Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (45 page)

Rodgers left it up to others to demonstrate how the musical details in
Carousel
support the lyrics and the libretto and create musical unity, and how such details create subtle correspondences between music, character, and drama. Nevertheless, his description of “musical dialogue” in
Love Me Tonight
and his analysis of his text-setting objectives in “It Might as Well Be Spring” reveal that Rodgers was fully conscious of how nuances can help a theater composer to achieve an artistic goal. In the light of his autobiography, a discussion of how dotted rhythms, triplets, and arpeggiated accompanimental figures reveal greater dramatic truths appears to be grounded in reality.
³²
Rodgers is the first to admit that a number of his musicals created with Hart do not even aspire to, much less achieve, the goals he first enunciated in the late 1920s with
Dearest Enemy
and
Peggy-Ann
. His primary desire throughout his extraordinary career, however, was to create a musical theater in which the songs belong to their characters and determine their place within the dramatic action, and a musical theater in which dialogue, song, and dance are unified and integrated. These ideals did not suddenly appear with
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
. After developing his vision and evolving technique as a dramatic composer with Hart, Rodgers found a collaborator who fully embraced the integrated ideal. Together, Rodgers and Hammerstein
were a winning combination that forged a living and posthumous legacy of popular commercial works and a critical stature unmatched by any other body of work in the history of the American musical.

After the death of his second collaborator, Rodgers, who had by necessity ghost-written lyrics for Hart, decided to write his own lyrics for an entire show. The result, the biracial romance
No Strings
(1962) with Diahann Carroll and Richard Kiley in the principal roles, turned out to be Rodgers’s final success (580 performances), albeit a modest one by the standards of
Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I
, and
The Sound of Music
. His next show, collaboration with Hammerstein’s lyricist protégé Stephen Sondheim, produced the disappointing, if underrated,
Do I Hear a Waltz?
in 1965 (220 performances).

Rodgers remained active to the end. In the 1970s he managed to mount three final shows on Broadway:
Two by Two
(1970), with lyrics by Martin Charnin and starring Danny Kaye as Noah (343 performances);
Rex
(1976), with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and starring Nicol Williamson as Henry VIII (49 performances); and
I Remember Mama
(1979), with lyrics by Charnin and Raymond Jessel and starring Liv Ullmann and George Hearn (108 performances).
³³
Less than four months after his fortieth and final musical closed, Rodgers died on December 30, 1979.

Because they float at the center of the mainstream, the convention-shattering features of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s adaptations of literary sources with their carefully constructed subplots (
Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific
, and
The King and I
) seem less apparent than their more experimental and less successful works with original books. Among the latter are
Allegro
(1947), with its Greek chorus and abstract sets, and the back stager
Me and Juliet
(1953), in which audiences could see on- and offstage events simultaneously.
³⁴
Just as it is often difficult for present-day listeners to appreciate the iconoclasm of the less noisy modernists (for example, the revolutionary Debussy), it requires a special effort in the post-Sondheim and Lloyd Webber era to understand just how unconventional and innovative Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals really were. Here is a glimpse of what was innovative (if not unprecedentedly new) in three of their shows, a body of work which helped to establish future conventions:

OKLAHOMA
! (1943) eschews the usual opening chorus (or singer accompanied by an orchestra) and instead opens with a woman churning butter alone onstage and the hero singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” (without even a piano to back him up) offstage.
It also presents perhaps the first genuine, albeit pathetic, villain who dies in a struggle with a hero, and its full-length dream ballet moves several steps beyond
On Your Toes
in its integration of dance into the plot.

SOUTH PACIFIC
(1949) offers the first major middle-aged romantic hero played by the first major defector from the Metropolitan Opera (Ezio Pinza). The younger romantic secondary male character dies, and the central romantic leads sing “Twin Soliloquies” to themselves “silently.” The drama is conveyed through rapid and seamless scene shifts, and, most provocatively, the musical seriously explores the causes of racial prejudice in the song “Carefully Taught.”

THE KING AND I
(1951), based at least loosely on a true story and real people, is the first major musical in which the characters (if not the cast) are mostly Asian, a foreign language is conveyed by instruments rather than by speech, the principals never kiss and touch only once, when they are dancing, and the central male character dies at the end (and, unlike Billy Bigelow, stays dead).

Carousel
(1945) was no less daring. It revolves around an unsympathetic character (when he is not singing) who hits his wife, sings a “Soliloquy” for nearly eight minutes before attempting a robbery, dies by suicide, and hits his daughter when he returns to earth (from purgatory) fifteen years later. Musicals of various types after
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
would continue to be remembered by their songs, of course, but from now on their revivability would usually depend on integrated and more coherent books. Although by no means did they invent the so-called integrated Broadway musical (often referred to as the “sung play”), or even always adhere to the elusive integrated ideal, more than anyone else Rodgers and Hammerstein can be praised (or blamed) for demonstrating in their optimistic, homespun, and sentimental shows the commercial potential of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

In the years following the success of
Anything Goes
in 1934 only Rodgers and Hart surpassed Porter in producing musical hits on Broadway. The Gershwins were unable to complete any more Broadway shows between
Porgy and Bess
in 1935 and George’s death two years later, and Kern managed only one more new Broadway show,
Very Warm for May
(1939) in a final decade spent mainly in films. As Gershwin and Kern ebbed, Porter flowed for the remaining years of the 1930s with one successful (albeit now nearly forgotten) musical after another filled with unforgettable songs: “Begin the Beguine” and “Just One of Those Things” from
Jubilee
(1935); “It’s De-Lovely” from
Red, Hot and Blue!
(1936); “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” from
Leave It to Me
(1938); “Well, Did You Evah!” and “Friendship” from
DuBarry Was a Lady
(1939).

