard of Oz (1939); Pinocchio, Broadway Melody of 1940, and Fantasia (1940); Yankee Doodle Dandy and Holiday Inn (1942); and Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather, and This Is the Army (1943).
Of the eight classic films that paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers between 1933 and 1938, only three were based even in part on Broadway shows. The Gay Divorcée, which was based, but not quite nominally, on Gay Divorce, starring Astaire, retained but one Porter tune, “Night and Day.” This movie, which has genuine merit on its own terms, gave film audiences an opportunity to see comics Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore, as well as Astaire, replay their stage roles and offered the attractive new face of Betty Grable. It also concludes with perhaps the most elaborate and certainly the longest of the dance duets in the Fred and Ginger series, “The Continental” (more than 16 minutes). With its relatively lengthy medium shot, this dance (and future Fred and Ginger dances) also showcased the dancers from head to toe, with only an occasional close-up, a directorial concession Astaire routinely demanded (and got).2 Despite these genuine merits, the film version of Gay Divorce is as different from its source as, well, night and day. The plot of Follow the Fleet (1936), like that of The Gay Divorcée, is also loosely derived from a Broadway show, Hit the Deck! from 1927, with music by Vincent Youmans (also the principal composer of the first of the Fred and Ginger films, Flying Down to Rio). With The Gay Divorcée, at least one song was composed by its original composer. Follow the Fleet, however, met Rosalie’s fate. Youmans’s entire score was thrown overboard, and Irving Berlin, who composed the music and lyrics to Top Hat and would soon do the same for Carefree (both films also in the first eight Fred and Ginger films), was brought in to write the complete score.3
James Whale’s 1936 Show Boat remains arguably the most successful relatively faithful transfer of operetta-leaning genre (with significant touches of musical comedy) from stage to screen in the 1930s. Kern’s Roberta, with lyrics by Otto Harbach, and yet another from the first Fred and Ginger eight, also deserves consideration as one of the finest contemporary film adaptations of a staged musical comedy (with significant touches of operetta). It also demonstrates how it is possible to retain a story line and much of a score while at the same time transforming leading acting roles into dancing stars. Onstage, the non-dancing role of Huck Haines, played by then-newcomer comedian Bob Hope, was now played by Astaire, while Rogers replaced the non-dancing Lyda Roberti (who as Countess Tanka Schwarenka was not even attracted to Haines in the stage version). The playful roles of Haines and the Countess were expanded both dramatically and musically and offered a sharp comic contrast to the ingénue elegance of Russian Princess Stephanie, played by romantic lead Irene Dunne, who now got to sing both big ballads, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Yesterdays” (the latter originally sung onstage by her Aunt Minnie, Fay Templeton). Other songs retained from the original score included the lively and jazzy “Let’s Begin” and “I’ll Be Hard to Handle.”
The film dropped “Something Had to Happen” and used “The Touch of Your Hand” and “You’re Devastating” as orchestral underscoring for the fashion-show sequence. As part of the musical enhancement for Huck and the Countess (Fred and Ginger), the film added two new swing dance numbers for this pair: “I Won’t Dance,” a reworking of a song by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh from Kern’s recent London flop with Hammerstein, Three Sisters, and a song composed expressly for the film, “Lovely to Look At.”4 The winning combination of romantic elegance (operetta) and catchy popular vernacular (musical comedy) and their signature songs (Dunne) and dances (Astaire and Rogers) captured the best of both worlds. Despite the outrageous notion of an exiled Russian princess living in Paris in 1935, the screen form of Roberta, with its great new roles for dancers, might even make a good candidate for a stage revival.
Given the 80–120 minute fixed time frame, a technical requirement for early films, reasonably faithful and complete adaptations would not be possible until the film adaptations of classic shows in the mid-1950s. If one expects fidelity of dialogue and score, all the film adaptations made before the 1950s are destined to disappoint. Looking at four of the shows treated in act I of Enchanted Evenings, we find a range of possible connections to the original stage versions:
• The 1936 film version of Show Boat featured several cast members who had appeared either in the original 1927 stage version or subsequent productions over the next nine years; a screenplay by the original librettist, Oscar Hammerstein; songs exclusively written for Show Boat by Hammerstein and Jerome Kern (but not all the songs heard onstage); and three new songs written expressly for the film.5 In a practice that would become increasingly common after Oklahoma!, two of these new songs, “Ah Still Suits Me” and “I Have the Room above Her” would reappear in future Broadway productions.6
• The 1936 Paramount Anything Goes retains much of the original plot, a surprising amount of dialogue from the 1934 libretto, the original star Ethel Merman, a small sampling of the songs Porter wrote for the stage version, and more than an equal numb
er of new songs by other composers and lyricists.
