The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations 9780190469993, 9780190490010, 9780190490003, 9780190051549, 0190469994

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

M USIC A L T H E AT R E S CR E E N A DA P TAT IONS

The Oxford Handbook of

MUSICAL THEATRE SCREEN ADAPTATIONS Edited by

DOMINIC McHUGH

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McHugh, Dominic, editor. Title: The Oxford handbook of musical theatre screen adaptations / edited by Dominic McHugh. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018049465| ISBN 9780190469993 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190490010 (Oxford Handbooks online) | ISBN 9780190490003 (updf) | ISBN 9780190051549 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Musical films—United States—History and criticism. | Musicals—United States—Film adaptations. | Film adaptations—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M86 O94 2019 | DDC 791.43/6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049465 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

In loving memory of my aunt, Linda Riley (1951–2015), who shared my passion for film musicals

Contents

Acknowledgementsxi Contributorsxiii About the Companion Websitexv

Introduction1 Dominic McHugh

PA RT I   A N I N T RODU C T ION TO T H E STAG E - TO - S C R E E N A DA P TAT ION 1. ‘And I’ll Sing Once More’: A Historical Overview of the Broadway Musical on the Silver Screen

13

Dominic McHugh

2. Refashioning Roberta: From Novel to Stage to Screen

29

Geoffrey Block

3. Getting Real: Stage Musical versus Filmic Realism in Film Adaptations from Camelot to Cabaret55 Raymond Knapp

4. The Party’s Over: On the Town, Bells Are Ringing, and the Problem of Adapting Postwar New York

85

Martha Shearer

5. Into the Woods from Stage to Screen

107

Mark Eden Horowitz

PA RT I I   T H E P OL I T IC S OF A DA P TAT ION 6. Li’l Abner from Comic Strip to Hollywood Jim Lovensheimer

127

viii   contents

7. Fidelity versus Freedom in Miloš Forman’s Film Version of Hair151 Andrew Buchman

8. ‘An Elegant Legacy?’: The Aborted Cartoon Adaptation of Finian’s Rainbow183 Danielle Birkett

9. Little Shop of Horrors: Breaking the Rules All the Way to the Big (Enormous, Twelve-inch) Screen

205

Jonas Westover

10. The Fascinating Moment of Godspell: Its Cinematic Adaptation in the Shadow of Jesus Christ Superstar and Leonard Bernstein’s Mass229 Paul R. Laird

PA RT I I I   B IO G R A P H Y A N D I DE N T I T I E S : R AC E , SE X UA L I T Y, A N D G E N DE R 11. Adapting Pal Joey: Postwar Anxieties and the Playmate

253

Julianne Lindberg

12. ‘Too Darn Hot’: Reimagining Kiss Me, Kate for the Silver Screen

275

Hannah Robbins

13. ‘A Humane, Practical, and Beautiful Solution’: Adaptation and Triangulation in Paint Your Wagon293 Megan Woller

14. ‘A Great American Service’: George M. Cohan, the Stage, and the Nation in Yankee Doodle Dandy315 Elizabeth Titrington Craft

15. Cole Porter’s List Songs on Stage and Screen

337

Cliff Eisen

PA RT I V   S TA R S A N D A DA P TAT ION 16. Loud, Pretty, Strong, White [Repeat]: The Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy Operettas at MGM (1935–1942) Todd Decker

355

contents   ix

17. ‘Is this the right material, girl?’: How Madonna Makes Us Like Eva, but Not Necessarily Evita377 Richard J. Allen

18. Brigadoon and its Transition to MGM Dance Musical: Adapting a Stage Show for Star Dancers

395

Susan Smith

19. ‘I’m Once Again the Previous Me’: Performance and Stardom in the Barbra Streisand Stage-to-Screen Adaptations

423

Dominic McHugh

PA RT V   M U LT I P L E A DA P TAT ION S OF A SI N G L E WOR K 20. The Shifting Sand of Orientalism: The Desert Song on Stage and Screen

447

William A. Everett

21. ‘You Will Know That She is Our Annie’: Comparing Three Adaptations of a Broadway Classic

473

Ian Sapiro

22. The Many Faces of Rio Rita493 John Graziano

PA RT V I   ST U DIO S , AU DI E N C E S , T E C H N OL O G Y 23. Lost in Translation: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel on the Silver Screen

515

Tim Carter

24. Carol Burnett and the Ends of Variety: Parody, Nostalgia, and Analysis of the American Musical

543

Robynn J. Stilwell

25. Flamboyance, Exuberance, and Schmaltz: Half a Sixpence and the Broadway Adaptation in 1960s Hollywood Amanda McQueen

569

x   contents

2 6. The Producers and Hairspray: The Hazards and Rewards of Recursive Adaptation

591

Dean Adams

27. Rescoring Anything Goes in 1930s Hollywood

613

Allison Robbins

Select Bibliography Index

635 643

Acknowledgements

The initial inspiration for this volume came from a conference I convened at the University of Sheffield in May 2014. Titled Restaging the Song: Adapting Broadway for the Silver Screen, it brought together scholars from a range of disciplines to discuss stage-to-screen adaptations across the decades and ran alongside an exhibition and film festival at the Workstation and Showroom at Sheffield. I am grateful to all the presenters at the conference for their support, to Hannah Robbins and Danielle Birkett (then PhD students of mine) for their help in organising the conference, to Amy Ryall for her support in organising funding for the festival and exhibition through the University’s Arts Enterprise scheme, and in particular to my fellow conference committee members, Stephen Banfield (who also acted as respondent to the conference), Geoffrey Block (keynote), and Jeffrey Magee, for their unswerving help and enthusiasm. The conference was especially important to me as it initiated a particularly close and important friendship between Geoffrey and me, and he has been incredibly helpful in reading and commenting on drafts of my material in this book. I am also grateful to all the contributors to this volume, which—like many a film musical—has been several years in the making. As always, I cannot begin to thank Norm Hirschy at Oxford University Press nearly enough for his incredible patience and support: it is difficult to imagine scholarship on musicals existing without his energy and enthusiasm in the background. Thanks also to Lauralee Yeary at Oxford, to the copyeditor, and to the team at SPi for seeing the volume through to completion. Special thanks are due to Cliff Eisen, who has been a wonderful mentor throughout my career and is now a very special friend. As ever, my family and numerous friends are almost the only reason I managed to bring this volume to fruition, especially my partner Lawrence Broomfield, my parents Gilly and Larry McHugh, and my friend Richard Tay. This volume is dedicated to the memory of my aunt Linda Riley, who died suddenly and unexpectedly in May 2015, leaving a gap in our family that will never be filled. She was a great fan of film musicals and I’m proud to leave behind this memorial to her. Sheffield, 2018

Dominic McHugh

Contributors

Dean Adams, Associate Dean and Professor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Richard  J.  Allen, Professor, Film, Television and Digital Media, Texas Christian University Danielle Birkett, Lecturer in Music, Northern Regional College Geoffrey Block, Emeritus Professor, University of Puget Sound Andrew Buchman, Faculty, Evergreen State College Tim Carter, David  G.  Frey Distinguished Professor of Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Elizabeth Titrington Craft, Assistant Professor, University of Utah Todd Decker, Professor and Chair, Music, Washington University in St. Louis Cliff Eisen, Professor of Musicology, King’s College London William  A.  Everett, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Musicology, University of Missouri-Kansas City John Graziano, Emeritus Professor, City University of New York Mark Eden Horowitz, Senior Music Specialist, Music Division, Library of Congress Raymond Knapp, Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Humanities, UCLA Paul R. Laird, Professor of Musicology, University of Kansas Julianne Lindberg, Assistant Professor of Musicology, University of Nevada, Reno Jim Lovensheimer, Associate Professor of Musicology, Vanderbilt University Dominic McHugh, Reader in Musicology, University of Sheffield Amanda McQueen, Lecturer in Media Studies/Auburn Global, Auburn University Allison Robbins, Associate Professor of Music, University of Central Missouri Hannah Robbins, Frederick Loewe Research Associate, University of Sheffield Ian Sapiro, Associate Professor of Music, University of Leeds

xiv   contributors Martha Shearer, Teaching Fellow in Film Studies, King’s College London Susan Smith, Associate Professor of Film Studies, Sunderland University Robynn J. Stilwell, Associate Professor of Music, Georgetown University Jonas Westover, University of Minnesota Megan Woller, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, Gannon University

About the Companion Website

www.oup.com/us/oxomtsa Oxford has created a website to accompany The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations. Readers are encouraged to consult this resource in conjunction with each chapter of the book. Examples available online are indicated in the text with Oxford’s symbol .

I n troduction Dominic M c Hugh

From Show Boat (1936) to The Sound of Music (1965) and from Grease (1978) to Chicago (2002), many of the most beloved film musicals in Hollywood history originated as Broadway shows. Yet in general, the number of screen adaptations of Broadway ­musicals and operettas is far greater than the number that have met with success, especially both critical and commercial success. This is all the more surprising since Hollywood tended almost (if not quite) exclusively to buy the rights to musicals that had been successful on the stage as a means of guaranteeing a profitable outcome. After all, musicals that had already enjoyed long runs and nationwide productions on the stage ought to have a readymade audience. One might also think that because the authors had puzzled over the individual challenges posed by such properties in their stage incarnations, it ought to be easier to turn them into strong film musicals. But for every West Side Story there were several Finian’s Rainbows, Man of La Manchas, and Carousels: movies that simply did not do justice to the ‘enchanted evenings’1 these works provided in their stage incarnations. This phenomenon is at the heart of this volume and explains why, with a few exceptions, the book deals with a lot of problematic films. Rather than turning the wheel with a series of chapters on what makes the movies My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music successful, I have invited twenty-five leading scholars on musicals to contribute articles on some of the deeper issues that are at the heart of Hollywood’s ­troubled love affair with Broadway, as well as some of the more overlooked stage-toscreen adaptations that have appeared over the last ninety years or so. Thus, instead of a comparison of the screen adaptations of Show Boat, which have been discussed in print before, the volume contains explorations of the different film versions of The Desert Song, Rio Rita, and Annie, each of which pose different questions about the nature of changing media from stage to screen. Movies such as Li’l Abner, Little Shop of Horrors, and Roberta, which may not easily fit into some of the more obvious trends in the Hollywood musical, reveal new insights into the ways in which we might think about the nature of adaptation. Chapters on how biopics and The Carol Burnett Show might be thought of as types of adaptation expand our understanding of the concept, while

2   introduction other chapters examine how stars and technology have had an impact on the ways in which musical theatre works have been transferred to the silver screen. The book’s aim, then, is not to provide an encyclopaedia of Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations (such volumes already exist) but rather to sharpen the critical discourse on the subject and to share some of the latest scholarship on the topic from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. Each of the book’s six sections deals with a broad issue or topic, starting with an introduction to the nature of adaptation. In the opening chapter, I attempt to outline some of the key trends in the history of the screen musical adaptation. Noting how Hollywood initially seemed like an exciting prospect for some of the leading Broadway writers of the 1920s and ’30s, I examine the liberal nature of most of the early stage-to-screen ­musicals up to On the Town (1949). In those days, Hollywood frequently retained only the title and a song or two from the Broadway shows it bought the film rights to, much to the frustration of the original composers and lyricists. But in the 1950s, a new trend saw an increasing trend from the reasonably faithful Annie Get Your Gun (1950) and Kiss Me Kate (the title lost its comma in the film version of 1953) to the reverential adaptations of Oklahoma! (1955), West Side Story (1962), and My Fair Lady (1964). The mixed results of many of the other screen adaptations of the 1960s, including Paint Your Wagon and Hello, Dolly!, led to the near-collapse of the genre, with only a few successful titles such as Cabaret (1972) and Grease (1978) appearing over the next thirty years. But the release of Chicago in 2002 led to an apparent renaissance that has seen one or more screen ­musicals made each year since, many of which have been movie adaptations of Broadway shows (e.g., Into the Woods, 2014). Following this, Geoffrey Block’s chapter looks at the adaptation of Jerome Kern’s Roberta from its origins as a novel into first a stage musical and then a film. Block notes that the movie Roberta provides an early and overlooked blueprint for how to adapt stage musicals into screen musicals. For example, he observes that the film achieves a manageable length while allowing audiences to hear ‘most of the score of the stage Roberta, either as a song (sometimes sung by a different character) or as generous orchestral background music,’ plus several new songs. Despite also having to accommodate the specific talents of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (thus making it a double star vehicle as well as a Broadway-Hollywood adaptation), the film’s treatment of the music adds up, in Block’s estimation, to ‘something extraordinary and may illustrate a phenomenon that would not be repeated in a film adaptation of a Broadway stage musical until Bob Fosse’s reimagining of Hal Prince’s Cabaret in 1972.’ In contrast, Raymond Knapp’s chapter looks at how several 1960s films approached the challenge of the screen adaptation, focusing in particular on how, thirty years after the stylized cinematic age of Roberta, Hollywood was turning to film’s documentary, realistic quality. In this context, the musical struggled to fit: idealistic stories such as Camelot, Finian’s Rainbow, and Man of La Mancha encountered some of what Knapp identifies as ‘the difficulties in bringing filmic reality into balance with other elements within musicals that were created with the dynamic and standards of stage-based ­stylization in mind.’ Contrasting several incongruities between the real and the fantastic

introduction   3 in Camelot with the use of darker elements (especially through choreography) in films such as West Side Story, Knapp reveals how the 1960s screen musical adaptation addressed the age of ‘getting real’ in Hollywood. Martha Shearer’s ensuing chapter also engages with the ways in which film and ­theatre offer different experiences, contrasting the movie version of On the Town (1949), which is usually praised for its location filming but criticized for its treatment of Bernstein’s score, with that of Bells Are Ringing (1960), which is praised for its retention of Judy Holliday from the Broadway production but criticized for not achieving an imaginative cinematic rendering. Shearer looks at adaptation through three different lenses: ‘how representations of the city are adapted from stage to screen, how those films themselves adapt the city, and how the transformation the city was undergoing required the adaptation of those processes of representation.’ Although location filming provided exciting opportunities for both films, the directors of both movies had to contend with the fact that New York itself was rapidly changing. Shearer reminds us that ‘at a time of New York City’s dramatic transformation, any film or play set there needed to contend with the interrelated questions of how to represent the city and how the experience of the city was changing. . . . Film adaptations of stage musicals used such divergent aesthetic strategies in ways that were thematically productive, as a means of tentatively, fleetingly resolving that problem. The shakiness of their resolutions indicates the genre’s increasingly apparent incompatibility with the new city, a problem more critical for film because of its direct engagement with the city through location shooting, which increased substantially in the 1960s.’ To conclude the first part of the book, Mark Eden Horowitz delves into the production of the movie adaptation of Into the Woods. Reminding us of the importance of gaining the perspectives of the production teams behind the films, Horowitz exploits interviews with composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, director Rob Marshall, screenwriter James Lapine (also the stage librettist and director), orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, and musical director Paul Gemignani, most of whom were also involved in the original Broadway production, to offer insights into the process of putting the ­ultimate fairy tale on the big screen. The interviews reveal surprising aspects of the movie’s production, such as the fact that the songs were recorded three different ways: a full orchestra track for the singers to rehearse to, a studio recording with the singers and orchestra together, and live on-set recordings. The final soundtrack includes a mixture of these three options, providing a solution to the age-old problem of how to make singing in film musicals appear natural. Horowitz also manages to persuade the creators to disclose why some of the songs were cut, plus other intriguing and poignant insights into changes made for the film adaptation. Part II of the book deals with politics: both film musicals that deal directly with p ­ olitics and adaptations that posed political problems for the creators. Jim Lovensheimer opens with a chapter on the curiously overlooked film adaptation of Li’l Abner. Lovensheimer points out that rarely ‘has a Broadway musical been adapted for film that looked [as much] like that original stage version as the 1959 Paramount Pictures version of Li’l Abner. . . . The film’s sets and costumes reproduced the artificiality of the Broadway

4   introduction sets, which in turn recalled Al Capp’s imaginatively grotesque comic strip on which both were based, and the staging of the film’s musical numbers was unapologetically theatrical and presentational.’ Yet Lovensheimer also reveals that by 1959, Capp’s comic strip had ‘moved away from the overt political satire for which it had become famous.’ Thus the film contains a ‘much deeper social satire than the strip was at that time providing.’ Similarly, Andrew Buchman’s chapter, which follows, looks at the 1979 film version of the stage musical Hair (1968), which had been produced in a very different political ­climate. Buchman describes the film as ‘a radical rewrite’ but also regards it as ‘remain[ing] faithful to the central ideas within the 1968 Broadway show,’ even returning ‘key ­elements of the first Off-Broadway production, in 1967.’ Charting the musical’s journey from stage to screen in meticulous detail, Buchman reveals how changing priorities and changing media brought about important shifts in Hair as a work. In particular, the rejection of a draft screenplay by the stage version’s book writers Rado and Ragni in favour of a new text by playwright Michael Weller meant that Hair on the screen was no longer ‘a song cycle, or concept album’ but instead a completely new rendering by ­director Miloš Forman, who claimed to have ‘read’ ‘political or social themes already present’ in the work. In Buchman’s chapter, Hair becomes a new case study in the ‘fidelity vs. freedom’ debate on musical adaptations. Different issues challenged the screen adaptation of Finian’s Rainbow, which was one of the most successful Broadway musicals of the 1940s but took more than twenty years to be released as a film. Using archival research, Danielle Birkett reveals the frustrated early attempts to make Finian’s into an animated film musical, partly blighted by the blacklisting of lyricist E. Y. Harburg in 1951. Ex-Disney animator John Hubley was hired to work on the film and created over 400 storyboard sketches, designs, and character drafts for the movie. By 1954, ten key songs were recorded by leading artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong; indeed, in an attempt to make the project as commercial as possible, Sinatra was assigned a part in nearly all the songs. A new prologue was added and changes were made to the story to soften its vigorous political message, but for a mixture of political and financial reasons the production was abruptly closed down; Finian’s Rainbow would not reach the screen until late the following decade. A slightly unusual set of production circumstances is also revealed by Jonas Westover in his chapter on the movie adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors. The musical was a huge success Off-Broadway and it would have been natural to move it to a larger, Broadway theatre. But David Geffen, who had underwritten the musical’s move from its original, ninety-eight-seat Off-Off-Broadway theatre, the WPA, to the Off-Broadway Orpheum, was now working in the movie industry, developing projects for Warner Bros., thus ­providing lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken with the unusual ­opportunity to develop a film adaptation of Little Shop. As we have seen with other successful movie adaptations, the film reconciles a broad understanding of what made the show work on the stage (by not allowing the landscape of the movie to become too large) with the need to accommodate a different medium (songs were dropped and new ones added). The movie was a huge success, showing how the behind-the-scenes decision to

introduction   5 move to film rather than a Broadway theatre (as happened with the Off-Broadway Hair, for example) sustained Little Shop’s commercial and critical success. Paul Laird also delves into contextual issues in his chapter on the film version of Godspell, focusing on ‘a small religious revival in American popular culture in the early 1970s.’ Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, and Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell appeared on stage within months of one another, and Christianity appeared in other aspects of popular culture at the time, including an image of Jesus on the front of Time magazine in 1971. The producers of Godspell, however, realized that the musical was quickly at the height of its cultural moment and they decided to release it as a movie while the stage production was still in its original run in various cities, thus providing a direct competition between stage and screen versions (normally film adaptations are released after the closing of stage versions). Changes were made to the material for the film version and, like On the Town and Bells Are Ringing, there were challenges related to the location filming in New York City. Reactions to the film were polarized, but it remains an important document of ‘a time when Jesus made more than just a cameo appearance in popular culture.’ Other kinds of identity form a unifying theme of the next part of the book. Julianne Lindberg’s chapter on the liberal movie adaptation of Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey situates the musical in the context of postwar America, when traditional forms of gender and domesticity were being challenged and replaced by ‘something more sexually “progressive.” ’ In the film, Joey is now a singer rather than a dancer, vulnerable rather than a heel, and he gets the girl in the end. Lindberg explores how the film’s promotion of ‘a set of emerging gender archetypes that defy traditional, middle-class, suburban constructions of masculinity and femininity’ is reflected in a new treatment of the score, which is ‘reworked, repurposed, and in some cases eviscerated in order to promote the ethos of the film.’ A good example is the film’s presentation of the song ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’ (an interpolation from Babes in Arms), which, in Sinatra’s version, ‘emphasize[s] that he is offering his body to her.’ ‘Despite the lyrics,’ Lindberg concludes, ‘it is Joey who plays the part of the “tramp.” ’ Sexuality is also a topic of Hannah Robbins’s chapter on the movie Kiss Me Kate, but it is also viewed through the lens of race. Although the film seems on the surface to be a comparatively faithful adaptation of the stage musical, Robbins highlights that it betrays the Broadway material by replacing the two African American characters, Paul and Hattie, with two white characters, Paul and Suzanne. The Broadway Paul’s nondiegetic song ‘Too Darn Hot,’ which explicitly deals with male impotence during hot weather, is reassigned in the movie to Ann Miller, for whom it becomes a diegetic showcase of both her tap-dancing ability and her potent sexuality (she is heavily objectified in the number). Hattie’s ‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show,’ meanwhile, is cut apart from a brief piece of orchestral underscoring. In this, the film is a problematic reflection of its time, as is the manipulation of the direction for the briefly popular 3D technology that was used during the making of the film. Robbins concludes that ‘the charisma of Sidney’s adaptation lies in the conviction of our love for the score, the strength of the central ­performances, and the visual character of the film rather than in its deference to the original Broadway text.’

6   introduction Megan Woller also focuses on sexuality in the much-maligned film adaptation of Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon, the least popular of the team’s three 1960s film adaptations (My Fair Lady and Camelot are the others), but, in Woller’s view, ‘a fascinating adaptation study.’ Situating the movie in the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism of the 1960s, Woller examines the characterization of Elizabeth and her only song, ‘A Million Miles Away behind the Door,’ as well as her polyandrous marriage to Ben and Pardner. Woller also reflects on ‘not only how adaptations change the source but—due to changing social conventions and expectations—why they must.’ In the case of Paint Your Wagon, the film matches Lerner’s depiction of triangular relationships in My Fair Lady and Camelot; deletes Jennifer and Julio, the principal romantic couple of the stage version; omits the Mexican American perspective represented by Julio; adds the new character Pardner; and places Ben Rumson into a polyandrous relationship with Pardner and Elizabeth. Thanks to the shift from the Production Code to the Ratings System in 1968, Paint Your Wagon could portray a more liberal sexual situation than would have been the case over a decade earlier when the stage version appeared, and the screenplay exploits this possibility in a variety of ways, thereby reflecting its time. Adaptation is considered with different meanings in Elizabeth Titrington Craft’s chapter on the musical biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy. George M. Cohan was still alive when the movie about his life was made, and his influence is seen on how it depicts aspects of his life to suit his own account of it. But Craft also explores how the movie is ‘a self-reflexive backstage musical and how its attention to theatrical authenticity served to deflect scrutiny from the lack of veracity in Cohan’s biography.’ Examples include the changing of details in scenes from the stage musicals George Washington, Jr and I’d Rather Be Right to serve the movie’s hagiographic depiction of Cohan’s life, as ­memorably played by James Cagney. But on the whole, Craft reveals, ‘fidelity was the byword in the treatment of Cohan’s musical oeuvre and the staging of musical numbers. James Cagney also took great care to capture Cohan’s renowned, distinctive dancing style; his instructor Johnny Boyle had even performed in Cohan shows and staged dances for Cohan.’ Cliff Eisen also unmasks the mixture of the personal and the public in his chapter on Cole Porter’s list songs on stage and screen. In his private life, Porter liked to make lists of things: Eisen uncovers a list made by Porter of things he required to be provided with ­during the out-of-town tryout of one of his musicals, as well as requests for lists of words and ideas for songs from Can-Can. The list song is a staple of most of Porter’s shows, with key examples including ‘You’re the Top’ and ‘Let’s Do It,’ but their transposition to the screen is not always straightforward. For example, the film adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate moves ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ from a song delivered in front of the curtain to the audience in the theatre (‘literally’ a show stopper) to a song performed in an alleyway ‘to cheer up Fred.’ Eisen proposes that this contextual dramatic change from the general to the specific ‘hints at a fundamental aspect of filmed musicals that is inimical to list songs: their separateness and staticness, their drawing of attention to themselves and to words rather than, primarily, visuals or the narrative of the film, and their potential open-­endedness may all work against the notion of what a film does.’ Most film musicals feature a bankable star name and the next part of the volume examines how stars act as an additional consideration when adapting musicals for the

introduction   7 screen. Todd Decker opens this section with a chapter on the series of operettas made by MGM for Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in the 1930s and early 1940s. Describing the series as ‘a sustained exercise in nostalgia’ and ‘prestige product,’ Decker examines the films’ legacy as ‘nostalgic romantic film operettas, richly realized in visual and ­musical terms and shaped entirely around the two stars’ distinct voices and personas.’ The movies are marked by lavish production values and ‘the recurrent grafting onto these musical films of narrative tropes from more prestige-oriented genres, such as historical epics and period-setting melodramas.’ Regular plot devices, the use of a legitimate singing style, similar character types, approaches to key and tonality in the arrangement of the songs, the preservation of racial whiteness: the films featured consistent elements, a formula that was facilitated by a liberal approach to the source material in all but Bitter Sweet. Susan Smith offers a complementary analysis of Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse in her chapter on the MGM adaptation of Brigadoon. On the stage, this musical was designed for singers, but the film version cast Kelly and Charisse, the latter replacing soprano Kathryn Grayson, who was the original choice for the character of Fiona. This necessitated enormous changes to the Broadway material, including the deletion of some of the most vocally demanding songs (‘There but for You Go I’ and ‘From This Day On’) and the reworking of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ and ‘Almost Like Being in Love’ into solos for Tommy (Kelly) rather than duets for Tommy and Fiona. Kelly’s presence also meant that he served, naturally, as the film’s choreographer, replacing Agnes de Mille, whose choreography had been one of the cornerstones of the Broadway production. Because the leads were now dancers, with additional opportunities for them to dance added to the piece, the role of Harry Beaton, which had revolved around the famous Sword Dance on the stage, was reduced and his number cut. Yet Smith also identifies benefits from the casting changes and argues that it is ‘one of MGM’s most underrated musicals, gaining tension and complexity from some of its perceived flaws.’ Coming many decades later, Alan Parker’s film version of Lloyd Webber and Rice’s Evita (1996) provides a different case study of how a star’s agency can affect a film ­musical’s narrative. Richard J. Allen’s chapter on the movie reveals how changes made to the piece for its movie incarnation result in a change of presentation of the title character, played by Madonna. Whereas the stage show depicts Eva as a figure of ‘moral ambiguity,’ the film turns her into ‘a probably well-meaning, mostly sympathetic, inherently romantic heroine’ with a series of ‘newly created flashbacks, scenes, lyrics, and entire songs crafted for the purpose of gaining insight into and empathy for Eva.’ For example, Eva, rather than Peron’s mistress, now sings ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall,’ one of the hit songs from the score, and the ‘Waltz for Evita and Che’ is staged as a romantic duet, without conveying the cynicism of the lyrics. The addition of ‘You Must Love Me’ adds a new insight into ‘her realization that if Peron can still show her such attention and affection when she is dying and no longer of any use to him, then he must love her after all.’ In these and many other ways, Eva is humanized in a way that is not the case in the Broadway original. My chapter on Barbra Streisand’s first three film musicals considers how her star text affects the adaptation of the three Broadway musicals on which they are based. Although

8   introduction Streisand starred in Funny Girl on the stage, the screen version made significant changes to the musical so that it could be telescoped through her perspective. Most of the other characters’ songs were cut, a ploy that was also used in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever to emphasize Streisand as the star. In both films, as well as in Hello, Dolly!, Streisand was cast opposite men with weak singing voices, empowering her performance musically in each case: a good example of how this works is in the title song of On a Clear Day, where Yves Montand performs the number complete with a simple orchestration and staging, followed by Streisand’s much grander performance. Meanwhile, in Dolly! it was necessary to make changes to the title character in order to draw attention away from the fact that Streisand was much too young for the role; thus she is depicted as a general busybody in ‘Just Leave Everything To Me,’ which replaced ‘I Put My Hand In,’ a song that focuses on Dolly as a matchmaker. Three chapters in the next part of the book offer comparisons of multiple adaptations of a single work, demonstrating how a work can be fragmented into a web of interrelated cultural items, all of which remain related to the original in different ways. William Everett’s chapter explores the fascinating screen journey of The Desert Song (1926), the Romberg-Hammerstein operetta. Warner Bros. released no less than three full-length screen adaptations of the piece, in 1929, 1943, and 1953, and a television version was broadcast in 1955. Everett’s chapter addresses the work’s ‘shifting relationships, in terms of world politics, depictions of Otherness, and the interplay between reality and fantasy.’ The 1929 version was the ‘first full-length screen adaptation of a Broadway musical with all-synchronized sound’ and it ‘recreate[d] the theatrical original in a nascent medium.’ However, the 1943 version (a story of ‘Nazi machinations in North Africa’) was a piece of ‘home-front propaganda’ and the hero (played by Dennis Morgan) was ‘no longer a former French soldier but rather Paul Hudson, an American pianist who rides off to continue his fight for justice rather than remain with his beloved French chanteuse, Margot (Irene Manning).’ Meanwhile, the 1953 Kathryn Grayson-Gordon MacRae version ­combined elements of the stage musical and the 1943 movie to create a ‘Cold War’ ­version of the story for a new political age. Ian Sapiro also identifies intertextual relationships between different screen adaptations of a work in his chapter on Annie. The 1982, 1999, and 2014 films not only offer ­different takes on the material; they also contain connections to one another as part of the influence of Annie as a larger cultural text stemming back to the 1924 comic strip. This gives rise in Sapiro’s chapter to an exploration of ‘the re-inventions of Annie rather than . . . pass[ing] judgement on their respective levels of commercial, cultural or musical merit.’ Sapiro observes how the 1999 Disney version is more influenced by the Broadway original than by the 1982 film, but the 2014 remake combines influences from Broadway and from the 1982 movie, including a chase through Manhattan that closely matches the climactic sequence from 1982; the 1999 version has not had an obvious influence on the 2014 movie, however. In this manner, each film’s reinventions offer ‘just enough of the original narrative and music for a new generation of viewers to recognize and accept it as “their Annie.” ’

introduction   9 There are similar contrasts in the movie versions of Rio Rita that form the focus of John Graziano’s chapter. The first adaptation was released in 1929 and rereleased, due to its enormous popularity, in 1932; though largely faithful to the stage version, it contained numerous changes to the script and score, including the addition of a new number. In 1942, MGM bought the screen rights in order to readapt it into a vehicle for the celebrated comic team of Abbott and Costello. This was a much more liberal adaptation: only two of the original songs made it into the film, with a miscellany of other numbers being added, including a new song by Harburg and Arlen and a performance by Kathryn Grayson of the ‘Shadow Song’ from Meyerbeer’s Dinorah. As with The Desert Song, Nazi characters were added to the film from this era: ‘On its own patriotic terms, the 1942 version served its purpose; audiences would be entertained by the antics of its stars, but also be made aware of the secret foreign intruders who were threatening to overthrow the American way of life.’ The concluding part of the book deals with aspects of production, commerce, and technology. Tim Carter’s opening chapter deals with the problematic movie adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel from a number of perspectives, including the team’s reluctance to allow their musicals to be adapted into movies too quickly and particularly the use of the new CinemaScope 55 widescreen process for making the movie; ‘The R&H brand clearly had a role to play in the emergence of new, competing technologies,’ Carter explains. The mid-1950s saw a war of technologies between the major studios, not only because of rivalry within the industry but also because of the decline in cinema audiences caused by the rise of television. Rodgers and Hammerstein were happy to jump on the bandwagon offered by CinemaScope 55 because it also meant a roadshow release to a limited number of theatres in major cities, with longer playing time, souvenir programmes, higher admission rates, and the more proscenium-like screen proportions. Although the film was not a success, Carter’s chapter explains how technology became a huge player in the development of the screen musical in the 1950s. By contrast, Robynn Stilwell’s chapter examines Hollywood’s great rival, television, in a study of how television adapted the Broadway musical. Rather than looking at conventional stage-to-small-screen adaptations, however, Stilwell focuses on how Carol Burnett’s TV show provided adaptations of another kind, that is, parodies of famous musicals. For example, Stilwell explains how ‘Hold Me, Hamlet’ can be read as a parody/ adaptation of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, even retaining the doubling of the onstage/ backstage musical format of the latter. Meanwhile, The Wiz is ‘the clearest referent’ for ‘Cinderella Gets It On.’ In Stilwell’s opinion, these Burnett shows ‘approach poesis’ because they ‘take the form of the musical, and they often do comment upon it, but they are also genuine expressions of the form and the creators’ deep love and understanding of it.’ Contemporaneous with the launch of The Carol Burnett Show was the roadshow release of the movie adaptation of Half a Sixpence. Amanda McQueen’s chapter reads it as ‘a product of its immediate industrial context’: it was one of a number of BroadwayHollywood adaptations that were intended as part of ‘a risk-reduction strategy’; it was

10   introduction spectacular and relatively faithful to its stage version; and it had ‘an unusual and ­markedly contemporary visual style, akin to that found in the low-budget, youth oriented films of the Hollywood Renaissance.’ Thus, although the movie was no hit, it was not ‘a completely misguided production’: McQueen explains that instead it was intended to address the musical genre’s need to adapt to ‘a new industrial climate in order to prolong its marketability into the 1970s.’ Marketability is also the focus of Dean Adams’s chapter on The Producers and Hairspray, movies based on stage musicals that were originally based on low-budget, largely nonmusical movies. Adams compares the two movie adaptations, noting that in The Producers Susan Stroman ‘restaged her original work for film, and many of the original creative team (including costume designer William Ivey Long) reprised their Broadway visual contributions for film,’ while the producers of Hairspray ‘select[ed] Hollywood professionals instead of the original Broadway creative team to supervise the making of the film.’ In another contrast, the 2005 film of The Producers is 134 minutes long to Hairspray’s 116, and The Producers used its Broadway stars rather than using the latest Hollywood names;2 Hairspray chose movie stars. With these contrasting strategies and their ­relationship to the audience demographics for cinema today, it is unsurprising that Hairspray was a hit on the screen and that The Producers was a flop. Allison Robbins’s chapter concludes the volume with a study of ‘Hollywood’s ­commercial approach to making musicals.’ Focusing on the 1936 movie adaptation of Anything Goes, Robbins looks at its production environment, one in which ‘­interpolations were common, song sales mattered more than wit, and risqué content was frowned upon, a combination that proved deadly for Porter’s score.’ Although some of the latter’s songs were retained, the studio’s music department head Nathaniel Finston ‘assigned Leo Robin, Richard Whiting,’ and several others to write some new numbers for the film. In the context of a Hollywood in which studios capitalized on purchasing publishing companies and then copyrighting new songs by (usually, staff) Hollywood songwriters to in-house publishing firms, it is unsurprising that Robbins concludes that faithful film adaptations are ‘unlikely.’ Hollywood was ‘devoted’ to commercial music while Broadway was ‘divorced from it’; and fidelity to ‘Broadway’s canonized songwriters’ ran contrary to ‘the commercial goals of Hollywood’s tunesmiths.’ Such tensions run throughout this book and help to explain the culture behind the unsettling but fascinating phenomenon of the stage-to-screen musical adaptation.

Notes 1. Here, I invoke the title of Geoffrey Block’s seminal survey of the Broadway musical. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 2. Matthew Broderick had appeared in a number of Hollywood films but his stage profile was bigger than his movie profile at this point.

pa rt I

AN I N T RODUC T ION TO T H E STAGETO -S C R E E N A DA P TAT ION

chapter 1

‘A n d I’l l Si ng Once Mor e’ A Historical Overview of the Broadway Musical on the Silver Screen Dominic M c hugh

The Stage-to-Screen Musical Up to On the Town (1949) When sound came to Hollywood in the late 1920s, the Broadway musical was a firmly established genre. Composers and lyricists such as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Vincent Youmans, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II had created a community of writers who were exploiting and expanding the possibilities of American musical comedy. Works such as the Music Box Revues (Berlin, 1921–24), Lady, Be Good! (the Gershwins, 1924), Dearest Enemy (Rodgers and Hart, 1925), A Connecticut Yankee (Rodgers and Hart, 1927), No, No, Nanette (Youmans, 1925), Oh, Kay! (the Gershwins, 1926), and especially Show Boat (Kern and Hammerstein, 1927) confirmed the genre as a varied and flexible site of creativity and collective and personal expression.1 The creativity shown by the writers and production teams behind the Hollywood musical in the first few years of sound was at least equally as remarkable. The rise in sophistication and fluency from The Jazz Singer (1927)2 to Love Me Tonight (1932), to take just two of the important films of that period, was exponential: the former was a mostly silent film with a few songs where Al Jolson lip-synchs to playback, plus one short scene of dialogue with sound; the latter was a fully fledged Rodgers and Hart film musical with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald performing songs such as ‘Mimi,’ ‘Lover,’ and ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ The last song features a truly cinematic musical sequence where the melody passes from character to character, starting with Chevalier singing in his shop, going on to be picked up by a man in a taxi, a troop of soldiers, and

14   musical theatre screen adaptations gypsies in a wood, and ending with MacDonald on her balcony. The scale and design of the number shows a liberation from the restrictions of the musical stage, and it is no wonder that many of the leading Broadway composers and lyricists of the 1920s went to try their luck in Hollywood. Berlin was especially successful, writing three of the nine Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers RKO pictures—Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Carefree (1938)—and Kern contributed the hit Swing Time (1936) as well as an adaptation of Roberta (1935) with some new songs (see Chapter 2 of this volume for a more detailed discussion of this movie).3 However, it turned out that Berlin was unusual in enjoying equal success in Broadway and Hollywood. Love Me Tonight was Rodgers and Hart’s only noteworthy achievement on the West Coast; their return to New York brought about a remarkable series of stage musicals post-Hollywood (including On Your Toes, Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse, and Pal Joey). Cole Porter’s only entry in the Astaire-Rogers canon, The Gay Divorcee, was a loose adaptation of his stage musical Gay Divorce, and his score was axed, apart from the hit ‘Night and Day.’ Although he did go on to write some successful film musicals later in the decade, arguably none had the quality of his stage output of the period, which included The New Yorkers (1930), Nymph Errant (1933), and Anything Goes (1934). The 1936 screen adaptation of Anything Goes again showed a disregard for his Broadway score, and only four of his songs were retained, though Geoffrey Block has shown that it did keep the original plot and even ‘a considerable portion of the original dialogue.’4 Kern was more fortunate with The Cat and the Fiddle (1934) and in particular the excellent 1936 screen adaptation of Show Boat, where he and Hammerstein were given the scope to reframe the material imaginatively for a new medium. The results are wholly successful. Indeed, Kern scholar Stephen Banfield concludes: ‘Shortened to less than two hours, the score, including three new songs (plus two more that were cut and are lost), and the new, tighter, closer-to-the-novel screenplay provided by Hammerstein together offer the most satisfying, balanced, and compelling version of Show Boat as drama achieved up to the present day. In almost every way it is superior to the stage version and its variants.’5 But, in general, the musical comedy did not fare well in screen adaptations in the early years. Arguably, because the form had not yet achieved much of a ‘work identity’ on the stage—a sense of a substantial, revivable text that could rewardingly be performed again—the idea of making such musicals ‘permanent’ in the form of a film document went against the grain of the transience of the stage versions. No wonder Show Boat was the only Broadway musical of the period to receive an outstanding screen adaptation at this point: practically all other musical comedies from that time have been significantly rewritten if they have ever been commercially revived, and this is anticipated in the liberal 1930 and 1940 adaptations of No, No, Nanette and the 1936 Anything Goes (the first and last of these have new songs by other writers). The other strand of stage-to-screen musical films in this period derived from the operetta genre. The popularity of singers such as Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy (a frequent pairing) came with a series of adaptations of the popular operettas (or operetta-­ish musical comedies) of the previous two decades, including The Cat

the broadway musical on the silver screen   15 and the Fiddle (1934), The Merry Widow (1934), Naughty Marietta (1935), Rose-Marie (1936), Maytime (1937), The Firefly (1937), Sweethearts (1938), New Moon (1940), and Bitter Sweet (1940). A number of these diverged significantly from the originals, often ditching most of the songs and/or the plots, but there was arguably a stronger tradition of creating film adaptations of operetta in this period than of other popular musical genres. It is especially striking that the Rodgers and Hart musicals fared so badly on screen, given their commercial success on the stage as well as some degree of durability. The 1939 film of On Your Toes is a case in point: all the singing is jettisoned and only the ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue Ballet’ remains from the Broadway version. Bosley Crowther’s review of Universal’s screen adaptation of The Boys from Syracuse (1940) summarizes the lack of imagination in the treatment of Rodgers and Hart’s score: Disappointing, too, is the casual fashion in which the producers have tossed away the lively musical score which Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote for the ­original. In passing, as it were, they have dropped in here and there a chorus or so from “Sing for Your Supper,” “Falling in Love With Love,” “He and She” and a bit more from “This Can't Be Love.” They have also introduced “Who Are You?” and “The Greeks Have No Word for It”—tuneful numbers, but modestly presented. More music and gay cavorting would have helped a lot.6

Similarly, only two of Rodgers and Hart’s songs from Babes in Arms (the title song and ‘Where or When’) are sung in the 1939 Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney film of the same name. The Gershwins were likewise badly represented by the film adaptations of Lady, Be Good! (with Eleanor Powell, 1941) and Strike Up the Band (another Garland-Rooney film, 1940), in which little other than the title songs were carried over from the stage musicals. Nor was a single song from Cole Porter’s Mexican Hayride used in the AbbottCostello film of the same name (1948), and only four were retained from his stage score for the film Panama Hattie (1942). Indeed, the 1940s was arguably an even weaker decade for the stage-to-screen Broadway adaptation. That may partly be because some of the major musicals of the 1930s never made it to the silver screen: the Gershwins’ long-running and Pulitzer Prize–winning Of Thee I Sing (1931), for example, did not enjoy the permanence of a film adaptation. Equally, the earlier problems with very loose adaptations continued. Kurt Weill was a new ‘victim’ of the process, for instance: while Ginger Rogers’ ­performance in the movie version of Lady in the Dark (1944) has some merit, most of the score is cut (including, most significantly, ‘My Ship,’ as Block notes).7 Scarcely better was the film version of One Touch of Venus (1948), which (unlike Lady) did not interpolate music by other composers but still does little to exploit Weill’s richly inventive songs. Vernon Duke’s score for Cabin in the Sky was similarly badly represented by Vincente Minnelli’s movie adaptation for MGM in 1943; for example, Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg were commissioned to add a new song, ‘Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe.’8 The best films of the period continued to be screen originals such as The Wizard of Oz (1939),9 Meet Me in St Louis (1944), and Easter Parade (1948). But in 1949, producer Arthur

16   musical theatre screen adaptations Freed managed to oversee the creation of the first satisfying Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptation in colour: On the Town (1949). While fans of the Broadway show will lament the disappearance of most of Leonard Bernstein’s stylish Broadway score, the film is a landmark for its cinematic flair and its freedom from ‘staginess.’ By using extensive location filming, Gene Kelly was able to be shown truly going ‘on the town’ with his costars Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin; yet the retention of a stylized dance element (led by Vera-Ellen) meant the film kept something of the stage musical’s artiness. There was no compensation for the deletion of Bernstein’s exquisite ballad ‘Some Other Time’ and one might query the addition of numbers such as ‘Prehistoric Man’ and the commercial ‘You’re Awful,’ but the opening-out of the stage material into a breathtaking cityscape was a significant achievement of which Freed was proud. Indeed, rather than being casual about the changes that had been made, he was aware that they were bold and necessary: “Why adaptation?” somebody invariably asks. “I thought the play was perfect. Why did you change it all around in the movie?” Undoubtedly the producer saw the stage show himself, and the chances are he also thought it was practically perfect—as a play. But if he has learned anything at all about his own business, he knows that a play and a motion picture are two separate and widely different things. A movie is a story told by a camera, an entertainment medium much more realistic than those from which it often borrows its basic material. It’s harder work and takes a little more courage to reject an obvious, literal translation—and not to have too much reverence for the story’s original form—although the producer must also be careful that he doesn’t “improve” it into a failure.10

After On the Town: The Age of the Broadway-Hollywood Adaptation Arthur Freed knew that Broadway had much to offer the Hollywood musical in terms of artistic progress, and it is no coincidence that many of the key figures in his unit, including Gene Kelly, Vincente Minnelli, Alan Jay Lerner, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green, started out in New York. Nor is it surprising that Freed, and later other producers at MGM, started to buy up the screen rights to successful Broadway musicals of the day: Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1950), Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1953), Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon (1954), and Wright and Forrest’s Kismet (1955) as well as new adaptations of Kern’s Show Boat (1951) and Roberta (retitled Lovely to Look At, 1953) showed a definite shift in artistic direction. Freed was also one of the key producers (though by no means the only one) of what we would today term ‘juke-box musicals’ using the back catalogues of successful songwriters. This had a hint of adaptation too, since it meant taking material written for one purpose and changing it to work in a new context: Singin’

the broadway musical on the silver screen   17 in the Rain (1952, Freed and Brown), An American in Paris (1951, Gershwin), The Band Wagon (1953, Dietz and Schwartz), and Easter Parade (1948, Berlin) are some of the most important examples. Biopics of Broadway composers’ and lyricists’ lives also afforded the opportunity for elements of adaptation, such as the Show Boat sequence in the Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By (1946). But what started to change in the 1950s, and would continue through the 1960s, was a greater (if by no means total) sense of fidelity to the stage versions, at least to preserve a sense of what the Broadway originals were about. Perhaps now that stage musicals had started to evolve more of a work identity, and musicals had started to run longer and tour further (making them more culturally present even before the movie versions), there was more of a motivation to adapt them more thoughtfully. Rodgers and Hammerstein, for example, decided to oversee the movie adaptation of Oklahoma! (1955) themselves, extending the kind of authorial control they had enjoyed as publishers and later producers of their own work on the stage. Thus, most of the script, score, and even the ballet made it to the screen adaptation, allowing for some cinematic opening-out by the director, Fred Zinnemann (the scene where the horses bolt has an almost Hitchcockian flair). Rodgers and Hammerstein also produced the screen South Pacific (1958) but left Fox to produce Carousel (1956), The King and I (1956), and The Sound of Music (1965) without the same sort of intervention. Nevertheless, this group of films provides a reasonably faithful series of adaptations of Broadway musicals that seemed to beg to be crystallized into a more permanent form than was possible in the transient stage musical. That sense of documenting the Broadway show can also be seen in the similarly (relatively) faithful pairs of screen adaptations of Irving Berlin’s and Adler and Ross’s hit musicals of the period. Ethel Merman was not allowed to repeat her stage success in the screen Annie Get Your Gun (Betty Hutton took her place) but she did make a lively appearance in the surprisingly engaging 1953 adaptation of Call Me Madam. Both films preserved most of the stage scores and left the plots untampered with. Similarly reverential were the Warner Bros. adaptations of The Pajama Game (1957) and Damn Yankees (1958),11 the former a star vehicle for the studio’s top female singing actress, Doris Day. Apart from Day, and Tab Hunter replacing Stephen Douglass in Damn Yankees, the original Broadway principals were invited to repeat their stage portrayals in the movie versions, and the shows’ Broadway director George Abbott was hired to helm both pictures alongside Stanley Donen (who codirected many of Gene Kelly’s major musicals). By this point, a new culture of adaptation had emerged, and the liberal films of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Pal Joey (1957) were exceptions rather than the rule. In many ways, the Samuel Goldwyn-Joseph Mankiewicz movie Guys and Dolls (1955) was to set the tone for a number of the stage-to-screen adaptations of the following decade and a half. Much remains from the Broadway production, including most of the score (with a few unfortunate changes),12 Vivian Blaine as Miss Adelaide, designer Oliver Smith, and choreographer Michael Kidd. But the film’s budget seems to have swamped the charm and character out of much of the film—for example, through the

18   musical theatre screen adaptations hiring of two Hollywood actors of limited vocal ability, Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons, who could not do Frank Loesser’s songs full justice. It had long been common for actors in film musicals to be dubbed if they could not sing well, but the idea of allowing average or even poor singers to perform their own vocals was a peculiar development. The seeds were sown for later examples of the same phenomenon, including Vanessa Redgrave’s labored performance in Camelot (1967), Sophia Loren’s problematic casting as Aldonza in Man of La Mancha (1972), Audrey Hepburn’s weak rendition of ‘How Long Has This Been Going On?’ in Funny Face (1957), and Omar Sharif ’s strained vocals in Funny Girl (1968). To some degree, of course, there had been a parallel trend of casting actors of limited singing ability in stage musicals too, most obviously Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady, 1956), Yul Brynner (The King and I, 1951), Richard Burton (Camelot, 1960), and later Katharine Hepburn (Coco, 1969) and Lauren Bacall (Applause, 1970), but at least these scores were written to accommodate their abilities. It went against the grain to cast a nonsinger such as Redgrave in a role written for a legitimate soprano such as Julie Andrews. Also ­important to this context is the fact that all three of the big Broadway-Hollywood adaptations of the 1960s contained significant dubbing because of the casting of a nonsinging star. In the case of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964), it became controversial news when her singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon;13 Nixon also dubbed Natalie Wood in the movie version of West Side Story (1961) and Bill Lee dubbed Christopher Plummer’s performance in The Sound of Music (1965). Such a disconnect between what we hear and what we see in film musicals is a problem of the genre, regardless of whether they are adaptations of stage productions or not; after all, even adept singers can be weak at lip-synching to their own prerecordings (most notably Barbra Streisand). But in cases where the stage roles are designed to showcase vocal ability, such as Eliza, Guenevere, or Maria (West Side), it undermines the experience for the audience when the movie version presents an under-par performance. Perhaps that is why a film such as The Sound of Music seems more satisfying, given Andrews’s particularly strong singing at that point in her career; the same goes for Barbra Streisand’s 1960s musical films. But in general, that decade brought about the downfall of the screen musical because studios no longer seemed to know how to make musicals well, partly as a result of no longer having the production staff on permanent contract, following the collapse of the studio system in the 1950s. The culture that allowed films such as An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958) to be made with such finesse had passed. In its place, producers now either made stage-to-screen adaptations that used Broadway stars in their original roles (e.g., Dick Van Dyke in Bye Bye Birdie, Robert Preston in The Music Man, and Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing) but which seem insufficiently cinematic to be truly great films, or lost a sense of what made the stage originals successful (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Finian’s Rainbow, Sweet Charity, Man of La Mancha, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Paint Your Wagon).

the broadway musical on the silver screen   19

Decline: The 1970 s to the 1990 s Just as The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story had been vastly more successful than the other screen adaptations of the 1960s, Cabaret and Grease fared significantly better than the other musical films of the 1970s. Of note, the screen versions of both musicals do not faithfully represent the Broadway incarnations, especially so far as the scores go. Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972) is especially different from the stage Cabaret (1966), as Ethan Mordden notes: Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972) also defied the tablets, reconstructing the show’s ­storyline to accord with its sources, Christopher Isherwood’s so-called Berlin stories . . . and John Van Druten’s play drawn from them, I Am a Camera (1951). The new narration, bringing in characters that weren’t in the stage musical, might have called for new numbers, but in fact Fosse banned all character songs, limiting the musical program to “real life” performance spots—the cabaret acts, 78s heard on a gramophone, and a group singalong, in an outdoor café, of a Nazi anthem. . . .  Fosse’s Cabaret was almost a musical by other means. As so often . . . it was more a movie than a movie musical, relying heavily on cinematic techniques such as crosscutting. On stage, Cabaret varied story scenes with the commentative cabaret numbers, first one and then the other. The Hollywood Cabaret interjects the scenes into the numbers and vice versa, letting the action flow along in a single molecule, like a pane of glass.14

By retaining Joel Grey from the Broadway production and adding a major singing star in Liza Minnelli to play Sally, Fosse guaranteed that the film would still feel like a musical. Yet, as Mordden implies, he also focused on making a good film rather than a faithful adaptation, and by making all the songs diegetic he cleverly ensured that the presence of song would not feel awkward at a time when audiences were ambivalent about the genre. Randal Kleiser’s movie Grease, on the other hand, flagrantly announces that it is a musical throughout, but gets away with it because of the genre of the music concerned. In fact, song becomes even more important and present in the screen version, partly because of the casting of major talents Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta, and partly because of the addition of new material (four new songs). For ­example, Barry Gibb (of the Bee Gees) was commissioned to write a new title song, which is heard over the opening titles in a recording by Frankie Valli. This number quite inappropriately introduces the language of disco into a film about the 1950s, but it also establishes the fabric of the movie as being centred around different genres of popular music, including the most contemporary ones, thus reaching out to its audience more assertively. The use of the songs in the film as a whole is also varied in oldschool Hollywood style: some are diegetic and some are traditional book numbers and staged as such (e.g., ‘Sandra Dee’). That is not, however, to take away from Kleiser’s

20   musical theatre screen adaptations achievement: the cutting and scope of a number such as ‘Summer Nights’ shows a flair at staging a conventional book number with the scale of the cinema rather than being tied down by the song’s theatrical roots. Grease earned nearly $9 million at the box office in its opening weekend15 and has taken something in the region of $190 million in total, ranking second only to the Beauty and the Beast live film (i.e., the 2017 remake of the cartoon) in the box office history of film musicals since 1974.16 It was nominated for only one Academy Award (for the new song ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’) and did not win either that or any of the Golden Globes for which it was nominated. Cabaret, on the other hand, was an extraordinary critical success, earning eight Academy Awards, even if it earned only a more modest (if still impressive) $40 million or so over time.17 But these movies were unusual in a new post-1970 era when the musical was simply not a major Hollywood genre any more. Audiences wanted Star Wars (1977), not The Little Prince (1974, Lerner and Loewe’s latecareer movie musical flop). Even the faithful, successful screen adaptation of the failsafe Fiddler on the Roof (directed by Norman Jewison in 1971) seems a little tired and drawn-out in comparison to its dynamic stage precedent. But at least Fiddler does not look particularly dated as a movie. Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Mame (1974), A Little Night Music (1977), The Wiz (1978), Annie (1982), and A Chorus Line (1985) all suffer in different ways from technological and stylistic weaknesses as well as issues with the performers. Mame, for ­example, was dogged by limp direction and poor casting: Lucille Ball was unable to do any justice at all to the songs that Angela Lansbury had sung to such triumph in the Broadway production, and neither Gene Saks (director) nor Onna White (choreography) managed to transcend the two-dimensional feel of a stage musical (most notably in the flat, unimaginative staging of the title song).18 In A Little Night Music, only the ‘Glamorous Life’ and ‘Weekend in the Country’ sequences truly do justice to the cinematic medium; star casting in The Wiz (Michael Jackson, Diana Ross) did not help to show off the work in a remotely flattering light; an inappropriate choice of director (Richard Attenborough) turned what was then the most successful Broadway musical of all time, A Chorus Line, into a Hollywood flop; and so on. There are several reasons the musical ceased to be a mainstream genre for Hollywood. Because filmmaking had become so expensive and there were no opportunities for ­writers simply to be on contract and enjoy the flexibility of being able to create what they wanted, the conditions for writing screen originals had completely disappeared. There could be no Singin’ in the Rain or Gigi for the 1980s because the system that had nurtured the creation of those films had long gone. At the same time, and more relevantly to this chapter, the nature of the Broadway musical had changed considerably. Most of the Golden Age classics had long been adapted into films or were no longer viable as such, and the newer shows posed various challenges. The critical and commercial response to A Little Night Music must have cast some doubt on the viability of Sondheim’s musicals on the screen: although the stage productions of Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods were preserved on film for the small screen, there were no movie adaptations of Sondheim’s musicals between Night Music (1977) and Sweeney

the broadway musical on the silver screen   21 Todd (2007) (excluding the TV version of Gypsy, 1993). That America’s most important Broadway songwriter’s works were not made into films, presumably because they were not seen as commercially viable or straightforward to make, helps to explain why there were so few adaptations in the 1980s and ’90s. There were problems with other leading writers’ works, too. Kleban and Hamlisch wrote nothing together after A Chorus Line, whose film version was a flop, so there was nothing more to come from them. Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, whose Little Shop of Horrors was turned into a relatively respectable film in 1986, went to work for Disney, producing animated musicals such as Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, which therefore put them out of the Broadway arena. The Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh blockbusters, such as Evita, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables, and Miss Saigon, tended to run such a long time and then tour nationally and internationally, that it took years before film versions became commercially desirable (bearing in mind that film adaptations tend to compete with stage versions). Thus Evita, which opened on Broadway in 1979 following its London production, became a film only in 1996, with Phantom and Les Misérables following in the new millennium. Another problem of these Mackintosh shows is that they focused on spectacle on stage—for example, in the form of the helicopter scene in Miss Saigon. The transfer to film—a more realistic medium—therefore requires even more scale, and therefore a higher cost. On the other hand, Cats and Starlight Express are highly theatrical concept musicals without traditional narratives, which means they would require a high level of ingenuity to achieve success on the big screen. The varied forms of nostalgia represented by other successful Broadway musicals of the 1970–99 period such as Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), La Cage aux Folles (1983), Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989), The Will Rogers Follies (1991), and Crazy for You (1992), to name but five, closed down another potential avenue for stage-to-screen musicals: this kind of stagey, ‘fondly looking back’ musical lacks obvious cinematic promise and is mostly aimed at audiences who are already passionate about musicals rather than a general film-going audience. Finally, the arrival of Disney on Broadway in the 1990s continued a trend arguably established by 42nd Street (1980), whereby Hollywood would now supply Broadway with material rather than the other way around.

Renaissance in the New Millennium Although Evita enjoyed significant success, including the Academy Award for Best Song (‘You Must Love Me’), it did nothing to solve the obstacles to a resumption of the m ­ usical film genre outlined above. But the new millennium saw the release of two movies that seemed to turn things around. First, in 2001 came Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, a highly self-reflexive, postmodern musical whose only obvious forebear (if one existed) was Singin’ in the Rain. Like the latter, Moulin Rouge! provided a critique of the genre

22   musical theatre screen adaptations while also embracing and celebrating it. A patchwork score of new and old songs, hyper-stylized visuals and staging, anachronism, obvious references to classic musicals (e.g., The Sound of Music): Luhrmann used these and many other techniques to achieve an unusual, if not wholly persuasive, movie musical for the new century. Interestingly, he also repeated something that was noted above in relation to Guys and Dolls: casting leading actors with (at best) average singing voices, in this case Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor. The ability to act mattered more than the singing; meanwhile, the singing was recorded live on set in an attempt to address the age-old issues of lip-synching in film musicals. Moulin Rouge! is obviously sui generis and the preponderance of contemporary ­popular music in the soundtrack meant that it had little to do with Broadway. Yet its worldwide success did mean that the film musical had proven recent commercial potential, thus contributing towards the dawn of a new era when most years since 2001 have seen the release of at least one musical on film. The other transformational release was Rob Marshall’s screen adaptation of Kander and Ebb’s Chicago (2002), which became the first musical to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards since Oliver! in 1968. On the stage, Chicago has had an unusual history: the original Broadway production (1975) was only solidly (not overwhelmingly) successful at 936 performances, but the popularity of a brief staging by City Center’s Encores! in 1996 led to a full Broadway revival later the same year and it has run continuously since then (more than twenty-one years as of this writing), making it the longest-running American musical in history. No wonder Zadan/Meron Productions decided to pursue a movie version. It is intriguing that a Broadway figure, Rob Marshall, was chosen to direct the film, because so many major movie musicals during the past half-century have been directed by film directors, Hollywood people (e.g., Robert Wise). Yet Marshall’s obvious understanding of Bob Fosse’s original concept for the show, where the story is told through a series of vaudeville numbers that were based on real-life vaudeville acts from the 1920s (the decade of the story’s setting), is a large reason the film worked. Marshall also follows Fosse’s screen treatment of Cabaret in keeping most of the musical numbers in either a real or imaginary (i.e., in Roxie’s head) theatrical space, rather than having characters breaking into song in too many places without reason. However, Marshall still cast three leads from the world of film rather than theatre, just as Luhrmann had done a year ­earlier: Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere. (Zeta-Jones and Gere had both appeared in musicals on the stage but only for a brief period much earlier in their career, and neither could reasonably be described as being a strong singer.) This approach to casting has been at the heart of most of the successful BroadwayHollywood adaptations since Chicago. For example, Tim Burton’s screen adaptation of Sweeney Todd (2007), cast Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, and Timothy Spall in some of the leading roles, leaving Sondheim’s most vocally operatic Broadway score to a group of actors without much singing experience or ability. For Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Les Misérables (2012), Hollywood actors with some musical theatre experience (Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway) were cast alongside several with no obvious vocal ability (Russell Crowe, Eddie Redmayne, Amanda Seyfried): a daring

the broadway musical on the silver screen   23 move for a sung-through musical that mostly requires highly trained voices on the stage. The return of John Travolta (of Grease) and Michelle Pfeiffer (Grease 2) to a movie ­musical with the screen Hairspray (2007), after many years of nonsinging roles, was obviously as much to do with their status in Hollywood as their ability to sing. More recently, Marshall’s latest film of a Broadway musical, Into the Woods (2014), features a cast primarily made up of singing actors rather than strong singers, including Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, Chris Pine, and Johnny Depp. Of this last group of films, the most convincing is arguably Into the Woods, where Marshall came back after his disappointing screen adaptation of Nine (2009) to liberate the stage version of Sondheim’s 1987 show without losing its essence. Two numbers in particular prove that he has a strong grasp of how the film musical works. First, the lengthy opening number (‘Prologue: Into the Woods’) cuts fluently between the different characters to introduce their dilemmas. The camera tells their stories alternately before physically showing them going ‘into the woods’ to achieve catharsis. Over eighty years after a song (and the soundtrack) unified different characters in different places in Love Me Tonight’s ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ (which, incidentally, also ends in a pastoral setting), Marshall was still using the same technique to tell a story through song in Into the Woods. Mordden has noted how this sequence goes beyond what could be achieved on the stage in this number, where the action seems rather static.19 The film’s other particularly strong moment is ‘Your Fault,’ when the surviving characters confront and blame each other about their dangerous situation now the Giant is seeking retribution. Rather than simply pointing the camera at the scene and allowing the actors to sing, Marshall creates a much more claustrophobic effect by using the camera in a series of tighter close-ups, almost pinning them down as they are each blamed for the disruption. To have dialogue in song is highly operatic, which is extremely challenging to make convincing on film. Marshall’s solution is boldly cinematic: he treats the song as a dialogue scene rather than a performance. This is even more effective when the number segues into the Witch’s hyper-operatic ‘Last Midnight,’ which really is a ­performance: the chaotic, intense interaction of ‘Your Fault’ gives way to display in ‘Last Midnight.’ It is ironic that Susan Stroman’s movie of The Producers, which she had directed on Broadway, almost completely fails to achieve a cinematic aesthetic because the stage musical was, of course, originally based on Mel Brooks’s movie of the same name. Brooks was behind the stage version too, but with the exception of the opened-out ‘We Can Do It,’ featuring a sequence in Central Park, the film belongs to the same kind of approach as The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees: it feels like the Broadway production has mostly been put on the screen, complete with its original stage stars (Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick), plus a couple of token Hollywood names (Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell) for commercial reasons. Rather like A Chorus Line, The Producers was a smash on the stage and a commercial flop on film. Of course, commercial success does not necessarily reflect quality: the remake of Annie (2014) is far from impressive but it thrived at the box office, partly thanks to its pandering to a family audience over the holiday season. Joel Schumacher’s film version

24   musical theatre screen adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera (2004) lacks the impact of the stage production and does not boast stars of any gravitas (the rumoured casting of Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones came to nothing; they were replaced by Gerard Butler and Emmy Rossum), but it was a smash success in terms of ticket sales. Dreamgirls (2006) was another commercial hit,20 despite transferring little drama to the screen: much of the film comes across like a series of static music videos without narrative or character development. At the other end of the spectrum, Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys movie is so determined to achieve a cinematic feel that it is filmed in a dark, almost noirish style with little ­importance given to staging the songs excitingly; it was perhaps unfairly criticized in the press but it only truly establishes a sense of genre in the closing sequence (which reads like an homage to the finale of the film version of The Music Man). Much more conventional is the film version of The Last Five Years, which even has a Broadway performer (Jeremy Jordan) rather than a Hollywood name in one of the only two roles. The movie trips up a little by fighting against part of the concept of the stage show: on the stage, the two actors appear in the same scene, and interact, only once, but the film version has both physically present at various points throughout (yet not singing). This undermines part of the postmodernity of the piece (i.e., the soliloquy style of the songs), even though the film as a whole is respectful.21

Conclusion This survey has deliberately avoided discussion of the television musical, and ­specifically television adaptations of Broadway musicals, because it is a huge topic that to some extent runs in parallel to the Hollywood adaptation. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that in the two periods when Hollywood was at its most engaged with the Broadway musical, television versions of stage shows were also common. First, the 1950s and 1960s saw some truly excellent, if usually truncated, versions of Broadway classics, including a TV Bloomer Girl (1956) that reproduced Agnes de Mille’s original Broadway choreography; two versions of Kiss Me, Kate (1958 and 1964), the first with original Broadway stars Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, and Lisa Kirk, the second with Morison and Howard Keel (star of the 1953 MGM screen version); a series involving Broadway favourite Robert Goulet in adaptations of Brigadoon (1966), Carousel (1967), and, again, Kiss Me, Kate (1968); a 1954 Anything Goes with original Broadway star Ethel Merman and movie star Frank Sinatra; TV adaptations of Annie Get Your Gun featuring its original Broadway (Ethel Merman, 1967) and National Tour stars (Mary Martin, 1957); two TV versions of Once upon a Mattress (1964 and 1972) featuring Carol Burnett in her Broadway role; valuable adaptations of Rodgers and Hart’s Dearest Enemy (1955) and A Connecticut Yankee (1955); and a Kismet (1967) with José Ferrer. The concept fizzled out in the 1970s, with only occasional interruptions such as Lauren Bacall’s appearance in Applause (1973), in which she had starred on Broadway, and a charming BBC adaptation of She Loves Me (1978). In the ensuing years, there were attempts to revive

the broadway musical on the silver screen   25 the TV Broadway adaptation, such as Bette Midler’s appearance in Gypsy (1993), Kristin Chenoweth and Matthew Broderick in The Music Man (2003), new versions of Bye Bye Birdie (1995) and Annie (1999), and a third version of Once upon a Mattress (2005, this time with Burnett in the role of the Queen), but only Gypsy achieved much quality. More recently, however, the television stage-to-screen adaptation has become something of a cultural event once more. Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, who were behind the movie Chicago, decided to experiment with the idea in 2013 with a live TV version of The Sound of Music starring country singer Carrie Underwood, who had won American Idol in 2005. Over 38 million viewers watched at least a portion of the broadcast, which achieved the largest nonsports audience since the finale of Frasier in 2004.22 Regardless of the mixed critical reception, Zadan and Meron have gone on to produce an annual musical for NBC, with titles including Peter Pan (2014, 9.21 million viewers), The Wiz23 (2015, 11.5 million viewers), Hairspray (2016, 9.05 million viewers), and Jesus Christ Superstar (2018, 9.4 million viewers).24 Fox, NBC’s rival, also produced Grease: Live25 in 2016, which was watched by 12.18 million viewers, and A Christmas Story Live! in December 2017, which in the words of TheWrap.com ‘delivered a lump of coal to Fox,’ with only 4.52 million viewers.26 A few blips aside, TV shows such as Glee (2009–15) and Smash (2012–13) and movies such as Enchanted (2007) and especially La La Land (2017) prove that the musical is once more a significant genre on the screen, and stage-to-screen adaptations are at the heart of its future. Disney, for example, has instigated a series of screen adaptations of its stage productions, with plans to follow up the recent Beauty and the Beast (2017) with Aladdin (2019), The Lion King (2019), and The Little Mermaid;27 all of these originated as animated films, of course, thus mirroring the journey of The Producers from screen to stage and back again. Playbill.com also lists 13, American Idiot, Bare, Beautiful, Cats, Come from Away, Finding Neverland, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy, In the Heights, Jekyll & Hyde, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Little Shop of Horrors, Lysistrata Jones, Matilda, Miss Saigon, Oliver!, Pippin, South Pacific, Spring Awakening, Sunset Boulevard, West Side Story, and Wicked as being in development for screen treatments28—an extraordinarily long list for a genre that many presumed dead at one point, even if it seems likely that many of them will never make it to the screen. As Ethan Mordden puts it, ‘musicals are back,’ and as long as a hit such as Into the Woods or Chicago comes along every couple of years, the Broadway musical will sing on the screen once more.

Notes Sincere thanks to Geoffrey Block and my parents, Gilly and Larry McHugh, for their comments on this chapter. 1. Amongst the extensive research on these early Broadway composers, important volumes include Stephen Banfield, Jerome Kern (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Jeffrey Magee, Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Dominic Symonds’ We’ll Have Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Larry Starr, Gershwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

26   musical theatre screen adaptations 2. Daniel Goldmark has written an important article on The Jazz Singer. See Goldmark, ‘Adapting The Jazz Singer from Short Story to Screen: A Musical Profile,’ Journal of the American Musicological Society 70, no. 3 (Fall 2017). 3. Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (New York: Vintage Books, 1972) remains a useful overview of the team’s output. For a deeper assessment of Top Hat based on archival research, see Peter William Evans, Top Hat (London: Wiley, 2010). 4. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 165. 5. Stephen Banfield, Jerome Kern (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 254–255. 6. Bosley Crowther, ‘The Screen: “The Boys from Syracuse,” A Musical Spoof of Ancient Greece and Things, at the Paramount,’ New York Times, 1 August 1940, http://www. nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9B06EFDF133EE432A25752C0A96E9C946193D6CF, accessed 12 March 2018. 7. Block, Enchanted Evenings, 186. 8. Hugh Fordin addresses the making of Cabin in the Sky in MGM’s Greatest Musicals (New York: Da Capo, 1996). 9. For a range of responses to the movie, see the essays in Danielle Birkett and Dominic McHugh, Adapting The Wizard of Oz: Musical Versions from Baum to MGM and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 10. Hugh Fordin, MGM’s Greatest Musicals (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 270. 11. This movie also affords the opportunity to see original star Gwen Verdon and her choreographer husband, the legendary Bob Fosse, in the number ‘Who’s Got the Pain.’ 12. Geoffrey Block reviews the modifications to the score, including the three new numbers, in Enchanted Evenings, 322–323. 13. See, for example, Stephen Cole, ‘Marni Nixon Remembered,’ Variety, 25 July 2016, http:// variety.com/2016/film/columns/marni-nixon-dead-collaborator-natalie-wood-1201822636/. accessed 15 March 2018. Nixon is also notable for her dubbing of Deborah Kerr in The King and I. 14. Ethan Mordden, When Broadway Went to Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 182–183. 15. See http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/?yr=1978&wknd=24&p=.htm, accessed 15 March 2018. 16. See http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=musical.htm, accessed 15 March 2018. 17. See http://www.worldwideboxoffice.com/movie.cgi?title=Cabaret&year=1972 for a suggested figure, accessed 15 March 2018. 18. Mordden, who thinks ‘the moment is quite thrilling,’ notes that the film reproduces the Broadway staging of this number. See Mordden, When Broadway Went to Hollywood, 218. 19. See Mordden, When Broadway Went to Hollywood, 227–228. Mordden notes: ‘It’s wonderful actually to see all the magic.’ 20. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=dreamgirls.htm cites gross domestic income of over $100 million, accessed 17 March 2018. 21. See, for example, Peter Debruge’s enthusiastic review for Variety: https://variety.com/2014/ film/festivals/toronto-film-review-the-last-5-years-1201300169/, accessed 27 July 2018. 22. See http://deadline.com/2013/12/the-sound-of-music-continues-to-echo-across-the-­ratingslandscape-656148/ for more details, accessed 18 March 2018. 23. This adaptation was especially well received, e.g., https://tv.avclub.com/nbc-finally-getsit-right-with-the-wiz-live-1798185904, accessed 27 July 2018.

the broadway musical on the silver screen   27 2 4. See https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/jesus-christ-superstar-nbc-ratings-1202741266/, accessed 27 July 2018. 25. The Hollywood Reporter viewed this project positively: https://www.hollywoodreporter. com/review/grease-live-tv-review-860952, accessed 27 July 2018. 26. See https://www.thewrap.com/a-christmas-story-live-early-ratings/, accessed 18 March 2018. 27. Rob Marshall has been announced at the director of the latter production; see Variety at http://variety.com/2017/film/news/little-mermaid-reboot-disney-rob-marshall-1202632266/, accessed 18 March 2018. 2 8. See http://www.playbill.com/article/schedule-of-upcoming-movie-musical-adaptationscom-216487, accessed 18 March 2018.

CHAPTER 2

R efashion i ng Roberta From Novel to Stage to Screen Geoffrey Block

Adapting to Broadway In response to a question posed in 2013, ‘What Are We Meant to Get Out of Movies Based on Short Stories and Novels?’ Zoë Heller, whose novel, Notes on a Scandal (2003) was adapted into a widely acclaimed movie starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, answered simply that we are ‘meant to get’ good movies.1 While acknowledging that ‘the common expectation is that adaptations should be “faithful” to their source texts,’ she wonders ‘why we should burden films with this obligation.’2 When it comes to film adaptations of stage musicals, perhaps we should adopt Heller’s view and be satisfied simply by getting good movies and not worrying too much about high fidelity, either to Broadway realities or to Broadway ideals. Such an approach may have brought about a different response to the film musical Gigi (1958), which had adopted Broadway stage values to such an extent that theatre and film scholar Gerald Mast quipped that Gigi was ‘the best Broadway musical ever written directly for the screen.’3 In contrast to adaptations of short stories and novels, on the surface at least, the inherent dramatic structures and presentation of stage musicals would seem to allow for a relatively seamless transition from stage to screen. Despite this common-sense assumption, we might keep in mind that no matter how faithfully they adhere to their stage sources, film adaptations will remain distinct and even contradictory entities. Still we might think about the question inevitably faced by adapters, ‘To what extent should a screen version of a stage show emulate its predecessor?’ When considering adaptations of shows prior to the 1940s—Roberta, for example—a time when original cast or studio albums and the publication of librettos and vocal scores were comparatively rare or incomplete, film versions are often the last great hope of getting a sense of what a stage show might have been like. But for the most part we

30   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations must abandon these hopes when confronted with the hellish reality that early films adapted from shows more often than not poorly reflect what stage audiences saw and heard in a theatre. Not until the 1950s did audiences seriously begin to expect and to receive more faithful renditions of stage musicals, or even, as in the case of Gigi, a film musical that seems to emulate an imagined stage work. On the rare occasions before the 1950s that a score was kept somewhat intact—for example, the 1934 film version of Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s The Cat and the Fiddle from 1931—the screenplay still might take annoying liberties with the original script (i.e., annoying for those who want to know what happened in the stage version). In the case of the 1934 film adaptation of Cole Porter’s Gay Divorce from its staged prede­ cessor two years earlier, the show was given what was then regarded as a more acceptable title, The Gay Divorcee, but in contrast to most film adaptations of the era, the plot was largely retained, as was its star on stage, Fred Astaire. Nevertheless, film audiences watching The Gay Divorcee heard only one song from Porter’s Gay Divorce, ‘Night and Day.’ In weighing the extent of sacrilege involved in the demolition of a fine score, one might argue that the losses and gains should be looked at on a case-by-case basis. The Gay Divorcee may have left ‘After You, Who?’ ‘I’ve Got You on My Mind,’ and ‘Mister and Missus Fitch’ at the stage door, but it did offer a terrific new song and dance number by the lesser known Herb Magidson (lyrics) and Con Conrad (music) called ‘The Continental,’ which would receive the first Academy Award for Best Song, one more than Porter would ever receive. The film versions of the Marx Brothers musical farce The Cocoanuts and Porter’s Anything Goes also retained considerable amounts of plot and perhaps more surprisingly, original dialogue, but here too most of the songs vanished in the transfer. The film version of Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms retains only two songs from its cornucopia of stage song hits, and in the film version of George and Ira Gershwin’s Strike up the Band, as with The Gay Divorcee, only one song remains.4 Reaching absolute zero on the song front, despite some fidelity to original plot lines, the film versions of Rosalie and Follow the Fleet deliver entirely new scores by composers not even remotely associated with the stage originals.5 The films of Alfred Hitchcock amply illustrate the premise that a film adaptation of a novel need not be faithful and in fact may be more likely to succeed on its own cinematic terms, unencumbered by fidelity to its source. The 39 Steps and Strangers on a Train, based respectively on novels by John Buchan and Patricia Highsmith, come immediately to mind. Several film adaptations of stage musicals such as the 1936 Show Boat, On the Town (1949), Cabaret (1972), Hair (1979), Chicago (2002), and Sweeney Todd (2007), the latter two adaptations filmed more than a quarter of a century after their stage debuts, offer striking structural departures and modes of performance that differ markedly from their respective stage sources in original and effective ways. Not being a purist in these matters, I appreciate the film settings of Gay Divorce and On the Town for what they are and even enjoy the three interpolated non-Porter songs sung by Bing Crosby (for example ‘Sailor Beware’ by Richard Whiting and Leo Robin) in the 1936 film version of Anything Goes, featuring Ethel Merman in her prime based on a stage role.

Adapting Roberta   31 Not being a purist in these matters I also concede that the interloper, ‘The Continental’ from The Gay Divorcee is definitely film-worthy.6 Nevertheless, for my taste, some of the most interesting film adaptations occur when the original composers, lyricists, and librettists are permitted some involvement in the adaptation process, for example, the 1936 film version of Show Boat with its screenplay by Hammerstein and new songs by Hammerstein and Kern. This adaptation worked so well that in his book on Kern, Stephen Banfield wrote that the 1936 film offered ‘the most satisfying, balanced, and compelling version of Show Boat as drama achieved up to the present day. In almost every way it is superior to the stage version and its variants.’7 In fact, for Banfield, ‘the stage Show Boat of 1927 constitutes a rough draft and the 1936 film a finished and culminating destination.’8 On this happy note, I now turn to a musical film I consider not only one of the first successful film adaptations of a stage musical, but an adaptation that arguably surpasses its predecessor, both dramatically and musically as a work of art, as well as in its superb dramatic and musical performances.9 That musical film is Roberta, the subject of this chapter (see Tables 2.1 and 2.2 for song listings of the stage and film versions).

Table 2.1  Songs from the Stage Version of Roberta PROLOGUE ‘Let’s Begin’ Billy Boyden, the Hoofer; Ensemble ‘Alpha, Beta, Pi’ [‘Madrigal’ in Vocal Score] Huckleberry ‘Huck’ Haines, the Crooner; Billy; John Kent, the Fullback ‘You’re Devastating’ Huck ‘Let’s Begin’ (First Reprise) Billy, John, Huck, Male Ensemble ACT 1 ‘You’re Devastating’ (Reprise) Stephanie, the Manager at Roberta’s ‘Yesterdays’ Aunt Minnie (Trade name, Roberta), the Modiste ‘Something Had to Happen’ Clementina Scharwenka, the Star Customer; Huck, and John ‘You’re Devastating’ (Reprise) Stephanie ‘The Touch of Your Hand’ Stephanie; Ladislaw the Doorman Fashion Show (music accompanying the appearance of the final dress is ‘Devastating’ based on ‘You’re Devastating’) ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’ Scharwenka Finale Act I (‘You’re Devastating,’ ‘I’ll be Hard to Handle’) (continued )

32   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations

Table 2.1  Continued ACT 2 ‘Hot Spot’ Scharwenka ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ Stephanie ‘Let’s Begin’ (Second Reprise) Huck, Stephanie ‘Something Had to Happen’ (Reprise) John ‘Let’s Begin (Third Reprise) Huck, John, Scharwenka, and Lord Henry Delves, the Friend of Roberta) ‘Don’t Ask Me Not to Sing’ Huck, California Collegians ‘The Touch of Your Hand’ (Reprise) Stephanie, Ladislaw Finale Ultimo (Reprises: ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle,’ ‘You’re Devastating’) Billy, Scharwenka, Huck, Stephanie, John * The listing in Table 2.1 is based on the published vocal score (New York: T.B. Harms Co.: London: Chappell & Col, Ltd. [PN 4033], [1950]. For an opening night song list see Richard C. Norton, A Chronicle of the American Musical Theater, vol. 2 (New York Oxford University Press, 2001), 704.

Table 2.2  Songs from the Film Version of Roberta ‘Indiana’ (lyrics: Ballard MacDonald; music: James F. Hanley; published in 1917) (Song) [Audition] [3:58] Fred Astaire and Indianians ‘Let’s Begin' (Song and Dance) [Audition] [20:23] Astaire, Johnny (Candy) Candido, and Gene Sheldon ‘Russian Song’ (Traditional Song)* [Serenade] [27:35] Irene Dunne ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle' (Song and Dance) (original lyrics by Bernard Dougall, Harbach’s nephew; revised lyrics by Dorothy Fields) [Rehearsal] [Song, 29:34; Dance, 31:32] Ginger Rogers song; dance with Astaire ‘Yesterdays’ (Song) [Serenade] [41:53] Dunne ‘The Touch of Your Hand’ (Orchestral Underscoring) [50:36–53:23] Accompanies the in-house dress shop fashion show and the removal of the Sophie’s future dress ‘You’re Devastating’ (Orchestral Underscoring) [59:50–1:04:38] Accompanies the dress shop scene in which Astaire and Dunne conspire to sell Raymond Scott’s girlfriend Sophie (Claire Dodd) the dress he will find ‘revealingly vulgar’ ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’ (Orchestral Background) [1:06:40] ‘You’re Devastating’ (Orchestral Underscoring) [106:59–108:42) Accompanies Sophie’s unveiling of the vulgar dress she finds ‘elegantly alluring.’ ‘I Won’t Dance’ (Song and Dance) [Performance] (original lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein; new lyrics by Dorothy Fields) [Song: 1:08:54; Dance: 1:11:55] Astaire and Rogers

Adapting Roberta   33 Royal entrance music for Princess Stephanie [1:14:43] ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ (Song) [Performance] [Begins 1:15:53; continues after dialogue at 1:21:26] Dunne ‘Don’t Ask Me Not to Sing’ (Orchestral accompaniment to Astaire’s spoken sales pitch [1:28:27] Astaire ‘Lovely to Look At’ (Song) [Performance] (lyrics by Dorothy Fields) [1:32:11] Dunne Note: the 24-year-old future Lucille Ball appears as a model at 1:36:23 and 1:37:33. ‘Lovely to Look At’ and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ (Dance) [Performance] [1:38:17] Astaire and Rogers ‘I Won’t Dance: Finale’ (1:43:49] Astaire and Rogers * Most Kern scholars consider this Russian lullaby a ‘traditional,’ tune but John Mueller writes that it was ‘apparently written by Kern’ in Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films (New York: Wings Books, 1991), 68.

From Novel to Film Although Gowns by Roberta, the novel by Alice Duer Miller upon which Roberta is based, was not published until September 1933, Kern managed to acquire and read it months before that date and soon persuaded Otto Harbach, his librettist and lyricist for The Cat and the Fiddle, to read it as well. One wonders what Kern found in the novel to musicalize, since it was Harbach, not Kern, who took public credit for the seemingly indispensable invention of the bandleader Huck Haines, conspicuously absent from Miller’s novel. Kern and Harbach began their work the previous winter and in the spring it was announced in the New York Times on 26 May that a show called Gowns by Roberta ‘will be one of Max Gordon’s offerings for the coming season.’ On 25 June the New York Times announced that casting for Gowns would begin on Kern’s return from London in early August, rehearsals would commence in the middle of September, and the out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia would begin on 22 October, only one month after the publication of Miller’s novel.10 The completed stage adaptation by Kern and Harbach beat this last projection by one day when tryouts began at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia. Three songs were dropped during the Philadelphia tryouts in October, including ‘Armful of Trouble,’ which was salvaged as incidental music.11 When the English patter in the song ‘Clementina’ proved too much for the Polish-born and heavily-accented Lyda Roberti to handle, it was replaced with a new song called ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle,’ with lyrics by Harbach’s nephew Bernard Dougall. The show opened on 18 November and closed after a successful run of 295 performances on 21 July 1934. A tour followed during the fall season, closing on 16 March 1935, only modestly eclipsing the opening of the film version at Radio City Music Hall on 8 March.

34   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations Kern had known Miller since 1920 when he composed a song for The Charm School, a play Miller cowrote with Robert Milton. Since Miller was a member of the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s along with Edna Ferber, the author of the novel Show Boat (1926), it is not too difficult to imagine how Kern might have come across Gowns by Roberta months prior to its publication. In any event, that Miller remained part of the Kern circle through the mid-1930s is clear from the fact that she was chosen to read a poem written by Franklin P. Adams at a tribute organized by Alexander Woollcott to celebrate Kern’s fiftieth birthday in 1935, a few weeks before the opening of the film version of Roberta.12 Although the stage Roberta takes much from the novel, including whole conversations, the focus in Gowns by Roberta was the mentorship and friendship between the former football star John Kent and his once-scandalous Great Aunt Minnie, the founder of the Roberta fashion line in Paris. The novel narrates how in the months before her death Minnie taught her great nephew, a backward son-of-a-farmer, how to dine and dress like an educated Parisian gentleman and more important, to acquire the self-confidence to realize he deserved a better partner than the attractive but shallow and shrewish Sophia (renamed Sophie in Roberta). In an exchange with this unworthy girlfriend in the opening chapter of the novel we learn that although John felt unworthy of her, at the same time ‘he had always known that he was something better than she understood.’13 As in the stage and screen adaptations, Aunt Minnie in the novel enabled John to discover that he was potentially deserving of a princess’s love. In contrast to the novel and the stage and film versions, however, the novel’s Minnie harbors the hope that the Russian monarchy will be restored, which would make John a commoner. Consequently, Miller’s modiste actively keeps John and Stephanie apart, which does not allow them to develop a romance until after Minnie’s death shortly before the midway point of the novel. On stage and screen Minnie’s comical misunderstanding when John tells her that Sophie has given him ‘the air’ (which she hears as the homonym for ‘heir’) comes straight out of the novel as does the rickety elevator in the film that twice traps John between floors in Roberta’s building (see Figure 2.1). The film version also uses the novel as the starting point for a few new jokes. For example, in the novel Madame Nunez comes back for a fitting; her stage and screen counterpart, the volatile Countess Scharwenka, comes back for her fit. Of greater relevance to the plot, both the novel and the stage musical include a conversation about Sophia/Sophie’s devastating dress, which can be seen, or what there is of it to be seen, both at the beginning and towards the end of the novel but only once, and late, in the film. Early in the novel the omniscient narrator foreshadows John’s decision to remove the dress from the Roberta line that was similar to the ‘indecent’ dress Sophia wore on the boat before it set sail for Paris: ‘He did not like either the dress, or the way it caused other men in the restaurant where they had dined to stare; they had looked at her, not with eyes that undressed her, for it seemed to John that that had been thoroughly accomplished already, but they had looked as if to be stared at was what she wanted.’14 On stage, Sophie and her mother Mrs Teale first show this dress to Huck, with its back bare to the waist and identified as a gown by Roberta shortly before she reveals the revealing dress to John. A similarly indecent indecent dress also appears on the sheet music cover of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ as shown in Figure 2.2.

Adapting Roberta   35

Figure 2.1  Randolph Scott stuck in an elevator looking up at Irene Dunne.

Also in the stage version it is Sophie who utters Roberta’s slogan we will hear in a different context in the film, that ‘if you don’t buy your gowns from Roberta, you’re not dressed at all,’ a remark that sets up Huck’s quip, ‘I see, nude if you don’t and (looks at her back) nude if you do!’15 (see Figure 2.3). When Sophie reminds Huck that he told one of the girls she looked ‘ravishing’ he quickly corrects her and tells her that he said ‘ravished,’ a comment you will not hear in the film. The reason behind this omission calls attention to the fact that Hollywood film adaptations from the mid-1930s through the 1960s also dialed down some of the more suggestive stage lyrics in compliance with the Hays Production Code. Among the major songwriters of the era, Porter wrote lyrics in particular that were considerably expurgated, not only in the first Anything Goes film adaptation of 1936 but the 1953 adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate as well.16 In Roberta, the stage lyric from ‘Let’s Begin,’ ‘you have necked / Til you’re wrecked,’ innocuously metamorphosed into ‘don’t forget / since we’ve met / there’s no reason for vain regret.’ Besides the word ‘ravished,’ the filmed Roberta removed other suggestive dialogue from the stage version—for example, the exchange when Huck, the Crooner, suggests to Aunt Minnie that his ‘orchestra could put new life into your manikins’ and Billie, the Hoofer, responds ‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’17 When Huck learns that Minnie wants to leave the business to John, he responds with a remark that links male dressmaking with effeminacy: ‘Wouldn’t that be a scream line for the dailies? “John Kent all-star fullback goes in for dressmaking.” Swish!,’ the last word a term that, according to the New Dictionary of American Slang, was first used in the 1930s to describe ‘the traits of an effeminate male homosexual.’18 The same goes for the word ‘Nellie,’ another term used for the same purpose traceable even earlier to the 1910s, heard in the stage version when John says to Huck,

36   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations

Figure 2.2  The sheet music cover of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’

‘Speak for yourself, Nellie!’ during their conversation about the idea of a man in the fashion field.19 Neither ‘swish’ nor ‘Nellie’ survived the journey from stage to screen. Prior to the completion of the Revised Final Script dated 27 November 1935 by Sam Mintz and Jane Murfin, who were also the two primary authors of the original film script, at least two treatments are extant. Both are located in the RKO holdings in the UCLA

Adapting Roberta   37

Figure 2.3  Claire Dodd reveals the indecent backless dress.

Arts Library Special Collection, the first treatment by Allan Scott and Dorothy Yost dated 23 August and the second dated 5 September solely credited to Alan Scott, who follows Jane Murfin and Sam Mintz as a cowriter in the screen credits if not the revised film itself.20 The August treatment opens with John Kent’s band café in Prague followed by dissolves to Vienna, Madrid, and eventually Paris. Marge, Huck’s college girlfriend (designated as Ginger Rogers in the treatment), sings with the band, which is conducted by Huck. After several weeks in Paris, Madame Roberta sends her assistant Stephanie to offer a personal invitation to visit her. Like the novel, the September treatment begins on a cross-Atlantic trip to Europe before we meet Huck’s band in Paris as in the first treatment. On the ship John has a room several classes below that of his fiancée, and Huck and Marge, already an engaged couple, are also on the boat. The treatments show that although much of the story was preserved in the film as we know it today, several important plot points had not been determined. For example, in both treatments the character played by Rogers was subdivided into two: Marge, Huck’s girlfriend; and the wealthy and volatile Madame Nunez, who corresponds closely to the Countess Scharwenka. Departing from the novel, Aunt Minnie, after refusing countless offers, impulsively agrees to marry Lord Henry Delves, a persistent suitor rather than a platonic old male friend. In the August treatment Minnie elopes with Lord Henry rather than dies, still leaving the business to Stephanie but with John as a copartner. Also in both treatments, the future nonsinging Madame Roberta is persuaded to sing a song, identified as ‘Yesterdays’ in the first treatment. In the September treatment Roberta dies intestate as she does in the novel, the stage version, and the finished film. The film production schedule, which coincided with the stage tour, began after nine weeks of rehearsal on 21 December 1934 with the filming of ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle,’ which took two days (see Table 2.3). The filming of this song was historic, as Ginger Rogers describes in her autobiography Ginger: My Story (1991): ‘This was also the first time that a number was done direct; the taps were just as we did them, with no additions.

38   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations

Table 2.3  Timeline of Important Dates and Production Schedule for Roberta 1927

Show Boat (Kern and Hammerstein) (Broadway, 27 December); allegedly contained the opening melody of the future ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ as an instrumental tap number for a scene change

1928

Blues Eyes (Kern and Graham John) (London, 27 April); contained ‘Do I Do Wrong?’ which served as the musical source of ‘You’re Devastating’

1929

Sweet Adeline (Kern and Hammerstein) (Broadway, 3 September) Show Boat (first of three film versions), based on the 1927 stage musical Sally (film), based on the 1920 stage musical by Kern and Clifford Grey

1930

Girl Crazy (George and Ira Gershwin) (Broadway, 14 October), introducing Ginger Rogers singing ‘Embraceable You’ and ‘But Not for Me’ Sunny (film), based on the 1925 stage musical by Kern, Harbach, and Hammerstein

1931

The Band Wagon (Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz) (Broadway, 3 June), starring Fred Astaire and his sister Adele in her final Broadway show The Cat and the Fiddle (Kern and Harbach) (Broadway, 15 October) Of Thee I Sing (George and Ira Gershwin) (Broadway, 26 December) Men of the Sky (film), score by Kern and Harbach (one song, unused)

1932

The Cat and the Fiddle (London, 4 March) Show Boat (Broadway revival, 19 May) Music in the Air (Kern and Hammerstein) (Broadway, 8 November) Gay Divorce (Cole Porter) (Broadway, 29 November), featuring Astaire in his final Broadway show Pardon My English (George and Ira Gershwin) (Broadway, 20 January), score by George featuring Lyda Roberti singing ‘My Cousin in Milwaukee’ Music in the Air (London, 19 May) Announcement in the New York Times of a new musical for the next season based on Gowns by Roberta (26 May) Casting of the Gowns by Roberta musical begins in early August Rehearsals of the Gowns by Roberta musical begins in mid-September Gowns by Roberta, novel by Alice Duer Miller published September 1933 As Thousands Cheer (Irving Berlin and Moss Hart) (Broadway, 30 September) Let ’Em Eat Cake (George and Ira Gershwin) (Broadway, 21 October) Roberta out of town try-out at the Forrest in Philadelphia (21 October) Roberta opens at the New Amsterdam on Broadway (18 November) Flying Down to Rio (film) (29 December), score by Vincent Youmans, first film in the Fred and Ginger series

1933

1934

Three Sisters (Kern and Hammerstein) (London, 19 April), introduced ‘I Won’t Dance’ with lyrics by Hammerstein (new lyrics by Dorothy Fields for Roberta film) Roberta closes after 295 performances (21 July) Anything Goes (Cole Porter) (Broadway, 21 November) The Cat and the Fiddle (film), based on the 1931 stage musical Music in the Air (film), based on the 1932 stage musical The Gay Divorcee (film) (based on 1932 stage musical Gay Divorce), second film in the Fred and Ginger series Shooting of Roberta film begins after nine weeks of rehearsal (November 26) ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’ (21–22 December) (continued )

Adapting Roberta   39

Table 2.3  Continued ‘I Won’t Dance’ (27–28 December) ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ (dance) (30 December) 1935

Shooting of Roberta film (continued) ‘Indiana’ (3 January) ‘Let’s Begin’ (5–6 January) Fashion show and modeling (8–9 January) End of Roberta shooting (16 January) Roberta film opens 26 February following previews in early February Porgy and Bess (George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward) (Broadway, 10 October) Jubilee (Cole Porter) (12 October) Jumbo (Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart) (Broadway, 16 November) Sweet Adeline (film), based on the 1929 stage musical, starring Irene Dunne as Addie I Dream Too Much (film), score by Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields

1936

On Your Toes (Rodgers and Hart) (Broadway, 11 April) Red, Hot and Blue! (Cole Porter) (Broadway, October) Anything Goes (film), based on the 1934 stage musical Show Boat (second film version), based on the 1927 stage musical, starring Irene Dunne as Magnolia

Addendum 1952 Lovely to Look At (second film based on Roberta, the first and only film remake in the Fred and Ginger series)

Fred’s and my laughter and giggling as we got into the throes of the dance were not added, either. They were real. The two of us enjoyed dancing together. The spontaneity was very real and it makes me laugh when I see it today. In ‘I’ll be Hard to Handle’ we had a real wood floor, which caused each tap to come out distinctly from each dancer. What a pleasure it was to work on it. Alas, in the future, most of the surfaces we danced on were made of slippery and shiny plastic.’21 As in the earlier films in the Fred and Ginger series, Fred’s dancing partner before Ginger herself arrived on the set was again Hermes Panagiotopulos (better known as Hermes Pan). Filming was completed according to the contracted schedule by 16 January, after which the film played to preview audiences in early February, about a month before its official opening, to ecstatic reviews. On 9 February a reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter filed this report: ‘Surefire smash; Astaire, Dunne, Rogers, Fine Direction, Writing, Music, 100%. A knockout, a honey, and a wow!’22 John Franceschina, the biographer of dance director Pan, offers the following impressive statistics: ‘When the film opened at Radio City Music Hall on 8 March, it earned raves from the New York Times, grossed $95,000 for the first week, and soon became RKO’s biggest hit to date, breaking box office records around the world, earning the studio a profit of $770,000.’23 New York Times reviewer Andre Sennwald found every aspect of this film ‘lovely to look at’ and magnificent to behold: ‘The work is a model for urbanity in the musical films and Mr. Astaire, the debonair master of light comedy and the dance, is its chief ornament.

40   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations To watch him skipping on effortless cat’s feet across a dance floor is to experience one of the major delights of the contemporary cinema.’24 Sennwald was particularly enamoured of Astaire’s ‘pantomimic dance with Miss Ginger Rogers [presumably the routine on “I’ll Be Hard to Handle”] which is quite as eloquently comic as an acrimonious love scene out of Noel Coward.’ Although he praised the entire cast and production, the one ‘flaw in the photoplay,’ is ‘the unfortunate circumstance that Mr. Astaire and his excellent partner, Miss Rogers, cannot be dancing during every minute of it.’

Roberta as a Film Adaptation of a Stage Musical In his autobiography Steps in Time (1959) Astaire described the song ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ as ‘a lovely thing’ and said that his dance with Ginger to this melody in Roberta ‘has always been one of my favourites.’25 Roberta was one of the most successful and lucrative films in the Astaire and Rogers series, third only to Top Hat and Follow the Fleet when weighing profits ($770,000) against costs ($610,000).26 Today, however, the film adaptation of Roberta remains less well known and less popular than the three original musicals that followed: Top Hat with lyrics and music by Irving Berlin, Swing Time with songs by Kern and Dorothy Fields, and Shall We Dance with a score by George and Ira Gershwin. A major contributor to the critical rehabilitation of Roberta was the dance critic Arlene Croce who in her classic Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book of 1972 refuted the folklore surrounding this neglected member of the Fred and Ginger canon: ‘Out of circulation since the early Forties and never shown on television, Roberta is the least known and least discussed of the Astaire-Rogers films. Because they share billing with Irene Dunne, a legend has grown that it’s a minor and unrepresentative film.27 On the contrary: it’s a key film. It widens their range and established them unshakably as an item. Astaire and Rogers become Astaire-Rogers in this film—you can see it happening. It’s true that the roles they play are inflated supporting roles, but since none of the characters has much definition and the story makes very little sense, this doesn’t diminish their impact. It lets them soar. Roberta gives us that soaring spirit in such abundance that, in a way, it does stand apart from the rest of the series. It’s their most ebullient film.’28 Dance critic and Astaire scholar John Mueller shares Croce’s view in Astaire Dancing (1985), a comprehensive study of the 133 ‘fully developed dance routines’ in all of Astaire’s thirty-one films: ‘In this film [Roberta] they reached their full development as a team—the breathless high spirits, the emotional richness, the bubbling sense of comedy, the romantic compatibility are all there in full measure. In Flying Down to Rio they had been coparticipants: in The Gay Divorcee they were partners; in Roberta they became coconspirators.’29 A telegram to producer Pandro Berman reveals that even Kern was pleased with this film: ‘It certainly was [a] unique experience to find [a] motion picture version

Adapting Roberta   41 of one of our plays something to be proud of instead of otherwise. . . Sorry I had so little to do with it.’30 Before I further extol the virtues of Roberta as an adaptation, I feel honour bound to mention that critical consensus tends to favour original films of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, such as The Wizard of Oz and Singin’ in the Rain, over even the most acclaimed stage adaptations of this era. Certainly, no Gershwin adaptation from the stage approaches Shall We Dance, A Damsel in Distress, or An American in Paris in critical stature, and no film based on a Rodgers and Hart stage show comes remotely close in quality or recognition to their 1932 original film collaboration with Rouben Mamoulian, Love Me Tonight. And how many of us can point to a film adaptation of a Berlin stage work that rivals Top Hat or Easter Parade in our affections (although I freely confess great affection for Call Me Madam, Ethel Merman’s second and final opportunity to replicate on film one of her great stage successes)? Although Kern probably fared better than his contemporaries in terms of the overall quality of the film adaptations of his stage shows and in particular the relatively large number of stage songs that managed to find their way into these films, for many the high point of Kern’s career on film is more likely to be original film musicals such as Swing Time or You Were Never Lovelier rather than the film adaptations, The Cat and the Fiddle, Roberta, or even Show Boat. Indeed, the film version of Roberta set a high critical barre and a long-lasting one. For example, musical film historian Roy Hemming may lament the relegation of ‘The Touch of Your Hand’ and ‘You’re Devastating’ to instrumental background music, but he nonetheless offers a startling critical verdict about Roberta when he claims that this film musical is ‘arguably, the first movie adaptation of a Broadway musical that turned out better than the original.’31 This is precisely the motion I would like to second in this chapter. In the second edition of Enchanted Evenings I wrote that ‘the winning combination of romantic elegance (operetta) and catchy popular vernacular (musical comedy) and their signature songs (Dunne) and dances (Astaire and Rogers) captured the best of both worlds.’32 Somehow I neglected to mention that The Cat and the Fiddle had done pretty much the same thing one year earlier (and even kept nearly all of the original songs), despite annoying plot liberties. But I still would not be prepared to argue that the film version of The Cat and the Fiddle surpassed its stage source as I am prepared to argue here. The improvements to Roberta begin with the significant plot changes generated and inspired by the expanded presence of Astaire and Rogers. The Broadway Roberta may have introduced Huck Haines, ‘the Crooner,’ who did not exist in Miller’s novel, but it split the honours by giving the role of Huck to the singing but nondancing newcomer Bob Hope and the dancing component to another new character, Billy Boyden, ‘the Hoofer,’ played on stage by future film star and California Senator George Murphy. With Astaire, it was now possible to offer a Huck who could sing and dance. Most spectacularly, the film offered a new big solo tap-dance number for Astaire, ‘I Won’t Dance,’ adapted from a Kern and Hammerstein song with new lyrics by Fields from a number recently sung and danced by Adele Dixon in London’s musically rich flop Three Sisters (1934). As a bonus, Astaire introduces ‘I Won’t Dance’ in the film with a rare film demonstration of what he calls ‘feelthy piano,’ a piano style markedly influenced by his early

42   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations accompanist and song feeder George Gershwin, as can be heard in a duet between George’s piano and Fred’s tap on ‘The Half of It Dearie Blues’ from Lady, Be Good! recorded in 1926.33 The character played by Ginger Rogers, who would become Countess Scharwenka with ‘the best figure in Europe,’ was described by Aunt Minnie in the novel as ‘an Argentine woman with a beautiful face and a lumpish figure.’34 Although interested in the handsome Kent, the novel’s Madame Nunez is married and essentially spoken for, and we even meet her husband late in the novel. In the stage version the unmarried Countess Scharwenka competes more vigorously for Kent’s attention. In the film, however, we soon find out not only that this character is impersonating a countess in order to provide cachet as an entertainer, but we also learn that Scharwenka is in fact the former Lizzie Gatz from Indiana, the woman who got away from Huck years ago. Rogers, who plays the Countess, is also impersonating the comical accent and mannerisms of Lyda Roberti, who played the role on Broadway. Roberti made her Broadway debut in 1931 with You Said It and sang George and Ira Gershwin’s ‘My Cousin in Milwaukee’ (available on YouTube from a recorded radio broadcast) in another musically rich failure Pardon My English, eleven months before Roberta’s opening night.35 Unfortunately, this promising star died of a sudden heart attack in 1938 at the age of thirty-one and left only two commercial recordings, both from the film musical College Rhythm (1934).36 These recordings provide ample demonstration of where Rogers got her material, which is especially prominent in ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle.’37 Incidentally, I would like to raise the possibility that a frequently repeated distinctive culminating phrase in ‘Hard to Handle’ (along with its more generic dotted rhythms) may have served as part of the genome in the pastiche song ‘Broadway Baby’ from Follies with lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim. In both songs the identical musical phrase—for example, on the words ‘Heck, I’d even play the maid’ in ‘Broadway Baby’ and ‘I say with a shrug I think’ in ‘Hard to Handle’—serves to launch musical punchlines. Sondheim was silent on this point, and when he discussed the musical sources of his many pastiches in Follies, he acknowledged only DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson as a possible stylistic model for this song, while offering Kern as a source for ‘Loveland’ and Kern and Burton Lane as potential models for ‘You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow’ and ‘Love Will See Us Through.’38 As newly constructed in the film, Gatz (a name she shares with the great Gatsby before he became great), now Scharwenka, is removed from the crowded field of three women competing on stage for Kent (Sophie, Stephanie, and Scharwenka). The film allows Huck and Lizzie an opportunity to develop their relationship and become ­performing and romantic partners to match the budding business and romantic partnership of Kent and Stephanie, who turns out to be a genuine singing, albeit non-dancing, Russian princess. In contrast to the romance of Kent and Stephanie, described in ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ as a solo song for Stephanie rather than a duet with her future non­ singing partner, the relationship between Huck and Lizzie will ignite into flames through their first dance, ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle,’ the dance that Croce describes as ‘the big event of the film, the number in which “Fred and Ginger” became fixed screen deities.’39

Adapting Roberta   43 The consolidation of Huck and Billy into a single character, Fred Astaire, who dances as well as sings, and the development of a romance between Huck and Countess Scharwenka, Fred and Ginger, constitute the major dramatic departures from the stage version. The film Roberta also did away with the opening stage scene; turned Huck and his band into a professional group, the Wabash Indianians, instead of an amateur college ensemble (The Collegians); and in the process allowed Huck and John to age a few years after college. Considering the norms of film adaptation prior to the 1950s these ad­ditional changes are relatively minor. Perhaps of still greater significance, in marked contrast to most film adaptations of its era, the film Roberta retained most of the major songs from the stage Roberta, although the creators of the film asked their characters not to sing some of these songs. One attractive number of arguably lesser dramatic significance was removed, the fraternity song, ‘Alpha, Beta, Pi,’ designated ‘Madrigal’ in the published vocal score.40 On stage this song followed the appearance of ‘Let’s Begin.’ In its place in the film was the first of four new film songs, an interpolation of the then-well-known popular song usually referred to simply as ‘Indiana’ but first published as ‘Back Home Again in Indiana’ in 1917; later the chords of this song became the basis for the widely performed jazz standard, ‘Donna Lee.’41 This interpolation of ‘Indiana’ in the film is a perfect fit for a group that calls itself the Wabash Indianians, even though manager Alexis Petrovich Moscuyvitch Ivan Voyda remains apoplectic when he learns that Huck’s ‘pale face Americans’ are not bona fide members of the Wabash Indian tribe. Of special relevance in this conflation between the Wabash Indians and the Wabash Indianians is that built into ‘Indiana’ is a readily perceptible musical quotation from Paul Dresser’s popular tune from 1897, ‘On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away.’ Another arguably minor song for Scharwenka, ‘Hot Spot,’ which opened the second act but was eventually reduced to twenty-three measures in the stage version, was also dropped from the film.42 Although in the end only four songs from the stage version were given what Mueller described as ‘the full treatment’ (‘Let’s Begin,’ ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle,’ ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ and ‘Yesterdays’), the film version removed only one major song altogether.43 This is the quirky, chromatic, and challenging song that John Kent sang on stage in act 1, ‘Something Had to Happen,’ with its many leaps, including ascending tritones at the beginning of its two central phrases (on the words ‘to happen’ and ‘caught nappin’) and its descending tritone at the end of the first phrase (‘hot to do’).44 On stage this song was sung as a trio by Scharwenka, Huck, and John in act 1 and as a solo reprise by John in act 2. It is perhaps surprising that this was the only major song assigned to the romantic leading stage male, especially since John Kent was played by Ray Middleton, the future Frank Butler in the original Broadway production of Berlin’s mega-hit Annie Get Your Gun opposite Ethel Merman in 1946. The dearth of songs for the stage door John, however, made it easier to replace his musical role in the film, now played by Randolph Scott, who was asked not to sing, especially not a song as difficult as ‘Something Had to Happen.’ To finish John off musically, Scott’s character was also removed from ‘Let’s Begin’ and bits of the Finale Ultimo, the only other musical numbers besides ‘Alpha, Beta, Pi’ in which John joined a larger ensemble in the stage version. With the exception of ‘Indiana’

44   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations for the ‘organ’ choir of Indianians, the next number ‘Let’s Begin,’ which featured three members of the band, their pianist, Astaire, their bassist Candy Candido, and the banjoist Gene Sheldon, and two duets with Rogers (‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’ and ‘I Won’t Dance’), all the remaining film songs metamorphosed into solo numbers for Stephanie (Irene Dunne) or dances for Huck and Scharwenka (Astaire and Rogers). In the process, the film version took several major songs away from their stage counterparts and thus removed singing opportunities from important stage characters, not only John, but also Aunt Minnie and Stephanie’s protective cousin Ladislaw, an exiled Russian prince who impersonates a doorman at the Roberta establishment in both the stage and film versions. The stage Madame Roberta, played by the ancient luminary Faye Templeton (1865–1939) who once starred at the turn of the century in a musical by George  M.  Cohan, now in her late sixties, sang ‘Yesterdays’ from a sitting position shortly before her death, first on stage and then in life. In the film, Irene Dunne usurped this song, which turned into a serenade to her beloved employer played by Helen Westley, who was also cast as the nonsinging Parthy in the film version of Show Boat the following year. The song’s purpose onscreen in Roberta was to help soothe the tired and frail Minnie to sleep during her afternoon nap. Sadly, Minnie will die in her sleep shortly after Stephanie and Ladislaw leave the room, her will unsigned. Ladislaw, who in the film accompanies Stephanie’s singing of ‘Yesterdays’ and another traditional Russian song on the guitar for an earlier naptime serenade, was deprived of the one song he sang on stage, ‘The Touch of Your Hand,’ a duet with Stephanie in act 1, reprised in act 2, the only harmonized duet in the show. Although a closer look clearly reveals that Minnie is the intended recipient of this love song, perhaps Harbach’s finest lyric in the show, its romantic nature might suggest that Stephanie and Ladislaw are kissing rather than platonic cousins. In the film ‘The Touch of Your Hand’ is converted into nearly three minutes of orchestral underscoring to accompany the in-house showing of the new Roberta dress line and John’s request to remove a dress he did not like, the dress with the missing back that Sophie purchases with relish shown in Figure 2.3. In the film that was released John does not offer a reason for rejecting the dress, but in the Revised Final Script dated 27 November 1935, which preceded the shooting, he specifically described the dress as indecent as he does in the novel. ‘You’re Devastating,’ another important song from the stage version—first as a song for Huck in the Prologue, reprised for Stephanie as the opening song in act 1, again as music to accompany the Fashion Show and the Finale of act 1, and in the Finale Ultimo—is also relegated to the orchestral background in the film. For nearly two minutes it accompanies Sophie’s unveiling of her new dress that John removed from Roberta’s line but which Sophie finds ‘elegantly alluring’ and refuses to return. The song originally appeared in a failed Kern musical from 1928 called Blue Eyes where it was titled ‘Do I Do Wrong?’ This leaves ‘Don’t Ask Me Not to Sing.’ On stage this catchy tune that slides so easily between duple and triple metre was sung by Huck and the Collegians. In its new film context it serves as an orchestral accompaniment to Huck’s spoken sales pitch at the culminating fashion show. Incidentally, ‘Don’t Ask Me Not to Sing’ was also cut as a vocal

Adapting Roberta   45 number from Kern’s previous show with Harbach, The Cat and the Fiddle, but it appeared in the show as dance music for the main character’s brother and sister-in-law played by Eddie Foy Jr and Doris Carson. To recapitulate, with the exception of ‘Something Had to Happen,’ film audiences heard most of the score of the staged Roberta, either as a song (sometimes sung by a different character) or as generous orchestral background music. They also heard four songs that stage audiences did not. The first of these, the interpolated ‘Indiana,’ would have been known to the characters as well as the audience, much like ‘After the Ball,’ the waltz by Charles K. Harris from 1892 interpolated in Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat. The second addition is a Russian Song for Stephanie to sing to Minnie before her first nap, a tune described in various credits as ‘traditional’ and nowhere in the literature directly attributed to Kern (which doesn’t mean he didn’t write it). The other two new songs were unmistakably Kern, ‘I Won’t Dance’ and ‘Lovely to Look At.’ ‘I Won’t Dance’ and ‘Lovely to Look At’ featured lyrics by Kern’s new collaborator Dorothy Fields, although the former song had been introduced in Three Sisters with a lyric by Hammerstein the previous year.45 In its new home ‘I Won’t Dance’ became the central solo dance number for Astaire. Fields adopted Hammerstein’s title and basic premise, ‘I won’t dance, don’t ask me’ and only slightly altered the transition to the return of the A section (Hammerstein’s ‘So that’s why I won’t dance’ became Fields’s ‘And that’s why I won’t dance’). Everything else is changed, starting with Hammerstein’s ‘I’m fond of dancing, but I won’t dance with you’ altered by Fields to ‘My heart won’t let my feet do things they should do’ to Fields lovely references to the other new song ‘Lovely to Look At’ in the second A section (‘You know what? You’re lovely, / And so what? You’re lovely’), and last, but not least, Scharwenka’s playful reference at the beginning of the release to ‘The Continental,’ their dance hit in their previous pairing, The Gay Divorcee: ‘When you dance you’re charming and you’re gentle! / ‘Specially when you do the Continental! / But this feeling isn’t purely mental.’ Compare these new lyrics of Fields with Hammerstein’s serviceable but less sparkling lyric that concludes the release: ‘Though I know your partners all call you good, / For me you’re too good, / Too good to do good.’ Like ‘I Won’t Dance,’ ‘Lovely to Look At’ was destined to become a song classic.46 Not only was it nominated for a Best Song Oscar in its own time, in 1952 it served as the title for the only remake of an Astaire-Rogers film (albeit not with Fred and Ginger). Fields is still the best source for the story of how in the composer’s absence (in fact, they hadn’t even met yet) she wrote her first Kern lyric in response to the following request by producer Pandro Berman: ‘We have a curiously uneven melody of Jerome Kern that he’s given us to add to the score; it needs a lyric. It has to be sung by Irene Dunne, who comes down the steps all in ermine for a fashion show, and it can be a love song.’47 Berman ‘had the nerve to shoot this whole sequence without Jerry okaying the lyric,’ but fortunately ‘Jerry loved it.’48 A number of accounts note Kern’s response when questioned why he only composed sixteen bars of the tune: it was all he had to say.49 Personally, I like this tune, what there is of it, but I am not alone in concluding that Kern might have worked a little harder to come up with eight measures of a release. Also,

46   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations like Alec Wilder, I find ‘Lovely to Look At’ ‘just a trifle frustrating because it ends before you want it to.’50 In fact, Wilder, who may be among the few who regard the score, if not the dramatic structure, of Roberta as superior to Show Boat, went on to complain that he felt ‘slightly cheated’ by the brevity of this song. Fortunately, not all is lost since the song does possess a verse, which is more than can be said for ‘Let’s Begin’ and its twenty-one bar chorus (without the benefit of either a verse or a release) or ‘Yesterdays’ (with only sixteen bars, slightly altered on repetition and no verse or release), and the famously verseless ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ which along with ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’ is the only song in Roberta in a standard thirty-two-bar AABA song form, including an eight-bar release. How many shows of the era relinquish the opportunity to introduce so many hit songs without this useful convention to take characters from talking to singing? I haven’t tested this out, but my rough guess is probably not too many. Yet even with the recurring returns of the ‘Lovely’ opening verse throughout the fashion show, I’m sorry to say that for my taste the six minutes of these sixteen bars overstay their welcome. Fortunately, those like me who tire of this wonderful but repetitive theme can occupy themselves trying to locate the then-glamourous future television star comedian Lucille Ball, then only twenty-four, who appears on screen as a model at two moments during the fashion show. Incidentally, someone had the clever idea to use the fanfare-like seventh and eighth (also thirteenth and fourteenth) bars of this tune as the clarinet signal to Scharwenka to warn Huck that it’s time to begin ‘Let’s Begin’ early in the film, a wonderful touch. Here’s a quick review of what songs one will hear in the film adaptation of Roberta: • Four mostly verseless musical numbers retained from the original stage Roberta: ‘Let’s Begin,’ ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle,’ ‘Yesterdays,’ and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’ • Three unsung musical numbers from the stage Roberta used for dramatically ­significant passages of instrumental underscoring: ‘The Touch of Your Hand,’ ‘You’re Devastating’ and ‘Don’t Ask Me Not to Sing.’ • Two interpolated songs new to the film: ‘Indiana’ and ‘Russian Song.’ • One new song and one recycled song with mostly new lyrics by Dorothy Fields: ‘Lovely to Look At’ and ‘I Won’t Dance.’

Concluding Remarks on the Roberta Film Adaptation As a sign of the high regard bestowed on some of these songs, Allen Forte, in his important and surprisingly accessible Schenkerian analyses of The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924–1950, analyzed six songs by Kern.51 Two made their debut on the musical stage in Roberta (‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘Yesterdays’). In his list of the twelve songs he regards as Kern’s best-known ballads Forte added ‘Lovely to Look At’ from the film to bring the total to three Roberta songs on this short and elite list (a number

Adapting Roberta   47 equaled by three songs from the film You Were Never Lovelier and compared to only two songs from Show Boat). In my view, the treatment and contexts of the eleven songs in the refashioned film Roberta add up to something extraordinary and may illustrate a phenomenon that would not be repeated in a film adaptation of a Broadway stage musical until Bob Fosse’s reimagining of Hal Prince’s Cabaret in 1972. It is widely known and often discussed that one of the major components of Fosse’s reworking of this seminal show was the decision to discard all the nondiegetic book songs and rely almost exclusively on diegetic cabaret songs, including some new ones. ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’—sung by the club waiters in Prince’s stage version, a context in which it is not clear whether they know they are singing—becomes a less equivocal diegetic rendition when launched as a song by a member of the Nazi youth who was then joined by a chorus of congregants in an outdoor beer garden. The idea of presenting songs diegetically in a stage show had already occurred to Kern, who in The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), as Stephen Banfield notes, produced a stage musical in which all the songs are diegetic, a phenomenon largely followed in the 1934 film.52 While it is not uncommon for filmmakers to look for opportunities to present songs diegetically as in 42nd Street, what makes Roberta different from The Cat and the Fiddle is the strong contrast between modes of interpretation onstage and onscreen. While the 1936 film of Show Boat follows its stage model in its mix of the diegetic and the nondiegetic, the filmed Roberta subverts its stage model and transforms one mode of presentation into another from the nondiegetic to the diegetic. The consistent and comprehensive manner in which it accomplishes this transformation is appealingly and effectively simple. Let’s see briefly how this works. The film Roberta offers several approaches to diegeticism. Perhaps most memorable are the series of song and dance performances by Fred and Ginger, ‘I Won’t Dance’ (a song and a dance) and dance renditions of ‘Lovely to Look At,’ and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’ But before viewers witness these performances, the film offers, first, a failed audition (‘Indiana’) followed by a successful audition (‘Let’s Begin’) for the pale-faced Indianians. After that comes the transformative rehearsal number, ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle,’ the historic song and dance in which Fred and Ginger first become a team. Irene Dunne also sings no less than four diegetic songs. The first two are songs Stephanie sings as serenades to Minnie (the ‘Russian Song’ and ‘Yesterdays’). The next is ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ Stephanie’s response when asked to sing at an evening gathering in her honor as a princess. Dunne’s final diegetic song is ‘Lovely to Look At,’ which she sings at the fashion show that precedes Huck and Scharwenka’s dance to this song and their dance rendition to the music of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ thus bypassing the lyrics which in any event are not relevant to the nature of Huck and Scharwenka’s romantic situation. We are accustomed to stage and film characters who break into song and the conventions that allow them to transcend the realism of the moment. In the film Roberta, not only are the characters placed in situations where it would be unnatural to ask them not to sing, all the songs in the film are integral components of the plot. Even ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ which perfectly embodies John’s problem, is broken up and resolved by a

48   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations dramatic confrontation with Stephanie, after which Stephanie returns to the release of the song, a release that begins in the Schubertian flat submediant, C-flat major in the key of E-flat major in the published vocal score. Clearly, Fosse did not invent the idea of refashioning a book musical into a diegetic musical film, any more than Rodgers and Hammerstein invented the integrated musical. A chorus of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ both sung and danced, can be seen in video examples 2.1 and 2.2. It’s worth taking a moment to celebrate the song on which the early success of the staged Roberta rests and to savor the unexpected and expressive move to the flat submediant (from E flat to C flat) in the release of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ a harmonic swerve favoured by Schubert more than a century earlier. In ‘Nacht und Träume’ (Night and Dreams), a song from circa 1822, Schubert anticipates Kern’s harmonic move by following a firm authentic cadence in B major with a dramatic unprepared swerve to a root position triad on G major (as in the Kern also the flat submediant) on the words ‘Die belauschen sie mit Lust’ (They listen with delight), an unforgettable and indescribably beautiful Schubertian moment. Kern adopts the same harmonic progression and produces something comparably memorable when he leaps suddenly and dramatically from E-flat major at the end of the second A section to the flat submediant (C-flat major) that launches the release of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’ Before my concluding remarks I cannot resist sharing a few other delights in Kern’s ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ release (see Figure 2.4), which offers a number of imaginative treatments of pivot tones in a series of reharmonizations.53 For example, the root of the tonic chord E flat at the end of the A section, which becomes the third of C-flat major in the first measure of the release, returns as a root, but

Figure 2.4  ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ Release (mm. 17–24).

Adapting Roberta   49 within a modal shift into E-flat minor, in the second measure of the release. In the second and sixth measures the same melody is harmonized, first with a C-flat 7 in the second measure, then with an A-flat minor ninth on the first two beats of the sixth measure. In the second half of this latter measure, the ninth (B flat) becomes the root of a B-flat 7 (a dominant seventh), adroitly setting up the return to the tonic E-flat major and the final A statement. The sinuous harmonies in these middle eight measures are old, new, borrowed (from Schubert perhaps), and a little bluesy, and together constitute a remarkable moment in the Euro-American song book. I am a big fan of Croce’s savvy study of Astaire and Rogers’s classic series of ten films, of which Roberta, the third film, receives the glowing assessment I shared earlier. In her chapter on Follow the Fleet which follows, Croce argues with some success that this film can be seen as a reworking of Roberta. As with the earlier film, the characters played by Fred and Ginger knew each other way back when, instead of meeting cute as they did in The Gay Divorcee or later would do in Swing Time. Fred once again has a band, although it is no longer known as the Indianians, and once again Randolph Scott helps turn a duckling into a swan, this time not Irene Dunne but Harriet Hilliard, the future Harriet Nelson of the long-running television show Ozzie and Harriet about the real-life Nelson family in the 1950s and ’60s. In the course of her analysis of Follow the Fleet Croce remarks with undisguised ­admiration that Roberta ‘came as close to plotlessness as that ideal Astaire-Rogers musical we all like to think they should have made.’54 Today we can come much closer to constructing a plotless Astaire-Rogers film musical. Indeed, with the technology of DVD or web streaming, audiences no longer have to sit through the 107 minutes of The Gay Divorcee in a theatre in order to watch the ten minutes of Astaire dancing alone or with Rogers. Since the 1940s we have been able to listen to cast albums without having to concern ourselves with the supposedly weak books that persist in interrupting the great songs when we see the works on stage. Now, with a click of a button, viewers can skip the dated dialogue and comedy shticks of film musicals, whether adaptations of stage musicals or originals.55 We can even bypass the gaudy gowns of Roberta’s fashion show and focus on the dancing stars, who, as Croce described matters in her discussion of The Gay Divorcee, appear to ‘have somehow fallen among a gang of incompetents,’ not only their coplayers but also ‘the people behind the scenes and writing the script.’56 Viewers can see for themselves whether they want to do without the moment when Randolph Scott as John Kent has finally gotten the smoke out of his eyes and stands up for the first time to his bitchy and disdainful girlfriend Claire Dodd (Sophie) as she proudly dons ‘an ugly, vulgar rag no decent girl should wear’: ‘You’ve bawled me out for the last time. . . I’ve stood for all your knocking and criticism just because it sounded so cute coming from such a little snip—(Sophie gasps)—and because I thought I loved you.’ Perhaps it is difficult to accept that although John truly loves Stephanie, he cannot sing his feelings and that neither of these well-suited partners can dance. Thus, it is only Huckleberry Haines and the reinvented Lizzie Gatz, Fred and Ginger, whom we observe falling in love in a song and dance while rehearsing ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle,’ a song and dance I might add, needlessly I trust, that, like the other songs in the film adaptation of

50   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations Roberta, is indispensable to the plot. And not only to the plot. Morris Dickstein in Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009) sees dance, not as an ‘escape into superficial glitter or romance but as a celebration of a collective social potential to surmount reversals and catastrophes by finding one another, by taking beautiful steps and turns together’ and interprets ‘the message of the series’ as ‘not that different from more socially conscious hard-times fables like The Grapes of Wrath: separately we fail, we lose heart and fall into confusion; together we have a chance.’57 Beyond its key role in the immortal Fred and Ginger series, Roberta also serves as an early model of film adaptation of the Broadway musical that succeeds on its own terms; arguably surpasses its stage model in dramatic power, musical interest, and visual appeal; and paves the way for the great (and not so great) film adaptations ahead, adaptations ‘lovely to look at’ and ‘delightful to know.’

Notes 1. Zoë Heller, ‘What Are We Meant to Get Out of Movies Based on Short Stories and Novels?’ New York Times, 24 December 2013. 2. Heller, ‘What Are We Meant to Get Out of Movies.’ 3. Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1987), 289. 4. Fortunately, a decade later in the Rodgers and Hart biopic, Words and Music, audiences would finally get a chance to hear Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney sing two of the songs stolen from arms of Babes: Garland and Rooney singing ‘I Wish I Were in Love Again,’ Garland alone on ‘Johnny One Note.’ If they did not live in the American South, film audiences could also hear Lena Horne sing encores of ‘Where or When’ and ‘The Lady Is a Tramp.’ The moral of this story is that viewers who want to hear the score of Babes in Arms on film probably should rent or download Words and Music. 5. In addition to the two songs from Babes in Arms retained in the film adaption, the title song and ‘Where or When,’ the stage score featured a prominent collection of notable songs, including ‘I Wish I Were in Love Again,’ ‘Way Out West,’ ‘My Funny Valentine,’ ‘Johnny One-Note,’ ‘Imagine,’ and ‘The Lady Is a Tramp,’ all of which were replaced. Filling in for these stage gems in the film is a musical hodgepodge, three songs by Nacio Herb Brown, (‘Good Morning,’ ‘You Are My Lucky Star,’ and ‘Broadway Rhythm’), ‘God’s Country’ by Harold Arlen and ‘Yip’ Harburg, Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s ‘I’m Just Wild about Harry,’ and ‘Daddy Was a Minstrel Man’ by Roger Edens. 6. Still I confess that the film adaptation of On the Town loses its luster with the intrusion of Roger Edens’s ‘Main Street,’ ‘You’re Awful,’ ‘On the Town,’ ‘Count on Me,’ and ‘Prehistoric Man,’ and would prefer to hear Leonard Bernstein’s own lyrical ‘Lonely Town’ and ‘Lucky to Be Me,’ the delightfully suggestive ‘I Can Cook Too,’ and the breathtakingly poignant ‘Some Other Time.’ Unfortunately, producer Arthur Freed did not appreciate Bernstein’s songs as much as we do today, and he was the boss. Bernstein might have insisted on a non-interpolation clause, as Kurt Weill did before the filming of One Touch of Venus, in which no music by other composers could be inserted, but had he done so the film musical On the Town, which I believe works well on its own terms, might have turned into a play with some exuberant and incongruous incidental music sung or danced here and there.

Adapting Roberta   51 7. Stephen Banfield, Jerome Kern (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 254–255; quoted in Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from ‘Show Boat’ to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 159. 8. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings, 159. 9. The source material does not permit a completely accurate text for what was heard on opening night on 18 November 1933, but in 2014 New World Records released a sensible and artistically satisfying reconstruction by Larry Moore and Sean O’Donoghue accompanied by invaluable scholarly notes. The cast includes Annalene Beechey as Stephanie, Kim Criswell as Scharwenka, Patrick Cummings as John Kent, Jason Graae as Huckleberry Haines, and Diana Montague as Madame Roberta. The recording also features the Orchestra of Ireland conducted by Rob Berman performing the original orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett. New World Records 80760–2 (2 CDS) (2014). ‘Let’s Begin’ (vocals by Fred Astaire and Candy Candido), ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’ (vocal by Ginger Rogers), and ‘I Won’t Dance’ (vocals by Rogers and Astaire and a ‘feelthy piano’ solo by Astaire), recorded in 1935, can be heard on Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers at RKO, Motional Picture Soundtrack Anthology, Turner Classic Movies Music, R2 72957 (2CDS) (1998). 10. ‘Jerome Kern Sails for Land,’ New York Times, 25 June 1933, X1. 11. An extended version of this song based on the original orchestrations of Robert Russell Bennett can be heard in the Appendix of the New World Records reconstruction of Roberta (see note 9). 12. Gerald Bordman, Jerome Kern: His Life and Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 353. 13. Alice Duer Miller, Gowns by Roberta (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1933), 12. 14. Miller, Gowns by Roberta, 10. 15. Otto Harbach, Roberta Libretto 1933, Act 1, Scene 1, p. 10. 16. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings, 164 and 317–318. 17. Otto Harbach, Roberta Libretto, 44 18. Harbach, Roberta Libretto, 42. New Dictionary of Slang, ed. Robert  L.  Chapman (New  York: Harper & Row, 1986), 426. For a slightly later origin, 1941, see The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, ed. John Ayto and John Simpson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 254. 19. Chapman, New Dictionary of Slang, 44. Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan E. Lighter (New York: Random House, 1997), 647. 20. The August 23 Treatment, Roberta 3 RKO-S350 is twenty-five pages; the 5 September Treatment (re-copied on 13 September), Roberta 3 RKO-B5350 is thirty-two pages. 21. Ginger Rogers, Ginger: My Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 136. 22. Quoted in John Franceschina, Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 62. 23. Franceschina, Hermes Pan, 62. 24. Andre Sennwald, ‘The Music Hall Presents “Roberta,” a Brilliant Musical Film—“Living on Velvet” ’ New York Times, 8 March 81935. 25. Fred Astaire, Steps in Time (New York: Harper, 1959), 205. 26. John Mueller, Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films (New York: Wings, 1985), 410. 27. Dunne was the unequivocal star and was listed as such in the RKO Studio of Production Cost. At $45,000 her salary surpassed the earnings of director William Seiter ($39,055.54) and more than doubled that of Astaire ($21,000), which in turn nearly doubled Rogers’s salary ($11,477). Salaries for the other parts had been determined, but the only other actors assigned

52   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations at the time the budget was drawn were Roberta (Helen Westley) with $5,333. 33 and John Kent (Randolph Scott) with $4,833.33. The comprehensive but undated Production Cost sheet can be found in the Roberta RKO holdings in the UCLA Arts Library Special Collections. 28. Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (New York: Outerbridge & Lazard, 1972), 46. 29. John Mueller, Astaire Dancing, 8. 30. Bob Thomas, Astaire: The Man, The Dancer (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 106. 31. Roy Hemming, The Melody Lingers On: The Great Songwriters and Their Movie Musicals (New York: Newmarket, 1986), 93. 32. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings, 157. 33. Fred Astaire, Complete Recordings Volume 1, 1923–1930 with Adele Astaire, Nostalgia Naxos 8.120501 (2000). 34. Sam Mintz and Jane Murfin, Roberta, Revised Final Script, 27 November 1934, p. 31; Miller, Gowns by Roberta, 39. 35. https//www.youtube.com/watch?v=T70JmCzxqmk, accessed 24 January 2017. 36. Roberti’s two recorded songs from College Rhythm, ‘College Rhythm’ and ‘Take a Number from One to Ten,’ can be heard on Ethel Merman (1932–1935), Lyda Roberti (1934), Mae West (1933), Sony WK 75017 (1991). 37. Mueller describes a film clip of ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’ housed in Miles Kreuger’s Institute of the American Musical that ‘suggests Rogers is imitating some of Roberti’s mannerisms as well as her accent’ (John Mueller, Astaire Dancing, 69n4). 3 8. Craig Zadan, Sondheim & Co., 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 147. 3 9. Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book, 47. 40. New York: T. B. Harms Co.; London: Chappell & Co. Ltd [PN 40433], [1950]. 41. ‘Back Home Again in Indiana’ by Ballard McDonald and James F. Hanley. ‘Donna Lee,’ based on the chord progression of ‘Indiana,’ was first recorded in 1947 by Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Widely attributed to Parker, ‘Donna Lee’ is now believed to be by Davis. 42. Notes to the New World Records Roberta, 35. 4 3. John Mueller, Astaire Dancing, 66. 44. In the Tams-Witmark stock-amateur libretto and the song list published in Richard C. Norton’s A Chronology of American Musical Theater, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 704, the song is listed as ‘Something’s Got to Happen.’ 45. For the published and screen versions of Hammerstein’s lyrics for ‘I Won’t Dance’ in Three Sisters, see Complete Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, ed. Amy Ash (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 206–207; for Dorothy Fields’s revised lyric in the film, see Deborah Grace Winer, On the Sunny Side of the Stree: The Life and Lyrics of Dorothy Fields (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 87. 46. Lyric published in Winer, On the Sunny Side of the Street, 85. 47. Interview with Dorothy Fields, in Max Wilk, They’re Playing Our Song (New York: Zoetrope, 1986), 56. 48. Interview with Dorothy Fields. 49. See, for example, Gerald Bordman, Jerome Kern, 351. 5 0. Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 69. 51. Allen Forte, The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era 1924–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 55. 52. Stephen Banfield, Jerome Kern (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 179.

Adapting Roberta   53 53. Thanks to Eliza Block for preparing Figure 2.4. 54. Arlene Croce, The Fred and Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book, 83. 55. In contrast to assemblages of comic talent that include Alice Brady (The Gay Divorcee), Helen Broderick (Top Hat, Swing Time), Eric Blore (Flying Down to Rio, The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Swing Time), Edward Everett Horton (The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Shall We Dance), Franklin Pangborn (Flying Down to Rio, Carefree), and Erik Rhodes (The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat), Roberta offered the lesser known Luis Alberni and John ‘Candy’ Candido. Alberni, who played the Carioca Casino manager in Flying Down to Rio, was cast as the proprietor of the Café Russe, Voyda, who comically expresses his disappointment and over-the-top outrage when Astaire’s band turns out to be a bunch of ‘pale face Americans’ called the Wabash Indianians when he expected genuine Wabash Indians. The other major comic character in Roberta was Candido, who displayed his falsetto voice and female drag, punctuated by sudden deep bass outbursts in ‘Let’s Begin,’ in which he played the bass as well. In a lesser comic role is Gene Sheldon, who dances in a rare male trio with Fred and Candido in ‘Let’s Begin’ and played the banjo when he was unable to get his fingers unstuck. Finally, the French teacher Adrian Rosley was definitely a bargain at the $200 they paid him to give his promising pupil a rousing vocabulary lesson. 56. Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book, 32. 57. Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 386.

CHAPTER 3

Get ti ng R e a l Stage Musical versus Filmic Realism in Film Adaptations from Camelot to Cabaret Raymond Knapp

One of the basic problems besetting the adaptation of stage musicals to film is that the two media often differ considerably not only regarding what will read to an audience as ‘real’ (versus stylized, fantastic, imagined, idealist, or simply false or unconvincing), but also regarding how a sense of the real is created, and how that reality figures in the story and its successful presentation.1 A well-established belief, shared by fans and detractors alike, is that musicals, whether on stage or on screen, are less concerned with reality than with escaping it. But the reductive corollary to this belief, that a convincing sense of reality is not relevant to musicals, is clearly untrue since some sense of what is real must always be evident if alternatives are to be well understood in dramatic terms. Even when fantasy or escape are paramount in a musical, the possibility of merging these with the real—whether making dreams ‘come true’ or substituting one reality for another—is inevitably an important driver to that musical’s plot. Traditionally, and generally in practice, the most important business of a stage ­musical will occur during its musical numbers, even if framing action and dialogue provide necessary context and, at times, will also foreground key events that are not given musical expression. In this sense, the ‘reality’ of a stage musical lies first of all in its songs. The stylization that takes place already in narrative film—in particular, its frequent recourse to ‘background’ music to set the scene and provide continuity—has often created sufficient space to absorb that dimension of stage musicals, but not always or consistently. Indeed, film music can be an especially unreliable bridge in this regard, since filmmakers more often than not position music well back in the mix of signifiers, as ‘unheard melodies’ setting context rather than carrying the film’s central dramatic business.2 Moreover, during some phases in the historical development of film as a narrative art, notions of filmic realism have made it hard for musicals to preserve their song-dominated hierarchies when adapted to film. This became a particularly thorny

56   musical theatre screen adaptations problem with the development of new standards and rationales for filmic realism in the 1960s and beyond. Many audiences for musicals during the early stretches of this period saw adaptations as opportunities to see versions of shows they already knew, at least on the basis of their cast albums. Yet, in creating a specifically filmic sense of reality, film adaptations of musicals often foreclosed a central function of their songs, which, rather than establishing the ‘real,’ often appeared as artificial intrusions within the realities established according to more basic filmic conventions. Songs—one of the defining ­features of a musical and the primary draw for stage musicals’ crossover fans—became increasingly irrelevant and distracting in an environment that was ostensibly created, in part, to support them. The difficulty many adaptations had in negotiating this conflict, beginning around the same historical moment in the mid-1960s when the ‘Golden Age’ for Broadway musicals seemed to be waning and the Hollywood studio system was showing signs of strain, reinforced two related notions: that something that had been working well no longer did so, and that musicals, unable to adapt convincingly to the new standards of reality operative in film, thereby demonstrated their increasing irrelevance, especially to the political realities that had been to some extent the motivating impulse for those new standards of filmic realism. To be sure, the newly fraught issues attending adaptation likely did not themselves engender the crisis for musicals on Broadway; that crisis has been more often understood in terms of the development of rock musicals, the a­ ttendant changes in the use of amplification (which affected the sound environment of all ­musicals), attitudinal shifts regarding the deployment of choreography, the rise of the ‘concept’ musical (seen by many—however indistinct the category may be—as an enemy of traditional narrative), and New York City’s economic decline (especially as it affected the area around Times Square), among other factors more local to Broadway’s continuously developing practices.3 Nevertheless, the apparent severing of the conduit between Broadway and Hollywood did much to deepen Broadway’s already festering crisis. Part of this was economic, since stage musicals could no longer look confidently to a marketsustaining filmic afterlife, once the Hollywood connection became less viable. But the effects also ran deeper. When much-hyped adaptations did not live up to expectations, they drew increasing attention to the specific question of how Broadway musicals could be understood as relevant during the troubled political scene of the 1960s and early 1970s. Each new iteration of the pattern seemed to offer additional proof of the genre’s inability to rise to the era’s general challenge for the depictive arts to ‘get real,’ undermining the musical’s generic conventions, and the aspirational convictions behind those conventions, in the process.4 In order to understand better this crucial period, which produced an upsurge of highprofile adaptations of musicals that were considered, by and large, failures, I first discuss briefly the problem of adaptation of musicals within the context of filmic realism, particularly for this period, before considering a handful of such films from the late 1960s and early 1970s, so as to delineate some of the difficulties in bringing filmic reality into balance with other elements within musicals that were created with the dynamic and standards of stage-based stylization in mind. I begin my survey with an extended

stage musical versus filmic realism   57 discussion of Camelot (Joshua Logan, 1967), a particularly expensive adaptation that failed to recoup even half of its expenses during its initial theatrical run and which has often been cited for its central role in undermining the perceived viability of film adaptations of stage musicals during this period. I then more briefly discuss two other adaptations that, like Camelot, partook of Broadway’s fantasy-idealist strain, Finian’s Rainbow (Francis Ford Coppola, 1968), and Man of La Mancha (Arthur Hiller, 1972). As a counterbalance to this strain, I then turn to Sweet Charity (Bob Fosse, 1969), considered alongside West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961) and Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) as one of a trio of films that contend, if in different ways, with grim realities. Within this group, Charity provides an interesting pivot for how film adaptations of Broadway musicals could find their own path to ‘getting real.’

Filmic Realism and Musicals in the Later 1960 s In the series of essays compiled in What Is Cinema?, André Bazin offers nuanced ­explorations of many topics relevant to the specific issues I address in this chapter, including filmic realism and its various foundations, the too-often essentialized differentiations between cinema and theatre aesthetics, and some problems relating to film adaptations of literature, the latter gesturing toward speculation about what happens when works in one artistic medium, type, or genre inspire work in others. Filmic realism, for Bazin, has many facets, deriving fundamentally from photography’s capacity to document reality. Yet, as his discussions of deep focus and other technologies make clear, even this capacity must be managed carefully to be convincing. As delineated in other explorations of realism in art, perhaps most influentially in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis,5 the constructed and contingent nature of an artistically realized sense of realism is evident at every turn. As Bazin succinctly puts it, ‘realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice.’6 As corollaries to this fundamental insight, each art form, to some extent independently, creates its own sense of reality, so that adaptations ‘work’ only if the derived form answers first to this imperative. Crucially for my own exploration of these issues, ­ usicals, those although film musicals create a sense of reality differently than stage m specific means are not set in stone but rather change according to evolving cultures and technologies, being responsive to both the invention of the filmmaker and the receptivity of an audience—who may, after all, respond differently depending on their generic expectations. This flexibility is essential, since, while an adaptation’s sense of reality must be grounded within filmic sensibilities, it must also find initial purchase in its source materials. Complicating the situation in the late 1960s were two developments that affected the deployment of music, and particularly song, in films. Film musicals based on rock and

58   musical theatre screen adaptations pop stars (such as Elvis Presley), which had emerged in the late 1950s as a niche-market subgenre, had mostly operated outside the standards of both stage musicals and filmic realism, and thus posed little threat to standard modes of adapting stage musicals. But that changed dramatically with Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), whose styles, especially in the former case, were based on a filmic correlative to the ways in which the Beatles, through their anarchic personae and the disruptive energies of their performances and interactions with fans, had transformed the world of popular music. Moreover, that filmic correlative, a documentary-styled filmic realism, labeled cinéma vérité by French filmmakers and theorists during the early 1960s, would by the end of the decade drastically undercut the use of underscore in narrative film in favour of diegetic music, in the process opening up a major place for the use of popular music in films, typically diegetic and seen to have both greater relevance and larger commercial appeal. In Julie Hubbert’s summation, regarding Hollywood films in the early 1970s: Popular music was dominating film music because young filmmakers realized that it had a cultural immediacy and a range of associations that orchestral scores did not. . . . [Along with] this striking stylistic change, the evidence of an additional and equally important change is both audible and visible. . . . Motivated by a new aesthetic of realism, these films reveal a preoccupation not only with the sound or style of film music but [also] the placement of music within the film . . . a change punctuated by both the audible rejection of a thirty-five-year tradition of nondiegetic music, and the visual allegiance to a “source music only” policy.7

‘Unheard melodies,’ which had been used to help impart a sense of realism to narrative film, were thus increasingly understood to undermine filmic realism. And, in turn, this developing aesthetic of filmic realism, coupled with the newly emergent preference for youth-oriented popular music in films (for which Lester’s two Beatles films and the 1967 Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back helped pave the way), had by the end of the decade eroded the foundational support for the kind of straightforward transference of stage musicals to film that had held sway for the previous decade. Even apart from these considerations, which undermined traditional presentations of musicals on film in general, there were more specific reasons for the failure of some adaptations during this period, deriving from the play between idealism and realism within the stage musicals on which they were based. This dynamic posed particular problems for the adaptation of Camelot.

Camelot and the Idealist-Reality Divide The stage musical Camelot (Lerner and Loewe, 1960) pits the idealism of a reconceived chivalry against the reality of human inclinations regarding, especially, lust and power. On one side we have King Arthur’s idealist vision, represented by the phrase ‘might for

stage musical versus filmic realism   59 right’ and the symbolic democracy of the famous Round Table. But however committed Camelot’s court is to Arthur’s idealist vision, opposing sentiments are many, and crucially placed. For example, Arthur’s principal confidant, King Pellinore, takes a jaundiced view of the new order, noting especially the simmering discontent of the knights, whose aggressive inclinations are being unnaturally held in check by its stringent codes. When the assembled court is first confronted with the insufferable fanaticism of Lancelot’s idealism, it rebels against both the conceit of his claimed purity and prowess and his idealist incapacity to relax and enjoy life. Egged on by Queen Guenevere, the best and strongest of the knights—Sirs Lionel, Sagramore, and Dinadan—are easily recruited to challenge Lancelot’s self-proclaimed prowess, even though he has already bested Arthur in one-to-one combat. Mordred—the illegitimate consequence of Arthur’s youthful lust, appearing in the second act as a constant reminder that Arthur himself has not always upheld the standards he now imposes on everyone else—exploits the inevitable hypocrisies of an idealism that fails to give human cravings their due, pursuing his lust for power with the aid of his aunt Morgan Le Fey’s dark powers. Placed in the centre of this precarious balance between idealism and human realities is the emergent, overwhelming love between Lancelot and Guenevere, at the same time idealist and lustful, its carnality barely held in check by the lovers’ steadfast commitment to chivalry and fierce personal devotion to Arthur. Both the idealism and the opposing realities that matter to Camelot are expressed directly in song, ennobling the former and enticing us to accept and even enjoy the ­latter. Yet idealism is in this area given decidedly shorter shrift, at least overtly. Although the title song will later serve as an emblem of the show’s idealism, it is introduced with tongue fully in cheek; the song connects more to the realm of fairy tale—as a lingering vestige of Merlin’s magic—than to the show’s more adult strain of idealism. A series of reprises of ‘Camelot’ clearly articulates the transition between the two strains, extending from an immediate reprise by Guenevere, as a gesture of her acceptance of Arthur as husband, to a second reprise just after Arthur first articulates his new order, to a third introducing Lancelot’s ‘C’est Moi,’ and to an eventual fourth in the face of Arthur’s ­anticipated defeat in the final battle, as the show’s finale brings the song back one last time in order to consign Arthur’s idealist vision to the realm of myth. Yet, already with Lancelot’s early reprise, it becomes necessary to temper the cloying grandiosity of the show’s sung expressions of idealism, which in ‘C’est Moi’ are rendered more palatable by a simulation of unintentional camp, a seeming extension of the tongue-in-cheek aspect of Arthur’s early version of the title song. Moreover, the sincerely presented exagger­ ations of Lancelot’s grandiosity also invite us to realize how ill-equipped he is to face hard truths about himself and his ideals, even as we also see that his naïveté is essential to his stunning physical and spiritual refinement. In this way, camp itself acts as an anti-idealist force, encouraging us not to take idealism too seriously however much we may admire it. Against this fairly modest and often compromised trajectory of sung idealism, most of the rest of the score explores, if often playfully, the realities arrayed against it. Guenevere’s ‘The Simple Joys of Maidenhood’ is already much less innocent than Arthur’s framing ‘charm’ songs, ‘I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight’ and ‘Camelot,’ and it is hard to deny that the bloodthirstiness of ‘Simple Joys’ is ‘real’ when it reappears more

60   musical theatre screen adaptations concretely, if with similarly wicked wit, in ‘Then You May Take Me to the Fair,’ which Guenevere launches as a goad to her three champions, inviting them to pit their wits against hers, and their jousting skills against Lancelot’s, even to the death. Moreover, ‘Take Me to the Fair’ follows soon after ‘The Lusty Month of May,’ also led by Guenevere, a song that just as frankly acknowledges how seductive and natural are the ‘ways of the flesh’ that Lancelot has just renounced in ‘C’est Moi.’ As the story evolves, three songs then treat of the illicit love between Lancelot and Guenevere, prepared by Arthur’s ruefully inadequate ‘How to Handle a Woman’ and following the full trajectory of the lovers’ journey, from their yearning separateness (Guenevere’s ‘Before I Gaze at You Again’ and Lancelot’s ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’) to their bittersweet, and u ­ ltimately disastrous, farewell (Guenevere’s ‘I Loved You Once in Silence’). And, in between the latter two second-act ballads, both Mordred’s ‘The Seven Deadly Virtues’ and the knights’ ‘Fie on Goodness!’ temper their explicit rejections of Arthur’s idealism with insouciant wit, if overridden in the latter case by the threat of incipient violence. But presenting the full array of realities deployed against Camelot’s idealism in song does more than charm us into accepting and even enjoying them. Rather more to the point, these songs both control and in their way idealize the baser impulses they explore, the former by allowing their singers to position themselves above them, managing their expressed sentiments through consistently witty lyrics—often among the wittiest ever written for Broadway—and through a variety of musical ontologies, most relevantly the sanguinities of deftly executed song forms.8 I have elsewhere described the idealist musical processes at work in the opening network of songs, whereby one song takes as its inspirational seed an interior moment from a preceding song,9 but there is something more dramatically obvious at work as well. Undergirding the bloodthirstiness of Guenevere’s ‘Simple Joys’ are her introductory prayer to St Genevieve, her understandable desire to control her own fate, and an idealist image of chivalry, whereas ‘Take Me to the Fair’ arises from the need to defend, against a meddlesome outsider, the sense of comradery established through Camelot’s ‘new order of chivalry’ and recently celebrated in ‘Lusty Month.’ Indeed, the celebratory function of ‘Lusty Month’ justifies and even overshadows its naughty encouragement of sexual licentiousness, an element introduced largely in order to be put aside; thus, the song’s overt lustiness is relatively absent from the four serious love-themed songs, underscoring through contrast that the latter are couched in terms more idealist than carnal. Even though ‘If Ever’ is saturated with eroticized images of the beloved, it is set up by an idealizing madrigal that ends with the couplet, ‘The reason to live is only to love / A goddess on earth and a God above,’ a pious sentiment much too pat to carry an erotic charge. ‘If Ever’ is, moreover, the only one of the love songs that ventures to describe the object of desire in physical terms. And the final song in the series, ‘I Loved You,’ clarifies that Lancelot’s and Guenevere’s love has throughout remained in the realms of private thoughts, soulful looks, and, eventually, shared words, stopping short of full physical expression. The film version of Camelot, in contrast, includes a montage during the instrumental bridge of ‘If Ever’ that clearly indicates that their love has been consummated, sketching the progress of the lovers’ affair while broadly paralleling the seasonal structure of the

stage musical versus filmic realism   61 ballad. This shift in the plot from an unrequited love to a requited one, which—as Megan Woller argues persuasively—reflects shifting attitudes toward sexuality in the 1960s,10 has been understood by some to be the key to the film’s failure, and even as a betrayal of the stage show’s sensibilities. Thus, and reportedly for this reason, when the show returned to Broadway in 1980, while it retained many features created for the film, it restored the lovers’ passionately stoic forbearance.11 Yet, altering this dimension of the story is only one of many ways that the film ­disturbs the careful balance between idealist and realist maintained on stage, which together leave the film in hapless confusion, on multiple levels, about how its realities are constituted. When new materialities are introduced for the film, they often carry a strong dose of the bizarre and ludicrous, and conflict directly with realities established by other means. Similarly, when songs do continue, as they had on stage, to carry the ‘real,’ their words often blatantly contradict what the film shows us, with no notice taken of the discrepancies. Moreover, when live action simply substitutes for song in establishing the real, it often lacks conviction. As a result of its unsure footings, the film’s ­structure creaks precipitously, supported inadequately by the conflicting modes of storytelling, and, in the end, it virtually abandons its principal characters, whose free fall from competency to a stark, shared inability to manage themselves and their situation, seems too far too fast. I will consider each dimension of these failures separately before taking up their disastrous effect on the principal storyline. There are several dimensions to the newly introduced filmic materialities. Perhaps most obviously, a great deal of money was spent in its making ($15,000,000, $2,000,000 over budget, with an initial gate netting only $7,000,000), but that money’s visibility on the screen does not make the film’s action seem real and often accomplishes the reverse. As Matthew Kennedy describes the situation in Roadshow!, Fifteen million dollars just sits there on the screen, proud, gauzy, and inert. It has no spark of life, just tremendous visual busyness. . . . [Camelot’s] olio of visual and ­dramatic moods, the dark, dank forest, medieval realism, musical fantasy, costumes as fashion parade, and flavorful crowds entertain as if Arthur’s court was the Renaissance Pleasure Fair.12

‘Production values’ sustained by a generous budget, including exotic locations with ­lavish sets and costumes, while they can create and support some sense of the real, are not as important to that sense as what people in a film say and do, or how consistently the film’s visual dimension confirms what we otherwise know to be true. For example, much of the jousting sequence works very well, and its sense of reality is in general well supported by the knights’ armour, horses, lances, and so forth. In particular, much is made of the jousters’ physicality during and after the sequence: they sweat, they bleed, one of them even dies and is resurrected through faith, and it all feels real enough for us to believe that Guenevere is in that moment of resurrection herself transfigured by  what she suddenly recognizes in Lancelot (  video example 3.1). But this ­supposedly medieval jousting sequence is set up, inappropriately, as pure Renaissance

62   musical theatre screen adaptations Fair—just as Kennedy suggests—replete with madrigalesque vocalizing in a cappella harmony, offering a brief reprise of ‘Lusty Month’ (  video example 3.2). Moreover, the sequence’s sense of authenticity is further undermined by a number of close-ups, disrupting continuity through being obviously filmed separately, and showing us as much makeup as they do sweat, tears, blood, or other tokens of the ‘real.’ Indeed, the film is saturated with this sort of visual tic, its often effective full-bodied acting within a larger space suddenly alternating with equally effective facial acting in (often heavily madeup) close-ups, with insufficient care for creating a sense of continuity between the two.13 Moreover, aside from this pervasive flaw, which undermines a sense of filmic realism throughout, there are numerous sequences invented for the film that play out as ludicrously ill-conceived, even beyond the campy ‘Renaissance Fair’ before the jousts. In one such second-act sequence, effusively grateful town folk offer a distracted Arthur, at presumptive length, the keys that are no longer needed in their village thanks to the elimination of crime under the new order. In an earlier sequence, sheaves of written proclamations of that new order are dispersed from a castle tower as part of a montage that culminates in men and women throughout the land and across the sea—seemingly from all walks of life, including field workers—avidly reading those flyers, without any question being put as to how they were produced in such profusion (an anachronistic printing press? an army of scribes working night and day?), why they seem to be preaged (yellowed and somewhat frayed), and how they are being read by an illiterate peasantry (see Figure 3.1 and video example 3.3). Another incongruity arises from the fine-looking round table created for the film, the basis for an impressive scene when the knights take their seats just before intermission ( video example 3.4) and for a later scene when it collapses, unable to sustain the weight of knights on horseback, whom Mordred has incited to drunken rampage. The latter is a literalizing extension of Mordred’s figurative suggestion, during ‘Guenevere’ in the stage show, that the table ‘is cracking’ (‘Can you hear the timbers split?’). Both scenes carry significant power, even if there is something coarse about the latter’s

Figure 3.1  Medieval peasants reading pre-aged proclamations in film adaptation of Camelot.

stage musical versus filmic realism   63 recasting of the figurative in literal terms. But it nevertheless all rings false, simply because the table isn’t big enough. Dialogue unaltered from the stage version makes both the table’s seating capacity and the number of knights who must have a place at it clear: Guenevere early on claims it seats 150, a figure that is later confirmed when it is reported separately that 80, or ‘over half ’ of the knights are killed when Lancelot rescues Guenevere from the stake. While it is somewhat difficult to pull a head count from the film’s long shot of the knights convening around the table (especially since some of the figures present are squires), it is obviously much too small; a generous assessment of its capacity on that basis would be at most 40, and probably fewer. As noted, many songs in the film retain their status as creators or reflections of the ‘real,’ and in key instances the film reinforces that reality, or inflects it, in direct ways. Not always, of course; the title song’s fanciful description of Camelot’s climate, where ‘Winter is forbidden till December’ is given no reality in the film, and is seemingly contradicted by the wintry scene (an invention for the film)—whose chill is, however, tempered by an overall sense of wonderland. Most interesting are the times when a song’s reality is significantly inflected in the film; this happens twice, in both cases involving the central love triangle. On stage, ‘Lusty Month’ celebrates and winks, but on film the wink becomes a leer leading to outright dalliance, whose resultant couplings undercut the group celebration and make us much more conscious of Guenevere’s restless separateness from the rest of the court. This is first of all because she has no real partner; if we hadn’t just seen Arthur distracted by Lancelot’s arrival, we might well wonder where he is. This is not really an issue on stage, especially if the dance part of the number is staged as courtiers dancing for their queen. But we are shown much more actual lovemaking in the film’s version of the number, obviously inspired by the lyrics. Indeed, when Guenevere and her women companions run in during the song’s introduction, they end, not by dancing, but by lying in invitational full repose on a convenient hillside, where all but Guenevere are instantly paired with obliging suitors; she thus begins the song proper—at a greatly reduced tempo, languidly eroticized—as a single female isolated within a tableau of ­couples ‘making their way,’ a wallflower at an orgy, who at first sings facing upward, to the sky and for herself, as everyone else seems otherwise engaged. Close-ups allow her to dwell on each nuance of the lyric, underscoring its clever turns of phrase and emphasizing the salacious content, punctuated with many vignettes of couples in various stages of coupling. Guenevere herself, without a partner, and in apparent illustration of the line ‘Proper or im-,’ eventually cozies up to a horse (resonating disturbingly with earlier images of her grooming the nether regions of a horse while conversing with Arthur about chivalry, their conversation continuing with the horse’s genitals looming above their heads) ( video example 3.5). Only as the song yields to dance does the celebratory dimension emerge fully, yet even then it is never really a group celebration, which it inevitably is on stage. All of this deeply inflects what happens next. During Lancelot’s introduction to the court, Guenevere’s bristling responses are now more pointedly personal (thus, archly giving Lancelot the French for ‘humility,’ elaborately over-pronouncing it) and less

64   musical theatre screen adaptations about defending the group. Her sly attacks come across as an extension of her brooding sexual discontent, delivered with consummate skill by Vanessa Redgrave, whose compelling re-rendering of the role of Guenevere, though wonderfully cinematic in its ­subtlety, takes the film to a place scarcely imagined by the stage show’s songs, while at the same time, in this sequence, shifting her own animus to be more squarely against the strictures of chivalry. Restoring ‘Take Me to the Fair,’ which had been cut during the first Broadway run, allows for an openly mocking engagement with Lancelot, who enters for the song’s conclusion: a brief tag by Guenevere and her three champions on ‘to the Fair,’ who smirk at Lancelot as they saunter past him. Both sequences intensify the direct conflict between Guenevere and Lancelot in a way that gives more agency to her and provides enhanced preparation for the familiar trope of an initial conflict transforming into love, acknowledged retrospectively in the montage sequence of ‘If Ever,’ the film’s other prominent instance of reinforcing and inflecting realities introduced through song. As Woller delineates, each of the specific verbal images of ‘If Ever’ is reproduced as a vignette during the song’s instrumental montage, coming into alignment with the music during the bridge (that is, during ‘Winter’). The alignment is complete by the end of the bridge, with an image of Guenevere catching the ‘fire’s glow,’ just in time so that Lancelot’s vocal reentry for ‘Spring’ may be accompanied by specific seasonal images, the first ones of spring, but then indulging an awkwardly measured reprise of clichéd images for each season in turn (‘Oh, no, not in springtime! / Summer, [. . .] winter [. . .] or fall!’; see Figure 3.2), while the colour filter shifts to reflect each season in turn, with inadvertent campy effect. (Musically, the sequence as a whole follows a Broadway convention, in which an instrumental extension—often a ‘dance break,’ or serving as background for dialogue—is rounded out after the bridge with a sung return of the final repetition of the main melody, the final ‘A’ section of an AABA structure). The matching of verbal images and vignettes in ‘If Ever’ took considerable care, not least because Redgrave’s Guenevere early in the film favoured the pale over the lustrous, especially during her wintry introduction. But even before ‘If Ever,’ once she falls for Lancelot, she becomes quicker to colour, with her enhanced colouring providing a compelling indication of her hyper-sensitized passion. In ‘If Ever,’ with the subtle help of blush makeup and a discreet use of lipstick, she almost matches the lyrics’ description of ‘Your lips red as flame, / Your face with a luster that puts gold to shame.’ Yet there remain significant other problems with the song and its montage sequence that may be traced to the very attempt to bring its verbal images to visual life, and to the film’s clumsiness in reconciling the two sources of the ‘real.’ Guenevere repeats her phrase ‘The past is all I have,’ across the first sequence of the montage, which begins with the first kindling of their love, over the resurrected body of Sir Dinadan. Grounding the montage in images we have seen makes it clear that the song is no mere projection of an imagined physical romance, as in the stage show, but based on specific memories; the montage is retracing the actual progress of their affair. But given how it is set up and framed, we may well ask: Whose memories are these? Even acknowledging the overall success of the sequence, this question draws attention to a fatal rift among song, image, and setting. Thus, the song itself is exclusively Lancelot’s

stage musical versus filmic realism   65

Figure 3.2  Four Seasons of Guenevere in film adaptation of Camelot: Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall.

perspective, which is largely maintained during the vignettes surveyed during the montage, especially as images come into increasing alignment with the song’s lyrics. But the memories the montage represents are set up as exclusively hers (‘all I have’ rather than ‘all we have’), a perspective reinforced by the first two vignettes, reproduced from earlier scenes in which, indeed, her budding love for Lancelot, and her recognition that he returns her love, seem to be the main dramatic content; these memories remind us that she was the principal instigator of both their conflict and their capitulation to love. But for the rest, following the lyrics, we are mainly given images of her from Lancelot’s perspective, and the resulting confusion only increases when Lancelot resumes singing during the ‘Spring’ strain. At this point, his voice first amplifies to a big ‘stage’ voice, but

66   musical theatre screen adaptations then returns to a more intimate singing voice as the memory-montage ends and we return to the present. With his sung conclusion, Lancelot, his arms around Guenevere as he faces the camera—presumably, he had just been singing quite loudly into her ear— completes the merger of montage to framing song, embracing the whole as his perspective, and swallowing up without explanation or comment the clear indication along the way that the montage was deliberately set up as her perspective ( video example 3.6). Another oddness in the film’s rendering of this song derives from the lengths it takes to make Lancelot’s voice (Gene Merlino) ‘belong’ to the visible actor (Franco Nero). While ‘dubbing’ for Nero’s voice was,14 to be sure, simply following a convention for film musicals, that convention was being brought into increased question beginning about a decade before Camelot, by using nonsinging actors with distinctive voices in film adaptations, who perform their own vocals—for example, Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls (1955), or Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1964, reproducing his stage performance). Even if the older convention continued to be followed when necessary, with dubbed voices in The King and I (1956), West Side Story, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music (1965), among others, there is a more immediate urgency to the question of dubbing in Camelot, given that both Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave perform their own songs—in real time, no less—with nuanced facial acting compensating for their lack of vocal training.15 The sotto voce singing of Gene Merlino during ‘If Ever’ seems an attempt to achieve something of Harris’s and Redgrave’s intimate delivery, and Nero’s lip-synching is creditable. Yet in the end, especially recalling ‘C’est Moi’ and its blatant artificialities (including rather less well-realized lip-synching), the union of soundtrack and image is not fully satisfactory according to the standard set by the other principals in the film. Instances of live action substituting for song in the film likewise produce a mixed result. Especially successful, as part of the film’s effort to purge the narrative of the stage show’s magic element, is the elimination of the sequence of numbers with which Mordred persuades Morgan Le Fey to build an invisible wall around Arthur in the Enchanted Forest, so that he can then catch Lancelot and Guenevere ‘in the act’ without the king’s interference. By substituting a scene in which Mordred convinces Arthur to remain in the forest on his own, the film intensifies the psychological drama between father and son, an effect whose believability in context is further enhanced by Arthur being in a state of confusion after Mordred interrupts his communion with the spirit of Merlin. Since Morgan Le Fey otherwise plays no part in the story, she is not missed, and this scenic substitution has been retained in most later-staged versions of the show. Yet, other substitutions are somewhat less successful. Eliminating ‘The Seven Deadly Virtues,’ in combination with eliminating Mordred’s musical encounter with his aunt, takes Mordred completely out of the film’s songscape. This is a trade-off, to be sure, since these musical cuts are compensated by a dramatic enhancement of his later scenes with Arthur, and by the palpable enhancement that removing his songs gives to the sense that he is an alien presence in the court.

stage musical versus filmic realism   67 Similarly mixed, if marginally less successful, are the film’s added dramatic sequences designed to augment our sense of the knights’ growing discontent. The depiction of Lancelot forcing a knight to recant accusations of treasonous adultery too severely compromises our sense of Lancelot as a pillar of moral rectitude, already weakened by the fact—strongly suspected and soon to be confirmed—that the accusations are true. The scene in which Mordred gets the knights drunk, leading to the destruction of the table, seems forced, not only because it makes the figurative splintering of the table literal, but also because the brief, jarring glimpse of Mordred interacting with the knights is singularly unconvincing, bringing attention to the unlikelihood that he—an unmanly outsider and a bastard, who refuses even to try to learn the skills required for knighthood—could so easily gain their confidence. Although ‘Fie on Goodness’ was already cut during the original stage run, its continued absence here (especially for those familiar with the cast album), coupled with the absence of ‘Seven Deadly,’ leaves the forces that most actively seek the table’s destruction with no musical presence. Restoring ‘Fie on Goodness’ (as had been done with ‘Take Me to the Fair,’ similarly cut during the first run) would have brought renewed focus to those forces and carried greater import than the unconvincing live action that serves in its stead. Most unsuccessful, however, are the changes to ‘Guenevere,’ which as a musical ­number on stage and on the cast album carries the weight of inexorable fate within its ­ostinato iterations and Bolero-like intensifications. This powerful number is mutilated in the film. The first verse, detailing Lancelot’s escape, is simply excised; instead, we see his escape, as a well-executed if fairly predictable re-creation of a standard ‘swashbuckling’ sequence, replete with standard, generically appropriate music deriving vaguely from ‘C’est moi’ (unfortunately not obvious enough to make the irony musically explicit, although his encountering Arthur on the very bridge where they first met separately reinforces the moment’s tragic irony). When ‘Guenevere’ does begin, it sounds at first like background music and is soon interrupted so that we might hear a full reading of the verdict and sentence from Guenevere’s trial, in a disembodied voice that sounds distressingly like a voiceover, or an ‘events’ announcer. Once the song gets fully under way, with the addition of woefully uninspired new lyrics (thus: ‘there isn’t too much time’), it is then abruptly curtailed in order to set up the last-minute rescue itself as ‘realistic’ film action, which in the end is ill-staged and mostly unconvincing (Kennedy terms it ‘brief and uninvolving’).16 The latter trade-off, in particular, is catastrophic for any hopes of a satisfactory end to the film, which scuttles the most powerful number of the score for the sake of two sequences of ‘action’ at turns generic and lackluster. Even for those who might prefer such action to their stylized rendering during a musical number, these episodes are a poor substitute for seeing the promised climactic battle. Indeed, the tepid rescue scene seems almost to advertise the fact that we are deprived that cinematic climax, getting instead a re-creation of the understated bittersweet conclusion of the musical, retained for the film but absent its pointed contrast to ‘Guenevere,’ whose effect has long since dissipated. Moreover, after the rescue (for which the song has been reduced to mere background music) we finally hear Mordred’s slightly recast taunt

68   musical theatre screen adaptations addressed to Arthur (‘Your table has cracked, Arthur. Shall I save the timbers for her next stake?’), quite as if the Round Table had not already been destroyed several scenes earlier. In an odd way, the film’s attempts to use live-action enactment to make us believe in the reality of the knights’ growing discontent within the court, and of the extended world around the court, draw attention to how ill-developed both elements are. This might be acceptable if the central story were rendered more compelling through similar processes, but it isn’t. It is one thing to maintain an unrealized sexual tension through looks and songs, as in the stage show, and quite another to bring to life a convincing ­narrative of a consummated love affair under morally and physically difficult circumstances. In this sense, as well as in others already detailed, the montage in ‘If Ever’ is a cop out, since there is no dialogue to demonstrate and document how the lovers found space in either realm, spiritual or material, sufficient to sustain their love and to keep it from discovery. Indeed, we don’t even see them talking during the montage; theirs seems to be an entirely wordless romance. The result is catastrophic in two ways. The dramatic arc of the stage show is sustained not only through maintaining the tension of the love triangle through nonconsummation but also through the capacity of the characters to reflect on their situation, through dialogue and song, giving verbal and musical reality to their idealism. The montage deprives the story of its sustaining tension and scuttles the sustaining, articulate idealism of the principal characters. Guenevere, in the film, thus has the right of it; all any of them are left with is the past, and that creates an entirely new kind of second-act problem.

