Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (119 page)

34
. Gershwin annotations to “The Third Dream Sequence Section 2.”

35
. Ibid. In his annotations of November 3, 1967, appended to the texts for “Three Discarded Songs,” Gershwin briefly explains their originally intended place in the show. “Unforgettable,” recorded as “You Are Unforgettable” on
Ben Bagley’s Kurt Weill Revisited
(Painted Smiles PSCD 108) and “It’s Never Too Late to Mendelssohn” were deleted from the second dream (some of the lyrics of the latter were retained). “Bats about You” “was written for a flash-back scene and supposedly was a song of the late Twenties, sung at a Mapleton High School graduation Dance.” In
Kurt Weill: A Handbook
, Drew lists “Bats about You” and “You Are Unforgettable” under unlocated songs.

36
. Ira Gershwin,
Lyrics on Several Occasions
, 187. Arthur and Francis were the given names of George and Ira’s lesser known younger siblings. The conclusion of the Wedding Dream (including the Mendelssohn Endelssohn and Lohengrin and Bear It material) is borrowed from another wedding song, “Bride and Groom,” in the act I finale of Ira’s collaboration with his brother George,
Oh, Kay!
(1926), starring Lawrence as Lady Kay.

37
. Drew,
Kurt Weill: A Handbook
, 274. See also Drew, “Reflections,” especially 243–48.

38
. Drew,
Kurt Weill: A Handbook
, 220.

39
. Michael Morley offers a possible “common denominator” between “In der Jugend Gold’nem Schimmer” and its reincarnations in
Marie Galante
and
One Touch of Venus
. See Morley, “‘I Cannot/Will Not Sing the Old Songs Now’: Some Observations on Weill’s Adaptation of
Popular Song Forms,” in Kim H. Kowalke and Horst Edler, eds.,
A Stranger Here Myself
, 221.

40
. Kowalke,
Kurt Weill in Europe
, 117.

41
. Originally published as “Über den gestischen Charakter der Musik.” Weill’s article is translated by Kim H. Kowalke in
Kurt Weill in Europe
, 491–93 (the quotations in this paragraph are found on p. 493).

42
. Ibid., 493.

43
. Ibid., 494. The remaining quotations from Weill’s essay are also found on this page.

44
. Kowalke,
Kurt Weill in Europe
, 113–23.

45
.
The New Harvard Dictionary of Music
defines the doctrine of affections as “the belief, widely held in the 17th and early 18th centuries, that the principal aim of music is to arouse the passions or affections (love, hate, joy, anger, fear, etc., conceived as rationalized, discrete, and relatively static states).” Don Randel, ed.,
The New Harvard Dictionary of Music
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 16.

46
. bruce d. mcclung, “
Psicosi per musica
,” 53–54.

47
. Weill’s self-borrowings parallel the controversial self-borrowings of Handel. See George J. Buelow, “The Case for Handel’s Borrowings: The Judgment of Three Centuries,” in
Handel: Tercentenary Collection
, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987), 61–82.

48
. Lewis Nichols, “‘One Touch of Venus,’ Which Makes the Whole World Kin, Opens at the Imperial,”
New York Times
, October 8, 1943; review excerpted in Steven Suskin,
Opening Night on Broadway
, 526; reprinted in
New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews
, vol. 4, 264.

49
. “September Song” from
Knickerbocker Holiday
, “My Ship” from
Lady in the Dark
, “Speak Low” from
One Touch of Venus
, “Green-Up Time” from
Love Life
, and the title song from
Lost in the Stars
are perhaps the best known song legacies from Weill’s otherwise currently little-known Broadway shows.

50
. Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of
Street Scene
.

51
. Ibid.

52
. Ibid.

53
. Rodgers explains his ideas about dramatic unity in
Chee-Chee
(1928) in his autobiography,
Musical Stages
, 118 (see also chapter 5, p. 85). Larry Stempel notes Rodgers’s early attempt at an integrated musical and adds Hammerstein’s
Rose-Marie
(1924) to the short list of integrated 1920s musicals (see Stempel, “
Street Scene
,” 324).

54
. William G. King, “Music and Musicians.”

55
. In Bob Fosse’s 1972 popular film adaptation of the Weill-influenced
Cabaret
(1966), for example, the songs that took place outside the Kit Kat Club on Broadway were mostly removed, an artistic decision that deprived the central male character the inalienable right of any central character in a musical: the right to sing.

56
.
Lady in the Dark
(Chappell, 1941). Hart dates his remarks March 18, 1941.

57
. mcclung, “
Psicosi per musica
,” 242–45.

58
. Ibid., 250–63.

59
. Howard Barnes of the
New York Herald Tribune
, October 17, 1943, wrote that
Venus
was “the first integrated and joyous entertainment of the current theatrical semester.”

60
. Stanley Richards, ed.,
Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1
(Radnor, Penn.: Chilton, 1973), 128.

61
. The subject of quarter-note (and half-note) triplets is introduced in the musical discussion of
Anything Goes
(see chapter 3, pp. 54–55).

62
. Richards,
Great Musicals of the American Theatre
,
Volume 1
, 129.

63
. Thanks to Robert M. Stevenson, professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, for this inspired simile.

64
. Richards,
Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1
, 158.

65
. Richards, ed.,
Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 2
(Radnor, Penn.: Chilton, 1976), 98.

66
. Ibid., 82.

67
. Ibid., 79.

68
. When Danny Kaye left the show and his role as Russell Paxton, his replacement proved difficult. Within two weeks after Gershwin wrote Weill that Rex O’Malley “is too lady-like for the lady-like characters and may make the character far too realistic,” the production staff bought out his contract. See the letter from Ira Gershwin to Kurt Weill, August 23, 1941, Music Division, Library of Congress.

