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

Not only is the Columbia 1957 Pal Joey bowdlerized, with little remaining from Frank O’Hara’s lively dialogue. It also plays havoc with the score. Nearly every song is either missing, buried in underscoring, or placed in a new and misleading context. Songs retained include the following:

• “That Terrific Rainbow,” originally sung by the main showgirl Gladys and now with Novak as Linda dubbed by Trudi Erwin (about 5 minutes into the film).

• “A Great Big Town” (or “Chicago”) for the showgirls, but only lasting a few seconds (about 9 minutes into the film). On Broadway, Joey sang this song as an audition number to open the show and the girls reprised the song at the opening of the actual nightclub act, which featured “That Terrific Rainbow.” Since the milieu was changed to San Francisco, the few preserved lyrics did not reveal the earlier town’s identity.

• “Zip” for Vera (Hayworth) once known as “Vanessa the undressa” (dubbed by Jo Ann Greer about 15 minutes into the film). As noted earlier, in the stage version the song is delivered by newspaper reporter Melba Snyder in act II.

• “I Could Write a Book” (about 25 minutes into the film). In the stage version, this was the song Joey sang to Linda English after spinning his yarn about the dog that was killed when Joey was young. Onstage, the fictitious childhood dog was named Skippy; in the film, the dog’s name is Snuffy and their stories are similar. Onstage, Skippy stays in the pet store, but in the film Snuffy remains a continuous presence. Much later, about seventy minutes into the film, the song returns as a waltz which sets up Linda’s striptease (stopped by Joey before it gets out of hand long before Linda runs out of clothes to discard).29

• “Bewitched” (about 48 minutes into the film). The staged context is changed in the film from a tailor shop where Vera is outfitting Joey in style to Vera’s boudoir. This occurs not long, we infer, after Vera and Joey have finished the early rounds of their non-adulterous and monogamous love making. As a way to stem the shock of moving from speech to song, Vera speaks rather than sings the lyrics of the opening verse before, again dubbed by Erwin, she sings the next part of the verse and the chorus (she also spoke the verse of “Zip”). Some of the less provocative lyrics she sings are not by Hart.

• “Pal Joey” (“What Do I Care for a Dame?”). Onstage Joey dreams of his new club at the end of act I; in the film the dream sequence, which will soon depict Vera and Linda along with the music of “Bewitched,” occurs in the last four minutes of the film (at about 83 minutes).30

Of these five songs and one fragment, which occasionally recur as underscoring, only one song is delivered by its rightful character (“Pal Joey”) and only one song (“That Terrific Rainbow”) shares a context familiar from the stage version. Other fragments of other songs from the great original Pal Joey score appear as fragments, ironically as if to remind those who know the score well of what they are missing. These include “Do It the Hard Way” at the beginning of the film, a brief orchestral statement of “Happy Hunting Horn” (about 27 minutes and again 54 minutes into the film), orchestral underscoring of “Plant You Now, Dig You Later” (at about 31 minutes), and “You Mustn’t Kick It Around” for the orchestra (at 60 minutes). Spaced out during the film to round out the decimated score are a small collection of hit Rodgers and Hart songs, one from One Your Toes and two from Babes in Arms.

• “There’s a Small Hotel,” Joey (Sinatra) (On Your Toes, 1936) (11 minutes into the film)

• “The Lady Is a Tramp,” Joey, dancing with Vera (Hayworth) (Babes in Arms, 1937) (41 minutes); a brief reprise returns late in the film (73 minutes)

• “My Funny Valentine,” Linda’s strip number (Novak) (Babes in Arms) (56 minutes into the film); a shorter version is reprised by Joey on a sofa a few minutes later (61 minutes)

With the addition of “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “My Funny Valentine” in their new homes, the least that can be said of Pal Joey as a film adaptation is that it included one more song from Babes in Arms than the 1939 film adaptation of this earlier, equally song-studded and richly crafted Broadway 1937 score. It’s a sad commentary on the gulf between the creative worlds of Broadway and Hollywood in the 1950s that such a potentially golden era of film musicals is instead tombstoned with many might-have-beens. Happily, when the Golden Age of song was long past, in such television dramas and movies as Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven (BBC, 1978) and The Singing Detective (BBC, 1986), or Woody Allen’s original film musical Everyone Says I Love You (Miramax, 1997)—and also prominently in most of Allen’s richly musical comedy soundtracks from Manhattan’s Gershwin tribute to Radio Days and Bullets over Broadway—filmmakers returned to ancient Broadway melodies for inspiration and sometimes musically felicitous reinterpretation.

The Cradle Will Rock (1999)

The Cradle Will Rock (1937) inspired no Hollywood adaptations until in 1999 the left-leaning director and actor Tim Robbins gave the work considerable popular exposure in a film that used Marc Blitzstein’s title and historic opening night as a plot fulcrum. Robbins’s original script blends the making of Cradle Will Rock (without the The) with four other interweaving story lines. As the end credits roll we learn that the conversations at the Dies Committee Hearings in the film, which might appear to be fictional, especially the surrealistic debate about whether Christopher Marlowe was a communist, were in fact “taken directly from the Congressional Record.” Throughout the film Zelig-like parabolic fictional characters interact with historical ones. For example, a major character in one of the