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

moved to Italy where they would soon launch three years of lavish party-throwing and party-going in their Venetian palazzos. On numerous such occasions the expatriate songwriter would entertain his friends with his witty lyrics and melodies. Near the end of this partying, Porter in 1927 auditioned unsuccessfully for Vinton Freedley and Alex Aarons, the producers of several Gershwin hit musicals and the future producers of four Porter shows starting with Anything Goes. When the following year Rodgers and Hart were preoccupied with A Connecticut Yankee, Porter was easily persuaded to leave Europe and bring Paris to New York. Anything Goes would arrive six years and many perennial song favorites later.

The Changing Times of Anything Goes

Most accounts of the genesis of Anything Goes attribute the disastrous fire that took between 125 and 180 passengers’ lives on the pleasure ship Morro Castle off the coast at Asbury Park, New Jersey, on September 8, 1934, as the catalyst that led to the revised book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. According to conventional wisdom, the earlier libretto about a shipwreck could not be used any more than Porter could use his line about Mrs. Lindbergh in “I Get a Kick Out of You” after the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby.1 But at least two sources, George Eells’s biography of Porter and Miles Kreuger’s introductory notes to conductor John McGlinn’s reconstructed recording, report that producer Freedley was dissatisfied by the Guy Bolton–P. G. Wodehouse book when he received it on August 15 and that the Morro disaster served mainly as a convenient explanation.

According to Eells, Freedley thought there was “a tastelessness about this piece of work that no amount of rewriting would eradicate,” a view echoed by both Kreuger and Bolton-Wodehouse biographer Lee Davis. Kreuger writes, “Freedley was fearful that the rather derisive attitude toward Hollywood might ruin chances of a film sale.” Davis goes further: “The first script was rejected by Freedley for its Hollywood treatment, not its similarity to the tragic fire at sea of the liner Morro Castle, as has been historically accepted. Nor would he blanch at the second version because of its continued treatment of a catastrophe at sea. It would be because the second version was a hopeless mess.”2

In an interview with Richard Hubler published in 1965, one year after Porter’s death, the composer-lyricist anticipated the future conclusions of Eells, Kreuger, and Davis. Porter recalled that the Morro Castle tragedy provided an excuse to scrap a Wodehouse-Bolton book whose quality was “so bad that it was obvious that the work was completely inadequate.”3 The synopsis included in this book is of course based on the revised Anything Goes book by Lindsay and Crouse, based in part on the rejected and now presumed lost second draft by Bolton and Wodehouse and Bolton’s original scenario from early 1934, currently housed at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (which includes some dialogue for “Gaxton” and “Ethel” and “Moore”).

Since it is possible that Lindsay and Crouse retained relatively little of the Bolton-Wodehouse second draft—although the new book may have contained more than an alleged five lines—it is not surprising that the inexperienced collaborators would be able to complete only a few scenes from act I and nothing of act II before rehearsals began on October 8. In contrast to the painstaking work and lengthy gestation period of most of the musicals surveyed in this volume, Anything Goes was hastily, perhaps even frantically, put together.

But Freedley, Lindsay, Crouse, and Porter had other objectives than to create an epic book musical along the lines of Show Boat. Their central concern was to produce a comic hit and to provide dramatic and musical opportunities to suit their outstanding preassembled cast. In particular, they needed a vehicle to display William Gaxton’s (Billy) proven flair for multifarious disguises and to exploit the inspired silliness of comedian Victor Moore’s incongruous casting as a notorious gangster (Moon). The result was enough to prompt Brooks Atkinson to exclaim that “comedy is the most satisfying invention of the human race.”4 Atkinson could not ask anything more of a show that exuded such refreshing topicality and personality, a show for the moment, if not for the ages. If one or two songs stuck around for awhile, so much the better.

Although John McGlinn later proclaimed the 1934 Anything Goes as “one of the most perfect farces ever written,” most producers and directors for the past forty years have been trying to solve the perceived disparity in quality between the book and the songs by altering the former and interpolating more of the latter.5 The 1987 revival at the Vivian Beaumont was not the first time audiences found themselves leaving a production of Anything Goes humming or whistling songs from other Porter shows. In the 1962 revival, the only version distributed by Tams-Witmark for the next twentyfive years, still other songs from other Porter shows had been interpolated. The lyricist-composer’s own reputed cavalier attitude toward his books and song interpolations prompted Broadway and Hollywood historian Gerald Mast to state erroneously that Porter’s last will and testament “granted explicit permission to take any Porter song from any Porter show and use it in any other.”6 Unfortunately, the relative commercial success of McGlinn’s recorded enterprise has not encouraged most producers and directors to revive the 1934 Anything Goes.

The online website presents an outline of the scenes and songs of the Anything Goes that audiences would have heard during most of the initial run of the show that opened on November 21, 1934 (as well the scenes and songs seen and heard in the Off-Broadway Revival of 1962 and the Vivian Beaumont Revival of 1987). As in the case of most musicals from any period (and many eighteenth-century operas), additional songs were tried and then discarded during tryouts or during the early weeks of the first New York run. In act I, scene 2, “Bon Voyage” was originally juxtaposed, then ingeniously combined, with another song, “There’s No Cure like Travel,” a song that interestingly