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

unsuccessfully to engage the non-singing Olivier for this role. It is difficult to imagine what would have happened if this had come to pass, since the demands of the role require a trained singer with a strong high G. The film also introduces a few touches that enhance the dramatic verisimilitude and topicality, such as when Fred, who thinks that Lilli has left the show, says in a stage whisper to a question about her whereabouts that she is probably at that moment flying over Newark. One charming musical touch that deserves honorable mention occurs during the duet in “Wunderbar” when Lilli sings the main melody of the overture and act II finale to Johann Strauss Jr.’s Die Fledermaus (one of the many operettas Fred and Lilli have doubtless sung together in various small towns) as a counterpoint to the main tune of Porter’s song.

Guys and Dolls (1955)

The starting point for the Samuel Goldwyn (1879–1974) film adaptation of Guys and Dolls was Goldwyn himself who, in the words of his biographer A. Scott Berg, “grew determined to produce Guys and Dolls as the ultimate film musical, an epic” and in the end “spent $5.5 million overproducing the movie.”11 Interestingly, in a career that goes back to the 1910s and includes such memorable films as Wuthering Heights (1939) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Guys and Dolls would be only the second in a group of musical films that concluded his body of work. The first film of this trilogy brought Goldwyn in contact with Frank Loesser on the successful original film musical Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye, three years earlier. The second musical, Guys and Dolls, would also prove to be the penultimate product of Goldwyn’s long career, his seventy-ninth feature film. Four years after Guys and Dolls, a huge box office success with the highest earnings of any film in 1956 (more than $13 million in the United States alone), Goldwyn finished his career with his third musical, the commercial and artistic failure, Porgy and Bess (discussed in chapter 8).

Guys and Dolls, 1955 film. Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) and Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons) dancing in Havana.

Goldwyn was famous for discovering and signing talent. In the case of Guys and Dolls it was mostly the latter. To complement Loesser and his great hit, Goldwyn turned to Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993), who not long before had gained distinction as the first to win a double pair of Academy Awards for both directing and screenwriting in two successive years A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). Mankiewicz, who had never directed or written a musical, wanted to convert Abe Burrows’s libretto into more of a play. In preparation for the transfer from stage to film Mankiewicz even wrote a new script that could stand alone without music. He made his goals and intentions clear in a letter to Goldwyn: “My primary, almost only, objective in this writing has been to tell the story as warmly and humanly as possible—and to characterize our four principals as fully as if their story were going to be told in purely dramatic terms.”12 Although Mankiewicz tried to flesh out Sarah Brown’s character, especially in the extended scene in Havana, Cuba, the movie ultimately falls short because the experienced screenwriter, but musical theater novice, failed to grasp how the subtleties of music, at least in Loesser’s songs, effectively removed the need to transform a musical into a play. Joseph Kerman’s famous principle that “the music is the drama” was not a concept that Mankiewicz believed or understood.

When Gene Kelly proved unavailable, Mankiewicz and Goldwyn turned to a, or perhaps the, major film star of the day, Marlon Brando (1924–2004), who like Mankiewicz had never participated in a musical. Within a few years after his powerful stage performance in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Brando had earned a string of four Best Actor nominations, including one for the film adaptation of Streetcar (1951) and one for the role of Mark Anthony in a film version of Julius Caesar (1953), directed and adapted for the screen by Mankiewicz. One year before Guys and Dolls, Brando won the award for On the Waterfront. Although Guys andDolls proved to be Brando’s last as well as first foray into musical film, he worked diligently under Loesser’s coaching and performed the songs creditably. He even managed to master the basic dance steps of the Cuba interlude with some grace. For his leading lady, Goldwyn tried unsuccessfully to acquire Grace Kelly, another recent Academy Award-winning star. The third choice for Sarah Brown, after Kelly and Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons (b. 1929), yet another star with no experience in musicals, proved to be surprisingly effective, both as a singer and as an actress.13 Unlike Brando, Simmons returned to musical theater when in 1975 she played the lead in the London production of A Little Night Music.

In addition to these newcomers to musicals, Goldwyn and Mankiewicz brought back several key figures associated with the Broadway production, even if the original Adelaide, Vivian Blaine, was another second choice after Betty Grable declined the role. Another notable singer actor reassigned to the film was Stubby Kaye, who played a major role in the success of the stage versions as Nicely-Nicely Johnson. According to the young Stephen (or in this early case, Steve) Sondheim, who reviewed the Goldwyn extravaganza in 1955 for Films in Review, Kaye was “the real hero of the picture,” who helped make “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” “one of the most memorable numbers in musical-comedy history.”14 For Sondheim, Kaye “sets the tone of every scene in which he appears: when he is singing ‘Fugue for Tinhorns’ and ‘Guys and Dolls’ he does more to create the atmosphere of Runyon’s New York than all the scenery lumped together (which it often seems to be).”15

A major benefit of the film version of Guys and Dolls is the opportunity to see the original