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

by Block, Geoffrey

  We realized that according to the classic standards of Broadway it [“Brush Up”] was a “boff” number—a show-stopper, if you please. Perhaps not a New Art Form, but definitely a must for the male patron. So instead of any throat-cutting [Porter had written that “Belle will probably cut her throat when she gets this”], we dropped the final scene (all Shakespeare) and a beautiful dance for which the stairs had been built. We had exactly three minutes left in which to finish our show.19

  According to Porter biographer George Eells, Porter’s decision to add another song, “Bianca,” for Harold Lang (Lucentio/Bill Calhoun) precipitated a strained correspondence between the Spewacks and the composer-lyricist.20 Since Lang, then known primarily as a dancer, was not yet the star he would become four years later as the lead in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey revival, he was not given a solo when Porter and the Spewacks were planning their scenario. Patricia Morison, the original Kate/Lilli, recalls, however, that Lang “had it in his contract that he had to have a song in the second act” and “pulled a snit” until Porter decided “to write something that’s going to be so bad they won’t keep it in.”21 Silly and parodistic of the old Gillette razor jingle (“Look Sharp”) as it is, “Bianca” added a great song and dance number for Lang and the show. Without “Bianca,” Bill Calhoun would only sing “Gee, I need you kid” near the end of “Why Can’t You Behave?” and a verse of “Tom, Dick or Harry,” and would remain virtually indistinguishable in musical importance from Bianca’s other suitors.22

  Bella Spewack fought and won a battle with the producers to retain “Were Thine That Special Face” and persuaded Porter himself to leave “Tom, Dick or Harry” in the show. Nevertheless, the libretto that the Spewacks originally sent to Porter contained far more of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew than audiences would eventually see in Kiss Me, Kate. Most notably, the May libretto included Shakespeare’s lines in act IV, scene 5, when Kate capitulates to Petruchio and agrees that the sun is the moon or vice versa according to his whim, and Kate’s complete final speech in act V, scene 2.23 Porter would collaborate with the bard on an abbreviated version of this latter speech to produce “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple.” Gone entirely from the May libretto is the Induction (often cut from Shakespeare productions as well). Also removed from Shakespeare is the character of the Widow, the woman who eventually marries Bianca’s suitor, Hortensio. The Widow’s departure led to the demise of her counterpart in the Baltimore company as well, Angela Temple.24

  The major dramatic departure from Shakespeare’s play, however, occurred after the May libretto draft. In May, when Lilli learns from Fred that she is no longer under the custody of the two gunmen and therefore free to abandon the Shrew play, she informs her ex-husband (Fred), without hesitation, that she will not desert:

  FRED: Well, Miss Vanessi, you may leave now.

  LILLI: I am not leaving!

  FRED: Sleeping Beauty [Harrison] waits in your dressing room.

  LILLI: Let him NAP!

  FRED: Don’t tell me the bloom is off (HE sneezes)—the rose?25

  A few lines later Fred and Lilli reprise “We Shall Never Be Younger,” a song that would soon be discarded. The two had sung a portion of this song together to conclude their duet in act I, scene 1, “It Was Great Fun the First Time,” and Lilli sang the whole song alone in her dressing room two scenes later. Although the two stormy actors are not yet fully reconciled, an audience could reasonably infer from the reprise of their shared song that Fred and Lilli are on the verge of starting a happier third act together.

  By December the Spewacks made a significant alteration in the dialogue to set up Fred’s reprise of the newly added “So in Love” to replace “We Shall Never Be Younger” in act I:

  FRED: You’re free to go. You don’t have to finish the show…. Aren’t you taking Sleeping Beauty with you?

  LILLI: Let him sleep.

  FRED: Don’t tell me the bloom is off—the rose? … Lilli, you can’t walk out on me now.

  LILLI: You walked out on me once.

  FRED: But I came back.

  (LILLI hesitates)

  DOORMAN: (From his cubbyhole) Your cab’s waiting, Miss Vanessi!

  (LILLI leaves.)

