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

by Block, Geoffrey

  Since nearly every Show Boat ends differently, it should come as no surprise that major changes have transpired between the 1927 stage and 1936 screen versions. Due largely to the show’s excessive length, the role of Magnolia’s daughter Kim, a successful young singing and dancing star on the stage in the tradition of her mother, was removed during the tryouts along with her song, “It’s Getting Hotter in the North,” in which Magnolia’s piano theme is transformed into a jazzy ’20s tune in the general style of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Although the growing length of the film forced a curtailment of Kim’s transformation of her mother’s “Gallivantin’ Aroun’” (sung earlier in the film in blackface), film viewers see a lot of Kim in 1936 from birth to young adulthood. Audiences witness her birth in a scene taken from the novel, we meet Kim again when Ravenal sings “Make Believe” to her at her convent school before his disappearance, and the adult Kim appears in several later scenes, including the happy reunion of her parents after twenty years who conclude the film with a reprise of their duet, “You Are Love.” The film also fleshed out the role of Joe, not only by giving him the rare full version of a song, “Ol’ Man River” and a new song later in film, but in some new dialogue with Queenie. Audiences also gain a richer sense of Joe’s character, when, in a demonstration of courage and resolve that belies Queenie’s accusations of laziness, Joe takes it upon himself to find a doctor in a hazardous storm so that Magnolia will give birth to Kim safely.

  Even if one does not find the 1936 filmed Show Boat a dramatic improvement on the 1927 stage original (or other versions), the opportunity to see so many actors associated with this musical in one film will help give a new generation of film viewers a renewed appreciation of this show. The characters understand and believe in their material. Charles Winninger’s enactment of The Parson’s Bride, assuming all the roles when his cast was scared off the stage by a backwoodsman who thought the villain was real, may be reason enough to seek out this film, one of the great film adaptations of a stage classic.

  Anything Goes (1936)

  Those who come to expect earlier musical film adaptations to abandon the original stage book and most of the songs will only be half mistaken when it comes to the first movie version of the 1930s hit show Anything Goes. For starters, viewers of the 1936 Paramount film will only hear about twenty seconds of the title song at the film’s beginning, albeit sung by Merman, followed by instrumental fragments of “All through the Night” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” After that tantalizing morsel, the only Porter tunes from Anything Goes, or from any other Porter show for that matter in the film will be “I Get a Kick Out of You” sung by Merman, “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair” sung by the Avalon Boys quartet, and “You’re the Top,” a duet for Merman and rising film star Bing Crosby. Due to the controversial nature of some of Porter’s lyrics, “sniffing cocaine” was not an option as a “kick” in “I Get a Kick Out of You,” replaced by “that perfume from Spain.” The new lyrics for “You’re the Top” were assigned to Ted Fetter. Joseph Breen, the new enforcer of the Hollywood Production Code, objected to suggestive lyrics such as “you and your love give me ecstasy,” which resulted in the total removal of the show’s central love ballad, “All through the Night.” The rousing “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” which might be interpreted as a slur on religion (and knowing Porter, perhaps also intended as a sexual double entendre), also bit the dust. If it was once shocking to catch a glimpse of a stocking (as the verse of “Anything Goes” went), when adapting a 1934 stage hit into a Hays Code–era Hollywood film in 1936, the phrase “anything goes” did not necessarily apply.

  Anything Goes, 1936 film. Billy Crocker (Bing Crosby, left), Reno Sweeney (Ethel Merman, upside down center), and Rev. Dr. Moon (Charles Ruggles, right).

  The Paramount film does offer a lot to be thankful for. Although she’s confined in a slow-moving swing in a nightclub, it’s a treat to see and hear a young Merman convey the words and the rhythms of “I Get a Kick Out of You,” including the tricky half-note triplets that pervade the opening of each A section over a rumba beat.11 Even with the altered lyrics it’s also a delight to see and hear Merman and Crosby share “You’re the Top.” Crosby—replacing the original Billy Crocker, William Gaxton, who never enjoyed much of either a recording or film career, and displacing Merman as the star of the show—was a marvelous singer, a natural actor, and well suited for the part. The comic role of Public Enemy No. 13, originated onstage by the bumbling Victor Moore, was played in the film by comedian Charles Ruggles in the non-singing role of Reverend Dr. Moon (Moore got to “Sing like the Bluebird”).12 The Avalon Boys’ rendition of “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair,” joined by Crosby in a reprise, is another highlight; performed at about half the speed of the John McGlinn reconstructed recording, the film rendition of this song belies the myth that 1930s tempos are always faster than modern ones, a valuable lesson in historical performance practice.

