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

this Broadway opera, a “dream of a special brand of musical theatre which would completely integrate drama and music, spoken word, song and movement,” was also the dream of his chief Broadway rival in the 1940s, Rodgers, who was composing Oklahoma!, Carousel, Allegro, and South Pacific during these years.50

In his notes to Street Scene, Weill acknowledges that he and his earlier collaborator Brecht “deliberately stopped the action during the songs which were written to illustrate the ‘philosophy,’ the inner meaning of the play.”51 It was not until Street Scene, however, that Weill achieved “a real blending of drama and music, in which the singing continues naturally where the speaking stops and the spoken word as well as the dramatic action are embedded in overall musical structure.”52 Three years before he completed his long and productive theater career, Weill appeared to repudiate the aesthetic he had worked out with Brecht and achieved his integrated American opera.

Thus Weill, by now a wayward branch from the German stem, did not begin his serious attempt to integrate drama and music until after he ceased collaborating with Brecht. On the other hand, Rodgers, in America, as early as Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, was already somewhat paradoxically striving to compose integrated musicals in a marketplace somewhat indifferent to this aesthetic.53 Weill’s contemporary and posthumous success with Threepenny Opera, both its German production in the late 1920s and its Broadway adaptation by Blitzstein in the middle and late 1950s, rests in part in the alienation between and separation of music and story. Even those who remain impervious to the quality and charm of Weill’s many other works acknowledge the artistic merits of Threepenny Opera and usually grant it masterpiece status.

Shortly before the debut of Lady in the Dark Weill informed William King in the New York Sun that in contrast to Schoenberg, who “has said he is writing for a time fifty years after his death,” Weill wrote “for today” and did not “give a damn about writing for posterity.”54 Between the extremes of his two posthumous success stories, Threepenny Opera and, to a lesser degree, Street Scene, lie Weill’s two greatest and—if posterity be damned—most meaningful hits. Both Lady and Venus exhibit integrative as well as non-integrative traits. On one level, Lady in the Dark might be considered the least integrated of any book show by any Broadway composer, since the play portions and the musical portions are unprecedentedly segregated. In this respect Lady shares much in common with film adaptations of musicals that remove the “nonrealistic” portions of their Broadway source.55

With the exception of “My Ship,” virtually all the music of the show appears in three separate dream sequences that comprise half of the show—the Glamour Dream and the Wedding Dream in act I and the Circus Dream in act II—and nowhere else. In each of these dreams virtually everything is sung or underscored by continuous music, while the other half is composed entirely of spoken dialogue. Hart’s original intent, evident in his draft of the play I Am Listening, was to have a play with a small amount of musical interjections rather than “three little one-act operas.”

Once Hart had decided to create a play that could accommodate Weill’s music, he fully embraced the integrated ideal (for the dreams) that within a few years would dominate Broadway. In his prefatory remarks to the published vocal score, Hart expressed the desire for himself and his collaborators not only to avoid “the tight little formula of the musical comedy stage” but to create a show “in which the music carried forward the essential story.” “For the first time … the music and lyrics of a musical ‘show’ are part and parcel of the basic structure of the play.”56

With due respect to Hart, the music in Lady in the Dark might more accurately be described as a conscious interruption of a play. But since an important component of the story is the disparity between Liza Elliott’s drab quotidian existence and the colorful pizzazz of her dream world, it makes sense for her to speak only in her waking life and reserve music for her dreams. The dream pretext also allows Weill to present the interruptions within the discontinuity of a dream, since, after all, audiences should not expect dreams to be totally logical. Dreams, as Weill wrote in his thoughts on dreams that he typed out in preparation for Lady in the Dark, “are, at the moment of the dreaming, very realistic and don’t have at all the mysterious, shadowy quality of the usual dream sequences in plays or novels.”

Liza’s dreams differ no more from her daily life than escapist musicals of the late 1930s differed from the daily lives of their audiences.57 The musical and dramatic non sequitur that launches “Tschaikowsky” may be equally abrupt as the opening gambits in 1930s musical comedies, for example, “There’s a Small Hotel” in On Your Toes. After Liza, accompanied by a chorus, concludes her musical defense—“Tra-la—I never gave my word”—in the breach of promise suit for failing to marry Nesbitt (clearly reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury), the music comes to a halt with a soft cymbal. The Ringmaster (Allure photographer Randy Paxton in real life) then breaks the silence with “Charming, charming, who wrote that music?”; the Jury answers, “Tschaikowsky!,” and the Ringmaster says, “Tschaikowsky? I love Russian composers!” Part of the joke, of course, is that Tchaikovsky did not compose “The Best Years of His Life” (Weill himself had composed this song several years earlier in Kingdom for a Cow). Moreover, in the slightly askew chronology of dreamland, the exchange between the Ringmaster and the Jury actually anticipates a real, albeit small, dose of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony (third movement).

While a major theme of Lady in the Dark is the disparity between Liza Elliott’s real and dream worlds (although she retains her name in her dreams), her co-workers often appear in her dreams as metaphors for their roles in Liza’s waking life. The metaphors