Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber
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Come we must return (Phantom) Recitative
Outline of The Phantom of the Opera Act II, Scene 7
Scene 7: “Don Juan Triumphant”
Thematic Material in Don Juan Triumphant
Don Juan A Those who tangle with Don Juan motive
Don Juan B I remember motive
Don Juan C The Phantom at his organ
Don Juan D I have brought you motive
Don Juan E Gypsy motive (Furtively, we’ll scoff and quaff)
Don Juan F No thoughts within her head
Orchestra (Introduction)
Turbulent variation on the Those who tangle with Don Juan motive (Don Juan A) followed by I remember (Don Juan B)
CHORUS
Here the sire may serve the dam (based on the I remember motive) (Don Juan B)
CARLOTTA AND CHORUS
Poor young maiden! For the thrill (loosely based on Don Juan A)
Tangled in the winding sheets! (rhythm of the Phantom at his organ motive, Don Juan C)
Don Juan triumphs once again! (I have brought you motive)
ORCHESTRA
Gypsy motive in 7/8 time, Don Juan D, followed by a variation of Don Juan
A DON JUAN (SIGNOR PIANGI)
Passarino, faithful friend (Don Juan A, extended)
Furtively, we’ll scoff and quaff (Don Juan E)
I shall say: “come—hide with me” (Don Juan E in vocal line; Don Juan A in orchestra)
PASSARINO
Poor thing hasn’t got a chance! (based on Don Juan A)
AMINTA (CHRISTINE)
No thoughts within her head (Don Juan F)
Reused in final lair scene on the words “The tears I might have shed for your dark fate grow cold, and turn to tears of hate …”
DON JUAN (now the PHANTOM)
For the trap is set and waits for its prey (variation on Don Juan A)
You have come here (Don Juan D)
I have brought you (Don Juan D)
SONG: “The Point of No Return”
AMINTA (CHRISTINE)
You have brought me (Don Juan D) SONG: “The Point of No Return”
BOTH
SONG: “The Point of No Return”
PHANTOM
SONG: “All I Ask of You” (last part of the song)
NOTES
Preface to the First Edition
1. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Song Book (New York: Simon & Schuster and Williamson Music, 1956); Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: Modern Library Association, 1959).
2. Like other Broadway-loving families, especially those residing on the west side of the country, it took the release of the West Side Story movie with Natalie Wood for us to become fully cognizant of this show.
3. “The World of Stephen Sondheim,” interview, “Previn and the Pittsburgh,” channel 26 television broadcast, March 13, 1977.
4. A chronological survey of Broadway texts from the 1950s to the 1980s might include the following: Cecil Smith, Musical Comedy in America; Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater; David Ewen, New Complete Book of the American Musical Theatre; Ethan Mordden, Better Foot Forward; Abe Laufe, Broadway’s Greatest Musicals (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1977); Martin Gottfried, Broadway Musicals; Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy; Richard Kislan, The Musical (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980); Gerald Bordman, American Musical Comedy, American Musical Theatre, American Musical Revue, and American Operetta; Alan Jay Lerner, The Musical Theatre: A Celebration; and Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin.’
5. See Gerald Bordman, American Musical Comedy, American Musical Revue, and American Operetta, and Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater.
6. Miles Kreuger, “Show Boat”: The Story of a Classic American Musical; Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess.” The literature on Porgy and Bess contains a particularly impressive collection of worthwhile analytical and historical essays by Richard Crawford, Charles Hamm, Wayne Shirley, and Lawrence Starr (see the Selected Bibliography).
7. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical; Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals.
8. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama; Paul Robinson, Opera & Ideas.
9. Peter Kivy, Osmin’s Rage.
10. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 205.
11. Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 6–7.
12. Ibid., 37. Quotation from Bernstein, 147. For a more detailed exploration of Swain and Banfield and the differences between opera and musicals, see my review essay of Banfield in Block, Review essay, 1996.
A New Preface
1. Several of the revivals on this list that appeared before 1995 were discussed in the first edition.
2. Gerald Bordman, American Operetta, American Musical Comedy, and American Musical Revue; Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater.
3. Engel, The American Musical Theater, xix, 35.
4. Ibid., 35.
5. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical.
6. Geoffrey Block, “Integration,” and Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama.
7. Block, “Reading Musicals.”
8. The volumes in Yale Broadway Masters and, in the future, Oxford’s Broadway Legacies, are among recent attempts to fully engage the musical component of a musical. Six volumes of the former series were published between 2003 and 2009: Richard Rodgers (Block), Andrew Lloyd Webber (John Snelson), Jerome Kern (Stephen Banfield); Sigmund Romberg (William A. Everett), Frank Loesser (Thomas L. Riis), and John Kander and Fred Ebb (James Leve). George Gershwin (Larry Starr) is scheduled to appear in 2010. Other important recent books in the field that face the music, even when it is not the central concern, include Tim Carter’s “Oklahoma!,” Raymond Knapp’s The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity and The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, bruce d. mcclung’s Lady in the Dark, and Mark Eden Horowitz’s Sondheim on Music.
