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

Similarly, Hammerstein’s Hollywood years in the 1930s and early 1940s yielded no original musical films of lasting acclaim, although here, too, a considerable number of songs with Hammerstein lyrics have become standards.68 Hammerstein also adapted the screenplay for the penultimate Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939).69 In the next decade Hammerstein began his historic collaboration with Rodgers, and by the time Show Boat was revived in 1946, they had already written two of their five major hit musicals, Oklahoma! and Carousel (the latter the subject of chapter 9).70

In addition to his subsequent work with Hammerstein, Kern created two successful musicals with Harbach, the unfortunately overlooked The Cat and the Fiddle (1931) and Roberta (1933), the latter best known in its greatly altered 1935 film version. In fact, most of Kern’s career after Show Boat was occupied with the creation of twenty-two full or partial film scores—thirteen original and nine adapted from Broadway—including several with lyrics by Hammerstein and the Astaire and Rogers classic Swing Time (1936), with lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Unfortunately, Kern never had the opportunity even to begin a new musical in the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, since he died shortly after Rodgers, who was producing a musical based on the life of Annie Oakley, had asked him to write the music.71

Kern and Hammerstein’s inability to produce another Show Boat in the 1930s enhances the significance of their earlier achievement. Although its ending did not embrace Ferber’s darker version, Show Boat, “the first truly, totally American operetta” had dared to present an American epic with a credible story, three-dimensional characters, a convincing use of American vernacular appropriate to the changing world (including the African-Americanization of culture) from the late 1880s to 1927, and a sensitive portrayal of race relations that ranged from the plight of the black underclass to miscegenation.72 As the first Broadway musical to keep rolling along in the repertory from its time to ours, while at the same time enjoying the critical respect of musical-theater historians for more than seventy years, Show Boat, the musical “that demanded a new maturity from musical theatre and from its audience,”73 has long since earned its coveted historical position as the foundation of the modern American musical.

CHAPTER THREE

ANYTHING GOES

Songs Ten, Book Three

Before the curtain rose on the 1987 revival of Anything Goes at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, audiences heard the strains of Cole Porter’s own rendition of the title song recorded in 1934. At the conclusion of this critically well-received and popularly successful show a large silkscreen photograph of Porter (1891–1964) appeared behind a scrim to cast a literal as well as metaphoric shadow over the cast. More than fifty years after its premiere the message was clear: the real star of Anything Goes was its composer-lyricist, the creator of such timeless song classics as “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” “All Through the Night,” “Easy to Love,” “Friendship,” “It’s De-Lovely,” and the title song. Readers familiar with Anything Goes from various amateur and semi-professional productions over the past thirty years may scarcely notice that the last three songs named were taken from other Porter shows.

Anything Goes, after the Gershwins’ Pulitzer Prize–winning Of Thee I Sing the longest running book musical of the 1930s and almost certainly the most frequently revived musical of its time (in one form or another), was Porter’s first major hit. Otherwise virtually forgotten, each of Porter’s five musicals preceding Anything Goes introduced at least one song that would rank a ten in almost anyone’s book: “What Is This Thing Called Love?” in Wake Up and Dream (1929), “You Do Something to Me” in Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), “Love for Sale” in The New Yorkers (1930), and “Night and Day” in Gay Divorce (1932). The Porter shows that debuted in the years between Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate (1948) are similarly remembered mainly because they contain one or more hit songs.

Anything Goes, act II, finale (1987). Photograph: Brigitte Lacombe.

In the unlikely Midwestern town of Peru, Indiana, Porter’s mother, appropriately named Kate, arranged to have Cole’s first song published at her own expense in 1902 (he was eleven at the time). Three years later Porter entered the exclusive Worcester Academy in Massachusetts. Upon his graduation from Yale in 1913, where he had delighted his fellow students with fraternity shows and football songs, Porter endured an unhappy year at Harvard Law School. Against his grandfather’s wishes and in spite of financial threats, Porter enrolled in Harvard’s music department for the 1914–1915 academic year. In 1917 he furthered his musical training with private studies in New York City with Pietro Yon, the musical director and organist at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral; in 1919–1920 the future Broadway composer continued his studies in composition, counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration with Vincent D’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris.

Although his first success, Paris, would not arrive for another twelve years, Porter had already produced a musical on Broadway, See America First (1916), before Gershwin or Rodgers had begun their Broadway careers and only one year after Kern had inaugurated his series of distinctive musicals at the Princess Theatre. The years between the failure of his Broadway debut after fifteen performances (inspiring the famous quip from Variety, “See America First last!”) and the success of Irene Bordoni’s singing “Let’s Do It” in Paris were largely dormant ones for Porter. In fact, the sum total of his Broadway work other than See America First was one song interpolation for Kern’s Miss Information in 1915 and approximately ten songs each in Hitchy-Koo of 1919 and the Greenwich Village Follies in 1924. During these years the already wealthy Porter—despite his profligacy an heir to his grandfather’s fortune—grew still wealthier when he married the socialite and famous beauty Linda Lee Thomas in 1919. In 1924 the Porters