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

dotted rhythms in the D-major sketch. Not only does Rodgers place “If I Loved You” in C major in the holograph, he also places the first page of “Scene Billy and Julie” in F major and G major instead of G major and A major, 33; he also assigns the “mill theme” (Example 9.1) to D major in both of its appearances rather than G major and E major as in the published score, 38–39 and 47–48, respectively.

24. The idea of retaining an accompaniment figure for the sake of musical unity rather than for a demonstrable dramatic purpose was earlier evident in On Your Toes (“There’s a Small Hotel” and the principal tune of “Slaughter on 10th Avenue”).

25. When in act II Carrie imitates one of the “hussies with nothin’ on their legs but tights” that she saw in New York, her music also clearly echoes the music associated with Julie’s name (“You’re a queer one, Julie Jordan”) that Carrie introduced early in act I (“I’m a Tomboy, jest a Tomboy”). Appropriately, the stage directions indicate that “Mr. Snow enters with Snow Jr. and interrupts song.”

26. Howard Kissel, “Carousel Is Music to Our Tears,” Daily News, March 28, 1994; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 55, 6.

27. Frank Scheck, “Sharp New Staging Gives a Lift to Rodgers and Hammerstein,” Christian Science Monitor, March 25, 1994; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 55, 72.

28. This quotation was Boswell’s adaptation of the medieval dictum, also appropriate in this context, “to cite heresy is not to be a heretic.” John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), xvii.

29. Edwin Wilson, “The Music Makes It Soar,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 1994; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 55, 76.

30. Rodgers, Musical Stages, 156.

31. Ibid., 236.

32. Joseph P. Swain discusses how augmented triads and modality also serve to establish an individual character and identity for Carousel. See Swain, The Broadway Musical, 99–127. An especially poignant use of the augmented triad (F-A-D) occurs on the fourth measure of “If I Loved You” (Example 9.5a) where it follows a simple but extremely effective harmonic progression in measures 1–3, a musical embodiment of the joys and soft terrors of a hypothetical romance: a D-major triad on measure 1, a D–diminished seventh on measure 2 that never fails to surprise and delight, and a D-major triad in first inversion (F in the bass) on measure 3 that gently prepares for the augmented triad on F in measure 4.

33. I Remember Mama was based on the first play that Rodgers and Hammerstein produced on Broadway, John Van Druten’s hit play of the same title, which opened its long run of 714 performances in 1944. In 1967 Rodgers wrote eight songs for a televised adaptation of Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion that featured Norman Wisdom as Androcles, Geoffrey Holder as the Lion, and Noël Coward as Caesar. For more on Rodgers’s final musicals see Geoffrey Block, Richard Rodgers, 202–55.

34. Perhaps the least known of their adaptations, Pipe Dream (1955), based on John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, ended up as their major disappointment; despite an enthusiastic review from Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times, it ran only 246 performances, less than either Allegro (315) or Me and Juliet (358). Their final musicals, both adaptations, produced one modest success, Flower Drum Song in 1958 (600 performances), and their fifth major hit, The Sound of Music in 1959, at 1,443 performances the second longest running musical of the 1950s (after My Fair Lady) and the fourth longest running show before 1960. In addition to these stage shows Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote Cinderella, a ninety-minute musical for television starring Julie Andrews broadcast on March 31, 1957; during Rodgers’s lifetime a remake starring Lesley Ann Warren was broadcast on February 22, 1965, and a third televised remake starring Brandy Norwood followed on November 2, 1997.

Chapter 10: Kiss Me, Kate

1. According to Steven Suskin’s “Broadway Scorecard,” Kiss Me, Kate received eight “raves” and one “favorable” review and no reviews in the lower categories (“mixed,” “unfavorable,” and “pan”). See Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 367. Of the musicals surveyed in this book only Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady would receive no reviews lower than a “rave.”

2. Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy, 156. The first sentence of the Porter quotation appears in Richard G. Hubler, The Cole Porter Story, 90; in the annotated Hubler interview Porter goes on to say without further explanation that Rodgers and Hammerstein “are, let us say, more musicianly.”

3. The only known commodity in the Kiss Me, Kate cast was Alfred Drake (Fred Graham/ Petruchio), who had earlier achieved stardom as the original Curley in Oklahoma!

4. George Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 279.

5. The Porter Collection also contains sketch material, the May libretto, and copies of the discarded songs.

6. Kiss Me, Kate, “Unfinished Lyrics” (“Bianca”), in the Cole Porter Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress. See also Stephen Citron, Noel and Cole, 218.

7. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 239.

8. This book will be referred to as the Spewack libretto draft or the May libretto.

9. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 248–49.

10. Stephen Citron cites additional borrowings “from native Italian dances, especially the Venetian boat song, and the canzones [canzonas] of Sorrento” in “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” Joseph P. Swain mentions the use of the modal flat seventh degree, a typical melodic figure in Renaissance music (e.g., B in the key of C) rather than the more tonal B that marks most European music after 1600). See Citron, Noel & Cole, 307, and Swain, The Broadway Musical, 133–34.

11. Citron notes another possible musical pun in the verse of “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?”: “And one cannot overlook Porter’s use of the Neapolitan sixth chord 3 bars before the