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

largely forgotten By Jupiter (1942), which received 427 performances. After that, Hart possessed neither the interest nor the will to tackle a setting of Lynn Riggs’s play, Green Grow the Lilacs (1931). Rodgers therefore left his “partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation,” and turned to Hammerstein to create Oklahoma! in 1942 and early 1943. In the increasingly small intervals between drinking binges Hart managed to create a few new songs for the successful 1943 revival of the 1927 hit A Connecticut Yankee (including the bitingly funny “To Keep My Love Alive”), but within a few months of Oklahoma!’s historic debut he was dead.

The new team of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the integrated ideal would dominate the American musical until Hammerstein’s death in 1960. But something irreplaceable was also lost when the Rodgers and Hammerstein era replaced Rodgers and Hart. The new partners would continue to compose excellent songs that, although integrated, can be sung successfully outside of their carefully considered contexts. Only rarely, however, would Rodgers recreate the rhythmic energy and jazzy melodic vernacular that distinguished so many of his songs with Hart, songs such as “You Mustn’t Kick It Around,” “Happy Hunting Horn,” “Plant You Now, Dig You Later,” and “Do It the Hard Way” in Pal Joey and “It’s Got to Be Love” “Slaughter on 10th Avenue,” and the title song in On Your Toes.

Alec Wilder addresses this point in American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900–1950, an idiosyncratic survey that for years was the only book seriously to discuss the musical qualities of popular songs.58 Although Wilder treats the songs show-by-show, he scrupulously avoids discussing their dramatic context or even their texts and consequently evaluates them solely on their autonomous musical merits. For this reason he remains impervious to the psychological insights in “Bewitched” and instead berates Rodgers’s repetitive “device” that was “brought to a sort of negative fruition in that it finally obtrudes as a contrivance.”59 Nevertheless, Wilder devoted fifty-three pages to Rodgers and Hart and only six to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and he tells us why:

Though he wrote great songs with Oscar Hammerstein II, it is my belief that his greatest melodic invention and pellucid freshness occurred during his years of collaboration with Lorenz Hart. The inventiveness has never ceased. Yet something bordering on musical complacency evidenced itself in his later career. I have always felt that there was an almost feverish demand in Hart’s writing which reflected itself in Rodger’s melodies as opposed to the almost too comfortable armchair philosophy in Hammerstein’s lyrics.60

Musical comedies in general, like their nonmusical stage counterparts, stand unfairly as poor relations to tragedies—musicals that aspire to nineteenth-century tragic operas filled with thematic transformations and conspicuous organicism. Pal Joey is a brilliant musical comedy that has not lost its relevance or its punch since its arrival in 1940. Despite its many virtues, however, this first musical in “long pants,” as Rodgers described it in 1952, and the first major musical to feature an anti-hero, lacks the great themes of Show Boat and Porgy and Bess and their correspondingly ambitious and complex dramatic transformations of musical motives. The transformation of “Bewitched” in Joey’s ballet from a ballad in duple meter to a fast waltz in triple meter—an idea that likely originated with the dance arranger rather than Rodgers—for example, does not convey the dramatic meaning inherent in Kern’s transformations of Magnolia’s piano theme, nor does it come close to attaining Gershwin’s dramatic application of his melodic and rhythmic transformations and paraphrases.

In contrast to Porter’s Anything Goes and Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes, however, Pal Joey possesses a book that could be revived in nearly its original state (even though some modern productions, including its 2008 Broadway revival, tend to treat the work as though it were Anything Goes). Its songs, nearly all gems, grow naturally from the dramatic action and tell us something important about the characters who sing them. For some, including Lehman Engel, if by no means most discerning critics, the bewitching Pal Joey deserves a chance to survive on its own terms as an enduring Broadway classic of its genre and of its time.

CHAPTER SIX

THE CRADLE WILL ROCK

A Labor Musical for Art’s Sake

Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964) remains an obscure figure. With few exceptions his music either was never published or is only gradually coming into print. As late as the early 1980s, one decade before her company, under new leadership, revived the work, Beverly Sills of the New York City Opera was rejecting Regina, Blitzstein’s 1949 adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, as “too old-fashioned” for present-day tastes.1 Bertolt Brecht scholar Martin Esslin had already dismissed Blitzstein’s “sugar-coated” English translation of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera—the version that during the years 1954–1960 became the longest Off-Broadway musical of its era and Blitzstein’s best-known achievement—as unworthy of Brecht’s vision.2

Although he is seldom treated as a major figure, the authors of most comprehensive histories of American music, as well as more idiosyncratic surveys, offer Blitzstein some space and a generally good press.3 Aaron Copland gives Blitzstein equal billing with Virgil Thomson in a chapter in Our New Music.4 Wilfrid Mellers presents Blitzstein along with Ives and Copland as one of three distinguished and representative American composers in Music and Society (1950).5 In Music in a New Found Land, published the year of Blitzstein’s death and dedicated to his memory, Mellers focuses on Regina in a laudatory chapter which pairs it with Bernstein’s West Side Story.6 Blitzstein’s Broadway opera Regina (1949), successfully revived and recorded in 1992 by the New York City Opera, was poised for the possibility of future enshrinement. Several years earlier the composer of The Cradle Will Rock was the subject of the longest biography up until that time of an American composer.7

Marc Blitzstein. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM

Historians and Broadway enthusiasts relatively unfamiliar with either Blitzstein or The Cradle Will Rock may