Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (118 page)

33
. The harmony here begins by alternating between E major (the key in which Daily began his second B section) and D minor. After the considerable harmonic maneuvering described in the text, this section ends up with a strong cadence back to D minor and circles back to the vamp that introduced Mr. Mister’s first
a
section.

34
. Hitchcock,
Music in the United States
, 226–27. The rocking “Hawaiian guitar” accompaniment also serves as a relaxed and understated version of the accompaniment heard earlier in “Let’s Do Something.”

35
.
Cradle
, 87–96, and Kozlenko,
The Best Short Plays
, 141–46.

36
. Max Unger, Notes to Beethoven’s
Overture to Goethe’s “Egmont”
(New York: Eulenburg, 1936), ii (with a musical illustration for this measure). It is tempting to speculate that Blitzstein had Thayer’s interpretation (reiterated in Unger’s notes) fresh on his mind. In any event the popular Eulenburg edition appeared the same year that Blitzstein wrote his
Cradle
.

37
.
Cradle
, 96, and Kozlenko,
The Best Short Plays
, 145–46.

38
. In his survey of Blitzstein’s theatrical work through 1941, Robert Dietz notes three recurring ideas in the midst of
Cradle
’s otherwise autonomous ten scenes: the multiple appearance of the Moll’s music (scenes 1, 2, 7, and 10); the reprise of the title song, first sung in scene 7, to conclude the work three scenes later; and an ominous three-chord motive in the orchestra. This last motive first appears in scene 5 to underscore Bugs’s explanation to Harry Druggist how an explosion will kill Gus and Sadie, and reappears in scene 9 when Mr. Mister explains to Dr. Specialist that Joe Hammer’s “accident” was due to drunkenness. Dietz, “The Operatic Style of Marc Blitzstein,” 297–98.

39
. Only the Moll, however, will sing the musical line first given to dreams in scene 7 (and repeated with new words to conclude the next two stanzas): “Oh, you can
dream
and
scheme
/ and happily
put
and take, take and
put
… / But first be sure / The nickel’s under your
foot
.”

40
. Quotation in Daniel Kingman,
American Music
, 458. For other examples of negative criticism based at least in part on Blitzstein’s political agenda see Samuel Lipman,
Arguing for Music—Arguing for Culture
(Boston: David R. Godine, 1990), 157–63, and Terry Teachout, “Cradle of Lies.”

41
. In his memorial tribute Copland wrote that “the taxi driver, the panhandler, the corner druggist were given voice for the first time in the context of serious musical drama …. No small accomplishment, for without it no truly indigenous opera is conceivable.” Copland, “In Memory of Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964),”
Perspectives of New Music
2/2 (Spring–Summer 1964): 6.

42
. Perhaps alone among recent assessments is Hitchcock’s, that “it was not so much the message as the music that was significant in Blitzstein’s art.” Hitchcock,
Music in the United States
, 227.

Chapter 7:
Lady in the Dark
and
One Touch of Venus

1
. To cite two examples out of many, Gerald Mast, in his otherwise comprehensive
Can’t Help Singin’
(1987), offers neither an explanation nor an apology for his conspicuous neglect of Weill, while Joseph P. Swain in
The Broadway Musical
(1990), a more selective study of sixteen musicals, remains similarly silent about Weill’s American works. In the years after the first edition of
Enchanted Evenings
, Raymond Knapp made
Lady in the Dark
one of his thirty-eight focus musicals in the second volume of his two-volume study (Knapp,
The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity
, 266–73). Ethan Mordden treats Weill appreciatively and at relative length in
Beautiful Mornin,’
devoting attention to
Lady in the Dark
, 59–69;
One Touch of Venus
, 159–62;
The Firebrand of Florence
, 144–48;
Street Scene
148–50;
Love Life
, 223–228; and
Lost in the Stars
, 229–35. Mordden considers Weill the most versatile of Broadway practitioners, “the absolute forties composer, running though all the available genres except revue” and even makes the refreshing argument on “the superiority of Weill’s Broadway over his German output” (Mordden, 163).

2
. See especially Ronald Sanders’s interpretation of
Lady in the Dark’
s genesis in
The Days Grow Short
, 292–309, and Matthew Scott, “Weill in America: The Problem of Revival.” Less judgmental in this respect is Jürgen Schebera,
Kurt Weill
.

3
. David Drew, “Weill, Kurt (Julian).” The ensuing quotations from this article are found on pp. 305 and 307–8; for a more recent assessment by Drew see
Kurt Weill: A Handbook
, 45–47.

4
. Scott, “Weill in America: The Problem of Revival.”

5
. Lehman Engel,
The American Musical Theater
, 61.

6
. Robert Garland, “Mary Martin, John Boles, Kenny Baker Head Cast of New Comedy,”
New York Journal-American
, October 8, 1943; quoted in Steven Suskin,
Opening Night on Broadway
, 525; reprinted in
New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews
, vol. 4, 264.

7
. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, February 27, 1944, Music Division, Library of Congress.

8
. Kurt Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of
Street Scene
(Columbia OL 4139).

9
. Ibid. See also Larry Stempel,
“Street Scene
,” 321–41.

10
. Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of
Street Scene
.

11
. Ibid.

12
. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, April 13, 1944, Music Division, Library of Congress. Gerald Mast also perceives second-act weaknesses in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. See Mast,
Can’t Help Singin,’
204–05.

13
. Letter to Ira Gershwin, April 13, 1944.

14
. Malcolm Goldstein,
George S. Kaufman: His Life, His Theater
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 343.

15
. See Arlene Croce,
The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book
, 142, 144, and 146 on Ginger Rogers’s film roles as women who cannot make up their minds (including the 1944 Paramount
film version of
Lady in the Dark
). The idea of a future Mr. Right being able to complete a “dream” song is at least as old as Victor Herbert’s “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” from
Naughty Marietta
(1910).

