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

Of the eight classic films that paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers between 1933 and 1938, only three were based even in part on Broadway shows. The Gay Divorcée, which was based, but not quite nominally, on Gay Divorce, starring Astaire, retained but one Porter tune, “Night and Day.” This movie, which has genuine merit on its own terms, gave film audiences an opportunity to see comics Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore, as well as Astaire, replay their stage roles and offered the attractive new face of Betty Grable. It also concludes with perhaps the most elaborate and certainly the longest of the dance duets in the Fred and Ginger series, “The Continental” (more than 16 minutes). With its relatively lengthy medium shot, this dance (and future Fred and Ginger dances) also showcased the dancers from head to toe, with only an occasional close-up, a directorial concession Astaire routinely demanded (and got).2 Despite these genuine merits, the film version of Gay Divorce is as different from its source as, well, night and day. The plot of Follow the Fleet (1936), like that of The Gay Divorcée, is also loosely derived from a Broadway show, Hit the Deck! from 1927, with music by Vincent Youmans (also the principal composer of the first of the Fred and Ginger films, Flying Down to Rio). With The Gay Divorcée, at least one song was composed by its original composer. Follow the Fleet, however, met Rosalie’s fate. Youmans’s entire score was thrown overboard, and Irving Berlin, who composed the music and lyrics to Top Hat and would soon do the same for Carefree (both films also in the first eight Fred and Ginger films), was brought in to write the complete score.3

James Whale’s 1936 Show Boat remains arguably the most successful relatively faithful transfer of operetta-leaning genre (with significant touches of musical comedy) from stage to screen in the 1930s. Kern’s Roberta, with lyrics by Otto Harbach, and yet another from the first Fred and Ginger eight, also deserves consideration as one of the finest contemporary film adaptations of a staged musical comedy (with significant touches of operetta). It also demonstrates how it is possible to retain a story line and much of a score while at the same time transforming leading acting roles into dancing stars. Onstage, the non-dancing role of Huck Haines, played by then-newcomer comedian Bob Hope, was now played by Astaire, while Rogers replaced the non-dancing Lyda Roberti (who as Countess Tanka Schwarenka was not even attracted to Haines in the stage version). The playful roles of Haines and the Countess were expanded both dramatically and musically and offered a sharp comic contrast to the ingénue elegance of Russian Princess Stephanie, played by romantic lead Irene Dunne, who now got to sing both big ballads, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Yesterdays” (the latter originally sung onstage by her Aunt Minnie, Fay Templeton). Other songs retained from the original score included the lively and jazzy “Let’s Begin” and “I’ll Be Hard to Handle.”

The film dropped “Something Had to Happen” and used “The Touch of Your Hand” and “You’re Devastating” as orchestral underscoring for the fashion-show sequence. As part of the musical enhancement for Huck and the Countess (Fred and Ginger), the film added two new swing dance numbers for this pair: “I Won’t Dance,” a reworking of a song by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh from Kern’s recent London flop with Hammerstein, Three Sisters, and a song composed expressly for the film, “Lovely to Look At.”4 The winning combination of romantic elegance (operetta) and catchy popular vernacular (musical comedy) and their signature songs (Dunne) and dances (Astaire and Rogers) captured the best of both worlds. Despite the outrageous notion of an exiled Russian princess living in Paris in 1935, the screen form of Roberta, with its great new roles for dancers, might even make a good candidate for a stage revival.

Given the 80–120 minute fixed time frame, a technical requirement for early films, reasonably faithful and complete adaptations would not be possible until the film adaptations of classic shows in the mid-1950s. If one expects fidelity of dialogue and score, all the film adaptations made before the 1950s are destined to disappoint. Looking at four of the shows treated in act I of Enchanted Evenings, we find a range of possible connections to the original stage versions:

• The 1936 film version of Show Boat featured several cast members who had appeared either in the original 1927 stage version or subsequent productions over the next nine years; a screenplay by the original librettist, Oscar Hammerstein; songs exclusively written for Show Boat by Hammerstein and Jerome Kern (but not all the songs heard onstage); and three new songs written expressly for the film.5 In a practice that would become increasingly common after Oklahoma!, two of these new songs, “Ah Still Suits Me” and “I Have the Room above Her” would reappear in future Broadway productions.6

• The 1936 Paramount Anything Goes retains much of the original plot, a surprising amount of dialogue from the 1934 libretto, the original star Ethel Merman, a small sampling of the songs Porter wrote for the stage version, and more than an equal number of new songs by other composers and lyricists.

• The 1959 Porgy and Bess presents a condensed “Broadway” version that replaced most of the recitative with spoken dialogue and like most musical comedies of the era also reduced the role of the chorus. Nevertheless, while heavily reduced, few songs were cut entirely, and no new songs by the Gershwins or others were added. It was not until 1993 that one could view a Porgy and Bess that, with two omissions, presented a filmed adaptation of a production (based on Glyndebourne in 1986) that offered what audiences heard during the Boston tryouts in the weeks before its 1935 Broadway debut, that is, a virtually uncut Porgy and Bess.

• The 1957 film version of Pal Joey, like the 1962 and 1987 stage versions of Anything