NYPL Blogs: Posts from New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center

Happy Public Domain Day, 2013!

Bob Kosovsky, Library for the Performing Arts, Music Division — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 05:19:56 -0500

Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a Public Domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. The Public Domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The Public Domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture.
—James Boyle, The Public Domain, p.40f, 2008, quoted on the Public Domain Manifesto.

Happy Public Domain Day! Public Domain Day occurs on New Years' Day, signifying the expiration of copyright on unpublished material whose authors who died 70 years ago.

[We are actually in a period of playing "catch-up": In 1998 Congress extended copyright for an additional 20 years, resulting in 95 years of protection for published works. Their actions were unprecedented, placing some public domain works back into copyright (despite the Constitution's guarantee that once entered in the public domain, works can not go back into copyright). So since 1998, 1922 has been the last year that published work went into the public domain. The "catch-up" year will be 2019, when published material from 1923 finally goes into the public domain.]

While we wait for 2019 to freely use material published in 1923, we are fortunate that the copyright period for unpublished work is only 70 years after the death of the creator. That means that for creators who died in 1942, their unpublished work is now in the public domain as of January 1, 2013.

You can see a list of people who died in 1942 on Wikipedia.
You can read more about Public Domain day at www.PublicDomainDay.org.
Read the Public Domain Manifesto
See also the Center for the Study of the Public Domain (at Duke University)

For those people interested in music, two people who died in 1942 are Emma Calvé and Leo Ascher.

Emma Calvé (1858-1942) was a French soprano, particularly known for her portrayal of the title character in Bizet's opera Carmen, as well as other roles in the French repertoire. She made a number of recordings (between 1902 and 1920), many of which are available in reissues, and some of which are available on YouTube.

The Music Division has several signed calling cards and a few letters by Calvé.

Even though this letter was written on May 24, 1903 (nearly 110 years ago), until January 1, 2013, the rights to this and other letters written by Calvé rested with her heirs or estate. Now, anyone can transcribe and use its contents without having to seek permission.

Leo Ascher (1880-1942) was a composer of operettas. He lived in Vienna, but after Kristallnacht, he fled to the United States, where he lived out his remaining years. Even though the bulk of his papers reside at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, the Music Division has a number of manuscript full scores of some of his operettas. (Unfortunately, Ascher's manuscripts — like many tens of thousands of scores the Music Division acquired prior to 1971 — do not appear in the online catalog.)

This page, from the manuscript full score to Ascher's operetta Bruder Leichtsinn, can now be legally reproduced without permission. In fact, the entire manuscript can be reproduced and published without permission.

We also have a series of sketch books where Ascher sketched musical ideas.

On the page above he has sketched a tune with the word "Böhemisch," i.e. gypsy-like.

Even though Ascher has vividly crossed out this idea, it's still visible beneath the blue pencil. Compositional sketches and sketch books such as the one above are of incalculable use to musicologists and those studying the genesis of musical composition. Therefore, in a very real sense, the creation of new work is based in part on access and use of existing work. Knowing that this work is freed from legal entanglements makes it more usable for those to want to study it, perform it, or reuse it in other ways.

A few other performing artists who died in 1942 were John Barrymore, George M. Cohan, Arthur Pryor, Erwin Schulhoff, and Alexander Zemlinsky.

So even though copyright ties up published work until 2019, we can take consolation in knowing that unpublished work is still freed on an annual basis.

Happy Public Domain Day!

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

One Week More! The Once and Future Les Miserables

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 04:55:25 -0500

I dreamed a dream in time gone by that someday I would be sitting in a cinema watching the film version of Les Misérables. In 1993 I had recently convinced my mother to take me to a touring production that had settled for a week in St. Louis (an event that is, in large part, the reason I am now sitting in this office in Lincoln Center).

After seeing the show, I ran home and connected my Commodore 128 to a mostly image and ad-free Internet to comb the various repositories of text files to find anything I could about the history and future of a movie version of the show. Then I was young and unafraid, and I took at face value the proclamations from the Cameron Mackintosh office that a "director had been engaged," that "preproduction had begun," and that the film would be released by the end of the decade. This, to my teenage mind, seemed impossibly far in the future, but, helpless to do otherwise, I waited. And 2000 came and went. And the movie versions of Evita, Chicago, The Producers, Hairspray, Dreamgirls, Nine, and even Phantom of the Opera were made, flickered briefly across a few screens in mostly empty Midwestern theaters, and were, with one or two exceptions, forgotten. And then Susan Boyle happened, and hope was high and life worth living. "Preproduction" at last turned to "production" in the IMDB status field, and then, last May, there was a trailer.

In 1993, I didn't necessarily want a movie version because I thought Les Miz was a musical particularly well suited to the medium. I wanted it, because in the those days before the 10th and 25th anniversary concerts were released on DVD and before the regional and amateur rights were released, it was the only way I could imagine seeing the show again. I quickly purchased most of the English language audio recordings (and wore out my three cassette album of the Complete Symphonic Recording within about a year), but I wanted to see the staging, the sets, movement, all that makes it theater, again.

Of course, no film version or live video recording can reproduce the experience of sitting in the audience of a Broadway show. Yet, like a cast recording or a published script and score, these artifacts help audiences rekindle the memories of the event they witnessed. Now, surrounded by such artifacts, I consider it part of my responsibility as a digital curator to serve versions of my younger self, now living far from New York City, with no real hope of getting here soon, who comb through the Internet trying to catch a few crumbs from the Broadway table. But, of course, all of us, even those who live or work in Midtown, are essentially in the same position. None of us can now experience the original Broadway production of Les Miserables any more than we can visit a Virgin Megastore, Lindy's Restaurant, or Footlight Records. All now exist only in the memories of those who lived in a time and a place when and where they existed. Those of us who study theater are, essentially, archeologists — attempting to reconstruct an event from the traces that it left behind: scripts, audio records, designs, photographs, and video.

So, today, with the very kind permission of photographer Joan Marcus, I am placing a few more traces of Les Misérables online in the form of photographs from early casts of Les Miserables. Unlike the photographs in our Digital Gallery (which are produced by our professional photography team in Long Island City), I personally digitized these photos with a consumer-grade camera, but in my excitement about the upcoming film (5 days more!) I couldn't wait to get them out there. Happy Holidays everyone!

All photos below © Joan Marcus

Works Created with the Help of the Music Division, 2011-2012

Bob Kosovsky, Library for the Performing Arts, Music Division — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 06:51:30 -0500

I'm happy to present a review of how the Music Division contributed to knowledge for 2011-2012. Although my information is based on the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, December seems like an appropriate time to post this information.

Today the pervasiveness of the Internet leads some to question the usefulness of libraries. Many try to determine a library's effectiveness by attendance: Surely 50 users in one day is better than 5? (I recall an article from library school that questioned whether it is worth collecting a book if it is consulted only once in 50 years.) It is my hope that the list below refutes the concept of determining value based on attendance. Many of the authors of the works on this list spent months or years working in the Special Collections Reading Room of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (often copying or transcribing documents to study them more in depth at home). Their work is a testament to them and to the value of a library — determined not by how many use it, but (in part) by the richness of what is contained in its walls, and how it fosters creation of new work and knowledge.

Have you published a book or article, written a dissertation, given a talk, or participated in a performance where you have benefited from research in the Music Division? WE WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT! Please send me an e-mail so that I may include your work in next year's list.

Books

Great Wagner Conductors: A Listener's Companion.
Jonathan Brown.
Fort Wayne, IN: Parrot Press, 2012.

The author did research with our materials and reproduced a number of our photographs and other visual media from our Iconography files.

Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix. Sämtliche Briefe. Band 2: Juli 1830 bis Juli 1832; Band 3: August 1832 bis July 1834.
Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Anja Morgenstern and Uta Wald.
Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2012.

Volumes 2-3 of the massive project to transcribe nearly all of Mendelssohn's letters. The Music Division is proud that many items from its collection of over 700 letters will be eventually included.

Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music.
Joel Sachs.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

The author examined every item in the Henry Cowell papers and consulted many other collections as well.

Articles

Anesko, Michael. "My Fair Henry?!" The Henry James Review 33, no. 1 (Winter 2012), p. 68-84.

Anesko used the Don Gohman papers to research the musical "Ambassador" based on Henry James's novel.

Brown, Richard H. "The Spirit Inside Each Object: John Cage, Oskar Fischinger, and 'The Future of Music'." Journal of the Society for American Music 6, no. 1 (February 2012), p. 83-11.

Used the John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, reprinting several manuscripts in facsimile. (The image is from the DVD collection of films by Fischinger, including "An Optical Poem," the 1937 film on which Cage briefly worked.)

Henderson, Ruth. "Marietta Alboni in the New World" in: Music, American Made: Essays in Honor of John Graziano ed. by John Koegel. Sterling Heights,
MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2011, p. 361-96.

Researched much of the article in the Music Division and reproduced 3 images from our collections.

Pamplin, Terrence. "The Influence of the Bandora on the Origin of the Baroque Baryton," Galpin Society Journal, p. 221-32.

We supplied a unique image of a baryton, a musical instrument (different from the one pictured here).

Ponick, Terry. "Rediscoveries: Charles Griffes' 'Kairn of Koridwen'." Washington Times, January 1, 2012.

The article discusses this musical composition and note that the manuscript is in the Music Division.

Proksch, Bryan. "'Forward to Haydn!': Schenker's Politics and the German Revival of Haydn." Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (Summer 2011), 319-48.

