NYPL Blogs: Musical of the Month

Musical of the Month: Barefoot Boy With Cheek

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Thu, 23 May 2013 09:32:07 -0400

A guest post by Ben West

“A young alumnus of the University of Minnesota and an old hand from Harvard and Broadway have turned out a wonderfully amusing musical comedy called Barefoot Boy With Cheek. A horde of exuberant young singers, dancers and actors, all of them bursting with vigor and brimming with talent, bounced it around the stage of the Colonial Theatre last night and rolled the customers out into the aisles. It’s the newest of the hits and one of the happiest.”

If this deliciously zany 1947 romp, based on the best-selling novel of the same name, was not previously on your radar, it is likely because Barefoot Boy chalked up a Broadway run of only 108 performances, despite Elliot Norton’s rave review in the Boston Post – not to mention those from the Boston Herald (“smash hit”), Billboard (“zippy, tuneful and altogether delightful”) and the other news outlets that covered the musical’s pre-Broadway engagements. It seems the New York critics were less taken with the show than their regional counterparts. But first things first...

“It was [Pulitzer Prize-winning composer] Morton Gould who gave me the idea of doing a musical with Max Shulman’s book as its base,” veteran producer-director George Abbott recounted in an interview. “Then there was the question of getting the right people to do the score, and all at once I remembered Sidney Lippman and Sylvia Dee [of “My Sugar is So Refined” and “Too Young”], who had submitted some work to me in the past.”

An outrageous satire of college life at the ‘fictitious’ University of Minnesota, Barefoot Boy With Cheek is a thoroughly nutty musical farce in the grand Broadway tradition (and written by three Broadway neophytes, no less). With a smart, tuneful score by Mr. Lippman and Ms. Dee and a sharply comic book by Mr. Shulman, steeped in his signature drollness, it is one of those rare musical comedies in which all of the elements – book, music, lyrics – come together seamlessly to create an exciting, genuinely engaging narrative told in a stunningly specific style and inhabited by an array of colorful, unique characters.

Moreover, the musical is superbly structured. Sun columnist Betty Brown’s 1947 article about the show noted, in fact, that Mr. Shulman “[rewrote] the script nine times” since it had been “grabbed for Broadway.” That Barefoot Boy is so tightly constructed is no small feat when you consider the story centers on freshman Asa Hearthrug, his trio of love-starved coeds (Clothilde Pfefferkorn, Noblesse Oblige and Yetta Samovar, the resident communist), the frat boys who con him into pledging their bankrupt fraternity (Roger Hailfellow, Shylock Fiscal), the smoother-than-smooth senior he unwittingly challenges (Kermit McDermott), his sardonic, over-the-hill professor (Schultz) and the rest of a rowdy gang, all set against the backdrop of a raucous student government election and an over-budget Pan-Hellenic dance. Absurd? Absolutely. Blissfully so!

If my aggressively positive characterization of this decidedly forgotten musical seems somewhat over-the-top, there could be three explanations: 1) in the short time I have known it, Barefoot Boy has become one of my favorite musicals; 2) I believe Mr. Shulman’s libretto to be among the best ever written for a musical comedy; or 3) it really is that good.

With a cast including Red Buttons, Ellen Hanley and celebrated comic actress Nancy Walker, Barefoot Boy journeyed to Boston and New Haven for its exceptionally well-received out-of-town tryouts, with essentially the sole criticism being the need for minor trimming and tightening. Its construction, however, was clearly sound. (Incidentally, my research has found only two unused musical numbers that had been written for the show: “Don’t Spoil the Party”, originally intended as the act one finale; and “Put ‘er There, Pal”, the lyric of which appears in an early draft of the libretto, though it is unclear if any music was ever composed for it.) With only a few minor changes on the road, namely “After Graduation Day” shifting positions, the stars seemed to be aligning for Broadway’s newest hit.

Yet, when Barefoot Boy ultimately opened in New York on April 3, 1947, the reviews were distinctly less enthusiastic, however favorable, to be sure. It seems most main stem critics were preoccupied with taking Mr. Abbott to task for presenting yet another collegiate satire filled with what the World-Telegram called the “same old campus humor.” Reviewing the musical in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson acknowledged its talented cast, clever lyrics and buoyant atmosphere, but summed up his comments by noting that “in his association with embryo citizens Mr. Abbott has had more real fun in the past.”

Still, the old-school entertainment had its fans, and Mr. Abbott and his team got encouraging news in the musical’s first full week of Broadway performances when it pulled in the highest one-week box office gross in the twenty-three year history of the Martin Beck Theatre: $34,232. But the momentum did not last. Barefoot Boy ended its brief run on July 5, an unfortunate victim of timing, as I see it, having been the latest in a string of youth-driven George Abbott musicals like Too Many Girls and Best Foot Forward, to which some critics compared it. Had Barefoot Boy been produced a few years earlier, or even later for that matter, I suspect the situation would have turned out differently.

Regardless, Barefoot Boy With Cheek remains a first-rate musical comedy. And from one of my favorite authors. A prolific writer across virtually all mediums, Mr. Shulman’s resume boasts numerous best-selling satirical novels (Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys!), a series of successful short stories introducing the Dobie Gillis character, a popular television program (“The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”), a handful of hit film adaptations (The Tender Trap) and a Tony-nominated Broadway musical (How Now, Dow Jones). Yet, virtually all of his work is now out-of-print and overlooked, particularly his theatrical endeavors.

But the tides are hopefully turning. In January 2011, my not-for-profit production company UnsungMusicalsCo. (UMC) began exploring Barefoot Boy through its developmental reading series. Though we have made a few minor musical and textual edits (which include restoring “Don’t Spoil the Party” as the act one closer, adding a musical moment for Professor Schultz and shifting “After Graduation Day” to its original position), the libretto we are using remains substantially as Mr. Shulman wrote it. I very much look forward to bringing today’s audiences a fully realized production of this extraordinary musical comedy in the not-too-distant future. Until then, I leave you with the Author’s Note from the novel upon which this daffy delight is based:

“All characters and events in this book are fictitious. The University of Minnesota is, of course, wholly imaginary. I think it would be of some interest to the reader to know how I happened to pick the name ‘Minnesota’. It is a combination of two Indian words – ‘Minne’ meaning a place where four spavined men and a minor woman ate underdone pemmican, and ‘sota’ meaning the day the bison got away because the hunter's wife blunted his arrows in a fit of pique. The combination of these two words means little, if anything, but the reader must consider that they are the only two Indian words I know.” –Max Shulman

A note from Doug

Like Ben West's other guest blogs, this month's Musical of the Month differs from our usual practice in several ways. As West describes above, the script included with this post is not the original version but a revision made for the the UnsungMusicalsCo production. Further, both the original and UnsungMusicalCo version remain under copyright protection, and the PDF of the new version is offered here for research use only with the permission of the rights holders. If you are interested in producing this script, please contact UnsungMusicalsCo at info@unsungmusicals.org

All photos in this blog entry are used with the permission of Eileen Darby Images, Inc.

Download the Libretto (PDF only this month)

Musical of the Month: The Fig Leaves Are Falling

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:35:41 -0400

A guest post by Ben West.

Strange as it may seem given its frank narrative and its traditional sound, The Fig Leaves Are Falling is not a conventional musical. This colorful, vivacious and disarmingly sweet 1969 confection is—at its core and in its construction—a unique and exciting entertainment that marvelously straddles the worlds of 1960s musical comedy and 1940s revue. It was, in fact, Fig Leaves' central story and stylized conceit that initially grabbed me and ultimately defined the reimagined UnsungMusicalsCo. (UMC) production.

Currently in its fifth year, UMC is a not-for-profit production company that I founded with a focus on obscure but artistically sound works from the Golden Age of musical theatre, a term I more broadly define as the 40 fruitful years between Mr. Florenz Ziegfeld and Mr. Stephen Sondheim's respective Follies: 1931-1971. Since its inception, UMC has given voice to nearly a dozen unsung musicals ranging in form from developmental readings and world premiere concerts to fully staged Off-Broadway productions, our most recent being the aforementioned musical comedy by "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh" scribe Allan Sherman and Tony Award winner Albert Hague.

While the material on which we focus is inherently pre-existing, I am particularly passionate about treating each property as a new musical thereby allowing the artists involved the freedom to form their own interpretations of the piece without feeling bound by the parameters of what may have worked wonderfully for the original team. I strongly believe that this process has the greatest potential of yielding a final product that feels intrinsically connected to its participating artists, even when the originating text has remained largely intact.

As such, my goal in researching potential projects is always to find those well-crafted works for which I have a visceral connection and a specific vision. There are, to be sure, an array of Golden Age gems whose fundamental foundation and individual components have struck me in their entirety, the deliciously zany 1947 musical comedy Barefoot Boy With Cheek by Max Shulman, Sidney Lippman and Sylvia Dee being one. In the case of Fig Leaves, however, it was specifically the work's core narrative and stylized presentational structure to which I was drawn. And so, with the intention of focusing in on these two principal elements and its innate vaudevillian feel, I began to adapt the piece, specifically trying to utilize as much of the authors' original material as possible. Given Fig Leaves' turbulent history, there was likely to be an abundance.

Originally titled Birth is the Coward's Way Out, Fig Leaves did not have an easy life. To begin with, the musical appeared to suffer from a considerable identity crisis, not unlike its central character. Essentially a love story built around a stagnant twenty-year marriage, its temporary dissolution and its subsequent rebirth, Fig Leaves nonetheless spent significant amounts of time endeavoring to sprinkle its narrative with socio-political commentary, timely teenage sexual angst and showbiz schtick, most notably the auctioning of a barbecued chicken to an unsuspecting audience member. (Despite being best known as a Grammy Award-winning parodist and comedian, Mr. Sherman could have perhaps dispensed with the social commentary here.)

To make matters worse, the production itself was steeped in troubles from the outset. Actor Jack Klugman had been hired to direct but made a sudden departure immediately prior to the start of rehearsals. Veteran director George Abbott picked the reigns and pushed forward with top-billed stars Barry Nelson, Dorothy Loudon and Jules Munshin, that is until the latter handed in his resignation during the pre-Broadway engagement in Philadelphia. Throughout the entire production process, substantial structural changes persisted, with multiple musical numbers being assigned to different characters while others were eliminated altogether (some only to reappear days later).

When the musical ultimately opened in New York on January 2, 1969, Fig Leaves received blistering reviews. The four-performance run is perhaps best remembered for Dorothy Loudon's Tony-nominated turn (literally stopping the show on more than one occasion) and the New York Times review in which Clive Barnes noted, "There is nothing much wrong with [the show] that a new book, new music, new lyrics, new settings, new direction, new choreography and a partially new cast would not quite possibly put right." Not unexpectedly, Fig Leaves quickly disappeared into obscurity.

Still, one simply cannot deny the power and excitement of its central story and the unique way in which it is told. And so, 44 years later, the Fig Leaves began falling once again in a new production which sought to embrace both the inherent charms of the musical's satirical suburban tale and the vibrant air of its distinctive style, all the while shedding Mr. Sherman's 1960s topical treatises.

My goal with any adaption is to respectfully reshape the respective work through carefully considered revisions that: 1) stem from a specific artistic vision; 2) work to further inform the storytelling; and 3) are purposefully implemented in such as way as to both honor and enhance the original landscape laid out by the work's creators. Fig Leaves was no different.

I began by focusing on the composition's central characters: Harry and Lillian Stone, our married couple; Charlie Montgomery, their long-time friend with whom each shares a rather colorful past; and Ms. Chapman, the attractive young secretary who leads Harry astray. With the hope of gathering moments and material that would speak to the relationships of these four individuals, I parsed through three early drafts of the script and listened intently to a live audio recording of the original production.

With regard to the musical's overall construction, its Broadway incarnation showcased several moments resembling those on a television game show, a format well-known to Mr. Sherman, having created and produced the long-running CBS hit "I've Got a Secret." Taking my cue from their own structural suggestions, I began to more clearly define the framework of our Fig Leaves as that of a 1960s variety show, which would allow us to further accent the direct audience address found in the original as well as the vaudevillian atmosphere to which Mr. Sherman and Mr. Hague were alluding in 1969.

Interestingly, I found that more than 40 songs had been written for the Fig Leaves score. While most were utilized in various versions of the libretto, there are several songs which appear never to have made it out of the proverbial trunk. True, some are simply suggestive sketches consisting of little more than a simple sixteen bar chorus. But, a handful of others are, in fact, fully constructed musical numbers. "The Question Song," in particular, is a wonderfully warm and reflective tune, almost unlike any other item in the show. Though I cannot be certain, I suspect it was written for our leading man's private moment of reckoning late in Act Two, a moment ultimately occupied by "Did I Ever Really Live?" Though similar in sentiment, "The Question Song" is quite different in style and execution, ultimately lacking the power needed to fill the eleven o'clock slot. (Though it is destined to become a cabaret staple.)

"Anything Can Happen," "Man" and "Westchester Wildcat," however, proved much more in line with the tone of the late-'60s musical comedy and quickly made their way back into the score. Two previously discarded scenes were restored. Our sexy, smart and sensible secretary Ms. Chapman picked up a much needed new name: Pookie (yes, Pookie) became Jenny. And our married couple's best friend, Charlie, became the host of the country's hottest weekly variety show: The Fig Leaves Are Falling.

The resulting incarnation opened at the Connelly Theatre in January 2013, with The New York Times calling it "a crisp production with exceptional singing and smart, smooth choreography."

The Fig Leaves Are Falling is a show unlike any on which I have had the opportunity to work. It was an honor to revisit Allan Sherman and Albert Hague's extraordinarily joyous musical, albeit in this new adaptation which I hope paid homage to the original while also creating an identity of its own: 1960s musical comedy by way of a 1940s revue with a dash of 1920s vaudeville.

No, our reimagined Fig Leaves is not a conventional musical. And therein lies the fun.

A note from Doug

Like Ben West's last guest entry on Make Mine Manhattan, this month's Musical of the Month differs from our usual practice in several ways. As West describes above, the script included with this post is not the original version but a revision made for the the UnsungMusicalsCo production performed in January. Further, both the original and UnsungMusicalCo version remain under copyright protection, and the PDF of the new version is offered here for research use only with the permission of the rights holders. If you are interested in producing this script, please contact UnsungMusicalsCo at info@unsungmusicals.org

Download the Libretto (PDF only this month)

Download "The Question Song" (PDF)

Musical of the Month: Listen to Very Good Eddie

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 07:18:24 -0400

I'll be posting a April's Musical of the Month later this week, but before I do, I wanted to share the results of a little experiment.

I recently discovered a new music streaming subscription called Rdio which, for a monthly subscription fee (currently about $5), allows one unlimited access to all of the songs in their catalog. It's more or less the same idea as Spotify, but with one really cool feature for programmers: an open and easy to use API (application programming interface) for playing music within your own site.

As I described in an earlier post, an API is a set of computer commands that software developers expose to the world so that other programmers can perform an action on their systems (often to retrieve data). NYPL just launched our own API to expose our digital collections and metadata. Rdio's API allows me a legal way to play music within an NYPL owned web page.

Rdio's API gives me to connect commercial musical recordings to the historical musical theater scripts. If you've ever listened to a cast recording while reading along in a printed script, you'll know its a bit of an awkward experience. I've been looking for ways to make this connection of music and text more elegant, and Rdio may have provided one.

The link below points to an HTML version of the script for Very Good Eddie which I've connected to the 1975 revival cast recording. You will need Flash to use the page, and it will not work on a mobile browser (a phone, eReader, iPad, etc.). You may also need to allow popups for the page. When the page loads you'll be asked to sign in to Rdio or to sign up for a new Rdio account. You can do this either by linking your Facebook account to Rdio, or by creating a new account from scratch (the sign up form makes the Facebook path a lot clearer, probably to encourage you to share your Facebook profile with Rdio). If you've never used the service before, you won't need to pay anything or provide any credit card information as Rdio currently offers a relatively generous preview period to test it out. After creating an account, you may need to refresh and "connect your Rdio account to Musical of the Month."

Once you've signed in, you'll see a little "play" icon in both the upper left hand corner (above the table of contents) and at the beginning of many of the songs. If you click one of the icons within the text itself, the music will start at the moment in the musical. Note that the music of the revival appears to have differed significantly from the original production, so not every song is linked to the text.

Let me know what you think.

Read it now: Very Good Eddie (HTML+Rdio edition)

Musical of the Month: Very Good Eddie

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:07:10 -0400

Last August, musical theater historian Laura Frankos detailed the history of the Princess Musicals in her introduction to Oh, Boy! This month's musical, Very Good Eddie, was the second of this set of smaller-and-smarter musicals produced at the Princess Theater on 39th street (following Nobody's Home and immediately preceding Oh, Boy!).

The musical is an adaptation of Over Night, a play written by co-bookwriter, Philip Bartholomae, with a plot that would not seem entirely out of place in a modern romantic comedy or television sitcom: Two newly-married, oddly-matched couples from Manhattan are about to board a cruise up the Hudson to a honeymoon hotel in Poughkeepsie. One of the husbands and one of the wives step off the boat to retrieve something left on shore. The boat leaves, separating the couples and creating a situation of innocent impropriety of a kind common in this sort of comedy.

This sort of comedy, though, was not entirely common in musicals in 1915. P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton write of Very Good Eddie in their autobiography Bring on the Girls:

It was a farce-comedy which would have been strong enough to stand on its own feet without the help of music, the first of its kind to rely on situation and character laugh instead of instead of clowning and Weberfieldian cross talk with which the large-scale musicals filled in between the romantic scenes.[1]

The "Weberfieldian cross talk" to which Bolton and Kern refer is the kind of comic chatter and quick puns that were common in vaudeville performance like those produced by the Weberfield company at the turn of the last century. In other words, unlike, for instance, the 1903 Wizard of Oz (which depends on puns, innuendo, and political references for laughs), the humor of Very Good Eddie's is mostly based in the complicated but almost believable situation in which the characters find themselves.

Nonetheless, vaudevillian humor is certainly present in Very Good Eddie. There is certainly enough "clowning and Weberfieldian cross talk" in the scenes involving the hotel clerk in Act Two (e.g. Clerk: I'll give you a room over the bowling alley. Rivers: Is that a quiet room? Clerk: Oh yes, there you can hear a pin drop."). Moreover, the title of the show itself comes, as Bolton and Wodehouse explain in their autobiography, "from a catch phrase which Fred Stone [the Scarecrow in Oz] had made popular in the latest Montgomery and Stone extravanganza at Charles Dillingham's globe." Ethan Mordden explains in his Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical:

In circus argot, ventriloquists' dummies were called "eddies," and the duller voice throwers used the line "very good, Eddie!" as punctuation in the act. [Co-bookwriter] Bartholomae called his diminuative hero Eddie because his efficient bride controls him as if she were pulling his strings... [p 73]

Vaudeville, then, was present at the Princess, but for the most part, the comedy is more like an episode of Friends than a sketch on Saturday Night Live.

Critics in both 1915 and 1975 noted that the score is not among Kern's best, though it is certainly no embarrassment to the composer. Happily, unlike most of the musicals we've published in this series, there are a number of ways to hear it. Colin Johnson has produced computer-generated MIDI files of most of the music and hosted these on his "Victorian and Edwardian Musical Shows" pages. A few songs are preserved on early recordings (unfortunately not with the original cast) and are now available online through the Library of Congress's National Jukebox. However, the most complete (albeit slightly updated) recording of the music is the cast album of the Goodspeed production.

The musical was a hit and ran for a total of 341 performances over a series of four transfers in a kind of tour of 39th street that included the Princess theater, the Casino Theater, the 39th Street Theater, and a return to the Princess. Sixty years later, in 1975, the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut staged a revival to great success, and the production transferred to Broadway and London. One could imagine that even today a production in a concert series like Musicals Tonight or Encores might be successful; the script remains, nearly a century after the first production and 40 years after its last revival, remarkably entertaining.

About the text

This text was transcribed from a typescript held by the Library for the Performing Arts by Professor Allen Woll of Rutgers University and his students: Clair Kotula, Aleah Holcomb, Gregory R. Sellers, and Alexandra Blake-Sanderlin. To the best of my knowledge, the text provided here has never before been published, and so it remains under copyight. However, the Bolton estate has given us the kind permission to post this here for research use ONLY. If you are interested in staging or performing this script, please contact Tams-Witmark Music Library, Inc.

File type What it's for ePub eBook readers (except Kindle) Mobi Kindle PDF Adobe Acrobat HTML Web browsers Plain Text Just about anything TEI Digital Humanities Geeks

[1] page 4. Also cited in Stanley Greene's The World of Musical Comedy.

Musical of the Month: Make Mine Manhattan

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:20:51 -0500

A guest post by UnsungMusicalsCo director, Ben West

Currently in its fifth year, UnsungMusicalsCo. (UMC) is a not-for-profit production company that I founded with the aim of researching, restoring and presenting obscure but artistically sound works from the Golden Age of musical theatre. It should be noted upfront that I am perhaps more liberal than most in my definition of the Golden Age, by which I mean those 40 glorious years between the Follies: Mr. Florenz Ziegfeld's in 1931 and Mr. Stephen Sondheim's in 1971.

While all of our projects had a prior life, even those that were unproduced (e.g. Gatsby), I am particularly passionate about treating every one of them as a new musical such that the artists involved have the freedom to create their own interpretations of the piece without feeling bound by the parameters of what may have worked wonderfully for the original team. The result is hopefully a production that has grown out of and is specific to its participating artists, even though the material is pre-existing and potentially unchanged.

As some of you may know, UMC programming began in 2009 with a developmental production of How Now, Dow Jones as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

In March 2012, three years, three readings and two world premiere concerts later, we presented our first fully staged Off-Broadway production: Make Mine Manhattan by Arnold B. Horwitt and Richard Lewine. Beyond being a delicious show, Manhattan is the embodiment of UMC's mission to research, preserve and present unknown musical works that deserve to be a part of the modern musical theatre repertoire. It is a delightful musical revue with charming, tuneful, well-crafted material and a wonderfully sweet sense of style. A resounding hit in 1948, Make Mine Manhattan has been decidedly forgotten.