• The 1959 Porgy and Bess presents a condensed “Broadway” version that replaced most of the recitative with spoken dialogue and like most musical comedies of the era also reduced the role of the chorus. Nevertheless, while heavily reduced, few songs were cut entirely, and no new songs by the Gershwins or others were added. It was not until 1993 that one could view a Porgy and Bess that, with two omissions, presented a filmed adaptation of a production (based on Glyndebourne in 1986) that offered what audiences heard during the Boston tryouts in the weeks before its 1935 Broadway debut, that is, a virtually uncut Porgy and Bess.
• The 1957 film version of Pal Joey, like the 1962 and 1987 stage versions of Anything Goes, presented, in addition to a few songs from the 1940 stage production, other songs created only by the original composer-lyricists Rodgers and Hart. Unlike the film Anything Goes, however, the Pal Joey film takes extensive liberties with the stage plot and script and features no actors or actresses from the original Broadway production.
Unfortunately, the Show Boat and Anything Goes 1930s adaptations discussed here are often harder to find than their 1950s remakes, probably because they are shot (albeit gorgeously) on black and white film.7 The readily attainable 1951 Technicolor Show Boat followed the basic plot outline, at least for the portion that corresponds to act I, and most of the major songs from the original stage version. On the other hand, it removes most of Hammerstein’s dialogue and eliminates or greatly reduces the African-American themes and characters that gave the stage and first film so much meaning. Gone entirely is the black chorus, gone after ten minutes is Queenie, Julie no longer has a revealing kinship with “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” and the exchange of blood between Julie and Steve is so underplayed that it would go unnoticed unless one were expressly on the lookout for this potentially powerful moment. Even “Ol’ Man River” is heard only twice, which is perhaps a dozen fewer times than patrons of the Harold Prince 1994 revival would experience. Howard Keel (a baritone) as Ravenal, Joe E. Brown as Cap’n Andy Hawks, and William Warfield as Joe are excellent in their roles, but not enough to compensate for the film’s infelicities. Although the film has its entertaining moments, in the end it does disservice to the stage version we examined in chapter 2 and does not begin to measure up to the 1936 film directed by Whale, the version of Show Boat that will be discussed in this chapter.
Similarly, given a choice between using the 1956 remake of Anything Goes and nothing at all (assuming that the 1936 version cannot be located), the suggestion offered here is to try to wait until one of the various stage revivals arrives at a theater near you, which should happen soon. Aside from taking place on a boat, nearly all vestiges of the plot have vanished in this version. Although in vastly altered contexts, the 1956 version delivers a little more of Porter’s score than the 1936 original, including “All through the Night” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” excised in the earlier film; the complete title song, “I Get a Kick Out of You”; “You’re the Top”; and a new Porter song, “It’s De-Lovely” six years before it would reappear in the 1962 Off-Broadway revival. It also offers Bing Crosby reprising his earlier film role under the assumed name of Bill Benson, joining co-star Donald O’Connor in two new songs by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn in addition to those by Porter. But the excessive liberties with plot disqualify the film from being a fair representation of any of the many possible stage versions.
Show Boat (1936)
The difficult-to-obtain Universal 1936 Show Boat, directed by the critically acclaimed James Whale, is almost without exception regarded as far superior to the 1929 sound-silent hybrid Show Boat of 1929 or the 1951 version. Stephen Banfield goes as far as to praise the 1936 film as the best of all possible Show Boats: “Shortened to less than two hours, the score, including three new songs (plus two more that were cut and are lost), and the new, tighter, closer-to-the novel screenplay provided by Hammerstein together offer the most satisfying, balanced, and compelling version of Show Boat as drama achieved up to the present day. In almost every way it is superior to the stage version and its variants.” For Banfield, the stage Show Boat of 1927 constitutes a rough draft and the 1936 film a finished and culminating destination.
Although the film added three new songs (“I Have the Room above Her,” “Gallivantin’ Aroun,’” and “Ah Still Suits Me”), time constraints required deletions or condensations of other songs and dialogue. Gone entirely are Ellie’s stage number “Life on the Wicked Stage” and Ellie’s duet with Frank, “I Might Fall Back on You”; Queenie’s ballyhoos in each act, “C’mon Folks” and “Hey Feller”; Ravenal’s “Till Good Luck Comes My Way” in act I; and three songs from the Chicago Fair scene that opens act II, “At the Fair,” “Why Do I Love You?,” and “In Dahomey.” Although this is a lot of songs at the expense of Queenie and Frank and Ellie, the latter relegated to singing non-Kern duets at the Trocadero, the new songs add considerable substance and nuance to the romantic principals and to Joe, now played by the iconic Paul Robeson, the 1928 London and 1932 New York Joe.