9. Charles Hamm, “Omnibus Review.” The five books reviewed are Jack Gottlieb, Funny It Doesn’t Sound Jewish; Mark N. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical; John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre; Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity; and Andrew Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical.
10. For three thoughtful books highly critical of megamusicals see Mark N. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical; Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama; and Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse. Even Barry Singer, in a book that is generally sympathetic to musicals of the past thirty years, has little positive to say about Lloyd Webber (Singer, Ever After). For positive critical assessments in the scholarly literature see John Snelson’s Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jessica Sternfeld’s The Megamusical.
11. George Gershwin (Rodney Greenberg, Howard Pollack, Wayne Schneider); Oscar Hammerstein (Amy Asch); Moss Hart (Steven Bach); Jerome Kern (Stephen Banfield); Arthur Laurents (Arthur Laurents); Frank Loesser (Robert Kimball and Steve Nelson, Thomas L. Riis); Cole Porter (William McBrien); Jerome Robbins (Deborah Jowitt, Greg Lawrence); Richard Rodgers (Geoffrey Block, William G. Hyland, Meryle Secrest); Rodgers and Hammerstein (Tim Carter, Frederick Nolan); and Kurt Weill (Foster Hirsch, Lys Symonette and Kim Kowalke, bruce d. mcclung).
12. Stephen Banfield, Jerome Kern; Todd Decker, “Do You Want to Hear a Mammy Song,” and a forthcoming volume on Show Boat in Oxford’s Broadway Legacies.
13. Howard Pollack, George Gershwin; and Larry Starr, George Gershwin.
14. bruce d. mcclung, “Lady in the Dark”; and Tim Carter, “Oklahoma!”
15. Thomas L. Riis, Frank Loesser.
16. This footnote indicates the points of overlap between Knapp, Miller, and Swain and the musicals discussed in the first edition of Enchanted Evenings:
SHOW BOAT (Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity [Knapp 2005]; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
ANYTHING GOES (Knapp 2005)
PORGY AND BESS (Knapp 2005
; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
THE CRADLE WILL ROCK (Knapp 2005; Miller, Rebels with Applause)
PAL JOEY (Miller, Rebels with Applause)
LADY IN THE DARK (Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity [Knapp 2006])
CAROUSEL (Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
KISS ME, KATE (Knapp 2006; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
GUYS AND DOLLS (Knapp 2005; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
MY FAIR LADY (Knapp 2006; Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story”; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
WEST SIDE STORY (Knapp 2005; Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story”; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
17. Kim Kowalke, Review essay.
18. Banfield, Jerome Kern, 254–56.
19. Quoted in Pauline Kael, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (New York: Plume, 1994): 37.
20. Ibid.
21. For a thorough and helpful introduction to Cabaret and the work of Kander and Ebb as a whole, see Leve, John Kander and Fred Ebb.
22. Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White (lyrics by David Zippel) ran nineteen months in London but only 108 performances in New York in 2004. Sondheim’s Road Show (formerly Bounce, Wise Guys, and Gold), with a book by John Weidman, and directed and designed by John Doyle, played a two-month Off-Broadway engagement at the end of 2008.
Chapter 1: Introduction
1. Book musicals contain a narrative and are represented by three discernible types: operas, operettas, and musical comedies. Operas, which come in various styles, including rock, are for the most part sung throughout. Musical comedies normally utilize contemporary urban settings with matching vernacular dialogue and music, the latter often incorporating jazz. Operettas are generally set in exotic locations, including early Americana (e.g., New England in the 1870s in Carousel and Oklahoma Territory “just after the turn of the century”) and typically utilize appropriate regional dialects and such nineteenth-century European genres as waltzes and polkas or a non-jazz musical vernacular that somehow sounds American. The largest category of non-book musicals is the revue, which may possess a unifying theme but only rarely a clearly delineated plot. In place of a book, most revues consist of a somewhat loose collection of skits (usually topical), along with dances and songs, often composed by a plethora of writers and composers.
2. Miles Kreuger, “Some Words about ‘Show Boat,’” 18.
3. A Trip to Chinatown contained “Reuben and Cynthia,” “The Bowery,” and Charles K. Harris’s “After the Ball”; Little Johnny Jones introduced “The Yankee Doodle Boy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.”
4. Both Irene and No, No, Nanette (670 and 321 performances, respectively, in their inaugural runs) enjoyed popular revivals in the early 1970s (No, No, Nanette in 1971 [861 performances] and Irene in 1973 [604 performances]).
5. The film version of Naughty Marietta (1935) starred Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, and The Student Prince (1954) featured the voice of Mario Lanza dubbing for Edmund Purdom.
