Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (16 page)

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 interpolated 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 continues 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.

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 successful 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
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
Nevertheless, despite its newfound popularity and acclaim among opera audiences,
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 Armstrong, 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 “plugger” 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 composition with Joseph Schillinger, a theorist who had developed a teachable system 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 instrumental 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 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 presented 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 musical 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.

George and Ira Gershwin. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK.
WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM

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
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 composing his opera.”
⁷
Although by March 1932 he wrote Heyward to express a continued 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 Hammerstein 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 January 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
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 letter 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.

Prior to its eventual acceptance into the operatic community, reviewers and historians alike were uncertain how to classify
Porgy and Bess
. At its premiere 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 Atkinson, expressed reservations about the stylistic disparities in the work when he wrote that Gershwin “has not completely formed his style as an opera composer” 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.”

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