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

time lost in largely preserving the play component in the film adaptation of Lady in the Dark, a film lasting only 100 minutes, the three dream sequences, half of the music of the stage show, were drastically cut. Only fractions of the Glamour Dream and Wedding Dream were retained. The latter dream also offers a new song interpolation not by Weill, “Suddenly It’s Spring” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, as a replacement for “This Is New,” the dramatic center of the original stage dream. The Circus Dream was shorn of both Danny Kaye and “Tschaikowsky.”

Most egregious is the elimination of “My Ship.” Since its completion is necessary to resolve Liza Elliott’s dramatic conflicts, its fragmentary instrumental-only and hummed presentation throughout the film is never resolved nor explained. According to bruce d. mcclung, who offers the most substantial historical and critical overview of the film, the executive producer, B. G. (Buddy) DeSylva, who earlier co-wrote the lyrics for the hit show of the 1920s, Good News! as part of the team of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson, did not like the song (or much of the score, for that matter) and overruled director Mitchell Leisen’s wishes.41 Despite its flaws, the film succeeded at the box office where “it racked up $4.3 million, making it the fourth-largest grossing film of 1944.”42 After that, its fate rivaled that of its stage successor by retreating even more deeply into darkness and near oblivion.

One Touch of Venus (1948)

The initial idea was a film musical starring the original Venus, Mary Martin, and featuring the original dances of Agnes de Mille. Mary Pickford, a leading actress from the silent era and early talkies and a co-founder of United Artists in 1919, had purchased the screen rights while the hit show was still running in 1943. After a series of delays, the rights were sold to Universal in 1947 and the revamped film, directed by William A. Seiter and produced by Seiter and Lester Cowan, was released in 1948 without the services of either Martin or de Mille, or even much of Weill and Nash, a torso of the show’s full form as seen on the Broadway stage.43 Perhaps the greatest disappointment is that viewers of this adaptation hear only three songs from the tuneful score, “Speak Low,” “That’s Him,” and “Foolish Heart,” none of which are placed in their stage contexts and are only partially sung by their rightful owners. To add injury to insult, in the song last named, the words of Ogden Nash are replaced by those of Ann Ronell, including a new title (“Don’t Look Now but My Heart Is Showing”). Even though the total film length adds up to only eighty-two minutes, one will have to wait thirty-three minutes before hearing the first of these songs, “Speak Low.” “That’s Him” appears about forty-four minutes into the film, “Foolish Heart” (“Don’t Look Now”) about sixteen minutes later, and a reprise of “Speak Low” appears five minutes before the end.

Although the story is roughly equivalent to the stage version, several of the plot machinations are quite different. Rodney (renamed Eddie) Hatch has been given a new male friend Joe Grant, played by one of the two actors whose actual voices are heard on the soundtrack, Dick Haymes, a popular singer of the day who played a major character in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair three years earlier.44 Considering how little they sing together, Rodney spends a considerable amount of time onscreen with Venus (Ava Gardner). Onstage, Gloria (Olga San Juan, the other singer in the film) disappears for long stretches; now she shares music of the film with Joe, and, not surprisingly, they gradually fall in love. As in the stage version, Rodney will end up with a Venus look-alike, this one by the name of Venus Jones (also played by Gardner just as Mary Martin played Venus and her earthling surrogate onstage) after the real Venus has returned to the land of the Gods and her earthly remains have become re-solidified as a statue. The popular Haymes naturally sings in two of the three songs, the second of which, formerly a solo for Venus (Martin), is now a double duet in two juxtaposed scenes, one between Eddie and Venus, the other between Joe and Gloria, an interesting cinematic flourish. The other major new plot wrinkle revolves around Whitfield (onstage Whitelaw) Savory’s gradual awareness that the love of his life is not Venus but his assistant Molly, played with characteristic acerbic wit by Eve Arden.

The role of Hatch was assigned to the non-singing Robert Walker. In recent years Walker had acted the role of two great songwriters, Jerome Kern in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) and Johannes Brahms in Song of Love (1947) and was convincing as the milquetoast window dresser who brings the statue of Venus to life with an impulsive kiss. Gardner’s voice was dubbed by Eileen Wilson; three years later in the 1951 remake of Show Boat, Gardner’s Julie LaVerne would be dubbed by Annette Warren on screen (although strangely Gardner’s own voice is heard on the Show Boat soundtrack album). Not long after making her first major film impression playing opposite Burt Lancaster in The Killers (1946), based on a Hemingway story, Gardner was invariably assigned to roles where physical beauty was a major prerequisite. Ephraim Katz in The Film Encyclopedia offers the following description that might help explain why Gardner was chosen to play Venus: “A sensuous, sloe-eyed beauty, with a magnetic, tigresslike quality of sexuality, she replaced Rita Hayworth in the late 40s as Hollywood’s love goddess [italics mine] and occupied that position until the ascent of Marilyn Monroe in the mid-50s.”45

Although it remains not only a poor replica of the Venus book, lyrics, and score seen and heard onstage four years earlier, the musical film Venus is not without its charms as a story. Walker, Arden, and Tim Conway as Whitfield carry off their respective characters with aplomb, Haymes sings his two songs mellifluously, and