Bloomer Girl and South Pacific

Bloomer Girl. Music by Harold Arlen. Lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. Book by Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy. 1944 Broadway.

South Pacific. Music by Richard Rodgers. Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. Book by Oscar Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. 1949 Broadway.

One of these shows is better known than the other but both concern race relations in war time. Both were considered progressive for the 1940's and both feature artists from the original production of Oklahoma!

Finian's Rainbow

Earlier this summer I wrote about Were The World Mine, a musical in which the homophobic jocks are magically transformed from straight to gay. In Finian's Rainbow a spell transforms the racist Senator from white to black. The Senator tries to undo his cruel policies but as a black man his staff will no longer listen to him. The leprechaun has to restore him to white to save the Sharecroppers. Pretty cutting social commentary for 1947.

A white actor put on blackface makeup on Broadway in 1947 and on film in 1968. When the show was revived in 2009 the switch was made with two actors. Critics praised the production but it only ran 15 weeks. 40's satire wasn't commercial in the 00's.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Before Dolly Levi, before the White Queen, Carol Channing's signature role was Lorelei Lee. Her rendition of "Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend" is very different than Marilyn Monroe's but no less fantastic.

Easter Parade

"Someday, we’re going to write a treatise on the crazy hats women wear in musicals. We propose that because there was so much sexual repression in these films, the outrageous hats are supposed to represent vaginas on top of their heads. It’s why so many of the men had walking sticks too.
Think about it." ~ Tom and Lorenzo

This one's not about the plot. It's about the showcase numbers. Here are some highlights:

Steppin' Out with My Baby - Fred Astaire and chorus
Shakin' The Blues Away - Ann Miller
A Couple of Swells - Fred Astaire and Judy Garland

St. Louis Woman

Legends say that Lena Horne declined the title role when the NAACP denounced the character's "easy virtue" as demeaning. The show went through a rocky tryout and a short Broadway run. Encores produced a concert in 1998 starring Vanessa Williams. The recording is uneven but it reminds us that the score is full of gems.

"Any Place I Hang My Hat is Home"
"I Had Myself a True Love"
"Come Rain Or Come Shine"
And Pearl Bailey's 11 o'clock number "It's A Woman's Prerogative"

Carmen Jones

A piece of gossip begat Mérimée's novella, which begat Bizet's Opera, which begat Hammerstein's adaptation Carmen Jones. Hammerstein remained faithful to Bizet's plot while moving the setting to WWII and filling the lyrics with 40's colloquialisms. The film is dated and heavily dubbed but it preserves the work of some extremely talented artists including Pearl Bailey and the Oscar nominated Dorothy Dandridge.

Clips:
Pearl Bailey performing Rhythm on a Drum in the 1954 film.
Diahann Carroll discussing her audition for Carmen Jones.
The delightful short All The Great Operas in Ten Minutes

Cabin in the Sky

In 2016 Encores produced a concert of Cabin in the Sky. Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Jack Viertel tried to cut the condescending material from Root's original book. Critics remained unimpressed with the "religious fable" despite the jazzy score. The show is best remembered for the starry 1943 film. The film is enjoyable but only kept three songs from the stage show.

Clips:
Ethel Waters singing the hit song "Taking a Chance on Love."
Lena Horne singing "Ain't It The Truth" in a bath tub. The scene was cut by the censors.
Highlights from the Encores concert starring LaChanze, Chuck Cooper and Norm Lewis.

The Pirate

Vincente Minnelli’s famous musicals—among them Meet Me In St. Louis and An American In Paris—tend to eclipse his 1948 Technicolor flop The Pirate, one of his richest and strangest works. One of his kinkiest, too. ~ The AV Club

It takes this mammoth show some time to generate a full head of steam, but when it gets rolling it's thoroughly delightful. However, the momentum is far from steady and the result is a lopsided entertainment that is wonderfully flamboyant in its high spots and bordering on tedium elsewhere. ~ The New York Times.

The Harvey Girls

“In this day and age girls don’t leave home. But if you get a hankering you wanna roam.”

The railroad allowed Fred Harvey’s chain of restaurants and hotels brought civility to the Wild West and independence to single women in the 1870’s. His waitresses, the “Harvey Girls,” are the subject of one of Judy Garland’s most interesting films.

The show had one breakout song, “The Atchison Topeka and the Santa Fe.” This fantastic number introduces the townsfolk, the Harvey girls, the supporting cast and the plot. Then Garland enters and brings it to a big finish. She’s come to town to get married but the groom is a bust. She joins the Harvey Girls and never looks back.