  After Lilli has walked out on both Fred and her sleeping (and, more significantly, non-singing) fiancé, Harrison Howell, Fred, “alone, reprises ‘So in Love.’” In the May libretto Lilli decides to stay in the show, the Spewacks were able to maintain their fidelity to Shakespeare, and Petruchio wins his wager in the last scene. In the revised libretto, however, Lilli leaves. What can Petruchio say if his offstage counterpart knows that he will lose the wager? Petruchio replies to Kate’s father: “I know she will not come. / The fouler fortune mine and there an end.” In contrast to both Shakespeare and the May libretto Lilli’s reappearance in December as a tamed Kate who will follow Petruchio’s bidding comes as much of a surprise to Petruchio as it does to the other Shrew players. To clarify the impact of her return, the stage directions tell us that Fred becomes “really moved, forgetting Shakespeare” and then utters a heartfelt “Darling” before returning to his Paduan character.

  The circumstances that led to the addition of “So in Love” sometime between June and November remain a mystery. Neither Spewack nor any Porter biographer has anything definitive to say about its appearance during auditions, but Morison recalled in 1990 that “‘So in Love’ was finished after I came into the show.”26 It is known, however, that “So in Love”—along with “Bianca” and “I Hate Men,” the last songs to be added to the show—replaced “We Shall Never Be Younger,” a song which all involved in the production agreed was a beautiful song but “too sad for a musical.”27 Like the song it superseded, the setting of “So in Love” is Lilli’s dressing room in act I (after Fred’s exit), and Lilli sings the song to herself unheard by her former husband. But the new song, unlike “We Shall Never Be Younger,” is unknown to Fred as well as unheard. The once-married couple (the show opens on the first anniversary of their divorce) had sung a few lines of the sad earlier song as a mood-changing coda to their earlier duet, “It Was Great Fun” (also dropped after May). In the May libretto Fred does not hear Lilli sing her confession and remains oblivious of her hope that “my darling might even need me,” but at least he knows the song that he has shared with his former romantic partner.28

  In chapter 5 it was noted that in the original 1936 production of On Your Toes, Sergei Alexandrovitch and Peggy Porterfield sing the reprise of “There’s a Small Hotel.” Audiences were asked to accept a convention in which characters somehow know songs introduced privately by others, in this case Phil Dolan II and Frankie Frayne. In 1983 Sergei and Peggy sing a reprise of “Quiet Night” instead, a song that they have actually heard. Nevertheless, modern audiences still are expected to accept the idea that the entire cast can manage to learn “There’s a Small Hotel” well enough to sing it the finale.

  In Kiss Me, Kate, Porter continues the tradition of characters singing songs they’re not really supposed to know. Certainly, the most significant example of this practice can be observed when Porter does not allow Lilli and Fred the opportunity to sing even a portion of “So in Love” together (as he did with the discarded “We Shall Never Be Younger”). Porter thus removes the means by which his characters can establish associations and connections with a song. When Fred reprises “So in Love” in act II, audiences might justifiably ask how he came to know it. Was he eavesdropping on Lilli when she sang it in act I?

  In contrast to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s powerful reuse of “If I Loved You” in Carousel, the reprise of “So in Love” puts the song above the drama, so that it becomes, as Joseph Kerman might say, a reprise “for the audience, not the play.”29 The dramatic impact of Billy Bigelow’s reprise of “If I Loved You” in Carousel stems at least in part from the audience’s memory of a shared interchange between Billy and Julie Jordan. The song belongs to them, they know it, and the audience knows that they know it. In
this isolated but telling dramatic detail in Kiss Me, Kate, Porter returns to the era he himself had done so much to establish: once again a great song (and its reprise) takes precedence over the dramatic integrity of a book. Despite this criticism, it might also be said that Fred’s reprise of “So in Love” demonstrates a credible bond and a communication with Lilli and serves a theatrical if not a literal truth.30

  Kiss Me, Kate and the Broadway Heroine

  In the revised ending Lilli (and, by extension, her Shrew counterpart, Katherine) willingly joins Fred and Petruchio in the final scene. She is free to leave both Fred (the frame of the musical) and his show (the musical within a musical). Although this ending took Porter and the Spewacks further away from their Shakespearean source, it also brought them perhaps a little closer to a modern view of the world. Lilli and Katherine return to their men as free agents, not as tamed falcons.

