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

the visual fluctuations between Venus/Eddie and Gloria/ Joe in “Foolish Heart” are welcome. The film also contains some chase scenes that recall the early Keystone Cops routines, which may be attributed to the fact that the film’s director William Seiter was himself once a Keystone Cop.

After experiencing the indignity of having songs deleted and, even worse, replaced, in Lady in the Dark, composer Kurt Weill insisted on a contract for One Touch of Venus that would include a “non-interpolation clause,” in which no music by other composers could be inserted. As he explained in a letter to his agent, Leah Salisbury, “All the songs in the picture have to be taken from the score, and the underscoring has to be based on themes from the original score.”46 The studio honored these conditions to the letter; the end result was a film adaptation that contained only the shell of the original score (and no new songs by others to fill in) and a few Weill songs inserted here and there between long stretches of dialogue.

This survey of film adaptations from Show Boat to One Touch of Venus reveals much about Hollywood’s response to their Broadway sources. The goal during these years was to entertain and engage a film audience, not to offer a replica of a sacrosanct stage artifact. Only the Nunn version of Porgy and Bess, which appeared nearly sixty years later, comes close to depicting a Broadway stage version, but even here the very completeness of the film, ironically, belies its “authenticity” (a problematic term) since in 1935 attendees at the opera’s first performances saw and heard a version of the work perhaps forty minutes shorter. Most of the films discussed in this chapter present heavily revised books and brutally abbreviated scores, sometimes with additional music by the original or newly contracted composers, and sometimes with recycled music from the original songwriter’s trunk placed in new contexts. It is probably not an exaggeration to assert that with the exception of Show Boat, these adaptations fall short of the best original films that use the music of the composers and lyricists featured in act I of Enchanted Evenings. We will conclude this chapter with a summary of other adaptations in relation to the original musicals with scores by Kern, Porter, the Gershwins, and Rodgers and Hart.47

• KERN

Of this quartet, Kern was probably the most frequently adapted with reasonable success. In fact, a number of films retained a significant amount of his music, including The Cat and the Fiddle and Music in the Air in 1934 and Sweet Adeline and Roberta in 1935.

• PORTER

We have already noted that the adaptation of Gay Divorce (renamed The Gay Divorcée) salvaged only one song, “Night and Day.” Film adaptations of Something for the Boys and Mexican Hayride contained no songs by Porter; Paris and Fifty Million Frenchmen confined Porter’s music to background noise; Let’s Face It offered two songs; Dubarry Was a Lady, three; and Panama Hattie, four. For worthy films with Porter’s music—prior to the 1953 adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate discussed in chapter 14—one would have to turn to the original film musicals Born to Dance (1936), Rosalie (1937), and Broadway Melody of 1940, and the modern-day biopic De-Lovely (2004), the latter chock full of stylistically updated Porter chestnuts starring Kevin Kline as the composer-lyricist.

• THE GERSHWINS

The films of George and Ira Gershwin were similarly disappointing as Broadway adaptations. Strike Up the Band offers only the title tune. At least the 1943 Girl Crazy, also starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, had the sense to retain six of the 1930 original’s fourteen songs, plus the Gershwin hit originally composed in 1924 for Fred Astaire in Lady, Be Good!, “Fascinating Rhythm.” Funny Face (1957), with Astaire reprising his original stage role thirty years later, satisfies as a film musical, but with only five songs from the original, “Clap Yo’ Hands” from another show, three interpolated song numbers by Roger Edens and Leonard Gershe, and a new scenario and script, it falls far short as a reliable adaptation of the Gershwin musical as it appeared onstage. Fortunately, George lived long enough to complete outstanding film scores the year he died (1937) for Shall We Dance with Astaire and Rogers and Damsel in Distress with Astaire, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and the non-dancing Joan Fontaine. Long after George’s death his music and Ira’s lyrics served as the centerpiece for another fine original musical, An American in Paris (1951), produced by Arthur Freed, directed by Vincente Minnelli, to an award-winning screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, and starring its choreographer Gene Kelly.

• RODGERS AND HART

Of the many films adapted from the stage musicals of Rodgers and Hart, none rivaled the increasingly recognized classic original film Love Me Tonight (1932), produced and directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, and Charles Ruggles. Of the rest, Too Many Girls, directed by its Broadway director George Abbott and starring four members of the original stage cast, managed to salvage half of the score, seven songs—if you have been counting, this is close to a record for film adaptations. Girls also added a new instant classic by Rodgers and Hart, “You’re Nearer,” and even kept much of the original libretto intact. Five of the six songs from Rodgers and Hart’s Jumbo can be heard in the 1962 film, which retains the basic plot and, twenty-seven years after its Broadway debut, its original star, Jimmy Durante.

In the film adaptation of On Your Toes (Warner Bros. 1938) none of the songs are sung, and only four tunes are heard in unobtrusive underscoring (“There’s a Small Hotel,” “Quiet Night,” and “On Your Toes”). On the other hand, Toes does contain the “Princesse Zenobia” and “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballets with the original choreography by George Balanchine and featuring Vera Zorina. About thirty seconds of the latter can be seen in the documentary Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds, but the film itself was never released on either VHS or