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

The genesis of the musical Pal Joey, based on John O’Hara’s collection of stories in epistolary form, can be traced to 1938 when a single O’Hara short story, “Pal Joey,” was published in the New Yorker. By early 1940, shortly after Rodgers had received O’Hara’s letter suggesting a collaboration on a musical based on his collection, an additional eleven Joey stories (out of a total of thirteen) had appeared.38 A normal five-week rehearsal schedule began on November 11 and tryouts took place in Philadelphia between December 16 and 22. Directed by Abbott and starring Gene Kelly as Joey and Vivienne Segal as Vera Simpson, the musical made its Broadway premiere at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Christmas Day and closed 374 performances later at the St. James Theatre on November 29, 1941.39

In his now-infamous review New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson found Pal Joey “entertaining” but “odious.” Referring to the disturbing subject matter, including adultery, sexual exploitation, blackmail, the somewhat unwholesome moral character of the principals, and a realistic and unflattering depiction of the seamy side of Chicago night life, Atkinson concluded his review with the question, “Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”40 Other critics greeted Pal Joey as a major “advance” in the form. Burns Mantle, for example, compared it favorably with the legitimate plays of the season and expressed his delight “that there are signs of new life in the musicals.”41 And in Musical Stages Rodgers proudly quotes Wolcott Gibbs’s New Yorker review as an antidote to Atkinson: “I am not optimistic by nature but it seems to me just possible that the idea of equipping a song-and-dance production with a few living, three-dimensional figures, talking and behaving like human beings, may no longer strike the boys in the business as merely fantastic.”42 Some reviewers noted weaknesses in the second act, but most praised O’Hara for producing a fine book. John Mason Brown described the work as “novel and imaginative.”43 Sidney B. Whipple lauded the “rich characterizations” and concluded that it was “the first musical comedy book in a long time that has been worth the bother.”44

Pal Joey appeared several years before the era of cast recordings, but in September 1950, ten years after its Broadway stage debut, a successful recording was issued with Vivienne Segal, the original Vera Simpson, and with Harold Lang as a new Joey. The recording generated considerable interest in the work and soon led to a revival on January 3, 1952, a sequence of events that foreshadowed the trajectories of several Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals of the 1970s and 1980s that were introduced as record albums and later evolved into stage productions. The 1952 Pal Joey became the second major revival (after Cheryl Crawford’s 1942 revival of Porgy and Bess) to surpass its original run, and at 542 performances remains the longest running production of any Rodgers and Hart musical, original or revival. Even Atkinson, while not exactly admitting that he had erred in his 1940 assessment, lavishly praised the work as well as the production in 1952, including “the terseness of the writing, the liveliness and versatility of the score, and the easy perfection of the lyrics.”45

Pal Joey. Gene Kelly in right foreground (1940). Photograph: Vandamm Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

After two successful revivals at the New York City Center in 1961 and 1963 (both with Bob Fosse in the title role), the artistic and commercial failure of a 1976 revival at New York City’s Circle in the Square—abandoned by New York City Ballet star Edward Villella shortly before opening night—would not cause Pal Joey to lose its place as a classic American musical, a place firmly established by the 1952 revival. As another sign of its artistic stature Pal Joey became the earliest musical to gain admittance in Lehman Engel’s select list of fifteen canonic musicals.46 For Engel, Pal Joey inaugurated a Golden Age of the American musical.47

Pal Joey in 1940 and 1952

Compared to the liberties taken with the 1962 Anything Goes and the 1954 On Your Toes, the 1952 Pal Joey revival followed its original book and song content and order tenaciously. Nevertheless, some of what audiences heard and saw in 1952 departs from the original Broadway production. For example, in the 1952 revival, “Do It the Hard Way” is placed outside of its original dramatic context (act II, scene 4), when it is sung by Joey to Vera in their apartment; in 1940 this song is presented as a duet between Gladys and Ludlow Lowell in Chez Joey one scene earlier.48

The 1952 lyrics also depart in several notable ways from O’Hara’s 1940 typescript.49 In 1940 Hart concluded the chorus of “That Terrific Rainbow” (act I, scene 3) with the following quatrain: “Though we’re in those GRAY clouds / Some day you’ll see / That terrific RAINBOW / Over you and me” (preserved on the pre-revival recording); for the 1952 revival someone (presumably not Hart) replaced two lines of this lyric with one that is grammatically incorrect, perhaps to emphasize the amateurish nature of the song. Thus “Some day you’ll spy” now rhymes with “Over you and I” (Hart rhymed “someday you’ll see” with “over you and me”). This alteration was adopted in the 1962 vocal score published by Chappell & Co.

The topical “Zip”—a song in which newspaper reporter Melba Snyder (played in the revival by Elaine Stritch) acts out her interview with Gypsy Rose Lee, “the star who worked for Minsky”—also underwent several lyrical changes in 1952. In the revival Melba opened the song with Hart’s earlier version of the first lines when she recalls her interviews with “Pablo Picasso and a countess named di Frasso.” It is possible that Picasso and di Frasso were more recognizable to an early 1950s audience than the revised 1940 lyric that paired Leslie Howard and Noël