Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (13 page)

Most accounts of the genesis of
Anything Goes
attribute the disastrous fire that took between 125 and 180 passengers’ lives on the pleasure ship
Morro Castle
off the coast at Asbury Park, New Jersey, on September 8, 1934, as the catalyst that led to the revised book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. According to conventional wisdom, the earlier libretto about a shipwreck could not be used any more than Porter could use his line about Mrs. Lindbergh in “I Get a Kick Out of You” after the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby.
¹
But at least two sources, George Eells’s biography of Porter and Miles Kreuger’s introductory notes to conductor John McGlinn’s
reconstructed recording, report that producer Freedley was dissatisfied by the Guy Bolton–P. G. Wodehouse book when he received it on August 15 and that the
Morro
disaster served mainly as a convenient explanation.

According to Eells, Freedley thought there was “a tastelessness about this piece of work that no amount of rewriting would eradicate,” a view echoed by both Kreuger and Bolton-Wodehouse biographer Lee Davis. Kreuger writes, “Freedley was fearful that the rather derisive attitude toward Hollywood might ruin chances of a film sale.” Davis goes further: “The first script was rejected by Freedley for its Hollywood treatment, not its similarity to the tragic fire at sea of the liner
Morro Castle
, as has been historically accepted. Nor would he blanch at the second version because of its continued treatment of a catastrophe at sea. It would be because the second version was a hopeless mess.”
²

In an interview with Richard Hubler published in 1965, one year after Porter’s death, the composer-lyricist anticipated the future conclusions of Eells, Kreuger, and Davis. Porter recalled that the
Morro Castle
tragedy provided an excuse to scrap a Wodehouse-Bolton book whose quality was “so bad that it was obvious that the work was completely inadequate.”
³
The synopsis included in this book is of course based on the revised
Anything Goes
book by Lindsay and Crouse, based in part on the rejected and now presumed lost second draft by Bolton and Wodehouse and Bolton’s original scenario from early 1934, currently housed at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (which includes some dialogue for “Gaxton” and “Ethel” and “Moore”).

Since it is possible that Lindsay and Crouse retained relatively little of the Bolton-Wodehouse second draft—although the new book may have contained more than an alleged five lines—it is not surprising that the inexperienced collaborators would be able to complete only a few scenes from act I and nothing of act II before rehearsals began on October 8. In contrast to the painstaking work and lengthy gestation period of most of the musicals surveyed in this volume,
Anything Goes
was hastily, perhaps even frantically, put together.

But Freedley, Lindsay, Crouse, and Porter had other objectives than to create an epic book musical along the lines of
Show Boat
. Their central concern was to produce a comic hit and to provide dramatic and musical opportunities to suit their outstanding preassembled cast. In particular, they needed a vehicle to display William Gaxton’s (Billy) proven flair for multifarious disguises and to exploit the inspired silliness of comedian Victor Moore’s incongruous casting as a notorious gangster (Moon). The result was enough to prompt Brooks Atkinson to exclaim that “comedy is the most satisfying invention of the human race.”
⁴
Atkinson could not ask anything more of a
show that exuded such refreshing topicality and personality, a show for the moment, if not for the ages. If one or two songs stuck around for awhile, so much the better.

Although John McGlinn later proclaimed the 1934
Anything Goes
as “one of the most perfect farces ever written,” most producers and directors for the past forty years have been trying to solve the perceived disparity in quality between the book and the songs by altering the former and interpolating more of the latter.
⁵
The 1987 revival at the Vivian Beaumont was not the first time audiences found themselves leaving a production of
Anything Goes
humming or whistling songs from other Porter shows. In the 1962 revival, the only version distributed by Tams-Witmark for the next twentyfive years, still other songs from other Porter shows had been interpolated. The lyricist-composer’s own reputed cavalier attitude toward his books and song interpolations prompted Broadway and Hollywood historian Gerald Mast to state erroneously that Porter’s last will and testament “granted explicit permission to take any Porter song from any Porter show and use it in any other.”
⁶
Unfortunately, the relative commercial success of McGlinn’s recorded enterprise has not encouraged most producers and directors to revive the 1934
Anything Goes
.