  Nevertheless, Katherine’s final Shakespearean speech, only “slightly altered by Cole Porter with apologies,” creates a serious challenge to a feminist interpretation.31 Katherine freely comes to Petruchio, but she then sings a speech almost invariably construed as degrading to women. Is Kiss Me, Kate therefore a sexist musical that should be banned, or at least restaged?

  Long before feminism became part of the mainstream of intellectual thought and social action in the late 1960s and early 1970s, critics have been put off by Shakespeare’s ending. For example, in 1897 George Bernard Shaw came to the following conclusion: “The last scene is altogether disgusting to modern sensibility. No man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the company of woman without feeling extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth. Therefore the play, though still worthy of a complete and efficient representation, would need, even at that, some apology.”32

  Nearly seventy years later Robert B. Heilman wrote that “the whole wager scene falls essentially within the realm of farce” and assumes that Shakespeare accepted the idea that women are subservient to men even if modern theatergoers do not: “The easiest way to deal with it is to say that we no longer believe in it, just as we no longer believe in the divine right of kings that is an important dramatic element in many Shakespeare plays.”33 In the 1990s, David Thornburn, during a panel discussion on “The Remaking of the Canon,” asked a conference speaker rhetorical questions that implicitly accused the Bard of harboring antediluvian views:

  Isn’t it true that Shakespeare actually believes that women are subservient to men in The Taming of The Shrew? Now it is incumbent on people who offer the reified conception of the canon, as you, Professor [Gertrude] Himmelfarb, do, to explain how you can justify or defend texts whose obvious, explicit themes are so deeply offensive to what you as a thinker and as a moral person would regard as acceptable.34

  Shakespeare has few modern defenders from the ranks of those who accept Katherine’s speech at face value. But one unexpected apology might be noted—Germaine Greer’s pioneering book on feminism, The Female Eunuch:

  The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and individuality: Bianca is the soul of duplicity, married without earnestness or good will. Kate’s speech at the close of the play is the greatest defense of Christian monogamy ever written. It rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend, and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both.35

  Other critics offer interpretations that bring the apparently sexist playwright closer to modern feminism. As Martha Andresen-Thom writes: “Extraordinary individuals learn to play with wit and wisdom the roles of sex and class that at once bind them and bond them. Subordination of woman to man, in this view, is an opportunity for a brilliant and worthy woman to transform limitation into an incentive for play.”36 The “play” interpretation is supported in Shakespeare’s text by the zeal with which Katherine takes the ball from Petruchio’s court and pretends that Lucentio’s elderly father Vincentio is a “young budding virgin, fair, and fresh, and sweet” (act IV, scene 5). At that moment Kate does not seem to be motivated by exhaustion and a realization that she cannot win, but by her newfound inspiration that play-acting can be fun rather than demeaning.37

  Evolving sensitivities toward white and African-American racial relations have been explored briefly in the discussions of the history of Show Boat and Porgy and Bess. Two Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals introduced during the period of the present survey deal with relations between whites and Asians, South Pacific and The King and I (albeit on white terms), and the reworked books of Anything Goes revivals discussed in chapter 3 demonstrate a progressively less stereotypical approach toward Chinese Americans.

  A discussion of sexism in Kiss Me, Kate opens the door to a broader discussion of how women featured in the present survey have fared. Show Boat’s Julie LaVerne and Magnolia Ravenal, Carousel’s Julie Jordan, and West Side Story’s Maria lose their men at some point in the musicals. Porgy’s Bess not only becomes a drug addict and a prostitute, she never gets to sing an aria by herself, even if she does have her own theme. The rich and powerful female executive in Lady in the Dark, Liza Elliott, must relinquish her post as head of a prestigious fashion magazine if she is to restore her lost glamour, femininity, and happiness, and complete her song, “My Ship.” Liza Elliott has merely exchanged her unpleasant dreams for a living nightmare of submission to a sexist man, Charley Johnson, the advertising manager of Liza’s magazine and her prosecuting attorney in the Circus Dream.

