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

a babies’underwear wholesaler), the duo enjoyed two big hits in 1925, The Garrick Gaieties, a revue that included among its seven Rodgers and Hart songs the still-popular “Manhattan,” and Dearest Enemy, a romantic musical set during the Revolutionary War.

These two shows launched a succession of popularly received musicals, each containing at least one future perennial song favorite: Peggy-Ann in 1926 (“Where’s That Rainbow?”), A Connecticut Yankee in 1927 (“My Heart Stood Still” and “Thou Swell”), Present Arms in 1928 (“You Took Advantage of Me”), and Evergreen in 1930 (“Dancing on the Ceiling”). In 1930 the pair began a five-year sojourn in Hollywood where they produced the much discussed but still relatively unknown Love Me Tonight (1932), directed by Rouben Mamoulian, the future stage director of Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, and Carousel. A circus musical spectacular, Jumbo, marked their return to Broadway in 1935 and the beginning of their greatest successes: On Your Toes(1936), I’d Rather Be Right and Babes in Arms (1937), I Married an Angel and The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Pal Joey (1940), By Jupiter (1942), and a revised A Connecticut Yankee (1943).

Before the belated triumphs of 1925, Rodgers, who like Hart had dropped out of Columbia University without earning a degree, decided at the age of twenty that he needed to acquire a more rigorous musical education. As an adolescent Rodgers had received informal instruction both from his mother, an amateur pianist, and from his father, an enthusiastic amateur singer. Over three academic years, 1920–21, 1921–22, and 1923–24, he studied piano, theory, and ear training, including a special harmony class limited to five students with the noted theorist and author Percy Goetschius his final year at the Institute of Musical Art (which became the Juilliard School of Music in 1926).

Complementing this musical training was a legendary facility in the creation of melody. Rodgers’s early biographer David Ewen reports that after Hammerstein had labored many hours and sometimes weeks, Rodgers needed only about twenty minutes to compose “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” and another twenty minutes for “Happy Talk”; the complex “Soliloquy” from Carousel allegedly occupied “about three hours.”1 Although in his autobiography, Musical Stages, Rodgers emphasizes the months of pre-compositional discussions with Hammerstein rather than his own speed, he corroborates the story that “Bali Ha’i” “couldn’t have taken more than five minutes.”2 It therefore comes as something of a shock, and perhaps a relief, that the opening of the chorus to “I Could Write a Book” in Pal Joey took Rodgers the three tries illustrated in Example 5.1 before he found a version that satisfied him.

Example 5.1. “I Could Write a Book,” three sketches for the opening four measures

Throughout his long career Rodgers placed innovation and integration among his loftiest goals for a musical. In Musical Stages he writes with pride that Dearest Enemy (1925), his first book musical with Hart, gave his team the welcome “chance to demonstrate what we could do with a score that had at least some relevance to the mood, characters and situations found in a story.”3 Rodgers took similar pride the following year in Peggy-Ann’s distinction as the first musical comedy to express Freud’s theories on the stage “by dealing with subconscious fears and fantasies.”4

Rodgers prefaces his remarks concerning the ill-fated musical about castration, Chee-Chee, a musical that received an all-time Rodgers and Hart low of thirty-one performances in 1928, with the suggestion that long before Pal Joey (1940) and Oklahoma! (1943), Rodgers with Hart “had long been firm believers in the close unity of song and story.”5Chee-Chee provided their first opportunity “to put our theories into practice,” as Rodgers explains:

To avoid the eternal problem of the story coming to a halt as the songs take over, we decided to use a number of short pieces of from four to sixteen bars each, with no more than six songs of traditional form and length in the entire scene. In this way the music would be an essential part of the structure of the story rather than an appendage to the action. The concept was so unusual, in fact, that we even called attention to it with the following notice in the program: NOTE: The musical numbers, some of them very short, are so interwoven with the story that it would be confusing for the audience to peruse a complete list.6

On Your Toes

By the time Rodgers and Hart returned from Hollywood in 1935, their desire to create innovative musicals reached a new level. One year later they wrote On Your Toes. The genesis of the show can be traced to the Hollywood years, however, when Rodgers and Hart conceived the idea of a movie musical about a vaudeville hoofer (to be played by Fred Astaire) who becomes involved with a Russian ballet company.7 Astaire, then busy with his series of films with Ginger Rogers, declined the role and Hollywood rejected their scenario. Soon, however, Broadway bought the idea as a vehicle for a new dancing sensation, Ray Bolger, the scarecrow in Hollywood’s The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and the star of Rodgers and Hart’s final Broadway show, By Jupiter, in 1942 and Frank Loesser’s first Broadway triumph, Where’s Charley? in 1948. Boston tryouts took place between March 21 and April 8, 1936, and On Your Toes opened at the Imperial Theatre three days later. When it concluded its run at the Majestic Theatre the following January 23, the hit show had been performed 315 times.

On Your Toes. Ray Bolger and Tamara Geva (1936). Photograph: White Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

The history of On Your Toes after its initial critically and popularly acclaimed run differs markedly from the history of its more popular predecessor, Porter’s Anything Goes (discussed in chapter 3). The first major revival of Anything Goes in 1962 offered a new book and many interpolated songs, and made a respectable Off-Broadway run of 239 performances; the first revival of On Your Toes in 1954, with one interpolation