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

verse’s end. Was Cole pulling our leg?” Stephen Citron, Noel & Cole, 309. Unfortunately, the Verdian orchestral tag at the end of “We Open in Venice” (shown in Example 9.1) vanished in the 1999 Broadway revival and recording.

12. According to Swain, the Baltimore songs “have no structural consistency, and show instead Porter’s vaunted and bewildering eclecticism.” Swain, The Broadway Musical, 138.

13. Perfect fourths also begin nearly every musical phrase in “Tom, Dick or Harry” and appear prominently in the finale to act I (see the vocal score published by Tams-Witmark, 118–20).

14. Among Porter’s drafts are a “minuet” version labeled “Bianca’s Theme,” an eighteenth-century dance that would soon give way to Lois’s song “Why Can’t You Behave?” in act I and its transformation into a Renaissance pavane for Bianca in act II (Example 10.4). Several labeled drafts in piano score also reveal that Porter abandoned an earlier idea to characterize Petruchio and Katherine with musical signatures.

15. “I Sing of Love” was excluded from both the original cast album issued in 1949 and its stereo re-recording (with most of the original principals) ten years later. See Discography and Filmography in the online website.

16. In the act II finale Porter returns to a guitar-like accompaniment (rather than a lute-like accompaniment as befits the Renaissance) that is similar to his first serenade to Kate in “Were Thine That Special Face,” now altered to triple meter.

17. The consistency with which Porter tried to create musical linkages among the songs is further demonstrated in at least four songs that were removed before the Broadway opening. In “It Was Great Fun the First Time” Porter presents a melody that will anticipate the distinctive melodic figure with its turn to minor that will appear in “I Sing of Love” and “Where Is the Life?”; another phrase in the song foreshadows the verse of “Bianca” (at that point probably unwritten). “We Shall Never Be Younger” exhibits an emphasis on perfect fourths suggestive of “Another Op’nin” and “Why Can’t You Behave?,” and a phrase in “A Woman’s Career” closely resembles a phrase in “Too Darn Hot” without any particular dramatic justification. Finally, the discarded “What Does Your Servant Dream About?,” also with many perfect fourths, opens with a vamp that is nearly identical to the conclusion of “I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua.”

18. Bella Spewack, “How to Write a Musical Comedy,” xiii.

19. Ibid., xiii–xiv.

20. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 248.

21. “Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger Discuss the Deleted Songs July 5, 1990,” Notes to Kiss Me, Kate, conducted by John McGlinn (EMI/Angel CDS 54033–2), 15.

22. Neither Spewack nor Eells has anything to say about the history of the two other songs that Porter added between June and November: “So in Love” and “I Hate Men.” The only dated typescript of “I Hate Men” shows the late date November 18.

23. These Shakespeare passages can be found in the final scene of the May libretto, act II, scene 7.

24. Morison had the following recollection: “In the scripts that were given to me by Bella Spewack, the song [“A Woman’s Career”] is performed by a character named Angela Temple, a friend and confidant of Lilli Vanessi” (Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger, “Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger Discuss the Deleted Songs,” 15). In the May Spewack libretto, however, “A Woman’s Career” was to be sung by Fred Graham to conclude act II, scene 5.

25. May libretto, act II, scene 6.

26. Morison and Kreuger, “Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger Discuss the Deleted Songs,” 5. Robert Kimball writes that “‘So in Love’ appears to have been composed as late as September 1948.” Kimball, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, 399.

27. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 244.

28. In addition to “It Was Great Fun the First Time” and “We Shall Never Be Younger,” the May libretto included two other songs that would be dropped: “If Ever Married I’m” (sung by Bianca in act I, scene 7), and “A Woman’s Career” (sung by Fred in act II, scene 5). Another two songs, also discarded before the Philadelphia tryouts, were probably introduced after the May libretto.

The first of these, “What Does Your Servant Dream About?” can be placed quite accurately, since Porter’s draft indicated “Opening Act 2, Scene 3,” and “Curtis and Lackeys.” No such indication occurs in the May libretto, although Curtis and other servants do appear in the opening of the scene to the accompaniment of “Where Is the Life?” A Porter lyric typescript for “What Does Your Servant Dream About?” is dated July 10.

The chronology and placement of the other later addition (also soon to be deleted), “I’m Afraid, Sweetheart, I Love You,” is less clear, since neither Porter nor the Spewacks offer clues as to who should be singing this song and where. Presumably this song, too, came and went between June and November, perhaps around the time of Porter’s August 7 typescript copy.

Lyrics to all of these songs are reprinted in The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter and are included in John McGlinn’s first complete recording of Kiss Me, Kate issued in 1990. Unfortunately, several of Morison’s recollections (for example, that “It Was Great Fun the First Time” and “If Ever Married I’m” were replaced by “Wunderbar” and “Tom, Dick or Harry,” respectively) are at odds with the information provided by the May libretto. See note 17 for a summary of the musical similarities between the discarded songs and those retained.

29. The reprise of “E lucevan le stelle” in act III of Puccini’s Tosca, an opera notoriously described by Kerman as a “shabby little shocker,” offers a more publicized example of a similar problem. As Kerman wrote: “Tosca leaps, and the orchestra screams the first thing that comes into its head, ‘E lucevan le stelle.’ How pointless this is, compared with the return of the music for the kiss at the analogous place in Otello, which makes Verdi’s dramatic point with a consummate sense of dramatic form…. ‘E lucevan le stelle’ is all about self-pity; Tosca herself never