16
. F. Anstey,
Humour & Fantasy
(New York: Arno Press, 1978), 288–468.

17
. Cheryl Crawford credits stage designer Aline Bernstein, who remains un-indexed in the standard biographies of Weill; Ronald Sanders (who used Crawford as his major source for the genesis of
One Touch of Venus)
attributes this suggestion to
Lady in the Dark
costume designer Irene Sharaff. Both Crawford and Sanders offer a date, the former in June 1942 and the latter November 1941. David Drew writes that “in February 1942
The Tinted Venus
headed a list of fifteen possibilities he [Weill] was considering for Cheryl Crawford.” Cheryl Crawford,
One Naked Individual
, 116; Sanders,
The Days Grow Short
, 322; and Drew,
Kurt Weill: A Handbook
, 328. See also Dorothy Herrmann,
S. J. Perelman: A Life
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1986), 147.

18
. Perelman had, however, contributed sketches to other Broadway revues beginning in 1931. Douglas Fowler,
S. J. Perelman
(Boston: Twayne, 1983).

19
. Crawford,
One Naked Individual
, 121.

20
. The role of Venus, originally intended for Marlene Dietrich, was Mary Martin’s first starring Broadway role. After answering more than tentatively in the affirmative, Dietrich backed down from playing the sexy Venus, allegedly for the sake of her impressionable nineteen-year-old daughter. Martin, now mainly known from later roles as the wholesome Nellie Forbush (
South Pacific
) and Maria Rainer (
The Sound of Music
), earlier in her career had proven her sexual allure in Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in
Leave It to Me
(1938).

21
. Crawford and Kazan had also worked together on Weill’s
Johnny Johnson
as producer and actor, respectively. Crawford continued to produce musicals, most notably Lerner and Weill’s
Love Life
and Lerner and Loewe’s
Brigadoon
(also with de Mille) and
Paint Your Wagon;
Kazan left musicals for theater and films after directing
Venus
and
Love Life
. According to Gerald Bordman, Kazan “was the most important American director of the late 1940s and the 1950s.” Gerald Bordman,
The Oxford Companion to American Theatre
, 2nd ed., 394.

22
. Virgil Thomson, “Plays with Music,”
New York Herald Tribune
, February 23, 1941. Barlow writes the following about
Lady in the Dark:
“In this long score, there are not three minutes of the true Weill. And in this new medium, this new life, this new success, the promise has been buried under a branch of expensive but imitation laurel.” Samuel L. M. Barlow, “In the Theatre,”
Modern Music
8/3 (March–April 1941): 189–93.

23
. The
Lady in the Dark
playbill also included other highly distinguished collaborators: Sam H. Harris, who had earlier produced fifteen Cohan musicals, seven Berlin shows, the Gershwins’
Of Thee I Sing
, Porter’s
Jubilee
, and Rodgers and Hart’s
I’d Rather Be Right
; Hassard Short, director of production, lighting, and musical sequences, who had designed illustrious shows for two decades, including
The Band Wagon, Roberta
, and
Jubilee
; and Albertina Rasch, the choreographer of
The Band Wagon, The Cat and the Fiddle
, and
Jubilee
.

24
. Crawford,
One Naked Individual
, 135.

25
. Ibid., 138.

26
. See bruce mcclung, “
Psicosi per musica
.” I am grateful to the author for sharing a typescript of this essay prior to its publication. See also mcclung, “American Dreams: Analyzing Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, and Kurt Weill’s
Lady in the Dark
” (Ph.D. dissertation, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 1994) and, more recently, mcclung’s thorough and excellent
“Lady in the Dark”: Biography of a Musical
.

27
. Also much later, Whitelaw Savory would sing the beautiful “Love in a Mist” in the place later reserved for “Westwind.” “Love in a Mist” can be heard in
Ben Bagley’s Kurt Weill Revisited Vol. II
(Painted Smiles PSCD 109).

28
. Another song, “Who Am I?,” which Savory sang in his bedroom early in act II before being surprised by the angry Anatolian Zuvetli, was also dropped after Weill had orchestrated it.

29
. A typescript of
I Am Listening
is located at the State Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin. The Weill-Gershwin correspondence and other Ira Gershwin documents are housed in the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and Weill’s musical manuscripts are housed at Yale University. Copies of all Hart, Gershwin, and Weill materials for
Lady in the Dark
are available for study at the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York. I am grateful to all of the above institutions for making these materials accessible to me, especially Harold L. Miller (State Historical Society), Raymond A. White (Library of Congress), Victor Cardell and Kendall Crilly (Yale), and David Farneth (Kurt Weill Foundation). Thanks are also due to Tom Briggs of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Theatre Library for enabling me to examine the full orchestral score of
Lady in the Dark
.

30
. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, September 2, 1940, Music Division, Library of Congress.

31
. Ibid.

32
. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, September 14, 1940, Music Division, Library of Congress. Since they had cut the Hollywood Dream (but not the Hollywood sequence) and Randy Curtis now had nothing to sing in the second act, all concerned were eager to have this character sing something. The problems with all of Curtis’s music, however, stemmed from the disturbing discovery about the man they had cast in this role, Victor Mature. As Ira Gershwin expressed it in
Lyrics on Several Occasions
, “when handsome ‘hunk of man’ Mature sang, his heart and the correct key weren’t in it” (144).

33
. Ira Gershwin annotations (September 1967) to “The Third Dream Sequence Section 1,” Music Division, Library of Congress; and
Lyrics on Several Occasions
, 207–8; reprinted in Robert Kimball, ed.,
The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin
, 291–92.