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

based on Joey’s thirteenth letter to his successful bandleader friend Ted, “A Bit of a Shock.” Finally, the preliminary typescript contained several pages of dialogue in which Joey is fitted for additional clothes and purchases an automobile before Linda arrives to warn Vera about the blackmail attempt.

53. Abbott, “Mister Abbott,” 195.

54. Rodgers biographer Frederick Nolan writes that “Larry Hart chortled with delight when he read those lines [“I love it / Because the laugh’s on me”] over the phone to Joshua Logan and explained with glee that they meant Joey was actually on Vera Simpson.” Frederick Nolan, The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: Walker, 1978), 112–13 [2002 ed., 139]. When the song was broadcast, these lyrics were changed to “the laugh’s about me.”

55. Rodgers, Musical Stages, 45. Although Goetschius does not discuss this particular point, his Exercises in Melody-Writing (first published in 1900) offers a systematic approach to a subject of great interest to Rodgers. Percy Goetschius, Exercises in Melody-Writing (New York: G. Schirmer, 1928).

56. Stephen Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 84–85.

57. The half step also appears conspicuously in “Talking to My Pal,” dropped during the out-of-town tryouts. Its presence, however, in “Plant You Now, Dig You Later,” a duet between Gladys and gangster agent Ludlow Lowell in the 1940 version, places a considerable strain on the theory that Rodgers is making a dramatic statement or creating subtle associations through a musical interval.

58. Alec Wilder, American Popular Song. Several decades later, important books by Allen Forte and Steven E. Gilbert appeared, all of which discuss popular song with more analytical rigor (and more selectively) than Wilder. Allen Forte’s first study, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950 (1995), offers detailed and insightful analytical discussions of selected songs by Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen (roughly a half dozen songs for each songwriter); his more accessible Listening to Classic American Popular Songs (2001) examines a total of twenty-three songs by these composers and a few others written between the 1920s and the 1940s. Steven E. Gilbert offers a more specialized analytical study of Gershwin’s songs in The Music of Gershwin (1995).

59. Wilder, American Popular Song, 216. In the essay cited above Sondheim clarifies why he is “down on” Hart. His principal objection was that the pyrotechnic lyricist created lyrics “so wrenching that the listener loses the sense of the line.” Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 83.

60. Wilder, American Popular Song, 164.

Chapter 6: The Cradle Will Rock

1. Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music, 538.

2. Martin Esslin, Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 80. As late as the 1990s, the Kurt Weill Foundation, still considered the Blitzstein version the only singable version of this work in English. After the 1976 Lincoln Center revival, the Foundation no longer permitted Ralph Manheim’s and John Willett’s harder edged, more literal translation to be staged. On the relative merits of the Blitzstein and Manheim-Willett productions see Kim H. Kowalke, “‘The Threepenny Opera’ in America,” Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera, ed. Stephen Hinton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78–119.

3. See, for example, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 225–27, and Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater, 146–50.

4. Aaron Copland, The New Music 1900–1960 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 139–44.

5. Wilfrid Mellers, Music and Society (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950), 211–20.

6. Mellers, Music in a New Found Land, 415–28.

7. Gordon, Mark the Music. Despite its length, Gordon’s study does not include an analytical component. See also the following: John O. Hunter, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock”; Robert James Dietz, “The Operatic Style of Marc Blitzstein”; John D. Shout, “The Musical Theater of Marc Blitzstein”; and Carol J. Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock. Since the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, the length of Gordon’s volume (603 pages) has been surpassed by at least two biographies of American composers, both by Howard Pollack: Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1999) [690 pages] and George Gershwin [884 pages].

8. Gordon, Mark the Music, 141–46. Blitzstein’s account of the premiere was recorded on Marc Blitzstein Discusses His Theater Compositions, published as “Out of the Cradle,” and reprinted posthumously in the New York Times. For other eye-witness accounts of the events surrounding the first performance, see Archibald MacLeish, Introduction to The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Random House, 1938), Howard Da Silva’s jacket notes for The Cradle Will Rock, MGM SE 4289–2–0C (1964), and especially John Houseman, Run-Through, 255–79.

9. John Houseman notes the irony of Blitzstein’s troubles with Musicians’ Local #802, which demanded that an orchestra be paid to remain silent during Cradle’s run at the Windsor, a commercial Broadway theater. As Houseman explains, “For thirteen weeks, eight times a week, twelve union musicians with their instruments and a contractor-conductor with his baton arrived at the theater half an hour before curtain time, signed in and descended to the basement where they remained, engrossed in card games and the reading of newspapers, while their composer colleague exhausted himself at the piano upstairs.” Run-Through, 336.

10. The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Random House, 1938) and The Best Short Plays of the Social Theatre, ed. William Kozlenko (New York: Random House, 1939), 113–67. A microfilm of the original Random House publication is included in the Blitzstein Papers of the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

11. The Cradle Will Rock, Musicraft, album 18 (recorded April 1938) (reissued in a limited edition on American Legacy Records, T 1001 [December 1964]) and “Mark Blitzstein Musical Theatre Premières,” Pearl Gems 0009, 2 CDs (1998).

12. Virgil Thomson, “In the Theatre,” 113. The deus ex machina ending, so clearly reminiscent of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, may have further prompted Weill to ask, “Have you seen my new opera?” See Minna Lederman, “Memories of Marc Blitzstein, Music’s Angry Man,” Show (June 1964): 18+.

13. Brooks Atkinson, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ Officially Opens at the Mercury Theatre,” New York Times, December 6,