Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (33 page)

With the exception of “My Ship,” virtually all the music of the show appears in three separate dream sequences that comprise half of the show—the Glamour Dream and the Wedding Dream in act I and the Circus Dream in act II—and nowhere else. In each of these dreams virtually everything is sung or underscored by continuous music, while the other half is composed entirely of spoken dialogue. Hart’s original intent, evident in his draft of the play
I Am Listening
, was to have a play with a small amount of musical interjections rather than “three little one-act operas.”

Once Hart had decided to create a play that could accommodate Weill’s music, he fully embraced the integrated ideal (for the dreams) that within a few years would dominate Broadway. In his prefatory remarks to the published vocal score, Hart expressed the desire for himself and his collaborators not only to avoid “the tight little formula of the musical comedy stage” but to create a show “in which the music carried forward the essential story.” “For the first time … the music and lyrics of a musical ‘show’ are part and parcel of the basic structure of the play.”
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With due respect to Hart, the music in
Lady in the Dark
might more accurately be described as a conscious interruption of a play. But since an important component of the story is the disparity between Liza Elliott’s drab quotidian existence and the colorful pizzazz of her dream world, it makes sense for her to speak only in her waking life and reserve music for her dreams. The dream pretext also allows Weill to present the interruptions within the discontinuity of a dream, since, after all, audiences should not expect dreams to be totally logical. Dreams, as Weill wrote in his thoughts on dreams that he typed out in preparation for
Lady in the Dark
, “are, at the moment of the dreaming, very realistic and don’t have at all the mysterious, shadowy quality of the usual dream sequences in plays or novels.”

Liza’s dreams differ no more from her daily life than escapist musicals of the late 1930s differed from the daily lives of their audiences.
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The musical and dramatic non sequitur that launches “Tschaikowsky” may be equally abrupt as the opening gambits in 1930s musical comedies, for example, “There’s a Small Hotel” in
On Your Toes
. After Liza, accompanied by a chorus, concludes her musical defense—“Tra-la—I never gave my word”—in the breach of promise suit for failing to marry Nesbitt (clearly reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Trial by Jury
), the music comes to a halt with a soft cymbal. The Ringmaster (
Allure
photographer Randy Paxton in real life) then breaks the silence with “Charming, charming, who wrote that music?”; the Jury answers, “Tschaikowsky!,” and the Ringmaster says, “Tschaikowsky? I love Russian composers!” Part of the joke, of course, is that Tchaikovsky did not compose “The Best Years of His Life” (Weill himself had composed this song several years earlier in
Kingdom for a Cow
). Moreover, in the slightly askew chronology of dreamland, the exchange between the Ringmaster and the Jury actually anticipates a real, albeit small, dose of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony (third movement).

While a major theme of
Lady in the Dark
is the disparity between Liza Elliott’s real and dream worlds (although she retains her name in her dreams), her co-workers often appear in her dreams as metaphors for their roles in Liza’s waking life. The metaphors also become increasingly obvious as Liza comes to understand the meaning of her dreams. Of the four men in her life, the “mildly effeminate” Paxton (Danny Kaye) plays a neutral role in Liza’s romantic life and serves the dreaming Liza with equal neutrality (a chauffeur in the Glamour Dream and the ringmaster in the Circus Dream). Nesbitt (Bert Lytell), who “waits” for Liza in real life, plays the role of a head waiter in a night club in the Glamour Dream and the real-life role of Liza’s expectant groom in the Wedding Dream before appearing as the first witness for the prosecution in the Circus Dream. The glamorous movie star Randy Curtis (Victor Mature), who appreciates and defends
Liza’s lack of glamour, naturally appears as Liza’s defense attorney in the Circus Dream.

Similarly, Hart captures the complexity of Liza’s relationship with her obnoxious advertising manager, Charley Johnson (MacDonald Carey). In the Glamour Dream Johnson plays the marine who paints Liza’s portrait for the two-cent stamp, not as Liza sees herself in the dream but as others see her in real life. Already in the first dream he has established himself as firmly grounded in reality and the person who truly sees Liza for what she is (significantly, Johnson’s realism is bound to speech and he never sings in the dreams, although he will eventually sing “My Ship” for Liza). In the Wedding Dream Johnson appears twice, first as the salesman who offers a dagger instead of a ring and then as the minister who, merely by asking the standard question, “If there be any who know why these two [Liza and Nesbitt] should not be joined in holy wedlock let him speak now or forever hold his peace,” prompts a truthful response from his congregation that exposes the wedding as a sham: “This woman knows she does not love this man.”

In the Circus Dream, Johnson acts as the prosecuting attorney and as a surrogate for Dr. Brooks when he repeats the psychiatrist’s diagnosis nearly word for word, adding a new accusatory tone at the end of the dream: “You’re afraid. You’re hiding something. You’re afraid of that music aren’t you? Just as you’re afraid to compete as a woman—afraid to marry Kendall Nesbitt—afraid to be the woman you want to be—afraid—afraid—afraid!” “That music” is of course the song “My Ship,” or rather the opening portion of this song that either leads to dreams (Glamour and Wedding Dreams) or makes a dream come to a stop (the Circus Dream).

In her final session with Dr. Brooks, Liza manages to recall the entire song as she formerly sang it to a boy named Ben. Ben, the Handsomest Boy at Mapleton High, many years earlier had abandoned the teenage Liza, the Most Popular Girl, to return to the Most Beautiful Girl. While she waits for Ben to return, another boy asks to take Liza to dinner (Liza prefers to wait). The boy’s name is Charles, yet another clue that someday a prince named Charley will come. In the final scene, Charley Johnson offers more substantive evidence that he is indeed Mr. Right for Liza Elliott: he knows “My Ship” and will sing it with her as their ship sails off into the golden sunset.

