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

“I was rather pleased to find, looking at it cold-bloodedly, that inspite [sic] of all the faults and mistakes it is a very good and interesting show and that it holds the audience all through once they sit through the first 15 minutes which are pretty awful.”7 Despite such public and private endorsements, Venus, like its wartime predecessor, has so far failed to establish itself in the Broadway repertory. The issues raised by Venus’s demise deserve more attention than they have so far received.

In his final years Weill himself seemed to repudiate his Broadway hits when he interpreted his creative evolution in America to show its culmination in Street Scene. In his notes to its recording the composer confesses that he “learned a great deal about Broadway and its audience” as a result of his first effort, Johnny Johnson, “a continuation of the [European] formula.”8 According to Weill’s revisionism, Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus, the former especially “with its three little one-act operas,” were merely way stations on the road to the development of “something like an American opera.”9 Just as Gershwin opted for a Broadway home for Porgy and Bess and Rodgers was content to present his brand of opera (Carousel) on the Great White Way, Weill concluded that his Broadway operas “could only take place on Broadway, because Broadway represents the living theatre in this country.”10 Weill continues: “[It] should, like the products of other opera-civilizations, appeal to large parts of the audience. It should have all the necessary ingredients of a ‘good show.’”11

Additional evidence that Weill appreciated, or at least understood, audience-pleasing shows can be found in his remarks to Ira Gershwin regarding Oklahoma! Weill had seen the tryouts in New Haven and was surprised that “they still haven’t got a second act” (although he quickly added that “they don’t seem to need one”).12 After praising Rouben Mamoulian’s work, the production as a whole, the direction and the songs (“just perfect for this kind of show”), and Hammerstein’s singable lyrics, Weill made this final assessment: “On the whole, the show is definitely designed for a very low audience … and that, in my opinion explains the terrific success.”13

Two Compromising Ladies

According to theater lore, Moss Hart (1904–1961) wrote I Am Listening when his psychiatrist advised him to cease his successful but inhibiting collaboration with George S. Kaufman and write a play of his own. As Hart tells it: “My psychoanalyst made me resolve that the next idea I had, whether it was good or lousy, I’d carry through.”14 In fact, three years before the creative crisis that led to Lady in the Dark, Kaufman and Hart had drafted the first act of a musical based on psychoanalysis starring Marlene Dietrich before settling on I’d Rather Be Right with Rodgers and Hart, and George M. Cohan as Franklin Roosevelt. I Am Listening also shares much in common with the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers film musical Carefree (1938), in which Rogers plays a woman similar to Liza Elliott who “can’t make up her mind” about marriage, a problem solved in the film by psychiatrist Astaire when he falls in love with her.15

One Touch of Venus is based on Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s novella The Tinted Venus (1885).16 Sources disagree as to how Weill learned about this relatively obscure work of fiction by the man who published under the pseudonym F. Anstey, but most credit him as the person who persuaded Cheryl Crawford to produce the show.17 Crawford then asked Sam and Bella Spewack, who had earlier worked on an abandoned Weill project, The Opera from Mannheim (1937), to write a libretto; light-verse poet Nash, a Broadway novice, would provide the lyrics. In August the Spewacks drafted the first act of One Man’s Venus. After at least five lyrics and as many as eight songs, the Spewack libretto, now Bella’s alone, was dismissed as beyond repair, and a new book was commissioned from Perelman, best known as the author of the Marx Brothers screenplays Monkey Business (1931) and Horsefeathers (1932), but untested in a book musical.18

Crawford articulates the causes for her dissatisfaction with Bella Spewack’s libretto: “The idea that had enticed me was the irreconcilable differences between the world of mundane, conventional human beings and the free untrammeled world of the gods. But this theme had not been developed.”19 In Perelman’s rewrite Anstey’s Victorian England was transformed into contemporary Manhattan. Foremost among other significant alterations was the character of Venus herself, more threatening and forbidding than sensual in Anstey’s novella, and a goddess who would return to her stone form for hours at a time. Rather than succumbing to her demands (as opposed to charms) the unfortunate barber (Leander Tweddle) remains steadfast in his love for his eventually understanding fiancée (Matilda Collum). By appealing to Venus’s vanity, Leander in the end manages to trick her into relinquishing the ring that gave her life.20

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

Throughout his career Weill rarely failed to surround himself with strong artistic figures. In Germany he collaborated with Brecht and Georg Kaiser. For the American musical stage he worked with a series of distinguished partners as the following list attests: Paul Green (Johnny Johnson); Maxwell Anderson (Knickerbocker Holiday and Lost in the Stars); Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes (Street Scene); and Alan Jay Lerner (Love Life). Similarly, the productions of Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus evolved under dynamic leadership, and his principal collaborators, Hart and Gershwin (Lady), Nash and Perelman (Venus), all possessed strong artistic personalities and identities. The One Touch of Venus team could boast an especially impressively deep talent roster. The previous year alone Crawford produced the immensely popular revival of Porgy and Bess, Elia Kazan directed his first memorable production, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, and Agnes de Mille had choreographed Copland’s ballet classic Rodeo. Only six months before Venus came to life in 1943