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

unfair to value a film adaptation in direct or indirect proportion to its fidelity to what audiences saw and heard onstage—the musical theater scholar’s own version of the early and traditional music “authenticity” and “historically informed performance” debates. An Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller roughly based on a novel or short story might be considered an improvement over its source or at least an excellent film in its own right. At the same time, readers of a survey on the Broadway musical deserve to know the connection between what they see on the silver screen and what they are likely to see on a stage. Film adaptations such as The Gay Divorcée, On the Town, and Funny Face may be worthy exponents of the film genre, but students of musical theater should know that these films only imperfectly approximate their stage counterparts.

One of the central purposes of the two “Stage versus Screen” chapters will be to inform fans of Broadway shows what they are getting into when they rent or purchase a film adaptation of a show they have seen on a stage or heard on a cast album. Just as quoting obscenity is not the same thing as being obscene, those who study musical film adaptations, and even those who occasionally shout vive la différence should not be accused of wantonly sleeping with the enemy or other acts of traitorous activity. While some, erroneously, treat stage and screen versions of Broadway shows as interchangeable, other musical theater advocates regard even the act of adaptation with suspicion, if not disdain. One articulate adversary of the film musical adaptation, Kim Kowalke, encapsulated this position: “The generic deformation inherent in adapting stage musicals as movies left few intact and most virtually unrecognizable, except for title, some songs, and perhaps a few actors in common.”1 Even if Kowalke’s blanket indictment is read as hyperbolic, the term “generic deformation” unfortunately more than occasionally applies.

There are many subtle cultural dimensions to the transition from live to recorded performance with which any musician familiar with a real-life performing tradition will be familiar. Creeping in on little cat feet, media craft workers and modern-minded audiences have revolutionized performances and their reception. The result, as Kowalke implies, is a change in the genre, or kind of a musical theater work—or, to use his carefully chosen term, a deformed genre. To return to the more straightforward structural dimensions of book and score, film adaptations of musicals from Show Boat to Oklahoma!generally, but by no means invariably, do retain recognizable story lines and more than just “some songs.”

On the other hand, with distressing frequency, departures and alterations from Broadway story lines result in the elimination of half or more than half of the songs people heard when they saw the show on the stage. To cite one extreme but not unique example, the musical film of George and Ira Gershwin’s Strike Up the Band managed to salvage only the title tune from this wonderful score. In another frequent practice that we will witness shortly in the 1936 film adaptation of Show Boat, the original composer and lyricist will add one or more songs expressly for the show’s new incarnation. Perhaps because only new songs are eligible for Best Song Academy Awards, this practice has continued until the present day, even if the new song is not heard until the final credits, as happens in the case of The Phantom of the Opera in the 2004 film version. Another common scenario is the practice of interpolating songs into a show from different shows by the original composer-lyricists, a practice that parallels the distortions we have come to expect in stage revivals (for example, in the revivals of Anything Goes on Broadway in 1962 and 1987). The 1957 film of Pal Joey exemplifies this widespread approach.

Before the Rodgers and Hammerstein era it was also a common practice to bring in new composers and lyricists who were under contract with the studio producing the film as collaborators after the fact. The 1936 film adaptation of Anything Goes provides a good example of this scenario. Another adaptation type is the 1937 film version of the show Rosalie, which has an entirely new score. The original double story (the Lindbergh flight and a visit from the Queen of Romania) was preserved, but the double compositional duties between George Gershwin and Sigmund Romberg were instead relegated solely to Cole Porter, a composer who was not even remotely involved in the Broadway version of 1928. Not until the 1950s did Broadway composers and lyricists begin to exert the kind of creative control over films they had begun to show decades earlier on Broadway. Since then, composers and lyricists have usually exerted the right to share their opinion about which songs to cut—although they can be overridden as we will see in producer Samuel Goldwyn’s version of Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls. Songwriters also gained the frequent privilege of contributing their own new songs.

A large percentage of Broadway shows were adapted into films. Among the highlights of the adaptation subgenre are Ernst Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow (MGM 1934), the series of eight freely adapted operettas (and the occasional musical comedy) with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy from 1935 to 1942, and On the Town (produced by Arthur Freed for MGM in 1949), not all of which are cherished for their fidelity to their stage sources. The most consistently memorable musical films to appear in the era between Show Boat and Oklahoma!, however, were original film musicals. A short list in this latter category would be remiss if it did not include the following: The Love Parade (1929); Love Me Tonight (1932); 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade (1933); The Great Ziegfeld and Born to Dance (1936); Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937); Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938); The Wizard of Oz (1939); Pinocchio, Broadway Melody of 1940, and Fantasia (1940); Yankee Doodle Dandy and Holiday Inn (1942); and Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather, and This