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Overview
In the 1930s, Broadway's lights still burned brightly. Ethan Mordden completes his history of the Broadway musical by taking a look at this forgotten era. Shows like Anything Goes brought the glitter of Cole Porter and Merman's brass to the public. Innovations in dance were pioneered by Balanchine and others. Scenic advancements made Astaire's The Band Wagon move across the stage in novel ways. Gershwin's revolutionary Porgy and Bess entered the canon of American Classics. And The Cradle Will Rock and Johnny Johnson took the American political temperature. With his trademark wit and style, Ethan Mordden shines the spotlight on Broadway's forgotten decade.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466893474 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/07/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 514 KB |
About the Author
Ethan Mordden is the author of many books, including The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Ethan Mordden is the author of dozens of books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Buddies and I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker and numerous other magazines and journals. He lives in Manhattan.
Read an Excerpt
Sing For Your Supper
The Broadway Musical in the 1930s
By Ethan Mordden
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2005 Ethan MorddenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9347-4
CHAPTER 1
A Lady Needs a Change: The State of the Art
Let's get our bearings by considering the different forms that a typical thirties show could take — in musical comedy, operetta or musical play, and revue. All of these genres were in rotation by 1900, but each developed in a particular direction during the 1920s.
For example, the most notable form of musical comedy was a type more or less invented — at least crystallized — by the producing partnership of Alex A. Aarons and Vinton Freedley in their first joint effort, Lady, Be Good! (1924). The format was built around the mating of star performers with star songwriters, in this case Fred and Adele Astaire and George and Ira Gershwin. I use "star" in the broadest sense, because these two teams, though well noticed, did not truly gain stardom till Lady, Be Good! itself.
Star performers in the musical are almost as old as the musical itself, perhaps best dated to the sudden prominence, in Humpty Dumpty (1868), of George L. Fox after some thirty-five years of obscurity. However, not till the 1920s was the notion of a "star score" even viable. First Age scores were hodgepodges. Then came Victor Herbert, but the lyrics lacked wit; and George M. Cohan's songs were drunk on genre. Not till P. G. Wodehouse arrived, in 1916, was a genuinely sharp lyric possible; and by then Kern and Berlin had begun their invention of American Song.
So now a star score was possible, especially because Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, and DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson came along at about the same time. It is no coincidence that Aarons and Freedley (or Freedley alone) worked with all those named in this paragraph, and they would probably have got to Vincent Youmans as well if he hadn't become his own producer for most of his work from 1927 on. Today, we know the importance of the director and choreographer in the making of musicals, not to mention the librettist. But twenties musical comedy — and its successor in the 1930s — counted on journeymen in these professions. There were a few ace directors, such as George M. Cohan. Most of the others were capably ordinary. Choreographers worked with the ensemble only, for solo dancers usually devised their own routines or assisted each other, as when Fred Astaire guided Marilyn Miller on her Sunny (1925) numbers.
As for the libretto, this, too, was at best functional. Our modern idea of the script that builds character, elaborates place and time, and even enlarges upon an idea — the kind of writing we find in Wonderful Town (1953) or The Music Man (1957) — is, as those parenthesized years remark, something that comes in after the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution in the 1940s. Producers of the 1920s and 1930s didn't star librettists: they put up with them.
There was one other significant ingredient in the Aarons-Freedley show, this one difficult to pin down. It's something like imagination, or ingenuity, or surprise; and it's not clear whose job it was to supply it. But with so many shows resembling each other, a given work might prosper only if it offered something most other shows lacked. What to call this? Freshness? Zip? Delight?
Here's an instance: Flying High (1930), a show about aviation, begins with a book scene between two young women on a Manhattan rooftop. After a bit of identity establishment, telling us who is heroine and who sidekick, the heroine sings her Wanting Song, "I'll Know Him." And while the audience is applauding, the airmail pilot hero, as if answering her summons, floats into view in a parachute.
I hope the reader noticed that Flying High begins with a book scene; and we need to pause here for emphasis. The most persistent of the factoids beloved of certain writers in this field is that absolutely every single show before Oklahoma! began with a choral number: and this is simply not the case. Only in operetta and musical play was an initiating ensemble (or underscored pantomime) preferred. Musical comedy, less permeated by music, sometimes started with a little tootle from the orchestra to set atmosphere but then a dialogue scene — not a few spoken lines: a scene — before reaching the first number. The most famous example of this (because the work is so constantly in view) is the start of Anything Goes (1934). Not only is there a book scene first of all but it is followed, much too early in the evening according to the musical-comedy handbook, by one of the show's major numbers, "I Get a Kick Out Of You."
While very much in the Aarons-Freedley mode, Flying High was produced by George White, the ex-dancer who made fame with his annual revue, the Scandals. Every so often, White put on a book show; Flying High was built around Bert Lahr, who earned a flash stardom in an Aarons-Freedley show about boxing, Hold Everything! (1928). Lahr and Victor Moore were Hold Everything! 's main performing assets, and DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson were its songwriters. White decided to retain the latter set for the Flying High songs, along with John McGowan, who co-wrote Hold Everything! 's libretto with DeSylva. Their assignment was Mission Very Possible: to fit Lahr's specialty character into the aviation background, balancing the crazy Lahr stuff with the requisite Boy Meets Girl stuff.
