Enchanted Evenings - The Broadway Musical

ENCHANTED
EVENINGS
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ENCHANTED
EVENINGS
The Broadway Musical from
Show Boat to Sondheim
and Lloyd Webber
second edition
Geoffrey Block
1 2009
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Block, Geoffrey Holden, 1948–
Enchanted evenings: the Broadway musical from Show Boat
to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber / Geoffrey Block.—2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-538400-0 (pbk.)
1. Musicals—New York (State)—New York—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML1711.8.N3B56 2009
782.1'4097471—dc22 2009003980
Visit the companion website at: www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
First Edition
To the beloved memory of
John Eastburn Boswell (“jeb”), 1947–1994
Best friend, best man,
Godfather to Jessamyn and (in spirit) to Eliza
Second Edition
To the memory of my beloved parents
Ruth Block (1913–2007) and
Stanley Block (1906–2008)
Devoted wife and husband to each other, in-laws to Jacqueline,
and grandparents to Jessamyn and Eliza
CONTENTS
Preface to the First Edition xi

A New Preface xvii
Acknowledgments xxix
Using the Enchanted Evenings Website
www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings xxxiii
Overture
1. Introduction: Setting the Stage 3
Act I: Before Rodgers and Hammerstein 17

2. Show Boat: In the Beginning 19
3. Anything Goes: Songs Ten, Book Three 40
4. Porgy and Bess: Broadway Opera 58
5. On Your Toes and Pal Joey: Dance Gets into the Act and
“Sweet Water from a Foul Well” 83
6. The Cradle Will Rock: A Labor Musical for Art’s Sake 112
7. Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus: The Broadway
Stranger and His American Dreams 130
vii
Contents
8. Stage versus Screen (1): Before Rodgers and Hammerstein 153
Act II: The Broadway Musical after Oklahoma! 193

9. Carousel: The Invasion of the Integrated Musical 195
10. Kiss Me, Kate: The Taming of Cole Porter 215
11. Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella: The Greater Loesser 233
12. My Fair Lady: From Pygmalion to Cinderella 260
13. West Side Story: The Very Model of a Major Musical 279
14. Stage versus Screen (2): After Oklahoma! 309
Epilogue: The Age of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber 333

15. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Sunday
in the Park with George: Happily Ever After West Side
Story with Sondheim 335
16. The Phantom of the Opera: The Reigning Champion of Broadway 383
Selected Bibliography 411

Index 425
Available online at www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings
Synopses W1
Discography and Filmography: Selected Original, Revival,
Film, and Studio Casts W11
Appendix A: Sources, Published Librettos, and Vocal Scores W26
Appendix B: Long Runs: Decade by Decade 1920s–2000s W31
Appendix C: The Forty Longest-Running Musicals on Broadway
1920–1959 and 1920–2008 W35
Appendix D: Show Boat: 1927–1994 W37
Broadway 1927 W37
Principal Changes in Selected Stage Productions and Films
(1928–1994) W38
Manuscript Sources for Ravenal’s Entrance and Meeting
with Magnolia W41
viii
Contents
Appendix E: Anything Goes: 1934, 1962, and 1987 W42

Broadway 1934 W42
Off-Broadway Revival 1962 W42
Vivian Beaumont Revival 1987 W43
Appendix F: Porgy and Bess: Songs, Arias, and Themes (1935) W45
Appendix G: On Your Toes: Broadway 1936 and Broadway
Revival 1983 W47
Appendix H: Pal Joey: Broadway 1940 and Broadway Revival 1952 W48
Appendix I: The Cradle Will Rock (1937) W49
Appendix J: Lady in the Dark (1941) W50
Appendix K: One Touch of Venus (1943) W51
Appendix L: Carousel (1945) W52
Appendix M: Kiss Me, Kate (1948) W53
Spewack Libretto Draft (May 28, 1948) W54
Appendix N: Guys and Dolls (1950) W56
Appendix O: The Most Happy Fella (1956) W58
Appendix P: My Fair Lady (1956) W60
Appendix Q: West Side Story (1957) W61
Libretto Drafts 1 (January 1956) and 2 (Spring 1956) W61
Appendix R: Follies: Broadway 1971 and London Revival 1987 W63
Broadway 1971 W63
London Revival 1987 W64
Appendix S: Sweeney Todd (1979) W66
Thematic Reminiscences in Sweeney Todd Final Sequence
Beginning with “City of Fire!” W67
Appendix T: Sunday in the Park with George (1984) W68
Appendix U: The Phantom of the Opera (1988) W69
Outline of The Phantom of the Opera, Act I, Scenes 5 and 6 W70
Outline of The Phantom of the Opera, Act II, Scene 7 W71
Notes W73
ix
PREFACE TO THE
FIRST EDITION
I
n many ways the preparation of this book brings me back to my child-
hood, where Rodgers and Hammerstein as well as Bach and Beethoven
were frequent and compatible visitors. I cannot remember a time when
my father, a professional jazz violinist and part-time lawyer (before he meta-
morphosed into a full-time attorney and part-time classical violinist), was not
playing Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” on the piano, invariably in the key
of E. Like many Americans in the 1950s, our family record library included
the heavy shellac 78 r.p.m. boxed album of South Pacific with Mary Martin
and Ezio Pinza and the lighter 33 r.p.m. cast album of Carousel with Jan
Clayton and John Raitt. A major event was the arrival of Rodgers and Ham-
merstein’s Oklahoma! and South Pacific in their newly released film versions.
Keeping in tune with Rodgers and Hammerstein mania, I played every note
and memorized many words of the songs contained in The Rodgers and Ham-
merstein Song Book and read Hammerstein’s librettos in the (then) readily
obtainable Modern Library edition of Six Plays by Rodgers & Hammerstein.1
My family was one of the eighteen million to purchase the cast album of
My Fair Lady, and my sister quickly mastered the dialect and memorized the
lyrics for all the roles. With the dawn of the stereo era in the late 1950s, we
purchased The Music Man to test out our new portable KLH record player.2
My parents, transplanted New Yorkers who settled near San Francisco,
would see the traveling versions of Broadway shows, and by the early 1960s
they began to take their offspring along.
xi
Preface to the First Edition
Musicals created before the era of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner
and Loewe were less known. Only Gilbert and Sullivan and the occasional
1920s operetta were presented as dramatic entities. The songs, however, of
many musicals from the 1920s and ’30s were heard and played regularly in
our community as well as in our home, especially those from Porgy and Bess.
A memorable event occurred in the sixth grade when a dear family friend
from Boston came to visit, sang and played Kern and Hammerstein’s “Make
Believe,” and assisted me in my efforts to compose a small musical of three
songs as a creative arts project. Earlier that year I had written a short term
paper, “Rodgers and Hammerstein II with Lorenz Hart.”
By the time I entered high school I had churlishly abandoned Broadway
in favor of Bach, Beethoven, and Ives. As a sophomore I somewhat grudg-
ingly served as rehearsal pianist for South Pacific and the following year still
more grudgingly played the saxophone and clarinet in the Guys and Dolls pit
band. Soon even Gershwin was suspect. I had not yet read the philosopher
and sociologist Theodor Adorno and the highly acclaimed but decidedly
unpopular composer Arnold Schoenberg, both of whom vigorously cham-
pioned and successfully promoted the view that great art was rightfully des-
tined to be unpopular. Only in retrospect did I realize that an ideological and
elitist component was somehow connected to my genuine love of classical
or “serious” music. Disdain for the music of the masses followed, including
hit Broadway musicals, until and unless this repertory could earn endorse-
ments from respectable sources, such as when Leonard Bernstein compared
the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home” from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band favorably with Schubert.
In the early 1970s graduate students in historical musicology in many
programs were strongly discouraged from studying American music of any
kind. Instead, my colleagues and I at Harvard dutifully learned to deci-
pher medieval notation and researched such topics as the life and works of
King Henry VIII’s Flemish-born court composer Philip van Wilder, Haydn’s
opera seria, and what really happened at the first performance of Rite of
Spring. A research paper on the chronology and compositional process of
Beethoven’s piano concertos evolved into a dissertation and inaugurated
my lifetime desire to understand how compositions of all types initially take
shape and the practical as well as artistic reasons behind their revision.
These activities did not prevent me from stumbling on a free ticket to
Kiss Me, Kate, which to my surprise I enjoyed immensely, despite a nega-
tive predisposition. My dormant love for Broadway musicals would receive
additional rekindling when, several years later, I found myself the musical
director in a private secondary school in Ojai, California, selecting a musical
to produce and choosing Kiss Me, Kate to everyone’s enjoyment and delight,
xii
including mine. In my second year at The Thacher School I anticipated Crazy

for You, the 1992 musical based on Girl Crazy, with my own assemblage of
freely interpolated Gershwin songs mixed with songs from the “dated” 1930
show—a triumph of accessibility over authenticity. By the end of that year I
completed my doctorate, a milestone that somehow liberated me to explore
American popular music of all types.
By then I had witnessed a broadcast in which Stephen Sondheim and
conductor André Previn conversed with extraordinary articulateness about
what a musical can accomplish.3 Increasingly, stage and film musicals of
both recent and ancient vintage occupied a major and passionate role in my
life. After teaching a sequence of one-month “winterim” courses on Ameri-
can musical theater at the University of Puget Sound, including one in which
students collaborated to create an original musical, I began to teach a Survey
of American Musical Theater course first during alternate years and later
annually. When faced with the dearth of usable textbooks, I began writing
one of my own in the late 1980s. The book would, of course, correspond
to what I had been teaching, a musical-by-musical study beginning with
Show Boat that focused on the so-called Golden Era from the 1930s to the late
1950s, with a survey of Sondheim to round out the semester. You are now
holding this book.
Before the 1990s, books on Broadway musicals were almost without
exception written by theater historians and critics. For the most part these
journalistic accounts typically covered a large number of musicals some-
what briefly and offered a useful and entertaining mixture of facts, gossip,
and criticism. What they did not try to do is address what happens musically
or how songs interact with lyrics within a dramatic context.4
Most books on the Broadway musical provided biographical profiles of
principal composers and lyricists and plot summaries of popular musicals
or those judged artistically significant. Some authors went considerably
beyond these parameters, for example, Gerald Bordman by his comprehen-
siveness and Lehman Engel by focusing more selectively on critical topics
and other issues such as adaptation of literary sources.5 Two of the musicals
surveyed in the present volume, Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, have inspired
book-length monographs, and several musicals and their creators have
received rigorously thoughtful scholarly, bibliographic, and critical atten-
tion. The fruits of this activity will be duly acknowledged in what follows.6
With few exceptions the musicological community studiously ignored
the Broadway terrain. In the 1990s two important books emphasized (or
“privileged”) music for the first time: Joseph P. Swain’s The Broadway Musi-
cal: A Critical and Musical Survey (1990), a study of selected musicals from
Show Boat to Sweeney Todd, and Stephen Banfield’s more specialized study,
xiii
Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (1993).7 Swain’s valuable survey contains a

great deal of perceptive musical and dramatic criticism and analysis. Never-
theless, Swain only rarely tries to place the discussion in a historical, social, or
political context, he presents virtually no documentary history of a musical,
and he does not address the questions of how and why musicals evolved as
they did, either before opening night or in revival. Most general readers will
also find Swain’s analysis, which deals primarily with harmony, too tech-
nical to be easily understood. In contrast to Swain, Banfield, who focuses
on a body of work by one significant composer-lyricist, does address com-
positional history and offers a multivalent and less autonomous approach;
additionally, his sophisticated and frequently dense musical and dramatic
analysis successfully incorporates techniques borrowed from literary criti-
cism. Building on the solid edifices constructed by Swain and Banfield, the
present book attempts to offer a musical and dramatic discussion more
accessible to readers unfamiliar with analytical terminology.
Two important books on European opera have influenced the ensuing
discussion of American musicals and merit special mention and gratitude
here: Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama and Paul Robinson’s Opera & Ideas.8
Kerman’s unflinching insistence on music’s primary role in defining char-
acter, generating action, and establishing atmosphere results in a somewhat
sparse assemblage of canonic masterpieces. However, his brilliant over-
view of opera with its powerful guiding principle, “the dramatist is the
composer,” can be fruitfully applied to Broadway, even to those works that
resolutely reject Kerman’s model of a major operatic musical masterpiece.
Robinson’s accessible yet subtle survey of six operas (one each by Mozart,
Rossini, Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, and Strauss) and of dramatic meaning in the
two Schubert song cycles offers imaginative and convincing insights on the
power of texted music to express emotional and intellectual nuance. Both
studies display a standard of excellence that might serve and inspire nearly
any serious study of dramatic music, including the Broadway musical.
A third book on opera, Peter Kivy’s Osmin’s Rage, supplies valuable
philosophical underpinning for a discussion on music and text.9 Kivy’s dis-
tinctions between the opposite principles of “textual realism” (music that
“sets meanings, not words”) and “opulent adornment” (music that “sets
words, not meanings”) are particularly helpful. The tensions between these
two principles are embodied in the “song and dance” musicals (composed
mainly but by no means exclusively in the 1920s and ’30s) that feature “opu-
lent adornment,” and the so-called integrated musicals, the Rodgers and
Hammerstein models of “textual realism” that gained commercial success,
critical stature, and cultural hegemony beginning in the 1940s.
xiv
In the recent past intense ideological differences have been solidified. In

one camp are those who argue that musicals are at their best when fully
integrated and aspiring toward nineteenth-century European tragic opera;
in another are those who relish nonintegrated and nonoperatic musical
comedies. The contrasting perspectives of Swain and Banfield offer strong
advocates for each side. Swain, who claims to disparage the taxonomic dif-
ferences between opera and Broadway shows, nonetheless invariably places
the latter, especially musicals that eschew their tragic potential, on a lower
echelon. Thus for Swain, “though a number of its best plots have offered
opportunities for tragic composition,” the Broadway musical provides a lit-
any of “missed chances and unanswered challenges.”10 Even West Side Story,
the only musical that Swain unhesitatingly designates a masterpiece (in part
because a central character achieves the heights of tragedy when he dies
singing), falls short of operatic tragedy when Maria speaks rather than sings
her response to the death of her beloved Tony.
Banfield, sympathetic to a subject (Sondheim) who is rarely “trying to
challenge opera on its own territory,” argues that in musicals, in contrast
to operas that are through-sung, music “can often not just move in and out
of the drama but in and out of itself, and is more dramatically agile . . . than
in most opera.”11 For Banfield, West Side Story keeps faith with Bernstein’s
desire to avoid “falling into the ‘operatic trap,’ ” and Maria’s final speech
works perfectly.12
Among other juicy bones of contention are the conflicts between popular-
ity and critical acclaim, authenticity and accessibility, opulent adornment
and textual realism, artistic autonomy and social and political contextuality,
and nonintegrated versus integrated musical ideals. This preface has intro-
duced some of these issues and critical quagmires that will be reintroduced
in chapter 1 and developed in subsequent chapters. Neutrality is neither
always possible nor always desirable to achieve, especially on the subject of
critical relationships between music and text and music and drama. My gen-
eral intent, however, is to articulate the merits as well as the flaws of oppos-
ing arguments. In the court of free intellectual inquiry, more frequently than
not, at least two sides are competent to withstand scrutiny and trial.
Tacoma, Wash. G. B.
January 1997
xv
A NEW PREFACE
Broadway’s “Golden Age”

Still popular with audiences young and old, the musicals explored in
Enchanted Evenings have not vanished from our stages or our consciousness.
In fact, the situation is just the reverse. Judging by the frequency and peren-
nial popularity of revivals (the practice of restaging favorite musicals from
the past) and the competitiveness of the revival category at the annual Tony
Awards (Broadway’s Oscars), the Broadway musical has evolved into one
of America’s greatest and most distinctive cultural institutions as well as
an opportunity for new work. Increasingly, classic musicals have received
serious critical scrutiny by directors with wide-ranging visions, and audi-
ences from all over the world flock to see and experience this unique Ameri-
can (and sometimes British) contribution to popular culture. If there is a
Broadway Museum, and I think there is, the musicals you will read about in
Enchanted Evenings occupy a major wing. In fact, in the years immediately
prior to, during, and since the period I wrote Enchanted Evenings all of the
shows I discussed continued to receive attention in high-profile revivals,
the vast majority on Broadway as well as elsewhere. In addition, revival
recordings and reissues with new and original casts or other recordings in
meticulous scholarly reconstructions for some of the older models were also
made for most of these shows.
xvii
A New Preface
Here are some highlights of the stage resurrections since 1980 of shows
featured in the first edition of Enchanted Evenings arranged chronologically
by show. No show from this edition is absent from the list.1
• Show Boat: The acclaimed (and controversial) Broadway revival

staged by Harold Prince (1994)
• Anything Goes: Broadway revival at the Vivian Beaumont (1987);
London revival (1989); Royal National Theatre revival in London
(2003); London revival (2005)
• Porgy and Bess: Glyndebourne Opera staged by Trevor Nunn (1986);
New York City Opera (2000 and 2002); Los Angeles Opera (2007)
• The Cradle Will Rock: Off-Broadway production directed by John
Houseman and starring Patti Lupone (1983); feature film about
the making of the show against the backdrop of other turbulent
events in art and politics in the 1930s, directed by Tim Robbins
(1999)
• On Your Toes: Broadway revival directed by George Abbott (1983)
• Pal Joey: New York City Center’s Encores! Great American Musicals
in Concert (1995); Broadway run at Studio 54, with a rewritten
book and added songs from other Rodgers and Hart shows
(2008)
• Lady in the Dark: New York City Center’s Encores! (1994); London
premiere (1997) followed by major performances in Japan and
Philadelphia
• One Touch of Venus: Goodspeed Opera House (1987); New York
City Center’s Encores! (1995); three productions mounted by
Discovering Lost Musicals Charitable Trust (1992–2000); BBC
broadcast (1995); London premiere at The King’s Head Theatre in
2001 (a production that failed to go beyond the workshop stage
for a New York performance two weeks after September 11);
Opera North in Leeds (2004); 42nd Street Moon staging in San
Francisco (2007)
• Kiss Me, Kate: Broadway revival directed by Michael Blakemore
(881 performances) (1999–2003); London revival (2001); Italian
version in Bologna (2007)
• Carousel: Directed for London and Broadway by Nicholas Hytner
(1994); London revival (2008)
xviii
A New Preface
• Guys and Dolls: Long-running Broadway revival (1,143

performances) starring Nathan Lane, not coincidentally named
for its star comic Nathan Detroit (1992–94); long-running London
revival (2005–07); Broadway revival (2009)
• The Most Happy Fella: Broadway revival (1992); New York City
Opera (2006)
• My Fair Lady: Broadway revival (1981); Broadway revival (1993);
London revival (2001)
• West Side Story: Broadway revival (1980); London revival (1998);
Hong Kong production (with lyrics in Cantonese) (2000); Bregenz
Festival, Austria (in German) (2003 and 2004); London revival
(2008); Montreal revival (in French) (2008); Philippine production
(2008); Broadway revival directed by Arthur Laurents which
includes significant dialogue and singing in Spanish (2009)
Today the American musical also thrives as a burgeoning subdiscipline

in musicology and a significant topic of study across disciplinary boundar-
ies. This is a relatively new phenomenon. When I embarked on Enchanted
Evenings in the early 1990s, historical musicology had not yet found the
Broadway musical a fertile grazing land. Musical theater historians Gerald
Bordman (in a series of Oxford volumes), and the conductor and influen-
tial musical theater workshop director Lehman Engel wrote knowledgeably
and engagingly about musicals, although neither seriously engaged their
musical component.2 In The American Musical Theater, first published in 1967,
Engel also offered a paradigm of “workable principles” that reveal what
made certain shows “models of excellence.”3 In Engel’s view, nearly all great
musicals were a product of a “Golden Age” that started with Pal Joey (1940)
and ended with Fiddler on the Roof (1964). For the 1975 second edition, Engel
found two worthy Sondheim shows to add to the list, Company (1970) and
A Little Night Music (1973). Although Cabaret (1966) did not make the cut,
Engel singled out this work for distinction as his sole “strong runner-up to
the list of ‘best’ shows.”4
The booming cultural canon wars of the 1990s brought about the break-
down of classical canons in literature and the arts. It also led to the formation
of new ones, albeit under various pseudonyms and disguises. Despite the
increasing postmodern discontent among scholars and even some musical-
theater lovers with the idea of a prescribed list of canonic “masterpieces,”
Broadway surveys, including scholarly ones such as Joseph P. Swain’s The
Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (Oxford, 1990), generally fol-
lowed Engel and without apparent collusion favored the same small group
xix
A New Preface
of shows.5 Whatever its intentions, the overlapping between one list and
another gave the appearance that a Broadway canon had emerged, despite
protestations to the contrary and however unwelcome. Enchanted Evenings
focused on a representative few of the usual canonic suspects, starting with
Show Boat (outside Engel’s list but the starting point for many others) and
ending with West Side Story. As an epilogue, I added one post–West Side
Story chapter, a survey of Sondheim that touched on Follies and Sunday in
the Park with George.
New Broadway Scholarship
Aside from correcting some errors—such as the perpetuation of the

unfounded rumor that Carousel’s “A Real Nice Clambake” was derived from
an unused Oklahoma! song “A Real Nice Hayride”—and other minor updat-
ing and clarifications, I have left chapters 1–12 of the first edition largely
unchanged. Were I writing these chapters for the first time, no doubt I would
do some things differently. For example, the controversy over the two Kurt
Weills, the German Weill versus the American Weill, of pressing concern in
the early 1990s and a division partially reconciled in the first edition, is now
a nonissue. Just as Germany gradually became unified in the 1990s, so did
Weill. On the other hand, the notion of the “integrated” musical has become
so questionable and contentious that the new protocol is to problematize
the term or at least to place it in quotation marks (what Richard Taruskin
calls scare quotes) to mark the increasing discomfort with the term. Since
I did already problematize the idea of the integrated musical to some extent
in the first edition and since I later addressed the issue in a separate essay,
I decided not to dig up these bones of contention further.6 By letting these
now wide-awake dogs lie in the first edition chapters, I am acknowledg-
ing that in these instances musical theater historians, like the musicals they
study, reflect their own time in their efforts to serve our understanding of
the past.
In the two new chapters on film adaptation (chapters 8 and 14) and the
Epilogue chapters (chapter 15 and 16), however, I have called attention to
some of the exciting new scholarship that has appeared since the mid-1990s.
In the Epilogue, for example, I revisit the notion of the integrated musical
as it evolves into what has become known as the concept musical (another
controversial notion also commonly placed in quotation marks) and the
still-more problematic, but less discussed, “totally integrated” approach
common to the megamusical. Since the quality and quantity of bibliographic,
xx
A New Preface
scholarly, and critical material on the Broadway musical has grown impres-
sively, even exponentially, over the last decade, I was not able to take full
advantage of the new research and thinking on the musicals discussed in the
first edition. The expanded Bibliography, which includes some of this unin-
corporated literature, will point the way to new directions and possibilities.
As in the past, much of this new work emphasizes biography, social his-
tory, and the librettos of musicals without addressing how the music works
with words and stories. I have addressed some of the negative ramifications
of this trend in a review essay published in 2004.7 In contrast to the isolated
exceptions that precede the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, however,
many studies do now seriously engage with music and music’s interaction
with lyrics and narratives.8
Another noticeable trend among the many books that have appeared since
the mid-1990s is the relative absence of attention, or sympathy, to musicals
that arrived after the end of the so-called Golden Age in the mid-1960s. In an
“Omnibus Review” of five significant books in the field published between
2003 and 2005, for example, Charles Hamm notes “an almost complete
absence in these books of meaningful commentary on American musicals of
the past three decades.”9 When books do not ignore the musicals of the last
generation (other than Sondheim), the tone frequently changes from respect
to disdain, with special xenophobic antipathy reserved for the imported
megamusicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber (Cats, Phantom), the team of Alain
Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg (Les Misérables and Miss Saigon), and
the Godfather who produced this quartet of box office juggernauts, Cameron
Macintosh.10 Another assumption governing many Broadway surveys and
other recent scholarship is that anything backed by Disney cannot be good,
despite the fact that Beauty and the Beast (1994) and the still-running The Lion
King (1997), directed and designed by Julie Taymor, currently stand as the
fifth and eighth most popular Broadway musicals of all time.
Among the many new books in the field published during the past decade
or so, major work has been published on several of the musicals featured in
the first edition of Enchanted Evenings. Biographies, autobiographies, critical
studies, publications of letters and lyrics, and other important books and
essays have appeared to inform and enlighten the life and work of many
major figures and shows and offer new information and ideas to those intro-
duced in acts I and II.11 Here are a few samples:
• Show Boat: Stephen Banfield includes an important analytical
and critical study of Show Boat in his book, Jerome Kern, and Todd
Decker has begun to publish the fruits of his archival work on
Show Boat.12
xxi
A New Preface
• Porgy and Bess: Howard Pollack’s monumental life and works

study of George Gershwin devotes nearly one hundred pages to
multiple aspects of this important work from its genesis and
production history to revivals, recordings, and films. I have also
had the privilege of reading Larry Starr’s insightful chapter on
this work that will soon be readily available.13
• Lady in the Dark and Oklahoma!: In 2007, Oxford University Press
published bruce d. mcclung’s award-winning “biography” of
Lady in the Dark, published by Oxford University Press, a study
that expands and offers new insights on the research of earlier
articles I was able to use in the first edition. Although I have
chosen to focus on Carousel rather than Oklahoma!, I would be
remiss if I did not single out Tim Carter’s exceptionally well-
researched archival study of Oklahoma! published by Yale
University Press, also in 2007.14 Both books are models for future
studies of individual musicals.
• Thomas L. Riis has added considerably to our knowledge of Guys
and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella in his recent book on Frank
Loesser.15
• Scott Miller’s three volumes containing thirty-four essays on
musicals (1996–2001), Raymond Knapp’s two-volume collection
of essays on thirty-eight individual stage musicals, ten musical
films, and one television musical (2005–2006), and Joseph P.
Swain’s 1990 survey of sixteen musicals (which includes a new
chapter on Les Misérables and a new concluding essay in its
second edition published in 2002) also complement and expand
on many of the shows discussed in the two editions of Enchanted
Evenings among other shows.16
Stage versus Screen

For good or ill, many first experience Broadway musicals through film adap-
tations, which, no matter how faithful to their stage sources (not always a
plus), remain distinct and even contradictory entities. The congruities and
distinctions between stage and screen versions of the shows we love merit
close study. In the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, however, I did not
devote much attention to these film adaptations. I have tried to fill in this
lacuna in the second edition with two new chapters on the film adaptations
xxii
A New Preface
of musicals featured in act I and act II, a discussion of the 2007 Tim Burton
Sweeney Todd with Johnny Depp in the greatly expanded Sondheim chap-
ter, and a discussion of Joel Schumacher’s Phantom of the Opera film adapta-
tion in 2004 in the newly written chapter on Lloyd Webber. Like Tolstoy’s
unhappy families, nearly all the stage musicals featured in the first edition
have suffered (and occasionally enjoyed) a musical film adaptation, and in
these new film chapters and portions of other chapters I write about most
of them. Existing material on these films tend to focus on behind-the-scene
stories and casting gossip rather than on how these adaptations altered or
added to the stage shows. These surveys also rarely discuss how the nature
of film media—and surrounding ideologies—moved directors and produc-
ers to treat the stage originals in some cases as expendable and in others
as sacrosanct. The second edition of Enchanted Evenings will engage these
neglected issues.
Some of the film adaptations discussed in chapter 8 are difficult to obtain.
One of these is the 1936 film version of Anything Goes with rising film star
Bing Crosby and its already risen stage star, Ethel Merman. Another is
Samuel Goldwyn’s unfairly maligned eightieth and final film of 1959, Porgy
and Bess, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy
Dandridge in the title roles. Despite numerous infelicities and distortions,
both films are well worth the effort it might take to locate them. In contrast,
some of the film adaptations discussed in chapter 14 are probably better
known than their stage versions. Prime specimens in this category include
the Academy Award–winning musical film adaptations of My Fair Lady with
Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Broadway’s original Henry Higgins,
Rex Harrison, and West Side Story, a frequent visitor to high schools all over
America to complement the study of Romeo and Juliet. What are we seeing
(and hearing) when we see these films? What are we missing?
The film chapters and remarks on the Sweeney Todd and The Phantom of
the Opera film adaptations will address these and other questions, including
how the plots, scripts, songs, and Broadway casts have been altered, what
was cut, what was retained, and why. Some of the films explored, while
not without controversy, were financially and critically successful in their
own day and remain well known and loved in ours. Until the 1950s, the
producers who controlled the studios and their contracted stars and song-
writers preferred infidelity over allegiance to Broadway stage sources. From
the 1930s through the 1950s all films were also subject to the Hays Produc-
tion Code, which enforced a stricter view than Broadway censors of what
was proper for a song lyric or a plot. This alternative universe explains the
expurgations of Cole Porter’s famously adult lyrics in the film adaptations
of both Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate and the disposal of Vera Simpson’s
xxiii
A New Preface
husband from the plot so that her affair with Pal Joey would not be an adul-
terous one. Nearly twenty years earlier Broadway audiences were already
free to experience and relish this unsavory material. Before the 1960s had
ended, Hollywood had achieved parity with Broadway on the degree of
unsavoriness permitted.
Despite the liberties they often take with their stage sources (Kim Kowalke
refers to most film adaptations as “generic deformation”), the films do not
invariably suffer by comparison.17 Take the 1936 Show Boat, in which, unusu-
ally, the authors were able to exert some creative control, including the use
of a screenplay by Hammerstein. Here, the new songs were all by Hammer-
stein and Kern and the creators of these songs were the same people who
helped make the thoughtful and imaginative changes necessary to adhere
to the unofficial but binding “two hour” rule operative from the 1930s
through the 1950s. Arriving a few years after the 1932 New York revival,
the film featured timeless performances by Charles Winninger and Helen
Morgan, reprising their stage roles of Cap’n Andy and Julie LaVerne, and
Paul Robeson, the actor originally intended to play Joe. The result was a film
that inspired Kern scholar Stephen Banfield to make the case that the film’s
dramatic structure constitutes an improvement of the problematic original
Broadway second act.18
The 1936 Anything Goes adaptation may have cut or mutilated much of
Porter, but it does give audiences a chance to see the original Ethel Merman
in her prime and fine film portrayals of Billy Crocker by the young Bing
Crosby, and the character of Moon by Charlie Ruggles. It also delivers a
surprising amount of the original Broadway libretto, which is much funnier
than later revisionists give it credit for. Most of the films that adapted Broad-
way shows did something right, and we will gain a better understanding
about the films, their sources, and ourselves from watching them—as long
as we do not rest our evaluation solely on their fidelity to the stage works
we hold dear.
Film adaptations of the Golden Age musicals, most of which were released
about a decade after their Broadway debuts, tend to be more faithful to their
original plots, scripts, and songs, and despite some deleted and rearranged
dialogue and song cuts, the new songs (e.g., in the Kiss Me, Kate and Guys and
Dolls adaptations) are almost invariably those of the Broadway songwriters.
In addition to discussing their relative fidelity and completeness, the film
chapters will address the practice of voice dubbing and various less notice-
able technological changes that manipulate and transform live theater into
the deceptively more realistic film medium. Some of these films have exerted
a profound effect on how audiences have come to appreciate the stage origi-
nals, and these chapters will address this historical legacy as well.
xxiv
A New Preface
Sources on West Side Story (to conclude with a particularly well-known

example) seldom neglect to mention that it was the film version rather than
the stage version that catapulted this show into universal popular conscious-
ness. Indeed, the 1961 film, co-directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins,
came within one award of a clean Academy Awards sweep, winning ten
out of a possible eleven awards. Despite a few conspicuous changes in the
song order, all the original West Side Story songs are present and accounted
for (unlike virtually every preceding film adaptation of a musical). Also in
marked contrast to most Hollywood film adaptations of Broadway from the
1930s to the 1950s, no songs were added, either by studio composers on con-
tract or by Leonard Bernstein, the composer. Although Robbins, the origi-
nal director and choreographer of the stage version, was fired from the film
after directing the Prologue for his inability to maintain a financially sound
production schedule, most of the choreography that appears on screen is
faithful to Robbins’s vision and that of original and film co-choreographer
Peter Gennaro.
The love versus hate theme of Romeo and Juliet carries over into the con-
trasting reactions this (and other) film adaptations inspire. Some film critics
loved the Robbins-Wise translation from stage to screen. Arthur Knight, in the
Saturday Review, considered it “a triumphant work of art”; Stanley Kauffmann
went even further when he proclaimed the adaptation “the best film musical
ever made.”19 On the other hand, an uncharacteristically grumpy Pauline Kael
did not even like the dancing and asked, “How can so many critics have fallen
for all this frenzied hokum.”20 Love it or hate it, the film remains one of the
most memorable film adaptations of a Broadway show.
Enchanted Evenings: A Textbook Example?

In the Preface to the First Edition I relate what brought me to write Enchanted
Evenings. I described the role musicals played in my childhood and adoles-
cence, my rejection of musicals as unworthy of my love, and my return to
the fold after completing a dissertation on the genesis and compositional
process of Beethoven’s early piano concertos. I also explain how this book
was the first to combine traditional musicological practices, such as the
study of primary manuscripts, with a serious discussion of how musicals
took shape in the minds of their creators and how the music in musicals
dramatically enhances words and stories. My goal was to write a book that
I wanted to write and at the same time a book that corresponded to what
I wanted to teach in my course, The Broadway Musical. Although most of
xxv
A New Preface
the musicals I chose to write about would generally be classified among the
usual suspects, others (e.g., The Cradle Will Rock, One Touch of Venus, and
The Most Happy Fella) might be considered idiosyncratic. Even when dealing
with such an essential component as Rodgers and Hammerstein, I felt free
to include Rodgers’s personal favorite, simply because it also interested and
moved me more than, say, Oklahoma! The book was my party, and I could
cry over Carousel if I wanted to.
Increasingly, however, the first edition seemed in need of some updat-
ing to better serve a general audience. It also constituted an incomplete
reflection of what I covered in my course in a given semester. Long before
Johnny Depp came along, a Broadway course without Sweeney Todd seemed
unthinkable. For years I have also spent a week on The Phantom of the Opera,
now included prominently in the second edition. Although I rarely fail to
single out Engel’s runner-up Cabaret in my course, unfortunately space did
not permit me to give this show or the important career of John Kander and
Fred Ebb (almost, but not quite brought to a halt by the death of Ebb in 2004)
the attention they merit.21
In preparing a second edition, I soon realized I would need to neglect
other major shows by those who followed the composers and lyricists who
starred in the first edition, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and
Lorenz Hart, Marc Blitzstein, Kurt Weill, Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein,
Frank Loesser, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederic Loewe, and Leonard Bernstein,
and in the process featured roles by major directors and choreographers,
including George Abbott, George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Moss Hart,
George S. Kaufman, Rouben Mamoulian, and Jerome Robbins. Nearly
fifty years have gone by since the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation
passed the torch to a new generation starting in the late 1950s with Jerry
Bock and Sheldon Harnick and then moving into the early 1960s with Cy
Coleman, Jerry Herman, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Stephen Sondheim,
and Charles Strouse; the 1970s with Marvin Hamlisch, Andrew Lloyd Web-
ber, and Stephen Schwartz; the 1980s with Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel
Schönberg, William Finn, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, and Maury
Yeston; the 1990s and 2000s with Jason Robert Brown, Stephen Flaherty and
Lynn Ahrens, Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChuisa, Jonathan Larson, and
Jeanine Tesori. The above list is by no means exhaustive.
With the exception of the Sondheim–Lloyd Webber Epilogue and some
attention to Hal Prince (who as the director of both Sweeney Todd and The
Phantom of the Opera successfully bridged the divide between these central
musical figures) and James Lapine, the second edition leaves most of the
lacunae unfilled. Nevertheless, my intention and hope is that this new edi-
tion will serve readers at least a little more adequately and usefully. For
xxvi
A New Preface
those who arrived on Broadway through Hollywood (and for those who
want to know thine enemy), the two new chapters on film adaptations and
the discussions of the Sweeney Todd and Phantom of the Opera films in the
greatly expanded Sondheim and entirely new Lloyd Webber chapters could
perhaps provide a point of access and lead to greater understanding and
appreciation of both stage and screen musicals.
When Enchanted Evenings appeared in 1997, Lloyd Webber’s Cats, directed
by Trevor Nunn, was on the verge of surpassing Michael Bennett and Marvin
Hamlisch’s A Chorus Line as Broadway’s longest running show, and Phantom
stood in fourth place behind the then still running Les Misérables, Cats, and
A Chorus Line on the all-time Broadway Hit Parade. Other shows by the
popular French and British invaders, Les Misérables and Miss Saigon (lyrics
by Boublil, music by Schönberg, and produced by Cameron Mackintosh),
Phantom (Lloyd Webber, also produced by Mackintosh), and Sunset Boule-
vard (Lloyd Webber, directed by Nunn) were in the process of extending
their runs, in some cases for more than a decade.
As I write this new preface, Phantom stands alone as the reigning champion,
followed by Cats, “Les Miz,” Chorus Line, and two shows new to the Broadway
scene twelve years ago, the Chicago revival and The Lion King. Musicals that
arrived about the time of Enchanted Evening’s first edition or since have both
begun and ended some of the longest runs in Broadway history (see “The Top
Forty Greatest Hit Musicals from 1920 to 2008 in the online website www.oup
.com/us/enchantedevenings—the numbers in parentheses refer to their cur-
rent place in this list): Beauty and the Beast (5), Rent (6), Hairspray (16), The Produc-
ers (17), Cabaret (Revival) (18), Smokey Joe’s Café (24), Aida (28), Monty Python’s
Spamalot (35), Jekyll & Hyde (37), and 42nd Street (Revival) (38). Another trio of
megahit shows that opened after Enchanted Evenings are still running, one or
more of which may reach the Top Broadway 10 by the time they eventually
close their curtains: Mamma Mia! (13), Avenue Q (22), and Wicked (23).
While these shows have attracted large audiences, Sondheim’s shows con-
tinued to enjoy greater critical prestige. In 1993, Sondheim became the sub-
ject of the first major musicological study of a Broadway composer, Stephen
Banfield’s Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals. Five years later the American
Musicological Society national meeting in Boston devoted a special evening
session to Sondheim. Lloyd Webber’s musicals have gradually attracted the-
ater scholars and musicologists as well, albeit far fewer than the legions of
literary and dramatic critics, cultural historians, and sociologists in addition
to the many musicologists attracted to the work of Sondheim. The chapters
on Sondheim and Lloyd Webber will try to shed light on why there exists
such a deep chasm between the ways audiences, critics, and theater histori-
ans have assessed these two major contributors to the American musical.
xxvii
A New Preface
Audiences did not know it at the time but by 1997 both Sondheim and
Lloyd Webber had completed most of their Broadway work.22 Their most
recent New York successes, Sondheim and Lapine’s Passion and Lloyd
Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, both arriving in 1994, had also recently closed. It
turns out that the years since the first edition of Enchanted Evenings marked
the beginning of the Post-Sondheim and Post–Lloyd Webber Era, a subject
for future books by future authors. Meanwhile, the contrasting achievements
and reputations of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber and the issues these impor-
tant Broadway figures raise (e.g., tradition vs. modernity and popularity vs.
critical acclaim) will serve in this second edition of Enchanted Evenings as
worthy representatives of the Broadway story beyond West Side Story.
To quote Cinderella’s opening and closing lines in Into the Woods, “I
wish.”
Tacoma, Wash. G. B.
January 2009
xxviii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
W
ithout more than a little help from parents, family, friends, teach-
ers and professors, colleagues, students, readers and editors,
librarians and archivists and the collections they serve, and copy-
right owners and their assistants and lawyers, this book could not have been
written. I am glad for this opportunity to thank some of the institutions and
people that contributed to this collaborative process.
Collections in the New York Public Library (Loesser), Yale University
(Porter, Weill), the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Blitzstein, Moss
Hart, Sondheim), the Kurt Weill Foundation (Weill), and the Library of Con-
gress (Gershwin, Kern, Loewe, Porter, Rodgers, and Weill) were indispens-
able in my research. Of the many who facilitated my use of these priceless
holdings I would like to thank individually Harold L. Miller of the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin, David Farneth and Joanna C. Lee of The
Kurt Weill Foundation, Victor Cardell and Kendall Crilly of Yale University,
and especially Raymond A. White of the Library of Congress, for sharing his
time and knowledge so generously.
For special kindnesses I would like to identify and thank the follow-
ing: Louis H. Aborn, President, Tams-Witmark; Tom Briggs, Director, The
Rodgers and Hammerstein Theatre Library; Tom Creamer, Dramaturg, The
Goodman Theater; Marty Jacobs and Marguerite Lavin of the Museum of
the City of New York; David Leopold, Al Hirschfeld’s representative at the
Margo Feiden Galleries; and Roberta Staats and Robert H. Montgomery
xxix
Acknowledgments
of the Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trusts. A grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities in 1990 enabled me to research
and draft several chapters, and the University of Puget Sound provided gen-
erous financial and other assistance at several stages over the past decade.
I am also grateful for the expertise and helpfulness of Oxford University
Press, especially my editor, Maribeth Payne, her assistant, Soo Mee Kwon,
production editor Joellyn M. Ausanka, and copy editor Paul Schlotthauer.
Jacqueline Block, Andrew Buchman, and Richard Lewis read portions of
various early drafts, offered useful advice and encouragement, and helped
me to consolidate central ideas as well as many details. In later stages sev-
eral reviewers offered valuable suggestions both large and small that I was
able to incorporate into the final draft. Throughout I was guided by the wise
counsel of my friend, colleague, and “ideal reader” (i.e., intelligent, curious,
and challenging, but not necessarily a musician), Michael Veseth, Professor
of Economics.
The following people also provided much-needed information, services,
or support: Marcie Bates, Ronald L. Blanc, Abba Bogin, John E. Boswell,
J. Peter Burkholder, Theodore S. Chapin, Tara Corcoran, Christopher Davis,
Lee Davis, Denise Dumke, Sarah Dunlop, Arthur Elias, Hugh Fordin, April
Franks, Peter P. Mc.N. Gates, Rosemarie Gawelko, Peter Greenfield, David
Grossberg, John L Hughes, Judy Hulbert, Autumn Inglin, Caroline Kane,
Andrew King, Al Kohn, Frank Korach, Deann Kreutzer, Arthur Laurents,
Florence Leeds, bruce d. mcclung, Anne McCormick, Judith McCulloh,
Kathy McCullough, Paul McKibbins, Zoraya Mendez, Betty Kern Miller,
Jeremy Nussbaum, Leonard Pailet, Harriet F. Pilpel, Mitchell Salem, Eve-
lyn Sasko, Joan Schulman, Larry Starr, Jo Sullivan, Hope H. Taylor, Andrea
N. Van Kampen, and Robin Walton.
Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends. My parents and
my sister, Norma, introduced me to the joy of musicals when I was a child,
and the senior Blocks have unceasingly nurtured my intellectual and aes-
thetic growth ever since. My friends shared and profoundly enriched my
processes of discovery. My wife, Jacqueline, was my friendliest and most
helpful critic. My daughters, Jessamyn and Eliza, not only inspired me to
organize my time more efficiently but gave perspective and meaning to this
and all my other work.
The second edition of Enchanted Evenings was born and nurtured from
inception to fruition through the generosity and wisdom of my editor at
Oxford University Press, Norm Hirschy. Throughout every stage of the
process, including an insightful reading of the new chapters, Norm offered
xxx
Acknowledgments
the full range of his punctual, thoughtful, nuanced, and always kind and
enthusiastic editorial expertise, guidance, and support. I can’t thank him
enough. Thanks also to Oxford’s Senior Production Editor Joellyn Ausanka
for honoring me by requesting this book and then ably guiding it through
the production process as she did with the first edition and with The Richard
Rodgers Reader. I would also like to thank Patterson Lamb for her unobtru-
sive and helpful copy editing and Katharine Boone and Madelyn Sutton for
their administrative assistance.
For this, as with every project I have undertaken, the library and music
office staff at the University of Puget Sound was invariably friendly and
helpful. In addition, Media Consultant Stephen Philbrook and his student
assistant Kyle Cramer provided indispensable assistance through the com-
plicated task of locating and processing the new film photos. I am also
grateful to my students for keeping me in touch with what is happening on
Broadway (and in general for that matter) and for sharing their perceptive
thoughts, observations, and reactions.
Michael Veseth, the “ideal reader” of the first edition, was always avail-
able to demonstrate his problem-solving acumen and to help me figure
out what I was trying to accomplish. Andrew Buchman offered thorough,
knowledgeable, and helpful comments on the expanded Sondheim chapter
and the three new chapters and provided an invaluable sounding board and
an endless source of enthusiasm and encouragement at every stage.
As with the first edition, my wife, Jacqueline, and daughters, Jessamyn
and Eliza, provided a family ambiance of love and encouragement, bless-
ings that were deeply appreciated and especially meaningful at a time of
loss and mourning. My mother died in August 2007, not long after Norm
first proposed my doing an expanded second edition of Enchanted Evenings,
and my dad died while I was writing the new chapters last October. I dedi-
cate this second edition to their inspiring example and beloved memory.
xxxi
USING THE ENCHANTED
EVENINGS WEBSITE
O
xford has created a companion website, www.oup.com/us/
enchantedevenings, to accompany Enchanted Evenings: The Broad-
way Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, and the
reader is encouraged to take full advantage of it. Among its contents, the
website offers plot synopses, a discography and filmography, appendices
of Sources, Published Librettos, and Vocal Scores, Long Runs: Decade by
Decade 1920s–2000s, The Forty Longest-Running Musicals on Broadway
1920–1959 and 1920–2008, and additional useful and extensive appendi-
ces listing scenes and songs for the opening night Broadway versions of all
of the principal shows discussed in the main text. In addition, the website
offers outlines of scenes and songs from pre-Broadway tryouts, Broadway
revivals, and other source material to assist the reader’s understanding and
comprehension of the discussions. The phrase “online website” will appear
at the mention of these appendices in the main text.
xxxiii
OVERTURE
chapter one
INTRODUCTION
Setting the Stage
T
he central subjects in acts I and II of this book are fourteen “book”
musicals that premiered on Broadway between the late 1920s and
the late 1950s, beginning with Show Boat (1927) and ending with West
Side Story (1957).1 All of these shows, and the Sondheim and Lloyd Web-
ber shows discussed in the Epilogue—most for several generations—have
demonstrated a measure of popularity and critical approbation. They also
offer an array of fascinating critical, analytical, social, and historical issues.
Perhaps more important, the musicals surveyed here continue to move us
to applaud and cheer (and sometimes hiss), to sing their songs, follow their
stories, and make us laugh and cry. In short, they entertain us. Forty, fifty,
sixty, even eighty years later we eagerly revisit these shows, not only on
Broadway, but in high school and college productions and amateur and pro-
fessional regional theaters of all shapes and sizes, artistic aims, audiences,
and budgets.
In this selective (and to some degree idiosyncratic) survey I do not pre-
sume to develop a theory of permanent or ephemeral values or to unravel the
mysteries of either artistic merit or popular success. I do, however, attempt
to establish a critical and analytical framework that might contribute to an
understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the selected musicals. The
purpose of this introduction is to present recurring topics and issues, to
encapsulate the approach to the subject this book will take, and to explain—
and sometimes defend—the choices.
3
Enchanted Evenings
Why start with Show Boat? Certainly, other American musicals that
premiered before December 27, 1927, are still successfully revived. Never-
theless, although the choice of where to begin a survey of Broadway is by
nature somewhat arbitrary and destined to generate controversy, Broad-
way historians and critics with surprising unanimity subscribe to the view
espoused by the admittedly biased judgment of Show Boat enthusiast Miles
Kreuger: “The history of the American Musical Theatre, quite simply, is
divided into two eras—everything before Show Boat and everything after
Show Boat.”2 Show Boat not only opened up a world of possibilities for what
an ambitious American musical on an American theme could accomplish; it
remains firmly anchored as the first made-in-America musical to achieve a
secure place in the core repertory of Broadway musicals.
Before Show Boat the Broadway shows that created their greatest initial
and most lasting imprints were often British and Viennese imports such as
William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore (1879) and Franz
Lehár’s The Merry Widow (1907), respectively. Earlier shows that displayed
unequivocally American themes—for example, the so-called Mulligan shows
of Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart between 1879 and 1883, Percy Gaunt and
Charles H. Hoyt’s phenomenally successful A Trip to Chinatown in 1891 (657
performances), and George M. Cohan’s Little Johnny Jones in 1904—are today
remembered for their songs.3 The latter show is perhaps best known from its
partly staged reincarnation in film (the 1942 classic film biography of Cohan,
Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring James Cagney) or the musical biography George
M! (1968), which features a potpourri of memorable Cohan songs. Victor
Herbert’s Naughty Marietta (1910), Jerome Kern’s so-called Princess Theatre
Shows (1915–1918) with books and lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bol-
ton (especially Very Good Eddie and Leave It to Jane), Harry Tierney and Joseph
McCarthy’s Irene (1919), Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince in Heidelberg
(1924), Vincent Youmans’s and Irving Caesar’s No, No, Nanette (1925), and
The Desert Song (1926) (music by Romberg, lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar
Hammerstein 2nd) are occasionally revived and singled out as outstanding
exponents of the American musical before Show Boat.4 But unlike Gilbert and
Sullivan and Lehár’s imported classics, these stageworthy as well as melodi-
ous operettas and musical comedies are not widely known, and the Herbert
and Romberg operettas are mainly familiar to the Broadway-attending pub-
lic primarily in greatly altered MGM film versions.5 The unfairly neglected
musicals before Show Boat certainly merit a book of their own.
By 1927, the early masters of the American Broadway musical, Herbert,
Cohan, Romberg, and Rudolf Friml, either had completed or were near-
ing the end of their numerous, lucrative, and—for their era—long-lived
Broadway runs. Joining Kern, a new generation of Broadway composers
4
Introduction
and lyricists—Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, George and Ira
Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and, in Germany, Kurt Weill—all
but Hammerstein and Weill are featured in Al Hirschfeld’s drawing “Amer-
ican Popular Song: Great American Songwriters”—had already launched
their Broadway careers by 1927.6
But despite their auspicious opening salvos, the greatest triumphs for this
illustrious list, with the exception of Kern’s, would arrive after Show Boat in
the 1930s and 1940s.
“American Popular Song: Great American Songwriters” (clockwise

from left): Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen,
Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin,
Hoagy Carmichael, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. 1983. © AL
HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive
representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK.
WWW. ALHIRSCHFELD.COM
5
Enchanted Evenings
Critical Issues
Although the present survey will offer biographical profiles of the compos-
ers, lyricists, librettists, and other key players in order to place their careers
in the context of a particular musical, critical and analytical concerns will
receive primary attention. In fact, each of the fourteen musicals explored
in the main body of the text and the Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd
Webber musicals in chapters 15 and 16 demonstrate critical issues of endur-
ing interest. Two issues in particular emerge as central themes and will
occur repeatedly throughout this survey: the tension between two ideologi-
cal approaches—song and dance versus integrated—to the Broadway musi-
cal, and the alleged conflict between temporal popularity and lasting value
and the selling out, again alleged, not of tickets but of artistic integrity.
Acute manifestations of the latter conflict have been attributed to the
careers of Gershwin, Rodgers, Weill, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, and
Sondheim. The former issue is embodied in (but by no means confined to) the
differences between the Rodgers and Hart and the Rodgers and Hammerstein
shows; the career of Porter, who, after a string of hits (and then some flops)
in musicals modeled after Anything Goes, responded in Kiss Me, Kate to the
“anxiety of influence” generated by Rodgers and Hammerstein; and the con-
troversial but frequently alleged schism between the European and the
American musicals of Weill.7 At the risk of giving away the plot, the view
espoused here is that the song and dance musical comedies that prevailed in
the 1920s and ’30s and the integrated musicals that became more influential
in the 1940s and ’50s both allow a meaningful dramatic relationship between
songs and their shows. A subtext of the ensuing discussion is that selling
tickets does not necessarily mean selling out artistic integrity.
In each chapter readers will hear again from opening-night theater (and
occasionally music) critics. These critics were usually the first to offer pro-
phetic pontifications for Broadway audiences eager to discover whether or
not they should feel smug or inadequate in their appreciation or rejection
of a show. The critics (again, mostly theater critics) can be reviled but they
cannot be ignored, especially since, despite their lack of specialized musi-
cal training, they have consistently demonstrated remarkable precognition
(or inspired self-fulfilling prophecies) regarding the critical as well as the
popular fate of Broadway shows. Although they must produce their work
under enormous pressure and seemingly against all odds, receiving little
sympathy in the process, opening-night critics frequently call attention to
issues that will reappear to haunt a show. Such early perceived problems
and issues as Show Boat’s second act or the jarring stylistic heterogeneity of
6
Introduction
Porgy and Bess or The Most Happy Fella do not go away but remain to be reas-
sessed and reinterpreted by future generations.
The degree to which the stage works we love should be performed in
authentic versions—to the often questionable extent this is possible—has
been a source of debate in America for more than two centuries. Writing
about nineteenth-century American approaches to European opera, Richard
Crawford defines accessibility as “the tailoring of the music to suit particular
audiences and circumstances” and authenticity “as an ideal countering the
marketplace’s devotion to accessibility.”8 According to Crawford, accessibil-
ity “privileges occasions over works” and “invests ultimate authority in the
present-day audiences.” “Authenticity privileges works over occasions” and
“invests ultimate authority in works and the traditions within which they are com-
posed.” The desirability of—or resistance to—establishing an authentic musi-
cal and literary text for a show and the struggle between authenticity and
accessibility will loom as a major issue in several chapters of this survey, in
particular those on Show Boat, Anything Goes, On Your Toes, Porgy and Bess,
and the James Goldman-Stephen Sondheim-Hal Prince-Michael Bennett Fol-
lies.9 Kern and Hammerstein, the principal creators of Show Boat, themselves
produced a second “authentic” version that would be more “accessible” to
audiences desiring the newer Rodgers and Hammerstein model. Anything
Goes revivals in 1962 and 1987 would be equipped with a new book and many
songs interpolated from other Porter shows. The 1983 On Your Toes would
match a new book with the original score (albeit somewhat rearranged).
The original “operatic” sung form (emphasizing authenticity) of Porgy
and Bess has clearly prevailed in recent years over its “Broadway” form
with spoken dialogue (emphasizing accessibility). Nevertheless, consider-
able debate continues to rage over what constitutes an authentic text for
this work. Charles Hamm has argued that the cuts made by the creators in
its original Theatre Guild production are justifiable for artistic as well as for
commercial reasons and that the current urge to restore these cuts creates a
historically and aesthetically untenable reconstruction.10 With the purpose
of shedding some light on this heated subject, the chapter on Porgy and Bess
will treat at length the historical background and aesthetic problems posed
by one such cut, the “Buzzard Song.”
The starting point for contemplating the “text” of a musical is almost
invariably a vocal score rather than a full orchestral score, and later—after
the release of Oklahoma! in 1943—the cast recording in various states of
completion. It is therefore not surprising that Broadway musicals as a genre
have been unusually susceptible to identity crises. Although some musicals
after Oklahoma! were considerably reworked in future productions, musicals
7
Enchanted Evenings
prior to this landmark show typically have been treated as less fixed and
therefore more subject to revision and interpolation. The first part of this
survey will trace how several shows have evolved in response to the com-
peting interests of accessibility or authenticity and what these responses tell
us about changing social and aesthetic tastes and values.
Analytical Issues
The principal analytical question raised in this survey is how music and lyr-
ics serve, ignore, or contradict dramatic themes and ideas, both in specific
scenes and in the shows as a whole. Although this study will only infre-
quently treat music autonomously, a major factor behind the selection of the
shows surveyed is the widely appreciated musical richness and enduring
appeal of their scores. In contrast to most previous surveys, in which music
is neglected beyond unhelpful generalities about its power to convey mood,
music in this study will emerge as an equal (and occasionally more than
equal) partner to the other components of a show, including lyrics, librettos,
choreography, and stage direction.
Even when a musical is seemingly distinguished more by self-contained
rather than integrated songs, the relationship of music and lyrics and music’s
power to express dramatic themes will be a central aesthetic issue for each musi-
cal. While some admiration will be reserved for those musicals that approxi-
mate Joseph Kerman’s criteria for European operatic excellence, using music to
define character and generate action as espoused in his Opera as Drama, other
musicals considered with equal favor here do not accomplish this at all.11
The philosophical distinctions regarding text setting expressed by Peter
Kivy apply also to the disparate approaches of Broadway musicals. As noted
in the Preface to the First Edition, Kivy contrasts “the principle of textual real-
ism,” in which the meanings of words are “interpreted” musically, “with
another approach to the setting of texts . . . the principle of opulent adornment,”
in which texts are set like precious jewels “hindered neither by the mean-
ing nor the intelligibility of what he [the composer] ‘sets.’ ”12 The contrast-
ing careers of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein represent
these different approaches. Comparisons might suggest that something was
lost as well as gained by the abandonment of cleverness, wit, and autono-
mous memorable tunes (Kivy’s “opulent adornment” of words) in favor
of integrated and more operatically constructed musicals filled with such
techniques such as leitmotivs, foreshadowing, thematic transformation, and
classical borrowings, however convincingly employed for various dramatic
purposes (Kivy’s “textual realism”).
8
Introduction
The language of the analysis is intended to be accessible to readers

unversed in musical vocabulary. For this reason harmonic details will receive
less emphasis than melodic and rhythmic aspects. Some of the shows dis-
cussed here adopt techniques analogous to those practiced in the operas of
Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner, and the book is based on the premises that for
some musicals, melodic and rhythmic connections and imaginative use of
classical borrowings (for striking examples of the latter see West Side Story)
audibly enrich the dramatic fabric, and that some knowledge of these connec-
tions might contribute to the appreciation and enjoyment of these works.
For readers who neither read music nor profess any musical discernment
beyond knowledge of what they like, the intent here is that the lyrics that
accompany most of the musical examples will provide an aid in figuring
out the point and purpose of the analytical discussion without undue dis-
comfort. Since for many, negotiating musical terminology of any kind is an
ordeal, occasionally even rudimentary concepts, including intervals, rhyth-
mic note values, and the idea of central and hierarchical key relationships,
will need to be explained. Although the attempt to create a text suitable for
a “Broadway audience” unaccustomed to musical terminology may inevi-
tably lead to some oversimplification from the perspective of theorists and
musicologists, it is nevertheless the goal that something meaningful and
new can be gained for this audience as well. In nearly all cases the focus will
be on those musical features that can actually be heard, and on the musical
expression of dramatic meanings and dramatic context.
The Making of a Musical, Adaptation,

and Social Issues
How is a musical created and how does knowledge of compositional pro-
cess, including the revisions made during out-of-town tryouts, lead to a bet-
ter understanding and appreciation of the works we see and hear today?
How were the composers, lyricists, and librettists, our principal subjects,
influenced by directors, choreographers, producers, and audiences? How
did the creators of these shows achieve a balance between artistic and com-
mercial control of their work?
Although a knowledge of a musical’s compositional process can provide
partial answers to these questions, the study of how a musical evolves from
pre-compositional discussions, early sketches, and drafts to opening night
and subsequent revivals has not been widely explored in the literature on
Broadway.13 In fact, this book is the first to do so over a broad spectrum
9
Enchanted Evenings
of the field. Sometimes the creative problems posed by musicals seem to

find solutions by opening night or shortly thereafter; other problems remain
for the life (and afterlife) of the show. When source materials permit this
type of an inquiry—and some musicals were selected for this survey in part
because they left conspicuous paper trails—the present study will exam-
ine how unpublished compositional materials (such as early libretto and
lyric drafts, musical sketches, and letters) support or contradict more widely
available published memoirs, interviews, and retrospective panels of cre-
ative participants.
One common denominator that links most of the musicals discussed in
this survey is the practice, ubiquitous after Oklahoma!, of adapting a literary
source for the musical stage (see “Sources, Published Librettos, and Vocal
Scores” in the online website). Three adaptations that contend with formi-
dable antecedents are explored at some length. The chapters on these shows
will examine how and why these famous plays were adapted for new audi-
ences in a new medium and how they preserved (Kiss Me, Kate and West
Side Story) or distorted (My Fair Lady) the fundamental dramatic meanings
of their sources in their musical reincarnations. The two new chapters that
conclude acts I and II (chapters 8 and 14) and the expanded Sondheim and
new Lloyd Webber chapters (chapters 15 and 16) will also examine what
happened in the next step of the adaptation process experienced by most
Broadway musicals, the conversion to film, and how partisans of stage per-
formances might handle the realities of an interloping medium.
When comparing stage musicals with their literary origins, the chapter on
Kiss Me, Kate (chapter 10) will discuss how Sam and Bella Spewack’s original
libretto differs from the final Broadway version as well as with Shakespeare’s
The Taming of the Shrew, and in the process suggest that Porter may have
learned as much from his own Anything Goes as he did from Rodgers and
Hammerstein about how to relate music to character. In My Fair Lady (chap-
ter 12) Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe departed significantly from
Shaw’s ending to Pygmalion. After giving the mean-spirited Professor Henry
Higgins a more humane face (intentionally denied by Shaw) by the end of act
I, the Broadway team, in their second act, made explicit, mainly through the
songs, what Shaw implies or omits. Ironically, although they romanticized—
and thereby misrepresented—Shaw’s intentions, Lerner and Loewe man-
aged to convey Eliza Doolittle’s metamorphosis as Higgins’s equal, through
both Lerner’s lyrics and Loewe’s reversal of their musical roles, more clearly
than either Shaw’s play or director Gabriel Pascal’s 1938 film, upon which
My Fair Lady was based.
When discussing West Side Story (chapter 13) the point argued is not sim-
ply that the Broadway collaboration more closely approximates the spirit
10
Introduction
of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet than earlier operatic adaptations (or some
films) that retain the Bard’s namesakes and setting, but that Bernstein—with
considerable help from Sondheim (lyrics), Arthur Laurents (libretto), and
Jerome Robbins (choreography and conception)—found a musical solution
to convey the dramatic meaning of Shakespeare through the use of leit-
motivs and their transformations in combination with a jazz and Hispanic
American vernacular.
The present survey will only occasionally emphasize social history. That
is another book that very much needs to be written. Nevertheless, the study
of a musical most often leads to political and cultural issues, even if it was
the expressed intent of its creators to escape from meaning. For many of
the musicals discussed in act I especially, the changes that went into their
revivals over the decades offer a valuable tool to measure changing social
as well as artistic concerns. Some musicals, such as Show Boat, Porgy and
Bess, and West Side Story are overtly concerned with racial conflicts; others,
such as Anything Goes, On Your Toes, One Touch of Venus, and My Fair Lady,
explore class differences. All musicals discussed here either directly or inad-
vertently make powerful statements about what James Thurber called The
War between Men and Women.14
The Cradle Will Rock serves as a worthy representative to show both the
wisdom and futility of the didactic political musical. Two songs from this
“avant-garde” musical will be discussed from this perspective. The first is
“Croon–Spoon,” which satirizes the vapidity of ephemeral popular music,
and the second is “Art for Art’s Sake,” which from Marc Blitzstein’s perspec-
tive indicts the equally vapid messages of so-called high art, the purposes to
which art is used, and the blatant hypocrisy of some artists.
Not surprisingly, few musicals measure up to evolving sensibilities. The
disparity between these shows and feminist values will be given special
attention in interpreting Anything Goes, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus,
Carousel, Kiss Me, Kate, Guys and Dolls, and My Fair Lady, all of which pro-
vide gender issues of unusual interest. Some musicals fare better than others
from the vantage point of the future, but no musical surveyed here can fully
escape the assumptions and collective values of their era.
Why These Musicals?

The present selection makes an effort to include representative musicals from
Show Boat to The Phantom of the Opera that pose intriguing critical, analytical,
aesthetic, and political issues as well as musicals that engage the enthusi-
asm of the selector. No attempt was made either to be comprehensive or
11
Enchanted Evenings
to discuss only the very most popular musicals of the era, but the lists of
“Long Runs” and “The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway” in
the online website will provide useful reference points for measuring and
interpreting the degree of popularity these musicals enjoyed. Despite the
above disclaimer, a few words should be said about the degree to which
popularity governed the present selections.
Ten of the fourteen Broadway musicals receiving top billing here (not
including those by Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber) were also among
the most popular of their respective decades. Show Boat was the third longest
running musical of the 1920s, Anything Goes and On Your Toes ranked second
and eighth, respectively, among book shows in the 1930s—the two longest
running 1930s shows, Hellzapoppin’ and Pins and Needles were revues—and
in the 1940s and ’50s Kiss Me, Kate, Carousel, One Touch of Venus, My Fair Lady,
Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, and The Most Happy Fella all fall within the
top fifteen longest runs. Eight of these musicals are among the top thirty-
eight musicals spanning these four decades; three rank among the top nine
book shows.15
While one measure of a show’s popularity and its even more important
correlate, commercial success, is the length of its initial run, the revivability
of a show arguably constitutes a more compelling measure of its success.
Many musicals, even blockbusters of their day, never manage to regain their
hit status and acquire a place in the Broadway repertory despite rigorous
marketing or a lustrous star. For example, despite its many merits, Of Thee
I Sing (1931), the longest running book musical of the 1930s and the recipi-
ent of the first Pulitzer Prize for drama, has disappeared as a staged work
on Broadway after its disappointing seventy-two performance revival in
1952. Two of the musicals under scrutiny here, Lady in the Dark (1941) and
One Touch of Venus (1943), both enormous hits in their time, still await a
fully staged New York revival. The chapter devoted to these last mentioned
shows (chapter 7) will offer the view that the absence of One Touch of Venus
is especially lamentable.
The remaining twelve musicals have resurfaced in at least one popular
Broadway, Off-Broadway, or other prominent New York revival from 1980 to
the present (if the prestigious New City Center’s Encores! counts as a promi-
nent performance, all fourteen shows would be accounted for).16 By 1960,
New York audiences had had the opportunity to see Show Boat 1,344 times, a
total that more than doubled its original run and was surpassed only by five
continuously running book musicals in the top forty before 1960 (“The Forty
Longest Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959” in the online website).
The Cradle Will Rock, something of a cult musical, admittedly remains an
idiosyncratic choice for a selective survey. Nevertheless, this controversial
12
Introduction
and sometimes alienating show has been revived in New York City no less
than four times since its original short but historic runs in 1937 and 1938.
Although these Cradle revivals may have been generated out of political
sympathy, the present study will make a case for the work’s still unacknowl-
edged and unappreciated artistic merits.
If popularity in absolute numbers is the ticket for admittance, what then are
Pal Joey (1940), Lady in the Dark (1941), and Porgy and Bess (1935), three shows
that were neither in the top forty nor among the top ten or fifteen musicals of
their decades, doing in a survey of popular Broadway musicals? To answer
this question, it might be helpful to consider a musical’s popularity by the
standards of its immediate predecessors. Although it may not have enjoyed a
major New York revival in more than sixty years, at 467 performances Lady in
the Dark would surpass even the longest running book musical of the 1930s, Of
Thee I Sing.17 Pal Joey (374 performances) would rank as the fifth longest run-
ning book show of the 1930s had it premiered one year earlier.18 More signifi-
cantly, in contrast to nearly every other musical comedy before Guys and Dolls,
including Anything Goes and On Your Toes, revivals of Pal Joey for the most part
retain the original book without fear of ridicule or loss of accessibility.
The inclusion of Porgy and Bess on popular grounds requires some spin
control. Because it lost money, it is fair to judge its initial total of 124 perfor-
mances as a relatively poor showing—even in a decade when two hundred
performances could constitute a hit. As a musical in the commercial mar-
ketplace, Porgy and Bess failed; as an opera, arguably a more accurate taxo-
nomic classification, it can be interpreted as a phenomenal success. No other
American opera of its (or any) generation comes close.19 Of course it helps
that it is also an acknowledged American classic.
In contrast to his musical comedies and operettas, Gershwin’s only Broad-
way opera returned a few years later in 1942, albeit more like a conventional
musical with spoken dialogue replacing sung recitative—favoring accessi-
bility over authenticity—and became a modest commercial success at 286
performances. Within seven years New York audiences thus were able to see
Gershwin’s opera (or a reasonable facsimile) 410 times before the arrival of
Oklahoma!, thirty performances fewer than Of Thee I Sing, the biggest hit of
the 1930s and of Gershwin’s career. And in contrast to Gershwin shows that,
in revival, have been transformed into barely recognizable but highly acces-
sible and commercially successful adaptations (My One and Only [1983], Oh,
Kay! [1990], and Crazy for You [1992]), revivals of Porgy and Bess, at least since
the mid-1970s, often go to great lengths to restore Gershwin’s opera to pre-
vailing notions of authenticity.
The willingness to eschew comprehensiveness leads to inevitable omis-
sions. In addition to Jule Styne’s four top forty musicals, the most conspicuous
13
Enchanted Evenings
absentees are Berlin, whose Annie Get Your Gun (ranked eighth among book
shows) has for many years earned an enduring place in the core repertory
(and major New York revivals in 1966 and 1999), and the team of Richard
Adler and Jerry Ross, the composer-lyricists who in 1954 and 1955 produced
two of the most successful book musicals before 1960, Pajama Game (tenth)
and Damn Yankees (eleventh), before Ross’s premature death in 1955 at the
age of twenty-nine. Some readers may lament the absence of lyricist E. Y.
(“Yip”) Harburg’s collaborations with composers Harold Arlen and Burton
Lane, or of composer-lyricists Harold Rome and Robert Wright and George
Forrest.20
Despite these omissions, the present representative survey includes at
least one musical selected from the work of those composers, lyricists, and
librettists responsible for many of the top forty musicals shown in the online
website (“The Forty Longest . . . 1920–1959”). The most popular creators of
each decade are also well represented. In the 1920s, six of the eleven longest
runs had either a score by Kern or lyrics or a libretto by Hammerstein. In the
1930s, only two book musicals of the twelve longest runs did not feature a
score by Rodgers and Hart, Kern, Porter, or the Gershwins (who provided
four, three, two, and one, respectively), and one of these consisted of recy-
cled music by Johann Strauss Jr. By the 1940s and ’50s, Rodgers, now teamed
with Hammerstein, dominated the musical marketplace with no less than
five of the ten longest runs of those years.21
Coda
In The American Musical Theater noted Broadway conductor and educa-
tor Lehman Engel offered the following list of fifteen Broadway “models
of excellence” that “represent that theater in its most complete and mature
state”: Pal Joey; Oklahoma!; Carousel; Annie Get Your Gun; Brigadoon; Kiss Me,
Kate; South Pacific; Guys and Dolls; The King and I; My Fair Lady; West Side
Story; Gypsy; Fiddler on the Roof; Company; and A Little Night Music.22 The first
twelve of Engel’s list fall within the central focus period of this study (acts
I and II), and six of these will be explored. In his pioneering volume Engel
is primarily concerned with the “working principles” that govern “excel-
lent” musicals. In another chapter he singles out four “Broadway operas”
that also embody these principles—Porgy and Bess, The Cradle Will Rock, The
Consul (Gian-Carlo Menotti), and The Most Happy Fella. Three of these will be
featured in the present volume.
All the musicals in Engel’s list of fifteen turned a profit and nearly all had
long runs, including seven of the ten longest runs between Oklahoma! and
14
Introduction
The Sound of Music. Engel’s most conspicuous omission is without a doubt

Show Boat, a musical almost invariably honored by subsequent list-makers
and Broadway historians and critics as the first major musical on a uniquely
American theme, one of the first to thoroughly integrate music and drama,
and the first American musical to firmly enter the Broadway repertory.
Although subsequent lists added a few scattered musical comedies from
the 1930s and the musicals of Weill, all of which Engel excludes, the spirit
of Engel’s list is echoed in nearly all those that followed.23 With virtually no
exceptions the musicals on these lists enjoyed long initial runs and critical
acclaim and usually received one or more major New York revivals.24
Within a few years after West Side Story, the age of Porter, Lerner and
Loewe, Loesser, Bernstein, Blitzstein, Berlin, and Rodgers and Hammerstein
was over. These classical Broadway masters of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s had
generally enjoyed a combination of popularity and critical acclaim analogous
to that of their nineteenth-century operatic and instrumental predecessors
in Europe. After 1970, irreconcilable differences between this incompatible
pair of attributes began to surface, exemplified by the contrasting trajecto-
ries of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, and few musicals by either of these
two emblematic artists would readily receive the combination of love and
respect enjoyed by the most popular and critically acclaimed musicals of the
1940s and ’50s.
The penultimate chapter of this survey will take a look at the career of
Sondheim, the lyricist-composer generally recognized as a central artistic
figure on Broadway after 1960. The position taken here is that Sondheim’s
modernism and postmodernism can be viewed as an extension and reinter-
pretation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein model rather than a rebellion
from it. It will also be argued that although Sondheim has vigorously denied
autobiographical elements in his shows, the pressure to compromise faced
by his characters is markedly similar to that faced by Sondheim himself as
he creates their songs and faces the demands of commercial theater.
After exploring the issue on an impersonal fictive level, Sondheim, in his
first two shows of the 1980s, Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday in the Park
with George, directly confronted the issue of artistic compromise in his own
work. Such conflicts had been faced more obliquely by several of his spiri-
tual Broadway ancestors surveyed here who experienced similar creative
crises in their effort to simultaneously transcend the conventions of their
genre and retain their audiences. The Sondheim chapter will acknowledge
his attempt to move beyond the integrated action model to the concept (or
thematic) musical and his ability to convey the nuances of his increasingly
complex characters and musically capture the meaning of his dramatic
subjects. It will additionally emphasize how Sondheim’s musicals can be
15
Enchanted Evenings
viewed as the proud inheritance of the great traditional musicals from Show
Boat to West Side Story.
As revivals continue to demonstrate, many musicals between Show Boat
and Gypsy (1927–1959), as well as another group created in the 1960s by
several relatively new Broadway artists (perhaps most notably Jerry Bock
and Sheldon Harnick’s Fiddler on the Roof [1964] and John Kander and Fred
Ebb’s Cabaret [1966]), have not simply disappeared. Although the verdict for
these more recent musicals is still inconclusive, it is not too soon to notice
the spectacularly long runs and endless tours of Lloyd Webber musicals and
the revivals of Sondheim’s earlier shows in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Even
if one hesitates to speak openly of a Broadway canon, few would deny the
presence of a core repertory of Broadway musicals for the period of this
study and considerably beyond. While the term “core repertory” avoids cul-
tural bias and has the benefit of inclusiveness—in the core repertory there
is a place somewhere for both Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (the subject of
a new final chapter in this second edition)—the idea of a canon, a nucleus
of works within a genre perceived as models of excellence or, more simply,
the musicals audiences want to see over and over again, remains a useful
if somewhat unpalatable construct. In any event, it is ironic that the decon-
struction and even demolition of canons, including the venerable and unas-
sailable eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European classical repertory,
has become fashionable just as a firm foundation for canonization has begun
to emerge in the genre of Broadway musicals.
While it is still permissible to say that some musicals are more popular
than others, most critics and historians are loath to argue that some are actu-
ally more worthy of canonical status.25 Northrop Frye, perhaps wisely (or
least safely), chastised advocates of both “popular” and “art for art’s sake”
camps when he wrote in his Anatomy of Criticism that “the fallacy common
to both attitudes is that a rough correlation between the merit of art and the
degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in
one case and inverse in the other.”26
The stance of the present volume is that “popularity” and “art for art’s
sake” are not mutually exclusive values, that writing for a commercial mar-
ket can lead to inspiration as well as compromise. Perhaps we cannot explain
or tell why this is so, but we can nonetheless revel in the many enchanted
evenings (and some matinees) that these musicals continue to provide.
16
•
Act I •
BEFORE RODGERS AND

HAMMERSTEIN
chapter two
SHOW BOAT
In the Beginning
T
he New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians informed its readers in
1980 without exaggeration or understatement that Show Boat is “per-
haps the most successful and influential Broadway musical play ever
written.”1 For the authors of New Grove, the impact of Show Boat has been
“inestimable, particularly in that it impelled composers of Broadway musi-
cals to concern themselves with the whole production as opposed to writing
Tin Pan Alley songs for interpolation.”2 For the many who judge a show by
how many songs they can hum or whistle when they leave (or enter) the
theater, Show Boat offered “at least” an unprecedented six song hits for the
ages; moreover, nearly all of these songs, according to Grove, “are integral to
the characterization and story.” And the many who place opera on a more
elevated plane than Broadway musicals could be impressed by the knowl-
edge that Show Boat, when it entered the repertory of the New York City
Opera in 1954, was the first Broadway show to attain operatic stature.3 By
virtually any criteria, Show Boat marks a major milestone in the history of the
American musical and has long since become the first Broadway show to be
enshrined in the musical theater museum.
Show Boat gained recognition in the scholarly world too when in 1977
it became the first Broadway musical to receive book-length attention in
Miles Kreuger’s thorough and authoritative “Show Boat”: The Story of a Clas-
sic American Musical.4 Five years later, manuscript material for the musical
numbers discarded during the tryout months prior to the December 1927
19
Enchanted Evenings
premiere was discovered in the Warner Brothers Warehouse in Secaucus,

New Jersey.5 By April 1983 the Houston Opera Company—which had in the
late 1970s presented and recorded a Porgy and Bess that restored material cut
from its pre-Broadway tryouts—arrived in New York with a version of Show
Boat that used Robert Russell Bennett’s original orchestrations (rediscovered
in 1978) and most of the previously discarded tryout material.
In 1988 John McGlinn (1953–2009), who had served as a music editor for
the Houston Opera, conducted a recording of Show Boat on EMI/Angel that
incorporated Bennett’s 1927 orchestrations and restored tryout material.
McGlinn’s recording offered a significant amount of dialogue with musical
underscoring. It even included an appendix containing longer versions of
several scenes (shortened for the New York opening) and songs that Kern
composed for the 1928 London engagement, the 1936 Universal film (with
a screenplay by Hammerstein and new songs by Kern), and the New York
revival in 1946.6
Critics who attended the opening night on December 27, 1927, at the
Ziegfeld sensed that Show Boat was not only a hit but a show of originality
and significance. Robert Coleman, for example, described Show Boat in the
Daily Mirror as “a work of genius” and a show which demonstrated the sad
fact that “managers have not until now realized the tremendous possibilities
of the musical comedy as an art form.”7 Coleman’s review is also representa-
tive in its praise of the original run’s exceptional production values, includ-
ing “fourteen glorious settings” and a superb cast. Although Show Boat, in
contrast to other Ziegfeld productions, did not open with a lineup of scant-
ily clad chorus girls, Coleman thought he saw “a chorus of 150 of the most
beautiful girls ever glorified by Mr. Ziegfeld.”8
Within a few days after its opening Percy Hammond wrote that Show
Boat was “the most distinguished light opera of its generation,” and Brooks
Atkinson described it as “one of those epochal works about which garrulous
old men gabble for twenty-five years after the scenery has rattled off to the
storehouse.”9 Nearly every critic described Kern’s score either as his best or
at least his recent best. Surveys of the American musical as far back as Cecil
Smith’s Musical Comedy in America (1950) support these original assessments
and single out Show Boat as the only musical of its time “to achieve a dra-
matic verisimilitude that seemed comparable to that of the speaking stage.”10
Beginning in the late 1960s historians would almost invariably emphasize
Show Boat’s unprecedented integration of music and drama, its three-dimen-
sional characters, and its bold and serious subject matter, including miscege-
nation and unhappy marriages.
Although critics for the most part found silver linings nearly every-
where, they also freely voiced their discontent with one aspect of the work:
20
Show Boat
the libretto. Show Boat might give the highly respected (albeit somewhat
curmudgeonly) critic George Jean Nathan “a welcome holiday from the
usual grumbling,” but most critics felt that the libretto, while vastly supe-
rior to other books of the time, did not demonstrate the same perfection
as Jerome Kern’s music and Florenz Ziegfeld’s production.11 In particular,
critics voiced their displeasure with the final scene. Robert Garland, who
described Show Boat as “an American masterpiece,” noted some “faltering,
like many another offering, only when it approaches the end,” and Alexan-
der Woollcott wrote that “until the last scene, when it all goes gaudy and
empty and routine, it is a fine and distinguished achievement.”12
More recent historians continued to view Show Boat as a refreshing but
flawed departure from other shows of its day. Richard Traubner, for example,
who praised Show Boat as “the greatest of all American operettas,” attributed
this greatness to its triumph over “libretto problems.”13 Even Show Boat afi-
cionado Kreuger corroborates the verdict of earlier complaints: “As a con-
cession to theatrical conventions of the time, Hammerstein kept everyone
alive to the end and even arranged a happy reunion for the long-parted
lovers, decisions, he revealed to this writer, that he came to regret.”14
Despite these reservations, only Lehman Engel, the distinguished Broad-
way conductor and the first writer to establish canonical criteria for the
American musical (see the “Coda” to chapter 1), would banish Show Boat
from this elite group. Although Engel acknowledges that Show Boat’s “score
and lyrics are among the best ever written in our theater,” he tempers this
praise by his assessment of “serious weaknesses.”15 For Engel, Show Boat’s
“characters are two-dimensional, its proportions are outrageous, its plot
development predictable and corny, and its ending unbearably sweet.”16
Engel is particularly perturbed by six “not only silly but sloppy” coinci-
dences that take place in Chicago within a three-week period in 1904 (sig-
nificantly all in the second act), coincidences that are comically improbable,
even in a city with half its present population.17
Of the two principal collaborators, Hammerstein (1895–1960) had far more
experience with operetta-type musicals as well as recent successes. Wild-
flower (1923), created with co-librettist Otto Harbach and composers Herbert
Stothart and Vincent Youmans, launched a phenomenally successful decade
for Hammerstein as librettist, lyricist, and director for many of Broadway’s
most popular operettas and musical comedies: Rose-Marie (1924) and The
Wild Rose (1926) with Rudolf Friml and Stothart; Song of the Flame (1925)
with George Gershwin and Stothart; and the still-revived The Desert Song
(1926) with Sigmund Romberg. Two years before Show Boat Hammerstein
had also collaborated with Harbach and Kern on the latter’s most recent
success, Sunny.
21
Enchanted Evenings
Kern (1885–1945), whose mother was a musician, “had some European

training in a small town outside of Heidelberg” when he was seventeen and
studied piano, counterpoint, harmony, and composition the following year
at the New York College of Music.18 Ten years before Show Boat, Kern stated
in interviews that “songs must be suited to the action and the mood of the
play.”19 At the same time he also considered devoting his full attention to
composing symphonies.
Although there is no reason to doubt Kern’s aspiration “to apply mod-
ern art to light music as Debussy and those men have done to more seri-
ous work,”20 it was not until Show Boat that Kern was able to fully realize
these goals. Kern had, of course, previously created complete scores for an
impressive series of precocious integrated musicals during the Princess The-
atre years (1915–1918), at least two of which, Very Good Eddie and Leave It to
Jane, have been successfully revived in recent decades. For the earlier years
of his career, however, Kern had been confined mainly to composing inter-
polated songs to augment the music of others. Two of these, “How’d You
Like to Spoon with Me?” interpolated into The Earl and the Girl (1905), and
“They Didn’t Believe Me” from The Girl from Utah (1914), remain among his
best known. Similarly, Sally (1920) and Sunny (1925), two vehicles for the
superstar Marilyn Miller and his most popular shows composed during the
years between the intimate Princess Theatre productions and the grandiose
Show Boat, are remembered primarily for their respective songs “Look for
the Silver Lining” and “Who?” and have not fared well in staged revivals.
Before 1924, Edna Ferber had never even heard of the once-popular trav-
eling river productions that made their home on show boats. By the fol-
lowing summer she had begun the novel Show Boat, which was published
serially in Woman’s Home Companion between April and September 1926 and
in its entirety in August by Doubleday. Early in October, Kern, who had read
half of Ferber’s new book, phoned Woollcott to ask for a letter of introduc-
tion to its author and met her at a performance of Kern’s latest musical,
Criss Cross, that same evening. Even before Ferber had signed a contract on
November 17 giving Kern and Hammerstein “dramatico-musical” rights to
her hot property, the co-conspirators had already completed enough mate-
rial to impress Follies impresario Ziegfeld nine days later.21 On December 11
Kern and Hammerstein signed their contracts, according to which a script
was to be delivered by January 1 and the play was to appear “on or before
the first day of April 1927.”22
By 1927, Kern had long since earned the mantle allegedly bestowed on
him by Victor Herbert (1859–1924), the composer of Naughty Marietta (1910)
and dozens of other Broadway shows, as the most distinguished American-
born theater composer. For more than a decade Kern had been the model
22
Show Boat
and envy of Porter, Gershwin, and Rodgers, who were embarking on their
careers during the Princess Theatre years. But it was not until Show Boat that
Kern had the opportunity to create a more ambitious species of Broadway
musical. The care which he lavished on the score is conspicuously evident
from the numerous extant pre-tryout drafts on deposit at the Library of Con-
gress (see “Manuscript Sources for Ravenal’s Entrance and Meeting with
Magnolia” no. 1 in the online website) and by an unprecedentedly long ges-
tation period from November 1926 to November 1927 that included numer-
ous and lengthy discussions with librettist and lyricist Hammerstein. Many
other changes were made during the out-of-town tryouts.
Reconstructing Show Boat (1927–1994)

In order to provide a framework for discussing Show Boat it will be useful to
distinguish among its various stage and film versions. Although the vocal
score of the 1927 production, published by T. B. Harms in April 1928, has
been out of print for decades, much of this original Broadway version was
retained in the still-available London vocal score published by Chappell &
Co. (also 1928). It is also fortunate that much of the Convent Scene and two
brief passages absent from the Chappell score—the parade music in act I,
scene 1, and the “Happy New Year” music (“Hot Time in the Old Town
Tonight”) in act II, scene 6—can be found in a third vocal score, published
by the Welk Music Group, that also corresponds reasonably well to the 1946
touring production.23
McGlinn’s 1988 recording is an indispensable starting point for anyone
interested in exploring a compendium of the versions produced between
1927 and 1946 (as well as the 1936 film).24 All of these versions incorporate
new ideas and usually new songs by the original creators. Even if one does
not agree with all of McGlinn’s artistic and editorial decisions, especially
his decision to include in the main body of the recording (rather than in the
appendix) material that Kern and Hammerstein had agreed to cut from the
production during tryouts, the performances are impressive and the notes
by Kreuger and McGlinn carefully researched.
In the introduction to his monograph Kreuger notes that “one fascinat-
ing aspect of Show Boat is that, unlike most major musicals, it has never had
an official script or score.”25 The lack of the former did not pose a problem
to Kreuger, who had obtained the 1927 libretto directly from Hammerstein
himself a few days before his death in August 1960.26 Its absence has proven,
however, to be an enormous headache for historians and, conversely, a
source of opportunity for some directors (for example, Hal Prince), who have
23
Enchanted Evenings
been given a free hand to decipher and interpret the complicated evolution
and varied documentary legacy of this musical according to their personal
visions.
One extended number published by Harms, “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun,’ ” had
been dropped from the production in Washington, D.C., as early as Novem-
ber 15 after the very first evening of the tryouts. Because Kern “insisted that
the number be published in the complete vocal score,” McGlinn argued, not
without justification, that Kern “hoped the sequence would have an afterlife
in a more enlightened theatrical world.”27 For this reason McGlinn includes
“Mis’ry” into the body of his recording rather than in an appendix.
McGlinn’s other “restorations and re-evaluations” are less convincing on
historical grounds. Dropped from both the Harms score and the 1927 pro-
duction were two numbers, “I Would Like to Play a Lover’s Part” (origi-
nally placed at the beginning of act I, scene 5) and “It’s Getting Hotter in the
North” (act II, scene 9). The latter song was replaced by a reprise of “Why
Do I Love You?” called “Kim’s Imitations,” performed by the original Mag-
nolia, Norma Terris, who was made up to look like her daughter Kim and
performed impressions of famous vaudeville stars. Since Kern did not wish
to include this discarded material in the vocal score (and it was in response
to Kern’s wishes that McGlinn reinserted “Mis’ry”), its presence in the body
of McGlinn’s recording is questionable. One other number deleted before
the December premiere, “Trocadero Opening Chorus” (at one time in act II,
scene 6), was placed in the main portion of McGlinn’s recording for “techni-
cal reasons.”28
For the first London production in 1928—which premiered after the New
York version had been playing for a little more than four months—Kern
and Hammerstein wrote “Dance Away the Night” (replacing Kim’s reprise
of “Why Do I Love You?,” itself a replacement of “Kim’s Imitations”). Also
in this production Kern’s 1905 London hit, “How’d You Like to Spoon with
Me?” replaced the non-Kern interpolation, “Good-bye, Ma Lady Love.” Two
scenes were entirely omitted, the Convent Scene (act II, scene 4) and the
scene in the Sherman Hotel Lobby (act II, scene 5), along with the song,
“Hey, Feller!” (act II, scene 7). Another song, “Me and My Boss,” composed
especially for Paul Robeson, who sang the role of Joe, was not used and is
presumed lost.29
After returning to Broadway in 1932 for 181 performances (with several
members of the 1927 cast and Robeson), the next major Broadway revival,
with extensive changes by Kern and Hammerstein, arrived on January 5,
1946.30 Even the overture was new, a more traditional medley-type version
to replace the “Mis’ry”-dominated overture of the 1927 production. The
first word heard in the original 1927 New York production, “niggers,” had
24
Show Boat
“Show Boat, the marriage of Magnolia and Ravenal at the end of act I (1946).”
Photograph: Graphic House. Museum of the City of New York. Theater
Collection. For a film still of this scene see p. 159.
already been replaced by “coloured folks” in the 1928 London production.

For the 1946 revival Hammerstein removed other references to this offensive
word and rewrote a quatrain in the opening chorus in which “Coal Black
Rose or High Brown Sal” was replaced by the less racially tinted phrase in
dialect, “Y’work all day, y’git no fun.”
Other changes in 1946 included a new emphasis on dance numbers, the
composition of yet another song for Kim in the final scene, “Nobody Else but
Me” (Kern’s final song before he died on November 11, 1945, during auditions),
three major deletions (“Till Good Luck Comes My Way,” “I Might Fall Back on
You,” and “Hey, Feller!” [dropped in London 1928]), an abbreviation (“C’Mon
Folks”), a repositioning (“Life upon the Wicked Stage”), the deletion of two
scenes (act I, scene 3, and act II, scene 5), and the rewriting of a third (act II,
scene 7).31 Kreuger, who briefly discusses these changes, does not mention the
elimination of local color (including banjos and tubas) and comedic elements
such as Cap’n Andy Hawks’s introduction of Rubber-Face Smith in the open-
ing scene. Although Kreuger regretted the absence of style in the stage perfor-
mances, he unhesitatingly supported these revisions as improvements.32
25
Enchanted Evenings
Theater historian and critic Ethan Mordden in a New Yorker essay on Show
Boat published one year after the McGlinn reconstruction assesses the 1946
version far less favorably. Although, like Kreuger, Mordden recognizes the
incalculable influence of Oklahoma! and Carousel, he regrets the alterations
that “homogenized a timeless, diverse piece into a document of a specific
place and time: Broadway mid-nineteen-forties.”33 Mordden continues:
In 1927, “Ol’ Man River” and the miscegenation scene and “Bill”
derived their power partly from a comparison with the musical-
comedy elements dancing around them. Take the fun away, the
apparently aimless vitality, and “Show Boat” loses its transcendence.
The 1946 “Show Boat” is dated now, too consistent, too much of its
day. The 1927 “Show Boat” is eclectic, of many days. Nevertheless,
the revisions were locked in. American “Show Boat” revivals hon-
ored the 1946 version without question, and it became standard.34
In contrast to most of the musicals discussed in subsequent chapters, Show

Boat directors and their public can choose among two authentic stageworthy
versions and one film version (considerably fewer, for instance, than the pos-
sibilities extant for Handel’s Messiah). More commonly, they have chosen to
assemble a version of their own. Just as conductors have for two hundred
years created their own Messiah hybrids, the 1971 London and 1994 Broadway
revivals presented provocative conflations of several staged versions of Show
Boat as well as the 1936 film.35 For example, two songs from the 1971 London
revival that were part of the 1928 London version did not appear in the origi-
nal 1927 New York production.36 Kern’s swan song and last attempt at a final
song for the show, “Nobody Else but Me,” introduced in the 1946 New York
revival (but not in the touring production), also appears, albeit sung out of
context in 1971 by superstar Cleo Laine, who refused the role of Julie unless
she was assigned a third song. From the 1936 Universal film the 1971 Lon-
don revival recycled two of its three new songs, “Ah Still Suits Me” (for Paul
Robeson’s Joe) and “I Have the Room above Her” (for Allan Jones’s Ravenal),
sung by their rightful characters but in newly conceived dramatic contexts.37
Although critical assessments may vary, the 1971 London production provides
an unmistakable example of the triumph of accessibility over authenticity.
In director Hal Prince’s revival of Show Boat in 1994 (the first Broad-
way production to take full advantage of McGlinn’s research), “brothers”
and later “coloreds” “all work on the Mississippi” and racial prejudice is
acknowledged onstage throughout the evening.38 Blacks move scenery and
pick up messes left by whites, whites steal the Charleston dance steps from
black originators, and an endlessly reprised “Ol’ Man River” sung by Michel
26
Show Boat
Bell looms larger than ever. In scenes depicting 1927 as well as the late 1880s,
audiences could see conspicuous signs over drinking fountains and else-
where marked “White Only” and “Colored Only.”39
Prince and production designer Eugene Lee employed modern stagecraft
“to create montages which integrate a leap of years, restore serious incidents
and clarify plot and character motivations.”40 From the 1928 London version
Prince borrowed “Dance Away the Night” when he needed some music for
the radio. From the 1936 film he used Ravenal’s suggestive song, “I Have
the Room above Her” and, more pervasively, “motion picture techniques
such as cross-fades, dissolves and even close-ups.”41 As in the 1946 Broad-
way production, Frank and Ellie’s “I Might Fall Back on You” was dropped
(although used as underscoring) and dance assumed a still more important
role, especially in the montages staged by choreographer Susan Stroman.42
The powerful “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun,’ ” restored for the Houston Opera
production on Broadway in 1983, was again featured.
In earlier productions act II opened with a crowd scene at the 1893 World’s
Fair in Chicago. Prince drops this scene along with its two songs (“At the
Fair” and “In Dahomey”) and takes the duet between Magnolia and Ravenal,
“Why Do I Love You?,” which was sandwiched between these songs, and
gives it to the otherwise songless Parthy (Elaine Stritch) to sing to her grand-
daughter. Perhaps inspired by the 1936 film, which, unlike the stage version,
shows the birth of Kim and Parthy rocking her, the effect of this change is
enormous. With this one gesture, the shrewish, bigoted, and largely unsym-
pathetic Parthy gains a humanity denied in all previous staged versions.
Musical Symbolism and Dramatic Meaning

In an article that appeared in Modern Music during Show Boat’s initial New
York run, Robert Simon, a staff writer for the New Yorker and an opera libret-
tist, wrote about what he perceived as Kern’s operatic predilections:
In Show Boat, Kern has an opportunity to make much of his dra-

matic gift. The action is accompanied by a great deal of inciden-
tal music—although “incidental” is a misleading trade term, for
Kern’s music heightens immeasurably the emotional value of the
situation. . . . Themes are quoted and even developed in almost
Wagnerian fashion.43
Without further elaboration Simon suggests that Kern, like Wagner and
several of the Broadway theater composers considered in this study, embraces
his principal dramatic themes within a family of leitmotivs.44 All of these
27
Enchanted Evenings
motives in Kern and Hammerstein’s “leit-opera” (a term perhaps coined

by Simon) can be seen against the backdrop of the Mississippi, arguably the
principal protagonist of the drama, much as the “folk” form the heart and
center of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.
In its purest form, closest to nature, like Mahler’s cuckoos in his First
Symphony (1888), Kern has chosen to represent the river by the interval of
a perfect fourth (the same interval that begins “Taps” and “Reveille”). As
shown in Example 2.1a, “Fish got to swim [B-E], and birds got to fly”
[E-B]), Kern uses this perfect fourth to connect the force of the natural world
with the central human theme of the work embodied in “Can’t Help Lovin’
Dat Man”: a woman in love is destined to love her man forever, even when
he abandons her. The theme first appears early in the work as underscor-
ing for the dialogue in which the unrequited lover Pete questions Queenie
about how she acquired the brooch he had given Julie. Since audiences have
not yet heard the words to this song, its meaning cannot be fully grasped
during the exchange between Pete and Queenie that interrupts choruses of
“Cotton Blossom.” But with Example 2.1a, the lyrical version of Julie’s song
that whites would not know (it was sung by her African-American mother
when Julie was a child), Kern and Hammerstein have successfully connected
Queenie and Julie from the outset of the show. Julie’s identity as a mulatto
otherwise remains undisclosed until two scenes later, when the meaning and
impact of her association with Queenie’s race will be clarified.
Significantly, the five three-note Show Boat themes shown in Example 2.2
are sung by and to people–or in one case to an anthromorphized boat—who
are part of the river and close to nature.45 The largest group of these “river”
motives, nearly all introduced in Show Boat’s opening scene, consist of short
Example 2.1. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”

(a) original form
(b) transformation into a rag
28
Show Boat
Example 2.1. Continued
musical figures, in which Kern fills in the perfect fourth of “Can’t Help
Lovin’ Dat Man” with a single additional note. The four notes of the “Cotton
Blossom” (Example 2.2a) when reversed provide the opening musical mate-
rial for the main chorus of Joe’s “Ol’ Man River” (Example 2.2b) and, when
reshuffled, Cap’n Andy’s theme (Example 2.2c).46 Additional transforma-
tions of these three notes encompassed within a perfect fourth can be found
in the opening of “Queenie’s Ballyhoo” (Example 2.2d) and in a prominent
segment of “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’ ” (Example 2.2e), included in all three
published vocal scores. Although Kern never acknowledged a source, all of
these themes might be traced, appropriately enough, to Dvořák’s contempo-
raneously composed “New World” Symphony (1893) (Example 2.2f).47
Parthy and Sheriff Vallon also lead their lives along the river. In contrast to
the characters who are in sympathy with this life force, however (Cap’n Andy
and his Cotton Blossom, Joe, Queenie, the black laborers, and the women of any
race who can’t help loving their men), Parthy and Vallon demonstrate their
intrinsic antipathy to the river with subtle alterations that intrude on the sim-
plicity and perfection of the perfect fourth. Audiences first meet Parthy and her
Example 2.2. “River Family” of motives (transposed to the key of C Major)

(a) “Cotton Blossom”
(b) “Ol’ Man River”
(c) Cap’n Andy's theme
(d) “Queenie's Ballyhoo”
(e) “Mis’ry” theme
(f) from Dvořák's “New World” Symphony
29
Enchanted Evenings
Example 2.2. (Continued)
theme (Example 2.3) after the climax of the song “Cotton Blossom” as under-
scoring to her yelling “Andy!!!! Drat that man, he’s never around!” moments
before we hear Magnolia’s piano theme (Example 2.4).
The first two notes of Parthy’s theme are a descending perfect fourth
(D-A). But although Parthy may lead a life along the river, Cap’n Andy can-
not and Kern will not make her drink in its physical beauty and spiritual
richness. Consequently, after this perfect fourth, Kern has Parthy introduce
a Bb, only a half-step up from the A but a giant step removed from the
natural world of the river. The Bb and its following note G combine with
the still-held D above to produce a G-minor triad, significantly the same
chord that generates and supports Magnolia’s inhibition and lament later
in the scene in section 4 of “Make Believe” (“Though the cold and brutal
30
Show Boat
Example 2.3. Parthy’s theme
fact is”). By the second measure of her theme Parthy has moved below
the descending fourth of the “Cotton Blossom” (to an F). In the third and
fourth measures—a repetition of the first two but transposed up a sinister
augmented fourth or tritone (D to G), the tense and dissonant interval that
will figure so prominently in the music of Sporting Life (Porgy and Bess)
and the Jets (West Side Story)—Parthy’s theme has moved radically from
G minor to C minor (also a tritone) where it will remain for the duration of
its remaining four measures. Perhaps in her musical resistance to the river
Parthy is expressing a longing for her home state of Massachusetts, where
“no decent body’d touch this show boat riffraff with a ten foot pole.”48
Once he has established musical equivalents for his characters and their world,
Kern transforms and links these themes melodically and rhythmically to make
his (and Hammerstein’s) dramatic points, as, for example, the transformation
of Cap’n Andy’s theme into a wedding march at the end of act I and then into a
processional and hymn in Kim’s convent school.49 Perhaps the clearest example
of this technique can be observed in the evolution of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat
Man.” In the late 1880s the song is introduced in its lyrical form by Julie (Exam-
ple 2.1a) followed immediately by an accelerated version sung by Queenie, Joe,
the black chorus, and Magnolia (act I, scene 2); in the second act (scene 4) the
song undergoes further transformation into a rag tune in 1904, when the Troca-
dero pianist Jake encourages Magnolia to sing a more animated modern version
in order to get her act into the Trocadero production (Example 2.1b).
31
Enchanted Evenings
Example 2.4. Magnolia's piano theme and “Where's the Mate for Me?”
(a) Magnolia's piano theme
(b) “Where's the Mate for Me?” (B section, or release)
32
Show Boat
Magnolia’s piano theme (Example 2.4), one of the most ubiquitous themes
of the show, will also undergo various transformations after its introduction
in the opening scene. These include a reharmonized statement that under-
scores Cap’n Andy’s announcement of Magnolia’s wedding to Ravenal
near the end of act I and a jazzy version, “It’s Getting Hotter in the North”
(the original finale dropped after the Washington, D.C., tryouts), sung by
Magnolia’s daughter, Kim, in 1927. It is also possible that Kern intended
audiences to hear a musical connection between Magnolia’s piano theme
and the opening fragment of the verse to “Ol’ Man River”—a verse that
not incidentally also begins the show opener, “Cotton Blossom”—when he
decided to adopt it almost unchanged from The Beauty Prize (1923).50 In any
event, Kern’s decision to join the second measure of Magnolia’s theme with
the central theme of the all-knowing and timeless river is more than a detail.
Not only does this touch provide another dramatically strong musical link-
age, but it also bonds Ravenal to his future bride and all she represents. Her
theme immediately enters his consciousness (even before they meet) and
takes over the B section of his song, “Where’s the Mate for Me?”51
The vast network of thematic foreshadowings and reminiscences introduced
here rarely fail to credibly unite the present with the past. One such example of
Kern’s ability to make a dramatic point through a musical reference is his use of
the “Mis’ry” theme (from the discarded song), which underscores Julie’s lecture
to Magnolia about men, immediately after the impressionable younger woman
has met Ravenal (at which point such a lecture is, of course, already too late).
The presence of “Mis’ry’ ” here anticipates Julie’s misery two scenes later, when
her partially black heritage is exposed and she and her blood partner Steve are
exiled from the Cotton Blossom. It also prepares listeners for Julie’s and Magno-
lia’s eventual misery in act II when both will lose the men they love.52 A rhyth-
mic connection that might also suggest a dramatic interpretation is the similarity
between the prevalent long-short-short rhythm of this “Mis’ry” theme and the
opening two measures of Ravenal’s “Where’s the Mate for Me?” (Example 2.5).53
In any event Ravenal’s musical remembrance of the waltz portion (section 2) of
“Make Believe,” when he sings “I let fate decide if I walk or ride” in “Till Good
Luck Comes My Way” (the latter unfortunately dropped from the 1946 revival),
reveals more clearly than anything he could say or do that Ravenal’s own des-
tiny is to love Magnolia even as he will one day abandon her.54
Ravenal’s Entrance and Meeting with Magnolia

An exceptionally powerful example of what Kern and Hammerstein were
able to achieve with their second collaboration can be found in Show Boat’s
33
Enchanted Evenings
expansive, intricate, and brilliantly conceived opening scene (act I, scene

1). After the opening chorus, “Cotton Blossom,” and Cap’n Andy’s “Bal-
lyhoo,” we meet the river gambler Gaylord Ravenal, he meets his future
bride Magnolia Hawks (Andy’s daughter), and the two fall in love at first
sight. In addition to its classic status as the quintessential Broadway “boy
meets girl” scene, Ravenal’s entrance and meeting with Magnolia offers two
major songs, “Where’s the Mate for Me?” and “Make Believe,” as well as a
continuous scene in which all actions and dialogue are underscored.
Ravenal’s meeting with Magnolia also provides an example of how per-
ceptively Kern and Hammerstein understood the dramatic potential of
Ferber’s narrative. In the novel Ravenal notices Magnolia on the deck of
the Cotton Blossom at the same moment Cap’n Andy offers him the leading
romantic role in their troupe. When Ravenal finds out that she will be his
dramatic counterpart, he unhesitatingly accepts the challenge even though
he has no experience (but of course he will not actually need to act). Ferber
then tells her readers of Ravenal’s and Magnolia’s destiny, an “inevitable”
and “cosmic course.”55 After describing this silent meeting, Ferber conspires
with her character Parthy and does not allow the future lovers to speak to
one another again for another twelve pages—and then not alone. Although
Kern and Hammerstein made many revisions in this portion of scene 1 dur-
ing the 1927 tryouts, only relatively minor changes differentiate the original
New York and London books from the 1946 revival and the three published
scores for this scene.56
Example 2.5. “Where's the Mate for Me?” (opening and “fancy”
harmonizations)
(a) “Who cares if my boat goes up stream?”
(b) “I drift along with my fancy”
(c) “I drift along with my fancy”
34
Show Boat
From the moment audiences first glimpse the future hero, Kern estab-
lishes the connection between Ravenal and his theme, capturing his aimless-
ness with a harmonically ambiguous accompaniment that refuses to find
a tonal harbor. The theme continues to underscore Ellie May Chipley, the
leading female comic with the Show Boat troupe, in her endeavor to attract
Ravenal’s attention. Ellie drops her handkerchief, Ravenal picks it up—but
not her cue—“hands it to her with courtesy,” and graciously acknowledges
her gratitude before leaving the embarrassed comedian to fall back on her
stage partner, Frank Schultz. After Sheriff Vallon’s appearance interrupts
what would have been a harmonic resting point on D major, Kern fore-
shadows Ravenal’s song from scene 3, “Till Good Luck Comes My Way,” to
underscore the remaining dialogue in which Vallon and Ravenal reflect on
the drifter’s bachelorhood.
In the thrice-repeated opening phrase of “Where’s the Mate for Me?” the
first shown in Example 2.5a (“Who cares if my boat goes up stream?” and
two statements of “I drift along with my fancy”), Kern ingeniously varies the
35
Enchanted Evenings
harmony of the final melodic note D (Example 2.5b and c). Its first appearance
on the words “up stream” (the third measure) is paradoxically and perhaps
unintentionally the lowest note of the phrase—after all, the point is that Rave-
nal does not care whether he is going upstream or downstream. Here Kern
harmonizes the tonic or central key, D, with a conventional tonic D-major
triad. Although Kern’s music initially preceded Hammerstein’s lyrics here and
elsewhere in Show Boat, one nonetheless suspects that Kern may have occa-
sionally altered his harmonies to correspond to the musical potential of Ham-
merstein’s lyrics. A major candidate for this creative scenario occurs in the
third measure of the opening phrase of “Where’s the Mate?” (Example 2.5b),
where Kern sets the word “fancy” with a fancy (and deceptive) resolution
to a minor triad on the sixth degree of the scale.57 On the final statement of
this phrase (Example 2.5c), moments before Ravenal hears Magnolia’s piano
theme, Kern displays his fanciest chord, again on the word “fancy.”58 Ravenal
is now as far adrift as Broadway harmony can take him.
To depict his speechlessness (or songlessness) upon seeing Magnolia,
Ravenal stops abruptly before the music moves toward a conclusion on the
expected tonal center. But “Where’s the Mate for Me?,” in contrast to most
Broadway songs, remains incomplete. Instead, Ravenal’s unasked final
musical question is answered by the mere presence of Magnolia. For such a
special occasion Kern and Hammerstein were willing to deprive audiences
of the opportunity to disturb dramatic continuity with applause. Even before
Magnolia’s physical presence interrupts the final statement of the A section,
however, Ravenal had already become subliminally aware of the answer
to his question “Where’s the mate?” In what is clearly a case of love at first
sound as well as first sight, Magnolia’s music (her piano theme shown in
Example 2.4) becomes immediately and completely absorbed into the B sec-
tion of Ravenal’s song.
In “Make Believe,” the ensuing duet between Magnolia and Ravenal
(thankfully, in contrast to the Ferber novel they are allowed to speak and
sing), Kern connects no less than four individual melodies and distinguishes
each by metrical or key changes. As in Ravenal’s “Where’s the Mate for
Me?” Kern’s purpose here is to provide a musical narrative that accurately
reflects the psychological progression of a budding romance. By the end of
the first section Ravenal has already admitted that his love for Magnolia is
not a pretense (“For, to tell the truth, I do”). On the word “do” the music
responds by becoming a waltz, which as far back as Franz Lehár’s The Merry
Widow and Johann Strauss Jr.’s Die Fledermaus had come to represent the lan-
guage of love for American as well as European audiences.59 Ravenal apolo-
gizes for “the words that betray my heart,” but Magnolia, who has in fact
betrayed her heart by joining Ravenal’s waltz, is not quite ready to abandon
36
Show Boat
the “game of just supposing” when she sings, “we only pretend.” Although
Magnolia wants to pretend that Ravenal is only “playing a lover’s part,”
Kern’s music belies Hammerstein’s words.
The third section of “Make Believe” leaves the tonic D major and modu-
lates four notes above to the subdominant (G major) with another metrical
change, this time from triple (waltz time) back to duple meter. Now Magno-
lia plays her game with a new level of flirtation accompanied by appropriate
melodic playfulness (“The game of just supposing”). Following Ravenal’s
reply to this flirtation, Magnolia introduces a fourth section in the parallel
minor mode (G minor, foreshadowed in Parthy’s theme), a response to her
sobering realization that “the cold and brutal fact is” they have never met
before. But the pessimism of the minor mode disappears after only four
measures when Magnolia states her rationale: since they are only playing a
lover’s part, they “need not mind convention’s P’s and Q’s.” Clearly, imagi-
nation that “can banish all regret” can also banish minor modes.60
Magnolia, a bystander in the first section and half of the second, has now
dominated all but eight measures since she first pointed out to Ravenal that
they are only pretending, after all. Most significantly, Magnolia introduces the
return of the central “Make Believe” melody more intensely than Ravenal’s
opening gambit, and to match this intensity the music escalates a half-step
higher (E major) from the original tonic D. When Ravenal joins her on the
words “others find peace of mind in pretending,” it is by now unequivocally
clear that Ravenal and Magnolia are not like these others. Their love is real.
The distribution between Magnolia and Ravenal during this return of the
main tune underwent several changes between the tryouts and the New
York premiere, and there remains some lingering ambiguity about who
should sing what after the first two lines (invariably given to Magnolia). For
example, according to the libretto typescript in the Library of Congress’s
Jerome Kern Collection (see “Manuscript Sources” no. 1 in the online web-
site), Kern and Hammerstein had once indicated that Magnolia alone should
sing the next lines (“Others find peace of mind in pretending—/ Couldn’t
you, / Couldn’t I? / Couldn’t we?”) before they conclude their duet. The
evolution of the final line is especially intricate.
Hammerstein remained unsatisfied by his decision to have both princi-
pals sing the last line (“For, to tell the truth,—I do”). Was Magnolia ready
to admit the truth of her love to Ravenal? In a penciled change Hammer-
stein has Ravenal sing the “I do” without Magnolia. In the New York Public
Library libretto typescript (see “Manuscript Sources” no. 2 in the online
website) the entire last line is given to Ravenal alone but placed in brackets.
In the New York production libretto published with the McGlinn recording
(no. 3) Ravenal sings the final line (without brackets), and this version is
37
Enchanted Evenings
preserved in the published London libretto of 1934 (no. 4), the 1936 screen-
play (no. 5), and the 1946 New York revival (no. 6).61 Further contributing to
the ambiguity and confusion is the lack of correspondence between these
text versions and the piano-vocal drafts and published scores, none of which
specifies that Ravenal profess his love alone until the Welk score (which cor-
responds to the 1946 production), where Magnolia’s “For, to tell the truth,—
I do” is placed in brackets.62
Perhaps most revelatory about these manuscripts are Kern and Hammer-
stein’s gradual realization that this portion of the scene needed to focus more
exclusively on Ravenal and Magnolia. The New York Public Library and
Library of Congress typescripts, for example, present two versions of a con-
versation between Ellie and Frank that would be discarded by the December
premiere.63 Hammerstein eventually concluded that this exchange slowed
down the action and distracted audiences from their focus on Ravenal.64
A second interruption, also eventually discarded, occurred after the B
section of Ravenal’s song “Where’s the Mate for Me?” (based on Magnolia’s
piano theme, Example 2.4). Both the Library of Congress and New York Public
Library typescripts present some dialogue and stage action during the twenty-
six measures of underscoring that have survived in Draft 2: Parthy’s theme
(Example 2.3), Cap’n Andy’s theme minus its six opening measures (Example
2.2c), and Ravenal’s theme (Example 2.5).65 Moments later Parthy intrudes once
again, shouting “Nola!,” and Hammerstein provides the following comment:
“Magnolia looks down on this splendid fellow, Ravenal. Her maidenly heart
flutters. She really should go in and answer mother—but she stays.”66
Like the brief dialogue between Ellie and Frank that intrudes on this
moment in the 1936 film, the appearance of Parthy here and after the B
section of “Where’s the Mate for Me?” interrupts the focus on the soon-
to-be-lovers. Parthy, while always unwelcome, is also unnecessary dur-
ing this portion of the scene, particularly since she had made a prominent
exit shortly before we met Ravenal. Wisely, Kern and Hammerstein in 1927
allowed Parthy’s music to prompt Magnolia to tell Ravenal she “must go
now” and avoided the reality of Parthy’s intrusion on the young couple’s
private moment before “Make Believe.”67
After Show Boat Kern and Hammerstein would collaborate on three of the
composer’s remaining five Broadway shows, two with respectable runs,
Sweet Adeline (1929) and Music in the Air (1932), and a disappointing Very
Warm for May (1939). Despite their considerable merits, none of these shows
have entered the repertory (although Music in the Air was chosen for New
York City Center’s Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert in the 2008–09
38
Show Boat
season). Less than a year after Show Boat Hammerstein collaborated with
Romberg on The New Moon, a show that went on for an impressive 509 per-
formances. Then, despite the success of individual songs, including “All
the Things You Are” from his final collaboration with Kern, Hammerstein’s
series of unwise choices (both in dramatic material and collaborators) and
hurried work resulted in eleven years of Broadway failures before he rose
from the ashes with Oklahoma!
Similarly, Hammerstein’s Hollywood years in the 1930s and early 1940s
yielded no original musical films of lasting acclaim, although here, too, a
considerable number of songs with Hammerstein lyrics have become stan-
dards.68 Hammerstein also adapted the screenplay for the penultimate Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939).69
In the next decade Hammerstein began his historic collaboration with Rod-
gers, and by the time Show Boat was revived in 1946, they had already writ-
ten two of their five major hit musicals, Oklahoma! and Carousel (the latter the
subject of chapter 9).70
In addition to his subsequent work with Hammerstein, Kern created two
successful musicals with Harbach, the unfortunately overlooked The Cat
and the Fiddle (1931) and Roberta (1933), the latter best known in its greatly
altered 1935 film version. In fact, most of Kern’s career after Show Boat
was occupied with the creation of twenty-two full or partial film scores—
thirteen original and nine adapted from Broadway—including several
with lyrics by Hammerstein and the Astaire and Rogers classic Swing Time
(1936), with lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Unfortunately, Kern never had the
opportunity even to begin a new musical in the Rodgers and Hammerstein
era, since he died shortly after Rodgers, who was producing a musical
based on the life of Annie Oakley, had asked him to write the music.71
Kern and Hammerstein’s inability to produce another Show Boat in the
1930s enhances the significance of their earlier achievement. Although
its ending did not embrace Ferber’s darker version, Show Boat, “the first
truly, totally American operetta” had dared to present an American epic
with a credible story, three-dimensional characters, a convincing use of
American vernacular appropriate to the changing world (including the
African-Americanization of culture) from the late 1880s to 1927, and a sen-
sitive portrayal of race relations that ranged from the plight of the black
underclass to miscegenation.72 As the first Broadway musical to keep rolling
along in the repertory from its time to ours, while at the same time enjoy-
ing the critical respect of musical-theater historians for more than seventy
years, Show Boat, the musical “that demanded a new maturity from musical
theatre and from its audience,”73 has long since earned its coveted historical
position as the foundation of the modern American musical.
39
chapter three
ANYTHING GOES
Songs Ten, Book Three
B
efore the curtain rose on the 1987 revival of Anything Goes at Lincoln
Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, audiences heard the strains of
Cole Porter’s own rendition of the title song recorded in 1934. At the
conclusion of this critically well-received and popularly successful show a
large silkscreen photograph of Porter (1891–1964) appeared behind a scrim
to cast a literal as well as metaphoric shadow over the cast. More than fifty
years after its premiere the message was clear: the real star of Anything Goes
was its composer-lyricist, the creator of such timeless song classics as “I Get
a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” “All Through
the Night,” “Easy to Love,” “Friendship,” “It’s De-Lovely,” and the title
song. Readers familiar with Anything Goes from various amateur and semi-
professional productions over the past thirty years may scarcely notice that
the last three songs named were taken from other Porter shows.
Anything Goes, after the Gershwins’ Pulitzer Prize–winning Of Thee I Sing
the longest running book musical of the 1930s and almost certainly the most
frequently revived musical of its time (in one form or another), was Porter’s
first major hit. Otherwise virtually forgotten, each of Porter’s five musicals
preceding Anything Goes introduced at least one song that would rank a ten
in almost anyone’s book: “What Is This Thing Called Love?” in Wake Up and
Dream (1929), “You Do Something to Me” in Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929),
“Love for Sale” in The New Yorkers (1930), and “Night and Day” in Gay
Divorce (1932). The Porter shows that debuted in the years between Anything
40
Anything Goes
Anything Goes, act II, finale (1987). Photograph: Brigitte Lacombe.
Goes and Kiss Me, Kate (1948) are similarly remembered mainly because they
contain one or more hit songs.
In the unlikely Midwestern town of Peru, Indiana, Porter’s mother, appro-
priately named Kate, arranged to have Cole’s first song published at her own
expense in 1902 (he was eleven at the time). Three years later Porter entered
the exclusive Worcester Academy in Massachusetts. Upon his graduation
from Yale in 1913, where he had delighted his fellow students with fraternity
shows and football songs, Porter endured an unhappy year at Harvard Law
School. Against his grandfather’s wishes and in spite of financial threats,
Porter enrolled in Harvard’s music department for the 1914–1915 academic
year. In 1917 he furthered his musical training with private studies in New
41
Enchanted Evenings
York City with Pietro Yon, the musical director and organist at Saint Patrick’s
Cathedral; in 1919–1920 the future Broadway composer continued his stud-
ies in composition, counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration with Vincent
D’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris.
Although his first success, Paris, would not arrive for another twelve
years, Porter had already produced a musical on Broadway, See America
First (1916), before Gershwin or Rodgers had begun their Broadway careers
and only one year after Kern had inaugurated his series of distinctive musi-
cals at the Princess Theatre. The years between the failure of his Broadway
debut after fifteen performances (inspiring the famous quip from Variety,
“See America First last!”) and the success of Irene Bordoni’s singing “Let’s Do
It” in Paris were largely dormant ones for Porter. In fact, the sum total of his
Broadway work other than See America First was one song interpolation for
Kern’s Miss Information in 1915 and approximately ten songs each in Hitchy-
Koo of 1919 and the Greenwich Village Follies in 1924. During these years the
already wealthy Porter—despite his profligacy an heir to his grandfather’s
fortune—grew still wealthier when he married the socialite and famous
beauty Linda Lee Thomas in 1919. In 1924 the Porters moved to Italy where
they would soon launch three years of lavish party-throwing and party-
going in their Venetian palazzos. On numerous such occasions the expatriate
songwriter would entertain his friends with his witty lyrics and melodies.
Near the end of this partying, Porter in 1927 auditioned unsuccessfully for
Vinton Freedley and Alex Aarons, the producers of several Gershwin hit
musicals and the future producers of four Porter shows starting with Any-
thing Goes. When the following year Rodgers and Hart were preoccupied
with A Connecticut Yankee, Porter was easily persuaded to leave Europe and
bring Paris to New York. Anything Goes would arrive six years and many
perennial song favorites later.
The Changing Times of Anything Goes

Most accounts of the genesis of Anything Goes attribute the disastrous fire
that took between 125 and 180 passengers’ lives on the pleasure ship Morro
Castle off the coast at Asbury Park, New Jersey, on September 8, 1934, as
the catalyst that led to the revised book by Howard Lindsay and Russel
Crouse. According to conventional wisdom, the earlier libretto about a ship-
wreck could not be used any more than Porter could use his line about Mrs.
Lindbergh in “I Get a Kick Out of You” after the kidnapping and murder of
the Lindbergh baby.1 But at least two sources, George Eells’s biography of
Porter and Miles Kreuger’s introductory notes to conductor John McGlinn’s
42
Anything Goes
reconstructed recording, report that producer Freedley was dissatisfied by

the Guy Bolton–P. G. Wodehouse book when he received it on August 15
and that the Morro disaster served mainly as a convenient explanation.
According to Eells, Freedley thought there was “a tastelessness about this
piece of work that no amount of rewriting would eradicate,” a view echoed
by both Kreuger and Bolton-Wodehouse biographer Lee Davis. Kreuger
writes, “Freedley was fearful that the rather derisive attitude toward Hol-
lywood might ruin chances of a film sale.” Davis goes further: “The first
script was rejected by Freedley for its Hollywood treatment, not its similar-
ity to the tragic fire at sea of the liner Morro Castle, as has been historically
accepted. Nor would he blanch at the second version because of its contin-
ued treatment of a catastrophe at sea. It would be because the second ver-
sion was a hopeless mess.”2
In an interview with Richard Hubler published in 1965, one year after
Porter’s death, the composer-lyricist anticipated the future conclusions of
Eells, Kreuger, and Davis. Porter recalled that the Morro Castle tragedy pro-
vided an excuse to scrap a Wodehouse-Bolton book whose quality was “so
bad that it was obvious that the work was completely inadequate.”3 The
synopsis included in this book is of course based on the revised Anything
Goes book by Lindsay and Crouse, based in part on the rejected and now
presumed lost second draft by Bolton and Wodehouse and Bolton’s original
scenario from early 1934, currently housed at the State Historical Society of
Wisconsin (which includes some dialogue for “Gaxton” and “Ethel” and
“Moore”).
Since it is possible that Lindsay and Crouse retained relatively little of the
Bolton-Wodehouse second draft—although the new book may have con-
tained more than an alleged five lines—it is not surprising that the inexpe-
rienced collaborators would be able to complete only a few scenes from act
I and nothing of act II before rehearsals began on October 8. In contrast to
the painstaking work and lengthy gestation period of most of the musicals
surveyed in this volume, Anything Goes was hastily, perhaps even frantically,
put together.
But Freedley, Lindsay, Crouse, and Porter had other objectives than to cre-
ate an epic book musical along the lines of Show Boat. Their central concern
was to produce a comic hit and to provide dramatic and musical opportuni-
ties to suit their outstanding preassembled cast. In particular, they needed
a vehicle to display William Gaxton’s (Billy) proven flair for multifarious
disguises and to exploit the inspired silliness of comedian Victor Moore’s
incongruous casting as a notorious gangster (Moon). The result was enough
to prompt Brooks Atkinson to exclaim that “comedy is the most satisfying
invention of the human race.”4 Atkinson could not ask anything more of a
43
Enchanted Evenings
show that exuded such refreshing topicality and personality, a show for the
moment, if not for the ages. If one or two songs stuck around for awhile, so
much the better.
Although John McGlinn later proclaimed the 1934 Anything Goes as “one
of the most perfect farces ever written,” most producers and directors for
the past forty years have been trying to solve the perceived disparity in
quality between the book and the songs by altering the former and inter-
polating more of the latter.5 The 1987 revival at the Vivian Beaumont was
not the first time audiences found themselves leaving a production of Any-
thing Goes humming or whistling songs from other Porter shows. In the 1962
revival, the only version distributed by Tams-Witmark for the next twenty-
five years, still other songs from other Porter shows had been interpolated.
The lyricist-composer’s own reputed cavalier attitude toward his books and
song interpolations prompted Broadway and Hollywood historian Gerald
Mast to state erroneously that Porter’s last will and testament “granted
explicit permission to take any Porter song from any Porter show and use it
in any other.”6 Unfortunately, the relative commercial success of McGlinn’s
recorded enterprise has not encouraged most producers and directors to
revive the 1934 Anything Goes.
The online website presents an outline of the scenes and songs of the
Anything Goes that audiences would have heard during most of the initial
run of the show that opened on November 21, 1934 (as well the scenes and
songs seen and heard in the Off-Broadway Revival of 1962 and the Vivian
Beaumont Revival of 1987). As in the case of most musicals from any period
(and many eighteenth-century operas), additional songs were tried and then
discarded during tryouts or during the early weeks of the first New York
run. In act I, scene 2, “Bon Voyage” was originally juxtaposed, then inge-
niously combined, with another song, “There’s No Cure like Travel,” a song
that interestingly contains the main musical material of “Bon Voyage.”7 Just
as Mozart composed the easier-to-sing aria “Dalla sua pace” to accommo-
date the Viennese singer in Don Giovanni who was unable to negotiate the
demands of the aria from the original Prague production (“Il mio tesoro”),
Porter composed “All through the Night” in this scene for Gaxton (Billy
Crocker) to replace the difficult-to-sing “Easy to Love.”
Another song intended for this scene, “Kate the Great,” was, according to
the recollection of Anything Goes orchestrator Hans Spialek, rejected by Ethel
Merman who “vouldn’t sing it” because it was a “durr-ty song!”8 A song
planned as a tongue-in-cheek romantic duet in act I, scene 6, between Hope
and Billy, “Waltz down the Aisle” (which bears striking melodic and rhyth-
mic similarities as well as a similar dramatic purpose to “Wunderbar” from
Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate) was also dropped from Anything Goes. A song for
44
Anything Goes
Hope in act II, scene 1, “What a Joy to Be Young,” was deleted before the
Broadway premiere.9
One song in the beginning of the Broadway run, “Buddie, Beware,” was
replaced by a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You” within a few weeks. In
order to understand the artistic implications of this change it is necessary to
recall Porter’s original motivation. Composers of musicals before (or after)
the Rodgers and Hammerstein era could not, of course, always predict
which song would become a hit. Nevertheless, they almost invariably tried
to place their best bets after an opening number, usually for chorus. In Any-
thing Goes Porter tried something more unusual. Instead of opening with a
chorus, Porter decided to begin less conventionally with a potential hit song
for Ethel Merman five minutes into the show, “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
Porter’s reasons for beginning with what he felt would be the hit of the
show may have been somewhat perverse. According to Kreuger, Porter’s
“society friends thought it was amusing to drift into the theatre fifteen or
twenty minutes after the curtain had gone up, so that all their friends could
observe what they were wearing.”10 Porter therefore “warned his friends for
weeks before the opening that they had better arrive on time or they would
miss the big song.”11 There is no record that Merman objected to “Buddie,
Beware” in act II, scene 2, for the same reason she objected to a song about
the sexual exploits of Catherine (Kate) the Great. Her objections in this case
were practical rather than moral: the show needed a reprise of “I Get a Kick
Out of You” “for the benefit of those who had arrived late!”12 If this undocu-
mented anecdote is to be believed, Porter, who had earlier agreed to cut
“Kate the Great,” was again willing to accommodate his star and cut “Bud-
die, Beware.”13
The history of Anything Goes after its premiere in 1934 differs mark-
edly from the fate of Show Boat discussed in the previous chapter. The
original 1927 Broadway version of Show Boat was superseded by Kern
and Hammerstein’s own rethinking of the work in the 1946 revival that
included a reworked book, several deleted songs and a brand new one,
and new orchestrations. As we have seen, after Hammerstein’s death in
1960, the 1971 London and 1994 Broadway Show Boat revivals presented
conflated versions of the musical that included songs from various earlier
stage productions (New York, 1927; London, 1928; New York, 1946) and
also songs from the 1936 film classic. Some of the original as well as inter-
polated songs were also either placed in different contexts or distributed to
different characters.
Despite these liberties, both the 1971 London and 1994 Broadway reviv-
als contained interpolated songs that had been associated with one version
or another of this musical (“How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” from the
45
Enchanted Evenings
1971 London production is an isolated exception). In contrast, the Anything

Goes revival in 1962, the version distributed to prospective producers until
replaced by the 1987 revival, incorporated no less than six songs out of a
total of fourteen from other Porter shows (“It’s De-Lovely,” “Heaven Hop,”
“Friendship,” “Let’s Step Out,” “Let’s Misbehave,” and “Take Me Back to
Manhattan”). Also, in 1962 the order of several songs was rearranged and,
ironically, a thoroughly revised book was written by Guy Bolton, who had
prepared the original scenario early in 1934 and with P. G. Wodehouse had
submitted the rejected 1934 book.
The 1987 revival contained yet another new book, this time by Russel
Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman.14 This book retained two of the
interpolations from 1962 (“It’s De-Lovely” and “Friendship”), and added
two other Porter tunes from shows that had not even appeared on Broad-
way, “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye” from O Mistress Mine, a 1936 musi-
cal produced in London, and “I Want to Row on the Crew,” from the Yale
fraternity show Paranoia of 1914. The 1987 production also rearranged the
order and dramatic context of several other songs from the original 1934
Broadway run. Most strikingly, the 1987 revision resurrected three songs that
had appeared at various phases of the 1934 tryouts and initial run: “There’s
No Cure like Travel,” “Easy to Love,” and “Buddie, Beware” (see the online
Appendix for the sources of all the interpolated songs).
One year before criticizing the undramatic use of recitative in the Theatre
Guild production of Porgy and Bess, Brooks Atkinson reviewed the Broadway
premiere of Anything Goes. The review is an unequivocal rave of “a thunder-
ing good musical show” with “a rag, tag and bobtail of comic situations and
of music sung in the spots when it is most exhilarating.”15 Most surprisingly
from a modern perspective is the fact that Atkinson praises the book, not as a
work of art, perhaps, but as a well-crafted vehicle to set off William Gaxton’s
talent for wearing disguises and the comic characterization of Victor Moore’s
Moon, “the quintessence of musical comedy humor.” Atkinson does not feel
the need to consider Anything Goes as anything other than the “thundering
good song-and-dance show” it purports to be.16 Another reviewer, Franklin P.
Adams, lambasted the songs from Anything Goes (because they were difficult
to remember or whistle), but offered no negative remarks about the book.17
Like Atkinson’s newfound distaste for On Your Toes upon its ill-fated 1954
revival (discussed in chapter 5), the New York Times review of the 1962 Off-
Broadway revival, twenty-eight years after Anything Goes made its debut,
demonstrates that a new standard for musical theater had evolved during
the intervening years. In contrast to Atkinson’s appreciation of the original
book, Lewis Funke wrote that “if you can get by the deserts that lurk in the
libretto, knowing that there always will be that oasis of a Cole Porter tune
46
Anything Goes
waiting at the end of each rugged journey, you may find yourself enjoying
the revival of Anything Goes.”18 In Funke’s account, “only some of the lines
retain their mirth” and the encapsulated plot summary that he offers serves
merely to remind sophisticated 1960s audiences that “those were simple
days in musical comedy.”19 What Funke neglects to report is that the book
he is criticizing is not the 1934 book by Lindsay and Crouse but a version
rewritten in 1962 by Bolton.
In his autobiography, director and librettist George Abbott (1887–1995),
who authored or co-authored books for an impressive array of musicals,
including On Your Toes, The Boys from Syracuse, Where’s Charley?, A Tree Grows
in Brooklyn, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and Fiorello!, discusses a review
of a 1963 Off-Broadway revival directed by Richard York of the 1938 Rod-
gers and Hart classic The Boys from Syracuse:
I was delighted to read of its outstanding success, and distressed

that some of the reviewers referred to the old-fashioned jokes in
the book. But I was puzzled when one of the reviewers cited one
of these jokes, a corny pun: “Dozens of men are at my feet.” “Yes,
I know, chiropodists.” This kind of humor is so alien to me that
I knew I could never have written it; and when I got back to New
York I found that the “old jokes” in the revival were new jokes
inserted by Mr. [Richard] York to “modernize” the script. I took out
some of these gags, but because the production as a whole was so
delightful, I couldn’t get very angry.20
It has become a commonplace almost universally shared by writers on Broad-

way musicals—along with directors and producers—that weak books are the
main reason for the neglect of most musicals before Oklahoma! and Carousel. For
this reason, after Rodgers and Hammerstein began an irreversible vogue for
integrated book musicals, revivals of musicals were almost invariably accompa-
nied by a team of doctors performing major surgery that included the reorder-
ing of songs and interpolations from other musicals of the same composer.
This type of surgical procedure begs several questions that merit further
exploration. Is the idea of the so-called integrated musical heralded by Rod-
gers and Hammerstein in the 1940s intrinsically superior to a musical with an
anachronistic book and timeless songs? Are the books of the 1930s as weak as
later critics make them out to be? Can some of the alleged weaknesses be attrib-
uted to the modernized books rather than to the originals? If the books of 1930s
musicals are weak, why are they weak, and can they be salvaged by revisions
and interpolations? Is it really a good idea to strip the original books down to
their underwear and then dress them up again with as many songs as possible
47
Enchanted Evenings
from other shows? Or can reasonable men and women provide an acceptable
modern alternative? Are modern actors unable to successfully recapture and
convey an older brand of comedy? Might the problem with Anything Goes stem
more from an incongruity between music and text than from a diseased book?
Part of the answer to these questions might be traced to evolving social con-
cerns rather than aesthetic considerations. Our current sensitivities and our
understanding of topical issues are no longer what they were in 1934. As Por-
ter would say, “times have changed.” The following chapter will suggest that
much of the criticism of Porgy and Bess, which followed the Porter hit one year
later, was due (especially after the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s)
less to its artistic qualities than to its perceived perpetuation of negative black
stereotypes and Heyward’s and Gershwin’s presumption to speak for blacks.
In Show Boat, changing sensitivities made it necessary for Hammerstein to alter
offending references, and later versions, especially the 1951 MGM film and the
1966 Lincoln Center production, tried to deflect criticism by minimizing the mis-
cegenation scene and the role of blacks in general. Most musicals suffer, some
irreparably, when their depiction of women is judged by feminist standards
that emerged in the 1970s (see the discussion of Kiss Me, Kate in chapter 10).
Although increasing sensitivity to ethnic minority groups or to women
is probably not the major obstacle to the revivability of Anything Goes, the
stereotypic depiction of Reverend Dobson’s Chinese converts to Christian-
ity, Ching and Ling (and the pidgin English adopted by Billy and Reno when
they put on Ching’s and Ling’s costumes), were subsequently considered to
be racially insensitive. In act I, scene 6, of the 1934 libretto, Moon refers to the
converts as “Chinamen”; in the analogous place in 1962 he refers to them as
Chinese.21 In 1987 Reverend Dobson was still accompanied by two Chinese
converts, but their names have been changed to the more biblical John and
Luke. The new authors also took care “to give them independent comic per-
sonas and not base the humor on the fact that they’re Chinese.”22
In response to dated slang, Crouse (the younger) and Weidman removed
some “terrible words in the language like, ‘wacky’ and ‘zany’ ” and other topi-
cal words and phrases that required a 1930s cultural literacy alien to later audi-
ences.23 But since the lyrics to the musical numbers were considered untouchable
onstage, if not the screen (see the discussion of the Anything Goes and Kiss Me,
Kate film adaptations in chapters 8 and 14, respectively), the removal of “wacky”
and “zany” do not fully solve the problems of topicality. In the preface to his
essay “The Annotated ‘Anything Goes’ ” that accompanies McGlinn’s recon-
structed recording, Kreuger describes the audiences for this and other 1930s
shows as a “constricted group of cognoscenti, who went to the same night spots,
read the same newspaper columns, and spent weekends at the same estates,”
and were therefore “swift to pick up even the most obscure references in all the
48
Anything Goes
lyrics.”24 Kreuger goes on to explain the meaning of seven references in the title
song and no less than thirty-eight topical references in “You’re the Top.”25
Although this level of topicality is problematic to modern audiences
who have neither lived through the 1930s nor had the opportunity to study
Kreuger’s annotated guide, it might also be said that Porter’s lyrics presented
problems to his British neighbors in his own time. In fact, in preparing for the
London opening of June 14, 1935, Porter was asked by producer C. B. Cochran
to remove several incomprehensible Americanisms when he took his show
across the Atlantic. Eells mentions a few of these changes: “Cole agreed and
set about converting the Bendel bonnet into an Ascot bonnet; a dress by Saks
into one by Patous; and the eyes of Irene Bordoni into those of Tallulah Bank-
head.”26 Nevertheless, in contrast to audiences who attended the 1962 and 1987
productions, most 1930s audiences, both in New York and London, would have
recognized the parodistic parallels between Reno Sweeney, the evangelist who
became a singer, and the then-famous evangelist Aimée Semple McPherson.27
What about audiences in 1962 or 1987 and beyond? And does it matter?
In a New York Times interview that appeared shortly before the 1987 revival,
the younger Crouse and Weidman admit to adding even more “swashbuck-
ling slapstick gags” to their updated version, although they quickly add
that none of these new gags were “gratuitous” and that they are “all closely
tied to the plot.”28 Crouse and Weidman also express their intention to take
their characters “more seriously” and to make them three-dimensional (or
“maybe two and two-thirds”).29 In a feature story on Anything Goes that also
appeared several days before the premiere of the 1987 revival, director, edi-
tor, and dramaturge Jerry Zaks discusses his search for a theme (“people
dealing with the ramifications of trying to fall in love”) and explains his
intention “to ground everything in a recognizable reality,” that is, to remake
the book in a post–Rodgers and Hammerstein image. He continues with a
telling example: “In previous versions of the show, Lord Evelyn Oakleigh,
with whom Reno Sweeney falls in love, is someone so totally foppish and
out of touch with his sexuality that she ends up looking stupid for hav-
ing fallen for him. Both in the book and the casting we tried to suggest the
potential for a real relationship between them.”30
Zaks makes a good point. When Sir Evelyn is introduced in 1934 (scene 2)
his masculine identity is immediately called into question:
reporter: Sir Oakleigh, you and Miss Harcourt. Right here, please.
(sir evelyn oakleigh and hope harcourt are pushed into focus)
Society stuff.
camera man: What are their names? Who are they?
reporter: Sir—what’s your first name?
49
Enchanted Evenings
oakleigh: Evelyn.
1st camera man: Not her first name—your first name!
When in act II, scene 1, Sir Evelyn relates that he “had an unpremeditated
roll in the rice and enjoyed it very much” with a Chinese maiden named
Plum Blossom, his admission may be taken more as a boast of his full-
blooded heterosexuality than the confession of a sin. And Reno, who has
experienced chagrin that Evelyn has been treating her every inch a lady and
is much relieved by this welcome revelation, immediately responds accord-
ingly: “Brother, I’ve been worried about you but I feel better now.”31 Reno
will repeat this sentiment in both 1962 and 1987.
The main reason that the generally stiff and staid Sir Evelyn provides a
less-than-perfect match for the exuberant Reno in the original Anything Goes
is more substantive than his androgynous first name and questionable het-
erosexuality: the Englishman is never allowed to sing. Although his sexual
identity is eventually resolved to the satisfaction of a 1930s audience, his non-
singing status significantly reduces his dramatic identity. In a musical (or
opera) a character who does not sing—for example, Parthy before the 1994
Show Boat revival (discussed in chapter 2)—proceeds at his or her own peril.
Apparently, future book doctors saw this as an illness that needed a
cure. Thus in the 1962 revival Bolton celebrates Sir Evelyn’s emergence as
a regular fellow in act II, scene 1, by letting him sing an innocuously risqué
interpolated duet with Reno, “Let’s Misbehave.” In 1987 Sir Evelyn remains
musically silent in his stateroom scene with Reno but eventually emerges
in act II, scene 3, with his own song for the first time, “The Gypsy in Me,” a
song that Hope sang in the 1934 original and no one sang in 1962.32
Extending the premise that a musical comedy character will be denied
three-dimensionality or identity if he or she is not allowed to sing, even
Billy’s boss, Elisha J. Whitney, is given a brief interpolated song to open act I,
scene 4, in 1987. On this occasion he sings “I Want to Row on the Crew,” bor-
rowed not from Broadway but from one of Porter’s fraternity shows at Yale.
The ship’s deck becomes even more crowded when Moon’s female accom-
plice, Bonnie, is given two interpolated numbers in 1962 (“Heaven Hop” in
act I and “Let’s Step Out” in act II). In 1987 Crouse and Weidman discard
these interpolations and in act II give Bonnie (now named Erma) “Buddie,
Beware,” the tune sung briefly by Ethel Merman as Reno in the original
Broadway production before she persuaded Porter to give his late-arriving
friends an opportunity to hear a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
In the 1987 revival words such as “wacky” and “zany” had been replaced,
offending ethnic stereotypes were removed, and all the important characters
were dramatically enhanced and, more important, allowed to sing. But do
50
Anything Goes
these changes make the 1987 Anything Goes superior to the original? Is it
any funnier to hear a new set of topical jibes at Yale, Porter’s alma mater, in
a libretto created by two former Harvard roommates? Is it an improvement
that Reno in 1934 is asked by Billy to seduce Sir Evelyn while in 1987 Reno
meets and falls in love with the Englishman on her own?
What is lost and gained by this book surgery? Gone from latter-day ver-
sions of Anything Goes, for example, is much of the Marx Brothers humor
built on puns and misunderstandings. Note the following exchange between
Mrs. Wentworth (a humorless society matron not unlike Groucho’s Marga-
ret Dumont) and Moon, an exchange missing from the 1962 and 1987 reviv-
als. Are modern audiences better or worse off for its absence?
mrs. wentworth: We have a great deal to talk about. You see, I’m
honorary president of the Texas Epworth League.
moon: Oh, the Texas League—you must know the Dean Boys.
mrs. wentworth: The Dean boys?
moon: Yes, Dizzy and Daffy.
mrs. wentworth: No, I don’t remember them—
moon: Well, you ask the Detroit Tigers about them. They remember them.
mrs. wentworth: The Detroit Tigers? I know a family in Detroit
named Lyons.
moon: Lyons? Well, I know Maxie Baer [the boxing champion], but
he’s from San Francisco.
mrs. wentworth: Ah, San Francisco. Have you ever been there?
moon: I summered a few years at San Quentin.
mrs. wentworth: San Quentin . . . Is that near Santa Clara?
moon: Clara wasn’t there when I was there. I wonder what ever
became of Clara?
mrs. wentworth: I’m not sure I understood what you just said.
moon: Well, I wasn’t listening.33
Some things about the evolving Anything Goes books stay the same the
more they change. In 1987 Billy still has the opportunity to reply when asked
his nationality that he is Pomeranian—the beard he is wearing was taken
from a dog of that breed—even though Reno no longer notices that Billy is
“putting on the dog.”34 Although many of the original puns and gags had
disappeared by 1987, one 1934 line, “calling all pants,” remained a part of
Anything Goes scripture because it always got a laugh, even though no one
involved in the production was able to explain why it was so funny or even
precisely what it meant (the discussion of the 1936 film adaptation of Any-
thing Goes in chapter 8 should hopefully clear up this mystery).
51
Enchanted Evenings
This survey of the reworked books for Anything Goes in 1962 and 1987 evokes
a paradox: comedy seems especially susceptible to becoming dated, yet many
of the plays that have survived from the 1930s are comedies rather than serious
dramas. Revivals of George S. Kaufman’s and Moss Hart’s comedies You Can’t
Take It with You (1936) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) or Noël Coward’s
British import Private Lives (1930) are frequent guests on modern stages, yet
audiences may have to wait a lifetime before getting an opportunity to see Clif-
ford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935). Theater historian Gerald Bordman, who
plays an active role in the resurrection of unjustifiably forgotten musicals, con-
cedes “that some older musicals seem old-fashioned,” but is quick to point out
that “so are gingerbread houses, Charles Dickens, and Mozart symphonies.”35
Dramatic and Musical Meaning

Is it fair to ask of Anything Goes what we ask of some of the other musicals
featured in this volume? What dramatic meaning does the work possess, and
how is this meaning conveyed through Porter’s music? What, if anything,
goes? In fact, Anything Goes is about many things, including the wrong-
headedness of disguises and pretenses of various kinds and the unthinking
attraction that common folk have for celebrities, even celebrity criminals.
Perhaps the central dramatic moral of Anything Goes is that sexual attrac-
tion and the desire for wealth exert a power superior to friendship and cama-
raderie in determining long-term partnerships. A few minutes into the play,
for example, we learn that Reno has a romantic interest—or, as Sir Evelyn
will later declare in his typical malapropian American English, “hot pants”—
for Billy that has gone unreciprocated for years. In any event, although Billy
thinks Reno is the “top” as well, he nevertheless enlists her help to wean Sir
Evelyn from Hope, Evelyn’s fiancée at the beginning of the musical.
The final pairing of Hope with Billy and Reno with Sir Evelyn has some
satisfying aspects to it. Billy brings out the “gypsy” in Hope and, because he
stays on board the ship, he is eventually able to extricate Hope and her fam-
ily from a bad marriage and financial ruin. For her part, Hope proves a posi-
tive influence in Billy’s life when she persuades him to drop his pretenses
and confess that he is not the celebrity criminal Snake Eyes Johnson, even
though he will be penalized by the rest of the ship, even temporarily impris-
oned, for his newfound integrity. Reno rekindles Sir Evelyn’s dormant mas-
culinity; Sir Evelyn will continue to entertain his future bride by his quaint
Britishisms and distortions of American vernacular and, not incidentally,
make an excellent provider for the lifestyle to which Reno would like to
become accustomed.
52
Anything Goes
But there is a darker side to the happily-ever-after denouement in this

rags-to-riches Depression fantasy. Even though Hope appreciates Billy’s
persistence and joie de vivre, she berates him for being a clown and will not
speak to him until he confesses (at her insistence) that he is not Snake Eyes
Johnson. More significantly, the main reason Reno rather than Hope remains
“the top” is because Porter’s music for Reno is the top. For all his wealth, the
non-singing Sir Evelyn might be considered the consolation prize.
Porter certainly cannot be faulted for giving nearly all his best songs in
the show—“I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Anything Goes,”
and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow”—to Reno as played by Merman, a singer-actress
of true star quality. As the curtain opens, Reno sings the first two of these
songs to Billy, the man she supposedly loves, before he asks her to seduce
Sir Evelyn so that Billy can successfully woo Hope. The degree to which
Reno expresses her admiration for Billy in “I Get a Kick Out of You” and the
mutual admiration expressed between Billy and Reno in “You’re the Top”
might prompt some in the audience to ask why the creators of Anything Goes
could not bring themselves to “make two lovers of friends.”36
In Anything Goes Porter does not attempt the variety of musical and dra-
matic connections that will mark his relatively more integrated classic four-
teen years later, Kiss Me, Kate (discussed in chapter 10). But Porter does pay
attention to nuances in characterization and to the symbiotic relationship
between music and words. To cite three examples, the sailor song, “There’ll
Always Be a Lady Fair,” sounds appropriately like a sea chantey, the chorus
of “Public Enemy No. 1” is a parodistic hymn of praise, and Moon’s song,
“Be Like the Bluebird,” makes a credible pseudo-Australian folk song (at
least for those unfamiliar with “authentic” Australian folk songs).
More significantly, Reno’s music, as befitting her persona, is rhythmically
intricate, ubiquitously syncopated, and harmonically straightforward. It is
also equally meaningful that in “You’re the Top” Billy adopts Reno’s musical
language as his own but changes his tune and his personality when he sings
the more lugubrious “All through the Night” with Hope. But even this song,
dominated by descending half steps and long held notes, exhibits Reno’s
influence with the syncopations on alternate measures in the A section of the
chorus and especially in the release when Billy laments the daylight reality
(Hope does not sing this portion). Billy’s syncopated reality partially sup-
plants the long held notes: “When dawn comes to waken me, / You’re never
there at all. / I know you’ve forsaken me / Till the shadows fall.”
Although rarely faithfully executed in performance, Porter’s score also
gives Reno an idiosyncratic and persistent rhythmic figure in “I Get a Kick
53
Enchanted Evenings
Out of You,” quarter-note triplets in the verse (“sad to be” and “leaves me
totally”) and half-note triplets in the chorus (“kick from cham-[pagne],”
“[alco]-hol doesn’t thrill me at [all],” and “tell me why should it be”), the
latter group shown in Example 3.1a. Because they occupy more than one
beat, quarter-note and half-note triplets are generally perceived as more
rhythmically disruptive than eighth-note triplets.37 Consequently, Reno’s
half-note triplets shown in Example 3.1a, like the quarter-note triplets that
open the main chorus of Tony’s “Maria” (“I just met a girl named Maria”
[Example 13.2b, p. 283]), are experienced as rhythmically out of phase
with the prevailing duple framework. A good Broadway example of the
conventional and nondisruptive eighth-note triplet rhythm (one beat for
each triplet) can be observed at the beginning of every phrase in Laurey’s
“Many a New Day” from Oklahoma! (Example 3.1b). Broadway composers
have never to my knowledge articulated the intentionality or metaphoric
meaning behind this practice. Nevertheless, with striking consistency, more
than a few songs featured in this survey employ quarter-note and half-note
triplets in duple meter (where triplets stretch in syncopated fashion over
three beats instead of two) to musically depict characters who are tempo-
rarily or permanently removed from conventional social norms and expec-
tations: Venus in One Touch of Venus, Julie Jordan in Carousel, Tony in West
Side Story.38 In Guys and Dolls, rhythms are employed or avoided to distin-
guish one character type from another. The tinhorn gamblers and Adelaide
frequently use quarter-note triplets, while Sarah Brown and her Salvation
Army cohorts do not.
Porter’s use of Reno’s rhythm in the chorus of “I Get a Kick Out of You”
constitutes perhaps his most consistent attempt to create meaning from his
Example 3.1. Triplet rhythms

(a) “I Get a Kick Out of You” (Anything Goes)
(b) “Many a New Day” (Oklahoma!)
(c) “Gypsy in Me” (Anything Goes)
54
Anything Goes
musical language. Half-note triplets dominate Reno’s explication of all the

things in life that do not give her a kick; they disappear when (with continued
syncopation, however) she informs Billy that she does get a kick out of him.
Reno will also sing her quarter-note triplets briefly in the release of “Blow,
Gabriel, Blow” (not shown), when she is ready to fly higher and higher.39 By the
time Hope loses some of her inhibitions and finds the gypsy in herself (“Gypsy
in Me”) in act II, she too will adopt this rhythmic figure on “hiding a-[way],”
“never been,” and “waiting its” (Example 3.1c). By usurping Reno’s rhythm,
Hope will become more like the former evangelist and, ironically, a more suit-
able partner for Billy.40
The verse of the title song shown in Example 3.2 offers a striking example
of Porter’s “word painting,” Kivy’s “textual realism” introduced in chap-
ter 1. Even if a listener remains unconvinced that the gradually rising half-
steps in the bass line between measures 3 and 7 (C-D-D) depict the winding
and consequently faster ticking of a clock, Porter unmistakably captures the
changing times in his title song. He does this by contrasting the descend-
ing C-minor arpeggiated triad (C-G-E-C) that opens the song on the
words “Times have changed” with a descending C-major arpeggiated triad
(C-G-E-C) on the words “If today.”41 The topsy-turvy Depression-tinted
world of 1934 is indeed different from the world of our Puritan ancestors.
Porter makes this change known to us musically as well as in his text.
55
Enchanted Evenings
Example 3.2. “Anything Goes” (verse, mm. 1-10)
56
Anything Goes
In the chorus of “Anything Goes” Porter abandons “textual realism” in

favor of a jazzy “opulent adornment” and does not attempt to convey nuances
and distinctions between “olden days,” a time when “a glimpse of stocking
was looked on as something shocking,” and the present day when “anything
goes.” Much has changed between 1934 and today and the chorus of “Any-
thing Goes” remains one of the most memorable of its time or ours. Neverthe-
less, it is difficult to argue that this central portion of the song possesses (or
attempts to convey) a dramatic equivalence with its text, even if it brilliantly
captures an accepting attitude to a syncopated world “gone mad.” Similarly,
in “You’re the Top” Porter does not capitalize on the text’s potential for real-
ism and opts for inspired opulent adornment instead. Thus, although the “I”
always appears in the bottom throughout most of the song, the “you” blithely
moves back and forth from top to bottom.”42 The upward leaping orchestral
figure anticipates the word, “top,” but the sung line does not, and at the punch
line, “But if Baby I’m the bottom, / You’re the top,” both Billy and Reno (“I’m”
and “You’re”) share a melodic line at the top of their respective ranges.43
In the end a search for an underlying theme in Anything Goes yields
more fun than profundity. An Englishman is good-naturedly spoofed for
speaking a quaint “foreign” language and for his slowness in understand-
ing American vernacular, and the celebrity status of religious entertainers
like Aimée Semple McPherson and public criminals like Baby Face Nelson
are caricatured by evangelist-singer Reno Sweeney and Public Enemy No.
1 (Moon Face). On a somewhat deeper level, the music suggests that the
friendship between Reno and Billy has more vitality and perhaps greater
substance than the eventual romantic pairings of Billy and Hope and Reno
and Sir Evelyn. Not only does Porter demonstrate their compatibility by
having Billy and Reno share quarter- and half-note triplet rhythms, but he
shows his affection for them by giving them his most memorable songs. By
the end of Anything Goes some may wonder how a person who cannot even
sing could deserve a gem like Reno who sings nothing but hits.
Anything Goes does not conform to the organic “Wagnerian” model of some
pre- and post-Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals beginning with Show Boat.
Instead it presents a striking parallel with the generally less ostentatiously
organic world of Baroque opera, in which great stars and show-stopping arias
can ensure at least short-term success (which is all that is required). In any of
its forms, including the 1962 Anything Goes that held the stage for almost three
decades and the 1987 reincarnation with its new book and numerous interpo-
lated songs (today’s default rental version), Anything Goes still works. And even
if the book that changes with the times falls short of the integrated ideal, it con-
tinues to provide marvelous vehicles to drive and showcase a parade of timeless
hit songs. Times have changed, but Anything Goes is apparently here to stay.
57
chapter four
PORGY AND BESS

