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

Thomas’s still-popular comedy, Charley’s Aunt (1892). Unlike other musical settings of popular plays—including Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, adapted from Sidney Howard’s Pulitzer Prize–winning but now mostly forgotten play, They Knew What They Wanted (1924)—Where’s Charley? (1948) never managed to surpass its progenitor. Nevertheless, this extraordinary Broadway debut became the first of Loesser’s four major hit musicals during a thirteen-year Broadway career (1948–1961). In the end, the composer-lyricist and one-time librettist would earn three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards (Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella, and How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying), two Tony Awards (Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed), and one Pulitzer Prize for drama (How to Succeed).5

Where’s Charley? was a well-crafted, old-fashioned Broadway show with sparkling Loesser lyrics and melodies. In order to show off a wider spectrum of Bolger’s talents, the character of Lord Fancourt Babberley (who impersonated Charley’s aunt in Thomas’s play) was excised, and much of the comedy revolved around Charley’s switching between two roles, Charley and his aunt, throughout the musical. Working against type, the opening duet, “Make a Miracle,” between the central character, Charley Wykeham (Bolger), and Amy Spettigue was a comic number rather than a love song. More typically, Charley’s formal expression of love, “Once in Love with Amy,” was a show-stopper directed not to Amy but to the audience, which Bolger asked to participate in his public tribute.

One year before Rodgers and Hammerstein offered a serious subplot with Lt. Joseph Cable and Liat in South Pacific, the lyrical principals of Where’s Charley? were the secondary characters, Jack Chesney and Kitty Verdun, who sing the show’s central love song, “My Darling, My Darling.” Despite this less conventional touch, at the end of the farce Charley (Bolger), without any dramatic justification other than his stature, was allowed to reprise and usurp his friend’s “My Darling, My Darling.” Such concessions were a small price to pay for a hit, even as late as 1948.

Guys and Dolls: Life in Runyonland

Although Where’s Charley? was one of the most popular Broadway book musicals up to its time, the show hardly prepared critics and audiences for Loesser’s next show two years later.6 Reviewers from opening night to the present day have given Guys and Dolls pride of place among musical comedies. Following excerpts from nine raves, review collector Steven Suskin remarks that “Guys and Dolls received what might be the most unanimously ecstatic set of reviews in Broadway history.”7 In contrast to most musicals where some perceived flaw was manifest from the beginning (e.g., libretto weaknesses in Show Boat, the disconcerting recitative style in Porgy and Bess, the unpalatable main character in Pal Joey), Guys and Dolls was problem free. John McClain’s epiphany in the New York Journal-American that this classic was “the best and most exciting thing of its kind since Pal Joey” is representative.8 Indeed, after Pal Joey in 1940 Loesser’s Guys and Dolls exactly ten years later is arguably the only musical comedy (as opposed to operetta) prior to the 1950s to achieve a sustained place in the Broadway repertory with its original book intact.

Although virtually no manuscript material is extant for Guys and Dolls, there is general agreement about the main outlines of its unusual genesis as told by its chief librettist Abe Burrows thirty years later.9 After securing the rights to adapt Damon Runyon’s short story “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” (and portions and characters drawn from several others, especially “Pick the Winner”), Where’s Charley? producers Feuer and Martin commissioned Hollywood scriptwriter Jo Swerling to write the book, and Loesser wrote as many as fourteen songs to match. Feuer and Martin then managed to persuade the legendary George S. Kaufman to direct. In a scenario reminiscent of Anything Goes and One Touch of Venus, where new librettists were brought in to rewrite a book, all of the above-mentioned Guys and Dolls collaborators concurred that Swerling’s draft of the first act failed to match their vision of Runyonesque comedy. Burrows was then asked to come up with a new book to support Loesser’s songs. As Burrows explains:

Loesser’s songs were the guideposts for the libretto. It’s a rare show that is done this way, but all fourteen of Frank’s songs were great, and the libretto had to be written so that the story would lead into each of them. Later on, the critics spoke of the show as “integrated.” The word “integration” usually means that the composer has written songs that follow the story line gracefully. Well, we did it in reverse. Most of the scenes I wrote blended into songs that were already written.10

The legal aspects of Swerling’s contractual obligations has generated some confusion regarding the authorship of Guys and Dolls. The hoopla generated by the Tony Award–winning 1992 Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls reopened this debate and other wounds.11 When novelist William Kennedy credited Burrows as “the main writer” in a feature article in the New York Times, he inspired a sincere but unpersuasive letter from Swerling’s son who tried to explain why the “myth” about Burrows’s sole authorship “just ain’t so.”12

Although the full extent of Kaufman’s contribution remains undocumented, his crucial role in shaping Guys and Dolls cannot be overlooked or underestimated. Just as his earlier partner in riotous comedy, Moss Hart, would work intensively with Lerner on the My Fair Lady libretto several years later and may be responsible for a considerable portion of the second act, the uncredited Kaufman had a major hand in the creation as well as the direction of the universally admired Guys and Dolls libretto. Even more than most comic writers, Kaufman was fanatically serious about the quality and quantity of his jokes, and under his guidance Burrows removed jokes that were either too easy or repeated. In addition, Burrows followed Kaufman’s advice to take the necessary time to “take a deep breath and set up your story.”13 Burrows recalls that even six weeks after the show opened to unequivocally positive notices Kaufman “pointed out six spots