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

Two Tough Acts to Follow

Act I: Rodgers and Hammerstein

In the years following the success of Anything Goes in 1934 only Rodgers and Hart surpassed Porter in producing musical hits on Broadway. The Gershwins were unable to complete any more Broadway shows between Porgy and Bess in 1935 and George’s death two years later, and Kern managed only one more new Broadway show, Very Warm for May (1939) in a final decade spent mainly in films. As Gershwin and Kern ebbed, Porter flowed for the remaining years of the 1930s with one successful (albeit now nearly forgotten) musical after another filled with unforgettable songs: “Begin the Beguine” and “Just One of Those Things” from Jubilee (1935); “It’s De-Lovely” from Red, Hot and Blue! (1936); “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” from Leave It to Me (1938); “Well, Did You Evah!” and “Friendship” from DuBarry Was a Lady (1939).

In the mid-1940s, however, two successive failures, Seven Lively Arts (1944) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1946), prompted Porter and his backers to question the commercial vitality of the pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein–type musical. Earlier in 1944 Porter had produced his sixth successive old-fashioned Broadway hit, Mexican Hayride. But the tides had turned, and the examples of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s second musical, Carousel (1945), Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and Porter’s own Kiss Me, Kate (1948) bear testimony to the power that Oklahoma! now exerted. Even these two old dog songwriters now felt the urgency of learning the new trick of writing integrated musicals.

Before the historic collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein was launched in 1943, both Berlin and Porter had achieved universal recognition as songwriters. Even today, as many of their shows drift into oblivion, these illustrious composer-lyricists unquestionably remain the most widely known and revered of their generation. After four decades of composing currently under-appreciated revues and musical comedies, Berlin was persuaded in 1945, after the sudden and unanticipated death of the intended composer Kern, to compose a full-fledged book show that to some extent paralleled the new objectives established in Oklahoma! and Carousel. Soon Porter attempted his first own “integrated” musical. The results, Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948) remain the only musicals by these great songwriters that occupy a firm position in the Broadway repertory (albeit with some book and song changes mainly in the case of Annie). Abandoned by his supporters and forced to sell his new work in degrading auditions, Porter celebrated his resurrection by creating one of the most highly regarded and popular musicals of all time.1

Shortly before his death in 1964 Porter publicly acknowledged the difficulty posed by the intimidating example of Rodgers and Hammerstein: “The librettos are much better, and the scores are much closer to the librettos than they used to be. Those two [Rodgers and Hammerstein] made it much harder for everybody else.”2 The specter of “those two” would haunt Porter for his remaining creative years. To add injury to insult they even managed to partially overshadow Kiss Me, Kate by depriving Porter of Mary Martin (the rising star of Porter’s Leave It to Me ten years earlier and, more recently, the star of One Touch of Venus), who had auditioned for the lead but instead accepted the role of Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, which opened three months after Porter’s classic.3

In a New York Times interview that he gave during the composition of CanCan in 1953, Porter reveals that Rodgers and Hammerstein remained under his skin: “They [the songs] didn’t come out of the book so much as now. Really, until Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you needed to change a scene, a girl could come out in front of the curtain and sing or dance or anything. But with Can-Can, I have worked since last June.”4

Additional evidence that Porter suffered anxiety from the influence of Oklahoma! and Carousel appears amid the extensive unpublished manuscript material for Kiss Me, Kate housed in the Music Division of the Library of Congress in a packet labeled “Unfinished Lyrics.”5 Although some of these lyrics are in fact unfinished and others only barely begun, including one tantalizing title, “To Be or Not to Be,” most lyrics in this packet are alternate versions of known Kiss Me, Kate songs. One such draft belongs with the song “Bianca,” a late addition to the show. In the staged (and published) verse of this song Bill Calhoun the Baltimorean and, as Lucentio, the Shakespearean suitor of Lois Lane/Bianca, sings the following lyric: “While rehearsing with Bianca, / (She’s the darling I adore), / Offstage I found / She’s been around / But I love her more and more; / So I’ve written her a love song / Though I’m just an amateur. / I’ll sing it through / For all of you / To see if it’s worthy of her. / Are yuh list’nin’?”

In the “Unfinished Lyrics” the private Porter can be observed working with an alternate idea: Bill Calhoun himself as an aspiring Broadway lyricist. Porter’s surrogate lyricist, however, is not merely a suitor for the fair Lois/Bianca in this version. Porter has given his still-anonymous poet additional importance as “the dog who writes incog” for the great Berlin. In this alternative scenario, “Bianca” is one of the songs Bill has composed on behalf of Mr. Berlin.

Despite this subterfuge, Porter’s draft labeled “Bianca 2nd Verse” on the second page arguably reveals more about Porter than it does about Bill Calhoun: “Ev’ry night I write for Irving [Berlin] / ’Til I nearly bust my bean / ’Cause Irving fears / Two rival peers / Known as Rodgers and Hammer-stein. / I shall now repeat my ballad / Then I’ll rush to Irving quick / And if he thinks / My ballad stinks / He’ll sell it to Oscar [Hammerstein II] and Dick [Richard Rodgers] / Are you list’nin? (repeat refrain).”6

All available witnesses corroborate the story that it was not an easy task for Bella Spewack, herself only