Broadway Opera
P
orgy and Bess, described by its composer George Gershwin (1898–
1937) as “a serious attempt to put in operatic form a purely American
theme” and “a new form, which combines opera with theatre,” began
its public life in 1935 before a Broadway audience.1 While the possibilities
of a Metropolitan Opera production had been explored, a Theatre Guild
production offered a more extended rehearsal schedule (six weeks), many
more performances, and fewer logistical problems in assembling a large cast
of operatically trained African-American singers.2 Six years earlier the Met
had signed a contract with Gershwin to produce an opera based on Sholem
Ansky’s version of the Jewish folktale “The Dybbuk” but abandoned the
project after Gershwin was denied musical rights to this property.3
After a disappointing initial Broadway run of 124 performances, Porgy
and Bess achieved a wider audience seven years later in the most success-
ful Broadway revival up to that time. But in contrast to the 1935 operatic
form, the 1942 revival presented a Broadway opera shorn of its operatic
accoutrements, that is, without recitatives (sung dialogue). Although some
spoken dialogue replaced Gershwin’s recitative, in the 1950s Porgy and Bess
regained more of its operatic form as it toured opera houses all over the
world (including La Scala).
In 1976 the work gained additional acceptance as an authentic as well
as an accessible operatic classic when the Houston Opera performed the
first largely uncut stage version since the Boston tryouts in 1935. By 1980
58
Porgy and Bess
two competing unexpurgated recordings, one by the Houston Opera and

another by the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, had appeared. Then, after
fifty years of negotiations, Porgy and Bess appeared at the Met in 1985.4 Nev-
ertheless, despite its newfound popularity and acclaim among opera audi-
ences, Porgy and Bess remains best known to the general public today as a
collection of Broadway show tunes including “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty
o’ Nuttin,’ ” and “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” sung, played, and recorded
by jazz and popular artists as diverse as Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Arm-
strong, Sammy Davis Jr. and Diahann Carroll, Harry Belafonte and Lena
Horne, Mel Tormé and Frances Faye, and Miles Davis.
Gershwin’s exposure to the European classical tradition began two years

after he started to play the piano at the relatively late age of twelve in
1910, when his teacher Charles Hambitzer introduced him to the music of
Debussy and Ravel. Following his apprenticeship as a popular song “plug-
ger” for the publishing house Remick & Company and some modest success
in his own right as a songwriter for various revues between 1919 and 1921,
Gershwin studied theory, composition, and orchestration with Edward
Kilenyi. For more than a decade before completing Porgy and Bess Gershwin
had composed a small body of jazz-influenced classical instrumental works
including Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Concerto in F (1925), and An American in
Paris (1928) that earned the respect, or at least the attention, of composers
as diverse as Ravel, Prokofiev, and Berg. Between 1932 and 1936, partly in
preparation for his first opera, Gershwin continued his studies in composi-
tion with Joseph Schillinger, a theorist who had developed a teachable sys-
tem of melodic composition (including some techniques that Gershwin was
able to incorporate in Porgy and Bess).
For the revue, George White Scandals of 1922, Gershwin created an unusual
work that revealed an interest in opera parallel to his interest in instrumen-
tal music, a work that similarly combined the cultivated European tradition
with the American vernacular. This modest first effort, Blue Monday, a one-
act verismo opera about blacks in Harlem, was dropped after opening night.
For the next thirteen years Gershwin would undergo a rigorous Broadway
apprenticeship that eventually gave him the technique and the experience
he needed to attempt a full-length opera in the European tradition, again
using the black experience for subject matter.
By 1924, with Lady, Be Good!, George had found a first-rate lyricist in his
brother Ira (1896–1983), and over the next decade the Gershwins produced
mostly successful musical comedies filled with great songs and great stars
such as Tip-Toes (1925) with Queenie Smith, Oh, Kay! (1926) with Gertrude
59
Enchanted Evenings
George and Ira Gershwin. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by

arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO
FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW. ALHIRSCHFELD.COM
Lawrence, Funny Face (1927) with Lady, Be Good! leads Fred and Adele Astaire,
and Girl Crazy (1930) with new stars Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers. All
of these shows were produced by Alex Aarons (who had independently pre-
sented George’s first book musical La La Lucille in 1919) and Vinton Freedley.5
From 1930 to 1933 the Gershwins created a trilogy of musicals that satirized
contemporary politics: Strike Up the Band (1930), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Let
’Em Eat Cake (1933). In addition to the opportunities they provided for musi-
cal humor and wit, these political musicals allowed Gershwin to continue
the practice he started in Oh, Kay!, in which extended ensemble finales are
presented continuously with a minimum of intervening dialogue.
The act I Finale to Of Thee I Sing also displays a substantial passage of
accompanied recitative or arioso (a singing style between recitative and aria).
This passage is sung by Diana Devereaux, the character who, by winning
60
Porgy and Bess
first prize in a national beauty contest, was entitled to become the First Lady
but was passed over in favor of Mary Turner because the latter could make
irresistible corn muffins. When instead of muffins Diana serves President
Wintergreen a summons for breach of promise, Gershwin gives the jilted
Southerner a blues-inflected musical line in recitative that would not be out
of place in Porgy and Bess.
When Gershwin finished reading the novel Porgy (1925) by DuBose
Heyward (1885–1940) after a sleepless night in October 1926, he wrote a
letter to the author, a leading Southern novelist and poet, informing him that
he wanted to use the novel as the basis for an opera. Nine years later Porgy
and Bess appeared on Broadway, a delay that can be contributed both to the
successful run of the Theatre Guild production of the play Porgy in 1927 and
to Gershwin’s many commitments and excuses and his sense that he needed
more experience before tackling a full-scale opera.
Since several Gershwin biographies offer detailed surveys of Porgy and Bess’s
pre-history, the events leading to the premiere need only be encapsulated here.6
The summer after he had first written Heyward, Gershwin met the author for the
first time, and they agreed to collaborate on an opera based on Porgy. DuBose’s
wife, Dorothy, who had co-authored the play, recalled years later that Gershwin
informed her husband that he “wanted to spend years in study before compos-
ing his opera.”7 Although by March 1932 he wrote Heyward to express a contin-
ued interest in composing the opera, two months later Gershwin hedged again
when he informed DuBose that “there is no possibility of the operatic version’s
being written before January 1933.”8 The two men met in New York City even
as plans were brewing for a Porgy that would feature the popular entertainer Al
Jolson in blackface with lyrics and music by Show Boat collaborators Hammer-
stein and Kern. The Jolson project was not abandoned until September 1934,
long after Gershwin and Heyward had begun their version.
By November 1933, Gershwin had experienced two successive Broadway
flops, Pardon My English and Let ’Em Eat Cake, the latter a bitter sequel to the
less acerbic Pulitzer Prize–winning Of Thee I Sing. Despite these setbacks,
the Theatre Guild, which had produced the popular play Porgy six years
earlier, announced that Gershwin and Heyward had signed a contract to
produce a musical version. On November 12, Heyward sent Gershwin a
typescript of the first scene, and in December and again the following Janu-
ary the composer visited the librettist in Charleston, South Carolina.
On February 6, 1934, Heyward mailed Gershwin a typescript of act II,
scenes 1 and 2. Several weeks later (February 26) Gershwin informed
Heyward that he had begun to compose the music for the first act and
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Enchanted Evenings
expressed his relief that their work would not suffer in comparison with the
all-black opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three
Acts, that had recently premiered on Broadway (February 20). On March 2
Heyward sent the composer a typescript of act II, scene 3, and six days later
Gershwin wrote that Ira was working on lyrics for the opening of the opera.9
By the end of March, Heyward had sent act II, scene 4, and completed a
draft for act III. In April Heyward traveled to New York to meet with the
Gershwins and together they created “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin,’” one of the
few numbers in the opera in which the music preceded the lyrics.
Gershwin completed the music for act I, scene 1, before the end of May. In
the summer he worked on the opera in Charleston (June 16 to July 21). In a let-
ter to Heyward dated November 5, Gershwin announced he had completed
act II and begun act III, scene 2. On December 17 he reported to Heyward that
he had heard a singer, Todd Duncan, who would make “a superb Crown and,
I think, just as good a Porgy,” and several weeks later he wrote to Duncan
(who would in fact be cast as Porgy) that he had just completed the trio in act
III, scene 3 (“Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess”), and was about to orchestrate his
opera. The arduous task of orchestration occupied Gershwin until three days
before rehearsals began August 26.10 The Boston tryouts began on September
30 and the Broadway premiere took place October 10 at the Alvin Theatre.
Questions of Genre, Authenticity, and Race

Genre
Prior to its eventual acceptance into the operatic community, reviewers and
historians alike were uncertain how to classify Porgy and Bess. At its pre-
miere the New York Times did not know whether to approach the work as
a dramatic event or a musical event, and assigned first-string reviewers in
both camps, drama critic Brooks Atkinson and music critic Olin Downes, to
review the work in adjacent columns.11 Most subsequent accounts of these
reviews conclude that Atkinson, who praised Gershwin for establishing “a
personal voice that was inarticulate in the original play,” appreciated the
work more fully than Downes.12 It is true that Downes, in contrast to Atkin-
son, expressed reservations about the stylistic disparities in the work when he
wrote that Gershwin “has not completely formed his style as an opera com-
poser” and that “the style is at one moment of opera and another of operetta
or sheer Broadway entertainment.”13 Nevertheless, Downes found much to
praise in Gershwin’s melody, harmony, vocal writing, and the “elements of a
more organic kind,” especially the “flashes of real contrapuntal ingenuity.”
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Porgy and Bess
Atkinson, who had nothing but praise for Anything Goes the previous
year, put his cards on the table when he now wrote that “what a theatre
critic probably wants is a musical show with songs that evoke the emotion
of situations and make no further pretensions.”14 It is not surprising then
that he expressed such distaste for the convention of recitative, which he,
like Gershwin, designated as “operatic form.” Atkinson also questioned
“why commonplace remarks that carry no emotion have to be made in a
chanting monotone.”15 Playing from the same deck, Downes lamented that
a composer like Gershwin, “with a true lyrical gift and with original and
racy things to say, has turned with his score of ‘Porgy and Bess’ to the more
pretentious ways of musical theatre.”16 For Downes as well as for Atkinson,
a composer who can “go upstairs and write a Gershwin tune” but whose
“treatment of passages of recitative is seldom significant,” should know his
place and stick to writing great but unpretentious tunes.17
The question of genre and “operatic form” raised by Atkinson and
Downes can be traced to the earliest stages in the collaboration of Gershwin
and Heyward. In fact, the issue of recitatives was their principal source of
artistic disagreement. As early as November 12, 1933, when he sent the first
scene, Heyward offered the following suggestion: “I feel more and more
that all dialogue should be spoken. It is fast moving, and we will cut it to
the bone, but this will give the opera speed and tempo.”18 Gershwin differed
strongly and overruled his librettist.
For the first decades of its history a critical consensus supported Heyward’s
original conviction. In his review of the Theatre Guild production in 1935
Virgil Thomson writes critically of Gershwin’s recitative as “vocally uneasy
and dramatically cumbersome” and concludes that “it would have been bet-
ter if he had stuck to [spoken dialogue] . . . all the time.”19 Part of Thomson’s
subsequent praise in 1941 for the Cheryl Crawford revival in Maplewood,
New Jersey, can be attributed to her practice “of eliminating, where possible,
the embarrassment due to Gershwin’s incredibly amateurish way of writing
recitative.”20
Vernon Duke—like Gershwin a hybrid classical-popular composer but
unlike Gershwin a man sharply divided between his two artistic personali-
ties, Duke and Dukelsky—was similarly critical. In their pre-compositional
discussions about Porgy and Bess he recalled that “George was still under
the sway of the Wagnerian formula,” which Duke believed to be “anti-
theatrical,” and wrote somewhat smugly that “it is generally acknowledged
that the separate numbers are superior to the somewhat amorphous stretches
of music that hold them together,” that is, the recitatives.21 Less surprisingly,
Richard Rodgers, who rarely abandoned the Broadway convention of
spoken dialogue, also believed that Gershwin had made “a mistake in
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Enchanted Evenings
writing Porgy and Bess as an opera.”22 According to Rodgers, “the recitative

device was an unfamiliar and difficult one for Broadway audiences, and it
didn’t sustain the story.” Consequently, it was only “when Cheryl Crawford
revived it later as a musical play that it gained such overwhelming success
and universal acceptance.”23 More recently, Gershwin biographer Charles
Schwartz concurred with the above-mentioned composers that the Craw-
ford revival “vindicated” Heyward’s original conception of the work, “for
as he had argued, Gershwin’s recitatives impeded the pacing of the original
production.”24
In addition to his controversial decision to give his work operatic form
by connecting his musical numbers with recitatives, the composer had
the audacity to load his score with hit songs, which makes the distinction
between aria and recitative more glaring than in most hitless operatic works
(see the list of scenes and songs in the online website). Clearly this issue was
a sensitive one for Gershwin, who felt the need to publicly defend the pres-
ence of songs in Porgy and Bess:
It is true that I have written songs for “Porgy and Bess.” I am not
ashamed of writing songs at any time so long as they are good
songs. In “Porgy and Bess” I realized I was writing an opera for
the theatre and without songs it could be neither of the theatre
nor entertaining from my viewpoint. But songs are entirely within
the operatic tradition. Many of the most successful operas of the
past have had songs. Nearly all of Verdi’s operas contain what
are known as “song hits.” “Carmen” [then performed with Ernest
Guiraud’s added recitatives] is almost a collection of song hits.25
In his overview of Gershwin’s posthumous reputation Richard Crawford

offers an insightful summary of several seemingly insurmountable criti-
cisms that made Gershwin so defensive about inserting popular songs in
a serious work that in the composer’s words “used sustained symphonic
music to unify entire scenes.”26 Crawford writes:
We see Gershwin as a great natural talent, to be sure, but techni-

cally suspect, and working in a commercial realm quite separate
from the neighborhood in which true art is created. So there sits
Gershwin, as Virgil Thomson once wrote, “between two stools,”
vastly appealing to the mass audience and hence a bit raffish, not
quite deserving of serious academic scrutiny: a man without a
category.27
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Porgy and Bess
Authenticity
Somewhat related to the problems of genre definition is another controversy
surrounding Porgy and Bess: how to determine an authentic performing ver-
sion. To place this debate in perspective it may be helpful to recall the dif-
ficulties in establishing a text for Show Boat (discussed in chapter 2). Since
Kern and Hammerstein themselves revised their work nineteen years after
its original Broadway run for the 1946 Broadway revival, it is arguable that
this later version represents the final intentions of the creators. Despite its
claim to legitimacy, however, revisionists such as John McGlinn rejected the
1946 version as an impure mutation of original authorial intent. Further, the
Houston Opera (1983), McGlinn (1988), and Prince (for the 1994 Broadway
revival) restored material that had been discarded—presumably with the
consent of the Kern and Hammerstein estates—in the pre-Broadway try-
outs. The appearance of the dropped “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’” in the first
published vocal score provides fuel for the idea that Kern really wanted this
music in the show but capitulated to external pressures. Other reinsertions
were not supported by equally compelling evidence.
The authenticity problems associated with Porgy and Bess (and many
European operas in the core repertory) differ from those posed by the per-
formance history of Show Boat. For example, in contrast to the Show Boat
score, which was published four months into the original Broadway run,
by which time the cuts had been stabilized, the Porgy and Bess vocal score
was published as a rehearsal score prior to the Boston tryouts on Septem-
ber 30, 1935, and therefore includes most of the music that was later cut
in the Boston tryouts. Thus the Gershwin score, unlike the first published
Show Boat score (with the exception of “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’”), is not a
score that accurately represents what New York audiences actually heard
on opening night ten days later. Thanks to the work of Charles Hamm it is
now possible to reconstruct what audiences did hear on the opening night
of Porgy and Bess (October 10, 1935) down to the last measure.28 But the ques-
tion remains: Were these cuts made for artistic or for practical or commercial
considerations?
Hamm argues that “most cuts made for apparently practical reasons were
of passages already questioned on artistic grounds,” and that “the compos-
er’s mastery of technique, his critical judgment, his imagination, and his
taste come as much in play in the process of final revisions as in the first
stages of composition.” In addition to the relatively modest “cuts to tighten
dialogue or action,” “cuts of repeated material mostly made before the open-
ing in Boston,” and “cuts to shorten the opera,” the openings of three scenes
were greatly reduced. By the time Porgy and Bess reached New York, only
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Enchanted Evenings
twenty measures of Jazzbo Brown’s music remained before “Summertime”

(and even these were eliminated a few days later), and the “six prayers” that
opened act II, scene 4 were removed (though a far shorter reprise could still
be heard at the end of the scene). More than two hundred measures from act
III, scene 3, had also been discarded, including much of the trio portion of
“Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess.”
An examination of one deleted portion, Porgy’s “Buzzard Song” from act
II, scene 1, might help to shed light on the complex issues of “authenticity”
and the relative virtues of “absolute completeness.”29 As in the play Porgy
by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, upon which the opera libretto is based
(rather than on the novel Porgy), the libretto draft that DuBose sent to George
on February 6, 1934, concludes this scene with the appearance of a buzzard.30
In the play, the fact that the buzzard lights over Porgy’s door represents the
end of the protagonist’s newly acquired happiness and peace of mind with
Bess and prompts the final stage direction of the scene, “Porgy sits looking
up at the bird with an expression of hopelessness as the curtain falls.”31
The text of the “Buzzard Song” in the libretto shows Porgy’s supersti-
tious response to and fear of the buzzard, but in keeping with his attempt
to be more upbeat in his adaptation from play to opera, Heyward presents
a triumphant protagonist who reminds the buzzard that a former Porgy,
decaying with loneliness, “don’t live here no mo.’”32 Because he is no longer
lonely, the Porgy in the first draft of Heyward’s libretto revels in his victory
over superstition and loneliness: “There’s two folks livin’ in dis shelter /
Eatin,’ sleepin,’ singin,’ prayin.’ / Ain’t no such thing as loneliness, / An’
Porgy’s young again.”33
Several pages earlier in the libretto manuscript George wrote the words
“Buzzard Song.” The song cue appears shortly after the arrival of the bird in
the scene and Porgy’s observation that “once de buzzard fold his wing an’
light over yo’ house, all yo’ happiness done dead.”34 By placing the “Buz-
zard Song” earlier in the scene, Gershwin paved the way for the following
duet between Porgy and Bess, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” a subsequent
addition.
Shortly before Porgy and Bess premiered in New York, the “Buzzard
Song” was among the deletions agreed to by Gershwin and director Rouben
Mamoulian. There is general agreement among various first- and second-
hand explanations for this cut. Mamoulian, in his 1938 tribute to Gershwin,
wrote that “no matter how well he loved a musical passage or an aria (like
the Buzzard Song in Porgy and Bess for instance), he would cut it out with-
out hesitation if that improved the performance as a whole.”35 According to
Edith Garson’s completion of Isaac Goldberg’s 1931 Gershwin biography,
the composer agreed to this particular cut for practical reasons: “In fact,
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Porgy and Bess
during the Boston run, it was George who insisted on cutting fifteen min-
utes from one section, saying to Ira, ‘You won’t have a Porgy by the time we
reach New York. No one can sing that much, eight performances a week.’ ”36
David Ewen writes that “Porgy’s effective ‘Buzzard Song’ and other of
his passages were removed at George’s suggestion.”37 Edward Jablonski
explains, “Unlike recent productions of Porgy and Bess, the 1935 production
had but one Porgy. So ‘Buzzard Song’ was among the first cut, in order to
provide [Todd] Duncan with a chance to breathe between songs.”38
There is little doubt that Heyward and the brothers Gershwin (mainly,
of course, George) agreed to relocate the buzzard number prior to the com-
position of the short score that served as the foundation of the published
piano-vocal version used in rehearsal. It can also be determined that those
most involved in the production, particularly the composer and the direc-
tor, agreed to cut the “Buzzard Song,” perhaps on the eve of the New York
premiere. Presumably the cut was made primarily for the practical reason
that the opera was forty-five minutes too long and that Porgy already had
two big numbers in this scene.
But the buzzard would light again with remarkable tenacity. Even dur-
ing the initial run of the Broadway Porgy and Bess, the discarded “Buzzard
Song” would appear among the first recorded excerpts from the opera. It
was ironic that the singer on the recording—Lawrence Tibbett—was white.
According to Gershwin, Tibbett was the likely candidate for a Metropolitan
Opera production rather than the original Porgy, Todd Duncan.39 Duncan
himself sang the “Buzzard Song” along with “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and
“Bess, You Is My Woman Now” (with Marguerite Chapman) in the Los
Angeles Philharmonic concerts organized by Merle Armitage in February
1937, and he included it along with other excerpts for a recording released
in 1942.40
The “Buzzard Song” was also one of the few items cut from the Boston
tryouts to resurface on the first nearly complete Porgy recording (and first
published libretto in English) in 1951 produced by Goddard Lieberson and
conducted by Lehman Engel, with Lawrence Winters and Camilla Williams
singing the title roles.41 And the song was among those portions reinstated
for the Blevins Davis-Robert Breen revival that premiered in Dallas in 1952
and toured Europe later that year.42 But in 1952 the buzzard did not appear
until the final scene of the opera, perhaps to symbolize Porgy’s bad luck in
losing Bess.43
Does the “Buzzard Song” belong in future productions of Porgy and
Bess? The central practical issue that led to its original omission was not
really its length (less than four minutes, including the recitative with the
lawyer Archdale) but the strain on Porgy’s voice. Does this mean that if
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Enchanted Evenings
several Porgys had been available or if the Broadway equivalent of Lauritz

Melchior had surfaced, the composer might have fought for its inclusion?
Not necessarily.
The artistic aspects are naturally more problematic than the practical
ones. Can we interpret Gershwin’s remarks in 1935—“The reason I did
not submit this work to the usual sponsors of opera in America was that I
hoped to have developed something in American music that would appeal
to the many rather than to the cultured few”—to justify the removal of
forty-five expendable minutes?44 What are present-day audiences to make
of Gershwin’s contemporaries, many directly involved in the first produc-
tion, who without exception concluded that Porgy and Bess was better off
with the cuts, including that of the “Buzzard Song”?
Clearly, even if Gershwin strove to approximate the “beauty of Meister-
singer,” he did not want to approximate its length, at least not on Broad-
way.45 But opera epicureans used to Die Meistersinger and desirous of
savoring every possible morsel of a work might eagerly welcome back the
deleted forty-five minutes and perhaps endorse portions of the opera that
never made it even to Boston, for example, the reconciliation duet between
Bess and Serena in act III, scene 1.46 The Houston Opera producers, who felt
no remorse at dividing the work into two long acts rather than the specified
three in order to save overtime labor costs, perhaps did not even consider
the option of cutting the “Buzzard Song.”
Several years before the Cleveland and Houston recordings were issued,
Wayne Shirley, an authority on the opera and a persuasive advocate for a
score that represents the composer’s intentions, wrote that the “Buzzard
Song” “is always cut, since Porgy has two other strenuous numbers in the
scene, and the work flows better for the cut.”47 And although he does not
offer an artistic justification for deleting this particular song, Hamm, who
contends, as we have seen, that “most cuts made for apparently practical
reasons were of passages already questioned on artistic grounds,” would
presumably support Fred Graham, who introduces Kiss Me, Kate with the
line, “Yes, the cut’s good, leave it in.”48 In contrast to Shirley and Hamm,
Wilfrid Mellers has argued that the “Buzzard Song” constitutes “the
turning-point of the opera, for it forces him [Porgy] to face up to reality and
suffering. . . . The appearance of the buzzard marks Porgy’s realization of the
significance of his love.”49
Some might argue for the retention of the “Buzzard Song” on musical
grounds; others might conclude with equal justification that the song creates
a dramatic intrusion. Certainly the “Buzzard Song” undermines the effect of
a scene that otherwise successfully shows Porgy and Bess as fully accepted
members of the Catfish Row community and, of course, illustrates their
68
Porgy and Bess
genuine and optimistic love. Because Porgy’s superstitious nature had been
de-emphasized in the adaptation of play to opera, its sudden appearance
in this scene, despite Porgy’s ultimate ability to conquer his fear, creates
an ominous tone that the love duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” cannot
overcome. Porgy’s extraordinary fear in act III, scene 2, when he learns that
he must look on Crown’s face or serve time in jail, is generated by his sense
of guilt at having murdered Crown rather than by irrational superstition.
(For this reason, its placement in act III of the Davis-Breen libretto makes
artistic sense despite the absence of historical justification.) To historians
troubled by the dramatic effect of the song, it comes as a relief to learn that
the composer had agreed to and perhaps even suggested its deletion.
Since the late 1970s the prevailing view holds that an uncut version of
Gershwin’s rehearsal vocal score best represents the composer’s final inten-
tions for the work. The more complete, the more authentic. For this reason
few of the cuts noted by Hamm are in fact observed in current productions
(although interestingly the video directed by Trevor Nunn in 1993 omitted
the “Buzzard Song”); virtually none are observed in the three recordings of
the work.50 The merits of the cuts can and should be argued on aesthetic as
well as historical grounds, and perhaps Porgy’s cuts should be disregarded,
especially on recordings, which are less beholden to the time constraints of
a Broadway production. But any careful consideration must acknowledge
that the published score does not represent what Theatre Guild audiences
heard during the initial run and may be alien to Gershwin’s considered
thoughts on the work.
Race
The criticism leveled at Gershwin for making his Broadway opera through-
composed and for straddling two worlds with his concoction of sung
speech and hit songs has somewhat abated in recent years. More persis-
tently controversial is Gershwin’s claim that his “folk opera” expressed the
African-American experience. Criticisms of Gershwin’s racial presumptions
appeared as early as the 1935 Broadway premiere, but in contrast to the
gradual tolerance and eventual appreciation of his musical ambitions and
the work’s length, the hubris of Gershwin’s depiction of black culture has
not diminished over time despite the proliferation of performances through-
out the world.51 In fact, the growing “classic” stature of Porgy and Bess may
actually have fueled racial controversies in recent years to a point that the
problems brought about by what is perceived as cultural colonization and
exploitation seems destined to remain central to the work in the minds of
many for some time to come.52
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Enchanted Evenings
In chapter 2 it was noted that the creators and future producers of

Show Boat made some revisions in response to evolving racial sensibilities.
Hammerstein replaced the word “niggers” with “coloured folks” as early
as the 1928 London production (“colored” in 1946) as the first words of the
show. For his screenplay to the 1936 film Hammerstein substituted “Darkies
all work on de Mississippi,” and in the 1946 film biography of Kern audi-
ences heard “Here we all work on de Mississippi.” Miles Kreuger wrote
that in a 1966 Lincoln Center revival, “Nobody works on the Mississippi,
because the Negro chorus was omitted altogether from the opening num-
ber.”53 In the 1994 Broadway revival directed by Hal Prince, “Brothers all
work on the Mississippi.”
Accounts of the genesis of McGlinn’s recording of the “authentic” Show
Boat of 1927 report that the contracted African-American chorus refused
to sing the offending word “niggers” and therefore was replaced by the
Ambrosian Chorus, who had been contracted to sing the white choral parts.
To show his solidarity with the black chorus, Willard White, the Joe for this
recording, resigned, and only after consultation with Eartha Kitt, a black per-
former and an articulate and influential opponent of racial indignities, did
Bruce Hubbard consent to sing the role of Joe and the word “niggers.” Ear-
lier, Etta Moten Barnett, who sang Bess in the popular 1942 revival of Porgy
and Bess, recalled that the cast “refused to used the word ‘nigger,’ and it was
removed from all of the lines except those spoken by white characters.”54
Some stage productions (and the 1951 film) of Show Boat circumvented the
issue by minimizing the role of blacks, but this type of evasive action was, of
course, impossible to accomplish with Porgy and Bess, Thus, from his time to
ours, Gershwin’s opera has been chastised for its composer’s presumption
to speak for another race.
Thomson in his 1935 review takes Gershwin to task for attempting a
folk subject: “Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as
long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself, which is certainly
not true of the American Negro in 1935.”55 A more detailed and closely rea-
soned critique of what Thomson termed “fake folk-lore” can be found in a
review of the opera by Hall Johnson that appeared in the African-American
journal Opportunity a few months after the Theatre Guild premiere.56 As the
composer of The Green Pastures (1930) and Run, Little Chillun! (1933), two
undisputed examples of authentic black folklore, Johnson’s credentials were
impeccable for this task.
Although Johnson, like Downes and Thomson, criticizes Gershwin’s
craftsmanship, again mainly in the recitatives, most of his remarks focus
on Gershwin’s misunderstanding of the African-American character and
experience.57 According to Johnson, the first of Gershwin’s many inauthentic
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Porgy and Bess
elements is his failure to capture “Negro simplicity.” For Johnson, Gershwin’s

music “suggests sophisticated intricacies of attitude which could not pos-
sibly be native to the minds of the people who make up his story.”58 What
makes the work “genuine” are the performances, particularly that of John
W. Bubbles, of the vaudeville team Buck and Bubbles, who as Sporting Life
played the central non-operatic character among the leading players. But
despite Bubbles’s genuineness, Johnson viewed “It Ain’t Necessarily So” as
“so un-Negroid, in thought and in structure that even Bubbles cannot save
it.”59 On the other hand, perhaps because its derivations were more urban
than folk, Johnson praises the authenticity of Sporting Life’s “There’s a Boat
Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” as a “real Negro gem.”60
Criticism of Porgy and Bess on racial grounds reached a new level of inten-
sity in the 1950s and 1960s, the era of Brown v. Board of Education and the civil
rights struggles for equality. Many blacks resented the fact that the State
Department, in sponsoring a global tour in 1952, was propagating nega-
tive stereotypes. On a televised broadcast playwright Lorraine Hansberry,
author of Raisin in the Sun, criticized Otto Preminger, director of the 1959
film version of the opera, for “portraying Negroes at their worst.”61 A. S.
“Doc” Young wrote in the Los Angeles Sentinel that Porgy and Bess “is com-
pletely out of context with modern times . . . it perpetuates old stereotypes
that right-thinking people have buried long ago.”62
Social historian Harold Cruse takes Hansberry to task for focusing on
content in her criticism of Porgy and Bess.63 Cruse instead sees the work “as
the most perfect symbol of the Negro creative artist’s cultural denial, deg-
radation, exclusion, exploitation and acceptance of white paternalism.”64 He
deeply resents the fact that blacks themselves did not produce their own
authentic folk opera. He also considers it as indisputable that even if blacks
had written such a work, it “would never have been supported, glorified
and acclaimed, as Porgy has, by the white cultural elite of America.”65
In Gershwin’s time knowledgeable black critics responded negatively to
the composer’s attempt to come “as close to the Negro inflection in speech
as possible” in his recitatives.66 Even the normally circumspect and polite
Duke Ellington was reported to have said that Porgy and Bess “does not use
the Negro musical idiom” and that “it was not the music of Catfish Row or
any other kind of Negroes.”67 Others found the idea of whites speaking for
blacks and the subject matter itself rather than the final product the principal
source of consternation.
Even those who for the most part reject Gershwin’s “fake folk-lore” might
find something to appreciate in Gershwin’s assimilation of black culture
inspired by his month at Folly Beach in 1934. Although simplistic by the
standards of a master drummer, the polyrhythmic drumming that precedes
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Enchanted Evenings
“I Ain’t Got No Shame” in act II, scene 2, comes closer to black African
drumming style than most jazz drumming (by drummers of any race)
before the 1950s. Similarly, Gershwin’s attempt to capture the effect he and
Heyward heard while listening outside a Pentecostal church in the opening
and closing of act II, scene 4, “Oh, Doctor Jesus,” in which six prayers are
presented in a six-part texture (unfortunately mostly cut in Boston and New
York), is a dazzling translation of the black experience.68 Certainly, these two
examples possess a “fake authenticity” analogous to nineteenth-century
slave narratives written by whites or Forrest Carter’s best-selling bogus
biography of the Cherokee Indian, The Education of Little Tree.69 If we use
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “blindfold test” (in which an expert usually failed to
determine the race of various jazz trumpeters without previous knowledge)
to judge a work’s authenticity, Gershwin’s evocation of African-American
drumming and prayer meetings might be heard more charitably.70
For the sake of musical homogeneity, Gershwin in most instances pur-
posefully created his own idiosyncratic pseudo-spirituals rather than copy
those he had heard. He also preferred to freely adapt his own Russian-Jewish
ethnicity into a personal interpretation of the African-American experience
rather than slavishly imitate it. The strong kinship between these musically
compatible traditions is evident in Sporting Life’s theme, which might be
interpreted as a chromatic transformation of the Jewish blessing that pre-
cedes and follows the reading of the Torah (Example 4.2b).71
How do we judge Porgy and Bess today, an opera that plays on black ste-
reotypes and has served as a negative symbol of black exploitation? Is it
enough to counter that the “civilized” and, moreover, non-singing whites in
the drama “are also more unemotional, drab and dull” and, as Edith Garson
says in her completion of Goldberg’s biography, “cruel and foolish”?72 In
the 1980s, Lawrence Starr attempted to defuse the passions of this debate:
“To insist on viewing Porgy and Bess as a racial document is to apply criteria
which lie wholly outside the tradition to which this work relates, with the
consequent risk of blinding oneself to the virtues it possesses.”73 Unfortu-
nately, when considering the escalating tensions between Jews and African
Americans after 1935, it seems less likely in the 1990s that the universal val-
ues of Gershwin’s opera espoused by Starr will soon transcend artistically as
well as politically divisive racial issues.
Establishing and Transforming Musical Character

It was previously observed when discussing Show Boat that Kern chose musi-
cal themes in part for their symbolic possibilities and reworked these themes
72
Porgy and Bess
in order to reveal dramatic connections and oppositions (see the “River Fam-
ily” of motives, Example 2.2, pp. 29–30). Kern also transformed two themes,
Cap’n Andy’s musical signature and Magnolia’s piano music, to convey the
continuity that underlies changing dramatic situations. Gershwin’s treat-
ment of the first technique is similar to that of Kern, since Gershwin assigns
specific themes to important characters (or to a thing like “happy dust”)
and allows his listeners actively or subliminally the possibility of attributing
dramatic significance to these themes.
But Gershwin went beyond Kern in discovering varied and ingenious
new ways to transform his melodies (even his hit tunes) for credible dra-
matic purposes. In altering Cap’n Andy’s theme and Magnolia’s piano
theme, Kern altered tempo and character—and presumably asked Robert
Russell Bennett to orchestrate these transformations—but he did not change
the pitch content of either theme. When Gershwin musically responds to
the ever-changing dramatic circumstances of his characters and their rela-
tionships, he frequently alters the pitches of the initial melodies by using a
technique known as paraphrase. As his characters evolve, Gershwin adds
and subtracts pitches and alters rhythms to create new melodies. In most
cases these new melodies retain the identity inherent in their fundamental
melodic contours. Some of Gershwin’s melodic transformations are diffi-
cult to perceive and are consequently meaningless to most listeners. Other
transformations are questionably related to the central themes. The remarks
that follow will focus on the most audible and dramatically meaningful of
Gershwin’s melodic manipulations, a union of craft and art.
Musicals, operatic and otherwise, thrive when they show two people
in love that audiences can care about. The opera Porgy and Bess, like all
the adaptations treated in this book, similarly places its greatest dramatic
emphasis on the love-story component of its literary source. A related
theme is the attempt of the principal characters to overcome their physi-
cal and emotional handicaps and dependencies, their loneliness and poor
self-esteem, and to establish themselves as fully accepted members within
a loving community. Act II, scenes 1 and 3, provide a good introduction to
how Gershwin created a symbolic musical language to express these great
dramatic themes.
At the musical heart of the opera stands (or kneels, depending on the
production) Porgy, not only because Gershwin gives him several themes but
because these themes relate so closely to the Catfish Row community.74 Porgy
may not feel as though he is a “complete” man (until ironically he gains his
manhood and loses his humanity by killing Crown and then gloating over
it), but from the outset of the drama he is definitely, unlike Bess, part of
the community. It is fitting, then, that his main theme, shown in Example
73
Enchanted Evenings
Porgy and Bess, act II, scene 1. Todd Duncan in window at right (1935).
Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.
4.1a, introduced by the orchestra rather than by Porgy himself, emphasizes

a pure (or perfect) fifth and a minor (or blue) third, intervals that reasonably
(if somewhat inexplicably) represent both the solidity and folk-like nature
Porgy shares with Catfish Row as well as his sadness before he met Bess.75
Soon after his introduction in act I Porgy sings the first of two loneliness
themes, “They pass by singin’” (Example 4.1b), a theme that melodically
consists entirely of minor thirds and a theme that will retain its strong rhyth-
mic profile in many future contexts.76
Moments later in this same monologue Gershwin has Porgy introduce a
second loneliness theme (Example 4.1c), a melody that emphasizes a major
second on “night time, day time” and “lonesome road” and a prominent
syncopated rhythm ( ) derived from the last two notes of Porgy’s central
theme (Example 4.1a) and the rhythm of “singin’” (Example 4.1b).77 Having
introduced these three rhythmically connected Porgy themes in the opening
scene, Gershwin will, in act II, scene 1, establish connections between Porgy
and his community to reveal how Bess and Catfish Row work together to
eliminate Porgy’s loneliness.
74
Porgy and Bess
Example 4.1. Porgy's themes

(a) Porgy's central theme
(b) Loneliness theme
(c) Loneliness theme
(d) Loneliness theme in “Buzzard Song”
(e) Loneliness theme in “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”
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Enchanted Evenings
Porgy’s loneliness themes will undergo further audible transformations

in the “Buzzard Song.” Throughout much of the “Buzzard Song” Gershwin
emphasizes the minor thirds that were so prominent in Porgy’s central theme
(e.g., “Don’ you let dat buzzard keep you hangin’ ‘round my do’ ”), and he also
retains the syncopations of the loneliness theme. But as seen in Example 4.1d,
Gershwin intensifies Porgy’s loneliness by contracting his major second a half
step in the song’s principal melodic motive to create a still-harsher minor second.
Even if one questions the dramatic effect of the “Buzzard Song” on this scene
and the drama as a whole and embraces the decision to remove it, its omnipres-
ent syncopations and dissonant minor seconds certainly provide a fitting musi-
cal counterpart to Porgy’s sudden apprehension upon seeing a buzzard.
The original form of Porgy’s loneliness theme returns in act II, scene 1, to
introduce the duet between Porgy and Bess, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.”
The dramatic point of this duet, that Bess’s love can eliminate Porgy’s loneli-
ness, soon becomes apparent when we hear Bess sing the second loneliness
theme, “I ain’ goin’! / You hear me sayin,’ / if you ain’ goin,’ / wid you I’m
stayin’” (Example 4.1e). Significantly, Porgy does not sing about his loneliness
with Bess, and when Bess returns to it later in the song, Porgy sings a different
counter line. In their fleeting, almost magical, moment of happiness, Bess has
thus absorbed Porgy’s loneliness while at the same time relieving her own.
Act II, scene 1, is thus the only scene in which Porgy and Bess express their
love with uninhibited optimism for their future together. Musically, “Bess,
You Is My Woman Now,” as Starr has noted, marks a special and ephemeral
moment of F-sharp major, a distant key heard nowhere else in the opera.78
The final transformation of Porgy’s loneliness in act II, scene 1, occurs in the
pseudo-spiritual “Oh, I Can’t Sit Down!” that immediately follows Porgy and
Bess’s love duet, a spiritual that could, without stretching things too much, be
interpreted as a melodic transformation of “It Take a Long Pull to Get There”
(with a switch of mode from minor to major) and especially “I Got Plenty o’
Nuttin.’ ” In any event, all of these melodies display the short-long syncopated
loneliness rhythm (in most cases the short note receives an accent) prominently
at the ends of many phrases.79 In the main portion of this final chorus Gersh-
win not only preserves the G major tonality of Porgy’s earlier tune, he creates
another melody that manages to sound new while operating completely within
Porgy’s perfect fifth. More strikingly, Gershwin in “Oh, I Can’t Sit Down”
maintains the melodic connection with Porgy’s central theme (the prominent
minor thirds in the opening musical line that correspond to the song title) and
the rhythmic connection (the characteristic syncopation on “happy feelin,’ ” “no
concealin,’ ” and many other words) with Porgy’s loneliness theme.
Through such devices Gershwin conveys the message that the most
effective way to overcome loneliness is to acknowledge it musically, then
76
Porgy and Bess
transform its character, also musically. Not only has Bess’s love for Porgy at
least momentarily conquered Porgy’s loneliness, Catfish Row revels in this
transformation. Ironically, at the end of this scene Bess does in fact leave
Porgy, albeit at his urging, to join the community at their picnic, an act that
sets up her eventual fall from grace. Nevertheless, the people of Catfish Row
invite Bess to join them on Kittiwah Island, a strong sign of her successful
integration into the community.
If Porgy’s themes and their transformations in community songs serve
to emphasize the unity between Porgy and Catfish Row, Sporting Life’s
central theme—both at his entrance in act II, scene 1, and in the main
melody of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” in act II, scene 2—demonstrates his
separation and estrangement from this same community (Example 4.2).
Just as Cap’n Andy’s shrewish wife Parthy possesses a melody that cannot
live in harmony with the other themes that dwell within the secure per-
fect fourths of the Mississippi River (Example 2.3, p. 31), Sporting Life’s
attempt to be a part of Catfish Row is demonstrably false, musically as well
as dramatically.
Example 4.2. Sporting Life's themes

(a) Sporting Life
(b) Jewish prayer (“Boruch attah adonoi”)
(c) Happy Dust theme
77
Enchanted Evenings
Like Porgy’s theme, the melody that Gershwin assigned to Sporting Life
is encompassed within a perfect fifth and concludes with a prominent minor
(or blue) third. What betrays Sporting Life as an unwelcome outsider, how-
ever, is the prominence of the diminished fifth (the same sound as Parthy’s
dissonant augmented fourth, or tritone), an interval that has been associated
with the devil since the Middle Ages when it was known as the diabolus in
musica. The chromatic machinations of Sporting Life’s theme appropriately
enough suggest the movements of a snake-in-the-grass, analogous to the
serpent who manages to tempt Eve out of the Garden of Eden. The agent
of Sporting Life’s evil, his “happy dust” (cocaine), receives a suitably chro-
matic, serpentine theme (Example 4.2c).80 Even if one takes the optimistic
view that Porgy will eventually find Bess after the final curtain, it must be
acknowledged that both Bess and Porgy have been forced to leave Eden and
search elsewhere for the Promised Land.
The third principal male character, Crown, exhibits a highly charged
orchestral theme that contrasts markedly with Porgy’s theme (Example 4.3).
Example 4.3. Crown’s theme
Crown’s strength and restless vitality, like those of a caged animal, are evi-
dent in the relentless syncopation of his theme. Musically, Crown’s theme is
also confined, within the narrow limits of a minor third. Further, in keeping
with his dominating presence, whenever Crown appears all other themes
are subordinate. His music even dominates the final struggle with Porgy in
act III, scene 1, before Porgy states his musical supremacy and manages to
overcome and kill his nemesis. In act II, scene 1, however, Crown, who has
been absent a month from Catfish Row, does not exert any dramatic influ-
ence on the actions or thoughts of Porgy and Bess, and his musical theme is
appropriately absent from this peaceful scene.
What about Bess? Does she not merit a theme of her own? Commentators
on the opera have without exception neglected to assign her one.81 Crown’s
music dominates his fight to the death with Porgy, but Bess’s musical iden-
tity is less assertive and strongly influenced by the man she is with at the
time (Porgy, Crown, or Sporting Life). Although Bess certainly holds her
own musically, the two songs that she sings to her men, “What You Want
78
Porgy and Bess
Wid Bess?” (to Crown) and “I Loves You Porgy” (to Porgy) (Example 4.4),
bear striking melodic or rhythmic resemblances to Porgy’s themes, the
former a paraphrase of Porgy’s central theme (Example 4.1a) and the latter a
new melody that uses the rhythms of “They pass by singin’” (Example 4.1b).
When she sings “Summertime” to Clara’s orphaned baby in act III, scene 1,
Bess demonstrates her hard-won acceptance into the Catfish Row commu-
nity by singing one of their songs.
Example 4.4. “I Loves You Porgy”
It is not surprising, then, that Bess’s weaknesses and chameleon-like

nature as a character have caused writers to overlook (with good reason)
that Gershwin did in fact associate a specific theme with his heroine, albeit
privately and ultimately unrecognizably. We know this only from Heyward’s
original libretto typescript, which he sent to Gershwin, where on page 2–17
Gershwin indicated in a handwritten notation that a “Bess theme” should
accompany the words sung by Bess, “Porgy, I hates to go an’ leave you all
alone.”82 At this point in the genesis of the work the idea of a love duet
between the principals, the future “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”—which
does not have a counterpart in the play Porgy—may have been an embryo in
Gershwin’s mind but it had not yet been hatched.
Earlier it was noted that the eventual insertion of “Bess, You Is My Woman
Now” was the most substantial alteration to Heyward’s typescript for this
scene. Perhaps it is possible to conjecture, after all, even without the benefit
of Gershwin’s handwritten notes, that the principal tune of this famous duet
(even if Porgy sings it) might belong to Bess (Example 4.5).83 And of course
it is reasonable (and egalitarian) that Bess, who is capable at this point in the
drama of dispelling Porgy’s loneliness, deserves her own theme, especially
since she is deprived of a solo aria in act III, scene 3. Surely it is significant
that her opening intervals consists mainly of consonant major thirds and
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Enchanted Evenings
sixths and that her principal minor third is gently completed by an interven-
ing step, just as Bess fills in the gap of Porgy’s lonely existence. Interestingly,
Bess’s theme also figures prominently in the orchestra in the opera’s final
scene, act III, scene 3, when Porgy inquires for Bess upon his return from
jail and she is not there to sing her theme. In the last moments of the opera
Bess’s theme—again presented in the orchestra in her absence—connects
with Porgy’s own central theme for the first time to seal their fate.84
Example 4.5. Bess's theme (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”)
Act II, scene 1, provides abundant evidence of Gershwin’s skill in mak-

ing dramatic connections and distinctions through his use of musical signa-
tures or leitmotivs. Once he has shown, for example, that Bess’s theme and
the Catfish Row songs can at least temporarily transform Porgy’s loneliness
into hope, Gershwin’s motivic transformations reveal a great deal about the
meaning and significance of future dramatic events. One such scene, act II,
scene 3, which takes place one week after Bess left Porgy to join the Catfish
Row picnic on Kittiwah Island, offers a particularly vivid demonstration of
Gershwin’s ability to establish dramatic meaning through motivic transfor-
mation and paraphrase.
For the week that followed Bess’s meeting with Crown on the island in
the previous scene (act II, scene 2), Bess was “out of her head” back in Catfish
Row. She remains in precarious condition at the opening of scene 3. Before
we see Bess, however, we hear Jake’s melody and a reprise of “It Take a Long
Pull to Get There.” In a passage cut from the New York production Bess
sings “Eighteen mile to Kittiwah, eighteen mile to trabble,” a musical line
that might be interpreted as another of the many transformations of Porgy’s
central theme. Like Porgy’s theme (Example 4.1a), it is encompassed within
a perfect fifth and contains a prominent descending minor third (at the end
of its second measure). It also reuses the syncopated rhythm of Porgy’s
80
Porgy and Bess
loneliness (on “trabble”) and combines this rhythm with the half-step inter-
val that dominated the “Buzzard Song” (Examples 4.1c and 4.1d).
Bess’s recitative also shows the influence of Sporting Life with its glaring
and ominous augmented fourth (A-D) (the same sound as the diminished
fifth (G-D) in Example 4.2). When she returns to this phrase moments later
with the words, “Oh, there’s a rattle snake in dem bushes,” one can imagine
the devilish and serpentine Sporting Life lurking in the bushes as well. After
Bess sings this brief passage she collapses and Porgy sings his first words
of the scene, “I think dat may-be she goin’ to sleep now,” an easily percep-
tible transformation of his central theme untarnished by any intrusion of
Sporting Life. The devil is taking a nap and Bess will recover.
Serena prays on Bess’s behalf and in answer to these prayers Catfish
Row comes back to life with Jake’s theme and the music of street vendors
hawking their wares.85 We know that Bess has recovered when we hear the
orchestra play the opening of her theme (unsupported by harmony), and her
conversation with Porgy is underscored by the continuation of “Bess, You
Is My Woman Now.” In their conversation Porgy tells Bess that he knows
she has “been with Crown” on Kittiwah Island, because “Gawd give cripple
to understan’ many thing he ain’ give strong men.” Bess, too, understands
many things about herself, including the fact that when Crown comes for
her, she will be incapable of resisting him. When, near the end of “I Loves
You Porgy,” she sings, “If you kin keep me I wants to stay here wid you
forever.—/ I got my man” (Example 4.4), she uses the rhythm of “They pass
by singin’” (Example 4.1b) to plead with Porgy to keep her safe from a man
who possesses a harmful power over her.
Although Bess survives her illness and is able to express her love for Porgy
once again, the moment of hope that concluded “Bess, You Is My Woman
Now” has vanished forever (along with the key of F major reserved for
their brief moment of bliss). With her realization that the irresistible Crown,
who was conspicuously absent in the earlier scene, now represents a men-
ace to her future happiness with Porgy and that she is now unworthy of the
man she loves, Bess has been rendered incapable of defusing Porgy’s loneli-
ness. Gershwin conveys this dramatic point simply and effectively when he
gives Bess a new melody that is rhythmically identical to Porgy’s loneliness
theme. Bess has now become so overwhelmed by Porgy’s loneliness that its
rhythm has become a consuming obsession for her as well. She cannot sing
anything else, despite Porgy’s assurances of a better life and a sturdy state-
ment of Porgy’s central theme to conclude their duet.86
Later, in act III, scene 2, Sporting Life mocks the hero (who is about to
lose the love of his life) by singing the short-long rhythm of Porgy’s loneli-
ness themes (Examples 4.1b and c) no less than four times in the first six
81
Enchanted Evenings
measures of his “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York.” But it is
Bess’s fatalistic sense of defeat in act II, scene 3, rather than Sporting Life’s
powers of mockery and seduction that enables us to understand why she is
so easily persuaded she belongs in New York rather than in Catfish Row.
We will meet Ira Gershwin again five years after Porgy and Bess as Kurt
Weill’s lyricist for Lady in the Dark (see chapter 7). For the first two of these
years, George was only able to compose a pair of film scores, Shall We Dance
(1936) and A Damsel in Distress (1937), and start a third, The Goldwyn Follies,
which was completed by Vernon Duke after Gershwin’s sudden death of a
brain tumor in July 1937.
Assessments on the relative merits of Gershwin’s twenty musicals and
one opera continue to vary, even among music historians. For example,
while H. Wiley Hitchcock concludes that Porgy and Bess was “a more preten-
tious but hardly more artistically successful contribution” than Gershwin’s
musical comedies and political satires, Hamm writes unreservedly that
Gershwin’s opera “is the greatest nationalistic opera of the century, not only
of America but of the world.”87 Unfortunately, from Gershwin’s time to ours,
the comedies and satires have seldom been revived in anything approach-
ing their original state, even though nearly all contain one or more songs of
lasting popularity and extraordinary musical, lyrical, and dramatic merit. In
contrast, Gershwin’s sole surviving opera, a work that began its career on
Broadway, has, despite its pretensions and attendant artistic and political
controversies, long since demonstrated a stage worthiness matched only by
the memorability of its tunes.
82
chapter five
ON YOUR TOES AND

PAL JOEY
Dance Gets into the Act and
“Sweet Water from a Foul Well”
T
he historic collaboration of Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and Lorenz
Hart (1895–1943) began inauspiciously, shortly after their first meet-
ing in 1919, when one of their first songs, “Any Old Place with You,”
was interpolated into a Broadway show. Hart was twenty-four and Rodgers
only seventeen. The next year the new partners produced the first of three
varsity shows at Columbia University and placed seven interpolated songs
in a modestly successful Sigmund Romberg musical, The Poor Little Ritz
Girl. After five years of failures and frustrations (Rodgers was on the verge
of quitting show business to become a babies’underwear wholesaler), the
duo enjoyed two big hits in 1925, The Garrick Gaieties, a revue that included
among its seven Rodgers and Hart songs the still-popular “Manhattan,” and
Dearest Enemy, a romantic musical set during the Revolutionary War.
These two shows launched a succession of popularly received musicals,
each containing at least one future perennial song favorite: Peggy-Ann in
1926 (“Where’s That Rainbow?”), A Connecticut Yankee in 1927 (“My Heart
Stood Still” and “Thou Swell”), Present Arms in 1928 (“You Took Advan-
tage of Me”), and Evergreen in 1930 (“Dancing on the Ceiling”). In 1930 the
pair began a five-year sojourn in Hollywood where they produced the much
discussed but still relatively unknown Love Me Tonight (1932), directed by
Rouben Mamoulian, the future stage director of Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!,
and Carousel. A circus musical spectacular, Jumbo, marked their return to
Broadway in 1935 and the beginning of their greatest successes: On Your Toes
83
Enchanted Evenings
(1936), I’d Rather Be Right and Babes in Arms (1937), I Married an Angel and
The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Pal Joey (1940), By Jupiter (1942), and a revised
A Connecticut Yankee (1943).
Before the belated triumphs of 1925, Rodgers, who like Hart had dropped
out of Columbia University without earning a degree, decided at the age of
twenty that he needed to acquire a more rigorous musical education. As an
adolescent Rodgers had received informal instruction both from his mother,
an amateur pianist, and from his father, an enthusiastic amateur singer. Over
three academic years, 1920–21, 1921–22, and 1923–24, he studied piano, the-
ory, and ear training, including a special harmony class limited to five stu-
dents with the noted theorist and author Percy Goetschius his final year at the
Institute of Musical Art (which became the Juilliard School of Music in 1926).
Complementing this musical training was a legendary facility in the
creation of melody. Rodgers’s early biographer David Ewen reports that
after Hammerstein had labored many hours and sometimes weeks, Rod-
gers needed only about twenty minutes to compose “June Is Bustin’ Out All
Over” and another twenty minutes for “Happy Talk”; the complex “Solilo-
quy” from Carousel allegedly occupied “about three hours.”1 Although in
his autobiography, Musical Stages, Rodgers emphasizes the months of pre-
compositional discussions with Hammerstein rather than his own speed, he
corroborates the story that “Bali Ha’i” “couldn’t have taken more than five
minutes.”2 It therefore comes as something of a shock, and perhaps a relief,
that the opening of the chorus to “I Could Write a Book” in Pal Joey took
Rodgers the three tries illustrated in Example 5.1 before he found a version
that satisfied him.
Example 5.1. “I Could Write a Book,” three sketches for the opening four
measures
84
On Your Toes and Pal Joey
Throughout his long career Rodgers placed innovation and integration

among his loftiest goals for a musical. In Musical Stages he writes with pride
that Dearest Enemy (1925), his first book musical with Hart, gave his team
the welcome “chance to demonstrate what we could do with a score that
had at least some relevance to the mood, characters and situations found in
a story.”3 Rodgers took similar pride the following year in Peggy-Ann’s dis-
tinction as the first musical comedy to express Freud’s theories on the stage
“by dealing with subconscious fears and fantasies.”4
Rodgers prefaces his remarks concerning the ill-fated musical about cas-
tration, Chee-Chee, a musical that received an all-time Rodgers and Hart low
of thirty-one performances in 1928, with the suggestion that long before Pal
Joey (1940) and Oklahoma! (1943), Rodgers with Hart “had long been firm
believers in the close unity of song and story.”5 Chee-Chee provided their first
opportunity “to put our theories into practice,” as Rodgers explains:
To avoid the eternal problem of the story coming to a halt as the

songs take over, we decided to use a number of short pieces of
from four to sixteen bars each, with no more than six songs of tra-
ditional form and length in the entire scene. In this way the music
would be an essential part of the structure of the story rather than
an appendage to the action. The concept was so unusual, in fact,
that we even called attention to it with the following notice in the
program: note: The musical numbers, some of them very short,
are so interwoven with the story that it would be confusing for the
audience to peruse a complete list.6
On Your Toes
By the time Rodgers and Hart returned from Hollywood in 1935, their desire
to create innovative musicals reached a new level. One year later they wrote
On Your Toes. The genesis of the show can be traced to the Hollywood years,
however, when Rodgers and Hart conceived the idea of a movie musical
about a vaudeville hoofer (to be played by Fred Astaire) who becomes
involved with a Russian ballet company.7 Astaire, then busy with his series
of films with Ginger Rogers, declined the role and Hollywood rejected their
scenario. Soon, however, Broadway bought the idea as a vehicle for a new
dancing sensation, Ray Bolger, the scarecrow in Hollywood’s The Wizard of
Oz in 1939, and the star of Rodgers and Hart’s final Broadway show, By
Jupiter, in 1942 and Frank Loesser’s first Broadway triumph, Where’s Charley?
in 1948. Boston tryouts took place between March 21 and April 8, 1936, and
85
Enchanted Evenings
On Your Toes. Ray Bolger and Tamara Geva (1936). Photograph: White
Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.
On Your Toes opened at the Imperial Theatre three days later. When it con-
cluded its run at the Majestic Theatre the following January 23, the hit show
had been performed 315 times.
The history of On Your Toes after its initial critically and popularly acclaimed
run differs markedly from the history of its more popular predecessor, Porter’s
Anything Goes (discussed in chapter 3). The first major revival of Anything Goes
in 1962 offered a new book and many interpolated songs, and made a respect-
able Off-Broadway run of 239 performances; the first revival of On Your Toes
in 1954, with one interpolation and several other modest alterations, folded
after only sixty-four showings. More incriminatingly, the work itself, not the
production, was considered the principal reason for its failure.
In 1936 Brooks Atkinson had written that “if the word ‘sophisticated’ is not
too unpalatable, let it serve as a description of the mocking book which Rich-
ard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and George Abbott have scribbled.”8 By 1954, the
86
integrated musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and even Rodgers and Hart’s
recently revived Pal Joey—which Atkinson had reviewed disparagingly in 1940
before extolling its virtues in 1952—had created new criteria that musicals such
as On Your Toes did not match. Thus eighteen years after his initially positive
assessment Atkinson attacked as “labored, mechanical and verbose” the book
he formerly had deemed sophisticated. For Atkinson and his public “the mood
of the day,” which had recently caught up to Pal Joey, had “passed beyond” On
Your Toes. The “long and enervating” road to the still-worthy “Slaughter on Tenth
Avenue” ballet at the end of the second act simply was not worth the wait.9
In the 1936 On Your Toes Rodgers and Hart attempted an integration of
music and drama that went beyond their successful innovations in Peggy-
Ann and their unsuccessful ones in Chee-Chee. In Musical Stages Rodgers dis-
cusses his ambitious new artistic intentions:
One of the great innovations of On Your Toes, the angle that had ini-
tially made us think of it as a vehicle for Fred Astaire, was that for
the first time ballet was being incorporated into a musical-comedy
book. To be sure, Albertina Rasch had made a specialty of creating
Broadway ballets [for example, The Band Wagon of 1931], but these
were usually in revues and were not part of a story line. We made
our main ballet [“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”] an integral part of
the action; without it, there was no conclusion to our story.10
Despite such claims, the degree to which co-authors Rodgers and Hart and
Abbott succeeded in their attempt to integrate dance, especially “Slaughter
on Tenth Avenue,” has been questioned by Ethan Mordden:
Much has been made of “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”’s impor-

tance as a book-integrated ballet, but it was, in fact, a ballet-within-
a-play . . . not a part of the story told in choreographic terms. Only
towards the ballet’s end did plot collide with set piece when the
hoofer learned that two gangsters were planning to gun him down
from a box in the theatre at the end of the number. Exhausted, terri-
fied, he must keep dancing to save his life until help comes, and thus
a ballet sequence in On Your Toes turned into the On Your Toes plot.11
Mordden’s challenge does not obscure the fact that On Your Toes treats
a vexing artistic issue: the conflict and reconciliation between classical and
popular art. Much of the plot and the comedy in On Your Toes evolves from
the tensions between the cultivated and the vernacular, between highbrow
and lowbrow art. Even the barest outlines of the scenario reveal this.
87
Enchanted Evenings
When in act I, scene 3, we meet Phil Dolan III (“Junior”) as an adult, he is

employed as a music professor at a W.P.A. [Work Projects Administration]
Extension University, having renounced his career as a famous vaudeville
hoofer sixteen years earlier at the insistence of his parents (scenes 1 and 2).
His student and eventual romantic partner, Frankie Frayne, writes “cheap”
(1936) or “derivative” (1983) popular songs, including “It’s Got to Be Love,”
“On Your Toes,” and “Glad to Be Unhappy”; another student, Sidney Cohn,
who supposedly possesses greater talent (to match his pretensions and
ambition), has composed “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” which will be per-
formed by the Russian Ballet in act II.
The Cat and the Fiddle, a 1931 hit with lyrics by Otto Harbach and music by
Kern, had explored the tensions and eventual accommodation of classical and
popular music in a European setting in which a “serious” Romanian male com-
poser and a jazzy American female composer—at the beginning of the show
she is already well known as the composer of “She Didn’t Say Yes”—eventually
produce a harmonious hybrid. On Your Toes contrasted the cultivated and ver-
nacular traditions through dance, two full-length ballets, both choreographed
by the revered George Balanchine (1904–1983), who in the previous decade
starred in Diaghilev’s ballet company: a classical ballet to conclude act I (“La
Princesse Zenobia”) and a jazz ballet (“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue”) as a climax
for act II. In the title song, tap dancing and classical ballet alternate and compete
for audience approbation in the same number. Further, the Russian prima balle-
rina (Vera Baranova) and her partner (Konstantine Morrosine) have important
dramatic (albeit non-singing) parts as well as their star dance turns. By contrast,
in the dream ballet that concludes act I of Oklahoma!—the musical which almost
invariably receives the credit for integrating dance into the book—the dancing
roles of Laurey and Curley are played by separate and mute dancers.
That On Your Toes is a musical about Art is frequently evident in the dia-
logue, especially its original 1936 manifestation. For example, in her efforts
to convince the Russian ballet director, Sergei Alexandrovitch, that Sidney
Cohn’s ballet is worthy of his company, manager and principal benefactress
Peggy Porterfield explains the case for branching out: “Your public is tired of
Schéhérazade, La Spectre de la Rose—they’ve seen all those Russian turkeys at
the Capital for 40 cents—this is something different—it’s a jazz ballet—they
can’t understand the music without the story and nobody can understand the
story—they’ll say it’s art.”12 Vera considers herself “a great artist” because she
has convinced Junior that her “dancing [has] a virginal charm.”13 And when
Morrosine tells a gangster that he “must wait till he [Junior] stops dancing”
before shooting him, Art takes precedence over jealousy and revenge.14
The libretto also explores conflicting attitudes on the relative merits of
classical and jazz dance. Frankie questions Junior’s priorities in giving up his
88
potential as “a headliner in vaudeville” to be a supernumerary in the Russian

ballet.15 In the 1936 libretto Morrosine’s infidelities and obnoxious behavior
toward his partner and paramour Vera are acceptable, but he is denied the
lead role in the jazz ballet for artistic reasons: “he does not understand Amer-
ican Jazz Rhythm” and “does not know how to dance on the off beat.”16
On Your Toes in 1936 and 1983

In 1983, nearly thirty years after it had previously stumbled in its first Broad-
way revival, On Your Toes was again revived, this time with a new book
from nonagenarian Abbott, the principal contributor to the original book.
Echoing Atkinson’s condemnation of the earlier production, Frank Rich of
the New York Times wrote that the 1954 failure “was no fluke” and that “its
few assets as entertainment are scattered like sweet and frail rose petals on
a stagnant pond.”17 With the exception of Rich, the new production received
mostly favorable reviews and ran 505 performances, after the 1952 revival
of Pal Joey (542 performances) the second longest running Rodgers and Hart
production and, like Porgy and Bess, Pal Joey, Candide, and in the 1990s, Guys
and Dolls, Cabaret, and the still-running Chicago, one of the relatively few
musical revivals to surpass its initial run.
What made the 1983 On Your Toes revival especially newsworthy was the
approach of the revivalists. In contrast to the drastic book revisions and inter-
polated songs of the 1962 and 1987 revivals of Anything Goes, the 1983 On
Your Toes in most respects closely followed its 1936 model. And unlike the
1954 revival, which had contained the interpolated “You Took Advantage of
Me” (originally heard in Present Arms of 1928) in act II, scene 3, and dropped
the first number, “Two a Day for Keith,” soon after opening night, no inter-
polations or deletions in 1983 disturbed the “authenticity” of the original.
That the 1983 production attempted to offer a faithful reenactment of the
1936 show is evident also in the reinstatement of the original dance and vocal
arrangements, for the most part uncut and unedited, and the resuscitation of
Hans Spialek’s 1936 orchestrations. Although some of the original choreog-
raphy was lost, “Donald Saddler, who restaged the non-ballet numbers, took
care to use only movements that belong to the dance of the time.”18
The considerable success of the 1983 revival prompted the publication
of the first complete vocal score two years later with the following intro-
ductory remarks from Theodore S. Chapin, President of the Rodgers &
Hammerstein Organization:
This score corresponds to the 1983 production of on your toes

which used the orchestrations and arrangements created for the
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Enchanted Evenings
original production in 1936. A few slight changes were necessary

and were made by Hans Spialek, the man who orchestrated the
show forty-seven years earlier. Therefore, what you have in your
hands is a record of a 1936 Rodgers and Hart score as it sounded
when first presented to the public, as well as a documentation of
a successful revival. That a score of this nature could be presented
as its creators intended, and that those intentions could seem as
vital today as they were in 1936, is a testament not only to the time-
lessness of Rodgers and Hart, but to the dedication and affection
lavished on the 1983 production.19
Chapin neglects to mention that the vocal score issued in 1985 by Chap-
pell does not entirely preserve the original order of these authentic 1936
orchestrations and arrangements. The brackets and other emendations in
the lists of scenes and songs from the 1936 Broadway production and 1983
revival in the online website reveal, for example, that “The Heart Is Quicker
Than the Eye” (sung in 1936 by Peggy and Junior in act I, scene 6) has been
transferred to the first scene of the second act to replace “Quiet Night” so that
Ms. Porterfield would have something to sing in both acts. “Quiet Night”
in 1936 opens act II, sung by a character identified only as Crooner; in 1983
“Quiet Night” is sung one scene later by a named nonentity (Hank J. Smith)
and a female trio and reprised in scene 4 by the Russian ballet impresario
Sergei Alexandrovitch and an offstage chorus.
Gone also is the act II reprise by Sergei and Peggy of Junior’s and Frankie’s
“There’s a Small Hotel.” Even if one refrained from asking how Sergei and
Peggy came to know this song, its second act appearance in 1936 seemed
somewhat gratuitous. In 1983 Sergei and Peggy sing a reprise of “Quiet
Night” instead. Both productions allow everyone to learn “There’s a Small
Hotel” well enough to sing it at the end of the show.
The 1983 version also changed the locale of a few scenes. For example,
the schoolroom scene in act I, scene 5, originally took place in Central Park
at night, a setting for “There’s a Small Hotel” that even the staunchest advo-
cates of authenticity might consider laughable in 1983. But these changes do
not contradict Chapin’s assertion that for the most part Abbott & Co. as well
as Chappell & Co. remained faithful to their musical source to a degree that
was remarkable for a 1980s revival of a 1930s musical.
Thirty years earlier, as a result of his dissatisfaction with director Dwight
Wiman, Abbott left for Palm Beach before rehearsals had begun in February,
returning after Rodgers reminded him that as co-(de facto principal) author
Abbott had an “obligation to come and protect it.”20 In his autobiography
Abbott explains his reaction and solution:
90
Arriving in Boston, where On Your Toes was playing its final week,
I found things in better shape than I had expected. Ray Bolger was
sensational in the lead, and “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” remains
in my memory as one of the best numbers I’ve ever seen in the
theatre, both musically and choreographically. The book, however,
was a mess; the story line had been destroyed by experimenting,
and the actors were out of hand. I behaved ruthlessly to the cast
to force them to play parts instead of fighting for material, and
I straightened the book out by the simple device of putting it back
the way I had written it in the first place.21
When he returned to the script in 1983, Abbott (now ninety-five) had

had time to rethink and reinterpret his responses and actions of 1936. He
now recalled the situation somewhat differently than in both his and Rod-
gers’s published autobiographies: “I respected Rodgers and Hart so much
in that field . . . I didn’t do as much as I should have done. . . . I threw out three
sets. . . . In the old days, if they wanted to sing a song, they set it in Central
park or the Palladium. What for? To sing a song like ‘Quiet Night’? I made
‘Quiet Night’ part of the plot.”22
In order to further integrate plot and music as well as to establish greater
credibility (and, of course, accessibility) for a 1980s audience, Abbott altered
his original libretto. In 1936 Sergei and Vera had been several times married;
in 1983 Sergei is given some romantic potential with Peggy (as revealed in
their reprise of “Quiet Night,” now “part of the plot”) and Vera and Kon-
stantine are lovers both on and off the stage. Also in 1983 the original meet-
ing between Junior and Peggy is made more understandable; Frankie now
knows a friend of Peggy’s uncle who can introduce them.
The main changes between the 1936 and 1983 books, however, deal less
with plot than with language. The earlier version is more sexually sugges-
tive and, still more surprisingly, perhaps even funnier. Here, for example,
is what 1936 audiences heard in the dialogue that precedes Vera’s meeting
with Junior in act I, scene 4:
peggy: You’re to be a strip tease girl in a burlesque show.

vera: Well, if he’s got ideas like that, why should I bother to dress?
peggy: Darling, he thinks you are an actress. He doesn’t know we are
casting to type.
In 1983 Vera is cast as a primmer prima ballerina who has the potential to
play a striptease character when given time to consider such an outrageous
thought. Abbott is clearly no longer casting to type:
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Enchanted Evenings
peggy: You’re going to love the part—it’s a striptease girl in a bur-

lesque show. It will shock the dance world. It will show us as the
progressive ballet company I want us to be.
vera: What about Sergei Alexandrovitch? He will say no.
peggy: First you have to like it. This young man who is coming will
play the music and tell you all about it.
vera (Begins to play the part): Sure, a striptease girl—why not?
As a sexually liberated goddess of the ballet world, the original Vera is

allowed to conclude the scene in her apartment with a risqué punch line that
indicates her desire to see more of Junior. After the foreplay of dancing to the
“Zenobia” ballet with Junior, they climb on her bed and she takes his glasses
off. When Junior tells Vera his real name and his nickname, Vera replies with
a line that could have been stolen from a Mae West film: “But I’ll call you
Phillip. I can’t call you Junior. For very soon you will be a great big boy.”23
The original book of On Your Toes had fewer Groucho Marx–Margaret
Dumont–type exchanges than the 1934 Anything Goes, but those that
remained were carefully expurgated. Thus in Abbott’s 1983 revised book
(act 1, scene 6) Sergei learns of the glitch that will pave the way for Junior to
escape from his role as a supernumerary to become a star of the “Zenobia”
ballet: the dancer Leftsky has been detained in jail. This change obscures the
politically topical nature of the 1936 version which finds Lefsky (less obvi-
ously named than his 1983 counterpart) in a hospital.
sergei: He got in fight with union delegates—All afternoon we are

waiting and waiting for him—
peggy: Waiting for Lefsky!24
Theater audiences in 1936 would not have had any trouble relating this ref-
erence to Clifford Odets’s then widely known union play produced the pre-
vious year, Waiting for Lefty, in which members of a taxi drivers’ union are
waiting in vain for their leader, who has been killed.
The Classroom Scene

A comparison between the 1936 and 1983 versions of the first classroom
scene, act I, scene 3, further demonstrates evolving social attitudes. In 1936
Junior not only derogates as “cheap” the musical ditty Frankie has com-
posed, but he also displays a favoritism toward his “serious” jazz (and, not
incidentally, male) student composer Sidney Cohn. In fact, he is so engrossed
in his protégé that he is oblivious to Frankie’s feelings. Although Frankie is
92
still the one who will return to apologize for leaving so abruptly, by 1983
Junior has learned something from the feminist movement of the interven-
ing years. At least he realizes that he has hurt her feelings.
Gone from both the lyrics and the vocal score of “The Three B’s” in 1983
are Hart’s virtuosic and delectably absurd rhymes in 1936 that called atten-
tion to their brilliance: “Who are the three ‘B’s’ of music? / Name the holy
trinity / Whose true divinity / Goes stretching to infinity / No asininity /
In this vicinity / Who are the three “B’s” of music?”25
In 1983 Junior offers the following interpretation of romantic lieder: “And
thus we note the painless transition into the next phase. The early 19th cen-
tury brought forth a renaissance of what we could term singing composers.
The great music of that period was idealized folk song. Chopin, Schumann,
Mendelssohn, and, last but not least, Franz Schubert.”26
The following dialogue from 1936 (abandoned in 1983) introduces “The
Three B’s” from quite a different perspective:
junior: You will notice I am careful of the pronunciation, Schu-bert, not

Shubert [a reference to the organization which, then as now, owned
a considerable number of Broadway theaters]. (Walks to piano) Let
us take this lovely melody. (He plays the Ständchen and sings) “Dein
ist mein Herz” which means “Yours is my heart.” We are all famil-
iar with that melody but I wonder is there anyone who can tell me
what life force may have inspired Franz Schubert? (Hands are raised
by some of the class) Yes, Miss Wasservogel?
miss wasservogel: A beautiful girl.
junior: Miss Frayne?
frankie: A handsome young man.
several students: A girl—a girl.
others: A boy.
junior: No—a pork chop, a glass of beer and liverwurst; Schubert
should be very close to our hearts here for he was born poor with
no W.P.A.27
Abbott’s 1936 dialogue lets audiences know unequivocally that Frankie—a

contemporary Schubert—is the one inspired by “a handsome young man.”28
Also in 1936, with a remark that would mean more to Depression audiences,
Junior disregards love as a motive and attributes Schubert’s inspiration to
a good meal. “The Three B’s” in the 1936 version (renamed “Questions and
Answers” in 1983) also demonstrates the essence of the conflict between
classical music and jazz so central to On Your Toes. Classical music, with its
“charms of Orpheus,” throws lovers of popular music “right into the arms
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Enchanted Evenings
of Morpheus.” Although the scholarly establishment would not lower itself

in 1936 (or even a 1983 version of 1936) to explain the artistic merits of jazz
in a university classroom, classical music is characterized as boring for all
its artistic pretensions while jazz, a “cheap” (or “derivative”) pseudo-art,
provides much greater entertainment.
Throughout “The Three B’s” the jazz-loving W.P.A. Extension University
class unabashedly reveals its ignorance of and derision for art music. To the
strains of the Symphony in D Minor and Les Préludes they mispronounce
César Franck’s name as Seezer Frank and convert Liszt’s popular classic
into a drinking song (Example 5.2).29 Next they add ignorance to sacrilege
when they confuse Shostakovich’s recently banned opera, Lady Macbeth of
Mtsensk, with celebrity stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s burlesque house Minskys,
and reach a “new low” (to rhyme with “Von Bülow”) when they assert that
Puccini wrote the popular song classic “Poor Butterfly” instead of Madame
Butterfly. In exclaiming in the chorus of “Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms”
that “two of them wrote symphonies and one wrote psalms,” they add the
sin of a weak rhyme “Brahms/psalms” to a tenuous historical claim (Bach
wrote chorales, after all, not psalms). But the students show that they are
not complete dunces when they place “the man who wrote Sari”—the now-
obscure Emmerich Kálmán (1882–1953)—on a par with Bernardino Molinari
(1880–1952).30 To paraphrase a line from Pal Joey’s “Zip,” “Who the hell is
Molinari?”
Example 5.2. “Questions and Answers (The Three B's)”

(a) with Franck’s Symphony in D Minor and Liszt’s Les Préludes
borrowings
(b) Liszt's Les Préludes
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The dramatic context of the song “It’s Got to Be Love” in act I, scene 3, is
a pretext for Frankie to sing the song she wrote (with Junior in mind). Here
is the exchange that leads to it in 1936:
junior: Well, I seem to remember that primarily you wanted to talk

about the song of yours.
frankie (cross to desk): Oh, no, not really. It’s so unimportant. Just
look at the title, “It’s Got to Be Love”—that’s unimportant to start
with, isn’t it?
junior: I wish I knew.
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Enchanted Evenings
frankie: What?
junior: I mean, well, perhaps if you play it for me a few times, I’ll
change my mind.31
Following a five-measure introduction and a tuneful verse of twenty-

three measures, which provides a smooth musical transition between spo-
ken dialogue and a song hit—Frankie has indeed composed a hit worthy of
Rodgers—Frankie and Junior sing two thirty-two-bar choruses. The melody
of the first chorus (the first A of an A-A form) is shown in Example 5.3.
Example 5.3. “It's Got to Be Love” (chorus, mm. 1-18)
A a [It’s] got to be love! [upbeats in brackets]

It couldn’t be tonsillitis;
It feels like neuritis,
But nevertheless it’s love.
(8 measures, mm. 1–8)
b [Don’t] tell me the pickles and pie à la mode
á [They] served me
Unnerved me,
And made my heart a broken down pump!
96
The first eight measures start off conventionally enough and present
what anyone familiar with the standard popular song form would inter-
pret as the beginning of an A section. Instead of the more conventional
repeat of A, however, the words that continue the song, “Don’t tell me
the pickles and pie à la mode” during the next two measures, inaugurate
something new, which in retrospect we can call b’ (we can call the first part
of A, “a”). More surprisingly, two measures later, beginning with “served
me,” Rodgers interrupts b’ and returns to a new version of a (more accu-
rately a’), a version much transformed through condensation. Probably
relatively few listeners would recognize that a’ (mm. 11–16) is fundamen-
tally the same as a (mm. 1–8), albeit stripped of all but the bare essential
notes of the earlier phrase. Together a, b, and a’ make up the sixteen mea-
sures of the first A.
After the first eight measures of the second A (a), Rodgers offers another
surprise when he returns to b, ‘but doubles its length from two measures to
four (mm. 25–28, not shown). The added measures (mm. 27–28), for which
Hart wrote the words “sinking feeling,” stand out from the rest of the song
as the only occasion (other than the ends of phrases) where a note is held
longer than a single beat. Hart understood that the descending melodic line
of these measures, D-C-B-B, aptly fits the sentiment of the lyric here, just
as in the previous line he set the melody that turns around the note E to
capture the feeling of “spinning around above” (m. 23). When he arrives at
the phrase that inspired Hart’s “sinking feeling,” Rodgers also presents a
harmonic rhythm dramatically altered from everything that came before in
the song. Instead of allowing several melody notes for each chord, he now
allots one note per chord.32 The final a″ (mm. 29–32) starts off like a before
returning to the opening lyrical idea and a new concluding musical phrase,
“But nevertheless it’s only love!,” to conclude the song.
“It’s Got to Be Love” contains a characteristic Hartian sentiment about
love as an unwelcome malady and its negative effect on the body and spirit.
Two years later in The Boys from Syracuse, Rodgers and Hart composed a
sequel, “This Can’t Be Love.” Why not? Because Luciana and Antipholus of
Syracuse “feel so well—no sobs, no sorrows, no sighs . . . no dizzy spell.” In
the earlier lament from On Your Toes Rodgers and Hart present a love song
composed by a woman so smitten that her lover’s hair, even if it “couldn’t
possibly be duller,” would be perceived as pure gold. Since at this stage in
the show Frankie cannot admit that Junior is the reason her heart has become
“a broken down pump,” the jazzy tune, like the lyrics (with the exception of
“that sinking feeling”), creates a surface lightness that masks the underlying
truth: Frankie is literally as well as figuratively lovesick. Perhaps even more
ingeniously than in Vera Simpson’s open admission of her obsession with
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Enchanted Evenings
Joey in “Bewitched,” discussed later in this chapter (Example 5.6), “It’s Got
to Be Love” displays a descending two-note figure in alternate measures (for
example, m. 1, A-B; m. 3, G-A; m. 5, F-G; m. 7, E-F) that subtly but surely
betrays Frankie’s obsession with her teacher Junior.
Organicism in On Your Toes

In his notes to the 1983 revival, recording conductor John Mauceri writes
tantalizingly of musical organicism in On Your Toes: “The score is full of
musical ‘cross-references’” like the theme of the pas de deux in ‘Princesse
Zenobia’ having the same rhythmic structure as ‘There’s a Small Hotel’
[Example 5.4]. The great composers of the American musical theater were
not merely tunesmiths but composers of songs, ensembles and occasionally
Example 5.4. “There's a Small Hotel” and “La Princesse Zenobia” Ballet
(a) “There's a Small Hotel,” original song
(b) transformation in “La Princesse Zenobia” ballet
98
larger structures, like Schumann, Mendelssohn and Schubert a century

before them.”33
Mauceri’s message is that great works of theatrical art such as On Your
Toes possess unity and structural integrity not usually associated with musi-
cal comedy—and, by implication, that large works are more worthy of
praise than “mere” tunes. And certainly “There’s a Small Hotel” and “Prin-
cesse Zenobia” have much in common melodically as well as rhythmically.
Since this song has previously served as the love duet between Junior and
Frankie, it is dramatically convincing when Rodgers uses a transformed ver-
sion of this song for a pas de deux (the balletic equivalent of a love song) that
depicts the love between the Beggar (Morrosine) and the Princesse (Vera).
Additional examples of organicism include the rhythmic and sometimes
melodic connections between the release or B section of “There’s a Small
Hotel” (which, unlike “It’s Got to Be Love,” displays the more usual A-A-B-
A thirty-two-bar form with each letter representing eight measures) and the
first phrase of “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye” (also A-A-B-A) shown
in Example 5.5. Mauceri might have noted that Rodgers reuses the dotted
rhythmic accompaniment of “Small Hotel” to accompany the main theme of
“Slaughter” for the jazzy duet between Junior (who knows the tune pretty
well by now) and the stripper Vera. He might also have mentioned that the
accompaniment of the second half of the verse, beginning with the words
“see . . . looks gold to me” of “It’s Got to Be Love” also anticipates the rhyth-
mic accompaniment throughout “There’s a Small Hotel” and the pas de deux
between Junior and Vera in “Slaughter.” Nevertheless, in contrast to the vast
network of connections previously observed in Show Boat and Porgy and
Bess, examples of organicism in On Your Toes are comparatively rare. More
Example 5.5. “There’s a Small Hotel” and “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye”
(a) “There's a Small Hotel” (B section, or release)
(b) “The Heart is Quicker Than the Eye” (opening of chorus)
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Enchanted Evenings
important, Rodgers, although he does employ the musical device of fore-

shadowing for dramatic purposes, especially of his second ballet, “Slaughter
on Tenth Avenue,” for the most part does not exploit the dramatic potential
of his musical connections as he would later with Hammerstein.34
Musical comedies before Oklahoma! and Carousel are almost invariably
criticized for their awkward transitions from dialogue into music. The segue
into “There’s a Small Hotel” (act I, scene 6), a big hit song in the original pro-
duction, provides a representative example by its absence of any references
in the dialogue that lead plausibly, much less naturally or inevitably, to the
song. In his 1983 revision Abbott tries to remedy this:
frankie: Oh, Junior, I wish we were far away from all this.
junior: Yes, so do I. With no complications in our lives.
frankie: Yes.
junior (Goes to her): Oh yes . . . very far away . . . Paris maybe.35
If the revised dialogue constitutes an improvement over the Central Park

setting of the 1936 original, where “There’s a Small Hotel” almost literally
comes out of nowhere, it does not fully solve the problem of how a librettist
or an imaginative director can successfully introduce a song like “There’s a
Small Hotel.” “It’s Got to Be Love” may subtly reflect Frankie’s disguised
obsession with veiled descending melodic sequences, but not even with all
the wisdom of his advancing years could a genius such as Abbott make these
songs grow seamlessly out of the dramatic action. But perhaps the point is
that if we think of the song and its performance as the show rather than an
interruption that “stops” the show, so-called integrated dramatic solutions
are less necessary?
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Pal Joey
Several days before Pal Joey’s 1952 revival, Rodgers wrote in the New York Times
that “Nobody like Joey had ever been on the musical comedy stage before.”36
In his autobiography Rodgers concluded that of the twenty-five musicals he
wrote with Hart, Pal Joey remained his favorite, an opinion also shared by
his lyricist.37 Porter’s Anything Goes may be more frequently revived. Several
Rodgers and Hart shows, including A Connecticut Yankee (1927) in its revised
1943 version, Babes in Arms (1937), and The Boys from Syracuse (1938) can boast
as many or even more hits. The scintillating 0n Your Toes can claim two full-
length ballets and an organic unity unusual in musical comedies. Despite
all this, only Pal Joey has proven that it can be successfully revived without
substantial changes in its book or reordering of its songs.
The genesis of the musical Pal Joey, based on John O’Hara’s collection of
stories in epistolary form, can be traced to 1938 when a single O’Hara short
story, “Pal Joey,” was published in the New Yorker. By early 1940, shortly after
Rodgers had received O’Hara’s letter suggesting a collaboration on a musi-
cal based on his collection, an additional eleven Joey stories (out of a total
of thirteen) had appeared.38 A normal five-week rehearsal schedule began
on November 11 and tryouts took place in Philadelphia between December
16 and 22. Directed by Abbott and starring Gene Kelly as Joey and Vivienne
Segal as Vera Simpson, the musical made its Broadway premiere at the Ethel
Barrymore Theatre on Christmas Day and closed 374 performances later at
the St. James Theatre on November 29, 1941.39
In his now-infamous review New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson
found Pal Joey “entertaining” but “odious.” Referring to the disturbing
subject matter, including adultery, sexual exploitation, blackmail, the some-
what unwholesome moral character of the principals, and a realistic and
unflattering depiction of the seamy side of Chicago night life, Atkinson
concluded his review with the question, “Although it is expertly done, can
you draw sweet water from a foul well?”40 Other critics greeted Pal Joey as
a major “advance” in the form. Burns Mantle, for example, compared it
favorably with the legitimate plays of the season and expressed his delight
“that there are signs of new life in the musicals.”41 And in Musical Stages
Rodgers proudly quotes Wolcott Gibbs’s New Yorker review as an antidote
to Atkinson: “I am not optimistic by nature but it seems to me just pos-
sible that the idea of equipping a song-and-dance production with a few
living, three-dimensional figures, talking and behaving like human beings,
may no longer strike the boys in the business as merely fantastic.”42 Some
reviewers noted weaknesses in the second act, but most praised O’Hara for
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Enchanted Evenings
producing a fine book. John Mason Brown described the work as “novel and
imaginative.”43 Sidney B. Whipple lauded the “rich characterizations” and
concluded that it was “the first musical comedy book in a long time that has
been worth the bother.”44
Pal Joey appeared several years before the era of cast recordings, but in Sep-
tember 1950, ten years after its Broadway stage debut, a successful recording
was issued with Vivienne Segal, the original Vera Simpson, and with Harold
Lang as a new Joey. The recording generated considerable interest in the
work and soon led to a revival on January 3, 1952, a sequence of events that
foreshadowed the trajectories of several Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals of
the 1970s and 1980s that were introduced as record albums and later evolved
into stage productions. The 1952 Pal Joey became the second major revival
(after Cheryl Crawford’s 1942 revival of Porgy and Bess) to surpass its origi-
nal run, and at 542 performances remains the longest running production of
any Rodgers and Hart musical, original or revival. Even Atkinson, while not
exactly admitting that he had erred in his 1940 assessment, lavishly praised
the work as well as the production in 1952, including “the terseness of the
writing, the liveliness and versatility of the score, and the easy perfection of
the lyrics.”45
Pal Joey. Gene Kelly in right foreground (1940). Photograph: Vandamm

Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.
102
After two successful revivals at the New York City Center in 1961 and
1963 (both with Bob Fosse in the title role), the artistic and commercial fail-
ure of a 1976 revival at New York City’s Circle in the Square—abandoned
by New York City Ballet star Edward Villella shortly before opening night—
would not cause Pal Joey to lose its place as a classic American musical, a
place firmly established by the 1952 revival. As another sign of its artistic
stature Pal Joey became the earliest musical to gain admittance in Lehman
Engel’s select list of fifteen canonic musicals.46 For Engel, Pal Joey inaugu-
rated a Golden Age of the American musical.47
Pal Joey in 1940 and 1952

Compared to the liberties taken with the 1962 Anything Goes and the 1954 On
Your Toes, the 1952 Pal Joey revival followed its original book and song con-
tent and order tenaciously. Nevertheless, some of what audiences heard and
saw in 1952 departs from the original Broadway production. For example, in
the 1952 revival, “Do It the Hard Way” is placed outside of its original dra-
matic context (act II, scene 4), when it is sung by Joey to Vera in their apart-
ment; in 1940 this song is presented as a duet between Gladys and Ludlow
Lowell in Chez Joey one scene earlier.48
The 1952 lyrics also depart in several notable ways from O’Hara’s 1940
typescript.49 In 1940 Hart concluded the chorus of “That Terrific Rain-
bow” (act I, scene 3) with the following quatrain: “Though we’re in those
gray clouds / Some day you’ll see / That terrific rainbow / Over you
and me” (preserved on the pre-revival recording); for the 1952 revival
someone (presumably not Hart) replaced two lines of this lyric with one
that is grammatically incorrect, perhaps to emphasize the amateurish
nature of the song. Thus “Some day you’ll spy” now rhymes with “Over
you and I” (Hart rhymed “someday you’ll see” with “over you and me”).
This alteration was adopted in the 1962 vocal score published by Chap-
pell & Co.
The topical “Zip”—a song in which newspaper reporter Melba Snyder
(played in the revival by Elaine Stritch) acts out her interview with Gypsy
Rose Lee, “the star who worked for Minsky”—also underwent several lyri-
cal changes in 1952. In the revival Melba opened the song with Hart’s ear-
lier version of the first lines when she recalls her interviews with “Pablo
Picasso and a countess named di Frasso.” It is possible that Picasso and di
Frasso were more recognizable to an early 1950s audience than the revised
1940 lyric that paired Leslie Howard and Noël Coward. In the final chorus
the then-better-known Arturo Toscanini replaced Leopold Stokowski as the
leader of the “the greatest of bands,” and one stripper (Lili St. Cyr) replaced
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Enchanted Evenings
another (Rosita Royce). Even present-day trivia buffs could not be expected
to know who either stripper is (although it might be said that Lili St. Cyr
has achieved immortality by being mentioned in “Zip”). The 1952 version of
“Den of Iniquity” (act II, scene 2) replaced Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with
Ravel’s Boléro and added a final lyrical exchange between Joey and Vera
after their dance.50
In his autobiography Abbott somewhat exaggeratingly refers to a pre-
liminary script by librettist O’Hara as “a disorganized set of scenes with-
out a good story line [that] required work before we would be ready for
rehearsal.”51 In fact, although it contains no lyrics among its indications for
songs and displays several notable deletions and departures from his Broad-
way typescript in 1940 (including an ending in which Linda and Joey are
reconciled), in most respects O’Hara’s preliminary typescript follows the
story line of the 1940 version closely.52
Some songs that became part of the Broadway draft, “That Terrific Rain-
bow,” “Happy Hunting Horn,” and even “Bewitched,” were not given any
space at all in O’Hara’s preliminary script. Further, the early typescript
offers no indication for a ballet, an idea that Abbott credits scene and light-
ing designer Jo Mielziner for suggesting during rehearsals.53 The dialogue
that precedes “The Flower Garden of My Heart” in the published libretto is
also missing from the earlier draft, but in this case O’Hara’s description of
this production number (original draft, beginning of act II) leaves no room
for doubt that he was responsible for the idea of the ballet:
The song is Richman corn [Harry Richman, who introduced

Irving Berlin’s song “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in the 1930 film also
called Puttin on the Ritz], the flower number kind of thing—every
girl reminds me of a flower; here is a hydrangea, here is a crocus,
etc. a young man stays in the spotlight, holding out a hand for
Hydrangea, who is in silly nudish costume. He never quite lets
her get all the way in the light, but hands her away with one hand
as he reaches for Crocus with the other. He looks at the fannies
etc. in a way to make them ridiculous, and is mugging terribly,
even in rehearsal.
Song and Story

O’Hara’s typescript of the 1940 Broadway libretto (I-6–36) contains hand-
written changes for “Bewitched,” the biggest song hit from Pal Joey. Here
are the typed lyrics as they once appeared in the B and final A sections of the
third A-A-B-A chorus.
104
B We can fight—we start shrieking

Always end in a row,
Horizontally speaking is not the whole thing now,
A I’m dumb again
And numb again
Like Fanny Brice singing “Mon Homme” again.
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I.
The draft poses a cultural literacy problem for those who might not know,
even in 1940, that Fanny Brice sang “My Man” in Ziegfeld 9 O’Clock Frolic
(1920) and Ziegfeld Follies (1921), or that this song was originally the French
song “Mon Homme” by Maurice Yvain and Channing Pollock.54
Fortunately this lyric was abandoned. The first three lines were crossed
out and replaced with the following handwritten script for the B section
with the forced rhyme pal / verti-cal:
When your dream boat is leaking

And your pal ain’t your pal
Geometrically speaking just keep it vertical
The final version published in 1940 with its paired rhymes in B, is not indi-
cated in the O’Hara typescript:
B Though at first we said, “No sir,”

Now we’re two little dears.
You might say we are closer
Than Roebuck is to Sears.
A I’m dumb again
And numb again,
A rich, ready, ripe little plum again—
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I.
All of these versions are variations on a theme that Hart explored in

numerous songs, including “It’s Got to Be Love” discussed earlier: love as
a sickness. Vera, the restless wife of the wealthy Prentiss Simpson, is gener-
ally in control of her emotions and entertains no delusions about the cause
of her sleepless nights. In the verse that precedes the chorus she even refers
to Joey as a “fool” and a “half-pint imitation,” but even this realization does
not prevent her from catching the dreaded disease.
In his autobiography Rodgers recalls what he learned from his training
in Goetschius’s class of five students: “Whenever Goetschius talked about
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Enchanted Evenings
ending a phrase with a straight-out tonic chord (the first, third and fifth step
of any scale), he would call it a ‘pig,’ his term for anything that was too easy
or obvious. Once I heard the scorn in Goetschius’ voice I knew that I’d avoid
that ‘pig’ as if my life depended on it.”55 In “Bewitched” (Example 5.6) Rod-
gers avoids the infelicitously named “pig” at the end of the second eight-
measure A section. He does this by moving to an A in measures 15 and 16
on the word “I” rather than the expected first note of the scale, F (also on the
word “I”), that he set up at the end of the first A section in measures 7 and 8.
The harmony, however, add interest as well as richness but not following the
expectations of the melody. When the melody resolves to F (mm. 7–8), Rod-
gers harmonizes this note, not with F but with D minor (D-F-A, with F as
Example 5.6. “Bewitched” (chorus)

(a) Chorus, mm. 1-16.
(b) B section, or release, mm. 17-20
106
the third rather than an F major triad, F-A-C, with F as the root); when the
melody closes on A at the end of the second A section (mm. 15–16), the note
that avoided the “pig,” Rodgers offers the F harmony expected eight mea-
sures earlier (but now a surprise), with A as the third. Only at the conclusion
of the final A section (mm. 31–32) does Rodgers join melody and harmony
(the note C in the melody matches the C major chord in the harmony) to
conclude the song with a satisfying close.
Rodgers also finds an effective musical means to capture Hart’s virtuosic
depiction of Vera’s obsession. Hart conveys the society matron’s idée fixe
by giving her thrice-repeated lyrics to conclude the first three lines of each
A section, as in “I’m wild again! / Beguiled again! / A whimpering, simper-
ing child again” (with the internal rhymes wild, beguiled, and child) before
delivering the “hook” of the song’s title, “bewitched, bothered and bewil-
dered” (always unrhymed) to conclude each A section. It is tempting to
conclude that Rodgers’s musical characterization of Vera’s emotional state
corresponds with uncanny accuracy to the lyrics. But since the lyrics appar-
ently followed the music—in contrast to Rodgers’s subsequent modus
operandi with Hammerstein—it is more accurate to admire Hart’s special
sensitivity to Rodger’s music, which presents an equally repetitive musical
line, the note B ascending up a half-step to C. By inverting the musical line
(turning it upside down) in the B section (mm. 17–24), Rodgers manages to
maintain Vera’s obsession while providing welcome musical contrast to the
repetitive A sections.
Vera’s ability to rhyme internally also reflects her complexity and
sophistication—or, as Sondheim would say, her education.56 In other songs
Hart’s lyrics convey literal lyrical parallels to Rodgers’s music. Examples
of textual realism include Joey’s monotonous recitation of the alphabet and
numbers to match the repeated notes in the verse of “I Could Write a Book,”
the word “blue” in the phrase “but I’m blue for you” to match Rodgers’s
“blue note” (a blue seventh) in the first period of “That Terrific Rainbow,”
and the hunting imagery that corresponds to the horn-like fifths in “Happy
Hunting Horn.” Other pictorial examples include the gunshot at the end
of this last song to suggest fallen prey, the graphic chord each time Melba
Snyder sings the word “Zip!,” and the dissonant chord cluster after she
mentions “the great Stravinsky.”
Perhaps in an effort to musically integrate his Pal Joey songs, Rodgers
maintains his obsession with the prominent half-steps that characterized
“Bewitched.” No less than three other songs in Pal Joey prominently employ
various melodic permutations of the half-step interval. Can we attribute any
dramatic meaning to this? By emphasizing this interval in both of Vera’s solo
songs, “Bewitched” and “What Is a Man?” (Examples 5.6 and 5.7), Rodgers
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Enchanted Evenings
Example 5.7. “What Is a Man?” (chorus, mm. 1-16)
helps establish the musical identity of a woman who has allowed herself
the luxury of an obsession. When Vera is with her paramour and sings with
him, she has no need to obsess about him. Consequently, the half-step is
absent in her duet with Joey, “Den of Iniquity.” Why Joey should sing half-
steps so often in “Plant You Now, Dig You Later” is less explicable.57 What
remains consistent is that the songs prominently displaying the half-step are
the “offstage” songs, not the songs sung in rehearsal or as part of the enter-
tainment in Mike Spears’s nightclub or Chez Joey.
The seemingly irresistible musical and psychological pull that character-
izes the move from the seventh degree of a major scale (aptly labeled the lead-
ing tone) to the tonic, one half-step higher (e.g., B-C in the key of C), was also
used to produce meaningful dramatic effects in other shows. In South Pacific
(1949) Rodgers (with Hammerstein) greases rather than avoids the “pig”
(an F) for the sake of verisimilitude in “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right
Outa My Hair.” In this well-known song Rodgers conveys Nellie Forbush’s
delusion by introducing the oft-repeated title line with an equally repetitive
ascending scalar phrase (C-D-E-F) that relentlessly and obsessively returns
to the central key and thereby exposes her failure to accomplish her task.
Later in the show when she admits to herself and her fellow nurses that she
is, in fact, “in love with a wonderful guy,” Nellie sings an exaggerated eigh-
teen repetitions of the half-step interval (again from the leading tone up to
the tonic) on the repeated words “love, I’m in” (B-C-C, B-C-C, etc.). In “Bali
Ha’i,” also from South Pacific, Rodgers convincingly conveys the mysterious
108
quality and seductive call of the exotic island by its emphasis on repeated
half-steps (e.g., “Ha’i may call you” becomes F-F-F-G).
Not to be overlooked is Rodgers and Hart’s ability in Pal Joey to write
first-rate songs appropriate for their second-rate surroundings, a delicate
balancing act that will also be used by Frank Loesser in the Hot Box num-
bers of Guys and Dolls. In “That Terrific Rainbow,” for example, Hart pres-
ents a wide array of trite and clichéd images to create his rainbow.
I’m a red-hot mama,

But I’m blue for you.
I get purple with anger
At the things you do.
And I’m green with envy
After moving from red, blue, purple, and green, the object of the lyric’s affec-
tion burns the protagonist’s heart with an ORANGE flame. Before the end of
the next stanza, the RED-hot mama with a heart of GOLD accuses her love
object of being WHITE with cold, an unfortunate situation which creates GRAY
clouds that, hopefully, will eventually make way for “That Terrific Rainbow.”
When Mike Spears’s club is converted to Chez Joey in act II, the lyrics of
the more elaborate and pretentious new opening production number, “The
Flower Garden of My Heart,” read like a parody of the hackneyed and for-
mulaic Mother Goose rhyme “Roses Are Red”: “In the flower garden of my
heart / I’ve got violets blue as your eyes. / I’ve got dainty narcissus / As sweet
as my missus / And lilies as pure as the skies.” In the same chorus Hart gives
Gladys the couplets, “Just to keep our love holy / I’ve got gladioli,” and in
ensuing choruses “Oh, the west wind will whisk us / The scent of hibiscus,”
and “You will look like sweet william / And smell like a trillium.” Was Rod-
gers perhaps too successful in achieving conventionality and mediocrity in
this song? Perhaps. In any event, it was one of only two numbers—the other
is “A Great Big Town”—excluded from the pre-revival cast album?
Pal Joey’s successful original run was surpassed by Rodgers and Hart in
their final collaboration, the now largely forgotten By Jupiter (1942), which
received 427 performances. After that, Hart possessed neither the interest
nor the will to tackle a setting of Lynn Riggs’s play, Green Grow the Lilacs
(1931). Rodgers therefore left his “partner, a best friend, and a source of per-
manent irritation,” and turned to Hammerstein to create Oklahoma! in 1942
and early 1943. In the increasingly small intervals between drinking binges
Hart managed to create a few new songs for the successful 1943 revival of
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Enchanted Evenings
the 1927 hit A Connecticut Yankee (including the bitingly funny “To Keep My
Love Alive”), but within a few months of Oklahoma!’s historic debut he was
dead.
The new team of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the integrated ideal
would dominate the American musical until Hammerstein’s death in 1960.
But something irreplaceable was also lost when the Rodgers and Hammer-
stein era replaced Rodgers and Hart. The new partners would continue to
compose excellent songs that, although integrated, can be sung successfully
outside of their carefully considered contexts. Only rarely, however, would
Rodgers recreate the rhythmic energy and jazzy melodic vernacular that dis-
tinguished so many of his songs with Hart, songs such as “You Mustn’t Kick
It Around,” “Happy Hunting Horn,” “Plant You Now, Dig You Later,” and
“Do It the Hard Way” in Pal Joey and “It’s Got to Be Love” “Slaughter on
10th Avenue,” and the title song in On Your Toes.
Alec Wilder addresses this point in American Popular Song: The Great
Innovators 1900–1950, an idiosyncratic survey that for years was the only
book seriously to discuss the musical qualities of popular songs.58 Although
Wilder treats the songs show-by-show, he scrupulously avoids discuss-
ing their dramatic context or even their texts and consequently evaluates
them solely on their autonomous musical merits. For this reason he remains
impervious to the psychological insights in “Bewitched” and instead berates
Rodgers’s repetitive “device” that was “brought to a sort of negative fruition
in that it finally obtrudes as a contrivance.”59 Nevertheless, Wilder devoted
fifty-three pages to Rodgers and Hart and only six to Rodgers and Hammer-
stein, and he tells us why:
Though he wrote great songs with Oscar Hammerstein II, it is my

belief that his greatest melodic invention and pellucid freshness
occurred during his years of collaboration with Lorenz Hart. The
inventiveness has never ceased. Yet something bordering on musi-
cal complacency evidenced itself in his later career. I have always
felt that there was an almost feverish demand in Hart’s writing
which reflected itself in Rodger’s melodies as opposed to the almost
too comfortable armchair philosophy in Hammerstein’s lyrics.60
Musical comedies in general, like their nonmusical stage counterparts,

stand unfairly as poor relations to tragedies—musicals that aspire to nine-
teenth-century tragic operas filled with thematic transformations and con-
spicuous organicism. Pal Joey is a brilliant musical comedy that has not lost
its relevance or its punch since its arrival in 1940. Despite its many virtues,
however, this first musical in “long pants,” as Rodgers described it in 1952,
110
and the first major musical to feature an anti-hero, lacks the great themes
of Show Boat and Porgy and Bess and their correspondingly ambitious and
complex dramatic transformations of musical motives. The transformation
of “Bewitched” in Joey’s ballet from a ballad in duple meter to a fast waltz
in triple meter—an idea that likely originated with the dance arranger rather
than Rodgers—for example, does not convey the dramatic meaning inher-
ent in Kern’s transformations of Magnolia’s piano theme, nor does it come
close to attaining Gershwin’s dramatic application of his melodic and rhyth-
mic transformations and paraphrases.
In contrast to Porter’s Anything Goes and Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes,
however, Pal Joey possesses a book that could be revived in nearly its original
state (even though some modern productions, including its 2008 Broadway
revival, tend to treat the work as though it were Anything Goes). Its songs,
nearly all gems, grow naturally from the dramatic action and tell us some-
thing important about the characters who sing them. For some, including
Lehman Engel, if by no means most discerning critics, the bewitching Pal
Joey deserves a chance to survive on its own terms as an enduring Broadway
classic of its genre and of its time.
111
chapter six
THE CRADLE WILL ROCK

A Labor Musical for Art’s Sake
M
arc Blitzstein (1905–1964) remains an obscure figure. With few
exceptions his music either was never published or is only gradu-
ally coming into print. As late as the early 1980s, one decade before
her company, under new leadership, revived the work, Beverly Sills of the
New York City Opera was rejecting Regina, Blitzstein’s 1949 adaptation of
Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, as “too old-fashioned” for present-day tastes.1
Bertolt Brecht scholar Martin Esslin had already dismissed Blitzstein’s
“sugar-coated” English translation of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny
Opera—the version that during the years 1954–1960 became the longest Off-
Broadway musical of its era and Blitzstein’s best-known achievement—as
unworthy of Brecht’s vision.2
Although he is seldom treated as a major figure, the authors of most com-
prehensive histories of American music, as well as more idiosyncratic sur-
veys, offer Blitzstein some space and a generally good press.3 Aaron Copland
gives Blitzstein equal billing with Virgil Thomson in a chapter in Our New
Music.4 Wilfrid Mellers presents Blitzstein along with Ives and Copland as one
of three distinguished and representative American composers in Music and
Society (1950).5 In Music in a New Found Land, published the year of Blitzstein’s
death and dedicated to his memory, Mellers focuses on Regina in a laudatory
chapter which pairs it with Bernstein’s West Side Story.6 Blitzstein’s Broad-
way opera Regina (1949), successfully revived and recorded in 1992 by the
New York City Opera, was poised for the possibility of future enshrinement.
112
The Cradle Will Rock
Marc Blitzstein. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with

Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES
LTD., NEW YORK. WWW. ALHIRSCHFELD.COM
113
Enchanted Evenings
Several years earlier the composer of The Cradle Will Rock was the subject of
the longest biography up until that time of an American composer.7
Historians and Broadway enthusiasts relatively unfamiliar with either
Blitzstein or The Cradle Will Rock may nevertheless know something of the
circumstances behind this work’s extraordinary premiere on June 16, 1937
(directed by Orson Welles). As reported on the front page of the New York
Times the next day—and almost invariably whenever the work is mentioned
for the next seventy years—the show, banned from a padlocked Maxine
Elliot theater, its government sponsorship revoked, moved its forces and
its assembled audience twenty blocks uptown to the Venice Theater. Once
there, in conformance to the letter (if not the spirit) of the prohibitions
placed upon its performance, cast members sang their parts from the audi-
ence while Blitzstein took the stage with his piano.8
After nineteen performances at the Venice, Cradle moved to the Mercury
Theater for several months of Sunday evening performances. On January
3, 1938, the controversial show opened on Broadway at the Windsor for a
short run of 108 performances (sixteen performances fewer than Porgy and
Bess and in a smaller theater).9 The play was published a few months later
by Random House, and the following year Cradle was anthologized in a
volume that included Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, a play with which
Cradle is frequently associated and compared.10 A recording of the original
production issued in 1938 became the first Broadway cast album, a historical
distinction almost invariably and incorrectly attributed to Oklahoma!11
Reviews were generally positive. Although he wrote that the “weak end-
ing” was “hokum” and a “fairy-tale,” Thomson also concluded that after
six months of the 1937 production “The Cradle was still a good show and its
musical quality hasn’t worn thin” and that the work was “the most appeal-
ing operatic socialism since Louise” [Gustave Charpentier’s realistic opera
that premiered in 1900].12 Brooks Atkinson considered the musical “a stirring
success” and “the most versatile artistic triumph of the politically insurgent
theatre.”13 Edith J. R. Isaac wrote that the work “introduces a persuasive new
theatre form.”14 Somewhat less sympathetically, the notorious George Jean
Nathan concluded his acerbic review with the often-quoted barb that Cradle
was “little more than the kind of thing Cole Porter might have written if,
God forbid, he had gone to Columbia instead of Yale.”15
In common with most of the musicals discussed in this survey Cradle has
been revived with relative frequency, including a production in 1947 under
the direction of Leonard Bernstein, who had presented the work at Har-
vard in 1939 while an undergraduate (playing the piano part from memory),
a New York City Opera production in 1960 (the most successful work of
their season), and an Off-Broadway production in 1964 that led to the first
114
complete recorded performance of the work. In 1983, an Off-Broadway pro-

duction and London run starring Evita superstar Patti Lupone (doubling as
Moll and Sister Mister) and directed by John Houseman, who produced the
premiere, generated a second complete recording and a television broad-
cast.16 Of all these performances, only the 1960 production resuscitated the
orchestral score that Blitzstein had completed in May 1937 and Lehman
Engel conducted at the dress rehearsal before the eventful opening night.
The performances with Blitzstein alone on his piano launched a tradition
that has long since become entrenched and seemingly irrevocable.17
Singing a Song of Social Significance

Authentic avant-garde works achieve their status in part by their continued
ability to shock audiences out of their complacency and to bite the hand
that feeds. For this reason, the purposeful retraction of government funding
when the political wind began to blow in a different direction in 1937—even
if the government was not initially targeting Cradle—arguably gives Cradle
more credibility than those works that were ideologically safe, including
Blitzstein’s earlier modernistic works. Cradle also joins other works of the
1930s, most notably the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing (1931) and Let ’Em Eat Cake
(1933) and composer-lyricist Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles (1937), in its
representation of politically satirical or antiestablishment themes.
Contributing to the continued problematic taxonomic status of The Cra-
dle Will Rock is its musical incongruity with both the avant-garde and the
conventional popular theater of the 1930s. Particularly jarring is Cradle’s
conflicting allegiances to vernacular song forms and styles and modernis-
tic characteristics and emblems, the latter including harsh dissonances and
chords that thwart expectations. How many musicals would encourage the
musically shrill hysteria of Mrs. Mister in the Mission Scene (scene 3) when
she asks Reverend Salvation in 1917 to pray for war in order to support her
husband’s military machine? What other musicals would permit the disso-
nance of the recurring gavel music that proclaims order in the Night Court
before a new flashback? On the other hand, although the work is for the
most part through-sung and contains proportionally far less talk than most
Singspiels, including Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Cradle’s treatment of popular
vernacular and its non-reliance on opera singers contributes further to the
difficulty of placing the work with one genre or another.
In contrast to Gershwin, who began as a popular songwriter before trans-
forming his popular music into art music, Blitzstein, like Copland and Weill,
began his musical career as a modernist who then converted to populism. As
115
Enchanted Evenings
a student of both Stravinsky-advocate Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Schoen-

berg in Berlin, Blitzstein became intimately acquainted early in his career
with the two primary tributaries to the modernist mainstream and reflected
their values in early works such as his Piano Sonata (1927) and Piano Con-
certo (1931). Blitzstein’s modernist phase prior to 1933 also embraces the
“art for art’s sake” ideology that he would soon come to loathe and indict in
his first major populist work, The Cradle Will Rock.
One month after he had completed Cradle, Blitzstein, a prolific essayist,
published an article in the left-wing magazine New Masses on July 14 (Bastille
Day) in 1936 in which he viewed modernism as an inevitable reaction against
the excesses required of “a capitalist society turning imperialist.”18 Although
Blitzstein thought that Schoenberg and Stravinsky wrote “the truth about
the dreams of humanity in a world of war and violence,” he concluded
this essay by asserting that these premier modernists were limited by their
inability to confront the social issues of their time: “It is too much to say
that the new men sought deliberately and fundamentally to battle the whole
conception. They were still the ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ boys, they didn’t see much
beyond their artistic vision.”19
One week later, in New Masses, Blitzstein praised the Gebrauchsmusik
movement (variously translated as “utility music” or “music for use”) for its
sense of direction and its topicality. At the same time, he faulted it because its
exponents—principally Paul Hindemith, who at that time was only slightly
less highly regarded than Schoenberg and Stravinsky—“had little politi-
cal or social education.”20 The value of Gebrauchsmusik for Blitzstein was its
spawning of men such as Brecht who possessed the necessary education
and who “saw the need for education through poetry, through music.”21
Earlier in 1936, in an article published in Modern Music, Blitzstein concluded
that Hanns Eisler and Weill, two of Brecht’s musical collaborators, “write the
same kind of music, although their purposes are completely at variance. . . .
Weill is flaccid (he wants to ‘entertain’); Eisler has spine and nerves (he wants
to ‘educate’).”22 By the time he composed Cradle, Blitzstein revealed in print
that he shared Eisler’s ideology and had become a card-carrying member of
the musical-theater proletariat led by Brecht. He ends his New Masses mani-
festo with a call to political action. Blitzstein himself had taken such action
the previous month when he had completed his Cradle after five weeks of
composing at “white heat.” “The composer is now willing, eager, to trade in
his sanctified post as Vestal Virgin before the altar of Immutable and Undefil-
able Art, for the post of an honest workman among workmen, who has a job
to do, a job which wonderfully gives other people joy. His music is aimed at
the masses; he knows what he wants to say to them.”23
116
Contributing to the changes in Blitzstein’s thinking was his meeting sev-

eral months earlier (probably in December 1935) with Brecht, at which the
playwright and poet shared his response to Blitzstein’s song “Nickel under
the Foot.” The scene was reported by Minna Lederman, the editor of Mod-
ern Music: “Marc said to Brecht, ‘I want you to hear something I’ve writ-
ten,’ and, sitting at his piano, played and sang ‘The Nickel under the Foot.’
This immediately excited Brecht. He rose, and I can still hear his high, shrill
voice, almost a falsetto, exclaiming, ‘Why don’t you write a piece about all
kinds of prostitution—the press, the church, the courts, the arts, the whole
system?’ ”24 Cradle’s dramatic structure follows Brecht’s suggestion to the
letter, and most of the work’s ten scenes in “Steeltown, U.S.A. on the night of
a union drive” focus on the metaphoric prostitution of various prototypes.25
The only incorruptible figures are Moll, who literally prostitutes herself but
does not metaphorically sell out to Mr. Mister and at least has something
genuine to sell, and Larry Foreman, who refuses to be corrupted by Mr.
Mister and eventually leads the unions to thwart the union buster’s corrupt
use of power.
Undoubtedly, the ideological nature of The Cradle Will Rock has obscured
its artistic significance. That the work deserves its frequently designated sta-
tus as an agit-prop musical is evident by the degree to which it was imitated
by life. Only a few months after its opening, America seemed to heed its call
to action with the formation of a strong national steel union, Little Steel. If
Cradle’s pro-unionist and anti-capitalist stance now seems dated, its central
Brechtian theme, the indictment of a passive middle class that sells out to the
highest bidder, continues to haunt and disturb. As Blitzstein wrote: “ ‘The
Cradle Will Rock’ is about unions but only incidentally about unions. What
I really wanted to talk about was the middleclass. Unions, unionism as a
subject, are used as a symbol of something in the way of a solution for the
plight of that middleclass.”26
With the exception of “Nickel under the Foot,” which observes Brecht’s
call for an epic theater and “the strict separation of the music from all the
other elements of entertainment offered,” Blitzstein, in contrast to Brecht
and Weill, created a work in which music and words were inseparable from
the axis of the work.27 Despite this aesthetic discrepancy, the integrated
songs of The Cradle Will Rock remain faithful to Brecht’s larger social artistic
vision. Consequently, the Cradle songs, like those of Brecht and Weill, both
embrace the didactic element espoused by Brecht’s epic theater and reject
the “hedonistic approach” and “senselessness” common to operas (and of
course musicals as well) before The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny of
1930.28
117
Enchanted Evenings
Two Scenes: Lawn of Mr. Mister and Hotel Lobby

Lawn of Mr. Mister: “Croon-Spoon”
Scene Four, which contains four songs (“Croon-Spoon,” “The Freedom of
the Press,” “Let’s Do Something,” and “Honolulu”) opens on the lawn of
Mr. Mister’s home, where his children, Junior and Sister Mister, are lounging
on hammocks.29 The stage directions describe Junior as “sluggish, collegiate
and vacant; Sister is smartly gotten up and peevish.” Unlike most of the
characters in Blitzstein’s morality tale, Junior and Sister Mister have nothing
to sell and therefore cannot be indicted for selling out. But they do possess
vacuous middle-class values that Blitzstein targets for ridicule in their duet
that opens the scene, “Croon–Spoon” (Examples 6.1 and 6.2), a spoof of the
type of trivial and ephemeral popular song on recordings, dance halls, and
non-didactic Broadway shows.
Blitzstein’s opinion of the idle rich, who spend their time singing songs
that do not convey a message of social significance, is apparent from the
opening lyrics to “Croon–Spoon” when Junior sings, “Croon, Croon till
it hurts, baby, / Croon, My heart asserts, baby, / Croonin’ in spurts, baby,
/ Is just the nerts for a tune!”30 True, Blitzstein permits Junior to begin on a
note that belongs to a chord in the key of the song, an F (the third of the
tonic D major triad). But this F is the last note in a tonic chord that Junior
manages to assert in his opening seven-measure phrase (one measure less
than the nearly ubiquitous eight of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songs). The
“conventional” theater song (e.g., “Anything Goes”) would present four
eight-measure phrases to create an A-A-B-A or thirty-two-bar song form.
Blitzstein’s altered phrase lengths (A[7]-A[7]-B[6+6+2]-A[7+4] measures)
within the A-A-B-A structure manage to acknowledge convention at the
same time he defies and ridicules it.
In contrast to Junior Mister, who concludes his first A section a half-step
too low for the accompanying harmony (E against a D-major chord), Sis-
ter Mister, in her complementary seven-measure phrase (the second A of the
askew A-A-B-A), manages to conclude correctly on a tonic D in the melody.
Blitzstein, however, subverts the harmonic implication of Sister’s more self-
assured D (again on the word “spoon”) with harmony that will rapidly depart
from the home tonic. The B section, which begins in F minor (Example 6.2)
and consists of two nearly melodically identical six-bar phrases followed by
Sister Mister’s two-bar patter that leads back to the final A section, is remark-
able for the C in measure 17 (on “-la-” of “pop-u-la-tion”) and measure 23
(on “nev-” of “nev-er”), a lowered or blue fifth that is relatively rare in Broad-
way songs (and even somewhat unusual in jazz before the 1940s).
118
Example 6.1. “Croon-Spoon” (beginning)
119
Enchanted Evenings
The punch line of the final A derives from the inability of either Junior or
Sister Mister to successfully resolve the harmony. After six measures, Junior
should be ready to conclude the song one measure later to preserve the odd
but symmetrical seven-bar units of the first two A sections. Instead, Sister
Mister, after a fermata (a hold of indefinite length), repeats her brother’s last
three measures and Junior, after another fermata, repeats the third measure
one more time before the siblings screech out the original tonic to conclude
the thirty-nine-measure tune.
Following Brecht and his own evolution as a reformed modernist with
a social agenda, Blitzstein is of course telling us to avoid singing what he
considers to be vapid songs about croon, spoon, and June, even as Junior
tells us in the bridge of this song that “Oh, the crooner’s life is a blessed
one, / He makes the population happy.” Junior concludes his song with
his own didactic message directed toward the poor who are “not immune”
to the wonders of croon spoon. “If they’re [the poor] without a suit, / They
shouldn’t give a hoot, / When they can substitute—CROON!” In Pins and
Needles, the inspired and phenomenally popular revue presented by the
International Garment Workers Union the same year as Cradle, Rome asks
Example 6.2. “Croon-Spoon” (B section, or release)
120
his audience to “Sing a Song of Social Significance.” “Croon–Spoon,” a song

far removed from social significance, serves as a forum in which Blitzstein
can lambaste songs that do not respond to his call for social action and pro-
vides the composer-lyricist with an irresistible opportunity to ridicule per-
formers who sing socially useless songs.31
Lawn of Mr. Mister: “The Freedom of the Press” and “Honolulu”

During the Windsor run of Cradle, Blitzstein concluded an article, “On Writ-
ing for the Theatre,” with some remarks on the relationship between theory
and practice in this work.
When I started to write the Cradle I had a whole and beautiful the-
ory lined up about it. Music was to be used for those sections which
were predominantly lyric, satirical, and dramatic. My theories got
kicked headlong as soon as I started to write; it became clear to me
that the theatre is so elusive an animal that each situation demands
its own solution, and so, in a particularly dramatic spot, I found
the music simply had to stop. I also found that certain pieces of
ordinary plot-exposition could be handled very well by music (The
Freedom of the Press is a plot-song).
“The Freedom of the Press” begins immediately (attacca subito) after

Mr. Mister excuses Junior and Sister Mister, an exit underscored by the vamp
that began “Croon-Spoon.” Blitzstein called this duet between Mr. Mister
and Editor Daily a plot-song because the song narrates (or plots) the entire
process by which Daily reinterprets the meaning behind its title: the free-
dom of the press can be a freedom to distort as well as to impart the truth.
The plot is as follows: Daily reveals that he is willing to sell out to the high-
est bidder (first stanza, A); Daily expresses his willingness to change a story,
that is, “if something’s wrong with it [the story] why then we’ll print to fit”
(second stanza, B); and Daily learns that Mr. Mister had purchased the paper
that morning (third stanza, Mr. Mister’s final A).
Following a vigorous six-measure introduction, the form of the song is
strophic in three identical musical stanzas. Blitzstein subdivides each stanza
into an a-b-a-b-c-d form, in which the melody of the rapid (q =160) a sections
(eight measures each) sung by Mr. Mister are tonally centered in F (conclud-
ing in C minor) and the equally fast b sections (also eight measures) are
answered by Editor Daily in a passage that begins abruptly one step higher
in D major (“All my gift . . . ”) and modulates to A major (on “very kind”)
before Mr. Mister returns to the a section and a D-minor seventh with equal
abruptness (Example 6.3 on next page).32
121
Enchanted Evenings
When Editor Daily returns to his b section (“Just you call . . . ”), Blitzstein
has him sing a whole step higher than his original D major (in E major) for
greater intensity. In the brief c section Mr. Mister departs from the relent-
lessness and speed of his (and Editor Daily’s) earlier material and for four
measures sings, “lento e dolce” (slow and sweetly), the menacing words
“Yes, but some news can be made to order” to match the menacing under-
lying harmony. In the d section (twenty measures) the music resumes the
original tempo, starting with E major (followed by shifts to C major, G
major, among other less clearly defined harmonies), and Mr. Mister and Edi-
tor Daily sing the main refrain. “O, the press, the press, the freedom of the
press . . . for whichever side will pay the best!”33
After “The Freedom of the Press,” the music stops for the first time in
the scene, and in spoken dialogue Editor Daily quickly agrees with his new
boss that Junior “doesn’t go so well with union trouble” and would be a
good candidate for a correspondent’s job “out of town, say on the paper.”
Junior and Sister enter to a brief and frenetic dance and jazzy tune, “Let’s
Do Something.” Editor Daily, now firmly ensconced as a stooge of his new
Example 6.3. “The Freedom of the Press”

(a) a section
(b) b section
122
123
Enchanted Evenings
boss, proposes the “something” that might satisfy Mr. Mister and appear
palatable to Junior: “Have you thought of Honolulu?”
In his survey of American music, H. Wiley Hitchcock writes that the first
twelve measures of “Honolulu” illustrate “Blitzstein’s subtle transformation
of popular song style,” in which “the clichés of the vocal line are cancelled
out by the freshness of the accompaniment.”34 Hitchcock singles out the
“irregular texture underlying” the “hint of Hawaiian guitars” in the first
eight measures (a four-measure phrase and its literal repetition), the “off-
beat accentuation of the bass under the raucous refrain,” which produces
a phrase structure of 3+4+1+3+4+1, and an “acrid” harmony (in technical
terms, an inverted dominant ninth) on the word “isle.” If the first four mea-
sures are labeled A and measures 9–12 B (Example 6.4) the overall form of
the song looks like this:
A A B A' A' A' AB A A A' A' B A' A' A' A' B A A'
4 4 44 4 4 24 4 4 6 4 4 4 4 4 6 4 6 3
The irregularity of the form and the unpredictability of the less frequent
B entrances go a long way to save “Honololu” from the banality it is trying
to satirize, just as the unconventional phrase lengths and unorthodox rela-
tionship between melody and harmony earlier spared “Croon-Spoon” from
a similar fate.
Hotel Lobby: “The Rich” and “Art for Art’s Sake”

If “Croon–Spoon” and “Honolulu” ridicule the vapidity of ephemeral popu-
lar music and some of the people who sing these tunes, the songs in the Hotel
Lobby Scene (scene 6) convey a more direct didactic social message about
the role of artists and their appropriate artistic purposes. Blitzstein saves his
sharpest rebuke for the artists themselves, the painter Dauber and the vio-
linist Yasha who meet by accident in a hotel lobby in scene 6.35 Like the other
members of Mr. Mister’s anti-union Liberty Committee, Dauber and Yasha
have sold themselves to the highest bidder, in this case to the wealthy Mrs.
Mister. The painter and the musician, like the poet Rupert Scansion to fol-
low, have come to the hotel to curry favor with their patroness in exchange
for a free meal and perhaps a temporary roof over their heads.
Blitzstein presents Dauber and Yasha as caricatures of artists who, in their
espousal of art-for-art’s-sake, have rejected nobler socially conscious artis-
tic visions. The audience learns immediately that they are second-rate art-
ists who fail whenever they are forced to rely on their talent alone. Then,
in the course of their initial exchange (a combination of song and under-
scored dialogue), Dauber and Yasha learn that both of them have appoint-
ments with Mrs. Mister. In the ensuing tango (shades of Brecht and Weill),
124
Example 6.4. “Honolulu”

(a) A phrase
(b) B phrase
125
Enchanted Evenings
appropriately named “The Rich,” they expose the foibles and inadequacies
of the “moneyed people” in such lines as “There’s something so damned
low about the rich!” and “They’ve no impulse, no fine feeling, no great itch!”
The answer to the question “What have they got?” is money; the answer to
the question “What can they do?” is support you. Clearly Dauber and Yasha
hate the rich as much as Blitzstein does.
At this point, the object of their scorn, Mrs. Mister, enters to the accom-
paniment of the horn motive from Beethoven’s Egmont Overture based on
Goethe’s play of the same name: “you know: ta, ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, yoo
hoo!” (Example 6.5). In Blitzstein’s satire of Gebrauchsmusik, Goethe’s tale
of a great man who loses his life in his efforts to overcome the tyrannical
bonds of political oppression is demeaned: Beethoven’s heroic horn call now
serves as the horn call on Mrs. Mister’s Pierce Arrow automobile. This horn
also includes the violin answer that was interpreted by nineteenth-century
Beethoven biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer as depicting the moment
when Egmont was beheaded.36 Clearly, the Pierce Arrow usurpation of
Beethoven’s horn motif constitutes a sacrilegious use of an art object.
That Mrs. Mister expects Dauber and Yasha to pay a price and kiss the
hand that feeds these untalented artists becomes clear near the end of the
scene, when she asks them to join her husband’s Liberty Committee, formed
to break the unions led by Larry Foreman, a heroic figure analogous to
Egmont. This is the same committee of middle-class prostitutes of various
professions who were mistakenly rounded up in scene 1 and taken to night
court in scene 2 before the flashbacks began in scene 3. Dauber and Yasha are
only too eager to oblige, and when Mrs. Mister asks them, “But don’t you
want to know what it’s all about?” they reply that they are artists who “love
art for art’s sake.”
Example 6.5. Scene Six, Hotel Lobby

Entrance of Mrs. Mister and Beethoven’s Egmont Overture
126
It’s smart, for Art’s sake,

To part, for Art’s sake,
With your heart, for Art’s sake,
And your mind, for Art’s sake—
Be blind, for Art’s sake,
And deaf, for Art’s sake,
And dumb, for Art’s sake,
Until, for Art’s sake,
They kill, for Art’s sake
All the Art for Art’s sake!37
As shown in Example 6.6a, Blitzstein’s choice to state each of these lines

with a nearly monotonal melody reinforces the pervasiveness of Dauber’s
and Yasha’s political vacuity. The fact that Blitzstein reharmonizes the B on
the downbeat of each measure with increasingly dissonant chords bears
some similarity to the notorious nineteenth-century “Art” song by Peter
Cornelius, “Ein Ton,” in which a single pitch is harmonized to an almost
absurd degree by evolving chromaticism. Through his relentless dissonant
harmonization of the Johnny-one-notes, Blitzstein creates a musical equiva-
lent to support his single-mindedly vitriolic text.
Because Blitzstein himself is a genuine artist, in contrast to Dauber and
Yasha, he cannot resist using Beethoven for his own artistic purposes as well.
He does this by making two simple rhythmic alterations that effectively dis-
guise the Egmont horn motive. The first allusion to Egmont occurs in the sec-
ond chorus of their initial vaudeville routine when Dauber sings “Your lady
friend does resemble a lot / Some one, and that’s very queer.” By adding
Example 6.6. Scene Six, Hotel Lobby

(a) “Art for Art’s Sake”
(b) “The Rich”
127
Enchanted Evenings
one beat to the first note of the horn motive Blitzstein accommodates the
difference between the triple meter of Beethoven’s original motive and the
duple meter of the vaudeville routine, a subtle but recognizable rhythmic
transformation (Example 6.6b). In the second allusion, the art-for-art’s-sake
passage previously discussed in Example 6.6a, Blitzstein keeps the rhyth-
mic integrity of Beethoven’s motive but distorts it almost (but not entirely)
beyond recognition in a duple context with contrary accentual patterns.
It is possible, albeit unlikely, that Blitzstein’s rhythmic distortions, which
parallel his bizarre atonal harmonizations of the B(“Art for Art’s sake,”
“smart for Art’s sake,” etc.) can be interpreted as a critique of Beethoven’s
noble purposes in Egmont as well as an indictment of Yasha and Dauber’s
art. In any event, Blitzstein’s incorporation of Beethoven into his Hotel
Lobby Scene goes beyond the conventions and expectations of a musical. It
also shows that a revered European master can serve Blitzstein’s artistic as
well as satiric purposes.
In contrast to Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, Blitzstein’s Cradle does not
offer a grand scheme of musical symbols and musical transformations that
reflect large-scale dramatic vision and character development. Unlike their
counterparts in the other musicals discussed in this survey, the characters in
Cradle for the most part sing their songs and then either assume a second-
ary role, merge into a crowd, or vanish entirely from the stage. The work is
episodic within a structured frame; the characters, vividly outlined, are not
filled in.38
It is significant that Moll, the pure prostitute, and Larry Foreman, who
represents the juggernaut of the oppressed, are the only characters permit-
ted to recycle musical material. In fact, both of the Moll’s songs are reprised.
128
The melody of “I’m Checkin’ Home Now,” the first music heard in the show,
returns as underscoring for Moll’s spoken introduction to her song “Nickel
under the Foot” in scene 7.39 Before her big scene Moll had sung most of
“Nickel” (using other words) in her conversation with Harry Druggist in
scene 2. “Nickel” returns a last time in scene 10 against a din of conversation
before Larry Foreman and the chorus of union workers concludes the work
with a reprise of the title song.
Although Cradle has been called “the most enduring social-political piece
of the period” and has generally received high marks as the musical equiva-
lent of Waiting for Lefty, its didacticism has unfortunately overwhelmed its
rich intrinsic musical and dramatic qualities.40 If other musicals of the time
rival The Cradle Will Rock as a work of social satire, few musicals of its time
(for example, those by Brecht and Weill the previous decade or E. Y. Har-
burg and Harold Arlen in the next) and few works since combine Blitzstein’s
call for social action with a vernacular of such musical sophistication and,
yes, artistry.41 In contrast to many avant-garde works eventually absorbed
into the mainstream, The Cradle Will Rock, despite its intent to reach a wider
public, has managed to sustain its anomalistic status remarkably well. After
more than seventy years it continues to resist artistic classification within a
genre. It also continues to offend its intended audience of middle-class capi-
talists through its messages, its devastating caricatures of clergy, doctors,
and even university professors, and its occasionally difficult and unconven-
tional score. With due respect to Blitzstein’s sincere didacticism, Blitzstein’s
Cradle—cult musical, historical footnote, and agent of social change—might,
even as it agitates and propagandizes, someday achieve the recognition it
deserves as a work of musical theater art (for art’s sake).42
129
chapter seven
LADY IN THE DARK AND

ONE TOUCH OF VENUS
The Broadway Stranger and
His American Dreams
W
ithin a year after Kurt Weill (1900–1950) emigrated to America
his Johnny Johnson (1936) had appeared on Broadway. By the time
he ended his brief but productive American career with Lost in
the Stars (1949), the German refugee had managed to produce no less than
eight shows in his adopted homeland, including two certifiable hits, Lady
in the Dark (467 performances) and One Touch of Venus (567 performances).
At the risk of minimizing such a notable achievement, it must be said that
Weill’s hits did not run significantly longer than the disappointing 315 per-
formances suffered by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro (1947), which
closed only a few months after Oklahoma!’s five-year run.
Furthermore, while all three of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1940s
hits, Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific, have gone on to form part of
the nucleus of the Broadway repertory, Weill’s two contemporaneous hits
have nearly vanished. With the escalating success of Street Scene (1947) and
Lost in the Stars and the championing of his previously neglected European
music from both sides of the Atlantic, however, Weill’s critical and popular
star continues to rise. At the same time, with the notable exception of the
perennially popular Threepenny Opera (Off-Broadway 1954–1960), the once-
popular Broadway Weill remains largely overlooked in the Broadway sur-
vey literature as well as in Broadway revivals.1
Weill, like Bernstein to follow, entered the world of Broadway after rigor-
ous classical training. In contrast to Bernstein, Weill made his mark as an
130
Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus
avant-garde composer before succumbing to the siren song of a more popular

musical theater. The trajectory of Gershwin’s career perhaps better exem-
plifies the more usual evolutionary pattern of the Tin Pan Alley composer
who harbored more lofty theatrical ambitions. Unlike most of his Broadway
colleagues (including Gershwin), Weill, years before his arrival in America,
had established himself as a reputable classical composer from Germany in
what Stravinsky called the “main stem” of the classical tradition. At fifteen
he began studying theory and composition as well as piano, at sixteen he
was creating “serious” compositions, and by seventeen he was acquiring
skills in instrumentation, orchestration—unlike most Broadway composers
Weill would score his own shows—and score-reading. In 1918 he enrolled at
Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik to study composition with Engelbert Hump-
erdinck, the composer of Hänsel und Gretel. Conducting and counterpoint
studies with equally distinguished teachers would continue.
At twenty, Weill was accepted as one of Ferruccio Busoni’s six composi-
tion students at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. After composing
an impressive series of instrumental as well as stage works, Weill made his
pivotal decision to devote his career to the latter in 1926. The next year he
began his most famous collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, a collaboration
that over the next six years yielded the works by which Weill remains best
remembered and most appreciated, at least in classical circles: Die Dreigro-
schenoper (The Threepenny Opera) (1928), Happy End (1929), and Aufstieg und
Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) (1930).
Those who saw the collaborations with Brecht as the summit of Weill’s
creative life concluded that when Weill immigrated to America after a two-
year Parisian interregnum, he traded in his artistic soul for fourteen years
of hits—and still more misses—in the cultural wasteland of Broadway. Even
writers sympathetic to his American musicals recounted the compromises
that Weill was forced to make to reach the lowest common Broadway denom-
inators.2 Just as politicians frequently do not survive a change of party alle-
giance or a conspicuous change of mind on a sensitive issue, composers who
abandon the trappings of “high culture” for the commercial marketplace
can be expected to pay a price for their pact with Mammon. Schoenberg’s
idea that great works are inherently inaccessible to general audiences and
that audiences who like great works cannot possibly understand them, died
a slow and lingering death.
In a reflective entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Weill
authority David Drew helped to place the transplanted German’s “divided”
career in perspective when he pointed out that even with his sharper-edged
collaborations with Brecht, Weill had also aimed to please a particular audi-
ence in a particular time and place.3 According to Drew, Weill discovered with
131
Enchanted Evenings
Die Dreigroschenoper “that a ‘serious’ modern composer could still reach the
broad masses without sacrifice of originality or contemporaneity.” Similarly,
when discussing the Broadway works, Drew helped to clarify the altered
aesthetic transformation between the “cultural implications” of a work like
Mahagonny and the Broadway period: “The creation of ‘works of art’ was not
Weill’s primary concern. . . . Weill now attempted to subordinate all aesthetic
criteria to purely pragmatic and populist ones. Musical ideas, and dramatic
ones too, were not to be judged in terms of originality or intrinsic inter-
est . . . but in terms of their power to evoke, immediately and unambiguously,
the required emotional response from a given audience.”
Drew went on to remark that Weill continued to take risks on Broadway
in dramatic form or subject matter. Even in the conventional One Touch of
Venus Weill took a risk by allowing dance to tell a story and by teaming
up with Broadway newcomers, librettist S. J. Perelman (1904–1979) and
lyricist Ogden Nash (1902–1971). But Drew seemed to share the view held
by even those sympathetic to Weill’s American adventure when he wrote
that Broadway “exacted from him a degree of self-sacrifice greater than
any that would have been demanded by a totalitarian ministry of culture.”
In Europe, Weill was a leading modernist and a composer “accustomed to
measure his talents and achievements against those of the most eminent of
his German contemporaries, Paul Hindemith.” In America, “the composer
whom he now saw as his chief rival was Richard Rodgers.” Nevertheless,
Weill’s “aural imagination” and “highly cultivated sense of musical char-
acter and theatrical form” enabled him to secure “a special place in the his-
tory of American popular music.”
Drew and other Weill biographers assumed that Weill sacrificed his
potential for growth and artistic achievement (albeit willingly) in order to
serve “a larger interest than his own, namely that of the American musical
theatre.” In any event, the absence of subsidized American theater and the
scarce opportunities for new works to be performed in what he viewed as
artistically stagnant American operatic institutions allowed Weill no place to
turn but to the somewhat restricted world of Broadway.
In its English translation by Blitzstein, Die Dreigroschenoper has demon-
strated its durability in the American musical theater repertory as The Three-
penny Opera. Of the works originally composed for American audiences
perhaps only Street Scene (1947), a modest success in its own time with 148
performances, and the comparably successful Knickerbocker Holiday (1938)
and Lost in the Stars (1949) (168 and 273 performances, respectively) have
gained increasing popular and critical acclaim (in the years since the first
edition of Enchanted Evenings, Weill performances have become increasingly
common). In fact, Street Scene has achieved a reasonably secure place in the
132
operatic repertory. Meanwhile, despite an increasing number of perfor-

mances on American and European stages, neither of Weill’s wartime hits,
Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus, has returned for a full-scale staged
Broadway production. It is indeed a peculiar legacy that Weill’s popularly
designed American works remain unrevived, if not revivable.4
Despite its long neglect, Lady in the Dark can be found in nearly every list
of notable musicals. While it failed to make Lehman Engel’s short list, this
pioneering critic confidently predicted that it “will come back again and
again.”5 One Touch of Venus was greeted as “an unhackneyed and imagi-
native musical that spurns the easy formulas of Broadway” and “the best
score by Mr. Weill that we recall.”6 Even Weill, in a letter to Ira Gershwin,
expressed the opinion that he had for the most part succeeded in produc-
ing an audience-worthy show: “I was rather pleased to find, looking at it
cold-bloodedly, that inspite [sic] of all the faults and mistakes it is a very
good and interesting show and that it holds the audience all through once
they sit through the first 15 minutes which are pretty awful.”7 Despite such
public and private endorsements, Venus, like its wartime predecessor, has so
far failed to establish itself in the Broadway repertory. The issues raised by
Venus’s demise deserve more attention than they have so far received.
In his final years Weill himself seemed to repudiate his Broadway hits
when he interpreted his creative evolution in America to show its culmina-
tion in Street Scene. In his notes to its recording the composer confesses that
he “learned a great deal about Broadway and its audience” as a result of
his first effort, Johnny Johnson, “a continuation of the [European] formula.”8
According to Weill’s revisionism, Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus,
the former especially “with its three little one-act operas,” were merely way
stations on the road to the development of “something like an American
opera.”9 Just as Gershwin opted for a Broadway home for Porgy and Bess
and Rodgers was content to present his brand of opera (Carousel) on the
Great White Way, Weill concluded that his Broadway operas “could only
take place on Broadway, because Broadway represents the living theatre
in this country.”10 Weill continues: “[It] should, like the products of other
opera-civilizations, appeal to large parts of the audience. It should have all
the necessary ingredients of a ‘good show.’ ”11
Additional evidence that Weill appreciated, or at least understood, audi-
ence-pleasing shows can be found in his remarks to Ira Gershwin regarding
Oklahoma! Weill had seen the tryouts in New Haven and was surprised that
“they still haven’t got a second act” (although he quickly added that “they
don’t seem to need one”).12 After praising Rouben Mamoulian’s work, the
production as a whole, the direction and the songs (“just perfect for this
kind of show”), and Hammerstein’s singable lyrics, Weill made this final
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Enchanted Evenings
assessment: “On the whole, the show is definitely designed for a very low
audience . . . and that, in my opinion explains the terrific success.”13
Two Compromising Ladies

According to theater lore, Moss Hart (1904–1961) wrote I Am Listening when
his psychiatrist advised him to cease his successful but inhibiting collabora-
tion with George S. Kaufman and write a play of his own. As Hart tells it:
“My psychoanalyst made me resolve that the next idea I had, whether it was
good or lousy, I’d carry through.”14 In fact, three years before the creative crisis
that led to Lady in the Dark, Kaufman and Hart had drafted the first act of a
musical based on psychoanalysis starring Marlene Dietrich before settling on
I’d Rather Be Right with Rodgers and Hart, and George M. Cohan as Franklin
Roosevelt. I Am Listening also shares much in common with the Fred Astaire–
Ginger Rogers film musical Carefree (1938), in which Rogers plays a woman
similar to Liza Elliott who “can’t make up her mind” about marriage, a prob-
lem solved in the film by psychiatrist Astaire when he falls in love with her.15
One Touch of Venus is based on Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s novella The Tinted
Venus (1885).16 Sources disagree as to how Weill learned about this relatively
obscure work of fiction by the man who published under the pseudonym
F. Anstey, but most credit him as the person who persuaded Cheryl Crawford
to produce the show.17 Crawford then asked Sam and Bella Spewack, who had
earlier worked on an abandoned Weill project, The Opera from Mannheim (1937),
to write a libretto; light-verse poet Nash, a Broadway novice, would provide
the lyrics. In August the Spewacks drafted the first act of One Man’s Venus. After
at least five lyrics and as many as eight songs, the Spewack libretto, now Bella’s
alone, was dismissed as beyond repair, and a new book was commissioned from
Perelman, best known as the author of the Marx Brothers screenplays Monkey
Business (1931) and Horsefeathers (1932), but untested in a book musical.18
Crawford articulates the causes for her dissatisfaction with Bella
Spewack’s libretto: “The idea that had enticed me was the irreconcilable dif-
ferences between the world of mundane, conventional human beings and
the free untrammeled world of the gods. But this theme had not been devel-
oped.”19 In Perelman’s rewrite Anstey’s Victorian England was transformed
into contemporary Manhattan. Foremost among other significant altera-
tions was the character of Venus herself, more threatening and forbidding
than sensual in Anstey’s novella, and a goddess who would return to her
stone form for hours at a time. Rather than succumbing to her demands
(as opposed to charms) the unfortunate barber (Leander Tweddle) remains
steadfast in his love for his eventually understanding fiancée (Matilda
134
Moss Hart. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with

Collum). By appealing to Venus’s vanity, Leander in the end manages to

trick her into relinquishing the ring that gave her life.20
Throughout his career Weill rarely failed to surround himself with strong
artistic figures. In Germany he collaborated with Brecht and Georg Kaiser.
For the American musical stage he worked with a series of distinguished
partners as the following list attests: Paul Green (Johnny Johnson); Maxwell
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Enchanted Evenings
Anderson (Knickerbocker Holiday and Lost in the Stars); Elmer Rice and Lang-
ston Hughes (Street Scene); and Alan Jay Lerner (Love Life). Similarly, the pro-
ductions of Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus evolved under dynamic
leadership, and his principal collaborators, Hart and Gershwin (Lady), Nash
and Perelman (Venus), all possessed strong artistic personalities and identi-
ties. The One Touch of Venus team could boast an especially impressively deep
talent roster. The previous year alone Crawford produced the immensely
popular revival of Porgy and Bess, Elia Kazan directed his first memorable
production, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, and Agnes de Mille had
choreographed Copland’s ballet classic Rodeo. Only six months before Venus
came to life in 1943 de Mille had gained enormous Broadway distinction as
the choreographer of Oklahoma!21
Even in this venerable company the composer could still play a major
role in the creative process of a musical, although he would not occupy the
center stage enjoyed by Mozart and Da Ponte, Verdi and Boito, and Wagner.
Theater critics appreciated the imagination of the Lady in the Dark and One
Touch of Venus teams, but music critics who focused on Weill felt betrayed
by his collaboration with the enemy, men and women of the theater who
helped Weill to sell out. Critics Virgil Thomson and Samuel Barlow, respec-
tively, accused Weill of banality and phoniness and wrote that the trans-
planted European had lost his sophistication and his satirical punch in his
efforts to please the lower class inhabitants of Broadway.22
Considering the experience and prestige of his collaborators, especially
Hart and Gershwin, it should come as no surprise that Weill would be asked
to defer to the judgment of these collaborators during the writing of Lady in
the Dark.23 As a result, one complete dream in Lady (first described as the “Day
Dream” and later as the “Hollywood Dream”) was rejected before its com-
pletion, allegedly to help trim escalating costs. To add pizzazz (and perhaps
to avoid racial stereotypes), the “Minstrel Dream” metamorphosed into the
“Circus Dream.” “The Saga of Jenny” was a response to Hart’s and producer
Sam H. Harris’s assessment that Gertrude Lawrence’s final number was not
funny enough, and the patter number which preceded it, “Tschaikowsky,”
was added as a vehicle to feature the talented new star Danny Kaye.
Crawford credits de Mille with many of the small cuts in the One Touch of
Venus ballets, summarizes the problem of the original ending, and explains
how Weill’s collaborators achieved a satisfactory solution:
The bacchanal of the nymphs, satyrs, nyads and dryads who carry
Venus off was very effective, but it left the audience hanging. It seemed
very unsatisfactory for Venus to disappear into the clouds, leaving
the poor barber all alone: the ending needed ooomph, something
136
upbeat. It was Agnes who thought of having Venus come back as

an “ordinary” human girl, dressed in a cute little dress and hat—a
sort of reincarnation.24
This new ending necessitated the shortening of Weill’s Bacchanale ballet,

which de Mille (as remembered by Crawford) considered “the best thing he’d
done since Threepenny Opera” and Weill himself treasured as “the finest piece of
orchestral music he had ever written.”25 But since Weill “wanted a success” and
was “predominantly a theatre man,” he acquiesced to de Mille’s suggestion.
It is likely that the musical starting point for both Lady and Venus were songs
that Weill had written for earlier contexts. Both of these songs, Lady’s “My
Ship” and Venus’s “Westwind,” would become pivotal to their respective
musical stories. Since “My Ship” was originally the only song Hart had in
mind when he drafted his play I Am Listening, it is not surprising that this
was the first song Weill wrote for the show.26
In the midst of his sketches for Lady, including a draft for “My Ship,” Weill
sketched a tune that with some modifications would eventually become
“Westwind” (Example 7.2a, p. 148). In the early stages Weill used its melody
solely for the “Venus Entrance” music (and he would continue to label this
tune as such throughout his orchestral score). Long after the entire show
had taken shape, the music of the future “Westwind” was still reserved for
Venus.27 At a relatively late stage Weill decided to show Savory’s total capti-
vation with Venus musically by adopting her tune as his own. After their first
meeting his identity is now fully submerged in the woman he idealizes.28
The extant manuscript sources and material of Lady in the Dark provide an
unusually rich glimpse into the compositional process of a musical: Hart’s
complete original play I Am Listening, two revised scenes for this play, and two
typescript outlines for two dreams not included in this play; Gershwin’s lyr-
ics drafts, including those for the discarded “Zodiac” song; and two hundred
pages of Weill’s sketches and drafts. Also extant are twenty letters between
Weill and Gershwin exchanged between September 1940 and February 1944
(“with random annotations” by Gershwin in 1967) that occasionally reveal
important information and attitudes about the compositional process.29
Gershwin had traveled from Los Angeles to New York in early May 1940 to
work with Hart and Weill, and the letters from Weill began one or two weeks
after Gershwin’s return in August. The two Weill letters in September are espe-
cially valuable because they precede the opening night (the following January
23). On September 2 Weill sets the context for his following suggestions with
a budget report: the show was $25,000 above its projected $100,000. Hart and
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Enchanted Evenings
Hassard Short “read the play to the boys in the office,” who were “crazy about
the show” but thought “that the bar scene and the Hollywood dream had noth-
ing to do with the play.”30 Hart asked Weill to cut the Hollywood Dream, and
the composer agreed to do this if Hart agreed to delete the bar scene as well.
Did this compromise breach Weill’s artistic sensibilities? Apparently
Weill did not think so. He explains his positive reaction to the excision of
the Hollywood Dream:
I began to see certain advantages. It is obvious that this change

would be very good for the play itself because it would mean that
we go from the flashback scene directly into the last scene of the
play. The decision which Liza makes in the last scene would be an
immediate result of the successful analysis. The balance between
music and book would be very good in the second act because we
would make the flashback scene a completely musical scene.31
Although Weill regretted losing “an entire musical scene and some very
good material,” he saw artistic benefits as well as financial ones, and agreed
to these changes.
After more discussion on the relationship between the Hollywood Dream
and the Hollywood sequence, both eventually discarded, Weill turned to
the “Circus Dream.” Here Weill was less acquiescent to Short’s suggestions.
Although he understood that “Gertie” (Gertrude Lawrence) might remain
dissatisfied until he provided “a really funny song” for her, Weill was not yet
ready to abandon his “Zodiac” song and defended its place in the show to
Gershwin. Although Weill acknowledged that the “Zodiac” song “is not the
kind of broad entertainment which Hassard has in mind,” he concluded that
“it is a very original, high class song of the kind which you and I should have
in a show and for which we will get a lot of credit.” Because Weill also recog-
nized “the necessity to give Gertie a good, solid, entertaining, humorous song
in the Circus dream,” he offered to make the “Zodiac” song “musically lighter,
more on the line of a patter, and to think about another song for Gertie.”
On September 14 Weill again commented on the evolving Circus Dream:
So Moss and Hassard suggested that we give the Zodiak song back
to Randy and I thought this might be good news for you because
that’s what we always wanted. Here is Moss’s idea: the Zodiak song
would become Randy’s defense speech, just the way you had origi-
nally conceived it, but we should try to work Gertie into it. . . . When
they have won over everybody to their cause, Liza should go into
a triumphant song. . . . That would give Liza her show-stopping (??)
138
Lady in the Dark. “Circus Dream.” Gertrude Lawrence sitting on the left, Danny
Kaye on the horse at right (1941). Photograph: Vandamm Studio. Museum of
the City of New York. Theater Collection. Gift of the Burns Mantle Estate.
song near the end of the dream and at a moment where she is trium-
phant and which allows her to be as gay or sarcastic as you want.32
From Ira Gershwin’s 1967 annotations that accompany his manuscripts

as well his published comments in Lyrics on Several Occasions, we learn that
the “Circus Dream” was originally planned as a “Minstrel Dream” and “an
environment of burnt cork and sanded floor” was transformed “to putty
nose and tanbark.”33 Gershwin divides the “Zodiac” into two parts, “No
Matter under What Star You’re Born” and “Song of the Zodiac,” “both of
which were discarded to make way for “The Saga of Jenny.”34 He also notes
that he and Weill “hadn’t as yet introduced ‘Tschaikovsky.’ ”35
Weill’s musical manuscripts add credence to the letters and Gershwin’s
annotations and reveal that when most of the Circus Dream nearly reached its
final form, “The Saga of Jenny” was just taking shape. It is ironic that Gertrude
Lawrence’s final number and Danny Kaye’s patter show stopper that directly
preceded it were the only musical portions originally written for this dream. All
the other musical material—with the exception of some recitative—was bor-
rowed from earlier shows. Even the lyrics to “Tschaikovsky” were borrowed
139
Enchanted Evenings
unchanged from a 1924 poem published in “the then pre-pictorial, humorous

weekly Life” that Ira published under the pseudonym Arthur Francis.36
Weill’s 1935 London box office debacle, A Kingdom for a Cow, served as an
important musical link between the German Weill and the American Weill.
In his Handbook, Drew lists thirteen major instances of Weill’s recycling ideas
from this most recent European venture into every American stage work
from Johnny Johnson and Knickerbocker Holiday (two borrowings each) to The
Firebrand of Florence.37 The two Kingdom for a Cow borrowings in Lady in the
Dark both occur in the Circus Dream: the opening circus march, “The Great-
est Show on Earth,” and “The Best Years of His Life.” The single borrowing
in One Touch of Venus occurs more obliquely in “Very, Very, Very.”
Of the Kingdom for a Cow borrowings in Lady and Venus “The Best Years
of His Life” comes closest to quotation. In fact, Kendall Nesbitt’s melody in
Lady is identical to the choral melody in the first act finale of Kingdom, and
the rhythmic alterations are insubstantial. Weill takes significant transfor-
mational liberties, however, in adapting “Very, Very, Very” from Kingdom to
Venus (where it is sung by Savory’s assistant, Molly). On this occasion Weill
uses two recognizable but highly disguised melodic fragments of “Madame
Odette’s Waltz” from the second act finale of Kingdom.
Weill’s remaining borrowing falls between these extremes. “The Greatest
Show on Earth,” the rousing march that opens the Circus Dream, borrows sig-
nificantly from the melody, rhythm, and dissonant harmonic underpinning of
the refrain of Kingdom’s “Auftrittslied des General.” When drafting his melody
in its new context and new meter, Weill began by retaining the rhythmic gestus
(to be discussed shortly) and symmetrical phrasing of its predecessor, altering
only the pitch. By the time Weill completed his transformation, he had added
a new syncopation at the ends of phrases and reinforced the sense of disar-
ray by concluding his phrase one measure earlier than expected. In real (and
especially military) life, marches contain symmetrical four-measure phrases; in
Liza’s confused dream message a seven-measure phrase makes more sense.
Partisans of Brecht may be disconcerted to hear the choral refrain “In der
Jugend gold’nem Schimmer” from Happy End (1929) set to Nash’s words in the
opening verses of “The Trouble with Women.” At the time Weill recast Brecht,
he had abandoned the possibility of a staged revival of this show, although
he had tried in 1932 to interest his publisher in “a kind of Songspiel with short
spoken scenes.”38 Perhaps his sense that all was lost with Happy End prompted
Weill to recycle no less than three numbers from this German show in his
Parisian collaboration with Jacques Déval, Marie Galante (1934). One of these
reincarnations is once again “In der Jugend gold’nem Schimmer,” this time
140
altered from triple to duple meter in the refrain of “Les filles de Bordeaux.”
Despite some modest melodic changes at the opening and closing and the
metrical change from the German and American waltzes to the French fox
trot, the two—or three—Weills are here much closer to one.39
The process by which A Kingdom for a Cow, Happy End, and Marie Galante
would reemerge in Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus suggests a deeper
than generally acknowledged connection between the aesthetic and work-
ing methods of the European and the American Weills. The connecting link
is embodied in the concept of gestus, a term that eludes precise identifica-
tion. According to Kim Kowalke, “the crucial aspect of gestus was the trans-
lation of dramatic emotion and individual characterization into a typical,
reproducible physical realization.”40 In any event, the principle of a gestic
music based on rhythm is demonstrable in the aesthetic framework and the
compositional process of Weill’s music in America as well as in Europe.
In his 1929 essay on this subject, “Concerning the Gestic Character of
Music,” Weill, after explaining that “the gestus is expressed in a rhythmic fix-
ing of the text,” makes a case for the primacy of rhythm.41 Once a composer
has located the “proper” gestus, “even the melody is stamped by the gestus
of the action that is to be represented.” Weill acknowledges the possibility
of more than one rhythmic interpretation of a text (and, one might add, the
possibility of more than one text for a given gestus). He also argues that
“the rhythmic restriction imposed by the text is no more severe a fetter for
the operatic composer than, for example, the formal schemes of the fugue,
sonata, or rondo were for the classic master” and that “within the frame-
work of such rhythmically predetermined music, all methods of melodic
elaboration and of harmonic and rhythmic differentiation are possible, if
only the musical spans of accent conform to the gestic proceeding.”
Weill concludes his discussion of gestic music by citing an example from
Brecht’s version of the “Alabama-Song,” in which “a basic gestus has been
defined in the most primitive form.”42 While Brecht assigns pitches to his
gestus—which may explain why he tried to assume the credit for compos-
ing Weill’s music—Weill considers Brecht’s attempt “nothing more than
an inventory of the speech-rhythm and cannot be used as music.”43 Weill
explains that he retains “the same basic gestus” but that he “composed” this
gestus “with the much freer means of the musician.” Weill’s tune “extends
much farther afield melodically, and even has a totally different rhythmic
foundation as a result of the pattern of the accompaniment—but the gestic
character has been preserved, although it occurs in a completely different
outward form.” Several compositional drafts and self-borrowings reveal that
in America as well as in Germany, Weill, like Loesser to follow, continued to
establish a rhythmic gestus before he worked out his songs melodically.
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Enchanted Evenings
Kowalke suggests that eighteenth-century Baroque opera seria served as the

aesthetic model for Brecht and Weill’s music drama of alienation widely known
as epic opera.44 Kowalke goes on to describe more specific stylistic similarities,
including the relationship between the Baroque doctrine of affections and Weill’s
interchangeable song types based on a related gestus.45 An especially applicable
example can be found in the genesis of “My Ship” from Lady in the Dark. Both
the opening of the second sketch draft and the final version feature a rising
diminished seventh, F-A-C-E (a resemblance noted by bruce d. mcclung).46 It
is also clear that Weill had established a gestus, if not the melodic working out,
by the time he drafted this second draft of five eventual versions.
Just as “Surabaya Johnny” (Happy End) constitutes a trope of the “Moritat”
(“The Ballad of Mack the Knife”) from Die Dreigroschenoper, the borrowed
songs in Lady and Venus may be considered tropes from Weill’s European
output. Weill’s practice of salvaging material from failed shows closely par-
allels the practice of other Broadway as well as European operatic compos-
ers as far back as Handel in the Baroque era.47 What makes such salvaging
possible for Weill is a shared gestus that might, like the Baroque affections,
serve several dramatic situations with equal conviction. Weill would con-
tinue to develop this particular brand of transformation within his Ameri-
can works. Lady and Venus exhibit an especially notable example as shown
in Example 7.1. Even the theater reviewer, Lewis Nichols, remarked after a
single hearing in his opening night review of Venus that at the conclusion of
act I, Savory “sings the sad story of ‘Dr. Crippen’ in a mood and a tune not
unlike that of Mr. Weill’s celebrated ‘Saga of Jenny.’ ”48
Example 7.1. “The Saga of Jenny” and “Dr. Crippen”