Transplanting Idealisms: Finian’s Rainbow and Man of La Mancha Black Like Me is a well-intentioned book but also a hopelessly anachronistic one.17

Idealistic musicals can come to seem dated as their urgencies fade and are replaced by others, and during the late 1960s and early 1970s this susceptibility negatively affected several film adaptations of such musicals. Among its other problems, Camelot was already out of step with the times in 1967, but the film version of Finian’s Rainbow, with more than two decades separating its appearances on Broadway (1947) and on film (1968), was much more so. As one of its central plot devices, a bigoted southern white senator becomes enlightened through experiencing directly what it means to be black. This situational moral lesson, audacious in its time, eventually acquired two real-life points of reference, spaced a decade apart, in which white journalists took on black identities in order to report on their experiences; by the time the musical was adapted to film, the device seemed at best tired and at worst highly offensive, not least because its implementation, whether on stage or film, entails using blackface.18

stage musical versus filmic realism   69 Already in the same year that Finian’s Rainbow opened on Broadway, Laura Z. Hobson’s novel Gentlemen’s Agreement, published serially by Cosmopolitan the previous year, became both a bestselling book and a film starring Gregory Peck, relating how a gentile journalist posing as a Jew experienced discrimination in the United States.19 A year later came a similar experiment but in real time: white author Ray Sprigle posed as a black man (chaperoned by John Wesley Dobbs of the NAACP), publishing his experiences in a series of newspaper articles, ‘I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days,’ and the 1949 book, In the Land of Jim Crow. A decade later, in a more elaborate experiment involving medical treatments, journalist John Howard Griffin travelled the South as a black man, unchaperoned, publishing his account serially in Sepia magazine as ‘Journey into Shame,’ and as a book in 1961, Black Like Me. The latter was a sensation, leading to speaking engagements for Griffin and a high-profile film version in 1964 starring James Whitmore, but also leading to death threats against Griffin and his family, their temporary relocation to Mexico out of concerns for safety, and his near-fatal beating in the same year the film came out. Griffin’s project was fuelled by his long-standing opposition to racial persecution and his own wrenching experiences. Fleeing the Gestapo after rescuing Jews with the French underground in the early stages of World War II, he returned to the United States to join the Army Air Corps. Then, while serving in the Pacific, spinal malaria briefly left him unable to walk, and he was later blinded by shrapnel, the latter condition persisting until a spontaneous recovery restored his sight in 1957. But despite Griffin’s early fervor and the insights he gained through experiencing paralysis, blindness, and blackness, he came to realize that he could not, as a white man, continue to serve as a spokesperson for blacks. Griffin’s experience demonstrates one of the ways idealism can come to seem dated, since idealistic impulses toward the disadvantaged from a position of relative privilege, while often advancing their cause, will eventually seem patronizing and presumptuous once disadvantaged populations become their own instruments of change.20 Moreover, this kind of scaffolding does not generally make for lasting art, although its artifacts may still be appreciated for what they are (as period pieces), or in fragments (as with effective musical numbers). In the case of the adaptation of Finian’s Rainbow, the scaffolding had become quite rickety by 1968, since the film is based without major alterations on a twodecades-old stage musical that partakes of cultural and ethnic stereotypes on all sides. Most prominent are the Irish stereotypes, sentimental and superstitious—represented musically by ‘How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,’ ‘Look to the Rainbow,’ and ‘Something Sort of Grandish’—whose presence drives the plot in numerous ways.21 The rural poor of Rainbow Valley in the state of Missitucky likewise produce a compendium of musical stereotypes, if conscientiously blending black and white: ‘This Time of the Year,’ ‘Necessity’ (dropped from the film), and ‘That Great Come-and-Get-It Day.’ Perhaps most problematic is Senator Rawkins joining the Passion Pilgrim Gospeleers in ‘The Begat’ after becoming black, a song that dances awkwardly between his white heritage and the imperative musicalities accruing to his newly acquired skin colour. In 1947, all of these stereotypes may well have registered as a kind of tongue-in-cheek play with a variety of inflected song-types, implicitly acknowledging their overripe

70   musical theatre screen adaptations v­ intage through exaggeration, and thus of a piece with the show’s satire and playing in part as a kind of camp. Indeed, even latter-day stage revivals may perhaps pull off something like this through the connections made between performers and audience in a live setting. But film cannot do this as easily, and—as is the case with Finian’s Rainbow—will typically seem fairly oblivious to any need for distancing itself from its stereotyping portrayals, musical or otherwise. There are two mutually reinforcing reasons for this seeming obliviousness. First, filmmakers had, even before cinema vérité, long been striving to remove the sense of a proscenium arch, aiming to make watching a film feel as much as possible like direct observation of real life. Second, as with film adaptations of any kind, but especially of musicals, there is a felt need, grounded in audience expectations, to bring the given property to life in all its fullness, almost in the manner of documenting it on film (even if those are in fact two quite different things). That felt need was especially strong with Finian’s Rainbow, given the popularity of many of its songs and the two-decade delay in bringing it to the screen, a delay marked by fierce struggles against tempering its story in any way. Indeed, the film’s one obvious gesture toward acknowledging that temporal gap—updating the aspirations of Henry, Woody’s young black friend—seems isolated and inadequate, and it disconcerts by adding modernizing emphasis to the tobacco-industry strand of the plot, quite as if the cancer research of the intervening years, with its resulting ‘Surgeon General’ warnings on cigarettes, hadn’t happened.22 The main idealist strains of Finian’s Rainbow centre on racism and social justice and are in the former concern of a piece with South Pacific’s ‘You Have to Be Carefully Taught,’ which would premiere on Broadway two years later. Both shows starkly present the claim that racism is unnatural; yet, despite the oft-cited courage of Rodgers and Hammerstein in insisting on the inclusion of ‘Carefully Taught,’23 South Pacific’s message about racism is diluted in two ways, by being not directly about racism in America, although the latter informs its characters’ attitudes and actions, and in being presented within a show that indulges its orientalist exoticism without apology. Finian’s Rainbow is much more direct. Senator Billboard Rawkins is a thinly disguised Theodore Bilbo (playing the same kind of ‘name game’ as Woody Mahoney’s evocation of Woody Guthrie), who as a senator and former governor of Mississippi was among the era’s most prominent exponents of white supremacy. More complex is the easy mix of races among the ‘untaught’ whites and blacks who populate Rainbow Valley, whose easy coexistence implicitly makes the point that South Pacific’s ‘Carefully Taught’ would soon make explicit. As a depiction of realities in either 1947 or 1968 ‘Missitucky,’ this is wishful thinking, salutary and good-intentioned, but so far from believable that it nearly makes an opposite and more defendable point: that racism and other forms of xenophobia must be untaught, since they are grounded in inclinations more ‘natural’ than empathy across racial lines. In view of the show’s political agendas, it matters that the film adaptation begins, not with the stage version’s ‘trouble in paradise’ setting, in which the idyllic Rainbow Valley is threatened by Rawkins and his cronies, but with a somewhat fanciful montage sequence of Finian McClonergan and his daughter Sharon (played by the film’s star

stage musical versus filmic realism   71 power, Fred Astaire and Petula Clark) hoofing it across stunning vistas of the United States ( video example 3.7). While this follows a typical maneuver to ‘open up’ a filmed musical (or play) to a more expansive setting than the stage version allows24—in this case, perhaps speaking, as well, to Coppola’s developing ambitions as a filmmaker25—its effect here is to distract from the original show’s presentation of Rainbow Valley’s racial harmony as a starting point.26 The relevant ‘setting’ for the story is thus confusingly displaced from the outset, from a fantasy based in the rural South to a fantasy spun from Finian’s whimsical conceits. While both are in play in the stage ­version, the opening inversion of emphasis for the film disrupts a hierarchy essential to the story’s larger themes. Thus, the show’s affectionately rendered Irish-based whimsy is largely for the fun of it, give or take a plot convenience or two, whereas the ‘wishful thinking’ of Rainbow Valley’s racial harmony and rescue are spun from a fervent idealism that the film allows to slip from its grasp. Why this opening shift matters has to do with the distinction between the film adaptation’s mode of ‘magic realism’ and the stage version’s generic self-description as ‘a musical satire.’ The latter places the emphasis first of all on politics, even if the show’s title deliberately slants its political satire toward an optimism fuelled by Finian’s buoyant fancy. The idealism of Finian’s Rainbow depends on this blend, differently balanced in the two versions, so that what plays on stage as an optimistic satire becomes on film a satirical fantasy. This circumstance leads to two salient observations, the second of which returns us to wider questions about how idealism functions in musicals. First, and most locally, the political allusions that point to the specific genre of Finian’s Rainbow come across as a kind of interference in the film adaptation, which mainly devolves into a romantic fantasy centred around the relationships among its principals. Thus, many of the stage show’s specific political references, often downplayed for the film if not simply excised, come across as somewhat jarring, not just because they are often dated, but also because they make it seem as though the stage show’s real-politics edginess is trying to peek through, only to be preempted by the film’s sometimes awkward negotiation with its own brand of cinematic realism, in which, for example, offstage events in the denouement are depicted onscreen. The latter is particularly telling, since showing Sharon about to be burned as a witch along with her coconspirator Woody (as opposed to having these events happen offstage) effectively displaces the brutality of Missitucky’s racism by upstaging it with the threat of brutality against its white protagonists and inverting the analogy between (modern) lynching of blacks and (long past) witch-burning, by making the latter the more viscerally present. Second and more generally, successful stage musicals with a strong idealist bent, whether satirical or not, tend to require an element of fantasy to counterbalance the gravity imposed by a governing sense of realism, which would otherwise too emphatically undercut the story’s believability. The true-to-life racial politics of Finian’s Rainbow, on stage, are directly managed by the enabling magic of Og’s gold, redirecting its plot to a happy ending. And Camelot is no less emphatic in allowing its idealist version of chivalry to emerge directly from its storybook setting. Man of La Mancha (Broadway 1965; film adaptation 1972) takes a seemingly different course, but with similar contours.

72   musical theatre screen adaptations Cervantes’s Don Quixote, like Finian’s Rainbow, is a satire, but the stage musical based on it is not. Although, like the book, Man of La Mancha presents the farcical story of an elderly man becoming a latter-day knight errant, it takes both its framing prison-based realities and the idealism of the delusional knight quite seriously. And in doing so, it cheats a bit. The prison’s cynical ‘Duke’ early on recognizes Cervantes’s fervent attachment to his manuscript, setting up the ending insight of the more humane ‘Governor,’ that the fictional knight is ‘brother’ to his author, a kinship ruefully acknowledged by the show’s Cervantes (‘God help us—we are both men of La Mancha’). By most accounts, such an admission would have been entirely contrary to the historical Cervantes’s ­sensibilities, and it is important to note that this turnaround is facilitated directly by the transformative power of bringing the story to life in the prison setting, transformative both for the other actor-prisoners (especially the woman playing Aldonza/Dulcinea) and for Cervantes’s own attitude toward his creation. This is especially so regarding the salutary effects of the very thing he satirizes, which offers a partial antidote for humanity’s inhumanity, and which refuels his own courage at a moment in the story when it seems to fail him, when the Inquisition appears, but summons another prisoner instead of him. Thus, his response to the Duke’s insistence, immediately after, that ‘A man must come to terms with life as it is!’: I have seen life as it is. Pain, misery, hunger, cruelty beyond belief. . . . I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle, or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. . . . These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing . . . their eyes filled with confusion, whimpering the question, “Why?” I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Too much sanity may be madness. . . . Perhaps to be practical is madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it ought to be.27

On stage, Man of La Mancha’s scenario of idealism leading to spiritual redemption, even when mocked through overt satire, is rendered believable through the concentrated power of theatrical artifice, triply intensified: by the starkly claustrophobic setting, by the conceit that several characters play characters within characters, in each case ‘trying on’ an alternative to ‘life as it is,’ and by the addition of songs that enact the transformative, heroic idealism of Cervantes/Quijana/Quixote. Each of these is, almost systematically, undermined by the film, which in the end thus fails in a sense much deeper than its errors and ineptitudes relating to casting and vocal dubbing. More fundamental than these choices and circumstances are the miscalculations entailed in ‘opening up’ the film, first by starting outside the prison, and then, more problematically, in transporting the enacted episodes to ‘real’ settings, in the process simultaneously losing the intensity of the prison setting and undermining the nested dimension of its ‘characters within characters.’ In this context, Peter O’Toole’s inability to deliver Quixote’s songs on his own, made excruciatingly obvious through an inept mixture of voices, both ­embodies and symbolizes the film’s more basic failure to give full rein to theatricality, which in this case provides the magic that gives idealism a stage on which to operate.

stage musical versus filmic realism   73 It is perhaps too easy to claim that Man of La Mancha’s mid-1960s idealism was already outmoded in 1972, even if it did appear the same year as the Watergate scandal began to unfold. After all, modestly successful revivals have continued to be mounted into the twenty-first century. Yet, the film seems uncomfortably self-conscious regarding its idealism, trying for large effects, posing, too broad in its gestures, too ponderous in its pacing, and mostly lacking the focused intensity of its stage version—which is to say, it is theatrical, but in the wrong way. It may be that the original show’s very theatricality— which carries its own idealist mode—resisted transfer to the screen. Thus, if Man of La Mancha, like Camelot and Finian’s Rainbow, suffered first of all from bad timing, its ­version of the latter may have been as much internal as external, a matter partly of pacing, and partly of failing to reproduce convincingly the vital, idealistically charged rhythms of its source material.

Realism within the Dynamic of Adaptation Successful adaptation requires that a film’s sense of reality both derive from its source material and be grounded in operative filmic sensibilities. To understand how this dynamic dimension of adaptation operates, we may consider an example with a quite different generic basis and from a later era: the relatively recent vogue for films based on graphic novels (i.e., comic books), for which the relevant generic link is visual rather than primarily aural (as in musicals). At the beginning of this development, which launched in earnest with the Superman series starring Christopher Reeve (1978, 1980, 1983, 1987), conventional standards for filmic realism established the general approach, with (occasionally campy) stylization applied to the ‘darker’ elements in the story. The Superman films tend toward contrasts between bright optimism and a bleak darkness deriving from film noir, albeit tempered with humour, grounding that largely visual duality in the double identity of its central character, whose dark past continues to haunt the film’s present. Although many later film series based on graphic novels have found other complexities within assemblages of diverse characters, often resembling westerns or adventure films, a more distinctive line of development has been securely grounded in both noir traditions and in specific visual effects pointing overtly toward their source material. As with the Superman films, this stylized element has verged often toward camp, but with an edge. Tim Burton’s Batman series (1989, 1992, 1995, 1997) has a pervasive darkness, the result of a director with a dark aesthetic seeking and responding to dark material, casting both heroes and villains into the shadows. Still darker was the later Batman series directed by Christopher Nolan, known as the ‘Dark Knight Trilogy’ (2005, 2008, 2012), which has to date culminated a mainstream trajectory of ‘from lightness to dark’ (much simplified in this account, to be sure), and which has served in turn as background to the much more shadowy worlds created in later series sometimes

74   musical theatre screen adaptations only obliquely related to the more mainstream superhero genre. The Sin City series (2005, 2014) derives its most salient features from the neo-noir graphic novels of Frank Miller, including their problematic temporal splicing, their distinctive look, and their turgid overwriting and portentous manner, in which each dark episode forebodes a greater darkness to come. And Wolverine (2009, 2013, 2017), Jessica Jones (to date, two thirteen-part series, 2015 and 2018), and Luke Cage (to date, two thirteen-part series, 2016 and 2018), although they are given more ‘natural’ settings than the Sin City series, all exist in the shadows of the already deeply shadowed filmic realities established by the two Batman series. Music, of course, plays hugely into how ‘dark’ we perceive these later series to be, as will be evident to anyone recalling John Williams’s heroic strains from the Superman series while watching any of the listed later series. But within the dynamic of adaptation, the point of that musical darkness is to reinforce a visual aesthetic that derives directly from the distinctively novel graphics of graphic novels—framed from above or at otherwise odd angles, emphasizing shadows, and, often enough, darkly campy. Music helps those derived images deliver a sense of a pervasively dark reality, skewed from the everyday one we know, yet easily related to it. But the basic project, for these later series, is to create a sense of realism based on the visual materials and governing sensibilities of what is being adapted to film; music’s role, though essential, is ancillary to the derived visuals and storylines. Filmic adaptation of stage musicals, while a quasi-reversal of this process, is not as starkly divided between the soundtrack and the visual, because stage musicals are already centrally concerned with both music and action. Numbers in musicals are choreographed, whether on stage or, as often in films, in a simulation of a more realistic space. By the 1960s, especially through the work of Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins, choreography had increasingly become key to establishing a stage musical’s governing sensibilities, constituting its character-based realities in terms of movement, and ­giving expressively embodied texture to its musical dimension. As Liza Gennaro describes Robbins’s process, he was already thinking holistically—one might say, almost ­cinematically—in his approach to choreography, creating styles of movement that extended beyond musical numbers, working from the idea that ‘movement is always dictated by character, situation and material’:28 Committed to the ideas of time and place in relation to character, Robbins, first ­relying on Stanislavsky and later employing Method Acting techniques learned at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio . . . [based] his choreographic inventions on authentic sources . . . [creating] made-to-order movement vocabularies to set within the dramatic structures of his dance numbers.29

Building on Robbins’s choreographic link between stage movement and a kind of ­cinematic thinking, and of a piece with the later development of neo-noir graphic novels, edgier musicals in this period were increasingly able to create a cinema-based sense of realism that remained in fundamental ways consistent with their source material

stage musical versus filmic realism   75 while cutting against the grain of the more traditionally grounded attempts, discussed above, to bring musical-based idealism to the screen. The principal figure in this ­development was Bob Fosse, especially as he moved into the role of film director.

Getting Real through Choreography: West Side Story, Sweet Charity, and Cabaret Jerome Robbins, in forging a strong link between choreography and acting more ­generally, and by using approaches that had come increasingly to inform film acting, established a choreographic bridge of sorts between stage and screen. But in some sense this bridge was already well-travelled by the mid-1950s, and not just by Robbins. More and more film adaptations reproduced choreography from the original stage show, including the work of Agnes de Mille (Oklahoma!, 1955; Carousel, 1956), Michael Kidd (Guys and Dolls, 1955), and Robbins himself (The King and I, 1956). To be sure, filmic realism as such was not much at stake in these adaptations, but each nevertheless establishes its cinematic world, however real or unreal, largely through choreography, and manages to sustain a recognizable extension of the stage production in the process. But West Side Story, with its highly stylized versions of street gangs, which Robbins had choreographed as a visual extension of an edgy score within a bleak urban landscape, posed a new set of problems. Realism in the film version necessarily derives from the show’s challenging political situation, which was based in contemporary realities, but that realism is held in check, perhaps of necessity, by Robbins’s stagey stylizations. It is tempting to speculate, however, that had Robbins not been fired from the film of West Side Story, the fairly orderly developmental pattern that would later govern the transfer of neo-noir graphic novels to the screen might not also have held sway for musicals in the 1960s. Certainly, the alignment between choreography and direction facilitated Fosse’s more unitary vision for the worlds his films inhabit. And there are many counterexamples, of worlds imperfectly rendered due to the conflicting visions of director and choreographer, such as Carousel (Broadway 1945, film 1956), where Henry King’s direction and the mix of Rod Alexander’s and Agnes de Mille’s choreography fail to convince, or the even more startling mixes in Finian’s Rainbow, with Hermes Pan (Astaire’s go-to choreographer from 1933 on) adding to the film’s chronological incongruities, mixing oddly with both Coppola’s naturalistic direction and with the memory of Michael Kidd’s ­original choreography. Notwithstanding West Side Story’s ten Academy awards, three Golden Globes awards, and healthy box office, not to mention its mostly positive, even glowing reviews (with the notorious exceptions of Pauline Kael and Dwight MacDonald), that film, too, suffers from its inability to enact a convincing ‘world.’30 The fairly direct transfer of its choreography to the screen produces mixed results, frequently intensifying the situational

76   musical theatre screen adaptations threat of violence but too often denying its very basis in reality. To be sure, other questionable choices contribute to the film’s failure to sustain a sense of realism: its frequent recourse to dubbing, its reliance on sometimes cardboard caricatures for its adults, its not always successful reordering of numbers to eliminate the sense of a first-act curtain, and its odd short-circuiting of the crucial number, ‘A Boy Like That.’ Yet, more basic than these factors is the generally straightforward presentation of the striking choreography, which only rarely penetrates to a deeper level of filmmaking; most often, it remains objectified, the thing being filmed rather than the film’s driving force. Moreover, however effective Robbins’s choreography is on stage, its balletic basis has l­ ittle resonance with New York City’s mean streets, reproduced more realistically on screen. In the end, the stunning choreography has no real purchase on Robert Wise’s screen, so that even the film’s ‘message’ (already a problem for Kael, who always ­distrusted films with a message), unsupported by a consistently established filmic world, is rendered as ineffectual as the film’s adults, who are unable to manage the youthful gangs, unable to go beyond Doc’s bitter condemnation: ‘You kids make this world lousy!’ Slightly over a decade later, another edgy musical with contemporary resonance (although set in pre–World War II Germany) was brought to the screen by Bob Fosse to similarly great critical acclaim and public success, winning a similar array of awards (eight Academy awards, three Golden Globes awards, and seven BAFTA awards) and doing similar box office, but also earning more enduring respect as a film. Bob Fosse’s Cabaret achieves its sense of realism in part by eliminating (nearly) all songs that take place outside the Kit-Kat Klub, and dropping the main subplot that those songs advance. Yet, its success stems in greater part from its powerful use of cross-cutting between the cabaret setting and the world around it. This relational element was already implicit, and occasionally explicit, in many of the ‘topical’ songs performed in the cabaret scenes of the stage show, but it is greatly intensified by the ways in which the film brings those ­elements together through cutting, which often emphasizes parallels in situation and movement between the two worlds. By ruthlessly eliminating all songs that function as songs typically do in musicals—that is, songs that directly advance a character-driven plot—Fosse brought increased emphasis to the film’s starker realities, limning sometimes ambiguous connections between the thuggery of the Nazis and the grotesqueries unfolding on the cabaret stage, each spiraling out of control. As with Camelot, lyrics and images sometimes tell different stories; unlike Camelot, Cabaret does so knowingly. And through its filmic juxtapositions, Cabaret allows its choreography something denied the choreography in West Side Story: it penetrates to the heart of the filmmaking process itself and allows the political dimension to emerge powerfully, if sometimes ambiguous about its specific targets.31 But what made the achievements of Cabaret possible were the experiments Fosse undertook with his adaptation of Sweet Charity three years earlier. The stage version of Sweet Charity, although severely hampered by a jokey script from Neil Simon (to be sure, many have credited Simon for rescuing the show),32 had a lot going for it: its basis in one of Federico Fellini’s best films (Nights of Cabiria, 1957), a great score by Cy Coleman setting ‘top drawer, first rate’ lyrics by Dorothy Fields, and Gwen Verdon, as Charity, leading an ensemble cast performing in director/choreographer

stage musical versus filmic realism   77 Fosse’s distinctive disjointed style. Besides his highly stylized movement vocabulary, Fosse, as director, ‘pushed everything at such a clip that the book’s contradictions and empty spaces washed away behind his vivid, sinuous production numbers. . . . [L]ike Charity, [the show’s] numbers brimmed with an old-fashioned, untempered eagerness to please.’33 As Stacy Wolf notes, in adapting the show from Fellini, its creators also grounded it securely in contemporary culture, with both overt and subtle references to the emergent ‘Single Girl,’ hippie counterculture, television, dance crazes, psychotherapy, and—most pointedly critical—1960s New Yorkers’ notoriously detached sensibilities, even when confronted with someone in dire distress.34 Sweet Charity on stage, especially in its satirical engagement with the world around it, was as grounded in reality as West Side Story,35 and Fosse’s direction, like Robbins’s, accentuated that grounding through stylized, character-driven choreography. But Charity’s satire, Simon’s distracting jokiness, and Fosse’s grotesquerie (which would take a different but related form in his adaptation of Cabaret, three years later) create a useful distance from the need for a naturalist realism that West Side Story’s earnestness does not permit, and from which even ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ offers no true respite. Moreover, the relatively short gap between stage and screen versions of Charity ensured that its contemporary satire would remain relevant, unlike much of the two-decades-old satire of Finian’s Rainbow the previous year. But in adapting Charity to the screen, Fosse still had to contend with the imperative toward realism, fraught, as we have seen in earlier examples, with the potential peril of undercutting the importance of the show’s music. And he still had Simon’s script to contend with. While he would engage well, if not always successfully, with both issues, the most important thing he did was to find a way to bring his approach to choreography into the filmmaking process itself, and in such a way as to reaffirm the show’s allegiance to contemporary pop culture, a connection that would be strengthened later the same year through the success of Easy Rider, with its famously disjointed, episodic style and frequent recourse to jump cuts. Stacy Wolf ’s apt description of Fosse’s ‘jazzy hallmark [choreographic] style of sharp contrasts of motion and surprisingly appealing, awkward movements,’36 applies as well to his production style in the film, particularly when his many stop-action moments are seen to be extensions of the many striking ‘poses’ struck in the early numbers. As Richard Dyer describes it: Fosse makes full use of the musical qualities of film—the rhythmic potential of editing, the melodic sweep of camera movement, the orchestral flair of colour and design. The cuts in “If My Friends Could See Me Now” follow precisely the line of the song.37

In the early series of ensemble dances, ‘Big Spender,’ ‘The Aloof,’ and ‘The Heavyweight’ (the first of these set in the Fan-Dango Ballroom, the latter two in the Pompeii Club, as part of the ‘Rich Man’s Frug’), each focuses cynically on an aspect of courtship, including, in order, the come-on, playing hard to get, and sparring. These elaborate ‘poses’—in Dyer’s description, ‘insistently sexual, yet in an angular, stiffened, ugly way that has nothing of sensuous enjoyment’—together set up Charity’s more innocent posing in

78   musical theatre screen adaptations ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now,’ during which the camerawork and cutting play repeatedly with Shirley MacLaine’s engaging performance, such as intersplicing from multiple takes and making bits run backwards ( video example 3.8). Presumably to emphasize these parallels, both between numbers and between choreography and ­montage, the film leaves out ‘Charity’s Soliloquy’ from the stage show, through which she charts her recovery from her breakup with Charlie, the man who robs her and pushes her off her favourite bridge in Central Park in the first scene. Fosse covers over this (otherwise regrettable) omission mainly through a montage sequence in which a camera plays across a series of staged photographs, creating a sense of catharsis over time. Importantly, curtailing the first scene at the Fan-Dango in this way, while establishing Charity’s close relationship to the other dancers (especially within the multiracial central trio of Charity, Helene, and Nickie), more strongly differentiates Charity from the other taxi dancers, as essentially innocent. Whereas in the stage show she is shown interacting with male customers soon after ‘Big Spender’ (during her ‘Soliloquy’), in the film she seemingly doesn’t partake of the seedy side of the Fan-Dango; indeed, the first time we see her dance with a man is her inept turn with Vittorio Vitale,38 against a backdrop of phoniness left over from ‘Rich Man’s Frug.’ Moreover, while on stage Charity makes it clear that she’s sexually available to Vittorio, the film shows her a little more resistant to his charms, at least in that respect. The reshaping of the opening numbers, along with the consequent emphasizing of Charity’s sexual innocence relative to her cohort, has two important results. First, the breakout number, ‘There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This,’ is more explosive in its effect, providing a tremendous, if temporary, sense of release for Charity, Nickie, and Helene: it ‘opens up’ effectively to the roof to provide a liberating expression of the lyric’s progression, ‘I’m gonna get up, get out, and live it,’ it uses the lineup from ‘Big Spender’ as a contrasting frame to its prayerful moment of repose, and, throughout, it harnesses the music’s flamenco-inspired energy to propel the dancers against the grain of Fosse’s usual tightly constricted movements.39 Second, this extended pretence of Charity’s innocence makes her final ‘confession’ to Oscar all the more devastating in the film. In both versions, she hints at the prostitution for which the Fan-Dango provides a convenient front. But, whereas in the stage script she makes it clear she does not take part in the ‘other business some of the girls are in,’40 in the film she hints strongly that she, too, has turned tricks, adding phrases not included in the stage script (‘and sometimes . . . and sometimes,’ and ‘all those men . . . all those men’) while her face darkens at the memory. To be sure, much in the film does not translate well from the stage (especially ‘Rhythm of Life’ and ‘I’m a Brass Band’); the film, overall, may have earned its notoriously poor showing at the box office, nearly ruinous for Universal Studios. But the basic dramatic trajectory traced here does succeed, more than justifying the displacement of ‘Where Am I Going?’ to the final number, which both brings the sequence of musical numbers into much closer alignment with the story’s dramatic arc, and, by using the medium itself to full advantage, goes a long way toward redeeming the less successful sequences in the film. The song begins as voiceover, after Oscar abandons Charity at the Marriage License Bureau, recalling the earlier ‘catharsis’ montage and substituting, in a sense, for the

stage musical versus filmic realism   79 s­ oliloquy that earlier sequence displaced. The song is interrupted just before the end by Charity’s heart-wrenching phone call to Nickie and the other dancers, leaving her to complete the song in real time. And that ending is devastating, following on Charity’s realization that she can no longer call on her cohort for emotional support, and concluding with a freeze frame that keeps the phone booth’s flashing light on her tear-streaked

Figure 3.3  Three Images from ‘Where Am I Going’ in Sweet Charity: On the subway (a and b) and concluding freeze frame (c).

80   musical theatre screen adaptations face for a lingering, agonized moment. At each step in this song’s journey, the film constructs an utterly believable inner reality for Charity while showing her being trapped within real settings: pushing through crowds, emotionally isolated in a crowded subway while she rubs rhythmically against two male passengers in alternation (recalling the detached, quasi-anonymous coupling of the Fan Dango’s furtive ‘dancing,’ see Figure 3.3a and b), retrieving her suitcase from a darkened locker (‘I meet myself there’), and left abandoned in the end, sobbing within the tight confinement of her phone booth (see Figure 3.3c and video example 3.9). It is useful to contrast ‘Where Am I Going?’ with the mix of montage and ‘real time,’ intimate singing we hear in ‘If Ever I Would Leave You,’ if only to underscore that one works, while the other doesn’t, and to ponder why. Perhaps it’s Fosse’s willingness to forego the obvious, giving us Charity fighting her way through crowds as we hear ‘staggering through the thin and thick of it’ and, more subtly, showing her swaying with surrogate ‘clients’ during ‘hating each old and tired trick of it,’ but avoiding the temptation to Mickey-Mouse the lyrics that the later words, ‘run to the Bronx, or Washington Square’ might suggest. Perhaps it’s as simple as hearing Shirley MacLaine’s voice instead of someone else’s. Perhaps it’s the interrupting phone call, obliquely recapturing the memory of her friends and coworkers consoling her after her earlier breakup with Charlie, a consolation denied her this time around. Perhaps it’s the difference between the starkness of Charity’s reality and the dishonest romanticism of the film version of Camelot, which attempts to have its idealistic cake and eat it, too. Perhaps it is even the resonance between the endings of Charity and Cabiria, reminding us that Charity’s first home was in film. It is, indeed, many things, which perhaps all come down to the double task of any successful adaptation, of building on the stage show and creating a believable filmic reality, which Camelot fails consistently to do, and which Sweet Charity, in its best moments, succeeds in doing, if not yet as consistently as Cabaret would.

Notes 1. Among those who have contributed to this project, I wish to thank especially Rachel and Zelda Knapp, Mitchell Morris, Dan Sallitt, and the 2017 Musical Theatre Forum, Liza Gennaro, David Savran, Jessica Sternfeld, Dominic Symonds, Stacy Wolf, and Morgan Woolsey. Earlier versions of the chapter were read at the 2017 annual conferences of Music and the Moving Image (New York University, 26–28 May), Song, Stage and Screen (‘Musical Multiplicity,’ Guildford School of Acting, University of Surrey, 19–22 June), and the American Musicological Society (Rochester, NY, 9-12 November). 2. While her categories have been challenged and many other texts are now available on the subject, Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) remains seminal for those who study film music, and her title continues to capture the heard/not-heard nature of much film scoring. 3. Regarding these and other contributing factors of Broadway’s decline during this period, see Mark  N.  Grant’s The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004). Regarding the economic decline of New York and its effect on Broadway, see Elizabeth L. Wollman’s Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). The concept of a ‘golden age’ has been

stage musical versus filmic realism   81 much disputed; for recent speculation on its persistence and relevance, see Arreanna Rostosky’s ‘Reconsidering the “Golden Age” Narrative for the American Musical in the New Millennium’ (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2017). 4. In a related study, Kelly Kessler looks at film musicals beginning, as I do, in the late 1960s, but extending to the early 1980s (specifically, 1966–1983); see Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical: Music, Masculinity, and Mayhem (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). While acknowledging the parallels between the crises Broadway and Hollywood musicals underwent in the late 1960s, against a common background of political and stylistic upheaval, she argues (see especially her introductory chapter) that the two types are profoundly different from each other; for this reason she does not consider processes of adaptation as such or linger on the stage versions that by her reckoning account for about half of the film musicals during this period. Notably, as well, some adaptations, such as Cabaret, do not meet her standards for consideration, vis-à-vis their level of ‘integration.’ 5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; originally published Berne: A. Francke, 1946, and in English 1953). 6. André Bazin, ‘An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism,’ in What Is Cinema!, essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005; ­originally published 1971), 16–40; (first publication in Espirit, 1948), 26. 7. Julie Hubbert, ‘ “Whatever Happened to Great Movie Music?” Cinéma Vérité and Hollywood Film Music of the Early 1970s,’ American Music 21, no. 2 (2003): 180–213, 207. 8. See Kessler, Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical, 103–105 for a different kind of musical ontology that typically operates in musicals, that of singing well (as opposed to speechsinging or weak singing, of which, more below); her apt term for this dimension of ­musicals is ‘song’s deus ex machina’ (104). 9. See my The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 174–176. 10. Megan Woller, ‘The Lusty Court of Camelot (1967): Exploring Sexuality in the Hollywood Adaptation,’ Music and the Moving Image 8, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 3–18. 11. Richard Harris was especially vocal about this dimension of the film when he reclaimed the role of Arthur; see, for example, David Hugh Smith’s ‘Camelot—Again in Revival, Musical Is Fresh, Appealing,’ Christian Science Monitor, 26 August 1981, p. 18. 12. Matthew Kennedy, Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 89. 13. Regarding the proliferation of close-ups in Camelot, see Kessler, Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical, 67–68. 14. The term ‘dubbing’ is not accurate although it is the standard way of describing scenes in which we hear a singing voice other than that of the actor who appears to be singing. Rather than fitting sound to an existing moving image, such scenes generally involve lipsynching to playback; this is also the normal procedure when a voice is not being ‘dubbed.’ Using untrained singers in film musicals can make this difficult to do convincingly and with good synchronization; in Camelot as with Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Harris and Redgrave are instead recorded ‘live.’ 15. The conservative decision to dub Nero’s voice runs counter to the much more daring decision to have Vanessa Redgrave, a nonsinger, take over songs originally delivered ­exquisitely by Julie Andrews. Equally perplexing is the way these contradictory choices alter the carefully calculated vocal casting for the stage show, which aligns Guenevere more with Lancelot than with Arthur.

82   musical theatre screen adaptations 16. Kennedy, Roadshow!, 89. 17. Tim Stanley, ‘The White Man Who Pretended to Be Black,’ Telegraph, 5 February 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/john-howard-griffin-black-like-me/, accessed 28 January 2017. 18. Although recent stage productions have double-cast the role, switching out a black actor for the transformation (as in the 2009 Broadway revival), the film, like the original stage production, uses blackface. 19. The device of assuming a marginalized identity was already dated by 1947, if still powerfully felt by contemporary audiences. In 1941, Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels satirizes this earnestly well-meaning device as both unhelpful to its targeted demographic and undermined by its casual exercise of upper-class white privilege. 20. Besides seeming presumptuous, attempts along these lines can also seem profoundly ­awkward and tone-deaf, as when men suddenly ‘discover’ how much more difficult things are for women in many contexts, having ignored or discounted decades of mounting documentation and direct testimony regarding those difficulties. See, for example, Nicole Hallberg’s ‘Working while Female,’ posted in early 2017 in response to her coworker’s Female-Like-Me-styled experiment in trading identities (https://medium.com/@nickyknacks/working-while-female-59a5de3ad266, accessed 13 May 2017). 21. Besides producing the central love plot between Irish immigrant Sharon McLonergan and local Woody Mahoney, the Irish presence sets up the transformation of the bigoted Senator Rawkins into a black man, which happens because Sharon denounces him while inadvertently standing over the leprechaun Og’s buried gold: ‘There’s something wrong with the world that he [Senator Rawkins] and his kind have made for Henry [a black youth]. I wish he could know what that world is like. I wish to God he were black so . . . ’ [at which point, she is interrupted by the ‘transformation scene,’ p. 83]. 22. The Surgeon General had already in 1957 taken the position that smoking causes cancer. Beginning in 1965, warning labels were required on cigarette packs, with the content of those labels becoming harsher over time, and in 1970 a ban was imposed against cigarettes being advertised on television and radio. 23. In this regard, see especially Jim Lovensheimer’s South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 24. See, e.g., the openings of the film versions of West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Cabaret, Man of La Mancha, and Hair (1979). 25. Finian’s Rainbow was Coppola’s first project after making a minor splash with his student film, You’re a Big Boy Now (1966). Although Finian did not itself do much to advance Coppola’s career, it provided the opportunity for him to meet George Lucas, who interned as a camera operator on the film while still a student. (The following year, Coppola and Lucas founded American Zoetrope as an early salvo against the studio system.) While it is tempting to find something of Coppola’s mature form of cinematic realism in Finian, particularly in its sometimes stunning location shooting, that element is not fully coherent within the film’s confused thematic and generic profile. 26. Moreover, the implicit presentation of an expansive, mostly uninhabited America awaiting immigrants is a gratuitous reinforcement of highly problematic fictions, notably that this is what actually greeted European immigrants (rather than the more typical crowded urban neighborhoods, ethnically isolated from each other), and that the American ­continent was basically uninhabited before the arrival of Europeans. 27. Dale Wasserman, Mitch Leigh, and Joe Darion, Man of La Mancha (New York: Sam Fox, 1966), 65–66.

stage musical versus filmic realism   83 28. New York Times, 28 April 1963, quoted in Liza Gennaro, ‘Evolution of Dance in the Golden Age of the American “Book Musical,” ’ in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45–61, 53. 29. Gennaro, ‘Evolution of Dance in the Golden Age,’ 52. 30. For a useful summary of the critical acclaim originally granted West Side Story, considered alongside Kael’s demurral and the film’s waning critical reputation, see Roger Ebert’s 2004 online review (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-west-side-story-1961, accessed 13 May 2017); see also Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz’s West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 131–136, as part of a mainly celebratory account of the film. Acevedo-Muñoz ­implicitly endorses Todd McCarthy’s 2009 assessment (p. 147) that latter-day perceptions of the film not standing up over time may be traced to Sondheim’s and Laurents’s ­‘bad-mouthing’ of the film; only in the final chapter does he fully engage what for many has been the show’s (and film’s) most problematic dimension, regarding its expressed ­attitudes toward Puerto Rico (pp. 150–169). 31. Regarding some of those political ambiguities, see Mitchell Morris’s ‘Cabaret, America’s Weimar, and the Mythologies of the Gay Subject,’ American Music 22 (2004): 145–157. 32. See, for example, Glenn Litton, ‘From The King and I to Sweeney Todd,’ in Musical Comedy in America by Cecil Smith and Glenn Litton (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1981), 291. 33. Litton, ‘From The King and I to Sweeney Todd,’ 291. 3 4. Stacy Wolf, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 58–67; see also 256, n42, regarding the ‘bystander effect’ the opening scene critiques. 35. Perhaps more so, given West Side Story’s oft-criticized portrayal of both Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican immigrant culture. 36. Wolf, Changed for Good, 62; see also Kessler, Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical, 120–124. 37. Richard Dyer, ‘Sweet Charity,’ in Only Entertainment, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 60–63, 60. 38. The film star on stage was named Vittorio Vidal, a surname that had become notorious by the late 1960s because of Gore Vidal, who was, among other things, the basis for a running gag on ‘Rowen and Martin’s Laugh-In’ (1968–1973), a show whose sensibilities and somewhat scattershot approach bear some resemblance to those of Sweet Charity. If in 1966 the name would have created a certain frisson, by 1969, then-raging controversies would have made it considerably more distracting. The parallel figure in Nights of Cabiria is named Alberto Lazzari. 39. The Latinate musical and dancing style in this number are better grounded than in the stage show, since Chita Rivera, as Nickie, provides a distinctive Latina presence. Nickie is played by Helen Gallagher in the orginal Broadway production, whereas Helene is African American in both, played by Thelma Oliver and Paula Kelly, respectively. 40. Neil Simon, Cy Coleman, and Dorothy Fields, Sweet Charity (New York: Tams-Witmark Music Library, 1967), 33–35.

chapter 4

The Pa rt y ’s Ov er On the Town, Bells Are Ringing, and the Problem of Adapting Postwar New York Martha Shearer

At the conclusion of his production history of the film adaptation of On the Town (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1949), Hugh Fordin quotes from his interview with Arthur Freed: “Why adaptation?” somebody invariably asks. “I thought the play was perfect. Why did you change it at all around in the movie?” Undoubtedly the producer saw the stage show himself, and the chances are he also thought it was practically perfect— as a play. But if he has learned anything at all about his own business, he knows that a play and a motion picture are two separate and wildly different things. A movie is a story told by camera, an entertainment medium much more realistic than those from which it often borrows its basic material. It’s harder work and takes a little more courage to reject an obvious, literal translation—and not to have too much reverence for the story’s original form—although the producer must also be careful that he doesn’t “improve” it into a failure.1

Freed points to issues of medium specificity, his perception of film’s greater capacity for realism, in order to argue against fidelity as a principle. The idea that adaptations need to account for medium specificity is widely held, particularly when it comes to adaptations of theatre. Film scholarship has often vociferously rejected any traces of the theatrical, such that Siegfried Kracaucer notoriously argued that ‘uncinematic stories . . . tend to follow the ways of the theater.’2 Recent theorists of adaptation, however, have questioned and complicated such ideas. Robert Stam, for example, is sceptical of medium-specificity approaches that assume certain media are good or bad at certain things, ‘as if specific aesthetic norms were inscribed in the celluloid itself.’3 Thomas Leitch lists the notion that differences between literary and cinematic texts are rooted in essential properties of media as one of the core fallacies of adaptation studies.4 And Kamilla Elliott notes a

86   musical theatre screen adaptations long-standing tendency to see film history as a progressive move away from theatre and attributes cinephile hostility to theatre to the close similarities between the two forms, such that ‘film is perceived as a mere technological recording device for theater, a memorialization of theatrical achievement rather than as an achievement in its own right.’5 When it comes to adaptations of musical theatre, the resemblances between theatre and film that Elliott points to may well be especially pronounced, given the musical’s emphasis on performance itself. And yet both Raymond Knapp and Jane Feuer have also pointed out the clear differences between performance in musical theatre and ­musical film, namely, the technological artificiality of film performance and the loss of a live, direct relationship between performer and audience.6 Film musical adaptations, then, have the potential for both increased realism (through location shooting, for example) and increased artificiality and, as Freed’s comments indicate, often sought to manage both a loss of liveness and a perceived threat of excessive theatricality, that is, a close mimicking of performance from a stage in offstage sequences. But the fact that Fordin presents Freed’s comments in relation to On the Town is also notable. For if not realist per se, that film certainly flagrantly displays film’s capacity to display the real world through its use of location shooting in New York. Implicit in Freed’s statement is a notion of how not only the book or the music of a work of musical theatre is adapted but also the world that it constructs visually and aurally, the different ways in which theatre and cinema typically represent place. On the Town is perhaps exemplary of the clear differences between postwar cinematic and theatrical means of representing New York, with the adaptation embracing a ‘cinematic’ propensity for ‘realism.’ This is not to say that photographic images could not be incorporated into theatre, but certainly, postwar film and theatre faced different restraints and norms. So, studio-era film musicals had an unusual proximity to theatre but also faced industrial conditions with quite distinct aesthetic norms for the representation of the city, norms that film adaptations of urban musicals highlighted. But adaptations of urban musicals adapted not only their source material but also the city itself. Indeed, Dudley Andrew argues that all representation is a form of adaptation of some kind of prior conception. The difference is that when we talk about adaptation rather than representation, ‘the cultural model which the cinema represents is already treasured as a representation in another sign system.’7 Any film and any play is already an adaptation of a place, whether that adaptation is a fictional concept that exists purely on the page or a real place that exists in the world that the audience or readership for that representation will be already familiar with through direct experience and/or cultural representation. As Andrew observes, one of the sources that film can adapt is a city: ‘What is a city symphony, for example, if not an adaptation of a concept by the cinema? A definite notion of Berlin preexisted Walter Ruttman’s 1927 treatment of the city [in Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt].’8 Christine Geraghty has drawn parallels between a ‘quest for authenticity’ in urban representation and adaptation criticism’s emphasis on fidelity.9 By contrast, she discusses how sets adapt the city’s architecture and how the locations used shape the meaning of an adaptation. She focuses on film adaptations of novels about old New York, yet the principle is far more widely applicable.10

the problem of adapting postwar new york   87 The notion of a city that a film or a play may adapt is highly contingent on historical and geographical conditions at the time of production, and the postwar period was a critical juncture for New York. The city was undergoing a dramatic transformation driven by forces including suburbanization, urban renewal, and highway construction, as well as the reshaping of the built environment through architecture like the International Style that came to dominate the design of the city’s new corporate office buildings. Those processes challenged existing forms of cinematic representation, including those established in Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and 1940s, conventions built around a valorization of urban density. At the same time, Hollywood cinema significantly increased its use of location shooting in the late 1940s so that cities, and especially New York, were increasingly cinematically visible, even if location shooting was far less prevalent in the often antirealist Hollywood musical than, say, semidocumentaries. So, adaptations of New York needed to account for both how the city itself was changing and how those changes required forms of cultural representation to themselves adapt. This chapter focuses on the city in musical theatre adaptations, approaching the term ‘adaptation’ from several related angles: how representations of the city are adapted from stage to screen, how those films themselves adapt the city, and how the transformation the city was undergoing required the adaptation of those processes of representation. I focus on two adaptations, On the Town and Bells Are Ringing (Vincente Minnelli, 1960), that both foreground the city itself, especially through their use of location shooting. Both films have reputations as bad adaptations, On the Town for its departures from its source text that deny its strengths (although it remains of interest for its location shooting, i.e., the ways it was rendered cinematic), Bells Are Ringing for its excessive fidelity to its source text that retains its weaknesses (although it remains of interest for its record of Judy Holliday’s stage performance, i.e., its theatricality).11 I am less interested in taking an evaluative position—or in side-by-side comparisons of source and ­adaptation—than I am in how both of those lines of criticism reductively obscure the ways in which both films function as musical theatre adaptations, as musicals, as ‘cinematic,’ and as bearing the marks of their theatrical origins. Both of these films foreground their status as m ­ usical theatre adaptations and draw out the urban themes of their source material, highlighting their processes of representation through their stylistic discontinuities and in so doing thematizing issues of urban adaptation at a time of dramatic urban transformation.

On the Town In brief comments on the film On the Town in her book-length study of the 1944 stage version, Carol Oja foregrounds what was lost in its adaptation, which constitute her primary points of interest in the show: Bernstein’s complex, symphonic music and the show’s racial integration, evident in its integrated chorus and casting of JapaneseAmerican ballerina Sono Osato as its female lead.12 Although the film, produced five years

88   musical theatre screen adaptations later in a film industry coming under the sway of anticommunism and the blacklist, keeps largely intact the play’s narrative concerning three sailors on shore leave in New York and the women they meet there, it undoubtedly abandons the show’s political subtext.13 But rather than simply being, as Oja suggests, a safe, watered-down version of a brilliant, progressive play, the film adaptation of On the Town is a fascinating engagement with the sweeping transformations taking place in postwar New York and was thoroughly shaped by its various dislocations from its original wartime context. The adaptation explicitly foregrounds its war-to-postwar shift through the selfconscious insertion of contemporary references: Kinsey, bebop, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945). Joseph Andrew Casper argues that the film’s male characters come across as an anachronism: These hicks adrift in a sophisticated metropolis are also out of joint with the times. They act as they would have acted before the war, when they and the country were younger and more foolish. True, the sailors are part of the optimism that pervaded postwar America—a mood that permeates the film—but they are oblivious to the uneasy transitions America was also then experiencing, which the film ­subtly sketches.14

When Chip (Frank Sinatra) first meets Hildy (Betty Garrett), he asks her, ‘What are you doing driving a cab? The war’s over!’ and this question foregrounds both the text’s adaptation and American society’s adaptation from war to peace. Whereas Scott Bukatman criticizes the film’s postwar setting because ‘if the sailors aren’t shipping out to war, where is the urgency of this day?’, the reasons are clear: the exhilaration of New York itself and the pressures of the Cold War.15 That new context is also something the film gestures at. Ivy’s (Vera-Ellen) ballet teacher Madame Dilly is renamed Madame Dilyovska (Florence Bates), who claims to have taught Nijinsky and tells Ivy, ‘I am best teacher this side of the world!’ Marshall Berman argues that the ‘specter’ of the Cold War is further evident in the shift from police being peripheral in the play to a ‘persistent presence throughout Manhattan’ in the film.16 On the Town was also made at a pivotal time for New York City. Samuel Zipp suggests that the city’s postwar transformation, particularly through urban renewal, had strong ties to its place in the Cold War, whereby ‘a renewed Manhattan could project an image of modernization and prosperity to compete with the equally grandiose vision of progress simultaneously motivating the Soviet Union.’17 What was significant, Zipp suggests, was both the creation and the projection of an image of a metropolis fit for global leadership, the renewal of, say, the city’s worst housing conditions, which tarnished the US (and capitalism’s) global image, as well as the city’s cultural representation. These factors reached a critical mass as New York launched a campaign, competing with other US cities, to become the site of the United Nations (UN) headquarters.18 In 1946, as part of the city’s campaign for the UN site, William O’Dwyer, New York’s mayor from 1946 to 1950, set up a public relations bureau to boost the city as a ‘center of art, culture, entertainment, fashion, and commerce.’19 At the same time, the city was being heavily

the problem of adapting postwar new york   89 promoted as a site for tourism and trade, with the volume of tourists visiting the city reaching record-breaking levels in 1949.20 The media was a key component of this boosterist drive: the city established its own film production unit, which produced film shorts to be shown worldwide promoting the city; New York Commissioner of Commerce Abe Stark was reportedly developing a film promoting the city along with a television ­publicity campaign; and O’Dwyer’s interest in film was such that sometime after resigning as mayor he set himself up in Mexico as a middleman between Hollywood runaway productions and local studios.21 The municipal government also made considerable efforts to attract film production and encourage the city’s (favourable) representation in cinema.22 On the Town’s location shooting, then, needs to be seen not only as an indication of postwar optimism but also as a product of that context. The city is most obviously displayed in its opening number, ‘New York, New York.’ Here, three sailors arrive in the city and embark on a sightseeing spree that shows them at an implausibly large number of tourist sites in an implausibly short amount of both screen and story time, edited together at exhilarating speed. This sequence contains the majority of the film’s location shooting and is the clearest indication of the film’s embrace of techniques for representing the city that are inaccessible in theatre. But clearly, ‘New York, New York’ was also entirely in keeping with the O’Dwyer administration’s efforts to use the media to attract tourism, trade, political capital, and political institutions. Indeed, when profiled in Time magazine in 1948, O’Dwyer’s image on the cover was accompanied by the caption ‘A helluva town,’ a lyric from ‘New York, New York’ as performed on Broadway. But although its location shooting has been prized—with the film occasionally, and utterly inaccurately, cited as the first musical shot on location—the vast majority of On the Town was shot in spectacular studio sets, aided by mattes and back-projected locations. At times, the contrast between the film’s different visual modes is quite glaring, such as when the film cuts straight from its opening location shooting to strikingly obvious back projection. At others, the film generates spectacle from its studio-created city, such as when Ivy looks out of a dance studio window to marvel at what is clearly a matte shot of the cityscape. But the artifice of the film’s New York is most apparent in the sequence where all six principal characters meet at the top of the Empire State Building, a forty-five-foot-high island in Esther Williams’s swimming pool on the MGM lot, surrounded by a backing showing both sides of Manhattan, with windows cut out through which twinkly lights are shone.23 When Chip, Ozzie (Jules Munshin), Claire (Ann Miller), and Hildy look over the edge of the observation deck, there is a mock-up of the rest of the building rising behind them that looks starkly artificial compared with the images of the real city present in the rest of the film. What this backdrop most resembles is the artwork typical of New York postcards of the period: looming skyscrapers with metallics fading into deep primary colours (see Figure 4.1). So, the city itself is depicted in two primary modes: touristic location shooting and studio sets that display the full capacities of studio production, that themselves have touristic elements. This contrast foregrounds the instability of urban representation in postwar Hollywood cinema, an instability that was especially pronounced in a musical.

90   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 4.1  The Empire State Building in On the Town.

But alongside these two modes is another: abstract fantasy numbers, where Gabey (Gene Kelly) attempts to make sense of the world around him. First is his fantasy of who ‘Miss Turnstiles’ might be based on a poster on the subway, in which he imagines her performing the wide range of roles the poster describes (painting, dancing, athleticism, ironing, etc.), all set against a yellow background. Here the lack of architecture and minimal props highlights the incompatibility of this fantasy with the real city. Second, the dream ballet ‘A Day in New York,’ retaining music from the play and prepared by Kelly in collaboration with Bernstein, is staged with an abstract silhouette of the Manhattan skyline that is shaded so as not to appear entirely flat, yet barely registers as three dimensional (see Figure 4.2).24 This sequence also uses spotlights to pick out a romantic pas-de-deux between Kelly and Vera-Ellen, while all the other principal performers are replaced with dancer substitutes. This sequence, then, is the film’s clearest break with the aesthetic impulse of its location shooting and the part of the film that most clearly signals its theatrical origins, self-consciously adopting stage conventions. This sequence also constitutes a shift in the film’s narration, retelling its narrative thus far purely through dance. The film combines two modes of representing the city with abstract fantasy sequences that take place in subjective space by which Gabey is attempting to make sense of and adapt to the urban environment. Those different modes combine cinematic and theatrical qualities, and the contrast between these modes is so striking that Casper claims

the problem of adapting postwar new york   91

Figure 4.2  The two-dimensional, silhouette New York skyline of ‘A Day in New York’ from On the Town.

the film has a ‘schizophrenic look.’25 As a musical, the film already relies on shifts between the different aesthetic modes of narrative and number as well as shifts into fantasy. Indeed, Clive Hirschhorn notes that concerns were raised during production about whether the combination of the real, in locations, with the unreal, in the film’s genre, would prove alienating.26 Yet the film’s chaotic aesthetic tensions are thematically productive given its emphasis on how the city is understood and represented and the messiness and disorder all that obscures. The film’s tourist protagonists must adapt to an unfamiliar environment, and its alternating visual registers enact that process. While Oja argues that the play ‘sought a realistic depiction of New York City during World War II,’ the film is consciously and explicitly about the ways in which New York is conceived and represented, rather than how it is lived, and particularly for outsiders to the city.27 The film’s representational instability should not be seen in isolation from the adaptations that the city was itself undergoing in the late 1940s. Carlo Rotella neatly ­summarizes the ‘great sea change’ of the postwar period as the passing of the nineteenth-century industrial city of downtown and neighborhoods, and the visible, speedy emergence of the late twentieth-century, post-industrial metropolis of suburbs and inner city. That change, almost invisible to many at midcentury, would develop into a full-blown “urban crisis” by the mid-1960s.28

92   musical theatre screen adaptations Similarly, Edward Dimendberg argues that in film noir, 1949 was a critical turning point for the emergence of what he, drawing on the geographer Charles Colby, calls centrifugal space: immaterial, invisible space most associated with postwar suburbs, freeways, and malls.29 The midcentury period was therefore a critical moment in terms of both the city’s form and its cultural meaning. On the Town had been shaped by an optimism that was both urban and geopolitical, a late 1940s surge in boosterism that in the city’s courting of the film industry and deployment of the media was an important p ­ recedent to the later development of urban branding. The film does not engage with the spatial transformation of the city directly, but it does foreground anxieties about how urban space is understood and does so through comparison with older, smaller, less bewildering models of urbanism. The scattershot montage of ‘New York, New York’ sets the tone for the film’s concern with how to make sense of a modern, ever-changing city. The number begins at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and then moves to Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge. This is followed by a collection of sites in Lower Manhattan: Federal Hall on Wall Street, Chinese and Italian neighbourhoods. The next section is less coherent, including the Statue of Liberty, the Third Avenue El, Washington Square Arch, and Grant’s Tomb, as video example 4.1. Following this are the two final groups of sites: can be seen in Central Park and Rockefeller Center (a Fifth Avenue bus passing the statue of Atlas, the top of the RCA Building, the Prometheus fountain). After the number finishes, the ­sailors are shown in Times Square, with rear projection. Throughout the number, there is progressive movement towards the centre that is paralleled by the choice of the Empire State Building, the city’s highest point, as a meeting place later in the film. The number’s chaotic elements (its frenetic pace and geographically scattershot middle section) are combined with a degree of order through its overall movement towards a centre, its use of recognizable landmarks, and its alternation between sung sequences in single locations and purely musical montages. The sequence’s tension between order and chaos was in part a product of the technical challenges posed by shooting a musical on location in a city. Fitting in a large number of sites in a small space of time, the unit jumped from one part of the city to another depending on traffic and the position of the sun.30 Location shooting was an interaction with the city that was fundamentally different from filming in the controlled and limited environments of studio sets, and the challenges of such a form of production created the sequence’s geographical incoherence. Its chaos was a chaos that could only be possible on location; it was a product of a film adaptation at a moment when location shooting was valued but where the infrastructure and support available once it had become standard practice, in the late 1960s, was inaccessible. The principal effect of this sequence is, contrary to Freed’s implication, not realism, but a sense that the city is exciting but also overwhelming and difficult to grasp. The film contrasts New York with Gabey and Ivy’s romanticized (fictional) hometown, Meadowville. In ‘Main Street,’ they sing that in the American small town, ‘life is easy and the tempo’s slow,’ ‘you'll learn in a minute all you have to know,’ and ‘you'll know the whole town just by walking down our Main Street,’ setting out both its simple

the problem of adapting postwar new york   93 geography and its knowable social/sexual conventions. The simplicity of ‘Main Street’ is the point, in its musical structure, lyrics, and straightforward staging: Kelly and VeraEllen do some simple dance steps and otherwise mime walking down a small-town street, as can be seen in video example 4.2. The addition of this number to the film accentuates the contrast between different forms of urban organization, between the simplicity and obviousness of Meadowville and the social, sexual, and geographic ­disorientation of New York. In a sense, Meadowville, the coherent and contained environment where no one can get lost, bears clear parallels to the New York of the backlot or, indeed, of the stage. By contrast, New York the place is vast and incomprehensible and life in the city fast, difficult, and complicated, as is shooting a film there. Meadowville, unlike New York, is legible. In his 1960 study The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch defined legibility as the ease with which a city’s users could recognize parts of the city and organize them into a coherent form.31 ‘Wayfinding devices’ such as maps and street signs aided legibility.32 It was also, Lynch contended, fundamentally shaped by urban form: he suggested parts of San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Manhattan as highly legible environments.33 Dimendberg observes of film noir that while the ‘fundamental legibility’ of centripetal space ‘can generally be assumed,’ centrifugal space provokes anxieties that ‘hinge upon temporality and the uncertainty produced by a spatial environment increasingly devoid of landmarks and centers and often likely to seem permanently in motion.’34 On the Town raises precisely these kinds of issues in its tensions between order and chaos. Dana Polan argues that the line ‘the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down,’ from the chorus of ‘New York, New York,’ is itself a wayfinding device, an ‘aural guidebook that the sailors rehearse to keep from getting lost in the big city.’35 When the sailors ask for directions uptown at the Times Square/42nd Street subway station, the speech of the person they ask is each time rendered unintelligible by the sounds of passing trains. Realizing that Chip’s own wayfinding device, his guidebook, is inadequate due to the pace of the city’s development, Hildy asks him, ‘Don’t you realize a big city like this changes all the time?’ And the film places considerably greater emphasis on wayfinding than the play: the joke about directions obscured by noise was added for the film, and in the play, the second chorus of ‘New York, New York’ has different lyrics, minus the ‘Bronx is up’ line.36 In another moment new for the film, Chip questions Gabey’s plan to seek out Ivy, telling him that in a city of four million women the law of averages renders this unlikely, only to find Ivy standing right in front of them, posing for a publicity shot at the turnstile itself. So, the film raises the question of whether the city is vast and confusing or structured and coherent, and it arguably raises that same question about its own narrative. When Gabey first decides to find Ivy, he claims that the poster he has taken from the subway is ‘full of clues’; if they follow them systematically, they will be able to find her in a few hours. He succeeds, finding her in a dance class at ‘Symphonic Hall’ (standing in for Carnegie Hall), but the fact that he keeps running into her does not suggest that New York actually works in just the same ways as the small towns the sailors come from but is one of the film’s central jokes. Such a narrative rests on the understanding that it is impossible. The film adaptation of On the Town, then, generates meaning from its

94   musical theatre screen adaptations incoherence of aesthetic registers and from the self-conscious implausibility of its narrative that suggests a shaky compromise between an ordered, centred, coherent urban space and a vast, bewildered, chaotic metropolis undergoing enormous change. Unlike its stage counterpart, the film is not an idealized vision of an inclusive, egalitarian space where races and musical styles mix freely, but a meditation on the experience of urban change and uneven development that raises the question of whether existing cultural forms are an adequate means of capturing postwar New York.

Bells Are Ringing Describing how they came up with the original idea for their 1956 stage musical Bells Are Ringing, Betty Comden and Adolph Green compared an advertisement for a telephone answering service—‘rows of girls, wearing earphones, seated at banks of switchboards, wires going out of their heads, seemingly plugged into the entire city’—with the premises of Green’s own answering service, ‘the cellar of a dilapidated brownstone.’37 Comden and Green here starkly contrast not only the reality and the advertising of the answering service but also two forms of urbanism: the modern, corporate, cybernetic city and the older, decaying remnants of the nineteenth-century city. Bells Are Ringing takes as its subject the conflict between those two kinds of city by focusing on a telephone answering service located in a dilapidated brownstone’s basement and the different kinds of urban experience that answering service is both part of and resistant to. The 1960 film adaptation goes even further than On the Town in using location shooting to bring to the surface those preoccupations with the condition and aesthetics of the city that lay dormant in its theatrical source text. The film opens with a title sequence/ overture over a montage of establishing shots of the Manhattan skyline connected by dissolves, a series of perspectives of Midtown Manhattan that all appear to be shot from the observation deck of the RCA Building. The titles themselves are in bright pink cursive set alongside twee pink bells, reinforcing the romanticism of the images of the city we are presented with. I have noted elsewhere the tendency of 1950s film musicals to reduce the city to the equivalent of a skyline establishing shot in aesthetic and ­ideological terms through an exclusive emphasis on the city’s commercial, cultural, and political power.38 Bells Are Ringing’s opening titles initially appear to replicate this tendency through their focus on Manhattan’s iconicity and corporate office buildings. The sequence includes images not only of the prewar skyscrapers that tend to feature ­prominently in such montages (the Chrysler Building, for example), but also the recently completed International Style skyscraper, the Seagram Building (1958). However, as the sequence progresses after the film’s title has been displayed, something different starts to occur. We see a shot where the Chrysler Building dominates the righthand third of the frame, yet in the centre is a building under construction. Then following the shot of the Seagram Building, there is a dissolve to a shot of rubble being cleared that plays under the acknowledgement of the film’s theatrical source material and the names of book writers/lyricists Comden and Green and composer Jule Styne (see Figure 4.3 here).

the problem of adapting postwar new york   95

Figure 4.3  The skyline establishing shot’s demolition in Bells are Ringing’s title sequence.

The shots that follow show construction workers working on the remains of a demolished building, shot at a canted angle before a cut to a close-up of a glass curtain wall with cranes and a building under construction visible in the reflection as the overtures moves from the upbeat brass-dominated ‘Just in Time’ to the smoother, string-based ‘The Party’s Over’ as the camera slowly pans left, as can be seen in video example 4.3. A final series of shots, several at canted angles, juxtapose International Style skyscrapers with the unfinished frame of a building under construction before the sequence ­concludes with a title declaring the name of the film’s director, Vincente Minnelli, over the construction site of what will become the Hanover Bank Building (1962) on Park Avenue. This sequence is notable for several reasons. Firstly, in what has often been derided as a stagey and unimaginative adaptation, these titles use the capabilities and conventions of cinema to draw out the film’s interest in the built environment and render that interest in visual terms inaccessible in theatre. In so doing, the film sets up an image of a romanticized New York skyline only to then show that image being demolished. All that the skyline establishing shot represents is being disrupted; the city’s demolition amounts to a symbolic threat. This sequence also establishes a number of the film’s themes: false and/or mistaken identity, as the clichéd image of the city we are presented with is then shown being demolished; a contrast between old and new, particularly in terms of the urban; and a sly, parodic tone that edges the film towards postmodernism. But it also seems notable that the images of demolition and construction sites first appear most strikingly at the credit for the stage production. In this moment, the film demonstrates its visual departure from its source text; the contrast between the scoring of songs taken from the stage musical and the images they accompany are an indication that how this film is adapting its source depends upon how the city is visualized. The film’s concern with the urban is also apparent in Susanswerphone’s setting: a dilapidated brownstone basement, as on stage, but here that brownstone is also freestanding; the buildings either side have been demolished (see Figure 4.4).

96   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 4.4  The freestanding brownstone that houses Susanswerphone in Bells are Ringing.

The house used as the exterior was shot on location at 239 East 68th Street in Manhattan and reconstructed as a studio set.39 Minnelli chose this location after seeing it in an August 1959 article in Life.40 Alongside a caption stating that it ‘awaits the ­inevitable,’ the article began: In the midst of New York’s greatest construction boom, a remnant of the city’s past stands desolate against a background of the new. This brownstone will soon give way, as did its block full of neighbors, to the latest changes in the ever ­changing city.41

While the article situates this house within a boom in construction of skyscrapers, apartment houses, and public housing projects, the film’s only indication of what will replace the building is the marked presence of International Style skyscrapers and Park Avenue demolition in the title sequence. The city’s transformation provoked public concern about the desertion and destruction of the city.42 Joshua Shannon argues that c.1960, New York art was preoccupied with a loss of New York’s ‘traditional palpability.’43 And in Bells Are Ringing, the historical city is disappearing, as is its social experience. At one point, Ella (Judy Holliday) and Jeff (Dean Martin) find themselves a few streets uptown from Times Square after Jeff, a playwright, has had a meeting with a theatrical producer. Ella encourages Jeff to say hello to strangers at a crosswalk and, amazed by this experience, he exclaims, ‘Look at me, I’m walking! I haven’t walked around this city in years!’ This moment of connection in the city’s traditional core is notable for its presentation as unusual. The freestanding brownstone is also significant because it draws out the musical’s concern with tensions between that historical city and the kinds of spatiality produced by the modern media and systems associated with centrifugal space. In particular, as the title sequence suggests, the film is preoccupied with mistaken identity and extends that preoccupation to its settings and geography. Following the title sequence is a spoof ad for Susanswerphone that declares, ‘On New York’s smart East Side, the smartest East

the problem of adapting postwar new york   97 Siders all use Susanswerphone. . . Our luxurious offices exude charm, confidence, elegance, chic good taste, and glamour.’ But rather than this Midtown glamour, the interior to the Susanswerphone office is shabby, with stained wallpaper and fraying fabrics. We can see here clear echoes of Comden and Green’s origin story for the show, all of which is accentuated through the film’s use of a building presumably facing demolition. That theme of geographical misdirection runs through the musical. On being discovered in Jeff ’s apartment when they first meet, Ella tells him that she was looking for 54 Sutton Place South rather than his apartment, number 60. She later tells Jeff that she is from Brooklyn Heights, yet when Jeff goes there trying to find her, he fails. Once he deduces her connection to Susanswerphone, he arrives at the offices and tells her that he has had a ‘long cab ride from Brooklyn Heights.’ On seeing the building, Jeff questions whether the cab has taken him to the right place, as it does not look like an office building. As well as adopting a false identity, the specific location of Susanswerphone is never identified, despite the geographical precision elsewhere in the film; it masquerades as other places, but is never actually located.44 Raymond Durgnat and Joe McElhaney both suggest that Bells Are Ringing treats New York like a small town.45 Rather than the connections in real, public space that it would suggest, however, or its relationship to its actual geographical location, Susanswerphone’s significance is as a network that creates connections across the expansive, chaotic city. By contrast, the film’s brief moment of genuine human connection takes place in public space, face-to-face, and in the city’s traditional centre. While these attributes are also present in the play (although the ‘Hello’ sequence was relocated from the subway), the film’s use of location shooting, with its association with realism, accentuates the ­musical’s geographical masquerade. So, the film amends the stage musical in its settings and through ‘cinematic’ techniques such as the use of the real city, pointing to the ­musical’s interest in how the everyday experience of urban space was being transformed, particularly through highly contemporary concerns about urban systems and networks that required the adaptation of both the city’s inhabitants and its cultural representation. The business of Susanswerphone is that messages are left with operators, either Ella, Gwynne (Ruth Storey), or its owner Sue (Jean Stapleton), and then retrieved by the ­subscribers, facilitating communication across invisible space. When three of the ­subscribers meet and Jeff asks where he can call the others later, Blake (Frank Gorshin) tells him ‘I don’t know where I’ll be’ and Dr Kitchell (Bernard West) responds, ‘I don’t know where I am,’ but that it is not a problem as they both use Susanswerphone. Their phrasing foregrounds how the telephone answering service allows the subscribers to maintain contact, to be part of a network, without being tied to a particular geographical location. Susanswerphone is not the film’s only system. In his song ‘A Simple Little System,’ Otto (Eddie Foy Jr), describes the code his fellow bookies need to use when calling ‘Titanic Records,’ his supposed classical record label that he runs from the Susanswerphone offices: placing orders for a record by a particular composer is in fact placing a bet on a horse in a particular race at a particular track. This allows the bookies to elude the surveillance of the police monitoring Susanswerphone, which they suspect of being a front for an escort service. In addition, Sue repeatedly criticizes Ella not only

98   musical theatre screen adaptations for conveying messages but also for passing information from one subscriber to another for their mutual benefit. Concluding that Jeff, one of the subscribers, has unplugged his phone, Ella visits his apartment and encourages him to write. When a producer buys up Jeff ’s play The Midas Touch, Ella anonymously visits Dr Kitchell, a dentist who wants to be a songwriter, and Blake Barton, a parody of Marlon Brando, to alert them to the production. The Midas Touch becomes another network that is constructed via Ella’s work at Susanswerphone. Ella’s function is to maintain these systems by regulating the transmission of information. As such, her position resembles that of the ‘steersman’ in cybernetic systems. Cybernetics—the study of control in systems through the transmission of information in the face of the universe’s tendency towards entropy—was a key driver of the development of the information age. In his landmark bestseller Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Norbert Wiener noted: Any organism is held together . . . by the possession of means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information. In a society too large for the direct contact of its members, these means are the press, both as it concerns books and as it concerns newspapers, the radio, the telephone system, the telegraph, the posts, the theater, the movies, the schools, and the church.46

Communications networks, such as those associated with Susanswerphone, were a means of transmitting information through centrifugal space in order to maintain the existence of the city as a system. Indeed, alongside colleagues from MIT’s departments of history and urban planning, Wiener developed a plan for urban decentralization to counteract the threat of atomic attack. Fundamental to Wiener’s plan was the creation of ‘life belts’ around cities that would allow for the maintenance of communication networks alongside other vital functions, such as healthcare, in the event of an attack on a central city.47 Although reported in Life in 1950, the plan was never published, but as Robert Kargon and Arthur Molella argue, it indicates that Wiener and his colleagues ‘saw the city as a nexus of communication channels; the purpose of anticipatory defence was to maintain the stasis of the information system.’48 The idea of the city as a system and site of information processing above all else would become an important component of New York’s postindustrial future as a neoliberal global city. Manuel Castells has argued that it was the major breakthroughs in electronics during World War II, of which cybernetics was an important outcome, that enabled the later development of what he calls the ‘informational city.’49 At the time Bells Are Ringing was made, the cybernetic view of the city as a communications system was influential, a way of rendering the city manageable in the wake of decentralization and increasing technological complexity. Phone networks were a critical part of this new decentralized urbanism. In 1961, Jean Gottmann argued that the volume of phone calls on the northeastern seaboard was ‘a fairly good measure of the relationships binding together the economic interests of the region.’50 He also, however, questioned whether communications technology might induce decentralization to an extent that would

the problem of adapting postwar new york   99 be disastrous for central cities.51 Such networks constituted a new way of thinking about the city and its future but were also viewed in ambivalent terms.52 Indeed, in his 1961 book The City in History, Lewis Mumford attacked cybernetic understandings of urban space, arguing, ‘ “Processing” has now become the chief form of metropolitan control.’53 Bells Are Ringing is preoccupied with forms of communication facilitated by and associated with networks and invisible space: codes, misreadings, duplicity, systems. Ella adopts various voices and characters when speaking to subscribers or taking their messages. Titanic Records is a front for a bookie ring. When meeting subscribers Ella adopts disguises, notably the alter ego ‘Melisande Scott’ that she uses with Jeff, only to leave him at a party once another guest calls her identity into question. At the film’s finale Ella sings ‘I’m going back, where I can be me’—rather, it is implied, than playing a series of roles. The film’s emphasis on performance is drawn out through the staging of its musical numbers, which point to Bells Are Ringing’s theatrical origins. Most of the scenes in the Susanswerphone basement are shot from the fourth wall, with the switchboard itself positioned much as it would be for a stage production, at the front of the set, enabling Holliday to perform in full view of an ‘audience’. Holliday performs Ella’s first number ‘A Perfect Relationship’ sat at the switchboard, in a medium shot; the camera reframes as she stands and then follows her as she walks around the basement, yet her gestures and facial expressions are large and theatrical, concluding the number by returning to the switchboard, and then standing and gesturing towards the fourth wall. This sort of staging is replicated in several of the film’s numbers, such as Jeff and Ella’s faux-vaudeville performance of ‘Just in Time’ for a crowd of onlookers, and especially ‘I’m Going Back,’ which Holliday performs in a Jolson-esque style, such that even when proclaiming her desire for authenticity, Ella’s desires are framed as a theatrical performance. It is these sorts of qualities of Bells Are Ringing that have led it to be declared an uncinematic bad adaptation or merely a record of Holliday’s theatrical performance. Yet according to her son, Holliday was ‘very unhappy’ working with Minnelli as he would ‘insist [she] perform in the manner he prescribed for her.’54 Minnelli himself defended the film as an adaptation, arguing, ‘Adding fluidity to the essential stage components seemed a logical approach.’55 Rather than simply transferring a theatrical performance to the screen, which then appears too big and gestural for film, the film deploys theatricality to emphasize its themes of performance and false identity. And in the particular kinds of performance that we see, the film clearly positions Ella as anachronistic. Joseph Litvak argues of the stage version of Bells Are Ringing that in Comden and Green’s ‘cabaret sensibility’ and the self-conscious corniness of the numbers, the show’s ‘preference for an eclectic mixture of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow registers over the c­ orporate homogeneity coming to distinguish postwar mass culture,’ allowing them to construct a ‘big-city utopia of little performance spaces . . . opposed to the prevailing national heaviness, darkness and cold.’ As such, the play is both utopian and anachronistic, seeking to evade ‘normative American space and time.’56 The film’s combination of cinematic location shooting with self-conscious theatricality, heightened

100   musical theatre screen adaptations onscreen through sheer incongruity, foregrounds the anachronistic qualities of Holliday’s ­performances and positions Ella as a fundamentally anachronistic figure. But the film’s theatricality also foregrounds its status as an adaptation and functions as a form of self-reflexivity. On this note, Stam points to the value of reflexive texts for adaptation studies as by ‘calling attention to artistic mediation,’ they ‘subvert the assumption that art can be a transparent mediation of communication, a window on the world, a mirror promenading down a highway.’57 Contrary to Freed, Stam suggests that the process of adaptation can destabilize the notion of realism itself. Whereas Dudley Andrew argues that cinematic realism is ‘driven by a desire to make the ­audience ignore the process of signification and to grasp directly the film’s plot or intrigue,’ adaptation foregrounds the ways in which texts are mediated, constructed, artificial.58 In Bells Are Ringing, the combination of an emphasis on the film’s own construction through its theatricality and the depiction of the city in terms of its ­networks and systems of communication makes it a significant precursor to what David Porush calls ‘cybernetic fiction’: texts that both confront technology, particularly cybernetics, and call attention to ‘the machinery or technology of their own fiction.’59 There are moments in Bells Are Ringing—such as the overt narrative convenience of the coincidence of three subscribers happening to meet and immediately comprehending their connection—that tonally approach metafiction. The film’s opening spoof ad, for example, edits together various glamourous interiors, largely depicting the travails of young women who have missed important phone calls, then to show the difference to their lives if they had had an answering service to take messages for them. The emphasis on female consumers here seems notable since the film itself is significantly more interested in Susanswerphone’s male subscribers—none of its female subscribers have any significant screen time—so as the film develops, this contrast serves to heighten the artifice of an already parodic sequence. That artifice is most apparent, however, at the conclusion of the ad when a young couple embrace in front of the freestanding brownstone. As they exit the frame and the ad concludes, the camera cranes up to linger on the building in the background, which is soon revealed to be the real Susanswerphone offices, as can be seen in video example 4.4. In this moment, the film demonstrates its commitment to blurring distinctions between the real and artificial. Are we still watching a fake ad? Is the narrative that now commences also a fantasy? This shot ­cannot help but point to the film’s status as a fiction, and its placement shortly after the union of a heterosexual couple, the near-standard conclusion of the narrative of a ­musical, in what is clearly presented to us as a deceptive, clichéd, unreliable piece of advertising, points to a similar degree of self-consciousness about generic conventions. The parody ad features in the play, but film as a medium is able to push its parody further by more closely mimicking television. Later, when Jeff takes Ella, unwillingly, to a fancy party, she is bewildered by their social conventions until they explain how to name drop (another of the film’s codes) in the number ‘Drop that Name,’ yet this also constitutes a sustained act of name dropping on the film’s part, referencing several names closely associated with the Freed Unit, of

the problem of adapting postwar new york   101 which Bells Are Ringing was a product, including Gene Kelly, Oscar Levant, Fred Astaire, Arthur Freed, and the film’s own director, Vincente Minnelli, with all of these names bar Astaire and Minnelli being absent on stage.60 The film ends with a shot of Jeff and Ella accompanied by the same voiceover from the opening spoof ad saying, ‘And so, like this satisfied customer, you too could solve all your problems by subscribing to an answering service,’ again calling attention to the film’s own construction and playing on the audience’s cultural knowledge of both the nature of advertising and of the Hollywood happy ending. But despite the film’s proto-postmodern self-reflexivity, there are significant differences between Bells Are Ringing and the paranoid critiques of cybernetic society (from authors like Vonnegut and Pynchon) that Porush discusses. Bells Are Ringing even lacks the concern of a contemporary film such as Desk Set (Walter Lang, 1957) about the potentially detrimental effects of information technology. As the anachronistic quality of Ella’s performances indicates, the telephone network is a way of regaining what has been lost through the decline of centripetal space. Rather than being fully postmodern, the film is invested in restoring an older sense of meaning and community via the techniques of this new spatiality to which both urban inhabitants and genres must adapt. In this respect, it is crucial that the Susanswerphone offices are not based in the new city, in the International Style office building their advertising implies, but in a condemned brownstone. What is far more of a threat, in the film’s terms, is the corporate culture housed in the International Style skyscrapers we see in the title sequence, itself wholly consistent with McElhaney’s argument that ‘the enormous attention to decorative clutter in Minnelli is a pointed rejection of a major strain of functional and streamlined modernist architecture.’61 A sense of the falseness of corporate life is reinforced by the film’s opening advertisement but also, for example, through Otto’s mimicking of ­corporate language in relation to his bookie ring, such as his references to its ‘board of directors.’ Instead, what Comden and Green later argued motivated the text was the idea that ‘somewhere in this seemingly cold and indifferent town there lurk unexpected pockets of warmth and love.’62 But the film is also uninterested in distinctions between fantasy and some sense of authenticity. Jeff knows Ella as either Melisande (in person) or Mom (as a Susanswerphone operator). When he finds that those two are the same person and that Ella has concealed her identity and lied about her name, he is unfazed and, much to Ella’s surprise, loves her still. The film both restores community amongst subscribers and also sees relationships as fundamentally performative. Paradoxically, it is in performing false identities that Ella is able to develop personal relationships with the ­subscribers and overcome the shyness she otherwise feels in real-life encounters (spelled out in a particularly awkward blind date early in the film); this is why she prefers Susanswerphone to more impersonal work at her previous job at the Bonjour Tristesse Brassiere Company. The film’s use of locations in which the traditional city is absent or being demolished foregrounds the urban component of the musical’s opposition between pockets of warmth and the new immaterial, corporate, and impersonal city; it is through its combination of the cinematic and the theatrical that the film draws out themes of adaptation to new urban conditions.

102   musical theatre screen adaptations That Ella is able to resist this new urbanism through cybernetic processes demonstrates the uneasy synthesis the film creates, between the old and new city and between an older cinematic realism and a new postmodernism.

Conclusion Linda Hutcheon argues that adaptations are inherently ‘palimpsestic’ works, that we ‘experience adaptations (as adaptations) as palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition and variation.’63 Whereas Hutcheon’s understanding of adaptations as palimpsestic rests on audience awareness of an earlier work, On the Town and Bells Are Ringing can be regarded as palimpsestic in two further ways. Firstly, their cinematic and theatrical qualities are evident regardless of audience ­familiarity with their source texts, serving as a rebuke to essentialist accounts of medium specificity. Instead, these films use what were at the time aesthetic strategies clearly identifiable with cinema and with theatre so that both films bear the mark of their adaptation through their aesthetics. And secondly, due to the divergent effects of those theatrical and cinematic qualities, both films draw attention to their means of representing the world, and specifically the most common place to represent in the studio-era Hollywood musical, New York City. At a time of New York City’s dramatic transformation, any film or play set there needed to contend with the interrelated questions of how to represent the city and how the experience of the city was changing. That is to say, the transformation of American urban space posed a problem for both stage and screen musicals. Film adaptations of stage musicals used such divergent aesthetic strategies in ways that were thematically productive, as a means of tentatively, fleetingly resolving that problem. The shakiness of their resolutions indicates the genre’s increasingly apparent incompatibility with the new city, a problem more critical for film because of its direct engagement with the city through location shooting, which increased substantially in the 1960s. Both On the Town and Bells Are Ringing call attention to their representation of New York, drawing out themes of adaptation, of both subjects and aesthetics, to new urban conditions. These films are palimpsests, not just of a film and its source material, but of forms of urban experience and modes of urban representation. These are musicals where the journey from stage to screen saw their source texts fundamentally destabilized by the transformations of their setting.

Notes 1. Hugh Fordin, The Movies’ Greatest Musicals: Produced in Hollywood USA by the Freed Unit (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), 270. 2. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 216.

the problem of adapting postwar new york   103 3. Robert Stam, ‘Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,’ in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 19. 4. Thomas Leitch, ‘Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,’ Criticism 45, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 150–153. 5. Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 116. 6. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 3; Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 7. 7. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 97. 8. Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 96–97. 9. Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 169. 10. See also Lesley Stern’s analysis of Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995) as a ‘makeover’ of both Emma and Los Angeles: Lesley Stern, ‘Emma in Los Angeles: Remaking the Book and the City,’ in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 221–258. 11. On On the Town: Scott Bukatman, ‘A Day in New York: On the Town and The Clock,’ in City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination, ed. Murray Pomerance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 35; Carol J. Oja, Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 111–112. On Bells Are Ringing: Gary Carey, Judy Holliday: An Intimate Life Story (London: Robson Books, 1983), 209; Fordin, The Movies’ Greatest Musicals, 507; Thomas Hischak, The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theater, Film, and Television (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 58. 12. Oja, Bernstein Meets Broadway, 186. 13. Fordin claims that much of Leonard Bernstein’s music was replaced with new songs by Roger Edens because Arthur Freed objected to Bernstein’s ‘avant-garde’ music. But there were perhaps other factors too. Gene Kelly’s biographer reports that when Louis B. Mayer saw the play in 1944, he thought it ‘smutty’ and ‘Communistic.’ By the late 1940s, Bernstein’s politics were becoming a professional barrier: a few weeks into the filming of On the Town, he was included in a list in Life of ‘dupes and fellow travellers’ associated with communist front organizations; he was later listed as a subversive in the influential right-wing pamphlet Red Channels; and in 1950, his music was banned from overseas State Department libraries and functions. Hugh Fordin, ‘On the Town,’ in The Hollywood Film Industry: A Reader, ed. Paul Kerr (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 67; Clive Hirschhorn, Gene Kelly, A Biography (London: W. H. Allen, 1984), 154; ‘Red Visitors Cause Rumpus,’ Life, 4 April 1949, 39–43; Barry Seldes, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 2. 14. Joseph Andrew Casper, Stanley Donen (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1983), 27. 15. Bukatman, ‘A Day in New York,’ 37. 16. Marshall Berman, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (New York: Random House, 2006), 84. 17. Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5. 18. On the choice of New York for the UN headquarters, see Robert  A.  Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975), 771–174.

104   musical theatre screen adaptations 19. Saul Carson, ‘N.Y.’s New Mayor O’Dwyer to Ballyhoo Gotham as World’s No. 1 Amus Capital,’ Variety, 2 January 1946, p. 1. 20. John E Booth, ‘Visitors Bureau Opens a Midtown Office,’ New York Times, 6 June 1948, p.  XX13; ‘N.Y.  Reports Record Breaking Tourist Throng,’ Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 October 1949, p. H5. 21. ‘WNYC Five-Man Film Unit to Produce Tele Show for N.Y. Stations,’ Variety, 26 January 1949, p. 20; ‘Stark Plans Film on City’s Virtues,’ New York Times, 9 February 1949, p. 29; ‘Bill O’Dwyer Role in Films Clarified,’ Variety, 10 August 1955, p. 7. 2 2. Martha Shearer, New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the Streets (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 155. 23. Fordin, ‘On the Town,’ 71. 2 4. Fordin, The Movies’ Greatest Musicals, 267. 25. Casper, Stanley Donen, 28. 26. Hirschhorn, Gene Kelly, 56. 27. Oja, Bernstein Meets Broadway, 270. 28. Carlo Rotella, October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 4. 29. Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 209–211. 30. Fordin, ‘On the Town,’ 73. 31. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 2–3. 32. Lynch, The Image of the City, 4. 33. Lynch, The Image of the City, 10. 34. Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, 172. 35. Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 234–235. 36. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, The New York Musicals of Comden and Green (New York: Applause, 1997), 9. 37. Comden and Green, The New York Musicals, 190. 3 8. Shearer, New York City and the Hollywood Musical, 157. 39. ‘Men at Work,’ New York Times, 20 August 1959, unpaginated, Bells Are Ringing production file, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills. 40. Vincente Minnelli and Hector Arce, I Remember It Well (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 335. 41. ‘A Newer New York,’ Life, 10 August 1959, 56–57. 42. Marya Mannes, The New York I Know (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1961), 142; Paul N Ylvisaker, ‘The Deserted City,’ Journal of the American Planning Association 25, no. 1 (1959): 1–6. 43. Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 44.  The film substitutes Brooklyn Heights for Bay Ridge, and one of the play’s stage directions has Jeff in Bay Ridge ‘yelling as if the sound could reach all the way to New York,’ implying that Susanswerphone is located in Manhattan, yet neither film nor play provides any further information. The indeterminacy of Susanswerphone’s location is such that Pamela Wojcik has it as Greenwich Village and Maya Cantu has it as Brooklyn. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 276. Pamela Robertson Wojcik, The Apartment Plot: Urban

the problem of adapting postwar new york   105 Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945–1975 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 53; Maya Cantu, American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imagining the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 175. 45. Raymond Durgnat, ‘Film Favorites: Bells Are Ringing,’ in The Film Comedy Reader, ed. Gregg Rickman (New York: Limelight Editions, 2001), 230; Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 175. 4 6. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: John Wiley, 1948), 187. 47. ‘How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War,’ Life, 18 December 1950, 76–86. 48. Robert Kargon and Arthur P. Molella, ‘The City as Communications Net: Norbert Wiener, the Atomic Bomb, and Urban Dispersal,’ Technology and Culture 45, no. 4 (October 2004): 774. 49. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 39. 50. Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northern Seaboard of the United States (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961), 590. On Bells Are Ringing and the telephone, see Wojcik, The Apartment Plot, 76. 51. Gottmann, Megalopolis, 630. 52. Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 327; Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 35–91. 53. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (London: Penguin, 1961), 617. 54. Joe McElhaney, ‘Medium-Shot Gestures: Vincente Minnelli and Some Came Running,’ in Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, ed. Joe McElhaney (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 335. 55. Minnelli and Arce, I Remember It Well, 335. 56. Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 203. 57. Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 12. 58. Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 48. 59. David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1985), 19. 60. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 265–266. 61. McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema, 156. 62. Comden and Green, New York Musicals, 190. 63. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 6–8. Original emphasis.

CHAPTER 5

I n to the Woods from Stage to Scr een Mark Eden Horowitz

Into the Woods opened on Broadway on 5 November 1987; the film adaptation opened twenty-seven years later on 8 December 2014. Both versions were critical and commercial successes. The show ran at the Martin Beck Theatre for 765 performances, a run second in length only to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum among the shows for which Stephen Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics. It garnered ten Tony nominations and won three, including best book for James Lapine and best score for Sondheim. In terms of combined popular and financial success, Into the Woods has become the most frequently leased of Sondheim’s musicals, while the film earned over $213 million worldwide in its initial release. What accounts for Woods’ extraordinary success in two demanding yet very different media? The continuity of creative talent from stage to screen was key. James Lapine, who conceived Into the Woods, wrote the libretto, and directed the original production, wrote a screenplay that was faithful to the original but not constrained by it. Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim amended several of his lyrics for the film and wrote one entirely new song. Orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and musical director and conductor Paul Gemignani performed the same functions for the film that they had on Broadway. Working with the remarkably gifted director Rob Marshall, these combined talents and others created Into the Woods, the film. What follows is a study of Woods’ ­transformation from stage to screen largely drawn from interviews I conducted with the creators themselves, providing rich personal insights into their collaborative process adapting the show.

Once Upon a Time Despite the number of years it took for the film to materialize, the idea of adapting the musical for the screen began to form soon after the show’s opening. The rationale seems obvious—the musical is based on well-known and much-loved fairy tales, cleverly

108   musical theatre screen adaptations entwined. The characters in Into the Woods undertake quests to fulfil what they think are their hearts’ desires. In that respect they are similar to the characters in The Wizard of Oz, arguably the apotheosis of the film musical. And there is magic! There are limits to the magical effects that can be created on stage, but on film, especially with the advances in computer-generated imagery (CGI), the only limitations are time and money. It is accessible and fun for children while sophisticated enough for adults—a family show with inherently broad audience appeal and box office potential. James Lapine was first to envision Woods as a film—and as an ideal project for the Walt Disney Company. He contacted the studio shortly after the show opened on Broadway. Considering Disney’s success with The Little Mermaid in 1989, a movie that ushered in a renaissance for animated musicals, the timing seemed perfect for Woods. For whatever reason, Disney passed up the opportunity. As Lapine dryly remembered, ‘Katzenberg1 went on to make Shrek for DreamWorks.’ Around 1995, Sondheim and Lapine were approached by Jim Henson Productions along with producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron about a possible screen adaptation. They proposed a film using a combination of live actors and puppets or animatronics for the animals. Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (screenwriters of Splash, and City Slickers) wrote a screenplay, and two readings were held, both featuring A-list Hollywood actors. No film resulted. A few years later still another attempt with a similarly starry cast met the same fate.2 The rights reverted to Sondheim and Lapine. Enter the director Rob Marshall. Marshall was a respected Broadway and television choreographer when, in 2002, he directed his first film—Chicago, an adaptation of the Bob Fosse, John Kander, and Fred Ebb musical. At the time, live-action film musicals were considered passé and unprofitable, but Chicago proved the naysayers wrong. The film became a staggeringly successful hit and the first musical to win the Oscar for Best Picture since Oliver! in 1968. Yet Marshall’s inspiration to make the film of Into the Woods came from an unexpected source—a speech given in 2012 by President Obama on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11. In it, Obama said: ‘Know this, that you will never be alone. Your loved ones will never be forgotten.’ Obama seemingly echoed the essential phrase from the Woods song, ‘No One Is Alone.’ In a conversation with another interviewer, Marshall explained: I remember hearing that and it hit me in such a powerful way because, to me, it’s such an important message for today, and it’s the central message, for me, of Into the Woods, that song “No One Is Alone.” And I thought, “Wow, what an important ­message for children of today, especially, but families as well, because I feel like ­children are dealing with a much more unstable and fragile world than existed when I was growing up.”

Soon after hearing the Obama speech, Marshall sought approval from Sondheim and Lapine to pursue making the film. At the time, Lapine and Marshall had only met in passing. Sondheim had come to know Marshall when he choreographed the Roundabout Theatre revival of Company at Center Stage in 1995 and the revival of Forum with Nathan Lane in 1996. And back in

into the woods from stage to screen   109 1984, Paul Gemignani was the musical director for The Rink and had approved Marshall as dance captain and swing. (Marshall would sometimes—jokingly, one assumes— credit Gemignani for kick-starting his career.) Plans began in earnest in 2011 while Marshall was editing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. He met with Lapine in Los Angeles and somewhat later with Sondheim in New York. Presciently enough, Marshall had actually met with Sondheim several years earlier, shortly after the film of Chicago opened, and expressed his interest in directing a film of one of his shows. As they discussed possibilities, Sondheim said, ‘Into the Woods is your film. You have the right sensibility for it.’ Marshall suspects Sondheim sensed how much he loved the show. Years later Sondheim’s official approval carried one condition: ‘As long as you get it done,’ alluding to the earlier false starts. Lapine had not liked the conceit of the 1995 screenplay with which he’d had no involvement. When it became clear that Marshall wanted to honour the original show and wanted Lapine to write the screenplay, he was happily onboard. As it turned out, Lapine was more open to changes than Marshall was, Lapine saying they could look at everything from scratch. He even raised the possibility of throwing out the lengthy opening number in which most of the characters are introduced and their wishes made known. Marshall’s immediate response was, ‘No!’ He thought that the opening number was so cinematic that it was one of the reasons he had wanted to make the film to begin with. Lapine is generally open to change. He recounts that he felt a lot of time pressure with the initial production of Woods, particularly as he was writing and directing simultaneously. Therefore, when he directed the 2001 Broadway revival he took the time to look at the script again and considered several revisions. Although he decided that the stage script didn’t really need any changes, the process was instructive and he did make changes to the staging. Marshall had (and continues to have) a ‘first look deal’ with Disney, whereby he approaches them first with any projects. He wasn’t sure they would be interested, but he was impressed to find them now excited about pushing the envelope with a more adult version of fairy tales—some of which were already famously associated with the studio in tamer versions. Marshall put together an unstaged presentation3 of the show with music stands for a private audience that included Sondheim, Lapine, and the Disney brass. A narrator read all of the description and physical movement in the script, and David Krane provided an improvised musical underscore. Marshall explains that it was so that people would understand what it was. Musicals are still rare. I mean, when you read one, it’s very hard to read it on the page because you get to the song, people just kind of skip the song. But in a Sondheim musical it’s in the song where the story takes place. We did this reading to help people see what it was going to be. But it also helped me because translating something from stage to film is a real challenge. You want to hold on to the original intention of the piece, the central core of the piece, but you also need to reimagine it as a film.

The studio executives liked what they saw and gave the project the green light. Marshall submitted a budget to Disney—which the studio promptly cut in half to $50 million.

110   musical theatre screen adaptations Other than the smaller budget, Disney had two requirements: a running time under two hours (it actually clocks in at 125 minutes with credits), and a PG rating. According to Sondheim’s lawyer, Rick Pappas, Sondheim’s stature enabled them to negotiate a deal that gave Sondheim and Lapine more creative control and approvals than is typical in a film contract. While Sondheim was not obligated to write a new song, it was stipulated that no one else could.4 Disney was hopeful that Sondheim would write a new song since it would then be eligible for Oscar contention. Sondheim and Lapine had final approval over the director, screenwriter, and producer, as well as the casting of the Baker, the Baker’s Wife, and the Witch. Lapine was engaged as the sole screenwriter. Sondheim had final approval over the arranger, orchestrator and orchestrations, any additions or deletions of songs, and changes in lyrics and changes in music, including any alteration to the genre or style of the music. If he chose not to write the underscore himself, Sondheim also had approval over its composer. Finally, he had the right to approve masters on the soundtrack; this enabled him to request the use of an alternate take if he felt a particular lyric was garbled or a wrong note was sung. If the above suggests any contention, just the opposite turned out to be true. By all accounts, the collaboration was a particularly happy one. Stage is often described as a writer’s medium and film as a director’s. It’s clear that Marshall was the marshal of the film, but coming from a theatre background he was described as having made the process ‘very collaborative, more than a typical movie, more like a stage musical.’ The positive spirit was shared not just among the creative team but also with Disney. Marc Platt was an independent producer hired by Disney and, according to Pappas, ‘he deserves a lot of the credit for how smoothly things went.’ Lapine recollects writing at least a dozen drafts of the script, sharing only the first with Sondheim. Characters, including Cinderella’s father and the Narrator, would come and go. The father would not be missed, but even if the Narrator went, his function necessarily remained. There was no question that the Baker would double as the Narrator. As Lapine observed, ‘It’s always been his story.’ Of course, in the film the Baker’s narration is a voiceover—though an identifiable voice. The tight budget meant that some of the things Lapine had hoped to include in the film were impossible, such as having a scene take place at the ball. And it’s important to realize that budgets don’t just limit the money that can be spent on things like sets, costumes, and actors, but also ­precious shooting time. In addition to the dialogue, Lapine’s scripts included descriptions of the action, ­camera point of view (POV), and other effects. Lapine explains, ‘Film is such a literal art form and stage is not. Film is much more visually driven than word driven; Rob would then make corrections and suggestions [to the script].’ Surprisingly, Lapine was never on-set during the actual filming, but he and Sondheim watched and responded to a ­preliminary cut of the film before the final editing. Unlike musical sequences in movies, songs in stage musicals are designed to elicit applause—a break from the action and a temporary break in the fourth wall.5 In a film, each scene segues directly to the next and the audience remains silent. It’s fascinating to see how it’s handled in Into the Woods. One trick is nearly perpetual underscoring so

into the woods from stage to screen   111 that even when the singing ends, the music itself continues. Sometimes the end of one scene cuts immediately to the beginning of the next, instantly captivating the audience’s attention with something new. Sometimes we don’t even see the characters we hear ­singing, such as at the end of the opening sequence. By the end of ‘Agony’ the camera has us watching from behind the Princes, seeing them only in silhouette while our eyes are drawn to the same vista that has captured their attention. According to Marshall, ‘At the end of the Prologue—opening sequence—I wanted a big ending. We actually did get applause at one audience screening. You ask yourself, “Do you want some kind of button . . . a moment?” But sometimes you want a seamless transition. Rhythm is everything for me.’ Auditioning actors, Marshall did not pair the couples to determine their chemistry, but says, for instance, he simply knew Emily Blunt would work well with James Corden: ‘They have similar sensibilities . . . senses of humour.’ And he believed Chris Pine and Anna Kendrick ‘should pair well, they have a similar contemporary quality.’ Meryl Streep was the ultimate get as the Witch. When she turned forty she had been offered three witch roles in a single year, prompting her to institute, as she stated in several interviews, a ‘no witches rule’—‘a political reaction against the concept of witches.’ Her protest was directed towards Hollywood’s obsession with young women and how quickly they age out of consideration for certain roles. Now, twenty-five years later, she abandoned that rule because she felt the Witch in Woods was more age appropriate and, more importantly, she was a fan of the show and eager to work with Sondheim and Marshall.6 It was a struggle to live within the reduced budget for the film, but the longer than normal rehearsal time is a large part of what made it possible. Marshall explains: What saved us, in addition to having really smart designers to help figure out how to do it properly, actors took less than they normally would on a film. Having that time to create the piece and work every single number, stage every number, stage every scene, work on scenes. I can’t even tell you how valuable that was. Not only did we get to the day of shooting and start to shoot, we were so prepared. But also, this is an ensemble piece. It was so important to create a company, have a company of actors that are all together, that are all in the same film. That was invaluable—having rehearsal. That was one of the saving graces.

Music Paul Gemignani’s job as conductor and music supervisor did not officially start until a few months before rehearsals began, but his involvement did begin earlier. He saw a script fairly early in the process. Rob Marshall would occasionally call him with questions. After casting was completed, there were six weeks of rehearsals before principal photography began, and during that period, Gemignani worked with the actors every day—whether or not they thought of themselves as singers. According to Gemignani,

112   musical theatre screen adaptations when actors with limited or even no singing experience are cast in musicals, the first thing they want to do is run out and take lessons. Gemignani strongly urges them to wait: Sometimes, with the wrong teacher, you can destroy what’s there naturally. I want them to sing the way they do when it’s their mother’s birthday. By rehearsing with the singer, they get to play, find acting moments, try different things. As a result, what you see on the screen seems natural. One of the most important things is if you can get them to feel like they’re good, confident.

Although Meryl Streep had done a fair amount of singing in previous films, arguably nothing had been as challenging and demanding as ‘Last Midnight.’ Gemignani helped her ‘find that.’ David Krane, the film’s musical score adaptor who often accompanied the singers in rehearsal, says of Meryl Streep: ‘In the studio she does it twenty different ways. Each one is legitimate. Then she makes rational choices. There’s no ego. She works like a Trojan.’ Among the other actors, Chris Pine had had virtually no singing roles and was reportedly so insecure about his singing he almost cancelled his audition. According to Gemignani, James Corden’s singing had been largely limited to comic songs. Anna Kendrick, on the other hand, was not only known for singing on stage and in films, but she had also sung Sondheim’s ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ in her first film, Camp, and played Fredrika in a New York City Opera production of A Little Night Music, both in 2003. Although the keys were set early, some of them were raised as actors grew more ­confident. By the time the performers recorded their songs, Gemignani said, ‘They knew the music so well, they didn’t really need to be conducted, or it was little more than having to cue the kids on their entrances.’ Apparently, there is less anxiety these days about casting nonsingers in musicals, Gemignani noted, because, ‘you have total control in a film to fix things if necessary. With Pro Tools [software] you can fix almost a­ nything—correct any pitch.’ However, Gemignani said, they did not need to use it at all on Woods. Marshall is the only film director Gemignani knows who records the vocals in three different ways. As a result, he has three choices for any given moment. First, the full orchestra records each song, and all the actors get their copy of the recording for learning and rehearsing their songs. Then, just as for an original cast recording, the actors record their songs live with the orchestra—a luxury that is all but unheard of in films. In addition, the actors may also sing live on the set to the accompaniment of the orchestra prerecord. What is seen and heard on screen may be any combination of these recordings. Gemignani largely credits this process for making the singing sound so natural. On Broadway, Jonathan Tunick orchestrated Into the Woods for a chamber ensemble of fifteen musicians. Sondheim has been quoted as having told Tunick that he wanted the stage score to sound like Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat7 by way of Disney—long before Disney actually got involved. But the visual scope of the film is so much grander than that of the stage, and only a large orchestra can match that. The sound must be rich,

into the woods from stage to screen   113 and to accomplish that, Tunick says, ‘it’s all about the strings.’ On stage there were six musicians in the string section, including two violins; in the film there were many times that number. Many of the visual effects in the film were also greatly enhanced by the wider palette of musical colours to accompany them. For instance, when the branches and leaves of the weeping willow swirl around Cinderella and become her dress, the  magic of the swirl is brought to musical life using the unique glissandos of the harp—­an instrument that wasn’t used at all on stage. After talking with Marshall and adding up his needs, Tunick suggested an average of fifty players. That didn’t mean every number would use fifty. For one session they might use thirty-five, while another would use sixty-five, for example. The recordings took six days, as Tunick remembers. Because so much of the instrumental music was based on songs which, by their nature, have strict rhythmic and melodic phrases, I assumed that the film was largely cut to the music but, it turns out, most of the instrumental music was cut to the film. Tunick saw no need to review his original orchestrations before starting on the film, explaining: ‘The songs are in my bones by now. With Steve, the fabric is so worked out— the harmony and counterpoint. Obviously, much of the underscoring is new, which is a different matter.’ Surprisingly enough, although Tunick was given the ranges of the performers, he didn’t actually listen to their voices before orchestrating, so the timbre and quality of their voices didn’t affect his choices. However, he did have a sense of Meryl Streep’s voice. Daniel Huttlestone sang ‘Giants in the Sky’ in a higher key than it’s ­typically done. Traditionally the part has been played by someone in his late teens or early twenties, but Huttlestone was young enough that his voice had not yet changed. In comparing the relative merits of the stage and film orchestrations, Sondheim says: ‘It’s true of most scores—if they’re good, they can work both ways. The pie shop version of Sweeney with three instruments works just as well as the original with twenty-seven.’

Moments in the Woods The film opens under rather dark clouds—is a storm approaching? Suddenly a boot lands in a puddle, muddling the image. Surprise! It was a reflection of the clouds, not the real thing. This opening image was Marshall’s idea and, according to Lapine, something he was passionate about. It’s important not just because it’s a reflection, but because it was Cinderella’s foot that revealed it, the foot that becomes such a pivotal part of the story. Here at the beginning we see it less than ideally clad—and, like the clouds, she’s not exactly what she first appears to be. Then a few minutes later we see her stepsisters preparing for the festival; when we pull back, we see that they’re framed in a mirror. Suddenly the mirror parts and we realize it’s on a door, and it’s through that door that Cinderella enters the room. Once again, Cinderella is associated with a reflection. The first words we hear are those of the Narrator (Baker): ‘Once upon a time in a far-off ­kingdom there lay a small village at the edge of the woods.’ Then the loud and jolting first

114   musical theatre screen adaptations chords of the opening number startle us into attention. On stage, the chords had come immediately after ‘Once upon a time.’ The change would seem minor if Sondheim had not spoken about its importance in the original opening: The Narrator comes out, and he says, ‘Once upon a time.’ Now, as soon as an audience hears that they start to relax inside, because they think it’s going to be ‘Once upon a time there was a little girl’ or ‘Once upon a time there was a . . .’ What I wanted to do was wake them up right away. So the Narrator starts, and before he gets into the fifth word, I want a very loud sound from the orchestra or the piano. And at that point, I hope the entire audience will be startled into having to listen to what you’re saying. They will also know instinctively that the evening is going to be full of ­surprises. And every time they think that they are going to be ahead of you—the storytellers—you are, in fact, going to pull something on them. And so the audience should be alert.

But the foot in the puddle accomplishes the same thing in the film as the chord does in the theatre—a good example of how things can be reconceived for different media but to the same effect. Wherever the music actually begins, Marshall says, ‘Because it’s a fairy tale there are reasons to sing. Because it starts with “Once upon a time,” you have that license to sing.’ The opening sequence of Into the Woods, both on stage and screen, is a tour-de-force, some sixteen minutes of song and dialogue blending together. It introduces most of the show’s major characters, their personalities, situations, and wishes. It launches them on their various quests and adventures. On stage, with all its cross-cutting, the scene has often been described as cinematic. On film, it absolutely is. Because the sequence skips rapidly around three locations—the dwellings of Cinderella, Jack and his Mother, and the Baker and his Wife—Marshall filmed the three stories so they could be told simultaneously as a triptych. But when he tried editing it that way the experiment didn’t work because, according to Marshall, ‘when people were singing at the same time, the audience didn’t know where to look.’ The changes to the dialogue and lyrics in the film are comparatively modest. In the opening sequence, some are as tiny as the Narrator describing Jack as ‘carefree’ rather than ‘sad’—for reasons that Lapine doesn’t recall. A change in the staging foreshadows Jack’s skill with a slingshot. Both Cinderella’s mother and father are now dead, her father having been determined to be an unnecessary character. Subtle dialogue changes in the bakery scene sharpen the differences between husband and wife. The Baker is less ­sympathetic toward Little Red Ridinghood’s ‘thievery,’ while his Wife is even more indulgent, thus setting up their uneven desires for a child. At the behest of either Marshall or Disney, Lapine inserted a reason for the sudden deadline for gathering the prescribed objects: the Witch now explains that the spell requires a once-in-a-century blue moon—which will appear in three days’ time. Lapine wasn’t convinced the explanation was n ­ ecessary, but he didn’t mind making the change and wasn’t even sure it would be included. ‘In film, it’s always better to do things like this so you have them. You can always cut later, but it’s really a drag to figure out how to do it after the film is

into the woods from stage to screen   115 shot.’ And, unlike on stage, the Witch reveals to the Baker and his Wife both that she has the Baker’s hitherto unknown sister and that the curse she hopes to reverse is ugliness. As for curses, the Witch now haunts the Baker with ‘When your mother died, your father deserted you. Your father was no father so why should you be?’ Over the Witch’s ‘rap’ section of the opening number, the film adds a flashback showing the Baker’s father and his ‘raping’ of the Witch’s garden. This flashback was added later. Two song segments from the opening sequence were cut from the film—a short ­section of ‘Into the Woods,’ and Jack’s Mother’s second refrain lamenting their lowly ­circumstances—already made clear by the dilapidated state of their farm.8 The song ends as the camera pulls back and up, until the audience can survey the vast woods and pick out characters following the paths to their desired goals. The pullback continues until the distant castle comes into view. And something is in the air. It’s so subtle that it barely ­registers, but it adds a magical quality to the woods. Something gently drifting down catching the light is an effect that will recur throughout the film. (The actual substance used to create the effect was goose down.) Moving to the equivalent of the stage show’s second scene in which Cinderella visits her mother’s grave, the change of one word enabled the incorporation of a dazzling special effect. On stage, the mother’s grave was ‘at the hazel tree.’ Lapine doesn’t recall why he made it a hazel tree but says it’s exactly the kind of detail he would likely have taken directly from the original Grimm fairy tale.9 Hazel, though traditionally magical, is ­visually rather shrublike. In the film, the tree is no longer hazel but is now a sinuous ­willow. The change accommodated the design team’s vision where the willow’s swirling branches and leaves become Cinderella’s gown. The brief scene between Cinderella and her mother is even shorter in the film, with Cinderella’s portion of their song cut. At this point in the stage version of the show, the Mysterious Man made his first appearance. There is no mystery to his absence from the film; he proved unnecessary. With his meddling and riddles he encouraged some of the characters to assist the Baker in his quest, but he wasn’t the deciding factor behind their choices. When we later learn in the stage version that the Mysterious Man is the Baker’s Father, we are more sympathetic to him because of the efforts we’ve seen him make to assist his son. But eliminating his character in the film results in a more confrontational and repentant scene between the Baker and his Father later on. Although Cinderella’s Mother appears briefly in the film, like the Mysterious Man, she no longer meddles in the action. Reflecting upon the loss of characters, Lapine observed, ‘Screen time is precious.’ After the scene between Cinderella and her mother, we find ourselves in the company of the Wolf played by Johnny Depp in a 1940s zoot suit! Depp himself made the suggestion, inspired by the work of the animator Tex Avery and, one assumes, his film short ‘Red Hot Riding Hood’ (1943). Although it does seem out of sync with the rest of the film, Marshall has said that he wanted each character’s ‘story’ to have its own look and time period. The movie’s costume designer, Colleen Atwood, accomplished that by outfitting the characters in clothes inspired from a wide range of periods, places, and styles—starting with the medieval (Rapunzel), and Renaissance Europe (the Princes). To match the Wolf ’s costume and sensibility, David Krane arranged and Jonathan

116   musical theatre screen adaptations Tunick orchestrated ‘Hello, Little Girl’ as a big band number. As fun as this jazzy ­version was on its own, the creative team agreed it was too jarring in the film, so they went back to the original arrangement. For those who are surprised that Sondheim even let them attempt it, when I asked him about it, he said, ‘I generally welcome anything out of left field.’ The sexuality of ‘Hello, Little Girl’ and the Wolf ’s scene with Little Red Riding Hood is far more muted in the film, less animalistic. On stage, the Wolf had appeared barechested and without pants, with a discernible penis in the fur. His more modest look in the film was probably the result of either Disney’s request or Marshall’s preemptive strike. Initially, Marshall cast a very young girl to play Little Red Riding Hood—only six or seven years old. After a week of filming, it clearly didn’t work; some feared it might be perceived as ‘creepy.’ She was replaced by Lilla Crawford, then about twelve. Given that Marshall began his career as a dancer and choreographer, it’s perhaps ­surprising that there’s hardly any true dance in Into the Woods. The closest example is the movement and staging of ‘Hello, Little Girl.’ However, Marshall himself thinks of film as dance. It’s one of the reasons he felt so immediately at home directing film: ‘It’s creating a seamlessness between movement and the camera; the key challenge is to make it seem seamless. It ends up feeling like choreography.’ For him, Into the Woods has a ‘fluidity, a sense of ballet.’ A good, if perhaps surprising, example of that is the scene in which Cinderella helps her stepsisters get ready for the ball. Although they’re not dancing, the scene is shot in one take and every moment and movement is choreographed for both the performers and the camera. It’s a good example of the dictum that ‘content dictates form’10; that scene-in-one contrasts dramatically with the frenetic edits and jump cuts that featured in so much of Marshall’s film of Chicago. Not only was the blue moon added to the film, but early on, the Witch explains the ‘rules’ of the spell to the Baker: she may not touch any of the objects herself or the spell will not work. In the stage play this had been a surprise reveal late in the proceedings. Either Marshall or the studio felt that the audience needed the explanation sooner, and Lapine accommodated the request, inserting it in the Witch’s dialogue the first time she surprises the Baker in the woods. Although Lapine was comfortable making the change, he did miss the surprise later when they feed Rapunzel’s hair11 to the cow and it doesn’t work. We come to the first set of songs cut in their entirety. First, ‘I Guess This Is Goodbye,’ Jack’s very brief love song to his cow, Milky White, and second and almost immediately following, the duet between the Baker and his Wife, ‘Maybe They’re Magic.’ The first song is sweet and funny, but it doesn’t propel the action. The latter is a somewhat philosophical discussion about what’s right and wrong, culminating in a delicious but cringeworthy pun. It’s replaced by a tense exchange between the Baker and his Wife in which he expresses his fear of being as bad a father as his own father was. On stage, this is followed by a scene of a few sentences in which Rapunzel lets her hair down so the Witch can climb the tower—a moment that’s covertly observed by the instantly smitten he-who-will-become Rapunzel’s Prince. For the 1990 London production of Into the Woods, Sondheim wrote a duet for the Witch and Rapunzel to sing at this

into the woods from stage to screen   117 point, ‘Our Little World.’ It is a funny song, but its primary purpose was to show a moment of tenderness between the two—to show that, despite her being overprotective and possessive, the Witch truly cares for Rapunzel, that there was a sincere emotional relationship. Apparently, the song was not considered necessary in the film, in which the addition of the briefest exchange serves a similar purpose. The Witch says, ‘Don’t you look lovely today, my dear. I brought your favourite, blackberries, fresh from the garden.’ Sondheim wrote one new song for the film, ‘She’ll Be Back,’ for a similar reason—to make the relationship between the Witch and Rapunzel more than that of guard and prisoner. This was a solo for the Witch that would have segued directly from the ‘Witch’s Lament.’ Before filming began, Meryl Streep and Rob Marshall went to Sondheim’s home where he sang the song for them, accompanied by David Krane on the piano. Moved to tears, Streep insisted that Sondheim inscribe the music for her. He did: ‘Dear Meryl, Don’t fuck it up. Love, Steve.’ Although the song was filmed, it was cut because it slowed down the pace of the film just as it was heading toward its denouement. As Marshall explained: ‘We found after the first screening that it actually didn’t help advance the story. You realize it’s not about you, it’s not about Stephen Sondheim, it’s not about Meryl Streep. It’s about serving the film. That’s the most important thing.’ Another modest change, presumably to keep Disney happy, eliminates the Grandmother’s gory plans to capture, torture, and kill the Wolf. This leads us to Little Red’s ‘I Know Things Now,’ the first of the four ‘I know things now’ songs12—one each for Little Red, Jack, Cinderella, and the Baker’s Wife. Unlike the stage show, in which Little Red sings her soliloquy directly to the audience, in the film she directs her confession to the Baker. Thus, the fourth wall remains standing throughout the film (aside from the narration). The only change to the lyric is in these three lines: So we wait in the dark Until someone sets us free, And we’re brought into the light,

which becomes: So we lay in the dark ’til you came and set us free, And you brought us to the light,

The song also takes advantage of what film can do so easily—show the journey into the Wolf ’s stomach while Little Red describes it. What had been static becomes dynamic. (Similarly, we see the Baker’s Father’s stealing into and from the Witch’s garden.) If the alimentary effects seem less than convincing, the budget limitations may be to blame. Lapine adds a wittily phrased foreshadowing when Jack’s mother admonishes him: ‘Get your head out of the clouds.’ And now, when she throws away his beans, the stalk begins to grow immediately. As the camera pulls up to follow the beanstalk, the distant but brightly lit castle comes into view, heightening anticipation for the King’s festival.

118   musical theatre screen adaptations Music is in the air—‘The Night Waltz’ from A Little Night Music! No one seems sure whose inspiration that was, though it appears to have been added in post-production. Things happen quickly now. The spoken-lyric ‘First Midnight,’ mostly by Lapine, is cut. The now fully grown beanstalk prompts Jack’s Mother’s scream in voiceover. Leaping forward in time, Jack is running to the Baker, bringing the five huge gold coins he stole from the Giant to redeem Milky White. In ‘Giants in the Sky,’ as with ‘I Know Things Now,’ Jack now recounts his adventure directly to the Baker—as opposed to the audience—complete with intercuts of the actual adventure. Of all the songs in Woods, ‘Agony’ falls most squarely in the musical comedy t­ radition, and Marshall makes it a highlight of the film. Marshall describes himself as always being ultra-prepared, a characterization echoed by others. Late one night, he was online ­poring over images of Windsor Great Park where they would be doing some of the film’s location shooting. He came upon pictures of the Cascade waterfall and immediately thought, ‘That’s it!’—the place to film ‘Agony.’ He wanted a setting that was ‘prince-like and grand,’ and he believed the unlikeliness of the location would make the competitive duet even funnier. As it happens, the waterfall is man-made with the added advantage that the water can be turned on and off. Marshall, John DeLuca—his partner, a producer, and the assistant choreographer—and others went to the waterfall where Marshall and DeLuca proceeded to choreograph the number. David Krane recalls ‘setting-up an electric piano in a fountain—running on something like twenty D batteries.’ He accompanied the choreography sessions and later rehearsals, improvising as ­necessary, making mental notes in order to create the dance arrangements. The choreography at the Cascade included camera placements using cranes because of the waterfall—‘otherwise it would have been too dangerous.’ Marshall likes to use three or four cameras when he’s filming musicals. ‘Agony,’ with only two characters, needed three; larger musical numbers would require four. Even though he plans his shots meticulously, he’s often surprised at which footage he’ll end up choosing for the final edit. Although Marshall uses storyboards for action sequences—‘You have to,’ he says—as a choreographer, he finds them ‘too slow’ for musical numbers.13 As heavily prechoreographed as ‘Agony’ was, Marshall says, ‘Obviously things change as you’re actually rehearsing.’ In fact, letting actors experiment and bring their own personalities and ideas to the set are among Marshall’s favourite parts of filmmaking—the collaboration. Speaking of the Princes: Billy Magnuson as Rapunzel’s Prince gave his character a somewhat goofy and accident-prone nature. He even improvised lines such as the embarrassed ‘Bad idea’ after hitting the tower wall, a mishap that may also have been improvised. And he inserted the pause followed by the surprised ‘I like it,’ after seeing Rapunzel’s shorn hair.14 ‘It Takes Two’ is the first true duet for the Baker and his Wife in the film, and it occurs more than a third of the way in (‘Maybe Their Magic’ having been cut). There are no lyric changes in the song, but a happy accident occurred while shooting the scene. Where the plan was for the song to end with a kiss, James Corden accidentally slipped down the hill at the end of the number, bringing Emily Blunt with him. The look of surprise and spontaneous laughter brings a frisson of reality to the moment.

into the woods from stage to screen   119 The reprise of ‘A Very Nice Prince’ is cut, as is ‘Second Midnight.’ ‘Stay with Me’15 is not only complete, but Meryl Streep’s intense and impassioned performance is breathtaking. Marshall edits the scene so that the chorus feels like one long circling close-up on the Witch, though there are two very brief cut-aways to Rapunzel. The third of the ‘I know things now’ songs is Cinderella’s ‘On the Steps of the Palace.’ Like Little Red and Jack, Cinderella does not sing of her realizations to the audience. The fourth wall is maintained, but unlike Little Red and Jack, Cinderella does not sing to someone else but to herself. Singing in the first person instead of the third—as she does in the stage version—she becomes an actor, not a reporter. On stage her escape from the ball happens offstage; in the film she’s actually singing as it happens. Sondheim changed lyrics throughout the song—a word or two here, a word or three there. ‘It’s your first big decision,’ becomes ‘It’s my first big decision.’ The most substantive change is replacing Then from out of the blue, And without any guide,

with Wait, on thinking it through, Things don’t have to collide.

Through the magic of film—and Marshall—the song takes place during a single moment as everything around Cinderella is nearly frozen in time. Even the flickering flames of the torches and the Prince in hot pursuit are suspended in time and place. It’s during this number that Kendrick’s contemporary quality shines. There are two primary storylines—two quests and three denouements—in the first half of Into the Woods. The denouements are the Prince tracking down Cinderella (with the assistance of the slipper she intentionally left behind), and the Baker and his Wife obtaining the four objects prescribed to ensure the conception of a child—and to restore the Witch’s youthful beauty. A striking difference—and improvement—between the stage and film versions was to reverse the order of the conclusions. The first half of the film ends not with Cinderella’s happy ending but with the Witch’s rejuvenation, a transformation so spectacular that one wonders why it wasn’t staged that way on Broadway. Surely the story of the Baker, his Wife, and the Witch is more significant than Cinderella being recognized by her Prince. As Lapine has stated, the show has always been the Baker’s story. In the case of the film, it’s not only the Witch’s far more visually stunning transformation, but seeing the immediate expansion of the Wife’s belly to fullterm pregnancy that makes for such a satisfying moment. Lapine had wanted to use this effect in the original production, but the sound of an inflatable stomach proved too loud and comical to work.16 The medium of film also required feeding real objects to a real cow: gold slippers molded of white chocolate, hair spun of cotton candy, and a cape fashioned from taffy.17

120   musical theatre screen adaptations To separate the ‘happy endings,’ the film adds a new scene for Rapunzel and her Prince, replacing a bit of narration. Rapunzel no longer gives birth to twins conceived out of wedlock. (A tad too Tangled for Disney?) However, the new scene shows Rapunzel wading through a terrifying snake-infested swamp. In the stage version, this portion of the story was followed immediately by a scene with the Witch, Rapunzel, and her Prince, where the Witch tries to cast a spell and realizes that in exchange for her beauty she has lost her magic. That scene now appears much later in the film. Of course, the film of Into the Woods has no second act. It has no intermission. Woods poses a particular challenge because its two acts are so fundamentally different in tone and substance. In his book, Look, I Made a Hat, Sondheim even stated, ‘There are not many musicals that demand a two-act structure (one example would be, Into the Woods).’18 The film does several things both to ease the transition and to tighten the script. The next four numbers in the show are all cut—‘Ever After’ and ‘So Happy,’ which book-ended the intermission in the theatre, and the reprises of ‘Into the Woods’ and ‘Agony.’ ‘Ever After’ is largely a recounting of what happened in the first act with a bit of moralizing thrown in. It gave the first act a sense of completion, and even led some audience members to think the show was over. ‘So Happy’ is an echo of the opening of the show—everything’s better, but the troubles in the first act are now replaced with new wishes—Cinderella’s ‘I wish to go to the festival’ becomes ‘I wish to sponsor a festival; the Baker’s Wife’s ‘I wish I had a child’ becomes ‘I wish we had more room.’ Although the song had added a certain balance to the stage show, Lapine explains, ‘Converting away from the two-act structure to uninterrupted film wasn’t that difficult. The second act on stage could have jumped forward. It’s something I had in mind for the stage, but never tried it—not to repeat the start of the show at the start of the second act.’ The film’s celebratory wedding procession for Cinderella and the Prince comes immediately after the Witch’s transformation and the Baker’s Wife’s pregnancy. David Krane arranged the underscoring of the celebration using themes based on ‘Ever After’ and ‘So Happy’—he is passionate about incorporating as much music as possible from the cut songs to use in the underscoring. The celebration is interrupted almost immediately by, what? An earthquake? No, it is the approach of the Giant’s widow. The film cuts to the woods full of smashed trees. Paths have lost their way. The homes in the village have been destroyed. The entire tone of the film is darker—we even lose the comic relief of the reprise of ‘Agony’ and later glimpses of the unfaithful Princes with Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. On the other hand, there is no longer a Narrator to be murdered19 and one presumes in the film that Rapunzel and her Prince are still together. Lapine also added a sly joke when the now blind Florinda confirms to the Giantess that Jack is hiding in the steeple tower, saying: ‘Yes, we saw him there.’ At this point in the stage version, Rapunzel runs toward the Giant and we hear the ‘squish’ off-stage; her Prince verifies her demise with a shake of his head. Her survival in the film is believed to be one of the changes requested by Disney. After the confrontation with the Giantess in the film, the Baker and his Wife go their separate ways in search of Jack while Rapunzel, her Prince, and the Witch have their delayed confrontation. This leads into the Witch’s ‘Lament.’ It was for this moment that Sondheim had written ‘She’ll Be Back.’20 In ‘Stay with Me’

into the woods from stage to screen   121 the Witch tried to convince Rapunzel to stay with her; in ‘She’ll Be Back’ she tries to ­convince herself that Rapunzel will. The surprising—even shocking—encounter between the Baker’s Wife and Cinderella’s Prince is largely the same in the film and the show. ‘Any Moment’ and ‘Moments in the Woods’ are almost identical, except the Prince’s brief reprise of ‘Any Moment’ is cut. To Marshall, the Baker’s Wife’s succumbing to the Prince and her infidelity to the Baker was the section of the story he thought most un-Disney-like, and he was thrilled that the studio kept it: ‘It’s what makes it modern and unique. The story is becoming more real—dealing with consequences and reality.’ In the film, the scene feeds the deeper symbolism of the scarf, which has come to represent the relationship between the Baker and his Wife. Early in the show, the Wife brings the scarf to the Baker in the woods, using it as the excuse for following him against his wishes. Later, as they are about to part again in the woods, the Baker returns the scarf to his Wife, saying ‘I don’t want you to get cold.’ Mere minutes later, the Prince seduces the Wife, first caressing the scarf and then removing it—along with her inhibitions. When Jack returns the scarf to the Baker, the latter knows his wife is dead. Marshall describes ‘Your Fault’ ‘as a dance,’ and found it to be one of the hardest numbers to stage. The scene required a lot of choreography of the actors and movement of the cameras, followed by a great deal of editing. Part of the choreography involved the Witch’s disappearing about a quarter of the way through the number, an effect not attempted on stage. ‘Your Fault’ segues directly into the Witch’s solo ‘Last Midnight,’ which now opens with a shock. The Witch is holding the Baker’s baby—‘as a hostage’— and her ‘Shhhhh!’ that begins the number doesn’t just stops the bickering; it’s clearly intended to silence the group so they won’t disturb the baby. When Lapine directed the 2002 Broadway revival of the show, one of the changes he made was for the Witch to take the baby before launching into ‘Last Midnight.’ He thinks it was one of his more inspired moments. ‘No More’ is the last song that was cut from the film, and the one that the collaborators most regretted losing. Lapine said, ‘It was painful to see “No More” go.’ Marshall shared that sentiment, expounding further: One of the most difficult decisions was losing ‘No More.’ You can’t sustain things on film as long as you can on stage. You have to earn a ballad . . . for it to land. The end was going to be ballad heavy [with ‘No More,’ ‘No One Is Alone,’ and ‘Children Will Listen’]. I was concerned about the rhythm. People might lose interest.

Plus, without the Mysterious Man with his riddles and jests the song doesn’t quite make sense. An intense scene between the Baker and his Father took the place of ‘No More’— which did serve as underscoring. The confrontation between son and father ends unexpectedly with the Baker’s Father’s admonishing his son: ‘Aren’t you making the same mistake? Aren’t you running away? Be better than me . . . son. Do better.’ This scene between James Corden and Simon Russell Beale is one of Lapine’s most powerful ­additions to the screenplay.

122   musical theatre screen adaptations Only a handful of changes follow. The Giant is killed somewhat differently—instead of luring her to an area the group have ‘smeared with pitch,’ they herd her into a tar pit. The change eliminates the parallel with the Prince smearing pitch on the stairs to capture Cinderella. On the other hand, the foreshadowing of Jack’s prowess with a slingshot pays off, evoking David and Goliath. The parting between Cinderella and the Prince is briefer and glances by the issue of infidelity. The method of Jack’s Mother’s death is muted; instead of being ‘struck by a deadly blow by the Prince’s steward,’ we have ‘She was pushed by the steward and she fell.’ And Jack’s vengeful response is tempered. A few lines are cut from “No One Is Alone,” the most regrettable being You move just a finger, Say the slightest word, Something’s bound to linger, Be heard.

Also lost is a certain resonance with ‘Children Will Listen’ which follows. The biggest change to ‘Children Will Listen’ is not with what is heard, but what is seen—or rather not seen. The song is a voiceover for the Witch and company as the Baker comforts his baby son. One might think this would force the audience to focus more on the words, but the visuals overwhelm the song, and the power of the lyric is diminished. Without actually seeing the Witch and company singing, the words and their meaning are upstaged, so to speak. The camera rises, following the sunlight out of the woods, but the dark clouds we saw at the beginning of the film return as the final image. But this time, the clouds are real, not a reflection. And they seem darker, perhaps suggesting that our survivors are now wiser for their experience and living a more realistic life?21 The end credits roll under the final reprise of ‘Into the Woods’ and Marshall applies his customary trademark: generously naming the actors accompanied by their characters’ identifying cameos.

Happily Ever After (final quotes) Marshall: Shooting took fifty-seven days (for Mary Poppins Returns we had ninety). It always takes more time to edit. Editing lasted from January through September. We’d have a cut, screen it for the studio, get notes, recut, screened it for Sondheim and Lapine, screened for an audience, got their notes, etc. Once the film is locked we go into the sound mix with scoring. Until then, we’d used a temp score created by Mike Higham (whom Steve loves), done with synthesized music.

into the woods from stage to screen   123 Marshall: Luckily, we were a hit—which proved Sondheim could be a success on film. But I thought it would be, because so many kids had done productions in high school.

Gemignani: Film is a dictatorship. Some listen, some don’t. Rob takes everything in like a sponge. I love working with Marshall. Sometimes he’s hard to convince, but when you do, he will make an idea happen. People who do musicals could learn from this boy, Rob Marshall. He does his homework. I’ve never been that organized. He inspires you.

Lapine: Seeing the final cut I was dazzled by the visual elements. It’s thrilling as a writer to see it come to life.

Sondheim: I loved hearing the new rich orchestrations. It was the main pleasure of the film.

Answering critics who might question changes made to the film from the stage show, Marshall says, ‘Film is different. You have to remember, the stage show lives forever.’ While David Krane recalls that during filming, Marshall kept saying: ‘This is forever. This is for keeps.’ Both are true. This piece was based largely on phone interviews with Paul Gemignani, David Krane, James Lapine, Rob Marshall, Rick Pappas, Stephen Sondheim, and Jonathan Tunick. There were occasional discrepancies among their memories.

Notes 1. Jeffrey Katzenberg, then CEO of the Walt Disney Company; later cofounder of DreamWorks SKG. 2. The first reading included Martin Short as the Baker, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the Wife, Neil Patrick Harris as Jack, Cynthia Gibb as Cinderella, Rob Lowe as her Prince, and Christine Lahti as the Witch. The second reading included Robin Williams as the Baker, Goldie Hawn as the Wife, Elijah Wood as Jack, Moira Kelly as Cinderella, Kyle MacLachlan as her Prince, Cher as the Witch, and Steve Martin as the Wolf. 3. The people at the unstaged presentation who would go on to appear in the film were James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Christine Baranski, and Tammy Blanchard. Other actors included Nina Ariadna as the Baker’s Wife, Donna Murphy as the Witch, and Patrick Wilson as Cinderella’s Prince.

124   musical theatre screen adaptations 4. When Marshall filmed Chicago, Miramax tried to convince Kander and Ebb to allow a new song to be written by Janet Jackson to be interpolated into the movie. 5. One of the rare exceptions is Passion, a show in which applause is not just unnecessary but unwanted. 6. Streep also recalled that Bernadette Peters had been thirty-nine when she had played the part on Broadway. 7. Stravinsky’s original orchestration called for a very lean ensemble of seven instruments. 8. For the unproduced 1995 film version of the show, Sondheim wrote a new opening number, ‘I Wish.’ It’s a much shorter number, placing the Baker and the Baker’s Wife within the small world of a village and focusing almost entirely on their desire for a baby. But it does suggest what Into the Woods might have been like had its score been conceived as a film. Or it might just have been more appropriate for the 1995 draft screenplay. 9. When writing the original show, Lapine considered both the Grimm and Perrault versions of the story but found Grimm’s Cinderella story ‘more interesting and better structured’ than the Perrault. 10. In his book Finishing the Hat, Sondheim includes this as one of the three principles ­necessary for a lyric writer, the others being ‘Less is more,’ and ‘God is in the details.’ Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat (New York: Virgin, 2010). 11. The wig Rapunzel wore in the film was made of real hair imported from Germany. 12. In his book, Look, I Made a Hat, Sondheim writes: ‘Early on in the game, James [Lapine] proposed that each of the folktale figures (Little Red, Jack and Cinderella) should have a musical soliloquy directed at the audience about their adventures in Act One, setting up a climactic soliloquy of the same sort for our newly invented character, the Baker’s Wife . . . in Act Two. . . . [Lapine’s] wife, Sarah, suggested that these songs would be more interesting if they dealt with what the adventures meant to the adventurers, rather than simply being descriptions . . . ‘I Know Things Now’ is a case in point. It is a signpost on the road to the story. The words of the title recur and resonate in each of the other soliloquies.’ Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat (New York: Virgin, 2011), 69. 13. Marshall mentioned ‘previsualization’—a computer-based process in the film industry that’s now taking the place of storyboards—suggesting it may have the capability to handle musical numbers and might be something he will use in the future. 14. Meryl Streep had recommended Magnuson to Marshall, calling him ‘the new Kevin Kline.’ 15. Much of ‘Stay With Me’ uses the same tune as Rapunzel’s wordless lay, although with the rhythms and metre changed. 16. He succeeded with a somewhat similar effect in Sunday in the Park when Dot swiftly shifts her bustle from back to front to show George she is pregnant. 17. Marshall admitted in the DVD commentary that, like Jack, he always referred to Milky White as a ‘he.’ 18. Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat, 85. 19. Characters were eliminated not just on film, but also in early drafts of the stage musical— Rumpelstiltskin; and out-of-town in San Diego—the Three Little Pigs and their Wolf, the brother of Little Red’s. 20. The song appears as an extra on the Blu-ray of the film. 21. I find it reminiscent of the end of Candide.

pa rt I I

T H E P OL I T IC S OF   A DA P TAT ION

chapter 6

Li’l A bn er from Comic Str ip to Hol ly wood JIM Lovensheimer

Considering the essential differences between the genres of stage and film musicals, some film adaptations of Broadway musicals have been remarkably faithful to their sources. For instance, despite minor changes to the script and the excisions of the unsettling song ‘Lonely Room’ and another, more inconsequential, number, the 1955 film version of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s classic Oklahoma! was ­relatively unchanged other than looking like it was taking place on the actual prairie instead of in a theatre. The dramatic text—that is, the book, music, and lyrics—was basically intact. But other film adaptations have greatly reimagined and rewritten works from the stage. The director Bob Fosse’s 1972 version of Cabaret, for example, made drastic changes to the script, cutting songs and characters as well as adding new ones. The effect was more like that of a new, or, at least, a drastically reconceived work than of a literal adaptation. Rarely, however, has a Broadway musical been adapted for film that so literally looked like the original stage version as the 1959 Paramount Pictures version of Li’l Abner, a Broadway hit from 1956 that was also largely financed by Paramount. The film’s sets and costumes reproduced the artificiality of the Broadway sets, which in turn recalled Al Capp’s imaginatively grotesque comic strip on which both were based, and the staging of the film’s musical numbers was unapologetically theatrical and presentational. Cuts were made to the book and score, especially in the second act, but what remained was less an adaptation of the stage version than a replication of it. Melvin Frank, the film’s director and coauthor of the screenplay, commented, ‘The stylization was important to putting Al Capp’s world up there on the screen.’1 Further, the transformation of the comic strip ‘Li’l Abner’ into stage and film versions also demonstrates in part how adaptations can sometimes deftly exploit the satirical style of a source while pointing their satirical arrows at different targets. In this case, the social and political climate was the same for the stage and screen versions—the two appeared only three years apart—but Capp’s comic strip had, at least since the early 1950s, moved away from the overt political satire for which it had become famous.

128   musical theatre screen adaptations Indeed, the musical’s adaptation of Capp’s strip and the subsequent film adaptation provided the writer–producer–director team of Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, and the lyricist Johnny Mercer, with the opportunity to create a musical with much deeper social satire than the strip was at that time providing. Even Gene de Paul’s music occasionally spoofed hillbilly music, although it was for the most part standard midcentury Broadway music, infused throughout with a remarkable and infectious enthusiasm. Other film adaptations of stage musicals have demonstrated contextual differences, of course. The 1979 film version of the 1968 musical Hair, for example, in addition to having to supply the highly improvisatory stage version with some semblance of a more clearly linear plot, was created after the end of the war in Vietnam, which had informed the immediacy of the original’s pervasive antiwar sensibility as well as its depiction of a counterculture that had largely disappeared by 1979. To fully understand the artistic, social, and political ramifications of the Broadway and subsequent film adaptations of Li’l Abner, therefore, those same ramifications of Al Capp’s highly original and successful comic strip require attention.

Al Capp’s Dogpatch The cover of the 31 March 1952 issue of Life magazine was devoted to an original drawing by Capp. It featured his well-known characters Li’l Abner Yokum, Daisy Mae Scragg, and Marryin’ Sam, and it pictured the popular culture event of the year: the wedding of Abner and Daisy Mae, an event assiduously avoided by Abner for almost twenty years. The marriage marked a change in the strip from political and social satire to a more domestic comedy. Capp talked about this change in a 1963 interview in the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town.’ He noted, ‘McCarthy was coming to power . . . and those were inconceivably terrible times. They got worse and worse, until eventually the only satire ­possible and permissible in this democracy of ours was broad, weak domestic comedy. That’s why I married off Li’l Abner.’2 Little did Capp know that just over two years after this eventful wedding, Senator Joseph McCarthy would be censured by the United States Senate and his reign of terror would unravel. Capp’s strip eventually returned to the irreverent and, to some, infuriating satire that had become one of its trademarks. Starting work in 1955, slightly before Capp’s return to political satire, the creators of the musical felt free to adapt and exploit Capp’s satirical style, which by the time the musical opened was featured in more than 900 newspapers with a daily readership of 90,000,000.3 The comic strip’s beginnings were more humble. The first daily strip of ‘Li’l Abner’ appeared in only eight newspapers on 8 August 1934. Within a year of its debut, it was featured in over 100 newspapers.4 While the early strips already demonstrated Capp’s strong storytelling skills, his pointed satirical humour developed a bit more slowly.5 This was in part because at the time ‘Li’l Abner’ appeared, comic strips were dominated by adventure and suspense subjects. Between 1931 and 1934, for example, ‘Dick Tracy,’ ‘Flash Gordon,’ ‘Mandrake the Magician,’ and

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   129 ‘Terry and the Pirates’ all appeared and became wildly popular. But Capp and his characters prevailed, and they became a regular source of social and increasingly political satire until 1977, when Capp retired the strip. While Capp’s was the first comic strip to be set in the South, it reflected the ­contemporaneous popular culture’s interest in the region. Films in the early twentieth century with southern foci ranged from D. W. Griffith’s silent classic The Birth of a Nation (1915) to the magnum opus of southern-themed films, Gone with the Wind (1939). Hillbilly music, originally called old-time music and, eventually, country music, appeared nationally even earlier, in the 1920s. Live broadcasts of radio shows such as the National Barn Dance and the Grand Old Opry were available to increasing numbers of listeners, and the 1927 ‘Bristol sessions,’ which first recorded the genre for commercial release, introduced two major acts, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, that caught the public’s fancy. Three years before the musical Li’l Abner opened, country music legend Hank Williams died, and his music had already begun to be popularized by more mainstream artists like Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney. At the time the musical opened, the classic honky-tonk style of country music was still flourishing. Most of Capp’s readers from even the earliest days of the strip were familiar with commercial country-themed entertainment even if they were not necessarily fans of it.6 The predominant hillbillies of Dogpatch remained a fixed cast of characters throughout the strip’s run. They were centred on the Yokums, headed by Mammy Yokum (née Pansy Hunks), who was the dominant power (and bare-knuckles boxing champion) of Dogpatch. She was often the central force in responding to threats made on the citizens of Dogpatch by outsiders, usually from the urban elite class. According to Arthur Asa Berger, who wrote the only book-length study of the print ‘Li’l Abner’ to date, Mammy was ‘a superwoman whose superhuman strength and goodness (and use of magic) are used to achieve social justice.’7 Her comment, ‘Ah has spoken,’ tended to end any argument. Her husband’s full name was Lucifer Ornamental Yokum, and he was a scrawny and crotchety fellow who generally obeyed the rules of his wife. Li’l Abner, their ­perpetually nineteen-year-old son, was a strong, handsome, and dim-witted youth whose narcissism was matched only by his apparent disinterest in the opposite sex. To play on the mountain tradition of family feuds, Capp created the Scragg family as the enemies of the Yokums. Although this feud continued throughout the history of the strip, it was rarely violent, and then only comically so. But it was complicated by the beautiful Daisy Mae Scragg’s undying, if unrequited, love for Li’l Abner, which was a recurring element of the plot until Capp had the two of them marry. The community was rich with other characters as well, although only a few retained for the musical need be mentioned here. Marryin’ Sam, who offered colourful weddings in every price range, looked like a typical preacher of the hills but always identified himself as a justice of the peace and, as Berger noted, Capp never identified the large book Sam often carried as a Bible.8 Available Jones, an entrepreneur who was also ‘available’ for odd jobs, was best known for providing his cousin, Stupefyin’ Jones, for various services. Stupefyin’ was a statuesque beauty whose presence could literally stop, or ‘stupefy,’ a man in his tracks and keep him motionless. Evil Eye Fleagle, who always

130   musical theatre screen adaptations wore a zoot suit and spoke with a Brooklyn accent, could achieve similar results with his ‘whammy.’ Senator Jack S. Phogbound was Capp’s stand-in for all blustering southern politicians, and General Bashington T. Bullmoose, who did not appear until 1953, was a heartless capitalist tycoon who sought possession of all the money in the world. Many of these characters were parodies of actual people—Phogbound bore a resemblance to Huey Long, for instance, and Bullmoose was based on Charles E. Wilson, former head of General Motors.9 Capp used figures such as Bullmoose and Phogbound, and most of the others, as representational types, and they thus remained undeveloped in any way as characters. Nonetheless, they provided Capp with recurring targets that he could continue to satirize and attack. Bullmoose in particular became an integral part of the plot of Li’l Abner. Despite this colourful and often grotesque cast of characters, however, we should remember that, as M. Thomas Inge pointed out, ‘Capp’s South was no different from the one already existent in the larger popular culture from which it derived, and his intent was neither to exploit Appalachian people nor address the genuine economic and social problems from which they have suffered under industrial exploitation.’10 Capp also steered clear of any mention of race, which was commonly found in most writing from or about the South. Instead, Capp’s intent was satire. For an introduction to a 1978 collection of highlights from the strip, he noted, ‘A satirist has only one gift: he sees where the fraud and fakery are.’11 He spent the lifetime of the strip pointing out those qualities to his readers, and in so doing provided what, for the literary critic Northrop Frye, were the essentials for satire: ‘wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque’—the denizens of Dogpatch and their society—and ‘an object of attack’—pretty much everyone else in the society surrounding the population of Dogpatch.12 Moreover, the general nature of a comic strip, which often unfolds in five-day stretches, lends itself to the episodic nature of satire, which frequently tends to exploit many different facets of an idea rather than developing one single characteristic of that idea.13 A strip can have stories, in other words, but they tend to unfold episodically rather than in a traditionally linear narrative. Indeed, beyond Daisy Mae’s ongoing pursuit of Abner, Capp’s ‘Li’l Abner’ had few longterm plots. Perhaps because of its episodic nature, and almost certainly because it was expressed through such dim-witted and grotesque hillbilly characters, Capp’s unending ridicule of almost any and everything in American social and political life was rarely taken as seriously as he often intended it. Of course, as Berger pointed out, ‘The only reason that Capp gets away with as much as he does is that ‘Li’l Abner’ is a comic strip.’14 The creators of the stage and film adaptations of the strip well understood this point. Two important aspects of the strip need to be emphasized, as they remain important in the stage and screen adaptations. The first is Abner’s disinterest in women. This rather complex issue came up in the first week of Capp’s strip. In the fifth installment (23 August 1934), Daisy Mae was distressed that Abner was going to New York to visit his newly rich aunt, and Mammy suggested that Abner talk to her. In this panel, Abner was drawn with a big smile, and two hearts appeared over his left shoulder even as he disclosed that he didn’t want to talk ‘wif no gal.’15 When he caught up with Daisy Mae, he promptly informed her that the only reason he was there was because Mammy insisted. In the

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   131 next day’s strip (24 August 1934), as Abner was preparing to leave Daisy Mae, she enthusiastically kissed him. In the next panel he can be seen chasing her with a raised fist and declaring, ‘No gal kin do thet [sic] to me!’16 In the subsequent installment, a character named Abijah Gooch taunts Abner for kissing Daisy Mae. Abner argues that she kissed him and that he cares nothing for her. ‘She’s jest an ornery no-account yaller-haired girl,’ he affirms. But when Abijah agrees with him, Abner knocks him to the ground. When the shocked Abijah argues that all he did was agree, Abner replies, ‘Yeh—but yo’ sounded like yo’ meant it.’17 The last comment suggests that on some level, Abner cares for Daisy Mae, or at least for upholding her honour. But throughout the years, he displays no physical attraction for her and avoids showing anything more than a kind of adolescent puppy-love for her despite her loyal devotion to him. Even after their marriage in 1952, Abner showed little sexual or even romantic interest in Daisy Mae, although they eventually produced a child. Moreover, Abner was always dominated by Mammy, as was Pappy Yokum. In an article that appeared between the opening of the musical and the release of the film, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White noted, ‘Although [the comic strip] ‘Li’l Abner’ is concerned with a ­multitude of facts of American culture . . . there is nonetheless one central problem on which it hinges: The maternally overprotected boy, the boy with an overpowering mother.’18 Berger further commented that Abner’s lack of interest in Daisy Mae was ‘ludicrous and perverse,’ going so far as to suggest an Oedipal complication. Indeed, Mammy seems to embody many of the fears that Philip Wylie and other authors of the 1940s and 1950s saw as an increasingly dangerous and threatening phenomenon: the smothering and castrating mother. Although Mammy’s cartoonish overkill was probably not exactly what they had in mind, she was nonetheless even more dangerous than most mothers due to her supernatural powers, which allowed her to maintain especial control over her son’s behaviour and physicality. (They also allowed her to save him from many mishaps.) A dyed-in-the-wool misogynist who blamed women for nearly everything he saw, or thought he saw, wrong in American society, Wylie wrote his infamous book A Generation of Vipers in 1942, and its merciless attack on women and mothers resounded throughout the 1950s. Capp’s creation of an overpowering mother with a gentle hunk of a son uninterested in women was surely no coincidence. Later, in a discussion of phallicism in the strip, Berger also mentioned a tension in ‘Li’l Abner’ between sexual excitement and oral satisfaction. Noting that Abner was more interested in food than sex, he further commented, ‘When we find Abner eating bananas—as he often does—it is meant to show that he is somewhat like an ape, but it also reveals that he is not very much alive sexually.’19 Berger seems either to have missed the phallicism of the banana or assumed his reader did not miss it. The theme of Abner’s asexuality remained important in the subsequent adaptations, although they sought to resolve it somewhat. The second aspect of the strip, which is far better known and certainly more celebrated than Abner’s asexuality, has become part of American culture. It is also not completely separate from the first aspect. This is Sadie Hawkins Day, which is Capp’s hillbilly fertility rite. Fertility rites generally occur in calendric cycles in the ancient world and were concerned with reproductive processes,20 and Capp’s is no different. The Sadie Hawkins

132   musical theatre screen adaptations Day Race was introduced as an affair in which the single young women of Dogpatch pursued eligible, but unwilling, bachelors. Any man who was caught by a woman had to marry her. It first appeared in the strip in 1937, and although he had no intention of repeating the race, its immense popularity forced Capp to make it a recurring event every November.21 The general point of the race in the strip was to demonstrate the various ways Abner could figure out how to avoid Daisy Mae. Berger also suggests the race blatantly implies that women more aggressively seek partnership than men.22 In addition to Sadie Hawkins Day having become and remaining a popular holiday to this day at high schools and colleges throughout the United States, the Sadie Hawkins Day Race provided Broadway director-choreographer Michael Kidd with an irresistible opportunity for a memorable first act finale, which was replicated in the film.

The Broadway Musical Before Paramount Pictures convinced Capp to approve its option for the stage and film rights to ‘Li’l Abner,’ other parties had been granted those rights. Richard Rodgers held an option on the material for a while, and in 1952 Alan Jay Lerner acquired the rights. But neither Rodgers nor Lerner knew quite what to do with the property.23 Neither did Capp when he subsequently decided to start adapting the strip for the stage. But Paramount offered more than just the prospects of stage and film adaptations. They also dangled a top-tier creative team in front of Capp: the highly successful Hollywood writing and producing team of Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, both of whom also directed films; the choreographer Michael Kidd, who had won acclaim on both Broadway (Finian’s Rainbow [1947] and Guys and Dolls [1950]) and in Hollywood (The Band Wagon [1953] and, especially, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers [1954]); and the songwriters Gene de Paul (music) and Johnny Mercer (lyrics). At that time, only Kidd and Mercer had any experience creating for the stage, but Kidd, Mercer, and de Paul had all recently collaborated on the original musical film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which had been a huge popular and critical success. Although the team might have seemed more appropriate for a film version of the strip, they were more than ready for Broadway. And Paramount had bought the film rights, too, of course. Panama and Frank’s film scripts had ranged from light comedies, such as Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), to musicals that included the now classic White Christmas (1954), to knockabout farces like Road to Utopia (1946), one of a series of comedies for Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, for whom they had also written radio comedy. This mixture of styles proved invaluable for adapting a satirical, unsentimental, and unusually zany comic strip into a musical comedy. The challenge was to adapt, extend, and create new stories while retaining the strip’s unique spirit. To achieve this goal, the writing team made two very smart choices. The first was to retain the Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae romance as a storyline, which allowed for a simple and fundamentally comic but still romantic narrative. That narrative, in turn, invited endless possibilities for

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   133 subplots that could provide obstacles to the inevitable union. The entire show remained centred on this concept. Given the expectations of Broadway audiences of the time, the writers also had to figure out a way to add some tenderness to the relationship of Abner and Daisy Mae, a feat that was accomplished primarily through song. Again, the result was more tender than anything in Capp’s strip but still within the frame of a farcical romance. The second choice was to connect the various obstacles to the romance by using the Sadie Hawkins Day Race at a key moment in the plot. ‘A “given” was that there had to be a Sadie Hawkins Day ballet,’ Panama later commented. ‘We promised Michael Kidd.’ This also allowed the foregrounding of the entire Dogpatch community as well as setting the romantic plot within a larger context. Panama and Frank also borrowed Capp’s use of a trope found in much folk humour: the introduction of a backwoods character into a big city environment, where the rube is preyed on or mocked by the urbanites until he eventually outwits them, often completely by accident, and returns to his roots.24 Indeed, the first storyline of Capp’s strip, after a week of introducing the characters, concerned Abner being brought to New York to be cultured by his Aunt Bessie (Mammy’s sister) who, through marriage, had become the Duchess of Bopshire. In this storyline, Bessie’s attempts completely failed and Abner returned to Dogpatch as he left it—oblivious to almost everything going on around him. But the episodes between Abner and the Duchess’s society friends were the fuel for much humour. And, as Inge observed, Capp repeated this device in the early years of the strip, perhaps to work within ‘a more familiar environment until he could develop more fully the less familiar and more exotic world of rural Dogpatch.’25 On other occasions, Capp allowed Abner to outsmart the sophisticates before returning to Dogpatch. Panama and Frank used this concept in the musical, sending Abner away not once but twice to encounter the dangerous manipulations of Washington, DC, a plot device that also opened the door to relentless political satire. The unique romance, Capp’s comically grotesque characters, and the centrality of the Sadie Hawkins Day ritual supported the creation of a farcical and satirical musical comedy. The result was a show that seemed much freer structurally than a more typical musical play of the time—the Rodgers and Hammerstein model was still predominant for Broadway musicals. In reality, as Panama and Frank knew, a broad farce like Li’l Abner, perhaps more than any other kind of comedy, demanded machine-like exactness in construction and execution, qualities they were more than prepared to provide. Panama and Frank eventually decided to build the basic plot around the community and a threat to that community from outside agents. All other stories, including the ­relationship of Abner and Daisy and Abner’s encounter with the world outside Dogpatch, were integrated into this central idea. The choice of this primary plot idea for Li’l Abner, therefore, is of particular interest. Panama and Frank hit upon something that was very much in the public consciousness at the time, although I have found no information about how or why that particular decision came to be made. Nonetheless, their focus was an American activity whose seriousness and attendant paranoia could perhaps only be sanely dealt with by the inanities of farce.

