Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (8 page)

After exploring the issue on an impersonal fictive level, Sondheim, in his first two shows of the 1980s,
Merrily We Roll Along
and
Sunday in the Park with George
, directly confronted the issue of artistic compromise in his own work. Such conflicts had been faced more obliquely by several of his spiritual Broadway ancestors surveyed here who experienced similar creative crises in their effort to simultaneously transcend the conventions of their genre and retain their audiences. The Sondheim chapter will acknowledge his attempt to move beyond the integrated action model to the concept (or thematic) musical and his ability to convey the nuances of his increasingly complex characters and musically capture the meaning of his dramatic subjects. It will additionally emphasize how Sondheim’s musicals can be
viewed as the proud inheritance of the great traditional musicals from
Show Boat
to
West Side Story
.

As revivals continue to demonstrate, many musicals between
Show Boat
and
Gypsy
(1927–1959), as well as another group created in the 1960s by several relatively new Broadway artists (perhaps most notably Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s
Fiddler on the Roof
[1964] and John Kander and Fred Ebb’s
Cabaret
[1966]), have not simply disappeared. Although the verdict for these more recent musicals is still inconclusive, it is not too soon to notice the spectacularly long runs and endless tours of Lloyd Webber musicals and the revivals of Sondheim’s earlier shows in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Even if one hesitates to speak openly of a Broadway canon, few would deny the presence of a core repertory of Broadway musicals for the period of this study and considerably beyond. While the term “core repertory” avoids cultural bias and has the benefit of inclusiveness—in the core repertory there is a place somewhere for both Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (the subject of a new final chapter in this second edition)—the idea of a canon, a nucleus of works within a genre perceived as models of excellence or, more simply, the musicals audiences want to see over and over again, remains a useful if somewhat unpalatable construct. In any event, it is ironic that the deconstruction and even demolition of canons, including the venerable and unassailable eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European classical repertory, has become fashionable just as a firm foundation for canonization has begun to emerge in the genre of Broadway musicals.

While it is still permissible to say that some musicals are more popular than others, most critics and historians are loath to argue that some are actually more worthy of canonical status.
²⁵
Northrop Frye, perhaps wisely (or least safely), chastised advocates of both “popular” and “art for art’s sake” camps when he wrote in his
Anatomy of Criticism
that “the fallacy common to both attitudes is that a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other.”
²⁶

The stance of the present volume is that “popularity” and “art for art’s sake” are not mutually exclusive values, that writing for a commercial market can lead to inspiration as well as compromise. Perhaps we cannot explain or tell why this is so, but we can nonetheless revel in the many enchanted evenings (and some matinees) that these musicals continue to provide.

T
he
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
informed its readers in 1980 without exaggeration or understatement that
Show Boat
is “perhaps the most successful and influential Broadway musical play ever written.”
¹
For the authors of
New Grove
, the impact of
Show Boat
has been “inestimable, particularly in that it impelled composers of Broadway musicals to concern themselves with the whole production as opposed to writing Tin Pan Alley songs for interpolation.”
²
For the many who judge a show by how many songs they can hum or whistle when they leave (or enter) the theater,
Show Boat
offered “at least” an unprecedented six song hits for the ages; moreover, nearly all of these songs, according to
Grove
, “are integral to the characterization and story.” And the many who place opera on a more elevated plane than Broadway musicals could be impressed by the knowledge that
Show Boat
, when it entered the repertory of the New York City Opera in 1954, was the first Broadway show to attain operatic stature.
³
By virtually any criteria,
Show Boat
marks a major milestone in the history of the American musical and has long since become the first Broadway show to be enshrined in the musical theater museum.

Show Boat
gained recognition in the scholarly world too when in 1977 it became the first Broadway musical to receive book-length attention in Miles Kreuger’s thorough and authoritative
“Show Boat”: The Story of a Classic American Musical
.
⁴
Five years later, manuscript material for the musical numbers discarded during the tryout months prior to the December 1927
premiere was discovered in the Warner Brothers Warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey.
⁵
By April 1983 the Houston Opera Company—which had in the late 1970s presented and recorded a
Porgy and Bess
that restored material cut from its pre-Broadway tryouts—arrived in New York with a version of
Show Boat
that used Robert Russell Bennett’s original orchestrations (rediscovered in 1978) and most of the previously discarded tryout material.

In 1988 John McGlinn (1953–2009), who had served as a music editor for the Houston Opera, conducted a recording of
Show Boat
on EMI/Angel that incorporated Bennett’s 1927 orchestrations and restored tryout material. McGlinn’s recording offered a significant amount of dialogue with musical underscoring. It even included an appendix containing longer versions of several scenes (shortened for the New York opening) and songs that Kern composed for the 1928 London engagement, the 1936 Universal film (with a screenplay by Hammerstein and new songs by Kern), and the New York revival in 1946.
⁶

Critics who attended the opening night on December 27, 1927, at the Ziegfeld sensed that
Show Boat
was not only a hit but a show of originality and significance. Robert Coleman, for example, described
Show Boat
in the
Daily Mirror
as “a work of genius” and a show which demonstrated the sad fact that “managers have not until now realized the tremendous possibilities of the musical comedy as an art form.”
⁷
Coleman’s review is also representative in its praise of the original run’s exceptional production values, including “fourteen glorious settings” and a superb cast. Although
Show Boat
, in contrast to other Ziegfeld productions, did not open with a lineup of scantily clad chorus girls, Coleman thought he saw “a chorus of 150 of the most beautiful girls ever glorified by Mr. Ziegfeld.”
⁸

Within a few days after its opening Percy Hammond wrote that
Show Boat
was “the most distinguished light opera of its generation,” and Brooks Atkinson described it as “one of those epochal works about which garrulous old men gabble for twenty-five years after the scenery has rattled off to the storehouse.”
⁹
Nearly every critic described Kern’s score either as his best or at least his recent best. Surveys of the American musical as far back as Cecil Smith’s
Musical Comedy in America
(1950) support these original assessments and single out
Show Boat
as the only musical of its time “to achieve a dramatic verisimilitude that seemed comparable to that of the speaking stage.”
¹⁰
Beginning in the late 1960s historians would almost invariably emphasize
Show Boat
’s unprecedented integration of music and drama, its three-dimensional characters, and its bold and serious subject matter, including miscegenation and unhappy marriages.

