Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (3 page)

•
The Cradle Will Rock
: Off-Broadway production directed by John Houseman and starring Patti Lupone (1983); feature film about the making of the show against the backdrop of other turbulent events in art and politics in the 1930s, directed by Tim Robbins (1999)

•
On Your Toes
: Broadway revival directed by George Abbott (1983)

•
Pal Joey
: New York City Center’s
Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert
(1995); Broadway run at Studio 54, with a rewritten book and added songs from other Rodgers and Hart shows (2008)

•
Lady in the Dark
: New York City Center’s
Encores!
(1994); London premiere (1997) followed by major performances in Japan and Philadelphia

•
One Touch of Venus
: Goodspeed Opera House (1987); New York City Center’s
Encores!
(1995); three productions mounted by Discovering Lost Musicals Charitable Trust (1992–2000); BBC broadcast (1995); London premiere at The King’s Head Theatre in 2001 (a production that failed to go beyond the workshop stage for a New York performance two weeks after September 11); Opera North in Leeds (2004); 42nd Street Moon staging in San Francisco (2007)

•
Kiss Me, Kate
: Broadway revival directed by Michael Blakemore (881 performances) (1999–2003); London revival (2001); Italian version in Bologna (2007)

•
Carousel
: Directed for London and Broadway by Nicholas Hytner (1994); London revival (2008)

•
Guys and Dolls
: Long-running Broadway revival (1,143 performances) starring Nathan Lane, not coincidentally named for its star comic Nathan Detroit (1992–94); long-running London revival (2005–07); Broadway revival (2009)

•
The Most Happy Fella
: Broadway revival (1992); New York City Opera (2006)

•
My Fair Lady
: Broadway revival (1981); Broadway revival (1993); London revival (2001)

•
West Side Story
: Broadway revival (1980); London revival (1998); Hong Kong production (with lyrics in Cantonese) (2000); Bregenz Festival, Austria (in German) (2003 and 2004); London revival (2008); Montreal revival (in French) (2008); Philippine production (2008); Broadway revival directed by Arthur Laurents which includes significant dialogue and singing in Spanish (2009)

Today the American musical also thrives as a burgeoning subdiscipline in musicology and a significant topic of study across disciplinary boundaries. This is a relatively new phenomenon. When I embarked on
Enchanted Evenings
in the early 1990s, historical musicology had not yet found the Broadway musical a fertile grazing land. Musical theater historians Gerald Bordman (in a series of Oxford volumes), and the conductor and influential musical theater workshop director Lehman Engel wrote knowledgeably and engagingly about musicals, although neither seriously engaged their
musical
component.
²
In
The American Musical Theater
, first published in 1967, Engel also offered a paradigm of “workable principles” that reveal what made certain shows “models of excellence.”
³
In Engel’s view, nearly all great musicals were a product of a “Golden Age” that started with
Pal Joey
(1940) and ended with
Fiddler on the Roof
(1964). For the 1975 second edition, Engel found two worthy Sondheim shows to add to the list,
Company
(1970) and
A Little Night Music
(1973). Although
Cabaret
(1966) did not make the cut, Engel singled out this work for distinction as his sole “strong runner-up to the list of ‘best’ shows.”
⁴

The booming cultural canon wars of the 1990s brought about the breakdown of classical canons in literature and the arts. It also led to the formation of new ones, albeit under various pseudonyms and disguises. Despite the increasing postmodern discontent among scholars and even some musical-theater lovers with the idea of a prescribed list of canonic “masterpieces,” Broadway surveys, including scholarly ones such as Joseph P. Swain’s
The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey
(Oxford, 1990), generally followed Engel and without apparent collusion favored the same small group
of shows.
⁵
Whatever its intentions, the overlapping between one list and another gave the appearance that a Broadway canon had emerged, despite protestations to the contrary and however unwelcome.
Enchanted Evenings
focused on a representative few of the usual canonic suspects, starting with
Show Boat
(outside Engel’s list but the starting point for many others) and ending with
West Side Story
. As an epilogue, I added one post–
West Side Story
chapter, a survey of Sondheim that touched on
Follies
and
Sunday in the Park with George
.

Aside from correcting some errors—such as the perpetuation of the unfounded rumor that
Carousel
’s “A Real Nice Clambake” was derived from an unused
Oklahoma!
song “A Real Nice Hayride”—and other minor updating and clarifications, I have left
chapters 1
–
12
of the first edition largely unchanged. Were I writing these chapters for the first time, no doubt I would do some things differently. For example, the controversy over the two Kurt Weills, the German Weill versus the American Weill, of pressing concern in the early 1990s and a division partially reconciled in the first edition, is now a nonissue. Just as Germany gradually became unified in the 1990s, so did Weill. On the other hand, the notion of the “integrated” musical has become so questionable and contentious that the new protocol is to problematize the term or at least to place it in quotation marks (what Richard Taruskin calls scare quotes) to mark the increasing discomfort with the term. Since I did already problematize the idea of the integrated musical to some extent in the first edition and since I later addressed the issue in a separate essay, I decided not to dig up these bones of contention further.
⁶
By letting these now wide-awake dogs lie in the first edition chapters, I am acknowledging that in these instances musical theater historians, like the musicals they study, reflect their own time in their efforts to serve our understanding of the past.

In the two new chapters on film adaptation (
chapters 8
and
14
) and the Epilogue chapters (
chapter 15
and
16
), however, I have called attention to some of the exciting new scholarship that has appeared since the mid-1990s. In the Epilogue, for example, I revisit the notion of the integrated musical as it evolves into what has become known as the concept musical (another controversial notion also commonly placed in quotation marks) and the still-more problematic, but less discussed, “totally integrated” approach common to the megamusical. Since the quality and quantity of bibliographic,
scholarly, and critical material on the Broadway musical has grown impressively, even exponentially, over the last decade, I was not able to take full advantage of the new research and thinking on the musicals discussed in the first edition. The expanded Bibliography, which includes some of this unincorporated literature, will point the way to new directions and possibilities.