134   musical theatre screen adaptations After 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb and the Cold War arms race began in earnest, Americans lived in a state of constant fear about the possibility of nuclear warfare. Bestselling fiction such as Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach or Pat Frank’s 1959 novel Alas, Babylon, the first later filmed and the second made into a television drama, supported such apocalyptic ideas. The paranoia perhaps reached some kind of peak with Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Although these particular works appeared after the Broadway premier of Li’l Abner, the show nonetheless opened amidst this national concern. The American public was encouraged to think of nuclear assault as a seemingly inevitable and unprovoked act by the enemy (the Soviet Union), and they were encouraged to build so-called fall-out shelters to protect themselves from the lingering ­radiation that a Soviet nuclear device would create. Indeed, in 1951–52, New York governor Thomas Dewey requested that $25,000,000 be reapportioned for statewide bomb shelters, and in 1955, Life magazine included an ad for what was called an ‘H-Bomb Hideaway.’26 The worry, as advertising and the government suggested, was from without: the godless communists would think nothing of using such devices to annihilate American cities and, eventually, freedom and democracy (not to mention capitalism) itself. What most Americans did not know, however, was that the biggest threat from atomic bombs in the 1950s came from their own government. This was especially true of a group of people in the Southwest who became known as ‘downwinders,’ referring to their geographic relation to atomic tests that took place in the Nevada desert after January 1951. The ‘Nevada Test Site,’ first and somewhat tellingly called the ‘Nevada Proving Ground,’ was only sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, and, during the 1950s, that newly burgeoning centre for entertainment and various forms of legal and illegal recreation featured one particularly unique form of tourist activity: observing giant mushroom clouds from atomic bomb detonations that could be seen from hotel ­windows on the Strip. Little did they know that in 1997, the National Cancer Research Institute would establish that from 1952 until 1957, approximately ninety atmospheric tests at the Nevada Test Site deposited enough levels of radioactive iodine across the area to create between 10,000 to 74,000 cases of thyroid cancer, among other ailments. The damaging results of those tests are still being probed.27 The public largely felt that patriotic duty outweighed any wariness they might feel about these tests, and the government repeatedly insisted there was no danger. Panama and Frank tapped into this now horrifying saga in American history, emphasized the absurdity factor, and created the central plot conceit of their musical. In act 1, scene 4, a ‘Cornpone Meetin’ is held in order for Senator Jack S. Phogbound to make an announcement to the citizens of Dogpatch. Phogbound declares that the Senate has just passed the Jack S. Phogbound Bill, which was created because of concern over the nuclear testing taking place in the young industry known as Las Vegas. As Phogbound tells it, this industry was created exclusively for ‘the stimulation and relaxation so necessary to the American Business Man.’28 The problem, according to Phogbound, is that the business man’s chief relaxation consists of gambling, and the fallout from the testing is ruining

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   135 the tables and slot machines. Even worse, the radiation is contaminating the money so that no one can touch it. His bill was written and passed in order to find another place for the government’s nuclear testing that would protect the businessmen’s leisure ­activities in Las Vegas. This alternative testing ground had to be the most unnecessary location in the United States. And that place, of course, was Dogpatch. Being loyal and patriotic Americans, the inhabitants of Dogpatch are thrilled to have been chosen by the US government for such a great honour, and when they are told their evacuation will begin immediately, they can hardly control their excitement. As Phogbound leaves, he again tells them the wonderful results of his bill: ‘Just remember yo’ government is spendin’ one million dollahs on one bomb to blow yo’ homes off the face of the earth! So show yo’ appreciation.’29 And so they do, in an absurd twenty-four measure song titled ‘(Don’t that Take the) Rag Off ’n the Bush,’ which is followed by one of director-choreographer Michael Kidd’s most exuberant dances in the show. It is a dance that somewhat generically, if energetically, celebrates Dogpatch as well as its upcoming annihilation by an atomic bomb, and it is one of the most surreal moments in all musical comedy. It is also, although not adapted from it, completely in keeping with Capp’s characteristic style of lunacy. All this would not be much of a primary plot without a complication, needless to say, and that complication also brings into play the Sadie Hawkins Day Race. Earlier in scene 4, Earthquake McGoon, who has been named the ‘World’s Dirtiest Wrestler,’ reveals that he is planning to marry Daisy Mae despite her protestations that no man can claim a woman unless she catches him in the annual race. The matter is interrupted by Phogbound’s appearance and pronouncement, but after his exit and the musical number, McGoon again claims Daisy Mae as his bride-to-be. When Mammy reminds him of Dogpatch tradition, he in turn reminds her that Dogpatch is scheduled to be destroyed the following Wednesday, two days before Sadie Hawkins Day. In other words, there will be no Sadie Hawkins Day. The women are distraught and the men relieved, and Daisy Mae is left in a predicament. Mammy shrewdly asks a government representative to confirm that Dogpatch had been chosen because the government had found nothing of value there. He so confirms, and she then asks what would happen if someone actually found something of value. The government man assures her that in such a case, Dogpatch would not be destroyed. And with that, the rest of the play is set in motion. What eventually turns out to be ‘something of value’ is Mammy Yokum’s Yokumberry Tonic. The elixir is made from the berries of the only Yokumberry tree in the world, which grows in Mammy’s front yard. When a scrawny government worker swallows a gulp to counter the burning effects of a taste of Kickapoo Joy Juice, a local alcoholic beverage and another attempt at demonstrating something of value, he is immediately transformed into a specimen of towering muscularity resembling Li’l Abner. Mammy attests that Abner is the only person up to that point who has ever drunk the tonic and that it is responsible for his physical perfection. I have found no mention of the Yokumberry Tonic in the strips I have consulted, and Mark Evanier, who has written extensively about the stage and film versions of

136   musical theatre screen adaptations Li’l Abner, has expressed in email correspondence a lack of knowledge of its preexistence as well.30 Further, in 1956, Capp introduced the character of Tiny Yokum, Abner’s younger brother who was unexpectedly born to Mammy when she was visiting a neighbour. She seems not to have known she was pregnant, but she didn’t feel well and asked if she could rest. When she woke up, she felt better and left, not knowing she had given birth to Tiny. Fifteen and a half years later, the neighbour returned the child to Mammy. (She just happened to be in the neighbourhood.) Tiny was anything but: looming over even Li’l Abner, the fifteen-year-old was a perfect specimen of massive muscularity comparable only to Abner. But he could never have tasted the Yokumberry Tonic. Indeed, in a sequence from 1956, Tiny remarked that he got his physique mostly by resting.31 So the tonic seems not to have been a part of the strip, although it is interesting that Tiny also did not show much interest in the opposite sex. (A subsequent character spoofing the flamboyant pianist Liberace showed interest in Tiny, though.) The evacuation of Dogpatch is immediately halted until the tonic can be taken to Washington for testing. The government agent asks for Abner and five volunteers to accompany him to Washington to be part of the experiments, and Abner, along with the volunteers, embarks on his first visit to the city. It should be noted that the five volunteers, scrawny and scraggly though they are, have a physical interest in the opposite sex, and their wives are excited that they might return looking like Abner. What transpires is, predictably, not that simple. The experiments done with the volunteers indeed turn them into perfect physical specimens who bear no resemblance to their earlier selves. When their wives journey to the capital to see what has become of their menfolk, they are at first thrilled: clad only in posing briefs, the men are paraded before the women and are indeed so magnificent and so changed that the women can barely recognize them. But when the women approach the men, they quickly realize that the men no longer have any interest in them. ‘They’s all turned into Li’l Abners,’ one of them laments, and the rest join her to energetically sing of their partners’ former but now absent lustiness and potency, demanding in the song’s chorus (and title), ‘Put ’Em Back the Way They Wuz.’ In one verse of the song, the women note that the men may have previously been ugly and dirty, but ‘they knowed a hiz from huz,’32 perhaps insinuating that the effects of the tonic went beyond merely dulling interest in heterosexual sex and created a sexual reorientation. Although the men show no apparent interest in each other, the combination of their physical beauty and disinterest in women could well have implied homosexuality to a mid-to-late 1950s audience. In addition, the sameness of their ­physical perfection—they have virtually lost their former individual identities and are recognizable to their women only by the names on the backs of their briefs— suggests another target of Panama and Frank’s satiric thrust: the threat to individuality posed by science and technology. Until the scientists testing the tonic realize its potentially undesirable effects on the sexual interests of the subjects, they are thrilled at the uniform perfection of the results. Early in the second act, they sing a song titled ‘Oh Happy Day’ that is rather chilling in its projection of genetic engineering and the conformity that could result from it. The scientists’ desire for the scientific development of human perfection is over the top, but

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   137 the concern with social and political conformity and loss of individuality was widespread in American culture in the 1950s. Some saw the American consumer culture as promoting conformity. Others had no such worries but were concerned with the kind of mindless conformity they saw in a collective communist state like the Soviet Union.33 In 1956, for instance, the now-classic film Invasion of the Body Snatchers tapped into this paranoia with a plot about an alien invasion that cultivated large seed pods, which in  turn produced exact duplicates of individuals, including their memories and ­personalities, that were without any human emotion. It was widely seen as an allegory of the communist stripping away of individual will, although others saw it as a reflection of the threat of conformity put forth by a more localized totalitarian power such as McCarthyism. The film’s director Don Siegel later said he was more concerned with what he saw as an overall lack of feeling in midcentury American culture, although he added that political similarities to McCarthyism and Soviet communism ‘were inescapable.’34 The musical’s scientists reflect this, especially when they sing of the ‘happy day’ when ‘scientists control the human race . . . [and] assume authority of human chromosomes.’ But perhaps most unsettling of all is when they look forward to the day ‘when in collective brains no individuality remains.’35 The pressure of conformity, in particular among the men in the new postwar whitecollar mode about whom William H. Whyte wrote in The Organization Man, is also related to the fear of female dominance discussed earlier. David Riesman, whose 1950 book The Lonely Crowd also addressed the diminution of American individuality, often wrapped his observations about this conformity in sexually overt terms: he, like Whyte, used a ‘hard-soft’ idiom to compare the changes from nineteenth-century individuality to mid-twentieth-century conformity. For instance, Riesman referred to what he deemed the formerly ‘inner-directed’ man, that is, one whose values and esteem were selfpossessed, as ‘hard’: such a man dealt with the material world with a ‘hard enduringness.’ He continued this image, arguing that in the midcentury culture it was the ‘softness’ of men rather than the ‘hardness’ of materials that was required for social and professional mobility.36 Even Adlai Stevenson, a standard of midcentury liberalism if not necessarily a poster boy for traditional American masculinity, reflected these gendered images in an address to the graduating women of Smith College in 1955. He warned of contemporary men being ‘mental neuters’ and of how it was the women’s responsibility to keep their men ‘whole’ by saving them from ‘further shrinkage and contraction of mind and spirit.’37 And anything else, one assumes. Stevenson and many others from both sides of the political aisle increasingly viewed industry and science, represented by their omnipresent white-collar (or white lab coat) uniforms, as threats to American individuality and masculinity, and the scientists in Li’l Abner unquestionably represent those threats and their questionable goals. Panama and Frank and, to a lesser extent, de Paul and Mercer, adapted Capp’s strip with an admirable sensitivity to its language and its special brand of political and social satire. They invented new plots and subplots that were completely in synch with those invented by Capp, and they satirized their political and social marks with the same unflinching zeal as did Capp. The adaptation is pitch perfect and demonstrates what the

138   musical theatre screen adaptations author Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1951 about Capp’s work: ‘He moves in a world of many dimensions, each of which includes and reflects upon the other.’38 Yet these dimensions, which also exist and function in the musical adaptation, seemed to have perplexed or annoyed some of the show’s critics. Time magazine’s reviewer thought the strip had been burdened with too much plot, which slowed down the action. And Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times criticized Panama and Frank of having ‘laboriously assembled a plot that involves some heavy-handed satire. . . . To look at it from the point of view of craftsmanship, some simple people have been strangled by complicated plot maneuvers.’39 The complaints about plot are odd. The strip, with its episodic structure that at best headed for momentary closures, needed plot structure to become a musical comedy. Otherwise it would have been a Dogpatch revue, which might have worked on stage but would not have transferred to the screen with much success. Further, the machinations of the plot are nimble, as they must be in farce. The satire is less heavy-handed than it is broad, and surely no one who already knew the strip was expecting subtlety. The musical draws on the styles of burlesque and vaudeville and is situated somewhere between low comedy and high camp, while all the time being as satirically savvy as nearly any other commercial musical of the decade. And we should remember that columnists like Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan were vigilant watchdogs for what they deemed lavender-to-red influences on the otherwise Great White Way. Perhaps because the creators of Li’l Abner knew that, at least in 1956, audiences did not take musical comedy very seriously, they were able to use the genre in general, and the dim-witted southern stereotypes in particular, as masks for their social critique, a technique mentioned earlier that had long before been established by Capp in his strip. These masks are not unlike those of blackface in early minstrelsy. The mask, regardless of its colour, serves to allow a freedom of discourse otherwise unacceptable in ­performance. The musical’s masks, which are of another socially marginalized group— poor white southerners—seems to have been relatively successful; the musical remains a popular choice of high schools and community theatres that revel in its high-spirited numbers and groan-inducing puns without paying much attention to its stereotyping. Despite important books like Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, hillbillies have been slow to come into the fold of groups considered deserving of cultural sensitivity.40 Nonetheless, Li’l Abner was a potent statement about the Cold War era that provided wonderfully stinging satire hiding just upstage of the singing hillbillies. The subsequent film version followed quite literally in its steps.

Dogpatch in Hollywood In his book on Broadway musicals of the 1950s, musical theatre historian Ethan Mordden gave Li’l Abner an entire chapter. Part of the show’s importance, Mordden argued, is that it was a key moment in the establishment of the director-choreographer

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   139 as the principal auteur of musical comedies. So, what was to be done when the ‘auteur’ of the musical Li’l Abner, which had been intended for film adaptation from the beginning, was the only member of the original creative team not to be involved in the making of the movie? Michael Kidd’s approach to the show, which was key to its concept, had already been cinematic. Indeed, Mordden described the staging of the opening number as looking ‘as if a camera were in charge.’41 The entire piece was all but camera-ready. But Kidd and Paramount could not agree on his contract and he had nothing directly to do with the film. Fortunately, almost everyone else involved with the show worked on or in the movie. Edith Adams (Daisy Mae), Charlotte Rae (Mammy Yokum), and Tina Louise (Appassionata von Climax) had to be replaced, but all the other principals repeated their roles, and nearly all the ensemble members did as well. Most important, Dee Dee Woods, who had been Kidd’s assistant and danced in the show, agreed to reproduce Kidd’s work. (Kidd and his original staging got prominent screen credit.) Although adjustments had to be made for filming some of the longer dance segments, the Sadie Hawkins Day ballet in particular, most of the choreography was a close replication of the original. According to Mark Evanier, Wood was especially sensitive to retaining as much of Kidd’s staging as possible: ‘She insisted on tailoring Kidd’s steps, rather than substituting her own, prompting many (polite) arguments with [director] Frank.’42 In the end, her adaptation preserved most of Kidd’s Tony Award–winning choreography. Melvin Frank directed and Norman Panama produced—the film was billed as ‘A Panama and Frank Production’—and both men collaborated on the screenplay. Frank and Panama’s decision to shoot the entire film on soundstages instead of on exterior locations kept the comic strip look of the musical intact, especially in the film’s equivalent of the first act. ‘Indoors,’ Frank remarked, ‘we could control the entire art direction, right down to how the trees and sky looked.’43 The scenic re-creation of the stage sets gives the film a wonderful and slightly off-kilter visual sense; nothing in Dogpatch seems at right angles with anything else. For the scenes outside Dogpatch, the interior sets are theatrically oversized. They are also, in varying degrees, less cartoon-like than the scenes in Dogpatch, which retain their distinct comic strip quality. Bullmoose’s office is unrealistically large, for instance, and humorously decorated, but it is nonetheless more realistic than anything Dogpatch. The laboratory scenes are somewhat more fanciful, looking less like a realistic laboratory than something from a science fiction movie. As Frank noted, the stylized artistic direction of the film, like that of the show, was on purpose. In addition to retaining the feeling of the strip, it also made possible a theatrical sensibility that largely keeps the look and feel of a stage performance despite having been adapted for film. And even though, according to actress Billie Hayes, the makeup, as well as the overall art direction, were toned down for the film, they nonetheless continued to dislodge the political satire from any believable realm of reality.44 The decision to replicate virtually the entire stage production on a soundstage was a bold one. Many film musicals ‘open up’ their sources—think of Julie Andrews being captured by the camera after endless establishing shots of mountains and meadows at the beginning of The Sound of Music, or the ‘Prologue’ from West Side Story, shot on

140   musical theatre screen adaptations actual streets and alleys—but Frank instead often uses the camera to establish the look of a theatrical performance by shooting many scenes straight on and often lining up actors and/or singer-dancers in straight lines, as if they were being observed within a proscenium arch. Combined with broad and caricatured performances, this effect established the perfect visual context for the show. And Billy Hayes’s comment about the toning down of the artistic direction suggests that Panama and Frank knew exactly how to achieve the theatrical effect they wanted without going too far. They also knew how to trim the show into an appropriate length. Most stage musicals in the 1950s averaged about two-and-a-half hours, including an intermission. Sometimes even that length is the result of cutting a plethora of material. Further cutting is always necessary for a film adaptation. In adapting the first act of the musical, Panama and Frank judiciously trimmed the material, and nearly all the musical numbers survived, albeit often in truncated form. It was in their treatment of the show’s second act that more substantial changes and cuts were made, including a softening of some of the satirical content. And, in both acts, the musical sentimentalizes the relationship between Abner and Daisy Mae to a degree not found in the strip. Perhaps the best way to examine their procedure in general is to compare the first four scenes of the musical, which constitute the exposition, with the comparable scenes in the film. Subsequent points of the adaptation process, particularly of the second act, can then be examined individually and more succinctly. The opening number was a perfect way to work in the obligatory opening credits along with the number’s exposition. After a brief musical fanfare, the film begins almost exactly as the musical did. After some rather idyllic music, violent noise and music accompany a man being thrown out of a cabin. Even the original script’s description of the cabin rocking ‘violently to and fro’ is followed. After this, several varmints shoot at an old lady, who turns and fires back at them. The man thrown from the cabin then begins singing about it being ‘a typical day’ and the song continues, gradually introducing the colourful citizenry notable for, among other characteristics, their laziness and reliance on unemployment pay for sustenance. A brief section that introduced Lonesome Polecat, Hairless Joe, and the Scraggs was cut, although those characters remained in the film. Instead, at the end of the first chorus, an old woman, catching her daughters flirting into the camera through a window, pulls down a blind on which the credits appear. The music under the credits, which interrupts the opening number, is a new overture that was needed because the original contained several songs cut from the film. After the credits, the opening number continues, although the choruses that ­originally separated the characters’ introductions were cut. Marryin’ Sam’s lyrics were changed somewhat, and the chorus after Daisy Mae’s introductory verse now includes a reference to the Sadie Hawkins Day Race not in the original. Most notable, perhaps, was the change in Mammy and Pappy’s introduction of Li’l Abner. Instead of singing, ‘His heart is the tenderes’/but neuter gender’s far as young gals is concerned,’ they refer to him instead as ‘unsentimental.’45 The number, which works beautifully, demonstrates how Panama and Frank in general dealt with their original material. To tighten the exposition in a genre that afforded them less time for it, they introduced something

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   141 already familiar—Sadie Hawkins Day—earlier than in the stage version, and to tone down material that was perhaps more appropriate for a Broadway audience, they tempered an early sexual aspect of the show—Abner’s asexuality—for Hollywood. Instead of following the opening number with the scene at the Yokum cabin, which, in the musical, immediately introduces Mammy, Pappy, and Abner, the film follows it with a shot of a sign announcing Sadie Hawkins Day and explaining what it is. Marryin’ Sam enters on a mule, and some excited young women ask him about his weddings, setting him up for some comic repartee. Sam then meanders over to Available Jones for some dialogue also not in the show. This part of the scene is particularly interesting for several reasons. First, Jones eagerly shows Sam his latest invention, which looks like a ten-foot missile and which Jones calls his ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile): ‘I catches bachelor men.’46 The missile, and the joke, is not in the 1956 musical because the first US ICBM, an unarmed prototype, was (unsuccessfully) launched in 1957, and the first successful launch was in 1958. While some Broadway audiences might have been aware of the ICBM’s earlier development in Germany and the Soviet Union, it did not fully enter the American Consciousness until after 1957.47 (The joke is developed further in a subsequent scene when the missile opens to reveal Stupefyin’ Jones, a proverbial ‘bombshell.’) Another point of interest comes when Jones implies that Mammy Yokum has paid him for the use of Stupefyin’ Jones in the Sadie Hawkins Day Race, although Jones refuses to say so outright. He argues, ‘When I makes a confidential deal for a price, my lips are sealed and they stay sealed.’ Sam counters, ‘Until you gets a better price.’48 Mammy’s deal with Jones is not mentioned in the musical. Later in the film, a scene in which Daisy Mae offers to pay Jones for the use of Stupefyin’ Jones is directly from the musical (act 1, scene 11; hereafter 1, 11 and so forth). No reference is made to the earlier deal with Mammy Yokum, although when Daisy Mae offers him fifty cents, he suggests, ‘Could you make that a dollar,’ and she agrees, thus sealing the deal. In that Daisy Mae is also given more agency in other places in the film, her unwitting one-upmanship of Mammy Yokum is notable here. A young girl enters and tells Sam that Mammy Yokum wants to see him, and the scene cross fades to the Yokum cabin. The opening of the scene is the same as 1, 2 in the ­musical. Mammy insists that Abner take his Yokumberry tonic, after which she tries to persuade him to let Daisy Mae catch him on Sadie Hawkins Day. Pappy protests and she sends him off. At this point in the musical, Daisy Mae enters with a can of worms for Abner, who is about to go fishing. After a brief scene in which she tries to bring up Sadie Hawkins Day with Abner, he scurries off with the worms to join his friends at the fishing hole. After Abner’s exit, Mammy assures Daisy Mae that she will win Abner in the race even if she has to do it with the help of ‘the detestable but ever available Available Jones,’49 which sets up Daisy Mae’s later scene with Jones in which she buys his services. Earthquake then enters with Marryin’ Sam, asking Sam about a two-dollar wedding. Asked why he is interested in wedding prices, Earthquake announces his intention to get married, although he does not specify his intended. Daisy Mae reminds him that a man cannot lay claim to a woman unless she first catches him on Sadie Hawkins Day. Earthquake slyly suggests that the explanation for his plans will be forthcoming in the

142   musical theatre screen adaptations upcoming Cornpone Meetin’, which indicates that something profoundly important to the community is about to transpire. Indeed, Earthquake announces that this Meetin’, which was called by none other than Senator Jack S. Phogbound, involves ‘a hideous change in the Dogpatch way of life.’ Mammy sends Daisy Mae off to fetch Abner, and Earthquake and Sam resume their discussion of variously priced weddings as they exit. In the film, Daisy Mae’s entrance is delayed, which eliminates the dialogue with Abner about Sadie Hawkins Day. Abner instead exits to go fishing immediately after Mammy sends Pappy off and, upon Abner’s exit, Marryin’ Sam enters. Soon after they begin what Mammy calls their ‘man to man’ talk, which concerns Sadie Hawkins Day, Daisy enters, distraught because she has just received an invitation to her own wedding to Earthquake McGoon. After Daisy shares this news, Earthquake enters. The information of Earthquake’s specific intent thus comes much earlier—it is not until two scenes later in the musical—which is another example of the more compact exposition used in the film. His announcement allows Daisy Mae the opportunity to remind him that, in Dogpatch, a man and a woman can’t get married unless she catches him in the Sadie Hawkins Day Race. Earthquake announces the Cornpone Meetin’, exits with Sam, and the scene ends as it did in the musical. The third scene is similar in both versions but, again, the film version is more succinct. For instance, 1, 3 begins with Abner and his cronies, as the script calls them, on a log across a stream, making small talk about not wanting to get caught on Sadie Hawkins Day because marriage wouldn’t be worth giving up their freedom. This leads into three choruses of ‘If I Had My Druthers,’ a charming character song for Abner and the boys. In the film, the scene begins with the song and uses only one chorus. The set for the opening of this scene in the film, a large fallen tree branch stretching over Polecat Creek, is a bit more realistic than the previous two scenes. And the placement of Abner and his ‘cronies,’ as the script calls the attractive young chorus boys on the branch, is interesting. A young man on the far left is reclining on the branch, resting on his right elbow. Abner’s legs are draped over him and, for much of the chorus, his left foot is gently nested in the young man’s crotch. At one point Abner reaches over and touches the man’s knee before pulling a dandelion out of his pocket and blowing on it. Another man, stretched out behind Abner, has his knee against Abner’s back. Two other young men sit together on the far right of the branch, and another sits on the ground looking at this scene. Innocence is implied, but so is a subtle homoeroticism. Daisy Mae enters and, in the subsequent scene between her and Abner, Daisy Mae tells him of Earthquake McGoon’s plans, information that neither of them yet has in the musical. That, in turn, gives Abner the opportunity to remind Daisy Mae and, yet again, the audience, that a man can’t marry a woman in Dogpatch unless she first catches him in the Sadie Hawkins Day Race. Daisy Mae activates Abner and his friends by telling them that there is to be a Cornpone Meetin’ and they run off leaving Daisy Mae to bring Abner’s worms. In the musical, she sings a reprise of ‘If I Had My Druthers,’ which was cut from the film. The Cornpone meeting scene is almost exactly the same in the film as in the musical, although ‘Jubilation  T.  Cornpone,’ the number that begins the scene, was somewhat trimmed. An interesting detail of the filmed number is the presence of a group of people

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   143 in the background—or far upstage, in stage parlance—not doing any of the staging beyond some rather generic hand movements while the downstage ensemble executes intricate staging and choreography around Sam. This recalls the practice in stage ­musicals of the time of using separate singing and dancing ensembles, even though extra vocal support is unnecessary in film due to the soundtrack being prerecorded. On Broadway stages, this practice started to disappear the season after Li’l Abner, when Jerome Robbins’s staging of West Side Story used only one ensemble to do everything. The Phogbound scene following the number was left unchanged, as was the ‘(Don’t that Take the) Rag Off ’n the Bush’ number and dance. The music for the ensuing dance section is the same as in the vocal score for the musical, minus a single four-bar cut. Even the instrumental cues in the score are observed in the soundtrack. This was highly ­unusual. Arrangements, in particular dance arrangements, often underwent sometimes drastic reimagining in film adaptations. Indeed, in the opening credits for Li’l Abner, the music scoring is credited to Nelson Riddle and Joseph J. Lilley, with ‘adapted from the stage production’ beneath. (Riddle and Lilley had nothing to do with the musical.) Even so literal an adaptation as that of Oklahoma! altered the dance music. The unchanged dance music for this number attests to the loyalty the film’s creators and Dee Dee Wood had to Michael Kidd’s original work. (The ‘Sadie Hawkins Ballet’ also closely follows the original score, including instrumental cues, although with interludes added to allow for the various settings permitted by film. The sequence of the retained music is the same.) An interesting change later in the scene, after Eathquake reminds everyone that the date of the nuclear annihilation of Dogpatch precedes Sadie Hawkins Day, is the shift from Mammy to Daisy for the lines inquiring about finding something valuable in Dogpatch and the subsequent questioning of the government agent. This makes Daisy Mae the predominant voice urging the preservation of Sadie Hawkins Day. As in the musical, when Earthquake tries to persuade his neighbours that they might prefer the outside world, Mammy quickly assures them that they would not, and the scene ends with her directing everyone to set out in search of something of value that can save their community. Given that the musical’s creative team was more experienced in screen than stage musicals, and that the intent to transfer Li’l Abner to the screen was part of Paramount’s initial agreement, the similarity between both versions is unsurprising, at least in the film’s first half. (The Sadie Hawkins Ballet was the end of act 1 in the musical and is also a convenient dividing point in discussing the film’s first and second sections.) The intentional artificiality of the film’s design, drawn directly from the stage concept and the largely presentational style of acting and of the ensemble musical numbers keep the show’s style out in front of its content. As in Capp’s strip, characters get away with making outrageous and often politically charged observations and comments because of the hillbilly mask. The film’s content, like the musical’s, frequently goes unnoticed because of the outrageousness. But not always, as a review of the film in the Hollywood Reporter demonstrated: ‘At its best, it is filled with soaringly witty political satire . . . probably the best intellectual musical comedy since Of Thee I Sing.’50 Even so, much of the political and social satire, especially in the second act, did not survive the adaptation, and the second act score was also altered.

144   musical theatre screen adaptations Much of the alteration of the second act had to do with tightening the narrative and keeping the running time down. (The entire film runs 113 minutes.) Also, the second act of the show leaves Dogpatch after the second scene and does not return there until the final scene, and while the residents remain present throughout the subsequent action in Washington, DC, the cartoon-like sensibility is more distilled on film than on stage. The first scene of the second act is cut entirely. It takes place in a testing laboratory in Washington and introduces the altered Dogpatch men, now handsome and muscular and seen with Abner doing their ‘conformity routines,’ which are mechanical movements done in expressionless unison. Dr Finsdale, the leader of the scientific research team, is giddy with the prospects of the power that could be possible for the owners of the Yokumberry tonic’s patent, a patent that Bullmoose wants but that Abner has sworn to give to the government for free. Finsdale and the scientists sing ‘Oh Happy Day,’ their paean to genetic manipulation and ‘automaton couples.’ Their glee is interrupted by a bit of Cold War humour: a representative of the State Department Division of ‘Agonizing Reappraisal’ demanding that the research must be finished within forty-eight hours due to the imminent release of another major scientific discovery—a ‘hydromatic ­convertible Droshky’—from an unnamed country. Since part of that discovery involves ‘a new secret fuel distilled from high octane borscht,’ the identity of the country is not much of a secret. After a short bit of business about the scientists having been assigned to their jobs because they were unfailingly loyal, as opposed to qualified, the scene ends. All of this, except for the very beginning, which is used somewhat later in the film, was cut. The film instead begins with 2, 2, in which Daisy Mae and Sam sing a charming song about Daisy Mae being past her prime. At the end of the number, they hear Mammy Yokum screaming and they run to the Yokum cabin. The scene shifts to inside the cabin, where Mammy is conjuring. (In the musical, she enters after the number, having already completed her conjuring.) Then, through clouds of smoke, we see what she sees. At this point, Panama and Frank take their script apart and reconstruct it to show what is seen later in the musical. First, Mammy sees the opening of 2, 1. Abner and the men are doing their conformity routine to the same music as in the musical, which was a version of the chorus of ‘Oh Happy Day’ made to sound fancifully mechanical. One of the scientists then places a call to General Bullmoose, and the action proceeds to 2, 3, which foregrounds the subplot of Bullmoose wanting possession of the tonic. When Mammy hears Bullmoose plot to murder Abner after getting the formula for the tonic from him, the scene shifts back to the cabin and picks up where it left off in 2, 2. The plan is hatched for all of Dogpatch to go to Washington to save Abner and the plot barrels along to that climax. The conflation of later scenes into Mammy’s conjuring definitely tightens the narrative, but the elimination of the act 2 opening also eliminates some of the political satire. A bit of such satire was excised earlier in the film through trimming the lyrics of ‘The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands,’ although the point of those cuts was probably time rather than any dulling of what was already fairly harmless satire of government ­procedures and behaviours. The elimination of 2, 1 got rid of more satire, some of it a bit more pointed, as did the excision of Bullmoose’s act 2 number, ‘Progress Is the Root of

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   145 All Evil.’ In this number, Bullmoose declares unacceptable such progressive developments as Social Security and filtered cigarettes. The song satirizes such effronteries to the moneyed class as minimum wages, the SEC’s (Securities and Exchange Commission) ability to prevent the wealthy from breaking Wall Street, rock ’n’ roll, and give-away policies. One other target of the song’s satire is especially interesting. Bullmoose expresses his frustration with not being able to run for office until he improves his ‘TV technique,’ noting, ‘a man who has no mass appeal is out of business.’51 Four years after this, Richard Nixon’s unflattering appearance during his televised debates with John F. Kennedy was considered a turning point in the election, and from that point on the video images of politicians became extremely important. Other smaller distillations of political satire appear throughout the film. One example will suffice: in the musical, when Bullmoose asks Evil Eye Fleagle if he has a ‘half-truth telling Whammy,’ Fleagle answers, ‘In Washington, it’s one of my biggest items.’52 In the film, Fleagle’s response is, ‘Among used car salesmen, it’s one of my biggest items.’ A small but notable shift of target. The one misstep in both versions of Capp’s strip is the sentimentalizing of Abner in regard to Daisy Mae. Although hearts may have appeared around Abner in the first week of the strip when Daisy Mae was mentioned, he remained fervently unsentimental about her for years. Although the stage directions in 1, 3 say that Abner ‘gets a soft look in spite of himself ’ during his dialogue with Daisy Mae, he remains at a distance throughout the act. This is in spite of his agreeing to marry Daisy Mae after hearing that Earthquake McGoon has plans to do so. But this is an act of valour, not of romance, and in the subsequent dialogue Abner is unable to explain why he is incapable of letting her catch him on Sadie Hawkins Day. The song that follows—’Namely You’—is a somewhat lighthearted and believable ballad in which Daisy Mae is predictably romantic while Abner is completely narcissistic, changing the title lyric to ‘namely me’ until the final line, which they sing together. It is a charm song more than a love song, and it works beautifully. But in the second act, the writers go off course. In 2, 3, having sneaked into the Bullmoose mansion in their quest to save Abner’s life, Mammy, Pappy, Sam, Earthquake, and Daisy Mae appear in Bullmoose’s office, where they have hidden. Daisy Mae convinces them to leave her alone with Abner so that she  can persuade him to come back to Dogpatch. She does this by appealing to his ­heretofore unexpressed love of hearth and home in an anthem titled ‘Love in a Home.’ After Daisy Mae helps Abner envision their home, he lists the things he would like there. They are all material: a rocking chair, a lamp, a couch, and so on. But Daisy Mae reminds him to add love, and the whole scene collapses into probably the least convincing scene in the musical. Although the song is quite lovely, it is totally out of character. Musically, it also somewhat resembles ‘Everybody’s Got a Home but Me’ from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Pipe Dream, which opened the previous season, especially in the climactic phrase, ‘And the clock seems to chime/come again any time/you’ll be welcome wherever you roam.’53 Abner’s verse, in which he sings of smiling tables and chairs, is particularly misguided. De Paul and Mercer must have thought the song was the wrong choice in the wrong spot, because for the film they wrote an altogether different song. Unfortunately, it is probably more inappropriate than the first one.

146   musical theatre screen adaptations The Abner-Daisy Mae scene from 2 to 3 was cut down to Daisy Mae warning Abner about Bullmoose’s plot to kill him. The song was dropped and not replaced. But later, in the film’s equivalent of 2–7 in which Abner and Daisy Mae are seemingly parting for good, de Paul and Mercer replaced a brief reprise of ‘Namely You’ with a new song titled ‘Otherwise.’ This song is an entirely generic love song with literally no foundation in the plot whatsoever. Daisy Mae sings, ‘I’m sorry we had to start with/those wonderful dreams you broke my heart with,’ as if Abner had fed her with romantic dreams, and the end of the song suggests that it is too bad things are not working out because ‘otherwise, you’d still be mine, all mine.’54 The only possible justification for the song, which, as a romantic hit parade ballad of the day might have been effectively sung by Dinah Shore or even Frank Sinatra, among others, is that a new song written for the film would have been eligible for an Academy Award. It was not nominated. Apart from ‘Namely You,’ which works for the characters because of its charm and humour, the songs for Abner and Daisy Mae are the only misfires in the show’s, and the film’s, book/screenplay and score.

Adapting the Comic Strip The journey of Al Capp’s memorable creation from the newspaper page to the Broadway stage and Hollywood turns out to have been a pleasurable one for almost all involved. Edith Adams and Charlotte Rae may have been disappointed in the size of their roles in the musical (although Adams nonetheless won a Tony award for her performance)— both left the show when their original contracts expired—and Michael Kidd may have been unable to satisfactorily negotiate a contract with Paramount, but the caravan from Dogpatch to Hollywood was otherwise pretty much free from any unpleasantness. The film retains most of the rowdy exuberance of the musical, which, as we have seen, stuck fairly close to Capp’s unique vision. The only other successful musicals to have been based on popular comic strips were Annie, which did even better on Broadway than Li’l Abner, and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which enjoyed acclaim Off-Broadway and, later, on Broadway in a revised version, although not as much as Li’l Abner. Like Li’l Abner, both of those shows stuck close to the tone and style of their sources, and both were much cherished by their readers. (It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman went so far as to attempt replicating the look of a comic strip, but it was a commercial failure.) Given that serial comic strips are far less popular than they were when reading newspapers was part of many people’s daily routine, it should be no surprise that they have not been more deeply tapped as a source for musicals. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, commercial films have become the most adapted sources for large-scale Broadway shows. But Li’l Abner continues to be revived by mostly nonprofessional groups, as a search on YouTube will demonstrate. Something about its knockabout silliness has kept its appeal even as the number of people who knew it as a comic strip decreases. Surely

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   147 Al Capp would be pleased that his characters and his satirical vision live on, if only in their adapted form. In the end, it is generally the faithfulness of the adaptations to their source that ensures their durability.

Notes 1. Mark Evanier, ‘Li’l Abner in Hollywood,’ at the blog News from Me, http://www. newsfromme.com/?s=%271+abner, accessed 5 May 2017. 2. ‘Talk of the Town,’ New Yorker, 26 October 1963. 3. Denis Kitchen, ‘Fame and Anonymity,’ Li’l Abner: The Frazetta Years, vol. 1, 1954–1955, ed. Denis Kitchen (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Press, 2003), 5. 4. Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen, Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 80. 5. Schumacher and Kitchen, Al Capp, 75. 6. See  M.  Thomas Inge, ‘Li’l Abner, Snuffy Smith, Pogo and Friends: The South in the American Comic Strip,’ in Southern Quarterly 48, no. 2 (2007): 38–40; Schumacher and Kitchen, Li’l Abner, 75–83; and Bill  C.  Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 3rd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 111–159, for further information on the presence of the South in popular culture during the 1920s–1930s. 7. Arthur Asa Berger, Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire (New York: Twayne, 1970), 102. 8. Berger, Li’l Abner, 28. 9. Bullmoose’s slogan, ‘What’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA,’ recalls Wilson’s 1952 comment to a Senate subcommittee, ‘What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice-versa.’ For further information on characters in the strip, see ‘Li’l Abner,’ Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%27l_Abner, accessed 1 May 2017. 10. Inge, ‘The South in the American Comic Strip,’ 55. 11. Al Capp, ‘Introduction,’ in The Best of Li’l Abner (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978), 12. 12. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 224. 13. See Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 206. 14. Berger, Li’l Abner, 158. 15. Al Capp, ‘Li’l Abner,’ http://www.gocomics.com/lil-abner/1934/08/23, accessed 24 July 2017. 16. Al Capp, ‘Li’l Abner’ http://www.gocomics.com/lil-abner/1934/08/24, accessed 24 July 2017. 17. Al Capp, ‘Li’l Abner,’ http://www.gocomics.com/lil-abner/1934/08/25, accessed 24 July 2017 (emphasis in original). 18. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, ‘How to Read Li’l Abner Intelligently,’ in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), 218. 19. Berger, Li’l Abner, 139. 20. See Thomas J. Barfield, The Dictionary of Anthropology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 184; John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray, eds., The Oxford History of the Classical World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 269–270. 21. David Schreiner, ‘Sadie’s First Run,’ in Li’l Abner: Dailies, vol. 3: 1937 (Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink Press, 1988), 8. 22. Berger, Li’l Abner, 97–98.

148   musical theatre screen adaptations 23. Mark Evanier, ‘Li’l Abner on Broadway,’ POV Online, http://www.povonline/Abner1.htm, accessed 22 March 2017. Originally published in Li’l Abner: Dailies, vol. 22: 1956 (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Press, 1996). 2 4. Inge points out the popularity of this narrative in American frontier antebellum literature (‘The South in the American Comic Strip,’ 33) and cites a similar discussion in Lawrence  W.  Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 30. 25. Inge, ‘The South in the American Comic Strip,’ 33. 26. See https://c5.staticflickr.com/9/8591/15852038092_623a5fb11d.jpg for a photograph of a typical fallout shelter. 27. See DOE Nevada Test Site: http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts/default.htm; account of NTS fallout in 1955: http://www.et.byu.edu/~shb34/school/ground-zero.pdf; Study Estimating Thyroid Doses of I-131 Received by Americans from Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Test: http://rex.nci.nih.gov/massmedia/Fallout/contents.html (National Cancer Institute, 1977); ‘Killing Our Own’: http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/ k003.html. 28. Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, Li’l Abner (New York: Tams-Witmark Music Library, 1957), 1-4-, 29. 29. Panama and Frank, Li’l Abner, 1-4-29, 30. 30. Mark Evanier, email message to author, 26 June 2017. 31. Capp, The Best of Li’l Abner, 28. 32. Panama and Frank, Li’l Abner, 2-7-38; 40. 33. For a general and well-documented overview of conformity in the 1950s, see James  T.  Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 333–342. 34. Interview with Don Siegel, in Alan Lovell, Don Siegel: American Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1975). 35. Panama and Frank, Li’l Abner, 2, 1-3, 4. 36. David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965). 37. Adlai  E.  Stevenson, Smith College Commencement Address, 6 June 1050. Quoted in K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), 127. 38. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard, 1951), 64. 39. Brooks Atkinson, Review, New York Times, 16 November 1956. 40. See Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2017); J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016). 41. Ethan Mordden. Coming Up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 167. 42. Evanier, ‘Li’l Abner in Hollywood.’ 43. Melvin Frank, quoted in Evanier, ‘Li’l Abner in Hollywood.’ 44. Quoted in Evanier, ‘Li’l Abner in Hollywood.’ 45. Panama and Frank, Li’l Abner, 1-5, 6. 4 6. Li’l Abner, directed by Melvin Frank (1959); Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2005, DVD.

li’l abner from comic strip to hollywood   149 47. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/intercontinental_ballistic_missile. 48. Li’l Abner, directed by Melvin Frank. 49. Panama and Frank, Li’l Abner, 1, 2–13. 50. Quoted in Evanier, ‘Li’l Abner in Hollywood.’ 51. Panama and Frank, Li’l Abner, 2–4, 27, 28. 52. Panama and Frank, Li’l Abner, 2–3, 18. 53. Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer, Li’l Abner vocal score, 148. 54. Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer, ‘Otherwise,’ in Li’l Abner, directed by Melvin Frank.

chapter 7

Fidelit y v ersus Fr eedom i n Mil oš For m a n ’s Fil m V ersion of H a ir Andrew Buchman

Introduction The 1979 film version of Hair, directed by the Czech-American Miloš Forman (1932–2018), departs startlingly from the 1968 Broadway stage production’s avant-garde flourishes and minimal book. Forman took liberties that even the most enthusiastic exponent of Regietheater onstage might question. Such drastic changes in settings might be seen on opera stages as well. Even authorial opera directors like Peter Sellars rarely cut and adjust the music, although they might occasionally cut and add to the libretto. Musical theatre directors are prone to make Forman-like changes when they revise musicals before Oklahoma! such as Anything Goes. With a few notable exceptions in the 1950s and early 1960s, Hollywood directors rarely leave anything alone.1 To be fair to Forman, he did confer with the show’s original authors and costars, Gerome ‘Jerry’ Ragni (1935–1991) and James Rado (b. 1932), inviting them to casting calls, for example. ‘I didn’t need their approval—but I wanted their approval,’ Forman said.2 But he rejected their screenplay draft. Forman worked on scripts himself instead, first with author/actor Jean-Claude Carrière in the late 1960s, and then playwright Michael Weller (b.1942) when the project finally came to fruition ten years later.3 Was the resulting film too far out, or was Forman being true to Hair in his own fashion? Were Twyla Tharp’s choreographic contributions appropriate or a distraction? What about the work of composer Galt MacDermot (1928–2018), the only original collaborator on the stage version to also participate in making the film? Comparisons of the stage and film versions, examinations of screenplay drafts, and analyses of two exceptional sequences in the film

152   musical theatre screen adaptations will be our pathways here to understanding why, as well as what, Forman and his teammates did to Hair. In my view, Forman and Weller remained faithful to the themes of the work but developed these themes freely; hence the title of this chapter. In Forman’s opinion, the ‘strong personal vision’ of a Steven Spielberg or a Francis Coppola is what made movies successful in the 1970s and 1980s, and he sought to emulate their example.4 While the new screenplay by Weller may retain only skeletal elements of the stage play, it rethinks rather than rejects the central ideas within the 1968 Broadway show and even restores elements from the first off-Broadway production in 1967, which Forman saw in previews.5 I agree with Thomas Slater that Forman and Weller ‘were able to look beyond Hair’s original purpose as a celebration of the ‘hippie’ lifestyle to its inherent capabilities as a musical for bringing opposites together.’6 As Frank Rich observed in his 1979 review of the film in Time magazine, the new ideas can be interpreted not as directorial intrusions but as imaginative, effective developments: ‘musical screenwriting.’7 The main characters in Forman’s Hair have the same names as in the stage show. But Sheila, Berger, and Claude each have new identities, more detailed motivations, and carefully elaborated backstories. Songs arise out of newly crafted dramatic situations, with many musical adjustments (pace Rich; see note 7). MacDermot revised his own stage score extensively into an engaging cinematic soundtrack, beautifully performed by fine session musicians. Forman’s elaborate montages of Twyla Tharp and her company performing evocative postmodern dances add another new dimension.8 (See Table 7.1 for a comparison of the creative principals and actors in central roles for these three versions.) Admittedly the result is a radical rewrite, almost as remote from the original version as West Side Story (on stage or screen) is from Romeo and Juliet. The sylvan settings in the film also stand out to anyone who has seen a typical Hair stage performance on a stark unit set. The movie begins on a ranch in Oklahoma, then moves to New York City’s Central Park—rus in urbe. After stops at a military base in a western desert and a military cemetery in Washington, DC, the film ends with reenactments of vast peace demonstrations in Washington, DC, and back in Central Park on Sheep Meadow. Bucolic settings within Central Park in summer predominate, with quick side trips to Wall Street, then Washington Square Park (in New York’s Greenwich Village neighbourhood) in winter. Photogenic locomotion is provided by an old pickup truck, a period highway bus, horses, a yellow New York Checker cab, and a classic mid-1960s Lincoln Continental convertible. Among the three original central characters, only Berger is still a hippie. Now a forceful protagonist, he initiates much of the action, from renting a horse to crashing a stuffy party (to woo Sheila, now a rich debutante), borrowing a car (without permission), and infiltrating a heavily guarded military base. In stark contrast, Claude, the first remade major character we meet in the film, is clean-shaven, crew-cut, and laconic— salt of the earth. Three other characters from the stage show reappear as a subsidiary love triangle. Woof has shining blond tresses, Hud a majestic Afro, Jeannie a mass of gorgeous curls. The cinematic Jeannie knows that either Woof or Hud is the father of her expected child.9 Within the last scenes of the film, Woof and Jeannie evidently hold the

forman’s film version of hair   153

Table 7.1  Selected Crew & Cast Members for Hair in 1967, 1968, and 1979 CREW: Director Choreographer Music Director Producer(s) Venue CAST: Berger Claude Sheila Hud Jeannie Woof Dionne

1967

1968

1979

Gerald Freedman Anna Sokolow (uncredited) John Morris Joe Papp

Tom O’Horgan Julie Arenal Galt MacDermot Michael Butler

Public Theater (Oct-Nov) Cheetah Discothèque (Dec-Jan)

Biltmore Theater

Miloš Forman Twyla Tharp Galt MacDermot Michael Butler & Lester Persky n/a

Gerome Ragni Walker Daniels Jill O’Hara Arnold Wilkerson Sally Eaton Steve Dean

Gerome Ragni James Rado Lynn Kellogg Lamont Washington Sally Eaton Steve Curry

Treat Williams John Savage Beverley D’Angelo Dorsey Wright Annie Golden Don Dacus Cheryl Barnes

Source: Barbara Lee Horn, The Age of Hair: Evolution and Impact of Broadway’s First Rock Musical (New York: Greenwood, 1991), 141–150.

baby, wrapped in blankets, while Hud holds his son (obscured behind Sheila), and stands behind the boy’s mother Dionne. Hud’s estranged, then reconciled fiancée and child (newly invented characters not in the stage show) join the band of six just in time for an epic trek westward. We still don’t learn the identity of the baby’s biological father, although this frame from the film also suggests three couples are forming (see Figure 7.1—Main Characters).10 This lack of narrative closure is a distant echo of Forman‘s early Czech films, as we’ll see. Forman also supplies an emphatic Hollywood-style ending plot twist: Berger (not Claude as in the stage show) dies. The communal, celebratory qualities of Hair onstage made it a night to remember, and the so-called tribe of more than twenty performers supplied energy aplenty. By shrinking the ensemble to seven plus an appealing toddler, Weller’s script gives fewer actors plenty of close-ups and much more backstory to build their characters on. Forman’s careful casting and creative direction brought his then little-known actors a long way (several went on to major careers thereafter). The filmmakers take full advantage of the park’s gorgeous scenery and Victorian architectural features such as the horse path with its many rustic tunnels and bridges, Bethesda Fountain with its adjacent lake and baroque plaza, and the Naumburg bandshell nearby on the park’s mall. Armed mounted police, a gang lurking in the underpasses by the fountain, and a scene during which Berger urinates from the stage of the bandshell all evoke the grittier side of life in New York in the late 1960s (although a precise year isn’t specified until we see the date ‘1968’ on a tombstone near the end of the film). Claude and Sheila’s points of origin

154   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 7.1  Main Characters (L to R): Woof, Jeannie, Hud's fiancée [Dionne], Hud, Sheila, Claude (Berger, played by Treat Williams, not pictured).

(a small rural ranch house in Oklahoma and a small mansion in ritzy Short Hills, New Jersey, respectively) offer contrasting landscapes, as does the finale, filmed in the desert near Barstow, California, on an army base, designated as ‘Nevada’ in the film. At the camera’s helm, Miroslav ‘Mirek’ Ondříček (1934–2015), whom Forman imported from Czechoslovakia where they had worked together on several films, used deep focus frequently, composed shots ravishingly, and lit both day and night locations expertly. For example, the opening three minutes of the film include a single tracking shot two minutes long that makes a long-range visual connection to the array of tombstones in a military cemetery pictured during the film’s finale: the crossbars on a line of power poles in Oklahoma form a receding row of grey crosses in the distance behind Claude and his father as the bus to New York arrives (see Figures 7.2 and 7.3). The series of far-flung locations, the elaborate military and mass protest scenes, and the road trips by bus and car within the film expand the stage show’s focus on the social divisions between young hippies and older conformists that characterized the 1960s by literally portraying the country’s grandiose geographic diversity and its people’s profound social divisions. Several scenes employ crowds far larger than any stage tribe such as a ‘Be-In’ in Central Park at which one character drops acid (LSD) and has a dream (set mostly back in Oklahoma) that includes Twyla Tharp levitating and officiating at a wedding, and a

forman’s film version of hair   155

Figure 7.2  Receding Line of Telephone Poles at Bus Stop.

scene set on Wall Street on a busy business day as Claude sings ‘Where Do I Go?’ The finale, ‘Let the Sunshine,’ set to huge peace demonstrations in New York and Washington, DC, featuring vast crowds of volunteer extras reenacts the late sixties anti–Vietnam War movement in quasi-documentary style. The costumes designed by Ann Roth (b.1931) often riff on Eastern European and other folk art traditions to create a kind of hippie folk couture—a 1970s fashion trend. The minimal makeup (by Max Henriquez and Robert ‘Bob’ Mills) and gleaming hairstyles (by Joe Tubens and Vivienne Walker) are also more typical of the 1970s, when even some stockbrokers wore their hair longish, than the 1960s. When casting the first production in 1967, long locks on men were still so rare that Ragni and Rado resorted to asking everyone they met on the street with long hair if they could sing.11 Forman’s redone Hair-style is disowned by some fans and disliked by some scholars who prefer either the original off-Broadway book (which to date has not been revived commercially) or the revised, stripped down, ‘non-book’ (in the authors’ own words) version produced in 1968 so successfully and revived so repeatedly ever since.12 Early on, the original authors championed Forman as an artist in his own right.13 But after the film was released they criticized it severely, seeing it not as a faithful rereading but as an unsuccessful reinvention. Barbara Lee Horn claimed in 1991 that Ragni and Rado ‘refer to the film as H because Forman took all of the air out of Hair.’14

156   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 7.3  Receding Lines of Tombstones in Military Cemetery.

To explore and critique Forman’s observant but radical reinterpretation, this chapter continues comparing and contrasting both early off-Broadway productions (which used substantially the same script), the heavily revised Broadway version, and the film, with special attention to settings, characters, themes, and reception. It focuses on Forman, Weller, MacDermot, and Tharp’s collaborative contributions, tracing the ­genesis of the screenplay, key changes in characters and settings, and how music and movement were reworked for the film. Lastly, it analyzes two especially intriguing sequences: the now transcontinental opening scene featuring the song ‘Aquarius’ and Forman and Weller’s plot-twisting new setting and singer for the anthemic lamentation ‘Easy to Be Hard.’

How to Read a Musical The currently rentable stage version of Hair, which received a successful Broadway revival and national tour in 2009–2010, with modest revisions approved by surviving author (and former star, as Claude) James Rado, exhibits significant differences from most successful Broadway shows.15 To many fans who grew up with the soundtrack recording and still prefer the show as they originally heard it, Hair is a song cycle, or

forman’s film version of hair   157 concept album.16 The original authors intended to create an alternately challenging and entrancing avant-garde stage work. The Broadway plot is skeletal. Hair can come across as a thematic revue dependent on the talents, skills, and ensemble spirit of its performers— and a time capsule from the 1960s, with anachronistic and deliberately confrontational references to raced and gendered stereotypes too numerous to excise easily.17 Thus Weller’s blunt comment that, in adapting Hair for the screen, he had ‘to make it up,’ aside from ‘the songs and some character names.’ In contrast, with E. L. Doctorow’s thick 1975 novel, Ragtime, his next collaboration with Forman (released in 1981), Weller had ‘to select and compress,’ as one usually does to make a film (or a musical) out of a novel or play.18 Forman put it more diplomatically, saying ‘Hair was such a brilliant piece of theatrical genius that you have only two honest ways how [sic] to make a film out of it. Either photograph the stage play faithfully or let me make, absolutely free, my own version. Anything in between and you end up like a bastard.’ In the same interview Forman asserted that he and Weller ‘developed a storyline that was hidden in the original one.’19 As we’ll see, Forman may have been referring to the longer off-Broadway script, not the better-known Broadway version. In an interview defending his freedom to invent while expressing some sympathy for fidelity, Forman maintained that he did not impose his own social messages onto his versions of Hair, Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (film version, 1984), or onto his adaptations of novels by Ken Kesey (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975) or E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime, 1981). Rather, he says that he ‘read’ political or social themes already present in those works.20 All four films have ensemble casts, including a protagonist who opposes social conventions and institutions.21 Forman’s artful use of the monosyllable ‘read’ neatly sums up a multitude of interpretive liberties and forges a connection between his artistic practices and critical theories around film. James Monaco’s classic textbook, How to Read a Film, first came out in 1977, offering engrossing summaries of successive schools of film theory. Forman, destined to teach for many years at Columbia University in New York, doubtless came across it then or thereafter, in one or more of its four editions.22 For Forman, reading a musical was an interpretive practice. Forman’s early Czech films were certainly ‘read’ by the government as subversive attacks on the social order. By the mid-1970s, Weller, too, had demonstrated deep engagements with social issues in his early plays. Speaking of Weller’s two film scripts for Forman as well as his many stage works, David Savran wrote in 1988, ‘All of his plays are closely attentive to group dynamics and tend to be dominated by several key figures whose interrelationship is foregrounded, rather than by one overruling protagonist. The personal development of the group is set in counterpoint against a background of lowering problems and social issues beyond the immediate control of any of the characters.’23 These observations ring true of Hair the movie as well as of Weller’s well-received plays including Moonchildren (1971) and Loose Ends (1979).24 After a Broadway revival of Hair flopped in 1977, Ragni stated that he and Rado began their own revisions of the book.25 But these, even with additions from Diane Paulus and others by 2008, were minimal compared to the film’s radically new script. While Ragni and Rado were replaced as authors, the composer of the stage show, Galt MacDermot,

158   musical theatre screen adaptations collaborated closely with Forman. MacDermot, already an experienced session musician and composer before Hair, by this time had also written scores for several more stage musicals.26 The new musical arrangements for the film were largely created and conducted by MacDermot, now working with a large technical crew and larger instrumental forces than in the stage production, synching sound to previously shot complex film montages, and employing then-novel technical advances, including Dolby noise reduction, wireless microphones, and eight-track location recording equipment.27 MacDermot composed some music expressly for the film, including two new songs, only one of which found its way into the finished work. The selected song, ‘Somebody to Love,’ a 1960s-style country song including obbligatos for electric slide steel-string guitar and a female backup chorus, underscores (diegetically, as if from a jukebox) a scene in a bar when Sheila gets to know a soldier from Claude’s army base in order to engineer a visit. ‘Hippie Life,’ the unused new song, wasn’t recorded until 2003.28 A number of songs from the 1967 and 1968 versions of the stage show were recorded, then cut or reduced to underscoring. Performances originally intended for the film of ‘A.I.R.,’ ‘Abie Baby,’ ‘Frank Mills,’ ‘My Conviction,’ and ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man?’ subsequently cut, but included on a CD reissue of the soundtrack album in 1999, reflect how much the film continued to change during the production process, which was unusually protracted— eight months (October 1977 to May 1978, with a six-week winter break) compared to the usual two to three months.29 Treat Williams estimated that Forman would ‘do anywhere from six to fifteen takes’ of a given scene. ‘In effect, he was waiting for us to stop doing what we thought we should be doing . . . and start behaving naturally. . . . [Then] the scene would become more and more alive.’30 ‘Don’t Put It Down,’ a part of the ­original opening number in 1967, becomes a string band instrumental in the film. Other underscoring features new music, as in ‘Party Music,’ for the banquet at Sheila’s parents’ suburban mansion in Short Hills, New Jersey. Just as many opera lovers put singers or arias first, the cascade of songs, some of the shorter ones sung attacca as medleys, are the principal pleasure of Hair for many, perhaps for most fans. An unsigned article in Time magazine in December 1969 stated that close to three million copies of the Broadway cast album had been sold, and that bidding for the film rights to the stage show had reached $2.5 million.31 However, the Recording Industry Association of America has certified the Broadway cast album (released in 1968, containing twenty-six songs) as having sold only 500,000 copies (the 1979 movie soundtrack album, containing twenty-five songs, is also certified to have sold that many copies).32 An off-Broadway cast album was released in 1967, containing twenty songs.33 An album including both cut songs and new arrangements of staged songs (nineteen titles in all), DisinHAIRited, was released in 1970, and a variant reading, Divine Hair/ Mass in F, in 1971. The latter, a recording of a sacred service celebrating the third anniversary of the Broadway production, interpolates homilies, organ improvisations, and a four-part mass by MacDermot among seven songs from the stage show. Happily, even these two formerly obscure recordings have recently been rereleased on CDs.34 The off-Broadway version of Hair included roughly twenty songs; the Broadway version roughly thirty (counts vary slightly).35 Table 7.2 lists all the tracks on available CD

forman’s film version of hair   159 rereleases of the music from the three versions, including ‘bonus’ tracks recorded ­contemporaneously but not released until 1989 or later, and identifies songs recorded for the film’s soundtrack but cut from the finished film.36 Music is an important element in many of Forman’s films, as are documentary techniques and conventions, emerging actors, and locations rather than sets. Forman’s second Czech feature, Loves of a Blonde (1965), begins with an uncut performance (in  one long shot) of a blues-style song, presenting, like the opening of the Iliad or Beowulf, a synopsis of the entire narrative. One of his first professional films, Konkurs (usually translated as Audition) (1963), dramatizes a crowded open audition for young female singers, and contrasts the rising tide of 1950s-style rock and roll in Eastern Europe with an older popular genre, folk brass band music by Czech composers. He recreated and elaborated on this audition scene in his first American film, Taking Off (1971), featuring the then virtually unknown singer/songwriter Carly Simon and actress Kathy Bates (who also wrote and sang her own song) as two of the competitors. Hair is his only essay explicitly in the musical genre, although both Ragtime and Amadeus contain copious music, and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) includes a major speaking role for the singer Courtney Love. Forman described his unease with conventional musical dramaturgy in an interview. ‘I love musicals. But you can’t repeat the musicals of the 30s and the 40s. . . . That was the main challenge . . . how to establish, right at the beginning, painlessly, that these people will be not only be talking but also singing.’37 In their creative reading, Forman and Weller brought back some formal aspects and themes that were more prominent in the first production of Hair, off-Broadway, at Joe Papp’s new Public Theater downtown in the fall of 1967. Ragni and Rado had bitter disputes with their director on that first production, Gerald Freedman, among other collaborators, so understandably they might not warm to restoring aspects of that book (even without literal borrowings), such as more conventional dialogue and plot, and fewer songs.38 However, there is only one literal borrowing. A memorable line of dialogue from an early script, Sheila repeating the single word, ‘no,’ over and over, r­ eappears in the film as a line for Woof, resisting getting his long hair cut off after being arrested and jailed.39 Although the line appears to have been cut during the show’s previews, this moment might well have stood out for an early spectator like Forman, whose fluency in English was still imperfect when he saw the show off-Broadway during those preview performances. Director and scholar Martha S. LoMonaco has singled out several themes from the 1967 version that were deemphasized in the 1968 Broadway revision.40 The first three were (1) the idea of creating a new society, (2) agony over whether to obey the draft and report for compulsory military duty or run away to Canada, and (3) contrasts between 1950s-era conformist values and the emerging social movements of the 1960s—the generation gap. Finally, LoMonaco singled out ‘character-motivated dialogue and actions versus those created for shock value’ as a fourth major theme that distinguished the 1967 version from the 1968 radical revision for Broadway. A review of the books for both versions supports her points.41 Forman and Weller address the first three themes with new force while radically revising and rebuilding the fourth.42

Table 7.2  Musical Numbers in the Off-Broadway, Broadway, and Film Versions of Hair. Songs on the film soundtrack CD, 1999. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

1967

1968

1979

•

• • • • • • • •

o o o o o • o • o • o • o o o o o o o o o o o • o o o

Aquarius Sodomy Donna/Hashish Colored Spade Manchester Abie Baby/Fourscore I’m Black/Ain’t Got No Air Party Music* My Conviction* I Got Life Frank Mills Hair L.B.J. (also known as ‘Initials’) Electric Blues/Old Fashioned Melody Hare Krishna (aka Be-In) Where Do I Go? Black Boys White Boys Walking in Space Easy to Be Hard 3-5-0-0 Good Morning Starshine What a Piece of Work Is Man Somebody to Love Don’t Put It Down The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In

•

•

• • • • • • • • • • • • • •

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Additional songs included on the 2003 rerelease of both stage cast albums on 2 CDs

Dead End Exanaplanetooch The Climax Opening* Red Blue & White* (aka Don’t Put It Down) Sentimental Ending* I Believe in Love* Going Down* The Bed*

Additional film music Church Organ and Chant (sung by Twyla Tharp) at Wedding Hud plays harmonica during ‘Nevada’ sequence ‘Hair’—Claude, Berger, and Company (underscores credits) ‘Hippie Life’ (new song; unused)

Sources: Film, notes to CDs released in 1999 and 2003. Notes: * Not released on original LPs; o = on CD and in film; • = on CD but not in film.

1967

• • • • • •

1968

• • • •

forman’s film version of hair   161 Most of the film focuses on the little band of friends in the park and their self-made, alternative universe. Although he joins it briefly, Claude, called up in the draft for the Vietnam War, expresses no ambivalence about his military obligation in the film (a crucial plot point onstage).43 His dialogues expressing indecision about obeying the call were written out of the screenplay after early drafts and replaced by interpersonal conflicts. After Berger and Hud urge him not to go (and after Sheila has stormed out of the park), his sense of duty leads him to leave his new friends and report the next day. This scene of young people talking past one another instead of listening is inherently more dramatic than the somewhat predictable intergenerational political disagreements in the stage show. Forman dramatizes and documents the realities of military service with vivid locations and new characters, including a satirical look at the induction process featuring singing sergeants and a cameo by fellow director Nicholas Ray as an authoritarian general, the commandant of the base where Claude undergoes basic training, depicted in a montage underscored by the lyrics to ‘My Body,’ sung offscreen by an ensemble, here merged with the song ‘Walking in Space,’ sung onscreen by yet another new character identified as ‘Dead Vietnamese Girl’ in the screenplay.44 She is backed up by the offscreen chorus, led by Thomas (Tom) Pierson (b. 1948), who also did some arranging for the film. To link up LoMonaco’s third and fourth points, for Forman and Weller character is key, and no character is an island. Exchanges between parents and children figure more prominently in Forman’s film than in either stage version, giving the generation gap specificities and complexities. While Claude’s parents were already present off and on Broadway, Forman adds in parts for all six parents of the three principal characters, and even adds in a young wife and child for Hud. At one point, Jeannie offers to marry Claude in order to gain him an exemption from military service, adding another familial resonance to the story. Some film critics zoomed in immediately on Weller and Forman’s plot innovations. Critics Vincent Canby (for the New York Times) and Rich praised the film for the most part. Canby backhandedly wrote that the film had ‘the charm of a fable and the slickness of Broadway showbiz at its breathless best,’ but he also noted that ‘Mr. Weller’s inventions make this Hair seem much funnier than I remember the show’s having been. They also provide time and space for the development of characters who, on the stage, had to express themselves almost entirely in song.’45 Rich praised Weller’s script as ‘a witty cross between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the 1949 MGM musical On the Town.’ He singled out Forman’s resettings of ‘I Got Life,’ danced and sung by Berger atop a long banquet table at Sheila’s suburban mansion, for which ‘the director creates a riotous but somehow benign paradigm of deadlocked cultural confrontation,’ and the finale, ‘The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine,’ where ‘Forman at once resolves the plot, reopens the national wounds of Viet Nam, and pulls back to bring the whole movie into a historical perspective.’46 Despite some strong reviews, Forman’s Hair redo did not recoup its investment.47 It cost $12 million to make ($2 million over its planned budget), received a relatively weak promotional campaign, and earned only $6.8 million in domestic box office rentals

162   musical theatre screen adaptations in its first year of release.48 Forman attributed this to external circumstances. ‘Hair . . . in 1967 . . . preached sexual liberation, war resistance, pacifism, gentleness, flower power, and ecology. . . . In 1977, none of the[se] notions raised blood pressure anymore. . . . The real problem was that Hair would be coming out at an awkward time commercially. By the late seventies the sixties were over and hadn’t yet begun to provoke nostalgia.’49 Perhaps Forman was right about the eventual power of nostalgia; despite its initial modest reception, the film has remained ‘in print,’ so to speak, via a series of videocassette and DVD editions.

Genesis of the Script Forman has said he wanted to make a film version of Hair as soon as he saw the offBroadway production at Joe Papp’s new downtown Public Theater—indeed, the first show Papp presented there, in the autumn of 1967. Forman claims that he saw ‘the first public preview’ of Hair, well before the show opened on 29 October.50 Forman has said that he was thrilled by the explorations of what individual freedom could lead to in this early version of the show, with a bigger book and some capable direction from Gerald Freeman. When he modestly stated in an interview in 1999, ‘I didn’t understand a word, but I loved the songs,’ he may have also been offering yet another diplomatic commentary on the book problems in both stage versions of Hair.51 Forman immediately pursued the film rights, but he had to be patient. Reworked, Hair on Broadway became a lively amalgam of avant-garde visual e­ lements typical of new director Tom O’Horgan’s work including crowd-pleasing draws like a brief, dimly lit nude tableau vivant at the end of Act I.52 Attracting a vast young adult audience, the Broadway version became an international stage phenomenon, and the film rights became both elusive and expensive. By 1971, the show’s publicists could crow, ‘In the past four years, more than 26,000,000 theatre-goers in 22 countries throughout the world have seen it performed in 14 languages. It has broken records in such disparate points of the globe as Tel Aviv, Belgrade and Sao Paolo [sic] and it is still playing in England, France, Australia, Germany and Scandinavia.’53 Eventually the Broadway producer, Chicago-area business scion Michael Butler, bought the film rights himself for just over $1 million, in 1971.54 He is credited as coproducer on the film, alongside Lester Persky, an experienced manager who, with his partner Richard Bright, provided production services for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and produced the 1977 film version of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus. Forman recalls in a memoir that while engaged in initially fruitless negotiations with the stage show’s owners, the prolific scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière ‘helped me get a clear conception of how I wanted to shoot Hair.’55 ‘Carrière and I had wanted to shoot Hair as an audition for the musical, a backstage story, a semidocumentary.’56 As previously mentioned, this idea, first tried in Konkurs, would return in Taking Off, his first film made in America. After receiving a definite no from Ragni and Rado, Forman

forman’s film version of hair   163 turned to another way of exploring similar subject matter. Taking Off (1971) alternates between a series of live musical performances and vignettes making up an original story about a young New Yorker (played by newcomer Linnea Heacock, in her only film role) and her family.57 When she slips away from the suburbs into the city, her parents fear she has become a hippie, a runaway, or worse, a victim of predators. The adolescent daughter eventually reappears with a low-key but long-haired new boyfriend in tow—a successful rock musician who earns much more than her father. Utterly unlike Hair, the story focuses mostly, refreshingly, on the parents’ worries and earnest attempts to remake their own humdrum lives in order to understand their daughter better. The viewer is forced to make his or her own sense of the abundant music, which is usually only tangentially related to the action. This all adds up to an experimental, avant-garde film juxtaposing serious, carefully constructed social satire with music in a wide range of styles featuring diverse performers including an ­anonymous naked cellist (perhaps a reference to Fluxus artist Charlotte Moorman, who collaborated with Nam Jun Paik in the 1960s), and Ike and Tina Turner and their ensemble, appearing at a club in the Catskills. Written by Forman in collaboration with Carrière, John Guare, and John Klein and starring writer/director/actor Buck Henry as the father, the low-budget film received good reviews and some awards but flopped at the box office. ‘I now think of Taking Off as my last Czech film,’ Forman said, philosophically. ‘When it was over, I knew if I really wanted to make films in Hollywood, I’d have to change my whole style of working. I’d have to swallow my impatience and acknowledge it would take years to absorb American culture.’58 In fact, Forman continued to employ many of his tried-and-true methods in his American films in the 1970s. He carefully chose casts of mostly unknown actors, shot on locations off the beaten track, and while sticking to well-crafted scripts, allowed his ­creative team and cast to add their own ideas to the mix. Black Peter (1964) and Loves of a Blonde (1965), Forman’s earliest full-length Czech feature films, centre on the family drama around an adolescent child coming of age during the youth-oriented rock and roll era, as does Taking Off. However, he did change genres in America, from satirical comedy to satirical tragedy, or at least more tragic subject matter, such as mental illness, crime and punishment, violence, and death. He also began to craft more coherent, seamless narratives, adhere to Hollywood editing conventions more closely, and pay special attention to satisfying, cumulative, often cathartic endings. Critically esteemed for his satirical Czech comedies, Forman hit pay dirt in the New World only by making a gripping cinematic drama starring Jack Nicholson, based on Oregonian Ken Kesey’s novel set mostly in an insane asylum. His second American film, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), grossed around $100 million worldwide, many times more than the relatively paltry $4 million it cost to make.59 As the Oscar-winning director of a hit film, Forman now won creative control over all aspects of the production of Hair. As Forman joked, ‘When you have a big success, even the studio heads suddenly believe that you know what you are doing . . . one month before they didn’t.’60 Forman felt that in just ten years ‘Hair had become a period piece.’61 By turning to two recruits from New York’s contemporary performance scene, playwright Michael Weller

164   musical theatre screen adaptations and choreographer Twyla Tharp, both ten years younger than himself and new to the movies, Forman added fresh voices to the creative team, artists with more eclectic aesthetic outlooks than the highly modernist social activists Ragni and Rado (­contemporaries of Forman) got to know in theatre workshops in the early 1960s, such as Nola Chilton at the Open Theatre, Ellen Stewart at La Mama E.T.C., and Tom O’Horgan, who directed Hair on Broadway (and, in 1971, Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar). Although they didn’t actually meet until 1980, it was playwright Peter Shaffer, another client of Forman’s agent, who suggested Weller as a possible scriptwriter.62 Tharp was hired after Forman saw Mikhail Baryshnikov dance her piece, Push Comes to Shove.63 Weller had first majored in music as an undergraduate at Brandeis where he wrote the score for an original musical, an adaptation of Nathanael West’s A Cool Million. He transferred to the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom to study playwriting with Stephen Joseph, then back in New York wrote a well-received play about 1960s college students, Moonchildren (1971). Collaborating with composer Jim Steinman, Weller wrote the book for a musical, More Than You Deserve (1973), presented by the New York Shakespeare Festival (the same company that produced the off-Broadway version of Hair), starring Fred Gwynne and Mary Beth Hurt with music direction by Paul Shaffer.64 Weller has stated that Forman ‘took it very seriously to train me as a screenwriter,’ and the collaboration blossomed into a creative partnership.65 The two went on to write a dramatic film together, Ragtime (1981), based on the novel by E. L. Doctorow, with an original score by Randy Newman. ‘There were no rules for the collaboration [on Hair] besides a tacit understanding that all ideas were allowed, the dumber the better,’ wrote Weller in 1999. ‘Often Forman would suggest startling ways to jolt us out of an impasse. “What if he says no to her instead of yes in this moment?” . . . [A]s often as not, these sudden horseshoe turns would open a hidden door to the best idea imaginable. . . . His lessons were concrete and practical. “Always bring the audience into a big scene through someone. Follow the waiter’s tray into the banquet, don’t just point the camera and show the banquet. You must always tell the story from the point of view of someone in the story.”’66 For Forman, ‘half of directing [in his own era, which he contrasted with the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s] is the capability to shape the script,  either ­directly through your own writing, or to work with the writer. . . . I was very thankful for my training as a screenwriter [at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague].’67 In the film, Claude, due to be called up soon for compulsory military duty, treats himself to a quick sightseeing journey to New York City before reporting. Sheila, a community organizer and political protester onstage, becomes the pampered child of a wealthy suburban family—the antithesis of a hippie, exquisitely groomed and attired, with her hair up in a bun. She temporarily escapes her parents’ stiflingly exclusive suburban world by joining the group of hippies in New York’s Central Park, as does Claude after impressing Sheila, also an equestrian, with his horse-riding skills. We do meet Berger’s parents in Queens in the stage version. However, in the film, these parents are portrayed sympathetically as Berger turns to them for money to get out of

forman’s film version of hair   165 a legal jam—another memorably reworked scene described below. We also see, briefly, Claude’s parents as he leaves home in Oklahoma. Sheila’s friends and family—more new supporting characters not present onstage—figure prominently in the party-crashing scene, the new setting for the number ‘I Got Life.’ On Broadway, Claude sang ‘I Got Life’ to his mother, but the scene isn’t woven into the story as in the film. There the song is moved to Sheila’s parents’ mansion, where Berger leaps onto the banquet table in an appeal to Sheila to run away with the raggle-taggle hippies. Berger visits his parents after the group is arrested at the banquet, then sentenced to either a fine or jail time. Berger searches desperately for money to pay the fines for his mates, after persuading Claude to use his own emergency funds (a parting gift from his father) to pay for Berger’s release rather than his own. There’s no song for this family reunion. It’s a veristic dramatic staging that creates a sense of connection with this American family, recalling the profound, if comic, sympathy Forman evinced for puzzled parents in Taking Off. ‘How much do you need?’ Berger’s mother finally asks, out of her husband’s hearing. Berger retains his function as the third party in a love triangle with Sheila and Claude, but here as well the dynamics are altered. Both LoMonaco and Elizabeth Wollman have written eloquently about the problematic gender dynamics, particularly the sexual coercion exerted upon Sheila by both leading men, in both stage versions of Hair.68 In the film, Berger only flirts with Sheila. Claude remains tongue-tied around Sheila in the film version, but the camera, in repeated close-ups, reads his intense feelings for her: he is smitten. The stage show’s drug-induced dream ballet is elaborated in the film into a trippy church wedding officiated by a levitating Twyla Tharp, enacted inside Claude’s head. The pair’s most revealing moment together is a skinny dip, at night, in one of Central Park’s sylvan lakes, which Sheila flees after the tribe hides (then restores) their clothes.69 The quiet climax of their relationship is a chance to have a real visit and a talk late in the film (in the finished film, but not in the second draft of the screenplay, in which they do make consensual love). This is not to diminish the reality of patriarchal attitudes on display in many passages in both the stage piece and this film. Both works reproduce social constructions typical of their respective eras, a topic explored more fully by Wollman in her books and Sarah Browne and Sarah Whitfield in several recent scholarly essays.70 As previously discussed, in the stage show Claude seriously considers evading the draft. In the film, he does not, although his induction becomes a musicalized social satire that draws on Forman’s formidable parodic imagination and Tharp’s choreographic ideas. Sheila is fulfilling her parents’ expectations by coming out as a society debutante but has also already started secretly smoking pot with friends. Like Claude, she is carried along in the course of events often initiated by the fearless, impulsive Berger, leaving school, borrowing one of her parents’ cars, and going to Nevada in the middle of winter with the gang to visit Claude before he is shipped out to Vietnam. In the film Berger’s impulsive risk-taking, in a surprise plot twist, leads to his doom when he switches places with Claude so that Claude can sneak off his army post to visit Sheila. In the stage show, it is Claude who dies in Vietnam.

166   musical theatre screen adaptations Claude, Sheila, and Berger’s differing class and regional origins set up examinations of larger social conflicts along axes of social inequality: age, geographic origins, ethnicities, racial identities, class, gender, religious beliefs, and political ideologies. While the stage musical dared to open up such challenging subjects as race and gender, its treatment lacked nuance. The New Yorker’s Hilton Als placed the blame for this aspect of the musical squarely on authors Ragni and Rado when Hair was revived on Broadway in 2009, declaring, ‘There is not one believable black character in ‘Hair.’ In fact, its strangled, hackneyed depiction of black masculinity is painful to watch.’71 As we’ll soon see, Forman and Weller found ways to give at least two characters of African descent some backstory, emotional depth, and engrossing plot complications in their resetting of the song ‘Easy to Be Hard.’ Four new sequences become satires on racial and gender ­identities in institutional settings: Woof ’s performance of the title song in jail while waiting for Berger to bail him out, Claude’s physical exam during army induction (during which ‘Black Boys’ and ‘White Boys’ are performed), Claude’s basic training, and Berger’s scenes on the army base, during which he passes first as an officer, then as a soldier. By abandoning textual fidelity in favour of interpretive freedom, Forman and Weller opened the door to deeper explorations of themes fundamental to the stage version—including social and political strife, race, gender, and social status, but particularly free love and its possible consequences.

Screenplay Revisions A second draft of Weller’s screenplay, dated 19 August 1977, deposited within the Ragni papers at the New York Public Library, includes a number of ideas that were later dropped from or reworked in the finished film.72 This script opens with a title sequence featuring Claude’s voice, off-camera, singing ‘Exanaplanetooch,’ a song from the offBroadway version that was cut on Broadway, as Indiana (not Oklahoma) clouds roll by.73 As the song ends, we see Claude for the first time, silently lying, fully dressed, on his bed in his parents’ house, ‘staring at the ceiling.’ The quiet sounds of a household waking up are heard. Downstairs in the kitchen, ‘Claude’s MOTHER stands at the window gazing out.’ She remains motionless as Claude’s father enters and yells up the stairs to Claude, to make sure he’s up. Then Claude’s parents revisit, once more, an earlier argument. Claude’s mother wishes that they could spend Claude’s last week together, at home, before he is drafted into the military. Claude’s father supports Claude’s plan for a last road trip, to New York City, before he returns to Indianapolis to be inducted. Thus, this countercultural musical, in its onscreen incarnation, was to have begun with a dialogue between two parents contemplating losing their child. As Claude enters and sits down, the father goes out and leaves him alone with his mother. He receives a big bag of food for the journey and tries to cheer her up by saying, ‘You know what I’m gonna do first thing when I get there? I’m gonna call you from the top of the Empire State Building.’ She responds, ‘If you spent the week here you wouldn’t have to call me at all.’ ‘I’ll call you

forman’s film version of hair   167 twice,’ Claude persists, trying to make light of his impending departure and subsequent military service. All this material was cut, but the remainder of this scene was largely retained in the final film. Although dramaturgically counterintuitive, the decision to make Claude, a major character, taciturn rather than voluble proved to be an especially successful cinematic result of the script revision process, tightening the opening sequence in the final film.74 Other ideas in the second draft of the script were also excised. A series of eleven cameos were written in for ‘the twins,’ a male and female dancer, who do appear in the opening sequence as filmed.75 To mention just the highlights from these cameos, the twins were to appear in blackface, during a performance of ‘Abie Baby,’ early in the film.76 During the final scenes of a mass peace demonstration in Washington, DC, the twins were to dress as soldiers but then remove their army uniforms and march, naked, with white crosses painted on their chests, inspiring the rest of the crowd at an antiwar demonstration to follow their example and begin removing their clothing.77 This scenario echoed actual episodes of mass nudity during demonstrations and rock festivals in the 1960s. Songs including ‘Abie Baby,’ ‘Air,’ ‘Frank Mills,’ ‘My Conviction,’ ‘L.B.J.,’ ‘Blue White and Red,’ and ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man’ were all written into the script within relatively thin dramatic pretexts, then dropped from the final film. Like the eloquently dancing twins, they slowed down the story with narrative digressions rather than moving the central plot forward.78 The second draft of the script contains twenty-nine songs, including two reprises. Quite a few are converted into underscoring or cut (see earlier discussion and Table 7.2). Yet more vignettes appear in this script but not in the finished film. In dialogue cut from the skinny-dipping scene, Claude does contemplate not reporting for duty, as in the stage play, clearly establishing that he is answering a draft call rather than enlisting.79 In the draft script, during the final reunion between Claude and Sheila, they sleep together; in the finished film, they are only shown talking to one another, which, given what little we know of Claude’s isolated, churched, rural, dutiful background, seems much more in keeping with his character. Woof earns his nickname in a cut scene by imitating, on all fours, a barking dog. During a montage depicting Claude in barracks just after his induction, ‘a DEAD VIETNAMESE GIRL’ was going to ‘rise from the ground and walk towards the camera,’ singing the song ‘Walking in Space.’80 This cameo is reduced in the finished film to a medium close-up of the actor (Linda Suhr) against a black background, in a panning shot. In the draft script, just before the joyful road song, ‘Good Morning Starshine,’ the women shoplift groceries for the road trip, hiding them under their clothes so that all three women (not just Jeannie) appear to be pregnant. In addition to stealing his car, the hippies kidnap and tie a sergeant to a tree and force him to drink wine. Also, in the draft but not the finished film, Berger, while impersonating Claude, passes a joint around to his fellow soldiers in the barracks on the army base. According to Weller, ‘The script [for Hair] was never really finished. We hand in a script because you have to get the production plans approved. But you just keep on evolving it all the way through, even in the editing room.’81 ‘He [Forman] writes one movie, he shoots another, but he makes his movies in the editing room,’ commented

168   musical theatre screen adaptations Michael Hausman, the first assistant director on Hair.82 Forman calculated his shooting ratio at thirty-seven feet of film shot for every foot used in the film, much of it for the two documentary-style crowd scenes employing volunteer extras—about 15,000 for the peace demonstration reenactment in Washington, DC, and about 7,000 for the ‘Be-In’ re-enactment on Central Park’s Sheep Meadow. Eight or nine camera crews covered angles for those two events, shooting for about eight hours each, inflating the total film footage considerably.83 Principal photography began as early as October 1977, and the soundtrack album was completed in December 1978 and January 1979, shortly before the film was released in the United States on 14 March 1979.84 The cuts cited above seem reasonable compromises in the interest of shortening the film. All the major characters and plot turns are already present in the second draft and preserved in the finished film. Thus, it doesn’t seem entirely accurate to describe Forman as writing one film and shooting another. Rather, his multiple takes ensured that a relatively inexperienced cast would have their best performances preserved. The script was judiciously edited for length and narrative concision, but it was fully executed. A detailed examination of two specific scenes in the finished film will give the reader a better sense of how Forman, Weller, MacDermot, and their collaborators sought to weave actors, settings, images, sequences, songs, and story into a coherent, moving, original Gesamtkunstwerk.

‘Aquarius’ The opening scene of any music drama is crucial to establishing mood, and Forman may have lost many lovers of the stage version at the outset by going perversely pastoral. This opening sequence constitutes a significant departure from the stage musical’s accretive opening gathering of the tribe, but it also can be interpreted as an ingenious, original development of it. Of this sequence, Frank Rich wrote, ‘Aquarius’ is now Hair’s equivalent to On the Town’s ‘New York, New York’ opening: it simultaneously defines the film’s characters and relationships, its stylistic plan and emotional tone.’85 The new instrumental sections make the song longer and weightier. Hair contains many short songs, some of which are sung as medleys, attacca. ‘Aquarius,’ ‘Hair,’ ‘Easy to Be Hard,’ ‘Good Morning Starshine,’ and the final medley, ‘The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine’ are standouts, best known to many, perhaps, in cover versions released on 45 rpm singles by artists of the 1960s like the 5th Dimension, the Cowsills, and Three Dog Night. Here Forman and MacDermot collaborated to take a hit song, three minutes in length, and make it the six-minute-long overture to a two-hour-long movie—almost nine minutes long if we count the soft sounds at dawn in rural Oklahoma occupying the first three minutes. The film opens in the quiet of a country morning, with a shot of a plain white farmhouse in misty dawn light. Horses graze in the yard and a mounted horseman passes by. A woman comes out on the porch to bid good-bye to two men, who drive away in an old

forman’s film version of hair   169 pickup truck. In the next shot, the film’s title hangs in the air in front of rolling green hills and a country church with a cross on top as a church bell tolls—a surreal juxtaposition, given the show’s reputation as one of the first adult musicals (see Figure 7.4). In the third shot, which lasts for a full two minutes, the men drive past a purring tractor to a bus stop, with a sign indicating that they are in Oklahoma. Behind them, a tall line of power poles with crossbars, looking like gigantic grey crosses, disappears into the mist, as we have seen in Figure 7.2. The older man calls the younger one son, gives him $50 as a parting gift to use in an emergency, and watches the bus pull away. Abruptly, a drummer enters with a paradiddle in straight eighths, then a bass riff begins. Seeing the journey now through Claude’s eyes, we are on the bus ourselves, looking out the window. This conscious play with point-of-view—the camera as character or spectator rather than as omniscient narrator—recurs throughout the film. We have previously noted that Weller described it as one of Forman’s big lessons for him when writing for cinema: ‘Always bring the audience into a big scene through someone. . . . You must always tell the story from the point of view of someone in the story.’86 A trap set, a rhythm guitar, and that cooking bass guitar riff replace the sounds of the countryside. We watch (from the young man’s point of view) the bus’s seemingly stationary shadow hypnotically passing over the road’s grassy verge. A Fender Rhodes electric piano and another guitarist using a wawa pedal join in. MacDermot and bassist Jimmy Lewis’s funky riffs, played with rhythmic precision, give this version of Hair a propulsive forward motion, particularly in travel scenes. A jump cut to sunset scenes indicate that time has passed. The Manhattan skyline appears, silhouetted in red and orange, heralded by a tight trumpet section. To the sound of sweet saxes playing a first inversion major triad that mimics a diesel train’s powerful air horns we enter a highway tunnel. Flames appear, dancing in the darkness like lighters at a rock concert. The camera zooms in to medium close-ups, introducing each of the initial members of the ‘tribe’ beginning with Woof, Jeannie, and Hud. After a slower zoom-in on Berger, established thereby as the leader, he reads the cautionary

Figure 7.4  Title of film superimposed on a church.

170   musical theatre screen adaptations copy off the back of the military draft card he is legally required to carry, prohibiting its destruction. All four then set Berger’s card alight and drop it into a steel drum. Suddenly we are in another tunnel, an underpass in Central Park, and as two mounted policemen approach, the tribe, huddled around a full-blown campfire in a fifty-five-gallon steel drum, runs away. When the police horses appear, a trumpet player quietly contributes a quick imitation of a horse’s whinny. The Central Park tunnel seems to be engulfed in flames. The camera cuts to a couple (now nameless, but a remnant of ­multiple vignettes identified in the early script as ‘The Twins’) dancing slowly, sensually touching not hands but forearms, transferring weight to one another in a contact improvisation. The couple part to reveal a meadow in the park below, as a voice begins singing. A vertiginous 360-degree pan around the singer of ‘Aquarius’ follows, but the narrative visual action continues as well, in counterpoint now with diegetic musical performance.87 This showy, expensive, and vertiginous on-location circular crane shot, first featured in other films of the 1970s such as Brian De Palma’s 1976 thriller Obsession, aids our transition into the dream world of music-drama while visually modeling the psychedelic zeitgeist of the 1960s. Next, we see the Oklahoma boy striding into the park, confronting a meadow full of dancing hippies who, dreamlike, all turn at once to eye the camera and him—and us. The two policemen on horseback reappear, sending the hippies running. But the cops’ threatening demeanor dissolves as the horses begin dancing along with a hippie couple (those Twins) who stay behind to face them, parodying the horses by swinging their legs and pawing the ground with hoof-like flat feet.88 Classical equine dressage reinterpreted as pedestrian movement transforms the mounted policemen from threatening figures to charming supers in a musical. To an extended instrumental break, the dancers add arm gestures drawn from martial arts and circus acrobatics—lifts and tumbles—to the dance. Then they mime the cinematic trope of slow motion, taking long seconds to sit down together on a long park bench. The Oklahoma boy—we will soon learn he is named Claude—spies three women also passing by on horseback. One we see in close-up catches his eye, and she, in close-up, looks back at him. This is Sheila. The number ends with the quiet crash of a large Chinese gong, another witty, unexpected instrumental moment signaling a dramatic transition, from dreamtime back to spoken dialogue and arrhythmic, naturalistic action. The hills and fields of Indian Territory (as Oklahoma was called until statehood in 1907), journeys through tunnels and flames, the vernal landscape of Central Park, where hippies did indeed roam in the 1960s, and horses with free-flowing manes and tails, conveying peaceful power, superior mobility, and innate grace—all these elements add widely shared visual tropes to what was a fiercely modernist, unadorned, yet still self-consciously ritualistic staging. The tight, transparent accompaniments add rhythmic intensity, and the closely miked singer embellishes the melody expertly with intense melismas and vocal colour changes drawn from the gospel tradition. It is no ­exaggeration to observe that this musical setting of ‘Aquarius’ is more true to New York’s multicultural mosaic and more subtle in its uses of syncopation than the mainstream rock arrangements prevalent in most of the stage show’s numbers as performed and

forman’s film version of hair   171 recorded in the late 1960s.89 In addition to MacDermot, the well-chosen session players who worked on the film surely deserve some credit for this groove-filled overture and other felicities in the score. Unfortunately, they are not listed in the film’s credits. Ragni and Rado specified ‘There is no overture,’ in the 1968 Broadway script for their stage child. The film’s opening sequence creates something very like an overture, but also, as Rich noted, moves the plot forward. It provides backstory for Claude along with a ‘stylistic plan and emotional tone.’ In a very few minutes, we meet the six principals, enter the park’s alluring landscape, set up the attraction Claude feels for Sheila that leads to much of the action in the film, and introduce visual motifs that will return in time. Note an analogy here to musical motifs, which recur in much film music as narrative, developmental elements within an extended composition. MacDermot’s new music for this expanded opening consists largely of beautifully crafted, propulsively danceable rhythmic grooves; his melodies often are chant-like or scalar declamations that eschew sudden dramatic leaps, long lines, and consequent variations in tempo that might impede the ensemble’s danceable forward motion. The sequence is a unique approach to the most difficult moment in any stage or film musical, ‘that moment where song takes over from speech.’90

‘Easy to Be Hard’ What was once just a subsidiary song, articulating a subplot, becomes a memorable musical and dramatic turning point in the film. In the stage show, this song is sung by Sheila after an argument with Berger. Sheila returns from a trip, but the reunion turns angry and Berger rips up the shirt Sheila has brought him as a gift and stalks out. Weller and Forman’s inventions turn even more radical here: ‘Easy to Be Hard’ is now sung by Dionne, a new character who doesn’t exist in the stage musical. Autumn has passed, and on a snowy winter day the four hippies are now in Greenwich Village, in Washington Square Park. Sheila shares a letter from Claude with the gang. Berger impulsively declares that they must travel to Nevada to visit Claude in basic training, before he’s shipped overseas. Suddenly a new voice calls out to Hud, addressing him as Lafayette. This turns out to be Hud’s given name. A virtually unknown singer named Cheryl Barnes plays Hud’s estranged fiancée, Dionne.91 Accompanied by their son Lafayette Jr, just old enough to be walking on his own, she confronts Hud and asks him where he’s been and who he’s with. She and the child are dressed conservatively—they are from a different world. Hud wants them to go right back. Dionne refuses to leave. Hud strides angrily away. Berger runs after him to mediate. Close-ups of Dionne gazing longingly at Hud and his little tribe alternate with shots from her point of view via a long telephoto lens, creating a suspenseful visual counterpoint. Another close-up reveals a tear in the eye of Hud’s son, invoking the toddler’s universal dilemma of suffering when parents fight. This potentially corny shot is kept

172   musical theatre screen adaptations just brief enough to be touching, and it is intercut with the opening bars of the song, which soon demands our full attention: a circular piano riff outlining a ii-V progression. Once again, we are in the grip of MacDermot’s rhythmic feel—the pauses in the keyboard’s riff are suspenseful, plangent. Dionne keeps her eyes on her Lafayette (i.e., Hud) in the distance, but we see, in close-up, her face, set like a mask into an expression of patient suffering. Medium, then long shots of the four young Caucasian hippies, grandly and variously attired in furs, embroidery, leather and colourful scarf, frozen at first in a kind of sympathetic horror, dramatize their initial role as spectators to a family drama between two African American contemporaries, who suddenly reveal previously unknown aspects of Hud’s past. Sheila has let her hair down, while Jeannie, now visibly pregnant, has adopted Sheila’s signature bun, but in a loosened louche style of her own. Hud’s natural hair, feather earrings, and dark duster coat contrast sharply with Dionne’s disciplined, pulled-back ponytail and light grey winter coat trimmed with sensible faux fur. Berger goes after Hud when he starts to stride angrily, despairingly away. We watch them negotiate, seemingly reconcile, then break away again, all from a great distance, foreshortened by the long lens. Just as in the opening scene added before ‘Aquarius,’ a dynamic montage sets up one of the show’s familiar songs as something quite fresh and new—something approaching a well-crafted operatic scena in emotional depth, social and narrative resonances, and musical virtuosity. To address the last aspect first, the gospel tradition as employed by Barnes lends intensity and vibrancy to her riveting performance, to which judicious reverberation is added. MacDermot’s song uses descending, then rising stepwise motion, then establishes and punctures a ‘pitch ceiling,’ rising from a high C to a slightly higher, repeated D, a common rhetorical/melodic method for creating musical and dramatic excitation in many genres, including operatic and gospel traditions.92 Barnes makes the most of this rhetorical structure. She fuses precise diction, relaxed in execution, seamlessly with powerfully expressive gospel-tinged timbral inflections and ornamental melismas. She transforms MacDermot’s short phrases into a series of rising, impassioned critiques of hypocrites and pleas for understanding. As in the opening scene, the rhythm section (drums, electric bass, and keyboards) generates forward motion just by displacing then emphasizing downbeats expertly. Here as elsewhere, horn sections are added judiciously, sparingly, augmented only occasionally, with synthesized string timbres. A polyrhythmic keyboard riff adds an avant-garde touch to the arrangement. The music is beautifully recorded in a multitrack studio without much added reverberation or other intrusive sonic sweetening. Saxophone obbligatos and trumpet stabs are added at a sonic distance. As in an opera, we are in our own dream time—drawing out our own meanings, caught up in the potential tragedy of a broken family enacted onscreen, so abruptly and surprisingly, in the midst of a winter walk and plans for tribal travel and joyful reunion. We may, variously, reflect on the cursed legacy of slavery in the Americas; think about the vexed complexities of racial identity, social class, and gender dynamics; review our own family tragedies; or simply listen to the music. Those in the audience may question

forman’s film version of hair   173 their own commitments to social action versus letting things—such as poverty and ­broken families—continue as they are. This is, of course, what the song is about—but Forman and Weller’s additions and fortuitous casting have deepened and intensified the song’s message by adding in divisions and expectations around race and marital conventions, and a child who needs his father. They have raised the stakes. Within the new script the song takes on several additional dramatic functions: introducing a new character, exploring a big idea—conflicts between freedom and responsibility, and leaving us wondering what will happen next.

Conclusions Forman’s artistic stretches, from satirical comedies to tragedies like Cuckoo’s Nest and Ragtime, and even his later projects drawing on biographies like The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man in the Moon, all come to mind during a twenty-first-century viewing of this version of ‘Easy to Be Hard.’ We don’t know what will happen after this scene—the plot has taken a totally unpredictable turn. Earlier in his career, Forman might have gone on to explore more family dynamics and left the ending of the film open, as he did as late as Taking Off. But by this time, he had learned his Hollywood lessons well. ‘Europe is somehow more used to this kind of so-called open ending. It’s very disturbing for the American audience.’93 A solution that might have been drawn from an eighteenthcentury opera buffa brings us back to earth. Hud’s fiancée Dionne and son end up joining the group and also journey to Nevada—in Sheila’s parents’ Lincoln convertible. Along the road westward, retracing Claude’s opening bus trip, ‘Good Morning Starshine’ becomes a hymn to motion and the open road, in another vivid, beautifully photographed montage set in magnificent western American scenery. We are back in the free-floating world of the American musical at its best, with a dash of eternal road movie on top, and are doubly grateful for the very existence of these genres, after the glimpse of real lives full of struggle and suffering afforded by the cinematic transformation of ‘Easy to Be Hard’ into an aria for a beset young mother of colour in modern America. Not all of Forman and Weller’s recalculations are so successful. Some songs—for example, just in the first half hour of the film, ‘Sodomy,’ ‘Donna,’ ‘Colored Spade,’ and ‘Manchester’—are larded into the film on fairly flimsy pretexts. While choreographer Twyla Tharp and her dance company make spectacular contributions, they ennoble and enrich but do not always advance or illuminate the story, even in the reimagined secondact drug dream ballet, in which Tharp sings and acts, floating through the air as the god-like officiant at Claude and Sheila’s imaginary wedding. At 121 minutes, the film as a whole may seem overly long, partaking still of the stage show’s dramatic faults: too many songs with minimal justification; too many loosely connected events; too little dramatic conflict, underdeveloped characters; too little raising of the stakes to make either moving drama or madcap comedy.94 Sheila, who progresses from doubting debutante to able agent, is the character who grows and

174   musical theatre screen adaptations changes the most. Rich’s generous comparison to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream points up the unities of time and space at the heart of the film during the scenes in Central Park. The opening travelogue and the extended closing scenes after ‘Easy to Be Hard’ (which occurs around eighty minutes in) can come across as brilliant digressions. Whether it was bad timing, departures from the original, or other factors, Forman’s version of Hair has lived on in home video formats but has not joined One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, or his esteemed early Czech films on his short list of critical and commercial successes. Rich noted that the film sharpened and deepened the themes that made Hair so ­notorious in its own time: free love; confrontational interrogations of racial, sexual, and gender identities; political ferment; and opposition to institutions and social conventions. In this sense, Forman’s free adaptation stays faithful, not just to the spirit of the musical’s times, but to the stage show’s ‘hidden’ possibilities.95 It is a development rather than a departure, a taking-up rather than a ‘taking off,’ and a creative, critical, clear-eyed rereading. But the attractive cast, the lush settings, the gorgeous cinematography, and the coherent, Hollywood-style, seamless narrative stand in opposition to the stage show’s in-your-face appeals to political and social changes via ideologically charged confrontations, elements that can, indeed, foster some nostalgic longing for the idealisms of the 1960s. Love it or hate it, Forman’s Hair makes one think as it preserves the dated original in technicolor amber within its novel and overall workable and convincing cinematic narrative. If this period stage piece is to have a future, it will depend, similarly, on the kindness of strangers: new generations of creative folk as gifted as Tharp, MacDermot, Weller, Forman, and their collaborators and cast, who are willing to try new approaches to making this enduring song cycle an engrossing show.

Notes 1. Profound thanks to Geoffrey H. Block for the observations in the last two sentences of my opening paragraph, and many other material contributions to this chapter as it progressed, including the loan of archival materials from his collection. Thanks also to Dominic McHugh, Sarah Browne, Hannah Robbins, Alex Gootter, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable suggestions. 2. According to Forman, in Robert  J.  Emery, writer, director, and producer, The Directors: Miloš Forman, DVD, Winstar TV & Video, 2000 [1999]. 3. Miloš Forman, Turnaround: A Memoir, Jan Novak, coauthor (New York: Villard/ Random House, 1993), 231–232. Although Forman didn’t wish to receive writing credit, he clearly collaborated on creating and revising the scripts by both these scenarists. 4. Todd McCarthy, ‘Miloš Forman Lets Down His Hair,’ Film Comment, March–April 1979, 21. 5. After closing at the Public Theater, this production was moved ‘lock, stock, and barrel’ to a midtown discothèque, the Cheetah, at 45th and Broadway, for an unsuccessful run of just forty-five performances in December 1967 and January 1968. See Barbara Lee Horn, The Age of Hair: Evolution and Impact of Broadway’s First Rock Musical (New York: Greenwood, 1991), 37–39.

forman’s film version of hair   175 6. Thomas J. Slater, Milos Forman: A Bio-Bibliography. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 17. 7. ‘Weller has not only translated the recent past into a creative vision, but he has also mastered the difficult craft of musical screenwriting. His spare, precise dialogue always lets the songs and dances advance the movie’s story and meaning. He has done this job so brilliantly that the Galt MacDermot-James Rado-Gerome Ragni score, though virtually unchanged, carries far more dramatic, satirical and emotional weight than it did on the stage.’ In Frank Rich, ‘A Mid-’60s Night Dream,’ Time, 19 March 1979, 88. 8. More conventional Broadway-style jazz dance, but in an individualistic, ‘60s-era mode, is also employed in several scenes, including ‘Aquarius’ and ‘Manchester.’ 9. Her part is significantly larger than the analogous role in the stage version of Hair. It is played by Jeannie Golden, who also appeared in the brief 1977 Broadway revival of the show as Berger’s mother. 10. The photos illustrating this chapter are still frames from the film. 11. According to Rado, in Wolfgang Held and Pola Rapaport, Let the Sun Shine In, documentary film, DVD, Alive Mind Media, 2008 [2007]. 12. Horn said, ‘What was a genuine revolution onstage devolved into a hackneyed adaptation on the screen.’ Horn, Barbara Lee. The Age of Hair: Evolution and Impact of Broadway's First Rock Musical (New York: Greenwood Pr, 1991), 188. See also James Leve, American Musical Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Leve observed of the Broadway version, ‘The expanded score crowded out much of the original narrative and thereby pushed the show in the direction of a theme-oriented revue’ (347). But of the film, he said ‘Twyla Tharp’s stunning choreography mattered little, as the overall concept was flawed’ (353). LoMonaco writes appreciatively about many aspects of the off-Broadway book. See Barbara LoMonaco, ‘From Archive to Stage, ‘Hair’ Then and Now,’ in Performing Arts Resources, vol. 22, Their Championship Seasons: Acquiring, Processing, and Using Performing Arts Archives, ed. Kevin Winkler (New York: Theatre Library Association, 2001), 69–86; and her earlier article ‘Teetering at the Margins: The Evolution of “Hair,” the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,’ in Theatre Symposium, vol. 8, Theatre at the Margins: The Political, the Popular, the Personal, the Profane, ed. John W Frick (Tuscaloosa: Southeastern Theatre Conference, University of Alabama Press, 2000), 95–104. 13. Horn, The Age of Hair, 114. 14. Horn, The Age of Hair, 118. 15. Rado, in his preface to a recent reissue of piano/vocal arrangements of the songs, calls the revisions ‘very faithful to the basic structure’ but ‘more theatrical, immediate, and meaningful for an audience one decade into the 21st Century.’ See ‘Note from the Composers,’ in Vocal Selections from Hair, ed. MacDermot et al. (New York: Alfred Music, 2009), 8. 16. The original Broadway cast recording reigned for thirteen weeks in 1969 at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart. See Keith Caulfield, ‘“Hamilton” Cast Album Races to No. 3 on Billboard 200 Chart after Tony Awards,’ Billboard, 19 June 2016 (online resource at ). 17. For a trenchant critique of portrayals of race in the show, see Hilton Als, ‘Not So Free Love,’ New Yorker, 13 April 2009, 82–83. 18. Michael Earley, interview with Michael Weller, 47–53, in ‘Playwrights Making Movies: Steve Tesich, Wallace Shawn, David Mamet, John Guare, Michael Weller,’ Performing Arts Journal 5, no. 3 (1981): 20–53; 48. 19. McCarthy, ‘Miloš Forman Lets Down His Hair,’18, quoted in Horn, The Age of Hair, 115.

176   musical theatre screen adaptations ̌ 20. See interview included on Miloš Forman (director), Cerny̓ Petr [Black sheep (aka Black Peter)] (1964); DVD of feature film, and an interview with Forman originally broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s series ‘Overseas Film Makers.’ Facets Video, 2004 [1964]. 21. It might be more accurate to describe Mozart’s character in Amadeus as worn down by Salieri’s deliberate duplicities and periods of poverty rather than brought down by his occasional flouting of societal and aesthetic norms. 22. James Monaco, How to Read a Film, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 [earlier editions in 1977, 1981, 2000]). With the support of French ‘New Wave’ author/ directors like François Truffaut, Forman first became internationally known as part of the ‘Czech New Wave,’ filmmakers who enjoyed a brief window of expressive freedom between Khrushchev’s loosening of artistic censorship in the early 1960s and the Soviet invasion and subsequent return to artistic and political repression in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1968. 23. David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), 273. 24. One might argue that Berger, in the film, is a strong central protagonist, although still a protagonist motivated by the desires of others within the group. 25. Rado in Talks at Google: ‘Hair’: Broadway at Google. Panel discussion including members of the cast and crew of the Public Theatre’s 2008 revival of Hair: author James Rado, ­director Diane Paulus, and cast members Nicole Lewis, Caren Lyn Manuel, Bryce Rhyness, and Kacie Sheik. Video recorded on 12 August 2008 at Google’s New York office. YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_o7mk4U2do, accessed 15 August 2016. See also Rado’s note in MacDermot, Vocal Selections, 8–9. 26. These included a London West End production, Isabel’s a Jezebel (1970), with book and lyrics by William Dumaresq; another musical at the Public Theater, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971) with a book by John Guare and Mel Shapiro and lyrics by Guare; and two short-running Broadway shows, Dude (October 1972), with book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni of Hair, and Via Galactica (November–December 1972), with a book by Christopher Gore and Judith Ross and lyrics by Gore. 27. The sound technology behind Hair was state of the art, including proprietary noise reduction equipment and multitrack location recording using wireless mikes. Multitrack magnetic recording had already spread to many audio studios by the mid-1970s, of course, but Hair featured a final mix-down to six optical sound channels printed out on double-wide 70mm prints distributed to the roughly 700 American movie theatres then equipped with multiple (not just two stereo) speakers. Hair was one of the first films shot using the then new but now standard technology, which allows for illusions of space as well as improved sound quality. See Charles Schreger, ‘The Second Coming of Sound,’ Film Comment, September–October 1978, 34–37. 28. ‘Hippie Life’ was finally recorded at a benefit concert performance of the score featuring many celebrity performers. See Galt MacDermot, Hair: The Actors’ Fund of America Benefit Recording, Seth Rudetsky, conductor, Ghostlight/Sh-K-Boom Records, 2005. ‘Hippie Life’ is sung by Eden Espinosa, Harris Doran, and chorus. Recorded in a studio on 1 October 2004; based on a benefit performance at the New Amsterdam Theatre on 20 September 2004. 29. Galt MacDermot et al., Hair: Original Soundtrack Recording Special [20th] Anniversary Edition, CD, BMG/RCA, 1999. See the discussion in the liner notes by Joseph F. Laredo.

forman’s film version of hair   177 See also Miloš Forman, Turnaround: A Memoir, Jan Novak, coauthor (New York: Villard/ Random House, 1993), 238–242. 30. Emery, writer, director, and producer, The Directors. 31. Time magazine, ‘Hairzapoppin’,’ no author credited, 12 December 1969, 78. 32. Recording Industry Association of America [RIAA], ‘Gold & Platinum.’ Website with searchable database, https://www.riaa.com/gold-platinum/?tab_active=default-award& ar=&ti=hair&lab=&genre=&format=&date_option=release&from=&to=&award=&type= &category=&adv=SEARCH#search_section, accessed 31 January 2017. The 1979 soundtrack album included new versions of ‘Frank Mills’ and ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man,’ but those songs did not appear in the final film. The 1999 rerelease of the movie soundtrack on CD (noted previously) includes two additional tracks: the instrumental ‘Party Music’ and the song ‘My Conviction.’ 33. The off-Broadway album was rereleased on CD on MacDermot, Hair: Broadway Deluxe Collector’s Edition, 2 CDs, RCA, 2003. This is a compilation of both the off-Broadway and Broadway cast albums. The off-Broadway CD includes a previously unreleased instrumental overture (two and a half minutes long) and the previously unreleased songs ‘Red, Blue, and White’ and ‘Sentimental Ending.’ The Broadway CD includes the previously unreleased songs ‘I Believe in Love,’ ‘Going Down,’ ‘Electric Blues,’ ‘Manchester England’ (reprise),’ ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man/Walking in Space’ (reprise)’, and ‘The Bed.’ 34. DisinHAIRited, CD, RCA, 2009 [1970]. The cut songs on this recording not available elsewhere are ‘1000 Year-Old Man,’ ‘So Sing the Children on the Avenue,’ ‘Manhattan Beggar,’ ‘Sheila Franklin/Reading the Writing,’ ‘Washing the World,’ ‘Hello There,’ ‘Mr Berger,’ ‘I’m Hung,’ ‘Climax,’ ‘I Dig,’ ‘You Are Standing on My Bed,’ ‘The Bed,’ ‘Mess’o’Dirt,’ ‘Oh Great God of Power,’ and ‘Eyes Look Your Last.’ Rearranged songs on this recording are ‘Exanaplanetooch,’ ‘Electric Blues,’ ‘Going Down,’ ‘Dead End,’ and ‘Sentimental Ending.’ See the 1999 liner notes by Nat Shapiro cited in n. 29. Divine Hair/Mass in F, CD, Sony, 2011 [1971], documents a service with music at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York City on 9 May 1971. Songs included are ‘Aquarius,’ ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man,’ ‘Hair,’ ‘3-5-0-0,’ ‘Where Do I Go?,’ ‘1000 Year-Old Man,’ and ‘The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine.’ 35. Leve, who has compared Ragni and Rado’s original script with materials from the Public Theater, Cheetah, and Biltmore productions (see table on pages 348–349 of his American Musical Theater) says there were ‘about 21 songs’ in the off-Broadway production (348); Laredo, in the liner notes accompanying MacDermot, Vocal Selections from Hair, says 20. Both versions changed shape during rehearsals and even during their runs. See Horn, The Age of Hair. Counts may also differ, depending on how one parses short songs sung attacca. This factor accounts for some discrepancies between the off-Broadway, Broadway, and film song titles in published and manuscript sources as well. 36. The 1979 soundtrack album included new versions of ‘Frank Mills’ and ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man,’ but those songs did not appear in the final film. The 1999 rerelease of the movie soundtrack on CD (noted previously) includes two additional tracks: the instrumental ‘Party Music’ and the song ‘My Conviction.’ An off-Broadway cast album was released in 1967, containing twenty songs. The off-Broadway album was rereleased on CD as part of Hair: Broadway Deluxe Collector’s Edition, 2 CDs, RCA, 2003. This is a ­compilation of both the off-Broadway and Broadway cast albums. The off-Broadway CD includes a previously unreleased instrumental overture (two and a half minutes long) and the previously unreleased songs ‘Red, Blue, and White’ and ‘Sentimental Ending.’ The

178   musical theatre screen adaptations Broadway CD includes the previously unreleased songs ‘I Believe in Love,’ ‘Going Down,’ ‘Electric Blues,’ ‘Manchester England’ (reprise), ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man/Walking in Space’ (reprise), and ‘The Bed.’ An album including both cut songs and new arrangements of staged songs (nineteen titles in all), DisinHAIRited, was released in 1970, and a variant reading, Divine Hair/Mass in F, in 1971. The latter, a recording of a sacred service celebrating the third anniversary of the Broadway production, interpolates homilies, organ improvisations, and a four-part mass by MacDermot among seven songs from the stage show. Happily, even these two formerly obscure recordings have recently been rereleased on CDs. See DisinHAIRited, CD, RCA, 2009 [1970]. The cut songs on this recording not available elsewhere are ‘1000 Year-Old Man,’ ‘So Sing the Children on the Avenue,’ ‘Manhattan Beggar,’ ‘Sheila Franklin/Reading the Writing,’ ‘Washing the World,’ ‘Hello There,’ ‘Mr Berger,’ ‘I’m Hung,’ ‘Climax,’ ‘I Dig,’ ‘You Are Standing on My Bed,’ ‘The Bed,’ ‘Mess o’ Dirt,’ ‘Oh Great God of Power,’ and ‘Eyes Look Your Last.’ Rearranged songs on this recording are ‘Exanaplanetooch,’ ‘Electric Blues,’ ‘Going Down,’ ‘Dead End,’ and ‘Sentimental Ending.’ Notes by Nat Shapiro, Divine Hair/Mass in F, CD, Sony, 2011 [1971], documents a service with music at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York City on 9 May 1971. Songs included are ‘Aquarius,’ ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man,’ ‘Hair,’ ‘3-5-0-0,’ ‘Where Do I Go?,’ ‘1000 Year-Old Man,’ and ‘The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine.’ 37. Emery, writer, director, and producer, The Directors. 38. Anna Sokolow, the choreographer, who briefly replaced Freedman as stage director, was fired by producer Joseph Papp. See Horn, The Age of Hair, 32–33. 39. Rado 1966, 61G. However, this passage doesn’t appear in the show’s prompt book, suggesting that it may have been cut before or after previews. See Rado, James & Gerome Ragni. “Hair: the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical.” Book and lyrics. Typescripts, 1966. New York Shakespeare Festival Collection, New York Public Library Archives, *T-MSS 1993-028, box 4-86. Unannotated copy of script, folder 14. Prompt Book, folder 10. 40. LoMonaco, ‘From Archive to Stage,’ 71–75. 41. See (among other early scripts for Hair included in this archive) James Rado and Gerome Ragni, ‘Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,’ book and lyrics, typescript, 1966. New York Shakespeare Festival Collection, New York Public Library [NYPL] of the Performing Arts, *T-MSS 1993–028, box 4–86, folder 14. Although it is actually an amalgam of the off-Broadway and Broadway scripts, for an approximation of the Broadway book, see Rado and Ragni, Hair: the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, book and lyrics. Originally issued in paperback (New York: Pocket Books, 1969), this version of the book was reprinted in Stanley Richards, ed., Great Rock Musicals (New York: Stein & Day, 1979), 379–478. As of this writing, the book for the Broadway version of Hair was available only via theatrical rentals. 42. McCarthy, ‘Miloš Forman Lets Down His Hair,’ 18, 20. 43. Over 58,000 American soldiers died in the Vietnam conflict, as did over a million (possibly as many as 3.5 million) Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian soldiers and civilians. 44. It is sometimes hard to distinguish between short songs sung attacca in Hair; thus, on the soundtrack album, both ‘My Body’ and ‘Walking in Space’ appear under the latter title. The former is not to be confused with the song ‘My Body’ in David Newman, Ira Gasman, and Cy Coleman’s much later musical, The Life (1997). 45. Vincent Canby, ‘HAIR,’ New York Times, 14 March 1979. 46. Rich, ‘A Mid-’60s Night Dream,’ 88. 47. Horn, The Age of Hair, 118.

forman’s film version of hair   179 48. Lee Beaupre, ‘Grosses Gloss: Breaking Away at the Box-Office,’ Film Comment, March– April 1980, 69–73; see p. 72. 49. Forman, The Directors, 230. 50. McCarthy, ‘Miloš Forman Lets Down His Hair,’18; Forman, the Directors, 170. 51. Emery, writer, director, and producer, The Directors. 52. ‘I think theater is sculpture,’ O’Horgan has said; see Lawrence Thelen, The Show Makers: Great Directors of the American Musical Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2000), 163. 53. Anonymous author. Press release in the New York Shakespeare Festival [NYSF] Collection at NYPL, *T-MSS 1993–028, box 279, folder 8. 54. NYPL New York Shakespeare Festival Records, Series II: Play Department Files, 1954–1992, Billy Rose Theatre Division. Box II–79 Cataloguing Code: *T-MSS 1993–028. FOLDER 2  - PLAY DEPARTMENT MACDERMOT GALT ‘HAIR’—Litigation. Correspondence from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wheaton & Garrison concerning $47,554.55 paid to New York Shakespeare Festival by Ragni, Rado, and MacDermot for settlement of a film rights sale issue. Suit includes the detail that the film rights were sold, on 8 December 1972, to Michael Butler, for $1,050,000. 55. Forman, Turnaround, 170. 5 6. Forman, Turnaround, 231. 57. Forman, Turnaround, 179–183. 58. Forman, Turnaround, 169. 59. Forman, Australian Broadcasting Corporation interview. 60. Forman, Australian Broadcasting Corporation interview. 61. Forman, Turnaround, 230. 62. Earley, interview with Michael Weller, 47; Forman, Turnaround, 258. 6 3. Forman, Turnaround, 234. Tharp and Forman worked together on two more films, Ragtime (1980) and Amadeus (1984). 64. Savran, In Their Own Words, 275–276. More recently, he also wrote the book for a stage musical version of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which ran briefly on Broadway in 2011. See Jeremy Gerard, ‘Michael Weller on Miloš Forman, “Hair” & Broadway’s “Dr. Zhivago”: Conversations with Jeremy Gerard.’ Deadline Hollywood (website), http://deadline. com/2014/12/michael-weller-Miloš-forman-doctor-zhivago-1201335934/, accessed 15 August 2016. 65. Gerard, ‘Michael Weller on Miloš Forman.’ 66. Weller, in Susan Gray, Writers on Directors (New York: Watson-Guptil, 1999), 140–143. 67. Forman, Australian Broadcasting Corporation interview. 68. LoMonaco, ‘Teetering at the Margins,’ and ‘From Archive to Stage’; Elizabeth L. Wollman, The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), and Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 69. This scene may also be a very distant echo of the story of the clown Frost and his wife Alma early in Bergman’s 1953 film, Sawdust and Tinsel. 70. Wollman, The Theater Will Rock and Hard Times; Sarah Browne, ‘ “What a Piece of Work Is Man” ’: Negation of the Feminine in the Stage to Screen Adaptation of Hair,’ a paper presented at ‘Restaging the Song’ Conference, Sheffield, UK, 2014; ‘The Tribal Sacrifice: Re-balancing the Role of the Female in Tharp’s Choreography for the Film Musical, “Hair,” ’ a paper presented at Society of Dance Research Conference, St Hilda’s College, Oxford University, UK, 2015; with Sarah Whitfield, ‘From Hair to Hamilton: Who Lives, Who Dies,

180   musical theatre screen adaptations Who Tells Your Story,’ a paper presented at ‘Song, Stage and Screen XI’ Conference, New York City, 2016; and ‘ “Dedicated to the Proposition . . . ”: Raising Cultural Consciousness in the Musical, Hair,’ in Revolutions|Revelations: Rethinking Musical Theatre, ed. S. Whitfield (New York: Palgrave, forthcoming). 7 1. Als, ‘Not So Free Love,’ 82. More recently Als has praised Rado and Ragni’s ‘perfect melding of story and antiwar sentiment with Galt MacDermot’s music, some of which might remind you of Sonic Youth’s controlled disarray.’ Als’s own introduction to the musical was Forman’s film, ‘with all those spectacular dances by Twyla Tharp, and that beautiful clown Annie Golden.’ See Hilton Als, ‘Let the Sunshine In: “Hair” Turns Fifty,’ New Yorker, 23 January 2017, 8. 72. Michael Weller, ‘Hair’ screenplay. Second draft, dated 19 August 1977. In Gerome Ragni Papers, Series II, box 2, folio 5, New York Public Library Archives, see pages 1–6. 73. In the off-Broadway script, Claude sings this song while spending the night with Sheila before he joins the army. See Rado, Hair script, 117. 74. Claude does join in on a few lines of ‘Manchester,’ and sings one song as a solo, ‘Where Do I Go?’ 75. Weller, ‘Hair’ screenplay, second draft, 9. 76. Weller, ‘Hair’ screenplay, second draft, 27–28. 77. Weller, ‘Hair’ screenplay, second draft, 148. 78. Dramatic scenes for these songs are included in Weller’s 1977 screenplay draft. Most of the songs were recorded as well, but not all released on CD until 1999. See the 1999 CD liner notes by Laredo. If ‘Initials’ and ‘Blue White and Red,’ were ever recorded, they have not been released as yet. 79. Weller, ‘Hair’ screenplay, second draft, 89–90. 80. Weller, ‘Hair’ screenplay, second draft, 105–106. 81. Earley, interview with Michael Weller 48. 82. Emery, writer, director, and producer, The Directors. 83. McCarthy, ‘Miloš Forman Lets Down His Hair,’19–20. 84. MacDermot, Vocal Selections from Hair, liner notes. 85. Rich, ‘A Mid-’60s Night Dream,’ 88. 86. Gray, Writers on Directors, 142–143. 87. The singer, with flowers in her natural hair, is Renn (or Ren) Woods, who had recently starred as Dorothy in the national tour of the The Wiz and much later, in 2006, would star on Broadway in Caroline, or Change. 88. Tharp claims this as her invention in her autobiography, but surely she may have had in mind central European Lipizzaner horse ballet, featured in Miracle of the White Stallions (1963) directed by Arthur Hiller. See Tharp, cited in Laredo’s notes to MacDermot, Vocal Selections from Hair. 89. Although the rhythm section on both the off-Broadway and Broadway cast albums— including MacDermot on keyboards—is also very strong, and the performances were often quite strong, by a racially integrated cast, which at the time was a rarity on Broadway as Hilton Als notes in “Not So Free Love,” The New Yorker, Vol. 85, Issue 9 (April 13, 2009), 82. Jimmy Lewis, the bassist off and on Broadway, later claimed that he had authored many bass lines, and there’s no question that memorable bass lines in a funk vein are important elements in many hooks in Hair, as in the opening sequence and the introduction to the finale, ‘The Flesh Failures.’ See Monk Rowe, interview with Jimmy Lewis, 16

forman’s film version of hair   181 November 1995, Hamilton College Jazz Archive, transcript downloaded 27 August 2016 from http://contentdm6.hamilton.edu/cdm/ref/collection/jazz/id/1049, pp. 11–14. 90. Graham Wood, ‘ “Why Do They Start to Sing and Dance All of a Sudden?” Examining the Film Musical,’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 212–230; 212. 91. The character Dionne’s name appears in the film’s credits and the script, but not in the dialogue of the film as completed. 92. See, for example, the discussion of pitch ceilings in the ‘Flower Song’ from Carmen in Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 59. 93. McCarthy, ‘Miloš Forman Lets Down His Hair,’18. 94. The first cut of the film was 2 hours and 40 minutes long. SeeMcCarthy, ‘Miloš Forman Lets Down His Hair,’ 19. 95. ‘Miloš Forman Lets Down His Hair,’ 18, quoted in Horn, The Age of Hair, 115. See Note 8.

CHAPTER 8

‘A n Elega n t L egacy?’ The Aborted Cartoon Adaptation of  Finian’s Rainbow Danielle Birkett

In the mid-1940s, controversy over capitalist domination and racial inequality ­continued to stimulate tension in contemporary American society. In response to the rising unrest, passionate socialist and renowned lyricist ‘Yip’ Harburg resolved to write a new musical to reflect his political opinion; in particular it would attack the white superiority ­campaigns that were spearheaded by Congressman John Rankin and Senator Theodore Bilbo. This intention to use the stage musical as a vehicle to emphasize the merits of a socialist ideology, however, presented difficulties from the outset: Harburg struggled to satisfy the commercial pressures of the genre alongside his political agenda. With the aim of resolving this tension, he reunited with his Bloomer Girl collaborator Fred Saidy and the pair determined to employ satire, whimsy, and ‘Stage Irishness’ to provide an alternative representation of the political idea. After two years spent developing the subject matter, the duo turned to the classically trained composer Burton Lane with the anticipation that his music would bring the show together by enhancing both the commercial and political elements. As Lane crafted a score that combined conventional Broadway tunes with black Gospel music, Harburg and Saidy refined their antagonistic script and assembled a cast and creative team; but the lack of box office names heightened concerns. As the production headed for its Broadway opening in January 1947, it was a serious financial risk. Initially, Finian’s Rainbow received many enthusiastic reviews both out of town and on Broadway. One New York critic was particularly thrilled with the show, writing, ‘Finian’s Rainbow is something about which to rave.’1 Another exclaimed: ‘Hallelujah! Broadway has another hit. A hit worthy to rank with Oklahoma!, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun and other top-notchers of the past few seasons.’2 Opening night comparisons to these prominent and highly successful shows gave Finian’s Rainbow immediate c­ ritical acclaim, anticipating it to be a long-running Broadway hit. However, other reviews were more scathing towards the radical plot: largely, these critics were not attacking the political

184   musical theatre screen adaptations stance but the vehicle through which the social comments were made. One simply stated that the piece was ‘too crowded with realism and fantasy,’ while another suggested that the ‘transitions from fantasy to brutal prejudice land with a thud.’3 Other apprehensions, however, prodded much deeper into the core of the plot: What I found missing was a certain quality of taste and judgement. If some of the political comments were just a little bit less blatant, the plot just a little bit more inventive in its manipulation . . . the tale of the leprechaun’s mission to America would have been even happier.4

Louis Kronenberger agreed that ‘Finian hasn’t enough taste or sensibility or integrity; and  at the level it professes to work on, these deficiencies stick out like sore thumbs.’5 Nonetheless, the production ran for 725 performances on Broadway, surpassing two other noteworthy shows of the year: Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Brigadoon (581 performances) and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Allegro (315 performances). With a prestigious reputation, the creative team approved an immediate West End transfer, and the show was expected to achieve international and screen success. Yet, Finian’s Rainbow received an apathetic reception on the West End in 1948, and although revivals were frequently staged across America and Europe it was not until 1968 that the musical was released as a motion picture. This delay was largely influenced by the ambiguity towards the book and, in particular, its controversial socialist message that could have been perceived to support communism. Furthermore, Harburg had been named on the Hollywood blacklist in 1951, and with the rise of McCarthyism throughout this decade, political repression against communists was on the increase. Concerned that any involvement with Finian’s Rainbow could result in blacklisting, film producers were hesitant to take on the property. As a result, the creative team were forced to explore other options. Early in the 1950s, they made a radical decision: they determined that the work would be more palatable on the screen in the medium of a feature-length cartoon. Until recently, little has been known about this fated animation, but the discovery of additional materials from the production (including a final draft of the extensively revised script, storyboard sketches, the recovered soundtrack recordings, an interview with Faith Hubley, and contemporary newspaper clippings) provides the opportunity to explore three key aspects.6 Firstly, a close comparison between the script of the original Broadway production and the screenplay of the feature-length animation highlights a decisive shift in focus: on the screen the creators were willing to dilute the political agenda to prioritize a more whimsical tone. Secondly, the recovered soundtrack reveals that the musical numbers were extensively reworked to showcase star performers who would drive the commercial appeal. Thirdly, the sources present the opportunity to explore the political and social circumstances that led to the sudden abandonment of the cartoon in 1954. With this new insight into the cartoon, in conclusion, one can reflect on the wider implications that the completion of this animation could have had on the history of transferring stage musicals to the screen.

the cartoon of finian’s rainbow   185

‘Sounds Like a Wonderful Idea’: Recruiting a Prestigious Team The first report of adapting Finian’s Rainbow into a feature animation appeared in the autumn of 1953 in the New York Times: E. Y. Harburg revealed that two “major film companies are discussing movie rights to the property and an independent group is talking about doing it as a featurelength cartoon with Al Capp limning the characters and supervising production.” Mr. Capp let it be known that “ ‘Finian’s Rainbow’ as a feature-length cartoon sounds like a wonderful idea. I’m most interested and excited about it but the whole matter is only in the discussion stage.”7

Financial restrictions had hindered the creative team from recruiting well-known ­figures for the Broadway production, but with more money available for the animation, the writers had greater freedom to hire a prestigious production team. American ­cartoonist Al Capp, best known for the comic strip ‘L’il Abner,’ was first approached to design the storyboard. When this failed to materialize, ex-Disney animation innovator John Hubley was quickly enlisted.8 During the 1950s, Hubley was also a highly respected cartoonist, with fellow animation artist, Earl Klein, describing him as ‘the most talented . . . most creative person I ever knew . . . almost a genius.’9 Working as a background and layout artist, Hubley had joined Disney back in 1935 and had been involved with iconic pictures such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and the ‘Rite of Spring’ sequence in Fantasia (1940).10 Following the workers’ strike at Disney in 1941, however, Hubley left the studio with ambitions to develop a fresh and innovative approach to animation. Initially, he directed films for Screen Gems and the US Army’s First Motion Picture Unit, but in 1944 he joined United Production of America (UPA). After supervising the animation of Academy Award–winning Gerald McBoing Boing (1950), however, Hubley was forced to resign from UPA in 1952 when he refused to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).11 Yet, this defiance led to new work as Harburg and Saidy approached him about the controversial Finian’s Rainbow animation; as early as 1953, Hubley could have commenced the cartoon sketches.12 With a supportive and able artist on board, Harburg and Saidy shifted their attention to the casting, and it was decided that the cartoon musical would require performers with specific attributes. Since the Broadway production, several of the songs from Finian’s Rainbow had become prominent radio hits. By hiring a vocally distinguishable, star-studded cast to perform these already well-known songs in the cartoon, the creative team immediately solved the commercial needs of the show that had presented challenges on Broadway (and elsewhere on the stage). Two figures were retained from the original stage show— Ella Logan (Sharon) and David Wayne (Og), who had both won awards for their Broadway performances—while a host of renowned popular singers and jazz musicians completed

186   musical theatre screen adaptations the remainder of the cast: Frank Sinatra (Woody), Barry Fitzgerald (Finian) and Ella Fitzgerald (Delores Martin). In addition, Louis Armstrong and the Oscar Peterson Trio were called in to enhance the soundtrack.13 Back in 1947, the creative team had advertised the musical primarily on its script and score, but increasingly aware of the mixed reception towards the script, and with some financial liberty, the creators decided to place greater focus on the casting for popular appeal. During 1954, Harburg and Saidy revised the book and preexisting songs to facilitate both this new stellar cast and the animation medium, while Hubley commenced the artwork. By November, the cartoon had made considerable progress: Hubley had created over 400 storyboard sketches, Harburg and Saidy had completed a draft of the screenplay, and ten musical numbers had been recorded.14 From these documents it is clear that both the script and score were dramatically reworked for the new cast. In the Broadway production, Logan had been given top billing as she performed a significant proportion of the musical material, but in the animation greater attention was placed on Sinatra as the star. After rising to fame in the late 1940s, Sinatra was a major figure in both the music and film industry: he was not only creating successful solo albums with Capitol Records but had also filmed From Here to Eternity (1953), Guys and Dolls (1955), and The Tender Trap (1955).15 Sinatra was one of the biggest box office names of the day and, from the outset, the animation team was eager to capitalize on his popular appeal.

‘Bees Are Buzzing, Butterflies Are Flitting Around’: A New Whimsical Prologue Despite the aspirations to create a star vehicle for Sinatra, the cartoon was expected to retain the essence of the plot from the original stage show; however, the different medium and political climate also influenced the rewriting of the script. In particular, the feature-length animation vehicle required a simplified and shortened script that prioritized visual style: this would allow greater opportunity to quicken the action by cutting quickly between scenes, to present intimacy through close-up shots, or to contextualize through long shots. More significantly, the medium also presented opportunities to exploit the fantastical setting. In his influential article on the cartoon, animation expert John Canemaker summarized: ‘The director’s script and surviving story sketches indicate how Hubley used the medium of animation—in which the impossible is made plausible—to wrest the narrative from the confines of live-action and release it into cartoon fantasy.’16 Although the animated style presented the opportunity to commercialize the work by exploiting the fantastical elements of the script, the controversial political subject still required alteration in light of the social context of the 1950s. As fears of blacklisting or communist affiliation became an increasing concern for all involved with the production, more significant alterations were required to reframe the contentious political drive.

the cartoon of finian’s rainbow   187 From the opening moments of the cartoon, Harburg and Saidy’s intention to ­incorporate extensive changes is obvious. On Broadway, the initial scene prioritizes racial injustice: the bigoted white Senator Rawkins descends on Rainbow Valley and unjustly attempts to strip the mixed-race community of their land. Instead of this, the creators decided to construct a new prologue that would refocus the tone of the opening for the cartoon medium. To prioritize the theme of fantasy, the writers resolved to introduce material that the stage show had ignored: the backstory to Finian’s appearing in Rainbow Valley with a crock of gold. The new vehicle supported this alteration as it provided the freedom to jump more frequently between sequences; at the outset, the audience are taken to a forest in Glocca Morra. The scene is constructed around ‘a strange, golden glow emanat[ing] from the vague form of a tree trunk:’ It is a glowing crock of gold. Guarding the crock with a shillelagh over his shoulder is Og the Leprechaun. Suddenly, to sharply accented music, we see a large human hand, Finian’s, set loose a bright yellow and black butterfly, which flies across the screen. It is only visible when its wings are open, revealing a fascinating design. The butterfly blinks, and Og makes a delighted run and leaps onto its back, soaring off into the misty woods. Now the silhouette, carrying a flowered carpet bag, darts across and behind the tree. Suddenly the glow disappears—the figure moves off rapidly as the screen floods into a brighter yellow-green sky.17

This brief sequence is crafted to complement the animation medium while also ­placing attention on the fantastical and soaking the plot in humour. The smorgasbord of colour in the glowing crock, the butterfly, and the sky accentuates the visuals, conveying a new brighter focus that contrasts with the black and white racial emphasis of the Broadway opening. From the beginning of the cartoon, there is a deliberate shift in focus as Harburg and Saidy present a lighter, optimistic picture that highlights the beauty and fun of this animated world and detracts from the darker social and political concerns of the stage show. Subsequently, as the credits roll, the audience watch Finian frantically leave Ireland with the ‘familiar flowered carpet bag’ and his daughter in tow. But back in the woods, chaos now ensues among all the leprechauns of Glocca Morra: There is alarm and hysteria in the air. Bees are buzzing, butterflies are flitting around, flowers are ringing—and out of holes in the ground, emerge all forms of elves, gnomes, leprechauns and banshees. Og flits past on the butterfly going in the ­opposite direction. The music and the chordal effect make a wailing sound reminiscent of a wake.18

Once again the emphasis is on animation, colour, and humour, but the cartoon v­ ehicle also facilitates a host of sprites and bugs to increase the frenzy of the situation. Up until this point the story is presented solely through visuals and music, but now the lack of discourse is suddenly juxtaposed with the leprechauns’ frantic and repeated cry ‘It’s a crisis!’ Believing that the thief has stolen the crock for its ability to grant three wishes, the leprechauns are hysterical about the consequences: if all three wishes are used, the

188   musical theatre screen adaptations gold will turn to dross and the neglectful Og will become mortal forever. To commence the transformation, two socks appear on Og’s feet; there is only one way out of this, and that is to ‘find the magic crock of gold.’19 By using this prologue to reveal plot details that were suspended in the Broadway production, the writers provoke greater excitement and anticipation from the outset; moreover, the sequence also prioritizes the crock of gold to clarify it as the pivotal concept of the book.

‘A New Shiny Pair of Black Jodphurs’: Satirizing the Racial Message One of the more straightforward changes to the script was the renaming of Senator Rawkins as Judge Rawkins, reducing the political affiliation. Yet the Judge’s actions remain highly controversial, particularly when gold is discovered on the land belonging to the Rainbow Valley community. The Judge determines to reclaim the ground at any cost and draws up a new writ of evacuation: as the dwellings on the land ‘ain’t in keeping with the adjoining neighbourhood,’ all the residents are ordered to leave.20 Although this follows the trajectory of the original Broadway script, the action then proceeds with a different emphasis. As Sharon defends her coloured friends, she exclaims: ‘I wish he [Judge Rawkins] were in your [sharecroppers] shoes.’21 Hearing Sharon’s cry, Finian remembers that the crock is nearby and that his daughter could have an unexpected and paramount effect. Nervously he sits on the treasure in an attempt to stop the reaction. Nevertheless, ‘there is a strange crash and flash effect—Buzz and Sharon look around, awed—Finian’s pants are burned— the writ is burned and the sharecropper has a new shiny pair of black jodhpurs.’22 Unlike in the stage show, the judge is absent from this scene and thus the full impact of the wish is not immediately obvious; but the Sharecropper’s new shoes indicate that something unusual has occurred. As the cartoon swiftly cuts to Rawkins’s study, the complete effects are confirmed and, once again, as the camera zooms in the emphasis is placed on his shoes: The magical effect of the crock has converted his magnificent black boots into torn and battered work shoes. He gets up, unaware of his changed aspect, and paces to the window. He passes a full-length mirror—is stopped short by what he sees.23

Glimpsing the reflection of the shoes, Rawkins thinks that the new black servant has appeared and shouts: ‘Dang it, you old rascal, let’s not get started on the wrong foot. You can’t come inside dressed like folks on the outside.’24 As Rawkins leans his face directly up to the mirror, he slowly begins to recognize his plight when Buzz bursts into the room rambling frantically about the gold discovery. Stopping suddenly, Buzz points at Rawkins clothes in horror. In a panic, Rawkins tries to explain, ‘I was sittin’ right over here . . . and . . . the place is bewitched!’25 At this point, the room also starts to transform: the judge’s high-backed leather swivel chair changes into a cracker barrel seat and then

the cartoon of finian’s rainbow   189 ‘the tiger-skin he is standing on shrinks down to a skunk skin.’ Suddenly, Buzz realizes what has happened, exclaiming, ‘She did it—that Irish witch changed you!’ In a moment of fright, Rawkins starts to leave, saying: ‘I’m getting’ outta here! I can’t stay here in this condition—besides it’s against the rules of the house.’ And as he gets into the car, it transforms into a mule.26 This climactic scene retains the essence of the original Broadway production, but the filmic setting is distinctively more comedic. By reframing the wish as a colloquial phrase and juxtaposing two scenes to focus on the Sharecroppers and Rawkins separately, the attack appears less calculated and its full impact is delayed. When the consequences are realized, the use of satiric humour further distracts from the political intentions, while Rawkins’s hyperbolic response to run away ridicules society’s racial judgements.27

‘Oh dem Golden Slippers’: Sacrificing Politics to Celebrate Farce and Fantasy After the excitement of the gold discovery, the cartoon script follows a similar plot to the stage show. Woody and Sharon announce their engagement and the wedding is arranged for the following Tuesday; but their joy is short-lived. Buzz and the Sheriff return, looking for the Judge, and accuse Sharon of witchcraft. The couple are left with an ­ultimatum: if the Judge is not returned before Tuesday, the wedding will be cancelled and the pair will be ‘hitched to a sycamore tree.’28 With the audience aware that the crock of gold offers the only salvation, the action jumps back to the forest where Og encounters Judge Rawkins and Susan excitedly digs the treasure out of the ground. These two ­scenarios in the forest are now adapted to keep the audience informed about the location of the gold and, more importantly, exploit the fantastical medium further. In the first situation, Og is sitting in the forest wistfully mourning his mortal transformation when he is interrupted by someone snatching an apple from his hand. In ­frustration he shouts, ‘You needn’t grab . . . there’s plenty of apples around,’ and more fruit suddenly materializes out of thin air. This immediately provides the writers with an opportunity to prioritize the enchanted setting again. Intrigued by the leprechaun’s powers, Rawkins emerges and asks if he can do any other tricks—like ‘change m’looks?’ Og cannot understand why the judge would want to alter his appearance until Rawkins reveals that a witch has distorted him. As Og looks for the culprit in ‘Which Is Witch,’ a close-up shot reveals his own name falling down the list of sorcerers as he becomes increasingly mortal. No spell seems to work on the Senator, and Og realizes, ‘That witch changed your outside when she should have changed your inside.’ Og resolves to cast a spell to alter the judge’s personality, but Rawkins is unconvinced and begins to walk away. Suddenly, he stops and his reformation is confirmed as he turns back singing ‘Oh dem Golden Slippers.’29 As in the stage production, the Judge’s inward change is outwardly expressed as he is

190   musical theatre screen adaptations given the ability to sing. By incorporating a silly rendition of the minstrel song, the writers humorously pick up on the words of Sharon’s wish; however, the spiritual also provokes moral reflection on the sacrifice of worldly possessions in light of a better future. Meanwhile, for Woody and Sharon the situation takes a turn for the worse as they are handcuffed at their wedding and thrown in jail. It is up to Finian to save them, by returning the Judge before the crack of dawn. Again, as Finian goes to retrieve the crock, the action cuts back to the enchanted forest. Quickly discovering that the crock has been moved, Finian panics and begins to dig random holes; at the same time ‘a little band of leprechauns and their chief ’ also search for the crock. Coming to a clearing, the leprechauns stop short as ‘they see Susan dancing with the gold and duck into a hollow log to hide.’30 Suddenly, Og calls from off-screen, and anxious to hide the crock, Susan shoves it into the same log and sits down on top of it. Og appears, now tall and skinny, but his transformation has also stimulated a new ‘frenzy’ for girls. Approaching Susan he asks, ‘Is this what it is like to be mortal? Is every girl the only girl?’31 Confirming that he is ‘beginning to like it’ Og bursts into song. As he delights in ‘When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love, I Love the Girl I’m Near,’ the leprechauns resume their attempt to get the crock out of the log. But it is stuck. Just as the song ends, the gold comes free and the leprechauns start to make for the woods, but they are prevented by the entrance of Finian. In an attempt to hide, they dash back into the log with the crock. This farcical situation not only introduces humour, but as the plot reaches its denouement the location of the crock is revealed to enhance the excitement of the pursuit. Finian assumes that Og has reclaimed the treasure and ominously advances towards him. As the leprechaun ends up on top of the log with Finian holding him by the throat, Og threateningly begins ‘I wish , , ,’ Inside the log, the crock throbs and radiates, forcing the leprechauns to sit on it in a frantic attempt to stop the inevitable. Just before another wish is gone, an off-stage voice shouts, ‘They’re tyin’ Sharon to a tree’ and Finian rushes off crying, ‘You gotta help me save Sharon.’32 In desperation Og asks Susan if she has seen the crock, but despite his best efforts to communicate through dance it is no use: ‘Oh Susan . . .  I love you, but I wish you could talk.’ A sudden glow from the log indicates that the wish has been granted and Susan affirms ‘I love you!’33 So excited by this declaration, Og fails to recognize that as his wish has come true the crock must be nearby. Suddenly he realizes and begins to search. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the leprechauns rushing into the woods with the gold. A frantic chase follows as the leprechauns hurl obstacles in Og’s path. Just as they are about to lower the treasure into a well, Og snatches the crock and begins to use the ultimate wish. The head leprechaun quickly reminds that with this final wish Og will ‘turn completely mortal,’ but as Susan kisses him, Og realizes that ‘fairyland was never like this!’ Using the wish, Og requests that the judge is returned to his previous state; as he does so, there is a loud clap of thunder and a flash of lightning— ‘The crack of dawn!’34 Although the plot reaches the same conclusion, this final sequence is transformed in the animation to focus more explicitly on the fantastical. By incorporating the leprechauns, who add a further complication to the resolution, Og becomes the hero. His frantic pursuit creates exhilaration and anticipation, while also propelling the humour of the piece. The cartoon ultimately runs full circle, finishing with the focus on the crock of gold rather

the cartoon of finian’s rainbow   191 than on the transformation of the Senator or Woody and Sharon’s release. Attention is diverted from resolving the consequences of discrimination and placed on the more humorous tale of Og and his fellow leprechauns, book-ending the piece with whimsy.

Reworking the Details: Balancing the Political and Commercial Tension Aside from these three pinnacle sequences, many smaller alterations were made to the script. Exploiting the film medium, the creative team were able to draw greater visual distinctions between the white officials and the multiracial Rainbow Valley community. For example, as this mixed community are evicted from their land, the animation cuts to Rawkins’s elaborate residence. A ‘Colonial estate. . . . [I]t is resplendent luxury of the year 1870—spiral staircase, portraits, velour,’ but even more shockingly, a new black servant is being ridiculed as he learns how to serve a drink to the Judge.35 By incorporating the servant, the writers not only retain one of the most controversial elements of the Broadway script, but they also hyperbolize the American social gap. The audience are now presented with a visual representation of the different social classes, and in this way the animation seems to make a stronger political point than the Broadway production. The satiric juxtaposition of these two settings prioritizes the theme of discrimination, evoking greater empathy towards the Rainbow Valley community and giving the writers greater flexibility to question the acceptance of racial prejudice within society. Aside from editing the footage to highlight the divide between races, filmic devices were also employed to increase the humour surrounding the fantastical notions in the plot. Particular fun was had with the crock, which becomes volatile every time the word ‘wish’ is mentioned and increases both the tension and the audience’s awareness. For example, as Og grows ever more mortal, the creators stimulate humour by experimenting with his change in physical appearance. One alteration occurs just after Finian has finished burying the crock, when Og furiously catches up with the thief: Og sticks his head out of the well, sees Finian and dematerialises, leaving only the pair of argyle socks. The socks jump out of the well, stock Finian, chase him and finally corner him against the old hollow log.36

Exploiting the advantages of animation, the creative team humorously visualize Og’s transformation as he becomes increasingly mortal in appearance and gradually loses his magical leprechaun powers. Canemaker notes: As Og gradually becomes mortal throughout the film, eventually experiencing love for two human women, he expresses this new ‘glowish, kind of perculiarish sensation’ by appearing and disappearing whole and in part throughout the film, and in one

192   musical theatre screen adaptations charming sequence, by performing a ballet-like dance with an a­ nthropomorphic wash from a clothesline.37

In another incident, a pair of socks seems to approach Finian when Og suddenly rematerializes from them. To show off further, Og produces a mushroom contour chair to sit in whilst speaking with Finian; unfortunately, however, his magic is fading fast and the seat is too hard for comfort. Enraged, Og accuses Finian of stealing the crock and consequently taking away his supernatural powers. Resolving to track the Irishman until the crock is returned, Og taunts him by magically appearing at several places along his route home. This semi-abstract depiction of the leprechaun, which blend caricatured humans with conceptual figures further blurs the distinction between the real and the fantastic (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2).38 Throughout the animation, the writers carefully construct the narrative and its visual representation to push the setting further from the realistic: more of the action takes place in the enchanted forest (framed by a new prologue); new fantastical characters are

Figure 8.1  Character drawing of Sharon created for the animation (images courtesy of The Hubley Studio, Inc.)

the cartoon of finian’s rainbow   193

Figure 8.2  Character drawing of Finian created for the animation (image courtesy of the Hubley Studio, Inc.)

introduced and take on a more significant role (such as the introduction of a band of leprechauns, fairies, and sprites that heightens the pursuit of the crock); and the magical repercussions of the wish are elaborated and satirized further. All of these alterations are facilitated by the new medium, but the animated style also enhances the whimsical setting and characters; thus, with the action taking place in an overtly fantastical world the script is further removed from reality and the politics of contemporary society. By drawing a greater divide between reality and make-believe, the writers moved forward to resolve some of the political tensions presented by the narrative.

‘Frank was fine and highly cooperative’: Adapting the Score for a Star Alongside adapting the script, the writers also revised the musical numbers to enhance the property’s commercial appeal. With only two members of the cast returning from the original Broadway production, vocal arranger Lyn Murray collaborated closely with

194   musical theatre screen adaptations the performers to rework the arrangements. Providing Harburg with a progress update, he summarized: Things are going. We saw Frank [Sinatra] and Ella [Fitzgerald] in Vegas Saturday, got the routines and keys set and the schedule arranged. Frank was fine and highly cooperative. We need two short hunks of new lyrics.39

This note highlights that changes were made to the musical numbers to accommodate two new stars. Not only were the songs musically adapted to suit different vocal ranges and styles, but they were also shifted within the plot (explaining Murray’s request for new lyrics). Nevertheless, despite an all-round stellar cast, out of the ten musical numbers recorded for the cartoon, strikingly, Sinatra features in nine of the existing recordings.40 Facilitating him was not a straightforward task, but at the apex of his career, he was a key figure to have on board and these recordings demonstrate that the creative team made widespread changes to the musical numbers to feature Woody. ‘If This Isn’t Love,’ a song that originally appeared much later in the plot as a showcase for Michael Kidd’s choreography, became Sinatra’s opening number in the cartoon; the romantic duet ‘Old Devil Moon’ was adapted for Sinatra’s swing style and expanded into an eight-minute song; the chorus number ‘That Great Come-and-Get-It Day’ was also transformed into a solo number for Sinatra; and even ‘Necessity,’ which had been conceived to express the struggles of the black women in the Rainbow Valley community, now featured Sinatra (along with Ella Fitzgerald and the Peterson Trio).41 Adapting the musical for Sinatra was not a straightforward task as it diluted the writers’ political and social agenda, but by making the cartoon into a star vehicle they hoped to exploit his popularity for their own commercial gain.

‘If This Isn’t Love’: Selling Out to Showcase Sinatra In the original Broadway production, ‘If This Isn’t Love’ appears in the middle of act 1, exhibiting Michael Kidd’s choreography as Woody’s mute sister Susan dances to convey her excitement at the news of her brother’s wedding. During the years following the production, however, the song became a radio success, recorded by artists including Gracie Fields (1947), Rosemary Clooney (1951), and Bing Crosby (1953). To exploit the popularity of the number, the creative team resolved to feature the song earlier in the animation and employ it to showcase Sinatra from the outset. Consequently, the number is performed as Woody and Sharon meet in Rainbow Valley, but as it is the lovers’ first introduction, the lyrics now seem excessively hyperbolic:

the cartoon of finian’s rainbow   195 If this isn’t love, The whole world is crazy. If this isn’t love, I’m daft as a daisy. With moons all around, And cows jumping over, There’s something amiss, And I’ll eat my hat, If this isn’t love.42

The negative lyric (‘If this isn’t love’) is followed by extravagant consequences to ­ironically expose the foolish and irrational attitudes that people supposedly experience when in love. With the new setting ridiculing the lyrics further, the creative team incorporated animation set in a school playground where ‘kids pantomime the song in ballet.’43 Complementing the sing-song style of the number and evoking the idea of children chanting about love in the school playground, the focus of the song now teases the young sweethearts rather than celebrating love. This visual sequence showcases choreography and animation, while also prioritizing Sinatra’s distinctive vocals from the outset of the film. As Sharon and Woody’s relationship intensifies, the second love song, ‘Old Devil Moon,’ depicts a sense of romantic entrapment. Again, the song was a commercial hit particularly popularized by Miles Davis (1954) and Sarah Vaughan (1954), but the m ­ agical intro­ erformance style. verted quality of the number undoubtedly suited Sinatra’s crooning p Starring in the new animation provided Sinatra with the opportunity to cover the song, with the ambition of achieving another successful record. Originally, the number was conceived as a duet between Sharon and Woody, but in the cartoon version it is another feature song for Sinatra, with Logan given only twenty-three bars in an almost eightminute song; furthermore, the reprise, after Sharon is accused of witchcraft, is delivered solely by Sinatra. This version of the song was unmistakably moulded around him and liberally adapted to complement his unique performance style. David Finck summarizes Sinatra’s prowess: He maintained a strong musical connection with his accompaniment. Sinatra’s ability to maintain this relationship so consistently is one of the skills that sets him apart dramatically from just about every other singer of his genre. Attack, delay, diction, phrasing, and vibrato are among the tools he used to fuse with his musical surroundings. However, it was undoubtedly his sense of rhythm that proved to be his most powerful tool.44

By introducing a denser big-band orchestration, the anxious nature of the verse was relaxed to create a broader sound. This orchestration also facilitated a lazy swing style, giving Sinatra the flexibility to experiment with a blues rhythm and tonality: consequently, the number was adapted to suit Sinatra’s distinctive style. With no dialogue noted in the

196   musical theatre screen adaptations script, and only an ‘abstract sequence’ as ‘boy and Girl symbols danc[e] with the moon’ forming the animation, the sequence focuses intensely on the musical material.45 Another number that was comprehensively reworked was the communal song ‘That Great Come-and-Get-It Day.’ In the Broadway production, the chorus number ­epitomized Harburg’s worldview: the lyrics satirized America’s folly in worshipping a god of capitalism and instead suggested that people’s relationships with one another offered greater value than gold or religion. This celebration of brotherhood as utopia is diminished in the animated version. Although it is not clear where this number was intended to be placed, the recording reveals that the song was perhaps reconceived as another solo number for Sinatra. With the omission of the ensemble the socialist message is already diluted, but furthermore, the character of the number is transformed to suit Sinatra. The song now incorporates new jazz influences: the full big-band accompaniment creates a brash and confident tone, while Sinatra’s vocal line experiments with syncopation to evoke a greater sense of freedom. Overall, the song drives towards the title line, suggesting that the emphasis is now on an ultimate day of reconciliation. Canemaker describes this new version as ‘particularly exhilarating,’ but again these commercial alterations are incorporated at the expense of one of the most effective presentations of Harburg’s philosophy.46 Aside from these three numbers that were originally written to include the character of Woody (albeit not always as the soloist), other songs were also altered significantly to incorporate Sinatra at the expense of the storyline. One particularly awkward adaptation was ‘Necessity,’ which had been conceived to express the struggles of the women in the Rainbow Valley community before the gold discovery. Three versions of this song were recorded and, again, they all feature Sinatra: one is a solo song, the other is a duet with Ella Fitzgerald, and the final recording is a scat version of the song. It is most likely that the latter version was intended as a reprise, but the other two recordings accentuate the desire to feature Sinatra at the expense of the writers’ political agenda. As the creative team adapted the number for Woody, a white and relatively advantaged citizen, they were evidently willing to sacrifice their storyline and forfeit considerable social impact for the popular attraction of a star performer. Although each of the recorded versions of ‘Necessity’ made significant changes to the original (the orchestration is once again adapted to suit Sinatra and he is given liberty with the rhythms and melodic line), the duet with Fitzgerald is particularly unusual. It is the only true duet that Sinatra performs. Unlike Logan in ‘Old Devil Moon,’ Fitzgerald is heard as an equal to Sinatra in ‘Necessity’: both singers are given considerable solo ­material, with Fitzgerald commencing the number and the couple singing in harmony at several points. It seems that Sinatra was more open to performing with Fitzgerald, who had not only achieved success as a solo artist but had also recorded prestigious albums with prominent jazz musicians. Furthermore, the accompaniment on this track is significantly pared back to exhibit the vocals: Canemaker notes that “ ‘Necessity” swings lightly with only guitar, bass, and drums for accompaniment.’47 Sinatra also performs with Louis Armstrong in this new soundtrack. The improvisatory number is based on the twelve-bar blues (a version of ‘Ad-Lib Blues’) and was intended to showcase Sinatra and Louis Armstrong’s scat singing.48 Although this style was

the cartoon of finian’s rainbow   197 closely associated with Armstrong, the number is performed with Sinatra taking the lead: he commences and drives the improvisatory song, while Armstrong provides an accompaniment or fills in between Sinatra’s more melodic lines. Once again, it is an unequal performance, with Sinatra dominating the number. It seems that Sinatra was happy to perform alongside Fitzgerald but was determined to out-perform Logan and Armstrong. Ultimately, this not only reveals the influence Sinatra had in the production but also suggests that he made artistic decisions to prioritize his own popular status. Several other numbers were also recorded before the animation shut down, and aside from Logan’s new version of ‘When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich,’ they all feature Sinatra. Logan’s popular numbers ‘Look to the Rainbow’ (albeit intended as a much shorter version, performed during the opening moments) and ‘How Are Things in Glocca Morra?’ were not recorded, but a short reprise of the latter number featuring Sinatra was made. Although this was Sharon’s defining song, the reprise was perhaps intended to conclude the cartoon, and as the star of the show Sinatra was undoubtedly to feature. Similarly, Sinatra also recorded a version of Og’s love song ‘When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love.’ This new version abandons the excited and frantic nature of David Wayne’s performance for a more dreamlike longing for ‘the girl I love.’ With no recordings by Wayne surviving for the animation, it is possible that Sinatra was to perform this number as well, but it is more likely that he simply made the recording for the soundtrack.49 Nevertheless, Sinatra’s influence in the production is ever-present: the creative team were selling out on their original script and were intent on shaping the production around him.

Abandoned Late in Production: Reasons for an Immediate Shut Down Although considerable effort was put into adapting Finian’s Rainbow for the screen, and the production appeared to be making significant progress, by the end of 1954 it had ground to a halt. There are no clear-cut answers as to why the cartoon was abandoned at this late stage, but two contributing factors should be considered: the tense political climate and insufficient funding. Firstly, during the 1950s, the political concerns of the piece had become increasingly controversial in American society. Following the Broadway run, in 1955 the New York City Center Light Opera Company had staged the first major revival of Finian’s Rainbow. Limited alterations were made, but the reception was less enthusiastic than expected and the production ran for only fifteen ­performances. In his review of the production, Lewis Funke of the New York Times concluded: ‘The social significance interlaced to the tale seems more obtrusive than before; perhaps because the humor fails to carry the full punch it once had.’50 Even in the eight years since the Broadway opening, social circumstances had progressed such that the satiric ridicule in the piece was less pertinent, causing the political attack to land more bluntly than before. Although racial equality was at the forefront of American politics, Congressman John

198   musical theatre screen adaptations Rankin continued to resist within the Senate during the 1950s, and frequent acts of racial discrimination in the South remained highly contentious; consequently, the injustice in Finian’s Rainbow was ever more uncomfortable and less suitable for ridicule. Where previously the piece had been a generic plea for a reform in attitudes to racial discrimination, the attack now landed on a specific demographic of society, increasing tension and limiting popular appeal. Perhaps this apathetic reception towards the stage show ­concerned the animation team, raising questions about the future success of the cartoon: this could have caused members of the production team to withdraw from the animation, thus forcing the production to be abandoned. Secondly, a lack of cash could have prevented further work on the animation. On one occasion, Hubley’s wife admitted that the production’s backers had financial problems and suggested they owed considerable money to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She explained, ‘We all went out to lunch one afternoon, and returned to find the door to the studio where we were working padlocked.’51 With the IRS in pursuit of the unnamed financial backers, Faith Hubley suggested that they had the production shut down. Alternatively, the disruption in cash flow could have been a result of John Hubley’s involvement with HUAC. After participating in the workers’ strike and subsequently leaving the Disney studio in 1941, Hubley was under attack from Walt Disney who testified against him (and the other breakaway employees) in 1947. John Canemaker explains in his article ‘The Lost Rainbow’: ‘Walt Disney, who took the strike as a personal attack, found the opportunity to exact revenge on his renegade employees when he testified as a “friendly witness” before HUAC on October 24, 1947. He painted them bright Red.’52 Disney implied that the strike was organized by a communist group, and Hubley was accused of communist involvement. Seven years later, when Hubley was working on the Finian’s Rainbow animation with Harburg, who was also tarred by the blacklist, he was once again requested to appear before HUAC to clear himself. Afraid that he would have to ‘name other names,’ Hubley refused, and financial support was supposedly withdrawn from the animation, forcing it to shut down.53 With the limited sources that still exist it is impossible to know which of the above factors determined the closure of the Finian’s Rainbow cartoon; nevertheless, the production still demonstrates active attempts to reimagine the piece in a new political climate and was a significant steppingstone towards the 1968 film.

A Successful Adaptation? Lingering Problems with Finian’s Rainbow As Haburg and Saidy struggled to transfer Finian’s Rainbow to Hollywood, they were highly aware of the need to prioritize the commercial agenda. The animation demonstrates their resolve to sacrifice the socialist message of their original Broadway script for popular appeal: key scenes were rewritten to satirize the racial tensions, while more material

the cartoon of finian’s rainbow   199 was incorporated to showcase the fantastical theme and exploit the animated medium. Recruiting a star performer also became a priority: the creative team went to great lengths to showcase Sinatra, selling out on their storyline, sacrificing their social agenda, and also, to some degree, loosening their control over the production. Despite making these changes, the animation was still problematic, and, over a decade later, as Warner Bros. commenced their adaptation of the musical, many of these flaws were still apparent. The first noteworthy problem in the cartoon was the lack of involvement from ­composer Burton Lane. Following the Broadway run of Finian’s Rainbow, Harburg and Lane had briefly extended their partnership: in 1950 they had worked on a movie musical based on the Mark Twain novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.54 When Harburg was blacklisted, however, the collaboration came to a sudden end and Lane moved on to collaborate with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner over the next decade.55 During this period, Lane had limited involvement with Harburg and Saidy, and thus no new music was composed for the animation. Instead, new orchestral arrangements were created in the absence of Lane with the intention of facilitating the star performers and bringing a fresh soundscape that complemented both the musical style of the 1950s and also the new medium. This disparity between the conventional 1940s-Broadway feel of the melodies and the blues orchestral accompaniment creates an awkward tension. Furthermore, the dramatic changes to the script seem to stimulate a need for new music to support the ­storyline (for example, during the new opening sequence or the pursuit of the crock of gold throughout the forest), but the animation is left lacking. As Lane’s involvement remained limited, even when Warner Bros. took ownership of the movie adaptation in the 1960s, the constraints of the music continued to present problems, leading critic Renata Adler to concluded that ‘the music is dated.’56 Secondly, by the mid-1950s, the political climate had changed such that the socialist message was losing its relevance and the creators were keen to adapt the work for a contemporary audience. To deal with the show’s old-fashioned reputation and modernize the racial stereotyping, the writers relied heavily on incorporating farce and satire into the storyline. Yet this device seems to trivialize the racial message by creating an awkward juxtaposition between the folk origins of the plot and the hyperbolic musical comedy. Again, this tension would continue to trouble the creators as the musical headed towards its screen release in 1968. Warner Bros. relied heavily on innovative cinematography to update the work, but similarly, this only heightened the divide between the ­traditional folklore origins and the bold 1960s psychedelic style. Finally, the emphasis on recruiting a star cast also presented artistic and economic challenges. Ultimately, it was a lack of funds that resulted in the abandonment of the animation, but the casting decisions also impacted the aesthetic priorities. The performers were chosen for their star quality rather than their suitability for the role and thus the storyline was significantly diminished to showcase musical numbers. In particular, by focusing on Woody, the plot becomes more artificial and the political intention is diluted. Warner Bros. ultimately adopted a similar ‘box-office’ approach to casting by recruiting Fred Astaire, and again made changes to prioritize the role of this star performer. This decision received the most controversial reaction from the critics, not least because Astaire

200   musical theatre screen adaptations (aged sixty-nine) had come out of retirement to feature in the film. Overall, the animators creatively adopted many successful strategies in an attempt to popularize the contentious musical and resolve some of the issues of the earlier stage show; however, tensions remained, and even Warner Bros. struggled to resolve fully this problematic musical.

Broader Reflections: The Nature of Adaptation Despite these shortcomings, in closing, it is worth acknowledging the wider significance of this cartoon. Faith Hubley argues: ‘If Finian’s had been finished, we’d have seen wonderful animated films of substance and content.’57 This comment reveals that Hubley and the other dissident Disney artists had planned to continue producing animation independently. Moreover, they had bold aspirations to significantly impact both the accepted subject matter and artistic style of this film genre. Although the existing sketches reveal a new sophisticated approach to animation, the team also had aspirations to ‘develop the visual art even further.’ In particular, they hoped to ‘play around with more ­plasticity . . . to get a graphic look that was totally unique to animation.’58 This high-brow style shifted away from the traditional Disney cartoon and towards a new aesthetic that ‘caricatured humans with impressionistic settings’: a vision that had the potential to appeal to both children and adults. With this avant-garde style and wider target audience, these animators believed they had the potential to create a new art form in a Disneydominated, child-orientated market.59 Therefore, with the completion of Finian’s Rainbow, perhaps similar cartoons would have been produced that challenged ­traditional approaches to animation. Rediscovering this lost animation provides a remarkable insight into the artistic aspirations of Hubley and his team of dissident artists as they explored a new approach to animation in the mid-1950s. This prestigious team also adopted a progressive approach to transferring stage ­musicals to the screen, and questions must therefore be raised about the influence this project could have had on the film musical. The Finian’s Rainbow animation perhaps had the potential to challenge conventional approaches to stage adaptation and present an alternative strategy. Since the 1930s, Disney has exploited the animation medium by producing many screen musicals in cartoon form, but the device has been less well explored for Broadway to Hollywood adaptations. Only a handful of stage musicals have ever been considered for animation, but perhaps Harburg and Saidy’s innovative approach to handling a difficult subject would have led to a more creative exploration of alternative vehicles. This sophisticated feature animation is a fascinating discovery not only in terms of the history of this particular show but also in the history of the Hollywood musical. Its discovery highlights a clear shift in aesthetic and commercial priorities as alternative methods were considered to transfer problematic Broadway musicals to the screen.

the cartoon of finian’s rainbow   201

Notes 1. Robert Garland, ‘Finian’s Rainbow Opens at 46th St. Theatre’ (undated), clipping found in Michael Ellis Papers, Library of University of Pittsburgh, box 2, folder 9. 2. Robert Coleman, ‘Finian’s Rainbow Is Smash Hit,’ 14 January 1947, clipping found in Michael Ellis Papers, Library of University of Pittsburgh, box 2, folder 9. 3. Ward Morehouse, ‘The New Play: Finian’s Rainbow Colorful Musical Play, Jubilant Hit at 46th St. Theatre,’ New York Sun (undated), clipping found in Michael Ellis Papers, Library of University of Pittsburgh, box 2, folder 9. Hawkins, ‘Finian Daft and Delightful: Play has Singable Songs and Dances with Bounce,’ clipping found in Michael Ellis Papers, Library of University of Pittsburgh, box 2, folder 9. 4. Richard Watts Jr., ‘Two on the Aisle: Mythical Visitor from Eire in Gay New Musical Show,’ New York Post, 11 January 1947. 5. Louis Kronenberger, ‘A Nice Musical Blend of Fantasy and Satire,’ 13 January 1947, clipping found in Michael Ellis Papers, Library of University of Pittsburgh, box 2, folder 2. 6. The animation script is available in the Yip Harburg Foundation Archives, Series 2: Scripts, box 3, folder 26. Hubley’s sketches were located through personal correspondence with a private investor who purchased the drawings at auction. Several of the recordings with Frank Sinatra were released in Frank Sinatra in Hollywood (1940–1964), produced by Didier Deutsch and Charles Granata, (2002), disc 6. 7. A.  H.  Weiler, ‘By Way of Report: Producers Eye ‘Finian’s Rainbow’—Other Items,’ New York Times, 4 October 1953. 8. It is unclear from the existing materials why or when the replacement was made. 9. Earl Kelin, quoted in John Canemaker, ‘Lost Rainbow,’ Print Magazine, March/April 1993. 10. Didier Ghez, ed., Walt’s People, vol. 11, Talking Disney with the Artists Who Knew Him (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2011), 78. 11. Ghez, Walt’s People, 78. 12. John Canemaker writes: ‘Michael Shore . . . commissioned Hubley to create the Finian’s Rainbow storyboard in 1953.’ Canemaker, ‘The Lost Rainbow,’ 66. 13. Charles Solomon, Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation (New York: Knopf, 1989). 14. Canemaker, ‘The Lost Rainbow,’ 62. 15. Sinatra won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for From Here to Eternity (1953). 16. Canemaker, ‘The Lost Rainbow,’ 62. 17. E.  Y.  Harburg and Fred Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ Yip Harburg Foundation Archives (New York), 1. 18. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 2A. 19. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 5. 20. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 44. 21. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 45. Emphasis mine. 22. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script.’ 23. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 46. 24. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script.’ 25. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 47. 26. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script.’ 27. This adaption cleverly deals with the antiracist criticisms of the original plot; however, the accusation against the ‘Irish witch’ raises concerns of Irish stereotyping, an issue that had previously emerged over the representation of Finian in the original stage show.

