Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (30 page)

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 performances 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 survey literature as well as in Broadway revivals.
¹

Weill, like Bernstein to follow, entered the world of Broadway after rigorous classical training. In contrast to Bernstein, Weill made his mark as an
avant-garde composer
before
succumbing to the siren song of a more popular musical theater. The trajectory of Gershwin’s career perhaps better exemplifies 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 Humperdinck, 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 composition 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 Dreigroschenoper
(
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 denominators.
²
Just as politicians frequently do not survive a change of party allegiance 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 audience in a particular time and place.
³
According to Drew, Weill discovered with
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 interest … 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 character and theatrical form” enabled him to secure “a special place in the history 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 demonstrated its durability in the American musical theater repertory as
The Threepenny 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
operatic repertory. Meanwhile, despite an increasing number of performances 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 imaginative 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 producing 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 culmination 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, audience-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
assessment: “On the whole, the show is definitely designed for a very low audience … and that, in my opinion explains the terrific success.”
¹³

According to theater lore, Moss Hart (1904–1961) wrote
I Am Listening
when his psychiatrist advised him to cease his successful but inhibiting collaboration 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 problem 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 differences between the world of mundane, conventional human beings and the free untrammeled world of the gods. But this theme had not been developed.”
¹⁹
In Perelman’s rewrite Anstey’s Victorian England was transformed into contemporary Manhattan. Foremost among other significant alterations 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 Collum). By appealing to Venus’s vanity, Leander in the end manages to trick her into relinquishing the ring that gave her life.
²⁰