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

18. In any event, Pal Joey’s revival (542 performances) falls only five performances and one show below the top forty, and the combined number of performances of its two runs (916) would place it just below Bells Are Ringing at No. 14.

19. Before Porgy and Bess arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 1986, no American opera had been performed there more than fifteen times. See Carl Johnson, “American Opera at the Met: 1883–1983,” The American Music Teacher 35/4 (February–March 1984): 20–25. Virgil Thomson’s and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), which premiered on Broadway one year before Porgy and Bess, lasted only forty-eight performances.

20. The composers, composer-lyricists, or teams that produced two or more musicals in “The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959” include the following: Adler and Ross (Damn Yankees, Pajama Game); Arlen and Harburg (Bloomer Girl, Jamaica); Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Madam); Rome (Fanny, Wish You Were Here); Styne (Bells Are Ringing, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Gypsy, High Button Shoes); and Wright and Forrest (Kismet, Song of Norway). Also missing is Gene de Paul’s Li’l Abner (with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) that debuted between the premieres of Show Boat and West Side Story. The contributions by Rudolf Friml, Ray Henderson, and Sigmund Romberg preceded Show Boat; Meredith Willson’s The Music Man followed West Side Story by two months.

21. Since Rodgers and Hammerstein produced Annie Get Your Gun, this leaves Kiss Me, Kate as the only show among the top five musicals of the 1940s that was not created or produced by the ubiquitous team.

22. Engel, The American Musical Theater, 35–36.

23. See Kurt Gänzl and Andrew Lamb, Gänzl’s Book of the Musical Theatre; Daniel Kingman, American Music: A Panorama; and Herbert Kupferberg, The Book of Classical Music Lists (New York: Facts on File, 1985).

24. Similar criteria motivate Gänzl’s criteria of selection: “Firstly, we chose those pieces which a theatre-goer would be likely to encounter on the current stages of … America, the hits of today and the hits of yesterday which have been brought back for the further enjoyment of the theatre-going public. Secondly, we chose those shows which had a notable success in their own times, those which have left a particular legacy of favourite songs, those which are significant historically or artistically and those which are just plain good and which deserve a reappearance on the modern stage. Thirdly, we added our own particular favourites among the shows of yesteryear which we hope, if we bring them to your notice, might become favourites of yours as well.” Gänzl and Lamb, Gänzl’s Book of the Musical Theatre, p. xii.

25. See Block, “The Broadway Canon.”

26. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 4.

Chapter 2: Show Boat

1. Ronald Byrnside, Andrew Lamb, and Deane L. Root, “Jerome Kern,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 10, 1–2; a slightly expanded version of this entry appeared in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1985), vol. 2, 623–26.

2. Byrnside, Lamb, and Root, “Jerome Kern,” 1.

3. The New Grove authors do not mention that the New York City Opera selected Show Boat perhaps more for financial than artistic reasons. See Martin L. Sokol, The New York City Opera: An American Adventure (London: Collier Macmillan, 1981), 126.

4. Miles Kreuger, “Show Boat.” Kreuger’s volume offers a comprehensive comparative survey of Edna Ferber’s novel, the New York 1927 premiere and revivals (1932 and 1946), and the three film versions (1929, 1936, and 1951).

5. The Secaucus materials discussed later in this chapter are identified in “Manuscript Sources for Ravenal’s Entrance and Meeting with Magnolia” in the online website.

6. Some reviewers of the album noted with admiration that the McGlinn reconstruction, which featured noted operatic crossover artists Frederica von Stade as Magnolia and Teresa Stratas as Julie, contained only ten minutes’ less music than Wagner’s Die Walküre.

7. Robert Coleman, Daily Mirror, December 27, 1927. Quoted in Stanley Green, ed., Rodgers and Hammerstein Fact Book, 353.

8. Ibid. According to Gerald Bordman, Show Boat opened with a cast of only ninety-six chorus members (fifty-two white and thirty-two black) and twelve black dancers. Bordman, Jerome Kern, 286.

9. Percy Hammond, New York Herald Tribune, January 8, 1928; Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, January 8, 1928. Quoted in S. Green, Rodgers and Hammerstein Fact Book, 354–55.

10. Cecil Smith and Glenn Litton, Musical Comedy in America, 158.

11. George Jean Nathan, Judge, January 21, 1928. Quoted in S. Green, Rodgers and Hammerstein Fact Book, 355.

12. Robert Garland, New York Telegram, n.d.; Alexander Woollcott, New York World, January 15, 1928. See also Robert Benchley, Life, January 12, 1928. Quoted in Green, Rodgers and Hammerstein Fact Book, 354–55.

13. Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), 393.

14. Kreuger, “Some Words about ‘Show Boat,’” 17. In Ferber’s novel Cap’n Andy becomes part of his beloved river when he is thrown overboard in a storm and drowns, Julie becomes a prostitute, and Ravenal and Magnolia are never reunited.

15. Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater, 13.

16. Ibid., 13. Two pages later Engel asserts his view that only Porgy and Bess (1935) and The Boys from Syracuse (1938) before Pal Joey (1940) have revivable books.

17. Ibid., 14. In a book published five years later Engel reiterates his 1967 perspective, but concedes Show Boat’s originality as well as the historical importance of its interweaving five couples: “Nothing as rich as this had happened before it in any other libretto, nothing as courageous in subject matter and nothing in America as opulent musically.” Engel, Words with Music, 70.

18. Bordman, Jerome Kern, 23 and 25; Kern quotation on page 23.

19. Ibid., 150.

20. Ibid., 171.

21. Kern was already a proven commodity to Ziegfeld, who had produced the hit Sally (570 performances) in 1920. Rumors of Ziegfeld’s lack of faith in Show Boat may be exaggerated.

22. Kreuger, “Show Boat,” 26.

23. The online website offers