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

“gone mad.” Similarly, in “You’re the Top” Porter does not capitalize on the text’s potential for realism and opts for inspired opulent adornment instead. Thus, although the “I” always appears in the bottom throughout most of the song, the “you” blithely moves back and forth from top to bottom.”42 The upward leaping orchestral figure anticipates the word, “top,” but the sung line does not, and at the punch line, “But if Baby I’m the bottom, / You’re the top,” both Billy and Reno (“I’m” and “You’re”) share a melodic line at the top of their respective ranges.43

In the end a search for an underlying theme in Anything Goes yields more fun than profundity. An Englishman is good-naturedly spoofed for speaking a quaint “foreign” language and for his slowness in understanding American vernacular, and the celebrity status of religious entertainers like Aimée Semple McPherson and public criminals like Baby Face Nelson are caricatured by evangelist-singer Reno Sweeney and Public Enemy No. 1 (Moon Face). On a somewhat deeper level, the music suggests that the friendship between Reno and Billy has more vitality and perhaps greater substance than the eventual romantic pairings of Billy and Hope and Reno and Sir Evelyn. Not only does Porter demonstrate their compatibility by having Billy and Reno share quarter- and half-note triplet rhythms, but he shows his affection for them by giving them his most memorable songs. By the end of Anything Goes some may wonder how a person who cannot even sing could deserve a gem like Reno who sings nothing but hits.

Anything Goes does not conform to the organic “Wagnerian” model of some pre- and post-Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals beginning with Show Boat. Instead it presents a striking parallel with the generally less ostentatiously organic world of Baroque opera, in which great stars and show-stopping arias can ensure at least short-term success (which is all that is required). In any of its forms, including the 1962 Anything Goes that held the stage for almost three decades and the 1987 reincarnation with its new book and numerous interpolated songs (today’s default rental version), Anything Goes still works. And even if the book that changes with the times falls short of the integrated ideal, it continues to provide marvelous vehicles to drive and showcase a parade of timeless hit songs. Times have changed, but Anything Goes is apparently here to stay.

CHAPTER FOUR

PORGY AND BESS

Broadway Opera

Porgy and Bess, described by its composer George Gershwin (1898–1937) as “a serious attempt to put in operatic form a purely American theme” and “a new form, which combines opera with theatre,” began its public life in 1935 before a Broadway audience.1 While the possibilities of a Metropolitan Opera production had been explored, a Theatre Guild production offered a more extended rehearsal schedule (six weeks), many more performances, and fewer logistical problems in assembling a large cast of operatically trained African-American singers.2 Six years earlier the Met had signed a contract with Gershwin to produce an opera based on Sholem Ansky’s version of the Jewish folktale “The Dybbuk” but abandoned the project after Gershwin was denied musical rights to this property.3

After a disappointing initial Broadway run of 124 performances, Porgy and Bess achieved a wider audience seven years later in the most successful Broadway revival up to that time. But in contrast to the 1935 operatic form, the 1942 revival presented a Broadway opera shorn of its operatic accoutrements, that is, without recitatives (sung dialogue). Although some spoken dialogue replaced Gershwin’s recitative, in the 1950s Porgy and Bess regained more of its operatic form as it toured opera houses all over the world (including La Scala).

In 1976 the work gained additional acceptance as an authentic as well as an accessible operatic classic when the Houston Opera performed the first largely uncut stage version since the Boston tryouts in 1935. By 1980 two competing unexpurgated recordings, one by the Houston Opera and another by the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, had appeared. Then, after fifty years of negotiations, Porgy and Bess appeared at the Met in 1985.4 Nevertheless, despite its newfound popularity and acclaim among opera audiences, Porgy and Bess remains best known to the general public today as a collection of Broadway show tunes including “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin,’” and “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” sung, played, and recorded by jazz and popular artists as diverse as Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr. and Diahann Carroll, Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, Mel Tormé and Frances Faye, and Miles Davis.

Gershwin’s exposure to the European classical tradition began two years after he started to play the piano at the relatively late age of twelve in 1910, when his teacher Charles Hambitzer introduced him to the music of Debussy and Ravel. Following his apprenticeship as a popular song “plugger” for the publishing house Remick & Company and some modest success in his own right as a songwriter for various revues between 1919 and 1921, Gershwin studied theory, composition, and orchestration with Edward Kilenyi. For more than a decade before completing Porgy and Bess Gershwin had composed a small body of jazz-influenced classical instrumental works including Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Concerto in F (1925), and An American in Paris (1928) that earned the respect, or at least the attention, of composers as diverse as Ravel, Prokofiev, and Berg. Between 1932 and 1936, partly in preparation for his first opera, Gershwin continued his studies in composition with Joseph Schillinger, a theorist who had developed a teachable system of melodic composition (including some techniques that Gershwin was able to incorporate in Porgy and Bess).

For the revue, George White Scandals of 1922, Gershwin created an unusual work that revealed an interest in opera parallel to his interest in instrumental music, a work that similarly combined the cultivated European tradition with the American vernacular. This modest first effort, Blue Monday, a one-act verismo opera about blacks in Harlem, was dropped after opening night. For the next thirteen years Gershwin would