The author used the Oster Collection (containing the papers of Heinrich Schenker).

Reichert, Matthew. "Carl Bergmann the Pioneer: The Introduction of Zukunftsmusik to the New York Concert Repertory" in: Music, American Made: Essays in Honor of John Graziano" ed. by John Koegel. Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2011, p. 211-26.

A chapter revised from the author's dissertation, the research for which he made extensive use of the Music Division.

Robinson, Suzanne."Percy Grainger and Henry Cowell: Concurrences Between Two "Hyper-Moderns." Musical Quarterly 94 (2011), p. 278-324;

Made extensive use of the Henry Cowell papers documenting the friendship between Percy Grainger and Henry Cowell.

Spilker, John D. "The Origins of Dissonant Counterpoint : Henry Cowell's Unpublished Notebook." Journal of the Society for American Music 5, no. 4 (Nov. 2011), p. 481-533.

Spilker made extensive use of Henry Cowell Papers, in particular the composer's counterpoint notebooks.

Recordings

Victor Herbert: Collected Songs. New World Records 80726-2.

Although most of Victor Herbert's manuscripts are in the Library of Congress, the producer of this amazing 4-CD album used the resources of the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to research the circumstances and details of these 102 songs.

Dissertations

Gilbert, David. "The Product of Our Souls": Ragtime, race, and the marketplace in James Reese Europe's New York. Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011.

Used a variety of books, music and ephemera in the Music Division
Portnow, Allison K. Einstein, Modernism, and Musical Life in America, 1921-1945. Ph.D., Musicology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Used the Henry Cowell Papers and the George Antheil Papers.

Blogs

John Cage Unbound: A New Digital Archive Presented by The New York Public Library. Open Culture, April 18, 2012.

Review of our online space John Cage Unbound.

Talks

Acker, Faith (University of St. Andrews, Scotland). "From Song to Screen: Rewriting Shakespeare's Sonnets in the Music of Henry Lawes and the Scripts of Star Trek." Collaboration, Authorship, and the Renaissance, January 13, 2012.

The author used the Commonplace Book of John Gamble, particularly for the works of Henry Lawes.
Bernstein, David (Mills College). "John Cage's Music of Changes and Its Genesis." John Cage und die Folgen / Cage & Consequences (International Symposium in Berlin).

The author consulted the John Cage Music Manuscript Collection.
Brown, Nancy (University of Southern California). "'Hearing Through, Seeing Through': John Cage, Richard Lippold, and Open Sculpture - American Musicological Society, November 11, 2011.

Another author who consulted the John Cage Music Manuscript Collection.
Fena, Christine (Stony Brook University). "The 'Sensational' Ballet Mécanique: the General Public and American Musical Modernism in the 1920s." American Musicological Society, November 12, 2011.

The George Antheil Papers (in particular the manuscripts of Ballet Méchanique) were one of the sources consulted by the author.
Ferencz, Jane (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater). "How Long, Brethren? Geneviève Pitot's Music for the WPA's Federal Dance Project." American Musicological Society, November 12, 2011.

Genevieve Pitot's manuscripts are in the Music Division, which the author consulted.
Guy, Nancy (University of California-San Diego). "Thinking Through Performance: Operatic Production Since 1960." American Musicological Society, November 11, 2011.

Guy's ongoing research utilizes Beverly Sills scores.
Lumsden, Rachel (Graduate Center, City University of New York). "Doris Humphrey and Vivian Fine's The Race of Life." Society for American Music, March 17, 2012.

The author's talk used a variety of archival collections involving American women composers.
Payette, Jessica (Oakland University). "Teiji Ito's Watermill : Controversy over the Use of World Music at the Ballet " Society for American Music, March 17, 2012.

The Teiji Ito papers and music manuscripts are part of the Music Division.
Piekut, Benjamin (Cornell University). "Our Modest Witness: John Cage's Modernism." Brooklyn College, November 2, 2011.

Yet another author who used the John Cage Music Manuscript Collection (last year it was our most frequently consulted collection).
Pruett, Laura. "Gottschalk's Tactical Maneuvers during the Civil War." Society for American Music, March 15, 2012.

The author made use of our extensive collection of Gottschalk materials.
Statham, Sabra (Pennsylvania State University). "Composing the Great American Symphony: George Antheil's Symphony #2-3 Understood through Sources and Documents." Society for American Music, March 16, 2012.

Ms. Statham's ongoing research involves George Antheil, for which she consulted his papers in the Music Division.

Reminder: Have you published a book or article, written a dissertation, given a talk, or participated in a performance where you have benefited from research in the Music Division? WE WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT! Please send me an e-mail so that I may include your work in the list for the current fiscal year.

"It's Great! But Why is it Here?" Musical Revue Research Guide, Part 2

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 05:40:44 -0500

In the Research Guide, Part I, I advised that the easiest way to find information at LPA is by name or title. I advised that the research can benefit by compiling a list of every person in or involved in a production and serendipity can come your way. That third dancer from the left can become a star and/or obsessive collector or just happen to have the right piece of information in a clipping file. Sometimes, however, you can do your research prep and be looking in a logical place when you find something that should not logically be there.

One of the most discussed artifacts found for The Great American Revue was an unknown song by George Gershwin. The George White Scandals, an annual series from 1919 through the 1920s, featured dancing, innovative designs by Erte and John Wenger, and comics, but is best remembered now as the revue series that gave impetus and visibility to George Gershwin at the start of his career. His too-short career was incredibly productive. White included and/or commissioned his early ballads, his novelties, and his towering Rhapsody in Blue. For the Act II finale of the 1921 edition, White selected Gershwin’s “Laugh Your Cares Away.” So if you are researching George Gershwin and hoping to find it or another lost, neglected song, you would logically focus on George White and the Scandals.

You would not go to the Hippodrome Theater or its producer, R. H. Burnside. Yet, Great American Revue’s newly discovered Gershwin was found in the Music Manuscripts in the vast R. H. Burnside Collection of papers, designs and music scores spread over the Theatre and Music Research Divisions. We expected to find Sousa, or the very early Cole Porter (for Hitchy-Koo of 1919) and Elsie Janis (for her Our Gang series), but the Gershwin piano score was a surprise. We will never know if Gershwin submitted it in the hope of working with the producer or whether it had been given to Burnside by a performer or musician.

Soul Music Tracks from the Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson Collection: "I Want You" and "Musical Massage"

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 06:33:06 -0500

I listen to many interesting things in my job, and I love it. As an AV cataloger at NYPL (Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound), I have listened to many archival recordings at the library for the past 8 years. Some of my highlights:

Sound effects tapes from plays in the New York Shakespeare Festival collection
Choral performances (more on that later...)
Radio programs from WNYC (Around New York, Spinning On Air, New Sounds, Music for the Connoisseur, etc.)
Interviews of Hollywood and Broadway stars for Brooke Hayward's memoir Haywire, and most recently...
Bach master classes taught by Rosalyn Tureck at the first Bach Tureck Institute Symposium (1983)

But my favorite audio gems nowadays are from the Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson collection; the rarer the better!

An excerpt from the biographical/historical notes of the finding aid of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson papers, 1975-1978:

"Although he was a multifaceted arranger, composer, conductor, pianist, and educator, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004) had a brief, but significant involvement with popular music, as an arranger for Motown recording artists in general, and Marvin Gaye in particular. Named after the Afro-British composer and conductor, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Perkinson was born in in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and moved to New York as a child. He attended the High School of Music and Art, New York University, and the Manhattan School of Music. Perkinson's professional accomplishments would span a remarkably wide range of fields, including classical music, jazz, popular music, dance, film soundtracks, scores for television, and music education."

One of my all-time favorite aspects of the job is discovering the evolution of a Broadway musical, a play, a song, and in this case, movie/television music tracks and soul music tracks of the 1970s. These tracks are not polished. They are many takes upon recording takes, rehearsals gone awry, rare tidbits that never make it to finished commercial recordings. Some takes are renamed, reassigned to different projects and performers, and reworked completely.

I Want You

One noteworthy example of this is the audition demo tape and the rough instrumental tracks of Marvin Gaye's 1976 album I Want You, composed by Leon Ware and Arthur "T-Boy" Ross, produced by Leon Ware and Marvin Gaye, with orchestral arrangements by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson.

So, as the story goes, Leon Ware was writing material for his own second album for Motown, which was eventually called Musical Massage. (More on Musical Massage later) After penning the songs, Ware and "T-Boy" Ross (who was also Diana Ross's brother), decided to make an audition demo tape of the songs to send to Berry Gordy. While I was listening to the copy of the music demos "I Want You," "All the Way Around," "By Loving You" and "Me and My Life", I realized this was the one of the few copies that helped to influence Gordy to take a chance on the material... by giving the songs to Marvin Gaye.

Personally, even though the audition tracks were rough and unpolished, as most audition demos tend to be, they were not that bad. I couldn't tell whether if Leon Ware or "T-Boy" Ross sang the lead vocals, but pleasant enough. (I put down "T-Boy" as the lead in the catalog record.) The backup singers were fabulous!

After listening to the rehearsals, rough mixes and instrumental tracks of the I Want You 1975 recording sessions, I will say that Marvin Gaye (along with Ross and Ware) is a consummate perfectionist in laying quality music down. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's arrangements of the songs adds incredible sensuality, soulfulness, yearning, and magnetism.