One often thinks that if a show is forgotten, it must have been a flop. Manhattan, in fact, ran a year on Broadway and had a subsequent tour starring Bert Lahr. No, it was by no means a flop. Rather, I believe Manhattan has been neglected for two main reasons: 1) the traditional revue format is no longer considered commercially popular; and 2) its authors, as acclaimed as they were, never became household names, their work therefore drifting into obscurity. It is these types of projects that are a major focus of UMC, thus making Manhattan an ideal candidate for our inaugural mainstage production.

In their initial drafts, the authors describe the musical, originally titled A Nice Place to Visit, as "a pocket revue, designed for a cast of eight, a small stage with either two pianos and rhythm, or a small orchestra. The cast should be highly versatile – they sing, play in sketches, dance a few steps now and then and may act as one of the revolving narrators. The look of the show is stylish but unpretentious. No curtain is necessary and only occasional, but simple, furniture and props are needed. Most of the time these are pushed or brought on stage by the cast themselves. The scenes flow from one to the other almost as 'dissolves', and the whole atmosphere is light. The cast members enjoy what they're doing and show it."

What ultimately opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1948, however, was a full-blown Broadway revue that set aside the intimate original concept in favor of a grander, razzle-dazzle affair. While it received rave reviews, Make Mine Manhattan displayed little of its "pocket revue" origins. That said, it fit spectacularly well into the 1940s Broadway environment in ways A Nice Place to Visit might not have.

On the road to New York, Manhattan was greeted with capacity crowds, great press and a spot of gossip. A report in the Philadelphia Bulletin indicated that the musical was:

"[...]undergoing last-minute tightening and sandpapering before braving Broadway. Writer-director George S. Kaufman dropped in last week to give the once-over for the skits in the Forrest SRO hit, for which his sidekick and frequent collaborator Moss Hart anted up 10% of the $165,000 nut. Kaufman restaged one sketch, an item concerning drama critics. As of Friday night, the revue's finale has been bolstered with new lyrics ["Never Again" became "Glad to Be Back."]"

But that was rather tame as far as gossip goes, and Manhattan went on to a celebrated run which helped launch the career of featured player Sid Caesar. (The sketch director of Make Mine Manhattan was one Max Liebman, with whom Caesar would soon create the acclaimed television series "Your Show of Shows.") Make Mine Manhattan is a classic revue wonderfully emblematic of its time, perfectly capturing the sweetness, levity and effervescence of a sparkling metropolis. As such, I was immediately drawn to the piece and found it to be an ideal fit for UMC.

The problem? Its original production had a cast over 30 strong. Part of UMC's mission is to give our projects fully realized productions such that we might breathe new life into the material for contemporary audiences. Given that we are still a young organization with limited resources, there was no way we could do justice to a piece requiring a cast of 30 actors. However, when I discovered its origins as a "pocket revue," I was struck with a distinct vision for the piece and became increasingly excited about its prospects. And so, on March 4, 2012, Make Mine Manhattan opened at the Connelly Theatre in a new production which returned the hit revue to its roots.

Much of my work researching and reconstructing the piece was done at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It was perhaps a spectacular twist of fate that housed within the NYPL's Billy Rose Theatre Division was the composer's collection. Needless to say, the Richard Lewine Papers proved an invaluable resource.

I began to assemble the piece using the original concept as a template and building in additional elements from the Broadway version. Our production saw the addition of four musical numbers that were cut at various points in the revue's development ("I Gotta Have You," "New York Gal," "Old Fashioned Girl," "Please Take It Back,") as well as new snatches of dialogue pulled from the original drafts that would serve as connective tissue between several items in our new production. Taking my cue from the authors' own words, I worked to add and subtract elements of the revue such that the individual items would "flow from one to the other almost as dissolves."

In strategically structuring the material and the running order, I created eight distinct performer tracks, which would hopefully provide us with a hint of a narrative within the episodic revue format. Actor Nicolas Dromard became our charismatic narrator, Kristen J. Smith our bright-eyed ingénue, Gabrielle Ruiz our young starlet, and so on. While making every effort to honor the original, our Make Mine Manhattan would be a fresh take on the classic revue.

Arnold B. Horwitt and Richard Lewine are not names that are regularly bandied about, but perhaps they should be. Mr. Horwitt achieved great success in theatre and in television, writing numerous episodes of the hit series "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"; Mr. Lewine received an Emmy Award for producing "My Name is Barbra" and served as director of special programming for CBS. Their combined talents here yielded "a sweet little revue with clever lyrics and cheery music," as reviewed in The New York Times. With its storied past and its enchanting material, it was an honor to revisit Make Mine Manhattan and I hope we have made a step toward returning it to the American musical theatre canon.

A note from Doug

This month's Musical of the Month is different in several ways. As Ben West describes above, the script included with this post is not the original version but a revision made for the the UnsungMusicalsCo production performed last year. Further, unlike the public domain scripts often found in this series, both the original and UnsungMusicalCo version remain under copyright protection, and the PDF of the new version is offered here for research use only with the permission of the rights holders. If you are interested in producing this script, please contact UnsungMusicalsCo at info@unsungmusicals.org

Download the Libretto (PDF only this month)

Musical of the Month: Night Boat

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 10:24:40 -0500

A guest post by Levi Branson

By 1920 Jerome Kern had achieved success as a noteworthy American composer with a uniquely American career. His melodies graced many entertainment platforms, but he was most prominently represented on the musical stage. His early composing career included scores for the successful Princess Theatre musicals as well as song interpolations into others' musicals. In 1919 a Charles Dillingham production paired him with a songwriter and librettist who would become a frequent collaborator in the approaching new decade, Anne Caldwell.

Anne Caldwell (O'Dea) began her career in entertainment when she debuted as a performer with a juvenile opera company at the age of 14. She began songwriting with her husband, James O'Dea, composing music first, and then proceeding to craft lyrics as well. Anne also enjoyed some success as an early American playwright. After her husband died in 1914, Anne continued to write, reaching the height of her career in the 1920s working with such notable composers as Ivan Caryl, Vincent Youmans, and Victor Herbert.

The first collaboration between Kern and Caldwell was the musical She's A Good Fellow (1919), and they would go on to create six other musicals that were very much American variations on traditional and generic plotlines. The Night Boat, Kern and Caldwell's second collaboration, is a light musical comedy with a storyline adapted from Alexandre Bisson's farce Le Controleur des Wagons-Lits. The plot centers on Bob White who persuades his wife, Hazel, and his mother-in-law to believe that he is the captain of an Albany night boat so that he might enjoy a few nights respite from his home and failing marriage. Becoming suspicious, the mother-in-law, Mrs. Maxim, with Hazel and her other daughter, Barbara, book passage aboard Captain Bob White's evening charter — comedy, mistaken identity, and complications ensue.

Opening in New York at the Liberty Theater on February 2, 1920, the show's most pleasing, lasting hits were "The Left All Alone Again Blues" and "Whose Baby Are You?", both recorded then by RCA records. The musical was produced by showman producer Charles Dillingham with breakout star Louise Groody (Barbara) who, according to the New-York Tribune, "contributed much to the entertainment" in the production. The Liberty Theater production was generally praised for the producer's showmanship in presentation and Kern's musical score. It ran on Broadway for a total of 313 performances before being forced to close by a production contracted to move into the Liberty Theater. However The Night Boat sailed out on a successful tour after its healthy run in New York.

While The Night Boat was one of Caldwell and Kern's more successful shows, their work isn't generally considered revivable today. The plots and comedy do not satisfy the expectations of contemporary audiences. However, their partnership was a fruitful one during the 1920's. Kern would proceed to collaborate with Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II on his final shows. Anne Caldwell would go on to success in Hollywood working for RKO on such movies as Flying Down to Rio (1933) and Babes in Toyland (1934) before dying in 1936. Although much of Caldwell's stage work is not produced today, her legacy and songs live on. Caldwell was a founding charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Along with Rida Johnson Young and Dorothy Donnelly, Anne Caldwell's work and career helped to establish the fact that writing American musical comedy was not solely a male domain and that a female writer could create works for the stage that were equally as satirical, witty, timely, and simply as comical as the work of any man.

A Note About The Libretto

The libretto here was transcribed from two typewritten copies of the script bound into a single volume and held at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The first version included in this collection appears to be clean copy of the earlier version with handwritten edits that follows it in the volume.

The musical had pre-Broadway tryouts in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Rochester before opening in New York. According to Gerald Bordman's Jerome Kern: His Life and Music, the musical underwent little revision during this period save for some rearranging and editing of the songlist. Of the changes made, a few songs were cut ("She's Spanish" and "Jazz") and "Rip Van Winkle And His Little Men" was added and discarded in Philadelphia. The Broadway premiere included the addition of "Girls Are Like A Rainbow" and a group of girls in the first and final acts who acted as a sort of chorus providing "Plot Demonstrators." The version of the libretto used for this transcription includes "She's Spanish" and a placeholder in the script for "Jazz." The earlier version in the NYPL volume also includes the song, "Rip Van Winkle And His Little Men" but neither libretto includes "Girls Are Like A Rainbow" nor the "Plot Demonstrators". Therefore it is my conclusion that the clean libretto, which is the basis of this transcription, is an early version of the musical presented during or after its run in Philadelphia.

Download the libretto File type What it's for ePub eBook readers (except Kindle) Mobi Kindle PDF Adobe Acrobat HTML Web browsers Plain Text Just about anything TEI Digital Humanities Geeks

Levi Branson is a student in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, with an interest in archives and special collections. He lives in Chicago, is a university administrator at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and is a passionate American musical theatre enthusiast.

Works Cited

Bordman, Gerald Martin. Jerome Kern: His Life and Music . New York: Oxford UP, 1980.

"'Night Boat' Rocks Slightly, But is Off on Long Cruise." New-York Tribune , February 03, 1920, Page 11, Image 11. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1920-02-03/ed-1/seq-11/. Last accessed January 28, 2013.

Norton, Richard C. A Chronology of American Musical Theater. Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2002. Pages 297-299 and 1486-1487.

"Songwriters Hall of Fame - Anne Caldwell Exhibit," Songwriters Hall of Fame. http://www.songwritershalloffame.org/exhibits/C319. Last accessed January 29, 2013.

Rothman, Korey R. "'Will You Remember' Female Lyricists of Operetta and Musical Comedy." In Women in American Musical Theatre, edited by Bud Coleman and Judith A. Sebesta, 14-16. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

Musical of the Month: Sally

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 05:07:30 -0500

A guest post by Maya Cantu

"America at the close of the Great War was a Cinderella magically clothed in the most stunning dress at the ball... immense gains with no visible price tag seemed to be the American destiny," as historian Ann Douglas has noted. In the expansively optimistic and prosperous America of 1920, there could hardly have been a musical — or heroine — more suited to its times than Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton's Sally, a Jazz Age Cinderella story clothed in opulent enchantment.

At the dawn of the Roaring Twenties, Sally was a sensation. With the effervescent Marilyn Miller in the title role of a waif who becomes a Follies star, Sally danced to the New Amsterdam Theater sprinkled with the box office fairy dust of Florenz Ziegfeld, then at the height of his commercial prowess as "The Great Glorifier." Opening on December 21, 1920, and running for 570 performances, Sally marked Ziegfeld's first great book musical; a crown jewel upon thirteen dazzling editions of his Follies. In terms of box office intake, Sally was "the biggest Broadway musical hit up to its time," as noted by Gerald Bordman, grossing over five million dollars (translating to sixty-five million, according to modern currency rates) by the end of Sally's New York run. "Sally is nothing less than idealized musical comedy," raved Charles Darnton of the Evening World, while audiences of Sally's Broadway, London, and national tour productions swooned to Sally's hit ballad "Look for the Silver Lining" (a song that has become so emblematic of its early-1920s era that it's been heard on both "Boardwalk Empire" and "Downton Abbey").

Certainly, the fabled "Ziegfeld Touch" and Kern's lilting melodies formed a large part of Sally's immense popular appeal. Yet the musical's creative team boasted a full dream team of musical theater wizards. As a star vehicle for Marilyn Miller (then billed as "Marilynn"), Sally showcased the charm and talent of its leading lady, whose own rise to fame both paralleled and exceeded Sally's fictional triumph in the Follies. In addition to its Kern score (with book by Guy Bolton and lyrics by various writers, including Clifford Grey), Sally also featured a "Butterfly Ballet" composed by the great Victor Herbert, and scenic design by Joseph Urban, the Austrian-born set designer whose exquisitely stylized landscapes had become a staple of the Follies.

While the production's scenic and theatrical beauties (not to mention Ziegfeld's "Glorified" ones) drew audiences in droves to the New Amsterdam, so did Sally's musical storytelling. Sally exemplified a wave of "Cinderella musicals" that swept the Broadway stages of the early 1920s, and Kern and Bolton's fancifully modern spin on the classic fairy tale captivated a public who, despite the short-lived economic recession of 1920-1921, could dream of joining a rapidly expanding middle class. While audiences may have seen their own aspirations mirrored in the ascent of Sally's spirited title character, who rises from foundling's rags to a Ziegfeld star's riches, female audiences in particular may have glimpsed shades of the "New Woman" in Miller's Sally, who is as much an ambitious modern working girl as she is the more traditional subject of a Prince Charming's courtship.

Echoing the metamorphic motif of Victor Herbert's "Butterfly Ballet," each of the musical's three acts takes its heroine through, quite literally, stages of transformation. Sally is a musical of — and about — acts of performance, as the heroine shifts through various identities as "Sally of the Alley, A Foundling," "Mme. Nockerova, A Wild Rose," and a "Premiere Star of the Follies." Accordingly, Sally's settings ascended in splendor, from "The Alley Inn, New York," to "The Garden of Richard Farquar, Long Island," to "The Land of Butterlies in the Ziegfeld Follies," "Sally's Dressing Room at the New Amsterdam Theatre After the Follies Premiere," and "The Little Church Around the Corner."

The first act introduces the heroine, toting her dog Custard, as an orphan from the settlement house of Mrs. Ten Broek, who arranges for Sally to wash dishes at the Elm Tree Alley Inn. Here, Sally – an aspiring dancer – attracts both the friendship of waiter Connie (really the exiled Constantine, Duke of Czechogovinia in disguise), as well as the romantic notice of society scion Blair Farquar. In the second act society ball, set at Blair's Long Island mansion, Sally masquerades as the Russian femme fatale dancer Madame Nockerova, beguiling Blair as her more luxuriously dressed alter ego. When her charade is revealed, Blair revokes his affections for the lowly dishwasher. (Sally's pose as Madame Nockerova anticipates Eliza Doolitte's Hungarian princess in My Fair Lady, a 1950s Cinderella musical by way of Pygmalion and Shaw). The final act covers Sally's transformation into a Ziegfeld star, as theatrical agent Otis Hooper wins Sally the star dancing spot in the latest Follies. Sally both triumphs in "The Butterfly Ballet," and agrees to become the wife of a repentant Blair Farquar. In a triple wedding finale, Sally marries Blair, Otis weds his girlfriend Rosie, and Connie ties the knot with Mrs. Ten Broek (played in the original production by Ziegfeld's stateliest showgirl, Dolores).

While Sally opened at the New Amsterdam with "such a splendor of curtains and settings and costumes as few theatres in the world dare dream of" (as described by Alexander Woollcott), the musical's origins were surprisingly modest. In fact, it was to have been a Princess Theatre musical. Sally was an expanded revision of Kern, Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse's aptly titled The Little Thing (1916), which would likely have been the third entry in the innovative series of intimate musicals at the Princess (after Nobody Home and Very Good Eddie), had it not been for the objections of co-producer F. Ray Comstock. With the Cinderella musical craze still a few years away, and marital farce the Princess house style, Comstock was unimpressed by The Little Thing's "whimsical trifle about an orphan girl in a Greenwich Village boarding house" (as described in Bolton and Wodehouse's marvelous joint memoir, Bring on the Girls!). Instead, Comstock urged Kern, Bolton and Wodehouse to work on another project: a musical adaptation of Charles Hoyt's 1894 farce A Milk White Flag. As Bolton and Wodehouse recounted, the writers were skeptical of the project's prospects:

Guy was still staring incredulously. "I've read A Milk White Flag," he said. "It's about a man who pretends to be dead so as to evade his creditors and collect on his insurance. He's laid out on ice and catches cold."

"That's right," said Ray, laughing heartily. "I had forgotten about him catching cold. I remember now it was terrific..."

"But listen, Ray. The thing that has made the Princess shows is charm. We must have charm."

"Be as charming as you like. No one's stopping you."

"Well, you can't say A Milk White Flag has charm, with a corpse that keeps coming on the stage without any trousers on."

As eventually adapted by another team (as Go To It), the musical A Milk White Flag ran for 23 performances at the Princess Theatre. Meanwhile, Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern shelved The Little Thing to work on the much more successful — and charming — Oh, Boy! (NYPL's August Musical of the Month).

The Little Thing was laid aside until 1919, when Bolton and Wodehouse ran into Ziegfeld while vacationing in Palm Beach. The impresario, currently presenting Marilyn Miller in the Follies of 1919, was considering a vehicle for the elfin blond dancing star (and the latest object of his romantic infatuations). Like Comstock, Ziegfeld had hit upon a not very promising source for a musical — Clare Kummer's farce Be Calm, Camilla, with book and lyrics to be written by Kummer, and music by Jerome Kern. "Isn't that the play in which the heroine breaks her ankle in the first act," enquired Plum (Wodehouse) innocently. "I wouldn't have thought it the ideal vehicle for a dancer," as the writers recounted in Bring on the Girls!.

Instead, Bolton suggested The Little Thing as a possible vehicle for Miller. The impresario was intrigued, and aboard a luxurious chartered yacht, Ziegfeld, Bolton and Wodehouse discussed the possibility of collaborating on The Little Thing. However, by the time Ziegfeld confirmed his commitment to produce The Little Thing a few months later, P.G. Wodehouse was unavailable. Increasingly successful with his Jeeves novels, Wodehouse decided to return to English literary life, leaving Kern and Bolton short a lyricist for the new version (at first titled Sally of the Alley, and finally, Sally). Rewrites for Sally were extensive, with eccentric characters from The Little Thing (Esmeralda, Sally's aged ex-ballet diva mentor, and the former's suitor Mr. Tolly) making way for new ones, including Sally's fairy godfathers Connie and Otis (vaudevillian roles tailor-made for Leon Errol and Walter Catlett, both of whom Ziegfeld had also contracted starring vehicles for). In a stroke both metatheatrical and characteristically self-publicizing, Ziegfeld stipulated another change: Sally must not only become a star dancer, but a star dancer in the Follies.

For the revamped Sally, Clifford Grey signed on as Wodehouse's replacement lyricist, though "Wild Rose" was one of only a few entirely new numbers written for Sally. Sally's score is a lyrical patchwork, with songs also co-written by Wodehouse, B.G. DeSylva and Anne Caldwell (who had replaced Wodehouse as Kern's most regular collaborator). While "Joan of Arc" (originally titled "You Can't Keep a Good Girl Down") and "The Little Church Around the Corner" were Wodehouse holdovers from The Little Thing, songs dropped from other Kern musicals dominated Sally's score. "The Lorelei," wittily conjuring the Rhine siren as the "Theda Bara of the days gone by," was written for Kern and Caldwell's The Night Boat (1920), while both "Whip-poor-will" and "Look for the Silver Lining" actually came from the flop Zip Goes a Million (1919), with lyrics by DeSylva. (Meanwhile, he ballad "Bill," first dropped from the Princess show Oh, Lady! Lady!!, was let go once again from Sally, only to turn up seven years later in Ziegfeld's production of Show Boat).

"It was all pretty haphazard and very different from the Princess days," recalled Bolton and Wodehouse of the show's musical motley. Nevertheless, Sally's score holds together not only in the throughline of Kern's melodious, lightly jazz-inflected music, but of its lyrical themes: while "Look for the Silver Lining" evokes a more gentle optimism, "The Lorelei," "(On the Banks of) The Schnitza-Kommiski" and "Wild Rose" glorify an emergent post-WWI ethos of individualism: of consumption, sensuality, and urban leisure. "We love the boys and all the noise/And lively plays and cabarets," sang the chorus girls in Sally's glamorous and rousing opening number, "It's the Nighttime."

As produced by Ziegfeld, Sally was certainly not deliberately "integrated" in the sense of either the Princess Theatre musicals, nor of Kern and Hammerstein's Show Boat (1927). Drawing from the lavishness of Ziegfeld's own revues, Sally is a spectacular book musical, with origins in extravaganza. Sally's Variety reviewer discerned as much when he wrote, referring to two 1903 musicals (the latter with music by Victor Herbert), "Ziegfeld has turned back the clock fifteen years and produced a pictorial extravaganza reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Toyland."

While retaining the charm and melody of the Princess Theatre shows, Sally also set the pattern for a series of Ziegfeld book musicals throughout the 1920s and early '30s (other examples include Rosalie, Rio Rita, and Whoopee). Variously musical comedy and operetta, the stories of these lavish productions centered around a standard boy-meets-girl plot, and one or more comic subplots, while serving the guiding principle of extravaganza. Like the other Ziegfeld musicals it inspired, Sally was a mix of visual opulence, feminine spectacle filled with dozens of "Glorified Girls" (Ziegfeld boasted that he'd chosen from among 10,000 beauties for Sally's chorus), and ethnically inflected vaudeville jokes — such as an order of "Hebrew coffee" suggested to Otis by the White Russian-like Connie, who'd heard another waiter say, "you wish (jew-ish) coffee?"

For all of Sally's show-stopping spectacle and groan-worthy gags, contemporary critics of Sally noted "a pretty little story (told with) deftness and humor and more plausibility than is common to musical comedy" (The Boston Daily Globe). Nevertheless, many critics noted "The Great Ziegfeld" as Sally's mastermind, and it was the synchronized beauty of the production, rather than Bolton's book, that was most effusively praised: Sally (is) "perfectly balanced in all its component elements, and with everything done just a little better than it has ever been done before" (Boston Daily Globe), while The New York Times's Alexander Woollcott raved of "a producer who knows a little more than any of his competitors the secret of bringing beauty to his stage...strangely enough, it is not of Urban, nor Jerome Kern, nor Leon Errol, nor even of Marilynn Miller that you think of as you rush for the subway at ten minutes to midnight. You think of Mr. Ziegfeld. He is that kind of producer. There are not many in the world."

