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

remains similarly silent about Weill’s American works. In the years after the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, Raymond Knapp made Lady in the Dark one of his thirty-eight focus musicals in the second volume of his two-volume study (Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, 266–73). Ethan Mordden treats Weill appreciatively and at relative length in Beautiful Mornin,’ devoting attention to Lady in the Dark, 59–69; One Touch of Venus, 159–62; The Firebrand of Florence, 144–48; Street Scene 148–50; Love Life, 223–228; and Lost in the Stars, 229–35. Mordden considers Weill the most versatile of Broadway practitioners, “the absolute forties composer, running though all the available genres except revue” and even makes the refreshing argument on “the superiority of Weill’s Broadway over his German output” (Mordden, 163).

2. See especially Ronald Sanders’s interpretation of Lady in the Dark’s genesis in The Days Grow Short, 292–309, and Matthew Scott, “Weill in America: The Problem of Revival.” Less judgmental in this respect is Jürgen Schebera, Kurt Weill.

3. David Drew, “Weill, Kurt (Julian).” The ensuing quotations from this article are found on pp. 305 and 307–8; for a more recent assessment by Drew see Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 45–47.

4. Scott, “Weill in America: The Problem of Revival.”

5. Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater, 61.

6. Robert Garland, “Mary Martin, John Boles, Kenny Baker Head Cast of New Comedy,” New York Journal-American, October 8, 1943; quoted in Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 525; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 4, 264.

7. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, February 27, 1944, Music Division, Library of Congress.

8. Kurt Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of Street Scene (Columbia OL 4139).

9. Ibid. See also Larry Stempel, “Street Scene,” 321–41.

10. Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of Street Scene.

11. Ibid.

12. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, April 13, 1944, Music Division, Library of Congress. Gerald Mast also perceives second-act weaknesses in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals. See Mast, Can’t Help Singin,’ 204–05.

13. Letter to Ira Gershwin, April 13, 1944.

14. Malcolm Goldstein, George S. Kaufman: His Life, His Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 343.

15. See Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book, 142, 144, and 146 on Ginger Rogers’s film roles as women who cannot make up their minds (including the 1944 Paramount film version of Lady in the Dark). The idea of a future Mr. Right being able to complete a “dream” song is at least as old as Victor Herbert’s “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” from Naughty Marietta (1910).

16. F. Anstey, Humour & Fantasy (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 288–468.

17. Cheryl Crawford credits stage designer Aline Bernstein, who remains un-indexed in the standard biographies of Weill; Ronald Sanders (who used Crawford as his major source for the genesis of One Touch of Venus) attributes this suggestion to Lady in the Dark costume designer Irene Sharaff. Both Crawford and Sanders offer a date, the former in June 1942 and the latter November 1941. David Drew writes that “in February 1942 The Tinted Venus headed a list of fifteen possibilities he [Weill] was considering for Cheryl Crawford.” Cheryl Crawford, One Naked Individual, 116; Sanders, The Days Grow Short, 322; and Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 328. See also Dorothy Herrmann, S. J. Perelman: A Life (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1986), 147.

18. Perelman had, however, contributed sketches to other Broadway revues beginning in 1931. Douglas Fowler, S. J. Perelman (Boston: Twayne, 1983).

19. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 121.

20. The role of Venus, originally intended for Marlene Dietrich, was Mary Martin’s first starring Broadway role. After answering more than tentatively in the affirmative, Dietrich backed down from playing the sexy Venus, allegedly for the sake of her impressionable nineteen-year-old daughter. Martin, now mainly known from later roles as the wholesome Nellie Forbush (South Pacific) and Maria Rainer (The Sound of Music), earlier in her career had proven her sexual allure in Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Leave It to Me (1938).

21. Crawford and Kazan had also worked together on Weill’s Johnny Johnson as producer and actor, respectively. Crawford continued to produce musicals, most notably Lerner and Weill’s Love Life and Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon (also with de Mille) and Paint Your Wagon; Kazan left musicals for theater and films after directing Venus and Love Life. According to Gerald Bordman, Kazan “was the most important American director of the late 1940s and the 1950s.” Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, 2nd ed., 394.

22. Virgil Thomson, “Plays with Music,” New York Herald Tribune, February 23, 1941. Barlow writes the following about Lady in the Dark: “In this long score, there are not three minutes of the true Weill. And in this new medium, this new life, this new success, the promise has been buried under a branch of expensive but imitation laurel.” Samuel L. M. Barlow, “In the Theatre,” Modern Music 8/3 (March–April 1941): 189–93.

23. The Lady in the Dark playbill also included other highly distinguished collaborators: Sam H. Harris, who had earlier produced fifteen Cohan musicals, seven Berlin shows, the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing, Porter’s Jubilee, and Rodgers and Hart’s I’d Rather Be Right; Hassard Short, director of production, lighting, and musical sequences, who had designed illustrious shows for two decades, including The Band Wagon, Roberta, and Jubilee; and Albertina Rasch, the choreographer of The Band Wagon, The Cat and the Fiddle, and Jubilee.

24. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 135.

25. Ibid., 138.

26. See bruce mcclung, “Psicosi per musica.” I am grateful to the author for sharing a typescript of this essay prior to its publication. See also mcclung, “American Dreams: Analyzing Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, and Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark” (Ph.D. dissertation, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 1994) and, more recently, mcclung’s thorough and excellent “Lady in the Dark”: Biography of a Musical.

27. Also much later, Whitelaw Savory would sing the beautiful “Love in a Mist” in the place later reserved for “Westwind.” “Love in a Mist” can be heard in Ben Bagley’s Kurt