Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (34 page)

One Touch of Venus
, act I, scene 4. Mary Martin in the center behind the dressing screen (1943). Photograph: Vandamm Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

We have previously noted that in contrast to the other musicals discussed in this survey,
Lady in the Dark
and
One Touch of Venus
have yet to receive fully staged Broadway revivals. Although both musicals have enjoyed a number of regional performances in America and in Great Britain, they remain shortchanged and underappreciated. Do they need revised books or more Weill hit songs to succeed like Porter and Rodgers and Hart revivals? The final section of this chapter will address the problems and possibilities of revival.

The first of several alleged problems with
Lady in the Dark
is its dependence on a star. After exhibiting indecisiveness equal to Liza Elliott, the versatile Gertrude Lawrence consulted with her friend and oracle Noël Coward as well as her astrological charts and accepted the demanding title role. When Lawrence left for the summer the show closed, and, unlike most shows, including Mary Martin’s
Venus
, Lawrence’s
Lady
never went on the road. A second problem is expense. Three revolving sets and the attendant costs of the three dream ballets do not travel cheaply.

But certainly these red herrings mask deeper problems. When Hart wrote the libretto to
Lady
, for example, psychiatry was still a relatively novel subject for a musical, and the endless series of obligatory dream ballets in musicals were mostly in the future. Nevertheless, even by the standards of the early 1940s, Hart’s treatment of psychiatry is simplistic and predictable.

More problematic than the dated treatment of psychiatry are the increasingly volatile subjects of sexism and sexual harassment. To be sure, the sexism in
Lady in the Dark
is rather unpalatable, especially as displayed in the character of Liza’s eventual Mr. Right, the fanny-pinching, male-chauvinist Charley Johnson, who tries to give Maggie “a wet kiss” against her will. When Johnson accuses Liza of having “magazines instead of babies and a father instead of a husband,” he may be telling it like it was (or how he saw things), but his remarks were not destined to please modern Broadway audiences.
⁶⁵
Instead of getting the girl, Johnson today might be obtaining the services of an attorney who specializes in sexual harassment suits; he certainly does not deserve a woman like Liza. The non-singing Kendall Nesbitt hardly seems a better alternative: “Somehow—I don’t know why—it’s
different for a man, but a woman can have no sense of fulfillment—no real peace and serenity as a woman, living out her life this way.”
⁶⁶
In a later era, the story of a bright, successful, and powerful woman whose achievement comes at the expense of her feminine identity does not bode well for a box office bonanza, even with Madonna in the title role.

Sexual stereotyping is not reserved for the heterosexual members of the
Lady in the Dark
cast. Russell Paxton, the “mildly-effeminate-in-a-rather-charming-fashion” photographer for Liza’s fashion magazine,
Allure
, is introduced as “hysterical, as usual.” He also freely acknowledges his physical admiration for male beauty when he describes Randy Curtis: “He’s got a face that would melt in your mouth…. He’s heaven.”
⁶⁷
Although some mystery will remain as to which of Liza’s suitors (Curtis, Nesbitt, or Johnson) will eventually win out, Paxton is removed at the outset as a romantic contender.
⁶⁸

The reasons for the demise of
One Touch of Venus
are less explicable. The premise of a cultural alien examining America from another perspective has proven remarkably durable in numerous films over the past two decades and includes aliens from another country (
Moscow on the Hudson
) and extraterrestrial aliens (
E.T
.) in its wide orbit. A genuine and liberated sex goddess adrift amid overly romantic types like Whitelaw Savory and prosaic practical types like Rodney Hatch provide for a potentially engaging story, a story wittily realized by Perelman, Nash, and Weill.

While Weill is criticized for abandoning his social conscience in his Broadway musicals,
Venus
manages to effectively satirize a host of American values. We know from the first song that Savory is more than a little eccentric because, in contrast with nearly anyone who loves popular musicals, he firmly believes that (with the notable exception of the classical Anatolian Venus) “New Art Is True Art”: “
Old
art is
cold
art, / The new art is
bold
art; / The best of ancient
Greece
, / It was centuries behind
Matisse
, / Who has carried us beyond Re
noir
, / Till our bosoms are tri-an-gu-
lar
.”

The largest target of the Perelman-Nash satire is the contrasting moral values of the very, very rich and the common folk. The loose morals of the wealthy are comically portrayed in the song “Very, Very, Very,” when Molly explains that “It’s a minor pecca
dillo
/ To patronize the wrong
pillow
, / When you’re very, very, very rich.” It was previously noted that Venus dismisses Savory’s idealistic and bourgeois love by favoring the twang of a bedspring over the moan of a violin. In contrast, Venus’s earthbound inamorata, Hatch, expresses his love for his fiancée Gloria through a series of negative prosaic images, for example, “I love you more than a wasp can sting, / And more than a hangnail hurts.” Although Venus helps Hatch to rid himself of his shrewish intended—“
sic transit
Gloria Kramer”—the simple barber retains
his desire to live in Ozone Heights, where “every bungalow’s just the same” and each has “a radio that looks like a fireplace—and a fireplace that looks like a radio.”
⁶⁹

If
Street Scene
is the American Weill stage work that posterity has voted retrospectively most likely to succeed,
One Touch of Venus
, the most Broadway-like of any Weill show, may turn out to be the most revivable—the sleeper musical of the 1940s. In short,
Venus
is a first-rate traditional Broadway show, packed with an unprecedented number of song hits and other fine songs by Weill, lyrics that reveal the idiosyncratic Nash at his cleverest, and engaging dialogue by Perelman.