Show Boat, 1936 film. The marriage of Magnolia (Irene Dunne) and Ravenal (Allan Jones) (left) with Cap’n Andy (Charles Winninger) and Parthy (Helen Westley). For a stage photo of this scene see p. 25.
Even the canonic and complex opening scene, which introduced no less than five couples, was subjected to considerable pruning in the film. In the 1988 McGlinn recording, which includes both dialogue and music for the entire scene, it runs twenty-nine minutes; in the film, this scene runs a little over eighteen minutes. We will look at these eighteen minutes in greater detail, starting with the opening of “Cotton Blossom,” which offers new words to the verse, B section, and the inversion of “Ol’ Man River,” all appearing over the credits.8
While the film charmingly (and cinematically) shows the universal effect on humans and animals generated by the arrival of the show boat, it leaves out some of the meaningful underscoring that characterized the stage version. Also missing from the stage are the choruses of town beaux and belles and their counterpoint with the black chorus. During the opening conversation between Magnolia and Ravenal, for example, stage audiences heard the orchestra interrupt with Parthy’s theme (which had already clearly been associated with Parthy, Cap’n Andy Hawk’s grumpy spouse). We can presume that Magnolia heard her mother’s theme calling—that is what prompts her to say she has to leave. The absence of Parthy’s theme in the film at this same point in the conversation makes Magnolia’s sudden desire to interrupt the conversation inexplicable.
An even more dramatically significant effect of an underscoring omission occurs during the short scene in which Pete confronts Queenie about where she got her brooch (which we soon learn was a gift from Julie who rejected Pete’s gift). The conversation appears in both the stage and film versions. In the stage version the underscoring of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” connects this song with Queenie and sets up its use in the next scene, where we learn that Julie somehow picked up a song closely associated with black culture. In the film, Pete’s confrontation with Queenie is accompanied, not by “Can’t Help Lovin,’” but by Magnolia’s piano theme. This important theme will not be associated with Magnolia until Ravenal asks her if she is a player.9 Although the 1936 Show Boat certainly exhibits expert plotting and dramatic consolidation, it discards some of the dramatic connections that the music of the 1927 stage original provided.
The opening number contains substantial cuts, and much of “Cap’n Andy’s Bally-hoo” is either deleted or spoken. The next two songs in the scene contain significant omissions as well. Among the most drastic and dramatically significant reductions are those in Ravenal’s entrance and first song, “Where’s the Mate for Me?” Those familiar with the stage version here (discussed in chapter 2) may recall that Ravenal sings a melody in AABA form in which the B section, “Magnolia’s Piano Theme,” forms the inspiration of Ravenal’s B section. Ravenal asks where his mate might be. He hears Magnoli
a, her theme enters his consciousness and his music, and when he repeats the question, Magnolia herself appears to answer the question before Ravenal is able to finish it in song. After Ravenal almost finishes the second of the first two A sections in the film version he is interrupted as well, but not by Magnolia’s piano theme. The interruption is in the form of a short film cutting to a conversation in which Frank contradicts Ellie’s assumption that Ravenal must be an aristocrat by pointing out the cracks in his shoes (after which Ravenal, now discredited, proceeds to complete the song with the final phrase). Together, the song and the dialogue interjection occupy a not-so-grand total of thirty seconds.
Although it no longer begins as the interruption of a song, the ensuing dialogue between Magnolia and Ravenal follows the stage version closely (with Parthy’s interrupting theme now absent). In the 1936 film, “Make Believe” is also deprived of its second section.10 With the time saved by the reductions of “Cotton Blossom,” “Where’s the Mate?,” and “Make Believe,” “Ol’ Man River,” sung by Paul Robeson accompanied by an inventive filmic montage of stevedores toting barges, lifting bales, Joe getting drunk and landing in jail, rolls along uninterrupted for more than four minutes to create a powerful conclusion to a magnificent if somewhat shorter scene. This change in emphasis surely reflects both Robeson’s star quality and the fact that since 1927, “Ol’ Man River” had become the signature song of the show and a deeply resonant reflection on American history. Indeed, in the MTV era, this filmic version of an iconic song can come across like a marvelous music video.
The 1936 film introduces to us a practice that becomes extremely common if not ubiquitous in films that discard significant amounts of musical material from the stage version. This is the practice of using fragments of abandoned songs as underscoring. Some examples include the appearance of the second section of “Make Believe” to underscore Julie’s departure, the use of “Till Good Luck Comes My Way” when Ravenal is seen gambling, and “Life on the Wicked Stage” when Frank and Ellie are seen together. “Why Do I Love You?” is also reduced to an orchestral fragment. Only if one knew the song would someone realize the significance of the words “Because I love you,” a lyric from this song and a line that appears in Ravenal’s farewell letter which Ellie reads out loud (or that the musical line that accompanies this lyric and the line in the letter are synchronized).
Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 22