The disposable love interest doesn’t appear till later. His duet with Garland was cut as the film’s not about him. Instead she shares a trio with Cyd Charisse (dubbed by Betty Russell) Virginia O’Brien’s fellow Harvey Girls as they struggle with the social roles they’ve been assigned. They learned their trades to attract husbands. When none appeared they used the skills to support themselves. The number feels like a template for Sweet Charities “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This.” Their boss, Marjorie Main, and their rival, Angela Lansbury, will get solos as well. Main wants to class up the town. Lansbury… does not.

Lansbury’s “showgirl” is a hoot. Her solos were dubbed but her body language says more about her character than the lyrics. She looks fabulous but she’s bored. Garland’s rivalry brings a spark into Lansbury’s life and helps her find her priorities. At the end she’s happy to hand her boyfriend off to Garland and focus on her career. 

Quick Sketch: Showboat and Carousel

Show Boat. Music by Jerome Kern. Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein and P.G. Wodehouse. Book by Oscar Hammerstein. 1927 Broadway.

Carousel. Music by Richard Rodgers. Lyrics and Book by Oscar Hammerstein. 1945 Broadway.

I didn't have time to draw a full cartoon today. I tried a couple of quick sketches and looked for a theme. I realized that these two particular shows were groundbreaking classics that I don't particularly enjoy watching today.

The Lincoln Center's 2015 concert of Showboat reminded me that it can still work if it's cast and paced well. Two well received productions of Carousel reminded me that I'll never really appreciate that story.

Cole Porter Series part 1

Kiss Me Kate. Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter. Book by Samuel and Bella Spewack. Basis William Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew. 1948 Broadway.

Silk Stockings. Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter. Book by George S. Kaufman, Leueen MacGrath & Abe Burrows. Basis Melchior Lengyel's story Ninotchka. 1955 Broadway.

This week I'll be looking at six musicals composed by Cole Porter. Two bad films have been made about his life. Both tell us he wrote musicals, had a complicated marriage, and broke his legs in a riding accident. The second film explores his bisexuality. The first film is less honest but features stronger musical performances.

It's been quoted that Cole Porter felt Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical librettos "made it that much harder for everyone else" Kiss Me Kate was Porter's most ambitious and most successful musical to date. The interweaving of Shakespeare's brutal comedy and Spewack's backstage farce inspired a broad range of music from Porter. It also explored a common theme of his: the abusive mismatched couple. Fred and Lilli's first duet, "Wunderbar," is a parody of Viennese opera. The honest song they share is "So In Love."

"Taunt me, and hurt me.
Deceive me, desert me.
I'm yours till I die.
So in love with you am I."

The melody and lyric present their co-dependent relationship as something beautiful and tragic.

Silk Stocking's leading lady gets her liveliest song when she dismisses love as "A Chemical Reaction." When she falls for Steve she sings the dreary "Without Love (What Is a Woman?)" which makes romance sound funereal. Porter's heart was clearly in the brassy comedy and the spiky conflict.

"Though the uninstructed faction
Calls it mutual attraction
it's a chemical reaction, that's all."

Part 2's shows will continue a theme from Kiss Me Kate: hooking up with your ex.

Street Scene

[Producer Theron Bamberger] opened the fly leave and looked at the cast of characters. “Twenty-two characters,” he said. “Too many.” And the play was returned forthwith to Mr. Rice. ~ New York Times, Adele Nathan, 2/2/1947

The play would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and be adapted into a Tony Award winning Opera. The family tragedy at the center branches off into subplots and vignettes for the neighbors and vendors that visit the central brownstone, expanding the cast from 22 to 30. 

On a side note, I'm realizing that the slice of life structure, and the brownstone set, had an influence on 2004's Avenue Q. 

One Touch of Venus

Marlene Dietrich dropped out of the show calling it "too sexy and profane." Stage fright seems more likely. She was replaced by Mary Martin. Martin had made a splashy Broadway debut in 1938 singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in Cole Porter's Leave it To Me. Her legendary moment in Venus came when she sat on a chair on an empty stage and crooned the song "That's Him." The brassy comedy suddenly had a heart and the audience was spell bound.

A film and TV broadcast have faded from memory and the show is seldom revived. Kurt Weill purists have dismissed this slight show for a lack of politics. However if you squint at this gentle  farce there is social commentary to be found. Venus inspires more fear than lust from those around her and is dismayed by the lack of romance in the modern world.

By Jupiter

A forgotten play starring Katharine Hepburn as an Amazon warrior...