(a) “The Saga of Jenny” (Lady in the Dark)
(b) “Dr. Crippen” (One Touch of Venus)
142
Lady in the Dark and One Touch

of Venus as Integrated Musicals
Despite his careful selection of librettists and lyricists and his devotion to
theatrical integrity, Weill’s Broadway offerings for the most part share the
posthumous fate of such popular contemporaries as Kern, Porter, and Rod-
gers and Hart who are similarly remembered more for their hit songs in
most of their shows.49 Even in the case of The Threepenny Opera, an extraor-
dinarily popular musical in its Off-Broadway reincarnation, “The Ballad of
Mack the Knife,” remains by far its most remembered feature.
It is additionally ironic that the ideal of Weill’s most successful musi-
cal deliberately disregards the principle of the so-called integrated model
popularized by Rodgers and Hammerstein, a principle that would hold
center stage (with some exceptions) at least until the mid-1960s. In Europe,
the apparent interchangeability of arias (providing the proper affects were
preserved) in opera seria gave way to the increasingly integrated, albeit occa-
sionally heterogeneous, operas of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, and Berg.
Many Broadway shows before Rodgers and Hammerstein (and some there-
after), like their Baroque opera counterparts, emphasized great individual
songs, stars, and stagecraft more than broader dramatic themes and treated
their books and music as autonomous rather than integrated elements.
After Oklahoma! and Carousel the aesthetic goals of Broadway shifted. Two
years after the disastrous Firebrand of Florence in 1945 (43 performances), Weill
too composed an integrated dramatic work, Street Scene (148 performances),
that would eventually achieve a commercial success roughly commensurate
with its critical acclaim. The dream that Weill shared on his notes to the
cast album of this Broadway opera, a “dream of a special brand of musical
theatre which would completely integrate drama and music, spoken word,
song and movement,” was also the dream of his chief Broadway rival in the
1940s, Rodgers, who was composing Oklahoma!, Carousel, Allegro, and South
Pacific during these years.50
In his notes to Street Scene, Weill acknowledges that he and his earlier
collaborator Brecht “deliberately stopped the action during the songs which
were written to illustrate the ‘philosophy,’ the inner meaning of the play.”51
It was not until Street Scene, however, that Weill achieved “a real blending of
drama and music, in which the singing continues naturally where the speak-
ing stops and the spoken word as well as the dramatic action are embedded
in overall musical structure.”52 Three years before he completed his long and
productive theater career, Weill appeared to repudiate the aesthetic he had
worked out with Brecht and achieved his integrated American opera.
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Enchanted Evenings
Thus Weill, by now a wayward branch from the German stem, did not begin
his serious attempt to integrate drama and music until after he ceased collabo-
rating with Brecht. On the other hand, Rodgers, in America, as early as Brecht
and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, was already somewhat paradoxically striving
to compose integrated musicals in a marketplace somewhat indifferent to this
aesthetic.53 Weill’s contemporary and posthumous success with Threepenny
Opera, both its German production in the late 1920s and its Broadway adapta-
tion by Blitzstein in the middle and late 1950s, rests in part in the alienation
between and separation of music and story. Even those who remain impervi-
ous to the quality and charm of Weill’s many other works acknowledge the
artistic merits of Threepenny Opera and usually grant it masterpiece status.
Shortly before the debut of Lady in the Dark Weill informed William King in
the New York Sun that in contrast to Schoenberg, who “has said he is writing
for a time fifty years after his death,” Weill wrote “for today” and did not
“give a damn about writing for posterity.”54 Between the extremes of his two
posthumous success stories, Threepenny Opera and, to a lesser degree, Street
Scene, lie Weill’s two greatest and—if posterity be damned—most meaning-
ful hits. Both Lady and Venus exhibit integrative as well as non-integrative
traits. On one level, Lady in the Dark might be considered the least integrated
of any book show by any Broadway composer, since the play portions and
the musical portions are unprecedentedly segregated. In this respect Lady
shares much in common with film adaptations of musicals that remove the
“nonrealistic” portions of their Broadway source.55
With the exception of “My Ship,” virtually all the music of the show
appears in three separate dream sequences that comprise half of the show—
the Glamour Dream and the Wedding Dream in act I and the Circus Dream
in act II—and nowhere else. In each of these dreams virtually everything is
sung or underscored by continuous music, while the other half is composed
entirely of spoken dialogue. Hart’s original intent, evident in his draft of
the play I Am Listening, was to have a play with a small amount of musical
interjections rather than “three little one-act operas.”
Once Hart had decided to create a play that could accommodate Weill’s
music, he fully embraced the integrated ideal (for the dreams) that within a
few years would dominate Broadway. In his prefatory remarks to the pub-
lished vocal score, Hart expressed the desire for himself and his collabora-
tors not only to avoid “the tight little formula of the musical comedy stage”
but to create a show “in which the music carried forward the essential story.”
“For the first time . . . the music and lyrics of a musical ‘show’ are part and
parcel of the basic structure of the play.”56
144
With due respect to Hart, the music in Lady in the Dark might more accu-
rately be described as a conscious interruption of a play. But since an impor-
tant component of the story is the disparity between Liza Elliott’s drab
quotidian existence and the colorful pizzazz of her dream world, it makes
sense for her to speak only in her waking life and reserve music for her
dreams. The dream pretext also allows Weill to present the interruptions
within the discontinuity of a dream, since, after all, audiences should not
expect dreams to be totally logical. Dreams, as Weill wrote in his thoughts
on dreams that he typed out in preparation for Lady in the Dark, “are, at the
moment of the dreaming, very realistic and don’t have at all the mysterious,
shadowy quality of the usual dream sequences in plays or novels.”
Liza’s dreams differ no more from her daily life than escapist musicals of
the late 1930s differed from the daily lives of their audiences.57 The musical
and dramatic non sequitur that launches “Tschaikowsky” may be equally
abrupt as the opening gambits in 1930s musical comedies, for example,
“There’s a Small Hotel” in On Your Toes. After Liza, accompanied by a cho-
rus, concludes her musical defense—“Tra-la—I never gave my word”—in
the breach of promise suit for failing to marry Nesbitt (clearly reminiscent
of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury), the music comes to a halt with a soft
cymbal. The Ringmaster (Allure photographer Randy Paxton in real life) then
breaks the silence with “Charming, charming, who wrote that music?”; the
Jury answers, “Tschaikowsky!,” and the Ringmaster says, “Tschaikowsky? I
love Russian composers!” Part of the joke, of course, is that Tchaikovsky did
not compose “The Best Years of His Life” (Weill himself had composed this
song several years earlier in Kingdom for a Cow). Moreover, in the slightly
askew chronology of dreamland, the exchange between the Ringmaster
and the Jury actually anticipates a real, albeit small, dose of Tchaikovsky’s
“Pathétique” Symphony (third movement).
While a major theme of Lady in the Dark is the disparity between Liza
Elliott’s real and dream worlds (although she retains her name in her
dreams), her co-workers often appear in her dreams as metaphors for their
roles in Liza’s waking life. The metaphors also become increasingly obvi-
ous as Liza comes to understand the meaning of her dreams. Of the four
men in her life, the “mildly effeminate” Paxton (Danny Kaye) plays a neu-
tral role in Liza’s romantic life and serves the dreaming Liza with equal
neutrality (a chauffeur in the Glamour Dream and the ringmaster in the
Circus Dream). Nesbitt (Bert Lytell), who “waits” for Liza in real life, plays
the role of a head waiter in a night club in the Glamour Dream and the real-
life role of Liza’s expectant groom in the Wedding Dream before appearing
as the first witness for the prosecution in the Circus Dream. The glamor-
ous movie star Randy Curtis (Victor Mature), who appreciates and defends
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Enchanted Evenings
Liza’s lack of glamour, naturally appears as Liza’s defense attorney in the

Circus Dream.
Similarly, Hart captures the complexity of Liza’s relationship with her
obnoxious advertising manager, Charley Johnson (MacDonald Carey).
In the Glamour Dream Johnson plays the marine who paints Liza’s portrait
for the two-cent stamp, not as Liza sees herself in the dream but as others
see her in real life. Already in the first dream he has established himself as
firmly grounded in reality and the person who truly sees Liza for what she
is (significantly, Johnson’s realism is bound to speech and he never sings
in the dreams, although he will eventually sing “My Ship” for Liza). In the
Wedding Dream Johnson appears twice, first as the salesman who offers a
dagger instead of a ring and then as the minister who, merely by asking the
standard question, “If there be any who know why these two [Liza and Nes-
bitt] should not be joined in holy wedlock let him speak now or forever hold
his peace,” prompts a truthful response from his congregation that exposes
the wedding as a sham: “This woman knows she does not love this man.”
In the Circus Dream, Johnson acts as the prosecuting attorney and as a
surrogate for Dr. Brooks when he repeats the psychiatrist’s diagnosis nearly
word for word, adding a new accusatory tone at the end of the dream:
“You’re afraid. You’re hiding something. You’re afraid of that music aren’t
you? Just as you’re afraid to compete as a woman—afraid to marry Kendall
Nesbitt—afraid to be the woman you want to be—afraid—afraid—afraid!”
“That music” is of course the song “My Ship,” or rather the opening portion
of this song that either leads to dreams (Glamour and Wedding Dreams) or
makes a dream come to a stop (the Circus Dream).
In her final session with Dr. Brooks, Liza manages to recall the entire song
as she formerly sang it to a boy named Ben. Ben, the Handsomest Boy at
Mapleton High, many years earlier had abandoned the teenage Liza, the
Most Popular Girl, to return to the Most Beautiful Girl. While she waits for
Ben to return, another boy asks to take Liza to dinner (Liza prefers to wait).
The boy’s name is Charles, yet another clue that someday a prince named
Charley will come. In the final scene, Charley Johnson offers more substan-
tive evidence that he is indeed Mr. Right for Liza Elliott: he knows “My Ship”
and will sing it with her as their ship sails off into the golden sunset.
The central unifying musical element of Lady in the Dark is certainly “My
Ship,” the opening portion of which appears in various harmonizations
in each dream before Liza manages to sing it completely in the otherwise
musically silent Childhood Dream.58 The musical material of the three main
dreams is internally “unified” around a characteristic rhythm (a rumba for
the Glamour Dream, a bolero for the Wedding Dream, and a march for the
Circus Dream). The Glamour dream contains the greatest use of internal
146
thematic transformation. Beyond the reuse and development of “My Ship,”

however, organic unity is not especially prominent from one dream to
the next.
In One Touch of Venus the use of song to musically interrupt rather than con-
tinue the action may be a characteristic shared with the non-integrated musi-
cals of Porter before Kiss Me, Kate. It also suggests a return structurally, if not
ideologically, to Weill’s epic creations with Brecht (Threepenny Opera, Happy
End, and Mahagonny). Venus’s final song, “That’s Him,” is representative of
Weill’s earlier ideal by distancing the singer from the object and providing
a commentary on love rather than an experience of it. Venus even speaks of
her love object in the third person.
Dramatic unity in One Touch of Venus, outwardly more conventional than
the intricate continuous dream scenes in Lady in the Dark, nevertheless corre-
sponds closely to the contemporary Oklahoma! model based on such devices
as thematic transformation in narrative ballets and the use of strong rhyth-
mic profiles to reflect character.59 These two techniques converge in Weill’s
recasting of Venus’s (Mary Martin’s) jazzy and uninhibited opening song,
“I’m a Stranger Here Myself” moments later in the ballet “Forty Minutes for
Lunch,” described in the libretto as “a series of formalized dance patterns
parodying the tension of metropolitan life.”60
Like the composers of Anything Goes, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, and West
Side Story, Weill uses quarter-note triplets when he wants to show his char-
acters moving emotionally beyond their metrical boundaries.61 Weill uses
the quarter-note triplet most prominently in Whitelaw Savory’s love song
“Westwind” (Example 7.2a), previously noted as based, appropriately
enough as it turns out, on Venus’s Entrance Music. Even Rodney Hatch,
when serenading his fiancée Gloria Kramer in his characteristically rhythmi-
cally square fashion, manages a few quarter-note triplets in the release of his
“How Much I Love You” when he sings “I love you” and “I yearn for you.”
But by the time he sings of his “Wooden Wedding” near the end of the show,
quarter-note triplets have vanished, and Venus will soon follow.
Venus herself, who tells Savory at their first meeting that “love isn’t
the dying moan of a distant violin—it’s the triumphant twang of a bed-
spring,” generally prefers swing rhythms, but quarter-note triplets remain
a prominent part of her musical character (as well as of the Venus Theme).62
She sings them prominently in the swinging and highly syncopated “I’m
a Stranger Here Myself” and even opens the verse of the waltz “Foolish
Heart” with a quarter-note triplet group. By the time Venus sings “Speak
Low” with Rodney, every phrase of both the main portion and the release
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Enchanted Evenings
Example 7.2. Quarter-note triplets in One Touch of Venus

(a) “Westwind”
(b) “Speak Low”
includes quarter-note triplets (Example 7.2b), and her characteristic swing-

ing rhythms are submerged in the accompaniment.
In the spoken dialogue that prepares for her final song Venus confesses
that while the ring brought the statue to life, it was not responsible for mak-
ing her love him. Nevertheless, Venus wastes no time in asking Rodney to
part his hair on the other side. The song itself, “That’s Him,” lyrically and
musically captures Venus’s ambiguity toward Rodney. On one hand, Venus
literally compares her potential mate to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, she
could “pick him out” from the millions of men in the world, and she concludes
her A sections by singing “wonderful world, wonderful you.” On the other
hand, despite his endearing qualitites, Rodney remains an unlikely roman-
tic partner, especially for a Venus. He is “simple,” “not arty,” “satisfactory,”
and appreciated primarily for his functionality, “like a plumber when you
need a plumber” and “comforting as woolens in the winter.”
In order to musically express less exalted feelings for her conventional
barber, Venus must be deprived of the musical identity she has established
for herself in her other songs. Weill conveys this underlying conflict when he
148
does not allow the accompaniment, significantly filled with Venus’s charac-
teristic swinging rhythms, to share the implied harmony of Venus’s melody.
Additionally, although Venus’s melodic line contains several telling vocal
leaps, it mainly consists of stepwise motion, again in contrast to her previ-
ously established melodically disjunct character portrayed in “I’m a Stranger
Here Myself” and “Speak Low.” Only at the end of the A′ sections—the song
forms an unusual arch, A-A′-B-A-A′ rather than A-A-B-A—do melody and
harmony resolve to the C major that Weill has Venus avoid so assiduously
for thirty-three measures. Although throughout this B section Venus returns
to her jazzy swing rhythms, she will abandon her unrealistic dream of an
unambiguous C major existence with Rodney after three measures. Venus
may be in love with a wonderful guy, but a marriage with Rodney would be
like Pegasus pulling a milk truck.63
At the end of the song, the delusion can no longer be sustained. When
Rodney finishes singing his description of their “Wooden Wedding” with
its “trip to Gimbel’s basement, / Or a double feature [pronounced fee’-tcha]
One Touch of Venus, act I, scene 4. Mary Martin in the center behind the
dressing screen (1943). Photograph: Vandamm Studio. Museum of the City
of New York. Theater Collection.
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Enchanted Evenings
with Don Ameche,” Venus must say, “Rodney, I hope I’ll be the right kind
of wife for you.”64 Venus’s nightmarish vision of herself as a conventional
“housewife” in the concluding ballet, “Venus in Ozone Heights,” finally
convinces her to rejoin the gods.
The Possibility of Revival

We have previously noted that in contrast to the other musicals discussed in
this survey, Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus have yet to receive fully
staged Broadway revivals. Although both musicals have enjoyed a num-
ber of regional performances in America and in Great Britain, they remain
shortchanged and underappreciated. Do they need revised books or more
Weill hit songs to succeed like Porter and Rodgers and Hart revivals? The
final section of this chapter will address the problems and possibilities of
revival.
The first of several alleged problems with Lady in the Dark is its depen-
dence on a star. After exhibiting indecisiveness equal to Liza Elliott, the
versatile Gertrude Lawrence consulted with her friend and oracle Noël
Coward as well as her astrological charts and accepted the demanding title
role. When Lawrence left for the summer the show closed, and, unlike most
shows, including Mary Martin’s Venus, Lawrence’s Lady never went on the
road. A second problem is expense. Three revolving sets and the attendant
costs of the three dream ballets do not travel cheaply.
But certainly these red herrings mask deeper problems. When Hart wrote
the libretto to Lady, for example, psychiatry was still a relatively novel sub-
ject for a musical, and the endless series of obligatory dream ballets in musi-
cals were mostly in the future. Nevertheless, even by the standards of the
early 1940s, Hart’s treatment of psychiatry is simplistic and predictable.
More problematic than the dated treatment of psychiatry are the increas-
ingly volatile subjects of sexism and sexual harassment. To be sure, the sex-
ism in Lady in the Dark is rather unpalatable, especially as displayed in the
character of Liza’s eventual Mr. Right, the fanny-pinching, male-chauvinist
Charley Johnson, who tries to give Maggie “a wet kiss” against her will.
When Johnson accuses Liza of having “magazines instead of babies and a
father instead of a husband,” he may be telling it like it was (or how he
saw things), but his remarks were not destined to please modern Broadway
audiences.65 Instead of getting the girl, Johnson today might be obtaining
the services of an attorney who specializes in sexual harassment suits; he
certainly does not deserve a woman like Liza. The non-singing Kendall Nes-
bitt hardly seems a better alternative: “Somehow—I don’t know why—it’s
150
different for a man, but a woman can have no sense of fulfillment—no real
peace and serenity as a woman, living out her life this way.”66 In a later era,
the story of a bright, successful, and powerful woman whose achievement
comes at the expense of her feminine identity does not bode well for a box
office bonanza, even with Madonna in the title role.
Sexual stereotyping is not reserved for the heterosexual members of the
Lady in the Dark cast. Russell Paxton, the “mildly-effeminate-in-a-rather-
charming-fashion” photographer for Liza’s fashion magazine, Allure, is
introduced as “hysterical, as usual.” He also freely acknowledges his physi-
cal admiration for male beauty when he describes Randy Curtis: “He’s got
a face that would melt in your mouth. . . . He’s heaven.”67 Although some
mystery will remain as to which of Liza’s suitors (Curtis, Nesbitt, or John-
son) will eventually win out, Paxton is removed at the outset as a romantic
contender.68
The reasons for the demise of One Touch of Venus are less explicable. The
premise of a cultural alien examining America from another perspective has
proven remarkably durable in numerous films over the past two decades
and includes aliens from another country (Moscow on the Hudson) and extra-
terrestrial aliens (E.T.) in its wide orbit. A genuine and liberated sex goddess
adrift amid overly romantic types like Whitelaw Savory and prosaic practi-
cal types like Rodney Hatch provide for a potentially engaging story, a story
wittily realized by Perelman, Nash, and Weill.
While Weill is criticized for abandoning his social conscience in his Broad-
way musicals, Venus manages to effectively satirize a host of American val-
ues. We know from the first song that Savory is more than a little eccentric
because, in contrast with nearly anyone who loves popular musicals, he
firmly believes that (with the notable exception of the classical Anatolian
Venus) “New Art Is True Art”: “Old art is cold art, / The new art is bold art; /
The best of ancient Greece, / It was centuries behind Matisse, / Who has
carried us beyond Renoir, / Till our bosoms are tri-an-gu-lar.”
The largest target of the Perelman-Nash satire is the contrasting moral
values of the very, very rich and the common folk. The loose morals of the
wealthy are comically portrayed in the song “Very, Very, Very,” when Molly
explains that “It’s a minor peccadillo / To patronize the wrong pillow, / When
you’re very, very, very rich.” It was previously noted that Venus dismisses
Savory’s idealistic and bourgeois love by favoring the twang of a bedspring
over the moan of a violin. In contrast, Venus’s earthbound inamorata, Hatch,
expresses his love for his fiancée Gloria through a series of negative prosaic
images, for example, “I love you more than a wasp can sting, / And more
than a hangnail hurts.” Although Venus helps Hatch to rid himself of his
shrewish intended—“sic transit Gloria Kramer”—the simple barber retains
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Enchanted Evenings
his desire to live in Ozone Heights, where “every bungalow’s just the same”
and each has “a radio that looks like a fireplace—and a fireplace that looks
like a radio.”69
If Street Scene is the American Weill stage work that posterity has voted
retrospectively most likely to succeed, One Touch of Venus, the most Broad-
way-like of any Weill show, may turn out to be the most revivable—the
sleeper musical of the 1940s. In short, Venus is a first-rate traditional Broad-
way show, packed with an unprecedented number of song hits and other
fine songs by Weill, lyrics that reveal the idiosyncratic Nash at his cleverest,
and engaging dialogue by Perelman.
After Venus, Nash would abandon Broadway and go back to the more inti-
mate world of comic verse. Perelman’s next (and last) musical, three years
after Venus, closed out of town; he would take time off from his prolific out-
put of comic literary fiction on one more occasion to write the script for
Porter’s last effort, the television musical Aladdin (1958). Hart ended his dis-
tinguished Broadway career with a successful play, Light Up the Sky (1948),
and as the director of My Fair Lady and Camelot. Between Light Up the Sky
and My Fair Lady he also wrote distinguished musical screenplays for Hans
Christian Andersen (lyrics and music by Loesser) and A Star Is Born (lyrics
by Ira Gershwin and music by Harold Arlen). One year after his failed col-
laboration with Weill, The Firebrand of Florence, Gershwin completed his
Broadway career with the poorly received Park Avenue (music by Arthur
Schwartz). He concluded his career by writing lyrics to several successful
films, most notably A Star Is Born, then spent three decades in creative retire-
ment as the guardian of his famous brother’s legacy. After Venus and Flor-
ence, Weill would compose the music to Street Scene, Love Life, and Lost in the
Stars, dying before he could realize his next American dream with Maxwell
Anderson (his lyricist-librettist on Knickerbocker Holiday and Lost in the Stars),
a musical based on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
152
chapter eight
STAGE VERSUS SCREEN (1)

Before Rodgers and
Hammerstein
Adapting to Hollywood
Show Boat marks one possible starting point for a study of the modern Broad-
way musical. Fortuitously, its arrival in December 1927 closely followed the
opening of a landmark in the history of one of the quintessential modern
media of the twentieth century, The Jazz Singer, the first American feature
film with sound. Although most of this historic film was still “silent”—
accompanied by a live pit band—Al Jolson’s songs were reproduced via a
recorded soundtrack, tube amplifiers, and loudspeakers placed behind the
movie screen at selected theaters. Seemingly traveling at the speed of sound,
if not light, talking and singing film adaptations of popular Broadway stage
works soon became rapidly, abundantly, and relatively cheaply available
to national then worldwide audiences. Masses of movie enthusiasts could
view film adaptations of major and minor works that until the end of the
1920s were accessible only on Broadway stages and in touring productions.
Audiences could also view a large body of original film musicals not based
on a stage work.
During the early decades of sound film, musical film adaptations were
usually remote from their stage sources, and it would often be a challenge
to discern the difference between an adaptation and an original musi-
cal film without prior knowledge. Before the Rodgers and Hammerstein
era, film adaptations tended to be footloose and fancy free and at times
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Enchanted Evenings
unrecognizable vis-à-vis their stage counterparts. The musical films high-

lighted in later chapters of this study tend to be relatively faithful, perhaps
too respectful, of their Broadway origins.
In any event, the two film “Stage versus Screen” chapters at the end of
acts I and II in this Broadway survey work from the premise that it is intrin-
sically unfair to value a film adaptation in direct or indirect proportion to
its fidelity to what audiences saw and heard onstage—the musical theater
scholar’s own version of the early and traditional music “authenticity” and
“historically informed performance” debates. An Alfred Hitchcock sus-
pense thriller roughly based on a novel or short story might be considered
an improvement over its source or at least an excellent film in its own right.
At the same time, readers of a survey on the Broadway musical deserve to
know the connection between what they see on the silver screen and what
they are likely to see on a stage. Film adaptations such as The Gay Divorcée,
On the Town, and Funny Face may be worthy exponents of the film genre, but
students of musical theater should know that these films only imperfectly
approximate their stage counterparts.
One of the central purposes of the two “Stage versus Screen” chapters
will be to inform fans of Broadway shows what they are getting into when
they rent or purchase a film adaptation of a show they have seen on a stage
or heard on a cast album. Just as quoting obscenity is not the same thing as
being obscene, those who study musical film adaptations, and even those
who occasionally shout vive la différence should not be accused of wantonly
sleeping with the enemy or other acts of traitorous activity. While some,
erroneously, treat stage and screen versions of Broadway shows as inter-
changeable, other musical theater advocates regard even the act of adap-
tation with suspicion, if not disdain. One articulate adversary of the film
musical adaptation, Kim Kowalke, encapsulated this position: “The generic
deformation inherent in adapting stage musicals as movies left few intact
and most virtually unrecognizable, except for title, some songs, and perhaps
a few actors in common.”1 Even if Kowalke’s blanket indictment is read as
hyperbolic, the term “generic deformation” unfortunately more than occa-
sionally applies.
There are many subtle cultural dimensions to the transition from live to
recorded performance with which any musician familiar with a real-life per-
forming tradition will be familiar. Creeping in on little cat feet, media craft
workers and modern-minded audiences have revolutionized performances
and their reception. The result, as Kowalke implies, is a change in the genre,
or kind of a musical theater work—or, to use his carefully chosen term, a
deformed genre. To return to the more straightforward structural dimensions
of book and score, film adaptations of musicals from Show Boat to Oklahoma!
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Stage versus Screen (1)
generally, but by no means invariably, do retain recognizable story lines and

more than just “some songs.”
On the other hand, with distressing frequency, departures and alterations
from Broadway story lines result in the elimination of half or more than
half of the songs people heard when they saw the show on the stage. To
cite one extreme but not unique example, the musical film of George and
Ira Gershwin’s Strike Up the Band managed to salvage only the title tune
from this wonderful score. In another frequent practice that we will witness
shortly in the 1936 film adaptation of Show Boat, the original composer and
lyricist will add one or more songs expressly for the show’s new incarna-
tion. Perhaps because only new songs are eligible for Best Song Academy
Awards, this practice has continued until the present day, even if the new
song is not heard until the final credits, as happens in the case of The Phan-
tom of the Opera in the 2004 film version. Another common scenario is the
practice of interpolating songs into a show from different shows by the origi-
nal composer-lyricists, a practice that parallels the distortions we have come
to expect in stage revivals (for example, in the revivals of Anything Goes on
Broadway in 1962 and 1987). The 1957 film of Pal Joey exemplifies this wide-
spread approach.
Before the Rodgers and Hammerstein era it was also a common practice
to bring in new composers and lyricists who were under contract with the
studio producing the film as collaborators after the fact. The 1936 film adap-
tation of Anything Goes provides a good example of this scenario. Another
adaptation type is the 1937 film version of the show Rosalie, which has an
entirely new score. The original double story (the Lindbergh flight and a visit
from the Queen of Romania) was preserved, but the double compositional
duties between George Gershwin and Sigmund Romberg were instead rele-
gated solely to Cole Porter, a composer who was not even remotely involved
in the Broadway version of 1928. Not until the 1950s did Broadway compos-
ers and lyricists begin to exert the kind of creative control over films they
had begun to show decades earlier on Broadway. Since then, composers and
lyricists have usually exerted the right to share their opinion about which
songs to cut—although they can be overridden as we will see in producer
Samuel Goldwyn’s version of Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls. Songwriters
also gained the frequent privilege of contributing their own new songs.
A large percentage of Broadway shows were adapted into films. Among
the highlights of the adaptation subgenre are Ernst Lubitsch’s The Merry
Widow (MGM 1934), the series of eight freely adapted operettas (and the
occasional musical comedy) with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy
from 1935 to 1942, and On the Town (produced by Arthur Freed for MGM in
1949), not all of which are cherished for their fidelity to their stage sources.
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Enchanted Evenings
The most consistently memorable musical films to appear in the era between
Show Boat and Oklahoma!, however, were original film musicals. A short list
in this latter category would be remiss if it did not include the following:
The Love Parade (1929); Love Me Tonight (1932); 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of
1933, and Footlight Parade (1933); The Great Ziegfeld and Born to Dance (1936);
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937); Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938); The
Wizard of Oz (1939); Pinocchio, Broadway Melody of 1940, and Fantasia (1940);
Yankee Doodle Dandy and Holiday Inn (1942); and Cabin in the Sky, Stormy
Weather, and This Is the Army (1943).
Of the eight classic films that paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
between 1933 and 1938, only three were based even in part on Broadway
shows. The Gay Divorcée, which was based, but not quite nominally, on Gay
Divorce, starring Astaire, retained but one Porter tune, “Night and Day.”
This movie, which has genuine merit on its own terms, gave film audiences
an opportunity to see comics Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore, as well as Astaire,
replay their stage roles and offered the attractive new face of Betty Grable.
It also concludes with perhaps the most elaborate and certainly the longest
of the dance duets in the Fred and Ginger series, “The Continental” (more
than 16 minutes). With its relatively lengthy medium shot, this dance (and
future Fred and Ginger dances) also showcased the dancers from head to toe,
with only an occasional close-up, a directorial concession Astaire routinely
demanded (and got).2 Despite these genuine merits, the film version of Gay
Divorce is as different from its source as, well, night and day. The plot of Fol-
low the Fleet (1936), like that of The Gay Divorcée, is also loosely derived from
a Broadway show, Hit the Deck! from 1927, with music by Vincent Youmans
(also the principal composer of the first of the Fred and Ginger films, Flying
Down to Rio). With The Gay Divorcée, at least one song was composed by its
original composer. Follow the Fleet, however, met Rosalie’s fate. Youmans’s
entire score was thrown overboard, and Irving Berlin, who composed the
music and lyrics to Top Hat and would soon do the same for Carefree (both
films also in the first eight Fred and Ginger films), was brought in to write
the complete score.3
James Whale’s 1936 Show Boat remains arguably the most successful rela-
tively faithful transfer of operetta-leaning genre (with significant touches
of musical comedy) from stage to screen in the 1930s. Kern’s Roberta, with
lyrics by Otto Harbach, and yet another from the first Fred and Ginger eight,
also deserves consideration as one of the finest contemporary film adapta-
tions of a staged musical comedy (with significant touches of operetta). It
also demonstrates how it is possible to retain a story line and much of a
score while at the same time transforming leading acting roles into danc-
ing stars. Onstage, the non-dancing role of Huck Haines, played by then-
156
newcomer comedian Bob Hope, was now played by Astaire, while Rogers
replaced the non-dancing Lyda Roberti (who as Countess Tanka Schwarenka
was not even attracted to Haines in the stage version). The playful roles of
Haines and the Countess were expanded both dramatically and musically
and offered a sharp comic contrast to the ingénue elegance of Russian Prin-
cess Stephanie, played by romantic lead Irene Dunne, who now got to sing
both big ballads, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Yesterdays” (the latter
originally sung onstage by her Aunt Minnie, Fay Templeton). Other songs
retained from the original score included the lively and jazzy “Let’s Begin”
and “I’ll Be Hard to Handle.”
The film dropped “Something Had to Happen” and used “The Touch of
Your Hand” and “You’re Devastating” as orchestral underscoring for the
fashion-show sequence. As part of the musical enhancement for Huck and
the Countess (Fred and Ginger), the film added two new swing dance num-
bers for this pair: “I Won’t Dance,” a reworking of a song by Dorothy Fields
and Jimmy McHugh from Kern’s recent London flop with Hammerstein,
Three Sisters, and a song composed expressly for the film, “Lovely to Look
At.”4 The winning combination of romantic elegance (operetta) and catchy
popular vernacular (musical comedy) and their signature songs (Dunne)
and dances (Astaire and Rogers) captured the best of both worlds. Despite
the outrageous notion of an exiled Russian princess living in Paris in 1935,
the screen form of Roberta, with its great new roles for dancers, might even
make a good candidate for a stage revival.
Given the 80–120 minute fixed time frame, a technical requirement for
early films, reasonably faithful and complete adaptations would not be
possible until the film adaptations of classic shows in the mid-1950s. If one
expects fidelity of dialogue and score, all the film adaptations made before
the 1950s are destined to disappoint. Looking at four of the shows treated
in act I of Enchanted Evenings, we find a range of possible connections to the
original stage versions:
• The 1936 film version of Show Boat featured several cast

members who had appeared either in the original 1927 stage
version or subsequent productions over the next nine years; a
screenplay by the original librettist, Oscar Hammerstein; songs
exclusively written for Show Boat by Hammerstein and Jerome
Kern (but not all the songs heard onstage); and three new
songs written expressly for the film.5 In a practice that would
become increasingly common after Oklahoma!, two of these
new songs, “Ah Still Suits Me” and “I Have the Room above
Her” would reappear in future Broadway productions.6
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Enchanted Evenings
• The 1936 Paramount Anything Goes retains much of the original

plot, a surprising amount of dialogue from the 1934 libretto,
the original star Ethel Merman, a small sampling of the songs
Porter wrote for the stage version, and more than an equal
number of new songs by other composers and lyricists.
• The 1959 Porgy and Bess presents a condensed “Broadway”
version that replaced most of the recitative with spoken
dialogue and like most musical comedies of the era also
reduced the role of the chorus. Nevertheless, while heavily
reduced, few songs were cut entirely, and no new songs
by the Gershwins or others were added. It was not until
1993 that one could view a Porgy and Bess that, with two
omissions, presented a filmed adaptation of a production
(based on Glyndebourne in 1986) that offered what audiences
heard during the Boston tryouts in the weeks before its 1935
Broadway debut, that is, a virtually uncut Porgy and Bess.
• The 1957 film version of Pal Joey, like the 1962 and 1987 stage
versions of Anything Goes, presented, in addition to a few
songs from the 1940 stage production, other songs created
only by the original composer-lyricists Rodgers and Hart.
Unlike the film Anything Goes, however, the Pal Joey film takes
extensive liberties with the stage plot and script and features
no actors or actresses from the original Broadway production.
Unfortunately, the Show Boat and Anything Goes 1930s adaptations dis-
cussed here are often harder to find than their 1950s remakes, probably
because they are shot (albeit gorgeously) on black and white film.7 The read-
ily attainable 1951 Technicolor Show Boat followed the basic plot outline, at
least for the portion that corresponds to act I, and most of the major songs
from the original stage version. On the other hand, it removes most of Ham-
merstein’s dialogue and eliminates or greatly reduces the African-American
themes and characters that gave the stage and first film so much meaning.
Gone entirely is the black chorus, gone after ten minutes is Queenie, Julie no
longer has a revealing kinship with “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” and the
exchange of blood between Julie and Steve is so underplayed that it would
go unnoticed unless one were expressly on the lookout for this potentially
powerful moment. Even “Ol’ Man River” is heard only twice, which is per-
haps a dozen fewer times than patrons of the Harold Prince 1994 revival
would experience. Howard Keel (a baritone) as Ravenal, Joe E. Brown as
Cap’n Andy Hawks, and William Warfield as Joe are excellent in their roles,
158
but not enough to compensate for the film’s infelicities. Although the film
has its entertaining moments, in the end it does disservice to the stage ver-
sion we examined in chapter 2 and does not begin to measure up to the 1936
film directed by Whale, the version of Show Boat that will be discussed in
this chapter.
Similarly, given a choice between using the 1956 remake of Anything Goes
and nothing at all (assuming that the 1936 version cannot be located), the
suggestion offered here is to try to wait until one of the various stage reviv-
als arrives at a theater near you, which should happen soon. Aside from
taking place on a boat, nearly all vestiges of the plot have vanished in this
version. Although in vastly altered contexts, the 1956 version delivers a little
more of Porter’s score than the 1936 original, including “All through the
Night” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” excised in the earlier film; the complete
title song, “I Get a Kick Out of You”; “You’re the Top”; and a new Porter
song, “It's De-Lovely” six years before it would reappear in the 1962 Off-
Broadway revival. It also offers Bing Crosby reprising his earlier film role
under the assumed name of Bill Benson, joining co-star Donald O’Connor in
two new songs by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn in addition to those
by Porter. But the excessive liberties with plot disqualify the film from being
a fair representation of any of the many possible stage versions.
Show Boat (1936)

The difficult-to-obtain Universal 1936 Show Boat, directed by the critically
acclaimed James Whale, is almost without exception regarded as far supe-
rior to the 1929 sound-silent hybrid Show Boat of 1929 or the 1951 version.
Stephen Banfield goes as far as to praise the 1936 film as the best of all pos-
sible Show Boats: “Shortened to less than two hours, the score, including
three new songs (plus two more that were cut and are lost), and the new,
tighter, closer-to-the novel screenplay provided by Hammerstein together
offer the most satisfying, balanced, and compelling version of Show Boat as
drama achieved up to the present day. In almost every way it is superior
to the stage version and its variants.” For Banfield, the stage Show Boat of
1927 constitutes a rough draft and the 1936 film a finished and culminating
destination.
Although the film added three new songs (“I Have the Room above Her,”
“Gallivantin’ Aroun,’ ” and “Ah Still Suits Me”), time constraints required
deletions or condensations of other songs and dialogue. Gone entirely are
Ellie’s stage number “Life on the Wicked Stage” and Ellie’s duet with Frank,
“I Might Fall Back on You”; Queenie’s ballyhoos in each act, “C’mon Folks”
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Enchanted Evenings
Show Boat, 1936 film. The marriage of Magnolia (Irene Dunne) and Ravenal
(Allan Jones) (left) with Cap’n Andy (Charles Winninger) and Parthy (Helen
Westley). For a stage photo of this scene see p. 25.
and “Hey Feller”; Ravenal’s “Till Good Luck Comes My Way” in act I; and
three songs from the Chicago Fair scene that opens act II, “At the Fair,”
“Why Do I Love You?,” and “In Dahomey.” Although this is a lot of songs at
the expense of Queenie and Frank and Ellie, the latter relegated to singing
non-Kern duets at the Trocadero, the new songs add considerable substance
and nuance to the romantic principals and to Joe, now played by the iconic
Paul Robeson, the 1928 London and 1932 New York Joe.
Even the canonic and complex opening scene, which introduced no less
than five couples, was subjected to considerable pruning in the film. In the
1988 McGlinn recording, which includes both dialogue and music for the
entire scene, it runs twenty-nine minutes; in the film, this scene runs a little
over eighteen minutes. We will look at these eighteen minutes in greater
detail, starting with the opening of “Cotton Blossom,” which offers new
words to the verse, B section, and the inversion of “Ol’ Man River,” all
appearing over the credits.8
While the film charmingly (and cinematically) shows the universal effect
on humans and animals generated by the arrival of the show boat, it leaves
out some of the meaningful underscoring that characterized the stage ver-
sion. Also missing from the stage are the choruses of town beaux and belles
160
and their counterpoint with the black chorus. During the opening conversa-
tion between Magnolia and Ravenal, for example, stage audiences heard
the orchestra interrupt with Parthy’s theme (which had already clearly been
associated with Parthy, Cap’n Andy Hawk’s grumpy spouse). We can pre-
sume that Magnolia heard her mother’s theme calling—that is what prompts
her to say she has to leave. The absence of Parthy’s theme in the film at this
same point in the conversation makes Magnolia’s sudden desire to interrupt
the conversation inexplicable.
An even more dramatically significant effect of an underscoring omission
occurs during the short scene in which Pete confronts Queenie about where
she got her brooch (which we soon learn was a gift from Julie who rejected
Pete’s gift). The conversation appears in both the stage and film versions. In
the stage version the underscoring of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” connects
this song with Queenie and sets up its use in the next scene, where we learn
that Julie somehow picked up a song closely associated with black culture.
In the film, Pete’s confrontation with Queenie is accompanied, not by “Can’t
Help Lovin,’ ” but by Magnolia’s piano theme. This important theme will
not be associated with Magnolia until Ravenal asks her if she is a player.9
Although the 1936 Show Boat certainly exhibits expert plotting and dramatic
consolidation, it discards some of the dramatic connections that the music of
the 1927 stage original provided.
The opening number contains substantial cuts, and much of “Cap’n
Andy’s Bally-hoo” is either deleted or spoken. The next two songs in the
scene contain significant omissions as well. Among the most drastic and
dramatically significant reductions are those in Ravenal’s entrance and first
song, “Where’s the Mate for Me?” Those familiar with the stage version here
(discussed in chapter 2) may recall that Ravenal sings a melody in AABA
form in which the B section, “Magnolia’s Piano Theme,” forms the inspira-
tion of Ravenal’s B section. Ravenal asks where his mate might be. He hears
Magnolia, her theme enters his consciousness and his music, and when he
repeats the question, Magnolia herself appears to answer the question before
Ravenal is able to finish it in song. After Ravenal almost finishes the second
of the first two A sections in the film version he is interrupted as well, but
not by Magnolia’s piano theme. The interruption is in the form of a short
film cutting to a conversation in which Frank contradicts Ellie’s assumption
that Ravenal must be an aristocrat by pointing out the cracks in his shoes
(after which Ravenal, now discredited, proceeds to complete the song with
the final phrase). Together, the song and the dialogue interjection occupy a
not-so-grand total of thirty seconds.
Although it no longer begins as the interruption of a song, the ensuing dia-
logue between Magnolia and Ravenal follows the stage version closely (with
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Enchanted Evenings
Parthy’s interrupting theme now absent). In the 1936 film, “Make Believe” is
also deprived of its second section.10 With the time saved by the reductions
of “Cotton Blossom,” “Where’s the Mate?,” and “Make Believe,” “Ol’ Man
River,” sung by Paul Robeson accompanied by an inventive filmic montage
of stevedores toting barges, lifting bales, Joe getting drunk and landing in jail,
rolls along uninterrupted for more than four minutes to create a powerful
conclusion to a magnificent if somewhat shorter scene. This change in empha-
sis surely reflects both Robeson’s star quality and the fact that since 1927, “Ol’
Man River” had become the signature song of the show and a deeply reso-
nant reflection on American history. Indeed, in the MTV era, this filmic ver-
sion of an iconic song can come across like a marvelous music video.
The 1936 film introduces to us a practice that becomes extremely common
if not ubiquitous in films that discard significant amounts of musical mate-
rial from the stage version. This is the practice of using fragments of aban-
doned songs as underscoring. Some examples include the appearance of the
second section of “Make Believe” to underscore Julie’s departure, the use of
“Till Good Luck Comes My Way” when Ravenal is seen gambling, and “Life
on the Wicked Stage” when Frank and Ellie are seen together. “Why Do
I Love You?” is also reduced to an orchestral fragment. Only if one knew the
song would someone realize the significance of the words “Because I love
you,” a lyric from this song and a line that appears in Ravenal’s farewell let-
ter which Ellie reads out loud (or that the musical line that accompanies this
lyric and the line in the letter are synchronized).
Since nearly every Show Boat ends differently, it should come as no surprise
that major changes have transpired between the 1927 stage and 1936 screen
versions. Due largely to the show’s excessive length, the role of Magnolia’s
daughter Kim, a successful young singing and dancing star on the stage in
the tradition of her mother, was removed during the tryouts along with her
song, “It’s Getting Hotter in the North,” in which Magnolia’s piano theme is
transformed into a jazzy ’20s tune in the general style of Gershwin’s Rhap-
sody in Blue. Although the growing length of the film forced a curtailment
of Kim’s transformation of her mother’s “Gallivantin’ Aroun’” (sung earlier
in the film in blackface), film viewers see a lot of Kim in 1936 from birth to
young adulthood. Audiences witness her birth in a scene taken from the
novel, we meet Kim again when Ravenal sings “Make Believe” to her at
her convent school before his disappearance, and the adult Kim appears in
several later scenes, including the happy reunion of her parents after twenty
years who conclude the film with a reprise of their duet, “You Are Love.”
The film also fleshed out the role of Joe, not only by giving him the rare
full version of a song, “Ol’ Man River” and a new song later in film, but
in some new dialogue with Queenie. Audiences also gain a richer sense of
162
Joe’s character, when, in a demonstration of courage and resolve that belies

Queenie’s accusations of laziness, Joe takes it upon himself to find a doctor
in a hazardous storm so that Magnolia will give birth to Kim safely.
Even if one does not find the 1936 filmed Show Boat a dramatic improve-
ment on the 1927 stage original (or other versions), the opportunity to see
so many actors associated with this musical in one film will help give a new
generation of film viewers a renewed appreciation of this show. The char-
acters understand and believe in their material. Charles Winninger’s enact-
ment of The Parson’s Bride, assuming all the roles when his cast was scared
off the stage by a backwoodsman who thought the villain was real, may be
reason enough to seek out this film, one of the great film adaptations of a
stage classic.
Anything Goes (1936)

Those who come to expect earlier musical film adaptations to abandon the
original stage book and most of the songs will only be half mistaken when
it comes to the first movie version of the 1930s hit show Anything Goes. For
Anything Goes, 1936 film. Billy Crocker (Bing Crosby, left), Reno Sweeney
(Ethel Merman, upside down center), and Rev. Dr. Moon (Charles Ruggles,
right).
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Enchanted Evenings
starters, viewers of the 1936 Paramount film will only hear about twenty
seconds of the title song at the film’s beginning, albeit sung by Merman,
followed by instrumental fragments of “All through the Night” and “Blow,
Gabriel, Blow.” After that tantalizing morsel, the only Porter tunes from
Anything Goes, or from any other Porter show for that matter in the film will
be “I Get a Kick Out of You” sung by Merman, “There’ll Always Be a Lady
Fair” sung by the Avalon Boys quartet, and “You’re the Top,” a duet for
Merman and rising film star Bing Crosby. Due to the controversial nature
of some of Porter’s lyrics, “sniffing cocaine” was not an option as a “kick”
in “I Get a Kick Out of You,” replaced by “that perfume from Spain.” The
new lyrics for “You’re the Top” were assigned to Ted Fetter. Joseph Breen,
the new enforcer of the Hollywood Production Code, objected to suggestive
lyrics such as “you and your love give me ecstasy,” which resulted in the
total removal of the show’s central love ballad, “All through the Night.” The
rousing “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” which might be interpreted as a slur on reli-
gion (and knowing Porter, perhaps also intended as a sexual double enten-
dre), also bit the dust. If it was once shocking to catch a glimpse of a stocking
(as the verse of “Anything Goes” went), when adapting a 1934 stage hit into
a Hays Code–era Hollywood film in 1936, the phrase “anything goes” did
not necessarily apply.
The Paramount film does offer a lot to be thankful for. Although she’s
confined in a slow-moving swing in a nightclub, it’s a treat to see and
hear a young Merman convey the words and the rhythms of “I Get a
Kick Out of You,” including the tricky half-note triplets that pervade the
opening of each A section over a rumba beat.11 Even with the altered lyr-
ics it’s also a delight to see and hear Merman and Crosby share “You’re
the Top.” Crosby—replacing the original Billy Crocker, William Gaxton,
who never enjoyed much of either a recording or film career, and displac-
ing Merman as the star of the show—was a marvelous singer, a natural
actor, and well suited for the part. The comic role of Public Enemy No.
13, originated onstage by the bumbling Victor Moore, was played in the
film by comedian Charles Ruggles in the non-singing role of Reverend Dr.
Moon (Moore got to “Sing like the Bluebird”).12 The Avalon Boys’ rendi-
tion of “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair,” joined by Crosby in a reprise, is
another highlight; performed at about half the speed of the John McGlinn
reconstructed recording, the film rendition of this song belies the myth
that 1930s tempos are always faster than modern ones, a valuable lesson in
historical performance practice.
Since Crosby, not Merman, was the big screen star, he needed more
material—new songs. Merman’s songs, “Anything Goes” and “Blow, Gabriel,
Blow,” were textually out of bounds as was Billy’s “All through the Night,”
164
while “Gypsy in Me,” sung in the Broadway show by his inamorata Hope
Harcourt, was not the right song for Crosby. Lewis Milestone, who had pre-
viously directed the Academy Award–winning All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930) but no musicals, brought in three interpolated songs expressly writ-
ten for Crosby to sing in the film: “Sailor Beware” (Richard Whiting and Leo
Robin), “My Heart and I” (Frederick Hollander and Robin), and “Moon-
burn” (Edward Heyman and Hoagy Carmichael). They may not have pos-
sessed the lyrical wit of “You’re the Top”—neither did the new and rewritten
lyrics of this song in the film—but all three are top-tier songs, engagingly
crooned by Crosby.
The 1936 Paramount Anything Goes may have less of Merman and sig-
nificantly less of Porter than the stage original, but it does offer a book that,
aside from a few twists here and there, is remarkably similar to the stage
plot from two years earlier. Even more remarkably, despite a number of plot
deviations that will go unmentioned here, the film retains a considerable
portion of the original dialogue, including many of the corny jokes. That
they go over as well as they do—even the silly misunderstanding of “in
door” China for Indo-China—is due to Ruggles’s impeccable delivery. The
“putting on the dog” joke is retained in the film script. So is the scene that
leads to “calling all pants” that director Jerry Zaks found incomprehensible
but kept in the 1987 Vivian Beaumont version because people still laughed.
The 1936 film clears this matter up once and for all. During the strip poker
game with the surprisingly adept Chinese missionaries, Billy bets his coat
and Wang bets his pants. When Moon asks Billy if he calls pants, Billy calls
pants, the missionaries call pants, and Moon calls pants. This exchange
fully explains why Moon concludes the scene by shouting, “CALLING ALL
PANTS.” Even though only the relatively ancient viewers of the film (or
trivia buffs) would make the connection between calling all pants and Call-
ing All Cars, a popular crime and police radio drama that ran from 1933 to
1939, it’s still a funny scene. Another surprise. The exchange between Moon
and Mrs. Wentworth, the kind of stream-of-consciousness banter that Grou-
cho and “straight man” Margaret Dumont excelled in (excerpted in chapter
3), can be found in the film between Ruggles as Groucho and the redoubt-
able Margaret Dumont as herself. By the way, Billy really does put on the
dog, Mrs. Wentworth’s newly shaved Pomeranian. PETA watchdogs should
take note.
Although much of the dialogue was retained in the scenes that
remained, some of the subtext regrettably did not manage to escape the
cutting floor. For example, in the 1934 libretto, when Reno arrives unan-
nounced in Evelyn Oakleigh’s stateroom in order to frame him for a phony
seduction, Evelyn, expecting the steward and without turning around,
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Enchanted Evenings
asks the visitor to “just put it down on the bed,” expresses his hope that
“it’s good and hot,” and states his desire that whatever the visitor has to
offer he wants to receive before he is dressed. In response to this propo-
sition, Reno asks whether she is early or late. In the screenplay, the tea
is replaced by a dozen martini cocktails, presumably not hot, and when
Reno arrives unseen Evelyn simply asks his visitor to leave the drinks
there to which Reno simply responds, “I beg your pardon.” The some-
what suggestive “not a grope” becomes “not a try” when Reno complains
to Billy that he shouldn’t have led her on by not getting her drunk, not
asking her to his apartment to see his etchings, and not making a move
on her in a taxi. “Hell” and other fiendish words, including “hot pants,”
may be banished, but Reno’s basic complaint to Billy onstage, “You never
even laid a hand on me, and I’m not used to men treating me like that!,”
was repeatable in the film. Similarly, although the details remain unspeci-
fied, Reno is allowed to confirm that Evelyn does “things” to her. One line
that has, if anything, increased its topicality and resonance in the early
twenty-first century is Moon’s claim that he left the con artist game when
the mortgage companies arrived.13
Although it often offers tangential connections with the 1934 stage ver-
sion of Anything Goes, this film should be put back in circulation without
delay where it can be criticized and enjoyed on its own terms.
Porgy and Bess
Samuel Goldwyn, 1959

As we have seen (see chapter 4), Rouben Mamoulian, with Gershwin’s
acquiescence, if not approval, managed to cut about forty minutes before
Porgy and Bess launched its career on Broadway in 1935. Despite the cuts,
what audiences heard at its Broadway debut was a full-scale opera, with
sparse amounts of spoken dialogue reserved mainly for white characters.
A few years later, the Cheryl Crawford Broadway revival of 1942 turned the
opera into a more conventional musical with many cuts and spoken dialogue
replacing much of Gershwin’s recitative. Ten years after that, the Blevins
Davis and Robert Breen production starring Leontyne Price as Bess, William
Warfield as Porgy, and Cab Calloway as Sporting Life brought the opera
closer to its operatic roots, style, and length. The historic Houston Grand
Opera production of 1976 completed this process. In fact, Houston returned
the work to what it looked like during the tryouts prior to its Broadway
166
Porgy and Bess, 1959 film. Porgy (Sidney Poitier) and Bess (Dorothy
Dandridge) inside Porgy’s room.
Porgy and Bess, 1959 film. Porgy (Poitier) and Bess (Dandridge) outside
Porgy’s door, with goat.
167
Enchanted Evenings
opening, that is, an uncut Porgy and Bess that included the forty soon-to-be-
discarded minutes.
Between the Davis-Breen and the Houston production lies the shadow of
the first film version of Porgy and Bess, produced by Samuel Goldwyn (his
eightieth and final picture), and after its first director Mamoulian was fired,
directed by Otto Preminger. Playing but not singing the part of Porgy was
Sidney Poitier, at the time still in the early stages of his career as America’s
leading black actor and box office draw. Dorothy Dandridge, a rising star
who had played the title role in Preminger’s Carmen Jones a few years earlier,
was cast as Bess. The film marked a return to the type of presentation not
seen since Crawford’s production, a shorter version in which the dialogue is
mostly spoken rather than sung and with less activity from the chorus. Some
critics lauded the film, including Bosley Crowther of the New York Times.
Others were highly critical, especially of the sets, which seemed too theat-
rical and unrealistic. In “Why Negroes Don’t Like ‘Porgy and Bess,’ ” Era
Bell Thompson, writing for the African-American magazine Ebony faulted
the film for its anachronistic continuities with the opera.14 Both works, this
reviewer felt, reinforced stereotypes. For Bell, the Goldwyn-Preminger
extravaganza was merely “the same old catfish.” This is a topic to which we
must return.
The film was a triumph of love over money. Goldwyn had seen the opera
in 1935 and wanted to bring it to the screen practically ever since, and he
spared no effort to attract the finest African-American stars of the day. When
the warehouse containing the sets was destroyed on the eve of production,
he built new sets from scratch. In the end the film lost half of its $7 million
investment and received only one of the three Academy Awards for which
it was nominated, a Best Scoring award shared between André Previn and
Ken Darby. When it was first released, Ira Gershwin was quoted as saying,
“It is everything we hoped for.”15 Other early supporters of the film included
Dorothy Heyward, who exclaimed that “the film exceeds our highest expec-
tations.”16 George Gershwin’s great friend Kay Swift was enthusiastic about
the film and agreed to give lectures and interviews on its behalf in twelve
cities over a period of fifteen weeks.17 The film was broadcast on national
television in 1967 and then withdrawn, along with the soundtrack, at the
insistence of the Gershwin estate owners Ira and Leonore Gershwin in 1974,
two years before the work returned to its operatic roots with the Houston
Opera production. Sometime between 1959 and 1974, Ira and Leonore, or at
least Ira, experienced a change of heart about the work.
Since neither Poitier nor Dandridge was a singer, their songs were dubbed.
Goldwyn attempted to complement their speaking voices musically and to
use African-American opera singers whenever possible for all the major roles.
168
The voice of Porgy was Robert McFerrin. Although today less well known
than his son Bobby McFerrin, in his own time the senior McFerrin had an
impressive and distinguished career. Among other achievements, he became
the first black male to sing at the Metropolitan Opera—in January 1955, the
same month that the first African-American female to perform there, Marian
Anderson, made her debut. The following year McFerrin sang the title role,
in Verdi’s Rigoletto, at the Met. The voice of Bess was Adele Addison, a ver-
satile singer of opera and concert literature, perhaps best known today for
her recordings of Baroque literature. Leontyne Price, the much-acclaimed
Bess of the Breen-Davis stage Bess, was invited but declined to dub the role
for Dandridge. In any event, Addison, whose operatic roles included Gilda
and Micaela (Price was noted for her Aïda onstage and Carmen on record-
ings), possessed a lighter lyric soprano sound than Price and thus matched
Dandridge’s speaking voice more closely.
Sammy Davis Jr., Sporting Life, widely praised for his “new sinister spin to
the character (thus establishing a precedent for later interpretations),” did his
own singing for the film.18 Since contractual agreements precluded the use of
his voice on Columbia records, however, Cab Calloway, the Breen-Davis Sport-
ing Life, is the voice heard on the album soundtrack. Brock Peters (Crown), who
played the falsely accused rapist in the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird
(1962) and sang the lead role in the Broadway revival and the screen version
of Lost in the Stars in the 1970s, sang for himself in the Porgy and Bess film. The
Maria was Pearl Bailey, the role created both in the 1927 play and the opera by
the non-singing precocious rapper Georgette Harvey. Unlike Harvey, Bailey, a
leading popular singer and one of the stars of St. Louis Woman on Broadway
in the 1940s, was featured as a soloist to augment what was a choral number
onstage, “I Can’t Sit Down.” One year earlier, in the film adaptation of South
Pacific, Juanita Hall, acclaimed on Broadway for her creation of Bloody Mary,
had suffered the indignity of being replaced on the soundtrack. Diahann Carroll
as Clara, the mother who sings “Summertime,” did not sing Clara onstage, but
she was nonetheless an able singer who before long would record an album of
Porgy and Bess songs and even starred in a Tony Award–winning performance
of Richard Rodgers’s No Strings; even so, she was similarly replaced on the
Porgy soundtrack. Peters, Bailey, and Carroll, along with Dandridge were all
alumni of Otto Preminger’s 1954 film Carmen Jones, the film adaptation of Ham-
merstein’s 1940s Broadway hit reinterpretation of Bizet’s opera Carmen.
Sammy Davis Jr. eagerly campaigned for the role of Sporting Life but
others, most prominently Harry Belafonte, who had played Joe (Don José)
in Preminger’s Carmen Jones, turned down offers to appear in Goldwyn’s
Porgy and Bess. Whether as a result of manipulation by his agent or Gold-
wyn, threats to his career, or a combination of these, the initially reluctant
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Enchanted Evenings
Poitier eventually capitulated. This is what he said at a news conference

held on December 10, 1957, six months before shooting was scheduled to
begin:
I have never, to my conscious knowledge, done anything that I

thought would be injurious to anyone—particularly to my own
people. Now this is a personal choice. I do not pretend to be the
conscience of all Negroes. . . . I was convinced irrevocably that it
will be a great motion picture and tremendous entertainment and
that it will be enjoyed by everyone—little and big—people of all
races and creeds.19
Poitier even went as far as asserting that Goldwyn and Mamoulian were
“almost as sensitive” as he was to the dangers of portraying racial stereo-
types in popular culture.
The film inevitably shared some of the stereotypes that characterize the
opera. The characters are uneducated; Sporting Life is a pimp, drug dealer,
and an atheist; and Bess is a former prostitute and drug addict, but none-
theless a relatively sedate progenitor of Mimi in Jonathan Larson’s Rent.20
Crown is a murderer. Sporting Life’s evil qualities may have been magni-
fied in the film, but Dandridge’s Bess was accused of being too elegant and
gentle. In response to the Production Code, if not the demands of the story,
Porgy seems to be sleeping on the floor and not directly adjacent to his
own bed, which is occupied by Bess. Missing from the film are not only the
“Buzzard Song” but other remnants of Porgy’s superstitions. Serena refuses
Bess’s money for the burial of her husband Robbins, who was murdered
in a drunken rage by Bess’s Crown; she later accuses Bess of being unfit to
mother Clara’s baby. The film introduces a genuine Christian preacher on
Kittiwah Island as a foil for Sporting Life’s blasphemous “It Ain’t Necessar-
ily So” (followed by an exuberant, almost orgiastic dance that was not in the
opera, in a jazz arrangement more 1950s than 1930s in style). These added
touches clarify that Christian values are preferred to those of Sporting Life
and his followers. The crooked lawyer Frazier is entirely absent, as is Arch-
dale, the benevolent white man whose parents were slave owners who once
owned the parents of Peter, the Honey Man. The film also greatly reduced
the amount of dialect heard in both the spoken dialogue and the songs them-
selves. In short, Porgy and Bess may be rightly interpreted as full of arguably
demeaning stereotypes, but the film version was demonstrably far less so.
Nevertheless, after its initial release and nationally televised broadcast in
1967, the Gershwin estate chose to suppress this historic cinematic version
of Gershwin’s masterpiece.
170
Ostensibly, the film was not withdrawn for its controversial depictions
of African Americans but for artistic reasons. It was withdrawn, they said
in effect, because the surviving Gershwins did not want a Broadway ver-
sion of Porgy and Bess to represent George and Ira’s opera in a film. Michael
Strunsky, the nephew of Ira and his wife Leonore and their executor after the
latter’s death in 1991, summarized Leonore’s strong position on the subject:
“My aunt didn’t want it distributed. She and my uncle felt it was a Holly-
woodization of the piece. We now acquire any prints we find and destroy
them.”21 It is also clear that Ira’s wife Leonore, who lived to see Porgy and Bess
produced on the prestigious stages of the Metropolitan and Glyndebourne,
did not want a filmed stage version to represent the work and for this reason
did not even approve a filmed operatic Porgy and Bess until nearly a decade
after Ira’s death in 1983. This was the television studio production directed
by Trevor Nunn (not a videotaped live performance in front of an audience)
that eventually appeared in 1993 and will be discussed shortly, nearly sixty
years after the opera’s Broadway debut.
Certainly, the Goldwyn-Preminger film poorly represents the work when
compared with the operatic form intended by Gershwin. This may be reason
alone for lovers of the opera to avoid the film. But the change of approach
from an operatic to a more conventional Broadway musical conception of
the work does not result in a film that is disrespectful of the work or a failure
on its own Broadway-Hollywood terms. Much of the recitative and large
stretches of the choral numbers have vanished, and Robbins and Crown fight
in silence. But nearly all of the many songs are present and often complete.
If one can believe the timings offered by A. Scott Berg or Howard Pollack,
the film actually runs longer than the version Broadway audiences saw in
1935 (after the 40 minutes of cuts).22 It might be constructive to compare
the Preminger Porgy and Bess with the Franco Zeffirelli Otello (1986), which
reduced Verdi’s opera to 123 minutes (including long stretches of elaborate
montages with neither music nor dialogue). Marcia Citron offers a list of
what is absent from this adaptation, including the seemingly indispensable
“Willow Song.”23 Compared to Zeffirelli, Preminger is a purist.
Preminger’s accomplishment was to reveal the opera’s vital Broadway
roots, and to reveal them in an idiomatic cinematic form. One fascinating by-
product of the non-operatic approach becomes evident in the decisions of
what besides the songs needed to be sung. Although Gershwin offers many
degrees and varieties of nuance in his recitatives, Preminger’s decision to
replace most of the recitatives with spoken dialogues allows the ones that
remain to become increasingly meaningful, especially since most of these
are given to central characters at strategic moments in the work. One telling
example is the expressive passage that begins with “They pass by singin,’ ”
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Enchanted Evenings
in which Porgy incorporates his own signature theme as well as his loneli-
ness to explain why he is resigned to life without a woman. Another occurs a
little later in the opening scene during Porgy’s musical foreshadowing of “I
Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ ” as he rolls the dice. Still another place where impas-
sioned recitative takes over speech occurs during Bess’s confrontation with
Crown on Kittiwah Island in act II, scene 2 (“It’s like dis, Crown”). As the
film progresses, the use of recitative at other lyrical musical moments when
dialogue can no longer suffice creates an aura around these moments that is
less evident when everything is sung. One might miss the addition of Serena
and Maria that converts Porgy’s great third act aria, “Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s
My Bess,” into a magnificent operatic trio in the stage version, but the direct,
uncluttered, and obsessive quality of his solo plea in the film has an effect
that is admittedly slightly reduced in an ensemble.
The filming was interrupted by a devastating fire that destroyed two mil-
lion dollars worth of sets and costumes and nearly brought production to
a permanent halt. One of the casualties of the fire was Mamoulian as direc-
tor, who was fired after he continued to insist on using actual settings in
Charleston, South Carolina, and expressed other ideas that were at odds
with Goldwyn’s vision of the film. In the end, only the Kittiwah scene was
filmed on location. His employment terminated, Mamoulian was nonethe-
less paid in full for his work, which did stop him from taking legal action.
Mamoulian’s firing marked the end of a brilliant career that included his
direction of Love Me Tonight, Golden Boy, Oklahoma!, and Carousel as well as
both the play and opera based on the story of Porgy and Bess.
Although allegedly none of the surviving footage was shot by Mamoulian,
one fascinating likely remnant occurs in the part of the film that corresponds
to the final scene of the opera (the part of the scene that occurs prior to
Porgy’s return from prison where he was jailed for a week because of his
refusal to look directly at Crown’s dead body). The published vocal score
contains most of the material that was cut during the tryouts, an unusual
situation that has greatly contributed to the resistance by music directors
to cuts in the opera. One part missing from this score, a rhythmic sequence
added by Mamoulian, opened the final scene onstage in 1935. A description
of the sequence appears in a production script now housed in the New York
Public Library. The concert performance under conductor John Mauceri
that was performed by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in 2006 not only
followed Gershwin’s cuts but restored this sequence. The 1959 film offers
something similar at the beginning of the scene before the chorus enters
with “How are you dis mornin’ ”?24
The film, long unavailable in theaters or on video, made a rare guest
appearance in 1998, on the occasion of a Gershwin Centennial Festival
172
sponsored by the Institute of Studies in American Music in Gershwin’s

beloved New York City. At this screening, Foster Hirsch, a professor of film
studies at Brooklyn College, where the film was shown, offered appreciative
reflections on the film. His thoughtful appraisal implicitly contradicts the
attitudes of Leonore Gershwin that continue to be enforced by the Gershwin
estate:
Preminger’s direction is intensely cinematic, his approach far more

sophisticated than that of a filmed play. Replacing passages of rec-
itative with dialogue, he has made no attempt to present the mate-
rial as an opera. . . . With his august presence and speaking voice,
Poitier is a remote, dignified Porgy, a survivor. In effective contrast,
Dandridge is an anguished Bess victimized by her beauty as well
as her race and gender. Quite contrary to its tarnished reputa-
tion, Preminger’s film is a magisterial pageant, a ceremonial work
deeply respectful both to the intentions of Gershwin and his collab-
orators and to its black subjects. . . . This “forbidden” text demands
to be shown exactly as it is here, on a large screen and with a sound
system that can do justice to what may well be the most glorious
theatrical work by an American composer.25
The overview in this chapter seconds Hirsch’s opinion. Despite its flaws,
Goldwyn’s Porgy and Bess should not be sequestered in the Library of Con-
gress. It deserves to be seen and heard.
EMI Classics, 1993

The first version of Porgy and Bess (1959) marked a return to the approach
popularized in the Crawford revival in the early 1940s. The 1970s introduced
the first recorded uncut Porgy and Bess, and the 1980s brought the uncut
opera to the stages of the Metropolitan and Glyndebourne. But it was not
until 1993 that this increasingly preferred version of the work reached the
screen. This film, videotaped in a television studio, was based on the 1986
Glyndebourne production staged by Trevor Nunn, known to the world of
Broadway through his direction of Cats and most recently Sunset Boulevard.
By filming in a studio, Nunn was able to visually expand the world of
Catfish Row, especially by taking advantage of a television studio’s ability
to depict realistic waterways and other humanly constructed natural sur-
roundings. In an unusual move, the cast—with few exceptions the same as
that of the 1986 stage production—lip-synched to their own voices in the
acclaimed 1989 London Philharmonic recording conducted by Simon Rattle.
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Enchanted Evenings
Porgy and Bess, 1993 film. Porgy (Willard White) casting away his crutches.
Porgy and Bess, 1993 film. Porgy (White) begins his long journey to New York
City.
174
Four singers, most importantly Bruce Hubbard (Jake) who had died, were
replaced by new actors.
For the most part, the television film, unlike its 1959 predecessor readily
available on DVD, for the first time offered the complete opera as seen and
heard onstage a few years earlier. All that is missing is the “Buzzard Song”
in act II, scene 1, one of the cuts made shortly before the Broadway debut,
and the opening of the final scene, act III, scene 3, which shows the citizens
of Catfish Row waking up just prior to Porgy’s return from his week in jail
for refusing to look at Crown’s dead body (ironically a scene partly visible
in the otherwise heavily cut version of this scene in the Preminger film).26 It
is not clear whether the stage version also cut these opening moments of act
III, scene 3, but the 1989 recording and probably the Glyndebourne staging
did contain the “Buzzard Song.” Surely its deletion cannot be attributed to
its length or the possible strains it might place on a dubbed singing voice.
The absence of the “Buzzard Song” and perhaps the opening of the final
scene explains why the 1993 DVD clocks in at five minutes less than the 189
minutes of the 1989 recording, which provided the soundtrack for both.
In addition to the film’s nearly complete performance state, some of its
length can be attributed to tempos slower than those of recordings made
between 1935 and 1942. The faster tempos of these older recordings hold
to the historical performance movement truism that older is faster, a belief
that is belied by the Avalon quartet’s leisurely film rendition of Porter’s
“There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair” (see the discussion of the 1936 film Any-
thing Goes). At the outset of the opera, Harolyn Blackwell’s performance of
“Summertime” runs two minutes and forty seconds; this is nearly a minute
longer than it took the original Clara, Abbie Mitchell, to sing the song at
a rehearsal performance recorded on July 19, 1935. The first commercially
recorded Clara, Helen Jepson, one year later clocked in at six seconds slower
than Mitchell, and when the first Bess, Anne Brown, recorded the song in
1942, her time was ten seconds longer than Mitchell.27 Like “Ol’ Man River”
before it, this particular song had by then become the signature moment of
the entire work, and slowing it down gives it more dramatic weight, if not
always more interest.
A central decision in Nunn’s stage and film versions was to raise Porgy off
his knees and take away his goat and his goat cart. Although Nunn’s Porgy
is deformed and limps around on crutches, his standing posture presents a
new view of the character, symbolically and literally raising his stature. At
the end of the opera Porgy even throws down the crutches as he begins his
slow and painful journey (on foot rather than by goat cart) to retrieve Bess
in New York City. The removal of the goat necessitated a few line changes
(e.g., in the final scene the coroner refers to Porgy as the beggar man instead
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Enchanted Evenings
of the goat man), but the effect is largely a visual and psychological one.
Other dramatically significant visual revisions include Bess’s unmistakable
flirtation with Robbins, which provides a motivation for Crown to murder
him in the first scene that goes beyond a simple argument over a crap shoot
as well as the decision to show Crown hobbling on to Kittiwah Island at
the end of the first act, two scenes before he prohibits Bess from leaving the
island to return to her Porgy. At the end of act II, scene 2, Nunn shows Jake’s
boat leaving to meet its fate in the storm and a close-up of Maria’s anguished
face. In act II, scene 4, he illustrates Crown’s attempted rescue and Clara’s
death, neither of which are seen when the opera is staged. Finally, before
we hear the music of act III, scene 1, we see Sporting Life lurking around,
and later in the scene Nunn makes it clear that Sporting Life is complicit in
Crown’s murder, a brutal murder by strangling that Sporting Life observes
and tacitly encourages. In the 1935 stage directions, Porgy uses a knife (there
are also no witnesses). In the 1959 film version, both methods of murder are
combined.
For those unable to see the opera Porgy and Bess in their neighborhood,
the Nunn film provides an innovatively filmed and well-sung opportunity
to see and hear what the work has become to most audiences and recording
aficionados since the late 1970s. It is a most welcome addition to the short
list of filmed adaptations of Broadway classics before Oklahoma!
Pal Joey (1957)

By the time a Hollywood studio got around to making a film version of Pal
Joey in 1957, the show had completed both its first run, begun in 1940, and
its 1952 Broadway revival. The Rodgers and Hart era was long past, and the
Rodgers and Hammerstein era was nearing its own finale with Flower Drum
Song and The Sound of Music. However, film versions of Oklahoma!, Carousel,
and The King and I had appeared within the past two years, the film ver-
sion of South Pacific was only one year away, and it must have looked like a
good time to mine the riches of Rodgers’s past achievements with his first
lyricist.
The film adaptation of Pal Joey provided vivid proof that the makers of
Broadway musicals could do more, show more, and say more onstage in
the early 1940s than it was possible to do, show, and say on film in the late
1950s. Portraying behavior such as adultery was possible, but the Holly-
wood Production Code, which had expurgated Porter’s lyrics two decades
earlier, had by now determined that a character engaging in such objection-
able behavior would have to pay a clear price for such conduct. A musical
176
Pal Joey, 1957 film. Joey Evans (Frank Sinatra) and Vera Simpson (Rita
Hayworth) take the gloves off.
based on two sleazy characters, Joey Evans and Vera Simpson, who use one
another for sexual and financial gain, would not be permitted in a major
motion picture in the United States for yet another decade—until the Code
was finally cast off in the turbulent 1960s. It is also possible that the censor-
ship was seconded by the projected onscreen Joey, Frank Sinatra, who may
have recoiled from playing such a fundamentally foul character for fear of
tarnishing his maturing public image, which was of concern to the broader
Italian-American ethnic community as well. In the current era of media mul-
tiple choice, it may be hard to fathom the contradictory strictures in a social
world with only one source of prestigious public audiovisual entertainment
(Hollywood), and only three fledgling television networks still broadcasting
only in black and white (CBS, NBC, and the upstart ABC).
In any event, Vera, the flagrant adulteress in the stage version, is now
a rich widower, and Joey, the heartless philanderer, at the end of the film
marries the innocent Linda English instead of walking offstage to catch a
fresh “mouse.” Linda, now a show girl infatuated with Joey instead of a
stenographer he happens to meet in front of a pet shop, agrees to do a strip
number, but in the end the uncharacteristically gallant Joey does not let her
go through with it and does not take advantage of her sexually off-camera.
Making Vera a former stripper sets up an opportunity to have her sing “Zip”
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Enchanted Evenings
to raise money for a charity. Onstage the song was delivered by the news-
paper reporter Melba, who uses the song to describe her interview with
the famous Gypsy Rose Lee, in which the surprisingly intellectual stripper
shared her musings (including her considered opinion that the philosopher
Schopenhauer was right) while zipping off her clothes. The seedy world of
blackmailers, strippers, and other low-life characters is now replaced by lik-
able show people and a likable ex-stripper socialite.
Placing Frank Sinatra in the title role removed the dancing component asso-
ciated with the role first played by Gene Kelly and in the revival by Harold
Lang. The non-singing and for the most part non-dancing Kim Novak played
Linda English. Novak, then at the peak of her popularity—one year before she
starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—and a major money earner for Colum-
bia pictures, gained additional national exposure when she appeared on the
July 29 cover of Time magazine shortly before the release of Pal Joey in Septem-
ber. Perhaps due to the star power of Sinatra and Novak, the film earned nearly
five million dollars, one of the ten highest grossing films of the year.
Appealing to a slightly older film audience, the role of Vera Simpson
was played by one of the most popular World War II pinups and the major
Columbia pictures star of the 1940s, Rita Hayworth. Hayworth herself had
been featured on both Time and Life covers in 1941, the latter in one of the
most famous photographs of the era (her image even appeared on an atomic
nuclear bomb dropped on Bikini Atoll shortly after World War II). In 1957,
she was a mature but still beautiful woman at thirty-nine and appropriate
in her new role as the older woman. “Zip” gave Hayworth the opportunity
to sing a suggestive but refined strip number without taking off more than
her gloves. Its referential gesture to her similar glove-strip in Gilda would
be familiar to anyone who had seen both films.28 Unfortunately, Hayworth,
the first of an exclusive group to have partnered with both Fred Astaire and
Gene Kelly, only dances a little with Sinatra here.
Not only is the Columbia 1957 Pal Joey bowdlerized, with little remain-
ing from Frank O’Hara’s lively dialogue. It also plays havoc with the score.
Nearly every song is either missing, buried in underscoring, or placed in a
new and misleading context. Songs retained include the following:
• “That Terrific Rainbow,” originally sung by the main showgirl

Gladys and now with Novak as Linda dubbed by Trudi Erwin
(about 5 minutes into the film).
• “A Great Big Town” (or “Chicago”) for the showgirls, but
only lasting a few seconds (about 9 minutes into the film). On
Broadway, Joey sang this song as an audition number to open
178
the show and the girls reprised the song at the opening of the
actual nightclub act, which featured “That Terrific Rainbow.”
Since the milieu was changed to San Francisco, the few
preserved lyrics did not reveal the earlier town’s identity.
• “Zip” for Vera (Hayworth) once known as “Vanessa the
undressa” (dubbed by Jo Ann Greer about 15 minutes into
the film). As noted earlier, in the stage version the song is
delivered by newspaper reporter Melba Snyder in act II.
• “I Could Write a Book” (about 25 minutes into the film). In the
stage version, this was the song Joey sang to Linda English
after spinning his yarn about the dog that was killed when Joey
was young. Onstage, the fictitious childhood dog was named
Skippy; in the film, the dog’s name is Snuffy and their stories
are similar. Onstage, Skippy stays in the pet store, but in the
film Snuffy remains a continuous presence. Much later, about
seventy minutes into the film, the song returns as a waltz which
sets up Linda’s striptease (stopped by Joey before it gets out of
hand long before Linda runs out of clothes to discard).29
• “Bewitched” (about 48 minutes into the film). The staged
context is changed in the film from a tailor shop where Vera is
outfitting Joey in style to Vera’s boudoir. This occurs not long,
we infer, after Vera and Joey have finished the early rounds of
their non-adulterous and monogamous love making. As a way
to stem the shock of moving from speech to song, Vera speaks
rather than sings the lyrics of the opening verse before, again
dubbed by Erwin, she sings the next part of the verse and the
chorus (she also spoke the verse of “Zip”). Some of the less
provocative lyrics she sings are not by Hart.
• “Pal Joey” (“What Do I Care for a Dame?”). Onstage Joey
dreams of his new club at the end of act I; in the film the dream
sequence, which will soon depict Vera and Linda along with
the music of “Bewitched,” occurs in the last four minutes of the
film (at about 83 minutes).30
Of these five songs and one fragment, which occasionally recur as under-
scoring, only one song is delivered by its rightful character (“Pal Joey”) and
only one song (“That Terrific Rainbow”) shares a context familiar from the
stage version. Other fragments of other songs from the great original Pal Joey
score appear as fragments, ironically as if to remind those who know the score
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Enchanted Evenings
well of what they are missing. These include “Do It the Hard Way” at the
beginning of the film, a brief orchestral statement of “Happy Hunting Horn”
(about 27 minutes and again 54 minutes into the film), orchestral underscoring
of “Plant You Now, Dig You Later” (at about 31 minutes), and “You Mustn’t
Kick It Around” for the orchestra (at 60 minutes). Spaced out during the film
to round out the decimated score are a small collection of hit Rodgers and
Hart songs, one from One Your Toes and two from Babes in Arms.
• “There’s a Small Hotel,” Joey (Sinatra) (On Your Toes, 1936) (11
minutes into the film)
• “The Lady Is a Tramp,” Joey, dancing with Vera (Hayworth)
(Babes in Arms, 1937) (41 minutes); a brief reprise returns late in
the film (73 minutes)
• “My Funny Valentine,” Linda’s strip number (Novak) (Babes in
Arms) (56 minutes into the film); a shorter version is reprised
by Joey on a sofa a few minutes later (61 minutes)
With the addition of “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “My Funny Valentine”
in their new homes, the least that can be said of Pal Joey as a film adapta-
tion is that it included one more song from Babes in Arms than the 1939 film
adaptation of this earlier, equally song-studded and richly crafted Broadway
1937 score. It’s a sad commentary on the gulf between the creative worlds
of Broadway and Hollywood in the 1950s that such a potentially golden
era of film musicals is instead tombstoned with many might-have-beens.
Happily, when the Golden Age of song was long past, in such television
dramas and movies as Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven (BBC, 1978) and
The Singing Detective (BBC, 1986), or Woody Allen’s original film musical
Everyone Says I Love You (Miramax, 1997)—and also prominently in most
of Allen’s richly musical comedy soundtracks from Manhattan’s Gershwin
tribute to Radio Days and Bullets over Broadway—filmmakers returned to
ancient Broadway melodies for inspiration and sometimes musically felici-
tous reinterpretation.
The Cradle Will Rock (1999)

The Cradle Will Rock (1937) inspired no Hollywood adaptations until in 1999
the left-leaning director and actor Tim Robbins gave the work considerable
popular exposure in a film that used Marc Blitzstein’s title and historic open-
ing night as a plot fulcrum. Robbins’s original script blends the making of
180
Cradle Will Rock, 1999 film. Marc Blitzstein (Hank Azaria at the piano)
is surprised to see Olive Stanton (Emily Watson) standing up from the
audience to sing the Moll’s song on opening night.
Cradle Will Rock, 1999 film. A closer view of Olive Stanton (Watson) singing
the Moll’s song from the audience on opening night.
181
Enchanted Evenings
Cradle Will Rock (without the The) with four other interweaving story lines.
As the end credits roll we learn that the conversations at the Dies Commit-
tee Hearings in the film, which might appear to be fictional, especially the
surrealistic debate about whether Christopher Marlowe was a communist,
were in fact “taken directly from the Congressional Record.” Throughout
the film Zelig-like parabolic fictional characters interact with historical ones.
For example, a major character in one of the subplots is the newly created
Tommy Crickshaw (Bill Murray), a conservative vaudeville ventriloquist
angry at the arty and (to him) shockingly socialistic Federal Theatre. The
character he teams up with to fight the communists, Hazel Huffman (played
by Joan Cusack), was based on an actual historical figure, an anti-communist
clerk employed by the WPA who testified against the Theatre for three days.
Hallie Flanagan, the real-life head of the Federal Theatre played by Cherry
Jones, was granted only six hours to reply to Huffman’s marathon of testi-
mony. The film points out this imbalance. Another invented character was
Aldo Silvano (John Turturro), an Italian American who opposed Mussolini’s
fascist regime and is consequently kicked out of his parents’ apartment
where he is living with his wife and family. Casting Silvano as the prin-
cipled Larry Foreman thus made an effective connection between life and
art within the complex plot world of the film.31
In addition to inventing or reinterpreting characters and situations,
the film takes the artistic liberty of compressing and conflating historical
events from the six years between 1932 and 1938 into the months between
the time Blitzstein was finishing his Cradle (fall 1936) and the evening of
its historic and dramatic premiere on June 16, 1937 (described simply as
“Summer 1937” in the script). The commission (by Nelson Rockefeller)
and destruction of a politically incendiary mural by Mexican artist Diego
Rivera (played in the film by the brilliant Panamanian Harvard-educated
attorney/actor/singer/songwriter Rubén Blades) in the new Rockefeller
Center actually happened, but in 1932–33. Since the Dies Hearings took
place in 1938, Huffman’s testimony did not actually play a role in the ter-
mination of federal funds and the closing of the Cradle’s scheduled theater.
In Robbins’s film, Flanagan’s abbreviated hearing, the obliteration of Rive-
ra’s mural commissioned and destroyed by Rockefeller (John Cusack), and
the opening night drama of Cradle all take place on the same fateful sum-
mer day.
Robbins’s Cradle Will Rock does not attempt to present a performance of
Blitzstein’s musical. Nevertheless, viewers hear more music from this show
over the course of the film’s 134 minutes than in several of the putative adap-
tations previously discussed in this chapter. Early in the film we see Blitzstein
(Hank Azaria) hard at work composing the opening, sung by Olive Stanton,
182
about whom little is known, as the Moll (Emily Watson). Olive is also the
first person we see in the film. In an effective but by necessity speculative
demonstration of life imitating art, the film begins as she wakes up in a
theater, an unemployed homeless street person who goes up to strange men
offering to sing a song for a nickel (early in the film viewers also see and
hear the character Blitzstein trying out the song based on this idea, “Nickel
under Your Foot”). The idea and the music come full circle when, during the
performance that concludes the film, Moll (played by Olive), finally sings
this plaintive melody. A sympathetic Huffman helps Olive find a job as a
stagehand for Project 891, now about to embark on the production of Cradle.
Although ineligible to act in the work, she is helped by John Adair (Jamey
Sheridan). Later, Adair plays the Gent, the man the Moll solicits in the musi-
cal and Olive beds in the film. Olive’s first song, the “Moll’s Song” which
opens with the words “I’m Checkin’ Home Now,” is heard again when
she auditions and continues seamlessly in the film as the time shifts to five
months later (where she sings the same song without improvement). Rein-
forcing Moll’s importance in the musical as well as dramatic components of
the film, both of her songs will return in the filmed version of the opening
night performance.
Before we arrive at this culminating moment, we also see and then hear
Blitzstein in Union Square conceiving yet another song, “Joe Worker.” In
a moment of magical realism, the song is overheard by the spirit of Bertolt
Brecht, who had inspired Blitzstein when he played “Nickel” for Brecht
in 1935, along with the ghost of Blitzstein’s wife and Brecht translator Eva
Goldbeck, who died of anorexia earlier in the year. As he allegedly did in
real life in 1935, Brecht in the film inspires Blitzstein to make his musical
address the reality that none of us, artists included, are immune to at least
metaphorical prostitution via moral dilemmas around money and patron-
age, encapsulated in the biblical adage, “the love of money is the root of
all evil.”
During its last portion the film focuses mainly on the Cradle performance,
albeit with occasional and brief cuts away to subplots. The film is faithful to
the spirit and many of the details of what happened that night, including
the banning of the performance onstage, and the twenty-block-long (one
mile) march uptown to the Venice Theater. In addition to most of the Moll’s
opening tune and her “Nickel under the Foot,” we hear announcements of
sample scenes, portions of dialogue, fragments of solo songs, and a harmo-
nious sextet belting out the phrase “We don’t want a union in Steeltown.”
The performance concludes with Larry Foreman’s powerful refusal to be
co-opted, or metaphorically prostituted, by Mr. Mister and the stirring title
song that concludes the show.
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Enchanted Evenings
Despite its historical and artistic veracities, those who were present do
not completely concur with Robbins about what actually happened on the
historic opening night. The actual proceedings began with some conciliatory
remarks by Houseman, who wanted to make it clear that the production
“was a gesture of artistic, not political, defiance.”32 Orson Welles then spoke
about his admiration for Blitzstein’s musical, informed those present about
what they would have seen if the scheduled theater “had not been taken
over by the Cossacks of the WPA,” and introduced the scene and the charac-
ters.33 In the film, Houseman (Cary Elwes) does not appear here and the two
introductions are reduced to a few sentences by the character playing Welles
(Angus Macfadyen), who acknowledges the unusual circumstances of the
performance, refers to the “sinister force at work” in the play that “frightens
people in Washington,” and then ironically introduces “the monster behind
The Cradle Will Rock: Mr. Marc Blitzstein.”34
Perhaps because what happened next was as dramatic as any fictional
portrayal could be, the next part of the film follows life quite closely. This is
how Houseman described these moments in his memoir, Run-Through:
The Cradle Will Rock started cold, without an overture. A short vamp
that sounded harsh and tinny on Jean Rosenthal’s rented, untuned
upright, and Marc’s voice, clipped, precise and high-pitched: “A
Street corner—Steeltown, U.S.A.” Then, the Moll’s opening lyrics:
[first three lines]. It was a few seconds before we realized that to
Marc’s strained tenor another voice—a faint, wavering soprano—
had been added. It was not clear at first where it came from, as
the two voices continued together for a few lines—[next three lines
of lyrics]. Then, hearing the words taken out of his mouth, Marc
paused, and at that moment the spotlight moved off the stage, past
the proscenium arch into the house, and came to rest on the lower
left box where a thin girl in a green dress with dyed red hair was
standing, glassy-eyed, stiff with fear, only half audible at first in the
huge theatre but gathering strength with every note.35
Houseman continues, relating that at the conclusion of the Moll’s song and
Blitzstein’s introductory “Enter Gent,” “a young man with a long nose rose
from a seat somewhere in the front section of the orchestra and addressed
the girl in green in the stage box.”36 The producer does not identify the man
as John Adair. This may be because the man cast as the Gent was actually
George Fairchild; Adair played the role of the Druggist, a character who does
not appear in the film. In the film, Blitzstein introduces the Gent with the
direction, “Enter a well-dressed gentleman,” and after a shot of Adair leaving
184
the theater, adds “on the make.” When there is no response, he then inter-
jects, “Enter me.” Adair’s film departure follows an invented but nonethe-
less heated disagreement between Olive and Adair over whether she should
challenge the actors’ union which, acting on federal instructions, forbade the
actors to participate onstage in this production. When the Olive of the film
sang her song, she was indeed once again on the street where we saw her in
the opening scene, although now she is on the street in a performance as well
as in real life. Adair’s departure from the theater confirmed his threat that if
she defied the union she would have to sleep somewhere else.
His dramatic exit stands as shorthand for what happened with the other
characters that evening. According to Blitzstein biographer Eric A. Gordon,
the real Adair, described by cast member Will Geer as a “rather reactionary
young man,” did not show up at all that night. Reverend Salvation, who
was not, as in the film, played by the African-American actor Canada Lee,
also did not sing.37 Houseman recalled that “Blitzstein played half a dozen
roles [Gordon says eight roles] that night, to cover for those who ‘had not
wished to take their lives, or rather, their living wage, into their hands.’
Other replacements were made spontaneously, on the spot.”38
The film treats a multitude of weighty political topics, including the con-
flict between unionism and management and communism and fascism. But
the main issue is the complex relationships between art, artists, politics, and
political theater. Although the political vantage point of the film leans left-
ward, it does make some effort to present other approaches to these issues.
Just as Cradle continues to generate strong critical reactions pro and con,
the film inspired a similarly wide span of responses ranging from positive
reviews in the New York Times, New Yorker, and National Review to a spirited,
unequivocally hostile attack by Terry Teachout in Commentary, a periodical
with strong anti-communist roots.39 At the conclusion of his indictment of
Robbins and Blitzstein, Teachout goes as far as to forge a link between this
pair of creators and the evils of Stalinism:
Evidently, in Robbins’s moral calculus, prostituting one’s art in the

name of the foremost mass murderer of modern times does not in
the least derogate from one’s idealism and courage, any more than
utter ignorance of the crosscurrents of cultural politics in the 30’s
disqualifies one from making a relentlessly preachy movie about
that decade’s complex history.40
Although the music of Cradle serves as a backdrop rather than the main
event, surprisingly few songs from the musical go entirely unheard in Rob-
bins’s film. And during the long credits, the soundtrack returns once again
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Enchanted Evenings
to “Nickel under the Foot,” sung by Polly Jean Harvey and Bob Ellis, fol-
lowed by a charming rendition of “Croon-Spoon,” unheard in the film, sung
by Eddie Vedder (the lead singer of the Pacific Northwest band Pearl Jam)
and Susan Sarandon (who in the film played Mussolini’s former mistress
Margherita Sarfatti). At the end of the credits the last sound we hear is the
bitter refrain of “Art for Art’s Sake.” It is not necessary to agree with Blitz-
stein or Robbins to be fascinated by their portrayals of an American world
roiled by the economic and political crises of the 1930s, so similar in some
ways to our own time.
Lady in the Dark and One Touch

of Venus
Lady in the Dark (1944)
Unfortunately, neither the film version of Lady in the Dark (Paramount 1944)
nor that of One Touch of Venus (Universal 1948) did much to maintain the
short-lived legacy of these two major contemporary Broadway successes.
While both films preserved the basic plot structure, the scores in each case
were severely truncated.
To compensate for time lost in largely preserving the play component
in the film adaptation of Lady in the Dark, a film lasting only 100 minutes,
the three dream sequences, half of the music of the stage show, were drasti-
cally cut. Only fractions of the Glamour Dream and Wedding Dream were
retained. The latter dream also offers a new song interpolation not by Weill,
“Suddenly It’s Spring” by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, as a replace-
ment for “This Is New,” the dramatic center of the original stage dream. The
Circus Dream was shorn of both Danny Kaye and “Tschaikowsky.”
Most egregious is the elimination of “My Ship.” Since its completion
is necessary to resolve Liza Elliott’s dramatic conflicts, its fragmentary
instrumental-only and hummed presentation throughout the film is never
resolved nor explained. According to bruce d. mcclung, who offers the most
substantial historical and critical overview of the film, the executive producer,
B. G. (Buddy) DeSylva, who earlier co-wrote the lyrics for the hit show of the
1920s, Good News! as part of the team of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson,
did not like the song (or much of the score, for that matter) and overruled
director Mitchell Leisen’s wishes.41 Despite its flaws, the film succeeded at
the box office where “it racked up $4.3 million, making it the fourth-largest
grossing film of 1944.”42 After that, its fate rivaled that of its stage successor
by retreating even more deeply into darkness and near oblivion.
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One Touch of Venus (1948)

The initial idea was a film musical starring the original Venus, Mary Martin,
and featuring the original dances of Agnes de Mille. Mary Pickford, a lead-
ing actress from the silent era and early talkies and a co-founder of United
Artists in 1919, had purchased the screen rights while the hit show was still
running in 1943. After a series of delays, the rights were sold to Universal in
1947 and the revamped film, directed by William A. Seiter and produced by
Seiter and Lester Cowan, was released in 1948 without the services of either
Martin or de Mille, or even much of Weill and Nash, a torso of the show’s
full form as seen on the Broadway stage.43 Perhaps the greatest disappoint-
ment is that viewers of this adaptation hear only three songs from the tune-
ful score, “Speak Low,” “That’s Him,” and “Foolish Heart,” none of which
are placed in their stage contexts and are only partially sung by their rightful
owners. To add injury to insult, in the song last named, the words of Ogden
Nash are replaced by those of Ann Ronell, including a new title (“Don’t Look
Now but My Heart Is Showing”). Even though the total film length adds
up to only eighty-two minutes, one will have to wait thirty-three minutes
before hearing the first of these songs, “Speak Low.” “That’s Him” appears
about forty-four minutes into the film, “Foolish Heart” (“Don’t Look Now”)
about sixteen minutes later, and a reprise of “Speak Low” appears five min-
utes before the end.
Although the story is roughly equivalent to the stage version, several of
the plot machinations are quite different. Rodney (renamed Eddie) Hatch
has been given a new male friend Joe Grant, played by one of the two
actors whose actual voices are heard on the soundtrack, Dick Haymes, a
popular singer of the day who played a major character in Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s State Fair three years earlier.44 Considering how little they
sing together, Rodney spends a considerable amount of time onscreen with
Venus (Ava Gardner). Onstage, Gloria (Olga San Juan, the other singer in the
film) disappears for long stretches; now she shares music of the film with
Joe, and, not surprisingly, they gradually fall in love. As in the stage version,
Rodney will end up with a Venus look-alike, this one by the name of Venus
Jones (also played by Gardner just as Mary Martin played Venus and her
earthling surrogate onstage) after the real Venus has returned to the land
of the Gods and her earthly remains have become re-solidified as a statue.
The popular Haymes naturally sings in two of the three songs, the second
of which, formerly a solo for Venus (Martin), is now a double duet in two
juxtaposed scenes, one between Eddie and Venus, the other between Joe and
Gloria, an interesting cinematic flourish. The other major new plot wrinkle
revolves around Whitfield (onstage Whitelaw) Savory’s gradual awareness
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Enchanted Evenings
that the love of his life is not Venus but his assistant Molly, played with char-
acteristic acerbic wit by Eve Arden.
The role of Hatch was assigned to the non-singing Robert Walker. In recent
years Walker had acted the role of two great songwriters, Jerome Kern in Till
the Clouds Roll By (1946) and Johannes Brahms in Song of Love (1947) and
was convincing as the milquetoast window dresser who brings the statue of
Venus to life with an impulsive kiss. Gardner’s voice was dubbed by Eileen
Wilson; three years later in the 1951 remake of Show Boat, Gardner’s Julie
LaVerne would be dubbed by Annette Warren on screen (although strangely
Gardner’s own voice is heard on the Show Boat soundtrack album). Not long
after making her first major film impression playing opposite Burt Lancaster
in The Killers (1946), based on a Hemingway story, Gardner was invariably
assigned to roles where physical beauty was a major prerequisite. Ephraim
Katz in The Film Encyclopedia offers the following description that might help
explain why Gardner was chosen to play Venus: “A sensuous, sloe-eyed
beauty, with a magnetic, tigresslike quality of sexuality, she replaced Rita
Hayworth in the late 40s as Hollywood’s love goddess [italics mine] and occu-
pied that position until the ascent of Marilyn Monroe in the mid-50s.”45
Although it remains not only a poor replica of the Venus book, lyrics, and
score seen and heard onstage four years earlier, the musical film Venus is not
without its charms as a story. Walker, Arden, and Tim Conway as Whitfield
carry off their respective characters with aplomb, Haymes sings his two songs
mellifluously, and the visual fluctuations between Venus/Eddie and Gloria/
Joe in “Foolish Heart” are welcome. The film also contains some chase scenes
that recall the early Keystone Cops routines, which may be attributed to the
fact that the film’s director William Seiter was himself once a Keystone Cop.
After experiencing the indignity of having songs deleted and, even worse,
replaced, in Lady in the Dark, composer Kurt Weill insisted on a contract
for One Touch of Venus that would include a “non-interpolation clause,” in
which no music by other composers could be inserted. As he explained in
a letter to his agent, Leah Salisbury, “All the songs in the picture have to be
taken from the score, and the underscoring has to be based on themes from
the original score.”46 The studio honored these conditions to the letter; the
end result was a film adaptation that contained only the shell of the original
score (and no new songs by others to fill in) and a few Weill songs inserted
here and there between long stretches of dialogue.
This survey of film adaptations from Show Boat to One Touch of Venus reveals
much about Hollywood’s response to their Broadway sources. The goal during
these years was to entertain and engage a film audience, not to offer a replica
188
of a sacrosanct stage artifact. Only the Nunn version of Porgy and Bess, which
appeared nearly sixty years later, comes close to depicting a Broadway stage
version, but even here the very completeness of the film, ironically, belies its
“authenticity” (a problematic term) since in 1935 attendees at the opera’s first
performances saw and heard a version of the work perhaps forty minutes
shorter. Most of the films discussed in this chapter present heavily revised
books and brutally abbreviated scores, sometimes with additional music by the
original or newly contracted composers, and sometimes with recycled music
from the original songwriter’s trunk placed in new contexts. It is probably not
an exaggeration to assert that with the exception of Show Boat, these adapta-
tions fall short of the best original films that use the music of the composers
and lyricists featured in act I of Enchanted Evenings. We will conclude this chap-
ter with a summary of other adaptations in relation to the original musicals
with scores by Kern, Porter, the Gershwins, and Rodgers and Hart.47
• KERN
Of this quartet, Kern was probably the most frequently adapted with rea-
sonable success. In fact, a number of films retained a significant amount of
his music, including The Cat and the Fiddle and Music in the Air in 1934 and
Sweet Adeline and Roberta in 1935.
• PORTER
We have already noted that the adaptation of Gay Divorce (renamed The Gay
Divorcée) salvaged only one song, “Night and Day.” Film adaptations of Some-
thing for the Boys and Mexican Hayride contained no songs by Porter; Paris and
Fifty Million Frenchmen confined Porter’s music to background noise; Let’s
Face It offered two songs; Dubarry Was a Lady, three; and Panama Hattie, four.
For worthy films with Porter’s music—prior to the 1953 adaptation of Kiss
Me, Kate discussed in chapter 14—one would have to turn to the original film
musicals Born to Dance (1936), Rosalie (1937), and Broadway Melody of 1940, and
the modern-day biopic De-Lovely (2004), the latter chock full of stylistically
updated Porter chestnuts starring Kevin Kline as the composer-lyricist.
• THE GERSHWINS
The films of George and Ira Gershwin were similarly disappointing as
Broadway adaptations. Strike Up the Band offers only the title tune. At least
the 1943 Girl Crazy, also starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, had
the sense to retain six of the 1930 original’s fourteen songs, plus the Gersh-
win hit originally composed in 1924 for Fred Astaire in Lady, Be Good!, “Fasci-
nating Rhythm.” Funny Face (1957), with Astaire reprising his original stage
role thirty years later, satisfies as a film musical, but with only five songs
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Enchanted Evenings
from the original, “Clap Yo’ Hands” from another show, three interpolated
song numbers by Roger Edens and Leonard Gershe, and a new scenario
and script, it falls far short as a reliable adaptation of the Gershwin musi-
cal as it appeared onstage. Fortunately, George lived long enough to com-
plete outstanding film scores the year he died (1937) for Shall We Dance with
Astaire and Rogers and Damsel in Distress with Astaire, George Burns and
Gracie Allen, and the non-dancing Joan Fontaine. Long after George’s death
his music and Ira’s lyrics served as the centerpiece for another fine original
musical, An American in Paris (1951), produced by Arthur Freed, directed by
Vincente Minnelli, to an award-winning screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, and
starring its choreographer Gene Kelly.
• RODGERS AND HART

Of the many films adapted from the stage musicals of Rodgers and Hart,
none rivaled the increasingly recognized classic original film Love Me Tonight
(1932), produced and directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Maurice
Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, and Charles Ruggles. Of the rest, Too Many
Girls, directed by its Broadway director George Abbott and starring four
members of the original stage cast, managed to salvage half of the score,
seven songs—if you have been counting, this is close to a record for film
adaptations. Girls also added a new instant classic by Rodgers and Hart,
“You’re Nearer,” and even kept much of the original libretto intact. Five of
the six songs from Rodgers and Hart’s Jumbo can be heard in the 1962 film,
which retains the basic plot and, twenty-seven years after its Broadway
debut, its original star, Jimmy Durante.
In the film adaptation of On Your Toes (Warner Bros. 1938) none of the
songs are sung, and only four tunes are heard in unobtrusive underscoring
(“There’s a Small Hotel,” “Quiet Night,” and “On Your Toes”). On the other
hand, Toes does contain the “Princesse Zenobia” and “Slaughter on Tenth
Avenue” ballets with the original choreography by George Balanchine and
featuring Vera Zorina. About thirty seconds of the latter can be seen in the
documentary Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds, but the film itself was
never released on either VHS or 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
190
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 contempo-
raneous 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.
191
•
Act II •
THE BROADWAY MUSICAL

AFTER OKLAHOMA!
chapter nine
CAROUSEL
The Invasion of the Integrated
Musical
W
orking under the premise that success begets success, Rodgers and
Hammerstein followed the phenomenal triumph ofOklahoma! (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 resis-
tance, 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 musi-
cal 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.”
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Enchanted Evenings
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 block-
buster in Sardi’s “toward the end of January, 1944.” The main obstacle for
Hammerstein was the Hungarian setting. When, the following week, the per-
sistent Helburn offered a more promising alternative locale in Louisiana, the
required dialect also proved to be “a disconcerting difficulty” for the libret-
tist. 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
196
Carousel
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 daugh-
ter 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 Rodgers] referred to this celestial
couple as Mr. and Mrs. God. . . .
Richard Rodgers, walking back to the hotel with his collaborator
afterwards, put it to Oscar Hammerstein bluntly:
“We’ve got to get God out of that parlor!”
Mild Oscar Hammerstein agreed.
“I know you’re right,” he said. “But where shall I put Him?”
“I don’t care where you put Him,” said Richard Rodgers. “Put
Him up on a ladder, for all I care, only get Him out of that parlor!”
So Oscar Hammerstein put Him up on a ladder. He discarded
the sitting room too, and put his deity into a brand new sequence.
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Enchanted Evenings
On a ladder in the backyard of heaven, He became the Star-Keeper,

polishing stars which hung on lines strung across the floor of infin-
ity, while a sullen Billy Bigelow looked and listened to his quiet
admonitions.4
Carousel’s premiere took place at the Majestic Theatre on April 19, and
the show closed a little more than two years later on May 24, 1947, after a
run of 890 performances. Following a successful national tour, Carousel began
another impressive run of 566 performances at London’s Drury Lane on June
7, 1950 (closing on October 13, 1951). Major New York revivals took place at
the New York City Center Light Opera in 1954, 1957, and 1967; at the Music
Theater of Lincoln Center in 1965; and in 1994 with an acclaimed New York
staging based on the Royal National Theater of Great Britain production.
Almost without exception Carousel opened to rave reviews. Neverthe-
less, most critics could not resist the temptation to compare the new work to
Oklahoma!, then beginning its third year on Broadway. Although an anony-
mous reviewer in the New York World-Telegram found “the distinct flavor of
‘Oklahoma!’ ” in “A Real Nice Clambake,” persistent rumors that the latter
song once belonged to the former and titled “A Real Nice Hayride,” are
unsubstantiated.5 Ward Morehouse’s review in the New York Sun is repre-
sentative in its conclusion that the laudatory Carousel could not quite match
the earlier masterpiece: “ ‘Carousel,’ a touching and affecting musical play,
is something rare in the theater. It’s a hit, and of that there can be no doubt.
If it is not the musical piece to challenge ‘Oklahoma’ for all-time honors it
is certainly one that deserves its place in the 44th Street block. The team of
Rodgers and Hammerstein will go on forever.”6
A handful of reviewers regarded the new musical more favorably than
its predecessor. According to John Chapman, “ ‘Carousel’ is one of the finest
musical plays I have seen and I shall remember it always. It has everything
the professional theatre can give it—and something besides: heart, integrity,
an inner glow.”7 Although reviewers then and now found the second-act
ballet too long, Robert Garland wrote that “when somebody writes a better
musical play than ‘Carousel,’ written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Ham-
merstein, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein will have to write it.”8
By the time it returned to New York in 1954 the climate of critical opin-
ion had shifted further, and Brooks Atkinson could now write that Carousel
“is the most glorious of the Rodgers and Hammerstein works.” Atkinson
continued: “Three of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows have had longer
runs than ‘Carousel.’ It is the stepchild among ‘Oklahoma!’ ‘South Pacific,’
and ‘The King and I.’ But when the highest judge of all hands down the
ultimate verdict, it is this column’s opinion that ‘Carousel’ will turn out to
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Carousel
be the finest of their creations. If it were not so enjoyable, it would probably

turn out to be opera.”9
Carousel would also remain the pride and joy of its creators. For Rod-
gers, especially, the second musical with Hammerstein stood as his personal
favorite among all his forty musicals. Without any false sense of modesty he
conveyed his reasons: “Oscar never wrote more meaningful or more moving
lyrics, and to me, my score is more satisfying than any I’ve ever written. But
it’s not just the songs; it’s the whole play. Beautifully written, tender without
being mawkish, it affects me deeply every time I see it performed.”10
The above critical reception and the judgment of its authors partially explains
why Carousel and not Oklahoma! was selected for examination in the present
survey. But given the importance attributed to Oklahoma! as the “Eroica” Sym-
phony of the American musical, the question “Why not Oklahoma!?” neverthe-
less lingers and needs to be addressed. The simple answer is that Oklahoma!’s
incalculable historical importance as the musical that changed all musicals is
equaled and arguably surpassed dramatically and musically by Carousel. Not
content to merely duplicate their earlier success, Rodgers and Hammerstein
in their second musical attempted to convey a still richer dramatic situation
with characters who were perhaps more complexly realized, through music,
than the inhabitants of the Oklahoma Territory.
Further, the artistic ambitions in Carousel are matched by a deeper rela-
tionship between music and drama. The integrated songs in Oklahoma! grow
naturally from the action and reflect each character’s idiosyncratic nature.
But, like Show Boat and Porgy and Bess before it and West Side Story after, the
music of Carousel develops action and explores nuances of characterization
that frequently transcend what the characters themselves understand.11 The
analysis that follows will suggest how Rodgers and Hammerstein’s imita-
tion may have surpassed (artistically if not in popularity) not only its model
but many other musicals that have had their two or more hours’ traffic on
the Broadway stage.
The “Bench Scene”

In several respects Julie Jordan, who moves us by her ability to see the good
qualities in her abusive husband, Billy Bigelow, and by her uncompromising
loyalty to his memory, bears a stronger kinship to Hammerstein’s Show Boat
heroine Magnolia Ravenal than to Oklahoma!’s Laurey. Even the message of its
central song, “What’s the Use of Wondrin,’ ” like that of Carousel as a whole,
echoes Hammerstein’s theme in Show Boat as embodied in the song “Can’t
Help Lovin’ Dat Man”: once fate brings two lovers together “all the rest is
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Enchanted Evenings
talk.” Julie shares with Magnolia rather than her Oklahoma cousin a common
destiny—to love a man who will eventually generate much unhappiness. Like
Magnolia, Julie will also meet the man she will love early in her show.12
Also like Magnolia and Ravenal, Julie and Billy—as well as Laurey
and Curley in the analogous “People Will Say We’re in Love”—describe
a hypothetical rather than an acknowledged love, at least at the outset of
their duets. The romantic leads in Show Boat, however, declare their love in
the waltz “You Are Love” at the emotional climax of act I and offer addi-
tional explanations for their feelings early in act II when they sing “Why Do
I Love You?” (at least before Hal Prince gave this song to Parthy in the 1994
Broadway revival). In contrast, Julie and Billy, more tragically, are unable to
express their love directly, not only in their first duet, “If I Loved You,” but
at any point in the drama, at least while Billy is alive.
In an extremely poignant moment that immediately follows Billy’s sui-
cide in act II, scene 2, Julie finally manages to share her feelings with her
deceased husband: “One thing I never told you—skeered you’d laugh at
me. I’ll tell you now—(Even now she has to make an effort to overcome her shy-
ness in saying it) I love you. I love you. (In a whisper) I love—you. (Smiles)
I was always ashamed to say it out loud. But now I said it. Didn’t I?”13
Outside Julie’s cottage three scenes later, Billy, whose presence is felt
rather than seen or heard, finally sings his love in the following reprise
(release and final A section) of “If I Loved You.” According to Rodgers, this
inspired new idea was, after the removal of Mr. and Mrs. God, the only
other major change made during the tryouts. “Longing to tell you, / But
afraid and shy, / I let my golden chances pass me by. / Now I’ve lost you; /
Soon I will go in the mist of day, / And you never will know / How I loved
you. / How I loved you.”14
Just as Kern conveys Magnolia’s penetration into Ravenal’s being by
merging her music with his, Rodgers finds subtle musical ways to let audi-
ences know that Julie’s love for Billy is similarly more than hypothetical.
During the opening exchange between Carrie and Julie, for example, Julie’s
friend makes it clear that she knows why Julie is behaving so “queerly.”
First, Carrie describes Julie’s recent habit of rising early and sitting silently
by the window. Julie lamely denies this circumstantial evidence of love sick-
ness (“I like to watch the river meet the sea”), but Carrie’s next and more
telling observation of Julie’s behavior on the job, the “Mill Theme” (Example
9.1) is incontrovertible: “When we work in the mill, weavin’ at the loom, / Y’
gaze absent-minded at the roof, / And half the time yer shuttle gets twisted
in the threads / Till y’can’t tell the warp from the woof !”15
Although Julie denies even this evidence with a “ ’Tain’t so!,” her strange-
ness, even more than Frankie’s in On Your Toes, cannot be attributed to
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Carousel
Example 9.1. The “Mill Theme”
tonsillitis or to the combination of pickles and pie à la mode: it’s got to be

love. The sensitive Carrie, now that Julie has a “feller,” can inform Julie of
her own romantic good fortune in being courted by the young entrepreneur
Enoch Snow. This time Julie does not attempt to deny Carrie’s presumption.
When Julie explains to Billy minutes later how she would behave, hypotheti-
cally, “if she loved him,” Rodgers and Hammerstein have her describe, again
to the “Mill Theme,” the behavior that Carrie has in fact already observed.
Julie’s denial of love may satisfy Billy, but it fails to convince either Carrie
or a knowing audience who has more than sufficient textual and musical
evidence to catch Julie in her self-deception.
The spark that will eventually set fire to Julie and Billy has already been lit in
the pantomimed prelude to act I.16 During this prelude we see that Billy “takes
his mind off his work” when he watches Julie and that she gains his atten-
tion in part by being the only person who does not “sway unconsciously with
the rhythm of his words.” The description of the prelude’s action points out
(parenthetically) that “Billy’s attitude to Julie throughout this scene is one of
only casual and laconic interest.” Although he makes a point of finding the last
place on the carousel for Julie, he then “dismisses her from his mind.” When
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Enchanted Evenings
he later waves “patronizingly,” the omniscient description notes that “it means
nothing to him,” but that “it means so much to her that she nearly falls!”17
“If I Loved You,” the climactic moment in the following Bench Scene (act I,
scene 1), reinforces these discrepancies in emotional intensity and awareness
between the principals. Julie sings as a young woman already in love; Billy,
although he admits to having noticed Julie at the carousel “three times before
today” (she has actually been there far more often) sings, if not about a hypo-
thetical love, about a love that he does not yet comprehend. Thus Billy can
truthfully assert that if he loved Julie he would be “scrawny and pale,” and
“lovesick like any other guy.” So far none of these symptoms has appeared.
In fact, Billy does not realize until act II, scene 5, what Mrs. Mullin, the jeal-
ous, older, and less desirable carousel proprietress, has understood only too
well as early as the prelude. Already in the pantomimed introduction Mrs.
Mullin has demonstrated that, like Julie, she is enamored of Billy. Also in the
prelude Mrs. Mullin has observed his unique attraction to Julie. We learn
later that Mrs. Mullin correctly perceived that this peculiar young woman
posed a serious threat both to her business—the other young women would
Carousel, prelude to act I. Jan Clayton and John Raitt on the carousel (1945).
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Carousel
patronize the carousel less ardently if Billy were romantically attached—and

to any more personal relationship she might enjoy with her favorite barker.
Although Rodgers and Hammerstein have the two love-struck mill
workers, Carrie and Julie, sing the same tune, “You’re a Queer One, Julie
Jordan,” Rodgers musically differentiates the sharp character distinctions
drawn by Hammerstein. He does this by contrasting Carrie’s even eighth-
note rhythms (“You are quieter and deeper than a well”) with Julie’s dotted
eighths and sixteenths (“There nothin’ that I keer t’choose t’ tell”) (Example
9.2a); revealingly, Billy will whistle Julie’s dotted rhythms rather than Car-
rie’s even ones (Example 9.2b). A clue to Rodgers’s intention might be found
in his autobiography, Musical Stages, where he discusses how “It Might as
Well Be Spring,” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein film musical State Fair
(Example 9.2c), serves as “a good example of the way a tune can amplify the
meaning of its lyric.”18 Rodgers continues: “The first lines are: ‘I’m as restless
as a willow in a wind storm, / I’m as jumpy as a puppet on a string.’ Taking
its cue directly from these words, the music itself is appropriately restless
and jumpy.”19
Example 9.2. “Jumpy” rhythms in Carousel and State Fair

(a) Julie and Carrie Sequence (Carousel)
(b) Scene Billy and Julie (Carousel)
(c) “It Might As Well Be Spring” (State Fair)
(d) Julie and Carrie Sequence (Carousel)
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Enchanted Evenings
Clearly, Julie’s dotted rhythms when she sings “There’s nothin’ that I keer
t’ choose t’ tell,” almost identical in pitch to Carrie’s “You are quieter and
deeper than a well,” successfully contrasts Julie’s restlessness with Carrie’s
stability. When Julie tells Carrie that she likes “to watch the river meet the
sea” (Example 9.2d), Rodgers presents a dotted melodic line filled with wide
leaps that are unmistakably “jumpy as a puppet on a string.” Once Rod-
gers has established Julie’s sharp rhythmic profile in her opening exchange
with Carrie, he shows Julie’s influence over her friend when Carrie adopts
dotted rhythms to conclude their sung exchange (“And as silent as an old
Sahaira Spink!”). More significantly, Julie’s dotted rhythms return when
Billy reprises “You’re a queer one” after Carrie’s “Mister Snow” and Julie
repeats her dotted jumpy melodic line to the words “I reckon that I keer t’
choose t’ stay.”
In the closing moments of the first act, Billy’s imaginary daughter, appro-
priately enough, will share Julie’s restlessness and her dotted rhythms. By
the time Billy sings the “My little girl” portion of his “Soliloquy,” dotted
rhythms have acquired a strong association with Julie, and by extension her
as-yet-unborn daughter, Louise. Thus when Billy imagines his daughter as
“half again as bright” and a girl who “gets hungry every night,” Rodgers
has the future father sing Julie’s dotted rhythms. True to her character, in the
second act Julie’s “What’s the Use of Wondrin’ ” also makes persistent use of
dotted rhythms. On this occasion, however, Rodgers captures Julie’s newly
acquired inner peace when he replaces with more sedate scales the jumpy
melodic leaps that characterized her conversations with Carrie and Billy in
act I, scene 1.
Rodgers also gives dramatic meaning to another distinctive rhythm in
Carousel: the triplet. The main association between triplets and the prin-
cipal lovers occurs when each attempts to answer what would happen if
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Carousel
they loved the other in the song “If I loved you.” The “hidden” triplets in
their response to this subjunctive (Example 9.3a) reinforce the unreality and
hesitation that matches the lines “Time and again I would try to say” and
“words wouldn’t come in an easy way.” Not only do these words appear on
the weak beats (second and fourth) of their measures–in marked contrast to
the triplets in “Many a New Day” from Oklahoma! (Example 3.1b)—they are
invariably tied to the stronger beats (first and third).
Of course, the imagined musical responses of Julie and Billy nevertheless
reveal the truth that Julie is hiding from Billy and Billy from himself: the two
misfits in fact are already in love. Although their desire for verbal communi-
cation is great (“Time and again I would try to say all I’d want you to know”
or “Longing to tell you, but afraid and shy”), the pair must rely on music to
express their deepest feelings. Words do not “come in an easy way.” Most
poignantly, as if to reflect the painful truth of the few words they do sing,
within a few months Billy indeed will be leaving Julie “in the mist of day.”
Just as Billy adopts Julie’s dotted rhythms in his “Soliloquy,” he will adopt
in this central (and earliest-composed song) the triplets that he shared with
Julie in “If I Loved You.” In contrast to the hesitant tied triplets of his duet
with Julie, however, Billy in his private “Soliloquy” sings “Many a New
Day”-type triplets that stand alone when he envisions having a daughter
(compare Example 9.3b with Example 3.1b).20 After Billy’s death, triplets also
Example 9.3. Triplets in “If I Loved You” and “Soliloquy”

(a) “If I Loved You”
(b) “Soliloquy”
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Enchanted Evenings
provide a brief but distinctive contrast in the release of Julie’s “What’s the
Use of Wondrin’ ” to the ubiquitous dotted rhythms of the main melody.
It makes musical sense, of course, for Rodgers to fill his prelude with waltzes
to accompany the swirling of the carousel. But marches and polkas would be
equally suitable. Rodgers knew, however, that waltzes, although capable of
expressing a variety of meanings and emotions, had been associated with love
ever since Viennese imports had dominated Broadway in the decade before
World War I.21 The most familiar waltz musical then and now was and is Lehár’s
The Merry Widow, the work that launched an operetta invasion on Broadway
in 1907. But waltzes had also figured prominently in 1920s operetta. Several
of these featured lyrics by Hammerstein himself, including “You Are Love” in
Show Boat. Later, in The King and I’s “Hello, Young Lovers” and South Pacific’s “A
Wonderful Guy” Rodgers gives Anna Leonowens and Nellie Forbush waltzes
when they sing of love, and Nellie’s temporarily rejected suitor Emile De Becque
sings a waltz lamenting a lost love in “This Nearly Was Mine.”
In Carousel waltzes are associated either with the carousel itself, as in the
procession of the several sharply defined waltzes that make up the panto-
mimed prelude, or in the chorus of community solidarity that character-
izes the main tune of “A Real Nice Clambake.” Rodgers and Hammerstein
therefore match the absence of directly expressed love between Billy and
Julie by not allowing them to sing a waltz. Only when Billy sings his succes-
sions of triplets in his “Soliloquy” does Rodgers suggest a waltz (Example
9.4a), a suggestion that is reinforced with a melodic fragment identical to the
melody of the final carousel waltz (Example 9.4b). Characteristically, Billy
must keep his waltzes, as well as his expression of love, to himself.
Rodgers and Hammerstein and the

Integrated Musical
As early as the 1920s, Rodgers strove to create musicals in which songs
were thoroughly integrated into a dramatic whole. In his finest efforts with
Hart, including On Your Toes and Pal Joey, and in his first collaboration
with Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, Rodgers often succeeded in making the songs
flow naturally from the dialogue and express character. But it was not until
Carousel that Rodgers created a thoroughly unified musical score which also
achieved a truly convincing coordination (i.e., integration) between music
and dramatic action. Earlier, in On Your Toes, Pal Joey, and Oklahoma! Rod-
gers used the technique of thematic transformation for dramatic purposes,
but the resulting musical unity did not always reinforce a drama generated
by musical forces.
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Carousel
Example 9.4. “Soliloquy” and “The Carousel Waltz” (fifth waltz)

(a) “Soliloquy”
(b) “The Carousel Waltz” (fifth waltz)
In Carousel, many musical details, including the subtle reuse and transfor-
mation of rhythms that correspond to musical characters previously noted,
frequently support dramatic details and generate dramatic themes. Some of
these details serve more a musical than a dramatic purpose in their integra-
tion of disparate sections. For example, the parallelisms between the musical
phrases that Carrie uses to describe Julie (“You are quieter and deeper than
a well”) and Mr. Snow (“He comes home ev’ry night in his round-bottomed
boat”) in the opening scene might be considered a musically meaningful but
dramatically irrelevant unifying detail.
On the other hand, the primary accompaniment of “If I Loved You,” in
which three arpeggiated eighth notes follow an eighth rest, foreshadows
the less breathless collection of four arpeggiated eighth notes that mark the
first half of most measures of “Two Little People” (a melody which also not
incidentally exhibits several prominent quarter-note triplets).22 The musi-
cal link between the accompaniments of “If I Loved You” and “Two Little
People” (Example 9.5a and b) shows up more clearly in the holograph man-
uscript on deposit at the Library of Congress, where the two songs share
the key of C major.23 Even those who refuse to see the accompaniment of
“If I Loved You” as a foreshadowing of the accompaniment to “Two Little
People” might acknowledge its connection with “You’ll Never Walk Alone”
(Example 9.5c). In this song the arpeggiated eighth-note figure is now con-
tinuous, not only for an entire measure but for nearly the entire song (Rod-
gers breaks the pattern in the final four measures). “If I Loved You” and
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Enchanted Evenings
“Two Little People” demonstrate the unity between Billy and Julie; “You’ll
Never Walk Alone” signifies musically as well as dramatically that neither
of these star-crossed lovers will walk alone as long as Julie carries Billy in
her memory.24
Example 9.5. Arpeggiated accompaniments

(a) “If I Loved You”
(b) “Two Little People”
(c) “You‘ll Never Walk Alone”
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Carousel
Rodgers and Hammerstein also manage to convey a musical correspon-

dence that matches the dramatic contrasts between two pairs of contrast-
ing romantic leads (de rigueur in musicals for the next twenty years): Billy
Bigelow and Julie Jordan on one end of the spectrum, Enoch Snow and Carrie
Pipperidge on the other. In stark contrast to Billy (a baritone), Enoch (a tenor)
is a man who plans ahead, whether he is building a fleet of herring boats or a
fleet of children. With his irritating, self-satisfied laugh Enoch is reminiscent
of Laurey’s silly rival Gertie in Oklahoma! and embodies the negative as well
as the positive consequences of conventionality and practicality.
When he gives Carrie flowers, Enoch, the builder and planner, gives her a
package of geranium seeds to plant rather than the beautiful but ephemeral
real thing. And when he tells Julie that he likes to “plant and take keer” of
flowers, Julie replies that Billy “likes t’ smell ‘em,” an impractical romantic
trait that endeared the carousel barker to her in their first scene together.
By the latter part of act II, Enoch has metamorphosed from an overbearing
but essentially likable hard-working man with lofty plans for his sardine
business and his family to an insufferable, condescending, and genuinely
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Enchanted Evenings
unsympathetic character. Unfortunately, his fleet of children are created in

his image. Further, in opposition to Carrie’s open appreciation for the less
savory entertainments witnessed on their trip to New York, the pure-
as-snow Enoch (the name is also uncomfortably close to eunuch) suggests
that she discuss the Shakespeare play instead. Enoch’s surreptitious visit to
the burlesque house (where he runs into Carrie) adds hypocrisy to a grow-
ing list of negative characteristics, even if this action allows him a human
vice that audiences might relate to.
In an age increasingly and justifiably less tolerant of wife-beating in any
form and for any reason, Billy might be considered a much less wonderful
guy than he was in 1945 (certainly than 1873), even if Rodgers and Hammer-
stein’s Billy is less abrasive than Molnár’s Liliom. Although his predilection
for violence is indefensible—to satisfy his fragile ego he hits Julie because
she is on the right side of their arguments—it is significant as part of the
fantasy that his blows do not hurt either Julie or later Louise. In fact, when
he slaps his daughter it feels like a kiss.
Without condoning Billy’s actions Hammerstein seems to be telling us
that other forms of abuse might take an even greater toll. By the end of act II,
Mr. Snow’s verbal abuse and condescension have at least partially stifled his
formerly spunky bride, whereas Julie Bigelow never fears to stand up to her
husband. When Mr. Snow and Carrie glorify their conventional and quotid-
ian life in their duet, “When the Children Are Asleep,” it is difficult not to
notice that Enoch’s love for Carrie is based on her maintaining a conven-
tional image as the “little woman.” Billy and Julie may each lose their jobs
within minutes of their meeting, certainly a bad omen for their future stabil-
ity, but their inarticulate and unexpressed love contains a richness lacking in
the conventional courtship and marriage of Enoch and Carrie.
On the surface Enoch and Carrie conclude their act I duet “When the Chil-
dren Are Asleep” in a close harmony that befits their harmonious image of
marital bliss. Nevertheless, this happiness depends in large part on Carrie’s
willingness to overlook the fact that Mr. Snow makes all the plans for the
two of them. Snow also adds musical injury to emotional insult by interrupt-
ing Carrie’s turn at the chorus, ironically with the words “dreams that won’t
be interrupted.” Billy may be a surly bully who occasionally strikes his wife
offstage, but he never interrupts Julie when they sing. Unlike Snow, Billy
allows his future bride to complete her song.25 Perhaps more significantly,
when he sings by himself, Billy allows Julie’s character—musically depicted
by dotted rhythms and triplets—to infiltrate his thoughts and become a part
of him. The pretentiousness of Mr. Snow and his fleet of nine offspring may
cause many in the audience to take pity on Carrie for having so many chil-
dren, one more than she had agreed to when Snow presented his blueprint
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Carousel
in the verse of “When the Children Are Asleep.” Given the choice of nega-
tives, it is certainly possible that one might prefer the fuller albeit deeply
troubled lives of Billy, Julie, and, after Billy’s death, their daughter Louise,
to the deceptively happily-ever-after, rudely interrupted American dream of
Mr. and Mrs. Snow and their brood.
Since revivals say as much about directors and their audiences as they
do about the works being revived, it is not surprising that the Carousel of
the 1990s emphasizes the show’s “dark side,” which was very dark indeed
for the 1940s. It is also not surprising that the primary means to convey this
dark side and thereby establish the work’s modernity and contemporary rel-
evance is through staging. In a bold rethinking of the work, director Nicho-
las Hytner took the liberty of opening his Carousel at the Vivian Beaumont
Theater in Lincoln Center on March 24, 1994, not with the amusement park
but at the Bascombe Cotton Mill. In this new setting (underscored musically
by the “moderato” introduction to the sequence of fast waltzes) audiences
could for the first time watch the young women mill workers “gaze absent-
minded at the roof” and perhaps also at the large clock about to strike six
o’clock. “As the waltz gains momentum,” wrote Howard Kissel of the New
York Daily News, “carousel horses begin circling the stage, the top of the
carousel lowers into place, and the girls find release riding up and down
under the admiring gaze of the handsome barker, Billy Bigelow. It takes
your breath away.”26
Reviewers were almost unanimous in praising “the most dazzling stag-
ing this musical is ever going to receive.”27 Two critics were even moved
to repeat the old joke about leaving a show “humming the scenery.” Oth-
ers singled out the multiracial casting. Enoch and Carrie were a mixed-race
couple in both the London and New York revivals; in a stylistic as well as a
racial crossover, the role of Nettie was sung by the African American Shirley
Verrett, a major opera star in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Hytner’s staging also intensified Billy’s more sinister side. For example,
no longer does Billy slap his daughter’s hand when he returns to earth, he
slaps her face. Thankfully, most critics, while rightly repulsed by a roman-
ticized wife-beating hero who gains salvation (even though he does not get
to sing his powerful musical plea, “The Highest Judge of All,” in the second
act), refused to confuse the message with the messenger. In the words of
medieval scholar John Boswell, “To cite obscenity is not to be obscene.”28
In any event, Edwin Wilson concludes in the Wall Street Journal that “in the
end, it is not Julie who can redeem Billy, but the musical alchemy of Richard
Rodgers’s score.”29
In Musical Stages Rodgers speaks of a rhyming and rhythmic dialogue
used in Mamoulian’s films Love Me Tonight and The Phantom President in
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Enchanted Evenings
1932 and the next year in Hallelujah, I’m a Bum. Rodgers, who preferred the
term “musical dialogue” to describe the use of rhymed conversation with
musical accompaniment, wrote that its purpose was “to affect a smoother
transition to actual song” and to become “an authentic part of the action.”30
Twelve years later Rodgers transferred the device of “musical dialogue” to
the stage to begin the Julie and Carrie sequence. In this new context the
two friends begin each phrase with the rhythmic signature of Julie’s name
before it develops into a melodic theme, thus adding one additional layer to
the dialogue-(spoken) verse-(musical speech) chorus (the main tune) pro-
gression from speech to song familiar from most theater songs of the 1920s
and 1930s. By the time Billy arrives, her motive underscores their conversa-
tion before they even begin to sing. In the course of the scene the rhythm of
Julie’s name becomes the foundation for a series of questions (three or four
syllables each) that Billy asks her about her love life: “Where’d you walk?,”
“In the woods?,” “On the beach?,” and “Did you love him?”
Also in his autobiography Rodgers reveals his sensitivity to potential
word painting. In the discussion of “It Might as Well Be Spring” noted ear-
lier and illustrated in Example 9.2c, Rodgers concludes that “since the song
is sung by a young girl who can’t quite understand why she feels the way
she does, I deliberately ended the phrase [“I’m as jumpy as a puppet on a
string”] on the uncertain sound of the F natural (on the word ‘string’) rather
than on the more positive F sharp.”31
Rodgers left it up to others to demonstrate how the musical details in
Carousel support the lyrics and the libretto and create musical unity, and
how such details create subtle correspondences between music, character,
and drama. Nevertheless, his description of “musical dialogue” in Love Me
Tonight and his analysis of his text-setting objectives in “It Might as Well Be
Spring” reveal that Rodgers was fully conscious of how nuances can help a
theater composer to achieve an artistic goal. In the light of his autobiogra-
phy, a discussion of how dotted rhythms, triplets, and arpeggiated accom-
panimental figures reveal greater dramatic truths appears to be grounded in
reality.32 Rodgers is the first to admit that a number of his musicals created
with Hart do not even aspire to, much less achieve, the goals he first enunci-
ated in the late 1920s with Dearest Enemy and Peggy-Ann. His primary desire
throughout his extraordinary career, however, was to create a musical the-
ater in which the songs belong to their characters and determine their place
within the dramatic action, and a musical theater in which dialogue, song,
and dance are unified and integrated. These ideals did not suddenly appear
with Oklahoma! and Carousel. After developing his vision and evolving tech-
nique as a dramatic composer with Hart, Rodgers found a collaborator who
fully embraced the integrated ideal. Together, Rodgers and Hammerstein
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Carousel
were a winning combination that forged a living and posthumous legacy

of popular commercial works and a critical stature unmatched by any other
body of work in the history of the American musical.
After the death of his second collaborator, Rodgers, who had by necessity
ghost-written lyrics for Hart, decided to write his own lyrics for an entire
show. The result, the biracial romance No Strings (1962) with Diahann
Carroll and Richard Kiley in the principal roles, turned out to be Rodgers’s
final success (580 performances), albeit a modest one by the standards of
Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music.
His next show, collaboration with Hammerstein’s lyricist protégé Stephen
Sondheim, produced the disappointing, if underrated, Do I Hear a Waltz? in
1965 (220 performances).
Rodgers remained active to the end. In the 1970s he managed to mount
three final shows on Broadway: Two by Two (1970), with lyrics by Martin
Charnin and starring Danny Kaye as Noah (343 performances); Rex (1976),
with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and starring Nicol Williamson as Henry VIII
(49 performances); and I Remember Mama (1979), with lyrics by Charnin and
Raymond Jessel and starring Liv Ullmann and George Hearn (108 perfor-
mances).33 Less than four months after his fortieth and final musical closed,
Rodgers died on December 30, 1979.
Because they float at the center of the mainstream, the convention-
shattering features of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s adaptations of literary
sources with their carefully constructed subplots (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South
Pacific, and The King and I) seem less apparent than their more experimental
and less successful works with original books. Among the latter are Allegro
(1947), with its Greek chorus and abstract sets, and the back stager Me and
Juliet (1953), in which audiences could see on- and offstage events simulta-
neously.34 Just as it is often difficult for present-day listeners to appreciate
the iconoclasm of the less noisy modernists (for example, the revolutionary
Debussy), it requires a special effort in the post-Sondheim and Lloyd Web-
ber era to understand just how unconventional and innovative Rodgers and
Hammerstein musicals really were. Here is a glimpse of what was innova-
tive (if not unprecedentedly new) in three of their shows, a body of work
which helped to establish future conventions:
OKLAHOMA! (1943) eschews the usual opening chorus (or singer

accompanied by an orchestra) and instead opens with a woman
churning butter alone onstage and the hero singing “Oh, What a
Beautiful Morning” (without even a piano to back him up) off-
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Enchanted Evenings
stage. It also presents perhaps the first genuine, albeit pathetic, vil-
lain who dies in a struggle with a hero, and its full-length dream
ballet moves several steps beyond On Your Toes in its integration of
dance into the plot.
SOUTH PACIFIC (1949) offers the first major middle-aged romantic

hero played by the first major defector from the Metropolitan Opera
(Ezio Pinza). The younger romantic secondary male character dies,
and the central romantic leads sing “Twin Soliloquies” to themselves
“silently.” The drama is conveyed through rapid and seamless scene
shifts, and, most provocatively, the musical seriously explores the
causes of racial prejudice in the song “Carefully Taught.”
THE KING AND I (1951), based at least loosely on a true story

and real people, is the first major musical in which the characters
(if not the cast) are mostly Asian, a foreign language is conveyed
by instruments rather than by speech, the principals never kiss
and touch only once, when they are dancing, and the central male
character dies at the end (and, unlike Billy Bigelow, stays dead).
Carousel (1945) was no less daring. It revolves around an unsympathetic

character (when he is not singing) who hits his wife, sings a “Soliloquy”
for nearly eight minutes before attempting a robbery, dies by suicide, and
hits his daughter when he returns to earth (from purgatory) fifteen years
later. Musicals of various types after Oklahoma! and Carousel would con-
tinue to be remembered by their songs, of course, but from now on their
revivability would usually depend on integrated and more coherent books.
Although by no means did they invent the so-called integrated Broadway
musical (often referred to as the “sung play”), or even always adhere to the
elusive integrated ideal, more than anyone else Rodgers and Hammerstein
can be praised (or blamed) for demonstrating in their optimistic, home-
spun, and sentimental shows the commercial potential of the Rodgers and
Hammerstein musical.
214
chapter ten
KISS ME, KATE

The Taming of Cole Porter
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 man-
aged 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),
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Enchanted Evenings
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 recogni-
tion 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 per-
suaded 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 Broad-
way 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 dif-
ficulty posed by the intimidating example of Rodgers and Hammerstein:
“The librettos are much better, and the scores are much closer to the libret-
tos 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 Can-
Can 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 Okla-
homa! and Carousel appears amid the extensive unpublished manuscript mate-
rial 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
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Kiss Me, Kate
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 work-
ing 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 a recent convert to the somewhat heretical
notion of setting Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew musically, to convince
her former collaborator on Leave It to Me that a Shakespeare musical would
not be “too esoteric, too high-brow for the commercial stage.”7 In contrast to
his modus operandi in Anything Goes and his other pre–Rodgers and Ham-
merstein musicals in which an often tenuous relationship existed between
the songs and the librettos, the extant manuscript evidence reveals that from
the time he began work on Kiss Me, Kate Porter was greatly concerned with
creating a musical that integrated music with the book.
Also in contrast to Anything Goes, whose second act was barely a gleam
in the eyes of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse at the time of their first
rehearsal and with deletions and substitutions continuing into the Broad-
way run, Kiss Me, Kate could boast a completed book by the end of May 1948
before auditions would begin the following month.8 Although much would
be altered during auditions and rehearsals (between May and November),
by the Philadelphia tryouts on December 2, Kiss Me, Kate as we know it
today was nearly set. As Spewack reports:
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Enchanted Evenings
I knew Cole had come through brilliantly. I knew what I had done
and what Sam [co-librettist and spouse Samuel Spewack] had
done was right. We had nothing to change. I knew it so I didn’t
have to be superstitious. In the history of American musicals this is
the only one where they didn’t have to touch a scene or a song. In
rehearsals, changes were made. I wrote three versions, but I knew
eventually we’d go back to the first one—and we did. There were
disagreements over “Why Can’t You Behave?” and over “Bianca,”
but the disagreements were all ironed out before we left town.9
After four weeks to “rehearse and rehearse,” Kiss Me, Kate opened at
the New Century Theatre on December 30, 1948, with nearly unequivocal
endorsements from New York City reviewers.
When discussing the dramatic merits of Anything Goes (chapter 3) it was
proposed that since Sir Evelyn Oakleigh does not sing, he does not deserve a
woman like Reno Sweeney (Ethel Merman) who sings such hits as “I Get a Kick
out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Anything Goes,” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” At
the very least, Sir Evelyn’s non-singing status created a dramatic problem that
future revivals tried to assuage. In Kiss Me, Kate the musically silent character
does not get the girl. Fred Graham’s rival, the powerful Washington diplomat
Harrison Howell who, like Sir Evelyn, remains songless, gets caught napping
and ends up barefoot on Fred’s wedding day. Petruchio/Fred, who sings more
songs than Kate/Lilli Vanessi, not only deserves to get a tamed Katherine at
the end of the Shrew play, but he also gets a reformed spouse in real life.
It was also previously noted that Porter attempted to convey character
musically in Anything Goes. Not only does Porter characterize his star Reno
(Merman) with catchy syncopations and uncomplicated harmonies but he
also conveys her spunky disregard for convention by having her sing triplets
that clash with her duple meter, first and most consistently in “I Get a Kick
Out of You” and later in “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” Once he makes this associa-
tion, Porter then demonstrates how Hope Harcourt becomes more like the
star when she adopts Reno’s rhythmic signature in her own “Gypsy in Me.”
Not surprisingly, in the wake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and
Carousel Porter made a still greater effort in Kiss Me, Kate to channel music’s
power to establish character. He does this most noticeably by distinguishing the
Shrew players from the Baltimore players. The former are given musical char-
acteristics loosely associated with music of the Italian Renaissance. Bianca and
her suitors are given an a cappella pseudo-madrigal in “Tom, Dick or Harry,”
the bluesy “Why Can’t You Behave?” is transformed into a Renaissance dance
(the pavane), and several of the Shrew songs display the long-short-short figure
( ) characteristic of the sixteenth-century Italian canzona.10
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Kiss Me, Kate
Example 10.1. “We Open in Venice” (closing orchestral tag) and “Miserere”
from Verdi‘s Il Trovatore (act 4)
(a) “We Open in Venice” (closing orchestral tag)
(b) “Miserere” from Verdi‘s Il Trovatore (act 4)
Porter’s Italian evocations are not confined to the Renaissance. One

nineteenth-century appropriation occurs in the orchestral tag to “We Open
in Venice” (Example 10.1), where he quotes the opening of the “Miserere”
from Verdi’s Il Trovatore (act 4). Perhaps Porter intended a musical pun
(the “misery” of an endless road tour and its associations with Verdi’s
fourteenth-century Spanish troubadour, Manrico) or perhaps he simply
wanted to link a classic playwright with a classic Italian opera composer.11
Porter adopts a more contemporary Italian flavor in “I Sing of Love” and
“Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” and a more generalized Latin beguine
character in “Were Thine That Special Face,” again to distinguish the Shrew
numbers from the more recognizably American Baltimore numbers. Rep-
resentative American vernacular characteristics include the show biz and
jazzy quality of “Another Op’nin,’ Another Show,” the jazzy “Too Darn
Hot,” the satire of Bowery waltzes in “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” and
the thirty-two-bar song form of a popularly styled ballad, “So in Love.”
219
Enchanted Evenings
Example 10.2. “Tom, Dick or Harry”

(a) minor mode
(b) major mode
In his analysis of Kiss Me, Kate, Joseph P. Swain notes Porter’s technique of
moving from the major mode to the minor mode or vice versa to distinguish
the Padua songs from their Baltimore counterparts.12 Indeed, with one excep-
tion (“I’m Ashamed That Women Are So Simple”) the texted songs sung in
Padua juxtapose major and minor in dramatically purposeful ways. In “Tom,
Dick or Harry” Porter distinguishes each suitor’s past accomplishments from
their rosy description of Bianca’s future if she were to marry one of them by
the simple juxtaposition of minor and major mode (Example 10.2). Similarly,
Petruchio at the conclusion of “Were Thine That Special Face” moves from
the minor to the major mode to capture the optimism of “then you’ll be mine,
all mine” that concludes the song. In Petruchio’s “Where Is the Life That Late
I Led?” Porter contrasts the life of the carefree bachelor in the main chorus
Example 10.3. “We Open in Venice”

(a) minor mode
(b) major mode
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Kiss Me, Kate
(major mode) with a mixture of minor and major modes that conveys his bit-
tersweet nostalgia for the women he must now relinquish as a married man.
Thus, in the slower second portion of the song Momo and Rebecca stir memo-
ries in the minor mode and Alice and Lucretia in the major, while memories of
Carolina and Fedora contain elements of the two.
Porter lessens the dramatic contrast between Padua and Baltimore,
however, when he contrasts major and minor modes in the latter songs as
well. In fact, it might be said that this device—widely and effectively used
by Schubert—not only serves as Porter’s way of demonstrating parallels
between the Shrew numbers and the Baltimore numbers. In the end, it func-
tions primarily as a unifying musical device that shapes a musically inte-
grated score. The Paduan “We Open in Venice,” for example, was certainly
intended to parallel “Another Op’nin,’ Another Show” in Baltimore. In the
Padua excerpts (Example 10.3) the players sing in the minor mode when
describing themselves and in the major mode when they relate their cir-
cular itinerary. Conversely, “Another Op’nin’ ” opens in the major mode
(E major) and moves to G minor in the release (the B section) to convey
the anxiety of the four weeks that lead to this opening (“Four weeks you
rehearse and rehearse / Three weeks and it couldn’t be worse”). Even a song as
far removed from the drama as “Too Darn Hot” demonstrates a prominent
move from minor (the “too darn hot” portion) to major (the “Kinsey report”
portion).
Although the degree to which Kiss Me, Kate employs the major-minor jux-
tapositions is perhaps unprecedented in a Porter show, the roots of this idea
can be found in Porter’s pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Anything
Goes (and many other songs; see, for example its continuous presence in
“Night and Day”). We have already observed that the verse of the title song
in his earlier musical (Example 3.2, p. 56) clearly contrasts the past (minor
mode) with the present (major mode). In another example, the sea chantey
“There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair” juxtaposes the modes to distinguish the
hardships of a sailor’s life in the verse (minor mode) from the fair ladies
waiting on land (major mode). The intimidation by Rodgers and Hammer-
stein may have inspired Porter to explore additional and increasingly subtle
ways to capture nuances in his characters and in their texts, but he did not
suddenly discover textual realism or the dramatic potential of music after
attending a production of Oklahoma!
Porter’s efforts to demonstrate even more thematic unity for the purposes
of dramatic credibility, however, do distinguish Kiss Me, Kate from his pre–
Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, including Anything Goes. It also arguably
surpasses Oklahoma!, if not Carousel, in this respect. Some musical material
such as the reappearance of the repeated fourth that marks the opening of the
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Enchanted Evenings
Example 10.4. “Why Can’t You Behave?” transformed in the Pavane

(a) “Why Can’t You Behave?”
(b) Pavane
main tune of “Another Op’nin’ ” as the vamp in the following “Why Can’t
You Behave?” (Example 10.4a, mm. 5–6), helps to create a smooth musical
linkage between the first two numbers without conveying a comparable
dramatic meaning.13 But most connections do serve dramatic purposes. Bill
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Kiss Me, Kate
and Lois, for example, share improper behavior. Bill is a shiftless yet likably
dishonest gambler who signs an I.O.U. with Fred Graham’s name; Lois is a
shameless and fickle (and equally endearing) flirt who, in the role of Bianca,
will mate with any Tom, Dick, or Harry and, as herself, date any man who
asks her out for “something wet.” It therefore makes sense that the verse of
“Why Can’t You Behave?” returns in “Always True To You in My Fashion.”
The transformation of “Why Can’t You Behave?” (Example 10.4a) from the
first act, when it is sung by Lois to Bill, into an orchestral pavane in act II
(Example 10.4b) reinforces the commonality between Lois and Bill. At the
same time it further identifies Lois and Bianca as the same character and
clarifies the usurpation of the “Behave” theme in “Fashion.”14
Another musical figure that links several songs first occurs in “I Sing of
Love.”15 Not only does this song display a 6/8 meter that evokes popular
Italian tarantellas such as “Funiculi, Funiculà,” it also presents a melodic and
harmonic shift from C major to F minor (on the words “We sing of [C major]
love” [F minor]) that will resurface in two songs from act II (a progression
Kiss Me, Kate, act I, finale. Patricia Morison and Alfred Drake in the center
(1948). Photograph: Eileen Darby. Museum of the City of New York. Theater
Collection.
223
Enchanted Evenings
anticipated in “What Is This Thing Called Love?” from 1920). With only
insignificant alterations this exotic, pseudo-Renaissance juxtaposition of
major and minor harmonic shifts returns in the verse of “Where Is the Life
That Late I Led?” (also in 6/8 meter). Here Petruchio describes the awak-
ening of his desire and occasionally love for the opposite sex many years
before (“Since I reached the charming age of [C major] puberty” [F minor]).
In “Bianca” the progression appears in reverse, F minor to C major, when
Bill as Poet expresses his love for Bianca in the verse of the song that bears
her name (“While rehearsing with Bianca, / She’s the darling I a- [F minor]
dore” [C major]). In each case, love underlies the harmony and links the
musical material.
Also dramatically motivated are the thematic recurrences between the
finales of act I and act II. At the end of act I Petruchio, accompanied by
“all singing principals (except Hattie) and chorus,” serenades his shrewish
new bride, who shrieks “No! Go! Nay! Away!” before breaking character
and shouting “Fred!” The verbal battle between Kate/Lilli and Petruchio/
Fred that ensues is supported appropriately enough by a military march
with dotted rhythms of a martial nature (Example 10.5a) before Kate sings a
“quasi cadenza angrily” and the chorus concludes the act with a syncopated
variant of “Another Op’nin.’ ”
Example 10.5. Transformation of act I finale into act II finale

(a) March
(b) Waltz
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Kiss Me, Kate
Porter signifies his intent to parallel this ending when, at the outset of
the second-act finale, he offers an unmistakable melodic transformation in
triple meter of Petruchio’s act I duple-metered serenade. Instead of insults,
Kate/Lilli now interjects various terms of endearment in Italian. Petruchio’s
words, like Petruchio himself, remain unchanged from one act finale to the
other, while Kate’s dramatically contrasting response reinforces the sig-
nificant change she had revealed moments before in her final song, “I Am
Ashamed That Women Are So Simple.”16 Finally, the second melody of the
act I finale (the march, Example 10.5a) returns transformed into a waltz, the
dance of love (Example 10.5b). The transformation from a militaristic march
to a romantic waltz succeeds simply but effectively in establishing musical
equivalences for the dramatic changes that have taken place in the dynamics
between Kate/Petruchio and Lilli/Fred.17
Act II: Shakespeare

After Rodgers and Hammerstein, the second tough act for Porter and his
collaborators Bella and Sam Spewack to follow was “the bard of Stratford-
on-Avon” himself, Shakespeare. As Bella Spewack writes in the introduction
to the published libretto, “We hated to cut Shakespeare.”18 But when she
received an unexpected and unwelcome new song from Porter, “Brush Up
Your Shakespeare,” both Spewacks acknowledged that they would have to
adjust to the unpleasant idea that Shakespeare would be playing second
225
Enchanted Evenings
fiddle to the demands of Broadway. Bella tells it this way in her introduction
to the published libretto:
We realized that according to the classic standards of Broadway

it [“Brush Up”] was a “boff” number—a show-stopper, if you
please. Perhaps not a New Art Form, but definitely a must for the
male patron. So instead of any throat-cutting [Porter had written
that “Belle will probably cut her throat when she gets this”], we
dropped the final scene (all Shakespeare) and a beautiful dance for
which the stairs had been built. We had exactly three minutes left
in which to finish our show.19
According to Porter biographer George Eells, Porter’s decision to add

another song, “Bianca,” for Harold Lang (Lucentio/Bill Calhoun) precipi-
tated a strained correspondence between the Spewacks and the composer-
lyricist.20 Since Lang, then known primarily as a dancer, was not yet the
star he would become four years later as the lead in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal
Joey revival, he was not given a solo when Porter and the Spewacks were
planning their scenario. Patricia Morison, the original Kate/Lilli, recalls,
however, that Lang “had it in his contract that he had to have a song in the
second act” and “pulled a snit” until Porter decided “to write something
that’s going to be so bad they won’t keep it in.”21 Silly and parodistic of the
old Gillette razor jingle (“Look Sharp”) as it is, “Bianca” added a great song
and dance number for Lang and the show. Without “Bianca,” Bill Calhoun
would only sing “Gee, I need you kid” near the end of “Why Can’t You
Behave?” and a verse of “Tom, Dick or Harry,” and would remain virtually
indistinguishable in musical importance from Bianca’s other suitors.22
Bella Spewack fought and won a battle with the producers to retain “Were
Thine That Special Face” and persuaded Porter himself to leave “Tom, Dick
or Harry” in the show. Nevertheless, the libretto that the Spewacks originally
sent to Porter contained far more of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew than
audiences would eventually see in Kiss Me, Kate. Most notably, the May libretto
included Shakespeare’s lines in act IV, scene 5, when Kate capitulates to Petru-
chio and agrees that the sun is the moon or vice versa according to his whim,
and Kate’s complete final speech in act V, scene 2.23 Porter would collaborate
with the bard on an abbreviated version of this latter speech to produce “I Am
Ashamed That Women Are So Simple.” Gone entirely from the May libretto is
the Induction (often cut from Shakespeare productions as well). Also removed
from Shakespeare is the character of the Widow, the woman who eventually
marries Bianca’s suitor, Hortensio. The Widow’s departure led to the demise
of her counterpart in the Baltimore company as well, Angela Temple.24
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Kiss Me, Kate
The major dramatic departure from Shakespeare’s play, however, occurred

after the May libretto draft. In May, when Lilli learns from Fred that she is no
longer under the custody of the two gunmen and therefore free to abandon
the Shrew play, she informs her ex-husband (Fred), without hesitation, that
she will not desert:
fred: Well, Miss Vanessi, you may leave now.