The online website presents an outline of the scenes and songs of the
Anything Goes
that audiences would have heard during most of the initial run of the show that opened on November 21, 1934 (as well the scenes and songs seen and heard in the Off-Broadway Revival of 1962 and the Vivian Beaumont Revival of 1987). As in the case of most musicals from any period (and many eighteenth-century operas), additional songs were tried and then discarded during tryouts or during the early weeks of the first New York run. In act I, scene 2, “Bon Voyage” was originally juxtaposed, then ingeniously combined, with another song, “There’s No Cure like Travel,” a song that interestingly contains the main musical material of “Bon Voyage.”
⁷
Just as Mozart composed the easier-to-sing aria “Dalla sua pace” to accommodate the Viennese singer in
Don Giovanni
who was unable to negotiate the demands of the aria from the original Prague production (“Il mio tesoro”), Porter composed “All through the Night” in this scene for Gaxton (Billy Crocker) to replace the difficult-to-sing “Easy to Love.”

Another song intended for this scene, “Kate the Great,” was, according to the recollection of
Anything Goes
orchestrator Hans Spialek, rejected by Ethel Merman who “vouldn’t sing it” because it was a “
durr-ty
song!”
⁸
A song planned as a tongue-in-cheek romantic duet in act I, scene 6, between Hope and Billy, “Waltz down the Aisle” (which bears striking melodic and rhythmic similarities as well as a similar dramatic purpose to “Wunderbar” from Porter’s
Kiss Me, Kate
) was also dropped from
Anything Goes
. A song for
Hope in act II, scene 1, “What a Joy to Be Young,” was deleted before the Broadway premiere.
⁹

One song in the beginning of the Broadway run, “Buddie, Beware,” was replaced by a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You” within a few weeks. In order to understand the artistic implications of this change it is necessary to recall Porter’s original motivation. Composers of musicals before (or after) the Rodgers and Hammerstein era could not, of course, always predict which song would become a hit. Nevertheless, they almost invariably tried to place their best bets
after
an opening number, usually for chorus. In
Anything Goes
Porter tried something more unusual. Instead of opening with a chorus, Porter decided to begin less conventionally with a potential hit song for Ethel Merman five minutes into the show, “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

Porter’s reasons for beginning with what he felt would be the hit of the show may have been somewhat perverse. According to Kreuger, Porter’s “society friends thought it was amusing to drift into the theatre fifteen or twenty minutes after the curtain had gone up, so that all their friends could observe what they were wearing.”
¹⁰
Porter therefore “warned his friends for weeks before the opening that they had better arrive on time or they would miss the big song.”
¹¹
There is no record that Merman objected to “Buddie, Beware” in act II, scene 2, for the same reason she objected to a song about the sexual exploits of Catherine (Kate) the Great. Her objections in this case were practical rather than moral: the show needed a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You” “for the benefit of those who had arrived late!”
¹²
If this undocumented anecdote is to be believed, Porter, who had earlier agreed to cut “Kate the Great,” was again willing to accommodate his star and cut “Buddie, Beware.”
¹³

The history of
Anything Goes
after its premiere in 1934 differs markedly from the fate of
Show Boat
discussed in the previous chapter. The original 1927 Broadway version of
Show Boat
was superseded by Kern and Hammerstein’s own rethinking of the work in the 1946 revival that included a reworked book, several deleted songs and a brand new one, and new orchestrations. As we have seen, after Hammerstein’s death in 1960, the 1971 London and 1994 Broadway
Show Boat
revivals presented conflated versions of the musical that included songs from various earlier stage productions (New York, 1927; London, 1928; New York, 1946) and also songs from the 1936 film classic. Some of the original as well as interpolated songs were also either placed in different contexts or distributed to different characters.

