Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (7 page)

When discussing
West Side Story
(
chapter 13
) the point argued is not simply that the Broadway collaboration more closely approximates the spirit
of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
than earlier operatic adaptations (or some films) that retain the Bard’s namesakes and setting, but that Bernstein—with considerable help from Sondheim (lyrics), Arthur Laurents (libretto), and Jerome Robbins (choreography and conception)—found a musical solution to convey the dramatic meaning of Shakespeare through the use of leitmotivs and their transformations in combination with a jazz and Hispanic American vernacular.

The present survey will only occasionally emphasize social history. That is another book that very much needs to be written. Nevertheless, the study of a musical most often leads to political and cultural issues, even if it was the expressed intent of its creators to escape from meaning. For many of the musicals discussed in act I especially, the changes that went into their revivals over the decades offer a valuable tool to measure changing social as well as artistic concerns. Some musicals, such as
Show Boat, Porgy and Bess
, and
West Side Story
are overtly concerned with racial conflicts; others, such as
Anything Goes, On Your Toes, One Touch of Venus
, and
My Fair Lady
, explore class differences. All musicals discussed here either directly or inadvertently make powerful statements about what James Thurber called The War between Men and Women.
¹⁴

The Cradle Will Rock
serves as a worthy representative to show both the wisdom and futility of the didactic political musical. Two songs from this “avant-garde” musical will be discussed from this perspective. The first is “Croon–Spoon,” which satirizes the vapidity of ephemeral popular music, and the second is “Art for Art’s Sake,” which from Marc Blitzstein’s perspective indicts the equally vapid messages of so-called high art, the purposes to which art is used, and the blatant hypocrisy of some artists.

Not surprisingly, few musicals measure up to evolving sensibilities. The disparity between these shows and feminist values will be given special attention in interpreting
Anything Goes, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, Carousel, Kiss Me, Kate, Guys and Dolls
, and
My Fair Lady
, all of which provide gender issues of unusual interest. Some musicals fare better than others from the vantage point of the future, but no musical surveyed here can fully escape the assumptions and collective values of their era.

The present selection makes an effort to include representative musicals from
Show Boat
to
The Phantom of the Opera
that pose intriguing critical, analytical, aesthetic, and political issues as well as musicals that engage the enthusiasm of the selector. No attempt was made either to be comprehensive or
to discuss only the very most popular musicals of the era, but the lists of “Long Runs” and “The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway” in the online website will provide useful reference points for measuring and interpreting the degree of popularity these musicals enjoyed. Despite the above disclaimer, a few words should be said about the degree to which popularity governed the present selections.

Ten of the fourteen Broadway musicals receiving top billing here (not including those by Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber) were also among the most popular of their respective decades.
Show Boat
was the third longest running musical of the 1920s,
Anything Goes
and
On Your Toes
ranked second and eighth, respectively, among book shows in the 1930s—the two longest running 1930s shows,
Hellzapoppin
’ and
Pins and Needles
were revues—and in the 1940s and ’50s
Kiss Me, Kate, Carousel, One Touch of Venus, My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story
, and
The Most Happy Fella
all fall within the top fifteen longest runs. Eight of these musicals are among the top thirty-eight musicals spanning these four decades; three rank among the top nine book shows.
¹⁵

While one measure of a show’s popularity and its even more important correlate, commercial success, is the length of its initial run, the revivability of a show arguably constitutes a more compelling measure of its success. Many musicals, even blockbusters of their day, never manage to regain their hit status and acquire a place in the Broadway repertory despite rigorous marketing or a lustrous star. For example, despite its many merits,
Of Thee I Sing
(1931), the longest running book musical of the 1930s and the recipient of the first Pulitzer Prize for drama, has disappeared as a staged work on Broadway after its disappointing seventy-two performance revival in 1952. Two of the musicals under scrutiny here,
Lady in the Dark
(1941) and
One Touch of Venus
(1943), both enormous hits in their time, still await a fully staged New York revival. The chapter devoted to these last mentioned shows (
chapter 7
) will offer the view that the absence of
One Touch of Venus
is especially lamentable.

The remaining twelve musicals have resurfaced in at least one popular Broadway, Off-Broadway, or other prominent New York revival from 1980 to the present (if the prestigious New City Center’s
Encores!
counts as a prominent performance, all fourteen shows would be accounted for).
¹⁶
By 1960, New York audiences had had the opportunity to see
Show Boat
1,344 times, a total that more than doubled its original run and was surpassed only by five continuously running book musicals in the top forty before 1960 (“The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959” in the online website).
The Cradle Will Rock
, something of a cult musical, admittedly remains an idiosyncratic choice for a selective survey. Nevertheless, this controversial
and sometimes alienating show has been revived in New York City no less than four times since its original short but historic runs in 1937 and 1938. Although these
Cradle
revivals may have been generated out of political sympathy, the present study will make a case for the work’s still unacknowledged and unappreciated artistic merits.

If popularity in absolute numbers is the ticket for admittance, what then are
Pal Joey
(1940),
Lady in the Dark
(1941), and
Porgy and Bess
(1935), three shows that were neither in the top forty nor among the top ten or fifteen musicals of their decades, doing in a survey of popular Broadway musicals? To answer this question, it might be helpful to consider a musical’s popularity by the standards of its immediate predecessors. Although it may not have enjoyed a major New York revival in more than sixty years, at 467 performances
Lady in the Dark
would surpass even the longest running book musical of the 1930s,
Of Thee I Sing
.
¹⁷
Pal Joey
(374 performances) would rank as the fifth longest running book show of the 1930s had it premiered one year earlier.
¹⁸
More significantly, in contrast to nearly every other musical
comedy
before
Guys and Dolls
, including
Anything Goes
and
On Your Toes
, revivals of
Pal Joey
for the most part retain the original book without fear of ridicule or loss of accessibility.

