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

by Block, Geoffrey

  Most egregious is the elimination of “My Ship.” Since its completion is necessary to resolve Liza Elliott’s dramatic conflicts, its fragmentary instrumental-only and hummed presentation throughout the film is never resolved nor explained. According to bruce d. mcclung, who offers the most substantial historical and critical overview of the film, the executive producer, B. G. (Buddy) DeSylva, who earlier co-wrote the lyrics for the hit show of the 1920s, Good News! as part of the team of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, did not like the song (or much of the score, for that matter) and overruled director Mitchell Leisen’s wishes.41 Despite its flaws, the film succeeded at the box office where “it racked up $4.3 million, making it the fourth-largest grossing film of 1944.”42 After that, its fate rivaled that of its stage successor by retreating even more deeply into darkness and near oblivion.

  One Touch of Venus (1948)

  The initial idea was a film musical starring the original Venus, Mary Martin, and featuring the original dances of Agnes de Mille. Mary Pickford, a leading actress from the silent era and early talkies and a co-founder of United Artists in 1919, had purchased the screen rights while the hit show was still running in 1943. After a series of delays, the rights were sold to Universal in 1947 and the revamped film, directed by William A. Seiter and produced by Seiter and Lester Cowan, was released in 1948 without the services of either Martin or de Mille, or even much of Weill and Nash, a torso of the show’s full form as seen on the Broadway stage.43 Perhaps the greatest disappointment is that viewers of this adaptation hear only three songs from the tuneful score, “Speak Low,” “That’s Him,” and “Foolish Heart,” none of which are placed in their stage contexts and are only partially sung by their rightful owners. To add injury to insult, in the song last named, the words of Ogden Nash are replaced by those of Ann Ronell, including a new title (“Don’t Look Now but My Heart Is Showing”). Even though the total film length adds up to only eighty-two minutes, one will have to wait thirty-three minutes before hearing the first of these songs, “Speak Low.” “That’s Him” appears about forty-four minutes into the film, “Foolish Heart” (“Don’t Look Now”) about sixteen minutes later, and a reprise of “Speak Low” appears five minutes before the end.

  Although the story is roughly equivalent to the stage version, several of the plot machinations are quite different. Rodney (renamed Eddie) Hatch has been given a new male friend Joe Grant, played by one of the two actors whose actual voices are heard on the soundtrack, Dick Haymes, a popular singer of the day who played a major character in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair three years earlier.44 Considering how little they sing together, Rodney spends a considerable amount of time onscreen with Venus (Ava Gardner). Onstage, Gloria (Olga San Juan, the other singer in the film) disappears for long stretches; now she shares music of the film with Joe, and, not surprisingly, they gradually fall in love. As in the stage version, Rodney will end up with a Venus look-alike, this one by the name of Venus Jones (also played by Gardner just as Mary Martin played Venus and her earthling surrogate onstage) after the real Venus has returned to the land of the Gods and her earthly remains have become re-solidified as a statue. The popular Haymes naturally sings in two of the three songs, the second of which, formerly a solo for Venus (Martin), is now a double duet in two juxtaposed scenes, one between Eddie and Venus, the other between Joe and Gloria, an interesting cinematic flourish. The other major new plot wrinkle revolves around Whitfield (onstage Whitelaw) Savory’s gradual awareness that the love of his life is not Venus but his assistant Molly, played with characteristic acerbic wit by Eve Arden.

  The role of Hatch was assigned to the non-singing Robert Walker. In recent years Walker had acted the role of two great songwriters, Jerome Kern in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) and Johannes Brahms in Song of Love (1947) and was convincing as the milquetoast window dresser who brings the statue of Venus to life with an impulsive kiss. Gardner’s voice was dubbed by Eileen Wilson; three years later in the 1951 remake of Show Boat, Gardner’s Julie LaVerne would be dubbed by Annette Warren on screen (although strangely Gardner’s own voice is heard on the Show Boat soundtrack album). Not long after making her first major film impression playing opposite Burt Lancaster in The Killers (1946), based on a Hemingway story, Gardner was invariably assigned to roles where physical beauty was a major prerequisite. Ephraim Katz in The Film Encyclopedia offers the following description that might help explain why Gardner was chosen to play Venus: “A sensuous, sloe-eyed beauty, with a magnetic, tigresslike quality of sexuality, she replaced Rita Hayworth in the late 40s as Hollywood’s love goddess [italics mine] and occupied that position until the ascent of Marilyn Monroe in the mid-50s.”45

  Although it remains not only a poor replica of the Venus book, lyrics, and score seen and heard onstage four years earlier, the musical film Venus is not without its charms as a story. Walker, Arden, and Tim Conway as Whitfield carry off their respective characters with aplomb, Haymes sings his two songs mellifluously, and the visual fluctuations between Venus/Eddie and Gloria/ Joe in “Foolish Heart” are welcome. The film also contains some chase scenes that recall the early Keystone Cops routines, which may be attributed to the fact that the film’s director William Seiter was himself once a Keystone Cop.

  After experiencing the indignity of having songs deleted and, even worse, replaced, in Lady in the Dark, composer Kurt Weill insisted on a contract for One Touch of Venus that would include a “non-interpolation clause,” in which no music by other composers could be inserted. As he explained in a letter to his agent, Leah Salisbury, “All the songs in the picture have to be taken from the score, and the underscoring has to be based on themes from the original score.”46 The studio honored these conditions to the letter; the end result was a film adaptation that contained only the shell of the original score (and no new songs by others to fill in) and a few Weill songs inserted here and there between long stretches of dialogue.

  This survey of film adaptations from Show Boat to One Touch of Venus reveals much about Hollywood’s response to their Broadway sources. The goal during these years was to entertain and engage a film audience, not to offer a replica of a sacrosanct stage artifact. Only the Nunn version of Porgy and Bess, which appeared nearly sixty years later, comes close to depicting a Broadway stage version, but even here the very completeness of the film, ironically, belies its “authenticity” (a problematic term) since in 1935 attendees at the opera’s first performances saw and heard a version of the work perhaps forty minutes shorter. Most of the films discussed in this chapter present heavily revised books and brutally abbreviated scores, sometimes with additional music by the original or newly contracted composers, and sometimes with recycled music from the original songwriter’s trunk placed in new contexts. It is probably not an exaggeration to assert that with the exception of Show Boat, these adaptations fall short of the best original films that use the music of the composers and lyricists featured in act I of Enchanted Evenings. We will conclude this chapter with a summary of other adaptations in relation to the original musicals with scores by Kern, Porter, the Gershwins, and Rodgers and Hart.47

  • KERN

  Of this quartet, Kern was probably the most frequently adapted with reasonable success. In fact, a number of films retained a significant amount of his music, including The Cat and the Fiddle and Music in the Air in 1934 and Sweet Adeline and Roberta in 1935.

  • PORTER

  We have already noted that the adaptation of Gay Divorce (renamed The Gay Divorcée) salvaged only one song, “Night and Day.” Film adaptations of Something for the Boys and Mexican Hayride contained no songs by Porter; Paris and Fifty Million Frenchmen confined Porter’s music to background noise; Let’s Face It offered two songs; Dubarry Was a Lady, three; and Panama Hattie, four. For worthy films with Porter’s music—prior to the 1953 adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate discussed in chapter 14—one would have to turn to the original film musicals Born to Dance (1936), Rosalie (1937), and Broadway Melody of 1940, and the mo
dern-day biopic De-Lovely (2004), the latter chock full of stylistically updated Porter chestnuts starring Kevin Kline as the composer-lyricist.

  • THE GERSHWINS

  The films of George and Ira Gershwin were similarly disappointing as Broadway adaptations. Strike Up the Band offers only the title tune. At least the 1943 Girl Crazy, also starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, had the sense to retain six of the 1930 original’s fourteen songs, plus the Gershwin hit originally composed in 1924 for Fred Astaire in Lady, Be Good!, “Fascinating Rhythm.” Funny Face (1957), with Astaire reprising his original stage role thirty years later, satisfies as a film musical, but with only five songs from the original, “Clap Yo’ Hands” from another show, three interpolated song numbers by Roger Edens and Leonard Gershe, and a new scenario and script, it falls far short as a reliable adaptation of the Gershwin musical as it appeared onstage. Fortunately, George lived long enough to complete outstanding film scores the year he died (1937) for Shall We Dance with Astaire and Rogers and Damsel in Distress with Astaire, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and the non-dancing Joan Fontaine. Long after George’s death his music and Ira’s lyrics served as the centerpiece for another fine original musical, An American in Paris (1951), produced by Arthur Freed, directed by Vincente Minnelli, to an award-winning screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, and starring its choreographer Gene Kelly.

  • RODGERS AND HART

  Of the many films adapted from the stage musicals of Rodgers and Hart, none rivaled the increasingly recognized classic original film Love Me Tonight (1932), produced and directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, and Charles Ruggles. Of the rest, Too Many Girls, directed by its Broadway director George Abbott and starring four members of the original stage cast, managed to salvage half of the score, seven songs—if you have been counting, this is close to a record for film adaptations. Girls also added a new instant classic by Rodgers and Hart, “You’re Nearer,” and even kept much of the original libretto intact. Five of the six songs from Rodgers and Hart’s Jumbo can be heard in the 1962 film, which retains the basic plot and, twenty-seven years after its Broadway debut, its original star, Jimmy Durante.

  In the film adaptation of On Your Toes (Warner Bros. 1938) none of the songs are sung, and only four tunes are heard in unobtrusive underscoring (“There’s a Small Hotel,” “Quiet Night,” and “On Your Toes”). On the other hand, Toes does contain the “Princesse Zenobia” and “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballets with the original choreography by George Balanchine and featuring Vera Zorina. About thirty seconds of the latter can be seen in the documentary Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds, but the film itself was never released on either VHS or DVD.48 The best place to find “Slaughter” on film is the athletic duet between Rodgers and Hart stage alums Gene Kelly (the original Pal Joey) and Vera Ellen (Mistress Evelyn in the 1943 revival of Connecticut Yankee) on the easily obtainable Rodgers and Hart biopic Words and Music (1948).49

  Although three of the films discussed in this chapter are difficult to locate and all offer distortions of one kind or another, these film adaptations offer their share of compensations. In particular, Show Boat and Anything Goes let us see some of the original stars or other actors and actresses associated with early productions. Seeing and hearing Charles Winninger, the original Broadway Cap’n Andy, Paul Robeson, the original London Joe, or Ethel Merman, the original Reno Sweeney sing their songs in a film that is roughly contemporaneous to their theatrical performances is worth the time it takes to find these films. Some of the shows have even retained a surprising amount of original dialogue, even when the plots are greatly altered. Although they are destined to disappoint musically they are worth getting to know, as long as you know what you’re missing.

  • ACT II •

  THE BROADWAY MUSICAL AFTER OKLAHOMA!

  CHAPTER NINE

  CAROUSEL

  The Invasion of the Integrated Musical

  Working under the premise that success begets success, Rodgers and Hammerstein followed the phenomenal triumph of Oklahoma! (1943) by assembling much of the same production team for their second hit, Carousel (1945). Like their historic opening salvo, Carousel was produced by the Theatre Guild and supervised by Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner, the pair who had given Rodgers and Hart their big break in 1925, The Garrick Gaieties. For their director the Theatre Guild selected Rouben Mamoulian, who had directed Oklahoma! as well as Rodgers and Hart’s classic film Love Me Tonight in 1932, the play Porgy in 1927, and the opera Porgy and Bess in 1935 (both of the latter were also Theatre Guild productions). Agnes de Mille was again asked to choreograph, and Miles White designed the costumes.

  Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom, which premiered in Hungary in 1909, had been successfully presented by the Guild in 1921 with the legendary Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut, and more recently in 1940 in a production that starred Ingrid Bergman and Burgess Meredith. After some initial resistance, Molnár, who had allegedly turned down an offer by Puccini (and Weill and perhaps Gershwin as well) to make an opera out of his play, reportedly agreed in 1944 to allow the Theatre Guild to adapt his play: “After fifteen months, all the legal technicalities involved in the production of the musical version of Liliom were settled last week.”1 The New York Post went on to say that “the smallest percentage, eight tenths of one percent, go to Ferenc Molnár, who merely wrote the play.”