Musical Massage

After completing the phenonmonal 1976 hit album I Want You, Leon Ware continued on his second solo Motown album Musical Massage. According to Discogs.com, the album was originally issued under the Gordy label [Gordy 976S1] in September 1976. Some discographies note the album was scheduled for release on Motown 876, then it changed to Gordy. It was also issued in the U.K. as Motown STML 12050 in February 1977. No singles were issued from the album. However, the album was eventually remastered and reissued by Motown on September 29, 2003.

Hands down, Leon Ware is a genius songwriter and producer. And he has a fabulous voice. Why did it take so long for the public to know about this album?!

Since NYPL doesn't have the actual commercial release of Musical Massage in the catalog (sob!), it was really cool to discover the music from the album in steps:

Rehearsal piano and vocal excerpts: Leon Ware is singing and playing piano, and it sounds like Ware is still writing the songs as he is playing. Featured tracks are "Strange Love" (it eventually became the instrumental part of "Feel My Love Inside" from the I Want You album), "Turn Out the Lights" and "Journey Into You."
Orchestral selections final mix: music arranged by C.-T. Perkinson. Featured tracks: "Turn Out the Lights," "Strange Love", "I Wanna Be Where You Are" and "Journey Into You."
Instrumental track demos ; Musical massage (1975): These music tracks are unfinished recording cuts for the 1976 album Musical Massage. It is a close as we can get to the real thing, people...

In my next blog about the Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson collection, I'll talk about the film and television music soundtracks Perkinson has worked on.

Until next time!

The audio collection is now available in the catalog.

The biography of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004) is found in the finding aid.

Another great site about Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson is AfriClassical.

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleridge-Taylor_Perkinson

Interviews with the Rich and Famous: The Brant Mewborn Interview Collection

Lena Deresh, Special Formats Processing, AV, Library for the Performing Arts — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:07:00 -0500

The Brant Mewborn collection of interviews was recently processed, preserved, and cataloged. This collection is a treasure trove of original interviews — conducted by Mewborn for his background research for various Rolling Stone articles, and for freelance pieces — with personalities of the 1970s and 1980s.

Brant Mewborn (1951-1990), a staff reporter and chief editor at Rolling Stone, conducted numerous interviews during this period with prominent people in the performing arts. Born and raised in North Carolina, he studied journalism, drama, and music, and possessed a profound knowledge of rock and roll music, its history and transformation, musicians and music groups and bands, and awareness of the current and old events in "show business" in general.

Always thoroughly prepared for each interview, and due to his genuine interest for his work and natural charisma, he was able to create an informal atmosphere that turned these recorded interviews into friendly conversations. The interviewees thus felt at ease and often revealed intimate thoughts and feelings, recounted anecdotes from their personal or professional life, expressed unrestricted opinions, and occasionally gossiped. Therefore, this collection of interviews depicts and presents a picture of the trends in show business, films, and popular music as well as the public’s preferences and tastes of the time.

These interviews are unique in their sincerity and informality: Cher comes across as a down to earth and smart woman, Peter Brown (personal assistant to Brian Epstein and the Beatles) provides “off the record” facts about the group, Ringo Starr displays arrogance and poor manners, artist Paul Cadmus chats about Andy Warhol, Frank Sinatra, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams, Tina Turner projects intelligence and civility, and so on.

This collection can be found under the collective title: Brant Mewborn Collection of interviews.

Among other outstanding personalities that granted Mewborn interviews were the playwright Tennessee Williams, the journalist and writer Tom Wolfe, actors Stacey Keach, Valerie Perrine, Stockard Channing, and Peter Gallagher, creators of famous rock operas Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, Andrew Lloyd-Webbee and Tim Rice, singers Dusty Springfield, Neil Sedaka and Annie Lennox, performers Madeline Khan, John Lennon’s son Julian Lennon, and many others.

It is also worth mentioning that in his preparations for interviews, Brant Mewborn used resources and collections amassed by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Collection Therapy: Hospice Series

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 06:43:08 -0500

My professional adventures, rooted in my own fascination with and questions about who we are as humans (how we identify ourselves, how we are layers of each version of our selves over time, how we become trapped in our elderly bodies, how we relate, how we die, how we cope, how we mourn) have been constantly honed in my work — asked and answered over and over within the context of audio/visual materials. I hopped from grant to grant to build new programs for years, describing, preserving and providing access to artworks, dance, oral histories, home movies, and various forms of performance because I believe these arts to be celebrations of humanity. I want to support them. I want you to find them. These works keep us tied to our most human bits of self. They keep us feeling. They keep us sharing. They bring us back to us.

So much of the work we do in a research library is based in preservation and on potential future needs — of scholars, of educators, of unknown enthusiasts. What are we doing to celebrate our collections right now? How do we use our collections to bring us closer to one another? How do we use our collections to highlight our connections to one another? How can we do more?

Inspired by a brilliant program at the Yorkshire Film Archives called Memory Bank (using archival film and home movies to create compilations for use in reminiscence and mood therapy, primarily with elderly patients battling Alzheimer's) and the very moving viral YouTube clip from the upcoming documentary Alive Inside, I realized how easily we could be utilizing our Collection to provide immeasurable comfort to the seniors of New York City.

I aimed to begin Collection Therapy as an educational listening program administered in senior homes and residences around New York City. Providing listening visits based upon resident requests, I wished to simply show up, listen, enjoy, and leave. The project was well received in theory, but, failed to catch any momentum as I sought partners who sought financial support I could not provide. I had an opening in late September while on the Special Collections desk when Sara Depczenski approached me seeking advice on how to hear and potentially share a non-circulating recording in our research collection. Sara had been reading Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales as an MJHS Hospice Reader. Her Lady, whom I will refer to as Anne from here on, made a request to hear Chaucer in Middle English, and Sara's search led her to an LP in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives.

After a series of meetings and a couple of scares that Anne may not make it until we ironed out how to begin piloting Collection Therapy: Hospice Series, I was able to visit and listen with Sara, Anne and Anne's husband on the evening of November 8th.

I was thrilled, but, I was nervous. Imagine the unknowing first steps you take into a Hospice listening session. I was not sure what to expect. I was afraid I would not be professional enough. I was afraid of being too professional. The apartment was warm and bright. I happily met Anne sitting up on her couch where she seems to spend most of her time, in the living room surrounded by beautiful antique furniture, illustrations of animals, books, and a bright white window sill lined with even brighter red geraniums.

We made our introductions and began by discussing the project which seemed to please Anne and her husband very much ("I've been a lot of things, but, I've never been a pilot."). She talked at length about her connection to Chaucer and early English before we proceeded to hear the recording (which was transferred to a CD for the listening session). Anne's oxygen machine pumped under the Middle English blaring from a boombox in the corner of the room. She and her husband both laughed aloud at the best jokes, and I stared at the red geraniums trying to keep up with the rhymes and do my best not to seem too impolite by staring at Anne while she listened.

After about fifteen minutes we turned off the recording and spoke about the recipe of Middle English — the meter, the rhyme. How does one know how to pronounce it all? This discussion led to our next request we are in the process of researching for her. Anne's Great Aunt came from Washington, D.C. Without ever fully being aware of how this Great Aunt's accent affected her, Anne was on a train platform one day as a teen when she heard a porter yell direction with this same old Washington D.C. accent. She burst into tears and threw herself into the porter's arms. We now search for this particular accent — this very specific sound — based on region and the Great Aunt's lifespan.

Am looking forward to future visits with Anne and her husband, as well as expanding the program and taking requests from other Hospice families.

The recordings we have worked so hard to collect and preserve have the power to provide an enriching, aurally comforting experience in death, and to cushion the grief of losing those we love. We also open an avenue of research regarding what we request on our deathbeds. What are the sounds we want to hear most when we know we won't hear much longer?

What sounds will bring you back to you?

Announcing the Dorothy Loudon Exhibition

Doug Reside, Digital Curator of Performing Arts, Library for the Performing Arts — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 06:56:02 -0500

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is pleased to announce the release of the Dorothy Loudon Digital Exhibition.

Dorothy Loudon (1925-2003) was a Tony Award-winning Broadway star, cabaret singer, and television performer. She is best remembered for her performance as Miss Hannigan in the original Broadway cast of Annie and for the playing the leading role of Bea Asher in the 1978 musical Ballroom.

This online exhibit, funded by a generous grant from the Dorothy Loudon Foundation, provides researchers and fans with digital access to selections from her personal and professional papers, held by the Library since 2005.

Loudon, a thorough autobiographer, documented her own career in more than thirty detailed scrapbooks, all of which have been digitized and are accessible in the exhibition, along with selected items from Loudon's archive of letters and personal photographs. Rehearsal drafts of the script for Annie and its ill-fated sequel, Annie 2: Miss Hannigan's Revenge (with Loudon's handwritten notes) can be read in their entirety, and a compete audio recording of a young Dorothy Loudon performing in a 1959 variety show at the Poconos summer theater, the Tamiment Playhouse, can be streamed from the site.

This exhibition is the most recent in a series of digital exhibitions produced by the Library for the Performing Arts that has also included, in the past year, an exhibition of photographs of Noël Coward productions and an interactive guide to the Library's John Cage archive.

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.

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

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.

Dorothy Loudon and Annie

Stephen Bowie, Library For the Performing Arts — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 10:05:10 -0500

Dorothy Loudon wasn't working. Neither was Annie.

Loudon, by the mid-1970s, had gone into a semi-voluntary semi-retirement. The Women, in 1973, was the last of a half-dozen promising Broadway shows (if you count Lolita, My Love, which never quite made it to New York) that closed in less than three months. She had enjoyed more success touring — Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, in 1971-1972, had been her favorite stage role — but Loudon was tired of the road, and hated leaving New York.