In the mid-1940s, however, two successive failures,
Seven Lively Arts
(1944) and
Around the World in Eighty Days
(1946), prompted Porter and his backers to question the commercial vitality of the pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein–type musical. Earlier in 1944 Porter had produced his sixth successive old-fashioned Broadway hit,
Mexican Hayride
. But the tides had turned, and the examples of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s second musical,
Carousel
(1945),
Irving Berlin’s
Annie Get Your Gun
(1946), and Porter’s own
Kiss Me, Kate
(1948) bear testimony to the power that
Oklahoma!
now exerted. Even these two old dog songwriters now felt the urgency of learning the new trick of writing integrated musicals.

Before the historic collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein was launched in 1943, both Berlin and Porter had achieved universal recognition as songwriters. Even today, as many of their shows drift into oblivion, these illustrious composer-lyricists unquestionably remain the most widely known and revered of their generation. After four decades of composing currently under-appreciated revues and musical comedies, Berlin was persuaded in 1945, after the sudden and unanticipated death of the intended composer Kern, to compose a full-fledged book show that to some extent paralleled the new objectives established in
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
. Soon Porter attempted his first own “integrated” musical. The results, Berlin’s
Annie Get Your Gun
(1946) and Porter’s
Kiss Me, Kate
(1948) remain the only musicals by these great songwriters that occupy a firm position in the Broadway repertory (albeit with some book and song changes mainly in the case of
Annie
). Abandoned by his supporters and forced to sell his new work in degrading auditions, Porter celebrated his resurrection by creating one of the most highly regarded and popular musicals of all time.
¹

Shortly before his death in 1964 Porter publicly acknowledged the difficulty posed by the intimidating example of Rodgers and Hammerstein: “The librettos are much better, and the scores are much closer to the librettos than they used to be. Those two [Rodgers and Hammerstein] made it much harder for everybody else.”
²
The specter of “those two” would haunt Porter for his remaining creative years. To add injury to insult they even managed to partially overshadow
Kiss Me, Kate
by depriving Porter of Mary Martin (the rising star of Porter’s
Leave It to Me
ten years earlier and, more recently, the star of
One Touch of Venus
), who had auditioned for the lead but instead accepted the role of Nellie Forbush in
South Pacific
, which opened three months after Porter’s classic.
³

In a
New York Times
interview that he gave during the composition of
CanCan
in 1953, Porter reveals that Rodgers and Hammerstein remained under his skin: “They [the songs] didn’t come out of the book so much as now. Really, until Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you needed to change a scene, a girl could come out in front of the curtain and sing or dance or anything. But with
Can-Can
, I have worked since last June.”
⁴

Additional evidence that Porter suffered anxiety from the influence of
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
appears amid the extensive unpublished manuscript material for
Kiss Me, Kate
housed in the Music Division of the Library of Congress in a packet labeled “Unfinished Lyrics.”
⁵
Although some of these lyrics are in fact
unfinished and others only barely begun, including one tantalizing title, “To Be or Not to Be,” most lyrics in this packet are alternate versions of known
Kiss Me, Kate
songs. One such draft belongs with the song “Bianca,” a late addition to the show. In the staged (and published) verse of this song Bill Calhoun the Baltimorean and, as Lucentio, the Shakespearean suitor of Lois Lane/Bianca, sings the following lyric: “While rehearsing with Bianca, / (She’s the darling I
adore
), / Offstage I
found
/ She’s been a
round
/ But I love her
more
and
more
; / So I’ve written her a love song / Though I’m just an ama
teur
. / I’ll sing it
through
/ For all of
you
/ To see if it’s worthy of
her
. / Are yuh list’nin’?”

In the “Unfinished Lyrics” the private Porter can be observed working with an alternate idea: Bill Calhoun himself as an aspiring Broadway lyricist. Porter’s surrogate lyricist, however, is not merely a suitor for the fair Lois/Bianca in this version. Porter has given his still-anonymous poet additional importance as “the dog who writes incog” for the great Berlin. In this alternative scenario, “Bianca” is one of the songs Bill has composed on behalf of Mr. Berlin.

Despite this subterfuge, Porter’s draft labeled “Bianca 2nd Verse” on the second page arguably reveals more about Porter than it does about Bill Calhoun: “Ev’ry night I write for Irving [Berlin] / ’Til I nearly bust my
bean
/ ’Cause Irving fears / Two rival peers / Known as Rodgers and Hammer-
stein
. / I shall now repeat my ballad / Then I’ll rush to Irving
quick
/ And if he
thinks
/ My ballad
stinks
/ He’ll sell it to Oscar [Hammerstein II] and
Dick
[Richard Rodgers] / Are you list’nin? (repeat refrain).”
⁶

All available witnesses corroborate the story that it was not an easy task for Bella Spewack, herself only a recent convert to the somewhat heretical notion of setting Shakespeare’s
Taming of the Shrew
musically, to convince her former collaborator on
Leave It to Me
that a Shakespeare musical would not be “too esoteric, too high-brow for the commercial stage.”
⁷
In contrast to his modus operandi in
Anything Goes
and his other pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals in which an often tenuous relationship existed between the songs and the librettos, the extant manuscript evidence reveals that from the time he began work on
Kiss Me, Kate
Porter was greatly concerned with creating a musical that integrated music with the book.

Also in contrast to
Anything Goes
, whose second act was barely a gleam in the eyes of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse at the time of their first rehearsal and with deletions and substitutions continuing into the Broadway run,
Kiss Me, Kate
could boast a completed book by the end of May 1948 before auditions would begin the following month.
⁸
Although much would be altered during auditions and rehearsals (between May and November), by the Philadelphia tryouts on December 2,
Kiss Me, Kate
as we know it today was nearly set. As Spewack reports: