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

as of the Venus Theme).62 She sings them prominently in the swinging and highly syncopated “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” and even opens the verse of the waltz “Foolish Heart” with a quarter-note triplet group. By the time Venus sings “Speak Low” with Rodney, every phrase of both the main portion and the release includes quarter-note triplets (Example 7.2b), and her characteristic swinging rhythms are submerged in the accompaniment.

Example 7.2. Quarter-note triplets in One Touch of Venus

(a) “Westwind”

(b) “Speak Low”

In the spoken dialogue that prepares for her final song Venus confesses that while the ring brought the statue to life, it was not responsible for making her love him. Nevertheless, Venus wastes no time in asking Rodney to part his hair on the other side. The song itself, “That’s Him,” lyrically and musically captures Venus’s ambiguity toward Rodney. On one hand, Venus literally compares her potential mate to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, she could “pick him out” from the millions of men in the world, and she concludes her A sections by singing “wonderful world, wonderful you.” On the other hand, despite his endearing qualitites, Rodney remains an unlikely romantic partner, especially for a Venus. He is “simple,” “not arty,” “satisfactory,” and appreciated primarily for his functionality, “like a plumber when you need a plumber” and “comforting as woolens in the winter.”

In order to musically express less exalted feelings for her conventional barber, Venus must be deprived of the musical identity she has established for herself in her other songs. Weill conveys this underlying conflict when he does not allow the accompaniment, significantly filled with Venus’s characteristic swinging rhythms, to share the implied harmony of Venus’s melody. Additionally, although Venus’s melodic line contains several telling vocal leaps, it mainly consists of stepwise motion, again in contrast to her previously established melodically disjunct character portrayed in “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” and “Speak Low.” Only at the end of the A’ sections—the song forms an unusual arch, A-A’-B-A-A’ rather than A-A-B-A—do melody and harmony resolve to the C major that Weill has Venus avoid so assiduously for thirty-three measures. Although throughout this B section Venus returns to her jazzy swing rhythms, she will abandon her unrealistic dream of an unambiguous C major existence with Rodney after three measures. Venus may be in love with a wonderful guy, but a marriage with Rodney would be like Pegasus pulling a milk truck.63

At the end of the song, the delusion can no longer be sustained. When Rodney finishes singing his description of their “Wooden Wedding” with its “trip to Gimbel’s basement, / Or a double feature [pronounced fee’-tcha] with Don Ameche,” Venus must say, “Rodney, I hope I’ll be the right kind of wife for you.”64 Venus’s nightmarish vision of herself as a conventional “housewife” in the concluding ballet, “Venus in Ozone Heights,” finally convinces her to rejoin the gods.

One Touch of Venus, act I, scene 4. Mary Martin in the center behind the dressing screen (1943). Photograph: Vandamm Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

The Possibility of Revival

We have previously noted that in contrast to the other musicals discussed in this survey, Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus have yet to receive fully staged Broadway revivals. Although both musicals have enjoyed a number of regional performances in America and in Great Britain, they remain shortchanged and underappreciated. Do they need revised books or more Weill hit songs to succeed like Porter and Rodgers and Hart revivals? The final section of this chapter will address the problems and possibilities of revival.

The first of several alleged problems with Lady in the Dark is its dependence on a star. After exhibiting indecisiveness equal to Liza Elliott, the versatile Gertrude Lawrence consulted with her friend and oracle Noël Coward as well as her astrological charts and accepted the demanding title role. When Lawrence left for the summer the show closed, and, unlike most shows, including Mary Martin’s Venus, Lawrence’s Lady never went on the road. A second problem is expense. Three revolving sets and the attendant costs of the three dream ballets do not travel cheaply.

But certainly these red herrings mask deeper problems. When Hart wrote the libretto to Lady, for example, psychiatry was still a relatively novel subject for a musical, and the endless series of obligatory dream ballets in musicals were mostly in the future. Nevertheless, even by the standards of the early 1940s, Hart’s treatment of psychiatry is simplistic and predictable.

More problematic than the dated treatment of psychiatry are the increasingly volatile subjects of sexism and sexual harassment. To be sure, the sexism in Lady in the Dark is rather unpalatable, especially as displayed in the character of Liza’s eventual Mr. Right, the fanny-pinching, male-chauvinist Charley Johnson, who tries to give Maggie “a wet kiss” against her will. When Johnson accuses Liza of having “magazines instead of babies and a father instead of a husband,” he may be telling it like it was (or how he saw things), but his remarks were not destined to please modern Broadway audiences.65 Instead of getting the girl, Johnson today might be obtaining the services of an attorney who specializes in sexual harassment suits; he certainly does not deserve a woman like Liza. The non-singing Kendall Nesbitt hardly seems a better alternative: “Somehow—I don’t know why—it’s different for a man, but a woman can have no sense of fulfillment—no real peace and serenity as a woman, living out her life this way.”66 In a later era, the story of a bright, successful, and powerful woman whose achievement comes at the expense of her feminine identity does not bode well for a box office bonanza, even with Madonna in the title role.

Sexual stereotyping is not reserved for the heterosexual members of the Lady in the Dark cast. Russell Paxton, the “mildly-effeminate-in-a-rather-charming-fashion” photographer for Liza’s fashion magazine, Allure, is introduced as “hysterical, as usual.” He also freely acknowledges his physical admiration for male beauty when he describes