Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (35 page)

Before the Rodgers and Hammerstein era it was also a common practice to bring in new composers and lyricists who were under contract with the studio producing the film as collaborators after the fact. The 1936 film adaptation of
Anything Goes
provides a good example of this scenario. Another adaptation type is the 1937 film version of the show
Rosalie
, which has an entirely new score. The original double story (the Lindbergh flight and a visit from the Queen of Romania) was preserved, but the double compositional duties between George Gershwin and Sigmund Romberg were instead relegated solely to Cole Porter, a composer who was not even remotely involved in the Broadway version of 1928. Not until the 1950s did Broadway composers and lyricists begin to exert the kind of creative control over films they had begun to show decades earlier on Broadway. Since then, composers and lyricists have usually exerted the right to share their opinion about which songs to cut—although they can be overridden as we will see in producer Samuel Goldwyn’s version of Frank Loesser’s
Guys and Dolls
. Songwriters also gained the frequent privilege of contributing their own new songs.

A large percentage of Broadway shows were adapted into films. Among the highlights of the adaptation subgenre are Ernst Lubitsch’s
The Merry Widow
(MGM 1934), the series of eight freely adapted operettas (and the occasional musical comedy) with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy from 1935 to 1942, and
On the Town
(produced by Arthur Freed for MGM in 1949), not all of which are cherished for their fidelity to their stage sources.
The most consistently memorable musical films to appear in the era between
Show Boat
and
Oklahoma!
, however, were original film musicals. A short list in this latter category would be remiss if it did not include the following:
The Love Parade
(1929);
Love Me Tonight
(1932);
42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933
, and
Footlight Parade
(1933);
The Great Ziegfeld
and
Born to Dance
(1936);
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937);
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
(1938);
The Wizard of Oz
(1939);
Pinocchio, Broadway Melody of 1940
, and
Fantasia
(1940);
Yankee Doodle Dandy
and
Holiday Inn
(1942); and
Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather
, and
This Is the Army
(1943).

Of the eight classic films that paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers between 1933 and 1938, only three were based even in part on Broadway shows.
The Gay Divorcée
, which was based, but not quite nominally, on
Gay Divorce
, starring Astaire, retained but one Porter tune, “Night and Day.” This movie, which has genuine merit on its own terms, gave film audiences an opportunity to see comics Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore, as well as Astaire, replay their stage roles and offered the attractive new face of Betty Grable. It also concludes with perhaps the most elaborate and certainly the longest of the dance duets in the Fred and Ginger series, “The Continental” (more than 16 minutes). With its relatively lengthy medium shot, this dance (and future Fred and Ginger dances) also showcased the dancers from head to toe, with only an occasional close-up, a directorial concession Astaire routinely demanded (and got).
²
Despite these genuine merits, the film version of
Gay Divorce
is as different from its source as, well, night and day. The plot of
Follow the Fleet
(1936), like that of
The Gay Divorcée
, is also loosely derived from a Broadway show,
Hit the Deck!
from 1927, with music by Vincent Youmans (also the principal composer of the first of the Fred and Ginger films,
Flying Down to Rio
). With
The Gay Divorcée
, at least one song was composed by its original composer.
Follow the Fleet
, however, met
Rosalie
’s fate. Youmans’s entire score was thrown overboard, and Irving Berlin, who composed the music and lyrics to
Top Hat
and would soon do the same for
Carefree
(both films also in the first eight Fred and Ginger films), was brought in to write the complete score.
³

James Whale’s 1936
Show Boat
remains arguably the most successful relatively faithful transfer of operetta-leaning genre (with significant touches of musical comedy) from stage to screen in the 1930s. Kern’s
Roberta
, with lyrics by Otto Harbach, and yet another from the first Fred and Ginger eight, also deserves consideration as one of the finest contemporary film adaptations of a staged musical comedy (with significant touches of operetta). It also demonstrates how it is possible to retain a story line and much of a score while at the same time transforming leading acting roles into dancing stars. Onstage, the non-dancing role of Huck Haines, played by then-newcomer
comedian Bob Hope, was now played by Astaire, while Rogers replaced the non-dancing Lyda Roberti (who as Countess Tanka Schwarenka was not even attracted to Haines in the stage version). The playful roles of Haines and the Countess were expanded both dramatically and musically and offered a sharp comic contrast to the ingénue elegance of Russian Princess Stephanie, played by romantic lead Irene Dunne, who now got to sing both big ballads, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Yesterdays” (the latter originally sung onstage by her Aunt Minnie, Fay Templeton). Other songs retained from the original score included the lively and jazzy “Let’s Begin” and “I’ll Be Hard to Handle.”

The film dropped “Something Had to Happen” and used “The Touch of Your Hand” and “You’re Devastating” as orchestral underscoring for the fashion-show sequence. As part of the musical enhancement for Huck and the Countess (Fred and Ginger), the film added two new swing dance numbers for this pair: “I Won’t Dance,” a reworking of a song by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh from Kern’s recent London flop with Hammerstein,
Three Sisters
, and a song composed expressly for the film, “Lovely to Look At.”
⁴
The winning combination of romantic elegance (operetta) and catchy popular vernacular (musical comedy) and their signature songs (Dunne) and dances (Astaire and Rogers) captured the best of both worlds. Despite the outrageous notion of an exiled Russian princess living in Paris in 1935, the screen form of
Roberta
, with its great new roles for dancers, might even make a good candidate for a stage revival.

Given the 80–120 minute fixed time frame, a technical requirement for early films, reasonably faithful and complete adaptations would not be possible until the film adaptations of classic shows in the mid-1950s. If one expects fidelity of dialogue and score, all the film adaptations made before the 1950s are destined to disappoint. Looking at four of the shows treated in act I of
Enchanted Evenings
, we find a range of possible connections to the original stage versions:

• The 1936 film version of
Show Boat
featured several cast members who had appeared either in the original 1927 stage version or subsequent productions over the next nine years; a screenplay by the original librettist, Oscar Hammerstein; songs exclusively written for
Show Boat
by Hammerstein and Jerome Kern (but not all the songs heard onstage); and three new songs written expressly for the film.
⁵
In a practice that would become increasingly common after
Oklahoma!
, two of these new songs, “Ah Still Suits Me” and “I Have the Room above Her” would reappear in future Broadway productions.
⁶

• The 1936 Paramount
Anything Goes
retains much of the original plot, a surprising amount of dialogue from the 1934 libretto, the original star Ethel Merman, a small sampling of the songs Porter wrote for the stage version, and more than an equal number of new songs by other composers and lyricists.

• The 1959
Porgy and Bess
presents a condensed “Broadway” version that replaced most of the recitative with spoken dialogue and like most musical comedies of the era also reduced the role of the chorus. Nevertheless, while heavily reduced, few songs were cut entirely, and no new songs by the Gershwins or others were added. It was not until 1993 that one could view a
Porgy and Bess
that, with two omissions, presented a filmed adaptation of a production (based on Glyndebourne in 1986) that offered what audiences heard during the Boston tryouts in the weeks before its 1935 Broadway debut, that is, a virtually uncut
Porgy and Bess
.

• The 1957 film version of
Pal Joey
, like the 1962 and 1987 stage versions of
Anything Goes
, presented, in addition to a few songs from the 1940 stage production, other songs created only by the original composer-lyricists Rodgers and Hart. Unlike the film
Anything Goes
, however, the
Pal Joey
film takes extensive liberties with the stage plot and script and features no actors or actresses from the original Broadway production.

Unfortunately, the
Show Boat
and
Anything Goes
1930s adaptations discussed here are often harder to find than their 1950s remakes, probably because they are shot (albeit gorgeously) on black and white film.
⁷
The readily attainable 1951 Technicolor
Show Boat
followed the basic plot outline, at least for the portion that corresponds to act I, and most of the major songs from the original stage version. On the other hand, it removes most of Hammerstein’s dialogue and eliminates or greatly reduces the African-American themes and characters that gave the stage and first film so much meaning. Gone entirely is the black chorus, gone after ten minutes is Queenie, Julie no longer has a revealing kinship with “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” and the exchange of blood between Julie and Steve is so underplayed that it would go unnoticed unless one were expressly on the lookout for this potentially powerful moment. Even “Ol’ Man River” is heard only twice, which is perhaps a dozen fewer times than patrons of the Harold Prince 1994 revival would experience. Howard Keel (a baritone) as Ravenal, Joe E. Brown as Cap’n Andy Hawks, and William Warfield as Joe are excellent in their roles,
but not enough to compensate for the film’s infelicities. Although the film has its entertaining moments, in the end it does disservice to the stage version we examined in
chapter 2
and does not begin to measure up to the 1936 film directed by Whale, the version of
Show Boat
that will be discussed in this chapter.

Similarly, given a choice between using the 1956 remake of
Anything Goes
and nothing at all (assuming that the 1936 version cannot be located), the suggestion offered here is to try to wait until one of the various stage revivals arrives at a theater near you, which should happen soon. Aside from taking place on a boat, nearly all vestiges of the plot have vanished in this version. Although in vastly altered contexts, the 1956 version delivers a little more of Porter’s score than the 1936 original, including “All through the Night” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” excised in the earlier film; the complete title song, “I Get a Kick Out of You”; “You’re the Top”; and a new Porter song, “It’s De-Lovely” six years before it would reappear in the 1962 Off-Broadway revival. It also offers Bing Crosby reprising his earlier film role under the assumed name of Bill Benson, joining co-star Donald O’Connor in two new songs by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn in addition to those by Porter. But the excessive liberties with plot disqualify the film from being a fair representation of any of the many possible stage versions.

The difficult-to-obtain Universal 1936
Show Boat
, directed by the critically acclaimed James Whale, is almost without exception regarded as far superior to the 1929 sound-silent hybrid
Show Boat
of 1929 or the 1951 version. Stephen Banfield goes as far as to praise the 1936 film as the best of all possible
Show Boats
: “Shortened to less than two hours, the score, including three new songs (plus two more that were cut and are lost), and the new, tighter, closer-to-the novel screenplay provided by Hammerstein together offer the most satisfying, balanced, and compelling version of
Show Boat
as drama achieved up to the present day. In almost every way it is superior to the stage version and its variants.” For Banfield, the stage
Show Boat
of 1927 constitutes a rough draft and the 1936 film a finished and culminating destination.

Although the film added three new songs (“I Have the Room above Her,” “Gallivantin’ Aroun,’” and “Ah Still Suits Me”), time constraints required deletions or condensations of other songs and dialogue. Gone entirely are Ellie’s stage number “Life on the Wicked Stage” and Ellie’s duet with Frank, “I Might Fall Back on You”; Queenie’s ballyhoos in each act, “C’mon Folks” and “Hey Feller”; Ravenal’s “Till Good Luck Comes My Way” in act I; and three songs from the Chicago Fair scene that opens act II, “At the Fair,” “Why Do I Love You?,” and “In Dahomey.” Although this is a lot of songs at the expense of Queenie and Frank and Ellie, the latter relegated to singing non-Kern duets at the Trocadero, the new songs add considerable substance and nuance to the romantic principals and to Joe, now played by the iconic Paul Robeson, the 1928 London and 1932 New York Joe.