The inclusion of
Porgy and Bess
on popular grounds requires some spin control. Because it lost money, it is fair to judge its initial total of 124 performances as a relatively poor showing—even in a decade when two hundred performances could constitute a hit. As a musical in the commercial marketplace,
Porgy and Bess
failed; as an opera, arguably a more accurate taxonomic classification, it can be interpreted as a phenomenal success. No other American opera of its (or any) generation comes close.
¹⁹
Of course it helps that it is also an acknowledged American classic.

In contrast to his musical comedies and operettas, Gershwin’s only Broadway opera returned a few years later in 1942, albeit more like a conventional musical with spoken dialogue replacing sung recitative—favoring accessibility over authenticity—and became a modest commercial success at 286 performances. Within seven years New York audiences thus were able to see Gershwin’s opera (or a reasonable facsimile) 410 times before the arrival of
Oklahoma!
, thirty performances fewer than
Of Thee I Sing
, the biggest hit of the 1930s and of Gershwin’s career. And in contrast to Gershwin shows that, in revival, have been transformed into barely recognizable but highly accessible and commercially successful adaptations (
My One and Only
[1983],
Oh, Kay!
[1990], and
Crazy for You
[1992]), revivals of
Porgy and Bess
, at least since the mid-1970s, often go to great lengths to restore Gershwin’s opera to prevailing notions of authenticity.

The willingness to eschew comprehensiveness leads to inevitable omissions. In addition to Jule Styne’s four top forty musicals, the most conspicuous
absentees are Berlin, whose
Annie Get Your Gun
(ranked eighth among book shows) has for many years earned an enduring place in the core repertory (and major New York revivals in 1966 and 1999), and the team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, the composer-lyricists who in 1954 and 1955 produced two of the most successful book musicals before 1960,
Pajama Game
(tenth) and
Damn Yankees
(eleventh), before Ross’s premature death in 1955 at the age of twenty-nine. Some readers may lament the absence of lyricist E. Y. (“Yip”) Harburg’s collaborations with composers Harold Arlen and Burton Lane, or of composer-lyricists Harold Rome and Robert Wright and George Forrest.
²⁰

Despite these omissions, the present representative survey includes at least one musical selected from the work of those composers, lyricists, and librettists responsible for many of the top forty musicals shown in the online website (“The Forty Longest … 1920–1959”). The most popular creators of each decade are also well represented. In the 1920s, six of the eleven longest runs had either a score by Kern or lyrics or a libretto by Hammerstein. In the 1930s, only two book musicals of the twelve longest runs did not feature a score by Rodgers and Hart, Kern, Porter, or the Gershwins (who provided four, three, two, and one, respectively), and one of these consisted of recycled music by Johann Strauss Jr. By the 1940s and ’50s, Rodgers, now teamed with Hammerstein, dominated the musical marketplace with no less than five of the ten longest runs of those years.
²¹

In
The American Musical Theater
noted Broadway conductor and educator Lehman Engel offered the following list of fifteen Broadway “models of excellence” that “represent that theater in its most complete and mature state”:
Pal Joey; Oklahoma!; Carousel; Annie Get Your Gun; Brigadoon; Kiss Me, Kate; South Pacific; Guys and Dolls; The King and I; My Fair Lady; West Side Story; Gypsy; Fiddler on the Roof; Company
; and
A Little Night Music
.
²²
The first twelve of Engel’s list fall within the central focus period of this study (acts I and II), and six of these will be explored. In his pioneering volume Engel is primarily concerned with the “working principles” that govern “excellent” musicals. In another chapter he singles out four “Broadway operas” that also embody these principles—
Porgy and Bess, The Cradle Will Rock, The Consul
(Gian-Carlo Menotti), and
The Most Happy Fella
. Three of these will be featured in the present volume.

All the musicals in Engel’s list of fifteen turned a profit and nearly all had long runs, including seven of the ten longest runs between
Oklahoma!
and
The Sound of Music
. Engel’s most conspicuous omission is without a doubt
Show Boat
, a musical almost invariably honored by subsequent list-makers and Broadway historians and critics as the first major musical on a uniquely American theme, one of the first to thoroughly integrate music and drama, and the first American musical to firmly enter the Broadway repertory. Although subsequent lists added a few scattered musical comedies from the 1930s and the musicals of Weill, all of which Engel excludes, the spirit of Engel’s list is echoed in nearly all those that followed.
²³
With virtually no exceptions the musicals on these lists enjoyed long initial runs and critical acclaim and usually received one or more major New York revivals.
²⁴

Within a few years after
West Side Story
, the age of Porter, Lerner and Loewe, Loesser, Bernstein, Blitzstein, Berlin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein was over. These classical Broadway masters of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s had generally enjoyed a combination of popularity and critical acclaim analogous to that of their nineteenth-century operatic and instrumental predecessors in Europe. After 1970, irreconcilable differences between this incompatible pair of attributes began to surface, exemplified by the contrasting trajectories of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, and few musicals by either of these two emblematic artists would readily receive the combination of love and respect enjoyed by the most popular and critically acclaimed musicals of the 1940s and ’50s.

The penultimate chapter of this survey will take a look at the career of Sondheim, the lyricist-composer generally recognized as a central artistic figure on Broadway after 1960. The position taken here is that Sondheim’s modernism and postmodernism can be viewed as an extension and reinterpretation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein model rather than a rebellion from it. It will also be argued that although Sondheim has vigorously denied autobiographical elements in his shows, the pressure to compromise faced by his characters is markedly similar to that faced by Sondheim himself as he creates their songs and faces the demands of commercial theater.