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

Calling All Cars, a popular crime and police radio drama that ran from 1933 to 1939, it’s still a funny scene. Another surprise. The exchange between Moon and Mrs. Wentworth, the kind of stream-of-consciousness banter that Groucho and “straight man” Margaret Dumont excelled in (excerpted in chapter 3), can be found in the film between Ruggles as Groucho and the redoubtable Margaret Dumont as herself. By the way, Billy really does put on the dog, Mrs. Wentworth’s newly shaved Pomeranian. PETA watchdogs should take note.

Although much of the dialogue was retained in the scenes that remained, some of the subtext regrettably did not manage to escape the cutting floor. For example, in the 1934 libretto, when Reno arrives unannounced in Evelyn Oakleigh’s stateroom in order to frame him for a phony seduction, Evelyn, expecting the steward and without turning around, asks the visitor to “just put it down on the bed,” expresses his hope that “it’s good and hot,” and states his desire that whatever the visitor has to offer he wants to receive before he is dressed. In response to this proposition, Reno asks whether she is early or late. In the screenplay, the tea is replaced by a dozen martini cocktails, presumably not hot, and when Reno arrives unseen Evelyn simply asks his visitor to leave the drinks there to which Reno simply responds, “I beg your pardon.” The somewhat suggestive “not a grope” becomes “not a try” when Reno complains to Billy that he shouldn’t have led her on by not getting her drunk, not asking her to his apartment to see his etchings, and not making a move on her in a taxi. “Hell” and other fiendish words, including “hot pants,” may be banished, but Reno’s basic complaint to Billy onstage, “You never even laid a hand on me, and I’m not used to men treating me like that!,” was repeatable in the film. Similarly, although the details remain unspecified, Reno is allowed to confirm that Evelyn does “things” to her. One line that has, if anything, increased its topicality and resonance in the early twenty-first century is Moon’s claim that he left the con artist game when the mortgage companies arrived.13

Although it often offers tangential connections with the 1934 stage version of Anything Goes, this film should be put back in circulation without delay where it can be criticized and enjoyed on its own terms.

Porgy and Bess

Samuel Goldwyn, 1959

As we have seen (see chapter 4), Rouben Mamoulian, with Gershwin’s acquiescence, if not approval, managed to cut about forty minutes before Porgy and Bess launched its career on Broadway in 1935. Despite the cuts, what audiences heard at its Broadway debut was a full-scale opera, with sparse amounts of spoken dialogue reserved mainly for white characters. A few years later, the Cheryl Crawford Broadway revival of 1942 turned the opera into a more conventional musical with many cuts and spoken dialogue replacing much of Gershwin’s recitative. Ten years after that, the Blevins Davis and Robert Breen production starring Leontyne Price as Bess, William Warfield as Porgy, and Cab Calloway as Sporting Life brought the opera closer to its operatic roots, style, and length. The historic Houston Grand Opera production of 1976 completed this process. In fact, Houston returned the work to what it looked like during the tryouts prior to its Broadway opening, that is, an uncut Porgy and Bess that included the forty soon-to-be-discarded minutes.

Porgy and Bess, 1959 film. Porgy (Sidney Poitier) and Bess (Dorothy Dandridge) inside Porgy’s room.

Porgy and Bess, 1959 film. Porgy (Poitier) and Bess (Dandridge) outside Porgy’s door, with goat.

Between the Davis-Breen and the Houston production lies the shadow of the first film version of Porgy and Bess, produced by Samuel Goldwyn (his eightieth and final picture), and after its first director Mamoulian was fired, directed by Otto Preminger. Playing but not singing the part of Porgy was Sidney Poitier, at the time still in the early stages of his career as America’s leading black actor and box office draw. Dorothy Dandridge, a rising star who had played the title role in Preminger’s Carmen Jones a few years earlier, was cast as Bess. The film marked a return to the type of presentation not seen since Crawford’s production, a shorter version in which the dialogue is mostly spoken rather than sung and with less activity from the chorus. Some critics lauded the film, including Bosley Crowther of the New York Times. Others were highly critical, especially of the sets, which seemed too theatrical and unrealistic. In “Why Negroes Don’t Like ‘Porgy and Bess,’” Era Bell Thompson, writing for the African-American magazine Ebony faulted the film for its anachronistic continuities with the opera.14 Both works, this reviewer felt, reinforced stereotypes. For Bell, the Goldwyn-Preminger extravaganza was merely “the same old catfish.” This is a topic to which we must return.

The film was a triumph of love over money. Goldwyn had seen the opera in 1935 and wanted to bring it to the screen practically ever since, and he spared no effort to attract the finest African-American stars of the day. When the warehouse containing the sets was destroyed on the eve of production, he built new sets from scratch. In the end the film lost half of its $7 million investment and received only one of the three Academy Awards for which it was nominated, a Best Scoring award shared between André Previn and Ken Darby. When it was first released, Ira Gershwin was quoted as saying, “It is everything we hoped for.”15 Other early supporters of the film included Dorothy Heyward, who exclaimed that “the film exceeds our highest expectations.”16 George Gershwin’s great friend Kay Swift was enthusiastic about the film and agreed to give lectures and interviews on its behalf in twelve cities over a period of fifteen weeks.17 The film was broadcast on national television in 1967 and then withdrawn, along with the soundtrack, at the insistence of the Gershwin estate owners