By all accounts, Sally showcased some of the producer's most stunning displays of stagecraft, in collaboration with director Edward Royce, set designer Urban, and a costume team of no less than five couturiers (Alice O'Neil had top billing). As for Sally's staging, highlights included the star's "surprise" entrance, in which Sally was yanked out of the end of a line of orphans wearing shabby dresses and oversized bonnets, suddenly revealing the sixth foundling as Marilyn Miller. Adding to audiences' appreciation of Miller, Ziegfeld installed a mechanical platform that rolled out over the orchestra pit during Miller's numbers, allowing them better views of the star's dancing feet.

Sally's sets and costumes dazzled alongside Miller. While audiences were touched by the buoyant simplicity of "Look for the Silver Lining," sung by Sally to Connie in the plainest of garb, they marveled at Miller's costumes as Madame Nockerova, and those of the showgirls in the "Butterfly Ballet." Even more eye-popping was a wedding finale in which, according to Bordman, Miller "paraded in a $10,000 lace wedding gown with a long train that required the attentions of fifty beautiful bridesmaids." The latter gowns were designed by Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, Ziegfeld's regular costume designer for the Follies. On the scenic end, Joseph Urban's wonders included a breathtaking quick change from a theatre dressing room to the exterior of the Little Church around the Corner, with Urban exquisitely rendering the Madison Avenue architectural landmark.

While the musical's form represented a mix of stylistic modes – intimate Princess Theatre whimsy and blockbuster Ziegfeldian spectacle – Sally is also a quintessential Cinderella musical. As a subgenre of musical comedy, Cinderella musicals were ubiquitous on Broadway in the first half of the 1920s, though anticipated by such earlier shows as the British A Gaiety Girl (1893), with its fabled chorus line of aristocrat-marrying Gaiety Girls. The 1919 smash hit Irene, about an Irish-American shop girl, sparked the 1920s series, and as Gerald Bordman recounts of Sally, "In raising a poor girl from rags to riches, Bolton's story fell in line with two other hits then running on Broadway, Irene and Mary (1920). Together, these three musicals established a vogue for similar stories and led to the early years of the 1920s being looked at as the Cinderella Era of American musicals."

While the genre was diverse, almost all Cinderella musicals were modern, democratic fairy tales set in Manhattan. But whereas the classic European fairy tale had moved its heroine from hearth to castle, the '20s Cinderella musicals took her from New York tenement to mansion. The genre's typical plot formula involved a young, Irish-American working girl, usually a poor shop girl, secretary, or aspiring actress, who — through a mix of pluck, luck, and hard work — wins the heart of a handsome millionaire, and, in quite a few cases, career success of her own. (Thoroughly Modern Millie, the movie turned Broadway hit, represents a contemporary pastiche of the early-'20s Cinderella musical). While the orphaned Sally (unlike Irene's Irene O'Dare) is not explicitly Irish-American, nor of an identified ethnic background, she follows genre convention by marrying into WASP high society, obtaining the American dream of assimilation and upward mobility.

Yet marriage to a Long Island Prince Charming by no means defines the Cinderella musicals, whose heroines also reflected the ascendance of the New Woman. Following WWI, scores of young (mostly unmarried) American women entered urban shops and offices in unprecedented numbers, forging new paths of personal and professional independence. Reflecting the heightened visibility of women in the workplace (and of working women in the audience), the heroines of '20s Cinderella shows are often surprisingly ambitious and assertive, such as Mary Thompson, who follows her boyfriend to Manhattan, only to out-succeed him in business by becoming a cookie company entrepreneur in The Gingham Girl (1922). Similarly, some Cinderella musicals bent formula in quirky and novel directions, as in Kern and Anne Caldwell's Good Morning, Dearie (1921), in which the Cinderella is a bootlegger's moll, and Harold Levey and Zelda Sears' The Magic Ring (1923), in which songwriter Polly makes her "sensational entrance" to the ball by crashing in through the chimney. (Caldwell, who penned Sally's "The Lorelei," and Sears were only two of the gifted women writing librettos during this era).

Certainly, the title character of Sally is no exception to this bolder strain of Cinderellas. Unlike her more demure fairy tale prototype, Sally has her own career ambitions. And while one might expect Sally's establishing "I want song" to be a ballad about waiting for her prince, Sally's first number is Kern and Wodehouse's march-like "Joan of Arc." Dreaming of own fame as a stage performer, Sally re-imagines the Maid of Orleans as a pugnacious flapper: "I wish I could be like Joan of Arc/She was "it" right from the start...She loves to fight and when foe-men come in sight/She would hand them Dempsey punches/Where they used to keep their lunches/For you can't keep a good girl down." Elsewhere, Sally displays a fast wit, sharp tongue, and fiery temperament, which she puts on uninhibited display in the dance number "Wild Rose." Here, Sally – masquerading as Nockerova — dances wildly with a chorus of serenading stage door Johnnies. "Wild Rose" (exhilaratingly performed here by Marilyn Miller and ensemble, in one of the surviving Technicolor sequences from the 1929 Warner Brothers/Vitaphone film adaptation of Sally) channels the intoxicating new freedoms that bloomed in the flapper era.

The title role of Sally — part winsome ingénue, part willful spitfire — was a perfect fit for Marilyn Miller, who, despite her reputation as "the undisputed queen of American musical comedy" in the 1920s, remains less familiar to musical theater aficionados than such later divas as Ethel Merman and Mary Martin. Happily, Miller did preserve two of her legendary 1920s performances, in the title roles of Sally and Sunny, in early talkie Hollywood musicals, both of which are now readily accessible on DVD. (Miller's connections to Hollywood royalty are notable: she was the one-time sister-in-law of Mary Pickford, having married Mary's playboy brother Jack. Miller also gave her name to a more famous blond Marilyn, when Miller's ex-fiancé Ben Lyon — à la Otis Hooper in Sally — became an actors' agent and suggested a name change to client Norma Jean Baker).

Dubbed the "Titania of the Jazz Age" by theater critic John Mason Brown, Miller played upon a fairy-princess appeal heightened by her ethereal dancing style, pert comic presence, and a thin, but charming, light soprano: her Cinderella persona was the Broadway counterpart of "America's Sweetheart." Offstage, Miller was another story. Tough, volatile, and headstrong (she battled constantly with the infatuated and controlling Ziegfeld), Miller was described by Mary Pickford as "probably the most ambitious human being I have ever met." A shrewd businesswoman, Miller was also the first female Broadway star to command a percentage of box office intake: roughly ten percent of Sally's weekly grosses. (Miller would go on to star in Sunny, Rosalie, and one of the great musical revues of the 1930s, As Thousands Cheer, before dying tragically young at the age of 37, from complications of surgery treating her chronic sinus infections).

Miller's mix of charm and drive comes through strongly in the 1929 film Sally, which co-starred Joe E. Brown in Leon Errol's role of Connie (Errol did reprise his performance in a 1925 silent film adaptation of Sally, with flapper star Colleen Moore in the title role). Sally was also resurrected in Hollywood for the 1946 MGM Jerome Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By (with Judy Garland, as an unlikely Marilyn Miller, singing "Look for the Silver Lining"). Two years later, a Broadway revival of Sally, co-starring Bambi Lynn and Willie Howard, ran for an unsuccessful 36 performances, its frivolities ill-timed at the height of the Rodgers and Hammerstein integrated musical play era. In 1948, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson (presciently foreseeing the early-1970s Broadway nostalgia craze) mused of the revival, "Although Sally sounds sweet, she has the old look now. Probably she should not be revived for another quarter of a century, when she will be in fashion again."

While the spectacular musical has yet to debut once again in a full-scale Broadway revival (or under the more likely auspices of Encores!), Sally's stardust can be traced in a wide array of other musical theater classics, perhaps most apparently in My Fair Lady, and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. The spirit of Sally also glistens in many backstage musicals. As Stuart Hecht has suggested, Funny Girl can be seen as a retelling of Sally, ethnically recasting the latter's (Anglicized) Follies Cinderella story through the life of the Jewish Ziegfeld star, Fanny Brice. Another great female character, Sally Durant-Plummer — the haunted ex-Weismann Girl of Sondheim and Goldman's Follies — might likewise represent an ironic nod to her 1920 namesake, while on a more optimistic note, Annie's eponymous orphan might be seen as a child tintype of Sally, even down to the mutt friend and millionaire's mansion. (In fact, in a 1988 staged concert of Sally, presented by the New Amsterdam Theater Company, Annie's original Sandy made a comeback appearance as Custard).

In 1949, a year after the failed Sally revival, and at the start of the Cold War era, Leo Robin and Jule Styne paid tribute to an already bygone age in the 1920s-set musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, blithely romanticizing the "Era of Wonderful Nonsense." In the song "Homesick Blues," heroines Lorelei and Dorothy, two American showgirls in Paris, led the ensemble in raising a toast: "Here's to Tin Pan Alley/A Yankee rally/A show like Sally." The American musical is a Janus-faced form, looking forward in optimism, looking backward in nostalgia — and, as Sally poignantly and exuberantly reminds us — ever looking at (if not for) the silver lining, such stuff as its dreams are made on.

Works Cited/Further Reading

Bordman, Gerald. Jerome Kern. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Bolton, Guy, and P.G. Wodehouse. Bring On the Girls!: The Improbable Story of Our Life in Musical Comedy with Pictures to Prove It. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953.

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1996.

Harris, Warren G. The Other Marilyn. Westminster, MD: Arbor House Publishing Company, 1985.

Hecht, Stuart. Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Mordden, Ethan. Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

About the Guest Blogger

Maya Cantu is a Doctor of Fine Arts candidate at Yale School of Drama, where she received her MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism in 2010. A theater historian, teacher, critic, and production dramaturg, Maya is currently writing a dissertation entitled "Working Girls, Gold Diggers, Broads, and Boss Ladies: Cinderella Mythologies of the American Musical Stage, 1919-1959."

Download the libretto

A note from Doug

The following eTexts were transcribed by Ann Fraistat and encoded by me based on a typescript copy of the libretto held in the Morton Da Costa papers here at the Library for the Performing Arts. Although there is a handwritten note on this copy that reads: "Copyright Version 1921," I have been unable to confirm that it was ever registered with the U.S. copyright office. As such, it is likely an unpublished work and still under copyright until 70 years after Guy Bolton's death (around 2050). However, the Bolton estate has very kindly given us permission to publish this transcript here for research and personal use. If you are interested in producing or performing this script, please contact the Tams-Witmark Music Library for licensing.

File type What it's for ePub eBook readers (except Kindle) Mobi Kindle PDF Adobe Acrobat HTML Web browsers Plain Text Just about anything TEI Digital Humanities Geeks

Musical of the Month: Evangeline

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 08:57:55 -0500

A guest post by Brian D. Valencia

Evangeline, or The Belle of Acadia rounds out the Musical of the Month blog's consideration of the four most popular American-devised musicals of the late 19th century. Only The Black Crook (1866) surpassed Evangeline in frequency, longevity, and popularity—and Humpty Dumpty (1868) and A Trip to Chinatown (1890/1) trailed not far behind. It premiered in New York in 1874, and remained a fixture of the American musical repertory for the next three decades, reportedly amassing more than 3,000 total performances and appearing as late as 1901 throughout Massachusetts, still "fresh and green," according to a preview in the Worcester Spy.

Based very loosely on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's very serious epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadia of 1847, the very un -serious musical adaptation was penned by Boston-bred showbiz novices J. Cheever Goodwin, who contributed the words, and Edward E. "Ned" Rice, who contributed the music. Rice was at the time a clerk in the printing office of the Cunard Steamship Office; Goodwin was a recent Harvard graduate, serving as a cub reporter for the Boston Evening Traveler ; and both were members of Boston's Papyrus Club, a literary society for young romantics.

The idea to write together seems to have struck them following a disappointing evening at a Boston theater in the early 1870s. Goodwin and Rice had just attended a musical burlesque performed by Lydia Thompson's British Blondes—full of risqué tomfoolery, leggy chorines, and unremarkable music—and, on the walk home from the performance, were intrigued by the prospect of improving upon it. One account of their post-show conversation appeared in the Boston Sunday Herald in 1896:

Said Goodwin, "If I couldn't write a better piece than tha[t], I would never touch pen again."

"If you can," rejoined Rice, "why don't you? There's money in it."

(Rice was ever the financial opportunist.)

Goodwin stopped short and turned to his friend. "See here," he said, "if it comes to that, will you write the music to my libretto?"

"I'll do it!" replied Rice, and they shook hands on the agreement.

This ad hoc collaboration decided on the subject of Longfellow's then well-known poem and set about adapting it (liberally) for the stage over the next several years. In doing so, they quickly discovered that, in the words of a reflecting journalist a generation later, "Goodwin's right hand could make a pen breathe and Rice's fingertips could make a piano talk."

Longfellow's stately poem tells the pathetic story of the titular young Acadian (Nova Scotian) maiden separated from her betrothed Gabriel in the Great Upheaval, the forced displacement of the Acadians from the northern French-colonial territories in present-day Canada ceded to Britain in 1763. As cruel fate carries Evangeline down the Mississippi River, wandering through the Ozarks, and eventually back northward to Philadelphia as a Sister of Mercy, she searches in vain for her beloved, sometimes unknowingly just crossing his path—only to be reunited with him, in the final stanzas, over his deathbed. From this, Goodwin and Rice borrowed only the most basic of building blocks: character names and sketches of their relationships to one another, Evangeline's expulsion from home and her subsequent separation from Gabriel, distant lovesick wanderings, . . . and "Evangeline's beautiful heifer," described only in passing by Longfellow as "Proud of her snow-white hide, and the ribbon that waved from her collar, / . . . as if conscious of human affection."

What they turned out was a raucous celebration of the silly, the nonsensical, and the non sequitur. In Goodwin and Rice's adaptation, Evangeline is not forced out of her geographically non-specific home (sometimes identified as Louisiana) until the end of Act 1, and not for ethnic or political reasons, as in the source poem, but because she is harboring deserting sailors. Naturally, she is arrested for this crime by the Dutch captain of the British Army, who intends to imprison her in the Bastille. But —as is revealed at the beginning of Act 2—the ship carrying her (as well as, naturally, all of the characters from Act 1) has run aground on the coast of a generic savage Africa, whose landscape glitters with forbidden diamonds! All the while, Evangeline is pursued by the foolhardy Le Blanc, the Acadian notary, who holds a secret will that will legally divert Evangeline's inheritance to his own pockets as soon as she signs her marriage contract, an event that is repeatedly, ludicrously interrupted.

This is essentially the plot, but none of it much matters, at least not in any meaningful way. And into the gaping void created by this lack of meaning, there is stuffed a spectacular glut of fun! Evangeline 's book, written largely in rhyming couplets, is not one motivated by convincing dramatic conflict, sustained by unexpected but believable reversals of fortune, and resolved by the reassessment of relationships or circumstances in light of learned or earned information. Instead, borrowing a comic strategy honed to an art by earlier musical playwrights James Robinson Planché and John Brougham, it is guided from one ridiculous episode to the next by no more than the cleverest pun or rhyme that can be effected in the next line of dialogue.

Therefore, the sound of the language, and not its sense , leads the way, and the resulting helter-skelter affords opportunities for delicious digressions from any classical sense of deliberately plotted dramatic action; these include, chiefly, the (as playbills and advertisements hawked loudly) " the dancing heiffer ! . . . the lively whales!" and "the baloon trip to arizona! " [sic]. Indeed, though they are hardly relevant to the larger story, a four-legged specialty dance performed by Evangeline's pet cow at her wedding, a harrowing encounter between Evangeline and a "mighty monster" of a whale during a quick dip in the sea, and a deus ex machina (the second of two) in the form of a balloon ride home from Africa comprise three of the most prominent and memorable moments in the show. In the three-act versions, none of which seem to have survived, the balloon overshoots fair "Arcady" and comes to rest instead in the middle of Arizona's uncharted Indian territory, where Act 3 takes place. The two-act version supplied here ends with the balloon's ascent—carrying only Evangeline, her father, and Gabriel. . . . (Never mind how the others get home.)

This structural looseness was perhaps compounded by the writers' tendency to develop songs in front of their built-in test audience at the Papyrus Club, and it was the membership's best-liked tunes that were originally conscripted for Evangeline , not necessarily those that were most dramatically appropriate to the circumstances of the plot. The club favorite, "Six Miserable Ruffians," for example, was published as a single sheet in 1875, boasting the dedication "to the Papyrus Club, Boston," yet its place and purpose in show is not immediately clear. In a program from the Boston Museum, a synopsis of scenes for the 1876 three-act version places the song in Act 3, where its title appears in type more prominent than any other in the surrounding pages—yet it remains unclear who sings it and why. In a separate "argument," after providing a lengthy description of Act 1, and a passable description of Act 2, the same program insists that the adventures of Act 3 "must be seen to appreciated."

Rice claimed to have written between 300 and 500 songs for Evangeline in total, though this is almost certainly propagandistic exaggeration. Despite the earlier quoted assessment of Rice's compositional skill, he was not a formally educated musician and could do little more than pick out his melodies at the piano (although later he was also an active musical director). Therefore, from the earliest, Evangeline depended on the additional collaboration of Boston composer and musical director John J. Braham—the first American conductor of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the brother of David Braham, the composer of Harrigan and Hart's important early musical plays—to transcribe, arrange, and orchestrate Rice's tunes. A rarity for this period, a sample of Braham's Evangeline orchestrations survives at the Library of Congress, indicating a busy nine-piece instrumentation for flute/piccolo, B-flat clarinet, two trumpets, trombone, two violins, viola, bass.

Dominated by merry marches and lilting waltzes, Rice's score is bookended by a recitative prologue delivered by Gabriel, in which he informs "the public . . . / About the play they've come to see," and a company finale announcing, "Our little play is done." The unapologetically trivial tone that marks these opening and closing numbers flavors much of the rest of the music, which is written largely in bright major keys and peppered richly with playful chromaticism.

The "Soldier's Chorus" near the end of the first act erupts in a surprising burst of musical complexity, as the principal characters express their anxiety over Evangeline's fate in counterpoint to the soldier chorus's bloodthirstiness. The heroine's prison song in Act 2, "Come to Me Quickly, My Darling" also exhibits traces of harmonic complexity indicative of an underlying emotional complexity, perhaps pointing toward the psychologically grounded musical-theater love songs to come. Immediately following this number, Gabriel is revealed, in an unmistakable nod to Longfellow, singing (the infinitely more straightforward) "Where Art Thou Now, My Beloved?" It's fun to imagine how these numbers might have been combined as a duet in performance—but, even without such a vocal coup, there is enough textural variety to maintain the sense of forward musical momentum throughout.

Whether or not Evangeline received a full public staging in Boston prior to its New York premiere is uncertain, but the musical opened in New York, after an exhaustive and frustrating search for a willing producer, on July 27, 1874, at Niblo's Garden, the site of The Black Crook premiere eight years earlier. Rice, who assumed the role of producer, was allowed a modest budget to fill a two-week gap in the theater's schedule between the dour pair of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and a revival of Augustin Daly's Griffith Gaunt . W.H. Crane, a low comedian from the world of legitimate opera, headlined the cast in the role of Le Blanc, and, in the grand burlesque tradition of cross-gender casting, the roles of Evangeline's brave beau Gabriel and zaftig playmate Catherine were played respectively by Miss Connie Thompson in a revealing tunic and tights and Mr. Louis Mestayer in outrageous female drag.

Perhaps a limited engagement was for the best. The New York Herald–Tribune led the initial critical assault on Evangeline , accusing it of "heaping a muck of absurdity upon exquisite purity of spirit," meaning Longfellow's poem. "Several scenes are so stupid," it continued, "that it is difficult to contemplate them without going to sleep," and—furthermore—that Ione Burke, in the title role, "has no more notion of humor than a lobster has of geometry." The New York Times , while still less than enthusiastic, attempted to see the bright side: ". . . it is not forever within the dead level of stupidity" (emphasis added). The one figure to receive standout praise was the curious Lone Fisherman, an omnipresent mute who plays absolutely no part in the action until mere minutes from the finale, and for whom there is no precedent in Longfellow. Meanwhile, the Herald–Tribune , the Times , the New York Herald , and the Daily Graphic all failed to make so much as a mention of the spectacular cow, whale, or balloon, all of which came to be synonymous with the Evangeline stage show.

Perhaps these elements were refined in rewrites. By the time Evangeline resurfaced in Boston a year later (with a stronger cast assembled partially from Lydia Thompson's alumnae), alterations, greeted as improvements, had been made, and were almost certainly ongoing. Although it's impossible to tell exactly what these were without a greater wealth of extant performance materials to compare, the lion's share of Rice and Goodwin's revisionary energy was spent on the book, which had been excoriated by the New York press. After a well-received run at the Boston Globe and Museum, and a subsequent tour to Philadelphia, Evangeline returned to New York in 1877, this time at Daly's Fifth Avenue Theatre, where a now favorable Times review perceived its "reproduction" with "all the freshness of a first night," singling out Goodwin's book, in particular, as "tolerably rich in puns and allusions." It concluded prophetically: "[ Evangeline 's] lightness and vivacity endow it with strong claims . . . to longevity in New-York." It had become an indefatigable hit, and was revived in there in 1878, 1880 (in Brooklyn), 1885 (for more than 250 performances), 1887, 1888, 1889, 1892, and 1896, in addition to making extensive tours to Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco, with many stops in between.

But the strain on Goodwin to fix his contributions seems to have put a pressure on his collaboration with Rice from which it never fully recovered. Although only Goodwin alone ever received billing for the show's book and lyrics, it has been proposed that an old John Brougham doctored the book prior to its 1877 return engagement in New York, and that a young John J. McNally continued to contribute new text for Evangeline after Goodwin and Rice parted ways shortly thereafter. (Rice, in fact, sued Goodwin, unsuccessfully, the following year for attempting to start a rival Evangeline company—though there is evidence they later attempted mending fences.) Even after the triumph of 1877, Rice continued rigorously to alter the content of the show, creating and dropping entire characters, songs, and incidents; rewriting topical jokes to suit a tour's environs; tweaking the title and subtitle to provide an added air of freshness; and interpolating new star turns for his star performers, which Evangeline had a knack for cultivating.

