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

and several other modest alterations, folded after only sixty-four showings. More incriminatingly, the work itself, not the production, was considered the principal reason for its failure.

In 1936 Brooks Atkinson had written that “if the word ‘sophisticated’ is not too unpalatable, let it serve as a description of the mocking book which Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and George Abbott have scribbled.”8 By 1954, the integrated musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and even Rodgers and Hart’s recently revived Pal Joey—which Atkinson had reviewed disparagingly in 1940 before extolling its virtues in 1952—had created new criteria that musicals such as On Your Toes did not match. Thus eighteen years after his initially positive assessment Atkinson attacked as “labored, mechanical and verbose” the book he formerly had deemed sophisticated. For Atkinson and his public “the mood of the day,” which had recently caught up to Pal Joey, had “passed beyond” On Your Toes. The “long and enervating” road to the still-worthy “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet at the end of the second act simply was not worth the wait.9

In the 1936 On Your Toes Rodgers and Hart attempted an integration of music and drama that went beyond their successful innovations in Peggy-Ann and their unsuccessful ones in Chee-Chee. In Musical Stages Rodgers discusses his ambitious new artistic intentions:

One of the great innovations of On Your Toes, the angle that had initially made us think of it as a vehicle for Fred Astaire, was that for the first time ballet was being incorporated into a musical-comedy book. To be sure, Albertina Rasch had made a specialty of creating Broadway ballets [for example, The Band Wagon of 1931], but these were usually in revues and were not part of a story line. We made our main ballet [“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”] an integral part of the action; without it, there was no conclusion to our story.10

Despite such claims, the degree to which co-authors Rodgers and Hart and Abbott succeeded in their attempt to integrate dance, especially “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” has been questioned by Ethan Mordden:

Much has been made of “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”’s importance as a book-integrated ballet, but it was, in fact, a ballet-within-a-play … not a part of the story told in choreographic terms. Only towards the ballet’s end did plot collide with set piece when the hoofer learned that two gangsters were planning to gun him down from a box in the theatre at the end of the number. Exhausted, terrified, he must keep dancing to save his life until help comes, and thus a ballet sequence in On Your Toes turned into the On Your Toes plot.11

Mordden’s challenge does not obscure the fact that On Your Toes treats a vexing artistic issue: the conflict and reconciliation between classical and popular art. Much of the plot and the comedy in On Your Toes evolves from the tensions between the cultivated and the vernacular, between highbrow and lowbrow art. Even the barest outlines of the scenario reveal this.

When in act I, scene 3, we meet Phil Dolan III (“Junior”) as an adult, he is employed as a music professor at a W.P.A. [Work Projects Administration] Extension University, having renounced his career as a famous vaudeville hoofer sixteen years earlier at the insistence of his parents (scenes 1 and 2). His student and eventual romantic partner, Frankie Frayne, writes “cheap” (1936) or “derivative” (1983) popular songs, including “It’s Got to Be Love,” “On Your Toes,” and “Glad to Be Unhappy”; another student, Sidney Cohn, who supposedly possesses greater talent (to match his pretensions and ambition), has composed “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” which will be performed by the Russian Ballet in act II.

The Cat and the Fiddle, a 1931 hit with lyrics by Otto Harbach and music by Kern, had explored the tensions and eventual accommodation of classical and popular music in a European setting in which a “serious” Romanian male composer and a jazzy American female composer—at the beginning of the show she is already well known as the composer of “She Didn’t Say Yes”—eventually produce a harmonious hybrid. On Your Toes contrasted the cultivated and vernacular traditions through dance, two full-length ballets, both choreographed by the revered George Balanchine (1904–1983), who in the previous decade starred in Diaghilev’s ballet company: a classical ballet to conclude act I (“La Princesse Zenobia”) and a jazz ballet (“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”) as a climax for act II. In the title song, tap dancing and classical ballet alternate and compete for audience approbation in the same number. Further, the Russian prima ballerina (Vera Baranova) and her partner (Konstantine Morrosine) have important dramatic (albeit non-singing) parts as well as their star dance turns. By contrast, in the dream ballet that concludes act I of Oklahoma!—the musical which almost invariably receives the credit for integrating dance into the book—the dancing roles of Laurey and Curley are played by separate and mute dancers.

That On Your Toes is a musical about Art is frequently evident in the dialogue, especially its original 1936 manifestation. For example, in her efforts to convince the Russian ballet director, Sergei Alexandrovitch, that Sidney Cohn’s ballet is worthy of his company, manager and principal benefactress Peggy Porterfield explains the case for branching out: “Your public is tired of Schéhérazade, La Spectre de la Rose—they’ve seen all those Russian turkeys at the Capital for 40 cents—this is something different—it’s a jazz ballet—they can’t understand the music without the story and nobody can understand the story—they’ll say it’s art.”12 Vera considers herself “a great artist” because she has convinced Junior that her “dancing [has] a virginal charm.”13 And when Morrosine tells a gangster that he “must wait till he [Junior] stops dancing” before shooting him, Art takes precedence over jealousy and revenge.14

The libretto also explores conflicting attitudes on the relative merits of classical and jazz dance. Frankie questions Junior’s priorities in giving up his potential as “a headliner in vaudeville” to be a supernumerary in the Russian ballet.15 In the 1936 libretto Morrosine’s infidelities and obnoxious behavior toward his