She turned down television offers that would have taken her to Los Angeles. Increasingly, her focus was on her husband, the composer-arranger Norman Paris, whom she had married in 1971. Loudon plunged into domesticity: cooking, cleaning, sewing, staying home. "I was never so happy in my life," she said of these years, after they were over for good. That was undoubtedly true, although Paris had troubles — health problems, tax problems — that consumed a lot of time and worry.

"Most people think I'm retired — or dead," Loudon told an interviewer in early 1977.

Meanwhile, the show that would become the Broadway juggernaut Annie was taking shape. It was lyricist Martin Charnin's brainchild, and for a long time he was the only one who thought Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie comic strip would make a great musical. Charnin corralled Thomas Meehan and Charles Strouse to write the book and the music, respectively, even though both men hated the idea at first. Meehan didn't want to write a show like Li'l Abner or You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Charnin insisted that Annie wouldn't be a comic-strip musical, but a musical "that simply happened to be based on a comic strip."

It took the Annie trio four years to get the show written and, finally, performed, during the 1976 summer stock season at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut. Charnin's insistence on directing the production himself discouraged many potential backers (and nearly dissuaded Michael Price, the artistic director of the Goodspeed, from taking the orphan Annie in). A bad notice from Walter Kerr in The New York Times seemed to kill the show's chances of transferring from the Goodspeed to a bigger arena. Kristen Vigard, the original Annie, came across as too nice; and Maggie Task's Miss Hannigan was too mean.

Then Annie got its own real-life Daddy Warbucks in the unlikely form of Mike Nichols, the film and theatre director who was, at the time, a quintuple Tony Award winner and an Oscar winner for the film The Graduate.

"You guys are sitting on a gold mine," Nichols said to Charnin, Strouse, and Meehan after seeing Annie at the Goodspeed. Nichols agreed to produce the show on Broadway (surprisingly, it would be his debut as a theatrical producer) and rounded up the heavyweight investors needed to make it happen. Nichols's own work, particularly in the cinema (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; Carnal Knowledge), tended toward darkness and cynicism. But, somehow, "the whole Annie experience has humanized Mike," explained Charnin. "He cries at the show sometimes."

Although Nichols was a hands-on producer, mediating disputes and offering vital notes during rehearsals and previews, the rumors that he was poised to take over for Charnin were apparently unfounded. Strouse, in his memoirs, insisted that Annie was directed entirely by Charnin. Nichols downplayed his creative contributions, but there were two elements for which he would accept credit: a major reworking of the sets, and the recasting of Miss Hannigan, the cruel orphanage matron who is the show's primary villain.

An odd couple, Nichols and Dorothy Loudon had crossed paths at several key points in their careers. She had shared a bill with Nichols and Elaine May, his partner in a hugely popular comedy act, at the Manhattan supper club The Blue Angel. In 1959, the three of them had appeared together (along with Dick Van Dyke, Shelley Berman, and Orson Bean!) on a short-lived live television panel show called Laugh Line. Then, as Loudon later noted ruefully, she stayed on at The Blue Angel — "like a faucet" — while Nichols entered the stratosphere. But Nichols didn't forget her. In 1962 he cast her in her first legitimate stage production, an Off-Broadway venture called The World of Jules Feiffer, which never quite cohered. Three years later Loudon appeared in the road company of Murray Schisgal's Luv, which Nichols had staged on Broadway. Although the touring production was directed by Jack Sydow, Nichols saw it in Los Angeles and told Loudon that "you did all the things with this part that I have ached to see — and never got .... We think alike."

Flash forward a decade: Nichols runs into Loudon, either on the street or in the lobby of the Minskoff Theatre, and asks if she's heard about Annie. Loudon thinks he's talking about Annie Get Your Gun: "Oh, Mike, where have you been?" Nichols straightens her out, but Loudon still isn't impressed. Growing up, her favorite strip was Maggie and Jiggs, not Little Orphan Annie.

Loudon, who always claimed she was never anyone's first choice for any role, had to audition twice before the other producers were convinced. But Nichols's instincts were right: she won the role. Still unsure about whether to do the show, Loudon turned to her husband for advice. He told her to take the part. "I said to Norman, 'I don't want to play some gnarled, nasty old dame, I want to play someone young and terrific!'" Loudon recalled. "But he said to me there's nothing funnier than a nasty old gal surrounded by a lot of kids, and he was right."

(In his 1977 book about the making of Annie, Martin Charnin wrote that he had thought of Loudon as Miss Hannigan as early as 1972. But Loudon herself always gave the credit to Nichols.)

Loudon's epiphany was to humanize Miss Hannigan, and to add a strong element of humor to a character who had been played straight at the Goodspeed. "Look, the only reason she's so mean to those orphans is she knows they have a chance, once they get out, to do something, all the things she's missed," Loudon mused. In another interview, she went even further: "In my heart of hearts, Aggie Hannigan is the true heroine of the show. She's as much a victim of the orphans as they are victims of her. In fact, maybe she's more a victim. They have their lives ahead of them. I so identify with her." Loudon cited three inspirations for her interpretation of Miss Hannigan: women she'd seen on the subway, reading the racing form; the twenty-five "beastly" children she had worked with on an industrial show; and Beatrice, the horrifyingly dysfunctional mother she had played in Marigolds.

Like most Broadway musicals, Annie underwent extensive tinkering during rehearsals. At first Miss Hannigan had an Irish accent. Nichols eliminated it, but the brogue occasionally crept back into Loudon's performance well into the show's run. There were also extensive dialogue revisions. "The part was literally written on my feet," said Loudon, who was never shy about taking credit for her own contributions to the character. Specifically, she laid claim to coming up with the whistle, the whiskey, and the radio, as well as the famous lines "Do I hear happiness in here?" and "Why any kid would want to be an orphan, I'll never know."

(An actor's claim to have made up her own best gags might typically be met with skepticism, but Loudon's surviving correspondence displays an arch, economical wit, and both of those lines are indeed scribbled in Loudon's handwriting in her rehearsal script.)

Charnin and company were supportive of Loudon's improvisations — up to a point. "Marty Charnin . . . was wonderful," Loudon told a reporter. "When I went too far, he'd tell me, but mostly he left me alone." Later, after she had left the production, Loudon was more critical, claiming that during previews the producers wanted to cut "Easy Street," because her role had grown too large and the number threatened to stop the show. "I made a very unimpassioned plea," Loudon recalled. "I said, 'This is not Chekhov. It goes and I go.'" It stayed.

The previews were chaotic but invigorating. Everyone smelled a hit — even Loudon, who continued to believe that Miss Hannigan wasn't a very good part until she heard the reaction of the first night's audience. Also on the first night of the Washington, D.C. tryout, Loudon broke a leg — or a toe, at least. After catching her foot in a treadmill backstage, she limped through the performance and then played Miss Hannigan from a wheelchair for an abbreviated command performance at the White House, which earned a great deal of welcome press for Annie before it moved to Broadway's Alvin Theater. From the White House, Loudon went straight to the emergency room.

Almost without exception, Loudon received the best notices for a show that was itself generally well-reviewed. David Richards in The Washington Star: "The rage she gets out of a single frozen stare is worthy of Medea on the ramparts." Clive Barnes in The New York Times: "Loudon is ... deliciously and deliriously horrid. She never puts a sneer, a leer or even a scream in the wrong place, and her singing has just the right brassy bounce to it." Jack Kroll in Newsweek. "Loudon raises mugging to a high art — she mugs with her face, her voice, her body — I swear she mugs with her very mind. Her bashingly funny performance tells the audience that it's all really a gag." Even the curmudgeons who dissented on the show thought that Loudon was the one right thing about it. Gordon Rogoff, in The Saturday Review, compared her to Ethel Merman.

Reading the reviews now, one gets the sense that Loudon's performance may have been the tipping point for a show that was exactly what New York theatre critics were primed to hate — an unpretentious and unapologetically optimistic and crowd-pleaser. "Loudon laces the sentiment with a healthy dose of nastiness," wrote Martin Gottfried in The New York Post. "Miss Loudon provides Annie with just that comic tone and balance it needs to keep things from getting maudlin," echoed Alvin Klein of WNYC. By winking at the audience, Loudon gave hard-bitten critics (and audiences) permission to like a show that was saccharine instead of cynical.

The accolades for Annie were many: Loudon received Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk Awards, a caricature on the wall of Sardi's, and fan letters from the likes of Agnes de Mille and Eugenie Leontovich. But the big one was, of course, the Tony. Loudon was nominated as Best Leading Actress in a Musical — a surprise to some observers, who considered Miss Hannigan a supporting role, albeit a showy one. (Her Drama Desk citation was in the "featured" category.) Loudon was also competing against Annie herself, Andrea McArdle, which meant that the two performers could split the vote among the show's champions. In the Post, Martin Gottfried predicted that both would lose to Clamma Dale, star of the Porgy and Bess revival. Even Loudon agreed that Dale was likely to win.

Of course, that's not how it worked out. From the stage, an exhilarated Loudon charmed the audience (and viewers of the Tonys telecast) with a frank, witty acceptance speech. "Talk about survival!" she exclaimed, acknowledging her long climb to victory. "I'm so glad I bought this dress!" Loudon held up the award next to her shiny frock and added: "It matches!"