lilli: I am not leaving!
fred: Sleeping Beauty [Harrison] waits in your dressing room.
lilli: Let him NAP!
fred: Don’t tell me the bloom is off (he sneezes)—the rose?25
A few lines later Fred and Lilli reprise “We Shall Never Be Younger,” a song
that would soon be discarded. The two had sung a portion of this song
together to conclude their duet in act I, scene 1, “It Was Great Fun the First
Time,” and Lilli sang the whole song alone in her dressing room two scenes
later. Although the two stormy actors are not yet fully reconciled, an audi-
ence could reasonably infer from the reprise of their shared song that Fred
and Lilli are on the verge of starting a happier third act together.
By December the Spewacks made a significant alteration in the dialogue
to set up Fred’s reprise of the newly added “So in Love” to replace “We Shall
Never Be Younger” in act I:
fred: You’re free to go. You don’t have to finish the show. . . . Aren’t
you taking Sleeping Beauty with you?
lilli: Let him sleep.
fred: Don’t tell me the bloom is off—the rose? . . . Lilli, you can’t walk
out on me now.
lilli: You walked out on me once.
fred: But I came back.
(lilli hesitates)
doorman: (From his cubbyhole) Your cab’s waiting, Miss Vanessi!
(lilli leaves.)
After Lilli has walked out on both Fred and her sleeping (and, more sig-
nificantly, non-singing) fiancé, Harrison Howell, Fred, “alone, reprises ‘So
in Love.’ ” In the May libretto Lilli decides to stay in the show, the Spewacks
were able to maintain their fidelity to Shakespeare, and Petruchio wins his
wager in the last scene. In the revised libretto, however, Lilli leaves. What can
Petruchio say if his offstage counterpart knows that he will lose the wager?
Petruchio replies to Kate’s father: “I know she will not come. / The fouler
227
Enchanted Evenings
fortune mine and there an end.” In contrast to both Shakespeare and the
May libretto Lilli’s reappearance in December as a tamed Kate who will fol-
low Petruchio’s bidding comes as much of a surprise to Petruchio as it does
to the other Shrew players. To clarify the impact of her return, the stage direc-
tions tell us that Fred becomes “really moved, forgetting Shakespeare” and
then utters a heartfelt “Darling” before returning to his Paduan character.
The circumstances that led to the addition of “So in Love” sometime
between June and November remain a mystery. Neither Spewack nor any
Porter biographer has anything definitive to say about its appearance dur-
ing auditions, but Morison recalled in 1990 that “ ‘So in Love’ was finished
after I came into the show.”26 It is known, however, that “So in Love”—along
with “Bianca” and “I Hate Men,” the last songs to be added to the show—
replaced “We Shall Never Be Younger,” a song which all involved in the
production agreed was a beautiful song but “too sad for a musical.”27 Like
the song it superseded, the setting of “So in Love” is Lilli’s dressing room
in act I (after Fred’s exit), and Lilli sings the song to herself unheard by her
former husband. But the new song, unlike “We Shall Never Be Younger,” is
unknown to Fred as well as unheard. The once-married couple (the show
opens on the first anniversary of their divorce) had sung a few lines of the
sad earlier song as a mood-changing coda to their earlier duet, “It Was Great
Fun” (also dropped after May). In the May libretto Fred does not hear Lilli
sing her confession and remains oblivious of her hope that “my darling
might even need me,” but at least he knows the song that he has shared with
his former romantic partner.28
In chapter 5 it was noted that in the original 1936 production of On Your
Toes, Sergei Alexandrovitch and Peggy Porterfield sing the reprise of “There’s
a Small Hotel.” Audiences were asked to accept a convention in which char-
acters somehow know songs introduced privately by others, in this case Phil
Dolan II and Frankie Frayne. In 1983 Sergei and Peggy sing a reprise of “Quiet
Night” instead, a song that they have actually heard. Nevertheless, modern
audiences still are expected to accept the idea that the entire cast can manage
to learn “There’s a Small Hotel” well enough to sing it the finale.
In Kiss Me, Kate, Porter continues the tradition of characters singing songs
they’re not really supposed to know. Certainly, the most significant example
of this practice can be observed when Porter does not allow Lilli and Fred
the opportunity to sing even a portion of “So in Love” together (as he did
with the discarded “We Shall Never Be Younger”). Porter thus removes the
means by which his characters can establish associations and connections
with a song. When Fred reprises “So in Love” in act II, audiences might
justifiably ask how he came to know it. Was he eavesdropping on Lilli when
she sang it in act I?
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Kiss Me, Kate
In contrast to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s powerful reuse of “If I Loved

You” in Carousel, the reprise of “So in Love” puts the song above the drama,
so that it becomes, as Joseph Kerman might say, a reprise “for the audi-
ence, not the play.”29 The dramatic impact of Billy Bigelow’s reprise of “If
I Loved You” in Carousel stems at least in part from the audience’s memory
of a shared interchange between Billy and Julie Jordan. The song belongs
to them, they know it, and the audience knows that they know it. In this
isolated but telling dramatic detail in Kiss Me, Kate, Porter returns to the era
he himself had done so much to establish: once again a great song (and its
reprise) takes precedence over the dramatic integrity of a book. Despite this
criticism, it might also be said that Fred’s reprise of “So in Love” demon-
strates a credible bond and a communication with Lilli and serves a theatri-
cal if not a literal truth.30
Kiss Me, Kate and the Broadway Heroine

In the revised ending Lilli (and, by extension, her Shrew counterpart, Kather-
ine) willingly joins Fred and Petruchio in the final scene. She is free to leave
both Fred (the frame of the musical) and his show (the musical within a
musical). Although this ending took Porter and the Spewacks further away
from their Shakespearean source, it also brought them perhaps a little closer
to a modern view of the world. Lilli and Katherine return to their men as
free agents, not as tamed falcons.
Nevertheless, Katherine’s final Shakespearean speech, only “slightly
altered by Cole Porter with apologies,” creates a serious challenge to a femi-
nist interpretation.31 Katherine freely comes to Petruchio, but she then sings
a speech almost invariably construed as degrading to women. Is Kiss Me,
Kate therefore a sexist musical that should be banned, or at least restaged?
Long before feminism became part of the mainstream of intellectual
thought and social action in the late 1960s and early 1970s, critics have
been put off by Shakespeare’s ending. For example, in 1897 George Bernard
Shaw came to the following conclusion: “The last scene is altogether dis-
gusting to modern sensibility. No man with any decency of feeling can
sit it out in the company of woman without feeling extremely ashamed
of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put
into the woman’s own mouth. Therefore the play, though still worthy of
a complete and efficient representation, would need, even at that, some
apology.”32
Nearly seventy years later Robert B. Heilman wrote that “the whole
wager scene falls essentially within the realm of farce” and assumes that
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Enchanted Evenings
Shakespeare accepted the idea that women are subservient to men even if
modern theatergoers do not: “The easiest way to deal with it is to say that
we no longer believe in it, just as we no longer believe in the divine right of
kings that is an important dramatic element in many Shakespeare plays.”33
In the 1990s, David Thornburn, during a panel discussion on “The Remak-
ing of the Canon,” asked a conference speaker rhetorical questions that
implicitly accused the Bard of harboring antediluvian views:
Isn’t it true that Shakespeare actually believes that women are sub-
servient to men in The Taming of The Shrew? Now it is incumbent
on people who offer the reified conception of the canon, as you,
Professor [Gertrude] Himmelfarb, do, to explain how you can jus-
tify or defend texts whose obvious, explicit themes are so deeply
offensive to what you as a thinker and as a moral person would
regard as acceptable.34
Shakespeare has few modern defenders from the ranks of those who
accept Katherine’s speech at face value. But one unexpected apology might
be noted—Germaine Greer’s pioneering book on feminism, The Female
Eunuch:
The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting

because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and
individuality: Bianca is the soul of duplicity, married without ear-
nestness or good will. Kate’s speech at the close of the play is the
greatest defense of Christian monogamy ever written. It rests upon
the role of a husband as protector and friend, and it is valid because
Kate has a man who is capable of being both.35
Other critics offer interpretations that bring the apparently sexist play-
wright closer to modern feminism. As Martha Andresen-Thom writes:
“Extraordinary individuals learn to play with wit and wisdom the roles of
sex and class that at once bind them and bond them. Subordination of woman
to man, in this view, is an opportunity for a brilliant and worthy woman to
transform limitation into an incentive for play.”36 The “play” interpretation
is supported in Shakespeare’s text by the zeal with which Katherine takes
the ball from Petruchio’s court and pretends that Lucentio’s elderly father
Vincentio is a “young budding virgin, fair, and fresh, and sweet” (act IV,
scene 5). At that moment Kate does not seem to be motivated by exhaustion
and a realization that she cannot win, but by her newfound inspiration that
play-acting can be fun rather than demeaning.37
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Kiss Me, Kate
Evolving sensitivities toward white and African-American racial rela-

tions have been explored briefly in the discussions of the history of Show
Boat and Porgy and Bess. Two Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals intro-
duced during the period of the present survey deal with relations between
whites and Asians, South Pacific and The King and I (albeit on white terms),
and the reworked books of Anything Goes revivals discussed in chapter 3
demonstrate a progressively less stereotypical approach toward Chinese
Americans.
A discussion of sexism in Kiss Me, Kate opens the door to a broader discus-
sion of how women featured in the present survey have fared. Show Boat’s
Julie LaVerne and Magnolia Ravenal, Carousel’s Julie Jordan, and West Side
Story’s Maria lose their men at some point in the musicals. Porgy’s Bess not
only becomes a drug addict and a prostitute, she never gets to sing an aria
by herself, even if she does have her own theme. The rich and powerful
female executive in Lady in the Dark, Liza Elliott, must relinquish her post as
head of a prestigious fashion magazine if she is to restore her lost glamour,
femininity, and happiness, and complete her song, “My Ship.” Liza Elliott
has merely exchanged her unpleasant dreams for a living nightmare of sub-
mission to a sexist man, Charley Johnson, the advertising manager of Liza’s
magazine and her prosecuting attorney in the Circus Dream.
Compared to what happens to most nineteenth-century tragic Euro-
pean opera heroines, however, Broadway’s women manage pretty well.38
In contrast to her operatic sisters, none of these heroines dies, although Julie
LaVerne is reduced to alcoholism and almost certainly a premature death
(offstage) in response to the loss of her man. Before Miss Saigon in the 1990s
many Cinderellas but no Madame Butterflys inhabited Broadway musi-
cals. Even Maria in West Side Story, unlike her Shakespearean counterpart,
survives and is thereby presumably able to effect societal changes that will
lead to a less violent world. After losing her man, Magnolia gains fame as
an actress, while Julie Jordan demonstrates enormous strength of character
before and after Billy’s death. Anna holds her own with the King of Siam
and her actions lead to democratic reforms.
Among our musical heroines Adelaide (Guys and Dolls) and Eliza Doolittle
(My Fair Lady) perhaps do the least to placate modern sentiments. Adelaide’s
saga of her fourteen-year engagement to Nathan Detroit (“Adelaide’s
Lament”) and her advice to Sarah Brown to “marry the man today and change
his ways tomorrow” might disappoint some. But audiences by and large have
successfully distanced themselves from this cartoonish Runyonesque world
and have been attending the Broadway and countless other revivals of this
show in record numbers ever since. And although we shall see in chapter 12
that it is admittedly a tough call that Eliza should end up with (in the epilogue
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Enchanted Evenings
to Shaw’s Pygmalion she marries Freddy), her decision to return to the barely
repentant misogynist Higgins in My Fair Lady might cause many to cringe in
their seats. Porter and Spewack’s Katherine may, like Shakespeare, put her
hand at Petruchio’s feet, but at least she is not asked to fetch his slippers.
Porter never surpassed the brilliance or the popularity of Kiss Me, Kate. Two
years later he completed Out of This World, a show that, before it was dropped
during tryouts, included the now-perennial favorite “From This Moment
On” (later interpolated by Ann Miller in the 1953 film version of Kiss Me,
Kate discussed in chapter 14). After Out of This World, Porter created two suc-
cessful Broadway shows, Can-Can (1953) and Silk Stockings (1955). He would
complete his illustrious career with two film musicals, High Society in 1956
(which included “True Love,” introduced by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly
in her final Hollywood role) and Les Girls in 1957. The next year, Porter’s
last eight songs appeared in the television production Aladdin (scripted by
One Touch of Venus librettist S. J. Perelman). His creative spirit broken after
the deaths of his mother and his wife and the amputation of a leg (he had
already suffered more than thirty operations since 1937 when a horse he was
riding crushed both his legs), Porter spent the remaining years before his
own death in 1964 in self-imposed isolation.
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chapter eleven
GUYS AND DOLLS AND

THE MOST HAPPY FELLA
The Greater Loesser
F
or once nostalgia rings true. As Broadway and London revivals so
frequently remind us, the 1950s were truly a glorious decade for the
American musical. Following in their own luminous footsteps of the
1940s (Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific), Rodgers and Hammerstein
continued to present their felicitous dramatic integrations of happy talk and
happy tunes (and serious dramatic subjects) when they opened the new
decade with their unprecedented fourth major hit musical, The King and
I (1951), and closed it with a final hit collaboration, The Sound of Music (1959).
In 1956, Lerner and Loewe presented My Fair Lady, a universally praised
musical that eventually eclipsed Oklahoma! as the longest running Broadway
musical. One year later the Laurents-Sondheim-Bernstein trilogy brought to
Broadway West Side Story. The decade introduced many critical and popular
successes, musicals like Wonderful Town (lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph
Green, music by Bernstein), Kismet (music and lyrics by Robert Wright and
George Forrest with more than a little help from the nineteenth-century Rus-
sian composer Alexander Borodin), Pajama Game and Damn Yankees (music
and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross), The Music Man (music, lyrics,
and book by Meredith Willson), Fiorello! (lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, music by
Jerry Bock), and Gypsy (book by Laurents, lyrics by Sondheim, and music by
Jule Styne); two of these by Frank Loesser, that have become classics—Guys
and Dolls (1950) and The Most Happy Fella (1956)—were the toast of Broadway
in the 1990s and Guys and Dolls returned yet again to Broadway in 2009.
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Enchanted Evenings
Even those who love to hate Broadway musicals make an exception for
Guys and Dolls and consider this show one of the most entertaining and
perfect ever. Although Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and perhaps Bernstein’s
Candide would later overshadow Loesser’s next show in popularity or criti-
cal approbation, The Most Happy Fella continues to boast the longest initial
run, 678 performances, of any Broadway work prior to the 1980s that might
claim an operatic rubric. As a tribute to its anticipated appeal as well as its
abundance of music, its cast album was the first to be recorded in a nearly
complete state, on three long-playing records.
In contrast to the instant and sustained appeal and unwavering stature
of Guys and Dolls, however, the popularity and stature of The Most Happy
Fella has evolved more slowly and less completely. In one prominent sign
of its growing popularity and acclaim in the United States, the 1990–1991
Broadway season marked the appearance (with generally positive critical
press) of two new productions, one with the New York City Opera and one
on Broadway.1 Despite lingering controversy regarding its ultimate worth,
The Most Happy Fella is clearly gaining in both popular acclaim and critical
stature and is even receiving some serious scholarly attention.2
Like fellow composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim two decades later, Loesser

(1910–1969) gained initial distinction as a lyricist.3 Unlike Sondheim, who had
been writing music to complement his lyrics since his teens, only after a decade
of professional lyric-writing could Loesser be persuaded to compose his own
music professionally. He scored a bull’s eye on his very first try, “Praise the
Lord and Pass the Ammunition” (1942), one of the most popular songs of
World War II. Earlier he wrote his first published song lyrics, “In Love with
the Memory of You” (1931), to music composed by William Schuman, the dis-
tinguished classical composer and future president of the Juilliard School and
the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In an unusual coincidence Loesser
made his Broadway debut (as a lyricist) for the same ill-fated revue, The Illus-
trator’s Show (1936), that marked the equally inauspicious Broadway debut of
Frederick Loewe, twenty years before My Fair Lady and The Most Happy Fella.
Loesser began a decade of film work more successfully the next year with
his song, “The Moon of Manakoora.” Film collaborations with major Hol-
lywood songwriters would soon produce lyrics to the Hoagy Carmichael
chestnuts, “Heart and Soul” and “Two Sleepy People” (both in 1938), and
song hits with Burton Lane and Jule Styne who, like Loesser, would soon be
creating hit musicals on Broadway beginning in the late 1940s.4 After “Praise
the Lord,” Loesser, a composer-lyricist in the tradition of Berlin and Por-
ter, would go on to compose other World War II popular classics, including
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Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella
Frank Loesser. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with

LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM
“What Do You Do in the Infantry” (in “regulation Army tempo”) and the
poignant “Rodger Young,” and later a string of successful film songs that
culminated in the Academy Award–winning “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” fea-
tured in Neptune’s Daughter (1947).
Clearly, by the late 1940s Loesser was ready for Broadway. Drawing on
the star status of Ray Bolger and the experience of George Abbott (the writ-
er-director of Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes, also starring Bolger, and the
director of Pal Joey), fledgling producers Ernest Martin and Cy Feuer were
prepared to take a calculated risk on Loesser’s music and lyrics with Abbott’s
adaptation of Brandon 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
235
Enchanted Evenings
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 imper-
sonated 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 com-
edies. 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 representa-
tive.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.
236
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 commis-
sioned Hollywood scriptwriter Jo Swerling to write the book, and Loesser
wrote as many as fourteen songs to match. Feuer and Martin then man-
aged 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 “inte-
grated.” 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 undocu-
mented, 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
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Enchanted Evenings
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 in the show
that weren’t funny enough.”14
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 conspicu-
ous 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 ill-
ness in “Adelaide’s Lament,” this convincing comic heroine adopts the
quarter-note triplets at the end of the verses (“Affecting the upper respi-
ratory 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 gentle-
manly 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 Broth-
ers type” to be worthy of her love. In her first meeting with Sky, she dis-
covers 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 sensi-
tive, 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
238
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 descend-
ing 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
Example 11.1. “My Time of Day”

(a) opening
(b) closing
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Enchanted Evenings
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
240
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.
Before their individuality is established Sky and Sarah are introduced more
generically in their respective worlds in one of the most perfect and imagina-
tive 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
of completeness and altered tempos. Inspired by Kaufman’s admonition
to “take a deep breath and set up your story,” the opening devotes itself
entirely through narrative ballet and mime to capturing the colorful world
of Runyon’s stories. The scene description in the libretto and the published
vocal score details an intricate comic interaction of con artists, pickpockets, a
man who pretends to be a blind merchant, naive tourists, bobby soxers, and
a prizefighter who is inadvertently knocked down by the unimposing Benny
Southstreet, the only named character to appear in this elaborate sequence.
At the end of “Runyonland” we meet two other tinhorns, Rusty Charlie and
Nicely-Nicely Johnson, the latter of whom will emerge, after Sky, as the lead-
ing male singer of the evening. In a transition that literally does not skip a
beat, the trio introduce the first song of the show, “Fugue for Tinhorns.”
Tinhorns are gamblers who pretend to be wealthier than they are.
Burrows’s and Loesser’s tinhorns match this description with their pretense
to a verbal and musical sophistication they do not possess. The verbal pre-
tensions are evident throughout their dialogue, the musical ones are most
clearly revealed in their opening song. Even the word “fugue” is preten-
tious, referring to a musical form associated with J. S. Bach in which similar
melodic lines, introduced at the outset in staggered entrances of a principal
melody (known as the fugue subject), are then heard simultaneously. True to
type, what Rusty, Nicely-Nicely, and Benny sing is in fact not a fugue at all
but a form that pretends to be a fugue, the lowlier round, known to all from
“Three Blind Mice” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
In the first of many departures from a fugue, the participants in a round
begin by singing the identical (rather than a similar) musical line, albeit also
241
Enchanted Evenings
Guys and Dolls, Crap game in the sewer in act II. Robert Alda throwing
the dice, Stubby Kaye kneeling to the left, Sam Levene to the right (1950).
in staggered entrances. The whole tune of Loesser’s “fugue” consists of

twelve measures of melody, with the final eight measures containing addi-
tional repetition. Despite their relative simplicity, rounds are tricky to create,
since they must be composed vertically (the harmonic dimension) as well
as horizontally (the melodic dimension). In “Fugue for Tinhorns” Loesser
therefore has constructed his twelve-bar tune so that it can be subdivided
into three four-bar phrases (one complete phrase is shown in Example 11.2);
each phrase is constructed so that it can be sung simultaneously with any of
the others. In order to squeeze a horizontal twelve-bar melody comfortably
into a vertical four-bar straitjacket, the harmony must not change. The entire
musical content therefore consists of repetitions of harmonically identical
four-bar phrases, alternated among the three participants, each of whom
argues in favor of his chosen horse, Paul Revere, Valentine, and Epitaph.
Even though Loesser does not produce a real fugue, he does offer a
degree of real counterpoint that is unusual in a Broadway musical, espe-
cially a musical comedy. In fact, the only substantial use of counterpoint
242
among earlier musicals surveyed in this volume occurs, not surprisingly, in

Porgy and Bess (a technique also demonstrated in earlier Gershwin shows
not discussed here, perhaps most notably in “Mine” from Let ’Em Eat Cake).
Prominent but relatively isolated additional examples can be found in Blitz-
stein’s The Cradle Will Rock (scene 10) and Bernstein’s Candide (“The Ven-
ice Gavotte”) and West Side Story (the “Tonight” quintet). After 1970 this
device would become more prominent in Sondheim (e.g., the combination
of “Now,” “Later,” and “Soon” in A Little Night Music). Even straightfor-
ward harmonization between two principals is exceptional in the musi-
cals of Kern, Rodgers, Porter, and Loewe. Interestingly, the only Broadway
composer to rival Loesser at the counterpoint game was Berlin, another
lyricist-composer with less formal musical training than the other compos-
ers discussed in the present survey, Loesser included. In songs that ranged
throughout his career, most famously “Play a Simple Melody” from Watch
Your Step (1914), “You’re Just in Love” from Call Me Madam (1950), and his
final hurrah as a composer, “An Old-Fashioned Wedding” from the 1966
revival of Annie Get Your Gun, Berlin created extraordinary pairs of melodies
that could be sung simultaneously.
Example 11.2. “Fugue for Tinhorns” (one complete statement of three-part

round)
243
Enchanted Evenings
Loesser’s predilection for counterpoint or overlapping musical lines can

be observed as early as “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” In Where’s Charley? Loesser
used counterpoint prominently in “Make a Miracle,” and he would continue
to present simultaneous melodies in ingenious new ways in more than a
few songs in Hans Christian Andersen, The Most Happy Fella, and How to Suc-
ceed. Since it is usually hard to sing simultaneous melodic lines (or even har-
mony), actor-oriented musicals, especially those inhabiting musical comedy
stages, use counterpoint relatively rarely, at least before Sondheim.
After the unison cadence that concludes “Fugue for Tinhorns,” the orches-
tra is instructed to hold their final D until the “Mission Band starts playing
on Stage” one half-step lower on C major. In this next number, “Follow the
Fold” (Example 11.3), the Save-a-Soul Mission Band and a quartet of mission-
aries led by Sarah provide a rhythmic and textural contrast to “Fugue for Tin-
horns” that could hardly be more extreme. The tinhorns inhabit a world of
syncopation, counterpoint, and lots of sharps and flats, while one jarring half-
step lower the missionaries occupy a rhythmically unsyncopated, homopho-
nic, C-majorish musical realm. The only conspicuous common denominator
between these contrasting musical worlds is a shared underlying harmonic
simplicity. In the fugue a measure of dominant harmony alternates with a
measure of tonic harmony; the mission march also employs these two basic
harmonies exclusively.17 “Follow the Fold” also illustrates a rare “appropri-
ate” use of a hymn-like style in Loesser’s work. The concluding a cappella
harmonies of the next song, “The Oldest Established,” is far more typical of
244
Example 11.3. “Follow the Fold” (opening)
Loesser’s predilection to translate the religious fervor of secular emotions

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 Roll-
ers.” In all stages of his career Loesser would revisit the secular religiosity of
his first hit, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”
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 Dolls
245
Enchanted Evenings
it was not discovered until casting Sam Levene as Nathan Detroit that the cre-
ative 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 Estab-
lished [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 exclu-
sively 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 Pub-
lic 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 specifi-
cally 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 sur-
face 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 pro-
motions 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 pres-
ence. 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.”
246
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 pseudo-
fugue 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 ques-
tioned 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 sec-
ondary 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-pro-
duced film starring Danny Kaye. In addition to its tuneful score, the movie
is notable for its screenplay by Kaufman’s former collaborator, Moss Hart.
After his second consecutive Broadway success, Loesser was otherwise free
to grow at his own pace and in his own way and to pursue his ambitious
new Broadway show.
By the end of 1952 Loesser was simultaneously drafting sketches for his
libretto, lyrics, and music in the first of sixteen sketchbooks of The Most Happy
Fella. For more than the next three years he would work single-mindedly on
his “musical with a lot of music” (calling it an opera would be the kiss of
death).20 His only other major creative project during these years was the
composition of three new songs for the film version of Guys and Dolls (1955),
also produced by Goldwyn (discussed in chapter 14).21
In contrast to the sparse documentary evidence for the compositional pro-
cess of Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella offers a cornucopia of dated and
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labeled material, all housed in the Music Division of the New York Public
Library. These manuscripts shed some light on the embryonic mysteries and
gestation of nearly every portion of the finished musical.22 The sketchbooks
tell us that Loesser had begun most of the major songs (i.e., the twenty-one
musical numbers in the published vocal score and libretto (indicated by small
capital letters in the online website) before September 1954. Most of these
numbers would require additional work during the next fifteen months. In a
striking demonstration of creative economy, Loesser managed to use nearly
every scrap of sketchbook material—more than one hundred entries—usually
in the final score, but at least in the longer version that opened in Boston.
From the sketchbooks we learn that Loesser’s initial vision of the work
allowed for even less spoken dialogue than the approximately fifteen minutes
that would remain in the finished work. By far the most dramatically important
material replaced by dialogue is the dramatic and climactic confrontation near
the beginning of act III, when Rosabella tells Tony, the man she had come to love
in act II, that she was willing to be seduced by his hired hand, Joe, at the end
of act I. Relatively late in the compositional process (September and December
1955), in sketches marked “Angry Tony,” Loesser revealed that the dialogue of
this scene initially contained powerful and dissonant underscoring.23
The sketches also show that Loesser’s titles for musical numbers, both
large and small, were the generating force for the music to follow and that
these titles generated rhythms (often indicated by X’s) before the rhythms
led to melodies. Those who admire Loesser’s impeccable declamation of
titles with strong profiles such as “The New Ashmolean Marching Society
and Students’ Conservatory Band” in Where’s Charley? and “The Oldest
Established” (the abbreviated title of “The Oldest Established Permanent
Floating Crap Game in New York”) in Guys And Dolls can observe firsthand
how the melody of a song such as “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance”
evolved from sketches that share the rhythmic rather than the melodic pro-
files of the finished product.
Without the sketchbooks, the process by which Loesser expanded arioso
passages into full-scale arias would go undetected, nor would we under-
stand how simple sequential musical patterns served Loesser as essential
starting points of so many of the songs in this show. The sketchbooks reveal
the creative effort that went into such nuances as the important elongated
emphasis on the word “full” in Tony and Rosabella’s big love duet, “My
Heart Is So Full of You,” after numerous compositional digressions over a
ten-month period. The sketchbooks also help to identify one of the strik-
ing unifying musical features in The Most Happy Fella: Loesser’s ubiquitous
use of the melodic sequence, that is, short melodic phrases of symmetrical
lengths repeated a step higher or lower. In Guys and Dolls, melodic sequences
248
The Most Happy Fella, act I, scene 2. Jo Sullivan and Robert Weede (1956).
Photograph: Vandamm Studio. Museum of the City of New York. Theater
Collection.
are noticeable in several songs, including the title song, “I’ll Know,” “I’ve
Never Been in Love Before,” “Take Back Your Mink,” and “Marry the Man
Today”; in Fella, sequences appear even more prominently and in nearly
every song. The first three phrases of “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance”
(Example 11.4), for example, open with Rosabella’s thrice-ascending melodic
sequence.
Example 11.4. Melodic sequence and counterpoint in “Happy to Make Your

Acquaintance”
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Enchanted Evenings
Not surprisingly, the sketchbooks reveal something about the process by

which Loesser worked out ways to combine melodies. What is seemingly
less explicable is that Loesser took the trouble early in his compositional
work to notate the familiar English round, “Hey Ho, Nobody Home” on a
sketch entry labeled “Lovers in the Lane” (“Hi-ho lovers in the lane” is how
Loesser’s text opens).24 In the duet portions of “How Beautiful the Days,”
Tony and Rosabella alternate entrances of the same melody much as Char-
ley and Amy shared their tune in “Make a Miracle” and the would-be lovers
in “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” When it came to “Abbondanza,” the trio in
which Tony’s servants take stock of the wedding feast, Loesser could not
decide whether he wanted exact melodic imitation in triple meter (3/4 time)
or a freer melodic counterpoint in duple meter (2/4 time).25 Eventually he
opted for the freer counterpoint and triple meter found in the published
vocal score.
Loesser also included several songs that featured two simultaneous
statements of independent but equally important melodies à la Berlin (non-
imitative counterpoint). As “I Like Ev’rybody” for Herman and Cleo attests,
Loesser did not reserve such contrapuntal complexity for his central roman-
tic characters. When the song is introduced in act II, scene 4, Cleo starts it
off with her tune. Then Herman sings the “main” tune against Cleo’s tune,
now moved to the bass, where it was located in Loesser’s sketchbook.26 At
the reprise of the song late in the show (act III, scene 1), the now-compat-
ible Herman and Cleo simultaneously sing their compatible melodic lines
(Example 11.5).
In a short essay printed in the Imperial Theatre playbill Loesser described
his initial resistance to the idea of adapting Howard’s play They Knew What
They Wanted.27 Before long, however, he realized that he could delete “the
topical stuff about the labor situation in the 1920’s, the discussion of religion,
etc.”28 Loesser continues: “What was left seemed to me to be a very warm
simple love story, happy ending and all, and dying to be sung and danced.”29
250
Example 11.5. Two-part counterpoint in “I Like Ev’rybody”
Throughout his compositional work Loesser never lost sight of this central
dramatic focus: the developing love and eventual fulfillment between the
central protagonists, Tony and Rosabella.
In keeping with the generally warmer and fuzzier expectations of a
Broadway musical, Loesser added Cleo, Rosabella’s partner in waitressing
drudgery in San Francisco, who receives a sitting job in Tony’s Napa Valley
to rest her tired waitressing feet. He also gives Cleo a partner not found in
Howard’s play, Herman, the likable hired hand who will win Cleo when he
learns to make a fist. Cleo and Herman, like their obvious prototypes, Ado
Annie and Will Parker in Oklahoma!, serve their function faithfully (in con-
trast to Adelaide and the relatively unsung Nathan in Guys and Dolls). They
also make admirable comic lightweights (albeit with sophisticated counter-
point) to contrast with the romantic heavyweights, Tony and Rosabella.
Gone from the musical are not only the lengthy discussions about reli-
gion, but even the character of Father McGee, the loquacious priest who
opposes the marriage between Tony and Amy (in the play Tony is in love
with Amy rather than Rosabella). In Howard’s play, Father McGee shows
no apparent concern about their age differences, nor is he motivated by the
jealousy that motivates his newly created counterpart in the musical, Marie,
Tony’s younger sister. Howard’s Father McGee responds negatively to the
marriage for religious reasons: Tony’s mail-order bride is not a Catholic.
Other differences between the musical and the somewhat darker play
might be briefly noted. Howard has Tony seek a mate outside his Napa
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Enchanted Evenings
Valley Community because all the single women have slept with Joe, and
he attributes Tony’s accident to drunkenness rather than fear of rejection. In
the play, but not the musical, we learn that Tony’s fortune in the grape busi-
ness stemmed from illegal earnings acquired during Prohibition. The play
also contains a striking politically incorrect plot discrepancy. Only after the
doctor tells Joe first that Amy (Rosabella) is pregnant does Joe tell Amy. In
Howard’s play Joe offers to marry Amy and take her out of the Napa Valley;
in Loesser’s adaptation Joe and Rosabella sing their private thoughts in the
beginning of act II, but they never sing (or speak) directly after act I, and Joe
leaves the community without knowing Rosabella’s condition.
In his obituary for his friend and collaborator, Burrows recalled an exchange
that took place after The Most Happy Fella premiere on May 3, 1956: “I came
out of the theater in great excitement, dashed up to Frank and began chat-
tering away about the marvelous, funny stuff. Songs like ‘Standing on the
Corner Watching All the Girls Go By.’ ‘Abbondanza,’ ‘Big D.’ Suddenly he
cut me off angrily. ‘The hell with those! We know I can do that kind of stuff.
Tell me where I made you cry.’ ”30 Not content with the triumph of Guys
and Dolls, Loesser wanted to do more in a musical than to entertain and
write hit songs. He wanted to make audiences cry. And although the critical
praise for Loesser’s most ambitious show about the Napa wine grower and
his mail-order bride was far more equivocal than that enjoyed by Guys and
Dolls, the view espoused here is that the achievement of The Most Happy Fella
is equally impressive and the work itself arguably even greater Loesser.31
Several New York tastemakers praised the show lavishly when it opened
at the Imperial Theatre. Robert Coleman headed his review in the Daily Mir-
ror with the judgment, “ ‘Most Happy Fella’ Is a Masterpiece” and subtitled
this endorsement with “Loesser has performed a truly magnificent achieve-
ment with an aging play.”32 John McClain of the New York Journal-American
encapsulated his reaction in his title, “This Musical Is Great,” and underlying
caption, “Loesser’s Solo Effort Should Last as One of Decade’s Biggest.”33
In contrast to the unequivocal acclamation of Guys and Dolls and My Fair
Lady (which opened less than two months before Fella), however, other New
York critics then (and now) would respond negatively to the work’s operatic
nature, its surfeit of music, and especially its stylistic heterogeneity, much as
they had two decades earlier with Porgy and Bess. Predictably, some New York
theater critics wanted a musical to be a traditional musical comedy or a Rod-
gers and Hammerstein sung play—anything but an opera in Broadway garb.
For these critics, a Janus-faced musical was a sin in need of public censure.
Walter Kerr’s remarks in the New York Herald Tribune embody this distaste
252
for works that combine traditional Broadway elements with features asso-
ciated with European opera: “Still, there’s a little something wrong with
‘Most Happy Fella’—maybe more than a little. The evening at the Imperial
is finally heavy with its own inventiveness, weighted down with the variety
and fulsomeness of a genuinely creative appetite. It’s as though Mr. Loesser
had written two complete musicals—the operetta and the haymaker—on
the same simple play and then crammed both into a single structure.”34
Writing in the New York Post, Richard Watts Jr. notes the appropriateness of
Loesser’s decision that “most of the music … suggests the more tuneful Ital-
ian operas.”35 Nevertheless, Watts is grateful that “the composer has wisely
added numbers which, without losing the mood, belong to his characteristic
musical comedy manner, and these struck me as the most engaging of the
evening.” By the end of his review Watts is urging Loesser to return to “his
more successful American idiom.” George Jean Nathan, another critic who
regularly expressed disdain for operatic pretensions in a musical, wrote in
the New York Journal-American that Loesser “is more at home on his popular
musical playground and that the most acceptable portions of his show are
those which are admittedly musical comedy.”36 Even New York Times theater
critic Brooks Atkinson, who praised the “great dramatic stature” and “musi-
cal magnificence” of the show, voiced “a few reservations about the work as
a whole” and concluded that the work “is best when it is simplest,” namely,
the songs that most clearly reveal Loesser’s “connections with Broadway.”37
Several weeks later the music critic Howard Taubman evaluated the
work in the New York Times.38 While he found much to praise in Loesser’s
score, including the operatic duet “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance” and
the quartet “How Beautiful the Days,” Taubman criticized in stronger terms
than his theater colleague Loesser’s failure “to catch hold of a lyrical expres-
sion that is consistent throughout.” He also found fault with the composer-
lyricist’s capitulation “to the tyranny of show business” in such numbers
as “Standing on the Corner” and “Big D.” In the end Taubman defends his
refusal to characterize The Most Happy Fella as an opera: “If it [music] is the
principal agent of the drama, if the essential points and moods are made
by music, then a piece, by a free-wheeling definition, may be called opera.”
Taubman writes that in a music column “it is not considered bad manners to
discuss opera,” but he agrees with Loesser’s disclaimer. For Taubman, “The
Most Happy Fella is not an opera.”
Times have changed. Thirty-five years and one less-than-ecstatically
received production (1979) later, Conrad Osborne, in an essay published sev-
eral days before its 1991 New York City Opera debut, singled out The Most
Happy Fella as one of three operatic musicals—the others were Porgy and
Bess and Street Scene—that “have shown a particular durability of audience
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Enchanted Evenings
appeal and a growing (if sometimes grudging) critical reputation.”39 Like

his predecessors in 1956 Osborne observed “a tension between ‘serious’
musicodramatic devices and others derived from musical comedy or even
vaudeville,” and noted perceptively that “this tension has been responsible
for much equivocation about ‘Fella.’ ”40
Rather than be disturbed by this clash between opera and Broadway,
however, Osborne attributes “much of the fascination of the piece” to the
same stylistic discrepancies that proved so disconcerting to Atkinson and
Taubman.41 Osborne also praises “Loesser’s melodic genius,” his “ability
to send his characters’ voices aloft in passionate, memorable song that will
take hold of anyone,” and contends that among musicals The Most Happy
Fella ranks as “one of the few to which return visits bring new discoveries
and richer appreciation.”42
More frequently than not, heterogeneous twentieth-century classical
music, especially American varieties, has been subjected to similar criticism.
Music that combines extreme contrasts of classical and popular styles, of
tonality and atonality, of consonance and dissonance, as found in Mahler,
Berg, and Ives, often disturbs more than it pleases listeners who enjoy the
more palatable stylistic heterogeneity of Mozart’s Magic Flute. Before the
1970s most critics and audiences found Porgy and Bess, with its hybrid mix
of popular hit songs and seemingly less-melodic recitative, at least partially
unsettling. In the following chapter it will be suggested that even in My Fair
Lady one song, the popular “On the Street Where You Live,” whether or not
it was inserted as a concession to popular tastes, clashes stylistically with the
other songs in the show.
Similarly, the colliding styles of nineteenth-century Italian opera (“Happy
to Make Your Acquaintance”) and Broadway show tunes (“Big D”) prac-
tically back-to-back in the same scene provoked strong negative reaction.
What Loesser does in The Most Happy Fella is to use a popular Broadway
style to contrast his Italian or Italian-inspired characters (and the operatic
temperament of Tony’s eventual match, Rosabella) with their comic coun-
terparts and counterpoints, Rosabella’s friend Cleo and her good-natured
boyfriend Herman. Between the extremes of “How Beautiful the Days” and
“Big D” lie songs like the title song and “Sposalizio,” which are more remi-
niscent of Italian popular tarantellas such as “Funiculi, Funiculà” than of
Verdian opera. Even those who condemn Loesser for selling out cannot fault
him for composing songs that are stylistically inappropriate.
Nor will the accusation stick that Loesser undermined operatic integrity by
inserting unused “trunk songs” from other contexts. The sixteen sketchbooks
tell a different story. In fact, among all of the dozens of full-scale songs and
ariosos, only one song, “Ooh! My Feet,” can be traced to an earlier show.43 The
254
sketchbooks reveal that Loesser conceived and developed the more popularly
flavored “Standing on the Corner” and “Big D” exclusively for his Broadway
opera (what Loesser himself described as a “musical with a lot of music”). In
the case of the latter, the solitary extant draft of “Big D” is a rudimentary one
from March 1954 (two years before the Boston tryout) that displays most of the
rhythm but virtually none of the eventual tune.44 Early rudimentary sketches
for “Standing on the Corner” appear in the first sketchbook (August 1953) and
continue in several gradual stages (December 1953 and February, May, and
June 1954) before Loesser found a verse and chorus that satisfied him.45
In “Some Loesser Thoughts,” another playbill essay, the composer notes
his “feeling for what some professionals call ‘score integration,’ ” which for
Loesser “means the moving of plot through the singing of lyrics.”46 Signifi-
cantly, Loesser acknowledges that his comic songs do not accomplish this
purpose when he writes in his next sentence that “in ‘The Most Happy Fella’
I found a rich playground in which to indulge both my ‘integration’ and my
Tin Pan Alley leanings.” His final remarks fan the fuel for those who would
accuse Loesser of selling out by making “love” the principal emphasis of
his adaptation. For Loesser, not only is love “a most singable subject,” it
remains a subject “which no songwriter dares duck for very long if he wants
to stay popular and solvent.”
Loesser’s judgment that the Tin Pan Alley songs do not contribute to
the “moving of plot” shortchanges the integrative quality of songs such as
Cleo’s “Ooh! My Feet” and Herman’s “Standing on the Corner,” which tell
us much about the characters who will eventually get together. Since one
prefers to sit and the other to stand, even the concepts behind their songs
reveal their complementariness. As a show-stopper in the literal sense, “Big
D” ranks as perhaps the sole (and welcome) exception to the work’s stature
as an integrated musical.
The principal characteristics that unify The Most Happy Fella musically do
not always serve dramatic ends. The first of Loesser’s most frequent melodic
ideas, the melodic sequence defined earlier (Example 11.4) provides musical
unity without dramatic meaning.47 With only a few small exceptions, however,
Loesser consistently employs another melodic unifier. This second melodic
idea serves as the basis of a melodic family of related motives, melodies in
which a descending minor or major second (a half-step or a whole-step) is
followed by a wider descending leap that makes forceful dramatic points. A
small but representative sample of this ubiquitous melodic stamp is shown
in Example 11.6. Loesser’s keen dramatic instincts can be witnessed as the
growing intensification of this large family of motives expands throughout
the evening from “Benvenuta” (Example 11.6a) to “How Beautiful the Days”
(Example 11.6b) and “Warm All Over” (Example 11.6c) to Rosabella’s heartfelt
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Enchanted Evenings
arioso, “I Love Him,” when a minuscule minor second twice erupts into a full
and uninhibited octave (Example 11.6d).
Loesser introduces a less familial and more individually significant musi-
cal motive after Tony has asked Joe for his picture (see the “Tony” motive
in Example 11.7a). Convinced by his sister Marie that he “ain’t young no
more,” “ain’t good lookin,’ ” and “ain’t smart,” the not-so-happy fella has
the first of several chats with his deceased Mamma (act I, scene 2): “An’
sometime soon I wanna send-a for Rosabella to come down here to Napa an’
get marry. I gotta send-a Joe’s pitch.’ ”48 The music that underscores Tony’s
dialogue with his mother consists of a repeated “sighing” figure composed
of descending seconds on strong beats (appoggiaturas), a familiar figure
derived from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operatic depictions of
pain and loneliness, underneath a sustained string tremolo that contributes
still further to the drama of the moment.49
Example 11.6. The family of motives in The Most Happy Fella (M = major;
m = minor; d = diminished; A = augmented; P = perfect)
(a) “Benvenuta”
(b) “How Beautiful the Days”
(c) “Warm All Over”
(d) “I Love Him”
256
In act II, Marie again feeds her brother’s low self-image despite Rosabel-
la’s assurance that Tony makes her feel “Warm All Over” (in contrast to the
“Cold and Dead” response she felt after sleeping with Joe). Consequently,
the still-unhappy central character “searches the sky for ‘Mamma’ and finds
her up there,” and the original form of his “sighing” returns to underscore a
brief monologue. Tony then sings a sad reprise of his sister’s didactic warn-
ing, “Young People,” with still more self-flagellating lyrics: “Young people
gotta dance, dance, dance, / Old people gotta sit dere an’ watch, watch,
watch. / Wit’ da make believe smile in da eye. / Young people gotta live,
live, live. / Old people gotta sit dere an’ die.”50
After the potent dramatic moment in the final scene of act II, Rosabella
finally convinces Tony that she loves him, not out of pity for an aging invalid
but “like a woman needs a man.” To celebrate this long-awaited moment
Tony and Rosabella sing their rapturous duet, “My Heart Is So Full of You.”
Tony announces that the delayed wedding party will take place that night,
and everyone spontaneously dances a hoedown.
The newfound joy of this May-September mail-order romance is short-
lived. Rosabella faints from the strain, discovers that she is pregnant with
Joe’s baby, and asks Cleo for advice. Tony, with a new self-confidence and
Example 11.7. “Tony” motive

(a) original
(b) transformed
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Enchanted Evenings
overcome by love (he is also somewhat oblivious to Rosabella’s internal

anguish), again communicates with his mother over the returning string
tremolo and the “sighing” “Tony” motive (Example 11.7a). This time, how-
ever, when Tony sings to his mother, Loesser ingeniously converts the
“sighing” motive into a passionate arioso of hope and optimism, “Mamma,
Mamma” (Example 11.7b). Tony’s sighing motive will return briefly in the
final scene of the show on the words “have da baby,” as Tony, “reflecting
sadly,” decides to accept Rosabella’s moment of infidelity as well as its con-
sequences. And as he did in “Mamma, Mamma” at the end of act II, Tony suc-
cessfully converts a motive that had previously reflected sadness, loneliness,
and self-pity into positive emotions throughout the ten passionate measures
of the abbreviated aria in act III, “She gonna come home wit’ me.”51
Just as Rosabella comes to express her growing love for Tony with ever-
expanding intervals, Tony learns to channel the self-pity expressed in his
sighing motive. By the end of the musical the “Tony” motive has been trans-
formed into a love that allows him to put the well-being of another person
ahead of himself and to understand how Rosabella’s mistake with Joe was
the consequence of Tony’s own error when he sent Rosabella Joe’s picture
rather than his own. As part of this metamorphosis Tony finally stands up to
his sister. When Marie once again points out his age, physical unattractive-
ness, and lack of intelligence, the formerly vulnerable Tony responds to the
final insult in this litany in underscored speech: “No! In da head omma no
smart, ma, in da heart, Marie. In da heart!”52
Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, smart in the head as well as in the heart,
has managed to entertain and move audiences as much as nearly any musi-
cal that aspires to operatic realms (Loesser’s denials notwithstanding).
258
Although it lacks the dazzling and witty dialogue, lyrics, and songs of its
more popular—and stylistically more homogeneous—Broadway predeces-
sor Guys and Dolls, Loesser’s musical story of Tony and his Rosabella offers
what Burrows described as “a gentle something that wanted to ‘make them
cry.’ ”53 The Most Happy Fella makes us cry.
Four years later Loesser himself was crying over the failure (ninety-seven
performances) of the bucolic Greenwillow (1960). The show contained an
excellent score, the best efforts of Tony Perkins in the leading role, and a
positive review by Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. Despite all this,
Donald Malcolm would ridicule the show’s tone in the New Yorker when he
wrote that the village of Greenwillow “makes Glocca Morra look like a teem-
ing slum” and a village where “Brigadoon could be the Latin Quarter.”54
The following year Loesser, again with Guys and Dolls librettist Burrows,
succeeded in a more traditional urban musical comedy, How to Succeed in
Business without Really Trying (1961). Unlike Tony in The Most Happy Fella,
whose vulnerability and humanity, if not age, appearance, and intelligence,
distinguishes him from other Broadway protagonists, the hero of Loesser’s
next (and last) Broadway hit, J. Pierrepont Finch, is a boyish and aggressively
charming Machiavelli who sings the show’s central love song to himself as
he shaves before a mirror in the executive washroom (“I Believe in You”).
As its well-received 1995 Broadway revival starring Matthew Broderick fur-
ther demonstrated, How to Succeed deserves recognition as one of the truly great
satirical shows. In how many musicals can we laugh so uproariously about
nepotism, blackmail, false pretenses, selfishness, and the worship of money,
among many other human foibles. One example of Loesser’s comic originality
and imagination in song is “Been a Long Day.” In this number, which might
be described as a trio for narrator and twin soliloquies, a budding elevator
romance is described in blow-by-blow detail through a third party before the
future lovebirds manage to express their privately sung thoughts directly.
For his remaining eight years Loesser was unable to bring a work to
Broadway. Pleasures and Palaces, a show about Catherine the Great, closed
out of town in 1965, and Loesser died before he could fully complete and
begin to try out Señor Discretion. But Loesser’s legacy remains large, and in
his thirteen years on the Broadway stage he fared far better than Runyon’s
6–5 odds against. As Loesser’s revivals have shown, Broadway audiences,
collapsing under the weight of musical spectacles, are reveling in the musi-
cals of Loesser, the composer-lyricist who continues to give audiences and
even musical and theater historians and critics so much to laugh (and cry)
about and so little to sneeze at.
259
chapter twelve
MY FAIR LADY
From Pygmalion to Cinderella
M
y Fair Lady was without doubt the most popularly successful musi-
cal of its era. Before the close of its spectacular run of 2,717 perfor-
mances from 1956 to 1962 it had comfortably surpassed Oklahoma!’s
previous record of 2,248.1 And unlike the ephemeral success of the wartime
Broadway heroines depicted in Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus, libret-
tist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner’s and composer Frederick “Fritz” Loewe’s fair
lady went on to age phenomenally well. Most remarkably, over eighteen mil-
lion cast albums were sold and profits from the staged performances, albums,
and 1964 film came to the then-astronomical figure of $800 million. Critically
successful revivals followed in 1975 and 1981, the latter with Rex Harrison
(Henry Higgins) and Cathleen Nesbitt (Mrs. Higgins) reclaiming their orig-
inal Broadway roles. In 1993 the work returned once again, this time with
television miniseries superstar Richard Chamberlain as Higgins, newcomer
Melissa Errico as Eliza, and Julian Holloway playing Alfred P. Doolittle, the
role his father, Stanley, created on Broadway on March 15, 1956.
As with most of the musicals under scrutiny in the present survey, the
popular and financial success of My Fair Lady was and continues to be
matched by critical acclaim. Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune told his read-
ers: “Don’t bother to finish reading this review now. You’d better sit down
and send for those tickets to My Fair Lady.”2 William Hawkins of the World-
Telegram & Sun wrote that the show “prances into that rare class of great
musicals” and that “quite simply, it has everything,” providing “a legendary
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My Fair Lady
evening” with songs that “are likely to be unforgettable.”3 In what may be

the highest tribute paid to the show, Harrison reported that “Cole Porter
reserved himself a seat once a week for the entire run.”4
Opening night critics immediately recognized that My Fair Lady fully
measured up to the Rodgers and Hammerstein model of an integrated
musical. As Robert Coleman of the Daily Mirror wrote: “The Lerner-Loewe
My Fair Lady. George Bernard Shaw and his puppets, Rex Harrison and Julie
Andrews (1956). © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with
Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD.,
NEW YORK. WWW. ALHIRSCHFELD.COM
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Enchanted Evenings
songs are not only delightful, they advance the action as well. They are ever
so much more than interpolations, or interruptions. They are a most impor-
tant and integrated element in about as perfect an entertainment as the most
fastidious playgoer could demand. . . . A new landmark in the genre fathered
by Rodgers and Hammerstein. A terrific show!”5
Many early critics noted the skill and appropriateness of the adaptation
from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912). For Daily News reviewer John
Chapman, Lerner and Loewe “have written much the way Shaw must have
done had he been a musician instead of a music critic.”6 Hawkins wrote
that “the famed Pygmalion has been used with such artfulness and taste,
such vigorous reverence, that it springs freshly to life all over again.”7 And
even though Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times added the somewhat
condescending “basic observation” that “Shaw’s crackling mind is still the
genius of My Fair Lady,” he concluded his rave of this “wonderful show” by
endorsing the work on its own merits: “To Shaw’s agile intelligence it adds
the warmth, loveliness, and excitement of a memorable theatre frolic.”8
Lerner (1918–1986) and Loewe (1901–1988) met fortuitously at New
York’s Lambs Club in 1942. Before he began to match wits with Loewe,
Lerner’s marginal writing experience had consisted of lyrics to two Hasty
Pudding musicals at Harvard and a few radio scripts. Shortly after their
meeting Loewe asked Lerner to help revise Great Lady, a musical that had
previously met its rapid Broadway demise in 1938. The team inauspiciously
inaugurated their Broadway collaboration with two now-forgotten flops,
What’s Up? (1943) and The Day before Spring (1945).
Documentation for the years before Loewe arrived in the United States in
1924 is sporadic and unreliable, and most of the frequently circulated “facts”
about the European years—for example, that Loewe studied with Weill’s
teacher, Ferruccio Busoni—were circulated by Loewe himself and cannot
be independently confirmed. Sources even disagree about the year and city
of his birth, and the most reliable fact about his early years is that his father
was the famous singer Edmund Loewe, who debuted as Prince Danilo in
the Berlin production of Lehár’s The Merry Widow and performed the lead in
Oscar Straus’s first and only Shaw adaptation, The Chocolate Soldier.9
As Loewe would have us believe, young Fritz was a child prodigy who
began to compose at the age of seven and who at age thirteen became the
youngest pianist to have appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic. None of
this can be verified. Lerner and Loewe biographer Gene Lees also questions
Loewe’s frequently reported claim to have written a song, “Katrina,” that
managed to sell two million copies.10 Loewe’s early years in America remain
similarly obscure. After a decade of often extremely odd jobs, including
professional boxing, gold prospecting, delivering mail on horseback, and
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My Fair Lady
cow punching, Loewe broke into show business when one of his songs was
interpolated in the nonmusical Petticoat Fever by operetta star Dennis King.
Another Loewe song was interpolated in The Illustrators Show (1936).11 The
Great Lady fiasco (twenty performances) occurred two years later.
After their early Broadway failures, Lerner and Loewe produced their
first successful Rodgers and Hammerstein–type musical on their third
Broadway try, Brigadoon (1947), a romantic tale of a Scottish village that
awakens from a deep sleep once every hundred years. By the end of the
musical, the town offers a permanent home to a formerly jaded American
who discovers the meaning of life and love (and some effective ersatz-
Scottish music) within its timeless borders. The following year Lerner
wrote the book and lyrics for the first of many musicals without Loewe,
the modestly successful and rarely revived avant-garde “concept musical”
Love Life (with music by Weill). Lerner and Loewe’s next collaboration, the
occasionally revived Paint Your Wagon (1951) was less than a hit on its first
run. Also in 1951 Lerner without Loewe wrote the Academy Award–win-
ning screenplay for An American in Paris, which featured the music and
lyrics of George and Ira Gershwin. By 1952 Lerner, reunited with Loewe,
was ready to tackle Shaw.
My Fair Lady and Pygmalion

The Genesis
It may seem inevitable that someone would have set Pygmalion, especially
when considering the apparent ease with which Lerner and Loewe adapted
Shaw’s famous play for the musical stage. In fact, much conspired against
any musical setting of a Shaw play for the last forty years of the transplanted
Irishman’s long and productive life. The main obstacle until Shaw’s death in
1950 was the playwright himself, who, after enduring what he considered
to be a travesty of Arms and the Man in Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier (1910),
wrote to Theatre Guild producer Theresa Helburn in 1939 that “nothing will
ever induce me to allow any other play of mine to be degraded into an oper-
etta or set to any music except its own.”12 As early as 1921, seven years after
the English premiere of his play, Shaw aggressively thwarted an attempt by
Lehár to secure the rights to Pygmalion: “a Pygmalion operetta is quite out of
the question.”13 As late as 1948 Shaw was rejecting offers to musicalize Pyg-
malion, and in response to a request from Gertrude Lawrence (the original
heroine of Lady in the Dark) he offered his last word on the subject: “My deci-
sion as to Pygmalion is final: let me hear no more about it. This is final.”14
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Enchanted Evenings
Much of our information on the genesis of My Fair Lady comes from Ler-
ner’s engagingly written autobiography, The Street Where I Live (1978), more
than one hundred pages of which are devoted to the compositional genesis,
casting, and production history of their Shaw adaptation.15 Additionally,
Loewe’s holograph piano-vocal score manuscripts in the Music Division of
the Library of Congress offer a fascinating glimpse into some later details of
the compositional process of the songs.
From Lerner we learn that after two or three weeks of intensive discussion
and planning in 1952 the team’s first tussle with the musicalization of Shaw’s
play had produced only discouragement. Part of the problem was that the
reverence Lerner and Loewe held for Shaw’s play precluded a drastic over-
haul. Equally problematic, their respect for the Rodgers and Hammerstein
model initially prompted Lerner and Loewe to find an appropriate place for
a choral ensemble as well as a secondary love story. While a chorus could
be contrived with relative ease, it was more difficult to get around the sec-
ond problem: Shaw’s play “had one story and one story only,” and the cen-
tral plot of Pygmalion, “although Shaw called it a romance, is a non-love
story.”16 In a chance meeting with Hammerstein, the great librettist-lyricist
told Lerner, “It can’t be done. . . . Dick [Rodgers] and I worked on it for over
a year and gave it up.”17
Lerner and Loewe returned to their adaptation of Shaw two years later
optimistic that a Shavian musical would be possible. As Lerner explains:
By 1954 it no longer seemed essential that a musical have a sub-

plot, nor that there be an ever-present ensemble filling the air with
high C’s and flying limbs. In other words, some of the obstacles
that had stood in the way of converting Pygmalion into a musi-
cal had simply been removed by a changing style. . . . As Fritz and
I talked and talked, we gradually began to realize that the way to
convert Pygmalion to a musical did not require the addition of any
new characters. . . . We could do Pygmalion simply by doing Pygmal-
ion following the screenplay [of the 1938 film as altered by director
Gabriel Pascal] more than the [stage] play and adding the action
that took place between the acts of the play.18
Instead of placing Higgins as a professor of phonetics in a university set-

ting in order to generate the need for a chorus of students, Professor Higgins
used his home as his laboratory and a chorus composed of his servants now
sufficed. Since the move from a tea party at the home of Higgins’s mother
to the Ascot races provided the opportunity for a second chorus, it seemed
unnecessary to insert a third chorus at the Embassy Ball. Although they did
264
My Fair Lady
not invent any characters, Lerner and Loewe did provide a variation of a
Rodgers and Hammerstein–type subplot by expanding the role of Alfred
P. Doolittle, Eliza’s father.19 Despite these changes and other omissions and
insertions that alter the tone and meaning of Shaw’s play, Lerner’s libretto
follows much of the Pygmalion text with remarkable tenacity. In contrast to
any of the adaptations considered here, Lerner and Loewe’s libretto leaves
long stretches of dialogue virtually unchanged.
By November 1954 Lerner and Loewe had completed five songs for
their new musical. Two of these, “The Ascot Gavotte” and “Just You Wait,”
would eventually appear in the show. Another song intended for Eliza, “Say
a Prayer for Me Tonight,” would be partially salvaged in the Embassy Ball
music and recycled in the film Gigi (1958).20 Also completed by November
1954 were two songs intended for Higgins, “Please Don’t Marry Me,” the
“first attempt to dramatize Higgins’s misogyny,” and “Lady Liza,” the first
of several attempts to find a song in which Higgins would encourage a
demoralized Eliza to attend the Embassy Ball.21 Rex Harrison, the Higgins
of choice from the outset, vigorously rejected both of these songs, and they
quickly vanished. The casting of Harrison, the actor most often credited
with introducing a new kind of talk-sing, was of course a crucial decision
that affected the musical characteristics of future Higgins songs.22 A second
try at “Please Don’t Marry Me” followed in 1955 and resulted in the now
familiar “I’m an Ordinary Man.” “Come to the Ball” replaced “Lady Liza”
and stayed in the show until opening night. Lerner summarizes the compo-
sitional progress of their developing show: “By mid-February [1955] we left
London with the Shaw rights in one hand, commitments from Rex Harrison,
Stanley Holloway, and Cecil Beaton [costumes] in the other, two less songs
than we had arrived with [“Please Don’t Marry Me” and “Lady Liza”] and
a year’s work ahead of us.”23
Earlier Lerner reported that a winter’s journey around the frigid Cov-
ent Garden had yielded the title and melody of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.”
The genesis of Eliza’s first song demonstrates the team’s usual pattern: title,
tune, and, after excruciating procrastination and writer’s block, a lyric.24 The
lyricist details the agony of creation for “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” a pro-
cess that took Loewe “one afternoon” and Lerner weeks of delay and psy-
chological trauma before he could even produce a word. Six weeks “after a
successful tour around the neighborhood with ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’ ”
they completed Higgins’s opening pair of songs, “Why Can’t the English?”
and “I’m an Ordinary Man.”25 These are the last songs that Lerner mentions
before rehearsals began in January 1956.
Lerner’s chronology accounts for all but four My Fair Lady songs: “With
a Little Bit of Luck,” “The Servants’ Chorus,” “Promenade,” and “Without
265
Enchanted Evenings
You.” All Lerner has to say about “With a Little Bit of Luck” is that it was
written for Holloway sometime before rehearsals.26 But although Lerner’s
autobiography provides no additional chronological information about the
remaining three songs, we are not reduced to idle speculation concerning
two of these. On musical evidence it is apparent that the “Introduction to
Promenade” was adapted from “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” one of the
earliest songs drafted for the show.27 It will also be observed shortly that the
principal melody of “Without You” is partially derived from Higgins’s “I’m
an Ordinary Man,” completed nearly a year before rehearsals.28 Loewe’s
holograph piano-vocal score manuscripts of My Fair Lady songs verify
Lerner’s remark that this last-mentioned song underwent “one or two false
starts.”29 Harrison described one of these as “inferior Noël Coward.”30 (In
other differences with the published vocal score, the holograph of “You Did
It” contains a shortened introduction and a considerable amount of addi-
tional but mostly repetitive material.)31
Of great importance for the peformance style of Higgins’s role was the
decision to allow the professor to talk his way into a song or a new phrase
of a song. In “I’m an Ordinary Man,” “A Hymn to Him,” and “I’ve Grown
Accustomed to Her Face,” audiences have long been accustomed to hear
Higgins speak lines that are underscored by orchestral melody; the pitches
are usually indicated in the vocal part by X’s, recalling the notation of
Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire. The first of many examples of
this occurs at the beginning of “I’m an Ordinary Man.” This move from song
to speech probably occurred during the course of rehearsals. In any event,
the holograph scores almost invariably indicate that these passages were
originally meant to be sung.32
A New Happy Ending

In their most significant departure from their source Lerner and Loewe
altered Shaw’s ending to allow a romantic resolution between Higgins and
Eliza Doolittle. Shaw strenuously argued against this Cinderella interpreta-
tion, but he would live to regret that his original concluding lines in 1912
allow the possibility that Eliza, who has metamorphosed into “a tower of
strength, a consort battleship,” will return to live with Higgins and Picker-
ing as an independent woman, one of “three old bachelors together instead
of only two men and a silly girl.”33 While in his original text Shaw expresses
Higgins’s confidence that Eliza will return with the requested shopping list,
for the next forty years the playwright would quixotically try to establish his
unwavering intention that Higgins and Eliza would never marry.34 Here are
the final lines of Shaw’s play:
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My Fair Lady
mrs. higgins: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. But never
mind, dear: I’ll buy you the tie and glove.
higgins: (sunnily) Oh, don’t bother. She’ll buy ’em all right enough.
Goodbye.
(They kiss. mrs. higgins runs out. higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in
his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.)
Despite Shaw’s unequivocal interpretation—and long before Pascal’s

Pygmalion film in 1938 or the My Fair Lady musical in 1956—the original
Higgins, Beerbohm Tree, had already taken liberties that would distort the
play beyond Shaw’s tolerance. In reporting on the 1914 London premiere to
his wife Charlotte, Shaw wrote: “For the last two acts I writhed in hell. . . . The
last thing I saw as I left the house was Higgins shoving his mother rudely
out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals to buy ham for his lonely
home like a bereaved Romeo.”35 Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw cre-
ated the role of Eliza, urged the playwright to attend another performance
“soon—or you’ll not recognize your play.”36
When he summoned enough courage to attend the hundredth perfor-
mance, Shaw was appalled to discover that “in the brief interval between
the end of the play and fall of the curtain, the amorous Higgins threw flow-
ers at Eliza (and with them Shaw’s instructions far out of sight).”37 To make
explicit what he had perhaps naively assumed would be understood, Shaw
published a sequel to Pygmalion in 1916, in which he explained in detail
why Eliza and Higgins could not and should not be considered as potential
romantic partners.
Considering his strong ideas on the subject, it is surprising that Shaw
permitted Pascal to further alter the ending (and many other parts) of
Shaw’s original screenplay for the 1938 Pygmalion film in order to create
the impression that Higgins and Eliza would in fact unite. Perhaps Shaw
was unaware that Pascal had actually filmed two other endings, including
Shaw’s. In 1941, Penguin Books published a version of Shaw’s screenplay,
which included reworked versions of five film scenes that were not part of
the original play:
1. Eliza getting in a taxi and returning to her lodgings at the end

of act I;
2. Higgins’s housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, giving Eliza a bath in the
middle of act II;
3. Eliza’s lessons with Higgins at the end of act II;
4. The Embassy Ball at the end of act III (this scene is based on
the Embassy Ball in the film—another Cinderella image—that
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Enchanted Evenings
replaced the ambassador’s garden party, dinner, and opera

that took place offstage in the play);
5. Eliza’s meeting with Freddy when she leaves Higgins’s
residence at the end of act IV.
In his book on Shaw’s films, The Serpent’s Eye, Donald P. Costello carefully
details and explains how the printed screenplay departs from the actual
film.38 Perhaps not surprisingly, the most dramatic departure between what
was filmed and the published screenplay occurred at the work’s conclusion.
This is what filmgoers saw and heard in the film:
Eliza’s voice is heard coming out of the phonograph:

eliza’s voice: Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!! I ain’t dirty: I washed my
face and hands afore I come, I did.
higgins’s voice: I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed
guttersnipe.
eliza’s voice: Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo!
higgins’s voice: In six months . . . (Higgins switches off the phonograph.
Close-up of Higgins’s sorrowful face.) Eliza enters the room, unseen by
Higgins. He hears her voice, speaking with perfect lady-like diction, soft,
gentle, lovingly.
eliza: I washed my face and hands before I came.
As Higgins turns to look at Eliza, the ballroom theme begins once
more. Higgins looks at Eliza tenderly. Cut to a close-up of Eliza,
looking back at him. Higgins just begins to smile; then he recol-
lects himself, and says sternly, as the camera looks only at the back
of his head:
higgins: Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?
As the ballroom theme swells into a crescendo, a fade-out from the
back of Higgins’s head. The lilting music of the ballroom waltz is
heard as “The End” and the cast are flashed upon the screen. 39
Before the 1941 publication of the screenplay (as altered by Pascal), how-
ever, Shaw managed to have the last word. It appeared in a letter of correc-
tions from August 19, 1939:
mrs. higgins: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. I should be
uneasy about you and her if she were less fond of Colonel Pickering.
higgins. Pickering! Nonsense: she’s going to marry Freddy. Ha
ha! Freddy! Freddy!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! (He roars with laughter as the
play ends.)
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My Fair Lady
After submitting this final ending, Shaw parenthetically inserted the fol-
lowing remark: “I should like to have a dozen pulls of the corrected page to
send to the acting companies.”40
When asked in an interview why he acquiesced to a “happy” ending in
Pascal’s film, Shaw replied somewhat archly that he could not “conceive
a less happy ending to the story of ‘Pygmalion’ than a love affair between
the middle-aged, middle-class professor, a confirmed old bachelor with a
mother-fixation, and a flower girl of 18.”41 According to Shaw, “nothing of
the kind was emphasised in my scenario, where I emphasised the escape of
Eliza from the tyranny of Higgins by a quite natural love affair with Freddy.”
Shaw even goes so far as to claim that Leslie Howard’s “lovelorn complex-
ion . . . is too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about.” Despite Shaw’s
desire to grasp at this perceived ambiguity and despite the fact that audi-
ences of both film and musical do not actually see Eliza fetch Higgins’s slip-
pers, most members of these audiences will probably conclude that Freddy
is not a romantic alternative.
Shaw’s denial to the contrary, the romanticization of Pygmalion intro-
duced by Beerbohm Tree during the initial 1914 London run of the play was
complete in the 1938 film. As Costello writes: “What remains, after a great
deal of omission, is the clear and simple situation of a Galatea finally being
fully created by her Pygmalion, finally asserting her own individual soul,
and, becoming independent, being free to choose. She chooses Higgins.”42
The stage was now set for My Fair Lady, where the phonetics lesson intro-
duced in the film would be developed still further, Alfred P. Doolittle would
be observed on his own Tottenham Court Road turf (and given two songs
to sing there, one in each act), and a new and more colorful setting at Ascot
would replace Mrs. Higgins’s home (act III of Shaw). Again following the
film, My Fair Lady deleted many of Doolittle’s lines, especially his philo-
sophical musing on middle-class morality.43
If Lerner and Loewe did not invent a romantic pairing between Henry
Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, they succeeded in contradicting Shaw still
more completely (albeit more believably), a task made difficult by Higgins’s
extraordinary misogyny, rudeness, and insensitivity in Shaw’s original
play. Using the Pascal film as its guide, the Broadway Pygmalion therefore
made Higgins less misogynist and generally more likable and Eliza less
crude, more attractive, and more lovable than their counterparts in Shaw’s
play and screenplay and Pascal’s film. Perhaps more significantly, Lerner
and Loewe prepared the eventual match of Higgins and Eliza when they
created two moments in song that depict their shared triumph, “The Rain
in Spain” and Eliza’s gloriously happy “I Could Have Danced All Night”
that shortly follows.
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Enchanted Evenings
Lerner and Loewe would also go beyond the film with several liberties of
omission and commission to help musical audiences accept the unlikely but
much-wished-for romantic liaison between the antagonistic protagonists.
More important, not only did Lerner remove all references to Higgins’s
“mother fixation,” but he gave Higgins compassion to match his brilliance.
In order to achieve Higgins’s metamorphosis from a frog to a prince, Lerner
added a speech of encouragement—a song would be overkill—not found in
either the film or published screenplay. Significantly, it is this newly created
speech that leads directly to Eliza’s mastery of the English language as she
finally utters the magic words, “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain”
with impeccable and lady-like diction.44
In this central speech, Higgins, in contrast to the play and screen versions,
demonstrates an awareness of what his subject might be feeling and suffer-
ing: “Eliza, I know you’re tired. I know your head aches. I know your nerves
are as raw as meat in a butcher’s window.” After extolling the virtues of “the
majesty and grandeur of the English language,” Higgins for the first time
offers encouragement to his human experiment: “That’s what you’ve set
yourself to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will. . . . Now, try it again.”45
A Cinderella Musical with an

Extraordinary Woman
After conveying Higgins’s humanity by the end of act I, Lerner and Loewe
tried in their second act to make musically explicit what Shaw implies or
omits in his drama. Not only does Eliza now possess the strength and inde-
pendence of “a consort battleship” admired by Higgins in Shaw’s play. After
the Embassy Ball in My Fair Lady the heroine now in fact has the psychologi-
cal upper hand as well. Clearly, Lerner and Loewe romanticized, and there-
fore falsified, Shaw’s intentions. At the same time they managed to reveal
Eliza’s metamorphosis as Higgins’s equal through lyrics and music more
clearly than either Shaw’s play or screenplay and Pascal’s film. The play-
wright lets Higgins express his delight in Eliza’s newfound independence,
but he does not show how Eliza surpasses her creator (in this case Higgins)
in psychological power other than by allowing Higgins to lose his compo-
sure (“he lays hands on her”). Lerner and Loewe accomplish this volte-face by
taking advantage of music’s power to reveal psychological change. Simply
put, the Broadway team reverse the musical roles of their protagonists.
In act I of My Fair Lady, Eliza, in response to her initial humiliation
prompted by her inability to negotiate the proper pronunciation of the letter
“a” and to Higgins’s heartless denial of food (recalling Petruchio’s method
270
My Fair Lady
My Fair Lady, act I, scene 5. Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison (“In Hertford,
Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.”) (1956). Museum
of the City of New York. Theater Collection. Gift of Harold Friedlander. For a
film still of this scene see p. 321.
of “taming” Kate in Kiss Me, Kate), sputters her ineffectual dreams of ven-
geance in “Just You Wait” (Example 12.1a).46 Eliza sings a brief reprise of this
song in act II after Higgins and the uncharacteristically inconsiderate Picker-
ing display a callous disregard for Eliza’s part in her Embassy Ball triumph
(“You Did It”). Eliza will also incorporate the tune at various moments in
“Without You,” for example, when she sings “And there still will be rain on
that plain down in Spain” (Example 12.1b).
Example 12.1. “Just You Wait” and selected transformations

(a) “Just You Wait”
(b) “Without You”
(c) “I’m an Ordinary Man”
(d) “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”
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Enchanted Evenings
The opening phrase of the chorus in “Without You,” Eliza’s ode to inde-
pendence, consists of a transformation into the major mode of “Just You
Wait.” Its first four notes also inconspicuously recall Higgins’s second song
of act I, “I’m an Ordinary Man,” when he first leaves speech for song on the
words “who desires” (Example 12.1c). By this subtle transformation, audi-
ences can subliminally hear as well as directly see that the tables have begun
to turn as Eliza adopts Higgins’s musical characteristics. At the same time
Higgins transforms Eliza into a lady, by the end of the evening Eliza (and
her music) will have successfully transformed Higgins into a gentleman.
To reinforce this dramatic reversal, Higgins himself recapitulates Eliza’s
“Just You Wait” material in both the minor and major modes of his final
song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (Example 12.1d). At this point
in the song Higgins is envisaging the “infantile idea” of Eliza’s marrying
Freddy.47 The verbal and dramatic parallels between Higgins’s and Eliza’s
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My Fair Lady
revenge on their respective tormentors again suggest the reversal of their

roles through song.
Higgins’s “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” in act II also offers a musi-
cal demonstration of a dramatic transformation needed to convince audiences
that Eliza’s return is as plausible as it is desirable. In the fast sections of “I’m
an Ordinary Man” in act I, Higgins explains the discomforting effect of women
on his orderly existence (Example 12.2a). Higgins’s dramatic transformation in
his final song is most clearly marked by tempo and dynamics, but the melodic
change is equally significant if less immediately obvious.48 As shown in Exam-
ple 12.2b, no longer does Higgins move up an ascending scale to reach his des-
tination like a “motor bus” (Eliza’s description in Shaw’s act V). For one thing,
the destination of the opening line, “She almost makes the day begin,” is the
fourth degree of the scale (F in the key of C) on the final syllable rather than the
first degree. For another, Higgins now precedes the resolution with the upper
note G to soften the momentum of the ascending scale. Thus a lyrical Higgins,
who sings more and talks less, conveys how he misses his Eliza. Eventually
within the song this lyricism (to be sung con tenerezza or tenderly) will conquer
the other side of his emotions, embodied in his dream of Eliza’s humiliation.
The reuse of “Just You Wait” and the transformation of the “but let a
woman in your life” portions of “I’m an Ordinary Man” into “I’ve Grown
Accustomed to Her Face” provide the most telling musical examples of
Higgins’s dramatic transformation. The far less obvious transformation of
“I’m an Ordinary Man” into “Without You” mentioned earlier (Example
12.1c) provides additional musical evidence of the power reversal between
Higgins and Eliza in the second act of My Fair Lady.49
Example 12.2. “I’m an Ordinary Man” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed

to Her Face”
(a) “I’m an Ordinary Man”
(b) “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”
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Enchanted Evenings
Although they lack the immediate recognizability of these melodic exam-

ples, the most frequent musical unities are rhythmic ones, with or without
attendant melodic profiles. The middle section of “Just You Wait,” for exam-
ple, anticipates the rhythm of “Get Me to the Church on Time” (Example
12.3). The eighteenth-century Alberti bass in the accompaniment of this sec-
tion, which suggests the propriety of classical music, is also paralleled in the
second act song of Eliza’s father when he decides to marry and thereby gain
conventional middle-class respectability.
It is possible that Lerner and Loewe intended to link the central characters
rhythmically by giving them songs that begin with an upbeat. In act I, both
parts of Higgins’s “Ordinary Man,” the main melody of Doolittle’s “A Little
Bit of Luck,” and Eliza’s “I Could Have Danced All Night” all begin with
three-note upbeats. Eliza’s “Just You Wait,” Freddy’s “On the Street Where
You Live,” and “Ascot Gavotte” each open with a two-note upbeat and “The
Rain in Spain” employs a one-note upbeat.
Dramatic meaning for all these upbeats may be found by looking at the
two songs in act I that begin squarely on the downbeat, “Why Can’t the
English?” and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” Significantly, these songs, the
first two of the show, are rhetorical questions sung by Higgins and Eliza,
respectively, before their relationship has begun. Clearly Higgins, in speak-
ing about matters of language and impersonal intellectual matters, plants
his feet firmly on solid ground. Similarly, the strong downbeats of Eliza’s
opening song demonstrate her earthiness and directness. Once Higgins has
encountered Eliza in his study and sings “I’m an Ordinary Man,” Lerner
Example 12.3. “Just You Wait” and “Get Me to the Church on Time”
(a) “Just You Wait” (middle section)
(b) “Get Me to the Church on Time” (opening)
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My Fair Lady
and Loewe let us know that Higgins is on less firm territory and can no
longer begin his songs on the downbeat. After Eliza begins her lessons with
Higgins, she too becomes unable to begin a song directly on the down-
beat. As Doolittle becomes conventional and respectable, he too will begin
respectably on the downbeat in his second-act number, “Get Me to the
Church On Time.”50
Although Eliza transforms Higgins’s “Ordinary Man” in “Without You,”
complete with upbeat, moments later she manages to demonstrate to Freddy
that she can once again begin every phrase of a song on the downbeat, as
she turns the Spanish tango of “The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain”
into the faster and angrier Latin rhythms of “Show Me.” Tellingly, Higgins
never regains his ability to begin a song on the downbeat. Especially reveal-
ing is his final song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” which retains
the three-note upbeat of his own “Ordinary Man” (“but let a woman in
your life”) and Eliza’s euphoric moment in act I, “I Could Have Danced All
Night.”
During the New Haven tryouts a few songs continued to present special
problems. One of these songs, “Come to the Ball,” Lerner and Loewe’s sec-
ond attempt to give Higgins a song of encouragement for Eliza prior to the
Embassy Ball, was dropped after one performance.51 Although Lerner never
seemed to accept its removal, his more objective collaborators, Loewe and
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Enchanted Evenings
especially director Moss Hart, understood why the show works better for its
absence: while it endorses Eliza’s physical beauty, it simply does not offer
her any other reason to attend the ball. Despite the current predilection of
reinstating deleted numbers from Broadway classics, it seems unlikely that
audiences will soon be hearing “Come to the Ball” in its original context.
The crucial role of Hart (the librettist of Lady in the Dark) in the develop-
ment of Lerner’s book should not go unnoticed. Even if the full extent of his
contribution cannot be fully measured, Lerner readily acknowledged that
the director went over every word with the official librettist over a four-
day marathon weekend in late November 1955.52 Several of Hart’s major
suggestions during the rehearsal and tryout process can be more accurately
gauged. In addition to his requesting the deletion of “Come to the Ball,” we
know from Lerner’s autobiography that Hart persuaded Lerner and Loewe
to remove “a ballet that occurred between Ascot and the ball scene and ‘Say
a Prayer for Me Tonight.’ ”53 To fill the resulting gap near the end of act I,
Lerner “wrote a brief scene which skipped directly from Ascot to the night
before the ball.”54
The other major song marked for extinction after opening night in New
Haven was “On the Street Where You Live.” In both his autobiography and
“An Evening with Alan Jay Lerner” presented at New York’s 92nd Street Y in
1971, Lerner discussed the negative response to this song, his own desire to
retain it, his failure to understand why it failed, and his solution to the prob-
lem several days later.55 For Lerner, the “mute disinterest” that greeted this
song was due to the fact that audiences were unable to distinguish Freddy
Eynesford-Hill from the other gentlemen at Ascot.56 Lerner’s autobiography
relates how he gave Freddy a new verse to help audiences remember him;
in his “Evening” at the Y, Lerner explains a revision in which for the sake of
clarity Freddy has the maid ask him to identify himself by name. In Lerner’s
view the positive response to this change was vindication enough. Certainly
“On the Street Where You Live” remains the most frequently performed
song outside the context of the show.
The rich afterlife of “On the Street Where You Live” as an independent
song may provide a clue as to why everyone else concerned with the show
(other than Lerner) was willing, even eager, to cut this future hit after it failed
to register on its opening night audience. Lehman Engel, an astute and sen-
sitive Broadway critic and a staunch proponent of the integrated musical,
writes that when he sees a musical for the first time “the highest compliment
anyone can pay is to not be conscious of the songs.”57 The absence of such
awareness “indicates that all of the elements worked together so integrally
that I was aware only of the total effect.”
Engel’s reaction to My Fair Lady expresses the problem clearly:
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My Fair Lady
I had a similar response to My Fair Lady the first time [that like
Fiddler on the Roof, the elements worked integrally], but I did
hear “On the Street Where You Live” and I believe this hap-
pened for two reasons. In the first place, nothing else was going
on when the song was sung; the singing character was simply
(and intentionally) stupid—nothing complex about that.58 But
secondly I heard the song because I disliked it intensely. (I love
everything else in the score. But this song, to me, did not fit.) It
was the picture that shoved its way out of the frame with a bang.
Suddenly there was a “pop” song that had strayed into a score
otherwise brilliant, integrated, with a great sense of the play’s
own style and a faithful, uncompromising exposition of charac-
ters and situations.
Although much of My Fair Lady departs from Shaw’s play, its Cinder-
ella slant nevertheless constitutes an extraordinarily faithful adaptation to
Pascal’s filmed revision of Shaw’s original screenplay. Moreover, the music
of My Fair Lady for the most part accurately serves most of Shaw’s textual
ideas. Additionally, the songs themselves, which are carefully prepared and
advance the action in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition, convey the
dramatic meaning that underlies this action.
One critical quandary remains. Just as Higgins neglects to consider the
question of what is to become of Eliza, Lerner and Loewe’s popular adapta-
tion of My Fair Lady poses the problem of what is to become of Shaw’s Pyg-
malion, a play that noted literary critics, including Harold Bloom, consider to
be the playwright’s masterpiece.59 The relative decline of Shaw’s Pygmalion
in the wake of My Fair Lady seems especially lamentable.60
But even measured by Shavian standards, Lerner and Loewe’s clas-
sic musical is by no means overshadowed on artistic grounds. Readers of
Shaw’s play know, as Shaw knew, that Higgins would “never fall in love
with anyone under forty-five.”61 Indeed, marrying Freddy might have its
drawbacks, but marrying Higgins would be unthinkable. It is the ultimate
achievement of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady that the unthinkable has
become the probable.
Two years after My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe completed Gigi, the Acad-
emy Award–winning film adaptation of a Colette novella. Not wishing to
argue with success, Gigi, like My Fair Lady, tells the story of a young woman
who ends up with an older man—Cinderella revisited. The final Broadway
collaboration appeared two years later, Camelot (1960), a partially successful
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Enchanted Evenings
attempt to recycle a production team (director Hart and Julie Andrews

as Guenevere, as well as a new, acclaimed, non-singing actor in the Har-
rison tradition, Richard Burton, as King Arthur). The box office magic of
the My Fair Lady “team” and a long televised segment on the Ed Sullivan
Show helped Camelot—the positive associations with President Kennedy
came later—to survive its extraordinarily bad critical press, growing ten-
sions between Lerner and Loewe, and Lerner’s hospitalization for bleeding
ulcers. Perhaps the most devastating blow of all was Hart’s sudden heart
attack and hospitalization, which forced the director to assume the unaccus-
tomed role of patient rather than that of play doctor, a role he had performed
so irreplaceably on My Fair Lady.
Even those who feel that Eliza should have gone off into the sunset (or
the fog) with Freddy rather than the misogynist Higgins might have second
thoughts about Guenevere’s decision to abandon her likable and desirable
husband Arthur for the younger but boorish and egotistical Lancelot. As
Engel writes: “It is not lack of fidelity that makes for our dissatisfaction but
an unmotivated, rather arbitrary choice that seemed to make no sense.”62
After Camelot, Lerner and Loewe would adapt Gigi for Broadway in 1973
(it ran for only three months). One year later they would work together on
new material for the last time in the film The Little Prince. With the excep-
tions of these brief returns, Loewe, who had collaborated exclusively with
Lerner ever since What’s Up? in 1943, retired on his laurels and died quietly
in 1988. The more restless Lerner, who as early as the 1940s had teamed
up with Weill on Love Life one year after Brigadoon, would collaborate with
Burton Lane within five years after Camelot to create the modestly successful
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.
For his last twenty years, Lerner without Loewe—and, in some respects
equally unfortunately, without Moss Hart, who died in 1961—would pro-
duce one failure after another. Not even the star quality of Katharine Hep-
burn in Coco (1970) could help this show with music by André Previn to run
more than a year. A potentially promising collaboration with the brilliant
Leonard Bernstein in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) closed within a week.
Other short-lived post-Camelot musicals included Lolita, My Love (1972), Car-
melina (1979), and Dance a Little Closer (1983) with music composed by John
Barry, Lane, and Charles Strouse, respectively. At the time of his death in
1986, the indefatigable librettist-lyricist had drafted much of a libretto and
several lyrics for yet another musical, this time based on the classic 1936 film
comedy, My Man Godfrey.63
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chapter thirteen
WEST SIDE STORY

The Very Model of a Major
Musical
W
est Side Story, a collaboration of four extraordinary individuals—
Jerome Robbins (choreographer and director), Arthur Laurents
(librettist), Leonard Bernstein (composer), and Stephen Sond-
heim (lyricist)—premiered on Broadway on September 26, 1957, and ran
for 734 performances.1 After a national tour that lasted a year, it returned
to Broadway for an additional 249 performances. A bona fide hit but not a
megahit like Oklahoma! or My Fair Lady, West Side Story eventually logged in
as the twelfth longest running show of the 1950s (see “Long Runs: Decade
by Decade 1920s–2000s” in the online website).2
In its initial run West Side Story received mostly favorable and respect-
ful notices from our by-now familiar cast of critics. John McClain was the
only critic who assessed the show as “the most exciting thing that has come
to town since ‘My Fair Lady.’ ”3 Walter Kerr focused his attentions on the
dancing, “the most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we’ve been
exposed to in a dozen seasons,” to the near exclusion of everything else,
and concluded his review with a tribute to Robbins: “This is the show that
could have danced all night, and nearly did. But the dancing is it. Don’t
look for laughter or—for that matter—tears.”4 Brooks Atkinson praised the
blend and unity of the work and production and the authors for “pooling
imagination and virtuosity” to create “a profoundly moving show that is
as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving.”5 Robert
Coleman and John McClain predicted that the show would be a hit, and,
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Enchanted Evenings
in what was perhaps the most laudatory critical response, John Chapman
opened his review in the Daily News by exclaiming that “the American
theatre took a venturesome forward step” to present “a bold new kind of
musical theatre.”6 Nevertheless, it was not until 1961, with the release of
the Academy Award–winning film starring the glamorous box-office draw
Natalie Wood (her singing dubbed by the ubiquitous Marni Nixon), that
West Side Story finally became a certified blockbuster, with a soundtrack that
Stephen Banfield reports “remains the longest ever number 1 on Billboard’s
album charts.”7
In the years since the film, West Side Story has appeared in revivals both
at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater in 1968 (89 performances), on
Broadway in 1980 (333 performances) and 2009, and in innumerable pro-
ductions outside of New York. West Side Story has also acquired serious
respect and attention from both theater and music historians and critics.
While it shares with some of the other musicals in this survey a complex
score rich in organicism and motivic and other musical techniques associ-
ated with the nineteenth-century European operatic ideal, as well as some
songs that eventually became standards, it surpasses its European and
Broadway predecessors in its reliance on dance and movement to depict
dramatic action. The creators of West Side Story also managed to take a
canonic and extremely well-loved Shakespeare play and adapt it for 1950s
audiences while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original. Most sig-
nificantly, the adaptation both provides dramatically credible and audible
musical equivalents of Shakespeare’s literary techniques and captures his
central themes.
Musicals prior to West Side Story featured dance to advance the plot
(“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” in On Your Toes); to convey deeper psycho-
logical truths in dreams, in fantasies, or through mime (Oklahoma!, and Car-
ousel); or to establish an ambiance at the beginning of the show (Guys and
Dolls). Thanks to the choreographic vision of Jerome Robbins (1918–1998),
the ability of Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) to conceive extended dance
music, and the willingness of Arthur Laurents (b. 1918) to let dance and
music speak for a thousand words (his libretto is widely considered to be the
shortest of any full-length Broadway show), West Side Story went beyond
these early landmarks in expressing essential dramatic action through the
medium of dance. At least four major moments in act I are told exclusively
or nearly exclusively in dance (Prologue, The Dance at the Gym, the “Cool”
Fugue, and The Rumble); act II features a dream ballet based on “Some-
where” and a violent Taunting ballet. Dances even figure prominently in
most of the songs, especially “America.”
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West Side Story
West Side Story is also notable for increasing the tragic dimensions of a
musical Jud Frye falls on his knife and dies in a fight with Curley in Okla-
homa! Billy Bigelow takes his own life in act II in Carousel. Cable is killed on
his military mission near the end of South Pacific, and the King dies at the
end of The King and I. In West Side Story two principal characters, Riff and
Bernardo, the respective leaders of the Jets and Sharks, are killed in a knife
battle before the end of act I. Tony is shot and killed by Chino near the end
of act II. In adapting what is arguably the most famous love story of all
time, Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story presented a level of youthful violence,
hatred, and death unprecedented in a Broadway musical.
The Making of a Masterpiece

Prior to its 1957 premiere, only Sondheim (b. 1930) among the principal cre-
ators of West Side Story had yet to distinguish himself on Broadway (Sond-
heim’s career will be surveyed in chapter 15). More than a decade earlier
librettist Laurents had written the critically lauded Home of the Brave (1945).
Between Robbins’s 1949 initial conception of a Romeo and Juliet musical with
lots of dance and its working out, Laurents wrote his most successful play,
The Time of the Cuckoo (1952).
In 1944 Robbins collaborated with Bernstein on both the ballet Fancy
Free (as featured dancer and choreographer) and its inspired Broadway off-
spring later that same year, On the Town. Beginning with High Button Shoes
in 1947 (lyrics by Sammy Cahn and music by Jule Styne), Robbins choreo-
graphed a quartet of musical comedies, mostly hits: Hugh Martin’s Look Ma,
I’m Dancin’ (1948), Berlin’s Miss Liberty (1949) and Call Me Madam (1950),
and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (1951), with its innovative
narrated ballet-pantomime “Small House of Uncle Thomas.” As co-director
with Abbott, Robbins helped to create Adler and Ross’s The Pajama Game
(1954); as director-choreographer he brought to life two shows with lyrics
by Comden and Green and music by Styne, Peter Pan (1954) and Bells Are
Ringing (1956), the latter one year before West Side Story.
Bernstein, like Gershwin, came to the piano at a relatively late age, in
Bernstein’s case, ten. He followed his undergraduate years as music major at
Harvard (class of 1939) with studies in orchestration, piano, and conducting
at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. In 1941 he began his private studies
with Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky. While an assistant to
Artur Rodzinski (then conductor of the New York Philharmonic), Bernstein
gained instant (and permanent) recognition when he filled in for ailing
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Enchanted Evenings
guest conductor Bruno Walter and conducted the orchestra on a national

broadcast in November 1943.
Within the next three months Bernstein’s first “serious” classical works
were performed in New York: the song cycle I Hate Music, the “Jeremiah”
Symphony, the ballet Fancy Free, and, by the end of 1944, when the composer
was twenty-six, his first Broadway hit, On the Town. Between On the Town and
West Side Story the phenomenally eclectic composer, conductor, pianist, and
educator composed three major theater works of enduring interest: Trouble
in Tahiti (1952; with his own libretto and lyrics), Wonderful Town (1953; book
by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov and lyrics by Comden and Green),
and Candide (1956; book by Lillian Hellman, lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John
Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Hellman, and Bernstein).
Several published personal remembrances help sort out the complicated

genesis of West Side Story. The first recollection was recorded in 1949 in
“Excerpts from a West Side Story Log,” the year Robbins introduced his
concept to two of his future collaborators, Laurents and Bernstein. Bern-
stein’s log, which originally appeared in the West Side Story Playbill, identi-
fies major events and ideological turning points between Robbins’s initial
idea and the opening night tryout in August 1957.8 Nearly thirty years later
the foursome (Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim) met in 1985
as a panel to discuss their creation before an audience of the Dramatists
Guild.9 Valuable information on the genesis of West Side Story can also be
found in excerpts from published interviews with those involved in the
original production, a number of which appear in Craig Zadan’s Sondheim
& Co.10 Other important sources on the compositional process are contained
in Bernstein’s letters to his wife, Felicia, who was visiting her family in
Santiago, Chile, during the rehearsals and Washington tryouts; Sondheim’s
“Anecdote” published in the song book Bernstein on Broadway; and a Bern-
stein interview with theater critic Mel Gussow published shortly after the
composer’s death in 1990.11
Despite some minor discrepancies in their 1985 recollection of West Side
Story’s genesis, the four collaborators shed a great deal of light on the evolu-
tion of their masterpiece.12 Moreover, their memory of compositional changes
is almost invariably vindicated by the eight libretto drafts and various lyric
sheets housed among the Sondheim papers in the State Historical Society of
Wisconsin. The first of the libretto drafts is dated January 1956, two months
after Sondheim joined the entourage, and the last was completed on July 19,
1957, approximately midway through the unprecedentedly long eight-week
rehearsal schedule (twice the usual length).13 Earlier versions of Bernstein’s
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West Side Story
holograph piano-vocal scores are also available both in Wisconsin and in the
Music Division of the Library of Congress.
From Bernstein’s log we learn that Robbins’s original “noble idea” in
January 1949 was “a modern version of Romeo and Juliet set in slums at the
coincidence of Easter-Passover celebration.”14 Over the next four months
Laurents drafted four scenes, and the original trio of collaborators discussed
the direction of what was then known as East Side Story. Bernstein recorded
that their goal was to write “a musical that tells a tragic story in musical-
comedy terms . . . never falling into the ‘operatic’ trap,” a show that would not
“depend on stars” but must “live or die by the success of its collaborations.”
The next log entries appear six years later when Robbins-Laurents-Bern-
stein returned to their dormant idea. On June 7, 1955, Bernstein reported
that the group remained excited and hypothesized that “maybe I can plan
to give this year to Romeo—if Candide gets in on time.” By August 25 the
trio had “abandoned the whole Jewish-Catholic premise as not very fresh,”
replacing Jews and Catholics with rival gangs, the newly arrived Puerto
Ricans (the future Sharks) and the “self-styled ‘Americans’ ” (the Jets). East
Side Story had metamorphosed into West Side Story.
Since Robbins’s balletic conception entailed an unusually extensive
musical score, Bernstein, who until then thought he could handle the lyr-
ics himself, decided that he needed a lyricist after all. On November 14 he
wrote that they had found “a young lyricist named Stephen Sondheim,” and
described him as “ideal for this project.”15 In the 1985 symposium Sondheim
added that when he was signed on as “co-lyricist” (in an unspecified month
in 1955) Laurents “had a three-page outline.”16
In the sole entry of 1956 (March 17) Bernstein announced that Romeo
would be “postponed for a year” to make way for Candide.17 Not unlike Can-
dide’s Professor Pangloss, Bernstein tried to put the best possible face on
this delay. He then described the “chief problem” of the new “problematical
work”: “To tread the fine line between opera and Broadway, between real-
ism and poetry, ballet and ‘just dancing,’ abstract and representational,” and
to “avoid being ‘messagy.’ ”18
On February 1, 1957, Bernstein noted briefly that with Candide “on and
gone . . . nothing shall disturb the project.” In the next entry (July 8), shortly
after rehearsals had begun, Bernstein confirmed the wisdom of 1949 in not
casting “ ‘singers,’ ” since “anything that sounded more professional would
inevitably sound more experienced, and then the ‘kid’ quality would be
gone.” On August 20, one day after the opening-night tryout in Washington,
Bernstein made his final entry. With great enthusiasm and pride he assessed
the successful artistic collaboration (“all writing the same show”). Together,
the quartet had created a work that possessed a “theme as profound as love
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Enchanted Evenings
versus hate, with all the theatrical risks of death and racial issues and young
performers and ‘serious’ music and complicated balletics.”19
Shortly before his death Bernstein revealed that the melody of “America,”
portions of “Mambo” from “The Dance at the Gym” (both derived from a never-
completed Cuban ballet called Conch Town begun in 1941), and the centrally
important “Somewhere” and “Maria” were among the first musical ideas con-
ceived.20 Regarding the origins of “Somewhere” Bernstein explained: “ ‘Some-
where’ was a tune I had around and had never finished. I loved it. I remember
Marc Blitzstein loved it very much and wrote a lyric to it just for fun. It was
called ‘There Goes What’s His Name.’ ”21 Larry Kert (the original Tony) placed
Bernstein’s recollection about “Somewhere” more precisely when he remem-
bered that “Somewhere” was “written about the time of On the Town” (1944),
which would make this song the earliest musical antecedent of the future West
Side Story.22 Of equal importance is Bernstein’s recollection that at the time the
musical was still East Side Story he “had already jotted down a sketch for a
song called ‘Maria,’ which was operable in Italian or Spanish.”23 Not only did
Bernstein’s sketch have a “dummy lyric,” it “had those notes . . . the three notes
of ‘Maria’ [that] pervade the whole piece—inverted, done backward.”24
Stephen Sondheim (at piano) and Leonard Bernstein rehearsing West Side
Story (1957). Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.
284
West Side Story
Example 13.1. “Somewhere” in Beethoven and Tchaikovsky

(a) “Somewhere”
(b) Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5, op. 73 (“Emperor”)
(c) Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet
Example 13.2. Blitzstein’s Regina and “Maria”

(a) Blitzstein’s Regina, Introduction to act I
(b) “Maria”
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Enchanted Evenings
In the light of their contribution to the organic unity of the work, the
knowledge that “Somewhere” and “Maria” were the first two songs drafted
provides invaluable historical confirmation of the analytical conclusions
that follow. Also striking, even if perhaps coincidental, is the fact that both
of these pivotal songs bear unmistakable resemblances to music of Bern-
stein’s predecessors. The opening five pitches and rhythms of “Somewhere”
(Example 13.1a) correspond closely to the fifth and six measures of the sec-
ond movement of Beethoven’s E major Piano Concerto, op. 73, known as
the “Emperor” (Example 13.1b).25 More significantly, the thrice-repeated
three-note motive in the cello part at the conclusion of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo
and Juliet Overture (Example 13.1c) is identical to the first three notes of
Bernstein’s melody. Intended or not, “Somewhere” seems to begin where
Tchaikovsky’s overture leaves off. Unlike borrowed material in other shows,
a number of Bernstein’s central classical borrowings were apparently chosen
for their programmatic and associative meaning.26
The main tune of “Maria” is more obviously indebted to an aria from the
opera Regina (based on Hellman’s The Little Foxes), composed by Bernstein’s
mentor and friend, Marc Blitzstein (Example 13.2).27 Perhaps not coinciden-
tally, Regina premiered in 1949, the year Robbins conceived his “noble idea.”
The exceedingly strong melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic similarities between
“Maria” and the introductory music to act I of Blitzstein’s lesser known opera
should be readily evident, even to those previously unfamiliar with the model.
Before intensive collaborative work began in 1956, several months after
the entrance of Sondheim, the tangible evidence of West Side Story included
a draft of several scenes, an outline of the remaining scenes, and substan-
tial compositional work on two dramatically and musically central songs,
“Somewhere” and “Maria.” The cross-fertilization between West Side Story
and Candide of the previous year is also evident. In 1956 the comic duet
now indelibly associated with Candide and Cunegonde, “Oh, Happy We,”
had been considered for the bridal shop scene in West Side Story, and the
song that was eventually placed there, “One Hand, One Heart,” was origi-
nally intended for Candide.28 Until at least 1957, however, this future bridal
shop song was located in the balcony scene, after which it was replaced by
“Tonight” (see “Libretto Drafts 1 [January 1956] and 2 [Spring 1956]” in the
online website). Another version of an unused Candide song, “Where Does It
Get You in the End?,” served as the basis for “Gee, Officer Krupke,” a song
that was not added until rehearsals in July.29
By the end of 1956 Laurents had completed his fourth libretto draft (out
of eight), and much of the eventual version was fixed. The most significant
changes in the months prior to and during the rehearsal schedule from mid-
June to mid-August 1957 were the addition of two songs, “Something’s
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West Side Story
Coming” and “Gee, Officer Krupke,” and considerable revamping of the

opening Prologue. Also in 1957 more dance numbers would be added to
the “Dance at the Gym” (only the “Mambo” was indicated for this section
at the end of 1956); Tony’s and Maria’s “One Hand, One Heart” on the tene-
ment balcony had still not been replaced by “Tonight.”30
The Prologue and first scene, which had already undergone a number of
changes in the first four librettos (all in 1956), required considerable revision
before it achieved its revolutionary final version in the summer months of
1957. Although Bernstein exaggerates the ease with which he and his col-
laborators worked out the solution to the complex problems posed by this
opening, the libretto and musical score drafts support his recollection in
1985 that the Prologue was originally intended to be sung: “It didn’t take us
long to find out that it wouldn’t work. That was when Jerry [Robbins] took
over and converted all that stuff into this remarkable thing now known as
‘the prologue to West Side Story,’ all dancing and movement.”31
The three sung themes of “Up to the Moon” (Example 13.3) found their
way into the instrumental Prologue and the instrumental portions of the “Jet
Song” as we know it. A fourth theme (and much of the text) from “Up to
the Moon” was salvaged in the eventual Broadway version of the “Jet Song,”
when the Jets sing “Oh, when the Jets fall in at the cornball dance, / We’ll be
the sweetest dressin’ gang in pants!”32 In Laurents’s fourth libretto (Winter
1956) the opening scene had shifted from a clubhouse to an alleyway, but it is
not until the similar fifth and sixth librettos (April 14 and May 1, 1957) that the
first scene—none of the eight librettos indicate a Prologue distinct from a first
scene—begins to resemble the final version shown in the online website.33
Example 13.3. Vocal passages from “Up to the Moon” reused in Prologue
and “Jet Song”
(a) “How long does it take?”
(b) “Gettin’ sweet and shined up”
(c) “Carazy, Daddy-O”
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Enchanted Evenings
Sondheim recalled in the 1985 Dramatists Guild symposium that West

Side Story “certainly changed less from the first preview in Washington to the
opening in New York than any other show I’ve ever done, with the excep-
tion of Sweeney Todd, which also had almost no changes.”34 In Sondheim & Co.
he comments further on the extent of these alterations: “Our total changes
out of town consisted of rewriting the release for the ‘Jet Song,’ adding a
few notes to ‘One Hand,’ Jerry potchkied with the second-act ballet, and there
were a few cuts in the book.”35
Again, the evidence from the music manuscripts and libretto drafts sub-
stantiates Sondheim’s recollection on all these points. Bernstein’s early pia-
no-vocal score reveals the rejected release for the “Jet Song” and two versions
of “One,” the original one-note-per-measure version and the familiar three-
notes-per-measure version.36 And in what is perhaps the most significant
potch of the dream ballet sequence, “Somewhere” was originally intended
to be danced rather than sung, at least until its conclusion when Tony and
Maria reprise the final measures.
Sondheim also remembered Robbins’s preoccupation during the tryouts
with a number that would be eventually rejected:
Jerry had a strong feeling that there was a sag in the middle of
the first act [scene 6], so we wrote a number for the three young
kids—Anybodys, Arab, and Baby John. It was called “Kids Ain’t”
and was a terrific trio that we all loved, but Arthur gave a most
eloquent speech about how he loved it also but that we shouldn’t
use it, because it would be a crowd-pleaser and throw the weight
over to typical musical comedy which we agreed we didn’t want to
do. So it never went in.37
During the July rehearsals Robbins & Co. had taken steps to remedy the lack of
a comic musical number caused by the removal of “Kids Ain’t.” Although there
had been a comic exchange between Officer Krupke and the Jets in act II, scene
2, in the four 1956 libretto drafts, no song had yet appeared in this space. Only in
the final libretto draft did a recycled “Where Does It Get You in the End?” from
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West Side Story
Jerome Robbins (second from left) rehearsing West Side Story (1957).
Candide materialize as “Gee, Officer Krupke.” Sondheim recalled that Robbins

staged this number “in three hours by the clock, three days before we went to
Washington.”38 At the time, Sondheim thought that “Officer Krupke” would
be better placed in act I, since its presence detracted from the serious develop-
ments in the drama. After viewing the 1961 film in which “Krupke” and “Cool”
were reversed “and weren’t nearly as effective,” Sondheim came to accept Rob-
bins’s directorial decision and to acknowledge that “Krupke” “works wonder-
fully” in act II on the basis of its “theatrical truth” rather than its “literal truth.”39
Since its comic intent was meant to provide dramatic contrast and relief from
the mostly tragic theme based on tritones and “Somewhere” motives (to be dis-
cussed), the absence of the latter and the softening of the former in “Krupke” is
understandable and dramatically plausible and welcome.
After “Krupke,” one final song, not indicated even as late as the final
libretto draft of July 19, was added during rehearsals.40 This song, newly
composed to conclude act I, scene 2, after Tony promises Riff that he will
attend the Settlement dance, is, of course, “Something’s Coming.” Bernstein
describes the circumstances and motivation for this song:
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Enchanted Evenings
“Something’s Coming” was born right out of a big long speech that
Arthur wrote for Tony. It said how every morning he would wake
up and reach out for something, around the corner or down the
beach. It was very late and we were in rehearsal when Steve and
I realized that we needed a strong song for Tony earlier since he had
none until “Maria,” which was a love song. We had to have more
delineation of him as a character. We were looking through this
particular speech, and “Something’s Coming” just seemed to leap
off the page. In the course of the day we had written that song.41
At Robbins’s suggestion, Laurents added the meeting between Tony and

Riff in front of the drugstore, and in the course of the Washington tryouts the
song “Something’s Coming” replaced much of the dialogue.42 Sondheim’s
recollection that the song ended with its eventual title is partially borne out
by the Winter 1956 libretto, which concludes with the following exchange:
tony: Now it’s right outside that door, around the corner: maybe being
stamped in a letter, maybe whistling down the river, maybe—
riff: What is?
tony: (Shrugs). I don’t know. But it’s coming and it’s the great-
est. . . . Could be. Why not?43
In contrast to “Gee, Officer Krupke,” the purpose of which was to provide

a respite from the surrounding tragedy, the motive behind “Something’s
Coming” was to introduce a main character and to link this character to
the ensuing drama.44 This is accomplished musically by allowing Tony to
resolve a dissonant and dramatically symbolic interval (the interval of hate,
a tritone) at the beginning and conclusion of his song.
From Verona to the Upper West Side

In order to understand the Romantic qualities inherent in West Side Story it may
be helpful to recall that the nineteenth century, an age obsessed by the theme
of idealized youthful passionate love that realizes its apotheosis only with pre-
mature death, was irresistibly drawn to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.45 Not
only did this play—in various degrees of fidelity to Shakespeare—occupy the
European stage throughout most of the nineteenth century, numerous musical
settings also made their debut. Just as revisions of Shakespeare’s play from
the late-seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries frequently included a
happy ending, most of the musical adaptations strayed conspicuously from the
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original. Gounod’s still-popular Roméo et Juliette (1867), for example, introduces

a major female role (Stephano) that has no Shakespearean counterpart.46
Although these operatic, orchestral, and balletic versions, unlike West
Side Story, retain the names of the major characters and basic plot machina-
tions, they more often than not distort Shakespeare’s tragic intention with
the insertion of either a happy ending (like many play performances) or an
ending that enables the principals to sing (or dance) an impassioned love
duet before their demise. Consider Prokofiev’s ballet (1935–36), one of the
most popular of the twentieth century and most likely an inspiration for
Robbins. After its premiere, Soviet Shakespearean scholars influenced cen-
sors to prohibit Prokofiev and his collaborators from allowing Romeo an
extra minute in order to take advantage of his pyrrhic opportunity to wit-
ness Juliet alive. Prokofiev defended his original scenario: “The reasons that
led us to such a barbarism were purely choreographic. Living people can
dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down.”47
Modern-day nonmusical versions of Shakespeare’s play are similarly
prone to alterations that can distort the meaning and tone of the Bard (or
eliminate substantial portions of text), presumably for the sake of broader
public palatability. The well-known 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet by director
Franco Zeffirelli, probably the most popular film adaptation of Shakespeare
ever made, serves as an instructive paradigm for the triumph of accessibility
over authenticity introduced in chapter 1 (even though the eponymous prin-
cipals die). One may acknowledge the need to make a Shakespeare movie
cinematic and argue on behalf of the many artistic merits of Zeffirelli’s con-
siderable textual excisions, but the conclusion is nonetheless inescapable
that Zeffirelli has succeeded more brilliantly in bringing himself rather than
Shakespeare to a mass audience.48
Although it contains extensive transformational liberties, the tragic dramatic

vision of West Side Story arguably corresponds more closely to Shakespeare
than Zeffirelli’s version or nineteenth-century musical adaptations that wear
the garb of the Montagues and the Capulets. Robbins spoke of Laurents’s
achievement in following the “story as outlined in the Shakespeare play
without the audience or critics realizing it,” but most theatergoers familiar
with the characters in Shakespeare’s tale of “fair Verona” can easily recog-
nize their West Side reincarnations.49
While preserving the central theme of youthful passionate love’s Pyrrhic
victory over passionate youthful hate and many of the central plot elements
from the Shakespearean source, adapted to suit New York gang culture of
the 1950s, the collaborators took four major transformational liberties:
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Enchanted Evenings
1. Increased motivation for the conflict between the gangs

2. Decreased importance of adults
3. Substitution of free will for fate in the demise of Tony
4. Decision to keep Maria alive
Most obviously, the warring gangs, the Jets and Sharks, parallel the war-
ring families, the Montagues and Capulets.50 Like Romeo at the outset of
Shakespeare’s play, Tony, a Jet, has disassociated himself from the violent
members of his clan. His friend, Riff, shares the fate and much of the mercu-
rial character of Romeo’s friend, Mercutio. Maria appears as an older and
therefore more credible Juliet for modern audiences. Bernardo’s death has
a more direct emotional impact because he is Maria’s brother rather than a
literal counterpart to Juliet’s cousin Tybalt. By 1957, New York City teenagers
were less likely to share intimacies with an aging nurse. Consequently, Anita,
a woman only a few years older than Maria, serves as a more credible coun-
terpart to Shakespeare’s elderly crone, a confidante to Maria, and of course an
agile dancing partner for her lover, Bernardo. Chino, Maria’s unexciting but
eventually excitable fiancé and Bernardo’s choice for his sister, corresponds
closely to Juliet’s parentally selected suitor, the County Paris.
All these changes reflect societal changes that transpired between the 1590s
and the 1950s. For similar reasons, adult authority has been greatly reduced
in the adaptation. Juliet’s parents, who play a prominent role throughout the
Shakespeare play (and in Laurents’s early libretto drafts), are reduced to off-
stage voices in the musical; Tony’s parents are represented metaphorically
as dummies in the bridal shop where Tony and Maria marry themselves
without benefit of clergy. Doc, a druggist who parallels the well-meaning
but ineffectual Friar Laurence, serves far less as a catalyst for the plot than as
an adult representative who can at least partially sympathize with troubled
youth; Officer Krupke, although more abrasive than his counterpart, Prince
Escalus, possesses less authority and earns even less respect.51
Other departures from Shakespeare’s play were similarly motivated for
the resulting accessibility. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, no Capulet or
Montague can recall a specific cause for their senseless enmity.52 West Side
Story audiences learn that the Americans (the Jets) fear that the Puerto Ricans
(the Sharks) are usurping jobs and territory. In contrast to the long-forgotten
causes, the Jets and the Sharks know they are fighting for control over a few
city blocks on the West side.
Perhaps the most dramatic departure from Shakespeare also developed
because the collaborators of West Side Story realized they needed a “believ-
able substitute for the philter.” Laurents speaks of his imaginative solution
to this problem with justifiable pride: “The thing I’m proudest of in telling
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the story is why she [Anita] can’t get the message through: because of preju-
dice. I think it’s better than the original story.”53
Thus, whenever dramatically possible, the youthful characters in West
Side Story make their own mistakes and generate their own fate. Tony’s
form of suicide, his vociferous public invitation for Chino to shoot him,
contrasts with Romeo’s quiet decision to take the poison he has purchased
for this purpose. In Shakespeare, a tragic coincidence (an outbreak of
plague) prevented the news of Juliet’s magic sleep from reaching Romeo;
the sleep itself was induced by Friar Laurence’s herbal potions, a well-
meaning, albeit imprudent, adult action. A much-provoked Anita sets the
stage for Tony’s death with her deliberate lie to the Jets that Maria is dead.
By letting Maria live, the creators of West Side Story allow her to assume
the authority previously delegated to the patriarchal figures of the Capulet
and Montague families and to inspire reconciliation between the Sharks
and Jets, who then carry Tony’s body off the stage at the final curtain.
Significantly, Maria leads the play’s dramatic catharsis in front of adults as
well as her peers.
Only the first two of Laurents’s libretto drafts (January and Spring 1956)
follow Shakespeare on this crucial dramaturgical point. Maria, thinking
Tony dead, returns to the bridal shop and “sings passionately of her not
wanting to live in a world without Tonio [at this point Tony was Italian-
American], a world that has taken him from her.” The scene description
continues: “At the peak of this, she grabs up a pair of dressmaking shears
and—with her back to us—plunges them into her stomach.” Moments later
Tony (Tonio) arrives and “cradling her in his arms, he starts to sing with her
a reprise of their song from the marriage scene.” The orchestra completes
their song and after kissing her, Tony opens the door of the shop and cries
out, “Come and take me! Come and take me too!”54
By the third draft (March 15, 1956), which also concludes at the bridal
shop, Maria “tries to tear the wedding veil with her hands, cannot, picks
up sewing shears and is about to cut the veil when a new thought [presum-
ably suicide] enters her mind.”55 In this draft, as in the five others over the
next sixteen months, a mortally wounded Tony finds Maria, and the lovers
are able to share a few final moments together.
Robbins credits Rodgers for realizing how to “solve a problem like
Maria” (two years before The Sound of Music’s Maria Von Trapp) and for
keeping Maria alive: “I remember Richard Rodgers’s contribution. We had
a death scene for Maria—she was going to commit suicide or something,
as in Shakespeare. He said, ‘She’s dead already, after this all happens to
her.’ ”56All sources agree that Bernstein’s collaborators wanted to convert
Laurents’s prose speech into music for Maria, just as Bernstein and Sondheim
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Enchanted Evenings
had raided the libretto for “Something’s Coming” and “A Boy Like That.”
In the 1985 panel discussion Bernstein recalled that he discarded four or
five attempts to create an aria for Maria from Laurents’s dummy lyric that
would become Maria’s speech: “It’s not that I didn’t try.” In an interview
with Humphrey Burton, Bernstein offered a more detailed account:
“It cries out for music,” Bernstein said himself. “I tried to set it
very bitterly, understated, swift. I tried giving all the material to
the orchestra and having her sing an obbligato throughout. I tried
a version that sounds just like a Puccini aria, which we really did
not need. I never got past six bars with it. I never had an experience
like that. Everything sounded wrong.” So Maria’s words, which
Laurents had written merely as a guide to lyricist and composer,
became the dramatic text. “I made,” Bernstein confessed, “a dif-
ficult, painful but surgically clean decision not to set it at all.”57
Despite these liberties, for the most part the collaborators of West Side Story
preserve the spirit of the original as well as what is perhaps Shakespeare’s
central theme: the triumph of youthful passionate love over youthful passion-
ate hate, even in death. They also incorporate Shakespeare’s literary device of
foreshadowing, for similar dramatic and musical purposes, to inform audi-
ences of the inevitable, albeit mostly self-made, destiny facing the young
lovers. Tony’s somewhat more optimistic premonition in “Something’s Com-
ing” early in the musical can be seen, for example, as a parallel to Mercutio’s
famous Queen Mab speech: “My mind misgives / Some consequence, yet
hanging in the stars, / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night’s
revels and expire the term / Of a despised life, closed in my breast, / By some
vile forfeit of untimely death” (act 1, scene 4, lines 112–17).
Romeo’s bittersweet, sorrowful premonitions in the first eleven lines
of act V (“I dreamt my lady came and found me dead”) clearly corre-
spond to the Romantic message most clearly expressed in “Somewhere,”
introduced by an anonymous offstage “Girl” (opera stars Reri Grist on
Broadway and Marilyn Horne on Bernstein’s 1985 recording, handpicked
by the composer) during the dream ballet sequence in act II.58 By the end
of Bernstein’s musical counterpart to Shakespeare in the dream sequence,
audiences know that the place and time for Tony and Maria will not be
a flat on the Upper West Side. Rather, as in the tale of Tristan and Isolde,
their passionate love will be fulfilled only after death. With great ingenuity
Bernstein manages to discover a convincing musical equivalent to Shake-
speare’s foreshadowing of death, a musical transformation from youthful
hate to youthful love.
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West Side Story
A “Tragic Story in Musical-Comedy Terms”

As early as 1949, Bernstein, Laurents, and Robbins were consciously striving
to write “a musical that tells a tragic story in musical-comedy terms” and to
avoid “falling into the ‘operatic trap.’ ” At the same time they—mainly Bern-
stein as the composer—borrowed freely from the European operatic and
symphonic traditions.59 The degree to which Broadway musicals could and
should aspire to the condition of nineteenth-century tragic opera remains a
controversial issue often vigorously and irreconcilably divided along party
lines. Representing one side is Joseph P. Swain, who views Broadway gener-
ally as a series of “missed chances and unanswered challenges” that “made
tragic drama in the American musical theater into an Olympus, beckoning
beyond reach.”60 Not surprisingly for Swain, “Maria’s last speech should
indeed have been her biggest aria.”61 Similarly, in the West Side Story entry
in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera Jon Alan Conrad considers Bernstein’s
“failure to find music for Maria’s final scene” one of the work’s “weak
points.”62 Those who interpret the dramaturgy of musicals as a workable
alternative, perhaps even a corrective, to opera might conclude with Ste-
phen Banfield that “whatever fears Laurents may have had that it would
turn into a ‘goddamned Bernstein opera,’ one of West Side Story’s greatest
strengths is that it did not.”63 Accordingly, “Maria’s final speech works per-
fectly well as dialogue.”64
The analytical remarks that follow will show that Bernstein borrowed
from his European predecessors as well as from his American present. The
varied score consists of three primary styles: a variant of cool jazz for the
Jets; a cornucopia of Latin American dances associated with the Sharks,
their girl friends, and Maria; and music that suggests European and Ameri-
can operatic traditions for much of the love music. The jazz can be heard
most readily in the Prologue, “Jet Song,” the Blues and Jump music in “The
Dance at the Gym,” “Cool,” and The Rumble. Latin music is featured in the
Promenade (paso doble), Mambo, and Cha-Cha dances in “The Dance at
the Gym,” the tango in “Maria,” the seis and huapango in “America,” and
the cachucha in “I Feel Pretty.” Of these song and dance prototypes only the
seis can claim any authentic ties with Puerto Rico, which for some makes
West Side Story about as Puerto Rican as Georges Bizet’s Carmen is Spanish
(or Cuban). Operatic dialects are most recognizable in “Tonight,” “Some-
where,” and the double duet “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love.”
Combining techniques and ideologies of nineteenth-century opera and
American and Latin vernacular styles, Bernstein forged his own dramatic
musical hybrid. While the connections to Latin dance rhythms and cool jazz are
immediately apparent and even labeled, the European technical procedures
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Enchanted Evenings
require more explanation. Although motivic melodic analysis no longer serves

as the central analytical paradigm, the crucial role motivic development plays
in some musicals, most notably Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, and West Side Story,
is persuasive. More important, the principal motivic transformations are read-
ily perceived (even to inexperienced listeners) and the more intricate melodic
connections usually serve a demonstrable dramatic purpose.
Since the most famous exponent of nineteenth-century tragic drama was
Wagner (his views were popular especially in the 1950s), it is not surprising
that Bernstein, in setting the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, borrowed melodic
and harmonic elements most commonly associated with Wagner’s operas
(although certainly not limited to these works). The principal melodic tech-
nique is the pervasive use of leitmotivs (short themes that represent people,
things, or abstract ideas) as source material for thematic transformation
and organic unity.65 Harmonically, Bernstein used the deceptive cadence, a
sequence of chords in which a dominant fails to resolve to its tonic.66 Also
associated with Wagner and adopted by Bernstein is the technique of having
the orchestra present an underlying dramatic commentary on the melodic
line. Finally, the ensuing analytical discussion will suggest that Bernstein
borrowed a central and specific leitmotiv from Wagner and used it for a
related dramatic purpose.67
Bernstein’s Wagnerian vision is most profoundly revealed in his use of the
song “Somewhere,” a song that, despite its early conception, did not achieve
its vocal independence until a relatively late stage in the compositional pro-
cess. As previously noted, until the production began its rehearsals in June,
the piano-vocal score manuscript reveals that this song, eventually intoned
by a woman offstage, was to be entirely danced. Only after the “Procession
and Nightmare” did Tony and Maria return to sing the final eight measures
of “Somewhere.”68
Nearly all of the musical material in the thirty-seven-measure “Some-
where” is based on one of three brief motives: (a), (b), and three versions of
(c). See Example 13.4, which shows A and B of the overall form, A (8), A′ (8), B
(8), A” (8), and B” (5). Despite their brevity, each motive contains a distinctive
rhythmic or melodic profile. More important, each motive will be purpose-
fully foreshadowed. The first motive (a) which opens the song on “There’s
a place”—possibly derived from the second movement of Beethoven’s
“Emperor” Concerto or, more likely, from the final measures of Tchaikovsky’s
Fantasy-Overture on Romeo and Juliet—consists of three notes: a rising minor
seventh (B up to A) followed by a descending half-step (A down to G).
Bernstein uses this motive in the vocal part to mark the principal statements
of the tune on the words “There’s a place” (mm. 1—2 and A′, mm. 25—26)
and “There’s a time” (A′, mm. 9—10) that initiate each A section.
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West Side Story
Example 13.4. “Somewhere” motives

(a) “There's a place for us” (motives a and b)
(b) “Some day! Somewhere” (motive c)
Bernstein elides the last note of this a motive with a second motive, b, on “place
for us,” composed of intervals that form a simple descending minor or, less fre-
quently, major triad. This second motive with its idiosyncratic rhythmic signature
is usually paired with its predecessor and occurs nine times in the first sixteen
measures of the song and another four thereafter. The most frequently stated
(six times) descending minor triad, C-sharp minor (G-E-C or vi in E major
as in m. 2) marks a deceptive and therefore ambiguous resolution. For most of
the song Bernstein plays on our expectation that the B major dominant seventh
implied in the first motive, which corresponds to the “place” for Tony and Maria,
should be followed by the tonic chord, E major. Like many nineteenth-century
composers, however, Bernstein does not allow his song to actually arrive on the
tonic E until the final measures. It is tempting to make a connection between
these deceptive cadences and Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, where har-
monic resolutions are similarly denied to make the dramatic point that nowhere
on earth will there be a place to rest for Wagner’s star-crossed lovers.
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Enchanted Evenings
The minor seventh melodic interval of the first motive (“There’s a place”)
and the dotted rhythm signature of the triadic second motive (“place for
us”) also permeates the orchestral underpinning of “Somewhere.”69 After the
offstage “Girl” introduces the first motive vocally, the orchestra will repeat
it until interrupted by the first appearance of the third (or “Somewhere”)
motive (c1) at measure 8. The “place for us” motive gains in orchestral as
well as vocal prominence after measure 8 as it frequently answers its vocal
statements, occasionally straddling measures in the process.70
After its solitary appearance during the course of the first two A sections,
the third “Somewhere” motive will emerge in the second half of the song as
the principal rhythmic motive (with no less than eight statements). Bernstein
introduces this third motive with a descending half-step (E to D); thereafter
the most emphasized melodic interval will be an ascending whole-step (c2)
to mark the modulation to C major on the words “Some day! Somewhere”
(mm. 17 and 18). On three other occasions, “living,” “–giving,” and “Some-
where” (mm. 20, 22, and 23, respectively) he changes the third motive more
drastically with a descending perfect fifth (c3). All three melodic versions of
this third “Somewhere” motive share the same defining rhythmic identity.
At the outset of Romeo and Juliet the character known as the Chorus informs
Shakespeare’s audience of the destiny soon to befall the doomed lovers.71
The characters themselves, of course, are not allowed to know this. Simi-
larly, Romeo’s dreams prepare audiences for the forthcoming tragedy, but
Romeo himself does not fully grasp their significance until after the fact.
Bernstein borrows the theatrical device of foreshadowing when he suc-
cessively anticipates the three “Somewhere” motives in “Tonight,” Tony and
Maria’s impassioned love duet on the fire escape (Shakespeare’s Veronese
balcony) within minutes of their first meeting at the gym dance.72 As in Wag-
ner’s music dramas, the orchestra gives an alert audience classified infor-
mation to which the principals are not privy. At the end of Wagner’s Das
Rheingold, for example, the first opera in the Ring tetralogy, when the gods
enter the newly constructed fortress Valhalla as the trumpet plays a new
motive that will be identified one opera later in the cycle, Die Walküre, when
Sieglinde tells Siegmund about the sword. At the conclusion of “Tonight”
the idealistic lovers show their oneness by singing in unison and the celes-
tial heights of youthful optimistic love by singing and holding high A’s.
Meanwhile, back on earth, the omniscient orchestra warns audiences of their
imminent doom (Example 13.5). Upon future hearings, audiences come to
realize that the death associated with “Somewhere” is already present at the
moment of greatest bliss in “Tonight.” As with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde,
another Romeo and Juliet prototype, love and death, like love and hate, are
inextricably entwined.
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West Side Story
Example 13.5. Orchestral foreshadowing of “Somewhere” at the conclusion

of the Balcony Scene (“Tonight”)
A second prominent foreshadowing of “Somewhere” occurs min-

utes later during the dance between choruses of “Cool,” when the Jets
make an energetic but ultimately fruitless attempt to achieve a calm
before the rumble. Here Bernstein uses the first “Somewhere” motive
(without its usual second-motive continuation) as the first three notes
of the fugue subject that introduces the “Cool” fugue, danced rather
than sung by the Jets (Example 13.6a). Several measures later a slightly
Example 13.6. “Somewhere” motives in “Cool” fugue

(a) first “Somewhere” motive (motive a)
(b) third “Somewhere” motive (motive c)
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Enchanted Evenings
transformed version of the third “Somewhere” motive (Example 13.6b,

c3 and c1) can also be heard.73 Like the use of the three “Somewhere”
motives presented in succession at the conclusion of the “Tonight” duet,
the idea here is an orchestral one that can be interpreted as a foreshad-
owing of death, much in the way the orchestra at the conclusion of Wag-
ner’s Das Rheingold informs the audience, but not Wotan, of Siegfried’s
sword.74
Ingeniously, Bernstein finds a new use for the “There’s a place” motive
when Maria and Anita reconcile their anger and pain in “I have a love,”
the song that follows the “Somewhere” dream ballet. In this climactic scene
the composer transforms the first “Somewhere” motive into a new context.
As shown in Example 13.7, Bernstein preserves the melody but alters the
rhythm to fit a new declamation on the words, “I love him, I’m his” and
“I love him, we’re one” sung by Maria to Anita, and in harmony with her
friend on the words, “When love comes so strong.”75
The “Procession and Nightmare” introduces a new important motive
shown in Example 13.8a, a motive that will return to conclude the musical
in the Finale. In contrast to the three “Somewhere” motives, the “Proces-
sion” motive is not foreshadowed in earlier portions of the work. Rather,
this “Procession” motive itself foreshadows a new principal theme, set to
“I have a love, and it’s all that I have” and “I have a love and it’s all that
I need” (the opening is shown in Example 13.8b), where it alternates with a
rhythmic transformation of the first “Somewhere” motive (compare Exam-
ples 13.4a and 13.7).76 The “I have a love” motive also retains its symbiotic
relationship with the three “Somewhere” motives, since it will either adjoin
or occur simultaneously with one or more of these “Somewhere” motives
whenever it is heard. The “Procession” motive also bears an uncanny and
perhaps intended melodic, rhythmic, and symbolic connection with Wag-
ner’s “redemption” theme (Example 13.8c) first sung by Sieglinde in Die
Walküre and later by Brünnhilde during the Immolation Scene that con-
cludes Die Götterdämmerung.77
Example 13.7. “Somewhere” motive in “I Have a Love”
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West Side Story
“Somewhere” and “Procession and Nightmare,” with their foreshad-

owings and symbolic apotheoses, musically convey the principal dra-
matic message of West Side Story. But Bernstein also uses musical materials
more directly by taking advantage of music’s power to depict psychologi-
cal states and by assigning appropriate musical equivalents to the driv-
ing emotions of passionate youthful hate and its counterpart in youthful
love. Bernstein’s principal musical accomplice to make this possible is
the tritone or augmented fourth, a highly charged dissonant interval that
figures prominently in the motive associated with the hate-filled gangs
(Example 13.9a, F-B). It may not be coincidental that the pervasive use
of the intervals formed by these notes C-F-B (a rising fourth followed by
a rising tritone) as a central motive in West Side Story) employs the same
three-note sequence of notes heard as the opening and central motive of
Alban Berg’s youthful late-Romantic early-modernist Piano Sonata, op.
1 (1907–1908), well known in Bernstein’s circle (Example 13.9b, G-C-F).
With its short upbeat, its disproportionately long second note, and the
short final note on the tritone, to mark the second note of the tritone, the
hate motive relates even more closely rhythmically as well in approxi-
mate pitch to the principal motive sounded by the Shofar (the latter not
always easily determined on this instrument), the ancient ram’s horn that
announces Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a sound that Bernstein
knew well.
In any event, Bernstein’s motive clearly serves as a central unifying ele-
ment. Although no one has speculated on its possible connection with Berg’s
sonata, its appearance (in nearly every musical number of the show) was
recognized as early as Jack Gottlieb’s 1964 dissertation; the motive has been
discussed in varying detail since then by Peter Gradenwitz, Larry Stempel,
and Swain.78 Gottlieb prefaces his discussion of the “hate” motive with the
following statement:
It was in west side story that the fullest expression of the interval
as a progenitor of musical development came into effect. Unlike
wonderful town (perfect fifth)79 and candide (minor seventh),80
the interval here was not used for melodic purposes only, but as
a harmonic force also. The interval in question is the tritone (aug-
mented fourth), the famous Diabolus in Musica, certainly an appro-
priate symbolism for this tragic musical drama.81
A summary of how Bernstein uses the “hate” motive for dramatic purposes
follows.
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Example 13.8. “Procession” motive in “I Have a Love” and Wagner’s Ring

(a) “Procession” motive
(b) “I Have a Love” (“Procession” motive)
(c) Redemption motive in Wagner's Die Walküre
Bernstein introduces the definitive form of the “hate” motive in the Pro-
logue shortly after the stage directions “Bernardo enters.”82 Once Bernstein
associates his unresolved tritone motive with the hate-filled Jets, he positions
himself to convey dramatic meanings through its resolution or attempted
resolution. An example of the latter occurs in Promenade, when the social
worker Glad Hand attempts to get the Sharks and Jets to mix amiably at the
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West Side Story
Settlement dance. Here the accented tritone dissonances in the bass (now
spelled C-G), symbolically demonstrate the underlying tensions and result-
ing futility of attempts to resolve the animosity between the gangs. The drama
reinforces this musical point when Promenade is interrupted by the Mambo,
and Bernardo and Riff circumvent their intended partners and heed Anita’s
subsequent dictum to associate exclusively with “their own kind.”
As the song instructs, the Jets in “Cool” attempt to achieve a degree of
calm prior to The Rumble (or after The Rumble in the film version).83 The
main tune of “Cool” consists of a tritone (spelled C-F) followed almost
invariably by its upward resolution to the perfect fifth (G) (Example 13.9c).
Underneath the main tune the definitive “hate” (or “gang”) motive appears
as an accompaniment, and tritones also provide a harmonic foundation. One
might interpret the upward resolution as an easing of tension, a perfect fifth
as a metaphor for a more perfect world. If so, the Jets’ attempt to compose
themselves in this song, like their attempts to mix at the Settlement dance,
Example 13.9. “Hate” in West Side Story

(a) “Hate” motive (Prologue)
(b) “Hate” motive in Berg’s Piano Sonata
(c) “Hate” motive in “Cool” (attempted resolution)
(d) Resolution of the “Hate” motive in “Something's Coming”
(e) Tony's resolution of the tritone and Maria's name as resolution of the
“Hate” motive in The Dance at the Gym
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are also destined for musical failure, a failure borne out dramatically by the
subsequent deaths of Riff and Bernardo.
Only the characters who represent the triumph of love over hate, Tony
and Maria, can unambiguously and convincingly resolve the tritone tension
embodied in the gang’s signature motive. This happens as early as Tony’s first
song, “Something’s Coming” (Example 13.9d). Tony’s first words, “Could
be!,” outline a perfect descending fourth (D-A), and his next question, “Who
knows?,” establishes a second perfect fourth after an eighth-note digression to
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West Side Story
the tritone (D-G-A). By this immediate resolution Bernstein lets his audiences
know, at least subliminally, that Tony, an ex-Jet, is a man capable of assuag-
ing the tensions of his former gang as his musical line resolves its tritones.
Throughout the entire first portion of “Something’s Coming,” the orchestral
accompaniment, which consists entirely of perfect fourths—in contrast to the
alternating perfect fourths and tritones in the bass of Promenade—supports
this important dramatic point: that Tony is a man who wants peace.
It is crucially significant that Maria’s name (Example 13.2b) resolves the
tritone and thus simply but powerfully embodies the musical antithesis of
the unresolved “hate” motive, a “love” theme. As with the first and third
“Somewhere” motives, Bernstein foreshadows Maria’s motive orchestrally
before fully establishing her identity vocally. Reasonably attentive listeners
can hear her motive for the first time at the outset of “The Dance at the Gym”
(the introduction to Blues) following Maria’s explanation to her brother that
“tonight” marks her debut “as a young lady of America!,” where its upward
resolution appears simultaneously with Tony’s downward tritone (Example
13.9e). More obviously, Bernstein foreshadows the entire Maria tune in the
Cha-Cha and brings it back appropriately as underscoring for her Meeting
Scene with Tony. The first ascending three notes of the song “Cool” are the
same as “Maria” (a tritone followed by a minor second), but instead of linger-
ing on the tritone resolution, “Cool” focuses on the tritone, for example the
tritone ascent on “crazy” followed by a tritone descent on “Boy.” (The “cool
fugue” dance after the song alternates between statement of the hate motive
in its pure Jet gang form and the first three notes of “Somewhere” [“There’s a
place”] with interjections from the two-note “someday, somewhere” motive.)
The Maria motive or “love motive” of course dominates the song “Maria,”
where each repetition of the heroine’s name conveys the message that Maria,
to an even greater extent than her romantic counterpart, can resolve dra-
matic tensions. Maria’s motive returns at other timely occasions during the
remainder of the musical: throughout the orchestral underscoring that intro-
duces the Balcony Scene that encompasses “Tonight”; in “Under Dialogue”
as a cha-cha (a rare omission in Bernstein’s “complete” 1985 recording); in
the underscoring that marks the moment Tony and Maria declare themselves
married directly prior to “One Hand, One Heart”; and at various other places
in the orchestral accompaniment to this last-mentioned song and the Ballet
Sequence. Thereafter, the full three-note Maria motive becomes displaced by
its dramatic (and musical) associate, the third “Somewhere” motive (c3 in
Example 13.4), which presents a readily apparent rhythmic association with
the last two syllables of Maria’s name.
The drama concludes with a “real” death procession (in contrast to the
dream procession earlier in the Ballet Sequence of the second act). In the
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final moments Bernstein presents three statements of the third “Somewhere”

motive (c2) with its customary rising whole-step (Example 13.10a). In the first
two statements the bass answer to this C-major triadic resolution in the mel-
ody (C-E-G) is none other than the note that will complete the sinister tritone
against C (F) for two statements. In the third and final statement, Bernstein
allows an undiluted C major to stand alone.84 Certainly it is possible to inter-
pret the absence of a third F as an optimistic ending, or at least more positive
than if Bernstein had chosen to state the tritone the third time as well.
The screen version of West Side Story adds a third tritone to accompany
the end credits. The original movie soundtrack album, however, departs
both from the Broadway and the film ending in its musical resolution of the
drama. As shown in Example 13.10b it abandons tritones altogether for all
three statements of the “Somewhere” motive.85 Why did the soundtrack do
this? Here is one possible explanation. Despite the fact that the film omit-
ted the Dream Ballet Sequence (based on “Somewhere”), except as under-
scoring at the beginning of act II, scene 3, the producers of the soundtrack
wanted to find a place for the song “Somewhere.” When first released, the
soundtrack therefore used the dream version of this song, but now sung by
the principals rather than an off-screen “Girl,” to conclude the recording.
For this reason the original soundtrack concluded with an unambiguously
positive major ending that avoids tritones entirely.86
Example 13.10. “Finale” and “Procession and Nightmare” (conclusions)

(a) Broadway ending (“Finale”)
(b) Conclusion of “Procession and Nightmare” and the film soundtrack
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West Side Story
To better depict an age when gang warfare is still rampant and exponen-
tially more violent than it was on the West Side in 1957 or 1961, Bernstein,
in his operatic recorded reinterpretation of the score he conducted in 1985,
departs from his Broadway ending. This time he has the orchestra follow
the third statement of the “Somewhere” motive with a third tritone as in
the “End Credits” that followed the drama in the film. But even in the 1985
recording Bernstein allows a hopeful glimmer of C major to sound when he
instructs the orchestra to quickly release the third tritone.
Maria lives, but Bernstein, despite numerous attempts, was unable to
create an operatic aria for her that rang true. Thus in her most Wagnerian
moment Maria does not sing. In an opera, Maria, albeit “skinny—but pretty”
and “delicate-boned” in contrast to the “fat lady” of operatic legend, would
have no choice but to sing in order to inform audiences that the evening
was over. Despite this conspicuous departure from operatic expectations,
even requirements, West Side Story has been said to achieve genuine trag-
edy because “for the first time in a musical the hero sings while dying.”87
Perhaps more significantly, when Tony is carried off, the music of West Side
Story has, metaphorically speaking, the last word. Audiences unaware of
the musical relationships between death (“Procession”) and love (“I Have a
Love”) and their mutual source in Wagner’s “redemption” motive (Example
13.8a–c) nevertheless cannot fail to understand that the love of Tony and
Maria, like that of Siegmund and Sieglinde, Brünnhilde and Siegfried, and
of course Romeo and Juliet, has redeemed the tragedy of youthful death.
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Enchanted Evenings
After West Side Story Bernstein failed to succeed on Broadway with a com-
pletely new musical, but a considerably revamped Candide directed by
Hal Prince (which included Sondheim’s newly created “Life Is Happiness
Indeed,” a reworded “Venice Gavotte”), triumphed in 1974. Two years later
Bernstein produced a musical with librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue. Although this promising but problematic show van-
ished after only seven Broadway performances, Bernstein managed to sal-
vage portions of its score in his last compositions, and after his death it was
reworked by Charlie Harmon and Sid Ramin into A White House Cantata:
Scenes from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One song, the anthem “Take Care of
This House” (originally sung by Abigail Adams in the White House), has
since served as a talisman to protect many buildings, from houses of wor-
ship to the Kennedy Center. In 1983, Bernstein, who by then was focusing
most of his creative energies on conducting, completed his final work for
the musical stage, the opera A Quiet Place. A sequel to Trouble in Tahiti three
decades later, A Quiet Place also recycled the former work (as a flashback)
for a middle act.
Two years after West Side Story, Robbins, Laurents, and Sondheim would
again collaborate successfully on a new musical, Gypsy, with music by Styne.
Without Robbins, Laurents and Sondheim worked together on two unsuc-
cessful musicals in the next decade before they went on to work with other
partners: Anyone Can Whistle (1964), a show without a literary source, and
Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), an adaptation of Laurents’s own The Time of the
Cuckoo (an unhappy collaboration with Rodgers). Meanwhile, Robbins and
his new creative associates, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry
Bock, would direct and choreograph his greatest popular triumph, Fiddler
on the Roof, in 1964. After Fiddler, Robbins virtually abandoned commercial
theater. Laurents, without Sondheim, returned to Broadway in subsequent
decades to direct Harold Rome’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962), a Tony-
nominated Gypsy (1975), the Harvey Fierstein–Jerry Herman Tony Award–
winning La Cage aux Folles (1983), and new Broadway productions of Gypsy
(2008) and West Side Story (2009). Without Laurents in the 1970s, ’80s, and
’90s, Sondheim, the subject of another chapter in this survey, would, like
the descendant of painter Georges Seurat in act II of Sunday in the Park with
George, continue to “move on” and in the process launch a new era in the
Broadway musical.
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chapter fourteen
STAGE VERSUS SCREEN (2)

After Oklahoma!
Adapting to Broadway
In contrast to most of the films discussed in “Stage versus Screen (1),” the
five films explored in this chapter—Carousel (1956), Kiss Me, Kate (1953),
Guys and Dolls (1955), My Fair Lady (1964), and West Side Story (1961)—are
widely known. All are accessible on DVDs that contain absorbing “Bonus”
or “Special” Features that include one or more of the following: interviews
with the creators of the show, interviews with members of the film cast,
commentaries by various experts, documentaries about the making of the
film, documentaries on film restoration, behind the scene notes, alternate
vocal versions, a deleted scene or song, vintage featurettes and archival foot-
age, historical background, storyboards, original intermission music, and
trailers. Most of these films were popular in their time and several remain so
in ours. Most made money. Within a three-year span of time West Side Story
and My Fair Lady took home the big Academy Award prize for Best Picture,
among numerous other awards.
Compared with the films of “Stage versus Screen (1),” these five films are
for the most part far more faithful to their stage sources than the films we
looked at in act I (the exception is Trevor Nunn’s virtually complete televised
1993 film of Porgy and Bess). Also in contrast to the earlier films, three of the
films discussed in this chapter even approximate the amount of stage time
offered by their predecessors. None follow their stage sources to the letter,
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however. In fact, only George Cukor’s My Fair Lady comes close to what
was seen and heard on Broadway. Robert Wise’s relatively faithful and rela-
tively complete West Side Story takes significant liberties with song order and
removes the second act ballet. Samuel Goldwyn and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s
Guys and Dolls and George Sidney’s Kiss Me, Kate subtract and add songs, but
in the former the songs were newly written by the composer-lyricist Frank
Loesser especially for the film and in the latter the new song was written by
the show’s rightful creative owner, Cole Porter. Henry King’s Carousel film
deletes but does not add songs.
Despite their commercial successes (the exception here is Carousel), the
film versions of the musicals treated in act II have generated controversies
over their artistic success as adaptations. Critics have taken issue with their
direction, scenic design, and cinematography, and perhaps most vociferously
over casting issues and the pros and cons of vocal dubbing. Two of the films,
Carousel and Kiss Me, Kate, feature mainly singers. Guys and Dolls combines
singers and non-singers but even the latter sang for themselves. In contrast,
most of the principals in the My Fair Lady and West Side Story adaptations
are dubbed by professional singers. Even Rita Moreno, herself an accom-
plished professional singer and recording artist, had her voice replaced.1
Less obvious but arguably even more radical aspects of sonic technologi-
cal change—orchestral augmentations, selective mixing via multiple-track
recording, combining alternate takes via editing, the effects of microphone
placement—have slipped past underneath most critics’ notice. For those
who have grown accustomed in recent years to the expectation that voices
we hear on the soundtrack belong to the faces of those we see in the pic-
ture (e.g., Chicago, Dreamgirls, Hairspray, Rent, The Phantom of the Opera, and
Sweeney Todd), the knowledge that Marni Nixon is the voice of Audrey Hep-
burn and Natalie Wood might be disconcerting. These musical adaptations
may come across today as faithful to their theatrical origins to the point of
being labored and unfaithful to their new medium. At the same time they
allow us to imagine their stage counterparts and for the most part will satis-
factorily see us through until something better comes along, such as a new
Broadway revival or a community theater or high school production.
Carousel (1956)
Not long after the release of Oklahoma! in October 1955, The King and I and
Carousel followed in quick succession in February and March of the next
year. Unlike the popular successes of Oklahoma! and The King and I, the third
Rodgers and Hammerstein film adaptation to appear within six months,
310
Carousel, 1956 film. Carrie Pipperidge (Barbara Ruick) and Julie Jordan
(Shirley Jones) (foreground left) watch Billy Bigelow (Gordon MacRae)
(right) at The carousel.
Carousel failed at the box office in its own time and has not enjoyed much
critical approbation in the decades since its debut—even though it brought
back from Oklahoma! the winning partnership of Gordon MacRae and Shir-
ley Jones. Although spared the acrimony heaved at Joshua Logan and those
disturbing colored filters he will always be blamed for in the next 20th Cen-
tury-Fox Rodgers and Hammerstein film adaptation, South Pacific in 1958—
which Gerald Mast found almost unrivaled “for sheer bad taste”—for Mast
and many others Carousel remains unequivocally “the worst of the lot.”2
Only two songs from the stage version were cut, however, “Geraniums
in the Winder” (also missing from the original Broadway cast album) and
“The Highest Judge of All.” The screenplay also retains much of Hammer-
stein’s libretto. Nevertheless, Thomas Hischak, who normally demonstrates
equanimity in his assessments of film adaptations in Through the Screen Door,
describes the Carousel adaptation, directed by Henry King, as “unfaithful,
incompetent, and certainly uninspired” and “the most unsatisfying film
treatment of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.”3 For a minority report
one can turn to an essay by Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans in
which the authors describe the dream ballets of Carousel as well as Oklahoma!
as works in which “the greater surrealist possibilities of the cinema [are]
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Enchanted Evenings
used to their fullest advantage” and other “ways in which the film is as
moving today as when it was made.”4
One of the many ways in which the staged Carousel stands out from con-
ventional musical theater fare is that the main character takes his own life. In
Oklahoma! the villain (Jud Fry) kills himself accidentally while in the process
of trying to kill the male protagonist (Curly), and film audiences who were
seeing the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows in their filmed order had also
recently witnessed the death of the King of Siam. Despite this sad eventual
turn in the plot, perhaps in an effort to prepare younger viewers and those
new to the show for Billy’s death and to reassure them that he was still
alive on screen, although technically dead, the film opens in heaven fifteen
heavenly minutes later (the equivalent of fifteen years on earth) where Billy
tells the story of Carousel, including his death, as if it were a flashback. For
those viewers who might view Billy’s suicide as a sin comparable to his
decision to commit a robbery in order to get enough money to support the
as yet unborn daughter he imagined in “Soliloquy,” the suicide of the stage
version was changed to an accidental death. By the end of the film Billy
will take advantage of the opportunity to return to earth in order to rectify
some of the emotional damage he inflicted on his daughter, Louise, now
fifteen earth years old. At the end of the play he succeeds in comforting his
troubled daughter at her high school graduation, and when he does, the
strains of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” can move even modern-day cynics to
request some tissues.
Even if the film proves disappointing on many levels, it offers the opportu-
nity to get a sense of what audiences saw onstage, including Louise’s dream
ballet with choreography pilfered from Agnes de Mille (who had to sue to
be properly credited) as well as most of the songs and a large helping of the
original stage dialogue. Looking at the scene we focused on in the Carousel
chapter, we see that much has been retained. It begins about seven minutes
into the film, after the first scene in heaven. Some of “The Carousel Waltz”
was heard over the credits—significantly shorn of its dissonant and mysteri-
ous opening, which will be heard later with new associations—but a more
substantial statement of the waltz, starting with the first main waltz after the
introduction, occurs in the transformation from Heaven to Earth. Despite a
few cuts here and there, most of the waltz returns when the scene shifts to
the amusement park. There it supports the pantomimed prologue that tells
us so much about how Billy regards Julie as special and how the carousel
proprietress Mrs. Mullin jealously senses an undeniable romance in bloom.
With a few small additions and deletions, most of the non-underscored dia-
logue with Carrie, Julie, Mrs. Mullin, and Billy that opens act I, scene 2, is
preserved.5 All this takes a little over five minutes.
312
The opening of the Julie and Carrie sequence that precedes “Mr. Snow,”
however, with its rhythmic recitative merging into the Julie Jordan tune and
the “Mill Theme” is entirely removed from the film.6 As a result, “Mr. Snow”
appears after only thirty seconds of underscored dialogue (a little more than
15 minutes into the film), the conversation in which the stage Carrie assumes
her friend now has “a feller of yer [your] own.” Now that Julie has Billy, more
an intuitive assumption than a reality at this stage in the relationship, Carrie
can sing about her feller. Instead of the Julie Jordan music that underscores
this conversation in the stage version, when we hear the “Mill Theme” for
the first time in the film, it is impossible to understand its significance. By the
end of the brief exchange, however, the underscoring will match the musical
phrase indicated in the score (this is the musical passage of dotted rhythms
and leaps in the deleted sequence illustrated in chapter 9), but now employed
with equal meaninglessness. As a result of these liberties, the proof substan-
tiating Carrie’s presumption that Julie has a feller, so clearly explained in
their musical exchange onstage but now deleted, creates an abrupt and less
convincing transition to Carrie’s song about her feller, “Mr. Snow.”
Billy’s long “Soliloquy” appears boldly without cuts and lasts nearly
eight minutes, and earlier “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” continues with an
elaborate and athletic dance of New Englanders that lasts nearly six min-
utes.7 On the other hand, portions of “A Real Nice Clambake” and “When
the Children Are Asleep,” including their verses, were cut, and the latter is
placed considerably later than in the stage version. In its new context, this
song now takes place on a boat Carrie and Mr. Snow are sharing with Julie
and Billy on the way to the clambake. Since they are now overheard by the
more troubled partners, the contrast between Julie and Billy’s turbulent rela-
tionship and the more placid one of Carrie and Enoch is more pronounced.
In another departure, the distinctive dissonant chords that open the stage
show were removed from the opening film credits and opening of the
“Carousel Waltz.” They return, however, in the film with a new meaning on
two occasions to underscore the darker menacing presence of Mrs. Mullin a
few minutes before the “Soliloquy” and again shortly after Billy’s death, and
a third time to announce the carnival troupe during Louise’s ballet.
In the end, the mixture of fantasy and realism that worked so well
onstage fails to persuade. Mast, the film critic who pronounced this Rodgers
and Hammerstein adaptation “the worst of the lot,” finds fault with nearly
every aspect but saves his sharpest comments for the director: “Henry
King’s direction captures a styleless visual void—from a papier maché for-
est beside a backlot . . . to a tacky electric-blue heaven strung with plastic
Stars of Bethlehem; to a real beach where a soliloquizing Billy wanders in
thought (but never picks up a pebble, sifts some sand, or touches a rock).”8
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Enchanted Evenings
It is possible that the musical film Carousel has negatively prejudiced many
viewers against the show. In any event, of all the films from the Rodgers
and Hammerstein era, Carousel is perhaps most in need of a film remake.
This might happen. In 2006, an article in FirstShowing.net announced that
the popular Australian movie and stage actor Hugh Jackman, who success-
fully portrayed Curly in the film adaptation of Trevor Nunn’s London stage
revival of Oklahoma!, had acquired the rights for Carousel and is looking for
a director and a screenwriter.9 Once everyone recovers from the financial
debacle of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008), Jackman’s most recent star vehi-
cle, it may be time to welcome a new turn on the carousel.
Kiss me, Kate (1953)

In the light of its MGM predecessors On the Town, which butchered Bern-
stein’s great 1944 score in its screen version of 1949, and the remake of Show
Boat in 1951, which cut many songs and played havoc with both the script
and spirit of its original, the film adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate, directed by
Kiss Me, Kate, 1953 film. Cole Porter (Ron Randell), Lilli Vanessi (Kathryn
Grayson), Lois Lane (Ann Miller), and Fred Graham (Howard Keel) in
Fred’s apartment after a run-through of “So In Love.”
314
Kiss Me, Kate, 1953 film. Petruchio (Keel) gives his new fiancée Katharine
(Grayson) an unscripted paddling to conclude the first act of “Taming
of the Shrew.”
Show Boat alumnus George Sidney and starring Show Boat film alumni Kath-
ryn Grayson and Howard Keel, was remarkably faithful. By later standards,
however, the film adaptation has a long way to go in terms of fidelity to
its increasingly respected source, the Broadway version. Sidney begins by
taking a major structural liberty in his decision to open the film in Fred’s
apartment a month or so earlier than the first rehearsal rather than begin-
ning with the stage show’s opening rehearsal number, “Another Opnin,’
Another Show.” In addition to “Another Opnin,’ ” another song gone from
the film was “Bianca,” which Porter wrote for the character Bill Calhoun
under duress when the actor who played him, Harold Lang, insisted he was
contractually entitled to a song. In the chapter on Kiss Me, Kate (chapter 10),
we noted Porter’s erroneous belief that the song’s banality would preclude
its use.
Also absent from the film was the choral number, “I Sing of Love,” which
those familiar with the cast album also never got to hear, and most of the
two parallel finales in which the vitriol and the martial nature of the former
is replaced by the tender words and musically lyrical qualities of the latter.
Partially compensating for these quasi-operatic omissions is the insertion of
a dazzlingly jazzy song and dance number originally composed for Porter’s
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Enchanted Evenings
Out of this World, for Lois (Miller), her suitor (Tommy Rall), her former suit-
ors (Bobby Van and Bob Fosse), and their new girlfriends (Carol Haney and
Jeanne Coyne). In marked contrast to the Pal Joey and Kurt Weill films we
looked at in act I, the Kiss Me, Kate screenplay, greatly shortened in the tran-
sition from stage to film, effectively creates a sequence of songs occasionally
interrupted by five minutes or less of dialogue.
The show’s principal ballad is the first of two songs to undergo a new con-
text. Although the final A section of “So in Love” will eventually be heard
in its rightful position as a reprise, sung by Lilli in her dressing room before
the show moves to its Padua phase and “We Open in Venice,” its main dra-
matic purpose in the film occurs in its new context as an audition number
in Fred’s apartment, a song performed by Fred to interest the prospective
dramatic lead Lilli in the show. The character impersonating Cole Porter
(Ron Randell), a depiction only slightly more believable than the casting of
Cary Grant in Night and Day (1946), sits down at the piano (later joined by
an invisible orchestra), and Fred starts the love song. Even before the second
A section Lilli joins in, and immediately making the song her own, sings
the second A by herself. Fred starts the B and is answered by Lilli, a process
repeated in the final A before both Fred and Lilli conclude the song in glori-
ous harmony and ardent glances. In the stage version Lilli sings the song
alone in the dressing room unheard by Fred, and Fred sings a reprise in act
II unheard by Lilli.
In contrast to the gradual unfolding of Fred and Lilli’s love onstage, before
seven minutes have gone by in the film, viewers in this medium hear and
see that they are deeply in love. Fred may be infatuated with the sexy Lois
(Bianca), but the flirtation is fundamentally innocent, or at least superficial.
In any event, Fred’s attentions are not seriously reciprocated by Lois, who is
using Fred to further her show business career and that of her boyfriend Bill
Calhoun (Lucentio). Despite its fundamental meaninglessness, the dalliance
between Lois and Fred leads to an incriminating note intended for Lois but
mistakenly delivered, with a bouquet of flowers, to Lilli, who imprudently
reads the note onstage, thus provoking genuine rather than acted stage vio-
lence against Fred as Petruchio. Had Fred not included the note, it is likely
that the onstage conflicts would not be mirrored by offstage fireworks but
by reconciliation, which would spoil the fun (and not incidentally end the
show prematurely). The flowers serve their purpose, helping Lilli to realize
that she is still in love with Fred. Although she is engaged to the rich and
powerful cattle baron Tex, a man incapable of song—in the stage version her
fiancé is the Washington diplomat Harrison Howell, also without a song—
tellingly we observe her remove the engagement ring in her dressing room
before she finishes the reprise of “So in Love.”
316
The re-connection Lilli and Fred make at the end of the “So in Love” duet
in Fred’s apartment is immediately interrupted by the whirlwind entrance of
Lois, who is clearly familiar with the surroundings. Lois (Ann Miller) then pro-
ceeds to sing and dance a sexually charged and energetic song and tap dance
number, which she hopes will go into the show. Those who find “Too Darn
Hot,” an entertaining but somewhat gratuitous act II opener may appreciate
its new context as a diegetic show-within-show. In fact, when she is finished
she learns that the song will be taken out because there’s no place to put it—
art imitating life evaluating art. In the absence of a second act subdivision, a
luxury offered to all stage works but only to a few of their longest film adapta-
tions (e.g., My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof ), where could such
a song go? The answer: as an audition number in the director’s apartment.
In order to guide film viewers who presumably are less familiar than
stage audiences with the plot of The Taming of the Shrew, the Shrew perfor-
mance in the film offers a narrative in which Petruchio explicitly intro-
duces the main characters and situation. The film is also clearer than the
stage version about such matters as the fact that Lilli reads Fred’s note to
Lois (at the end of “Were Thine That Special Face”), which explains why
her violence toward Fred goes considerably beyond what is called for in
the script. The film also clarifies the connection between Fred’s removal of
food from the hungry Lilli in the dressing room scene and when Petruchio
deprives Kate of food in his later efforts to tame her. The cuts in the libretto
deprive film audiences of some of the Spewacks’ and even more of Shake-
speare’s lively dialogue, but when films were expected to run less than two
hours, even great material had to go.
One of the more unfortunate aspects of this often successful film adapta-
tion is that even nearly twenty years after the first film version of Anything
Goes (see chapter 8), Porter’s lyrics still required considerable cinematic
expurgation. We might expect that the script would replace “bastard” with
“louse,” but changes in the lyrics amount to a censorship that is collectively
depressing. What follows is a generous, if not exhaustive, sample:
• “Too Darn Hot”