202   musical theatre screen adaptations 2 8. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 52. 29. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 57. 30. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 61. 31. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 62. 32. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 66. 33. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script.’ 34. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 68. 35. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 30. 36. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 23. 37. Canemaker, ‘The Lost Rainbow,’ 62. 38. This juxtaposition is further evident in the ‘Old Devil Moon’ number, which is discussed later in the chapter. 39. Lyn Murray, letter to E.Y. Harburg, Yip Harburg Papers, Yale University Library, box 21, folder 169 (undated). 40. It should be noted that the only recordings that exist are those found as bonus tracks on Sinatra’s album Frank Sinatra in Hollywood (1940–1964). It is therefore unsurprising that Sinatra features heavily in this musical material and is worth acknowledging that some of these versions may have been recorded only for the album and were not intended to feature in the cartoon. Without the availability of further sources, however, it is impossible to know what other versions of these songs were recorded; therefore, this chapter assumes that the majority of these numbers were intended to feature in the production. 41. A shortened version of Sinatra’s ‘Old Devil Moon’ is available at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=2RLN7WNhiL4; Sinatra and Fitzgerald’s version of ‘Necessity’ is also available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXpKJ2p3lEo. 42. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 20. 43. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 20. 44. David Finck, ‘The Musical Skills of Frank Sinatra,’ in Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Music, the Legend, ed. Jeanne Fuchs and Ruth Prigozy (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007). 45. Harburg and Saidy, ‘Finian’s Rainbow: Final Revised Script,’ 29. 46. Canemaker, ‘The Lost Rainbow,’ 62. 47. Canemaker, ‘The Lost Rainbow,’ 62. 48. It is not clear where within the script the number would be placed, but the blues style was most closely associated with the black sharecroppers so the scat song was most likely intended to feature Woody working alongside the black community. 49. Og’s second song (‘Something Sort of Grandish’) was not recorded before the animation closed, but a note beside the song on the final draft script stated ‘add new lyrics.’ It is therefore evident that this song was to appear in some form in the final edit. 50. Lewis Funke, ‘The Theatre: Finian’s Rainbow: City Center Revives Satirical Fantasy,’ New York Times, 19 May 1955. 51. Faith Hubley, interview with Chuck Granata, found on the following online music forum: http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/sinatra-capitol-the-finians-rainbow-recordings. 331435/. 52. Canemaker, ‘The Lost Rainbow,’ 65. 53. Canemaker, ‘The Lost Rainbow,’ 65. 54. Several of the songs that Harburg and Lane worked on (including ‘Jumpin’ Jubilee’ and ‘Don’t Run Mirandy’) are available in the E.Y. Harburg Collection of Music, New York Public

the cartoon of finian’s rainbow   203 Library, box 7, folder 8. The lyric for ‘Don’t Run Mirandy’ is also available in the E.Y. Harburg Papers (1913–1985), New York Public Library, box 21, folder 1. This latter lyric is dated 21 July 1950, thus helping to determine when Harburg and Lane worked on the show. 55. Although Lane and Lerner continued working on the Huckleberry Finn project, the ­collaboration fell apart in the early 1950s; however, the brief partnership between Lerner and Lane was significant. The following decade, Lerner was working on a new musical I Picked a Daisy with Richard Rodgers; when tensions in the working relationship forced Rodgers to withdraw from the production, Lerner and Lane reestablished their partnership. Ultimately, the show received a new title and in October 1965 the Lerner/Lane musical, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, premiered on Broadway. The Lane/Lerner manuscripts for Huckleberry Finn are available in the Burton Lane Collection, Library of Congress (unprocessed collection). Rodgers’s I Picked a Daisy sketches are available in the Richard Rodgers Collection, Library of Congress, box 7, folder 29. The sketches are for the following songs: ‘Come Back to Me,’ ‘Jensen,’ ‘Lover to Lover,’ ‘Melinda,’ ‘Terrible Mother,’ ‘Straight Down the Middle,’ and ‘What Did I Have that I Don’t Have.’ Additional production files and two versions of the script for I Picked a Daisy are available in the Richard Rodgers Papers, New York Public Library, box 8. 56. Renata Adler, ‘Petula Clark and Fred Astaire Head Cast,’ New York Times, 10 October 1968. 57. Canemaker, ‘The Lost Rainbow,’ 122. 58. John Hubley, in Canemaker ‘The Lost Rainbow,’ 66. 59. In the early 1930s, Disney had created the concept of a short animated feature film with The Ugly Duckling (1931) and The Three Little Pigs (1933), and as the decade progressed the short feature was expanded into a full-length fantasy movie musical with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs appearing in 1937. Since then Disney had controlled the animated film musical market, aiming their products primarily at children.

CHAPTER 9

Little Shop of   Hor rors Breaking the Rules All the Way to the Big (Enormous, Twelve-inch) Screen Jonas Westover

During its tenure at the Orpheum Theater, Little Shop of Horrors was a dream come true for its creators. Not only did it run for more than five years in its Off-Broadway home, but it remained on the boards while simultaneously appearing as a movie musical on screens across America. And, despite being at the height of its success during the 1980s, Little Shop did not follow the pattern of other hit Off-Broadway shows, making the leap to Broadway. Instead, it ushered in a new era for musicals. In 1988, one theatre manager stated, ‘If you’ve got a winner, there are more people to invest than in previous years. That wasn’t true until “Little Shop of Horrors.” It proved there could be a lot of money in an Off-Broadway theater.’1 Breaking the rules of the entertainment industry is never easy, but this is exactly how Little Shop of Horrors distinguished itself at almost every turn. As a show, its narrative was unlike anything audiences had seen before, and the fact that it was granted a film adaptation without a Broadway engagement made it stand out even further. Howard Ashman (book and lyrics) and Alan Menken (music) would go on to great acclaim as architects of the Disney renaissance, but this musical was the start of their meteoric rise to fame. The show has become a representative case study for the continual reworking of original ideas across varied media, with each iteration altering the substance in new and surprising ways. The genesis of Little Shop may be unusual, but there is no denying that decades after its first appearance, both the musical and its film adaptation represent major successes for the creators and for any show that might seem (at first glance) nothing more than another plant among the zinnias.

206   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations

Green Thoughts As most enthusiasts of the show know, the most direct inspiration for the musical comes from Roger Corman’s 1960 film, The Little Shop of Horrors. This is undoubtedly the source of Ashman and Menken’s creation, but many sources suggest that the truth goes deeper, stretching back decades and perhaps even further. Although Corman has never divulged his muse for the cult movie, he and the screenwriter, Charles Griffith, probably borrowed the idea from a decades-old short story. In 1931, John Collier penned ‘Green Thoughts’ for Harper’s Magazine. The tale follows a middle-aged man named Mr Mannering, his Cousin Jane, and an angry nephew, as well as an orchid of uncertain origin. Many elements of the 1960 movie are present in Collier’s writing, lending credence to the fan theories. The first time the plant is seen in the film, it matches the story’s description of a small, withered object, ‘hideously gnarled’ even in its ‘dry, brown, dormant root state.’2 Mannering, who has a collection of unusual plants, studies day and night to bring it to life, putting the orchid in a hothouse and reading ‘nothing but catalogues and books on fertilizers.’ Soon it takes over the area where it was planted, ‘spread[ing] out in every direction,’ while ‘at the end of the stalks . . . were set groups of tendrils, which hung idly, serving no apparent purpose.’ The orchid soon grows tiny buds that open to show small flowers that look like the heads of flies, which are its first victims. As the story progresses, a cat is consumed, followed by Mr Mannering and eventually Cousin Jane, who ‘always had maintained that in the end no good would come of his preoccupation with “those unnatural flowers.” A major difference, however, is that the second half of the story takes place from Mannering’s perspective after he has become a part of the ‘lethargic vegetable.’ Though The Little Shop of Horrors does not mirror this brief fable precisely, there are so many points of departure for the movie that Corman and Griffith almost certainly read it. Writing on the history of tales of carnivorous plants, T. S. Miller agrees that Corman probably knew ‘Green Thoughts,’ but he also points to a host of other writers, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Ambrose Bierce, and H. G. Wells, who used the man-eating plant trope much earlier.3 And, although Miller does not venture beyond written works before the nineteenth-century, it is notable that one of the most important collections of adventure in Europe for centuries included dangerous plants. Among the many plot threads that make up Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532) is an account of Ruggerio, a handsome Saracen, who becomes ensorcelled by the witch, Alcina. Once alone on her island, he is threatened by a group of threatening florae. The story was so popular it was turned into an early opera, Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggerio dall’isola d’Alcina (1625), featuring a chorus of enchanted plants who try to lure Ruggerio to his doom. But in Miller’s estimation, the earliest version of the narrative comes from travellers’ tales, and probably derives from an Indo-Arabian legend concerning the Waq-Waq tree, which ‘bears fruit in the shape of human bodies or heads.’4 The Collier version of the narrative, too, uses the device of a flower in the shape of the heads of the victims, and this is carried over into

Little Shop of Horrors   207 Corman’s movie as well as Ashman and Menken’s stage iteration of the tale. Wherever Corman and Griffith found their inspiration, they were surely tapping into a long ­history of ‘strange and unusual’ (and dangerous) vegetation.

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) The Little Shop of Horrors was one of Corman’s many ‘B movies,’ films that were notoriously low-budget and intended to be marketed to different audiences from those of their studio-made cousins. In this particular case, it was filmed over ‘only two shooting days and [cost] only $22,500’ to make.5 Corman verified this in his splendid autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, saying, ‘I did Little Shop in two days on a leftover set just to beat my speed record.’6 The movie review in Variety called it ‘kind of one big sick joke’ but ‘essentially harmless and good-natured. The plot concerns a young, goofy florist's assistant who creates a talking, blood-sucking, man-eating plant, then feeds it several customers from skid row before sacrificing himself to the horticultural gods.’7 The director and his small cast, which included a young Jack Nicholson in the role Bill Murray would eventually play, worked quickly, thoroughly lacing the picture with dark humour. Although some viewers have speculated that the movie was thrown together as it was made—a technique used by another B-movie specialist, Ed Wood—this was not the case. Corman and his crew assembled everything they would need days in advance, adhering ‘quite closely to the script. . . . Everyone just came in very well prepared.’ Because he had limited time and funding, Corman made the choice to use only two cameras, and he became more c­ reative with the use of space than he had been in earlier films. The result, according to the director, is one of the reasons the movie could so easily be transferred to the spatially limiting world of the theatre. I shot between Christmas and New Year’s 1959, using the plant shop set for about 80 or 90 per cent of the movie. I had to shoot so tight in there I couldn’t show the street outside. But by then I was getting fairly skilled with camera movements, so even in the opening scenes I was moving from over-the-shoulder, panning back and across and dollying more fluidly as the actors crossed the store in long scenes. I tried to get a lot of movement in the background—people wandering outside the doorway, busy customers inside—to open up the look as much as possible. That is why this film became so easy to adapt to the stage. . . . The script breaks you out of the shop just enough to not get overly bored; we cut away and cut back to vary things.8

The director’s insight into his own production and its future transposition helps explain what Ashman and Menken might have seen in the original movie that encouraged them to make the jump in the first place. The movie received a tepid response and managed to make only a small profit at first, which disappointed Corman, who remarked, ‘A movie that strange and weird . . . should have either been a hit or a flat-out failure.’ The picture did build an audience over time, especially at colleges and late-night movie showings,

208   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations where it appeared repeatedly. ‘It became a phenomenon much like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where people who have seen it dozens of times and m ­ emorized the entire film shout lines in the theater,’ said Corman.9 The extended screen life for the original movie was the reason Howard Ashman managed to see it ‘when [he] was a kid,’ and by the time he thought about making a theatrical version of the film, he could also rent it for the VCR.10

Genesis of the Stage Musical By 1981, Ashman had only managed to make a small dent in the theatre world, and he began searching for something new that would catch an audience’s attention. Just after graduating from college, he moved to New York and started writing plays. Some of his early projects, including ’Cause Maggie’s Afraid of the Dark and The Confirmation, were staged during the mid-1970s, but none of these productions met with much success, critically or financially. He decided to change direction in 1978. The previous year, he had become artistic director of the WPA Theater and shortly thereafter decided he wanted to do a musical. He contacted composer Alan Menken, and the two met at Menken’s apartment to talk about adapting Kurt Vonnegut’s story ‘God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.’ Menken later described the meeting: ‘[Ashman] wore torn jeans and a bomber jacket. He talked with a tight, intense, energy, chain smoking the entire time. He was clearly very smart.’11 God Bless You, Mr Rosewater had a small run of performances at the WPA Theater in 1979 and was followed by a tour, but it was not the hit its creators were hoping for. Ashman said of his idea to turn to Corman’s movie for inspiration, ‘It seemed to me  that the idea for a nonhuman leading character in a musical might be unique. Remember, this was when Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog were in their heyday.’12 He had seen the movie while he was in high school (somewhere between fourteen and sixteen years old, depending on the source), and it had made a powerful impression. The most important element for the writer was the emphasis on satire: ‘It was one of the first movies I saw that didn’t take itself seriously, that was only spoofing the genre,’ Ashman said.13 Howard’s sister, Sarah Ashman Gillespie, remembered the moment when the author tried to get some of his close companions interested in the project that also interested him. She admits, ‘full confession—we tried to talk him out of it. . . . If making a musical out of a Kurt Vonnegut classic was problematic, making a musical out of a Roger Corman B-movie set on Skid Row and featuring a talking plant was suicidal. And we loved Howard a lot. . . . We rented a Betamax (look it up) tape and screened the movie. Howard, my husband and I, some friends, and Howard’s agent, Esther Sherman, gathered around the television and—all but one of us—shuddered.’14 Ashman confirmed that Sherman, especially, was completely against the project, telling him that he was lucky he was the artistic director of a theatre because she was sure no other administrator would allow him to stage the show.15 It should have not surprised any of his family members

Little Shop of Horrors   209 that the writer would be drawn to such an unusual topic because he had been inspired by the film in the past. Not long after seeing The Little Shop of Horrors on television as a teen, he wrote a musical called The Candy Shop.16 It was ‘a terrible musical about a man who fell in love with a flower because it had opiate powers,’ but he did not realize until he was an adult that he ‘had subconsciously ripped off ’ the film.17 There had been previous musicals and film musicals that used science fiction and horror as a place to draw inspiration, but none of them were well known enough to have provided a basis for comparison. The Rocky Horror Show (1973, West End; 1974 Los Angeles) was undoubtedly the most important predecessor of Little Shop, both in terms of ­musical approach and its unusual subject matter; but in terms of tone, it was quite different. Rocky Horror used camp as the central focus of the musical—playing with concepts of reality, truth, and exaggeration throughout the production—rather than the sincerity Ashman wanted Little Shop to maintain. It is also important that Rocky Horror was essentially a British concoction that found popularity outside of New York before going directly to Broadway in 1975. Instead, Via Galactica (1972) is probably the closest predecessor to Little Shop. The musical had a book by Christopher Gore and Judith Ross, ­lyrics by Gore and music by Galt MacDermot, who had written Hair (1967) only a few years before. This was also a rock musical, but stylistically it was more along the lines of funk. It ran for seven performances, failing to interest audiences or critics.18 In an interview in 2011, Gore’s brother, Rick, shared his remembrances of what happened with the show. He identified the problem as capturing the ‘heart’ of the show, which was rewritten during rehearsals by many members of the creative team. This is exactly the central issue Menken mentions for why Little Shop worked but other shows along these lines did not. The composer remembered that many ‘unusual’ shows were being produced in nontraditional venues, but they lost their way by not adhering to a central core that offered the dramatic weight an audience would need to take the production seriously. Menken said, ‘There were a lot of musicals and cabaret pieces in the late 70s and 80s that were playing with the interface of apocalyptic, end-of-the-world, tacky horror movies and pop music. But Howard’s insistence that we remain truly heartfelt and knowing, yet not getting into self-mockery, was the key to what made us different.’19 Ashman showed Menken the movie after recording it from television, but they did not start writing immediately. It took the team about a year to secure ‘a very casual contract’ from attorney Barbara Boyle and Corman, who was unconcerned about future royalties ‘because, quite honestly [he] thought of [his] film as more of a joke than anything else.’20 After the deal was finally struck, Ashman and Menken started to write, and did so ‘in a series of fits and starts.’ Menken explained that the process was slow at first, going through ‘a long period of outlines and song styles that we discarded.’21 But once they decided on the tone of the project, it moved along quickly. For Menken, the key was finding the right musical style, ‘the girl group sound [which] has a very dark, menacing ring. You can almost hear the whips and chains in the background. There were two [white] ponytailed teenagers in the movie and we decided to turn them into a black trio that functions as a Greek chorus.’22 The creators kept several lines of dialogue as

210   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations ­ eparture points for songs and also maintained the physicality of most of the characters. d Seymour, for example, was still small, unimposing, and klutzy, while Audrey was ­willowy and conspicuously overdressed for Skid Row. As they began to alter details of the movie for their musical, they felt that some components of the original were weak, especially the ending. They first changed the location from Los Angeles to New York. Although not much has been said of relocating the action, it is quite important in altering the genre conventions of the movie. The source film starts with a voiceover from a policeman, which suggested two different film styles of the fifties—film noir and ‘B’ science fiction movies. Each genre frequently used the voiceover as a narrative framing technique, and both were strongly associated with the seedy side of Los Angeles because, quite simply, so many movies in these categories were filmed there. The move to New York helped to free the show from its filmic conventions, but it also allowed the creators to more directly place Mushnik’s shop in a Jewish context, specifically the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The voiceover in the beginning was retained, but instead of coming from a police officer, it comes, according to the script, from ‘a [disembodied] voice not unlike god’s.’ The use of the organ and bass underscoring creates a gospel-themed foundation for this warning, making it much more menacing than the cop’s statement in the original movie. Characters were changed, too, with the cast cut down and several relationships streamlined for overall unity. For example, instead of merely using dentist Orin Scrivello for comic relief, Ashman placed him in a sado-masochistic relationship with Audrey, putting Audrey in jeopardy before the play has begun and also adding competition for Seymour. Other characters were removed entirely, including Seymour’s mother, who fakes her illness so she can take as much alcoholic ‘tonic’ as possible. They also wisely changed the plant’s name from ‘Audrey, Jr’ to ‘Audrey II.’ But the most important difference between Corman’s movie and the musical was that instead of feeding the plant ­people who have died accidentally, they turned the story into a Faustian bargain, with Seymour choosing to feed Audrey II specific victims that he had already killed. This choice was extremely important. It allowed for a narrative that made use of the dark humour of the original but added significant depth to the role of Seymour, transforming him into both a victim and a villain simultaneously.23 As a result, the tragedy that unfolds has an emotional weight not present in the source material. In order to match these heightened stakes, the plant itself needed to be absolutely believable. Ashman tried to entice members of Jim Henson’s team from the Muppets to the project so he could build the puppet. While none of them were interested, Ashman interviewed another puppeteer, Martin P. Robinson, who was working on Sesame Street as Mr Snuffleupagus. ‘He said [it] was his favorite movie,’ said Ashman. ‘After he first saw it, he had run around the house chasing his little sister and yelling “Feed Me! Feed Me!” ’24 Robinson accepted the challenge and eventually used four versions of the plant, with two run by hand and the third and fourth with the puppeteer inside. Robinson’s designs for the plant kept some of the elements from the original movie. For example, the first time Audrey II is seen in the film, Seymour has planted it in the bottom part of a coffee can, and this look was kept for both the show and the filmic remake. The voice

Little Shop of Horrors   211 of the flytrap in Corman’s movie was comic in its delivery, but for the musical, the creators wanted the voice to be more menacing. Menken decided that Audrey II should have a ‘deep, New Orleans, funky kind of sound,’ so they hired Ron Taylor to provide his voice.25 Taylor had found success in other roles, both as the Cowardly Lion in the national tour of The Wiz and also in Eubie! (1978), but Little Shop made him famous. The development of Audrey II involved building Robinson and Taylor into a cohesive unit. The singer was placed inside a box at the back of the stage where he could stand up while watching Robinson’s movements. I have my sights on Marty, and he has his ears on me. . . . Being in the box bothered me at first because I am used to being on stage, and when you sing on stage, there is open space; you can throw your voice all the way to the end of the house. When you are in that small space, it plays a psychological trick on you. You feel you have nowhere to sing to. I had to keep telling myself, ‘O.K. I have a microphone right here, I don’t have to push. They can hear me.’ You know I can’t hear anything in there. I can’t hear applause.26

The puppets ate up most of the budget for the show, but it was essential to make Audrey II as real as possible.27 With his team assembled, Ashman then tried to find a director who was willing to participate, but after discussing it with several possible candidates, he felt that ‘the concept was so peculiar that nobody really understood it except me, so I had to direct it if I wanted to get what I wanted out of it. It was sheer self-defense.’28

Little Shop of Horrors (1982, Musical) The show finally opened on 6 May 1982 at the WPA Theater (considered Off-Off Broadway) and ran for exactly one month, closing on 6 June. The reason for the end of the run, however, was not that the show faltered but rather because of the high demand for tickets due to the attention it received. Part of the problem was that the WPA Theater only had ninety-eight seats, and they sold out for every performance. Mel Gussow, reviewing the musical, was impressed with the performances, especially by actor Lee Wilkof (Seymour) who ‘has an affable, offhanded manner that allows him to get away with grotesque activities such as homicide.’29 The review also mentioned the high quality of the combo in the pit with Menken himself at the piano: ‘The score . . . is a spicy blend of rock, pop, and Latin’ styles with lyrics that ‘have an appropriate simplicity’ that demonstrates a ‘cynical sensibility’ that worked for the show. Overall, Gussow felt the production was a success, saying, ‘Admittedly, this is rather a rarefied idea for a musical comedy, but the evening is as entertaining as it is exotic. It is a show for horticulturists, horror-cultists, sci-fi fans, and anyone with a taste for the outrageous.’30 With good reviews and sold-out shows, the management realized a change was ­necessary. Kyle Renick, who ran the WPA along with Ashman, received twenty-six

212   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations offers to bring the show to larger venues and eventually chose to go with the Bernie Jacobs and the Shubert Organization. Renick explained, ‘I knew that he was in tune with our demands. . . . Also, he brought with him two gentlemen into the deal that are very valuable to our show. David Geffen . . . and Cameron Mackintosh.’31 Becoming connected with these future luminaries would be the key to turning Little Shop’s future into something special. The decision to move to a larger theatre allowed for greater ticket sales, but it also demanded larger puppets; instead of a budget of $2,000, the expanded version of the show would cost nearly $350,000. It was Geffen who underwrote the transfer to the Orpheum Theater (and paid for the new versions of Audrey II).32 This would be the show’s home in New York for the next five years. Alan Menken’s music was one of the central reasons for Little Shop’s success. The majority of the songs are tied to the time period of the show and especially to the music of African American girl groups. The most obvious nods to this source are the names of the three girls who introduce many of the numbers and act as a Greek chorus throughout the show; they are named Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon, each a prominent girl group from the early 1960s.33 The style of some of the musical numbers borrows from this musical source, too. For example, after the voiceover, the opening number, ‘Prologue (Little Shop of Horrors),’ uses a triplet figure in the piano, a rhythmic gesture used repeatedly throughout the rock ’n’ roll years (1956–60) that continued into the pop music of the early 1960s. The section after the voiceover is an aural surprise, exploding from the loose introduction and shifting to an energetic, fast-paced musical warning from the Three Girls.34 But what is so important about the Prologue is that it sets up the two musical languages that then become the framework for the tone of the whole musical; 1960s ­girl-group doo-wop becomes the inspiration for the ‘fun’ of the show while gospel provides the moral center, offering a basis for the ballads and more ‘heartfelt’ moments. Ashman and Menken made sure these styles were tied together—after all, both the voiceover and the Three Girls offer the same warning to the audience—but the differing musical genres offer characters two different ways to say the same thing. This supports the dark humour of the script while simultaneously providing an emotional core to the characters, and by using this dual musical language, they successfully transcended their source material. And then there is the Motown sound, the model for Audrey II’s music. This becomes menacing and dark with Menken’s treatment, but it can also be fun. The deep bass voice is paired with rhythms that are either erratic or demanding, depending on what mood is being evoked; as Frank Rich stated in his review, ‘After [the show] ends its run, it’s not inconceivable that Audrey II could go on the road as the soulful Jimmy Early from “Dreamgirls.” ’35 The numbers in the show go beyond just referencing general stylistic elements. The creators also used models of specific songs from the period. ‘Skid Row,’ which musically introduces the central characters, is a parody of a past hit. Ashman and Menken used the Crystals’ song, ‘Uptown’ (Philles 102, released March 1962) for direct reference; anyone familiar with the tune would recognize its presence in the score, both lyrically and ­musically. And, given that it hit number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, many fans of the era would certainly know the song. The introduction for ‘Uptown’ begins with a sforzando in the string section followed by a tremolo, all the while supported by castanets.

Little Shop of Horrors   213 An acoustic guitar uses the opening gesture, too, but it then flows into an extended ‘improvisation’ over which the voice of singer Barbara Alston can be heard doing recitative—a mixture of singing and speaking. The narrative concerns a young man who works all day Downtown (meaning Midtown Manhattan) where ‘everyone’s his boss/ and he’s lost/in an angry land.’ But, when the workday is done, he can go uptown (meaning, in this case, Spanish Harlem, above 96th Street on the East side of Harlem), where he can relax and be respected for who he is—specifically, be treated as a human being without his skin colour or economic status determining his position in society. The song was written by Brill Building couple Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, who had penned a number of other popular doo-wop hits. It was produced by Phil Spector, who carefully developed the song’s rhythmic timing and timbre, using his ‘Wall of Sound’ technique to double up sections of many of the musical lines, sometimes matching the middle voices with the strings and at other times the bass guitar. The energy of the song explodes after this opening, which structurally ends up being the first verse. It is a fine example of the girl group sound of the early 1960s, and it was a useful model for ‘Skid Row.’ Ashman and Menken take the song and turn it on its head in some ways, while maintaining other elements of the original, creating an opening number that both pays homage and pokes fun. The introduction for ‘Skid Row’ keeps the accent and the tremolo, but it is played on a piano with synth accompaniment. The thinner texture allows Crystal, one of the Three Girls, to open with a similar gesture to the original song. However, instead of using the more passive recitative style, she bursts into a highly ornamented gospel-inspired opening, encouraged after her first phrase by Ronette, who says, ‘Sing it, child.’ The opening for the new section is a direct homage to ‘Uptown,’ both in its rhythm, melodic contour, and lyrics, but it also fulfills a key role in the show—setting the scene in time, place, mood, and sound. The section, however, does not function as an introduction (as it does in the source tune) but is actually a verse, which then is followed by a twice-repeated chorus. This important structural alteration allows Ashman and Menken to present the main characters, but it also extends the number, effectively balancing out the chorus and verse that follow the brief bridge. First, the tired shop owner, Mr Mushnik, takes a solo line, and he is soon followed by Audrey (who takes the second half of the first chorus) and Seymour, who briefly tells his life story in the second verse. The chorus that follows this depletes the energy of the song, slowing down and thinning the orchestration to bass, piano, and guitar. But it soon builds to another crescendo, using Seymour and Audrey as the vocal leads and identifying them as the show’s stars. The song is effective because it manages to use parody, homage, and sincerity all in equal parts, adding up to something that transcends each individual treatment to become something new. The meaning of ‘Skid Row’ is the opposite of ‘Uptown,’ which might seem on the surface to be parody, but for this show, it means a great deal. The characters in Little Shop leave Midtown, but they do not go to a better place. Their Downtown (meaning the Lower East Side, a rough part of New York in the 1980s) is Skid Row, where the nasty behaviour of the bosses is made worse by the urban nightmare filled with drugs, abusive boyfriends, and hopelessness. The pacing of the song’s opening matches the loss of hope communicated by the characters, and it taps into their dreams by

214   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations pushing the vocal range higher, quickening the pace, and raising the dynamic level. The reality for those in this Skid Row is the total failure of everything the American Dream of the 1950s promised. The gentle acceptance of ‘Uptown’ becomes desperation in ‘Skid Row,’ but it manages to also add in humour with the bass interruptions of drunks and a clever reuse of lyrics, where Ashman refashions source song lyrics for his own purposes.36 Ashman and Menken used the source material efficiently, keeping the original framework while creating their own artwork—a choice they made throughout the show as they looked at things that inspired them, consistently (and brilliantly) transmuting the old material into something fresh. The orchestration of the show is quite different from the score for Corman’s movie. In the source work, an augmented orchestra plays Fred Katz’s jazz-based music. Rooted in the bop world of John Coltrane and mixed with the modernistic orchestration of Edgar Varèse, the score eschews melodic development for sporadic aural bursts. In the animated opening credits, brass and woodwinds explode over a pulsating timpani pulse, but the texture quickly dissolves as a celeste segues into the narration. Trumpet and ­saxophone solos accompany the cop’s voiceover, followed by erratic interruptions by snare drum, triangle, and flute. This opening is probably meant to invoke something along the lines of the credits for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), with music by Bernard Hermann and animation by Saul Bass. In effect, this (and the voiceover already discussed) prepares the audience for something much more serious than they actually receive, and it may have been this discordant product that in part drew Ashman to the film. The sound of the musical was drastically different. Robert Merkin used a smaller orchestration for the Orpheum production, and this was retained as the show began to tour. The original combo included bass, drums (including bells, castanets, bongo, drum kit, and mark tree), guitar (both acoustic and electric), and keyboards (electric and piano). Given the size of the group used for the pit, the music has significant variation, partially due to clever combinations of the keyboards and differing percussion creating diverse textures. ‘Ya Never Know,’ for example, uses the drum kit to move the rhythm forward, but the syncopated keyboard sounds almost hollow. When Mushnik’s vocal line begins, the style seems more evocative of a Brill Building pop song (Lesley Gore’s ‘California Nights’ comes to mind). The Three Girls then interrupt with a description of Seymour’s newfound success and the music shifts to a cha-cha rhythm that shifts back to the girl group sound, using a more active bass guitar, a new keyboard sound, and a thicker vocal texture in places. In ‘Mushnik and Son,’ the melodic minor scale is used to suggest the Jewish proprietor and the family connection he tries to build with Seymour (in this case, so the latter will not walk out, taking the growing Audrey II with him). Using relatively small forces, the sonic world of the show is widely varied but cohesive and is one of the reasons the stage production worked. Another factor in this well-balanced mix was finding the right cast to provide the tone Ashman wanted. Ellen Greene and Lee Wilkof eventually took the roles of Audrey and Seymour, but other actors were considered during auditions. The callback sheet can be found in the Howard Ashman papers, now housed at the Library of Congress, and it offers a fascinating glimpse into the Little Shop that might have been.37 The sheet

Little Shop of Horrors   215 includes four columns, each of which has a number of performers listed in the order they were desired by the creators for the role. Lines are drawn between the ‘Seymour’ and ‘Audrey’ columns that suggest pairings tested by the producers. Wilkof is at the top of the ‘Seymour’ group, and he is connected to Faith Prince, who was atop the ‘Audrey’ column. Nathan Lane is next in line, and he was paired with Randy Graff, with Lucinda Cone written in below her. Next in the male category is Ralph Bruneau who was tested with Louisa Flaningham. Then is Steve Mellor, auditioning with both Annette Kurek and Margaret Warncke. Finally, Chip Zien is listed and paired with Carolyn Mignini. At the bottom of the sheet are two ‘late Audreys,’ Didi Conn and Ellen Greene. The role of Audrey was originally offered to Faith Prince, but due to a standing contract for an industrial film, she could not accept immediately. Greene and Wilkof were eventually cast as the leads, with Hy Anzell as Mushnik and Frank Luz as Orin.38 The show became one of the most successful Off-Broadway shows ever during its run, closing on 1 November 1987 after 2,209 performances.39 A national tour followed in 1984 with limited engagements, and soon afterwards, the show became a mainstay in stock productions and, especially, in high schools. One of the indicators of just how well the musical was doing was that halfway through its run, it was listed as one of the few Off-Broadway shows that charged $35 for its top-tier ticket prices—only $10 less than the cost of a ticket for a Broadway musical.40 Multiple awards were accrued by the cast and the creators, and within a year, it was clear Little Shop was a hit. A West End production and several tours of the show met with similar applause from critics and audiences alike.41 But, every once in a while, a production would be housed in a location that did not fit the show itself. The main issue, according to some, was that staging the show in a theatre that was too large fundamentally changed the experience. The critic in Washington, DC, stated, ‘Audrey II . . . is the only cast member who doesn’t seem to be pushing and straining to fill the Warner, a theatre about four times too large for this kind of camp.’42 The line between cheekiness and sincerity was a difficult one for performers to capture, and for some reviewers, the material itself lent itself to silly, over-the-top performances.43 Finding the balance—getting the tone just right—was one of the central reasons the production never moved to Broadway. Ashman even placed instructions into the script’s character descriptions so that future actors would know exactly what his intentions were. For Seymour, Ashman explained that he’s ‘a sweet and well-meaning little man. He is not a silly, prat-falling nerd, and therefore should not be played as the hero of a Jerry Lewis film.’44 Audrey should be a combination of ‘Judy Holliday, Carol Channing, Marilyn Monroe, and Goldie Hawn,’ but with their ‘education and self-worth’ removed. Orin should be cocky, but ‘not a leftover from the movie version of Grease.’ Audrey II should be a ‘street-smart, funky, conniving villain—Rhythm and Blues’ answer to Richard III.’ And finally, the Three Girls are ‘the only ­people in the cast who know what’s really going on. . . . They . . . sing to the audience directly . . . with a “secret smile” that says: “we know something you don’t know.” ’ Overall, Ashman warned, there is a danger in indulging in overacting, and this was to be avoided at all costs, mainly because he saw a fundamental difference between the treatment of the narrative and its performance. ‘The script keeps its tongue firmly in cheek,’ he said,

216   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations ‘so the actors should not. Instead, they should play with simplicity, honesty, and sweetness—even when events are at their most outlandish.’45 Maintaining this balance was essential for the original cast, and as new productions were sent on national and ­international tours, adhering to the right tone became one of the most challenging components of staging the musical.

Turning to Film The logical next step for a show like Little Shop would have been to move to Broadway. However, a strange confluence of events came into play, steering this musical in a unique direction. First of all, Ashman was aware that getting Little Shop right meant that moving into a bigger theatre would probably overwhelm the show itself, causing it to lose its ‘heart and soul.’46 Secondly, David Geffen, who had been a part of the deal that Renick made when moving the show to the Orpheum, began a new venture shortly after Little Shop began to see real success. He was no longer only involved in the recording business (with a few theatre projects on the side), but in the following year, he became involved in the movie industry. The opportunity to move the small musical to the screen was risky since film musicals had seen limited success in the late 1970s and 1980s, but the chance to offer audiences a Little Shop that remained visually restrained in a controlled environment was one that even Ashman could not pass up. The author considered a film adaptation as early as July 1983 but knew the time had not yet come. He explained in a letter to a friend that he had spoken to Steven Spielberg about the possibility of directing and would also be meeting with another possible director: But, between you, me, and the lamp-post, the only person who takes the LITTLE SHOP movie seriously right now is David Geffen. It’s still in the contract-finishing stage (I signed yesterday). I’m seeing Scorsese this week in L.A. and again in New York when I return from England. . . . [The movie] may be 1986, you understand. Scorsese’s shooting Kazanzakis [sic, The Last Temptation of Christ], Spielberg’s shooting RAIDERS II [Temple of Doom], and L’IL SHOP OF ABNER’S is making too much money onstage for anyone to want to rush the picture just now.47

Over the next two years, the project coalesced, with Ashman revising the script ­multiple times. The movie was announced publicly in August 1985.48 However, sharp-eyed readers may have noticed an earlier article that captured the process and made it clear that a filmed version of Little Shop was in preparation. The article appeared in the New York Times, which just happened to feature a piece on Geffen during the period he was meeting with some members of the production team. It paints Geffen as an executive who sits in comfortable chairs instead of hiding behind a desk, and prefers jeans and tennis shoes over wearing a suit. The man is a dynamo of ideas, but his real gift, according to author Don Shewey, is an ability to balance the demands of the

Little Shop of Horrors   217 movie business with the needs of creative artists. Little Shop was the third movie Geffen developed for Warner Bros., with his first being, Risky Business (1983). Shewey spent a week with Geffen, and he included a short description of what happened during a day putting together the Little Shop movie project. Wednesday afternoon: A production meeting for “Little Shop of Horrors” in Geffen's office. Present are Eric Eisner, the 37-year-old former business lawyer who runs Geffen's film company; Howard Ashman, the screenwriter who wrote the book and lyrics for “Little Shop,” and Frank Oz, who directed “The Muppets Take Manhattan.” Only Oz is a newcomer, and he seems cowed by Geffen. He expresses his preference for shooting in England (Geffen’s first choice is Los Angeles) as if expecting to be fired on the spot. But Geffen has faith in Oz, and the film will end up being shot in England anyway; the pound is so cheap they can save $4 million. Attention turns to the latest draft of the script, and Geffen gives his comments first. He wonders what would happen if Seymour didn’t die, if the hero and his girlfriend ended up together. Ashman, the author, points out that Seymour feeds people to a man-eating plant, and letting him off would leave the film on “morally shaky ground.” Geffen is thinking about the audience's expectations and tells a story about “Risky Business.”49

The story Geffen relates is one about the ending of the movie. In the original, he says, Joel, the kid (played by Tom Cruise), ends up neither getting into college nor getting the girl. The movie was screened with this ending, and test audiences hated it. When a short alteration was added where Joel receives the news that he at least gets accepted into school, at least 70 percent of the audience said they ‘would recommend’ the movie to their friends. And, although Geffen admitted the director, Paul Brickman, was still unhappy about the change years later, the movie was a commercial success because ‘the nerds in the audience needed to win something.’50 The ending needed to provide some hope for the future, and in the case of Risky Business, the admission to Princeton represented an investment in the character’s later life. Although this was just one moment in Geffen’s career, this meeting and the issue at hand would have a profound impact on the shape of Little Shop as it made the jump to the silver screen. As the debate continued about how to make the movie, several articles about the process pointed out that the very fact that the Off-Broadway show was about to become a film was surprising. ‘At a time when filming stage musicals is out of fashion,’ said Michael Billington, “Little Shop of Horrors” is bucking a trend.’51 Numerous changes were made to the script and to the songs—a common predicament for any stage to movie adaptation. However, what is important for Little Shop is that almost all tweaking involved the most important issue for Ashman: tone; the author wanted assurance that the movie would adhere to the original even as producers tried to shape a new product for wider audience appeal. Word changes softened the hard, and often cruel, reality explored in Little Shop, and songs were both dropped and added that changed the balance of the original. The direction the production team decided to go for the final theatrical release

218   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations may have represented an alteration of attitude, but they judged correctly that more ­people than ever would be taken with the story, and they were correct, to the tune of nearly $40 million—a profit of over $15 million.52

Little Shop of Horrors (1986, film) When filming began in October of 1985, Oz’s wish to film in England was fulfilled. Oz mentions in each of his interviews—both before and after the movie was released— about how supportive his producer was in getting the film made, as well as how much latitude he himself was given about making decisions; he told the Globe and Mail, ‘David supported everything I did.’53 Oz articulated three main reasons he chose to shoot in a studio. Firstly, he wanted the setting to be intimate. Secondly, Oz felt that maintaining the studio look made for a sense of ‘heightened reality,’ which he said an audience would accept more than something that tried to be ‘real.’ And finally, shooting in a studio tied the musical to both the theatre and also to the tradition of Hollywood film musicals. The movie was shot at Pinewood Studios on the 007 soundstage, the largest indoor filming location in the world at the time, but despite the enormous location, Oz restricted his camera to medium shots with a limited view of the surroundings.54 The director stated that he ‘wanted to keep this simple . . . rather than ballooning it up into a musical ‘Gandhi.’55 He had been nervous about the script in the beginning, but while working closely with Ashman, he felt he eventually found what he needed to make the adaptation something special. Using the Three Girls as filmic devices as well as elements of the narrative, Oz felt he could distort the audience’s sense of reality to effectively make the story seem believable.56 The many appearances of the Three Girls offer a variety of surprises, including impossible costume changes, mysterious placements in adjacent shots, and a distance from the events within the narrative (their presence is often ignored by others, giving them an almost supernatural quality). It was Oz who made the casting choices, but several women were suggested as Audrey before filming began. The most high-profile choice was Cyndi Lauper, the director admitted in an interview years later.57 Others were considered, but Oz eventually kept Ellen Greene from the stage production because he felt she brought something special to the part. For the other cast members, the director went further afield, bringing in Rick Moranis for Seymour, Vincent Gardenia for Mushnik, and Steve Martin as Orin. Moranis had only begun to become nationally recognized through his work in Ghostbusters (1984), and Martin was an old friend of Oz through his work on the Muppets. Smaller parts in the film were played by prominent comedians and helped to create buzz about the picture—John Candy (who had known Moranis while they were both on Second City Television [SCTV]), Bill Murray (who had worked with Oz and had also been in Ghostbusters), and Christopher Guest all made short appearances.58 Greene prepared for moving the role to film by watching several pictures of the period, but she found it was difficult to find a character who reminded her of Audrey. She was worried that the already ‘larger-than-life’ character would become ‘too big on screen.’59

Little Shop of Horrors   219 As for Moranis, who had done a great deal of improvisation, he not only had to ‘try to breathe life into a character whose lines were already well written,’ but he also had to learn how to sing.60 However, the most difficult thing for him to do was to learn how to work with the plant, saying, ‘For me, that was the hardest part, getting used to working with the puppeteers and that beast; I was really blown away by how big this thing was.’61 The look and scope of Audrey II was one of the most important and most expensive changes from the stage production. What had been manipulated by one person in the show morphed into something much more substantial for the screen. Oz said that before shooting began, he knew how hard it was going to be to make the plant work, and hoped that the actors would be patient.62 The way they got the lip-synching to work was to shoot at a much slower rate, with the actors literally moving in slow motion so they could make it look right. Oz later clarified, ‘When the plant is singing by itself it’s 12 frames a second . . . when Rick Moranis is singing along with it, it’s 24 frames a second . . . and when they are singing together, it was 16 frames a second.’63 It was a painstaking process, and Oz brought in fellow Jim Henson puppeteer, Lyle Conway, and hired a group of fifty people to help bring the villain to life. Instead of four iterations of Audrey II, there were seven. ‘The biggest version is pretty brutal,’ said Conway, ‘She’s twelve-and-a-half feet tall, has 15,000 leaves, and vine-like arms that do a lot of grabbing, touching, and dialing telephones. She has a definite shark-like look—a big, open mouth with teeth in it. . . . The small versions are very precious and feminine. I was working from a caricature of Ellen’s lips.’64 The massive creature was seen at the end of the movie, and was a spectacular example of visual effects magic produced in the era just before CGI (computer-­ generated imagery). One of the most important challenges was how to handle the musical numbers, and the production team decided to rework some of Menken’s score. In the final theatrical release, six songs were entirely dropped, two were rewritten, and one new number was written specifically for the screen. The new song was ‘Mean, Green Mother from Outer Space,’ and it worked well enough to garner Ashman and Menken their first Oscar nomination. The altered songs were ‘Don’t It Go to Show Ya Never Know,’ which became ‘Some Fun Now,’ and ‘Sudden Changes/Feed Me (Git It),’ which was cut down to become just ‘Feed Me (Git It)’ for the movie. The original songs that were dropped were ‘Closed for Renovations,’ ‘Mushnik and Son,’ ‘Now (It’s Just the Gas),’ ‘Call Back in the Morning,’ ‘The Meek Shall Inherit,’ and ‘Finale (Don’t Feed the Plants).’ Two of these songs (‘Closed . . .’ and ‘Call Back . . .’) involved life getting better for both Seymour, the shop itself, and his close circle of friends, and these were replaced with montage and a scene that depicted media attention that made Seymour’s life filled with new possibilities. Two more of the songs—’The Meek . . .’ and ‘Finale’—were filmed (and even included on the released soundtrack) but did not make it to the final release. In a few places, lyrics were slightly changed, softening the harsh realities of the core characters as well as the people who populate Skid Row. For example, in ‘Suddenly Seymour,’ Audrey says her mother was ‘cruel’ in the stage production, but was ‘poor’ in the film. Even the tempi of the songs needed tweaking. Menken said, ‘The stage songs require a manic urgency. In the movie, they can be more relaxed. But the feeling is the same.’65

220   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations ‘Mushnik and Son’ is one song that drastically changed a character’s portrayal through omission. This frenetic patter song delivers the first suggestion that Seymour is beginning to receive things in life he never thought possible at the show’s opening. In this case, Mushnik showers him with praise for the first time, offering to officially adopt him. The introduction demonstrates that the shop owner only does this in response to overhearing Scrivello (the dentist) telling Seymour to ‘get [his] ass outta this dump and take the plant with’ him.66 In Corman’s film, Mushnik has a significant Yiddish accent and often speaks in altered English. For the stage work, the proprietor’s Jewish identity was scaled back somewhat, but this song uses indicators to heighten awareness of that background. For example, Yiddish words are used (‘Mensch’) and Jewish stereotypes involving money are also employed. Gardenia, who played the character in the film, backed away from this portrayal, with a less-pronounced accent and no obvious remarks about his past. But dropping the song had the greatest impact on reshaping (and whitewashing) Mushnik’s ethnic identity. The adaptation of ‘Skid Row’ into a filmed song provides insight into the kinds of changes that were made from the stage production without lyrical manipulation. Menken keeps the musical tremolo in the piano as the song opens, but this time, it is not Crystal who introduces Skid Row but an unknown woman in an alley. Oz makes an excellent choice with this, because at first, the audience does not know if the woman is homeless or not; she carries bags with her and almost hobbles in the dark alley, but as she emerges, the viewer realizes she is returning from work (which she sings about), making her way home to a decrepit brownstone. The bags she carries are not trash but instead include a satchel—a slick visual prop trick to open the number. The audience is told that the story she tells is authentic for her—that it reflects the woman’s own life—by the pointed movements of the Three Girls who accompany her as she crosses the street, trudging up to her awful home. The position of the camera shifts as they move across the screen, and it is followed by a shot-reverse shot where the building and the woman reluctantly ‘greet’ each other. The editing cuts speed up as the song gains energy, and instead of using the available onstage characters (such as Mushnik) for some of the solo lines, the movie spreads the song out among the diverse crowd of unhappy slum denizens. The camera also takes time to show a single shot of the Empire State Building and Midtown in the distance, and as it pans out to take in the view, Oz briefly shows an old movie poster on the wall saying ‘Too Soon to Love,’ which remarks on the plot itself. When the bridge begins, the movie version of the song uses strings, which are not even present in the show’s small pit orchestra. Changes in orchestration are heard throughout the number, sometimes with great effect. When Audrey sings her solo in the third chorus, a newly composed oboe countermelody is used, and the new texture feels almost like a different song. Her own desperation is heightened from the original song, too; she sings the notes that Seymour uses in the later version of the chorus when she sings ‘relationships are no-go.’ It is only a small melodic alteration, but it serves to propel the action forward into Seymour’s verse. When Seymour reaches the end of his own version of the chorus, Oz brings the two characters together using a cutting technique that is frequently used to build tension,

Little Shop of Horrors   221 where the camera jumps back and forth between leads until they finally share the same shot and, in this case, share the final note of the song. As the final note expands, so does the view for the audience, and as the camera moves upwards, it takes in all the other Skid Row inhabitants who feel as trapped as the protagonists do. Although this final crane shot is only possible on film, Oz uses the original material from the stage production in a similar manner to how Ashman and Menken use the song, ‘Uptown.’ The director and cinematographer, Robert Paynter, use plenty of unconventional camera angles and ­creative shots to accentuate the song’s pacing, but they do not stray too far from what would be possible in the source work; they maintained the exterior of a Skid Row that could have been seen in a theatre, even when the camera offers perspectives not possible from a stationary point of view. In this way, they used the available visual and musical language of the musical, maintaining the feel and the spirit of the stage production while expanding and embellishing it to make it idiomatic for film. But despite all the details concerning Little Shop of Horrors on the screen, nothing overshadowed the challenge of dealing with the ending. In the original show, Audrey II attacks Audrey I, consuming her and, shortly thereafter, Seymour. A song called ‘Don’t Feed the Plants’ provides the finale, with the Three Girls singing, ‘Thus the plants worked their will/finding jerks who would feed them their fill, and the plants proceeded to grow.’ The moral is delivered by the ‘dead faces’ of Orin, Audrey, Mushnik, and Seymour: ‘They may offer you fortune and fame/love and money and instant acclaim/but whatever they offer you/don’t feed the plants!’ Mary Pharr reminds us that Seymour and the plant are both metaphorically monsters by the end, the hero having been transformed from a small-time loser into someone who would do anything to get what he wants.67 The girls then sing about the destruction of Cleveland, Peoria, and eventually Washington, DC, and New York; Audrey II has taken over.68 On stage at the Orpheum, when the song was over, vines would drop down from the ceiling, providing a final scare for the unwitting audience. It was this negative ending that Geffen was worried about in his early meeting with Oz and Ashman, and thus it is no surprise that it continued to be a central issue throughout the development of the movie. As the ending was being reworked, a new song was written, ‘Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,’ adding several layers of violence to the movie that did not—and probably could not—have existed on stage. The upbeat number is the culmination of Audrey II’s growth and depicts the plant as the most animated it becomes in the film, both musically and kinetically. This was one of two songs written by Ashman at the request of Oz, who felt ‘for a play you didn’t need it, but for a movie, you need a big, violent number.’69 The first of the two songs (called ‘I’m Bad’) was rejected, but Oz felt this one worked. The tempo is much faster—a contrast to the menacing ‘Suppertime’ that precedes it—and when four chords set up the chorus in traditional doo-wop style, the small buds surrounding the plant become its own choral support. The swiftly moving ending is appropriate for the film, with Seymour’s desperation increasing as he grabs a pistol and shoots. The gun does no damage to the vegetable, and the protagonist is beaten by the very monster he nurtured; Audrey II takes the weapon shoots back, chasing Seymour away. Finally, Seymour can only stand in the back office looking lost as more

222   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations and more roots appear, ripping apart the floors and tearing down the entire shop, allowing Audrey II to emerge as the horror it truly is. And then things get interesting. At this point, one of two things could happen—the ending as it happened in the stage show, or something new. As fate would have it, both finales were filmed, but the theatrical release became a scene where Audrey and Seymour beat the alien and survive. The set for the dream version of suburban America (from ‘Somewhere That’s Green’) becomes the couple’s new home, even though a small, smiling bud of the monster lurks in the garden, promising future troubles. Anyone who had seen the stage play would have been surprised at this ‘feel-good’ conclusion, especially since it deletes the show’s central moral lesson and its best long-term joke. For the latter, when Audrey II kills its namesake, Seymour feeds her to the plant, but just before she loses consciousness, she thanks him for finally sending her ‘Somewhere That’s Green.’70 Seymour is then buried by the shop’s walls bursting, but, in the movie’s original ending, the widest shot yet is used to take in the newly grown monster, who consumes the hapless man and spits out his glasses.71 What followed was the show’s chorus of ‘Don’t Feed the Plants,’ with an incredible ending that showed multiple plants destroying various locations (an apartment, a dance club, city streets) and battling the military. This was something directly out of a 1950s sci-fi movie like Them! (1954), where giant ants terrorized the West Coast and fought miniatures on large sets. This finale was meant to be a tour-de-force ­combination of music and effects and, according to reported estimates, cost about one-fifth of the budget for the whole movie, or roughly $5,000,000; it took about a year for unit supervisor Richard Conway to film.72 Multiple versions of Audrey II make their way through city streets, and they appear to be fifty feet tall or more, laughing maniacally when any of the pods destroys a building or eats a subway train. They all share the same voice, and it is clear that because so many ‘jerks’ were ‘tricked into feeding them blood,’ these clones can now take over New York City. In the stunning final shot, the Statue of Liberty is overrun by vines (invoking the vines in the theatre), and to add a final fright, a plant rips through a filmed version of the screen, to make the audience feel like one of the plants has invaded the theatre. It was a powerful ending, and it added about twelve minutes to the movie.73 The loss of this finale was a major blow to everyone involved in the project. In an introduction to the movie at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2012, Oz praised Conway’s ‘brilliant’ work and said he was the one who had to make the phone call telling his colleague they would not be using the ending.74 The reason for the change was quite simple—when the movie was screened, first in San Jose and then in Los Angeles, audiences were effusive with praise for the bulk of the film, but were silent at the ending. According to Oz, they scored 15 percent on the all-important question, ‘Would you recommend this movie to your friends?’ and with this reaction, the studio felt they could not keep the original ending.75 Ashman later said he was ‘unhappy with the last third of the film,’ but understood why it had to be changed.76 ‘Frank . . . would tell you there’s a big difference between theater and film, and that people were empathizing much more with the characters and that’s basically part of the genre,’ said Ashman, a statement that Oz echoed in interviews.77 None of this surprised the creators—even in the early meeting with Geffen,

Little Shop of Horrors   223 there was a concern that they would not be able to go with a finale that mirrored the darkness of the stage plot. But Oz was thankful they could shoot the ‘monster’ ending and see what audiences thought. They returned to England and shot the new material over a two-week span, splicing elements of the first conclusion together with reshoots. This was the final product that audiences saw when the movie was released on 19 December 1986. It is interesting to note that before the movie was actually released, some news stories reported that there had been screenings that were not well received. However, perhaps to avoid negative buzz, Geffen insisted that the reason for the new material was that people loved the show so much that a sequel was being considered; ‘the reaction at our sneaks was so gigantic, we re-shot the ending so Rick doesn’t die,’ he stated.78 The documents of the Library of Congress further prove that a sequel was indeed considered but did not materialize. The journey of Little Shop of Horrors has continued into new territories even into the twenty-first century. In 2003, for example, a version of the show was finally brought to Broadway, starring Kerry Bulter and Hunter Foster. A tour followed that, and in recent years, announcements have been made about a remake of the film. The show has inspired several interesting alternative adaptations, including a hip-hop cartoon (Little Shop, 1991, using child versions of the characters), comic books (both by DC, 1987, and Cosmic, 1995), and even a narrative-based slot machine (IGT Games). With the success of Little Shop, new possibilities opened for musicals, in terms of financing and adaptation, but also in terms of subject matter. Within a short time, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express (1984) presented a major sci-fi production, and many horror-based shows have also seen the stage, including Carrie the Musical (1988), based on a story by Stephen King. Alan Menken even returned to the genre with Weird Romance (1992), which debuted at the WPA Theater with a book by Alan Brennert and lyrics by David Spencer. Although Broadway is still an important destination for musical theatre, it is by no means the only possible location to put on a show that triumphs; as technologies have evolved and types of theatrical experiences have transformed, shows like Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998) and videos like Dr Horrible’s Sing-along-blog (2008) owe significant debts to Little Shop of Horrors for changing the nature of what constitutes a ‘hit’ musical.

Notes I want to thank James Wintle at the Library of Congress for his essential help in writing this chapter. I also want to thank Sarah Ashman Gillespie and Kyle Renick, with whom I corresponded, and both of whom clarified important details for me. 1. Jeremy Gerard, ‘Off Broadway’s Biggest Gamble,’ New York Times, 5 January 1988, p. C13. The manager being interviewed was Albert Poland. 2. John Collier, ‘Green Thoughts,’ in The John Collier Reader (New York: Alfred  A.  Knopf, 1972), 385–399. 3. T.  S.  Miller, ‘Plants, Monstrous,’ in The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, ed. Jeffery Andrew Weinstock (New York: Routledge, 2016), 470–475. Miller mentions that man-eating plants have found their way into a wide variety of media also,

224   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations with perhaps the most recognizable being the ‘sharp-toothed flora of the pipes in the Mario video game universe.’ 4. Miller, ‘Plants, Monstrous,’ 470. 5. ‘The Little Shop of Horrors,’ Variety, 1 January 1961, p. 49. 6. Roger Corman and Jim Jerome, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (New York: Random House, 1990), 62. 7. ‘The Little Shop of Horrors,’ Variety, 1 January 1961, p. 49. 8. ‘The Little Shop of Horrors,’ Variety, 1 January 1961, pp. 65–68. 9. ‘The Little Shop of Horrors,’ Variety, 1 January 1961, p. 69. 10. Richard Christiansen, ‘Howard Ashman and Little Shop of Horrors: How a Good Idea Can Grow and Grow,’ Chicago Tribune, 27 April 1986, n.p. 11. Alan Menken, interview with Sarah Ashman Gillespie, ‘Da Doo: Interview with Alan Menken, Part 1,’ 8 January 2013, www.howardashman.com/blog. 12. Richard Christiansen, ‘Howard Ashman and Little Shop of Horrors,’ n.p. 13. John  H.  Richardson, ‘ “Little Shop of Horrors” Just Grew, Naturally,’ Chicago Tribune, 16 January 1987, p. F37. 14. Sarah Ashman Gillespie, interviewed at New York City Center before the Encores! revival in 2015, posted 30 June 2015, ‘Little Shop Talk: Howard Ashman’s Sister Looks Back,’ http:// www.nycitycenter.org/Home/Blog/June-2015/Ashmans-Sister-Looks-Back. 15. Richardson, ‘ “Little Shop of Horrors” Just Grew, Naturally,’ p. F37. 16. Louis Botto, ‘How Howard Ashman and Alan Menken Created the Iconic “Little Shop of Horrors,” ’ Playbill, 27 July 1982, n.p. Originally published in the Playbill for the show, reprinted at http://www.playbill.com/article/how-howard-ashman-and-alan-menkencreated-the-iconic-little-shop-of-horrors. 17. Botto, ‘How Howard Ashman and Alan Menken Created the Iconic “Little Shop of Horrors,” ’ n.p. 18. In an interview in 2011, Gore’s brother shared his remembrances of what happened with the show. He identified the problem as capturing the ‘heart’ of the show, which was rewritten during rehearsals by many members of the creative team. http://www.paulleary.org/ web/Home/Entries/2011/1/7_Exclusive_interview_about_Via_Galactica.html. 19. Logan Culwell-Block, ‘Never-before-seen Pictures and Anecdotes from the Creation of Little Shop of Horrors!,’ 30 June 2015, http://www.playbill.com/article/never-before-seenpictures-and-anecdotes-from-the-creation-of-little-shop-of-horrors-com-352177. 2 0. Corman, How I Made A Hundred Movies, 69. 21. Botto, ‘How Howard Ashman and Alan Menken Created the Iconic “Little Shop of Horrors,” ’ n.p. Many of these ideas, and samples of some of the songs, can be perused in the Howard Ashman papers at the Library of Congress. 22. Botto, ‘How Howard Ashman and Alan Menken Created the Iconic “Little Shop of Horrors,” ’ n.p. 23. The first death in the source movie is accidental, but it is worth noting that the bum who is run over by the train is first hit in the head by a stone thrown by Seymour, so it is implied that he feels responsible for the accident. 24. Botto, ‘How Howard Ashman and Alan Menken Created the Iconic “Little Shop of Horrors,” ’ n.p. 25. Botto, ‘How Howard Ashman and Alan Menken Created the Iconic “Little Shop of Horrors,” ’ n.p. An extended discussion of Audrey II as a gendered creature could be very interesting. Most of the time, it (which I have chosen to use) is usually referred to by its

Little Shop of Horrors   225 creators as ‘she.’ This is in direct opposition to the voice type, though. Racial issues can also be attributed to the voice type and musical language of Audrey II. For a discussion of this, see Marc Jensen, ‘ “Feed Me!”: Power Struggles and the Portrayal of Race in “Little Shop of Horrors,” ’ Cinema Journal 48, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 51–67. It is worth noting, though, that there is much still to be said on the matter. For example, one of the earliest scripts describes Audrey II as ‘Cookie Monster with foliage and a Mick Jagger voice and attitude.’ See Howard Ashman papers, 1973–2010, Library of Congress. 26. Barbara Crossette, ‘Making a Plant Grow: A Hidden Art on Stage,’ New York Times, 8 October 1982, p. C3. 27. For some, the plant was more of a problem than a solution. Veteran reviewer Walter Kerr wrote a short-sighted piece about the ‘gimmick’ of ‘special effects’ in movies and in the theatre. See Walter Kerr, ‘ “Little Shop of Horrors” and the Terrors of Special Effects,’ New York Times, 22 August 1982, p. H3. 28. Botto, ‘How Howard Ashman and Alan Menken Created the Iconic “Little Shop of Horrors,” ’ n.p. 29. Mel Gussow, ‘Musical: A Cactus Owns “Little Shop of Horrors,” ’ New York Times, 30 May 1982, p. 47. 30. Gussow, ‘Musical,’ 47. 31. Louis Botto, ‘How Howard Ashman and Alan Menken Created the Iconic “Little Shop of Horrors,” ’ n.p. 32. Richardson, ‘ “Little Shop of Horrors” Just Grew, Naturally,’ p. F37. 33. Elizabeth Wollman mentions this connection in her book on rock musicals. See Elizabeth Wollman, The Theatre Will Rock! (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 131–133. 34. It was also a visual surprise, with the placard that carried the show’s title whisked away to show the Three Girls behind a screen. 35. Frank Rich, ‘A Theatrical Mystery: The Missing Balconies,’ New York Times, 9 September 1982, p. C22. 36. The most obvious example of this is the line ‘Downtown he’s just one of a million guys’ in the source song, which Menken turns into ‘Uptown you cater to a million jerks.’ 37. Callback Sheet, Howard Ashman papers, 1973–2010, box 11, folder 6, Library of Congress. Several names are misspelled, including ‘Randi,’ ‘Warnke,’ ‘Flanningham,’ and ‘Zein,’ but have been edited here for clarity. 38. Prince discussed her audition experience and her feelings about not taking the part in an interview with Seth Rudetsky for BroadwayCon 2017, http://www.playbill.com/video/ obsessed-live-faith-prince-reveals-her-little-shop-secret-sings-suddenly-seymour-withseth. The sheet lists Edmund Lindig and Joe Palmieri as possible men for Mushnik, and Greg Salata, Michael Gross, Ray DeMattis, Paul Kappel, and Jim Jansen as possible replacements for Orin (et al.). As a small bit of trivia, I cannot help but mention that Menken and Greene shared an interesting connection to each other and the show—both their fathers were dentists. 39. It is unlikely that any off-Broadway show will ever overcome The Fantasticks, which ran for more than 17,000 performances over forty-two years. 40. Samuel  G.  Freedman, ‘Off Broadway Ticket Prices Have Increased to Match Those of Broadway,’ New York Times, 23 January 1985, p. C15. 41. Kyle Renick told me that the West End production was popular but was not a financial success.

226   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations 42. David Richards, ‘ “Shop”: Growing Pains,’ Washington Post, 3 May 1984, p. D9. Richards cites Audrey’s audible gasps as an effect that came off well in a small space but ‘seem like the stripping of car gears’ that ‘easily turn to mugging when magnified.’ 43. A negative review from the London production lists the glorification of ‘male violence’ as  his reason for not liking the show. See Paul Allen, ‘Teaching Aid,’ New Statesmen, 21 October 1983, pp. 30–31. 44. Howard Ashman, Little Shop of Horrors, libretto (New York: Musical Theater International, 1982), 8–9. 45. Ashman, Little Shop of Horrors, libretto, 7. 46. Robin Pogrebin, ‘The Show That Ate the Original Cast,’ New York Times, 20 October 2003, p. E1. 47. Letter to Harriet from Howard Ashman, dated 7 August 1983, Howard Ashman papers, 1973–2010, box 13, folder 10, Library of Congress. 48. Aljean Harmetz, ‘ “Little Shop” Is Returning to the Screen,’ New York Times, 23 August 1985, p. C6. 49. Don Shewey, ‘On the Go with David Geffen,’ New York Times, 21 July 1985, p. A 28. 50. Shewey, ‘On the Go with David Geffen,’ p. A 28. 51. Michael Billington, ‘New Life for “Little Shop,” ’ New York Times, 8 December 1985, p. A14. 52. ‘Little Shop of Horrors,’ ‘Box Office,’ imdb.com, accessed 19 July 2017. 53. Anne Thompson, ‘Muppeteer Manipulates Little Shop of Horrors, Miss Piggy Supplanted by Audrey,’ Globe and Mail, 17 December 1986, p. D6. 54. Billington, ‘New Life for ‘Little Shop,’’ p. A14. 55. Nancy Mills, ‘Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back into the Greenhouse,’ Los Angeles Times, 2 February 1986, p. R30. 56. Thompson, ‘Muppeteer Manipulates Little Shop of Horrors,’ p. D6. 57. Frank Oz interview, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 16 May 2012, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=t1ctRUsJSWU. 58. On a draft of the movie script from 14 February 1985, Ashman wrote in pencil several ideas for cameos. He lists David Letterman, Eugene Levy, Harold Ramis, John Candy, Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, [Dan] Aykroyd, and [Bill] Murray. Next to a star, he states, ‘Martin Short is the perfect masochist!’ See Howard Ashman papers, 1973–2010. 59. Mills, ‘Just When You Thought It Was Safe,’ R30. The movie Greene thought was closest in tone to Little Shop was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 60. Mills, ‘Just When You Thought It Was Safe,’ R30. ‘I’ve gone through a few different vocal teachers,’ said Moranis. ‘I remember one who took me down to her basement on the most shmutzik rug I ever saw and told me to make duck sounds for 30 minutes.’ One of the actor’s favourite memories was seeing Sigourney Weaver (also in Ghostbusters), who was in the midst of filming Aliens next door; she ‘used to come over to our set in her guns and ammo to watch’ them shoot. 61. Jay Scott, ‘Moranis Feels the Heat of a Sizzling Career,’ Globe and Mail, 2 January 1987, n.p. 62. Mills, ‘Just When You Thought It Was Safe,’ p. R30. 63. Frank Oz interview, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 16 May 2012. The normal frame rate for movies is twenty-four frames per second. 64. Mills, ‘Just When You Thought It Was Safe,’ p. R30. 65. Alvin Klein, ‘Composer Finds His Niche in Life,’ New York Times, 27 July 1986, p. WC24. 6 6. Howard Ashman, Little Shop of Horrors, libretto, 44.

Little Shop of Horrors   227 67. Mary Pharr, ‘Different Shops of Horrors: From Roger Corman’s Cult Classic to Franz Oz’s Mainstream Musical,’ in Modes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twelfth Annual Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Robert  A.  Latham and Robert  A.  Collins (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 212–219. 68. This taps into the narrative trope of many Cold War sci-fi and horror movies, where the ‘Other’ is often a proxy for communism. 69. Frank Oz interview, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 16 May 2012. 70. Sarah Ashman Gillespie says that at the WPA Theater, the audience would usually join in as Greene sang the line, getting the joke as it was delivered. 7 1. In multiple interviews, Oz points out that only two crane shots are used in the film—with this being one of them. The other is the end of ‘Skid Row.’ 72. Frank Oz interview, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 16 May 2012. 73. One of the complaints in the reviews was that the film was only eighty-eight minutes long, which they thought was too short. This was the reason why. See Jack Matthews, ‘Director Frank Oz Goes for Comedy of “Horrors,” ’ Los Angeles Times, 19 December 1986, p. OC, G18. 74. Frank Oz interview, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 16 May 2012. 75. Frank Oz interview, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 16 May 2012. 76. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken interview, 92nd St. Y, 3 March 1988. 77. Ashman and Menken interview. Ashman lamented the difficulty inherent in adapting a stage work, saying ‘making a film out of a musical is an exercise in stupid,’ adding that many other writers have seen their musicals turned into something much different than they expected (his main example is Grease). This did not mean that Ashman disliked the film musical genre—Oz states that movie musicals were some of Ashman’s favourite films—but that the process of adaptation involved many more people making choices that affected the final product rather than the small group of creators involved in stage works. For Oz’s comments, see Jack Matthews, ‘Director Frank Oz Goes for Comedy of “Horrors.” ’ 78. John M. Wilson, ‘Packing a Pistil,’ Los Angeles Times, 5 October 1986, p. R15.

CHAPTER 10

The Fasci nati ng Mom en t of G odspell Its Cinematic Adaptation in the Shadow of Jesus Christ Superstar and Leonard Bernstein’s Mass Paul R. Laird

Rare are moments in popular culture when religion takes a central place. People of faith might object to content in a song, television show, or film, but seldom do creators of popular culture use a religious topic as a central theme. It was therefore notable in the early 1970s when three stage properties emerged within months that dealt primarily with religious content: Jesus Christ Superstar with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice; Godspell, conceived by John-Michael Tebelak and with score by Stephen Schwartz; and Mass with music by Leonard Bernstein and English lyrics by Schwartz. Although substantially different in conception and effect, the writers of each explored distinctive approaches and interpretations of religious beliefs, causing rich debate within the contemporary press and faith communities. Many criticized these properties for perceived lapses in religious judgment or dogma, but the creators were more interested in the reaction of audiences and dramatic critics. The appearance of Jesus Christ Superstar as an album in 1970 was the first sign of these works.1 It became a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic—those of us who can remember those days know that the title cut was ubiquitous on radio, and discussion of the album was everywhere. Lloyd Webber and Rice presented Jesus as a political figure and philosopher, but one cannot portray the last weeks of his life without confronting religion. Jesus Christ Superstar became a theatrical work when it opened on Broadway on 12 October 1971. The original New York production of the show ran until 1973, the year that the film of Jesus Christ Superstar opened. During fall 1970, John-Michael Tebelak conceived Godspell for his master’s project in directing at Carnegie Mellon, drawing his text from the gospels and allowing actors

230   musical theatre screen adaptations to improvise in rehearsals how they would act out the parables and other material.2 The show was so striking in its brief run in Pittsburgh that Tebelak was invited to bring it to the famous La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York, where it ran in late winter 1971. Edgar Lansbury, Joe Beruh, and Stuart Duncan produced Godspell OffBroadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre starting on 17 May 1971 with a new score by Stephen Schwartz. Its subsequent popularity caused its move uptown to the Promenade Theater in October, and the show quickly became successful in tours and sit-down productions in North America and Europe. The Bell Records original cast album was a huge hit, as was the single of ‘Day by Day.’ While Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell were created by young adults, Mass was primarily the work of Leonard Bernstein, fifty-three years old at the premiere and an establishment figure of classical music.3 The composer, however, cultivated the youthful market in Mass, filling it with his liberal politics. Bernstein often addressed himself to what he considered a modern ‘crisis of faith’ and Mass was his largest statement on the subject. The simple plot involved a community’s loss of faith, regained through returning to a child’s simple beliefs. It was commissioned for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. Bernstein procrastinated in writing the work; less than four months before its opening, his sister Shirley Bernstein, a theatrical agent, escorted the worried composer to meet her client Stephen Schwartz and see Godspell, and the young lyricist helped save the project.4 Schwartz assisted in conceiving the plot for Mass and wrote most of the English lyrics that present political messages and interpret the Latin Mass texts. The premiere was on 8 September 1971. Critical reaction was mixed, but Mass touched a popular nerve in Washington and in subsequent runs in New York, and the album was successful for classical music. Although a sprawling piece that mirrors Bernstein’s complexity, Mass presents a coherent viewpoint that, like Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, offers a fascinating glimpse into the Zeitgeist of the early 1970s. Religion appeared elsewhere in popular culture at the time. Indeed, Robert Detweiler, in a 1974 article about the phenomenon, mentioned Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, pop and folk songs, works of fiction, poetry, films, and even underground comic books where Jesus and his teachings made appearances.5 Among popular tunes, ‘Put Your Hand in the Hand’ by Gene MacLellan appeared in an enormously successful cover version from the Canadian band Ocean in March 1971. The cover of Time magazine on 21 June 1971 featured a psychedelic drawing of Jesus, announcing a lengthy article: ‘The New Rebel Cry: Jesus Is Coming!’ It was a multifaceted consideration of societal developments that might have caused artists to consider religious topics.6 Jesus appears as rebel, citing his anti-establishment activities, such as driving businessmen out of the temple. It chronicles the ecstatic evangelical fervor of ‘Jesus People’ living in ‘Christian houses’ around the country, run as communes with residents focusing ‘their total belief in an awesome, supernatural Jesus Christ’ that had freed some from drugs and other aspects of the counterculture. The anonymous writers trace the movement’s start to 1967 and tie it to such older college-age organizations as the Campus Crusade for Christ and Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, as well as the new Catholic Pentecostalism.

the fascinating moment of godspell   231 (Elsewhere, Larry Eskridge provides a brief history of the interest in Jesus within the counterculture starting in 1967 and culminating in the appearance of Jesus Christ Superstar in the early 1970s.)7 Named in the Time article are several popular musicians who became involved in the movement: Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Paul Stookey (of Peter, Paul, and Mary), and Jeremy Spencer of Fleetwood Mac. The text mentioned Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, calling the latter ‘a bright, moving musical’ and ‘sell-out hit OffBroadway.’ Mainstream religious sects dealt with the Jesus Revolution in various ways, but some could not assimilate it easily, a situation that resonates with why John-Michael Tebelak created Godspell, described below. Recognizing what Time described here about religion and popular culture in 1971, Godspell producer Edgar Lansbury has stated that he and his partners found the time ripe for a play based on a biblical story.8

Godspell on Stage at Carnegie Mellon John-Michael Tebelak (1949–1985) attended an Easter service on 29 March 1970 at St Paul’s Cathedral in Pittsburgh. Congregants made him feel unwelcome because of his appearance, and upon exiting, he was stopped by a policeman and searched for drugs. This experience inspired Tebelak to create a play intended as ‘a statement against the organized Church—an indictment of it for keeping religion so serious and removed from the people.’9 The vast majority of the play’s script came directly from the King James Bible. Another inspiration was Harvard theologian Harvey Cox’s book The Feast of Fools, which included consideration of ‘Christ the Clown.’10 Tebelak also appears to have been influenced by recent theatrical works, such as Peter Brooks’s play Marat/Sade (1967), where the cast was in clown outfits and a wire fence surrounded the stage (another feature of Godspell), and Paul Sills’ Story Theatre, in which cast members played multiple roles while telling stories with interpolated pop songs.11 Tebelak submitted his script, The Godspell, to the directing faculty at Carnegie Mellon. He met initial opposition but finally prevailed, and the department scheduled the play for December 1970 in the department’s Studio Theater, a small concrete space that seated about fifty.12 This was one of five master’s projects performed in this intimate theatre during the 1970–71 academic year.13 Cast and crew came from the student body, including Randy Danson, David Haskell (who played John the Baptist/Judas), Martha Jacobs, Stanley King, Robin Lamont, Sonia Manzano (later María on Sesame Street), Mary Mazziotti, Robert Miller (later known as Bob Ari), Andrew Rohrer (who played Jesus), and James Stevens. Susan Tsu was the costume designer.14 Tebelak asked the cast to improvise, building camaraderie through theatrical exercises conceived by Jerzy Grotowski and others.15 Original cast members recall a chaotic atmosphere in early rehearsals, caused partly by the director’s poor communication skills. Tebelak’s substance abuse problem was no secret, perhaps compromising his ability to

232   musical theatre screen adaptations work with the group. There were, however, ‘watershed’ moments that helped the show gel. Martha Jacobs remembers Andrew Rohrer assigning each clown a personality,16 and Rohrer describes how Tebelak brought grease pencils to rehearsal one night and told the cast they would paint clown faces on each other during the show.17 The actors started to feel like those clowns, and their joint creativity exploded. The cast remembers few specifics about The Godspell in its initial version, and for some the experience is confused because they were also in the show at La MaMa and Cherry Lane. Tebelak’s original play was more confrontational than the versions that followed, including the film. In Pittsburgh, the fence around the stage, topped by barbed wire, cut off all stage entrances; actors came and went through the audience. They allowed their improvisations to reflect the Yippie spirit, and Bob Ari said that they shared marijuana during the communion scene in act 2.18 Leon Katz, then a member of the Carnegie Mellon theatre faculty, noted that the show opened with Tebelak urging audience members to do something illegal during the show, and the production ended with a twirling red light off-stage, like police had come to stop the production.19 (Police also arrive in the film before the crucifixion.) In the opening scene with philosophers, someone threw a can on stage while yelling an obscenity.20 The score was by Duane Bolick, a friend of Tebelak’s from the Cleveland area. According to the programme, the musicians were Bolick on keyboards and Cpt Horton on organ,21 but a recording from the original production on 14 December 1970 also includes drum set.22 Tebelak took most of the texts from the Episcopal Hymnal. Bolick and his band demonstrate a wide stylistic range, from soft rock to an edgier sound, with jazz, funk, and electronic sounds that resemble music by Morton Subotnik. The Godspell was a huge success, performed between four and six times, with the audience growing by word of mouth.23

To New York: Godspell at La MaMa The show’s introduction to New York City occurred at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart. Godspell played there from 24 February to 6 March 1971.24 Stewart learned about it from Leon Katz and others. Tebelak hoped to take his Carnegie Mellon cast to New York City but ran into opposition from the department’s faculty. Some members of the cast went and others decided to stay; several were seniors and leaving school jeopardized their graduation. Tebelak put together a cast that included students who had played in the show and actors that he knew who had either left Carnegie Mellon or previously graduated: Herb Braha, Jimmy Canada, Peggy Gordon, David Haskell (again John/Judas), Tina Holmes, Robin Lamont, Sonia Manzano, Gilmer McCormick, Jeffrey Mylett, and Stephen Nathan (Jesus). Susan Tsu went to New York to recreate her costumes, and Tebelak convinced Nina Faso, a friend who had graduated from Carnegie Mellon, to serve as stage manager.25 The new cast had five weeks of rehearsal before the La MaMa opening, again preparing through Grotowski-like exercises

the fascinating moment of godspell   233 and improvisations. The generous schedule allowed them to develop their characters and form a cohesive ensemble; the result was a major success. Tebelak retained Duane Bolick’s score at La MaMa with different musicians playing it. Two songs were added, and one, ‘By My Side’ with music by Peggy Gordon and lyrics by Jay Hamburger, remained in the later, famous score.

Enter Stephen Schwartz: Godspell at the Cherry Lane Producers Edgar Lansbury (brother of Angela Lansbury) and Joe Beruh heard about the show and went to see it. They had a producing organization that also included Stuart Duncan, and, as noted earlier, were seeking a play based on a religious subject. Ronda Rice Winderl has reported that there were two other bids from producers; Tebelak and his mates accepted the ‘most modest’ proposal.26 Godspell had possibilities for an Off-Broadway venue, but Lansbury and Beruh did not believe that the music would pass muster for the New York stage outside of the experimental confines at La MaMa. They had auditioned Stephen Schwartz and his material for Pippin and passed on that property (which changed almost completely before opening on Broadway in 1972) but were impressed with the young composer/lyricist.27 It was a striking coincidence that he was an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon (play directing major, graduated 1968); Tebelak and some cast members already knew Schwartz, but that did not make the process of ­replacing the music any easier for them because they felt loyalty for Bolick’s score. When one hears the earlier music, there is little doubt that Schwartz’s approach was more commercial and of more consistently high quality.28 He did not get involved in the show until early March 1971, and they opened at the Cherry Lane Theatre on 17 May, giving him only a matter of weeks to write the score. He proceeded quickly by choosing songs that he loved by Holland–Dozier–Holland, Burt Bacharach, Laura Nyro, James Taylor, and other pop luminaries, and he wrote settings of the same Episcopal Hymnal texts that Bolick had used, borrowing rhythmic, harmonic, and formal ideas from his influences. Schwartz created new songs—comparison of models with his work is fascinating, but no plagiarism can be suggested—and his winsome, fresh approach proved appealing. For the most part, the confrontational nature of the two versions that Tebelak directed disappeared and what remained was the clowning and Jesus forming a community with his followers, made more serious by the Last Supper and Crucifixion in the second act. This change in tone was surely partly a result of fresh blood, such as Schwartz, entering the creative process. The composer/lyricist also suggested new placements for songs, producing, for example, ‘Alas for You,’ with Schwartz’s own lyrics modeled after Matthew 23: 13–22. One should consider that the recording of Jesus Christ Superstar existed months before Schwartz became involved with Godspell. In the end the two scores are quite different, but Schwartz claims that he assiduously avoided any possible influence:

234   musical theatre screen adaptations I knew of the existence of Jesus Christ Superstar. . . . [T]he album had just come out . . . but I was very careful not to listen to it at all! But not so much as not to be influenced by it, to take things from it. I didn’t want to feel limited, thinking, ‘I can’t do that because it’s too much like something in Jesus Christ Superstar.’ . . . I was really careful. If ever anyone was playing it, or if it came on the radio, I turned it off. I never heard it until after the show opened.29 It is easy to be cynical here, and it is almost unthinkable that Schwartz never heard the title song of the Lloyd Webber/Rice show, played frequently on the radio for months, but once he got involved in Godspell it is entirely possible that he avoided the full album of Jesus Christ Superstar between March and May. The one place where one can make a strong case for similarity between the shows is when both include an aggressive electric guitar solo during the crucifixion, but Schwartz simply notes that both he and Lloyd Webber probably accessed similar influences at that moment.30 Schwartz names Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane, admitting that the latter was his favourite. This can be heard in audio example 10.1. Schwartz became more than just composer/lyricist for the new version of Godspell, getting involved in directing and in other ways behind the scenes. He brought in Stephen Reinhardt as music director, and his background in dance was also useful. Schwartz wanted better voices to sing his songs and insisted on replacing some of the La MaMa cast with Joanne Jonas and Lamar Alford. The actors at the Cherry Lane included Lamar Alford, Herb Braha, Peggy Gordon, David Haskell (John/Judas), Joanne Jonas, Robin Lamont, Sonia Manzano, Gilmer McCormick, Jeffrey Mylett, and Stephen Nathan (Jesus). Tebelak remained director, but he was out of his depth in staging what was becoming more of a musical. Schwartz, Reinhardt, and Jonas, an experienced dancer, helped with musical staging,31 and everyone in the cast was again involved in improvisations that marked the creation of a new version. Tebelak apparently became uneasy and disappeared for periods before the opening, increasing Schwartz’s role. Lansbury recalls how useful the composer/lyricist was in many areas while creating the Cherry Lane version,32 and Schwartz remained a major player as they started to work on the film in 1972. In addition to his continuing work on Godspell, as noted above, Schwartz also became involved in the creation of Bernstein’s Mass. Godspell was not an immediate sensation at the Cherry Lane, but careful publicity and television appearances by the cast got the word out, and by summer it was a hit. There were sufficient positive, and even rapturous, reviews to provide fetching quotations for advertising, but some critics disliked the show, and the reasons for these varied reactions carried over to the film’s reception.33 Those who appreciated the show described its freshness and joy, and often they liked the music. Lee Silver of the Daily News called it ‘cheerfully irreverent, spirited, loving, sprinkled with wry humor and bolstered with a good selection of songs,34 and Jeffrey Tallmer of the Post raved: ‘A thing of joy. Youthjoy. Which I’d believed I’d had enough of, in the theater. But last night . . . I found I was wrong.’35 Other critics, however, could not reconcile the varied tones, and instead of finding the clowns fresh and funny, they thought the proceedings dopey. Dirk Brukenfeld

the fascinating moment of godspell   235 of the Village Voice wrote: ‘The performers become not zanies but stupids, and their simple clowning not only palls but makes a destructive contrast with the underlying reverence.’36 In a dissertation that provides detailed theatrical analysis of Godspell, Winderl has stated that the show’s comic element needed to be kept in perspective: ‘Although the primary focus for the improvisations was usually humorous, care was taken that the comedy never detract from the central messages of the gospels.’37 In truth, critical reactions mattered little for a show that quickly outgrew the Cherry Lane Theatre, ran for more than four years at the Promenade Theater at Broadway and 76th Street, and then moved to Broadway-sized theatres for 527 performances at the end of its first New York residency. One could surely have expected a movie to be made, but it is surprising how quickly that it happened, and how unsuccessful it was.

Moving to the Screen Once Lansbury and Beruh realized that they had a hit, they jumped quickly into other markets. Their move to the Promenade, with its 399 seats, gave them access to a larger space38 and provided a base for auditions and rehearsing touring companies, an expansion made grander by placing sit-down companies in various North American cities, London, and Paris.39 Producers often wait for several years to make a film of a popular musical while marketing the stage version, but Lansbury and Beruh were in a hurry to produce a movie of Godspell. Given what might have been seen as the show’s trendy audio popularity among the young, amplified by the song ‘Day by Day’ (heard in example 10.2) climbing high on the charts, perhaps they decided to strike while the iron was hot. That said, however, because they made the film in 1972 and released it in spring 1973, it played in cities where the stage version was still in its first run. Lansbury has stated that the producers had to reimburse the Boston company’s producer for what he considered lost revenue when the film opened.40 Edgar Lansbury appears to have been the primary impetus for the decision to bring Godspell to the screen. He got into show business as a designer, and his career included a period in California working in television and film. Lansbury entered stage production on his return to New York, serving in that capacity for the play The Subject Was Roses (1964) by Frank D. Gilroy. It won the Pulitzer Prize, making Lansbury an instant success as a producer; the company’s general manager was Joe Beruh, whom Lansbury had known before. They started producing shows together when Stuart Duncan provided money for the partnership, but Lansbury reports that several years later the two of them bought out Duncan.41 Lansbury appears to have been a hands-on producer for the film of Godspell, as he was involved in creative decision making. David Greene (1921–2003) was a British film and television director and also a friend of Lansbury’s, having worked with him on earlier projects. Greene had started out in theatre as an actor and joined the television department at the Canadian Broadcasting

236   musical theatre screen adaptations Company in 1952.42 He moved to New York in 1956, and within several years was a highly regarded director for television shows, working on episodes for such series as Playhouse 90, General Electric Theater, Sir Francis Drake, and The Defenders. In terms of feature films, his work before Godspell included, among others, The Shuttered Room (1967), Sebastian (1968), and The Strange Affair (1968). Lansbury was in the United Kingdom and asked Greene to come and see Godspell in London, where a talented cast performed the show. The director liked what he saw and was eager to be involved; he seems to have come into the project mostly because he was Lansbury’s friend. There might have been better choices for the director’s chair, but few films like Godspell have ever been made. Greene had to deal with a crowded creative team, with Lansbury, Schwartz, Tebelak, and choreographer Sammy Bayes all offering input. In addition, the cast was entirely drawn from stage versions, meaning that the director was the least experienced person in the Godspell world working on the film. Lansbury had trouble finding interest from a studio.43 There was little about the show that cried out for cinematic treatment because it takes place on a stage covered with just a few sawhorses and long boards and a fence as a backdrop. Such plain surroundings allow an energetic cast to present lively versions of Jesus’s parables and sing Schwartz’s score, but film audiences expect more visual stimulation. Also, it is an ensemble piece antithetical to casting stars, and it perhaps would have been clear to studio heads that the film would probably use the same approach, a major problem for those considering box office appeal. Lansbury reports that they had one unsatisfactory offer from an independent studio. Finally, John Van Eyssen, head of the Columbia-affiliated studio in London, saw the show there and became interested in its cinematic possibilities. Van Eyssen’s imprimatur meant that Godspell would have a major studio release, certainly an important consideration for its possible success. As Carol de Giere reports, Stuart Duncan raised $1.3 million for production costs, and preproduction for the film began in May 1972.44 To fill major positions in their cinematic team, Lansbury hired Kenneth Utt as associate producer and production manager, Alan Heim as editor, and Richard G. Heimann as cinematographer. Utt had worked on some of the television series for which Greene had directed episodes and had been an associate producer for The French Connection (1971) in Hollywood.45 Lansbury and Utt had worked together as producer and associate producer on the film The Subject Was Roses (1968). For Alan Heim, Godspell came early in an editing career that continued for decades. Heimann was a daring cinematographer who leaned out of a helicopter to take the shots of the dancing troupe on top of the unfinished World Trade Center. The film’s creative team decided early that they would choose their actors from the various stage casts performing the show. Greene, Tebelak, and Schwartz travelled together to see each, but final decisions rested with the film director; the resulting competition caused resentments to build.46 Given the fact that each part in all versions of the show bore the name of the actor who first created the role, and to an extent was based on that individual’s personality, the original cast surely would have felt some sense of ownership in desiring to play themselves on screen. Greene, however, looked for actors he felt would work well in the film, and he made some idiosyncratic choices.

the fascinating moment of godspell   237 There was a rumor that Columbia wanted known actors in the cast to help with box office,47 but that was never the intention within the Godspell world. The cast that Greene chose included five actors who opened at the Cherry Lane: David Haskell (again John/ Judas), Joanne Jonas, Robin Lamont, Gilmer McCormick, and Jeffrey Mylett; Lamont was the only actor on film who had been in the show from its beginnings. Some of the original actors simply were not available, such as Sonia Manzano, who had started playing María on Sesame Street, a role that she occupied for more than four decades. The other five cast members for the film came from various Godspell casts: Victor Garber playing Jesus (as he had in Toronto), Katie Hanley (New York), Merrell Jackson (who auditioned for the Chicago cast but was selected for the film),48 Jerry Sroka (Boston), and Lynne Thigpen (Washington). Obviously forming this group into a cohesive cast required juggling of roles.49 Haskell, Lamont, McCormick, and Mylett played the parts they had created at the Cherry Lane, but Jonas split her time between her original part and the one Sonia Manzano had played; Jonas sang ‘Turn Back, O Man’ in the film, as can be heard in audio example 10.3. Greene had wanted Thigpen for Jonas’s original part, and in the film she, rather than Jonas, sang ‘Bless the Lord,’ as can be heard in audio example 10.4. Hanley had often played Robin on stage, but Greene heard her performing Peggy and hired her for that in the film; Peggy Gordon was u ­ navailable because of a tonsillectomy. Jackson played Lamar, chosen over the considerably older Alford, and Sroka played Herb. There were cast members who found this reassigning of parts to be problematic, but understudies in the stage casts routinely covered a number of parts, meaning that ultimately these were simply roles to be played. Clearly the biggest challenge in moving Godspell to the screen would be maintaining the play’s intimate feeling while also rendering the film visually compelling; Lansbury did not think that theatrical intimacy would be possible on the screen. He also has stated that the idea to film at locations all over New York City was a joint notion that he had with Greene.50 Schwartz has also taken credit for it as part of his belief that the film needed to appear unreal so that characters could sing without creating the uncomfortable feeling that he thought audiences had in film musicals when characters burst into song in everyday settings.51 Clearly an empty New York City could be described as a place beyond the ordinary! Carol de Giere has reported that Tebelak also had ideas for how the film might be different, including using animation.52 Lansbury remembers Tebelak working with them on the set and believes that he liked what was happening, but this apparently did not describe the whole shoot. Tebelak did not remain a major player on all major creative decisions, and Leon Katz reported that he finally left the set because he saw his creation being changed in ways that he could not control.53 Robin Lamont remembers both Greene and Tebelak working on the set and cooperating, at least at some point, because the film director knew less than Tebelak about improvisational techniques that they used to set up the parables, and Tebelak knew nothing about shooting a film. Lamont also recalls, however, that by the time they were making the film, in the Godspell world Schwartz was more significant as a director than Tebelak.54 Greene worked on the script with both Tebelak and Schwartz, and they excised ­material from the stage show and changed the order of presentation for parables and

238   musical theatre screen adaptations other teachings.55 In general, Greene worked with a script that was gentler than the one for the stage version because what he excised tended to be Jesus’s darker statements and stories, a taming of material that made it more acceptable to the mainstream. Schwartz’s score was convincingly realized in the film. De Giere reports that Greene disliked the ‘high-energy theatricality’ of ‘We Beseech Thee’ and deleted it.56 This gave Schwartz the chance to write a new song for the film, ‘Beautiful City,’ which now often appears in stage versions. They recorded the soundtrack in A&R Recording Studios in New York with percussionist Ricky Shutter; bassists Richard Labonte and Steve Mains; keyboardists Stephen Reinhardt, Paul Shaffer, and Schwartz; and guitarists Jesse Culter and Don Thomas, mostly musicians who had worked on one or more stage versions. Shaffer, later famous as bandleader for The David Letterman Show, played with the Toronto cast and drew some plum assignments on the film, such as wailing away on a Hammond B3 organ, heard to fine advantage during the final credits, excerpted in audio example 10.5.57 De Giere also reports that other singers helped in the recording, such as Ben Vereen singing eight seconds of ‘All Good Gifts.58

The Adaptation: The Film Version versus the Stage Script The stage show opened with Jesus’s voice speaking of God’s majesty, the goodness of creation, and how God made Earth for humans to garden, the words that open the film as Greene presents images of New York City. Cut from the film is the ‘Tower of Babble’ segment that had opened the show, with statements by Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Leonardo da Vinci, Edward Gibbon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Buckminster Fuller, an exchange that devolves into a melee before John the Baptist appears to sound the shofar and sing ‘Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.’59 Schwartz musicalized the opening philosophic debate with effective use of counterpoint, but it did not provide the most cinematic of possibilities. Greene and company opted to delete ‘Tower of Babble’ and tell us something about the characters that become part of Jesus’s troupe, presenting images of city life before emptying out New York for the fantasy that follows. After reminding the audience of traffic in New York, we see John the Baptist (David Haskell) walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, dressed as a ringmaster and pulling a cart filled with props, including the shofar. John hums and sings ‘Prepare Ye.’ The sound of an airplane provides transition to a scene of a parking lot with angry customers who cannot enter or leave. Jerry Sroka is the disinterested attendant and Jeffrey Mylett drives a cab nearby, honking on a recorder in traffic. Merrell Jackson is in the garment district pulling a rack of clothes, grooving to music he hears from his ear buds. Gilmer McCormick is an aspiring fashion designer who leaves the subway before an appointment; a man knocks her portfolio into a puddle. When she reaches her possible interview, there are

the fascinating moment of godspell   239 many women just like her already in line; she leaves and John the Baptist appears to her on the elevator. Joanne Jonas practices ballet in a dance studio, and at one point John replaces her partner. Katie Hanley waits on customers in a diner while trying to read Ulysses by James Joyce, until someone spills coffee on her book. She sees John beckon to her from across the street. Robin Lamont, dressed as a young professional, admires a mannequin in a window dressed as a ringmaster, and John appears in its place. Lynne Thigpen is a college student in a library using the copy machine; in a silly moment she copies her face, emerging from the bright light and seeing John across the library. The camera switches between these characters until they flee in the same direction to the sound of the shofar and John singing ‘Prepare Ye.’ We have met a set of young people, several with artistic sensibilities and a desire to be somewhere else. This knowledge grounds the movie more than the stage version, where we know nothing about the characters besides what we see them do in the ‘Tower of Babble’ and as Jesus’s followers. In the film, we know that they have a life outside their interaction with John and Jesus, making the film appear a fantasy on religious reflection. The eight enter the fantasy world by running to the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, where John sings ‘Prepare Ye’ and is ready to baptize them. As they arrive and jump in, guitars start to play. Riotous, fully clothed water play commences, far more demonstrative and cinematic than the tame bucket and sponge that John uses to baptize the troupe on stage. While they cavort, John spies Jesus in nothing but boxer shorts waiting his turn. The troupe runs off, shedding some clothing and a purse while John declares the greatness of the one who will follow him. Greene deleted the longest portion of the speech from the stage script that warns of future ‘retribution,’ part of the film’s gentler and more positive stance.60 As in the show, John reluctantly baptizes Jesus, who emerges fully clothed from the water, singing ‘Save the People,’ the song in its same audio example 10.6. Jesus and John pull the red ­position as on stage and heard in ­circus wagon through Central Park, joined by the eight followers dressed in their ‘clown’ outfits, which Schwartz has described as more like clothes for hippies.61 We see the troupe in Sheep Meadow and then running down a deserted street, everyone singing ‘Save the People.’ Differences between the stage script and film are cited below; if the film more or less follows the stage script through a segment, the similarity is assumed and usually not mentioned. The troupe enters a junkyard, which becomes the film’s emotional centre. It is here where the community forms, where Jesus paints their faces and tells them why he has come (Matthew 5:17–20), where they act out the first parables, and where they return at the end to have their face paint removed (perhaps showing their readiness to enter the world on their own), and where Jesus is crucified. In the junkyard they find additional decorations for their costumes, frills that further mark them as clowns, such as Joanne’s vaguely sexy use of an old bra on the outside of her dress. (Sonia Manzano wore a fringed bra over her dress in the Cherry Lane production.)62 After Jesus paints their faces, he leads them in play, bouncing an old car up and down rhythmically, leading to a rendition of ‘Learn Your Lessons Well’ on found instruments, the text of which is not sung in the film. This establishes Jesus as the leader and shows that a light mood will prevail.

240   musical theatre screen adaptations Greene deleted what follows in the stage script, with Joanne calling attention to herself and being admonished by Jesus, another negative moment removed.63 Also skipped is the first parable concerning the judge and widow (Luke 18:1–8);64 Greene went straight to the second parable concerning a Pharisee and tax collector (Luke 18:10–14), presented with the flamboyant, comic flair that was part of Godspell stage productions. The next excised material includes Jesus warning his followers to avoid being angry with brothers (Matthew 5:22).65 Certainly not all teachings or parables with a threat of negative consequences fell out of the film, but this is yet another example of Greene emphasizing the show’s sweetness and light. What follows is a brief teaching about settling with one’s brother quickly in a lawsuit (Matthew 5:24–26)—a logical continuance of what was just cut—followed by the p ­ arable of a king who forgave a huge debt, but when that man failed to forgive another man a small debt, the king ordered his torture (Matthew 18:23–35). Jeffrey plays the torture victim, a scene acted out with glee by the troupe using tools found in the junkyard. Robin then becomes the first character to accept Jesus, symbolized when she starts to sing ‘Day by Day,’ which later is an ensemble number. It starts diegetically but becomes a voiceover as they clean up the junkyard and add fresh coats of paint, beautifying the place to which they will return. As the music continues, they leave the junkyard. Greene then cut teachings concerning removing a part of one’s body that sins rather than losing the whole body (Matthew 5:29), ideas greeted with broad humour in the stage production.66 Material from the stage script continues in the film with Jesus decrying the ‘eye for an eye’ mentality and stating that his followers should offer their second cheek after one is slapped (Matthew 5:38–39); this is more than John, evolving into Judas (by which name he is now known in the stage script), can accept. He briefly confronts Jesus, who quickly forgives the disciple. Jesus then acts out the parable of the sheep and goats (Matthew 25:31–46) with his followers at Grant’s Tomb. Jesus consigns the goats to the fires of Hell but quickly forgives his friends and invites them to join the others. While walking, they begin the stage version’s ‘Lamp of the Body’ chant, performed in call-andresponse with Jesus as the leader, moved here from later in act 1,67 using an underpass for the echo-effect called for in the stage script. Jesus briefly teaches that one cannot serve God and money (Matthew 6:24), taken from later in act 1 of the stage version. In the film they enter the Carnegie Mansion, where Joanne leads the group in ‘Turn Back, O Man,’ choreographed with movements of sheets that cover the furniture in the mansion and antics on the grand staircase. Greene moved the song here from the beginning of act 2 on stage.68 Following the song they leave the mansion and perform the ­parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–35), told by Jeffrey with novelty instruments and sound effects while cast members walk their fingers on the back of a park bench to represent figures in the story. Gilmer is the Samaritan and explains his goodness by a state of inebriation, the kind of comic touch that some find silly about Godspell. The cast celebrates wildly after finishing the parable, causing Jesus to say that they should not make public show of their religion or acts of charity (Matthew 6:2–4). His explanation includes magically producing a live dove, continuing the tradition of Jesus doing magic, started by Stephen Nathan in the New York cast. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus

the fascinating moment of godspell   241 (Luke 16:19–31) follows, this time with some of the cast gleefully ‘torturing’ the rich man, played by Robin, after death, and Katie Hanley’s broad interpretation of Abraham in heaven (on Grant’s Tomb) telling the rich man why he is in torment. At this point in the stage show Gilmer sang ‘Learn Your Lessons Well,’ a segment that Greene deleted along with the next parable concerning a rich man who hopes to build more barns for his huge crop yield and then sit back and enjoy life (Luke 12:16–21). God then brings about his death that night, another hard lesson deleted from the film.69 Lynne Thigpen leads the cast in a spirited rendition of ‘Bless the Lord’ before a metallic curtain on an outdoor stage. After the song, Greene deleted Jesus’s teaching about how one should not worry about the future (Matthew 6:28–30; moved later to be said by Jesus during ‘All Good Gifts’).70 Instead, at the number’s end Jesus is sitting in the audience. Members of the cast run to him and blurt out beginnings of lines from the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12), which Jesus finishes. It concludes with Judas yelling from the stage a line from the Beatitudes that shows his concern for Jesus’s future, a difficult moment that Jesus resolves with nonsense about how he can ‘read feet,’ leading directly into ‘All For the Best,’ the most elaborate production number in the film with segments shot at Lincoln Center, from the air in a penthouse pool and on the roof of another building, before an electronically lighted sign in Times Square, and ending with the cast atop an unfinished World Trade Center Tower. An excerpt may be heard in audio example 10.7. Stephen Schwartz has spoken about how this song must show the special relationship between Jesus and Judas;71 as they perform their traditional hat-and-cane routine in exotic settings, one clearly understands that this is an emotional apex in the film. Following this song a ‘fight’ breaks out between some of the characters, allowing Jesus to admonish them to ‘Love your enemy’ (Matthew 5:44), a segment moved from earlier in the act.72 A group hug ensues. A comic bit that follows in the stage script along the same lines was deleted. Katie then starts the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1–9, 18–23), performed ­elaborately with various characters imitating seed that fell in different types of soil. It is an extended sequence, closing with Jesus explaining the story. Greene cut a brief introduction to the song ‘All Good Gifts,’ a number led by Merrell as he makes his commitment to Jesus, heard in audio example 10.8. Greene changed Jesus’s speech during the song in the stage version from being about storing one’s treasure in heaven in favor of a comment moved from earlier in the act concerning how beautifully God dresses the lilies of the field, meaning that he will clothe his followers as well (Matthew 6:28–30).73 The song continues with the troupe performing for Jesus in Central Park, closing with Jeffrey’s recorder solo as heard in the original production. In the stage script the tone changes quickly as Herb begins to act like a drill sergeant and Jesus provides teachings in rhythm as they march. A note in Schwartz’s script states that this demonstrates how the group now functions as a unit, but Greene skipped all of this and jumped to the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32).74 In a reference to the original production, the troupe goes to the Cherry Lane Theatre. Jesus pretends to play piano, with the soundtrack providing ragtime-like arrangements of tunes from Godspell as screened excerpts from silent film comedies illustrate the parable along with actors in the troupe. Few parables are more famous, and the cast reinvigorates the story with the

242   musical theatre screen adaptations typical comic vision one associates with the show. They leave, chanting ‘The law and the prophets’ as they cross the lower level of a bridge and move to a tugboat for the song ‘Light of the World,’ much of it sounding as a voiceover as they engage in various shenanigans. The opening of the song is heard in audio example 10.9. In the stage version this song concludes the first act, a division not reflected in the film; from here the tone changes substantially. After the song, they find themselves on a dock and the ‘Pharisee Monster’ appears, surely the film’s most bizarre segment. In the original stage show, Robin, Herb, and Jeffrey played Pharisees, but Greene seemed to believe that the scene required a more dramatic confrontation. As noted, ‘Turn Back, O Man’ was deleted from this position, but the film picks up here with what follows that song in the stage version.75 Jesus states, enigmatically, ‘This is the beginning.’ The monster appears with the same questions that members of the troupe ask in the stage script (Matthew 21:23–27, 22:15–22, 34–39) and Jesus provides the expected answers, but the scene is shorter with the excision of a short parable (Matthew 21:28–31) that Jesus tells on stage.76 After three test questions intended to entrap him, Jesus becomes angry and begins to rail against the Pharisees, but Greene shortened this speech for the film, moving onto the song ‘Alas for You’ (based on Matthew 23:13–36), excising from the film the third A section and second B section.77 An excerpt is heard in audio example 10.10. Members of the troupe tear apart the monster during the song, revealing some of their friends operating it. The outlandish sequence is a radical departure from the stage version and defies simple i­ nterpretation. What is the purpose of this strange, ungainly monster? It is true that the film’s ethos must change dramatically from the light depiction of parables to the crucifixion, and perhaps this is an attempt at such a transition. One might suggest that the ‘Pharisee Monster’ is a continuation of the playful enactments of parables, a sort of backyard bogeyman that might have been built by children out of odds and ends. Whatever its inspiration, however, it is a scene that qualifies for the adjective ‘weird’ that Edgar Lansbury applied to the entire film, his explanation for its commercial failure.78 As in the stage musical, following this song Jesus mourns Jerusalem and its tendency to ignore prophets (Matthew 23:37–39, 24:4–8). He has walked out onto the dock and the troupe follows. Greene cut more than four pages of material from the stage script in which Jesus continues to preach (from Matthew 24 and elsewhere) and the troupe reacts in their usual comic manner, showing that they do not understand that his end is near.79 The film troupe comes to Jesus sitting towards the end of the dock and Katie Hanley starts to sing ‘By My Side,’ which becomes a moving chorus for the ensemble. An excerpt is heard in audio example 10.11. Although it does not say this in the current script, in the original stage version Peggy Gordon sang the song and reached out to Jesus, but did not touch him.80 In the film almost everyone comes to touch him in comfort. As in the stage script, Judas states in the third person (Matthew 26: 14–16) that he has accepted thirty pieces of silver from the chief priests. On stage, Peggy announces that Judas then looked for an opportunity to betray Jesus, but Judas says this in the film. As a substitute for ‘We Beseech Thee,’ the troupe joyfully sings Schwartz’s ‘Beautiful City’ as they make their way back through the streets of New York to their junkyard,

the fascinating moment of godspell   243 Jesus leading the way while holding hands with Judas; an excerpt is heard in audio example 10.12. Once they reach their destination, the film proceeds to the end with most of the same lines, actions, and spirit of the stage script. For example, Jesus removes paint from their faces and notes that one will betray him (Matthew 26:21–25), causing Judas to flee. Jesus offers communion to the remainder (Matthew 26:26–29) and shares an endearing last moment with each loyal follower during a lovely rendition of ‘On the Willows,’ much of it sung in a voiceover by Victor Garber. The opening, sung by Stephen audio example 10.13. Jesus leaves them to pray and they fall Reinhardt, is heard in asleep; he admonishes them (Matthew 26:36–46). Judas returns followed by a police car that parks outside the junkyard with its light flashing. The act of Judas pantomiming that he is stuck in a box and cannot change his actions from the stage script is not in the film.81 He cannot bring himself to kiss Jesus, as occurs in the gospels (such as Matthew 26:49); instead, in the film Jesus kisses him. Judas ties Jesus to the fence, and the crucifixion scene proceeds with the entire troupe writhing against the fence accompanied by aggressive rock guitar. Jesus sings his last lines and dies. Timothy Joseph Bryant, who also sees the film of Godspell as a fantasy and assumes that the members of the troupe will return to the lives we saw at the beginning of the film, describes Judas’s actions in the crucifixion, with the police light in the background, as bringing the film back to reality.82 The next morning, the troupe removes his body from the fence and carries Jesus, lying in a cruciform position, into the empty city singing ‘Long Live God’ and ‘Prepare Ye,’ finally disappearing around a corner as the crowds of New York City return and the credits run.

Reception The overt religiosity of the film’s message made it especially relevant during the Jesus Revolution of the early 1970s. The stage version seems a fantasy, with nine characters interacting with Jesus on a rough playground and at the end carrying his body out into the world, appearing to indicate that the troupe has matured in their Christian training and is now ready to function on their own. In the film, the fantasy aspect is made more explicit because it takes place in an otherwise empty New York City. Godspell might have started as a theatrical experience, but to deny its religious implications makes little sense. The main character, Jesus, spends the show in his clown outfit accented by the Superman shirt spouting age-old religious teachings in language current from 350 years before. As Winderl has noted, most of the teachings emanate directly from Jesus, as his followers would have heard them.83 The troupe demonstrates that Jesus’s teaching can be presented with broad humour and a fun spirit, but they also form a solid community and mature in their own faith. In the stage show, some say that Jesus’s resurrection occurs in the curtain calls when the character reappears,84 but there is no such moment in the film. Greene and his collaborators avoided that part of the message—what many Christians would assert is the most important element in Jesus’s life and ministry—but

244   musical theatre screen adaptations much of the remainder of the film could be a Sunday School lesson for a broad-minded church. Michael Singer noted what he considered the general acceptance by many Christians of the film Godspell as it transmitted what he called ‘some real charm with its hippy-dippy post-Aquarian Age Jesus-is-Love philosophy.’85 Those who wish to view the film with a religious bent have done so, as may be seen, for example, in a chapter of Richard Walsh’s Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus on Film.86 He describes Godspell as ‘a musical version of a passion play’ that one can compare to Jesus Christ Superstar, but, as Walsh asserts, the former gives far more screen time to Jesus’s teachings.87 Walsh contextualizes the film’s treatment of parables as ­examples of sacred discontent, sacred play, and affective symbol, while presenting an overall argument that, despite the producer’s claim that the show was based on Matthew, ‘its “location” of Jesus’ teaching provides more insight into the non-canonical tradition of Jesus’ teaching in Q and in Thomas.’88 These are gospels that did not make it into the Bible, the first a putative source for Matthew and Luke, written after Mark but with considerable material missing from that gospel. Biblical scholars insist that there must have been a lost source, Q (for the German Quelle, or ‘source’), which included these other stories and teachings. Thomas was Jesus’s famous doubting disciple, said to be author of another gospel that was not accepted as canonical during the assemblage of the New Testament.89 Walsh seriously considers the show’s relationship to these sources. He also looks at the film as a denial of ‘urban modernity,’90 as representative of ‘American Romanticism’ and ‘capitalist consumerism,’91 and as a religious work that includes little in the way of ‘apocalyptic thought.’92 He approaches the appropriateness of portraying Jesus as a clown and how he might relate to other clowns like Wile E. Coyote and Charlie Chaplin,93 how the film presents Jesus’s teachings in ‘an alternative reality’ that might represent ‘the kingdom of God,’94 the importance of text from the Sermon on the Mount in the film,95 and how the only resurrection of Jesus at the end of the film might be through the songs that the troupe sings as they carry the body.96 Despite the popularity of the show and its score, the film of Godspell found little success with audiences in its initial release and it is not a highly regarded Hollywood film musical. Reviews were mixed. In Variety, the critic who wrote as ‘Sege’ believed that the film retained much of what worked about the stage version, including, ‘a strong Schwartz score and an infectious joie de vivre conveyed by an energetic, no-name cast.’97 Sege also saw the show’s flaws in the film, such as the ‘relentlessly simplistic approach’ and ‘mugging’ by the actors that would seem more appropriate in children’s theatre. The critic liked the choreography, found the ‘musical portions . . . often stunning,’ and praised most technical aspects. New York City critics loved the use of the Big Apple and some were mostly positive, but others were devastating. Vincent Canby of the Times found the film more ‘a celebration of theater, music, youthful high spirits, New York City locations and the zoom lens’ than of the life and teachings of Jesus, but also saw that the ‘simplicity and sweetness’ could be interpreted as ‘fierce anti-intellectualism.’98 He notes that ‘All for The Best’ is an excellent production number but concludes with a statement of ambivalence about the film: ‘I like its music, its drive, and its determination, even though it’s pretending to a kind of innocence and naiveté that I never for a second believe.’

the fascinating moment of godspell   245 Rex Reed of the Daily News walked out after an hour and concluded, ‘I don’t recommend Godspell under any conditions.’99 Archer Winsten of the Post reported that the film generated ‘spontaneous cheers’ at the Philharmonic Hall premiere and offered: ‘The movie simply takes the whole city for its stage, beginning and ending with street crowds effectively used by director David Greene, and between times utilizing familiar or rare locations with admirable flair.’100 Howard Kissel of Women’s Wear Daily, another New York newspaper of the period, hated the show and the film: ‘ “Godspell” is repugnant because it is so subsumed in its own cleverness, so smug about its smart-alec point of view. It is a little unsettling to see how responsive audiences are to it.’101 Comments about ‘anti-intellectualism’ and concerns about strong response from the audience point directly at what some commentators dislike about Godspell, both the stage show and film.102 One person’s acceptable, broad comedy becomes dopiness for another observer. A London critic stated, ‘I knew we had to become like little children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but didn’t realize it was necessary to become retarded also. Nauseating!’103 Rex Reed opined that the staging of the musical numbers looked ‘like stoned Pepsi-Cola commercials.’104 Paul  D.  Zimmerman felt that film director Greene included an excessive amount of ‘slap stick business of the Three Stooges variety’ and continued by lamenting that too many lines needed to be presented with a funny voice.105 How one reacts to the film’s persistent goofiness is a matter of personal opinion, of course, and whether one likes this type of presentation will be a strong determinant as to whether one might enjoy Godspell. Lansbury admitted that the film is ‘weird.’ Reviewers seemed to attribute this quality to its depiction of a deserted metropolis. Zimmerman cited the ‘strangely empty New York City.’106 Richard Schickel panned the film in Time and asked: ‘Where has Greene hidden the psychologically bombed civilian population? Where have all the smog, graffiti and litter gone?’107 Even a reviewer who loved the film’s use of the city offers statements that make one realize how unusual this choice was. Arthur Knight, writing for Saturday Review/Sciences, stated: ‘It is as if he shot his entire picture very early on Sunday mornings in October, when New York is not only empty but sparkling.’ 108 He continued, offering that ‘Never . . . has Fun City looked more entrancing. . . . The inventiveness of the camera work continually transforms the drably familiar city into something fresh and wonderful, simply by looking at it new ways.’ Other reviewers said similar things, perhaps not as rapturously, but such a strong part of the film could not help but have detracted from the show’s intended effect, which is a theatrical or religious modern commentary on Jesus and his teachings. What does an empty New York City, no matter how lovely it looks, add to that? As suggested above, it appears to be part of the troupe’s joint fantasy, but it is also freakish, pulling the entire film in an unrelated direction. New York City has been a star of many films, such as On the Town (1949), but that musical depends on rushing around the bustling city as a major part of its effect. In the end, the city provides Godspell with little in the way of relevant material. There were reviewers who admired the film’s religious message. Louise Sweeney, in her review for the Christian Science Monitor, called Godspell an ‘exuberant, joyful, inspiring film’ and noted that ‘Greene . . . has opened up the production in film terms

246   musical theatre screen adaptations with extraordinary insight and imagination.’109 She welcomed the humour and popular culture references as devices that allow the audience to look at old stories in new ways, and summarized the cast’s effect jubilantly: ‘Dressed in their glad rags, running, jumping, roller skating, warbling, bobbing, laughing, and praying their way through “Godspell,” they are like a band of rowdy angels always ready to praise God to anyone who’ll listen.’ Arthur Knight found that Godspell ‘projects all the innocent faith and fervor of early Christianity’ and that it ‘becomes increasingly moving as the Passion approaches its inevitable climax. Godspell, with no religious trappings whatsoever, provides a religious experience of extraordinary intensity.’110 It is mystifying how Knight missed ‘the religious trappings,’ unless he just means visual hints usually associated with Christian worship. Jesus spends most of the film preaching from the Bible and dies on a ‘cross’ at the end; indeed, it is fascinating to consider how many scriptural references Godspell shares with J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The show and film appeared at a time when Jesus made more than just a cameo appearance in popular culture. More than either Jesus Christ Superstar or Bernstein’s Mass, Godspell preserves and transmits the most important essence of Jesus’s teachings. Whether or not it did so to the satisfaction of all viewers is perhaps beside the point, because the film of Godspell remains today a recognizable reflection of its time, reminding us of a small religious revival in American popular culture in the early 1970s.

Notes 1. For additional material on Jesus Christ Superstar, see Jessica Sternfeld, The Megamusical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 8–66. 2. Histories of creating Godspell appear in several sources, including Carol de Giere, Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked (New York: Applause & Cinema Books, 2008), 42–69; Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 15–44; Carol de Giere, The Godspell Experience: Inside a Transformative Musical (Bethel, CT: Scene 1 Publishing, 2014); and Andrew Martin and Paul Shaffer, All for the Best: How Godspell Transferred from Stage to Screen (Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2012). 3. A useful source on the genesis of Mass and its music is Helen Smith’s There’s a Place for Us: The Musical Theatre Works of Leonard Bernstein (Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate Press, 2011), 171–205. 4. For information on Schwartz’s role creating Mass, see Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 45–54. 5. Robert Detweiler, ‘The Jesus Jokes: Religious Humor in the Age of Excess,’ CrossCurrents 24, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 55–74; 56. 6. Time Magazine, 21 June 1971. (Consulted on EBSCOhost without page numbers.) 7. Larry Eskridge, ‘ “One Way”: Billy Graham, the Jesus Generation, and the Idea of an Evangelical Youth Culture,’ Church History 67, no. 1 (March 1998): 83–106; see pp. 90–91, note 21. 8. Personal interview with Edgar Lansbury, New York, 22 January 2008. 9. Geoffrey Wansell, ‘John-Michael Tebelak,’ Times (London), 2 February 1972.

the fascinating moment of godspell   247 10. Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). Joseph P. Swain considers Cox’s influence on Godspell in his The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey, revised and expanded (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 299–300. 11. Carol de Giere mentions Marat/Sade in Defying Gravity, 45. The similarity between Paul Sills’ Story Theatre and Godspell was mentioned by reviewers and publicists at the time of the latter show’s opening. 12. See de Giere, The Godspell Experience, 45–46. 13. Productions 1970–1971, Carnegie Mellon University Archive. 14. The Carnegie Mellon programme for The Godspell is included in the Drama Department programme books for 1970–1971 at the Carnegie Mellon Archives. 15. Nina Faso commented to de Giere on Tebelak’s interest in Grotowski (The Godspell Experience, 23), and several actors involved in the original production mentioned in interviews with the author Grotowski’s influence on the conception of Godspell. 16. Telephone interview with Martha Jacobs, 8 February 2008. 17. Telephone interview with Andrew Rohrer, 30 March 2008. 18. Electronic message from Bob Ari, 1 May 2008. 19. Telephone interview with Leon Katz, 1 February 2008. 20. Telephone interview with Sonia Manzano, 31 January 2008. 21. Carnegie Mellon Archives, The Godspell programme. 22. I thank Peggy Gordon for giving me an unreleased recording of the 14 December 1970 performance of The Godspell at Carnegie Mellon University. 23. Cast members could not remember the number of times they performed the show. The Carnegie Mellon programme reports but one performance, on 14 December 1970. 24. http://www.lamama.org/archives/year_lists/1971page.htm, accessed 3 February 2013. 25. Telephone interview with Susan Tsu, 3 February 2008. Telephone interview with Nina Faso, 6–7 February 2008. 26. Ronda Rice Winderl, ‘New York Professional Productions Depicting the Gospel, 1970–1982’ (PhD diss., New York University, 1985), 20. 27. Personal interview with Edgar Lansbury, New York, 22 January 2008. 28. For more consideration of Bolick’s music, see Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 16–18. 29. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 39. 30. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 39. 31. Winderl, ‘New York Professional Productions,’ 22–23, describes a collaborative process on staging the musical segments with everyone participating, with Schwartz, Tebelak, and Faso leading the way and Reinhardt entering when they needed a specific dance step. 32. Personal interview with Edgar Lansbury, New York, 22 January 2008. 33. For a survey of the critical reaction to the stage version of Godspell, see Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 24–27. 34. Lee Silver, ‘St Matthew’s Gospel Grooves in “Godspell,” ’ Daily News, 18 May 1971. 35. Jeffrey Tallmer, ‘Off-Broadway: Surprise in Nazareth,’ New York Post, 18 May 1971. 36. Dirk Brukenfeld, ‘The Gospel Truth and a Few Fibs,’ 20 May 1971, 55. 37. Winderl, ‘New York Professional Productions,’ 47. 38. Campbell Robertson, ‘Arts, Briefly; Promenade Theater to Close,’ New York Times, 8 June 2008. 39. For information on Godspell production in other cities, see Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 23, 39–41; de Giere, The Godspell Experience, 109–115, 263–275.

248   musical theatre screen adaptations 4 0. Personal interview with Edgar Lansbury, New York, 22 January 2008. 41. Personal interview with Edgar Lansbury, New York, 22 January 2008. 42. IMDb.com, ‘David Greene (I),’ accessed 29 October 2016. 43. Personal interview with Edgar Lansbury, New York, 22 January 2008. 44. De Giere, The Godspell Experience, 281. 45. IMDb.com, ‘Kenneth Utt,’ ‘Alan Heim,’ ‘Richard G. Heimann,’ accessed 29 October 2016. 46. De Giere, The Godspell Experience, 282–285. 47. De Giere, The Godspell Experience, 282–283. 48. IMDb.com, ‘Merrell Jackson,’ accessed 29 October 2016. 49. De Giere, The Godspell Experience, 284–286. 50. Personal interview with Edgar Lansbury, New York, 22 January 2008. 51. De Giere, The Godspell Experience, 286–287. 52. De Giere, The Godspell Experience, 286. 53. Telephone interview with Leon Katz, 1 February 2008. 54. Telephone interview with Robin Lamont, 22 February 2008. 55. De Giere considers briefly what Greene chose to include and leave out of the screenplay in The Godspell Experience, 288–289. According to imdb.com (accessed 11 November 2016), the screenplay was by Greene and Tebelak. 56. De Giere, The Godspell Experience, 289. 57. De Giere, The Godspell Experience, 290. 58. De Giere, The Godspell Experience, 291. 59. Schwartz, Godspell, 4–9, is the ‘Tower of Babble’ sequence. 60. Schwartz, Godspell, 10. 61. De Giere, The Godspell Experience, 291. 62. Winderl, ‘New York Professional Productions,’ 27. 63. Schwartz, Godspell, 14. 64. Schwartz, Godspell, 15–17. 65. Schwartz, Godspell, 20–22. 66. Schwartz, Godspell, 30. 67. Schwartz, Godspell, 41–43. 68. Schwartz, Godspell, 73–75. 69. Schwartz, Godspell, 46. 70. Schwartz, Godspell, 49–51. 71. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, 33. 72. Schwartz, Godspell, 34–35. 73. Schwartz, Godspell, 50, 64. 74. Schwartz, Godspell, 65–66. 75. Schwartz, Godspell, 76ff. 76. Schwartz, Godspell, 77. 77. Schwartz, Godspell, 80–81. 78. Personal interview with Edgar Lansbury, New York, 22 January 2008. 79. Schwartz, Godspell, 82–86. 80. Peggy Gordon stated in a personal interview in New York City on 17 January 2008 that Stephen Nathan suggested that both Peggy and Jesus should reach out to each other, but not touch. 81. Schwartz, Godspell, 99–100. 82. Timothy Joseph Bryant, ‘Ordinary Transcendence: Christianity, Authority, and Crisis in American Literature and Culture, 1865–1990’ (PhD diss., University of Buffalo, State

the fascinating moment of godspell   249 University of New York, 2011), 149–152. Bryant notes: ‘The function of Judas is thus to facilitate the relationship between these two places, where authority is renegotiated in the imaginary world and where it continues to be exerted in the everyday world’ (p. 152). 83. Winderl, ‘New York Professional Productions,’ 48. 84. Schwartz, Godspell, 103. 85. Michael Singer, ‘Cinema Savior,’ Film Comment 24, no. 5 (September–October 1988): 44–47; see p. 46. 86. Richard Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus on Film (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003). 87. Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark, 72–73. 88. Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark, 73. 89. The Gospel of Thomas is available in Ron Cameron, ed., The Other Gospels: NonCanonical Gospel Texts (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), 24–37. No manuscript for Q has been found, but scholars approximate what they believe to be its contents by comparing Matthew and Luke with Mark. See earlychristianwritings.com, ‘The Lost Sayings Gospel Q,’ accessed 30 October 2016, and Richard A. Edwards, A Theology of Q: Eschatology, Prophecy, and Wisdom (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), among other sources. 90. Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark, 73. 91. Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark, 74. 92. Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark, 76. 93. Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark, 78–80. Kevin Fauteux has stated that the film’s ultimate intention was not to show that Jesus was a clown, but rather ‘to remind us he was human’ (203). See Fauteux’s ‘The Final Portrait of Christ,’ Journal of Religion and Health 28, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 195–206. 94. Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark, 84. 95. Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark, 85–86. 96. Walsh, Reading the Gospels in the Dark, 87. 97. Sege, ‘Film Reviews: Godspell,’ Variety, 28 March 1973, p. 18. 98. Vincent Canby, ‘The Gospel according to “Godspell” Comes to Screen,’ New York Times, 22 March 1973, p. 52. 99. Rex Reed, ‘Forget “Godspell”; “Sawyer” Family Treat,’ Daily News, 23 March 1973, p. 66. 100. Archer Winsten, ‘The New Movies: “Godspell” Bows at Columbia 2,’ New York Post, 22 March 1973, p. 52. 101. Howard Kissel, review in Women’s Wear Daily, 22 March 1973, p. 9. 102. Penelope Gilliatt, review in the New Yorker, 7 April 1973, 135, also speaks of ‘powerful anti-intellectualism.’ 103. George Melly, review in Observer (London), 3 June 1973. 104. Reed, ‘Forget “Godspell,” ’ 66. The most famous soft drink commercials of the day that included young people singing were for Coca-Cola, including what became the famous jingle, ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing . . .’ 105. Paul D. Zimmerman, ‘Jesus in Fun City,’ Newsweek, 9 April 1973, pp. 104, 109. 106. Zimmerman, ‘Jesus in Fun City,’ 109. 107. Richard Schickel, ‘Godawful,’ Time, 9 April 1973, 83. 108. Arthur Knight, ‘ “Godspell”: Dancing in the Streets,’ Saturday Review/Sciences, May 1973, 72. 109. Louise Sweeney, ‘ “Godspell” Film’s New Views of Familiar Concepts,’ Christian Science Monitor, 26 March 1973. 110. Knight, ‘ “Godspell.” ’

pa rt I I I

BIO GR A PH Y A N D   I DE N T I T I E S R AC E , SE X UA L I T Y, AND GENDER

chapter 11

A da pti ng Pa l Joey Postwar Anxieties and the Playmate Julianne Lindberg

Now, in studying a case history of Joey, you must know his philosophy— ‘you treat a dame like a lady, and a lady like a dame.’ . . . Didja get the message? –Frank Sinatra1

The 1957 screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey (1940)—starring Frank Sinatra as Joey, Rita Hayworth as Vera, and Kim Novak as Linda—redeems Joey, the infamous ‘heel’ of John O’Hara’s epistolary novel. Now a singer rather than a dancer, Joey genuinely falls in love with the ingénue Linda and makes seemingly selfless decisions that the stage Joey would have scorned. The film praises Joey’s vulnerability and laughs conspiratorially at his self-seeking behaviour; in the end Joey gets the girl. The 1957 screen version of Pal Joey promotes a set of emerging gender archetypes that defy traditional, middle-class, suburban constructions of masculinity and femininity. Joey’s stage-toscreen evolution—from heel to swinging bachelor—is mirrored by Linda’s transformation from stenographer to sex kitten. Both of these archetypes are responses to what cultural theorists have called the postwar ‘crisis’ in masculinity, and both reject traditional constructions of gender and domesticity in favour of something more sexually deviant, even potentially ‘progressive.’ Vera’s character presents a foil to these seemingly uncomplicated archetypes. She more closely resembles the femme fatale of the 1940s: she is selfish, ruthless, and sexually ­experienced. Yet she is also played by Rita Hayworth, and in the end Joey tames her. The anxiety over contested gender roles is reflected in the alteration of the original score, which is reworked, repurposed, and in some cases eviscerated in order to promote the ethos of the film.

254   musical theatre screen adaptations

Adapting Joey Pal Joey centres on the antihero Joey Evans, who begins a self-serving affair with the hard, worldwise, sophisticated, and significantly older Vera Simpson, who in turn bankrolls Joey’s dream club. Joey is, for the most part, happy to be Vera’s object, and in return, Vera enjoys his physical charms: in the 1940 stage version of the show (which featured Gene Kelly and Vivienne Segal in the lead roles), this is a fairly straightforward, almost contractual agreement.2 A side plot of the stage version involves the innocent Linda English (played by Leila Ernst), a stenographer who plays the part of the ingénue. In the absence of a true leading man, however, Linda’s storyline fails to progress. Joey’s two-timing, selfish ways are acknowledged, and both women eventually reject Joey, dramatized through the song ‘Take Him.’ Although many early audiences were won over by Joey’s (or perhaps Kelly’s) charm, there was no denying that he was a scoundrel: the sympathies of the narrative lie with the women.3 The film adaptation of Pal Joey was released by Columbia, headed by the irascible Harry Cohn. The film was directed by George Sidney; Dorothy Kingsley wrote the heavily revised screenplay. Both Sidney and Kingsley were veterans of Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations.4 Columbia had secured the rights to Pal Joey in the early 1940s, but they had a notoriously difficult time with casting. Early on they had considered casting Gene Kelly, again in the title role, with Rita Hayworth as Linda (their partnership had already proven successful in Cover Girl, from 1944).5 MGM, however, refused to lend out Kelly. Other considerations for the title role included Marlon Brando, Kirk Douglas, and Jack Lemmon. At other points Marlene Dietrich, Ethel Merman, and Mary Martin were considered for the role of Vera. 6 Although the basic outline of the original story remains, except for the Hollywood ending, much of the book was adjusted to satisfy a more conventional love triangle and the trio of stars who made it up. In the film, our story is set in San Francisco rather than Chicago, Vera is now a widow (rather than an adulterer), Linda is a chorus girl (rather than a secretary), the character Gladys (a conniving nightclub dancer) is reduced to almost nothing, and many subplots and characters are cut altogether, including Ludlow Lowell (an opportunistic ‘agent’) and Melba, a journalist who is immune to Joey’s charms. Another major revision is the medium through which Joey’s charms are communicated: instead of a third-rate nightclub dancer, Joey is now a third-rate nightclub singer.7 The irony, of course, is that both Kelly and Sinatra were masters of their ­respective crafts, and part of Joey’s charm is that, at least from the nondiegetic perspective of the audience, he is not in fact a hack.8 The score was also radically altered. Although some of Rodgers and Hart’s songs from Pal Joey remain—including ‘I Could Write a Book,’ ‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,’ and ‘Zip’—many are cut or reduced to orchestral underscore, the latter skillfully arranged by Nelson Riddle. A handful of songs from earlier Rodgers and Hart shows are also strategically incorporated into the film, including ‘There’s a Small Hotel’

adapting pal joey   255 (from On Your Toes, 1936), ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’ and ‘My Funny Valentine’ (from Babes in Arms, 1937), and ‘I Didn’t Know What Time It Was’ (from Too Many Girls, 1939). As much as it was a vehicle for the lead stars, the show was also a Rodgers and Hart showcase, even though censors from the Production Code office ruthlessly purged much of Hart’s lyrical wit. Joseph Breen’s initial report on the script (from 14 February 1941) states that the lyrics to ‘Happy Hunting Horn,’ ‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,’ and ‘In Our Little Den’ are ‘entirely unacceptable,’ and goes on to say that ‘a number of the others contain unacceptable lines, which will have to be changed.’9 Breen’s report officially rejected the script for its inclusion of ‘blackmail, sex perversion, adultery, [and] offensive dialogue.’10 Between 1941 and the release of the film in 1957, Columbia engaged in a back-and-forth with the Production Code Administration (PCA) office regarding the ‘unacceptable’ elements of the film; the censored aspects were often the result of concessions made on the part of Columbia, while some of its racier elements were included due to a PCA policy that had relaxed, to a certain degree, by 1957. Still, Dorothy Kingsley recalls that it was Cohn who favoured the Hollywood ending, where Sinatra and Novak literally walked off into the sunset: ‘Well, the story should have stopped with Pal Joey walking away, just alone, with the girl telling him, “That’s all, brother,” you know. But Harry Cohn insisted that we put on the traditional happy ending, that Kim and Frank must get together. And we fought and we fought but it didn’t do any good.’11 For those critics who were expecting a true-to-the-original revival of Pal Joey, the film was a disappointment. Lost were many of the book songs as well as some of the adult features that, in the words of Richard Rodgers, ‘forced the entire musical comedy theater to wear long pants for the first time.’12 Film critic Daniel O’Brien, in a book dedicated to the films of Frank Sinatra, said: ‘If the 1950s revival had toned down some of the show’s more controversial elements, Columbia’s ultra-safe adaptation went for total emasculation.’13

Pal Joey and the Crisis in Masculinity O’Brien’s critique is ironically relevant, as the film reacts in various ways to anxieties surrounding masculinity. As countless studies have outlined, attitudes towards gender and sexuality were shifting in the 1950s. Numerous publications in the popular press addressed what many saw as a ‘crisis’ in masculinity.14 Not only were women in the workforce in unprecedented numbers, but many social critics saw the rise of corporate America (and office culture specifically) as emasculating, as well. Contemporary novels like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) addressed these issues, questioning whether one could be personally fulfilled (or optimally masculine) in such an environment. For many, corporate environments went hand in hand with the ‘feminization’ of mass culture. The civil rights struggle offered yet another critique of white, patriarchal culture. Historian James Gilbert argues that there was a ‘relentless and self-conscious preoccupation with masculinity,’ and that this preoccupation led to new and varied masculine

256   musical theatre screen adaptations archetypes.15 The official image of the cheerful 1950s housewife, standing behind her corporate, be-suited husband, was challenged by the reality of women in the workforce and new attitudes towards sex and sexuality. Karen McNally, in a consideration of Frank Sinatra’s film roles, traces new attitudes towards sex in the postwar era to ambivalent feelings regarding white, middle-class, suburban constructions of gender roles and to the infamous Kinsey reports (released in 1948 and 1953), which revealed that the sex lives of average Americans were far more varied than most publicly admitted to.16 In 1953 (the same year the Kinsey report on female sexuality was released), the first issue of Playboy was launched, providing an antidote to the seemingly emasculated environment of corporate, suburban culture.17 Early issues of Playboy were sophomorically misogynistic, blaming women for denying men their full masculine potential by trapping them in restrictive marriages.18 Arguably the strongest proponent of the new ‘swinging bachelor’ archetype, Playboy carved a space out for a nonnormative form of virile heterosexuality, inextricably tied to material pop culture. By the mid-1950s, Frank Sinatra was their poster boy.19 Sinatra’s hipness was signaled through pop culture references (especially urban slang), snappy dressing (with his hat tilted cockily to the side), and a disregard for ­traditional postwar views concerning marriage and domesticity. Joey’s slang, which originated in O’Hara’s libretto and was updated for the film adaptation, is rooted in the vernacular of urban African American culture, especially that associated with jazz and jazz musicians. The preface to Wentworth and Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang (1967) explains, in part, why Sinatra (or Joey, for that matter) might have adopted the vernacular of a minority social group: ‘ For self defense, and to create an aura (but not the fact) of modernity and individuality, much of our slang purposely expresses amorality, cynicism, and “toughness.” ’20 The history of slang runs parallel to the history of American popular song: the so-called deviance of the material culture of marginalized groups is seen as both dangerous and desirable. When pulled into the mainstream, the dangerous qualities of a given cultural signifier are eventually neutralized, though they still retain the thrill of nonconformity. One of the early trailers to Pal Joey plays up his use of slang, conflating Sinatra, the star, with Joey, the ‘heel.’ In the trailer, Sinatra/Joey gives us a crash course in Joey’s ‘slanguage,’ and, incidentally, the film’s attitude towards women. The trailer opens with Sinatra introducing himself to the audience as ‘your pal Joey.’21 He goes on to describe Joey’s ‘slanguage,’ which is made up, according to Sinatra, of ‘Joey-isms.’ In particular, he outlines four terms: ‘mouse’ (a beautiful woman), ‘gasser’ (the ‘very best,’ typified by Rita Hayworth’s form), ‘loose’ (Joey’s unattached attitude towards life), and ‘poppin’ (demonstrated in a clip from the film, where Sinatra/Joey is peeping through a keyhole at a bathing Novak/Linda). He goes on to say that his philosophy in life is this: ‘treat a dame like a lady, and a lady like a dame’ (in Pal Joey the ‘mouse’ is the dame, and the ‘gasser’ is the lady). Some of the language Sinatra introduces was already a part of John O’Hara’s Joey stories from the late 1930s (principally, the term ‘mouse’ to describe the various women that Joey encounters), and some of it shows up in jazz lexographies.22 O’Hara actually invented some of the slang in the original stage production.23 Joey/Sinatra’s slang marks him as an outsider—he is socially deviant but also ‘hip’ and in line with the

adapting pal joey   257 masculine archetype promoted by Playboy. His deviance was tied to signifiers that were in conflict with middle-class respectability. Playboy also challenged dominant views of femininity, especially where sex was concerned. Playboy, whose playmates appeared each month as centrefolds, rejected the idea that women couldn’t be both sexual and wholesome (the early centrefold features, for instance, were accompanied by other photos of the playmate, cooking, horseback riding, or even having dinner with her parents).24 Although most studies of Playboy play up the misogynistic qualities of the magazine, which undoubtedly existed and persist today, the magazine also carved out a space (in an admittedly heteronormative, heavily conditioned universe) for the wholesome sex kitten, termed by Playboy as a ‘playmate.’ The sex kitten/playmate—naturally sexual, and perceived as somewhat innocent—helps complicate the virgin-whore dichotomy. To an extent, both Novak/Linda and Hayworth/ Vera take on the role of the sex kitten in Pal Joey, though, undoubtedly, Hayworth’s role is a bit more complex. Clearly, the appearance of the sex kitten archetype is less illustrative of how women experienced their own sexuality and more indicative of how sexuality is embodied. The sex kitten/playmate is the counterpart to the swingin’ bachelor/playboy and perhaps says more about constructions of masculinity than about actual feminine desire. And yet, the 1950s discourse on sexuality was complex; in a discussion of the cultural discourse surrounding Marilyn Monroe, Richard Dyer states that ‘the image of the ­desirable playmate, which Monroe so exactly incarnated, is an image of female sexuality for men. Yet so much does it insist on the equation women = sexuality, that it also raises the question, or spectre, of female sexuality for women.’25 Dyer’s insight might help us better understand the film versions of both Linda and Vera, who, to varying degrees, are cast as playmates.

The Playmate Kim Novak’s Linda is much more central to the narrative than the original stage role was. To ensure that the audience knows she is ingénue material, Ned, the bandleader, describes Linda as ‘a nice kid’ and goes on to say, ‘She has ambition, too—she wants to be a singer.’ Still, this observation occurs as Joey is sizing her up, appreciating her figure as she performs in the abbreviated costume of a nightclub dancer (see Figure 11.1). The visual portrayal of Linda is in direct contrast to the Linda of 1940, who is modest, reserved, primly dressed, and the antithesis of the nightclub dancer Gladys (see Figure 11.2).26 Still, Novak’s Linda is characterized as innocent, and even wholesome. Novak’s star image during this period—reflective of the sexual politics of the day— was dictated by her contract at Columbia, under the direction of Harry Cohn. As many accounts document, Cohn was cruelly controlling of his stars—especially his female stars—and both Hayworth’s and Novak’s relationship with Cohn were amongst the most publicly fraught. As Hayworth’s career began to decline—and as she pushed against the strictures of her contract—Cohn sought out another star to replace her. Marilyn Monroe was contracted to 20th Century Fox, and in the early 1950s, Novak was regularly

258   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 11.1  Still from Pal Joey (1957), Columbia pictures: ‘That Terrific Rainbow’ dance sequence.

Figure 11.2  Jack Durant (as Ludlow Lowell), Leila Ernst (as Linda English), and June Havoc (as Gladys Bumps); photo by Vandamm Studio, 1940; NYPL Digital Collections.

adapting pal joey   259 compared to her and to other famous blondes. It is likely that Cohn sought to reproduce the most marketable aspect of Monroe—her ‘sexual readiness’—in Novak. He tried to do this by dictating what roles she played, how she behaved in public (and who she dated), and, crucially, how she looked. To differentiate her from other famous studio blondes, including Marilyn Monroe and later Jayne Mansfield, she was dubbed, and made into, ‘the lavender blonde.’ The studio also sought to create an air of relatability; as Sumiko Higashi observes, ‘Since most Photoplay readers could not aspire to become a voluptuous blonde, stories continued to stress the star’s awkward and gawky girlhood,’ emphasized, for instance, in a story titled ‘How to Be Good and Popular.’27 The song that introduces Linda/Novak—and, perhaps, best demonstrates her ‘naturally sexy,’ Playboy approved side—is ‘That Terrific Rainbow,’ a tune that was originally performed by Gladys and the nightclub dancers. In the stage musical, this tune is meant to reveal the depraved state of a cheap club in the South Side of Chicago. Although there is no audible record of the 1940 premiere, the Columbia studio recording from 1950, produced by Goddard Lieberson, includes the voice of the original Vera (Vivienne Segal). Conducted by Lehman Engel, the record also features Harold Lang, who would star as Joey in the 1952 revival (see Table 11.1 for a list of the principal roles and actors featured in the stage premiere, stage revival, and film adaptation). The Columbia recording includes a stellar orchestra, typified by the instrumental introduction in ‘That Terrific Rainbow,’ up to the task of improvising in the idiomatic way of jazz musicians in a club setting.28

Table 11.1  List of actors and roles from the first two stage productions of Pal Joey, and the film adaptation. Year of Premiere

Role/Actor

1940 (stage premiere)

Vera Joey Linda Gladys Melba

Vivienne Segal Gene Kelly Leila Ernst June Havoc Jean Casto

1952 (stage revival)

Vera Joey Linda Gladys Melba

Vivienne Segal Harold Lang Pat Northrop Helen Gallagher Elaine Stritch

1957 (film adaptation)

Vera Joey Linda Gladys Melba

Rita Hayworth Frank Sinatra Kim Novak Barbara Nicholsi *role eliminated

  Nichols also played the part of Valerie, a nightclub dancer, in the p­ remiere of the 1952 stage revival, and the part of Stella in the 1958 film adaptation of O’Hara’s novel Ten North Frederick (1955).

i

260   musical theatre screen adaptations On stage, the character Gladys sings the introductory stanza, and communicates the boredom of a nightclub chorine, a stark contrast to the virtuosic energy of the instrumental introduction.29 She is bored, jaded, and clearly cynical about the text she sings: ‘my life had no color/before I met you./What could have been duller,/The time I went through?/ You weakened my resistance/And colored my existence./I’m happy and unhappy too.’ Hart’s lyrics are brilliant, reflecting both the hackneyed nature of these sorts of club tunes and the manufactured tackiness that Rodgers and Hart e­ nthusiastically embraced.30 At the chorus, a raucous blues takes over, allowing Gladys, thus far portrayed as a bored chorine, to shift character from (in)sincere lover to unapologetically sexual nightclub dancer, complete with the requisite bumps and grinds. In addition to idiomatic gestures like blue notes and swung, syncopated rhythms, the harmonic progression clearly references the blues. Though not organized in a standard 12-bar or 16-bar format, the first 11 measures of the 32-bar chorus, excepting bar 12, follows a typical blues progression. Measure 12, the last measure of what would typically be the ‘turnaround’ (leading to a repetition of the form), instead sets up a harmonic extension (measures 13–16), completing the first half of the chorus. The second half of the chorus repeats the melodic figuration and harmonic progression of the first 6 measures of the chorus; the remaining 10 measures act as another harmonic extension, using standard techniques like strings of secondary dominants, in addition to some spicy altered chords, to bring Gladys home. In this way we can see that Rodgers adjusted a typical blues progression to satisfy the constraints of a standard 32-bar song. The 1952, Capitol recording demonstrates well the aesthetic shift between the introductory verse and the chorus (see Table 11.2 for a list of significant recordings of Pal Joey). Helen Gallagher (Gladys in the revival and the Capitol recording) positively growls on the text ‘I’m a red hot mama.’ The lyrics to the chorus are delightfully clichéd: ‘I’m a red hot mama/but I’m blue for you/I get purple with anger/at the things you do/and I’m green with envy/when you meet a dame/but you burn my heart up/with an orange flame.’ Each hue was originally matched by the appropriate shift in lighting (designed, in addition to all of the sets, by Jo Mielziner), a clever visual cue that made its way into the film. On stage, the tune creates not only an aura of tackiness but also brings into question the true attitudes of the nightclub chorines towards sex: perhaps they’re bored with it. The playmate archetype is at odds with sexual boredom, for she is, seemingly, always ­ ancers (and their ‘ready.’ In this way, the embodied sexuality of some of the nightclub d calculated attitude towards it) sets them apart from the Playboy ideal. The scene plays out a bit differently in the film: the introduction is thrown out—­ flattening out the characterization of the women—and each line of the chorus is given to a new dancer. All of the girls, except Linda, are either characterized as world-weary ­dancers, or empty-headed bimbos. None of them can sing, and many of them overact, to comic effect. When Linda eventually enters, appropriately on the lyric ‘Doncha know your mama/has a heart of gold,’ the aim is to set her apart from the other nightclub ­dancers. Her voice, dubbed by Trudy Erwin—a crooner known for her collaborations with Bing Crosby, and for dubbing vocals for other Hollywood starlets, including

adapting pal joey   261

Table 11.2  Significant Recordings of Pal Joey. Recording

Featured Singers

1950 Columbia Records recording

Vivienne Segal (Vera), Harold Lang (Joey)

1952 Capitol Records recording

Jane Froman (Vera), Dick Beavers (Joey), Helen Gallagher (Gladys), Elaine Stritch (Melba)

i

1980 London Cast Recording (Jay Records)

Sian Phillips (Vera), Denis Lawson (Joey)

1995 City Center Encores! Cast Recordingii

Patti Lupone (Vera), Peter Gallagher (Joey), Vicki Lewis (Gladys), Bebe Neuwirth (Melba)

  Billed as a cast album for the 1952 revival, nearly all of the original cast members are replaced. Froman and Beavers replaced Segal and Lang; only Helen Gallagher, who played Gladys in the stage revival, remains on the recording. ii   This is the most complete recording of Pal Joey (including oft-omitted songs like ‘Chicago/Great Big Town’ and ‘Flower Garden of My Heart’ and the music accompanying the Dream Ballet “Joey Looks into the Future”). There is also evidence to suggest that the orchestrations on this recording are, of all commercial recordings, closest to the original production. See Paul Christman, ‘Pal Joey: reconstructing a Classic Rodgers and Hart Score,’ Studies in Musical Theatre 3, No. 2 (2009): 174–176. i

Lucille Ball and Lana Turner—is much more polished than that of her colleagues, and she moves naturally, without overacting. So, while the audience is encouraged to gaze upon the ‘mouse with the built’ (the words Joey uses when he sees her for the first time), they are also encouraged to view her as somewhat innocent of her sexuality. Although she does appear in full dress in the film, Linda/Kim Novak is often seen in short, strapless club numbers, or form-fitting gowns with severe slits up the skirt. A conspicuous bathtub scene is also included, which was played up in early promotional material (see Figure 11.3). But, in the words of Ned, the bandleader, we are assured that ‘she’s a nice kid.’ The notion that women should be ‘naturally’ sexual (implying an innocence and a continual ‘readiness’), while also exuding a niceness, or a wholesomeness, is in line with the fraught sexual politics of the 1950s, as well as the popular discourse surrounding Kim Novak herself. Linda’s wholesome side is exemplified by her performance of ‘My Funny Valentine,’ originally from Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms and here performed in the ­aspirational Chez Joey (this club, bankrolled by Vera, debuts in act 2 of the stage version of Pal Joey). ‘My Funny Valentine’ is both a gift to Linda (Joey allows her to sing the feature) and a love song to Joey who, as even the film concedes, is terribly flawed. Through the combination of soft-focus close-ups, string accompaniment, and the sultry, dark tones of Erwin’s voice, this song is the true love ballad of the film (see Figure 11.4). The tune begins with a solo guitar—played by Bobby Sherwood—outlining a broken F minor chord, which sets the stage for the string orchestra’s sotto voce entrance. Dominated by lushly orchestrated strings, ‘My Funny Valentine’ creates a romantic sensibility not yet heard in the film. While relatively short (Novak/Erwin sings through the form only one and a half times [the bridge and final chorus are repeated]), the song carries narrative weight. It brings

262   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 11.3  Still from Pal Joey (1957), Columbia pictures: Linda bathing at the Hotel.

Figure 11.4  Still from Pal Joey (1957), Columbia pictures: ‘My Funny Valentine.’

out Vera’s jealous side, and she subsequently makes Joey fire Linda. It also convinces Joey, as well as the audience, that he is capable of a kind of selfless love not consistent with his stage persona. Significantly, the original stage production of Pal Joey did not include a sincere love song: ‘I Could Write a Book’ is the closest version of one, and while it’s true that it satisfies the requirements of a love song sonically, it is merely a pickup line within the narrative. ‘My Funny Valentine,’ however, transforms Linda from a cheap dancer into a romantic

adapting pal joey   263 lead. By playing up the ‘natural,’ innocent sexiness of Kim Novak, the film reinforces the idea that a more calculated relationship to one’s sexuality (as typified by the other dancers in the nightclub shows and Vera) is undesirable. The distinction between these two versions of sexualized femininity is demonstrated throughout the film. Linda’s performance of ‘My Funny Valentine’ signals the softening and taming of a kind of sexuality that, a decade prior, would have been considered dangerous. Consider the words of historian Elaine Tyler May, who argues that during the postwar era, ‘knockouts and bombshells could be tamed, after all, into harmless chicks, kittens, and the most famous sexual pet of them all, the Playboy bunny.’31 Surely, we can add to this list Joey’s term ‘mouse,’ his pet name for Linda.

Femme Fatale? Novak’s image in the film is deliberately set against Hayworth’s. Significantly, this tension was also being played out in real life: Cohn was both goading Hayworth and paving the way for her replacement as Columbia’s ‘love goddess’ when he helped cast Novak as Linda against Hayworth’s Vera, originally a character decades older than the young ingénue. The press, predictably, saw the potential for scandal and played up what they saw as a certain rivalry between the two actors. The contrast between Hayworth and Novak was, at Cohn’s hands, at the expense of Hayworth. In a cruel bit of symmetry, a comparison between the two actors has also been played up in scholarly literature, but to the opposite effect: Hayworth is often ‘rescued’ from her cruel treatment at the hands of Columbia and Cohn, but usually at the expense of Novak, who is characterized as vacant, against Hayworth’s complexity, and lacking, against Hayworth’s talent. Film scholar Adrienne McLean, in her illuminating study of Hayworth, admits in her conclusion that she set out to rescue Hayworth, too, at the expense of Novak. Through research, however, she found that Novak was not, in reality, the ‘blank’ (or, in the words of a 1956 Time cover story, the ‘pudding-faced, undistinguished girl’) that the press made her out to be.32 Novak, in fact, received good reviews for many of her films, Pal Joey included. As McLean puts it, ‘Novak (like Hayworth) did have something more than a face and body, and it is probably not mere nostalgia that leads headline writers to refer now to Novak with epithets reminding us of her “enduring magnificence.” ’33 Further, the two women were, in fact, friendly on the set of Pal Joey: Hayworth sympathized with Novak (who was just a few years into her contract at Columbia), and Novak admired the film veteran. Pal Joey was Hayworth’s last film with Columbia and marked the end of a bitter relationship with Cohn and with the studio. Her last performance with Columbia is ­indicative of the kind of image Cohn tried to project, even as Hayworth ‘rejected the binding stereotype that the Love Goddess represented.’34 Hayworth’s Vera undergoes a similar sort of ‘softening’ as Novak’s Linda, though, for plot purposes, she remains the foil to the relationship between Linda and Joey. Vera can’t quite achieve ‘playmate’ status because she is a bit too smart and a bit too ruthless: she ‘owns’ Joey for a good part of the

264   musical theatre screen adaptations film (despite Joey’s insistence that ‘nobody owns Joey but Joey’). Her age is also a barrier to ‘bunny’ or ‘mouse’ status, although Rita Hayworth was in fact a few years younger than Sinatra. And yet any power she has—whether it is through status, money, or sex— is consistently neutralized. The song ‘Zip’ demonstrates this well. ‘Zip’ presents perhaps the biggest alteration to an existing song in the screen version of Pal Joey. It was originally sung by Melba, a smart, cynical journalist who interviews Joey about his newly opened nightclub. In the course of the interview, and in line with his morally defunct character, Joey begins making up stories about his fictional highclass upbringing. Like most of the characters in both the stage and screen versions, she sees right through Joey, but rather than call him out on it, or indulge him, she simply brushes him off. Melba intimidates Joey, something even Vera can’t accomplish. Melba is witty (thanks to Hart’s clever lyrics), portrayed as somewhat masculine, and knows what she wants in a drink (‘Double St. James and water, no ice’).35 Sadly, Melba doesn’t exist in the screen version, or even in the most recent Broadway revival.36 The song depicts Melba’s interview with the famous burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee, a pop culture reference that resonates with the adult nature of the show.37 Sung from the perspective of Gypsy Rose, Melba paints her as an ironic intellectual, a quality Lee played up in her own acts.38 Like the character she sings about, Melba is transgressive in the way that she embodies femininity. Rather than play up the ‘naturalness’ of sex, Melba’s performance promotes the idea that sex, or sex acts, might in fact be quite staged. Rodgers’s music is clever, and it amplifies the disaffected, cynical personality of Melba/Gypsy Rose. The opening lines of the introduction, for instance, comprise a repetitive, singsongy, broken B-flat major chord. This gives the effect of someone ‘going through the motions,’ perhaps like a bored child at the piano, letting her thoughts stray to playtime (see Figure 11.5). This contrasts delightfully with the decidedly un-childlike character of our soon to be introduced stripper, and yet they are both bored, ­mechanically going about their work. The true humour of ‘Zip’ comes from the deliberate juxtaposition between the act of stripping and the inner intellectual life of the fictionalized Gypsy Rose: ‘Zip! Walter Lippmann wasn’t brilliant today/Zip! Will Saroyan ever write a great play?/Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night/Zip! And I think that Schopenhauer was right.’ The humour is amplified when Melba—our hard-boiled journalist—pantomimes a striptease. Jean Casto was the original Melba, and she reportedly prepped for the role by attending (at George Abbott’s and Rodgers’s prompting) ‘every burlesque show on Broadway’ (see Figure 11.6).39 When Melba shifts into the character of Gypsy Rose in the last two measures of the introduction, most singers shift their vocal timbre to signal a new character.40 Jo Hurt, from the 1950 Columbia recording, sings the part of Melba and gives a fair representation of the disaffected journalist. Hurt excels at bringing out the humorous mind/body

Figure 11.5  Melodic introduction, Measures 3-6 of ‘Zip.’

adapting pal joey   265

Figure 11.6  Gene Kelly (Joey) and Jean Casto (Melba) in a Publicity still from Pal Joey (1940); photo by Vandamm Studio, 1940; NYPL Digital Collections.

disconnect through a distinction between timbres on the word ‘Zip!’ (which are alternately flat and bored, or nasal and flirtatious) and the rest of the lyrics (which she performs in a broad belt). The orchestral accompaniment also emphasizes the distinction, including exaggerated, muted trumpet ‘wha-whas,’ a clear reference to striptease, at the ends of phrases. As a character, Melba is the polar opposite of a playmate. Her mock striptease draws attention to the artifice of the seemingly sexy-all-the-time stripper and in doing so questions the authenticity of sex acts altogether. Hart’s biting lyrics—including the line ‘I don’t want a deep contralto/or a man whose voice is alto/Zip! I’m a heterosexual’—put the fictionalized Lee in the position of the knowing pursuer rather than the sexually ‘ready’ vessel for male sexual gratification. Melba doesn’t exist in the film; instead, Vera sings ‘Zip.’ This change marks a clear ­distinction between the stage and screen Veras: in the film, it is revealed that our sophisticated society dame was actually once a stripper known as ‘Vanessa the Undresser.’ Joey outs Vera at a society party (where he’s performing, and where he first meets her), and, somewhat against her will, convinces her to perform the song. This maneuver effectively takes Vera off her gilt pedestal—the audience is made aware that she was once part of the same working class that Joey now occupies, and the power dynamics between the two shift considerably. As in the original, the tune is performed as a mock striptease, but now Vera sings the song in the first person, about her own mind/body disconnect when stripping. The bulk of Hayworth’s version is dubbed over by Jo Ann Greer (as are the rest of her songs in the film), but Hayworth herself recites the introduction as a monologue, in a posh, affected manner, which, given her origins, we now know is a ruse. Some of the humour of the original introduction is lost, but Hayworth’s version brings out the sultry side—the sexually experienced side—of Vera’s character, which is amplified by Greer’s lush, teasing, warm voice, a stark contrast to the bright timbres of Jo Hurt

266   musical theatre screen adaptations (or anyone who has played Melba on stage since, including Elaine Stritch [1952]). Joey appreciates the performance, and we can see that her sexual charms are not lost on him. The lyrics of the screen version are also significantly altered. Given the references to contemporary pop culture (some which were out of date by that point), this is partially understandable, and, certainly, the PCA office flagged some of the original lyrics.41 But it seems that one of the primary purposes of changing the lyrics was to transform the irreverent, critical, somewhat ‘masculine’ Melba (and by extension, Gypsy Rose Lee) into our screen Vera, who has lost her claws in favour of a more Playboy-approved performance. What is lost is the bulk of Hart’s lyrical brilliance.42 Instead, the jokes are transparent and not nearly as funny. Take Hart’s caustic, culminating line: ‘Zip! It too intellect to master my art/Who the hell is Margie Hart?’ With each iteration of the ­chorus, our fictionalized Gypsy Rose references her stripteaser rivals: Margie Hart, Sally Rand, and Lili St. Cyr. In the film, Hayworth sings ‘Zip! It took intellect to master my art/Zip! Every movement from the heart.’ Hayworth’s performance is also self-reflexive—this scene immediately brings to mind another famous mock-strip performed by Rita Hayworth: ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ from her iconic Gilda, from 1946 (see Figure 11.7). Although performed by one of the most famous femme fatales of the 1940s, the lyrics to ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ also comment on the way that women function as scapegoats in film noir. Richard Dyer argues that this song—in addition to Hayworth’s star status, the film’s objectification of the character Johnny, and the fact that Hayworth is given a number of nonpartnered dance features (perhaps as a form of self-expression)—might allow for a reading in which Gilda allows Hayworth a degree of agency.43 Pal Joey, I argue, undercuts Hayworth’s agency.

Figure 11.7  Stills from Rita Hayworth’s mock stripteases: ‘Put the Blame on Mame,’ Gilda (1946); ‘Zip,’ Pal Joey (1957); Columbia Pictures.

adapting pal joey   267 ‘Zip’ not only comments on the character Vera but also on the star playing her, whose own status as a femme fatale was established by Columbia, a studio she was now on rocky terms with.44 Linking Vera to Gilda provides the subtext that characters who use sex as a tool/weapon are necessarily punished. It also places Vera in the position of being objectified by Joey, a relationship that was reversed in the original (indeed, Vera refers to Joey somewhat condescendingly as ‘beauty’ in both the stage and film versions). As Karen McNally has noted, Joey ‘forces her to revisit her relinquished identity as an erotic object and puts in place the power plays that will define their relationship.’45 In a direct way, this scene helps Joey regain power over Vera, while Vera makes herself vulnerable to both Joey and to the viewer. It’s a little hard to reconcile this difference, given our knowledge of the original character. The film Vera is made even more vulnerable through her performance of ‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,’ originally sung near the end of act 1 by Vivienne Segal, the original Vera. In its stage life, this song humanizes a hard-to-like character. The original Vera is a married woman, an experienced adulterer, and, at heart, a cynic where men are concerned. She is tough and seems to appreciate Joey’s crude honesty. In this song, Vera acknowledges Joey’s flaws and seems to be faintly baffled by her affection towards him. She also expresses, in language largely censored in the film, her appreciation for his sexual prowess, summed up in the line ‘horizontally speaking/he’s at his very best.’46 The song is also one of passionate infatuation. As Geoffrey Block has argued, the ­repetition in the opening four measures of the refrain, reaching compulsively towards the tonic five times before cadencing at measure 5, perfectly accommodates Hart’s obsessive lyrics: ‘wild again!/Beguiled again!/A simpering, whimpering child again.’ The lyrics, in Block’s words, communicate ‘the society matron’s idée fixe,’ though, as he points out, Rodgers would have written the music first, and Hart would have followed with the lyrics.47 Typical of tin pan alley song form (this song is organized into an AABA structure), the A sections of the tune are thematically in contrast to the B section: in this case, the refrain represents Vera’s rapturous longing, while the bridge (B) seems to represent her self-awareness (the melodic contour of the bridge is the reverse of the upwardreaching A section: the tune repetitively turns downwards, perhaps indicating that Vera is, ultimately, grounded in reality). While humanizing, this tune also demonstrates that even in the midst of infatuation, Vera is self-aware—and perhaps a little disgusted with herself for falling prey to Joey.48 Depending on the performer, Vera is depicted as selfpossessed but infatuated (as in Vivienne Segal’s performance on the 1950 Columbia record), tough and diva-like (as in Patti Lupone’s performance on the 1995 City Center Encores! cast album), or worldly yet tragic (as in Stockard Channing’s performance in the 2008 Broadway revival). In all cases, Vera is a multidimensional character who is somewhat ambivalent about her feelings towards Joey. Rita Hayworth’s performance of the tune, however, dispenses with Vera’s characteristic self-awareness and instead relies on her own ‘love goddess’ star image, which was cultivated, and exploited, by Columbia. Numerous scholars and critics have noticed that her costume in this scene—a yellow silk and lace negligee—is reminiscent of the

268   musical theatre screen adaptations outfit featured in her famous ‘pinup’ photo from 1941, published in Life magazine. Other references to the star’s glory days are also made. Karen McNally makes the case that Hayworth’s strategic hairstyling in Pal Joey was in contrast to her typical image: ‘by tying up and taming the star’s trademark long, flowing hair, the film suggests that Hayworth’s days as a misunderstood femme fatale may be behind her.’49 And yet in the beginning of this scene, her hair flows freely: here she is much more ‘love goddess’ than ‘society matron,’ and more easily fits the Playboy ideal. What’s particularly telling about the scene is that while many of the lyrics are censored, Hayworth’s performance is overtly sexual: this is communicated through Hayworth and Greer’s vocals, Hayworth’s gestures, and strategic film cuts. The tune begins with a sultry, spoken introduction (spoken by Hayworth, as in ‘Zip’), as Vera rolls atop her bed, stretching suggestively for the camera: ‘He’s a fool and don’t I know it/But a fool can have his charms/I’m in love and don’t I show it/Like a babe in arms.’ This morning-after scene is full of innuendo, even without the original lyrics. Jo Ann Greer’s voice enters on the lyric ‘Men are not a new sensation,’ and Vera begins her morning routine: putting on her dressing gown, brushing her hair, pinning it up, taking tea, and eventually disrobing (on the line ‘the way to my heart is unzipped again’) before entering the shower. Here the sexual thrill is played up by mirrors, and quick camera cuts that barely avoid any nudity.50 Since the original scene from the stage show doesn’t include any of the aforementioned visual cues (it was originally set in a tailor shop), this scene was not altered to satisfy the censors. On the contrary, Hayworth’s performance of ‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered’ is meant to satisfy the typical sorts of roles Columbia afforded her. Though Vera seemingly expresses her own sexual desire, a scene like this undercuts her agency. As Dyer has said of Marilyn Monroe, her image reinforces a Playboy-approved attitude that women’s sexuality is for men: the discourse on Monroe’s body ‘is not referring to a body she experiences but rather to a body that is experienced by others. . . . [B]y embodying the desired sexual playmate she, a woman, becomes the vehicle for securing a male sexuality free of guilt.’51 Ultimately, Vera’s three-dimensional inner life—conveyed partly through a worldwise cynicism and her unexpected affection for Joey—is reduced to a clichéd, two-dimensional portrayal of feminine desire.

