Milk and Honey

Jerry Herman's first Broadway musical laid some interesting groundwork. The operating first couple struck some critics as dull. The most unconventional thing about them is the fact they don't end up together. Molly Picon's supporting comic reads as a sort of proto-Dolly Levi. In Jerry's later hits the big lady/life force would take center stage.

If Milk and Honey didn't come along for you, do you think you would have written your other shows?
JH: I don't think it would have happened as quickly as it happened. Milk and Honey certainly gave me that push, that start. Being nominated for a Tony Award [in 1962, in the category of Best Composer, a category now known as Best Score], I'll never forget the night my name was called out with [Frank Loesser] and Richard Rodgers…to hear my name called out with those guys just put me away. I was still this boy from Jersey City. I hadn't changed. It was an extraordinary adventure, filled with love.
Playbill Interview - 2011

Mack and Mabel

As with Fanny Brice, Gypsy Rose Lee and Maria Von Trapp, Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand have been preserved for future generations in a historically dubious musical. Legends say Mack and Mabel's glorious score was undercut by a gloomy book. There's a little more to it.

Mack and Mabel tells two competing stories. Mabel’s playing the tragic romance. She gets the best songs but most of her character growth happens off stage. Mack’s telling the story of his movie career. He gets 4-5 songs about his movies that start to sound alike. When people say glorious score they're right, but they're usually thinking more Time Heals Everything and less Hit 'Em On the Head.

There’s a large supporting cast with nothing to do because the book was cut to shreds during the out-of-town tryout. Gower Champion thought the key to the show were the re-enactments of Mack Sennet’s films but what’s lasted is Jerry Herman’s score. 

The Apple Tree

Though tuneful and sweet-tempered, this slender series of comic sketches about those silly but overpowering creatures called women was already looking faded in the 1960s, when writers like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem were finding and raising their voices as feminists. But the original “Apple Tree” had the irresistible force of its star, Barbara Harris, on its side. ~ New York Times, Ben Brantley, 2006.

Three short stories made an uneven star vehicle for Barbara Harris but the critics were ready to celebrate her. Sadly she disappeared from Broadway soon after for reasons she kept to herself. When the show was revived with Kristin Chenoweth the critics again felt that the leading lady was grand but the rest of the show was easily forgotten.

The cast album reveals some forgotten gems including “What Makes Me Love Him” and “Gorgeous.”

This concludes my Bock and Harnick series. Next up Jerry Herman's Mack and Mabel. 

Fiddler on the Roof vs. The Rothschilds

With a time crunch this week I've decided to pay homage to (ie steal) the art style of the site that inspired this blog: Three Panel Shakespeare.

Fiddler on the Roof remains Bock and Harnick's biggest hit show. Six years afterwards they would attempt a spiritual successor. Where Tevye fought to hold on to home and tradition Mayer Rothschild wants to break free. He dies with the ghetto walls still standing but his sons carry on the family business and buy their freedom. Losing three quarters through the show bothered some audiences. The show ran a respectable 505 performances but did not capture the international acclaim of Fiddler.

One Year Anniversary

One Year.
160 posts.

Thank you all for reading!

Next on the horizon: More Bock and Harnick, Jerry Herman, and the Broadway musicals of the 2014-2015 season.

She Loves Me

GEORGE: You’ve never really looked at me.

AMALIA: I’m looking at you right now- and shall I tell you what I see? A smug, pompous, petty tyrant-very sure of himself and very ambitious.

But I see him ten years from now- selling shampoo.

And twenty years from now-selling shampoo.

And thirty years from now still selling shampoo!

Because, basically, you know what he is? Just a not-very-bright, not-very-handsome, not-very-young man with balding hair and the personality of a python!

Is this a couple you want to get together? Oddly enough yes. 

She Loves Me is a rare romcom where neither of the sparring lovers has to rewrite their personality to come together at the final curtain. By setting them in a larger workplace drama we see the tensions that are causing them to lash out and the good qualities that will make them compatible when they take the time to really see each other. The show loses money in a large house but delights in a black box.

Tenderloin

How would Guys and Dolls have fared if we spent all our time with General Cartwright in the Save-A-Soul Mission? Maurice Evans was the star and he played the Reverend Brock so he got five stodgy songs. The fun numbers go to the prostitutes and gamblers, leaving the show with a permanent imbalance.

After the 2000 Encores revival the New York Times wrote:

The book, by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman, is full of hokum, but the score has a great deal of the sophisticated charm that is characteristic of the composer and lyricist, whose gift for time-specific musical spirit is apparent in numbers like the winking, oversentimental ballad ''Artificial Flowers'' and the ragtime-ish production number ''Little Old NewYork.'' The score also shines a light on a number of gems. One, ''How the MoneyChanges Hands,'' is an explanation by the chorus of prostitutes to a disguised Reverend Brock of the sequential payoffs of a corrupt capitalist system. Sung to a slowly swaggering Bock melody, it has the same gleeful that's-the-way-of-the-world acceptance as ''Politics and Poker'' from ''Fiorello!''