6. Included among these early hits are the following: Berlin (Watch Your Step [1914]); Kern (Princess Shows [1915–1918], Sally [1920], and Sunny [1925]); Porter (numerous interpolated songs in shows by other composers between 1919 and 1924 before making a hit with Paris in 1928); Hammerstein (Wildflower [1923], Rose-Marie [1924], Sunny [1925], and The Desert Song [1926]); George and Ira Gershwin (Lady, Be Good! [1924], Oh, Kay! [1926], and Funny Face [1927]); and Rodgers and Hart (The Garrick Gaieties, Dearest Enemy, [1925], and A Connecticut Yankee [1927]); and Weill (Die Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera] [1927, in Germany]). Several months before the premiere of Show Boat, the team of Ray Henderson (music) and B. G. DeSylva and Lew Brown (lyrics) presented their first book musical hit, Good News.
7. The term “anxiety of influence” is borrowed from literary critic Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
8. Richard Crawford, The American Musical Landscape, 87.
9. For a valuable perspective on the development of cultural hierarchies, authentic versus accessible approaches to Shakespeare, and “the sacralization of culture” in nineteenth-century America, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
10. Charles Hamm, “The Theatre Guild Production.”
11. Kerman, Opera as Drama. While under current attack for its elitism and restricted vision of dramatic worthiness, Kerman’s study remains a central text for any exploration of the relationship between music and drama. Another excellent and less judgmental study of opera with concepts that can be applied to Broadway musicals is Robinson.
12. Kivy, Osmin’s Rage, 10–11.
13. Some exceptions are Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals; Block, “Frank Loesser’s Sketchbooks”; Hamm, “The Theatre Guild Production”; Carol Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock”; and Wayne Shirley, “Porgy and Bess” and “Reconciliation on Catfish Row.”
14. The literature on gender studies in music is considerable and growing exponentially. The most influential work to appear is probably Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
15. The top forty also includes four musicals that premiered before Show Boat (The Student Prince, Blossom Time, Sally, and Rose-Marie, nos. 31, 33, 37, and 40 in the 1920–1959 list) and four that first appeared after West Side Story (The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Fiorello!, and Gypsy, nos. 4, 6, 20, and 26 in the 1920–1959 list).
16. West Side Story (1980); My Fair Lady (1981, 1993); Show Boat (1983, 1994); On Your Toes (1983); The Cradle Will Rock (1983); Porgy and Bess (1983, 1986, 1989); Anything Goes (1987); The Most Happy Fella (1992); Guys and Dolls (1992–1994); and Carousel (1994). See A New Preface for major New York and London performances after 1994.
17. The figure 467 is deceptively low since Lady in the Dark returned to Broadway after a tour for another 310 performances. The grand total of 777 performances would place this show as the ninth longest running musical of the 1940s and no. 20 in the 1920–1959 list. See Lys Symonette and Kim H. Kowalke, eds., Speak Low, 274.
18. In any event, Pal Joey’s revival (542 performances) falls only five performances and one show below the top forty, and the combined number of performances of its two runs (916) would place it just below Bells Are Ringing at No. 14.
19. Before Porgy and Bess arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 1986, no American opera had been performed there more than fifteen times. See Carl Johnson, “American Opera at the Met: 1883–1983,” The American Music Teacher 35/4 (February–March 1984): 20–25. Virgil Thomson’s and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), which premiered on Broadway one year before Porgy and Bess, lasted only forty-eight performances.
20. The composers, composer-lyricists, or teams that produced two or more musicals in “The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959” include the following: Adler and Ross (Damn Yankees, Pajama Game); Arlen and Harburg (Bloomer Girl, Jamaica); Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Madam); Rome (Fanny, Wish You Were Here); Styne (Bells Are Ringing, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Gypsy, High Button Shoes); and Wright and Forrest (Kismet, Song of Norway). Also missing is Gene de Paul’s Li’l Abner (with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) that debuted between the premieres of Show Boat and West Side Story. The contributions by Rudolf Friml, Ray Henderson, and Sigmund Romberg preceded Show Boat; Meredith Willson’s The Music Man followed West Side Story by two months.
21. Since Rodgers and Hammerstein produced Annie Get Your Gun, this leaves Kiss Me, Kate as the only show among the top five musicals of the 1940s that was not created or produced by the ubiquitous team.
22. Engel, The American Musical Theater, 35–36.
23. See Kurt Gänzl and Andrew Lamb, Gänzl’s Book of the Musical Theatre; Daniel Kingman, American Music: A Panorama; and
Herbert Kupferberg, The Book of Classical Music Lists (New York: Facts on File, 1985).
24. Similar criteria motivate Gänzl’s criteria of selection: “Firstly, we chose those pieces which a theatre-goer would be likely to encounter on the current stages of … America, the hits of today and the hits of yesterday which have been brought back for the further enjoyment of the theatre-going public. Secondly, we chose those shows which had a notable success in their own times, those which have left a particular legacy of favourite songs, those which are significant historically or artistically and those which are just plain good and which deserve a reappearance on the modern stage. Thirdly, we added our own particular favourites among the shows of yesteryear which we hope, if we bring them to your notice, might become favourites of yours as well.” Gänzl and Lamb, Gänzl’s Book of the Musical Theatre, p. xii.