Joey’s Charm: The Swinging Bachelor The sexual power dynamics of Hayworth’s scenes are fascinating when compared to Sinatra’s performance of ‘The Lady Is a Tramp,’ where Joey willingly objectifies himself. Like ‘My Funny Valentine,’ ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’ is from Babes in Arms (1937). In Babes in Arms the song was sung by the character Billie (Mitzi Green), a young girl who proudly rejects typical constructions of middle- and upper-class femininity. Sinatra’s version of the song transforms the gender dynamic by exploiting the two meanings of the term ‘tramp.’ His performance reveals yet another way that Joey’s

adapting pal joey   269 working-class identity is linked to Vera’s (a clever pairing to ‘Zip’). Dorothy Kingsley, the screenwriter, claimed that this song was chosen to advance the plot: ‘We wanted Rita to get together with Joey and have him tell her that he knew the type of dame she was, I happened to think of this Rodgers and Hart song, “That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp.” And when he looked at Rita and said, “that’s why the lady is a tramp,” I think the audience got the whole picture.’52 Though central to Joey’s philosophy—‘treat a dame like a lady and a lady like a dame’—his performance of this tune is a risk. Having already been snubbed by Vera— and prior to this performance, Joey goes to her estate to let her know that the only reason he was originally interested in her was because of her money—he rightly assumes that this atypical disregard for her social position will intrigue her. (There is a parallel to this in the original stage production, though instead of coming to her house, he calls Vera on the telephone and tells her to ‘go to hell.’) When she arrives at the club after hours and requests a song, it’s a way of both exerting her power over Joey and letting him know that his earlier behaviour intrigued her. The two uses of the term ‘tramp’—associated both with overt sexuality and/or prostitution and with the free-spirited hobo—reveal a great deal about Joey’s relationship with Vera: he is clearly offering her his sexual favours in return for her funding of his club, but he is also aligning himself with her working-class roots, which the lyrics regard as virtues (both of them like the ‘free, fresh wind in [their] hair’). The careful balance with which Joey expresses his own freedom, while simultaneously offering it to Vera, is ­indicative of the power relations of the film, which are much more straightforward in the stage version (Rita Hayworth, after all, was a major, if aging, sex idol). The performance of the song, despite the lyrics, emphasizes that he is offering himself—namely, his body—to Vera. This is underscored when, at the bridge, he leaves the piano bench, and displays himself at the front of the stage, eventually leaning over her table, circling her, and, as Karen McNally observes, approaching her ‘in a style similar to a flirtatious striptease act.’53 At one point he spreads his arms wide (as a gestural articulation of the lyrics, which he leaves out), offering himself. After the performance, she accepts his proposal, saying ‘Come now, beauty,’ and takes him to her yacht. Despite the lyrics, it is Joey who plays the part of the ‘tramp.’ The parallel scene on stage happens entirely through dialogue; after he insults her, she slaps him, but soon after says ‘Come on.’ He replies ‘Where to?’ and her answer is pure, self-aware Vera: ‘Oh, you know where to. You knew it last night. Get your hat and coat. I’ll be waiting in the car.’ * * * Though not addressed in this chapter, it would be worth further considering, as Karen McNally has, the inconsistencies in Joey’s ‘swinging bachelor’ character, an interesting counterpoint to characterizations of the female leads (there are many inconsistencies. For one, he is securely working class and conspicuously without the bachelor pad. For another, he is routinely objectified).54 What is clear, however, is that by 1957, Joey is not nearly as subversive as he was in 1940. This is due in large part to shifting conceptions regarding masculinity, which tended to valourize, rather than demonize, Joey.

270   musical theatre screen adaptations Richard Rodgers seems to have been aware of the shifting climate as early as 1951. In an interview in anticipation of the 1952 revival, he remarked: ‘[Since the 1940 premiere of Pal Joey] characters in musical plays have become more human, and the attitude of the public toward these characters has become more human, too. It’s very possible that Joey will have more friends today than he did eleven years ago.’55 He was right, though he might not have anticipated that Frank Sinatra would be the star to immortalize Joey, who in turn helped immortalize Sinatra. To underscore this point, consider a quote by John O’Hara. When asked if he had seen Frank Sinatra as Joey, he remarked, ‘I didn’t have to see Sinatra: I invented him.’56

Notes 1. Frank Sinatra, in an early trailer for Pal Joey (1957). Columbia Pictures, ‘Pal Joey Trailer,’ online video clip, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-chWouJQflw, accessed on 14 September 2014. 2. Indeed, Vera muses on the charms and practical functions of men in the song ‘What Is a Man?’ (‘What is a man?/Is he an ornament/useless by day/handy by night?’). This song was cut from the film. 3. It’s true, however, that despite being the only virtuous character on stage, Linda is portrayed as naïve at best and empty-headed at worst. Rodgers said: ‘There wasn’t one decent character in the entire play except for the girl who briefly fell for Joey—her trouble was simply that she was stupid.’ Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 200. 4. Before working on Pal Joey, Sidney’s stage-to-screen musicals included Annie Get Your Gun (1950), Show Boat (1951), and Kiss Me Kate (1953); Kingsley’s included Girl Crazy (1943), Kiss Me Kate (1953; with Sidney), and the screen-to-(eventually)stage Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). 5. Daniel O’Brien, The Frank Sinatra Film Guide (London: Batsford, 1998), 102, 6. In a letter from Harry Cohn to George Cukor, who was slated to direct the film as early as 1954, Cohn notes that he met with Brando: ‘He was forthright, friendly and simple. . . . I had a very friendly and helpful talk with Richard Rodgers this morning. He is enthusiastic about the notion of Brando playing the part. He did make the observation that he hoped Brando could be light enough.’ This is an interesting comment, in view of the fact that Brando would play Sky Masterson in the MGM film version of Guys and Dolls the following year (1955). Cohn goes on to say that he also heard back from Mary Martin, who was considered for the role of Vera: ‘She could not imagine herself playing it.’ Harry Cohn, letter from Cohn to George Cuckor, 2 May 1954, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 7. Though Hermes Pan choreographed the diegetic club numbers and the ‘dream’ sequence at the end of the film (loosely tied to the dream ballet that closed the first act of the stage show), none of Bob Alton’s original choreography remains. 8. In an unpublished interview held at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Kelly describes the paradox inherent to Joey: ‘Joey had to be attractive, and I had to make him attractive, so I had to dance well. . . . That created a bit of a paradox. Just because I could only get a job in a fourth-rate nightclub, I couldn’t then dance like a fourth-rate dancer. So

adapting pal joey   271 I had to start thinking about that problem. . . . So we combined, Mr. Alton and myself, some things like unusual and energetic steps that might be done in a kind of a cheap act, but would be exciting at the same time.’ Gene Kelly, Oral History Project of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library (NYPL), interview by Marilyn Hunt, 10–14 March 1975. 9. Joseph Breen, letter to Harry Cohn, 14 February 1941, Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration (PCA) records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. 10. Breen, letter to Harry Cohn, 14 February 1941. 11. Dorothy Kingsley, interview with Leonard Spiegelgass, in ‘Fade in . . . Fade Out. A Writer’s Retrospective’ (1970). Transcript held at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. 12. Richard Rodgers, ‘ “Pal Joey”: History of a Heel,’ in the New York Times, 30 December 1951. 13. O’Brien, The Frank Sinatra Film Guide, 104. 14. Three of the most visible, by the decade’s end, were William Atwood, George B. Leonard, and J. Robert Moskin’s The Decline of the American Male (Random House, 1958); Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s ‘The Crisis of American Masculinity,’ in Esquire, November 1958; and Philip Wylie’s ‘The Womanization of America,’ in Playboy, October 1958. 15. James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 16. Karen McNally, When Frankie Went to Hollywood: Frank Sinatra and American Male Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 133–169. 17. For a thorough, enlightening exploration of the gender roles promoted by Playboy, see Carrie Pitzulo, Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 18. An article from Playboy’s inaugural issue, titled ‘Miss Gold-Digger of 1953,’ criticized alimony laws; another, titled ‘Open Season on Bachelors,’ warns men off marriage. For more, see Pitzulo, Bachelors and Bunnies, 23–24. 19. McNally makes the important point that Sinatra’s persona didn’t always line up easily with Playboy’s ‘swingin’ bachelor’ archetype; her chapter on The Tender Trap and Pal Joey aims to reveal the contradictions in Sinatra’s Playboy persona, principally his unstable class status (in contrast to the middle-class aspirations of Playboy) and his routine objectification in film. McNally, When Frankie Went to Hollywood, 133–169. 20. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, eds., Dictionary of American Slang (New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1967), xi–xii. This passage is quoted in Rick McRae’s informative ‘ “What Is Hip?” and Other Inquiries in Jazz Slang Lexicography,’ in Notes 57, no. 3, 575. 21. Frank Sinatra, ‘Pal Joey Trailer.’ 22. The term ‘gasser,’ for instance, is defined in Robert S. Gold’s A Jazz Lexicon: ‘by analogy with the immobilizing effects of being, literally, gassed,’ and is cited as ‘current since c. 1942.’ References for the term include The New Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary (1944), and Down Beat (28 July 1948). A Jazz Lexicon (New York: Knopf, 1964), 119–120. 23. In a letter to William Maxwell, who took over as fiction editor at the New Yorker in 1936, O’Hara complained that Harold Ross, New Yorker editor-in-chief who roundly criticized his use of slang, didn’t in fact understand it. ‘I was the first person ever to do a piece about double talk, and God knows a lot of people still don’t know what it is, but that was several years ago that I did the piece . . . and several things in that piece have become established slang. It is a point of artistry with me.’ John O’Hara in Matthew J. Bruccoli, The O'Hara Concern: A Biography of John O'Hara (New York: Random House, 1975), 152.

272   musical theatre screen adaptations 24. For more on the normalization of the ‘girl next door,’ see ‘Inventing the Girl-Next-Door: The Pulchritudinous Playmates,’ in Pitzulo’s Bachelors and Bunnies, 35–70. 25. Richard Dyer, ‘Monroe and Sexuality,’ in Heavenly Bodies, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 50. 26. In O’Hara’s original Joey story, which was translated fairly faithfully to the stage, Joey meets Linda while she’s looking through the window at a pet shop. Like the film musical, he sizes her up, but unlike the film, he tells her an outrageous story about his fictionalized uppercrust childhood. A reference to this scene occurs in the film, but only after Joey sees her dancing in the club. John O’Hara, Pal Joey (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), 49–61. 27. Sumiko Higashi, Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading Photoplay (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 78. 28. Listen, for example, to the clarinetist in the introduction. The published piano vocal score by Chappell includes clarinet cues (original stand parts held by the Rodgers and Hammerstein Org. reveal these as being doubled at the third), but this solo performer improvises the call and response between the clarinet and the brass melody. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Pal Joey (New York: Chappell, 1962), 44. 29. On the 1995 City Center Encores! cast recording, Vicki Lewis, playing the part of Gladys, actually stifles a yawn in the introduction. 30. Rodgers states, in his autobiography, that ‘Larry and I were able to have fun writing numbers burlesquing typically tacky floor shows.’ Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages, 201. 31. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 108. 32. Adrienne McLean, Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 202. 33. McLean, Being Rita Hayworth, 203. 34. McLean, Being Rita Hayworth, 203. 35. This scene comes directly from O’Hara’s ‘Joey’ stories (this one titled ‘A Bit of a Shock’) and remains close to the original. In O’Hara’s story, though, Joey is much harsher in his appraisal of Melba’s looks: he refers to her as a ‘something,’ rather than a woman, and later says ‘I tho’t to myself Lesbo.’ His description of her dress is typical Joey: ‘She is wearing this suit that you or I wd turn down because of being too masculine. Her hair is cut crew cut like the college blood. She is got on a pair of shoes without any heels and a pr. of glasses that make her look like she lost something but gave up the hope that she will ever find it.’ In the short story, however, the real joke is on Joey, who later finds out Melba is in fact a conventionally attractive woman (‘for the 1st time in many wks I forgot about Lana Turner’). This last bit (the ‘shock’) didn’t make it into the Broadway version of the story (though O’Hara toys with it in a draft script) or into the film. Note: Joey’s shorthand and misspellings appear in O’Hara’s original stories. John O’Hara, ‘A Bit of a Shock,’ in Pal Joey, 175. 36. Martha Plimpton, who played Gladys in the 2008 stage revival, performed the number (admittedly to great effect). 37. In a coincidence that was not lost on journalists of the time, Lee’s sister, the then unknown June Havoc, was featured as Gladys in the original production of Pal Joey. Havoc was a child star in vaudeville (immortalized as Baby June in the largely fictionalized Gypsy), and had a difficult time transitioning after vaudeville died; Pal Joey was her first big break. As Havoc tells it, Lee was supportive of Havoc’s stage career, and cried tears of joy after seeing her perform in the Philadelphia tryout. The same could not be said for her mother (the infamous Mama Rose), who, according to Havoc, left after seeing the first act of Pal Joey. June Havoc, More Havoc (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 213, 209.

adapting pal joey   273 38. A performance of Lee’s intellectual (mock) striptease can be seen in the 1943 film Stage Door Canteen. 39. Jean Casto, ‘ “Zip”—It’s Strip Tease: But All She Takes Off Is a Heavy Tweed Coat,’ New York Post, 29 March 1941. 40.  Take, for instance, Jo Hurt’s version on the 1950 Columbia studio release, or Elaine Stritch’s version on the 1952 Capitol studio recording of the revival cast. 41. In a letter to Harry Cohn contained in the Production Code files, Joseph Breen reveals that an early script had Linda perform ‘Zip’: ‘It will be absolutely essential that there be no objectionable movements where Linda is pantomiming a strip tease.’ Joseph Breen, letter to Harry Cohn, 4 May 1954, Production Code Administration records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. 42. According to the Production Code file, Stanley Styne, son of Jule Styne, wrote the revised lyrics. Styne, in a PCA note dated 12 February 1957, Production Code Administration records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. 43. Richard Dyer, ‘Resistance through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda,’ in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 2nd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 115–122. 44. Hayworth’s rocky relationship with Columbia studio head Harry Cohn is well documented. Pal Joey was her last film as a contracted actor with the studio. 45. McNally, When Frankie Went to Hollywood, 163. 46. This line was adapted to read ‘Romantic’lly speaking/He’s at his very best,’ but didn’t end up in the film. One of Hart’s favourite lines, however, which made its way past the Production Code censors and into the film despite the double-entendre, was ‘he’s a laugh, but I love it/because the laugh’s on me.’ 47. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 107. 48. Vivienne Segal’s performance, on the 1950 Columbia record, brings out this mild selfdisgust: on the lyric ‘Seen a lot/I mean a lot!/But now I’m like sweet seventeen a lot,’ she mockingly affects a girlish voice on the words ‘sweet seventeen.’ 49. McNally also notes that this was Hayworth’s last film with Columbia under contract. Other scholars and critics have noted Hayworth’s uneasy relationship with Columbia’s head, Harry Cohn, which, in addition to life circumstances, likely resulted in Hayworth’s exodus from Columbia. McNally, When Frankie Went to Hollywood, 165. 50. The Production Code note from February of 1957 warns that ‘care will be needed in this scene where Vera takes a shower, to avoid any undue exposure.’ In the end, the studio just barely heeded this recommendation. 51. Richard Dyer, ‘Monroe and Sexuality,’ in Heavenly Bodies, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge 2004), 39. 52. Dorothy Kingsley, interview with Leonard Spiegelgass. 53. McNally, When Frankie Went to Hollywood, 166. 54. See McNally, When Frankie Went to Hollywood, 133–169. 55. ‘ “Pal Joey”: History of a “Heel,” ’ New York Times, 30 December 1951, in The Richard Rodgers Reader, ed. Geoffrey Block (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 56. John O’Hara, in ‘Interview with John O’Hara,’ Morning Herald (Uniontown, PA), 15 August 1961. Also quoted in McNally, When Frankie Went to Hollywood, 158.

chapter 12

‘Too Da r n Hot’ Reimagining Kiss Me, Kate for the Silver Screen Hannah Robbins

Of all MGM’s well-loved adaptations of stage musicals, producer Jack Cummings and director George Sidney’s interpretation of Cole Porter and Samuel and Bella Spewack’s Kiss Me, Kate is regarded as one of the most faithful to its source material. Following the impressive reception of the original Broadway production, which was deemed a surprise hit for all involved, the film version was widely anticipated and drew in large audiences in the United States, Australia, and Europe. Billed as the first-ever musical to be filmed with 3D technology, it received almost exclusively positive notices, with eminent New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther proclaiming it ‘a beautifully staged, adroitly acted and really superbly sung affair—better, indeed, if one may say so, than the same frolic was on stage.’1 Reviewers particularly noted the impactful casting of MGM stars Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson in the leading roles of Fred/Petruchio and Lilli/ Katherine as well as the dance spectacles featuring Ann Miller and Tommy Rall. The review in the Hollywood Reporter was one of many to note that balance of song and text in Kiss Me Kate that finally allowed Keel an opportunity to demonstrate his full potential as a ‘big selling star.’2 Other accounts of the film noted that while the 3D technology added fun to the audience experience, the film was equally arresting when seen flat, and indeed Kiss Me Kate was widely distributed in its 2D format. The process of realizing Kiss Me, Kate on screen was not a simple one. Lemuel Ayers, Arnold Saint Subber (both producers), Cole Porter, and Samuel and Bella Spewack received several different offers (with their own creative priorities) before the film rights were secured by MGM. For example, in 1951, Bella Spewack briefly championed a hypothetical project with Columbia Pictures to star Rita Hayworth as Lilli, which Porter then quashed as a false rumour.3 Two other directors proposed undertaking a live recording of the stage production featuring the original Broadway cast. As such, it seems that there was no one artistic vision for a film realization of the musical. This could perhaps have allowed MGM potential licence to change Kiss Me, Kate in comparison to other screen translations of stage shows. However, the emphasis on recording the original Broadway

276   musical theatre screen adaptations production perhaps indicates that the rights holders were more interesting in preserving the stage text than updating it. Once the film rights were secured, there was some concern about how to cast Kiss Me Kate, and especially the part of Fred, appropriately. As part of the discussions of the Hayworth film concept, it is clear that Porter and the Spewacks’ attorney Edward Colton were not in favour of using dubbed voice recording in a film adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate; they anticipated that the film adaptation would feature performers who could deliver the songs with some verisimilitude. Alfred Drake, who originated Fred on Broadway, was screen-tested for the part and provisionally cast for the film. However, he claimed he was then discounted for holding liberal political views, which made him a liability during the rise of McCarthyism.4 In a recorded interview (later aired on the BBC), Keel recalled that although he was tested for Fred early on in proceedings, the producer Jack Cummings attempted to avoid casting him in the hopes of securing Danny Kaye or Laurence Olivier.5 In Keel’s estimation, they were looking for a performer who did not exist: ‘You are looking for an Olivier that can sing like Lanza or a Lanza who can act like Olivier and there isn’t anybody.’6 Cummings was ultimately forced to make use of Keel (who was also championed by Grayson) as the best available option. However, Keel recalled experiencing considerable stress and anxiety at the pressure to counteract the negativity associated with his casting. The MGM adaptation closely maintained the narrative of the original Broadway musical. Sidney created a sense of spectacle, bringing together a range of exciting choreography by Hermes Pan, compelling performances, and striking set designs (­referencing Lemuel Ayers’s aesthetic vision on Broadway). As a result, Kiss Me Kate is seen to be a ‘remarkably faithful’ adaptation of its source text,7 allowing audiences to experience on screen some of what they may not have been able to see if they had missed the show on Broadway. Yet in addition to addressing practical concerns including casting, there were obvious aspects of the original Broadway libretto and lyrics that could not be translated to film. Under the terms of the Hays or Motion Picture Production Code, references to and demonstrations of sexuality were considerably limited, impacting the lexicology of Kiss Me, Kate on screen. As such, some of Porter’s more explicit lyrics and references (e.g., to ‘the Kinsey report’—Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering research into human sexuality— in ‘Too Darn Hot’) were altered to suit more conservative regulations. Geoffrey Block provides a succinct summary of the significant points of difference between the stage text and the film adaptation in his monograph Enchanted Evenings.8 In his second chapter on screen adaptations of canonical musicals, Block particularly highlights the ‘cinematic expurgation’9 of Porter’s lyrics, the reordering of the songs, and the addition of a prefacing opening scene—a prerehearsal audition held in Fred’s luxurious apartment—as salient areas of change. This chapter investigates the distinct identity of Kiss Me Kate as a film that transmits much of the joy of the stage musical while also revealing some less appealing aspects of film adaptations of the period. The capacity for comedy, sumptuous set and costume design, visual effects (such as flame-eating in the 3D cut and exaggerated dance moves using strings and trampolines) in Kiss Me, Kate allowed Sidney to create a distinct visual

reimagining kiss me, kate   277 culture for the musical in film. However, the erasure of the African American cast members and the changes that removed the chorus from active participation in the life of the film, which intersect with the expansion of the character of Lois Lane, give this Kiss Me Kate significant areas of difference from the stage musical that have been largely ignored. Using the revisions to the cast—removing the chorus and the characters Paul and Hattie—as a framing context, this chapter reviews the two most widely discussed aspects of the film: Miller’s performance of ‘Too Darn Hot’ and the misogynistic potential of The Taming of the Shrew in Kiss Me, Kate. In so doing, it suggests that the charisma of Sidney’s adaptation lies in the conviction of our love for the score, the strength of the central ­performances, and the visual character of the film rather than in its deference to the original Broadway text.

Replacing the Ensemble: Community and Reflexivity in Kiss Me Kate There is a clear unity in the script amendments by Dorothy Kingsley and the changes made to the running order of songs in Kiss Me Kate (see Table 12.1). Whereas the stage musical is structured around ‘full ensemble’ numbers at the beginning and end of each act, this (arguably, stagey) feature of the original Broadway production has been largely eradicated from the film adaptation. Most notably, this has led to the recasting and ­rearrangement of ‘Too Darn Hot’ as a pseudo-Latin vamp performed by Ann Miller in the opening scene of the film. However, this alternative vision also diminishes the opening number ‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show’ to a gesture in the underscoring, cuts one of the least well-remembered songs ‘I Sing of Love,’ and substantially reduces ‘Finale Act One,’ replaced by a new segue reprise, ‘I Came and Wived It Wealthily in Padua.’ This final adjustment resulted in two important changes from the source text: (1) it removed Grayson’s opportunity to perform Katherine’s outraged virtuosic tantrum, repeated on  the word ‘never’ (after the ‘flute cadenza’ incorporated into Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor) and (2) reiterates the focus on Fred’s Petruchio as the narrator and orchestrator of The Taming of the Shrew in a manner that is not present in original Broadway script. The concept of ensemble in the original Broadway version of Kiss Me, Kate is defined by the backstage aspect of the musical. As such, ‘the chorus’ in Kiss Me, Kate contributes to the theatrical environment in which the narrative takes place. In ‘Another Op’nin’,’ Hattie and the chorus build the sense of anticipation, of place, and provide the first musical spectacle of the show. One might say that they establish the identity of Kiss Me, Kate to the audience before the domestic dramas interfere with the onstage performance of The Taming of the Shrew. The chorus and minor roles (Paul, Hattie, Baptista/Harry Trevor) establish the environment, which is then disrupted by the catalytic secondary characters (Bill, Lois, and the Gunmen) while the central lovers’ quarrel punctuates each

278   musical theatre screen adaptations

Table 12.1  Breakdown of songs in the original Broadway production and film adaptation Kiss Me, Kate (1948)

Kiss Me Kate (1953)

‘Another Op’nin, Another Show’ Why Can’t You Behave?’ ‘Wunderbar’ ‘So In Love’ ‘We Open In Venice’ ‘Tom, Dick Or Harry’ ‘I’ve Come To Wive It Wealthily in Padua’ ‘I Hate Men’ ‘Were Thine That Special Face?’ ‘We Sing of Love’ ‘Finale Act One’   ‘Too Darn Hot’ ‘Where Is The Life That Late I Led?’ ‘Always True To You In My Fashion’ ‘Bianca’ ‘So In Love (Reprise)’ ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ ‘I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple’ ‘So Kiss Me, Kate’: Finale Act Two’

‘So In Love’ ‘Too Darn Hot’ ‘Why Can’t You Behave?’ ‘Wunderbar’ ‘So In Love (Reprise)’ ‘We Open In Venice’ ‘Tom, Dick Or Harry’ ‘I’ve Come To Wive It Wealthily in Padua’ ‘I Hate Men’ ‘Were Thine That Special Face?’ ‘Finale Act One’ [abridged] ‘‘I’ve Come To Wive It Wealthily in Padua’ (reprise) ‘Where Is The Life That Late I Led?’ ‘Always True To You In My Fashion’ ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ ‘From This Moment On’ ‘So Kiss Me, Kate’: Finale Act Two’

Note: Titles in italics either indicate songs from the original Broadway production that were omitted from the film or are supplementary to the original Broadway score. Titles in bold highlight the songs that were moved in the organisation of the film.

aspect of the show (the production, the relationship between Bill and Lois, the r­ esolution of the Gunmen’s plot line, the performance of The Taming of the Shrew, etc.). Therefore, the centrality of this song is further demonstrated by its new placement as the very opening section of Kiss Me, Kate in Michael Blakemore’s revised text, which opened on Broadway in 1999. In lieu of the overture in the original Broadway score, the chorus builds the set, proffering the first metatheatrical gesture of the musical. (In the original Broadway script, ‘Another Op’nin’ closes act 1, scene 1 as the ensemble recovers the atmosphere of excitement after Lilli has stormed out and Fred has given his pep talk.) This gesture—having an ‘establishing’ opening number—is not unfamiliar to musical theatre audiences (e.g., ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ in Oklahoma! [1943] or ‘I Hope I Get It’ from A Chorus Line [1975]) and also in the opening sequences of many wellknown film musicals, especially those produced by Walt Disney Studios (e.g., Aladdin [1992], Hercules [1997], or The Princess and the Frog [2009]). However, the reflexivity of ‘Another Op’nin’ is the first indication that the ensemble exists like a contemporary American ‘Greek chorus’ in Kiss Me, Kate. To some extent, its role provides a relatively early model in stage musicals for the Aristotelian notion that the chorus is a character and essential to the identity of the work.10 It becomes a living audience for the details of the backstage storyline. For example, the assembled ‘company’—the principal and

reimagining kiss me, kate   279 secondary cast and attendant chorus—provide the first reaction when Lilli calls Fred a ‘bastard’ during rehearsals in act 1, scene 1. This is recapitulated in the act 1 Finale as Lilli/Katherine prepares to rebel against Fred and the gunmen holding her captive. In Gestures of Musical Theater, Bethany Hughes highlights the frequent misconception that perceives the chorus as ‘something that cleans up a musical, dancing and singing a bit while the important characters change costumes.’11 While Hughes’s chapter particularly interrogates the function of the chorus in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro, she introduces the idea of the chorus as a community—the chorus members frequently spectate or participate in solo numbers as dancers if not supporting vocalists. However, by taking the ‘major structural liberty’12 of creating a new opening scene in which Fred and Lilli review ‘So in Love’ while ‘Cole Porter’ (Ron Randell) plays at the piano, the film adaptation loses ‘the need’ for ‘Another Op’nin’.’ The details of the production, the love triangle between Fred, Lilli, and Lois, and the basic parallels between their Taming of the Shrew characters are each established, giving extra context to the tensions in final rehearsals. This also foregrounds Fred, Lilli, and Lois as the stars of Kiss Me Kate, meaning that the contrasting attitudes of leading actor, supporting actor, and ­chorus member are less necessary to the vocabulary of the film. Yet the film adaptation loses a detail of satire and reflexivity present in the stage musical by removing the chorus as a functional body in Kiss Me Kate. This absence damages the duality of the dramatic layers in which a stagehand who is a backstage witness to the backstage drama is also a Shakespearean player in The Taming of the Shrew performance. It also dissipates some of the reflexive humour in ‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show,’ echoed in ‘We Open in Venice,’ as structural landing points that acknowledge their function as establishing songs in musical architecture in the show. More gravely, the lack of a present and active ensemble and their music removes a meaningful context for one of the most progressive elements of the stage musical: the integration of two African American members of the backstage cast.

Erasing Paul and Hattie from Kiss Me, Kate In addition to the restructuring of the score to suit the filmic context, the MGM adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate recasts two secondary characters from the original Broadway show: Paul, Fred’s African American dresser, and Hattie, Lilli’s African American maid. In the stage musical, both characters are peripherally involved in establishing the central quarrel between Fred and Lilli that capitulates with the actors ad libbing on stage: Paul ­delivers Fred’s good luck flowers to the wrong love interest (to Lilli and not to Lois) and Hattie discovers and gives Lilli the accompanying card that reveals their intended recipient. Interestingly, Paul makes an assumption that Fred is still emotionally connected to his ex-wife, which parallels unused dialogue between Lilli and Hattie that makes clear she has joined the production in order to win Fred back.13 This is one of many symmetrical details that can be traced to the draft versions of the original

280   musical theatre screen adaptations Broadway libretto. However, it is also one superficial indication of the extent to which these characters are familiar with the emotional details of their employers’ lives. They are not isolated from the key details of the plot. More significantly, Paul and Hattie are fully integrated into the backstage crew and achieve considerable agency by carrying major song moments—‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show’ and ‘Too Darn Hot’—that have little to do with their race or social status. Both these songs come at significant structural points—the opening scenes of act 1 and act 2, respectively—and feature the chorus as supporting players.14 They also position Paul and Hattie as the leads of two potentially spectacular and show-stopping moments in Kiss Me, Kate. In the context of removing the chorus as a present community that frames and reacts to the interpersonal collisions in Kiss Me, Kate with diminished song moments, Paul and Hattie’s identities are changed. The vocabulary and demonstration of their individual statuses are absent and therefore, this negatively impacts the details of their characters, removing the progressivity of the original Broadway musical. For example, without ‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show,’ Hattie becomes another African American maid following the caprices of her wealthy white mistress. To contemporary spectatorship, it would be problematic and part of a negative cultural legacy to watch an African American servant mutely appear to collect Lilli’s clothes and look disapprovingly at Fred. This would also have potentially connotative associations to the Sapphire and Mammie stereotypes of protectively aggressive, emasculating, and servile African American women, which in Porter and Spewack’s Hattie are largely absent. Hattie’s movie incarnation, a prim, elderly French woman called Suzanne, seems superficially to prevent this regression from taking place. However, it is also indicative of the systemic racism that either negates the role of African American performers or removes their visibility altogether. This gesture undeniably highlights uncomfortable truths about the social context of film adaptations in early 1950s America (especially MGM’s film musical adaptations) while also drawing attention to the lack of visibility of African American performers in nonservile roles. In general terms, this detail of change in Kiss Me, Kate is indicative of a more insidious social context that facilitated the ­troubled trajectory of Lena Horne’s career at MGM. The framing details of Horne’s ­performance of ‘Love’ in Ziegfeld Follies (1946)15 is an obvious example of the problematic representation of ‘exotic temperaments’ that is partly echoed in the Havana scenes of Guys and Dolls as well as other film musicals. A brief reading of the film Kiss Me Kate might situate the alterations to Paul, who emerges as an aging and slightly comedic pastiche of an English gentleman’s gentleman, as similar to the treatment of Hattie. However, the reinterpretation of ‘Too Darn Hot’— Paul’s song number—is more complicated in the context of the Motion Picture Production code. Given the prohibition of any nonmarital sexuality for anyone on screen, the original context of ‘Too Darn Hot,’ in which Paul describes the unbearable heat by suggesting it is too hot for sex, could not have been directly translated to the film. Furthermore, there was also no precedent for casting an African American performer to carry a song about sex or love in an otherwise all-white cast. Similarly, laws prohibiting interracial marriage were still active in most states in America in 1953 when the film

reimagining kiss me, kate   281 was  released. While there is no implication of interracial sex in Kiss Me, Kate, the demographic of the cast would have loaded this performance because of a lack of alternative context. There is no question that Paul (even attended by his two black companions as on stage) would have been considered for the film in this way. The relative emancipation possible in the context of the original Broadway production allowed ‘Too Darn Hot’ to be a playful showstopper dominated by male dancers without causing offence.16 However, Porter revised many of the lyrics performed on Broadway and heard on the original cast album for the national tour. For example, ‘And blow my top [for my baby tonight]’ was replaced with ‘And play bebop.’17 ‘Too Darn Hot’ was already subject to censorship before reaching the screen, and yet, the method of reinterpretation present in the Sidney film also highlights other concerning aspects of racial portraiture in film musicals of the time. In the film adaptation, the recasting of this song from Paul to Lois, and therefore from male to female, immediately dissipated some of the nuance of Porter’s lyrics in ‘Too Darn Hot,’ sanitizing the thinly veiled allusions to male sexual experience (‘be a flop,’ ‘blow my top,’ etc.) in the original lyrics. The sung section of the song was considerably shortened and many of the remaining lyrics underwent further sanitization although subtler expressions like ‘I ain’t up to my baby tonight’ remained intact. Late in the dance sequence, we watch Miller tap frenetically, framed by mirrors so we see her body from multiple angles, accompanied by the bongos. As is shown in video e­ xample 12.1, the hands of the musician ‘playing’ the rhythm frame her dance so that this is a feature of the shot. This adds to the voyeurism of the moment and to the exoticization of Miller’s performance. Given that this number was originally interpreted by three African American performers, this becomes an uncomfortable gesture. However, when we situate this interpretation of ‘Too Darn Hot’ in the context of some of Miller’s other iconic dance sequences, it becomes clear that there is a pattern of design, which pairs her outstanding agility with crude exoticization. For example, during her performance of ‘Prehistoric Man’ in the film adaptation of On the Town (1949), Miller’s dancing is framed again by the spectatorship of other characters who follow her movements, provide a physical frame to her ‘on the spot’ choreography, and play drums from the museum exhibit to accompany her as can be seen in video example 12.2. In this last example, the supporting choreography crudely evokes a kind of tribalism that makes a subtle but uncomfortable connection between spectatorship, ­appropriation, and exoticism, which is supported by the percussion-led orchestration of the underscore. The fetishization of non-Western melodies and rhythms is certainly less evident in ‘Too Darn Hot.’ However, the obvious focus on Miller’s body, her physicality, and the Latin features of the orchestration clearly connect the sexual nuances of the l­yrics (even after censorship), the exhibition of the female body, and exoticism. In his article ‘The Gang's All Here: Generic versus Racial Integration in the 1940s Musical,’ Sean Griffin argues that MGM prioritized musicals in which the songs substitute conventional dialogue, meaning that the performers (of any race) needed to play character roles related to the plot.18 This, therefore, excluded actors of colour who might disrupt MGM’s wholesome American utopia as depicted in a film such as

282   musical theatre screen adaptations Meet Me in St Louis (1944). Griffin continues to demonstrate that in the early 1940s, Twentieth Century-Fox embraced a more vaudevillian structure of film musicals allowing performers of colour (including Lena Horne, Carmen Miranda, and the Nicholas brothers) opportunities to perform in static, staged, or ‘speciality’ numbers. While he acknowledges that the limitations of this structure allowed more conservative distributors to simply erase these performers from their screenings, Griffin also analyzes how artists like Miranda or the African American actor Bill Robinson (most famous for his work with Shirley Temple) exercised control over their performances off-camera as well as on screen.19 In this context, the erasure of Paul and Hattie highlights how Porter created a unique space for two characters of colour in the original Broadway version of Kiss Me, Kate. While ‘Too Darn Hot’ might be considered a speciality number for Paul and his supporting dancers in the stage musical, this song situates Kiss Me, Kate in present-day America in juxtaposition to the heightened Shakespearean performance onstage. Both ‘Too Darn Hot’ and ‘Another Op’nin’ ’ are integral to the framework of this musical (on stage) and to the crucial contemporaneous aspect of the Baltimore scenes throughout. Kiss Me, Kate would lack a rousing backstage ensemble number to open and frame act 2 before its next Taming of the Shrew scene if ‘Too Darn Hot’ were cut. The fact that both these numbers are carried by African American characters is of note and highlights this particularly limiting aspect of the film adaptation. It also intensifies the problematic exoticism of Miller’s performance of ‘Too Darn Hot.’ African American performers were not invisible in film musicals in the decade before Kiss Me Kate came to cinemas. Indeed, the Nicholas brothers’ performance with Gene Kelly in ‘Be a Clown’ in MGM’s musical adaptation The Pirate (1947) was the first ‘racially integrated number’ to be performed in this way.20 As ‘Be a Clown’ is contained as performance in The Pirate, it does conform to some of the limitations highlighted with the guest performances in the Fox musicals. However, it draws attention to a framework set up by MGM with a Cole Porter score that was entirely unrealized in the film adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate.

Lois Lane: Representing Sex under the Production Code Beyond the issues of fetishization and exoticization raised in the context of removing people of colour from Kiss Me Kate, ‘Too Darn Hot’ also provides a case study of the way that MGM navigated the representation of sex and liberal sexuality in Kiss Me, Kate. The narrative context frames Lois as a chorus girl (if not a nightclub performer) ‘at the Copa,’ which associates her with a different social framework than that of the other performers and enabled the costume designers to dress Miller in a spangled pink leotard. As she bursts into Fred’s apartment, she throws off a deliberately oversized raincoat to reveal the costume underneath. The film dampens the sexualization of this gesture, her subsequent

reimagining kiss me, kate   283 striptease (she removes and throws her gloves and jewellery at her audience), and the obvious emphasis on her dancing body in the context of the song’s lyric by creating comedic contrast between Lois and Lilli. There is an obvious aesthetic barrier created by their costumes and hair and makeup design as Grayson’s Lilli is buttoned-up in a beautifully tailored but modest black suit. Similarly, the strip details are made amusing by Lilli’s icy disapprobation of the performance taking place. This sequence is predicated on social norms in which demonstrations of sexualization and exhibitionism create class distinctions. Taken in isolation, the gestures that shape Miller’s portrayal of Lois seem exclusively tied to this film itself and as logically connected to the sexualized details of her character in the original Broadway show. However, as highlighted previously, Miller’s p ­ erformance builds on a consistent portfolio of roles, which have often included specific details that are also evident in her previous film work. For example, the standout ‘Too Darn Hot’ tap sequence is not unreminiscent of Miller’s performance of ‘Shakin’ the Blues Away’ in Easter Parade (1948) or the deliberately charged ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’ in the fashion tableau at the end of Lovely to Look At (1953). In Easter Parade, we see Miller pull away the drapes of her neon yellow skirt in the preface to the coming tap sequence (see Figure 12.1). Similarly, ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’ begins with a close-up tease of Miller’s leg appearing suggestively from behind a curtain. Later in this number, the supporting dancers (all male) watch her wind and position her hips so that the emphasis is not simply on Miller’s ability to dance but also on her legs as objects of interest. However, both these examples are framed as static performances where the audience is separate from the dance sequence. (Robert Lawson-Peebles also explains how Miller’s ‘Too Darn Hot’ costume and posturing have come after Rita Hayworth’s ‘Put the Blame on Mame, Boys’ in Gilda [1946] and Cyd Charisse’s cameo in the speakeasy section of ‘Broadway Melody’ in Singin’ in the Rain [1952].)21

Figure 12.1  Ann Miller releases her wrap skirt before the chorus of ‘Shakin’ the Blues Away.’

284   musical theatre screen adaptations Given the reemphasis of Porter’s lyrics for ‘Too Darn Hot’ from the original Broadway text to the film adaptation throughout the score, this early number establishes Miller’s Lois as the vehicle for the most sexualized details in Kiss Me Kate. Furthermore, the connotative association of her dance, the strip, and the allusions to sex in the song are made more palatable by establishing Lois’s backstory, polarizing her from Lilli, and making the song a cut number from the show. The connection to the exotic in the arrangement further distances ‘Too Darn Hot’ from any contrived realism in the scene. It also disconnects this audition sequence further from other parts of the film (set in the theatre) whilst conforming to the song-and-dance expectations associated with Miller and with the film musical vehicle more generally. It is worth noting that some of the nuances established in this original opening scene are threaded through Miller’s performance in the rest of the film. For example, Lois repeatedly lifts and parts her skirts to reveal her legs. Indeed, Hermes Pan’s choreography for ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ incorporates Bianca’s skirt into lots of the movement so that Miller is not simply working with her costume but featuring it (see Figure  12.2). Again, the potential sexualization of this moment is displaced with literalism of Bianca pursuing her suitors with a net. This performance is less about sex and more about the chase of catching one of her interested admirers. Miller’s Lois has some ‘smarts’ but is characterized on several occasions as genuinely stupid, which troubles her agency. Also, the film reframes one of Lois’s key solo songs ‘Always True to You (In My Fashion)’ so that she performs the number as a duet with Bill. In so doing, ‘Always True to You’ becomes about playful appeasement rather than as the capitulation of Lois’s characterization through the stage musical. As Bill poses some of the anecdotes in the verses to Lois, there is a structural change to the song that renders some of Lois’s encounters with wealthy suitors hypothetical. Furthermore, her consistent interaction with Bill, her deliberately false posturing (clasping her hands as though praying or reaching out penitently—mimicking the ‘virginal’ Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew), and Bill’s subsequent parody of her behaviour draw attention away from the content of the lyrics more generally (see Figures 12.3 and 12.4). This is a subtle shift from

Figure 12.2  Miller throws up her skirts during ‘Tom, Dick or Harry.’

reimagining kiss me, kate   285

Figure 12.3  Miller mimics the choreography Lois performs as Bianca during ‘Always True To You (In My Fashion).’

Figure 12.4  Tommy Rall (Bill) imitates her performance in a later verse of ‘Always True.’

the original Broadway script (and numerous other interpretations of this number)22 in which Bill leaves the stage before or during the first verse of the song. As a result of this stage direction, Lois regales the audience with playful and self-aware anecdotes about her various infidelities in direct parallel to Petruchio’s ‘Where Is the Life That Late I Led?’ The textual connection between these songs also affirms Lois’s agency, as she (unlike Petruchio) has no intention of modifying, or reason to modify, her behaviour. This is reinforced by Bill’s subsequent admission in the number ‘Bianca’ (cut from the film) in which he explains to the amassed chorus girls: ‘Off-stage I’ve found, / She’s been around, / But I still love her more and more.’23

286   musical theatre screen adaptations The shift in audience from stage to screen is significant because, once again, it interferes with the immediacy of the meaning of the lyrics. On stage, it is hard to misunderstand the playful insincerity of the repeated refrain ‘But I’m always true to you, / Darlin’, in my fashion’ and that Lois both enjoys her way of life and has no inclination to change. Indeed, in the recording of Michael Blakemore’s revised version of Kiss Me, Kate (first performed on Broadway in 1999 and recorded during the London transfer in 2001), Bill darts in and out of his dressing room during ‘Always True to You’ so that Lois directs the refrain to him and her stories about the men to the audience.24 In this example, Lois is seen to be caveating the truth behind Bill’s back, giving her reassurances a disingenuous character. However, in the reinterpretation on screen, we focus on Tommy Rall and Miller’s interplay, mirroring an earlier scene including the original appearance of ‘Why Can’t You Behave?’ (Porter modified the verse of ‘Why Can’t You Behave?’ to serve as the introduction of ‘Always True to You’ and Sidney’s adaptation capitalizes on this parallelism.) Indeed, on screen (and presumably to adhere to the code), Bill seemingly reproves Lois for her conduct. Her lack of fidelity is a point of concern, which is hardly the case in the original Broadway musical. Miller’s effervescence and undeniable skill adds a further glamour to Lois that is not inherently present in the libretto. The context of her previous performances established her as an effective and appealing secondary lead who could also facilitate the dance moments with ease and polish. The reworking of ‘Too Darn Hot’ can be interpreted as an opportunity to objectify Lois but it also serves as an incredible vehicle for Miller’s physical prowess, which sets her apart from so many of her contemporaries. Furthermore, it creates a new dance spectacle comparable to that envisaged in the act 2 opening of the stage show. To some extent, it highlights the craft of this opening scene, which establishes the key characters, their skills, their foibles, and frames the inevitable fallout that will result from Fred’s trying to satisfy both Lilli and Lois in the same e­ nvironment. It incorporates a short but striking performance of Porter’s emotive torch song ‘So in Love’ featuring Grayson and Keel (loosely reminiscent of their performance of ‘Make Believe’ in Show Boat [1951]).25 Read without context, ‘Too Darn Hot’ seems like a perfect flourish, characteristic of the static song and dance moments of parts of the original Broadway musical. Sidney acknowledges the nature of display, which forms part of the theatrical metatext of the musical. However, there are similarly uncomfortable details about the representation of Lois as a woman, as an object of desire, and of objectification that are noticeably regressive in comparison to Spewack and Porter’s original renderings of the role.

Reframing Emancipation on Screen Initially, it seems logical to suggest that MGM’s Kiss Me Kate reflects the period in which the film was made. The use of Ansco Color and 3D technology can be situated alongside the relentless technological competition between studios to compel audiences back to

reimagining kiss me, kate   287 the cinema during the rise of television and after the devastating effects of the Paramount decision (1948).26 (Porter’s song ‘Stereophonic Sound’ from Silk Stockings [1955] provides a humorous insight into this commercial imperative.) Again, the largely subtle changes to the narrative of Kiss Me, Kate seem shaped by the increasing social conservatism as the role of women and the agency of men were the subject of renewed social scrutiny. Furthermore, Alfred Drake’s alleged dismissal on the grounds of being too liberal forms part of a familiar picture of the contours of American society in the early 1950s. To some extent, this film reacts to each of these concerns—commercial, social, political—and puts it in a different context from that of the original Broadway production, which had opened less than four years earlier. In American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage, Maya Cantu situates the original Broadway version of Kiss Me, Kate alongside the gender politics of screwball comedies in a wave of positive and largely affirmative texts, which include empowered and active female characters.27 However, as has been explored earlier, the changes to Kiss Me, Kate for the screen seem to belong more with the ‘princess and prostitute’ tropes that Cantu highlights as part of the cultural zeitgeist of the 1950s, stemming from Cold War anxieties about the threat of ‘sexual chaos’ from women.28 This is partly demonstrated in the displacement of power from Lilli to Fred achieved in the film adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate. In the original Broadway musical, Lilli has wealth and social status, which is referenced at several stages in the libretto. She is able to poke fun at Fred, who has had limited commercial success while pursuing his ambitions as an actor/producer.29 This gives her important agency in a narrative that involves Fred’s successfully (if temporarily) manipulating Lilli through the threat of violence posed by the Gunmen. In the new opening scene of the film adaptation, Fred is clearly ‘successful and sophisticated,’30 another film and theatre star, which limits Lilli’s potential social currency in comparison to him. Robert Lawson-Peebles highlights Keel’s ‘characteristic chest-swelling masculinity’31 as a feature of his performance. Not only is Keel’s Fred disconnected from any former poverty he and Lilli experienced as young actors, but he is also given considerable distance from the woes of a struggling theatre impresario who cannot afford to pay off the IOU. His production of The Shrew is lavish: it involves a live donkey, special effects, and a travellator. Furthermore, Kingsley’s film script also references an understudy (Jeanie) who is expected to replace Lilli onstage. Therefore, the impact of her absence in this version is specifically personal rather than part of a rupture in the wider structure of Fred’s world. As a result of this, Lilli’s ‘power’ in the stage musical, which includes seriously ­damaging the opening try-out performance of Fred’s new venture, is significantly diminished in the film. Grayson’s Lilli remains a credible force of personality in confrontation with Fred. However, the film reduces the significance of her impact on anything other than Fred himself. Furthermore, the script develops the familiar trope—setting women against one other—which is only fleetingly realized on stage by having Lilli and Lois fight over parts in the opening scene. Similarly, Lilli reacts to Lois’s posturing and lifting of her skirts, competing with her at several moments early in the film. Whereas Lilli has no active interest in Lois other than as Fred’s possible girlfriend in the stage

288   musical theatre screen adaptations musical,32 she engages with details of Lois’s behaviour, how she carries herself, talks to Fred, and so on. In one of the promotional photos circulated for the film (also used as one of a set of lobby cards), Lilli and Lois’s faces are shown confronting each other as opponents as though in a still from the opening scene. As has been noted earlier, some of the sexual charge of ‘Too Darn Hot’ is negated by the contrast in costume and demeanour between Lilli and Lois. This example of promotional materials—of the visual culture associated with the film—deliberately polarizes these characters, limiting some of the nuance achieved on stage. While the details of female emancipation in Kiss Me, Kate sometimes consider the characterization of Lilli, most discussions centre on the potentially misogynistic overtones of the penultimate song in the score: ‘I Am Ashamed that Women Are So Simple.’33 For some, Porter’s musical setting of Katherine’s controversial closing speech in The Taming of the Shrew—‘Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow’—provides a detrimental frame to Fred and Lilli’s reconciliation at the end of the musical. As there is some debate as to whether it is possible to perform ‘the taming’ of Katherine in Shakespeare’s play as ironic, the fundamental message of Shakespeare’s original speech, which advocates a wife’s unfailing submission to her husband, presents obvious challenges to a contemporary feminist approach to The Shrew, and to Kiss Me, Kate. Followed through, this reading argues that both Lilli and Katherine are potentially subjugated to the tyranny of oppressive and damaging relationships at the end of Kiss Me, Kate. However, the musical is structured so that it is both simple and essential that we differentiate between Lilli and Katherine. We can acknowledge the intricately crafted narrative and character parallels developed by Bella Spewack and Porter in the original Broadway production without concluding that Katherine and Lilli eventually become the same character. To some extent, the film adaptation addresses some of the potential concerns raised when analyzing the libretto and score of the stage musical by de-musicalizing this part of the plot. Firstly, the problematic speech is framed by Fred delivering Katherine’s cue line with clear uncertainty about what Lilli is going to do or, vitally, to say, next. This is in contrast with the abridged 1958 Hallmark Hall of Fame television adaptation, starring Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison, in which Drake proclaims these prefacing lines with considerable exuberance. In the MGM adaptation, Grayson then speaks the abbreviated speech instead of singing it. It is striking that Porter’s simple but idiomatic melodic writing would have particularly suited her abilities but that this (like the operatic cadenza in the first act finale) was removed from the musical language of the film. Grayson’s ­performance of the speech is perhaps the least convincing ‘Shakespearean’ moment in the film; she appears to break character in the final lines of the speech (from Katherine to Lilli), smiling and then mouthing Fred’s name. This gesture is captured by a tight close-up on Grayson’s face in contrast to the wide-framed shots earlier, which show her with the rest of the cast and in perspective with the audience behind Fred watching her. As such, the film removes the potential musical appeal of the song and the dramatic currency this might add to the moment but also displaces the emphasis on the text by having Lilli and Fred acknowledge each other in their offstage personas. Kingsley and Sidney perhaps recognized the challenges of creating an ‘onstage’ environment where the backstage narrative is ever present and included this break of character to make Fred

reimagining kiss me, kate   289 and Lilli’s reunion more blatant than it can perhaps be interpreted in the original Broadway text. The details of Fred and Lilli’s personal relationship, such as her recognition of his character and his manipulation of temper, inform Kiss Me, Kate and shape our ­interpretations of equality, power, and the viable romance between the leading characters. When Lilli/Katherine pulls out Petruchio’s ‘little black book’ that he has previously consulted in ‘Where Is the Life That Late I Led?’ in the final moments of the film and tosses it away, there is a moment of mutual understanding that is crucial to the power play of this musical, which is far less comfortably demonstrated when addressing the gender politics of The Taming of the Shrew. In reality, the MGM adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate is not defined by its limitations. Lilli still carries out acts of rebellion. Lois continues to pay attention to male suitors other than Bill. Fred is emotionally affected by his lack of harmony with Lilli. Similarly, ‘Too Darn Hot’ includes exciting, visually arresting dance that might ‘stop a stage show cold.’ However, this film helps to reveal more complex aspects of the adaptation process than whether the narrative is identical to the original book or not. The role of the ensemble in Kiss Me, Kate is more complex than in some other metatheatrical musicals; it is both a collective that supports or carries larger musical numbers/sections of dialogue and is also made up of individuals who exist backstage and onstage, occasionally with small narrative functions (as with Paul and Hattie). The nature of film changes the layers of scale that are apparent in a stage production, contained by the scope of a single stage. Also, the presence of a ‘live’ audience during certain scenes in the film removes the necessity of the ‘onstage’ ensemble as participants of the drama. In order to demonstrate the metatheatricality present in Kiss Me, Kate ­cinematically, some of the stage mechanisms that create points of difference between ‘backstage’ and ‘onstage’ in the musical are less necessary in the film. Similarly, the artifice of the film is evident in the Shrew dance sequences (‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ and ‘From This Moment On’) when the edge of the stage and the structure of the proscenium arch vanish to allow for more expansive routines. While we lose some of the character of the score by losing the ‘voice’ of the ensemble in the songs, we gain some exceptional ­dancing, including Bob Fosse’s choreographic debut in ‘From This Moment On.’ This chapter does not argue that we cannot enjoy the MGM adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate but suggests that ‘fealty’ to the original Broadway production was not a primary focus of its creation nor the best measure of what it does well. Keel, Grayson, and Miller are presented as stars in the film, changing the nature of the relationships at the heart of Kiss Me, Kate. Unlike the original Broadway production, in which Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison were seen as commercial risks and relatively unexciting casting choices, MGM capitalized on the ‘bankable’ names at their disposal. However, this also created expectations about how these actors would be presented. (For example: there is notable contrast between Keel’s performance in the MGM adaptation and his careworn interpretation of the role in the later television recording made for the launch of British television channel, BBC2, in 1964.) The new opening scene provides a playful, reflexive opportunity for Grayson and Keel to sing ‘So in Love’ together while framed by trophies of Keel’s other film performances. This includes a still

290   musical theatre screen adaptations of Grayson and Keel as Magnolia and Gaylord in the MGM film remake of Show Boat (1951). Robert Lawson-Peebles describes this set dressing as ‘sketchily suggestive of contemporary movies,’ highlighting the painting of ‘Fred’ as Hamlet (directly referencing a familiar image of Laurence Olivier).34 Although he notes the cyclical dimension of this environment as drawing attention to the layers of performance—we are potentially watching Fred play Petruchio as he thinks Olivier might—Lawson-Peebles does not clarify how this scene deliberately draws attention to the identities of Keel and Grayson themselves, particularly during the song moment. Here we watch a contrived ‘rehearsal’ of the only sincere love ballad in Kiss Me, Kate while the mise-en-scene of the scene reminds us of Keel and Grayson’s previous performances (e.g., of the similarly reflexive ‘Make Believe’ in Show Boat). As such, the film presents the reflexive layers of performance that exist in Kiss Me, Kate in a new way, providing an alternative, more cinematic approach to the musical. The star dimension of this gesture adds to Miller’s tap performance for those familiar with her previous routines: we become aware of the performers’ identities which inform their interpretations of numerous film musical roles. Porter’s Taming of the Shrew songs are less suited to the extended tap spectacles associated with Miller whereas ‘Too Darn Hot’ is dominated by the dance music at the end of the vocal section. While there are limitations to MGM’s reimagination of this number, this decision also complements the framing of Grayson and Keel and builds on the metatextuality of watching actors playing actors performing a show. Although the 3-D rendering of the film continues to divide opinion, the additional sequence filmed to preface ‘We Open in Venice’ reveals the potential of this technology, when used sympathetically and idiomatically, to heighten special effects. It provides an interesting template when paired with the technique of tracking the movements of the dancers instead of capturing a static space in which the choreography is contained. As such, this Kiss Me Kate provides underestimated visual richness alongside more superficial directorial and cinematographic choices. Film scholar Richard Dyer defines entertainment in his writing on television revues (not dissimilarly structured to Kiss Me, Kate) as asserting ‘the fact of human energy in the vitality of the dance number, the pow of the singing, the snap of the humour, the sparkle of the sexuality—so many showbiz clichés.’35 This quality is as present in MGM’s Kiss Me Kate as was reported in the outstanding reception to the original Broadway production and of many stage revivals. The ‘faithfulness’ of the film is complex to determine. However, it is clear how Sidney, Kingsley, and the other creative team members involved attempted to construct Kiss Me Kate to follow the ‘fine singing, plus captivating personalities and performances, entertaining dancing, and stunning settings and costumes’ that had previously been praised on Broadway.36

Notes 1. Bosley Crowther, ‘The Screen in Review: “Kiss Me Kate,” an Inviting Film Adaptation of Stage Hit, Has Debut at the Music Hall,’ New York Times, 6 November 1953. Note that the stage musical has a comma in the title while the movie omits it.

reimagining kiss me, kate   291 2. W. R. Wilkerson, ‘Trade Views,’ Hollywood Reporter, 27 October 1953. See also Gene., ‘Kiss Me Kate’ (Musical-Color-2D and 3D), Variety, 22 October 1953; Brog., ‘Film Review: Kiss Me Kate,’ Variety, 27 October 1953 or ‘M-G-M Musical Is Splashy, Fast,’ Los Angeles HeraldExpress, 26 December 1953. 3. Letter from Bella Spewack to ‘Salem’ (Lemuel Ayers and Arnold Saint Subber), 19 July 1951, Sam and Bella Spewack Papers, Columbia University, New York. 4. James Klosty, ‘Alfred Drake on The Life That Late He Led,’ Show Music, Winter 1998–99, 25–27. 5. Howard Keel in interview, broadcast in Sheridan Morley, ‘Introduction to Kiss Me, Kate,’ Kiss Me Kate [live broadcast] BBC Radio 2, London, 5 October 1996. [This is available to hear at the British Library, London.] 6. Keel in interview. 7. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 315. 8. Block, Enchanted Evenings, 314–319. 9. Block, Enchanted Evenings, 317. 10. Other early examples include Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro (1947) and Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life (1948). 11. Bethany Hughes, ‘Singing the Community: The Musical Theater Chorus as Character,’ in Gestures of Musical Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance, ed. Dominic Symonds and Millie Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 263. 12. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evening, 315. 13. Kiss Me, Kate draft script (labelled ‘Kiss Me, Kate Script C with Notes’), 11 October 1948, Sam and Bella Spewack Papers, Columbia University, New York, 1-3-7. 14. Although this has not remained the case in all productions, the original Broadway production and published stage directions indicate that the three African American performers who lead ‘Too Darn Hot’ are joined by secondary lead Bill. 15. This sequence was directed by Lemuel Ayers, producer and designer of costumes and sets for Kiss Me, Kate. 16. It is perhaps worth noting that ‘Too Darn Hot’ was one of several songs in Kiss Me, Kate to be banned from public broadcast in Australia because of the nature of its lyrics. 17. This change (and others) is evident on piano-vocal scores for ‘Too Darn Hot’ in Porter’s papers at the Library of Congress. Porter amended the lyrics in pencil, replacing the Broadway versions with sanitized alternatives. ‘Too Darn Hot’ fair copy, labelled ‘Road Co.,’ Cole Porter Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. These changes are also noted in Cole Porter, Kiss Me, Kate: A Musical Play, ed. David  C.  Abell and Seann Alderking (Van Nuys, CA: Alfred, 2014), 189–194. 18. Sean Griffin, ‘The Gang’s All Here: Generic versus Racial Integration in the 1940s Musical,’ Cinema Journal 42 (Autumn 2002): 21–45. 19. Sean Griffin, ‘The Gang’s All Here: Generic versus Racial Integration in the 1940s Musical,’ 35. 20. Griffin, ‘The Gang’s All Here,’ 39. 21. Robert Lawson-Peebles, ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare: The Case of Kiss Me, Kate,’ in Approaches to the American Musical, ed. Robert Lawson-Peebles (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 99. 22. There are examples available online and on DVD from the BBC Proms performance, the Opera North.

292   musical theatre screen adaptations 23. Cole Porter, Sam Spewack, and Bella Spewack, Kiss Me, Kate, in Ten Great Musicals of the American Theatre, ed. Stanley Richards (Radnor, PA: Chilton, 1973), 338. 2 4. Kiss Me, Kate, directed by Chris Hunt (n.p.: Arthaus Musik: 2010) [DVD]. 25. There is conscious reference to this section of Showboat as the set is dressed with ‘real-life’ and fake memorabilia from ‘Fred’s’ career. As such, there is a photo on the piano of Keel and Grayson as Ravenal and Magnolia, which is in the centre of the shot for a considerable section of the song. It is also featured later as they reach the final phrases and Keel comes to stand close to Lilli. Kiss Me Kate, directed by George Sidney (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003) [DVD]. 26. As a result of the capitulation of several legal cases, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that film studios could no longer own cinemas to show their films and saturate the market with their own output. Where companies like Paramount and MGM had previously offered subsidized distribution fees to the venues that the studios owned, they either had to form a new company as Paramount did in 1953 or sell their interests, causing a rise in the costs of showing films and a loss in relatively secure revenue from cinemas guaranteed to book a studio’s films. 27. Maya Cantu, American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage: Imaging the Working Girl from Irene to Gypsy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 128–130. 2 8. Cantu, American Cinderellas, 159. 29. Cole Porter, Sam Spewack, and Bella Spewack, Kiss Me, Kate, 208. 30. Robert Lawson-Peebles, ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare: The Case of Kiss Me, Kate,’ 96. 31. Lawson-Peebles, ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare,’ 104. 32. In one draft of the original Broadway script, Spewack created a rehearsal built around Lilli and Lois, which was cut before rehearsals. 33. See, for example, Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 20–21. 34. This frame is also noted in Robert Lawson-Peebles, ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare: The Case of Kiss Me, Kate,’ 96. 35. Richard Dyer, Light Entertainment (London: British Film Institute, 1973) 39. Some of this text has been reprinted as a chapter, ‘The Idea of Entertainment,’ in Only Entertainment, by Richard Dyer (London: Routledge, 2002). 36. ‘Plays on Broadway: Kiss Me, Kate,’ Variety, 5 January 1949.

chapter 13

‘A H um a n e , Pr actica l , a n d Be au tifu l Solu tion ’ Adaptation and Triangulation in Paint Your Wagon Megan Woller

The 1969 film version of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon offers an incredibly interesting case study on the subject of adaptation. The film represents the third in a line of Lerner and Loewe 1960s musical adaptations. As arguably the least respected and certainly the least faithful to the original stage production of the three 1960s adaptations, Paint Your Wagon highlights a number of questions and topics that occur in the study of Hollywood adaptations of Broadway musicals. By 1969, the Rodgers and Hammerstein film adaptations of the 1950s had set a standard of relative fidelity. The final Lerner and Loewe adaptation, however, adheres to an earlier model of Hollywood musicals, in which filmmakers freely made changes when adapting a show. Furthermore, Paint Your Wagon diverges from the approach to fidelity in My Fair Lady (1964) and Camelot (1967), both of which maintain a strong link with their stage counterparts. Yet, as I argue, Paint Your Wagon in its cinematic incarnation can be viewed as the culmination of themes and relationships explored in these earlier musicals. Therefore, the film is a fascinating adaptation study. This chapter explores several interrelated threads: Paint Your Wagon in relation to other Lerner and Loewe adaptations of the 1960s, the concept of fidelity through an examination of the changes made from stage to screen, and the effect of as well as reasons for many of these alterations. In particular, this chapter focuses on the changes made for the film surrounding the lead female character Elizabeth and her relationship with the two male leads. These changes reveal key intersections with sociocultural trends in the late 1960s, namely the so-called sexual revolution and second-wave feminism. Since Elizabeth sings only one song

294   musical theatre screen adaptations in the entire film, it plays a significant role in her characterization yet represents only one piece of the puzzle. My investigation considers Elizabeth’s characterization and her only song ‘A Million Miles Away Behind the Door’ as well as her polyandrous marriage with Ben and Pardner. Through this analysis, this article addresses several key issues that surround not only Paint Your Wagon but film musical adaptations more broadly. In conjunction with the work represented in this volume, this chapter dovetails with research on film musical adaptations that explores how the filmmakers balance fidelity with creativity in moving a work from stage to the screen. Investigating how much an adaptation adheres to its source provides an important starting point but represents only one aspect of adaptation theory. I find it essential to look at not only how adaptations change the source but—due to changing social conventions and expectations— why they must. Adaptation theory, as I use it, offers a framework that breaks away from value judgements rooted in ideas of fidelity, and therefore ‘authenticity.’ Since film ­musical adaptations have switched media, they engage in what Julie Sanders identifies as ‘a transpositional practice.’1 As such, the process can involve pruning as well as augmenting and reorganizing so that the adapted stage work succeeds onscreen. As Linda Hutcheon puts it, adapting a work for a new medium requires ‘recoding [the work] into a new set of conventions as well as signs.’2 Application of these ideas allows for a consideration of Hollywood adaptations on their own terms and emphasizes the reasons filmmakers make revisions. Key modifications often reflect not only differing practices but social implications. Since Hollywood movie musicals draw from theatrical productions, they use Broadway conventions by extension. However, they simultaneously strive to transform the original productions into cinematic entities. Historically, Hollywood filmmakers have handled the amount of fidelity to the ­original show in various ways. Geoffrey Block observes that before the Rodgers and Hammerstein era Hollywood musical adaptations were often ‘footloose and fancy free and at times unrecognizable vis-à-vis their stage counterparts’ while film adaptations since the famed duo ‘tend to be relatively faithful.’3 Yet throughout the 1960s, the myriad approaches to fidelity in Broadway film adaptations often seems tied to larger goals, which may reflect social concerns, more individualized agendas, or a mixture of both. The adaptation of Paint Your Wagon certainly displays intersections with interests shown by one of its original creators, Alan Jay Lerner, as well as sociocultural concepts from the late 1960s.

Triangulation in Lerner and Loewe Musicals The polyandrous marriage between Ben, Pardner, and Elizabeth in Paint Your Wagon reflects a fascination with triangulated relationships, which earlier Lerner and Loewe musicals similarly explore. It bears mentioning, of course, that love triangles have been

paint your wagon    295 prevalent in stories long before Lerner’s particular interest—to which the adaptations of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and even more strikingly, Arthurian legend attest. In  other words, there is certainly nothing new in Lerner’s interest in love triangles. However, his specific treatment of triangulation and its implications mean much. In particular, My Fair Lady and Camelot both contain similar sorts of love triangles as the film version of Paint Your Wagon, albeit presented more obliquely. Each of the earlier musicals introduces two overlapping triangles, which overtly involve or can be read as romantic or intimate relationships. Eliza Doolittle, Henry Higgins, and Freddy EynsfordHill comprise the most obvious ‘love’ triangle in My Fair Lady. At the same time, Eliza, Professor Higgins, and Colonel Pickering can be considered another t­ riangle of sorts. Similarly, Camelot focuses on the legendary tale of forbidden love and tragedy surrounding King Arthur, Queen Guenevere, and Sir Lancelot. Once again, another older friend enters the relationship tangle through the character of Pellinore. As Raymond Knapp discusses, Pickering’s relationships with Higgins ‘strongly suggests homosexuality or its second cousin, a variation of the buddy trope.’4 Pellinore, played by Robert Coote in the stage production (who also originated Pickering), provides a similar type of male-centred relationship with Arthur. In terms of the main love triangles, My Fair Lady and Camelot offer important references for the film version of Paint Your Wagon. Dominic McHugh’s study of character development in the genesis of My Fair Lady provides key insight to how Lerner altered both the character of Freddy and the relationship between Eliza and Higgins from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Importantly, McHugh notes that ‘Lerner watered down Freddy’s personality to render him an impossible choice of suitor for Eliza, thereby introducing the parting of ways with the published epilogue of Pygmalion, in which the two are united in marriage.’5 Additionally, McHugh reveals that Lerner toyed with making the romantic connection between Eliza and Henry Higgins more explicit but states that ‘in the end, Lerner tantalizes us with the possibilities of an alliance between Eliza and Higgins, but never quite delivers it.’6 Even so, the changes Lerner made to Shaw’s Pygmalion highlight the possibilities of romantic triangulation to a greater degree. In Camelot, Lerner once again adapts an existing source—this time taking on T. H. White’s version of Arthurian legend, The Once and Future King (1958). Lerner chose to focus on the doomed love triangle of Arthur, Guenevere, and Lancelot. In the stage version, Knapp identifies the unconsummated love between Guenevere and Lancelot as part of the musical’s idealism and its impossibility reflects the doomed nature of Camelot itself.7 Thus, Lerner’s Camelot builds on the idea of a love triangle, making it more explicit as well as a source of tragedy. Furthermore, the way in which the film adaptations specifically handle the love ­triangles in these musicals makes a strong case for Paint Your Wagon representing the symbolic (in addition to the literal) culmination of the 1960s Lerner and Loewe adaptations. My Fair Lady and Camelot are much more faithful to their stage counterparts than the film version of Paint Your Wagon. Yet how they handle romance, the concept of triangulation, and the implications offered by these relationships presents an almost linear progression from the earliest film adaptation to the latest.

296   musical theatre screen adaptations As in the stage production, two triangles form in the film version of My Fair Lady: Eliza Doolittle, Henry Higgins, and Freddy Eynsford-Hill as well as Eliza, Higgins, and Colonel Pickering. As mentioned above, the musical does not present Freddy as a ­serious choice for Eliza. Jeremy Brett, largely known as a British theatre actor, was cast in this pseudo-romantic role. At the time of filming, Brett had appeared in relatively few film roles. Notably, however, he played Count Nikolai Rostov in the 1956 film War and Peace, also starring Audrey Hepburn (who played Nikolai’s sister Natasha). At the beginning of the film, Freddy actually appears onscreen before Higgins; he accidentally bumps into Eliza, spilling her flowers. While he apologizes, Freddy almost immediately dismisses her. In fact, they make very little impression on each other in general. Eliza, too, only cares that her flowers have been ruined. In contrast, the audience soon learns that Higgins notices her and her atrocious accent, finding it fascinating. From the outset, Freddy overlooks a lower-class flower girl while Higgins is drawn to her. Freddy does not appear onscreen again until about an hour and twenty minutes after the first brief encounter when he becomes smitten with Eliza at the Ascot races. Eliza, now cleaned up and dressed well, attracts Freddy with her good looks and amuses him with her unconventional behaviour. This encounter, of course, leads to Freddy’s only song, ‘On the Street Where You Live.’ One of the hits from the Broadway production, the lovely song has a catchy lyrical tune and is highly extractable. ‘On the Street Where You Live’ had already been popularly recorded by the premiere of the film adaptation. Vic Damone’s version reached number 4 on the Billboard charts, making it the most popular version of the decade. And in 1964, Andy Williams had a version that reached number 3 on the adult contemporary chart and number 28 on the Hot 100. Thus, the song was quite well known at the time of the film’s release. ‘On the Street Where You Live’ represents some of the best singing in the film without the more personal, narrative connection of several of the other songs. Although Jeremy Brett could sing, the studio chose to dub ‘On the Street Where You Live’ with tenor Bill Shirley.8 Shirley had experience on radio as well as other film dubbing and provided the singing voice of Prince Phillip in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959). It seems that the studio was taking no chances with an already popular hit. Once the opening verse ends, this song could be sung by anyone about anyone. Thirty minutes after ‘On the Street Where You Live,’ we discover that Freddy spends his time loitering on the street of Higgins’s house, and he reprises the song. Eliza finally appears (as he sings ‘any second she may suddenly appear’ while looking away from the house). In an attempt to woo her, Freddy sings a romantic verse, which Eliza interrupts with ‘Show Me.’ The humour of this song comes from Freddy’s attempts to act while Eliza constantly obstructs him. While her words ask him to show his love, her actions clearly demonstrate that she does not truly want it. Freddy has a remarkably unceremonious final appearance in the film. He comes to collect Eliza after she has tried to go home and discovered she no longer belongs. Practically speaking, a suitor who appears onscreen for less than half an hour in a nearly three-hour film makes less impression than characters with more screen time. The audience does not have the time to become emotionally invested in the Freddy/Eliza relationship, despite his charming song. On the surface,

paint your wagon    297 Freddy appears to be a lover on the order of Lancelot or Pardner. However, he never quite makes the grade. Higgins’s obvious dismissal of the younger, attractive rival makes this abundantly clear. In their final argument, Eliza makes two threats to Higgins: to marry Freddy and to work for the Hungarian language expert. In the moment, Higgins responds more passionately to the second threat. In his rant during ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,’ Higgins assumes that any marriage between the young couple would be doomed to fail, even reveling in the possibility. Furthermore, Higgins makes no objection to Eliza marrying another man—rather, he rejects a potential marriage with Freddy specifically because he feels that the young man is not good enough for her. In fact, Higgins twice mentions Eliza marrying. The first instance occurs after the ball when the uncertainty of her future upsets Eliza. Higgins points out that Eliza is attractive and now suited to marry an eligible man. The second instance is even more telling: Higgins suggests that Eliza may marry Pickering. While Eliza dismisses Pickering as too old, the suggestion alludes to the already comfortably established triangle. Eliza has been living with not one—but two—‘confirmed, old bachelors.’9 Although Lerner gives hints as to the potential relationship between Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, Pickering forms an important part of the picture. The threesome are nearly always together, and Pickering shares in many of their key moments. For examples, the ‘Rain in Spain’ number is not a private moment simply between Eliza and Higgins but all three of them. Additionally, Pickering, not Higgins, acts as Eliza’s public escort at both Ascot and the Embassy Ball. Furthermore, Eliza freely admits to Mrs Higgins that Pickering’s courtesy taught her how ‘ladies and gentlemen behave towards one another.’10 While meant as a barb to Higgins, the behavioural contrast between the two confirms the statement; Pickering coaxes Eliza with politeness and kindness while Higgins acts boorishly towards everyone. When Eliza leaves the house, both men storm around trying to find her. And while Higgins (selfishly and ­typically) assumes Pickering’s concern is on his behalf, Pickering states in no uncertain terms to Mrs Pearce that he will miss Eliza’s presence. Little romance—and even less sex—are apparent in this triangle and yet it is the more viable of the two. Eliza, Higgins, and Pickering live together comfortably. Shown all along with no ceremony whatsoever, they form the acceptable triangle, and we are given no reason to believe that this will change. When Eliza returns, the film ends with just her and the Professor at home, but the missing member of the household will certainly return and show his delight. In some ways, their living arrangement is a precursor to the three-way marriage in the film version of Paint Your Wagon. Two men live with a beautiful young woman, content to share her affections with the other in a pleasant home environment. Although Camelot similarly remains quite faithful to the 1960 Broadway stage production, the film enhances the sexuality inherent in the love story between Guenevere and her two suitors. As I argue elsewhere, the film brings the feelings between Lancelot and Guenevere out of the ideal and into the earthly realm, from courtly love to consummated lust.11 Through the use of bodies and other visual cues, the film strongly implies that Guenevere has had a sexual relationship with both Arthur and Lancelot over the course of the time period depicted. While the stage version certainly highlights the

298   musical theatre screen adaptations romance, albeit in an idealized manner, the 1967 film of Camelot takes the triangulation a step farther. Guenevere takes two lovers; Lancelot and Arthur share a knowledge of both her body and her mind. To some degree, each suitor acknowledges that the other knows about the illicit affair, thus tacitly agreeing to continue sharing Guenevere’s affections until forced otherwise by outside forces. The shift in the portrayal of the love ­triangle from the Broadway to the Hollywood production suggests Lerner’s strong interest in this type of triangulation. My Fair Lady and Camelot both indicate that Lerner was drawn to stories that had an element of triangulation built into the narrative. Furthermore, he chose to focus on this aspect of the source material and even enhance it to some degree. Examining these earlier Lerner and Loewe film adaptations contextualizes Paint Your Wagon specifically in relation to Alan Jay Lerner’s interest in this type of love theme. My Fair Lady and Camelot show Lerner’s fascination with love triangles in which two men vie for—or perhaps more accurately share in—the affections of the same woman. Furthermore, Lerner worked on the screenplay for all three 1960s adaptations. As such, he made numerous changes to the plot, whether large or small, himself. Comparing the 1964 adaptation of My Fair Lady and the 1967 adaptation of Camelot already displays a propensity to highlight this notion of two men sharing the same woman as well as the sexual and emotional implications of such a relationship. Paint Your Wagon then offers the culmination of this particular interest. Notably, the original stage version does not contain this same type of triangulation to such a prominent degree.12 The film, however, makes the newly conceived marriage between Elizabeth, Ben, and Pardner the central romantic relationship. As such, Paint Your Wagon more explicitly deals with elements only hinted at in Camelot and to a lesser extent, My Fair Lady. The Hollywood industry changes and the sociocultural context of the late 1960s allowed Lerner to explore this triangulation more fully.

Adaptation in Paint Your Wagon Unlike the two other Lerner and Loewe musicals from the 1960s, the film version of Paint Your Wagon plays fast and loose with the original story and music of the original western musical. The stage production opened 12 November 1951 at the Schubert Theatre and received decent critical notices from reviewers. Brooks Atkinson called the score ‘superb’ and the musical as a whole ‘heartily enjoyable’ while identifying problems with the second act.13 The show garnered no Tony nominations, however, and ran for only 289 performances. Both versions can be described as a musical comedy about gold ­miners in 1850s California. The two productions include the characters of Ben Rumson, an alcoholic miner, and Elizabeth Woodling, the Mormon wife whom he bought at auction. The general plot outline also remains, which involves Rumson discovering gold and the development of a mining town in the area. However, the similarities nearly end there. Although Lerner produced the film and ultimately wrote the screenplay, Paddy

paint your wagon    299 Chayefsky adapted the original script. Chayefsky produced a preliminary script which Lerner used as an outline for the final screenplay. The film makes significant plot changes, including the removal of the Mexican romantic leading male and the addition of a polyandrous marriage. The original stage production follows miner Ben Rumson, played by James Barton, and his daughter Jennifer, played by Olga San Juan. Rumson, a widower with a restless spirit, discovers gold in California. Subsequently, a gold mining town named after him springs up. For a time, Jennifer is the only woman in the newly populated town of ‘Rumson.’ The musical’s primary romance occurs when Jennifer falls in love with a Mexican prospector named Julio Valveras, played by Tony Bavaar. The other miners constantly discriminate against Julio due to his ethnicity, forcing him to travel farther out of town in order to make a living in hopes of supporting Jennifer. Meanwhile, Ben buys the second wife of a Mormon traveler at auction. The marriage between Ben and his wife Elizabeth is not a happy one, and she runs away with another miner. While ­originally planning to leave Rumson for ‘golder’ pastures, Ben realizes his attachment to the town and chooses to settle.14 Jennifer also remains, waiting for Julio’s return. Julio eventually does come back despite not striking gold, and Jennifer and he begin their life together. The Broadway stage version tackles social issues surrounding ethnicity and prejudice in American history. The romantic lead is a Mexican character whom others constantly discriminate against and treat as an outsider despite his prior claim to the land. Through Julio’s character as well as his romance with Jennifer, Lerner explores tolerance and multi-ethnic relationships. The narrative highlights the consequences of western expansion and questions the historic American dream. The removal of Julio Valeras and his plot omits these socially significant elements of the plot, missing an opportunity in light of the Chicano movement of the 1960s. The film version of Paint Your Wagon keeps the Gold Rush Californian setting, the characters of Ben Rumson and Elizabeth Woodling, and a very general outline of some of the original plot points. Chayefsky and Lerner change much, however. They completely omit the stage musical’s principal couple, Julio and Jennifer. Consequently, the younger generation, and more importantly, the Mexican American perspective have also been removed. Instead, the film follows the partnership of Ben Rumson and the unimaginatively named Pardner. Rumson now appears as a bachelor with no children rather than a widower and father. An entirely male-populated town called No Name City develops around the gold veins where Ben and Pardner work and become friends. When a Mormon traveller passes through town with his two wives, he resolves to sell one, Elizabeth. A drunk Ben buys Elizabeth at auction and marries her. Unlike in the stage version, Elizabeth falls in love with the blustering drunkard Ben, who builds her a cabin of her own. For a time, Elizabeth remains the only female in No Name City, and this situation sparks consternation in her jealous husband. He thus concocts a plan to steal several prostitutes en route to a larger town. After some confusion, the two partners discover that Elizabeth loves both of them. They eventually agree to both be married to her. The second portion of the film shows No Name City growing and becoming increasingly debauched. During this heady time, the polyamorous marriage thrives. A preacher

300   musical theatre screen adaptations arrives in No Name City and immediately condemns the raucous behaviour and questionable establishments. Soon, a winter storm brings a stranded churchgoing family to stay at the Rumson home. During their stay, both Pardner and Elizabeth realize that they no longer want to continue in their unusual situation. This realization coupled with his wandering nature prompts Ben to leave. After an emotional farewell to Ben, Pardner returns to Elizabeth as her sole husband. This brief plot outline of the original Broadway production versus the Hollywood version of Paint Your Wagon already demonstrates how much changed between the two productions. The film features notable western stars Clint Eastwood as the taciturn yet sensitive Pardner and Lee Marvin as the blustering drunk yet kind-hearted Ben Rumson, with Jean Seberg appearing as their wife. The star text here reveals volumes in terms of marketing, genre associations, and musical ability. Director Joshua Logan chose nonsinging actors for all three of the starring roles.15 As the polygamous Elizabeth, Seberg brought a European film pedigree to Paint Your Wagon. Although her career began somewhat unsuccessfully in Hollywood, the actress had since made a name for herself in French films, most notably in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). Unsurprisingly perhaps, Logan emphasized the western atmosphere of Paint Your Wagon by casting two actors largely known for working in that genre. By 1969, Lee Marvin had a well-established career as an actor ‘identified with roles of violence and sadism,’ known especially for his roles in westerns.16 For example, he played one of the title characters in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) opposite John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. In the 1965 comedy western film Cat Ballou, Marvin played dual roles as two sharpshooters on opposite sides of a conflict and won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance. Like his costar, Clint Eastwood conjured associations related to the western. Eastwood had risen to international stardom through Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western trilogy A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966). All three of these films had US premieres in 1967 and gave Eastwood a star persona as an antihero with a ‘laconic and even animal aura.’17 As someone so identified with the western in the late 1960s, Eastwood’s very presence in the film contributed greatly to the genre mixing in Paint Your Wagon. He was also cast against type as a gentle farmer who ultimately desires the moral strictures of society. Of both Eastwood and Marvin, Kelly Kessler states that they ‘reflect variations on a form of contemporary masculinity that rejects the fifties ­ideals of marriage, white collar work, and family.’18 The two actors bring their star text, developed from westerns, to bear on the film. Several conditions in Hollywood in the late 1960s allowed for certain aspects of Paint Your Wagon to flourish. The film production of Paint Your Wagon occurred during the so-called early New Hollywood era. Two years earlier, the highly regarded, much-touted New Hollywood films Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate premiered. Hallmarks of this style include narrative and character ambiguity, genre blurring, and techniques most associated with European art film (e.g., jump cuts). The casting of Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood brought specific associations regarding the western as a genre. Similarly, the presence of Jean Seberg would bring to mind the French New Wave for

paint your wagon    301 those in the know, alluding to a connection with European art film. Paint Your Wagon, however, o ­ therwise does very little in the way of New Hollywood filmmaking. For example, the camerawork, editing, and narrative devices are not New Hollywood in style. Ultimately, the film does not live up to its genre blurring potential implied by the creative casting. At the same time, the film contains elements that superficially attempt to forge this connection. This time period also marks the final shift from the Hollywood Production Code to the Ratings System in 1968, which films exploited through an increased focus on sexual situations. Since the mid-1930s, the Production Code had provided a form of selfcensorship that dictated what could and could not be shown on film. Although the Code varied throughout its lifetime, it affected the portrayal of sex, nudity, homosexuality, and drug use as some of the most notorious taboos.19 As early as the 1950s, however, the Code began to lose its hold, and film found ways to get around the strict censorship system. In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America put into place an early form of the current Ratings System. With the new Ratings System, formerly prohibited subjects and images could appear in films with the caveat that the films received a ‘more adult’ rating. Paint Your Wagon, in some ways, revels in the newfound sense of freedom pervading Hollywood at the time. However, the filmmakers relegate the emphasis on sex to the dialogue instead of the visuals. The most nudity that the audience sees occurs in a scene where Ben drunkenly rips off the bodice of Elizabeth’s dress on their wedding night. The population of No Name City has lots of sex in the second half of the film, and with prostitutes no less, but the activity happens off screen. On the other hand, sex talk and bawdy humour permeate the film. Crude jokes and obvious references to sex replace the ­subtlety and double-entendres that infuse the dialogue and lyrics of many musicals. The acquisition of a bunch of ‘French tarts’ represents a turning point in the plot and leads the mining town into its debauched behaviour. To the chagrin of Paramount, the constant reference to prostitutes, sex, and of course the three-way marriage earned Paint Your Wagon a Mature (M) rating.20 In addition to the major plot changes, the film version of Paint Your Wagon alters the original score greatly. Without reprises, the film cut twelve major song and dance numbers (see chapter appendix for full song list from Broadway and Hollywood versions). These include romantic or mournful tunes sung by Julio and/or Jennifer, including ‘Carino Mio,’ ‘Another Autumn,’ and ‘All for Him.’ Lerner and collaborators redistribute a few of the remaining songs. For example, ‘I Still See Elisa’ understandably acts as Ben’s torch song for his dead wife in the stage version. Since Ben is not a widower in the film, Pardner appropriates this tune. Pardner’s version nonsensically becomes a song about an imaginary woman. Pardner also sings Julio’s ‘I Talk to the Trees.’ In the stage version, this wistfully romantic number reveals the isolation experienced by Julio due to racism among the miners. In the film, it loses its poignant implications, simply revealing that Pardner tends to be a bit of a loner as well as showing his guilt for falling in love with his best friend’s wife. Harve Presnell, the only trained singer cast in the film, unsurprisingly sings a lovely version of ‘They Call the Wind Maria.’ The decision to give this song to the

302   musical theatre screen adaptations best singer in the film makes sense given its popularity. Although Paint Your Wagon has never been among the best known of Lerner and Loewe’s musicals, ‘They Call the Wind Maria’ did constitute a hit—due in part because folk revival group, the Kingston Trio, recorded the song in 1959. As the most recognizable song from the musical, the filmmakers took care to provide a well-sung version for the film. Furthermore, the studio hired André Previn to write five new songs for the film. Ben receives two additional songs, establishing and affirming his rough ways. Clint Eastwood sings the tune ‘Gold Fever.’ Previn wrote the pseudo-gospel style song ‘Here It Is’ for the preacher, a newly created character who attempts to spiritually ­rescue No Name City from its sinful ways. The final new song, ‘A Million Miles Away Behind the Door,’ represents the only song in the entire film sung by a female character. Discussed in more detail later in the chapter, this is sung by Elizabeth as a tribute to her new home. Additionally, the visual choices made by the filmmakers play a significant role in adapting a stage work for the screen. In Paint Your Wagon, the location shooting in Oregon represents the most notable aspect of the film’s overall look. The cinemato­graphy tends to focus on the wide open spaces through an abundance of long shots and tracking shots that display the scenery. For the film’s action, the editing and ­cinematographic choices are generally quite conventional. Mid-shots and longer shots that encompass ­several characters, coupled with the more seamless shot-countershot style of classic Hollywood, predominate. Given director Joshua Logan’s reputation for somewhat unusual—and sometimes controversial—filmic choices in his musical adaptations, the sheer visual ­conventionality of Paint Your Wagon seems notable. Logan infamously added filters to the musical scenes in the film adaptation of South Pacific, giving the film an artificial appearance.21 And in his other Lerner and Loewe adaptation, Camelot, he juxtaposed the grandeur of the legendary setting with myriad close-ups, several quite extreme, in order to depict the emotional anguish of the characters. For Paint Your Wagon, however, the choices of Logan and his collaborators reflect the connection to the genre of the western more than anything through the visual focus on the location shooting. Film and musical theatre scholars alike tend to dismiss the film adaptation. Musical theatre scholars, for example, most often focus on My Fair Lady (1956; 1964 film) or even Brigadoon (1947; 1954 film) as representative of the duo’s successful collaboration.22 In film scholarship, authors lump the adaptation together with Star! (1968) or Sweet Charity (1969) as what Richard T. Jameson calls ‘box office debacles (and lousy movies).’23 Yet the figures reveal that Paint Your Wagon did much better than these other films. While Star! grossed $4 million and Sweet Charity grossed $8 million, Paint Your Wagon actually grossed over $30 million. In fact, it was one of the top ten highest grossing films of the year. While certainly nowhere near the more than $100 million mark of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of the same year, Paint Your Wagon would have done reasonably well if not for overspending.24 We can speculate that perhaps the star power of Eastwood and Marvin contributed to this initial success and the sheer bizarre quality of the film itself to its later dismissal. Regardless, this disconnect makes an investigation of this adaptation an intriguing one.

paint your wagon    303

Relationships and Sexuality A major change from stage to screen involves the alteration of the romances depicted. Initially, Lerner and Loewe clearly conceived of the relationship between Mexican ­prospector Julio Valveras and Ben Rumson’s daughter Jennifer as the primary romance. Again, the film removes both of these characters. Without the young lovers, the film version compensates by building on the hasty marriage between Ben and Elizabeth. In the original stage production, Elizabeth does indeed come to the small mining town as the second wife of a Mormon traveller. She similarly agrees to be sold to another man, and Ben buys her. Elizabeth cares for the often-inebriated Ben, who still misses his dead wife, but she remains romantically dissatisfied. Ultimately, she falls in love with a minor character named Edgar Crocker and the two run away together—a decision which Ben respects. The film, however, adds Eastwood’s character Pardner: a handsome, solitary, gentle young farmer who unwittingly becomes Ben’s mining partner and just as unwittingly falls in love with his partner’s wife. In the first half of the film, Pardner admits his love for Elizabeth and decides to leave town out of a sense of honour. Ben realizes that Elizabeth loves Pardner, prompting his decision to leave instead (which then begins a physical fight over which man will leave). Finally, Elizabeth, who loves both men, proposes what she calls a ‘humane, practical, and beautiful solution.’25 She cannot understand why she could be a second wife but not in turn have two husbands. The logic of her argument wins over unconventional Ben and the even more reticent Pardner. The advent of this polygamous marriage seems to promote the type of alternative relationships advocated by the so-called sexual revolution. This social movement in the late 1960s notoriously challenged traditional modes of sexual behaviour, encouraging displays of sexuality and relationships outside monogamous heteronormativity. Trite ideas involving ‘free love’ associated with the predominant counterculture of the time as well as the increased visibility of second-wave feminism and the gay rights movement all contribute to the concept of the sexual revolution. Importantly, it seemed for a time in the film industry that sexual repression was a thing of the past. As discussed above, the move away from the Production Code to the Ratings System allowed many films to explore sexuality more fully. Paint Your Wagon portrays a harmonious marriage between a single female and two males, showing polyandry, which is the rarer form of polygamy. At the same time, however, the film implies that there is not a sexual relationship involving all three members. The two men trade off spending the night with their wife. Interestingly, the film hints at the polyandrous love affair well before Pardner admits his feelings for Elizabeth. During the auction, Ben bids on Elizabeth while drunk and proceeds to pass out directly after winning her by doubling the previous bid. Pardner initially comes forward to withdraw Ben’s alcohol-induced bid—an effort that proves unsuccessful. Thus, when Elizabeth enters the area, she sees the handsome Pardner and appears visibly pleased with her apparent new husband. Pardner quickly disavows her assumption and speaks on behalf of his incapacitated partner. Ben remains insensible

304   musical theatre screen adaptations throughout the entire preparation and wedding process. As such, Pardner walks him down the aisle and stands up with the couple. Furthermore, he actually answers ‘he does’ and ‘she does’ for Ben and Elizabeth, acting as the catalyst for their marriage. From the outset then, Pardner might be seen as an integral member of the marriage. Although Elizabeth professes her love for both husbands and the two men similarly declare their love for her, the film contains only one real love song, ‘I Talk to the Trees.’ As mentioned before, Julio sings this song in the stage version, and it, in part, serves to highlight his marginality in the miner’s community as a Mexican prospector. In the film, Pardner sings this song from the stage version as he struggles with his feelings for Elizabeth. The song comes on the heels of a brief montage of Elizabeth’s and Pardner’s interactions while Ben is away stealing prostitutes. Images of them spending time together fade into one another as an instrumental introduction to the forthcoming song plays. The differences in sound as well as context for ‘I Talk to the Trees’ from the stage version emphasize specific elements about the film and the character of Pardner. Prior to this song, Pardner has sung only one other song, the wistful ‘I Still See Elisa.’ Both songs reveal Pardner’s introspective nature as well as his romanticism. While Julio ‘talks to the trees’ out of necessity due to social ostracism, Pardner does so out of guilt and his own taciturn disposition. The orchestration further gives Pardner’s song a particularly western type of romanticism, emphasizing the harmonica. In fact, the harmonica plays a countermelody to Eastwood’s vocal melody ( video example 13.1). As the instrument has been used in numerous westerns as a symbol and a portable instrument used by cowboys, it holds strong associations with the genre.26 Therefore, adding and even emphasizing the harmonica in Pardner’s songs, and especially ‘I Talk to the Trees’ strengthens his association to the western. This song also becomes a turning point as it explicitly introduces the love triangle. However, the conflict displayed by Pardner during the song implies a more conventional love triangle than the one that will eventually occur. Furthermore, Pardner’s appropriation of the romantic ballad proves significant because he embodies conventionality throughout the film. Until Ben declares him his ‘pardner,’ Sylvester Newel intends to farm rather than search for gold in California. His wagon, which also contained his brother, turns over. While his brother died, Ben manages to save Pardner, whose gratitude to Ben for saving his life turns into loyalty and affection that gives the older man influence over the gentle Pardner. The contemplative ‘I Talk to the Trees’ permits Pardner to express his feelings and embody the romanticism that Ben lacks. While Ben’s songs in the first half of the film tend to be boisterous, raucous numbers suited to a drunken miner, Pardner sings sweeter ballads. Once Elizabeth states that she wants to be married to both suitors, Ben and Elizabeth must convince the reluctant Pardner to agree. Although he eventually pronounces ‘Hot damn, I think it’s great. It’s history-making!,’ he soon passes out drunk.27 The normally temperate Pardner turns to drinking in his discomfort with the situation. In the second half of the film, a stranded churchgoing family come to stay in their home, and Pardner seems eager to readopt conventional behaviour. Since Elizabeth

paint your wagon    305 introduced Pardner as her husband first, she kicks Ben out of her home for the duration of the family’s stay. Pardner quickly becomes a model ‘only’ husband. He begins to chide Ben for his wild ways and lead prayers before dinner. This taste of traditional marriage sours Pardner’s conception of their original arrangement. He tells Elizabeth that he cannot return to the way things were; he needs a ‘real’ marriage with her. And finally, he achieves his desires. Ben gives in to his wanderlust and moves on from the soon-to-be respectable No Name City. Pardner dissolves their partnership and returns to Elizabeth. Despite the ­ ltimately returns film’s attempt to shock with its three-way marriage, Paint Your Wagon u to traditional relationships and modes of behaviour.

Feminism versus Chauvinism Paint Your Wagon also contains a somewhat disconcerting tension between feminist and chauvinist perspectives. By the end of the 1960s, second-wave feminism was in full swing as a movement concerned with issues such as women’s rights in the workplace and over their bodies. In film theory, second-wave feminism seeks to problematize and challenge traditional depictions of women onscreen.28 As amongst the most seminal (yet not infallible) essays in feminist film theory, Laura Mulvey’s discussion of the male gaze often informs Hollywood’s onscreen women as well as those representations that subvert conventions.29 Changing ideas of traditional gender roles also allowed for the possibility of more assertive and powerful female characters. And of course, this possibility sparks varied reactions and ways of looking at ‘nontraditional’ women who are no longer necessarily relegated to the domestic sphere. Nevertheless, mainstream films often depicted women who displayed behaviours such as intense sexuality in a more negative light (e.g., The Graduate’s Mrs Robinson). Indeed, the treatment of women and the characterization of Elizabeth in Paint Your Wagon reveal an ambivalence towards the feminist movement. The film’s basic plot elements display a highly chauvinistic treatment of women. Despite Ben and Pardner’s love and even respect for Elizabeth, they view her as property on some level. Elizabeth comes to No Name City as the second wife of a travelling Mormon man. Having suffered the loss of her baby and being dissatisfied with her ­secondary status, she willingly agrees to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The film adds a line not present in the stage version that briefly objects to this clearly odd practice. A member of the crowd shouts ‘You can’t buy a woman for money!’30 However, this ­protestation is quickly overcome, and the auction commences. Thus, Ben buys Elizabeth, and their marriage ceremony resembles a claim-staking procedure. Similarly, the gentle, romantic Pardner uses rhetoric implying that he sees Elizabeth as a man’s property. He tells Elizabeth that she ‘belonged to Ben. He shared you with me.’31 Only when Ben renounces her and leaves town does Pardner stay to build a life with Elizabeth. The idea of women as property that can be bought also comes through the centrality of the prostitutes in No Name City. The miners literally steal six women en route to a larger town in

306   musical theatre screen adaptations order to make use of their services. For the remainder of the film, these women are seen as objects for the male population’s pleasure. The score emphasizes the marginality of Elizabeth and other women in the town. The prostitutes who make up the female population of No Name City never sing. They simply exist as objects of visual (and implied physical) pleasure for the more active and audible men. While a prominent nondiegetic male chorus sings often, the only time offscreen female voices are heard singing is in Previn’s newly composed ‘Gold Fever.’ Largely a solo for Pardner, which deals with the change that gold mining has wrought in his life, this song includes a background chorus of mixed voices. Additionally, Elizabeth sings only one solo number while both Ben and Pardner sing many. As such, the film marginalizes the female singing voice to the point that it is almost nonexistent. Furthermore, the film privileges male homosocial bonds. Although the plot revolves around the three-way marriage, Ben and Pardner form the central relationship of Paint Your Wagon. Significantly, Ben gives Eastwood’s character the name that he goes by for the majority of the film. Pardner’s entire identity in No Name City is defined by his relationship to Ben—he is his partner. At the end of the film, Sylvester Newel (alias Pardner) finally reveals his true name to Ben as a parting gift. The first half hour of the film establishes the partnership and growing friendship between the two. The advertising for the film prepares this expectation from the outset. One tagline stated that ‘Ben and Pardner shared everything—the gold, the laughs, the songs . . . even their wife!’ This advertisement highlights their friendship as the film’s primary relationship. Throughout the beginning of the film, the pair open up to one another, and Pardner takes care of Ben when he lies drunk in the road. Only after their relationship is well established does Elizabeth enter the picture. Thus, Paint Your Wagon begins as a ‘buddy’ film—a popular film type in the late 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the two most popular films of 1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Easy Rider, privileged male relationships. Robin Wood posits that the buddy format exemplifies the ‘repressed bisexuality that lurked (always ambiguously) in ’70s Hollywood cinema.’32 These undertones certainly materialize in this western musical. Ben and Pardner share a strong emotional connection, arguably deeper than their relationship with Elizabeth. When Ben abandons No Name City, he does not bother to say goodbye to Elizabeth but takes an emotional leave of Pardner. In fact, Ben willingly leaves Elizabeth alone in her house but had hoped that Pardner would travel with him. Pardner admits to Ben, ‘Never liked a man as much as I liked you.’33 Throughout their final conversation, relative close-ups on Ben’s and Pardner’s faces show their emotions throughout the exchange.34 Furthermore, the plot relies on the near absence of women in a gold mining town. The men work and carouse together before and after women arrive in No Name City. Once she arrives, Elizabeth is the only woman in No Name City. As such, she is both marginalized and objectified. She says very little at first and sings less, but the sexstarved miners track her movements. Elizabeth begins her time in No Name City as an object for male visual pleasure as described by Mulvey. At the same time, however, the film also subverts this viewpoint. The very first image of Elizabeth is presented in a long,

paint your wagon    307 full-body shot that shows her carrying supplies and struggling through the river on foot. As such, the audience’s first view of Elizabeth shows a hard-working, travel-weary woman rather than a sexual object. She quickly becomes the object of No Name City’s male gaze as the shot-countershot technique illustrates, showing close or mid-shots of Elizabeth followed by men staring. In this way, the camera becomes conflated with the male characters’ gaze, perhaps implying a male spectator as well. Yet the subsequent dialogue makes it apparent that the men are just as enamoured by the presence of a baby—even asking to hold her—as by the sudden appearance of a woman. This interest subverts the visual message to some extent, becoming part of the humour of the scene. Furthermore, her presence disrupts the camaraderie among the miners as Ben becomes prone to jealous rages, which prompts the town members to steal prostitutes in the first place. More importantly, she comes between Ben and Pardner until she announces that she wishes to take both as her husband. This development leads to an additional element of homoeroticism since the two men share one woman. The situation in the second half of the film contains strong s­ imilarities to the Camelot love triangle. As mentioned earlier, Camelot makes clear that Arthur notices the feelings that Lancelot and Guenevere have for one another and even tolerates their relationship. Likewise, Lancelot admits to Guenevere that he believes Arthur knows of their clandestine meetings. However, the two men do not admit this ­knowledge to each other until forced by Mordred. Bruce Kirle claims that love triangles of this sort represent a ‘classic, closeted homosexual fantasy; one man symbolically sleeping with his powerful friend by seducing the friend’s wife.’35 Kirle’s analysis of the situation in Camelot can comfortably be applied to Paint Your Wagon, and he calls this film ‘the most startling version of this gender-fluid fantasy.’36 The fact that both men knowingly and willingly make love to the same woman renders the homoerotic subtext even more explicit. The social and industry context of the late 1960s gives further credence to a homoerotic reading. The film, however, stops short of implying a sexual relationship between Ben and Pardner, or indeed, even both men engaging in sexual intercourse with their common wife on the same night. They switch off spending the night at home (in the cabin’s one bed) while the other husband visits the gambling house. Although the film indicates that they do not have sexual relations, the living arrangements (especially when considering that they lived with one another prior to Elizabeth’s arrival) and close emotional relationship expose marital intimacy between Ben and Pardner. The music enhances the homosocial aspect of Paint Your Wagon. An integral part of the original production, which Ethan Mordden claims gives the works ‘its tinta, its unique sound,’ the male chorus becomes even more present in the film.37 Both versions of the musical contain a male-heavy cast. The stage version, however, includes more than ten songs featuring a female singer (see chapter appendix). The miners do sing in several numbers throughout the show, but solos and duets without them is just as common. In the film version, a nondiegetic or onscreen men’s chorus sings or accompanies a male soloist in the majority of the film’s songs, including ‘I’m On My Way’ (and its many reprises), ‘Hand Me Down That Can o’ Beans,’ ‘They Call the Wind Maria,’ ‘Whoop-Ti-Ay,’ ‘There’s a Coach Comin’ In,’ ‘Wand’rin’ Star,’ and the reprise of ‘Here It

308   musical theatre screen adaptations Is.’ Therefore, the uniformity and tight harmonies of the studio-enhanced men’s chorus become the film’s primary aural marker, marginalizing the female voice. The dominant soundscape has significance in any film but especially in a musical. The cyclical way in which the film begins and ends further emphasizes the male population in the wilds of California. ‘I’m On My Way,’ sung by the ubiquitous male chorus, opens and closes the film, accompanied by various shots of people travelling in wagons (as can be heard video example 13.2). These scenes show wagons moving through wild and seen in country in a series of location shots, and at the end, revisit individual characters. Indeed, the last image of the film shows Ben in his wagon, reinforcing the dominance of the male voice. Despite her ostensible position, Elizabeth demands respect and asserts her control throughout the film. In the original stage production, Elizabeth steadfastly keeps house for Ben and nurses him in his drunken state. She rebels, but in secret, until finally leaving Ben for the miner with whom she secretly fell in love. And the stage version of Ben applauds her spirit and ability to make her desires come true. Elizabeth in the film version actively asserts her will on her men when she deems it important enough. From the outset, she uses the rather disconcerting proposition of being sold to the highest bidder as an opportunity to gain a better situation for herself. She clearly sees her current ­position as the second wife untenable. The visuals during this scene reinforce her stance. Elizabeth appears in mid-shot, sitting and eating at a table with a smirk on her face at the attention from No Name City’s men. She listens to the debate about auctioning her off and actively argues for her present husband to sell her. When Ben comes to his senses enough to realize he has a wife, he unappealingly tries to force her into sexual submission on their wedding night. When Ben lunges at her and rips her bodice, however, Elizabeth pulls a gun on him and exclaims that she was ‘bought as a wife, not as a whore.’38 She insists that he respect her and build her a proper cabin. Her only song ‘A Million Miles Away Behind the Door’ expresses her long-held desire for a home and subsequent joy when it has been built. André Previn and Lerner wrote this song for the film. It conforms closely to a conventional love song with moderately slow tempo, lyrical vocal melody, and a full, particularly lush orchestration that often accentuates the string section. In some ways, the song fits into a popular trope in ­musicals, which Jeffrey Magee has identified as the ‘cozy cottage’ trope: finding a home that represents domestic bliss.39 For Elizabeth, however, the romantic notions behind the home are secondary. The lyrics emphasize her desire. She sings ‘four cabin walls would be just right for me, I need a threshold I can cross where I can sit and gather moss,’40 as can be heard in video example 13.3. While she acknowledges the joy of having ‘someone smiling from his chair across the floor,’ this is clearly not the main purpose of the house.41 The visuals further enhance this point. Ben does not appear onscreen until halfway through the song then largely has his back to the camera. Instead, the camera follows Elizabeth as she revels in her new home. Significantly, Ben remains mute rather than joining Elizabeth in her song as might be expected in a more traditional ‘cozy cottage’ type love duet. Taken together, the music, lyrics, and visuals, emphasize Elizabeth’s love of her home and subvert focus on conventional romance.

paint your wagon    309 First and foremost, she wants a house that she can call her own. In fact, Elizabeth refuses to leave her home regardless of whether her husbands remain. She also makes it clear that the cabin is her property, not Ben’s nor Pardner’s—a fact that Ben freely concedes and allows her to kick one or both of them out of the house at will. Furthermore, it is Elizabeth who initially proposes the idea that she take both Ben and Pardner as her husbands. While they are possessive of her, she wants something from each of them and actively works to get it. Her argument quickly persuades Ben, and even Pardner cannot form an adequate rebuttal for why she should not have both men, if she wants. Throughout the three-way marriage proposition scene, the cinematography includes shots that encompass all three members of the romantic triangle. As such, the visual construction echoes the polyandrous relationship being formed. Once married to both, she easily rules over their home life. Tellingly, she refuses to leave her house in No Name City even when the gold veins begin to run dry, and the men must bow to her wishes. And she throws Ben out of the house when the stranded family comes to stay. Elizabeth is a strong-willed woman who is not afraid to challenge either husband in spite of her subordinate status.

Conclusion In a film such as Paint Your Wagon, the changes in plot loom large since the filmmakers altered it so drastically in meaningful, if somewhat bizarre, ways. One cannot help but comment on the polygamous marriage, particularly when it becomes apparent that this relationship was an addition not present in the original Broadway production. Yet the plot—significant as it is—only gives one piece of a complicated puzzle. And in a study of a musical, the score represents another key element. As this article explores, the music in Paint Your Wagon also changes quite a bit from the stage version and in ways that highlight the narrative approach taken in the film. Much of the film was shot on location in Oregon, in an attempt to give it the feel of a western with an emphasis on wide open landscape spaces. The location shooting, of course, differentiates the film from its stage counterpart. While the success and even meaningfulness of this might be seen as debatable, the treatment of Elizabeth and the other few women in the film through ­camerawork and editing do offer significant interpretations. Finally, the potential reasons behind these changes also become important. Indeed, Paint Your Wagon, a seemingly strange adaptation of a lesser known Lerner and Loewe musical, proves to be very much a product of its time. Although it certainly explores a well-worn trope of triangulation, with which Lerner had long been ­fascinated, the means by which the film shows this relationship reflects the social and industry conditions of the late 1960s. Through its many alterations, the film exhibits a tension between traditional gender roles and marriage and the sense of freedom brought on by the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and the end of the Production Code. As the only lead female character in what essentially amounts to a buddy film, Elizabeth

310   musical theatre screen adaptations appears highly marginalized and certainly objectified by the male town. At the same time, she grasps at an opportunity to better her life. In agreeing to be sold, she no longer settles for being the second wife. Elizabeth demands respect, insists on a home, and even takes a second spouse herself. By the end of the film, however, it look as if she and Pardner will settle down to a quiet life of farming and domesticity. In this move and indeed throughout the film, Paint Your Wagon reflects a deep ambivalence towards significant social movements of the late 1960s. As Paint Your Wagon makes abundantly clear, the process of adapting a work is a ­creative endeavour with many factors at play. The concept of fidelity—not only what changes are made in translation, but why they occur—remains an important part of musical adaptation studies. At the same time, I propose that forming value judgements based on ideas of fidelity can be shortsighted and even detrimental to the study of adapted works. It remains necessary to keep in mind the various other factors that impact adaptations. In the case of Hollywood film musical adaptations, the change in mediums makes alterations of some sort essential. The artistic success of a work does not depend solely on its faithfulness to the original source. While there is nothing inherently wrong with altering an original work, the types of changes made can certainly lead to questionable artistic choices, influencing the reputation of the musical. Adaptation— or in a broader sense the concept of combining familiarity and novelty—can provide a way for these works to remain relevant yet it can also have adverse effects. In the case of Paint Your Wagon, the original Broadway stage production never garnered the critical and popular success of My Fair Lady, Brigadoon, or even the film musical Gigi. As such, audience expectation—or lack thereof—allowed for myriad changes in the film version. At the same time, the film has acquired an extremely poor reputation. While neither version is as well known as other Lerner and Loewe musicals, the film remains widely available and potentially the more familiar version. Therefore, looking at the changes and specific approaches that a single Hollywood adaptation makes can tell us much about adaptation in general. Perhaps the first question is why was the musical adapted in the first place? From an industry standpoint, adapting a successful stage musical can make studios a great deal of money. This was certainly the case during the studio era and the enormous popularity of The Sound of Music would give many studios cause to hope in the late 1960s. Another prominent line of inquiry deals with the involvement of any of the original creators and team members. Producers have used multiple approaches throughout the history of the film musical, and of course, Rodgers and Hammerstein maintained a significant amount of control in their film musical adaptations. While Frederick Loewe did not work on any of the 1960s film adaptations, Alan Jay Lerner involved himself in all of them to some extent, earning screenwriting credit for all three. This knowledge, coupled with the fact that Lerner tinkered with Paint Your Wagon throughout his long career, indicates that he may have viewed the film adaptation as an opportunity to try to ‘get it right.’ Lerner also potentially shaped the storyline to better fit his interests. All of this speaks to a wider issue: potential agendas of the various people involved in the making of an adaptation.

paint your wagon    311 Furthermore, adaptations can tell us much regarding historical context and how changes over time might impact an artistic work. Paint Your Wagon represents a remarkably good example of this issue. To some extent, the film version misses a real opportunity, ignoring important movements such as civil rights and, relevantly, the burgeoning Chicano movement. Dovetailing with the momentum of these social movements could have bolstered the themes of bigotry versus love and acceptance and the repercussions of western expansion inherent in Lerner’s original script. The whitewashing of the film version of Paint Your Wagon proves particularly problematic in light of these social movements, which pushed for equality for people of colour. Instead, the film intersects with the sexual revolution and reacts to second-wave feminism. As such, this film offers a look at how an adaptation can connect with the social mores of its time, whether explicitly or implicitly. The social movements the filmmakers choose to interact with and those they seemingly ignore provide a great deal of information. In conclusion, I find that an in-depth exploration of a single Hollywood adaptation of a Broadway musical provides invaluable insight in myriad ways. While not all adaptations take the same approaches, studying these film musicals and their changes reveal ideas regarding fidelity to the original show, the aspects considered to earn success (­typically financial), and the sociocultural context that may impact its creation. Paint Your Wagon might not be the most successful film musical of the late 1960s—though neither was it anywhere near the worst flop—and it might not have endured to be particularly well known or well respected in the twenty-first century. Yet a comparison of the film with its earlier stage counterpart reveals a great deal about the industry, individual filmmakers, and the times in which it was produced. This type of fruitful comparison makes a reconsideration of this film, and others like it, worthwhile.

Appendix Stage: Act 1 I’m On My Way Rumson What’s Goin’ On Here? I Talk to the Trees They Call the Wind Maria I Still See Elisa How Can I Wait? Trio Rumson (reprise) In Between Whoop-Ti-Ay How Can I Wait? (reprise) Carino Mio

Screen: Act 1 I’m On My Way (opening credits) I’m On My Way (choral reprise) I Still See Elisa The First Thing You Know* Hand Me Down That Can o’ Beans They Call the Wind Maria Whoop-Ti-Ay A Million Miles Away Behind the Door* I Talk to the Trees There’s a Coach Comin’ In Act 2 Here It Is* The Best Things in Life Are Dirty* (continued)

312   musical theatre screen adaptations There’s a Coach Comin’ In Finaletto Act 2 Hand Me Down That Can o’ Beans Rope Dance Can-Can Another Autumn Movin’ I’m On My Way (reprise) All for Him Wand’rin’ Star I Talk to the Trees (reprise)

Wand’rin’ Star Gold Fever* Here It Is (reprise) I’m On My Way (reprise)

* New songs by Alan Jay Lerner and André Previn. Source: Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Paint Your Wagon: A Musical Play in Two Acts (New York: Coward-McMann, 1952), and Alan Jay Lerner, Paint Your Wagon DVD. Directed by Joshua Logan (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video, 1969).

Notes 1. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 18. 2. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 16. 3. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Showboat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 153–154. 4. Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 286. 5. Dominic McHugh, Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 83. 6. McHugh, Loverly, 87–88. 7. Knapp, The American Musical, 178–180. 8. Brett discusses the fact that Shirley provided the playback vocals in Suzie Galler, ‘More Loverly than Ever: My Fair Lady Then and Now,’ in My Fair Lady, Special Edition (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 1994). 9. Higgins refers to both himself and Pickering as such on several occasions. Alan Jay Lerner and George Bernard Shaw, Signet Classics: Pygmalion and My Fair Lady (New York: Penguin, 1980), 166. 10. Lerner and Shaw, Signet Classics, 183. 11. An expanded article that focuses on the following conclusion regarding sexuality in the film version of Camelot can be found in Megan Woller, ‘The Lusty Court of Camelot (1967): Exploring Sexuality in the Hollywood Adaptation,’ Music and the Moving Image 8, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 3–18. 12. It should be noted, however, that the stage version of Elizabeth does fall in love with another gold miner—a minor character—and actually runs away with him. 13. Brooks Atkinson, ‘Swell Folks: Top Banana and Paint Your Wagon Are Acted by Some Vivid Performers,’ New York Times, 18 November 1951. 14. Notably, Ben Rumson dies at the end of the stage version.

paint your wagon    313 15. Logan did, however, cast classically trained singer Harve Presnell in the minor role Rotten Luck Willie to sing the already popular song ‘They Call the Wind Maria.’ Presnell made his film debut as Johnny Brown, a role he originated on Broadway, in Meredith Wilson’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Ray Walston played another minor character, Mad Jack Duncan. Walston had previously appeared in musicals in roles such as Luther Billis in South Pacific (1958) and Mr Applegate in Damn Yankees (1958). 16. Norma Lee Browning, ‘On the Wilderness Trail with Paint Your Wagon,’ Chicago Tribune, 16 February 1969. 17. Paul Smith, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 12. 18. Kelly Kessler, Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical: Music, Masculinity, and Mayhem (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 100. 19. Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph  I.  Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 2 0. New York Times articles reveal that the studio appealed the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) decision twice. The rating controversy is discussed in Matthew Kennedy, Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 183. 21. Logan called the use of the garish filters ‘one of the major mistakes of my career.’ Joshua Logan, Movie Stars, Real People, and Me (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), 123. 2 2. Joseph Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 193–220, and Block, Enchanted Evenings, 260–278. 23. Richard T. Jameson, ‘Dinosaurs in the Age of the Cinemobile,’ in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 155. 24. Kennedy, Roadshow!, 184. 25. Alan Jay Lerner, Paint Your Wagon DVD. Directed by Joshua Logan (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video, 1969). 26. The examples are too numerous to list. However, one famous and prominent western musical scene that features the harmonica can be found in Rio Bravo (1959), starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Ricky Nelson. 27. Lerner, Paint Your Wagon DVD. 28. Constance Penley, ed., Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988). 29. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 57–68. 3 0. Lerner, Paint Your Wagon DVD. 31. Lerner, Paint Your Wagon DVD. 32. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 199. 33. Lerner, Paint Your Wagon DVD. 34. I use the term ‘relative’ here as none of the closer shots in Paint Your Wagon can be c­ onsidered extreme by any means. 35. Bruce Kirle, Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 164. 3 6. Kirle, Unfinished Show Business, 164. 37. Ethan Mordden, Coming Up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 57.

314   musical theatre screen adaptations 38. Lerner, Paint Your Wagon DVD. 39. Jeffrey Magee, ‘From Flatbush to Fun Home: Broadway’s Cozy Cottage Trope,’ keynote address, Putting It Together: Investigating Sources for Musical Theatre Research, 10–12 May 2016. 40. Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, and André Previn, Paint Your Wagon: Vocal Selections (New York: Chappell, 1970), 13–17. 41. Lerner, Loewe, and Previn, Paint Your Wagon: Vocal Selections, 16.

chapter 14

‘A Gr eat A m er ica n Serv ice’ George M. Cohan, the Stage, and the Nation in Yankee Doodle Dandy Elizabeth Titrington Craft

At the intersection of two popular film genres—the film musical and biographical motion picture, or ‘biopic’—sits the hybrid subgenre of the musical biopic, films about the life and works of musical figures like composers, performers, or music industry professionals. Biopics, generally, are a sort of film adaptation, but the source material to be adapted is not an existing work but rather a personal history. In the 1930s and 1940s, they were a way of ‘sober[ing] up’ for a film industry tired of the ‘extravagances’ of 1920s romances, scholar Richard Gustafson has speculated.1 But in merging musical and biography, musical biopics walked a middle path, promising the spectacle of entertainment as well as some semblance of authenticity. The success of The Great Ziegfeld in 1936 (about producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr) set off a craze of ‘epidemic proportions’ for these films.2 Among the subjects featured—with varying degrees of faithfulness to their actual lives—were the Austrian composer known as ‘The Waltz King,’ Johann Strauss II (The Great Waltz, 1938); American songwriters Stephen Foster (Harmony Lane, 1935 and Swannee River, 1939) and Paul Dresser (My Gal Sal, 1942); and a famous husbandand-wife ballroom dance pair (The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, 1939). Many of these musical biopics spotlighted someone from American ‘show business,’ capitalizing on a ready-made story, natural ‘backstage musical’ set-up, and already popular songs and shows. One of the most long-lived and critically acclaimed twentieth-century musical ­biopics is Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) about George M. Cohan. A Warner Bros. film, Yankee Doodle Dandy was produced by Hal Wallis and associate producer William Cagney, was directed by Michael Curtiz, and starred James Cagney as Cohan, a career-defining role for which Cagney won Academy and New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Cohan’s

316   musical theatre screen adaptations story offered Warner Bros. and audiences the advantages of a showbiz biopic with one of the most famous showmen in the United States, yet it was also unusual in several ways. For one thing, Cohan himself was an uncommon, even singular, Broadway theatrical figure in his manifold professional roles: he was a composer, lyricist, playwright, ­director, producer, and star actor to boot. His career, which started with his family’s vaudeville troupe the Four Cohans, bridged historical and theatrical eras—from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, from vaudeville to musical comedy—and he was a key figure in the transition. Cohan was also a skilled self-promoter with a distinct interest in telling his own story; his many writings included an autobiography published when he was forty-six.3 And unlike Stephen Foster or Florenz Ziegfeld Jr, long deceased when their biopics hit the screens, Cohan was still living at the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy’s writing and premiere. The film’s contract stipulated that he would be an active participant in its development and have final approval of the product.4 Moreover, Cohan’s shows and his self-constructed personal narrative had long emphasized his American identity and patriotism, themes that were particularly timely in the early 1940s as World War II loomed. Thus, the goals of biopic, backstage musical, and wartime propaganda intersect in Yankee Doodle Dandy in ways that would not have been possible with any other protagonist. This chapter explores how the film harnesses the particularities of Cohan’s story as well as the communal, nostalgia-laden mythologies typical of the Hollywood musical to unify and glorify the United States in wartime, simultaneously solidifying the reputation of Cohan as a premier patriot and helping to position the musical as the nation’s own, homespun art form.5

‘The Story of George M. Cohan by Himself’ Upon Cohan’s death in 1942, only months after the release of Yankee Doodle Dandy, the New York Times declared ‘he was patriotism on the stage’ and that he ‘almost represented the American flag.’6 While Cohan was well known in the early twentieth century, especially for such patriotic shows and songs as ‘Yankee Doodle Boy’ and ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag,’ the film solidified and made immortal—through the permanent fixity of recording technology—this image of him. It was only the culmination, however, of Cohan’s extensive decades-long efforts to shape his patriotic persona through the press in an era when Gilded Age–wealth and mass circulation newspapers propelled the notion of celebrity in the United States.7 Born in 1878, Cohan was the grandson of Irish immigrants in an era when the Irish were considered racially distinct from—and inferior to—Anglo-Saxons. Both in spite of his heritage and because of it, however, he built his career on hyper-patriotic ‘flagwaving’ shows.8 As his early, turn-of-the-century songs and musicals helped define a ‘Yankee’ national identity, he simultaneously linked himself to the patriotic heroes he

yankee doodle dandy   317 portrayed onstage. He was so successful, in fact, that (long before the biopic chose the sobriquet as its title) he became known as the ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ celebrated in one of his hit songs. Programs, advertisements, and sheet music for Cohan’s patriotic ­musicals abounded with national buzzwords and other signifiers. In Little Johnny Jones (1904), Cohan was billed front and centre as ‘the Yankee Doodle Comedian,’ a change of tack from his first two Broadway efforts in which The Four Cohans received joint billing.9 George Washington, Jr (1906) was advertised as either the ‘great National Song Show’ or ‘His Latest American Musical Play,’ and its sheet music sported a flag design (see Figure 14.1). The Yankee Prince (1908) was said to open its first rehearsal with the singing of ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee,’ and, building on the title of the show The American Idea (1908), Cohan sponsored a contest for the best statements of ‘what the American idea is.’10 Some critics disparaged his ‘commercializing of the flag,’ as one put it, but the tactics won ringing endorsement from the box office.11 Cohan’s output did include more than just ‘flag-waving’ shows, and the film adapts his anecdote on the point. As he tells it, when theatre magnate A. L. (‘Abe’) Erlanger asked him whether he could write a play

Figure 14.1  Cover of the sheet music for ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’ (New York: F. A. Mills, 1906) from George Washington, Jr., University of Tennessee Library, Digital Collection, Sheet Music Collection, http://diglib.lib.utk.edu/utsmc/main.php?bid=320 (accessed July 26, 2018).

318   musical theatre screen adaptations without a flag, he countered, ‘I could write a play without anything but a pencil.’12 Nonetheless, his reputation for patriotism is what stuck in the public imagination. Cohan’s patriotic reputation was deliberately earned. A master of what today might be called personal branding, he took full advantage of the human-interest journalism that proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century. He bolstered his patriotic persona in countless interviews and articles, including, early on in his career, in The Spot Light, a bulletin ‘devoted to the interests of Geo. M. Cohan and the Cohan and Harris attractions.’ The Spot Light noted in 1905 that when Cohan ‘makes himself sing’ the line ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ in the song ‘Yankee Doodle Boy,’ ‘he is singing the truth,’ because he was indeed born on 4 July 1878.13 Historians have disputed whether he was actually born on 3 July or 4 July, but Cohan certainly embraced sharing a birthdate with the national holiday, and it proved a convenient token of authenticity.14 He attributed the shape of his career to being ‘born under the Stars and Stripes’ and even chose 4 July for his wedding date.15 By the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, George M. Cohan’s autobiography was well rehearsed and familiar, at least to fans. A series of articles in 1914 in Green Book Magazine, a theatrical periodical boasting ‘timely articles by and about prominent stage folk’ as well as coverage of motion pictures, fiction, and a ‘play of the month,’ was one of many places one could read about Cohan.16 The magazine advertised its series as ‘The Story of George  M.  Cohan by Himself ’ (though writer Verne Hardin Porter ­collaborated with Cohan and delivered the first installment about his parents), and its editor’s note declared Cohan’s life story ‘the most American document we have ever read.’17 The articles emphasize his strong family ties and theatrical upbringing, address character traits like his ego (or, as he preferred to put it, ‘self-certain[ty]’), highlight his lack of formal education, and plainly acknowledge the simplicity of his methods and aims—in short, they cast Cohan as a self-made song-and-dance man.18 Cohan’s Irish background is not overlooked—the story talks about the years his father Jerry spent playing in the hibernicon, an Irish-themed moving panorama show—but his American pride is paramount.19 Cohan did his best to shape the storyline of Yankee Doodle Dandy, even offering his own screenplay at one point.20 The film’s first screenwriter Robert Buckner wrote in a memo to the executive producer, ‘The picturization of his life story is an extremely ­serious matter with [Cohan]. He is independent as hell about it.’21 Because of his assertive involvement in the film and because he had already so deliberately shaped his  public image, it is unsurprising that the film echoes similar themes to those he had propagated.22 The film presents his life story as an extended flashback during his visit to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s office, where he expects to be upbraided for his portrayal of the president in the musical I’d Rather Be Right (1937) but instead receives a Congressional Gold Medal.23 As the flashback to the year of Cohan’s birth begins, the scene shows a banner with the year 1878, and Cohan, in voiceover, describes the period as ‘the beginning of the Horatio Alger age,’ setting the scene for his own ascendance from immigrant to preeminent American, poor vaudevillian to famous actor and wealthy impresario.24

yankee doodle dandy   319 In keeping with Cohan’s autobiographical writings, much of Yankee Doodle Dandy focuses on Cohan’s childhood and relationships with his parents and sister. His father Jerry, mother Helen, and sister Josephine (called Josie) are central characters. As Patrick McGilligan notes in his introduction to the published screenplay, many of ‘Cohan’s anecdotes about his childhood and youth were adopted wholesale.’25 In addition, the film ignored aspects of Cohan’s life that were uncomplimentary to him or that he found objectionable for the big screen.26 He famously insisted, for example, that there be no mention of his first wife Ethel Levey and no love scenes. Levey was, indeed, omitted, as were his children by both his first and second marriages, though Cohan eventually agreed to the film’s portraying a fictionalized love interest named Mary.27 The film also avoided any mention of Cohan’s infamous hard-line stance against Actor’s Equity Union, despite its major ramifications for his life and career. According to contemporaneous biographer Ward Morehouse, Cohan’s daughter Georgette said of the film, ‘That’s the kind of a life daddy would have liked to have lived.’28 Two sequential scenes early in the film establish Cohan’s ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ patriotic persona: his meeting with the president and his birth, related as a flashback. In both scenes, his Americanness is linked to his Irishness, helping to solidify cultural acceptance of a dual, patriotic Irish American identity at a time when the Irish had only relatively recently been accepted as bona fide Americans.29 The scene with President Roosevelt introduces the theme of Cohan’s Irish-tinged patriotism: remembering his youth, Cohan tells the president, ‘I was a pretty cocky kid in those days—a regular Yankee Doodle Dandy. Always in a parade or following one.’ The president comments, ‘That’s one thing I’ve always admired about you Irish-Americans. You carry your love of country like a flag, right out in the open. It’s a great quality.’ As historian Meaghan Dwyer-Ryan notes, this ‘oft-repeated quote’ from the film ‘became an acknowledgement of Irish contributions to the country.’30 As in his own writings, Cohan’s 4 July birthdate is critical to his historiography, and the birth scene in Yankee Doodle Dandy forcefully establishes both George’s Irish ­heritage and his complementary fate as a patriotic American through closely intertwined aural and visual signifiers of Irish and US national identity. Initiating the extended flashback after the early scene with President Roosevelt, an image of Cohan in the president’s study slowly dissolves to an American flag, then the camera pans downwards to Providence, Rhode Island, amidst Independence Day celebrations. We hear, then see, a marching band playing the nineteenth-century patriotic tune ‘Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,’ then we see a sign for the Colony Opera House showing ‘Week of July 1, 1878 / Mr and Mrs Jerry Cohan / “The Irish Darlings.” ’ On the stage inside, Jerry sings and dances as Irish dancing master Larry O’Leary, costumed in breeches, a cape, and a ‘jaunty Irish hat,’ with shamrock appliqués on his hat and lapels, and carrying a shillelagh.31 (His song, ‘The Dancing Master,’ was one performed by the real-life Jerry.)32 He dashes off the stage as soon as his performance ends, and a Civil War veteran with an Irish brogue rushes him through the parade to his destination—the bedroom where his wife Nellie has just given birth to George. As they consider what to call the newborn, the doctor suggests George Washington Cohan, since he was born on the Fourth of July,

320   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 14.2  George M. Cohan at birth in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).

but Nellie replies that ‘Washington’ is too long to fit on a billboard. They instead ­combine George with the ‘nice short Irish [middle] name’ Michael. When the veterans outside fire a cannon in George’s honor and the baby breaks into a wail, Jerry exclaims, ‘He’s crying with a brogue!’ and hands him an American flag (see Figure 14.2).33 In continued voiceover, Cohan says, ‘I guess the first thing I ever had my fist on was the American flag. I hitched my wagon to thirty-eight stars. And thirteen stripes.’ Fulfilling the biopic’s generic expectation of establishing its hero’s ‘sense of destiny,’ the scene introduces the theme of patriotism as well as the literal symbol of the flag, one of many to be seen in Yankee Doodle Dandy.34

The Stage and the Nation In its celebration of American theatre, Yankee Doodle Dandy exemplifies the stage and screen’s ‘intertwining of intimately shared histories,’ as scholars Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris have put it.35 The film is at once a chronicle of US theatrical history and a sort of backstage musical, with its attendant tropes.36 While Cohan wrote plays as well as musicals, Yankee Doodle Dandy focusses almost exclusively on the latter. Occasionally musical and dramatic performances serve to advance the plot or develop a character, as when Mary plays and sings the song George has written for her (‘Mary’s a Grand Old Name’) at the piano in her home. More often, however, songs—both snippets heard in montages and complete numbers—mark the passing of time or highlight key moments in Cohan’s career. Dressing room scenes, backstage shots, and stage performances abound, and, with the notable exception of ‘Over There’ (discussed in this chapter’s next

yankee doodle dandy   321 section), the songs are part and parcel of show business, whether the characters are performing onstage, auditioning for a producer, or singing a newly written number at a living room piano.37 In tracing Cohan’s journey through his theatrical experiences, from the touring ­circuits of vaudeville in small town America to the ‘legit’ stages in the heart of Broadway, Yankee Doodle Dandy strategically elides three simultaneous histories: those of Cohan, the musical, and the nation. Cohan’s voiceover narration at the start of his flashback— with his quip, ‘There weren’t so many stars then, in the flag or on the stage, but folks knew that more were coming’—reveals the story’s central metaphor while capturing the Gilded Age sense of optimism, confidence, and growth. After the scene of his birth, we see images of a family photo album, with Cohan’s sister Josie (who was, in fact, the elder sibling) added to an empty frame (see Figure 14.3a), and a series of theatrical scenes. The imagery and narration continue to link the Cohans’ experiences to the nation’s. Cohan describes playing a Daniel Boone show on the ‘kerosene circuit,’ the term denoting lowbudget companies performing a series of one-night engagements in very small towns.38 We see a train traversing the countryside as Cohan, extending his use of flag symbolism, declares, ‘They kept putting new stars in the flag, and the Cohans kept rushing out to meet them.’ We see a young George playing the Irish ‘Dancing Master’ as his father had done, but with a novelty twist, playing (quite badly) the violin above his head. He also adds a patriotic flourish, shooting an American flag out of his shillelagh at the number’s conclusion. In another scene, Josie sings and performs a dance to ‘The Fountain in the Park,’ a popular late nineteenth-century tune by Edward Haley, and in yet another, we see the four Cohans performing a blackface minstrel number with tambourines. Cohan’s narration continues, ‘We trouped through depression and inflation. Part of the country’s growing pains.’ Throughout, the Cohans’ history touring the nation as performers is paralleled with the growth of the United States; their ups and downs are aligned with the nation’s. While Yankee Doodle Dandy, more than many Hollywood musicals, treats theatrical performance unabashedly as a commercial business, the film also partakes of similar generic mythologies, as described by scholar Jane Feuer. It valorizes entertainment, for instance, and presents a ‘vision of musical performance originating in the folk.’39 Show business is business, but it’s also bound up with family ties (among the Four Cohans), romantic love (between George and Mary), and national sentiment. In one critical scene, the prominent producer Abe Erlanger tells the petulant star Fay Templeton, who has refused a role in a Cohan show, that she should reconsider. erlanger.  You’re making a mistake, Fay. He’s the most original thing that’s ever hit Broadway. And do you know why? Because he’s the whole darn country, squeezed into one pair of pants! His writing—his songs—even the way he walks and talks— they all touch something way down here in people! (He lays a hand over his heart.) Don’t ask me why it is—but it happens every time the curtain goes up. It’s pure magic! templeton.  I’m bored by magic. I know his formula—a fresh young sprout gets rich between 8:30 and 11:00 pm. erlanger.  That’s just it! George  M.  Cohan has invented the success story, Fay. And every American loves it because it happens to be his own private dream. He’s

322   musical theatre screen adaptations found the mainspring in the Yankee clock—ambition, pride, and patriotism. That’s why they call him the Yankee Doodle Boy.40

Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy insists, not only creates show business magic, but he embodies it. He becomes the epitome of Broadway because he’s the epitome of America. Within Yankee Doodle Dandy, even as great liberties are taken with the major events of George’s life, considerable care is taken with the details of the Cohans’ theatrical history. The film’s original screenwriter Robert Buckner did extensive research using Cohan’s autobiography, the scrapbooks of the Robinson Locke Collection housed in the New York Public Library, articles in newspapers and magazines, interviews with Cohan’s acquaintances, and conversations with Cohan himself.41 As one montage depicts, the family did indeed tour together: with Jerry’s hibernicon company, as ‘The Cohan Mirth Makers,’ and later as the famous ‘Four Cohans’ act. The film’s iconography conveys a sense of authenticity; we see signs, playbills, and other documents, frequently used to introduce theatrical scenes (see Figure  14.3). The performance scenes are fairly true to life as well. George M. Cohan did, indeed, play the violin in his boyhood, Josie was known for her dancing, and Cohan wrote in his autobiography about the family playing ‘Daniel Boone on the Trail,’ ‘Peck’s Bad Boy,’ and other skits and shows referenced in (a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 14.3a–d  Images of documents in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).

yankee doodle dandy   323 the film.42 The plethora of seemingly historical images, evocative of a visual archive, serves both to commemorate theatrical history and to deflect from the film’s many ­biographical falsities. Musical and choreographic decisions, too, were made with the goal of authenticity as well as capitalizing on the popularity of Cohan’s songs. In the contract, Cohan agreed to provide music and piano arrangements for the film.43 (He was even to provide three new songs, though that did not happen.) He was quite concerned with the accuracy of the film’s musical staging of his numbers, and his assistance was appreciated more in this realm than others.44 While the final version of the film had a few non-Cohan songs, the majority were his, including ‘The Warmest Baby in the Bunch’ (1897), ‘Mary’s a Grand Old Name’ (1905), ‘I Was Born in Virginia’ (1906, originally published as ‘Ethel Levey’s Virginia Song’), ‘Harrigan’ (1907), and others. The screenwriters took liberties with chronology as well as with the arrangement of some numbers, like ‘The Yankee Doodle Boy’ (1904) and ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’ (1906)—the first in order to explain the song’s role within the plot, and the second (discussed in more detail later in the chapter) to evoke national pride in wartime.45 Overall, however, fidelity was the byword in the treatment of Cohan’s musical oeuvre and the staging of musical numbers. James Cagney also took great care to capture Cohan’s renowned, distinctive dancing style; his instructor Johnny Boyle had even performed in Cohan shows and staged dances for Cohan.46 The numerous special features on the 2003 DVD release, including a second disc of ‘bonus material,’ extend the film’s approach to theatrical authenticity while also historicizing the film itself. These include feature-length commentary by film historian Rudy Behlmer; a short documentary chronicling Yankee Doodle Dandy’s making; Warner Night at the Movies 1942, a recreation of the various features (trailer, newsreel, and more) in a typical evening at the movie theatre during the period; listings of the film’s cast, crew, and awards; You, John Jones, a wartime short starring Cagney; the Looney Tunes cartoons Yankee Doodle Daffy (1943) and Yankee Doodle Bugs (1954); an ‘audio vault’ including prerecording session outtakes and rehearsals; and the ‘Waving the Flag Galleries’ containing images of sheet music, set and scene stills, and publicity materials.47 These supplementary features impart a similar veneer of authenticity to the film, as historical object, as the documents and performances do within the film’s story, furthering Yankee Doodle Dandy’s almost archival aura and masking its notable departures from the facts.

‘With the American Spirit at a Crisis’ The film’s nostalgia for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and its emphasis on the Americanness of the theatre were perfectly suited to the historical moment of its release during World War II. War was under way abroad when discussions about the film began, and Warner Bros. was already showing its keen interest in wartime intervention through anti-Nazi films like Sergeant York (1941).48 For Cohan and Cagney, however, the

324   musical theatre screen adaptations initial attraction of the project lay elsewhere. Cohan saw in the film a chance to preserve his legacy now that he was no longer so widely known.49 Cagney, on the other hand, sought a chance to distance himself from recent charges of communism as well as the opportunity to escape his ‘tough guy’ typecasting and to do a musical.50 William Cagney, associate producer of Yankee Doodle Dandy and James Cagney’s brother, explained later that he told Warner Bros. studio head Jack L. Warner, ‘We should make a movie with Jim playing the damndest patriotic man in the country,’ George M. Cohan.51 The wartime climate and William Cagney’s comment notwithstanding, patriotism was not necessarily to be Yankee Doodle Dandy’s primary theme. Rather, during the film’s development, its writers struggled to choose their focus. In May 1941, Buckner and William Cagney despaired to executive producer Hal B. Wallis that ‘we needed a romantic personal story,’ but Cohan refused to let his ‘private domestic life [be] a major e­ lement of [the] picture.’ Buckner and Cagney explained a number of different approaches they had tried, like keeping the focus on the Four Cohans and developing a fictitious romance. Another tactic they tried, but found lacking, was ‘develop[ing] the patriotic theme, George M. Cohan as the symbol of a dynamic and sincere American.’ ‘We gave this angle a tremendous workout,’ they explained, ‘But it spreads too thin.’ Cohan, they acknowledged, was a good citizen, but they felt ‘the evidence is neither complete enough or dramatic enough to ask any intelligent person to accept [it] as the key to his character.’ Moreover, this theme failed as entertainment as well as biography; they thought it ‘dangerous as a bore to a modern audience, for today Cohan’s flashy type of patriotism sounds as cornily theatrical as it was in 1910’—a kiss of death for a motion picture that aimed first and foremost to entertain.52 Finally, they were concerned about the implications of opportunism: ‘Accidentally or not,’ they wrote, ‘the fact still blares at you that he made several million dollars with this act—during the War,’ presumably referring to the way Cohan profited from his hit song ‘Over There’ and patriotism more generally during World War I.53 The criticism of ‘flag-waving’ as a cheap trick pandering to the masses to make a buck that plagued Cohan during his career clearly troubled the makers of the film as well.54 By the end of Yankee Doodle Dandy’s production, however, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States had formally entered World War II, and Warner Bros. had decided to sell Cohan and the world on the picture’s patriotism. In part, when tensions between the recalcitrant Cohan and the studio came to a head in August 1941, stressing Yankee Doodle Dandy’s patriotism was a compelling way to persuade Cohan to allow the studio more liberties with the film’s storytelling. In a lengthy letter to Cohan dated 29 August 1941, Hal Wallis, William Cagney, and Robert Buckner made a forceful, last-ditch effort to get approval for their script, including the plea: ‘The dramatization of your life, Mr Cohan, has a great timely importance. It is the story of a typical American boy, who grew up with a strong love of his country, its ways and institutions. His life was spent in expressing and defending an American way of life.’ By now, the team had settled on its through line; they stated, ‘We believe that the deep-dyed Americanism of your life is a much greater theme than the success story.’ The letter concluded, ‘We have worked for six months because all of us here have an unshaken faith that this picture should be

yankee doodle dandy   325 made—and today more than ever, with the American spirit at a crisis. It is our hope that perhaps you, too, will see this story of your life in its broader implications and give us your trust.’55 A memo from a couple of days prior confirms the coercive intention of their pitch. William Cagney reported to Wallis that an outside party close to Cohan ‘agrees with my point that Cohan should be made to realize that this is a great American message at the most crucial period in American history and he should patriotically bow to our efforts to dramatically present the story of this great American spirit.’56 Had the filmmakers been swept up in patriotism as war loomed? Or was this a ploy to get Cohan onboard? It seems likely that both were true to some extent. Whatever the degree of their sincerity, Wallis, Cagney, and Buckner’s appeal to Cohan’s sense of patriotic duty was successful, and work on the film proceeded.57 Several elements of the film bear witness to its wartime roots and the ways in which the theme of patriotism came to dominate the story. The emphasis on wartime Americanism is legible from the opening credits, which use a stars-and-stripes pattern for the lettering of the names. (Warner Bros. had done the same for Sergeant York shortly earlier.)58 Another indicator is the notable absence of Cohan’s two real-life Japanese American valets. The first was Yoshin Sakurai, who Cohan also cast in his play Get Rich Quick Wallingford (1910); this is the earliest known appearance of an Asian American actor on Broadway.59 The second was Michio ‘Mike’ Hirano, who had a small part in Cohan’s 1936 play Dear Old Darling.60 On 18 December 1941, only days after Pearl Harbor and during the filming of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Cohan telegraphed Attorney General Francis Biddle to request permission to travel with Hirano in the wake of the Presidential Proclamation making the Japanese in the United States who were not naturalized ‘alien enemies.’ Cohan wrote that he would ‘personally vouch’ for Hirano.61 Recounting this story in an article for the magazine Cabinet, historian Scott A. Sandage points out that despite Hirano’s importance to the Cohan family, ‘the film did not portray Michio Hirano, not even for one line.’62 We see instead an African American, whom Cohan calls Eddie, assisting Cohan in a mid-film dressing room scene. Japanese Americans were expelled from US society just as they were in the film: President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 and the government began its forced ‘relocation’ of Japanese American citizens shortly before Yankee Doodle Dandy premiered. The film’s propagandistic tinge is most glaringly obvious, though, in the treatment of ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag.’ In the original scene of the musical George Washington, Jr (1906), the song is prefaced by the hero encountering veterans who have come to Mount Vernon to decorate George Washington’s tomb.63 While the scene in the film likewise opens with a group of men in uniform (some with instruments, serving as the ‘military band’ mentioned in the song’s verse), it is otherwise wholly divorced from the plot and setting of the original show, unlike the film’s Little Johnny Jones number. The final screenplay contained little of the elaborate scene that ended up on the screen; its version was much shorter and emphasized the Cohans’ love for one another and Mary’s for George. According to that script, the Cohans would sing a verse and chorus, and then the company would have an ensemble dance number. ‘The happiness on the Cohans’ faces as they work together and smile at each other is something to see,’ and Mary watches

326   musical theatre screen adaptations George from the chorus ‘with much affection,’ the directions note.64 The number was also marked for spectacle early on—Buckner wrote in an earlier version of the screenplay that there should be ‘flags all over the stage. This is an excellent opportunity for special trick effects.’65 Still, the emphasis in earlier versions was the characters at least as much as it was the nation. The final version of ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’ follows through with Buckner’s ideas of spectacle, but it adds a sort of historical pageant of wartime scenes. In it, Cagney, as Cohan playing the hero of George Washington, Jr, sings a verse and chorus, backed by a group of Boy Scouts, then the Cohan song is intercut with various scenes representing key moments in US history with correspondent interpolated or newly composed tunes. Describing his plans for the number in a memo to William Cagney in January 1942, LeRoy Prinz, one of the directors of the musical numbers, cited as inspiration radio programs like ‘Cavalcade of Am[erica],’ which dramatized the nation’s history in glowing terms.66 In the final number as filmed, we see Betsy Ross sewing the flag. Visually referencing the iconic painting The Spirit of ’76, as Holley Replogle-Wong has noted, revolutionary soldiers with fife and drums play ‘Yankee Doodle.’67 An African American soloist and chorus sing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ and the Lincoln Memorial appears behind them; we hear Lincoln’s voice deliver a line from the Gettysburg Address: ‘And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ Soldiers of the Spanish–American War led by Theodore Roosevelt march to ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ (in fact, a Civil War–era song). We then seem to leave the musical’s historical moment as we hear a group of citizens—the farmer, labourer, banker, as Prinz described them—sing a rallying cry for the then-current conflict: ‘We’re one for all and all for one, / . . . / And now that we’re in it, / We’re going to win it.’ The closing musical phrase ‘We’ll fight as we did before’ segues directly into “for ‘my country, ’tis of thee . . . ,’ ” quoting musically and lyrically from the well-known patriotic song by the same title. ‘All the tableaux,’ Prinz wrote to William Cagney, ‘are to have a  spiritual effect.’68 The camera intersperses close-ups—for example, of the African American soloist’s face and soldiers’ bayonets—with long shots of the stage, moving between the ‘real-world’ framing of the stage, as the theatre audience would see it, and a more abstract, cinematic approach that invites film audiences to extrapolate to the present historical moment. The finale of the number returns to the stage mode and the song ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag,’ with Jerry Cohan costumed as Uncle Sam and Nellie Cohan as Lady Liberty, but replete with spectacular visual effects. We see, as Prinz described it, an ‘ensemble of flags— entire group on treadmill across entire stage, walking towards audience’ to create ‘a finale video example 14.1). For this of apparently hundreds of flags’ (see Figure 14.4 and closing, he sought to evoke the theatrical rather than cinematic: ‘This will not be a [Busby] Berkeley effect, but all legitimate stagecraft that could have been developed at this period.’ The flag that appears on a scrim on the number’s final bars, he notes, ‘could have been done by Lantern projection.’69 As the final chord rings out, the camera shows audience members jumping to their feet and applauding enthusiastically. The choice of staging marks the Cohans and the theatre itself as emblematic of wartime patriotism.

yankee doodle dandy   327

Figure 14.4  ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’ finale in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).

The scenes about Cohan’s World War I hit ‘Over There’ are likewise written with pointed reference to current affairs. Upon learning about the sinking of the Lusitania, Cohan says, in voiceover narration, ‘It seems it always happens. Whenever we get too high-hat and too sophisticated for flag-waving, some thug nation decides we’re a pushover all ready to be blackjacked. And it isn’t long before we’re looking up, mighty anxiously, to be sure the flag’s still waving over us.’ The clear implication was that Cohan’s brand of exuberant patriotism not only defined and celebrated the nation but also kept it safe, and the universal tone made its present-day applications patently obvious as well. In one scene, we see Cohan and a female singer, played by radio performer and film star Frances Langford, performing ‘Over There’ for the US troops. Langford’s casting drew a connection to the contemporary conflict, since she also performed for military forces in real life: she later said that entertaining the troops was ‘the greatest thing in [her] life.’70 As they perform, the lights go out, and Cagney, as Cohan, runs out into the crowd to ask vehicles to turn on their headlights to light the stage—this borrowed from Cohan’s own anecdotes.71 Returning to the stage, Cagney conducts the audience for a few bars and calls out, ‘Everybody sing!’ (as can be heard in video example 14.2). The troops join in heartily, a powerful scene of communal singing that engenders a sense of national pride and civic duty, inviting the film’s audience, whether symbolically or literally, to join in.72 The scenes with Cohan and President Roosevelt that bookend the film bring the action to the present day; as Patrick McGilligan writes, ‘History was manipulated so the president’s summoning George directly from a performance of I’d Rather Be Right [which in reality opened in 1937] coincides with the outbreak of World War II.’73 Lyrics

328   musical theatre screen adaptations referencing Hitler and the war were added for the performance of ‘Off the Record’ in the I’d Rather Be Right scene. When the president gives Cohan the Congressional Medal of Honor, Cohan protests that he’s undeserving as he’s ‘just a song-and-dance man,’ but the president insists, ‘A man may give his life to his country in many different ways, Mr Cohan. . . . Your songs were a symbol of the American spirit. “Over There” was just as powerful a weapon as any cannon, as any battleship we had in the First World War. Today, we’re all soldiers, we’re all on the front. We need more songs to express America. I know you and your comrades will give them to us.’ Cohan’s response ties the Horatio Alger narrative of the film back to the nation’s greatness and readiness for war: ‘I wouldn’t worry about this country if I were you,’ he says. ‘We’ve got this thing licked. Where else in the world could a plain guy like me come in and talk things over with the head man?’ FDR concurs, ‘Well, that’s about as good a definition of America as any I’ve ever heard.’ As Cohan leaves the White House, the soldiers and crowd outside are singing ‘Over There.’ He joins the troops, and a soldier asks him, ‘What’s the matter, old-timer, don’t you remember this song?’ Cagney, as Cohan, then joins in the singing, tears visible on his face. The real-life Cohan had indicated a scene of troops marching in his script, noting that ‘this shot of the boys marching away might possibly be a delicate thing to do considering world conditions today, but if it is strongly planted that it is June 1917, and not 1941, you might get away with it.’74 By the time of Yankee Doodle Dandy’s filming and release, however, a marching scene set in the present was no longer risky but apropos. The film’s marketing and release established its reputation for wartime patriotism before audiences even stepped into the theatres. The premiere, which was moved from 4 July to 29 May in recognition of Cohan’s failing health, was held in Times Square as a war bonds benefit, with tickets available for the price of bonds ranging from $25 to $25,000.75 A second war bonds benefit labelled the ‘Build Ships’ premiere followed in Hollywood on 12 August. The reception at both was encouraging, and the day after the Hollywood premiere Jack Warner wrote to the heads of advertising and publicity at Warner Bros. that they should put forth ‘a real campaign, telling not only the Exhibitors but America and the world that we are “first in the hearts of our countrymen,” and “YANKEE DOODLE DANDY” is one picture every man, woman and child should see.’76

The Legacy of Yankee Doodle Dandy In the end, Warner Bros. and Cohan alike viewed the film as more than a commercial product or even a biopic: rather, it was their patriotic contribution to their nation. Jack Warner telegraphed Cohan on the day of the film’s premiere, ‘Dear George: I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for permitting me to produce the story of your grand and glorious career. . . . It’s more than a picture. It’s the whole spirit of America rolled into one and by your permitting me to produce this picture you have done a great American service.’77 Cohan’s response echoed these hopes that the film ‘may aid the

yankee doodle dandy   329 theatre to contribute its share towards the realization of peace and civilization to follow the present tragic experiences. . . . With that thought I trust your statement in your telegram that Yankee Doodle Dandy is a great patriotic service will be true.’78 While reportedly quite pleased with the film and likely proud of its contribution to the war effort, Cohan may have also recognized the potential downside of flag-waving patriotism at this late stage of his life. His son later shared with Scott Sandage that his father felt very bad about Mike Hirano, who disappeared during the war. Cohan ‘finally made the connection,’ as Sandage put it, ‘between jingoism and prejudice.’79 Individual responses and reviews alike attest to Yankee Doodle Dandy’s impact at a pivotal time in US history. One enthusiastic viewer wrote to Jack Warner, ‘This picture will undoubtedly receive all its praise from the Box Office, and what is more important to us all, from the uplift in the morale of the American public.’ The letter closes, ‘Viva J. L. Warner! A true (many words could be used here, but only one would do you justice) AMERICAN!!!’80 Another wrote to Warner, ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy just makes you feel like being a better American.’81 Critic Edwin Schallert described the film in the Los Angeles Times as ‘patriotic, with plenty of flag waving, yet not too much for the present.’ He further appreciated the film’s interweaving of national and theatrical history, complimenting its ‘delightful nostalgia attaching to the depiction of the old show days’ and noting that the film ‘brings to mind the passing pageant of American history through its chronicle of one man’s huge success in the show business.’82 The film also secured a permanent place in Hollywood film history. It won three Academy Awards, for Actor in a Leading Role, Music (Scoring of a Musical Picture), and Sound Recording. In 1993, it was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. In adapting Cohan’s life and works, the makers of Yankee Doodle Dandy depicted a rich theatrical history that corresponded with the nation’s history. Drawing heavily on nostalgia for a mythologized past, they sought to show the nation’s merit and resilience through its depth of historical experience—both cultural and military—and its national pride, exemplified by the rose-tinted character of one of its homegrown citizens. Demonstrating the Americanness of musico-theatrical entertainment, Yankee Doodle Dandy helped establish ‘the American musical,’ as a national art form, only a few months before Oklahoma! burst onto Broadway. It rejuvenated Cohan’s legacy, which had begun to fade. And, furthering the project Cohan had already undertaken in his own public relations, it contributed mightily to his lasting image of patriot extraordinaire.

Notes This project was made possible by Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. I am deeply grateful to Brett Service, curator of the Warner Bros. Archives; Morgen Stevens-Garmon, associate curator of the Theater Collection at the Museum of the City of New York; and historian Scott Sandage for their assistance with the project. My thanks also to Louis Epstein, Frank Lehman, Hannah Lewis, Matthew Mugmon, and other colleagues who have generously shared ideas and feedback.

330   musical theatre screen adaptations 1. Richard Gustafson, ‘The Vogue of the Screen Biography,’ Film and History 7, no. 3 (September 1977): 32. 2. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 235. On the musical biopic, see also John C. Tibbetts, Composers in the Movies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 102–154. 3. George M. Cohan, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There: The True Story of a Trouper’s Life from the Cradle to the ‘Closed Shop’ (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925). 4. For an excellent account of the film’s creation, see Patrick McGilligan’s introduction to the published screenplay: ‘The Life Daddy Would Have Liked to Live,’ in Yankee Doodle Dandy, Wisconsin/Warner Bros. Screenplay Series (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 11–64. The contract with Cohan is discussed on pp. 16–17. 5. On the musical’s mythologies, see Jane Feuer, ‘The Self-reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,’ in Genre: The Musical, ed. Rick Altman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), and The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), esp. 15–22 and 90–97. 6. Russell Owen, ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ New York Times, 1 March 1942. 7. Charles L. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 8. For further discussion of Cohan’s early, hyper-patriotic musicals, his construction of his public identity, and how he negotiated his Irish American identity (including in a series of Irish American–themed musicals from 1918 to 1927), see Elizabeth Titrington Craft, ‘Becoming American Onstage: Broadway Narratives of Immigrant Experiences in the United States’ (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014), 30–158. 9. See, for examples, Little Johnny Jones Liberty Theatre playbill clipping, ‘Week Beginning . . .  Nov. 14, 1904,’ box 819, Edward B. Marks Co. Collection on George M. Cohan, 1901–1968 (hereafter ‘Cohan Collection’) at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY); Little Johnny Jones advertisement, New York Times, 6 November 1904; Cohan, ‘They’re All My Friends’ (New York: F. A. Mills, 1904). 10. ‘Rehearsing “A Yankee Prince,” ’ New York Tribune, 28 February 1908; ‘The American Idea,’ Boston Daily Globe, 10 September 1908. 11. Untitled article, Life, 12 October 1911, 618. 12. Cohan, Twenty Years on Broadway, 201. 13. The Spot Light 1, no. 28 (9 December 1905), Cohan Collection, MCNY. 14. Biographer Ward Morehouse uncovered a baptismal certificate naming 3 July as Cohan’s birth date, but other official documents name 4 July and Cohan scholar John McCabe argues that ‘the baptismal certificate hardly settles the matter.’ McCabe suggests that the date on the certificate is a ‘clerical error,’ citing a diary entry by George’s father as well as the fact that George’s parents always celebrated his birthday on the fourth and noting their ‘utter probity.’ Morehouse, George M. Cohan: Prince of the American Theater (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1943), 24–25; McCabe, George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 1–2. 15. Cohan, ‘What the American Flag Has Done for Me,’ Theatre Magazine, June 1914, 286; ‘Agnes Nolan of Brookline to Become Mrs George M. Cohan,’ Boston Daily Globe, 15 April 1907. 16. Table of contents, Green Book Magazine, December 1914.

yankee doodle dandy   331 17. Verne Hardin Porter, ‘The Story of George M. Cohan,’ Green Book Magazine, December 1914, 964. 18. George  M.  Cohan and Verne Hardin Porter, ‘The Stage as I Have Seen It,’ Green Book Magazine, February 1915, 247. 19. On the hibernicon, Jerry Cohan’s role in it, and its function for the Irish transnational community, see Michelle Granshaw, ‘Performing Cultural Memory: The Travelling Hibernicon and the Transnational Irish Community in the United States and Australia,’ Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 41, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 76–101; and Michelle Granshaw, ‘The Hibernicon and Visions of Returning Home: Popular Entertainment in Irish America from the Civil War to World War I’ (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2012). 20. On Cohan’s script, which the initial screenwriter Robert Buckner described as an ‘­egotistical epic,’ see McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 30–34; Buckner to Wallis, 27 September 1941, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 9/8/41–10/30/41,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 21. Robert Buckner to Hal Wallis, 25 November 1941, folder 2375 ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 11/1/41–11/28/41,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 22. One theme—Cohan’s lack of formal education—is stressed less in the film than in Cohan’s writings. As Patrick McGilligan notes, earlier efforts with the script had included attempts to dramatize the Cohan children’s education (and problems therewith) but they were ‘­ultimately abandoned.’ McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 98, 211n14. 23. Cohan was, in fact, awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor. Although it was authorized by Congress in 1936, Cohan did not receive it from President Roosevelt until 1940. Cohan may have delayed the meeting for political reasons: see McCabe, George M. Cohan, 234, and Garrett Eisler, ‘Kidding on the Level: The Reactionary Project of I’d Rather Be Right,’ Studies in Musical Theatre 1, no. 1 (2007): 19–20. 24. All film quotations are from Yankee Doodle Dandy, based on the story of George M. Cohan, directed by Michael Curtiz, starring James Cagney (1942; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video 2003), DVD. 25. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 21. 26. On Robert Buckner’s attempts to show Cohan in a favourable light, see McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 25. 27. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 20. 28. Morehouse, George M. Cohan, 229. 29. On the process of the Irish ‘Becoming Caucasian,’ see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 91–135. On the film’s portrayal of Irish Americanness, see Meaghan Dwyer-Ryan, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Paddy”: Themes of Ethnic Acculturation in Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ Journal of American Ethnic History 30, no. 4 (Summer 2011): 57–62, and Christopher Shannon, Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2010), 153–169. 30. Dwyer-Ryan, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Paddy,” ’ 61. The ability for Irish American characters in film to easily maintain both identities stands in notable contrast to other ethnic groups as portrayed by Hollywood, for instance, the Jewish American protagonist Jackie Rabinowitz in The Jazz Singer: Shannon, Bowery to Broadway, xxxi–xxxii, 161–162.