The 1977 Tony Awards were handed out on June 5. Loudon's date was her husband, Norman Paris, whom she credited from the stage with believing that she could create something special in Annie before she herself did. In the telecast of the awards ceremony, Paris can be seen standing and mouthing "I love you" to his wife as she walks to the stage. Less than a month later, Norman Paris suffered a crippling stroke and fell into a coma from which he never emerged. He died on July 10. Loudon soldiered on in Annie, missing only two performances. "It wasn't so much that she show had to go on, it just gave me some place to go," she said later.

Miss Hannigan existed in the form of Dorothy Loudon for a total of fifteen months. When Loudon left in the summer of 1978 to go into Ballroom, Alice Ghostley replaced her, followed during Annie's six-year run by Dolores Wilson, Betty Hutton, Marcia Lewis, and June Havoc. Most got respectable reviews, but everyone agreed: none of them was Dorothy Loudon. A Liz Smith column, best taken with a grain of salt, asserted that Loudon didn't actually watch Annie from the audience until December of 1979 — and did so standing up, because Annie was still an impossible ticket to get.

Thirty-five years later, with a new Annie on Broadway and Promises, Promises star Katie Finneran inheriting her signature role, Loudon is still getting the best reviews. "In 1977," Ben Brantley wrote in a mixed New York Times notice, "Miss Hannigan was portrayed by Dorothy Loudon as a juicy gargoyle, with equal parts Dickensian villainy and showbiz oomph."

Along with Martin Charnin's Annie: A Theatre Memoir (E.P. Dutton, 1977) and Charles Strouse's Put on a Happy Face: A Broadway Memoir (Union Square Press, 2008), this piece was sourced entirely from the Dorothy Loudon Papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Along with her correspondence, quotes from Loudon are taken from the following articles, all collected in Loudon's scrapbooks: Richard Lee, "Washington surrenders to a musical," New York Post, April 2, 1977; Thomas Meehan, "On Making Little Orphan Annie Sing and Dance," New York Times, April 17, 1977; Robert Wahls, "A starlet suitable for Sardi's framing," New York Daily News, April 17, 1977; Cliff Jahr, "What Makes 'Annie' Run?," Village Voice, April 25, 1977; Judy Klemesrud, "Annie Hates Her, Audiences Love Her," New York Times, April 28, 1977; Jo Ann Levine, "Broadway's favorite ogress," Christian Science Monitor, June 17, 1977; Gerrit Henry "Dorothy Loudon: 'Talk about survival!'" After Dark, October 1977; Kevin Kelly, "How a saloon gal won her Tony," Boston Globe, October 2, 1977; William Raidy, "Loudon loves her hated role," The Star-Ledger, November 20, 1977; Glenna Syse, "Dorothy Loudon a nobody who's somebody special," Chicago Sun-Times, May 16, 1982; Hap Erstein, "Dorothy Loudon's life on stage no 'Easy Street,'" Washington Post, November 2, 1983.

The Lost Musicals: Redhead

Diana Bertolini, Manuscripts and Archives Division — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 05:35:45 -0500

Musicals are often most associated with women, or at least with divas: the larger than life stars that musicals are built around. To get a show produced you want to have a decent score and story, but another thing that sells the backers — and the audience — is having a name attached. You need Ethel Merman, Gertrude Lawrence, Mary Martin, Julie Andrews, Chita Rivera, Angela Lansbury, Carol Channing, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, or last but not least, the star of our show, that improbably sexy, brittle but strong, mercurial, redheaded dancer, Gwen Verdon.

Verdon started her Broadway career as assistant choreographer to Jack Cole and danced in the revue Alive and Kicking (1950). Her next show, Cole Porter's Can-Can (1953) was her breakout role. Cast as the second female lead, Verdon had a couple of big dance numbers and her personality shone in the scenes. Verdon walked away with the show and the Best Featured Actress Tony Award.

Her next show, Damn Yankees (1955), was a mega-hit that solidified her place in the pantheon of stars, earned her the Best Actress Tony and teamed her up with her future husband and creative soul mate, choreographer Bob Fosse.

Their next project, New Girl in Town (1957), was a Bob Merrill musical based on Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. It wasn't as big a hit as Damn Yankees, but largely thanks to Verdon's popularity and Fosse's inspired showcasing of her, it had a healthy run, and she won another Tony.

The next Verdon vehicle was Redhead (1959), but this time she wasn't the only woman behind the show. Female stars are usually on top in the musical theatre, but as far as writing is concerned, Broadway has always been a bit of a boys' club.

In recent years, a few women have written Broadway scores — usually only lyrics, but sometimes music as well. The pioneer female songwriter, the one woman in the first golden age of Broadway songwriters, a contemporary of Gershwin, Berlin, Kern, Porter and Rodgers & Hart, was Dorothy Fields.

Dorothy Fields was born into a theatrical family. Her father, Lew Fields, was one half of the famous vaudeville comedy team, Weber and Fields and later become a producer. Her brothers, Joseph and Herbert, were both writers. Dorothy and Herbert collaborated on libretti for many musicals, some with lyrics by Dorothy. In the 1920s and 30s she wrote lyrics for many Broadway revues and Hollywood movies, as well as stand-alone popular songs. Some of her famous songs include "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," "The Way You Look Tonight," "I'm in the Mood for Love," and "On the Sunny Side of the Street."By the time she teamed up with composer Albert Hague (Plain and Fancy, 1955) to write the score for Redhead, she'd provided lyrics for a few book musicals like Up in Central Park (1945) with Sigmund Romberg and two collaborations with Arthur Schwartz, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951) and By the Beautiful Sea (1954).

Redhead, which had a book by Dorothy Fields, Herbert Fields, Sidney Sheldon and David Shaw, was murder mystery set in Victorian London. Dorothy and Herbert Fields had been ruminating on a mystery musical set in a wax museum since visiting Madame Tussaud's in the 1940s. In the interim, Herbert Fields died and Sheldon and Shaw took over the book. The project was shopped around to stars like Ethel Merman and Bea Lillie, but sat on the shelf until it caught the interest of Verdon and Fosse.

As successful as the mystery genre has been in novels, films and straight plays, most attempts to musicalize mysteries haven't worked. Maybe characterizing a musical that ran 452 performances and won 6 Tonys including Best Musical as a failure isn't fair, but I think we have to classify Redhead as a failure anyway. It's never revived, none of the songs became hits, and there wasn't a film adaptation.

Conventional wisdom says that it only ran that long because of Verdon, and it only swept the Tonys because it was a weak season. While the shows in the competition pool were generally undistinguished (apologies to fans of La Plume de Ma Tante, Whoop-Up and Goldilocks), but there was one great show to beat, (Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song) and Redhead beat it.

Redhead, set in a deliciously ghoulish Jack the Ripper atmosphere, focuses on a sheltered young woman (Verdon) who runs a wax museum with her two maiden aunts. When they depict the recent murder of an American chorus girl at the museum they are visited by the victim's former colleagues and friends, most notably the "Strong Man" from her show (Richard Kiley). Verdon's instantly and strongly attracted to Kiley and pretends to have had a vision of the killer to pique his interest. This silliness escalates into Verdon pretending the killer's attacked her so she has to hide in Kiley's show. Somewhere along the line Verdon gets a makeover (which turns her from a mousy brunette into — what else? — a redhead!) and they fall in love.

The inevitable complications ensue when he finds out she's been faking, but all ends happily after Verdon throws herself in harm's way to catch the killer. If that sounds convoluted and confusing...it is. I have to admit, though, that I thought the red herring was the killer right until the dénouement.

In addition to the powerful ladies behind (and in front of) Redhead, some talented men were instrumental to its (relative) success. Bob Fosse's direction and choreography clearly made this show work. It was a total triumph of style over substance Fosse actually wanted to appear in the show himself, as the real killer, but thought it would be too taxing along with his other duties. (Leonard Stone, who did play that part, was nominated for the Best Featured Actor in a Musical Tony Award.)

Verdon's leading man (who took home the Best Actor in a Musical Tony) was a huge asset as well. Richard Kiley would become one of the all-time greats with his acclaimed starring role in Man of La Mancha (1966). And before you accuse me of bias, I'll forestall you by admitting that he's my personal favorite Broadway leading man. When cast in Redhead, Kiley was known for his performance as the Caliph inKismet, in which he introduced the hit song "Stranger in Paradise." He'd done a bit of film and television work, too and he had a few good films to his credit. The most notable film he'd been in was Blackboard Jungle, (1955) playing Glen Ford's naïve, sensitive fellow teacher, whose victimization in a destructive crime provides one of the film's most powerful sequences. Obviously, Redhead is Verdon's show, but casting her opposite a talent like Kiley — handsome, a great actor and one of the most gorgeous voices in Broadway history — didn't hurt.

The score is a mixed bag. Albert Hague turned out some catchy music and Fields' character writing is witty and specific as always. Because Verdon was on stage so much and had to dance so much, the score was tailored to allow her plenty of vocal downtime, especially in Act Two when she needed her energy for her show-stopping dance, "The Pick-Pocket Tango."

Verdon has a lovely, if unmemorable "I Want" song in the first act, "The Right Finger of My Left Hand," and "Merely Marvelous" is winning--and was probably even more so with the dance she did after it. Though Fields did manage some clever tongue twisters for the lyric of her comedy number, "Erbie Fitch's Twitch," it's one of those songs that'd supposed to be "bad" (in the contect of the plot) but still charming in the show, but it's actually bad and Verdon's phony British accent is more grating in this song than the others.