One such star, Henry E. Dixey, a young Boston-based dancer who later rose to fame in Rice's Adonis (1884), appears to have joined the production following its 1874 New York debut as one end of Evangeline's heifer (which end, it has been debated endlessly); his dancing partner, Richard Golden, assumed command of the cow's two other legs. It has been repeated anecdotally that the "Heifer Dance" originally fell flat in New York, but the comic virtuosity of the new Dixey/Golden choreography made it into a legendary showstopper. Another, George K. Fortescue joined the company for the 1876 incarnation at the Boston Museum in the transvestite role of Catherine, a part he virtually made his career. It was for Fortescue's Catherine that "In Love With the Man in the Moon" seems to have been written. Lillian Russell, perhaps the most luminous actress of Broadway's early days, was discovered while making her New York debut in the chorus of Evangeline in 1880. Additionally, N.C. "Nat" Goodwin (unlikely any close relation to J. Cheever Goodwin) joined Rice's company in 1876 as the Captain, and by 1877 had graduated to the star-making role of Le Blanc. A 20-year-old Fay Templeton made her professional stage premiere as Gabriel in the celebrated, long-running New York revival of 1885.

Owing to the overwhelming public and critical acclaim it received, Evangeline became a myth in its own time, and, as time marched on, that myth (d)evolved into history. Exaggeration and misinformation bred more of the same, to the point where no two accounts seem to agree on any point of fact regarding its origin or early productions—a fitting parallel for a script and score that were always constantly changing, to the point where no extant materials present exactly the same image of the show. As a consequence, however, much of what has been written about Evangeline , even in contemporary sources, has little or no grounding in verifiable fact, explaining my hesitation to commit firmly to every incident I recount here.

Rice, on the other hand, appears to have harbored no such hesitation in using exaggeration to sell the show (recall the Herculean number of songs he claims to have written for it). It is not implausible, then, that the sensational stories of company members' divorces, suicides, bankruptcies, and lawsuits that appeared in the New York Times especially between 1878 and 1882, for example, were, at least in part, clever marketing ploys, purposely (and perhaps recklessly) trumped up by Rice himself to tantalize potential ticket-buyers otherwise unconvinced by the whale, the balloon, the cow, the Lone Fisherman, or even the girls in tights!

It is Evangeline 's mythic status that has largely earned it the distinction commonly bestowed upon it: the first American-devised Broadway show with a wholly original score supplied by one composer. As is the case with so many historic "firsts," this is only true with endless qualifications (and dis-qualifications). The claim is also frequently made that the term musical comedy was first used in America in connection with Evangeline , citing Cecil Smith's groundbreaking 1950 study Musical Comedy in America —which, unfortunately, does not sufficiently cite its source.

Over the course Evangeline 's production history, there is no question that Rice did advertise it successively as an extravaganza, an (American) opéra bouffe , and a burlesque. And while some later critics have insisted that Evangeline is, in fact, a burlesque and a burlesque only, it is helpful to remember that there are no-hard-and-fast generic categories in this period of very messy musical-theater dramaturgy. Only in hindsight did these labels develop specialized identities. In their own time, they were used interchangeably, by Rice and by others, more to make such entertainments appear European and au courant than to describe their precise literary species.

Even so, Evangeline is at once an extravaganza in its commitment to spectacle and wayward narrative wanderings, an opéra bouffe (literally "opera puffed up") in its implementation of homespun characters overflowing with playful music, and a burlesque in its cross-dressed, parodic roast of well-known source material. It also shows shades of pantomime in its comic reliance on the silent Lone Fisherman and humorous tableaux vivants, and glimmers of a musical comedy-to-come, too, in its occasional slips into vernacular speech and music. The real achievement of Evangeline , then—rather than ushering a transition out of the muddled 19th century into the somehow more "mature" forms of the early 20th—was the perpetuation of a deliciously overstuffed musical formula that, in Smith's appraisal, "was permissive rather than restrictive[,] . . . an informal manner of presentation that allowed [it] to grow along with the tastes and fashions of the time, to develop new performers, and to take on new colorations." In a sense, it summarized and put a point on the 19th-century musical-theater muddle, and captivated the collective imagination of a generation in doing so.

Because no book for Evangeline has been easily available, it has been frequently dismissed as dismissible, relegating Evangeline to the nether category of a "leg show" and lending credence to the popular perception that such early musical shows bear no resemblance to the musical theater of today. The libretto presented here—despite the dust of archaic references to calcium lights, frequent indications of obscure comic " business ," and preponderance of groan-inducing puns (groan-inducing, to be sure, even at the time of their writing)—is almost surprisingly accessible, delightful, not off-putting, in its incoherence. If it is at times sloppy, it is most certainly not shoddy. And it does much to bridge the temporal gap between the musical theater of then and now.

Through its prism, we might see Edna Turnblad in Hairspray (originated on Broadway memorably by Harvey Fierstein) as a distant descendant of Fortescue's Catherine, or the Mute in The Fantasticks an eventual theatrical successor to the Lone Fisherman. We might begin to understand how the scene-stealing spectacle of the mechanical whale developed a larger-than-life reputation of its own, much like the chandelier and helicopter of The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon . We now get the joke of the bungled balloon ride to Kansas in L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz novel and subsequent MGM musical film and its subsequent theatrical adaptations.

And then there's the cow. . . . Speaking of Baum, there is no question that the fizzling specter of Evangeline hovered over his typewriter as he dispensed with Toto in favor of a pet cow, Imogen, for Dorothy in his 1902/3 Wizard of Oz stage extravaganza. Gypsy 's "moo cow" Caroline and Into the Woods 's Milky-White (performed in a full-body puppet by Chad Kimball in the 2002 Broadway revival) perpetuate our bizarre fascination with performers in cow costumes on the musical stage. And—as a particularly perceptive Yale College student of mine, Ethan Karetsky, has observed—we get a kind of post-modern rendering of Evangeline's cow in Maureen's "Over the Moon" performance in Rent . So much of what made Evangeline the theatrical blockbuster it was is, in so many ways, still with us.

Whereas Evangeline the musical concludes with an exuberant grand finale, with the company "Singing, dancing, / Always feeling gay . . . ," the conclusion of Evangeline the poem lingers over the somber image of the lovers resting "Side by side, in their nameless graves . . . . / . . . / In the heart of the city, . . . unknown and unnoticed . . . ." As irreconcilable as these endings may seem, perhaps Longfellow's is not totally irrelevant in discussing the stage adaptation's legacy. In the lines that follow the passage quoted above, the poet reverts his focus to the world of the living, recently vacated by Evangeline and Gabriel, where there exist now

Thousands of throbbing hearts, where theirs are at rest forever,
Thousands of aching brains, where theirs no longer are busy,
Thousands of toiling hands, where theirs have ceased from their labors,
Thousands of weary feet, where theirs have completed their journey!

Though today it is not widely known and seldom noticed, Evangeline, or The Belle of Acadia lies beneath so much of the musical theater that now occupies the spaces it once did. It deserves from us whose hearts throb and brains ache and hands toil and make our feet weary in order to make and enjoy what the American musical has become, more credit than we have previously been willing to grant it. Attention must be paid.

Libretto Notes

The basis for this libretto is the most complete Evangeline promptbook extant, housed at the University of Wisconsin's Tams–Witmark Collection, and dug up nearly two decades ago by Richard Jackson. Although Jackson was certain this two-act text was "one of the earliest ones" from 1874, its indication of several later songs makes clear it must be from 1877 at the earliest. In act two, cues for "In Love With the Man in the Moon" and "The Sunshine of Paradise Alley" suggest an even later date, as they were not published until circa 1890 and 1895, respectively.

The source typescript exists in a sorry state, and I have taken great care to decipher its horrific spelling, jumbled verse, creative punctuation, handwritten corrections, pencil cross-outs, and archaic stage directions, while attempting to preserve its textual integrity. In particular, however, where stage directions in the original appear either incomplete or garbled, I have rewritten them altogether for sense, clarity, and consistency. Due to the sheer volume of my emendations, they appear mostly without indication or comment, though my own original editorial insertions appear in [square brackets]. Additionally, only puns underlined in the typescript appear in italics here unless clarification was deemed necessary.

The two-act Evangeline reflected in the libretto does not match either of the three-act versions of the show reflected in the two published vocal scores. Furthermore, the libretto, which contains no lyrics whatsoever, is not always clear about which song belongs where. At times it refers to songs by name; at other times it merely sets up songs in dialogue, or else indicates in stage directions that a character sings. I have done my best to insert the lyrics where I believe they fit best in the given book. In the end, however, mine is only one solution to the "open text" puzzle (and the fun!) that is Evangeline .

The character descriptions in the "Cast of Characters" are drawn from an undated playbill held in the theatrical ephemera collection of the American Antiquarian Society. Evangeline's father is referred to as Ben in the promptbook, but as Basil in the vocal scores and AAS playbill. Out of deference to Longfellow, who calls her father Benedict, I have opted for Ben throughout. (In the poem, Basil is Gabriel 's father. In different stage versions, Basil seems sometimes to have been Evangeline's father, sometimes Gabriel's.)

Finally, antiquated indications in the stage directions taking the form " R.1.E ." signify which numbered entrance or exit a character is to use (with 1 being the downstage-most opening) and on which side of the stage ( L or R ) to do so. A letter U in place of a number simply means "upstage," perhaps through an opening in a drop.

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Musical Link

Most of the songs in the accompanying libretto can be heard in MIDI audio format on Colin M. Johnson's excellent website Victorian and Edwardian Musical Shows . Visit his Evangeline page at http://www.halhkmusic.com/evangel.html.

About the Editor/Writer

Brian D. Valencia is a doctor of fine arts candidate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama, where he is writing a dissertation on the rise and proliferation of musical dramatic forms in 18th- and 19th-century America. As a composer, musical director, dramaturg, and performer, Brian has presented his own theatrical work in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut. He is originally from Bay City, Michigan, and holds a master of fine arts degree from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in musical theater writing, as well as a bachelor of science degree from Yale College in chemical engineering. Brian is a 2012–13 Last Fellow for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society, and the 2012–13 John M. Ward Fellow in Dance and Music for the Theatre at Harvard University's Houghton Library.

Musical of the Month: Dorothy

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 09:43:49 -0400

A guest post by Tracy C. Davis, Barber Professor of Performing Arts — Northwestern University.

Extracted from the preface to Dorothy in Tracy C. Davis, ed., The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012). The full text of the book and lyrics (based on the British Library's manuscript) appears for the first time in this volume.

Florence Dysart as Lydia
[Victoria & Albert Museum]Dorothy premiered in 1886 it was billed as a comic opera; it has been classed as a musical comedy only in retrospect. In the mid-1880s, lyric comic forms tended toward the sexually suggestive, and much of the fare produced in London (originating in Paris or Vienna) consisted of "leg shows" trading on the appeal of revealing female costumes. Dorothy, in common with Gilbert and Sullivan's works, reversed the trend by offering something in verse as "perfectly pure" as it was thoroughly English (Lloyd's Weekly, 26 September 1886). Significantly, however, even The Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore were burlesques (in the parodic, not musical sense) of the comic opera form.

Dorothy looks forward to the development of musical comedy while also reaching backward, not only to earlier comedies but also to the social practice of the bal masqué (a thematic costume ball). On 6 June 1845, for example, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert hosted a bal masqué at Buckingham Palace, the "1745 Fancy Ball," which harked back to fashions of a hundred years before. The Queen and the Prince sported white wigs and specially made antiquated costumes, as did their assembled guests. This suggested a time before revolutions tore at the social fabric of France and when courtly activity still dominated the social hierarchy of England. Setting Dorothy in 1740, among commoners, allowed audiences to enjoy the spectacle of antique clothes and manners purely as dress-up, an homage to noble authority that had long since faded in potency. Squire Bantam's eagerness to accommodate the Duke of Berkshire (a fictitious title taken by someone bent on felonious action) passes without commentary, but in terms of 1886, the Squire's self-deception was naïve and quaintly old-fashioned. One might be neighbourly to a distressed traveler of any station in life, but to then give them the benefit of the doubt on money matters was an action worthy only of the stage. Both the pastoral and courtly settings of Dorothy registered as long, long ago, yet they provided attractive backdrops to the parallel romantic and comic plots. When critics commented on the deficiencies of Stephenson's plot, they implicitly noted its failure to challenge late-Victorian sensibilities; however, they also registered its triumph in pleasing playgoers who did not go to the theatre to be challenged.

Florence Dysart and Marion Hood in a
scene from "Dorothy"
[From The Victoria & Albert Museum]While Dorothy draws upon earlier stage repertoire and the courtly entertainment of the bal masqué, it also utilizes several other forms of social revelry and ritual. Indeed, these constitute the pretexts for the spectacles of acts 1 and 3, and are crucial to the comic opera's impression of creating integrated music and action. The hop-pole celebration and harvest feast of act 1 might be regarded as mere backdrops to introducing the courting quartet except that these rites of country life establish Dorothy and Lydia's aliases as the country lasses Dorcas and Abigail. Wilder and Sherwood's flirtations gain ground (and greater tension) when city collides with country, and gentlemen think they pursue serving wenches of the lower classes. Without the rituals of country life, the women's pretence for disguise would have neither credibility nor forward momentum. In act 3, the framing rite is the marriage of Phyllis and Tom, true country folk, celebrated by their entire village. Somewhat improbably, this occurs in a wooded coppice in order to double locations with the duel between Percy Dasher (seconded by Tilbury Slocomb) — actually Dorothy and Lydia — and Wilder (seconded by Sherwood). The beginning and end of this bit of plot are framed by a country dance by the bridal party and a song urging everyone to be content with their lot. These framing devices make music, song, and dance diegetic — justified within the logic of the plot — rather than merely incidental. They ground the story of the marriage (and the betrothals of the quartet) as the form of musical comedy.

Stephenson's integration of public rituals into Dorothy underscores the waning dependence upon theatrical sources (the mode of much burlesque) and highlights the growing importance of other kinds of entertainment in the public's acceptance of the new genre of the musical. This leaves three factors that account for Dorothy's novelty: the catchiness of the tunes, the performances by starring principal performers, and the moment-by-moment gorgeousness of the unfolding mise en scène. Like so much nineteenth-century fare, Dorothy coheres as a recognizable piece of stage work through its masterful recombination of elements rather than as a breakthrough innovation in any part. While it does not warrant the status of "inventing" musical comedy, Dorothy helped to establish the popularity of elements that became an enduring performance genre, and its financial success encouraged other creative teams to work in its generic mould. Thus it is recognizable, in retrospect, as near the vanguard of a trend without being so decisive a break with tradition as to constitute a watershed.

A note on the text from Doug

The following electronic texts are based on an edition by Tracy C. Davis sent to me as a Word file. I converted this file to TEI and used the result to produce the other forms. Any errors in formatting are therefore my own.

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The Music of Oh, Boy!

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 09:43:00 -0400

A guest post by Professor William Everett

Part of the innate appeal of the Princess Theatre musicals comes from the songs, which famously emerge out of the plots. Musical numbers in these shows illuminate some dimension of the story; characters often reflect on what is happening at the time or offer insights into their personalities and desires. As Stephen Banfield asserts in his extraordinary study of Kern and his music, songs in the Princess Theatre musicals constitute the middle parts of sequences that generally move from dialogue to song to dance. (Banfield, Jerome Kern, 86-88). In a musical, musical style can accentuate or reveal details in ways that cannot be accomplished through words alone. This aspect is certainly evident in Oh, Boy!, as a brief investigation of the three duets in act 1 and solo songs for each of the female leads will demonstrate.

Act 1 includes three duets: Lou Ellen and George's "You Never Knew About Me," Jacky and Jim's "A Pal Like You (We're Going to Be Pals)," and George and Jacky's "Till the Clouds Roll By." Each pair of lovers who will ultimately end up together, Lou Ellen and George on one hand and Jacky and Jim on the other, sing a duet, as do George and Jacky, who find themselves offering each other mutual support. The three duets are in recognizably different musical styles, and through musical characterization, Kern provides insights into the nature of each relationship.

The first duet in the show (and the second number) is "You Never Knew About Me." Lou Ellen and George have just returned to George's apartment after their elopement and don't want any excitement. Marked "Moderato semplice," the song exudes an air of graceful sentimentality and genteel nostalgia. George tells his wife that his earlier life would have been so much happier if she had been part of it, while she confesses that she would have lived less for pleasure alone if she knew that she'd find in him "an ideal for which to strive."

The refrain boasts several remarkable features. While it begins in a standard Tin Pan Alley manner — the second measure offers a slight syncopation and the first and third measures are virtually the same (except for a slight harmonic difference on the final beat) — it quickly becomes non-normative. Nothing is repeated during the remainder of the refrain, defying an anticipated AABA, ABAB, or ABAC structure. The refrain does have four distinct phrases, however, which hints at conventional sixteen-bar form. But Kern once again defies expectations by adding two measures to the final phrase, expanding the refrain to an unusual total of eighteen bars.

Through the anomaly that Kern presents in terms of the refrain's non-repetition of musical material and its atypical length, he subtly informs his audience that other unexpected antics may be afoot. And indeed they are, as the farcical plot begins to unfold.

In the show's second duet, "A Pal Like You," we get to know the other pair of eventual lovers, Jacky and Jim. They are glad to have met, and Jacky is especially grateful to Jim for his help after her predicament with the police.

As a dancing couple, their musical idiom here is a cut-time cakewalk. An infectious short-LONG-short motif (quarter note-half note-quarter note) unifies the verse and refrain and infuses the entire number with a sense of lightness. The 32-bar refrain in ABAC form conforms to Tin Pan Alley norms (unlike "You Never Knew About Me"), though the final cadence resolves in the penultimate measure. This slight anticipation matches the free-spirited working methods of Jacky and Jim; their quick-witted responses and quirky actions can catch people slightly off guard, just like the placement of the final note of their duet. The approach to this final cadence is also worth mentioning. It is not accomplished through a standard melodic ascent (la-ti-do) but rather by skip (la-la-do). Jacky and Jim again demonstrate, though subtle musical means, that they do not always adhere to expectations.

The third duet, "'Till the Clouds Roll By," emerged as Oh, Boy!'s most famous song. The final duet in act 1, it is a paean to platonic friendship and mutual support sung not by one of the romantic pairs but rather by George and Jacky. Its moderately brisk tempo, foxtrot character, Tin Pan Alley-style refrain, and smart lyrics allowed it to achieve success outside of its original context. The words of the verse are actually closely tied to the storyline: Jacky and George find themselves in a typical farcical dilemma and in order to save Jacky's reputation, George must leave, even though it is raining.

The clever literal references to rain, raingear, and waiting "for a clearer sky," became metaphorical in the sense that when the show opened on February 20, 1917, it would be only weeks until the US formally entered World War I (which it did on April 6). Lines such as "Skies are weeping/While the world is sleeping/Trouble heaping/On our head" took on additional significance during the show's run. The song's popularity and its identifiable ties to Jerome Kern led to its title being used for the 1946 MGM biopic of Kern in which Robert Walker played the popular composer.

Just as the three duets in act 1 accentuate character and plot dimensions through musical means, Kern deftly tells us more about the two principal female leads, Lou Ellen and Jacky, in their solo songs. Lou Ellen's "An Old-Fashioned Wife" recalls an old-fashioned paradigm while Jacky's "Rolled into One" is a rollicking romp befitting a chorus girl.

"An Old-Fashioned Wife" emulates the style of an operetta waltz. In the verse, Lou Ellen reflects despairingly on modern wives, who seem to be drawn to "wicked ways." She asserts, in the refrain, that she will not be like that: she won't stay out all night at parties but will stay home and remain true to one man. As Lou Ellen confessed in "You Never Knew About Me," she had previously been the type to enjoy parties and flirting, but now that she has married George, she is ready to settle down to her knitting, a pastime that reflects her new, more ordered existence. As a stylistic vehicle for Lou Ellen to express her worldview, Kern employs a staple of musical theater tropes, the waltz. Lou Ellen is entering a traditional marriage and her music, rooted in tradition, largely reflects this desire. Waltzes often appeared in musicals of the time to signify themes of love, memory, or nostalgia. Is Lou Ellen, who sings this song as she declines an offer to go to another party, perhaps feeling a bit nostalgic for the times when she would have gone along without a moment's hesitation? This could be a waltz of "nevermore," not for lost love or a faraway land, but for the life Lou Ellen once led.

Lou Ellen has found her true love in George, and Jacky eventually finds hers in Jim. Jacky knows what she wants — a combination of the best traits of all the men she has ever dated — and expresses this in the delightful "Rolled into One" [available below]. In contrast to Lou Ellen's waltz, Jacky's solo is filled with dotted rhythms, jaunty syncopations, and other rhythmic delights. Jacky enjoys modern life and love, and her music reflects this.

Intimacy and integration are terms often used to describe the Princess Theatre shows, including Oh, Boy! The three act 1 duets and the solo numbers for each of the two female leads demonstrate the validity of this claim. Through musical style, the audience gains insights into particular dimensions of the show's characters, a feature that figures significantly into the emerging notion of an "integrated musical."

Sheet Music

A Pal Like You Rolled Into One 'Till the Clouds Roll By

Musical of the Month: Erminie

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 08:28:37 -0400

A guest post and edition by Andrew Lamb.

The works of Gilbert and Sullivan dominated nineteenth-century British comic opera from the start. Yet in neither London nor New York was a work of theirs the longest-running British comic opera of its time. Indeed, in New York The Mikado wasn't even the most successful British comic opera of its year.

