Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (2 page)

My family was one of the eighteen million to purchase the cast album of
My Fair Lady
, and my sister quickly mastered the dialect and memorized the lyrics for all the roles. With the dawn of the stereo era in the late 1950s, we purchased
The Music Man
to test out our new portable KLH record player.
²
My parents, transplanted New Yorkers who settled near San Francisco, would see the traveling versions of Broadway shows, and by the early 1960s they began to take their offspring along.

Musicals created before the era of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe were less known. Only Gilbert and Sullivan and the occasional 1920s operetta were presented as dramatic entities. The songs, however, of many musicals from the 1920s and ′30s were heard and played regularly in our community as well as in our home, especially those from
Porgy and Bess
. A memorable event occurred in the sixth grade when a dear family friend from Boston came to visit, sang and played Kern and Hammerstein’s “Make Believe,” and assisted me in my efforts to compose a small musical of three songs as a creative arts project. Earlier that year I had written a short term paper, “Rodgers and Hammerstein II with Lorenz Hart.”

By the time I entered high school I had churlishly abandoned Broadway in favor of Bach, Beethoven, and Ives. As a sophomore I somewhat grudgingly served as rehearsal pianist for
South Pacific
and the following year still more grudgingly played the saxophone and clarinet in the
Guys and Dolls
pit band. Soon even Gershwin was suspect. I had not yet read the philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno and the highly acclaimed but decidedly unpopular composer Arnold Schoenberg, both of whom vigorously championed and successfully promoted the view that great art was rightfully destined to be unpopular. Only in retrospect did I realize that an ideological and elitist component was somehow connected to my genuine love of classical or “serious” music. Disdain for the music of the masses followed, including hit Broadway musicals, until and unless this repertory could earn endorsements from respectable sources, such as when Leonard Bernstein compared the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home” from
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
favorably with Schubert.

In the early 1970s graduate students in historical musicology in many programs were strongly discouraged from studying American music of any kind. Instead, my colleagues and I at Harvard dutifully learned to decipher medieval notation and researched such topics as the life and works of King Henry VIII’s Flemish-born court composer Philip van Wilder, Haydn’s
opera seria
, and what really happened at the first performance of
Rite of Spring
. A research paper on the chronology and compositional process of Beethoven’s piano concertos evolved into a dissertation and inaugurated my lifetime desire to understand how compositions of all types initially take shape and the practical as well as artistic reasons behind their revision.

These activities did not prevent me from stumbling on a free ticket to
Kiss Me, Kate
, which to my surprise I enjoyed immensely, despite a negative predisposition. My dormant love for Broadway musicals would receive additional rekindling when, several years later, I found myself the musical director in a private secondary school in Ojai, California, selecting a musical to produce and choosing
Kiss Me, Kate
to everyone’s enjoyment and delight,
including mine. In my second year at The Thacher School I anticipated
Crazy for You
, the 1992 musical based on
Girl Crazy
, with my own assemblage of freely interpolated Gershwin songs mixed with songs from the “dated” 1930 show—a triumph of accessibility over authenticity. By the end of that year I completed my doctorate, a milestone that somehow liberated me to explore American popular music of all types.

By then I had witnessed a broadcast in which Stephen Sondheim and conductor André Previn conversed with extraordinary articulateness about what a musical can accomplish.
³
Increasingly, stage and film musicals of both recent and ancient vintage occupied a major and passionate role in my life. After teaching a sequence of one-month “winterim” courses on American musical theater at the University of Puget Sound, including one in which students collaborated to create an original musical, I began to teach a Survey of American Musical Theater course first during alternate years and later annually. When faced with the dearth of usable textbooks, I began writing one of my own in the late 1980s. The book would, of course, correspond to what I had been teaching, a musical-by-musical study beginning with
Show Boat
that focused on the so-called Golden Era from the 1930s to the late 1950s, with a survey of Sondheim to round out the semester. You are now holding this book.

Before the 1990s, books on Broadway musicals were almost without exception written by theater historians and critics. For the most part these journalistic accounts typically covered a large number of musicals somewhat briefly and offered a useful and entertaining mixture of facts, gossip, and criticism. What they did not try to do is address what happens
musically
or how songs interact with lyrics within a dramatic context.
⁴

Most books on the Broadway musical provided biographical profiles of principal composers and lyricists and plot summaries of popular musicals or those judged artistically significant. Some authors went considerably beyond these parameters, for example, Gerald Bordman by his comprehensiveness and Lehman Engel by focusing more selectively on critical topics and other issues such as adaptation of literary sources.
⁵
Two of the musicals surveyed in the present volume,
Show Boat
and
Porgy and Bess
, have inspired book-length monographs, and several musicals and their creators have received rigorously thoughtful scholarly, bibliographic, and critical attention. The fruits of this activity will be duly acknowledged in what follows.
⁶

With few exceptions the musicological community studiously ignored the Broadway terrain. In the 1990s two important books emphasized (or “privileged”) music for the first time: Joseph P. Swain’s
The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey
(1990), a study of selected musicals from
Show Boat
to
Sweeney Todd
, and Stephen Banfield’s more specialized study,
Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals
(1993).
⁷
Swain’s valuable survey contains a great deal of perceptive musical and dramatic criticism and analysis. Nevertheless, Swain only rarely tries to place the discussion in a historical, social, or political context, he presents virtually no documentary history of a musical, and he does not address the questions of how and why musicals evolved as they did, either before opening night or in revival. Most general readers will also find Swain’s analysis, which deals primarily with harmony, too technical to be easily understood. In contrast to Swain, Banfield, who focuses on a body of work by one significant composer-lyricist, does address compositional history and offers a multivalent and less autonomous approach; additionally, his sophisticated and frequently dense musical and dramatic analysis successfully incorporates techniques borrowed from literary criticism. Building on the solid edifices constructed by Swain and Banfield, the present book attempts to offer a musical and dramatic discussion more accessible to readers unfamiliar with analytical terminology.