Although critics for the most part found silver linings nearly everywhere, they also freely voiced their discontent with one aspect of the work:
the libretto.
Show Boat
might give the highly respected (albeit somewhat curmudgeonly) critic George Jean Nathan “a welcome holiday from the usual grumbling,” but most critics felt that the libretto, while vastly superior to other books of the time, did not demonstrate the same perfection as Jerome Kern’s music and Florenz Ziegfeld’s production.
¹¹
In particular, critics voiced their displeasure with the final scene. Robert Garland, who described
Show Boat
as “an American masterpiece,” noted some “faltering, like many another offering, only when it approaches the end,” and Alexander Woollcott wrote that “until the last scene, when it all goes gaudy and empty and routine, it is a fine and distinguished achievement.”
¹²

More recent historians continued to view
Show Boat
as a refreshing but flawed departure from other shows of its day. Richard Traubner, for example, who praised
Show Boat
as “the greatest of all American operettas,” attributed this greatness to its triumph over “libretto problems.”
¹³
Even
Show Boat
aficionado Kreuger corroborates the verdict of earlier complaints: “As a concession to theatrical conventions of the time, Hammerstein kept everyone alive to the end and even arranged a happy reunion for the long-parted lovers, decisions, he revealed to this writer, that he came to regret.”
¹⁴

Despite these reservations, only Lehman Engel, the distinguished Broadway conductor and the first writer to establish canonical criteria for the American musical (see the “Coda” to
chapter 1
), would banish
Show Boat
from this elite group. Although Engel acknowledges that
Show Boat
’s “score and lyrics are among the best ever written in our theater,” he tempers this praise by his assessment of “serious weaknesses.”
¹⁵
For Engel,
Show Boat
’s “characters are two-dimensional, its proportions are outrageous, its plot development predictable and corny, and its ending unbearably sweet.”
¹⁶
Engel is particularly perturbed by six “not only silly but sloppy” coincidences that take place in Chicago within a three-week period in 1904 (significantly all in the second act), coincidences that are comically improbable, even in a city with half its present population.
¹⁷

Of the two principal collaborators, Hammerstein (1895–1960) had far more experience with operetta-type musicals as well as recent successes.
Wild-flower
(1923), created with co-librettist Otto Harbach and composers Herbert Stothart and Vincent Youmans, launched a phenomenally successful decade for Hammerstein as librettist, lyricist, and director for many of Broadway’s most popular operettas and musical comedies:
Rose-Marie
(1924) and
The Wild Rose
(1926) with Rudolf Friml and Stothart;
Song of the Flame
(1925) with George Gershwin and Stothart; and the still-revived
The Desert Song
(1926) with Sigmund Romberg. Two years before
Show Boat
Hammerstein had also collaborated with Harbach and Kern on the latter’s most recent success,
Sunny
.

Kern (1885–1945), whose mother was a musician, “had some European training in a small town outside of Heidelberg” when he was seventeen and studied piano, counterpoint, harmony, and composition the following year at the New York College of Music.
¹⁸
Ten years before
Show Boat
, Kern stated in interviews that “songs must be suited to the action and the mood of the play.”
¹⁹
At the same time he also considered devoting his full attention to composing symphonies.

Although there is no reason to doubt Kern’s aspiration “to apply modern art to light music as Debussy and those men have done to more serious work,”
²⁰
it was not until
Show Boat
that Kern was able to fully realize these goals. Kern had, of course, previously created complete scores for an impressive series of precocious integrated musicals during the Princess Theatre years (1915–1918), at least two of which,
Very Good Eddie
and
Leave It to Jane
, have been successfully revived in recent decades. For the earlier years of his career, however, Kern had been confined mainly to composing interpolated songs to augment the music of others. Two of these, “How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?” interpolated into
The Earl and the Girl
(1905), and “They Didn’t Believe Me” from
The Girl from Utah
(1914), remain among his best known. Similarly,
Sally
(1920) and
Sunny
(1925), two vehicles for the superstar Marilyn Miller and his most popular shows composed during the years between the intimate Princess Theatre productions and the grandiose
Show Boat
, are remembered primarily for their respective songs “Look for the Silver Lining” and “Who?” and have not fared well in staged revivals.

Before 1924, Edna Ferber had never even heard of the once-popular traveling river productions that made their home on show boats. By the following summer she had begun the novel
Show Boat
, which was published serially in
Woman’s Home Companion
between April and September 1926 and in its entirety in August by Doubleday. Early in October, Kern, who had read half of Ferber’s new book, phoned Woollcott to ask for a letter of introduction to its author and met her at a performance of Kern’s latest musical,
Criss Cross
, that same evening. Even before Ferber had signed a contract on November 17 giving Kern and Hammerstein “dramatico-musical” rights to her hot property, the co-conspirators had already completed enough material to impress
Follies
impresario Ziegfeld nine days later.
²¹
On December 11 Kern and Hammerstein signed their contracts, according to which a script was to be delivered by January 1 and the play was to appear “on or before the first day of April 1927.”
²²