As in the past, much of this new work emphasizes biography, social history, and the librettos of musicals without addressing how the
music
works with words and stories. I have addressed some of the negative ramifications of this trend in a review essay published in 2004.
⁷
In contrast to the isolated exceptions that precede the first edition of
Enchanted Evenings
, however, many studies do now seriously engage with music and music’s interaction with lyrics and narratives.
⁸

Another noticeable trend among the many books that have appeared since the mid-1990s is the relative absence of attention, or sympathy, to musicals that arrived after the end of the so-called Golden Age in the mid-1960s. In an “Omnibus Review” of five significant books in the field published between 2003 and 2005, for example, Charles Hamm notes “an almost complete absence in these books of meaningful commentary on American musicals of the past three decades.”
⁹
When books do not ignore the musicals of the last generation (other than Sondheim), the tone frequently changes from respect to disdain, with special xenophobic antipathy reserved for the imported megamusicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber (
Cats, Phantom
), the team of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg (
Les Misérables
and
Miss Saigon
), and the Godfather who produced this quartet of box office juggernauts, Cameron Macintosh.
¹⁰
Another assumption governing many Broadway surveys and other recent scholarship is that anything backed by Disney cannot be good, despite the fact that
Beauty and the Beast
(1994) and the still-running
The Lion King
(1997), directed and designed by Julie Taymor, currently stand as the fifth and eighth most popular Broadway musicals of all time.

Among the many new books in the field published during the past decade or so, major work has been published on several of the musicals featured in the first edition of
Enchanted Evenings
. Biographies, autobiographies, critical studies, publications of letters and lyrics, and other important books and essays have appeared to inform and enlighten the life and work of many major figures and shows and offer new information and ideas to those introduced in acts I and II.
¹¹
Here are a few samples:

•
Show Boat
: Stephen Banfield includes an important analytical and critical study of
Show Boat
in his book,
Jerome Kern
, and Todd Decker has begun to publish the fruits of his archival work on
Show Boat
.
¹²

•
Porgy and Bess
: Howard Pollack’s monumental life and works study of
George Gershwin
devotes nearly one hundred pages to multiple aspects of this important work from its genesis and production history to revivals, recordings, and films. I have also had the privilege of reading Larry Starr’s insightful chapter on this work that will soon be readily available.
¹³

•
Lady in the Dark
and
Oklahoma!
: In 2007, Oxford University Press published bruce d. mcclung’s award-winning “biography” of
Lady in the Dark
, published by Oxford University Press, a study that expands and offers new insights on the research of earlier articles I was able to use in the first edition. Although I have chosen to focus on
Carousel
rather than
Oklahoma!
, I would be remiss if I did not single out Tim Carter’s exceptionally well-researched archival study of
Oklahoma!
published by Yale University Press, also in 2007.
¹⁴
Both books are models for future studies of individual musicals.

• Thomas L. Riis has added considerably to our knowledge of
Guys and Dolls
and
The Most Happy Fella
in his recent book on Frank Loesser.
¹⁵

• Scott Miller’s three volumes containing thirty-four essays on musicals (1996–2001), Raymond Knapp’s two-volume collection of essays on thirty-eight individual stage musicals, ten musical films, and one television musical (2005–2006), and Joseph P. Swain’s 1990 survey of sixteen musicals (which includes a new chapter on
Les Misérables
and a new concluding essay in its second edition published in 2002) also complement and expand on many of the shows discussed in the two editions of
Enchanted Evenings
among other shows.
¹⁶

For good or ill, many first experience Broadway musicals through film adaptations, which, no matter how faithful to their stage sources (not always a plus), remain distinct and even contradictory entities. The congruities and distinctions between stage and screen versions of the shows we love merit close study. In the first edition of
Enchanted Evenings
, however, I did not devote much attention to these film adaptations. I have tried to fill in this lacuna in the second edition with two new chapters on the film adaptations
of musicals featured in act I and act II, a discussion of the 2007 Tim Burton
Sweeney Todd
with Johnny Depp in the greatly expanded Sondheim chapter, and a discussion of Joel Schumacher’s
Phantom of the Opera
film adaptation in 2004 in the newly written chapter on Lloyd Webber. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, nearly all the stage musicals featured in the first edition have suffered (and occasionally enjoyed) a musical film adaptation, and in these new film chapters and portions of other chapters I write about most of them. Existing material on these films tend to focus on behind-the-scene stories and casting gossip rather than on how these adaptations altered or added to the stage shows. These surveys also rarely discuss how the nature of film media—and surrounding ideologies—moved directors and producers to treat the stage originals in some cases as expendable and in others as sacrosanct. The second edition of
Enchanted Evenings
will engage these neglected issues.

Some of the film adaptations discussed in
chapter 8
are difficult to obtain. One of these is the 1936 film version of
Anything Goes
with rising film star Bing Crosby and its already risen stage star, Ethel Merman. Another is Samuel Goldwyn’s unfairly maligned eightieth and final film of 1959,
Porgy and Bess
, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge in the title roles. Despite numerous infelicities and distortions, both films are well worth the effort it might take to locate them. In contrast, some of the film adaptations discussed in
chapter 14
are probably better known than their stage versions. Prime specimens in this category include the Academy Award–winning musical film adaptations of
My Fair Lady
with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Broadway’s original Henry Higgins, Rex Harrison, and
West Side Story
, a frequent visitor to high schools all over America to complement the study of
Romeo and Juliet
. What are we seeing (and hearing) when we see these films? What are we missing?