“According to the Kinsey report” is replaced by “according to
the latest report” and instead of indulging his favorite sport,
man prefers taking the lyrically cumbersome “lovey-dovey to
court.”
• “Tom, Dick, or Harry”
“God-damned nose” is replaced by “Doggone nose” and “in
the dark they [women] are all the same” is replaced by “in a
brawl they are all the same.”
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Enchanted Evenings
• “I Hate Men”
“Maiden” replaces “virgin” and instead of Mother having
to marry Father, she now “deigns to marry Father.” The film
version goes on to make several other unfortunate deletions
and additions in this song.
• “Where Is the Life that Late I Led?”
Since “puberty” is suggestive and provocative, “the charming
age of puberty” becomes the first awareness of “masculinity.”
Later in the song the mandatory removal of “hell” (also
removed later in “Always True to You in My Fashion” and in
“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”) necessitates the replacement of
the rhyme “well / hell” with “pain / Cain,” as in raising a bit of.
• “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”
The suggestive failure of a woman to defend her virtue (All’s
Well That Ends Well) is replaced by the infelicitous woman
“shocked she pretends well.”
• “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple”
Perhaps the title of this song should have been altered to
something like “I Am Ashamed to Sing a Sexist Song about
Women Being Simple.” In any event, Kate replaces the
music to this beautiful song with a recitation (with a little
underscoring of “So in Love”), fortunately unexpurgated, of
Shakespeare, who wrote the lyrics.10
While Porter’s reputation will survive the changes made to his lyrics
in the film, it is not enhanced by them. Yet all things considered, the film
adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate, is not only relatively faithful to its stage ver-
sion (when compared with its predecessors) but boasts full-throated but not
overdone singing by Keel and Grayson, and exuberant singing and dancing
by Miller. The ensemble dancing of Miller, Rall, Van, Haney, Coyne, and
Fosse, choreographed by Fosse in the angular signature style that he would
develop further in the 1960s and 1970s, is outstanding as well as historic,
and the supporting roles, especially Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore as
the two gunmen, add to the film’s quality. Even the interpolated “From This
Moment On,” is arguably no more extraneous than “Too Darn Hot” was in
its original place as the opening of act II. The film, shot and released in 3D,
in its day a novelty and today a distraction, does not undermine the film’s
enjoyment, but it is probably good to know about it in advance.
The large and impressive oil painting of Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in
Fred’s apartment is clearly visible as a backdrop to Miller’s “Too Darn Hot” and
other scenes. The character of Hamlet not only demonstrates a Shakespearean
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connection but likely also alludes to the fact that producer Jack Cummings
tried unsuccessfully to engage the non-singing Olivier for this role. It is dif-
ficult to imagine what would have happened if this had come to pass, since
the demands of the role require a trained singer with a strong high G. The film
also introduces a few touches that enhance the dramatic verisimilitude and
topicality, such as when Fred, who thinks that Lilli has left the show, says in a
stage whisper to a question about her whereabouts that she is probably at that
moment flying over Newark. One charming musical touch that deserves hon-
orable mention occurs during the duet in “Wunderbar” when Lilli sings the
main melody of the overture and act II finale to Johann Strauss Jr.’s Die Fleder-
maus (one of the many operettas Fred and Lilli have doubtless sung together
in various small towns) as a counterpoint to the main tune of Porter’s song.
Guys and Dolls (1955)

The starting point for the Samuel Goldwyn (1879–1974) film adaptation of
Guys and Dolls was Goldwyn himself who, in the words of his biographer
A. Scott Berg, “grew determined to produce Guys and Dolls as the ultimate
Guys and Dolls, 1955 film. Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) and Sarah Brown
(Jean Simmons) dancing in Havana.
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Enchanted Evenings
film musical, an epic” and in the end “spent $5.5 million overproducing the
movie.”11 Interestingly, in a career that goes back to the 1910s and includes
such memorable films as Wuthering Heights (1939) and The Best Years of Our
Lives (1946), Guys and Dolls would be only the second in a group of musical
films that concluded his body of work. The first film of this trilogy brought
Goldwyn in contact with Frank Loesser on the successful original film musi-
cal Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye, three years earlier. The
second musical, Guys and Dolls, would also prove to be the penultimate
product of Goldwyn’s long career, his seventy-ninth feature film. Four years
after Guys and Dolls, a huge box office success with the highest earnings of
any film in 1956 (more than $13 million in the United States alone), Goldwyn
finished his career with his third musical, the commercial and artistic failure,
Porgy and Bess (discussed in chapter 8).
Goldwyn was famous for discovering and signing talent. In the case of
Guys and Dolls it was mostly the latter. To complement Loesser and his great
hit, Goldwyn turned to Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993), who not long
before had gained distinction as the first to win a double pair of Academy
Awards for both directing and screenwriting in two successive years A Letter
to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). Mankiewicz, who had never
directed or written a musical, wanted to convert Abe Burrows’s libretto into
more of a play. In preparation for the transfer from stage to film Mankiewicz
even wrote a new script that could stand alone without music. He made his
goals and intentions clear in a letter to Goldwyn: “My primary, almost only,
objective in this writing has been to tell the story as warmly and humanly
as possible—and to characterize our four principals as fully as if their story
were going to be told in purely dramatic terms.”12 Although Mankiewicz
tried to flesh out Sarah Brown’s character, especially in the extended scene
in Havana, Cuba, the movie ultimately falls short because the experienced
screenwriter, but musical theater novice, failed to grasp how the subtleties of
music, at least in Loesser’s songs, effectively removed the need to transform
a musical into a play. Joseph Kerman’s famous principle that “the music is
the drama” was not a concept that Mankiewicz believed or understood.
When Gene Kelly proved unavailable, Mankiewicz and Goldwyn turned
to a, or perhaps the, major film star of the day, Marlon Brando (1924–2004),
who like Mankiewicz had never participated in a musical. Within a few
years after his powerful stage performance in Tennessee Williams’s A Street-
car Named Desire in 1947, Brando had earned a string of four Best Actor
nominations, including one for the film adaptation of Streetcar (1951) and
one for the role of Mark Anthony in a film version of Julius Caesar (1953),
directed and adapted for the screen by Mankiewicz. One year before Guys
and Dolls, Brando won the award for On the Waterfront. Although Guys and
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Dolls proved to be Brando’s last as well as first foray into musical film, he
worked diligently under Loesser’s coaching and performed the songs cred-
itably. He even managed to master the basic dance steps of the Cuba inter-
lude with some grace. For his leading lady, Goldwyn tried unsuccessfully to
acquire Grace Kelly, another recent Academy Award-winning star. The third
choice for Sarah Brown, after Kelly and Deborah Kerr, Jean Simmons (b.
1929), yet another star with no experience in musicals, proved to be surpris-
ingly effective, both as a singer and as an actress.13 Unlike Brando, Simmons
returned to musical theater when in 1975 she played the lead in the London
production of A Little Night Music.
In addition to these newcomers to musicals, Goldwyn and Mankiewicz
brought back several key figures associated with the Broadway production,
even if the original Adelaide, Vivian Blaine, was another second choice after
Betty Grable declined the role. Another notable singer actor reassigned to the
film was Stubby Kaye, who played a major role in the success of the stage ver-
sions as Nicely-Nicely Johnson. According to the young Stephen (or in this
early case, Steve) Sondheim, who reviewed the Goldwyn extravaganza in 1955
for Films in Review, Kaye was “the real hero of the picture,” who helped make
“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” “one of the most memorable numbers in
musical-comedy history.”14 For Sondheim, Kaye “sets the tone of every scene
in which he appears: when he is singing ‘Fugue for Tinhorns’ and ‘Guys and
Dolls’ he does more to create the atmosphere of Runyon’s New York than all
the scenery lumped together (which it often seems to be).”15
A major benefit of the film version of Guys and Dolls is the opportunity to
see the original athletic and amusing choreography of Michael Kidd (1919–
2007), who recreated the impressive original Runyonland opening and the
sewer dance scene to the music of “Luck Be a Lady” much as audiences
had seen these numbers onstage five years earlier. Many critics, including
Sondheim, lamented scene designer Oliver Smith’s sets in which realism
and stylization clashed infelicitously, but Kidd created a convincing ambi-
ance through the movements of his eccentric and cartoonish but devel-
oped characters, both major and minor. Kaye leading the trio of tinhorns
in “Fugue for Tinhorns” near the beginning of the film and the gambling
sinners in his rendition of “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” near the end
are indeed two of the great translations from Broadway to film. Although
Vivian Blaine’s dramatic stage delivery is less suitable than Kaye’s for the
more intimate framework of film, it is still a treat to hear her repeat her
stage performance of “Adelaide’s Lament” (with the sole visual addition of
a medicine cabinet). In addition to its entertainment value, the recreation of
Kidd’s choreography and the roles of Nicely-Nicely and Adelaide make the
film an invaluable historical document.
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Enchanted Evenings
On the debit side, although the three new songs added to the film are all
by Loesser, they do not make up in either quality or quantity for the five
songs deleted from the show. The first new song, “Pet Me Poppa,” replaced
“A Bushel and a Peck” for Adelaide and the Hot Box Girls for the simple rea-
son that Goldwyn didn’t like it. Seeing dancers precociously impersonating
cats nearly thirty years before Lloyd Webber made this a must-see musical
theater experience does not make up for the song switch. The second new
song was written to give Frank Sinatra, then at the peak of his stardom as a
recording artist and fresh from winning the best supporting actor Oscar for
From Here to Eternity (1953), an expanded singing role as Nathan Detroit.
We may recall from chapter 11 that his non-singing stage predecessor Sam
Levene gradually observed his singing requirements dwindle down to a line
or two in the verse of “Oldest Established” in act I and a few more lines in
his duet with Adelaide, “Sue Me,” in act II. In what corresponds to act I in
the film Nathan gets more to sing in “Oldest Established” in the opening
scene and replaces one of the tinhorns in the title song about an hour into
the film. Another fifteen minutes later he sings a new song expressly written
for Sinatra, “Adelaide,” a song that Nathan sings to Lieutenant Brannigan
to convince him that the gamblers are holding an engagement party rather
than a meeting to decide where to hold the floating crap game.
The third and final new song, the lyrical “A Woman in Love” arguably
receives more air time than any song in the film. Introduced after the title
song in the Overture, the song dominates the musical ambiance of the din-
ner date in Havana, Cuba, where Sky has taken Sarah on a bet. For twelve
minutes of movie time (roughly from 77 to 89 minutes into the film), we
hear it as a serenade in the café, as background music in the restaurant, and
finally sung over a Latin accompaniment over dinner. After Sarah sings “If I
Were a Bell” in a state of drunkenness and the couple returns to New York,
“My Time of Day,” the song in which Sky bares his soul and reveals his bibli-
cal name (Obediah), is reduced to underscoring. Instead he sings a reprise of
“A Woman in Love.”
“Pet Me Poppa” was a matter of one Hot Box Tune replacing another,
but the deletion of “My Time of Day” seriously defeats Mankiewicz’s stated
purpose of character development. In contrast to “Adelaide’s Lament,”
which reveals so much about this character, the song “Adelaide” may be an
opportunity for Sinatra but does little to enhance Nathan’s character or the
dramatic situation. Before the film is over, three more songs from the show
would disappear. The first is “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” a genuine
love duet between Sky and Sarah directly following Sky’s intimate revela-
tions in “My Time of Day,” and arguably the great ballad of a rich theater
score. The second casualty is “More I Cannot Wish You,” another of Loesser’s
322
most lyrical ballads and the only chance Arvide Abernathy, Sarah’s gentle
Salvation Army mentor, gets to sing in the show. The last song to end up on
the cutting room floor is the cynical duet between Sarah and Adelaide in
which they each share their goal to “Marry the Man Today” “and change his
ways tomorrow.” The song was honest in its day, but its message would cast
pallor on the romantic double wedding that ends the film and is the least
missed of the five discarded numbers.
My Fair Lady (1964)

Not only did the film version of My Fair Lady, which arrived two years after
the show completed its unsurpassed six-year Broadway run, present all the
songs from its stage source, it also retained nearly all of the dialogue and
most of the original running order. At nearly three hours, Lady is the most
faithful adaptation in our group of films. As an added bonus, film audiences
got a chance to see stage stars Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins and Stanley
Holloway as Alfred P. Doolittle repeating their roles. Cecil Beaton returned
as costume and set designer.16
My Fair Lady, 1964 film. Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) and Henry
Higgins (Rex Harrison) (“In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes
hardly ever happen.”) For a stage photo of this scene see p. 271.
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Enchanted Evenings
My Fair Lady on film enjoyed some financial success, despite its then
stratospheric production costs of $17 million. It also received more than its
share of critical acclaim. Nominated for twelve Oscars, it won in no less
than eight categories: cinematography (Harry Stradling), sound (George R.
Groves), musical scoring (André Previn), art direction (Gene Allen, Cecil
Beaton, and George James Hopkins), costume design (Beaton), and major
awards for Best Actor (Harrison), Director (George Cukor), and Best Picture.
The film also received Golden Globe awards in these last three categories. In
the American Film Institute rankings of the Top Twenty-Five Movie Musi-
cals of All Time created in 2006, My Fair Lady placed eighth, the fourth high-
est ranking among adaptations of Broadway musicals (the others in the top
eight are original musical films).
We have noted that between the mid-1950s and early 1970s, roughly
between The King and I and Carousel films of 1956 and Fiddler on the Roof in
1972, film musical adaptations of Broadway shows tended to be far more
faithful and more complete than the films we have looked at between
Show Boat and Guys and Dolls (with Pal Joey from 1957 and Porgy and Bess
from 1959, not coincidentally shows created between 1935 and 1940, prov-
ing the exceptions). While some cuts, additions, and other changes can
be expected, the film adaptations of Broadway musicals that debuted in
the 1940s and 1950s more often than not attempted to recapture the spirit
and more than occasionally the letter of their stage sources. Before the
1950s producers and studios ruled the roost. After that the creators took
over. As producers, Rodgers and Hammerstein had acquired the control of
their own films; Lerner and Loewe did the same for Gigi. After decades of
Broadway films redesigned to serve the needs and values of Hollywood,
Gigi (1958), an original musical film made by Broadway creators, served
a new master. In Mast’s astute epiphany, Gigi, which won an Academy
Award for best picture, “is the best Broadway musical ever written for the
screen.”17
Countering the predilection toward greater fidelity to Broadway sources,
Hollywood values, in particular the desire to sign movie stars with strong
box office appeal, gradually led to casting decisions based more on popu-
lar appeal than on singing experience and talent. But even those first cast
on Broadway as the King in The King and I (Yul Brynner) and Higgins in My
Fair Lady (Harrison) were in roles conceived for dramatic actors without
vocal credentials. Interestingly, there was an attempt to bypass Harrison
in favor of a bigger film star—Cary Grant turned down the role and Peter
O’Toole demanded unreasonably high contractual terms—but after Harri-
son was chosen there was no need to replace his voice with that of a more
polished singer. Goldwyn, too, in casting Guys and Dolls, also wanted to
324
attract big box office draws such as Gene Kelly and (no relation) Grace
Kelly for Sky and Sarah, and his final choices, Brando and Simmons, fit
this profile. Once cast, however, Brando and Simmons were expected to
lend their own voices to the film and both proved adequate (or better) as
singers.
Soon this would change. The film adaptation of The Music Man took a
chance that paid off in casting the original stage lead, Robert Preston, who
had little proven box office traction, but Jack Warner and Cukor were not
eager to take a similar chance and allow Julie Andrews to repeat her stage
role as Eliza Doolittle. In replacing Andrews, the goal was to find a star more
likely to help Warner recoup the $5.5 million dollars he paid for the screen
rights. The gorgeous and glamorous Audrey Hepburn, a box office tested
movie star, fit this description, while Andrews, the luminous star of My Fair
Lady on the stage but as yet an untested movie personality, did not.18 Work-
ing under the assumption that she would be the voice of Eliza in the film,
Hepburn made demos of at least two songs, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and
“Show Me,” both of which can be seen and heard as a special feature in
the two-disc DVD Special Edition. There is little question that Hepburn did
not possess the voice quality either of Andrews, whom she replaced, or of
Hepburn’s vocal double Marni Nixon, who had dubbed the role of Anna
Leonowens for Deborah Kerr in The King and I.
On the other hand, the demos reveal a voice roughly comparable in qual-
ity to that of Jean Simmons. By this standard, Hepburn arguably made a
plausible candidate to sing her role, especially when playing a character
who was more guttersnipe than lady. In his autobiography, Lerner praises
Leslie Caron (Gigi) for her dancing and acting but thought her singing abili-
ties were “not up to scratch, or, if you will, too much up to scratch.”19 Later
in the same paragraph he places Hepburn in the same category as an actress
with “the gift for auditory illusion” who when hearing her “sadly inade-
quate singing voice” in a control room imagines that she is hearing Joan
Sutherland.20 The fact that Harrison only sings a fraction of the actual notes
in “You Did It” and about the same amount of “Hymn to Him” shows that
double standards were alive and well when it came to casting Higgins and
Eliza. Considering the widespread criticism Hepburn received for lacking
the coarseness necessary to capture the guttersnipe Eliza before she became
a lady, it seems a shame that Hepburn was not allowed to sing the songs
her character sings prior to her transformation in order to create a vocal
transformation to match the social one. To its credit, however, in its released
version, just as we see the beauty of Hepburn underneath the dirt, thanks to
the subterfuge of Marni Nixon we hear her beauty long before she emerges
triumphant at the Embassy Ball.
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Enchanted Evenings
Despite its fidelity, the film did make a few changes worth noting. “With
a Little Bit of Luck” is delayed from act I, scene 2, to scene 4, where it had
been reprised onstage. Now the song is both introduced and reprised in
the same scene. Also in act I, scenes 6 and 7 are reversed and some dia-
logue of the former moved to the latter after the “Ascot Gavotte.” The
film contains other reordering and some new dialogue here and there that
does not effect the placement of songs. The brief exchange between Hig-
gins and his mother that follows Ascot, for example, is new in the film.
Between what corresponds to act I, scenes 8 and 9, the film also offers
a short scene in which Pickering cancels his bet six weeks before the
Embassy Ball.
When Eliza returns to Covent Garden after leaving Higgins, her reprise
of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” is sung as both a voice-over and a flashback.
Not only are these techniques cinematically useful, but they also effectively
demonstrate the extent of Eliza’s transformation. Perhaps now that she is
a lady she doesn’t want to wake up her former neighbors so early in the
morning. For the most part, however, the film does not take advantage of
the possibilities cinema offers to “open up” the show onto a wider “stage”
via quick-yet-elaborate scene changes and location settings. One modest
exception is the short scene in which we discreetly observe the undressing
and bathing of Eliza by Mrs. Pearce and other servants, an offstage event in
the theater. The most obvious lost opportunity for cinematic extravagance
is the “theatrical” Ascot scene. Although visually interesting with its suit-
ably colorless black and white costuming for the rigid and lifeless upper
crust of society—Eliza gets a conspicuous touch of red in her hat to match
her inappropriate but refreshing enthusiasm for the event—we hear but do
not see the horses actually racing. Perhaps we might conclude that the film
adaptation works so well because of moments like this one, where cinematic
excess is avoided in favor of a consistent, theatrical focus on the principal
players and their interactions. At this and many other moments, we are
reminded that we are seeing a film of a play rather than an original film—
and this is a good thing.
In an effective cinematic juxtaposition, the shot of Higgins’s laughter at
the ball when he hears about Karpathy’s erroneous conclusion regarding
Eliza’s national identity merges seamlessly with the continuation of this
same laughter now shot in Higgins’s study after the ball. When it ran in the-
aters the film included an intermission after the stunningly beautiful Hep-
burn descends the staircase in Higgins’s apartment before they leave for the
ball (about 100 minutes into the film). On Broadway, the act I curtain closes
at the Embassy Ball with the suspense of whether Eliza will be able to fool
the wily Karpathy. Theater audiences would have to wait to learn whether
326
Higgins’s former student would expose Eliza’s lowly origins. Since the film
intermission had taken place before the ball, Higgins’s laughter provides a
welcome linkage between Eliza’s triumph at the ball and “You Did It,” in
which Higgins and Pickering insensitively and undeservedly appropriate
all the credit for her achievement.
Despite the iconic stature of Cukor’s My Fair Lady, Comingsoon.net
announced in 2008 that Duncan Kenworthy, who “has produced three of the
most successful British films of all time, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting
Hill, and Love Actually,” all starring Hugh Grant, together with Cameron
Mackintosh, the phenomenally successful stage producer who brought Les
Misérables, Miss Saigon, and The Phantom of the Opera from London to New
York, have cleared the rights with Columbia Pictures and CBS Films to pro-
duce a new version of Lerner and Loewe’s classic. Discussions have begun
with their chosen lady, the very fair Keira Knightly, in significant contrast
to the casting process in both the stage and earlier film versions, in which
the starting point was Higgins. While respectful of Cukor’s treatment,
Kenworthy and Mackintosh are confident they can improve on the 1964
original by shooting on location. In their press release Doug Belgrad, a presi-
dent of Columbia Pictures, espoused the view that “by drawing additional
material from Pygmalion” Mackintosh would create an updated version that
“will preserve the magic of the musical while fleshing out the characters and
bringing 1912 London to life in an authentic and exciting way for contempo-
rary audiences.”21 To reach this lofty prediction Mackintosh will need more
than just a little bit of luck.
West Side Story (1961)

Writers on West Side Story seldom neglect to mention that it was the film
rather than the stage version that catapulted the show into universal popu-
lar consciousness. Indeed, the film, produced by Mirisch Pictures, won ten
out of its eleven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and
Best Direction (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins). The other awards were
for Best Supporting Actor and Actress (George Chakiris as Bernardo and
Rita Moreno as Anita), Best Art Direction, Cinematography, Costumes, Film
Editing, Scoring, and Sound Mixing.22 With graceful irony, the Academy
even presented a Special Award to Robbins, who had been fired from the
film after directing the Prologue for falling behind the production schedule.
The only nomination that did not result in an award was Ernest Lehman’s
for Best Screenplay. Lehman did, however, receive an equivalent award from
the Writers Guild of America.
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Enchanted Evenings
West Side Story, 1961 film. Tony (Richard Beymer) and Maria (Natalie Wood)
meet at the Gym and fall in love at first sight.
In the early 1960s, most movie theaters continued the then-common prac-
tice of offering two films for one admission price, a feature presentation and
a B-movie. Longer films appeared as a single feature with an intermission, a
break in the action that presented an opportunity for audiences to purchase
refreshments. At 152 minutes, West Side Story merited an intermission. Theo-
retically, it was possible to divide the film at the end of act I directly after
the Rumble and begin the second act with “I Feel Pretty.” Instead, director
Robert Wise revamped the scenario and moved the Rumble closer to the end
of the story where it was followed rather than preceded by “Cool.”
Despite such adjustments, in marked contrast to the pillaged film version
of Bernstein’s On the Town and even such relatively faithful film adapta-
tions as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, all the West Side Story songs
are present and accounted for. This may be a first (to be followed by My
Fair Lady’s film adaptation three years later). Also in marked contrast to On
the Town and numerous other Hollywood adaptations from the 1930s and
1940s, no songs were added by studio composers on contract or even by
Bernstein, although Sondheim was called upon to add and rework his lyr-
ics for “America” in response to the new gender mix. The film also rein-
stated an overture, which had been deleted from the stage version. It can
be heard under the static abstract graphic design with changing colors that
328
will metamorphose into an overhead realistic cinematic view of the south-

ern tip of Manhattan before the camera makes its leisurely way to the West
side, where it zooms in on the Jets protecting their little corner of the island.
After diligently observing the musical order from the Prologue to “Maria”
(Prologue, “Jet Song,” “Something’s Coming,” “The Dance at the Gym,” and
“Maria”), however, the film made changes both large and small to the order
of the next nine songs before returning to the stage order for the final songs,
“A Boy Like That / I Have a Love,” “Taunting,” and Finale (see the online
website for a list of the songs in the stage version).
It might seem strange at first to dwell on the ordering of songs. But con-
sider how important the steps in a story’s telling can be, even a story we
know well like Romeo and Juliet. Try telling a friend the story in your own
words, then compare its impact to Shakespeare’s language. Similarly, the
collaborators on the film version of West Side Story made a variety of creative
decisions about how to re-tell the musical/dramatic story of the show, with
the many differences between live theater and film techniques always in
mind. Even though the film includes all the songs from the stage version, the
sequence in which those songs are presented exerts a strong effect on how
we understand the show.
We left off with “Maria.” Onstage, after singing the song based on the
name of his new love, Tony continues to call her name until he finds her on
her tenement balcony. They then converse and sing “Tonight.” The film fol-
lows “Maria” with a scene in Maria’s apartment between Maria, Bernardo,
and Anita, during which they move to the rooftop to join the rest of the
Shark men and women for “America.” In the film version of this song, the
men, absent from the stage version, contrast the women’s positive view of
their newly adopted country with sarcastic new lyrics. Only after “America”
does Tony reappear in the film and the lovers sing “Tonight.”
More radically, “Cool,” the song that follows “America” in the stage ver-
sion, is replaced by “Gee, Officer Krupke” and will not be heard until late in
the movie, where it directly follows the much-delayed Rumble. Since Riff led
the “Cool” song onstage, his absence, as he is dead by this point in the show,
necessitated the elevation of Ice (the character Diesel onstage) to lead both
the Jets and the song. In the remarks about the show’s genesis we pointed
out that in its position in the film, “Gee, Officer Krupke” no longer functions
as comic relief after the tragic events of the Rumble, a brief respite between
the “Procession and Nightmare” that concludes the Ballet Sequence and the
dramatically intense “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love.”
The next change in song order occurs with the earlier appearance of “I
Feel Pretty” in the film—in fact, right after “Gee, Officer Krupke!” Onstage,
this song, which in the story occurs almost at the same moment as the
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Enchanted Evenings
Rumble that ended act I (but presented consecutively rather than simulta-
neously to avoid modernist chaos), opens the second act with a moment of
deeply ironic levity. By placing “I Feel Pretty” before the Rumble, the irony
is lost. In its new position, the song serves as a prelude to the mock, but
non-ironic, wedding depicted in the next song in the film, “One Hand, One
Heart,” which onstage had occurred after “Cool.” “I Feel Pretty” is notable
for the energy of its fast waltz tempo and Maria’s lilting words full of inner
rhymes (“it’s alarming how charming I feel”). At every opportunity Sond-
heim has expressed his dissatisfaction with these lyrics and relates how he
tried to remove the inner rhymes but was outvoted. From then until now he
has criticized Maria’s lyric as too urbane for a gritty inner-city character.23
There is some truth to this. But in its new position, “I Feel Pretty” is arguably
more in character than it was onstage. The following grim confrontations of
the Rumble scene are perhaps more dramatic (or perhaps more cinematic) as
a result—even if the complex irony of the stage version is lost.
In another departure of major significance, the offstage voice singing
“Somewhere” in the second act Ballet Sequence is replaced in the film by
a more realistic and conventional “Somewhere” duet between Tony and
Maria. The removal of a dream ballet is typical of other transfers from stage
to screen in the early 1960s, where audience expectations called for more
apparent realism. Balancing the deletion of this major dance section, several
other dances, including the Prologue, The Dance at the Gym, and the now
mixed gendered “America” (in the film men as well as women sing and
dance this number) are extended.
Realism as a vital component of the Hollywood film aesthetic and the
likely motive for removing the surrealistic Ballet Sequence, is considerably
challenged, however, by the presence of gang toughs snapping their fin-
gers (painfully with their thumbs and first fingers at Robbins’s insistence)
and their balletic and acrobatic dancing up and down a real Manhattan. To
better prepare film audiences for this incongruity, Robbins greatly expanded
the Prologue, which itself followed an overture in contrast to the stage ver-
sion. After the abstract drawing of Manhattan seen throughout the overture
metamorphoses into realistic aerial footage that ends up on a West side play-
ground and surrounding tenements, the lengthened Prologue allows the Jets
to ease more naturally into dance through a series of incremental movements
from natural to stylized movements, much in the same way spoken dialogue
moves into a talky song verse before emerging as a great tune. Here, as at the
Ascot races, a stage convention—the autonomy of dance as an expressive
art form—is valued over conventional filmic naturalism. Shot on location in
New York City using the fastest color film stocks and most advanced com-
pact sound and camera equipment of the day, artistically executed mostly
330
by New Yorkers, West Side Story was both grittier and artier than almost any
contemporary Hollywood film made in beautiful sunny California.
In his eloquent memoir Original Story By, Laurents, writing about the stage
version of West Side Story, concludes without false modesty, that this show
was richer in content and quality than innovation:
As for those inflated claims, if West Side Story influenced the musi-
cal theatre, it was in content, not form. Serious subjects—bigotry,
race, rape, murder, death—were dealt with for the first time in a
musical and as seriously as they would be in a play. That was inno-
vative; style and technique were not. They had all been used piece-
meal in one way or another before. . . . The music for the dances
is extraordinarily exciting; that music and the basic story are the
lasting strengths of the show. The difference between the music of
West Side Story and other shows, however, is in quality, not in pur-
pose. . . . What we really did stylistically with West Side Story was
take every musical theatre technique as far as it could be taken.
Scene, song and dance were integrated seamlessly; we did it all
better than anyone ever had before. We were not the innovators we
were called but what we did achieve was more than enough to be
proud of.24
While the musical and dramatic techniques of West Side Story may have been
nothing new, the thought, complexity, and seriousness with which they were
employed were exceptional. It was in the domain of overall quality that the
show was innovative—it raised the bar (and the barre) for what a musical
could be, beyond even the ambitious standards of Rodgers and Hammer-
stein’s collaborations of the 1940s and early ’50s. Their new post–West Side
Story shows such as Flower Drum Song and The Sound of Music began to look a
little artificial in comparison to Wise’s film version of West Side Story in 1961
(but not the film version of The Sound of Music, which Wise also directed).
Although the movie may exert less appeal today in the context of the
similarly accomplished and even grittier Chicago and Sweeney Todd adapta-
tions, Wise’s (and Robbins’s) West Side Story—with its contemporary urban
setting, ubiquitous and stunning dancing, and careful use of recurring sung
and orchestral musical motives creatively augmented by location photog-
raphy on the streets of New York—remains still something of a rarity in
musical films where control over the soundtrack was typically facilitated by
working on indoor stage sets. Anyone who has seen the opening of the film,
with its unforgettable bird’s-eye view of Manhattan office towers and slums,
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Enchanted Evenings
brings that memory with them to even the best staged revival of the show.
Wise brought taste and sophistication to his direction. Although he changed
the show quite a bit, he brought it enduring fame and introduced the real-
istic, contemporary musical to a much broader audience, first across the
United States, then around the globe. On September 3, 2006, the American
Film Institute placed West Side Story behind only Singin’ in the Rain (1952) as
the Greatest Film Musical of all time.25
332
EPILOGUE: THE AGE OF
SONDHEIM AND LLOYD WEBBER
chapter fifteen
SWEENEY TODD AND

SUNDAY IN THE PARK
WITH GEORGE
Happily Ever After West Side
Story with Sondheim
Sondheim and His Mentors

Within two years after creating the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) to music
by Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim, who wanted to be a Broadway composer-
lyricist, reluctantly but again successfully wrote the lyrics only for a show
to Jule Styne’s music for the canonic Gypsy (1959), also directed by Jerome
Robbins. Sondheim’s second foray into Broadway lyric writing brought
him into direct contact for the first time with a major star, Ethel Merman,
and Sondheim contributed greatly to the creation of her character, Rose.
Merman’s role in Gypsy capped a long career studded with star vehicles
dating back to Girl Crazy (1930).1 Sondheim’s next show, the wacky but well-
crafted farce, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), marked
his long-awaited Broadway debut as a lyricist and composer at the age of
thirty-two. Forum won the Tony Award for best musical, and at 964 per-
formances enjoyed a longer run (200 performances longer) than any future
Sondheim show. Even during these early associations with acclaim and
popularity, Sondheim was generally relegated to the background, barely
mentioned in the reviews of West Side Story and Gypsy and bypassed as a
nominee for his work on Forum.
Perhaps the major achievement of his next musical, Anyone Can Whistle
(1964), again with a libretto by West Side Story and Gypsy author Arthur Lau-
rents, was that despite the show’s disappointing run of nine performances,
335
Enchanted Evenings
Stephen Sondheim in 2007.
Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records had the foresight to produce a

commercial original cast recording. One year later Sondheim completed his
trilogy of collaborations with composer legends begun with Bernstein and
Styne when, against his better judgment, he wrote the lyrics for Richard
Rodger’s Do I Hear a Waltz? (the fourth and probably final Laurents libretto
that Sondheim set), an unpleasant and increasingly acrimonious experi-
ence for all concerned. The result was a quickly forgotten and subsequently
neglected musical that despite its troubled genesis deserves to be heard and
seen more often.2
After two hits (as a lyricist), one hit as a composer-lyricist, a flop, a disap-
pointing run, and five fallow years Sondheim, in tandem with Harold Prince,
erupted on Broadway between 1970 and 1973 with a creative explosion: Com-
pany (1970), Follies (1971), and A Little Night Music (1973). From this trilogy
Company has been most frequently singled out for its historic and artistic sig-
nificance as a pioneering exponent of the so-called concept musical. Not atyp-
ical is the assessment by Thomas P. Adler in the Journal of Popular Culture that
Company was “every bit as much a landmark musical as Oklahoma!”3 Eugene
K. Bristow and J. Kevin Butler conclude their essay on Company in American
Music with a similar epiphany: “As Oklahoma! was the landmark, model, and
inspiration for almost all musicals during the three decades that followed
336
Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George
its opening, Company became the vantage point, prototype, and stimulus for
new directions in musical theater of the seventies and eighties.”4
By 1973 Sondheim, now forty-three, had composed the lyrics to two of the
most critically acclaimed shows of Broadway’s Golden Age and music and
lyrics for another five shows, including a trilogy that inaugurated a new age.
Over the next twenty years Sondheim’s next seven shows (three with direc-
tor Prince, three with librettist-director James Lapine, and one with director
Jerry Zaks) would provide Broadway with some of the most compelling,
innovative, thought-provoking, and often emotionally affecting musicals of
their, or any, time. Sondheim, although arguably a central figure in these
collaborations, was not entirely responsible for all the remarkable qualities
audiences and critics appreciate in these shows. In fact, the only show he
initiated himself was Sweeney Todd.
Sondheim’s shows have lacked in immediately popular appeal, but they
are everywhere lavished with deep and lasting critical praise. In the long
run, most of his works have acquired a consequential audience of lovers and
aesthetes, year after year. The relatively short initial runs of even his most
successful shows as composer-lyricist or their revivals therefore do not accu-
rately reflect the influence and popularity of his work within the musical
theater community. Here are the first performance runs of the twelve shows
between 1962 and 1994 for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics, in
numerical rather than chronological order:
Forum (1962) 964

Into the Woods (1987) 764
Company (1970) 706
Sunday in the Park with George (1984) 604
A Little Night Music (1973) 601
Sweeney Todd (1979) 558
Follies (1971) 522
Passion (1994) 280
Pacific Overtures (1976) 193
Assassins (Off-Off Broadway) (1991) 72
Merrily We Roll Along (1981) 16
Anyone Can Whistle (1964) 9
Obviously, Sondheim’s towering reputation must be based on other

factors, including critical esteem and widely available excellent audio and
video recordings. Despite these relatively modest, and sometimes even less
than modest runs, with the exception of Passion and the two-month work-
shop of Bounce (formerly Gold and Wise Guys) in 1999 and its brief return
337
Enchanted Evenings
for a two-month New York Off-Broadway engagement in 2008 as Road

Show, every Sondheim show has also received a major New York revival
of some sort—Broadway, Off-Broadway, Staged Reading, New York City
Opera—and innumerable productions in regional and community the-
aters, colleges, and high schools throughout the United States, and in opera
houses throughout the world. After a popular Forum revival in 1996 (715
performances) starring Nathan Lane, then Whoopi Goldberg as the slave
Pseudolus, the short twenty-first century has already witnessed a Sondheim
Broadway revival nearly every year: Follies (2001), Into the Woods (2002),
Assassins (2004), Sweeney Todd (2005), Company (2006), and Sunday in the Park
with George (2008), and as a lyricist Gypsy (2003 and 2008) and West Side Story
(2009). Sondheim’s work, while lacking in initial popularity, appears to be
gaining longevity and ubiquity.
What Sondheim Learned from Hammerstein

Sondheim, a native New Yorker whose father could play harmonized show
tunes by ear after hearing them once or twice, was the beneficiary of a pre-
cocious, suitably specialized musical education. While still a teenager and
shortly after the premiere of Carousel, Sondheim had the opportunity to be
critiqued at length by the legendary Hammerstein, who, by a fortuitous
coincidence that would be the envy of Show Boat’s second act, happened to
be a neighbor and the father of Sondheim’s friend and contemporary, James
Hammerstein. Sondheim’s unique apprenticeship with the first of his three
great mentors, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, one of the giants of the Broadway
musical from the 1920s until long after his death in 1960 (see the chapters on
Show Boat and Carousel), might serve as a Hegelian metaphor for Sondheim’s
thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of modernism and traditionalism, high-brow
and low-brow. His great aesthetic achievements have been as a loyal revo-
lutionary (not unlike Beethoven) who thoroughly engaged with—rather
than rejected—Broadway’s richest traditions. Before his collaborations with
three major composers in this tradition as well as Robbins and Laurents and
Merman, Sondheim was able to learn invaluable lessons about the craft of
Broadway from one of its greatest pioneers. Sondheim never forgot Ham-
merstein’s priceless lessons in how to write and how not to write a musical.
To help his student develop his craft and discover his own voice, Hammer-
stein suggested that Sondheim write four kinds of musicals to develop his
craft.5 For the next six years Sondheim would attempt to follow this advice.
Some of what Sondheim learned about lyric writing and dramatic struc-
ture from the master soon became available to musical theater aficionados
338
when Hammerstein published a seminal essay on the subject in 1949.6 One

central premise stated early in the essay is Hammerstein’s conviction that
“a song is a wedding of two crafts.”7 Later, Hammerstein articulates the
importance of “very close collaboration during the planning of a song and
the story that contains the song” and espouses the view that “the musician
is just as much an author as the man who writes the words.”8 The result-
ing marriage of music and words, the welding of two crafts and talents
“into a single expression” is for Hammerstein “the great secret of the well-
integrated musical play.”9 Unlike Hammerstein, Sondheim would assume
two mantles, author and musician—although, unlike his mentor, Sondheim
did not write the librettos for any of his Broadway shows.
Throughout the course of his essay Hammerstein explores a number of
issues and ideas about theatrical songwriting that did not go unnoticed by
his student and neighbor. For example, Hammerstein advocates what we
might call a non-operatic approach to the musical that maintains clear and
sharp distinctions between spoken dialogue and song. With few excep-
tions, and in marked contrast to his popular contemporary Lloyd Webber,
Sondheim has followed this approach ever since. Hammerstein also never
wavered from his conviction “that the song is the servant of the play” and
“that it is wrong to write first what you think is an attractive song and then
try to wedge it into a story.”10 His protégé would follow this advice as well,
in fact unwaveringly for the next forty years.
Hammerstein goes on to share his ideas about the craft of lyric writing.
Here are some of the highlights:
• Hammerstein on rhyming: “If one has fundamental things

to say in a song, the rhyming becomes a question of deft
balancing. A rhyme should be unassertive, never standing out
too noticeably. . . . There should not be too many rhymes. In fact,
a rhyme should appear only where it is absolutely demanded
to keep the pattern of the music. If a listener is made rhyme-
conscious, his interest may be diverted from the story of the
song. If, on the other hand you keep him waiting for a rhyme,
he is more likely to listen to the meaning of the words.”11 As
an example of the latter technique, Hammerstein points out
the delay of the “cotton” and “forgotten” rhyme in Show Boat’s
“Ol’ Man River,” a delay that focuses the rhymes on the most
crucial words when additional and possible rhymes would
detract from their power. Interestingly, Hammerstein considers
the exuberant mood of “A Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific
an opportunity for “interior rhymes, undemanded rhymes and
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Enchanted Evenings
light-hearted similes.” These were techniques that Sondheim

became justly critically famous for, but would generally avoid
in later years, especially when setting lyrics for less educated
characters. Opting for character over craft (“song” as “servant
of the play”), Sondheim criticized his own brilliant lyrics for
Maria’s exuberant number in West Side Story, “I Feel Pretty,”
for their lack of verisimilitude.12
• Hammerstein on phonetics: “The job of the poet is to find the
right word in the right place, the word with the exact meaning
and the highest quality of beauty or power. The lyric writer
must find this word too, but it must be also a word that is clear
when sung and not too difficult for the singer to sing on that
note which he hits when he sings.”13 Although Hammerstein
points out a number of successful song conclusions that follow
this principle, most of which end on a vowel (e.g., “Oh, what a
beautiful day”), the self-critical lyricist chose to dwell on what
he felt was one failed ending, the consonant that concludes
“What’s the Use of Wond’rin’ ” in Carousel (“all the rest is talk”).
• Hammerstein on sincerity: “The most important ingredient of
a good song is sincerity. Let the song be yours and yours alone.
However important, however trivial, believe it. Mean it from
the bottom of your heart, and say what is on your mind as
carefully, as clearly, as beautifully as you can.”14
A quarter of a century later Sondheim published some of his own thoughts

about lyric writing adapted from a talk he simply called “Theater Lyrics”
first given to the Dramatists Guild and then later published in a slightly
altered form in the collection Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers, on Theatre. On
the first page of this talk in its published form Sondheim informs his audi-
ence and readers that most of what he knows he learned from Hammerstein,
his first mentor (although he also acknowledges the example of other lyri-
cists, including Cole Porter). Sondheim recalls that the mentorship officially
began when Hammerstein critiqued a draft of a musical called By George, a
musical à clef about the preparatory school where the young protégé was
then a junior.15
What Hammerstein taught the novice at their historic first session not
only encompassed lyric writing but also addressed larger dramatic issues.
This is how Sondheim recalled his lesson nearly thirty years later: “Detail by
detail, he told me how to structure songs, how to build them with a begin-
ning and a development and an ending, according to his own principles,
340
how to introduce character, what relates a song to character, etc. etc. It was
four hours of the most packed information. I dare say, at the risk of hyper-
bole, that I learned in that afternoon more than most people learn about
song writing in a lifetime.”16 Some of what his teacher told him (e.g., the
remarks on rhyming, phonetics, and sincerity quoted earlier) appeared a
few years later in Hammerstein’s essay. Over the years Sondheim also often
repeated Hammerstein’s anecdote about the importance of detail, which
was inspired by his mentor’s astonishment when he learned that the sculp-
tor of the Statue of Liberty carefully detailed the top of Lady Liberty’s head
long before it was possible to anticipate the popularity of photographs of the
iconic image from above.17
The first of the four apprentice musicals assigned by Hammerstein was
to be a musical based on a play he admired, the second a musical based on a
play he found flawed and felt he could improve, a third based on a novel or
a short story, and for the finale an original musical. In the end only the first,
Beggar on Horseback, based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Con-
nelly, was completed and performed (at Williams College in March 1949 at
the end of Sondheim’s junior year). Sondheim continued to work on the sec-
ond, Climb High, based on Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor, for several years
after he graduated and made substantial progress on the third show, based
on the Mary Poppins stories.18 At the end of his sophomore year a fifth non-
pedagogical show, a spoof on Williams College life called Phinney’s Rainbow,
was staged there and Hammerstein came up to Massachusetts to see it.19 The
final original musical was the post-collegiate Saturday Night. Abandoned
after the unexpected death of its producer Lemuel Ayers in 1955, shortly
before Sondheim was asked to join the West Side Story team, Saturday Night
would not receive its first professional reading for another forty years.20
In “Theater Lyrics” Sondheim encapsulates the craft of lyric writing from
two seemingly straightforward but potentially profound central principles:
(1) “Lyrics exist in time” and (2) “Lyrics go with music.” Both principles
possess far-reaching artistic consequences for Sondheim’s future in musical
theater and both take as a given the wedding of music and lyrics that Ham-
merstein emphasized in his essay a quarter of a century earlier. The lyric
writer must take into account not only the fact that “music is a relentless
engine and keeps lyrics going,” but that lyrics need to be “underwritten”
and “simple in essence.” In addition, a lyric writer must learn the difficult
lesson of the fundamental difference between serious poetry and lyric writ-
ing. Sondheim begins with his “favorite example,” Rodgers and Hammer-
stein’s “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’ / Oh, what a beautiful day” from
Oklahoma! (a lyric that seemed simplistic on paper but came to life when
sung) to demonstrate this last point: “I would be ashamed to put it down on
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Enchanted Evenings
paper, it would look silly. What Hammerstein knew was that set to music
it was going to have an enormous richness. It did, it’s a beautiful lyric—but
not on paper.”21
Another great Hammerstein lesson was a variation on the theme of sin-
cerity Hammerstein espoused in his published essay on lyrics: the impor-
tance of expressing your own lyric voice (to “Say what you feel, not what
other song writers feel”). Sondheim’s view of the world was by no means
the same as his mentor’s. Nevertheless, for the rest of his career Sondheim
would live by Hammerstein’s example, which is eloquently captured in the
advice Dot gives to her great-grandson in the song “Move On”: “Anything
you do, / Let it come from you.” In addition to what he was able to impart
about lyric writing and dramatic construction, Hammerstein played a major
advisory role when he encouraged the aspiring composer-lyricist to accept
seemingly less ambitious opportunities and agree to work exclusively as a
lyricist with such talented and experienced composers as Bernstein, Styne,
and Rodgers, a major star such as Merman, and a director-choreographer of
Robbins’s talent and stature.
Other Lessons Learned

Burt Shevelove, who co-authored the book for Forum, and Arthur Laurents,
the librettist for the other four Sondheim shows staged between 1957 and
1965, also gave Sondheim lessons that would last long after he moved on to
other creative partnerships. From Shevelove, Sondheim learned “that clarity
of language was as important as well as clarity of thought” and to “never
sacrifice smoothness for cleverness.”22 In a remark that might be considered
dismissive of such musicals as Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I
Sondheim credits Laurents as someone who taught “playwriting principles
about lyrics, much deeper and subtler than Oscar because Arthur writes
deeper and subtler plays than Oscar.”23 This brings Sondheim to the major
lesson he learned from Laurents, “the notion of sub-text”:
Now this is a word I had heard tossed around by Actors Studio

types for a long time and really rather sneered at: but what it means
simply is, give the actor something to act. I think this is a real secret;
if I had to sell secrets about lyric writing I would sell this secret
about sub-text. Watch how even some Broadway lyrics that you
admire just sit there, with nothing for the actor to play. They just
play the next logical step. A playwright when he writes a scene
always gives some sub-text, or it’s a very shallow scene. Well, that
342
happens with lyrics. They may be very good, but if they’re just on
the surface, if there’s not pull, there’s a kind of deadness on the
stage.24
Sondheim’s unstated parallel between subtext in a play and subtext in a

song is a telling one. A few years before Sondheim’s tutorial as an adoles-
cent, Hammerstein wrote that songs “must help tell our story and delineate
characters, supplementing the dialogue and seeming to be, as much as pos-
sible, a continuation of dialogue”—in short, to exhibit the characteristics of a
well-made play.25 Through a conscious use of subtext, Sondheim goes further
when he takes the strengths of a well-made play and applies them to a well-
made song. The result is a song that expands into its own miniature play.
Among the examples that Sondheim uses to illustrate subtext is “In Bud-
dy’s Eyes” from Follies. In this poignant and touching song, Sally Plummer
tells her former and inextinguishable flame, the seemingly self-confident
but ultimately pathetic Benjamin Stone (described by Sondheim as “ripped
to shreds internally”), about how her husband, the devoted but philander-
ing Buddy, sees what Sally herself cannot see:
In Buddy’s eyes,
I’m young, I’m beautiful.
In Buddy’s arms,
On Buddy’s shoulder,
I won’t get older.
Nothing dies.
In contrast to a sophisticated and pyrotechnically verbal character such as

the lawyer Fredrik Egerman in A Little Night Music, the emotionally trans-
parent Sally sings deliberately, repeats words, and utters mostly simple one-
syllable rhymes. Like her husband, Buddy, who is fated to love a woman
who cannot return his love, Sally continues to carry the torch—and sing
torch songs—for the unhappily married and emotionally unattainable Ben,
who discarded her thirty years ago and will take advantage of her vulner-
abilities at their reunion. Sondheim’s words have often been celebrated for
intellect and intricacy. Here is a clear example of his own early preference
for simplicity and emotional directness in lyrics and, as we will soon see,
music as well.
In the central chorus of her song, Sondheim gives Sally an identical four-
note melodic figure each of the six times she sings “in Buddy’s eyes” (the
last up an octave) and the one time she sings “in Buddy’s arms.” The music
sets the lyrics simply and syllabically (rather than melismatically, with more
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Enchanted Evenings
than one note per syllable). The figure turns on itself, down from and back
to F via D and E , above a static harmony that reflects Sally’s sincere simplic-
ity, Buddy’s stoic solidity, and perhaps also Sally’s boredom with Buddy’s
constant admiration. Significantly, the music Sondheim gives Sally to sing
for this mantra, “in Buddy’s eyes” (or “arms”), is the only music that fits the
underlying static harmony. It is also significant, perhaps a sign of her lack
of self-awareness and desire to avoid the psychological root of her problems
(symbolically represented as the harmonic root of her song), that when Sally
moves from the third to the fifth of the tonic triad, she conspicuously avoids
singing the root note of this chord, so relentlessly repeated in the bass.
In “Theater Lyrics” Sondheim describes this song as a “woman’s lie to her
former lover” (Ben), but it may also be interpreted as her lie to the man she
married (Buddy), a man who loves her deeply and who provides a steady
but boring static grounding, both psychological and harmonic. For Sond-
heim, the song’s subtext is Sally’s anger at being rejected by Ben many years
ago, a subtext that is not found explicitly in either the lyrics or implied by
the melody or harmony. Sondheim credits and praises Jonathan Tunick, his
principal orchestrator for more than the thirty years between Company and
Road Show, who demonstrated his understanding of the subtext of this song
by assigning the “dry” woodwinds to Sally’s wry references about Buddy,
and warm strings for the self-referential parts of the text, Sondheim perhaps
gives too much credit to Tunick. Even without this orchestral subtlety, which
Sondheim describes as analogous to the details in the head of the Statue of
Liberty that so impressed Hammerstein, it is arguable that Sondheim’s own
subtle musical distinctions between the harmonically synchronized repeti-
tive rhythmic pattern that accompanies the melodic mantra “in Buddy’s
eyes” and the more varied contrasting musical phrases when she refers to
herself (but still in Buddy’s eyes) would emerge with comparable clarity
even in a piano-vocal reduction.
One last mentor, one not cited in “Theater Lyrics,” needs to be mentioned:
the composer and mathematician Milton Babbitt. Babbitt’s mentoring began
several years after Hammerstein’s initial tutelage when Sondheim, who had
majored in mathematics as well as music at Williams College, elected to use
his Hutchinson Prize money to study principles of composition and analyze
popular songs such as Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are” with the illus-
trious Princeton music theory and composition professor and avant-garde
composer, who also was knowledgeable about jazz and loved musicals (he
even tried his hand at writing a musical score once and published some of
the resulting theater songs).26 At the same time he was teaching Sondheim
traditional classical and popular musical forms, Babbitt was pioneering a
new composition technique widely known as “total serialization” as well as
344
complex electronic works. Babbitt has stated that he did not ask Sondheim to
work within this modernist idiom because he did not consider it appropri-
ate to his student’s aesthetic aims. But is it not possible that Sondheim chose
Babbitt as a postgraduate compositional mentor at least partly because of
his gathering reputation as a mathematically adept modernist? While thirty
years earlier Schoenberg systematically arranged pitch according to various
permutations of a twelve-tone series in his quest to systematically avoid a
tonal center, Babbitt less systemically serialized other parameters as well,
including rhythm and tone color.
Stephen Sondheim. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with

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Enchanted Evenings
It is possible to make the analogy between Babbitt’s allegedly “total” seri-

alization and Sondheim’s allegedly “modernist” musicals, aided and abet-
ted by extraordinarily thoughtful and creative choreographers, directors,
scene designers, and orchestrators, which really expand upon, rather than
discard, the traditions established by earlier acknowledged masterpieces.
Like Babbitt, who only seemed to break with the past while really extending
Schoenberg’s aesthetics as well as his methods, Sondheim expanded on the
insights and achievement of Hammerstein and other predecessors in what
had become, by the 1950s, a great American musical tradition. Following the
example of his theatrical mentors, Hammerstein, Shevelove, and Laurents,
the revolutionary traditionalist Sondheim would continue to probe into the
nuances of his complex characters and the meaning of his dramatic subjects,
achieving moments of moving emotional directness as well as dazzling
verbal and artistic pyrotechnics.
The Prince Years (1970–1981): Sweeney Todd

While the so-called integrated musical remained very much alive after West
Side Story, the next step in dramatic organicism, the so-called concept musi-
cal, where “all elements of the musical, thematic and presentational, are
integrated to suggest a central theatrical image or idea,” began to receive
notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s.27 Sondheim and his collaborators, espe-
cially Jerome Robbins, Michael Bennett, Harold Prince, Boris Aronson, who
designed the first four Prince-Sondheim collaborations with striking origi-
nality, and several excellent librettists (George Furth, James Goldman, John
Weidman, and Hugh Wheeler), were in the forefront of this development.
Musicals based more on themes than on narrative action were no more new
in the 1960s than the integrated musicals were in the 1940s. Nevertheless,
earlier concept musicals, for example, the revue As Thousands Cheer in 1933
(arguably all revues are concept musicals), book musicals such as Rodgers
and Hammerstein’s Allegro (1947), or Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love
Life (1948)—like the precociously integrated Show Boat and Porgy and Bess
explored in the present survey—deviate from what Max Weber or Carl
Dahlhaus would call an “ideal type.”28 In any event, the pioneering concept
musicals of the late 1940s, Allegro and Love Life, failed to inspire a flock of
popularly successful followers. In the 1970s, Sondheim and his collaborators
were clearly critically central Broadway figures, even though they garnered
only relatively limited live audiences, while more popular artists such as
Andrew Lloyd Webber or Stephen Schwartz were marginalized and criti-
cized, probably unfairly, for their alleged aesthetic vacuities.
346
Perhaps more than any single individual, the inspiration in the move
toward the concept musical ideal was Robbins, who early in his career
had established thematic meaning through movement and dance as the
choreographer of The King and I (1951) and as the director-choreographer
for Sondheim’s first Broadway efforts, West Side Story and Gypsy. Robbins
was notorious for relentlessly asking, “What is this show about?,” a ques-
tion that led to the late (and uncredited) insertion of “Comedy Tonight” in
Forum to inform audiences and prepare them for what they might expect in
the course of the evening. Robbins’s insistence on getting an answer to this
probing question soon led to the show-opener “Tradition” in Fiddler on the
Roof (1964), a song that embodied an overriding idea (rather than an action)
that could unify and conceptualize a show.
After Fiddler, the concept musical was principally championed by Prince
(b. 1928–), who had co-produced two of the above-mentioned Robbins shows
(West Side Story and Fiddler). Prince also directed and produced John Kander
and Fred Ebb’s Cabaret, Zorbá, the considerably altered 1974 hit revival of
Bernstein’s Candide, and produced the first four of the six Sondheim shows
he directed from Company in 1970 to Merrily We Roll Along in 1981.29 While
producing or co-producing such major hits as The Pajama Game, Damn Yan-
kees, West Side Story, Fiorello!, and, with Sondheim, A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Forum (with Sondheim), and Fiddler on the Roof between 1953
and 1964, Prince came into his own as a producer-director with Jerry Bock
and Sheldon Harnick’s She Loves Me (1963). The use of a German cabaret as
a metaphor for pre–World War II German decadence in Cabaret exemplifies
Prince’s continuation of the concept idea developed by Robbins.
Arguably, the Sondheim-Prince standard of the concept musical—in the
absence of a more meaningful term—throughout the 1970s, with the non-
linear Company as its iconic exemplar, was in the end, like most of Sondheim’s
work with other collaborators, less a revolution than a reinterpretation of
the integrated musical.30 In line with high-modernist aestheticism, narrative
structures became more avowedly experimental in the Robbins-Sondheim-
Prince “concept” era, and ambitious attempts to expand the expressive scope
of the musical were also in vogue. Open appeals to a broad audience Lloyd
Webber-Schwartz style, perhaps borrowed from rock, were as critically sus-
pect as a pop song by Babbitt might have been in the same era. Nevertheless,
at least one influential director, Prince, managed to navigate through the
treacherous shores of the Broadway aesthetic divide.
During the Sondheim years Prince also collaborated with the man this
volume has singled out in its Epilogue as the other major Broadway com-
poser who flourished from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, Lloyd Webber
(see chapter 16). In a dazzling display of Prince’s versatility, the Lloyd
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Enchanted Evenings
Webber-Prince collaboration, Evita, appeared only a few months after

Sweeney. In addition to his work with Sondheim, Bernstein, Kander and Ebb,
and Lloyd Webber, Prince during these years managed to direct On the Twen-
tieth Century with yet another composer, Cy Coleman (with the legendary
librettist-lyricists Comden and Green). Coleman was another distinguished
composer with a long career that flourished during the Sondheim-Lloyd
Webber era in musicals from Wildcat and Sweet Charity in the 1960s to City
of Angels, Will Rogers Follies, and The Life in the late 1980s and 1990s. By the
later 1990s, Prince had received more Tony Awards, twenty-one, than any-
one since the awards were established in the later 1940s. Of these, no less
than eight were bestowed in his capacity as director: Cabaret, Company, Fol-
lies (shared with Michael Bennett), the Candide revival of 1974, Sweeney Todd,
Evita, Phantom of the Opera, and the Show Boat revival of 1994. The quan-
tity and range of Prince’s achievement is nothing short of staggering. This
chapter will focus on selected moments in the historic collaboration between
Prince and Sondheim.
Although Prince and Sondheim had been friends since 1949—according
to Prince’s recollection they met on the opening night of South Pacific—and
Prince had co-produced West Side Story and produced Forum, Company was
the first of the six Sondheim productions he either directed, or in the case of
Follies, co-directed (with Bennett). These six shows, Company, Follies, A Little
Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along, form
a remarkable group. We have already noted the historical and artistic signifi-
cance assigned to Company and an example of subtext in Follies.
Each musical in the first trilogy of Sondheim-Prince shows, Company,
Follies, and A Little Night Music, earned Sondheim Tony and Drama Critics
Circle Awards for best score. This was a major critical achievement, if not
always a financial one. Company and Night Music earned some profit despite
relatively modest runs, 706 and 601 performances and profits of $56,000 and
$97,500 respectively, while the more lavish Follies lost $665,000 of its $700,000
investment during its 522 performance run.31 As a tie-in with the “nostalgia”
revival along with the more successful revival of Vincent Youmans’s No, No,
Nanette (1925) in 1971, Follies even appeared on the cover of Time magazine.32
Only Night Music, however, was spared the criticism that Sondheim was
destined to share with another early twentieth-century modernist, Igor Stra-
vinsky, who was also, unfairly, accused of cynicism, coldness, and “blood-
lessness.” In the waning days of high modernism, Sondheim was neither
high nor low, but somewhere in between. Thus he suffered from some crit-
ics’ binary high/low expectations. Like Stravinsky in his early Ballet Russe
period (Firebird, Petrushka, Rite of Spring), Sondheim was delightfully novel
for some in the audience, and yet still not too cerebral and difficult (at least
348
some of the time) for the mass of musical theatergoers with more traditional
expectations of a diverting night out with a happy ending.
The career of Sondheim marks, perhaps for the first time, not only the
consistent failure of a composer of the most highly regarded musicals of his
generation to produce blockbusters on Broadway, but even major song hits
(Night Music’s “Send in the Clowns” is the exception that proves the rule).33
Pacific Overtures, competing in the same season as A Chorus Line and Chicago,
lost its entire investment as well as most of the Tonys. Sweeney Todd, which
lost about half of its million dollar investment, received more than half of
the major Tony awards, including those for best actor (Len Cariou), actress
(Angela Lansbury), director (Prince), scenic design (Eugene Lee), costume
design (Franne Lee), book (Wheeler), best score (Sondheim), and best show.
Sweeney Todd as Melodrama and as Opera

Within a short time Sweeney Todd also earned classic status among critics and
cognoscenti as perhaps Sondheim and Prince’s finest effort. Even those who
prefer other Sondheim shows regard this score as one of the composer’s rich-
est. In 2007, Sweeney Todd gained hordes of new converts via its acclaimed
and reasonably popular (by Hollywood standards) transfer to film by direc-
tor Tim Burton starring Johnny Depp. While many regard the work as one of
the great musicals of the post–Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, others
consider it to be one of the greatest operas composed by an American. It
will be helpful to try to understand what genre Sweeney Todd represents and
what is at stake in the formulation.
With the exception of national comic opera traditions, which alternate
between spoken dialogue and songs (the latter known in operas as arias)—
the Singspiel in Germany and Austria (The Magic Flute), the opéra comique in
France (Carmen in its original form), the ballad opera in England (The Beg-
gar’s Opera)—opera in the European classical tradition tends to be through-
sung (i.e., sung throughout without spoken dialogue). In the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, composers presented a strong contrast
between arias and sung speech (recitative). Although less so for Verdi and
Puccini than for Wagner and Strauss, as the nineteenth century progressed
and moved into the twentieth, recitative often became more like arias and
the arias more like recitative. For the most part—we have already looked at
two such exceptions, Porgy and Bess and The Most Happy Fella—Broadway
musicals adopted the national comic traditions that go back to Beggar’s
Opera in the eighteenth century and Gilbert and Sullivan in the nineteenth:
spoken dialogue interrupted by song, or vice versa, depending on your
point of view.
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Enchanted Evenings
In distinguishing between operas and musicals, what is arguably more

important than measuring amounts of song and speech is asking whether
significant dramatic moments are sung or spoken. After the death of Tristan,
his beloved Isolde must sing, and sing she does. Until a late stage in the cre-
ative process, Maria was going to sing, and Bernstein remained hopeful that
he would be able to come up with effective love-death music to serve the
dramatic moment after the death of Tony. For Bernstein, spoken dialogue for
Maria was an option. If West Side Story were unequivocally an opera, Maria,
like Isolde, would have no choice. She would sing.
The fact that by Sondheim’s estimation 80 percent of the first act of
Sweeney Todd is through-sung seems to locate the work more in the direction
of opera.34 Furthermore, much of the dialogue (the other 20%) is delivered
over an orchestral backdrop. Dialogue over underscoring in fact is a key
component in the traditional definition of melodrama, a word frequently
used to describe Sweeney Todd—and used by Sondheim. Melodramatic story
lines also are expected to be “thrilling,” with the audience in on violence to
come (while the characters on stage are unaware) and occasionally moved
to yell remarks such as “Don’t open the door” at evidently clueless play-
ers. Well-known operatic examples of early nineteenth-century melodrama
include portions of Beethoven’s Fidelio and Carl Maria von Weber’s (not
Lloyd Webber’s) Der Freischütz. Schoenberg adapted the technique to create
a spooky heightened speech known as Sprechstimme in his chamber song
cycle Pierrot Lunaire in 1912.
Sondheim loved melodrama. In fact, he found not only the inspiration
but the source for his own version of Sweeney Todd when he attended a tell-
ing of the tale in an exceptionally artful melodramatic play by Christopher
Bond at a theater known for putting on the genre in London. Perhaps idio-
syncratically, Sondheim also considered the melodrama compatible with
high art. At the same time, he acknowledges that in calling Sweeney Todd a
musical thriller instead of a musical melodrama, he could circumvent some
of the genre’s negative connotations, including its extravagant theatricality,
the emphasis of plot over characters who are prone to be one-dimensional,
and the sensationalism of the form. For Sondheim, “Melodrama is theater
that is larger than life—in emotion, in subject, and in complication of plot.”35
Sweeney Todd admirably fits this description.
Early in their collaborative process Sondheim and his librettist Hugh
Wheeler “wanted to make a melodrama but with a twentieth-century sensi-
bility,” and they wanted audiences to take the subject as seriously as audi-
ences took nineteenth-century versions.36 Sondheim wanted both the story
and the music “to scare an audience out of its wits,” but not with cheap
theatrical thrills.37 In Sondheim’s view, “The true terror of melodrama comes
350
from its revelations about the frightening power of what is inside human
beings.”38 He also expressed his intention to achieve in a musical what Chris-
topher Bond achieved in the play that inspired Sondheim, “which is to make
Sweeney a tragic hero instead of a villain, because there is something of
Sweeney in all of us,” even if most of us elect not to become serial killers.39
Sondheim’s interpretation of what Sweeney Todd is all about differed from
Prince’s initial concept. Prince wanted the show to be about “how society
makes you impotent, and impotence leads to rage, and rage leads to mur-
der—and in fact, to the breaking down of society.”40 Sondheim credits Prince
with developing this socially critical perspective in his setting of the story
but does not identify with it. Instead, Sondheim interprets Sweeney Todd as
a musical about an individual’s psychological obsession, an obsession that
leads to revenge and murder.
Bernstein was not alone in his inability to find a musical solution for a
major dramatic moment, in his case a final aria for Maria. Sondheim too has
acknowledged that he was originally unable to determine how to musicalize
eight scenes of Sweeney Todd, five of which he found solutions for after the
fact: “I sort of figured the five, but I’ve never gotten around to doing them.
I thought I would do them for the National Theatre production in London
[1993], but Julia McKenzie said: ‘Oh, please don’t give me anything new to
learn. Please don’t give me anything new to learn.’ That was all the incentive
I needed not to work, so I didn’t do it.”41 Sondheim specifically identifies one
of these scenes as “the trio in the second act, which I’d always wanted to do,
where Mrs. Lovett tries to poison the Beadle.”42 Bernstein faced a creative
impasse and Sondheim a time crunch and, as a result, dramatic moments in
West Side Story and Sweeney are today spoken rather than sung.
Some critics consider the absence of music for such important moments a
dramatic flaw or a lost opportunity, especially the final moments of Sweeney,
which are occupied by a speaking rather than a singing Tobias. Sondheim
scholar Stephen Banfield considers the brighter side of the musical respite:
“Sondheim says that there are five spoken sections of the show that he would
like to set to music one day. One of them is the ending. The last three min-
utes of plot involve very little music: after Todd has sung his last word, even
the underscoring peters out and leaves the stage to Tobias’s last speech and
still more to the silence of mime. It remained unsung and unplayed simply
because Sondheim did not have time to add music before the production
opened.” And yet: “Sweeney Todd, even if by authorial default at this point,
demonstrates the dramatic potency and rightness of music’s self-denial in this
genre that is not opera, just as Maria’s final speech does in West Side Story.”43
Bernstein’s lack of inspiration and Sondheim’s lack of time may have
played a role in the musical silence of Maria and Tobias, and some may
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Enchanted Evenings
continue to lament the absence of music within the finales of each show. It
is also worth mentioning that in its present form Tobias may have the last
words but Sweeney has the last musical word (in West Side Story Maria’s
speech is similarly followed by a moving musical death procession). When
Sweeney dies, so does the music. Only in the epilogue do the characters
(including Sweeney) return to sing “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” one last
time. On stage, Tobias needs to kill Sweeney, but he does not need to sing.
In the film version, his final speech is also removed. As with Maria and
West Side Story, if Sweeney Todd were an opera, neither Tobias nor Sondheim
would have a choice; everything would be sung.
Banfield insightfully captures a crucial distinction between opera and
musicals that gets lost in the shuffle when brooding critics focus with
Sweeney Todd-like obsession on how much is sung and whether trained
opera singers or singing actors are best equipped to handle the demands of
the latter genre:
Yet we must again stress that Sondheim’s way of privileging music

within melodrama is not opera’s way. The pacing of his sung ver-
bal language remains that of spoken drama, rather than being, as
in opera, subservient to the slower and longer-spanned emotional
arcs of music. Thus, unlike most opera composers, he does not
draw out syllables to unnaturalistic length, nor does he repeat ver-
bal phrases except in a refrain context; the book of Sweeney Todd
is consequently a good deal fatter than a printed opera libretto.
Coupled with this verbal fecundity, he retains wit, colloquialism,
and (taking the word in a neutral sense, as building action into the
delivery) pantomime as governing Affekts in his songs, whose ver-
bal values thereby remain those of the musical theater.44
In the case of Sweeney Todd, Angela Lansbury in the role of Mrs. Lovett was
an actor who could also sing, but other roles could profit from a singing
actor who also possessed a trained voice. It is not the voice that defines the
work as an opera or musical but how the work weighs the balance between
words and music.
In an interview with David Savran about a decade after Sweeney Todd
Sondheim expressed his lingering distaste for opera: “I’ve never liked opera
and I’ve never understood it. Most opera doesn’t make theatrical sense to
me. Things go on forever. I’m not a huge fan of the human voice. I like song,
dramatic song. I like music and lyrics together, telling a story.”45 Despite
this fundamental antipathy, Sondheim has also readily acknowledged that
after seeing a production of Bond’s transformation of George Dibdin Pitt’s
352
Sweeney Todd play of 1847 his original intention was to make an opera out
of Bond’s entire script rather than a more traditional cut-down libretto ver-
sion of the play. When Sondheim had reached only page five of Bond’s text
after twenty minutes of music, however, he turned to Night Music librettist
Wheeler and director Prince to convert the work into a musical, but a musi-
cal with a lot of through-singing (almost like an opera).
Bernard Herrmann and the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath)

The sheer amount of music—nearly four hundred pages in the published
vocal score—as well as its continuity was also greatly influenced by
another subgenre, the musical film score. Sondheim has often referred to
his intense enjoyment of Hangover Square (1945), a thriller about a composer
who becomes deranged when he hears certain high pitches and, in a stupor
induced by these sounds, unwittingly murders people. At the end of the
film the composer-serial killer, played by the legendary film noir star Laird
Cregar, collapses while performing the piano concerto he was compos-
ing during his saner moments. The film score, including the concerto, was
composed by Bernard Herrmann, who during this period was also creating
masterful scores for director Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane and
several suspense thrillers in the 1950s and 60s directed by Alfred Hitchcock,
including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. The film, and especially
Herrmann’s score, had a powerful effect on the fifteen-year-old Sondheim,
and since that time he had “always wanted to [write] an answer to Hangover
Square.”46 In the end, the “Musical Thriller” Sweeney Todd, the first show
idea generated by Sondheim himself, offered its rich and often continuous
score, not to emulate opera, but to emulate film:
“What I wanted to write,” Sondheim says, “was a horror movie.

The whole point of the thing is that it’s a background score for a
horror film, which is what I intended to do and what it is. All those
chords, and that whole kind of harmonic structure . . . the use of
electronic sounds and the loud crashing organ had a wonderful
Gothic feeling. It had to be unsettling, scary, and very romantic.
In fact, there’s a chord I kept using throughout, which is sort of a
personal joke, because it’s a chord that occurred in every Bernard
Herrmann score.”47
In a later interview Sondheim elaborates on the connections between

Hermann’s score for Hangover Square and the musical requirements for a
“musical thriller.” His remarks reinforce the position that the plentiful score
353
Enchanted Evenings
of Sweeney Todd was due more to the requirements of mid-twentieth-century

American horror film scoring and harmony than the demands of nineteenth-
century European opera:
I wanted to pay homage to him [Herrmann] with this show, because

I had realized that in order to scare people, which [is] what Sweeney
Todd is about, the only way to you can do it, considering that the
horrors out on the street are so much greater than anything you
can do on the stage, is to keep music going all the time. That’s the
principle of suspense sequences in movies, and Bernard Hermann
was a master in that field. So Sweeney Todd not only has a lot of
singing, it has a lot of underscoring. It’s infused with music, to keep
the audience in a state of tension, to make them forget they’re in a
theater and to prevent them from separating themselves from the
action. I based a lot of the score on a specific chord that Herrmann
uses in almost all his film work, and spun it out from that. That
and the “Dies Irae,” which is one of my favorite tunes, and is full
of menace.48
Like West Side Story, the score of Sweeney Todd demonstrates impressively
intricate musical connections that are dramatically meaningful. Although
he acknowledged some indecision about the conclusion of the work, the
idea that major characters would be given distinctive themes and the deci-
sion to have these themes “collide in the end” was present almost from
conception. This is how Sondheim explained his procedure: “I determined
that it would be fun for Sweeney Todd to start each character with a specific
musical theme and develop all that character’s music out of that theme, so
that each song would depend in the true sense of the word on the last one.
Sweeney’s opening scene dictates his next song, and so on. It’s a handy com-
positional principle, and it seemed to me that it would pay off very nicely
at the end.”49
In order to understand how this compositional principle works it is neces-
sary to introduce the Gregorian chant Dies irae (literally the Latin for “Day of
Wrath” and more conventionally Judgment Day), a thirteenth-century text
and melody that became officially incorporated into the Catholic Requiem
Mass, the mass for the dead, by the sixteenth century. It is this chant that
Sondheim chose as the starting point for Sweeney’s theme and for the open-
ing choral number, “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” sung by a chorus to help
the audience “attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” and reprised to introduce
various episodes throughout the story. With its connections to death and the
354
Last Judgment and its musical resonances, the theme has been especially
favored in the last two hundred years from Berlioz to Rachmaninoff. It was
an inspired choice to serve as the embodiment of a character who by the end
of the first act “Epiphany” will take it upon himself to impart his demented
vengeful judgment on the world. On the stage, “Epiphany” provided an
opportunity for Sweeney to break the fourth wall and invites the audience
to “Come and visit your good friend Sweeney” and to get a shave and “wel-
come to the grave.” The Sweeney in Burton’s film extends this idea and, in a
fantasy sequence, leaves his shop, roams the streets like a ghost visible only
to the audience, and invites unaware passersby to get their shaves and his
vengeance.
Sondheim explained why he chose the chant and offers information about
how he used it: “I always found the Dies Irae moving and scary at the same
time,” says Sondheim. “One song, ‘My Friends,’ was influenced by it . . . it
was the inversion of the opening of the Dies Irae. And although it was never
actually quoted in the show, the first release of ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’
was a sequence of the Dies Irae—up a third, which changed the harmonic
relationship of the melodic notes to each other.”50
The following set of examples (see Example 15.1 on the next page) begins
with the opening of the Dies irae chant, continues with various transforma-
tions of the chant’s opening in Sweeney Todd (mainly its first seven notes),
and concludes with a famous use of the work in the classical literature and a
possible earlier allusion by Sondheim himself.
Although Sondheim states he did not quote Dies irae (15.1a) literally in
Sweeney Todd, the published score offers just such a quotation on its second
page in the Prelude (15.1b).51 Probably the most prominent and most recur-
ring reference to Dies irae is the paraphrase of the chant that marks the open-
ing of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” which includes notes 2–7 of the chant
(15.1c). Interestingly, the jig-like rhythm of this paraphrase is reminiscent of
the melodically more literal rhythmic and major mode transformation of the
chant in the “Dream of the Witches Sabbath” movement of Berlioz’s famous
Symphonie fantastique of 1830 (15.1 h). The longer and more chant-like notes
(the first five notes) at the portion of “The Ballad” shown in Example 15.1d
described by Sondheim are offset by some pitch alterations to create another
major mode variation on the tune. Anthony’s paraphrase of the tune (includ-
ing some changes in the note order in the first four notes of the chant) in “No
Place Like London” (15.1e) adds harmonic density by placing the Dies irae in
F minor against E in the bass (plus two non-chord tones B and D), to create
an enriched variant of the “Sweeney Todd” chord (a minor seventh with the
seventh in the bass or in this case E-F-A-C).
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Enchanted Evenings
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Example 15.1. Dies irae and Sweeney Todd

(a) Dies irae original chant (beginning)
(b) First reference of the Dies irae in Sweeney Todd Prelude (first seven
chant notes)
(c) Dies irae paraphrased in the opening of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”
(notes 2 through 7 of the chant)
(d) “Sequence of the Dies Irae—up a third” described by Sondheim in
“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (first five chant notes)
(e) Dies irae paraphrased in “No Place Like London (first four chant notes
rearranged as notes 4, 2, 1, and 3 with notes 5-7 in original order and all
seven notes harmonized with the “Sweeney Todd” chord)
(f) Fleeting allusion to Dies irae in “The Worst Pies in London” (first five
chant notes)
(g) Dies irae in “My Friends” (first four chant notes first inverted and then
in their original order)
(h) Dies irae in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (quotation and
transformation, first seven chant notes)
(i) Possible allusion to Dies irae in the “The Miller’s Son” from A Little
Night Music (first five chant notes with an added note between notes 4
and 5)
356
(e)
(f)
(g)
(h)
(i)
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Enchanted Evenings
The Dies irae does not appear directly in the music of the Beggar Woman
(Sweeney’s wife Lucy) but nevertheless provides its foundation. In particu-
lar, the half step descent on the first two notes of the chant appears promi-
nently in her recurring lament (“Alms . . . alms . . . for a mis’rable woman”).
In “Epiphany” the descending half step will launch a scalar series of four
notes starting with the musical phrase that begins “never see Johanna” and
repeated obsessively with new words for the rest of the song. It is possible
Sondheim realized that the descending four-note scalar figure, a ubiqui-
tous motive that goes back at least as far as John Dowland’s song “Flow
My Tears” in the early seventeenth century, has become a traditional musi-
cal sign of lament and mourning. In any case, this is how Sondheim used
this simple but powerful figure in “Epiphany” and later when Sweeney
mourns his Lucy’s death in the Final Scene. Although the musical connec-
tion between the Dies irae with Mrs. Lovett is present (in the midst of “The
Worst Pies in London” for the first notes of the chant), the chant reference
occurs so fleetingly it is barely audible and may be more imagined than real
(15.1f).
Example 15.1g shows how the first four notes of “My Friends” inverts
the opening notes of Dies irae as Sondheim noted when describing his use of
the chant (in the second phrase of the song, the first four notes of the chant
appear in their original order). The remaining excerpts demonstrate how
Berlioz famously reused the Dies irae in his Symphonie fantastique (15.1h) and
how Sondheim might have previously incorporated the chant in the music
he gave Petra to sing in the defiant recurring faster section of Night Music’s
“The Miller’s Son” (15.1i). If the allusion is intentional in the earlier musical,
the point might be considered ironic in that this young sensual character
seems so non-judgmental and full of life. On the other hand, the irony is
tempered by the fact that Petra points out in her song that life is brief and
moments of joy are fleeting.
Reprise Redux
The reprise or return of a song, usually the return of a song from the first act
in the second, is a tested, ubiquitous, and perhaps even invariable feature of
the Broadway musical. In a previous chapter we have observed the replace-
ment of “Buddie Beware” in favor of a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You” in
Anything Goes in deference to Ethel Merman’s wishes. In another chapter we
noted that Kiss Me, Kate, a show written by Cole Porter during the heyday of
Rodgers and Hammerstein, implausibly reprised a song “So in Love” by a
character who had no discernible opportunity to have heard it. We have also
seen that the change of a word “how I loved you” instead of “if I loved you”
358
was momentous when it was reprised in Carousel. The next chapter will look
at the frequent, systemic reprises of Lloyd Webber.
In his essay, “The Musical Theater,” Sondheim voices his skepticism
about the effectiveness of reprises.52 For Sondheim, the fact that most char-
acters change throughout the play necessitates at least a change in the lyric
of a reprised song. Throughout his career Sondheim has found welcome
opportunities to reprise the melody of a song, but never a situation where it
was possible to reprise its lyric. This is why he objected to Rodgers’s desire
to reprise “Take the Moment” in Do I Hear a Waltz? simply because the com-
poser wanted the audience to hear the tune again (as was Merman’s ratio-
nale for reprising “I Get a Kick Out of You” thirty years earlier).53
In a double interview with Prince and Sondheim, “Author and Director,”
the “author” commends the “director” who initiated the idea to reprise all
the songs at the end of Night Music.54 Although in the end they were able to
reprise only five songs (“Soon,” “You Must Meet My Wife,” “A Weekend in
the Country,” “Every Day a Little Death,” and “Send in the Clowns,” plus
significant underscoring of “Liaisons”), Sondheim found this device movie-
like and “very effective.” With Sweeney Todd, Sondheim credits Wheeler with
the suggestion that he could base the final twenty minutes of the show on
“little modules” of reprised melody. Although Sondheim may not have com-
pleted some of the unmusical portions of these twenty minutes to his full
satisfaction, the conclusion of Sweeney Todd demonstrates an impressive use
of earlier songs, mostly from the first act, whether as fragments or relatively
extended segments, underscoring, or in combination with other modules.
The Final Sequence (Vocal Score No. 25-No. 29B), framed by “The Ballad
of Sweeney Todd,” includes one brief interjection of the Ballad’s refrain after
Sweeney’s failed attempt to kill Johanna at the end of No. 28. According to
the stage direction, following a chorus of the Ballad (No. 25), the Company
“transform themselves into the inmates of Fogg’s Asylum, which is now
revealed.” In the early portion of the sequence these lunatics on the loose use
and repeat the frantic new “City on Fire!” music no less than four times.55 In
addition to the “Ballad,” Sondheim inserts significant returns of no less than
eleven songs listed below (see “Thematic Reminiscences in Sweeney Todd”
in the online website for a more detailed outline of thematic returns during
this exciting finale).56
ACT I: “No Place like London” (including Beggar Woman’s music),

“Poor Thing,” “My Friends,” “Ah, Miss,” “Johanna” (Judge’s ver-
sion), “Kiss Me,” “Pretty Women,” “Epiphany,” “A Little Priest”
ACT II: “By the Sea,” “Not While I’m Around”
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Enchanted Evenings
Each one of these reprises contains significant dramatic meaning and

contributes to the propulsion of the final scene toward its tragic conclusion
while at the same time sonically summing up what has come before. For
those who have not already perceived the musical connections between the
Beggar Woman’s music (“Alms”) and “Epiphany,” in the final moments her
identity as Sweeney’s beloved Lucy is unmistakably revealed. The main
musical connection is the pronounced half step shared by both musical
lines, both of which are ultimately connected with the Dies irae. The con-
nection is especially pronounced in the orchestral passage that follows the
death of the Beggar Woman with the return of the opening of “Epiphany”
and the return of the half steps on the word “Lucy” (Vocal Score, p. 352)
when Todd realizes the enormity of his action. As Todd acquires this tragic
understanding, the audience can see his potential as a tragic figure, if not
necessarily a sympathetic one. The collision of themes Sondheim referred to
in his initial plan then returns in full force as Mrs. Lovett sings “Poor Thing”
against Todd’s latest (and last) “Epiphany.” Most strikingly, just before the
reprise of “A Little Priest”—and her own death at the hands of Sweeney—
Mrs. Lovett herself starts singing a fragment of “Epiphany” in counterpoint
to the demon barber of Fleet Street.
The Film
Sondheim, discussing Sweeney Todd with Mark Horowitz in 1997, spoke of
possible plans for a film of this show directed by Tim Burton, who “fell in
love with the show when he was in London in 1981 and saw it ten times.”57
Not only did the composer agree when Horowitz summarized Sondheim’s
often stated position that “film musicals usually don’t work,” he commented
specifically with the pessimistic prediction that a film of Sweeney wouldn’t
“work for two seconds.”58
Despite his lifelong love for film, Sondheim admires very few film musi-
cals; of those which he does like, none are adaptations.59 Unfortunately,
among the adaptations he found unsatisfying were the four films based on
his own shows, West Side Story, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
the Forum, and A Little Night Music. In Sondheim’s view, the action in a film
must “move forward constantly,” and this does not happen in these adapta-
tions. For Sondheim, the theatrical convention of stationary singers, such as
Tony and Maria singing “Tonight,” does not translate well into film. He also
expressed some skepticism about whether a Sweeney Todd film would hap-
pen before the year 2099 since Burton needed time to finish Superman Twelve.
Although it took another ten years (twenty-six you start from Burton’s ini-
tial binge on the London stage version), the musical film of Sweeney Todd
360
Sweeney Todd, 2007 film. Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) and Sweeney
Todd (Johnny Depp) at the bloody conclusion of the film.
finally appeared shortly before Christmas 2007. It was directed by Burton

and starred Johnny Depp.60
Like most of the musical films discussed in acts I and II beginning with
the Show Boat adaptation of 1936, Sweeney Todd, and like most of the films
with the exception of My Fair Lady and to a lesser extent West Side Story,
the musical film Sweeney Todd does not attempt to present a faithful and
complete version of its stage sources. In addition, for the most part, stage
musicals exceed “the two hours’ traffic” announced by Chorus at the outset
of Romeo and Juliet. Sweeney’s stage traffic is about three hours. Film musi-
cals, whether original or adaptations from the musical stage, generally take
Shakespeare’s estimated performance time more seriously. Burton’s film
realization of Sweeney Todd contains even less than two hours of traffic con-
gestion, 116 minutes to be exact.
In order to perform Sweeney Todd so succinctly, some material had to be cut,
including some of the 80 percent that was taken up by music. Sondheim thus
went into the Sweeney Todd project knowing that some songs would have to
go, especially those songs that did not keep the action moving. For example,
the Beadle’s “Parlor Songs” served the dual purpose of creating a diversion
to keep this character from inspecting Todd’s basement and giving a tenor
something substantial to sing in the course of an evening, but it slowed the
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Enchanted Evenings
action and could be slashed with impunity in order to “shave” close to four
minutes. Since the lyrical middle section of “Ladies in Their Sensitivities” was
also removed, the Beadle’s vocal contribution to the film is greatly reduced.
We have earlier remarked that Sondheim for a long time regretted not adding
music for this scene with Mrs. Lovett in the scene with the Beadle.
Another cut was Anthony’s “Ah, Miss,” which appeared on stage between
Johanna’s solo song “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” and Anthony’s “Johanna,”
the show’s great love ballad. To create greater plausibility as well as a few
minutes of film time, the Beggar Woman and her “Alms” music no longer
welcome Sweeney and Anthony when they get off the boat in the first scene.
Instead she sings her “Alms” when she stumbles upon Anthony in front of
Johanna’s house (a more logical place for her mother to hover, although we
do not yet know her identity). In some newly inserted dialogue after the
“Alms” music Anthony gives her some money and the Beggar Woman in
return informs the young man, who has seen Johanna in the upstairs window
and is clearly smitten, that Judge Turpin is the owner of the house and that
the young woman Johanna is his ward. She then warns Anthony of dire con-
sequences should he pursue the beautiful ward in the window.61
Before Rodgers and Hammerstein acquired control of their own film
adaptations, stage properties were at the mercy of producers and directors
who simply did not believe in the material and were given carte blanche
not only to cut mercilessly but to add songs by studio composers. Sond-
heim’s contract allowed him the authority to approve or reject the proposed
changes. Since he agreed with the premise that cuts would be needed when-
ever the music held up the action and that the film should be primarily cin-
ematic rather than theatrical, Sondheim himself assumed the major role in
the decisions of what to include, delete, or rework.
One of the deleted songs in the film, the Judge’s version of “Johanna”—a
completely different song from Anthony’s “Johanna”—was also deleted in
the stage version of the show and relegated to the Appendix of the published
vocal score (although it appears on the cast recording and in the revised
vocal score in its originally intended position). Prince either found the song
offensive or thought others would object to the depiction of masochism
and self-flagellation in the song and urged Sondheim to take it out. A few
years later, however, Sondheim persuaded Prince to reinstate the Judge’s
“Johanna” in the New York City Opera production (1984) and has contin-
ued to advocate its inclusion in future productions.62 In the film, the Judge’s
perverted nature could be observed more directly in the privacy of his room
where screen audiences watch as he fondles his leather-bound volumes of
pornography and spies on Johanna through a peephole in the wall. Within a
few seconds the film captures what it takes the Judge nearly four minutes to
362
sing, and although the Judge now has nothing of his own to sing, this is less
of an expectation for a major character in a movie than on a stage.
Much of the material involving the chorus also vanished from the screen
version, although some of this music, so important to the stage effect, found
its way into orchestral underscoring. The most audible example of this non-
vocal use occurs over the extensive Opening Title sequence in which “The
Ballad of Sweeney Todd” can be heard without either words or voices (there
are, however, some chorus-like synthesized vocals during an orchestral cli-
max). The orchestral vamp from the “Ballad” recurs throughout the film
and contributes greatly to the melodramatic atmosphere. Other ensembles,
including “The Letter” quintet, the “City on Fire!” chorus of Fogg Asylum
lunatics, and a good slice of the “God, That’s Good!” pie, join the discarded
“Parlor Songs” among the major deletions of act II.
In his interview with Jesse Green in the New York Times, Sondheim esti-
mated that about 20 percent of the remaining songs were trimmed and
“in all fewer than 10 of the stage show’s 25 major numbers survived sub-
stantially intact.”63 Add up all the time saved and the result is a leaner and
meaner Sweeney approximately one-third shorter than its staged predeces-
sor. When interviewed for a special feature of the DVD, Sondheim extends
the 80 percent–20 percent ratio he offered for the first act twenty years earlier
in “Author and Director” to encompass the entire show: “There are very
few moments of silence from the orchestra pit in the show. I’d say the show
is probably about 80% sung, 20% talk, but even the talk, about half of that,
is underscored, and it’s the way to keep the audience in a state of tension,
because if they ever get out of the fantasy, they’re looking at, you know, a
ridiculous story with a lot of stage blood.”64
Burton’s Sweeney Todd gathered a lot of critical attention and audience
appeal for casting the popular Depp, an enormously talented and versatile
actor who had worked with the director on six previous films (e.g., Edward
Scissorhands and Ed Wood) but had never sung anything other than backup
vocals in a rock band. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of film technology,
it was not necessary for Depp—or Helena Bonham Carter, who had never
sung at all, in the arguably more demanding role of Mrs. Lovett—to be able
to project in a theater or even to have to sing all the notes of a song consecu-
tively with the correct rhythms and pitches.
The recording process went through several stages. First, music supervisor
Mike Higham created a backing track without voices. Then, after rehearsing
with Sondheim, the cast recorded their solos and duets (the only exception
was Laura Michelle Kelly in the role of the Beggar Woman and Lucy who
sang live on the film set). Each member of the cast was recorded on a sepa-
rate track. The solitary sounds could then be refined, retuned, and mediated
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Enchanted Evenings
sufficiently that a sung whisper could be heard over a mighty orchestra.

Finally, this orchestra of sixty-four musicians, more than double the number
that squeezed into the Uris Theater in 1979, recorded the voiceless backing
track audiences hear in the film.
In borrowing a major production technique from MTV and rock videos,
Burton’s Sweeney departed from two generations of traditional film practice,
in which the actors in the film or the singers who dub the actors in the film
lip-synch to a finished visual product. Burton’s Sweeney reversed the process
(with the professional singer Kelly again the sole exception). The recordings
came first. After the recordings, the actors, none of them dubbed, lip-synched
to the pre-recorded sounds, which included the sixty-four piece orchestra and
any duet partnerships in a given song. Lip-synching to prerecorded sound, the
norm in MTV and rock videos, was rare, if not unprecedented in the production
of a film musical. The process seemed to help produce a natural and intimate
look to the singing without any operatic signs of strain in the final product.
At every turn Burton applies cinematic techniques, some of which would
be difficult to capture in the theater. They appear most often in the narrative
songs, “Poor Thing,” where Mrs. Lovett’s tale of the Barber and his Wife is
shown in vivid flashback; “A Little Priest,” in which the camera zooms in
from Mrs. Lovett’s window on people who represent the various occupations
of potential victims described in the song; and “By the Sea,” in which Mrs.
Lovett and Sweeney are placed in the locations and situations described in the
song. These songs are also set off by adding splashes of color to the grayish tint
that pervades the film (other color splashes would appear from time to time
such as Pirelli’s garish blue outfit and Sweeney’s specially constructed red
barber’s chair). This kind of filmic enhancement of text and story has become
more common in recent years, for example, the visual realization of thoughts
in Rob Marshall’s award-winning Chicago in 2002). A rare early example of the
practice can be seen in the visual images that capture the bridge of “Ol’ Man
River” in the 1936 Show Boat (starting with images of stevedores sweating and
straining and Joe, played by Paul Robeson ending up in jail looking up at a
distorted camera angle). It seems surprising how seldom directors have taken
advantage of this cinematic opportunity to tell a story.65 Perhaps the success of
Burton’s Sweeney will influence future directors.
In a DVD special feature and in other public interviews, Sondheim makes
the case that Burton’s Sweeney Todd is not only different from the stage
Sweeney but is different from other film adaptations. He offers this advice to
audiences who may be disappointed in this difference: “I’m going to urge
them as much as possible to leave their memory of the stage show outside the
door, because, as I say, unlike all other movies of musicals that I know, this
really is an attempt to take the material of the stage musical and completely
364
transform it into a movie. This is not a movie of a stage show, this is a movie
based on a stage show.”66 In a public conversation with former New York
Times theater critic and current political affairs editorialist Frank Rich that
took place in Portland, Oregon, on March 11, 2008, a few months after Bur-
ton’s Sweeney Todd opened nationally and one month before its release on
DVD, Sondheim went as far as to say that Burton’s transformation was the
“most satisfying version of a stage piece I’ve ever seen.”
The Lapine Years (1984–1994): Sunday

in the Park with George
After Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim joined forces with
a new, younger creative partner, James Lapine (b. 1949). During the next
ten years, Lapine became arguably as important and innovative a collabora-
tor as Prince and his generational peers were in the previous decade and
exerted an influence in Sondheim’s post-Prince development comparable to
that of earlier collaborators such as Bernstein, Robbins, Styne, and Laurents
before the Prince years.
Sondheim’s first show with Lapine was about the art of making art. The
first act of Sunday in the Park with George focuses on the painter Georges Seurat,
and the creation of the painting lent its title to Sondheim’s musical. The first
act also creates the imagined lives of his imagined mistress Dot among others
who have become immobilized and immortalized in this famous painting in
its permanent residence at the Art Institute of Chicago. In contrast to Franklin
Shepard, the fictional composer in Merrily We Roll Along, Seurat was not only
an actual historical figure but one of the least compromising artists in any field
of art. In this landmark Pulitzer Prize–winning show, Sondheim and Lapine,
who wrote the book and directed, explore the relationship between artistic
and procreative legacies as embodied in the contrast between the ephemeral
cream pies of Louis the baker versus the timelessness of an artistic master-
piece, and the contrasting legacies of children and art.67 In his dedication to art
Seurat has foresworn his relationship with Dot, although through her he will
leave a human legacy in their daughter Marie and, two generations later, in
another artist named George (without the “s”), Marie’s grandson, whom we
will meet one hundred years later in act II.
In the song “No Life,” Sondheim creates more characters who voice criti-
cisms that Sondheim himself has been subjected to throughout much of his
career. When viewing a tableau vivant of Seurat’s recently completed Bathing
at Asnières, his rival, Jules, and Jules’s wife, Yvonne, decry the passionless,
lifeless, unlyrical, and inappropriate subject matter of Seurat’s paintings.
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Enchanted Evenings
Yvonne ridicules Seurat for painting “boys with their clothes off,” and Jules
responds mockingly that he “must paint a factory next.” Similarly, Sond-
heim has frequently been indicted for writing about cold, neurotic, and fre-
quently unlikable people and for confronting unpalatable subjects ranging
from marital infidelity (e.g., Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sunday in
the Park, Into the Woods), the loss of youthful dreams (Follies, Merrily We Roll
Along, Woods), murder (Pacific Overtures, Woods, Assassins), and even serial
murder (Sweeney Todd).
The contrast between accessible and difficult art is powerfully delineated
in Dot’s song, “Everybody Loves Louis.” Louis the baker, a man who nei-
ther fathers a child nor sings a song in the show, is willing to take Dot and
her child by Seurat to America, where the baker can cater to the whims of a
wealthy and boorish Texas businessman. In vivid contrast to the unlovable,
unpopular, and overly intellectual painter, Louis is lovable, popular, and
“bakes from the heart.” “Louis’ thoughts are not hard to follow,” his “art
is not hard to swallow,” and, unlike George, the baker is “not afraid to be
gooey.” Also in contrast to George, Louis “sells what he makes.” In return,
Louis, like his pastries, will perish without producing either art or (in a plot
twist) children of his own. Louis also has the potential to become a better
father than George, as well as a better provider and companion.
Putting It Together
In the final scene of act I, the uncompromising Seurat completes his great
painting Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte after two years and many
months of Sundays, an act marked musically by the completion of the open-
ing horn melody that represents Seurat’s blank canvas (Example 15.2a) and
its transformation into the song, “Sunday” (Example 15.2b).
Act II centers on a contemporary artist, still confronting old dilemmas
of popular versus personal, more “sincere” art (remember Hammerstein’s
emphasis on this quality in a song’s genesis). But this new George is a lot
more like Louis in some respects. In stark contrast to the painter’s excep-
tional meticulousness, his great-grandson is rapidly turning out a series
of similar and risk-free high-tech sculptures known as Chromolumes. The
new George also shares with his forefather an inability to connect the dots
of human relationships (a central task for both artists), but unlike Seurat, the
modern George has managed to successfully negotiate the politics of art and
has gained all the trappings of success, including the profit and fame denied
the greater artist. Nevertheless, he is deeply dissatisfied with his own work.
Like the characters in Lady in the Dark who appear metaphorically in Liza
Elliott’s dreams, many characters in Seurat’s life and painting reappear in
366
(a)
(b)
Example 15.2. Sunday in the Park with George

(a) Opening horn melody
(b) Opening of “Sunday” based on the opening horn melody
the life of the present-day George. Seurat’s mistress, Dot, lives on as her
daughter, the aged Marie. Seurat’s unsympathetic rival, Jules, metamor-
phoses into Bob Greenberg, the director of the museum that now houses
Chromolume #7. Perhaps most tellingly, the Old Lady who turns out to be
Seurat’s hypercritical but supportive mother in act I returns in act II as the
perceptive art critic Blair Daniels, who, like Seurat’s mother, is able to see
367
Enchanted Evenings
Sunday in the Park with George, 1986 film of the Broadway show. George, the
painter based on Georges Seurat (Mandy Patinkin) (left), finishing his painting,
“A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” at the end of act I.
that the emperor has no clothes, but also like her act I counterpart believes
in George’s talent and promise.
The connections between act I and act II are also musical ones, in which
key musical material develops character and plot through dramatically
meaningful thematic melodic reprises and transformations. One of the most
audible examples is the music Seurat uses in the act of painting his master-
piece (“Color and Light”) in act I, which returns in an electrified version that
marks the Chromolume music in act II. When the ghost of Dot returns at
the end of act II to resolve her personal issues with George and to help the
modern George “Move On” artistically, her music shares several prominent
motives heard in “We Do Not Belong Together” that Dot sang in act I when
she left the great artist in order to start a new life in America with Louis. To
cite but one prominent example, “Stop worrying where you’re going” is set to
the same music as the title and opening phrase, “We do not belong together.”
The gossips in the museum in act II sing the same “I’m not surprised” motive
in discussing the Chromolumes (“Putting It Together,” Part II) as Seurat’s
contemporaries in act I (“Gossip Sequence”). The textual and musical
phrase that George uses to express his discomfort at the heat in his studio in
“Color and Light” becomes the foundation for the song the characters, now
368
Sunday in the Park with George, 1986 film of the Broadway show. The picture
frame descends to enclose the finished painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on
the Island of La Grande Jatte,” at the end of act I.
imprisoned and frozen forever at the Art Institute of Chicago, sing to open
act II, “It’s Hot Up Here.” The obsessively repeated musical motive of “Put-
ting It Together” (Example 15.3a) can be traced to the music associated with
the phrase “Finishing the Hat” in the song of that name (Example 15.3b), and
at the end of act I with its one note extension—from four shorts and a long to
four shorts and two longs—as Seurat completes his canvas before the charac-
ters in the painting start to sing “Sunday” (Example 15.3c).68 These examples
are only the most prominent of a much longer list.69
Just as Seurat’s mother evolves from a critical pose to an attitude of under-
standing and appreciation in act I, the childless Blair Daniels in act II—the
act II George is both childless and divorced—rightly points out the mean-
inglessness and superficiality of recycling past successes and encourages the
formerly vital artist to move on to something new. By the end of the evening,
young George returns to La Grande Jatte and meets Dot, a deus ex machina
figure introduced to help George change and grow as an artist and “move
on.” Like the sadder-but-wiser characters in Into the Woods, George learns
that he too is not alone, but rather part of a great tradition that includes the
artistry of his great-grandfather and the wisdom of his maternal ancestors.
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Enchanted Evenings
(a)
(b)
(c)
Example 15.3. “Putting It Together” motive from Sunday in the Park with George
(a) “Putting It Together” motive in “Putting It Together”
(b) “Putting It Together” motive anticipated in “Finishing the Hat”
(c) “Putting It Together” motive anticipated in “Sunday”
Most important, he learns that his duty as an artist is to grow and develop
his art and his humanity. The modern George has thus escaped the fate of
Franklin Shepard Inc., the composer anti-hero of Merrily We Roll Along.
It is crucial to emphasize that despite the seemingly endless critical state-
ments about its redundancy, a second act is necessary for George to learn
this great lesson. At the end of the first act the painter has completed his
great painting and connected fully with his art. Indeed, the completion of
the painting (see pages 366 and 367) is a breathtaking conclusion to act I, one
of the most stunning visual wonders in Broadway history. But Seurat has
not yet connected with his life and the people in it. We know that although
Sondheim and Lapine struggled with the second act, the issue was how to
follow up act I, not whether this needed to be done.
Increasingly for audiences and critics—although Frank Rich boldly and
repeatedly championed the work in the New York Times when it was new—
the story of Sunday in the Park with George is not simply the completion of
370
the painting. It is the completion of the artist as a human being. Sondheim

clearly states his personal interpretation of the work in his interview with
Savran: “He takes the trip. It’s all about how he connects with the past and
with the continuum of humanity. The spirit of Dot in the painting is exactly
what makes him do it. But he’s the one who comes to a recognition at the
end. If you don’t connect with the past, you can’t go on. People who say the
second act’s not necessary misunderstand the play. The second act is what
it’s about. The first act’s the set-up.”70
A Few Words on Into the Woods

For their next show, Sondheim and Lapine continued to explore the topics of
personal growth and maturation in another musical with two quite different,
but complementary, acts. They decided to explore the deeper psychological
properties of such popular fairy tales as Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel,
and Cinderella, among others, combined with several new fairy tales of their
own, most notably a story about the Baker and his Wife. In the first act, the
characters, each with a wish, intersect in complicated ways and everyone
gets what they wish for. In act II, the characters—in this case the same char-
acters in each act—face the often unethical and unsavory paths they have
taken to fulfill their wishes and the negative consequences of attaining them,
problems that their original fairy tale counterparts did not have to confront.
The intricate and interactive dramatic connections among the characters
from many tales demonstrate the aptness of John Dunne’s Meditation XVII:
“No man is an island, entire of itself.” Eventually, after deflecting responsibil-
ity for their predicament to each other in the song “Your Fault,” they realize
that if they work together they can resolve their collective crisis and grow,
both individually and as a group. Sondheim acknowledges his connection to
Dunne’s message in an interview with Michiko Kakutani:
I think the final step in maturity is feeling responsible for every-

body. If I could have written “no man is an island,” I would have.
But that’s what “No One Is Alone” is about. What I like about the
title is it says two things. It says: no one is lonely, you’re not alone—
I’m on your side and I love you. And the other thing is: no one is
alone—you have to be careful what you do to other people. You
can’t just go stealing gold and selling cows for more than they are
worth, because it affects everybody else.71
Not surprisingly, Sondheim came up with a musical idea that not only meta-
phorically but literally realizes the dramatic implications of the idea that
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Enchanted Evenings
(a)
(b)
Example 15.4. The Bean Theme from Into the Woods

(a) The Bean Theme
“Baker drops five beans in Jack’s hand” followed by the Bean theme as
an accompaniment figure to “I Guess This Is Goodbye”
(b) Rapunzel’s theme (based on the Bean theme)
we are connected and not alone. Put simply, he links the themes with an Ur
theme ultimately common to all, the theme which the characters identify
early in the story as the Bean Theme.
Although we hear the Bean Theme for the first time when the Witch men-
tions her garden (where the beans grow), a clearer example to open our dis-
cussion is the significant moment a little later when the Baker gives Jack
five beans (“keeping the sixth for his own pocket”) in exchange for his cow
(Example 15.4a). The isolated xylophone that clearly sounds out one note for
each of the five beans makes the connection between the Bean Theme and
the beans themselves memorable and unmistakable. In the next measure the
Bean Theme is then used as the main melodic material for a lyrical vamp
that accompanies Jack’s poignant farewell to his cow, “I Guess This Is Good-
bye.” One of the central manifestations of the Bean Theme is embodied in
Rapunzel, who as the Witch’s daughter—but audiences won’t find this out
for some time—is naturally a direct outgrowth of the beans. Throughout the
372
story we will hear her singing a lyrical extended and unchanging version of
the Bean Theme offstage and without words (Example 15.4b).
Space does not permit a full-scale description of how the Bean Theme
evolves from here. A few highlights from the first act must suffice. In
“Maybe They’re Magic,” the orchestra underscores the music sung by the
Baker and his Wife with the Bean Theme and follows the clever punch line
(“If the end is right, it justifies the beans”) with an isolated statement of
the five-note theme. A few songs later in “First Midnight,” Rapunzel starts
with the same five notes when she sings her elongated transformation of the
Bean Theme. In fact, for the entire first act this is the only music Rapunzel
sings; in the second act she does not sing at all, although we continue to hear
her music. Audiences may not realize that Rapunzel’s Theme and the Bean
Theme are the same, but they know that Rapunzel is repeating her music ad
nauseam. On the words “giants in the sky” Jack introduces the song of this
title with the Bean Theme before it submerges as underscoring. Fittingly,
when Rapunzel’s Prince sings his “Agony about the unreachable woman in
the tower with the long hair,” he quotes her theme. Also fittingly, Rapunzel’s
mother, the Witch, uses her daughter’s theme as the starting point for the
song “Stay with Me.”
Sondheim and the Broadway Tradition:

Two Follies
Although Kern died before all the revisions were made, the 1946 revival of
Show Boat—from then until the 1990s the only version regularly performed—
gave Kern and Hammerstein an opportunity to rethink the work together
in the light of a new present. Audiences accustomed to reworked versions
of the pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and to relatively fixed ver-
sions of musicals composed in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s may be surprised to
discover that the sometimes extensive changes made in revivals of Sond-
heim shows parallel the revival histories of several musicals treated in the
present survey, including Show Boat, Porgy and Bess, Anything Goes, and On
Your Toes.
The 1985 La Jolla Playhouse revival of Merrily, for example, dropped
“Rich and Happy,” the high school scene, and the idea of casting ado-
lescents. More radically, the 1987 London revival of Follies precipitated a
revised book with a new ending and both new and discarded songs.72 The
Follies section in the online website encapsulates the genesis of the show
from The Girls Upstairs in 1965 to the tryouts in 1971 and lists the songs of
the 1987 London Follies.
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Enchanted Evenings
The Follies revival in particular offers a striking modern example of a

process that has much in common with the pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein
musicals examined in the first part of this survey.73 After a long gestation
period that included the composition and production of Company, Sondheim
& Co. were ready to return to a drastically revamped James Goldman script,
The Girls Upstairs, originally drafted in 1965. According to Prince, the new
Follies, begun in earnest 1970 after the completion of Company, could salvage
only six of the songs from the earlier version.74 Prince biographer Carol Ilson
summarizes the radical metamorphosis from The Girls Upstairs to Follies:
The realistic and naturalistic The Girls Upstairs became the sur-
realistic Follies. Originally, Sondheim and Goldman wanted the
show to be a backstage murder mystery with an attempted murder
being planned. The idea was dropped. Prince, working with his
collaborators, decided to use only the two couples that had been
written to be the major characters, and to use the theatre locale. He
encouraged the authors to utilize the younger selves of the leading
characters. Four new cast members would represent the leading
characters as they had been thirty years earlier.75
All involved agree that it was Prince’s concept to mirror the younger
unmarried versions of the two unhappily married couples, Phyllis and
Benjamin Stone and Sally and Buddy Plummer (we have already met Sally
and examined her act I ballad, “In Buddy’s Eyes”). The collaborative minds
of co-directors Prince (stage director) and Michael Bennett (musical director)
led to many additional dramaturgical changes, including an unusually large
number of nine song replacements during rehearsals.
An opening montage that consisted of a medley of five songs, one of
which was dropped during rehearsals, was also abandoned, and two
additional songs were replaced during tryouts.76 The first of these songs,
“I’m Still Here,” was added because Yvonne De Carlo “couldn’t do” the
song originally intended for her, “Can That Boy Foxtrot!”77 Out of this neces-
sity Sondheim invented a song that more closely fit the evolving concept.
De Carlo’s character, Carlotta Campion, like De Carlo herself, was an actress
who stayed in show business for many years after her prime and endured
the ravages of time. A clever musical conceit of Sondheim’s in the song is to
have her sing an ascending major triad nearly every time she sings “I’m Still
Here” (E -G-B).78
The device of repeating a simple motive parallels torch songs such as
“In Buddy’s Eyes” and would occur in other obsessive situations in subse-
quent Sondheim shows, for example, when Seurat sings about “Finishing
374
the Hat.” Sally’s song expresses a defeatist attitude and a disconnection

with reality, exemplified metaphorically by her inability to find a root or
tonal center when she sings the oft-repeated “in Buddy’s eyes” in her first
song and her descending melodic phrase that matches “I think about you”
in her second song. In bold contrast, Carlotta’s mantra, a major triad invari-
ably ends each time in ascending and affirmative melodic triumph on its
fifth, like a bugle call. Sweeney Todd may be about obsession, but compared
with Sally and later George in Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney’s
musical obsessions are relatively tame.
Two songs were added to Follies late in the process. The first was
Phyllis’s folly number, “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” a song that
replaced “Uptown, Downtown”; the second was Ben’s folly song, “Live,
Love, Laugh.” Both were apparently composed and staged during a
frenetic final week of rehearsals. In their published remarks Sondheim
and Bennett disagree about why “Uptown, Downtown” was discarded.
Sondheim remembers that he wrote it after he had worked out Ben’s
breakdown number and gave it to Bennett one day before the Boston try-
outs. Sondheim also recalls that Bennett resented being rushed, “turned
against it,” and asked for a new number: “I don’t think there’s really any
difference between the numbers, but because he had more time to think
about it, I think he liked it better.”79 Bennett recalled the situation some-
what differently: “I quite honestly don’t understand why Steve had to
write ‘Lucy and Jessie’ for Alexis [Smith] to replace the other number.
I like ‘Uptown Downtown’ so much better. It also lost me a phrase to
hang her dance on. I was originally able to differentiate the character’s
two personalities by having half the phrase strutting up and the other
half strutting down.”80
In a view that lies between these contrasting recollections, Prince com-
mented tersely that “Uptown, Downtown” was “the right idea” but that
“The Story of Lucy and Jessie” was “a better number.”81 Jeffrey Lonoff’s
notes to A Collector’s Sondheim offer a thoughtful comparison that places
these disparate memories within a critical perspective: “In the show we see
two Phyllises—the young, open, vibrant girl and the cool, distant woman
she carefully molds herself into. Her song in the Loveland section was to
reflect her schizoid personality. But ‘Uptown, Downtown’ presented Phyl-
lis as a two-sided character whereas she was, as the show presented, really
two separate people. It was dropped, and ‘The Story of Lucy and Jessie’ was
written to better portray this.”
Although Sondheim credits the influence of Cole Porter on “The Story of
Lucy and Jessie,” a more likely model might be Kurt Weill and Ira Gersh-
win’s “The Saga of Jenny” from Lady in the Dark. Resemblances between
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Enchanted Evenings
the Sondheim and Weill songs go beyond their suggestively similar titles
and subject matter—a woman responding to the accusation that she cannot
make up her mind—and include such musical details as the nearly constant
dotted rhythms and frequent descending minor triads, a predilection for
flatted (blue) fifths, and a general jazz flavor.82
Earlier it was observed that the successful cast recording of Pal Joey led to
a Broadway revival that surpassed its initial run. The abbreviated and what
was generally perceived as an uncharacteristically poorly produced origi-
nal 1971 cast album of Follies (albeit with a great cast) generated the need
for a recording that was both more complete and more felicitously engi-
neered. Unfortunately, in contrast to the pre-production Pal Joey recording
that led to a full staged revival two years later, the new Follies album with
its all-star cast issued in 1985 was not followed with a staged Broadway
performance. Although a revised Follies made a successful appearance on
the London stage two years later, it was not until a 1998 revival at the Paper
Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, that a staged version would return
to the New York vicinity. A modestly staged production finally made it to
Broadway for a short run in 2001.
James Goldman’s original libretto for Follies was not only critically contro-
versial, it provoked strenuous debate between the two visionary co-directors,
Bennett and Prince. What mainly bothered Bennett was the absence of humor
and the general heaviness of tone—in short, its lack of commercial appeal.
When Prince vetoed the idea of bringing in Neil Simon, a master of the one-
liner, Bennett gave Goldman a joke book.83 Although he remained embittered
by Follies’s disappointing box office returns, Bennett felt that his judgment of
the book was vindicated by the show’s box office failure.84 Goldman agrees
that the show might have had a long run, but that “at the same time we
would have disemboweled it.”85 In retrospect, although Prince does not go as
far as to say that he likes the book, he valued the book more highly than Ben-
nett and clarifies that he did not “hate the book at all.”86 Sondheim thought
the large number of pastiche numbers “hurt the book and subsequently hurt
the show” and concluded that if they “had used fewer songs and had more
book the show would have been more successful.”87
For the 1985 concert performance, Herbert Ross, hired to stage the show,
asked Sondheim to change the ending: “I never liked the kind of hopeless-
ness of the show’s finale. . . . I think you never really believed that the death
of the theater was a sort of symbol for the death of these people’s lives.
My view of it was that this was a celebration, and the original ending was
too downbeat and not appropriate for this event.”88 Eventually Goldman
himself had second thoughts about the ending of his 1971 Follies: “The final
scene of the show has always bothered me, I must admit. There were all
376
kinds of thoughts as to how we should have gone out at the end. I was
pleased with the ending that Buddy and Sally had. I think it was honest and
on target and about all you could do. I’m not so sure that if I had it to write
over again that I would have had Ben and Phyllis together at the end.”89 Two
years later Goldman did have it to write again when Follies was staged in
London. This time, Goldman produced a new and even more upbeat book
than the one implied in the 1985 concert performance.90
The principal deletions from the 1971 Follies (see the online website) are
Ben Stone’s philosophical “The Road You Didn’t Take” and, perhaps sig-
nificantly, the two latest additions to the earlier version, Phyllis’s folly song,
“The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” and Ben’s concluding folly song, “Live,
Laugh, Love.”91 Sondheim also created a new “Loveland” to replace the 1971
song of the same name to open the quartet of follies (one each for Benjamin
and Phyllis Stone and Buddy and Sally Plummer) that brought the earlier
show to its depressing close. Perhaps not surprisingly, the superficially suc-
cessful Ben, who ultimately emerges as the most pathetic of the quartet in
1971, underwent the most surgery in 1987.
The first discarded song, Ben’s “The Road You Didn’t Take,” is replaced
two songs later with “Country House,” a duet between Ben and Phyllis.
This new song, although it conveys their poor communication and half-
hearted attempts to work out their problems, demonstrates a civil and
resigned incompatibility rather than their earlier bitterness and hostility.
Phyllis’s new song, “Ah, but Underneath,” like “Being Alive” in Company,
provides another illustration of a final attempt to capture a difficult dra-
matic situation. It also marks a return to Phyllis’s two-sided nature depicted
in “Uptown, Downtown,” discarded earlier from the 1971 Follies in favor of
“Lucy and Jessie.”
Ben’s new folly song, like his new duet with Phyllis, constitutes the most
radical change of tone between 1971 and 1987. Rather than breaking down as
he did in “Live, Laugh, Love,” with newly acquired equanimity Ben tells his
1987 audiences not “to disclose yourself” but to “compose yourself” as he
sings “Make the Most of Your Music.” Among the ironies of the song—and
perhaps also its subtext—with its instructions to “Make the most of the music
that is yours,” is Sondheim’s decision to begin Ben’s song with a quotation
from the opening of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto set to words in the vocal
line (in the orchestra alone the related opening of Tchaikovsky’s first Piano
Concerto directly follows).92 Ben initially considers himself “something big
league” along with “Tchaikovsky and Grieg.” Soon, however, he advises his
admirers that even if they are unable to produce a work like Debussy’s Clair
de Lune, they can “make the most of the music that is yours” and eventu-
ally produce music that “soars.” Whatever Sondheim is saying about the
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Enchanted Evenings
relative merits of Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Debussy, Sondheim himself might

be accused in this rare case of not practicing what his character preaches.
Although Sondheim’s new songs were expressly composed for this
revival rather than for other shows, the results are not dissimilar. In fact,
the 1987 London Follies, with its rewritten book and deleted, reordered, and
new songs, is clearly analogous to Porter’s Anything Goes in its 1962 and
1987 reincarnations, and perhaps even more closely akin to the changes in
Show Boat between 1927 and 1946. Just as the comic, even farcical, touches
added to Bernstein’s 1974 Candide (including Sondheim’s own new lyric for
“Life Is Happiness Indeed”) no doubt contributed to its newfound success,
perhaps at Voltaire’s expense, the more upbeat 1987 Follies might eventually
have found the audience it lost in 1971. But it did not. Despite its relative
grimness, the original 1971 Follies soon replaced the 1987 book.93
In his conversations with Mark Horowitz, Sondheim explains that he
went along with Goldman’s and Cameron Mackintosh’s ideas about chang-
ing Follies for London, but like Goldman and eventually even Mackintosh,
he voiced his strong preference for the earlier version: “It might have turned
out better. It didn’t. And when it didn’t, I said: I don’t want this show ever
shown in America, and I made it legally certain that the London version
can never be shown here. I don’t want it shown again in England either,
but Cameron has the right to do it. But Cameron’s given in now too, and
there was just a production in Leicester last year, and it’s the original.”94 As
George says in Sunday in the Park with George’s “Putting It Together,” “If no
one gets to see it, it’s as good as dead.” This is a good description of the 1987
London Follies.
The Art of Compromise

By the end of Sondheim’s Company, Robert, the bachelor protagonist, has
learned that compromise is an essential feature of marriage. The ambigu-
ity that three of Robert’s married male friends feel toward their wives and
their marriages, expressed relatively early in the evening in “Sorry-Grate-
ful,” culminates in Robert’s final readiness to share their fate, “Being Alive.”
It is widely known that “Being Alive” was Sondheim’s fourth attempt at
a final song for Robert.95 “Marry Me a Little,” which expressed Robert’s
unwillingness to compromise, has found a secure place, albeit a new place,
in the revised book of Company. The extraordinarily biting “Happily Ever
After” described a marriage that ends “happily ever after in hell.” The mar-
riage envisioned in “Being Alive” is far from perfect, but advocates of mar-
riage can take heart that Robert has come to realize that “alone is alone,
378
not alive.” In his autobiography, Contradictions, Prince voiced his continued

dissatisfaction with this final song, which he felt “imposed a happy ending
on a play which should have remained ambiguous.” Otherwise, Prince con-
cludes his chapter on Company by saying that this show “represents the first
time I had worked without conscious compromise.” The producer in Prince
was doubly pleased with its profit, however small, since “that is what com-
mercial theatre must ask of itself.”96
Follies, which explores the compromise of ideals in the lives of two unful-
filled married couples, lost most of its backers’ money because of its cre-
ators’ refusal to compromise and offer a lighter touch. The characters in
Sondheim’s (and Prince’s) next musical, A Little Night Music, may need to
discover their true feelings and are subjected to humiliation in the process,
but at least they do not have to compromise them. The compromises were
artistic ones and occurred offstage, at least according to Prince, who wrote
in his memoirs sardonically that “mostly Night Music was about having
a hit.”97
In Pacific Overtures (1976), generally perceived as a less compromising
musical than Night Music, the formerly obedient feudal vassal Kayama for-
sakes ancient traditions in order to profit financially from his new West-
ern trading partners. In act II, Kayama sports “A Bowler Hat” and a pocket
watch, pours milk in his tea, and smokes American cigars. The eponymous
anti-hero in Sweeney Todd (1979) and the infamous historical murderers and
would-be murderers in Assassins (1991) relinquish their moral decency for
the sake of revenge, notoriety, or other misguided ideals. Into the Woods (1987)
concludes with abandoned, deceived, and disillusioned fairy-tale characters
who have compromised their innocence but now understand that “No One
Is Alone.” Some, such as Martin Gottfried, find the moralizing tone of Into
the Woods platitudinous, yet a critic as rigorous as Stephen Banfield assesses
this show as “Sondheim’s finest achievement yet.”98
In his first two shows of the 1980s, Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday in the
Park with George, Sondheim directly confronted the issue of artistic compro-
mise in his own work, an issue previously faced more obliquely by several
of Broadway’s spiritual fathers surveyed in earlier chapters. On Your Toes
addresses the dichotomy between art music and popular music and The Cra-
dle Will Rock offers a devastating attack on compromising artists, but Merrily
and Sunday may be unprecedented in the degree to which they explore the
creative process and commercial pressures on artists. Merrily tells the dis-
concerting story of a Broadway composer, Franklin Shepard, who has sold
out his ideals and his artistic soul, the road pointedly not taken by Sond-
heim. Sunday presents two portraits of artists. In act I we meet a fictional-
ized but nevertheless once-real artist in 1884, the uncompromising painter
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Enchanted Evenings
Georges Seurat, who refused to sell out. In fact, Seurat reportedly never sold
a painting in his lifetime. One hundred years later in act II, we meet his
great-grandson, also an artist named George, a man who evolves from a
compromising sculptor grubbing for grants and commissions to a genuine
artist more like Seurat by the end of the evening.
Since Merrily is told in reverse, the disintegration of this Broadway Faust
is all the more disturbing. When we first meet Franklin Shepard in 1980 as
the graduation speaker of his former high school (a scene dropped from the
1985 revival), the once idealistic but now artistically sterile Broadway com-
poser tells “young innocents a few realities” and introduces them to the two
words that symbolize his abandoned ideals, “practical” and “compromise.”
The older Frank says “compromise is how you survive”; the younger Frank
answers that compromise is “how you give up.”
Twenty years earlier, but much later in the show, Franklin, his high school
classmate and present collaborator Charley Kringas, and their mutual
friend Mary Flynn, an aspiring novelist, sing “Opening Doors.” Sondheim
has acknowledged the autobiographical aspect to this song: “If there is one
number that is really me writing about me, it is ‘Opening Doors.’ That was
my life for a number of years. It is a totally personal number. Luckily it fits
into the piece.”99 In this song Frank and Charley are creating their first show,
auditioning the material, facing rejection and disappointment, and strug-
gling to reject compromising alternatives. Charley is typing and Frank is
composing “Good Thing Going,” heard in its completed state earlier in the
show when Frank and Charley sing it at a party in 1962. This is the party
where Frank tells Mary, now a critic who has forsaken her dream to write
a great American novel, that he has not composed the music for his own
recent film. In fact, Frank has long since abandoned his creative partnership
with Charley, who did not sell out, yet has become a distinguished play-
wright. Frank may be “Rich and Happy” in 1970, but he is also morally and
artistically bankrupt and sad. By the end of Shepard’s career, which real-life
audiences witnessed with disappointment near the beginning of the show,
the selling of an artistic soul is complete.
In the creation of “Opening Doors,” Frank experiences considerable dif-
ficulty going beyond the opening phrase, which, not incidentally, is the
phrase that most clearly resembles the idealistic anthem that he and Charley
composed for their high school graduation (both at the opening and toward
the close of the musical in its original production).100 When Mary calls to tell
Frank that she is about to abandon her principles and her novel by taking
commercial writing jobs, she sings this same opening phrase. Later in the
song Charley and Frank audition the first several phrases of their future hit
song for a wary producer, Joe Josephson.
380
Even without Sondheim’s admission, reaffirmed at the March 2008 public

interview in Portland with Frank Rich, it would be difficult to overlook the
autobiographical component of Josephson’s criticism, so closely does it cor-
respond to the critical reactions which the modernist Sondheim, a close con-
temporary of the fictional Mr. Shepard, had by then been facing for more than
two decades. Ironically, however, when Josephson tells them that “There’s
not a tune you can hum.—/ There’s not a tune you go bum-bum-bum-di-
dum” or that he will let them “know when Stravinsky has a hit,” he sings
Frank’s tune. After this initial rejection, Charley and Frank continue to pitch
their song. Josephson then abruptly dismisses them and sings his own: “Write
more, work hard,—/ Leave your name with the girl.—/ Less avant-garde.”
At this moment the ghost of Rodgers and Hammerstein returns to haunt
Sondheim as well as Franklin Shepard. The “plain old melodee dee dee
dee dee dee” that Josephson desires is none other than the chestnut, “Some
Enchanted Evening,” from South Pacific. Characteristically, Josephson does
not know the words to this familiar classic and apparently does not even
realize that he is trying to hum a Rodgers and Hammerstein song. In addi-
tion to several conspicuously incorrect pitches, Josephson also sings its
opening musical phrase completely outside of its proper metrical founda-
tion (with an extra quarter-note within a measure of 4/4 time, one extra beat
too many for the measure).
Sondheim is reinforcing what we all know: that in 1958 as well as in 1981
a Rodgers tune was and is the ideal Broadway theater song and the stan-
dard by which Shepard—and Sondheim—will be measured. In defiance of
this expectation, Charley and Frank refuse to alter their work and write a
Rodgers and Hammerstein-type song, and instead join with Mary to create
something new and all their own, an original revue. Within a few years the
rejected song becomes a hit song in Frank and Charley’s new Broadway
show, produced by Josephson. By the 1980s, people everywhere were begin-
ning to hum Sondheim’s songs, too, and by the 1990s and 2000s more and
more could be heard out of their original stage contexts in cabaret theaters,
recordings, and television.101 And although few, if any, of his songs match
the familiarity of “Send in the Clowns,” and of course many songs by Rod-
gers, Sondheim’s songs have belatedly begun to receive broader recognition.
Paradoxically, what was uncommercial has become, to an extent, evergreen
(and belatedly commercial as well).
The fin-de-siècle classical modernists are rarely accused of compromis-
ing their ideals, but they are, like Sondheim and Seurat, equally faulted for
lacking artistic passion. Sondheim also shares with his modernist counter-
parts a profound awareness of his classic predecessors and self-consciously
responds to his tradition in varied and profound ways. Just as the European
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Enchanted Evenings
modernists recreate the past in their own image, so Sondheim pays alle-
giance to and reinterprets his tradition and makes it his own. At the center
of this tradition are the integrated musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein,
Sondheim’s one-time collaborator and long-time mentor, respectively. Sond-
heim’s shows depart from the Rodgers and Hammerstein models stylisti-
cally and dramaturgically, especially in their subject matter and in their use
of time and space. But at least from Company on they preserve the concept
of the integrated musical. As with Rodgers and Hammerstein, the more-
than-occasionally compromising characters in a Sondheim musical sing lyr-
ics and music that reveal their essences and nuances and move the drama,
narrative or non-narrative, uncompromisingly forward.
Sondheim, like Seurat and his modernist musical counterparts, Debussy,
Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, has long since demonstrated his ability to move
on, to learn from the example of his mentor Hammerstein who wrote “You’ll
Never Walk Alone” and to give the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition
renewed life in “No One Is Alone.” Throughout his more than fifty-year
career on Broadway, Sondheim has successfully combined the musical trap-
pings of musical modernism and created works that encompass an extremely
broad dramatic range. Like Beethoven, who radically reinterpreted the clas-
sical style without abandoning its fundamental principles, in a larger sense
Sondheim’s modernism might also be construed as a reinterpretation rather
than a revolution. Nevertheless, despite this allegiance to the innovative
but traditional principles of Hammerstein and Robbins, Sondheim’s music
is more dissonant and less tonal than his predecessors’—with the possible
exception of Bernstein’s tritone-laden West Side Story—and his characters
are usually more neurotic and even occasionally psychotic.
Like Seurat and the modern George, Sondheim is willing to rethink his
theatrical legacy to say something new. The ingenious incorporation of past
models in the pastiches of Follies would reappear in subsequent shows, most
extensively and literally in Assassins.102 In this respect, Sondheim’s shows
are very much analogous to Show Boat, On Your Toes, The Cradle Will Rock,
and West Side Story, to name only the musicals discussed in the present sur-
vey that prominently display popular and classical allusions. Sondheim suc-
ceeded in moving the Broadway musical to a new phase through words and
music supported by imaginative solutions to perennial dramatic problems.
At the same time, Sondheim’s approach to the musical can be placed firmly
in the great tradition from Show Boat to West Side Story. The Broadway musi-
cal from the 1920s to the 1950s could hardly ask for a worthier heir or more
enchanted evenings.
382
chapter sixteen
PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

The Reigning Champion
of Broadway
The Lloyd Webber Problem

The composer’s career was thus marked by popular success and critical
doubt; in the years since his death, these motifs have remained central
to his musical and musicological reputation. . . . For some time his works
remained objects of contempt, and even when he was not openly derided,
he was often conspicuous by his absence, failing to merit more than a cur-
sory mention in many supposedly “comprehensive” studies of the Ameri-
can and British musical.1
The above panegyric, purposely misquoted, contains one important omis-

sion that should be cleared up without delay. In place of the anonymous
“composer’s career,” the author of the passage, Alexandra Wilson, put
forward a particular composer. The composer named by Wilson in her
critical reception study The Puccini Problem is actually Giacomo Puccini
(1858–1924), who composed operas rather than musicals and received little
more than “cursory mention in many supposedly ‘comprehensive’ stud-
ies of twentieth-century music,” rather than in “studies of the American
and British musical” as misstated in the passage. Instead of the anony-
mous “composer’s career,” try to imagine the name Andrew Lloyd Webber
(b. 1948) at the outset of the excerpt. Aside from the not unimportant fact
that Lloyd Webber, at the time this second edition of Enchanted Evenings is
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Enchanted Evenings
written (2008), is only sixty years old and still quite active in the musical
theater domain, the parallels in reception history between Lloyd Webber
and Puccini are arguably present, perhaps uncannily so. The composer
of The Phantom of the Opera has, in fact, like Puccini, so far endured an
unresolved dissonance between high popularity and great wealth on the
one hand and relatively low critical stature and recognition on the other.
Before resuming our focus on the critical contradictions that surround the
remarkable career of Lloyd Webber, it will be useful to review its well-
known highlights.
While still a teenager, Andrew, the talented son of a prominent com-
poser and teacher at the London College of Music, William Lloyd Webber,
teamed up with Tim Rice to write a fifteen-minute staged cantata based on
the biblical story of Joseph and many brothers for the students of a boys’
school, Colet Court, in 1968. A slightly longer version was recorded and
then expanded still further into a full-length musical that was performed
in London in 1972 as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. By that
time, Lloyd Webber and Rice in 1970 had produced a two-record concept
rock album based on another biblical theme, the last days of Christ told
from the perspective of his betrayer Judas Iscariot. Jesus Christ Superstar,
a stage realization of this album, significantly sung throughout, became a
Andrew Lloyd Webber in 2004.
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Phantom of the Opera
modest hit in New York in 1971 and a major hit when it opened in London
the following year.
After the failure of the first version of the more traditional Jeeves (1975;
revised as By Jeeves in 1996) with the playwright Alan Ayckbourn, the fol-
lowing year Lloyd Webber and Rice produced another two-record concept
album in a mixture of rock and Latin styles based on the stormy life and
early death of Eva Peron, the controversial and charismatic wife of Argen-
tina’s authoritarian leader Juan Peron. Under the guidance of Harold Prince,
Evita, first in London (1978) and the next year in New York, developed into
another successful through-sung musical (i.e., with minimal spoken dia-
logue) on a provocative political theme. In retrospect, it is clear that Evita,
the longest running imported musical until that time, was the true launch-
ing pad for the second British musical theater revolution (the first being the
comparably earth-shaking arrival of Gilbert and Sullivan exactly one cen-
tury earlier). By the time he was thirty, Lloyd Webber thus had created three
significant works for the musical stage. The greatest successes would follow
in the next decade.
The first of these was Cats in 1981, an unusual show that abandoned
a traditional book and instead added a loose revue-like story line to T. S.
Eliot’s poetic collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). Unlike
a traditional revue, Cats was told entirely through dance and song. The
song “Memory,” Trevor Nunn’s reworking of another Eliot poem not
part of Practical Cats called “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” surpassed in
popularity even the big song hits of Jesus Christ Superstar (“I Don’t Know
How to Love Him”) and Evita (“Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”). In his next
show, Starlight Express (1984), with lyrics by Richard Stilgoe (who would
contribute about 20 percent of the lyrics to Phantom), toy trains come to
life, perform on roller skates, and sing a rock based score with a smat-
tering of other popular vernacular styles (blues, spirituals, gospel, and
country).
One year after Starlight, Lloyd Webber produced yet another album
that would eventually lead to a staged show, this time a hit single and
promotional music video of the title song of The Phantom of the Opera
performed by his new bride Sarah Brightman and lead rock singer Steve
Harley. That same year, July 1985, a rough rock-oriented version of act I
was performed at Lloyd Webber’s annual summer Sydmonton Festival,
a performance that introduced his new and previously untested lyricist
Charles Hart then only twenty-four. Not wanting to be influenced by a
performance, however unpolished, Prince stayed away from Sydmonton
but would soon join Lloyd Webber and Hart to shape the work into its
present form.
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Enchanted Evenings
Popularity . . .
It took some time for Sondheim to gain a wide following and critical respect
as a composer-lyricist. I have duly noted allegations of coldness, a lack of
melody, and, when discussing Sunday in the Park with George, even the absence
of a second act. Despite enormous critical praise and scholarly attention, not
one Sondheim show lasted as many as one thousand performances during
its first Broadway run. Most lasted fewer, and some considerably fewer, than
five hundred performances.
By contrast, from the early 1970s to the present, Lloyd Webber has enjoyed
record-breaking success on both sides of the Atlantic. The facts are indisput-
able. Via immense popular and commercial success (with a few exceptions
in New York), the British composer of Jesus Christ Superstar (New York, 1971;
London, 1972), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (London 1972;
New York, 1981), Evita (London, 1978; New York, 1979), Cats (London, 1981;
New York, 1982), Starlight Express (London, 1984; New York, 1987), The Phan-
tom of the Opera (London, 1986; New York, 1988), Aspects of Love (London,
1989; New York, 1990), and Sunset Boulevard (London and Los Angeles, 1993;
New York, 1994) has achieved unprecedented popular acclaim on Broadway
and still greater popularity in London’s West End.2 With the two longest
all-time Broadway runs (Phantom, Cats) and three of the top five West End
runs (Phantom, Cats, Starlight), Lloyd Webber is simply the most popular
Broadway composer of the post–Rodgers and Hammerstein era and prob-
ably of all time. Paul Prece and William Everett summarize the economic
and geographic reach of the Phantom: “In January 2006, it was reported
that Phantom alone had grossed more money than any other production on
stage and screen (£1.7 billion/approximately $3.2 billion), surpassing huge
money-making films such as Star Wars, E.T., and Titanic. The show has been
seen by over eighty million people.”3
One unmistakable sign of success and critical acclaim is the number of
major awards a show and its creators earn in a given year and over time.
Comparing the awards to Lloyd Webber and Sondheim, the two dominant
Broadway composers of the past several decades, and to the number of
Tonys awarded to each for Best Score, Sondheim owns a distinct advantage.
Between 1971 and 1994 Sondheim received six awards for Best Score (Com-
pany, Follies, Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, and Passion). Lloyd
Webber received three between 1980 and 1995 (Evita, Cats, and Sunset Bou-
levard).4 From this elite group all but Follies and Into the Woods also won the
Tony Award for Best Show.
Since Phantom was nominated the same year as Woods, it would have
been necessary for the shows to share the award for both to win. In some
386
sense they did share the award in that Phantom received the award for Best
Musical, Director (Prince), the three major design awards (Maria Björnson
for both scenic and costume design and Andrew Bridge for lighting), princi-
pal actor (Michael Crawford as the Phantom), and actress in a featured role
(Judy Kaye as the Prima Donna Carlotta Guidicelli), while Into the Woods
took home the awards for Book (James Lapine), Score (Sondheim), and prin-
cipal actress (Joanna Gleason as the Baker’s Wife). Staging awards to Phan-
tom, the writing awards to Into the Woods, and a split in acting awards (with
the edge to Phantom).
In the years since Into the Woods (November 5, 1987) and shortly thereafter
Phantom (January 26, 1988) first arrived on Broadway, the former show, with
a solid but unremarkable 765 performances, has already experienced a seven-
month revival in 2002 (18 previews and 279 performances). Meanwhile, The
Phantom of the Opera, like Carlotta in Follies, is still here. Four years after the
Into the Woods revival closed, on January 9, 2006, Phantom surpassed another
Lloyd Webber musical, Cats, as Broadway’s longest running show. At the time
this is written Phantom has reached 8,771 performances, giving it the distinc-
tion of being the first to cross 8,000. Cats remains in second place at 7,485.
Among currently running shows only the revival of Chicago (5,088) or The
Lion King (4,720) are in any position to overtake these two Lloyd Webber
megamusical megahits, and these still have long way to go.5 From the New
York arrival of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971 to the present, the sun has yet
to set on the Lloyd Webber era either on Broadway or in the West End. As
John Snelson writes, “in the West End, the opening of Jesus Christ Superstar
in 1972 marked the start of a continuous presence of Lloyd Webber shows
through to the time of writing [2004]; often during that span there have been
four concurrent Lloyd Webber shows, and in both 1991 and 1997 six were
playing simultaneously.”6
. . . versus Critical Acclaim

Before the first edition of Enchanted Evenings was published in 1997, the only
serious Lloyd Webber biography to appear was Michael Walsh’s biographi-
cally thorough, generally sympathetic, non-technical Andrew Lloyd Webber:
His Life and Works (1989, revised and enlarged 2nd ed., 1997).7 In The Broadway
Musical (1990; revised and expanded 2nd ed., 2002), Joseph P. Swain devoted
a highly critical chapter to Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita.8 Before the end of
the 1990s serious Broadway scholarship was still the exception to the rule,
but a number of books, dissertations, and journal articles on Sondheim had
already appeared, including Stephen Banfield’s comprehensive analytical
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Enchanted Evenings
study Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (1993). A journal devoted exclusively

to Sondheim, The Sondheim Review, was launched in 1994. In recent years
at least three full essay collections on Sondheim have appeared in addition
to major scholarly and analytical attention to Sondheim in books, journals,
courses and seminars, papers and even whole sessions of papers at musico-
logical conferences, and substantial parts of more general books in the field.
Readers have come to expect more than a “cursory mention” (see the quota-
tion that opened this chapter) on Sondheim when they pick up a survey of
the Broadway musical.
On the other hand, in a situation similar to the relatively sparse attention
given Puccini in comparison with Verdi and Wagner, serious study of Lloyd
Webber, including recent scholarship, “is conspicuous by its absence” (also
quoted from the opening of the chapter). The second edition of Steven
Suskin’s Show Tunes (1991) included a section called “Notable Imported
Shows.” About half of the shows listed were shows with music by Lloyd
Webber. In the Preface to the third edition Suskin justifies the omission of
this section and the expunging of Lloyd Webber that resulted: “All of the
British imports since the Second Edition have failed; thus, I have seen fit
to excise the import section and concentrate on matters of more interest.”9
As a consequence of this executive decision, the most popular Broadway
composer of the last thirty years and probably in history is now banished
from a major reference book that purports to cover “The Songs, Shows,
and Careers of Broadway’s Major Composers.” In his critical remarks on
Maury Yeston’s excellent version of Phantom, which was performed to
some acclaim by Houston’s Theater of the Stars in 1991, Suskin compares
the work favorably with its vastly better known predecessor: “Yeston’s
score is actually far more tuneful than you-know-who’s.”10 Even the iden-
tity of “you know who” remains securely hidden, a phantom of the musi-
cal theater.
Of the thirty-eight Broadway musicals explored in Raymond Knapp’s
two-volume survey of the American musical and musical film, seven feature
shows by Sondheim and only one considers a show by Lloyd Webber (Evita).11
Although Knapp notes that not everyone shares a negative view and offers
dramatic reasons behind Lloyd Webber’s reuse of melodic material, the dis-
parity in emphasis nonetheless speaks for itself and reveals a stronger interest
in Sondheim. Of the thirty-four shows discussed in Scott Miller’s three vol-
umes of essays, eight are devoted to works by Sondheim, only one by Lloyd
Webber (the early Jesus Christ Superstar).12 Ethan Mordden, who devotes from
four to fourteen pages each to nearly every Sondheim show in his seven-
volume survey, dismisses Lloyd Webber through sharp criticism but mainly
through neglect. In fact, among all of Lloyd Webber’s output, only Jesus Christ
388
Superstar, according to Mordden, demonstrates meaningful dramatic correla-

tion between theme and characters (and consequently merits two pages).
Despite relative inattention in mainstream surveys, the past few years
have witnessed serious studies on Lloyd Webber musicals that combine
biographical, critical, and analytical commentary, especially John Snelson’s
Andrew Lloyd Webber (2004) and Jessica Sternfeld’s The Megamusical (2006).13
Both Snelson and Sternfeld are sympathetic to their subject and offer spirited
defenses of Lloyd Webber against his many critics. For the most part, how-
ever, authors who devote some attention to Lloyd Webber characteristically
treat significant elements of his shows, if not the composer himself, with
undisguised disdain. Some of these studies minimize—they can’t ignore—
Lloyd Webber’s achievement and attribute the staggeringly popular success
of his shows, and other overblown megamusicals, merely to stagecraft and
media hype.14 Another commonly voiced criticism of Lloyd Webber shows,
even in writings that are largely positive—for example, Stephen Citron’s
double study of Lloyd Webber and Sondheim in 2001—are aimed at what
is perceived as generic and otherwise sub-par lyrics, especially those writ-
ten by lyricists who have come after Evita, when Rice and Lloyd Webber
parted ways.15 On the whole, the overwhelming critical assessment of Lloyd
Webber so far consists of high marks for stagecraft, spectacle, and popular
success, and low marks for artistic craft, inspired originality, and general
overall esteem.
Borrowing and the Organically Overgrown

Megamusical
Two controversial issues have long haunted the musicals of Lloyd Web-
ber: (1) his common practice of musical borrowing from other composers;
and (2) allegations of excessive reuse of his own music within a musical.
Neither issue is unique to Lloyd Webber. Virtually all composers, including
Broadway composers, borrow from other musical sources. Composers in
the classical tradition from Handel, Bach, and Mozart to Stravinsky and Ives
have used previous music frequently and with great originality and craft for
centuries, a force that prompted eighteenth-century theorist Johann Mat-
theson to pronounce that “borrowing is permissible, but one must return the
object borrowed with interest.”16 The problem is that Lloyd Webber is often
accused of borrowing without paying interest. Since the days of Sigmund
Romberg it would be difficult to produce a Broadway composer who has
so blatantly been accused of plagiarism, several steps beneath borrowing.17
Similarly, in regard to the second controversy, all composers surveyed in
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Enchanted Evenings
this volume reuse material and reprise songs in their musicals. Here too, the
issue is that Lloyd Webber, perhaps more than any major Broadway figure,
is accused of indiscriminate or dramatically meaningless reuse.
Borrowing
This volume has shown that the composers of our featured shows occasion-
ally quote or allude to the music of other composers. The most interesting
borrowings are those that are dramatically purposeful and meaningful—for
example, the use of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony as a source of the
River Family in Show Boat, the use of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and
Wagner’s “Redemption through Love” leitmotiv in West Side Story, and the
“Dies irae” in Sweeney Todd. It has also been observed that a number of bor-
rowings are seemingly less than meaningful to the work at hand (e.g., the
Puccini allusions in My Fair Lady or the undisguised resemblances between
Bernstein’s “Maria” and Blitzstein’s Regina).
Writers such as Stephen Citron, John Snelson, Jessica Sternfeld, and
Michael Walsh who have discussed the music of Lloyd Webber’s shows
more often than not dismiss the borrowings as inconsequential. This chap-
ter espouses the view that the sheer number of examples and their closeness
to their borrowed sources suggest that students of musical theater should
examine this phenomenon critically rather than ignore it. Lloyd Webber’s
first major hit, Superstar’s “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” is the first of
many examples that writers have noticed and commented on for its strong
melodic and harmonic similarity to the second movement of Mendelssohn’s
Violin Concerto in E Minor, op. 64. Before he goes on to show what Lloyd
Webber added to Mendelssohn, Snelson writes that “from a musical stand-
point, the resemblance between the pop melody and the concerto is so obvi-
ous and continues through such an extended passage (some seven bars) that
any claim to coincidence is untenable.”18
In his chapter-length study of “musical reminiscences” in Lloyd Webber,
Snelson describes the even closer connection between “On This Night of a
Thousand Stars,” sung by the nightclub singer Magaldi in Evita, and the
popular Latin tune “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” by the com-
poser who wrote under the nom de plume Louiguy, as “self-evident.”19 He
concludes that since the borrowing “sticks so closely to those features which
create the character of the Louiguy number, the whole piece can even be seen
as a vocal extemporization around ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’
in the manner of an interpretation-in-performance of the original.”20 In
short, Lloyd Webber’s “Thousand Stars” has accomplished for the unknown
Louigay what Romberg’s Blossom Time earlier did for Schubert.
390
By way of comparison, Magnolia in Show Boat sings Charles K. Harris’s

“After the Ball” to evoke fin-de-siècle popular music. The published score,
however, credits Harris (and not Kern) as the composer. The composers of
much of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and “On This Night of a Thou-
sand Stars” receive no attribution. Before moving on to Phantom I would like
to bring up another likely “musical reminiscence” that to my knowledge has
gone unrecognized, at least in print. When I used to give an annual musical
plagiarism lecture to non-music majors, I frequently asked students whether
the melody and harmony of the opening of “I’d Be Surprisingly Good for
You,” also from Evita, reminded them of any other popular song they hap-
pened to know. Invariably several students would immediately volunteer
the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”
The relationship between these songs is analogous, but not identical, to
the bop practice of creating new tunes using harmonic progressions from
older popular tunes (e.g., “Shaw Nuff” and “Cottontail,” among others,
employ the harmony of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”). Among music his-
torians, the term of choice to describe this practice is contrafacta (the plural
of contrafactum), a fancy name used to describe either the appropriation of
harmony from one song to another or the recycling of melodies with new
texts. “I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You” borrows more than a little from
both the melody and harmony of “Yesterday,” but unlike most contrafacta
the borrowing does not continue throughout the entire song. The technique
of contrafacta as more commonly practiced was widely used in the Renais-
sance and can be found later in multi-texted reharmonized chorale melodies
in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and in popular songs recycled with texts, such
as the conversions of “Anacreon in Heaven” into “The Star Spangled Ban-
ner” and “God Save the King” into “America.” The technique ensures unity
and musical integration and provides opportunities to create new dramatic
meanings for previously heard musical themes.
Several borrowing possibilities in Phantom have been proposed, some by
more than one author. Both Mark Grant and Michael Walsh, for example, sug-
gest that the distinctive, powerful, and meaningfully employed descending
instrumental chromatic figure that introduces Phantom’s overture, title song,
and seven additional Phantom appearances in the score is noticeably derived
from Ralph Vaughan William’s Second (or “London”) Symphony, the first ver-
sion of which appeared in the years before World War I (see Example 16.1).21
No fewer than three borrowings have been offered for the opening phrase
of “Music of the Night” alone: “Come to Me, Bend to Me” from Brigadoon,
“School Days” from 1907 (“School days, school days / Dear old Golden Rule
days”), and a phrase from “Recondite armonia” from Puccini’s Tosca.22 In
each case only the first five notes, and in the first two examples the rhythms
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Enchanted Evenings
Example 16.1. Descending chromatic motive in Vaughan Williams’s Second

(“London”) Symphony
also, are the same. The “School Days” connection became a part of popular
culture when the character played by Billy Crystal in the movie Forget Paris
(1995) left a performance of Phantom with Debra Winger accusing “Music of
the Night” of ripping off the old tune. To prove his claim, Crystal sang the
opening phrase of the earlier melody.
The second phrase of the Phantom’s serenade shares eight consecutive
notes and the same rhythmic contour with another melody, this time by Puc-
cini (see Example 16.2). Snelson acknowledges that this phrase in “Music of
the Night” “is identical to the climactic section of Dick Johnson’s declaration
of love to Minnie at the conclusion of act I of La fanciulla del West.” Although
he does not claim a dramatic purpose in the borrowing, in Lloyd Webber’s
defense Snelson finds an “emotional [italics mine] link from one musical the-
ater work to the other.”23
Example 16.2. Dick Johnson’s “Una gioia” from Puccini’s La fanciulla del West
Walsh notes that the melody first sung by Christine when she describes
the Phantom to Raoul on the rooftop of the opera house with the words “Yet
in his eyes, all the sadness of the world,” “is closely related to Liù’s suicide
music in the last act of Puccini’s Turandot" (see Example 16.3).24
This is not the first time audiences heard this famous theme, however.
It appeared earlier in the orchestra after the Phantom had cursed Christine
for unmasking him in his lair and again in the orchestra when Raoul and
Christine first arrive on the roof. The theme then reappears at two signifi-
cant moments in the second act, once when Raoul asks Christine to sing the
392
Example 16.3. Liù’s motive in Puccini’s Turandot
Phantom’s opera and later when Christine tells the Phantom in the final
scene that “This haunted face holds no horror for me now.” The melody is
one of the most important in Phantom, as Liù’s melody is in Turandot.
Surprisingly, neither Citron, Snelson, nor Sternfeld mentions the extraor-
dinary melodic and rhythmic correspondence between this Phantom theme
and Liù’s comparably significant melody, heard relentlessly for nearly
eight minutes in Turandot’s second act. Snelson, who alone among this trio
acknowledges that scholars need to seriously consider the issue of Lloyd
Webber’s borrowing, provides numerous examples that he tries to explain
or justify, but not this one. For the most part, Sternfeld’s response to Lloyd
Webber’s accusers seems unwarrantedly dismissive: “When critics or histo-
rians do go hunting for actual stolen tunes, they rarely find any, and when
they do, the results do not amount to much.”25
Unless one is wearing a mask that covers the ears, however, I would argue
that borrowings come to some of us unbidden and that they do add up to
something significant. The amount Lloyd Webber borrows from Fanciulla in
“The Music of the Night” and the Turandot borrowing in “Yet in his eyes” and
“This haunted face” is approximately the same as Bernstein’s appropriation
of Wagner’s “Redemption through love” motive in “I Have a Love” and the
death processional in West Side Story. The issue is not the fact of borrowing
or even how much is borrowed. The problem lies in the gratuitousness and
apparent arbitrariness of the borrowings. In another famous, more recent
Puccini borrowing that occurs in Rent, Roger, the character doing the bor-
rowing, informs the audience that he is trying to compose a love song that
does not sound like “Musetta’s Waltz” from Puccini’s La bohème. Eventually
Puccini’s melody returns, but not before Roger has finished his own original
love song, “Your Eyes,” inspired, but not composed, by Puccini.
To a remarkable extent perhaps not seen since his British predecessor Han-
del, who is nonetheless generally credited for borrowing with interest, Lloyd
Webber reuses music by other composers and does not acknowledge his
sources. A typical Lloyd Webber show also contains more reprises and con-
trafacta than most previous and current successful Broadway shows. More
significant than the number of reprises is the frequent absence of dramatic
meaning. Lloyd Webber continues to receive criticism from many quarters
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Enchanted Evenings
for these practices and habits and audience approbation in spite of them.
Either way, friends and foes alike perhaps might concede that the works he
created for London and Broadway from Joseph to Sunset Boulevard amply
support Lloyd Webber’s claim as the reigning champion of Broadway.26
Musical Organicism
If Rodgers and Hammerstein did not invent what soon would become known
as the “integrated” musical, their success with Oklahoma! and Carousel popu-
larized this approach, gave it cachet, and arguably made it desirable, if not
imperative, for others to follow in their path. The fundamental principles of
the integrated musical, in contrast to the allegedly more frivolous fare of the
1920s and 1930s, are that the songs advance a plot, flow directly from the dia-
logue, and express the thoughts of the characters who sing them. In addition,
the presence of dance serves to advance the plot and enhance the dramatic
meaning of the songs that precede them, and the orchestra, through accompa-
niment and underscoring, parallels, complements, or advances the action.27
Despite increased attention to these basic principles of integration, which
also involved greater attention to the integrity, coherence, and depth of the
book, the principle of the integrated musical is to some extent undermined
by the separation of dialogue and song.28 The megamusicals of Lloyd Webber
and Boublil-Schönberg from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s increased
the possibility of integration by making their works through-sung. Even such
a harsh detractor of the megamusical as Scott McMillin, who finds Phan-
tom “pretentious and overblown,” concedes that the through-sung musical,
often composed in a rock style, surpasses the Rodgers and Hammerstein
integrative model: “I can see the logic of claiming that the drive for integra-
tion has finally been achieved in Lloyd Webber. Perhaps Phantom should be
celebrated for being a musical on the verge of becoming an opera.”29
One of the problematic side effects of the integrated, through-sung mega-
musical is the potential for integration that lacks dramatic meaning. Evita,
Les Misérables, and Phantom are musically integrated in the sense that they
use a relatively small repertoire of motives and themes and recycle these
melodies continuously, usually with new lyrics (i.e., contrafacta, a term
used extensively in Joseph Swain’s chapters on Lloyd Webber and Boublil-
Schönberg).30 When characters in musicals use each other’s music and when
the underscored passages appear without seeming regard for the appropri-
ateness of the appropriation, the increased integration leads to decreased
dramatic meaning. The reuse, or overuse, of contrafacta in the work of the
composer at hand, according to Swain, “has become a rather careless infatu-
ation with [Lloyd] Webber’s not inconsiderable powers of melody.”31
394
The reliance on contrafactum also frequently results in mismatched texts.

