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

also become increasingly obvious as Liza comes to understand the meaning of her dreams. Of the four men in her life, the “mildly effeminate” Paxton (Danny Kaye) plays a neutral role in Liza’s romantic life and serves the dreaming Liza with equal neutrality (a chauffeur in the Glamour Dream and the ringmaster in the Circus Dream). Nesbitt (Bert Lytell), who “waits” for Liza in real life, plays the role of a head waiter in a night club in the Glamour Dream and the real-life role of Liza’s expectant groom in the Wedding Dream before appearing as the first witness for the prosecution in the Circus Dream. The glamorous movie star Randy Curtis (Victor Mature), who appreciates and defends Liza’s lack of glamour, naturally appears as Liza’s defense attorney in the Circus Dream.

Similarly, Hart captures the complexity of Liza’s relationship with her obnoxious advertising manager, Charley Johnson (MacDonald Carey). In the Glamour Dream Johnson plays the marine who paints Liza’s portrait for the two-cent stamp, not as Liza sees herself in the dream but as others see her in real life. Already in the first dream he has established himself as firmly grounded in reality and the person who truly sees Liza for what she is (significantly, Johnson’s realism is bound to speech and he never sings in the dreams, although he will eventually sing “My Ship” for Liza). In the Wedding Dream Johnson appears twice, first as the salesman who offers a dagger instead of a ring and then as the minister who, merely by asking the standard question, “If there be any who know why these two [Liza and Nesbitt] should not be joined in holy wedlock let him speak now or forever hold his peace,” prompts a truthful response from his congregation that exposes the wedding as a sham: “This woman knows she does not love this man.”

In the Circus Dream, Johnson acts as the prosecuting attorney and as a surrogate for Dr. Brooks when he repeats the psychiatrist’s diagnosis nearly word for word, adding a new accusatory tone at the end of the dream: “You’re afraid. You’re hiding something. You’re afraid of that music aren’t you? Just as you’re afraid to compete as a woman—afraid to marry Kendall Nesbitt—afraid to be the woman you want to be—afraid—afraid—afraid!” “That music” is of course the song “My Ship,” or rather the opening portion of this song that either leads to dreams (Glamour and Wedding Dreams) or makes a dream come to a stop (the Circus Dream).

In her final session with Dr. Brooks, Liza manages to recall the entire song as she formerly sang it to a boy named Ben. Ben, the Handsomest Boy at Mapleton High, many years earlier had abandoned the teenage Liza, the Most Popular Girl, to return to the Most Beautiful Girl. While she waits for Ben to return, another boy asks to take Liza to dinner (Liza prefers to wait). The boy’s name is Charles, yet another clue that someday a prince named Charley will come. In the final scene, Charley Johnson offers more substantive evidence that he is indeed Mr. Right for Liza Elliott: he knows “My Ship” and will sing it with her as their ship sails off into the golden sunset.

The central unifying musical element of Lady in the Dark is certainly “My Ship,” the opening portion of which appears in various harmonizations in each dream before Liza manages to sing it completely in the otherwise musically silent Childhood Dream.58 The musical material of the three main dreams is internally “unified” around a characteristic rhythm (a rumba for the Glamour Dream, a bolero for the Wedding Dream, and a march for the Circus Dream). The Glamour dream contains the greatest use of internal thematic transformation. Beyond the reuse and development of “My Ship,” however, organic unity is not especially prominent from one dream to the next.

In One Touch of Venus the use of song to musically interrupt rather than continue the action may be a characteristic shared with the non-integrated musicals of Porter before Kiss Me, Kate. It also suggests a return structurally, if not ideologically, to Weill’s epic creations with Brecht (Threepenny Opera, Happy End, and Mahagonny). Venus’s final song, “That’s Him,” is representative of Weill’s earlier ideal by distancing the singer from the object and providing a commentary on love rather than an experience of it. Venus even speaks of her love object in the third person.

Dramatic unity in One Touch of Venus, outwardly more conventional than the intricate continuous dream scenes in Lady in the Dark, nevertheless corresponds closely to the contemporary Oklahoma! model based on such devices as thematic transformation in narrative ballets and the use of strong rhythmic profiles to reflect character.59 These two techniques converge in Weill’s recasting of Venus’s (Mary Martin’s) jazzy and uninhibited opening song, “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” moments later in the ballet “Forty Minutes for Lunch,” described in the libretto as “a series of formalized dance patterns parodying the tension of metropolitan life.”60

Like the composers of Anything Goes, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, and West Side Story, Weill uses quarter-note triplets when he wants to show his characters moving emotionally beyond their metrical boundaries.61 Weill uses the quarter-note triplet most prominently in Whitelaw Savory’s love song “Westwind” (Example 7.2a), previously noted as based, appropriately enough as it turns out, on Venus’s Entrance Music. Even Rodney Hatch, when serenading his fiancée Gloria Kramer in his characteristically rhythmically square fashion, manages a few quarter-note triplets in the release of his “How Much I Love You” when he sings “I love you” and “I yearn for you.” But by the time he sings of his “Wooden Wedding” near the end of the show, quarter-note triplets have vanished, and Venus will soon follow.

Venus herself, who tells Savory at their first meeting that “love isn’t the dying moan of a distant violin—it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring,” generally prefers swing rhythms, but quarter-note triplets remain a prominent part of her musical character (as well