Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (117 page)

In the preliminary typescript Vera was nine years older (Joey found Vera’s name in the 1910 rather than the 1919 social register; see note 50). Lowell’s racket is more clearly explained, and Lowell participates in the song “Plant You Now, Dig You Later.” The typescript also contains some additional dialogue for Joey, Mike, and Melba to create a smoother transition for “Zip.” Following “Zip,” Melba takes a costume away from a show girl and poses for photographs with Joey and another chorus girl for her newspaper. This scene is based on Joey’s thirteenth letter to his successful bandleader friend Ted, “A Bit of a Shock.” Finally, the preliminary typescript contained several pages of dialogue in which Joey is fitted for additional clothes and purchases an automobile before Linda arrives to warn Vera about the blackmail attempt.

53
. Abbott,
“Mister Abbott,”
195.

54
. Rodgers biographer Frederick Nolan writes that “Larry Hart chortled with delight when he read those lines [“I love it / Because the laugh’s on me”] over the phone to Joshua Logan and explained with glee that they meant Joey was actually
on
Vera Simpson.” Frederick Nolan,
The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers and Hammerstein
(New York: Walker, 1978), 112–13 [2002 ed., 139]. When the song was broadcast, these lyrics were changed to “the laugh’s about me.”

55
. Rodgers,
Musical Stages
, 45. Although Goetschius does not discuss this particular point, his
Exercises in Melody-Writing
(first published in 1900) offers a systematic approach to a subject of great interest to Rodgers. Percy Goetschius,
Exercises in Melody-Writing
(New York: G. Schirmer, 1928).

56
. Stephen Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 84–85.

57
. The half step also appears conspicuously in “Talking to My Pal,” dropped during the out-of-town tryouts. Its presence, however, in “Plant You Now, Dig You Later,” a duet between Gladys and gangster agent Ludlow Lowell in the 1940 version, places a considerable strain on the theory that Rodgers is making a dramatic statement or creating subtle associations through a musical interval.

58
. Alec Wilder,
American Popular Song
. Several decades later, important books by Allen Forte and Steven E. Gilbert appeared, all of which discuss popular song with more analytical rigor (and more selectively) than Wilder. Allen Forte’s first study,
The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950
(1995), offers detailed and insightful analytical discussions of selected songs by Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen (roughly a half dozen songs for each songwriter); his more accessible
Listening to Classic American Popular Songs
(2001) examines a total of twenty-three songs by these composers and a few others written between the 1920s and the 1940s. Steven E. Gilbert offers a more specialized analytical study of Gershwin’s songs in
The Music of Gershwin
(1995).

59
. Wilder,
American Popular Song
, 216. In the essay cited above Sondheim clarifies why he is “down on” Hart. His principal objection was that the pyrotechnic lyricist created lyrics “so wrenching that the listener loses the sense of the line.” Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 83.

60
. Wilder,
American Popular Song
, 164.

Chapter 6:
The Cradle Will Rock

1
. Eric A. Gordon,
Mark the Music
, 538.

2
. Martin Esslin,
Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 80. As late as the 1990s, the Kurt Weill Foundation, still considered the Blitzstein version the only singable version of this work in English. After the 1976 Lincoln Center revival, the Foundation no longer permitted Ralph Manheim’s and John Willett’s harder edged, more literal translation to be staged. On the relative merits of the Blitzstein and Manheim-Willett productions see Kim H. Kowalke, “‘The Threepenny Opera’ in America,”
Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera
, ed. Stephen Hinton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78–119.

3
. See, for example, H. Wiley Hitchcock,
Music in the United States
, 225–27, and Lehman Engel,
The American Musical Theater
, 146–50.

4
. Aaron Copland,
The New Music 1900–1960
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 139–44.

5
. Wilfrid Mellers,
Music and Society
(New York: Roy Publishers, 1950), 211–20.

6
. Mellers,
Music in a New Found Land
, 415–28.

7
. Gordon,
Mark the Music
. Despite its length, Gordon’s study does not include an analytical component. See also the following: John O. Hunter, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock”; Robert James Dietz, “The Operatic Style of Marc Blitzstein”; John D. Shout, “The Musical Theater of Marc Blitzstein”; and Carol J. Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s
The Cradle Will Rock
. Since the first edition of
Enchanted Evenings
, the length of Gordon’s volume (603 pages) has been surpassed by at least two biographies of American composers, both by Howard Pollack:
Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999) [690 pages] and
George Gershwin
[884 pages].

8
. Gordon,
Mark the Music
, 141–46. Blitzstein’s account of the premiere was recorded on
Marc Blitzstein Discusses His Theater Compositions
, published as “Out of the Cradle,” and reprinted posthumously in the
New York Times
. For other eye-witness accounts of the events surrounding the first performance, see Archibald MacLeish, Introduction to
The Cradle Will
Rock
(New York: Random House, 1938), Howard Da Silva’s jacket notes for
The Cradle Will Rock
, MGM SE 4289–2–0C (1964), and especially John Houseman,
Run-Through
, 255–79.