Raymond Knapp discusses the implications of the problem: “Especially in
its seemingly wanton recycling of music and inadequate attention to text set-
ting, Evita is seen as lacking two perceived strengths of the more traditional
Broadway stage: musical variety and an oft-demonstrated capacity for mar-
rying words and music so intimately that neither seems sufficient without
the other. According to this ideal, Lloyd Webber’s use of the same music
for quite different songs seems fundamentally inadequate.”32 The problem
is not the reuse, or even the ubiquitous reuse of the material. The problem is
the lack of discrimination in the recycling of melodic material. When used
indiscriminately, the opportunities for increased dramatic meanings are
squandered. Music can become just an attractive but subsidiary adjunct to
the show rather than a conveyor of idiomatic meanings and moods. I will
return to the use and reuse of themes in the section “Music and Meaning in
The Phantom of the Opera.”
The Phantom of the Opera: The Novel and

the Silent Film
The story line of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hal Prince’s The Phantom of the
Opera can be traced to two sources, the classic fairy tale about the Beauty
and the Beast and George du Maurier’s novel Trilby from 1894. The novel, in
which the musical magician Svengali places the nonmusical ingénue Trilby
in a trance during which she attains great operatic success, was a popular
novel in both England and America in its day and was soon adapted into
a popular play. Between September 1909 and January 1910, Gaston Leroux’s
new twist on this story, Le Fantöme de l’Opéra, appeared in serial form (in
French); the English translation The Phantom of the Opera followed in 1911.
More than seventy years later, three years after the phenomenon of Cats had
begun its long-lived London run, Lloyd Webber found a copy of Leroux’s
gothic novel in a used book shop. The novel inspired the modern-day musi-
cal theater Svengali (Lloyd Webber), inspired by his Trilby and wife at the
time (Sarah Brightman), to create a musical version that proved to be a
greater phenomenon even than Cats, at least on Broadway, when The Phan-
tom of the Opera opened in London (1986) and New York (1988).
The genesis of Phantom has been told often, and authoritative summaries
of the novel and film and television adaptations can be found in George
Perry’s The Complete “Phantom of the Opera.” Less explored are the cre-
ative choices Lloyd Webber and Prince—in collaboration with the Midas-
touched producer of Les Misérables the previous year, Cameron Macintosh
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Enchanted Evenings
(b. 1946)—made in their conversion of Leroux’s novel and the comparably

influential 1925 classic silent film directed by Rupert Julian and starring
Lon Chaney as the Phantom, Marie Philbin as Christine, and Norman Kerry
as Raoul.33 Although the novel provided a broad structure and the film a
more focused structure (in addition to providing a visual model for the
opera house stage and majestic staircase), the Lloyd Webber-Prince version
departed in significant ways from each.
The film had already accomplished some of Prince’s work. Foster Hirsch
credits Prince for removing the gruesome details of the Phantom’s medical
afflictions and early biography, the back story to Christine’s relationship to
her father (it was the father’s prophecy of an angel-to-come that worked
on Christine’s susceptibility to the magical charms of the Angel of Music),
and the childhood romance between Christine and Raoul.34 All of this mate-
rial, plus Leroux’s detailed explanation of how the Phantom accomplished
his supernatural tricks, had already vanished in the 1925 film. The charac-
ter of the Persian, the man who knew the true story about Erik, the future
Phantom, was retained from the novel but transformed in the film into a
suspicious character often seen lurking about the same time film viewers
witnessed actions attributed to the Phantom. In the early portions of the
film it seemed possible that the Persian and the Phantom were the same.
Deeper into the story, viewers learn that the Persian is working on behalf of
the police to apprehend the Phantom.
As in the novel, the Persian, who sports an astrakhan hat, is the detective
Ledoux (a name that sounds similar and is spelled suspiciously close to the
novel’s author Leroux) who tries to help Raoul escape harm in the vast and
literally torturous underground of the Paris Opera as they pursue Christine
and her abductor, the Phantom. To achieve what is often referred to as the
“Abbott shorthand,” in deference to the ability of director George Abbott,
Prince’s mentor, to capture the essence of a plot, both forms of the Persian,
the Phantom’s former acquaintance in the novel and the private investigator
Ledoux from the silent film, entirely disappeared from the musical. To fill in
for the absence of the Persian, another mysterious character, Madame Giry,
served as a secret liaison between the Phantom and the other principals.
No one felt the need to provide an alternative character to replace detective
Ledoux.
The Lloyd Webber-Prince scenario added much to the novel and film to
enhance the plot and alter its effect. By making the Phantom physically less
deformed and musically more brilliant and seductive, he becomes for the
first time a serious “romantic alternative” to Raoul.35 Raoul, too, has become
a more endearing figure, especially when compared to his depiction in the
novel and film as a condescending, controlling character who possesses
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neither sympathy nor understanding for Christine’s plight nor the heroism
to withstand the Phantom’s threats. In the novel and the 1925 silent film, the
Phantom’s spell inhibits Christine’s judgment, and her fear of the Phantom
causes her to put Raoul at arm’s length. In a significant discrepancy, through-
out much of the musical the Phantom is portrayed as a relatively benevolent
figure who has entranced Christine into believing he is the Angel of Music
as prophesied by Christine’s father. Until “The Point of No Return” toward
the end of the evening, audiences would probably not be too shocked if
Christine decided to join her Phantom in the depths of the Paris Opera and
leave Raoul behind.
Although film viewers see the Phantom at his organ and know that he is
composing Don Juan Triumphant, inspired by his love for Christine, it is only
in the stage musical that audiences witness and actually hear his trium-
phant work. As a modernist decades ahead of his time compositionally, the
Phantom, when he isn’t serenading Christine with a lyrical lullaby (“Music
of the Night”), composes music that tends to be dissonant and even vio-
lent. It is filled with whole-tone scales and whole-tone harmonies, sounds
that before long would be associated with the real-life French modernist
Claude Debussy (with a touch of Vaughan Williams as the basis for a vamp
in the title song in a rock style, see Example 16.1). Not only does the whole-
tone scale pervade the phrase “Those who tangle with Don Juan” (which
the traditionally trained and musically limited Piangi cannot master in the
rehearsal [act II, scene 4]), but it also appropriately melodically and har-
monically underlies the “I have brought you” verse to “Music of the Night”
and, less explicably, when the same verse returns at the outset of “All I Ask
of You.”36
In the novel and the silent film, all the opera scenes—prior to the time
when the opera scenes were granted the gift of sound in 1930—are taken
from Charles Gounod’s opera Faust, probably the most popular French opera
between its premiere in 1859 and the appearance of the novel and silent film
of Phantom. After the largely spoken Prologue told as a flashback, a framing
device absent in both the novel and film, the story of Phantom in the musical
begins with a rehearsal of Hannibal, clearly a parody of the once towering
mid-nineteenth-century French composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Later in the
first act, Lloyd Webber offers a second operatic pastiche, Il Muto, this time in
the late-eighteenth-century Italian style of Antonio Salieri, another largely
forgotten composer. At the center of the second act, musical themes of the
first act come together in the Phantom’s creation, Don Juan Triumphant, which
offers the dissonant sound of modernism, including whole-tone scales and
harmonies, an appropriate musical language for a precociously avant-garde
and vengeful composer.
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Enchanted Evenings
The Musical Film

It took nearly twenty years from its London premiere before the musical
film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera arrived in 2004. The film was
directed by Joel Schumacher, an American director who came on the scene
in the 1980s with St. Elmo’s Fire and The Lost Boys. In the 1990s he directed
two films based on John Grisham novels, The Client and A Time to Kill, and
replaced Tim Burton as the director of choice in the ongoing series of Batman
films, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. The film version of Phantom,
which the composer had discussed with Schumacher in the late 1980s, was
for the most part faithful in spirit and letter to the stage original. In contrast
to Burton’s Sweeney Todd, Schumacher’s Phantom is also “a movie based on
a stage show.”37 At a leisurely 143 minutes it is able to accommodate most of
the original stage version, with a few minor (but not inconsequential cuts)
and a few moments of cinematic and non-verbal leisure.38
The film, shot in a faded black and white tint, ranges backward in time
from 1919 to 1870, the auction omits the Meyerbeer memorabilia auctioned
in the stage version, and film viewers are introduced not only to the Vicomte
The Phantom of the Opera, 2004 film. Close-up of Christine Daaé (Emmy
Rossum) and The Phantom (Gerard Butler).
398
The Phantom of the Opera, 2004 film. Christine Daaé (Rossum) and The
Phantom (Butler) performing in The Phantom’s opera Don Juan Triumphant.
de Chagny, or Raoul (Patrick Wilson), but also to Madame Giry (Miranda

Richardson), whom he outbids for the monkey. The original stage version
begins in 1905 with a Prologue that takes place at an auction in which items
from a distant time are being auctioned off, a poster from the opera Hannibal,
“a wooden pistol and three human skulls from the 1831 production of Robert
le Diable by Meyerbeer” (an opera actually composed for the Paris Opéra by
the composer, unlike the fictitious Meyerbeer Hannibal parody), a papier-
máché music box of a monkey in Persian robes clanging cymbals, and a
chandelier from the Opéra restored from a shattered state. The auctioneer
switches on the chandelier and the scene miraculously shifts to a rehearsal
of Hannibal at the Opéra Populaire in Paris 1861.
Prince never returns to the older Vicomte in the stage version to remind
audiences that they are watching a flashback, but Schumacher makes several
strategic returns to Raoul and the events of 1919 in the film, starting with
the scene in act I between Christine Daaé (Emmy Rossum) and the Phan-
tom (Gerard Butler) in the Phantom’s lair (about 47 minutes into the film).
The last of these flash-forwards occur at the film’s conclusion when Raoul
is wheeled to the cemetery to place the papier-máché monkey on a tomb.
The tomb inscription informs us that Raoul and Christine, the future Count-
ess de Chagny (1854–1917), were married after the events of the story, that
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Enchanted Evenings
she was only sixteen at the time the story takes place—Rossum herself was
only seventeen at the time of filming—and died two years before the film
begins. Film viewers also learn that history remembers her as a “Beloved
Wife and Mother” and not as an opera star. Christine did not have it all.
The final image of the film is a withered rose, just like the rose the Phan-
tom gave to Christine after her first performance nearly fifty years earlier. In
the stage version the Phantom disappeared at the end and stage audiences
never learn whether he was alive or dead in 1905. In contrast, the film lets
viewers know that the Phantom still lives (thus preparing for the possibility
of a sequel) and that he has by no means forgotten the only woman who was
able to love him.39
Whereas the stage version sustains much of the mystery until the end
about the connections between Madame Giry and the Phantom, the film
soon lets us know by silent visual clues that Madame understands what is
happening. Later in the film, when Madame Giry explains to Raoul about
the Phantom’s early history, Schumacher assists her tale with vivid cinematic
flashbacks. Film viewers learn from Giry and see the documentation, not
only that the Phantom was deformed from birth but that he was abused and
battered before lashing back by garroting his father with the Punjab lasso.
Finally, film viewers see Giry smuggling the future Phantom safely into the
opera house where he would establish a refuge for the rest of his life.
The film takes advantage of other opportunities to add clarity and
remove mystery. Raoul is now identified in the first scene as a Count during
the rehearsal instead of as a mysterious aristocrat who recognizes Chris-
tine from his box at a performance. Raoul does not notice Christine at the
rehearsal, but she notices him and informs Meg (and film viewers) that he
was a childhood sweetheart. When Christine travels by coach to the cem-
etery to visit her father’s tomb, stage audiences might rightfully wonder
how the Phantom found her there. Film viewers watch the Phantom as he
overhears Christine tell a drunken stable hand she is going to the cemetery,
easily knocks out the intended driver, and takes her there himself.
Madame Giry’s explanation about the Phantom’s origins gives film view-
ers a more sympathetic understanding of the childhood abuse that eventu-
ally created a pathetic murderer, albeit a genius. Not only does the Phantom’s
life acquire a context, he is also less loathsome physically than earlier Phan-
toms. Thus, when Christine unmasks the Phantom during the performance
of his opera, viewers see a man with burn-like scars on the upper portion
of one side of his face, but nowhere near the disfigurement that shocked
film audiences in 1925 when Lon Chaney was revealed for the first time in
the Phantom’s lair. Even more than the stage Phantom, the film Phantom of
2004 was a dashing and credible romantic alternative. As Christine observes
400
in the climactic scene, it is the Phantom’s soul, not his face, where “the true
distortion lies.”
Lloyd Webber and Schumacher also found an imaginative way to add a
new song. Since, as previously noted, musical film adaptations are encour-
aged to include at least one new song in order to become eligible for an
academy award, an early plan was to give the Phantom a new solo song
called “No One Would Listen.” When the film’s length became prohibitive
and the song was viewed unnecessary (other than perhaps to secure an
award nomination), Schumacher and Lloyd Webber took the song away from
the Phantom and inserted its melody as underscoring when Raoul places
the monkey on his wife’s tomb at the end of the film. Immediately thereaf-
ter the song can be heard as the credits roll. The title has been changed to
“Learn to Be Lonely” and the lyrics are also new. Since Raoul’s “All I Ask of
You” usurped portions of “The Music of the Night” and transformed other
parts of this song into something new, it is fitting that the Phantom’s song
in its final context and associations with Raoul would retain the melody of a
Phantom tune, another example of a contrafactum.40
The film takes various liberties in scene order, such as the placement of the
cemetery scene (act II, scene 5) directly after Madame Giry’s story about the
Phantom’s origins in scene 2, returning after the cemetery scene to portions
of scenes 3 and 4. Another revealing example of Schumacher’s desire to
avoid continuity occurs between what was act I, scene 5 (the scene in the
Phantom’s lair where he sings “Music of the Night”), and the next morn-
ing when Christine unmasks the Phantom while he is playing the organ.
After “Music of the Night” in the film, instead of the continuation of the
scene between the Phantom and Christine that stage audiences experience,
film viewers are shown some leisurely new footage of Meg Giry looking
for Christine, her discovery of the mirror (“the mechanics of what seemed
at first magic”) and the passageway to the Phantom. The music of “I Have
Brought You” grows louder as the shadow lurking ominously behind Meg
turns out to be her mother reaching out in the darkness to place a hand on
her inquisitive daughter’s shoulder and lead her back to the safety of the
dressing room. Only then does the film return to the Phantom’s lair.
The next scene in the film corresponds to scene 7. Joseph Buquet, described
at first meeting in the screenplay as a leering “sinister scene shifter in over-
alls” (a description that helps viewers adjust to his violent death later in
the film), is explaining to the ballet girls about the Phantom and his mag-
ical lasso to their “horror and delight.” Madame Giry appears and chas-
tises him for this sacrilege. Both Buquet and Giry sing what I am calling
the “I remember” motive, the music that becomes Don Juan B, previously
unheard on stage since the Prologue. The next morning the monkey music
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Enchanted Evenings
box gently awakens Christine. The first music she sings is the “I remember”
motive, which viewers have just heard Buquet and Madame Giry sing sev-
eral times.41 The next image is the Phantom at his organ, but unlike the stage
version, film viewers do not hear him. Is he composing an important theme
from his opera (e.g., “Tangled in the Winding Sheets!” or Don Juan C)? Film
viewers will never know.
The film adaptations of both My Fair Lady and West Side Story included
intermissions during their opening runs in movie theaters (although in nei-
ther case did the intermission in the film correspond precisely to the conclu-
sion of act I in its stage counterparts). Had it been the 1950s or 1960s, it would
have easily been possible in a musical film adaptation of Phantom to present
an intermission break at the end of what was act I of Phantom on the stage.
Forty years later, however, when single features had long been the rule, it
was no longer necessary, or even a realistic option, to make a film with an
intermission. This posed a problem for Phantom (only ten minutes shorter
than the West Side Story film), since the first act contained such a dramatic
and scenically dazzling climax: the freefall of the chandelier. Instead of the
falling chandelier, the musical film thus fades forward to 1919 to reveal a
shot of Raoul observing a young couple admiring the sumptuous jewels in
the windows of a jewelry store. Finally, much closer to the end of the film,
the Phantom launches the chandelier at the climax of his opera. Its fall cre-
ates a fire and in the chaos the Phantom is able to move Christine to the
opera underground as the film moves to its dramatic conclusion.
The film, which cost somewhere between $60 and $70 million to produce,
did well during its first month, but less well financially in the United States
than either The Incredibles or The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. It also failed
to garner the critical acclaim lavished on the film versions of Chicago (2002)
or later, Sweeney Todd (2007). Nevertheless, the $100 million it earned in
world markets provided its makers with popular and financial vindication.
Although lacking the transformative qualities of the Chicago and Sweeney
Todd films, Schumacher’s Phantom offers a scenically beautiful and admira-
bly sung souvenir of Broadway’s great stage hit.
Music and Meaning in The Phantom of the Opera

In earlier chapters, when comparing the relative dramatic meanings between
the second act reprises of “If I Loved You” from Carousel and “So in Love”
from Kiss Me, Kate, I suggested that the former was based on something Billy
and Julie Jordan shared while the latter seemed more for the purpose of
bringing back a great song.42 While one might argue whether Fred’s reprise
402
of Lilli’s song demonstrates a bond that transcends what audiences have

experienced in the play, and it is certainly a priceless romantic song that
audiences enjoy rehearing for its own sake, I concluded that an opportu-
nity for dramatic meaning was lost. I also noted that even Puccini advocate
Roger Parker acknowledged the lack of dramatic meaning when “E lucevan
le stelle” returns in act III of Tosca, the opera that prompted Joseph Ker-
man’s famously derogatory description of the popular work as a “shabby
little shocker.”43
Several scholars offer dramatic explanations for the reuse of Lloyd Web-
ber’s recurring themes in Phantom, and in some cases the explanations are
plausible. As with Puccini’s Tosca, however, other explanations are less per-
suasive. The problem lies not with the dramatic uses served by the seven big
tunes in the show (“Think of Me,” “Angel of Music,” “The Phantom of the
Opera,” “The Music of the Night,” “All I Ask of You,” “Wishing You Were
Somehow Here Again,” and “The Point of No Return”), but with the dozen
or more motives, many of which I argue are used indiscriminately. Ironi-
cally, the problem is too much integration.
A comparison between two complementary sections from The Phantom of
the Opera reveals the extent to which Lloyd Webber has taken advantage of
or thwarted the opportunities for musical meaning and dramatic effective-
ness. The sections in question are the first scenes between the Phantom and
Christine in his lair in act I, scenes 5 and 6, and the performance of the Phan-
tom’s opera in act II, scene 7 (the online website offers a detailed thematic
outline of these scenes). The scenes share a considerable amount of musical
material, and it is this sharing that can potentially lead either to increased or
decreased meaning.
Some themes are used with consistency and effectiveness. The descend-
ing chromatic scale that figures so prominently in the title song, for example,
first heard throughout the overture, firmly establishes a connection between
the musical figure and the Phantom that will follow him wherever he goes.
The fact that it may be derived from Vaughan Williams (Example 16.1) does
not diminish its dramatic effectiveness in Phantom. The orchestra announces
the Phantom’s chromatic presence at the conclusion of “Prima Donna”; they
play it when audiences see Buquet’s dead body hanging from the stage,
when the Phantom makes the chandelier fall at the end of act I, and finally
when Christine publicly removes the Phantom’s mask during the perfor-
mance of Don Juan Triumphant. Another important motive that is effectively
associated with the Phantom is first heard fittingly on the words “He’s here,
the Phantom of the opera.” This occurs early in the work where it interrupts
Carlotta’s rendition of “Think of Me.” Like the chromatic figure, the motive
first associated with “He’s here, the Phantom of the opera,” will appear
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Enchanted Evenings
numerous times (at least eight), always in proximity with the Phantom—or
the idea of the Phantom—and always serving a persuasive dramatic effect.
On several occasions Lloyd Webber also goes beyond thematic recurrence
and creatively transforms his musical material. For example, the phrase
often repeated by the lead tenor Piangi—who futilely attempts to sing the
ascending whole-tone scale on the words, “Those who tang-”[without the
“le”], in the rehearsal of Don Juan Triumphant in act II, scene 4— was fore-
shadowed as violent orchestral underscoring when the Phantom curses
Christine in act I, scene 6, for removing his mask. The “I remember” phrase
that Christine sings at the beginning of this scene also returns in a loud and
dissonant version in the orchestral introduction of Don Juan Triumphant and
in a comparably dissonant choral version when the chorus begins the sung
portion of the work on the words “Here the sire may serve the dam” (shown
in the outlines of the online website).
All together, the first part of the “I remember” phrase appears no less than
fourteen times in the opera, more than any other motive; the second part by
itself appears on two other occasions.44 It is the first music sung in the Pro-
logue, the auction flashback which occurs forty-four years after the story’s
main action, and it is indeed possible that the aged Raoul remembers a major
phrase he himself heard his beloved Christine sing at the climactic moment
when she kisses the Phantom in his lair. But why do Buquet, Raoul, Madame
Giry, and the Phantom sing this theme? Its transformation in Don Juan Trium-
phant offers the possibility that the theme belongs to Christine and that she
has served as a muse and inspiration for the Phantom’s great and forward-
looking operatic work. Unfortunately, this possibility goes unrealized.
In the film, but not the original London cast album, the “I remember”
motive can be heard earlier, albeit softly, in the orchestra under the dialogue
that followed the moment when the backdrop fell in front of Carlotta, inter-
rupting her inappropriately operatic rendition of “Think of Me.” It reappears
in the film soon thereafter when viewers observe the Phantom stealthily
lock the door to Christine’s dressing room (an action not shown in the stage
version). Placing the short scene with Buquet and Madame Giry before the
continuation of the lair scene (the morning after) not only interrupts the con-
tinuity of the scene between Christine and the Phantom, but it also deprives
Christine of the opportunity to be the first to sing this motive in the main part
of the story. If Christine was the first to sing the motive, it would be possible
to imagine a scenario in which her music serves as the inspiration behind
the Phantom’s opera. It is not dramatically clear how Buquet and Madame
Giry would have heard a theme from this as-yet-unwritten work. By placing
this motive in the mouths of these characters, one must conclude that any-
one involved with the Phantom would know the “I remember” theme and
404
are free to use it in normal conversation. In this case, enhanced integration

results in a reduction of dramatic meaning. The theme no longer belongs to
Raoul and Christine. It belongs to anyone who knows the Phantom.
When audiences eventually hear Don Juan Triumphant they might realize
(perhaps on a second or third hearing) that the music the Phantom played
at his organ before Christine awoke to sing “I remember” functions in ret-
rospect as the starting point of this work. Here too audiences can imagine
the Phantom, inspired by Christine’s presence, formulating the seeds of his
masterpiece. Unfortunately, this possibility is removed when the orchestra
inexplicably returns to this theme as Raoul and Christine escape to the roof
toward the end of act I. It was noted previously that at the end of the Balcony
Scene in West Side Story an omniscient and clairvoyant orchestra explained
what the characters do not know (see Example 13.5). It is not clear in this
case what dramatic purpose is served by using the Phantom’s Don Trium-
phant theme to accompany the flight of Raoul and Christine. Instead, the
indiscriminate recycling of a theme becomes a lost opportunity to achieve a
meaningful dramatic association between theme and character.
The lair scene in act I contains other reminiscences of music previously
heard and new music that will be reheard in act II. In the former category,
the “I remember” motive and “Masquerade” appeared in the Prologue and
“Angel of Music” had set up associations between Christine and the Phan-
tom in Christine’s duet with Meg “After the Gala” (scene 2) and in Chris-
tine’s duet with the Phantom between the mirrors in “Christine’s Dressing
Room” (scene 3). The verse of “Music of the Night” (“I have brought you”),
which was anticipated in the “Little Lotte” music, returns in the perfor-
mance of Don Juan Triumphant as the verse for “The Point of No Return.”45
This latter return constitutes another meaningful and powerful connection
between the Phantom and Christine that retains these associations when
Christine employs its bridge and relates her visit to the Phantom’s lair with
Raoul in the final scene of act I, “The Roof of the Opera House” (scene 10).
The Phantom himself recalls the music of “Stranger Than You Dreamt It” in
the reprise of “Notes” in act II, scene 3, when he instructs the house to “Let
my opera begin!” to launch the performance of Don Juan Triumphant (at the
end of scene 6), and in the final confrontation with Raoul (scene 9).
The last important music introduced in the lair scene (“The Next Morn-
ing,” act I, scene 6) is the instrumental music that followed Christine’s
unmasking and the Phantom’s violent response. This is the theme that
so closely resembles Liù’s theme in Turandot (Example 16.3). On this first
appearance it is heard and not sung. Snelson describes this melody as the
“Sympathy” theme and Sternfeld labels it the “Yet in his eyes” phrase (I am
tempted to call it Liù’s theme). After the first unmasking in the lair, this
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Enchanted Evenings
theme will return four times, the last three of which are sung in three differ-
ent pairs of conversations: Christine to Raoul on the roof (“Yet in his eyes”),
Raoul to Christine shortly before Don Juan Triumphant (“You said yourself
he was nothing but a man”), and Christine to Phantom in his lair during the
final scene (“This haunted face holds no horror for me now”). It makes sense
why Christine, in describing the Phantom, would sing this music to Raoul
and why she would return to this phrase in the final scene. On the other
hand, the appropriation of the phrase by Raoul seems gratuitous. Although
audiences might understand how he would know this theme, it remains
unpersuasive why he would choose to sing it.
The next appropriation by Raoul of the Phantom’s music is fully appro-
priate. It also demonstrates what is arguably the most ingenious trans-
formation from one theme into another in the work and a transformation
that also makes a strong dramatic point. The appropriation occurs in the
opening phrase of “All I Ask of You,” the love duet between Raoul and
Christine in the final scene of act I, scene 10.46 Raoul’s tune, later sung by
Christine as well, bears three subtle but collectively meaningful connec-
tions with Phantom’s serenade to Christine in his lair in scene 5. Sung by
the Phantom as a solo, “The Music of the Night” possessed serenity and
a seductiveness that is never fully recaptured again when it is reprised.
Nevertheless, its initial power is sufficient to persuade audiences, and
Christine, that the Phantom, indeed for the first time in many adapta-
tions, offers a viable romantic alternative to Raoul. After a gentle sus-
tained D-flat major harmony for four measures, the harmony moves for
the first time to a second harmony on the words “Silently the senses” (this
is the phrase that borrows directly from Puccini’s Il Fanciulla shown in
Example 16.2). The harmony selected, the subdominant (G-flat major) cre-
ates a hymn-like quality that returns on the note of the song (on the word
“night”), which can be identified as an enhanced plagal IV-I (or Amen)
cadence from G to D. Similarly, Raoul’s “All I Ask of You” opens with a
tonic pedal, also on D for more than two full measures before it moves to
its second chord, which not coincidentally is also a IV chord on G (on the
words “harm you”).
The connections between “The Music of the Night” and “All I Ask of
You” are even more striking and recognizable, as both songs share an identi-
cal final phrase. Just as the verse of “Music of the Night” (“I have brought
you”) returns to introduce the verse of “The Point of No Return” (“You
have come here”), the final phrase of “All I Ask of You” shares the same
music as the end of “The Music of the Night” (in each case incorporating the
words of the song’s title, another fleeting contrafactum). But the openings of
each song are also remarkably intertwined, albeit subtly so. Snelson offers
406
a musical example in which he juxtaposes these openings and explains per-

ceptively that “the opening phrase of one is pretty much a musical anagram
of the other, for both melodies encompass the same pitches, A -D -E -F, and
both are bounded by their dominant at lower and upper octaves.”47 Both
openings also reach these lower and upper dominants the same way, by a
two-note descent from F to A-flat (ironically on the syllable “sharpens” in
“Music of the Night” and “darkness” in “All I Ask of You”) and an eighth-
note ascent, D -E -F, that arrives on A at the end of the phrase in the sec-
ond measure of each song. In singing this “duet” between the Phantom and
Raoul, one could follow the first phrase of either song with the first phrase
of the other without any loss of coherence.
Snelson offers a persuasive explanation as to why Raoul appropriates the
Phantom’s unheard theme:
Both men are trying to lure their prey, initially one ostensibly for
art and one for human love, but ultimately both for emotional and
physical love; both are investing Christine with their own desires
and aspirations; each represents a different potential within Chris-
tine. . . . The Phantom and Raoul are reflections of each other—each
defining himself through his opposite number—yet they share a
common purpose in the seduction of Christine; and so it is appro-
priate that their two big vocal gestures should have common fea-
tures.48
More than any other factor, it is the song “Music of the Night” that persuades
Christine (and the audience) that the Phantom should be taken seriously as
a romantic alternative to Raoul. In “The Point of No Return,” Raoul gains
the trust and love of Christine by usurping the Phantom’s music, making it
his own, and thus breaking the spell. In the end, Lloyd Webber’s Christine
sings the music of the Sympathy (or Liù’s) theme, “Yet in his eyes,” and
ultimately rejects the Phantom, the man who developed her potential as an
artist. Instead, she chooses the soon-to-be-endangered Raoul, the man who
offers a life of wealth and high society but who might not embrace Chris-
tine’s professional career. It is crucial to the Lloyd Webber-Prince vision of the
story that the reason Christine decides as she does is neither the Phantom’s
“haunted face” nor any lack of musical talent, but the Phantom’s venge-
ful, murderous, and immoral soul. It is striking that Lloyd Webber gives
Christine one of her most original and expressive melodies (and a melody
that does not belong to anyone else) to express her conflict about whether
to regard the Phantom as an angel or a monster (“Twisted every way what
answer can I give?).49
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Enchanted Evenings
In addition to borrowing and reuse issues, some may legitimately wonder

why in a non-rock score the title song should contain such a prominent
rock beat or why the Meyerbeer parody, Il Muto, which sets up for the most
part a reasonable facsimile of mid-nineteenth-century French grand opera
style, would include a generic pop song “Think of Me” that undermines the
evocation of a historical style. In the film, servants insert ear plugs when
Carlotta begins to sing in an overdone operatic manner and remove them
when Christine continues with her lighter and more pop manner, modeling
a nihilistic boredom with the opera tradition for a presumably appreciative
audience—yet this is the same tradition Lloyd Webber draws on frequently
(although relatively few in the audience know it).50 Is it fair to ask “What
would Sondheim do” or is popularity the final critical arbiter for these
decisions?
Lloyd Webber may not be Sondheim, but his ability to reach audiences is
impressive. Phantom, the show that Snelson and other authorities considers
the Lloyd Webber show “most assured of a place in the canon,” is a musical
that authors of surveys on Broadway should take seriously for its stage-
craft, theatrical polish, and memorable melodies.51 Snelson admirably sums
up the significance of this achievement: “His work has inspired a visceral
response to be praised for itself, and the enjoyment in the dramatic moment
or the phrase that catches the ear so effectively is not to be lightly dismissed.
This, after all, is fundamental to the greatest of musicals composers and the
most long-lived of shows.”52
Although Lloyd Webber continued to grow musically in his next two musi-
cals Aspects of Love (1989) and Sunset Boulevard (1993), he would not be able to
capture the magic that placed Broadway audiences in raptures over Cats and
Phantom of the Opera for so many years. Aspects of Love not only received a criti-
cal bashing, but it lasted less than a year on Broadway, and while Sunset Boule-
vard won the major Tony Awards and had a relatively long run, it managed to
lose a record $25 million.53 After Sunset, Lloyd Webber was unable to secure a
Broadway venue for either of his next two shows, Whistle Down the Wind (1996)
or The Beautiful Game (2000), and his next return to New York was as a producer
(not a composer) for Bombay Dreams (2003), another failure. In fact, since Sunset
Boulevard closed, only one new Lloyd Webber show, The Woman in White, man-
aged a short New York engagement (108 performances) in 2004.
Just as Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals typically fared far better in New
York than in London, Lloyd Webber’s shows were more warmly received on
his home turf with the exception of the initial run of Joseph and the Amazing
Technicolor Dreamcoat.54 The pattern continued with the shows that followed
Phantom, although none were hits on the order of Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita,
408
Cats, Phantom, or Starlight Express (which failed in New York). The London
Aspects of Love ran four years and Sunset Boulevard ran 1,529 performances
(but still lost money). Whistle Down the Wind, which did not even make it to
New York, ran a respectable 1,044 performances in London. Even in Lon-
don, however, The Beautiful Game, another non-starter in New York, closed
after only eleven months (and is currently being reworked as The Boys in the
Photograph), and The Woman in White barely lasted 500 performances.
As of this writing Lloyd Webber’s next show is on the verge of a produc-
tion in London, if not New York, in 2009. Consistent with his longtime prac-
tice, Lloyd Webber’s guests at Sydmonton were treated to a run-through of
act I in July 2008. The show is a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, currently
called Phantom: Love Never Dies, and is based on Frederick Forsyth’s 1999
novel The Phantom of Manhattan. According to press reports, the new Phan-
tom takes place in Coney Island in 1906 where Erik has escaped to run a
freak show. For those who feared that marriage to Raoul would thwart her
career Christine is now a famous prima donna. Unfortunately, Raoul has
turned into a dissolute version of Ravenal, not only broke but “a drunken
wreck.” New York Post reporter Michael Riedel provides another clue to the
plot that leads to unanswered questions: “Christine has a child, Gustave, but
is his father Raoul or the Phantom? I can’t tell you because no one’s seen the
second act yet.”55
I began this chapter with analogies between Puccini and Lloyd Webber,
two phenomenally successful composers for the theatrical stage who are
also burdened by a corresponding lack of critical esteem. One can defend
or attack either Puccini or Lloyd Webber, and although probably less com-
mon, some might remain neutral or agnostic and simply report the parallel
criticisms that have followed these perpetually successful and controversial,
well-loved and but loathed composers. When it comes to Lloyd Webber, it
is admittedly not easy to help those who passionately disbelieve in Lloyd
Webber’s work to gain appreciation of this crucially important West End
and Broadway composer or those who revere him to discover serious flaws.
It should be repeated that, up to this point, the atheists outweigh the faithful
and the revisionists. The intention here is to neither praise nor bury Caesar
but to try to understand both “the problem of Lloyd Webber” and the plea-
sure he gives to so many.
Although, as Sternfeld points out, “almost every Lloyd Webber show
receives at least a few raves, and most garner mixed reviews rather than out-
right pans,” the criticism of Lloyd Webber and his creative output remains
a real problem that I have tried to confront.56 Perhaps Lloyd Webber has
become a symbol, something like Paul Whiteman, a musical figure whose
financial success and popularity seem disproportionate to his merits. In the
409
Enchanted Evenings
company of music historians I might lead a sheltered life, but I can not think
of anyone other than Whiteman or perhaps Kenny G in the jazz field who
inspires the kind of antipathy reserved for Lloyd Webber. In any event, as I
have tried to show, Andrew Lloyd Webber is a Broadway phenomenon that
scholars and historians, if not his idolaters, need to face rather than ignore.
His work, although, as I have argued, flawed, has proven lasting and influ-
ential as well as popular and merits our attention and respect.
410
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INDEX
A Guide to the Index

• The Index includes all names and works in the main text and selective entries for names
and works that appear in the online website (Synopses, Discography and Filmography,
Appendices, and Notes).
• Titles in bold indicate the major shows and films discussed in Enchanted Evenings.
• Titles of musicals, films, plays, operas, novels, and miscellaneous other works are placed in
italics.
• Titles of songs are placed in “quotes.”
• Composers and authors are placed in parentheses after the title, and categories of works
other than musicals are indicated in [brackets].
• Page numbers in italics indicate musical examples.
• Page numbers in bold indicate drawings and photographs.
• Numbers preceded by a W indicate pages in the online website.
“Abbondanza” (Loesser), 250, 252 “Ah Still Suits Me” (Kern and Hammerstein),
Abbott, George, xviii, xxvi, 47, 86, 87, 89, 26, 157, 159, W80n41
90–91, 92, 100, 101, 104, 190, 235, 281, 396 “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” (Herbert and
Adams, Franklin P., 46 Young), W98n15
Addison, Adele, 169 Aida ( John and Rice), xxvii
“Adelaide” (Loesser), 322, W111n21 “Alabama-Song” (Brecht and Weill), 141
“Adelaide’s Lament” (Loesser), 231, 238, 246, Aladdin (Porter and Perelman), 152, 232
321, 322 Alda, Robert, 242
Adler (Richard) and Ross ( Jerry), 14, Alexander’s Ragtime Band [film], 156
W77n20 All About Eve [film], 320
Adler, Thomas, P., 336 “All I Ask of You” (Lloyd Webber and Hart),
Adorno, Theodor, xii 397, 401, 403, 406–7, W133n46
“After the Ball” (Harris), 391 All Quiet on the Western Front [film], 165
“Ah, but Underneath” (Sondheim), 377 “All the Things You Are” (Kern and
“Ah, Miss” (Sondheim), 359, 362 Hammerstein), 39, 344
425
Index
“All Through the Night” (Porter), 40, 44, 53, As Thousands Cheer (Berlin), 346, W84n27,
159, 164, W85n32 W126n28
Allegro (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 136, “The Ascot Gavotte” (Lerner and Loewe),
143, 213, 346 265, 274, 326
All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare) Asimov, Isaac, W121n52
[play], 318 Aspects of Love (Lloyd Webber and Hart and
“Alms . . . alms . . .” (Sondheim), 358, 360, 362 Black), 386, 408, 409, W130n2
Alpert, Hollis, W86n6, W123n83 Assassins (Sondheim), 337, 338, 366, 379, 382
“Always True To You in My Fashion” Astaire, Fred, 85, 87, 136, 156, 178, 189, 190
(Porter), 223, 318 Astaire (Fred and Adele), 60, 190
Ameche, Don, 150 Astaire (Fred) and Rogers (Ginger), 39, 156, 157
“America” (words by S. F. Smith) [same “At the Fair” (Kern and Hammerstein), 27, 160
melody as “God Save the King”], 391 Atkinson, Brooks, 20, 43–44, 46, 62–63, 86–87,
“America” (Bernstein and Sondheim), 280, 89, 101, 102, 114, 198–99, 253, 254, 259, 262,
284, 295, 328, 329, 330, W118n27, W122n75 279, W87n25
An American in Paris [film], 190, 263, Australia [film], 314
W125n25 Avalon Boys quartet, 164, 175
An American in Paris (Gershwin), 59 Avenue Q (Lopez and Marx), xxvii,
“Anacreon in Heaven” [same melody as Star Ayers, Lemuel, 341
Spangled Banner], 391 Azaria, Hank, 181, 182
Anderson, Marian, 169, W87n39
Anderson, Maxwell, 136, 152 Babbitt, Milton, 344–46, 347, W126n26,
Andresen-Thom, Martha, 230 W126n30
Andrews, Julie, 261, 271, 278, 325, W124n18 Babes in Arms (Rodgers and Hart), 84, 101, 180
Androcles and the Lion (Rodgers), W107n33 Babington, Bruce, and Peter William Evans,
“Angel of Music” (Lloyd Webber and Hart), 311–12
403, 405 “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (Loesser), 235, 244,
“Angry Tony” (Loesser), 248 250
Annie Get Your Gun (Berlin and Fields), 14, Bach, J. S., 241, 389
216, 243, W77n21, W83n71 Bacchanale ballet (Weill), 136–37
“Another Op’nin’, Another Show” (Porter), Bailey, Pearl, 169
219, 221, 222, 315 Balanchine, George, xxvi, 88, 190
Anstey, F. [pseudonym of Thomas Anstey Balcony Scene. See “Tonight”
Guthrie], 136 “Bali Ha’i” (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 84,
“Any Old Place with You” (Rodgers and 108–9, W114n24
Hart), 83 “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” (Brecht and
Anyone Can Whistle (Sondheim), 308, Weill), 142, 143
335–36, 337 “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (Sondheim),
Anything Goes (Porter) [musical], xviii, 352, 354, 355, 356, 359, 363
6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 40–57 (41), 86, 89, 92, Ballet Sequence (Bernstein), 305, 329, 330
101, 103, 111, 147, 155, 215, 221, 237, 238, The Band Wagon (Schwartz and Dietz)
245, 247, 358, 373, 378; Synopsis (W1); [film], 87
Discography and Filmography (W11–12); Banfield, Stephen, xiii-xiv, xv, xxi, xxiv,
Appendix A (W26); Appendix E (W42–44); xxvii, 159, 280, 351, 352, 379, 386–88,
Notes (W100n61) W76n13, W122n73, W122n 77, W127n48,
Anything Goes [1936 film], xxiii, xxiv, 51, 155, W130n99–100
158, 163, 163–66, 175, 191, 217, 218, 231, 317 Bankhead, Tallulah, 49
Anything Goes [1956 film], 159 Barlow, Samuel, 136
“Anything Goes” (Porter), xi, 53, 55–56, 57, Barnes, Howard, W100n59
164, 218, W85n43 Barnett, Etta Moten, 70
Arden, Eve, 188 Bathing at Asnières [painting] (Seurat), 365–66
Arlen, Harold, 5, 14, 136, 152, W77n20 Batman films (Burton), 398
Armitage, Merle, 67 “Be Like the Bluebird” (Porter), 53
Aronson, Boris, 346 Bean Theme (Sondheim), 372–73 (372)
Around the World in Eighty Days (Porter), 215 Beaton, Cecil, 265, 323, 324, W124n16
Arms and the Man (Shaw), 263 The Beautiful Game (Lloyd Webber and Elton),
Armstrong, Louis, 59 408, 409
“Art for Art’s Sake” (Blitzstein), 11, 123, 126, Beauty and the Beast (Ashman, Menken, and
127, 128, 186 Rice), xxi, xxvii
426
Index
The Beauty Prize (Kern and Wodehouse), 33 Bloom, Harold, 277, W76n7, W110n35
“Been a Long Day” (Loesser), 259 Blore, Eric, 156
Beethoven, Ludwig, 126, 127, 128, 338, 382, Blossom Time (Romberg and Donnelly), 390,
W129n78 W131n17
“Being Alive” (Sondheim), W130n95 “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” (Porter), 40, 53, 55,
“Begin the Beguine” (Porter), 215 159, 164
Beggar on Horseback (Kaufman and Blue Monday (Gershwin), 59
Connelly), 341 Blues (from “The Dance at the Gym”)
The Beggar’s Opera (Gay) [opera], 349 (Bernstein), 295, 305, W118n32
“Being Alive” (Sondheim), 377, 378–79 Boccherini, Luigi, W103n29
Belafonte, Harry, 59, 169 Bock ( Jerry) and Harnick (Sheldon), xxvi
Belgrad, Doug, 327 Bogin, Abba, W112n43
Bell, Michel, 27 Boléro (Ravel), 104
Bells Are Ringing (Styne, Comden and Green), Bolger, Ray, 85, 86, 91, 235, 236
281, W116n2 Bolton, Guy, 46, 47, 50. See also Wodehouse
Bennett, Michael, xxvii, 346, 348, 374, 376, (P. G.) and Bolton (Guy)
W129n87 Bombay Dreams (Rahman and Black), 408
Bennett, Robert Russell, 20, 73, W80n47 “Bon Voyage” (Porter), 44
“Bench Scene” (Rodgers and Hammerstein), Bond, Christopher, 349, 352–53
199–206 (203) Bordman, Gerald, xiii, xix, 52, W73n4,
Benchley, Robert, W78n12 W78n8, W80n46, W80n47, W98n21
“Benvenuta” (Loesser), 255, 256 Bordoni, Irene, 42, 49
Berg, Alban, 59, 143, 254, 301 Boris Gudunov (Musorgsky), 28
Berg, A. Scott, 171, 319 Born to Dance [film], 156, 189
Bergman, Ingrid, 195 Borodin, Alexander, 233
Berlin, Irving, 5, 15, 156, 216, 217, 234, 243, “Boruch attah adonoi” ( Jewish prayer), 77
250, W77n20 Boswell, John, 211
Berlioz, Hector, 355 Boublil (Alain) and Schönberg (Claude-
Berman, Pandro, W90n7 Michel), xxi, xxvi, xxvii, 394
Bernstein, Aline, W98n17 Boulanger, Nadia, 116
Bernstein, Felicia, 282, W120n44 Bounce (Sondheim). See Road Show
Bernstein, Leonard, xii, xxvi, 6, 11, 15, 114, “A Bowler Hat” (Sondheim), 379
136, 279–308 (284), 327–32, 335, 336, 342, “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love.” See “I
348, 350, 351, 365, 382, 392, W115n46, Have a Love”
W129n82 The Boys from Syracuse (Rodgers and Hart),
“Bess, You Is My Woman Now” (G. and I. 47, 84, 97, 101
Gershwin and Heyward), 59, 66, 67, 69, 75, The Boys in the Photograph. See The Beautiful
76, 79–80, 81 Game
Bess’s theme (Gershwin), 78–80, W89n81 Brando, Marlon, 319, 320–21, 325
“The Best Years of His Life” (Weill and I. Brecht, Bertolt, 112, 116, 117, 120, 124, 131,
Gershwin), 140, 145 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 183
The Best Years of Our Lives [film], 320 Breen, Joseph, 164
“Bewitched” (Rodgers and Hart), 98, 104–7 Brice, Fanny, 105
(106), 110, 111, 179, 238 Bridge, Andrew, 387
Beymer, Richard, 328 Brigadoon (Lerner and Loewe), 14, 263, 278
“Bianca” (Porter), 217, 218, 224, 226, 228, 315 Brightman, Sarah, 385, 395, W7
“Big D” (Loesser), 252, 253, 254, 255 Bristow, Eugene K., and J. Kevin Butler, 336–37
“Bill” (Kern, Wodehouse, and Hammerstein), Broadway Melody of 1940 [film], 156, 189
26, W81n52 Broderick, Matthew, 259
Bing, Rudolf, W87n39 “Brotherhood of Man” (Loesser), 245
Björnson, Maria, 387 Brown, Anne, 175
Blackwell, Harolyn, 177 Brown, Gwynne Kuhner, W88n67, W102n14
Blades, Rubén, 184 Brown, Jason Robert, xxvi
Blaine, Vivian, 321 Brown, Joe E., 158
Blakemore, Michael, xviii Brown, John Mason, 102
Blitzstein, Marc, xxvi, 11, 15, 112–28 (113), 136, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” (Porter), 219,
144, 180–86, 284, 286, W115n46, W121n67 225, 226, 318
Block, Geoffrey, W74n12, W76n13, W77n25, Brynner, Yul, 324
W121n63 Bubbles, John W., 71
427
Index
Buckley, Betty, W125n1 394; Synopsis (W1–2); Discography and

“Buddie, Beware” (Porter), 45, 46, 50, 358 Filmography (W12); Appendix A (W26);
Bullets over Broadway [film], 180 Appendix L (W52); Notes (W116n60)
Burleske for piano and orchestra (R. Strauss), Carousel [film], 309, 310–14 (311), 324
W118n26 “The Carousel Waltz” (Rodgers), 206, 207,
Burns (George) and Allen (Gracie), 190 312, 313
Burton, Humphrey, 294, W118n29, W121n57 Carroll, Diahann, 59, 169
Burton, Richard, 278 Cariou, Len, 349
Burton, Tim, xxiii, 349, 355, 360–61, 363, 364, Carter, Forrest, 72
365, 398 Carter, Helena Bonham, 361, 363
Burrows, Abe, 237–38, 252, 259, 320 Carter, Tim, xxii, W74n8, W104n5
“A Bushel and a Peck” (Loesser), 322 The Cat and the Fiddle (Kern and Harbach),
Busoni, Ferruccio, 136, 262 39, 88, 189
Butler, Gerard, 399 Cats, xxi, xxvii, 173, 385, 386, 387, 395, 408,
“Buzzard Song” (G. Gershwin and 409, W131n2, W131n5
Heyward), 7, 65–69, 75, 76, 81, 170, 175 Cha-Cha (from “The Dance at the Gym”)
By George (Sondheim), 340, W125n15 (Bernstein), 295, 305
By Jeeves (Lloyd Webber and Ayckbourn), 385 Chakiris, George, 327
By Jupiter (Rodgers and Hart), 84, 85, 109 Chamberlain, Richard, 260
“By the Sea” (Sondheim), 359, 364 Chaney, Lon, 396, 400
“Chansons Romanesque” (Ravel), W118n27
Cabaret (Kander and Ebb), xix, xxvi, 16, 347, Chapin, Theodore S., 89–90, W127n32
348, W100n55 Chapman, John, 198, 262, 280
Cabaret [revival], xxvii, 89 Chapman, Marguerite, 67
Cabin in the Sky [film], 156 Charley’s Aunt (Thomas), 235
Cagney, James, 4 Chee-Chee, 85, 87, W100n53
Cahn, Sammy, 159 “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White”
Call Me Madam (Berlin), 281 (Louiguy), 390, W132n19
Calling All Cars [radio drama], 165 Chevalier, Maurice, 190
Camelot (Lerner and Loewe), 152, 277–78, Chicago (Kander and Ebb) [revival], xxvii, 89,
W116n63 349, 387
Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 267, W115n34 Chicago [film], 310, 331, 364, 402
Can-Can (Porter), 216, 232 “Chicago” (Rodgers and Hart). See “A Great
“Can That Boy Foxtrot!” (Sondheim), 374, Big Town”
W129n77 The Chichester Psalms (Bernstein), W118n33
“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (Kern and Childhood Dream (Weill), 146
Hammerstein), 28, 29, 31, 158, 161, 199 The Chocolate Soldier (Straus), 262, 263
Candide (Bernstein and Wilbur et al.), 89, A Chorus Line (Hamlisch, Kleban, Kirkwood,
234, 243, 282, 283, 286, 289, 301, 308, 347, and Dante), xxvii, 349
348, 378, W111n34, W118n35, W122n74, Chromolume music (Sondheim), 368
W123n80, W128n73 Cinderella (Rodgers and Hammerstein)
Calloway, Cab, 166, 169 [television], W107n34
“Captain Andy’s Ballyhoo” (Kern and Circus Dream (Weill), 136, 138, 139, 140, 144,
Hammerstein), 34, 161 145, 146, 186, 231
Captain Andy’s theme (Kern and Citizen Kane [film], 353
Hammerstein), 29, 30, 31, 38 Citron, Marcia, 171
Carefree (Berlin) [film], 136, 156 Citron, Stephen, 389, 390, 393, W107n10,
“Carefully Taught” (Rodgers and W107n11, W132n22
Hammerstein), 214 City of Angels (Coleman and Zippel), 348
Carey, MacDonald, 146 “City on Fire!” 359, 363
Carmelina (Lane and Lerner), 278 Clair de Lune (Debussy), 377
Carmen (Bizet) [opera], 64, 169, 295, 349 “Clap Yo’ Hands” (G. and I. Gershwin), 190
Carmichael, Hoagy, 5, 234 Clapham, John, W80n47
Caron, Leslie, 325 “Clara, Clara” (G. Gershwin and Heyward),
Carousel (Rodgers and Hammerstein) W90n81
[musical], xi, xviii, xxii, xxvi, 11, 12, 14, Clayton, Jan, xi, 202
26, 39, 47, 54, 83, 84, 100, 143, 147, 172, Clément, Catherine, W110n38
176, 195–214 (202), 213, 215, 216, 218, The Client [film], 398
221, 231, 233, 241, 280, 281, 338, 342, 358, Climb High (Sondheim), 341
428
Index
Cochran, C. B., 49 Crouse (Timothy) and Weidman ( John), 46,

Coco (Previn and Lerner), 278 48, 49, 50
Cohan, George M., 4, 136 Crown’s theme (Gershwin), 78
“Cold and Dead” (Loesser), 257 Crowther, Bosley, 168
Coleman, Cy, xxvi, 348 Cruse, Harold, 71
Coleman, Robert, 20, 252, 261–62, 279 Crystal, Billy, 392
“Color and Light” (Sondheim), 368 Cukor, George, 310, 324, 325, 327
“C’Mon Folks” (Kern and Hammerstein), 25, 159 Cummings, Jack, 319
Comden (Betty) and Green (Adolph), 348 Cusack, Joan, 182
“Come to Me, Bend to Me” (Lerner and Cusack, John, 182
Loewe), 391
“Come to the Ball” (Lerner and Loewe), 265, Dahlhaus, Carl, 346
275–76 “Dalla sua pace” (Mozart), 44
“Comedy Tonight” (Sondheim), 347 Daly, Tyne, W125n1
Company (Sondheim), xix, 14, 336, 337, 338, Damn Yankees (Adler and Ross), 14, 47, 233,
344, 347, 348, 366, 374, 377, 378, 379, 382, W116n2
386, W131n4 A Damsel in Distress (G. and I. Gershwin)
The concept musical, xx, 346–47 [film], 82, 190
Concerto in F (Gershwin), 59 Dance a Little Closer (Strouse and Lerner), 278
Conch Town (Bernstein), 284 The Dance at the Gym (Bernstein), 280, 287,
A Connecticut Yankee (Rodgers and Hart), 42, 295, 304, 305, 329, 330, W118n32
83, 84, 101, 110, 190 “Dance Away the Night” (Kern and
Conrad, Jon Alan, 295 Hammerstein), 24, 27, W80n36
The Consul (Menotti), 14 “Dancing on the Ceiling” (Rodgers and
“The Continental” (Magidson and Hart), 83
Conrad), 156 Dandridge, Dorothy, xxiii, 167, 168, 170, 173
Conway, Tim, 188 Darby, Ken, 168
“Cool” (Bernstein and Sondheim), 280, Da Silva, Howard, W95n8, W103n31
289, 295, 299, 303, 304, 305, 328, 329, 330, Davis (Blevins) and (Robert) Breen, 67, 69,
W122n75, W123n82 166, 168, 169
Copland, Aaron, 112, 115, 136, W97n41 Davis, Lee, 43, W83n2
Costello, Donald P., 268, 269, W115n38 Davis, Miles, 59
“Cotton Blossom” (Kern and Hammerstein), Davis, Sammy Jr., 59, 169
28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 162 The Day before Spring (Lerner and Loewe), 262
“Cottontail” (Ellington), 391 Dearest Enemy (Rodgers and Hart), 83, 85, 212
“Country House” (Sondheim), 377 Debussy, Claude, 22, 59, 213, 377, 378, 382, 397
Cowan, Lester, 187 De Carlo, Yvonne, 374
Coward, Noël, 103, 150, 266 De Mille, Agnes, xxvi, 136–37, 187, 195, 312
Coyne, Jeanne, 316, 318 De Paul, Gene, W77n20
The Cradle Will Rock (Blitzstein) [musical], Decker, Todd, xxi
xviii, xxvi, 11, 12–13, 14, 112–28, 243, 379, “Dein ist mein Herz.” See “Ungeduld”
382; Synopsis (W2–3); Discography and De-Lovely [film], 189
Filmography (W13); Appendix A (W27); “Den of Iniquity” (Rodgers and Hart), 104, 108
Appendix I (W49); Notes (W121n67) Depp, Johnny, xxiii, xxvi, 349, 361, 363
Cradle Will Rock [film], 180–86 (181) The Desert Song (Romberg, Harbarch and
Crawford, Cheryl, 63, 64, 102, 134, 136, 137, Hammerstein), 4, 21,
166, 168, 173, W98n21 DeSylva, B. G. (“Buddy”), 186, W76n6
Crawford, Michael, 387, W7 Di Frasso, “Countess,” 103
Crawford, Richard, 7, 64, W73n6 Dies irae, 354–58 (356–57), 360, 390
Crazy for You (G. and I. Gershwin and Dietrich, Marlene, 136, W98n20
Ludwig), xiii, 13 Dietz, Robert, W96n38, W113n17
Cregar, Laird, 353 D’Indy, Vincent, 42
Croce, Arlene, W97n15 Do I Hear a Waltz? (Rodgers and Sondheim),
“Croon-Spoon” (Blitzstein), 11, 118–121 (119, 213, 308, 336, 359, W127n53
120), 123, 186 “Do It the Hard Way” (Rodgers and Hart),
Crosby, Bing, xxiii, xxiv, 159, 163, 164, 165, 103, 110, 180
232, W96n31, W102n13 “Dr. Crippen” (Weill and Nash), 142
Crouse, Russel. See Lindsay (Howard) and Don Juan Triumphant (Lloyd Webber and
Crouse (Russel) Hart), 397, 403, 404, 405, 406
429
Index
Donne, John, 371 Evita (Lloyd Webber and Rice), 115, 348,
“Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” (Lloyd 385, 386, 387, 389, 390, 391, 394, 395, 408,
Webber and Rice), 385 W131n4
Downes, Olin, 62–63, 70, W87n25 Ewen, David, 67, 84, W73n4, W86n6,
Drake, Alfred, 223, W107n3 W105n21, W131n2
Dream Ballet Sequence (Bernstein), 306,
W122n75 Fancy Free (Bernstein) [ballet], 281, 282
Dreamgirls [film], 310 Fanfare for the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy
Dreigroschenoper (Brecht and Weill). See The (Bernstein), W118n34
Threepenny Opera Fantasia [film], 156, W125n25
Drew, David, 131–32, 140 “Fascinating Rhythm” (G. and
Dubarry Was a Lady (Porter), 189, 215 I. Gershwin), 190
Duke, Vernon, 63, 82 Faust (Gounod), 397
Dumont, Margaret, 51, 92, 165 Faye, Frances, 59
Duncan, Todd, 62, 67, 74 Feather, Leonard, W89n70
Dunne, Irene, 157, 160, W101n5 Feminism, 229–32
Durante, Jimmy, 190 Ferber, Edna, 22, 34, 39
“The Dybbuk” (Ansky) [folktale], 58 Fetter, Ted, 164
Feuer (Cy) and Martin (Ernest), 235, 237
“E lucevan le stelle” (Puccini), 403, W109n29 Fidelio (Beethoven) [opera], 350
E. T. [film], 151, 386 Fiddler on the Roof (Bock and Harnick), xix,
El Salón Mexico (Copland), W118n27 14, 16, 277, 308, 317, 324, 347
The Earl and the Girl (Kern and Laska), 22 Fields, Dorothy, 5, 39
East Side Story (early title of West Side Story), Fifty Million Frenchmen (Porter), 40, 189
283, 284 Film adaptations of Broadway musicals,
“Easy to Love” (Porter), 40, 44, 46, W85n40 153–91, 309–32, 398–402
Ed Sullivan Show, 278 Finales (Kiss Me, Kate), 224, 225
Ed Wood [film], 363 The Firebrand of Florence (Weill and I.
Edens, Roger, 190 Gershwin), 140, 143, 152
Edward Scissorhands [film], 363 First Symphony (Mahler), 28
Eells, George, 42, 43, 49, 226 “Finishing the Hat” (Sondheim), 369, 370,
Egmont (Goethe) [play], 126 374–75
Egmont Overture (Beethoven), 126, 127, 128, Finn, William, xxvi
W121n67 Fiorello! (Bock and Harnick), 47, 233, 347
1812 Overture (Tchaikovsky), 104 “First Midnight” (Sondheim), 373
Eisler, Hanns, 116 Fitzgerald, Ella, 59
“Ein Ton” (Cornelius), 127 Flaherty (Stephen) and Ahrens (Lynn), xxvi
Ellen, Vera, 190 Die Fledermaus (Strauss Jr.), 36, 319
Ellington, Duke, 5, 71 “Flow My Tears” (Dowland), 258
Ellis, Bob, 186 Flower Drum Song (Rodgers and
Elwes, Cary, 184 Hammerstein), 176, 331, W107n34
Embassy Ball music (Loewe), 264 “The Flower Garden of My Heart” (Rodgers
“Emperor” Concerto (Beethoven), 285, 286, and Hart), 104, 109
296, W118n27, W122n73 Follies (Sondheim), xx, 7, 336, 337, 338, 348,
Emperor Jones (Gruenberg) [opera], 366, 373–78, 379, 382, 386, 387; Discography
W85–86n2, W87n39 and Filmography (W13–14); Appendix R
Engel, Lehman, xiii, xix, xx, xxvi, 14–15, (W63–65); Notes (W126n31, W131n4)
21, 67, 103, 111, 115, 133, 276–77, W73n4, Follow the Fleet [film], 156
W94n3 “Follow the Fold” (Loesser), 241, 244, 245
“Epiphany” (Sondheim), 355, 358, 359, 360 Fontaine, Joan, 190
Errico, Melissa, 260 “Foolish Heart” (Weill and Nash), 147,
Erwin, Trudi, 178, 179 187, 188
Esslin, Martin, 112 Footlight Parade [film], 156
Evergreen (Rodgers and Hart), 83 Forget Paris [film], 392
“Every Day a Little Death” (Sondheim), 359 Forte, Allen, W94n58
“Everybody Loves Louis: (Sondheim), 366 “Forty Minutes for Lunch” (Weill), 147
Everyone Says I Love You [film], 180 42nd Street [revival] (Warren, Dubin, Stewart,
“Everything’s Coming Up Roses” (Styne and and Bramble), xxvii
Sondheim), W85n38 42nd Street [film], 156
430
Index
Fosse, Bob, 103, 316, 318, W100n55 Gestus, 141–142

Four Saints in Three Acts (Thomson and Stein) “Get Me to the Church on Time” (Lerner and
[opera], 62, W77n19 Loewe), 275, W115n50
Four Weddings and a Funeral [film], 327 Geva, Tamara, 86
Franck, César, 94 Gibbs, Wolcott, 101
Freed, Arthur, 155, 189 Giddins, Gary, W89n70, W102n13
Freedley, Vinton, 43, W86n5 Gigi (Lerner and Loewe) [film], 265, 277,
Freedley (Vinton) and Aarons (Alex), 42, 60 278, 324
“The Freedom of the Press” (Blitzstein), 117, Gilbert (William Schwenck) and Sullivan
121–24 (122–23) (Arthur Seymour), xii, 4, 349, 385
Der Freischütz (Weber) [opera], 350 Gilbert, Steven E., W94n58
Freud, Sigmund, 85 Girl Crazy (G. and I. Gershwin), xiii, 60,
“Friendship” (Porter), 40, 46, 215, W85n43 189, 335
Friml, Rudolf, 4, W77n20 The Girl from Utah (Kern et al.), 22
From Here to Eternity [film], 322 The Girls Upstairs (early version of Follies),
“From This Moment On” (Porter), 318 373, 374, W129n74
Frye, Northrop, 16 “Glad to Be Unhappy” (Rodgers and Hart), 88
“Fugue for Tinhorns” (Loesser), 241–44, “A Glamorous Life” (Sondheim), W128n65
243–44, 321 Glamour Dream (Weill), 144, 145, 146, 186
“Funiculi, Funiculà” (Denza and Turco), 223, Gleason, Johanna, 387
254 Gloria’s Romance [film], W80n44
Funke, Lewis, 46–47 Goetschius, Percy, 84, 105–6
Funny Face (G. and I. Gershwin), 60 “God Save the King,” 391
Funny Face [film], 154, 158 “God, That’s Good!” 363
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum Gold (Sondheim). See Road Show
(Sondheim), 335, 337, 338, 342, 347, 348, 360 Gold Diggers of 1933 [film], 156
Furth, George, 346 Goldberg, Isaac, 66, 72
Golden Boy [film], 172
“Gallivantin’ Aroun’” (Kern and Goldbeck, Eva, 183
Hammerstein), 159, 162, W80n37 Goldberg, Whoopi, 338
Gänzl, Kurt, and Andrew Lamb, W99n23, Goldman, James, 346, 374, 376–77, 378,
W99n24 W129n87, W130n93
Gardner, Ava, 187, 188 Goldwyn, Samuel, xxiii, 155, 168, 169–70,
Garland, Judy, 189 171, 172, 247, 310, 319–20, 322, 324
Garland, Robert, 21, 198 The Goldwyn Follies (G. and I. Gershwin)
The Garrick Gaieties (Rodgers and Hart), 83, 195 [film], 82
Garson, Edith, 66, 72 “Good-bye, Ma Lady Love” (Howard), 24
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 72 “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye” (Porter),
Gay Divorce (Porter), 40, 156, 189 46, W85n32
The Gay Divorcée [film], 154, 156, 189 Good News! (DeSylva, Brown, and
Gaxton, William, 43, 44, 46, 164 Henderson), 186
“Gee, Officer Krupke” (Bernstein and “Goodnight Sweetheart” (Noble, Campbell,
Sondheim), 286, 287, 288, 290, 329 and Connelly), W91n29
Geer, Will, 185 “Good Thing Going” (Sondheim), 380
Genaro, Peter, xxv Gordon, Eric A., 187, W94n7, W95n17,
George M! [Cohan], 4 W96n31
George White Scandals of 1922, 59 “Gossip Sequence” (Sondheim), 368
“Geraniums in the Winder” (Rodgers and Die Götterdämmerung (Wagner) [opera], 300
Hammerstein), 311 Gottfried, Martin, 379, W73n4
Gerard, Jeremy, W80n39 Gottlieb, Jack, 301, W122n78
Gershe, Leonard, 190 Grable, Betty, 156, 321
Gershwin, George, xii, 5, 6, 13, 23, 42, 48, Gradenwitz, Peter, 301, W123n78
58–82, 111, 115, 136, 137, 155, 166–76, 180, Grant, Cary, 316, 324
195, 243, 281 Grant, Hugh, 327
Gershwin, Ira, 5, 82, 136, 137, 138, 139, 152, Grant, Mark, 391, W74n10, W132n21,
168, 171, W88n54 W133n46
Gershwin, Leonore, 168, 171, 173 Grayson, Kathryn, 314, 315, 318
The Gershwins (George and Ira), 14, 58–82 “A Great Big Town” (Rodgers and Hart), 109,
(60), 158, 169–76, 189–90, 215, 263 178
431
Index
“The Greatest Show on Earth” (Weill and Hangover Square (Herrmann) [film], 353–54,
I. Gershwin), 140 W127n48
“Great Fugue” from the String Quartet, op. Hannibal (Lloyd Webber) [Phantom opera],
135 (Beethoven), W122n73 397, 399, 408
Great Lady (Loewe), 262, 263 Hansberry, Lorraine, 71
The Great Ziegfeld [film], 156 Hans Christian Andersen (Loesser) [film], 152,
Green, Jesse, 363, W128n59 244, 247, 320
Green, Paul, 136 “Happily Ever After” (Sondheim), 378,
Green, Stanley, W73n4, W81n54, W90n4, W130n95
W110n6 Happy Dust theme (Gershwin), 77, 78
Greenfield, Peter, W110n33 Happy End (Brecht and Weill), 136, 140, 141, 147
“Green Finch and Linnet Bird” “Happy Hunting Horn” (Rodgers and Hart),
(Sondheim), 362 104, 107, 110, 180
Green Grow the Lilacs (Riggs), 109, W83n70 “Happy New Year.” See “Hot Time in the Old
The Green Pastures ( Johnson), 70 Town Tonight”
Greenwich Village Follies (Porter et al.), 42 “Happy Talk” (Rodgers and Hammerstein),
Greenwillow (Loesser), 259 84, W114n24
Greer, Germaine, 230 “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance”
Greer, Jo Ann, 179 (Loesser), 248, 249–50, 253, 254
Grieg, Edvard, 377, 378, W130n92 Harburg, E. Y. (“Yip”), 14, 136, W77n20,
Grisham, John, 398 W113n17
Grist, Reri, 294 Harley, Steve, 385
“Grosse Fuge.” See “Great Fugue” Harmon, Charlie, 308
Groves, George R., 324 Harrigan (Edward) and Hart (Tony), 4
Gruenberg, Louis, W85n2 Harris, Sam H., 136, W98n23
Guettel, Adam, xxvi Harrison, Rex, xxiii, 245–46, 260, 261, 265,
Gussow, Mel, 282 266, 271, 323, 324, 325
Guys and Dolls (Loesser), xii, xix, xxii, 11, Hart, Charles, 385
12, 13, 14, 54, 89, 109, 147, 155, 231, 233, Hart, Lorenz, xii, 5. See also Rodgers
234, 235, 235–47 (242), 248–49, 251, 252, (Richard) and Hart (Lorenz)
280; Synopsis (W3–4); Discography and Hart, Moss, xxvi, 135, 136, 137, 144, 146, 150,
Filmography (W14–15); Appendix A (W27); 152, 237, 247, 276, 278, W84n27
Appendix N (W56–57); Notes (W107n1) Harvey, Georgette, 169
Guys and Dolls [film], xxiv, 155, 247, 310, Harvey, Polly Jean, 186
319–23 (319), 324 “Hate” motive (West Side Story), 301–5 (303),
“Guys and Dolls” (Loesser), 321 W118n34, W123n78
Gypsy (Styne and Sondheim), 14, 16, 233, 308, “(Haveynue) Shalom A’leychem”
335, 338, 347, 360 (Ben-Chaim), W89n71
“The Gypsy in Me” (Porter), 50, 55, 218 Hawkins, William, 260–61, 262
Haymes, Dick, 187
H. M. S. Pinafore (Gilbert and Sullivan), 4 Hayworth, Rita, 177, 178, 179, 180, 188
Hairspray (Shaiman and Wittman), xxvii, 310 Hays Production Code, xxiii, 164, 170, 176–77
Hall, Juanita, 169 “He’s Here, the Phantom of the Opera”
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (Rodgers and Hart) (Lloyd Webber and Hart), 403–4
[film], 212 Hearn, George, 213
Hambitzer, Charles, 59 “Heart and Soul” (Loesser and
Hamlisch, Marvin, xxvi, xxvii Carmichael), 234
Hamm, Charles, xxi, 7, 65, 68, 69, 82, W73n6, “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye”
W76n13 (Rodgers and Hart), 90, 99, 100
Hammerstein, James, 338 “Heaven Hop” (Porter), 46, 50
Hammerstein, Oscar, 2nd, xxiv, 5, 14, 19–39, Heilman, Robert B., 229–30
48, 70, 84, 100, 110, 136, 157, 159–63, 338–42, Helburn, Theresa, 195, 196, 263
343, 344, 346, 366, 382, W114n24. See also “Hello, Young Lovers” (Rodgers and
Rodgers (Richard) and Hammerstein Hammerstein), 206
(Oscar) Hellzapoppin’ (Fain, Olsen, and Johnson), 12
Hammond, Percy, 20 Henderson, Ray, W77n20
Handel, George Frideric, 142, 389, 393, Hepburn, Audrey, xxiii, 310, 323, 325, 326
W100n47 Hepburn, Katharine, 278
Haney, Carol, 316, 318 Hepokoski, James, W83n2
432
Index
Herbert, Victor, 4, 22 “I Ain’t Got No Shame” (G. and

Herman, Jerry, xxvi I. Gershwin), 72
Herrmann, Bernard, 353–54 “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple”
“Hey, Feller!” (Kern and Hammerstein), 24, (Porter), 220, 225, 226, 318
25, 160, W80n42 I Am Listening (M. Hart) [play], 136, 137, 144
Heyward, Dorothy, 61, 168 “I Believe in You” (Loesser), 245, 259
Heyward, Dubose, 48, 61, 62, 63, 64, 72, 79 I Can Get It for You Wholesale (Rome), 308
High Button Shoes (Styne and Cahn), 281 “I Could Have Danced All Night” (Lerner
High Society (Porter), 232 and Loewe), 269, 274, 275, W115n49
High Tor (Anderson) [play], 341 “I Could Write a Book” (Rodgers and Hart),
Higham, Mike, 363 84, 107, 179
“The Highest Judge of All” (Rodgers and “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (Lloyd
Hammerstein), 211, 311 Webber and Rice), 385, 390, 391
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 230 “I Feel Pretty” (Bernstein and Sondheim),
Hindemith, Paul, 116, 136 295, 328, 329–30, 340, W118n27
Hirsch, Foster, 173, 396 “I Get a Kick Out of You” (Porter), 40, 42,
Hirschfeld, Al, 5, 60, 113, 135, 196, 235, 261, 345 45, 50, 53, 54, 55, 159, 164, 218, 358, 359,
Hischak, Thomas, 311 W105n20
Hit the Deck (Youmans, Grey, and Robin), 156 “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” (G. and I. Gershwin
Hitchcock, Alfred, 154, 353, W97n42 and Heyward), 59, 62, 67, 76, 172, W89n79,
Hitchcock, H. Wiley, 82, 124, W94n3 W90n85
Hitchy-Koo of 1919 (Porter et al.), 42 “I Got Rhythm” (G. and I. Gershwin), 391
Holiday Inn [film], 156 “I Guess This Is Goodbye” (Sondheim), 372
Holloway, Julian, 260 “I Have Brought You” (Lloyd Webber and
Holloway, Stanley, 260, 265, 266, 323 Hart), 401, 405, 406, W133n45
Hollywood Dream (Weill), 136, 138 “I Hate Men” (Porter), 228, 317
Hollywood Production Code. See Hays I Hate Music (Bernstein), 282
Production Code) “I Have a Love” (Bernstein and Sondheim),
Home of the Brave (Laurents) [play], 281 294, 295, 300, 302, 329, 390, 393, W118n27
“Honolulu” (Blitzstein), 118, 120, 124, 125 “I Have the Room above Her” (Kern and
Hope, Bob, 157 Hammerstein), 26, 27, 157, 159
Hopkins, George James, 324 “I Like Ev’rybody” (Loesser), 250, 251
Horn, David, W88n51, W88n52 “I Love Him” (Loesser), 256, 257
Horne, Lena, 59 “I Loves You Porgy” (G. and I. Gershwin and
Horne, Marilyn, 294 Heyward), 79, 81
Horowitz, Mark, 360, 378, W74n8 I Married an Angel (Rodgers and Hart), 84
Horsefeathers [film], 136 “I Might Fall Back on You” (Kern and
“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” (Metz), 23 Hammerstein), 25, 27, 159
Houghton, Norris, W121n50 I Remember Mama (Rodgers, Charnin, and
Houseman, John, xviii, 115, 184, 185, W95n8, Jessel), 213
W95n9 “I remember motive” (Lloyd Webber and
Houston Opera, 20, 27, 58, 59, 65, 68, 166, 168 Hart), 401–2, 404–5, W133n41
“How Beautiful the Days” (Loesser), 250, “I Sing of Love” (Porter), 219, 223, 315
253, 254, 255, 256 “I Want to Row on the Crew” (Porter), 46, 50
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying “I Won’t Dance” (Kerns, Fields, and
(Loesser), 235–36, 244, 245, 259, W130n92 McHugh), 157
Howard, Leslie, 103, 269 “I Would Like to Play a Lover’s Part” (Kern
Howard, Sidney, W116n60 and Hammerstein), 24
“How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” (Kern “I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You” (Lloyd
and Laska), 22, 24, 45, W80n36, W80n42 Webber and Rice), 391
“How Much I Love You” (Weill and Nash), 147 I’d Rather Be Right (Rodgers and Hart), 84, 136
Hubbard, Bruce, 70, 175 “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” (Runyon)
Hubler, Richard, 43, W107n2 [short story], 237
Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 152 “If I Loved You” (Rodgers and
Hughes, Langston, 136 Hammerstein), 200, 202, 205, 207–8, 229,
Humperdinck, Engelbert, 136 358–59, 402, W106n32
“A Hymn to Him” (Lerner and Loewe), 266, “If I Were a Bell” (Loesser), 238, 239, 322
325, W114n32 “Il mio tesoro” (Mozart) [aria], 44
Hytner, Nicholas, xviii, 211 Il Muto (Lloyd Webber), 397
433
Index
Il Trovatore (Verdi) [opera], 219 The Jazz Singer [film], 153, W125n25
“I’ll Be Hard to Handle” (Kern and Jeeves (Lloyd Webber and Ayckbourn). See
Harbach), 156 By Jeeves
“I’ll Know” (Loesser), 238, 239, 249 Jekyll & Hyde (Wildhorn and Bricusse), xxvii
The Illustrator’s Show (Loesser, Loewe, et al.), Jepson, Helen, 175, W87n39
234, 263, W113n11 “Jeremiah” Symphony (Bernstein), 282
Ilson, Carol, 374, W129n90 Jesus Christ, 384
“I’m a Stranger Here Myself” (Weill and Jesus Christ Superstar (Lloyd Webber and
Nash), 147, 149 Rice), 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 390, 408,
“I’m an Ordinary Man” (Lerner and Loewe), W131n2, W131n4
265, 266, 272–73, 274, 275, W114n32 “Jet Song” (Bernstein and Sondheim), 287–88,
“I’m Checkin’ Home Now” (Blitzstein), 136, 295, 329, W118nn31–32, W118n34
183 “Joe Worker” (Blitzstein), 183
“I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My “Johanna” (Anthony’s version)
Hair” (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 108 (Sondheim), 362
“I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy” “Johanna” ( Judge’s version)
(Rodgers and Hammerstein), 108, 204, 339 (Sondheim), 359, 362–63
“I’m Still Here” (Sondheim), 374 Johnny Johnson (Weill and Green), 135, 140
“In Buddy’s Eyes” (Sondheim), 343–44, 374–75 Johnson, Hall, 70–71
“In Dahomey” (Kern and Hammerstein), 27, Jolson, Al, 61, 153
160 Jones, Allan, 26, 160, W101n5
“In der Jugend gold’nem Schimmer” (Weill Jones, Cherry, 182
and Brecht), 140 Jones, Shirley, 311
“In Love with the Memory of You” (Loesser Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
and Schuman), 234 (Lloyd Webber and Rice), 384, 386, 394,
The Incredibles [film], 402 408, W131n2
The integrated musical, xiv, xx, 6, 47, 85, 100, Jubilee (Porter), 215
143–47, 206–11, 237, 255, 394–95, 403 Judas Iscariot, 384
Intermezzo for piano, op. 117, no. 3 (Brahms), Julian, Rupert, 396
W115n46 Julius Caesar [film], 320
Into the Woods (Sondheim and Lapine), Jumbo (Rodgers and Hart), 83, 190
xxviii, 337, 338, 366, 369, 379, 386–87, Jump (from “The Dance at the Gym”)
Discography and Filmography (W15) (Bernstein), 295
Isaac, Edith J. R., 114 “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” (Rodgers and
“It Ain’t Necessarily So” (G. Gershwin and Hammerstein), 84, 313, W124n7
Heyward), 71, 77, 170 “Just One of Those Things” (Porter), 215
“It Might As Well Be Spring. “(Rodgers and “Just You Wait” (Lerner and Loewe), 265,
Hammerstein), 204, 212 271, 272, 273, 274, W115n50
“It’s De-Lovely” (Porter), 40, 46, 159, 215,
W85n32, W85n43 Kael, Pauline, xxv
“It’s Getting Hotter in the North” (Kern and Kakutani, Michiko, 371
Hammerstein), 24, 33, 162, W80n42 Kálmán, Emmerich, 94
“It’s Got to Be Love” (Rodgers and Hart), 88, Kander ( John) and (Fred) Ebb, xxvi, 348
95–98 (96), 99, 100, 105, 110 “Kate the Great” (Porter), 44, 45
“It’s Hot up Here” (Sondheim), 369 “Katrina” (Loewe}, 262
“It Take a Long Pull to Get There” Katz, Ephraim, 188
(G. Gershwin and Heyward), 76, 80, Kauffmann, Stanley, xxv
W89n71, 79 Kaufman, George S., xxvi, 136, 237–38, 241,
“It Was Great Fun the First Time” (Porter), 245, 247
227, 228 Kaufman (George S.) and Hart (Moss), 52, 136
“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” Kaye, Danny, 136, 139, 145, 186, 213, 247, 320,
(Lerner and Loewe), 266, 272–73, 275, W101n68
W114n32, W115n49 Kaye, Judy, 387
“I’ve Never Been in Love Before” (Loesser), Kaye, Stubby, 242, 246, 321
239, 249, 322 Kazan, Elia, 136, W98n21
Ives, Charles, 112, 254, 389 Keel, Howard, 158, 314, 315, 318
Kelly, Gene, 101, 102, 178, 190, 320, 325
Jablonski, Edward, 67, W86n6 Kelly, Grace, 230, 321, 325
Jackman, Hugh, 314 Kelly, Laura Michelle, 363, 364
434
Index
Kennedy, William, 237 La La Lucille (Gershwin), 60

Kenny G, 410 LaChuisa, John, xxvi
Kenworthy, Duncan, 327 “Ladies in Their Sensitivities” (Sondheim), 362
Kerman, Joseph, xiv, 8, 229, 320, 403, Lady, Be Good! (G. and I. Gershwin), 59, 60, 189
W109n39, W122n73 Lady in the Dark (Weill and I. Gershwin)
Kern, Jerome, xxvi, 4, 5, 14, 19–39, 42, 70, [musical], xviii, xxii, 11, 12, 13, 82, 136–41
72–73, 111, 143, 159–63, 189, 200, 215, 216, (139), 140, 141, 142, 143–46, 150–51, 231,
243, 373, 391, W89n77 260, 263, 366, 375; Synopsis (W4–5);
Kern ( Jerome) and Hammerstein (Oscar), Discography and Filmography (W16–17);
xxiv, 5, 7, 45, 61, 65, 159–63, 373 Appendix A (W27); Appendix J (W50)
Kerr, Deborah, 321, 325 Lady in the Dark [film], 186, 188
Kerr, Walter, 252–53, 260, 279, W111n34 “The Lady Is a Tramp” (Rodgers and Hart), 180
Kerry, Norman, 306 “Lady Liza” (Lerner and Loewe), 265,
Kert, Larry, 284 W114n26
Kidd, Michael, 321 Lady Macbeth of Mitsensk (Shostakovich)
“Kids Ain’t” (Bernstein and Sondheim), 288 [opera], 94
Kilenyi, Edward, 59 Lahr, John, W83n72, W128n70
Kiley, Richard, 213 Laine, Cleo, 26
The Killers [film], 188 Lamb, Andrew. See Gänzl, Kurt
“Kim’s Imitations” (Kern and Lancaster, Burt, 188
Hammerstein), 24 Lane, Burton, 14, 234
King, Dennis, 263 Lane, Nathan, xix, 338
King, Henry, 310, 311, 313 Lang, Harold, 102, 178, 224, 315
King, William, 144 Langner, Lawrence, 196, 197
The King and I (Rodgers and Hammerstein), Lansbury, Angela, 349, 352, W125n1
14, 176, 198, 213, 214, 231, 233, 281, 310, Lapine, James, xxvi, xxviii, 337, 365–71, 387,
324, 325, 342, 347 365, 370, 371
A Kingdom for a Cow (Weill), 140, 141, 145, 281 Larson, Jonathan, xxvi
Kinsley, Gershon, W95n17 Laufe, Abe, W73n4
Kislan, Richard, W73n4 Laurents, Arthur, xix, 11, 279, 280, 281, 282,
Kismet (Wright and Forrest), 233 283, 286, 287, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 308,
“Kiss Me” (Sondheim), 359 331, 335, 336, 338, 342, 346, 365, W84n23
Kiss Me, Kate (Porter) [musical], xii, xviii, Lawrence, Gertrude, 60, 136, 138, 139, 150,
6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 41, 44, 48, 53, 68, 147, 263, W99n36
189, 215–32 (223), 271; Synopsis (W4); Le Gallienne, Eva, 195
Discography and Filmography (W15–16); “Learn to Be Lonely” (Lloyd Webber and
Appendix A (W27); Appendix M (W53– Hart), 401
55), Notes (W77n21, W112n47) Leave It to Jane (Kern, Wodehouse, and
Kiss Me, Kate [film], xxiii, xxiv, 310, 314–19 Bolton), 4, 22, W86n5
(314, 315) Leave It to Me! (Porter), 215, 216, 217
Kissel, Howard, 211 Lederman, Minna, 117
Kitt, Eartha, 70 Lee, Canada, 185
Kivy, Peter, xiv, 8, 55 Lee, Eugene, 27, 349
Kline, Kevin, 189 Lee, Franne, 349
Knickerbocker Holiday (Weill and Anderson), Lee, Gypsy Rose, 94, 103, 178
136, 140, 152 Lees, Gene, 262, W112n4, W113n9, W113n17
Knight, Arthur, xxv Lehár, Franz, 4, 263
Knightly, Keira, 327 Lehman, Ernest, 327
Knapp, Raymond, xxii, 388, 394, W74n8, Leisen, Mitchell, 186
W97n1, W123n78, W131n11 Leroux, Gaston, 395–96
Koussevitzsky, Serge, 281 Lerner, Alan Jay, 136, 190, 237, 263, 278,
Kowalke, Kim, xxiv, 141, 142, 154, W94n2 W495n4. See also Lerner (Alan Jay) and
Kreuger, Miles, 4, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 42, 43, 45, Loewe (Frederick “Fritz”)
48–49, 70, W78n23, W83n2 Lerner (Alan Jay) and Loewe (Frederick
“Fritz”), xii, xxvi, 10, 15, 233, 260–78, 323–27
La bohème (Puccini) [opera], 393 “Les filles de Bordeaux” (Weill and Déval), 140
La Cage aux Folles (Herman), 308 Les Girls (Porter), 232
La fanciulla del West (Puccini) [opera], 392, Les Misérables (Boublil and Schönberg), xxi,
393, 406, W132n23, W133n46 xxvii, 327, 394, 395, W131n2
435
Index
Les Préludes (Liszt), 94, 95–96 Long runs (Lloyd Webber), W130n2
Let ‘Em Eat Cake (G. and I. Gershwin), 60, 61, Lonoff, Jeffrey, 375
115, 243 “Look for the Silver Lining” (Kern and
“Let’s Begin” (Porter and Harbach), 157 Grey), 22
“Let’s Do It” (Porter), 42 Look Ma, I’m Dancin’ (Martin), 281
“Let’s Do Something” (Blitzstein), 118, 122 “Look Sharp” (Gillette razor jingle), 226
Let’s Face It (Porter), 189 Lost Boys [film], 398
“Let’s Misbehave” (Porter), 46, 50 Lost in the Stars (Weill and Anderson), 136,
“Let’s Step Out” (Porter), 46, 50 152, 168
“The Letter” quintet (Sondheim), 363 Louise (Charpentier) [opera], 114
A Letter to Three Wives [film], 320 Love Actually [film], 327
Leve, James, W497n21 “Love in a Mist” (Weill and Nash), W99n27
Levene, Sam, 242, 246, 322 “Love for Sale” (Porter), 40
Levine, Lawrence, W76n9 Love Life (Weill and Lerner), 152, 263, 278, 346
“Liaisons” (Sondheim), 359 Love Me Tonight (Rodgers and Hart) [film],
Lieberson, Goddard, 67, 336 83, 156, 172, 190, 195, 211, 212
The Life (Coleman and Gasman), 348 The Love Parade [film], 156
“Life Is Happiness Indeed” (Bernstein and “Loveland” (Sondheim), 377
Sondheim), 308, 378 “Lovely to Look At” (Kern and Fields), 157
“Life upon the Wicked Stage” (Kern and Low, Bill, W113n22
Hammerstein), 25, 162 Lubitsch, Ernst, 155
Light Up the Sky (M. Hart) [play], 152 “Luck Be a Lady” (Loesser), 240, 241, 321
Liliom (Molnár), 193, 196–97, W116n60 Lupone, Patti, xviii, 115, W125n1
Lindsay (Howard) and Crouse (Russel), 42, Lytell, Bert, 145
43, 47, 217
The Lion King ( John and Rice), xxi, xxvii, 387 McClain, John, 236, 252, 279
Lipman, Samuel, W96n40 McClary, Susan, W76n14, W110n38
Liszt, Franz, 94 mcclung, bruce d., xxii, W74n8, W98n26
Little Foxes (Hellman), 112, 286 MacDonald, Jeanette, 190
Little Johnny Jones (Cohan), 4 MacDonald ( Jeanette) and Eddy (Nelson), 155
A Little Night Music (Sondheim), xix, 14, 243, Macfadyen, Angus, 184
321, 336, 337, 343, 348, 353, 359, 360, 366, McFerrin, Bobby, 168
379, 386, W131n4 McFerrin, Robert, 168–69, W87n39
“A Little Priest” (Sondheim), 359, 360, 364 McGlinn, John, 20, 23–24, 26, 37, 42, 44, 48,
The Little Prince (Lerner and Loewe), 278 65, 70, 160, 164
Liù’s motive in Turandot (Puccini), 392–93, Macintosh, Cameron, xxi, xxvii, 327, 378, 395
405–6, 407 McKenzie, Julia, 351
“Live, Love, Laugh” (Sondheim), 377 MacLeish, Archibald, W94n8
Lloyd Webber, Andrew, xxi, xxiii, xxvi, xxvii, McMillin, Scott, 394, W74n6, W74n10
xxviii, 3, 6, 10, 12, 15, 16, 102, 213, 322, 339, McPherson, Aimée Semple, 49, 57
346, 347, 348, 350, 359, 383–410 (384) MacRae, Gordon, 311
Lloyd Webber, William 384 Madame Butterfly (Puccini) [opera], 94
Loesser, Frank, xxii, xxvi, 6, 15, 85, 109, “Madame Odette’s Waltz” (Weill and
155, 233–59 (235), 310, 319–23, W113n11, Vambery), 140
W114n24 Madonna, W130n101
Loewe, Edmund, 262 The Magic Flute (Mozart) [opera], 115, 254, 349
Loewe, Frederick (“Fritz”), 234, 243. See also Magnolia’s piano theme (Kern), 30, 32, 33, 36,
Lerner (Alan Jay) and Loewe (Frederick 111, 161, 162
“Fritz”) Mahler, Gustav, 254
Logan, Joshua, 311 “Make a Miracle” (Loesser), 236, 244, 245, 250
Lolita My Love (Barry and Lerner), 278 “Make Believe” (Kern and Hammerstein),
“London” Symphony (Vaughan Williams), xii, 30, 33, 34, 36–38, 162, W81n48, W81n59,
391, 392, W132n21 W105n11
“Long Runs: Decade by Decade 1920–2000s,” “Make the Most of Your Music”
Appendix B (W31–34) (Sondheim), 377
Long Runs: “The Forty Longest-Running Malcolm, Donald, 259
Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959 and Mambo (from “The Dance at the Gym”)
1920–2008,” Appendix C (W35–36); Notes (Bernstein), 284, 287, 295, 303
(W76n15) “Mamma, Mamma” (Loesser), 258
436
Index
Mamma Mia! (Andersson and Luvaeus), xxvii Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 397, 398
Mamoulian, Rouben, xxvi, 66, 83, 136, 166, Midler, Bette, W125n1
168, 170, 172, 190, 195, 211 Mielziner, Jo, 104
The Man Who Came to Dinner (Kaufman and Milestone, Lewis, 165
Hart) [play], 52 “Mill Theme” (Rodgers), 200, 201, 312
Manhattan [film], 180 Miller, Ann, 314, 315, 317
“Manhattan” (Rodgers and Hart), 83 Miller, Marilyn, 22
Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 310, 320, 321, 322 Miller, Scott, xxii, 388, W131n12
Mantle, Burns, 101 “The Miller’s Son” (Sondheim), 356, 357, 358
“Many a New Day” (Rodgers and “Mine” (G. and I. Gershwin), 243
Hammerstein), 54, 55, 205 Minnelli, Vincente, 190
“Maria” (Bernstein and Sondheim), 54, 284, Minstrel Dream. See Circus Dream
285, 286, 295, 305, 329, 390 “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’” (Kern and
Marie Galante (Weill and Déval), 140, 141 Hammerstein), 24, 27, 29, 30, 33, 65
Marlowe, Christopher, 182 Miss Information (Porter et al.), 42
“Marry Me a Little” (Sondheim), 378, Miss Liberty (Berlin), 281
W130n95 Miss Saigon (Boublil and Schönberg), xxi,
“Marry the Man Today” (Loesser), 247, 249, xxvii, 2231, 327
323, W111n16 “Mister Snow” (Rodgers and Hammerstein),
Marshall, Rob, 364 204, 312
Marx Brothers, 51, 136 Mitchell, Abbie, 175
Marx, Groucho, 51, 92, 165 “Mix” (Bernstein and Sondheim), W118n31,
Martin, Ernest. See Feuer (Cy) and Martin W118nn32–34
(Ernest) Molinari, Bernardino, 94
Martin, Mary, xi, 147, 149, 150, 187, 216, “Moll’s Song.” See “I’m Checkin’ Home Now”
W98n20 Molnár, Ferenc, 195, 196, 197, 210
Mary Poppins, W126n18 Monkey Business [film], 136
“Masquerade” (Lloyd Webber and Hart), 405 Monroe, Marilyn, 188
Mast, Gerald, 44, 311, 313, 324, W73n4, W97n1 Monty Python’s Spamalot (Du Prez and Idle),
Mature, Victor, 145 xxvii
Mattheson, Johann, 389 “The Moon of Manakoora” (Loesser and
Mauceri, John, 98–99, 172 Newman), 234
“Maybe They’re Magic” (Sondheim), 373 “Moonburn” (Heyman and Carmichael), 165
Me and Juliet (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 213 Moore, Victor, 43, 46, 164
“Me and My Boss” (Kern and Mordden, Ethan, 26, 87, 388–89, W73n4,
Hammerstein), 24 W74n10, W80n46, W81n54, W83n2,
Meditation XVII [poem] (Donne), 371 W97n1, W103n40, W126n31
Meeting Scene (from “The Dance at the “More I Cannot Wish You” (Loesser), 322–23
Gym”) (Bernstein), 305 Morehouse, Ward, 198
The megamusical, xx, 394 Moreno, Rita, 310, 327, W124n1
Die Meistersinger (Wagner) [opera], 68 Morgan, Helen, xxiv, W101n5
Melchior, Lauritz, 68 Morison, Patricia, 223, 226, W108n24
Mellers, Wilfrid, 68, 112 “Moritat” (Brecht and Weill). See “The Ballad
Melodrama, 350–52 of Mack the Knife”
“Memory” (Lloyd Webber and Nunn), 385 Morley, Michael, W99n39
Mendelssohn, Felix, 390 Moross, Jerome, W133n46
Menken (Alan) and Ashman (Howard), xxvi “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love”
Mercer, Johnny, 5 (Porter), 215
Meredith, Burgess, 195 Moscow on the Hudson [film], 151
Merman, Ethel, xxiii, xxiv, 44, 45, 50, 60, 158, The Most Happy Fella (Loesser), xix, xxii,
163, 164, 165, 191, 218, 245, 335, 338, 342, xxvi, 7, 12, 14, 233, 234, 235, 244, 247–59
358, 359 (249), 349; Synopsis (W5); Discography
Merrily We Roll Along (Sondheim), 337, and Filmography (W17–18); Appendix
347, 348, 365, 366, 370, 373, 379–81; A (W27); Appendix O (W58–59); Notes
Discography and Filmography (W17) (W116n60)
The Merry Widow [film], 155 “Move On” (Sondheim), 342, 368
The Merry Widow (Lehár), 4, 36, 206, 262 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 9, 44, 136,
Messiah (Handel), 26 143, 389
Mexican Hayride (Porter), 189, 215 “Multitudes of Amys” (Sondheim), W130n95
437
Index
Murray, Bill, 182 Nixon, Marni, 280, 310, 325

“Musetta’s Waltz” (Puccini), 393 “No Life” (Sondheim), 365
Music in the Air (Kern and Hammerstein), “No Matter under What Star You’re Born.”
38, 189 See Zodiac Song
The Music Man (Willson), xi, 233, 325, W116n2 No, No Nanette (Youmans and Caesar), 4, 348
“Music of the Night” (Lloyd Webber and “No One Is Alone” (Sondheim), 371, 379, 382
Hart), 391, 392, 393, 397, 401, 403, 405, “No One Would Listen” (Lloyd Webber and
406–7, W132n22 Hart). See “Learn to Be Lonely”
Musical theater types, W75n1 No Strings (Rodgers), 169, 213
“My Darling, My Darling” (Loesser), 236 Noah, Timothy, W84n25
“My Heart and I” (Hollander and Robin), 165 “Nobody Else But Me” (Kern and
“My Heart Belongs to Daddy” (Porter), 215, Hammerstein), 25, 26
W98n20 Nolan, Frederick, W93n54
“My Heart Is So Full of You” (Loesser), 248, 257 “Non la sospiri la nostra casetta” (Puccini),
My Fair Lady (Lerner and Loewe) [musical], W115n46
xi, xix, 10, 11, 12, 14, 152, 231–32, 233, “No Place Like London” (Sondheim), 255,
234, 237, 245, 252, 254, 260–78 (271), 279, 356, 357, 359
390; Synopsis (W5–6); Discography and Norton, Elliot, 197
Filmography (W18); Appendix A (W28); “Not While I’m Around” (Sondheim), 359
Appendix P (W60); Notes (W107n1, “Notes” (Lloyd Webber and Hart), 405
W116n2) Notting Hill [film], 327
My Fair Lady [film], xxiii, 10, 277, 310, 317, Novak, Kim, 180
323–27 (323), 328, 361, 402, W125n25 “Now,” “Later,” “Soon” (Sondheim), 243, 359
“My Friends” (Sondheim), 355, 356, 357, Nunn, Trevor, xviii, xxvii, 69, 171, 173, 175–76,
358, 359 189, 309, 314, 385
“My Funny Valentine” (Rodgers and
Hart), 180 O’Connor, Donald, 159
“My Greatest Day” (Bernstein and O’Hara, John, 101, 103, 104, 105, 178
Sondheim), W118n31 O’Malley, Rex, W101n68
“My Heart Stood Still” (Rodgers and Hart), 83 O’Toole, Peter, 324
“My Man” (originally “Mon Homme” by Of Thee I Sing (G. and I. Gershwin), 12, 13, 40,
Yvain and Pollock), 105 60–61, 115
My Man Godfrey (Lerner), 278 “Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess” (G. and I.
My One and Only (G. and I. Gershwin), 13 Gershwin), 62, 172
“My Ship” (Weill and I. Gershwin), 137, 142, “Oh, Doctor Jesus” (Gershwin and
144, 146, 147, 186, 231 Heyward), 72
“My Time of Day” (Loesser), 239–40, 322 “Oh, Happy We” (Bernstein and Wilbur), 286
“Oh, I Can’t Sit Down!” (G. and I. Gershwin),
Nash, Ogden, 134, 140, 151, 152, 187 76, 169, W89n79
Nathan, George Jean, 21, 114, 253 “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” (Rodgers
Naughty Marietta (Herbert), 4, 22, W76n5, and Hammerstein), 211, 341–42
W98n15 Oh, Kay! (G. and I. Gershwin), 13, 59, 60,
Nelson, Baby Face, 57 W99n36
Neptune’s Daughter [film], 235 Oja, Carol, W76n13
Nesbitt, Cathleen, 260 Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein), xi,
“New Art Is True Art: (Weill and Nash), 151 xxii, xxvi, 7, 10, 13, 14, 26, 39, 47, 83, 85, 88,
“The New Ashmolean Marching Society and 109, 110, 114, 136, 143, 147, 154, 156, 157,
Students’ Conservatory Band” (Loesser), 172, 176, 195, 196, 198, 199, 205, 206, 209,
248 212, 213–14, 216, 218, 221, 233, 251, 260,
The New Moon (Romberg and 279, 280, 281, 310, 311, 312, 314, 328, 336,
Hammerstein), 39 394, W83n71
“New World” Symphony (Dvořák), 29, 30, “Ol’ Man River” (Kern and Hammerstein),
390, W89n77 26, 29, 30, 33, 158, 160, 162, 175, 339, 364
The New Yorkers (Porter), 40 “An Old-Fashioned Wedding” (Berlin), 243
Nichols, Lewis, 142 “The Oldest Established” (Loesser), 241,
“Nickel Under the Foot” (Blitzstein), 117, 244–45, 246, 248, 322
136, 183, 186 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (Eliot)
Night and Day [film], 316 [poems], 385
“Night and Day” (Porter), 40, 155, 189, 221 Olivier, Laurence, 318–19
438
Index
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Lane and “Parlor Songs” (Sondheim), 361–62, 363
Lerner), 278 Park Avenue (Schwartz and I. Gershwin), 152
“On the Street Where You Live” (Lerner Parker, Roger, 403, W109n29
and Loewe), 254, 274, 276–77, W115n49, Parthy’s theme (Kern), 29–30, 31, 38, 77, 78,
W116n55 161, 162
On the Town (Bernstein, Comden and Green), Pascal, Gabriel, 10, 267, 268, W113n17,
281, 282, 284 W115n43
On the Town [film], 154, 155, 314, 328 Passion (Sondheim and Lapine), xxviii, 337, 386
On the Twentieth Century (Coleman and Pathétique Symphony (Tchaikovsky), 145
Comden and Green), 348 Patinkin, Mandy, 368, 369
On the Waterfront [film], 320 Pavane (Porter), 222
“On This Night of a Thousand Stars” (Lloyd Peggy-Ann (Rodgers and Hart), 83, 85, 87, 212
Webber and Rice), 390, 391 Pennies from Heaven (Potter) [film], 180
On Your Toes (Rodgers and Hart), xviii, “People Will Say We’re in Love” (Rodgers
7, 11, 12, 13, 46, 47, 83, 85–100 (86), 101, and Hammerstein), 200
103, 110, 111, 145, 180, 190, 200, 206, 214, Perelman, S. J., 134, 151, 152
228, 235, 373, 379, 382; Synopsis (W6); Perkins, Tony, 259
Discography and Filmography (W18–19); Peron, Eva, 385
Appendix A (W28); Appendix G (W47) Peron, Juan, 385
“On Your Toes” (Rodgers and Hart), 88, 190 Perry, George, 395
“One Hand, One Heart” (Bernstein and “Pet Me Poppa” (Loesser), 322
Sondheim), 286, 287, 288, 305, 330, Peter Pan (Styne, Comden and Green), 281
W119nn35–36, W122n74 Peters, Bernadette, W125n1
One Man’s Venus (B. and S. Spewack), 136 Peters, Brock, 169
One Touch of Venus (Weill and Nash) Petticoat Fever (Loewe), 263
[musical], xviii, xxvi, 11, 12, 54, 132, 133, Petrushka (Stravinsky), W123n84
134–35, 136–37, 141, 143, 144, 147–50 (149), Peyser, Joan, W117n12, W122n77
151, 152, 237, 238, 260; Synopsis (W6); Phantom (Yeston), 388
Discography and Filmography (W19); The Phantom of Manhattan (Forsyth) [novel], 409
Appendix A (W28); Appendix K (W51) The Phantom of the Opera (Lloyd Webber)
One Touch of Venus [film], 186, 187–88, 216 [musical], xxi, xxvi, xxvii, 11, 327, 348,
“Once in Love with Amy” (Loesser), 236 385, 386–87, 391–93, 402–8, 409; Synopsis
“Ooh! My Feet” (Loesser), 254, 255 (W7); Discography and Filmography
“Opening Doors” (Sondheim), 380–81 (W20); Appendix A (W28–29); Appendix U
The Opera from Mannheim (Weill), 136 (W69–72); Notes (W131n2)
Osbourne, Conrad, 253–54 The Phantom of the Opera [musical film],
Otello (Verdi) [opera], W109n29 xxiii, 157, 398–402 (398, 399)
Out of This World (Porter), 232, 315 The Phantom of the Opera [novel], 395–97
The Phantom of the Opera [silent film], 396–97
Pacific Overtures (Sondheim), 337, 348, 349, “The Phantom of the Opera” [song], 403
366, 378 Phantom: Love Never Dies (Lloyd Webber), 409
Paint Your Wagon (Lerner and Loewe), 263 The Phantom President [film], 211
Pajama Game (Adler and Ross), 14, 47, 233, Phinney’s Rainbow (Sondheim), 341
281, 347 Piano Concerto (Blitzstein), 116
Pal Joey (Rodgers and Hart) [musical], Piano Concerto (Grieg), 377, W130n92
xviii, xix, 13, 14, 84, 85, 87, 89, 94, 101–9 Piano Concerto No. 1 (Tchaikovsky), 377
(102), 110, 111, 206, 226, 235, 236, 238, Piano Sonata (Berg), 301, 303, W118n27
376; Synopsis (W7); Discography and Piano Sonata (Blitzstein), 116
Filmography (W19–20); Appendix A Picasso, Pablo, 103
(W28); Appendix H (48) “Pick the Winner” (Runyon) [short
Pal Joey [film], xxiv, 155, 158, 176–80 (177), story], 237, 247
316, 324 Pickford, Mary, 187
Pal Joey [novel], 101 Pierrot Lunaire (Schoenberg), 266, 350
“Pal Joey” (“What Do I Care for a Dame”) Pinocchio [film], 156
(Rodgers and Hart), 179 Pins and Needles (Rome), 12, 115, 120
Panama Hattie (Porter), 189 Pinza, Ezio, xi, 214, 246
Pardon My English (G. and I. Gershwin), 61, Pipe Dream (Rodgers and Hammerstein),
W86n5 W107n34
Paris (Porter), 42, 189 Philbin, Marie, 396
439
Index
“Plant You Now, Dig You Later” (Rodgers Prokofiev, Sergei, 59

and Hart), 108, 110, 180 Promenade (from “The Dance at the Gym”)
“Play a Simple Melody” (Berlin), 243 (Bernstein), 302, 303, 305
“Please Don’t Marry Me” (Lerner and “Promenade” (Lerner and Loewe), 265, 266
Loewe), 265, W114n26 “Public Enemy No. 1” (Porter), 53
Pleasures and Palaces (Loesser), 259 Puccini, Giacomo, 94, 195, 294, 349, 383–84,
“The Point of No Return” (Lloyd Webber 388, 390, 392, 393, 403, 409, W109n29,
and Hart), 397, 403, 405, 406, 407 W121n57, W132n25
Poitier, Sidney, xxiii, 167, 168, 170, 173 “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (Berlin), 104
Pollack, Howard, xxii, 171, W86n6 “Putting It Together” (Sondheim), 368, 369,
“Poor Butterfly” (Hubbell and Golden), 94 370, 378, W128n68
“The Poor Little Ritz Girl” (Romberg, Pygmalion (Shaw), 10, 232, 262–70, 273, 277, 327
Rodgers and Hart), 83 Pygmalion [film], 267, 268–69, 270
“Poor Thing” (Sondheim), 359, 360, 364
Porgy (Dubose Heyward) (novel), 61 “Queenie’s Ballyhoo” (Kern and
Porgy (Dorothy and DuBose Heyward) Hammerstein), 29, 30, 159
(play), 61, 66, 79, 195, W116n60 “Questions and Answers” (Rodgers and
Porgy and Bess (G. and I. Gershwin, Heyward) Hart). See “The Three B’s”
[opera], xii, xiii, xviii, xxii, 7, 11, 13, 14, 20, 28, “Quiet Night” (Rodgers and Hart), 90, 91,
31, 46, 48, 58–82 (74), 83, 89, 99, 102, 111, 114, 190, 228
128, 136, 195, 199, 215, 231, 234, 236, 243, 252, A Quiet Place (Bernstein) [opera], 308,
253, 254, 296, 346, 349, 373; Synopsis (W8); W122n77
Discography and Filmography (W21–22); Quintet in E Major, op. 11, no. 5 (Boccherini),
Appendix A (W29); Appendix F (W45–46); W103n29
Notes (W116n60, W121n65)
Porgy and Bess [1959 film], xxiii, 158, 166–73 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 355, W132n26
(167), 309, 320, 324, W101n7 Radio Days [film], 180
Porgy and Bess [1993 film], 173–76 (174), 188 “The Rain in Spain” (Lerner and Loewe),
Porgy’s themes, 73–74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80 269, 274, 275, W114nn26, W114n28
Porter, Cole, xxiii, xxiv, xxvi, 5, 6, 7, 10, 14, 15, Raitt, John, xi, 202
23, 40–57 (41), 114, 143, 147, 150, 152, 155, Rall, Tommy, 315, 318
156, 158, 159, 163–66, 176, 189, 215–32, 234, Ramin, Sid, 308
243, 261, 310, 314, 314–19, 340, 358, 375, Randell, Ron, 314, 316
W112n47, W112n4, W113n17, W114n24 The Rape of Lucretia (Britten) [opera],
Porter’s Will, W83n6 W118n27
“Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” Rapunzel’s Theme (Sondheim), 372, 373. See
(Loesser), 234, 245 also The Bean Theme
Prece, Paul, and William Everett, 386 Rasch, Albertina, 87, W98n23
Prelude No. 2 for piano (Gershwin), W89n76 Rattle, Simon, 173
Preminger, Otto, xxiii, 71, 168, 171, 173, 175 Ravel, Maurice, 59, 104
Present Arms (Rodgers and Hart), 83, 89 “A Real Nice Clambake” (Rodgers and
Preston, Robert, 325 Hammerstein), xx, 198, 206, 313, W104n5
“Pretty Women” (Sondheim), 359 “A Real Nice Hayride” (attributed to
Previn, André, xiii, 168, 324 Rodgers and Hammerstein), xx, 198,
Price, Leontyne, 166, 169 W104n5
“Prima Donna,” 403 “Recondite armonia” (Puccini), 391,
Prince, Harold (“Hal”), xviii, xxvi, 23, 26, 27, W132n22
65, 70, 158, 200, 308, 336, 337, 346–60, 362, Red, Hot and Blue! (Porter), 215, W86n5
364, 374, 376, 379, 384, 387, 395, 396, 399, Redemption through Love (Wagner). See
W116n1 “I Have a Love”
“La Princesse Zenobia” (Rodgers), 88, 92, 98, Reprises, 358–60
99, 190 Riedel, Michael, 409
Princess Theatre Shows, 4, 22, 23, 42 Regina (Blitzstein), 112, 285, 286, 390,
Private Lives (Coward) [play], 52 W118n27
“Procession and Nightmare” (Bernstein), 296, Rent (Larson), xxvii, 170, 310, 393, W131n5
300, 301, 302, 307, 329, 393 Rex (Rodgers and Harnick), 213
The Producers (Brooks and Kelly), xxvii Rhapsodie Espagnole (Ravel), W118n27
Prologue (Bernstein), 280, 287, 295, 302, 303, Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin), 59, 148, 162,
327, 329, 330, W118nn31–33 W86n17
440
Index
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (Eliot) Romeo and Juliet Overture (Tchaikovsky),

[poem], 385 285, 286, 296, 390, W118n27, W120n46,
Das Rheingold (Wagner) [opera], 298, 300 W123n78
Rhodes, Erik, 156 Romeo and Juliet [Zeffirelli film], 291,
Rice, Elmer, 136 W120n48
Rice, Tim, 384, 389 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare and early
Rich, Frank, 89, 365, 370, W134n56 versions), W120n45
“The Rich” (Blitzstein), 125, 126, 128 Ronell, Ann, 187
“Rich and Happy” (Sondheim), 373, 380 Rooney, Mickey, 189
Richardson, Miranda, 399 Rosalie (stage versus film), 155, 156, 189
Richman, Harry, 104 Rose-Marie (Friml, Stothart, and
Riis, Thomas L., xxii Hammerstein), 21
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny Rosenberg, Deena, W81n54, W89n81
(Brecht and Weill), 117, 131, 132, 147 Ross, Herbert, 376
“River Family” (Kern), 28–29, 29–30, 73, 390, Rossum, Emmy, 398, 399, 400
W89n77, W121n65 Royce, Rosita, 104
Rivera, Diego, 182 Ruick, Barbara, 311
“The Road You Didn’t Take” (Sondheim), 377 Ruggles, Charles, xxiv, 163, 164, 165, 189
Road Show (Sondheim), 338, W75n22 The Rumble (Bernstein), 280, 295, 303, 328,
Robbins, Jerome, xxv, xxvi, 11, 279, 280, 281, 329, 330, W118n33
282, 283, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 293, 295, Run, Little Chillun! ( Johnson), 70
308, 327, 330, 335, 338, 342, 346, 347, 365, 382 Runyon, Damon, 241, 259, 321
Robbins, Tim, xviii, 180, 182, 184, 185, 186 “Runyonland” (Loesser), 241
Robert le Diable (Meyerbeer), 399 Russell, Rosalind, W125n1
Roberta (Kern and Harbach) [stage versus
screen], 39, 156–57, 189 Saddler, Donald, 89
Roberti, Lyda, 157 “The Saga of Jenny” (Weill and I. Gershwin),
Robeson, Paul, xxiv, 24, 26, 160, 162, 191, 364, 136, 139, 142, 375–76, W129n82
W101n5 “The Saga of Lenny” (Sondheim), W129n82
Robinson, Paul, xiv, W76n11 Saidy, Fred, W113n17
Rockefeller, Nelson, 182 “Sailor Beware” (Whiting and Robin), 165
Rodeo (Copland), 136 St. Cyr, Lili, 103, 104
“Rodger Young” (Loesser), 235 St. Elmo’s Fire [film], 398
Rodgers, Richard, xxvi, 5, 6, 23, 42, 63–64, St. Louis Woman (Arlen and Mercer), 169
132, 144, 243, 293, 342, 359, W100n53, St. Matthew Passion (Bach), 391
W114n24. See also Rodgers (Richard) and Salieri, Antonio, 397
Hammerstein (Oscar) Sally (Kern et al.), 22
Rodgers (Richard) and Hammerstein (Oscar), Sanders, Ronald, W97n2, W98n17
xi, xii, xiv, xxvi, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 15, 39, 47, San Juan, Olga, 187
49, 87, 107, 108, 109, 110, 143, 153, 155, 176, Sarandon, Susan, 186
195–214 (196), 215, 216, 217, 218, 225, 231, Saturday Night (Sondheim), 341, W126n20
233, 246, 252, 261–62, 263, 264, 265, 277, Savran, David, 352, 371
310–14, 324, 349, 362, 373, 374, 381, 382, “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” (Lerner and
386, 394, 408, W113n17, W113n19 Loewe), 265, 266, 276
Rodgers (Richard) and Hart (Lorenz), xxvi, 6, Schebera, Jürgen, W97n2
8, 14, 42, 83–111, 143, 150, 158, 176–80, 189, Schildkraut, Joseph, 193
190, 195, 212, 213, 215, 221 Schillinger, Joseph, 59, W86n10
Rodzinski, Artur, 281 Schoenberg, Arnold, xii, 116, 131, 266, 345,
Rogers, Ginger, 60, 85, 136 346, 382, W126n30
Romberg, Sigmund, 4, 155, 389, W77n20, Schönberg, Claude-Michel. See Boublil
W132n17 (Alain) and Schönberg (Claude-Michel)
Rome, Harold, 14, 120, W77n20 “School Days,” 391–92, W132n22
Roméo et Juliette (Berlioz) [dramatic Schopenhauer, Arthur, 178
symphony], W120n46 Schubert, Franz, xii, 93, 221, 390, W91n28
Roméo et Juliette (Gounod) [opera], 290–91 Schumacher, Joel, xxiii, 398, 401
Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev) [ballet], 291 Schuman, William, 234
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) [play], xxiii, Schwartz, Arthur, W113n17
11, 281, 283, 290–94, 296, 298, 329, 361, Schwartz, Charles, 64, W86n6
W116n60 Schwartz, Stephen, xxvi, 346, 347
441
Index
Scott, Matthew, W97n2 “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat”

See America First (Porter), 42 (Loesser), 246, 321
Segal, Vivienne, 101, 102 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (Bernstein and
Seiter, William A., 187, 188 Lerner), 278, 308
“Send in the Clowns” (Sondheim), 349, Skin of Our Teeth (Wilder), 136
359, 381 “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (Rodgers), 87,
Señor Discretion (Loesser), 259 88, 91, 99, 100, 110, 190, 280, W106n24
“The Servants’ Chorus” (Lerner and Loewe), “Small House of Uncle Thomas”
265, W114n28 (Robbins), 281
Seurat, Georges, 365, 366–69, 370, 381, 382 Smith, Cecil, 20, W73n4
Seven Lively Arts (Porter), 215 Smith, Oliver, 321
Shakespeare, William, 11, 210, 217, 225–32, Smith, Queenie, 59
280, 290–94, 298, 317, 318, 329, 361, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” 157
W124n10 Smokey Joe’s Café (Leiber and Stoller), xxvii
Shall We Dance (G. and I. Gershwin) [film], Snelson, John, 387, 389, 390, 392, 393, 405,
82, 190, W90n7 406–07, 408, W74n10, W132n22, W133n36,
Sharaff, Irene, W98n17 W133n46, W134n49
Shaw, Charlotte, 267 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [film], 156,
Shaw, George Bernard, 10, 229, 261, 262, W125n25
263–70, 273, 277, W116n56 “So in Love” (Porter), 219, 227, 228–29, 314,
“Shaw Nuff” (Gillespie), 391 316, 358, 402–3
“She Didn’t Say Yes” (Kern and Harbach), 88 “Soliloquy” (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 84,
“She gonna come home wit’ me” 204, 205, 206, 207, 214, 312, 313
(Loesser), 258 Solomon, Maynard, W91n28
Sheridan, Jamey, 183 “Some Enchanted Evening” (Rodgers and
“She’s Leaving Home” (The Beatles), xii Hammerstein), 381, W133n46
Shevelove, Bert, 342, 346 “Somehow I Never Could Believe” (Weill
Shirley, Wayne, 68, W73n6, W76n13, W89n80 and Hughes), W105n11
Short, Hazzard, 138, W98n23 Something for the Boys (Porter), 189
Show Boat (Kern and Hammerstein) “Something Had to Happen” (Kern and
[musical], xiii, xviii, xx, xxi, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, Harbach), 157
11, 12, 15, 16, 19–39 (25), 43, 45, 48, 50, 57, “Something’s Coming” (Bernstein and
61, 65, 70, 72, 99, 111, 128, 153, 154, 155, Sondheim), 286–87, 289–90, 294, 304–5, 329
159, 199, 200, 231, 236, 296, 338, 346, 348, “Somewhere” (Bernstein and Sondheim),
373, 378, 382, 390, 391; Synopsis (W8–9); 280, 284, 285, 286, 288, 289, 294, 295,
Discography and Filmography (W22–23); 296–301 (297, 299, 300), 305, 306, 307, 330,
Appendix A (W29); Appendix D (W37–41); W119n36, W122n73, W123n80, W123n82
Notes (W79n26, W89n77, W121n65) Sondheim, Stephen, xiii, xiv, xv, xx, xxi, xxvi,
Show Boat [1936 film], xxiv, 155, 156, 157, xxvii, xxviii, 3, 6, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 213, 234,
158, 159–163 (160), 189, 191, 324, 361, 364 243, 279, 281, 282, 283, 284, 288, 289, 290,
Show Boat [1951 film], 158–59, 188, 314–15 293, 308, 321, 328, 330, 335–82 (336, 345),
Show Boat [novel], 22, 34, W78n14 386, 387–88, 389, 408, W94n59
“Show Me” (Lerner and Loewe), 275, 325 Song of Love [film], 187
Shostakovich, Dmitri, 94 Song of the Flame (Gershwin, Stothart, and
“Shufflin’ Sam” (Kern and Wodehouse), Hammerstein), 21
W80n47 “Song of the Zodiac.” See “Zodiac Song”
Sidney, George, 310, 315 “Soon” (Sondheim), 359
Silk Stockings (Porter), 232 “Sorry-Grateful (Sondheim), 378
Sills, Beverly, 112 The Sound of Music (Rodgers and
Simmons, Jean, 319, 321, 325, W124n13 Hammerstein), 15, 176, 213, 233, 331,
Simon, Neil, 376, W129n83 W107n34, W125n125
Simon, Robert, 27 South Pacific (Rodgers and Hammerstein), xi,
Sinatra, Frank, 177, 178, 180, 322 xii, 14, 108, 130, 143, 169, 176, 198, 213, 214,
“Sing a Song of Social Significance” 216, 231, 233, 236, 281, 311, 342, 381
(Rome), 120 “Speak Low” (Weill and Nash), 147, 148,
“Sing like the Bluebird” (Porter), 164 149, 186
Singer, Barry, W74n10 Spewack, Bella, 10, 136, 217, 218, 225–27,
Singin’ in the Rain [film], 332, W125n25 232, 317
The Singing Detective [film], 180 Spewack, Sam, 10, 136, 218, 225–27, 232, 317
442
Index
Spialek, Hans, 44, 89, 90 Sunday in the Park with George (Sondheim)
Spitzer, John, W88n69 [musical], xx, 15, 308, 337, 338, 365–71
The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie [film], 402 (368, 369), 375, 379–80, 386; Synopsis (W9);
“Sposalizio” (Loesser), 254 Discography and Filmography (W24);
Sporting Life’s theme (Gershwin), 77, 78 Appendix A (W29); Appendix T (W68)
Stade, Frederica von, W78n6 Sunny (Kern, Harbach, and Hammerstein),
“Ständchen” (Schubert). See “Ungeduld” 21, 22
“Standing on the Corner” (Loesser), 252, 253, Sunset Boulevard (Lloyd Webber and Black),
254, 255 xxvii, xxviii, 173, 386, 394, 408, 409,
A Star Is Born (Arlen and I. Gershwin) W126n31, W130n2, W132n26, W134n53
[film], 151 “Surabaya Johnny” (Brecht and Weill), 142
Star Wars [film], 386 Suskin, Steven, 236, 388, W107n1
Starlight Express (Lloyd Webber and Stilgoe), Swain, Joseph P., xiii-xiv, xv, xix, xxii, 220,
385, 386, 409, W131n2 295, 301, 387, 394, W89n81, W97n1,
“The Star Spangled Banner” (words by W106n32, W107n10, W121n63
Key), 391 Sweeney Todd (Sondheim) [musical], xiii,
Starr, Larry, xxii, 72, 76, W73n6 xxvi, xxvii, 288, 338, 346–60, 365, 366, 379,
State Fair (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 187, 386, 390; Synopsis (W9); Discography
203 and Filmography (W24); Appendix A
“Stay with Me” (Sondheim), 373 (W29–30); Appendix S (W66–67); Notes
Stempel, Larry, 301, W100n53, W105n11, (W131n4)
W114n30, W122n76 Sweeney Todd [film], xxiii, 310, 331, 337, 355,
Sternfeld, Jessica, 389, 390, 393, 405, 409, 360–65 (361), 398, 402
W74n10, W131n13, W132n25, W133n41, Sweeney Todd (Bond) [play], 350, 351–52
W133n44 Sweeney Todd (Pitt) [play], 352
Stevenson, Robert M., W101n63 Sweeney Todd Final Sequence, 358–60, W127n56
Stokowski, Leopold, 103 Sweeney Todd Prelude, 355, 356, W127n51
Stormy Weather [film], 156 “Sweeney Todd” chord, 355, 356, 357,
“The Story of Lucy and Jessie” (Sondheim), W127n48
375–76, 377 Sweet Adeline (Kern and Hammerstein), 38, 189
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle [film], 39 Sweet Charity (Coleman and Fields), 348
Stradling, Harry, 324 Swerling, Jo, 237
“Stranger Than You Dreamt It” (Lloyd Swift, Kay, 168
Webber and Hart), 405 “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (African-
Stratas, Teresa, W78n6 American spiritual), W89n77
Strauss, Johann Jr., 14 Swing Time (Kern and D. Fields) [film], 39
Strauss, Richard, 143, 349 Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) (Beethoven),
Stravinsky, Igor, 107, 116, 348, 382, 389 W129n78
Street Scene (Weill and Rice), 132, 136, 143, Symphony in D Minor (Franck), 94
152, 253, W105n11 Symphonie fantastique (Berlioz), 355, 356,
A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams) [play], 320 357, 358
Strike Up the Band (G. and I. Gershwin), 60, Symphony of Psalms (Stravinsky), W118n27
155, 189 Synopses, W1–10
Stritch, Elaine, 27, 103
Strunsky, Michael, 171 “Take Back Your Mink” (Loesser), 249
The Student Prince in Heidelberg (Romberg “Take Care of This House” (Bernstein and
and Donnelly), 4, W76n5 Lerner), 308
Stroman, Susan, 27 “Take Me Back to Manhattan” (Porter), 46
Strouse, Charles, xxvi “Take the Moment” (Rodgers and
Styne, Jule, 234, 335, 336, 342, 365, W77n20 Sondheim), 359
“Suddenly It’s Spring” (Burke and Van “Talking to My Pal “(Rodgers and Hart),
Heusen), 186 W94n57
Sutherland, Joan, 325 The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare),
“Sue Me” (Loesser), 247, 322, W111n15 10, 217, 218, 219, 221, 225–32, 315, 317,
“Summertime” (Gershwin and Heyward), W116n60
59, 79, 169, 175 “Tangled in the Winding Sheets” (Lloyd
“Sunday” (Sondheim), 367, 369, 370 Webber and Hart), 400
Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte [Seurat Taruskin, Richard, xx
painting], 366, 368, 369, 370 Taubman, Howard, 253, 254
443
Index
“Taunting Scene” (Bernstein), 280, W117n20 “Tonight” (Bernstein and Sondheim), 286,
Taymor, Julie, xxi 287, 295, 298, 299, 300, 305, 329, 360, 405,
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, 104, 145, 377, 378 W118n27
Teachout, Terry, 185, W96n39 “Tonight” Quintet (Bernstein and
Templeton, Faye, 157 Sondheim), 243
Terris, Norma, 24 Tony motive (Loesser), 256, 257–58
Textual realism versus opulent adornment, “Too Darn Hot” (Porter), 219, 221, 317, 318
xiv, 8, 55–56 Too Many Girls [film], 190
“That Terrific Rainbow” (Rodgers and Hart), Top Hat [film], 156
103, 104, 107, 109, 178, 179 Tormé, Mel, 59
“That’s Him” (Weill and Nash), 147, 148, 187 Tosca (Puccini) [opera], 403, W109n29,
Thayer, Alexander Wheelock, 126 W115n46
Theatre Guild, 46, 58, 61, 63, 69, 70, 195, 263 Toscanini, Arturo, 103
“There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair” (Porter), 53, “The Touch of Your Hand” (Kern and
164, 175, 221 Harbach), 157
“There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New “Tradition” (Bock and Harnick), 347
York” (G. and I. Gershwin), 71, 82 Traubner, Richard, 21
“There’s a Small Hotel” (Rodgers and Hart), “Travelin’ Light” (Loesser), W111n19
90, 98–99, 100, 145, 180, 190, 228, W106n24 Tree, Beerbohm 267, 269
“There’s No Cure like Travel” (Porter), 44, 46 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Schwartz and
“They Didn’t Believe Me” (Kern), 22 Fields), 47
They Knew What They Wanted (Howard), 235, Trial by Jury (Gilbert and Sullivan), 145
250, 251–52 Trilby (Du Maurier) [novel], 395
“They pass by singin,’ ” 74, 79, 81, 171–72 A Trip to Chinatown (Gaunt and Hoyt), 4
“Think of Me” (Lloyd Webber and Hart), 403, Tristan and Isolde [tale], 294
404, 408 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner) [opera], 297, 298,
“This Can’t Be Love Love” (Rodgers and 350, W122n77
Hart), 97 “Trockadero Opening Chorus” (Kern and
“This Is New” (Weill and I. Gershwin), 186 Hammerstein), 24
This Is the Army [film], 156 Trouble in Tahiti (Bernstein), 282, 308
“This Nearly Was Mine” (Rodgers and “The Trouble with Women” (Weill and
Hammerstein), 206 Nash), 140
“This Turf Is Ours” (Bernstein and “True Love” (Porter), 232
Sondheim), W119nn33–34 “Tschaikowsky” (Weill and I. Gershwin), 136,
Thomas, Linda Lee, 42 139, 145
Thompson, Era Bell, 168 Tunick, Jonathan, 344
Thomson, Virgil, 63, 64, 70, 112, 136 Turandot (Puccini), 393, 405, W132nn24–25
Thornburn, David, 230 Turturro, John, 182
“Thou Swell” (Rodgers and Hart), 83 “Twin Soliloquies” (Rodgers and
“The Three B’s” (Rodgers and Hart), 93–94 Hammerstein), 214
Three Sisters (Kern and Hammerstein), 157 “Two a Day for Keith” (Rodgers and Hart), 89
The Threepenny Opera (Brecht and Weill), 112, Two by Two (Rodgers and Charnin), 213
131, 132, 137, 142, 143, 144, 147, W95n12 “Two Little People” (Rodgers and
Tibbett, Lawrence, 67, W87n39 Hammerstein), 207–8
“Till Good Luck Comes My Way” (Kern and “Two Sleepy People” (Loesser and
Hammerstein), 25, 33, 35, 160, 162 Carmichael), 234
The Time of the Cuckoo (Laurents) [play], 281,
308 Ullmann, Liv, 213
A Time to Kill [film], 398 “Una gioia” (Puccini), 392
The Tinted Venus (F. Anstey), 136 Under Dialogue (Bernstein), 305, W122n75
Tip-Toes (G. and I. Gershwin), 59 “Unforgettable.” See “You Are
Till the Clouds Roll By [film], 188 Unforgettable”
Titanic [film], 386 “Ungeduld” (Schubert and Müller)
“To Be or Not to Be” (Porter), 217 [incorrectly designated as “Ständchen” in
“To Keep My Love Alive” (Rodgers and On Your Toes], 93, W91n28
Hart), 110 Unger, Max, W96n36
To Kill a Mockingbird [film], 169 “Up to the Moon” (Bernstein and Sondheim),
“Tom, Dick or Harry” (Porter), 218, 220, 287–88, W118n31
226, 317 “Uptown, Downtown” (Sondheim), 375, 377
444
Index
Vallon’s theme (Kern), 35, W80n48, W101n9 “We’re the Greatest” (Bernstein and
Van, Bobby, 316, 318 Sondheim), W118n33
Van Heusen, Jimmy, 159 “Were Thine That Special Face” (Porter), 219,
Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 397, 403 220, 226, 317
Vedder, Eddie, 186 West, Mae, 82
“The Venice Gavotte” (Bernstein), 243, 308 West Side Story (Bernstein and Sondheim)
“Venus Entrance” (Weill), 137, 147 [musical], xv, xix, xx, xxv, xxviii, 3, 9, 10, 11,
“Venus in Ozone Heights” (Weill), 150 12, 14, 15, 16, 31, 54, 112, 147, 199, 231, 233,
Verdi, Giuseppe, 9, 64, 136, 143, 171, 219, 349, 238, 243, 279–308 (284, 289), 335, 338, 341,
388, W87n25, W107n11, W109n29 346, 347, 348, 350, 351–52, 354, 382, 390,
Verrett, Shirley, 211 393, 405; Synopsis (W9–10); Discography
Vertigo [film], 178 and Filmography (W24–25); Appendix
Very Good Eddie (Kern, Wodehouse, and A (W30); Appendix Q (W61–62); Notes
Bolton), 4, 22 (W73n2, W84n23, W111n34)
Very Warm for May (Kern and West Side Story [film], xxiii, 280, 309,
Hammerstein), 38, 215 310, 317, 327–32 (328), 360, 361, 402,
“Very, Very, Very” (Weill and Nash), 140, 151 W125nn24–25
Violin Concerto in E Minor West Side Story “Finale,” 306, W122n75
(Mendelssohn), 390 Westley, Helen, 160
Villella, Edward, 103 “Westwind” (Weill and I. Gershwin), 137,
Voltaire (pseudonym of François-Marie 147, 148
Arouet), 378 Whale, James, 156, 159
“What a Joy to Be Young” (Porter), 45
Wagner, Richard, 9, 27, 57, 63, 136, 143, “What Do You Do in the Infantry”
296–98, 307, 349, 388, 390 (Loesser), 235
Waiting for Lefty (Odets) [play], 52, 92, 114, “What Is a Man?” (Rodgers and Hart), 107,
136 108
Wake Up and Dream (Porter), 40 “What Is This Thing Called Love?” (Porter),
Walker, Robert, 187 40, 224
Die Walküre (Wagner) [opera], 298, 300, 302, “What You Want Wid Bess?” (Gershwin and
W78n6, W118n27 Heyward), 78–79
Walsh, Michael, 387, 390, 391, 392, “What’s the Use of Wondrin’” (Rodgers and
W132nn21, W132n24 Hammerstein), 197, 204, 206, 340
Walter, Bruno, 281 What’s Up? (Lerner and Loewe), 262, 278
“Waltz Down the Aisle” (Porter), 44 Wheeler, Hugh, 346, 349, 350, 359
“Waltz Suite” (Rodgers), W105n21 “When the Children Are Asleep” (Rodgers
Warfield, William, 158, 166 and Hammerstein), 210–11, 313
“Warm All Over” (Loesser), 255, 256, 257 “Where Does It Get You in the End?”
Warner, Jack, 325 (Bernstein and Latouche), 286, 288,
Warren, Annette, 188 W118n29
Watson, Emily, 181, 182 “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” (Porter),
Watts, Richard Jr. 253 219, 220, 224, 318
“We Do Not Belong Together” Where’s Charley? (Loesser), 47, 85, 235, 236,
(Sondheim), 368 237, 244, 245
“We Open in Venice” (Porter), 219, 221, 316, “Where’s That Rainbow?” (Rodgers and
W107n11 Hart), 83
“We Shall Never Be Younger” (Porter), 227, “Where’s the Mate for Me?” (Kern and
228 Hammerstein), 32, 33, 34–35, 36, 38, 161,
Weber, Max, 346 162, W105n11, W121n66
Wedding Dream (Weill), 144, 145, 146, 186 Whipple, Sidney B., 102
Weede, Robert, 249 Whistle Down the Wind (Lloyd Webber and
“A Weekend in the Country” Steinman), 408, 409
(Sondheim), 359 A White House Cantata (Bernstein), 308
Weidman, John, 346 White, Miles, 195
Weill, Kurt, xx, xxvi, 5, 6, 82, 115, 116, 117, White, Sammy, W101n5
125, 130–52, 186–88, 195, 262, 278, 316, White, Willard, 70, 173
W95n12, W104n47 Whiteman, Paul, 409–10, W105n21
“Well, Did you Evah?” (Porter), 215 Whitmore, James, 318
Welles, Orson, 116, 186, 353 “Who?” (Kern and Hammerstein), 22
445
Index
“Who Am I?” (Weill and Nash), W99n28 “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” (Lerner and
“Why Can’t the English?” (Lerner and Loewe), 265, 274, 325, 326
Loewe), 265, 274, W114n30 Wright (Robert) and Forrest (George), 14,
“Why Can’t You Behave?” (Porter), 218, 222, W77n20
223, 226 “Wunderbar” (Porter), 44, 319
“Why Do I Love You?” (Kern and Wuthering Heights [film], 320
Hammerstein), 24, 27, 160, 162, 200 Wynn, Keenan, 318
Wicked (Schwartz), xxvii
Wildcat (Coleman and Leigh), 348 Yale Broadway Masters, W74n8
Wilder, Alec, 110 Yankee Doodle Dandy [film], 4, 156, W125n25
The Wild Rose (Friml, Stothart, and “Yesterday” (Beatles), 391
Hammerstein), 21 “Yesterdays” (Kern and Harbach), 157
Wildflower (Stothart, Youmans, Harbach, and Yeston, Maury, xxvi, 388
Hammerstein), 21 Yon, Pietro, 42
Will Rogers Follies (Coleman and Comden York, Richard, 47
and Green), 348 “You Are Love” (Hammerstein and Kern),
Williams, Camilla, 67 162, 200, 206, W81n59
Williamson, Nicol, 213 You Can’t Take It with You (Kaufman and
Wilson, Alexandra, 383 Hart) [play], 52
Wilson, Edwin, 211 “You Did It” (Lerner and Loewe), 266, 271,
Wilson, Eileen, 188 325, 327
Wilson, Patrick, 399 “You Do Something to Me” (Porter), 40
Wiman, Dwight, 90 “You Must Meet My Wife” (Sondheim), 359
Winger, Debra, 392 “You Mustn’t Kick It Around” (Rodgers and
Winninger, Charles, xxiv, 160, 163, 191, Hart), 110, 180
W101n5 “You Took Advantage of Me” (Rodgers and
Winters, Lawrence, 67 Hart), 83, 89
Wise, Robert, xxv, 310, 327, 328 “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (Rodgers and
Wise Guys (Sondheim). See Road Show Hammerstein), 197, 207–9, 312, 382
“Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” Youmans, Vincent, 156
(Lloyd Webber and Hart), 403 Young, A. S. (“Doc”), 71
“With a Little Bit of Luck” (Lerner and “Young People” (Loesser), 257
Loewe), 265, 266, 326, W114n32, “Your Eyes” (Larson), 393
W115n46 “Your Fault” (Sondheim), 371
“Without You” (Lerner and Loewe), 265–66, “You’re Devastating” (Kern and Harbach), 157
271, 272, 273 “You’re Just in Love” (Berlin), 243
The Wizard of Oz (Arlen and Harburg), 85, “You’re Nearer” (Rodgers and Hart), 190
156, W125n25 “You’re the Top” (Porter), 40, 49, 53, 57, 159,
Wodehouse (P.G.) and Bolton (Guy), 4, 43, 46 164, 165, 218
Woll, Allen, W79n51
“A Woman in Love” (Loesser), 322 Zadan, Craig, 282
The Woman in White (Lloyd Webber and Zaks, Jerry, 49, 165, 337
Zippel), 408, 409, W75n22 Zeffirelli, Franco, 171, 291
Wonderful Town (Bernstein, Comden, and Ziegfeld, Florenz, 20, 21, 22
Green), 233, 282, 301, W123n79 “Zip” (Rodgers and Hart), 94, 103, 104, 107,
Wood, Natalie, 280, 310, 328, W73n2 177–78, 179
“Wooden Wedding” (Weill and Nash), 147 “Zodiac Song” (Weill and I. Gershwin), 137,
Woollcott, Alexander, 21 138, 139
Word and Music [film], 190 Zorbá (Kander and Ebb), 347
“The Worst Pies in London,” 356, 357, 358 Zorina, Vera, 190
446
SYNOPSES
Anything Goes
Reno Sweeney (Ethel Merman), an evangelist turned bar hostess, gets such a
kick out of Billy Crocker (William Gaxton) that she boards a Europe-bound
liner to dissuade him from pursuing Hope Harcourt (Bettina Hall).
Although Billy dreams of Hope all through the night, Hope is determined
to marry an English peer. Crocker has boarded without a ticket, so is forced
to adopt a number of disguises. Also aboard is a wistful little man, the
Reverend Dr. Moon (Victor Moore), whom J. Edgar Hoover has branded
“Public Enemy 13.” Moon’s ambition is to rise to the top of Hoover’s list.
With a minister and former evangelist as passengers the captain hopes to
cheer his Depression-ridden travelers with a revival meeting. Reno obliges
with a rousing anthem directed at the archangel Gabriel. On landing, Hope
discovers she has become an heiress. She drops her Englishman and consents
to marry Billy. The Englishman turns his attention to Reno, while Moon,
learning he has been judged harmless and dropped from the FBI list, walks
away muttering nasty things about Hoover.
Carousel
When Billy Bigelow (John Raitt), a New England carnival barker, falls in love
with Julie Jordan (Jan Clayton), he proves so shy that he can only convey his
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Synopses
feelings by suggesting what might happen “If I Loved You.” Nonetheless,

by the time “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,” he wins Julie. Later he discovers
she is pregnant, so he agrees to join the scowling Jigger Craigin (Murvyn
Vye) in a robbery to earn extra money. The plan misfires, and Billy kills him-
self rather than be caught. Before a heavenly judge, he pleads for another
chance to return to earth, to redeem himself and see his daughter. But when
the daughter refuses his gift of a star he has stolen from the sky he slaps
her and must return to purgatory. The widowed Julie and her child are left
to continue alone in the world, in stark contrast to her old friend Carrie
Pipperidge (Jean Darling), who has made a prosperous marriage to the rich
Mr. Snow (Eric Mattson). Julie’s sole comforter, Nettie Fowler (Christine
Johnson), assures her “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

Scene 1. Street Corner: In “Moll’s Song” a prostitute (Olive Stanton) explains
how the two dollars she earns on two days each week in Steeltown barely
provides enough to eat for the five days her “efforts ain’t required.” A Gent
enters, offers the Moll thirty cents, harasses her, and departs when a Dick
comes to protect the Moll in exchange for sexual favors. A Cop instructed to
pick up union workers mistakenly arrests the Liberty Committee, a group
selected and cultivated by Mr. Mister (Ralph MacBane) to destroy the bur-
geoning attempts to form a union. The Liberty Committee and the Moll are
taken to Night Court.
Scene 2. Night Court: The Liberty Committee explains how they were
arrested as they were attempting to stop a union speech. Since they had gath-
ered together for this purpose, and since Mr. Mister gave strict orders to “arrest
anyone forming a crowd,” the police arrested the Liberty Committee instead
of Larry Foreman (Howard da Silva), “the man who made the speech.” Sig-
nificantly, the Moll and Harry Druggist (John Adair), the only nonmembers of
the Liberty Committee to be arrested—the Moll for soliciting her body and the
Druggist his soul—sing their exchange to the main theme from “Nickel under
the Foot.” Harry explains that “they won’t buy our milkwhite bodies, / So
we kinda sell out in some other way—to Mr. Mister.” While waiting for the
latter to arrive at Night Court and bail them out, Harry Druggist explains in
flashbacks how each of the Liberty Committee has sold out.
Scene 3. Mission: In a flashback sequence that moves from 1915 to 1917,
Reverend Salvation (Charles Niemeyer) changes his sermon from peace to
war in response to the requests of Mrs. Mister (Peggy Coudray), who repre-
sents her husband’s attempts to profit from World War I.
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Synopses
Scene 4. Lawn of Mr. Mister’s Home: Junior Mister (Maynard Holmes) and
Sister Mister (Dulce Fox), Mr. Mister’s vapid children, sing “Croon-Spoon.”
Editor Daily (Bert Weston) arrives and capitulates to the demands of Mr.
Mister, the paper’s new owner (“The Freedom of the Press”), and agrees to
print whatever his boss wants. After Junior and Sister wildly exhibit their
boredom in “Let’s Do Something,” Editor Daily offers the bored Junior a
post in “Honolulu” to get him out of the way of union trouble.
Scene 5. Drugstore: In a flashback Harry Druggist tells how he sold out
to Mr. Mister six months earlier in order to keep the mortgage on his store,
an act that led to the death of his son as well as the loving Polish immigrant
couple, Gus and Sadie (“Love Song”).
Scene 6. Hotel Lobby: The artists Yasha (Edward Fuller) and Dauber (Jules
Schmidt) show nothing but loathing and contempt for “The Rich,” but nev-
ertheless eagerly accept Mrs. Mister’s invitation for additional patronage
(“Ask Us Again”) and join Mr. Mister’s Liberty Committee to obtain a free
meal. Since they are apolitical artists who espouse “Art for Art’s Sake,” Yasha
and Dauber do not even want to know the cause the Liberty serves.
Scene 7. Night Court: After the Moll sings a complete version of “Nickel
under the Foot,” the Liberty Committee witnesses the long-awaited arrival
of Larry Foreman, “the man who made the speech.” Foreman explains to the
Moll in “Leaflets” (an underscored rhythm song) how he has been formally
charged with “Incitin’ to Riot.” He also asserts the power of the unions in
the title song.
Scene 8. Faculty Room: President Prexie accedes to Mr. Mister’s demand
for compulsory military training in exchange for funding. Although the
music is underscored almost throughout, this is the only scene without a
musical number.
Scene 9. Dr. Specialist’s Office: Dr. Specialist (Frank Marvel) lies in order
to obtain his coveted research grants controlled by Mr. Mister. Ella Ham-
mer (Blanche Collins) tells the press how her brother, Joe Hammer (“Joe
Worker”), gets “gypped” and abused by a corrupt system.
Scene 10. Night Court: Larry Foreman refuses to be bought by Mr. Mister,
the boilermakers agree to join the steel workers, and a union chorus reprises
“The Cradle Will Rock.”
Guys and Dolls

Nathan Detroit (Sam Levene), who runs the oldest established permanent
floating crap game in New York, is hard up for money, a special problem
since the biggest plunger of all, Sky Masterson (Robert Alda), is in town,
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Synopses
ready to play. When Sky boasts that he can have any woman he wants,
Nathan sees his chance. He wagers that Sky cannot win any woman Nathan
points to. Sky takes the bet. At that moment, Sister Sarah (Isabel Bigley) of
the Salvation Army comes marching by, and Nathan points to her. When
Sky wins big at dice he forces the losers to attend a Salvation Army rally in
order to help his pursuit of Sarah, whom he earlier had lured to Havana.
In the end she converts him to her ways. Meanwhile Nathan agrees to wed
Adelaide (Vivian Blaine), a nightclub singer with whom he has had a four-
teen-year courtship.
Kiss Me, Kate

While cast members of a revival of The Taming of the Shrew celebrate “Another
Op’nin,’ Another Show,” the show’s stars, Fred Graham (Alfred Drake)
and Lilli Vanessi (Patricia Morison), celebrate the first anniversary of their
divorce. They take time from their bickering to recall they had once sung
“Wunderbar” in a long-forgotten operetta. Lilli receives a bouquet from
Fred, leading her to believe he still loves her, and she confesses she is still “So
in Love” with him, but when she learns the flowers are meant for someone
else she determines to be revenged. Fred’s problems are compounded when
another member of the company, Bill Calhoun (Harold Lang), signs Fred’s
name to a gambling debt. Opening night is peppered by warfare between
Fred and Lilli, and by demands by two comic hoods for payment of the
debt. Fred convinces the hoods that they must force Lilli to perform. Bill’s
promiscuous girl, Lois (Lisa Kirk), helps him try to reform by promising
she will be “Always True to You in My Fashion,” and the hoods eventually
leave when the debt proves no longer valid on a technicality. They decide it
might be more profitable to “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” In the course of
the evening, Fred and Lilli recognize they still do love each other.
Lady in the Dark

Liza Elliott (Gertrude Lawrence), a successful but greatly troubled fashion
editor of a prestigious fashion magazine, reluctantly consults the psychi-
atrist, Dr. Brooks (Donald Randolph). In two sessions she relates musical
dreams of a glamour girl (the Glamour Dream) and marriage (the Wed-
ding Dream) that contrast markedly with the state of her waking life. In her
dreams Liza is the toast of the town; in real life she dresses in dreary clothing
and protects her emotional vulnerabilities in a dispassionate affair with a
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Synopses
married man, Kendall Nesbitt (Bert Lytell). Her waking world unravels still
further when Nesbitt offers to leave his wife and marry Liza. In her third
dream, the Circus Dream, Liza goes on trial for her indecisiveness.
The people close to Liza appear metaphorically in her dreams. In the
Circus Dream, Nesbitt is the first witness for the prosecution, her nemesis
Charley Johnson (MacDonald Carey) is the prosecuting attorney, the movie
star Randy Curtis (Victor Mature) serves as the attorney in her defense, and
the magazine’s photographer Russell Paxton (Danny Kaye) appears as the
Ringmaster. In a final session Dr. Brooks helps Liza understand the child-
hood trauma behind her fear of her femininity and success. As her repres-
sion vanishes, she is finally able to complete the song “My Ship,” which has
haunted her throughout the play. Having achieved this understanding as
well as her feminine identity, Liza realizes that she really loves Johnson.
The Most Happy Fella

Rosabella (Jo Sullivan) comes to the Napa Valley expecting to marry a hand-
some young man who has sent her his picture and proposed by mail. She
is certain that she has at last found “Somebody, Somewhere” to really love
her. But she soon discovers the handsome man, Joe (Art Lund), is merely a
hired hand, and that the man who proposed is actually an aging Italian vint-
ner, Tony (Robert Weede). He had sent her Joe’s picture, fearing one of him-
self would have disheartened her. He believes that she will quickly become
reconciled and make him “The Most Happy Fella” in all of the valley. The
shock, however, drives Rosabella into Joe’s arms. Eventually she realizes
that Tony is an honorable, loving man. Bit by bit, she and Tony admit that
they are “Happy to Make Your Acquaintance.” When he offers to accept not
only her but the baby she is now pregnant with, she comes to love him.
My Fair Lady
Coming from a performance at Covent Garden, Professor Henry Higgins (Rex
Harrison) meets a fellow scholar, Colonel Pickering (Robert Coote), and a
somewhat raucous Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle (Julie Andrews). Hig-
gins casually mentions to Pickering that given a little time he could turn a
flower girl into a lady, so when Eliza appears later at his residence asking him
to make good on his boast, Higgins accepts Pickering’s wager on the affair. It
is a long, hard struggle, but by the time Eliza can properly enunciate “The Rain
in Spain” and Higgins takes her to Ascot, her pronunciation is perfect—even
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Synopses
if her conversation is not. Later she is successfully passed off as a lady at a ball,
and she is so pleased that she confesses, “I Could Have Danced All Night.”
At one point Higgins must bribe Eliza’s father, Alfred P. Doolittle (Stanley
Holloway), to stay out of the girl’s life. With his newfound wealth Doolittle
recognizes that he must subscribe to middle-class morality by marrying, so
he urges his friends to “Get Me to the Church on Time.” But Higgins has no
objections to rich, lovesick Freddy Eynsford-Hill (John Michael King) court-
ing Eliza. So lovesick is Freddy he is happy merely to be “On the Street Where
You Live.” Nevertheless, Eliza recognizes she is too intelligent for the charm-
ing but vacuous young man, so casts her lot with the reluctant Higgins, who
is appalled but admits “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” When Eliza
returns Higgins can only respond, “Where the devil are my slippers?”
On Your Toes
Junior Dolan (Ray Bolger), music professor and former child vaudeville star,
presents his student’s jazz composition, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” to the
Russian Ballet. Prima Ballerina Vera Barnova (Tamara Geva) takes a fancy to
Junior and sees to it that the ballet is produced with Junior dancing the male
lead. Vera’s former partner and lover, Konstantine Morrosine (Demetrios
Vilan), becomes extremely jealous, and during a performance, tries to turn
a stage killing into a real one. At the last minute, Junior is warned by his
devoted student, Frankie (Doris Carson).
One Touch of Venus

Rodney Hatch (Kenny Baker), an unassuming barber, has come to shave
Whitelaw Savory (John Boles). The latter, a prominent eccentric art collec-
tor, has recently acquired a statue of the Anatolian Venus for his Founda-
tion of Modern Art, because it reminded him of a lost love. When Hatch is
left alone, he foolishly puts the ring intended for his fiancée Gloria Kramer
(Ruth Bond) on the statue’s finger, and the statue of Venus (Mary Martin)
comes to life ready to love the man who summoned her. After some ini-
tial resistance, Venus wins Hatch’s affections and disposes of the shrewish
Gloria. She also easily evades Savory’s agents, who want to “Catch Hatch”
for allegedly stealing the statue. When Venus comes to realize the quotidian
nature of her monogamous future with Hatch, she returns to Mount Olym-
pus and her statue returns to stone. As a parting gesture she arranges the
descent of a more suitable partner for the prosaic but endearing barber.
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Synopses
Pal Joey
Joey (Gene Kelly), a handsome, small-time dancer, begins his courtship of
innocent Linda English (Leila Ernst) by proclaiming about [“about” in origi-
nal Bordman summary quoted here] her virtues, “I Could Write a Book.”
Joey himself is notably short on virtues, so when Vera Simpson (Vivienne
Segal), a rich, callous, past-her-prime matron, finds herself “Bewitched” by
him and offers to set him up in luxury with his own nightclub, he all but
drops Linda. In time, Joey’s selfishness and egotism pall even for the toler-
ant Vera. Matters come to a head when Linda tells Vera of a plan to black-
mail her by threatening to tell Mr. Simpson of the liaison. The women agree
that as far as Joey is concerned they no longer want him, and the other can
“Take Him.” Having lost both women Joey wanders off into the night to find
another romance.
The Phantom of the Opera

We’re at an auction of items from the Paris Opera House. Here is a musical
box, there a chandelier that featured in a famous accident. Suddenly it rises
up to the top of the theater, and the action moves back several decades.
Christine Daaé (Sarah Brightman) is a young member of the chorus of the
Paris Opera. Unbeknown to all, she is helped by a Svengali, a vocal coach
whom she has never seen. She believes him to be the spirit of the Angel of
Music, promised to her as a guardian by her late father. The voice belongs
to a phantom, the Phantom of the Opera (Michael Crawford), a facially dis-
figured genius who lives in the hidden passages of the opera house. He has
fallen in love with his young student. He terrorizes the theater’s admin-
istrators into mounting a production of the opera Don Juan Triumphant.
He also frightens the leading soprano, Carlotta, and causes the gigantic
chandelier to crash into the auditorium. But the Phantom cannot accept
the mutual affection between Christine and a young nobleman, Raoul de
Chagny. He kidnaps Christine, taking her down to his secret apartments
beneath the theater, on its underground lake. By this time he has com-
mitted murder, as well as terrorizing the theater and its inhabitants. A
party of avengers, led by Raoul, is searching for him. Christine tears off
the Phantom’s mask and, though appalled by the wreck of his face, shows
him compassion and tenderness. The Phantom now has it in his power to
kill Raoul, but her action has melted his spirit and he disappears, leaving
Christine safely reunited with her lover as the show ends.
W7
Synopses
Porgy and Bess

When Clara (Abbie Mitchell) fails to lull her baby to sleep with a lullaby
about the languorous virtues of “Summertime,” her husband, Jake (Edward
Matthews), tries with “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing.” One reason the baby
has trouble sleeping is that Catfish Row is a noisy, dangerous place, where
the menfolk are drinking and gambling. The men tease the crippled Porgy
(Todd Duncan), who rides around in a goat-cart, about his love for Crown’s
girl, Bess (Anne Brown). Crown (Warren Coleman) himself gets into a fight
with his fellow gambler, Robbins (Henry Dobbins), and stabs him to death.
Robbins’s wife, Serena (Ruby Elzy), is left to wail “My Man’s Gone Now.”
Crown flees, leaving Porgy, who has been content to boast “I Got Plenty o’
Nuttin,’ ” free to court Bess. Arranging for her to get a divorce, he tells her,
“Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” The neighbors all go on a picnic where a glib
drug peddler, Sportin’ Life (John W. Bubbles), tells them of his cynical ideas
about the Bible, insisting, “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Crown suddenly appears,
and he and Porgy fight, with Porgy killing Crown with Crown’s own knife.
Porgy is sent to jail. When he is released he learns that Sportin’ Life has taken
Bess to New York, so he sets out in his goat-cart to retrieve her.
Show Boat
When Cap’n Andy (Charles Winninger) and wife Parthy Ann (Edna May
Oliver) bring their show boat Cotton Blossom into town for a performance,
their daughter Magnolia (Norma Terris) meets a handsome professional
gambler, Gaylord Ravenal (Howard Marsh). The youngsters fall in love at
first sight, although they profess it is “Make Believe.” Magnolia seeks advice
on what to do from a black workhand, Joe (Jules Bledsoe), who tells her
probably “Ol’ Man River” alone can answer her but that the river “don’t say
nothin.’ ” The show’s leading lady, Julie (Helen Morgan), begins to under-
stand Magnolia’s situation and, recalling an old folk song, tells her how
she too “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” of hers. But when Julie is accused of
having Negro blood she is forced to leave the boat, taking the leading man
with her. Magnolia and Gaylord are pressed into assuming the leads. Soon
enough they are telling each other “You Are Love.” They marry and head
off. Years pass. At the Chicago World’s Fair they seem amazed not only at
the sights but at how their love has grown, and ask, “Why Do I Love You?”
But eventually Gaylord’s gambling costs him all his money, so he deserts
Magnolia. She applies for a job singing at a nightclub where Julie, now a
drunkard, is rehearsing her “Bill” number. Julie recognizes Magnolia and
W8
Synopses
sacrifices what is left of her own career to help Magnolia begin hers. When
Cap’n Andy finds his daughter there he persuades her to return to the Cotton
Blossom. More years pass. One day an aging Gaylord returns. To his relief he
is welcomed by Magnolia.
Sunday in the Park with George

Georges Seurat (Mandy Patinkin) is determined to finish his painting, A Sun-
day Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, even if it means his friends and
associates will ridicule him and even if in the process he must neglect and
lose his mistress, Dot (Bernadette Peters). Years later his American great-
grandson, George (Patinkin), is also an artist, hoping to find meaning and
purpose working on a multimedia “Chromolume.” He is encouraged by his
grandmother, Marie (Peters). Visiting the drearily overdeveloped Grande
Jatte after her death, he finds solace in her memory and in notes once scrib-
bled by his great-grandfather.
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Bitter at his imprisonment and at the world in general, Sweeney Todd (Len
Cariou) returns to London and sets up as a barber. But he is no ordinary
barber. He slits his customers’ throats and turns their bodies over to his
friend, Mrs. Lovett (Angela Lansbury), who bakes them into pies. He even
succeeds in murdering the venal judge who sent him to prison, but when
he learns he has also inadvertently murdered his long-lost wife his mind
snaps completely and he pushes Mrs. Lovett into her own oven. He in turn
is murdered by a young boy Mrs. Lovett had befriended.
West Side Story

