Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (4 page)

The film chapters and remarks on the
Sweeney Todd
and
The Phantom of the Opera
film adaptations will address these and other questions, including how the plots, scripts, songs, and Broadway casts have been altered, what was cut, what was retained, and why. Some of the films explored, while not without controversy, were financially and critically successful in their own day and remain well known and loved in ours. Until the 1950s, the producers who controlled the studios and their contracted stars and songwriters preferred infidelity over allegiance to Broadway stage sources. From the 1930s through the 1950s all films were also subject to the Hays Production Code, which enforced a stricter view than Broadway censors of what was proper for a song lyric or a plot. This alternative universe explains the expurgations of Cole Porter’s famously adult lyrics in the film adaptations of both
Anything Goes
and
Kiss Me, Kate
and the disposal of Vera Simpson’s
husband from the plot so that her affair with Pal Joey would not be an adulterous one. Nearly twenty years earlier Broadway audiences were already free to experience and relish this unsavory material. Before the 1960s had ended, Hollywood had achieved parity with Broadway on the degree of unsavoriness permitted.

Despite the liberties they often take with their stage sources (Kim Kowalke refers to most film adaptations as “generic deformation”), the films do not invariably suffer by comparison.
¹⁷
Take the 1936
Show Boat
, in which, unusually, the authors were able to exert some creative control, including the use of a screenplay by Hammerstein. Here, the new songs were all by Hammerstein and Kern and the creators of these songs were the same people who helped make the thoughtful and imaginative changes necessary to adhere to the unofficial but binding “two hour” rule operative from the 1930s through the 1950s. Arriving a few years after the 1932 New York revival, the film featured timeless performances by Charles Winninger and Helen Morgan, reprising their stage roles of Cap’n Andy and Julie LaVerne, and Paul Robeson, the actor originally intended to play Joe. The result was a film that inspired Kern scholar Stephen Banfield to make the case that the film’s dramatic structure constitutes an
improvement
of the problematic original Broadway second act.
¹⁸

The 1936
Anything Goes
adaptation may have cut or mutilated much of Porter, but it does give audiences a chance to see the original Ethel Merman in her prime and fine film portrayals of Billy Crocker by the young Bing Crosby, and the character of Moon by Charlie Ruggles. It also delivers a surprising amount of the original Broadway libretto, which is much funnier than later revisionists give it credit for. Most of the films that adapted Broadway shows did
something
right, and we will gain a better understanding about the films, their sources, and ourselves from watching them—as long as we do not rest our evaluation solely on their fidelity to the stage works we hold dear.

Film adaptations of the Golden Age musicals, most of which were released about a decade after their Broadway debuts, tend to be more faithful to their original plots, scripts, and songs, and despite some deleted and rearranged dialogue and song cuts, the new songs (e.g., in the
Kiss Me, Kate
and
Guys and Dolls
adaptations) are almost invariably those of the Broadway songwriters. In addition to discussing their relative fidelity and completeness, the film chapters will address the practice of voice dubbing and various less noticeable technological changes that manipulate and transform live theater into the deceptively more realistic film medium. Some of these films have exerted a profound effect on how audiences have come to appreciate the stage originals, and these chapters will address this historical legacy as well.

Sources on
West Side Story
(to conclude with a particularly well-known example) seldom neglect to mention that it was the film version rather than the stage version that catapulted this show into universal popular consciousness. Indeed, the 1961 film, co-directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, came within one award of a clean Academy Awards sweep, winning ten out of a possible eleven awards. Despite a few conspicuous changes in the song order, all the original
West Side Story
songs are present and accounted for (unlike virtually every preceding film adaptation of a musical). Also in marked contrast to most Hollywood film adaptations of Broadway from the 1930s to the 1950s, no songs were added, either by studio composers on contract or by Leonard Bernstein, the composer. Although Robbins, the original director and choreographer of the stage version, was fired from the film after directing the Prologue for his inability to maintain a financially sound production schedule, most of the choreography that appears on screen is faithful to Robbins’s vision and that of original and film co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

The love versus hate theme of Romeo and Juliet carries over into the contrasting reactions this (and other) film adaptations inspire. Some film critics loved the Robbins-Wise translation from stage to screen. Arthur Knight, in the
Saturday Review
, considered it “a triumphant work of art”; Stanley Kauffmann went even further when he proclaimed the adaptation “the best film musical ever made.”
¹⁹
On the other hand, an uncharacteristically grumpy Pauline Kael did not even like the dancing and asked, “How can so many critics have fallen for all this frenzied hokum.”
²⁰
Love it or hate it, the film remains one of the most memorable film adaptations of a Broadway show.

In the Preface to the First Edition I relate what brought me to write
Enchanted Evenings
. I described the role musicals played in my childhood and adolescence, my rejection of musicals as unworthy of my love, and my return to the fold after completing a dissertation on the genesis and compositional process of Beethoven’s early piano concertos. I also explain how this book was the first to combine traditional musicological practices, such as the study of primary manuscripts, with a serious discussion of how musicals took shape in the minds of their creators and how the music in musicals dramatically enhances words and stories. My goal was to write a book that I wanted to write and at the same time a book that corresponded to what I wanted to teach in my course, The Broadway Musical. Although most of
the musicals I chose to write about would generally be classified among the usual suspects, others (e.g.,
The Cradle Will Rock, One Touch of Venus
, and
The Most Happy Fella
) might be considered idiosyncratic. Even when dealing with such an essential component as Rodgers and Hammerstein, I felt free to include Rodgers’s personal favorite, simply because it also interested and moved me more than, say,
Oklahoma!
The book was my party, and I could cry over
Carousel
if I wanted to.

