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

Dream.” Here Weill was less acquiescent to Short’s suggestions. Although he understood that “Gertie” (Gertrude Lawrence) might remain dissatisfied until he provided “a really funny song” for her, Weill was not yet ready to abandon his “Zodiac” song and defended its place in the show to Gershwin. Although Weill acknowledged that the “Zodiac” song “is not the kind of broad entertainment which Hassard has in mind,” he concluded that “it is a very original, high class song of the kind which you and I should have in a show and for which we will get a lot of credit.” Because Weill also recognized “the necessity to give Gertie a good, solid, entertaining, humorous song in the Circus dream,” he offered to make the “Zodiac” song “musically lighter, more on the line of a patter, and to think about another song for Gertie.”

On September 14 Weill again commented on the evolving Circus Dream:

So Moss and Hassard suggested that we give the Zodiak song back to Randy and I thought this might be good news for you because that’s what we always wanted. Here is Moss’s idea: the Zodiak song would become Randy’s defense speech, just the way you had originally conceived it, but we should try to work Gertie into it…. When they have won over everybody to their cause, Liza should go into a triumphant song…. That would give Liza her show-stopping (??) song near the end of the dream and at a moment where she is triumphant and which allows her to be as gay or sarcastic as you want.32

Lady in the Dark. “Circus Dream.” Gertrude Lawrence sitting on the left, Danny Kaye on the horse at right (1941). Photograph: Vandamm Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection. Gift of the Burns Mantle Estate.

From Ira Gershwin’s 1967 annotations that accompany his manuscripts as well his published comments in Lyrics on Several Occasions, we learn that the “Circus Dream” was originally planned as a “Minstrel Dream” and “an environment of burnt cork and sanded floor” was transformed “to putty nose and tanbark.”33 Gershwin divides the “Zodiac” into two parts, “No Matter under What Star You’re Born” and “Song of the Zodiac,” “both of which were discarded to make way for “The Saga of Jenny.”34 He also notes that he and Weill “hadn’t as yet introduced ‘Tschaikovsky.’”35

Weill’s musical manuscripts add credence to the letters and Gershwin’s annotations and reveal that when most of the Circus Dream nearly reached its final form, “The Saga of Jenny” was just taking shape. It is ironic that Gertrude Lawrence’s final number and Danny Kaye’s patter show stopper that directly preceded it were the only musical portions originally written for this dream. All the other musical material—with the exception of some recitative—was borrowed from earlier shows. Even the lyrics to “Tschaikovsky” were borrowed unchanged from a 1924 poem published in “the then pre-pictorial, humorous weekly Life” that Ira published under the pseudonym Arthur Francis.36

Weill’s 1935 London box office debacle, A Kingdom for a Cow, served as an important musical link between the German Weill and the American Weill. In his Handbook, Drew lists thirteen major instances of Weill’s recycling ideas from this most recent European venture into every American stage work from Johnny Johnson and Knickerbocker Holiday (two borrowings each) to The Firebrand of Florence.37 The two Kingdom for a Cow borrowings in Lady in the Dark both occur in the Circus Dream: the opening circus march, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” and “The Best Years of His Life.” The single borrowing in One Touch of Venus occurs more obliquely in “Very, Very, Very.”

Of the Kingdom for a Cow borrowings in Lady and Venus “The Best Years of His Life” comes closest to quotation. In fact, Kendall Nesbitt’s melody in Lady is identical to the choral melody in the first act finale of Kingdom, and the rhythmic alterations are insubstantial. Weill takes significant transformational liberties, however, in adapting “Very, Very, Very” from Kingdom to Venus (where it is sung by Savory’s assistant, Molly). On this occasion Weill uses two recognizable but highly disguised melodic fragments of “Madame Odette’s Waltz” from the second act finale of Kingdom.

Weill’s remaining borrowing falls between these extremes. “The Greatest Show on Earth,” the rousing march that opens the Circus Dream, borrows significantly from the melody, rhythm, and dissonant harmonic underpinning of the refrain of Kingdom’s “Auftrittslied des General.” When drafting his melody in its new context and new meter, Weill began by retaining the rhythmic gestus (to be discussed shortly) and symmetrical phrasing of its predecessor, altering only the pitch. By the time Weill completed his transformation, he had added a new syncopation at the ends of phrases and reinforced the sense of disarray by concluding his phrase one measure earlier than expected. In real (and especially military) life, marches contain symmetrical four-measure phrases; in Liza’s confused dream message a seven-measure phrase makes more sense.

Partisans of Brecht may be disconcerted to hear the choral refrain “In der Jugend gold’nem Schimmer” from Happy End (1929) set to Nash’s words in the opening verses of “The Trouble with Women.” At the time Weill recast Brecht, he had abandoned the possibility of a staged revival of this show, although he had tried in 1932 to interest his publisher in “a kind of Songspiel with short spoken scenes.”38 Perhaps his sense that all was lost with Happy End prompted Weill to recycle no less than three numbers from this German show in his Parisian collaboration with Jacques Déval, Marie Galante (1934). One of these reincarnations is once again “In der Jugend gold’nem Schimmer,” this time altered from triple to duple meter in the refrain of “Les filles de Bordeaux.” Despite some modest melodic changes at the opening and closing and the metrical change from the German and American waltzes to the French fox trot, the two—or three—Weills are here much closer to one.39

The process by which A Kingdom for a Cow, Happy End, and Marie Galante would