The story is set among two rival youth gangs in New York City in the 1950s,
the longer established Jets, led by Riff, and the Puerto Rican newcomers,
the Sharks, led by Bernardo. Riff intends to meet Bernardo at a community
dance—neutral territory—and challenge him to a fight for control of the
neighborhood. Tony (Larry Kert), a former Jet and Riff’s best friend, meets
Maria (Carol Lawrence), Bernardo’s sister, at the dance, and they fall immedi-
ately in love. They meet that night on her fire escape, and again the next day
at the shop where she works, where they enact a mock wedding ceremony.
W9
Synopses
Tony tries to intervene at the rumble but succeeds only in accidentally per-
mitting Bernardo to kill Riff; in a rage, Tony himself kills Bernardo. Maria
manages to forgive him and they decide to run away together. She sends
a message to Tony who is in hiding with the Jets, by Bernardo’s girlfriend
Anita, but the gang so abuses her that she angrily tells them Maria is dead.
Tony, in despair, runs through the streets begging to be killed; he discovers
that Maria is alive just as a Shark shoots him. Maria in her grief manages to
persuade everyone to let the retaliation stop, giving a hint of hope for recon-
ciliation as the play ends.
W10
DISCOGRAPHY AND
FILMOGRAPHY
Selected Original, Revival, Film,
and Studio Casts
Anything Goes
Composer and original cast (1934, 1935, and 1947): Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”
in New York and London with the composer and members of the original 1934
cast. Ethel Merman, Jack Whiting, The Foursome, Jeanne Aubert, Sidney
Howard, Porter (vocals and piano). Smithsonian American Musical The-
ater Series DPM1–0284 R 007. Contents: “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re
the Top,” “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” (Merman), “All Through the Night”
(Whiting), “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” (Aubert), “You’re the Top” (Whiting and
Aubert), “Sailor’s Chanty,” “Gypsy in Me” (The Foursome), “You’re the
Top,” “Anything Goes,” “Be Like the Bluebird” (Porter), and “Be Like the
Bluebird” (Howard). Porter’s rendition of “You’re the Top” (October 26,
1934) was reissued on the compact disc Showstoppers: Historic Victor Record-
ings BMG 9590–2-R.*
Revival cast (1962): Hal Linden, Eileen Rodgers, Kenneth Mars, Ted Simons
(conductor)†. Epic Footlight Series FLS 15100 (S); reissued on Time-Life
* By the late 1980s all shows were issued in compact disc (the numbers given in this Discogra-
phy) or tape formats. Many older long-playing cast recordings have also been reissued on CDs
in recent years.
† Throughout, no attempt is made to honor the distinctions between conductor, musical direc-
tor, or musical supervisor. The term “conductor” is used exclusively.
W11
Discography and Filmography
P 15602 (S), set STL AM02 with Kiss Me, Kate and Can-Can (set title, Cole
Porter). Missing: “Where Are the Men?”
Revival cast (1987): Patti LuPone, Howard McGillin, Bill McCutcheon,
Edward Strauss (conductor). RCA 7769–4 RC.
Studio cast (1989): Kim Criswell, Cris Groenendaal, Jack Gilford, Frederica
von Stade, John McGlinn (conductor). EMI/Angel CDC 7–49848–2.
FILM (Paramount 1936): Cast: Bing Crosby, Ethel Merman, Charlie Ruggles, Ida
Lupino, and Margaret Dumont. Screenplay by Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse,
and Guy Bolton. Produced by Benjamin Glazer. Directed by Lewis Milestone.
Songs (from Anything Goes): “Anything Goes” [fragment] (Merman), “I Get a
Kick Out of You” (Merman), “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair” (Crosby and
Avalon Boys), “You’re the Top” (Merman and Crosby). [82 minutes]
FILM (Paramount 1956): Cast: Bing Crosby, Donald O’Connor, Mitzi Gaynor,
Phil Harris, Jeanmarie. Screenplay by Sidney Sheldon. Produced by Robert
Emmett Dolan, Directed by Robert M. Lewis. Choreography by Nick Cas-
tle. Songs by Porter: “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Anything Goes,” “You’re
the Top,” “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” “It’s De-Lovely” (from 1962 Revival), “All
through the Night.” [106 minutes]
Carousel
Original cast (1945): John Raitt, Jan Clayton, Jean Darling, Christine John-
son, Joseph Littau (conductor). Decca DLP-8003; reissue. MCA 2033.
Missing: “Geraniums in the Winder” and some dance numbers.
Film cast (1956): Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Barbara Ruick, Robert Roun-
seville, Cameron Mitchell, Alfred Newman (conductor). Capitol SW 694.
Missing: “Geraniums in the Winder,” “The Highest Judge of All,” and some
dance numbers.
Studio cast (1988): Barbara Cook, Samuel Ramey, Sarah Brightman, David
Rendall, Maureen Forrester, and Paul Gemignani (conductor). MCA Clas-
sics MCAD 6209.
FILM (2Oth Century-Fox 1956): Cast: Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Cameron
Mitchell, Barbara Ruick, Claramae Turner, and Robert Rounseville. Screenplay
by Henry and Phoebe Ephron. Produced by Henry Ephron. Directed by Henry
King. Choreography by Rod Alexander and Agnes de Mille. Not included:
“Geraniums in the Winder” and “The Highest Judge of All.” [128 minutes]
W12

Composer and original cast (1938): Olive Stanton, Charles Niemeyer, Bert
Weston, Edward Fuller, Jules Schmidt, John Adair, Ralph MacBane,
Peggy Coudray, Maynard Holmes, Dulce Fox, George Fairchild, Blanche
Collins, Howard da Silva, Marc Blitzstein (narration and piano). Musi-
craft Records No. 18; reissued American Legacy T 1001 and “Marc Blitz-
stein Musical Theatre Premières,” Pearl Gems 0009, 2 CDs (1998). Nearly
complete.*
Composer and studio cast (1957): Marc Blitzstein Discusses His Theater
Compositions. Evelyn Lear, Roddy McDowall, Jane Connell, Alvin Epstein,
Marc Blitzstein (piano). Spoken Arts 717. Spoken historical introduction
by Blitzstein, “Nickel under the Foot,” and Hotel Lobby Scene.
Revival cast (1964): Jerry Orbach, Lauri Peters, Clifford David, Rita Gard-
ner, Micki Grant, Hal Buckley, Nancy Andrews, Gershon Kingsley (musical
director and pianist). MGM SE 4289–2 OC (complete on two records).
London cast (1985): Patti Lupone, Randle Mell, Michael Barrett (musical direc-
tor and pianist). That’s Entertainment Records ZC TED 1105 (complete).
Film Soundtrack (1999): BMG/RCA 0902700. Songs (with selective sing-
ers): “Nickel under the Foot,” “Moll’s Song” (Steven Tyler, Emily Watson),
“Croon Spoon” (Eddie Vedder, Susan Sarandon), “Joe Worker” (Audra
McDonald), “Honolulu,” “Reverend Salvation,” Freedom of the Press,”
“The Cradle Will Rock.”
FILM (Touchstone 1999): Cast: Hank Azaria, Rubén Blades, Joan Cusack, John
Cusack, Cary Elwes, Angus MacFadyen, Bill Murray, Vanessa Redgrave,
Susan Sarandon, John Turturro, and Emily Watson. Screenplay by Tim Rob-
bins. Produced by Lydia Dean-Pilcher, Jon Kilik, and Robbins. Directed by
Robbins. Songs: See Film Soundtrack (1999). [134 minutes]
Follies
Original cast (1971): Alexis Smith, Gene Nelson, John McMartin, Yvonne
DeCarlo, Dorothy Collins, Mary McCarty, Ethel Shutta, Victoria Mallory,
Fifi D’Orsay, Harold Hastings (conductor). Capitol SO 761.
* See Hummel, vol. 1, 32.
W13
Concert cast (1985): Barbara Cook, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Lee Remick,
Mandy Patinkin, Licia Albanese, George Hearn, Phyllis Newman, Carol
Burnett, Elaine Stritch, Paul Gemignani (conductor). RCA HBC2–7128.
Studio cast (1985): A Collector’s Sondheim. Craig Lucas, Suzanne Henry, E.
Martin Perry (conductor). Contents (dropped songs only): “All Things
Bright and Beautiful,” “Uptown, Downtown,” “Who Could Be Blue?,” “Lit-
tle White House,” “It Wasn’t Meant to Happen,” and “Can That Boy Fox-
trot!” RCA CRL4–5359. With the exception of “Can That Boy Foxtrot!” all
songs above appear in Marry Me a Little (1981) RCA ABL1–4159.
London cast (1987): Diana Rigg, Julia McKenzie, Daniel Massey, David
Healy, Dolores Gray, Martin Koch (conductor). Geffen 24183–4. Includes
“Ah, but Underneath” (replacing “The Story of Lucy and Jessie”), “Coun-
try House” (replacing “The Road You Didn’t Take”), “Make the Most of
Your Music” (replacing “Live, Laugh, Love”)
Paper Mill Playhouse Cast, “The Complete Recording” (1998). Kaye Ballard
(“Broadway Baby”), Eddie Bracken, Laurence Guittard, Dee Hoty, Donna
McKechnie, Ann Miller (“I’m Still Here”), Lilane Montevecchi, Phyllis
Newman, Tony Roberts, and Donald Sadler, and Jonathan Tunick (con-
ductor). TVT Soundtrax TVT 1030–2.
Guys and Dolls

Composer and studio cast (c. 1950–1955): An Evening with Frank Loesser:
Frank Loesser Performs Songs from His Hit Shows. DRG 5169 (CD). Con-
tents: “Fugue for Tinhorns” (with Milton Delugg and Sue Bennett), “I’ll
Know,” “Luck Be a Lady,” “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” “Sit Down
You’re Rockin’ The Boat,” “Sue Me,” “Traveling Light” (unused), and
“Adelaide” (from 1955 MGM film).
Original cast (1950): Robert Alda, Vivian Blaine, Sam Levene, Isabel Big-
ley, Pat Rooney Sr., Stubby Kaye, Irving Actman (conductor). Decca 8036;
reissue MCA 2034. Missing: “Havana” and “Crapshooter” dances.
Film cast (1955): Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jean Simmons, Jay Black-
ton (conductor). Decca ED 2332. Added: “Pet Me, Poppa,” “A Woman in
Love,” and “Adelaide.”
Studio Cast (1986): Emily Loesser, Gregg Edelman, Kim Criswell, John
Owen Edwards (conductor). JAY 1356.
W14
Revival cast (1992): Peter Gallagher, Nathan Lane, Josie de Guzman, Faith
Prince, Edward Strauss (conductor). RCA 09026–61317–2.
FILM (Samuel Goldwyn [released by MGM] 1955): Cast: Marlon Brando,
Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra, Vivian Blaine, and Stubby Kaye. Screen-
play by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Chore-
ography by Michael Kidd: Deleted songs: “A Bushel and a Peck,” “More
I Cannot Wish You,” “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” and “Marry the
Man Today.” Added songs: “Pet Me, Poppa,” “A Woman in Love,” and
“Adelaide.” [149 minutes]
Into the Woods

Original Cast (1987): Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleason, Chip Zien, Tom
Aldredge, Robert Westenberg, Kim Crosby, Ben Wright, Danielle Ferland,
Kay McClelland, and Lauren Mitchell, Paul Gemignani (conductor). RCA
6796–2-RC.
London Cast (1991): Julia McKenzie, Imelda Staunton, Patsy Rowlands,
Clive Carter, Jonathan Tunick (conductor). New song (for the Witch and
Rapunzel): “Our Little World.” BMG/RCA 0902700.
FILM (Image Entertainment (1991): Cast: Bernadette Peters, Joanna Glea-
son, Chip Zien, Tom Aldredge, Robert Westenberg, Kim Crosby, Ben
Wright, Danielle Ferland, Kay McClelland, and Lauren Mitchell, Paul
Gemignani (conductor). Produced by Iris Merlis and Michael Brandman.
Directed by James Lapine. [153 minutes]
Kiss Me, Kate

Original cast (1949): Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, Lisa Kirk, Harold
Lang, Lorenzo Fuller, Harry Clark, and Jack Diamond, Pembroke Dav-
enport (conductor). Columbia S 32609; reissued on Time-Life P 15602
(S), set STL AM02 with Anything Goes and Can-Can (set title, Cole Porter).
Missing: “I Sing of Love,” “Act I Finale,” and some dance numbers.
Film cast (1953): Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller, Bobby Van,
Tommy Rall, Keenan Wynn, James Whitmore, Bob Fosse, André Previn
(conductor). MGM 3077. Added: “From This Moment On,” dropped from
Out of This World.
W15
Original cast (1959): Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, Lisa Kirk, Harold
Lang, Lorenzo Fuller, Pembroke Davenport (conductor). Capitol STAO
126. Contents same as Original cast 1949.
Studio cast (1990): Josephine Barstow, Thomas Hampson, Kim Criswell,
George Dvorsky, Damon Evans, David Garrison, John McGlinn (conduc-
tor). EMI/Angel CDS 54033–2.
Studio cast (1996): Thomas Allen, Diana Montague, Graham Bickley, Diane
Langton, John Owen Edwards (conductor). Includes original orchestra-
tions by Robert Russell Bennett. JAY 2–1296 (2 CDs).
Revival cast (1999): Brian Stokes Mitchell, Marin Mazzie, Amy Spanger,
Michael Berresse, Paul Gemignani (conductor). DRG 03855 (2000).
FILM (MGM 1953): Cast: Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Ann Miller,
Tommy Rall, Bobby Van, Bob Fosse, Keenan Wynn, James Whitmore, Carol
Haney. Screenplay by Dorothy Kingsley. Produced by Jack Cummings.
Directed by George Sidney. Choreography by Hermes Pan (Bob Fosse
uncredited). Deleted songs: “Another Opnin,’ Another Show,” “Bianca,”
“I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” [spoken]. [110 minutes]
Lady in the Dark

Original cast (1941): Gertrude Lawrence, MacDonald Carey, Donald Ran-
dolph, Maurice Abravenal (conductor). AEI 1146. Contents: “Oh, Fab-
ulous One,” “One Life to Live,” “Girl of the Moment,” “It Looks Like
Liza,” “The Saga of Jenny,” “My Ship,” and dialogue from act I, scenes 1,
2, 4, and 5. Lawrence’s “My Ship” (February 23, 1941) appears on Show-
stoppers: Historic Victor Recordings. BMG 9590–2 R (CD).
Original cast (1941): Kurt Weill from Berlin to Broadway, Vol. 1 (Pearl/Pavil-
ion): Gertrude Lawrence, Danny Kaye. Contents: “Oh, Fabulous One,”
“Huxley,” “Girl of the Moment,” “One Life to Live,” “The Is New,” “The
Princess of Pure Delight,” “It’s Never Too Late to Mendelssohn,” “Tschai-
kowsky (and Other Russians),” “The Saga of Jenny,” and “My Ship.”
Original cast (1941): Gertrude Lawrence. Contents: “My Ship,” Jenny,” “This Is
New,” “One Life to Live,” “Oh, Fabulous One,” “Huxley,” “Girl of the Moment,”
“The Princess of Pure Delight.” Leonard Joy (conductor). Pearl GEM 0208, 2004.
Studio recording (1950s): Arthur Winograd (conductor). MGM E 3334.
Contents: “Dance of the Tumblers.”
W16
Studio cast (1963): Risë Stevens, Adolph Green, John Reardon, Lehman
Engel (conductor). Columbia OS 2390; reissued on Time-Life P 16374, set
STL AM10 with One Touch of Venus and The Threepenny Opera (set title,
Kurt Weill); CD reissue MK44689. Missing: “Dance of the Tumblers.”
Original London cast (1998): Maria Friedman, Adrian Dunbar, James Drey-
fus, Steven Edward Moore, Charlotte Cornwell. Mark W. Dorrell (con-
ductor). CD: Jay Productions CDJAY 1278.
FILM (Paramount 1944): Cast: Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Warner Bax-
ter, Jon Hall, Barry Sullivan, Mischa Auer. Screenplay by Frances Goo-
drich and Albert Hackett. Produced by B. G. DeSylva. Directed by Leisen.
Deleted songs: “My Ship,” “This Is New,” most of the “Glamour Dream”
and the “Wedding Dream.” [100 minutes]
A Little Night Music

Original cast (1973): Len Cariou, Glynis Johns, Hermione Gingold, Vic-
toria Mallory, Laurence Guittard, Patricia Elliott, Mark Lambert, Harold
Hastings (conductor). Columbia KS 32265.
FILM (Hen’s Tooth Video 1977): Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Rigg, Len Cariou,
Lesley-Anne Down, Hermione Gingold, Laurence Gittard, Christopher Guard,
Chloe Franks, Heinz Maracek, Lesley Dunlop. Screenplay by Hugh Wheeler.
Produced by Elliott Kastner. Directed by Harold Prince. [120 minutes]
Merrily We Roll Along

Original cast (1981): Jim Walton, Ann Morrison, Lonny Price, Paul Gemi-
gnani (conductor). RCA CBL1–4197.
The Most Happy Fella

Composer and studio cast (1953): An Evening with Frank Loesser: Frank Loesser
Performs Songs from His Hit Shows. DRG 5169 (CD). Act I, Scene 1, vocals
by Maxene Andrews as Cleo and unidentified singers (contains previously
unreleased material). Contents: “Ooh! My Feet!,” “How’s About Tonight/
House and Garden,” “The Letter,” and “Wanting to Be Wanted” (unused).
W17
Original cast (1956): Robert Weede, Jo Sullivan, Art Lund, Susan Johnson, Shorty
Long, Mona Paulee, Arthur Rubin, Herbert Greene (conductor). Columbia 03L
240; reissued on Columbia Special Products CO3L 240 (three LPs).
Revival cast (1992): Spiro Malas, Sophie Hayden, Scott Waara, Tim Stella
(conductor). RCA 09026–61294–2 (two pianos).
My Fair Lady
Original cast (1956): Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Stanley Holloway, Rob-
ert Coote, Franz Allers (conductor). Columbia OL 5090 (M); reissued on
Columbia Special Products AOL 5090 (M) and E/Philip RBL 1000 (M).
Missing: “The Embassy Waltz.”
Film cast (1964): Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn (sung by Marni Nixon),
Stanley Holloway, André Previn (conductor). Columbia KOL 8000; reis-
sued on Columbia JS 2600. Missing: “The Embassy Waltz.”
Lyricist (1971): An Evening with Johnny Mercer, Alan Jay Lerner and Sammy Cahn
Singing Their Own Songs. Contents (Lerner only): “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?,” “Oh
Come to the Ball,” and spoken introduction to “On the Street Where You Live.”
Book-of-the-Month-Club Records 70–5240 (re-released on DRG 5175 [1977]).
FILM (Warner Bros. 1964): Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Stanley
Holloway, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Gladys Cooper, Jeremy Brett, Theodore
Bikel. Screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner. Produced by Jack L. Warner. Directed
by George Cukor. Choreography by Hermes Pan. [170 minutes]
On Your Toes
Original cast, revival cast, composer, studio cast (1936–1954).*
Original revival cast (1954): Vera Zorina, Bobby Van, Elaine Stritch, Ben
Astar, Kay Coulter, Joshua Shelley, Nicholas Orloff, Jack Williams, George
Church, Salvatore Dell’Isola (conductor). Decca DL 9015; reissued on Stet
DS 15024. Missing: “La Princesse Zenobia Ballet.”
Original revival cast (1983): Lara Teeter, George S. Irving, Dina Merrill,
George De La Pena, Christine Andreas, John Mauceri (conductor). Poly-
dor 813667–1 Y 1.
W18
FILM (Warner Bros. 1939): Cast: Vera Zorina, Eddie Albert. Musical num-
bers: “Princesse Zenobia” (ballet), “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” (ballet). [93
minutes]
One Touch of Venus

Composer (1943): Tryout: A Series of Private Rehearsal Recordings—Including
Actual Performances by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin. DRG 904 (CD). Con-
tents: “West Wind,” “Very Very Very,” “Wooden Wedding,” “Speak
Low,” “The Jersey Plunk” (“Way Out West in Jersey”), “The Trouble with
Women” (quartet), and “That’s Him.”
Original cast (1943): Mary Martin, Kenny Baker, Maurice Abravanel (con-
ductor). Decca DL 79122; reissued on AEI 1136; reissued on Time-Life P
16374, set STL AM10 with Lady in the Dark and The Threepenny Opera (set
title, Kurt Weill). Contents: “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” “Forty Minutes
for Lunch (ballet),” “Speak Low,” “West Wind,” “Foolish Heart,” “The
Trouble with Women,” “That’s Him,” “Wooden Wedding,” and “Venus
in Ozone Heights (ballet).”
Studio cast (mainly): Ben Bagley’s Kurt Weill Revisited. Paula Lawrence
(original cast), Arthur Siegel, Chita Rivera, Jo Sullivan. Painted Smiles PS
1375; reissued 1989 on Painted Smiles PSCD 108. Contents: “One Touch
of Venus,” “How Much I Love You,” “Dr. Crippen,” “Very, Very, Very,”
“Vive la différence” (cut), and “Love in a Mist” (cut).
FILM (Republic Pictures 1948): Cast: Robert Walker, Ava Gardner (dubbed
by Eileen Wilson), Olga San Juan, Eve Arden. Produced and directed by
William A. Seiter. Songs: “Speak Low,” “That’s Him,” “Foolish Heart”
(retitled “Don’t Look Now but My Heart Is Showing”). [82 minutes]
Pal Joey
Original cast, revival cast, and studio cast (1950): Vivienne Segal, Harold
Lang, Barbara Ashley, Beverly Fite, Kenneth Remo, Jo Hurt, Lehman
Engel (conductor) (1940s lyrics and orchestrations). Columbia ML 54364;
* See Hummel, vol. 1, 430.
W19
reissued on Columbia Special Products COL 4364. Missing: “Chicago”

and “The Flower Garden of My Heart.”
Original revival cast, studio cast (1952): Helen Gallagher, Patricia Northrop,
Elaine Stritch, Lewis Bolyard, Jane Froman, Dick Beavers, Max Meth (con-
ductor) (1952 lyrics and orchestrations). Missing: Ballet (“Chez Joey”).
Angel ZDM 0777–7-646962–2-1.
Film cast (1957): Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth (sung by Jo Ann Greer),
Kim Novak (sung by Trudi Erwin), Morris Stoloff (conductor). Songs
(from Pal Joey): “Zip,” “Chicago,” “That Terrific Rainbow,” “Pal Joey,” and
“Bewitched.” Songs interpolated from other Rodgers and Hart shows:
“There’s a Small Hotel” (On Your Toes, 1936), “My Funny Valentine” and
“The Lady Is a Tramp” (Babes In Arms, 1937), and “I Didn’t Know What
Time It Was” (Too Many Girls,” 939). Capitol W-912.
Encore! Concert Cast (1995): Patti Lupone, Peter Gallagher, Bebe Neu-
wirth, Rob Fisher (conductor). DRG 94763. With original orchestrations
by Hans Spialek. Restored song: “I’m Talkin’ to My Pal.”
FILM (Columbia 1957): Cast: Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak.
Screenplay by Dorothy Kingsley. Produced by Fred Kohlmar. Directed by
George Sidney. Choreography by Hermes Pan. Songs (from Pal Joey): “Zip,”
“Chicago,” “That Terrific Rainbow,” “Pal Joey,” and “Bewitched.” Songs
interpolated from other Rodgers and Hart shows: “There’s a Small Hotel”
(On Your Toes, 1936), “My Funny Valentine” and “The Lady Is a Tramp”
(Babes In Arms, 1937), and “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” (Too Many
Girls,” 1939). RCA/Columbia Classics [listed time 109 minutes; actual time
app. 87 minutes]
The Phantom of the Opera

Original London cast (1986): Michael Crawford, Sarah Brightman, Steven
Barton, Michael Reed (conductor). Polydor 831 273–2 Y-2.
FILM (Warner Bros. 2004): Cast: Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Pat-
rick Wilson, Miranda Richardson, Minnie Driver, Simon Callow, Ciarán
Hinds, Jennifer Ellison. Screenplay by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel
Schumacher. Produced by Lloyd Webber. Directed by Schumacher. Added
song: “Learn to Be Lonely” [143 minutes]
W20
Porgy and Bess

Original cast (1935): Gershwin Performs Gershwin Rare Recordings 1931–
1935. Musicmasters 5062–2 C (CD). Porgy and Bess rehearsal performance,
July 19, 1935, conducted by Gershwin. Contents: “Introduction,” “Sum-
mertime” (Abbie Mitchell), “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing” (Edward
Matthews), Act I, scene 1: Finale, “My Man’s Gone Now” (Ruby Elzy),
and “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” (Todd Duncan, Anne Brown).
Studio cast (1936): George Gershwin Plays George Gershwin. Pearl Gemm CDS 9483
(CD). Lawrence Tibbett, Helen Jepson, Alexander Smallens (conductor). Selec-
tions from Porgy and Bess, November 1935 (originally issued on Victor 11878/81).
Contents: “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “The Buzzard Song,” “Scene: Summertime/
Crapgame/A Woman Is a Sometime Thing,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “I
Got Plenty O’ Nuttin,’ ” “Where Is My Bess?,” “Summertime,” and “My Man’s
Gone Now.” Lawrence Tibbett’s “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ ” (October 23, 1935)
appears on Showstoppers: Historic Victor Recordings. BMG 9590–2 R (CD).
Original cast (1940–1942): Todd Duncan, Anne Brown, Edward Matthews,
Eva Jessye Choir, Alexander Smallens (conductor). Decca DL 9024; reis-
sued on MCA 2035. Fourteen selections.*
Studio cast (1951): Lawrence Winters, Camilla Williams, Inez Matthews,
Warren Coleman, Avon Long, J. Rosamond Johnson Chorus, Lehman
Engel (conductor). Columbia OSL 163; reissued on Odyssey 32 36 0018
(nearly complete on three LPs).
Jazz recording (1957): Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong. Verve VE 2–2507.
Jazz recording (1958): Miles Davis, Gil Evans. Columbia PC 8085.
Film cast (1959): Cab Calloway (replacing the film’s Sammy Davis Jr. for
contractual reasons), Pearl Bailey, Brock Peters, André Previn (conduc-
tor). Columbia OS 2016.
Studio cast (1963): Leontyne Price, William Warfield, McHenry Boatwright, John
Bubbles, Skitch Henderson (conductor). RCA LSC 2679. Twelve selections.
Studio cast (1976): Willard White, Leona Mitchell, McHenry Boatwright,
Florence Quivar, Barbara Hendricks, Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus,
Lorin Maazel (conductor). London OSA 13116.
Opera production (1977): Clamma Dale, Donnie Ray Albert, Larry Marshall,
Houston Opera Company. John DeMain (conductor). RCA ARL 3–2109.
W21
Opera production (1989): Cynthia Haymon, Willard White, Damon Evans,

Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Simon Rattle (conductor). EMI/Angel
CDCC 49568.
FILM (Samuel Goldwyn film released by Columbia 1959): Cast: Sidney Poitier,
Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Brock Peters, Diahann
Carroll. Screenplay by N. Richard Nash. Directed by Otto Preminger. Chore-
ography by Hermes Pan. Deleted?: “My Man’s Gone Now” (included on the
soundtrack but not in the film copy available to me). [listed at 139 minutes;
actual time of film copy available to me app. 115 minutes]
FILM (EMI Classics 1993): Cast: Willard White, Cynthia Haymon, Gregg
Baker, Cynthia Clarey, Marietta Simpson, Damon Evans, Paula Ingram
(sung by Harolyn Blackwell), Gordon Hawkins (sung by Bruce Hub-
bard). Produced by Richard Price (Primetime) and Dennis Marks (BBC).
Adapted for the screen and directed by Trevor Nunn. Simon Rattle (con-
ductor). [184 minutes]
Show Boat
Original London cast (1928): “Make Believe” (Edith Day and Howett Wor-
ster), “Ol’ Man River” (Paul Robeson), “Ol’ Man River” (Jules (Bledsoe),
“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (Marie Burke), “You Are Love” (Day and
Worster), “Why Do I Love You?” (Day and Worster), “Bill” (Marie Burke),
and “Dance Away the Night” (Day). Pearl Gemm CD 9105.
Original London cast (1928): Showstoppers: Historic Victor Recordings. BMG
9590–2 R (CD). Contents: “Ol’ Man River” (Paul Robeson, March 1, 1928)
and “Bill” (Helen Morgan, February 14, 1928).†
Original revival cast (1932): “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Bill”
(Helen Morgan), “Ol’ Man River” (Paul Robeson), “Make Believe” (James
Melton), “You Are Love” (Countess Olga Albani and Frank Munn). Vic-
tor Young (conductor). Columbia-CBS/ASV-Living Era.
Original revival cast (1946): Jan Clayton, Carol Bruce, Charles Fredericks,
Kenneth Spencer, Helen Dowdy, Edwin McArthur (conductor).‡
* See Hummel, vol. 1,462.

† See Hummel, vol. 1, 520–21 for a comprehensive listing of original Broadway and London
cast excerpts between 1928 and 1936.
‡ Ibid., 522.
W22
Film cast (1951): Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, William Warfield, Marge
and Gower Champion, Ava Gardner, Adolph Deutsch (conductor). MGM
E 3230.
Original Lincoln Center revival cast (1966): Barbara Cook, Constance Tow-
ers, Stephen Douglass, David Wayne, William Warfield, Franz Allers
(conductor). RCA LSO 1126.
London cast (1971): Cleo Laine, Thomas Carey, Lorna Dalla, Kenneth Nel-
son, Andrew Jobin, Ena Cabayo, Ray Cook (conductor). Stanyon Records
10048 (two LPs).
Studio cast (1988): Frederika von Stade, Teresa Stratas, Jerry Hadley, Paige
O’Hara, David Garrison, Bruce Hubbard, John McGlinn (conductor).
EMI/Angel CDS 7–49108–2.
Revival cast (1994): Rebecca Luker, Lonette McKee, Mark Jacoby, Elaine
Stritch, Michel Bell, Gretha Boston, Robert Morse, Jeffrey Huard (con-
ductor). Quality 257.
“The Ultimate ‘Showboat’ ” (1999): Contains the Original Revival Cast
(1932) [eight songs], the Original Revival Cast (1946), and other historic
and novelty Show Boat recordings.
FILM (Universal 1929): Cast: Laura La Plante, Joseph Schildkraut, Emily
Fitzroy, Otis Harlan. Produced by Carl Laemmle. Directed by Harry A.
Pollard. Songs (from Show Boat): “Ol’ Man River,” “Can’t Help Lovin’
Dat Man.” [146 minutes with prologue; 129 minutes without prologue]
FILM (Universal 1936): Cast: Irene Dunne, Allan Jones, Charles Win-
ninger, Paul Robeson, Helen Morgan, Helen Westley, Hattie McDaniel,
Queenie Smith, Sammy White. Screenplay by Oscar Hammerstein 2nd.
Produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. Directed by James Whale. Deleted songs:
New songs: “I Have the Room above Her,” “Gallivantin’ Around,” “Ah
Still Suits Me.”[113 minutes]
FILM (MGM 1951): Cast: Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, Howard Keel,
Joe E. Brown, Marge and Gower Champion, Robert Sterling, Agnes
Moorehead, Leif Erickson, William Warfield. Screenplay by John Lee
Mahin. Produced by Arthur Freed. Directed by George Sidney. Songs:
“Cotton Blossom,” “Where’s the Mate for Me?,” “Make Believe,” “Can’t
Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “I Might Fall Back on You,” “Ol’ Man River,”
“You Are Love,” “Why Do I Love You?,” “Bill,” “After the Ball.” [108
minutes]
W23
Sunday in the Park with George

Original cast (1984): Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Charles Kim-
brough, Barbara Bryne, Dana Ivey, Paul Gemignani (conductor). RCA
HBC1–5042.
FILM (Brandman Productions, 1986): Cast: Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette
Peters, Charles Kimbrough, Barbara Bryne, Dana Ivey. Produced by Iris
Merlis. Directed for the Broadway stage by James Lapine; directed for
television by Terry Hughes. Paul Gemignani (conducter). [146 minutes]
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Original Cast (1979): Len Cariou, Angela Lansbury, Victor Garber, Sarah
Rice, Edmund Lyndeck, Paul Gemignani (conductor). RCA 3379–2-RC.
Film cast (2007): Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman,
Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen. Paul Gemignani (conductor). None-
such 368572–2.
FILM (Warner Bros. 1982): Cast: Angela Lansbury, George Hearn. Pro-
duced by Bonnie Burns. Directed for the stage by Harold Prince; directed
for television by Terry Hughes. [139 minutes]
Film cast (DreamWorks Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures 2007): Screenplay
by John Logan. Produced by Richard D. Zanuck, Walter Parkes, Laurie
MacDonald, Logan. Directed by Tim Burton. Deleted songs: “The Ballad
of Sweeney Todd” (underscoring only), “Ah, Miss,” “Johanna” (Judge’s
version), “God, That’s Good!” (nearly all), “The Letter,” “Parlor Songs,”
“City on Fire!” (from Final Sequence). [116 minutes]
West Side Story

Original cast (1957): Larry Kert, Carol Lawrence, Chita Rivera, Max Gober-
man (conductor). Columbia OL 5230; reissued on Columbia S 32603.
Missing: “Taunting.”
Film cast (1961): Natalie Wood (sung by Marni Nixon), Richard Beymer
(sung by Jim Bryant), Rita Moreno (sung by Betty Wand), Russ Tamblyn,
W24
George Chakiris, John Green (conductor). Columbia OS 2070; reissued

with previously unreleased masters on Sony SK 48211 (1992).
Studio cast (1985): Kiri Te Kanawa, José Carreras, Kurt Ollmann, Tati-
ana Troyanos, Leonard Bernstein (conductor). Deutsche Grammophon
415253–1/4.
Revival cast (2009): Matt Cavenaugh, Josefina Scaglione, Karen Olivo,
Patrick Vaccariello (conductor). Sony Masterworks 752391.
FILM (Mirisch/United Artists 1961): Cast: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer,
Russ Tamblyn, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris. Screenplay by Ernest Leh-
man. Produced by Robert Wise. Directed by Wise and Jerome Robbins.
Choreography by Robbins. [152 minutes]
W25
APPENDICES
Appendix A: Sources, Published Librettos,

and Vocal Scores
Anything Goes (1934)
Source: Original book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, revised by Howard Lind-
say and Russel Crouse.
Published Libretto: None (rentals of Off-Broadway 1962 and Beaumont Version 1987
rental available from Tams-Witmark Music Library).
Published Vocal Score: Chappell & Co., and Harms (Broadway 1934); Vocal Selec-
tions Revival Edition, Warner Bros., 1988 (Broadway 1987).
Carousel (1945)
Source: Liliom (1921) by Ferenc Molnár (as adapted by Benjamin F. Glazer) (New
York: Samuel French, 1945). [play]
Published Libretto: Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: Modern Library
Association, 1959).
Published Vocal Score: Williamson Music Co., 1945.
W26
Appendix A
The Cradle Will Rock (1937)
Source: Original book by Marc Blitzstein.

Published Libretto: The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Random House, 1938); reprinted
in The Best Short Plays of the Social Theatre, ed. William Kozlenko (New York:
Random House, 1939).
Published Vocal Score: None (rental available from Tams-Witmark Music Library).
Guys and Dolls (1950)
Source: “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” and “Pick the Winner” by Damon Runyon.
Guys and Dolls. Philadelphia: (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931). [short stories]
Published Libretto: The Guys and Dolls Book. London: Methuen, 1982. [includes “The
Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown”]
Published Vocal Score: Frank Music Corp., 1949, 1950, 1951, 1953; renewed 1977,
1978, 1979, 1981.
Kiss Me, Kate (1948)
Source: The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (c. 1592). [play]
Published Libretto: Great Musicals of the American Theatre Volume One, ed. Stanley
Richards (Radnor, Pa.: Chilton Book Company, 1973).
Published Vocal Score: Chappell & Co., 1951, 1967.
Lady in the Dark (1941)
Source: Original book by Moss Hart.

Published Libretto: Great Musicals of the American Theatre Volume Two, ed. Stanley
Published Vocal Score: Chappell & Co, 1941.
The Most Happy Fella (1956)
Source: They Knew What They Wanted by Sidney Howard (New York: Doubleday,
Page & Company, 1925); reprinted in Famous American Plays of the 1930s,
selected and introduced by Harold Curman (New York: Dell Publishing Co.,
1959). [play]
Published Libretto: Frank Music Corp., 1956, 1957 [included with the Vocal Score];
reprinted in Theatre Arts October 1958), 26–53.
Published Vocal Score: Frank Music Corp., 1956, 1957.
W27
Appendix A
My Fair Lady (1956)
Source: Pygmalion (1913) by George Bernard Shaw; reprinted in Pygmalion/My Fair

Lady (New York: Signet, 1975). [play]. See also published Libretto.
Published Libretto: Pygmalion/My Fair Lady (New York: Signet, 1975).
Published Vocal Score: Chappell & Co., 1956.
On Your Toes (1936)
Source: Original book by Rodgers and Hart and George Abbott.

Published Libretto: None (rental available from The Rodgers & Hammerstein The-
atre Library).
Published Vocal Score: Chappell & Co., 1985 (Broadway 1983).
One Touch of Venus (1943)
Source: The Tinted Venus (1885) by F. Anstey (Thomas Anstey Guthrie); reprinted in
Humour & Fantasy (New York: Arno Press, 1978). [novel]
Published Libretto: Great Musicals of the American Theatre Volume One, ed. Stanley
Published Vocal Score: None (rental score available from the Rodgers and Ham-
merstein Theatre Library); vocal selections, The Richmond Organization, 1944;
renewed by Hampshire House Publishing Corp. and Chappell & Co., 1972.
Pal Joey (1940)
Source: Pal Joey by John O’Hara; Pal Joey: The Novel and The Libretto and Lyrics (New
York: Vintage, 1983). [novel based on short stories in the form of letters first pub-
lished in the New Yorker from 1938 to 1940]. See also published Libretto.
Published Libretto: Pal Joey: The Novel and the Libretto and Lyrics.
Published Vocal Score: Chappell & Co, 1962.
The Phantom of the Opera (London 1986, New York, 1988)
Sources: Le Fantöme de L’Opéra, daily installments in Le Gaulois. Collected and repub-

lished. Paris: Pierre Lafitte et Cie, June, 1910; published in English as The Phantom
of the Opera. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1911; modern edition: The Essential
Phantom of the Opera, ed. Leonard Wolf. New York: ibooks: 1996. [novel]
Published Librettos: The Complete Phantom of the Opera by George Perry, pp. 139–67.
New York: Holt, 1987 [musical]; Perry, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the
W28
Appendix A
Opera Companion. Contains Original Screenplay. London: Pavilion, 2004. [screen-

play]
Published Vocal Score: Vocal Selections, Hal Leonard, 1987.
Porgy and Bess (1935)
Sources: Porgy by DuBose Heyward (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1925)
[novel]; Porgy, A Play in Four Acts by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward (New
York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928); reprinted in Famous American Plays of the 1920s,
selected and introduced by Kenneth MacGowan (New York: Dell Publishing
Co., 1959). [play]
Published Librettos: London OSA-13116 (1976); RCA ARL 3–2109 (1977); EMI/Angel
CDCC-49568 (1986); Columbia OSL 162; reissued on Odyssey Stereo 32-36-0018
(1951), also published in Great Musicals of the American Theatre Volume One, ed.
Stanley Richards (Radnor, Pa: Chilton Book Company, 1973); see also the pub-
lished Vocal Score.
Published Vocal Score: Gershwin Publishing Corp./Chappell & Co., 1935.
Show Boat (1927)
Source: Show Boat by Edna Ferber (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1926). [novel]
Published Librettos: Chappell, 1934 (London 1928); act I, scenes 1, 2, 4, 7, and 8, and
act II, scene 3 [virtually complete] and scenes 4 and 9 [well represented] in EMI/
Angel CDS-7-49108-2 (1988).
Published Vocal Scores: Harms Co., 1927 (Broadway 1927); Chappell & Co. and T. B.
Harms Co., 1928 (London 1928); The Welk Music Group, 1927 (Broadway 1946).
Sunday in the Park with George (1984)
Source: Based on the life of the painter Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and the creation
of his painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886).
Published Libretto: New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986; reprinted in Four by Sondheim.
New York: Applause, 2000.
Published Vocal Score: New York: Alfred, 1987.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979)
Sources: The String of Pearls: A Romance by Thomas Peckett Prest, 1846–47 [serialized
novel]; The String of Pearls, or the Fiend of Fleet Street (produced as Sweeney Todd)
by George Dibdin Pitt, 1847 [play]; Sweeney Todd by Christopher Bond, 1973
W29
Appendix A
[play]. [Hugh Wheeler’s book for Sweeney Todd includes the following credit on
the title page: “Based on a version of ‘Sweeney Todd’ by Christopher Bond.”]
Published Libretto: New York: Dodd, Mead, 1979; reprinted in Four by Sondheim.
New York: Applause, 2000.
Published Vocal Score: New York: Rilting Music and Alfred, 1999.
West Side Story (1957)
Source: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (1595). [play]. See also published
librettos.
Published Librettos: Romeo and Juliet/West Side Story (New York: Dell Publishing Co.,
1965); Great Musicals of the American Theatre Volume One, ed. Stanley Richards
(Radnor, Pa.: Chilton Book Company, 1973).
Published Vocal Score: G. Schirmer and Chappell & Co., 1957 and 1959.
W30
Appendix B
Appendix B: Long Runs: Decade by Decade

1920s–2000s
1920s
1. The Student Prince in Heidelberg (1924) (Romberg and Donnelly) 608

2. Blossom Time (1921) (Romberg and Donnelly) 592
3. Show Boat (1927) (Kern and Hammerstein)* 575
4. Sally (1920) (Kern, Bolton, and Grey) 570
5. Rose-Marie (1924) (Friml, Harbach, and Hammerstein) 557
6. Good News (1927) (Henderson, DeSylva, and Brown) 551
7. Sunny (1925) (Kern, Harbach, and Hammerstein) 517
8. The Vagabond King (1925) (Friml and Hooker) 511
9. The New Moon (1928) (Romberg and Hammerstein) 509
10. Rio Rita (1927) (Tierney and McCarthy) 494
11. Wildflower (1923) (Youmans, Stothart, Harbach, and Hammerstein) 477
12. The Desert Song (1924) (Romberg, Harbach, and Hammerstein) 471
1930s
1. Hellzapoppin’ (1938) (Fain, Olsen, and Johnson) 1,404

2. Pins and Needles (1937) (Rome) 1,108
3. Of Thee I Sing (1931) (G. and I. Gershwin) 441
4. Anything Goes (1934) (Porter) 420
5. DuBarry Was a Lady (1939) (Porter) 408
6. The Cat and the Fiddle (1931) (Kern and Harbach) 395
7. Flying High (1930) (Henderson, DeSylva, and Brown) 357
8. Music in the Air (1932) (Kern and Hammerstein) 342
9. I Married an Angel (1938) (Rodgers and Hart) 338
10. On Your Toes (1936) (Rodgers and Hart) 315
11. The Great Waltz (1934) (Johann Strauss Jr. and Carter) 298
12. Roberta (1933) (Kern and Harbach) 295
13. I’d Rather Be Right (1937) (Rodgers and Hart) 290
14. Babes in Arms (1937) (Rodgers and Hart) 289
1940s
1. Oklahoma! (1943) (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 2,212

2. South Pacific (1949) (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 1,925
W31
Appendix B
3. Annie Get Your Gun (1946) (Berlin and H. and D. Fields) 1,147
4. Kiss Me, Kate (1948) (Porter and B. and S. Spewack) 1,070
5. Carousel (1945) (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 890
6. Follow the Girls (1944) (Shapiro, Pascal, and Charig) 882
7. Song of Norway (1944) (Wright and Forrest) 860
8. Where’s Charley? (1948) (Loesser and Abbott) 792
9. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949) (Styne and Robin) 740
10. High Button Shoes (1947) (Styne, Cahn, and Abbott) 727
11. Finian’s Rainbow (1947) (Lane and Harburg) 725
12. Bloomer Girl (1944) (Arlen and Harburg) 654
13. Brigadoon (1947) (Lerner and Loewe) 581
14. One Touch of Venus (1943) (Weill, Nash, and Perelman) 567
1950s
1. My Fair Lady (1956) (Lerner and Loewe) 2,717

2. The Sound of Music (1959) (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 1,443
3. The Music Man (1957) (Wilson) 1,375
4. The King and I (1951) (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 1,246
5. Guys and Dolls (1950) (Loesser and Burrows) 1,200
6. Pajama Game (1954) (Adler and Ross) 1,063
7. Damn Yankees (1955) (Adler and Ross) 1,019
8. Bells Are Ringing (1956) (Styne, Comden, and Green) 924
9. Can-Can (1953) (Porter and Burrows) 892
10. Fanny (1954) (Rome, Behrman, and Logan) 888
11. Fiorello! (1959) (Bock and Harnick) 796
12. West Side Story (1957) (Bernstein, Sondheim, and Laurents) 732
13. Gypsy (1959) (Styne, Sondheim, and Laurents) 702
14. Li’l Abner (1956) (de Paul and Mercer) 693
15. The Most Happy Fella (1956) (Loesser) 676
1960s
1. Fiddler on the Roof (1964) (Bock, Harnick, and Stein) 3,242

2. Hello, Dolly! (1964) (Herman and Stewart) 2,844
3. The Man of La Mancha (1965) (Leigh, Darion, and Wasserman) 2,328
4. Hair (1968) (MacDermot, Ragni, and Rado) 1,750
5. Mame (1966) (Herman, Lawrence, and Lee) 1,508
6. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961) (Loesser
and Burrows) 1,417
7. Funny Girl (1964) (Styne, Merrill, and Lennart) 1,348
8. Promises, Promises (1968) (Bacharach, David, and Simon) 1,281
9. 1776 (1969) (Edwards and Stone) 1,217
10. Cabaret (1966) (Kander, Ebb, and Masteroff) 1,165
W32
Appendix B
11. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) (Sondheim,
Shevelove, and Gelbart) 964
1970s
1. A Chorus Line (1975) (Hamlisch, Kleban, Kirkwood, and Dante) 6,137

2. Grease (1972) (Jacobs and Casey) 3,388
3. Annie (1977) (Strouse, Charnin, and Meehan) 2,377
4. Pippin (1971) (Schwartz and Hirson) 1,944
5. The Magic Show (1974) (Schwartz and Randall) 1,920
6. The Wiz (1975) (Smalls and Brown) 1,672
7. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978) (Hall, King, and Masterson) 1,639
8. Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978) (Waller and Razaf) 1,604
9. Evita (1979) (Lloyd Webber and Rice) 1,567
10. They’re Playing Our Song (1979) (Hamlisch, Sager, and Simon) 1,082
11. Shenandoah (1975) (Geld, Udell, and Barrett) 1,050
12. Chicago (1975) (Kander, Ebb, and Fosse) 898
13. Applause (1970) (Strouse, Adams, Comden, Green) 896
14. I Love My Wife (1977) (Coleman and Stewart) 872
15. No, No, Nanette (1971) (revival) (Youmans, Caesar, and Shevelove) 861
16. Raisin (1973) (Woldin, Brittan, Memiroff, and Zaltberg) 847
17. Candide (1974) (revival) (Bernstein, Wilbur, Sondheim, et al.,
and Wheeler) 740
18. Jesus Christ Superstar (971) (Lloyd Webber and Rice) 720
19. Company (1970) (Sondheim and Furth) 706
1980s
1. Phantom of the Opera** (1988) (Lloyd Webber, Hart, and Stilgoe) 8,643
2. Cats (1982) (Lloyd Webber and Eliot) 7,485
3. Les Misérables (1987) (Boublil, Schönberg, and Kretzmer) 6,680
4. 42nd Street (1980) (Warren, Dubin, Stewart, and Bramble) 3,486
5. La Cage aux Folles (1983) (Herman and Fierstein) 1,761
6. Dreamgirls (1981) (Krieger and Eyen) 1,522
7. Me and My Girl (1986) (Gay, Rose, and Furber) 1,412
1990s
1. Beauty and the Beast (1994) (Menken, Ashman, and Rice) 5,461
2. Rent (1996) (Larson) 5,124
3. Chicago (Revival)** (1996) (Kander and Ebb) 5,088
4. The Lion King** (1997) (John and Rice) 4,720
W33
Appendix B
5. Miss Saigon (1991) (Schönberg and Boublil) 4,097

6. Mamma Mia!** (1999) (Andersson and Luvaeus) 3,058
7. Cabaret (Revival) (Kander and Ebb) 2,378
8. Smokey Joe’s Café (Leiber and Stoller) 2,036
9. Crazy for You (G. and I. Gershwin and Ludwig) 1,622
2000s
1. Hairspray (2002) (Shaiman and Wittman) 2,641

2. The Producers (2001) (Brooks and Kelly) 2,502
3. Avenue Q** (2003) (Lopez and Marx) 2,306
4. Wicked** (2003) (Schwartz) 2,198
5. Aida (2000) (John and Rice) 1,852
6. Monty Python’s Spamalot (2005) (Du Prez and Idle) 1,574
*Musicals in boldface type are discussed in the text.

**Running as of February 22, 2009, according to Playbill’s “Long Runs on Broadway,” prepared
by Ernio Hernandez.
W34
Appendix C
Appendix C: The Forty Longest-Running Musicals

on Broadway 1920–1959 and 1920–2008
1920–1959
1. My Fair Lady (1956)* 2,717

2. Oklahoma! (1943) 2,212
3. South Pacific (1949) 1,925
4. The Sound of Music (1959) 1,443
5. Hellzapoppin’ (1938) 1,404
6. The Music Man (1957) 1,375
7. The King and I (1951) 1,246
8. Guys and Dolls (1950) 1,200
9. Annie Get Your Gun (1946) 1,147
10. Pins and Needles (1937) 1,108
11. Kiss Me, Kate (1948) 1,070
12. Pajama Game (1954) 1,063
13. Damn Yankees (1955) 1,019
14. Bells Are Ringing (1956) 924
15. Can-Can (1953) 892
16. Carousel (1945) 890
17. Fanny (1954) 888
18. Follow the Girls (1944) 882
19. Song of Norway (1944) 860
20. Fiorello! (1959) 796
21. Where’s Charley? (1948) 792
22. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949) 740
23. West Side Story (1957) 732
24. High Button Shoes (1947) 727
25. Finian’s Rainbow (1947) 725
26. Gypsy (1959) 702
27. Li’l Abner (1956) 693
28. The Most Happy Fella (1956) 676
29. Bloomer Girl (1944) 654
30. Call Me Madam (1950) 644
31. The Student Prince in Heidelberg (1924) 608
32. Wish You Were Here (1952) 598
33. Blossom Time (1921) 592
34. Kismet (1953) 583
35. Brigadoon (1947) 581
36. Show Boat (1927) 575
37. Sally (1920) 570
38. One Touch of Venus (1943) 567
W35
Appendix C
39. Wonderful Town (1953) 559

40. Rose-Marie (1924) and Good News (1927) 557
1920–2008
1. The Phantom of the Opera** (1988) 8,771

2. Cats (1982) 7,485
3. Les Misérables (1987) 6,680
4. A Chorus Line (1975) 6,137
5. Beauty and the Beast (1994) 5,461
6. Rent (1996) 5,124
7. Chicago (Revival)** (1996) 5,088
8. The Lion King** (1997) 4,720
9. Miss Saigon (1991) 4,097
10. 42nd Street (1980) 3,486
11. Grease (1972) 3,388
12. Fiddler on the Roof (1964) 3,242
13. Mamma Mia!** (1999) 3,058
14. Hello, Dolly! (1964) 2,844
15. My Fair Lady (1956) 2,717
16. Hairspray (2002) 2,641
17. The Producers (2001) 2,502
18. Cabaret (Revival) (1998) 2,378
19. Annie (1977) 2,377
20. The Man of La Mancha (1965) 2,328
21. Avenue Q** (2003) 2,306
22. Oklahoma! (1943) 2,212
23. Wicked** (2003) 2,198
24. Smokey Joe’s Café (1995) 2,036
25. Pippin (1971) 1,994
26. South Pacific (1949) 1,925
27. Magic Show (1974) 1,920
28. Aida (2000) 1,852
29. La Cage aux Folles (1983) 1,761
30. Hair (1968) 1,750
31. The Wiz (1975) 1,672
32. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978) 1,584
33. Crazy for You (1992) 1,622
34. Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978) 1,604
35. Monty Python’s Spamalot (2005) 1,574
36. Evita (1979) 1,567
37. Jekyll & Hyde (1997) 1,543
38. 42nd Street (Revival) (2001) 1,524
39. Dreamgirls (1981) 1,522
40. Mame (1966) 1,508
*Musicals in boldface type are discussed in the text.
**Running as of February 22, 2009.
W36
Appendix D
Appendix D: Show Boat: 1927–1994
Broadway 1927
Overture
(Based mainly on “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Around” and “Why Do I Love You?” Other
musical material includes “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and references to Mag-
nolia’s piano theme and “Ol’ Man River”). [Harms vocal score, 5–11]
Act I
Scene 1: The levee at Natchez, on the Mississippi—in the late eighteen eighties.
1. “Opening—Cotton Blossom” (Chorus) [12–44], “Cap’n Andy’s Ballyhoo”
(Captain Andy), “Where’s the Mate for Me?” (Ravenal)
2. “Make Believe” (Ravenal and Magnolia) [45–53]
3. “Ol’ Man River” (Joe) [54–65]
Scene 2: Kitchen pantry of the “Cotton Blossom”—a half-hour later.
4. Orchestra: Parthy’s theme, “Ol’ Man River” (verse), Magnolia’s piano theme,
second “Mis’ry” theme [66–67]
5. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (Julie, Queenie, and Servants) [68–84]
Scene 3: Outside a waterfront gambling saloon. Simultaneous with scene 2.
6. Orchestra: “Life on the Wicked Stage,” “Make Believe” (sections 5 and 2)
[85–86]*
7. “Life on the Wicked Stage” (Ellie and Girls) [87–95]
8. “Till Good Luck Comes My Way” (Ravenal and Men) [96–104]
Scene 4: Auditorium and stage of the “Cotton Blossom”—one hour later.
9. “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’” (Queenie and Colored Chorus) [105–14]
Underscoring: “Mis’ry” themes, “Where’s the Mate for Me?,” “If We Were on
Our Honeymoon,” “Make Believe” (A section) [115–25]
Scene 5: Box-office, on foredeck of the “Cotton Blossom”—three weeks later.
10. Introduction (“Cotton Blossom”) [126–27]*
11. “I Might Fall Back on You” (Frank, Ellie, and Girls [128–37]
12. “C’mon folks” (“Queenie’s Ballyhoo”) (Queenie) [138–47]
Scene 6: Auditorium and stage of the “Cotton Blossom”—during the third act of The
Parson’s Bride—that evening.
13. Incidental Music, played on the stage during the presentation of “The Par-
son’s Bride” (Lange’s “Blumenlied,” Parson’s Entrance, Villain’s Entrance)
[148–49]*
14. “Villain Dance” [150–51]
Scene 7: The top deck of the “Cotton Blossom”—later that night.
15. Introduction and Duet “You Are Love” (“Ol’ Man River,” “Can’t Help Lovin’
Dat Man,” “Make Believe”) [152–54]
16. “You Are Love” (Ravenal and Magnolia) [155–61]
Scene 8: The levee—next morning.
17. Finale [162–76]
W37
Appendix D
Act II
18. Entrac’te (“Make Believe,” “Ol’ Man River”) [177–78]*
Scene 1: The Midway Plaisance, Chicago World’s Fair, 1893
19. “Opening—At the Fair” (Chorus) [179–92], Incidental (Fatima’s 2nd Dance)
[193]*
20. “Why Do I Love You?” (Magnolia and Ravenal) [193–205]
21. “In Dahomey” (Dahomey Villagers and White Chorus) [206–19]
Scene 2: A room on Ontario Street, 1904. “Good Morning, Carrie” [Cecil Mack and
Tim Brymn]*
22. Underscoring during Ellie’s reading of Ravenal’s letter (“Why Do I Love
You?”) [220]*
Scene 3: Rehearsal room of the Trocadero Music Hall, about 5 p.m. “The Washington
Post March” (Sousa). [not in Harms]
23. “Bill” (Julie) [221–23]
24. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (Reprise) (Magnolia) [224–26]
Scene 4: St. Agatha’s Convent—meanwhile.
25. Service and Scene music (includes “Alma Redemptoris Mater” [Nuns] and a
reprise of “Make Believe” [Ravenal]) [227–34]
Scene 5: Corner of lobby of the Sherman Hotel, Chicago, 8 p.m. New Year’s Eve,
1904.
26. Introduction (“Cotton Blossom,” “Life on the Wicked Stage”) [235]*
Scene 6: Trocadero Music Hall, New Year’s Eve, 11:30 p.m., 1904.
27. “The Washington Post” (Sousa) [direction for performance only in 236]*
“Apache Dance” [not included in Harms] “Goodbye, Ma Lady Love” (How-
ard) (Frank and Ellie) [236–38]
Captain Andy’s Entrance [239]* “After the Ball” (Harris) (Magnolia) [239–42]
Scene 7: In front of the office of “The Natchez Evening Democrat,” 1927.
28. “Ol’ Man River” (Reprise) (Joe) [243–44]
29. “Hey, Feller!” (Queenie and Chorus) [245–57]
Scene 8: Top deck of the new “Cotton Blossom,” 1927. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”
(Radio broadcast/reprise)*
30. “You Are Love” (Reprise) (Ravenal) [258–60]
Scene 9: Levee at Natchez, the next night.
31. “Cotton Blossom” (Chorus) [261], “Why Do I Love You?” (Reprise) (Kim and
Chorus) [262–63; Kim’s imitations of her mother, Eccentric Dance, and Tap
Dance not included in Harms or the McGlinn recording]
32. Finale (“Make Believe” and “Ol’ Man River”)
Principal Changes in Selected Stage Productions

and Films (1928–1994)
1. May 3, 1928, Drury Lane, London (350 performances)†
Added
“How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” (1905) (replaced “Good-by, Ma Lady Love”)
W38
Appendix D
“Dance Away the Night” (replaced Kim’s reprise of “Why Do I Love You?”) [Chap-
pell, 219–25]
Deleted
Service and Scene Music with “Make Believe” reprise (No. 25) (not included in
Chappell Vocal Score)
Apache Dance
“Hey Feller!” (No. 29)
Eccentric Dance and Tap Dance
2. March 16, 1929, Universal Pictures, Paramount Theatre, Palm Beach, Florida†
The first film version was distributed the day after the first Broadway produc-
tion closed on May 4 (following a world premiere in Florida in March and a
New York City premiere in April). Although mostly silent, this first of three
filmed Show Boats included five synchronized Kern songs (“C’Mon, Folks,”
“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “Hey, Feller!” “Bill,” and “Ol’ Man River”).
Its story line followed Edna Ferber’s novel more closely than Hammerstein’s
libretto.
3. May 19, 1932, Casino, New York (181 performances)†
Reinstated
Service and Scene Music with “Make Believe” reprise (No. 25)
“Good-bye, Ma Lady Love” (“How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” interpolation
from 1928 dropped)
“Hey, Feller!” (No. 29)
“Why Do I Love You!” reprise (“Dance Away the Night” from 1928 dropped)
Eccentric Dance and Tap Dance
4. May 14, 1936, Universal Film, Radio City Music Hall, New York†
New songs
“I Have the Room above Her”
“Gallivantin’ Aroun’”
“Ah Still Suits Me”
Deleted
“Life on the Wicked Stage” (used as underscoring)
“Till Good Luck Comes My Way” (used as underscoring)
“I Might Fall Back on You”
5. January 5, 1946, Ziegfeld, New York (418 performances)†
Added
Dance: “No Gems, No Roses, No Gentlemen”
Dance: No Shoes
Cakewalk
“Nobody Else but Me” (replaced reprise of “Why Do I Love You?”) (No. 31)
Dance 1927 (replaced Eccentric Dance)
W39
Appendix D
Deleted
“Life on the Wicked Stage” (moved from No. 7 to No. 11 [“I Might Fall Back on
You”] [No. 11])
“Till Good Luck Comes My Way” (No. 8)
“Dandies on Parade” (“When the sports of gay Chicago” from “At the Fair”) (No.
19)
“Hey, Feller!” (No. 29)
Eccentric Dance
Tap Dance
6. July 29, 1971, Adelphi, London (910 performances)†
Reinstated
“Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’” (No. 9) (reinstated after being dropped during the try-
outs in Washington, D.C.)
“I Might Fall Back on You” (No. 11) (reinstated after being dropped from the 1946
revival)
“How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” (reinstated from London 1928)
“Dance Away the Night” (reinstated from London 1928 production)
Deleted
“Life on the Wicked Stage” (No. 7)
“In Dahomey” (No. 21)
Service and Scene and “Make Believe” reprise
Dance: “No Gems, No Roses, No Gentlemen”
Dance: “No Shoes” (Cakewalk is the only dance retained from 1946 revival)
“Nobody Else but Me” (retained from the 1946 production but placed in a new
context and sung by Julie in act I)
7. October 2, 1994, Gershwin, New York (951 performances)†
Reinstated and Added

“Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’” (dropped from 1927 production)
“I Have the Room above Her” (from 1936 film)
“Alma Redemptoris Mater” (Gregorian chant interpolation from 1927
production)
“Why Do I Love You?” (sung by Parthy instead of Magnolia and Ravenal)
Deleted
“In Dahomey”
Deleted (but used as underscoring)
“I Might Fall Back on You” (from 1927 production)
“It’s Getting Hotter in the North” (dropped from Broadway 1927)
“Ah Still Suits Me” (1936 film)
“How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” (interpolated song from 1905, used in Lon-
don 1928 and London 1971)
W40
Appendix D
“Dance Away the Night” (London 1928)

“Hey, Feller!” (1927 Broadway)
“The Washington Post” (by John Philip Sousa) (first interpolated in Broadway
1927)
Manuscript Sources for Ravenal’s Entrance and

Meeting with Magnolia
1. Before November 1927: Pre-tryout and tryouts Jerome Kern Collection Box
9 (Library of Congress). Manuscript material including an early typed script
(26 pages) (Envelope 217) and two piano-vocal drafts (Envelope 245 [Draft
1] and Envelope 238 [Draft 2]).
2. November–December 1927: Tryouts
Tryout Libretto in Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library.
3. December 27, 1927: Original New York production
Libretto of New York Production (Hammerstein’s personal copy given to
Miles Kreuger on August 3, 1960). Substantial libretto portions published
with the McGlinn EMI/Angel recording CDS 7–49108–2, pages 55–130. Vocal
Score published by T. B. Harms Co. in April 1928 (268 pp.).
4. May 3, 1928: London production
Libretto published by Chappell in 1934.
Vocal Score published by Chappell & Co. Ltd. in 1928 (229 pp.).
5. April 30, 1936: Universal film
Screenplay by Oscar Hammerstein (unpublished).
6. January 5, 1946: New York revival
Libretto of touring version distributed by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Vocal
Score based on touring version published by Welk Music Group (192 pp.).
*
Songs followed by an asterisk in Broadway 1927 are not included in the McGlinn recording.
†
Based on Kreuger, Show Boat, 226–27.
W41
Appendix E
Appendix E: Anything Goes: 1934, 1962, and 1987
Broadway 1934
Act I
Scene 1: The Weylin Caprice Bar.
“I Get a Kick Out of You” (Reno)
Scene 2: The Afterdeck. Midnight sailing.
“Bon Voyage” (Boys/Girls)
“All through the Night” (Billy/Hope/Sailors)
Scene 3: Mr. Whitney’s and Dr. Moon’s Cabins. The next morning.
“Sailor’s Chanty” (“There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair”) (Four Sailors)
Scene 4: The Afterdeck. Same morning.
“Where Are the Men?” (1st & 2nd Girls/Girls’ Chorus)
“You’re the Top” (Reno/Billy)
Scene 5: Sir Evelyn’s Cabin.
Reprise: “Sailor’s Chanty” (Four Sailors)
Scene 6: The Deck.
“Anything Goes” (Reno/Four Sailors)
Reprise: “You’re the Top” (Reno)
Act II
Scene 1: The Lounge. That evening.
“Public Enemy Number One” (Four Sailors/ Passengers)
“Blow, Gabriel, Blow” (Reno/Company)
Scene 2: The Brig. Five days later.
“Be Like the Bluebird” (Moonface)
Reprise: “All through the Night” (Hope/Billy)
“Buddie, Beware” (Reno) (replaced by a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of
You” by the week of December 10)
Scene 3: Conservatory of Sir Evelyn’s Home in England.
“The Gypsy in Me” (Hope)
Reprise: “Anything Goes” (All)
Off-Broadway Revival 1962
Act I
Scene 1: Afterdeck of the Ship.
“You’re the Top” (Billy/Reno)
“Bon Voyage” (Company)
W42
Appendix E
Scene 2: On the Ship’s Deck. Night.

“It’s De-Lovely” (Billy/Hope/Company) (introduced in Red, Hot and Blue
by Ethel Merman and Bob Hope [October 29, 1936])
Scene 3: Two Cabins on the “A” Deck.
Reprise: “Bon Voyage” (Orchestra)
Scene 4: The Ship’s Deck.
“Heaven Hop” (Bonnie/Girls) (introduced in Paris by Irving Aaronson
and the Commanders [October 8, 1928])
“Friendship” (Billy/Reno/Moon) (introduced in DuBarry Was a Lady by
Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr [December 6, 1939])
Scene 6: Evelyn’s Stateroom.
Scene 8: The Afterdeck.
“Anything Goes” (Reno/Chorus)
Act II
Scene 1: Ship’s Lounge.
“Public Enemy Number One” (Chorus)
“Let’s Step Out” (Bonnie/Chorus) (introduced in Fifty Million Frenchmen
by Evelyn Hoey and Gertrude McDonald [November 27, 1929])
“Let’s Misbehave” (Reno/Sir Evelyn) (written for Paris but replaced before
the New York opening by “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love”)
“Blow, Gabriel, Blow” (Reno/Chorus)
Scene 2: The Brig.
“All through the Night” (Billy/Hope)
“Be Like the Bluebird” (Moon)
Reprise: “All through the Night”
“Take Me Back to Manhattan” (Reno/Four Angels) (introduced in The
New Yorkers by Frances Williams [December 8, 1930])
Reprise: “You’re the Top” (Company)
Vivian Beaumont Revival 1987
Act I
Scene 1: A Smokey Manhattan Bar.
Scene 2: The Afterdeck of an Ocean Liner Shortly before Sailing.
“There’s No Cure like Travel” (Captain/Sailors) (dropped from original
production and replaced by “Bon Voyage”)
“Bon Voyage” (Sailors/Passengers)
W43
Appendix E
Scene 3: On Deck. That evening.

“You’re the Top” (Reno/Billy)
“Easy to Love” (Billy) (dropped from original production and replaced by
“All through the Night”; introduced in Born to Dance by James Stewart,
Eleanor Powell, and Reginald Gardiner [April 13, 1936])
Scene 4: Lights up on Whitney’s Stateroom.
“I Want to Row on the Crew” (Whitney) (introduced in Paranoia by New-
bold Noyes [April 24, 1914])
Scene 5: On Deck, Mid-morning.
“Sailor’s Chantey” (Sailors)
“Friendship” (Reno/Moon) (see act I, scene 5 of 1962 revival)
Scene 6: Evelyn’s Stateroom.
No song
Scene 7: On Deck.
“It’s De-Lovely” (Billy/Hope) (see act I, scene 2 of 1962 revival)
Scene 8: The Same, early the following morning.
“Anything Goes” (Reno)
Act II
Scene 1: The Ship’s Nightclub.
“Public Enemy Number One” (Company)
“Blow, Gabriel, Blow” (Reno/Chorus)
“Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye” (Hope) (dropped from Born to Dance
and Red, Hot and Blue in 1936 before its introduction in the English pro-
duction, O Mistress Mine [December 3, 1936])
Scene 2: The Brig.
“Be Like the Bluebird” (Moon)
“All through the Night” (Billy/Hope/Sailors)
Scene 3: On Deck.
“The Gypsy in Me” (Evelyn)
Scene 4: The Brig.
No song
Scene 5: On Deck.
“Buddie, Beware” (Erma, new name for original Bonnie) (dropped from
original 1934 production by the week of December 10)
Reprise: “Anything Goes” (Company)
W44
Appendix F
Appendix F: Porgy and Bess: Songs, Arias,

and Themes (1935)
Published Vocal Score (Gershwin Publishing

Corporation/Chappell & Co.)
Act I
Scene 1: Catfish Row, a summer evening (lyrics by Heyward).
“Introduction” (Catfish Row)
“Jasbo Brown Blues” (Catfish Row)
“Summertime” (Clara)
“A Woman Is a Sometime Thing” (Jake)
“Here Come De Honey Man” (Peter)
“They Pass By Singin’” (Porgy)
“Oh Little Stars” (Porgy)
Scene 2: Serena’s Room, the following night (lyrics by Heyward).
“Gone, Gone, Gone” (Catfish Row)
“Overflow” (Catfish Row)
“My Man’s Gone Now” (Serena)
“Leavin’ for the Promise’ Lan’” (Bess)
Act II
Scene 1: Catfish Row, a month later.
“It Take a Long Pull to Get There” (Catfish Row) (Heyward)
“I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” (Porgy) (I. Gershwin and Heyward)
“Buzzard Song” (Porgy) (Heyward)
“Bess, You Is My Woman” (Porgy and Bess) (Heyward and I. Gershwin)
“Oh, I Can’t Sit Down” (Catfish Row) (I. Gershwin)
Scene 2: Kittiwah Island, evening, the same day.
“I Ain’ Got No Shame” (Catfish Row) (Heyward)
“It Ain’t Necessarily So” (Sporting Life) (I. Gershwin)
“What You Want Wid Bess?” (Bess) (Heyward)
Scene 3: Catfish Row, before dawn, a week later.
“Oh, Doctor Jesus” (Catfish Row) (Heyward)
“Strawberry Woman” (Strawberry Woman) (Heyward)
“Crab Man” (Crab Man) (Heyward)
“I Loves You, Porgy” (Bess) (I. Gershwin and Heyward)
Scene 4: Serena’s Room, dawn of the following day.
“Oh, Hev’nly Father” (Catfish Row) (I. Gershwin and Heyward)
“Oh, de Lawd Shake de Heavens” (Catfish Row) (Heyward)
“Oh, Dere’s Somebody Knockin’ at de Do’” (Catfish Row) (Heyward)
“A Red Headed Woman” (Crown) (I. Gershwin)
W45
Appendix F
Act III
Scene 1: Catfish Row, the next night.
“Clara, Clara” (Catfish Row) (Heyward)
Scene 2: Catfish Row, the next afternoon.
“There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” (Sporting Life)
(I. Gershwin)
Scene 3: Catfish Row, a week later.
“Good Mornin’, Sistuh!” (Catfish Row) (Heyward)
“Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess” (Porgy) (I. Gershwin)
“Oh Lawd, I’m on My Way” (Porgy and Catfish Row) (Heyward)
W46
Appendix G
Appendix G: On Your Toes: Broadway 1936

and Broadway Revival 1983
Act I
Scene 1: A Vaudeville Stage, sixteen years ago. [About 1920]
“Two a Day for Keith” (Phil II, Lil, and Phil III)
Scene 2: The Vaudeville Dressing Room.
Scene 3: A Classroom at Knockerbocker [Knickerbocker] University—W.P.A. Extension.
“The Three B’s” [“Questions and Answers (The Three B’s)] (Junior and the
Ensemble)
“It’s Got to Be Love” (Frankie and Junior)
Scene 4: Vera’s Apartment, the next morning.
“Too Good for the Average Man” (Peggy and Sergei)
Scene 5: Central Park, night. [The Schoolroom as in scene 3]
“There’s a Small Hotel” (Frankie and Junior)
Scene 6: A Green Room, Cosmopolitan Opera House.
[The Bare Stage, Cosmopolitan Opera House, the next evening]
“The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye” (Peggy and Junior) [placed in act II,
scene 1 in the 1983 revival]
Scene 7: “La Princesse Zenobia” Ballet–Cosmopolitan Opera House.
Act II
Scene 1: A Planetarium Roof Garden. [The Bare Stage, Cosmopolitan Opera House]
[“The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye” (Peggy and Junior)]
“Quiet Night” (Crooner) [placed in act II, scenes (2 and 4, in 1983 revival]
“Glad to Be Unhappy” (Frankie and Sidney)
Scene 2: The Stage of the Cosmopolitan Opera House. [The Classroom as in Act 1,
scenes 3 and 5]
[“Quiet Night” (Hank and Three Girls)]
“On Your Toes” (Frankie, Junior, and the Ensemble)
Reprise: “There’s a Small Hotel” (Peggy and Sergei) [omitted from 1983
revival]
Scene 3: Stage Door. [The Bare Stage, Cosmopolitan Opera House]
1936
Scene 4: “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” Ballet.
Scene 5: The Stage of the Cosmopolitan Opera House.
Reprise: “There’s a Small Hotel” (Frankie and Junior)
1983
[Scene 4: The Stage Door, Cosmopolitan Opera House.]
[Reprise: “Quiet Night” (Sergei)]
[Scene 5: “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” Ballet, Stage of Cosmopolitan Opera House.]
[Reprise: “There’s a Small Hotel” (Frankie and Junior)]
Brackets include 1983 revival.
W47
Appendix H
Appendix H: Pal Joey: Broadway 1940 and

Broadway Revival 1952
Act I
Scene 1: Mike’s South Side Night Club. A September afternoon.
“Chicago [A Great Big Town]” (Joey)
“You Mustn’t Kick It Around” ( Joey, Gladys, Agnes, The Kid, and
Ensemble)
Scene 2: The Pet Shop. That evening.
“I Could Write a Book” (Joey and Linda)
Scene 3: Mike’s Night Club. An evening a month later.
Reprise: “Chicago” [“A Great Big Town”] (Ensemble)
“That Terrific Rainbow” (Gladys, Victor, and Ensemble)
Scene 4: (a) A Phone Booth. (b) Vera’s Boudoir. The next afternoon.
“What Is a Man?” (Vera)
Scene 5: Mike’s Night Club. After closing time that evening.
“Happy Hunting Horn” (Joey, Terry, and Ensemble)
Scene 6: The Tailor Shop. A few days later.
“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered (Vera)
“Pal Joey” (Joey)
Scene 7: Ballet.
Act II
Scene 1: Chez Joey. A few weeks later.
“The Flower Garden of My Heart” (Gladys, Specialty Dancer, and Ensem-
ble) [Louis, Gladys, and Ensemble]
“Zip” (Melba Snyder)
“Plant You Now, Dig You Later” (Lowell, Gladys, and Ensemble) [Gladys
and Ensemble]
Scene 2: Joey’s Apartment. The next morning.
“Den of Iniquity” (Vera and Joey)
Scene 3: Chez Joey. That afternoon.
Reprise: “Chicago (Morocco)” (Dance and song)
“Do It the Hard Way” (Lowell, Gladys, and Ensemble) [act II, scene 4,
sung by Joey]
Scene 4: Joey’s Apartment. Later that afternoon.
“Take Him” (Linda and Vera)
Reprise: “Bewitched” (Vera)
Scene 5: The Pet Shop. Later that evening.
Finale: “I Could Write a Book” (Joey)
[“I’m Talking to My Pal” (Joey) dropped during Philadelphia tryouts]
Brackets include 1952 changes.
W48
Appendix I
Appendix I: The Cradle Will Rock (1937)

Scene 1: Street Corner.
“Moll’s Song” (Moll)
Moll and Gent
Moll and Dick
Scene 2: Night Court.
Moll and Druggist
“Oh, What a Filthy Night Court” (Ensemble)
Scene 3: Mission.
Mrs. Mister and Reverend Salvation
Scene 4: Lawn of Mr. Mister’s Home.
“Croon-Spoon” (Junior and Sister Mister)
“The Freedom of the Press” (Mr. Mister and Editor Daily)
“Let’s Do Something” (Junior and Sister Mister)
“Honolulu” (Editor Daily, Junior Mister, Mr. Mister, and Sister Mister)
Scene 5: Drugstore.
Drugstore scene
“Gus and Sadie Love Song” (Gus and Sadie)
Scene 6: Hotel Lobby.
“The Rich” (Yasha and Dauber)
“Ask Us Again” (Mrs. Mister, Yasha, and Dauber)
“Art for Art’s Sake” (Yasha and Dauber)
Act II
“Nickel under the Foot” (Moll)
“Leaflets” (Larry Foreman)
“The Cradle Will Rock” (Larry Foreman)
Scene 8: Faculty Room.
Scene 9: Dr. Specialist’s Office.
Doctor and Ella
“Joe Worker” (Ella Hammer)
“Finale: The Cradle Will Rock” (reprise) (Ensemble)
W49
Appendix J
Appendix J: Lady in the Dark (1941)

Act I
1. Glamour Dream.
“Oh Fabulous One” (Liza Elliott’s Admirers)
“Huxley” (Sutton and Liza)
“One Life to Live” (Liza)
“Girl of the Moment” (Liza Elliott’s Admirers)
2. Wedding Dream.
“Mapleton High Choral” (Boys and Girls of Mapleton High)
“This Is New” (Randy and Liza)
“The Princess of Pure Delight” (Liza)
Act II
3. Circus Dream.
“The Greatest Show on Earth” (Ringmaster [Russell Paxton] and Paraders)
Ballet: “Dance of the Tumblers”
“The Best Years of His Life” (Ringmaster, Randy, and Liza)
“Tschaikowsky” (Ringmaster)
“The Saga of Jenny” (Liza)
4. Childhood Dream.
“My Ship” (Liza and Charley Johnson)
W50
Appendix K
Appendix K: One Touch of Venus (1943)

Act I
Scene 1: Main Gallery of the Whitelaw Savory Foundation of Modern Art.
“New Art Is True Art” (Savory and Students)
“One Touch of Venus” (Molly)
Scene 2: Rodney’s Room.
“How Much I Love You” (Rodney)
Scene 3: Radio City Plaza.
“I’m a Stranger Here Myself” (Venus)
Scene 4: Arcade of the N.B.C. Building in Radio City.
Ballet: “Forty Minutes for Lunch”
“West Wind” (Savory)
Scene 5: Waiting Room of Mid-City Bus Terminal.
“Way Out West in Jersey” (Mrs. Kramer, Rodney, and Gloria)
Scene 6: The Roof Garden of the Foundation.
“Foolish Heart” (Venus)
Scene 7: Rodney’s Barbershop.
“The Trouble with Women” (Taxi, Stanley, Savory, and Rodney)
“Speak Low” (Venus)
Scene 8: The Roof Garden of the Foundation.
“Doctor Crippen” (Savory)
Act II
Scene 1: Savory’s Bedroom.
“Very, Very, Very” (Molly)
Scene 2: The Tombs.
“Speak Low” (reprise) (Rodney and Venus)
Scene 3: The Sitting Room of a De Luxe Suite.
“That’s Him” (Venus)
“Wooden Wedding” (Rodney)
Scene 4: The Main Galley of the Foundation.
“Speak Low” (reprise) (Rodney)
W51
Appendix L
Appendix L: Carousel (1945)

Prelude
An Amusement Park on the New England Coast. May.
“Carousel Waltz” (Orchestra)
Act I
Scene 1: A tree-lined path along the shore. A few minutes later.
“You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan” (Carrie and Julie)
“Mister Snow” (Carrie)
“If I Loved You” (Billy and Julie)
Scene 2: Nettie Fowler’s Spa on the ocean front. June.
“June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” (Nettie, Carrie, and Ensemble)
Reprise: “Mister Snow” (Carrie and Girls)
“When the Children Are Asleep” (Mr. Snow and Carrie)
“Blow High, Blow Low” (Jigger, Billy, and Men)
“Soliloquy” (Billy)
“Finale” (Billy, Jigger, Nettie, and Chorus)
Act II
Scene 1: On an island across the bay. That night.
“A Real Nice Clambake” (Carrie, Nettie, Julie, Mr. Snow, and Ensemble)
“Geraniums in the Winder” (Mr. Snow)
“There’s Nothin’ So Bad for a Woman” (Jigger and Ensemble)
“What’s the Use of Wond’rin’” (Julie)
Scene 2: Mainland waterfront. An hour later.
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” (Nettie)
Scene 3: Up there.
“The Highest Judge of All” (Billy)
Scene 4: Down here. On a beach. Fifteen years later.
Ballet (Louise, A Younger Miss Snow, The Brothers and Sisters Snow,
Badly Brought Up Boys, A Young Man Like Billy, A Carnival Woman,
Members of the Carnival Troupe)
Scene 5: Outside Julie’s cottage.
Reprise: “If I Loved You” (Billy)
Scene 6: Outside a schoolhouse. Same day.
Reprise: “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (Company)
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Appendix M
Appendix M: Kiss Me, Kate (1948)

Act I
Scene 1: Stage of Ford’s Theatre, Baltimore.
“Another Op’nin, Another Show” (Hattie and Singing Ensemble. Danced
by Dancing Ensemble.)
Scene 2: The corridor backstage.
“Why Can’t You Behave?” (Lois Lane)
Scene 3: Dressing rooms, Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi.
“Wunderbar” (Lilli and Fred)
“So In Love” (Lilli)
Scene 4: Padua.
“We Open in Venice” (Petruchio, Katherine, Bianca, Lucentio)
Scene 5: Street Scene, Padua.
Dance (Dancing Ensemble)
“Tom, Dick, or Harry” (Bianca, Lucentio, and the Two Suitors (Gremio and
Hortensio)
Specialty Dance (Lucentio)
“I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua” (Petruchio and Singing Ensem-
ble)
“I Hate Men” (Katherine)
“Were Thine That Special Face” (Petruchio. Danced by Janet Gaylord and
Dancing Girls)
Scene 6: Backstage.
Scene 7: Fred’s and Lilli’s dressing rooms.
Scene 8: Before the curtain.
“I Sing of Love” (Bianca, Lucentio, and Singing Ensemble)
Scene 9: Exterior church.
Tarantella (Danced by Bianca, Lucentio, and Dancing Ensemble)
Finale: “Kiss Me, Kate” (Katherine, Petruchio, and Singing Ensemble)
Act II
Scene 1: Theatre alley.
“Too Darn Hot” (Paul, Fred Davis, and Eddie Sledge. Danced by Fred
Davis, Eddie Sledge, Bill Calhoun and Dancing Ensemble)
Scene 2: Before the curtain.
Scene 3: Petruchio’s house.
“Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” (Petruchio)
“Always True to You in My Fashion” (Lois)
Scene 5: Lilli’s dressing room.
“Bianca” (Bill Calhoun and Singing Girls. Danced by Bill Calhoun and
Dancing Girls)
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Appendix M
Reprise: “So in Love” (Fred)

Scene 7: Before the asbestos curtain.
“Brush Up Your Shakespeare” (First Man and Second Man)
Scene 8: Baptista’s home.
Pavane (Dancing Ensemble)
“I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” (Katherine)
Finale (Petruchio, Katherine, and Company)
Spewack Libretto Draft (May 28, 1948)
Act I
Scene 1: The bare stage of Ford’s Theater, Baltimore.
Scene 2: Connecting dressing rooms of Fred and Lilli.
Background music: “Another Opnin’[Op’nin’], Another Show”
“Wunderbar” (Fred and Lilli)
“It Was Great Fun” [No. 2] (Fred and Lilli)
Scene 3: Iron stairs and landing.
“Why Can’t You Behave?” (Lois and Bill)
Scene 4: Exterior of Ford Theater.
“Another Opnin’, Another Show”
Scene 5: Dressing rooms of Lilli and Fred.
Background music: “Another Opnin’, Another Show”
“We Shall Never Grow Younger”
Scene 6: Same.
Background music: “We Shall Never Grow Younger” (Counterpoint, “It Was
Great Fun”)
Scene 7: Shrew curtain.
“We Open in Venice” (Shrew players)
“If Ever Married I’m” (Bianca) [crossed out]
“I Sing of Love” (Lucentio and Petruchio) [crossed out]
“I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua” (Petruchio) [crossed out]
“Were Thine That Special Face” (Petruchio) [crossed out]
Scene 8: Wings.
Scene 9: Opposite wings.
Scene 10: On stage.
Bill does his specialty with Ballet.
Scene 11: Exterior of Baptista’s house and church.
Scene 12: Same.
Scene 13: Walled garden of Baptista’s house.
“Tom, Dick or Harry” (Bianca and her suitors, Gremio, Tranio, and
Lucentio) [crossed out]
Scene 14: Wings.
Scene 15: Garden.
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Appendix M
Scene 17: Exterior church.

Finaletto: “Kiss Me, Kate” (Petruchio, Katharine, Bianca, Lucentio, and
Company) [lyrics yet to be written]
Act II
Scene 1: Theatre alley.
“Too Darn Hot” (Negroes) [crossed out]
Scene 2: Shrew curtain.
Background music: “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?”
Scene 3: Main room in Petruchio’s house.
“Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” (Petruchio)
Scene 4: Back stage.
“I’ve Been Faithful to You, Darlin’ in my Fashion” (Lois) [p. 2–4–16 miss-
ing in typescript]
“A Woman’s Career” (Fred) [p. 2–5–27 missing in typescript]
Scene 6: Iron staircase.
Reprise: “We Shall Never Be Younger”
Scene 7: Garden of Baptista’s house.
Reprise: “I Sing of Love” (Shrew players) [no text included in typescript]
“I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” [entirely spoken]
Reprise: “Were Thine That Special Face” [crossed out]
Reprise: Finaletto. First Act Finale. New lyrics.
W55
Appendix N
Appendix N: Guys and Dolls (1950)

Act I
Scene 1: Broadway.
Opening (Runyonland) (Ensemble)
“Fugue for Tinhorns” (Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Benny Southstreet, and
Rusty Charlie)
“Follow the Fold” (Sarah, Arvide, Agatha, and Mission Group)
“The Oldest Established” (Nathan, Nicely-Nicely, Benny, Brandy-Bottle
Bates, and the Crapshooters)
Scene 2: Interior of the Save-A-Soul Mission.
“I’ll Know” (Sarah and Sky)
Scene 3: A Phone Booth.
Scene 4: The Hot Box, Nightclub.
“A Bushel and a Peck” (Adelaide and the Hot Box Girls)
“Adelaide’s Lament” (Adelaide)
Scene 5: A Street Off Broadway.
“Guys and Dolls” (Nicely-Nicely and Benny)
Scene 6: Exterior of the Mission. Noon, the next day.
Scene 8: Havana, Cuba—El Café Cubana.
Dance: Havana
Scene 9: Outside El Café Cubana. Immediately following.
“If I Were a Bell” (Sarah)
Scene 10: Exterior of the Mission.
“My Time of Day” (Sky)
“I’ve Never Been in Love Before” (Sky and Sarah)
Incidental music: The Raid
Act II
Scene 1: The Hot Box Nightclub.
“Take Back Your Mink” (Adelaide and Dolls)
“Adelaide’s Second Lament” (Adelaide)
Scene 2: Forty-Eighth Street.
“More I Cannot Wish You” (Arvide)
Scene 3: Crap Game in the Sewer.
“Luck Be a Lady” (Sky and the Crapshooters)
“Sue Me” (Adelaide and Nathan)
Scene 5: Interior of the Save-A-Soul Mission.
“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” (Nicely-Nicely and the Crapshooters)
W56
Appendix N
Scene 6: Near Times Square.

“Marry the Man Today” (Adelaide and Sarah)
Scene 7: Broadway.
Reprise: “Guys and Dolls” (Ensemble)
W57
Appendix O
Appendix O: The Most Happy Fella (1956)

Act I
overture
Scene 1: A restaurant in San Francisco; January, 1927.
“ooh! my feet!” (Cleo)
“ . . . I know how it is” (Cleo)
“ . . . Seven million crumbs” (Cleo)
“ . . . I don’t know” (Rosabella)
“ . . . Maybe he’s kind crazy” (Rosabella)
“somebody, somewhere” (Rosabella)
Scene 2: Main Street, Napa, California; in April.
“the most happy fella” (Townspeople)
“ . . . A long time ago” (Marie)
“standing on the corner” (Herman, Jake, Clem, and Al)
“joey, joey, joey” (Joe)
“ . . . Soon you gonna leave me, Joe” (Tony)
“rosabella” (Tony)
Scene 3: Tony’s barn; a few weeks later.
“abbondanza” (Giuseppe, Ciccio, and Pasquale)
“ . . . Plenty bambini” (Tony)
Scene 4: Tony’s front yard.
“sposalizio” (Townspeople)
“ . . . I seen her at the station” (Postman)
“benvenuta” (Giuseppe, Ciccio, and Pasquale)
“ . . . Aren’t you glad” (Rosabella)
“ . . . No home, no job” (Rosabella)
“don’t cry” (Joe)
Act II
prelude
Scene 1: The vineyards; in May.
“fresno beauties” (Vineyard Workers)
“ . . . Cold and dead” (Joe and Rosabella)
“ . . . Love and kindness” (Doc)
“happy to make your acquaintance” (Rosabella and Tony)
“ . . . I don’t like this dame” (Cleo)
“big d” (Cleo and Herman)
Scene 2: Late in May.
“how beautiful the days” (Tony, Rosabella, Marie, and Joe)
Scene 3: The vineyards; in June.
“young people” (Marie)
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Appendix O
“warm all over” (Rosabella)

“ . . . Old people gotta” (Tony)
Scene 4: The barn.
“i like ev’rybody” (Herman)
Scene 5: The vineyards; in July.
“ . . . I love him” (Rosabella)
“ . . . I know how it is” (Cleo)
“ . . . Like a woman loves a man” (Rosabella)
“my heart is so full of you” (Tony and Rosabella)
“mamma, mamma” (Tony)
Act III
prelude
Scene 1: The barn; an hour later.
“ . . . Good-bye darlin’” (Cleo and Herman)
“ . . . I like ev’rybody” (Duet) (Cleo and Herman)
“song of a summer night” (Doc and the Townspeople)
“please let me tell you” (Rosabella)
Scene 2: Napa Station; A little later.
“ . . . Tell Tony and Rosabella good-bye for me” (Joe)
“ . . . She gonna come home wit’ me” (Tony)
“ . . . Nobody’s ever gonna love you” (Trio) (Marie, Tony, and Cleo)
“ . . . I made a fist!” (Herman)
Finale (Ensemble)
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Appendix P
Appendix P: My Fair Lady (1956)

Act I
Scene 1: Outside the Opera House, Covent Garden. A cold March night.
Overture and Street Entertainers (The Three Buskers)
“Why Can’t the English?” (Higgins)
“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” (Eliza and Costermongers)
Scene 2: A Tenement Section—Tottenham Court Road. Immediately following.
“With a Little Bit of Luck” (Doolittle, Harry, and Jamie)
Scene 3: Higgins’s Study. The following morning.
“I’m an Ordinary Man” (Higgins)
Scene 4: Tenement Section—Tottenham Court Road. Three days later.
“With a Little Bit of Luck” (reprise) (Doolittle and Friends)
Scene 5: Higgins’s Study. Later that day.
“Just You Wait” (Eliza)
“The Rain in Spain” (Higgins, Eliza, and Pickering)
“I Could Have Danced All Night” (Eliza, Mrs. Pearce, and Maids)
Scene 6: Near the Race Meeting, Ascot. A July afternoon.
Scene 7: Inside a Club Ten, Ascot. Immediately following.
“Ascot Gavotte” (Spectators at the Race)
Scene 8: Outside Higgins’s House, Wimpole Street. Later that afternoon.
“On the Street Where You Live” (Freddy)
Scene 9: Higgins’s Study. Six weeks later.
Scene 10: The Promenade of the Embassy. Later that night.
“Promenade” (underscoring)
Scene 11: The Ballroom of the Embassy. Immediately following.
“The Embassy Waltz” (Higgins, Eliza, Karpathy, and Guests)
Act II
Scene 1: Higgins’s Study. 3:00 the following morning.
“You Did It” (Higgins, Pickering, Mrs. Pearce, and Servants)
“Just You Wait” (reprise) (Eliza)
Scene 2: Outside Higgins’s House, Wimpole Street. Immediately following.
“On the Street Where You Live” (reprise) (Freddy)
“Show Me” (Eliza and Freddy)
Scene 3: Flower Market of Covent Garden. 5:00 that morning.
“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” (reprise) (Eliza and Costermongers)
“Get Me to the Church on Time” (Doolittle, Harry, Jamie, and Costermongers)
Scene 4: Upstairs Hall of Higgins’s House. 11:00 that morning.
“A Hymn to Him” (Higgins)
Scene 5: The Conservatory of Mrs. Higgins’s House. Later that day.
“Without You” (Higgins and Eliza)
Scene 6: Outside Higgins’s House, Wimpole Street. Immediately following.
“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (Higgins)
Scene 7: Higgins’s Study. Immediately following.
W60
Appendix Q
Appendix Q: West Side Story (1957)

Act I
Prologue: The Months Before.
1. Prologue (Instrumental)
Scene 1: 5:00 p.m. The Street.
2. “Jet Song” (Riff and Jets)
Scene 2: 5:30 p.m. A Back Yard.
3. “Something’s Coming” (Tony)
Scene 3: 6:00 p.m. A Bridal Shop.
Scene 4: 10:00 p.m. The Gym.
4. The Dance and the Gym (Instrumental)
5. “Maria” (Tony)
Scene 5: 11:00 p.m. A Back Alley.
6. Balcony Scene (“Tonight”) (Maria and Tony)
7. “America” (Anita, Rosalia, and Girls)
Scene 6: Midnight. The Drugstore.
8. “Cool” (Riff and Jets)
The Next Day
Scene 7: 5:30 p.m. The Bridal Shop.
9. “One Hand, One Heart” (Tony and Maria)
Scene 8: 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. The Neighborhood.
10. “Tonight” (Quintet) (Maria, Tony, Anita, Riff, and Bernardo)
Scene 9: 9:00 p.m. Under the Highway.
11. The Rumble (Instrumental)
Act II
Scene 1: 9:15 p.m. A Bedroom.
12. “I Feel Pretty” (Maria and the Girls)
13. Ballet Sequence (Instrumental, Tony, Maria and a Girl)
Scene 2: 10:00 p.m. Another Alley.
14. “Gee, Officer Krupke” (Jets)
Scene 3: 11:30 p.m. The Bedroom.
15. “A Boy Like That/I Have a Love” (Maria and Anita)
Scene 4: 11:40 p.m. The Drugstore.
16. Taunting (Instrumental)
Scene 5: 11:50 p.m. The Cellar.
Scene 6: Midnight. The Street.
17. Finale (Maria and Tony)
Libretto Drafts 1 (January 1956) and 2 (Spring 1956)
Act I
Scene 1: An Alleyway. Sundown.
“Rumble Song” [“Mix” ?] (Jets and “Tonio”)
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Appendix Q
Scene 2: The Crystal Cave. Night.

Mambo (Pantomime)
“Maria” (“Tonio”)
Scene 3: Back of the Tenements. Night.
“Maria” (second chorus) (“Tonio”)
“Love Song” [“One Hand, One Heart” ?] (“Tonio” and Maria)
“Song for Anita and Girls” [“America” ?]
Scene 4: Drugstore. Night.
“Cool” (Riff and Jets)
Scene 5: The Neighborhood. The Next Day.
“Tonight” (Quintet) (Maria, Tony, Anita, Riff, and Bernardo)
Scene 6: Bridal Shop. Late Afternoon.
“Love Song” [“Oh, Happy We” from Candide ?] (“Tonio” and Maria)
“Rumble Song” [“Mix” ?] (Instrumental)
Scene 7: The Park. Sundown.
“Rumble Song” [“Mix” ?] (Jets)
Act II
Scene 1: An Apartment. Early Evening.
“I Feel Pretty” (Maria and Girls)
Scene 2: A Street. Night.
Scene 3: Police Station. Night.
“Love Song” (reprise) [“One Hand, One Heart” ? ] (“Tonio” and Maria)
Scene 4: Outside the Bridal Shop. Night.
“Duet” [“I Have a Love” ?] (Anita and Maria)
Scene 5: Drugstore. Night.
“Duet” (continuation) [“I Have a Love” ?] (“Tonio”)
Scene 6: A Street. Night.
Scene 7: Bridal Shop. Night.
“This scene will be almost entirely to music. Maria comes in the back door,
the music has brief theme of her love with Tonio” [“One Hand, One
Heart”?]
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Appendix R
Appendix R: Follies: Broadway 1971 and

London Revival 1987
Broadway 1971*
scene: A party on the stage of the Weismann Theatre

time: Tonight
There will be no Intermission
“Prologue” [Based on “All Things Bright and Beautiful” from The Girls Upstairs, sec-
ond draft, preceding “Could I Leave You?” and “It Wasn’t Meant to Happen,”
planned in 1966 as a second duet for Ben and Sally]†
“Beautiful Girls” (Roscoe and Company) [The Girls Upstairs, first and second
drafts]‡
“Don’t Look at Me” (Sally, Ben) [The Girls Upstairs, second draft]
“Waiting for the Girls Upstairs” (Buddy, Ben, Phyllis, Sally, Young Buddy, Young
Ben, Young Phyllis, Young Sally) [The Girls Upstairs, first and second drafts]
“Rain on the Roof” (The Whitmans) [Follies, January 2, 1971]
“Ah, Paris!” (Solange) [Follies, January 2, 1971]
“Broadway Baby” (Hattie) [Follies, January 2, 1971]
“The Road You Didn’t Take” (Ben) [Follies, January 2, 1971; replaced in London Follies
1987 by “Country House”]
“Bolero d’Amour” (Vincent and Vanessa) [added in 1971 rehearsal; cut in London
Follies 1987]
“In Buddy’s Eyes” (Sally) [Follies, January 2, 1971]
“Who’s That Woman?” (Stella and Company) [Mirror Dance Routine in The Girls
Upstairs, first and second drafts]
[“Can That Boy Fox-trot!” in The Girls Upstairs, second draft, cut in 1971
rehearsals]
“I’m Still Here” (Carlotta) [replaced “Can That Boy Fox-trot!” during 1971
rehearsals]
[“Pleasant Little Kingdom” in The Girls Upstairs, first draft; cut in 1971]
“Too Many Mornings” (Ben, Sally) [The Girls Upstairs, first and second drafts]
[“That Old Piano Roll” (Buddy) in Follies, September 1970 draft]
“The Right Girl” (Buddy) [added in 1971 rehearsals]
“One More Kiss” (Heidi, Young Heidi) [The Girls Upstairs, first and second drafts]
“Could I Leave You?” (Phyllis) [The Girls Upstairs, second draft]
*Includes songs retained from The Girls Upstairs (1965).

† See Carol Ilson, Harold Prince, 177–97; Mandelbaum, “A Chorus Line,” 66–78; Prince, 158–70;
Sondheim, “Musical Theater,” 231–32; and Zadan, Sondheim & Co. 135–53.
‡ Sondheim mentions a predecessor to “Beautiful Girls” called “Bring on the Girls” that
Michael Bennett asked him to change when he “joined the show.” See Mandelbaum,
“A Chorus Line,” 71.
W63
Appendix R
loveland
1. The Folly of Love
“Loveland” (Sung by The Ensemble) [rewritten in London Follies 1987]
The Spirit of First Love (Miss Kathie Dalton)
The Spirit of Young Love (Miss Margot Travers)
The Spirit of True Love (Miss Suzanne Briggs)
The Spirit of Pure Love (Miss Trudy Carson)
The Spirit of Romantic Love (Miss Linda Perkins)
The Spirit of Eternal Love (Miss Ursula Maschmeyer)
2. The Folly of Youth
Scene—A Bower in Loveland.
[“Who Could Be Blue?” and “Little White House”] [cut in 1971 rehearsals]
“You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow” (Sung by Mr. Ben Stone and Miss Phyllis Rogers)
[added in 1971 rehearsals]
“Love Will See Us Through” (Sung by Mr. Buddy Plummer and Miss Sally Durant)
[added in 1971 rehearsals]
3. Buddy’s Folly
Scene—A Thoroughfare in Loveland.
“The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me-Blues” (Sung and Danced by Mr. Buddy
Plummer) (With the Assistance of Miss Suzanne Rogers and Miss Rita
O’Connor) [added in 1971 rehearsals]
4. Sally’s Folly
Scene—A Boudoir in Loveland.
“Losing My Mind” (Sung by Mrs. Sally Durant Plummer) [added in 1971 rehears-
als]
5. Phyllis’s Folly
Scene—A Honky-Tonk in Loveland.
“Uptown, Downtown” [cut in 1971 rehearsals]
“The Story of Lucy and Jessie” (Sung by Mrs. Phyllis Rogers Stone) (Danced by
Mrs. Stone and The Dancing Ensemble) [added in 1971 rehearsals; cut in Lon-
don Follies 1987]
6. Ben’s Folly
Scene—A Supper Club in Loveland.
“Live, Laugh, Love” (Sung by Mr. Benjamin Stone) (Danced by Mr. Stone and The
Dancing Ensemble) [cut in London Follies 1987]
London Revival 1987
place: The stage of the Weismann Theatre, New York City

time: 1970
Act I
“Beautiful Girls” (Roscoe and Company)
“Don’t Look at Me” (Sally, Ben)
“Rain on the Roof” (The Whitmans)
W64
Appendix R
“Ah! Paris” (Solange)

“Broadway Baby” (Hattie)
“Waiting for the Girls Upstairs” (Buddy, Ben, Phyllis)
“Who’s That Woman” (Stella and Company)
“In Buddy’s Eyes” (Sally)
“Country House” (Phyllis and Ben) [replaced “The Road You Didn’t Take”]
“Too Many Mornings” (Ben, Sally)
Act II
“Social Dancing” (Company)
“I’m Still Here” (Carlotta)
“The Right Girl” (Buddy)
“Could I Leave You?” (Phyllis)
“One More Kiss” (Heidi, Young Heidi)
“Loveland” (Roscoe and Company) [rewritten in 1987]
“Love Will See Us Through” (Sung by Mr. Buddy Plummer and Miss Sally Durant)
[revised as Double Duet in 1987]
“Buddy’s Blues” (Sung and Danced by Mr. Buddy Plummer) (With the Assistance of
Miss Suzanne Rogers and Miss Rita O’Connor)
“Losing My Mind” (Sung by Mrs. Sally Durant Plummer)
“You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow” (Sung by Mr. Ben Stone and Miss Phyllis Rogers)
“Ah! But Underneath” (Sung by Mrs. Phyllis Rogers Stone) (Danced by
Mrs. Stone and the Dancing Ensemble) [replaced “The Story of Lucy and Jessie”]
“Make the Most of Your Music” (Sung by Mr. Benjamin Stone) (Danced by Mr. Stone
and the Dancing Ensemble) [replaced “Live, Laugh, Love”]
Double Duet (Young Sally, Young Ben, Young Phyllis, and Young Buddy) [revised
“Love Will See Us Through”]
W65
Appendix S
Appendix S: Sweeney Todd (1979)
Musical Numbers
the place: London: Fleet Street and environs

the time: The 19th Century
Act I
“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (Company)
“No Place Like London” (Anthony, Todd Beggar Women Woman)
“The Barber and His Wife” (Todd)
“The Worst Pies in London” (Mrs. Lovett)
“Poor Thing” (Mrs. Lovett)
“My Friends” (Todd, Mrs. Lovett)
“Green Finch and Linnet Bird” (Johanna)
“Ah, Miss” (Anthony, Beggar Woman)
“Johanna” (Anthony)
“Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir” (Tobias, Dodd, Mrs. Lovett, Company}
“The Contest” (Pirelli)
“Wait” (Mrs. Lovett)
“Kiss Me” ( Johanna, Anthony)
“Ladies in Their Sensitivities” (The Beadle)
Quartet ( Johanna, Anthony, The Beadle, Judge Turpin)
“Pretty Women” (Todd, Judge Turpin)
“Epiphany” (Todd)
“A Little Priest” (Todd, Mrs. Lovett)
Act II
“God, That’s Good!” (Tobias, Mrs. Lovett, Todd, Beggar Woman, Customers
“Johanna” (Anthony, Todd, Johanna, Beggar Woman)
“By the Sea” (Mrs. Lovett)
“Not While I’m Around” (Tobias, Mrs. Lovett)
“Parlor Songs” (The Beadle, Mrs. Lovett)
“City on Fire!” (Lunatics, Johanna, Anthony)
Final Sequence (Anthony, Beggar Woman, Todd, Judge Turpin, Mrs. Lovett, Johanna,
Tobias)
“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (Company)
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Appendix S
Thematic Reminiscences in Sweeney Todd

Final Sequence Beginning with “City On Fire!”
No. 25: FOGG’S ASYLUM (COMPANY) (Vocal Score, p. 315)

“The engine roared, the motor hissed” (The Ballad of Sweeney Todd [based on Gre-
gorian chant, “Dies Irae” or “Day of Wrath”])
No. 25A: FOGG’S PASSACAGLIA (Vocal Score, p. 321)
[First two notes, the half step of “Dies Irae,” repeated in the tenor line.]
No. 26: CITY ON FIRE! (LUNATICS, JOHANNA) (Vocal Score, p. 323)
“City on Fire!” (City on Fire!)
“Will we be married on Sunday?” (Kiss Me)
“City on Fire! [fragment]
No. 27: SEARCHING (PART I) (MRS. LOVETT, TODD, BEGGAR WOMAN)
(Vocal Score, p. 327)
“Nothing’s gonna harm you, not while I’m around” (Not While I’m Around)
“City on Fire!” [fragment]
“Beadle… Beadle… No good hiding, I saw you” (Beggar Woman’s music in No
Place Like London) [focuses on the half steps of the first two notes of the “Dies Irae”
“City on Fire!” [fragment]
No. 27A: SEARCHING (PART II) (ANTHONY, JOHANNA, BEGGAR WOMAN)
(Vocal Score, p. 335; optional addition for the 1993 London production, p. 390)
“Poor Thing” [“There was a barber and his wife” underscoring]
“Ah, miss, look at me” (Ah, Miss)
“And we’ll sail the world and see its wonders” (No Place Like London)
“Beadle! Beadle! Where are you? [Beggar woman’s music in vocal line, “There was a
barber and his wife” from Poor Thing underscoring]
No. 28: THE JUDGE’S RETURN (TODD, JUDGE) (Vocal Score, p. 341)
“The Judge. I have no time.” (Epiphany underscoring) [Sweeney slits the Beggar
Woman’s throat]
“Pretty women” (Pretty Women) [Sweeney slits the Judge’s throat]
“Rest now, my friend” (My Friends) [Sweeney’s interrupted attempt to slit Johanna’s
throat]
“Lift your razor high, Sweeney” (The Ballad of Sweeney Todd)
No. 29: FINAL SCENE (PART I) (TODD, MRS. LOVETT) (Vocal Score, p. 351)
Beggar Woman’s music for “Lucy” and underscoring (Epiphany)
“No, no, not lied at all” (Poor Thing) together with “Lucy… I’ve come home again”
(Epiphany)
“Mrs. Lovett, you’re a bloody wonder” (A Little Priest)
“The history of the world, my pet” (A Little Priest)
“By the sea Mister Todd” [fragment] (By the Sea)
“And life is for the alive, my dear” (A Little Priest) [Sweeney throws Mrs. Lovett into
the oven]
No. 29A: FINAL SCENE (PART II) (TODD) (Vocal Score, p. 359)
“There was a barber and his wife” (Poor Thing) [Tobias slits Sweeney’s throat]
No. 29B: THE BALLAD OF SWEENEY TODD (COMPANY) (Vocal Score, p. 362)
“Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” (The Ballad of Sweeney Todd)
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Appendix T
Appendix T: Sunday in the Park with George (1984)
Musical Numbers
Act I
“Sunday in the Park with George” (Dot)
“No Life” ( Jules, Yvonne)
“Color and Light” (Dot, George)
“Gossip” (Celeste #1, Celeste #2, Boatman, Nurse, Old Lady, Jules Yvonne)
“The Day Off” (George, Nurse, Franz, Frieda, Boatman, Soldier, Celeste #1, Celeste
#2, Yvonne, Louise, Jules, Louis)
“Everybody Loves Louis” (Dot)
“Finishing the Hat” (George)
“We Do Not Belong Together” (Dot, George)
“Beautiful” (Old Lady, George)
“Sunday” (Company)
Act II
“It’s Hot Up Here” (Company)
“Chromolume #7” (George, Marie)
“Putting It Together” (George, Company)
“Children and Art” (Marie)
“Lesson #8” (George)
“Move On” (George, Dot)
“Sunday” (Company)
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Appendix U
Appendix U: The Phantom of the Opera (1988)
Inhalt
Prologue
The stage of the Paris Opéra, 1905
Auctioner, Raoul, and Company
OVERTURE
Act I, Paris 1861

Scene 1: The Dress Rehearsal of Hannibal
“Think of Me” (Carlotta, Christine, and Raoul)
Scene 2: After the Gala
“Angel of Music” (Christine and Meg)
Scene 3: Christine’s Dressing Room
“Little Lotte . . . / The Mirror . . . (Angel of Music)” (Raoul, Christine, and
Phantom)
Scene 4: The Labyrinth Underground
“The Phantom of the Opera” (Phantom and Christine)
Scene 5: Beyond the Lake
“The Music of the Night” (Phantom)
Scene 6: Beyond the Lake, the Next Morning
“I Remember . . . / Stranger Than You Dreamt It . . . ” (Christine and Phan-
tom)
Scene 7: Backstage
“Magical Lasso” (Buquet, Meg, Madame Giry, and Ballet Girls)
Scene 8: The Manager’s Office
“Notes . . . / Prima Donna” (Firmin, André, Raoul, Carlotta, Giry, Meg,
and Phantom)
Scene 9: A Performance of Il Muto
“Poor Fool, He Makes Me Laugh” (Carlotta and Company)
Scene 10: The Roof of the Opera House
“Why Have You Brought Me Here . . . / Raoul, I’ve Been There” (Raoul
and Christine)
“All I Ask of You” (Raoul and Christine)
“All I Ask of You (Reprise) (Phantom)
Act II, Six Months Later

Scene 1: The Staircase of the Opera House, New Year’s Eve”
“Masquerade / Why So Silent” (Company)
Scene 2: Backstage (Raoul and Giry)
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Appendix U
Scene 3: The Manager’s Office

“Notes . . . / Twisted Every Way . . . (André, Firmin, Carlotta, Piangi, Raoul,
Christine, Giry, and Phantom)
Scene 4: A Rehearsal for Don Juan Triumphant (Christine, Piani, Ryer, Carlotta, Giry,
and Company)
Scene 5: A Graveyard in Perros
“Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” (Christine)
“Wandering Child . . . / Bravo, Monsieur . . . ” (Phantom, Christine, and
Raoul)
Scene 6: Before the Première (Raoul, André, Firmin, Firemen, and Phantom)
Scene 7: Don Juan Triumphant (Carlotta, Pianig, Passarino, and Company)
“The Point of No Return” (Phantom and Christine)
Scene 8: The Labyrinth Underground
“Down Once More . . . / Track Down This Murderer . . . (Company)
Scene 9: Beyond the Lake (Christine, Phantom, Raoul, and Company)
Outline of The Phantom of the Opera,

Act I, Scenes 5 and 6
Scene 5: Beyond the lake
I have brought you (Phantom)

Opening verse to both “Music in the Night” and “Point of No Return,” first
heard as underscoring (under the words “Little Lotte”) when Raoul first meets
Christine in her dressing room). The melody is based on a whole-tone scale:
E F (ascending) D C (descending)
Reused in Don Juan Triumphant (“Don Juan Triumphs once again!”) as the verse
for the song “The Point of No Return.”
“The Music of the Night” (complete tune sung by the Phantom)
Scene 6: The next morning

The Phantom at his organ (instrumental only)
Reused in Don Juan Triumphant (“Serve the meal and serve the maid!”)
(Don Juan C)
“Masquerade” (papier-mâché music box)
The beginning of a tune that was heard once before when we saw the music box
up for auction in the Prologue to act I. The complete tune opens act II.
I remember (Christine) (Don Juan B)
E-F-B (ascending) F-E (descending) F-B (ascending); Note the prominent use of
the tritone between F and B.
Reused in Don Juan Triumphant (“Here the sire may serve the dam”)
“Angel of Music” (Christine)
Second phrase of the original song, beginning with the words “Father once
spoke of an angel.” The complete song was heard in Christine’s dressing room.
Damn you! (Phantom)
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Appendix U
Curse you! (Phantom) Don Juan A

Beginning with the words “Curse you!” the orchestral underscoring of this pas-
sage consists of a melodic variant derived from the whole-tone scale later prom-
inent in the phrase “Those Who Tangle with Don Juan” (the rehearsal scene in
act II, scene 4) and reused in Don Juan Triumphant (“Passarino, faithful friend”)
Damn you . . . Curse you . . . (Phantom)
Elongation of the first four notes of “Music of the Night” (chorus)
Stranger than you dreamt it— (Phantom)
The material is reused by the Phantom directly before the performance of Don
Juan Triumphant, but not in the opera itself
Yet in his eyes (Orchestra)
The orchestra and only the orchestra presents this dramatically important melody
for the first time. John Snelson calls this melody the “Sympathy” theme and Jes-
sica Sternfeld labels it the “Yet in his eyes” phrase. It will return four times, the
last three of which are sung in three different conversations: Christine to Raoul on
the roof (“Yet in his eyes”), Raoul to Christine shortly before Don Juan Triumphant
(“You said yourself he was nothing but a man”), and Christine to Phantom in his
lair during the final scene (“This haunted face holds no horror for me now”).
Come we must return (Phantom) Recitative
Outline of The Phantom of the Opera Act II, Scene 7
Scene 7: “Don Juan Triumphant”
Thematic Material in Don Juan Triumphant

Don Juan A Those who tangle with Don Juan motive
Don Juan B I remember motive
Don Juan C The Phantom at his organ
Don Juan D I have brought you motive
Don Juan E Gypsy motive (Furtively, we’ll scoff and quaff )
Don Juan F No thoughts within her head
Orchestra (Introduction)
Turbulent variation on the Those who tangle with Don Juan motive (Don Juan A)
followed by I remember (Don Juan B)
CHORUS
Here the sire may serve the dam (based on the I remember motive) (Don Juan B)
CARLOTTA AND CHORUS
Poor young maiden! For the thrill (loosely based on Don Juan A)
Tangled in the winding sheets! (rhythm of the Phantom at his organ motive, Don Juan C)
Don Juan triumphs once again! (I have brought you motive)
ORCHESTRA
Gypsy motive in 7/8 time, Don Juan D, followed by a variation of Don Juan A
DON JUAN (SIGNOR PIANGI)
Passarino, faithful friend (Don Juan A, extended)
Furtively, we’ll scoff and quaff (Don Juan E)
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Appendix U
I shall say: “come—hide with me” (Don Juan E in vocal line; Don Juan A in
orchestra)
PASSARINO
Poor thing hasn’t got a chance! (based on Don Juan A)
AMINTA (CHRISTINE)
No thoughts within her head (Don Juan F)
Reused in final lair scene on the words “The tears I might have shed for your
dark fate grow cold, and turn to tears of hate . . . ”
DON JUAN (now the PHANTOM)
For the trap is set and waits for its prey (variation on Don Juan A)
You have come here (Don Juan D)
I have brought you (Don Juan D)
SONG: “The Point of No Return”
AMINTA (CHRISTINE)
You have brought me (Don Juan D)
BOTH
PHANTOM
SONG: “All I Ask of You” (last part of the song)
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NOTES

1. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Song Book (New York: Simon & Schuster and Williamson Music,
1956); Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: Modern Library Association, 1959).
2. Like other Broadway-loving families, especially those residing on the west side of the coun-
try, it took the release of the West Side Story movie with Natalie Wood for us to become fully
cognizant of this show.
3. “The World of Stephen Sondheim,” interview, “Previn and the Pittsburgh,” channel 26 tele-
vision broadcast, March 13, 1977.
4. A chronological survey of Broadway texts from the 1950s to the 1980s might include the fol-
lowing: Cecil Smith, Musical Comedy in America; Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater;
David Ewen, New Complete Book of the American Musical Theatre; Ethan Mordden, Better Foot
Forward; Abe Laufe, Broadway’s Greatest Musicals (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1977); Martin
Gottfried, Broadway Musicals; Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy; Richard Kislan,
The Musical (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980); Gerald Bordman, American Musical
Comedy, American Musical Theatre, American Musical Revue, and American Operetta; Alan Jay
Lerner, The Musical Theatre: A Celebration; and Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin.’
5. See Gerald Bordman, American Musical Comedy, American Musical Revue, and American Oper-
etta, and Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater.
6. Miles Kreuger, “Show Boat”: The Story of a Classic American Musical; Hollis Alpert, The Life
and Times of “Porgy and Bess.” The literature on Porgy and Bess contains a particularly impres-
sive collection of worthwhile analytical and historical essays by Richard Crawford, Charles
Hamm, Wayne Shirley, and Lawrence Starr (see the Selected Bibliography).
7. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical; Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals.
8. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama; Paul Robinson, Opera & Ideas.
9. Peter Kivy, Osmin’s Rage.
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Notes to Pages xv–xxii
10. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 205.

11. Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 6–7.
12. Ibid., 37. Quotation from Bernstein, 147. For a more detailed exploration of Swain and Ban-
field and the differences between opera and musicals, see my review essay of Banfield in
Block, Review essay, 1996.
A New Preface
1. Several of the revivals on this list that appeared before 1995 were discussed in the first
edition.
2. Gerald Bordman, American Operetta, American Musical Comedy, and American Musical Revue;
Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater.
3. Engel, The American Musical Theater, xix, 35.
4. Ibid., 35.
5. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical.
6. Geoffrey Block, “Integration,” and Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama.
7. Block, “Reading Musicals.”
8. The volumes in Yale Broadway Masters and, in the future, Oxford’s Broadway Legacies,
are among recent attempts to fully engage the musical component of a musical. Six vol-
umes of the former series were published between 2003 and 2009: Richard Rodgers (Block),
Andrew Lloyd Webber (John Snelson), Jerome Kern (Stephen Banfield); Sigmund Romberg
(William A. Everett), Frank Loesser (Thomas L. Riis), and John Kander and Fred Ebb (James
Leve). George Gershwin (Larry Starr) is scheduled to appear in 2010. Other important recent
books in the field that face the music, even when it is not the central concern, include
Tim Carter’s “Oklahoma!,” Raymond Knapp’s The American Musical and the Formation of
National Identity and The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, bruce
d. mcclung’s Lady in the Dark, and Mark Eden Horowitz’s Sondheim on Music.
9. Charles Hamm, “Omnibus Review.” The five books reviewed are Jack Gottlieb, Funny It
Doesn’t Sound Jewish; Mark N. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical; John Bush
Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre; Raymond
Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity; and Andrew Most, Mak-
ing Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical.
10. For three thoughtful books highly critical of megamusicals see Mark N. Grant, The Rise and
Fall of the Broadway Musical; Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama; and Ethan Mordden, The
Happiest Corpse. Even Barry Singer, in a book that is generally sympathetic to musicals of
the past thirty years, has little positive to say about Lloyd Webber (Singer, Ever After). For
positive critical assessments in the scholarly literature see John Snelson’s Andrew Lloyd Web-
ber and Jessica Sternfeld’s The Megamusical.
11. George Gershwin (Rodney Greenberg, Howard Pollack, Wayne Schneider); Oscar Ham-
merstein (Amy Asch); Moss Hart (Steven Bach); Jerome Kern (Stephen Banfield); Arthur
Laurents (Arthur Laurents); Frank Loesser (Robert Kimball and Steve Nelson, Thomas L.
Riis); Cole Porter (William McBrien); Jerome Robbins (Deborah Jowitt, Greg Lawrence);
Richard Rodgers (Geoffrey Block, William G. Hyland, Meryle Secrest); Rodgers and Ham-
merstein (Tim Carter, Frederick Nolan); and Kurt Weill (Foster Hirsch, Lys Symonette and
Kim Kowalke, bruce d. mcclung).
12. Stephen Banfield, Jerome Kern; Todd Decker, “Do You Want to Hear a Mammy Song,” and a
forthcoming volume on Show Boat in Oxford’s Broadway Legacies.
13. Howard Pollack, George Gershwin; and Larry Starr, George Gershwin.
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Notes to Pages xxii–4
14. bruce d. mcclung, “Lady in the Dark”; and Tim Carter, “Oklahoma!”
15. Thomas L. Riis, Frank Loesser.
16. This footnote indicates the points of overlap between Knapp, Miller, and Swain and the
musicals discussed in the first edition of Enchanted Evenings:
SHOW BOAT (Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity
[Knapp 2005]; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
ANYTHING GOES (Knapp 2005)
PORGY AND BESS (Knapp 2005; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
THE CRADLE WILL ROCK (Knapp 2005; Miller, Rebels with Applause)
PAL JOEY (Miller, Rebels with Applause)
LADY IN THE DARK (Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal
Identity [Knapp 2006])
CAROUSEL (Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story; Swain, The Broadway Musi-
cal)
KISS ME, KATE (Knapp 2006; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
GUYS AND DOLLS (Knapp 2005; Swain, The Broadway Musical)
MY FAIR LADY (Knapp 2006; Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story”; Swain,
The Broadway Musical)
WEST SIDE STORY (Knapp 2005; Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story”;
Swain, The Broadway Musical)
17. Kim Kowalke, Review essay.

18. Banfield, Jerome Kern, 254–56.
19. Quoted in Pauline Kael, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (New York: Plume, 1994): 37.
20. Ibid.
21. For a thorough and helpful introduction to Cabaret and the work of Kander and Ebb as a
whole, see Leve, John Kander and Fred Ebb.
22. Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White (lyrics by David Zippel) ran nineteen months in Lon-
don but only 108 performances in New York in 2004. Sondheim’s Road Show (formerly
Bounce, Wise Guys, and Gold), with a book by John Weidman, and directed and designed by
John Doyle, played a two-month Off-Broadway engagement at the end of 2008.
Chapter 1: Introduction
1. Book musicals contain a narrative and are represented by three discernible types: operas,
operettas, and musical comedies. Operas, which come in various styles, including rock, are
for the most part sung throughout. Musical comedies normally utilize contemporary urban
settings with matching vernacular dialogue and music, the latter often incorporating jazz.
Operettas are generally set in exotic locations, including early Americana (e.g., New Eng-
land in the 1870s in Carousel and Oklahoma Territory “just after the turn of the century”)
and typically utilize appropriate regional dialects and such nineteenth-century European
genres as waltzes and polkas or a non-jazz musical vernacular that somehow sounds Amer-
ican. The largest category of non-book musicals is the revue, which may possess a unifying
theme but only rarely a clearly delineated plot. In place of a book, most revues consist of
a somewhat loose collection of skits (usually topical), along with dances and songs, often
composed by a plethora of writers and composers.
2. Miles Kreuger, “Some Words about ‘Show Boat,’ ” 18.
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Notes to Pages 4–13
3. A Trip to Chinatown contained “Reuben and Cynthia,” “The Bowery,” and Charles K. Harris’s
“After the Ball”; Little Johnny Jones introduced “The Yankee Doodle Boy” and “Give My
Regards to Broadway.”
4. Both Irene and No, No, Nanette (670 and 321 performances, respectively, in their inaugu-
ral runs) enjoyed popular revivals in the early 1970s (No, No, Nanette in 1971 [861 perfor-
mances] and Irene in 1973 [604 performances]).
5. The film version of Naughty Marietta (1935) starred Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy,
and The Student Prince (1954) featured the voice of Mario Lanza dubbing for Edmund
Purdom.
6. Included among these early hits are the following: Berlin (Watch Your Step [1914]); Kern
(Princess Shows [1915–1918], Sally [1920], and Sunny [1925]); Porter (numerous interpo-
lated songs in shows by other composers between 1919 and 1924 before making a hit with
Paris in 1928); Hammerstein (Wildflower [1923], Rose-Marie [1924], Sunny [1925], and The
Desert Song [1926]); George and Ira Gershwin (Lady, Be Good! [1924], Oh, Kay! [1926], and
Funny Face [1927]); and Rodgers and Hart (The Garrick Gaieties, Dearest Enemy, [1925], and A
Connecticut Yankee [1927]); and Weill (Die Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera] [1927, in
Germany]). Several months before the premiere of Show Boat, the team of Ray Henderson
(music) and B. G. DeSylva and Lew Brown (lyrics) presented their first book musical hit,
Good News.
7. The term “anxiety of influence” is borrowed from literary critic Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety
of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
8. Richard Crawford, The American Musical Landscape, 87.
9. For a valuable perspective on the development of cultural hierarchies, authentic versus
accessible approaches to Shakespeare, and “the sacralization of culture” in nineteenth-
century America, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural
Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
10. Charles Hamm, “The Theatre Guild Production.”
11. Kerman, Opera as Drama. While under current attack for its elitism and restricted vision of
dramatic worthiness, Kerman’s study remains a central text for any exploration of the rela-
tionship between music and drama. Another excellent and less judgmental study of opera
with concepts that can be applied to Broadway musicals is Robinson.
12. Kivy, Osmin’s Rage, 10–11.
13. Some exceptions are Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals; Block, “Frank Loesser’s Sketch-
books”; Hamm, “The Theatre Guild Production”; Carol Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle
Will Rock”; and Wayne Shirley, “Porgy and Bess” and “Reconciliation on Catfish Row.”
14. The literature on gender studies in music is considerable and growing exponentially. The
most influential work to appear is probably Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gen-
der, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
15. The top forty also includes four musicals that premiered before Show Boat (The Student
Prince, Blossom Time, Sally, and Rose-Marie, nos. 31, 33, 37, and 40 in the 1920–1959 list) and
four that first appeared after West Side Story (The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Fiorello!,
and Gypsy, nos. 4, 6, 20, and 26 in the 1920–1959 list).
16. West Side Story (1980); My Fair Lady (1981, 1993); Show Boat (1983, 1994); On Your Toes (1983);
The Cradle Will Rock (1983); Porgy and Bess (1983, 1986, 1989); Anything Goes (1987); The Most
Happy Fella (1992); Guys and Dolls (1992–1994); and Carousel (1994). See A New Preface for
major New York and London performances after 1994.
17. The figure 467 is deceptively low since Lady in the Dark returned to Broadway after a tour
for another 310 performances. The grand total of 777 performances would place this show
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as the ninth longest running musical of the 1940s and no. 20 in the 1920–1959 list. See Lys
Symonette and Kim H. Kowalke, eds., Speak Low, 274.
18. In any event, Pal Joey’s revival (542 performances) falls only five performances and one
show below the top forty, and the combined number of performances of its two runs (916)
would place it just below Bells Are Ringing at No. 14.
19. Before Porgy and Bess arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 1986, no American opera had
been performed there more than fifteen times. See Carl Johnson, “American Opera at the
Met: 1883–1983,” The American Music Teacher 35/4 (February–March 1984): 20–25. Virgil
Thomson’s and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), which premiered on
Broadway one year before Porgy and Bess, lasted only forty-eight performances.
20. The composers, composer-lyricists, or teams that produced two or more musicals in “The
Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959” include the following: Adler
and Ross (Damn Yankees, Pajama Game); Arlen and Harburg (Bloomer Girl, Jamaica); Berlin
(Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Madam); Rome (Fanny, Wish You Were Here); Styne (Bells Are
Ringing, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Gypsy, High Button Shoes); and Wright and Forrest (Kismet,
Song of Norway). Also missing is Gene de Paul’s Li’l Abner (with lyrics by Johnny Mercer)
that debuted between the premieres of Show Boat and West Side Story. The contributions
by Rudolf Friml, Ray Henderson, and Sigmund Romberg preceded Show Boat; Meredith
Willson’s The Music Man followed West Side Story by two months.
21. Since Rodgers and Hammerstein produced Annie Get Your Gun, this leaves Kiss Me, Kate as
the only show among the top five musicals of the 1940s that was not created or produced
by the ubiquitous team.
22. Engel, The American Musical Theater, 35–36.
23. See Kurt Gänzl and Andrew Lamb, Gänzl’s Book of the Musical Theatre; Daniel Kingman,
American Music: A Panorama; and Herbert Kupferberg, The Book of Classical Music Lists (New
York: Facts on File, 1985).
24. Similar criteria motivate Gänzl’s criteria of selection: “Firstly, we chose those pieces which
a theatre-goer would be likely to encounter on the current stages of . . . America, the hits of
today and the hits of yesterday which have been brought back for the further enjoyment of
the theatre-going public. Secondly, we chose those shows which had a notable success in
their own times, those which have left a particular legacy of favourite songs, those which
are significant historically or artistically and those which are just plain good and which
deserve a reappearance on the modern stage. Thirdly, we added our own particular favou-
rites among the shows of yesteryear which we hope, if we bring them to your notice, might
become favourites of yours as well.” Gänzl and Lamb, Gänzl’s Book of the Musical Theatre,
p. xii.
25. See Block, “The Broadway Canon.”
26. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1957), 4.
Chapter 2: Show Boat

1. Ronald Byrnside, Andrew Lamb, and Deane L. Root, “Jerome Kern,” The New Grove Dic-
tionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 10, 1–2;
a slightly expanded version of this entry appeared in The New Grove Dictionary of Ameri-
can Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1985), vol. 2,
623–26.
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2. Byrnside, Lamb, and Root, “Jerome Kern,” 1.

3. The New Grove authors do not mention that the New York City Opera selected Show Boat
perhaps more for financial than artistic reasons. See Martin L. Sokol, The New York City
Opera: An American Adventure (London: Collier Macmillan, 1981), 126.
4. Miles Kreuger, “Show Boat.” Kreuger’s volume offers a comprehensive comparative survey
of Edna Ferber’s novel, the New York 1927 premiere and revivals (1932 and 1946), and the
three film versions (1929, 1936, and 1951).
5. The Secaucus materials discussed later in this chapter are identified in “Manuscript Sources
for Ravenal’s Entrance and Meeting with Magnolia” in the online website.
6. Some reviewers of the album noted with admiration that the McGlinn reconstruction,
which featured noted operatic crossover artists Frederica von Stade as Magnolia and Teresa
Stratas as Julie, contained only ten minutes’ less music than Wagner’s Die Walküre.
7. Robert Coleman, Daily Mirror, December 27, 1927. Quoted in Stanley Green, ed., Rodgers and
Hammerstein Fact Book, 353.
8. Ibid. According to Gerald Bordman, Show Boat opened with a cast of only ninety-six chorus
members (fifty-two white and thirty-two black) and twelve black dancers. Bordman, Jerome
Kern, 286.
9. Percy Hammond, New York Herald Tribune, January 8, 1928; Brooks Atkinson, New York
Times, January 8, 1928. Quoted in S. Green, Rodgers and Hammerstein Fact Book, 354–55.
10. Cecil Smith and Glenn Litton, Musical Comedy in America, 158.
11. George Jean Nathan, Judge, January 21, 1928. Quoted in S. Green, Rodgers and Hammerstein
Fact Book, 355.
12. Robert Garland, New York Telegram, n.d.; Alexander Woollcott, New York World, January 15,
1928. See also Robert Benchley, Life, January 12, 1928. Quoted in Green, Rodgers and Ham-
merstein Fact Book, 354–55.
13. Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), 393.
14. Kreuger, “Some Words about ‘Show Boat,’ ” 17. In Ferber’s novel Cap’n Andy becomes part
of his beloved river when he is thrown overboard in a storm and drowns, Julie becomes a
prostitute, and Ravenal and Magnolia are never reunited.
15. Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater, 13.
16. Ibid., 13. Two pages later Engel asserts his view that only Porgy and Bess (1935) and The Boys
from Syracuse (1938) before Pal Joey (1940) have revivable books.
17. Ibid., 14. In a book published five years later Engel reiterates his 1967 perspective, but con-
cedes Show Boat’s originality as well as the historical importance of its interweaving five
couples: “Nothing as rich as this had happened before it in any other libretto, nothing as
courageous in subject matter and nothing in America as opulent musically.” Engel, Words
with Music, 70.
18. Bordman, Jerome Kern, 23 and 25; Kern quotation on page 23.
19. Ibid., 150.
20. Ibid., 171.
21. Kern was already a proven commodity to Ziegfeld, who had produced the hit Sally (570 per-
formances) in 1920. Rumors of Ziegfeld’s lack of faith in Show Boat may be exaggerated.
22. Kreuger, “Show Boat,” 26.
23. The online website offers an outline of the 1927 Show Boat (scenes and songs) as listed
in a souvenir program for the week beginning Monday, October 28, 1928, by which time
changes had long since been consolidated (the program is reproduced in Kreuger, “Show
Boat,” 68–69). For convenience, the outline is keyed to the show numbers as they appear
in the original Harms vocal score. Songs listed in the Harms score (but not listed in the
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souvenir program) are placed in italics. The website also provides an encapsulated view of
the most important subsequent productions.
24. EMI/Angel CDS 7–49108–2.
25. Kreuger, “Show Boat,” viii–ix.
26. With the issuing of McGlinn’s reconstructed recording, a libretto that is virtually complete
for those scenes where underscored dialogue plays an important role (act I, scenes 1, 2, 4,
7, 8) finally became widely available. Act II, scene 3, is also nearly complete and the text of
act II, scenes 4 and 9, is well represented. The only previously published libretto is based on
the 1928 London production (Chappell, 1934).
27. John McGlinn, “Notes on ‘Show Boat,’ ” 28.
28. McGlinn candidly concedes that his recording is not absolutely complete. He does not,
for example, include the Entr’acte to act II or several “utility arrangements . . . which are
in any case verbatim repeats of music recorded herein,” and he notes also the omission of
underscoring in act II, scene 2. McGlinn leaves unmentioned the unfortunate absence of the
interpolated “Good Morning, Carrie” from the same scene and Gustav Lange’s “Blumen-
lied” (“Flower Song”). The latter served Kern as the “Incidental Music, played on the Stage
during the presentation of ‘The Parson’s Bride’ ” in act I, scene 6.
29. The dramatic changes are fully reflected in Chappell’s published libretto of 1934, but the
published vocal score, while it contains “Dance Away the Night” and omits “Good-bye, Ma
Lady Love” and “Hey, Feller,” does not include “How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” and
prints “Ol’ Man River” in the original C major (to better feature Robeson’s basso profundo;
the London “Ol’ Man River” was transposed down a whole tone to B from its New York
key of C major).
30. After 418 performances the 1946 revival would spawn two phenomenal national tours
(fourteen cities and forty-five cities, respectively) that would last the better part of the next
two years.
31. Kreuger, “Show Boat,” 160–63. The legacy of the 1946 production is largely preserved in the
Welk vocal score and the unpublished libretto distributed by the Rodgers and Hammer-
stein Theatre Library for those who would produce Show Boat over the next five decades.
Missing, however, from both the Welk score and the acting edition of the 1946 libretto is
Kim as an adult and her song “Nobody Else but Me.” This was the song that replaced
Norma Terris’s impersonations and Edith Day’s new song for the London production,
“Dance Away the Night.” Although he acknowledges that it was made “to facilitate travel
and trim the running time to avoid overtime fees for the stage hands,” Kreuger asserts that
these changes “strengthen the reunion of Magnolia and Ravenal.” Ibid., 170.
32. For Kreuger, the three scene cuts “were made to help trim the lengthy show to a more con-
ventional running time,” and, since “developments in scenic technology permitted speed-
ier set changes than were possible in the 1920s,” such “front” scenes (including act I, scene
3) were an unnecessary impediment to contemporary possibilities in stagecraft. Kreuger
also defends another deletion when he writes that “although the replacement of one song
for another in the same spot requires the sacrifice of ‘I Might Fall Back on You,’ the better of
the two songs is retained; and the script probably benefits from far smoother action.” Ibid.,
160 and 162.
33. Ethan Mordden, “ ‘Show Boat,’ ” New Yorker, July 3, 1989, 83.
34. Ibid.
35. The London production that docked on July 29 at the Adelphi Theatre stayed afloat longer
than any previous production, closing 910 performances later on September 29, 1973. Its
legacy is preserved on a recording promoted somewhat inaccurately in the jacket notes
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as “the first and only complete recording containing all the lyrics and music.” Stanyon
Records 10048 (two LPs).
36. The first of these, “How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” (Kern’s first London success of
1905 with lyrics by Edward Laska) served in the 1971 London production as an interpola-
tion to replace “I Might Fall Back on You.” The second, “Dance Away the Night,” which
Kern had written as a new last song for the London Magnolia, Edith Day, in 1928, was
transferred to Frank Schultz.
37. “Gallivantin’ Aroun’” (sung by Irene Dunne in the film) was not used.
38. In both the Playbill (“Director’s Notes”) and in his Tony Award acceptance speech, Prince
gratefully acknowledged McGlinn’s scholarship. Hal Prince, “Director’s Notes,” Playbill
95/11 (1994), n.p.
39. Variety critic Jeremy Gerard noted that these signs were “just about the only things that
remain unchanged over the show’s 40–year span”; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’
Reviews 55/13 (1994): 262.
40. Prince, “Director’s Notes,” n.p.
41. Ibid., n.p. Robeson’s “Ah Still Suits Me” from the film was used as underscoring.
42. Kim’s “It’s Getting Hotter in the North,” dropped after opening night in 1927, was restored
as a dance number; Queenie’s “Hey, Feller!” (gone since the 1928 London production) and
“How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” from London 1971 were relegated to underscoring.
43. Robert Simon, “Jerome Kern,” 24.
44. A precedent for this technique can be found in 1916, when to accompany the silent film Glo-
ria’s Romance, Kern had composed “fifteen themes for specific characters and situations.”
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 128.
45. Not only do these motives avoid notes outside the scale, but they also capture the openness of
the river as well as its simplicity and purity by avoiding the tensions inherent in half steps.
46. Bordman was perhaps the first to note “that the Cotton Blossom theme is essentially the
beginning of the chorus of ‘Ol’ Man River’ played in reverse and accelerated.” Bordman,
Jerome Kern, 290. The relationship between the “Cotton Blossom,” “Ol’ Man River,” and
Cap’n Andy’s themes is also mentioned by Ethan Mordden (“ ‘Show Boat’ ”).
47. Bordman writes that Kern “demonstrated the universality of some folk themes when
he returned to his roots and used an old Bohemian melody for Cap’n Andy’s entrance.”
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 291. Dvořák authority John Clapham notes a connection between
Dvořák’s theme and the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Clapham, “The Evolution
of Symphony ‘From the New World,’ ” Musical Quarterly 44 (April 1958): 175; see also Jean
E. Snyder, “A Great and Noble School of Music: Dvořák” and “Harry T. Burleigh, and the
African American Spiritual,” in Dvořák in America 1892–1895, ed. John C. Tibbetts (Port-
land, Ore: Amadeus Press, 1993), 123–48, especially 131–32. Three years before Show Boat
Kern quoted the openings of both the first movement and the even more well-known slow
movement from Dvořák’s symphony in the dance music of “Shufflin’ Sam” (from Sitting
Pretty), perhaps as a musical pun to support Sam’s motto, “This old world’s no place to cry
and be glum in.” Bordman attributes this last Dvořák reference to orchestrator Robert Rus-
sell Bennett. Bordman, Jerome Kern, 249.
48. It is more difficult to offer an unequivocal identification of the theme associated with Sher-
iff Vallon. Unlike the “Cotton Blossom,” Cap’n Andy, and Parthy themes, which establish
immediate associations, Vallon’s theme, introduced immediately after the Overture, at first
suggests a more generalized darker side of river life rather than a specific human represen-
tative of law and order. At its second appearance, where stage directions tell directors to
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“enter Vallon,” Kern makes a direct association between Vallon and his theme, an associa-
tion that Kern will recall at the conclusion of “Make Believe” (“enter Vallon followed by
Joe”).
49. In the 1994 Broadway revival Cap’n Andy’s theme is absent on both these occasions.
50. Not only does Kern adopt the B section of The Beauty Prize music as the B section of “Where’s
the Mate?” he also retains its unusual modulation from G major to F major.
51. The three-note descending scalar fragment also returns prominently in the opening chorus
(sung by whites) at the Midway Plaisance in Chicago (Harms, 181).
52. Julie’s song “Bill,” if not her fate, is also foreshadowed by the barker at the Chicago Fair
(Harms, 186).
53. Also mm. 5–6, 9–10, and 15–16.
54. Stanley Green notes this reference to “Make Believe” in The Rodgers and Hammerstein Story
(New York: John Day, 1963), 58–59. Ethan Mordden and Deena Rosenberg provide two
additional examples of thematic reminiscence. In “Why Do I Love You?” the orchestra
plays the first eight measures of “I Might Fall Back on You” while a chorus sings “Hours
are not like years, / So dry your tears! / What a pair of love birds!” Immediately thereaf-
ter Ravenal reprises the first eight measures of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” to the words
“I’ll come home as early as I can, / Meanwhile be good and patient with our man.” Mord-
den, “ ‘Show Boat,’ ” 81, and Rosenberg, “ ‘Show Boat’ Sails into the Present,” New York
Times, April 24, 1983, sec. 2, 12.
55. Show Boat (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1926), 183–85.
56. The meeting scene portion of act 1, scene 1, is found in Harms, 37–53, Chappell, 36–52, and
Welk, 31–46; the libretto appears in the McGlinn booklet of the EMI recording, 62–66.
57. This harmonic progression is known in classical theoretical parlance as a deceptive cadence
(a B-minor triad in the key of D major).
58. This chord, an augmented sixth chord on B expands into a dominant A-major triad to
prepare circuitously the return to the tonal center of D.
59. It is similarly not an accident that Magnolia and Ravenal’s declaration of love at the con-
clusion of the act will also be a waltz, “You Are Love.” Considering the importance of this
waltz section in “Make Believe,” its omission in both the 1936 and 1951 film versions is
regrettable.
60. The Library of Congress typescript (identified in “Manuscript Sources” no. 1 of the online
website) shows that before settling on “convention’s P’s and Q’s” the line read, “There
really is no cause to have the blues,” a lyric that was removed before Kern’s first musical
draft of this scene. In the third section of the song, this same typescript shows that “the
world we see” replaced “reality.”
61. The 1951 MGM film version offers yet another division of this material before Magnolia
and Ravenal profess their love together:
ravenal: Others find peace of mind in pretending

Couldn’t you?
magnolia: Couldn’t I?
both: Couldn’t we:
ravenal: Make believe our lips are blending
In a phantom kiss or two or three—
both: Might as well make believe I love you—
For, to tell the truth . . . I do.
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Notes to Page 38
62. In addition to the Library of Congress and New York Public Library libretto typescripts
there are two substantial musical drafts for this scene housed in the Library of Congress
(designated Draft 1 and Draft 2 in the “Manuscript Sources” no. 1 of the online website).
All of the Library of Congress material was acquired from the Warner Brothers Warehouse
in Secaucus, New Jersey.
63. In the Library of Congress typescript Frank appears before Ravenal has the opportunity to
pick up Ellie’s handkerchief.
64. The 1927 production offered two other exchanges between Ellie and Frank that succeeded
in conveying the dynamics between them. The first of these opens act I, scene 3 (Outside a
Waterfront Gambling Saloon), where Ellie explains to Frank that she “won’t never marry no
actor”; the second appears in scene 5 where she informs him that she might settle for Frank
if nothing better comes along (“I Might Fall Back on You”).
65. The dialogue in the New York Public Library typescript (see “Manuscript Sources” no. 2 of
the online website) goes like this:
parthy (Off): Magnolia! (She enters lower deck.) Andy! Drat that man, he’s never
home—Magnolia! (Magnolia enters on top deck. Windy motions her to stand
still where she is so that Parthy won’t see her. Windy exits R. Parthy exits L.)
ravenal (Ravenal resumes soliloquy): Who cares if my boat goes
upstream?
parthy (Off): Nola!
ravenal: Or if the gale bids me go with the river’s flow.
The Library of Congress typescript (see “Manuscript Sources” no. 2 of the online website)
originally had Magnolia’s stage action occur after Ravenal sang this last line with correc-
tions made in pencil.
66. Library of Congress typescript 1–21 and 1–22.
67. During the tryouts Kern and Hammerstein made still more changes in this scene. Shortly
before its closing moments, according to Draft 2 of the Library of Congress score, the lov-
ers sing a reprise of the waltz (section 2) for fifteen measures, after which Kern indicated
by arrows and hatch marks a direct move to the coda. Draft 2 also contained another six
measures of “Make Believe” after the coda, which Kern deleted before the return of Vallon’s
theme. The underscored waltz of section 2 then led to a scene between Magnolia and Joe
and “Ol’ Man River.”
In the earlier musical manuscript (Draft 1) Kern had Ravenal introduce the main chorus
of “Make Believe” with a different text (beginning with “As the river goes so time goes”),
and while the text is crossed out, the melody provides the underscoring between Ravenal
and Vallon before the former sings the first A section of “Where’s the Mate for Me?” Also in
Draft 1 after Ravenal hears Magnolia’s piano theme, a chorus of Girls rather than Ravenal
himself repeats the theme. Kern’s inspiration to have Magnolia’s piano theme intrude upon
Ravenal’s song was apparently not part of the initial conception.
In contrast to Draft 2, a draft that clearly served as the model for the published vocal
scores, Draft 1 does not show the third and fourth sections of “Make Believe,” sections
that provide much psychological nuance and musical richness to the scene. Instead, Draft
1 brings back the six measures of coda and the final confrontation between Ravenal and
Vallon. As in Draft 2, the scene in Draft 1 concludes with Magnolia seeing Joe, and their
dialogue (not given) is underscored by the opening strains of “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t
Help Lovin’ Dat Man.”
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68. Included among this group of song hits are “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” from The Night Is
Young (1935) with Romberg, and a trio of hits with Kern, “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” and
“Can I Forget You?” from High, Wide and Handsome (1937), and the Academy Award–winning
“The Last Time I Saw Paris” from Lady, Be Good (1941). Soon after he had begun working with
Richard Rodgers, Hammerstein wrote “It Might as Well Be Spring” and “It’s a Grand Night for
Singing” for State Fair (1945) with Rodgers and “All through the Day” from Centennial Summer
(1946) with Kern.
69. Beginning with the first of three versions of Show Boat in 1929, Hollywood would adapt
twenty-six of Hammerstein’s Broadway shows for film.
70. Kern turned down Hammerstein’s offer in 1942 to write a musical based on Lynn Riggs’s
play, Green Grow the Lilacs (1931). One year later the property was turned over to Rodgers.
The result, of course, was Oklahoma!
71. The Annie Oakley property turned out to be Berlin’s greatest book show, Annie Get Your
Gun, in 1946 with a book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields.
72. The quotation is from Bordman, Jerome Kern, 294. The sensitive issues explored in Show Boat
have hardly gone away. In reviewing the 1993 Toronto production of Show Boat, directed by
Prince, theater critic John Lahr found it necessary to respond to the Coalition to Stop Show
Boat, a group that tried to close the show for its alleged “racist, anti-African propaganda.”
According to Lahr “the past must be remembered for its sins as well as for its triumphs”
and Show Boat admirably “chronicles slavery not to condone but to deplore it.” “Mississippi
Mud,” New Yorker, October 25, 1993, 123–26; quotation on p. 126.
73. Ibid., 126.
Chapter 3: Anything Goes

1. Porter’s original lyric, “I wouldn’t care for those nights in the air / That the fair Mrs. Lind-
bergh went through,” intended for the unproduced Star Dust (1931), was replaced in Any-
thing Goes by the now familiar “Flying too high with some guy in the sky / Is my idea of
nothing to do, / Yet I get a kick out of you.” See Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 113, and
Robert Kimball, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, 167 and 270.
2. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 111; Miles Kreuger, “Some Words About ‘Anything Goes,’ ”
13; and Lee Davis, Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern, 329–36. Kreuger also points out that the
Bolton-Wodehouse book was not really about a shipwreck. In fact, a fake bomb created
a mood of terror that was eventually alleviated by a celebratory prayer, “Blow, Gabriel,
Blow.” Davis’s more detailed survey of the early genesis of Anything Goes has the advan-
tage of being based on a previously unknown first draft from 1934 in addition to Bolton’s
less reliable reconstruction of the still-missing second draft (the rejected draft) years later.
Davis does not seem to be aware of the Bolton scenario now in the State Historical Society
of Wisconsin, but Ethan Mordden discusses it briefly in Sing for Your Supper, 69–70. Thanks
to James Hepokoski for calling my attention to the existence of the Bolton scenario.
3. Richard G. Hubler, The Cole Porter Story, 30.
4. Brooks Atkinson, “The Play: ‘Anything Goes’ as Long as Victor Moore, Ethel Merman and
William Gaxton Are Present,” New York Times, November 22, 1934, 26.
5. John McGlinn, “The Original ‘Anything Goes,’ ” 30.
6. Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin,’ 194. Many thanks are due to Roberta Staats of The Cole
Porter Musical and Literary Property Trusts for generously sending me a copy of Por-
ter’s twenty-nine-page will, and to trustee Robert H. Montgomery Jr. for confirming its
contents.
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7. In the McGlinn recording “There’s No Cure for Travel” is relegated to the appendix.
8. The McGlinn notes indicate that Merman’s principal objection was the line “She made
the maid who made the room,” with its implied homosexuality. Ibid., 33. A similar line
appears in act I, scene 2, when Billy asks if Reno made the boat and a character named
Snooks replies: “Did she make the Boat? She made the Cap’n!” Perhaps because of its
heterosexual implications this line was permissible and could be retained in the dia-
logue (see the 1934 libretto, 1–2–13).
9. In this instance McGlinn was reluctant to perform an appendectomy so he inserted “What
a Joy to Be Young” in the main body of his recording rather than its rightful place in his
appendix beside “There’s No Cure Like Travel,” “Kate the Great,” and “Waltz Down the
Aisle.”
10. Kreuger, “Some Words about ‘Anything Goes,’ ” 17.
11. Ibid., 17.
12. McGlinn, “The Original ‘Anything Goes,’ ” 33.
13. Perhaps because present-day late-arriving listeners usually come into the theater already
whistling “I Get a Kick Out of You,” McGlinn took the initiative of placing “Buddie, Beware”
in the body of his recording rather than the appendix.
14. Weidman has also written three librettos for Sondheim musicals, Pacific Overtures (1976),
Assassins (1990), and Road Show (2008).
15. Atkinson, “The Play: ‘Anything Goes,’ ” 26.
16. Ibid., 26.
17. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 116.
18. Lewis Funke, “Theatre: ‘Anything Goes’ Revival of Musical Opens at Orpheum,” New York
Times, May 16, 1962, 35.
19. Ibid., 35.
20. George Abbott, “Mister Abbott,” 187.
21. 1962 libretto, 1–8–59. Many thanks to Louis H. Aborn, president of Tams-Witmark, for gra-
ciously allowing me to examine the 1934, 1962, and 1987 Anything Goes librettos, and to
John L. Hughes, managing director of Samuel French Limited in London, for generously
supplying a reference copy of the 1935 London libretto.
22. Stephen Holden, “A Glimpse of Olden Days, via Cole Porter,” New York Times, October 18,
1987, section 2, p. 5.
23. “Son Helping to Update Crouse’s ‘Anything Goes,’ New York Times, August 25, 1987, sec-
tion 3, 14. For West Side Story, librettist Arthur Laurents created a deliberately artificial and
meaningless slang that would never become old-fashioned and require updating.
24. Kreuger, “The Annotated ‘Anything Goes,’ ” 133.
25. Ibid., 133–37. Despite Kreuger’s best efforts, he was unable to discover the full mean-
ing of the reference, “Drumstick Lipstick,” and concluded that its meaning “is lost to
the ages.” In the new millennium, readers of Slate Magazine’s Timothy Noah replied to
his plea and located two 1934 references to Drumstick lipstick in New York Times ads for
Drumstick face power and the Drumstick compact, various cosmetic products manufac-
tured by the French firm, Charbert. Noah announced the solution in “Drumstick Lipstick,
Explained!” posted June 16, 2005.
27. A more direct reference to Aimée Semple McPherson had occurred in Moss Hart’s sketch
on the headline “Gandhi Goes on Hunger Strike” in the 1933 revue As Thousands Cheer
(music by Berlin).
28. “Son Helping to Update Crouse’s ‘Anything Goes,’ ” sec. 3, 14.
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29. Ibid., 14.

30. Holden, “A Glimpse of Olden Days,” 35.
31. 1934 libretto, 2–1–11.
32. Those concerned by this usurpation of Hope’s role and her solo opportunity may be some-
what placated to learn that in 1987 she is given a new interpolation, “Goodbye, Little Dream,
Goodbye” (act II, scene 1), and a duet with Billy and some sailors, “All through the Night”
(a song from the original 1934 version now transferred to act II, scene 2). Furthermore, she
is allowed to retain her interpolated duet with Billy in act I, scene 7, “It’s De-Lovely,” which
had been introduced in act I, scene 2, of the 1962 version (see the online website).
33. 1934 libretto, 1–6–71. Mrs. Wentworth is the owner of the Pomeranian canine that Billy
turns into a Mexican hairless.
34. In 1962 Billy is Chinchilian. The phrase “putting on the dog” made a comeback. Through-
out the gestation of this first edition of Enchanted Evenings the New Yorker regularly dis-
played ads for “Put on the Dog” T-shirts, the expected side of the shirt featuring drawings
of the front or back of a dog.
35. Gerald Bordman, “Preserving the Heritage: The Living Record,” in Musical Theatre in Amer-
ica, ed. Glenn Loney, 407.
36. From Pal Joey, “I Could Write a Book.”
37. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music defines a triplet as “three notes of equal value to be
played in the time normally occupied by two notes of the same value, indicated by the fig-
ure 3.” Don Randel, ed., The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1986), 873.
38. “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” (lyrics, Stephen Sondheim; music, Jule Styne) from Gypsy
(1959), also written for Merman as the eccentric Rose, uses a variation of this idea on the
title words.
39. In an early version of “Blow, Gabriel Blow,” vastly different melodically but otherwise
rhythmically identical to the familiar version, the triplets are absent. See the Cole Porter
Collection, Box 15, Folder 121, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
40. “Easy to Love,” Billy’s love song to Hope, dropped because of its difficulty for William
Gaxton, also retains Reno’s half-note triplet in the midst of a chromatic line.
41. Porter harmonizes “if today” with a dominant seventh on C (C-E-G-B), a chord that leads
to a change of key (F major) two measures later.
42. See Stephen Citron, Noel & Cole, 112.
43. Those responsible for choosing the interpolated songs either inadvertently or by design dis-
covered two that fit in with the syncopated world of Reno and Billy, “Friendship” and “It’s
De-Lovely,” both of which share melodic fragments in common with the original “Any-
thing Goes” and, of course, many other Porter songs.
Chapter 4: Porgy and Bess

1. “Gershwin Gets His Music Cues for ‘Porgy’ on Carolina Beach,” New York Herald Tribune,
July 8, 1934, sec. 5, 2, and George Gershwin; reprinted in Merely Armitage, ed., George Ger-
shwin, 72–77.
2. See Frederick S. Roffman, “At Last the Complete ‘Porgy and Bess,’ ” New York Times, Sep-
tember 19, 1976, sec. 2, 1+, and Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre, 165–66. Shortly before
these exploratory negotiations the Metropolitan Opera introduced Louis Gruenberg’s opera
The Emperor Jones. Although well received, Gruenberg’s opera, which featured Lawrence
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Tibbett singing the title role in blackface, was performed only ten times in 1933 and 1934.
African Americans were similarly excluded in most of the other important roles.
3. Edward Jablonski, Gershwin, 194–96.
4. Only one year after its Met debut the international reputation of Porgy and Bess as an opera
was further enhanced in Glyndebourne. A third uncut recording generated by this produc-
tion was made in 1989. See the Discography and Filmography in the online website.
5. After Gershwin’s Pardon My English, Freedley (without Aarons) would produce four hits
for Porter shows: Anything Goes (1934), Red, Hot and Blue! (1936), Leave It to Me! (1938), and
Let’s Face It (1941).
6. See especially Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess,” 11–118; David Ewen,
George Gershwin, 218–65; Jablonski, Gershwin, 250–91; and Charles Schwartz, Gershwin, 243–
71. For an important source on the genesis of Porgy and Bess that was published since the
first edition of Enchanted Evenings, see Howard Pollack, George Gershwin, 567–91.
7. Dorothy Heyward, “Porgy’s Goat,” Harper’s 215 (December 1957): 37.
8. Jablonski, Gershwin, 255.
9. The outline of scenes and songs in the online website indicates the division of lyrical labor
between DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin.
10. Gershwin began his orchestration with act I, scene 2, completing it in February 1935. In a
letter to Schillinger (May 16) the composer wrote that he had completed act I, scene 1. Act II
occupied Gershwin’s attentions at least for the remainder of May and June, and on July 19
Gershwin conducted a run-through of acts I and II at the CBS studio. Completion dates for
act III are even more meticulously documented: scene 1 ( July 22); scene 2 (August 4), scene
3 (August 23). Several weeks later Gershwin wrote on the first page of the orchestral score,
“finished September 2, 1935.”
11. Brooks Atkinson and Olin Downes, “ ‘Porgy and Bess,’ Native Opera, Opens at the Alvin;
Gershwin Work Based on DuBose Heyward’s Play,” New York Times, October 11, 1935, 30.
12. Atkinson and Downes, ibid.
13. Downes, ibid.
14. Atkinson, ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Downes, ibid.
17. Ibid. Several days later the New York Times gave the composer an opportunity to respond
at some length to his critics: “I chose the form I have used for ‘Porgy and Bess’ because
I believe that music lives only when it is in serious form. When I wrote the ‘Rhapsody
in Blue’ I took ‘Blues’ and put them in a large and more serious form. That was twelve
years ago and the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is still very much alive, whereas if I had taken the
same themes and put them in songs they would have been gone years ago.” G. Gersh-
win, 1.
18. Jablonski, Gershwin, 264.
19. Virgil Thomson, “George Gershwin,” 18.
20. Thomson, “Porgy in Maplewood,” New York Herald Tribune, October 19, 1941; reprinted in
Thomson, The Musical Scene (New York: Knopf, 1945), 167–69.
21. Vernon Duke, “Gershwin, Schillinger, and Dukelsky: Some Reminiscences,” Musical Quar-
terly 33 (January 1947): 108.
22. Richard Rodgers, “Foreword,” The Gershwins, by Robert Kimball and Alfred Simon (New
York: Atheneum, 1973), xiii.
23. Ibid.
24. Schwartz, Gershwin, 318.
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25. George Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row,” 1–2. Interestingly, neither Atkinson nor
Downes was bothered by Gershwin’s songs. In fact, according to Atkinson it was their pres-
ence that made the “hour of formal music transitions” palatable. Similarly, Downes may have
felt that there were a few songs too many “which hold back the dramatic development,”
but he undeniably shared Atkinson’s view that “it is in the lyrical moments [i.e., songs] that
Mr. Gershwin is most completely felicitous.” Gershwin finds an ardent recent defender in
Lawrence Starr, who observes that “for a nineteenth-century European like Verdi, it is accept-
able—perhaps even appropriate and admirable—to have ‘hit tunes’ in an opera; for a twenti-
eth-century American it is inappropriate and vulgar.” Starr, “Gershwin’s ‘Bess,’ ” 430.
26. Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row,” 1.
27. Richard Crawford, “Gershwin’s Reputation,” 259.
28. Charles Hamm, “Theatre Guild Production,” 495–532.
29. The following discussion of the “Buzzard Song” is adapted (with some changes) from
Block, “Gershwin’s Buzzard.”
30. The play by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward was originally published by Doubleday in 1927.
Page references in this chapter correspond to the version of Porgy anthologized in Famous
American Plays of the 1920s (New York: Dell, 1959), 207–307. The typescript of DuBose Hey-
ward’s libretto with George Gershwin’s annotations is now housed in the Music Division
of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Gershwin Collection, Box 27, Item 2).
31. Dorothy and Dubose Heyward, Porgy, 252.
32. Typescript libretto, 2–18.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 2–14.
35. Armitage, George Gershwin, 52.
36. Isaac Goldberg, George Gershwin, 325.
37. Ewen, George Gershwin, 231.
38. Jablonski, 288.
39. The original 78 r.p.m. discs (Victor 11878/81) were reissued on long-playing records (RCA
Camden CAL 500) and again on CDs (Pearl Gemm CDS 9483). At the same October 14 ses-
sion, which took place only four days after the Broadway premiere, Tibbett also recorded
“It Ain’t Necessarily So” and, with Helen Jepson, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” The
selections sung by Tibbett and Jepson have also been reissued on Pearl Gemm CDS 9483.
The baritone was the Met’s most highly marketable commodity where new operas were
concerned, and he had already portrayed a black man there (the title role of Louis Gruen-
berg’s Emperor Jones in 1933). It was not until the administration of Rudolf Bing that black
singers were welcomed at the Met (Marian Anderson, the first, followed closely by Robert
McFerrin, were both in 1955).
40. A facsimile of the Los Angeles Gershwin program appears in Merle Armitage, George Ger-
shwin: Man and Legend (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1958), between pages 144 and 145.
The Duncan recordings were issued on Decca DL-9024.
41. Columbia OSL 162; reissued on Odyssey Stereo 32–36–0018.
42. Armitage, George Gershwin: Man and Legend, 156–60.
43. The idiosyncratic Davis-Breen version became the second published version of the opera
libretto. See Stanley Richards, ed., Great Musicals of the American Theatre Volume One (Rad-
nor, Penn.: Chilton, 1973), 75–113.
44. Gershwin, “Rhapsody on Catfish Row,” 1–2.
45. New York Herald Tribune, July 8, 1934, sec. 5, 2.
46. Wayne Shirley, “Reconciliation on Catfish Row.”
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47. Shirley, “ ‘Porgy and Bess,’ ” 104.

