Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (23 page)

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
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

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.

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 spoken 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)

The first eight measures start off conventionally enough and present what anyone familiar with the standard popular song form would interpret 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 accurately
a
’), a version much transformed through condensation. Probably relatively few listeners would recognize that
a
’ (mm. 11–16) is fundamentally 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 measures 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
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.