The character that Lahr specialized in was the adorable fraud, notable not only as the washroom attendant–monarch of DuBarry Was a Lady (1939) or Volpone in Foxy (1964), but in his classic Cowardly Lion. Flying High 's top joke will be that Lahr, as plane mechanic Rusty Krause, breaks the record for time spent in the air because he doesn't know how to land the plane, and the story will have plenty of space for set-piece sketches, including Rusty's press conference after he finally gets down, and, earlier, a physical exam:
DOCTOR: What's your name?
RUSTY: Emil Krause.
DOCTOR: Born?
RUSTY: (doing a take) What do you think?
The examination's blackout jest, involving Lahr's confusing a jigger of whiskey with a urine sample, was the terror of the critics but had audiences roaring. It was a shock laugh, really: the public's realization that, unlike the format that Aarons and Freedley had developed for the Astaires and the Gershwins in Lady, Be Good! six years earlier, thirties musical comedy intended to dare the taboos, shake the place up.
As he had done in Hold Everything!, Bert Lahr occupied the center of the entertainment but not that of the plot, which got rather fascinated with the sweetheart couple. Grace Brinkley played the heroine we met when Flying High 's curtain rose, and Oscar Shaw was her parachuting vis-à-vis, the true aviator of the piece. More interesting to readers today will be Lahr's opposite, Kate Smith, as Pansy Sparks. Smith made her contribution far more in radio than on stage or in film, because she was a big girl in a time that had no sympathy for such, though she became so beloved on the air that she was able to make a success in television in the 1950s. Flying High treated Smith with cruelty; Robert Littell of the New York World felt "embarrassed at the crude sort of fun for which she is the target."
Smith's main reason for being in Flying High was to sing the heck out of the music, for neither romantic lead was a strong vocalist and Lahr had only two numbers. Smith's big one was "Red Hot Chicago," a jazz anthem with a verse suggestive of a clarinet in heat, the whole devoted to the idea of Chicago as the nation's musical capital. So vital was Smith to the evening's musical presentation that after Brinkley and Shaw each got a shot at the torchy "Without Love," Smith was allotted its third rendition so that its melody might at last be savored.
Truth to tell, the Aarons-Freedley plan expects a better score than DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson gave producer White. The songs are good enough, with the functional choruses such as "Air Minded" and "Rusty's Up in the Air" and — typical especially of this songwriting trio — the risqué charm song. "Thank Your Father" mixes a fetching whimsy with its erotic intimations, and "Good For You — Bad For Me" includes a gem of a line in the verse, "Stop that Chevalier stuff!" And Flying High ended as the season's biggest musical hit, at 357 performances.
Still, it was not an outstanding show in any way, and like most others was in part a vaudeville. "Red Hot Chicago" all but blundered into the action, and a dance specialty was performed twice, by the acrobatic girl group the Gale Quadruplets and also by Pearl Osgood, who played Grace Brinkley's sidekick. Note, too, that while the founding title of this format, Lady, Be Good!, left behind one of the hardiest of standards in "Fascinating Rhythm" and is generally extremely tuneful, Flying High didn't even throw off an ephemeral hit tune.
Cole Porter's The New Yorkers (1930) offered a much stronger sing, in a genre different from Aarons-Freedley. The latter style uses any old story at all, with the familiar mistaken identity, purloined jewels, farcical solutions to problems that are worse than the problems, and so on. With The New Yorkers we have stars and songs, but also a novel idea for the libretto, one to create unique events not seen in other shows. Flying High wasn't about aviation; it simply used aviation. But The New Yorkers' subject matter is as discussed as the first theme in a sonata-allegro development section.
The idea for the show came from New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno, who not only helped plot the script, drafted ideas for the sets, and designed some of the costumes, but also drew the logo art. This featured three couples out on the town in full dress kit: a snooty older pair, distracted youngsters, and, at center, a renegade heiress with a crook in a fedora, grinning out of the side of his mouth as he draws his gun.
This mating of the rich and the lawless was The New Yorkers' concept: the corruption of urban life is found not at the bottom of the human scale but at the top, where money is morality. Billed as "a sociological musical satire," The New Yorkers followed the adventures of that renegade heiress (Hope Williams) as she pairs off with gangster Al Spanish (Charles King). The entire evening is cast as her dream; one character keeps getting shot dead and keeps reappearing. Still, the action is otherwise naturalistic rather than fantastical. Arno's plan was to show the places where the sophisticated cluster — a speakeasy, outside Reuben's restaurant, even Sing Sing prison — and fill it with adulterers and entertainers, bootleggers and V.I.P.s. As Arno saw it, they're all of a type, and Herbert Fields' book expanded on the racy satire he had been injecting into the musical since he began work, with Rodgers and Hart, in the mid-1920s:
There comes a time in every man's life when a woman needs fifty dollars.
or:
I don't think it's respectable to accept jewelry from a man — unless you're at least living with him.
or:
There are only two kinds of girls. Those who do and those who say they don't.