48. Hamm, “Theatre Guild Production,” 495–532. Samuel Spewack and Bella Spewack, Kiss
Me, Kate, anthologized in Richards, Great Musicals, 273.
49. Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land, 402.
50. The video directed by Nunn was a Primetime/BBC and Homevale/Greg Smith Produc-
tion, a Picture Music International Release, and was issued on EMI Records, Ltd., 1993.
51. Allen Woll explores the “irony” of Porgy and Bess as a black musical created by whites
for a white audience, and David Horn shows how Gershwin’s opera continues to pose
“struggles over meaning” between various social and ethnic groups. See Woll, Black Musical
Theatre, 154–75, and David Horn, “From Catfish Row to Granby Street.”
52. Horn, “From Catfish Row to Granby Street.” Horn explores the ideological conflict in 1989
between the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society, who praised Gershwin for “forging a
new musical language,” and the Liverpool Anti-Racist and Community Arts Association,
who condemned Gershwin for “wading into black culture.”
53. Miles Kreuger, “Showboat,” 212.
54. Ira Gershwin writes that in preparation for the 1951 recording of the complete opera he
went through the score and changed “some opprobrious terms in the recitatives—there
were about twenty—to substitutes inoffensive to the ear of today.” Ira Gershwin, Lyrics on
Several Occasions, 83.
55. Thomson, “George Gershwin,” 17.
56. Hall Johnson, “Porgy and Bess.”
57. Ibid., 24. Johnson made the following comment about Gershwin’s recitatives: “We are con-
fronted with a series of musical episodes which, even if they do not belong together, could
be made to appear as if they do by a better handling of the musical connecting tissue.”
58. Ibid., 25. Johnson also finds fault with Mamoulian’s staging for its misperceptions about
African Americans.
59. Ibid., 26. According to Johnson, it is incredulous that Sporting Life “could be so entirely
liberated from that superstitious awe of Divinity which even the most depraved southern
Negro never quite loses.”
60. Ibid.
61. Era Bell Thompson, “Why Negroes Don’t Like ‘Porgy and Bess,’ ” 54.
62. Ibid.
63. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967), 100–01.
64. Ibid., 103.
65. Ibid., 102.
66. Gershwin, “Rhapsody on Catfish Row,” 1.
67. Edward Morrow, “Duke Ellington on Gershwin’s ‘Porgy,’ ” New Theatre (December 1935):
5–6; reprinted in Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 114–18 (quotation on page 115). For an informative study of Porgy and Bess’s
reception and race see Gwynne Kuhner Brown, “Problems of Race and Genre in the Critical
Reception of Porgy and Bess.”
68. One important difference might be noted. In Porgy and Bess all six prayers are in the same
key; in the African-American Pentecostal tradition each singer chooses his or her own key.
69. The relationship between perceived authenticity and critical approbation is explored by
John Spitzer in “Musical Attribution and Critical Judgment: The Rise and Fall of the Sinfo-
nia Concertante for Winds, K. 297b),” Journal of Musicology 5 (Summer 1987): 319–56.
70. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “ ‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree.” “The Blindfold Test,”
which forced unknowing listeners to make their listening judgments independently of
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racial or gender bias, was invented by the influential English jazz critic, Leonard Feather,
for Metronome in 1946. In his tribute to Feather, Gary Giddins assessed the test’s impor-
tance: “The significance of the blindfold test exceeds its entertainment value. It added a
phrase to the language and a dimension to the issue of critical authority, demonstrating
that people often judge a work of art differently when they don’t know who signed it.”
See Giddins, “Leonard Feather, 1914–1994,” in Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second
Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 101. Among famous test takers were
Mary Lou Williams, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis.
71. Gershwin’s spiritual, “It Take a Long Pull to Get There,” also bears an uncanny resem-
blance to the Jewish folk song “(Haveynu) Shalom A’leychem,” music and Hebrew lyrics
by Shlomo Ben-Chaim (New York: Henseley, 1960).
72. “Gershwin Gets His Music Cues,” 2, and Goldberg, George Gershwin, 331.
73. Starr, “Toward a Reevaluation,” 27.
74. Additional connections between Porgy’s theme and other characters are charted in Deena
Rosenberg, Fascinating Rhythm, 277, 279, 282, 285, and 294.
75. Gershwin enhances the blues flavor by supporting Porgy’s melodic minor third (G) with
a major harmony (G).
76. Again, Gershwin creates a harmonic clash with a G against the G in the melody. Note
also the resemblance between this Porgy theme and Gershwin’s Prelude No. 2 for piano
composed in 1926.
77. The melodic as well as rhythmic profile of Porgy’s “loneliness” theme also figures promi-
nently in the River Family of themes in Show Boat shown in Example 2.2. It may not be too
fanciful to speculate that Gershwin’s choice for Porgy’s motive, like Kern’s choice for his
River Family of motives, may owe something to Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony and
the African-American spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (see chapter. 2, note 47).
78. Starr, “Toward a Reevaluation,” 36; see also Starr’s extended analysis of a Gershwin song
in “Gershwin’s ‘Bess.’ ”
79. Examples include the following: “Oh, I Can’t sit Down!” (the word “down!” at the outset,
and in the middle section, “Hap-py feel-in,’” “a-steal-in,’” “con-ceal-in,’” and many more); “It
Take a Long Pull to Get There” (the frequently repeated “get there” and “Lan’” [the latter
divided into two musical syllables]); and “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” (the repeated “nut-tin’”
and “plen-ty”).
80. Labeled by Gershwin in the typescript libretto 1–11. The presence of a separate “happy
dust” theme was first noted by Shirley, “ ‘Porgy and Bess,’ ” 106.
81. For two recent sources, which in the absence of Gershwin’s handwritten emendations rea-
sonably argue against the presence of a “Bess” theme, see Rosenberg, Fascinating Rhythm,
285, and Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 62.
82. Vocal score (New York: Gershwin Publishing Corporation/Chappell, 1935), 272.
83. Since Bess is Porgy’s woman now, it makes some sense for him to appropriate her theme as well.
84. Vocal score, 533–36 and 559. The signature melodies for Porgy, Sporting Life (and his
“happy dust”), Crown, and Bess do not exhaust the themes of the opera nor even those
of act I, scene 2. Gershwin himself designated at least one other theme, the first fisher-
man theme used prominently in this and other scenes (see the beginning of act II, scene
1 [Vocal score, 189]). A second theme also introduced in act I is associated more specifi-
cally with the enterprising Jake; four measures before rehearsal no. 171 (Vocal score, 323)
shows this theme as it opens act II, scene 3, shortly before Jake goes out into the storm
that will take his life and that of his wife Clara. Finally, Gershwin assigns an orchestral
motive to indicate the presence of the lawyer Frazier, who appears only in act II, scene 1,
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a descriptive theme with a prominent dissonant syncopated leap of a major seventh (see
rehearsal no. 41 [Vocal score, 214]).
85. Note that Peter’s melody which follows Bess’s recitative is rhythmically identical to “I Got
Plenty o’ Nuttin’” (Vocal score, 329–30).
86. To complete the cycle of reminiscence motives that began this scene Gershwin returns
one last time to Jake’s motive (Vocal score, 357–58) before new storm music takes over to
conclude the scene (359–64). The short-long rhythm of the dirge that opens act III, scene
1 (“Clara, Clara”), might also be interpreted as an augmentation of Porgy’s loneliness
theme.
87. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 205, and Charles Hamm, Music in the New
World, 450.
Chapter 5: On Your Toes and Pal Joey

1. David Ewen, Richard Rodgers, 236 and 254.
2. Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages, 262.
3. Ibid., 71.
4. Ibid., 91. Stanley Green summarizes other innovations in Peggy-Ann: “No songs were sung
within the first fifteen minutes, the scenery and costumes were changed in full view of
the audience, and the first and last scenes were played in almost total darkness.” Stanley
Green, Broadway Musicals Show by Show.
5. Rodgers, Musical Stages, 118.
6. Ibid., 118.
7. Pandro Berman, the man who dismissed the vaudeville-Russian ballet idea, produced in
Shall We Dance (1937) a movie musical starring Astaire and Rogers (with a score and lyr-
ics by the Gershwins) that bears more than a passing resemblance to Rodgers and Hart’s
rejected conception.
8. Brooks Atkinson, “ ‘On Your Toes,’ Being a Musical Show with a Book and Tunes and a
Sense of Humor,” New York Times, April 13, 1936, 14.
9. Atkinson, “On Your Toes,” New York Times, October 12, 1954, 24.
11. Ethan Mordden, Better Foot Forward, 143.
12. On Your Toes, 1936 libretto, I-4–22. Special thanks to Tom Briggs of the Rodgers and
Hammerstein Theatre Library for allowing me to examine the librettos of the 1936 and 1983
productions.
13. Ibid., I-4–30.
14. Ibid., II-2–13; 1983 libretto, 46.
15. 1936 libretto, I-5–34.
16. Ibid., II-2–13. In the 1983 libretto (30), Junior explains further: “I admit that basic off-beat
appears in many cultures—but I would think that all would have to agree that American
jazz has a very individual sound”; also, in the 1983 version Sergei expresses artistic as well
as commercial motives for staging “Slaughter” when he acknowledges to Peggy that he
finds the work “admirable.” His primary question is “can we dance it?” The problem fac-
ing the Russian ballet in 1983 is not that jazz is demeaning but whether a classical ballet
company can master the stylistic nuances and comparable challenges of an alien form.
17. Frank Rich, “Theater: ‘On Your Toes,’ A ‘36 Rodgers and Hart,” New York Times, March 7,
1983, C13; reprinted in Rich, Hot Seat, 213–16.
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18. Helen Dudar, “George Abbott Dusts Off a Broadway Classic.”

19. Theodore S. Chapin, On Your Toes (vocal score) (New York: Chappell 1985), 4.
20. Quotation in George Abbott, “Mister Abbott,” 177; see also, Rodgers, Musical Stages, 174.
21. Abbott, “Mister Abbott,” 177–78, and Rodgers, Musical Stages, 174.
22. Dudar, “George Abbott Dusts Off a Broadway Classic.”
23. On Your Toes, 1936 libretto, I-4–32.
24. Ibid., I-6–39.
25. Ibid., I-3–10.
26. 1983 libretto, 4.
27. 1936 libretto, I-3–8 and I-2–9.
28. The professor reveals the limitations of his own education and refinement, since it is he
who mispronounces Schubert’s name. Professor Dolan also assigns the words “Dein ist
mein Herz” to the wrong song (“Ständchen”). The correct answer is “Ungeduld” from
Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. It should also be noted that as late as 1983 the possibility
that Schubert was gay was more of a conjecture than a scholarly argument. Thus Frankie in
both 1936 and 1983 is most likely referring to Junior, not one of Schubert’s male lovers. See
Maynard Solomon, “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” 19th Century
Music 12 (Spring 1989), 193–206.
29. The opening of “Goodnight Sweetheart” by Ray Noble, Jimmy Campbell, and Reg Con-
nelly, published in 1931, also bears an unmistakable resemblance to the opening of Les
Préludes.
30. By a twist of fate, in 1943 Hart collaborated with Kálmán on an unproduced musical about
the French underground in World War II, Miss Underground. See Dorothy Hart and Robert
Kimball, The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart, 291.
31. On Your Toes, 1936 libretto, I-3–16 and 17. In 1983 the conclusion to the exchange that pre-
cedes “It’s Got to Be Love” is as follows (7–8):
junior: I’ll tell you something—and I shouldn’t say it—it’s terribly personal—
I’m very fond of you.
frankie: You are? Even with my derivative song?
junior: Yes, Miss Frayne.
frankie: Well, in that case, why don’t you call me Frankie?
junior: All right—and you can call me Junior.
frankie: All right. Yesterday some of the kids were dancing to my song and
they thought it was pretty good.
junior: Well, gee Christmas, I’d like to hear it again.
frankie: (Goes to bench. Gets music): O.K. That’s a fair exchange.
32. Rodgers’s sinking melody also conveys a new harmonic interpretation of an identical
(albeit more extended) descending melody from the verse of the song (mm. 9–13) on the
words, “color, Aquamarine or em’rald green. And . . . ”
33. John Mauceri, Notes to On Your Toes.
34. By the time the audience witnesses the entire “Slaughter,” one of its principal tunes has
been heard on several previous occasions, always in an appropriate context, e.g., in act I,
scene 3, when Junior’s private rehearsal is interrupted by Frankie.
35. 1983 libretto, 19.
36. Richard Rodgers, “ ‘Pal Joey’: History of a Heel.” New York Times, December 30, 1951,
sec. 2, 1+.
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38. O’Hara’s letter was reprinted with Rodgers’s jacket notes for the 1950 recording (Colum-
bia 4364). Rodgers recalls receiving the letter in Boston in October 1939 during the try-
outs of Too Many Girls (Rodgers, 198). The letter, however, is dated “early 1940.” See
Selected Letters of John O’Hara, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Random House, 1978),
158–59.
39. Stanley Green, in his Rodgers and Hammerstein Fact Book (217), provides more comprehensive
information on Pal Joey’s unusual initial New York run in three theaters: Ethel Barrymore
Theatre (December 25, 1940—August 16, 1941), Shubert Theatre (September 1—October 18,
1941), and St. James Theatre (October 21—November 29, 1941). Tryouts were held at the
Forrest Theatre, Philadelphia, December 16–22, 1940.
40. Brooks Atkinson, “Christmas Night Adds ‘Pal Joey’ to the Musical Stage,” New York Times,
December 26, 1940, 22; reprinted in Block, ed., The Richard Rodgers Reader, 68–70.
41. Burns Mantle, “ ‘Pal Joey’ Smart and Novel,” Daily News, December 26, 1940, reprinted in
New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 1, 172.
43. John Mason Brown, “ ‘Pal Joey’ Presented at The Ethel Barrymore,” New York Post, Decem-
ber 26, 1940; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 1, 172.
44. Sidney B. Whipple, “Pal Joey Is a Bright Gay, Tuneful Novel Work,” New York World-Tele-
gram, December 26, 1940; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 1, 173.
45. Brooks Atkinson, “At the Theatre,” New York Times, January 4, 1952, 17; reprinted in New
York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 13, 399.
46. Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater, 35–36.
47. Ibid. Engel places another four Rodgers musicals with Hammerstein among his top fifteen
(Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I).
48. “Plant You Now, Dig You Later,” another duet between Gladys and Lowell in 1940—ren-
dered by Harold Lang ( Joey) on the pre-revival recording—is sung solely by Gladys in 1952
(Gladys’s verse is not, however, included in the 1952 published libretto). Consequently, the
comically sinister blackmailer Lowell becomes as ineffectual musically as he is dramati-
cally (for example, his confrontation with Vera and her powerful police allies). One final
change deprived Gladys of a fifth musical number (one less than Joey’s six songs) when
she is excluded from “You Mustn’t Kick It Around.” But unlike Lowell, Gladys as played
by Helen Gallagher in 1952 remains as she was when played in 1940 by June Havoc (sister
of the famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee), i.e., third in musical prominence after Joey and
Vera and the lead show singer both in Mike Spears’s second-class nightclub in act I (“That
Terrific Rainbow”) and the chic Chez Joey in act II (“The Flower Garden of My Heart”). In
this last named song the character Louis (the tenor), who sings the verse, first chorus, and
recitations, was added in 1952.
49. For example, in O’Hara’s Broadway typescript Joey does not sing the opening song, “Chi-
cago,” the first song of 1952. Similarly, Joey’s audition number is nowhere to be found
in the earlier script, only the words, “Joey has just finished singing.” When it appears
later in the show, slightly altered as “Morocco,” it is sung by Michael Moore. See Hart
and Kimball, The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart, 271. I am grateful to Chicago’s Goodman
Theatre for allowing me to see the unpublished typescripts of O’Hara’s 1940s Broadway
libretto and the preliminary script.
50. Gone from “Take Him” (act II, scene 4) in 1952 are both Linda’s and Vera’s verses. Vera’s
verses appear in the O’Hara Broadway typescript. See also Hart and Kimball, The Complete
Lyrics of Lorenz Hart, 275.
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Revisions in the 1952 book are more modest than those for the lyrics, although the absence
of a reprise of “I Could Write a Book” from O’Hara’s 1940 Broadway transcript must be
considered a significant change. The dialogue that separates the refrains in “You Mustn’t
Kick It Around” was not present in 1940, and the transition lines to “Plant You Now” and
“Do It the Hard Way” would later exclude Lowell. Perhaps the most substantial change in
the 1952 book is the deletion of a page of dialogue between Joey and the manager of the
apartment house, who dispassionately informs the anti-hero that he has until 6:00 P.M. to
leave the building. Other changes in the 1952 book: Vera is now “over twenty-one” instead
of “thirty-six,” Gladys’s interpretation of Lowell’s brand of humor is an old lady hit by a
trolley car (rather than a truck), and Joey no longer gets a good meal at the home of Linda’s
sister.
51. Abbott, “Mister Abbott,” 194–95.
52. In O’Hara’s early typescript Joey meets Linda English, generically named Girl, at Mike
Spears’s club where she performs as a singer. Like other performers at the club, Linda
is initially repelled by Joey and what he stands for. In the final 1940 libretto, where Joey
wins her over in front of the pet store with his fictitious story of his childhood dog Skippy,
Linda acquired more sweetness. She also acquired more dialogue as a guest rather than a
performer in Mike Spear’s joint in act I, scene 3, and in a telephone exchange in scene 4.
Some additional distinctions: In O’Hara’s original draft Lowell and Gladys actively solicit
Linda’s help in their plan to blackmail Vera, which in the later libretto Linda merely over-
hears. In both versions the generous Linda warns her rival. Nevertheless, the earlier and
tougher Vera thwarts the blackmail attempt without the help of Police Deputy Commis-
sioner O’Brien when she reproduces a photograph that shows her husband and Gladys in
flagrante delicto. Not present in the earlier typescript are the angry final words between Joey
and Vera following Vera’s lie (that Joey frightened away the blackmailers), an exchange that
credibly prepares Vera’s reprise of “Bewitched.”
In the preliminary typescript Vera was nine years older (Joey found Vera’s name in
the 1910 rather than the 1919 social register; see note 50). Lowell’s racket is more clearly
explained, and Lowell participates in the song “Plant You Now, Dig You Later.” The type-
script also contains some additional dialogue for Joey, Mike, and Melba to create a smoother
transition for “Zip.” Following “Zip,” Melba takes a costume away from a show girl and
poses for photographs with Joey and another chorus girl for her newspaper. This scene is
based on Joey’s thirteenth letter to his successful bandleader friend Ted, “A Bit of a Shock.”
Finally, the preliminary typescript contained several pages of dialogue in which Joey is fit-
ted for additional clothes and purchases an automobile before Linda arrives to warn Vera
about the blackmail attempt.
53. Abbott, “Mister Abbott,” 195.
54. Rodgers biographer Frederick Nolan writes that “Larry Hart chortled with delight when he
read those lines [“I love it / Because the laugh’s on me”] over the phone to Joshua Logan
and explained with glee that they meant Joey was actually on Vera Simpson.” Frederick
Nolan, The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: Walker,
1978), 112–13 [2002 ed., 139]. When the song was broadcast, these lyrics were changed to
“the laugh’s about me.”
55. Rodgers, Musical Stages, 45. Although Goetschius does not discuss this particular point, his
Exercises in Melody-Writing (first published in 1900) offers a systematic approach to a subject of
great interest to Rodgers. Percy Goetschius, Exercises in Melody-Writing (New York: G. Schirmer,
1928).
56. Stephen Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 84–85.
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57. The half step also appears conspicuously in “Talking to My Pal,” dropped during the out-
of-town tryouts. Its presence, however, in “Plant You Now, Dig You Later,” a duet between
Gladys and gangster agent Ludlow Lowell in the 1940 version, places a considerable strain
on the theory that Rodgers is making a dramatic statement or creating subtle associations
through a musical interval.
58. Alec Wilder, American Popular Song. Several decades later, important books by Allen Forte
and Steven E. Gilbert appeared, all of which discuss popular song with more analytical
rigor (and more selectively) than Wilder. Allen Forte’s first study, The American Popular Bal-
lad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950 (1995), offers detailed and insightful analytical discussions
of selected songs by Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard
Rodgers, and Harold Arlen (roughly a half dozen songs for each songwriter); his more
accessible Listening to Classic American Popular Songs (2001) examines a total of twenty-three
songs by these composers and a few others written between the 1920s and the 1940s. Steven
E. Gilbert offers a more specialized analytical study of Gershwin’s songs in The Music of
Gershwin (1995).
59. Wilder, American Popular Song, 216. In the essay cited above Sondheim clarifies why he is
“down on” Hart. His principal objection was that the pyrotechnic lyricist created lyrics “so
wrenching that the listener loses the sense of the line.” Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 83.
60. Wilder, American Popular Song, 164.
Chapter 6: The Cradle Will Rock

1. Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music, 538.
2. Martin Esslin, Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 80.
As late as the 1990s, the Kurt Weill Foundation, still considered the Blitzstein version the only
singable version of this work in English. After the 1976 Lincoln Center revival, the Founda-
tion no longer permitted Ralph Manheim’s and John Willett’s harder edged, more literal
translation to be staged. On the relative merits of the Blitzstein and Manheim-Willett produc-
tions see Kim H. Kowalke, “ ‘The Threepenny Opera’ in America,” Kurt Weill: The Threepenny
Opera, ed. Stephen Hinton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78–119.
3. See, for example, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 225–27, and Lehman Engel,
The American Musical Theater, 146–50.
4. Aaron Copland, The New Music 1900–1960 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 139–44.
5. Wilfrid Mellers, Music and Society (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950), 211–20.
6. Mellers, Music in a New Found Land, 415–28.
7. Gordon, Mark the Music. Despite its length, Gordon’s study does not include an analytical
component. See also the following: John O. Hunter, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’’;
Robert James Dietz, “The Operatic Style of Marc Blitzstein”; John D. Shout, “The Musical The-
ater of Marc Blitzstein”; and Carol J. Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock. Since the first
edition of Enchanted Evenings, the length of Gordon’s volume (603 pages) has been surpassed
by at least two biographies of American composers, both by Howard Pollack: Aaron Copland:
The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1999) [690 pages] and George
Gershwin [884 pages].
8. Gordon, Mark the Music, 141–46. Blitzstein’s account of the premiere was recorded on
Marc Blitzstein Discusses His Theater Compositions, published as “Out of the Cradle,” and
reprinted posthumously in the New York Times. For other eye-witness accounts of the events
surrounding the first performance, see Archibald MacLeish, Introduction to The Cradle Will
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Rock (New York: Random House, 1938), Howard Da Silva’s jacket notes for The Cradle Will
Rock, MGM SE 4289–2–0C (1964), and especially John Houseman, Run-Through, 255–79.
9. John Houseman notes the irony of Blitzstein’s troubles with Musicians’ Local #802, which
demanded that an orchestra be paid to remain silent during Cradle’s run at the Windsor, a
commercial Broadway theater. As Houseman explains, “For thirteen weeks, eight times a
week, twelve union musicians with their instruments and a contractor-conductor with his
baton arrived at the theater half an hour before curtain time, signed in and descended to the
basement where they remained, engrossed in card games and the reading of newspapers,
while their composer colleague exhausted himself at the piano upstairs.” Run-Through, 336.
10. The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Random House, 1938) and The Best Short Plays of the Social
Theatre, ed. William Kozlenko (New York: Random House, 1939), 113–67. A microfilm of the
original Random House publication is included in the Blitzstein Papers of the Wisconsin
State Historical Society.
11. The Cradle Will Rock, Musicraft, album 18 (recorded April 1938) (reissued in a limited edi-
tion on American Legacy Records, T 1001 [December 1964]) and “Mark Blitzstein Musical
Theatre Premières,” Pearl Gems 0009, 2 CDs (1998).
12. Virgil Thomson, “In the Theatre,” 113. The deus ex machina ending, so clearly reminiscent of
Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, may have further prompted Weill to ask, “Have
you seen my new opera?” See Minna Lederman, “Memories of Marc Blitzstein, Music’s
Angry Man,” Show (June 1964): 18+.
13. Brooks Atkinson, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ Officially Opens at the Mercury
Theatre,” New York Times, December 6, 1937, 19.
14. Edith J. R. Isaacs, “An Industry without a Product—Broadway in Review,” Theatre Arts
Monthly 22 (February 1938): 99.
15. George Jean Nathan, “Theater,” Scribner’s Magazine 103 (March 1938): 71.
16. That’s Entertainment Records ZC TED 1105.
17. In citing the German premiere in Recklinghausen (1984), the first Cradle performance in
continental Europe, Gordon notes that Gershon Kinsley, the director and pianist of the 1964
production and recording, “rescored it for chamber ensemble, including synthesizer.” Gor-
don, Mark the Music, 539.
18. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music,” 27.
19. Ibid.
20. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music, II,” 29.
21. Ibid.
22. Blitzstein, “New York Medley, Winter, 1935,” Modern Music 13/2 (January–February 1936):
36–37.
23. Blitzstein, “The Case for Modern Music, II,” 29.
24. Minna Lederman, The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (Modern Music, 1924–1946), I. S. A.
M. Monograph, no. 18 (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1983), 67.
25. Its published text and original conception called for the ten scenes to form an unbroken
chain. Despite this, it became traditional to divide the work into two acts with a break after
scene 6, a division observed in the Tams-Witmark Music Library rental score.
26. Blitzstein, “Author of ‘The Cradle,’ ” 7.
27. The quotation is taken from Brecht’s essay “On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre.” See
Bertolt Brecht, in Brecht on Theatre, John Willett, ed. and trans., 85.
28. Brecht explores these ideas in “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre (Notes to the Opera
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny).” See Brecht, in Brecht on Theatre, John Willett, ed. and
trans., 33–42.
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29. The “Croon–Spoon” portion of Scene Four is found in The Cradle Will Rock (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1938), 52–58 (the piano-vocal score for this song is included) and Kozlenko,
The Best Short Plays, 132–33.
30. The word “nerts,” another expression for “nuts” (as in “crazy”) was, like spoon, also used
in the early 1900s. The New Dictionary of American Slang, ed. Robert L. Chapman (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975), 298.
31. In the event that devotees of Bing Crosby (1901–1977), perhaps the best-remembered
and best-loved crooner, are reading this note, it should be mentioned that Crosby (and
many other crooners) did not share Junior’s poor sense of pitch. Blitzstein might be
indicting the content of Crosby’s songs and the legion of Crosby epigones, but not
crooners in general or Crosby in particular. In fact, Gordon notes that Blitzstein had
considered Crosby for the film Night Shift (1942) and that several years later he gladly
worked with the crooner on the American Broadcasting Station in Europe. Gordon,
Mark the Music, 216, 250, 274.
32. At the risk of further complicating this analysis, it should be noted that the F center of
Mister Mister’s melody in the A sections (harmonized by a D-minor seventh) is neither
major nor minor but in the Lydian mode (F major with a raised fourth degree of the scale
or B instead of B).
33. The harmony here begins by alternating between E major (the key in which Daily began his
second B section) and D minor. After the considerable harmonic maneuvering described in
the text, this section ends up with a strong cadence back to D minor and circles back to the
vamp that introduced Mr. Mister’s first a section.
34. Hitchcock, Music in the United States, 226–27. The rocking “Hawaiian guitar” accompani-
ment also serves as a relaxed and understated version of the accompaniment heard earlier
in “Let’s Do Something.”
35. Cradle, 87–96, and Kozlenko, The Best Short Plays, 141–46.
36. Max Unger, Notes to Beethoven’s Overture to Goethe’s “Egmont” (New York: Eulenburg,
1936), ii (with a musical illustration for this measure). It is tempting to speculate that Blitz-
stein had Thayer’s interpretation (reiterated in Unger’s notes) fresh on his mind. In any
event the popular Eulenburg edition appeared the same year that Blitzstein wrote his
Cradle.
37. Cradle, 96, and Kozlenko, The Best Short Plays, 145–46.
38. In his survey of Blitzstein’s theatrical work through 1941, Robert Dietz notes three recur-
ring ideas in the midst of Cradle’s otherwise autonomous ten scenes: the multiple appear-
ance of the Moll’s music (scenes 1, 2, 7, and 10); the reprise of the title song, first sung in
scene 7, to conclude the work three scenes later; and an ominous three-chord motive in
the orchestra. This last motive first appears in scene 5 to underscore Bugs’s explanation to
Harry Druggist how an explosion will kill Gus and Sadie, and reappears in scene 9 when
Mr. Mister explains to Dr. Specialist that Joe Hammer’s “accident” was due to drunkenness.
Dietz, “The Operatic Style of Marc Blitzstein,” 297–98.
39. Only the Moll, however, will sing the musical line first given to dreams in scene 7 (and
repeated with new words to conclude the next two stanzas): “Oh, you can dream and scheme
/ and happily put and take, take and put . . . / But first be sure / The nickel’s under your
foot.”
40. Quotation in Daniel Kingman, American Music, 458. For other examples of negative criti-
cism based at least in part on Blitzstein’s political agenda see Samuel Lipman, Arguing for
Music—Arguing for Culture (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990), 157–63, and Terry Teachout,
“Cradle of Lies.”
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41. In his memorial tribute Copland wrote that “the taxi driver, the panhandler, the corner
druggist were given voice for the first time in the context of serious musical drama . . . . No
small accomplishment, for without it no truly indigenous opera is conceivable.” Copland,
“In Memory of Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964),” Perspectives of New Music 2/2 (Spring–Sum-
mer 1964): 6.
42. Perhaps alone among recent assessments is Hitchcock’s, that “it was not so much the
message as the music that was significant in Blitzstein’s art.” Hitchcock, Music in the
United States, 227.
Chapter 7: Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus

1. To cite two examples out of many, Gerald Mast, in his otherwise comprehensive Can’t Help
Singin’ (1987), offers neither an explanation nor an apology for his conspicuous neglect
of Weill, while Joseph P. Swain in The Broadway Musical (1990), a more selective study of
sixteen musicals, remains similarly silent about Weill’s American works. In the years after
the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, Raymond Knapp made Lady in the Dark one of his
thirty-eight focus musicals in the second volume of his two-volume study (Knapp, The
American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, 266–73). Ethan Mordden treats
Weill appreciatively and at relative length in Beautiful Mornin,’ devoting attention to Lady
in the Dark, 59–69; One Touch of Venus, 159–62; The Firebrand of Florence, 144–48; Street Scene
148–50; Love Life, 223–228; and Lost in the Stars, 229–35. Mordden considers Weill the most
versatile of Broadway practitioners, “the absolute forties composer, running though all the
available genres except revue” and even makes the refreshing argument on “the superiority
of Weill’s Broadway over his German output” (Mordden, 163).
2. See especially Ronald Sanders’s interpretation of Lady in the Dark’s genesis in The Days
Grow Short, 292–309, and Matthew Scott, “Weill in America: The Problem of Revival.” Less
judgmental in this respect is Jürgen Schebera, Kurt Weill.
3. David Drew, “Weill, Kurt (Julian).” The ensuing quotations from this article are found on pp.
305 and 307–8; for a more recent assessment by Drew see Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 45–47.
4. Scott, “Weill in America: The Problem of Revival.”
5. Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater, 61.
6. Robert Garland, “Mary Martin, John Boles, Kenny Baker Head Cast of New Comedy,” New
York Journal-American, October 8, 1943; quoted in Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway,
525; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 4, 264.
7. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, February 27, 1944, Music Division, Library of Congress.
8. Kurt Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of Street Scene (Columbia OL 4139).
9. Ibid. See also Larry Stempel, “Street Scene,” 321–41.
10. Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of Street Scene.
11. Ibid.
12. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, April 13, 1944, Music Division, Library of Congress.
Gerald Mast also perceives second-act weaknesses in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals.
See Mast, Can’t Help Singin,’ 204–05.
13. Letter to Ira Gershwin, April 13, 1944.
14. Malcolm Goldstein, George S. Kaufman: His Life, His Theater (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1979), 343.
15. See Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book, 142, 144, and 146 on Ginger Rog-
ers’s film roles as women who cannot make up their minds (including the 1944 Paramount
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film version of Lady in the Dark). The idea of a future Mr. Right being able to complete
a “dream” song is at least as old as Victor Herbert’s “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” from
Naughty Marietta (1910).
16. F. Anstey, Humour & Fantasy (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 288–468.
17. Cheryl Crawford credits stage designer Aline Bernstein, who remains un-indexed in the
standard biographies of Weill; Ronald Sanders (who used Crawford as his major source
for the genesis of One Touch of Venus) attributes this suggestion to Lady in the Dark cos-
tume designer Irene Sharaff. Both Crawford and Sanders offer a date, the former in June
1942 and the latter November 1941. David Drew writes that “in February 1942 The Tinted
Venus headed a list of fifteen possibilities he [Weill] was considering for Cheryl Crawford.”
Cheryl Crawford, One Naked Individual, 116; Sanders, The Days Grow Short, 322; and Drew,
Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 328. See also Dorothy Herrmann, S. J. Perelman: A Life (New York: G.
P. Putnam’s Sons, 1986), 147.
18. Perelman had, however, contributed sketches to other Broadway revues beginning in 1931.
Douglas Fowler, S. J. Perelman (Boston: Twayne, 1983).
19. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 121.
20. The role of Venus, originally intended for Marlene Dietrich, was Mary Martin’s first star-
ring Broadway role. After answering more than tentatively in the affirmative, Dietrich
backed down from playing the sexy Venus, allegedly for the sake of her impressionable
nineteen-year-old daughter. Martin, now mainly known from later roles as the wholesome
Nellie Forbush (South Pacific) and Maria Rainer (The Sound of Music), earlier in her career
had proven her sexual allure in Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Leave It to Me
(1938).
21. Crawford and Kazan had also worked together on Weill’s Johnny Johnson as producer and
actor, respectively. Crawford continued to produce musicals, most notably Lerner and
Weill’s Love Life and Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon (also with de Mille) and Paint Your
Wagon; Kazan left musicals for theater and films after directing Venus and Love Life. Accord-
ing to Gerald Bordman, Kazan “was the most important American director of the late 1940s
and the 1950s.” Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, 2nd ed., 394.
22. Virgil Thomson, “Plays with Music,” New York Herald Tribune, February 23, 1941. Barlow
writes the following about Lady in the Dark: “In this long score, there are not three minutes
of the true Weill. And in this new medium, this new life, this new success, the promise has
been buried under a branch of expensive but imitation laurel.” Samuel L. M. Barlow, “In the
Theatre,” Modern Music 8/3 (March–April 1941): 189–93.
23. The Lady in the Dark playbill also included other highly distinguished collaborators: Sam
H. Harris, who had earlier produced fifteen Cohan musicals, seven Berlin shows, the Ger-
shwins’ Of Thee I Sing, Porter’s Jubilee, and Rodgers and Hart’s I’d Rather Be Right; Hassard
Short, director of production, lighting, and musical sequences, who had designed illustri-
ous shows for two decades, including The Band Wagon, Roberta, and Jubilee; and Albertina
Rasch, the choreographer of The Band Wagon, The Cat and the Fiddle, and Jubilee.
24. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 135.
25. Ibid., 138.
26. See bruce mcclung, “Psicosi per musica.” I am grateful to the author for sharing a typescript
of this essay prior to its publication. See also mcclung, “American Dreams: Analyzing Moss
Hart, Ira Gershwin, and Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark” (Ph.D. dissertation, Eastman School
of Music, University of Rochester, 1994) and, more recently, mcclung’s thorough and excel-
lent “Lady in the Dark”: Biography of a Musical.
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27. Also much later, Whitelaw Savory would sing the beautiful “Love in a Mist” in the place
later reserved for “Westwind.” “Love in a Mist” can be heard in Ben Bagley’s Kurt Weill
Revisited Vol. II (Painted Smiles PSCD 109).
28. Another song, “Who Am I?,” which Savory sang in his bedroom early in act II before being
surprised by the angry Anatolian Zuvetli, was also dropped after Weill had orchestrated
it.
29. A typescript of I Am Listening is located at the State Historical Society in Madison, Wiscon-
sin. The Weill-Gershwin correspondence and other Ira Gershwin documents are housed in
the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and Weill’s musical manuscripts are housed
at Yale University. Copies of all Hart, Gershwin, and Weill materials for Lady in the Dark are
available for study at the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York. I am grateful to all
of the above institutions for making these materials accessible to me, especially Harold L.
Miller (State Historical Society), Raymond A. White (Library of Congress), Victor Cardell
and Kendall Crilly (Yale), and David Farneth (Kurt Weill Foundation). Thanks are also due
to Tom Briggs of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Theatre Library for enabling me to exam-
ine the full orchestral score of Lady in the Dark.
30. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, September 2, 1940, Music Division, Library of Congress.
31. Ibid.
32. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, September 14, 1940, Music Division, Library of Congress.
Since they had cut the Hollywood Dream (but not the Hollywood sequence) and Randy
Curtis now had nothing to sing in the second act, all concerned were eager to have this
character sing something. The problems with all of Curtis’s music, however, stemmed from
the disturbing discovery about the man they had cast in this role, Victor Mature. As Ira Ger-
shwin expressed it in Lyrics on Several Occasions, “when handsome ‘hunk of man’ Mature
sang, his heart and the correct key weren’t in it” (144).
33. Ira Gershwin annotations (September 1967) to “The Third Dream Sequence Section 1,”
Music Division, Library of Congress; and Lyrics on Several Occasions, 207–8; reprinted in
Robert Kimball, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin, 291–92.
34. Gershwin annotations to “The Third Dream Sequence Section 2.”
35. Ibid. In his annotations of November 3, 1967, appended to the texts for “Three Discarded
Songs,” Gershwin briefly explains their originally intended place in the show. “Unforget-
table,” recorded as “You Are Unforgettable” on Ben Bagley’s Kurt Weill Revisited (Painted
Smiles PSCD 108) and “It’s Never Too Late to Mendelssohn” were deleted from the second
dream (some of the lyrics of the latter were retained). “Bats about You” “was written for a
flash-back scene and supposedly was a song of the late Twenties, sung at a Mapleton High
School graduation Dance.” In Kurt Weill: A Handbook, Drew lists “Bats about You” and “You
Are Unforgettable” under unlocated songs.
36. Ira Gershwin, Lyrics on Several Occasions, 187. Arthur and Francis were the given names of
George and Ira’s lesser known younger siblings. The conclusion of the Wedding Dream
(including the Mendelssohn Endelssohn and Lohengrin and Bear It material) is borrowed
from another wedding song, “Bride and Groom,” in the act I finale of Ira’s collaboration
with his brother George, Oh, Kay! (1926), starring Lawrence as Lady Kay.
37. Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 274. See also Drew, “Reflections,” especially 243–48.
38. Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 220.
39. Michael Morley offers a possible “common denominator” between “In der Jugend Gold’nem
Schimmer” and its reincarnations in Marie Galante and One Touch of Venus. See Morley, “ ‘I
Cannot/Will Not Sing the Old Songs Now’: Some Observations on Weill’s Adaptation of
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Popular Song Forms,” in Kim H. Kowalke and Horst Edler, eds., A Stranger Here Myself,
221.
40. Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, 117.
41. Originally published as “Über den gestischen Charakter der Musik.” Weill’s article is trans-
lated by Kim H. Kowalke in Kurt Weill in Europe, 491–93 (the quotations in this paragraph
are found on p. 493).
42. Ibid., 493.
43. Ibid., 494. The remaining quotations from Weill’s essay are also found on this page.
44. Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, 113–23.
45. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music defines the doctrine of affections as “the belief, widely
held in the 17th and early 18th centuries, that the principal aim of music is to arouse the
passions or affections (love, hate, joy, anger, fear, etc., conceived as rationalized, discrete,
and relatively static states).” Don Randel, ed., The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 16.
46. bruce d. mcclung, “Psicosi per musica,” 53–54.
47. Weill’s self-borrowings parallel the controversial self-borrowings of Handel. See George J.
Buelow, “The Case for Handel’s Borrowings: The Judgment of Three Centuries,” in Han-
del: Tercentenary Collection, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI
Research Press, 1987), 61–82.
48. Lewis Nichols, “ ‘One Touch of Venus,’ Which Makes the Whole World Kin, Opens at the
Imperial,” New York Times, October 8, 1943; review excerpted in Steven Suskin, Opening
Night on Broadway, 526; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 4, 264.
49. “September Song” from Knickerbocker Holiday, “My Ship” from Lady in the Dark, “Speak
Low” from One Touch of Venus, “Green-Up Time” from Love Life, and the title song from
Lost in the Stars are perhaps the best known song legacies from Weill’s otherwise currently
little-known Broadway shows.
50. Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of Street Scene.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Rodgers explains his ideas about dramatic unity in Chee-Chee (1928) in his autobiography,
Musical Stages, 118 (see also chapter 5, p. 85). Larry Stempel notes Rodgers’s early attempt
at an integrated musical and adds Hammerstein’s Rose-Marie (1924) to the short list of inte-
grated 1920s musicals (see Stempel, “Street Scene,” 324).
54. William G. King, “Music and Musicians.”
55. In Bob Fosse’s 1972 popular film adaptation of the Weill-influenced Cabaret (1966), for
example, the songs that took place outside the Kit Kat Club on Broadway were mostly
removed, an artistic decision that deprived the central male character the inalienable right
of any central character in a musical: the right to sing.
56. Lady in the Dark (Chappell, 1941). Hart dates his remarks March 18, 1941.
57. mcclung, “Psicosi per musica,” 242–45.
58. Ibid., 250–63.
59. Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune, October 17, 1943, wrote that Venus was “the
first integrated and joyous entertainment of the current theatrical semester.”
60. Stanley Richards, ed., Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1 (Radnor, Penn.:
Chilton, 1973), 128.
61. The subject of quarter-note (and half-note) triplets is introduced in the musical discussion
of Anything Goes (see chapter 3, pp. 54–55).
62. Richards, Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1, 129.
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63. Thanks to Robert M. Stevenson, professor emeritus at the University of California at Los
Angeles, for this inspired simile.
64. Richards, Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 1, 158.
65. Richards, ed., Great Musicals of the American Theatre, Volume 2 (Radnor, Penn.: Chilton,
1976), 98.
66. Ibid., 82.
67. Ibid., 79.
68. When Danny Kaye left the show and his role as Russell Paxton, his replacement proved dif-
ficult. Within two weeks after Gershwin wrote Weill that Rex O’Malley “is too lady-like for
the lady-like characters and may make the character far too realistic,” the production staff
bought out his contract. See the letter from Ira Gershwin to Kurt Weill, August 23, 1941,
Music Division, Library of Congress.
69. Richards, Great Musicals of the Musical Theatre, Volume 1, 157.
Chapter 8: Stage versus Screen (1): Before Rodgers and Hammerstein

1. Kim Kowalke, Review essay, 693.
2. The dancing in “Night and Day” only lasted 4 ½ minutes. “The Continental,” composed by
Con Conrad and Herb Magidson, also accomplished what the music by Berlin, Gershwin,
Kern, Porter, and Youmans did not: It won the Oscar for best song.
3. The 1955 film Hit the Deck used seven of Youmans’s ten songs, but set the songs to a new
book.
4. Three Fred and Ginger films later, Kern and Fields would team up to contribute the com-
plete score to Swing Time.
5. Charles Winninger (Cap’n Andy), Helen Morgan (Julie), and Sammy White (Frank) appeared
in the original production and 1932 revival, Paul Robeson played Joe in the 1928 London
production and the 1932 revival, and both Irene Dunne (Magnolia) and Allan Jones (Rave-
nal) had appeared in these roles in other Show Boat performances between 1927 and 1936.
6. Both “Ah Still Suits Me” and “I Have the Room above Her” appeared in the 1971 London
revival and the latter in the 1994 Broadway revival directed by Hal Prince.
7. Although shot in color, the Preminger Porgy and Bess, withdrawn from circulation by the
Gershwin Estate, is also difficult to obtain.
8. Not included in these eighteen minutes is an overture that lasts about fifty-five seconds,
which presents an athematic buzz followed by the first phrase of “Ol’ Man River” and
opening snippets of “I Have the Room above Her” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.”
9. The stage version opens with the ominous Vallon theme, which in the absence of Vallon
appears more generically as a darker force on the river before audiences can make the con-
nection between the theme and Vallon himself. The film waits to introduce Vallon’s theme
until we meet Vallon, thirteen minutes into the scene.
10. This is the waltz that begins with “Your pardon I pray,” brings Magnolia into the song,
and returns as underscoring when the song is completed. When this theme finally makes
its appearance thirty-four minutes into the film it is used to accompany Julie’s departure
from the show boat and thus bears no connection with the principal couple. Back to “Make
Believe,” the return of the main chorus offers only the first and last lyrics (a reduction from
32 measures to 16).
11. Caryl Flynn, Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2007), 69.
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12. Ruggles can be seen earlier as an aristocrat in Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and later
as a hunter in the Katharine Hepburn–Cary Grant classic Bringing Up Baby (1938).
13. In an essay on the films of Bing Crosby, Gary Giddins offers a characteristically erudite
summary assessment of this unjustifiably little known film (Giddins, Natural Selection:
Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books [New York: Oxford University Press,
2006], 113). Giddins also briefly discusses the film adaptation of Anything Goes in Bing
Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years 1903–1940 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001),
391–93.
14. Era Bell, “Why Negroes Don’t Like ‘Porgy and Bess,’ ” Ebony 14/12 (October 1959): 50–52,
54 (quoted in Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess,” 279). Bell’s view was
widely held in the black community, but Gwynne Kuhner Brown notes the varied range of
African-American (and white) critical responses to the opera in Problems of Race and Genre
in the Critical Reception of “Porgy and Bess.”
15. Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess,” 276.
16. Ibid.
17. Vicki Ohl, Fine and Dandy: The Life and Work of Kay Swift (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004), 180.
18. Howard Pollack, George Gershwin, 653.
19. A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn, 481.
20. Rent’s Mimi is memorably described in the satirical Broadway revue Forbidden Broadway
when it summarizes how the character has evolved from La Bohème: “In La Bohème she’s
a sweet, shy, seamstress. Now, she’s a crackhead, nymphomaniac, prostitute, YEAH!!!”
Forbidden Broadway Strikes Back DRG 12614 (1997).
21. Pollack, George Gershwin, 654.
22. The film version that was available to me was a non-commercially distributed recording
that clocked in at 115 minutes. Depending on the source consulted, the published literature
offers film times of about 150 minutes (Berg, Goldwyn, 487); “just under two and half hours
(with an intermission following Crown’s seduction of Bess, as in many two-act versions of
the work)” (Pollack, George Gershwin, 649); and 138 minutes according to Stanley Green,
Hollywood Musicals Year by Year, 220. The Berg and Pollack figures would make the film
only thirty-five minutes less than the 1993 Nunn version. Assuming these two authors are
correct, the copy I viewed may have been missing portions of the nine reels housed in the
Library of Congress available for private viewing. Despite this possible omission, the only
major “song” missing in the DVD available to me was “My Man’s Gone Now” (included on
the soundtrack). See the discussion of Pal Joey for a discrepancy between the timings listed
on the package of a commercially distributed video and the contents of the video itself.
23. “The most obvious change is the elimination of some major numbers: the ‘Fuoco di gioia’
chorus in Act I, the Concerted Finale of Act III, and the ‘Willow Song’ of Act IV (Zeffirelli
finds it ‘boring,’ even on the stage). In addition, major sections in individual numbers are
cut: a few pages of the ‘Vittoria’ chorus (act I), the second stanza of the Drinking Song (I), a
large portion of the final stanga of ‘Si pel ciel’ (II), and various passages in the Duet between
Otello and Desdemona (III). There are also many small cuts in the semi-declamatory syntax
that pervades the work.” Marcia J. Citron, Opera on Screen, 75–76.
24. Mamoulian’s notes were published in Tom Milne, Rouben Mamoulian (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1969), 13, and in Charles Hamm, “The Theatre Guild Production,”
509. The sequence, which bears a strong rhythmic resemblance to the opening drumbeats
and some of the rhythmic layering that introduce the Kittiwah scene, appears in a different
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place on the soundtrack where it serves as an introduction to “I Can’t Sit Down” after a
fragment of “How are you dis morning’”?
25. Foster Hirsch, in “Porgy and Bess—The Film,”12–13. Hirsch is also the author of books on
the Shubert brothers, Kurt Weill, and Harold Prince (see the Bibliography for listings of the
latter two).
26. After presenting the orchestral introduction from the beginning of the scene to Rehearsal
93, the film cuts to Mingo’s announcement of Porgy on the measure before Rehearsal 128
(17 pages of the Vocal Score, 506–522).
27. Abbie Mitchell: Gershwin Performs Gershwin: Rare Recordings 1931–1935, Music Masters
5062–2-C (1991); Helen Jepson: Gershwin Plays Gershwin, Pearl GEMM CDS 9483 (1991);
Anne Brown: Porgy and Bess, Decca MCAD-10520 (1992).
28. Robert Lawson-Peebles, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” 99.
29. The actual strip music is a jazzy version (with growling trumpet) of Luigi Boccherini’s
familiar minuet from the Quintet in E Major., op. 11, no. 5 (1771), which had recently figured
prominently in the plot of The Ladykillers (1955), starring Alec Guinness.
30. This is a good place to mention that both Stanley Green, in Hollywood Musicals Year by Year,
and the commercial but generally fairly meticulous website IMDb cite 111 minutes as the
length of the film; Wikipedia and the covers and liner notes on both the VHS and DVD
releases state the timing as 109 minutes. The actual running time is 87 minutes. For various
reasons, I think this correction might spare potential viewers considerable anxiety about
what could possibly have happened to the twenty or so non-existent minutes they may
have been looking forward to.
31. Turturro claimed that the character of Silvano was based on his own father, an Italian immigrant
who fought and died for America at Normandy (Robbins, “ ‘Cradle Will Rock,’ ” 69). The creator
of the role of Larry Forman, Howard da Silva, also the first Jud Fry in Oklahoma! and Benjamin
Franklin in 1776, was blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s for refusing to testify before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, the progeny of the Dies Committee in the 1930s.
32. John Houseman, Run-Through, 266.
33. Ibid., 267.
34. Tim Robbins, “ ‘Cradle Will Rock,’ ” 122–23. According to Houseman, Welles’s final remarks
were less dramatic: “We have the honor to present—with the composer at the piano—The
Cradle Will Rock.” Houseman, Run-Through, 267.
35. Houseman, Run-Through, 268 (compare with Robbins, “ ‘Cradle Will Rock,’ ” 123).
36. Ibid., 269.
37. Although not in the cast of Cradle, Lee was part of the WPA Federal Theater Project and
played under Welles in the American Negro production of Macbeth one year before Cradle.
38. Houseman, Run-Through, 270.
39. Terry Teachout, “ ‘Cradle’ of Lies,” 51–55.
40. Ibid., 55. When comparing Weill to Blitzstein, Ethan Mordden judges the latter’s politics
and artistic legacy harshly: “Weill was a melodist and an artist, who happened for various
complex reasons, having to do with the nature of the precarious Weimar Republic, to have
collaborated on artwork with Leftists. Blitzstein was a braying stooge of the Communazi
Red Front whose work never succeeded and who is virtually forgotten today” (Mordden,
Beautiful Mornin,’ 144).
41. bruce d. mcclung, “ ‘Lady in the Dark,’ ”: 173–74. According to both Ira Gershwin and Leisen,
Rogers had recorded an a cappella version of the whole song.
42. Ibid., 174.
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43. The initial delay in filming was due to Martin’s pregnancy. Production was delayed further
as a consequence of a lawsuit filed by Gregory LaCava, who claimed to be the rightful
producer and director. Mainly for these reasons, the gestation from the purchase of the film
rights to the release of the film original took more than four years.
44. In 1953 he married Rita Hayworth, a fourth marriage for each (ending in 1955).
45. Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia, 506.
46. Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage, 238.
47. Concerning Weill, in addition to Lady in the Dark and One Touch of Venus, two other Ameri-
can shows received film treatment. Like the two discussed here, Knickerbocker Holiday (1944)
eradicated most of Maxwell Anderson’s political satire and bypassed most of the score,
retaining only three songs, including the famous “September Song,” and interpolating new
ones by Jule Styne, Sammy Cahn, and other lesser known studio composers. In 1974, the
American Film Theatre released a relatively faithful and reasonably complete version of
Lost in the Stars, starring Brock Peters (Crown in the Preminger Porgy and Bess) that received
generally unfavorable notices.
48. Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds, An American Masters Production, CentreStage
WHE73153 (2001).
49. Words and Music, directed by Norman Taurog, Warner Home Video, 2007.
Chapter 9: Carousel
1. New York Post, October 23, 1944; cited in Frederick Nolan, The Sound of Their Music: The Story
of Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: Walker, 1978), 128; 2nd ed., 156. For the Gershwin
reference see Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages, 238; for the Weill reference see Kim H. Kow-
alke, “Formerly German: Kurt Weill in America,” 50.
2. Oscar Hammerstein II, “Turns on a Carousel,” New York Times, April 15, 1945, sec. 2, 1, and
Rodgers, Musical Stages, 238.
3. David Ewen, Richard Rodgers, 236–37. Hammerstein also recalled that Molnár made a
“valuable suggestion” during the New Haven tryouts, “which involved playing two scenes
in one set—actually a more radical departure from the original than any change we had
made” and “proved successful in pulling together a very long second act.” See Oscar Ham-
merstein, “Turns on a Carousel,” 1.
4. Elliot Norton, “Broadway’s Cutting Room Floor,” 80. Ewen credits Mamoulian for remov-
ing Mr. and Mrs. God from their New England living room and replacing them with a
Starkeeper. Ewen, Richard Rodgers, 236.
5. “Guild Scores Again with Its ‘Carousel,’ ” New York World-Telegram, April 20, 1945; review
excerpted in Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 147; reprinted in New York Theatre
Critics’ Reviews, vol. 6, 226. Since the first edition of Enchanted Evenings was among the guilty
parties, it is imperative to note that in his recent well-researched archival study Tim Carter
“found no evidence for the quite persistent story that “[This Was] A Real Nice Clambake”
in Carousel derives from a song (“This Was a Real Nice Hayride”) originally intended for
Oklahoma!” (Tim Carter, “Oklahoma!” The Making of an American Musical, 285n23).
6. Ward Morehouse, “ ‘Carousel,’ Beguiling Musical Play with Lovely Score, Opens at Majestic,”
New York Sun, April 20, 1945; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 6, 226–27.
7. John Chapman, “ ‘Carousel’ Is a Lovely, Touching Musical Drama Based on ‘Liliom,’ ” Daily
News, April 20, 1945; quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 144; reprinted in New
York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 6, 228.
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8. Robert Garland, “ ‘Carousel’ Makes Bow at Majestic Theatre,” New York Journal-American,
April 20, 1945; quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 146; reprinted in New York
Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 6, 227.
9. Brooks Atkinson, “The Theatre: ‘Carousel,’ ” New York Times, June 3, 1954, 32.
10. Rodgers, Musical Stage, 243.
11. For another interpretation of the relationship between music and drama in Carousel see
Larry Stempel’s comparison between the aria “Somehow I Never Could Believe” from
Weill’s Street Scene and Billy’s “Soliloquy.” Stempel observes that Hammerstein’s words
and not Rodgers’s music “indicate the basic emotional change he [Billy Bigelow] undergoes
in thinking about being a father.” Stempel, “Street Scene,” 327.
12. Kern’s shrewd decision to use Magnolia’s piano theme for the release of Ravenal’s song
“Where’s the Mate for Me?” (Example 2.4) lets audiences know immediately that Magnolia
has entered Ravenal’s consciousness and foreshadows their eventual union. At the end of
Ravenal’s song Magnolia appears as if in answer to the question posed in the song’s title,
and Ravenal is unable to complete his final words, “for me.” After some underscored dia-
logue Ravenal admits within the song “Make Believe” that his love for Magnolia is not a
pretense but a reality (“For, to tell the truth, I do”). Versions of Show Boat differ on whether
or not Magnolia actually says the magic words “I do” at the conclusion of their duet, but
no one in the audience can seriously doubt that after “Make Believe” her love for Ravenal
is the real thing.
13. Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: Modern Library Association, 1959), 161–62.
14. Ibid., 176.
15. Ibid., 100.
16. Although the published vocal score (Williamson Music Co.) lists the scene between Julie
and Billy as act I, scene 1 (following the pantomimed Prelude), the published libretto identi-
fies the scene as act I, scene 2. See Six Plays.
17. Ibid., 93–94.
18. Quotation in Rodgers, Musical Stages, 236. State Fair was released in August 1945, several
months after the April opening of Carousel.
19. Ibid.
20. The words “dozens of boys,” “many a likely,” “does what he can,” “she has a few,” and
“fellers of two” also display these untied and metrically neutral eighth-note triplets. Dur-
ing the opening thoughts in the “Soliloquy” (when Billy imagines that he will be having a
son), he sings metrically challenging quarter-note triplets tied to quarter notes (e.g., “The
old man!” and “Of his Dad”). See the introduction of the quarter-note triplet in chapter 3,
54–55.
The eighth-note triplets that Billy and Julie sing do not go against the metrical grain as
Reno Sweeney’s half-note triplets do in “I Get a Kick Out of You” (the bracketed words and
syllables in “Mere al-co-[hol doesn’t thrill me at] all, / so [tell me why should it be] true”
and Example 3.1a). Nevertheless, they do help to establish a distinct and slightly askew
rhythmic plane (especially when preceded by ties in “If I Loved You”), just as Billy and
Julie try unsuccessfully to thwart society’s expectations. Four measures of triplets appear
in succession in Billy’s “Soliloquy” (in duple meter) on the words that describe the future
Billy Jr. and Billy himself: “No pot-bellied, baggy-eyed bully’ll boss him a round” (in Exam-
ple 9.4a), later with the words, “No fat bottomed, flabby-faced, pot-bellied, baggy-eyed
bastard’ll boss him around.”
21. David Ewen writes that the Carousel waltzes were taken from a work called Waltz Suite
that Paul Whiteman had commissioned but never performed (Ewen, Richard Rodgers, 239).
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Rodgers, who in his autobiography recalls two other associations with Whiteman in 1935
and 1936, is silent on this point.
22. “Two Little People” does not appear as a separate title in the vocal score (Williamson Music
Co., 43–47), but Hammerstein does so title this music in his Lyrics, 142. Also in Lyrics Ham-
merstein includes a stanza that does not appear in the published vocal score: “There’s a
feathery little cloud floatin’ by / Like a lonely leaf on a big blue stream. / And two people—
you and I—/ Who cares what we dream?” Hammerstein’s stanza does appear, however, in
the holograph manuscript in the Music Division of the Library of Congress where it is sung
by Julie to music that is altered only on the words, “leaf on a big blue stream” (g-f-e-d-
c-d). In his holograph score Rodgers entered a sketch labeled “2 little people” that does not
correspond either to Hammerstein’s text or to Rodgers’s final version.
23. Aside from Julie’s complementary stanza discussed in the previous note, the only major
changes between Rodgers’s holograph and the published vocal score are those of key and
the absence of dotted rhythms in the D-major sketch. Not only does Rodgers place “If I
Loved You” in C major in the holograph, he also places the first page of “Scene Billy and
Julie” in F major and G major instead of G major and A major, 33; he also assigns the
“mill theme” (Example 9.1) to D major in both of its appearances rather than G major and
E major as in the published score, 38–39 and 47–48, respectively.
24. The idea of retaining an accompaniment figure for the sake of musical unity rather than
for a demonstrable dramatic purpose was earlier evident in On Your Toes (“There’s a Small
Hotel” and the principal tune of “Slaughter on 10th Avenue”).
25. When in act II Carrie imitates one of the “hussies with nothin’ on their legs but tights” that
she saw in New York, her music also clearly echoes the music associated with Julie’s name
(“You’re a queer one, Julie Jordan”) that Carrie introduced early in act I (“I’m a Tomboy, jest
a Tomboy”). Appropriately, the stage directions indicate that “Mr. Snow enters with Snow
Jr. and interrupts song.”
26. Howard Kissel, “Carousel Is Music to Our Tears,” Daily News, March 28, 1994; reprinted in
27. Frank Scheck, “Sharp New Staging Gives a Lift to Rodgers and Hammerstein,” Christian
Science Monitor, March 25, 1994; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 55, 72.
28. This quotation was Boswell’s adaptation of the medieval dictum, also appropriate in this
context, “to cite heresy is not to be a heretic.” John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), xvii.
29. Edwin Wilson, “The Music Makes It Soar,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 1994; reprinted in
31. Ibid., 236.
32. Joseph P. Swain discusses how augmented triads and modality also serve to establish an
individual character and identity for Carousel. See Swain, The Broadway Musical, 99–127.
An especially poignant use of the augmented triad (F-A-D) occurs on the fourth
measure of “If I Loved You” (Example 9.5a) where it follows a simple but extremely effec-
tive harmonic progression in measures 1–3, a musical embodiment of the joys and soft
terrors of a hypothetical romance: a D-major triad on measure 1, a D–diminished sev-
enth on measure 2 that never fails to surprise and delight, and a D-major triad in first
inversion (F in the bass) on measure 3 that gently prepares for the augmented triad on F in
measure 4.
33. I Remember Mama was based on the first play that Rodgers and Hammerstein produced
on Broadway, John Van Druten’s hit play of the same title, which opened its long run of
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714 performances in 1944. In 1967 Rodgers wrote eight songs for a televised adaptation of
Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion that featured Norman Wisdom as Androcles, Geoffrey Holder
as the Lion, and Noël Coward as Caesar. For more on Rodgers’s final musicals see Geoffrey
Block, Richard Rodgers, 202–55.
34. Perhaps the least known of their adaptations, Pipe Dream (1955), based on John Steinbeck’s
Sweet Thursday, ended up as their major disappointment; despite an enthusiastic review
from Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times, it ran only 246 performances, less than either
Allegro (315) or Me and Juliet (358). Their final musicals, both adaptations, produced one
modest success, Flower Drum Song in 1958 (600 performances), and their fifth major hit, The
Sound of Music in 1959, at 1,443 performances the second longest running musical of the
1950s (after My Fair Lady) and the fourth longest running show before 1960. In addition to
these stage shows Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote Cinderella, a ninety-minute musical for
television starring Julie Andrews broadcast on March 31, 1957; during Rodgers’s lifetime a
remake starring Lesley Ann Warren was broadcast on February 22, 1965, and a third tele-
vised remake starring Brandy Norwood followed on November 2, 1997.
Chapter 10: Kiss Me, Kate

1. According to Steven Suskin’s “Broadway Scorecard,” Kiss Me, Kate received eight “raves”
and one “favorable” review and no reviews in the lower categories (“mixed,” “unfavor-
able,” and “pan”). See Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 367. Of the musicals surveyed
in this book only Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady would receive no reviews lower than a
“rave.”
2. Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy, 156. The first sentence of the Porter quotation
appears in Richard G. Hubler, The Cole Porter Story, 90; in the annotated Hubler interview
Porter goes on to say without further explanation that Rodgers and Hammerstein “are, let
us say, more musicianly.”
3. The only known commodity in the Kiss Me, Kate cast was Alfred Drake (Fred Graham/
Petruchio), who had earlier achieved stardom as the original Curley in Oklahoma!
4. George Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 279.
5. The Porter Collection also contains sketch material, the May libretto, and copies of the dis-
carded songs.
6. Kiss Me, Kate, “Unfinished Lyrics” (“Bianca”), in the Cole Porter Collection, Music Division,
Library of Congress. See also Stephen Citron, Noel and Cole, 218.
8. This book will be referred to as the Spewack libretto draft or the May libretto.
9. Eells, The Life That Late He Led, 248–49.
10. Stephen Citron cites additional borrowings “from native Italian dances, especially the
Venetian boat song, and the canzones [canzonas] of Sorrento” in “Where Is the Life That
Late I Led?” Joseph P. Swain mentions the use of the modal flat seventh degree, a typical
melodic figure in Renaissance music (e.g., B in the key of C) rather than the more tonal B
that marks most European music after 1600). See Citron, Noel & Cole, 307, and Swain, The
Broadway Musical, 133–34.
11. Citron notes another possible musical pun in the verse of “Where Is the Life That Late I
Led?”: “And one cannot overlook Porter’s use of the Neapolitan sixth chord 3 bars before
the verse’s end. Was Cole pulling our leg?” Stephen Citron, Noel & Cole, 309. Unfortunately,
the Verdian orchestral tag at the end of “We Open in Venice” (shown in Example 9.1) van-
ished in the 1999 Broadway revival and recording.
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12. According to Swain, the Baltimore songs “have no structural consistency, and show instead
Porter’s vaunted and bewildering eclecticism.” Swain, The Broadway Musical, 138.
13. Perfect fourths also begin nearly every musical phrase in “Tom, Dick or Harry” and appear
prominently in the finale to act I (see the vocal score published by Tams-Witmark, 118–20).
14. Among Porter’s drafts are a “minuet” version labeled “Bianca’s Theme,” an eighteenth-
century dance that would soon give way to Lois’s song “Why Can’t You Behave?” in act I
and its transformation into a Renaissance pavane for Bianca in act II (Example 10.4). Several
labeled drafts in piano score also reveal that Porter abandoned an earlier idea to character-
ize Petruchio and Katherine with musical signatures.
15. “I Sing of Love” was excluded from both the original cast album issued in 1949 and its ste-
reo re-recording (with most of the original principals) ten years later. See Discography and
Filmography in the online website.
16. In the act II finale Porter returns to a guitar-like accompaniment (rather than a lute-like
accompaniment as befits the Renaissance) that is similar to his first serenade to Kate in
“Were Thine That Special Face,” now altered to triple meter.
17. The consistency with which Porter tried to create musical linkages among the songs is fur-
ther demonstrated in at least four songs that were removed before the Broadway open-
ing. In “It Was Great Fun the First Time” Porter presents a melody that will anticipate the
distinctive melodic figure with its turn to minor that will appear in “I Sing of Love” and
“Where Is the Life?”; another phrase in the song foreshadows the verse of “Bianca” (at that
point probably unwritten). “We Shall Never Be Younger” exhibits an emphasis on perfect
fourths suggestive of “Another Op’nin” and “Why Can’t You Behave?,” and a phrase in
“A Woman’s Career” closely resembles a phrase in “Too Darn Hot” without any particular
dramatic justification. Finally, the discarded “What Does Your Servant Dream About?,” also
with many perfect fourths, opens with a vamp that is nearly identical to the conclusion of
“I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua.”
18. Bella Spewack, “How to Write a Musical Comedy,” xiii.
19. Ibid., xiii–xiv.
21. “Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger Discuss the Deleted Songs July 5, 1990,” Notes to Kiss
Me, Kate, conducted by John McGlinn (EMI/Angel CDS 54033–2), 15.
22. Neither Spewack nor Eells has anything to say about the history of the two other songs that
Porter added between June and November: “So in Love” and “I Hate Men.” The only dated
typescript of “I Hate Men” shows the late date November 18.
23. These Shakespeare passages can be found in the final scene of the May libretto, act II,
scene 7.
24. Morison had the following recollection: “In the scripts that were given to me by Bella
Spewack, the song [“A Woman’s Career”] is performed by a character named Angela Tem-
ple, a friend and confidant of Lilli Vanessi” (Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger, “Patricia
Morison and Miles Kreuger Discuss the Deleted Songs,” 15). In the May Spewack libretto,
however, “A Woman’s Career” was to be sung by Fred Graham to conclude act II, scene 5.
25. May libretto, act II, scene 6.
26. Morison and Kreuger, “Patricia Morison and Miles Kreuger Discuss the Deleted Songs,” 5.
Robert Kimball writes that “ ‘So in Love’ appears to have been composed as late as Septem-
ber 1948.” Kimball, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, 399.
28. In addition to “It Was Great Fun the First Time” and “We Shall Never Be Younger,” the May
libretto included two other songs that would be dropped: “If Ever Married I’m” (sung by
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Bianca in act I, scene 7), and “A Woman’s Career” (sung by Fred in act II, scene 5). Another
two songs, also discarded before the Philadelphia tryouts, were probably introduced after
the May libretto.
The first of these, “What Does Your Servant Dream About?” can be placed quite accu-
rately, since Porter’s draft indicated “Opening Act 2, Scene 3,” and “Curtis and Lackeys.”
No such indication occurs in the May libretto, although Curtis and other servants do appear
in the opening of the scene to the accompaniment of “Where Is the Life?” A Porter lyric
typescript for “What Does Your Servant Dream About?” is dated July 10.
The chronology and placement of the other later addition (also soon to be deleted), “I’m
Afraid, Sweetheart, I Love You,” is less clear, since neither Porter nor the Spewacks offer
clues as to who should be singing this song and where. Presumably this song, too, came
and went between June and November, perhaps around the time of Porter’s August 7 type-
script copy.
Lyrics to all of these songs are reprinted in The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter and are
included in John McGlinn’s first complete recording of Kiss Me, Kate issued in 1990.
Unfortunately, several of Morison’s recollections (for example, that “It Was Great Fun the
First Time” and “If Ever Married I’m” were replaced by “Wunderbar” and “Tom, Dick or
Harry,” respectively) are at odds with the information provided by the May libretto. See
note 17 for a summary of the musical similarities between the discarded songs and those
retained.
29. The reprise of “E lucevan le stelle” in act III of Puccini’s Tosca, an opera notoriously described
by Kerman as a “shabby little shocker,” offers a more publicized example of a similar prob-
lem. As Kerman wrote: “Tosca leaps, and the orchestra screams the first thing that comes
into its head, ‘E lucevan le stelle.’ How pointless this is, compared with the return of the
music for the kiss at the analogous place in Otello, which makes Verdi’s dramatic point with
a consummate sense of dramatic form . . . . ‘E lucevan le stelle’ is all about self-pity; Tosca
herself never heard it.” Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, 15.
Although Kerman’s overall assessment of Tosca’s artistic worth has not gone unchal-
lenged, even sympathetic Puccini scholars such as Roger Parker and Mosco Carner under-
stand Kerman’s “exasperation.” Like Kerman, Parker concludes that “the theme is that of
Cavaradossi’s soliloquy earlier in the third act; Tosca has had no opportunity to hear it;
what we see and what we hear seem out of joint.” Roger Parker, “Analysis: Act I in perspec-
tive,” in Mosco Carner, Giacomo Puccini: “Tosca” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), 138.
30. The terms “theatrical truth” and “literal truth” are used by Sondheim in his assessment in
1985 of the most effective placement of “Gee, Officer Krupke” in West Side Story. Otis, L.
Guernsey Jr., ed., Broadway Song & Story, 50.
31. In adopting Shakespeare, Porter first uses the eight lines that begin with “I am ashamed
that women are so simple” and ends with “should well agree with our external parts.” He
then replaces Shakespeare’s “Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, / And place your
hands below your husband’s foot” with “So wife, hold your temper and meekly put / Your
hand ‘neath the sole of your husband’s foot.” Porter’s final two lines agree with Shake-
speare’s external rhymes (although the composer adds a second “ready” in the last line).
32. Bernard Shaw, Dramatic Opinions and Essays with an Apology (New York: Brentano’s, 1928),
vol. 2, 364.
33. Robert B. Heilman, “The Taming Untamed, or the Return of the Shrew,” Modern Language
Quarterly 27 (June 1966): 159.
34. “The Remaking of the Canon,” Partisan Review 58 (1991): 380.
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35. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 206. More recently,
Harold Bloom offers a thoughtful and spirited defense of Kiss Me, Kate on social grounds,
for example: “One would have to be tone deaf (or ideologically crazed) not to hear in this
[Act V, scene 1, lines 130–38] a subtly exquisite music of marriage at its happiest” (Harold
Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 28–35; quotation on 33).
36. Martha Andresen-Thom, “Shrew-taming and Other Rituals of Aggression: Baiting and Bond-
ing on the Stage and in the Wild,” in Women’s Studies 9 (1982): 121–43; quotation on 141.
37. I am indebted to my colleague Peter Greenfield, professor of English at the University of
Puget Sound, for pointing out the “play” interpretation.
38. See, for example, Catherine Clément’s feminist indictment of the operatic tradition, Opera,
or the Undoing of Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), and Susan
McClary, Feminine Endings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
Chapter 11: Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella
1. This last Broadway revival of The Most Happy Fella was again upstaged in the Best Revival
category by the splashier and fully orchestrated revival of Guys and Dolls (the Fella revival
offered only two pianos).
2. See Geoffrey Block, “Frank Loesser’s Sketchbooks”; Larry Stempel, “The Musical Play
Expands”; and Thomas L. Riis, Frank Loesser, 117–66.
3. For profiles of Loesser’s early career see Arthur Loesser, “My Brother Frank,” Notes 7
(March 1950): 217–39, David Ewen, “He Passes the Ammunition for Hits,” and Thomas
L. Riis, Frank Loesser, 1–49.
4. Styne’s High Button Shoes (1947) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949) and Lane’s Finian’s
Rainbow (1947) were the earliest successes of these prominent Broadway composers.
5. Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 275.
6. In his notes to the 1958 original London cast recording of Where’s Charley?, Stanley Green
noted that “at the time of its closing, its 792 performances made it the tenth longest-running
musical in Broadway history” (Monmouth-Evergreen MES/7029). See also Riis, 50–73.
7. Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 275.
8. John McClain, “The Best Thing since ‘Pal Joey,’ ” New York Journal-American, November 25,
1950; quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 274; reprinted New York Theatre Critics’
Reviews, vol. 11, 186.
9. Abe Burrows, “The Making of Guys & Dolls.” For additional material on the genesis of Guys
and Dolls see Arthur Martin Mann, “The Musicals of Frank Loesser,” 67–87, and Riis, 74–82.
10. Burrows, “The Making of Guys & Dolls,” 41.
11. On June 29, 1994, this production became the longest running revival in Broadway history
up to that time.
12. William Kennedy, “The Runyonland Express Is Back in Town,” New York Times, April 12,
1992, sec. 2, 1 and 26, and Jo Swerling Jr., “Abe Burrows: Undue Credit?,” New York Times,
May 3, 1992, sec. 2, 4 (with a response from William Kennedy). Those familiar with the
machinations of Hollywood screenplays will recognize the terms of Swerling’s contract
that allowed him to receive primary credit as the libretto’s author, even if none of his work
was used. It is difficult to credit the notion espoused by Swerling’s son that Feuer, Martin,
and stage manager Henri Caubisens conspired with Burrows to diminish Swerling’s role in
the Guys and Dolls drama. Burrows’s account is also corroborated in Susan Loesser, A Most
Remarkable Fella, 101–02.
13. Burrows, “The Making of Guys & Dolls,” 44.
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14. Ibid, 47.

15. The quasi-triplets created by two groups of three eighth notes (in 6/8 time) also pervade
Adelaide’s admonishment of Nathan in “Sue Me.”
16. Late in the show when Sarah sings her duet with Adelaide, “Marry the Man Today,” her
evolution is complete and triplets (albeit of the common eighth-note variety) become the
dominant rhythm.
17. Tonic (4 measures), dominant (2 measures), tonic (6 measures), dominant (2 measures), and
tonic (1 measure).
18. A leading Italian bass at La Scala (1921–24) and the Metropolitan Opera (1926–1948), Pinza
was introduced in chapter 9 as the first internationally known opera singer to star on Broad-
way (South Pacific [1949]).
19. Another song intended to feature Nathan and Sky, “Travelin’ Light,” was one of several
songs dropped from the show. It is included in An Evening with Frank Loesser: Frank Loesser
Performs Songs from His Hit Shows (DRG 5169).
20. Frank Loesser, “Some Notes on a Musical.”
21. Ironically, one of these new songs, “Adelaide,” was given to Nathan, played by Frank Sinatra.
22. Block, “Frank Loesser’s Sketchbooks.”
23. Loesser Collection, Music Division, New York Public Library, 3129–30.
24. Ibid., 2842. This undated sketch page is found sandwiched between other pages dated
December 1953.
25. “Abbondanza” sketches (first sketched as “The Helps”), unlike the sketches for “Lovers in
the Lane,” were dated precisely by Loesser in December 1953. Ibid., 2851 and 2859–62.
26. Ibid., 3006–07.
27. Loesser, “Some Loesser Thoughts on ‘The Most Happy Fella.’ ”
28. Ibid. Loesser expresses the same sentiment in “Some Notes on a Musical.”
30. Abe Burrows, “Frank Loesser 1910–1969,” New York Times, August 10, 1969, sec. 2, 3.
31. The phrase “Greater Loesser” in the present chapter title is borrowed from a New York Times
Magazine profile by Gilbert Millstein, May 20, 1956.
32. Robert Coleman, “ ‘Most Happy Fella’ Is a Masterpiece,” Daily Mirror, May 4, 1956; review
excerpted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 455; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’
33. John McClain, “This Musical Is Great,” New York Journal-American, May 4, 1956; review
excerpted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 455–56; reprinted in New York Theatre Crit-
ics’ Reviews, vol. 17, 310.
34. Walter F. Kerr, “ ‘The Most Happy Fella,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, May 4, 1956; quoted in
Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 455; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol.
17, 308. Kerr’s lack of appreciation for shows most take for granted as rich in music is also
evident in his responses to Candide and West Side Story.
35. Richard Watts Jr., “Arrival of ‘The Most Happy Fella,’ ” New York Post, May 4, 1956; reprinted
in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 17, 308.
36. George Jean Nathan, “Theatre Week: Fish nor Foul,” New York Journal-American, May 9,
1956, 16.
37. Brooks Atkinson, “Theatre: Loesser’s Fine Music Drama,” New York Times, May 4, 1956, 20;
reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’s Reviews, vol. 17, 311.
38. Howard Taubman, “Broadway Musical: Trend toward Ambitious Use of Music Exempli-
fied by ‘Most Happy Fella,’ ” New York Times, June 10, 1956, sec. 2, 7.
39. Conrad L. Osborne, “ ‘Happy Fella’ Yields Up Its Operatic Heart.”
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40. Ibid., 5.
41. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 17.
43. According to Abba Bogin, Loesser’s musical assistant and rehearsal pianist in Fella and
a reliable source of practical and anecdotal information, “Ooh! My Feet” was originally
intended for Lieutenant Branigan in Guys and Dolls. See Block, “Frank Loesser’s Sketch-
books,” 77–78.
44. Loesser Collection, 3004. A transcription of this “Big D” draft appears in Block, “Frank
Loesser’s Sketchbooks,” 65.
45. Loesser Collection, 2794, 2811, 2857–58, 2900–01, and 2915.
47. In the previous chapter it was suggested that Porter deprived Kiss Me, Kate of dramatic
nuance when he departed from his conceit that the Padua songs would distinguish them-
selves from the Baltimore songs through contrasting statements in the major and minor
modes.
48. Vocal score and libretto (New York: Frank Music, 1956, 1957), 67.
49. Sometimes Loesser’s melodic manipulations can be subtle to the point of inaudibility for
most listeners. For example, a transformed version of the “Tony” motive (the seconds have
now been inverted to become sevenths) can be detected during the final moments of act I,
when Rosabella “overcomes her resistance” and willingly accepts Joe’s sexual advances.
During the course of their kiss the “Tony” motive returns to the “sighing” seconds that
underscored Tony’s imaginary conversation. Vocal score, 126.
Moments later (near the beginning of act II) Loesser inserts another small musical detail
that conveys a dramatic message. In the fleeting moment between choruses of the uplift-
ing “Fresno Beauties” Joe and Rosabella sing their private thoughts in a duet that neither
can hear. The interval that separates the one-night lovers is the same minor seventh that
brought them together in the seduction music ending act I. Ibid., 133.
50. Ibid., 187–88.
51. Ibid., 252–53.
52. Ibid., 257.
53. Burrows, “Frank Loesser: 1910–1969, New York Times, August 10, 1969.
54. Donald Malcolm, “Nymphs and Shepherds, Go Away,” New Yorker, March 19, 1960,
117–18.
Chapter 12: My Fair Lady

1. My Fair Lady’s performance run was not surpassed until nearly a decade later by Hello
Dolly! in 1971.
2. Walter Kerr, “ ‘My Fair Lady,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, March 16, 1956; quoted in Steven
Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 470–71 (quotation on 470); reprinted in New York Theatre
Critics’ Reviews, vol. 17, 346.
3. William Hawkins, “ ‘My Fair Lady’ Is a Smash Hit,” New York World-Telegram and The Sun,
March 16, 1956; quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 470; reprinted in New York
Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 17, 347.
4. Rex Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 114. According to Gene Lees, Porter was one of the
many who had turned down the Pygmalion adaptation (see note17). Gene Lees, Inventing
Champagne: The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe, 88.
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5. Robert Coleman, “ ‘My Fair Lady’ Is a Glittering Musical,” Daily Mirror, March 16, 1956;
quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 470; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’
6. John Chapman, “ ‘My Fair Lady’ a Superb, Stylish Musical Play with a Perfect Cast,” Daily
News, March 16, 1956; quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 468 and 470 (quotation
on 468); reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, 17, 345.
7. Hawkins, “ ‘My Fair Lady,’ ” 347; Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 470.
8. Brooks Atkinson, “Theatre: ‘My Fair Lady,’ ” New York Times, March 16, 1956, 20; quoted
in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 468. Reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews,
17, 347.
9. Gene Lees in Inventing Champagne and William W. Deguire, The New Grove Dictionary of
American Music and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera annotator, give 1901 as the date for
the composer’s birth (some earlier sources say 1904). Although Lees remains curiously
noncommittal in attributing the city of Loewe’s birth (Berlin or Vienna), Berlin is the set-
ting for all the biographical material that he offers for Loewe’s early years. Lees, Inventing
Champagne, 12–16; and William W. Deguire, “Loewe, Frederick,” The New Grove Dictionary
of American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1985),
vol. 2, 101–3, and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan,
1992), vol. 2, 1306.
10. Lees, Inventing Champagne, 14.
11. It was noted in the previous chapter that the revue The Illustrators Show, which folded after
five performances, also marked the Broadway debut of Loesser, who wrote the lyrics of
several Irving Actman songs for this same show.
12. Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw Collected Letters 1926–1950 (New York: Viking, 1988), 528.
13. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw Collected Letters 1911–1925, (New York: Viking, 1985), 730–31. It
is clear from this letter, however, that Shaw’s motives were as much financial as they were
artistic.
14. Laurence, ed., Collected Letters 1926–1950, 817.
15. Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 30–135. See also Stephen Citron, Wordsmiths, 261–64,
and Keith Garebian, The Making of “My Fair Lady” (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993).
16. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 36.
17. Ibid., 38. In Lees’s undocumented claim, Lerner and Loewe “knew that he [Pascal] had
previously approached Rodgers and Hammerstein, Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz,
Cole Porter, and E. Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy, all of whom had turned the project down as
fraught with insoluble book problems.” Gene Lees, Inventing Champagne, 88.
18. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 43–44.
19. In contrast to the Rodgers and Hammerstein prototype, in which the secondary characters
show some emotional or comic bond and sing to or about one another, My Fair Lady audi-
ences never actually meet Doolittle’s bride.
20. “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” would be abandoned in the Broadway version of Gigi
(1973).
21. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 50. Before it became My Fair Lady, Lady Liza was the show’s
working title.
22. Harrison attributed his idiosyncratic combination of speaking and singing to conductor
Bill Low. According to Harrison, Low informed him that “there is such a thing as talking
on pitch—using only those notes that you want to use, picking them out of the score, some-
times more, sometimes less. For the rest of the time, concentrate on staying on pitch, even
though you’re only speaking.” Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 108.
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23. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 65. Harrison places his meeting with Lerner, Loewe, and their
lawyer, Herman Levin, several months later “in the summer of 1955 . . . in the middle of the
London run of Bell, Book and Candle.” Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 106.
24. Lyricist-composers Porter and Loesser similarly gave their songs a title before composing a
tune. Lerner also shared the frustrations suffered by fellow lyricist-librettist Hammerstein.
While falling somewhat short of Rodgers’s legendary speed (e.g., “Bali Ha’i” allegedly
in five minutes, “Happy Talk” in twenty), the comparative ease and rapidity with which
Loewe composed melodies was a fate that Lerner too had to endure.
26. Lerner places the creation of “The Rain in Spain,” his one “unexpected visitation from the
muses,” during a spontaneous ten-minute period after an audition (Ibid., 87). Harrison
contradicts Lerner when he recalls hearing “The Rain in Spain” along with “Lady Liza”
and “Please Don’t Marry Me” at his initial London meeting with Lerner, Loewe, and Levin.
Harrison, Rex: An Autobiography, 107.
27. Just as “Say a Prayer” would return two years later in the film Gigi, the main theme of
“Promenade” would return in both the film and subsequent stage versions of this show as
“She Is Not Thinking of Me.”
28. The chronology of “The Servants’ Chorus” must remain conjectural. The most likely
hypothesis is that it followed the inception of “The Rain in Spain” during rehearsals. The
fact that the lyrics were added in pen in the Library of Congress holograph score suggests,
but does not confirm, that they were a late addition.
30. Ibid., 79. The earlier version of “Why Can’t the English?,” the lyrics of which Lerner dis-
cusses in his autobiography (Ibid., 79–80), can be found on the reverse sides of three song
holographs in the Loewe Collection of the Library of Congress: “I Could Have Danced All
Night,” “Show Me,” and “On the Street Where She Lives” (original title). Larry Stempel
notes their presence and their “Coward touch,” as exemplified in “Mad Dogs and English-
man,” in the first two of these holograph scores. See Larry Stempel, “The Musical Play
Expands,” 166, note 18.
31. The holograph does not display a text over the underscoring as found on the vocal score
(152 and 159) or the right-hand accompaniment figure that is prominently featured a lit-
tle later (160 and 161). Also in the holograph the word “aren’” (to rhyme with “foreign”)
appears as “aren’t.”
32. A complete list for the spoken passages in the three mentioned Higgins songs follows:
“I’m an Ordinary Man” (“I’m an ordinary man,” “But let a . . . ” [all three times], “I’m a very
gentle man,” and “I’m a quiet-living man”) [the final spoken “Let a woman in your life”
does not appear on the holograph in any form]; “A Hymn to Him” (“What in all of Heaven
could have prompted her to . . . ” [the next word “go” is sung] and “Why can’t a . . . ” [the
next word “woman” is sung]; and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (“I can see her
now,” “In a . . . ,” and “I’m a most forgiving man”).
Despite this increased tendency to replace song with speech-song, the holograph indicates
that some passages were originally spoken. For example: “A Hymn to Him” (“Why can’t a
woman be like that?,” “Why can’t a woman be like you?,” and “Why can’t a woman be like
us?”); and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (“Damn!! Damn!! Damn!! Damn!!” and “I’ve
grown accustomed to her face!” at the beginning of the song, and later the “quasi recitative”
“Poor Eliza! How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful!”). It should also be noted
that the holograph of the opening three syllables in Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “The
Lord a-,” indicates three sung pitches, a rising scale G-A-B leading to a C on “-bove.”
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33. George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion/Alan Jay Lerner My Fair Lady (New York: Signet, 1975), 88.
34. As late as February 23, 1948, ten years after the film version of Pygmalion, Shaw would
write, “I absolutely forbid the Campbell interpolation [‘What size’] or any suggestion that
the middle-aged bully and the girl of eighteen are lovers.” Laurence, ed., Collected Letters
1926–1950, 815.
35. Laurence, ed., Collected Letters 1911–1925, 227.
36. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, Volume II, 1898–1918, The Pursuit of Power (New York:
Random House, 1989), 339.
37. Ibid., 340.
38. Donald P. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye: Shaw and the Cinema. Costello discusses each of the
fourteen scenes that appear in the film but not its screenplay; he also offers a useful appen-
dix, “From Play to Screen Play to Sound Track: A Textual Comparison of Three Versions of
Act V of Shaw’s Pygmalion.”
39. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye, 187–88.
40. Laurence, ed., Collected Letters 1926–1950, 532–33.
41. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, 93–94. The remaining quotations in this paragraph can be found on
p. 94.
42. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye, 76.
43. Considering its indebtedness to the Pascal film, it is not surprising that on the title page of the
My Fair Lady vocal score, Lerner and Loewe were requested to include the phrase “adapted
from Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ produced on the screen by Gabriel Pascal,” and that Pascal
would receive 1 percent of the My Fair Lady royalties. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye, 68.
44. The exercises themselves appeared in the film (but not the published screenplay): “The rain
in Spain stays mainly in the plain” for vowels and “in Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire
hurricanes hardly ever happen” for aspirate h’s. See the stage photograph of this latter
exercise on p. 271 and its counterpart in the film on p. 323.
45. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, 140.
46. The opening notes of Loewe’s melody are identical to the opening of Brahms’s intermezzo
for piano in C minor, op. 117, no. 3. On the subject of musical quotation, Tosca’s “Non la
sospiri la nostra casetta” in act I of her opera bears an uncanny melodic resemblance to
Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck.” In contrast to Blitzstein’s and Bernstein’s significant
classical borrowings, neither of these possible My Fair Lady borrowings was apparently cho-
sen to make a dramatic point.
47. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 196.
48. Ibid., 199.
49. More remote and perhaps unintentional are the melodic correspondences between the open-
ing A sections of “On the Street Where You Live” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”
In any event, it makes sense that a dramatically transformed Higgins would sing a varia-
tion of Freddy’s lovesick tune. After all, Higgins could easily have heard Freddy’s song on
any number of the many occasions Eliza’s would-be suitor performed it under his window.
Although the causes are less dramatically explicable, it is also arguable that “On the Street
Where You Live” is melodically derived from “I Could Have Danced All Night.”
50. It might be recalled that the rhythm of “Get Me to the Church on Time” was anticipated in
the middle portion of “Just You Wait,” where it was preceded by an upbeat.
51. The full text of “Come to the Ball” is located in Benny Green, ed., A Hymn to Him: The Lyrics
of Alan Jay Lerner, 109–10. Loewe’s holograph score can be found in folder 15 of the Loewe
Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.
52. Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 88–89.
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53. Ibid., 106.

54. Ibid., 106–7. Lerner went on to explain how “quite unwittingly, the new scene also solved
our one major costume problem.” In contrast to the original ball scene when Eliza’s elegant
gown was unable to stand out from the splendor of the other gowns, “in the new scene she
appeared at the top of the stairs in Higgins’ house in her ball gown, and the audience broke
into applause.” Ibid., 108.
55. The original text of “On the Street Where You Live” appears in Green, ed., A Hymn to Him,
96. Lerner commented on and performed the opening night version of this song in “An
Evening with Alan Jay Lerner” at the 92nd Street Y, December 12, 1971 (Book-of-the-Month
Records 70–524; re-released on DRG 5175 [1977])
56. Shaw introduces Freddy and his ineffectual attempts to hail a cab as well as his sister Clara
in act I; Lerner and Loewe do not present Freddy until Ascot, and they drop the role of
Clara altogether.
57. Lehman Engel, Words with Music, 116. All quotations in this and the following paragraph
can be found on p. 116.
58. In contrast to Engel, Lerner described “the flagrantly romantic lyric that kept edging on the
absurd” as “exactly right for the character.” Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 106.
59. Harold Bloom, ed., George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), vii
and 1–10.
60. The demise of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, Sidney Howard’s They Knew What
They Wanted, and Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom, and their displacement by Porgy and Bess, The
Most Happy Fella, and Carousel has been accepted with equanimity by theater audiences and
producers. Fortunately, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet have so
far been spared a similar fate.
61. Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, 43. The original Mrs. Patrick Campbell was a youthful forty-eight
at the time she introduced the role of Eliza.
62. Engel, Words with Music, 87.
63. For all of Lerner’s shows after Camelot see Benny Green, ed., A Hymn to Him for Lerner’s
lyrics, and, in the case of My Man Godfrey, his outline and scenario.
Chapter 13: West Side Story

1. In his autobiography Harold Prince acknowledged that he closed the show six months
prematurely. Harold Prince, Contradictions, 39–40.
2. West Side Story was surpassed in first-run longevity by twenty-two shows that premiered
before 1960 (see “The Forty Longest Running Musicals on Broadway 1920–1959 and 1920–
2008 in the online website), including several concurrent hits that had not yet completed
their initial runs: Damn Yankees, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, and, of course, My Fair
Lady, which opened the year before. Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, which first paraded
on Broadway two months after West Side Story and eventually ran for 1,375 performances,
also eclipsed the Romeo and Juliet adaptation when it won the Tony for best musical of 1957.
The London version of West Side Story was voted the Best Musical of the Year 1960. If one
were to take into account the return engagement that directly followed West Side Story’s
tour, however, its place in the 1920–1959 list would rise to fourteenth and the 985 perfor-
mance total would move West Side Story up to eighth place on the Broadway scoreboard for
the decade, less than 100 performances below Pajama Game and Damn Yankees in sixth and
seventh position, respectively. The point is that despite the difficulty of raising the needed
$350,000, despite the cast of virtual unknowns, despite the fact that about a hundred people
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walked out night after night in response to its grim subject matter, West Side Story was
a hit.
3. John McClain, “Music Magnificent in Overwhelming Hit,” New York Journal-American,
September 27, 1957; quoted in Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 696; reprinted in
4. Walter Kerr, “ ‘West Side Story,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, September 27, 1957; quoted in
Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 695–96 (quotations on 696); reprinted in New York The-
atre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 18, 253.
5. Brooks Atkinson, “Theatre: The Jungles of the City,” New York Times, September 27, 1957,
14; quoted in Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 695; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’
6. Robert Coleman, “ ‘West Side Story’ A Sensational Hit!,” Daily Mirror, September 27, 1957.
New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 18, 254. John McClain, “Music Magnificent in Over-
whelming Hit,” and John Chapman, “ ‘West Side Story’: A Splendid and Super-modern
Musical Drama,” Daily News, September 27, 1957; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’
Reviews, vol. 18, 252; the McClain and Chapman reviews are excerpted in Suskin, Opening
Night on Broadway, 695–96.
7. Quotation in Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 39. Not until 1988 would a
movie (The Last Emperor) capture as many Academy Awards (see chapter 14 for specific
details).
8. Bernstein’s log was reprinted in Findings, 144–47, and in 1985 with the jacket notes to Bern-
stein’s recording, Deutsche Grammophon 4125253–1/4. References to this log will be keyed
to the pagination in Findings.
9. Otis L. Guernsey Jr., ed., Broadway Song & Story, 40–54.
10. Craig Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 11–31.
11. Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 265–77; Sondheim, “An Anecdote,” xi–xii; and Mel
Gussow, “ ‘West Side Story’: The Beginning of Something Great.” Stephen Banfield dis-
cusses the genesis of West Side Story in Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 31–38.
12. The manuscript evidence suggests that the discrepancies among the recollections are
greatly exaggerated in Joan Peyser’s relentlessly negative Bernstein biography, in which
she accuses the collaborators of deliberate lying. See Peyser, Leonard Bernstein, 255–77.
13. The eight libretto drafts are dated as follows: (1) January 1956; (2) Spring 1956; (3) March
15, 1956; (4) Winter 1956; (5) April 14, 1957; (6) May 1, 1957; (7) June 1, 1957; and (8) July
19, 1957. I am grateful to Harold L. Miller and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for
making these and other West Side Story materials available to me.
14. All 1949 entries appear in Bernstein, Findings, 147.
15. All 1955 entries appear in Bernstein, Findings, 147–48.
16. Guernsey, ed., Broadway Song & Story, 41.
17. Candide would open the first of its disappointing seventy-three performances on December
1, 1956.
18. Bernstein, Findings, 148.
19. Bernstein’s 1957 entries are located in Bernstein, Findings, 146–47.
20. “Mambo” was reprised on the drugstore juke box late in act II when the Jets are taunt-
ing Anita (Taunting Scene). Gussow, “ ‘West Side Story’: The Beginning of Something
Great.”
21. Ibid.
22. Peyser, Leonard Bernstein, 267 and note 20.
23. Gussow, “ ‘West Side Story’: The Beginning of Something Great.”
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24. Ibid. The undeniable organicism of the work and Bernstein’s awareness of musical technique
makes one skeptical of the composer’s remark that he “didn’t do all this on purpose.”
25. Peyser, Leonard Bernstein, 267.
26. Another possible melodic source for the opening of “Somewhere” is a prominent lyrical
theme in Richard Strauss’s youthful Burleske for piano and orchestra (1885–1886). See chap-
ter 12, note 46.
27. Peyser, Leonard Bernstein, 261. Despite its borrowed origins, Bernstein remembered that it
“took longer to write that song [“Maria”] than any other” because “it’s difficult to make a
strong love song and avoid corn.” See Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 21.
The principal certain or possible borrowings are derived from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and
Juliet (and perhaps Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto), Blitzstein’s Regina (previously dis-
cussed and illustrated with Bernstein’s transformations in Examples 13.1 and 13.2), the
Shofar call or Berg’s Piano Sonata, op. 1 (the latter shown in Example 13.9), and Wagner’s
“redemption” motive from Die Walküre (Example 13.8). Other possibilities include the fol-
lowing: “America” (Ravel’s “Chansons romanesque” from Don Quichotte [1933] and Cop-
land’s El Salón México [1936], the latter a work which Bernstein had arranged for solo piano
in 1941); “Tonight” (Quintet) (Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, third movement [1930]);
and “I Feel Pretty” (Ravel’s Rhapsodie Espagnole [1908]). The Stravinsky reference appears
in Stempel, “Broadway’s Mozartean Moment,” 48. For another possible Beethoven borrow-
ing, see note 73.
Gradenwitz overstates the musical resemblance between the opening measure of the Bal-
cony Scene and the first four notes of Britten’s “Goodnight Theme” from act I of The Rape of
Lucretia, the recently published score of which Bernstein noticed in Gradenwitz’s “modest
private apartment.” Peyser fixes a date (1946) to this occasion and adds that Bernstein was
then attending rehearsals of the work prior to its premiere. Her statement that “ ‘Tonight’
was derived from Benjamin Britten” similarly places far too great a burden on this four-
note descending scale. See Peter Gradenwitz, Leonard Bernstein, 193 and Peyser, Leonard
Bernstein, 365–66.
28. The libretto drafts of January and Spring 1956 describe the bridal shop song as “light and
gay,” a description that fits “Oh, Happy We” but not “One Hand, One Heart,” which until
the Washington tryouts in August 1957 “had only a dotted half note to each bar.” Zadan,
Sondheim & Co., 23 (see also note 35).
29. According to Burton, “Where Does It Get You in the End?” was “annexed from the Venice
scene in Candide.” Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 269.
30. Other material would be altered or discarded in 1957. Instead of a Dream Ballet, the libret-
tos before April 14 indicated a scene in a police station where the death of Bernardo and
Riff, unknown to the Sharks and the Jets, would be announced. In the police station Tony
and Maria would reenact their meeting at the dance and decide to elope, and Chino would
utter the immortal words, “Life, liberty . . . and the pursuit of crappiness.” In the drugstore
scene before the climax of the drama in the final 1956 version, Maria rather than Anita was
taunted by the Jets. Not until the final months before rehearsals began did the creators of
West Side Story succeed in finding a substitute for the philter.
31. Guernsey, ed., Broadway Song & Story, 44. The first two libretto drafts (January and Spring
1956) contained one song in an opening scene, the “Rumble Song.” Judging from an earlier
musical draft of the actual Rumble, the “Rumble Song” of early 1956 and the song “Mix”
were probably one and the same, but since no lyrics are given in the libretto, this conclusion
cannot be established with certainty. In any event, by the third libretto draft (March 15), the
concluding song of the scene is in fact labeled “Mix” (in the fourth libretto draft, however,
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“Mix” is not indicated). The early libretto drafts also suggest that two songs, “Up to the
Moon” and “My Greatest Day,” based on the eventual Prologue and “Jet Song,” respec-
tively, preceded “Mix.”
32. Bernstein would reuse a melody from “Mix,” also discarded from the Prologue, in the Blues
portion of “Dance at the Gym.” A version of this idea (with some different lyrics) was
retained in the published vocal score, 20–21, as part of the “Jet Song,” and accompanied by
a note that this material was cut in the New York production.
33. Laurents’s fifth and sixth libretto drafts still indicate only one song in the Prologue, “Mix”;
the seventh and eighth drafts (June 1 and July 19) contain a song for the Jets called “We’re
the Greatest” and a reference in the dialogue to another ephemeral song, “This Turf Is
Ours.” Shortly before rehearsals “Mix” was finally dropped. Although it is more difficult
to date the “new” Rumble, the rehearsal period certainly marks a terminal date for the
replacement of a Rumble (based on “Mix”) with the present version. Bernstein recalls in
his interview with Gussow that “Mix” “wound up in ‘The Chichester Psalms’ in Hebrew.”
See Gussow, “ ‘West Side Story’: The Beginning of Something Great” and Chichester Psalms
II (Amberson/Boosey & Hawkes), 38–50.
34. Guernsey, ed., Broadway Song & Story, 45. Sondheim also confirms the reference to “This
Turf Is Ours” in an interview reported in Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 24: “Then we wrote a new
opening because everyone felt the opening wasn’t violent enough. The new opening was
really violent and everyone thought it was too violent, so we went back to the ‘Jet Song.’ ”
Like “Mix,” “This Turf Is Ours” resurfaced in another Bernstein work when it was incor-
porated in the Fanfare for the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy (January 19, 1961). Its opening
motive is nearly identical to the “hate” motive (see Example 13.9a).
35. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 23–24. Sondheim also has more to say about the aptly titled “One”:
“I remember that the tune of ‘One Hand, One Heart,’ which Bernstein originally wrote for
Candide, had only a dotted half note to each bar. I realized I couldn’t set any two-syllable
words to the song, it had to be all one-syllable words. I was stifled, and down in Washing-
ton, after my endless pleas, Lenny put in two little quarter notes so that I could put ‘make
of our’ as in ‘Make of our hearts one heart.’ Not a great deal, but at least a little better.”
Ibid., 23.
36. The piano-vocal manuscript of “One Hand, One Heart” also reveals that some of its orches-
tral material was sung, and more significantly, that the instrumental foreshadowing of
“Somewhere” introducing the song was not a late addition.
37. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 24. “Kids Ain’t” is included among Bernstein’s vocal manuscripts.
39. Ibid., 49–50.
40. In a letter dated “8 Aug already!” Bernstein writes to his wife, Felicia, that he had written
“a new song for Tony” the day before. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 272.
41. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 21. Sondheim confirms that “Something’s Coming” was indeed
completed in a day. See Sondheim, “An Anecdote,” xi–xii.
42. The locale of this scene changed several times. In the first two librettos “Tonio” appears in
the opening scene with the Jets. In the two following libretto drafts, the scene takes place
at the drugstore fountain; in the librettos of April 14 and May 1 the locale is the corner of a
playground. The final draft moves from Tony’s bedroom (June 1) to an unspecified yard in
(July 19).
43. The final libretto of July 19 concludes with a variation on the first words of the song, “Who
knows? Could be. Why not?!” See also Guernsey, ed., Broadway Song & Story, 43, and Zadan,
Sondheim & Co., 21.
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44. Bernstein describes his intentions further in his “8 Aug. already!” letter to Felicia: “It’s
really going to save his character—a driving 2/4 in the great tradition (but of course fucked
up by me with 3/4s and whatnot)—but it gives Tony balls—so that he doesn’t emerge as
just a euphoric dreamer.” Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 272.
45. The antecedents of the Romeo and Juliet legend go back at least as far as the Greek myth
of Pyramus and Thisbe, who, like their Shakespearean counterparts, are forbidden from
marrying by their parents, and who, mistakenly thinking the other dead, needlessly take
their own lives. Variations on a related theme frequented Renaissance Italy and were
adapted by French and English writers for more than a hundred years before Shakespeare
drafted his play. Geoffrey Bullough and Kenneth Muir have surveyed these and other
sources of this tale of woe, and it is now unquestioned that Shakespeare borrowed heavily
from Arthur Brooke’s once popular poem, “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet”
(1562), itself based on the Italian Le Novelle del Bandello (1554), adapted into French by
Pierre Boisteau (1559) and translated into English by William Painter (1567). Muir demon-
strates Shakespeare’s fidelity to Brooke’s poem, including unmistakable “verbal echoes,”
and notes “three occasions” where “the phrasing of the poem is repeated almost word for
word.”
In performing his alchemy Shakespeare condensed the time frame of Brooke’s leisurely
romance (3,020 lines) from more than nine months to less than one week. Brooke even
allows his Romeus and Juliet a month or two of marital bliss before the fatal duel in which
Romeus, in self-defense, kills Tybalt. Muir argues that this striking increase in “speed and
intensity . . . shows the passionate impulsiveness of the two lovers, and [that] it makes them
consummate their marriage in the knowledge that they must separate on the morrow.”
Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. I, Early Comedies,
Poems, Romeo and Juliet (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 269–83; Kenneth Muir,
Shakespeare’s Sources, vol. I, Comedies and Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1957), 21–30 (quota-
tion on 24).
46. Despite the vocal resources on hand, Berlioz in his “dramatic symphony” (1838–1839) uses
the orchestra exclusively to portray the central dramatic events, the Balcony Scene and
the Death of Romeo and Juliet. Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture (1869, revised in 1870 and
1880) contains no vocal parts at all.
47. Harlow Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1987), 302.
48. Most of Zeffirelli’s distortions can be attributed to his predilection to replace Shakespeare’s
dialogue with visual images, often with musical accompaniment. Act V exemplifies this
approach. In scene 1 he replaces Romeo’s soliloquy (a description of a dream that lasts
approximately thirty seconds) with the visual image of Balthasar passing Friar John on the
road to Mantua. Gone also from scene 1 is Romeo’s poignant meeting with the Apothecary.
Together these deletions reduce Shakespeare’s eighty-five lines to a mere six. Gone entirely
is the twenty-nine-line second scene between Friar Laurence and Friar John.
In scene 3 Zeffirelli omits Paris and his duel with Romeo in front of Juliet’s tomb, the
dialogue between the watchmen, most of Prince Escalus’s lines, and Friar Laurence’s expla-
nation of the tragic events. Capulet, Lady Capulet, and Montague are seen but not heard.
Thus, out of 310 lines Zeffirelli preserves only 160. The time he saves on Shakespeare’s
“extraneous” dialogue allows movie audiences to hear additional uninterrupted repeti-
tions of Nino Rota’s “Love Song from Romeo and Juliet.” Ironically, when all is said and
sung, the nineteen minutes of Zeffirelli’s act V occupy nearly as much total time as the mar-
ginally abbreviated British Broadcasting Corporation version (twenty-two minutes).
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50. Some of the parallels between Shakespeare’s play and its musical adaptation described in
the following paragraphs were derived from Norris Houghton, “Romeo and Juliet and West
Side Story.”
51. A rare “sugar coating” in the film version occurs when Doc’s drugstore is metamorphosed
into a candy store.
52. Isaac Asimov cites numerous textual details to support his assertion that the feud had lost
most of its steam before the outset of the play. Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare (New York:
Avenel Books, 1978), vol. 1, 474–98.
54. West Side Story libretto drafts Nos. 1 and 2, 2–5–9.
55. West Side Story libretto draft No. 3, 2–5–23.
57. Ibid., 44. Bernstein told Burton in an interview that he “tried giving all the material to the
orchestra and having her [Maria] sing an obbligato throughout” and “a version that sounded
just like a Puccini aria, which we really did not need.” Even after numerous attempts, he
“never got past six bars with it.” Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 275.
58. Original cast, Columbia S 32603; studio cast, Deutsche Grammophon 415253–1/4.
59. In a letter to Felicia, dated July 23, 1957, Bernstein writes that “all the aspects of the score I
like best—the big, poetic parts—get criticized as ‘operatic’—and there’s a concerted move
to chuck them.” Burton, Leonard Bernstein, 271.
60. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 205.
61. Ibid., 245.
62. Jon Alan Conrad, “West Side Story,” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie
(London: Macmillan, 1992), vol. 4, 1146.
63. Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 37. For a more extended comparison between the
viewpoints of Swain and Banfield see my Review Essay, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals,
20–27.
64. Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 37.
65. In chapter 2 the notion of a “river family” of motives in Show Boat was considered; a network
of motives related to the principal characters of Porgy and Bess was explored in chapter 4.
66. The deceptive chord is usually the submediant or vi chord (e.g., an A minor triad in the
key of C). An earlier example of a deceptive cadence to the vi chord occurs in Show Boat’s
“Where’s the Mate for Me?,” the first chord on the word “fancy” (see Example 2.5b).
67. See also the discussion of Blitzstein’s meaningfully dramatic treatment of Beethoven’s
Egmont Overture in The Cradle Will Rock (chapter 6, pp. 125–28).
68. In the orchestral manuscript that followed shortly, Tony and Maria also sing the four pre-
ceding measures reserved for the orchestra in the vocal manuscript and the final version.
69. Bernstein also displaces the second note of “Somewhere” in measures 3, 11, and 27 by rais-
ing it an octave.
70. See measures 11, 13, 14–15, 27, 29, 31–32. When they reach the “open air” (m. 6) with “time
to spare” (m. 14), the vocal part melodically outlines an E major triad (E-G-B), although
Bernstein contradicts this latter tonic resolution with opposing harmony. The harmony
that supports “time to spare” once again suggests C minor (C-E-G). Bernstein further
dilutes the impact of his first major triads associated with his second motive by immedi-
ately following each of its statements with a minor triad in the vocal line.
71. Shakespeare, much like a Greek tragedian, wanted his audiences to know in advance the
fate of his “star-crossed lovers.” In the event that they were unfamiliar with this popular
and often-told tale, he provided a précis of the plot in the Prologue to act I told by a Chorus.
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The Chorus can be a chorus of one, for example, John Gielgud in two filmed versions
(Verona 1954 and BBC 1978).
72. The scene that contains “Tonight” is designated the Balcony Scene in the published vocal
score (New York: G. Schirmer and Chappell, 1957 and 1959).
73. In his introductory survey of music, Joseph Kerman concludes his discussion of West Side
Story by pointing out that “Bernstein’s fugue recalls the famous ‘Great Fugue’ by Lud-
wig van Beethoven” [the original final movement of the B Major String Quartet, op. 130].
Joseph Kerman, Listen, 2d brief ed. (New York: Worth, 1992), 393. According to Banfield,
“the ‘Cool’ twelve-note fugue seems as indebted to Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge as does ‘Some-
where’s melodic contour to his ‘Emperor’ Concerto and its sparse counterpoint to his late
quartet.” Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 37.
74. In particular, the abrupt and explosive sforzando accent on the concluding third note of the
first motive (a) and the strong accents on the first note of the third motive (c1 and c3) within
a jazzy context depict a convincing premonition of the inevitable outcome facing the Jets
and Sharks as well as Tony and Maria.
The remaining appearances of the first or “There’s a place” motive from “Somewhere”
(a) maintains its primary association with the principal lovers. For example, the orchestral
introduction to “One Hand, One Heart”—which also incorporates additional melodic liber-
ties in its statement of the “place for us” motive (b)—again prepares the future fate of Tony
and Maria and in the process links a song to West Side Story that had been withdrawn from
Candide the previous year. The upwardly striving “There’s a place” motive acts as a musi-
cal symbol for a better place in another life for Tony and Maria. In a dramatically effective
reprise, at the end of the “Nightmare,” the elided first and second “Somewhere” motives
(“There’s a place” and “place for us”) return to the orchestra and Bernstein uses the second
motive to support Tony’s singing of “half-way there” and “take you there.”
75. Like the “There’s a place” motive, the third “Somewhere” motive (Example 13.4c) appears
ubiquitously in the “Cool” fugue. It is most conspicuous, however, in earlier portions of
the Dream Sequence where an ascending half step—again as in Maria’s name—appears
in the orchestral underpinning of Under Dialogue (13) and Ballet Sequence (13a). The
third “Somewhere” motive will again figure prominently in the “Finale” (17) directly after
Tony’s death as an inner melodic strand throughout the procession and in the three final
statements that parallel the finale of the Dream Ballet as the last notes we hear. It also
appears conspicuously but with less apparent dramatic justification throughout much of
“America” (7).
76. Larry Stempel notes that the music of “I Have a Love” is a transformed version of Anita’s
music in the preceding “A Boy Like That,” for example, on the words, “A boy who kills can-
not love, / A boy who kills has no heart.” Stempel, “Broadway’s Mozartean Moment,” 50.
77. Among West Side Story chroniclers, only Banfield notes a possible Wagnerian reference
when he writes that “one even senses a hint of Tristan in Tony’s supplication for ‘endless
night.’ ” Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 34. Peyser, in noting the influence of Wag-
ner in Bernstein’s final opera, A Quiet Place (1983), concludes that Wagner was “an influence
that had been nowhere apparent in Bernstein up to the late 1970s.” Peyser, Leonard Bern-
stein, 457.
78. Gottlieb, “The Music of Leonard Bernstein,” 26–32; Gradenwitz, Leonard Bernstein, 185–202;
Stempel, “Broadway’s Mozartean Moment,” 39–56; and Swain, The Broadway Musical, 205–
46. Gottlieb, a composer who acted as Bernstein’s musical assistant and general factotum
at the New York Philharmonic from 1958–1966, wrote articulate jacket notes for Bernstein’s
recordings and served as an editor of the composer’s writings, including the Omnibus
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television lectures of the 1950s. Gradenwitz, a German musicologist who remained a per-
sonal friend of the composer, also wrote notes for Bernstein recordings. For studies that
appeared since the first edition of Enchanted Evenings see Gottlieb, Funny, It Doesn’t Sound
Jewish on Bernstein’s use of the Shofar call (179–80) and Raymond Knapp, The American
Musical and the Formation of National Identity for the plausible observation that the Maria or
love transformation of the hate motive may be derived from the opening of the love theme
from Tchaikovsky’s Overture to Romeo and Juliet (212).
79. In the underrated Wonderful Town (1953), perfect fifths also figure prominently in abbrevi-
ated thematic reminiscences that contribute to an “organic” musical unity, although these
musical connections do not reinforce dramatic nuances as they will in West Side Story. Sev-
eral melodies that emphasize perfect fifths reappear in other songs as well: the main tune
of “A Little Bit in Love” serves as an introduction to “It’s Love” and the main tune of “It’s
Love” forms the introduction to “A Quiet Girl.” A second type of connection is thematic
reminiscence, as, for example, when the first measure of “Pass That Football”—most of the
tune is musically and dramatically identical to “What a Waste”—returns in the first two
measures of “A Quiet Girl.” A third unifying element derives from the reuse of the dot-
ted boogie-woogie accompaniments originally associated with the sisters Ruth and Eileen
in “Ohio,” Ruth in “One Hundred Easy Ways,” and Eileen in “A Little Bit in Love,” and
distorted in Wreck’s “Pass That Football,” Ruth’s “Swing!,” and the sisters’ “Wrong Note
Rag.”
80. The instrumental “Paris Waltz Scene” and its rhythmic transformation in the finale “Make
Our Garden Grow” of Candide bears a strong resolution to the first “Somewhere” motive. In
both, the upward leap of a minor seventh is followed by descending half step (minor sec-
ond). In the Candide finale, as in “Somewhere,” Bernstein starts in E major and modulates
to C (although Candide parts company with “Somewhere” with its intervening modulation
to A major and in its avoidance of a return to E). The overlapping compositional histories
of Candide and West Side Story produced additional musical affinities that go beyond the
exchanges among their songs discussed earlier in this chapter.
81. Gottlieb, “The Music of Leonard Bernstein,” 26.
82. Bernstein’s manuscript for the Prologue opens with the “hate” motive (A-D-G), brack-
eted and labeled “optional curtain music.” The Broadway cast album retains this introduc-
tion, and in the film version, the “hate” motive is used effectively at the outset and at other
strategic moments as the Jet’s warning whistle. The “hate” motive also appears unaltered
in the “Cool” fugue where it joins the first and third “Somewhere” motives.
83. In the album jacket notes of the soundtrack, Hollis Alpert makes the following point: “With the
intermissions between acts eliminated, one rising line of tension, from beginning to end, was
required. The neatest solution, resulting in almost no change in the text, was the juxtaposition
of musical numbers” (Columbia OS 2070). Thus, in dramatic contrast to most movie versions of
hit Broadway shows, the makers of the West Side Story film made a valiant attempt to retain all
of the music and to preserve the dramatic integrity, if not the ordering, of the Broadway origi-
nal. Ironically, when West Side Story was first released, theaters, deprived of a B-movie second
feature due to the length of the main event, thwarted the intentions of the film’s creators by
inserting an intermission as a concession to the concessionaires. Following the numbers in the
vocal score and the online website, the order in the film version is as follows: Nos. 1–5, 7–6, 14,
12, 9–11, 13, 8, and 15–17.
84. The final measures of Bernstein’s musical bears a striking—and identically pitched—resem-
blance to the apotheosis of the central character on the final notes of Stravinsky’s Petrushka
(1911).
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85. The CD reissued in 1992 restores the Broadway ending in the previously unreleased
“Finale” (Sony SK 48211).
86. In the reissued CD, the previously released End Credits restored the three tritones that
accompanied the film.
87. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 243. See also Stempel, “Broadway’s Mozartean Moment,” 54.
Chapter 14: Stage vs. Screen (2) After Oklahoma!

1. Among her many roles Moreno played the waitress in “It’s an Art” from the 1982 American
Playhouse broadcast of Working in 1982 and dubbed the voice of Carmen Sandiego in the
television series Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
2. Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin,’ 217 and 216.
3. Thomas S. Hischak, Through the Screen Door, 153–54.
4. Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Blue Skies and Silver Linings, 187–204 (quotations
on 197 and 204).
5. One interesting addition is when Billy’s responds to Mrs. Mullin’s accusation that his atten-
tions to Julie have spoiled the good name of her carousel by accusing Mrs. Mullin herself of
giving the enterprise a bad name the day she acquired it. For ’50s audiences who may not
know what a chippie is, the word is replaced by its modern equivalent, slut.
6. See chapter 9 for a discussion of the Julie and Carrie Sequence and the Bench Scene.
7. Like many recordings of popular songs of the era, the “June” chorus is heard before its
verse.
8. Mast, Can’t Help Singin,’ 217.
9. “Hugh Jackman Updates Carousel Remake,” November 13, 2006, www.firstshowing.net/
2006/11/13/hugh-jackman-updates-carousel-remake/.
10. Porter himself did to Shakespeare what new lyric writers frequently did to Porter through-
out the film when he changed Shakespeare’s “Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot
/ And place your hands below your husband’s foot” to “So wife, hold your temper and
meekly put / Your hand ’neath the sole of your husband’s foot” in Porter.
11. A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn, 470.
12. Ibid., 470.
13. Even before the age of twenty Simmons gained exposure in the role of Estella in Great
Expectations (1946) and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948). In the years before
Guys and Dolls she had leading roles in Androcles and the Lion and The Robe in 1953 and
played opposite Brando’s Napoleon in Desiree in 1954. After Guys and Dolls, her major film
role was probably that of Sister Falconer in Elmer Gantry (1960).
14. Steve Sondheim, “ ‘Guys and Dolls,’ ” 524–25.
15. Ibid., 525.
16. In the years between the stage and film versions of My Fair Lady, Beaton had designed the
costumes and sets for Lerner and Loewe’s Academy Award–winning film Gigi (1958).
17. Mast, Can’t Help Singin,’ 289.
18. Cast aside as the film Eliza, Andrews accepted the consolation prize role of Mary Poppins
and earned eternal vindication when she took home the Best Actress Oscar and Hepburn
was not even nominated. The next year Andrews starred in the popular and acclaimed film
musical, The Sound of Music.
19. Lerner, On the Street Where I Live, 171.
20. Ibid.
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21. “Keira Knightley is My Fair Lady,” June 6, 2008, www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.

php?id=45737.
22. With the exception of the winning costume designer and the quartet of orchestrators, most
of the hardworking craftspeople honored are unknown other than to insiders in the field.
This footnote will honor their substantial contributions to this technically brilliant film:
Art Direction (Victor A. Gangelin); Cinematography (Daniel L. Fapp); Costumes (Irene
Sharaff); Film Editing (Thomas Stanford); Scoring (Saul Chaplin, Johnny Green, Sid Ramin,
and Irwin Kostal); and Sound Mixing (Gordon E. Sawyer and Fred Hynes).
23. See for example, Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 84–85.
24. Laurent, Original Story by, 347–48.
25. The AFI also placed West Side Story as No. 41 on its “Top 100 American Movies of the Last
100 Years,” compiled in 1998. The only musicals ahead of West Side Story on the list were The
Wizard of Oz at No. 6 and Singin’ in the Rain at No. 10. The other seven film musicals on the
AFI list, which include two animated features and a biopic, were Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs (49), The Sound of Music (55), Fantasia (58), An American in Paris (68), The Jazz Singer
(90), My Fair Lady (91), and Yankee Doodle Dandy (100).
Chapter 15: Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George
1. After Merman’s departure, Gypsy received several acclaimed revivals and films that
highlighted a staggering array of luminous stars, including Rosalind Russell (Warner
Bros. Film, 1962), Angela Lansbury (West End and Broadway, 1973 and 1974), Tyne
Daly (Broadway, 1989), Bette Midler (Television movie, 1993), Betty Buckley (Paper
Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., 1998), Bernadette Peters (Broadway, 2003), and Patti
Lupone (Ravinia Festival, Chicago, 2006; Encores! City Center, N.Y., 2007; Broadway,
2008).
2. For an extended discussion of the difficult collaboration and a more positive appraisal of
Waltz, see Geoffrey Block, Richard Rodgers, 213–25.
3. Thomas P. Adler, “The Musical Dramas of Stephen Sondheim,” 513–25; quotation on 523.
4. Eugene K. Bristow and J. Kevin Butler, “Company, About Face!,” 241–54; quotation on 253.
5. See Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 20–25, and Stephen Sondheim, “The-
ater Lyrics,” 62–63.
6. Oscar Hammerstein II, “Notes on Lyrics,” 3–48.
7. Ibid., 4.
8. Ibid., 15.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 19.
11. Ibid., 21.
12. Ibid., 22.
13. Ibid., 23.
14. Ibid., 34.
15. Although work on By George was begun in the spring of 1945, the show remained largely
dormant until the following spring (around the time of Sondheim’s sixteenth birthday
on March 22). It is possible that Hammerstein’s famous shredding of Sondheim’s work
occurred later than usually reported. In any event, By George was first performed in May
1946.
16. Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 62.
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17. Hammerstein, “Notes on Lyrics, 45–46; Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 65–66. Hammerstein’s
point is well taken, but if he had been a Civil War buff he might have known that hot air
balloons developed by France in the eighteenth century made it possible to use this technol-
ogy for reconnaissance several decades before the French gave the United States its beloved
statue.
18. From the third show, Mary Poppins, based on the stories by P. L. Travers, Sondheim dis-
covered the difficulties of libretto writing (Hammerstein customarily wrote the librettos as
well as the lyrics). In “Theater Lyrics” Sondheim recalls that he sent Hammerstein a script
for the fourth, original musical that included a ninety-nine-page first act and that Hammer-
stein circled this impressive number and wrote “Wow” (“Theater Lyrics,” 63).
19. The title Phinney’s Rainbow incorporated allusions to Finian’s Rainbow, a popular musical of
1947 with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg and music by Burton Lane and to the president of Wil-
liams at the time, James Phinney Baxter.
20. Steven Suskin lists three stagings of Saturday Night: a reading by the Bridewell Theater
Company in 1995; a small production, also in London, in 1997; and a production by the
Pegasus Players in Chicago in 1999 with two new songs (Suskin, Show Tunes, 274–75). The
show received its New York premiere on February 17, 2000. A cast recording was released
that same year on Nonesuch 79609–2.
21. Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,” 64.
22. Ibid., 70.
23. Ibid., 70–71.
24. Ibid., 71.
25. Hammerstein, “In Re ‘Oklahoma!,’ ” 11.
26. Babbitt’s encyclopedic knowledge of popular music of the 1920s and 1930s and his aborted
aspirations to composing popular music in the 1940s are less widely known. For those
familiar with the breadth of his interests it is not surprising that in addition to teaching
the European classics, Babbitt would also analyze the popular songs of DeSylva, Brown,
and Henderson, Kern, Rodgers, and Gershwin “with exactly the same serious tone.” See
Eugene R. Hubert, ed., “A Conversation with Stephen Sondheim” (typescript), quoted in
Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 22.
27. Gordon, Art Isn’t Easy, 7. See also Steven Swayne, How Sondheim Found His Sound, 257–59,
and Block, “Integration,” forthcoming.
28. Sondheim remarked in an interview that “Moss Hart did a concept musical. His
Thousands Cheer was a concept musical in 1933. Concept musicals have existed forever.”
Quoted in Ilson, 195. For an application of the “ideal type” to the Broadway musical,
see Block, “The Broadway Canon,” 537–39 and note 15.
29. See Foster Hirsch, Harold Prince, and Carol Ilson, Harold Prince.
30. The use of the concept musical on behalf of the integrated ideal is analogous to the practice
of classical modernists (for example, Schoenberg and later Sondheim’s teacher Babbitt),
who offered increasingly complex exhibitions of motivic unity to generate new heights in
organicism.
31. Prince, Contradictions, 231. Ethan Mordden’s take on whether Follies should be considered
a failure is worth quoting: “Obviously, in days of lower costs, a hit made money and a flop
lost money. But by 1971, hits lost money. No show that wins Follies’ awards and runs over
a year and eventually gets four major recordings, all the while becoming a classic by any
standard of measurement, can be called a failure” (Mordden, One More Kiss, 40). Twenty
years later, Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, another relatively long-running, award-win-
ning hit, managed to lose $25 million.
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32. In his informative Everything Was Possible, Ted Chapin includes the Newsweek design
that featured Follies on the cover. The caption reads: “Both Time and Newsweek were
planning to do cover stories of the show. However, they never liked to run the same
‘soft’-news covers, so when Time went forward with theirs, Newsweek canceled, but
not before this cover was designed” (Chapin, second page of photo inserts between
144 and 145).
33. Considering the alleged absence of song hits, one cannot help but be struck by the fre-
quency and popularity of revues and other retrospectives based on Sondheim songs, espe-
cially Side by Side by Sondheim (1976) and Putting It Together (1993).
34. Sondheim (with Prince), “Author and Director” (published in 1985), 357.
35. Sondheim, “Larger than Life: Reflections on Melodrama and Sweeney Todd,” 3.
36. Ibid., 6.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 10.
40. Ibid., 11.
41. Mark Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, 155.
42. Ibid., 155.
43. Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 290.
44. Ibid., 291.
45. Sondheim, “Interview with Stephen Sondheim,” 1988, 229.
46. Sondheim, “Larger than Life: Reflections on Melodrama and Sweeney Todd,” 10–11.
47. Craig Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 246.
48. Sondheim, “The Art of the Musical,” 274. Banfield points out that the chord Sondheim
labeled as his “Sweeney chord” (a minor seventh with the seventh in the bass, C-D-F-A)
and which appears only rarely in the score—for example, the last chord of the Judge’s ver-
sion of “Johanna”—is in any event not the same as the Hanover Square chord (a diminished
triad with an added major seventh, spelled as a diminished octave, G-B-D-G) (Banfield,
305–7).
49. Sondheim (with Prince), “Author and Director,” 365.
50. Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 248.
51. In Sondheim’s “defense,” the version of the organ Prelude heard on the cast album alludes
to but does not quote the Dies irae.
52. Sondheim, “The Musical Theater,” 228–250.
53. In Laurents’s revised version of Do I Hear a Waltz? performed at the George Street Play-
house in New Jersey in 2000 and the Pasadena Playhouse in 2001 (Fynsworth Alley CD
302 062 156 2), the reprise of “Take the Moment” was deleted and replaced by “Everybody
Loves Leona,” which had been discarded from the original production.
54. Sondheim (with Prince), “Author and Director,” 365.
55. “City on Fire!” is first heard at the beginning of No. 26 and repeated after a short reprise
of “Kiss Me.” It returns in No. 27, after the Searching music “Not While I’m Around” and
again after the Beggar Woman’s “Alms . . . alms.”
56. The eight songs that are not reprised in the final sequence are “The Worst Pies in London,”
“Green Finch and Linnet Bird,” “Johanna” (Anthony’s version), “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,”
“Wait,” and “Ladies in Their Sensitivities” from act I and “God, That’s Good!” and “Parlor
Songs” from act II.
57. Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, 143.
58. Ibid., 144.
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59. In “Sondheim Dismembers ‘Sweeney,’ ” Green cites Love Me Tonight, Under the Roofs of Paris,
The Smiling Lieutenant, “and a couple of the MGMS” (none mentioned by name) among the
short list of Sondheim’s favorite film musicals.
60. Several useful discussions on the Sweeney Todd adaptation include Jesse Green, “Sondheim
Dismembers ‘Sweeney’ ”; Mark Salisbury, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (n.c.:
Titan Books, n.d.); and Andrew Buchman, “Tim Burton’s Cinematic Sweeney Todd (2007),”
an unpublished paper presented at the Symposium on the American Musical held at the
University of Washington, April 11, 2008. I am grateful to Andrew Buchman for allowing
me to reap the benefits of this paper. The special features in the 2-Disc Special Edition of
Sweeney Todd (DreamWorks Pictures 2007) also provide considerable information about the
film (see especially Sondheim, “Interview with Sondheim,” 2007).
61. The soundtrack includes the music and lyrics attached to the Beggar Woman’s coarse sex-
ual solicitations that follow her plaintive solicitations for money, which Anthony gives her
before he asks about the residents of the house.
62. Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, 136–37.
63. Green, “Sondheim Dismembers ‘Sweeney’ ” (“Slashing the Score”), quotation by Green.
64. Sweeney Todd, 2-Disc Special Edition, Special Feature, “Musical Mayhem: Sondheim’s
Sweeney Todd,” DreamWorks Pictures 2007.
65. Another excellent example of this approach occurs in the film version of “A Glamorous
Life,” in which Frederika sings about her mother; it is accompanied by images of her
mother, Desiree, played by Elizabeth Taylor, who does not sing in this number.
66. DreamWorks 2007.
67. The published literature on Sondheim offers numerous and often valuable discussions of
Sunday in the Park with George (see especially Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 343–79;
Stephen Citron, Sondheim & Lloyd-Webber, 289–99; Gordon, Art Isn’t Easy, 262–300; Martin
Gottfried, Sondheim, 155–66; Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, 91–98; Scott Miller, Deconstruct-
ing Harold Hill, 153–89); Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim, pp. 327–41. I am grateful to Larry
Starr for making available to me in typescript the penetrating critical overview of Sunday
he presented at the Annual Meeting of the Sonneck Society for American Music (now the
Society for American Music), Nashville, Tennessee, April 1989, “The Broadway Musical as
a Critique of Modernist Culture, or Sunday in the Park with Sondheim.”
68. The motive of “Putting It Together” (Ex. 15.3a) adds one additional long note to the horn
call. Although neither of the two new long notes of the former are as long as the single long
note in the horn call, the connection between these motives might be discernible even to
those who disdain the idea of organic connections.
69. See Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 364–79, especially 375–79.
70. Sondheim, “Interview with Stephen Sondheim,” 1988, 236. For a recent example of the
opposite view, see John Lahr’s acerbic and unsympathetic portrait of the work in his
review of the 2008 revival with its reference to “the strained, deadly second act” (Lahr,
“The Haunted,” The New Yorker, March 3, 2008, 85).
71. Michiko Kakutani, “Beyond Happily Ever After,” New York Times Magazine, August 30,
1987, 30, 76.
72. For more on Follies, see Chapin, Everything Was Possible, passim; Hirsch, Harold Prince,
93–105; Ilson, Harold Prince, 177–97; Mandelbaum, “ ‘A Chorus Line,’ ” 66–78; Ethan Mord-
den, One More Kiss, 34–47; Prince, Contradictions, 158–70; Sondheim, “The Musical Theater,“
231–32; and Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 135–53.
73. Another post–Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Candide, underwent considerable lit-
erary and musical alterations between 1956 and 1989. See Andrew Porter, “Candide: An
W128
Introduction,” notes to the 1989 recording, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, Deutsche

Grammophon, 429–73401.
74. The two librettos of The Girls Upstairs (from among the alleged thirteen) housed in the
Theater Collection of the New York Public Library (Restricted Material #5870 [first draft]
and Restricted material #2624 [second draft]) for the most part substantiate Prince’s recol-
lection. Seven of the twenty-two numbers in the 1971 Follies (in addition to the “Prologue”)
can be traced to these pre-Follies versions; four of these songs appear in Restricted Material
#5870. The New York Public Library also houses two drafts of Follies, one dated September
1970 (Restricted Material #2625) and the other January 2, 1971 (NCOF+73–1867).
75. Ilson, Harold Prince, 180.
76. Many, if not all, of the discarded Follies songs have been recorded on Follies: The Complete
Recording (1998) (CD: TVT 1020–2) 2-disc set and A Collector’s Sondheim (1985) (CD: RCD3–
5480) 3-disc set.
77. Sondheim discusses the artistic limitations of “Can That Boy Foxtrot!” in Sondheim, “The-
ater Lyrics,” 87–88.
78. The resolution of a triadic figure to the fifth of its triad offers a striking parallel (if not influ-
ence) in the culminating transformation of the principal motive in the first movement of
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (the “Eroica”), first heard toward the end of the development
and increasingly prominent in the recapitulation and coda. See the commentary by J. Peter
Burkholder in Norton Anthology of Western Music. Volume 2: Classic to Twentieth Century, 5th
ed., ed. by Burkholder and Claude V. Palisca (New York: W. W. Norton), 281–82.
79. Mandelbaum, “ ‘A Chorus Line,’ ” 70–71.
81. Prince, Contradictions, 163.
82. In honor of Bernstein’s seventieth birthday, Sondheim composed the parody “The Saga of
Lenny,” which, according to a particularly helpful anonymous reader of this book (later
revealed as Wayne Shirley), “shows a good understanding and sympathy with the original
‘Saga of Jenny.’ ” See also Steve Swayne, How Sondheim Found His Sound, 272n110.
83. Prior to Follies, Simon had written the books for Little Me (1962), Sweet Charity (1966), and
Promises, Promises (1968) (the latter choreographed by Bennett). After Follies, Simon would
contribute uncredited one-liners in Bennett’s Seesaw (1973) and A Chorus Line (e.g., Shei-
la’s “Sometimes I’m aggressive”), and the libretto for the adaptation for his The Goodbye
Girl, like Chorus Line with music by Marvin Hamlisch. Bennett also played an important
role in Simon’s work. He assisted (without credit) the direction of The Good Doctor (1973)
and directed God’s Favorite (1974). See Mandelbaum, “ ‘A Chorus Line,’ ” 74, 78, 85–86, 124,
146–47.
84. Ibid., 74.
86. Ibid., 148, 150.
87. Ibid. Although he acknowledged that “many critics felt that Goldman’s book was the
weak link in Follies, and that it contained unpleasant characters difficult to care about and
action that was hard to follow,” Sondheim concluded that “these critics were only echoing
Bennett’s sentiments throughout the tryout” (Mandelbaum, “ ‘A Chorus Line,’ ” 73–74). For
a thoughtful defense of the book, see Mordden, One More Kiss, 34–47.
89. Ibid., 151–52.
90. Ilson also notes that “ironically, when the show was revived in London in 1987, Goldman
has them [Ben and Phyllis] stay together” (Ilson, Harold Prince, 196).
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91. A folly song (in Follies) is a song in which each of the principals sings an honest diegetic
“number” that reveals their deeper nature and conflicts. All the follies take place in the
imaginary Loveland in the last part of the musical. After “The Folly of Love” (an ensemble
number) and “The Folly of Youth” (separate and then combined duets by the principal
married couples), Buddy, Sally, Phyllis, and Ben sing their solo follies in succession.
92. The first movement of Grieg’s concerto had also been featured prominently in Song of
Norway (loosely based on the life of Grieg) and more briefly in the song “Rosemary” from
Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying.
93. When I asked to study a copy of the 1987 Follies libretto, Goldman “turned the matter over
to his attorney” and “notified the Library of Congress that no permission is to be given for
an examination copy” (letter to the author from Barbara Deren, President, Barbara Deren
Associates, July 5, 1994). From this letter I have inferred that the librettist came to favor the
1971 libretto, but I could be mistaken.
94. Horowitz, Sondheim on Music, 123.
95. The lyrics to all four songs, “Marry Me a Little,” “Multitudes of Amys,” “Happily Ever
After,” and “Being Alive,” are printed and discussed in Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics,”
92–97. See also Banfield, 166–73.
96. Prince, Contradictions, 143–57; quotations on 156–57.
97. Ibid., 183.
98. Gottfried, Sondheim, 189, and Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 382.
99. Gottfried, Sondheim, 151. Banfield considers the critical problems generated by Merrily’s
autobiographical subject matter: “But it would be difficult to fix the audience’s sympa-
thy—and regrets—on Franklin Shepard, for the simple reason that the musical is about
the compromise of his talent and we can only measure that talent by transferring it to
Sondheim” (Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 312).
100. Banfield would call this technique “reflexivity,” that is, “the words describing what the
music is doing.” Ibid., 42.
101. The populist Sondheim composed two songs for Madonna to sing in the movie Dick Tracy
(1990), including the Academy Award–winning Best Song of 1991, “Sooner or Later.” Sond-
heim gained major recognition with the popular and critically acclaimed 2007 film release of
Sweeney Todd featuring box-office sensation Johnny Depp discussed earlier in this chapter.
102. Block, Review of Assassins, American Music 11 (Winter 1993): 507–9.
Chapter 16: The Phantom of the Opera

1. Alexandra Wilson, The Puccini Problem, 6.
2. Of these shows only Aspects of Love (closed too soon) and Sunset Boulevard (too expensive)
lost money in their New York runs. It should be noted that Lloyd Webber musicals almost
invariably enjoyed longer, usually far longer London runs. Here are the comparisons:
Joseph New York, 747 performances; London, 243

Jesus Chris Superstar New York, 711 performances; London, 3,358
Evita New York, 1,568 performances; London, 2,900
Cats New York, 7,485 performances; London, 8,949
Starlight Express New York, 761 performances; London, 7,406
Phantom New York, 8,771 (as of 2/2/09); London, 9,568
(as of 10/9/08)
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Aspects of Love New York, 377 performances; London, 1,325

Sunset Boulevard New York, 977 performances; Los Angeles, 369;
London, 1,529
Despite the apparent reversal of the norm in the case of Joseph, according to Michael Patrick
Kennedy and John Muir in Musicals, “the 1980 production became a provincial phenom-
enon in Britain, setting up a record as the longest-lived touring show of the postwar era,
and making periodic appearances in London en route” (Michael Patrick Kennedy and John
Muir, Musicals, 187). As of this writing, after Les Misérables (Boublil and Schönberg), the
second, third, and fifth longest running shows in the West End (Phantom, Cats, and Starlight
Express, respectively) are Lloyd Webber shows. Jesus Christ Superstar ran for eight years,
Evita nearly seven. Evita was also the longest running foreign musical import up to that
time, to be eventually surpassed by Cats.
3. Paul Prece and William A. Everett, “The Megamusical,” 255.
4. Jesus Christ Superstar was the only Lloyd Webber-nominated show before Evita was nomi-
nated for the 1972 Best Score Tony Award (awarded to Sondheim’s Follies); by the time Evita
won for Best Musical and Best Score in 1980, Sondheim had already obtained this prize for
four shows (Company, Follies, Night Music, and Sweeney Todd).
5. Rent (5,124 performances) lost its bid to overtake Cats when it closed on September 7, 2008.
6. John Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 2. Everett notes that during the 2000–01 season West
End audiences could see as many as five Lloyd Webber shows (Prece and Everett, “The
Megamusical,” 254).
7. Michael Walsh, Andrew Lloyd Webber.
8. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 315–32.
9. Steven Suskin, Show Tunes, rev. and expanded 3rd ed., xii.
10. Ibid., 378.
11. Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005) and The
American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (2006). The seven Sondheim shows
are Assassins and Pacific Overtures in the earlier volume and Company, Into the Woods, A Little
Night Music, Passion, and Sweeney Todd in the latter.
12. Scott Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story” (Assassins, Company, Into the Woods, Jesus
Christ Superstar, Merrily We Roll Along, and Sweeney Todd); Deconstructing Harold Hill (Pas-
sion, Sunday in the Park with George); and Rebels with Applause (Anyone Can Whistle).
13. Jessica Sternfeld, The Megamusical. In her “Introduction,” 1–7, Sternfeld presents a useful
definition and description of the megamusical. The chapters that follow constitute the most
thorough study of the subgenre to date.
14. See, for example, Mark Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical; John Bush Jones, Our
Musicals, Ourselves; and Scott McMillin, The Musical Drama.
15. Stephen Citron, Sondheim & Lloyd-Webber. I think it is not inappropriate to mention that
some on the Advisory Board seriously questioned whether Lloyd Webber merited inclu-
sion in a series called Yale Broadway Masters.
16. Quoted from Mattheson’s Der Vollkommene Capellmeister (1739) in J. Peter Burkholder,
“Borrowing.” In Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/
subscriber/article/grove/music/62918pg15 (accessed September 24, 2008). The quote con-
tinues: “One must so construct and develop imitations that they are prettier and better than
the pieces from which they are derived.”
17. Romberg’s Blossom Time (1921), a huge hit in its day and in many touring productions for
decades thereafter, consisted of Romberg’s reworking of recognizable Schubert melodies.
W131
Romberg’s reported quip, “Not yet,” at a party in response to whether he had composed
Offenbach’s familiar Barcarolle from Les Contes d’Hoffmann which was playing in the back-
ground, humorously acknowledges this reputation for musical borrowing.
18. Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 172.
19. Ibid., 167. Louiguy’s given name was Louis Guglielmi. In 1955 a cha-cha arrangement of
“Cherry Pink” by “Mambo King” Pérez Prado was number one on American hit charts for
ten consecutive weeks. After “Cherry Pink,” Louiguy’s other mega song hit was “La vie en
rose,” composed for French chanteuse Edith Piaf.
20. Ibid., 168.
21. Walsh describes Lloyd Webber’s descending chords as “the spiritual heirs of the first notes”
of Vaughan Williams’s symphony while Grant more directly states that the “opening
minor-key descending riff in the title tune of Phantom of the Opera is stolen from Vaughan
Williams’s London Symphony” (Walsh, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 33; Grant, The Rise and Fall of the
Broadway Musical, 33).
22. Citron includes a comparative musical example of “Music of the Night” and “School Days”
and Snelson includes the relevant passage of “Recondite armonia” (Citron, Sondheim &
Lloyd-Webber, 334–35, and Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 179).
23. Example 16.2 shows the relevant phrase only in La fanciulla. For an example that includes
other “motivic connections” between both La fanciulla and its borrowing in Phantom, see
Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 179.
24. Walsh, “The Curiosity of Cats,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2007 www.printthis.
clickability.com/pt/cpt?actional_cpt&title—The+Curiosity+of+Cat+%7 . . . In his introduc-
tion to his larger study, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Walsh describes the “match” between these
phrases of Phantom and Turandot as “obvious” (Walsh, 13).
25. Sternfeld, 87. Sternfeld does address the disparity between people who love and people
hate the musicals of Lloyd Webber, and recognizes parallels in reception between the com-
poser of Phantom and the composer of Turandot but reaches different conclusions from those
presented here: “It is rare for critics and audiences to disagree so strongly about a composer;
interestingly, another of these rare instances concerns reactions to the operas of Giacomo
Puccini, whose style Lloyd Webber has admired and occasionally emulated. In fact, critics
often complain that Lloyd Webber sounds too much like Puccini, even when the music does
not support this, as if they are considering instead reputation and their own role as critics
deriding a popular composer” (Ibid., 72).
26. Space prohibits rigorous identification of Lloyd Webber’s borrowings, but I think it is
important to note the subtle melodic and harmonic allusions to the finale of Rachmaninoff’s
Second Piano Concerto in the very first sounds audiences hear in Sunset Boulevard (which
return as the main musical material in the refrain of Max von Mayerling’s homage to the
great silent film star Norma Desmond he serves and loves, “The Greatest Star of All”). This
is an inspired allusion. Unfortunately, this degree of originality is rare in Phantom and other
Lloyd Webber shows.
27. Block, “Integration.”
28. McMillin, The Musical as Drama, 31–53
29. Ibid., 165.
30. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 2nd ed., 315–32 and 385–408.
31. Ibid., 325.
32. Knapp, The American Musical, 2006, 342.
33. The Ultimate Edition, The Phantom of the Opera, Milestone Film and Video, DVD, 2007.
34. Foster Hirsch, Hal Prince, 169.
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35. The apt phrase “romantic alternative” was coined by Mel Gussow, “The Phantom’s Many
Faces over the Years,” New York Times, January 30, 1988.
36. John Snelson illustrates the whole-tone scale in the “I have brought you“ verse (which he
labels “Phantom’s Lair theme” [Ex. 4.6]) and reveals how this scale pervades an earlier pas-
sage in the coda of “Angel of Music” between Christine and Meg (Ex. 4.5), where Christine
explains that “He’s with me even now” (Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 94–95).
37. From the Sondheim interview in the “Musical Mayhem” special feature in the DVD in
which he asserted that the Sweeney film was “an attempt to take the material of the stage
musical and completely transform it” and “not a movie of a stage show” (Sondheim, “Inter-
view with Sondheim,” 2007).
38. The film abandons some dialogue and recitative, the reprise of “Notes” in act II, and most
lamentably the rehearsal of Don Juan Triumphant, also in act II. Conversely, the film adds
numerous underscored scenic visual moments and pantomimed action devoid of either
singing or talking. An example of the latter is an intense and prolonged swordfight at the
cemetery in which Raoul emerges victorious over the Phantom but spares his life at Chris-
tine’s urging. Viewers also watch at some length as Raoul tries to overcome physical obsta-
cles to reach Christine in the Phantom’s lair at the climax of the story.
39. The returns to the 1919 frame are part of a larger attempt to make some of the more mysteri-
ous plot elements clear to a film audience who may not have seen the stage version many
times. For example, the film adds a short conversation between Christine and Meg before
they sing “Angel of Music,” including flashbacks of Meg’s mother bringing Christine to
the opera house after her famous violinist father died and promised that an Angel of Music
would appear to guide her. The conversation also lessens Christine’s gullibility and clarifies
her emotional connection to the disembodied teacher sent by the spirit of her beloved father.
40. In an interesting touch, the singer over the credits is Minnie Driver, who plays the tempera-
mental Italian prima donna Carlotta Giudicelli, whose voice in the film is dubbed by an
operatic professional Margaret Preece.
41. Sternfeld calls this motive the “story motif” due to its usual association with various kinds
of narration or exposition, but in his own program listing of musical material Lloyd Web-
ber offers the title “I Remember” for act I, scene 6 (Sternfeld, The Megamusical, 247–50 and
385).
42. Enchanted Evenings, 1st ed., 191–93,
43. Ibid., 375n29.
44. This is the theme Sternfeld labeled “the story motif” (Sternfeld, The Megamusical, 245–46).
45. See Example 5.7 in Sternfeld for the simple rhythmic variation on the “I have brought you“
motive in the “Little Lotte” music (Ibid., 251–52).
46. In “The Making of The Phantom of the Opera,” the documentary that accompanies the DVD
release of the 2004 Phantom film, viewers learn that Lloyd Webber wanted “All I Ask of
You” to capture the quality of “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific, a musical long
regarded as one of his earliest and most lasting favorites. While the pitches and harmonic
underpinning are distinct, the rhythm that opens “All I Ask of You” does bear an intriguing
resemblance to the opening rhythm of its Rodgers and Hammerstein predecessor. Snelson
includes a musical example of a connection between the second major phrase of “All I Ask
of You” and a phrase sung by Minnie, also in La fanciulla del West (Snelson, Andrew Lloyd
Webber, 180). Grant, who offers Jerome Moross as “the least credited source from whom
Andrew Lloyd Webber steals tunes” states that “ ‘All I Ask of You” from Phantom of the
Opera is arguably a direct steal from Moross’s great 1958 film score, The Big Country (Grant,
The Rise and Fall, 107).
W133
47. Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 97–98.

48. Ibid., 98.
49. See Snelson’s thoughtful accompanying discussion of the melody he labels “Twisted”
(Example 4.3) and its meaning (Ibid., 91–92 and 231n8).
50. Since the cast recording omits the intervening dialogue, listeners hear Christine’s rendition
less perceptibly meld into Carolotta’s, and the contrast in performance styles is far less
extreme.
51. Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 210.
52. Ibid.
53. Even Lloyd Webber’s financial losses are more colossal than those of Sondheim. Compared
to $25 million, the $665,000 that Follies lost seems puny in comparison, even when consider-
ing rising costs in the twenty-three years that separated the openings of Follies and Sunset
Boulevard.
54. New York, 747 performances and London, 243 performances. See note 2 for a comparison
between New York and London runs for other Lloyd Webber shows.
55. Michael Riedel, “A Really Wine Time: “Phantom Sequel Is Unmasked at UK Bash,” New York
Post, July 16, 2008.
56. Sternfeld, The Megamusical, 75. For what it’s worth, the reason Lloyd Webber named his
gelding Frank Rich is not because Rich’s reviews in the New York Times were among these
raves.
W134

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ENCHANTED

Copyright © 1997, 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Visit the companion website at: www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings

Preface to the First Edition xi

Act I: Before Rodgers and Hammerstein 17

8. Stage versus Screen (1): Before Rodgers and Hammerstein 153

Act II: The Broadway Musical after Oklahoma! 193

Epilogue: The Age of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber 333

Selected Bibliography 411

Available online at www.oup.com/us/enchantedevenings

Appendix E: Anything Goes: 1934, 1962, and 1987 W42

including mine. In my second year at The Thacher School I anticipated Crazy

Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (1993).7 Swain’s valuable survey contains a

In the recent past intense ideological differences have been solidiﬁed. In

Broadway’s “Golden Age”

• Show Boat: The acclaimed (and controversial) Broadway revival

• Guys and Dolls: Long-running Broadway revival (1,143

Today the American musical also thrives as a burgeoning subdiscipline

New Broadway Scholarship

Aside from correcting some errors—such as the perpetuation of the

• Porgy and Bess: Howard Pollack’s monumental life and works

Stage versus Screen

Sources on West Side Story (to conclude with a particularly well-known

Enchanted Evenings: A Textbook Example?

“American Popular Song: Great American Songwriters” (clockwise

The language of the analysis is intended to be accessible to readers

The Making of a Musical, Adaptation,

of the ﬁeld. Sometimes the creative problems posed by musicals seem to

Why These Musicals?

The Sound of Music. Engel’s most conspicuous omission is without a doubt

BEFORE RODGERS AND

premiere was discovered in the Warner Brothers Warehouse in Secaucus,

Kern (1885–1945), whose mother was a musician, “had some European

Reconstructing Show Boat (1927–1994)

already been replaced by “coloured folks” in the 1928 London production.

In contrast to most of the musicals discussed in subsequent chapters, Show

Musical Symbolism and Dramatic Meaning

In Show Boat, Kern has an opportunity to make much of his dra-

motives in Kern and Hammerstein’s “leit-opera” (a term perhaps coined

Example 2.1. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”

Example 2.1. Continued

Example 2.2. “River Family” of motives (transposed to the key of C Major)

Example 2.2. (Continued)

Example 2.3. Parthy’s theme

Ravenal’s Entrance and Meeting with Magnolia

expansive, intricate, and brilliantly conceived opening scene (act I, scene

Example 2.5. Continued

Anything Goes, act II, ﬁnale (1987). Photograph: Brigitte Lacombe.

The Changing Times of Anything Goes

reconstructed recording, report that producer Freedley was dissatisﬁed by

1971 London production is an isolated exception). In contrast, the Anything

I was delighted to read of its outstanding success, and distressed

It has become a commonplace almost universally shared by writers on Broad-

Dramatic and Musical Meaning

But there is a darker side to the happily-ever-after denouement in this

Example 3.1. Triplet rhythms

Example 3.1. Continued

musical language. Half-note triplets dominate Reno’s explication of all the

Example 3.2. “Anything Goes” (verse, mm. 1-10)

In the chorus of “Anything Goes” Porter abandons “textual realism” in

PORGY AND BESS