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

The Library of Congress typescript (see “Manuscript Sources” no. 2 of the online website) originally had Magnolia’s stage action occur after Ravenal sang this last line with corrections made in pencil.

66. Library of Congress typescript 1–21 and 1–22.

67. During the tryouts Kern and Hammerstein made still more changes in this scene. Shortly before its closing moments, according to Draft 2 of the Library of Congress score, the lovers sing a reprise of the waltz (section 2) for fifteen measures, after which Kern indicated by arrows and hatch marks a direct move to the coda. Draft 2 also contained another six measures of “Make Believe” after the coda, which Kern deleted before the return of Vallon’s theme. The underscored waltz of section 2 then led to a scene between Magnolia and Joe and “Ol’ Man River.”

In the earlier musical manuscript (Draft 1) Kern had Ravenal introduce the main chorus of “Make Believe” with a different text (beginning with “As the river goes so time goes”), and while the text is crossed out, the melody provides the underscoring between Ravenal and Vallon before the former sings the first A section of “Where’s the Mate for Me?” Also in Draft 1 after Ravenal hears Magnolia’s piano theme, a chorus of Girls rather than Ravenal himself repeats the theme. Kern’s inspiration to have Magnolia’s piano theme intrude upon Ravenal’s song was apparently not part of the initial conception.

In contrast to Draft 2, a draft that clearly served as the model for the published vocal scores, Draft 1 does not show the third and fourth sections of “Make Believe,” sections that provide much psychological nuance and musical richness to the scene. Instead, Draft 1 brings back the six measures of coda and the final confrontation between Ravenal and Vallon. As in Draft 2, the scene in Draft 1 concludes with Magnolia seeing Joe, and their dialogue (not given) is underscored by the opening strains of “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.”

68. Included among this group of song hits are “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” from The Night Is Young (1935) with Romberg, and a trio of hits with Kern, “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” and “Can I Forget You?” from High, Wide and Handsome (1937), and the Academy Award–winning “The Last Time I Saw Paris” from Lady, Be Good (1941). Soon after he had begun working with Richard Rodgers, Hammerstein wrote “It Might as Well Be Spring” and “It’s a Grand Night for Singing” for State Fair (1945) with Rodgers and “All through the Day” from Centennial Summer (1946) with Kern.

69. Beginning with the first of three versions of Show Boat in 1929, Hollywood would adapt twenty-six of Hammerstein’s Broadway shows for film.

70. Kern turned down Hammerstein’s offer in 1942 to write a musical based on Lynn Riggs’s play, Green Grow the Lilacs (1931). One year later the property was turned over to Rodgers. The result, of course, was Oklahoma!

71. The Annie Oakley property turned out to be Berlin’s greatest book show, Annie Get Your Gun, in 1946 with a book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields.

72. The quotation is from Bordman, Jerome Kern, 294. The sensitive issues explored in Show Boat have hardly gone away. In reviewing the 1993 Toronto production of Show Boat, directed by Prince, theater critic John Lahr found it necessary to respond to the Coalition to Stop Show Boat, a group that tried to close the show for its alleged “racist, anti-African propaganda.” According to Lahr “the past must be remembered for its sins as well as for its triumphs” and Show Boat admirably “chronicles slavery not to condone but to deplore it.” “Mississippi Mud,” New Yorker, October 25, 1993, 123–26; quotation on p. 126.

73. Ibid., 126.

Chapter 3: Anything Goes

1. Porter’s original lyric, “I wouldn’t care for those nights in the air / That the fair Mrs. Lindbergh went through,” intended for the unproduced Star Dust (1931), was replaced in Anything Goes by the now familiar “Flying too high with some guy in the sky / Is my idea of nothing to do, / Yet I get a kick out of you.” See Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 113, and Robert Kimball, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, 167 and 270.

2. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 111; Miles Kreuger, “Some Words About ‘Anything Goes,’” 13; and Lee Davis, Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern, 329–36. Kreuger also points out that the Bolton-Wodehouse book was not really about a shipwreck. In fact, a fake bomb created a mood of terror that was eventually alleviated by a celebratory prayer, “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” Davis’s more detailed survey of the early genesis of Anything Goes has the advantage of being based on a previously unknown first draft from 1934 in addition to Bolton’s less reliable reconstruction of the still-missing second draft (the rejected draft) years later. Davis does not seem to be aware of the Bolton scenario now in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, but Ethan Mordden discusses it briefly in Sing for Your Supper, 69–70. Thanks to James Hepokoski for calling my attention to the existence of the Bolton scenario.

3. Richard G. Hubler, The Cole Porter Story, 30.

4. Brooks Atkinson, “The Play: ‘Anything Goes’ as Long as Victor Moore, Ethel Merman and William Gaxton Are Present,” New York Times, November 22, 1934, 26.

5. John McGlinn, “The Original ‘Anything Goes,’” 30.

6. Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin,’ 194. Many thanks are due to Roberta Staats of The Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trusts for generously sending me a copy of Porter’s twenty-nine-page will, and to trustee Robert H. Montgomery Jr. for confirming its contents.

7. In the McGlinn recording “There’s No Cure for Travel” is relegated to the appendix.

8. The McGlinn notes indicate that Merman’s principal objection was the line “She made the maid who made the room,” with its implied homosexuality. Ibid., 33. A similar line appears in act I, scene 2, when Billy asks if Reno made the boat