That distinction belongs to a work now virtually forgotten — Erminie, a comic opera with libretto by Claxson Bellamy and Harry Paulton, and music by Edward Jakobowski. It was produced at the Grand Theatre, Birmingham, England, on 26 October 1885, and after a further week in Brighton reached the Royal Comedy Theatre, London, on 9 November 1885 — some eight months after the première of The Mikado. However, it was not designed in the British comic opera format of Gilbert and Sullivan but in that of imported French works by the likes of Charles Lecocq, Edmond Audran and Robert Planquette. Erminie, indeed, was set in France and had French characters, centring on villains developed from the archetypal Robert Macaire and his hapless companion Jacques Strop, as featured in a 1823 French melodrama L'Auberge des Adrets and its 1834 English version by Jacques Selby.

In Erminie the two villains become the classy criminal Ravannes and his clumsy side-kick Cadeaux. Having escaped from jail, they waylay Ernest, Vicomte de Brissac, who is on his way to meet his promised bride, the Marquis de Pontvert's daughter Erminie, whom he has never met. With thoughts of further theft, Ravannes poses as the Vicomte, with Cadeaux as a supposed Baron whose comic turn of phrase provides the major fun of the piece. Their intervention finally derails plans sufficiently to secure Erminie's marriage to her real lover, the Marquis's secretary Eugène.

The part of Cadeaux was written for himself by co-librettist Harry Paulton (1841-1917). Like most of the principals, Paulton had made a name for himself in London productions of French comic operas. Playing his companion Ravannes was Frank Wyatt (1852-1926), who four years later would create the role of the Duke of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers. In 1886 Wyatt would marry Erminie's manageress Violet Melnotte (née Emma Solomon; 1855-1935), who created the role of Erminie's companion Cerise, who finally marries Erminie's intended husband. Erminie herself was played by Florence St John (1855-1912), a leading lady of French comic opera in London, with Erminie's true lover Eugène played by Welsh tenor Henry Bracy (1846-1917), who had created the role of Hilarion in the Gilbert and Sullivan Princess Ida. Auguste van Biene (1849-1913), later famous in Britain as composer of 'The Broken Melody,' was the production's musical director, while the chorus master was Otto Langey (1851-1922), who in 1889 would settle in America as composer and arranger associated particularly with Victor Herbert.

Harry Paulton's fellow-book-author on Erminie was George Claxson Bellamy (1856-1914), a small-time lyricist whom Paulton later recalled as "a young fellow in the mercantile business." Paulton had apparently given Bellamy the outline of a comic opera, which composer Edward Jakobowski then set to music. When producer Violet Melnotte sought a work for the Comedy Theatre, Paulton offered her both this latter Bellamy/Jakobowski work and also Erminie, for which music publisher Joseph Williams (1847-1923) had provided music under his nom de plume Florian Pascal. Miss Melnotte's verdict was that she liked the Erminie plot and the Jakobowski music. Paulton rewrote Bellamy's work extensively for Erminie but retained his colleague's book-writing credit even though Bellamy ultimately contributed little, while Joseph Williams was happy enough to obtain the music-publishing rights.

As for Erminie's composer, Edward Jakobowski (1856-1929)[1] was born in Islington, London, with parents who were Viennese of Polish extraction. Taken to Vienna as a boy, young Jakobowski lived there for some fifteen years and studied at the conservatory. Then came two years in Paris, after which he moved back to the country of his birth. His first London productions came in 1883, followed soon by Dick, a comic opera version of the Dick Whittington story. Produced at the Globe Theatre on 17 April 1884, it was inevitably overshadowed by Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida but was a pretty fair success, not least achieving production in Australia.

Then came Erminie, whose initial London run of 154 performances was creditable enough for the time. What confirmed the show's very real success was the way it returned to the Comedy Theatre in June 1886, before touring Britain and its Empire for decades. Yet that popularity in Britain and its Empire was nothing compared with that of the United States production, for which Harry Paulton crossed the Atlantic to stage it at the New York Casino under proprietor Rudolf Aronson (1856-1919). Pauline Hall (1860-1919) was Erminie, with Harry Pepper as Eugène, Carl Irving as the Marquis, Marion Manola as Cerise, Agnes Folsom as Javotte, and Rose Beaudet as young Captain Delaunay (a 'trousers' role). As the two jail-birds were William S. Daboll (1854-92) as Ravannes and, most significantly, Francis Wilson (1854-1935) as Cadeaux.

In his Theatrical and Musical Memoirs (New York, 1913), Rudolf Aronson reports Harry Paulton expressing the view at the final dress rehearsal that, "With all the antics of some of the people on the stage, the many interpolations and its Americanization, so to speak, Erminie will be a fiasco." In fact, when Erminie opened at the Casino on Broadway at West 39th Street on 10 May 1886 it was an immediate success. Aronson ran the piece there for 150 performances and then, because of a pre-arranged six-week Casino engagement, took it to Boston, Philadelphia and Brooklyn. It then returned to the Casino for what in those days was an astonishing further 362 performances. After a four-month break, in January 1888 it began yet a further four-month run. The resultant total of well over 600 performances was more than double the run of The Mikado at the Fifth Avenue Theatre and put other Gilbert and Sullivan works even more in the shade.

In New York Erminie was, indeed, a sensation. In his Variety Music Cavalcade (Englefield Cliffs, N.J., 1952, rev. 1962), Julius Mattfeld lists five of its numbers among ten American song hits from 1886, namely Erminie's 'Dream Song' ('At Midnight on My Pillow Lying') and 'Lullaby' ('Dear Mother, in Dreams I See Her,') the Marquis's 'A Soldier's Life,' Eugène's 'Darkest the Hour,' and Cadeaux's comic song 'What the Dicky-Birds Say.' Yet it was not just the musical numbers that made the work such a success but more particularly Francis Wilson's clowning in the role that came to define his career. Besides Erminie's extensive touring history, Wilson mounted his own Broadway production in 1893 after falling out with Aronson, with Jakobowski sailing over from England with several new numbers. Rudolf Aronson then mounted further New York productions in 1897 and 1898 without Francis Wilson, and in 1899 and 1903 with him.

Though the published US score of Erminie is identical to the British, this hides the changes that were undoubtedly made for the U.S., with Aronson describing a couple of ways in which he felt it necessary to supplement the existing score. Firstly, he states, "I found it necessary in order to strengthen the entrance of the two thieves … in the first act … to introduce something foreign …, which I had discovered in Planquette's Les Voltigeurs du 32me and it fitted the situation like a glove." Then, when Marie Jansen (1856-1914) took over the role of Javotte, she pleaded with Aronson to give her a song. "And I did," he says. "I took a little catchy German song I had heard in Berlin some years before, had words written to fit the situation, with the refrain 'Sundays after three, my sweetheart comes to me'." We know too that, after British tenor Henry Hallam took over as Eugène in August 1886, he interpolated a song 'Golden Moon' from Ivan Caryll's 1886 London comic opera The Lily of Léoville.

The first of Aronson's above claims has led to some controversy, since Francis Wilson picked it up for his own memoirs Francis Wilson's Life of Himself (Boston, 1924) — published five years after Aronson's death — and made it refer to the villains' duet 'Downy Jail-Birds of a Feather' — a reference that was clearly false. The "something foreign" that Aronson claimed to have introduced was undoubtedly for their actual entrance, after which comes considerable dialogue before 'Downy Jail-Birds of a Feather.'

Not least among Aronson's changes was to move Erminie's 'Lullaby' to an earlier position in Act 2, where it became the undoubted hit number. Associated with that change was seemingly also the dropping of the 'Supper Chorus' and the termination of Act 2 after the 'Vocal Gavotte.' What was originally the second scene of Act 2 then became Act 3. There were even changes to the names of the two thieves, who had been Ravannes and Cadeau in London listings (and early New York scripts) but Ravannes and Cadeaux in the vocal score and then Ravennes and Cadeaux in American cast-listings.

The New York Public Library's Francis Wilson Collection has typescripts that were clearly prepared for the first New York production and were possibly typed from handwritten British sources. They show many manuscript amendments, indicating cuts, changes of running order and interpolations that would have been made in rehearsal as well as later. It's impossible to know just how the text would have existed at any particular time, but I have used those scripts to create the libretto given here. My aim has been to produce a text that faithfully enough represents the work as it began its American life and which, above all, corresponds with the printed vocal score. I have retained some cuts in the dialogue, but apart from regularising punctuation and correcting seeming errors I have invented nothing. A later typescript, containing topical references to 'rapid transit' and 'subway,' evidently dates from the early twentieth century and shows how the scene-setting and character-setting were later cut back sharply to bring on Francis Wilson earlier, with his part further enhanced by more elaborately developed business.

After Erminie, Harry Paulton and Edward Jakobowski worked on further comic operas both together and separately, without ever achieving comparable success. Besides works for London, Jakobowski composed for both Vienna and New York, the latter shows including The Devil's Deputy, written expressly for Francis Wilson and first seen at Abbey's Theatre in September 1894. Wilson's popularity helped it to 94 New York performances, after which it toured. However, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of 4 December 1894, while praising the humour of J. Cheever Goodwin's "uncommonly good libretto," felt that Jakobowski's music had "nothing noteworthy about it, and he seems to have pumped himself dry in Erminie."

A further Jakobowski romantic opera La Tarantella was produced at the Studebaker Theater, Chicago, on 17 July 1899, and was later announced as Christmas attraction of the Castle Square Opera Company at the American Theater, Manhattan. However, it was "postponed because of the delay in the manufacture of the scenic settings and costumes" and was not heard of again. Jakobowski's final indignity came with a musical comedy originally entitled Miss Walker of Woolloomooloo, written with Harry Paulton's son Edward and played for copyright purposes at London's Globe Theatre in October 1900 with Harry Paulton as Pericles. When something finally came of the show, Woolloomooloo had become Kalamazoo, and the title had become Winsome Winnie. Produced at the Academy of Music, Baltimore, on 28 September 1903, it toured the U.S. successfully, but with the bulk of Jakobowski's score dropped in favour of replacement numbers by Gustav Kerker of Belle of New York fame.

By the time Jakobowski died in 1929 both Erminie and its composer had been largely forgotten in Britain. However, that was by no means the case in America. The 'Lullaby' especially remained a favorite and was recorded several times in the early days of recording. As late as 1921 Francis Wilson played Cadeaux on Broadway one last time, thereby bringing the work into the sphere of a new generation of Broadway practitioners. Irving Caesar revised the lyrics, and in The New York Times journalist and playwright George S. Kaufman contributed a tribute to Erminie's 35 years. As late as 1942 Erminie still had sufficient currency for publisher Carl Fischer to bring out a new version for high school and community performance.

Thus, too, did Erminie survive in America into the post-War era, with a potted version with Gordon MacRae and Nell Tangeman included in NBC's weekly 'Railroad Hour' on 21 April 1952. Indeed Erminie even made it to the era of stereo recording. Around 1957 Nathaniel Shilkret conducted soloists and the Symphonic 'Pops' Orchestra in two tracks for an 'Operetta Favorites' LP produced by the performing right organisation SESAC for distribution to radio stations.

Thanks to the internet, something of Erminie is once more available to us today. Besides the script presented here, the vocal score can be downloaded from either The Internet Archive or The Petrucci Music Library. The whole score can also be heard in computer-generated Midi files at Colin M. Johnson's site. Of early recordings accessible online, one by Elsie Baker from 1913 is of particularly good quality . The 1952 'Railroad Hour' broadcast, too, can be heard at The Internet Archive, while those 1957 tracks (featuring 'Dark is the Hour,' 'What the Dicky-Birds Say,' 'A Soldier's Life' and the 'Lullaby' and in excellent sound) can be purchased from amazon.com.

If ultimately it was Francis Wilson's delivery of Harry Paulton's dialogue that ensured the longevity of Erminie, Jakobowski's tuneful and well-made score was a crucial element in its acclaim. Nobody would suggest that Paulton's lyrics match Gilbert's or that Jakobowski possessed the cultured invention of Sullivan. Yet Erminie contains undeniably attractive elements that make it well worth consideration for revival today by some enterprising comic opera company.

—Andrew Lamb

A note from Doug Reside: The following editions were transcribed and edited by Andrew Lamb from two early copies held by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in the Francis Wilson papers. Lamb's original DOCX file is provided below in addition to the usual ebook formats which I produced from it. Any errors in the formatting of the derrivative versions are entirely my fault.

File type What it's for DOCX Microsoft Word ePub eBook readers (except Kindle) Mobi Kindle PDF Adobe Acrobat HTML Web browsers Plain Text Just about anything TEI Digital Humanities Geeks

[1] Not 1858-1927, as widely stated.

Musical of the Month: Oh, Boy!

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 07:19:22 -0400

A guest post By Laura Frankos
Oh, Boy!: Kern, Bolton, Wodehouse and the Princess Theatre Musicals
The Genesis of the Series

In 1913, the Shuberts added another theatre to their empire at 104 West 39th Street, on the edge of the theatre district. Architect William Albert Swaney, who had built the Winter Garden for the brothers, designed an intimate 299-seat house, with an understated Georgian exterior of red brick and limestone and five stories of office space for rental income. The theatre, dubbed the Princess, spent its first seasons as "the Theatre of Thrills," as manager Ray Comstock mounted a series of unsuccessful Grand Guignol one-acts. Its future was in doubt when agent Elisabeth Marbury made a suggestion that would have a lasting effect on the history of the American musical.

Marbury, a feisty agent who represented, among others, Wilde, Barrie and dance duo Vernon and Irene Castle, was one of the first to demand percentages of the box office take for her clients. She had previously tangled with Comstock, but she now joined him as a co-producer. She proposed using the intimate Princess to best advantage: staging small-scale shows, with more realistic, less fanciful plots played out on two sets. By necessity, they would scale down the personnel to a handful of principals, a chorus of eight to ten, and an eleven-piece orchestra. A big operetta could have as many as a dozen sets, a chorus of to ninety, and a forty-piece orchestra.

Nor would the plots be set in exotic lands or glamorous past eras. Contemporary American settings meant economizing on costumes, a key issue, as the first show had a budget of $7500 and the small house meant a lower weekly income. Marbury's partner, designer Elsie de Wolfe, did the sets at a discount. Marbury suggested Jerome Kern, who had been interpolating songs into shows for a decade on both sides of the Atlantic, as composer.

Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern

Comstock and Marbury's next project was based on Over Night, a comedy by Philip Bartholomae. Again, there were wholesale changes in the creative team during tryouts. At Kern's urging, Bolton joined them, doctoring Bartholomae's farce. He later wrote, "I laid out the music plot with Jerry and discussed the lyrics in relation to the subjects that the action of the play called for..." The plot was frivolous fun — mixed-up honeymoon couples on a Hudson River cruise ship — with the humor arising from the situations and characters. Retitled Very Good Eddie, it opened in December 1915 and became the Princess' second hit, running a whopping 341 performances, with numerous road companies.

But while Kern and Bolton worked well together, they did not have a consistent lyricist. Half a dozen hands, including Kern, contributed verses to Very Good Eddie.

Here Pelham Grenville (P.G.) “Plum” Wodehouse entered the picture. In their hilarious (but highly imaginative) memoirs, Bring On the Girls, Bolton and Wodehouse described their meeting at Very Good Eddie’s opening night, which Plum covered for Vanity Fair. An Englishman who would become one of the most acclaimed humorists of the twentieth century, with over ninety novels, countless short stories, and immortal characters, including Jeeves and Wooster, to his credit, Wodehouse passionately loved theatre. He had, in fact, briefly worked with Kern on a British show in 1906. The imagined meeting has Plum saying he liked Eddie, but not the lyrics, leading to his joining them as lyricist. Whatever the details, it brought the melodic genius of Kern together with the wit of Wodehouse and the skilled pacing and deft plots of Bolton.

Only one hitch: Ray Comstock rejected their first ideas. This doesn't speak well for his judgment, since both eventually became huge hits (Oh, Boy! and Sally). The trio didn't like Comstock's proposal — which would flop horribly — and worked on a show for Klaw and Erlanger, Miss Springtime (September 25, 1916). Kern's work was limited to a few lovely interpolations; Bolton and Wodehouse's contributions got excellent notices.

Miss Springtime was based on a Viennese operetta. While Americanized, it was still far from the contemporary zing of the Princess libretti. The trio's next work, Have a Heart (January 11, 1917, the Liberty Theatre), hewed closer to the Princess parameters, again featuring a plot with honeymooning couples. It didn't have a long run, but had a charming duet, "You Said Something," and the comic song, "Napoleon."

Comstock wooed the trio back to the Princess, accepting Oh, Boy! at last. Bolton wrote the first draft in fall 1916. He continually revised to keep even pacing as they inserted songs. Kern wrote the music before Wodehouse added his verses, a system both men preferred. Wodehouse felt that after hearing the melodies, he could better meld his words with the emotional flow of the music. Perhaps it was the care that went into those drafts, perhaps it was that all the elements of the team were in place from the start; but, unlike its predecessors, Oh, Boy! was in fine shape through its tryouts. It opened on February 20, 1917, to rave reviews and ran 463 performances, moving to the larger Casino and playing in London as Oh, Joy!, with young Beatrice Lillie as Jackey.

Oh, Boy! : The Story

Bolton's plot for Oh, Boy! centers on marriage and mistaken identities. The first act is set in the apartment of George Budd, who has just eloped with Lou Ellen Carter, only to postpone their wedding night. George's guardian, his Quaker Aunt Penelope, having learned of her nephew's romance, has sent a telegram. She's coming to check out his intended, and warns against hasty action. That's not George's only worry: his pal Jim Marvin is throwing a party in the dining room. Keeping his marital state a secret, George tells Jim to move his bash elsewhere, and sadly takes Lou Ellen home. Jim's alone in the place when a girl with a gun — an actress named Jackey Sampson — breaks in. She's on the run following an altercation at the Inn with a drunken lecher named Tootles and a cop named Simms. Gallant Jim covers for her when Simms enters, introducing her as George's wife. Jim tells Jackey to stay in the apartment; George can bunk on Jim's sofa. Meanwhile, Jim will go back to the Inn to search for Jackey's purse.

George returns to find a strange woman in his wife's pajamas. He learns the details of the charade in time to produce his marriage certificate as further proof for Simms' second appearance. The cop is much taken with "Mrs. Budd's" pajamas; he'd like the pattern for his own wife. George departs in the rain for Jim's place.

The chaos continues when he returns in the morning. Jim's debutantes are back, and first Judge Carter, then Lou Ellen and her mother show up, with Aunt Penelope due any minute. George dispatches his valet, Briggs, to detain the aunt at all costs. He spins yarns of chemical experiments to keep everyone out of his bedroom. Too late, for Jackey emerges, and George hastily passes her off as Aunt Penelope. Jackey plays along, with Wodehouse introducing Quakerisms ("I never knew about thee") in the lyrics. She gets her own surprise when she recognizes Judge Carter as the boisterous Tootles.

The Carters leave for the Country Club; Jackey vows to follow, for Jim has discovered the ammunition she needs: the manuscript of a speech the Judge was scheduled to present.

Act Two is set at the Country Club, with the chorus still partying, Briggs nursing a shiner where Aunt Penelope smacked him, and Simms hunting for his assailant... and pajama patterns. Jackey and the Judge parley: she'll return the speech if he gets her purse from Simms. Mrs. Carter, meanwhile, has had enough of the wild Mr. Budd; she says he and Lou Ellen may never speak to each other again.

Jim is now clearly fixated on Jackey, and urges her to consider a romantic future with him in "Nesting Time in Flatbush." George learns of Aunt Penelope's arrival, but, because of his promise, he must converse with Lou Ellen through Briggs about their future. Jackey returns, and pretends to be a Quaker aunt and George's wife at the same time. She orders cocktails, claiming to be ill, and everyone retires to the porch.

Aunt Penelope enters, shaken from her battle with Briggs. Simms shocks her further, remarking he's met Mrs. Budd. She's overcome, but, instead of downing water, drinks Jackey's cocktails. She gets plastered, and goes to lie down.

Now matters have come to a head, for Lou Ellen has discovered Aunt Penelope and demands explanations. When Jackey, Simms, Briggs, the Carters, and drunken Aunt P. all end up on stage, everything is resolved. Jackey gets her purse, the Judge gets his speech, the snockered aunt gives her consent, and George reassures Lou Ellen that that girl in the p.j.'s "is the wife of Jim Marvin...at least she's going to be." Which, Jim notes, is the first time all day George has told the truth.

In the playbill for the Princess shows, Bolton and Wodehouse shared credit for book and lyrics, though Bolton was primarily responsible for the libretti and Wodehouse the lyrics. Yet certain touches in the script for Oh, Boy! recur in Wodehouse's fiction, including tyrannical aunts, judges behaving badly, and the irate policemen, who have either been socked or had their helmet stolen. The valet Briggs, however, is no Jeeves, ready to solve George's problems. He's Cockney, and is there to be shocked at what he sees as his master's sudden wildness and mistaken for a maniac by the aunt. Wodehouse has even admitted that writing a novel was like "making a musical comedy without the music." Two of his tales, Bill the Conqueror and The Small Bachelor, were direct adaptations of musicals (Sitting Pretty and Oh, Lady! Lady!!).

Bolton keeps the action in Oh, Boy! at a constant clip, with characters pelting in and out of doors with perfect timing. The song intervals serve as breathing spaces for the audience, as Sondheim's songs do in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The humor is largely situation-based, but Bolton also indulges in puns, ranging from chorus characters' names (Phil Ossify, Annie Olde-Knight) to the dialogue, as when George says, "My wife has too much honor," to which Simms replies, "Too much on her? If she had on much less, I'd pinch her." Or Jim, contemplating idyllic landscapes — "Between us would lie the greensward," — prompts Jackey to ask, "Oh, Jim, why do you want a sword between us?"

Puns aside, Bolton manages to give the characters likable, distinct personalities. George is nervous, admitting he wilted when the minister asked him "Wilt thou?", but gamely tries to set things right. Jim is a party animal, given to slang and clipping his words ("Simms is snooping around and would be very suspish."). But he shows his mettle defending Jackey. Lou Ellen has less to do, but still seems sweet. The authority figures (the cop, the aunt, the judge) have a reality beyond their stock, comic attributes.