Became a forgotten musical starring Ray Bolger as the unhappy Amazon king. The show was their longest running hit.

New York Times, 1942: “Mr Bolger… can cross the stage like a waif, or a king, he can sing or mug. He can play the unhappy, mincing consort of Hippolyta before the Greeks brought the breath of new thought into the kingdom of the Amazons, and afterwards he can bellow like an injured Senator. There is much for him to do and Mr. Bolger is not one to back away from a part. He is magnificent.”

Larry Hart was not at his best of health in 1942. The comedy based on reverse gender roles (Women acting likemen? Crazy!) was stale in revival and the Rodgers and Hart score was dismissed. 

New York Times, 1967: “This particular score – which always was a second-best in the Rodgers-Hart canon- is full of tunes that are little more than titles. Someone got a bright first idea, jotted it down as it stood, and then never did bother to turn the juice on.”

We won’t be seeing this one at Encores any time soon, but here are some clips of the big numbers.

A Connecticut Yankee

Mark Twain's story was a cynical take down of modern greed. The musical settles for a love triangle. Legends say that Rodgers tried to save his partnership with the alcoholic Larry Hart by pitching a revisal for their Pal Joey star Vivienne Segal. Sadly Hart passed shortly after opening. His last song was a showstopping "To Keep My Love Alive."

The show is not favored for revival due to a dull book that the New York Times called "feeble" in 1943 and "quaint" in 2001. The songs "Thou Swell" and "My Heart Stood Still" were hits and "To Keep My Love Alive" has been recorded by the likes of Mary Testa, Ella Fitzgerald and Elaine Stritch.

The Bing Crosby film in 1949 used the same source story but a different (and in my opinion inferior) score.

Musical Theater vs. The Outsider

Hilton Als: "Difference is usually synonymous with danger: it’s the outsider or the outcast who introduces sex and violence into the musical’s relatively moral world. (American musicals almost always argue in favor of the status quo.)"

Scott Miller:  This is also a common device in many musicals, in which the protagonist must either assimilate into the community (as in The Music Man, Brigadoon, La Cage aux Folles, Hello, Dolly!) or be removed (as in Cabaret, Sweeney Todd, Man of La Mancha, Bat Boy, Urinetown).

Stephen Sondheim: "I remember how everyone goes off to the clambake at the end of Act One and Jigger just follows, and he was the only one walking on stage as the curtain came down. I was sobbing."

Panama Hattie

Class war is a staple of an Ethel Merman musical.

Disposable love interests are another. Poor Nick Bullet, the aristocrat, appears once on the song list in a duet with Hattie titled “MyMother Would Love You.” The featured duet in a Merman musical was  a friendship duet. Here it’s “Let’s Be Buddies” where Merman wins over Nick’s spoiled daughter.

The stakes are briefly raised with a terrorist attack (!?) but no mad bomber stands a chance against Ethel. 

On The Town

A rough experiment with digital art tools today.

On The Town was a hit in 1944 but the ’59, ‘71 and ‘98 revivals flopped. Audiences remember the song New York, New York, but resist the blend of high and low comedy. The current production has fared better and received a Tony nomination for best revival.

"In social terms, the most fascinating aspect of ''On the Town'' today is that its women are the active romantic partners, a mirror of changing sexual roles in the war years." ~ New York Times, 1998

“On the Town” traffics in two kinds of exaggerations, that of the earthy, even dirty cartoon and of the gossamer romance of poets. This reflects the bi-cultural nature of Robbins and Bernstein, who belonged equally to Broadway and the concert hall." ~ New York Times, 2014.

Carousel vs. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Quick! Which of these two shows features:

• Ne'er do well fathers who dies young
• Leaving their winsome working mothers
• to raise mopey teenage daughters alone.
• The father returns from the dead to offer the daughter advice at her high school graduation,
• while the wife's feisty best friend provides the comic relief with her own dysfunctional marriage.

If you answered both you are correct!

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn's Johnny never beats his long-suffering wife. He just drinks and gambles away her money while promising to "Buy her a star." Meanwhile Carousel's Billy brings an actual star to his daughter but settles for giving her a slap.

Miss Liberty

Mary McCarty is best remembered today for originating the roles of Mama Morton in Chicago and Stella "Who's That Woman" in Follies. In 1949 she played the ill-treated third wheel in the love triangle of Irving Berlin's Miss Liberty. Her character was so poorly treated by the callow leading man that audiences turned against him and his new love.

Though an Irving Berlin score is always fun, the critics did not consider this work his best. Miss Liberty lasted 308 performances but has not been heard from since.