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

with mock musical religiosity: gambling as a religious experience. In Where’s Charley? Loesser had inserted a cadence (marked “religioso”) in several places to mark the miracle in “Make a Miracle.” Later, in How to Succeed, J. Pierre-pont Finch’s faith in himself would inspire Loesser to musical religiosity and prayer at the punch line of “I Believe in You.” The revival-tune quality of the concluding “Brotherhood of Man” in this show is designated “a la Holy Rollers.” In all stages of his career Loesser would revisit the secular religiosity of his first hit, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

Example 11.3. “Follow the Fold” (opening)

In addition to the touches inspired by Kaufman, the casting of the show also led to considerable changes of emphasis. This was not new. Earlier it was noted that the will of a star, Ethel Merman, led to the rejection of one song and a reprise of another in Anything Goes. Within the next five years, some of the songs of My Fair Lady would be composed after the non-singing Rex Harrison had been cast, and written accordingly. Strangely enough, with Guys and Dollsit was not discovered until casting Sam Levene as Nathan Detroit that the creative team had cast a star who would make Harrison sound like Ezio Pinza.18

Guys and Dolls follows the Rodgers and Hammerstein integrated model with the careful insertion of a comic subplot, in Loesser’s show the fourteen-year engagement of Nathan and Adelaide and the debilitating psychosomatic symptoms brought about by this delay (described in “Adelaide’s Lament”). Indeed, Nathan’s role is truly a large one. Even much of “The Oldest Established [Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York]” is sung in his praises: “Why it’s good old reliable Nathan, / Nathan, Nathan, Nathan Detroit.—/ If you’re looking for action he’ll furnish the spot.—/ Even when the heat is on it’s never too hot, / Not for good old reliable Nathan.”

But all that the musically unreliable Nathan is given to sing in act I is a speech-like chant in the verse to this song, rhythmically set almost exclusively to quarter-note triplets and virtually monotonal (all but three pitches are Cs): “And they’ve now got a lock on the door—/ Of the gym at Public School Eighty-four” and a couple of lines later, “And things being how they are, / The back of the Police Station is out.” Later in act I, Levene as Nathan was not only deprived of leading the title song, but he was specifically instructed not to sing along.

In act II Nathan is finally—in number twenty-seven out of the thirty-two numbered selections in the vocal score—allowed to “sing” his waltz of love, “Sue me, Sue me, / What can you do me? / I love you.” But before Kaufman & Co. discovered that Levene had meant what he said when he told them he could not sing, Nathan had also been designated to lead the song “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” at the prayer meeting.19 Although this challenging song came to be indelibly associated with Stubby Kaye on stage and film in the expanded role of Nicely-Nicely Johnson, the reassignment of Nathan’s music on the surface lessens his dramatic stature as well as his credibility as a romantic lead.

In any event, Nathan’s romance with Adelaide certainly has a less comic side. How often must a major character undergo the indignity of a fourteen-year engagement (and fourteen years of a psychosomatic cold) and engage in a perpetual series of lies to her mother about her alleged husband’s promotions and their inexorably growing family? To add insult to illness, on the one occasion she is aroused to anger, Adelaide remains the last to know that Nathan is for once telling the truth. Her fiancé is indeed on his way to attend a prayer meeting, Sky having successfully gambled to obtain his presence. After he reluctantly agrees to accept the inevitable deprivation of his freedom and mobility and marry Adelaide (now of course cured), Nathan expresses his feelings about this turn of events by appropriating his fiancée’s former symptoms. Thus, after Adelaide describes the new Nathan “sitting there, beside me, every single night,” he discharges an “enormous sneeze.”

Adelaide and even Sarah are not above deceit and pretense. In the song that precedes Nathan’s sneeze, “Marry the Man Today,” the conniving pair reveal themselves as “dolls” who desire to change (in midstream) their chosen horses. A conspicuous and dramatically suitable resemblance to the pseudofugue tinhorn trio that opened the show is readily evident in the simple and static counterpoint of the following lines: “Marry the man today / Rather than sigh and sorrow, / Marry the man today / And change his ways tomorrow.”

As we have observed, future book doctors of Anything Goes rightly questioned the 1934 premise in which a non-singing Sir Evelyn Oakleigh gets the girl. Their solution in the 1962 and 1987 revivals was to interpolate songs from other Porter shows. But Nathan’s inability to sing as extensively as other secondary leads in other musicals (especially in the first act) should not be cause for alarm. Fortunately, by the end of the evening and faced with the imminent loss of Adelaide (no longer willing to be taken for granted), Nathan can and does finally demonstrate his love for his long-suffering fiancée when he breaks into song (“Sue Me”). In the Runyon story, “Pick the Winner,” Cutie Singleton, a nom de plume for Adelaide, leaves Nathan for Professor Woodhead after a ten-year engagement and lives happily ever after with her new beau in their country house. By the simple but powerful act of singing, Nathan convinces us that Loesser’s Adelaide need not have followed Cutie’s example.

The Most Happy Fella: “A Musical with a Lot of Music”

During the long Guys and Dolls run, Samuel Goldwyn persuaded Loesser to compose the music for Hans Christian Andersen (1952), a Goldwyn-produced film starring Danny Kaye. In addition to its tuneful score, the movie is notable for its screenplay by Kaufman’s former collaborator,