Oh, Boy! : The Songs

The trio agreed that the songs should spring naturally from the action of the plot. For the most part, those in Oh, Boy! do. The opening chorus, sung by Jim and his girls, proclaims "Let's Make a Night of It" as they prepare to raid George's booze. After the newlyweds arrive, Bolton has George admit his past was dark, "because you weren't there to brighten it," smoothly transitioning to "You Never Knew About Me." The couple regret that they hadn't met in childhood: "I'd have let you feed my rabbit/Till the thing became a habit, dear!/But I never knew about you."

Kern wasn't above recycling melodies, and "A Package of Seeds" came from the flop Ninety in the Shade, with Wodehouse revising Herbert Reynolds' lyrics for Jim's ode to ladies. Bolton prepares the way for the song, giving Jim dialogue about a garden of "American beauties."

Lou Ellen's number, "An Old-Fashioned Wife," in which she declines the debs' invitation to party, reveals her character. Jackey and Jim's first duet, the sprightly cakewalk, "A Pal Like You" shows their free spirits, as does Jackey's "Rolled into One."

The big hit was "Till the Clouds Roll by," one of Kern's personal favorites. It arises realistically, for George must leave the apartment in the rain, lest he ruin Jackey's reputation: "I'd be gaining/Nothing by remaining,/What would Mrs. Grundy say?" Concerned Jackey frets (in a splendid bit of rhyming), "What bad luck, it's/Coming down in buckets,/Have you an umbrella handy?" Wodehouse's naturalistic touches, with references to waterproof coats and bracing nips of brandy, combined with Kern's sweet melody, win the audience over. The pair are not lovers, yet they're as warm as the glass of toddy Jackey mentions.

Jim and Jackey's duet, "Nesting Time in Flatbush," is a comic masterpiece. Here Wodehouse has the lovers dismiss songs celebrating spring in Normandy for more conventional joys: "When it's nesting time in Flatbush,/We will take a little flat,/With welcome on the mat,/Where there's room to swing a cat." The mood is cozy, not exotic: fitting for the Princess shows.

Oh, Boy! : The Cast and Crew

Although its budget ($29,000) was far larger than earlier shows, Oh, Boy! starred lesser-known actors. Tom Powers (George) had some stage and film credits, but would go on to greater fame afterwards. With the Theatre Guild, he starred in Strange Interlude, and later toured as Brutus in Orson Welles' Julius Caesar before returning to the screen. Anna Wheaton (Jackey) and Hal Forde (Jim) also weren't stars. The big attractions were the chorus girls, Marion Davies and Justine Johnstone, whom Comstock bragged he had lured from Ziegfeld. The truth was that Johnstone was Bolton's lover and Davies had been in Ninety in the Shade, a teenaged chorine who hadn't added yet that "e" to her surname. Davies got the frisky "A Little Bit of Ribbon," a kind of ancestor to Porter's "Satin and Silk," and she and Johnstone wore eye-catching gowns. Davies would gain fame in films and as William Randolph Hearst's mistress. Johnstone left show business, became a pathologist, and helped create the modern intravenous drip. Edna May Oliver (Penelope) made a career of playing spinsters on stage and screen, turning the cliché of the inebriated matron into a comic specialty. She impressed Kern enough to get the role of Parthy in Show Boat.

Oh, Boy!'s director was Edward Royce, an Englishman who had worked with Kern before and would direct more of his shows. The orchestrator was Frank Saddler, who worked closely with Kern on many scores, helping to revolutionize the sound of musical theatre. For a 1912 show, he and Kern put the first saxophones in a Broadway pit. He admirably met the challenge of tailoring Kern's music to the tiny Princess orchestra.

Later Collaborations and Lasting Influence

The trio would create several more shows together: the college romp Leave It To Jane (August 1917 at the Longacre, but considered a Princess show); The Riviera Girl (September 1917, New Amsterdam); Miss 1917 (November 1917, Century); Oh, Lady! Lady!! (February 1918, the final Princess show); Sally (December 1920, New Amsterdam — lyrics mostly by Clifford Grey); and Sitting Pretty (April 1924, Fulton). Jane and Lady! were successes, and, at 570 performances, Sally was one of the longest running shows in history.

Kern and Wodehouse worked together on a few more shows, and a cut song from Oh, Lady! Lady!! wound up in Show Boat: the classic "Bill." Bolton and Wodehouse remained close friends throughout their long lives. They collaborated on several more shows, notably the Gershwins' Oh, Kay!, Gershwin and Romberg's Rosalie, and the original libretto for Porter's Anything Goes.

The Princess shows weren't the first musicals to try to integrate story and song, but the trio of talents did it so well they had a lasting influence. The next generation of songwriters were hooked on them. Vincent Youmans' No, No, Nanette is a clear descendant. Young Richard Rodgers saw Very Good Eddie six times, and recognized the American character of Kern's music: "I was watching the beginning of a new form of musical theatre... and wanted desperately to be part of it." Rodgers' future lyricist, Lorenz Hart, took Wodehouse as his inspiration. The Gershwin brothers were also devotees — young George was rehearsal pianist on the flop, Miss 1917.

Perhaps George Kaufman put it best, parodying a ditty about the Chicago Cubs infield (Tinker to Evers to Chance):

This is the trio of musical fame,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern.
Better than anyone else you can name,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern.
Nobody knows what on earth they've been bitten by,
All I can say is I mean to get lit an' buy
Orchestra seats for the next one that's written by
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern.

Laura Frankos is an escaped academic who has written in the fields of mysteries, science fiction and fantasy. She turned a lifelong obsession with musicals into The Broadway Musical Quiz Book (Applause Books, 2010), and also writes " The Great White Wayback Machine," a column devoted to musical theatre history.

A note on the text from Doug

The following eTexts were produced from a transcription made by Ann Fraistat from a copy of an early promptbook owned by NYPL. This prompt book did not include most of the lyrics, though these are available in the published sheet music. The text was encoded by me (Doug) for the various eBook file-types.

Because this text of Oh, Boy! was not published prior to 1923, the text is in copyright until 70 years after the author's death. The Wodehouse and Bolton estates have kindly granted us permission, however, to present this new edition for research use only. Those wishing to license the play for production should contact Tams-Witmark Music Library, Inc.

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Musical of the Month: A Biography of George M. Cohan

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 09:24:58 -0400

A guest post by Professor William Everett.

His statue stands in Times Square, the only one located at the "Crossroads of the World." This legendary showman did it all—actor, writer, composer, producer, manager, sheet music publisher. If one individual had to be chosen as an embodiment of the breadth of the stage entertainment industry at the turn of the twentieth century, an ideal choice would be George M. Cohan (1878-1942).

Born into a family of vaudevillians, it comes as no real surprise that George, while a child, became part of a family act with his parents and sister appropriately called The Four Cohans. Thanks to the young man's entrepreneurial and management skills, by 1900 the team was among the most popular on the variety circuits. At the same time, the youthful Cohan began to write plays and musicals, compose songs, and direct stage productions. His multi-faceted talents came together in 1904 for this month's "Musical of the Month," Little Johnny Jones. Cohan created the book, lyrics, and music for the show, as well as serving as its director, co-producer, and star. He continued to write, direct, produce, and headline shows for more than twenty years. Among Cohan's more notable musicals are Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1906), George Washington, Jr. (1906), Hello, Broadway! (1914), Little Nellie Kelly (1922), and The Merry Malones (1927). Cohan did not limit himself exclusively to musical theater; his non-musical plays include Seven Keys to Boldpate (1913) and The Tavern (1920). On the business side of things, Cohan established an important partnership with Sam H. Harris that lasted from 1904 until 1920. In addition to producing musical comedies, revues, and straight plays, the team created a publishing company and acquired financial interests in several New York theaters.

Cohan possessed a strong sense of dramatic and musical pacing. At times this was rapid while at others more sentimental. His deeply rooted ability to control the overall flow of a work was matched by his careful attention to detail. This dualistic approach concerning the larger plan of a musical as well as a focus on its most meticulous aspects defined, in part, a Cohan show.

Cohan’s career moved in a slightly different direction in the 1930s when he appeared in works by other creators. He starred in three significant productions during the decade: the early film musical.The Phantom President (Paramount, 1932, with a score by Rodgers and Hart), Eugene O'Neill's play Ah, Wilderness!(1933), and George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's musical satire I'd Rather Be Right (1937, again with a score by Rodgers and Hart). In The Phantom President, Cohan played a dual role—first as the stuffy banker Theodore K. Blair, a presidential candidate who lacks personal charisma, and second as "Doc" Varney, a song-and-dance man who looks just like Blair. Rather than giving Blair a personality makeover, the banker's political campaign hires Doc to impersonate their man in order to gain votes. In I'd Rather Be Right, Cohan played not a fictional presidential hopeful but rather a theatrical incarnation of real-life President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Phantom President and I'd Rather Be Right are especially significant in that they are the only musicals in which Cohan starred but did not write, and both have overt political themes. Cohan, whose stage persona in shows such as Yankee Doodle Dandy did so much to define an American identity in the early years of the twentieth century, moved to playing national-level politicians in the 1930s. These were not overt and straightforward jingoistic patriotic roles by any means, for Cohan was anti-Union and reportedly was opposed to FDR and his policies.

Even though Cohan lacked formal musical training, he wrote over 500 songs, many of which became extremely popular. In addition to "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "Give My Regards to Broadway" from Little Johnny Jones, other especially significant songs include "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Mary's a Grand Old Name," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," and the monumental patriotic song for two World Wars, "Over There." Cohan's songs have tremendous appeal because of their decidedly uncomplicated nature. They are easily remembered due to their generally straightforward form (introduction, two verses, chorus), direct lyrics, and unfussy musical language. Their relatively narrow vocal ranges make them eminently singable, whether as solos or in group settings.

George M. Cohan remains one of the most significant figures in American musical history. His life and work inspired a musical film and a stage musical: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), in which James Cagney played Cohan, and George M! (1968), featuring Joel Grey as the legendary showman. Yankee Doodle Dandy focuses on Cohan's musical legacy, fictionalizing aspects of its subject's personal life. The splendid re-creations of two scenes from Yankee Doodle Boy, "Yankee Doodle Boy" and "Give My Regards to Broadway," are among the film's most memorable moments. George M!'s thin book chronicles Cohan's career, but the show's highlights, following the lead of Yankee Doodle Dandy, rests in its impressive production numbers. Cohan was thus immortalized both in film and on stage, and it seems entirely appropriate that a statue of this quintessentially American entertainer, fittingly situated on Times Square, continues to greet throngs of theatergoers and tourists on a daily basis.

Musical of the Month: Little Johnny Jones

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 07:35:22 -0400

A guest post by Elizabeth Titrington Craft.

"I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy / A Yankee Doodle do or die / A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam / Born on the Fourth of July." If these lines conjure up a familiar patriotic ditty, perhaps learned in school or heard at Independence Day celebrations, then you already know one of the hit songs from George M. Cohan's 1904 musical Little Johnny Jones. This landmark show tapped into the nationalism of the day and fashioned Cohan's public persona, earning him his reputation as the "Yankee Doodle Dandy" himself. Cohan's theatrical "flag-waving" and his vision of nationhood both delighted and raised hackles, but they were impossible to ignore.

With its fast pace, colloquial language, and patriotic themes and tunes, Little Johnny Jones proved a prototypical Cohan musical. A certain plot template emerges from Cohan's so-called "flag plays," many of which were set abroad: Americans run amok in London or Paris, where fortune-hunting British noblemen, in cahoots with title-hunting American parents, create hurdles for brash young Yankee heroes and their charming sweethearts. In Little Johnny Jones, the musical's title character, loosely based on the real-life jockey Tod Sloan, has traveled to England to ride in the English Derby. Jones is in love with the heiress Goldie Gates, but Goldie's aunt Mrs. Kenworth, a wealthy widow and the leader of the San Francisco Female Reformers, has traveled to England to arrange Goldie's marriage to a British earl. Goldie intervenes, however. Unbeknownst to her aunt or Jones, she, too, has made the trip abroad, disguising herself first as a French mademoiselle and then posing as the earl himself. Meanwhile, the dastardly villain Anthony Anstey, "king" of San Francisco's Chinese lottery, has become betrothed to Mrs. Kenworth in order to reap her riches and quash her reform efforts. When Jones is accused of throwing the Derby, it looks like not only his honor but also his chance with Goldie is lost. But Whitney Wilson, the mysterious eccentric who turns out to be an undercover investigator, exposes Anstey as the crooked agent behind Jones's set-up. In the end, Wilson takes down the Chinese lottery, Mrs. Kenworth learns her lesson that an upright American beats an English earl any day, and Jones and Gates are happily reunited.

Amidst the upheaval wrought by industrialization, imperialism, and immigration, Little Johnny Jones informed audiences in overt and more insidious ways about what and who qualified as true-blue American. The cast list found in the libretto at the Museum of the City of New York and on playbills used the national label liberally, describing Johnny Jones as "the American Jockey" and Anstey as "an American Gambler." Cohan was billed in playbills and advertisements as "the Yankee Doodle Comedian." Starring as Jones, Cohan epitomized his own vision of the model American – young and energetic, honest and forthright, and a bit cocksure. In the entrance number "Yankee Doodle Boy," Jones introduces himself as patriotism personified:

I'm the kid that's all the candy,
I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,
I'm glad I am,
[Chorus]: So's Uncle Sam

The refrain, which begins with the opening lines of this post, hammers home this personification of patriotism. The song is laden with musical and lyrical references from other well-known tunes, and some critics decried Cohan's lack of originality. But listeners loved the "brassy and bass-drummy" sound (in the words of one writer).

It may seem ironic that a musical so fixated on patriotism and American identity is set abroad. In part, setting the show in England allowed for suitably "exotic" colorful scenery and fun novelty numbers like "'Op in Me 'Ansom," in which a chorus of hansom cab drivers and female reformers sing about touring London. The European-American encounter of these shows also served up ample opportunities for a somewhat chauvinistic brand of humor, as when the heroine Goldie (in disguise as Mlle. Fanchonette) asks Anstey, "What makes the Americans so proud of their country?" "Other countries," he quips in response. In another scene, the humorously undiplomatic and apparently oblivious Wilson delivers London a backhanded compliment:

Wilson. I certainly had a good time here in Pittsburgh.
Starter. Pittsburgh?
Wilson. I mean, London. Ain't it funny I always get these two towns mixed? London and Pittsburgh. But say, no joking, London is a great town for fun.
Starter. Right you are, sir.
. . .
Wilson. And you take it from me, for a good time London makes Worcester and Springfield look like thirty cents.

The meeting of Europeans and Americans provided plentiful fodder for jokes while sending the clear message that traveling abroad may be fun, but life at home in the United States is best.

Yet Little Johnny Jones reflected the nation's lurking anxieties at the turn of the century as well as its confidence. Apprehension about European influence can be seen in the threat of Goldie's arranged marriage to the Earl of Bloomsbury, for example. Common wisdom on "international" or "foreign" marriages, the contemporary terms for those marriages between titled Europeans and high society Americans, held that the member of the nobility was seeking wealth and the American (or her parents) jockeying for a title. In this regard, Little Johnny Jones reflected contemporary distaste (tinged, perhaps, with admiration or envy) for these unions. The other major danger in the show, the Chinese lottery, is associated with another group of outsiders. While Cohan is careful to note in the script that the lottery is "controlled by Americans" and that the Chinese emperor would disapprove, like many playwrights of the period, he also traffics freely in offensive stereotypes of Asian characters for the sake of a cheap laugh. One such joke plays on the stereotype of the Chinese laundryman: "Just the fellow I want to see," exclaims the tactless Wilson upon meeting the Chinese character Sing Song. "Say, if I give you some laundry tonight, can I get it Friday night?"

Nor do the outsiders within the United States' borders escape commentary, though Cohan's messages about immigrant Americans are decidedly ambivalent. The Chinese Americans and, in absentia, southern European immigrant characters remain outsiders. And in the second verse of "Yankee Doodle Boy," Jones employs nativist rhetoric, citing his parents' old-stock lineage to justify his Americanness:

Father's name was Hezekiah,
Mother's name was Ann Mariah,
Yanks through and through,
[Chorus:] Red, white and blue.
. . .
My mother's mother was a Yankee true,
My father's father was a Yankee too;
. . .
[Chorus:] Oh, say can you see anything about my pedigree that's phony?

This is a surprising statement from Cohan given that he, as a third-generation Irish American, could hardly claim such a lineage. And indeed, Cohan also shows his Irish American character, Timothy D. McGee, to be a "good man" and a good American, ultimately pairing him with the wealthy Mrs. Kenworth.

Amidst the lessons in nationalism were the makings of a successful, "Cohanesque" style of entertainment. Journalists took to adjectivizing Cohan's name to describe the musicals for which he was not only book writer, composer, and lyricist, but also typically director and co-producer (with Sam Harris) and frequently star. The plot of Little Johnny Jones, though light, was coherent. The scenery and costumes were handsome – one Boston review reported "eleven distinct changes of wardrobe" for the chorus. And an ambitious "transformation" scene at the end of Act II impressed audiences while conveying the excitement of a key moment in the plot. Disgraced by the accusations of throwing the English Derby, Jones chooses to stay ashore as the steamship leaves for the United States. The detective Wilson is to signal Jones when his innocence is proven. "Give My Regards to Broadway," Jones and the chorus sing. The ship sets out, a bell rings, the stage darkens… and then, a skyrocket is launched from the steamship as the sign that Jones's name has been cleared of wrongdoing. Jones sings a final, elated chorus before the curtain falls.

The music of Little Johnny Jones, though not particularly innovative, was pleasant and catchy, with Tin Pan Alley forms and generous doses of ragtime syncopation. "As a composer, I could never find use for over four or five notes in my musical numbers," Cohan wrote in a letter to a friend, and he claimed he "never got any further than…four F-sharp chords." But while his music does have a straightforward simplicity to it, Cohan undersells his musical know-how. Musically and lyrically as well as dramatically, he was a craftsman. And his delivery of his songs as singer-dancer-actor, in his distinctive manner of speak-singing, helped put them over. The patriotic style he used in "Yankee Doodle Boy" was the most striking, but the philosophical "Life's a Funny Proposition After All" and "Give My Regards to Broadway," which could be either warmly wistful or jauntily energetic depending on the performance, also became favorites.

Although the first Broadway run of Little Johnny Jones was relatively brief (52 performances), Cohan responded by taking the show on the road and then returning to New York in 1905 and 1907, for a combined total of over 200 New York performances. Cohan wrote in his autobiography, "It was the one and only Broadway 'comeback' I have ever known or heard of." Reviews were mixed. A few raved, and a few ranted. (Life described the 1907 production as "the apotheosis of stage vulgarity.") Most, though, conceded finding it enjoyable as entertainment if not up to the standards of serious drama. Most important to Cohan, it received the endorsement of the box office and made him a Broadway figure of note.

The songs from Little Johnny Jones have stood the test of time much better than the show. A silent film adaptation was released in 1923 and a Vitaphone "talkie" in 1930; neither is commercially available today. A Goodspeed Opera House revival opened on Broadway in 1982 but was panned and closed after one performance. An excellent recording by Rick Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra is a good way to experience a broad swath of Cohan's music, however. And Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) is a fun, if not particularly accurate, biopic of Cohan's life, with James Cagney doing his rendition of Cohan performing "Yankee Doodle Boy" from Little Johnny Jones.

Now, as for the early twentieth-century audiences and critics, Cohan's proud and exuberant "flag waving" provokes strong reactions. Some may find it endearing, others embarrassing. His conception of American identity may seem wholesome, outmoded, or even objectionable. As we pack up the flags and sparklers from the Fourth of July, the debates over what – and whom – we celebrate rage on.

A note on the text from Doug:

The text below was transcribed by Ann Fraistat and encoded for eReading by me. It is based on a copy at the Museum of the City of New York which did not include any of the lyrics. However, many of the songs can be found in NYPL's Digital Gallery.

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Musical of the Month: A Trip To Chinatown

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 04:13:25 -0400

A quiz for musical theater fans: Name a musical, set at the close of the 19th century, in which two young men deceive a crotchety old man in order to escape his oversight and seek love and adventure in the big city. The young men, together with their female romantic partners and a romantically available widow, go to a fancy restaurant where, through a somewhat improbable chain of events, the old man is also present and expecting to meet a potential romantic partner himself. A scuffle breaks out at the restaurant, and at the conclusion of the scene the old man is left with a bill for the whole party — which he cannot pay because he has lost his wallet. The musical was extremely popular and played a record-breaking number of performances in New York.

Hello Dolly! would be an obvious answer. However, the description above applies equally accurately to June's musical of the month: the 1891 hit A Trip to Chinatown. Of course, Hello Dolly! was explicitly based on the 1955 Thornton Wilder play "The Matchmaker," which was in turn based on the 1842 Austrian musical, "Einen Jux will er sich machen" (which was, itself, based on a 1835 play, "A Day Well Spent" by British opera librettist John Oxenford) As happens more often than we champions of the musical theater genre might like to admit, originality sometimes seems to have been inversely proportional to popularity.

To be fair, Charles Hoyt, bookwriter of A Trip to Chinatown, made no great artistic claims for his play. As was his custom, Hoyt included a self-deprecating note on the Broadway program that read: "In extenuation: The author begs to say that whatever this play may be, it is all that is claimed for it." Hoyt could well afford to be so dismissive of his work; he knew it would make no difference to his audience. Although his later personal life was plagued with tragedy (including the death of two wives and a child in the course of five years), Hoyt enjoyed an extremely successful career as a playwright. A Trip to Chinatown, for instance, ran for a record-breaking 657 performances; Hoyt knew what entertained, and seems to have very rarely allowed artistic high-mindedness get in the way of his providing it to his audiences.

Regular readers of this blog may note that after the relative integration of music and plot in last month's Naughty Marietta and April's The Pink Lady, A Trip To Chinatown, hearkens back to the early musicals covered in this series for which the songs were more or less interchangable parts — able to be dropped, added, or replaced as popular tastes changed. Indeed, the text at the Museum of the City of New York that is transcribed below does not contain any lyrics at all but rather stage directions that suggest the placement of a number. Although the songs listed in the program during the original New York seem to have remained relatively constant, and the 3rd act number, "On the Bowery" (with lyrics by Hoyt and music by Percy Gaunt) became closely identified with the show, later productions freely interpolated new music. The immensely popular waltz song, "After the Ball," perhaps best known to musical theater fans for it's later inclusion in Show Boat, was interpolated into A Trip To Chinatown soon after it was written.