9
. John Houseman notes the irony of Blitzstein’s troubles with Musicians’ Local #802, which demanded that an orchestra be paid to remain silent during
Cradle
’s run at the Windsor, a commercial Broadway theater. As Houseman explains, “For thirteen weeks, eight times a week, twelve union musicians with their instruments and a contractor-conductor with his baton arrived at the theater half an hour before curtain time, signed in and descended to the basement where they remained, engrossed in card games and the reading of newspapers, while their composer colleague exhausted himself at the piano upstairs.”
Run-Through
, 336.

10
.
The Cradle Will Rock
(New York: Random House, 1938) and
The Best Short Plays of the Social Theatre
, ed. William Kozlenko (New York: Random House, 1939), 113–67. A microfilm of the original Random House publication is included in the Blitzstein Papers of the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

11
.
The Cradle Will Rock
, Musicraft, album 18 (recorded April 1938) (reissued in a limited edition on American Legacy Records, T 1001 [December 1964]) and “Mark Blitzstein Musical Theatre Premières,” Pearl Gems 0009, 2 CDs (1998).

12
. Virgil Thomson, “In the Theatre,” 113. The
deus ex machina
ending, so clearly reminiscent of Brecht and Weill’s
The Threepenny Opera
, may have further prompted Weill to ask, “Have you seen my new opera?” See Minna Lederman, “Memories of Marc Blitzstein, Music’s Angry Man,”
Show
(June 1964): 18+.

13
. Brooks Atkinson, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ Officially Opens at the Mercury Theatre,”
New York Times
, December 6, 1937, 19.

14
. Edith J. R. Isaacs, “An Industry without a Product—Broadway in Review,”
Theatre Arts Monthly
22 (February 1938): 99.

15
. George Jean Nathan, “Theater,”
Scribner’s Magazine
103 (March 1938): 71.

16
. That’s Entertainment Records ZC TED 1105.

17
. In citing the German premiere in Recklinghausen (1984), the first
Cradle
performance in continental Europe, Gordon notes that Gershon Kinsley, the director and pianist of the 1964 production and recording, “rescored it for chamber ensemble, including synthesizer.” Gordon,
Mark the Music
, 539.

18
. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music,” 27.

19
. Ibid.

20
. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music, II,” 29.

21
. Ibid.

22
. Blitzstein, “New York Medley, Winter, 1935,”
Modern Music
13/2 (January–February 1936): 36–37.

23
. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music, II,” 29.

24
. Minna Lederman,
The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (Modern Music, 1924–1946
), I. S. A. M. Monograph, no. 18 (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1983), 67.

25
. Its published text and original conception called for the ten scenes to form an unbroken chain. Despite this, it became traditional to divide the work into two acts with a break after scene 6, a division observed in the Tams-Witmark Music Library rental score.

26
. Blitzstein, “Author of ‘The Cradle,’” 7.

27
. The quotation is taken from Brecht’s essay “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre.” See Bertolt Brecht, in
Brecht on Theatre
, John Willett, ed. and trans., 85.

28
. Brecht explores these ideas in “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre (Notes to the Opera
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
).” See Brecht, in
Brecht on Theatre
, John Willett, ed. and trans., 33–42.

29
. The “Croon–Spoon” portion of Scene Four is found in
The Cradle Will Rock
(New York: Random House, 1938), 52–58 (the piano-vocal score for this song is included) and Kozlenko,
The Best Short Plays
, 132–33.

30
. The word “nerts,” another expression for “nuts” (as in “crazy”) was, like spoon, also used in the early 1900s.
The New Dictionary of American Slang
, ed. Robert L. Chapman (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 298.

31
. In the event that devotees of Bing Crosby (1901–1977), perhaps the best-remembered and best-loved crooner, are reading this note, it should be mentioned that Crosby (and many other crooners) did not share Junior’s poor sense of pitch. Blitzstein might be indicting the content of Crosby’s songs and the legion of Crosby epigones, but not crooners in general or Crosby in particular. In fact, Gordon notes that Blitzstein had considered Crosby for the film
Night Shift
(1942) and that several years later he gladly worked with the crooner on the American Broadcasting Station in Europe. Gordon,
Mark the Music
, 216, 250, 274.

32
. At the risk of further complicating this analysis, it should be noted that the F center of Mister Mister’s melody in the A sections (harmonized by a D-minor seventh) is neither major nor minor but in the Lydian mode (F major with a raised fourth degree of the scale or B
instead of B
).