  Rodgers and Hammerstein. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM

  The idea for setting Molnár’s play came from the Theatre Guild, who naturally wanted to reproduce a second Oklahoma! Writing in the New York Times four days before the birth of the new sibling, Hammerstein recalled Helburn and Langner propositioning the creators of their previous blockbuster in Sardi’s “toward the end of January, 1944.” The main obstacle for Hammerstein was the Hungarian setting. When, the following week, the persistent Helburn offered a more promising alternative locale in Louisiana, the required dialect also proved to be “a disconcerting difficulty” for the librettist. Sources agree that the workable idea to “transplant the play to the New England coast” came from Rodgers and that the starting point for the show was Billy Bigelow’s “Soliloquy.” In Musical Stages Rodgers wrote that once the team had conceived “the notion for a soliloquy in which, at the end of the first act, the leading character would reveal his varied emotions about impending fatherhood,” the central problem of how to sing Liliom was resolved.2

  Although their contract allowed Rodgers and Hammerstein considerable latitude in their adaptation, they were nonetheless relieved to learn during an early rehearsal run-through that the playwright had given his blessing to their changes, including a greatly altered ending.3 In the play, a defiant Liliom does not regret his actions and is doomed to purgatory for fifteen years. He is then required to return to earth for a day to atone for his sins. While on earth, disguised as a beggar, Liliom slaps his daughter when she refuses the star he stole from heaven; she sends him away, and the play ends on this pessimistic note. In the musical a much more sympathetic Liliom, renamed Billy Bigelow, comes to earth by choice, appears as himself, and can choose either to be seen or to remain invisible. As in the play he has stolen a star and slaps his daughter Louise, but now the slap feels like a kiss (in the play it felt like a caress). In stark contrast to the play, the musical’s final scene shows Billy, in his remaining moments on earth, helping his “little girl” at her graduation to overcome her loneliness and misery. To the inspirational strains of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” with its somewhat dubious advice if taken literally (“when you walk through a storm keep your chin up high”), Louise finds the courage to live, Julie realizes that her marriage—in Molnár’s less family-oriented play she remained Billy’s mistress—was worth the pain. Billy redeems his soul, and even the most jaded of contemporary audiences find themselves shedding real tears.

  Aud
itions began in February 1945 and tryouts took place the following months in New Haven (March 22–25) and Boston (March 27–April 15). Elliot Norton describes the principal dramatic alteration made during the Boston tryouts:

  The original heaven of Carousel was a New England parlor, bare and plain. In it sat a stern Yankee, listed on the program as He. At a harmonium, playing softly, sat his quiet consort, identified as She. Later some observers [including Rodgers] referred to this celestial couple as Mr. and Mrs. God….

  Richard Rodgers, walking back to the hotel with his collaborator afterwards, put it to Oscar Hammerstein bluntly:

  “We’ve got to get God out of that parlor!”

  Mild Oscar Hammerstein agreed.

  “I know you’re right,” he said. “But where shall I put Him?”

  “I don’t care where you put Him,” said Richard Rodgers. “Put Him up on a ladder, for all I care, only get Him out of that parlor!”

  So Oscar Hammerstein put Him up on a ladder. He discarded the sitting room too, and put his deity into a brand new sequence. On a ladder in the backyard of heaven, He became the Star-Keeper, polishing stars which hung on lines strung across the floor of infinity, while a sullen Billy Bigelow looked and listened to his quiet admonitions.4

  Carousel’s premiere took place at the Majestic Theatre on April 19, and the show closed a little more than two years later on May 24, 1947, after a run of 890 performances. Following a successful national tour, Carousel began another impressive run of 566 performances at London’s Drury Lane on June 7, 1950 (closing on October 13, 1951). Major New York revivals took place at the New York City Center Light Opera in 1954, 1957, and 1967; at the Music Theater of Lincoln Center in 1965; and in 1994 with an acclaimed New York staging based on the Royal National Theater of Great Britain production.