The central unifying musical element of
Lady in the Dark
is certainly “My Ship,” the opening portion of which appears in various harmonizations in each dream before Liza manages to sing it completely in the otherwise musically silent Childhood Dream.
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The musical material of the three main dreams is internally “unified” around a characteristic rhythm (a rumba for the Glamour Dream, a bolero for the Wedding Dream, and a march for the Circus Dream). The Glamour dream contains the greatest use of internal
thematic transformation. Beyond the reuse and development of “My Ship,” however, organic unity is not especially prominent from one dream to the next.

In
One Touch of Venus
the use of song to musically interrupt rather than continue the action may be a characteristic shared with the non-integrated musicals of Porter before
Kiss Me, Kate
. It also suggests a return structurally, if not ideologically, to Weill’s epic creations with Brecht (
Threepenny Opera, Happy End
, and
Mahagonny
). Venus’s final song, “That’s Him,” is representative of Weill’s earlier ideal by distancing the singer from the object and providing a commentary on love rather than an experience of it. Venus even speaks of her love object in the third person.

Dramatic unity in
One Touch of Venus
, outwardly more conventional than the intricate continuous dream scenes in
Lady in the Dark
, nevertheless corresponds closely to the contemporary
Oklahoma!
model based on such devices as thematic transformation in narrative ballets and the use of strong rhythmic profiles to reflect character.
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These two techniques converge in Weill’s recasting of Venus’s (Mary Martin’s) jazzy and uninhibited opening song, “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” moments later in the ballet “Forty Minutes for Lunch,” described in the libretto as “a series of formalized dance patterns parodying the tension of metropolitan life.”
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Like the composers of
Anything Goes, Carousel, Guys and Dolls
, and
West Side Story
, Weill uses quarter-note triplets when he wants to show his characters moving emotionally beyond their metrical boundaries.
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Weill uses the quarter-note triplet most prominently in Whitelaw Savory’s love song “Westwind” (
Example 7.2a
), previously noted as based, appropriately enough as it turns out, on Venus’s Entrance Music. Even Rodney Hatch, when serenading his fiancée Gloria Kramer in his characteristically rhythmically square fashion, manages a few quarter-note triplets in the release of his “How Much I Love You” when he sings “I love you” and “I yearn for you.” But by the time he sings of his “Wooden Wedding” near the end of the show, quarter-note triplets have vanished, and Venus will soon follow.

Venus herself, who tells Savory at their first meeting that “love isn’t the dying moan of a distant violin—it’s the triumphant twang of a bedspring,” generally prefers swing rhythms, but quarter-note triplets remain a prominent part of her musical character (as well as of the Venus Theme).
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She sings them prominently in the swinging and highly syncopated “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” and even opens the verse of the waltz “Foolish Heart” with a quarter-note triplet group. By the time Venus sings “Speak Low” with Rodney, every phrase of both the main portion and the release
includes quarter-note triplets (
Example 7.2b
), and her characteristic swinging rhythms are submerged in the accompaniment.

Example 7.2.
Quarter-note triplets in
One Touch of Venus

(a) “Westwind”

(b) “Speak Low”

In the spoken dialogue that prepares for her final song Venus confesses that while the ring brought the statue to life, it was not responsible for making her love him. Nevertheless, Venus wastes no time in asking Rodney to part his hair on the other side. The song itself, “That’s Him,” lyrically and musically captures Venus’s ambiguity toward Rodney. On one hand, Venus literally compares her potential mate to Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
, she could “pick him out” from the millions of men in the world, and she concludes her A sections by singing “wonderful world, wonderful you.” On the other hand, despite his endearing qualitites, Rodney remains an unlikely romantic partner, especially for a Venus. He is “simple,” “not arty,” “satisfactory,” and appreciated primarily for his functionality, “like a plumber when you need a plumber” and “comforting as woolens in the winter.”

In order to musically express less exalted feelings for her conventional barber, Venus must be deprived of the musical identity she has established for herself in her other songs. Weill conveys this underlying conflict when he
does not allow the accompaniment, significantly filled with Venus’s characteristic swinging rhythms, to share the implied harmony of Venus’s melody. Additionally, although Venus’s melodic line contains several telling vocal leaps, it mainly consists of stepwise motion, again in contrast to her previously established melodically disjunct character portrayed in “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” and “Speak Low.” Only at the end of the A’ sections—the song forms an unusual arch, A-A’-B-A-A’ rather than A-A-B-A—do melody and harmony resolve to the C major that Weill has Venus avoid so assiduously for thirty-three measures. Although throughout this B section Venus returns to her jazzy swing rhythms, she will abandon her unrealistic dream of an unambiguous C major existence with Rodney after three measures. Venus may be in love with a wonderful guy, but a marriage with Rodney would be like Pegasus pulling a milk truck.
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At the end of the song, the delusion can no longer be sustained. When Rodney finishes singing his description of their “Wooden Wedding” with its “trip to Gimbel’s basement, / Or a double feature [pronounced fee’-tcha] with Don Ameche,” Venus must say, “Rodney, I hope I’ll be the right kind of wife for you.”
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Venus’s nightmarish vision of herself as a conventional “housewife” in the concluding ballet, “Venus in Ozone Heights,” finally convinces her to rejoin the gods.