332   musical theatre screen adaptations 31. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 92. 32. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 38; Michelle Granshaw, ‘Hibernicon and Visions,’ 90. 33. When they filmed this scene, the war had recently begun and tensions were high, so d ­ irector Michael Curtiz had to get permission from both Warner Bros. and the city of Burbank, California, to fire the cannon: Behlmer commentary on Yankee Doodle Dandy, DVD. 34. Richard Gustafson describes a ‘sense of destiny’ as one of the archetypes of the early to mid-century biopic in ‘Vogue of the Screen Biography,’ 36. On the use of flags in American cinema, including Yankee Doodle Dandy, and this scene, see Robert Eberwein, ‘Following the Flag in American Film,’ in Eastwood’s Iwo Jima: Critical Engagements with Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, ed. Anne Gjelsvik and Rikke Schubart (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), esp. 85–86; and William  H.  Epstein, ‘Biopics and American National Identity—Invented Lives, Imagined Communities,’ introduction to ‘Biopics and American National Identity,’ ed. Epstein, special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 26, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 12, 15–17. 35. Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, ‘The Filmed Musical,’ in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 136. 36. Rick Altman writes, ‘The greater the star, we might expect, the less it is possible for Hollywood to fit his or her biopic into the familiar syntactic mold of the backstage m ­ usical, for the public would certainly be aware of at least the basic outline of the star’s career. Such, however, is far from being the case’ due to the ‘American popular mythology’ in which these larger-than-life figures operate. Altman, The American Film Musical, 236. 37. On the use of the framing of the stage as part of LeRoy Prinz’s style, see Allen L. Woll, The Hollywood Musical Goes to War (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983), 55. 3 8. James Fisher, Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 252. 39. Feuer, ‘Self-Reflective Musical,’ 159–174, esp. 168. 4 0. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 157. 41. James and William Cagney were not happy with the versions of the script that Buckner submitted in October 1941, and Edmund Joseph, then Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, were brought in to ‘doctor’ the script. The final production credits state that the screenplay is by Robert Buckner and Edmund Joseph; despite their significant contributions, the Epsteins agreed not to be listed. Robert Buckner to Hal Wallis, 15 April 1941, folder 2375 ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 1/16/41–4/28/41,’ and Robert Buckner to Joseph D. Karp (TS, unsigned), 27 April 1943, folder 2375 ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 7/1/42—1/31/44,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 19, 39–45, 54. 4 2. Cohan, Twenty Years on Broadway, 10–13, 22–26. 43. Heinz Roemheld and Ray Heindorf, however, were credited with the film’s musical scoring, for which they won an Academy Award. 4 4. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 16–17, 30, 38, 54. 45. Seymour Felix, who staged the production numbers along with Leroy Prinz, wrote to Hal Wallis about going outside the bounds of the contract to interpolate small bits of music for dramatic purposes; for example, he stated: ‘If the “Yankee Doodle” number is to be done as a production number, it . . . might be a good idea to inject about eight or sixteen bars of music and lyrics, advising the audience that Little Johnny Jones, the jockey, is going to ride in the Derby race, this done to gallop music, which will help to create musical excitement.’

yankee doodle dandy   333 The additions ‘Good Luck Johnny’ and ‘All Aboard for Broadway’ were written by Jack Scholl and M. K. Jerome. Felix to Wallis, 12 November 1941, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 11/1/41–11/28/41,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; George Feltenstein, liner notes to Original Warner Bros. Motion Picture Soundtrack: Yankee Doodle Dandy, R2 78210, 2002, cd. 46. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 47. 47. Other features were directly related to James Cagney: a ‘gallery’ of trailers of Cagney films; a profile of Cagney hosted by Michael J. Fox; and a tribute to Cagney by John Travolta: Yankee Doodle Dandy, DVD. 48. During a 1941 congressional hearing to investigate purported ‘Moving Picture Screen and Radio Propaganda,’ initiated by the isolationist North Dakotan Senator Gerald Nye, Harry M. Warner gave a speech declaring outright, ‘I am opposed to nazi-ism. I abhor and detest every principle and practice of the Nazi movement.’ On Warner Bros. politically oriented prewar films, see Michael  E.  Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism, 1934–1941 (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 39–42; Woll, Hollywood Musical, 3–11, 33–44. 49. ‘Four-fifths of the people who remember me are dead,’ Cohan commented to Buckner. The film’s opening, with Cohan’s name in lights on a marquee, was designed in part to ‘establish the importance of George M. Cohan for today’s generation’ according to a letter from director Michael Curtiz to Hal Wallis. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 14–15; Curtiz to Wallis, 14 November 1941, folder 2375 ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 11/1/41–11/28/41,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 5 0. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 15–16, 46. 51. Thomas  F.  Brady, ‘Facts Behind “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” ’ New York Times, 10 January 1943. The anecdote is related similarly on the James Cagney: Top of the World feature hosted by Michael J. Fox on the Yankee Doodle Dandy special edition DVD set. 52. One advertisement for Yankee Doodle Dandy proclaimed, ‘Warner Bros. are on an all-out basis on the entertainment front. . . . All of us who are Warner Bros. . . . have one purpose and one only; to give you the kind of entertainment that raises your spirits, lifts your chin, and helps brighten things for any day ahead.’ Yankee Doodle Dandy advertisement, undated, folder 2883, ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy—Picture File,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 53. William Cagney and Robert Buckner to Hal Wallis, 5 May 1941, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 5/2/41–6/30/41,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 54. On critics’ responses to Cohan and his ‘flag-waving’ musicals, see Craft, ‘Becoming American Onstage,’ 74–87. 55. Hal B. Wallis, William Cagney, and Robert Buckner to George M. Cohan, copying [story editor] Jacob Wilk, 29 August 1941, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 7/1/41–9/5/41,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 56. William Cagney to Hal Wallis, 27 August 1941, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 7/1/41–9/5/41,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

334   musical theatre screen adaptations 57. In response to this letter Cohan agreed to compromise according to 8 September ­correspondence from Buckner to Wilk. A 6 October telegram from Buckner to Hal Wallis reported a ‘very encouraging conference with Cohan today’ in which he ‘assure[d] general approval of new script’ with minimal changes. Robert Buckner to Jake Wilk, 8 September 1941, and Robert Buckner to Hal B. Wallis, 6 October 1941, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 9/8/41–10/30/41,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 58. Eberwein, ‘Following the Flag,’ 85. 59. Walter Anthony, ‘A Japanese Invasion,’ San Francisco Call, 28 January 1912; Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 14. 60. Scott  A.  Sandage, ‘Old Rags, Some Grand,’ Cabinet 7 (Summer 2002), http://www.­ cabinetmagazine.org/issues/7/oldrags.php; Cohen, ‘Dear Old Darling,’ Variety, 8 January 1936. 61. George M. Cohan to Hon. Francis Biddle, 16 December 1941, Cohan Collection, MCNY. 62. Sandage, ‘Old Rags, Some Grand.’ 63. Cohan, ‘George Washington, Jr’ script (Act I, pp. 37–40), box 519, Cohan Collection, MCNY. 6 4. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 169. 6 5. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 219n42. 66. LeRoy Prinz to William Cagney, 7 January 1942, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 7/1/42–1/31/44’ [filed out of date?], Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 67. Replogle-Wong’s excellent analysis of this scene demonstrates how it presents ‘an idealistic version of the American model of national inclusiveness, in which past offenses are absorbed by the spirit of unification’: ‘Coming-of-Age in Wartime: American Propaganda and Patriotic Nationalism in Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 8, no. 1 (Fall 2006): paragraphs 9–16. 68. LeRoy Prinz to William Cagney, 7 January 1942, in Warner Bros. Archives. Seymour Felix had been taken off the project in December 1941: Seymour Felix to Hal Wallis, 26 December 1941, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 12/1/41–1/30/42,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Rudy Behlmer commentary on Yankee Doodle Dandy, DVD. 69. LeRoy Prinz to William Cagney, 7 January 1942, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 7/1/42–1/31/44’ [filed out of date?], Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 70. Richard Severo, ‘Frances Langford, Trouper on Bob Hope Tours, Dies at 92,’ New York Times, 12 July 2005. 7 1. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 221n52. 72. I draw here upon Sheryl Kaskowitz’s discussion of communal singing, of another patriotic song from the same era, in God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 73. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 24. 74. McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 221n53. 75. ‘Exploitation: Treasury Dept Cued WB’s $25,000 “Tickets” for ‘Yankee Doodle,’ Variety, 6 May 1942. On the premiere and publicity, see also McGilligan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, 58. 76. Jack Warner [to ‘Messrs. Einfeld and Blumenstock’], 13 August 1942, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 7/1/41–9/5/41,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. The

yankee doodle dandy   335 document is filed with the July–September 1941 documents. However, the 1942 date is probably correct given that it was common during the period for a film to move gradually to different theatres and that the press reported that the national merchandising campaign would be rolled out following the film’s premiere: ‘Exploitation: Nat’l Campaign on “Yankee” Rests on Preem Results,’ Variety, 27 May 1942. 77. Jack Warner to George  M.  Cohan, 29 May 1942, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 2/2/42–6/20/42,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 78. George M. Cohan to Jack Warner, 17 August 1942, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 7/1/42–1/31/44,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 79. Sandage, ‘Old Rags, Some Grand.’ 80. Donald A. Sardinas to [Jack] Warner, 29 May 1942, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story—Memos and Correspondence, 2/2/42–6/20/42,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 81. Lydia Wilbur to Jack L. Warner, 21 July 1942, folder 2375, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Story— Memos and Correspondence, 7/1/42–1/31/44,’ Warner Bros. Archives, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 82. Edwin Schallert, ‘ “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Registers Super Success,’ Los Angeles Times, 13 August 1942.

chapter 15

Cole Porter’s List Songs on Stage a n d  Scr een Cliff Eisen

List songs have a long history: Leporello’s catalogue aria from Don Giovanni and ‘I Have a Little List’ from The Mikado are only two of the best-known examples. And songs made up primarily, if not entirely, of lists, figure prominently among Cole Porter’s works, including ‘You’re the Top,’ ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare,’ and ‘Let’s Do It.’1 As enumerations—of things, places, and people, sometimes as themselves and sometimes as metaphors—these songs juxtapose a variety of objects, images, and ideas. ‘You’re the Top,’ ‘Let’s Do It,’ and ‘Can-Can’ include references to people, places, and things; ‘Thank You So Much Mrs Lowsborough-Goodby’ satirizes high society entertaining like racing, card playing, backgammon, hot cocktails, cold baths, and eating tinned salmon that causes ptomaine poisoning; ‘The Law,’ also from Can–Can, is about metaphors: the final version, dropped during the Philadelphia tryouts in 1953, includes only the line ‘The law is my life, the law is my wife,’ but when Porter first thought about composing the song he wrote his librettist, Abe Burrows: Your notes concerning the song which I have to write about the law helped me so much that the song is nearly finished. Do you know other phrases besides the body of the law, the letter of the law and the arm of the law, which would also apply to a beautiful woman? If you could send me these I could write several more lyrics. My secretary just suggested the clutches of the law and the shadow of the law, but I need more.2

Burrows suggested the limbs of the law, the eyes of the law, the majesty of the law, legal lights, lovely loop-holes in the law, the statuesque beauty of a statute, the fine points of the law, the essence of the law, and the law is a mistress.3 If a lyric sheet for ‘Can-Can’ is typical, Porter may have initially sketched out these songs by creating lists of appropriate

338   musical theatre screen adaptations rhyming words (Figure 15.1). But he was also not opposed to getting help constructing his lists. In addition to Burrows’s potential contributions to ‘The Law,’ P. G. Wodehouse was co-opted to write additional lyrics for ‘Anything Goes’ when it was produced in London in 1935.4 And Porter was receptive to the idea of others writing additional lyrics to his songs; indeed, he apparently saw his list songs—and others’ adaptations of them—as something of a national poetical pastime. While composing Can-Can he wrote to Burrows: I am enclosing the lyrics to a new song which could easily be the most important in the Show. As far as numbers go, this song could be sung by a solist [sic] alone on stage or to several other people on stage. It need not be danced to immediately after the vocal is finished, but could be used as a dance number later in the Show. This is a real Can-Can in its tempo and in its feeling. I shall send you the music to this shortly. I am already working on two other sets of lyrics which will become the fourth and fifth refrains. I hope to write even more lyrics, as this song can easily become a national game, such as was ‘Your [sic] The Top’ and ‘Let’s Do It.’5

According to David Savran, Porter’s engagement with the public through list songs, and the public’s willingness to embrace them, represent something fundamental about

Figure 15.1  Notes for Can-Can. Reproduced with permission of the Cole Porter Literary and Musical Property Trusts.

cole porter’s list songs   339 their nature, that they not only catalogue but also produce desires, whether desires for the objects, peoples, and places themselves, or more covert, sexualized desires that these objects, peoples, and places may stand in for.6 (Parenthetically, Porter was himself attached to the idea of lists that catalogued his own needs, desires, and tastes: when he travelled to Philadelphia for the out-of-town tryout for Out of This World in 1950, he had his secretary write ahead detailing what he required in his hotel suite, even down to specific brands, including Ivanhoe shrimp, sturgeon, cocktail mushrooms, Persian melons, Saltine crackers, maraschino cherries, stuffed olives, Miracle Whip mayonnaise, Carnation condensed milk, Medaglio d’Oro coffee, Adams Chiclets (peppermint), Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and Pard dog food (Figure 15.2)). At a more immediate but just as important level, list songs catalogue and encourage pleasure in ever more extravagant, creative, and extended verbal play, conceivably without end: list songs, like lists, are potentially infinite. William Glass notes that many list songs juxtapose objects that seemingly do not ‘belong’ together—‘You’re a rose, / You’re Inferno’s Dante / You’re the nose / Of the great Durante’ from ‘You’re the Top’—and that in doing so, they create ‘a site, something like [a] . . . universe of discourse, a place where everything on the list can co-exist, a common space.’7 This is similar to Umberto Eco’s notion of ‘accumulations,’ a common occurrence in biblical and medieval literature where linguistic terms ‘belonging to the same conceptual sphere’ appear in sequence and juxtaposition. Such accumulations need not be coherent or may appear incoherent; their deeper coherence depends on just what the ‘conceptual sphere’ is.8 Both Glass’s and Eco’s ideas derive from Leo Spitzer’s notion of ‘chaotic enumerations,’ the ‘lumping together [of] things spiritual and physical, as the raw material of our rich, but unordered modern civilization which is made to resemble an oriental bazaar.’9 Porter’s list songs, with their potentially infinite expressions of desire and chaotic enumerations, are similarly a sort of ‘oriental bazaar’ and, in addition, he attached to them an important theatrical function. When he was composing Kiss Me, Kate he wrote to his librettist, Bella Spewack: I have written a . . . song for the two gangsters. I indicated that they could sing this song for their exit on page 2-6-29 of your book. . . . I suggest that they enter after the scene is finished, in front of the curtain & sing it just before we go into the final Shrew scene.10

The same day he explained to the show’s producer, Jack Wilson: I have already taken care of [the] next to closing spot. I had been looking for that spot for weeks, as I always have had one of those low comedy numbers in practically all my shows, just before the final scene. . . . The number is titled Brush up your Shakespeare. It’s [sic] music is reminiscent of East Side, West Side, i.e., the typical Bowery song of the 1900’s, and I firmly believe it will tie up the show into a beautiful knot. The lyrics are a series of gags and I am almost sure that it will be a show-stopper and everyone that I have played it to is crazy about it.11

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Figure 15.2 Cole Porter, list of requirements for his hotel room in Philadelphia, 1953. Reproduced with permission of the Cole Porter Literary and Musical Property Trusts.

For Kiss Me, Kate, the inclusion of ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ necessitated a fundamental change in the script of the final scene: where originally Lilli/Kate had been given the whole of Kate’s final speech from act 4, scene 2 of The Taming of the Shrew—‘Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow’—now she was restricted to only a few lines.

cole porter’s list songs   341 Perhaps to compensate Lilli/Kate, Porter wrote ‘I am ashamed that women are so ­simple,’12 which includes much of the text cut from her final Shakespearian speech. The result is an ending less Shakespearian but more in keeping with Porter’s established musical theatre practice. In the play, ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ is delivered by the gangsters in front of the curtain (Figure 15.3). They—and the song—are set off from the rest of the show, creating a unique physical and psychological space, one different from the Shakespearian space of Petruchio and Katherine, the backstage theatrical space of the protagonists Fred and Lilli, or the alley-behind-the-theatre space of ‘Too Darn Hot.’ This focuses attention solely on the gangsters and their list song: two singers alone on a stage illuminated by  spotlights and in no identifiable physical location with respect to the rest of the show,  enumerating at length, conceivably even infinitely if they do not run out of Shakespearian puns and wordplay. What is more, aside from the obvious Shakespearian textual connection, there is really no reason for this song—certainly no compelling dramatic reason—other than to enumerate and entertain, to be a ‘low comedy number . . . just before the final scene.’ To be—literally—a showstopper. In the film version of Kiss Me, Kate from 1953, however, the gangsters deliver their list not to the audience (except for a brief moment at the end), but to a depressed Fred (Figure 15.4). The physical space, still the theatre, remains clearly attached to both Fred/ Lilli and Petruchio/Kate while the text is considerably abbreviated (see Table 15.1) and the song remade in no small part into a soft shoe dance number. It also has a function: to cheer up Fred. Morose at the start of the song because he thinks he has lost Lilli, he is laughing by the end, the gangsters seemingly having told him there are other ‘girls’ out there and how to get them (Table  15.1). Possibly this restaging of ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ was merely a directorial decision. Or possibly it hints at a fundamental aspect of filmed musicals that is inimical to list songs: their separateness and staticness; their drawing of attention to themselves and to words rather than, primarily, visuals or the narrative of the film; and their potential open-endedness may all work against the notion of what a film does. The 1950s film version of Anything Goes (Paramount, 1956)—the 1934 show that featured ‘You’re the Top’—finds a similar solution to the filming of a list song. In the stage show, Reno Sweeney and Billy Crocker are alone on the deck of the S.S. American sailing to England; Billy has smuggled himself aboard so he can convince his true love, Hope Harcourt, not to marry Lord Evelyn Oakley. But he has a crisis of confidence and Hope tries to buck him up with ‘You’re the Top.’ The 1954 film of Anything Goes, starring Bing Crosby, Donald O’Connor, Zizi Jeanmaire, and Mitzi Gaynor, considerably rewrites the story, not atypically for film versions of stage musicals. Crosby and O’Connor are sailing for New York, each having promised a different actress the leading part in a new musical. But neither of them has the courage to break the news to them, the actresses, that they can’t both star in the show. So they avoid each other, scheduling what should have been a joint rehearsal in two different places. The number they rehearse is ‘You’re the Top.’ As with ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare,’ the text is truncated and the song becomes a dance number, it is given a more fixed and identifiable physical location, and it serves to

342   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 15.3  ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare,’ New Century Theatre, 1948.

Figure 15.4  ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare,’ MGM, 1953.

advance the plot, reinforcing the main characters’ attempts to move forward with the show they are planning but not create havoc by owning up to their casting problem—or jeopardizing their love lives since each has fallen in love with the other’s star actress (Figure 15.5). Can-Can represents a more extreme example. The stage show, from 1953, included at least five list songs or songs made up mostly of lists: ‘Maidens Typical of France,’ ‘Live and Let Live,’ ‘Never, Never Be an Artist,’ ‘Ev’ry Man Is a Stupid Man,’ and ‘Can-Can.’ Neither ‘Never, Never Be an Artist’ nor ‘Ev’ry Man Is a Stupid Man’ made it into the 1960 film with Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Maurice Chevalier, and Louis Jourdan

cole porter’s list songs   343

Table 15.1  Texts: ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ (Kiss Me, Kate: stage show 1948, film 1953). Lyrics in italics are either newly written for the film version or have been moved from their originaly position in the stage version. Show: VERSE The girls today in society Go for classical poetry, So to win their hearts one must quote with ease Aeschylus and Euripides. One must know Homer and, b’lieve me, Bo, Sophocles, also Sappho-ho. Unless you know Shelley and Keats and Pope, Dainty debbies will call you a dope. But the poet of them all Who will start ’em simply ravin’ Is the poet people call The bard of Stratford-on-Avon.

Film: VERSE The girls today in society Go for classical poetry, So to win their hearts one must quote with ease Aeschylus and Euripides.

REFRAIN 1 Brush up your Shakespeare, Start quoting him now. Brush up your Shakespeare And the women you will wow. Just declaim a few lines from ‘Othella’ And they’ll think you’re a helluva fella. If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ’er Tell her what Tony told Cleopaterer, If she fights when her clothes you are mussing, What are clothes? ‘Much Ado About Nussing.’ Brush up your Shakespeare And they’ll all kowtow.

REFRAIN 1 Brush up your Shakespeare, Start quoting him now. Brush up your Shakespeare And the women you will wow. Just declaim a few lines from ‘Othella’ And they’ll think you’re a heckuva fella. If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ’er Tell her what Tony told Cleopaterer, And if still she pretends to be shocked, well, Just remind her that ‘All’s Well That Ends Well.’ Brush up your Shakespeare And they’ll all kowtow.

But the poet of them all Who will start ’em simply ravin’ Is the poet people call The bard of Stratford-on-Avon.

REFRAIN 2 Brush up your Shakespeare, Start quoting him now. Brush up your Shakespeare And the women you will wow. With the wife of the British embessida Try a crack out of ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ If she says she won’t buy it or tike it Make her tike it, what’s more, ‘As You Like It.’ If she says your behavior is heinous Kick her right in the ‘Coriolanus.’ Brush up your Shakespeare And they’ll all kowtow. REFRAIN 3 Brush up your Shakespeare, Start quoting him now. Brush up your Shakespeare And the women you will wow. If you can’t be a ham and do ‘Hamlet’ (continued )

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Table 15.1  Continued They will not give a damn or a damnlet. Just recite an occasional sonnet And your lap’ll have ‘Honey’ upon it. When your baby is pleading for pleasure Let her sample your ‘Measure for Measure.’ Brush up your Shakespeare And they’ll all kowtow. REFRAIN 4 Brush up your Shakespeare, Start quoting him now. Brush up your Shakespeare And the women you will wow. Better mention ‘The Merchant of Venice’ When her sweet pound o’ flesh you would menace If her virtue, at first, she defends—well, Just remind her that ‘All’s Well That Ends Well.’ And if still she won’t give you a bonus You know what Venus got from Adonis! Brush up your Shakespeare And they’ll all kowtow. REFRAIN 5 Brush up your Shakespeare Start quoting him now. Brush up your Shakespeare And the women you will wow. If your goil is a Washington Heights dream Treat the kid to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ If she then wants an all-by-herself night Let her rest ev’ry ’leventh or ‘Twelfth Night.’ If because of your heat she gets huffy Simply play on and ‘Lay on, Macduffy!’ Brush up your Shakespeare And they’ll all kowtow, We trow, and they’ll all kowtow. GRAND FINALE Brush up your Shakespeare, Start quoting him now. Brush up your Shakespeare And the women you will wow. So tonight just recite to your matey, ‘Kiss me, Kate, kiss me, Kate, kiss me, Katey.‘ Brush up your Shakespeare And they’ll all kowtow.

REFRAIN 2 Brush up your Shakespeare Start quoting him now. Brush up your Shakespeare And the women you will wow. If your goil is a Washington Heights dream Treat the kid to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ If she fights when her clothes you are mussing, What are clothes? ‘Much Ado About Nussing.‘ If she says your behavior is heinous Kick her right in the ‘Coriolanus.‘ Brush up your Shakespeare And they’ll all kowtow, We trow, and they’ll all kowtow. 

cole porter’s list songs   345

Figure 15.5  ‘You’re The Top’ from Anything Goes (Paramount, 1956).

(the list song ‘Let’s Do It,’ from Porter’s 1928 show Paris is smuggled into the film but in a much abbreviated version). The two that remain, ‘Maidens Typical of France’ and ‘Can-Can’ are so extensively reworked and altered as to eliminate them from consideration as list songs altogether. In the stage show, the mini-list song ‘Maidens Typical of France’ is the first number and it is performed in a courtroom by Simone Pistache’s dancing girls as a kind of legal defence against the charge that their show, and the can-can in particular, violates morality laws—it is, they are saying, entirely innocent. ‘Maidens’ not only represents an ensemble opening number but also sets the scene for the rest of the action: its short list not only juxtaposes high and low (in this case supposed moral rectitude though in fact meant to represent self-righteousness and social high-handedness as opposed to the club culture of Montmartre) but also, in keeping with literary enumerations, their legitimate and meaningful coexistence. This juxtaposition of high and low is also what fuels Judge Aristide Forestrier’s falling in love with club owner and showgirl Simone Pistache, and his recognition, as well as the recognition by others who think like him, that he was wrong to be so strait-laced. The song is a microcosm of the whole. ‘Maidens Typical of France’ is not the opening number in the film. The opening number is ‘Montmartre,’ which in the stage show appears considerably later. ‘Montmartre’ not only sets a different kind of scene, identifying the place and culture that are central to the action, but it also serves more immediately to introduce the audience to two of the main characters, the younger, high-living lawyer Francois Durnais, and the older, highliving judge Paul Barriere. Or better, it serves to introduce Frank Sinatra and Maurice Chevalier who play parts that are less important in the stage version but central to the film. And when ‘Maidens Typical of France’ is introduced, not demurely in the courtroom

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Table 15.2  ‘Maidens Typical of France’ (Can-Can: stage show 1953, film 1960) Show: REFRAIN 1 We are maidens typical of France, In a convent educated. From the wicked clutches of romance, We have all been segregated. We know how to sew, we know how to knit, We know how to read—at least a little bit, We know how to wash, we know how to clean. If also we know the difference between A pair o’ panties and a pair o’ pants, We are maidens typical of France.

Film: REFRAIN 1 We are maidens typical of France, In a convent educated. From the wicked clutches of romance, We have all been segregated.

REFRAIN 2 We are maidens typical of France, In a convent educated. From the wicked clutches of romance, We have all been segregated. We know how to sweep, we know how to dust, We know how to stew—a rabbit if we must, We know how to bake, we know how to fry. If also we know a tart is not a pie It is because we had the lucky chance To be maidens typical of France. REFRAIN 3 We are maidens typical of France, In a convent educated. We’re all very pure, we’re all very good, We all try to do exactly as we should, We all go to church, we all say our prayers, And if, when we dance, we show our derrieres It is to show that, even when we dance, We are maidens

We’re all very pure, we wash our dainties white, We all try to do exactly what is right, We all go to church, we all say our prayers, And if, when we dance, we show our derrieres It is to show that, even when we dance, We are maidens typical of France.

POLICEMEN: They are maidens ALL: Typical of France.

but in a satirizing setting at Pistache’s club Bal du Paradis, it is truncated: only one verse is given, a verse made up of bits and pieces from the original (Table 15.2). What is more, it is followed—even overshadowed—by a dance that reminds spectators they are watching a late 1950s film: whereas much of the dance is musically in keeping with the rest of the show, set in 1890s Paris, at the end it becomes modern and jazzy, with bump and grind gestures reminiscent of Adelaide’s ‘Take Back Your Mink’ from Guys and Dolls or June’s version of ‘Let Me Entertain You’ in Gypsy. As a scene-setting number, as an enumeration of high and low, as a microcosm of what follows—as a list song—the film version of ‘Maidens Typical of France’ is to a large extent eviscerated.

cole porter’s list songs   347

Table 15.3  ‘Can-Can’ (Can-Can: stage show 1953, film 1960; not sung in film) REFRAIN 1 There is no trick to a can-can, It is so simple to do, When you once kick to a can-can, ’Twill be so easy for you. If a lady in Iran can, If a shady African can, If a Jap with a slap of her fan can, Baby, you can can-can too. If an English Dapper Dan can, If an Irish Callahan can, If an Afghan in Afghanistan can, Baby, you can can-can too. REFRAIN 2 If in Deauville ev’ry swell can, It is so simple to do, If Debussy and Ravel can, ’Twill be so easy for you. If the Louvre custodian can, If the Guard Republican can, If Van Gogh and Matisse and Cezanne can, Baby, you can can-can too. If a chief in the Sudan can, If the hefty Aga Khan can, If the camels in his caravan can, Baby, you can can-can too. REFRAIN 3 Takes no art to do a can-can, It is so simple to do, When you start to do a can-can, ’Twill be so easy for you. If a slow Mohammedan can, If a kilted Scottish clan can, If in Wagner a Valkyrian can, Baby, you can can-can too. If a lass in Michigan can, If an ass in Astrakhan can, If a bass in the Saskatchewan can, Baby, you can can-can too. REFRAIN 4 If the waltz king Johann Strauss can, It is so simple to do, If his gals in Fledermaus can, ’Twill be so easy for you. Lovely Duse in Milan can, Lucien Guitry and Rejane can, Sarah Bernhardt upon a divan can, Baby, you can can-can too. (continued )

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Table 15.3  Continued If a holy Hindu man can, If a gangly Anglican can, If in Lesbos, a pure Lesbian can, Baby, you can can-can too. REFRAIN 5 If an ape gargantuan can, It is so simple to do, If a clumsy pelican can, ’Twill be so easy for you. If a dachshund in Berlin can, If a tomcat in Pekin can, If a crowded sardine in a tin can, Baby, you can can-can too. If a rhino with a crash can, If a hippo with a splash can, If an elm and an oak and an ash can, Baby, you can can-can too.

The handling of the song ‘Can-Can’ is more extreme. Coming at the end of the show, its chaotic enumeration and alliterations—‘If the Louvre custodian can, / If the Guard Republican can, / If Van Gogh and Matisse and Cézanne can,/ Baby you can can-can too’ is juxtaposed with ‘If an ape gargantuan can, / . . . If a clumsy pelican can, / . . . If a dachshund in Berlin can, / If a tomcat in Pekin can, / If a crowded sardine in a tin can, / Baby, you can can-can too’—sum up the whole of the action, bring about a kind of general rapprochement, and represent a resolution to the supposed incompatibility among the characters, between high and low, between the moral and the licentious (Table 15.3). Yet in the film, ‘Can-Can’ is reduced to a dance only: there are no words, it is not sung, there is no list (Figure 15.6). There are some common patterns here: in all of these examples much, sometimes all, of the text is omitted; in the cases of ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ and ‘You’re the Top’ the songs are given physical locations related to the action of the plot; they are meant to further the narrative rather than represent a static aside; and in every case, they become less songs and more like dance numbers. A reason for this may be that in their original, full-length form, list songs represent an outlier among song genres that is potentially incompatible with film, especially musical films of the 1950s. A historical view might be that for the 1950s, list songs, showstoppers, were incompatible with the idea of the ‘integrated’ musical, a notion that first gained wide currency with Oklahoma!, in which narrative considerations trump performance. A list song, a potentially unending recitation devoid of action or even characterization specific to any show, as opposed to more universal notions of character and attributes, stops the narrative in its tracks. It is perhaps no coincidence that Porter’s film musicals, as opposed to his stage musicals, do not include list songs at all (Born to Dance, 1936;

cole porter’s list songs   349

Figure 15.6  ‘Can-Can’ from Can-Can (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1960).

Rosalie, 1937; Broadway Melody of 1940, 1940; and The Pirate, 1948). The one exception is ‘Now You Has Jazz’ from High Society (1956)—an exception explained by the fact that it is a ‘live’ performance number for Louis Armstrong. Since the appeal of list songs is as much—if not more—the words as the music, they should perhaps be thought of as not just a musical genre but a literary genre as well (after all, Porter wrote that ‘Can-Can’ didn’t have to be danced, hence the primacy of words over action), constructing meaning primarily through linguistic codes and conventions. This may also be why list songs are problematic in film: they represent a kind of openended literary structure that may be incompatible with the nature of the film musical itself and the demands of film narrative.13 On a purely practical level, this appears to manifest itself in some well-understood rules about the length of a song, even in a film musical: in 1958, when Porter was working on Aladdin for CBS television, his producer, Richard Lewine, wrote to him that no song—for television or film—ought to exceed two and a half or three minutes, the maximum length for both the narrative and the audience.14 Even then, the potential of an infinity of words, for an unending chaotic enumeration, seems to have been considered too much even for three minutes. In virtually all of the examples noted above, the songs mostly become action, become dances; as Rick Altman says, ‘The beauty of dance is that it needs no words—indeed, it escapes words.’15 List songs, then, can also be thought of as representatives of a broader literary tradition, whether of rhetoric, as described by Eco, or chaotic enumerations, as described by Spitzer, and as theatrical traditions. They work on stage because they can ‘become,’ in a manner of speaking, literary works appropriate to live performance: the actors or

350   musical theatre screen adaptations singers can be physically isolated, even soliloquize, in front of the curtain; there is a ­recognized theatrical game to be played, whether encouraging applause at the false ­ending of a song like ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ or the inclusion of, as Porter put it, a literal showstopper near the end; and because the immediacy of verbal performance in a theatre is different from the immediacy of visual performance on screen. List songs work in the theatre because they take centre stage all by themselves and invite listeners or watchers to be complicit in literary and theatrical conventions that go beyond a ­specific moment, scene, or show, conventions seemingly incompatible—to judge how Porter’s list songs are presented on screen—with film.

Notes 1. Considering that there is no fixed notion of what does or does not count as a list song, a rough account of the list songs in Porter’s Broadway shows could conceivably include the following: ‘The Physician’ (Nymph Errant, 1933); ‘You’re the Top’ (Anything Goes, 1934); ‘Gather Ye Autographs While Ye May’ and ‘A Picture of Me without You’ (Jubilee, 1935); ‘From Alpha to Omega’ (You Never Know, 1938); ‘But in the Morning, No’ and ‘Well Did You Evah!’ (DuBarry Was a Lady, 1939); ‘Fresh as a Daisy,’ ‘I’m Throwing a Ball Tonight,’ and ‘Americans All Drink Coffee’ (Panama Hattie, 1940); ‘A Lady Needs a Rest,’ ‘Farming,’ and ‘You Irritate Me So’ (Let’s Face It, 1941); ‘I Can Do without Tea in my Teapot’ (Something to Shout About, 1943); ‘The Good-Will Movement’ and ‘It’s Just Like the Good Old Days’ (Mexican Hayride, 1944); ‘Drink’ and ‘Hence It Don’t Make Sense’ (Seven Lively Arts, 1944); ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ (Kiss Me, Kate, 1948); ‘I Got Beauty’ and ‘Nobody’s Chasing Me’ (Out of this World, 1950); ‘Never, Never Be an Artist’ and ‘Can-Can’ (CanCan, 1953); and ‘Give Me the Land’ (Silk Stockings, 1955). 2. Cole Porter Literary and Musical Property Trusts (hereafter CPT), Correspondence 1952. 3. Letter of 1 July 1952; New York Public Library (NYPL), Abe Burrows Papers, *T-Mss 2000–006, box 13, folder 19. 4. The London version of the lyrics for ‘Anything Goes’ survive at CPT. 5. CPT, Correspondence 1952. 6. See David Savran, ‘ “You’ve Got That Thing”: Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, and the Erotics of the List Song,’ Theatre Journal 64, no. 4 (December 2012): 533–548. 7. William H. Glass, ‘I’ve Got a Little List,’ Salmagundi 109–110 (1996): 22–23. 8. Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 133. Eco makes this argument in particular with respect to lists of God’s attributes—since God is unknowable, the metaphor-attributes include the whole of existence. It is the larger ‘conceptual sphere’ of God’s attributes that makes them cohere. 9. Leo Spitzer, ‘Explication de Texte Applied to Walt Whitman’s Poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” ’ originally published in Journal of English Literary History 16 (1949): 229–249; reprinted in Leo Spitzer, Essays on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (New York: Gordian Press, 1984), 23. 10. Letter of 16 June 1948 (Columbia University, Spewack collection). This reference, incidentally, dates a draft script for Kiss Me, Kate in the Hanya Holm collection (US-NYPL, (S) *MGZMD 135, folder 502) to ‘before 16 June 1948’ where the gangsters’ exit is on page 2-6-29. 11. CPT, Correspondence 1948.

cole porter’s list songs   351 12. This is also described in Porter’s letter to Spewack; see note 11. 13. This formulation is complementary to Jane Feuer’s notion that film musicals are shaped by the loss of live performance: since list songs in stage shows are explicitly ‘live performances,’ their truncation or even elimination in film musicals, as well as their recasting as part of the action and mis-en-scène, attenuates what would otherwise be a ‘non-filmic’ disruption. See Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), especially chap. 2, ‘Spectator and Spectacles,’ 23–47. 14. US-NYPL, *T-Mss 2006–008, box 1, folder 31. 15. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 40.

pa rt I V

STA R S AND A DA P TAT ION

chapter 16

L ou d, Pr et t y, Strong, W hite [R epe at] The Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy Operettas at MGM (1935–1942) Todd Decker

Soprano Jeanette MacDonald and baritone Nelson Eddy shared top billing in eight musical films for Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) between 1935 and 1942. All eight bear the titles of Broadway shows. In all but one case, the film versions radically alter their stage originals. These very free adaptations are best understood as acts of opportunistic scavenging of Broadway show titles and songs by a Hollywood studio producing a wellmade line of lucrative prestige products: nostalgic romantic film operettas, richly realized in visual and musical terms and shaped entirely around the two stars’ distinct voices and personas. MacDonald and Eddy’s six signature films—Naughty Marietta (1935), Rose Marie (1936), Maytime (1937), Sweethearts (1938), New Moon (1940), and Bitter Sweet (1940)— are ostensibly derived from operettas staged on Broadway between 1910 and 1929, halcyon years for the singing- and spectacle-centred musical theatre genre on the commercial New York stage.1 The cycle draws in equal measure on the pre–World War I and the 1920s Broadway operetta, with the genre’s signature composers, mostly European expatriates, well represented. Prewar stage sources include Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta (1910, 136 performances) and Sweethearts (1913, 136 performances), as well as Sigmund Romberg’s Maytime (1917, 492 performances). Long-running hits of the 1920s adapted for MacDonald and Eddy include Romberg’s The New Moon (1928, 509 performances) and Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart’s Rose-Marie (1924, 557 ­performances). Bitter Sweet, a late entry in the operetta repertory by the English composer, lyricist, and playwright Noel Coward—a multiyear hit in London that lasted 159 performances in New York in 1929—found a place as well at MGM. The chronological gap between the respective stage and screen versions for each of these titles is telling: just over a decade for Rose Marie, New Moon, and Bitter Sweet; two decades for Maytime; a quarter century for Naughty Marietta and

356   musical theatre screen adaptations Sweethearts. None of these operettas had seen commercially successful Broadway revivals before MGM acquired and adapted them for the synchronized sound screen. Indeed, lavish, large-cast, long-running operettas—abundant on the New York stage for the quarter century before the stock market crashed—were mostly a thing of the past during Broadway’s lean, musical-comedy-centred 1930s. MGM’s costly investment in operetta proved extraordinarily successful at the box office, finding a depression-era movie audience who longed for a sweeping sort of musical narrative that was, elsewhere in popular culture, going out of style. The inherently conservative, indeed old-fashioned theatrical sources MGM acquired for MacDonald and Eddy mark this star-centred operetta cycle as a sustained exercise in nostalgia. MacDonald and Eddy virtually never nod towards contemporary popular music or culture—even in Sweethearts, their only film set in the American urban present day.2 Use of operetta sources from prior decades also speaks to a studio strategy of prestige. Herbert, Romberg, and Friml were names to conjure with—icons of an elevated but in its day popular musical style untouched by the constant advance, since about 1910, of syncopated popular musics such as ragtime, jazz, and swing that were derived from African American sources. (Herbert is singled out with his name above the title in Naughty Marietta and Sweethearts, as is Coward in Bitter Sweet—a distinction only songwriter Irving Berlin otherwise enjoyed in Hollywood at the time.) Further marks of MGM’s treatment of the cycle as prestige products includes consistently lavish investment in production and costume designs and the recurrent grafting onto these musical films of narrative tropes from more prestige-oriented genres, such as historical epics and period-setting melodramas. For example, Eddy as the hero tragically dies in Maytime and Bitter Sweet and threatened or actual violence treated seriously, as in a dramatic film, is a regular plot device. The at-once nostalgic and elevated register of the MacDonald/Eddy films comes into focus when compared to two contemporary couple-based musical cycles: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ nine films for RKO made between 1932 and 1939 and four films pairing Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made by MGM between 1939 and 1943. All but two of Astaire and Rogers’ films bear original titles and plots and feature new songs by the top Broadway musical comedy talents of the day, songwriters such as Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and George and Ira Gershwin, known nationally for writing popular music hits.3 These films celebrated cutting-edge Art Deco design, swanky and sexy fashion trends (especially in Rogers’ gowns), and, most importantly, contemporary popular music and dance, in particular jazz as heard in nightclubs.4 The Rooney/Garland films are similarly immersed in popular music, specifically the youth culture surrounding swing music and dance, with an added orientation towards the New York commercial musical comedy stage facilitating elaborate production numbers and a ‘let’s put on a show’ energy. Following studio strategy used with MacDonald and Eddy, three of the four Rooney/Garland films borrow their titles from Broadway shows—jazzy musical comedies from the late 1920s and 1930s—and generally rewrite the stage ­originals’ plots and mix up the song list.5 Put beside Astaire/Rogers and Rooney/Garland, the MacDonald/Eddy cycle comes into focus as adult-oriented,

jeanette macdonald and nelson eddy operettas   357 backward-looking, and aligned more with historical and melodramatic film genres than with current popular culture. The MacDonald and Eddy films were successful from the start. Naughty Marietta turned a $407,000 profit and Film Daily’s Critics of America Poll ranked it the fourth best feature of the year and the best musical (ahead of Astaire and Rogers’ Top Hat). Rose Marie more than tripled Marietta’s profits ($1,488,000) and was MGM’s second-highest grossing film of 1936 (exceeded only by MacDonald’s San Francisco). Maytime, despite being very expensive to produce, made money as well, as did all the pair’s successive films except for their last. Sweethearts, MacDonald and Eddy’s first Technicolor film (made and released just before MGM’s The Wizard of Oz [1939]), was voted Best Picture of 1938 by the readers of Photoplay.6 At the core of MacDonald and Eddy’s distinctiveness lies the matter of musical and vocal style. MacDonald and Eddy alike sing in a full-voice, supported, classically trained, operatic style—also known as legitimate or legit singing—taken from the European bel canto tradition and historically associated with the opera stage. The characters they play and the plots of their films carve out an innovative narrative space where classically trained singing could find a home in the commercial film industry and in the genre of the film musical, which was otherwise oriented towards popular music and singing styles. This insertion of operatic voices into commercial musical film marks the cycle’s primary aesthetic achievement in its time and since.7 Among the six adapted operettas in the MGM cycle, only the film Bitter Sweet follows the plot of its stage original with any faithfulness. Naughty Marietta, New Moon, and Rose Marie retain their respective original stage settings but run substantial variations on their characters and plots, tailoring the film versions tightly to MacDonald’s persona as a beautiful and independent-minded woman with a powerful voice and personality. (MacDonald was an established star when the cycle began and she made successful films with other leading men during her years with Eddy. Eddy’s fame was entirely tied to his films with MacDonald.) Maytime, a melodramatic tale of late nineteenth-century American opera singers, and Sweethearts, an anachronistic satire of contemporary Broadway operetta stars, depart entirely from their sources as to plot and (mostly) music. MGM’s attraction to the Broadway originals was a matter of the name recognition of the titles and the opportunity to mine each show’s musical resources. Still, these films feature rather few songs from the original shows: New Moon and Bitter Sweet include six songs from their respective stage scores; Naughty Marietta and Sweethearts, five; and Rose Marie, just four. Maytime includes only one song from its purported Broadway source. Musical films generally include fewer songs and less music than musical shows. But given the musical richness and the generous extent of operetta scores on the stage, the constrained song lists for the MacDonald/Eddy films marks a radical reduction of the genre on the screen. In the case of these six adaptations, a stage musical subgenre known for large and varied casts and opulent choral singing is reduced almost entirely to two singers singing mostly solos and, to a surprisingly limited extent, duets. Indeed, on only four occasions in the cycle does an individual performer other MacDonald or Eddy perform a complete musical number lacking either of the two stars.8

358   musical theatre screen adaptations Two of the pair’s eight films stand out in terms of their sources. The Girl of the Golden West (1938) borrows the title and the plot (just barely) of writer, director, and producer David Belasco’s 1905 play, which had 224 performances in its original Broadway run. Audiences for the film might have also known the Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini’s 1910 operatic version La fanciulla del West, but the film makes no musical nods towards it. Romberg was engaged to compose original music—six songs in all—for the film.9 MacDonald and Eddy’s final film, I Married an Angel (1942), adapted Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s musical comedy, which enjoyed a 338-performance run on Broadway in 1938. This film is not considered here for several reasons. I Married an Angel falls chronologically outside the pair’s most intense period of filmmaking and fame: 1935–1940. The plot centres on Eddy—rather than MacDonald, as the others mostly do—and both stars are cast against type: Eddy as a sophisticated man about town; MacDonald as a simple bank clerk. The plot offers a satirical and sardonic view of love and romance that jars against the earnest and sincere tone of the pair’s combined persona. Musically, I Married an Angel draws on musical comedy and even features MacDonald in a swing number (dancing with another woman). The film failed commercially: it was the only entry in the cycle not to earn a profit. Markedly different from all their other films, I Married an Angel offers little insight by way of contrast into the MacDonald and Eddy partnership which, across their first seven collaborations, is remarkably consistent. On the opera and operetta stage, sopranos and baritones do not normally fall in love. Indeed, all but one of the source operettas for the MacDonald and Eddy cycle feature soprano and tenor romantic leads, by far the norm across the opera and the pre–World War II operetta repertory.10 The primary musical innovation of the MacDonald and Eddy cycle is the romantic pairing of a soprano and a baritone. The musical changes to the stage sources required by the pairing of MacDonald and Eddy can be tracked by comparing the keys of the love duets in the films and in the ­original stage versions. At issue, of course, is the comfortable range of a given song for both singers and the crucial matter of where the climactic high notes for each singer lie. For Eddy, music composed for tenors had to be lowered. For MacDonald, retaining the original soprano range was crucial, especially to preserve sufficiently high top notes to show off her voice. Naughty Marietta set the pattern for the refashioning of soprano-tenor duets into soprano-baritone duets. In show’s climactic love duet, ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,’ Marietta and Dick share the same key (D major), sing the melody in unison, and hit the same high note (A) ( audio example 16.1). In the film, MacDonald and Eddy require three keys—hers, his, and theirs—each, of course, yielding different top notes. MacDonald introduces the tune, ostensibly performed to entertain her party guests but aimed squarely at Eddy, in its original stage key (D major) which provides a range-topping high A. After she completes her chorus, the score falls briefly silent and five seconds of applause from the party guests further muddle any continuity of tonal centre. Eddy, ready to declare his love in return, launches without instrumental introduction into his solo chorus, sung a major third lower (B-flat major) with a baritone-friendly top note of F.  An efficient modulation to a shareable key (D-flat major) follows, setting up a final duet chorus. In

jeanette macdonald and nelson eddy operettas   359 this key, MacDonald sings the melody in a high enough register to display her soprano voice. For Eddy, however, the new key is simply too high to sing the melody in unison with MacDonald—as a stage operetta tenor would do. And so, he is relegated to a secondary harmony part in his baritone range (likely composed by music director Herbert Stothart), the first of many musically uninteresting supporting parts Eddy sings in the cycle while MacDonald takes the tune ( audio example 16.2).11 ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’ as remade for Naughty Marietta the film employs three strategies to negotiate the sharing of a love song by a soprano and a baritone: each singer gets his or her own key for solo choruses; breaks in musical continuity (silence in the score) or quick modulations mask the changing tonal centre between choruses; and on the r­ equisite duet choruses, MacDonald’s range on the melody is favoured in the choice of key, relegating Eddy to singing harmony. The above strategies were employed again and again in the cycle. For example, ‘Indian Love Call’ in Rose Marie is similarly sung in three keys: his (D-flat major), hers (F major), and theirs (E-flat major). In the stage version, the song is introduced by Rose-Marie in a solo chorus in F major. Then, Rose-Marie and Jim Kenyon, by operetta standards a notvery-high tenor role, share a chorus, still in F major but with Jim singing in harmony a third below Rose-Marie most of the time (in tenor range). In the film, Eddy introduces ‘Indian Love Call’ in a comfortably lower key, a major third below the stage original. Then, after a lengthy stretch of dialogue and underscoring has clouded any continuing sense of tonal centre, the couple shares a chorus in a key more comfortable for MacDonald, the same as the stage original. Eddy proves able to sing the original harmony part from the show. At the close of the film, the couple again share a chorus, only this time a compromise key is required to meet the narrative imperative that Eddy alone sing the soaring melodic phrase that begins ‘that means I offer my love to you.’ The previous shared key of F major must have been too high for him to manage the melody in this passage and Eddy’s solo key of D-flat major not amenable to MacDonald, who had to offer a thrilling high note to end the film. And so, they share the final reprise of ‘Indian Love Call’ in E-flat major, a ‘theirs’ key at the exact midpoint between ‘his’ and ‘hers.’ ‘Wanting You,’ the love duet in New Moon, reveals a further strategy informing the making of soprano-baritone love duets: the strategic assignment of individual phrases within a tune to either singer based on range. In the published vocal score for the stage version, Marianne and Robert (a rather high baritone role), share the tune in unison and in F major. The ‘B’ section in this AABA tune, marked molto espressivo, appassionato, rises to a sustained high G, a top note that exceeds the comfortable limit for most baritones. Operatic baritone Rodney Gilfry, singing Robert in the 2004 Encores! concert production of The New Moon, delivered the passage as written ( audio example 16.3). Howett Worster, the 1929 London Robert, avoided the song’s very high phrase entirely and sang an uninspired alternate melody on his contemporary recording ( audio ­example 16.4). The song and the moment demand that any convincing romantic male lead sing Romberg’s molto espressivo phrase as written: an outburst of unbounded passion, the passage captures the essence of operetta’s defining asset—vocally centric lovemaking of an especially yearning, lyrical, light classical kind. In the film, Eddy begins

360   musical theatre screen adaptations ‘Wanting You’ in E-flat major as a solo declaration of love. In this key, the molto espressivo phrase is simply too high for him to sing, and so MacDonald takes over just for the first half of the B phrase—the high part. Eddy reenters for the second half of the B phrase— which repeats the same yearning upper-neighbour note motion a third lower—and finishes his solo chorus ( audio example 16.5). There is no dramatically compelling reason for MacDonald to take over vocally for eight bars during Eddy’s solo chorus and the decision for her to do so seems dictated by matters of range and anticipation of what comes next musically. At the end of Eddy’s chorus, an efficient, longingly expressive, perhaps slightly overwrought modulation upwards by whole step moves the tonal centre to (the original key of) F major for MacDonald’s solo ( audio example 16.6). From the molto espressivo phrase on, Eddy joins her on a lower harmony part as per usual. Eddy’s final high note on his solo chorus—higher than it would have been were he in a key that allowed him to sing the molto esppressivo passage—and the overheated modulation into MacDonald’s chorus come at a key moment in the film’s narrative. What had been a kind of musical play-acting between Eddy’s house servant and MacDonald’s plantation-owning princess—a classic example of what Oscar Hammerstein II called a conditional love duet—turns serious on the final ‘A’ phrase of Eddy’s solo chorus, mostly by way of Eddy’s vocal and physical intensity and the in context transgressive act of a servant grasping his mistress’s hands. The swooning modulation between the two choruses expresses the ­lovers bursting through a (perceived) barrier of love across social class. (In fact, Eddy is a nobleman pretending to be a bondservant.) On a more practical level, ending the duet in F major favours MacDonald’s vocal comfort and provides her with the chance to sing a high C at the close. In one case—the opening duet scene ‘I’ll See You Again’ in Bitter Sweet—favouring MacDonald and the nature of the stage original worked against finding a compromise key that Eddy could negotiate. And so, Eddy speaks instead. In the show, the character of Carl, a tenor role, sings a lovely rising line when he invites Sarah, as her music teacher, to begin her voice lesson ( audio example 16.7). In the film, Eddy speaks Carl’s too-high phrases ( audio example  16.8). The extent to which the MacDonald/Eddy cycle favours the soprano is audibly evident here. And there are further consequences for how the l­ overs’ voices interact. In the stage version, the intense waltz-time strain features an ­intimate intertwining of the soprano and tenor voices ( audio example 16.9). Such reciprocity and tight interchange are not possible for MacDonald and Eddy’s conventionally mismatched soprano and baritone ( audio example 16.10). (A similar effect can be heard in ‘Will You Remember?’ as composed for the stage version of Maytime and as revised for the film [ audio examples 16.11 and 16.12]). ‘I’ll See You Again’ occurs unusually early in the film: this love duet, full of suppressed longing and ardent looks, starts some three minutes into Bitter Sweet and, pointedly, does not end in a passionate kiss, the cycle’s characteristic post-singing action that signals shared acknowledgement of requited love.12 The love duets discussed above occur much later in their respective films: ‘Wanting You’ comes forty-three minutes into New Moon; ‘Will You Remember?’ some eighty minutes into Maytime; the duet to ‘Indian Love Call’ is held off for ninety minutes into Rose Marie; and ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’ is finally sung a full ninety-five minutes into Naughty Marietta, just before the picture

jeanette macdonald and nelson eddy operettas   361 concludes. Love duets in the cycle mark serious character transformations, specifically the willingness to admit—or inability to any longer deny—feelings of love for the romantic other. Passionate kisses immediately after the final sung notes in ‘Indian Love Call,’ ‘Will You Remember?,’ and ‘Wanting You’ seal—as the cliché goes—the just-sung bond between MacDonald and Eddy’s characters (Figures 16.1a–16.3b). All three duets are set in isolation in the beauties of nature: ‘Indian Love Call’ on the top of a mountain (shot on location in California’s Sierra Nevadas); ‘Will You Remember?’ in an idealized glade with blossoming trees around a still pool of water; ‘Wanting You’ in a mossy, overgrown southern forest. The mechanics of the plot prevent MacDonald and Eddy from falling into a kiss at the end of ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.’ Singing to each other during a party, the crowd of guests understand their song as a performance, even though the pair only has eyes for each other, singing in full voice when physically very close (Figure 16.4a). This social context for shared song postpones the post-duet kiss to the next scene in a private room (Figure 16.4b). Grand outdoor settings can only be suggested by painted backdrops on the stage. At the movies, lovers can raise their (powerful) voices while in visibly realistic nature (usually done with back projections) and rest assured their audience can hear them with clarity and at a high volume in the still somewhat novel sonic space of the sound cinema.13 The setting in nature isolates the lovers and permits their expressions of love to be both loud and private, at once specific to each plot (as expressed in costuming and hair) and mythic (in the sense that evidence for human society and culture goes unseen; the lovers abstractly representing a man and a woman sublimating, just barely, their erotic attraction in song). In nature, lovers torn apart by custom or circumstance can imagine and dwell within—crucially by singing together—a world where their love might live. Love duets in nature also suggest, without the tension of an adjacent couch or bed, more intimate acts the Production Code would never allow to be shown but which passionate melodies and climactic high notes might stand in for sonically. Operetta love duets set in nature serve another purpose: naturalizing the film operetta’s presentation of full-voice singers and singing in the medium of motion pictures. Film operetta in the sound era offers an aesthetic experience that cannot be had on the operetta stage: amplified love duets framed in close-up.14 Setting such singing in the wilds of nature proved a recurring visual solution to the potential mismatch between the scale of the image and the volume of the voice. Electronic microphones were introduced in 1925. Within a few years, popular singing fundamentally changed with the advent of crooners—male singers, such as Rudy Vallee, Russ Columbo, and Bing Crosby—who sang at the level of a whisper but could be easily heard by way of speakers. Electronic microphones and speakers, still relatively new technology when MacDonald and Eddy’s career began, were essential to the development and commercial success of the synchronized sound cinema. Related technological developments such as optical recording for film soundtracks and the mixing desk (both in place by 1934) had made film sound an especially flexible technological medium. Fred Astaire, emerging as a film musical star in 1934, brought the low-volume, nontechnical, microphone singing of popular music into the film musical, where it comfortably matched Hollywood’s default privileging of dialogue in the soundtrack mix. Operatic singing,

362   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 16.1a,b  ‘Indian Love Call’ (Rose Marie).

Figure 16.2a,b  ‘Will You Remember?’ (Maytime).

Figure 16.3a,b  ‘Wanting You’ (New Moon). figures 16.1a–3b  Alone in the great outdoors, MacDonald and Eddy seal their love duets with a kiss.

jeanette macdonald and nelson eddy operettas   363

Figure 16.4a,b Singing on the stair at the party, kissing in private in the next room in ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’ (Naughty Marietta).

however, posed a different test: effectively and transparently recording and mixing a kind of singing that provided its own projecting power and that, in the pre-microphone era, was experienced live and at a distance. The challenge of simply recording and mixing the classically trained voice was a recognized achievement of Naughty Marietta, which received the Academy Award for Best Sound Recording. MacDonald and Eddy put the still-new sound recording and amplification technologies of the day to a less than timely but challenging technical test capturing and reproducing a vocal style that evolved in the absence of microphones and speakers. On the musical stage, full-voiced singing was necessary to reach the audience and defined the larger-than-life romantic stories operetta typically told. On screen, this same vocal style worked differently. No longer needed to project to the back of the hall, the recorded operetta voice—thrillingly loud in the wired-for-sound cinema—could be experienced as sometimes at odds with the colossal yet also intimate scale of human bodies and faces on the silver screen. As mentioned, one recurring solution to the sound and image challenge posed by the operetta love duet was to locate the lovers in the great outdoors, where they could be simultaneously loud and alone and close enough to kiss. MacDonald and Eddy’s combination of loud, legitimate singing in tightly framed two shots and close-ups, often climaxing in a kiss, pushes to its realistic limit the fundamentally synthetic and antinaturalistic nature of film musical sound. MacDonald and Eddy’s films are somewhat stingy with love duets. Indeed, each film typically includes only one passionate duet (sometimes with a film-ending reprise) that serves as both narrative crux—the shared admission they are in love—and musical high point.15 Often the song they share is sung several times, as solo and duet, and fairly dominates the score: ‘Indian Love Call’ is sung on four occasions in Rose Marie; ‘Will You Remember?,’ three times in Maytime. To fill out the score with more singing, MacDonald and Eddy delivered multiple solo numbers in each of their films. These solos define their individual personas in consistent fashion across the cycle. Eddy’s solos present him as a manly man who naturally leads other men and as an ardent lover eager to declare himself in a serenade (often, like the

364   musical theatre screen adaptations love duets, in an outdoor setting). MacDonald’s solos virtually all present her as a woman of artistic and technical accomplishment who sings for eager audiences that delight in her voice. Only once does she sing in a private moment to express her inner self. Eddy’s solos assemble a composite cinematic operetta masculinity that draws ­selectively on tenor and baritone parts in the source operettas.16 In Rose Marie, Eddy leads ‘The Mounties,’ (sung by the minor character Malone in the show) and also sings ‘Rose Marie’ and ‘Indian Love Call’ (numbers assigned to the show’s tenor romantic lead, Jim). In Bitter Sweet, Eddy sings the tenor Carl’s songs but also the baritone Captain Lutte’s rousing drinking song ‘Tokay.’ In show and film, the Captain, a lecherous and presumptuous military man, easily kills Carl in a duel over Sarah’s honor. In taking ‘Tokay’ for himself, Eddy pulls star rank, renders the Captain a minor speaking role, and gives the cinematic Carl the chance to lead some robust, wine-driven bonhomie. New Moon combines songs taken from the tenor role Philippe (‘Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise’) and the high baritone role Robert (‘Stouthearted Men,’ ‘Wanting You’). In the show, Robert introduces ‘Stouthearted Men’ and sings its top note—a high G—to get the musical scene going. On the choral repeat, a prime example of the mighty male chorus aesthetic characteristic of 1920s operetta, Philippe sings a new topmost line and all subsequent high notes whilst Robert’s part folds into the vocal mass. In the film, Eddy introduces ‘Stouthearted Men’ in F major—a whole-step lower than the stage version—in a manner that invites straightforward singing along rather than vocal display (for him or the company as a whole). Eddy’s solos display solid, resolutely unflashy baritone singing: he is not a show-off but instead a man with a great voice singing material the listener might imagine singing as well—in short, a classically trained version of popular baritone Bing Crosby. Staging, framing, camera movement, and editing combine to forge a visually dynamic masculine persona for Eddy’s singing in his three most memorable solos. Each number places Eddy at the head of a moving group of men who join him in song. He enters Naughty Marietta and the cycle leading an orderly group of scouts through the forests of Louisiana singing ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!’ The group’s conventional good looks stand in sharp contrast to the leering pirates who have taken MacDonald and a group of vulnerable young women hostage nearby. The sound alone of the scouts’ singing sends the pirates, who have already killed an old woman at point blank range, scurrying in a panic that allows MacDonald to grab a torch and cry for help. But before this can happen, Naughty Marietta lingers on Eddy as a leader of men, marching forward with rows of men following behind. In a treadmill effect, Eddy and company march forward as the camera tracks smoothly backwards (Figure 16.5a). Their relentless and resolved physical forward motion powerfully interacts with the march they sing. The effect is both ­startlingly realistic—the men’s movement through space is palpable, with the lighting suggesting the sequence was shot outside in natural light—and solidly cinematic—only the medium of motion pictures could put the viewer into motion with the men in this way. The viewer moves through space with the men but never adopts their point of view. Their resolve, rather than any specific place they are headed, is the topic of the sequence. Rose Marie recycles to lesser effect the stunning visual realization of ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!’ Eddy enters the film leading a group of Royal Canadian Mounted Police. But

jeanette macdonald and nelson eddy operettas   365 before the song ‘The Mounties’ begins, a montage of real Mounties riding and training in Canada treats the film audience to a mini travelogue—a genre of film short that escaped the otherwise studio-bound classical Hollywood style. But while Eddy and MacDonald did travel to Lake Tahoe to shoot exterior sequences and ‘Indian Love Call’ on location, Eddy did not go to Canada to shoot with the Mounties. And so, when ‘The Mounties’ begins he appears alone on a horse walking a treadmill (on a soundstage at MGM’s lot in Culver City) with a poorly matched back projection of real Mounties behind (Figure 16.5b). The effect has none of the dynamism or physical texture of ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!’ and reveals a rare technical compromise undermining the development of a defining trope of the cycle. Eddy’s third marching song, ‘Stouthearted Men’ from New Moon, returns to the capturing of real motion through space, this time enhanced with multiple quick cuts of men running to catch up with a huge singing crowd. The men move through a vast soundstage forest which, through crane shots and dynamic cutting, seems to go on and on (Figure 16.5c). At the climax, Eddy leads the large, torch-bearing crowd across a small lake. The visual grandeur of the cycle lies in just such moments. Eddy initiates ‘Stouthearted Men’ with a speech calling on the men to join together and seize their freedom. He starts the song proper by speaking the lyrics rather than singing. This thoroughly integrated number can, if the viewer wishes, be understood not as actual song—the men aren’t really singing—but instead as song being used to express, more forcefully than mere dialogue, the characters’ ideas and intentions in a heightened form that is naturalized by the dramaturgical allowances of operetta. This distinction is supported by Eddy’s position vocally within the groups of men he leads. He does not sing any of these solos in a manner that makes his voice the primary interest. Instead, he sings to rouse other men to action or to express their shared identity as men of action. Bursting into song is a leadership tactic and not a performance per se. And—crucially—in all three cases the men sing for themselves and not for an audience. A fourth Eddy marching solo reveals how not performing forms a crucial part of his masculine persona. In Sweethearts, Eddy’s only solo is contextualized as a recording session of the Victor Herbert tune ‘On Parade.’ Eddy is accompanied by a large uniformed military band arrayed on risers and playing without music. Various sections of the band rise from their chairs during the number—similar to how swing bands were shot in this period—and by the end the entire band is standing. The camera pans smoothly across the scene, eventually passing into the control room where a sound engineer adjust the dials on the recording console and a spinning disc cutting machine transforms an ephemeral performance into a permanent artefact—literally, a record. Crucially, no audience witnesses the recording, which ends without applause. (In the scene just prior, MacDonald sings for a studio audience at a live radio show.) The entirely male ‘On Parade,’ lacking physical motion except for the band members standing up or sitting down and the disc cutter spinning, is—like the three marching solos described above—all about men of action doing things in the world. In each of these masculine solos, Eddy sings not for show or attention but to express, in song, his fundamental character as a man of action.

Figure 16.5a  ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!’ (Naughty Marietta).

Figure 16.5b  ‘The Mounties’ (Rose Marie).

Figure 16.5c  ‘Stouthearted Men’ (New Moon). Figures 16.5a–c  Shared song as masculine action: Eddy as leader of men.

jeanette macdonald and nelson eddy operettas   367 By contrast, MacDonald’s solos are virtually all public performances where her skill as a singer and beauty as a woman is attended to by an enthusiastic in-film audience. She exists in these often quite extended, plot-arresting numbers to be listened to, looked at, and applauded. Such moments are facilitated by MacDonald’s characters being either professional singers (Rose Marie, Maytime, Sweethearts) or young women with natural singing ability that has been cultivated due to her high social status (Naughty Marietta, New Moon, Bitter Sweet) or her good luck and interest in the finer things (The Girl of the Golden West). MacDonald playing women who sing forms a natural extension of MacDonald herself as a singer.17 The necessarily social contexts for MacDonald’s solos for in-film audiences include fully realized opera house performances (Rose Marie, Maytime, Bitter Sweet), more commercial popular music settings (a New York theatre and radio show in Sweethearts; a Viennese café in Bitter Sweet), religious rituals (Naughty Marietta, The Girl of the Golden West), elaborate occasions with royalty in attendance (Maytime, New Moon), fancy parties (Naughty Marietta, New Moon), and informal musical moments in daily life (with street musicians in Naughty Marietta and Maytime, with social others both elite and common in Rose Marie, The Girl of the Golden West, and Bitter Sweet). This considerable range of contexts makes a tacit argument that MacDonald’s kind of singing is welcome just about everywhere—at least in the overwhelmingly pre-twentieth-century historical settings where the cycle mostly journeys. Opera enters the cycle at the start of Rose Marie and continues strongly in the next film, Maytime. These two films—among the pair’s best-performing at the box office—use opera as a prestige element and assume movie audiences who either know a bit about opera or who are willing to sit through extended stretches of opera as part of a movie narrative. Minimal nods are made towards the latter, less informed group. Rose Marie’s image track opens on the marquee of the Royal Theatre announcing ‘Romeo & Juliet’ starring ‘Canada’s own Marie de Flor.’ A crowd stands outside the ­theatre evidently listening to an opera chorus, the sound of which fades in on the soundtrack during the conclusion of the opening titles. An usher hushes a shouting paperboy walking past the theatre, telling him ‘there’s a show going on.’ The paperboy pauses, turns towards the open doors of the lobby, and joins the rapt sidewalk listeners. The populist appeal of opera is reinforced several times over here: the performance is in a theatre (not an opera house), everyday people passing by—like the folks who go to movies—are shown listening (even though it’s doubtful they could hear much in the real world), and even lowly paperboys find themselves lending an ear to what’s described colloquially as a ‘show.’ Rose Marie’s opening makes an invitation to all to listen and enjoy. After the sidewalk set-up, Rose Marie ushers the viewer into the theatre where the Capulet’s ball is in progress. So begins a five-minute tab show-cum-montage of Charles Gounod’s 1867 opera Romeo et Juliette, sung in French (without English subtitles). The more extended excerpts include Romeo (played by tenor Allan Jones) catching sight of Juliet, MacDonald as Juliet in a complete performance of Juliette’s waltz song (a staple of the soprano repertory), and the very end of the love duet concluding the opera. One cut

368   musical theatre screen adaptations to the audience during the waltz song instructs the viewer on how to assess MacDonald’s musicianship: an excited older man in the gallery (cheap seats taken by the most devoted fans) whispers something about ‘the high C’ and the opera lovers around him show great appreciation. The cycle’s second film insists not only that MacDonald plays an opera singer but that she is, in fact, capable of singing opera. A second opera scene concludes Rose Marie. It’s MacDonald and Jones together again, this time as Tosca and Cavaradossi in the final five minutes of act 3 of Giacomo Puccini’s 1900 opera Tosca, misidentified as ‘La Tosca’ on the Royal Theatre marquee. Sung in Italian, the film audience is assumed to be instantly familiar with the events unfolding in the opera: Cavaradossi’s fake, in fact real, execution by firing squad; Tosca’s horrified discovery that he’s dead, followed by her leaping to her death off the parapet of the Castel Sant’Angelo.18 With the dramatic events of the opera unfolding according to Puccini’s musical-dramatic pacing, MacDonald’s character, unstable after the arrest of her brother for murder, begins to hear Eddy’s voice singing ‘Indian Love Call.’ Some knowledge of Tosca is required to understand immediately that the sound of Eddy’s voice—which could be a voice from offstage within the opera—is only audible to MacDonald. (Prominent cries from offstage during Tosca act 2 might even briefly confuse a viewer who knows the opera.) Indeed, Eddy’s second intrusion fits tonally into Puccini’s score. Tosca continues to move towards its climax and MacDonald continues singing but she also keeps on hearing Eddy’s voice, giving ample evidence on her distressed face that she has lost the thread of the part. Cuts to audience members give clues pitched to the knowing that she has gone off script: ‘She ought to be upstage,’ says one gentleman to his companion, signalling rather subtly, and only to the filmgoer who knows Tosca, that scant time remains in the score for MacDonald to get to the parapet for Tosca’s dramatic exit. Indeed, MacDonald’s Tosca never jumps: she sings to the end of the role but faints downstage to the consternation of all onstage, backstage, and in the audience. While the fact that something has gone wrong is evident, an opera-literate viewer enjoys a much more nuanced film narrative, with Rose Marie and Tosca in a sustained and intense interplay. MGM bets heavily on a prestige audience here: reaching out to opera fans; assuming all others—surely in the majority—will go along for the ride, gleaning what they can (like, perhaps, most audiences for musical theatre in another language are wont to do). Maytime follows up on Rose Marie’s assumption of audience knowledge of opera, with MacDonald again playing a diva and with extended opera scenes that go unexplained to the film audience. In a production of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots in Paris, MacDonald performs the aria ‘Nobles seigneur, salut’ in the trouser role Urbain. Dressed as a man, MacDonald wears a seventeenth-century style (and figure- and legsrevealing) costume (Figure 16.6). Opera audiences accept such gender-bending displays as a matter of course—although Les Huguenots was far from standard repertory in the 1930s. Most film audiences would lack the cultural knowledge to understand exactly what was going on. Maytime tacitly assumes they will accept the conventions and high cultural status of opera, with little more prompting than the enthusiastic in-film audiences presented here and in Rose Marie.

jeanette macdonald and nelson eddy operettas   369

Figure 16.6  MacDonald in pants on the opera stage in Paris (Maytime).

Indeed, the plot of Maytime rests on the filmgoer’s ability to read through representations of the operatic stage to revel in and weep over MacDonald and Eddy’s forbidden love, which—as the story goes—can only be expressed under cover of their playing ­lovers on stage. The opera they perform together, especially composed for MacDonald’s diva character by a fictitious Italian composer named Trentini, is called Czaritza. Stothart concocted this work using melodies taken from Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony to meet the unique needs of MacDonald and Eddy, who—of course—required a romantic stage work that paired a soprano and a baritone, of which there are none in the standard repertory. The Czaritza sequence takes a full twelve minutes—sung in Russian and French with a plot no one in the film audience knows since it’s not a real opera. Some events seem clear: MacDonald, who has some personal connection to Eddy, is declared empress (or, presumably, ‘Czaritza’). Eddy, a rebel of sorts, comes before her under guard and sings defiantly of ‘liberté,’ after which MacDonald reluctantly signs what is likely his death warrant. She then clears the room to speak with Eddy alone and they share a love duet that begins ‘Mon amour.’ The broad aesthetic strokes of love on the romantic operatic stage—passionate but for some reason impossible—are here expressed with utmost seriousness using instrumental melodies from the symphonic repertory and within a film plot that has the singers acting out real love for each other within dramatic roles. The duet ends in a kiss—like all MacDonald and Eddy love duets—that lasts twelve seconds (in 1937 to the consternation of the Production Code Administration), followed by a whispered exchange where MacDonald and Eddy’s characters declare their intention to finally be together.19 But Czaritza’s not over yet—to still more singing, the lovers are parted and the curtain falls. The operatic sequences in Rose Marie and Maytime are extraordinary for their length and the assumptions they make about film audience knowledge of and tolerance for opera. With no snootiness or satire, these films assume MacDonald and Eddy’s audience

370   musical theatre screen adaptations will enjoy long stretches of opera performed in a foreign language, will absorb the genre’s stranger practices without feeling alienated from the film’s stars, and can interpret basic operatic tropes even when the opera being performed is, in fact, made up. (All of this from a studio that made the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera just two years ­earlier. Stothart served as music director on that film, too.) While not typical of the cycle, Rose Marie and Maytime invest heavily in presenting MacDonald as a legitimate opera singer who could succeed on the stage. (After her film career, MacDonald made a largely unsuccessful attempt to do so.)20 Most of MacDonald’s solos offer light classical favourites in picturesque surroundings: song-like arias, often with an exotic flavour, that endear her to the crowds that clamour to listen and sometimes join in. Such solos happen early on in most of the films, as if answering a presumed desire among MacDonald’s movie audience to hear her sing soon after the opening titles. Indeed, Naughty Marietta begins with a bit of coloratura from MacDonald (about which more below) and continues with the number ‘Chansonette,’ which has MacDonald’s down-to-earth French princess leading a group of commoners in song. Positioned just after the Romeo and Juliette sequence in Rose Marie, ‘The Walking Game’ similarly imagines a crowd of various classes wanting to hear and singing along a bit with MacDonald. At Emperor Louis Napoleon’s elaborate ball early in Maytime, MacDonald as a young American opera singer enchants the court with ‘Les filles de Cadix’ by Leo Delibes, then offers a rousing patriotic rendition of ‘Le Régiment de Sambre et Meuse’ by Robert Planquette: again, the crowd joins in. In New Moon, she offers the interpolated song ‘Paree’ at the very start of the picture: the bondsmen on the deck below, led by Eddy, answer with a parody version. In Naughty Marietta and The Girl of the Golden West, MacDonald performs prayerful solos as part of religious moments or solemn occasions, offering in the latter film bits of Liszt’s ‘Liebestraum’ and the Bach/ Gounod ‘Ave Maria.’ All these performances employ MacDonald’s legitimate singing voice in repertoire that is crowd-pleasing and either rhythmic or reverent. Her selections would be comfortable on a mid-century pops concert program. These i­ mportant, persona-defining moments frame MacDonald as a diva in touch with her popular and mass audience. She can, of course, sing opera—Rose Marie and Maytime insist—but mostly she offers lighter fare designed to please: pretty songs prettily sung by a pretty lady in a pretty dress. All of MacDonald and Eddy’s films end with the couple together and singing. The tragic Maytime and Bitter Sweet conclude with the lovers in a mystical union: in the latter, Eddy, having died, appears to the still-living MacDonald in the clouds. In the former, the years-dead Eddy is there to greet the spirit of MacDonald as she rises, young again, from her old body (Figure 16.7). The other six films end with the lovers together and very much alive: back on Broadway still singing ‘Sweethearts’ in Sweethearts; reunited in bourgeois comfort by a fireside in Rose Marie; together at last for real rather than in Eddy’s dream in I Married an Angel. Three films explicitly connect MacDonald and Eddy’s union in the final reel with larger political tales of the land: democratic soil in the New World. In Naughty Marietta, MacDonald and Eddy ride into the wilderness, escaping soul-destroying aristocratic

jeanette macdonald and nelson eddy operettas   371

Figure 16.7  United in death at the close of Maytime.

and military obligations to a rotten French monarchy (Figure 16.8a). In New Moon, they enter their humble new home in a French colony that has just received word of a victory for the republic over the monarchy back home (Figure 16.8b). And in The Girl of the Golden West, the pair rides a covered wagon into a shared life in California, leaving behind Eddy’s upbringing by Mexicano bandits (Figure 16.8c). All three of these films present the New World as the dominion of whites. Naughty Marietta and New Moon similarly imagine Louisiana and the Caribbean as a space defined by Old World issues of class rather than New World racial encounters or mixing. The Girl of the Golden West tackles racial mixing in Old California and promises that the influence of ‘Mexicanos’ can be overcome by pure love. Naughty Marietta and New Moon alike centre on French aristocrats or military men who embrace Revolutionary values, choosing New World democratic norms over Old World strictures. MacDonald’s good-humoured French princess in Naughty Marietta walks freely among the common people in the opening scene, declaring to her blackclad, status-conscious duenna, ‘I have my native dignity.’ She escapes a forced marriage to a Spaniard by disguising herself as a commoner and journeying to America, sharing the goals of her maid, who goes along and says of the New World, ‘Maybe I can become a new person there.’ MacDonald’s character shares this desire. Eddy, introduced as a hearty backwoodsman, turns out to be a military officer—he’s thus a natural leader of  both casual and formal groups of men. The pair exits the film fleeing society’s ­expectations—in MacDonald’s case, her wealth; in Eddy’s, his military commission in an unjust context—as a pair of pioneers journeying into the wilderness, destined to be what the plot of the film has made them: Americans who rule the land by natural right. In New Moon’s reciprocal tale, Eddy plays a nobleman fleeing the French king and disguised as a bondsman sent to Louisiana (an exact male corollary to MacDonald’s character in Naughty Marietta). MacDonald’s bejewelled French aristocrat takes to the

Figure 16.8a  Naughty Marietta.

Figure 16.8b  New Moon.

Figure 16.8c  The Girl of the Golden West. Figures 16.8a–c  MacDonald and Eddy exiting into a free and white land of love.

jeanette macdonald and nelson eddy operettas   373 democratic milieu of a community of escaped bondsmen with easy grace: she casts aside the finery of her life as a plantation mistress in favour of hard work on the land. At the end of New Moon, the pair’s love story is resolved in political joy as the island learns of the triumph of democracy back home in France. (In a similarly class-conscious narrative, MacDonald’s Sarah in Bitter Sweet rejects the proper path for an upper-middle-class English girl and elopes with her one true love, Eddy’s Carl, a penniless Viennese composer. Together they defy the masculine sexual presumptions of the Old World, Eddy sacrificing his life for MacDonald’s honor in the process.) All these plots and characters present the viewer with European-born, white characters who choose their own life paths—in short, who act like white Americans free to set their own course for the future. Racial contrasts regularly define the couple when their characters are American-born or their plots encounter distinctly American racial others. In Maytime, playing opera singers born in the American South but living in Paris, they linger together around a piano singing a tender version of James Bland’s minstrel tune ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.’ In this duet, MacDonald and Eddy (and MGM) offer, with characteristic ­sincerity and aesthetic craft, a hymn to a racist Old South vision of enslaved African Americans content in their labor for ‘dear old massa.’ In the afterglow, MacDonald says wistfully, ‘Makes you kind of homesick doesn’t it.’ Scenes of distant observation of racial others in performance occur in three of the pair’s films. Each speaks to the privileges of whiteness. In Rose Marie, they watch an illimagined Hollywood-style indigenous festival. The massive production number ‘Totem Tom Tom,’ from the stage version of the show, nonsensically combines totem poles (an aspect of indigenous culture in the forested northern reaches of North America) with the feathered bonnets of the Plains Indians in a dance described as a ‘corn festival.’ The scene, watched from a distance by the couple, climaxes with the appearance of a gigantic drum straight out of MGM studio aesthetics. However syncretistic its content, ‘Totem Tom Tom’ presents the indigenous peoples of Rose Marie as a coherent culture, against which the leads’ whiteness finds a contrast. MacDonald, with her character’s eye for beauty, responds when the dance concludes, ‘Oh, that was thrilling.’ Eddy, a Mountie, declares ‘We have to police these things.’ In an analogous moment of shared and distant observation of the ritual actions of racial others, MacDonald and Eddy watch and listen to the black slaves on MacDonald’s plantation perform the so-called trouble tree ceremony in New Moon. The entire sequence begins with black voices singing a faux Negro spiritual that begins ‘no more weepin’ and wailin’.’ ‘It’s a strange ritual,’ Eddy comments. MacDonald describes it as an ‘old jungle superstition.’ The ceremony is more heard than seen for the film audience: MacDonald and Eddy look on the sight and describe it. At one point, the black women begin singing a wordless, haunting, minor-mode tune. MacDonald leans back and listens, saying, ‘My nurse used to hum that strain. I’ve often tried to find words of my own to go with it.’ She hazards a few lines but lapses into humming. Indeed, later in the film, MacDonald finds the words and turns the tune into ‘Lover, Come Back to Me’—her only solo-as-private-reflection in the entire cycle. Eddy, in turn, speaks of a song from back home in France about ‘a humble shepherd who loved a lady of high rank.’ The shepherd

374   musical theatre screen adaptations sang his song and she answered (just like the lovers in ‘Indian Love Call’ any fan of the cycle would know). The song Eddy’s story refers to is, of course, ‘Wanting You,’ into which the trouble tree ceremony seamlessly segues. Both of the sophisticated and romantic songs by Romberg featured in this scene are described in the dialogue as ­originating among socially low others, whether country folk in the Old World or racial others in the New. New Moon executes these turns without irony, absorbing the musical style of operetta and legit voices—both associated with elite European culture—into a vision of the New World peopled almost solely by whites. Indeed, New Moon—like Naughty Marietta—offers a strange twisting of the ­historical facts of race in the Americas. The film opens on a French ship bound for the French colony of Louisiana, its hold filled with white bondservants. On arrival, MacDonald, an aristocrat arriving to take her place as the mistress of a plantation, buys Eddy. All of her house servants, Eddy among them, are white. Black children are seen around her house—Eddy sings his ‘Shoes’ solo to one cute boy—but the black field slaves only appear in the distance dancing around the trouble tree. In the later reels, MacDonald and Eddy and an all-white group of French men and women are shipwrecked on an uninhabited Caribbean island. An egalitarian culture develops where ‘the one to command is a mere matter of circumstances.’ Eddy and MacDonald emerge as natural leaders of this island society, which resembles nothing so much as a group of maroons—escaped African slaves who set up hidden free societies beyond the reach of the law in the remote reaches of the Americas—including, until the 1760s, parts of colonial Louisiana. The Girl of the Golden West also includes an elaborate exotic production number titled ‘Mariache,’ a display of elite Mexicano otherness that chimes with ‘Totem Tom Tom’ and the trouble tree ceremony. At the number’s height, Eddy, in disguise as an Anglo military officer, lassos MacDonald about the waist: this romantic display of Latin exoticism welcomes white participation. But before Eddy can claim MacDonald’s orphan girl from Kentucky, he must slough off his Mexicano self. Eddy’s character is a white boy, evidently the sole survivor of a westward-bound family killed by Indians en route to California. Raised by Mexican bandits under the moniker ‘Gringo,’ he speaks both Spanish and a native language and grows to be a bandit leader who speaks with a ‘Mexicano accent’ when in disguise. The film’s romance plot involves Eddy being sold out to the authorities by his ‘half-breed’ lover. MacDonald, wishing for a pure love, learns of Eddy’s other ‘girl’ and says to him, ‘You made me feel all cheap inside.’ To be together, Eddy must return to the boy he was when he first travelled west with his white family. As noted, Eddy and MacDonald exit The Girl of the Golden West in a covered wagon, committing to a shared life of respectable whiteness. As they ride, they sing together Romberg’s exotically tinged serenading song, ‘Senorita.’ All that remains of Eddy’s Mexicano identity at the close is a popular tune by an expatriate European composer with English words on a Mexican theme that Eddy effectively deployed earlier in the film—attired in his dashing Anglo officer disguise—to romance MacDonald by a seashore in the moonlight. A white viewer of The Girl of the Golden West—or any of the other fantasies of a white New World offered by MGM’s MacDonald and Eddy cycle—is, of course, welcome to sing along.

jeanette macdonald and nelson eddy operettas   375

Notes 1. For a summary of American operetta on the New York stage as drawn upon by MGM, see Richard Traubner, Operetta: A Theatrical History, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 366–392. 2. MacDonald briefly sings in a quasi-scat style during the number ‘Pretty as a Picture’ in Sweethearts during the only scene in the cycle set in a nightclub. In Rose Marie, MacDonald tries to sing ‘hot’ at a low-down saloon in the Canadian wilderness. Gilda Grey, a minor star of 1920s Broadway musical revue, takes over when MacDonald fails to deliver. The songs in the scene are old pop favourites: ‘Dinah’ (1925) and ‘Some of These Days’ (1910). MacDonald’s opera singer character behaves as if she has never heard them. 3. Astaire and Rogers’s Broadway adaptations come early in their output: The Gay Divorcee (1933) and Roberta (1934), their second and third films together. Only one Astaire/Rogers film is set before World War I: the pair’s final RKO film, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), uses mostly older songs but also features a new tune, ‘Only When You’re in My Arms’ (music by Con Conrad, lyrics by Burt Kalmar and Harry Ruby), in a bid for pop relevance. 4. Todd Decker, Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 101–103. 5. Babes in Arms (MGM, 1939; Broadway, 1937, 289 performances), Strike Up the Band (MGM, 1940; Broadway, 1930, 191 performances), Girl Crazy (MGM, 1943; Broadway, 1930, 272 performances). 6. Edward Baron Turk, Hollywood Diva (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 159, 172, 230. 7. The other Hollywood stars known for singing in a trained style are Deanna Durbin (a contract star at Universal in the late 1930s and 1940s) and Kathryn Grayson and Jane Powell (both at MGM in the years after MacDonald’s career ended). Durbin’s persona, emphasizing her youth, contrasted strongly with MacDonald’s. See Gaylyn Studlar, Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chap. 3. 8. Buddy Ebsen, ‘The West Ain’t Wild Anymo,’ in Girl of the Golden West; Ray Bolger’s clog dance near the start of Sweethearts; Edward Everett Horton’s ‘To Count Palaff (There Comes a Time),’ and the women’s small group number ‘Tira Lira La’ in I Married an Angel. 9. See William A. Everett, Sigmund Romberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 250–255. 10. To the end of the 1920s, tenors served as leading men in almost all stage operettas. From the early 1940s, beginning with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Oklahoma! (a work some have categorized as an operetta), leading males in Broadway musical plays have tended to be baritones, with the tenor relegated to a character or supporting part or absent entirely. A general historical drift away from trained singing towards belting from the chest and other vocal styles, facilitated by the advent of wireless microphones, accompanied this shift in Broadway masculinity. 11. Herbert Stothart worked on every MacDonald and Eddy film except I Married an Angel. He was most often credited with a special title card for ‘musical adaptation,’ signalling his important role solving basic musical challenges inherent in adapting stage operettas for MacDonald’s and Eddy’s star personas and unusual soprano-baritone pairing. For a detailed discussion of Stothart’s musical work on Maytime, see Ronald Rodman, ‘Tonal Design

376   musical theatre screen adaptations and the Aesthetic of Pastiche in Herbert Stothart’s Maytime,’ in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 187–206. 12. Bitter Sweet originally began with a prologue set in the present, casting the main narrative as a flashback (as in the stage version). ‘On the basis of a few responses from a preview audience, [MGM] decided this frame-and flashback device would strike moviegoers as too reminiscent of Maytime (whose 1937 story was probably inspired by Bitter Sweet).’ Turk, Hollywood Diva, 244. 13. For a later analogy, consider the contrast between the title song for The Sound of Music as sung in the enclosed space of a Broadway theatre and as realized on location in the Austrian Alps in the 1965 film. 14. While present-day musical theatre singers wear wireless microphones, which amplify their voices through speakers as in a movie theatre, their bodies and faces remain at a distance from the audience. 15. Rose Marie, Maytime, and Bitter Sweet reprise their respective love duets at the close. Maytime, exceptionally, has two duets that end in a kiss: one with the couple alone together in nature; the other with the couple playing lovers on the opera stage. 16. In Naughty Marietta, Eddy sings ‘’Neath a Southern Moon,’ assigned on stage to the female character ‘Adah, a Quadroon.’ 17. This emphasis on MacDonald’s natural talent and cultivated skill is entirely absent in her Paramount films made between 1929 and 1932. Only at MGM did her identity as a ­classically trained singer form an essential part of her star persona. 18. The Tosca sequence originally included Jones singing Cavaradossi’s act 3 aria, ‘E lucevan le stelle.’ After seeing the film at a public preview, Eddy threatened studio head L. B. Mayer that he would ‘go on strike; you’ll have trouble with me’ if the aria remained in the film. Turk, Hollywood Diva, 173. 19. Turk, Hollywood Diva, 199. 20. See Turk, Hollywood Diva, chap. 14.

chapter 17

‘Is This th e R ight M ater i a l , Gir l?’ How Madonna Makes Us Like Eva, but Not Necessarily Evita Richard J. Allen

Although musicals have been a staple of international cinema since the movies began to talk—with Warner Bros.’ 1927 The Jazz Singer, generally considered the first feature film to utilize synchronized sound—the film industry has constantly struggled with the process of successfully adapting stage musicals to the screen. The studio musicals of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, starring the likes of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and Judy Garland, often centred on original but threadbare stories that were merely ‘excuses’ to thematically incorporate high-concept musical numbers, such as Top Hat (1935), Meet Me in St Louis (1942), and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). But when Broadway and West End stages found success in the 1940s and 1950s with plot-based, dramatically structured ‘book musicals’ such as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls, converting these more realistic, dramatic vehicles from stage to screen became a trickier—and riskier—proposition.1 Besides the inherent artistic challenges in adapting work from the fantastical setting of the stage to the increasingly realistic medium of mid-twentieth century film, the story-centred stage musicals of 1940s–1950s—which were major commercial successes on Broadway and the West End—rarely turned a profit in their cinematic incarnations. And considering the enormous expense of producing these lavish spectacles on film, these box office disappointments cost several Hollywood studios many millions of ­dollars over a relatively short period of time. The particular story of the attempt to adapt the international hit stage musical Evita to the medium of film is one of the most extraordinary and revealing examples of this artistically and commercially treacherous process, incorporating legends of stage, screen, and the recording industry with distinguished careers off- and onstage, behind and in front of the camera.

378   musical theatre screen adaptations Before beginning a comprehensive comparison of the 1978 original stage version of Evita to its 1996 cinematic counterpart, it would be prudent to examine the genesis of the project, which famously chronicles the brief but eventful life of the infamous Eva Peron, wife of Argentinean president Juan Peron. As so often is the case with stage ­musicals, the first spark of inspiration comes from the writers, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist/librettist Tim Rice. Lloyd Webber and Rice began their long-­ running collaboration working on The Likes of Us in 1965.2 Although that show wasn’t professionally produced until some forty years later (at Lloyd Webber’s own Sydmonton Festival in 2005), the duo’s next two collaborations—Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—opened to critical acclaim and box office success on Broadway in 1971 and London’s West End in 1973. As young writers seeking a fast track to production, Lloyd Webber and Rice took an unorthodox route with both Superstar and Joseph, producing them as ‘concept albums’ before imagining a scripted or stage version. The commercial success of those albums attracted sufficient financial backing to spawn the aforementioned stage productions of both shows. Thus, it was not surprising when the team decided to employ a similar process with Evita in 1976. The initial idea for Evita came to Tim Rice in 1973, when he happened to catch the last part of a radio program about Eva Peron, the actress turned politically influential wife of one-time Argentinian president, Juan Peron. Having known little about the details of her life but intrigued by what he had heard, Rice began to research Mrs Peron’s past to the point of what one might term ‘obsession.’ He claims to have watched Queen of Hearts—a 1972 British made-for-television documentary about Eva Peron— ‘at least twenty times,’ then travelled to Buenos Aires to research original documents and interview contacts about the details of her life.3 As further evidence of his obsession, in 1976, Rice named his newborn daughter Eva. Based on this research, Rice pitched the idea for an Eva Peron–inspired musical to Lloyd Webber. At this juncture the concept hinged at least in part on a score that would incorporate a variety of Latin musical forms and styles including tangos, passos doble, and others. Although tempted, Lloyd Webber ultimately rejected the project in favour of collaborating with iconic British playwright Alan Ayckbourn on a more traditional musical entitled Jeeves, based on the popular P. G. Wodehouse character. Ironically, the initial idea for a musical about the u ­ nflappable butler Jeeves was suggested to Lloyd Webber by Rice himself, but Rice eventually lost interest in the project, leaving Lloyd Webber to proceed with Ayckbourn. When Jeeves’s West End production ‘flopped magnificently,’4 closing in May of 1975  after garnering almost universally negative reviews and accumulating only 38 ­performances, Lloyd Webber reconsidered Rice’s offer and began working with his former partner on the songs for an Evita concept album. Interestingly, though Jeeves was considered a failure, two pieces of music from the show were used for Evita, becoming ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall‘ and ‘Goodnight and Thank You.‘ Years later, other sections of Jeeves’ extensive score were repurposed by Lloyd Webber in shows he wrote with lyricists other than Rice: ‘Unexpected Song’ in Song and Dance (1982) and

evita   379 Sunset Boulevard’s ‘As if We Never Said Goodbye’ (1993), two of the composer’s most often-recorded songs.5 Although Rice was clearly determined to dramatize Eva Peron’s brief but very eventful and impactful life, there is some question about the specific inspiration for the style and substance of the musical itself. Besides the aforementioned 1972 television film Queen of Hearts, by 1975 there had been a number of published biographies on the one-time First Lady of Argentina. It has been suggested, however, that the majority of Rice’s depiction is based on 1952’s The Woman with the Whip, written by Mary Main under the pseudonym ‘Maria Flores’ (apparently for fear of repercussions from the Peron regime). Main was of British descent but grew up in Argentina, and while her mostly negative account of Eva Peron’s life is more consistent with the Evita of Rice’s libretto, Rice insists that—although he was influenced by Main’s book—the musical is based on a wider spectrum of source material. It is interesting to note, however, that some of the facts about Peron’s life that were challenged for accuracy in Evita, are similar to events described by Main.6 Considering that Rice and Lloyd Webber’s project was intended to eventually lead to a full production, it is not surprising that their artistic choices in crafting the album would be influenced more by theatricality than authenticity. To support that assertion, one need only look at the manner in which Rice and Lloyd Webber choose to tell Eva’s story: through the sardonic and often scathingly critical narration of a character known only as ‘Che.’ In the original concept album phase of Evita, Che was meant to represent a sort of Argentine ‘everyman,’ providing reflection, insight and criticism to explain, ­analyze, and assess Eva Duarte Peron’s rise to power and her subsequent demise. There is nothing in the original lyrics to suggest any connection between the narrator and the real-life South American Marxist revolutionary figure Che Guevera, after whom the character was fairly explicitly modelled in Hal Prince’s original West End and Broadway versions of Evita. Instead, the completely fictionalized, original conception of the Che character was meant to represent ‘an ‘everyman’ of the lower/ working class, serving as the voice of the people; not the revolutionary, Che Guevara.’7 The reasons for Prince’s interpretation of Che’s role in the staged version are discussed in more detail below. But for the concept album, the name Che was likely inspired by the traditional Argentinian usage, which—according to website gringoinbuenosaires. com—‘is ubiquitous in Argentina’ and is often ‘used as the equivalent of mate, dude or buddy.’8 This artistic choice effectively renders the facts of Eva Peron’s life as secondary in priority to the ‘­people’s’ perception of her actions in her personal life and public career. Upon completion of the score, Lloyd Webber and Rice decided to produce the ­original Evita recording themselves, using MCA Records—the company that had successfully marketed the original album of Jesus Christ Superstar—to release the record. They cast actress Julie Covington, a veteran of the hit West End production of Steven Schwartz’s Godspell, in the role of Eva. Che was sung by Colm Wilkinson, who had played Judas in the London production of Jesus Christ Superstar (and later originated the role of Jean Valjean in Cameron Mackintosh’s record-breaking West End and Broadway productions of Les Miserables). Others included Paul Jones as Juan Peron,

380   musical theatre screen adaptations Barbara Dickson as Peron’s teenage mistress, and Tony Christie as Magaldi, the lounge singer whose affair with Eva provides her with a route to Buenos Aires. Released as a two-disc set in 1976, the album outsold the very successful Jesus Christ Superstar in Great Britain, Australia, South America, and a number of European markets. Although it was not quite as big a commercial hit in the United States, the song ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ was covered by various artists in America, including Olivia Newton-John and Karen Carpenter. Released separately as a single in the United Kingdom (under the title ‘It’s Only Your Lover Returning’) Julie Covington’s version of the song became a number one hit on the U.K. Singles Chart in the fall of 1976, boosting the popularity and awareness of the concept album worldwide and providing impetus for Producer Robert Stigwood to undertake a West End production with Hal Prince—who had been sent a copy of the recording by Lloyd Webber himself—agreeing to direct.9 Prince’s 1978 London production was a huge commercial success (it ran for eight years) encouraging Stigwood and Prince to proceed with a Broadway incarnation featuring Patti LuPone, Mandy Patinkin, and Bob Gunton as Eva, Che, and Peron, respectively. Although those first London and New York productions of Evita are now remembered for their success at the box office and their domination of the Olivier and Tony Awards, our collective memory seems to have misplaced the fact that the initial reviews of both productions were mixed. The mostly familiar score (Rice and Lloyd Webber had revised, cut, and added songs since the release of the concept album) generally received high praise, as did the star-making performances of LuPone and Patinkin in New York, but many critics took issue with the show’s inability to engage the audience in caring for its self-serving heroine. Reviewing the 1979 New York opening, venerated New York Times critic Walter Kerr called the character of Eva ‘dubious and remote,’ comparing the experience of watching Evita to the ‘emotional limbo we inhabit when we’re just back from the dentist but the Novocain hasn’t worn off yet.’10 Another point of view held that the musical was intended as a critical take on its coldblooded protagonist. In fact, when the show was revived on Broadway in 2012, David Sheward of Backstage bemoaned director Michael Grandage’s attempt to engage the audience by creating a more sympathetic portrayal of Eva Peron, claiming that ‘Harold Prince’s Brechtian staging [had] infused the otherwise flimsy material with a frightening political edge. Evita’s slick stagecraft in presenting herself as a saintly benefactor to the downtrodden while accumulating wealth and power was starkly presented in imaginatively surrealistic terms.’11 As Sheward and others saw it, Prince envisioned Evita as a cautionary tale about a woman so obsessed with power and popularity that the pretence of ‘helping the people’ was merely a means to a selfish end. And given the success of Prince’s Brechtian Cabaret in the 1960s, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret-like staging of Chicago in the 1970s, and an acclaimed revival of Brecht’s own Threepenny Opera in 1976, Prince certainly had precedent for fashioning a musical around an unsympathetic character and took pains to underscore that interpretation at every turn. The timing of the New York opening might also have influenced the foreboding tone of Prince’s production and its negative view of Eva Peron’s moral and political intentions. Opening in September 1979, the show arrived during a period of major change in

evita   381 the cultural and political climate of the United States. With the economy floundering under the leadership of liberal Democratic president Jimmy Carter, conservatives like Republican Ronald Reagan were on the verge of winning the support—and votes—of a generation that had been strongly influenced by the idealistic liberalism of the 1960s. With the focus of younger Americans seeming to move towards an ‘individualistic, competitive, and materialistic ethos that shared much in common with Reagan's own worldview,’12 it is likely that Prince saw Eva’s ascension to power and wealth as the dangerous result of a culture that values materialism over idealism. When one considers that like Eva Peron, Ronald Reagan began his career as a modestly successful entertainment figure, the potential for comparison is undeniable. And while Prince’s intention of making this comparison, or purposely channelling any particular political point of view, is subject to debate, it is a fact that his production about the materialistic Argentinian icon ran for nearly four years, booming on Broadway during Reagan’s transformative first term as president. Subsequent theatrical productions of the musical, especially those mounted long after the ‘Reagan Era,’ have taken issue with Prince’s interpretation. Scott Miller, the artistic director of St Louis’s New Line Theatre, believed that Tim Rice was originally more concerned with the duality of Eva Peron as a character. On the New Line Theatre’s website, in anticipation of its 2010 revival of the show, Miller quotes Lloyd Webber: Evita was Tim Rice’s idea. He was very intrigued by the fact that she [Eva Peron] was mentioned in the context of a whole load of fifties figures who were very successful, including people like James Dean, and I think he was curious to find out why she became this kind of cult figure, this huge figure in Argentina. The biggest problem for me as the composer of it is that of course I could have let the whole thing go as a high romance. I could make everybody cry their eyes out at the end of all this, but that was not the point of the piece. In a way, the piece had to keep this slightly Brechtian approach to the whole thing, where you have the Che character able to comment on the quite grisly things that she did.13

From such comments, Miller gleaned that while the writing team saw Eva as a complex, multidimensional character, it was Prince’s choice to present Eva as basically heartless and opportunistic. But in Miller’s mind, Eva Peron ‘was certainly complicated. It’s that conflicting legacy—and our inability to know for sure one way or the other which is more true—that makes her story so fascinating. But as a character she’s not the cold-hearted bitch that Patti LuPone portrayed on Broadway. That’s just not what Tim Rice wrote.’14 In fact, Walter Kerr was only one of many critics who were not fans of Prince’s interpretation. Comparing the 1979 Broadway production to the West End original, Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Post, ‘They have upped the Brechtian atmosphere—but unfortunately, Brecht himself was not around. The fault of the whole construction is that it is hollow. We are expected to deplore Evita’s morals but adore her circuses. We are asked to accept a serious person onstage, and yet the treatment of that person is essentially superficial, almost trivial. The gloss of the surface is meant to be impenetrable—and it is.’15 Given this ambivalent reaction to the character of Eva Peron, it is not surprising

382   musical theatre screen adaptations that—despite its international success on stage—Hollywood was reluctant to produce a film version. To be fair, although there were legitimate artistic concerns about translating Evita to the screen, the biggest stumbling block was probably the litany of commercial disasters that resulted from the screen adaptations of hit stage musicals in the decades leading up to Evita. Ironically, the end of Hollywood’s proclivity for bringing stage musicals to the screen via lavish, star-studded adaptations, was propelled by one of the most phenomenal ­success stories in film history, Twentieth Century-Fox’s The Sound of Music (1965). In order to appreciate that irony, however, one must refer back to the 1950s, when cinematic realism became more fashionable than fantasy and America’s appetite for film musicals had severely waned. Evidence of that transition can be found in the fact that MGM’s Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen–directed musical, the aforementioned Singin’ in the Rain, raked in a $7.7-million profit on its initial release in 1951, while four years later, It’s Always Fair Weather—directed by the same duo and receiving mostly positive reviews— resulted in a loss of $1,675,000 for the studio.16 Brigadoon, an MGM musical adapted from the Lerner and Loewe Broadway hit, starring Kelly and directed by the legendary Vincente Minnelli, lost a similar sum the previous year. Thus, with even its biggest stars, writers, and directors unable to garner much response at the box office, MGM began turning its attention away from musicals. But with Broadway conversely experiencing a ‘Golden Age’ of musicals in the 1950s,17 Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., and others took up the business of bringing hit stage musicals to the screen. Such star-laden adaptations as The King and I, Guys and Dolls, Carousel, and Oklahoma! met with varying degrees of commercial success. Ultimately in 1961, United Artists achieved a box office bonanza with the grittier, youth-focused West Side Story becoming one of the most successful film musicals to that date. Spurred by the success of West Side Story, Jack L. Warner invested record-breaking amounts of money to bring My Fair Lady—at the time, the longest-running Broadway musical ever—to the screen. His investment paid off, and My Fair Lady bypassed West Side Story at the box office. With musicals seemingly back on track—especially those spawned in Broadway’s Golden Age—Richard Zanuck (son of pioneering studio executive Daryl Zanuck, who had been the driving force behind the Warner Bros. 1933 classic, 42nd Street) set Twentieth Century-Fox into motion producing a screen version of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s last Broadway collaboration, The Sound of Music. Without having the theatrical box office pedigree of My Fair Lady (The Sound of Music’s Broadway run was about half as long) or the raw dynamism of West Side Story, there was no assurance that Zanuck’s vision for The Sound of Music would result in ­profits anywhere near those garnered by the aforementioned smash hits. But working primarily with key members of the team that had so deftly adapted West Side Story to the screen, notably director Robert Wise, screenwriter Ernest Lehman, and associate producer Saul Chaplin (a major contributor to MGM’s biggest musicals under producer Arthur Freed), Zanuck shocked the cynics and produced a film that was to surpass Gone with the Wind as the most successful of all time.

evita   383 But as Matthew Kennedy convincingly asserts in his 2014 book, Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, the unprecedented success of The Sound of Music (coming on the heels of the hugely profitable big-budget My Fair Lady) ended up doing far more harm than good for the future of its studio (Fox), its genre (musicals), or the film industry in general. Two separate quotes by Richard Zanuck highlight this phenomenon. When it was clear that the Sound of Music’s profits would effectively save Twentieth Century-Fox from the near-bankruptcy it faced due the catastrophic losses incurred by 1963’s colossal failure, Cleopatra, Zanuck effusively stated that The Sound of Music ‘unquestionably marked the dramatic turnaround of Twentieth Century-Fox. Everything about this picture has a happy ending.’ Years later, when Fox was losing money with every over-produced, multimillion-dollar musical it produced, Zanuck changed his tune, admitting ‘The Sound of Music did more damage to the industry than any other picture. Everyone tried to copy it. We were the biggest offenders.’18 The long-lasting extent of the damage stemmed from the intrinsic production ­realities of the film industry. Once a film opens, calculating its ultimate profitability can take years. And if the profits of one or more films are so stupefying that they tempt others to use those films as templates for future projects, the resulting movies will need to be written, cast, designed, directed, edited, and distributed before they are projected on a single screen or earn their first dollar. As such, in the late 1960s the pages of Variety were overrun with news about one box office disaster after another, among them Camelot and Doctor Dolittle (1967); Finian’s Rainbow, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Star! (1968); Paint Your Wagon, Sweet Charity, Goodbye, Mr Chips, and Hello Dolly! (1969). In fact, the millions upon millions of dollars lost on Doctor Dolittle, Star!, and Hello Dolly! ended up costing Richard Zanuck his job at Fox (he was fired by his own father) and left the studio forced to auction off a large portion of their property and assets to avoid folding completely.19 It should be noted here that while some of the aforementioned flops were not film adaptations of Broadway musicals, films like Doctor Dolittle and Chitty, Chitty Bang, Bang—among others—had the narrative structure and cinematic style of Broadway adaptations, were created by and cast with Broadway talent, and were clearly meant to evoke the tone and spirit of The Sound of Music. The very early 1970s saw some success in film musicals like Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Cabaret (1972), both of which deviated in significant ways from the original stage versions. The highly stylized stage Fiddler adopted a more realistic, serious cinematic tone. For the film version of Cabaret, entire storylines and characters were added, others removed, while director Bob Fosse and screenwriter Jay Allen eliminated any instance in which a character (who is not actually performing on a stage within the story) ‘bursts’ into song. As such, the film version of Cabaret was able to portray the reality of the Nazi influence on Berliners in the 1930s without having to accommodate the temporary suspension of disbelief that a traditional ‘book musical’ would inherently require. Thus, with only a few such exceptions, the vast majority of traditional 1970s film musicals, particularly those adapted from the stage, were significant failures, including Song of Norway and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970); The Boyfriend (1971); Man of La Mancha and 1776 (1972); Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar (1973); Mame (1974);

384   musical theatre screen adaptations A Little Night Music (1977); The Wiz (1978), and Hair (1979). Darling Lili (1970); Lost Horizon (1973); The Little Prince (1974); At Long Last Love, Tommy, and Funny Lady (1975) are among the other large-scale 1970s ‘Broadway-style’ musical failures, though they were not stage adaptations per se. Arguably one of the most famous examples of 1970s stage-to-film musical adaptations was notably unsuccessful in both its Broadway run and as a newly released feature film. Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show was a huge commercial hit from its opening in London through its seven-year run in the West End. The New York version closed in less than two months and the 1975 film version—The Rocky Horror Picture Show—did so poorly in its original release that it was quickly pulled from theatres by an understandably skittish Twentieth Century-Fox (clearly, the raunchy science fiction parody was the polar opposite of The Sound of Music in virtually every way, from its edgy content to its counterculture demographic). It was only in subsequent years, due to weekend midnight screenings—rife with a then-unique element of audience participation—that the film became a cult classic. Ironically, The Sound of Music has had a revival in the twenty-first century with family-friendly audience-participation sing-alongs selling to sold-out audiences in theatres throughout the world.20 As previously implied, the plethora of movie musicals (especially adaptations of stage hits) was more prominent in the early 1970s, as many of those film rights were purchased and productions set in motion when My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music still represented a sort of ‘holy grail’ for film studios trying to repeat—or at least build on—the success of those films. Hollywood’s musical output (and income) drops off towards the end of that decade, with the notable exception of Grease, which grossed $150 million in its initial 1978 release. A quick examination of its history shows that Grease generated staggering results at every stage of its existence. First presented as a low-budget show at a small Chicago theatre, its novice creators, Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, received enough positive response during an eight-month run to prompt producers Ken Waissman and Maxine Fox to bring the show to New York, where it moved from off-Broadway to Broadway and was on the way to a then record-breaking 3,388 performances when the movie was released in 1978. Much of the credit for the success of the film version of Grease was given to its capitalizing on the 1950s nostalgia craze of the period. The very simple, nearly bare set of the Broadway production (the proscenium was decorated with black and white 1950s-style high school yearbook photographs) was replaced by a colorful, almost cartoon-like design. In fact, the opening number ‘Grease Is the Word’—written specifically for the movie and performed by the then chart-topping Bee Gees—was sung over an extended cartoon sequence, introducing the major characters and the actors (led by 1970s stars John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John), portraying them in comic book fashion. Thus, although Grease the film was released one year before the Broadway opening of Evita, its success would not have much bearing on the decision of whether to turn the politically fraught Evita into a film. Nonetheless, even if Stigwood and Paramount (the movie studio that originally held the rights to Evita) had been encouraged by the success of Grease, two colossal Hollywood failures of the early 1980s invariably dampened Hollywood’s enthusiasm

evita   385 towards bringing Broadway musicals to the screen. A Chorus Line opened on Broadway in 1975 and proceeded to run for 6,137 performances, passing Grease as the longest-running Broadway musical to that point (and held the record until surpassed by Lloyd Webber’s Cats in 1997). Annie (based on the iconic comic strip, Little Orphan Annie) opened one year later than A Chorus Line and had similar financial success, lasting six years on Broadway while spawning an astounding four simultaneous North American touring companies and a long-running West End production. Yet despite the phenomenal commercial success of both shows, the film versions of Annie (1982) and A Chorus Line (1985) were failures of similar scope to Hello Dolly and its ilk. Touted as the most expensive movie musical ever made, the 1982 Annie’s total ­revenue did not come close to recouping its expenses. Chorus Line, the even bigger Broadway hit, grossed only $14 million at the box office, not close to its $25 million budget.21 Perhaps the many negative reviews garnered by both of these 1980s stage-to-screen adaptations were the major reason for their commercial failures. Both films could deservedly be accused of extracting well-crafted—if simplistic—plotlines and replacing them with pointless spectacle, in the case of Annie, and soap opera convolution for A Chorus Line. But even had Stigwood promised to deliver the highest quality cinematic product with the best available creative team, he would have been hard-pressed to convince the 1980s’ Paramount brass to gamble on an expensive film version of Evita or to claim that it would revive the popularity of the film musical. For if Annie and A Chorus Line, with their likeable, sympathetic characters, could not attract an audience, why would anyone expect a purposefully alienating musical about an egotistical woman who pretends to be a champion for the masses while lining her own pockets and heightening her dubious legacy to appeal to a mass audience? Nonetheless, soon after the show’s 1978 West End opening, Stigwood hired director Ken Russell to begin conceiving a screen version of Evita. As the next decade went by and the project foundered in the ‘development’ stages, many actresses were considered for the lead role, including Barbra Streisand, whose work in both the stage (1964) and film (1968) versions of Funny Girl had turned her instantaneously into a bona fide superstar. But Streisand eventually rejected the role of Evita, perhaps reticent to play a heartless manipulator, given her own reputation as a demanding offscreen diva. It is equally conceivable that Stigwood and his potential business partners were reticent to  build a film around Streisand, considering the devastating losses of Hello, Dolly! Concurrently, Tim Rice pressed hard for the original West End Eva, Elaine Paige, who also happened to be romantically linked to Rice at the time. But with no Hollywood box office track record, Paige was never given serious consideration. As for Ken Russell, the presumptive director had set his sights on Liza Minnelli in the role. Minnelli, who had won an Oscar playing narcissistic Sally Bowles in Fosse’s 1972 Cabaret, was a reasonable choice, especially given her ease in handling the Brechtian tone of Cabaret. But by the 1980s, Minnelli’s box office appeal was waning and Russell— who had already screen-tested the brunette Minnelli in a blonde wig—found himself alone on the Liza bandwagon. In the end, it was Russell’s refusal to work with anyone but Minnelli as Evita that cost him his contract as director of the film.22

386   musical theatre screen adaptations By 1987, the in-fighting and indecision over casting, script, and other major elements of production seemed poised to extinguish any possibility that the film would ever get made. But the road to production took a positive turn that year when the Weintraub Entertainment Group (WEG), led by producer Jerry Weintraub, purchased the film rights from Paramount. Soon after, Weintraub was contacted by writer-director Oliver Stone, whose success with controversial dramas such as Wall Street and Platoon would seem to have prepared him to tackle the political and personal affairs of Eva and Juan Peron. Stone was not only eager to write and direct the project but also willing to meet with and consider casting the internationally known rock superstar, Madonna, in the title role. In fact, Madonna’s determination to portray the onscreen Evita had been made evident a year before Stone’s involvement with the project even began. In 1986 (a full ten years before the film version of Evita was shot and released) the singer/actress arranged a meeting with Weintraub to express her desire to play Eva Peron. She even went as far as to dress the part, adorned in extravagant period attire and wearing her hair in chic 1940s style. Apparently, Stigwood was duly impressed and it is possible to trace the eventual casting of Madonna as Eva back to this 1986 encounter.23 As stated, however, there was still a decade of turmoil ahead before a deal would be sealed and production begun. This includes another meeting in 1988 in which Stone and Lloyd Webber met with Madonna to discuss the artistic approach that would be taken with the film version. The meeting left both the film’s would-be writer/director and the show’s composer dumbfounded as Madonna demanded final script approval and massive changes to the musical score. Stone found these demands both audacious and insulting. By 1990, Stone had not only ended the negotiations with Madonna but backed out of the project completely. Over the next few years, the project ping-ponged between a host of studios (including Disney in the early 1990s), producers, directors, writers, and stars, while Stone and Madonna took turns being in and out of the picture. It was not until 1994 that the eventual creative team was set. With Stone turning his attention to Nixon, Stigwood found new producing partners in Andrew  G.  Vajna’s independent film company, Cinergi Pictures, and investor Arnon Milchan of Regency Enterprises. The newly formed team put the screenwriting and directing chores in the hands of Alan Parker, who had directed the edgy and successful musicals Fame, Pink Floyd: The Wall, and The Commitments, as well as the taut historical dramas, Midnight Express and Mississippi Burning. Like Stone, Parker had proven that he was up to the challenge of translating explosive material to the screen. The fact that he could direct musicals was an added factor in his favour. In coming to the project, Parker was focused on two aspects of production: the script and the star. For the script, Parker opted to discard both Stone’s version and the original stage version, choosing instead, in his words, to ‘write a balanced story, as thoroughly researched as possible, inspired always by the heart of the original piece, which was Andrew's score and Tim’s lyrics.’24 Although it was Parker who penned the final version, the Writers’ Guild of America awarded Stone shared credit as screenwriter. Casting the lead actress would be even more complicated than crafting the script. At the time Parker

evita   387 came on board as writer-producer-director, the previous regime had finally settled on Michelle Pfeiffer, then a big box office name who had starred in film musicals and ­dramas, including The Fabulous Baker Boys and Grease 2. But just as Parker took over the artistic reins of Evita, Pfeiffer announced that she was pregnant with her second child and would not be available. When renewed negotiations with Meryl Streep could not bring about an agreement, Parker considered Glenn Close for the role. It was during this period of indecision, at the end of 1994, that Madonna made the crowning gesture that finally won over the support of Parker: a personal letter designed to persuade Parker that she was destined to play Eva Peron. As Parker later explained, ‘her handwritten, four-page letter was extraordinarily passionate and sincere. As far as she was concerned, no one could play Evita as well as she could, and she said that she would sing, dance and act her heart out, and put everything else on hold to devote all her time to it should I decide to go with her.’25 With Madonna having won over Parker and eventually Rice, Lloyd Webber remained the sceptic among the creative team. For although Madonna was well known for her string of pop hits, the composer was still concerned about her ability to sing the more legitimate, opera-like aspects of his score. Proving her respect for the magnitude of the role and its vocal demands, Madonna embarked on intensive vocal coaching sessions and extensive research of Eva Peron’s place in Argentinian history, including a 1996 trip to Buenos Aires where she personally interviewed aging contemporaries of the Perons.26 Madonna’s enthusiasm and passion for the project was evident in the diary she wrote during the film shoot, published in the November 1996 issue of Vanity Fair. ‘This is the role I was born to play,’ she wrote. ‘I put everything of me into this because it was much more than a role in a movie. It was exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. . . . And I am prouder of Evita than anything else I have done.’ 27 The long road that ironically began and ended with Madonna as Eva is arguably the defining aspect of how Evita got made, how the character was reinvented for the film, and how the film itself was received by the public. For Parker, knowing the glamourous pop star would be at the centre of the film clearly affected his more romantic approach to the script. ‘While Evita is a story of people whose lives were in politics, it is not a political story,’ he explained later. ‘It is a Cinderella story about the astonishing life of a girl from the most mundane of backgrounds, who became the most powerful woman her country (and indeed Latin America) had ever seen, a woman never content to be a mere ornament at the side of her husband, the president.’28 Parker’s reference to ‘Cinderella’ may have been more prescient than he intended, as it bespeaks a major shift in the source, focus, and style of film musicals in the waning years of the twentieth century. During the fifteen-plus years (1978–1995) when the Evita movie project was floundering—and, as discussed, traditional film musicals were not getting made—the Disney Company found a new way to package and present its signature animated musicals. Beginning with 1989’s Little Mermaid, Disney found huge financial and critical success by rebranding a genre that was formerly geared almost exclusively to children. Hiring Alan Mencken and Howard Ashman, the composing team that was responsible for the off-Broadway hit Little Shop of Horrors, Disney encouraged them to

388   musical theatre screen adaptations approach story and character on The Little Mermaid with the depth and complexity that had been a staple of Broadway’s ‘book’ musicals since 1943’s Oklahoma! In return, The Little Mermaid set a box office record for an animated film and won two Academy Awards in 1989. Its success spurred the making of Beauty and the Beast, which was not only a box office hit but was the first animated film ever to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. With Aladdin in 1992 and The Lion King in 1994, each Disney musical continued to earn record profits, both films having the highest worldwide grosses of their respective release years. Not so coincidentally, Tim Rice was the lyricist for both of these films (taking over on Aladdin when Ashman passed away during production). As Kantor and Maslon describe it, ‘Disney ingeniously adapted the formula of the Golden Age of Broadway for a contemporary audience’ and not only revived a faltering studio but saved a dying genre in the process.29 With these Disney successes signalling the possibility that 1990s audiences might be more open to a heroine bursting into song, taking a chance on Evita suddenly seemed less of an artistic or commercial stretch. And with Madonna now guaranteed to play Evita, the film was likely to attract an audience that might not otherwise have been interested in a Broadway-generated musical film. On the other hand, having Madonna on board did not guarantee a financial ‘slam dunk.’ Whereas the 1980s began with Madonna exploding onto the pop scene and ended with her being named ‘Artist of the Decade’ by MTV, Billboard and Musician magazine, the 1990s started out less auspiciously for Madonna. With the release of a controversial sexually explicit book, aptly entitled Sex, as well as playing lead roles in graphic films (such as 1993’s Body of Evidence and Dangerous Game) that were received negatively by fans and critics alike, the once high-flying superstar was facing an identity crisis: would she be known for her creative influence on popular music and her well-received performances in quality films like Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) and A League of Their Own (1992)? Or would she be viewed as an overrated narcissist, whose career took a fatal turn emphasizing shock over art. By 1996 it seemed very likely that the answer would come by way of her performance in Evita, which was now in the seemingly able and experienced hands of Alan Parker. Given Parker’s hard-nosed, edgy style as a director, one might have suspected him to follow some aspects of Hal Prince’s ambivalent interpretation, shining a harsh light on the sort of scheming, ambitious, sexually charged vixen usually played by Madonna. Instead, the writing and direction of the film version of Evita takes basically the opposite approach. ‘I ignored the stage play completely,’ said Parker, ‘as the theatrical decisions that Hal Prince made bore little relevance to a cinematic interpretation.’30 As suggested, Parker did view Evita as a Cinderella story, which could explain his ­gentler approach. But in casting a celebrity who daringly evoked a much darker persona, one would imagine Parker would invoke some of the moral ambiguity that made the stage Eva so fascinating. Yet Parker, Madonna, and Stigwood seemed bent on evoking the audience’s sympathy for its tragic heroine. There could be a variety of possible explanations for Parker’s more ‘heroic’ Evita. He simply might have seen the way the superstar’s own fans had turned on her when she began producing and performing more salacious material or ‘behaved badly’ in public,

evita   389 as when she swore inappropriately throughout a TV interview with David Letterman in 1994. Or perhaps the film’s more sympathetic Eva was designed to combat the increasingly shallow, egotistical reputation of its star, fearing that the moviegoing masses would not be as tolerant of an unsympathetic heroine as their theatregoing counterparts. Or perhaps Parker (a fan of the original album version of Evita) shared Scott Miller’s view that Tim Rice’s material (and Eva’s story) was inherently sympathetic. Whatever the reason, the Eva Peron presented in the film is indeed sympathetic, with newly created flashbacks, scenes, lyrics, and entire songs crafted for the purpose of gaining insight into and empathy for Eva. Although these changes may have succeeded in giving superstar Madonna a more compassionate role to play, did they serve to make Evita a better film? Before attempting to answer that question, it is advisable to look at the most significant changes and adjustments made to story and character in adapting Evita from stage to screen. Interestingly, the first—and one of the most significant—changes involves a character other than Eva. In the original conception of Evita, both as a concept album and theatrical production, Rice and Webber envisioned Che as a sort of Argentinian Everyman, narrating and commenting on the positive and negative aspects of Evita, presenting a fairly objective point of view. As mentioned earlier, Prince chose to portray the character as the embodiment of the iconic South American Marxist revolutionary figure Che Guevera. Although historical facts reveal that Guevera and Eva almost certainly never crossed paths, and that Guevera’s years as the militant rebel portrayed by David Essex and Mandy Patinkin, respectively, in the original London and New York productions, did not coincide with Eva Peron’s rise to power and fame, Prince felt it would be effective to position Che as a combination narrator/judge. The real Che Guevera would not have been a fan of Eva Peron, and the character of Che as played in these initial productions represents her harshest critic. But for the film version, Parker and company abandon the Guevera model, and opt for the ‘everyman’ figure as envisioned by Lloyd Webber and Rice. Casting heartthrob Antonio Banderas in the role, Che is first seen seated among the stricken audience members in a Buenos Aires movie theatre, reacting to the news of the death of Eva Peron. It is obvious by his wardrobe and bruised face that Banderas is playing a commoner, not Che Guevera. And while there is something of an ambivalence about Banderas’s reaction to the news of her death, he is clearly neither cynical nor unmoved, which is the attitude portrayed in the original production, as the words ‘Oh what a circus, oh what a show’ emanate from Che’s lips as he takes in the spectacle of the mourning masses. This shot of a grieving Che transitions to a flashback sequence, added for the film version, which is positioned as perhaps the defining moment of Eva’s life. Captioned ‘Chivilcoy—1926’ we are transported to the scene of Eva’s father’s funeral, where we find a seven-year-old Eva with her mother and siblings being barred from attending the funeral. Eva’s mother, clearly of the lower classes, pleads with the man’s wife—of a higher class—to let his children into the funeral. But the wife calls the children bastards, propelling Eva to run past the blockade into the elaborate church, to the shock of the well-dressed mourners. After Eva places flowers on her father’s embalmed

390   musical theatre screen adaptations corpse, she is dragged away, literally kicking and screaming. This incident—alluded to only by a single sentence in the stage version—seems to motivate and even justify much of Eva’s animosity towards the ‘middle classes’ for the rest of the film’s narrative. The subsequent transition back to Eva’s own extravagant, lavish state funeral is interrupted by Che, now seated alone at a bar, singing the same ‘Oh What a Circus,’ but here, in civilian clothes, he seems more like a jilted lover drowning his sorrows than a rebel with a political axe to grind. As he walks through the crowd of mourners, though the words he sings are critical of Eva, Banderas exudes more bitterness than hatred. It is interesting to note that twenty-first-century theatrical director Michael Grandage must have had a positive reaction to the choice of Che as ‘everyman,’ as he chose the nonGuevera approach in his 2012 revival. What follows immediately is the story of Eva’s rise to fame, from her seduction of small-time tango singer Magaldi to her eventual bedding of the highly decorated Colonel Juan Peron. On stage, as indicated by the cynical lyrics of such songs as ‘Buenos Aires,’ Eva’s ascension is calculated, fuelled by a lust for power, devoid of sympathy or feeling for those she encounters along the way. Magaldi is presented as a pathetic, if not sympathetic, character who genuinely warns Eva to ‘Beware of the City.’ But Eva uses blackmail and sex to get her way, blithely tossing Magaldi aside for more ‘useful’ ­paramours. As a disgusted Che sings the cynical ‘Goodnight and Thank You,’ we watch Eva seduce then toss aside a string of other men, once they have served her purpose in advancing her career as an actress in Buenos Aires. Via sometimes subtle but always significant changes, Eva’s rise to fame is portrayed quite differently in the movie. The major change involves her relationship with the small-time singer Magaldi. Although the lyrics still indicate that she is guided by ambition and she flirts heavily with other men, the audience is apparently meant to believe that she is indeed in love with, or at least cares for, Magaldi—so much so that when Magaldi ends their fling by returning to his wife and children, Eva looks on heartbroken. At this point, a major change occurs in the storytelling. In response to the rejection by Magaldi, Madonna launches into ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall.’ The most logical reason for this change is that the song is generally considered one of the Lloyd WebberRice team’s best and surely a pop legend like Madonna would want to sing all the best songs in the show. The difficulty with this choice, however, is that the lyrics indicate that the singer is the kind of person who repeatedly trusts in people then finds herself tossed back onto the streets, asking plaintively, ‘So what happens now? Where am I going to?’ When this song is sung as originally intended—by Peron’s teenage mistress—it is meant to convey a character who is completely the opposite of Evita. In fact, it is when Evita coldly displaces the mistress and throws her out of Peron’s house that she sings the song. The implication is that unlike this lost soul, Eva Peron never has to ask what happens now or where she is going. She knows what happens next because she decides where she is going, who she is going with, and what she will do when she gets there. (Tellingly, Eva does sing these words later in the play—when she knows she is dying, the one obstacle she cannot conquer.) But the film leaves us with a very different Eva at this point. After being rejected by Magaldi, the song continues as Eva suffers humiliations at auditions

evita   391 and other rejections. She is thus presented as a naïve, jilted young woman looking for love and success and Che’s newly softened, borderline romantic reactions to her do nothing to dissuade us from that view. The second act of the film, beginning when Eva and Peron meet at a major charity event, sticks a bit closer to the original stage musical. One might attribute this in part to the fact that once she marries Peron, Eva’s actions are a matter of public record, so there is less room for blatant reinterpretation. But the portrayal of Eva’s relationship with Peron and her subsequent tenure as the First Lady of Argentina do lean towards the sympathetic. One clear example is when Eva addresses the masses in Evita’s signature number, ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.’ Parker makes use of the close up here to draw us inside Eva’s mind and see this musical monologue from her point of view. So, whereas on stage, the theatre audience is left to watch Eva from afar—much like the Argentinians watching from beneath the balcony of the Casa Rosada—and can only speculate about her sincerity, the film brings us up-close and personal, where Madonna betrays nothing but sincerity and even genuine humility behind the now-familiar words. The accompanying close-ups of the adoring crowd, the shots of Peron—played by an intensely focused Jonathan Pryce—bathed in light as he looks at her lovingly, and especially the flashbacks of her rise to the top, beginning with the crying little girl banished from her Daddy’s funeral, all combine to present a woman who is both loving and beloved. Che is only given two brief reaction shots during the number, and though he shakes his head with slight scepticism when she sings of her disinterest in ‘fortune and fame,’ he is compelled to look at her more as an object of desire than scorn. On both stage and screen, when the song is done, a stuffy politician rains on Eva’s parade singing, ‘Statesmanship is more than entertaining peasants.’ On stage, Eva sharply replies, ‘We will see, little man!’ The implication of course is that she agrees that they are peasants but she knows how to handle them. In the film, Eva does not seem to hear his remark, and the snide retort is given by her mother, thus preserving the sincerity of Eva’s address to her people. The sequences involving Eva’s jaunt through Europe, the so-called Rainbow Tour, invariably evoke some sympathy even in the stage version of Evita, in part because she is portrayed as a victim of prejudice by arrogant aristocrats. Additionally, this is the sequence where Eva’s health begins to fail, and vulnerability is inevitable, no matter what the directorial interpretation. Upon Eva’s return home, she starts her charitable foundation, leading to the cleverly double-edged ‘And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out).’ Onstage, the song is sung by Che with vitriolic disdain. In the film, Che sings the song, but it is accompanied by images of Eva Peron doing a series of wonderful things for a grateful nation. When the lyrics suggest that funds are being misappropriated, we see other government officials doing the dirty deeds, possibly without Eva’s knowledge. Two songs that are performed during the film’s final act potentially solidify the film’s point of view of Eva Peron as a probably well-meaning, mostly sympathetic, inherently romantic heroine. In his extended synopsis of the original 1979 Broadway production of Evita for his 1995 volume, Gänzl’s Book of the Broadway Musical, Kurt Gänzl describes the ‘Waltz for Eva and Che’ as the point in the show when ‘Che faces up to

392   musical theatre screen adaptations Evita to belittle both her work and her image.’31 But even though the lyrics indicate a hostile encounter between adversaries, the movie stages the number romantically, with soft lighting and sweeping choreography that evoke memories of the waltz in Beauty and the Beast and ‘Shall We Dance?’ of The King and I. It is probably not a coincidence that both those numbers represent a revelation of romantic interest for the participants— and one gets the feeling that the same is happening in the film version of Evita. As if to underscore the point, the stage version of the dance ends with Che physically pushing Eva away. In the film, the dance ends when Eva passes out, too weak to go on. The original stage version of Evita proceeds quickly from this point to Eva’s ultimate death. Peron sings of Eva’s value, albeit a declining one, in ‘She Is a Diamond’ while Eva tries to ignore the inevitable and voices her desire to be Argentina’s next vice president. But Peron insists she is too ill and ‘a jeering Che,’ in Gänzl’s words, ‘is only too happy to remind her [that] this time she has lost.’ Eva then takes to the airwaves with a farewell radio broadcast reprising her mantra of ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,’ and then she dies, her final words indicating that she leaves no regrets behind. As such, the play’s final focus is on the passing of a dubious political figure and the still-unanswered questions about her value to her country and the sincerity of her stated plight. Although the template for the story remains the same for the film, following the ­documented history of Eva Peron’s final days, the film uses music and cinematic techniques to shift the focus of the ending to Eva as a romantic figure, not just in the eyes of the people, but specifically in her relationship with her husband. It is customary for film adaptations of stage musicals to add at least one totally new number, with the goal, at least in part, to garner an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. But the addition of ‘You Must Love Me’ has far greater impact and resonance on the story, theme, and tone of Evita. To demonstrate the public’s perspective on both Madonna and Eva prior to the film’s release, when word came out that a number had been added with the title ‘You Must Love Me,’ some assumed that the song would be about the character of Eva angrily insisting—even ordering—those around her that they must love her, because she is insisting they do and that is reason enough. It was therefore very surprising to see the film and discover that the song is meant as an epiphany on Eva’s part, her realization that if Peron can still show her such attention and affection when she is dying and no longer of any use to him, then he must love her after all. When she sings ‘Deep in my heart I'm concealing/Things that I'm longing to say/Scared to confess what I'm feeling/ Frightened you'll slip away’32 it is really the first time since their courtship that Eva realizes that she does love Peron, the man, and is afraid of losing him, not just the love of the people or the power it brings. When Ernest Lehmann’s 1965 screenplay of The Sound of Music proved so much more effective—and commercially successful—than the Lindsay/Crouse book for the 1959 stage version, subsequent stage productions began incorporating its changes into the script. The same is true for other musicals, most notably revivals of Cabaret produced after the hit Bob Fosse film. Given this trend, it is interesting that ‘You Must Love Me’ is the most prominent newly created aspect of the film that made its way into Michael

evita   393 Grandage’s recent revival. The author attended a performance of that production on the US tour, and it was clear that Grandage’s choice went beyond the desire to include an Oscar-winning song in his version. Because even though the new stage version still presents a mostly unsympathetic portrait of Eva, the addition of the poignant song—and its admission of legitimate emotional feelings—urges the audience to look at Eva Peron’s impending death as tragic, the passing of a character who, late in her short life, discovers that she could be needed or loved for something beyond power, fame, or money. Without the revelatory ‘You Must Love Me,’ Evita ends as basically an ‘I told you so’ for our narrator Che Guevera or otherwise. With it, the element of romance shares the stage with politics. Of course, Parker’s film version, which has shown us Eva’s vulnerability, sensitivity, and sincerity for over two hours by this point, serves up an ending filled with extended close-ups of Eva on her deathbed, her emotional confessions unquestionably heartfelt, followed by the reactions of those around her, most notably her devoted mother and loving husband. And finally, at her funeral, Peron and Che stand over Eva’s coffin, like two lovers vying for a claim on the beautiful glass-encased corpse before them. Though the words he sings still invoke questions about Eva’s true motivations and impact, the tenderness in Bandera’s voice is unmistakeable. And when he leans down and kisses her coffin, Peron, played by the older, less gorgeous Pryce, glares at Che as though Eva’s lover has been revealed. In metaphoric terms this could mean that Peron is jealous that the people—symbolized by Che—were Eva’s true love. But in the well-established language of Hollywood, the kiss, the very last action of the film, proves what was hinted at all along, that Banderas’s Che was always in love with Madonna’s Eva. The success or failure of any big-budget Hollywood-produced motion picture is ­inevitably going to be judged by its success at the box office, and Evita, taking in over $100,000,000 worldwide definitely qualifies as a success, as well as probably encouraging investment in subsequent musicals like Moulin Rouge and Chicago. But the critical reception to Evita was lukewarm at best, with Madonna receiving some particularly scathing reviews and being ignored by the Motion Picture Academy for an Oscar ­nomination. (The Foreign Press did award her a Golden Globe for the performance.) In any event, the film certainly did not evoke the extreme reactions that emanated from the Harold Prince stage version. And after careful examination of the differences between the versions, these alternate results make perfect sense. For onstage, Prince’s production was straightforward and critical, as if to say ‘You think this show is shallow and simplistic? Look who it’s about!’ Whereas for a movie counting on the box office appeal of its megastar, the filmmakers seemed well aware that whether we’re referring to Madonna or Eva, you ‘must love her’ or you’re not going to pay to see the film.

Notes 1. Ted Sennet, Hollywood Musicals (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 283. 2. Stephen Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber: The New Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111.

394   musical theatre screen adaptations 3. Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber, 192–193. 4. Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber, 191. 5. Scott Miller, ‘Inside Evita,’ 2010, https://www.newlinetheatre.com/evitachapter.html. accessed 4 January 2019. 6. Miller, ‘Inside Evita.’ 7. Andrew Ganz, ‘In Upcoming Revival of Evita, Che Will Be the “Everyman” Not Che Guevara,’ February 2012, Playbill.com, accessed March 2017. 8. https://www.gringoinbuenosaires.com/five-argentine-spanish-words/, accessed 4 January 2019. 9. Citron, Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber, 230. 1 0. Ben Brantley, Broadway Musicals (New York: Abrams, 2012), 264. 11. David Sheward, NY Review: Evita, 5 April 2012, https://www.backstage.com/magazine/ article/ny-review-evita-52397/, accessed 4 January 2019. 12. Shmoop Editorial Team, ‘Culture in the Reagan Era,’ November 2008, http://www. shmoop.com/reagan-era/culture.html, accessed 4 January 2019. 13. Miller, ‘Inside Evita.’ 14. Miller, ‘Inside Evita.’ 15. Miller, ‘Inside Evita.’ 16. The Eddie Mannix Ledger, Margaret Herrick Library, Center for Motion Picture Study, Los Angeles. 17. Michael Kantor and Lawrence Maslon, Broadway: The American Musical (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2004), 190. 18. Matthew Kennedy, Roadshow: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 23–24. 19. Kennedy, Roadshow, 23–24. 20. Kennedy, Roadshow, 249. 21. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=chorusline.htm, accessed 4 January 2019. 22. James Greenberg, ‘Is It Now Time to Cry for Evita?’ New York Times, 19 November 1989. 23. David Ansen, ‘Madonna Tangos with Evita,’ Newsweek, 15 December 1996. 24. Alan Parker, ‘EVITA – Alan Parker – Director, Writer, Producer,’ http://alanparker.com/ film/evita/making/, accessed 4 January 2019. 25. Parker, ‘EVITA.’ 26. Lucy O’Brien, Madonna: Like an Icon (London: Bantam Press, 2008), 305–306. 27. Madonna Ciccone, ‘The Madonna Diaries,’ Vanity Fair, November 1996. 28. Gonthier, David  F.  Jr, and Timothy  L.  O’Brien, The Films of Alan Parker, 1976–2003 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015). 29. Kantor and Maslon, Broadway, 420. 3 0. Parker, Evita. 31. Kurt Gänzl, Gänzl’s Book of the Broadway Musical (New York: Schirmer Books, 1995). 32. Tim Rice, ‘You Must Love Me,’ Evita (1996).

chapter 18

Br iga doon a n d Its Tr a nsition to MGM Da nce M usica l Adapting a Stage Show for Star Dancers Susan Smith

Reflecting on the second of three MGM film musicals in which she appeared with Gene Kelly,1 Cyd Charisse once mused: Brigadoon was a beautiful film, but somehow it missed. I’ve never really understood why that happened but it did. Motion pictures are funny that way; they can seemingly have all the ingredients, as Brigadoon had, and yet when they are all put together, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Whatever the reason, Brigadoon never lived up to our expectations. It made money—I’m proud of the fact that I was never in a financial flop—but it wasn’t quite the picture it should have been, despite Lerner’s great talents.2

In the memoirs from which the above quote is taken, Charisse alludes to some of the problems encountered during the filming of Brigadoon—the studio’s original intention, reportedly, to shoot the picture on location in Scotland along with the lesser known tension between director Vincente Minnelli and actor Van Johnson3 and her own one-and-only spat with Kelly.4 Overall, though, she presents Brigadoon as something of an enigma in failing to realize its full potential, despite referring to it as ‘one of my favorite films.’5 If Charisse is noncommittal as to why Brigadoon supposedly fell short of ­expectations, Alan Jay Lerner—the film’s screenwriter and lyricist (and librettist for the stage show)—is more forthright: ‘It was a picture that should have been made on location in Scotland and was done in the studio. It was a singing show that tried to become a dancing show, and it had an all-American cast which should have been all-Scottish.’6 In his autobiography, Vincente Minnelli mirrors Lerner’s comments, invoking Gene Kelly’s views in support.7 Of these, two factors—the decision to shoot the picture entirely

396   musical theatre screen adaptations on MGM’s sound stage at Culver City instead of on location, as originally planned, and to turn Brigadoon from a show that had been designed for singers on the stage into one suited for dancers on the movie screen—are most frequently cited as proof that the film transpired into a disappointing adaptation of a highly successful Broadway musical. In relation to the first reason, Clive Hirschhorn, one of Kelly’s biographers, attributes the film’s perceived failure, above all, to the lack of location work. His view that ‘[Dore] Schary’s decision to confine Brigadoon to a sound stage was, unfortunately, a bad one, and the film never recovered from it’8 would become enshrined in the dominant narrative regarding Brigadoon’s critical reception. The decision to film in CinemaScope is also described by Alvin Yudkoff (another Kelly biographer) as ‘the nail in the coffin for the movie’ and something about which ‘Gene was to complain bitterly in interviews throughout the years.’9 Criticisms of the film on account of its studio-bound artifice have sometimes become entwined, as well, with indictments of its portrayal of Scotland according to an ersatz view that has no correspondence in reality. Producer Arthur Freed’s much-quoted statement (on returning to Hollywood from a scouting trip to the Highlands) that ‘Scotland did not look Scottish enough,’10 has occasionally been enlisted in support, with the film criticized for eschewing the greater naturalism that cinema (compared to theatre) affords through (among other things) location shooting. Yet although this line of thought has become strongly entrenched in Brigadoon scholarship, it has been challenged in recent years, most notably by Colin McArthur and Murray Pomerance. Despite their very different approaches, both scholars take issue with some of the recurring criticisms of the film on account of its studio artifice. Hence, McArthur maintains that ‘there is no intrinsic reason why shooting outdoors should be more artistically valuable than shooting on a built set’ and indeed, for him, the latter’s ‘unreality’ actually gels far more with the film’s ‘overall theme’ ‘than the stubborn authenticity of actual landscapes.’11 Noting critics’ failure to recognize Kelly and Freed’s need—as makers of cinematic musicals— ‘to create a space more mythical than historical,’12 Pomerance also reconstrues the extreme artifice of Brigadoon’s setting not as ‘a flaw . . . as so many critics scathingly thought at the time’ but, rather, as a strength that enables ‘viewers of Brigadoon [to] have a deliriously mixed sensation of reality and illusion.’13 If this counterargument regarding the imaginative effects arising from Brigadoon’s studio-bound set suggest there may be more to our experience of this movie than previously cited criticisms have tended to allow, then what of the claim that the film also suffered from being reworked into a musical for dancers (rather than singers)? This other crucial dimension to the show’s transfer to the movie screen has received much less critical scrutiny so, with that in mind, the purpose of my chapter is to redress such neglect. Basing my analysis on two songs which each played a prominent role in the original Broadway production but which met starkly different fates in the film adaptation, I hope to demonstrate, above all, both the benefits and losses arising from MGM’s ­transformation of the stage show along these lines. To describe the original Broadway production as a musical for singers requires some qualification, however, since it overlooks the significant contribution made to that show by dance, the responsibility for which lay with the show’s choreographer Agnes de Mille,

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   397 who had already received acclaim for her work on Rogers and Hammerstein’s landmark Broadway production of Oklahoma!14 In her study of de Mille, Kara Anne Gardner traces this important female choreographer’s role in shaping the Broadway production of Brigadoon.15 Gardner notes how de Mille worked harmoniously with director Robert Lewis to create seamless transitions between the drama and musical numbers, and she also examines how de Mille built up the character of Harry Ritchie, the dissatisfied figure (renamed Harry Beaton in the film) who (as developed by her) tries to leave Brigadoon, making him central to her staging of the dances.16 Nonetheless, as originally written for the stage, Brigadoon was primarily conceived for singers. The libretto for the 1947 Broadway show lists twelve songs (fourteen including the ‘Prologue’ and ‘Vendors’ Calls’) while both male and female leads are specified as singers: Tommy is described as ‘Light Baritone’ (Low B–High G) and Fiona as ‘Lyric Soprano’ (Low B–High A [optional B flat]).17 Under de Mille’s expert guidance, the dance component of the stage show evolved alongside the singing although, according to Stephen Harvey, these two elements coexisted fairly independently of each other: As with many of the ambitious stage musicals written in the shadow of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Brigadoon’s principals were singers who couldn’t move, complemented by a dance troupe barely required to speak. As pop arias alternated with Agnes de Mille ballets, they rarely shared the stage, brushing kilts in the wings and then again at the final curtain call.18

In interview, Gene Kelly himself comments that ‘when the studio bought [Brigadoon] from the stage play it was certainly done for singers’ and that ‘the only big dancing in it were the Scottish dances and sword dances.’19 Brigadoon’s status as predominantly a stage show for singers can be linked to the post-Oklahoma! phase of the Broadway ­musical which, as Jerome Delamater points out, was characterized by a ‘trend in stage musicals towards a kind of folk opera, [in which] dance became less significant, even though it did have persistent manifestations.’20 Indeed, according to Delamater, ‘By the late fifties film makers were rationalizing not using dance in films,’21 and he quotes Vincente Minnelli as saying that ‘Alan Lerner started the kind of school of musicals that had very little dancing, and the lyrics are like dialogue.’22 As Delamater notes, the 1950s was also a time when the American film musical—weakened by economic pressures within Hollywood and the advent of rock music in popular culture—became increasingly reliant on producing respectful adaptations of successful Broadway shows (a growing feature of which was their song-driven nature).23 Harvey concurs, observing that Hollywood’s deference towards ‘the security of pre-sold hits from the stage’ was largely at the expense of the original film musical, despite (as he maintains with regard to MGM) the latter’s continuing box office popularity.24 ‘One result of [all] this,’ Delamater argues, ‘was a general feeling of obeisance to the property—an attitude that what had worked once should work again, and many of the films were transferred to the screen without consideration of their potential as film.’25 Delamater contrasts MGM musical director George Sidney, as an exponent of

398   musical theatre screen adaptations ultra-fidelity to the stage original, with ‘composer and music director Dimitri Tiomkin,’ who expressed concern that such an approach ‘hardly strikes me as right, healthy or forward looking.’26 He also quotes Freda June Lockhart as saying in 1957 that the trend towards slavish adherence to the original was ‘combining to bring dancing musicals once more to a standstill, to take us to another age of stationary singing spectacle.’27 It’s fascinating to consider the MGM version of Brigadoon, released on 8 September 1954, in the context of all this since it suggests that the film’s more specific difficulties may be symptomatic of broader pressures and trends facing the movie musical at this time. MGM’s decision to shoot the picture entirely on a sound stage rather than on location in Scotland highlights the financial pressures affecting Hollywood generally, not to mention the studio’s waning confidence in the movie musical’s profitability. For some critics, this decision also rendered Brigadoon vulnerable to the charge that it sought to play safe by subscribing to a form of artifice more reminiscent of a work of musical ­theatre.28 That Brigadoon was an adaptation of a Broadway show couched in the folk opera tradition can only have compounded its struggle to establish an independent identity. Yet while the casting of dancers in the lead roles may have been partly influenced by financial considerations concerning who was already under contract, the studio’s decision to reorient Brigadoon in this way and to hire not Agnes de Mille but Gene Kelly as choreographer suggests a less than faithful adherence to the stage play, countering that tendency towards ‘obeisance’ that Delamater detects in movie musical adaptations during the mid- to late fifties. Thus, when Brigadoon was adapted into an MGM musical, the lead roles that had been performed by singers David Brooks and Marion Bell on Broadway were assigned to Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, two of Hollywood’s most famous dancers, with Kelly doubling up as choreographer. As Dominic McHugh notes, there had been initial interest from J. Arthur Rank, who ‘for many months . . . pursued the rights to make the film in England, with Bing Crosby as the lead.’29 Once MGM bought Brigadoon, however, it seems that Gene Kelly was always the first choice for the male lead although Kathryn Grayson was initially envisaged for the role of Fiona before being replaced by Charisse when Grayson’s contract expired. Harvey and Yudkoff both suggest that Scottish-born ballet dancer Moira Shearer was considered for the part before Charisse, but McArthur casts doubt on this idea.30 That singing star Grayson was initially earmarked to play Fiona suggests MGM had initially contemplated closer adherence to the stage original. Irrespective of whether Shearer was then considered, though, the decision to cast a dancer as Kelly’s female costar appears to have been taken fairly easily despite the deviation this posed from the Broadway show. On the mismatch created by MGM’s casting of two of its foremost star dancers in a show originally designed for singers, the film’s musical director, Johnny Green, refers to this as tantamount to having ‘two dancers in a vocal operetta,’ describing Kelly as someone ‘who sings with a kind of appealing, husky, Irish high baritone to low tenor’ while the ‘monotone’ Charisse ‘cannot carry a tune.’31 To accommodate the casting of ‘two dancers in a vocal operetta,’ significant changes were made to the songs. Most obviously, Charisse’s singing had to be dubbed, as it was in

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   399 all of her pictures, in this case by Carol Richards.32 Possessed with a more proficient singing voice, Kelly sings his own songs in Brigadoon—whether joining in with Van Johnson (who plays his character’s best friend, Jeff) in the all-male ensemble number ‘I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean’ or serenading Fiona in the lyrical lead-in to ‘The Heather on the Hill’ or celebrating ‘Almost Like Being in Love’ in front of a bemused Jeff. But two of his character’s songs that had been such a prominent part of the stage show— Tommy Albright’s solo ballad ‘There But for You Go I’ and his duet ‘From This Day On’ with Fiona—were cut at various points during production. Of the songs that survived, several (e.g., ‘Go Home with Bonnie Jean,’ ‘Waitin’ for My Dearie’) were reworked either entirely or in part around the dancing talents of the film’s stars. Two of the show’s major songs—‘The Heather on the Hill’ and ‘Almost Like Being in Love’—were originally designed as romantic duets sung by Tommy and Fiona to each other. In the MGM production, though, the first is reworked so that only Tommy sings the opening verses to Fiona as a prelude to a balletic dance they perform together instead (accompanied by an orchestral version of the song) while the second is recast as Kelly’s big solo number which he now sings and dances to entirely in the presence of his best friend Jeff, Fiona being absent throughout. Not all of the song deletions arose from the film’s casting of star dancers in the lead roles. Two of the Broadway production’s most successful songs—Meg Brockie’s ‘The Love of My Life’ and ‘My Mother’s Wedding Day’—were censored by the Breen Office on account of their salacious lyrics, so much so that these numbers were never part of the screenplay and hence never shot. Another key song, ‘Come to Me, Bend to Me’—sung by Charlie Dalrymple (Jimmy Thompson, dubbed by John Gustafsen) to his bride-to-be Jean (Virginia Bosler) outside her father’s home on their wedding day—was cut during production, a decision perhaps also partly motivated by a desire to trim the romantic subplot so it didn’t distract from the main romance between Tommy and Fiona. The more minor tune, ‘Jeannie’s Packin’ Up’ (performed on stage as part of an ensemble piece involving Jean’s female friends) was removed as well. One other song by Fiona—‘Dinna You Know Tommy’—sung by her to Tommy just before he leaves Brigadoon and ­originally as a prelude to ‘From This Day On’—was dropped too. In total, then, seven of the twelve Lerner and Loewe songs present in the original stage show didn’t make it into the film (two due to censorship, five as a result of decisions made during production). In their feedback on the two audience preview screenings of MGM’s Brigadoon on 4 and 15 June 1954, viewers protested repeatedly about the omission of these songs33 as well as the ‘Sword Dance’ (performed during the Wedding scene), commenting on the contribution they had made to the stage show and questioning why New York Ballet dancer Hugh Laing’s role as Harry Beaton in the film had been reduced to a mainly acting part only. ‘I’ll never understand why people buy a lot of good material and throw out much of it to make room for some inferior added material’ carped one audience member, before adding, ‘but, in this case, there is plenty left.’34 Others complained testily about Kelly’s performance and MGM’s adapting of the stage show to suit him: ‘I loved play, but with picture M-G-M took a vehicle for voices and made it into a Gene Kelly show case, cutting good show tunes and Pamela Britton [Meg Brockie] part especially. Kelly’s

400   musical theatre screen adaptations dances getting to look all alike.’35 Although frequent comments about the painted sets and scenery are generally very positive, with some even suggesting the film is more successful than the stage show, the recurring complaints about the cutting of certain songs tend to endorse the idea that Brigadoon was a musical for singers that had to be adapted into one for dancers. As if to bear this out, the award-winning telecast in 1966 goes some way towards returning the show to its original format, casting baritone Robert Goulet in Gene Kelly’s role and soprano Sally Anne Howes36 as Fiona, restaging the MGM film’s dance-oriented numbers as songs, and reinstating several (albeit not all) of the omitted numbers. It wasn’t just certain songs that were cut from the film version of Brigadoon. Many of the dance elements were also dropped or altered when the Broadway show was transferred to the big screen (most notably the ‘Sword Dance,’ which had been performed adeptly on Broadway by James Mitchell in the role of Harry Ritchie/Beaton). This can be explained partly in terms of the adjustments necessitated by the CinemaScope format but it also owes much to MGM’s decision to replace De Mille with Gene Kelly as choreographer. According to Yudkoff, although de Mille’s choreographic approach chimed artistically with Kelly’s, ‘he had no intention of collaborating with her’ since ‘at this point it would do his fading career no good merely to serve as a conduit for De Mille, ushering her well-received dance concepts into the film version.’37 In the case of the chief choreographic casualty arising from Brigadoon’s transition from stage to screen, it’s possible to concur with McArthur: ‘Measured against the stage version, the film may have lost dramatic force by dropping the Sword Dance in which symbolically violent activity Harry was the main actor.’38 Yet perhaps it isn’t altogether surprising that a number centred around a dancer (Hugh Laing), highly regarded in the world of ballet39 but relatively unknown cinematically, was eliminated from a film driven largely by the star talents of its two main dancers.40 According to Delamater, however, the notion of the musical as a star vehicle was itself under threat in the 1950s. Drawing on John Cutts, he argues that whereas ‘formerly the star—not the property itself—drew the audience . . . later the property became the attraction, thus reflecting a change in the audience’s attitude.’41 If this is the case, then perhaps part of Brigadoon’s difficulty as a movie musical is that its appeal lay somewhere confusingly on the border between still being perceived as a star vehicle (for Kelly and Charisse), on the one hand, but now also being considered as a ‘property,’ on the other (namely, a screen transfer of a Broadway show with all of the ‘adaptation baggage’ this entails). In moving on to consider how MGM’s reworking of Brigadoon into a dance musical for its two main stars affects the finished film, my aim is to remain sensitive to the possibilities and rewards—not just difficulties and problems—resulting from this crucial aspect of the show’s adaptation. Rather than concentrating exclusively on the depletions arising from, say, the dropping or reframing of certain songs, we need to ask what does it mean to have the lead characters now engaging in dance instead of or as well as song, and how does this enhance, rather than merely detract from, the show? Conversely, what are the implications of having Kelly sing and what issues arise from the cutting of some of his songs?

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   401 In addressing these questions in the next two sections, our main focus is on the reconceptualized ‘The Heather on the Hill’ number and the deleted ‘There But for You Go I’ ballad, respectively. By scrutinizing, in turn, the contrasting destinies of these two songs, the chapter considers how the cinematic restaging of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ number demonstrates what can be gained when a stage musical composed primarily for singers is altered to suit the dancing talents of its film counterpart’s costars. Having done so, it turns to reflect (in the second and final section) on how the cutting of the ballad ‘There But for You Go I’ conversely shows what may be squandered, too, in the process.

Dancing to ‘The Heather on the Hill’ On assessing the implications arising from the reconfiguring of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ number, it’s easy to see how the film version threatens to remove the more equal interplay made possible through the singing duet. By having only Kelly sing the opening section and removing Fiona’s singing part altogether, it places him in the conventional male role of initiator and serenader of the romance. In terms of the dance itself, ­moreover, McArthur finds the choreography suggestive of ‘a patriarchal wooing with Kelly quite literally chasing Charisse across the hill and she feigning resistance and then succumbing.’42 But restaging the second half of the number as a pas de deux also enables Fiona and Tommy to discover their feelings for each other in ways that now entail a physical exploration (and interaction) with the landscape around them. This is very different from the more introspective performance style encouraged by the romantic sung duet, where the would-be lovers—on singing passionately to each other—are liable to become isolated from and oblivious to their surroundings. The inclusion of a dance segment therefore makes greater sense, arguably, of the song’s subject matter, which is after all about Fiona and Tommy searching for the heather on the hill and, in the process, falling in love with each other. In emphasizing the landscape as a brooding physical presence that literally surrounds and envelops the two l­ overs while their romance is playing out, this reworked number is more in tune with the story’s dramatic needs, suggesting that their relationship cannot be forged in isolation of Brigadoon’s world but, rather, must be defined in relation to it. Minnelli and Kelly’s staging of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ creatively exploits this idea in ways that complicate any sense that the hillside setting affords Fiona and Tommy a romantic release from the confines of the village. Moments before their dance begins, for example (with Tommy still singing to Fiona), they walk up the hill and stand facing each other beside a silver birch tree. As they remain in this pose, a wayward branch cuts diagonally between them, reaching upwards from left to right of screen, symbolically separating them in a visual reminder of Brigadoon’s ability to intrude on their romance video example 18.1). This detailed use of mise-en-scène and keep them apart (see invests the couple’s burgeoning love for each other with a special fragility, building on the solitary flute/oboe at the start of Conrad Salinger’s exquisite orchestration and the

402   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 18.1  The visual composition of this shot complicates the romance of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ as Tommy (Kelly) sings to Fiona (Charisse) prior to their dance together.

song’s tentative couching of Tommy’s serenade in the form of a question (‘Can’t we two go walking together . . .?’) (Figure 18.1). The heather of the song’s title itself represents not simply a literal goal but an object of yearning that encapsulates and stands in for their romantic desire. As the setting for their dance, the heather-clad hillside is located within the boundaries of the village and, as such, represents a distant yet safe site wherein Fiona and Tommy can begin to explore their feelings for each other, allowing them to test out their viability as a couple. Yet, situated on a hillside away from the village, the heather at the same time carries a frisson of danger. Hinting at the prospect of a world beyond Brigadoon, their search for it t­ hreatens to pull them away from the town’s physical confines and rules, the breaching of which countenances the possibility that the ‘miracle’ that’s brought them together will be destroyed. Indeed, it’s shortly after this number—following a comic interlude involving Jeff being pursued by Meg Brockie (Dodie Heath)—that a frightened Fiona calls out to Tommy on seeing him at risk of breaching the invisible boundary of their world. Kelly’s choreography beautifully capitalizes on this ambivalence to the hillside setting, investing the initially coy but increasingly enraptured movements of the two ­dancers with a heightened charge. With their outstretched limbs, lifts, spins, turns, and arching lines counterpointed by inwardly enfolding movements, Tommy and Fiona’s dance seems shaped by the landscape within which it’s performed, making their acting out of their desire for each other a response also to the spaciousness and enclosure afforded by the heather-clad hillside. This idea is encouraged by Kelly’s staging of the dance to suit the CinemaScope frame,43 the greater breadth and shorter height of which (compared to the standard square format or even widescreen ratio) help evoke the tension between freedom and constraint in their emerging relationship. Kelly’s choreography also combines with the painted sets and the director’s characteristically imaginative use of colour. His organization of the dance ‘so that Charisse frequently leans back or bends over with a leg out, in a classical ballet pose that seems inadvertently to mimic the lines of the hills that Gibson has painted’44 articulates Fiona’s

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   403 affinity with the fantasy world of Brigadoon, suggesting how much her fate is bound up with its landscape. But her balletic movements also suggest a young woman attempting to unfurl herself physically and emotionally in the relatively more open space of this heather-clad hillside, exploring newly awakened feelings for Tommy and finding at least some relief from the social pressures that had previously motivated her to perform ‘Waitin’ for My Dearie.’ Although the title of that earlier song alludes to the passivity inscribed in her gender destiny, the musical number itself is triggered by one of the young women asking Fiona whether it doesn’t worry her that she might not marry by the time she’s twenty-five. During the course of ‘Waitin’ for My Dearie,’ Fiona explicitly voices her disagreement with this expectation. ‘One day he’ll come walkin’ o’er the horizon/But should he not then an old maid I’ll be’ she sings early on. Then, later, in a mock playing out of the courtship ritual, one of the other women appears dressed as a potential suitor and sings, ‘But when lassies sit an’ have no men/Oh, how long becomes the night,’ only for Fiona to respond, ‘But I fear the night is longer/When the lad’s no’ right.’ At the time of the film’s release, one critic ridiculed the idea that Charisse should play a young woman born in  the eighteenth century, arguing that the urban modernity of this dancer’s screen image simply wasn’t suited to such a role.45 Yet this quality that Charisse brings to her ­performance seems to chime with the sentiments expressed by Fiona during ‘Waitin’ for My Dearie.’ It tends to strengthen Fiona’s compatibility with Tommy, as well, not to mention her underlying affinity with Harry Beaton (significantly, it’s Fiona who empathizes with Harry’s sense of entrapment: ‘I’m truly sorry’ she tells him, on hearing him explain how he feels). Charisse had, of course, created a stir as the vampish siren who seduces Kelly’s character during the ‘Broadway Ballet’ dream in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and one wonders whether this association influenced Minnelli’s creative use of editing so as to suggest a more predatory side to Fiona in the sequence leading up to ‘The Heather on the Hill’ number. Sitting at home, visibly affected by her first encounter with Tommy earlier, Fiona affects outrage on hearing her sister (intrigued by reports that two men have turned up in the village and wondering what they’re like) indicate her intention to go and find out whether they’re still around. Scolding Jean for even thinking about venturing outside and risk being seen on her wedding day, Fiona is shown hurrying away from the house, basket in hand. Technically, this scene ends with her turning away from camera and exiting round a tree (doubling back to left of screen). But, in splicing together this shot with the next one showing Meg Brockie emerging (right of screen) from around the corner of another tree (carrying a lamb) and eyeing Jeff as a potential suitor, Minnelli deftly edits them together in a way that presents the unrestrained lust of this comic female figure as an extension or physical embodiment of Fiona’s active desires (see video example 18.2). It’s a moment of cinematic subterfuge that opens up another dimension to Charisse’s character, complicating her outward acceptance of her fate (unlike Harry Beaton) and challenging the film’s more explicit assertion of Tommy as romantic predator moments later: ‘I thought we were going hunting?’ asks Jeff on being plied with another jar of ale

404   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 18.2  Fiona leaves the family home, intent on finding Tommy again.

Figure 18.3  She exits this scene by hurrying round a nearby tree . . .

Figure 18.4  . . . Only for the lustful Meg Brockie to appear from another tree (in a c­ ontinuation of Fiona’s movement) in the next shot.

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   405 to keep him happy, only for Tommy to respond, with a knowing Kelly smile: ‘I am,’ just before hurrying off in pursuit of Fiona. Charisse’s expressive dancing during ‘The Heather on the Hill’ number consequently develops this more complex sense of Fiona, extending those earlier suggestions of her resistance to the cramping social, not just physical, restrictions of life in Brigadoon and providing space for the gradual release of her pent-up desire. The very different opportunities arising from the decision to stage the second part of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ as a dance rather than a sung duet culminate as the number draws to a close. As McArthur points out, ‘In the stage version, the love duet of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ ends quietly with Tommy and Fiona looking at each other,’ whereas in the film ‘Minnelli uses the freedom the cinema confers by ending on a grander note with the camera pulling back rapidly into a long shot to reveal the highland panorama with Tommy and Fiona, just like the audience, turning to admire its “picturesqueness.” ’46 McArthur attributes the sweeping camera movement involved to Minnelli, the film’s director, but the staging of the two dancers within this shot also seems informed and complicated by Kelly’s outlook as choreographer and performer. Hence, as the couple turns to look out towards the distant landscape, Charisse assumes a seated position on a nearby rock while Kelly remains standing, his body appearing more tense and strained than hers as he stares out longingly at the loch and mountains ( video example 18.3). To understand the significance of Kelly’s taut physical posture at the end of this number, it’s helpful to consider it in the context of his overall approach to dance on film. In a detailed study of this, Delamater writes of Kelly’s experimentation ‘with the camera in ways specifically aimed at capturing some cinematic equivalent to the sense of kinetic energy inherent in live dance.’47 In particular, he cites Kelly’s awareness of the role of the camera and how the latter’s position can affect the viewer’s impression of dance in film, noting that ‘Kelly felt, therefore, that the camera’s movements and/or the dancer’s movements must provide some of that same kinetic force which the viewer would appreciate seeing dance on a stage.’48 For Kelly, then, ‘the more [the dancer] can go into the camera the more force you’ll get . . . [while, on the contrary] as he goes away from the camera, he decreases that force.’49 Observing that ‘this greater involvement with the pro-filmic space required both a choreographing of the camera and a conscious choreographing for the camera,’50 Delamater finds examples of dancers moving towards the camera in It’s Always Fair Weather, another mid-fifties MGM musical released just a year after Brigadoon and which Kelly both starred in and codirected with Stanley Donen. Delamater goes on to point out that Kelly’s dictum about movement away from the camera is manifest in the films, too; for when he wants a number to end more or less unobtrusively, to have the dancer or dancers move easily back into the narrative of the film, he ends with movement away from the camera or with the camera pulling back from the action. [Hence] . . . Withholding that kinetic force could serve as advantageously as emphasizing it.51

406   musical theatre screen adaptations Minnelli’s adroit pulling back of the camera to take in a panoramic view of the ‘Highlands’ at the conclusion of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ number is at odds with Kelly’s theory of the kinetic energy that can be generated through the dancer moving towards the camera, offering conditions more suited to an unobtrusive ending. Yet Kelly’s taut figure, as he looks out yearningly at the Scottish vista before him, seems to run counter to any sense of unobtrusiveness encouraged by the camera’s movement away from the performer, conveying a feeling of tension that isn’t entirely dispelled by the number’s otherwise uplifting finale. Tommy doesn’t yet know about the spell cast over the village (although he suspects something strange about the place) so Kelly’s pose doesn’t entirely make sense at this point, except perhaps to suggest an instinct in his character to move beyond Brigadoon’s invisible boundaries into the world outside (all of which bodes ill for Tommy’s relationship with Fiona once he commits to staying in the village with her). Kelly’s strained stance gains an altogether profounder resonance, however, when viewed in light of the studio’s decision not to shoot the film on location and this actor/choreographer’s creative frustrations with the studio-bound set. Considered in relation to that, his longing posture as he stands looking out towards the mountains—towards a painting of a landscape that doesn’t really exist but represents (for Kelly) the actual location of Scotland he strove for but could not have—acquires a deeper logic. The decision to shoot entirely on the studio sound stage rather than on location has often been cited as evidence of the film’s flaws, with any shortcomings in Kelly’s choreography and performance commonly explained as a consequence of his disappointment with that decision. The complexity of this moment at the end of ‘The Heather on The Hill,’ however, arguably offers an instance where his creative frustrations (indicative of a broader interest in expanding dance into cinematic space) actually seem to enrich and inform the ­ ltimately faced detailed texture of a number. That Kelly should play a character who is u with the dilemma of whether to give up the outside world in favour of the physically constrained but emotionally fulfilling Brigadoon is ironic, certainly. Retrospectively, though, this dancer’s final pose at the end of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ enacts in microcosm a tension that’s integral to the overall structure of Brigadoon’s filmic universe, articulating, as it does, his character’s dilemma, ultimately, of being drawn to Fiona yet yearning for a space that lies beyond ‘the heather on the hill.’ Tommy’s final decision to renounce his life in the outside world in favour of Fiona therefore appears all the more momentous and precarious given the containment it signifies for the actor concerned. In a sense, then, the person with whom Kelly has the greatest affinity within the narrative is Harry Beaton, the discontented villager who in seeking to escape can be read as an embodiment of a darker, potentially more frustrated side to this male star that needs to be killed off so as to enable him/Tommy to accept the containment posed by Brigadoon. To read Harry as Kelly’s shadow self goes against the story’s more likely paralleling of Tommy Albright with Charlie, who is about to marry Fiona’s younger sister, and the pairing of the cynical Jeff with Brigadoon’s outcast instead (in the bar in New York later in the film, Jeff alludes to his kinship with Harry when referring to Brigadoon as ‘his kid brother who ran away’). But the Harry Beaton/Gene Kelly parallel endows the confrontation between these two dark-haired figures on the bridge during the chase sequence

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   407

Figure 18.5  Fiona and Tommy look out towards the loch and mountains at the end of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ number.

( video example 18.4) with a stronger psychological force. This seems especially the case since that encounter between them occurs at the very boundary point that Kelly’s character inadvertently almost transgressed when gathering heather with Fiona. His kinship with Harry Beaton is inscribed, above all, in Kelly’s tense stance at the end of ‘The Heather on the Hill,’ encapsulating an impulse to break free from Brigadoon’s circumscribed world that seems expressive of both the star and the character he plays.

