Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (26 page)

Not to be overlooked is Rodgers and Hart’s ability in
Pal Joey
to write first-rate songs appropriate for their second-rate surroundings, a delicate balancing act that will also be used by Frank Loesser in the Hot Box numbers of
Guys and Dolls
. In “That Terrific Rainbow,” for example, Hart presents a wide array of trite and clichéd images to create his rainbow.

I’m a
RED
-hot mama,

But I’m
BLUE
for you.

I get
PURPLE
with anger

At the things you do.

And I’m
GREEN
with envy

After moving from red, blue, purple, and green, the object of the lyric’s affection burns the protagonist’s heart with an ORANGE flame. Before the end of the next stanza, the RED-hot mama with a heart of GOLD accuses her love object of being WHITE with cold, an unfortunate situation which creates GRAY clouds that, hopefully, will eventually make way for “That Terrific Rainbow.”

When Mike Spears’s club is converted to Chez Joey in act II, the lyrics of the more elaborate and pretentious new opening production number, “The Flower Garden of My Heart,” read like a parody of the hackneyed and formulaic Mother Goose rhyme “Roses Are Red”: “In the flower garden of my heart / I’ve got violets blue as your
eyes
. / I’ve got dainty
narcissus
/ As sweet as my
missus
/ And lilies as pure as the
skies
.” In the same chorus Hart gives Gladys the couplets, “Just to keep our love
holy
/ I’ve got
gladioli
,” and in ensuing choruses “Oh, the west wind will
whisk us
/ The scent of
hibiscus
,” and “You will look like sweet
william
/ And smell like
a trillium
.” Was Rodgers perhaps too successful in achieving conventionality and mediocrity in this song? Perhaps. In any event, it was one of only two numbers—the other is “A Great Big Town”—excluded from the pre-revival cast album?

Pal Joey
’s successful original run was surpassed by Rodgers and Hart in their final collaboration, the now largely forgotten
By Jupiter
(1942), which received 427 performances. After that, Hart possessed neither the interest nor the will to tackle a setting of Lynn Riggs’s play,
Green Grow the Lilacs
(1931). Rodgers therefore left his “partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation,” and turned to Hammerstein to create
Oklahoma!
in 1942 and early 1943. In the increasingly small intervals between drinking binges Hart managed to create a few new songs for the successful 1943 revival of
the 1927 hit
A Connecticut Yankee
(including the bitingly funny “To Keep My Love Alive”), but within a few months of
Oklahoma!
’s historic debut he was dead.

The new team of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the integrated ideal would dominate the American musical until Hammerstein’s death in 1960. But something irreplaceable was also lost when the Rodgers and Hammerstein era replaced Rodgers and Hart. The new partners would continue to compose excellent songs that, although integrated, can be sung successfully outside of their carefully considered contexts. Only rarely, however, would Rodgers recreate the rhythmic energy and jazzy melodic vernacular that distinguished so many of his songs with Hart, songs such as “You Mustn’t Kick It Around,” “Happy Hunting Horn,” “Plant You Now, Dig You Later,” and “Do It the Hard Way” in
Pal Joey
and “It’s Got to Be Love” “Slaughter on 10th Avenue,” and the title song in
On Your Toes
.

Alec Wilder addresses this point in
American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900–1950
, an idiosyncratic survey that for years was the only book seriously to discuss the musical qualities of popular songs.
⁵⁸
Although Wilder treats the songs show-by-show, he scrupulously avoids discussing their dramatic context or even their texts and consequently evaluates them solely on their autonomous musical merits. For this reason he remains impervious to the psychological insights in “Bewitched” and instead berates Rodgers’s repetitive “device” that was “brought to a sort of negative fruition in that it finally obtrudes as a contrivance.”
⁵⁹
Nevertheless, Wilder devoted fifty-three pages to Rodgers and Hart and only six to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and he tells us why:

Though he wrote great songs with Oscar Hammerstein II, it is my belief that his greatest melodic invention and pellucid freshness occurred during his years of collaboration with Lorenz Hart. The inventiveness has never ceased. Yet something bordering on musical complacency evidenced itself in his later career. I have always felt that there was an almost feverish demand in Hart’s writing which reflected itself in Rodger’s melodies as opposed to the almost too comfortable armchair philosophy in Hammerstein’s lyrics.
⁶⁰

Musical comedies in general, like their nonmusical stage counterparts, stand unfairly as poor relations to tragedies—musicals that aspire to nineteenth-century tragic operas filled with thematic transformations and conspicuous organicism.
Pal Joey
is a brilliant musical comedy that has not lost its relevance or its punch since its arrival in 1940. Despite its many virtues, however, this first musical in “long pants,” as Rodgers described it in 1952,
and the first major musical to feature an anti-hero, lacks the great themes of
Show Boat
and
Porgy and Bess
and their correspondingly ambitious and complex dramatic transformations of musical motives. The transformation of “Bewitched” in Joey’s ballet from a ballad in duple meter to a fast waltz in triple meter—an idea that likely originated with the dance arranger rather than Rodgers—for example, does not convey the dramatic meaning inherent in Kern’s transformations of Magnolia’s piano theme, nor does it come close to attaining Gershwin’s dramatic application of his melodic and rhythmic transformations and paraphrases.

In contrast to Porter’s
Anything Goes
and Rodgers and Hart’s
On Your Toes
, however,
Pal Joey
possesses a book that could be revived in nearly its original state (even though some modern productions, including its 2008 Broadway revival, tend to treat the work as though it were
Anything Goes
). Its songs, nearly all gems, grow naturally from the dramatic action and tell us something important about the characters who sing them. For some, including Lehman Engel, if by no means most discerning critics, the bewitching
Pal Joey
deserves a chance to survive on its own terms as an enduring Broadway classic of its genre and of its time.