  Since Crosby, not Merman, was the big screen star, he needed more material—new songs. Merman’s songs, “Anything Goes” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” were textually out of bounds as was Billy’s “All through the Night,” while “Gypsy in Me,” sung in the Broadway show by his inamorata Hope Harcourt, was not the right song for Crosby. Lewis Milestone, who had previously directed the Academy Award–winning All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) but no musicals, brought in three interpolated songs expressly written for Crosby to sing in the film: “Sailor Beware” (Richard Whiting and Leo Robin), “My Heart and I” (Frederick Hollander and Robin), and “Moonburn” (Edward Heyman and Hoagy Carmichael). They may not have possessed the lyrical wit of “You’re the Top”—neither did the new and rewritten lyrics of this song in the film—but all three are top-tier songs, engagingly crooned by Crosby.

  The 1936 Paramount Anything Goes may have less of Merman and significantly less of Porter than the stage original, but it does offer a book that, aside from a few twists here and there, is remarkably similar to the stage plot from two years earlier. Even more remarkably, despite a number of plot deviations that will go unmentioned here, the film retains a considerable portion of the original dialogue, including many of the corny jokes. That they go over as well as they do—even the silly misunderstanding of “in door” China for Indo-China—is due to Ruggles’s impeccable delivery. The “putting on the dog” joke is retained in the film script. So is the scene that leads to “calling all pants” that director Jerry Zaks found incomprehensible but kept in the 1987 Vivian Beaumont version because people still laughed. The 1936 film clears this matter up once and for all. During the strip poker game with the surprisingly adept Chinese missionaries, Billy bets his coat and Wang bets his pants. When Moon asks Billy if he calls pants, Billy calls pants, the missionaries call pants, and Moon calls pants. This exchange fully explains why Moon concludes the scene by shouting, “CALLING ALL PANTS.” Even though only the relatively ancient viewers of the film (or trivia buffs) would make the connection between calling all pants and Calling All Cars, a popular crime and police radio drama that ran from 1933 to 1939, it’s still a funny scene. Another surprise. The exchange between Moon and Mrs. Wentworth, the kind of stream-of-consciousness banter that Groucho and “straight man” Margaret Dumont excelled in (excerpted in chapter 3), can be found in the film between Ruggles as Groucho and the redoubtable Margaret Dumont as herself. By the way, Billy really does put on the dog, Mrs. Wentworth’s newly shaved Pomeranian. PETA watchdogs should take note.

  Although much of the dialogue was retained in the scenes that remained, some of the subtext regrettably did not manage to escape the cutting floor. For example, in the 1934 libretto, when Reno arrives unannounced in Evelyn Oakleigh’s stateroom in order to frame him for a phony seduction, Evelyn, expecting the steward and without turning around, asks the visitor to “just put it down on the bed,” expresses his hope that “it’s good and hot,” and states his desire that whatever the visitor has to offer he wants to receive before he is dressed. In response to this pro
position, Reno asks whether she is early or late. In the screenplay, the tea is replaced by a dozen martini cocktails, presumably not hot, and when Reno arrives unseen Evelyn simply asks his visitor to leave the drinks there to which Reno simply responds, “I beg your pardon.” The somewhat suggestive “not a grope” becomes “not a try” when Reno complains to Billy that he shouldn’t have led her on by not getting her drunk, not asking her to his apartment to see his etchings, and not making a move on her in a taxi. “Hell” and other fiendish words, including “hot pants,” may be banished, but Reno’s basic complaint to Billy onstage, “You never even laid a hand on me, and I’m not used to men treating me like that!,” was repeatable in the film. Similarly, although the details remain unspecified, Reno is allowed to confirm that Evelyn does “things” to her. One line that has, if anything, increased its topicality and resonance in the early twenty-first century is Moon’s claim that he left the con artist game when the mortgage companies arrived.13

  Although it often offers tangential connections with the 1934 stage version of Anything Goes, this film should be put back in circulation without delay where it can be criticized and enjoyed on its own terms.

