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

and starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge in the title roles. Despite numerous infelicities and distortions, both films are well worth the effort it might take to locate them. In contrast, some of the film adaptations discussed in chapter 14 are probably better known than their stage versions. Prime specimens in this category include the Academy Award–winning musical film adaptations of My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Broadway’s original Henry Higgins, Rex Harrison, and West Side Story, a frequent visitor to high schools all over America to complement the study of Romeo and Juliet. What are we seeing (and hearing) when we see these films? What are we missing?

The film chapters and remarks on the Sweeney Todd and The Phantom of the Opera film adaptations will address these and other questions, including how the plots, scripts, songs, and Broadway casts have been altered, what was cut, what was retained, and why. Some of the films explored, while not without controversy, were financially and critically successful in their own day and remain well known and loved in ours. Until the 1950s, the producers who controlled the studios and their contracted stars and songwriters preferred infidelity over allegiance to Broadway stage sources. From the 1930s through the 1950s all films were also subject to the Hays Production Code, which enforced a stricter view than Broadway censors of what was proper for a song lyric or a plot. This alternative universe explains the expurgations of Cole Porter’s famously adult lyrics in the film adaptations of both Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate and the disposal of Vera Simpson’s husband from the plot so that her affair with Pal Joey would not be an adulterous one. Nearly twenty years earlier Broadway audiences were already free to experience and relish this unsavory material. Before the 1960s had ended, Hollywood had achieved parity with Broadway on the degree of unsavoriness permitted.

Despite the liberties they often take with their stage sources (Kim Kowalke refers to most film adaptations as “generic deformation”), the films do not invariably suffer by comparison.17 Take the 1936 Show Boat, in which, unusually, the authors were able to exert some creative control, including the use of a screenplay by Hammerstein. Here, the new songs were all by Hammerstein and Kern and the creators of these songs were the same people who helped make the thoughtful and imaginative changes necessary to adhere to the unofficial but binding “two hour” rule operative from the 1930s through the 1950s. Arriving a few years after the 1932 New York revival, the film featured timeless performances by Charles Winninger and Helen Morgan, reprising their stage roles of Cap’n Andy and Julie LaVerne, and Paul Robeson, the actor originally intended to play Joe. The result was a film that inspired Kern scholar Stephen Banfield to make the case that the film’s dramatic structure constitutes an improvement of the problematic original Broadway second act.18

The 1936 Anything Goes adaptation may have cut or mutilated much of Porter, but it does give audiences a chance to see the original Ethel Merman in her prime and fine film portrayals of Billy Crocker by the young Bing Crosby, and the character of Moon by Charlie Ruggles. It also delivers a surprising amount of the original Broadway libretto, which is much funnier than later revisionists give it credit for. Most of the films that adapted Broadway shows did something right, and we will gain a better understanding about the films, their sources, and ourselves from watching them—as long as we do not rest our evaluation solely on their fidelity to the stage works we hold dear.

Film adaptations of the Golden Age musicals, most of which were released about a decade after their Broadway debuts, tend to be more faithful to their original plots, scripts, and songs, and despite some deleted and rearranged dialogue and song cuts, the new songs (e.g., in the Kiss Me, Kate and Guys and Dolls adaptations) are almost invariably those of the Broadway songwriters. In addition to discussing their relative fidelity and completeness, the film chapters will address the practice of voice dubbing and various less noticeable technological changes that manipulate and transform live theater into the deceptively more realistic film medium. Some of these films have exerted a profound effect on how audiences have come to appreciate the stage originals, and these chapters will address this historical legacy as well.

Sources on West Side Story (to conclude with a particularly well-known example) seldom neglect to mention that it was the film version rather than the stage version that catapulted this show into universal popular consciousness. Indeed, the 1961 film, co-directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, came within one award of a clean Academy Awards sweep, winning ten out of a possible eleven awards. Despite a few conspicuous changes in the song order, all the original West Side Story songs are present and accounted for (unlike virtually every preceding film adaptation of a musical). Also in marked contrast to most Hollywood film adaptations of Broadway from the 1930s to the 1950s, no songs were added, either by studio composers on contract or by Leonard Bernstein, the composer. Although Robbins, the original director and choreographer of the stage version, was fired from the film after directing the Prologue for his inability to maintain a financially sound production schedule, most of the choreography that appears on screen is faithful to Robbins’s vision and that of original and film co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

The love versus hate theme of Romeo and Juliet carries over into the contrasting reactions this (and other) film adaptations inspire. Some film critics loved the Robbins-Wise translation from stage to screen. Arthur Knight, in the Saturday Review, considered it “a triumphant work of art”; Stanley Kauffmann went even further when he proclaimed the adaptation “the best film musical ever made.”19 On the other hand, an uncharacteristically grumpy Pauline Kael did not even like the dancing and asked, “How can so many critics have fallen for all this frenzied