69
. Richards,
Great Musicals of the Musical Theatre, Volume 1
, 157.

Chapter 8: Stage versus Screen (1): Before Rodgers and Hammerstein

1
. Kim Kowalke, Review essay, 693.

2
. The dancing in “Night and Day” only lasted 4 ½ minutes. “The Continental,” composed by Con Conrad and Herb Magidson, also accomplished what the music by Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Youmans did not: It won the Oscar for best song.

3
. The 1955 film
Hit the Deck
used seven of Youmans’s ten songs, but set the songs to a new book.

4
. Three Fred and Ginger films later, Kern and Fields would team up to contribute the complete score to
Swing Time
.

5
. Charles Winninger (Cap’n Andy), Helen Morgan (Julie), and Sammy White (Frank) appeared in the original production and 1932 revival, Paul Robeson played Joe in the 1928 London production and the 1932 revival, and both Irene Dunne (Magnolia) and Allan Jones (Ravenal) had appeared in these roles in other
Show Boat
performances between 1927 and 1936.

6
. Both “Ah Still Suits Me” and “I Have the Room above Her” appeared in the 1971 London revival and the latter in the 1994 Broadway revival directed by Hal Prince.

7
. Although shot in color, the Preminger
Porgy and Bess
, withdrawn from circulation by the Gershwin Estate, is also difficult to obtain.

8
. Not included in these eighteen minutes is an overture that lasts about fifty-five seconds, which presents an athematic buzz followed by the first phrase of “Ol’ Man River” and opening snippets of “I Have the Room above Her” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.”

9
. The stage version opens with the ominous Vallon theme, which in the absence of Vallon appears more generically as a darker force on the river before audiences can make the connection between the theme and Vallon himself. The film waits to introduce Vallon’s theme until we meet Vallon, thirteen minutes into the scene.

10
. This is the waltz that begins with “Your pardon I pray,” brings Magnolia into the song, and returns as underscoring when the song is completed. When this theme finally makes its appearance thirty-four minutes into the film it is used to accompany Julie’s departure from the show boat and thus bears no connection with the principal couple. Back to “Make Believe,” the return of the main chorus offers only the first and last lyrics (a reduction from 32 measures to 16).

11
. Caryl Flynn,
Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 69.

12
. Ruggles can be seen earlier as an aristocrat in Mamoulian’s
Love Me Tonight
(1932) and later as a hunter in the Katharine Hepburn–Cary Grant classic
Bringing Up Baby
(1938).

13
. In an essay on the films of Bing Crosby, Gary Giddins offers a characteristically erudite summary assessment of this unjustifiably little known film (Giddins,
Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books
[New York: Oxford University Press, 2006], 113). Giddins also briefly discusses the film adaptation of
Anything Goes
in
Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years 1903–1940
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 391–93.

14
. Era Bell, “Why Negroes Don’t Like ‘Porgy and Bess,’”
Ebony
14/12 (October 1959): 50–52, 54 (quoted in Hollis Alpert,
The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess,”
279). Bell’s view was widely held in the black community, but Gwynne Kuhner Brown notes the varied range of African-American (and white) critical responses to the opera in
Problems of Race and Genre in the Critical Reception of “Porgy and Bess.”

15
. Alpert,
The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess,”
276.

16
. Ibid.

17
. Vicki Ohl,
Fine and Dandy: The Life and Work of Kay Swift
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 180.

18
. Howard Pollack,
George Gershwin
, 653.

19
. A. Scott Berg,
Goldwyn
, 481.

20
.
Rent
’s Mimi is memorably described in the satirical Broadway revue
Forbidden Broadway
when it summarizes how the character has evolved from
La Bohème
: “In
La Bohème
she’s a sweet, shy, seamstress. Now, she’s a crackhead, nymphomaniac, prostitute, YEAH!!!”
Forbidden Broadway Strikes Back
DRG 12614 (1997).

21
. Pollack,
George Gershwin
, 654.

22
. The film version that was available to me was a non-commercially distributed recording that clocked in at 115 minutes. Depending on the source consulted, the published literature offers film times of about 150 minutes (Berg,
Goldwyn
, 487); “just under two and half hours (with an intermission following Crown’s seduction of Bess, as in many two-act versions of the work)” (Pollack,
George Gershwin
, 649); and 138 minutes according to Stanley Green,
Hollywood Musicals Year by Year
, 220. The Berg and Pollack figures would make the film only thirty-five minutes less than the 1993 Nunn version. Assuming these two authors are correct, the copy I viewed may have been missing portions of the nine reels housed in the Library of Congress available for private viewing. Despite this possible omission, the only major “song” missing in the DVD available to me was “My Man’s Gone Now” (included on the soundtrack). See the discussion of
Pal Joey
for a discrepancy between the timings listed on the package of a commercially distributed video and the contents of the video itself.

23
. “The most obvious change is the elimination of some major numbers: the ‘Fuoco di gioia’ chorus in Act I, the Concerted Finale of Act III, and the ‘Willow Song’ of Act IV (Zeffirelli finds it ‘boring,’ even on the stage). In addition, major sections in individual numbers are cut: a few pages of the ‘Vittoria’ chorus (act I), the second stanza of the Drinking Song (I), a large portion of the final stanga of ‘Si pel ciel’ (II), and various passages in the Duet between Otello and Desdemona (III). There are also many small cuts in the semi-declamatory syntax that pervades the work.” Marcia J. Citron,
Opera on Screen
, 75–76.