Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

Two years after West Side Story, Robbins, Laurents, and Sondheim would again collaborate successfully on a new musical, Gypsy, with music by Styne. Without Robbins, Laurents and Sondheim worked together on two unsuccessful musicals in the next decade before they went on to work with other partners: Anyone Can Whistle (1964), a show without a literary source, and Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), an adaptation of Laurents’s own The Time of the Cuckoo (an unhappy collaboration with Rodgers). Meanwhile, Robbins and his new creative associates, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock, would direct and choreograph his greatest popular triumph, Fiddler on the Roof, in 1964. After Fiddler, Robbins virtually abandoned commercial theater. Laurents, without Sondheim, returned to Broadway in subsequent decades to direct Harold Rome’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962), a Tony-nominated Gypsy (1975), the Harvey Fierstein–Jerry Herman Tony Award–winning La Cage aux Folles (1983), and new Broadway productions of Gypsy (2008) and West Side Story (2009). Without Laurents in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Sondheim, the subject of another chapter in this survey, would, like the descendant of painter Georges Seurat in act II of Sunday in the Park with George, continue to “move on” and in the process launch a new era in the Broadway musical.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

STAGE VERSUS SCREEN (2)

After Oklahoma!

Adapting to Broadway

In contrast to most of the films discussed in “Stage versus Screen (1),” the five films explored in this chapter—Carousel (1956), Kiss Me, Kate (1953), Guys and Dolls (1955), My Fair Lady (1964), and West Side Story (1961)—are widely known. All are accessible on DVDs that contain absorbing “Bonus” or “Special” Features that include one or more of the following: interviews with the creators of the show, interviews with members of the film cast, commentaries by various experts, documentaries about the making of the film, documentaries on film restoration, behind the scene notes, alternate vocal versions, a deleted scene or song, vintage featurettes and archival footage, historical background, storyboards, original intermission music, and trailers. Most of these films were popular in their time and several remain so in ours. Most made money. Within a three-year span of time West Side Story and My Fair Lady took home the big Academy Award prize for Best Picture, among numerous other awards.

Compared with the films of “Stage versus Screen (1),” these five films are for the most part far more faithful to their stage sources than the films we looked at in act I (the exception is Trevor Nunn’s virtually complete televised 1993 film of Porgy and Bess). Also in contrast to the earlier films, three of the films discussed in this chapter even approximate the amount of stage time offered by their predecessors. None follow their stage sources to the letter, however. In fact, only George Cukor’s My Fair Lady comes close to what was seen and heard on Broadway. Robert Wise’s relatively faithful and relatively complete West Side Story takes significant liberties with song order and removes the second act ballet. Samuel Goldwyn and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Guys and Dolls and George Sidney’s Kiss Me, Kate subtract and add songs, but in the former the songs were newly written by the composer-lyricist Frank Loesser especially for the film and in the latter the new song was written by the show’s rightful creative owner, Cole Porter. Henry King’s Carousel film deletes but does not add songs.

Despite their commercial successes (the exception here is Carousel), the film versions of the musicals treated in act II have generated controversies over their artistic success as adaptations. Critics have taken issue with their direction, scenic design, and cinematography, and perhaps most vociferously over casting issues and the pros and cons of vocal dubbing. Two of the films, Carousel and Kiss Me, Kate, feature mainly singers. Guys and Dolls combines singers and non-singers but even the latter sang for themselves. In contrast, most of the principals in the My Fair Lady and West Side Story adaptations are dubbed by professional singers. Even Rita Moreno, herself an accomplished professional singer and recording artist, had her voice replaced.1 Less obvious but arguably even more radical aspects of sonic technological change—orchestral augmentations, selective mixing via multiple-track recording, combining alternate takes via editing, the effects of microphone placement—have slipped past underneath most critics’ notice. For those who have grown accustomed in recent years to the expectation that voices we hear on the soundtrack belong to the faces of those we see in the picture (e.g., Chicago, Dreamgirls, Hairspray, Rent, The Phantom of the Opera, and Sweeney Todd), the knowledge that Marni Nixon is the voice of Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood might be disconcerting. These musical adaptations may come across today as faithful to their theatrical origins to the point of being labored and unfaithful to their new medium. At the same time they allow us to imagine their stage counterparts and for the most part will satisfactorily see us through until something better comes along, such as a new Broadway revival or a community theater or high school production.

Carousel (1956)

Not long after the release of Oklahoma! in October 1955, The King and I and Carousel followed in quick succession in February and March of the next year. Unlike the popular successes of Oklahoma! and The King and I, the third Rodgers and Hammerstein film adaptation to appear within six months, Carousel failed at the box office in its own time and has not enjoyed much critical approbation in the decades since its debut—even though it brought back from Oklahoma! the winning partnership of Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones. Although spared the acrimony heaved at Joshua Logan and those disturbing colored filters he will always be blamed for in the next 20th Century-Fox Rodgers and Hammerstein film adaptation, South Pacific in 1958—which Gerald Mast found almost unrivaled “for sheer bad taste”—for Mast and many others Carousel remains unequivocally “the worst of the lot.”2

Carousel, 1956 film. Carrie Pipperidge (Barbara Ruick)