Increasingly, however, the first edition seemed in need of some updating to better serve a general audience. It also constituted an incomplete reflection of what I covered in my course in a given semester. Long before Johnny Depp came along, a Broadway course without
Sweeney Todd
seemed unthinkable. For years I have also spent a week on
The Phantom of the Opera
, now included prominently in the second edition. Although I rarely fail to single out Engel’s runner-up
Cabaret
in my course, unfortunately space did not permit me to give this show or the important career of John Kander and Fred Ebb (almost, but not quite brought to a halt by the death of Ebb in 2004) the attention they merit.
²¹

In preparing a second edition, I soon realized I would need to neglect other major shows by those who followed the composers and lyricists who starred in the first edition, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Marc Blitzstein, Kurt Weill, Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederic Loewe, and Leonard Bernstein, and in the process featured roles by major directors and choreographers, including George Abbott, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, Rouben Mamoulian, and Jerome Robbins. Nearly fifty years have gone by since the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation passed the torch to a new generation starting in the late 1950s with Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and then moving into the early 1960s with Cy Coleman, Jerry Herman, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Stephen Sondheim, and Charles Strouse; the 1970s with Marvin Hamlisch, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Stephen Schwartz; the 1980s with Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, William Finn, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, and Maury Yeston; the 1990s and 2000s with Jason Robert Brown, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChuisa, Jonathan Larson, and Jeanine Tesori. The above list is by no means exhaustive.

With the exception of the Sondheim–Lloyd Webber Epilogue and some attention to Hal Prince (who as the director of both
Sweeney Todd
and
The Phantom of the Opera
successfully bridged the divide between these central musical figures) and James Lapine, the second edition leaves most of the lacunae unfilled. Nevertheless, my intention and hope is that this new edition will serve readers at least a little more adequately and usefully. For
those who arrived on Broadway through Hollywood (and for those who want to know thine enemy), the two new chapters on film adaptations and the discussions of the
Sweeney Todd
and
Phantom of the Opera
films in the greatly expanded Sondheim and entirely new Lloyd Webber chapters could perhaps provide a point of access and lead to greater understanding and appreciation of both stage and screen musicals.

When
Enchanted Evenings
appeared in 1997, Lloyd Webber’s
Cats
, directed by Trevor Nunn, was on the verge of surpassing Michael Bennett and Marvin Hamlisch’s
A Chorus Line
as Broadway’s longest running show, and
Phantom
stood in fourth place behind the then still running
Les Misérables, Cats
, and
A Chorus Line
on the all-time Broadway Hit Parade. Other shows by the popular French and British invaders,
Les Misérables
and
Miss Saigon
(lyrics by Boublil, music by Schönberg, and produced by Cameron Mackintosh),
Phantom
(Lloyd Webber, also produced by Mackintosh), and
Sunset Boulevard
(Lloyd Webber, directed by Nunn) were in the process of extending their runs, in some cases for more than a decade.

As I write this new preface,
Phantom
stands alone as the reigning champion, followed by
Cats, “Les Miz,” Chorus Line
, and two shows new to the Broadway scene twelve years ago, the
Chicago
revival and
The Lion King
. Musicals that arrived about the time of
Enchanted Evening
’s first edition or since have both begun and ended some of the longest runs in Broadway history (see “The Top Forty Greatest Hit Musicals from 1920 to 2008 in the online website
www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings
—the numbers in parentheses refer to their current place in this list):
Beauty and the Beast
(5),
Rent
(6),
Hairspray
(16),
The Producers
(17),
Cabaret
(Revival) (18),
Smokey Joe’s Café
(24),
Aida
(28),
Monty Python’s Spamalot
(35),
Jekyll & Hyde
(37), and
42nd Street
(Revival) (38). Another trio of megahit shows that opened after
Enchanted Evenings
are still running, one or more of which may reach the Top Broadway 10 by the time they eventually close their curtains:
Mamma Mia!
(13),
Avenue Q
(22), and
Wicked
(23).

While these shows have attracted large audiences, Sondheim’s shows continued to enjoy greater critical prestige. In 1993, Sondheim became the subject of the first major musicological study of a Broadway composer, Stephen Banfield’s
Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals
. Five years later the American Musicological Society national meeting in Boston devoted a special evening session to Sondheim. Lloyd Webber’s musicals have gradually attracted theater scholars and musicologists as well, albeit far fewer than the legions of literary and dramatic critics, cultural historians, and sociologists in addition to the many musicologists attracted to the work of Sondheim. The chapters on Sondheim and Lloyd Webber will try to shed light on why there exists such a deep chasm between the ways audiences, critics, and theater historians have assessed these two major contributors to the American musical.

Audiences did not know it at the time but by 1997 both Sondheim and Lloyd Webber had completed most of their Broadway work.
²²
Their most recent New York successes, Sondheim and Lapine’s
Passion
and Lloyd Webber’s
Sunset Boulevard
, both arriving in 1994, had also recently closed. It turns out that the years since the first edition of
Enchanted Evenings
marked the beginning of the Post-Sondheim and Post–Lloyd Webber Era, a subject for future books by future authors. Meanwhile, the contrasting achievements and reputations of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber and the issues these important Broadway figures raise (e.g., tradition vs. modernity and popularity vs. critical acclaim) will serve in this second edition of
Enchanted Evenings
as worthy representatives of the Broadway story beyond
West Side Story
.

To quote Cinderella’s opening and closing lines in
Into the Woods
, “I wish.”

W
ithout more than a little help from parents, family, friends, teachers and professors, colleagues, students, readers and editors, librarians and archivists and the collections they serve, and copyright owners and their assistants and lawyers, this book could not have been written. I am glad for this opportunity to thank some of the institutions and people that contributed to this collaborative process.