The Boy Meets Girl of Hope Williams and Charles King is more liberated than such things had been but half a dozen years before:
KING: Are you a wet?
WILLIAMS: I'm so wet that if you blow on me I'll ripple.
and Williams got a line that so typified the spirit of not only The New Yorkers but thirties musical comedy generally that it has been quoted right up to the present day (sometimes incorrectly lacking the preposition), a definition of Park Avenue:
The street where bad women walk with good dogs.
Hope Williams was pertinently cast as the protagonist of Arno's debunking spoof, for she had established a persona as the smart and idealistic Philip Barry heroine, having created Linda Seton in Barry's Holiday just two years earlier. Thus, Arno and Fields could make a hash of the high moral fibre of Barry's wealthy, who at worst are selfish or silly. In The New Yorkers, the rich — like everyone else — are sociopaths.
The New Yorkers had more than Williams: it was lousy with stars. Williams' parents were Richard Carle and Marie Cahill, the latter a long-reigning diva making a bold career move after playing the wholesome heroines of shows like Sally in Our Alley (1902), The Boys and Betty (1908), and, struck by amnesia, Judy Forgot (1910). In The New Yorkers, Cahill played the kind of mother who presents her daughter with a bejeweled machine gun as a wedding gift, and Cahill's solo (dropped during the Philadelphia tryout) was an early version of the lascivious list song "The Physician," later used in Nymph Errant (1933). Considering that Cahill established her persona introducing "Under the Bamboo Tree"— the number that Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien perform in Meet Me in St. Louis — The New Yorkers really was a breakaway, or perhaps simply Cahill's observation that Cole Porter and Herbert Fields are what happens to Sally, Betty, and Judy twenty years later. It was Cahill's farewell, too: she retired after the show's 168 performances and died in 1933.
Filling out the view was singer Frances Williams, dancer Ann Pennington, and, most important, the comedy team of Lou Clayton, Eddie Jackson, and Jimmy Durante. As bootlegger Jimmie Deegan, Durante was his usual whirlwind of malapropisms, righteous indignation at imagined slurs, and sudden non sequiturs. At one point, a bell went off somewhere, and Durante, with a child's innocence, said to the audience, "Mama, there's somebody in the candy store." "He is a mug at heart" was Brooks Atkinson's report. "There is a huge, elemental joke in finding him removed from a mug's environment and smashing his dangerous way through a metropolitan musical show." Everyone loved especially the first-act finale, a number called "Wood!," during which Durante and his two pals dressed the stage with instances of the subject matter — wagons, pushcarts, barrels, canoes, tree stumps, a barber pole, and even instruments they grabbed from the orchestra players just before the curtain came down.
"Wood!" was not by Cole Porter. It and almost all of Durante's other numbers were specialties run up by Durante himself: "The Hot Patata," "Money!," and "Data!." Porter's job was to figure out what music suited society's loafers, cheats, and sinners, and he didn't have to take a wild guess. However, while his Broadway byline was already fourteen years old, The New Yorkers was only his second book score in any real sense. Barring the short-lived and all but unknown See America First (1916), which would appear to be little more than college-show material or its equivalent taken to Broadway, and the play with songs Paris (1928), Porter's shows before The New Yorkers were revues and Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), a story piece set in Paris.
So this was Porter's first chance to style a précis of the culture he thrived in. There was no all-basic New York ensemble number to bring up the curtain, for The New Yorkers is another piece opening with a book scene. When the chorus finally did get its innings, with "Say It With Gin," Hope Williams had already fallen for Charles King in the pounding minor-key "Where Have You Been?" Amusingly, Porter wrote numbers for both New York homesickness and New York fatigue, in, respectively, Frances Williams' jaunty "Take Me Back To Manhattan" and the lovers' wistful "Let's Fly Away," with the typical Porter patter section referring to people and places of the era.
Oddly, the score's one standard was banned for some years from the radio play that ensures popularity, because of the wicked honesty that was as much a part of Porter as his flip sangfroid. This was "Love For Sale," one of Porter's most distinctive musical inventions. The verse, almost as spare as recitative, seems to set a scene visually, in the moon looking down on a woman on a near-deserted street. A prostitute, she moves into a lightly swinging chorus filled with mocking ironies till the release hits a bitter climax on the most sentimental of phrases — which later earned Porter one of his four Oscar nominations for Best Song —"true love." As the last A section soars to a grand high note on the dominant augmented seventh, Porter repeats the song's title on a curious melisma that falls and then rises in a woebegone sigh.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sing For Your Supper by Ethan Mordden. Copyright © 2005 Ethan Mordden. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
A Lady Needs a Change: The State of the Art * Carry On, Keep Smiling: Musical Comedy I * We're Off to Feathermore: Nymph Errant, Anything Goes, and Jubilee * Harlem on My Mind: The Black Shows and Porgy and Bess * Leave it to Katarina: Operetta Begins its Forty-Year Death Scene * Fun To Be Fooled: Revue * A Song with Social Significance: Politics * It's Better with a Union Man: The Leftist Revue * Life's a Dance: The Choreography of the 1930s * I Got Rhythm: The Music of the 1930s * All in Fun: Musical Comedy II