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

obsession. Hart conveys the society matron’s idée fixe by giving her thrice-repeated lyrics to conclude the first three lines of each A section, as in “I’m wild again! / Beguiled again! / A whimpering, simpering child again” (with the internal rhymes wild, beguiled, and child) before delivering the “hook” of the song’s title, “bewitched, bothered and bewildered” (always unrhymed) to conclude each A section. It is tempting to conclude that Rodgers’s musical characterization of Vera’s emotional state corresponds with uncanny accuracy to the lyrics. But since the lyrics apparently followed the music—in contrast to Rodgers’s subsequent modus operandi with Hammerstein—it is more accurate to admire Hart’s special sensitivity to Rodger’s music, which presents an equally repetitive musical line, the note B ascending up a half-step to C. By inverting the musical line (turning it upside down) in the B section (mm. 17–24), Rodgers manages to maintain Vera’s obsession while providing welcome musical contrast to the repetitive A sections.

Vera’s ability to rhyme internally also reflects her complexity and sophistication—or, as Sondheim would say, her education.56 In other songs Hart’s lyrics convey literal lyrical parallels to Rodgers’s music. Examples of textual realism include Joey’s monotonous recitation of the alphabet and numbers to match the repeated notes in the verse of “I Could Write a Book,” the word “blue” in the phrase “but I’m blue for you” to match Rodgers’s “blue note” (a blue seventh) in the first period of “That Terrific Rainbow,” and the hunting imagery that corresponds to the horn-like fifths in “Happy Hunting Horn.” Other pictorial examples include the gunshot at the end of this last song to suggest fallen prey, the graphic chord each time Melba Snyder sings the word “Zip!,” and the dissonant chord cluster after she mentions “the great Stravinsky.”

Perhaps in an effort to musically integrate his Pal Joey songs, Rodgers maintains his obsession with the prominent half-steps that characterized “Bewitched.” No less than three other songs in Pal Joey prominently employ various melodic permutations of the half-step interval. Can we attribute any dramatic meaning to this? By emphasizing this interval in both of Vera’s solo songs, “Bewitched” and “What Is a Man?” (Examples 5.6 and 5.7), Rodgers helps establish the musical identity of a woman who has allowed herself the luxury of an obsession. When Vera is with her paramour and sings with him, she has no need to obsess about him. Consequently, the half-step is absent in her duet with Joey, “Den of Iniquity.” Why Joey should sing half-steps so often in “Plant You Now, Dig You Later” is less explicable.57 What remains consistent is that the songs prominently displaying the half-step are the “offstage” songs, not the songs sung in rehearsal or as part of the entertainment in Mike Spears’s nightclub or Chez Joey.

Example 5.7. “What Is a Man?” (chorus, mm. 1-16)

The seemingly irresistible musical and psychological pull that characterizes the move from the seventh degree of a major scale (aptly labeled the leading tone) to the tonic, one half-step higher (e.g., B-C in the key of C), was also used to produce meaningful dramatic effects in other shows. In South Pacific (1949) Rodgers (with Hammerstein) greases rather than avoids the “pig” (an F) for the sake of verisimilitude in “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.” In this well-known song Rodgers conveys Nellie Forbush’s delusion by introducing the oft-repeated title line with an equally repetitive ascending scalar phrase (C-D-E-F) that relentlessly and obsessively returns to the central key and thereby exposes her failure to accomplish her task. Later in the show when she admits to herself and her fellow nurses that she is, in fact, “in love with a wonderful guy,” Nellie sings an exaggerated eighteen repetitions of the half-step interval (again from the leading tone up to the tonic) on the repeated words “love, I’m in” (B-C-C, B-C-C, etc.). In “Bali Ha’i,” also from South Pacific, Rodgers convincingly conveys the mysterious quality and seductive call of the exotic island by its emphasis on repeated half-steps (e.g., “Ha’i may call you” becomes F-F-F-G).

Not to be overlooked is Rodgers and Hart’s ability in Pal Joey to write first-rate songs appropriate for their second-rate surroundings, a delicate balancing act that will also be used by Frank Loesser in the Hot Box numbers of Guys and Dolls. In “That Terrific Rainbow,” for example, Hart presents a wide array of trite and clichéd images to create his rainbow.

I’m a RED-hot mama,

But I’m BLUE for you.

I get PURPLE with anger

At the things you do.

And I’m GREEN with envy

After moving from red, blue, purple, and green, the object of the lyric’s affection burns the protagonist’s heart with an ORANGE flame. Before the end of the next stanza, the RED-hot mama with a heart of GOLD accuses her love object of being WHITE with cold, an unfortunate situation which creates GRAY clouds that, hopefully, will eventually make way for “That Terrific Rainbow.”

When Mike Spears’s club is converted to Chez Joey in act II, the lyrics of the more elaborate and pretentious new opening production number, “The Flower Garden of My Heart,” read like a parody of the hackneyed and formulaic Mother Goose rhyme “Roses Are Red”: “In the flower garden of my heart / I’ve got violets blue as your eyes. / I’ve got dainty narcissus / As sweet as my missus / And lilies as pure as the skies.” In the same chorus Hart gives Gladys the couplets, “Just to keep our love holy / I’ve got gladioli,” and in ensuing choruses “Oh, the west wind will whisk us / The scent of hibiscus,” and “You will look like sweet william / And smell like a trillium.” Was Rodgers perhaps too successful in achieving conventionality and mediocrity in this song? Perhaps. In any event, it was one of only two numbers—the other is “A Great Big Town”—excluded from the pre-revival cast album?

Pal Joey’s successful original run was surpassed by Rodgers and Hart in their final collaboration, the now