In 1912, Florenz Ziegfeld produced a new, somewhat less commercially successful version of A Trip to Chinatown, retitled "The Winsome Widow."[1] True to Ziegfeld's form, the production seems to have been a spectacular extravanganza with many specialty numbers (one review mentioned an ice-skating number), but, perhaps counter-intuitively, the songs appear to have been more tightly integrated into the plot than in Hoyt's original play. A Winsome Widow opened the Moulin Rouge, New York and ran for 172 performances during the summer season—quite a bit fewer than A Trip To Chinatown but also not a strikingly short run for the period. Ethan Mordden called the show a "hit"; Kurt Ganzl described it as "a singular flop." I have been unable to locate any financial information about the run, but the contemporaneous reviews suggest it was critically received as something in between. Regardless, it is clear it enjoyed nothing like the success of A Trip to Chinatown.

The history of musical theater is a complicated one. The popular narrative in the mid-to-late 20th century told a story of a steady evolution from spectacles with musical speciality numbers (like The Black Crook) to popular operetta (like Naughty Marietta) to shows like The Winsome Widow, Show Boat, and Oklahoma in which the songs (it has been argued) flow naturally out of the spoken dialogue (a form some have called the "integrated" musical). Recent historians have challenged this idea--arguing musicals as "integrated" as Oklahoma existed long before 1943, and some (most prominently the late Bruce Kirle) have questioned the often assumed superiority (or even reality) of a fixed score. This debate can be fascinating, but it is often relatively limited as many of musical theater texts written before Show Boat are not generally available. It is my hope that by providing access to the texts of the period of supposed transition between the "embryonic" Black Crook and the more "integrated" Show Boat, this series allows the public to better understand what the "pre-Hammerstein" musical actually was, and to decide for themselves whether Hello Dolly! or A Trip to Chinatown is a better work of art, or if, as Hoyt vaguely requests in his program note, both should be taken for what they are and enjoyed according to the conventions of their own, different, forms.

A note on the text:

The following text was transcribed by Ann Fraistat from the a text held by the Museum of the City of New York which lacks lyrics. Given the frequency with which the music changed and the lack of clarity as to the exact placement of the songs, I have decided to preserve the integrity of the source text and not supply lyrics from other sources. However, I have transcribed the song list from the opening night program below with links to where period sheet music with lyrics may be found.

Act I

The Pretty Widow (Hoyt and Gaunt)

Out for a Racket (Gaunt)

Dorothy (Gavotte) (Gaunt)

["Dorothy" seems to have been quickly replaced by African Cantata—"Push Dem Clouds" (Gaunt)]

Crisp Young Chaperone (Barton)

Act II

Burlesque of Italian Opera (Gaunt)

Medley (Arranged by Gaunt)

Whistling extraordinary: "The Waiting Maid" (Gaunt)

Act III

On the Bowery (Hoyt and Gaunt)

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[1] There appears to be an annotated typescript copy of this libretto at the Museum of the City of New York. Although it is titled "A Trip to Chinatown," the songs in the libretto match those in a program for "The Winsome Widow" held by NYPL.

Naughty Marietta: A Production History

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:41:31 -0400

A Guest Blog By Project Co-Director, Professor William Everett

In 1910 impresario Oscar Hammerstein sold his interests in his Manhattan Opera Company to his chief rival, the Metropolitan Opera, and agreed not to produce any opera in New York City for a decade. Instead, he turned his attention toward the related genre of operetta and commissioned the noted composer-conductor Victor Herbert to write a new work that would feature two of his Manhattan Opera Company stars, Emma Trentini and Orville Harrold. Hammerstein wanted a highly operatic operetta, and Herbert more than accommodated his producer's wishes.

Since Herbert was writing for opera singers, he produced a truly ambitious score filled with virtuoso solo passages, expansive ensemble and choral numbers, and a general sense of élan and finesse. Herbert, by this time, was an established figure on Broadway. Among his earlier successes was Babes in Toyland (1903), a previous Musical of the Month.

Rida Johnson Young was the show's librettist and lyricist. One of a handful of women creating Broadway shows at the time, Young, whose early career had been as an actress, collaborated with several leading composers of the day, including Jerome Kern (The Red Petticoat, 1912), Sigmund Romberg (Her Soldier Boy, 1916; Maytime, 1917) and Rudolf Friml (Sometime, 1918).

Naughty Marietta opened at the New York Theater on November 7, 1910. The venue, which Hammerstein had built years earlier as the Olympia, did not generate fond memories for the producer. This was the house that had indeed bankrupted him and from which he had to be forcibly evicted. For Naughty Marietta, he rented the renamed theater from Klaw & Erlanger (producers of The Pink Lady, a previous Musical of the Month) and was justifiably nervous when he reentered the house forNaughty Marietta, though it turned out to be a triumphal return. The comic opera, as it was called, played 136 performances before beginning its tour, the normal practice for musicals at the time.

Hammerstein heard Emma Trentini sing in a Milan cabaret and brought her to New York in 1906 to sing with his Manhattan Opera Company. The diminutive soprano (she was less than five feet tall) with a fiery temperament triumphed as Musetta in La boheme, Michaela in Carmen, and Olympia in The Tales of Hoffman. The producer also discovered lyric tenor Orville Harrold when he heard him sing in an amateur production in Indiana. Harrold's "day job" was as a hearse driver. Hammerstein brought Harrold to New York, ensured he received formal training, and cast him in roles such as the Duke in Rigoletto and Rodolfo in La boheme. Harrold received audience and critical accolades for his performances and later joined the company at the Met.

Part of the orchestra, the chorus, and some singers also came from the defunct Manhattan Opera Company, as did the conductor, Gaetano Merola. The Naples born and trained conductor led the premieres of not only Naughty Marietta but also Rudolf Friml's The Firefly (1912) and Sigmund Romberg's Maytime (1917). He eventually went to San Francisco, where he founded the San Francisco Opera in 1923 and was its general director through 1953. William Axt succeeded Merola on the podium ofNaughty Marietta. Like his predecessor, Axt ultimately ended up in California, not to lead opera in San Francisco but rather to create nearly 200 film scores in Hollywood, including Ben-Hur (1925), Grand Hotel (1933), and The Thin Man (1934).

Set in the late eighteenth century, Neapolitan Countess Marietta d'Altena (Trentini) escapes an unwanted marriage by going to New Orleans on a bride ship. (The brides-to-be are referred to as casquette girls, named after the small trunks they carried with them to hold their few belongings.) Travelling in cognito, Marietta comes under the protection of Captain Dick Warrington (Harrold), a frontiersman who is pursuing the pirate Bras Piqué (Edward Martindel), identifiable by a tattoo on his arm as his name implies (bras piqué = pricked arm [literally] or tattooed arm). Captain Dick and the lieutenant governor's son, Étiene, become rivals for Marietta's affections, but Marietta only wants to be with the man who can complete her "Dream Melody" (a.k.a. "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life"). The Governor's son turns out to be Bras Piqué and Captain Dick, as expected, completes Marietta's dream melody.

Naughty Marietta opens with an extraordinary sequence, one that establishes the general largesse that dominates the work. A church bell strikes five and the watchman announces that "all's well." Beggars, the Sacristan, and flower girls all begin to prepare for the day. The flower girls offer an effervescent ode to the morning before various vendors' street cries fill the aural space and the number concludes with general revelry. The quiet scene that morphs into a celebration prefigures the famous beginning of Bernstein's On the Town (1944) and the lively market setting anticipates that of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956).

Captain Dick and his followers, the ubiquitous male chorus, enter to "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!," a classic operetta march in which the chorus extols its rugged masculine virtues through lyrics that today would be considered largely politically incorrect. Such marches—sung by a male chorus and generally extolling themes of justice—would become a mainstay of American operetta in classics such as "The Mounties" from Rudolf Friml and Otto Harbach's Rose Marie (1924), "Song of the Vagabonds" from Friml and Brian Hooker's The Vagabond King (1925), and "Stouthearted Men" from Sigmund Romberg, Harbach, and Oscar Hammerstein 2nd's The New Moon (1928).

Marietta has two character-defining songs in Naughty Marietta. In the first, a cavatina of sorts, she describes the two sides of her personality, one proper and one horrid. The lightly scored accompaniment for "Naughty Marietta" allows the character-defining lyrics to be easily understood. With Italian-born Trentini singing in a heavily accented English, this was an extremely important consideration. In the famous "Italian Street Song," with its difficult coloratura obligato passages and sustained high Cs, Marietta lets everyone know, through her music, that she is indeed of noble birth. Her sophisticated virtuosic music demands a singer who is operatically trained and this attribute sets her apart from her female compatriots.

Similarly, Marietta and Captain Dick share two duets, "It Never, Never, Can Be Love" and "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life." In the first, they declare that their relationship will only be platonic, implying that no romance will ever develop between them. The skipping dotted rhythms and light-hearted style place the song in the realm of musical comedy and keep the plot from becoming too serious and melodramatic. While in some ways it anticipates the almost love songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein, in which characters sing something along the lines of "I love you, but…" (for example, "People Will Say We're in Love" from Oklahoma! [1943]), the overall spirit of the music and lyrics conveys a spirit of innocence. By contrast, "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life" is a soaring duet. It too has dotted rhythms, linking it to the earlier duet, but this time, they cascade downwards after dramatically held high notes. The idea of a specific piece of music being integral to the plot, as it is here, is not unique to Naughty Marietta. In Romberg and Frederick Arnold Krummer's The Magic Melody (1919), a mother and son who have been separated for years recognize each other through knowing the same melody. Most famously, in Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark (1941), Liza Elliot's "My Ship" is the tune for which the protagonist is looking for a duet partner.

The score is filled with other delights. Among these is Adah's languid ballad "'Neath the Southern Moon." Adah, one of Etienne's former lovers, is a mezzo, making her vocal sound distinctive from that of Marietta in terms of range and timbre. These vocal differences accentuate the characters' differences in terms of personality and ethnic background, for Adah is described as a "quadroon," a historical term for a person of mixed race with three-quarters African ancestry. We must remember that Marietta is of noble Italian heritage. The gently oscillating thirds at the beginning of the refrain draw attention to the references to breezes in the lyrics and accentuate the timeless quality of the song. By contrast, "Live for Today" is a glorious concerted waltz for Marietta, Adah, Captain Dick, and Etienne in which they celebrate youth and the immediacy of love. Captain Dick's effusive "I'm Falling in Love with Someone" is also a waltz. Through subtle musical hints, such as slithering chromatic melodies and the famous leap of a ninth (an octave plus one note) in the refrain on the words "one girl," Herbert lets his audience know that this singing lawman has the musical fortitude necessary to complete Marietta's "Dream Melody."

Low comedy comes in the characters of Simon O'Hara, Captain Dick's servant (Harry Cooper) and Lizette, a casquette girl (Kate Elinore). These two reflect some of the ethnic stereotyping that, while troublesome today, was common in the era and which contemporary audiences would have found entertaining.

Naughty Marietta has an impressive legacy on stage and screen. Romberg and Hammerstein's The New Moon shares a similar setting—eighteenth-century New Orleans, complete with pirates and Frenchmen, though the city was in reality under Spanish rule when both shows take place. Much later, Mel Brooks included "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life" to climatic effect in the film Young Frankenstein (1974) and subsequent Broadway musical (2007). In 1983, Naughty Marietta appeared in an episode of the star-studded television series Fantasy Island. In the "Naughty Marietta" storyline, a pushy mother (Jayne Meadows) wants her daughter (Dorothy Hamill) to become an actress. On the island, they encounter Richard Warrington (Lorenzo Lamas) and Governor Gaspar d'Annard (James Doohan).

Musical of the Month: Naughty Marietta

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Fri, 25 May 2012 04:06:40 -0400

A Guest Blog By Ellen Peck

To music historian Richard Traubner, operetta evokes “gaiety and lightheartedness, sentiment and Schmalz” (Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History, revised edition, 2003). If any song in the history of American musical theatre has earned a reputation for schmaltz, it would have to be “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” from the 1910 Victor Herbert and Rida Johnson Young operetta Naughty Marietta.

Its purple expressions of finding the greatest gift known to humanity, the love to end all sorrows, have subjected the song to perennial ridicule. (Mel Brooks infamously used it as a post-coital anthem for his 1974 film Young Frankenstein.) But as we must not judge a book by its cover, nor should we judge Naughty Marietta solely on its most famous song over a hundred years later. When its first audiences left the New York Theatre on November 7, 1910 humming the tune, Herbert and Young (and producer Oscar Hammerstein I) had a major hit on their hands. Naughty Marietta would be each writer’s most enduring work and lead to a film in 1935, a television special in 1955, and enter the repertories of light opera companies all over the United States.

In 1910, the up-and-coming playwright Rida Johnson Young had garnered attention not just for her successful plays Brown of Harvard and The Boys of Company ‘B,’ but also for the incidental songs she had written for them. When Hammerstein hired Young to write the lyrics and libretto for the new Victor Herbert operetta, she had little knowledge of the challenges inherent in the form. Although no stranger to songwriting – she had spent two years as a staff lyricist at Tams-Witmark – operetta required a different dramaturgical approach than her non-musical plays. For Naughty Marietta, Young had to tie the songs to the action and emotion of the scene and characters, yet still make them able to stand on their own, outside the context of the show, in order to sell sheet music (still a booming business in 1910). Other matters of practicality intervened as well, such as following the conventions of operetta. The form that had taken Vienna by storm in the 19th century spawned a wave of American imitators eager to cash in on its increasing popularity in the United States. When Herbert and Young began working on Naughty Marietta, New York was still buzzing about the American premiere of Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow only three years before. The Viennese style of operetta featured lush, romantic music, dashing characters, popular dance forms (including the ultimate expression of romantic love, the waltz), and a palpable sense of nostalgia for a fairy-tale past. Fortunately, Herbert and Young were experts at their respective crafts.

The setting for Naughty Marietta fulfilled one basic requirement, that the operetta take place in a remote time and locale that never really existed. (The term “Ruritania” had often been applied to European operetta settings: an Eastern European mountain village or kingdom, populated by beautiful ladies and handsome men, and bathed in the golden glow of nostalgia.) But this being an American operetta, the locale – New Orleans around 1780 – had a decidedly raw feel to it. And this New Orleans was populated entirely by French settlers, not the Spanish ruling class who actually occupied it in the 1780s. Thus, although Herbert and Young did not invent New Orleans, they fictionalized it to create a world that could only belong to Marietta D’Altena (runaway Italian countess) and her dashing hero, Captain Dick Warrington (American commander of a band of rough-and-ready rangers).

Marietta, played by the fiery Italian soprano Emma Trentini, has escaped from a life of familial servitude on a French ship headed for New Orleans, full of casquette girls bearing gold and land deeds from the French king to present to potential husbands in the growing colony. Marietta yearns for the man who will finish the tune spinning in her head (the “Dream Melody,” which is the basis for “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life”), and greets every man she meets by singing it. Meanwhile, Captain Dick has two missions to fulfill: return Marietta to France and capture the pirate Bras Pique, who has been terrorizing the high seas. Marietta convinces him to harbor her in New Orleans. The two bicker and protest any romantic feelings toward each other, but there is no doubt from the beginning that Dick will be the man to finish Marietta’s song. Etienne Grandet, the son of the Lieutenant Governor, has his eyes on Marietta and a secret: he is Bras Pique. Etienne plans to take over New Orleans, but his attraction to the feisty Marietta and trouble with his quadroon slave, Adah, interrupt his schemes. Another subplot features the comic character Silas Slick, a servant with lofty ambitions, and Lizette, a casquette girl who cannot get a husband and latches onto Silas. (This character originated as Simon O’Hara, a broad ethnic stereotype; Hammerstein toned down the character and renamed him in the second year of the run.) When Etienne threatens to kidnap Marietta, Dick allows him to escape with his secret as long as he leaves Marietta behind. The show ends with Dick professing his love for Marietta in the song she has been singing throughout the show, proving that he is the only love for her. Several other songs from the show became hits, including “I’m Falling In Love With Someone” and “Italian Street Song.”

The 1935 MGM version of Naughty Marietta put Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy together for the first time and their onscreen chemistry led to seven more pairings in films of operettas. Unfortunately for Herbert and Young – and for musical theatre purists – much of the original script and score were excised for the sake of film conventions. Only five of Herbert’s songs remained and two of Young’s three plots were axed to put all the focus on MacDonald and Eddy. But the movie’s success also produced a trend of beloved operettas on film, including Maytime (Young and Sigmund Romberg) and The Student Prince (Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly). The 1955 television version starred Patrice Munsel and Alfred Drake. In 1959, a revision penned by Phil Park and Ronald Hanmer replaced the previously licensed version. The Ohio Light Opera Company’s complete recording of their 2000 production is available from Albany Records.

Ellen Peck is Assistant Professor of Drama at Jacksonville State University. Additionally, she has worked as a freelance Stage Manager for several theatres and opera companies around the country, including Michigan Opera Theatre, Goodspeed Musicals, Spoleto USA, and Utah Opera. She has been a member of Actors Equity Association (AEA) since 2000 and the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) since 2001. As a historian, Ellen specializes in Musical Theatre History, with an emphasis on the early twentieth century. She has presented at several national theatre conferences, published an article in Contemporary Theatre Review, and has two forthcoming articles for Studies in Musical Theatre. She is also contributing entries to the 2nd edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music, as well as an essay in a forthcoming book on female artists of the early twentieth century.

Download the Libretto

Transcribed by Ann Fraistat from a typescript in the Morton Da Costa papers at NYPL

Encoded for web and eBooks by Doug Reside

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Musical of the Month: A History of The Pink Lady

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:02:25 -0400

A guest blog by project co-director, Professor William Everett

The Pink Lady (1911) is one of those delightful gems from a century ago with a title that suggests something eminently enjoyable. This is indeed the case for the English-language musical version of the French farce Le Satyre by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud. The Pink Lady's creative team included several significant names of the era, as did the original cast. The music and plot were closely intertwined, with musical numbers advancing the storyline and dramaturgical aspects being emphasized through musical style.

Many members of the musical comedy's creative team and stars had known one another in either London or New York. Ivan Caryll (1861-1921, born Felix Marie Henri Tilkin), the show's Belgian-born composer, arrived in London in 1882 and eventually became musical director at the Gaiety and Lyric Theatres, both of which were managed by impresario George Edwardes (1855-1915). Edwardes was the primary creative impetus behind a new style of musical comedy that fused aspects of burlesque and music hall with the idea of narrative storytelling. Many of the musical comedies that played at the Gaiety Theatre had the word "girl" in their titles and often were Cinderella-type rags-to-riches tales. Examples include The Shop Girl (1894), Caryll's first big success as a composer for the Gaiety, The Circus Girl (1896), and A Runaway Girl (1898). The Pink Lady could be seen as a maturation of these shows, for the title character is no longer merely a girl but has become a lady.

The librettist and lyricist for The Pink Lady, C.M.S. (Charles Morton Stewart) McLellan (1865-1916) previously wrote the book and lyrics for The Belle of New York (1897, music by Gustave Kerker) under the pseudonym Hugh Morton. After Belle played in New York, it transferred to London, where it was immensely popular. Just before The Pink Lady graced the stage of the New Amsterdam Theatre on March 13, 1911, Caryll and Stewart collaborated on the short-lived Broadway musical comedy Marriage a la Carte (January 2, 1911, Casino Theatre).

Klaw & Erlanger, the business partnership of attorney Marcus Klaw (1858-1936) and entrepreneur A. L. Erlanger (1859-1930), was a major force in late nineteenth century American theater. In 1896, they joined with others to form the "Theatrical Syndicate," a system of booking networks with theaters throughout the country. Klaw & Erlanger produced over 200 Broadway shows, including revivals of Humpty-Dumpty, one of the musicals featured previously as a Musical of the Month.

Readers of this blog have also encountered two musicals on which Julian Mitchell (1954-1926), who staged The Pink Lady's musical numbers, worked: The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Toyland. Mitchell's fast, fluid pacing was an absolute necessity in staging a farce such as The Pink Lady.

The show's star, Hazel Tout (1891-1988), was born in Ogden, Utah and went with her family to Wales during her father's time there as a Mormon missionary. She met Ivan Caryll at a party in London, and he advised her to change her name from the "impossible" Hazel Tout to Hazel Dawn. She made her London debut in Dear Little Denmark (1909) and her Broadway debut in The Pink Lady. Trained as a violinist, Dawn played a violin solo during the waltz "My Beautiful Lady" in The Pink Lady and later reprised this talent in The Debutante (1914). (John Doyle was certainly not the first to have instrument-playing singers on stage!) Dawn also appeared in several silent films.

Three of the male principals in The Pink Lady had significant musical theater careers. William Elliott (ca. 1879-1931), soon after his appearance as Lucien Garidel, became a producer; his credits included Oh, Boy! (1917), Leave It to Jane (1917), and Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918). Frank Lalor (1869-1932), who created the role of the Parisian antiques dealer-turned-Satyr Philippe Dondidier, had previously played Dionysius Fly in The Show Girl (1902) and went on to appear as Gideon Gay in Irving Berlin's Stop! Look! Listen! (1915) and Friar Tuck in the 1932 revival of Reginald de Koven's Robin Hood. Finally, Fred Wright Jr. (1865-1928), who played the media-mad detective Benevol, had previously appeared in several Ivan Caryll shows at the Gaiety Theatre in London, including A Runaway Girl, The Messenger Boy (1900), The Toreador (1901), and The Orchid (1903).

The combination of talent in the creative team and on stage was central to the show's success. This was an ensemble show, and the creative team and cast were keenly aware of each other's talents and abilities.