Two important books on European opera have influenced the ensuing discussion of American musicals and merit special mention and gratitude here: Joseph Kerman’s
Opera as Drama
and Paul Robinson’s
Opera & Ideas
.
⁸
Kerman’s unflinching insistence on music’s primary role in defining character, generating action, and establishing atmosphere results in a somewhat sparse assemblage of canonic masterpieces. However, his brilliant overview of opera with its powerful guiding principle, “the dramatist is the composer,” can be fruitfully applied to Broadway, even to those works that resolutely reject Kerman’s model of a major operatic musical masterpiece. Robinson’s accessible yet subtle survey of six operas (one each by Mozart, Rossini, Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, and Strauss) and of dramatic meaning in the two Schubert song cycles offers imaginative and convincing insights on the power of texted music to express emotional and intellectual nuance. Both studies display a standard of excellence that might serve and inspire nearly any serious study of dramatic music, including the Broadway musical.

A third book on opera, Peter Kivy’s
Osmin’s Rage
, supplies valuable philosophical underpinning for a discussion on music and text.
⁹
Kivy’s distinctions between the opposite principles of “textual realism” (music that “sets meanings, not words”) and “opulent adornment” (music that “sets words, not meanings”) are particularly helpful. The tensions between these two principles are embodied in the “song and dance” musicals (composed mainly but by no means exclusively in the 1920s and ’30s) that feature “opulent adornment,” and the so-called integrated musicals, the Rodgers and Hammerstein models of “textual realism” that gained commercial success, critical stature, and cultural hegemony beginning in the 1940s.

In the recent past intense ideological differences have been solidified. In one camp are those who argue that musicals are at their best when fully integrated and aspiring toward nineteenth-century European tragic opera; in another are those who relish nonintegrated and nonoperatic musical comedies. The contrasting perspectives of Swain and Banfield offer strong advocates for each side. Swain, who claims to disparage the taxonomic differences between opera and Broadway shows, nonetheless invariably places the latter, especially musicals that eschew their tragic potential, on a lower echelon. Thus for Swain, “though a number of its best plots have offered opportunities for tragic composition,” the Broadway musical provides a litany of “missed chances and unanswered challenges.”
¹⁰
Even
West Side Story
, the only musical that Swain unhesitatingly designates a masterpiece (in part because a central character achieves the heights of tragedy when he dies singing), falls short of operatic tragedy when Maria speaks rather than sings her response to the death of her beloved Tony.

Banfield, sympathetic to a subject (Sondheim) who is rarely “trying to challenge opera on its own territory,” argues that in musicals, in contrast to operas that are through-sung, music “can often not just move in and out of the drama but in and out of itself, and is more dramatically agile … than in most opera.”
¹¹
For Banfield,
West Side Story
keeps faith with Bernstein’s desire to avoid “falling into the ‘operatic trap,’” and Maria’s final speech works perfectly.
¹²

Among other juicy bones of contention are the conflicts between popularity and critical acclaim, authenticity and accessibility, opulent adornment and textual realism, artistic autonomy and social and political contextuality, and nonintegrated versus integrated musical ideals. This preface has introduced some of these issues and critical quagmires that will be reintroduced in
chapter 1
and developed in subsequent chapters. Neutrality is neither always possible nor always desirable to achieve, especially on the subject of critical relationships between music and text and music and drama. My general intent, however, is to articulate the merits as well as the flaws of opposing arguments. In the court of free intellectual inquiry, more frequently than not, at least two sides are competent to withstand scrutiny and trial.

Still popular with audiences young and old, the musicals explored in
Enchanted Evenings
have not vanished from our stages or our consciousness. In fact, the situation is just the reverse. Judging by the frequency and perennial popularity of revivals (the practice of restaging favorite musicals from the past) and the competitiveness of the revival category at the annual Tony Awards (Broadway’s Oscars), the Broadway musical has evolved into one of America’s greatest and most distinctive cultural institutions as well as an opportunity for new work. Increasingly, classic musicals have received serious critical scrutiny by directors with wide-ranging visions, and audiences from all over the world flock to see and experience this unique American (and sometimes British) contribution to popular culture. If there is a Broadway Museum, and I think there is, the musicals you will read about in
Enchanted Evenings
occupy a major wing. In fact, in the years immediately prior to, during, and since the period I wrote
Enchanted Evenings
all of the shows I discussed continued to receive attention in high-profile revivals, the vast majority on Broadway as well as elsewhere. In addition, revival recordings and reissues with new and original casts or other recordings in meticulous scholarly reconstructions for some of the older models were also made for most of these shows.

Here are some highlights of the stage resurrections since 1980 of shows featured in the first edition of
Enchanted Evenings
arranged chronologically by show. No show from this edition is absent from the list.
¹

•
Show Boat
: The acclaimed (and controversial) Broadway revival staged by Harold Prince (1994)

•
Anything Goes
: Broadway revival at the Vivian Beaumont (1987); London revival (1989); Royal National Theatre revival in London (2003); London revival (2005)

•
Porgy and Bess
: Glyndebourne Opera staged by Trevor Nunn (1986); New York City Opera (2000 and 2002); Los Angeles Opera (2007)