Despite these liberties, both the 1971 London and 1994 Broadway revivals contained interpolated songs that had been associated with one version or another of this musical (“How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” from the
1971 London production is an isolated exception). In contrast, the
Anything Goes
revival in 1962, the version distributed to prospective producers until replaced by the 1987 revival, incorporated no less than six songs out of a total of fourteen from
other
Porter shows (“It’s De-Lovely,” “Heaven Hop,” “Friendship,” “Let’s Step Out,” “Let’s Misbehave,” and “Take Me Back to Manhattan”). Also, in 1962 the order of several songs was rearranged and, ironically, a thoroughly revised book was written by Guy Bolton, who had prepared the original scenario early in 1934 and with P. G. Wodehouse had submitted the rejected 1934 book.

The 1987 revival contained yet another new book, this time by Russel Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman.
¹⁴
This book retained two of the interpolations from 1962 (“It’s De-Lovely” and “Friendship”), and added two other Porter tunes from shows that had not even appeared on Broadway, “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye” from
O Mistress Mine
, a 1936 musical produced in London, and “I Want to Row on the Crew,” from the Yale fraternity show
Paranoia
of 1914. The 1987 production also rearranged the order and dramatic context of several other songs from the original 1934 Broadway run. Most strikingly, the 1987 revision resurrected three songs that had appeared at various phases of the 1934 tryouts and initial run: “There’s No Cure like Travel,” “Easy to Love,” and “Buddie, Beware” (see the online Appendix for the sources of all the interpolated songs).

One year before criticizing the undramatic use of recitative in the Theatre Guild production of
Porgy and Bess
, Brooks Atkinson reviewed the Broadway premiere of
Anything Goes
. The review is an unequivocal rave of “a thundering good musical show” with “a rag, tag and bobtail of comic situations and of music sung in the spots when it is most exhilarating.”
¹⁵
Most surprisingly from a modern perspective is the fact that Atkinson praises the book, not as a work of art, perhaps, but as a well-crafted vehicle to set off William Gaxton’s talent for wearing disguises and the comic characterization of Victor Moore’s Moon, “the quintessence of musical comedy humor.” Atkinson does not feel the need to consider
Anything Goes
as anything other than the “thundering good song-and-dance show” it purports to be.
¹⁶
Another reviewer, Franklin P. Adams, lambasted the
songs
from
Anything Goes
(because they were difficult to remember or whistle), but offered no negative remarks about the book.
¹⁷

Like Atkinson’s newfound distaste for
On Your Toes
upon its ill-fated 1954 revival (discussed in
chapter 5
), the
New York Times
review of the 1962 Off-Broadway revival, twenty-eight years after
Anything Goes
made its debut, demonstrates that a new standard for musical theater had evolved during the intervening years. In contrast to Atkinson’s appreciation of the original book, Lewis Funke wrote that “if you can get by the deserts that lurk in the libretto, knowing that there always will be that oasis of a Cole Porter tune
waiting at the end of each rugged journey, you may find yourself enjoying the revival of
Anything Goes
.”
¹⁸
In Funke’s account, “only some of the lines retain their mirth” and the encapsulated plot summary that he offers serves merely to remind sophisticated 1960s audiences that “those were simple days in musical comedy.”
¹⁹
What Funke neglects to report is that the book he is criticizing is
not
the 1934 book by Lindsay and Crouse but a version rewritten in 1962 by Bolton.

In his autobiography, director and librettist George Abbott (1887–1995), who authored or co-authored books for an impressive array of musicals, including
On Your Toes, The Boys from Syracuse, Where’s Charley?, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees
, and
Fiorello!
, discusses a review of a 1963 Off-Broadway revival directed by Richard York of the 1938 Rodgers and Hart classic
The Boys from Syracuse
:

I was delighted to read of its outstanding success, and distressed that some of the reviewers referred to the old-fashioned jokes in the book. But I was puzzled when one of the reviewers cited one of these jokes, a corny pun: “Dozens of men are at my feet.” “Yes, I know, chiropodists.” This kind of humor is so alien to me that I knew I could never have written it; and when I got back to New York I found that the “old jokes” in the revival were new jokes inserted by Mr. [Richard] York to “modernize” the script. I took out some of these gags, but because the production as a whole was so delightful, I couldn’t get very angry.
²⁰