After
Venus
, Nash would abandon Broadway and go back to the more intimate world of comic verse. Perelman’s next (and last) musical, three years after
Venus
, closed out of town; he would take time off from his prolific output of comic literary fiction on one more occasion to write the script for Porter’s last effort, the television musical
Aladdin
(1958). Hart ended his distinguished Broadway career with a successful play,
Light Up the Sky
(1948), and as the director of
My Fair Lady
and
Camelot
. Between
Light Up the Sky
and
My Fair Lady
he also wrote distinguished musical screenplays for
Hans Christian Andersen
(lyrics and music by Loesser) and
A Star Is Born
(lyrics by Ira Gershwin and music by Harold Arlen). One year after his failed collaboration with Weill,
The Firebrand of Florence
, Gershwin completed his Broadway career with the poorly received
Park Avenue
(music by Arthur Schwartz). He concluded his career by writing lyrics to several successful films, most notably
A Star Is Born
, then spent three decades in creative retirement as the guardian of his famous brother’s legacy. After
Venus
and
Florence
, Weill would compose the music to
Street Scene, Love Life
, and
Lost in the Stars
, dying before he could realize his next American dream with Maxwell Anderson (his lyricist-librettist on
Knickerbocker Holiday
and
Lost in the Stars
), a musical based on Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn
.

Show Boat
marks one possible starting point for a study of the modern Broadway musical. Fortuitously, its arrival in December 1927 closely followed the opening of a landmark in the history of one of the quintessential modern media of the twentieth century,
The Jazz Singer
, the first American feature film with sound. Although most of this historic film was still “silent”—accompanied by a live pit band—Al Jolson’s songs were reproduced via a recorded soundtrack, tube amplifiers, and loudspeakers placed behind the movie screen at selected theaters. Seemingly traveling at the speed of sound, if not light, talking and singing film adaptations of popular Broadway stage works soon became rapidly, abundantly, and relatively cheaply available to national then worldwide audiences. Masses of movie enthusiasts could view film adaptations of major and minor works that until the end of the 1920s were accessible only on Broadway stages and in touring productions. Audiences could also view a large body of original film musicals not based on a stage work.

During the early decades of sound film, musical film adaptations were usually remote from their stage sources, and it would often be a challenge to discern the difference between an adaptation and an original musical film without prior knowledge. Before the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, film adaptations tended to be footloose and fancy free and at times
unrecognizable vis-à-vis their stage counterparts. The musical films highlighted in later chapters of this study tend to be relatively faithful, perhaps too respectful, of their Broadway origins.

In any event, the two film “Stage versus Screen” chapters at the end of acts I and II in this Broadway survey work from the premise that it is intrinsically unfair to value a film adaptation in direct or indirect proportion to its fidelity to what audiences saw and heard onstage—the musical theater scholar’s own version of the early and traditional music “authenticity” and “historically informed performance” debates. An Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller roughly based on a novel or short story might be considered an improvement over its source or at least an excellent film in its own right. At the same time, readers of a survey on the Broadway musical deserve to know the connection between what they see on the silver screen and what they are likely to see on a stage. Film adaptations such as
The Gay Divorcée, On the Town
, and
Funny Face
may be worthy exponents of the film genre, but students of musical theater should know that these films only imperfectly approximate their stage counterparts.

One of the central purposes of the two “Stage versus Screen” chapters will be to inform fans of Broadway shows what they are getting into when they rent or purchase a film adaptation of a show they have seen on a stage or heard on a cast album. Just as quoting obscenity is not the same thing as being obscene, those who study musical film adaptations, and even those who occasionally shout
vive la différence
should not be accused of wantonly sleeping with the enemy or other acts of traitorous activity. While some, erroneously, treat stage and screen versions of Broadway shows as interchangeable, other musical theater advocates regard even the act of adaptation with suspicion, if not disdain. One articulate adversary of the film musical adaptation, Kim Kowalke, encapsulated this position: “The generic deformation inherent in adapting stage musicals as movies left few intact and most virtually unrecognizable, except for title, some songs, and perhaps a few actors in common.”
¹
Even if Kowalke’s blanket indictment is read as hyperbolic, the term “generic deformation” unfortunately more than occasionally applies.

There are many subtle cultural dimensions to the transition from live to recorded performance with which any musician familiar with a real-life performing tradition will be familiar. Creeping in on little cat feet, media craft workers and modern-minded audiences have revolutionized performances and their reception. The result, as Kowalke implies, is a change in the
genre
, or
kind
of a musical theater work—or, to use his carefully chosen term, a deformed
genre
. To return to the more straightforward structural dimensions of book and score, film adaptations of musicals from
Show Boat
to
Oklahoma!
generally, but by no means invariably, do retain recognizable story lines and more than just “some songs.”

On the other hand, with distressing frequency, departures and alterations from Broadway story lines result in the elimination of half or more than half of the songs people heard when they saw the show on the stage. To cite one extreme but not unique example, the musical film of George and Ira Gershwin’s
Strike Up the Band
managed to salvage only the title tune from this wonderful score. In another frequent practice that we will witness shortly in the 1936 film adaptation of
Show Boat
, the original composer and lyricist will add one or more songs expressly for the show’s new incarnation. Perhaps because only new songs are eligible for Best Song Academy Awards, this practice has continued until the present day, even if the new song is not heard until the final credits, as happens in the case of
The Phantom of the Opera
in the 2004 film version. Another common scenario is the practice of interpolating songs into a show from
different
shows by the original composer-lyricists, a practice that parallels the distortions we have come to expect in
stage
revivals (for example, in the revivals of
Anything Goes
on Broadway in 1962 and 1987). The 1957 film of
Pal Joey
exemplifies this widespread approach.