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

DVD.48 The best place to find “Slaughter” on film is the athletic duet between Rodgers and Hart stage alums Gene Kelly (the original Pal Joey) and Vera Ellen (Mistress Evelyn in the 1943 revival of Connecticut Yankee) on the easily obtainable Rodgers and Hart biopic Words and Music (1948).49

Although three of the films discussed in this chapter are difficult to locate and all offer distortions of one kind or another, these film adaptations offer their share of compensations. In particular, Show Boat and Anything Goes let us see some of the original stars or other actors and actresses associated with early productions. Seeing and hearing Charles Winninger, the original Broadway Cap’n Andy, Paul Robeson, the original London Joe, or Ethel Merman, the original Reno Sweeney sing their songs in a film that is roughly contemporaneous to their theatrical performances is worth the time it takes to find these films. Some of the shows have even retained a surprising amount of original dialogue, even when the plots are greatly altered. Although they are destined to disappoint musically they are worth getting to know, as long as you know what you’re missing.

• ACT II •

THE BROADWAY MUSICAL AFTER OKLAHOMA!

CHAPTER NINE

CAROUSEL

The Invasion of the Integrated Musical

Working under the premise that success begets success, Rodgers and Hammerstein followed the phenomenal triumph of Oklahoma! (1943) by assembling much of the same production team for their second hit, Carousel (1945). Like their historic opening salvo, Carousel was produced by the Theatre Guild and supervised by Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner, the pair who had given Rodgers and Hart their big break in 1925, The Garrick Gaieties. For their director the Theatre Guild selected Rouben Mamoulian, who had directed Oklahoma! as well as Rodgers and Hart’s classic film Love Me Tonight in 1932, the play Porgy in 1927, and the opera Porgy and Bess in 1935 (both of the latter were also Theatre Guild productions). Agnes de Mille was again asked to choreograph, and Miles White designed the costumes.

Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom, which premiered in Hungary in 1909, had been successfully presented by the Guild in 1921 with the legendary Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut, and more recently in 1940 in a production that starred Ingrid Bergman and Burgess Meredith. After some initial resistance, Molnár, who had allegedly turned down an offer by Puccini (and Weill and perhaps Gershwin as well) to make an opera out of his play, reportedly agreed in 1944 to allow the Theatre Guild to adapt his play: “After fifteen months, all the legal technicalities involved in the production of the musical version of Liliom were settled last week.”1 The New York Post went on to say that “the smallest percentage, eight tenths of one percent, go to Ferenc Molnár, who merely wrote the play.”

Rodgers and Hammerstein. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM

The idea for setting Molnár’s play came from the Theatre Guild, who naturally wanted to reproduce a second Oklahoma! Writing in the New York Times four days before the birth of the new sibling, Hammerstein recalled Helburn and Langner propositioning the creators of their previous blockbuster in Sardi’s “toward the end of January, 1944.” The main obstacle for Hammerstein was the Hungarian setting. When, the following week, the persistent Helburn offered a more promising alternative locale in Louisiana, the required dialect also proved to be “a disconcerting difficulty” for the librettist. Sources agree that the workable idea to “transplant the play to the New England coast” came from Rodgers and that the starting point for the show was Billy Bigelow’s “Soliloquy.” In Musical Stages Rodgers wrote that once the team had conceived “the notion for a soliloquy in which, at the end of the first act, the leading character would reveal his varied emotions about impending fatherhood,” the central problem of how to sing Liliom was resolved.2

Although their contract allowed Rodgers and Hammerstein considerable latitude in their adaptation, they were nonetheless relieved to learn during an early rehearsal run-through that the playwright had given his blessing to their changes, including a greatly altered ending.3 In the play, a defiant Liliom does not regret his actions and is doomed to purgatory for fifteen years. He is then required to return to earth for a day to atone for his sins. While on earth, disguised as a beggar, Liliom slaps his daughter when she refuses the star he stole from heaven; she sends him away, and the play ends on this pessimistic note. In the musical a much more sympathetic Liliom, renamed Billy Bigelow, comes to earth by choice, appears as himself, and can choose either to be seen or to remain invisible. As in the play he has stolen a star and slaps his daughter Louise, but now the slap feels like a kiss (in the play it felt like a caress). In stark contrast to the play, the musical’s final scene shows Billy, in his remaining moments on earth, helping his “little girl” at her graduation to overcome her loneliness and misery. To the inspirational strains of “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” with its somewhat dubious advice if taken literally (“when you walk through a storm keep your chin up high”), Louise finds the courage to live, Julie realizes that her marriage—in Molnár’s less family-oriented play she remained Billy’s mistress—was worth the pain. Billy redeems his soul, and even the most jaded of contemporary audiences find themselves shedding real tears.

Auditions began in February 1945 and tryouts took place the following months in New Haven (March 22–25) and Boston (March 27–April 15). Elliot Norton describes the principal dramatic alteration made during the Boston tryouts:

The original heaven of Carousel was a New England parlor, bare and plain. In it sat a stern Yankee, listed on the program as He. At a harmonium, playing softly, sat his quiet consort, identified as She. Later some observers [including