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

Randy Curtis: “He’s got a face that would melt in your mouth…. He’s heaven.”67 Although some mystery will remain as to which of Liza’s suitors (Curtis, Nesbitt, or Johnson) will eventually win out, Paxton is removed at the outset as a romantic contender.68

The reasons for the demise of One Touch of Venus are less explicable. The premise of a cultural alien examining America from another perspective has proven remarkably durable in numerous films over the past two decades and includes aliens from another country (Moscow on the Hudson) and extraterrestrial aliens (E.T.) in its wide orbit. A genuine and liberated sex goddess adrift amid overly romantic types like Whitelaw Savory and prosaic practical types like Rodney Hatch provide for a potentially engaging story, a story wittily realized by Perelman, Nash, and Weill.

While Weill is criticized for abandoning his social conscience in his Broadway musicals, Venus manages to effectively satirize a host of American values. We know from the first song that Savory is more than a little eccentric because, in contrast with nearly anyone who loves popular musicals, he firmly believes that (with the notable exception of the classical Anatolian Venus) “New Art Is True Art”: “Old art is cold art, / The new art is bold art; / The best of ancient Greece, / It was centuries behind Matisse, / Who has carried us beyond Renoir, / Till our bosoms are tri-an-gu-lar.”

The largest target of the Perelman-Nash satire is the contrasting moral values of the very, very rich and the common folk. The loose morals of the wealthy are comically portrayed in the song “Very, Very, Very,” when Molly explains that “It’s a minor peccadillo / To patronize the wrong pillow, / When you’re very, very, very rich.” It was previously noted that Venus dismisses Savory’s idealistic and bourgeois love by favoring the twang of a bedspring over the moan of a violin. In contrast, Venus’s earthbound inamorata, Hatch, expresses his love for his fiancée Gloria through a series of negative prosaic images, for example, “I love you more than a wasp can sting, / And more than a hangnail hurts.” Although Venus helps Hatch to rid himself of his shrewish intended—“sic transit Gloria Kramer”—the simple barber retains his desire to live in Ozone Heights, where “every bungalow’s just the same” and each has “a radio that looks like a fireplace—and a fireplace that looks like a radio.”69

If Street Scene is the American Weill stage work that posterity has voted retrospectively most likely to succeed, One Touch of Venus, the most Broadway-like of any Weill show, may turn out to be the most revivable—the sleeper musical of the 1940s. In short, Venus is a first-rate traditional Broadway show, packed with an unprecedented number of song hits and other fine songs by Weill, lyrics that reveal the idiosyncratic Nash at his cleverest, and engaging dialogue by Perelman.

After Venus, Nash would abandon Broadway and go back to the more intimate world of comic verse. Perelman’s next (and last) musical, three years after Venus, closed out of town; he would take time off from his prolific output of comic literary fiction on one more occasion to write the script for Porter’s last effort, the television musical Aladdin (1958). Hart ended his distinguished Broadway career with a successful play, Light Up the Sky (1948), and as the director of My Fair Lady and Camelot. Between Light Up the Sky and My Fair Lady he also wrote distinguished musical screenplays for Hans Christian Andersen (lyrics and music by Loesser) and A Star Is Born (lyrics by Ira Gershwin and music by Harold Arlen). One year after his failed collaboration with Weill, The Firebrand of Florence, Gershwin completed his Broadway career with the poorly received Park Avenue (music by Arthur Schwartz). He concluded his career by writing lyrics to several successful films, most notably A Star Is Born, then spent three decades in creative retirement as the guardian of his famous brother’s legacy. After Venus and Florence, Weill would compose the music to Street Scene, Love Life, and Lost in the Stars, dying before he could realize his next American dream with Maxwell Anderson (his lyricist-librettist on Knickerbocker Holiday and Lost in the Stars), a musical based on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

CHAPTER EIGHT

STAGE VERSUS SCREEN (1)

Before Rodgers and Hammerstein

Adapting to Hollywood

Show Boat marks one possible starting point for a study of the modern Broadway musical. Fortuitously, its arrival in December 1927 closely followed the opening of a landmark in the history of one of the quintessential modern media of the twentieth century, The Jazz Singer, the first American feature film with sound. Although most of this historic film was still “silent”—accompanied by a live pit band—Al Jolson’s songs were reproduced via a recorded soundtrack, tube amplifiers, and loudspeakers placed behind the movie screen at selected theaters. Seemingly traveling at the speed of sound, if not light, talking and singing film adaptations of popular Broadway stage works soon became rapidly, abundantly, and relatively cheaply available to national then worldwide audiences. Masses of movie enthusiasts could view film adaptations of major and minor works that until the end of the 1920s were accessible only on Broadway stages and in touring productions. Audiences could also view a large body of original film musicals not based on a stage work.

During the early decades of sound film, musical film adaptations were usually remote from their stage sources, and it would often be a challenge to discern the difference between an adaptation and an original musical film without prior knowledge. Before the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, film adaptations tended to be footloose and fancy free and at times unrecognizable vis-à-vis their stage counterparts. The musical films highlighted in later chapters of this study tend to be relatively faithful, perhaps too respectful, of their Broadway origins.

In any event, the two film “Stage versus Screen” chapters at the end of acts I and II in this Broadway survey work from the premise that it is intrinsically