M
arc Blitzstein (1905–1964) remains an obscure figure. With few exceptions his music either was never published or is only gradually coming into print. As late as the early 1980s, one decade before her company, under new leadership, revived the work, Beverly Sills of the New York City Opera was rejecting
Regina
, Blitzstein’s 1949 adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s
Little Foxes
, as “too old-fashioned” for present-day tastes.
¹
Bertolt Brecht scholar Martin Esslin had already dismissed Blitzstein’s “sugar-coated” English translation of Brecht and Weill’s
The Threepenny Opera
—the version that during the years 1954–1960 became the longest Off-Broadway musical of its era and Blitzstein’s best-known achievement—as unworthy of Brecht’s vision.
²

Although he is seldom treated as a major figure, the authors of most comprehensive histories of American music, as well as more idiosyncratic surveys, offer Blitzstein some space and a generally good press.
³
Aaron Copland gives Blitzstein equal billing with Virgil Thomson in a chapter in
Our New Music
.
⁴
Wilfrid Mellers presents Blitzstein along with Ives and Copland as one of three distinguished and representative American composers in
Music and Society
(1950).
⁵
In
Music in a New Found Land
, published the year of Blitzstein’s death and dedicated to his memory, Mellers focuses on
Regina
in a laudatory chapter which pairs it with Bernstein’s
West Side Story
.
⁶
Blitzstein’s Broadway opera
Regina
(1949), successfully revived and recorded in 1992 by the New York City Opera, was poised for the possibility of future enshrinement. Several years earlier the composer of
The Cradle Will Rock
was the subject of the longest biography up until that time of an American composer.
⁷

Marc Blitzstein. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK.
WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM

Historians and Broadway enthusiasts relatively unfamiliar with either Blitzstein or
The Cradle Will Rock
may nevertheless know something of the circumstances behind this work’s extraordinary premiere on June 16, 1937 (directed by Orson Welles). As reported on the front page of the
New York Times
the next day—and almost invariably whenever the work is mentioned for the next seventy years—the show, banned from a padlocked Maxine Elliot theater, its government sponsorship revoked, moved its forces and its assembled audience twenty blocks uptown to the Venice Theater. Once there, in conformance to the letter (if not the spirit) of the prohibitions placed upon its performance, cast members sang their parts from the audience while Blitzstein took the stage with his piano.
⁸

After nineteen performances at the Venice,
Cradle
moved to the Mercury Theater for several months of Sunday evening performances. On January 3, 1938, the controversial show opened on Broadway at the Windsor for a short run of 108 performances (sixteen performances fewer than
Porgy and Bess
and in a smaller theater).
⁹
The play was published a few months later by Random House, and the following year
Cradle
was anthologized in a volume that included Clifford Odets’s
Waiting for Lefty
, a play with which
Cradle
is frequently associated and compared.
¹⁰
A recording of the original production issued in 1938 became the first Broadway cast album, a historical distinction almost invariably and incorrectly attributed to
Oklahoma!
¹¹

Reviews were generally positive. Although he wrote that the “weak ending” was “hokum” and a “fairy-tale,” Thomson also concluded that after six months of the 1937 production “
The Cradle
was still a good show and its musical quality hasn’t worn thin” and that the work was “the most appealing operatic socialism since
Louise
” [Gustave Charpentier’s realistic opera that premiered in 1900].
¹²
Brooks Atkinson considered the musical “a stirring success” and “the most versatile artistic triumph of the politically insurgent theatre.”
¹³
Edith J. R. Isaac wrote that the work “introduces a persuasive new theatre form.”
¹⁴
Somewhat less sympathetically, the notorious George Jean Nathan concluded his acerbic review with the often-quoted barb that
Cradle
was “little more than the kind of thing Cole Porter might have written if, God forbid, he had gone to Columbia instead of Yale.”
¹⁵

In common with most of the musicals discussed in this survey
Cradle
has been revived with relative frequency, including a production in 1947 under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, who had presented the work at Harvard in 1939 while an undergraduate (playing the piano part from memory), a New York City Opera production in 1960 (the most successful work of their season), and an Off-Broadway production in 1964 that led to the first
complete recorded performance of the work. In 1983, an Off-Broadway production and London run starring
Evita
superstar Patti Lupone (doubling as Moll and Sister Mister) and directed by John Houseman, who produced the premiere, generated a second complete recording and a television broadcast.
¹⁶
Of all these performances, only the 1960 production resuscitated the orchestral score that Blitzstein had completed in May 1937 and Lehman Engel conducted at the dress rehearsal before the eventful opening night. The performances with Blitzstein alone on his piano launched a tradition that has long since become entrenched and seemingly irrevocable.
¹⁷

Authentic avant-garde works achieve their status in part by their continued ability to shock audiences out of their complacency and to bite the hand that feeds. For this reason, the purposeful retraction of government funding when the political wind began to blow in a different direction in 1937—even if the government was not initially targeting
Cradle
—arguably gives
Cradle
more credibility than those works that were ideologically safe, including Blitzstein’s earlier modernistic works.
Cradle
also joins other works of the 1930s, most notably the Gershwins’
Of Thee I Sing
(1931) and
Let ’Em Eat Cake
(1933) and composer-lyricist Harold Rome’s
Pins and Needles
(1937), in its representation of politically satirical or antiestablishment themes.