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

60. Stanley Richards, ed., Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1 (Radnor, Penn.: Chilton, 1973), 128.

61. The subject of quarter-note (and half-note) triplets is introduced in the musical discussion of Anything Goes (see chapter 3, pp. 54–55).

62. Richards, Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1, 129.

63. Thanks to Robert M. Stevenson, professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, for this inspired simile.

64. Richards, Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1, 158.

65. Richards, ed., Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 2 (Radnor, Penn.: Chilton, 1976), 98.

66. Ibid., 82.

67. Ibid., 79.

68. When Danny Kaye left the show and his role as Russell Paxton, his replacement proved difficult. Within two weeks after Gershwin wrote Weill that Rex O’Malley “is too lady-like for the lady-like characters and may make the character far too realistic,” the production staff bought out his contract. See the letter from Ira Gershwin to Kurt Weill, August 23, 1941, Music Division, Library of Congress.

69. Richards, Great Musicals of the Musical Theatre, Volume 1, 157.

Chapter 8: Stage versus Screen (1): Before Rodgers and Hammerstein

1. Kim Kowalke, Review essay, 693.

2. The dancing in “Night and Day” only lasted 4 ½ minutes. “The Continental,” composed by Con Conrad and Herb Magidson, also accomplished what the music by Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Youmans did not: It won the Oscar for best song.

3. The 1955 film Hit the Deck used seven of Youmans’s ten songs, but set the songs to a new book.

4. Three Fred and Ginger films later, Kern and Fields would team up to contribute the complete score to Swing Time.

5. Charles Winninger (Cap’n Andy), Helen Morgan (Julie), and Sammy White (Frank) appeared in the original production and 1932 revival, Paul Robeson played Joe in the 1928 London production and the 1932 revival, and both Irene Dunne (Magnolia) and Allan Jones (Ravenal) had appeared in these roles in other Show Boat performances between 1927 and 1936.

6. Both “Ah Still Suits Me” and “I Have the Room above Her” appeared in the 1971 London revival and the latter in the 1994 Broadway revival directed by Hal Prince.

7. Although shot in color, the Preminger Porgy and Bess, withdrawn from circulation by the Gershwin Estate, is also difficult to obtain.

8. Not included in these eighteen minutes is an overture that lasts about fifty-five seconds, which presents an athematic buzz followed by the first phrase of “Ol’ Man River” and opening snippets of “I Have the Room above Her” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.”

9. The stage version opens with the ominous Vallon theme, which in the absence of Vallon appears more generically as a darker force on the river before audiences can make the connection between the theme and Vallon himself. The film waits to introduce Vallon’s theme until we meet Vallon, thirteen minutes into the scene.

10. This is the waltz that begins with “Your pardon I pray,” brings Magnolia into the song, and returns as underscoring when the song is completed. When this theme finally makes its appearance thirty-four minutes into the film it is used to accompany Julie’s departure from the show boat and thus bears no connection with the principal couple. Back to “Make Believe,” the return of the main chorus offers only the first and last lyrics (a reduction from 32 measures to 16).

11. Caryl Flynn, Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 69.

12. Ruggles can be seen earlier as an aristocrat in Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and later as a hunter in the Katharine Hepburn–Cary Grant classic Bringing Up Baby (1938).

13. In an essay on the films of Bing Crosby, Gary Giddins offers a characteristically erudite summary assessment of this unjustifiably little known film (Giddins, Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006], 113). Giddins also briefly discusses the film adaptation of Anything Goes in Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years 1903–1940 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 391–93.

14. Era Bell, “Why Negroes Don’t Like ‘Porgy and Bess,’” Ebony 14/12 (October 1959): 50–52, 54 (quoted in Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess,” 279). Bell’s view was widely held in the black community, but Gwynne Kuhner Brown notes the varied range of African-American (and white) critical responses to the opera in Problems of Race and Genre in the Critical Reception of “Porgy and Bess.”

15. Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess,” 276.

16. Ibid.

17. Vicki Ohl, Fine and Dandy: The Life and Work of Kay Swift (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 180.

18. Howard Pollack, George Gershwin, 653.

19. A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn, 481.

20. Rent’s Mimi is memorably described in the satirical Broadway revue Forbidden Broadway when it summarizes how the character has evolved from La Bohème: “In La Bohème she’s a sweet, shy, seamstress. Now, she’s a crackhead, nymphomaniac, prostitute, YEAH!!!” Forbidden Broadway Strikes Back DRG 12614 (1997).

21. Pollack, George Gershwin, 654.

22. The film version that was available to me was a non-commercially distributed recording that clocked in at 115 minutes. Depending on the source consulted, the published literature offers film times of about 150 minutes (Berg, Goldwyn, 487); “just under two and half hours (with an intermission following Crown’s seduction of Bess, as in many two-act versions of the work)” (Pollack, George Gershwin, 649); and 138 minutes according to Stanley Green, Hollywood Musicals Year by Year, 220. The Berg and Pollack figures would make the film only thirty-five minutes less than the 1993 Nunn version. Assuming these two authors are correct, the copy I viewed may have been missing portions of the nine reels housed in the Library of Congress available for private viewing. Despite this possible omission, the only major “song” missing in the DVD available to me was “My Man’s Gone Now” (included on the soundtrack). See the discussion of Pal Joey for a discrepancy between the timings listed on the package of