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

Even in this venerable company the composer could still play a major role in the creative process of a musical, although he would not occupy the center stage enjoyed by Mozart and Da Ponte, Verdi and Boito, and Wagner. Theater critics appreciated the imagination of the Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus teams, but music critics who focused on Weill felt betrayed by his collaboration with the enemy, men and women of the theater who helped Weill to sell out. Critics Virgil Thomson and Samuel Barlow, respectively, accused Weill of banality and phoniness and wrote that the transplanted European had lost his sophistication and his satirical punch in his efforts to please the lower class inhabitants of Broadway.22

Considering the experience and prestige of his collaborators, especially Hart and Gershwin, it should come as no surprise that Weill would be asked to defer to the judgment of these collaborators during the writing of Lady in the Dark.23 As a result, one complete dream in Lady (first described as the “Day Dream” and later as the “Hollywood Dream”) was rejected before its completion, allegedly to help trim escalating costs. To add pizzazz (and perhaps to avoid racial stereotypes), the “Minstrel Dream” metamorphosed into the “Circus Dream.” “The Saga of Jenny” was a response to Hart’s and producer Sam H. Harris’s assessment that Gertrude Lawrence’s final number was not funny enough, and the patter number which preceded it, “Tschaikowsky,” was added as a vehicle to feature the talented new star Danny Kaye.

Crawford credits de Mille with many of the small cuts in the One Touch of Venus ballets, summarizes the problem of the original ending, and explains how Weill’s collaborators achieved a satisfactory solution:

The bacchanal of the nymphs, satyrs, nyads and dryads who carry Venus off was very effective, but it left the audience hanging. It seemed very unsatisfactory for Venus to disappear into the clouds, leaving the poor barber all alone: the ending needed ooomph, something upbeat. It was Agnes who thought of having Venus come back as an “ordinary” human girl, dressed in a cute little dress and hat—a sort of reincarnation.24

This new ending necessitated the shortening of Weill’s Bacchanale ballet, which de Mille (as remembered by Crawford) considered “the best thing he’d done since Threepenny Opera” and Weill himself treasured as “the finest piece of orchestral music he had ever written.”25 But since Weill “wanted a success” and was “predominantly a theatre man,” he acquiesced to de Mille’s suggestion.

It is likely that the musical starting point for both Lady and Venus were songs that Weill had written for earlier contexts. Both of these songs, Lady’s “My Ship” and Venus’s “Westwind,” would become pivotal to their respective musical stories. Since “My Ship” was originally the only song Hart had in mind when he drafted his play I Am Listening, it is not surprising that this was the first song Weill wrote for the show.26

In the midst of his sketches for Lady, including a draft for “My Ship,” Weill sketched a tune that with some modifications would eventually become “Westwind” (Example 7.2a, p. 148). In the early stages Weill used its melody solely for the “Venus Entrance” music (and he would continue to label this tune as such throughout his orchestral score). Long after the entire show had taken shape, the music of the future “Westwind” was still reserved for Venus.27 At a relatively late stage Weill decided to show Savory’s total captivation with Venus musically by adopting her tune as his own. After their first meeting his identity is now fully submerged in the woman he idealizes.28

The extant manuscript sources and material of Lady in the Dark provide an unusually rich glimpse into the compositional process of a musical: Hart’s complete original play I Am Listening, two revised scenes for this play, and two typescript outlines for two dreams not included in this play; Gershwin’s lyrics drafts, including those for the discarded “Zodiac” song; and two hundred pages of Weill’s sketches and drafts. Also extant are twenty letters between Weill and Gershwin exchanged between September 1940 and February 1944 (“with random annotations” by Gershwin in 1967) that occasionally reveal important information and attitudes about the compositional process.29

Gershwin had traveled from Los Angeles to New York in early May 1940 to work with Hart and Weill, and the letters from Weill began one or two weeks after Gershwin’s return in August. The two Weill letters in September are especially valuable because they precede the opening night (the following January 23). On September 2 Weill sets the context for his following suggestions with a budget report: the show was $25,000 above its projected $100,000. Hart and Hassard Short “read the play to the boys in the office,” who were “crazy about the show” but thought “that the bar scene and the Hollywood dream had nothing to do with the play.”30 Hart asked Weill to cut the Hollywood Dream, and the composer agreed to do this if Hart agreed to delete the bar scene as well.

Did this compromise breach Weill’s artistic sensibilities? Apparently Weill did not think so. He explains his positive reaction to the excision of the Hollywood Dream:

I began to see certain advantages. It is obvious that this change would be very good for the play itself because it would mean that we go from the flashback scene directly into the last scene of the play. The decision which Liza makes in the last scene would be an immediate result of the successful analysis. The balance between music and book would be very good in the second act because we would make the flashback scene a completely musical scene.31

Although Weill regretted losing “an entire musical scene and some very good material,” he saw artistic benefits as well as financial ones, and agreed to these changes.

After more discussion on the relationship between the Hollywood Dream and the Hollywood sequence, both eventually discarded, Weill turned to the “Circus