  Compared to what happens to most nineteenth-century tragic European opera heroines, however, Broadway’s women manage pretty well.38 In contrast to her operatic sisters, none of these heroines dies, although Julie LaVerne is reduced to alcoholism and almost certainly a premature death (offstage) in response to the loss of her man. Before Miss Saigon in the 1990s many Cinderellas but no Madame Butterflys inhabited Broadway musicals. Even Maria in West Side Story, unlike her Shakespearean counterpart, survives and is thereby presumably able to effect societal changes that will lead to a less violent world. After losing her man, Magnolia gains fame as an actress, while Julie Jordan demonstrates enormous strength of character before and after Billy’s death. Anna holds her own with the King of Siam and her actions lead to democratic reforms.

  Among our musical heroines Adelaide (Guys and Dolls) and Eliza Doolittle (My Fair Lady) perhaps do the least to placate modern sentiments. Adelaide’s saga of her fourteen-year engagement to Nathan Detroit (“Adelaide’s Lament”) and her advice to Sarah Brown to “marry the man today and change his ways tomorrow” might disappoint some. But audiences by and large have successfully distanced themselves from this cartoonish Runyonesque world and have been attending the Broadway and countless other revivals of this show in record numbers ever since. And although we shall see in chapter 12 that it is admittedly a tough call that Eliza should end up with (in the epilogue to Shaw’s Pygmalion she marries Freddy), her decision to return to the barely repentant misogynist Higgins in My Fair Lady might cause many to cringe in their seats. Porter and Spewack’s Katherine may, like Shakespeare, put her hand at Petruchio’s feet, but at least she is not asked to fetch his slippers.

  Porter never surpassed the brilliance or the popularity of Kiss Me, Kate. Two years later he completed Out of This World, a show that, before it was dropped during tryouts, included the now-perennial favorite “From This Moment On” (later interpolated by Ann Miller in the 1953 film version of Kiss Me, Kate discussed in chapter 14). After Out of This World, Porter created two successful Broadway shows, Can-Can (1953) and Silk Stockings (1955). He would complete his illustrious career with two film musicals, High Society in 1956 (which included “True Love,” introduced by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly in her final Hollywood role) and Les Girls in 1957. The next year, Porter’s last eight songs appeared in the television production Aladdin (scripted by One Touch of Venus librettist S. J. Perelman). His creative spirit broken after the deaths of his
mother and his wife and the amputation of a leg (he had already suffered more than thirty operations since 1937 when a horse he was riding crushed both his legs), Porter spent the remaining years before his own death in 1964 in self-imposed isolation.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  GUYS AND DOLLS AND THE MOST HAPPY FELLA

  The Greater Loesser

  For once nostalgia rings true. As Broadway and London revivals so frequently remind us, the 1950s were truly a glorious decade for the American musical. Following in their own luminous footsteps of the 1940s (Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific), Rodgers and Hammerstein continued to present their felicitous dramatic integrations of happy talk and happy tunes (and serious dramatic subjects) when they opened the new decade with their unprecedented fourth major hit musical, The King and I (1951), and closed it with a final hit collaboration, The Sound of Music (1959). In 1956, Lerner and Loewe presented My Fair Lady, a universally praised musical that eventually eclipsed Oklahoma! as the longest running Broadway musical. One year later the Laurents-Sondheim-Bernstein trilogy brought to Broadway West Side Story. The decade introduced many critical and popular successes, musicals like Wonderful Town (lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Bernstein), Kismet (music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest with more than a little help from the nineteenth-century Russian composer Alexander Borodin), Pajama Game and Damn Yankees (music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross), The Music Man (music, lyrics, and book by Meredith Willson), Fiorello! (lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, music by Jerry Bock), and Gypsy (book by Laurents, lyrics by Sondheim, and music by Jule Styne); two of these by Frank Loesser, that have become classics—Guys and Dolls (1950) and The Most Happy Fella (1956)—were the toast of Broadway in the 1990s and Guys and Dolls returned yet again to Broadway in 2009.