  Porgy and Bess

  Samuel Goldwyn, 1959

  As we have seen (see chapter 4), Rouben Mamoulian, with Gershwin’s acquiescence, if not approval, managed to cut about forty minutes before Porgy and Bess launched its career on Broadway in 1935. Despite the cuts, what audiences heard at its Broadway debut was a full-scale opera, with sparse amounts of spoken dialogue reserved mainly for white characters. A few years later, the Cheryl Crawford Broadway revival of 1942 turned the opera into a more conventional musical with many cuts and spoken dialogue replacing much of Gershwin’s recitative. Ten years after that, the Blevins Davis and Robert Breen production starring Leontyne Price as Bess, William Warfield as Porgy, and Cab Calloway as Sporting Life brought the opera closer to its operatic roots, style, and length. The historic Houston Grand Opera production of 1976 completed this process. In fact, Houston returned the work to what it looked like during the tryouts prior to its Broadway opening, that is, an uncut Porgy and Bess that included the forty soon-to-be-discarded minutes.

  Porgy and Bess, 1959 film. Porgy (Sidney Poitier) and Bess (Dorothy Dandridge) inside Porgy’s room.

  Porgy and Bess, 1959 film. Porgy (Poitier) and Bess (Dandridge) outside Porgy’s door, with goat.

  Between the Davis-Breen and the Houston production lies the shadow of the first film version of Porgy and Bess, produced by Samuel Goldwyn (his eightieth and final picture), and after its first director Mamoulian was fired, directed by Otto Preminger. Playing but not singing the part of Porgy was Sidney Poitier, at the time still in the early stages of his career as America’s leading black actor and box office draw. Dorothy Dandridge, a rising star who had played the title role in Preminger’s Carmen Jones a few years earlier, was cast as Bess. The film marked a return to the type of presentation not seen since Crawford’s production, a shorter version in which the dialogue is mostly spoken rather than sung and with less activity from the chorus. Some critics lauded the film, including Bosley Crowther of the New York Times. Others were highly critical, especially of the sets, which seemed too theatrical and unrealistic. In “Why Negroes Don’t Like ‘Porgy and Bess,’” Era Bell Thompson, writing for the African-American magazine Ebony faulted the film for its anachronistic continuities with the opera.14 Both works, this reviewer felt, reinforced stereotypes. For Bell, the Goldwyn-Preminger extravaganza was merely “the same old catfish.” This is a topic to which we must return.

  The film was a triumph of love over money. Goldwyn had seen the opera in 1935 and wanted to bring it to the screen practically ever since, and he spared no effort to attract the finest African-American stars of the day. When the warehouse containing the sets was destroyed on the eve of production, he built new sets from scratch. In the end the film lost half of its $7 million investment and received only one of the three Academy Awards for which it was nominated, a Best Scoring award shared between André Previn and Ken Darby. When it was first released, Ira Gershwin was quoted as saying, “It is everything we hoped for.”15 Other early supporters of the film included Dorothy Heyward, who exclaimed that “the film exceeds our highest expectations.”16 George Gershwin’s great friend Kay Swift was enthusiastic about the film and agreed to give lectures and interviews on its behalf in twelve cities over a period of fifteen weeks.17 The film was broadcast on national television in 1967 and then withdrawn, along with the soundtrack, at the insistence of the Gershwin estate owners Ira and Leonore Gershwin in 1974, two years before the work returned to its operatic roots with the Houston Opera production. Sometime between 1959 and 1974, Ira and Leonore, or at least Ira, experienced a change of heart about the work.

  Since neither Poitier nor Dandridge was a singer, their songs were dubbed. Goldwyn attempted to complement their speaking voices musically and to use African-American opera singers whenever possible for all the major roles. The voice of Porgy was Robert McFerrin. Although today less well known than his son Bobby McFerrin, in his own time the senior McFerrin had an impressive and distinguished career. Among other achievements, he became the first black male to sing at the Metropolitan Opera—in January 1955, the same month that the first African-American female to perform there, Marian Anderson, made her debut. The following year McFerrin sang the title role, in Verdi’s Rigoletto, at the Met. The voice of Bess was Adele Addison, a versatile singer of opera and concert literature, perhaps best known today for her recordings of Baroque literature. Leontyne Price, the much-acclaimed Bess of the Breen-Davis stage Bess, was invited but declined to dub the role for Dandridge. In any event, Addison, whose operatic roles included Gilda and Micaela (Price was noted for her Aïda onstage and Carmen on recordings), possessed a lighter lyric soprano sound than Price and thus matched Dandridge’s speaking voice more closely.