The musical represented a succession of sorts to George Edwardes' variety of musical comedy at the Gaiety Theatre. Light-hearted entertainment was the key element, but a good bit of "class," as exemplified by the Pink Lady herself in addition to the assortment of aristocratic characters who surround her, was likewise integral. Ivan Caryll's delightful score most certainly endorsed this approach, for The Pink Lady is filled with musical bon-bons. Effervescent individual numbers provide tremendous delight for audiences and performers alike. The score as a whole remains closely tied to the story, exemplifying the principles that later would become known as the "integrated" musical.

The opening number, "Here's a Lady," sets up, through music and text, the basic premise of the show: a mysterious man, the Satyr, seizes and kisses women when they are gathering mushrooms. The fast-paced tempo, almost like a collective patter song, captures the sense of giddy excitement surrounding the Satyr and his happy victims.

Caryll knew Fred Wright's tremendous gifts as a comedic character actor and incorporated them in the second song in the show, "Bring Along the Camera (one of the selections recorded for expressly for this blog). Caryll evokes the ethos of music hall in the number, which could easily function as an independent song about anyone who craves media attention. In The Pink Lady, though, it has a dramatic function in that it illuminates a central aspect of Benevol's character and is reprised in the act 1 finale.

Lucien Garidel wants one more fling before he marries Angele de Verrier in six weeks and confesses his desire in the swirling waltz "I'm Single for Six Weeks More." (In the vocal score, this number appears as an addendum, and is recorded here.) He mentions his fiancée Angele and his "old friend" Claudine ("The Pink Lady," whom he has known for one year) in the lyric, thus tying the song directly into the plot.

Angele and Maurice, a real ladies' man, discuss the nature of love in ""Love Is Divine" (recorded here), Angele's idealistic view contrasting with Maurice's cynical one. Angele's waltz refrain links her musically to Lucien, who just sang a waltz, indicating to the audience that despite all the deceptions, disguises, identity confusions, and convoluted plot twists (including Lucien's poor behavior), Angele and Lucien are true musical soul mates and will indeed be together at the final curtain.

Bebe Guingolph, Angele's cousin, and Desiree, who is quite interested in Bebe, sing one of the score's most delightful numbers, "By the Saskatchewan." Bebe tells Desiree that he will remain faithful to a girl in Saskatchewan while she implores him to take "a rest from your fidelity." The jaunty refrain with its oom-pah accompaniment opens and closes the Victor Light Opera Selections. The song was later interpolated into The Night Boat (1920, music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Anne Caldwell).

The title character's first number, "Oh, So Gently" (recorded here), displays Claudine's perkiness and slightly naughty nature. The uncredited words that appear in the libretto differ from those in the published vocal score and playbill, which are by the eminent English actor and songwriter George Grossmith, Jr. (1874-1935). The libretto's words are a bit racier than those in the vocal score and include a final stanza concerning Suffragettes. The recurring "Oh, so gently" motif, with its gently rising repetitions, creates a increasing sense of expectation that is resolved in the final line of each stanza.

Caryll showcases his admirable vocal scoring abilities in act 2's brilliant ensemble, "Donny Did, Donny Didn't, " during which the Countess of Montavert accuses Dondidier of kissing her, something he vehemently denies. Dondidier's wife and Lucien join in the proceedings, as do the Parisian dilettantes who are in Dondidier's shop. Dance-like rhythms, lightening-fast exchanges between characters, and unison patter all contribute to the innate jocularity of the number, which is featured in the Victor Light Opera Selections (1'16'' to 2'04'').

Later in act 2, Angele and Dondidier play a game of "hide and seek" to the song of the same name (recorded here). Dondidier, who had been a respectable antiques dealer, is rapidly changing his ways, thanks to Lucien's influence. He is delighted that Angele, Lucien's fiancée, finds him wicked as he is discovering, in Doug Reside's immortal words, his "inner Satyr."

In act 3, Dondidier confesses that he enjoys his new life as the Satyr in the spirited "I Like It!" (recorded here). In the verses, he recounts his experiences since Lucien, whom he calls the "bold buffoon," entered his shop earlier that afternoon and the subsequent arrival of the lady dressed in pink. He is thrilled that "the cyclone came and it whirled me 'round."

Caryll delivers a fine march, complete with fanfare motifs, in "The Right to Love," a quartet for Claudine (The Pink Lady), Angele, Lucien, and Maurice. After taking turns in the verse, the quartet sings the refrain in unison, "For love, and the right to love,/In France, you must fight for love." It is a jovial number in which the quartet decides to set things right.

One of the most famous numbers in The Pink Lady, and the one that often appears on anthologies of music from the period, is its splendid waltz. Claudine first sings it in act 2, where it is titled "The Kiss Waltz." During the evocative song, with its gentle chromatic inflections, she instructs Dondidier on how to kiss in various ways. Of course, Dondidier's wife enters at the end of the song and spies what appears to be Claudine making overt romantic advances toward her husband.

The waltz is reprised near the end of the show as "My Beautiful Lady," this time with different words. Claudine is again instructing Dondidier, but now encourages him to no longer be the wild "Satyr of the Tornado" but instead the charming "Satyr of the Waltz." She sings him words that any woman would love to hear: "To you, beautiful lady, I raise my eyes." In the libretto, the song is a solo for Claudine, while in the published vocal score, Claudine sings the first verse and Angele, whose purity of love matches her name, sings the second.

In addition to the fine individual numbers, the first and second acts both conclude with extensive, multi-sectional finales that advance the plot. The first act includes a graceful waltz in which Claudine reminds the men, especially Benevol, that they are only men and therefore must be pitied. The second act finale includes a splendid policeman's march, "Readily, steadily, tramp, tramp, tramp!," that cannot help but make one recall "When a felon's not engaged in his employment" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance.

A lighthearted farce, The Pink Lady boasts a finely crafted musical score that complements, enhances, and advances the story. The team that created the show and the cast that brought it to life may now be largely forgotten, but for 312 performances in 1911 and a return engagement of 24 more in 1912, audiences at the New Amsterdam Theatre reveled in her delights.

Musical of the Month: The Pink Lady

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:25:23 -0400

When I asked Miles Kreuger, founder of the Institute of the American Musical in Hollywood, if there were any pre-1923 (out-of-copyright) titles he would especially like to see online, he replied, "Ohhh, the Pink Lady" with the sort of fond recollection usually reserved for a dear, departed loved one. I was embarrassed that I had never heard of it. Asking around amongst my friends and fellow musical theater scholars, I found, somewhat salving my pride, that I was not alone. No one had read the script or knew much of the score.

For the most part, The Pink Lady, if it was known at all, was just a title remembered from its brief mentions in histories like Kurt Ganzl's The Musical or Larry Stempel's Showtime. In fact, as Cecil Smith notes in his, Musical Comedy in America, as early as 1914 the show seems to have been forgotten by the drama critic of the Dramatic Mirror when he wrote "With the exception of Victor Herbert, there is no one in this country who seems to understand musical comedy requirements" (Smith observes that "it was perhaps an oversight[...]not to link the name of [Pink Lady composer] Ivan Caryll with that of Herbert.") Despite the show's initial success, it has never been revived on Broadway (although the original production did return to the New Amsterdam Theater briefly in 1912 after a relatively unsuccessful London engagement).

It really is a shame, because the script and score remain remarkably enjoyable and funny even today. Based on the French farce, Le Satyre by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud, the musical is set in a European village threatened and thrilled by a licentious Satyr who wantonly kisses and "squeezes" the town's maidens who wander into the woods. Into this scene come a bachelor, about to be married, who wants to have one last fling, followed closely by his fiancée, along with her idiot-savant cousin and a jealous admirer who have both convinced the woman to track her future husband and uncover his philandering. The entire party is soon enmeshed in a tangled web of lies and misunderstandings and carried off, improbably, to the home of a curmudgeonly antique dealer in Paris who, encouraged by a chorus of townswomen, discovers his inner Satyr. All is finally resolved by yet one more deceit practiced, this time, by the Pink Lady herself.

The show was a huge hit in 1911. Cecil Smith writes "Everybody, the country over, had heard of it, and everybody wanted to see it." He observes that the show inspired "women's fashions", and indeed, programs from the time suggest that at some performances it literally supplied them. John Kenrick's musicals101.com site reprints the July 29, 1911 program which promises a "pink lady pink parasol" to every women in attendance at the matinee, and a July 1 program in NYPL's collection promises "the fashionable 'Le Satyre' bracelet now in great vogue...to every lady in attendance at the matinee, whether she occupies a $2 seat or a 50c. seat."

Perhaps most interesting, though, is what the contemporaneous reviews praised about the show. Philip Hale, a Boston critic quoted by Smith, wrote "Here we have then, an amusing book, pleasing music, a rare combination. Here we have a musical comedy that does not depend upon the antics of an acrobatic comedian, on clowning or the independent display of brazen-faced show girls." Likewise, The New York Times critic wrote "'The Pink Lady' is not a musical comedy of either the English or the American brand. Its fun is developed logically out of its situations, and so are its songs. In the second act, for instance, not a musical number occurs which does not carry the plot along further, instead of halting it, and yet no songs in the piece were more persistently applauded than these." The critic is describing what early historians of American Musical Theater might have called the "integrated musical," a form which some have claimed was not invented until Oklahoma opened in 1943. How could The Pink Lady, so popular in its time and so enjoyable even today, be so often overlooked?

It's impossible to say for sure, of course, but several possibilities do present themselves. First, as the producer in Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along might say, "There's not a tune you can hum." This isn't actually true, of course, but it does seem to have been the impression of opening night critics. The writer for the New York Times observed, "Perhaps the most popular song in the piece, speaking for those who whistle, will be 'The Girl by the Saskatchewan'[...] 'Beautiful Lady' in the last act has a waltz [...] which also may prove worthy of attention from these sources. The rest of the music does not offend, and it often helps in its bustle and breeziness, but little more can be said for it." This opinion may have influenced early record producers; the Victor Light Opera company produced only a medley of music from the show in 1911, and the only other recordings seem to be radio productions from the Palmolive Beauty Box Theater in the 1930s and the Railroad Hour in the 1950s. With few recordings and no published script it is very difficult for a show to be remembered.

Further, and somewhat counter-intuitively, The Pink Lady may not have been as well remembered because its pleasures derived more from its script than its stars. Although Hazel Dawn (who played the Pink Lady) and others in the cast either became (or were already) famous, the musical did not depend on the comic repertoire of a particular well-known performer. One might assume this would actually increase a play's longevity, as printed books tend to outlast the careers of those who perform from them. However, without a charismatic star to "own" the show and make it part of his or her professional identity, a musical loses an advocate for future revivals and tours. There is a note in our clippings file from Julie A. Herne (dated January 26, 1934) seemingly advising against a proposed film version (a proposal for which is also in the folder). Herne writes, "the characters are not suited to any of our stars." Perhaps producers rejected potential revivals of the show for the same reason.

Notably, though, regional producers, particularly in the Midwest, found The Pink Lady a much more perennially profitable commodity. Cecil Smith records that the original tour was a huge success (but especially in Columbus, Ohio), and our own clipping files contain notices and programs from several productions at my own hometown theater, the St. Louis Muny, which produced the show in 1926, 1937, 1945, and 1950. It is difficult to know why the show was remembered so much better regionally, of course, but a good script is clearly easier to pass on to a new cast hundreds of miles from Broadway than the personality and "business" of a particular constellation of stars. Many libretti of this period are filled with the ambiguous stage direction "Bus." or "Stage Business" (referring to semi-improved physical comedy that became the trademark of some high profile performers). This stage direction is employed in The Pink Lady as well, but is used relatively infrequently and the piece is not badly damaged if the "business" is not known, making it easier for the script to be performed by companies with little knowledge of the original production.

The Pink Lady is almost certainly too dated in both form and content to be commercially revived as a Broadway musical (at least without significant revisions). However, light opera companies or college theater groups looking for a public domain period piece should certainly consider it as they plan their upcoming seasons. Although I find all of the libretti of this period interesting as historical artifacts, I have rarely enjoyed reading one as much as I did The Pink Lady. I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud and truly enjoying the convolutions of the plot. I hope all of you have the same experience.

We are especially fortunate this month as Adam Roberts and his intrepid troupe of Austin based performers have recorded a six songs from the score. Although the published sheet music is available on Google Books, to the best of knowledge, the entire score has never been fully recorded. Adam and his team have therefore given us one of the only cast recordings of this very enjoyable musical.

Libretto

(Transcribed by Ann Fraistat, encoded for web and ebooks by Doug Reside)

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MP3

Bring Along the Camera Eric Ferguson Single For Six Weeks More Eric Ferguson Love is Divine Yvonne Love and Chris Stewart Oh So Gently Yvonne Love Hide and Seek Andrew Cannata and Libby Dees I Like It Andrew Cannata

Performer Bios

Andrew Cannata is excited to record for Music Theatre Online. An award-winning musical theater performer from the Austin, Texas area, his credits include Footloose (Ren), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Freddie), I Love You Because (Austin), Rent (Mark), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Chip), The Pajama Game (Sid), and The Last Five Years (Jamie), among others. Cannata graduated from St. Edward's University in 2009 with a degree in Computer Science. His love for theater runs deep and he cherishes every project in which he is blessed to take part.

Libby Dees is very excited to record for Music Theatre Online. She has lived and performed in Austin, Texas for the past seven years, where she graduated from St. Edwards University with a BA in Theatre Arts. Past credits include Company (Susan), Parade (Lucille), On the Town (Hildy), and Footloose (Betty), in addition to benefit performances for Zilker Productions and The Human Rights Campaign.

Eric Ferguson has established himself as a singer/actor in Central Texas with a wide array of performances spanning various genres. Recent regional productions include Hairspray (Link), High School Musical (Troy), The Music Man (Harold Hill), Assassins (Baladeer), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Joseph), and I'll Be Seeing You. Other credits include gala performances for the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Human Rights Campaign, in addition to numerous appearances at professional sporting events. He has served as a musical director for The Ransom Notes, an Austin-based a cappella group, and as an associate musical director, pianist, and vocal coach for several local productions. Ferguson's active commitment to the church lead him to serve as an assistant director for two youth choirs and as a worship leader for numerous traditional and contemporary services. He is a graduate of the University of Texas.
Yvonne Love is honored to be involved in these recordings for Musical Theatre Online. With Bacherlor's and Master's degrees in opera from the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Houston, respectively, she has found a new love in musical theater. Her musical theater credits include The Sound of Music (Mother Abbess), A Little Night Music (Mrs. Nordstrom), and Scrooge! The Musical (Ghost of Christmas Past). Her opera credits include Le Nozze di Figaro (Countess), Dangerous Liaisons (Madame de Tourvel), Il Viaggio a Rheims (Madame Cortese), Cosi fan tutte (Dorabella), and Elektra (Overseer). She is very excited to be involved in this project!

Chris Stewart is thrilled to join Music Theater Online. A practicing attorney in Austin, Texas, he has taken part in a number of musical projects over the years. Theatrical credits include High School Musical (Chad), Pippin (Pippin), and The Sound of Music (Rolf). His most recent project was the Austin Bar Association's 2011 Bar & Grill show, Legal Shop of Horrors (Seymour). Chris received BA and JD degrees from the University of Texas, where he also directed two a cappella groups -- The Ransom Notes and UT Law's Medley. He and his beautiful wife Amy will become proud parents in May 2012.

The Echo of a Sigh: Noël Coward's "Bitter Sweet"

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 05:46:20 -0400

A Guest Post By Brad Rosenstein

Bitter Sweet, an operetta that features wall-to-wall music, ironically began its life as a silent film scenario. Noël Coward’s tremendous theatrical successes of the 1920s were a lure to movie producers, and no fewer than three of his plays were translated into films in 1927 alone. But given that it was still the era of silent movies, all three adaptations unsurprisingly flopped, bereft of Coward’s scintillating comic dialogue.

Producer Michael Balcon, who had undertaken all three of the films, then suggested to Coward that he try his hand at writing a scenario specifically constructed for the silent screen. Coward responded with Concerto, and although Balcon liked the story, he felt that Coward’s romantic tale of musicians “cried out for music,” and so still failed to solve the problem. Noël wisely returned his fee to Balcon, thereby retaining rights to the basic story that would eventually become Bitter Sweet.

Previously Coward had discussed with Gladys Calthrop, his lifelong friend and longtime theatrical designer, the vague possibility of his writing a romantic operetta. They were both entranced by the idea of her designing “uniforms, bustles, chandeliers and gas-lit cafes,” but the idea was abstract until a friend played them a new recording of Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. The music clicked, and Coward and Calthrop were barely out the door before they began outlining the specific shape of Bitter Sweet.

By the end of the 1920s, Coward seemed to many to be the embodiment of the Jazz Age, with his irreverent comedies like Hay Fever, daring contemporary dramas like The Vortex, and his witty satirical songs that were featured in hit revues. So it came as a surprise that this Bright Young Thing should choose to close out the decade by writing an über-romantic operetta in the style of Strauss and Lehár. But in the peak years of his career Coward had an uncanny ability to remain just ahead of the curve, predicting what audiences might want next before they themselves knew. By the end of the Twenties Noël himself was beginning to grow weary of the speed and cynicism that informed the era, and found he was yearning to tell a sincerely romantic story in the spirit of an earlier time.

For all of his up-to-the-minute sophistication, Coward had been born in the final weeks of 1899, and always felt he had one foot firmly planted in the previous century. Music had played a huge role in his family life, and music was his most potent link to the years of his Edwardian childhood (and, stretching further back, to his parents’ Victorian generation). Music is both the medium and the message in Bitter Sweet: the native language of its passionate musician characters and Coward’s graceful means of instantly bridging time across the 55-year span of his story.

Bitter Sweet is in fact about time, about the phases of a woman’s life measured out in music. Originally titled Sari Linden after its main character’s married name (Coward’s friend Alfred Lunt suggested the ultimate title), Bitter Sweet charts the transformation of Sarah Millick to Sari Linden to Lady Shayne across its three acts as a woman’s voyage from youth to experience to maturity. Music is so central to her journey Coward even built it into one of his great theatrical coups. At the start of the first act, the septuagenarian Lady Shayne sings to a group of young guests in 1929 that they, like she as a young girl, must answer to “The Call of Life.” In Coward’s original production (and in his libretto), during the last verse of the song, the lights faded to black, Lady Shayne continued to sing in the darkness, her voice growing ever younger, and the lights came up moments later on the same performer now transformed into her 16 year-old self, triumphantly finishing the song in 1875.

“I’ll See You Again,” the classic waltz that remains one of Coward’s most enduring songs (and which he famously wrote while stuck in a New York traffic jam), is not just a charming love duet uniting the young Sarah and her future husband Carl. Its yearning melody says much more than their constrained words can ever say, and it will reappear throughout the show, connecting the lovers even beyond death, later reconciling Sarah/Sari with long-lost friends at the dawn of her new life as Lady Shayne, and finally coming full circle to connect her with her young guests in 1929, who transform her song into their own jazzy foxtrot and Charleston out into the night.

Throughout, the music is both the substance and the spur to past memory and present action, connecting there and then to here and now. Ultimately, the story and score weave a complex web of associations about the cyclical nature of time and lived experience, connecting generations in the repetitive patterns it reveals. Coward’s audiences in 1929 proved as eager to take that sentimental journey as he was, and Bitter Sweet was an enormous hit in both London and New York. During the run, the stock market crashed, ending the decade with a decisive bang and further underscoring a pervasive yearning for the imagined security of a less ironic time.

The production itself, however, was marked by its own ironies. While the idea for the show had originally been sparked by Gladys Calthrop’s keen desire to design the demimonde of Old Vienna, producer Charles B. Cochran steadfastly refused to let a nice English girl soil her hands on such a sordid locale. The set and costumes for the Viennese café scenes of Act II were designed by Ernst Stern, while Calthrop had to content herself with the English drawing rooms and ballrooms of Acts I and III. She had a field day designing the dozens of beautiful gowns Noël sent swirling in his highly fluid staging of Bitter Sweet, and her sumptuous sets and costumes would come to define an era of luxurious theatrical elegance, one which would soon become impossible to replicate as the Great Depression began to be felt around the globe.

“I think of all the shows I have ever done Bitter Sweet gave me the greatest personal pleasure,” Coward later commented. It was the most glorious score he would ever write, and he himself admitted he was never quite able to match it. He never stopped trying, however, and made a number of other attempts at the operetta form, from Conversation Piece (1934) and Operette (1938) to Pacific 1860 (1946) and After the Ball (1954), and there are even echoes of Bitter Sweet in Coward’s final musical, The Girl Who Came to Supper (1963).

Coward thought that the success of Bitter Sweet would be long-lasting enough to provide an annuity in his old age, but he was disappointed in the British film version of 1933, and devastated by the MGM remake in 1940 starring Jeannette McDonald and Nelson Eddy. He is rumored to have cried when he saw it in a private screening room in Hollywood, and thought it permanently damaged the reputation of one of his most highly prized properties. Unfortunately Coward did not live to see a first-rate revival of the show mounted by Sadler’s Wells in 1988, with Valerie Masterson as Sarah, the source of a superb and complete recording of the score.

In keeping with the circular nature of life that it celebrates, Bitter Sweet’s music has continued to delight and touch new generations, with several of its songs becoming personal touchstones for Coward. Of “I’ll See You Again” he wrote, “Brass bands have blared it, string orchestras have swooned it. Palm Court quartets have murdered it, barrel organs have ground it out in London squares and swing bands have tortured it beyond recognition…and I am still very fond of it and very proud of it.” The signature line from “If Love Were All” is inscribed on Coward’s memorial stone in Westminster Abbey, in modest appreciation of The Master’s overwhelming gifts: “A talent to amuse.”

[This post is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license by Brad Rosenstein]

Brad Rosenstein is an independent curator and speaker. His acclaimed exhibition Star Quality: The World of Noël Coward is currently on view at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The show has previously been mounted in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in New York is the centerpiece of a five-month Noël Coward Festival. For ten years he served as the Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Museum of Performance & Design in San Francisco, where he organized some of the museum’s most popular shows, including Hirschfeld: A Centennial Celebration, Madame Butterfly: From Puccini to Miss Saigon, and More Life! Angels in America at Twenty. His recent speaking engagements include The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (New York) and moderating artist conversations with San Francisco Performances.