Musically speaking, the strongest songs are all Kiley's. He has a great duet with his sidekick (Leonard Stone) "She's Not Enough Woman for Me" ("Knows her trade enough/Not paid enough/She seems like a girl who hasn't played enough.") It's reprised later (after Verdon's makeover!) for Kiley as "My Girl is Just Enough Woman for Me."

Kiley also has a terrific second act angry song for the misunderstanding, "I'm Back in Circulation." ("I'm gonna book my nights/I'm gonna pick my spots/I'm gonna hang two dolls on my arm/I'm back in circulation/And I'm absolutely soaked in charm.") Both songs are steeped in appropriate masculine bravado and Fields is very witty with the lyrics. Kiley's duets with Verdon, "Look Who's In Love" (charming despite being too cutesy) and especially "I'll Try," are highlights of the cast album.

The choral numbers, "Uncle Sam Rag" and "We Loves Ya, Jimey" are generic and feel like filler. The opening, "The Simpson Sisters" is fun. There are two situation songs that highlight Fields' strength as a lyricist. Kiley and his sidekick (Leonard Stone) convince Verdon to come out of her shell, romantically, and do something foolish "Just for Once." ("if you're tempted to kiss a man then kiss him/And feel reckless and giddy with delight/If you don't want to kiss him then dismiss him/What can you lose?/You'll experience an interesting night!") In "Behave Yourself" Verdon's aunts give her simultaneous and conflicting advice on her first date with Kiley. ("You lower your lids/You look straight in his eye/Your dress is cut low/No, your dress is cut high!")

After Redhead, Fields and Verdon (and Fosse) teamed up again in 1966 for Sweet Charity, a complete triumph for everyone involved. Is Redhead a masterpiece? No, but there's plenty to enjoy from listening to the cast album and it must have been a fun show in the theatre. By all accounts, Fosse's staging elevated the mediocre material into an exhilarating evening. It truly is a lost musical, because it cannot and should not ever be revived, unless another Gwen Verdon comes along and Fosse's production can be recreated.

Those interested in the script can find it in the Dorothy Fields Scripts in the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

You Never Can Tell: Musical Revue Research Guide, Part 1

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 07:23:03 -0500

Visitors to the exhibition and blog channel The Great American Revue have peppered me with questions that can be summarized as: "where do you find that stuff?" Substitute artifacts for "stuff" and it becomes a request for a research guide.

The New York Public Library has been collecting performing arts content since the 1880s and online cataloging since the 1980s. Most of the material in the Revues exhibition was acquired during those gap years and are not represented in nypl.org searches. Many of the best sources — clipping files, program files and scrapbooks — can be found only through the card files, currently located on the 2nd floor. So the next few blogs will discuss how best to find information and materials at LPA relating to revues and other large performing arts productions.

Part 1: Getting Started

The best and easiest way to find anything at the Performing Arts Library is by the name of production or performer. You can use the open stack reference books (currently on the 2nd and/or 3rd floors) to determine which shows fit your study's criteria — all revues, all shows in a season, all shows at roof theaters, whatever. The most comprehensive are Gerald Bordman's The American Musical Theatre (1978), American Musical Comedy (1982) or American Musical Revue (1985), if you prefer prose; or Richard C. Norton's Chronology of the American Musical Theater (2002) for listings only.

Brooks McNamara, pioneering popular entertainments historian at NYU and my dissertation advisor, always recommended that the next step was to identify every person in or involved with each of the production. You can do that on IBDB, but I prefer compiling those lists by working directly from programs. That way, you can see their billing, specialties and name variants. Search every name! The important thing to remember is that you can never tell which performer/songwriter/designer/staff member will be your key to provide answers, inspiration or surprises. They, their families or their fans may have kept files or scrapbooks with what turn out to be priceless or, at least, informative, treasures. So, where did I find those unknown Irving Berlin lyrics?

Martin Pakledinaz for "The Pajama Game" (2006)

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:05:27 -0400

Legendary Broadway composer and lyricist Richard Adler passed away this year on June 21st. His seamless partnership with friend and composer Jerry Ross in the 1950s led to the hit musical scores and lyrics for The Pajama Game in its original Broadway run in 1954. Directed by George Abbott and Jerome Robbins, the show went on to win a Tony Award for best musical.

Fast forward to 2006, and we find Broadway director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall guiding and choreographing a 21st century revival of The Pajama Game with the Roundabout Theatre Company. Marshall researched the first 1954 production, and immediately put together what she described as a "first-class" team of David Chase as Vocal and Dance Arranger, and the artistic trio of Peter Kaczorowski for Lighting Design, Derek McLane for Scenic Design, and Martin Pakledinaz for costume design.

Marshall's The Pajama Game went on to received a Tony award for Best Revival of a Musical, and Pakledinaz was nominated for the fifth time for Best Costume Design. Both lead actors in the show, Kelli O'hara and Harry Connick Jr., also earned Tony nominations for their turns as Babe Williams and Sid Sorokin.

The Pajama Game focuses on a union dispute at the Sleep Tite Pajamas factory in the 1950s. Babe, the confident head of the workers' Grievance Committee, attracts the attention of the company's handsome superintendant, Sid Sorokin.

Costume designer Martin Pakledinaz took into consideration the economic situation of the working class characters, and avoided high fashion inspiration from the period. Rather, the designer sought out contemporary Sears and Spiegel catalogues, as well as documentary photographs that depicted working people.

"There's a nobility and a joy to theses characters, so you want to study each personality carefully" Pakledinaz said in a 2006 interview the Roundabout Theatre Company's publication Upstage. He also based his costume design for each character on the actors' own attributes as well. Pakledinaz said, of all the tasks involved with costuming the show, "my favorite is just picking the fabric because it is fun to put together a collection of prints and patterns like a big jigsaw puzzle."

Set in the 1950's, Pakledinaz costumes the cast in bright stripes and pastels conveying an energetic feeling to the production. The designer said "even though we don't cartoon the clothes, we want to 'lift' them a bit, because it is a musical, and we want it to look at home onstage, and the scenery is theatrical as well."

The trouble with using authentic clothing produced in the 1950s was that, as Pakledinaz stated "it is more charming up close than from a distance." The designer's challenge was to find fabrics that appeared authentic from a distance and correctly convey the fifties to an audience in a theater. "Finding fabrics that look like they're from the 50's and look correct can be one of our trickier problems."

Seen below are designs for the vibrant, celebratory "Hernando's Hideaway" musical sequence in Act 2, Scene 5. Hernando's Hideaway was one of a few scenes in The Pajama Game that involved dancing. Pakledinaz certainly kept this in mind as he designed for the cast. "You have to make sure that the costumes feel comfortable and strong on them, and that the shoes are also comfortable and supportive..." It was also essential that the cast "...feel safe in the clothes, so that they can forget about them."

The costume design for Harry Connick Jr. (above) in the "Hernando's Hideaway" musical number features a bright tuxedo with purple patterned jacket, vest and trousers.

Above is Pakledinaz's design for Megan Lawrence as Gladys during the "Hernando's Hideaway" musical sequence. Pakledinaz said of the energetic, no-nonsense character played by Lawrence, "Gladys is sexy, but she is also management, so her clothes have to look a bit more upscale..." The costume features an iridescent fuchsia taffeta dress, fitted in a mermaid silhouette and accented with purple sequins and black tulle and net petticoats.

In The Pajama Game, Martin Pakledinaz sought to costume the cast in a cohesive, energetic way, while still highlighting the personalities of each actor and their characters. Every Broadway cast needed to be a balanced group of strengths, and as Pakledinaz said, "They need to be independent, and yet work together, like in any community."

Bibliography

Roundabout Theatre Company, "The Costume Game," Upstage Magazine, Winter/Spring 2006, 10-11.
John Istel et al., Front & Center: The Magazine of the Roundabout Theatre Company, Volume 1, Issue 1, Winter 2006.

Coming next week...

Costumes by Martin Pakledinaz for Kiss Me Kate (2000) starring Marin Mazzie and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

For contact info and to learn more, please visit the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

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.

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

How Not to Succeed in Business

Stephen Bowie, Library For the Performing Arts — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 12:33:55 -0400

The idea of late blooming was essential to Dorothy Loudon's mythology.

Although she admitted to being 44 at the time of Annie (a fiction that many internet sites, including the Internet Movie Database, presently maintain), Loudon was actually 52. Prior to Annie, Loudon had been through nearly three decades of supper clubs, television, and touring companies, and a series of near misses on Broadway — projects that collapsed before they went on (including a musical version of Casablanca and New Faces of 1959); productions where she got good reviews, but the show didn't (Nowhere to Go But Up; The Fig Leaves Are Falling); or revivals that barely revived (Three Men on a Horse; The Women).

But Loudon's career almost went an entirely different way. She very nearly debuted on Broadway in one of the biggest hits of the 1960s — one that might have made Loudon a star of the stage fifteen years earlier.

"Dot Loudon cuts nitery date for B'way legiter," read the headline in Variety on February 22, 1961. The article noted that Loudon would be canceling an engagement at the St. Regis Hotel's Maisonette club in order to take a role in a new fall musical entitled How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Five weeks later, on March 29, New York Times theatre columnist Sam Zolotow offered a casting update on the new Frank Loesser-Abe Burrows show. Along with Loudon, Robert Morse, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Virginia Martin were now attached to How to Succeed. The manic, gap-toothed British film comedian Terry-Thomas was also "pondering terms" for "one of the major assignments" — unnamed by Zolotow, but clearly that of Biggley, the part eventually originated by Rudy Vallee. But Terry-Thomas wasn't the only potential cast member to take a pass. On April 19, the New York Herald Tribune carried a short item noting that Loudon had dropped out, "on the basis of book revisions recently which have altered her part."