  Sammy Davis Jr., Sporting Life, widely praised for his “new sinister spin to the character (thus establishing a precedent for later interpretations),” did his own singing for the film.18 Since contractual agreements precluded the use of his voice on Columbia records, however, Cab Calloway, the Breen-Davis Sporting Life, is the voice heard on the album soundtrack. Brock Peters (Crown), who played the falsely accused rapist in the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and sang the lead role in the Broadway revival and the screen version of Lost in the Stars in the 1970s, sang for himself in the Porgy and Bess film. The Maria was Pearl Bailey, the role created both in the 1927 play and the opera by the non-singing precocious rapper Georgette Harvey. Unlike Harvey, Bailey, a leading popular singer and one of the stars of St. Louis Woman on Broadway in the 1940s, was featured as a soloist to augment what was a choral number onstage, “I Can’t Sit Down.” One year earlier, in the film adaptation of South Pacific, Juanita Hall, acclaimed on Broadway for her creation of Bloody Mary, had suffered the indignity of being replaced on the soundtrack. Diahann Carroll as Clara, the mother who sings “Summertime,” did not sing Clara onstage, but she was nonetheless an able singer who before long would record an album of Porgy and Bess songs and even starred in a Tony Award–winning performance of Richard Rodgers’s No Strings; even so, she was similarly replaced on the Porgy soundtrack. Peters, Bailey, and Carroll, along with Dandridge were all alumni of Otto Preminger’s 1954 film Carmen Jones, the film adaptation of Hammerstein’s 1940s Broadway hit reinterpretation of Bizet’s opera Carmen.

  Sammy Davis Jr. eagerly campaigned for the role of Sporting Life but others, most prominently Harry Belafonte, who had played Joe (Don José) in Preminger’s Carmen Jones, turned down offers to appear in Goldwyn’s Porgy and Bess. Whether as a result of manipulation by his agent or Goldwyn, threats to his career, or a combination of these, the initially reluctant Poitier eventually capitulated. This is what he said at a news conference held on December 10, 1957, six months before shooting was scheduled to begin:

  I have never, to my conscious knowledge, done any
thing that I thought would be injurious to anyone—particularly to my own people. Now this is a personal choice. I do not pretend to be the conscience of all Negroes…. I was convinced irrevocably that it will be a great motion picture and tremendous entertainment and that it will be enjoyed by everyone—little and big—people of all races and creeds.19

  Poitier even went as far as asserting that Goldwyn and Mamoulian were “almost as sensitive” as he was to the dangers of portraying racial stereotypes in popular culture.

  The film inevitably shared some of the stereotypes that characterize the opera. The characters are uneducated; Sporting Life is a pimp, drug dealer, and an atheist; and Bess is a former prostitute and drug addict, but nonetheless a relatively sedate progenitor of Mimi in Jonathan Larson’s Rent.20 Crown is a murderer. Sporting Life’s evil qualities may have been magnified in the film, but Dandridge’s Bess was accused of being too elegant and gentle. In response to the Production Code, if not the demands of the story, Porgy seems to be sleeping on the floor and not directly adjacent to his own bed, which is occupied by Bess. Missing from the film are not only the “Buzzard Song” but other remnants of Porgy’s superstitions. Serena refuses Bess’s money for the burial of her husband Robbins, who was murdered in a drunken rage by Bess’s Crown; she later accuses Bess of being unfit to mother Clara’s baby. The film introduces a genuine Christian preacher on Kittiwah Island as a foil for Sporting Life’s blasphemous “It Ain’t Necessarily So” (followed by an exuberant, almost orgiastic dance that was not in the opera, in a jazz arrangement more 1950s than 1930s in style). These added touches clarify that Christian values are preferred to those of Sporting Life and his followers. The crooked lawyer Frazier is entirely absent, as is Archdale, the benevolent white man whose parents were slave owners who once owned the parents of Peter, the Honey Man. The film also greatly reduced the amount of dialect heard in both the spoken dialogue and the songs themselves. In short, Porgy and Bess may be rightly interpreted as full of arguably demeaning stereotypes, but the film version was demonstrably far less so. Nevertheless, after its initial release and nationally televised broadcast in 1967, the Gershwin estate chose to suppress this historic cinematic version of Gershwin’s masterpiece.