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

contains the main musical material of “Bon Voyage.”7 Just as Mozart composed the easier-to-sing aria “Dalla sua pace” to accommodate the Viennese singer in Don Giovanni who was unable to negotiate the demands of the aria from the original Prague production (“Il mio tesoro”), Porter composed “All through the Night” in this scene for Gaxton (Billy Crocker) to replace the difficult-to-sing “Easy to Love.”

Another song intended for this scene, “Kate the Great,” was, according to the recollection of Anything Goes orchestrator Hans Spialek, rejected by Ethel Merman who “vouldn’t sing it” because it was a “durr-ty song!”8 A song planned as a tongue-in-cheek romantic duet in act I, scene 6, between Hope and Billy, “Waltz down the Aisle” (which bears striking melodic and rhythmic similarities as well as a similar dramatic purpose to “Wunderbar” from Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate) was also dropped from Anything Goes. A song for Hope in act II, scene 1, “What a Joy to Be Young,” was deleted before the Broadway premiere.9

One song in the beginning of the Broadway run, “Buddie, Beware,” was replaced by a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You” within a few weeks. In order to understand the artistic implications of this change it is necessary to recall Porter’s original motivation. Composers of musicals before (or after) the Rodgers and Hammerstein era could not, of course, always predict which song would become a hit. Nevertheless, they almost invariably tried to place their best bets after an opening number, usually for chorus. In Anything Goes Porter tried something more unusual. Instead of opening with a chorus, Porter decided to begin less conventionally with a potential hit song for Ethel Merman five minutes into the show, “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

Porter’s reasons for beginning with what he felt would be the hit of the show may have been somewhat perverse. According to Kreuger, Porter’s “society friends thought it was amusing to drift into the theatre fifteen or twenty minutes after the curtain had gone up, so that all their friends could observe what they were wearing.”10 Porter therefore “warned his friends for weeks before the opening that they had better arrive on time or they would miss the big song.”11 There is no record that Merman objected to “Buddie, Beware” in act II, scene 2, for the same reason she objected to a song about the sexual exploits of Catherine (Kate) the Great. Her objections in this case were practical rather than moral: the show needed a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You” “for the benefit of those who had arrived late!”12 If this undocumented anecdote is to be believed, Porter, who had earlier agreed to cut “Kate the Great,” was again willing to accommodate his star and cut “Buddie, Beware.”13

The history of Anything Goes after its premiere in 1934 differs markedly from the fate of Show Boat discussed in the previous chapter. The original 1927 Broadway version of Show Boat was superseded by Kern and Hammerstein’s own rethinking of the work in the 1946 revival that included a reworked book, several deleted songs and a brand new one, and new orchestrations. As we have seen, after Hammerstein’s death in 1960, the 1971 London and 1994 Broadway Show Boat revivals presented conflated versions of the musical that included songs from various earlier stage productions (New York, 1927; London, 1928; New York, 1946) and also songs from the 1936 film classic. Some of the original as well as interpolated songs were also either placed in different contexts or distributed to different characters.

Despite these liberties, both the 1971 London and 1994 Broadway revivals contained interpolated songs that had been associated with one version or another of this musical (“How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” from the 1971 London production is an isolated exception). In contrast, the Anything Goes revival in 1962, the version distributed to prospective producers until replaced by the 1987 revival, incorporated no less than six songs out of a total of fourteen from other Porter shows (“It’s De-Lovely,” “Heaven Hop,” “Friendship,” “Let’s Step Out,” “Let’s Misbehave,” and “Take Me Back to Manhattan”). Also, in 1962 the order of several songs was rearranged and, ironically, a thoroughly revised book was written by Guy Bolton, who had prepared the original scenario early in 1934 and with P. G. Wodehouse had submitted the rejected 1934 book.

The 1987 revival contained yet another new book, this time by Russel Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman.14 This book retained two of the interpolations from 1962 (“It’s De-Lovely” and “Friendship”), and added two other Porter tunes from shows that had not even appeared on Broadway, “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye” from O Mistress Mine, a 1936 musical produced in London, and “I Want to Row on the Crew,” from the Yale fraternity show Paranoia of 1914. The 1987 production also rearranged the order and dramatic context of several other songs from the original 1934 Broadway run. Most strikingly, the 1987 revision resurrected three songs that had appeared at various phases of the 1934 tryouts and initial run: “There’s No Cure like Travel,” “Easy to Love,” and “Buddie, Beware” (see the online Appendix for the sources of all the interpolated songs).

One year before criticizing the undramatic use of recitative in the Theatre Guild production of Porgy and Bess, Brooks Atkinson reviewed the Broadway premiere of Anything Goes. The review is an unequivocal rave of “a thundering good musical show” with “a rag, tag and bobtail of comic situations and of music sung in the spots when it is most exhilarating.”15 Most surprisingly from a modern perspective is the fact that Atkinson praises the book, not as a work of art, perhaps, but as a well-crafted vehicle to set off William Gaxton’s talent for wearing disguises and the comic characterization of Victor Moore’s Moon, “the quintessence of musical comedy humor.” Atkinson does not feel the need to consider Anything Goes as anything other than the “thundering good song-and-dance show” it purports to be.16 Another reviewer,