But which part? And what revisions?

Although it would have fit neatly into her "queen of the flops" mystique, Loudon rarely discussed How to Succeed in interviews, even after Annie established her as a star. One of the few profiles of Loudon that mentions the episode was a Mel Heimer's New York column of December 11, 1963, published shortly after she had become an "overnight success" on Garry Moore's television variety show. Heimer wrote that Loudon "had a good part, with four songs, in How to Succeed — and then [producers Cy] Feuer and [Ernie] Martin decided to build up the Vallee part, so they wrote out Dorothy."

That's the extent of clues to be mined from the fossil record of Loudon's papers. None of the press coverage in 1961 bothered to identify the role Loudon was to play, probably because the soon-to-be familiar characters were still unknown to audiences. Loudon in early 1961 — a thirty-five year-old singing character comedienne — might have been versatile enough to have played any of the three major female roles after the ingenue, Rosemary. But in truth, unless Loesser and Burrows originally had something different in mind, Loudon was too old for Smitty, too young for Miss Jones, and not sultry enough for Hedy LaRue. (Plus, the announcement of Virginia Martin's casting at the same time as Loudon would seem to rule out Hedy.) From the details in Heimer's column, one might suspect that the show's authors were thinking of creating a new character just for Loudon. But the Billy Rose Theatre Collection's Abe Burrows Papers contain script drafts from the spring of 1961 that hew too closely to the produced version to make that a likely possibility.

Over the summer, I reached out to surviving members of the original How to Succeed company in the hope that someone could clarify the nature of Loudon's involvement. But Robert Morse didn't remember her being associated with the show. Neither did Stuart Ostrow, who was Frank Loesser's assistant at the time, or Merle DeBuskey, the show's publicist. Joseph Weiss, a Broadway historian and general manager of Frank Loesser Enterprises, had never heard of a Loudon connection to How to Succeed. Nor had Jo Sullivan Loesser, the composer-lyricist's widow, when Weiss asked her on my behalf. And Lionel Larner, Loudon's agent and close friend since around the time of Noël Coward's Sweet Potato in 1968, told me that Loudon had never spoken of the matter.

Finally, when I contacted Claudette Sutherland, the original Smitty, I began to have some luck. For Sutherland (who was, coincidentally, in The Women with Loudon in 1973), How to Succeed was a classic "big break" story. It was her first audition in New York. Sutherland was there at the start of rehearsals and, she told me, even earlier, learning the songs with Loesser in his office on 57th Street. But, sometime into the run of the production, Sutherland heard that Loudon had originally been set to play Smitty.

Then Lionel Larner put me in touch with Arthur Gorton, who was a friend of Loudon's as early as 1961. Last month Gorton confirmed that Loudon had been offered the role of Smitty — but that she had turned it down.

"My understanding is, she called Abe Burrows and wanted to know if it was a good part. And he said, 'It's a part,'" recalled Gorton. "That sort of turned her off, and as far as I know she just didn't go in for it. She was very picky about what she did, and she was very savvy about what was good for her and would move her along."

Gorton's memory that Loudon never accepted the Smitty role is difficult to reconcile with the press items (which also appeared in the Post and the Tribune) detailing both her entry and her exit from How to Succeed. But, perhaps, press agents for either Loudon or the show exaggerated the extent of her commitment.

In any event, How to Succeed ran on Broadway for four years and more than 1,400 performances. Did Loudon regret passing on it, even during the years before Annie made her a star? According to Larner, no. "She wouldn't have had any regrets at all," Larner speculated. "Right after that, she did Nowhere to Go But Up and got glorious reviews. She wouldn't have scored the same way [in How to Succeed]. So I think Dorothy was choosing how she wanted to debut."

Discovering Dance Lineages Through Oral Histories

Cassie Mey, Oral History Archive, Jerome Robbins Dance Division — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 10:14:21 -0400

Next week (on October 24, 26 and 27, 2012) I have the honor of performing at the Museum of Modern Art's Marron Atrium in Voluntaries by choreographer Dean Moss and visual artist, Laylah Ali. These performances are part of MoMA's Some sweet day dance exhibition series. Voluntaries examines the legacy of John Brown, a white abolitionist who attempted an armed slave revolt in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, resulting in his capture and execution. This piece is my first project working as a dancer/performer with Dean, Laylah, and the company. We have been developing this work in rehearsals for over a year, most recently at Baryshnikov Arts Center on a dance residency.

Although I have been a dancer my entire life, my understanding of the richness and complexity of dance history has greatly expanded during the three years I have spent as the Oral History Archive Assistant at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. In dance, as opposed to the visual art represented at MoMA for example, fewer records of the past exist, and the final product — the performance itself — is of course ephemeral. Dance is passed along, on the whole, orally, directly from person to person in a process that creates complex personal networks within (and between) many dance communities. The lineage of today's dance artists are interwoven with the generations of dancers and dance supporters that precede them. Yet sometimes these historical connections can be difficult even for the dance performers themselves to uncover.

Oral histories have the potential to reveal the threads that connect, support and inspire new dance work. For example, in the course of my work at the Oral History Archive, listening to Dean Moss' Oral History Project interview allowed me to further understand the background of his life and the development of his artistic philosophy through his own perspective. I was interested to learn that Dean had been a performer with David Gordon/Pickup Company. Coincidentally, this past summer the Oral History Project taped interviews with both David Gordon, and his wife and creative muse, Valda Setterfield. Dean also spoke in his interview about his time as an artist in residence at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) and his long-time supporter, Marya Warshaw, BAX's Artistic/Executive Director. The Oral History Project also recently taped an interview with Marya, in which she spoke about her pivotal role as a sponsor for dance artists in Brooklyn. Listening to these interviews helped me to contextualize and deepen my understanding of Dean's work, and certainly to enrich my own experience as a dance artist in Voluntaries.

Brief clips from the Moss, Gordon and Setterfield interviews are now available online at the Dance Oral History Channel. The full interviews with Gordon, Setterfield and Warshaw will become available in 2013.

Here is a list of all of the interviews that have been produced by the Oral History Project since it began in 1974. These interviews can be listened to in their entirety on the third floor of the Library for the Performing Arts. Perhaps there are some that might enrich your own experience as an artist, or as an audience member…

Speaking of, come see us at MoMA!

Robot Dawn: The Stage Origins of a Sci-Fi Idol

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 05:20:40 -0400

Nothing is more strange to man than his own image. —Dr. Alquist, sole survivor of the robot rebellion.

It's standard sci-fi melodrama now: The robots evolve and become indistinguishable from their creators. They rise up and in their revolt decide to eradicate the human race. Sound familiar? Well, before you start looking for Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's not 1984 and we're not in a movie theatre. The year is 1922 and it's all happening live on stage in an Off-Broadway theatre on 35th Street.

90 years ago today, the Theatre Guild's bold new stage production R.U.R. was unveiled at the Garrick Theatre. R.U.R., written by Czech playwright Karel Čapek, is one of the earliest science fiction stage plays and introduced the word robot to the English language*. Soon after the show opened, 'robot' would forever replace 'automaton' in common usage to mean a man-made artificial being. The 1922 production also marked the stage debut of Spencer Tracy (he and buddy Pat O'Brien were struggling actors in New York City when they got parts as non-speaking robots).

Interestingly, the robots of Čapek's conception aren't the tin clunkers of B movie fame, but are made of organic flesh and bone; Their body parts are synthetically grown, cultured, and assembled Ford Motor-style. These creatures resemble more the genetically-engineered clones of today or the replicants from Blade Runner, or even those impossible to detect Cylons of the recent Battlestar Galactica series. The play deals with the revolt of mass-produced worker robots against an oppressive corporation, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).

The play was written in 1920 and has been translated and performed all over the world to this day. It is notable for its critique of modern civilization and the Pandora's box of applied science. It is a dark Dystopian tale of rebellion where robots (spoiler alert!), reaching for a sense of individualism, rise up and kill their masters, only to fall into the same human dilemmas of creating a civilization. Lee Strasberg's revival in 1942 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre was more politically grounded. It interpreted R.U.R in terms of president Roosevelt's promotion of a new United Nations against the forces of Nazi tyranny:

We exult in the thought that it is the young, free men and women of the United Nations, and not the wound-up robots of the slave states, who will mold the shape of the new world.

Even today R.U.R.'s mordant themes remain great fodder for playwrights and screenwriters alike: genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, the uncanny valley between machines and human likeness, self-identity, free will, and a whole range of speculative scenarios involving sentient machines. I personally can't wait to see Cloud Atlas.

Happy birthday robot!

Browse the latest books and ebooks of robot fiction or peruse lists of related works hand-picked by your Library community.

*A note on the historical usage of 'robot' for our logophiles and wordsmiths: Although 'robot' in the sense of an artificial human-like being was introduced into the lexicon in 1920 with the publication of R.U.R., the word had already existed in a different context in the 19th century. Robot also referred to the European system of serfdom, where tenants paid rent with service or forced labor.

There's more at OED and for cultural literacy addicts there's a whole range of Articles and Databases on every topic under the sun to feed the mind.

Remembering Martin Pakledinaz, 1953-2012

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 13:58:55 -0400

“Costumes have to tell you in a moment what that person is feeling, what they’re going through, what changes are happening.”

