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

In contrast to Pal Joey, with its prominent melodic use of a leading tone that obsessively ascends one step higher to the tonic (e.g., B to C in “Bewitched”) as a unifying device, Guys and Dolls achieves its musical power and unity from the rhythms associated with specific characters. The “guys” and “dolls,” even when singing their so-called fugues, display a conspicuous amount of syncopation and half-note and quarter-note triplet rhythms working against the metrical grain—illustrated also by Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes (Example 3.1, p. 56), Venus and Whitelaw Savory in One Touch of Venus (Example 7.2, p. 148), and Tony in West Side Story (on the words “I just met a girl named Maria” in Example 13.2b, p. 285).

The clearest and most consistently drawn rhythmic identity occurs in Adelaide’s music. Even when “reading” her treatise on psychosomatic illness in “Adelaide’s Lament,” this convincing comic heroine adopts the quarter-note triplets at the end of the verses (“Affecting the upper respiratory tract” and “Involving the eye, the ear, and the nose, and throat”). By the time she translates the symptoms into her own words and her own song, the more common, rhythmically conventional eighth-note triplets are almost unceasing.15

In order for Loesser to convince audiences that Sarah Brown and Sky Masterson are a good match, he needed to make Sarah become more of a “doll” like Adelaide; conversely, he needed to portray Sky as more gentlemanly than his crapshooting colleagues. He accomplishes the first part of this task by transforming Sarah’s rhythmic nature, giving the normally straitlaced and rhythmically even “mission doll” quarter-note triplets in “I’ll Know” and syncopations in “If I Were a Bell.”16

Sarah must also cast aside her biases against the petty vice of gambling and learn that a man does not have to be a “breakfast eating Brooks Brothers type” to be worthy of her love. In her first meeting with Sky, she discovers a person who surpasses her considerable knowledge of the Bible (Sky emphatically points out that the Salvation Army sign, “No peace unto the wicked” is incorrectly attributed to Proverbs [23:9] instead of to Isaiah [57:21]). Soon Sky will reveal himself to be morally sound, genuinely sensitive, and capable of practicing what the Bible preaches. Not only does he refuse to take advantage of her physically in act I, but he will even lie to protect her reputation in act II.

After audiences learn from his dialogue with Sarah that Sky’s interest in and knowledge of the Bible sets him apart from the other “guys,” his music tells us that he is capable of singing a different tune. His very first notes in “I’ll Know” may depart from Sarah’s lyricism, metrical regularity, and firm tonal harmonic underpinning, but after Sarah finishes her chorus, audiences will discover that Sky shares her chorus and verse as well as chapter and verse. Following Sarah’s more “doll-like” acknowledgment of her changing feelings toward Sky in “If I Were a Bell,” Sky is almost ready to initiate their second duet, “I’ve Never Been in Love Before.” But first he needs to tell Sarah in “My Time of Day” (predawn) that she is the first person with whom he wants to share these private hours. The metrical irregularity, radical melodic shifts, and above all the harmonic ambiguity that mark his world before he met Sarah capture the essence of Sky’s dramatic as well as musical personality.

The twenty measures of this private confession (the opening and closing measures are shown in Example 11.1) is stylistically far removed from any other music in Guys and Dolls. After the first chord sets up F major, Sky’s restless nature will not allow him to find solace in a tonal center. By the end of his first phrase on the words “dark time,” he is already singing a descending diminished fifth or tritone (D to A) which clashes with the dominant seventh harmony on C (C-E-G-B) that pulls to F major. Only when Sarah becomes the first person to learn Sky’s real name, the biblical Obediah, will the orchestra—as the surrogate for Sky’s feelings—return the music to F major. But now F is reinterpreted as a new dominant harmony instead of a tonic and serves to prepare a new tonal center, Bb major, and herald a new song, “I’ve Never Been in Love Before.”

Even when Sky sings his own music rather than Sarah’s, he shows his closeness to her by avoiding much of the metrical, melodic, and harmonic conventionality and syncopated fun of the other “guys.” In his song for the souls of his gambling colleagues in act II, “Luck Be a Lady,” syncopation is reserved for the ends of phrases, and his music, compared to the music of the tinhorns Rusty, Benny, and Nicely-Nicely, is contrastingly square. The marriage of Sarah and Sky at the end of the show is thus made possible (and believable) by the compromising evolution of their musical personalities. Just as Sarah becomes more like Sky and his world, Sky moves closer to Sarah’s original musical identity.

Example 11.1. “My Time of Day”

(a) opening

(b) closing

Before their individuality is established Sky and Sarah are introduced more generically in their respective worlds in one of the most perfect and imaginative Broadway expositions, an opening scene that includes “Runyonland,” “Fugue for Tinhorns,” “Follow the Fold,” and “The Oldest Established.” The ancestor of “Runyonland” was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, which opened with an inspired pantomimed prologue—Guys and Dolls also includes an independent overture—that set up an ambiance and allowed audiences to place Julie Jordan’s subsequent denial of her feelings in perspective. As we have seen in chapter 9, the Carousel pantomime focused on establishing the relationships between the central characters, Julie and Billy Bigelow, and the jealousy their romance will arouse in the carousel proprietress, Mrs. Mullin.

The musical component of the pantomimed “Runyonland” is a medley of the title song, “Luck Be a Lady,” and “Fugue for Tinhorns” in various degrees