‘There But for You Go I’: Reclaiming Gene Kelly’s Singing Self in Brigadoon In the previous section, we explored MGM’s reworking of Brigadoon as a musical for dancers, with emphasis on the creatively enriching effects arising from the ­incorporation of dance into this movie adaptation. Using ‘The Heather on the Hill’ rather than, say, ‘Almost Like Being in Love’ to demonstrate this might be deemed an easier task, given that the first is by far the most critically lauded number in the film. My objective, though, was to counter some of the unfavourable criticisms levelled at the film for adapting a singers’ show into one for dancers. Having done that, I now want to adopt a different tack, using the rest of this chapter to consider some of the challenges and difficulties stemming from MGM’s screen adaptation of Brigadoon. Indeed, if the previous section addressed what is gained by the introduction of dance into song-based numbers like ‘The Heather on the Hill,’ then this one contemplates what may have been lost, conversely, by the removal of tracks such as ‘There But for You Go I’ from the production. Aside from the Breen Office’s censoring of Meg Brockie’s songs, MGM’s cutting of others like ‘There But for You Go I’ and ‘From This Day On’ has usually been explained in terms of pacing and the limitations of Kelly’s singing voice. In an interview, the dancer-choreographer recalls how ‘the music in Brigadoon generally was on the slow

408   musical theatre screen adaptations side, and the solo numbers were excised,’ with one number involving himself and Charisse (presumably ‘From This Day On’) being ‘cut from the film because of length, just slowness.’52 In his liner notes to the 1996 soundtrack album’s release on CD, Will Friedwald concurs, maintaining that ‘most of the excised material consisted of ballads, which Freed and Minnelli felt slowed down the picture’s pacing.’53 Friedwald also cites Arthur Freed as stipulating a film running time of 108 minutes, and this concern with economy by MGM’s prestigious producer seems to have been borne out by some of the recurring comments on the audience preview cards about the film dragging in places. On Kelly’s vocal limitations, the film’s director cites the star as modestly admitting, ‘My voice wasn’t good enough to do the Lerner and Loewe numbers.’54 And elsewhere Kelly concedes that Fred Astaire has a better voice than I, but we both have tiny voices. . . . We sing, usually, to set up the scene, to set up the dance. Neither Fred nor myself . . . pretend that we can put ourselves in league with the good, popular singers, and we don’t try. But, like every song and dance man, we tell the lyrics, we speak them as they were written and give them whatever nuance the lyricist intended.55

Both of the reasons cited above for cutting certain songs—their slowness, Kelly’s vocal limitations—are closely bound up with MGM’s overall decision to turn Brigadoon into a dance musical. This is perhaps most acutely evident in the case of ‘There But for You Go I,’ a slow, pensive, solo ballad that fulfills a vital role on stage, enabling Tommy to confess his love to Fiona. Displaying an almost conversational style of delivery (‘This is hard to say/But as I wandered through the lea’) and possessing lyrics that demand to be listened to, it’s easy to understand how this song proved resistant to being reworked as a dance number. In the audio outtake version that’s available (the first verse of which can be video example 18.5), Kelly’s rendition is followed by an orchestral only heard in passage, raising the possibility that some form of follow-up dance may have been considered. Even so, Kelly sings all five verses of the song in the outtake before the instrumental section begins. Taking into account his well-documented insecurities about his singing voice, having him stand and perform this entire ballad to Fiona (whatever else might have ensued) may simply have made the number feel too prolonged and liable to expose any vocal weaknesses. The decision to cut a song like this perhaps suggests, then, that the circumscribed nature of the studio set may not have been the biggest or only problem facing the c­ reators of the film spatially. Rather, it was the slower, serious ballads (associated in all but one case in the stage show with the lead roles) that risked reducing the film version of Brigadoon to what Lockhart (quoted earlier) refers to as a ‘static singing spectacle’—the nature of which seems so at odds with Kelly’s own investment in the kinetic energy of film dance. That ‘There But for You Go I’ pushed Kelly to his vocal limits is hinted at by archival material relating to the film’s production. A schedule of prerecordings by MGM’s Music Department reveals that Kelly attended two studio sessions, with full orchestra present,

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   409 for this song—one on 30 November 1953, the second on 18 February 1954—and that four takes of the song were recorded in total. This isn’t particularly unusual since some of Brigadoon’s other songs also entailed a similar number of sessions and takes. But in an inter-office communication (dated 21 June 1954) about preparations for a record album of Brigadoon, Lela Simone, a member of the Arthur Freed unit who had worked on other album soundtracks, makes a telling comment in relation to ‘There But for You Go I’: ‘We must be sure that we use the Kelly Vocal Re-Do [‘Re-Do’ is underlined in the memo] and not his original vocal track,’56 she cautions, gesturing towards possible difficulties with the star’s first recording of that song. That the song appears not to have reached the shooting stage and was cut from the picture before it was shown at the audience preview screenings in June 1954 suggests there was some consensus among Freed, Minnelli, and Kelly about dropping it. A memo dated 1 March 1954 indicates that ‘There But for You Go I’ was the last part of the film to be rehearsed and shot, after the Wedding sequence on 2 March, with preparations and final rehearsals diarized for early that same month and the number due to be filmed on 12 March. Significantly, the author of the memo, Bill Ryan, stresses that ‘Mr Freed feels he should see the Wedding Sequence cut [and run it with Minnelli] before he okays the final rehearsal of the Kelly-Charisse number.’57 This seems to tie in with McArthur’s speculation that the song was probably dropped not just for its perceived slowness but because ‘Minnelli very likely (and Kelly possibly) found the song too low-key emotionally after the frenzy (both musically and in terms of mise-en-scène) of the chase’58 (which follows directly from the drama of the Wedding sequence). The fact that the song has disappeared from a draft script dated March 1954 (having been included in earlier versions of the screenplay) indicates that the decision to e­ liminate it from the film took place around this time. In all likelihood, this was probably after Freed had watched the Wedding-Chase sequence in consultation with Minnelli (presumably on or just after 8 March that year, when, as that same memo outlines, the Wedding sequence was expected to be cut and ready to run). A studio schedule (dated 25 October 1954) outlining all of the footage that was shot but eliminated from the final film (and the approximate costs) confirms by the song’s absence that it was never filmed (while in contrast, there are entries for ‘Come to Me, Bend to Me,’ the ‘Sword Dance,’ and ‘From This Day On’).59 And when the remastered film was released on DVD in 2005, Kelly’s rendition of ‘There But for You Go I’ (presumably the ‘Re-Do’ version) is only made available as an audio outtake (unlike those other three musical sequences, the deleted footage of which appears in all cases).60 In the finished film, ‘There But for You Go I’ is replaced by Kelly and Charisse dancing to an orchestral reprise of ‘The Heather on the Hill.’ This statement masks a much more complicated adaptation process, however, since ‘The Heather on the Hill’ reprise was only included following a late change that took place at some point after the audience preview screenings in June 1954 and before the film’s final release two months later on 8 September. Prior to that, the intention seems to have been to replace ‘There But for You Go I’ with ‘From This Day On,’ another major song from the stage show, meant to be performed in the film (as on Broadway) as a duet between Fiona and Tommy but now

410   musical theatre screen adaptations occurring slightly earlier in the narrative and segueing into a sensual dance (­accompanied by an orchestral only version of this song) between the two lovers. As a result of its narrative relocation (to replace the dropped ‘There But for You Go I’), ‘From This Day On’ would no longer serve (as in the stage version) as the lovers’ parting duet (following Tommy’s realization that he can’t stay in Brigadoon after all). Instead, it was construed as the number that prompts him to announce that he loves Fiona so much that he can’t leave her. At some point after the preview screenings, though, ‘From This Day On,’ the song designed to replace ‘There But for You Go I,’ was itself dropped, hence its inclusion in MGM’s listing of footage eliminated from the final film. Although Kelly’s vocals with Carol Richards (Charisse’s singing stand-in) were deleted, his dance with Charisse directly afterwards was retained—only now it’s accompanied by a new orchestral reprise of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ (rather than ‘From This Day On’). Bearing in mind this taxing sequence of changes involving ‘There But for You Go I’ and ‘From This Day On,’ it’s tempting to read the demands placed on Kelly’s voice, as he strove to do justice to these and his other songs in Brigadoon, as a metaphor for the strains placed on the Hollywood musical as it sought to adapt hit Broadway shows intended for singers. That several songs were cut during production at least suggests some form of resistance on MGM’s part to any slavish adherence (or ‘obeisance,’ to use Delamater’s term) to the stage original. But it’s also indicative of a pressure to adapt in ways that are geared around showcasing the main talents of the film’s star dancers. The ­ pportunities risk arising from this, however, is that it may result in a closing down of the o such a production affords, especially if the studio only panders to what it assumes audiences expect of a star like Kelly. Already insecure about his vocal limitations, it’s possible that Kelly himself may have felt constrained and unable to take his skills in new directions and this may have contributed to the downsizing of his singing role in the film. It may be that MGM had no choice except to dub Charisse’s singing, but in Kelly’s case it’s worth considering what may have been lost as a result of the decision to excise his rendition of a song like ‘There But for You Go I.’ Quite how we respond to the paring down of his singing role may depend largely on whether one evaluates this part of his performance repertoire strictly according to standards of tonal range, timbre, pitch, and so on or, rather, in terms of how it relates to his character, the narrative, and indeed Kelly’s own star persona. His singing voice isn’t comparable technically with that of David Brooks or Robert Goulet (who played Tommy Albright on Broadway and television, respectively) and, while Kelly was defined as a song-and-dance man (like Astaire), this first part of his performing identity was always an unequal adjunct to the second. Clive Hirschhorn recounts how this star’s singing was even ‘once described as “­gargling with pebbles,” ’61 although, for him, Kelly’s vocal work in Cover Girl (Charles Vidor, 1944) marks a significant turning point in his career as a singer. Citing none other than composer Jerome Kern’s appreciation of Kelly’s rendition of ‘Long Ago and Far Away,’ ‘a difficult song which needed more than the simple ability to remain in the right key,’ Hirschhorn contends that in this film, ‘Gene not only found his feet but his voice as well. These light, high, slightly grainy notes are heard to marvelous effect as they caress Kern’s tender melodies and joke with the rousing, more sprightly ones.’62

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   411 Notwithstanding Hirschhorn’s comments, Kelly’s singing—both generally and specifically in relation to Brigadoon—has suffered from critical disparagement and neglect. For some, it seems to be all too easy to conflate it with other supposedly less favourable aspects of this star’s screen persona. During his discussion of Kelly’s performance of Brigadoon’s ‘Almost Like Being in Love,’ for example, McArthur notes that he ‘had a colleague to whom Kelly’s singing and dancing was anathema, the reason being that “he always looks so damned pleased with himself.” ’63 Citing Stephen Harvey, moreover, he describes that critic as ‘merciless in traducing what he describes as “Kelly’s throbbing falsetto” and his “patented irresistible grin.” ’64 At times, even fans of Kelly have taken issue with his singing. Jennifer Welsh, for example, acknowledges that ‘he does have some shining moments, “Love Is Here to Stay” from An American in Paris (1951) chief among them’ but claims ‘he was often forced to stretch his voice beyond its powers,’ arguing, ‘The songs from 1954’s Brigadoon (particularly the outtakes) reveal his voice at its weakest.’65 In the case of the ballad ‘There But for You Go I,’ McArthur ventures that the fault may not lie entirely with Kelly. Describing it as ‘one of the least memorable of the show’s songs,’66 he suggests that it ‘is, indeed, often dropped for that reason.’67 The numerous complaints by audience members at the preview screenings regarding the song’s omission don’t appear to bear out McArthur’s dismissal of it, however. And from among Gene Kelly’s online fan community, Canadian jazz singer Mary-Catherine McNinchPazzano ventures that there’s an emotional honesty to this star’s rendition of ‘There But for You Go I’ that’s very particular to him.68 This affecting aspect to Kelly’s rendition of Lerner and Loewe’s lovely ballad seems far removed from the sort of traits that some critics have detected in the star’s screen persona. In the words of John Russell Taylor: Kelly is the open, confident, brash . . . straight-forward American male, with a smile on his face for the whole human race, as one of his songs puts it. The personality is not altogether appealing. There is sometimes the feeling that the charm is laid on a little too thickly, that the smile is a trifle synthetic, that, to quote another of his songs, he may like himself just a fraction too much.69

Arguing for a greater complexity in Kelly’s screen persona, Delamater maintains that ‘Taylor’s comments . . . do not recognize the great variety of Kelly’s roles, nor do they relate the ways in which he presents his personality through dance, for it is precisely through his dance roles that the persona is revealed.’70 Yet, for Michael Wood, it is precisely in Kelly’s dancing that a complex mixture of ‘brash confidence’ laced with uncertainty reveals itself: ‘Gene Kelly has plenty of skill,’ Wood asserts, ‘but ease is the last thing we associate with him.’71 Describing this mood projected on screen by Kelly as ‘an odd confidence,’ Wood considers it premonitory of 1950s America, arguing that ‘Kelly was always trying too hard. . . . He suggests fantastic skill edged with uncertainty. He’s got things together but his achievement seems too precarious for him to be happy. He can’t rest.’72 Indeed, according to Wood, ‘part of his appeal is a touch of strain and even faint fear, an air of scenting locusts on the wind.’73

412   musical theatre screen adaptations Considering this star’s films in relation to the MGM musical’s attempt in the 1950s to offer a show of confidence at a time when it was ‘ebbing fast’—in fact ‘because it was ebbing fast’74—Wood juxtaposes earlier Kelly musicals like Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and An American in Paris (1951) plus the Astaire vehicle The Band Wagon (1953) with a new breed of melodramas (populated by troubled protagonists) such as On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Rather tellingly, Brigadoon isn’t included in his list. Yet, if the doubt that lay underneath America’s confidence in the 1950s is, as Wood contends, ‘contained in Kelly’s style,’75 then Brigadoon offers a fascinating vehicle through which to consider this. In terms of the character Kelly is playing, Tommy Albright is someone who at the start of the film has lost his way literally and metaphorically and, on confessing that he doesn’t feel ‘satisfied,’ engages in the following exchange with his friend Jeff: jeff:  Oh, that’s the silliest thing I ever heard. You’ve got a fine job, and you’re engaged to a fine girl, and you’re lost in a fine forest. What more do you want? tommy:  I don’t know. Something seems wrong, especially about Jane and me. And that makes everything seem wrong. Look how I postpone getting married. I just can’t get myself to that altar. jeff:  Well you love her, don’t you? At least you did three days ago when you left New York. tommy:  Sometimes I think I’m really not capable of loving. [Then, on seeing Jeff ’s dismayed response.] Sometimes I think nobody is anymore. jeff:  Oh, that’s nonsense. Now don’t start talking yourself into an inferiority complex. You don’t deserve it. tommy:  What do you mean? jeff:  Well, most of my friends who have inferiority complexes are right. They’re not as good as everybody else. [Tommy laughs] But you! Young. Dashing. Loaded.

The very name of Kelly’s protagonist—Tommy Albright—implies the kind of effervescent optimism that Wood finds in this star’s screen personality. Yet, considering the anxieties to which Tommy admits early on, it’s as if everything that had previously given Kelly grounds for confidence has now been eroded (significantly, it’s directly after this disclosure by Tommy that Brigadoon appears, as if in response to the male protagonist’s emotional needs). It’s an admission that suggests a puncturing of the self-assurance inherent in Kelly’s star persona, exposing cracks in the confidence that Wood argues the MGM musical sought to project by way of masking the reality of its disintegration. Moving beyond Kelly’s role in the film to his performance style, it’s possible to regard his singing voice as another element that punctures (or at least complicates) his confident screen persona, articulating the very sense of doubt and strain that Wood identifies. His light, ‘high baritone to low tenor’ voice76 certainly offers a softer counterbalance to some of the brasher masculine excesses that Taylor and Wood detect in Kelly’s persona. The insecurity his singing evokes (will Kelly manage to reach the required note or not?) also seems entirely relevant to his portrayal in Brigadoon of a young man in crisis, investing

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   413 Wood’s contention that Kelly ‘suggests fantastic skill edged with uncertainty’77 with another dimension. Considered dramatically and in light of the above, therefore, Kelly’s solo ballad ‘There But for You Go I’ marks a major breakthrough in Tommy’s emotional development, ­enabling this character to overcome his earlier anxiety about being incapable of loving. The song ‘Almost Like Being in Love’ had marked a movement forward in this regard but, as suggested by the qualified nature of its main refrain (‘It’s Almost Like . . .’), Tommy hasn’t fully comprehended his feelings for Fiona at that point. In his 1954 review of the film, critic Edward Jablonski argues that Kelly ‘spoils the beautiful ballad “Almost Like Being in Love” by ignoring the caesura after the word “it’s” in the chorus,’78 his failure to do so presumably suggesting insufficient grasp of the song’s irony. This criticism seems a bit unfair since (as video example 18.6 demonstrates) Kelly does inject a noticeable pause before the relevant word on the first two out of three occasions when it appears in the lyrics (as does Brooks in the relevant track on the original Broadway album and Goulet in the 1966 telecast). Salinger’s orchestration encourages this vocal hiatus by providing a brief accompanying halt in the music each time and, as Kelly starts to dance, the ‘almost like being in love’ section of the title refrain becomes purely instrumental (as apparent in video example 18.7). Although, on resuming his singing, Kelly’s introduction of a pause before ‘almost’ tends to become less consistent (and increasingly played for comedy), the fact that he dances as well as sings is a mitigating factor and this particular aspect to his performance of the song isn’t all that much different from Brooks’s or Goulet’s renditions anyhow. In other respects, there is a sense in which Kelly’s ebullient performance risks overpowering the more ironic qualities of ‘Almost Like Being in Love.’ Indeed, whereas that song toys with the possibility that Tommy is in love with Fiona but doesn’t yet know it, Kelly performs (and stages) it as if it were a rerun of Singin’ in the Rain’s title number, the mood he projects through his dancing and singing conveying the sense of a man who has fallen in love and surely knows it. As a grinning Kelly launches into the song, seizing Jeff ’s hat and placing it jauntily on his head before going on to sing cheekily to the highland animals nearby, then tap dancing along the stone wall and throwing off his hat and jacket in a rousing finale, one can’t help but feel that a little less polished routine and greater hesitancy might have gelled more convincingly with the song’s lyrics and what we know of Tommy at this point. There is, in other words, a trifle too much self-confidence imparted by Kelly’s performance, here, and (perhaps encouraged by lines like ‘I could swear I was falling’) this tends to work against the more qualified romantic assertion inherent in the song’s title. One could invert this argument, of course, and say that Kelly’s performance during ‘Almost Like Being in Love’ purposefully conveys a sense of Tommy as someone not yet fully in touch with his deeper emotional self. That is to say, it presents a character who at this stage in the narrative is too overtaken by his incipient feelings for Fiona and, not really knowing whether he’s capable of loving (or presumably what love is like), can only admit that what he’s feeling is ‘almost like being in love.’ That Tommy performs this number so enthusiastically in front of Jeff also suggests someone as yet too surprised by

414   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 18.6  In celebration of Tommy’s newfound feelings for Fiona, Kelly launches into his rendition of ‘Almost Like Being in Love’ while Van Johnson’s Jeff looks on.

his feelings to reflect more seriously on what they mean and the fact he doesn’t yet know about the ‘miracle’ of Brigadoon may be another extenuating factor in his (and Kelly’s) defence. At the very least, though, ‘There But for You Go I’ would have offered an ­important counterpoint to this song, providing a necessary moment of stasis wherein Kelly can no longer hide behind the kind of habitual tricks-of-the-trade that were formerly on display in his dancing routine. His tender vocals would also have evoked a humility and vulnerability quite different from his singing in that earlier number, potentially revealing a charm in Kelly’s screen persona that’s often obscured by claims regarding his overconfidence and self-satisfied demeanour. In gesturing towards a realm of sorrow, loneliness, and unfulfilled longing that the male protagonist realizes would have been his destiny had it not been for his newfound love for Fiona, ‘There But for You Go I’ is profoundly suited to the less buoyant side of Kelly’s screen persona. The song’s lyrics (particularly those lines italicized below) are strikingly resonant of Delamater’s claim that ‘there is a somewhat melancholy aspect to almost all the Kelly roles, for it is the character’s nature to brood about his loneliness’:79 This is hard to say, but as I wandered through the lea, I felt for just a fleeting moment that I suddenly was free of being lonely. Then I closed my eyes and saw the very reason why. . . .  I saw a man with his head bowed low. His heart had no place to go. I looked and I thought to myself with a sigh: There but for you go I. I saw a man walking by the sea, Alone with the tide was he. I looked and I thought as I watched him go by: There but for you go I. Lonely men around me, trying not to cry, Till the day you found me, there among them was I.

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   415 I saw a man who had never known a love that was all his own. I thought as I thanked all the stars in the sky: There but for you go I.

Kelly’s tremulous delivery of the word ‘Alone’ on the tenth line (as can be heard in video example 18.8) captures the vulnerability and sincerity of his singing—qualities that soften his muscular dancing style and complicate his rugged masculine image. Indeed if, as Delamater argues, ‘in spite of his aligning himself with buddies or companions, Kelly’s characters are also frequently alone, and significant dances are soliloquies— almost meditations on the essential loneliness of his role at that point,’80 then this finds its most poignant expression, arguably, not in his dancing but in his singing of this excised song. It’s only on the penultimate word of the last line that Kelly (unlike David Brooks or Robert Goulet)81 injects a small embellishment into his delivery (captured in video example 18.9). His final iteration of ‘go’ in the song’s title refrain is uttered with a little trill which could easily have been overdone to the point of sounding amateurishly out of place. But Kelly executes this rhetorical flourish with such delicate restraint, emerging as it does out of an otherwise unadorned vocal performance, that it appears far from vainglorious or attention seeking. Indeed, there’s something entirely fitting about how, through this tiny piece of vocal decoration, he allows himself to express just the right modicum of delight, release, even relief at the end of a challenging ballad so preoccupied with the loneliness of others. Following on from the gently ascending scale he adopts with the previous line (‘I thought as I thanked all the stars in the sky’) this moving undulation in his voice (which mirrors and extends his lilting delivery of the word ‘sky’) subtly confirms Tommy’s gratitude at the fate he’s been dealt, implying that some form of emotional transcendence (also inherent in his rising pitch throughout the last line) has been quietly reached. It’s a moment of subdued vocal ornamentation that exemplifies how Kelly’s tender, humble rendition of a ballad so mindful of the fate of others could not be further removed from those overly confident, egotistical traits that some have ascribed to his screen personality. Delivered without a hint of self-congratulation, Kelly’s ­rendition of ‘There But for You Go I’ is the antithesis of all that. Perhaps, then, what makes ‘There But for You Go I’—and Kelly’s interpretation of it— so poignantly memorable is that it isn’t simply a self-preoccupied love song (nor, hence, a simple love song). Instead, the joy of Tommy’s discovery of his love for Fiona is countered by a sorrowful realization (couched almost like a lament) that not all men are so fortunate; in other words, he sings of a fate—of never finding great love and leading an emotionally unsatisfied life—that might have been his destiny had he not met Fiona. That Tommy should declare his love for Fiona in this way—acknowledging who he has become and what he might have been—suggests a much greater emotional maturity, humility, and self-awareness than anything conveyed earlier by his ebullient ­performance of ‘Almost Like Being In Love.’ Indeed, if the film as a whole can be read as an attempt to restore Tommy’s emotional self-belief, then his discovery of this is to be found not in the

416   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 18.7  Fiona and Tommy dance passionately to a reprise of ‘The Heather on the Hill’.

grandstanding ‘Almost Like Being in Love’ but in his tender grieving for men like his former self in ‘There But for You Go I.’ As such, this song promises the opposite of what I argued regarding the film’s ­incorporation of dance into ‘The Heather on the Hill.’ Whereas that earlier number had exploited dance in ways that suggest the couple’s interaction with their environment (eschewing the more introspective tendencies encouraged by a sung duet), in the reprise (available in video example 18.10), Kelly and Charisse’s balletic dance is, by contrast, clingingly self-absorbed, suggesting the two lovers’ infatuation with each other and their inability to be apart (Figure 18.7). In contrast, the romantic impulse and physical stasis of ‘There But for You Go I’ are offset by a wider, more mobile viewpoint that’s conveyed through this song’s lyrics (rooted as these are in a comparison between Tommy’s former and reborn selves). The song begins with Tommy describing himself wandering ‘through the lea’ only to then close his eyes and imagine other men who have not been fortunate enough to find a love like he has with Fiona. Although still a love song that expresses Tommy’s joy of discovery, in contrast to his earlier tendency merely to project his happiness onto the world around him (‘There’s a smile on my face for the whole human race,’ he sang in ‘Almost Like Being in Love’), the lyrics now suggest a more melancholic regard for the lovelorn other. Inherent in the song’s words, therefore, is an imaginative capacity, the power of which implies an outward-looking perspective that isn’t dependent on location shooting for its impact (‘I saw a man who had never known a love that was all his own’). It would be naïve in the extreme to suggest that all criticisms of the film version would evaporate, Brigadoon-style, with the inclusion of ‘There But for You Go I.’ But if this song had been retained, it would have amounted to a bold, significant piece of decision making by the filmmakers. Its presence would have prevented the stage show from simply being recast into (and typecast as) a film musical for dancers, signalling MGM’s ability to see beyond the dominant attributes of its stars’ screen personae and to understand that fidelity to the source play may not necessarily be a barrier to creativity.

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   417 Kelly’s virtuosity as a dancer was such that there may have been little agonizing by the film’s creators about the decision to relegate ‘There But for You Go I’ to the cutting room floor despite its fundamental relevance to his character and its logical place in Tommy’s emotional development. Far from slowing down the narrative too much, his sincere admission through song of the extent of his love for Fiona seems wholly suited to the dramatic needs of the moment, its contemplative pace potentially affording viewers a welcome pause in the action after the drama of the chase and allowing Tommy to reflect on the intensity of his feelings for Fiona at this crucial point. The song’s more measured approach is deeply in tune with his emotional needs and the awakening of his love that it expresses could have provided the motivation for any ensuing dance between the couple. Of course, the wonderfully sensuous dance between Kelly and Charisse in the finished film only came about through a series of changes triggered by the cutting of ‘There But for You Go I.’ But on playing the audio outtake of Kelly’s rendition of that song over a freeze frame of Tommy and Fiona facing each other while they stand at the archway of the old kirk and then watching them dance to an orchestral reprise of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ directly after this, I’m struck by how effective this combination could have been. Lovely as the cut version of ‘From This Day On’ is (the closing duet section of which can video example 18.11), I can accept that song’s excision as a necessary be found in ­casualty of the adaptation process. Kelly’s rendition of ‘There But for You Go I,’ on the other hand (at least the version publicly available), would have brought something else dramatically to the show. While this star’s singing voice plays an important role in softening his screen persona elsewhere in his musical films, arguably it’s in his heartfelt delivery of this excised song that it reveals its greatest emotional depth, yielding a dimension that, if anything, intensifies the vulnerability beneath the self-confidence and the sense of strain that comes from trying too hard. In cutting this song from the film, MGM displayed a lack of conviction in the dramatic possibilities afforded by Kelly’s singing, committing an error that would anticipate academic neglect of this part of his performing identity. Given that some of the criticisms of Kelly’s performance in Brigadoon at the audience preview screenings were that it was too derivative of his earlier work (‘It’s too bad Gene Kelly has to always be the same—I mean dancing style mostly’82 complained one viewer), one can’t help but think that this gentle ballad by him might have offered something substantively different, revealing a tender sincerity often obscured by the brasher elements of his star persona and reclaiming a song otherwise cut from the stage show that might have appeased any countervailing criticism that the film dragged in places. As I hope to have demonstrated through my earlier analysis of the creative restaging of ‘The Heather on the Hill’ number along with this reflection on the cutting of the ballad ‘There But for You Go I,’ Brigadoon is a musical for singers that both benefits and suffers from MGM’s efforts to turn it into a vehicle for its star dancers. It did indeed ‘have all the ingredients,’ as Charisse observed, and arguably qualifies as one of MGM’s most underrated musicals, gaining tension and complexity from some of its perceived flaws. But the studio’s faltering confidence in the cinematic potential of the show’s tunes and in Kelly’s

418   musical theatre screen adaptations talents as a song-and-dance man may well account for any sense of the film being ‘less than the sum of its parts.’

Notes 1. The other two films in which Charisse appeared with Gene Kelly are Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and It’s Always Fair Weather (1955). Kelly codirected both with Stanley Donen. Brigadoon is the first film in which Charisse plays the female lead. For more on Charisse’s career, see, for example, her obituary by Robert Berkvist, ‘Cyd Charisse, 86, Silken Dancer of Movies, Dies,’ New York Times, 18 June 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/ arts/dance/18charisse.html. 2. Cyd Charisse in Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse, as told to Dick Kleiner, The Two of Us (New York: Mason/Charter, 1976), 207–208. 3. Apparently, Van Johnson would leave work promptly at 6:00 pm, thwarting Minnelli’s attempt to shoot a sequence he’d been preparing all day. Charisse in Martin and Charisse, The Two of Us, 206. 4. Charisse in Martin and Charisse, The Two of Us, 206–207. 5. Charisse in Martin and Charisse, The Two of Us, 206. In That’s Entertainment! III (1994), Charisse admits that Brigadoon was her favourite collaboration with Gene Kelly, highlighting their ‘Heather on the Hill’ dance routine together. That’s Entertainment! III, DVD, directed by Bud Friedgen and Michael J. Sheridan (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1994). 6. Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live: The Story of My Fair Lady, Gigi and Camelot (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978), 127. 7. Vincente Minnelli, with H. Arce. Foreword by A. J. Lerner. Vincente Minnelli: I Remember It Well (Hollywood, CA: Samuel French, 1990 [1974]), 279. 8. Clive Hirschhorn, Gene Kelly: A Biography (London: W. H. Allen, 1974), 239. 9. Alan Yudkoff, Gene Kelly: A Life of Dance and Dreams (New York: Back Stage Books, 1999), 231. 10. Arthur Freed, quoted in Colin McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 70. 11. McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, 89. 12. Murray Pomerance, The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 200. 13. Pomerance, The Eyes Have It, 218–219. 14. Robert Emmet Long, Broadway, The Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors, 1940 to the Present (New York: Continuum, 2001), 37–40. 15. Kara Anne Gardner, Agnes De Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 117–140. 16. Gardner, Agnes De Mille, 124–131. 17. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Brigadoon (Libretto): A Musical Play (London: Faber Music, 2007), v–vii. 18. Stephen Harvey, Directed by Vincente Minnelli (New York: Museum of Modern Art/ Harper & Row, 1989), 128. 19. Gene Kelly in Jerome Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), 217.

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   419 2 0. Kelly in Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 176. 21. Kelly in Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 175. 22. Vincente Minnelli quoted in Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 176. 23. Minnelli in Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 170–171. 2 4. Harvey, Directed by Vincente Minnelli, 126. 25. Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 170. 26. Dimitri Tiomkin quoted in Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 171. 27. Freda June Lockhart quoted in Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 171. 28. On the stagey nature of Brigadoon’s Cinemascope, see Harvey, Directed by Vincente Minnelli, 130–131. 29. Dominic McHugh, ed., Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16. 30. According to McArthur, ‘The story of MGM’s interest in Shearer seems to be a myth since she herself denies that any such discussions took place.’ McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, 89. 31. Johnny Green quoted in Pomerance, The Eyes Have It, 195–196. 32. Carol Richards also dubbed Charisse’s singing in Deep in My Heart (1954), It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), and Silk Stockings (1957); in The Band Wagon (Minnelli, 1953), India Adams performs this role. For further information regarding who dubbed Charisse in other films, see Ray Hagen, Laura Wagner, Steve Tompkins, et al., Movie Dubbers, http:// www.janettedavis.net/Dubbers/dubberslist.php. 33. Audience feedback from preview screenings of Brigadoon (Arthur Freed Collection, USC, Cinematic Arts Library), First Preview: First Report, 4 June 1954, 1–14 and Second Preview: First Report 15 June 1954, 1–15. 34. Audience feedback from preview screenings of Brigadoon (Arthur Freed Collection, USC, Cinematic Arts Library), First Preview: First Report, 4 June 1954, 14. 35. Audience feedback from preview screenings of Brigadoon, Second Preview: First Report, Arthur Freed Collection, USC, Cinematic Arts Library), 15 June 1954, 5. 36. Brigadoon, directed by Fielder Cook, 1966. Broadcast on CBS as a television special on 15 October 1966. 37. Yudkoff, Gene Kelly: A Life of Dance and Dreams, 230. 38. McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, 90. 39. For more on Hugh Laing’s career, see his obituary by Jack Anderson, ‘Hugh Laing, Specialist in Ballets by Antony Tudor, Is Dead at 77,’ New York Times, 11 May 1988, https:// www.nytimes.com/1988/05/11/obituaries/hugh-laing-specialist-in-ballets-by-antonytudor-is-dead-at-77.html. 40. According to Kelly, the Sword Dance may have been cut simply because the excitement it garnered on stage didn’t translate well onto the screen (Kelly in Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 217). At the time of the film’s release, though, one disgruntled critic speculated that perhaps it was deleted because the dancing ‘badly outclassed Kelly’s own numbers’ (Dick Williams, ‘Assets of “Brigadoon” Are Color, Music, Sets,’ Los Angeles Mirror, 9 September 1954). The force of such conjecture is blunted by this critic’s mistake in incorrectly naming the chief sword dancer as Matt Mattox (who would perform the role in the 1957 Broadway stage revival). On the cutting of Hugh Laing’s role to ‘primarily an acting part,’ however, Stephen Harvey similarly observes that ‘as a choreographer, Kelly was not generous to other male dancers unless they were cast as his clownish lower-case pal.’ See Harvey, Directed by Vincente Minnelli, 128.

420   musical theatre screen adaptations 41. Jerome Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 170. 42. McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, 85. 43. On the use of CinemaScope, see Pomerance, The Eyes Have It, 208–209. 44. Pomerance, The Eyes Have It, 209. 45. ‘Whoever cast Cyd Charisse, the most contemporary and empty of danseuses, as Fiona must be as fey as the person who should have had the part.’ Clayton Cole, ‘Brigadoon,’ Films and Filming 10, no. 54. 46. McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, 86. 47. Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 135–136. 48. Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 136. 49. Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 136. 50. Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 140. 51. Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 140–141. 52. Gene Kelly in Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 217. 53. Will Friedwald, Compact Disc (CD) liner notes, M-G-M’s Brigadoon: Music from the Original Motion Picture (1996), 16. 54. Kelly quoted in Minnelli, Vincente Minnelli, 279. 55. Kelly in Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 151. 56. Lela Simone, M-G-M Inter-office Communication, Roger Edens (M-G-M Music Department) Collection, USC Cinematic Arts Library, 21 June 1954. 57. Bill Ryan, M-G-M Inter-office Communication, Arthur Freed Collection, USC Cinematic Arts Library, 1 March 1954. 58. McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, 91. 59. ‘Eliminations’ (MGM Collection, University of Southern California, 25 October 1954) lists all footage recorded but removed from Brigadoon (along with the estimated time taken to shoot and the approximate cost of the material deleted). This four-page schedule is ­accompanied by an inter-office communication from Joe Finn to J. J. Cohn, 26 October 1954. 60. The remastered version of Brigadoon was released on DVD by Warner Home Video on 15 March 2005, with all four outtakes included in the ‘Special Features’ section. Brigadoon, DVD, directed by Vincente Minnelli (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005). 61. Hirschhorn, Gene Kelly, 133. 6 2. Hirschhorn, Gene Kelly, 133. 6 3. McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, 87. 6 4. McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, 87. 65. Jennifer Welsh (2015), ‘Fred Astaire vs. Gene Kelly: A Fan of the Song-and-Dance Men  Weighs In,’ The Outtake, 5 June 2015, https://theouttake.net/fred-astaire-vs-genekelly-736f795c3b39. 6 6. McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, 61. 67. McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, 62. 68. Claiming that Kelly is an underrated singer, Mary-Catherine McNinch-Pazzano argues, ‘Fans, scholars, and critics alike talk all the time about Gene Kelly the dancer, Gene Kelly the director, Gene Kelly the choreographer, and Gene Kelly the actor. But rarely do they discuss Gene Kelly the singer. As a singer who is completely enchanted by Kelly’s light, clear, and pure tenor voice, I often wonder why it doesn’t get the appreciation it should. . . . While Kelly is constantly heralded as one of Hollywood’s favourite song-and dance men, the “song” aspect of this phrase is too often silenced or dismissed in discussions of Kelly’s work and talents.’ McNinch-Pazzano also recounts Kern’s complimentary response (briefly

brigadoon as mgm dance musical   421 alluded to via a reference to Hirschhorn’s biography of Kelly earlier in this chapter) on hearing the star’s rendition of ‘Long Ago and Far Away’ during rehearsal one day on the set of Cover Girl (see note 61). Mary-Catherine McNinch-Pazzano, ‘Gene Kelly: The Underrated Singer,’ 12 July 2012, https://classicmoviemoments.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/. 69. John Russell Taylor quoted in Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 144. 70. Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 144. 7 1. Michael Wood, America in the Movies: Or, ‘Santa Maria, It Had Slipped My Mind’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989): 149. 72. Wood, America in the Movies, 164. 73. Wood, America in the Movies, 164. 74. Wood, America in the Movies, 155. 75. Wood, America in the Movies, 163. 76. Johnny Green quoted in Pomerance, The Eyes Have It, 195–196. 77. Wood, America in the Movies, 164. 78. In a generally negative review of the film, Jablonski is highly critical of Kelly’s overall ­performance. Arguing that his ‘choreography and dancing seem repetitive and tired, and the gestures, patterns, and facial expressions of An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain appear in Brigadoon as clichés,’ he maintains that ‘Kelly’s singing voice is hollow and strained.’ ‘As for Cyd Charisse, she neither looks nor dances like a Highland lass.’ ‘Brigadoon’ by Edward Jablonski, Films in Review 5, no. 8 (October 1954): 429–430. 79. Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 146. 80. Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical, 146. 81. Robert Goulet, for example, in his rendition of this song in the 1966 telecast, maintains a steady, deep baritone hold over his notes in the last line. 82. Audience feedback from preview screening of Brigadoon (Arthur Freed Collection, USC, Cinematic Arts Library), First Preview: First Report, 4 June 1954, 15.

chapter 19

‘I’m Once Aga i n th e Pr ev ious M e’ Performance and Stardom in the Barbra Streisand Stage-to-Screen Adaptations Dominic M c hugh

After the gradual demise of the studio system in the 1950s, the film musical became a less regular fixture. With a handful of exceptions, Hollywood looked to Broadway hits as the basis of screen musicals and many fewer examples of the genre were produced in the 1960s. At the same time, more money was spent on each project and each film became more of an event. Matthew Kennedy has explored at length the phenomenon of the theatrical ‘roadshow’ presentation that became an important marketing tool in the 1960s: ‘To generate something akin to the crackling energy of a Broadway opening, roadshow musicals often came with an overture, intermission, entr’acte, and exit music, in addition to a souvenir program and bookings in the most lavish single-screen theatres in large cities.’1 Following the release of The Sound of Music in 1965, Kennedy notes, ‘it became de rigueur for any film musical to be released in the roadshow format if it wanted to rightfully be labelled “major,” “important,” or “lavish.” ’2 As well as importing Broadway hits, Hollywood also brought over two of musical theatre’s most promising young stars in an attempt to guarantee quality: Julie Andrews and Barbra Streisand. On the screen, each enjoyed enormous success (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Funny Girl), a hint of the average (Thoroughly Modern Millie, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), and a major disappointment (Star! and Hello, Dolly!). The two actresses could not have been more different. The very English Andrews was primarily a stage animal, but in addition to her film musicals she also appeared in a few nonsinging movie roles in the 1960s, including in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966). Streisand, on the other hand, was American, had made her name through her recording career, and also had made a series of successful television specials starting with My Name Is Barbra (1965; unusually, for a newcomer, she was the main performer on the specials and did not rely on other big names to boost the shows’ appeal).

424   musical theatre screen adaptations Although being an English star in a series of hit Hollywood musicals was uncommon, Andrews otherwise conformed to an old-school stereotype of the squeaky-clean, charming soprano, a little like a British Jane Powell but with unusual vocal purity and clarity. Streisand, on the other hand, was (and is) sui generis: a one-off talent and persona that left her mark on any material she performed. Although both stars are worthy of being the focus of a case study in stardom, in this chapter I focus on Streisand’s first three screen musicals, all of which are adaptations of successful Broadway productions from the same decade: Funny Girl (Broadway: 1964; Hollywood, 1968), Hello, Dolly! (Broadway: 1964; Hollywood: 1969), and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Broadway: 1965; Hollywood: 1970). In each case, I examine how the nature of Streisand’s star persona affects decisions made in the adaptation of each musical and also how her ­performance of the text reframes the original material (e.g., through vocal inflection). What emerges is a sense of how a combination of performance, personality, and the presence of the performer’s body acts as an agent of adaptation as potently as the writing of the screenplay and score.

Casting Streisand in Hollywood Adaptations Of her three stage-to-screen projects, Funny Girl was by far the most obvious fit for Streisand because she starred in the original Broadway production. Although the ­musical had a difficult pre-Broadway tryout period, with various songs being added and dropped, the producer Ray Stark noted that Streisand had gradually absorbed the character of Fanny Brice, the beloved comedienne who was the subject of the musical, to create a compelling performance: ‘Somehow the two personalities have come together. . . . I don’t know what is Barbra and what is Fanny. Barbra plays Fanny as an extension of herself—which is something that Fanny could never have done. Fanny wasn’t an actress but a satirist.’3 Stark’s observation about the differences between the two figures is also reflected in Norman Nadel’s Broadway review of Streisand’s performance in which he declares: ‘Hail to thee, Barbra Streisand; Fanny Brice thou never wert! But there you have the whole paradox of this show—one spectacular talent in the role of another spectacular talent, but never becoming, or perhaps even trying to become, the woman this play is about. Streisand prefers to create a 1918 Barbra Streisand, and the ­justification is that she does it superbly.’4 Other reviews of the show on Broadway were undeniably mixed—the Times called it ‘hokum and schmaltz’ and the Post labelled it ‘a disappointing entertainment’—but it went on to run an impressive 1,348 performances, following its premiere on 26 March 1964. Composer Jule Styne’s opening night telegram to the actress noted that ‘it takes a star to play a star’5 and Streisand’s recordings of his songs ‘People’ and ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ quickly turned them into standards. She also went on to recreate her portrayal of Brice in the London production of Funny Girl in 1966 and this time met with greater

barbra streisand stage-to-screen adaptations   425 critical success. The Daily Express noted: ‘Barbra Streisand opened in “Funny Girl” in London last night and performed the daunting feat of living up to her legend. The girl and the myth are indivisible. A gawky, loping, long-limbed lass with the ant-eater profile of a long-ago Egyptian queen, Miss Streisand is a compendium of uncommon talents.’6 The show ran only four months in London because Streisand became pregnant, but she had already been contracted by Columbia Pictures to appear in the film version,7 thus guaranteeing her indelible link with the musical. Work on the screenplay began in 1966 and continued through 1967, with rehearsals beginning in July of that year. Army Archerd reported in Variety: ‘A song and a (film) star born? Yesterday, in the nostalgia-filled recording Stage 7 at Goldwyn studios, newcomer Barbra Streisand pre-recorded “Funny Girl” [sic] title tune to the Columbia epic she starts filming Monday. It is one of four new Jule Styne-Bob Merrill numbers for the pic version. The orch, [sic] made up of the town’s top musicians under the baton of Walter Scharf, and accustomed to the best, applauded her after the dramatic playbacks.’8 Filming continued throughout the remainder of 1967, with locations including New Jersey and California, and concluded in December 1967. After a long delay, the movie received its premiere on 18 September 1968 in New York, with international premieres occurring throughout the ensuing months, leading up to Streisand’s triumph at the Academy Awards (as Best Actress) on 14 April 1969.9 Even before this landmark event in Streisand’s career, she had already signed up to her next two film musical roles. It is extraordinary that the young actress was fast-tracked to a series of such large and important movie projects, given her lack of experience and in particular the fact that her clout at the box office had not yet been proven. Her casting as the matchmaker Dolly Levi in Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly! was especially controversial and unexpected, since the musical was the biggest Broadway hit of the decade and was a vehicle for a well-established, mature star: actresses such as Mary Martin, Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, and Ethel Merman followed the ­original star, Carol Channing, in the role on the stage. When Streisand began shooting the film in 1967, she was just twenty-five years old versus the forty-three-year-old Channing. Since the character of Dolly is a widow who has stayed away from society for some time after the death of her first husband, Streisand was an implausible choice on paper. Her casting was announced on 8 May 1967 and the outrage in the press was unusually scathing. For example, Richard Coe in the Washington Post declared: ‘Would you believe Barbra Streisand for the screen’s “Hello, Dolly!”? Well, that’s the knuckle headed fact. . . . With all due respect to young Miss Streisand, the mournful Nefertiti is clearly not the outgoing, zestful Irishwoman whose vitality brightens Thornton Wilder’s mature, life-loving Dolly Gallagher-Levi. The perversity of not choosing to get Carol Channing’s musical-comedy classic on film is hard to fathom.’10 (Channing had won the Tony Award for her performance on Broadway.) Yet, as the New York Times review of the movie would much later go on to observe, the objections to Streisand’s casting were arguably irrelevant. Vincent Canby openly declared: The screen adaptation of ‘Hello, Dolly!,’ which began a reserved-seat engagement last night at the Rivoli Theater (after a private, somewhat violent, invitational

426   musical theatre screen adaptations ­ remiere Tuesday night), is not invulnerable to criticism, but I suspect that Barbra p Streisand is. At the age of 27, and for the very good reason that she is one of the few, mysteriously natural, unique performing talents of our time, she has become a National Treasure. Casting her as Dolly Levi (the ‘née Gallagher’ has been dropped from the film), is rather like trying to display Yellowstone National Park in a onegeyser forest preserve. It doesn’t really work, but most people probably couldn’t care less. Miss Streisand is at that point of her career where her public personality invests everything in which she happens to appear with an importance and a resonance that have no relation to the vehicle itself.11

Filming of the movie began on 15 April 1968 and took ninety days, following several months of rehearsal earlier in the year.12 It was a stellar affair: the legendary Gene Kelly was hired as director, with Michael Kidd (of the Broadway Finian’s Rainbow and Guys and Dolls, as well as MGM’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) providing the c­ horeography; Walter Matthau was cast opposite Streisand as Horace Vandergelder and Michael Crawford played Cornelius, Vandergelder’s young clerk. With the rights alone costing a reported $2 million, Twentieth Century–Fox meant business.13 Yet the film was surrounded by stories of tension between the figures involved. For example, composer-lyricist Jerry Herman reported that Kelly refused to collaborate with him: ‘Gene Kelly, who directed, did not want to have anything to do with me. It wasn't that he hated me personally, he just didn’t want his movie to be contaminated by anyone from Broadway. Gene Kelly wasn’t the only one who had that old anti-Broadway bias. So many of these movie people are like that. I am not the kind of person who generally gets a cold reception, because the smart ones know that I can be very helpful. But these Hollywood types didn't like any theatre people. They considered us the enemy—and that's the God's truth.’14 There was also at least one major disagreement between Streisand and Matthau and there was little chemistry between the two, with the actress supposedly confiding to her stand-in, Marie Rhodes: ‘What I needed was Rhett Butler to sweep me back up again. What I got was Walter Matthau.’15 Streisand is also reported to have become open in her awareness that she was unusual casting for the role, ringing screenwriter Ernest Lehman in the middle of the night and asking: ‘What the hell am I doing in this picture? . . . There is no way I can play Dolly Levi in a way that makes sense of the woman.’16 She even discussed the issue frankly in an interview with Look magazine: ‘I did feel that Dolly was a story of older people and that they should hire Elizabeth Taylor to play her. I thought that would be a great role for her first musical. But when everybody seemed to be against me as Dolly, I took up the challenge. I’ve never been an underdog in Hollywood, and people get spiteful about me. They tell lies that make good journalistic copy. I have very little in common with a character like Dolly, who fixes people up and lives other people’s lives. I do share the fun she gets in bargaining and buys, and can understand her experience as a woman who has loved and lost. A woman can be any age for that. But I really didn’t respond to the Broadway show—a piece of fluff. It’s not the kind of thing I’m interested in. I’m interested in real life, real people, and in playing Medea. Dolly takes place in an age before people realized they hated their mothers—the whole Freudian thing. So it wasn’t something I could delve psychologically into too deeply, but I could have fun with

barbra streisand stage-to-screen adaptations   427 Dolly and get days off because I didn’t have to be in every single scene for once. I call Hello, Dolly! my last big voice picture.’17 Streisand’s equivocation about the role is palpable in this statement, but this was a movie at which everything was thrown—names, energy, and over $20 million—and the studio was determined to have a hit. Release of the film was delayed until 16 December 1969 because the original Broadway production was still running and Fox had to pay David Merrick (the Broadway producer of Dolly) a fee of $1.85 million to allow them to bring forward the release date.18 But with mixed reviews and a drop off in box office, the deficit was great: within thirty-four weeks it had made a gross of less than $8 million, and according to the Los Angeles Times in December 1972, the film had lost around $16 million up to that date (though it would continue to make money from television and home video).19 It became known as a landmark flop that contributed to the downfall of the studio and was a disappointment after the critical success of Funny Girl. Yet even before the latter had been released, Streisand was cast in a third screen adaptation of a Broadway musical, and for a third studio, too. On 1 September 1968, Paramount announced that they had hired the actress to play Daisy in the Hollywood version of Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane’s modestly successful On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, which had opened on Broadway in 1965 and run a little under a year.20 Like Funny Girl, it had received mixed reviews on Broadway, and the screen adaptation would be liberal in every way. The original Broadway production was to have starred Louis Jourdan and Barbara Harris, but Jourdan was fired out of town and replaced by John Cullum, Richard Burton’s understudy in Lerner’s Camelot (1960). For the film, Vincente Minnelli was hired as director, following his previous collaborations at MGM with Lerner on An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954), and Gigi (1958). Paramount approached a number of stars—including Frank Sinatra and Richard Harris—to play opposite Streisand before French actor Yves Montand signed to the role.21 Cecil Beaton and Arnold Scaasi shared the costume designs, with a diverse ­supporting cast that included the young Jack Nicholson as Streisand’s former stepbrother and a number of British veterans for the Regency scenes. Filming began at Paramount on 6 January 1969 and moved in April to England, where some of the regression scenes were shot at the Brighton Pavillion. In May, the production moved to New York for location shooting (mainly for the ‘Come Back to Me’ sequence) and completed back in California in early June.22 Before the movie’s release, it was condensed in length by at least fourteen minutes— an uncut version was accidentally played for a preview audience and reported on in Variety—leaving gaps where ‘She Isn’t You,’ ‘Wait Till We’re Sixty-Five,’ and ‘Who Is There among Us Who Knows’ should have appeared.23 The reviews of the film were varied, but they also recognized the film’s merits. For example, the New York Times reviewer said it was a movie of fits and starts, but because the fits are occasionally so lovely, and the starts somewhat more frequent than Fifth Avenue buses, I was eventually hypnotized into a state of benign though not-quite-abject permissiveness. The reasons have to do

428   musical theatre screen adaptations with nostalgia, and with expectation. ‘On a Clear Day’ is the first conventional musical film to open this year, the first Minnelli musical since ‘The Bells Are Ringing’ in 1960, and the first Barbra Streisand movie to suggest—even briefly—that she is capable of playing someone other than Fannie [sic] Brice in the seven stages of woman. The film . . . is solidly grounded in a casting coincidence: Barbra Streisand, a performer who sometimes seems too big for movies as well as for life, portrays a girl who is so full of life that she leads a succession of lives.24

Generally, the film’s pace and the peculiarity of the material were criticized, but Streisand’s performance was widely praised and, critically at least, she came out of the project much better than was the case with Dolly.

Adapting and Staging the Films for Streisand Putting Broadway musicals on the screen always requires some element of change, even when the adaptation is relatively faithful. But in the case of the three films under investigation here, both the medium and the star motivated far-reaching changes. On top of that, all three films were helmed by major directors—William Wyler, Gene Kelly, and Vincente Minnelli—who inevitably left their authorial stamp on the material in ­distinctive ways, thus adding an additional significant creative force to that of Streisand as the star. Of the three films, by far the most imaginative and cinematic adaptation is Funny Girl, which is perhaps surprising given that Streisand had also appeared in the stage version. Arguably, Wyler’s Funny Girl even hints at what was to come a few years later in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972) in its mixture of the psychological and the visual: like Fosse, Wyler does not hesitate in making changes to the material in order to accommodate the screen (and in particular the screen Streisand). Of course, screenwriter Isobel Lennart—who also wrote the book for the Broadway version—deserves credit for the reconception of the musical too: the combination of writer and director seems to have provided an effective team around Streisand. Two interconnected elements of the movie particularly deal with the medium in ways that serve Streisand’s needs: the flashback device and the framing device. First, the story’s delivery as a flashback is considerably expanded, returning to an idea that Lennart originally had in an early draft of the Broadway script dated 16 October 1962 (preserved in the David Merrick Collection at the Library of Congress).25 In the stage version, this consists of a few lines of brief dialogue between Fanny and her dresser Emma, and the flashback begins rapidly. For the film, Lennart expands and extends the framing device that promotes the notion that the story is all in Fanny’s memory; Lennart adds an opening tableau in which Fanny is seen entering the New Amsterdam Theatre. The camera follows her from behind—we do not see her face for some time— and her name lights up on the marquee as she passes the facade. She continues through

barbra streisand stage-to-screen adaptations   429 the doors to the backstage area until eventually she stands in front of a mirror. She pulls back her lapel and we finally see her face in the mirror. With a slight tear in her eye, Streisand speaks her first words on camera: ‘Hello, gorgeous!’ Although much has been made of this moment, what follows is arguably more striking. She moves to the empty theatre, where she plays a few notes of the melody of ‘People’ on the piano. The sound of applause is heard, and she mimes ‘shooting’ the audience. She then goes to sit in the audience and her maid, Emma, comes to see her. Fanny comments, ‘Maybe things look different from here’; she puts her head back, closes her eyes, and the flashback begins with a fade to Mrs Brice’s saloon. Both the direction and acting of this scene, especially in the mock-gunfire section, are so compellingly disjointed as to almost render it a mad scene. Certainly there is such a remarkable blurring of the watcher and the watched, the spectator and spectacle, that the movie immediately becomes telescoped through Fanny’s eyes (a device that Rob Marshall would later exploit in the movie version of Chicago, in which the story is viewed through Roxie’s eyes). The lack of underscoring and the focus on Streisand’s body, with very few words spoken, accentuates her presence and helps to frame her as the star. The combination of diegetic and nondiegetic sounds is also sophisticated and poignant. The sound of applause is in Fanny’s head but the mock gunshot noises are made by Fanny herself; the piano’s notes are heard in ‘reality’ but since the song ‘People’ is a ‘book’ number, it is illogical that Fanny knows the melody. Most of the rest of the film is told in chronological order, without any reiteration of the flashback device, until ‘Funny Girl,’ the penultimate number of the movie. Here, Fanny and Nick have just said goodbye while he sets off for prison, and Fanny sings part of the song in the flashback/past. Halfway through the number, the acoustic changes and we are back in the empty theatre from the beginning of the film, with Fanny still sitting in the audience. The editing of the soundtrack gives the impression that the song is now an echo of a memory bouncing around the theatre; Streisand is shown sitting in the theatre but her mouth does not move until the last couple of lines of the song (‘Funny how it ain’t so funny, / Funny girl’), when the vocal becomes ‘present’ again. The rest of the story, with Nick’s return and final farewell, continues chronologically. All of this gives the plot a new subjectivity that it did not have in the Broadway show: Lennart’s framing device turns Fanny into the limited narrator of Funny Girl, telling the story from her point of view. The film becomes personal rather than a simple biopic, and by setting up Fanny’s psyche so compellingly at the opening, Wyler and Lennart establish the film as truly belonging to Streisand. The opening sequence also sets up a leitmotif that will return throughout, whereby Streisand confronts herself in the mirror. The rapid juxtaposition of the ‘Hey, gorgeous!’ line and the film’s first song, ‘If a Girl Isn’t Pretty,’ which starts at the very beginning of the flashback, help to make sense of this gesture: Brice/Streisand is not a traditional Hollywood beauty, yet the film’s recurring debate about her physical appearance explores her image in such detail that the camera’s objectification of her ultimately emphasizes her sui generis beauty. Yet this is also a personal process because she constantly examines her image, and identity, through the mirror, and therefore comes to terms with her own

430   musical theatre screen adaptations appearance (and self). Examples include a moment where she sees herself, pre-Ziegfeld, in the mirror during ‘If a Girl Isn’t Pretty,’ when her mother and her friends are discussing her limited chances of success, based on the way she looks; a comedic moment in the Ziegfeld production number ‘His Love Makes Me Beautiful’ when she recoils in shock at seeing the reflection of her pregnant figure (the line ‘I ask my looking glass, “What is it / Makes me so exquisite?” ’ underlines the idea); a brief moment in the ‘You Are Woman’ scene when she is shown in the mirror during Nick’s seduction of her; another in ‘Sadie, Sadie’ when she looks at herself in the mirror when sitting in the bath, at last a ‘married lady’; and most memorable of all, the final dialogue scene of the film, when Fanny/ Streisand sits putting on her makeup, using the three panels of her dressing room mirror, when Nick returns. The act of grooming herself with a triple reflection of herself here implies a greater level of self-acceptance about her appearance, even as Nick enters to say farewell. Wyler extends the device of framing Streisand’s image and performance in other scenes too. For example, in the ‘Second Hand Rose’ number, the Follies ensemble sit or stand around onstage behind her, watching and reacting to her performance; Ziegfeld is also seen at several points, watching from the audience. Earlier, Fanny’s star quality emerges in ‘I’d Rather Be Blue’ when she relaxes (after an initially tentative performance) on the line ‘For you I’m strong.’ The audience at Keeney’s slowly warms to Brice’s ­performance and by the end there is rapturous applause. (In this sense, the number is designed rather like Louise’s ‘Let Me Entertain You’ in Gypsy, an earlier Jule Styne musical.) Wyler also subtly creates a dynamic of spectacle versus spectator in the filming of the ‘People’ number. Initially, Brice delivers the number to Nicky as if in conversation, but the latter part of the song is staged so that it is no longer addressed to him as a character: instead, he stands in the background, watching passively, while Streisand performs and emotes to nobody in particular. Her next appearance in the film also has an element of framing: Fanny is asked to pose for photographs while disembarking the train. During the second half of the film, she is also framed by the doorway when she arrives at Nick’s cabin on board ship. In addition to ‘People,’ various scenes that are ostensibly about Nick are filmed to emphasize Fanny/Streisand instead, most notably the card game at which Nick wins enough money for the pair to get married. Wyler focuses on Fanny’s anxiety (played as a comic tour de force by Streisand) rather than Nick’s gambling manoeuvres. Similarly, in the argument scene after ‘The Swan,’ the camera looks at Nick (who is standing) from behind Fanny’s head on the sofa, channelling the viewer’s attention towards her emotional reaction to his words rather than the words themselves. This kind of technique is also used in their conversation after the trial. When Nick asks for a divorce (‘We’re just no good for each other’) the camera lens on him is blurred when he is speaking and instead focuses on her; Wyler constantly underlines her reactions to his lines rather than what he is saying. Then in the final scene of the movie (before ‘My Man’), when Nick leaves the dressing room we only see the door close in the mirror, with Fanny’s reaction, rather than Nick’s physical departure. In short, the movie is entirely about Fanny and therefore about Streisand (or at least her performance): even

barbra streisand stage-to-screen adaptations   431 Nick/Sharif is a surprisingly incidental presence. She is, as Fanny declares in her first big number, ‘the greatest star’ of this movie, and the entire picture articulates Streisand’s star persona. Hello, Dolly! is a somewhat different matter because, as noted above, Streisand’s age was inappropriate for the character of Dolly Levi. She was in her mid-twenties when filming the role, but Dolly is supposed to be a widow (at least forty or fifty) who has spent years hiding away from life, finding matches for other couples. By the time the film was made, and particularly by the time it was released, the stage show had been firmly established as a vehicle for a veteran actress: Carol Channing, Ginger Rogers, Mary Martin, and so on. Part of the musical’s appeal was the presence of a familiar figure of a certain seniority that the audience already knew well. For Streisand, then, the role was particularly difficult to make sense of. Therefore, screenwriter Ernest Lehman and director Gene Kelly went about reconceiving the story as much as possible, as well as emphasizing Dolly’s humorous and vulnerable qualities (which suited Streisand’s star persona) and changing numerous aspects of her songs to show off her vocal prowess (this is discussed at length in the next section). In particular, Kelly embraces Streisand’s youthful energy rather than hiding it. Although her costumes, hair, and makeup have hints of a slightly older character, there is no obvious attempt to make Streisand look or, more importantly, behave as a middleaged woman. From her first appearance in the movie, she skips and runs around with limitless reserves of energy and is rarely out of breath. In this telling of the story, Dolly apparently displaces her feelings of bereavement by being everywhere and doing everything, so that she never has free time to fill. This is in contrast to the stage Dolly, who seems more of a maternal figure who is motivated by passing on her warmth and wisdom to help others to reach the kind of happiness she once felt. Streisand’s Dolly ­implausibly gets the train to Yonkers simply to inform Horace that she has set him up on a date, and while she is there she also encourages Cornelius and Barnaby (Horace’s clerks) to play truant for the evening; the physical presence of the train in the film draws attention to how much effort this relatively brief errand has required, arguably pointing to how Dolly’s work expands to fill the time available. The flip side of this characteristic is that in two scenes where Dolly is absolutely alone, there is a strong feeling of poignancy, stasis, and isolation. As ‘Dancing’ comes to an end at the climax of the first half of the film, Dolly is shown on her own on a park bench and Streisand’s delivery of her speech about ‘rejoining the human race’ is intimate and ­sorrowful. The camera is in close-up and Streisand’s performance is beautifully understated, as if to reveal the true sadness that underlies the humour that she portrays in her fast-paced comic dialogue scenes when interacting with other characters. The same is also true of the ‘Love Is Only Love’ scene. This number, which was added for the movie adaptation, takes place in the private/personal space of Dolly’s apartment, where she is shut off from the rest of the world; Kelly and Lehman contrast the claustrophobia of this scene with the ‘Elegance’ number that precedes it, in which Irene (Horace’s intended, and a shop owner), Minnie (her assistant), Cornelius, and Barnaby wander freely around the town (the outdoors) without a care.

432   musical theatre screen adaptations One of the most complex implications of having a younger Dolly is that she suddenly becomes close in age to the six junior characters: Cornelius, Irene, Barnaby, Minnie, Ermengarde, and Ambrose. Lehman’s solution is to make the difference between her and them in the movie that she is smart and they are passive: Michael Crawford’s Cornelius is excessively buffoonish and has little chemistry with Marianne McAndrew’s Irene, while the others tend to turn to Dolly for guidance on their every move rather than showing spirit or agency of their own. One of the major changes for the movie is the removal of the courtroom scene, in which Cornelius saves himself and his friends from being convicted by singing ‘It Only Takes a Moment’; the number is performed as a simple romantic ballad (nothing more than a declaration of love) in the park instead. In other words, the song is recontextualized into a less pivotal scene and the secondary characters become less substantial, thus providing less competition for Streisand’s Dolly, who appears at the start of the next scene and breaks into her arresting performance of ‘So Long, Dearie.’ Lehman and Kelly constantly make Streisand’s Dolly energetic and resourceful, but in the process the other characters and plot elements often seem generic or watered-down. Since the film is also unquestionably overblown—the external dance section of ‘Dancing,’ for example, has no purpose other than display of the opulent sets, costumes, and athletic choreography—the film’s framing of Streisand as the star does not make the movie as a whole coherent (unlike with Funny Girl). Despite being the most uneven of the three movies, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is perhaps the most interesting example of how a stage musical was adapted into a film musical for Streisand’s talents. Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay diverges significantly from his book for the stage version, from opening scene to last (the score is also extensively changed, as shown in the next section). For example, the first scene of the Broadway show takes place in Dr Mark Bruckner’s office, where he meets Daisy Gamble for the first time and discovers that she has extra-sensory perception through her own admission. The movie, however, provides an opportunity to introduce Daisy as an outsider: she attends Dr Marc Chabot’s (as he becomes in the movie) lecture on hypnosis and is accidentally hypnotized herself. By planting her in the audience but having her behave unconventionally, Lerner establishes her as an unusual character, an outsider, a star. The added scene also gives her the opportunity to show off her comic talents, when she starts taking off her stocking on post-hypnotic suggestion. The scene cleverly makes Daisy into a layered character: it’s amusing that she cannot control herself but it is also the cause of discomfort on Daisy’s part, and therefore a reason to feel compassion for her. Lerner and Minnelli try to give the film a sense of mystery by presenting the story of Melinda—Daisy’s former incarnation, that is, in another life—in reverse chronological order during a series of flashbacks under hypnosis.26 As with Funny Girl, the device of the flashback helps to frame the film through Streisand’s eyes, and even though Chabot puts her under hypnosis, it is Daisy’s story: Chabot/Montand is passive through most of the film, as are Sharif/Nick and Matthau/Horace in the previous movies. Chabot sits around discovering the story of Melinda (and even falls in love with her) but he never really psychoanalyzes Daisy, who is much more insightful. The first regression scene

barbra streisand stage-to-screen adaptations   433 shows Melinda’s trial, followed by a further flashback to a scene where Melinda meets her beloved, Robert Tentrees (a lavish sequence filmed at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton). Subsequent regressions show Melinda’s escape from school—a grotesque scene in which the character accidentally lassos a woman around the neck from the other side of a wall—as well as a scene at a gambling table in which Melinda helps Robert to win through extra-sensory perception. This narrative device—of telling the story-within-the-story in reverse order—­ contributes to the mystery and fragmentation associated with Streisand’s character. In the film, she alternately plays a kooky New York girl (Daisy), a cockney British teenager (Melinda as a girl), and a British (fake) aristocrat (Melinda as a woman). In addition, Daisy’s personality has different facets: she claims to be ‘normal’ and have ‘no neuroses’ but she alternates between faux dumb and feistily wise, the latter brought about because she remembers several previous lives and also knows what happens in the future. This combination of character traits allows Streisand to play the full range of her acting ­abilities (her lamentable English accent notwithstanding), including comedy, romance, and drama. And while Chabot is convinced by Daisy’s stories in the end, everything other than the scenes in the present day is a fantasy, which means that the different incarnations of Melinda (and the ‘other’ Daisy in the duet ‘Go to Sleep’) is a fragment of Streisand’s personality, unified only by her body on the screen. Therefore, while the main narrative of the film makes very little sense at all, as a film it reaches coherence as a showcase of Streisand’s acting talent and diverse star persona.

Adapting the Scores Yet it is through the scores of the three films that Streisand makes her biggest mark. By the time of the films’ releases, she was already a major recording artist and it was ­inevitable that all three films would find every opportunity to showcase her voice. Changes were made to the score of each film to accommodate both the shift in medium and the change in star (in the case of Dolly and Clear Day). Tables 19.1–3 ­outline the Broadway and movie incarnations of the three scores, with some striking differences in the song list in each case. With Funny Girl, Streisand appears in all the vocal numbers in the movie version, accentuating the feeling that the film is in her psyche, and hardly anyone else sings. According to Matt Howe, several songs involving other characters were filmed but cut, most importantly Nick’s ‘Temporary Arrangement,’ ‘Locked in a Pink Velvet Jail,’ and reprise of ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade,’ as well as Eddie and Mrs Brice’s ‘Who Taught Her Everything She Knows.’27 The silencing of Nick is especially noticeable in the final film, where his vocal contributions are ­confined to ‘You Are Woman, I Am Man’ and a brief part of ‘Sadie, Sadie.’ Styne reportedly hoped to cast Frank Sinatra in the movie rather than Sharif and was disappointed in the latter’s vocal abilities; either that or the decision to focus on Fanny’s story led to the cuts in his songs.28

434   musical theatre screen adaptations

Table 19.1  A comparison of the principal numbers of the score of Funny Girl on the stage (left) and screen (right) Broadway

Movie

Act 1 Overture Poker Change No. 1/If A Girl Isn’t Pretty [Mrs Strakosh, Mrs Brice, Eddie and Ensemble] I’m The Greatest Star [Fanny] Eddie’s Fifth Encore [Eddie] Cornet Man [Fanny and Dancing Chorus] Nicky Arnstein No. 1 [Fanny] Who Taught Her Everything? [Mrs Brice and Eddie] His Love Makes Me Beautiful [Fanny and Ziegfeld Ensemble] I Want To Be Seen With You Tonight [Nicky and Fanny] Nicky Arnstein No. 2 [Fanny] Henry Street [Ensemble] People [Fanny] Poker Chant No. 2 [Mrs Brice and Mrs Strakosh] You Are Woman, I Am Man [Nicky and Fanny] Don’t Rain On My Parade [Fanny]

  Overture If A Girl Isn’t Pretty [Fanny, Mrs Brice, Mrs Strakosh] I’m The Greatest Star [Fanny] Rollerskate Rag [Fanny and Female Ensemble] I’d Rather Be Blue [Fanny] Nicky Arnstein [Fanny] Second Hand Rose [Fanny] His Love Makes Me Beautiful [Fanny and Ziegfeld Ensemble] People [Fanny] You Are Woman [Nicky and Fanny] Don’t Rain On My Parade [Fanny]

Act 2 Entr’acte Sadie, Sadie [Fanny and Friends] Find Yourself a Man [Mrs Strakosh, Mrs Brice, Eddie] Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat [Eddie, Fanny and Ziegfeld Ensemble] Who Are You Now? [Fanny] Don’t Rain on My Parade – Nick’s Version [Nick] The Music That Makes Me Dance [Fanny] Don’t Rain On My Parade - Reprise [Fanny]

  Entr’acte Sadie, Sadie [Fanny and Nick] The Swan [Fanny] Funny Girl [Fanny] My Man [Fanny]

The musical style of the score also features several shifts of style and emphasis in comparison to the Broadway version. Overall, the movie score is much more symphonic in sound (much to Styne’s chagrin),29 especially in the book numbers (e.g., ‘People’). The movie makes a much stronger distinction between the vaudeville sound of the diegetic Follies numbers and the book songs, whereas on the stage Styne gives most of the score a vaudevillian feel (e.g., by being highly rhythmic and quirky) to provide coherence. In fact, the Broadway songs that were left out of the film nearly all (apart from ‘Who Are You Now?’ and ‘The Music That Makes Me Dance’) contain a sense of the theatre, which is curious in light of the decision to insert ‘Second Hand Rose’ and ‘I’d Rather Be Blue,’ two period vaudeville songs by composers other than Styne. This creates a sharp ­division between true vaudeville songs, which are diegetic and totally generic, and the book numbers, which are mostly expressive and personal. Also added to the score is ‘My Man,’ one of Fanny Brice’s signature songs, which replaced the finale reprise of ‘Don’t Rain on

barbra streisand stage-to-screen adaptations   435

Table 19.2  A comparison the principal numbers of the score of Hello, Dolly! on the stage (left) and screen (right) Broadway

Movie

Act 1 Overture Opening: Call On Dolly [Ensemble] I Put My Hand In [Dolly] It Takes a Woman [Horace, Cornelius, Barnaby and Ensemble] It Takes a Woman - reprise [Horace and Dolly] Put On Your Sunday Clothes [Cornelius, Barnaby, Dolly, Ambrose, Ermengarde and Ensemble] Ribbons Down My Back [Irene] Ribbons Down My Back - reprise [Irene] Motherhood [Dolly, Irene, Minnie and Horace] Dancing [Dolly, Cornelius, Barnaby, Irene, Minnie and Ensemble] Before The Parade Passes By [Dolly and Ensemble] Finale Act 1: Before The Parade Passes By [Dolly]

  Call On Dolly [Ensemble] Just Leave Everything To Me [Dolly] Main Titles It Takes a Woman [Horace, Cornelius, Barnaby and Ensemble] It Takes a Woman - reprise Put On Your Sunday Clothes [Cornelius, Barnaby, Dolly, Ambrose, Ermengarde and Ensemble] Ribbons Down My Back [Irene] Dancing [Dolly, Cornelius, Barnaby, Irene, Minnie and Ensemble] Before The Parade Passes By [Dolly and Ensemble]

Act 2 Entr’acte Elegance [Cornelius, Barnaby, Irene and Minnie] The Waiters’ Galop [Waters’ Ensemble] Hello, Dolly! [Dolly and Waiters] The Waiters’ Galop - reprise [Waters’ Ensemble] The Polka Contest [Ensemble] It Only Takes a Moment [Cornelius, Irene and Ensemble] So Long, Dearie [Dolly] Hello, Dolly! [Dolly and Horace] Finale [Ensemble]

  Entr’acte Elegance [Cornelius, Barnaby, Irene and Minnie] Love Is Only Love [Dolly] The Waiters’ Galop [Waters’ Ensemble] Hello, Dolly! [Dolly and Waiters] The Polka Contest [Ensemble] It Only Takes a Moment [Cornelius, Irene and Ensemble] So Long, Dearie [Dolly] Hello, Dolly! [Dolly and Horace] Finale [Ensemble]

My Parade,’ against Styne’s protestations.30 Although the lyric to ‘My Man’ suggests a downbeat ending for Fanny, Streisand’s performance—the tearful first part of which was recorded live on set—is so powerful as to portray a sense of defiance, especially in her aggressive delivery of the words ‘what’s the difference.’ The chiaroscuro design of the number augments the potency of the vocals: Streisand wears a black dress against a black backdrop, so the white appearance of her face, neckline, and hands is stark and bold. Streisand’s vocal performances of several songs are quite different in the Broadway cast album and movie soundtrack. On the Broadway album Streisand adheres much more strictly to the pulse, perhaps most especially in ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade,’ ‘His Love Makes Me Beautiful’ and ‘I’m the Greatest Star.’ One can almost hear the ­conductor, Milton Rosenstock, beating time in these numbers, and it is striking that Streisand observes most of the syncopated rhythms in ‘Parade’ compared to the much

436   musical theatre screen adaptations

Table 19.3  A comparison of the principal numbers of the score of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever on the stage (left) and screen (right) Broadway

Movie

Act 1 Overture Hurry, It’s Lovely Up Here [Daisy] Ring Out the Bells [Samuel, Mrs Welles, Sir Hubert and Ensemble] Tosy and Cosh [Daisy] On a Clear Day [Mark] On the S.S. Bernard Cohn [Daisy, Muriel, Preston and Millard] At the Hellrakers [Ballet] Don’t Tamper with My Sister [Edward, Sir Hubert and Ensemble] She Wasn’t You [Edward] Melinda [Mark]

  Hurry, It’s Lovely Up Here [Daisy] On a Clear Day: Main Titles [Ensemble] Love With All the Trimmings [Daisy] Melinda [Marc] Go To Sleep [Daisy] He Isn’t You [Daisy] What Did I Have That I Don’t Have [Daisy] Come Back to Me [Marc] On a Clear Day [Marc] On a Clear Day - reprise [Daisy] 

Act 2 Entr’acte When I’m Being Born Again [Kriakos] What Did I Have at I Don’t Have [Daisy] Wait Till We’re Sixty - Five [Warren and Daisy] Come Back to Me [Mark]] On a Clear Day [Ensemble]

freer rendition in the movie. Her part in ‘You Are Woman’ is also much straighter and less ­colourful on the Broadway album, and ‘Sadie, Sadie’ is delivered like a vaudeville song, with a strong, deliberate sense of the metre, whereas the montage version in the film is much smoother and seems more personal. Interestingly, a few documents from the Broadway production in Bob Merrill’s papers at the Library of Congress indicate that Streisand was inclined to take a liberal, spontaneous approach to the score even on the stage and that—assuming Merrill’s notes were communicated—she was encouraged to observe the score more closely. For example, a copy of the sheet music of ‘Who Are You Now’ is annotated: ‘Please don’t let Barbra improvise so!’ Another document says: ‘Please have Barbra make up mind before orchestrating.’ A lyric sheet for ‘People’ is annotated: ‘Barbra—must not do her second version improvising too much.’31 Perhaps the writers exerted more ­authorial control against her creativity during preparations for the Broadway version, when their songs would be heard for the first time, but when it came to making the film, Streisand the star was able to follow her own artistic path. By the time of Hello, Dolly!, there was no doubt that Streisand was going to give the songs her own spin—and her youth meant that her delivery of the score was the freshest on record. There were fewer changes to the song set than with Funny Girl: Table 19.2 shows two new songs, ‘Just Leave Everything to Me’ in place of ‘I Put My Hand In’ and

barbra streisand stage-to-screen adaptations   437 ‘Love Is Only Love’ (originally written for but dropped from Jerry Herman’s Mame) to give Streisand another solo in the second half of the movie. Streisand was also given an extended reprise of ‘It Takes a Woman’ that was mainly sung by Horace in the Broadway version. (The maternalistic ‘Motherhood’ was deleted.) These three extra numbers support the strategies to emphasize specific elements of the character as discussed above, namely, Dolly’s feelings of bereavement (the intimate ‘It Takes a Woman’ reprise and particularly ‘Love Is Only Love’ showcase the elegiac, poignant facet of Streisand’s performance, making her more believable as the widow) and energy (‘Just Leave Everything’ is a comic patter song that established the youthfulness of Streisand’s version of the role, recalling ‘Come to the Supermarket’ and ‘Down with Love’ from her first two studio albums). Importantly, ‘Just Leave Everything’ outlines a range of roles (including importing cheese and tweezing eyebrows) for Dolly, whereas ‘I Put My Hand In’ (the song it replaces from the Broadway version) is focused on matchmaking; in the movie, she is a general busybody. Also, the opening of ‘Love Is Only Love’ recycles the aural technique of the second half of the title song from Funny Girl: Streisand’s voice is muffled, like an echo in the memory, and only becomes ‘present’ when she reaches the refrain. This adds to the nostalgia of her characterization, versus the general energy of ‘Just Leave Everything.’ These are the two main modes of Streisand’s performance, and the contrast between the two helps to establish the framework for her unusual assumption of the role. Yet the more arresting aspect of her performance in Dolly is how she delivers the familiar songs carried over from the Broadway show. Engineered into the arrangements of the songs is a new approach to Dolly’s music, especially in relation to tempo and vocal writing; on top of this, Streisand frequently pulls the melodic line, rhythm, and pulse around, as a means of taking ownership of the material. In ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes,’ she is (quite illogically) assigned the male chorus’s line ‘To town we’ll trot to a smoky spot / Where the girls are hot as a fuse’—Kelly has her walk through the middle of the railway carriage to frame her gutsy and musically liberal performance—and she sings a kind of chesty descant part on the final lines of the song too, supported by the chorus. Then in ‘Before the Parade Passes By,’ Herman expands Dolly’s opening solo, giving her a complete refrain sung ad lib with some new lyrics (‘Before it all moves on / And only I’m left’ and ‘Life without life / Has no reason or rhyme left’). This section homes in on the intimacy of Streisand’s portrayal of Dolly’s lifelessness because of her widowhood, and in the spoken monologue that follows she resolves to ‘rejoin the human race,’ leading to a grand accelerando during the next refrain. To end the first half of the film, Dolly/ Streisand is given the climax of the song, holding the final note for over half a dozen bars while the parade moves on around her and the camera pans out: another spectacular assertion of her star status. For the title song, the production team came up with an additional device to make the number more exciting: near the end of the sequence, Louis Armstrong, who had made a hit record of the number, appears and sings a refrain as a duet with Streisand. In order to make that moment a highlight, the earlier parts of the number create a slow build. The opening refrain is sung freely by Streisand, with only an intermittent sense of pulse. The waiters take over, then Streisand sings the verse, whose recitative-like quality is turned

438   musical theatre screen adaptations into an intimate moment thanks to close-up camera work and total freedom in the vocal delivery by Streisand. In particular, the words ‘good old days’ are stretched out to emphasize the feeling of nostalgia. After another sung refrain and a dance break, Dolly/ Streisand encounters Armstrong and the pair improvise their vocal lines, both with interaction and (at the end) in harmony. Here, Streisand has met her musical equal and her own star power is augmented by being able to hold her own in such distinguished and experienced company. It is also a true ‘Streisand moment’ because she appears to have total freedom in her interjected responses to Armstrong’s singing of the written lines of the refrain. Indeed, the number as a whole is different in the screen version because it becomes a vehicle for Streisand’s vocal talents, which are considerably fresher, more flexible, and bigger than those of most of the actresses who played the part on the stage. Yet an even more salient shift is seen in the adaptation of ‘So Long, Dearie,’ Dolly’s mock farewell to Vandergelder after the chaos at the Harmonia Gardens. For Streisand, the song was rearranged from a steady ‘in 4’ feel to a swift ‘in 2’ delivery. It is c­ onsiderably faster, which transforms it into a rhythm song: the orchestra provides a fast-moving foundation over which Streisand delivers the vocal line with, again, considerable freedom and flexibility. As is the case with most of her recordings, she places little i­ mportance on observing written note lengths and frequently elides or elongates notes and phrases like a jazz performer. In fact, in places where she delivers a phrase straight, such as ‘Don’t you come a-knockin’ at my door’ in this song, this accurate rendition of the notes becomes an expressive gesture. This is at the heart of her expressivity as a singer. In all three films, Streisand is cast opposite a male actor without vocal prowess. Even Yves Montand (the best of the three—a competent crooner and a recording artist) is often silenced or outsung in On a Clear Day. For example, Daisy/Streisand’s ‘He Isn’t You’ was originally supposed to be immediately followed by a complementary version for Marc/Montand, ‘She Wasn’t You.’32 It was cut, leaving Montand without a song for a long stretch. Then in the final scene of the film, Montand sings the title song complete, in his intimate crooner style, but Streisand is allowed to reprise the entire refrain again to close the movie. Her version is much more spectacular, both vocally and in staging. Montand’s is sung in his study but Streisand’s is set outdoors, as she wanders back through the university gardens she walked through in the opening scene of the film; at the end, she is suspended in space against a superimposed backdrop of clouds, illustrating the ‘you can see forever’ line in the lyric. Furthermore, Montand’s version has a light scoring, with most of the refrain performed against an easy rhythm section accompaniment with light fills between the phrases; Streisand’s is scored for full strings and has a considerably more complex texture and much more contrapuntal edge. Few would come away from the film remembering Montand’s rendition over Streisand’s, not only because her performance is vocally stronger but also because her version is set up to magnify her presence, for example, through the kinetic energy of walking through the gardens. Also cut from the film is ‘Wait Till We’re Sixty-Five,’ a duet for Daisy and her fiancé Warren; it was to be his only song in the film so its excision is significant. The role of Tad, Daisy’s stepbrother, played by Jack Nicholson, was also trimmed generally and his only

barbra streisand stage-to-screen adaptations   439 song, ‘Who Is There among Us Who Knows,’ in which Streisand hummed along, was filmed but then cut.33 It is striking, in fact, that all musical interaction between Streisand and other characters is completely excised from the movie. But in an ingenious move, Lerner and Lane add a duet for Streisand with her alter ego, a song called ‘Go to Sleep’ that was written specially for the film. Lerner conceives the number as an interaction between Daisy, who is attracted to Marc despite being engaged to Warren, and her conscience, who encourages her not to follow her erotic impulse. It is the most playful scene in the movie, partly because the design of Streisand’s costume, bedclothes, and w ­ allpaper all match one another, as if Daisy’s psychological fracturing has spread to her surroundings. More importantly, the scene affirms Streisand’s stardom by implying that the only performer she can duet with in the film is herself. Her allure, and that of Melinda, is also accentuated in the performance of ‘He Isn’t You.’ Here, in another regression sequence, Melinda is seen at the harp. Streisand’s voice can be heard delivering the song, but her mouth does not move—the return of a device used in both Funny Girl and Dolly. The vocal performance is intimate and because there is no physical effort shown in the onscreen visuals, the audience focuses on the nuances of Streisand’s vocals. The set-up also serves the dramatic situation well: Marc is now thoroughly obsessed with Melinda and believes she is interacting with him, in the past. Later in the song, Marc and Melinda are shown dancing together in a fantasy sequence that transcends the limitations of time and realism. As the impossible object of male desire, Melinda/Streisand is once again framed as the star. Streisand’s other important musical moment in the movie is ‘What Did I Have That I Don’t Have.’ In the Broadway version, the song is a straightforward blues song in which Daisy laments the fact that Mark does not love her. It was a highlight of the show for the Broadway actress, Barbara Harris, but it explored one expressive idea throughout (the lament of the jilted lover). In the film, however, it becomes a much more extensive dramatic scene for Streisand. Daisy has just discovered the tapes on which Chabot has recorded her sessions of hypnosis, as well as his reactions to them, and she is devastated. The delivery of the verse is relatively free and the vocal performance is saturated with the sound of sobbing, but the treatment of the first section of the first refrain is particularly interesting. The arrangement engineers a long, slow growth in momentum and speed. Initially, the orchestra plays just one chord per bar, accompanying colla voce to allow Streisand to deliver the vocal part almost like a spoken monologue: the presence of pitch perhaps distracts from the fact that all sense of metre is absent at first, in contrast to the tighter rhythmic pattern of the Broadway version heard on the cast album. In Streisand’s version, the rhythm kicks in after a few lines but is still fairly lazy and light. The ­performance becomes more emphatic leading into ‘I’m just a victim of time,’ where a harp glissando initiates a warmer and more assertive string accompaniment. The final section of the first rendition resumes the easier feel of the first part, then Daisy has a spoken section where she mourns her situation. She then takes a phone call from Chabot, in which she loses her temper. The underscore changes to a hot drum rhythm to communicate a change of mood from despair to

440   musical theatre screen adaptations defiance. Streisand then performs another refrain of the song at double tempo and with constant deviation from the pitches of the vocal line and notated rhythms. The blueprint of the routine would appear to be ‘My Man’ from the Funny Girl film. Both songs feature a slower opening that is tearful, spontaneous, emotional, metrically free, and highly ‘acted.’ In the middle, a change of mood leads to a defiant continuation of both songs that is more up-tempo (though this aspect is exaggerated in ‘What Did I Have’) and richly scored. The dramatic situation of both songs is similar—a rejected woman reflects on her position—yet although the second half of both songs continues in the torch song vein from a lyrical point of view, Streisand’s rendition (and the accompaniment/arrangement) implies a contradiction or rejection of the words. This tension between language and message helps to draw attention to Streisand’s presence and power: the message ultimately overwhelms the language, and this enhances the status of the messenger.

Conclusion In his insightful book on Streisand, Neal Gabler observes: ‘Every movie Streisand made, the awful ones as well as the good ones, were unmistakably Streisand movies—movies in which her personality dominated, as is usually the case in star vehicles, but also in which her theme dominated, which is not always the case, even for major stars. . . . [S]he is always the auteur, the major creative force, and in her films, no less than in her music, she provides the governing idea, the overarching continuity.’34 We have seen how what Gabler describes as Streisand’s ‘creative force’ functions as an agent of adaptation in Funny Girl, Hello, Dolly! and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, both in the revision of material or the framing of her performances. The extension of her musical (vocal) presence and the trimming or deletion of other characters’ (especially the male stars’) songs in all three films contributes to the feeling that they are Streisand movies; with Funny Girl and On a Clear Day, her musical domination almost gives the impression that the movies are Streisand albums with dramatic context. Indeed, aspects of musical arrangement that can be found in Streisand’s early albums are adopted in these movies too. For instance, she made various records where she reversed the conventional tempo of a song, most famously in her down-tempo version of ‘Happy Days Are Here Again,’ and this approach individualizes her tempo-reversing rendition of ‘So Long, Dearie’ in Dolly. Similarly, the division of her recording of ‘Down with Love’ into a very slow, ­ad-libbed opening refrain and a hyper-fast closing one, was mirrored in the arrangement of ‘What Did I Have’ in On a Clear Day. Adding songs especially for Streisand’s screen ­performances (‘Funny Girl,’ ‘Just Leave Everything to Me,’ ‘Go to Sleep,’ etc.) further individualizes the films as works so that she is not simply required to reperform fixed texts that had been widely performed on the stage: the films are new texts in every sense. Yet the dramatic element matters too, of course, and each musical has been adopted for the screen in ways that accommodate Streisand. The screen Funny Girl adds a framing device to render the story as a flashback in her head, allowing Streisand to act as the lens

barbra streisand stage-to-screen adaptations   441 for the story and removing other characters’ perspectives; the screen Dolly emphasizes aspects of the character that attempt to deflect the problems of the actress’s age; and the screen Clear Day taps into her fragmentation as a star by allowing her to play a range of roles from the young Melinda to Daisy’s alter ego/conscience (in the ‘Go to Sleep’ scene). The latter is particularly successful in showing her range, from vulnerable to strong and from comic to serious, though these aspects are also well demonstrated in Funny Girl and hinted at in the finer moments of Dolly. Pamela Robertson Wojcik observes that Streisand’s ‘star persona produces a unique variant of the musical genre.’35 As part of this personal stamping process, certain elements of Streisand’s film musicals run throughout her career, such as the ‘travel and stride’ sequences in ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ (Funny Girl), ‘Before the Parade Passes By’ (Dolly), ‘Come Back to Me’ (Clear Day), ‘Let’s Hear It for Me’ (Funny Lady), and ‘A Piece of Sky’ (Yentl).36 Streisand’s artistic output as a whole—whether it is to one’s personal taste or not—has a coherence based on artistic choices, presentation, and aspects of production that are common to multiple examples of her work, regardless of genre or character; but it was potent from the beginning of her screen career with her three Broadway-to-Hollywood musicals, where her stardom was a powerful agent of adaptation.

Notes 1. Matthew Kennedy, Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4. 2. Kennedy, Roadshow, 5. 3. Quoted in Kennedy, Roadshow, 60. Original source: New York Times, 19 September 1968. 4. Quoted in Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway (New York: Schirmer, 1990), 236, 238. 5. Telegram reproduced at http://barbra-archives.com/live/60s/funny_girl_broadway_1b. html, accessed 14 February 2018. 6. Hebert Kretzmer, ‘Super Girl!,’ Daily Express, 14 April 1966; reproduced on http://barbraarchives.com/live/60s/funny_girl_london_5.html, accessed 14 February 2018. 7. Kennedy, Roadshow, 60. According to http://barbra-archives.com/films/funny_girl_­ streisand_1.html, accessed 14 February 2018, the announcement was made on 25 December 1965. 8. Army Archerd, Variety, 7 July 1967; reproduced at http://barbra-archives.com/films/ funny_girl_streisand_1.html#filming, accessed 14 February 2018. 9. Various relevant primary sources appear at http://barbra-archives.com/films/funny_girl_ streisand_2.html, accessed 14 February 2018. 10. Quoted in Lorraine LoBianco’s TCM blogpost on Hello, Dolly!, http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/188872%7C0/Hello-Dolly-.html, accessed 16 February 2018. 11. Vincent Canby, ‘On Screen, Barbra Streisand Displays a Detached Cool,’ New York Times, 18 December 1969, http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9807E2D6123CEE34BC4 052DFB4678382679EDE, accessed 16 February 2018. 12. In the absence of other sources, the Barbra Archives website was consulted; it cites an article in American Cinematographer from 1970, which gives these facts. See http://barbraarchives.com/films/hello_dolly_streisand.html, accessed 16 February 2018. 13. Darcie Denkert, A Fine Romance (New York: Billboard, 2005) 290.

442   musical theatre screen adaptations 14. Jerry Herman, Showtune (New York: Donald Fine, 2001), 210–211. Herman overlooks the fact, of course, that Kelly began his career as a Broadway performer, his most notable appearance being in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey. 15. Quoted in Anne Edwards, Streisand: A Biography (New York: Taylor Trade, 2016 [reprint]), 199. 16. Quoted in Edwards, Streisand, 199. 17. ‘Barbra Streisand: On a Clear Day You Can See Dolly,’ Look, 16 December 1969, http:// barbra-archives.com/bjs_library/60s/look_69_dolly.html, accessed 16 February 2018. 18. Howard Kissel, The Abominable Showman (New York: Applause, 1993), 366. 19. See Kennedy, Roadshow, 205, for details. 20. The announcement is quoted in Kennedy, Roadshow, 147. 21. See Kennedy, Roadshow, 174. The casting is also discussed at http://barbra-archives.com/ films/clear_day_streisand_1.html, accessed 16 February 2018. 22. Details of the filming are covered comprehensively in Stephen Harvey, Directed by Vincente Minnelli (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 287–289, and at http://barbra-archives.com/ films/clear_day_tests_filming.html, accessed 16 February 2018. 23. See Dominic McHugh, Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 183–184, for an explanation of this issue. 24. Vincent Canby, ‘On a Clear Day You Can See Forever Begins Its Run,’ 18 June 1970, http:// www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C06E4D6103EE034BC4052DFB066838B669 EDE, accessed 5 March 2018. 25. Although the dialogue for the scene is quite different, the show was similarly to have started with Fanny ‘picking out the notes of “People” ’ on the rehearsal piano. 26. In his memoir, Minnelli takes the credit for the reverse order of the regression sequences, which he describes as ‘not much of a story,’ in an attempt to add tension to the film. However, several drafts of the screenplay show reverse chronology in these sequences, so Lerner may also have had this idea. Vincente Minnelli, with H. Arce, Vincente Minnelli: I Remember It Well (Hollywood, CA: Samuel French, 1990 [1974]), 364. 27. See http://barbra-archives.com/films/funny_girl_movie_cut1.html, accessed 9 March 2018. 28. See http://barbra-archives.com/films/funny_girl_movie_cut1.html, accessed 9 March 2018. 29. Theodor Taylor, Jule: The Story of Composer Jule Styne (New York: Random House, 1979), 247. 30. In fact, Styne started objecting to the idea of interpolating ‘My Man’—which Streisand had sung as an encore after the final curtain of her last Broadway performance of Funny Girl—as early as July 1965. In a letter in the Bob Merrill Collection at the Library of Congress, producer Ray Stark reassures Styne that ‘I have neither the desire nor the intention to use the song “MY MAN” in the motion picture version of “FUNNY GIRL.” ’ Bob Merrill Collection, Library of Congress, box 2. 31. ‘Who Are You Now?,’ annotated copyist score, Bob Merrill Collection, Library of Congress. 32. A draft of the screenplay with Marc’s version can be read in the Alan Jay Lerner collection at the Library of Congress. The song was prerecorded and can be heard at http://barbraarchives.com/films/clear_day_streisand_8.html, accessed 8 March 2018. 33. Matt Howe discusses the filming and cutting of these numbers, with illustrations, at http:// barbra-archives.com/films/clear_day_streisand_9.html (‘Wait Till We’re Sixty-Five’) and http://barbra-archives.com/films/clear_day_streisand_8.html (‘Who Is There’), accessed 8 March 2018.

barbra streisand stage-to-screen adaptations   443 34. Neal Gabler, Barbra Streisand: Redefining Beauty: Femininity, and Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 124–125. 35. Pamela Robertson Wojcik, ‘The Streisand Musical,’ in The Sound of Musicals, ed. Steven Cohan (London: BFI, 2010), 129. 36. Wojcik, ‘The Streisand Musical,’ 134.

pa rt V

M U LT I PL E A DA P TAT IONS OF A SI NGL E WOR K

chapter 20

Th e Shifti ng Sa n d of Or ien ta lism The Desert Song on Stage and Screen William A. Everett

Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1926 romantic operetta, The Desert Song, captured the hearts of countless fans in various stage productions. To capitalize on this popularity, Warner Brothers released three full-length adaptations of the adventurous romance, in 1929, 1943, and 1953, as well as a short version called The Red Shadow in 1932. In 1955, the classic operetta was broadcast live on network television. All versions of the tale, whether on stage or screen, explore the nebulous world of Orientalism, defined here as a Western construct of an imagined East. This chapter introduces each incarnation of The Desert Song and explores how the operetta’s various manifestations over nearly thirty years, from the stage version in 1926 to the television version of 1955, address shifting relationships in terms of world politics, depictions of Otherness, and the interplay between reality and fantasy. As an operetta, music takes centre stage, and no matter what the storyline, the performance of the musical score is what draws audiences. Romberg wrote some of his most beloved tunes for The Desert Song, including the evocative title song with its waltz refrain, the heroic ‘Riff Song’ featuring a thunderous male chorus, the perky ‘Romance’ with its coloratura obbligato, and the languid ‘One Alone,’ an ode to monogamy. What distinguishes this operetta from many of its counterparts, however, is its contemporary, though exotic, setting. While this element is not unique to the genre (Strauss’s Die Fledermaus [1874] is set at the time of its creation), many operettas are set in a distant time and place with the express purpose of evoking a sense of fantasy, nostalgia, and nevermore. Against such backdrops, contemporary issues and attitudes are often reflected, refracted, and interrogated. When it comes to the real-world setting of The Desert Song, France had established a protectorate in Morocco in 1916, in effect asserting colonial control while allow­ing Morocco to maintain its sovereignty. The first resident-general in Morocco,

448   musical theatre screen adaptations Hubert Lyautey (Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey, 1854–1934) wanted to work with the Moroccan sultan Yusef ben Hassan (1882–1927, ruled 1912–27) to ‘modernize’ Moroccan society according to French principles. Lyautey held his post until 1925, though Morocco ­continued to be a French protectorate until 1956, when it gained its independence. Significantly, the original stage libretto for The Desert Song is set in 1925, the exact time that Lyautey was concluding his direct role in Morocco, and all versions of the tale discussed here were created while Morocco was a French protectorate and not a fully autonomous state. Concerning Orientalism, John Maier remarks on the construct in Desert Songs: Western Images of Morocco and Moroccan Images of the West: ‘Orientalism at its worst involves crude stereotyping of supposedly inferior peoples. Somewhat more frequently, the Orient is imaged [sic] as a backward place in need of modernizing and ­civilizing—in the direction, of course, of the West.’1 In the 1926 stage play and the 1929 film, Morocco exists as an underdeveloped land of vast mystery and primal sexuality. This shifts in the version from the early 1940s, where the Moroccans are vilified and depicted as treacherous and devious Nazi collaborators. The next decade’s version offers a blend of the two constructions (though without the Nazi element), while the television version returns to the spirit of the original. Music occupies a ­central role in each of these discourses. Romberg’s musical stylings differentiate between European and non-European characters through the use of major and minor modes, and in the mid-century film adaptations, the indigenous-sounding musics add a sense of documentary realism, as do diegetic performances of several key musical numbers.

The 1926 Stage Original: Chic Meets Sheik Among the central works in the American operetta repertory stands The Desert Song.2 With a rhapsodic score by Sigmund Romberg (1887–1951), a contemporary book by Frank Mandel (1884–1958), and romantic lyrics by Otto Harbach (1873–1963) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960), the work opened at the Moorish-clad Casino Theatre on 30 November 1926 and played 471 performances in its original Broadway run. Mandel and Laurence Schwab (1893–1951) produced the work, which marked a change in Romberg’s approach to operetta. Rather than having a bittersweet ending in which the principal lovers are not together at the final curtain (such as in Maytime [1917], Blossom Time [1921] or The Student Prince in Heidelberg [1924]), the lovers now embrace for a happy ending. Equally important is the show’s setting in the immediate past. Whereas orthodox operetta recreated the past through rose-tinted glasses, The Desert Song looked to current events through an Orientalist gaze. Its creators sought to blend

the desert song on stage and screen   449 nostalgic sentiment with present-day situations, a difficult concoction and one that was not always convincing. The show transferred to London, where it opened at Drury Lane on 7 April 1927 for 432 performances and subsequently appeared in translation throughout continental Europe. The stage show’s popularity continued for decades, with scores of professional, amateur, and summer stock companies mounting productions throughout the Englishspeaking world.

The Story: Pierre Loves Margot, Who Thinks She Loves Paul, Who Is Lusted after by Azuri, Who Detests the General, Who . . . The operetta’s convoluted web of relationships is set in 1925 in Morocco. Pierre Birabeau (played by Robert Halliday), the nerdy son of the new commander of a military outpost, is in love with the beautiful Margot Bonvalet (played by Vivienne Segal), a woman he knew in France.3 Margot, though, feigns disinterest in Pierre; she wants to be with a hero. Her wish to be with a champion actually motivated Pierre to come to Morocco, where he could earn medals for bravery, which in turn could help him win Margot’s heart. Margot, however, has come to Morocco to be with Paul Fontaine, a French officer with whom she thinks she is in love. Paul’s father was the former commander of the French outpost and was known as ‘the butcher’ because of his desperate cruelty. Pierre, while under the elder Fontaine’s command, was ordered to attack Riff villages, acts he found appalling. He resigned from the military and seems to enjoy a life of picking wildflowers. Since Pierre’s resignation, the mysterious Red Shadow keeps thwarting the French military’s efforts. Hassi, a Riff, is the only one among his people who knows the truth: the Red Shadow is Pierre. After the death of the senior Fontaine, the French appoint a new commander: Pierre’s father. General Birabeau’s primary goal in coming to Morocco is to dispose of the Red Shadow. The General is very disappointed with his son and even tells him at one point that he wishes he would just do one thing to make him proud. Margot, meanwhile, has discovered that Paul isn’t the man she thought he was and that he’s only a ‘military machine.’4 She confesses to Pierre that even though he (Pierre) is far from heroic, he is the only person who truly understands her. But when Margot hears of the Red Shadow, she is captivated by his mystique and adventurous spirit. The General, hoping to embarrass Pierre for his lack of overt masculinity, tells his son that Margot wishes the Red Shadow would come and carry her over the sands. So, Pierre changes clothes, enters as the Red Shadow, and whisks Margot off to the desert as the first act ends. Act 2 opens at Ali Ben Ali’s desert palace, where a troupe of Spanish dancing girls entertains the guests. Ali Ben Ali simply cannot understand why Pierre is so smitten

450   musical theatre screen adaptations with Margot, one woman, and Moroccan and European cultural differences emerge in the musical-dramatic scene ‘Eastern and Western Love.’ General Birabeau arrives to rescue Margot and meets the Red Shadow, whom he challenges to a duel. Swords drawn, the Red Shadow drops his. By forfeiting the duel, the Red Shadow can no longer lead the Riffs and must be banished into the desert with only his broken sword. General Birabeau orders Fontaine to go into the desert and kill the Red Shadow. Azuri, a native dancer who is obsessed with Fontaine and knows the Red Shadow’s true identity, asks the General repeatedly and with increasing intensity, ‘Where is Pierre?’ The General finally realizes his son’s dual identity. Fontaine returns and tells the assembled group that the Red Shadow is dead. When Fontaine confesses that it was Pierre who killed him, everyone is surprised, except for the General, who is relieved. Pierre enters, carrying the costume of the Red Shadow. In a short scene that follows, father and son pledge to work together to protect the Riffs. Margot enters, angry with Pierre that he killed an unarmed man. Pierre dons the Red Shadow’s costume, joins her in a reprise of ‘One Alone,’ and kisses her as she realizes the truth. Benjamin ‘Bennie’ Kidd, a newspaper reporter for the Paris Daily Mail, and Susan, his secretary, provide comic respite and serve as foils for the primary love story of Pierre and Margot. Bennie and Susan have a curious sort of platonic relationship, though Susan begs for something more intimate. Their duet, ‘It,’ is an ode to sex appeal. It is performed in a nearly speech-singing style reminiscent of music hall. The song’s fast tempo, frequent rests, and references to Sigmund Freud and Elinor Glyn place it in a syncopated style closer to sexualized revue than to sentimental operetta. Glyn’s novel It, from which the song takes its title, was first published serially in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1926, the same year in which The Desert Song appeared. Their characters further root the show in the present day. Benny resists the advances of not only Susan but also Clementina, the leader of the Spanish dancers, and explains his reticence as the result of women treating him badly when he was young in his quasi-pitiable song ‘Bold Women.’

Orientalist Discourse in the 1920s Edward  W.  Said’s theory of Orientalism, as demonstrated in his landmark study, Orientalism,5 permeates The Desert Song. Desert locales especially became symbols for underdevelopment—unchangeable terrains that were trapped in an uncivilized (by Western standards) stasis. These vast landscapes added to the allure of Orientalist discourse. Furthermore, the Orientalist/colonialist notion that the peoples living in the Orient needed Western assistance is evident in The Desert Song, for near the end General Birabeau and Pierre pledge to work together to help the Riffs, who, ironically, might not need their help if the French were not in Morocco in the first place! When Howard Carter discovered King Tutankhamen’s tomb on 26 November 1922, a new wave of Orientalism erupted, one that melded nineteenth-century perfumed exoticism with contemporary media. New technologies of photography, print media, and film brought news of ancient civilizations to the world. Europeans (and Americans)

the desert song on stage and screen   451 subsequently became aware of current events in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. The character of Bennie, in a way, represents homage to the foreign press corps of the time; he is in Morocco to tell the world about the Red Shadow. Following nineteenth-century models, the Orient was being conceived as a land of overt sexuality, with rugged macho men and alluring, barely clothed women vying for the attention of Westerners. Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926), in the title role of The Sheik (1921), embodied the image of a virile exotic male. Valentino popularized sideburns as a symbol of male virility, and his image of a kaffiyeh-covered man became the personification of lust and violence.6 This attitude appears in The Desert Song in how the Riff men are imagined as physically (and sexually) superior to Europeans. For example, Margot tells Pierre that the Red Shadow, who she thinks at this point is a Riff, is ‘about a head taller than you.’7 Later, Clementina, exasperated with the strength of Arab men, tells Ali Ben Ali, ‘Oh, I will be so happy when I can meet a real man again—a nice, weak Western man.’8 Regarding the female imagining of the Orient, a substantial tradition existed whose musical incarnations included Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (1877), with its sultry bacchanal, and Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905), most notably ‘The Dance of the  Seven Veils.’ Significantly, both of these examples rely on the physicality of the female performer for their meaning. A reviewer of The Desert Song in Boston offered a contextually apt description of Pearl Regay, who played Azuri: ‘Then, when tribal musicians drummed and piped, she wove Azuri’s body into writhings, whirlings, bendings, archings wondrous to see.’9 The nearly erotic element is also evident in the remarks of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office when it reviewed the play for licensing in London. The examiner, George Street, noted that ‘the scenes at Ali ben Ali’s include a good deal of voluptuous dancing and so on, but we can be sure that kind of thing will be kept within bounds at Drury Lane.’10 Orientalist fantasy held a potent allure for audiences. Film emerged as a notable medium for Orientalist discourse, the exemplar being The Sheik.11 The film’s plot was an emblematic colonial rescue fantasy—a Western woman is kidnapped by an Arab and rescued by a European. In The Sheik (and in The Desert Song), the ‘Arab’ kidnapper is a disguised European, and the kidnapper and the rescuer are in fact the same person. Valentino, star of The Sheik, died on 23 August 1926 at the young age of thirty-one.12 At the time, Romberg and Hammerstein were working on The Desert Song at the Hotel Marie Antoinette, across the street from Campbell’s Funeral Parlor, where Valentino’s body lay in state. They saw and heard the tremendous outpouring of grief, and since their new work included tropes associated with the immortalized star, Romberg and Hammerstein were prepared to ride the wave of Valentino’s legend. The Sheik, with its plot of disguise and dual identity, was an obvious influence on The Desert Song. Real-life inspirations also existed for The Desert Song, including Lawrence of Arabia (Thomas Edward Lawrence, 1888–1935), an Englishman who donned dashing robes and whose exploits in the Near East were well known in the English-speaking world. He himself added to his celebrity status by privately publishing his autobiography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in 1926, the same year that The Desert Song appeared.

452   musical theatre screen adaptations His  personal account had the flavour of a heroic epic adventure, the spirit of which infuses much of The Desert Song. Gertrude Bell (1868–1926) also figures into the story. Here was an Englishwoman who became famous for her travels in the Arab world through the books she wrote about her experiences.13 Her contributions to Arab culture were greatly lauded after her death on 12 July 1926 in Baghdad, five and half months prior to the opening of The Desert Song. Bell could have been an inspiration for intrepid women like Margot and Susan, who travel to distant climes. Finally, there was Abd El-Krim (1882–1963), a real-life Riff leader who detested ­foreign rule in Morocco. In 1904, Spain and France divided Morocco into spheres of influence, and in 1920, Abd El-Krim led a four-year revolt that eventually drove the Spaniards out of Morocco. In 1925, France and Spain formed an alliance to defeat Abd-El Krim and his Riff forces. They achieved victory the following year (the year of The Desert Song’s premiere), though it took 25,000 French and Spanish troops to do so. The Red Shadow’s efforts paralleled those of Abd El-Krim, though the real Riff leader was not a disguised European. Speaking of the Riffs, they are an actual Berber tribe that resides in northern Morocco and Algeria. Adult men wear a long blue veil (a tegelmoust) to cover their faces, with a slit for the eyes.14 This level of costume accuracy would not be possible in The Desert Song, for the actors must have their mouths uncovered in order to project their singing voices. In short, the Orientalist perspective reflected in The Desert Song conflates a sense of present-day realism, notable in the appearance of Riffs in French-controlled Morocco, with Orientalist images inherited from the nineteenth century, especially sexual allure. The appeal of Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik with the general attraction of Orientalist cinema as well as the autobiographical tales of Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell similarly played into The Desert Song’s tale of romance, disguise, and desert fantasy.

Musical Orientalism in The Desert Song In 1928, Romberg offered his views on modes and their ethnic associations. ‘Music is in two categories: major and minor. Hungarian, Russian, and Balkan States, Persia, and India take music in the minor key; Anglo-Saxon and Latin countries are written in major.’15 To extend this axiom to The Desert Song, European characters sing resolutely in major, while Moroccan ones perform in minor, often with chromatic inflections. When ambiguity exists, as in the case of the dual identity of Pierre and the Red Shadow, Romberg employs musical means to accentuate this split personality. This tonal trope is readily apparent in the ‘The Desert Song,’ the luscious waltz duet that is also the operetta’s title song. Pierre begins the verse by singing in Margot’s major-mode language, ‘Why waste your time in vague romancing,’ in D-flat major. As he dons the persona of the Red Shadow, though, he shifts to C-sharp minor (the enharmonic

the desert song on stage and screen   453 parallel minor) to intone the inviting ‘My desert is waiting’ in a largely pentatonic vocal line. When he reaches the refrain, he is again Pierre the Frenchman and expresses the wistful ‘Blue heaven and you and I’ in D-flat major. He is being truthful in all things—his European heritage and his love for Margot—so he must sing in his native major mode. Through adroit shifting between major and minor, we hear this single character express himself in his two personas, the major-mode Frenchman and the minor-mode Riff leader. A similar harmonic technique exists in ‘The Riff Song.’ The verse of the heroic male choral number begins in D minor and centres on a sustained G sharp, a tritone away from the tonic, and a pitch that immediately establishes a sense of aural Otherness. The Riffs are not Europeans, and their tonal language immediately affirms this distinction. The refrain, which features their leader, the European-born Red Shadow, hovers between F major and D minor and thus confirms the dual identity (European and Riff leader) of Pierre/Red Shadow. The ‘Eastern and Western Love’ sequence near the beginning of act 2 likewise employs musical means to distinguish between the two approaches to gender relations, Eastern polygamy and Western monogamy. Two Moroccans, Ali Ben Ali and Sid El Kar, explain their views of love in their respective songs ‘Let Love Go’ and ‘One Flower Grows Alone in Your Garden,’ both of which are in F minor. As non-Westerners, they perform in the minor mode. The vocal ranges of both men also prove to be exotic (for Broadway audiences), for Ali Ben Ali is a low bass and Sid El Kar is a high tenor. After they have expressed their views, Pierre enters with ‘One Alone,’ his ode to monogamy as clearly reflected in the title, in A-flat major. He expresses his European view in the major mode. Furthermore, he is a baritone, a mid-range, familiar voice, as opposed to the extreme ranges heard immediately before. The Christian world of monogamy, by appearing last in the sequence, dominates the Eastern, Islamic world of polygamy, indicating, though an Orientalist gaze, the latter to be inferior to the former.16 A related sort of treatment is evident in the music of the female characters. Margot is the soprano heroine who dreams of romance with one man in the effusive ‘Romance,’ with its resolutely major mode. Her foils are Clementina and Azuri, both personifications of an exotic Other. Clementina is one of the Spanish dancing girls at the beginning of act 2 who performs her ‘Song of the Brass Key’ in a sultry mezzo voice; she is the ­progeny of Carmen from Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera. The music begins in the minor mode but turns to major for the refrain. The liminal place of Spain in the musical and dramatic discourse is summoned here—Spain is exotic on one hand, akin to North Africa with its Moorish influence; and European on the other, for it too had acted as a European colonizing force in Morocco. Furthermore, as a mezzo, Clementina is as much a musical foil for Margot, a soprano, as a dramatic one. Azuri, likewise, is a Moroccan dancer who seeks revenge on men who have wronged her, including Paul Fontaine. She does not sing but appears over a slithering chromatic monophonic line in the orchestra filled with half steps and augmented seconds; her music—and life—lie far away from Margot’s effusive major-mode world.

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1929: A Faithful Rendition in a New Medium Warner Bros. purchased exclusive motion picture rights to The Desert Song on 4 March 1928,17 and the studio released two versions of its film the following year, a dialogue version and a nondialogue version, the latter of which included cue cards.18 We focus here on the dialogue version, since it holds the distinction of being the first full-length screen adaptation of a Broadway musical with all-synchronized sound. Its conception and realization remain extremely close to the stage original in terms of plot, music, and general atmosphere. The creators’ purpose was to recreate the theatrical original in a nascent medium. The film starred musical actor and former baseball player John Boles (1895–1969) in the dual role of Pierre/Red Shadow opposite radio singer Carlotta King (1898–2000) as Margot, with Myrna Loy (1905–1993), already famous for her vamp roles, as Azuri. Harvey Gates fashioned the screenplay after the original stage script, and Roy Del Ruth directed the 123-minute feature. Louis Silvers served as music director and led the Vitaphone Orchestra, whose more than hundred members sat just off-camera.19 The Desert Song was released on 8 April 1929. But just how close to the original was this 1929 adaptation? The courts actually answered this question. Lillian Macloon, who held stage rights for the show west of and including Denver and Winnipeg, filed a suit against Warner Bros. She claimed that the film caused unfair competition for her stage productions.20 Macloon lost the case as well as her appeal.21 A similar instance occurred in the United Kingdom. The studio paid Lee Ephraim, who held the stage rights to the show, £1,000 to release The Desert Song film in London, noting that the trouble apparently was that the ‘DESERT SONG’ after a long run at the Drury Lane Theatre, was then being shown in the provinces, and Lee Ephraim, who held the rights, naturally had to be squared before he would submit to the competition of the film.22

While the romantic tale was maintained, even down to a great deal of specific dialogue, the comedic elements were severely curtailed. Benny and Susan are no longer a comic couple, and indeed, Benny (played by Johnny Arthur) is coded as homosexual.23 After he falls off his horse and is brought to a Riff camp, suspected of being a spy, he slyly tells one of his captors, ‘How’s it goin’, Big Boy?’ Susan seems basically content with their asexual relationship, and after they spend a night together in the desert, she disappointingly confesses that nothing happened, for ‘he was such a gentleman.’ Whenever Benny and Susan appear, ‘It’—their song in the original stage version concerning sex appeal—is heard in the underscoring, though the song itself is never featured. As a pioneering work in the history of Hollywood film, this Desert Song also takes on a salient feature of ‘silent-era’ films, the omnipresence of musical underscoring.

the desert song on stage and screen   455 Rex Dunn created a tapestry based on Romberg’s themes. Dunn’s underscoring is rooted in standard Hollywood practice, where specific musical signifiers are associated with specific characters or screen events. This became known as a ‘classical film score’ and is a descendant of the Leitmotif system. For example, whenever the Riffs are conferring, ‘The Riff Song’ is heard, while ‘French Military Marching Song’ accompanies the French army. The screenplay’s adherence to the stage libretto includes its Orientalist aspects. Notably, the ‘Eastern and Western Love’ sequence appears intact, as do the culture-defining modal cues of the stage version. The vast desert terrain and its promise as a land of adventure and mystery, a central tenet of Orientalism, squares front and centre in this version. Several of the spectacular scenes appeared in Technicolor to enhance their allure.24 Critics lauded the effort though they qualified their praise. Harry Evans, writing in Life magazine, admired the film’s sweeping desert vistas, which cinema could give its audiences in a way that live theatre could not. The incongruence between this level of realism and the sentimental romance of an operetta, though, posed a critical disruption: However, the effectiveness of these shots is one of the disturbing elements of the picture, because the realism created is in direct conflict with the theatrical atmosphere of the singing scenes. For instance, one moment you see a gang of Arabs riding over the sands hell bent on death and destruction, and the next they are shown in a typical stage interior humming tenor accompaniments while the lovers sing ditties at each other.25

Veracity and fantasy came head to head, and some sort of accord between the two narrative styles remained unresolved in the film. The reviewer for Variety offered a possible solution to the film’s incongruity: ‘It is not what might have been accomplished had picture license been taken, to which it would lend itself easily.’26 Perhaps reworking the storyline and adjusting the placement of musical numbers would help alleviate the disparity between cinematic realism and operetta-like escapism. This approach began to be considered in the late 1930s, when Warner Bros. was thinking about a new film of The Desert Song, one with a significantly altered plot. MGM did this with its 1930 treatment of The New Moon, Romberg and Hammerstein’s operetta from 1928, where the setting was changed from eighteenth-century Louisiana to nineteenth-century Russia.27 But before another full-length treatment arrived, the studio released a highly condensed version of the operetta to showcase its most famous songs.

1932: A Vitafone Short Called The Red Shadow, the nineteen-minute short directed by Ray Mack showcased the talents of Alexander Gray as Pierre/The Red Shadow and Bernice Claire as Margot. The stars had appeared together on stage in The Desert Song many times and recreated their beloved theatrical performances for the camera.

456   musical theatre screen adaptations As in the 1929 version, all the dialogue is underscored, this time by David Mendoza, a staff composer at Warner Bros. Mendoza also created a shortened paraphrase of ‘Azuri’s Dance’ for the film. The basic romantic plot of Pierre/The Red Shadow and Margot is all that remains of the multilayered storyline. As would be expected, the film includes shortened versions (usually refrains) of the operetta’s most endearing music. It begins with two refrains of the evocative title song followed immediately by the rousing ‘Riff Song.’ The leads offer a duet rendition of ‘One Alone.’ The exotically tinged ‘One Flower Grows Alone in a Garden’28 (from the ‘Eastern and Western Love’ sequence) appears in its entirety, and the film concludes with stirring choral reprises of ‘Riff Song’ and the title song. The practice of adding new songs to film versions of The Desert Song begins here. (This was becoming standard practice in film adaptations of Broadway musicals.) Cliff Hess created a new song, ‘Morocco Bound,’ that was supposed to create a sense of exotic Otherness early in the film. In the final cut, only an instrumental version appears as brief underscoring. ‘Romance,’ Margot’s effusive ode in the original, likewise appears only as instrumental background music. The Red Shadow distilled The Desert Song to its most basic escapist romantic elements and offered its audiences abridged performances of its most popular musical numbers. This was a strong reminder that the music of The Desert Song is its most enduring quality.

Unrealized Treatments, 1936–1942 Since Warner Bros. held the exclusive rights to film adaptations of The Desert Song, in the 1930s, it began developing new storylines to surround the songs in a way that was less stilted and more plausible than in the 1929 adaptation. As the studio executives learned, audiences were much more willing to suspend belief in a live theatrical ­performance than they were in the cinema when it came to a musical treatment of a ­contemporary subject. In 1935, MGM’s film adaptation of Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta placed the singing team of Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy firmly in the public consciousness in a vehicle that prided itself on its historical escapism. Since The Desert Song was set in the recent past, this type of historical distancing was simply not possible. Therefore, creative restructurings of the narrative were necessary, ones that would keep a disguised male lead firmly in place while altering other aspects of the story. These treatments ranged from the nearly comical, where the whole idea of the Red Shadow is a publicity stunt, to the politically realistic, complete with Nazis. Elements of several of these unrealized efforts would eventually appear in subsequent film versions. Several versions of the tale appeared during the 1930s and early 1940s. In Robert Lord’s treatment from December 1934, Paul Fontaine is engaged to marry Margot Lambert, but when he shows up late at a Parisian restaurant, the rake Pierre dances with her. This infuriates Pierre’s uncle, the General, who orders Pierre to resign from the

the desert song on stage and screen   457 army. Pierre and his friend Benny, a journalist, go to Algiers, where the Caliph Ali Ben Ali hires Pierre to command his army and Benny to be his publicity person. Since Ali wants publicity, Pierre and Benny concoct the story of the Red Shadow and print stories about how Ali Ben Ali plans to kill the menace. Meanwhile, Margot arrives in Algiers, confessing love for Pierre. The Riffs attack the French, and the Red Shadow kidnaps Margot. He removes his mask, and Margot ‘laughs and kisses him.’ At the end, Margot and Pierre are aboard a ship bound for Paris. At a costume party, Margot is wearing a native Moorish costume and Pierre is dressed as the Red Shadow. In this fanciful treatment, Margot learns of her lover’s dual identity early on, and Morocco is literally shown to be a source for make-believe costumes. Fantasy trumps any sense of reality. On 25 March 1936, Warner Bros. and Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation agreed to make a full-length film version of The Desert Song.29 Seton I. Miller prepared a ­preliminary scenario, dated 17 April 1936, and a version marked ‘Miller’s Script with [Robert] Lord’s changes’ from 7 July 1936 includes the directive to ‘eliminate as much operetta mood as possible.’30 It is in this version that the Red Shadow is renamed El Khobar, as happens in the subsequent films. (Because of fears surrounding ­communism, calling a hero ‘The Red Shadow’ had become untenable. So he becomes El Khobar, which is actually the name of a city in Saudi Arabia.) Pierre becomes Paul Bernard, and Margot is now Liane. In the new plot, the Riffs kidnap Fontaine, who plans to marry Liane, and El Khobar rescues him. El Khobar then carries Liane, who knows he really is Paul, off to the desert. El Khobar is arrested, sentenced to die, and Bennie and Opal (the Susan character) slip El Khobar a gun so that he can escape. El Khobar and Liane ride off together as the film ends. Central to this discussion is the agreement that Romberg and Hammerstein signed to write a new song for the film, due no later than 1 November 1936. The agreement stipulated that the song could not be used in any other film until it had appeared in the new version of The Desert Song and that Romberg could use the song on any radio program on which he appeared, as long as he would not use it without the consent of Warner Bros. prior to the picture’s opening.31 The new song, ‘As Lovely as You Seem,’ is a wistful romance for Paul to sing to Liane.32 On 16 April 1937, the proposed film was cancelled.33 The previous August, R.  J. Obringer noted that casting and ‘other production problems’ were delaying the project.34 Warner Bros. returned to the property in the summer of 1938, with a new screenplay by Michael Fessier and Warren Duff.35 Pierre becomes Paul Bonnard, Margot is now light opera star Liane Dupre, and David Lansing is an Englishman who assumes Bennie’s character role. Making Margot a singer would allow for diegetic—that is, more cinematically realistic—performances of Romberg’s music. As with previous efforts in the 1930s, this version was also shelved. In August 1941, Robert Buckner and Charles Grayson proposed yet another new treatment for the operetta, which they described as ‘a valuable piece of studio property, a million-dollar title and one of the greatest musical scores of our times.’36 They found the story outdated and wanted to infuse it with ‘modern feeling’ and ‘real human beings instead of “Chocolate Soldiers,” ’37 a reference to the overt artifice of operettas such as

458   musical theatre screen adaptations Oscar Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier. Their version would be set in current times, with Nazi-occupied Vichy France ruling Morocco, and would feature two brothers with ­differing political views—one a supporter of the Vichy state and the other a supporter of Free France under Charles De Gaulle—who are in love with the same woman. Buckner and Grayson described the set-up: ‘The three of them together typify vividly the France of today, brother against brother, each believing his to be the right side; and the girl whose emotions are torn by loyalties.’38 In the proposed scenario, the Nazis are using slave labour to build a railroad across the Sahara to Dakar. The sole hope for the unwilling labourers lies in the Red Shadow. As in the original, the heroic Red Shadow has a mild-mannered alter ego, now called Paul Bonnard. The authors envisioned this as a role for Errol Flynn, claiming that it was ‘difficult to think of anyone else with the same color and dash that he could give the famous role.’39 Although Errol Flynn would be a massive audience draw, this was a musical and Flynn was not known as a singer. To address this, the creators envisioned a new character, Raoul Bonnard, Paul’s brother, to be played by Dennis Morgan. Raoul, who was a singer in Paris before the war, supports the Vichy government. The proposed scenario would thus provide two male leads—a swashbuckling hero (Flynn) and a singing sibling rival (Morgan). Furthermore, they introduced Denise Bonet as a singer from Paris who comes to Morocco to be near Raoul and becomes smitten with Paul. Raoul learns of his brother’s dual identity, and after a skirmish at the German governor’s palace, Raoul and Denise watch Paul ride off into the desert to continue his fight for freedom. A version dated 18 April 1942 outlines a revised approach to the basic story. The Errol Flynn-inspired Paul is jettisoned, as is the part of Raoul. Paul, whose dual identity again provides a fundamental plot point, is to have ‘a natural voice.’40 His alter ego, now called El Khobar, is seen ‘not as a crack-pot renegade’ but as someone who supports ‘the poor and the weak—the little guys of the earth.’41 Denise is still a singer, now the star ‘of one of those bush-league light opera troupes.’42 Benoit, the troupe’s manager, hears Paul sing and wants to make him a star. The notion of diegetic and dramatically believable reasons for songs to be sung is central to this vision of the storyline.

1942: Home-Front Propaganda On 17 December 1943, nearly fifteen months after its completion, Warner Brothers finally released its second full-length cinematic version of The Desert Song. Since many Hollywood studios were producing home-front propaganda musicals at the time, Robert Buckner’s adaptation of The Desert Song followed suit.43 The disguised hero (Dennis Morgan) in the ninety-six-minute film’s story of Nazi machinations in North Africa in 1937 is no longer a former French soldier but rather Paul Hudson, an American pianist who rides off to continue his fight for justice rather than remain with his beloved French chanteuse, Margot (Irene Manning).44 The addition of North African–sounding music and the diegetic presentation of much of the score provide a

the desert song on stage and screen   459 sense of documentary realism that helps shift the Orientalist markers from 1920s’ exotic resonances to 1940s’ real-world monikers. The Technicolor production offered plenty of spectacular desert scenery. The location filming took place at the Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona and near Gallup, New Mexico. The delay in the film’s release was largely due to its depiction of the French in North Africa. In December 1942, the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures decreed that the film presented an unsympathetic image of the French and recommended either a wholesale revision or not screening the film until the war was over. Indeed, for much of the film, the Vichy government is depicted as the true France. Fontaine, the military commander in Morocco, works in collusion with a dishonest Caid who himself is conspiring with the Nazis. The situation changes, though not soon enough. Even after the film was released, concerns remained about how the French appeared in the film. In an inter-office memo from Robert Schless to J.  L.  Warner dated 7 February 1944, Schless mentioned some cuts requested by the French, including the elimination of certain lines of Paul’s dialogue such as ‘Why doesn’t France export some of its love of freedom?’ and his self-reply to the question, ‘And what did they get out of our civilization?,’ ‘Only a kick in the face.’45 (Both comments remain in the DVD of the film released in 2014.)

Nazis in the Desert: The Musical In this adaptation, Nazi campaigns in North Africa form the basic premise, over­ shadowing the romance. The film opens in Geneva in the summer of 1939, where the Germans scheme to build a railroad across the Sahara. Slave labour is being used to build the railroad, including captured Riffs and various opponents of the Vichy French. This scenario echoed a real situation in North Africa, for in the early 1940s, the Vichy government was constructing a railroad through French North Africa. Caid Yousseff, the film’s fictional villain (in a menacing portrayal by Victor Francen), is a local leader who colludes with the Nazis to enslave his countrymen. The scene shifts to Morocco, where Johnny Walsh, an American journalist working for the American Press Bureau (and drolly played by Lynne Overman), shares living accommodation with another American, Paul Bonnard (Dennis Morgan), a mildmannered pianist and café orchestra leader. We first meet Paul while he is sitting in the bathtub intoning plenty of Riff motifs (the opening four notes of ‘The Riff Song’) and a version of ‘One Flower Grows Alone in Your Garden’ in a style imitating Islamic chant. We also learn that El Khobar has succeeded Abd-El-Krim, one of the real-life ­inspirations for the original 1926 The Desert Song, as the Riff leader, thus tying the ­cinematic remake to the stage original. Paul signals his fellow Riffs by playing the Riff motif on the piano, which becomes a full-fledged instrumental rendition of ‘The Riff Song’ featuring the café orchestra. The Riffs hear the motif and pass it along, until a posse assembles near the Ben Nour Prison

460   musical theatre screen adaptations Camp, where the railroad is being built, and attacks it. The Riffs take Tarbouch, one of Yousseff ’s deputies, as prisoner. Margot, a singer recently arrived from Paris, makes her debut at the Benoit Concert Palace with a song expressly written for the film, ‘Gay Parisienne,’ an effervescent waltz with a sprightly coloratura obbligato. She follows this with the refrain of ‘Romance.’ Caid Yousseff enters during the next song on the program, ‘Fifi’s Song.’ He updates the suave French commander, Colonel Fontaine (played by Bruce Cabot) on the railroad’s progress; they are both concerned that Tarbouch will tell El Khobar what he knows about the real reason for the railroad—a quicker pathway between Nazi Germany and South America. Johnny overhears and quickly goes to phone his paper, only to be stopped by François, the French censor, who pushes down the button on the phone and abruptly ends the call. Fontaine wants to show Margot a local café and takes her to Au Chien Fidele (At Faithful Dog), owned by the comically eccentric Pere FanFan (played by Gene Lockhart), who constantly cools himself with an electric fan. Fontaine suspects some café owners of being Riff informants, including FanFan, and really wants to go check up on him. He tells Margot that FanFan had been a Legionnaire but ‘went native’ and befriended the Moroccans who come to his establishment. His café, unlike the Benoit Concert Palace, is filled with smoke (from hookahs) and features sensual dancing women. It is the physical embodiment of the Oriental Other, a stark contrast to the Eurocentricism of the Benoit Concert Palace. Paul just happens to be playing piano at FanFan’s café, and when Margot and Fontaine sit near him, he begins playing ‘One Alone.’ He asks Margot if she knows the song—she replies that she does, but that she has not heard it in a long time. This is another reference to the legacy of The Desert Song—it had been sixteen years, after all, since the show had opened on Broadway. Paul’s infuses the Riff motif into his rendition of the song, and Margot, remembering the melody of ‘One Alone,’ joins in. The aural and visual worlds collide here, for North African instruments appear on screen (as opposed to the Western instruments of the Benoit Concert Hall) but produce Western sounds. The Riff motif, which Paul uses to warn the Riffs of Fontaine’s presence, causes the café to empty, leaving only him, Margot, and Fontaine. Paul, disguised as El Khobar, takes Margot secretly to his Riff camp, where he reveals his dual identity to her, with ‘One Alone’ as underscoring. Paul sings ‘The Desert Song’ to his newfound love, and she joins him for the second refrain. He returns to FanFan’s café, where he sings ‘Long Live the Night’ while accompanying himself on the piano. Johnny finds Margot at FanFan’s, and Margot tells him that Paul and El Khobar are the same person. The reporter goes to warn Paul of an impending French ambush on the Riff camp. When he finds him, he gives him his horse and surrenders to the French, carrying El Khobar’s costume. Fontaine comes to Margot’s room and tells her that they’ve captured El Khobar and that he (Fontaine) may be transferred and promoted. He of course wants her to

the desert song on stage and screen   461 join him. The underscoring is telling here—a languid version of ‘Romance’ lets us know she is dreaming of Paul, and when Fontaine proposes marriage, she declines. The music shifts to ‘One Alone’ when she mentions Paul and unwittingly tells Fontaine that Paul is El Khobar. Back at the Benoit Concert Hall, dancing girls provide a cabaret-style ‘French Marching Song’ featuring a solo turn for Margot. Paul talks to Fontaine about releasing Johnny, who the French still think is El Khobar. Fontaine tells Paul he knows that he is El Khobar, and Paul responds by telling Fontaine that the source of the railroad money is Berlin and the Nazis. Fontaine is genuinely surprised, and the two of them team up to expose Yousseff. They find Yousseff conferring with Germans, even speaking in German, and a fight erupts. Fontaine, realizing the Nazi machinations, becomes in effect a De Gaullist and promises to restore ‘all rights and liberties to the Riff tribes.’ Yousseff is killed, and in a final celebratory scene, El Khobar leads the entire cast in a refrain of the ‘Riff Song.’ Paul leads the horseback chorus as they leave to fight for justice, and Margot proudly waves him off.

American Propaganda With Paul, the American, as the hero, the film definitely implies American strength and the power of just one American to effect change. Additionally, Paul and Margot emblematize a wartime couple: Paul fights for democracy and freedom while Margot loves and supports him. Through the efforts of individual Americans like Paul, the United States is shown to be assuming a vital role in curtailing the spread of the Nazi regime. In publicity materials and on the sheet music cover issued in association with the film, Morgan wears munitions sashes, an obvious military reference, while smiling broadly, proud of his wartime participation. In order to make the film about American heroism in World War II, the romance between the principals had to be simplified. The original idea of a hero in disguise and a desert rescue fantasy were no longer appropriate. Margot learns Paul’s identity relatively quickly and supports him in his efforts, including when he rides off at the end of the film and leaves her behind. The storyline shifts to a tale of defeating Nazis and away from one that kept audiences wondering when Margot will finally realize that the mild-mannered Paul (or Pierre) and El Khobar (or the Red Shadow) are one and the same person.

Cultural and Gender Constructions El Khobar embodies Orientalism’s tenet that the West constructs the Orient as needing the West to save it from itself. The Moroccans cannot deal with Yousseff themselves; they require Western intervention in the person of Paul/El Khobar. It is a Westerner, precisely an American, who leads the attack on Yousseff ’s palace, killing the Caid, along with several Nazis.

462   musical theatre screen adaptations Furthermore, the film presents a stereotype of Arab leaders as villainous and Arabs in general as inferior to the French. The fundamentally benign Morocco of the original has become vilified. A single enemy is created in Yousseff, whereas no single villain exists in the 1926 original; tyranny and oppression are the enemies. Yousseff exploits his own people and is a Nazi sympathizer. Knowing the film was set in the immediate past, Warner Bros. was concerned about making the film as authentic as possible. Jamiel Hassan was hired to perform Arabic chants,46 and a research record in the WBA lists purchases that include maps, pictures, guides to pronunciation, the February 1942 issue of Free World with an article on Morocco, and various props, including a Moroccan four-wheeled cart.47 Along with a near-documentary desire for authenticity, the Colonial Gaze of the ­original is magnified. El Khobar, champion of the Riffs, calls his followers ‘savages about their freedom.’48 A French bartender despairingly remarks, in another scene, ‘It’s a shame these Muhammadans don’t drink.’49 The desire for realism makes these remarks especially striking. Not incidentally, this film version of The Desert Song, which was completed in 1942, was not granted a general export licence until 1944. Even then it carried a provision not allowing sale in countries with significant Arab or Muslim populations, according to studio records because it could be interpreted as glorifying a revolt.50 Its reductionist depictions of Moroccans as either evil or weak and in desperate need of external aid could have been another factor. European cultural attitudes also appear in how the characters describe the music they are experiencing. Margot describes the title song as ‘weird music,’ reflecting her Eurocentric worldview. Paul chants the pentatonic opening of the verse (‘My desert is waiting’), and Margot comments that it is a ‘strange chant,’ to which Paul replies that it is an ‘old Toric love song.’ When he reaches the tonal refrain (‘Blue heaven’), aural tension is released with the arrival of the major mode. Margot takes over the second refrain, something she is capable of doing since the refrain is tonal, European-style music. In addition to cultural difference, sexualized Otherness also appears in this version of The Desert Song. Sylvia Opert, who played Azuri, performed what one reviewer called ‘a hedonistic native dance’51; another critic noted that ‘a sleekly provocative dancer, Sylvia Opert, puts on quite a one-girl show.’52 The sensual lure of the desert is foregrounded in Opert’s performances. Whereas Bennie was coded as gay in the 1929 version, here it is the French censor, François (played by the German actor Curt Bois), whose performance engenders an effete quality. He tells Johnny, the American reporter and really the only person in the film with whom he interacts, that he feels unloved, and also informs him about an impending attack in order to gain his friendship. He is a definite outsider and his dress, mannerisms, and speech place him squarely against the macho heroics of the other male characters, including Johnny. He is the only French character who actually speaks with a non-American accent in the film, something that emphasizes his Otherness. During the scenes featuring Johnnie and François, ‘It’ plays in the underscoring, just as it did for

the desert song on stage and screen   463 those with Bennie in the 1929 film. Bennie’s gay coding in 1929 connected to François’s in the 1943 adaptation through this common musical number.

Music of the Cabaret and the Desert The 1943 release of The Desert Song includes music from the original stage work as well as new songs in a Broadway style and diegetic music that evokes a sense of Moroccan Other. Since the film was envisioned as wartime propaganda, dramatic realism was of greater importance than in a fundamentally escapist work. Hence, a diegetic use of music, when music is performed or heard on screen, becomes paramount in creating a sense of narrative believability. Six songs from the original stage version appear in the film: ‘The Riff Song,’53 ‘One Flower Grows Alone in Your Garden,’ ‘Romance,’ ‘One Alone,’ ‘The Desert Song,’ and the ‘French Military Marching Song.’ The film’s producer, Robert Buckner, wanted to use what he considered the musical’s three principal songs—‘The Riff Song,’ ‘The Desert Song,’ and ‘One Alone’—and condense others.54 Three new numbers were created for the film, all of which are performed in diegetic contexts: ‘Gay Parisienne’ (music by Serge Walter, lyrics by Jack Scholl), ‘Fifi’s Song’ (music by Romberg, lyrics by Jack Scholl), and ‘Long Live the Night’ (music by Romberg, lyrics by Mario Silva and Jack Scholl). ‘Gay Parisienne’ introduces the film’s audience to the singing voice of Irene Manning, and Buckner wanted a new song for this moment.55 ‘Fifi’s Song,’ a feature for a male vocalist that also appears in the first Benoit Concert Hall cabaret sequence, has its musical source in ‘Then You Will Know,’ a duet for Margot and Pierre from the original stage operetta. In the film, with new lyrics about what a man will do if woman after woman refuses him, it becomes a Maurice Chevalier-style feature for a male singer. Leo F. Forbstein, the film’s music director, wanted to use a Chevalier-style song at this point in the film, but they were all under copyright.56 So, he returned to the 1926 Desert Song and chose a song that was not going to appear in the film. ‘Long Live the Night’ is a 1940s croon-style ballad that Paul sings at FanFan’s café. The musical source for the refrain comes from the verse of ‘The Desert Song’ (‘Why waste your time in vain romancing’). Mario Silva composed a new verse for the fetching song. In addition to the songs and the essential choral renditions of ‘The Riff Song,’ other music appeared as underscoring, mostly in medleys alongside snippets of Romberg’s music. Songs in the public domain such as the ‘Marseillaise’ and ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ (The Watchman on the Rhein), a German patriotic song, provided nation-specific references (the ‘Marseillaise’ representing the Free French and ‘Die Wacht’ signifying the Nazis). Film composer Heinz Roemheld (who won an academy award for Yankee Doodle Dandy) provided atmospheric music for various scenes in the film, for which Ray Heindorf crafted arrangements.57 In addition to these European soundscapes, Warner Bros. staff composer Dave Bonnesar created numbers that provide diegetic aural stimuli to evoke the Moroccan

464   musical theatre screen adaptations setting: ‘Mal El Sham’ (Heights of Damascus), ‘Asmar El Loon’ (You’re dark complected [sic]), and ‘Howid Men Hina (Stop here),’ and ‘Rhana Meshwar’ (We took a trip).58 These feature largely in outdoor scenes, where they are played by street musicians on Arabsounding instruments and are in stark contrast to the European musical atmospheres created by Romberg and Roemheld. By including these allusions to actual non-Western music, Romberg’s musical h ­ andling of cultural difference in songs such as ‘One Flower Grows Alone in Your Garden,’ as sung by Paul in his bathtub, demonstrates a musical hybridity. Instead of using major and minor to differentiate between European and non-European attitudes, melodic practices such as gapped scales and vocal timbre now come into play. Paul, in how he sings at the beginning of the film, demonstrates not just his awareness of various musical cultures (he is a musician, after all) but also his ability to navigate between cultures through musical means. In order to allow for the diegetic performances, the romantic leads have both become musicians. Margot is a singer and Paul is a pianist and orchestra leader. Margot performs at Benoit’s Concert Palace, a cabaret for the French in Morocco. Paul not only works as an orchestra leader and pianist at Benoit’s but also plays piano at FanFan’s Café. ‘The Desert Song’ occupies a liminal place in this diegetic/nondiegetic realm. Paul and Margot sing the duet in the Riff camp, far from a concert hall or café. No orchestra is seen or heard on screen. The characters, though, describe the music, so they must be hearing it. (Margot calls it ‘weird music’ and Paul informs her that it is ‘an old Toric love song.’) Music also functions as a dramatic device in this Desert Song. The Riff motif becomes a secret code for the Riff bands; its local origins are never explicitly stated but strongly implied. Its distinctive character of Otherness (set in a minor key, the Riff motif is a descending third, an ascending third, and a minor second) is familiar enough to audiences familiar with ‘The Riff Song’ to recognize it and associate it with the non-European Riffs. El Khobar and others sound the signal early in the film to rally the Riffs, and Paul infuses it into his rendition of ‘One Alone’ as a warning to the Riffs at FanFan’s Café.

Reality versus Romance? The World War II version of The Desert Song offers some breathtaking visual scenes and some fine musical performances. However, the attempts at dramatic realism put the film’s story increasingly at odds with the escapist sentimentality of the musical numbers. While this dichotomy poses a challenge for any rendering of The Desert Song, as noted in the critical response to the 1929 version, it is especially evident in this adaptation. The film’s attempts at authenticity through diegetic musical performance and the inclusion of non-European sounds in some ways only accentuate the inherent artifice of the ­musical theatre medium. Critical response was mixed, but perhaps the most intense disfavour for the film came from fans. When Warner Bros. announced in the early 1950s that it was planning to

the desert song on stage and screen   465 remake The Desert Song, fans wrote directly to the studio to express their disdain at the previous version and their hopes for the new one. One wrote, ‘What a mess the Dennis Morgan film a few years ago was—it should have been called “The Nazis in North Africa”—it was terrible to a lover of the superb “Desert Song,” its story & its music.’59 Another expressed a similar sentiment: ‘The one with Dennis Morgan—that should be forgotten—Irene Manning was awful—and the story was too terrible for words.’60 For the third Warner Bros. adaptation, even less of the score would make it to the screen, and the plot would again be changed.

1953: A Technicolor Fantasy The third full-length film adaptation of The Desert Song, starring Gordon MacRae and Kathryn Grayson, melds elements of the stage original with remnants of the 1943 release. Bruce Humberstone directed the adaptation, with Rudi Fehr as producer and Ray Heindorf as music director.61 The setting is again 1920s French Morocco, and Margot does not realize the dual identity of her lover until the final scene. Yousseff is again the antagonist, though now he is a sheik. A gentler, kinder El Khobar is now a Robin Hood figure, for he and his Riff followers take only what Yousseff and his crew have stolen from them. Inter-Arab conflict thus becomes central to the plot of this Desert Song. Yousseff is a duplicitous villain, for he is behind a master plan to simultaneously starve villagers, garner further French support, and subsequently overthrow French rule.

Viva la France! In this Cold War version of the tale, the French are portrayed as trustworthy while the Moroccans, especially the followers of Sheik Yousseff, ignite suspicion. Indeed, El Khobar and the Riffs never fight the French in this version; their sole adversary is the corrupt Sheik. The French want to secure peace with all peoples in Morocco. This radical transformation comes, according to cultural historian John Maier, because the United States wanted to slow down Moroccan independence movements since they could jeopardize US interests in the Mediterranean world, not only because of the potential loss of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bases in Morocco but also because of the threat of a communist takeover.62 The United States was on solid diplomatic terms with France, and this film reflects the close relationship between the two countries. Charles Grayson crafted the revised plot from which Roland Kibbee developed the screenplay. The romantic leads are now Paul Bonnard (MacRae), an anthropology professor at the University of Paris, and Margot Birabeau (Grayson), the daughter of the French governing general. (Margot’s surname in the film is that of Pierre in the stage original.) Margot, a coy student, is supposed to study with Professor Bonnard, but she

466   musical theatre screen adaptations shows absolutely no interest in doing so, for she would much rather flirt with Captain Claude Fontaine (Steve Cochran) and fantasize about the mysterious El Khobar. Bonnard is dedicated to the Riffs, knows the Qur’an, plays and sings traditional chants, and even provides them with Western medicines. The character of Benjamin Kidd (Dick Wesson) returns as the American newspaperman sent to cover the story of El Khobar. As in the 1943 version, his roommate is the mild-mannered Paul. Fontaine informs General Birabeau (Ray Collins) that he wants to arm Yousseff (Raymond Massey) to help him get rid of the Riffs. Paul hears this and protests, remarking that the Riffs take only what has been taken from them. When Mindar, a traitorous Riff, wants to steal weapons and later strike Yousseff ’s palace, El Khobar dissuades him. Mindar eventually attacks El Khobar and is defeated. According to Riff law, Mindar must be bound and banished to the desert to die. El Khobar goes to the desert and rescues Mindar, shows him mercy, gives him passage to Tunis, and tells him to ‘leave his hatred behind.’ Azuri (Allyn McLerie), a Riff dancer who is in love with El Khobar, watches this act of clemency. Meanwhile, Yousseff has invited General Birabeau, Margot, and Claude to his palace, which provides a plot point for plenty of Orientalist dancing, including a solo number for Azuri. Yousseff plans to convince the French to give him weapons by having his own men dress as Riffs and attack the palace. Paul arrives and hears Margot humming ‘One Flower Grows Alone in Your Garden’ in a flower garden, to which he responds, as El Khobar, with ‘One Alone.’ El Khobar tells Margot he has come to prove that Yousseff is the enemy. She immediately tells Claude that El Khobar is in the garden, and when she returns, El Khobar whisks her off to the desert, where he shows her a village that Yousseff has burned to the ground. In a Riff compound, a group of musicians begins to play music, setting up the title song. Paul returns to Yousseff ’s palace to tell the General that Margot is unharmed and that the Riffs want to discuss peace. Benji, meanwhile, tries to convince the French that he saw a stockpile of weapons in the palace and follows Paul and the General to the Riff village. When they arrive, the village is deserted. Hassan, a Riff left to die, tells Paul that Yousseff ’s men took ‘the girl,’ meaning Margot. Paul dons El Khobar’s clothing, which Benji sees and thus learns of his secret identity. As El Khobar leaves the village, the French pursue him. El Khobar falls off his horse, and when the French unmask the mysterious man, they find Benji, who feigns the opening of ‘The Riff Song.’ Benji leads the Riffs into Yousseff ’s palace through a secret entrance as Margot sings ‘Long Live the Night,’ which she calls her favourite song, to Yousseff. She keeps telling him that there’s more to the song in order to buy time for the Riff invaders.63 A note in the typescript musical synopsis suggests that Margot should act like Scheherezade in 1,001 Nights in the continual prolongation of her performance.64 After Yousseff is impaled, the truth about his stolen guns and devious plans are revealed. Paul enters with El Khobar’s costume and tells the assembled group that the desert hero has died, to which the General replies that they owe El Khobar thanks and an apology. Margot is sad at the news and confesses, ‘I loved him.’ As in the original,

the desert song on stage and screen   467 Paul begins singing ‘One Alone’ and Margot recognizes his voice as that of El Khobar. A final reprise of ‘The Riff Song’ accompanies Paul, Margot, and the Riffs as they ride across the desert.

Orientalist Fantasies As in the 1943 release, the Moroccans are portrayed here as inept and in need of European (e.g., French) rescue from themselves. Here, though, no outside threat from either the French or the Nazis exists—Yousseff injures his own people for his own gain. The French want to facilitate peace, despite Yousseff. Attitudes towards non-European music are softened when compared with the 1943 version. Dave Bonnesar’s ethnic-evoking musical sequences are backgrounded as underscoring, and Paul describes the pentatonic section of the verse of ‘The Desert Song’ (‘My desert is waiting’) as a ‘Moorish folk chant.’ Margot calls it ‘beautiful,’ and Paul elaborates, ‘primitive and beautiful.’ It is no longer ‘weird,’ as Margot described it in the 1943 version, but now ‘primitive.’ Its timelessness, like that of the desert, is still implied as part of the region’s underdevelopment, according to an Orientalist gaze.

Authenticity The creators of this adaptation did extensive research to evoke a sense of visual and, to a degree, aural authenticity. They requested a list of French marching commands, order arms, and other military calls, and Max Steiner, who was preparing musical underscoring, requested a book that included authentic French bugle calls.65 The studio also sought images of Foreign Legion uniforms, information on the Riffs in the 1920s, and examples of Moroccan pottery, musical instruments, and rugs. Not knowing where to locate Arab instruments that would appear on-screen, the studio issued a request via a press release: Anybody got a gunibry? Or a zummarah? Or even a kuitra or an arghool? Warner Bros.’ music department is on the prowl for these Arabian musical instruments for scenes in ‘The Desert Song,’ and so far all they’ve been able to come up with is a pair of darboukas, and one old tamboura. The gunibry is a kind of Moroccan drum, crudely constructed of a half a pumpkin covered with a sheepskin and strung with cat gut and twanged with a split quill. A kuitra comes from Tunisia and it’s made with a tortoise shell, cat gut and played with a small plectrum. The tamboura is like a tambourine, only it’s played with a vulture’s feather. The others are reed instruments.66

The studio succeeded in its search, for several of these instruments appear in the film.67

468   musical theatre screen adaptations

Songs in the Desert Only five songs from the original stage version appear in this version (one less than in 1942): ‘The Riff Song,’68 ‘Romance,’ ‘The Desert Song,’ ‘One Flower Grows Alone in Your Garden,’ and ‘One Alone.’ Two songs from the 1943 film were reprised: ‘Gay Parisienne’ and ‘Long Live the Night.’ Furthermore, the Riff motif serves the same function as an aural identifier as it did in the previous adaptation, though its inclusion was a point of contention during the film’s development.69 The overtly diegetic treatment of most of the songs in the 1942 adaptation gives way here to nondiegetic appearances. The club and café atmospheres as venues for musical performance are no longer present. For example, Margot now sings ‘Gay Parisienne’ as she enters the French compound. No orchestra is in sight, though the soldiers accompany her as a male chorus. The ‘Eastern and Western Love’ sequence from the original is reworked to offer a gendered approach to romance. Margot sings ‘One Flower Grows Alone in Your Garden’ as she wanders in a flower garden, interpreting the lyric as wanting to collect as many men as possible and not limiting herself to just one. El Khobar responds with ‘One Alone’— he is the one and only man who can satisfy her. Max Steiner created the cues that appear as underscoring. These are very short, ­ranging anywhere from five to fifty-five seconds. Steiner also arranged the ‘Kooch Dance’ for Azuri’s (Allyn McLerie) performance at Yousseff ’s palace. His highly evocative orchestration calls for three balalaikas, two guitars, harp, piano, mandola (mandolin piano), celesta, and harp. Percussion instruments include finger cymbals, tam tam, small gong, timpani, and vibraphone.70 This was a lavish production, and the conjuring of Orientalism in this scene returns to the nineteenth-century idea of splendid exoticism and a celebration of the female body.

El Khobar = Kal-El? When this version of The Desert Song appeared, Superman was part of mainstream ­popular culture. With the shared story of a mild-mannered man’s secret identity and the woman who loves him not realizing that the hero after whom she lusts and the man who pines for her are the same person, it’s no surprise that some references to the tale exist in the film. Coincidentally, Superman’s Krypton name, Kal-El, is a shortened inversion of El Khobar. Almost not coincidentally, though, is the fact that Professor Paul Bonnard wears black-framed glasses, just like Clark Kent in Superman. When the film appeared, Adventures of Superman (1952–58) was showing on television. In one scene early in the film, Gordon MacRae looks like a bespectacled George Reeves as Clark Kent, and Kathryn Grayson’s hair is styled in the same way as Noel Neill’s as Lois Lane.71 Paul even removes his glasses to see if Margot recognizes him as El Khobar; she does not. El Khobar, like Kal-El, is a man of peace who wants to help those who in need. Both oppose tyranny and genuinely care about the people they serve.

the desert song on stage and screen   469

The 1955 Television Version On 7 May 1955 NBC broadcast a live eighty-eight-minute adaptation of the operetta with Nelson Eddy and Gale Sherwood as the romantic leads. The noted Hollywood baritone was thus given a chance to perform Romberg’s famed score in a staged context. Metropolitan opera bass Salvatore Baccalone played Ali Ben Ali, offering a highly spiritual rendition of ‘Let Love Go’ in the ‘Eastern and Western Love’ sequence. William Friedberg, Neil Simon, and Will Glickman prepared the teleplay, which Max Liebman produced and directed. Charles Sanford and His Orchestra provided the orchestral underpinning. The plot is necessarily trimmed, though Romberg’s music generally appears in its original contexts. The romantic tale is kept, while the comic subplot with Benny and Susan is completely excised—their characters do not even appear. We no longer have specific villains, tyranny and oppression are the forces to be defeated, as in the original. Some plot elements were modified for the television version. For example, although set in 1925, the French want to establish a colony in Morocco, which historically they already had. Pierre likes to drink cognac, as opposed to picking wildflowers. Several musical changes are also evident. Act 1 concludes with a new dream ballet that recalls the dream ballet that ends act 1 of Oklahoma! After Margot fantasizes about the Red Shadow (whose name returns to the original in this version) and sings a reprise of ‘Romance,’ the masked hero appears and intones a refrain of ‘The Desert Song.’ Dancers then take over from the singing stars. Rod Alexander’s choreography is reminiscent of Agnes de Mille’s in Oklahoma!, with parallel graceful moves and multiple lifts. At the end, the Red Shadow carries Margot off to the desert, and she doesn’t resist. In ‘The Sabre Song,’ Margot’s solo expression of her love for the Red Shadow, the song begins in her mind, with extra reverb added to the sound. She doesn’t move her lips until late in the song, when she expresses what she had previously only been thinking. This is something that could be accomplished on television through close-up shots and proved to be effective for the soliloquy. Perhaps most striking, though, is the final duet, where Pierre and Margot sing ‘The Desert Song’ and not ‘One Alone.’ The production ends with the dreamy title song. During the end titles, though, the chorus provides a reprise of the refrain of ‘One Alone.’

Shifting Sand Orientalism as a cultural construct shifts over time, like sand in the desert. When it comes to The Desert Song, various factors affect these changes, ranging from real-world politics to film aesthetics. In the 1926 stage version and the 1929 film, the Moroccans are relatively benign, and the desert background is the canvas for a rescue fantasy with a disguised hero akin to The Sheik. In the 1942 and 1953 adaptations, though, the Moroccans are vilified and either collude with the Nazis or mistreat each other. The main Moroccan

470   musical theatre screen adaptations leader in both versions, Yousseff, is dishonest and oppresses his own people. The television version of 1955 returns largely to the original concept, coming full circle back to a tale of romance. These adaptations also interrogate the conflation of operetta, a genre steeped in escapism and nostalgia, with contemporary real-world issues. The two perspectives seem to run counter to each other, even with cinematic practical solutions that include diegetic musical performances and having the characters themselves comment on the music they experience. Plots may change, contexts may shift, but what remains at the heart of any adaptation of The Desert Song are Romberg and Hammerstein’s evocative and truly memorable songs. They are the sole reason, after all, that any of the adaptations were made.

Notes 1. John Maier, Desert Songs: Western Images of Morocco and Moroccan Images of the West (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 2. 2. For more on The Desert Song, see the author’s ‘Romance and Exoticism in North Africa: The Desert Song,’ chap. 6, in Sigmund Romberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 155–180. 3. Robert Halliday (1891–1975) and Vivienne Segal (1897–1992) led the original cast. Halliday was a noted operetta baritone who also created the role of Robert Misson in Romberg and Hammerstein’s The New Moon (1928). Segal was regarded as among the finest musical theatre singers of her generation. She made her Broadway debut in 1915 in Romberg’s The Blue Paradise and later achieved fame as Vera Simpson in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey (1940) and as Morgan le Fay in the 1943 revival of the same team’s A Connecticut Yankee, where she introduced the morbidly delicious ballad ‘To Keep My Love Alive.’ 4. Harbach, Hammerstein, and Mandel, The Desert Song (London: Chappell, 1927), 23. 5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). 6. Alan Jenkins, The Twenties (New York: Universe Books, 1974), 205. 7. The Desert Song, 37. 8. The Desert Song, 48. 9. ‘More Operetta: American Style, African Setting,’ Boston Transcript, 9 November 1926. 10. Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Correspondence Files, The Desert Song, Manuscripts Department, British Library, LC Plays 1927/4. 11. Other notable films in the genre include Sahara Love (1926), The Son of the Sheik (1926), One Stolen Night (1929), Desert Nights (1929), and Morocco (1930). 12. Valentino died of complications following surgery for a perforated ulcer. His particular type of ulcer became known as ‘Valentino’s syndrome.’ 13. Bell’s books included The Desert and the Sown (1907) and Amurath to Amurath (1911). 14. Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Brooklyn, NY: Olive Branch Press, 2001), 168. 15. Sigmund Romberg, ‘A Peep into the Workshop of a Composer,’ Theatre Magazine 48, no. 6 (December 1928): 27. 16. Ella Shohat, ‘Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema,’ in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 39.

the desert song on stage and screen   471 17. Memo from Philip B. Wattenberg to Harold Brekowitz, 22 March 1956, The Desert Song (1929), Warner Bros. Archive (hereafter WBA). 18. The music for the nondialogue version was recorded at the Vitaphone Studios in Brooklyn in early November 1929, well after the release of the dialogue version. It included not only Romberg’s music but also excerpts of atmospheric works from other composers, such as John Ansell’s ‘The Grand Visier’ and H. E. Haines’s ‘An Eastern Romance.’ 19. Richard Barrios, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 78. The music was recorded at Warner Bros. in Hollywood on 13, 14, 20, and 21 March 1929. (‘Notification of Intention to Use Musical Material,’ The Desert Song [1929], WBA.) 2 0. Uncited document, The Desert Song (1929), WBA. 21. Barrios, A Song in the Dark, 78. 22. Typed letter, S.  M.  Green, London, to E.  H.  Murphy, Hollywood, 13 October 1931, The Desert Song (1929), WBA. 23. My thanks to Alastair Wright for pointing out this characterization. 2 4. Barrios, A Song in the Dark, 87. 25. Harry Evans, New York Life: Movies, ‘The Desert Song,’ Life, 24 May 1929, 23. 26. ‘The Desert Song (Musical-Dialog),’ Variety, 10 April 1929. 27. For more on film versions of The New Moon, see William Everett, ‘Film Versions of Romberg’s The New Moon: From New Orleans to Russia and Back Again,’ in Music, American Made: Essays in Honor of John Graziano, ed. John Koegel (Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2011), 479–496. 28. The song is titled ‘One Flower in Your Garden’ on the music lists for The Red Shadow in the WBA. 29. Technicolor agreement, 25 March 1936, The Desert Song, WBA. 30. ‘Miller’s Script with Lord’s Changes,’ 7 July 1936, The Desert Song, WBA. 31. Romberg was a prominent radio personality in the 1930s, either hosting his own programs or appearing as a guest on others. 32. The lyrics for song are published in Amy Asch, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II (New York: Knopf, 2008), 402. 33. Note dated 16 April 1937, The Desert Song, WBA. 34. Inter-office communication from R.  J.  Obringer, 24 August 1936, The Desert Song, WBA. 35. The Desert Song screenplay, 20 July 1938, WBA. 36. Robert Buckner and Charles Grayson, ‘A New Cure for “The Desert Song” ’/‘THE DESERT SONG: Presentation of a New Approach’ (both titles appear on the document, the first on the title page and the second on first page of prose), 26 August 1941, 1, WBA. 37. Buckner and Grayson, ‘A New Cure,’ 1. 38. Buckner and Grayson, ‘A New Cure,’ 5. 39. Buckner and Grayson, ‘A New Cure,’ 4. 40. ‘ “The Desert Song,” Suggestion for a New Treatment,’ folder 1846B, WBA, 2–3. 41. ‘ “The Desert Song,” Suggestion for a New Treatment,’ 2–3. 42. ‘ “The Desert Song,” Suggestion for a New Treatment,’ 2–3. 43. For more on World War II–era home front Hollywood musicals, see Jennifer R. Jenkins, ‘ “Say It with Firecrackers”: Defining the “War Musical” of the 1940s,’ American Music 19, no. 3 (2001): 315–339. 44. This version of The Desert Song was not the only instance of a preexisting musical work being revised to reflect contemporary wartime America. Carmen Jones, Oscar Hammerstein

472   musical theatre screen adaptations II’s revision of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, opened on 2 December 1943 at the Broadway Theatre. A film version appeared in 1954. 45. Inter-office memo from Robert Schless to J. L. Warner, 7 February 1944, The Desert Song (1943), WBA. 46. Receipts for $25 on 23 May 1942 and $25 on 5 June 1942 are in the materials for The Desert Song (1942), WBA. 47. Research record, The Desert Song (1942), WBA. 48. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, 168. 49. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, 168. 50. Letter from Watterson R. Rothacker, Chairman, Office of Censorship, Los Angeles Board of Review, to Steve Trilling, 12 August 1944, The Desert Song (1942), WBA. 51. L.E.R., ‘ “Desert Song” Colorful Melodrama,’ Hollywood Citizen-News, 24 January 1944. 52. Bosley Crowther, ‘The Screen: “The Desert Song,” Modernized Version of the Old Operetta, with Dennis Morgan, Irene Manning, Opens at Hollywood,’ New York Times, 18 December 1923. 53. Jack Scholl revised the lyrics to refer to El Khobar and not the Red Shadow. 54. Letter from R. J. Obringer to Morris Ebenstein, 7 May 1942, The Desert Song (1942), correspondence file, WBA. 55. Letter from R. J. Obringer to Morris Ebenstein, 16 May 1942, The Desert Song (1942), correspondence file, WBA. 56. Letter from Victor Blau to Leo Forbstein, 20 May 1942, The Desert Song (1942), WBA. 57. ‘Music for Underscoring,’ box 253, Musical scores, The Desert Song (1942), WBA. 58. The translations appear on the music parts in the WBA. 59. Wesley Chase, letter to Warner Bros., 6 August 1951, The Desert Song (1953), WBA. 60. Mrs Laban T. Johnston, letter to Warner Bros., 8 August 1951, The Desert Song (1953), WBA. 61. Heindorf provided the song arrangements for the numbers featuring Kathryn Grayson and Gordon MacRae, while Norman Luboff prepared the vocal arrangements. Murray Cutter was the credited orchestrator. Original orchestral scores and parts are extant at the WBA. 6 2. Maier, Desert Songs, 25. 63. Because of the increased length of the song due to its dramatic purpose, Sammy Cahn wrote lyrics for an additional refrain of ‘Long Live the Night’ (Contract, 9 August 1952, The Desert Song [1953], WBA). 64. Musical breakdown, 3 April 1952, based on script of 23 February 1952, The Desert Song (1953), WBA. 65. Research request list, The Desert Song (1953), WBA. 66. Carl Combs, Press release HO-91251, The Desert Song (1953), WBA. 67. Production notes for press releases, The Desert Song (1953), WBA. 68. The revised lyrics for the 1942 version that refer to El Khobar were reused here. 69. Rudi Fehr felt its use was inconsistent, first to have the Riffs hide and later to call El Khobar. (Rudi Fehr, memo to Steve Trilling, 29 February 1952, The Desert Song [1953], WBA.) Roland Kibbee, though, thought it was necessary to introduce the motif before it is used to summon El Khobar. (Roland Kibbee, memo to Rudi Fehr and Bruce Humberstone, 21 February 1952, The Desert Song [1953], WBA.) 70. Scores and sketches, music materials, reel 9, part 2, The Desert Song (1953), WBA. 7 1. Neill joined the cast in the second season, taking over the role of Lois Lane from Phyllis Coates.

chapter 21

‘ You W il l K now Th at She Is Ou r A n n ie ’ Comparing Three Adaptations of a Broadway Classic Ian Sapiro

Please take good care of our little darling. Her name is Annie. She was born on October 28th. We will be back to get her soon. We have left half of a silver locket around her neck and kept the other half so that when we come back for her you will know that she’s our baby.1

Thus reads Annie’s note, left with her on the steps of New York’s Municipal Orphanage by her parents in the stage musical Annie. The show, which opened on Broadway in April 1977 and transferred to London’s West End around a year later, was written by Thomas Meehan with music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Martin Charnin. Columbia Pictures produced a film version in 1982 featuring additional songs by Strouse and Charnin, and their music is also used exclusively in Disney’s 1999 television movie adaptation. By contrast, while Will Gluck’s 2014 film of Annie includes modifications of several of Strouse and Charnin’s numbers, this is the only one of the adaptations that includes songs not written by the show’s original composer and lyricist.2 This chapter focuses primarily on the relationships between the stage musical and these three adaptations but also considers intertextual connections between the different screen versions of Annie. The first part of the chapter considers some of the issues that arise with the creation of multiple remakes, a phenomenon particularly prevalent with films, though more rarely with screen musicals. The critical perspectives that frame the analysis of these adaptations are outlined, followed by a broad overview of each movie and consideration of their approaches to the show’s underlying narrative. The final and most substantial part of the chapter is devoted to the musical aspects of the films, and explores in detail matters relating to the pictures’ musical profiles and the

474   musical theatre screen adaptations various scores’ narrative agency, coherence, and sound. Importantly, although the chapter includes criticism of each screen version there is no intention to demonstrate that any adaptation is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than any other; rather, the aim is to offer thoughts on how each picture might be better understood and interpreted, and how ‘our Annie’ might therefore be identified within the stage show’s three screen ‘children.’3

Framing the Adaptations Stage musicals have been adapted for the screen since the earliest years of sound film, but in the vast majority of cases when a musical has made this transition it has done so only once. Indeed, there very few shows for which two screen-musical adaptations exist—Anything Goes; Bye Bye Birdie; Girl Crazy; Gypsy; The King and I; The Music Man; No, No, Nanette; Showboat; and South Pacific—and Annie is particularly rare in being transferred three times.4 This status as a thrice-adapted musical raises questions as to precisely what has driven producers and directors to return to this show. As Linda Hutcheon notes, stage-to-screen adaptation has ‘an obvious financial appeal,’ especially given that ‘a successful Broadway play will be seen by 1 to 8 million people; but a movie or television adaptation will find an audience of many millions more.’5 However, while commercial gain is doubtless almost always a significant factor in the decision to ­produce a film version of a musical, as Miguel Mera observes, ‘The most prevalent error is that many studies simply view the reinvented text as parasitical—cashing-in on the success of the source—as if this is the only reason that re-invention occurs. By taking this stance the re-invented text can only ever be found wanting.’6 Indeed, the contrasts between the three screen Annies—which include aspects of narrative structure, music, characters and characterization, casting, setting, politics, and technology—indicate that each set of filmmakers considered their product to have a different relationship with its source(s). Robert Stam applies Gérard Genette’s concept of hypertextuality to film adaptation, arguing that ‘filmic adaptations are hypertexts derived from pre-existing hypotexts,’7 while Thomas Leitch suggests that filmic remakes of other films establish a ‘triangular relationship among themselves, the original film they remake, and the property on which both films are based.’8 Not only does the presence of the third screen Annie render Leitch’s two-dimensional triangle into a three-dimensional tetrahedron in which direct relationships exist between four versions of the show, but both the original musical and the first film draw on the cartoon strip Little Orphan Annie. The resulting relational diagram shown in Figure 21.1 therefore also features a spur connecting these two versions to the original source. Indeed, as Stam notes, ‘The diverse prior adaptations of a [text] can come to form a larger, cumulative hypotext available to the filmmaker,’9 a perspective with which Christine Geraghty concurs, observing that in addition to links with its primary source, ‘an adaptation might also draw on memories, understandings, and associations with other versions of the original.’10 As these views indicate, it is important

three adaptations of annie   475 Disney (1999)

Stage Show (1977)

Gluck (2014)

Columbia (1982)

Comic Strip (1924)

Figure 21.1  Tetrahedral relationship between the stage show and its three filmic adaptations, with an additional spur to the Little Orphan Annie comic strip

to consider the possible and potential influence of the Columbia film on the Disney remake, and of both these iterations on the 2014 film within this investigation.11 In his consideration of remade films, ‘Invention/Re-invention,’ Miguel Mera acknowledges the idea of hypertextuality, but opts instead ‘to use the term re-invention because it suggests a continuing sense of exploration and discovery.’12 A further advantage of this solution to the terminological quagmire inherent in discussions of adaptations is that reinvention does not have its origins in literary theory, as is the case for many alternative terms.13 Additionally, while there is an implication that an ‘adaptation’ is based heavily on and therefore might be constrained by one or more source texts, the same is not necessarily true of a ‘reinvention,’ this latter term suggesting an increased level of creativity in the making of the new work that is particularly useful when considering films based on other sources. Indeed, although a significant amount of criticism received by adaptations (and filmic adaptations in particular) stems from the idea of fidelity to the original text, Cartmell and Whelehan suggest that ‘film reviewers today are often unconcerned as to whether a film adaptation is “faithful” [since] it is the a­ dditions, not the deletions to the source that are largely responsible for an adaptation’s box-office and critical success,’14 lending further support to the idea of reinvention. Changes to the plot are common when stories are adapted from one medium to another, not least because the nature of, for instance, the screen, is quite different to that of the stage, and there are some things that can be achieved or will work more successfully in one format than another. In the case of these films, it should also be considered that the Disney version is a made-for-television movie, whereas the other two are cinematic productions. Narrative changes resulting from a stage-to-screen transfer will often lead to alterations to the music, causing yet more divergence from the source, but this does not necessarily mean that the changes are inappropriate or do not work, nor that the adapted version is in any way a lesser work than the original. Importantly, therefore, while this investigation considers the ways in which each screen iteration has changed

476   musical theatre screen adaptations (literally reinvented) the stage show of Annie, the critical evaluations must not be reduced to a simple question of ‘fidelity.’ In keeping with this perspective, and as ­outlined at the start of this chapter, the intention is to ‘explore’ (to use Mera’s term) the ­reinventions of Annie rather than to pass judgement on their respective levels of commercial, cultural, or musical merit.