—Martin Pakledinaz

Martin Pakledinaz was one of the most distinguished costume designers on Broadway, and was known for creating costumes that brilliantly conveyed character and time period. Pakledinaz passed away on July 8, 2012, shortly after receiving his tenth Tony Award nomination for Best Costume Design for his costumes in Nice Work If You Can Get It, starring Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara.

In April 2012, Martin Pakledinaz gave a generous gift to the New York Public Library for Performing Arts — an extraordinary collection of his personal costume bibles and production files documenting his designs for plays, musicals and operas produced in New York City over the last thirty years. The collection is now housed with the significant work of other great designers such as Patricia Zipprodt, Boris Aronson and Bonnie Cashin in The Billy Rose Theatre Division within LPA. In honor of his important contribution to the Library for Performing Arts, this blog series will highlight some of the extraordinary work found in the Martin Pakledinaz Costume Designs Collection.

A detail-oriented and thoughtful designer, “Marty,” as he was known to friends and colleagues on Broadway, was very involved with the creation of hiscostumed characters. Throughout his design process, Pakledinaz edited and improved his costumes. He took inspiration from changes in scene and setting and the personality of characters as written in the production script. When designing period costume for The Pirate Queen, Pakledinaz described the design process as “a continual learning curve to make each design different from each other and yet relate.” He conducted extensive research for his notable period costumes, gleaning inspiration from paintings and historical documentation to inform his garment patterns and inspire his use of fabrics, colors, textures and embroidery.

His costume bibles are composed of meticulously organized design materials neatly sorted into 3-ring binders for each musical, play or opera. Some productions are documented with a series of up to ten costume bibles filled with color reproductions of his costume sketches, his notes on production manuscripts, original color photos of actors in costume fittings, textile swatches and detailed information on costume material sourcing.

The collection also includes several boxes of production files which are filled with correspondence, photographs, notes, programs and other ephemera produced during the course of Pakledinaz’s design process.

Currently on display in the Reading Room at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts are several costumebibles and notable designs from the Martin Pakledinaz Costume Designs Collection. These include the designer’sTony Award-winning work for Thoroughly Modern Millie in 2002, and Kiss Me, Kate in 1999, as well as his designs for the opera Alcina (2003), and the Noel Coward comedy, Blithe Spirit (2009), starring Angela Lansbury.

We welcome you to visit our memorial display for this extraordinary designer, and please stay tuned to this blog series for more on the inspirational designs of Martin Pakledinaz.

Coming next week:

Costumes by Martin Pakledinaz for The Pajama Game (2008) starring Harry Connick Jr. and Kelli O'Hara.

For contact info and to learn more about the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, please visit our website.

Ruth Chatterton: A Screen Career in Photographs (In Defense of the Fan Collection)

Diana Bertolini, Manuscripts and Archives Division — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 12:39:28 -0400

This post is about a fascinating, talented and beautiful movie star of the 1930s named Ruth Chatterton. However, it's also about a dedicated fan who preserved her legacy. Yes, this is the type of collection many archivists dread: the much-maligned fan collection.

Perhaps I better explain this for any laymen reading. If the library had Ruth Chatterton's Papers, that would mean that the stage and film actress, novelist and aviatrix (!) maintained her own photographs, scripts, correspondence, programs, clippings, etc. and gave them to us (or her heirs did.) If that were the case, Chatterton would be both the subject of the collection and its creator. In this case, Chatterton is the subject of the collection, but Ruth Moesel is the creator, so we have the Ruth Moesel Collection of Ruth Chatterton Materials.

So, who is Ruth Moesel? Ruth Moesel, a Pennsylvanian pre-school teacher, started out as just a fan of Ruth Chatterton. As she told The Scrantonian, in an interview on Sept. 2, 1951, “I thought she was a very good actress. I admired her, so I started the scrapbook. After I got a good start, I just kept on with it.” She certainly did! The collection I processed has no fewer than 32 scrapbooks!

Moesel may have started as a fan, but she soon upgraded to Chatterton's quasi-official custodian and biographer. Chatterton eventually met Moesel many times and gave her interviews for her biography. The collection includes drafts for Moesel's Chatterton biography, but I can't find any evidence that it was published. Many repositories were interested in her collection, but she expressed her intention to give it to NYPL as early as the 1950s.

Some archivists have disdain for fan collections. To be perfectly candid, I've even occasionally been guilty of this myself. And our disdain isn't completely unfounded. Fan collections can consist entirely of stuff that's readily available for purchase on eBay. But my experience with this collection surprised me, so I'm going to make a case, here and now, in favor of fan collections. In this case, according to notes on collection items, Chatterton gave Moesel some of her personal papers — correspondence and photographs — as well as artifacts, like a tin of face powder, a purse with two cigarettes in it, a suit, and best of all — a mink collar!

This collection has a lot to offer, but the real treasure trove here is the amazing group of scrapbooks containing photographs — production stills from Chatterton's movies, spanning her entire film career. To prove that, under certain circumstances, a fan collection can be just as good as the real thing, I'd like to share with you a few out of the hundreds of beautiful photographs this collection includes.

After a successful career on the New York Stage — a career that encompassed starring in Broadway hits and translating plays from French to English — Chatterton made her film debut at age 35 in Sins of the Fathers (1928). In this, her only silent film, Chatterton was cast as a femme fatale who pushes Emil Jannings on to financial ruin. The film didn't get very good reviews, but Chatterton did.

In 1929, Chatterton starred in 5 talkies at Paramount, most of them adaptations of plays by well-know authors such as W. Somerset Maugham (Charming Sinners) and J. M. Barrie (The Doctor's Secret).

That same year Chatterton also got a crack at one of Hollywood's favorite stories — at least, it must've been since they filmed it half a dozen times! — Madame X. This melodrama, also based on a hit play, tells the story of a fallen woman who shoots a lover who's threatening to reveal her identity to the son she lost 20 years ago, now a successful lawyer, and ends up being defended in the trial by said son, who still doesn't know who she is! Sure, this story is up to its ears in hoary sentiment and maternal self-sacrifice, but it's also undeniably powerful, and it earned Chatterton her first Oscar nomination.

The next year Chatterton got another Oscar nomination for Sarah and Son, another story of a woman searching for a lost son. This time she's a good girl whose bad husband stole her son and sold him to a rich man. When she becomes an opera star she wins her son back with the help of a devoted lawyer, after her deadbeat husband conveniently dies and in the end she gets her son and her lawyer.

Chatterton's Paramount films are mostly unavailable on home video, and largely forgotten. Notably, three of them were directed by Hollywood's only female director in this era, Dorothy Arzner. After a series of women's pictures/melodramas, Chatterton left Paramount Studios, where she had reigned as top female star, for Warner Brothers. Chatterton and a few other stars perceived as sophisticated were wooed by that studio, associated mostly with gangster films, in an attempt to change its image. Her first film at Warner's was another melodrama, The Rich Are Always with Us, which cast her opposite future husband George Brent, and also featured one of the studios' rising stars, Bette Davis.

Some notable films from Chatterton's time at Warner Brothers include Frisco Jenny (1932), Lily Turner (1933) and Journal of a Crime (1934). Perhaps her most intriguing vehicle is Female (1933). Chatterton stars as the CEO of an automobile company. Not only does she boss around all her male employees with easy assurance, she gets just as many kicks from inviting the attractive ones to work “overtime” at her house, getting them drunk on her "special vodka" and toying with them, only to discard them callously at the office the next day.

The film does takes a disappointing and predictable turn when Chatterton's character finally meets her match in George Brent, but the first half of the film is remarkable for the casual way the heroine engages in sexual encounters and the complete power she has over men — both sexually and professionally. It's also worth noting that in youth-obsessed Hollywood, Chatterton was 41 when she played this role!

In her mid-forties, Chatterton's career was beginning to wane. Journal of a Crime (1934) was her last film at Warner Brothers. After that she bounced around from one studio to another, doing films at Columbia, at Fox and for the Samuel Goldwyn Company, where she made the film for which she is best remembered today. Dodsworth (1936) was an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' novel about a middle-aged American husband and wife, who retire to Europe together and quickly realize they have nothing in common.

Walter Houston starred as Dodsworth, Chatterton as Fran, his bored, social-climbing wife. The impressive cast also boasted Paul Lukas and David Niven as some of Chatterton's new beaux, the formidable Maria Ouspenskaya as the forbidding mother of a young nobleman Chatterton wants to marry, and Mary Astor as the wonderful woman Houston finds happiness with. Dodsworth also had one of the greatest directors of all time, William Wyler, at the helm.

Though Chatterton's character is unsympathetic because of her snobbery and cruelty to her gentle husband, her complexities make her fascinating and Chatterton's performance is certainly dynamic. Fran Dodsworth's fear of aging is especially poignant, particularly in the devastating scene between Chatterton and Ouspenskaya. Chatterton had some reservations about playing a middle-aged woman. While doing so did effectively end her career as a leading lady, it was also her greatest film and greatest role.

Despite her success in Dodsworth, Chatterton's Hollywood film career was over. She made two films in England, The Rat (1937) and A Royal Divorce (1938) before going back to the stage. For the next twenty years she worked steadily in theatre and also flew solo across the Atlantic several times and turned out four novels in her spare time!

That's Ruth Chatterton, a remarkable woman with a fascinating career. I'm grateful to Ruth Moesel for collecting these wonderful images and everything else in this valuable collection. I know I won't be dismissing the fan collection out of hand ever again! And if anyone wants to write that Chatterton bio, Moesel's done a lot of the job already.

To learn more about Chatterton, check out the Ruth Moesel Collection of Ruth Chatteron materials in the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.