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

Can’t Be Love.” Why not? Because Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse “feel so well—no sobs, no sorrows, no sighs … no dizzy spell.” In the earlier lament from On Your Toes Rodgers and Hart present a love song composed by a woman so smitten that her lover’s hair, even if it “couldn’t possibly be duller,” would be perceived as pure gold. Since at this stage in the show Frankie cannot admit that Junior is the reason her heart has become “a broken down pump,” the jazzy tune, like the lyrics (with the exception of “that sinking feeling”), creates a surface lightness that masks the underlying truth: Frankie is literally as well as figuratively lovesick. Perhaps even more ingeniously than in Vera Simpson’s open admission of her obsession with Joey in “Bewitched,” discussed later in this chapter (Example 5.6), “It’s Got to Be Love” displays a descending two-note figure in alternate measures (for example, m. 1, A-B; m. 3, G-A; m. 5, F-G; m. 7, E-F) that subtly but surely betrays Frankie’s obsession with her teacher Junior.

Organicism in On Your Toes

In his notes to the 1983 revival, recording conductor John Mauceri writes tantalizingly of musical organicism in On Your Toes: “The score is full of musical ‘cross-references’” like the theme of the pas de deux in ‘Princesse Zenobia’ having the same rhythmic structure as ‘There’s a Small Hotel’ [Example 5.4]. The great composers of the American musical theater were not merely tunesmiths but composers of songs, ensembles and occasionally larger structures, like Schumann, Mendelssohn and Schubert a century before them.”33

Example 5.4. “There’s a Small Hotel” and “La Princesse Zenobia” Ballet

(a) “There’s a Small Hotel,” original song

(b) transformation in “La Princesse Zenobia” ballet

Mauceri’s message is that great works of theatrical art such as On Your Toes possess unity and structural integrity not usually associated with musical comedy—and, by implication, that large works are more worthy of praise than “mere” tunes. And certainly “There’s a Small Hotel” and “Princesse Zenobia” have much in common melodically as well as rhythmically. Since this song has previously served as the love duet between Junior and Frankie, it is dramatically convincing when Rodgers uses a transformed version of this song for a pas de deux (the balletic equivalent of a love song) that depicts the love between the Beggar (Morrosine) and the Princesse (Vera).

Additional examples of organicism include the rhythmic and sometimes melodic connections between the release or B section of “There’s a Small Hotel” (which, unlike “It’s Got to Be Love,” displays the more usual A-A-B-A thirty-two-bar form with each letter representing eight measures) and the first phrase of “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye” (also A-A-B-A) shown in Example 5.5. Mauceri might have noted that Rodgers reuses the dotted rhythmic accompaniment of “Small Hotel” to accompany the main theme of “Slaughter” for the jazzy duet between Junior (who knows the tune pretty well by now) and the stripper Vera. He might also have mentioned that the accompaniment of the second half of the verse, beginning with the words “see … looks gold to me” of “It’s Got to Be Love” also anticipates the rhythmic accompaniment throughout “There’s a Small Hotel” and the pas de deux between Junior and Vera in “Slaughter.” Nevertheless, in contrast to the vast network of connections previously observed in Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, examples of organicism in On Your Toes are comparatively rare. More important, Rodgers, although he does employ the musical device of foreshadowing for dramatic purposes, especially of his second ballet, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” for the most part does not exploit the dramatic potential of his musical connections as he would later with Hammerstein.34

Example 5.5. “There’s a Small Hotel” and “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye”

(a) “There’s a Small Hotel” (B section, or release)

(b) “The Heart is Quicker Than the Eye” (opening of chorus)

Musical comedies before Oklahoma! and Carousel are almost invariably criticized for their awkward transitions from dialogue into music. The segue into “There’s a Small Hotel” (act I, scene 6), a big hit song in the original production, provides a representative example by its absence of any references in the dialogue that lead plausibly, much less naturally or inevitably, to the song. In his 1983 revision Abbott tries to remedy this:

FRANKIE: Oh, Junior, I wish we were far away from all this.

JUNIOR: Yes, so do I. With no complications in our lives.

FRANKIE: Yes.

JUNIOR (Goes to her): Oh yes … very far away … Paris maybe.35

If the revised dialogue constitutes an improvement over the Central Park setting of the 1936 original, where “There’s a Small Hotel” almost literally comes out of nowhere, it does not fully solve the problem of how a librettist or an imaginative director can successfully introduce a song like “There’s a Small Hotel.” “It’s Got to Be Love” may subtly reflect Frankie’s disguised obsession with veiled descending melodic sequences, but not even with all the wisdom of his advancing years could a genius such as Abbott make these songs grow seamlessly out of the dramatic action. But perhaps the point is that if we think of the song and its performance as the show rather than an interruption that “stops” the show, so-called integrated dramatic solutions are less necessary?

Pal Joey

Several days before Pal Joey’s 1952 revival, Rodgers wrote in the New York Times that “Nobody like Joey had ever been on the musical comedy stage before.”36 In his autobiography Rodgers concluded that of the twenty-five musicals he wrote with Hart, Pal Joey remained his favorite, an opinion also shared by his lyricist.37 Porter’s Anything Goes may be more frequently revived. Several Rodgers and Hart shows, including A Connecticut Yankee (1927) in its revised 1943 version, Babes in Arms (1937), and The Boys from Syracuse (1938) can boast as many or even more hits. The scintillating On Your Toes can claim two full-length ballets and an organic unity unusual in musical comedies. Despite all this, only Pal Joey