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

that Billy can successfully woo Hope. The degree to which Reno expresses her admiration for Billy in “I Get a Kick Out of You” and the mutual admiration expressed between Billy and Reno in “You’re the Top” might prompt some in the audience to ask why the creators of Anything Goes could not bring themselves to “make two lovers of friends.”36

In Anything Goes Porter does not attempt the variety of musical and dramatic connections that will mark his relatively more integrated classic fourteen years later, Kiss Me, Kate (discussed in chapter 10). But Porter does pay attention to nuances in characterization and to the symbiotic relationship between music and words. To cite three examples, the sailor song, “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair,” sounds appropriately like a sea chantey, the chorus of “Public Enemy No. 1” is a parodistic hymn of praise, and Moon’s song, “Be Like the Bluebird,” makes a credible pseudo-Australian folk song (at least for those unfamiliar with “authentic” Australian folk songs).

More significantly, Reno’s music, as befitting her persona, is rhythmically intricate, ubiquitously syncopated, and harmonically straightforward. It is also equally meaningful that in “You’re the Top” Billy adopts Reno’s musical language as his own but changes his tune and his personality when he sings the more lugubrious “All through the Night” with Hope. But even this song, dominated by descending half steps and long held notes, exhibits Reno’s influence with the syncopations on alternate measures in the A section of the chorus and especially in the release when Billy laments the daylight reality (Hope does not sing this portion). Billy’s syncopated reality partially supplants the long held notes: “When dawn comes to waken me, / You’re never there at all. / I know you’ve forsaken me / Till the shadows fall.”

Although rarely faithfully executed in performance, Porter’s score also gives Reno an idiosyncratic and persistent rhythmic figure in “I Get a Kick Out of You,” quarter-note triplets in the verse (“sad to be” and “leaves me totally”) and half-note triplets in the chorus (“kick from cham-[pagne],” “[alco]-hol doesn’t thrill me at [all],” and “tell me why should it be”), the latter group shown in Example 3.1a. Because they occupy more than one beat, quarter-note and half-note triplets are generally perceived as more rhythmically disruptive than eighth-note triplets.37 Consequently, Reno’s half-note triplets shown in Example 3.1a, like the quarter-note triplets that open the main chorus of Tony’s “Maria” (“I just met a girl named Maria” [Example 13.2b, p. 283]), are experienced as rhythmically out of phase with the prevailing duple framework. A good Broadway example of the conventional and nondisruptive eighth-note triplet rhythm (one beat for each triplet) can be observed at the beginning of every phrase in Laurey’s “Many a New Day” from Oklahoma! (Example 3.1b). Broadway composers have never to my knowledge articulated the intentionality or metaphoric meaning behind this practice. Nevertheless, with striking consistency, more than a few songs featured in this survey employ quarter-note and half-note triplets in duple meter (where triplets stretch in syncopated fashion over three beats instead of two) to musically depict characters who are temporarily or permanently removed from conventional social norms and expectations: Venus in One Touch of Venus, Julie Jordan in Carousel, Tony in West Side Story.38 In Guys and Dolls, rhythms are employed or avoided to distinguish one character type from another. The tinhorn gamblers and Adelaide frequently use quarter-note triplets, while Sarah Brown and her Salvation Army cohorts do not.

Porter’s use of Reno’s rhythm in the chorus of “I Get a Kick Out of You” constitutes perhaps his most consistent attempt to create meaning from his musical language. Half-note triplets dominate Reno’s explication of all the things in life that do not give her a kick; they disappear when (with continued syncopation, however) she informs Billy that she does get a kick out of him. Reno will also sing her quarter-note triplets briefly in the release of “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” (not shown), when she is ready to fly higher and higher.39 By the time Hope loses some of her inhibitions and finds the gypsy in herself (“Gypsy in Me”) in act II, she too will adopt this rhythmic figure on “hiding a-[way],” “never been,” and “waiting its” (Example 3.1c). By usurping Reno’s rhythm, Hope will become more like the former evangelist and, ironically, a more suitable partner for Billy.40

Example 3.1. Triplet rhythms

(a) “I Get a Kick Out of You” (Anything Goes)

(b) “Many a New Day” (Oklahoma!)

(c) “Gypsy in Me” (Anything Goes)

The verse of the title song shown in Example 3.2 offers a striking example of Porter’s “word painting,” Kivy’s “textual realism” introduced in chapter 1. Even if a listener remains unconvinced that the gradually rising half-steps in the bass line between measures 3 and 7 (C-D-D) depict the winding and consequently faster ticking of a clock, Porter unmistakably captures the changing times in his title song. He does this by contrasting the descending C-minor arpeggiated triad (C-G-E-C) that opens the song on the words “Times have changed” with a descending C-major arpeggiated triad (C-G-E-C) on the words “If today.”41 The topsy-turvy Depression-tinted world of 1934 is indeed different from the world of our Puritan ancestors. Porter makes this change known to us musically as well as in his text.

Example 3.2. “Anything Goes” (verse, mm. 1-10)

In the chorus of “Anything Goes” Porter abandons “textual realism” in favor of a jazzy “opulent adornment” and does not attempt to convey nuances and distinctions between “olden days,” a time when “a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking,” and the present day when “anything goes.” Much has changed between 1934 and today and the chorus of “Anything Goes” remains one of the most memorable of its time or ours. Nevertheless, it is difficult to argue that this central portion of the song possesses (or attempts to convey) a dramatic equivalence with its text, even if it brilliantly captures an accepting attitude to a syncopated world