Annie, Born 1977, 1982, 1999, and 2014 Acclaimed by Gerald Bordman as the ‘the season’s biggest hit’ and awarded the somewhat dubious distinction by Thomas Hischak of being ‘the most successful musical ever made from a comic strip,’ the stage show of Annie collected the 1977 Tony Award for Best Musical and ran for 2,377 performances in its initial Broadway run.15 The show transferred to London in 1978 where its run, while not as extensive, lasted three and a half years, and although it closed before its Broadway counterpart, Columbia’s film of the show was already in production by that time. Writing in 1985, just three years after the release of this first filmic reinvention, Thomas G. Aylesworth comments that while the stage musical ‘was a warm, intimate, pleasant show, with songs to match,’ Columbia’s film ‘missed the point of intimacy and was turned into an overblown production by director John Huston, who was filming his first musical.’16 Aylesworth suggests the film had a budget in excess of $40 million, Hischak putting the figure at $52 million, and labelling the production ‘one of the most expensive flops in the history of Columbia Pictures.’17 The film retains most of the main elements of the stage show’s plot, but Carol Sobieski’s screenplay introduces two characters from the comic strip that are not in the musical—Warbucks’s bodyguard, Punjab, and chauffeur, the Asp—though neither contributes musically or narratively in a significant way until Punjab’s involvement in the closing sequence. Sobieski also radically altered the climax of the story so that rather than Annie’s kidnappers being arrested at Warbucks’s mansion they are captured only after chasing her to the top of the B&O Bridge on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and trying to kill her. The chase sequence is an excellent example of Aylesworth’s criticism of the picture, since it replaces a much more intimate scene from the stage musical in which Annie finally finds out that her parents are dead and her emotional relationship with Warbucks is strengthened. Indeed, the show’s creators were highly critical of Houston and producer Ray Stark’s film, calling it ‘preposterous,’ ‘terrible,’ and ‘cock-eyed.’18 and voicing particular displeasure at Stark’s decision to reset the story around American Independence Day rather than Christmas because the film was shot in summer and he felt it was too expensive to make fake snow.19 The Disney reinvention returns the setting to winter and draws much more heavily on the specifics of the musical’s plot than the Columbia picture. Indeed, this second screen Annie can be seen as what Leitch defines as a ‘readaptation,’ since it ‘ignores or treats as inconsequential’ the earlier Columbia film, instead prioritizing fidelity to the original

three adaptations of annie   477 text, translated to the filmic medium.20 The screenplay by Irene Mecchi, whose credits prior to Annie include the animated Disney films The Lion King, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules, introduces very little that cannot be readily traced back to the stage show, and as will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter, some of the musical decisions taken in the first film are reversed in this reinvention. This version being made for television rather than cinema is clearly a factor here, with the intended presentation on a small screen—and doubtless being made on a much smaller budget—resulting in a more constrained development of the show’s underlying narrative.21 Jessica Sternfeld commends director Rob Marshall, who ‘infused the potentially sticky-sweet show with unflagging wit and even bite’ without needing to rely on extravagances such as helicopters and high-speed pursuits.22 The 2014 film is a contemporary reimagining of the Annie story and is far more akin to the Columbia movie than the Disney in terms of scale and spectacle. Rather than being an orphan, Annie is in foster care with Miss Hannigan and accidentally meets the Warbucks figure—renamed as Benjamin Stacks—when he pulls her out of the way of a truck as she runs into the road. She moves in with him as part of a plan to get him elected as the mayor of New York City, and she is reunited with her parents, who of course turn out to be fakes, by Stacks’s campaign manager, Guy, who realizes that the publicity and popularity boost will win Stacks the election. Given the size of the hypotext that precedes it, it is perhaps unsurprising that the picture seems to straddle three of Leitch’s categories of filmic remake: it can be read as an ‘update’ of the stage show, which it both reveres and revises while trying to bring the story up to date; it is, as shown below, arguably a ‘homage’ to the Columbia film; and it is also a readaptation of Annie inasmuch as it overlooks the presence of the Disney film, much as that production disregarded the Columbia movie. These assertions are reinforced by Will Gluck’s director commentary on the DVD release,23 in which he suggests that this Annie has been made with a lot of reverence for the original stage show and the Columbia picture but fails to make any mention of the 1999 television movie. The first of several tributes occurs at the very outset of the film, with shots of a girl called Annie with masses of curly red hair delivering a presentation. This is a misdirection, however: the teacher calls up another girl, also called Annie, and it is she who is the star of this story. Her presentation is on President Roosevelt—another nod to the original show—and she takes the class through an admittedly superficial account of the New Deal that the stage Annie apparently helped inspire. While these connections might be readily apparent to any viewer with a working knowledge of a previous Annie, there are also more subtle references. In the same scene, written on the chalkboard is a list of American presidents, but the names of the musical’s creators, Martin Charnin, Charles Strouse, and Thomas Meehan, are interpolated into the list in tribute. The influence of the Columbia film is particularly apparent in some of the choreographic and narrative decisions. Several of the dance sections of ‘It’s the Hard-Knock Life,’ such as the plate-throwing sequence in the kitchen, resonate strongly with similar moves in Arlene Phillips’s choreography, and while in the stage show and the Disney

478   musical theatre screen adaptations reinvention Annie does not actually leave Warbucks’s mansion with her ‘parents,’ Gluck’s film features a car chase through New York involving the police on the ground and members of the Stacks household pursuing from the air in a helicopter, closely ­mirroring the climactic sequence from Huston’s picture. However, whereas in Sobieski’s screenplay Annie is found thanks to the rather unlikely circumstance of Punjab identifying the kidnappers’ car in the dark from a monocopter, the 2014 chase is brought right up to date, with Stacks and the others able to track Annie via posts on social media that tag her location as the car in which she is travelling moves through the city. Leitch observes that filmic remakes might include what he terms ‘special rewards for viewers who remember the original’ that are in no way important to the overarching narrative but ‘provide an optional bonus of pleasure to those in the know.’24 As has been discussed, this is very much the case with the 2014 Annie, though there are times when these in-jokes can be interpreted in ways that conflict with the film’s underlying premise or coherence. In his recent chapter on the Annie films, Olaf Jubin criticizes the 2014 picture for presenting viewers with several messages that appear to be incongruent with contemporary society, including asking ‘why would Stacks be afraid to expose his baldness in a society where shaving your head is a popular fashion choice for men?’25 While much of Jubin’s criticism is very well made, this immaterial sequence is clearly not intended to be of any narrative consequence, and is simply a visual ‘one-liner’ connecting Stacks to the traditional representation of Warbucks as bald, harking back to the overlooked Victor Garber in 1999, to Albert Finney in 1982, and further to the original 1977 stage Warbucks, Reid Shelton.26

Musical Profiles The official trailers for both the Columbia and Disney movies reference the stage ­musical, identifying it directly as the source text for the screen reinvention, and while the same is not true for the most recent screen Annie, the fact that the trailer is saturated with the most recognizable songs from the show (albeit remixed) implies strongly that the film is based on the show. Indeed, although in an interview for Playbill Charles Strouse comments that Jay-Z was ‘contracted to only use six of the songs’ from the show,27 the film includes eight sung numbers from the musical with another two used as underscoring. Table 21.1 shows the musical structure of the stage show and each of the films, and reveals the structural importance of the main numbers, the majority of which appear across all four versions. Leaving aside the opening credit sequence, once the narrative begins there is considerable similarity across all iterations, with ‘Maybe’ and ‘It’s the Hard-Knock Life’ the first two numbers presented. However, from here they break down with varying levels of consistency of musical structuring across the different productions. As noted, several key songs are retained across the three screen reinventions. Besides ‘Maybe’ and ‘It’s the Hard-Knock Life,’ the songs, ‘Tomorrow,’ ‘Little Girls,’ ‘I Think I’m Gonna Like It

three adaptations of annie   479

Table 21.1  List of songs in each version of Annie Stage Musical (1977)

Columbia (1982)

Disney (1999)

Gluck (2014)

Overture (various)

Tomorrow (credits)

Overture (various)

Overture (various)

Maybe

Maybe

Maybe

Maybe

It’s the Hard-Knock Life

It’s the Hard-Knock Life

It’s the Hard-Knock Life

It’s the Hard-Knock Life

It’s the Hard-Knock Life (R)

It’s the Hard-Knock Life (R)

Tomorrow

Dumb Dog

We’d Like to Thank You

Sandy

Little Girls

I’m Gonna Like It Here

Little Girls (R)

Tomorrow

Tomorrow Hard-Knock Life (R, U)

Little Girls

I’m Gonna Like It Here

Little Girls (R)

Maybe (U) Never Fully Dressed

I’m Gonna Like It Here

Little Girls

I’m Gonna Like It Here

Little Girls

NYC

NYC (U)

Maybe (R) NYC

Let’s Go to the Movies

Easy Street

Easy Street

You Won’t Be an Orphan We Got Annie Maybe (R)

Sign

Maybe (R)

Maybe (U)

Never Fully Dressed

Never Fully Dressed

Never Fully Dressed

The City’s Yours

Never Fully Dressed (R)

Never Fully Dressed (R)

Never Fully Dressed (R)

Tomorrow (R) Easy Street (R)

Easy Street

Opportunity Easy Street (R)

Tomorrow (R)

Easy Street Tomorrow (R, U)

Something Was Missing

Something Was Missing

I Don’t Need Anything

I Don’t Need Anything

Something was Missing (U)

Annie Maybe (R)

Maybe (R)

Maybe (R)

Who am I?

Tomorrow (R) Little Girls (Reprise)

Chase Sequence (various, U)

New Deal for Christmas

Finale (medley): I Don’t I Don’t Need Need Anything, We Got Anything (R) Annie (R), Tomorrow (R)

I Don’t Need Anything

Tomorrow (R, bows)

Tomorrow (R, credits)

Tomorrow (R, credits) End Credits

Moonquake Lake (credits)

Note: R indicates that the number is a reprise; U stands for instrumental underscoring rather than sung material.

480   musical theatre screen adaptations Here,’ ‘Easy Street,’ ‘You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile,’ and ‘I Don’t Need Anything but You’ appear in the stage show and all of the films, though in several cases their position and function in the story differ from the original. Of course, some changes are made within musical numbers—some cosmetic, others more surgical—but these eight songs form the spine of each reinvention and maintain their strong connections to the stage show. What Table 21.1 additionally shows clearly is how the filmic Annies relate musically not only to the stage show but also to each other. The parallels between the musical and the Disney film are quite apparent, with the omission of three chorus numbers (‘We’d Like to Thank You,’ ‘You Won’t Be an Orphan for Long,’ and ‘Annie’) the only notable points of ­departure prior to final scenes. A small narrative shift supports an extra reprise of ‘Little Girls’ in the closing sequence, and the removal of politics from the story necessitates a repurposing and repositioning of the ‘Tomorrow’ reprise and the omission of ‘New Deal for Christmas.’ The latter is replaced consistently across all of the reinventions with ‘I Don’t Need Anything but You,’ which is a reprise in the Disney version, having been sung originally at the same narrative point as the stage musical. Perhaps unexpectedly, the Columbia and Gluck Annies also bear similarities in terms of musical structuring, with several of the adjustments made to the order of songs in the first film replicated in the most recent iteration. Notably, both pictures switch ‘I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here’ and ‘Little Girls,’ place ‘Easy Street’ at the point at which the reprise of the number is heard in the stage show (omitting the reprise), and, as just noted, use ‘I Don’t Need Anything but You’ as the pre-credit finale, though in the Columbia film this is the start of a medley. Notwithstanding this, the 2014 film’s use of songs from the musical for instrumental underscoring means that it mimics the show’s overall musical structure much more closely than its 1982 counterpart. The stage show of Annie features the children’s chorus in three numbers—‘It’s the Hard-Knock Life’ and its reprise, and the reprise of ‘You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile’—and the adult chorus in a further six songs—‘We’d Like to Thank You,’ ‘I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here,’ ‘NYC,’ ‘You Won’t Be an Orphan for Long,’ ‘I Don’t Need Anything but You,’ and ‘Annie’—as well as ‘New Deal for Christmas’ and the bows version of ‘Tomorrow’ for the full company. The Columbia film retains two of the three songs for children’s chorus—‘It’s the Hard-Knock Life’ and ‘You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile’—though the latter features only the principal orphans rather than the whole group, and the adult chorus performs in ‘I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here,’ ‘Let’s Go to the Movies’ (which replaces the chorus number ‘NYC’), and a new part-choral version of ‘Tomorrow’ over the opening credits. However, ‘I Don’t Need Anything but You’ is stripped back to just the principals, most of the chorus is removed from ‘We Got Annie’ (itself a rewritten version of the chorus number ‘Annie’ from the stage show), and the rest of the original chorus numbers are removed from the film completely. In total, the film omits one third of the show’s musical numbers, something that is perhaps particularly surprising given that it was released while Annie was still running on Broadway. As indicated in Table 21.1, under half of the fourteen remaining songs in the Columbia movie are retained in their original positions, and four new songs are inserted into the

three adaptations of annie   481 picture: ‘Dumb Dog,’ ‘Sandy,’ ‘Let’s Go to the Movies,’ and ‘Sign.’ The first two of these songs show Annie’s love for Sandy, the stray dog she rescues from the pound, but they displace her first rendition of ‘Tomorrow,’ which, as discussed later, affects the u ­ nderlying narrative of the story somewhat. ‘Let’s Go to the Movies’ was originally designed to show off the singing and dancing talents of Ann Reinking, playing Grace, and although broadly speaking it serves a similar function to that of ‘NYC’—introducing Annie to the City and its culture—it does not afford Warbucks the same opportunity for relaxation and nostalgia that starts his transformation from cold-hearted businessman to loving father figure. ‘Sign,’ the last new insertion, is a duet for Warbucks and Hannigan that neither seems to enjoy very much, in which she tries to seduce him while he repeatedly pesters her to authorize his adoption of Annie. Although written by Strouse and Charnin, none of the new songs enhance the musical palette of the film particularly, and their inclusion arguably weakens some aspects of the story. While the structure and songs of the Disney film are much closer to that of the o ­ riginal show, it is the adult chorus that is the main casualty of this small-screen reinvention. It is notable that the songs omitted from the television version are ‘We’d Like to Thank You,’ ‘You Won’t Be an Orphan for Long,’ ‘Annie’ and ‘New Deal for Christmas,’ all of which feature the chorus prominently in the stage show, with ‘NYC’ (reintroduced in place of ‘Let’s Go to the Movies’) and ‘I Don’t Need Anything but You’ rewritten to remove the chorus parts. Although it does not feature the chorus, ‘You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile’ is also heavily abridged, with just a snippet of the main song featuring on the radio before the children perform their reprise of the number. However, prior to the final scene these are the only significant musical deviations from the stage show (accepting that there is also a significant amount of reorchestration, some r­ earranging in dance numbers, and the underscoring, where it exists, is generally new). The only new material in the film comes right at the end, with a second airing of the ‘Little Girls Reprise,’ a short reprise of ‘I Don’t Need Anything but You’ to act as a finale, and instrumental end credits based around ‘Maybe’ rather than ‘Tomorrow.’ In his discussion of film and theatre, Neil Sinyard notes that ‘because a film has to reach a wider audience than a play, the play is sometimes in danger of either being simplified or diluted in order to make it more acceptable and accessible to the mass public.’28 Such a statement applies just as aptly to musicals as plays, with perhaps the principal method of dilution coming from the removal of chorus songs when a show becomes a film. While such changes to the role of the chorus do not impact greatly on the story in either the 1982 or 1999 reinventions of Annie—indeed, the removal of ‘You Won’t Be an Orphan for Long,’ which is a weak song, arguably strengthens the narrative—such simplification can adversely affect the picture. The opening of Tim Burton’s 2007 film of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd is a case in point. The chorus is largely excised (butchered, even) from the picture, with the result that ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’ not only fails to present the audience with the background to the story through Sondheim’s lyrics but also lacks the most haunting and chilling elements of the song: the dramatic and chromatic vocal harmonies. Cost is surely not an issue—Columbia clearly had the budget to retain more of the chorus singing in Annie, for example—indicating that it

482   musical theatre screen adaptations may simply be an aesthetic choice. Perhaps the tendency to value the visual over the aural in films leads to a perception that a large cast gives a picture grandeur whereas a singing chorus brings unnecessary complexity. Whatever the reason, it might be hoped that this trend will be at least slowed by the inclusion of a large chorus in the groundbreaking 2012 screen version of Les Misérables, particularly given the many ways in which the picture has revolutionized film musicals.29 With this in mind, the music in Will Gluck’s 2014 Annie is considered in detail later in this chapter, alongside c­ onsideration of that reinvention as a contemporary screen musical. Constructing a framework for each film with reference to the placement of named songs offers an overview of the way in which apparently recognizable music supports each adaptation of Annie, but a comparison such as that presented in Table 21.1 does not provide any detail regarding the function, agency, or even sound of these musical numbers. Evaluation of these aspects of the music requires close consideration of selected songs from each reinvention, starting with the most famous of the show’s numbers, ‘Tomorrow.’

Tomorrow: Narrative Agency through Song According to Bordman, ‘ “Tomorrow,” Annie’s paean of hope for the future, became the last Broadway show song for many seasons to enjoy widespread appeal.’30 Indeed, while narratively the song features no more often in the stage show than ‘Maybe,’ ‘It’s the HardKnock Life,’ ‘Little Girls,’ ‘You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile,’ and ‘Easy Street,’ each of which is reprised, ‘Tomorrow’ also opens and closes the show overture and is the music for the final company bows. This bookending of the show promotes ‘Tomorrow’ disproportionately in the memory of the audience, who are likely to recall it more clearly than other songs owing to the serial position effect.31 Similarly, the opening credits of the Columbia film showcase ‘Tomorrow,’ but this new version combines Annie singing solo and a choral rendition rather than being a purely instrumental overture, thrusting the song’s story into the foreground far sooner than in the musical. This artificially increases even further the apparent importance of ‘Tomorrow’ to the story, not least because the stage overture features several other of the main melodies whereas the filmic version is musically single-minded. This being the case, it is particularly surprising to find that the first proper musical divergence within the actual film arrives at the point when Annie should sing her solo version of ‘Tomorrow,’ as noted earlier, a change that results in the song’s not acquiring the same sort of personal connection with Annie that it has in the stage show. Indeed, although film critic Pauline Kael observes that Annie ‘bawls out “Tomorrow” regularly, on schedule,’32 the song actually features only once within the filmic narrative, when Annie and Warbucks visit President Roosevelt in Washington, DC, at the point when the reprise is heard in the original. In the musical,

three adaptations of annie   483 the cabinet members observe the worsening state of the economy, unemployment, and the potential of war in Europe—the setting is the mid-1930s—and out of their despair Annie raises their spirits with a reprise of ‘Tomorrow’ that drives Roosevelt and his ministers to set the country on the road to recovery through the New Deal. After Annie and Warbucks leave, the president leads his cabinet in another chorus. Perhaps ironically, this is an occasion where fidelity to the source generates a musical problem in the adapted film. In the scene in the stage musical, Annie begins to speak the words of ‘Tomorrow’ only to be shouted down by the cabinet before she can complete the verse, and when Roosevelt encourages her to sing, she continues from where she stopped. As shown in Table 21.2, the impact of this is that the first A section of the song’s structure is omitted from this reprise, since the music leads on naturally from the preceding dialogue—the text of the (almost) complete first A secaudio example 21.1. Columbia’s Annie sings exactly the tion—as can be heard in same material as her stage forebear, but the dialogue that leads to this moment is significantly different, as video example 21.1 demonstrates, meaning that the song is incomplete; in this context there is no logical musical reason for the omission of the first A section, unbalancing the song. When ‘Tomorrow’ is repeated by Annie, Warbucks, and the Roosevelts immediately afterwards it starts with the previously omitted phrase, which was also present at the very opening of the film as the song played through the credits. Indeed, it seems therefore that the reason the start is removed in the Washington, DC scene is simply because that is what is sung—though not all that is heard—in the stage show. There is also a small change in the song lyric that marks a notable difference in Columbia’s reinvention. Onstage when Roosevelt and his cabinet repeat the song, the president seals the creation of the New Deal through a subtle lyric change in the song’s C  section, so that rather than ‘always,’ tomorrow is ‘only’ a day away. However, in Columbia’s version of the story Roosevelt asks Annie and Warbucks for help delivering the New Deal, and it is Annie rather than the president who proclaims tomorrow is ‘only’ a day away (indicated in italics in Table 21.2). Indeed, this is the only version of the lyric used in the film, with Annie also singing ‘only’ in the opening credit track. The shift from ‘always’ to ‘only’ is quite noticeable in the musical, and it supports the idea that, as president, Roosevelt actually holds the power to improve people’s quality of life (to bring the sun out) as the country recovers from the Depression. Removing this subtle change means that one of the key musico-narrative aspects of the original score is lost, and having Annie sing ‘only’ surely ascribes too much influence and responsibility to a young girl.33 Paradoxically, ‘Tomorrow’ leads to similar though opposite problems in Gluck’s Annie. The song is restored to its position in the first part of the narrative, in alignment with the original show, and it expresses Annie’s longing to find her parents, thus e­ nabling the audience to empathize with her and her situation. Indeed, the main ‘Tomorrow’ sequence contains some of the most inspired cinematography in the 2014 film, as can be seen in video example 21.2. Annie walks back to Hannigan’s after a secret trip to the public records office to try to gather information on her parents, and as she passes

484   musical theatre screen adaptations

Table 21.2  Lyrical structure of Annie’s solo from the ‘Tomorrow Reprise’ from the stage show and the only narrative rendition of ‘Tomorrow’ from the Columbia film (author’s emphasis) Version

A—4 bars [SPOKEN]

Stage Show

The sun’ll come out tomorrow/ bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow/ there’ll be . . .

A—4 bars

Just thinking about tomorrow/ clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow/ Columbia (Different dialogue til there’s none. Film leading into song)

B—5 bars

When I’m stuck with a day that’s grey and lonely/ I just stick out my chin, and grin, and say/oh.

A'—4 bars

C—4 bars

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow/ you’re always a day away.

The sun’ll come out tomorrow/so you gotta hang on til tomorrow/come Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love what may. you, tomorrow/ you’re only a day away.

Source: Thomas Meehan, Charles Strouse, and Martin Charnin, Annie. Libretto Vocal Book, 99–100; Annie, directed by John Huston (Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment, [1982] 2004) [DVD], 1:25:25–1:26:14.

through the city she sees reflections of parents with their children wherever she looks. In reality, however, none of these children exist, and when the actual people are revealed they are usually carrying out mundane activities such as pulling a mail cart, throwing a bucket on a building site, and carrying a sofa. Sadly, while this imagination in the visual imagery gives the song additional depth, the film has no sung reprise of ‘Tomorrow’ until the end credits. It therefore appears only once in this reinvention, and as a result it is arguably no more important a song for the protagonist than any other that she sings. Indeed, when it does return at the end of the film, complete with marching band, parade, balloons, and full choreography, tomorrow is still ‘always’ a day away, despite Annie’s adoption by Stacks, which rather misses the whole point of the song. While the omission of politics means that the placement of the ‘Tomorrow’ reprise in the Disney film also differs from the stage show, the narrative function of the song is retained much more closely in this reinvention. The agency lost from ‘Tomorrow’ in the Columbia picture is restored, with the song taking pride of place in the first act of the picture as it does in the 2014 movie. However, even though there is no trip to Washington, DC, in this version, the reprise of ‘Tomorrow’ still plays a key role in the narrative, coupled in this adaptation with a reprise of Annie’s other personal song, ‘Maybe.’ Surprisingly, however, these numbers are sung to Annie by Grace after Mr and Mrs Mudge are apparently shown to be Annie’s parents and she realizes she will have to leave Warbucks. While the removal of the political aspects of the show does have an impact on the structure of the narrative, it is the reassignment of the reprises of both ‘Maybe’ and ‘Tomorrow’ to Grace, rather than Annie herself, that most affects

three adaptations of annie   485 the interpretation of the story. Giving Grace, who up to that point has been a relatively peripheral character, the two songs that encapsulate Annie’s character, enhances her standing and importance to the story, and to Annie. She is portrayed as a staunch ­supporter of Annie in all of the films, but only in this reinvention does she get to prove her love for the orphan by singing to her using Annie’s own musical material. Her key position in the narrative is confirmed by enabling her to change ‘always’ to ‘only’ in the closing line of ‘Tomorrow,’ signalling her guiding hand in Annie’s future. Director Rob Marshall’s clear understanding of the two songs’ agency is further demonstrated by the use of ‘Maybe’ rather than ‘Tomorrow’ for the closing credit sequence. After all, it is this song that Annie returns to at key points in her personal story—the very start, after Warbucks says he will look for her parents, and on the morning she is set to leave Warbucks with her ‘parents’—indicating that ‘Maybe’ is actually the show’s most important number.

(Un-)‘Easy Street’ ‘Easy Street’ is another number that is treated quite differently in all three reinventions. The placement of the song in each film has already been noted, but the impact of such a repositioning requires closer attention. In the stage show and the Disney picture the song is a light-hearted number about the life the Hannigans always wanted, and while the lyrics include a vague notion of using Annie to get to Warbucks and his money, the number serves mainly to emphasize that these characters are the villains of the piece. It is only in the second act dialogue scene that culminates with the ‘Easy Street’ reprise that Rooster and Lily outline to Hannigan their plan to pose as Annie’s parents in order to claim the reward money, and they appeal to her for information that will help them convince Warbucks that they really are Annie’s mum and dad. There is nothing further actually shown in the stage musical, but it is clear that Hannigan furnishes them with the information found in Annie’s note and, importantly, tells them of the existence of the silver locket left with Annie by her parents. It is this detail that appears to confirm that Annie is indeed their little girl, though the libretto includes a performance direction that Rooster’s comparison of his and Annie’s half lockets is done ‘very quickly, too quickly,’34 indicating that he does not have the real locket section. There is no false locket in Disney’s reinvention, with Rooster and Lily’s knowledge of the necklace enough to convince Warbucks and the others that they are Annie’s parents; and while this makes a little more sense than for the Hannigans to rely on a fake locket, in many ways it is equally problematic in the context of the story. Given the lengths to which Warbucks has gone to locate Annie’s parents, it seems astounding that he does not insist on seeing both parts of the locket for himself to be sure the claim is genuine, especially as by this time he wants to adopt Annie himself and would therefore be particularly keen to be able to dismiss any claim to her as false. In the Columbia film, ‘Easy Street’ is heard after Warbucks offers a large financial reward to any responders who can prove they are Annie’s parents, and the whole number

486   musical theatre screen adaptations is therefore entwined with the idea of obtaining this money and then disposing of the child. During the song, Hannigan reveals that Annie’s parents were killed several years earlier in a vehicle accident, and that the police sent their possessions to her to be looked after. As a result, she is able to provide the locket half for Rooster and Lily, resolving the issue from the stage show (and the Disney film) discussed earlier. The dancing in the bulk of the song retains an air of slapstick comedy, especially in the way Hannigan is pushed around by the other two,35 with the editors of the Consumer Guide going so far as to suggest that ‘compared to everything else in the film it stands out like a gem.’36 However, the change of narrative context means the start of the song is somewhat darker than in the original show, and there is also an uncomfortable sexuality to the opening of the number that feels quite out of place in a family film. This is particularly notable when Rooster opens the envelope that contains the locket and reveals it slowly to Hannigan and Lily. As emphasized in video example 21.3, his drawn-out and salacious ‘E’ at the start of the lyric ‘Easy Street’ seems to drive the two women into some sort of orgasmic frenzy, and Lily writhes around on the desk in apparent ecstasy as he lowers the locket seductively onto her face. While these actions may be designed to emphasize quite how evil Rooster is in this reinvention—he actually tries to kill Annie when she escapes and destroys Warbucks’s cheque, an intention only ever hinted at in other versions of the story—they seem quite inappropriate given the film’s target audience.37 There is a marked difference between the Columbia and Disney representations of the relationships between Rooster, Lily, and Hannigan, which results in contrasting interpretations of the way in which the trio operate. Whereas Lily is Rooster’s first priority in the Columbia film, his principal loyalty is clearly to his sister, Hannigan, in the Disney version. Indeed, Disney’s Lily matches the stage show’s character description—‘a floozy and bimbo’—very closely, leading Hannigan to decide that she, rather than Lily, will accompany Rooster as Mrs Mudge, Annie’s apparent mother. Lily is left in charge of the orphans and it is this that ultimately foils the criminals’ scheme: the orphans trick Lily into revealing the plan by convincing her that Rooster has no intention of returning for her once he and Hannigan have the money, a circumstance in which Columbia’s Lily would never have ended up. Rooster and Lily are both absent from Will Gluck’s reinvention, with their role taken on by Stacks’s campaign manager, Guy, who stands to receive a substantial pay packet if he can get his employer elected mayor of New York City. Guy sings ‘Easy Street’ to Hannigan in a bar as he explains his plan to find fake parents for Annie to increase Stacks’s chance of winning the election, darkening the number in a similar manner to the Columbia version and again linking it with the notion of removing Annie for personal gain.38 Additionally, while the chorus is retained, ‘Easy Street’ is effectively a new song that is based on and borrows from the original musical and lyrical material, and it is not the only number to receive this sort of treatment. Indeed, in addition to considering Gluck’s Annie with regard to the stage show and the other filmic reinventions, attention must be paid to the quite radical changes to the sound of the music, and to the status of this reinvention as a contemporary film musical.

three adaptations of annie   487

Music in Will Gluck’s Annie Jay-Z, who co-produced the 2014 film, first engaged professionally with the music of Annie in his 1998 hit ‘Hard-Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),’ but the film’s musical soundscape eschews the hip-hop/rap stylings of this track in favour of a fairly generic pop sound. The soundtrack combines new arrangements of some of the existing songs, new songs based on the show’s songs (as is the case with ‘Easy Street’), and totally new songs, with significant variety in the level of success across the picture. There is an effort to embed music into the fabric of the film practically from the ­outset as the camera follows Annie as she races away from school at the end of the day and heads off into New York City. Her journey is accompanied by an overture of sorts that not only presents several of the songs from the original show but also integrates many of them into the city: the sound effects of roadworks, truck doors, and car horns all synchronize with the music; a young woman listening to music on headphones sings a riff from ‘Tomorrow’; ‘It’s the Hard-Knock Life’ could be interpreted as being on the radio in a taxi and the melody is taken up by bicycle bells; and part of ‘I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here’ is performed by a band busking on the subway platform. Olaf Jubin notes that ‘at first this conceit seems like a charming attempt to apprise audiences that the urban sounds of New York City form the soundtrack of our heroine’s life’; however, as the film progresses, ‘it gets more and more desperate and unconvincing,’39 and indeed further use in ‘It’s the Hard-Knock Life’ of what might roughly be termed as musical ­bricolage is more annoying and distracting than engaging and interesting. Perhaps the greatest success of the overture is the misdirection caused by the music (which is ‘Tomorrow’ at this point) ending as Annie arrives at Stacks’s product launch. However, while most of the action does indeed revolve around the familial relationship that develops between Annie and Stacks, her mad dash from school is not so that she can get a new phone; Annie moves on after only a momentary pause to complete what is revealed to be a weekly pilgrimage to the Domani restaurant where she was abandoned by her parents. Some of the reinvented songs work reasonably well—there is an interesting ­rearrangement of ‘Maybe’ that perhaps emphasizes the closeness of Annie’s foster-child group, for instance—and the idea of paying tribute to the original stage show results in some songs that have been excised as vocal numbers used within the picture as instrumental underscoring. However, when the original song has served only as the basis for a number, the results are more mixed. ‘I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here’ retains the narrative idea of the show song but presents it in a more contemporary setting. Tennis courts and servants are replaced with notions of thought-controlled and voice-activated technologies, and there is enough of the main melody and chorus lyric in the remix to at least capture the essence of the Broadway number. The song also plays on some of the ­elements of the original number, continuing the idea of homage identified by Gluck in his director’s commentary; for example, while the 1977 (and 1982) Annie is astonished that Warbuck’s swimming pool is inside his house, for the twenty-first-century youngster

488   musical theatre screen adaptations the surprise is that Stacks’s pool knows what temperature she would like it to be. By contrast, ‘Little Girls’ departs quite significantly from the source materials and suffers from a loss of identity as a result. Indeed, it is almost unrecognizable as a version of the same song since the two have so little in common aside from the title lyric. While the cinematography again nods towards elements of the Columbia film through the appearance of the foster children everywhere Hannigan looks, the song is ‘perfunctory and shallow rather than transcendent,’40 and fails to reach the heights of the original.41 The four completely new songs—‘The City’s Yours,’ ‘Opportunity,’ ‘Who Am I?,’ and ‘Moonquake Lake,’ by Greg Kurstin and Sia Furler—also fail to offer anything particularly inspiring or memorable to the film musically, lyrically, or narratively. Functionally, the first three replace ‘You’re Never Fully Dressed’ (Annie becoming famous), the ‘Tomorrow’ reprise (Annie lifts the spirits with a song of hope for the future), and the reprise of ‘Maybe’ (Annie, and in this version of the story also Stacks and Hannigan, consider what the future will bring), but in all three cases the substitution weakens the musical profile of the picture, particularly through the loss of the reprises of Annie’s main songs. The fourth, ‘Moonquake Lake,’ is the title song of a movie Annie and her friends are taken to by Stacks but is actually only heard over Annie’s closing credits.42 Indeed, it seems likely that the intention in adding the new tracks was to garner an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song—as is usually the case in screen adaptations of  stage musicals—an endeavour in which the writers were unsuccessful. Annie’s solo, ‘Opportunity,’ was nominated for a Golden Globe, but it lost out to ‘Glory’ from Selma, which also won the Academy Award. However, for me at least, all thoughts on the quality of the music are tempered by two related factors that identify Annie as an outlier in terms of contemporary film musicals. Despite efforts made to modernize the narrative and musical content of the show for this reinvention, the filmmakers—all of whom were novices in the production of movie musicals—seem to have been unaware of the significant changes wrought in the industry by the film of Les Misérables two years earlier. In his director commentary Gluck informs viewers that the songs were prerecorded in the studio,43 and although the cast were also recorded singing on set and the final soundtrack is a mix of these recordings, the use of prerecorded vocals is quite apparent across the picture, especially given some of the choreography carried out while singing.44 The other issue is the fact that, as Lapin derisively remarks, the songs are ‘overproduced with slimy AutoTune [sic.],’45 with Jason Clark even more disparaging in his review for Entertainment Weekly: ‘Musically, Annie is a disaster. The melodious original score by Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin gets the full-on Autotune pap treatment, which takes to these songs about as well as a lute to death metal.’46 While it might be argued that this has been done to align the picture with the post-X-Factor auto-tune aesthetic, it sounds more like a necessity than a stylistic preference, particularly in the case of Annie herself, Quvenzhané Wallis.47 While Depressionera politics may root the original Annie story in the 1930s, the stage show and the first two films can at least offer an element of nostalgia to audiences; Gluck’s film is entrenched in the early twenty-first century by the audible results of these t­echnological decisions, which might mean bizarrely that it dates far faster than any of its predecessors.

three adaptations of annie   489

Conclusion Columbia’s film from 1982 remains the most widely known screen version of Annie, and the visual and narrative references to this first picture in the 2014 reimagining only serve to reinforce this point. Indeed, despite Disney’s offering being the closest to the stage musical in both narrative and musical terms, and the programme doing very well when it was broadcast on ABC in 1999, the lack of a cinematic release means that it has never received the level of exposure afforded to the other two movies. It also lacks some of the ‘star power’ found in the other films’ casts, with Columbia’s movie headlined by Albert Finney and Carol Burnett, and Gluck’s by Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, and Quvenzhané Wallis, the only one of the three Annies not making her screen debut in the role.48 While the Disney cast includes Oscar winner Kathy Bates and a number of Tony-award winning Broadway performers including Audra MacDonald, Alan Cumming, and Kristen Chenoweth, they perhaps do not carry the same level of celebrity among the film-watching public. It was noted at the start of this chapter that there was no intention to prove that any of these reinventions was ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than any of the others, and that remains the case. This exploration has considered not only the ways in which the films are similar to and different from the original stage show but also each other, and the impacts (whether intentional or unintentional) that some of the musical and narrative decisions taken in the creation of each reinvention have had on the ways in which the story, songs, and characters are presented and received. While there are undoubtedly contrasting areas of strength and weakness in each of the three screen versions of Annie, each one adapts the preceding hypotextual material in different ways and to different ends. Indeed, it seems that Annie’s identity remains as mysterious as that of the character’s mother and father. In each film, imposters needed only a few key details to be accepted as Annie’s parents, and so too each screen reinvention offers just enough of the original narrative and music for a new generation of viewers to recognize and accept it as ‘their Annie.’

Notes 1. Thomas Meehan, Charles Strouse, and Martin Charnin, Annie. Libretto Vocal Book (New York: Musical Theatre International, 1977), 3. 2. Columbia Pictures was actually involved in the production of all three films; the 1999 ­television movie was a coproduction with Disney, and Village Roadshow Pictures and Overbrook Entertainment produced the 2014 film for Columbia. However, for clarity, all references in this chapter to ‘Columbia’s Annie’ relate to the 1982 film. 3. Olaf Jubin poses the question of why it has been difficult to transfer Annie onto the screen, exploring many of the production decisions behind each of these adaptations and considering their relative levels of commercial and artistic success. See Olaf Jubin, ‘The Trouble with “Little Girls”: Annie on the Big (and Small) Screen,’ in Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen, ed. George Rodosthenous (New York: Routledge, 2017), 196–211.

490   musical theatre screen adaptations 4. Annie Get Your Gun and The Desert Song, the latter of which is discussed by William A. Everett in his chapter in this volume, have also been adapted for the screen on multiple occasions. Once upon a Mattress has been filmed three times, though both the 1965 and 1972 versions are effectively recordings of the stage show for the screen—there was a live audience at the filming and the production is theatrical rather than filmic in look—rather than screen musicals. Accordingly, it is more akin to The Sound of Music, which exists on screen as a film musical (1965) and as two live television musicals (NBC 2013, ITV 2015), than to Annie. 5. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 5. 6. Miguel Mera, ‘Invention/Re-invention,’ Music Sound and the Moving Image 3, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 1–20, 2. 7. Robert Stam, ‘Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,’ in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 1–52, 31. 8. Thomas Leitch, ‘Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake,’ in Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, ed. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard  R.  Koos (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 37–62, 40. 9. Stam, ‘Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,’ 31. 10. Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 4. 11. The comic strip is acknowledged as the inspiration for the stage show and is arguably the fundamental hypotext for any consideration of Annie. However, the purpose of this chapter is not to critique the musical as an adaptation in itself but as a source for filmic adaptation, and since neither the 1999 nor the 2014 film draws on the cartoon (as indicated by the lack of connecting lines in Figure 21.1), the stage musical is taken as the point of origin unless otherwise noted. 12. Mera, ‘Invention/Re-invention,’ 2. 13. Mera, ‘Invention/Re-invention,’ 2. 14. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 73. 15. Gerald Bordman, Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 685; Thomas Hischak, The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film and Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23. 16. Thomas G. Aylesworth, Broadway to Hollywood: Musicals from Stage to Screen (Twickenham: Hamlyn, 1985), 251. 17. Aylesworth, Broadway to Hollywood, 251; Hischak, The Oxford Companion to the American Musical, 24. 18. Robert Simonson, ‘Second Floor of Sardi’s with Martin Charnin, Thomas Meehan and Charles Strouse: A Drink with the Annie Creators,’ Playbill, 21 March 2013, http://www. playbill.com/article/second-floor-of-sardis-with-martin-charnin-thomas-meehan-andcharles-strouse-a-drink-with-the-annie-creators-com-203656, accessed 18 July 2018. 19. Simonson, ‘Second Floor of Sardi’s,’ accessed 30 June 2017. 20. Leitch, ‘Twice-Told Tales,’ 45. 21. Geoffrey Block considers all four of Disney’s television musical adaptations in ‘Disney as Broadway Auteur: The Disney Versions of Broadway Musicals for Television in the Late 1990s and Early 2000s,’ in The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Approaches from ‘Snow White’ to ‘Frozen,’ ed. George Rodosthenous (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 83–99.

three adaptations of annie   491 22. Jessica Sternfeld, ‘Revisiting Classic Musicals: Revivals, Films, Television and Recordings,’ The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 2nd ed., ed. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 325–339, 337. 23. Will Gluck, ‘Director’s Commentary,’ Annie (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, [2014] 2015) [DVD]. 24. Leitch, ‘Twice-Told Tales,’ 42. 25. Jubin, ‘The Trouble with “Little Girls,” ’ 204. 26. Indeed, though he describes the scene as ‘controversial,’ Will Gluck confirms it is another of the filmmakers’ homages to earlier iterations of Annie. Gluck, ‘Director’s Commentary.’ 27. Simonson, ‘Second Floor of Sardi’s,’ accessed 30 June 2017. 28. Neil Sinyard, Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 160. 29. See Ian Sapiro, ‘Beyond the Barricade: Adapting Les Misérables for the Cinema,’ in Contemporary Musical Film, ed. K.  J.  Donnelly and Elizabeth Carroll (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 123–139. 30. Bordman, Musical Theatre, 685. 31. The serial position effect is the psychological phenomenon whereby items heard at the  start and end of a list are more readily recalled than those in the middle. See Angela K. Troyer, ‘Serial Position Effect,’ Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology, ed. Jeffrey  S.  Kreutzer, John DeLuca, and Bruce Caplan (New York: Springer, 2011), 2263–2264. 32. Pauline Kael, Taking It All In: Film Writings 1980–1983 (London: Arena, 1987), 344. 33. The character description for Annie on the website of the performing rights holder, Music Theatre International, gives her age as ten to twelve years old. See Music Theatre International, ‘Annie: Full Cast Info,’ Music Theatre International, 2018, http://www. mtishows.co.uk/full-cast-info/509, accessed 18 July 2018. 34. Meehan, Strouse and Charnin, Annie. Libretto Vocal Book, 122. 35. Huston and Stark originally conceived their version of ‘Easy Street’ as an extravagant showstopper number filmed on a $1million specially constructed street set. However, they were forced to rethink the song when viewing it within the context of the whole film after principal photography had been completed, reshooting it in the orphanage. Perhaps ­ironically, Disney’s song begins in the orphanage but moves outside to the street for a dance break and the final part of the song. See Kenneth Turan, ‘Hollywood Puts Its Money on Annie,’ New York Times Magazine, 2 May 1982, http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/02/ magazine/hollywood-puts-its-money-on-annie.html, accessed 18 July 2018. 36. Editors of the Consumer Guide with Phillip J. Kaplan, The Best, Worst & Most Unusual: Hollywood Musicals (New York: Beekman House, 1983), 148. 37. Olaf Jubin notes similarly that the scene on the B&O Bridge in which Rooster tries to kill Annie ‘is both confusing and too suspenseful for little children,’ again calling into question the suitability of parts of the film for its target audience. See Jubin, ‘The Trouble with “Little Girls,” ’ 199. 38. Jubin dissects the narrative and cinematographic issues with the ‘Easy Street’ sequence in ‘The Trouble with “Little Girls,” ’ 206–207. 39. Jubin, ‘The Trouble with “Little Girls,” ’ 206. 40. Andrew Lapin, ‘21st-century Musicals Still Haven’t Found a Way Out of the Woods,’ The Dissolve, 12 January 2015, https://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/876-2014s-­musicalsmight-just-save-us-all/, accessed 18 July 2018.

492   musical theatre screen adaptations 41. The song’s cause is not helped by the fact that Cameron Diaz is weaker vocally than the other Hannigans: Dorothy Loudon (Broadway), Carol Burnett (Columbia), and Kathy Bates (Disney). 42. Contemporary films often feature a pop song over the closing credits rather than repeating music from the main score, with some songs, such as Take That’s ‘Rule the World’ from Stardust (2007), written specifically for this purpose to connect the track to the film’s narrative. However, it is very unusual for a film musical to introduce new material at this point, placing Annie out of alignment not only with the other reinventions but with its genre more broadly. 43. Gluck, ‘Director’s Commentary.’ 4 4. To date, Annie is the only film musical produced since Les Misérables (2012) that does not feature any ‘pure’ live on-set singing. See Sapiro, ‘Beyond the Barricade,’ 134. 45. Lapin, ‘21st-century Musicals Still Haven’t Found a Way Out of the Woods,’ accessed 30 June 2017. 46. Jason Clark, ‘Annie,’ Entertainment Weekly, 25 December 2014, http://ew.com/­article/ 2014/12/25/annie-4/, accessed 18 July 2018. 47. Jamie Foxx suffers the most in this respect, since although he can sing, his vocal is as overproduced as everyone else’s. 48. Wallis made her debut two years before Annie in Beasts of the Southern Wild, for which she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role. See IMDB, ‘Quvenzhané Wallis,’ Internet Movie Database, 2018, http://www.imdb.com/name/ nm4832920/?ref_=nv_sr_2, accessed 18 July 2018.

CHAPTER 22

The M a n y Face s of R io R ita John Graziano

The critical and financial success of Rio Rita in February 1927 could not have come at a better time for Florenz Ziegfeld. The Follies were no longer guaranteed moneymakers, partially due to the restraints on drinking alcoholic beverages imposed by Prohibition, nor were Ziegfeld’s standard book shows providing him with a substantial profit. He was being sued continually by people who worked for him1; he was constantly in debt, partly due to his high stakes gambling habit and his extravagant spending; and he had to fund the monthly expenses of $10,000 for his estate, Burkeley Crest, in New York State’s posh village, Hastings-on-Hudson. In the midst of all his financial problems, Ziegfeld dreamed of building a new theatre that would be named after him. In partnership with William Randolph Hearst, he decided to locate the theatre far from Times Square, on West 54th Street, across from the Warwick Hotel, which was owned by Hearst. The ­theatre was designed by the well-known architect/illustrator/set designer Joseph Urban (1872–1933);2 it cost $2.5 million and accommodated 1,666 ticket holders. The stage was huge (almost ninety-one feet across and forty feet deep); Urban’s fanciful ­ ecorated the entire theatre.3 murals d Ziegfeld had hoped that Show Boat would be the first show to play at his new theatre, but when the creative team said it was not ready, Rio Rita received that honor, premiering on 2 February 1927.4 While the musical was in development, its place of honor in opening the Ziegfeld Theatre was not contemplated. As is clear from the earliest sheet music covers, copyrighted in 1926, the show was not yet associated with any theatre. When it became apparent that Show Boat would not open the house, the cover was changed to advertise Ziegfeld’s new theatre (see Figure 22.1), and two numbers, ‘Are You There?’ and ‘Sweetheart,’ were added to Rio Rita. During the tryouts in Boston and several other cities, major tinkering took place. At the Colonial Theatre in Boston, for example, an extant programme from 27 December 1926 shows that ‘Sweetheart’ (a thirty-two-bar song without a verse) was not yet a part of the first act, and that act 2, in three scenes, was still not in its final form. But by the time

494   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 22.1  2nd sheet music cover for Broadway production of Rio Rita.

the production reached the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia in mid-January, the New York Times reported that there was an ‘endless’ line for tickets; Ziegfeld said he would try to meet audience demand by extending the run.5 Once the New York premiere was set for opening night at his new theatre, Ziegfeld set the price for orchestra seats at $27.50. Thereafter, they were priced at $5.50.6

the many faces of rio rita   495 Crowds thronged the streets outside the theatre for glimpses of the celebrities ­attending the premiere.7 Rio Rita has a book by Guy Bolton (1884–1979), already known for his scripts for the Princess shows with P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), and Fred Thompson (1884–1949), who previously worked with Bolton on the Gershwins’ Lady, Be Good! The lyrics are by Joseph McCarthy (1885–1943), who was one of the stable of writers Zeigfeld hired for the various editions of his Follies; he contributed to the 1919, 1920, 1923, and 1924 editions, but was best known to the public for his 1918 hit song, ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,’ for which he wrote both lyrics and music. Harry Tierney (1890–1965), another regular member of the Ziegfeld creative team, wrote the music for Rio Rita. He had contributed songs to a number of the Follies; had written the music for Irene (1919), which introduced the extremely popular ‘Alice Blue Gown’; and had provided Ziegfeld with the score for his last money-making book show, Kid Boots (1923), which starred Eddie Cantor. Rio Rita was given a typical Ziegfeld spectacular production, with a chorus of twentyseven male and eighty-six female singers/dancers. Urban designed five lavish sets and one of Ziegfeld’s favourite collaborators, John Harkrider (1899–1982), designed the spectacular costumes. Sammy Lee (1890–1968), already known for his choreography of Lady, Be Good! and No, No, Nanette, choreographed most of the dances, but Albertina Rasch (1891–1967) provided the choreography for the six numbers in which her sixteen specialty dancers, the Albertina Rasch Girls, appeared. The show was orchestrated by Frank Barry (dates unknown); the Entr’acte was unusual—a two piano ‘specialty’— played by Constance Mering and Muriel Pollock. J. Brooks Atkinson’s review in the Times is effusive, while noting that the show was not groundbreaking: ‘ “Rio Rita” breaks no fresh trend into the hinterland of musical comedy; . . . But for sheer extravagance of beauty, animated and rhythmic, “Rio Rita” has no rival among its contemporaries.’ Although Atkinson doesn’t say whether he liked the music other than referring to the ‘Rangers’ March’ as a ‘ “Vagabond King” type of marching song,’ he applauds the spectacle while noting that by 11:00 pm, when he left, the identity of the Kinkajou had not yet been established: But that had not prevented inordinate beautiful dancing girls, or gringo cabaret girls, or Albertina Rasch dancers, or South-American troubadours or, for that matter, the original Central American Marimba Band (Nicaraguan hostages, perhaps?) from spinning across the stage, stamping their chic feet in unison or singing in chorus on any number of hot-blooded themes. In the most lustrous costumes—silver sombreros, blood-red shirts, fluffy ballet stuffs, embroidered velvet waistcoats—they whirl in squads, one on the heel of another, until the stage was as furious in its design as the wall decorations. . . . The hippodromic proportions of ‘Rio Rita,’ splashed with bold brushfuls of color, were a feast to the eye.8

Arthur Pollock, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, lauded the show and praised the theatre, noting that it was unusual for its elliptical shape, which ‘does away with all angles, [and] adds to the acoustics.’ His review of the show centred on the star-turn performance of Ada-May, who ‘was lovely. . . . [S]he turns out to be a charming comedienne who can

496   musical theatre screen adaptations sing a song with the best of them, effortlessly, buoyantly, dance in a manner always ­original and surprising, and make herself in all necessary respects, delightful.’ Of Rio Rita itself, he said: ‘It has a gracious beauty and fine manner.’ 9 Frank Vreeland of the Evening Telegram called Rio Rita an ‘orgy of beauty and bounty. . . . [The book is] brisk if slightly conventional. . . . This production . . . primarily glorifies the American eye for beauty. . . . A bewitching feature which stopped the show was the Albertina Rasch ballet, providing the daintiest musical comedy number ­imaginable as a swaying flight of moonbeams.’10 From the time of its premiere, there has been some confusion as to whether Rio Rita is a musical comedy or an operetta.11 At its Broadway opening in 1927, it was labelled a ‘musical comedy’ in advertising and on sheet music and a ‘Romantic musical comedy’ (is there any other kind?) on the piano-vocal score. For its film release in 1929, it was advertised as a ‘Radio Picture Screen Operetta’ and ‘Fabulous Operetta.’ Some of the confusion may be the result of a recording of excerpts by the Victor Light Opera Company just two weeks after the show’s successful premiere. The excerpts heard, with one exception, are the operetta-style songs, with soaring melodies, avoidance of 1920s syncopation, no use of slang, and so on; they provided a basis for the opinions of the many critics who labelled the show an operetta. The singers are unidentified except for J. Harold Murray, who is the only member of the original cast to appear on the recording. Operetta selections dominate the sheet music as well, with only three of eight numbers offering the Broadway-style songs. An examination of the entire score, however, shows that Rio Rita is a hybrid, combining two distinct genres, operetta and 1920s musical comedy. Harry Tierney’s music is ­distinct for each group of characters. Rita and Jim, as befits their true love, sing operettastyle numbers. Lovett, Bean, and their flapper girlfriends/wives, on the other hand, represent the crass New York crowd that club-hop during the spirit-free Prohibition. Their love is fickle and, in Lovett’s case, pecuniary. Lovett is a sleazy lawyer, always involved in shady deals, while Chick is a naïve dupe, who usually has difficulty figuring out his next move. The music written for them and their girlfriends is in typical 1920s musical ­comedy style. As the drama takes place in Mexico, Tierney provides local-colour ‘exotic’ dances, including the Fado, for the elaborately costumed chorus and dancers, 100 strong, to provide Ziegfeldian grandeur in the big ensembles. The storylines are kept separate; the characters in the first group never interact with those in the second group, until the triple wedding at the very end of Rio Rita. There is, however, no sense of disjunction in the show. I have not been able to discover which of the creators—Bolton, Thompson, McCarthy, or Tierney—had the idea to set the two plots to different musical styles. I also have not been successful in finding other musicals written before 1927 that use this particular musical device to consistently delineate characters of different classes that might have been used as a model for the show.12 The complicated main plot of Rio Rita, which features a secret identity villain and the Texas Rangers, is somewhat reminiscent of other 1920s shows;13 it is set on the Texas border and in Mexico on the Rio Grande river, where one Roberto Ferguson, Rita’s brother, is accused, by General Enrique Joselito Esteban, of being an arch-criminal bank

the many faces of rio rita   497 robber, the Kinkajou. A Texas Ranger, Jim, who has fallen in love with Rita, is trying to arrest Roberto, but after some doubts, he realizes finally that the General, not her brother, is the Kinkajou. By cutting the ropes of a barge on which the General is having a party—at which time he is attempting to force Rita to marry him—Jim allows it to drift into United States waters, so he can arrest the villain. This (almost) classic love triangle between two suitors—one of whom is the villain—is augmented by the inclusion of Rita’s brother, Roberto, who is accused by Esteban of being the Kinkajou. The drama keeps the audience in the dark about the Kinkajou’s identity until the penultimate scene of act 2. In contrast with the operetta-like intrigue of the main story, the secondary musical comedy plot centres around two American Easterners, Ed Lovett and Chick Bean, and Bean’s two wives. Lovett is a not-too-honest lawyer who has secured a Mexican divorce for Bean, who has hurriedly married a second time (to Dolly). Following his Mexican marriage, however, Bean is informed by Lovett that the divorce is not valid in Texas, and he will, therefore, be considered a bigamist in the United States. Chick has to avoid sharing a bedroom with Dolly until the divorce is final. They lament their separation in the duet, ‘Are You There?’ To complicate matters even further, Bean’s first wife, Katie, appears at General Esteban’s floating barge to announce unexpectedly that she has inherited $3 million. Her announcement catches Lovett’s attention and he pursues her. In the final scene, the three couples—Jim and Rita, Chick and Dolly, and Ed and Katie—are married in a moonlight ceremony, three weeks after the Kinkajou’s capture. Bolton and Thomson’s script is a canny mixture of melodrama and comedy. The scenes between Rita, Esteban, and Jim are serious, while those with Chick and Ed are snappy, with jokes and risqué dialogue. The characters are all operetta/musical comedy stock figures. Rita is a simple but upright young woman who cannot be swayed from her quest to marry Jim, though for a short time (the end of act 1), she tells him to go away forever. Jim is a rather bland but serious character, given to platitudes; he is a symbol of the law and in this somewhat lawless state and foreign country, it is his job to pursue bank robbers. More interesting is Esteban, who rejoices in being the villain. He, too, is single-minded about his secret career as a criminal, but he can also be suave when courting Rita. The comic scenes hew more closely to what audiences would have expected from the creators of the Princess musicals, including Very Good Eddie (1915), Oh, Boy! (1917), and Oh Lady! Lady! (1918). Lovett and Bean partake in fast repartee that reflects the musicals of the 1920s. Tierney’s score is probably his masterpiece. The various numbers that comprise the score are inventive, with unusual forms and extended period phrases.14 ‘The Best Little Lover in Town,’ which is heard following the opening chorus and dance, introduces Ed Lovett with a chorus of girls. His spoken cue to the song is ‘Five minutes alone with me, and you’re a girl with a past.’ Joseph McCarthy’s lyrics for Lovett’s syncopated number starts the show with an up-to-date double-entendre number. A thirty-two-bar verse begins with a clever rhyme: [Lovett] ‘I’m chivalrous, but frivolous/I’m vigorous, quite rigorous,/ Should you add fastidious, Tut, tut!/Loquacious, Sagacious,/ I might add

498   musical theatre screen adaptations vivacious./[Girls] ‘We must say, My gracious, you’re a nut.’ The thirty-six-measure ­chorus, sung entirely by Lovett, continues: ‘Who is the best little lover in Town?/Just look me up when there’s no one around,/Here in a crowd I seem tragic;/ But, oh! you’ll be proud of my parlour magic./I never rest, Oh! I can’t settle down,/ With all the affairs that I’ve found./For I’m busy all day/giving samples away./The best little lover in town.’ It is followed by a sixteen-bar patter section that is sung by all. The chorus is heard once again, as both a vocal and a dance. Tierney’s next two numbers shift from musical comedy to operetta; they do not conform to the verse/chorus form that one would expect to hear. Rita muses about her love for Jim to a brief ‘air,’ ‘Sweetheart,’ which is immediately followed by ‘River Song’ (see ex. 22.1). This latter number is musically significant, since it is combined later in the act with the chorus of the title song, ‘Rio Rita’ and also closes act 1 (ex. 22.2). The large-scale Finale to act 1 (249 measures), which brings the drama to its ­traditional crisis point, is unusual in structure and also quite effective, eschewing complete statements of reprises. It is episodic, combining sung fragments from several of the numbers heard earlier with new music and underscored spoken dialogue in a variety of tempos, and in a number of different keys, beginning in E minor and ending in E-flat major, with a large central section in F major. Tierney opens the finale (mm. 1–38) with a Sousa-like march rhythm in 6/8 for General Esteban, his soldiers, and Rita, in which Esteban convinces her that Jim is an American spy who really does not love her. The music changes tempo to accommodate Rita’s questioning feelings. She replies ‘I must believe you then’ (ex. 22.3) to a new strain, but breaks off singing. The accompaniment continues with repetitions of her plaintive phrase while Esteban speaks, telling his men to kill Jim on sight. After he leaves, Rita sings a dreamy waltz (mm. 53–80). Her plaint, ‘A fool had a dream/By the river of dreams’ is set to a new melody with large leaps that is reminiscent of ‘River Song’ (ex. 22.4).

Example 22.1  Rio Rita, ‘River Song.’ (mm. 1-8)

the many faces of rio rita   499

Example 22.2  Rio Rita, ‘River Song’ and ‘Rio Rita’ combined. (mm. 41-48)

Example 22.3  Rio Rita, act 1 finale, mm. 39-50.

500   musical theatre screen adaptations The formal structure is again incomplete; after two eight-measure periods, the B s­ ection begins, but it breaks off after four measures. There is no return to the opening A material. Instead, Jim enters, singing the opening strain of the chorus of ‘Rio Rita.’ His singing is interrupted by a reprise of the waltz, ‘When You’re in Love, You’ll Waltz’ heard under a conversation between Jim and Rita. Jim then reprises his strain from that song (ex. 22.5), but Rita does not join him at its close as she did in the original duet. The waltz continues, though Jim’s singing is interrupted by a servant, who delivers a letter from Esteban that has false information in an effort to trap him. To an abrupt change of tempo, Jim tells Rita he has to go but can’t tell her why. She is angry and tells him to go forever: (Sung) ‘You’re not here for me. (spoken) But through me, the

Example 22.4  Rio Rita, act 1 finale, ‘A fool . . . ’ (mm. 53-60)

Example 22.5  Rio Rita, act 1 finale, ‘If you’re in love’ (mm. 100-120).

the many faces of rio rita   501 Kinkajou!’ She asks him to leave and never return. The chorus has entered during their confrontation, and excitedly supports her (in F minor). After professing his love for her, Jim prepares to leave (mm. 186–199). As he turns to walk through the gate of her hacienda, which will result in his death from Esteban’s men, a slow dirge-like passage is heard (ex. 22.6); Rita shouts ‘Stop! Wait! Not through that gate.’ Jim escapes. Over a brief underscored passage, Esteban accuses Rita of loving Jim. She denies it. As he leaves, Rita reprises measures 17–24 of ‘River Song,’ with a slight, but significant change of text. ‘River Song’ text And there beneath the palms,’ We met, and we knew A dream, with all its charms, came true, All life began there.

Finale text ’Twas there, beneath the palms We met, and we knew A dream with all its charms, came true, And now, it’s ended.

Her reverie is interrupted by Jim, who from afar (offstage) sings a variant of the first strain of the chorus to ‘Rio Rita.’ The act ends as Rita and the hacienda denizens sing the final four measures of ‘River Song.’ Six new numbers are introduced in the second act, including three dance specialities. In addition to Dolly and Lovett’s comic duet ‘I Can Speak Espanol,’ the most talkedabout dance of the show, Albertina Rasch’s ‘Black and White Ballet’ is seen (ex. 22.7).

Example 22.6  Rio Rita, act 1 finale, ‘Dirge’ (200-208)

Example 22.7  Rio Rita, act 2, ‘The Black and White Ballet’ (mm. 1-20)

502   musical theatre screen adaptations The lyrics for ‘Following the Sun Around,’ offer another example of how the creators straddled the fence between operetta and musical comedy. When the chorus is first heard, sung by Jim, it is a serious love plaint. Set to a wide-ranging operetta-type melody (ex. 22.8), Jim’s lyric suggests the hopelessness of his love affair: ‘I’ll spend my days/ Chasing after sunshine,/Some day one ray may steal through./Can’t change my ways,/Always hoping some time/Someone else may learn/To care as I do./There’s only one beneath the sun/That I’ve ever found./If she would smile on me a while,/’Twould change things all around;/Until then, I’ll spend my days/Chasing after sunshine/Following the sun around.’ Later in the act, a reprise of the song’s chorus, now titled ‘Moonshine’ is sung by Chick Bean.15 Now it is no longer a love plaint but a primer that comments on how one gets around the problems of prohibition. Chick sings: ‘I’ll spend my nights/Chasing after moonshine,/How I love my mountain dew./Must have my rights,/Morning, night, or moontime,/I must have my little toddy or two./It’s natural that the things we want are real hard to get./They made our country dry, but my! They made our cities twice as wet./ I’ll spend my nights/Chasing after moonshine,/Following the Vans around.’ Unlike the stellar cast he was to contract for Show Boat, the performers chosen for Rio Rita were Ziegfeld regulars, well known to the public but not of superstar quality. Ethelind Terry (1899–1984) was cast as Rio Rita. She had appeared in the Music Box Revue

Example 22.8  Rio Rita, act 2, ‘Following the sun around’.

the many faces of rio rita   503 of 1922 and had a small part in Ziegfeld’s Kid Boots.16 J. Harold Murray ­(1891–1940) was cast as Captain Jim. Rita’s brother, Roberto, and General Esteban were played by Walter Petrie (dates unknown) and Vincent Serrano (1866–1935), respectively. The two comic roles, Ed Lovett and Chick Bean, teamed Robert Woolsey (1888–1938) and Bert Wheeler (1895–1968) for the first time.17 Their comic interactions clicked with both critics and audiences, and they were the only Broadway cast members who were signed to recreate their roles in the first film version. When Show Boat was ready to open at the Ziegfeld Theatre in December 1927, Rio Rita was relocated to the Lyric Theatre, where it remained until Rudolf Friml’s The Three Musketeers opened in March 1928. Ticket sales were still strong, so Rita ended the last few months of its Broadway run of 494 performances at the Majestic Theatre.18 Shortly thereafter, Ziegfeld and Hearst were approached by the RKO studio, which purchased the screen rights to the show for $85,000.19 With the advent of sound, films of Broadway musicals were a natural to attract audiences to the recently built movie palaces. In 1929, fifty-two musicals were released by the studios.20 Rio Rita, which is the second Broadway musical to be released as a film, was a huge success; it was voted one of the ten best films of the year.21

The 1929 film Although Rita has been categorized as ‘virtually a filmed transcription of the play,’22 there are significant differences between it and its Broadway predecessor. While the plot was not changed substantially, it was ‘adapted’ by the director, Luther Reed (1888–1961). Some musical numbers were dropped, others were combined, and one new number, the duet/quartet/chorus dance, ‘Sweetheart, We Need Each Other,’ was added as a replacement for ‘Are You There?,’ possibly because the studio may have felt the latter’s lyrics were too risqué for movie audiences. ‘You’re Always in My Arms’ was added, a result of its reinstatment as part of the film, but ‘I’m Out on the Loose To-Night’ was dropped, even though it is heard in the film.23 Sheet music with pictures of the stars was published when the film opened in England. Urban’s sets were discarded, as were the dances choreographed by Lee and Rasch. Rita and Jim were sung by Bebe Daniels (1901–1971) and John Boles (1895–1969), and Esteban, now renamed General Ravinoff, a Russian exile living in Mexico, and Roberto were played by Georges Renavent (1894–1969) and Don Alvarado (1904–1967), respectively; Woolsey and Wheeler (Ed Lovett and Chick Bean) recreated their original vaudeville-shtick roles.24 The new choreography was by Pearl Eaton (1898–1958). As is the case with many early musicals, the 1932 rerelease that survives and is ­currently available is not complete; several writers have reported that the original version, in fifteen reels, was reduced to ten in the rerelease, cutting about forty minutes from the film.25 Warner Bros. is said to have the complete 140 minute RCA Photophone recording, though this statement has not been confirmed.26 Several ‘lost’ segments are

504   musical theatre screen adaptations available on YouTube; they include the Kinkajou scene from the beginning of the film, some of the deleted opening colour sequence dance that corresponds to the beginning of act 2, and the sound portion of John Boles singing ‘Following the Sun Around,’ number 24 in the piano-vocal score. RKO was able to film only the last forty minutes in the Technicolor process, due to the limited availability of their colour camera.27 Some of the script was rewritten by Russell Mack, though most of the Woolsey and Wheeler segments are from the original Broadway show. The ending was changed ­significantly; the triple wedding at Jim’s house is now a single wedding taking place on  the barge immediately after Ravinoff ’s arrest. Musically, the movie opens with ‘The Kinkajou,’ which in the Broadway version is heard in act 1, scene 3. Similar musical changes occur throughout the film. Somewhat surprisingly, ‘You’re Always in My Arms,’ no. 13 in the vocal score, which was dropped from the show on Broadway, was restored to the movie version. The show’s act 1 finale survives almost intact, with only a brief ­section omitted. Finally, the newly added ‘Sweetheart, We Need Each Other’ became a major number in the Technicolor portion of the film. It is in a traditional verse/chorus form, though with a little twist. A sixteen-measure verse is followed by the refrain, which has a ‘B’ section of only four measures (ex. 22.9). This gives the song a decidedly strange metric balance, the result of which can be seen in the somewhat awkward performance by Bert Wheeler and Dorothy Lee. The choreography, while imitative of Ziegfeld’s opulent production, is massive and clearly underrehearsed. Although RKO hoped to make a big splash with Rio Rita, it was shot on a tight budget in twenty-four days (26 June to 20 July), leaving little time to rehearse adequately the big chorus and dance numbers.28 The public and the critics, however, overlooked these a­ rtistic issues, and clearly were entranced by this ‘talkie’ musical. Mordaunt Hall’s review lauds the spectacle, while noting somewhat incorrectly that Luther Reed, ‘has contented himself in making virtually an audible animated photographic conception of the ­successful Ziegfeld show.’ The singing, dancing, and costumes were high points for him: Chorus girls appear as if by a magic wand ready to dispel the gloom of the lovers with their presence, their singing and dancing. . . . Rita has many gowns, each one more bewitching than the other. . . . [She] has a bridal dress . . . [which is] not any more fascinating than the metallic cloth gown in which [she] appears at the ball. . . .

Example 22.9.  Rio Rita, ‘Sweetheart, we need each other,’ chorus, mm. 17–20.

the many faces of rio rita   505 [A]lthough some of the scenes [in the Technicolor process] are not quite in focus, the effect is invariably beautiful. . . . There are several impressive spectacular passages in this film, and those that are in prismatic hues are always interesting because of their loveliness. . . . It is an evening of good music, enjoyable fun and constant screenfulls of striking scenes that cause one to wonder how much such a production cost.29

RKO grossed about $2,000,000 and netted a $935,000 profit.30 Rio Rita was so popular that it was rereleased in 1932, even though by that time, many of the film’s production values were decidedly primitive. During the 1930s and into the 1940s, Rio Rita also remained viable on the stage, performed by various road companies around the country. It also was seen by audiences in vaudeville houses in an abbreviated version that accompanied feature movies. It was still being performed as late as 1941; a production with Joe E. Brown, Peter Lind Hayes, and Mary Healy was seen in San Francisco in June of that year.31

The 1942 Film MGM licenced the rights to Rio Rita sometime in 1940.32 Louis B. Mayer (1884–1957) negotiated a deal with Universal Pictures, who held the contract for the comic team of Bud Abbott (1895–1974) and Lou Costello (1906–1959), to borrow them to make three pictures, one per year, at a salary of $150,000 per year.33 Pandro S. Berman (1905–1996) served as producer and S.  Sylvan Simon (1910–1951) directed, shooting the movie between 10 November 1941 and 14 January 1942.34 In a clear effort to duplicate Woolsey and Wheeler’s comic success in the original show, MGM reimagined the musical remake as a vehicle for the preeminent early-1940s comic team, Abbott and Costello, who ­combined burlesque show physical comedy with word play, but unlike Wheeler and Woolsey, did not sing or dance. Abbott’s unchanging straight-man persona was the smooth-talking ‘idea’ man who comes up with dangerous and/or foolish schemes that his partner is asked to carry out. Costello epitomized the poor soul—the common bluecollar everyman, short in stature, fairly fat, with a distinct New York accent, most likely a resident of Brooklyn, and very literal-minded—who often was taken advantage of but usually came out triumphant by the end of each comic misunderstanding. By 1942, they were a big box office hit, having starred as a team in seven comic films. They filled a lacuna that resulted when Robert Woolsey died in 1938. Other comic teams might have been hired for the remake, though they were not as close to the Woolsey and Wheeler model as were Abbott and Costello. The Marx Brothers, with their well-defined personalities, were still active in the early 1940s, but they were not really a good fit for the script as it was conceived. The Ritz Brothers, who appeared in several films during the 1930s, were another possibility, but there were three of them and they did not have superstar status. The only other comic team active in the late-1930s who might have been appropriate for the comic roles were ‘Ole’ Olsen (1892–1963) and ‘Chic’ Johnson

506   musical theatre screen adaptations (1891–1962), who delighted audiences with their somewhat off-beat surrealistic routines on Broadway and in several films, but they, too, were not in the same box office league as Abbott and Costello. Once the studio had settled on Rio Rita, they decided to scrap most of Tierney’s music. Only two numbers survive: the title song, ‘Rio Rita,’ and the ‘Rangers’s Song,’ which includes a newly composed verse as well as an interpolated and uncredited Mexican song, ‘Caliente,’ sung mostly in Spanish, which is intertwined with the original chorus.35 Harold Arlen (1905–1986) and ‘Yip’ Harburg (1896?–1981) were hired to write four new songs, but only one, ‘Long before You Came Along’ is heard in the film.36 For a Brazilian dance sequence with a solo by the Brazilian dancer Eros Volúsia (1914–2004) that takes place before the broadcast of the club show at Rita’s hotel, Nilo Barnet’s ‘Brazilian Dance,’ which includes the well-known ‘Tico, Tico’ by Zequinha de Abreu (1880–1935) and ‘Ora O Conga’ by Osvaldo Costa de Lacerdo (1927–2011), is performed. In addition to Abbott and Costello, the MGM cast comprised one young performer on the verge of stardom, and actors who were usually seen in supporting roles. Rita is played by nineteen-year-old Kathryn Grayson (1922–2010) in her first starring role; ­following the dancers at the club show, she unexpectedly sings an extended excerpt of the ‘Shadow Song’ (‘Ombra leggiera’) from Meyerbeer’s Dinorah.37 Her diverse repertory in the film showcased her as a talented singer who was comfortable both with Broadway song and opera.38 Rita’s love interest, Ricardo Montero, is played by John Carroll (1906–1979), a Hollywood veteran who appeared in many movies of the 1930s in  supporting roles. Tom Conway (1904–1967) plays the part of the villain, Maurice Craindall. Although he, too, was most often cast as a supporting player, he starred as the Falcon in ten films in the 1940s. Musically, all the music in this film is diegetic; it differs from the Broadway show and first film version, which combine both diegetic and nondiegetic numbers. The 1942 version of Rio Rita is related only vaguely to the original Broadway show and the first film. A new script, offering an improbable and episodic story, was written by Richard Connell (1893–1949) and Gladys Lehman (1892–1993); John Grant (1891–1955) provided special material for Abbott and Costello. Rita’s last name has been changed from Ferguson to Winslow; she is still the youthful owner of a ranch hotel, the Vista del Rio, near the Mexican border in Texas. The remaining characters are newly minted. Instead of the Ranger, Jim, the romantic lead is a well-known crooner, Ricardo Montero, who is returning to Texas after ten years to visit his childhood home and to sing at the first national broadcast of the Fiesta that is being run by Rita at her hotel; she has been in love with him since she was a teenager. General Esteban is replaced by another villain, Maurice Craindall, who is the manager of the hotel but also a fifth columnist foreign agent and Nazi collaborator. Instead of the comic team Ed Lovett and Chick Bean, Abbott and Costello play Doc and ‘Wishy’ Dean, out-of-work New Yorkers. Abbott and Costello’s comic routines occupy almost two-thirds of the film, leaving little time for the remainder of the plot and the music. The comic routines incorporate some of the burlesque show physical and verbal antics for which they were well known. For example, in the opening scene, they are working in a pet store, which allows them to

the many faces of rio rita   507 engage in the kind of long punning rapid-fire repartee for which they were famous. As the scene progresses, Doc receives a call from a customer, Mrs Pike, who wants to have her dog, a Pekingese, picked up: doc: wishy: doc: wishy: doc:

Wishy, go over and get a Peke at Mrs Pike’s. Why can’t I take a good look? I want you to get me Pike’s Peke! Pike’s Peak? What do you think I am? A mountain climber? Go over to Mrs Pike’s house. You’ll see a Peke around the yard.

wishy: I’ll see a peek around the yard? What do you want me to do? Play hideand-seek with the girl? Look, the boss, I mean, after all, told me to get busy with that white dog. He wants me to wash— doc: What white dog? wishy: The white one—you know, what do you call it? The— doc: Spitz. wishy: No-o-o. But he drools a little. After being fired from the pet shop, Doc and Wishy get into the trunk of a car with New York plates, thinking it will take them home. It is Montero’s car, however, which is headed for the hotel. Montero follows Rita to the Texas desert, where she is singing to an instrumental phonograph recording (!); they sing ‘Long before You Came Along’ together, and then join the Rangers in the ‘Rangers’ Song.’39 As part of his broadcast scheme (see below), Craindall has ordered fake apples that have short wave radios in them that will allow other fifth columnists to receive insurrection instructions. Among Craindall’s generally dim-witted helpers are Jake, who menaces Doc and Wishy several times, and Lucette, a femme fatale, who tries to ensnare Montero after he overhears the spies. When Rita meets Doc and Wishy, after they have been chased by Jake and Craindall’s other goons, she offers them jobs as hotel detectives. After many twists and turns, including a scene with a ‘talking’ dog, who has swallowed one of the fake apples and after being petted, gives the score of a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game, Montero is given a Nazi ‘code book’ by Wishy, which the spies try to retrieve. At the nightclub, Montero warms up before the broadcast by singing ‘Rio Rita,’ which is followed by the Brazilian dance sequence and Meyerbeer.40 When Wishy goes to Craindall’s office to tell him that there are Nazis at the hotel, he is chased by the Nazi goons; ultimately, after Wishy winds up in a laundry room washing machine, he and Doc are captured and tied up with a time bomb, set to go off in thirty minutes, at 11:25 pm. As a donkey appears in a window and Hitler’s voice is heard, Jake gives the Nazi salute. Wishy turns to the talking donkey (Hitler) and says: ‘I’ve heard your voice, but this is the first time I’ve seen your face.’ As the broadcast begins, with the orchestra playing ‘Rio Rita,’ Montero punches Craindall in the face to stop him from sending the coded message over the airwaves.

508   musical theatre screen adaptations A general fight breaks out, but suddenly the Rangers’s Song is heard in the distance and all the Nazis except Jake flee. The hotel guests are baffled since the Rangers do not seem to be there, but then Doc and Wishy, who have somehow escaped their bonds, come into the ballroom with a herd of donkeys who have swallowed the radios. Wishy, it seems, has requested the Ranger’s song from an El Paso radio station, and it is being broadcast at the precise moment it was needed. Montero catches Jake, but Wishy lets him escape. Though the audience does not see the manoeuvre, Wishy has quietly put the time bomb in Jake’s pocket. When Ricardo asks Wishy why he let Jake go, he winks broadly at the movie audience. An explosion follows, killing all of the Nazis.41 Costello, now no longer in his Wishy character, says: ‘11.25. (He waves at the movie audience.) Good night, folks.’ Although the comic antics of Abbott and Costello were crucial to the hoped-for financial success of Rita, this 1942 film, one of the first musicals to include Nazi characters, was also intended to offer a not-too-subtle propaganda message. While the German sympathizers think they are smart, they are shown to be rather stupid and inept in their several attempts to implement their scheme and to capture Montero, Wishy, and Doc. Their fifth column activity revolves around an impossibly flawed plan, in which they will distribute fake apples that have radios installed in place of the cores, which are intended to alert German sympathizers in American factories of the time for an attack. Unfortunately for them, the apples stolen by Wishy and Doc are ingested by the donkeys and the dog, who, at various crucial moments in the action, ‘magically’ speak. The denouement combines the talking animals, a time bomb, and the Germans’ mistake of believing that a recording of the ‘Ranger’s Song’ playing on the radios is actually the lawmen riding to the ranch to capture them. There are many gaps in the plot that the writers have cheerfully ignored. In bringing the comedy to its conclusion, they have not addressed why the Nazis would think that the Rangers would be returning to the hotel. The national broadcast has nothing to do with border issues. Nor have they addressed a resolution to the love interest between Rita and her older friend, an exotic ‘other,’ Ricardo, who is clearly understood to be a Mexican who grew up and went to school in Texas. Unlike the previous versions of Rio Rita, this movie does not have a love story as its underlying raison d’être. Indeed, at the film’s conclusion, we do not even know whether Rita and Ricardo will continue their relationship and eventually marry. Rather, this Rio Rita is about the adventures of two unemployed working-class New Yorkers in Texas. Wishy and Doc, two average and not-too-bright Americans, have been able to outwit sophisticated foreign agents. To audiences, however, they were cardboard stand-ins for Abbott and Costello, the most famous and most celebrated American comedians after 1940. Costello acknowledges his identity and fame when he breaks the fourth wall at the end to wave at the audience and wish them a ‘good night.’ American audiences implicitly understood that Lou Costello, an American everyman, with New York street smarts, had defeated the German agents. If everyone was able to do what he did, then the Nazis and their fifth column accomplices didn’t stand a chance of taking over America.

the many faces of rio rita   509

Conclusions The changing theatrical values seen in the three versions of Rio Rita respond to the changing political conditions in America from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. Ziegfeld’s voluptuous production of an old-fashioned, somewhat creaky book musical, with a cast of more than 100, reflected his penchant for extravaganzas that featured opulent scenery and an excess of minimally clad chorus girls in a variety of eye-catching costumes, as well as the needs and excesses of the decade leading to the financial collapse of the country in 1929. By that time, the ‘talking’ film of the show had been released; while it was not a replica of the original or as lavishly produced, it brought audiences around the country a taste of Ziegfeld’s Broadway. As one of the first ‘talkies,’ filmed partly in twocolour process Technicolor, it offered a sense of the Broadway musical to those who had never seen one live. Film studios saw the sound musical as a strong audience draw and were quick to option some of Broadway’s mega-hits, which, in addition to Rio Rita, included So Long, Letty, The Desert Song, Little Johnny Jones, and Sally, all of which were released in 1929. By 1942, America had changed dramatically. The excesses of the 1920s were long past; the decade-long depression was slowly dissipating, and the country was embroiled in a world conflict. Hollywood studios were continuing to produce many escapist films to entertain their audiences; they also were, finally, after a decade of mostly ignoring the Nazi threat, now involved in the American propaganda machine as well. This second Rio Rita movie, though not very similar to the original, fit Hollywood’s new direction of the early 1940s—a Broadway and film mega-hit that 1940s audiences surely remembered; two popular comedians; a rising young singer to provide a bit of ‘high class’ ­culture through an operatic selection; and the defeat of enemy agents in the country. Popular entertainment has regularly followed social and political trends. The Hollywood studios have always tried, sometimes successfully and other times not, to mirror the larger trends. Ziegfeld’s Broadway show was, as most Broadway shows are, a delineation of a love triangle, in this case between a young woman, an officer of the law, and a corrupt military man from Mexico. The two film versions of Rio Rita provide an exemplar of how popular entertainment genres can be fuelled by changing social and political issues. The first version details several relationships between Americans, Mexicans, and a corrupt Russian exile. The basic plot was not changed, though audiences could now vent their anger at a military man from a Bolshevik country. By 1942, the Mexican bandits led by General Ravinoff in the first version were no longer needed to serve as the evil exotic ‘Others’; German sympathizers had replaced them. The love story of Rita and Ricardo (and briefly her competitor, Lucette) was secondary to the story of Nazi agents on American soil. On its own patriotic terms, the 1942 version served its purpose; audiences would be entertained by the antics of its stars but also be made aware of the secret foreign intruders who were threatening to overthrow the American way of life. Understanding the changing social values seen in the Broadway

510   musical theatre screen adaptations show and the two film versions of Rio Rita offers us a well-defined view of popular ­entertainment in the context of early twentieth-century history.

Notes 1. For example, Edward Royce, his director for several shows, including Kid Boots and Sally, sued him for breach of contract, stating that he was to receive 1 percent of the gross receipts of Rio Rita for his work directing the show for two weeks before he was fired. His suit states that Ziegfeld was $200,000 in debt, having lost $100,000 gambling in Florida in 1926 (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 27 May 1927, p. 1). 2. Joseph Urban was born in Vienna, where he studied architecture. He emigrated to the United States in 1911. From 1914 to his death, he was associated with Ziegfeld, Hearst, the Boston Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera (New York Times, 11 July 1933, p. 17). The Ziegfeld Theatre was demolished in 1966 over the objections of some architectural h ­ istorians and historic preservationists. 3. For details on the lavish decorations in the theatre, see Richard Ziegfeld and Paulette Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch: The Life and Times of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 134–135. 4. Ziegfeld first announced that the New York City opening would take place on 24 January (New York Times, 10 January 1927, p. 18), but because he extended the show’s run in Philadelphia, he pushed back the New York opening. 5. New York Times, 17 February 1927, p. 18. 6. ‘Ziegfeld Opening Feb, 2,’ New York Times, 19 January 1927, p. 21. 7. ‘Dreams of Girl and Producer Come True,’ [Albany, NY] Times-Union, 3 February 1927, p. 9. 8. J. Brooks Atkinson, ‘The Play: “Rio Rita” Riot,’ New York Times, 3 February 1927, p. 18. 9. Arthur Pollock, ‘Plays and Things: Florenz Ziegfeld Opens His Own New and Beautiful Theater with a Charming Musical Comedy Called “Rio Rita,” ’ Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 3 February 1927, p. 10A. 10. Burns Mantle, ‘Zeigfeld in Double Success,’ Buffalo Courier-Express, 13 February 1927, Stage and Screen Section, p. 1. The quote is from a letter Mantle received from Frank Vreeland, the [New York] Evening Telegram critic, informing him of the musical’s opening in the city. Mantle had come down with the flu and was not able to review new shows for more than a week. 11. Defining the show’s genre is a continuing issue. Gerald Bordman, for example, in American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 472, says ‘Though it was branded a musical comedy . . . the show was in reality an operetta.’ Similarly, Donald  J.  Stubblebine, in Broadway Sheet Music: A Comprehensive Listing, 1918–1937, labels Rio Rita ‘an old fashioned operetta’ (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), 238; and Thomas Hischak refers to the show as a ‘large-scale operetta’ in Broadway Plays and Musicals: Descriptions and Essential Facts of More than 14,000 Shows through 2007 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 389. 12. One might cite Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos as a predecessor work that features two types of music to represent the different characters, though they do interact with one another, but since the opera was not premiered in the United States until 1946, I doubt that Tierney knew it. 13. Sigmund Romberg’s The Desert Song, for example, also revolves around a secret identity; it opened on 30 November 1926, just two months before Rita Rio.

the many faces of rio rita   511 14. The 1927 piano-vocal score differs in part from the programme of the show that opened on Broadway. No. 13, a song for Rita, ‘You’re Always in My Arms,’ is not listed in the programme. Two numbers, ‘The Jumping Bean’ and ‘Montezuma’s Daughter,’ have been added to the second act. Perhaps an examination of the original orchestral parts, if they are extant, might shed more light on the development of the play from its previews to the final version. 15. The piano-vocal score assigns the reprise to Katie Bean. 16. Rio Rita was the high point of Terry’s career. She was not successful in her film appearances and played bit parts through the 1930s. 17. RKO’s choice of Woolsey to recreate the role of Lovett is remarkable given that he did not play the entire run of the show; he left sometime after October 1927 and was replaced by Walter Catlett (1889–1960), a well-known comedian who had film experience. He ­reassumed the role on the post-Broadway road tour. 18. While the show was on tour in Chicago, Ziegfeld was negotiating with Sir George Butt to bring Rio Rita with its American cast to London (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 3 November 1928, p. 17). It opened there in 1930. 19. Richard B. Jewell, RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan Is Born (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 25. Ziegfeld bragged during a bankruptcy lawsuit that he expected to be offered $100,000 for the rights. 20. IMDb ‘Rio Rita (1929)’ accessed 12 June 2018. In Jack Burton, The Blue Book of Hollywood Musicals (Watkins Glen, NY: Century House, 1953), 12–18, the performance total is given as 447. 21. Rio Rita opened in New York City on 15 September 1929; it was preceded by The Desert Song, which opened on 8 April 1929. Stanley Green in The World of Musical Comedy (New York: Ziff-Davis, 1960), 76, writes of the former, ‘The 1929 film version with Bebe Daniels and John Boles was the first successful screen adaptation of a Broadway musical.’ The important word in his statement is ‘successful’; although The Desert Song opened earlier than Rio Rita, it was not included as one of the ten best pictures of 1929. A film version of Show Boat also preceded Rio Rita; it was released in April 1929, but it is not an adaptation of Ziegfeld’s musical. Along with two original screen musicals, The Broadway Melody and Gold Diggers of Broadway, Rio Rita was named one of the ten best pictures of 1929 in a poll taken by the industry paper, Film Daily (7 February 1930, p. 8). 22. Ted Sennett, Hollywood Musicals (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 48. 23. Several sources, including IMDb list E. Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen’s ‘Long Before You Came Along’ as an added number to the 1929 film version. It was, however, written for and heard in the 1942 version; Arlen and Harburg wrote three additional songs (‘A Couple of Caballeros,’ ‘Poor Whippoorwill,’ and ‘Such Unusual Weather’) for the 1942 film, which were not used. 24. Woolsey and Wheeler were so popular with audiences that during the 1930s, they costarred in more than twenty comedies. Wheeler usually played the mark while Woolsey was the sharp dealmaker, usually concocting schemes that were barely legal. 25. The length of the original film has been estimated at 137 minutes by some commentators, and at 125 minutes by others. The currently available version is approximately 103 minutes. In his 1929 review, Mordaunt Hall noted that ‘the last half of this handsome vocalized motion picture is filmed by the Technicolor process.’ This statement cannot be correct, since the Technicolor portion is no more than forty minutes and might be as little as thirty-eight minutes. Much of the cut material from this part of the movie is or has been available on YouTube; it comprises about seven additional minutes. If the complete film

512   musical theatre screen adaptations was 137 minutes, then the first part of the movie would be approximately 100 minutes long, which means the current version is 28 (or 23) minutes short. A three-minute excerpt of the deleted Kinkajou number has surfaced, but no other missing fragments have emerged, nor is it possible to determine where they might have been in the original unless one can examine the length of each reel. 26. The Museum of Modern Art is said to have had a copy of the complete film, but it has been either misplaced, lost, or stolen. 27. Sennett, Hollywood Musicals, 48. Richard Barrios, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 227. The currently available print of the film of the Technicolor portion corresponds to the second act of the show. The most important missing segments of the act are parts of the opening dance sequence on the barge, the pirate dance that follows ‘Sweetheart, We Need Each Other,’ and ‘Following the Sun Around,’ some of which are available on YouTube. 28. Edwin M. Bradley, The First Hollywood Musicals: A Critical Filmography of 171 Features, 1927 through 1932 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), 176. 29. Mordaunt Hall, ‘The Screen: “A Ziegfeld Show on the Screen,” New York Times, 7 October 1929, p. 29. 30. Richard B. Jewell, ‘RKO Grosses, 1929–1951: The C. J. Tevlin Ledger,’ Historic Journal of Film, Radio and Television 14 ( ): 37–49. 31. Reported in the Syracuse Herald-Journal, 2 June 1941, p. 16. 32. I have not yet uncovered whether MGM licenced Rio Rita from the Ziegfeld estate or RKO. I believe the studio contracted with RKO, since one of the provisions of the contract was that the 1929 version could not be publicly shown. 33. Originally, the sum was split 50/50, but after 1942, Costello received 60 percent of the sum. 34. Scott Allen Nollen, Abbott and Costello on the Home Front: A Critical Study of the Wartime Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 49. 35. It is not the 1935 song, ‘In Caliente,’ by Mort Dixon and Allie Wrubel, which was heard in a number of films during the 1930s and 1940s. It may be an uncredited original song by Herbert Stothart, who was music director for the film. 36. See note 21. 37. The choice of an aria by Meyerbeer can only be speculated on, though as a showcase ­vehicle for the young star, it can hardly be surpassed. Given that Dinorah was no longer part of the standard repertory, one can ask why Grayson didn’t sing the ‘Bell Song’ from Delibes’s Lakme or ‘Una voce poco fa’ from Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia. These virtuoso pieces were known by the general public through the recordings and appearances of the French soprano, Lily Pons (1898–1976). My guess is that Meyerbeer’s aria is in triple metre, which allows Grayson to ‘waltz’ around the set while she is singing. 38. Grayson was MGM’s replacement for Deanna Durbin, who moved to Universal Studios. 39. This is a major change from the original show. The Rangers, in this film, appear only once. When their song is heard at the climax of the movie, it is in a broadcast recording. 40. Grayson sings an abbreviated version of this well-known aria. After the opening segment (mm. 1–79), she skips to the final reprise (m. 159). A new cadenza is heard at measure 218, in which Grayson sings a G-flat 6, before concluding on an F6. 41. Lucette, however, has not been seen in this final scene; perhaps she did not attempt to escape in the car with the other Nazis. Her fate at the film’s end is undetermined.

pa rt V I

ST U DIO S , AU DI E NC E S , T E C H NOL O GY

chapter 23

L ost i n Tr a nsl ation Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel on the Silver Screen Tim Carter

In the mid-1950s, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II did what they had hitherto said would never happen: they sanctioned screen versions of their classic Broadway musicals, Oklahoma! (which had opened in 1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), and The King and I (1951). The films of Oklahoma! (1955; directed by Fred Zinnemann), The King and I (1956; Walter Lang), and South Pacific (1958; Joshua Logan) were showered with awards. Carousel (1956; Henry King), however, was not. Rodgers was particularly fond of the original show: Oscar never wrote more meaningful or more moving lyrics, and to me, my score is more satisfying than any I’ve ever written. But it’s not just the songs; it’s the whole play. Beautifully written, tender without being mawkish, it affects me deeply every time I see it performed.1

But the film of Carousel is widely regarded as the least successful of the Rodgers and Hammerstein transfers from stage to screen. Its stage version was already less wholesome than Oklahoma!, less exotic than The King and I, and more ambiguous in moral terms than South Pacific. It was also the most ‘operatic’ of all those shows in terms of its extensive and quite complex musical fabric. All that was enough to steer an onscreen Carousel into troubled waters. The bigger question, however, is why it hit the rocks. Answering it forces consideration of a range of issues: the fluctuating fortunes of Rodgers and Hammerstein in the 1950s and their consequent move into the film industry; changing cinematic technologies; competition between Hollywood and Broadway; the  pressures of shooting on location; and the inherent problems of Carousel itself. It is easy enough to conclude that the film fell victim to an unfortunate concatenation of ­circumstances; more provocative, however, is what this tells us about transfers from stage to screen whether in the 1950s or more broadly conceived.

516   musical theatre screen adaptations

The Ups and Downs of ‘R&H’ On 16 October 1955, Philip K. Scheuer’s regular column in the Sunday Los Angeles Times (‘A Town Called Hollywood’) presented a gushing account headlined ‘Rodgers, Hammerstein Spin Show Business Carousel’: Sometimes it seems as if Rodgers and Hammerstein are the whole of show business these days. Last week the film Oklahoma! was launched triumphantly in Manhattan; Pipe Dream, their new musical play, from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row stories, is selling out weeks ahead of its premiere, and both Carousel and The King and I are in production here at 20th Century Fox.

As with most such stories in the newspapers, it seems likely that this one was less a result of deep investigative journalism than prompted by press releases issued by one or more public relations departments (in the present case, within Rodgers and Hammerstein’s own production company and/or Twentieth Century–Fox). The facts are not in dispute: the film version of Oklahoma! was indeed launched at the Rivoli Theatre, New York, on 11 October 1955; Rodgers and Hammerstein’s new show, Pipe Dream, reached the stage of the Shubert Theatre on Broadway on 30 November; and Carousel and The King and I had their screen premieres on 16 February and 29 June 1956. The spin placed on these facts, however, was a different matter. There is no doubt that by now, Rodgers and Hammerstein were regarded as a (singular) national institution. Since their first collaboration on Oklahoma! in 1943, they had created a major sequence of Broadway musicals on a two-year cycle that would continue until The Sound of Music (1959).2 They also operated a production company to curate at home and abroad their own shows and others under their belt (including Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun of 1946), plus a music publishing company (Williamson Music) to market their products more widely. This enabled R&H to licence performances of their shows under uncommonly strict conditions in terms of adhering to the original script, score, and even production values. As the profits rolled in, Rodgers and Hammerstein were regarded as a unique combination: consummate theatrical professionals and outstanding businessmen. Recognition came in other ways as well. On 28 March 1954—in effect marking ten years of the official R&H partnership—all four major US networks broadcast the two-hour television special, A Salute to Rodgers and Hammerstein (produced as the General Foods 25th Anniversary Show). Here stars of stage and screen gathered to introduce or perform the greatest hits from the R&H canon to date, some by the original cast members; the show reached an estimated seventy million viewers.3 On 4 April 1956, Columbia College (the main undergraduate college of Columbia University) granted Rodgers and Hammerstein its highest honor for distinguished alumni, the Alexander Hamilton Award, at a special ceremony attended by the New York glitterati. The accolades kept coming in.

carousel on the silver screen   517 At the same time, one might be forgiven for wondering whether Rodgers and Hammerstein really did represent ‘the whole of show business these days.’ Of the major players in musical theatre of the 1930s and 1940s, Jerome Kern had died in 1945 and Kurt Weill in 1950, and Irving Berlin seemed to have come to the end of a long stage career with his Call Me Madam (1950; 644 performances): only Cole Porter was still producing hit shows, although Can-Can (1953; 892 performances) and Silk Stockings (1955; 478) were his last. Younger figures were starting to take over the field: Berlin’s Call Me Madam was roundly beaten by Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls which opened some five weeks later but played for nineteen months longer (1,200 performances); Harold Rome had two surprising hits with Wish You Were Here (1952; 598 performances) and Fanny (1954; 888), as did Richard Adler and Jerry Ross with The Pajama Game (1954; 1,063) and Damn Yankees (1955; 1,019); Leonard Bernstein had already made a name for himself with On the Town (1944; 462 performances), and his Wonderful Town did well enough in 1953–54 (559 performances); and Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend reached Broadway in 1954 (485 performances) fresh from its sell-out success in London’s West End. The music-theatrical landscape was also on the verge of shifting in favour of that other double-barrelled songwriting team, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who had established a reputation with Brigadoon (1947; 581 performances) and Paint Your Wagon (1951; 289) but would sweep the boards with a show that Rodgers and Hammerstein had themselves contemplated doing, My Fair Lady (2,717 performances from 1956 to 1962).4 The world of Broadway was fickle at best. But many felt that in creative terms, Rodgers and Hammerstein were on a downward slide: their shows from 1953 and 1955, Me and Juliet (358 performances) and Pipe Dream (246), would have rated reasonably well for any lesser team, but pundits were accustomed to the much higher figures of South Pacific (1,925 performances) and The King and I (1,246). Not since their Allegro of 1947 (315 performances) had Rodgers and Hammerstein seen such a dip. Some may have noticed one common factor to their three short-running shows: Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream were each set in modern times and places—as to a large degree also was Allegro—with none of the historical distance and local colour of The King and I (Siam in the 1860s), Carousel (Maine, 1873–88), Oklahoma! (around 1900), or even South Pacific (World War II). Allegro was innovative in concept; Me and Juliet should have been a successful ‘backstage musical’; and Pipe Dream had the prestige of being based on a novel by John Steinbeck. But none of these shows seems to have suited the R&H profile (or perhaps better, what audiences considered it to be): when it came to modern subjects, Rodgers and Hammerstein appeared to lose their Midas Touch. They themselves put a brave spin on it. On 4 May 1955, Variety carried an article headlined ‘R&H Paradox: Office Never Busier Despite No B’way Show, Only 1 on Tour.’ There was no real ‘paradox,’ Rodgers and Hammerstein would have claimed: they had plenty to do in terms of handling the numerous other productions of their classic shows.5 But the apparent drop in their Broadway fortunes certainly offers some explanation for their decision to take a step they had long resisted: to put their most successful musicals on the silver screen. It was a risky business given the precipitous decline in the US film

518   musical theatre screen adaptations industry in the early 1950s, due not least to the rise of television. But the studios may have seen some advantage as well: musicals suited the medium (at least, up to a point) and seemed a safer bet in the context of the Hollywood Blacklist.6 For their part, Rodgers and Hammerstein perhaps took hope from Irving Berlin: his Annie Get Your Gun (which they had produced in 1946) had transferred well enough to film in 1950 once Betty Hutton replaced an ailing Judy Garland, as did his Call Me Madam in 1953 (with Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor, Vera-Ellen, and George Sanders in the starstudded lineup); Berlin also continued his successes with straight-to-screen musicals such as There’s No Business Like Show Business and White Christmas (both 1954). MGM’s treatment of Cole Porter’s 1948 musical, Kiss Me, Kate (1953) had done well at the box office, in part because of the cast (Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, and Ann Miller) but also given its use of the latest fad: 3D projection (for those cinemas able to show it). Guys and Dolls (Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 1955; with Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra, and Vivian Blaine) was even more successful, reportedly scoring $20 million on a $5.5 million production budget, more than justifying Goldwyn’s insistence on filming it in expensive CinemaScope. (I return to the issue of screen formats later in this chapter.) Rodgers and Hammerstein knew full well that they could not match such high-octane musicals. Nor would they have found much comfort in the film version of Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon (MGM, 1954), even though its plot and music were in a vein closer to the R&H mould. This, too, was filmed in CinemaScope, but because of reductions in its budget, the soundstage sets did not take advantage of the medium. (I return to this issue of sets, too.) Nor was it a success: it failed by a long way to recoup its $3 million cost. Critics blamed the cast—Gene Kelly, Van Johnson (but Donald O’Connor had been in for his role), and Cyd Charisse (replacing Kathryn Grayson)—and also the omission of favourite songs from the stage version: ‘Come to Me, Bend to Me,’ ‘There But for You Go I,’ ‘From This Day On,’ and ‘The Sword Dance’ were filmed but cut prior to release, while ‘The Love of My Life’ and ‘My Mother’s Wedding Day’ had already fallen foul of the censors because of their risqué lyrics. Indeed, by most reckonings Brigadoon was a model of how not to adapt an effective stage musical to film. But Rodgers and Hammerstein clearly had ambitions to protect and profit from their own shows in more effective ways.

Contractual Negotiations Shortly after the Broadway opening of Oklahoma! on 31 March 1943, various Hollywood studios made successive bids to produce a film version of the show. All were roundly rejected by Rodgers and Hammerstein and by the show’s producers, the Theatre Guild. As Lawrence Langner, one of the Guild’s executive directors, wrote to producer Harry Sherman on 22 June 1944, ‘We have no interest in having a picture made of Oklahoma! for many years to come. We are making a net profit of between $750,000 and $1,000,000 a year out of the stage rights and expect to do so for a number of years to come. So why

carousel on the silver screen   519 bother with a picture until, let us say, 1950!’7 An article in Variety on 23 February 1949 made a similar point: Rodgers and Hammerstein ‘Won’t Sell Okla! to Pix, at Least in Their Lifetime,’ given their huge income from stage royalties. But this was not true. Oklahoma! had ended its record-breaking five-year Broadway run on 29 May 1948, and while it was still doing well enough on its national tour, in its production on London’s West End, and internationally, Rodgers and Hammerstein had already started thinking about the silver screen. Indeed, by 1950 (so Joshua Logan said) they had decided to form a company to produce film versions of all their musicals based on the stage productions.8 However, that decision remained secret for a number of important reasons. The notion that any film of an R&H musical should be based on its stage version was important, given that the production was part of its identity. Rodgers and Hammerstein preferred to ‘freeze’ each of their shows once they reached Broadway: cast members might come and go, but the sets, costumes, and staging would stay the same. In the case of Oklahoma! the publicity shots of, say, successive Ado Annies remain remarkably consistent; performances were monitored for uniformity by spot-check visits; and when the touring company’s costumes and sets were destroyed in a warehouse fire in March 1952, the original scene designer, Lemuel Ayers, was immediately contracted to supervise their exact reconstruction.9 In part, this was because Rodgers and Hammerstein had an outstanding product to sell (so there was no reason to change it), but more important, it was a case of branding. Any audience attending an R&H musical—whether on Broadway or in the West End, or on national and international tours—was guaranteed to see more or less the same thing. This raised the bar significantly when it came to transferring any such show to film. But Rodgers and Hammerstein could not go public with their plans until various complex contractual issues had been resolved. In particular, Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Allegro had been done in partnership with the Theatre Guild (R&H broke away with South Pacific), which in effect co-owned them subject to various conditions being met by either side. Thus, in March 1952, R&H began a protracted series of negotiations to buy out the Guild and gain exclusive rights to these three shows. The Guild held out, haggling to its advantage precisely because of the film prospects on the horizon. The agreement for Oklahoma! was signed on 6 August 1953; four days later (on 10 August), the New York Times reported that a film version of the show was in the cards, and on the 17 August it announced that a firm agreement had been made for it between Rodgers and Hammerstein, producer Arthur Hornblow Jr, and director Fred Zinnemann.10 Hornblow had only limited experience with film musicals—he produced the Esther Williams showcase Million Dollar Mermaid (1952)—and Zinnemann had none: his recent films included High Noon (1952) and From Here to Eternity (1953).11 However, Zinnemann had a reputation for his realistic shooting on ‘authentic’ locations, which, we shall see, had a direct bearing on the film of Oklahoma! Again, the newspapers were being manipulated by press releases. Rodgers and Hammerstein had already joined (in March 1953) the board of directors of the newly formed Magna Theatre Corporation, created by Joseph  M.  Schenk of Twentieth Century–Fox and Michael Todd, who were promising to begin the output of films in the

520   musical theatre screen adaptations new Todd-AO widescreen process: Schenk none too convincingly denied rumours that the first such film would be Oklahoma! though in fact the screenplay—by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig—was already in development (they hid the project behind the title ‘Operation Wow!’). At the same time, the Theatre Guild presented its own conflicting information about whether the show was set for Hollywood. This may just have been part of the Guild’s bargaining strategy over the rights, however, given that any film of Oklahoma! was clearly going to rest in the hands of a new company: Rodgers and Hammerstein Pictures, Inc.12

The ‘Battle of Scopes’ Rodgers and Hammerstein knew enough of the film industry from their various, and variously mixed, experiences with it in the 1930s. They had also collaborated on their own straight-to-screen musical in the case of State Fair (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1945). But writing six songs to meet the typical studio contract was a very different matter from filming a Broadway musical play, and so far as Rodgers and Hammerstein were concerned, forming their own company was the only way to retain what they considered to be the necessary degree of creative control over film versions of their shows. There were still other contractual issues to be resolved, however. Back in 1943, the Theatre Guild had made the smart move of buying from MGM the rights that playwright Lynn Riggs had sold to his Green Grow the Lilacs, the source-play for Oklahoma! With the Guild now out of the reckoning, this left Rodgers and Hammerstein without restriction in terms of pursuing the film. Likewise, R&H managed the screen version of South Pacific without interference from the main Hollywood studios by forming the company ‘South Pacific Enterprises,’ co-owned with Magna Theatre Corporation, Leyland Hayward (who coproduced the Broadway production), and Joshua Logan (who directed the stage and film versions).13 Carousel and The King and I were more problematic, however, because screen rights to their sources—Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom (1909) and Margaret Landon’s novel Anna and the King of Siam (1944)—were owned by Twentieth Century–Fox: Fox Studios produced a film of Liliom in 1930 (and Fox Europa another one in French in 1935), and the company in its later incarnation released the film Anna and the King of Siam (with Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison) in 1946. Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century–Fox, took advantage of those rights so as to have Carousel and The King and I done by his studio instead, if still paying R&H handsomely for the privilege. This is why Oklahoma! and South Pacific are truer to their originals than Carousel and The King and I, which were subject to greater studio interference. It also explains why the first four screen versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals were in two different formats: Todd-AO (Oklahoma! and South Pacific) and CinemaScope 55.14 The 27 June 1954 issue of the Los Angeles Times included Philip K. Scheuer’s article ‘New Wide-Screen Process Enters Battle of Scopes.’ He was reporting on Michael Todd’s

carousel on the silver screen   521 demonstration ‘last Tuesday’ (22 June) of his new Todd-AO system, ‘a wide-film, widescreen process’: Todd-AO offers potential competition only to Cinerama whose mammoth proportions it most nearly approaches. Where Cinerama uses three strips of standard 35-mm film, three projectors and a three-sided screen, Todd-AO employs one strip of 65-mm film, one projector and a curved ‘unbroken’ screen. Its angle of vision is, I gather, 128 degrees compared to Cinerama’s 146, in a ratio of 2 (wide) to 1 (high).

This proportion, Scheuer wrote, is, like VistaVision’s, more nearly that of the congenial screen shape we are accustomed to, and so different from 20th Century Fox CinemaScope’s 2.55-to-1 ‘ribbon.’ In simpler words, it’s higher. But like Cinerama, it will require far more special equipment and so is likely to be limited to single theaters in key spots.

Scheuer was impressed by Todd’s demonstration reel, though he thought the experience slightly inferior to Cinerama’s. But Todd-AO’s real gimmick, its ace in the hole, is something known as R & H—the rights to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and South Pacific. With these and other fabulous R & H properties, Todd-AO can support its own exclusive circuit for years.

The final point was also clear: One thing is plain in this War of the Shapes and Scopes: the motion picture is undergoing profound changes. All these systems are spectacular in themselves. We have spawned a new race of giants as an ‘answer’ to the dwarfs of TV: now we shall need stories and themes of commensurable stature and breadth. Bigger facades and bigger faces alone will not suffice.

In fact, Todd-AO was not linked exclusively to Rodgers and Hammerstein (through the  Magna Theatre Corporation): another film planned for it was the spectacular Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which Michael Todd produced on his own. But the R&H brand clearly had a role to play in the emergence of new, competing technologies. As Scheuer reported in that same article, Twentieth Century–Fox had held its own press conference also on 22 June, bringing another musical into the fray: Same day, Darryl Zanuck—who owns one R & H treasure, The King and I—starred himself as principal actor in a demonstration of the latest in CinemaScope. It was all to the good. Excerpts from forthcoming productions, filmed with improved Bausch & Lomb lenses, revealed almost stereopticon depth and contained shots so magnificent that the trade audience burst frequently into applause. Those ranged from a full-scale South African native uprising to Newcomer Sheree North’s leggy legs.15

522   musical theatre screen adaptations Zanuck was probably engaging in a spoiling operation against Todd (although to be fair, Zanuck’s lenses were new). Twentieth Century–Fox’s CinemaScope had already made its impact with the release of the biblical epic, The Robe, on 16 September 1953 and the romantic comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (with Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, and Lauren Bacall) on 5 November. The next significant improvement in the Twentieth Century–Fox system was still to come: the development of CinemaScope 55 in 1955, introduced, we shall see, by way of the film of Carousel. But Michael Todd was out to upstage the competition as well. His choice of images to demonstrate Todd-AO on 22 June 1954 was no coincidence: the full-length documentary This Is Cinerama, released on 30 September 1952 to show off another new technology, began (after the opening narration) with a spectacular roller-coaster ride, and its subsequent vignettes included a tour through Venice. Cinerama, however, remained little more than a gimmick given that it required specially designed theatres. Another attempt on the part of the film industry to improve the visual experience was the reintroduction of 3D film—with Bwana Devil released on 30 November 1952 (‘A LION in your lap! A LOVER in your arms!’) and Warner Brothers’ House of Wax (10 April 1953)—but it had similar issues in terms of needing a special screen and coordinated equipment (two projectors running simultaneously); furthermore, audiences had to wear special glasses, and the sightlines were problematic in larger theatres. This left two main competitors in the field of widescreen formats: Twentieth Century–Fox’s CinemaScope (‘The Modern Miracle You See without Glasses!’—so the advertising for The Robe proclaimed) and its competitor created by Paramount, VistaVision. Todd-AO was to be the third, and according to the newspapers, it was making the biggest splash. On 24 April 1955, Louis Berg puffed the technology in the Baltimore Sun (‘Biggest Movie News of the Year’) with seven photographs from the film and set  of Oklahoma! (including one demonstrating the span of the widescreen image compared with the normal projection ratio), most taken during the location shooting the previous summer: The film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical (greatest hit in the history of show business) and the startling wide screen (nearest thing to Cinerama) have been the talk of the movie industry for two years. It is predicted that when they hit the public, there will be another Hollywood revolution, similar to the one started by Cinerama and CinemaScope. New screens, new sound, new projectors, new methods of photography and a fresh wailing on the part of movie exhibitors, who will have to adapt their theaters to the changed medium.

Berg went on to note that as a result, Paramount was producing an ‘improved’ VistaVision, and Twentieth Century–Fox was ‘tinkering’ with CinemaScope: ‘The battle of the big screens rages afresh and a war of words rages with it.’ This ‘battle’ was an inevitable result of inter-studio competition, although Twentieth Century–Fox was willing to licence CinemaScope to any rivals who found it cheaper

carousel on the silver screen   523 than coming up with a comparable system (such as Superscope, used by RKO). It was also intended to counteract the serious decline in cinema audiences and, as Philip Scheuer noted, to put the ‘dwarf ’ of television back in its place. Film posters made a splash of the new widescreen formats in increasingly extravagant fashion, and audiences noted the difference in terms not just of perspective but also of colour saturation, finer grain, and clearer focus (even if CinemaScope and VistaVision still had problems in that last regard). Moreover, the aim was to provide an immersive experience not just for the eyes but also for the ears by way of new tools for mixing monophonic sound across three channels (in the Perspecta system used with VistaVision) and stereophonic sound on four (CinemaScope), six (Todd-AO, CinemaScope 55), or seven (Cinerama). This explains the attraction of musicals as a way of vaunting the results: Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam (1953) looked well enough in Technicolor, but it is no coincidence that Paramount used his White Christmas (released on 14 October 1954) to introduce the public to VistaVision (previous displays of the system had been only for the trade), even if Twentieth Century–Fox’s Carmen Jones (28 October 1954) and There’s No Business Like Show Business (16 December 1954) looked and sounded even better in CinemaScope—as indeed MGM’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (22 July 1954) in that format had already proved—at least in those houses that had the correct equipment to show them.16 Not all did. Cinemas across the country were gradually adapting to the projection and sound systems, and screens, required for VistaVision and CinemaScope, if not always in ideal ways. However, Todd-AO and then CinemaScope 55 went beyond such capabilities and needed still more special facilities (hence the ‘fresh wailing’ noted by Louis Berg). This, plus changing approaches to studio marketing, led to a new focus on so-called roadshow releases restricted to long-term engagements in a limited number of theatres in major urban centres (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) remodelled to maximize the benefits of the technology. Films given roadshow releases were longer than the norm, they played as a single feature (sometimes in two ‘acts’ with an intermission), seats were to be reserved for individual showings (evenings and matinées), admission prices were higher, and audiences were often given souvenir programmes (obviating the need for opening credits, although that was a matter of dispute with the various guilds and unions that governed the film industry).17 The experience was meant to be akin, but far superior, to live theatre, aided, of course, by the screen proportions looking more like a proscenium stage. This is no doubt another reason why Rodgers and Hammerstein were willing to jump on the bandwagon. The film of Brigadoon was cut down to 108 minutes (close to a standard length for general release); the one of Oklahoma! ran for a luxurious 145, and South Pacific, for 171.18 Roadshow versions of films would have to be reworked in some way for general release unless they had already been created in two formats. Oklahoma! was filmed in  Todd-AO (on 65-mm film) and CinemaScope (35 mm)—with some significant ­differences—although the latter version was held back for just over a year (released on 1 November 1956). Twentieth Century–Fox used Carousel to pioneer its new CinemaScope

524   musical theatre screen adaptations 55 system (on 55-mm film) but started parallel filming in normal CinemaScope as a security measure. However, the 35 mm filming was dropped midstream after the ­studio viewed the CinemaScope 55 rushes and also quickly developed the technology to transfer the negatives to normal 35 mm film (and four-track sound) for general release.19 The King and I was filmed just in CinemaScope 55. But 35 mm versions of both Carousel and The King and I were granted general release much sooner than had been the case with Oklahoma! as a result of pressure from cinemas lower down the distribution chain that were severely disadvantaged by the roadshow system.20 Audiences in the Washington, DC, area were able to see Carousel sooner than they had access to Oklahoma!21 An overview of films released in 1954 suggests that widescreen formats were deemed all well and good for biblical epics (Demetrius and the Gladiators, the sequel to The Robe) or large-scale adventure films (20,000 Leagues under the Sea) and westerns (River of No Return, Vera Cruz), but not for dramas (The Caine Mutiny, On the Waterfront, Hitchcock’s Rear Window) or comedies (It Should Happen to You, Sabrina, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s semi-musical Living It Up). Most of the major film musicals issued that year were in widescreen formats (Brigadoon, Carmen Jones, Lucky Me, New Faces, Rose Marie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, A Star Is Born, The Student Prince, There’s No Business Like Show Business, White Christmas), although some were not, including Athena (with Jane Powell), Deep in My Heart (a biopic of Sigmund Romberg), Red Garters (featuring Rosemary Clooney), Top Banana (Phil Silvers; filmed in 3D but not released as such), and Young at Heart (Frank Sinatra and Doris Day). For the studios, and aside from questions of genre, the choice of one format over the other came down to budget on the one hand, and the intended market on the other. But some of these widescreen musicals suited the new medium better than others. As a classic case in point, White Christmas seems distinctly ambivalent over how best to handle VistaVision, even though it should have been encouraged by its settings (Montecassino, Florida, Vermont), and still more, by its stars (Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen). Nor were those involved in creating film musicals always enthusiastic over the new format: Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, for example, had to work hard to adapt their typical dance routines to the wide screen. In general, however, the race towards new technologies was irresistible. Cole Porter spoofed the trend in his stage musical Silk Stockings (1955): Today to get the public to attend a picture show, It's not enough to advertise a famous star they know. If you want to get the crowds to come around You've got to have glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope, and Stereophonic sound.22

The question for film musicals was what to do with them.

carousel on the silver screen   525

A Clash of Stage and Screen In the 14 January 1956 issue of Billboard, Lee Zhito noted how ‘Hollywood Tunes Up to Send Box Office on a Musical Whirl.’ He wrote that all the Hollywood studios were beefing up production of musicals for 1956, with a projected thirty-five or more releases compared with twenty in 1955 (which had, of course, included Oklahoma!): his long list of titles includes Anything Goes (which came out starring Bing Crosby, Donald O’Connor, Jeanmaire, and Mitzi Gaynor), High Society (Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra), Kismet (Howard Keel, Ann Blyth), and The Vagabond King (Kathryn Grayson, Oreste Kirkop). Zhito pointed to three issues explaining this new flurry of activity: competition with television (again!); the profits to be made from tie-ins with broadcast radio; and the growth of foreign markets in a flourishing postwar economy.23 The Vagabond King was a remake of Rudolf Friml’s 1925 operetta, but out of the other twenty-nine titles on Zhito’s list, only four had direct links to Broadway shows (as Anything Goes did not): Can-Can, Carousel, The King and I, and Pal Joey. Of those four, only two in fact appeared in 1956 (Pal Joey came out in 1957, and Can-Can in 1960). This was par for the course. Nowadays our perception skews in favour of filmed versions of the classic shows from Broadway’s Golden Age: they are often the only way to catch some glimpse of their originals, although that is a dangerous strategy. But they formed a very small proportion of a genre—the American film musical—that operated according to quite different principles. Thus, the vast majority of musicals released by the studios in 1956 fit its parameters. On the one hand stood biopics of prominent real-life musical figures—The Benny Goodman Story, The Best Things in Life Are Free (on the songwriters Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson), The Eddy Duchin Story—or imagined ones (‘Damon Vincenti’ played by Mario Lanza in Serenade). On the other we have some version of the ‘backstage musical’ or, and increasingly, its ‘nightclub’ variant: The Girl Can’t Help It (Jayne Mansfield), Meet Me in Las Vegas (Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse), The Opposite Sex (June Allyson, Joan Collins, Dolores Gray, Ann Sheridan, Ann Miller). Lower down the list come screwball comedies with occasional songs: Bundle of Joy (Eddie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds), Pardners (the penultimate film in the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis franchise), You Can’t Run Away from It (June Allyson and Jack Lemmon in a remake of It Happened One Night). Relatively new to the field were lower-budget black-and-white films building on the new craze for rock ’n’ roll: Don’t Knock the Rock (with Bill Haley & His Comets, Little Richard, etc.), Rock Around the Clock (Bill Haley & His Comets again), Rock, Rock, Rock, (Tuesday Weld, Chuck Berry), and Shake, Rattle, and Rock! (Fats Domino, etc.), to which one might well add Love Me Tender (Elvis Presley’s first film), although it is more in the ‘Western with songs’ mould. Stage musicals were a different matter altogether. Cole Porter’s song ‘Stereophonic Sound’ was witty enough, but it exposed a number of anxieties within a genre that already had a wide-‘screen’ format, colourful sets and costumes, and high-quality sound.

526   musical theatre screen adaptations Broadway and Hollywood existed in a complex relationship, both symbiotic and ­fractured.24 When the Theatre Guild was casting the stage version of Oklahoma! it first considered film stars for the main roles as a way of capturing an audience: Deanna Durbin as Laurey, Shirley Temple as (probably) Ado Annie, Groucho Marx as Ali Hakim, and Anthony Quinn as Jud Fry.25 None of them worked out—whether for lack of interest or for contractual reasons—which the Guild then claimed was an advantage by allowing them to bring to the stage a group of relatively unknown actors willing to work as a coherent team. In the case of subsequent cast members in Oklahoma! the Guild repeatedly complained about their being lured to (or poached by) the Hollywood studios.26 But it happily did the reverse by recruiting actors who had (often unwisely) signed Hollywood contracts that had yet to gain them exposure: two cases in point were the lead players in the original stage Carousel, Jan Clayton (a ‘Metro starlet’) and John Raitt (who broke his contract with the low-budget Producers Releasing Corporation). In general, however, not many actors were able to cross back and forth between stage and screen given the quite different demands in terms of looks, ability, temperament, and contract status: they may have fit one mould perfectly, but rarely the other. In the case of the R&H musicals, only Yul Brynner (King Mongkut in The King and I) and Juanita Hall (Bloody Mary in South Pacific) took the same roles in the film versions as they had done in the onstage premieres, and Juanita Hall’s songs were dubbed by Muriel Smith (who had played Blood Mary onstage in London).27 If the stars of stage and screen largely lived in different worlds, so, too, did the works they performed. Part of Hollywood’s resistance to transfers from the stage was no doubt due to the complex contractual problems they created in terms of who had rights to what: it was easier to stick within a single system of production and its legal administration. Far more important, however, was Hollywood’s antipathy to musical theatre as it was now developing on the stage. In the 1930s, the studios had posed a serious threat by way of appropriating what Broadway then did best: spectacular revues with their roots in vaudeville, plus their ‘backstage musical’ derivatives. It was impossible for Broadway to compete with the likes of Busby Berkeley, or of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The rise of Technicolor film from the mid-1930s was still more dangerous, especially when it was used to such effect as in, say, The Wizard of Oz (1939). One might well argue that Broadway’s turn to the so-called integrated musical in the early 1940s was a clear response: Oklahoma! is usually granted ‘landmark’ status in that regard, though there were plenty of other, even earlier, examples. But any show that brought drama, dance, and music into some kind of coherent whole—a ‘musical play’ to use the contemporary term—went very much against the Hollywood grain, and probably deliberately so. The problem was the perennial one of opera and musical theatre: the plausibility of song. The medium of film retained certain canons of verisimilitude—matters needed to be ‘lifelike’—and also depended on audiences imagining themselves in the middle of the action in ways that made singing problematic unless it could somehow be done in realistic (or nearly so) circumstances or otherwise justified by way of convention or fantasy. Even the MGM musicals produced by Arthur Freed—who is generally considered to have done the most to free up the genre—reflected many of the same constraints.

carousel on the silver screen   527 This  explains Hollywood’s continuing preference for musical biopics or ‘backstage’ ­scenarios, where songs could largely be presented as diegetic save in certain restricted circumstances. ‘Book’-musicals of the 1940s, however, increasingly pushed against those boundaries. True, in the case of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaboration a cowboy might feasibly wax lyrical over a ‘beautiful’ morning box socials customarily involve dancing (‘The Farmer and the Cowman’), and one can sing at a wedding (the song ‘Oklahoma’), while comic songs (Ado Annie’s ‘I Cain’t Say No’) and love duets (‘People Will Say We’re in Love’) are close enough to convention. But Jud Fry’s passionate outburst in ‘Lonely Room’ is wholly inverisimilar, however ‘real’ it might seem in emotional terms. Hollywood did not quite know how to respond. Annie Get Your Gun transferred well enough to film in 1950 given that it was a ‘backstage musical’ of sorts (hence ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’). So did Show Boat (in 1951, as in 1936) and Kiss Me, Kate (1953) for similar reasons. Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon (1954), on the other hand, did not, however much it tried to rely on its fantastical plot and exotic location to allow Gene Kelly to sing to, and then dance with, Cyd Charisse in ‘The Heather on the Hill.’ And even so purportedly faithful a transfer as the film of Oklahoma! felt obliged to cut Jud’s ‘Lonely Room.’28 The problems are clear in another of the 1956 film musicals listed by Lee Zhito: The Court Jester. This high-budget (eventually, some $4 million) production designed as a vehicle for Danny Kaye, co-starring Glynis Johns, was released by Paramount in VistaVision on 27 January, less than three weeks before Carousel. It took the form of a costume musical in the manner of the forthcoming The Vagabond King, although its satirical target seems to have been the Disney swashbucklers of the mid-1950s such as The Sword and the Rose and Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue (1953), in which Johns had appeared. The plot is set in medieval England: Kaye plays the role of Hubert Hawkins— minstrel to the Black Fox (a Robin Hood-type figure)—who infiltrates the court of the wicked King Roderick, usurper of the throne. Hawkins manages to defeat Sir Griswold of MacElwain in a tournament, then the evil Lord Ravenhurst (Basil Rathbone) in a swordfight. His overthrow of King Roderick is aided by a team of midget acrobats, thereby restoring the rightful heir, a baby bearing the purple pimpernel (a birthmark) on its behind. In addition to those acrobats, further novelty was provided by the fast ­formation marching of the Zouave Drill Team (American Legion, Post no. 29, Jackson, Michigan). All this action, largely done on two mammoth sets constructed on Paramount soundstages (the exterior courtyard and interior hall of a castle), was clearly designed to fill the VistaVision screen. So did some fine panoramic location shots on the coast of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, southwest of Los Angeles. Visually, The Court Jester made better use of VistaVision than, say, White Christmas, but the latter’s ‘let’s put on a show’ format was more congenial to the presentation of Irving Berlin’s songs. Writers Melvin Frank and Norman Panama were involved in the screenplays for both films, but their move also into directing Danny Kaye (first in Knock on Wood in 1954) presented them with a different set of musical problems. In the case of The Court Jester, Sammy Cahn and Sylvia Fine (Danny Kaye’s wife) provided them with eight songs, although in the film’s final release, only four were heard complete, with

528   musical theatre screen adaptations fragments of two others (but all eight were given in full on the ‘soundtrack’ album issued in 1956). The cuts were no doubt caused, at least in part, by the difficulty of finding diegetic moments in the pseudo-historical context. The problems are solved somewhat by Kaye establishing his character with ‘(You’ll Never) Outfox the Fox,’ singing a lullaby to the baby under his protection (‘I’ll Take You Dreaming’), and performing before King Roderick’s court a typical tongue-twisting ‘Maladjusted Jester.’ But what was seemingly the main song of the film, ‘Life Could Not Better Be,’ is left to the briefest of reprises right at the end; instead, Kaye introduces it in full in an ingenious title-sequence over the opening credits (with Kaye dressed as a jester, but in a costume not otherwise used in the film), crossing the fourth wall and commenting on the credits themselves.29 The number finds scant room later on, although its use in the credits does help to define the film as a musical in the first place. One wonders, however, whether The Court Jester warrants the term given the limited role of the songs overall. Certainly this is not something that could, or would, have been put on the stage.

Location Shooting Of course, some straight-to-film musicals made a far better job of the genre, both within the typical constraints but sometimes also beyond them. MGM’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), directed by Stanley Donen, could just as well have been a stage musical in the manner of Oklahoma!—as it became in 1978, if none too successfully (the adaptation by Lawrence Kasha and David Landay flopped on Broadway in 1982). The ancestry is clear, and the film’s star, Howard Keel, had stepped into the lead roles in the first two R&H musicals on the stage (as Curly and Billy Bigelow). Donen was more in tune than many Hollywood directors with musicals on the silver screen (Vincente Minelli is another case in point): his other directing credits included On the Town (1949), Royal Wedding (1951), and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). This sympathy came from his prior experience as a choreographer (in particular, for Gene Kelly), but also because he recognized the fallacy that lay behind cinematic verisimilitude in so far as any musical was concerned. When asked about the opening of On the Town shot on the streets of New York, he made his position clear: That is not real. That is anything but real, it just happens that the street is real. A musical is like an opera in the sense that it is anything but real. It seems to me that the whole mistake that films made was in trying to make it believable, as if it were happening in reality.30

He accepted the essential surrealism of the genre, and in the case of Singin’ in the Rain, he played with it in gloriously witty ways. That opening number of On the Town, ‘New York, New York,’ was certainly a cinematic tour de force, with the song (though much of it is instrumental) lip-synched on location shots in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on the Brooklyn Bridge, then through the

carousel on the silver screen   529 sights of Manhattan ending up in Rockefeller Plaza. Most of the rest of film was shot in the MGM backlot and soundstages save for occasional second-unit footage (some used as rear-projected background). This was more the norm given that the conditions for filming could be better controlled and manipulated in the studio, and costs could be kept down. Widescreen formats, however, tended to favour location shooting to the extent that films in CinemaScope and VistaVision often have the air of a travelogue (compare also the Venice scene in This Is Cinerama).31 This is clear also in director Henry King’s two films immediately prior to Carousel (both for Twentieth Century–Fox and released in 1955): Untamed was shot in part in South Africa, and Love Is a ManySplendored Thing in Hong Kong. Stanley Donen said that he had wanted to shoot Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on location in Oregon, and that it would have been a better use of money than filming it in two formats (for CinemaScope and normal 35-mm projection); however, for budgetary reasons it was done mostly in the studio, with not much advantage taken of its briefer location shooting (in Sun Valley, Idaho). But as Donen also admitted, ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, as far as the studio was concerned, was a B picture and they didn’t give a damn about it.’32 Rodgers and Hammerstein certainly gave a damn about Oklahoma!, and with Fred Zinnemann on board as director, location shooting was clearly part of the plan from the beginning: the cast and crew spent seven weeks (from mid-July 1954) in Arizona and New Mexico. This added significantly to the film’s widescreen impact—especially in the Todd-AO version—and also to its air of authenticity. So, too, did the even more unusual choice to situate the bulk of the show’s act 1 daytime numbers in this ‘real’ world outdoors. The contrast with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is striking and presumably was somehow intended: while the latter’s famous barn-raising scene was done in the studio, the song-and-dance number ‘Kansas City’ in Oklahoma! was shot at a real railway station (Elgin, Arizona) and also with a moving train.33 The evening songs in Oklahoma! (according to the time span represented in the show; so, most of act 2) had to be done on a soundstage for reasons of lighting, and likewise the dream-ballet. But as long as the sun was shining, here were genuine farmers and cowmen singing their way through life. This was also one reason the film came in way over budget. Seven Brides cost $2.54 million, which was fairly typical for larger-scale musicals not at the high end of, say, There’s No Business like Show Business ($4.34 million). For Oklahoma! the figure was $6.8 million. In fact, Richard Rodgers was somewhat less than enthusiastic over the results: Visually, parts of the film were impressive, with some stunning shots of elephanteye-high corn, the surrey ride, and the cloud-filled Arizona sky. But the wide-screen process was not always ideal for the more intimate scenes, and I don’t think the casting was totally satisfactory. At any rate, from then on—except for South Pacific— Oscar and I left moving pictures to moving-picture people and stayed clear of any involvement with subsequent film versions of our musicals.34

Nevertheless, he and Hammerstein seem to have felt that filming their shows in their real-world locations was the one novelty that the medium could bring to the stage musical. They exploited it even more in their other self-produced film, South Pacific

530   musical theatre screen adaptations (1958). This was shot mostly on the island of Kauaʻi (Hawaiʻi), and with still more open-air numbers. Again, this had an impact on the budget ($5.61 million). But while Zinnemann had no problem with cowboys singing and dancing outdoors, the director of South Pacific, Joshua Logan, seems to have been more anxious over American SeaBees and nurses, French plantation owners, and even Tonkinese immigrants doing the same. The obvious paradox was that the excess of verisimilitude in location shooting would only exacerbate the inverisimilitude of music. Logan tried to compensate by using ­special light filters to create some ‘other’ world for several of the songs. He ended up regretting it deeply.

Filming Carousel Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century–Fox would not have wanted to pay $5.61 million or $6.8 million for any film musical, even one with the R&H cachet: he still went overboard for Carousel ($3.38 million) and The King and I ($4.45 million), but nowhere near to that degree. He cut corners in other ways, too. For Carousel, he assigned an in-house director, Henry King, whose prior experience of musicals was limited to Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938): he was better known for epic adventures and romantic dramas. The in-house director for The King and I, Walter Lang, at least had a stronger track ­record in the genre (and he had directed the R&H State Fair). Zanuck did, however, allow King to go on location as Carousel went through production in the second half of 1955: The King and I, on the other hand, was done in the studio for reasons of cost, even if Lang and others might have preferred it otherwise.35 The named producer of Carousel was Henry Ephron, who also wrote the screenplay with his wife, Phoebe. Ephron wanted to try his hand at production, he said, because of the success of his working with Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron on Daddy Long Legs (1955).36 That had mostly been shot in the studio, but Carousel needed a different approach, both because of the precedent created by Oklahoma! and given that the film was to be a showcase for Twentieth Century–Fox’s new response to VistaVision and Todd-AO: CinemaScope 55. It was given a very large advertising budget; the premiere was anticipated by Zanuck’s introducing special showings of a demonstration reel of CinemaScope 55 with extracts from Carousel and The King and I; and the broader ­marketing played strongly on the still sharper widescreen panoramas than standard CinemaScope, as well as the higher-quality sound (see Figure 23.1).37 Zanuck also made the connection when appearing directly in a trailer for the film: ‘Just as Rodgers and Hammerstein represent the very last word in musical perfection, we feel that Carousel, in the new CinemaScope 55, represents the very last word in viewing pleasure.’38 One problem, however, was that Carousel was in general a more intimate musical than that format would suggest. Another was that the setting for the show, Maine, was not as visually enticing as the wide-open spaces of the American Southwest, and less exotic than any island in the Pacific. Nor did it help that much of the action of Carousel, and large

carousel on the silver screen   531

Figure 23.1  Advertising spread for Carousel (1956): This tended to appear in local newspapers around the time of the opening of the film of Carousel in a given location, as in the Iola Register (Kansas), 26 April 1956 (p. 6), and the Sunday Standard (Singapore) on the 29th (p. 9). The image accentuates the curve of the screen, probably to prompt a more favorable comparison with Cinerama; it also emphasizes the six-channel sound, with the five separate speakers in front (a sixth was positioned within the auditorium for sound-effects). However, few regional cinemas would have had the facilities to show Carousel in this manner. Source: www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wingcs6.htm

portions of the music, take place from dusk into evening: Julie Jordan and Carrie Pipperidge go to the carousel after work, the opening of act 2 on the island comes at the end of a day devoted to ‘A Real Nice Clambake,’ and so on. Widescreen vistas are fine in daylight, but there is not much point to them at night. Furthermore, Maine is hardly thematic to Carousel in the way that the soon-to-be-astate Oklahoma Territory is to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first show. The source-play, Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom, is set in the outskirts of Budapest, and while Rodgers and Hammerstein were clear on the need to transplant the action from Hungary to the United States, they could have picked almost anywhere one might find a carnival ­carousel (they initially thought of Louisiana). Only two songs in the stage Carousel have direct references to any setting on the New England coast, and one of them, a rather

532   musical theatre screen adaptations implausible paean to whaling (‘Blow High, Blow Low’), was dropped from the film anyway. The other, ‘June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,’ certainly has brief mentions of Penobscot and Augusta but it would otherwise work for any coastal fishing community that suffered harsh weather in March and had access to clams. Henry King initially suggested shooting Carousel in northern California, but Henry Ephron insisted on Maine: thus 115 actors, dancers, and crew travelled to Boothbay Harbor in mid-August 1955, staying there until early October.39 At that point, the lead roles were assigned to Shirley Jones (Julie Jordan) and Frank Sinatra (Billy Bigelow). Jones had been discovered by Rodgers and Hammerstein; in a pattern typical for them they used her in stage versions of South Pacific and Me and Juliet prior to pushing her for the role of Laurey in the film of Oklahoma! Sinatra was, of course, a much bigger star, fresh from creating another character of dubious morals, Nathan Detroit, in the soon-tobe-released MGM film of Guys and Dolls (rumour has it that Sinatra’s costar there, Marlon Brando, was also considered for the role of Billy Bigelow).40 Presumably this was the studio’s idea, but if so, it turned out to be a bad one: Sinatra walked out right as filming started, purportedly because he was unwilling to shoot each scene twice for just a single fee—in CinemaScope and Todd-AO he initially thought, but he was confused, and ­doubly so when the studio claimed that the CinemaScope 35 and 55 cameras would run simultaneously (though they did not). A million-dollar lawsuit ensued that was later resolved when Sinatra agreed to play in the film of Cole Porter’s Can-Can (1960).41 Meanwhile, Gordon MacRae, who had been Curly to Shirley Jones’s Laurey in Oklahoma!, was brought in as a last-minute replacement, although he later said that he had been campaigning for the role and had even done it on stage as preparation.42 MacRae probably took a gentler view of the character than Sinatra would have done. But it may have helped render the difficult subject of Carousel more palatable by reuniting the couple so happily married at the end of Oklahoma!, even though their fates were now quite different. The early location shooting went well enough, and the citizens of Boothbay Harbor were delighted to watch the filming of the musical numbers that Henry King had elected to shoot there to take whatever widescreen advantage he could of the daylight scenery. ‘June Is Bustin’ Out All Over’ had already been a big production number in the stage show, choreographed by Agnes de Mille; the choreography for the film was done instead by Rod Alexander, and ‘June’ was done on an even grander scale on the deck and roof of Cousin Nettie’s seaside spa—one of the energetic highlights of the film if clearly modelled on the acrobatic barn dance in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (choreographed by Michael Kidd).43 Somewhat more oddly—but again for widescreen advantage—‘When the Children Are Asleep’ was shifted from its original position. In the stage version, it comes in the middle of act 1 as a scene for just Enoch Snow and Carrie Pipperidge; the film put it between acts 1 and 2 as Enoch and Carrie sail across to the island for the clambake in the company of a silent Julie and Billy, whose presence makes for an awkward duet, although the sailboats look well enough save for a wholly improbable transition at the end from the midday sun to a gloomy dusk. There was some confusion, however, about where to shoot the other outdoor numbers. The final Graduation Scene (including the choral reprise of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’),

carousel on the silver screen   533 set in the daytime, was done elsewhere in Maine, although Howard Thompson reported in the New York Times (on 11 September) that it would be shot in the studio. He also said that ‘Mister Snow’ and ‘If I Loved You’—both nighttime numbers—would be situated ‘on the lawn of the Lincoln Home for aged folks’ (which still exists, in Newcastle, Maine, on the bank of the Damariscotta River). Henry Ephron certainly intended an outdoor location for them and said that ‘Mister Snow’ was shot there, albeit with some issues caused by the wind. But while the prior dialogue (between Julie, Carrie, Mrs Mullin, and Billy) does indeed take place outdoors, ‘Mister Snow’ through the ‘Bench scene’ seems to have been done on a soundstage (if with the backgrounds perhaps spliced in), maybe again because of lighting issues.44 Thompson further noted that the first appearance of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ (at Billy’s death) would be done on the pier (in Boothbay Harbor, presumably). which may only be partly true given that there appears to be some splicing going on here, too. He was correct, however, that ‘A Real Nice Clambake’ would be done in ‘sunny California’ (by which he meant a soundstage) because of the ‘intricacies of nighttime photography.’45 The weather may have affected matters—Henry Ephron said that luck ran out and ‘it began to rain and rain and rain’46—although one strange decision had already been made, it seems: Howard Thompson reported that Billy Bigelow’s big act 1 number, ‘Soliloquy,’ would be shot ‘on a West Coast beach.’ This was indeed the case as Gordon MacRae and the crew went to Point Dume State Preserve, near Malibu, California. Perhaps the filmmakers were worried about finding a spot in Maine where Billy could plausibly muse on the future without interruption. In the stage version of Carousel, the number is set on the deck of Nettie’s spa. Billy has just heard from Julie that she is expecting a baby; he relays the news to Jigger Craigin and Mrs Mullin, who leave him alone to contemplate the prospect of being a father to a son (‘My boy, Bill!’) or, he suddenly realizes, perhaps a daughter (‘My little girl’). This eight-minute sequence is one of the more remarkable musical moments in Carousel, and also perhaps its most operatic in terms of its scale and structure; it does not need crashing Pacific waves to make it any more so. Those waves cause further distraction later in the film as (fifteen years on, according to the time span of the plot) Billy’s daughter, Louise, begins her act 2 ‘Ballet’ there, watched by a now-invisible Billy allowed back on earth for a day to do a good deed. The parallel location is predictable enough, although it creates a very awkward transition (by way of a spinning cartwheel that has suddenly appeared on the beach) to the soundstage set for the ballet itself, returning (the cartwheel again) to the ‘real’ beach for its conclusion.47 In the case of both Billy (after ‘Soliloquy’) and Louise (after her ‘Ballet’), it is unclear how they get from the Pacific surf to the calmer shores of the Atlantic for their next scenes, should anyone care enough to ask the question (some reviewers did). That strange choice of location might just be excused as clumsiness in the search for widescreen visual effect. Other troublesome alterations to the stage version of Carousel, however, rested in the hands of screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron. The latter claimed that ‘the screenplay wasn’t difficult and we made as many changes in the dialogue as one dared in a classic.’48 But those changes were quite significant. Actors Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones may have made a fine couple in the film of Oklahoma!, but

534   musical theatre screen adaptations they play very different characters in Carousel. Billy Bigelow is feckless, maladjusted, and prone to violence: more of a Jud Fry than a Curly McClain. Julie Jordan is a victim of domestic violence and seems to accept its inevitability (in the song ‘What’s the Use of Wond’rin’?’). The other characters are not particularly sympathetic: for example, even the stage versions of Carrie Pipperidge and Enoch Snow are insufferably priggish, in part because of changes made to the roles in the course of drafting the libretto.49 And certainly there is no comic relief in the manner of Will Parker and Ali Hakim in Oklahoma! The Ephrons seem to have had some difficulty in dealing with the consequences. One can explain some of those ‘problems’ of Carousel by the date of its creation, towards the end of World War II, and therefore of the social issues with which it sought to engage (including traumatized veterans and penniless war widows). Molnár’s play, Liliom: The Life and Death of a Scoundrel (Budapest, 1909), also had much to answer for, however. Its eponymous antihero (Billy in Carousel) dies by his own hand, is judged in a courtroom ‘in the beyond’ and sentenced to sixteen years in the ‘crimson fire,’ and then gains the opportunity to spend one day back on earth to perform some kindly act for his daughter, which he fails to do. The outcome is ambiguous, although Molnár quite strongly suggests that Liliom does not, in the end, gain redemption: he is a ‘scoundrel’ through and through. When the play was done in New York—as it was quite frequently in the 1920s and 1930s—it became the fashion to speculate on the nature and outcome of Liliom’s fate, often with a more positive spin. This was also the case in the endings added to the three films made of the play in 1921, 1930, and (in French) in 1934.50 The stage version of Carousel followed the trend: Hammerstein dropped the notion of judgment and the ‘crimson fire’—his Starkeeper is a rather kindly figure—and he negotiated what he called the ‘tunnel’ of the last portion of the play by adding the final Graduation Scene, in which Billy’s brief words of encouragement to Louise and then Julie seem to be sufficient to make amends. Turning him into a more sympathetic character was inevitable, not least because his eloquent music was bound to make him so anyway. But the film version went even further, not least by rewriting the opening of the show to make it clear that something good could come of Billy in the first place. Molnár’s Liliom had gained its fairground prologue in the German translation of the play done in Berlin in 1912 and Vienna in 1913: this was the text followed (with some further revisions) in the English-language version premiered by the Theatre Guild in 1921.51 Rodgers and Hammerstein followed suit in their stage musical, dispensing with the traditional overture to start straight in with the action at curtain up (over the ‘Carousel Waltz’). This left the makers of the film in something of a bind. Film musicals had already started to play with reinventing the typical opening-credits sequence (we have seen the case of The Court Jester), or even attempting to dispose of it altogether. For Carousel, the Ephrons came up with new pre- and post-credits sequences. The first has Billy polishing stars ‘up there’; the Heavenly Friend tells him that ‘things ain’t going so good for your kinfolk down on earth’; Billy asks whom to see

carousel on the silver screen   535 to get permission to exercise his right to go back for a day (the Friend says he should address the Starkeeper); and Billy says that he will ‘think about it.’ He throws out a star which triggers the opening credits (on a blue screen with stars in the background), done over an abridged version of the ‘Carousel Waltz’ with a feeble fanfare ending presumably requested by Alfred Newman (the conductor and music supervisor). The scene returns ‘up there’ as Billy enters the office of the Starkeeper, who notes that Billy has already declined his right of return but invites him to tell his story anyway. As Billy recalls his life as a carousel barker, the image pans down to the fairground (on a studio set), the ‘Carousel Waltz’ starts up again, and the scene plays out more or less as in the stage version. Creating a separate ‘overture’ (over the credits) out of the ‘Carousel Waltz’ solved a problem for the film, although not in ways Rodgers and Hammerstein had wanted for the stage. Newman’s (one assumes) idea of adding musical underscoring to the precredits sequence with sounds akin to an orchestra tuning up solved another—quite neatly, in fact—given that this is what one would hear in a theatre prior to any formal music. The pre- and post-credits sequences taken together, however, quite fundamentally changed the nature of Carousel, turning its main action (up to Billy’s death) into a flashback narrative ‘told’ by Billy to the Starkeeper. Thus, his later scene ‘up there’ brings us back to the present, as does Billy’s final day on earth. The reason for this revised opening suggested at the time was to prevent audiences from thinking that the death of Billy marked the end of the story, but it is not a particularly strong argument.52 However, there was a triple benefit to this strategy. First, placing the opening on a set that looks overtly (nay, exaggeratedly) stage-like makes the filmic qualities of the main action all the more striking. Second, the fact that Billy tells his own story warts and all prompts the audience to take a more sympathetic view of things from his perspective. Third, it allows the film to enter a musical world that for all its widescreen realism is, in essence, a flashback fantasy, and therefore more plausible in terms of its use of the medium. This was a trick of a kind that had been used in The Wizard of Oz (1939), moving from a sepia-toned Kansas to an ‘over the rainbow’ Land of Oz that was both colourful (literally) and musical. In the case of Carousel it sought to allow for the show’s far greater use of music—and in a more ‘operatic’ style—than in the case of Oklahoma! However, it was not sufficient: large cuts were still made to the score in terms of individual numbers (‘Blow High, Blow Low,’ ‘The Highest Judge of All,’ and ‘Geraniums in the Winder’ disappeared completely) and of significant parts of its various musical ‘sequences’ that Rodgers and Hammerstein used to move from dialogue into song. This may have been because of concerns over length: ‘Blow High, Blow Low’ and one of the musical sequences (Carrie’s ‘You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan’) may have been filmed and then cut during editing (they are included in the soundtrack album), perhaps as a result of the decision not to produce a roadshow version of the film.53 But regardless, even in this safer narrative world, music still posed problems for film, and the screen treatment of  Carousel did serious damage to the complex musical fabric that Rodgers and Hammerstein had woven for the stage.

536   musical theatre screen adaptations Many reviews of the film of Carousel were favourable enough, praising the c­ inematography and the acting, singing, and dancing. According to Edwin Schallert in the Los Angeles Times on 17 February 1956 (‘Carousel Ranks with Best Films’): Carousel belongs with the very best in screen achievements, because it is amazingly beautiful scenically, singularly rich in romantic appeal and surprisingly philosophical. Moreover it follows the authentic pattern of its originals, the stage play Liliom by Ferenc Molnar, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein footlight presentation.

But Schallert’s last point was an exaggeration, to say the least, and the film was not the expected success at the box office: the roadshow Oklahoma! soon went higher up the rankings, while the more exotic, and more upbeat, The King and I dominated the summer and fared much better with audiences and in the award listings.54 One negative review of Carousel by the distinguished dance critic Arlene Croce also picked up on a number of issues that will now have a familiar ring. After complaining about the tendency of film studios to allocate musicals to directors unfamiliar with the genre, and more inclined to favour story content over other parameters, she raised a number of other objections: In Carousel, CinemaScope 55 presents to the span of the eye New England beaches, churchyards and sunsets, all very pretty and very real, into which the surrealistic de Mille ballet and the interstellar rovings of Billy Bigelow intrude like perverse thoughts in a cathedral. For here again, the American cinema runs aground on the darkling plain of fantasy, and the failure of Carousel is the dual failure to realize an adequate film form for music drama and for fantasy.55

Croce considered the film of Carousel to represent ‘a crisis of form’; my aim here has been to provide some context in which to understand that crisis in terms of how the show became trapped by way of conflicting aesthetic, technological, and economic demands, some of its own making and some the studio’s. But most will agree with her: whatever was gained in translating Carousel from stage to screen could not compensate for what was lost.

Notes This essay expands significantly on the brief discussion of the film version of Carousel in Tim Carter, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Carousel’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), which covers in greater depth the original show’s creation, content, and reception. I am grateful to Gina Bombola for her comments on a draft of this chapter. Production information for the shows and films discussed here (dates, performance statistics, budgets, box office receipts, and the like) are taken somewhat indiscriminately from the standard sources such as www.afi.com, www.ibdb.com, www.imdb.com, www. playbill.com, www.tcm.com, and even some relevant entries on Wikipedia. I have made no effort to verify or corroborate them by way of in-depth archival investigation; while

carousel on the silver screen   537 this might seem a case of scholarly negligence, it is also a practical inevitability, albeit one with obvious methodological consequences. I refer to newspaper articles by way of their author (where indicated), main headline, and date: page references are less useful given that they could vary from edition to edition. However, articles on entertainments tended to come in the same location in each issue save where they were front-page news. Quotations are lightly edited (for example, to put show or film titles in italic), but I retain the original spellings and punctuation, even if they lead to inconsistency. 1. Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2002), 243. 2. The exception to the cycle (on odd-numbered years) Is Flower Drum Song, premiered on 1 December 1958. For 1957, R&H wrote the television version of Cinderella, and they had also explored (somewhat diffidently, it seems) the idea of a musical version of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s 1939 play Life with Father; for the latter, see ‘Life with Father Pends as Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Next Broadway Musical,’ Variety, 25 July 1956. However, Rodgers was also suffering from illness and depression. 3. ‘70,000,000 view R&H Cavalcade,’ Variety, 31 March 1954. 4. For Rodgers and Hammerstein and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the source-play for My Fair Lady, see Tim Carter, ‘Oklahoma!’: The Making of An American Musical (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 243. 5. Compare also the details of out-of-town productions in ‘R&H Legits’ Summer Meal Ticket; Pull $234,600 Gross Total for Week,’ Variety, 27 July 1955. The summer 1955 season at the Muny in St. Louis included Carousel, Allegro, South Pacific, and The King and I; see ‘St. Loo Muny Sked,’ Variety, 16 March 1955. 6. For a useful overview of these and other issues, see Julie Hubbert, Celluloid Symphonies: Text and Contexts in Film Music History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), part 3. 7. Given in Carter, Oklahoma!, 225. 8. Joshua Logan, Movie Stars, Real People, and Me (New York: Delacorte, 1976), 125. 9. Carter, Oklahoma!, 233 (monitoring), 235 (Shelley Winters as Ado Annie), 242 (fire). 1 0. Carter, Oklahoma!, 243–244 (negotiations); Sam Zolotow, ‘Producing Team Faces Busy Year,’ New York Times, 10 August 1953; ‘Oklahoma! Film Set: Stage Success Will Be Made in Todd’s Wide-Screen Process,’ New York Times, 17 August 1953. For the subsequent negotiations over the other R&H shows, see also ‘R&H Seek Production Rights to All Their Shows: [South] Pacific Deal Snagged,’ Variety, 28 September 1955. 11. Both had recently worked on other stage-to-screen adaptations, however: Hornblow produced Remains to Be Seen (1953; based on the Broadway comedy by Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay, with three added songs), and Zinnemann directed The Member of the Wedding (1952; Carson McCullers’s drama, based on her 1946 novel). 12. Carter, Oklahoma!, 244–249. 13. Hayward and Logan already had some informal control over the film rights to James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific before R&H took on the project of turning these short stories into a musical (they also coproduced the Broadway show and retained some rights to it); see Jim Lovensheimer, ‘South Pacific’: Paradise Rewritten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 46. 14. There were also rumours of an intended Todd-AO film of another R&H musical, although this never came to fruition; see Edwin Schallert, ‘Me and Juliet Prospect Good for Todd-AO,’ Los Angeles Times, 10 July 1954.

538   musical theatre screen adaptations 15. Philip K. Scheuer, ‘New Wide-Screen Process Enters Battle of Scopes,’ Los Angeles Times, 27 June 1954. The first of those excerpts probably came from Untamed (released on 1 March 1955; the Zulu battle sequence was shot on location in South Africa in spring 1954). The second may have been a screen test for Sheree North, who was later (January 1955) chosen to replace Marilyn Monroe opposite Betty Grable in How to Be Very, Very Popular (22 July 1955). 16. The first musical in CinemaScope was Warner Bros.’ Lucky Me (released on 9 April 1954), starring Doris Day, Robert Cummings, and Phil Silvers. 17. Arthur Hornblow Jr, the producer of the film Oklahoma!, argued in favour of dropping the opening credits but met strong resistance from the Directors Guild; see Thomas M. Pryor, ‘Hollywood Dossier,’ New York Times, 23 January 1955. 18. The films of Carousel (128 minutes) and The King and I (133) were shorter. The cut-down Brigadoon, however, was typical for a Gene Kelly musical (and most others): compare On the Town (1949; 98 minutes), Summer Stock (1950; 109), An American in Paris (1951; 113), and Singin’ in the Rain (1952; 103). 19. ‘Carousel Will Finish in 4X-55M C’Scope,’ Variety, 21 September 1955. 20. ‘20th Foregoes Roadshowing of 55m: On Balance, Prefers Fast Playoff of Carousel in Short Market,’ Variety, 16 November 1955; ‘Time & Squawks Make “King” 35m,’ Variety, 29 February 1956. 21. Richard L. Coe’s ‘New Carousel a Jim-Dandy,’ Washington Post, 22 February 1956—reviewing the film being shown at the Capitol Theatre (Washington, DC)—noted that the roadshow Oklahoma! would open in Baltimore on ‘Monday night,’ which it did (on 27 February). 22. Subsequent stanzas expand the jargon still further (Cinerama, VistaVision, Superscope, Todd-AO, Cinecolor, Warnercolor, Pathécolor, Eastmancolor, Kodacolor . . .). 23. However, it was generally acknowledged that American film musicals did not always do well in non-English-speaking markets because of the problems of vernacular references and of dubbing. As Variety reported (‘20th’s Full Sync on Carousel in German,’ 3 October 1956), the latter issue was addressed in Twentieth Century-Fox’s unusual decision on ­dubbing Carousel into German also to redo the songs as well, with the African American baritone Lawrence Winter (at that time on tour in West Germany) singing Billy, and ‘Senta Schoener’ (recte Sonja Schöner) as Julie. 24. Both Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1987) and Thomas S. Hischak, Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical When It Went to Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004) cover some of the broader aesthetic issues, but fewer of the structural ones considered in the present essay. 25. Carter, Oklahoma!, 50–58. 26. Compare the case of Pamela Britton, who was Ado Annie in the ‘national’ company (then playing in Chicago) but left for Hollywood; Carter, Oklahoma!, 237. She played the unnamed ‘Girl from Brooklyn’ opposite Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh (1945) but did not have success in films and soon returned to the stage. 27. Both Hall and Smith were African American, although Rodgers and Hammerstein tended to cast Hall as somehow Asian, both in South Pacific and (as Madam Liang) in Flower Drum Song. 28. As it did Ali Hakim’s ‘It’s a Scandal, It’s a Outrage’; compare Carter, Oklahoma!, 246. 29. This was a trick adopted by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in some of their earlier Road to. . . films also from Paramount.

carousel on the silver screen   539 3 0. From an interview with Donen in 1977, given in Hubbert, Celluloid Symphonies, 278. 31. There were also often tax-based reasons to go abroad on location; see the discussion of so-called runaway productions in the 1950s in Hubbert, Celluloid Symphonies, 187. 32. Hubbert, Celluloid Symphonies, 280. 33. The parallels with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers also probably help explain the decision to move one act 1 ‘outdoor’ number in Oklahoma! to an interior set. ‘Many a New Day,’ for Laurey and her female companions, is done indoors, turning it (somewhat problematically) into a women-in-underwear number in the manner of ‘June Bride’ in the earlier film. 3 4. Rodgers, Musical Stages, 285. The remaining two films of R&H musicals, Flower Drum Song (1961) and Sound of Music (1965), were done after Hammerstein’s death. 35. So Hannah Lewis suggested in her paper ‘From Stage to Screen: The Film Musicals of Screenwriter Ernest Lehman’ presented at the conference Music and the Moving Image XII, New York University, 26–28 May 2017. 36. Henry Ephron discusses Carousel in his autobiography, We Thought We Could Do Anything: The Life of Screenwriters Phoebe and Heny Ephron (New York: Norton, 1977), 141–174. I have drawn on this for some of the information given below, although like most such casual memoirs, not everything Ephron says can be verified, and in some cases he clearly misremembered things. 37. For the demonstration reel, see Thomas M. Pryor, ‘New Film Process Is Shown by Fox,’ New York Times, 16 November 1955; Edwin Schallert, ‘CinemaScope 55 Hailed at Initial Showing Here,’ Los Angeles Times, 24 January 1956. ‘Big Spark-Up of 20th’s Carousel,’ Variety, 18 January 1956, notes an initial advertising budget of $1.2 million before the release— including buy-time on the CBS radio network—which was then predicted to reach $2 million with continued publicity. 3 8. www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/600658/Carousel-Original-Trailer-.html. 39. Howard Thompson, ‘Riding a Cinema Carousel Way Down East,’ New York Times, 11 September 1955; Fred Hift, ‘Native Actors See Double in Down East Carousel Shooting in Maine,’ Variety, 14 September 1955. Hift noted that the CinemaScope 55 cameras were noisy, creating severe difficulties for sound recording on location. There are various other newspaper reports on the shooting, such as Marjory Adams, ‘Movies’ New Singing Team Likes Making Pictures in Maine,’ Boston Daily Globe, 18 September 1955; ‘From Fish to Films in Maine: Carousel on Location There,’ New York Herald Tribune, 9 October 1955. Adams notes that Claramae Turner, who played Nettie Fowler, needed to ‘rush back’ to the West Coast to play Amneris in the San Francisco Opera’s production of Aida; in fact, she had already done so for the opening night on 15 September, though she had a substitute for the second performance on the 22nd (see archive.sfopera.com). The original stage Nettie Fowler was also played by an opera contralto, Christine Johnson; see Carter, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Carousel,’ 43. 40. For Brando, see Hedda Hopper, ‘Gordon MacRae: He Just Had to Play ‘Curly’!,’ Chicago Tribune, 31 July 1955. But this kind of gossip ran rife, often without foundation. Nor is it clear how much one can trust Henry Ephron’s claim (We Thought We Could Do Anything, 146) that agents for Doris Day and Judy Garland approached him for them to take the role of Julie Jordan, although Shirley Jones also says that she had heard rumours about Garland; see her Shirley Jones: A Memoir, with Wendy Leigh (New York: Gallery, 2013), 77. 41. ‘Sinatra Quits Film Site,’ New York Times, 25 August 1955 (CinemaScope and Todd-AO); ‘Sinatra Sued for Million for Balking over Film,’ Los Angeles Times, 30 August 1955; ‘Zanuck

540   musical theatre screen adaptations Praises New Fox 55mm Process Rushes,’ Independent Film Journal 36, no. 4 (3 September 1955): 6 (simultaneous filming but 35 mm now dropped). Among the various other rumours concerning Sinatra’s abrupt departure, there was widespread suspicion that he had manufactured an excuse so that he could take a more profitable engagement in Las Vegas instead. Shirley Jones, however, claimed that the pressure on him to leave Carousel had come from his then wife, Ava Gardner; see Shirley Jones: A Memoir, 84–85. Henry Ephron identified a number of problems with Sinatra (including the singer’s anxieties over the music) in We Thought We Could Do Anything, 149–150, 154–160. He also noted (158) that the idea of replacing him with Gene Kelly had been vetoed by Richard Rodgers given that his voice was not suited to ‘Soliloquy.’ 42. MacRae’s campaigning (and his performance in a stage production in Dallas, Texas) is reported in Celestine Sibley, ‘Hollywood Adds New Glitter to Carousel,’ Atlanta Constitution, 4 March 1956. He did a two-week run in Carousel in Dallas starting on 18 July 1955; see ‘The Drama Desk,’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9 June 1955. 43. De Mille retained some credit for ‘Louise’s Ballet’ in the film version of Carousel, but she was very bitter about otherwise being supplanted by Rod Alexander; see Kara Anne Gardner, Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 109–112. 44. Such splicing may have been one of the ‘special photographic effects’ attributed to Ray Kellogg in the opening credits for the film. 45. Thompson, ‘Riding a Cinema Carousel Way Down East.’ Ephron noted that in Sinatra’s absence ‘we took the “If I Loved You” location and used it for “Mr Snow,” the song between Julie and Carrie. There was a wind that kept blowing their hairdos around, but [Henry] King decided that that made it look real’; We Thought We Could Do Anything, 157–158. For ‘A Real Nice Clambake’ being shot in Hollywood, see ‘New England Clambake Staged for Carousel,’ New York Herald Tribune, 16 October 1955. 46. Ephron, We Thought We Could Do Anything, 164. However, Ephron says that ‘we were getting past the middle of August and it was cold,’ which does not square with the chronology. Howard Thompson noted in his 11 September report that ‘the shifting daylight and the weather’ had caused some juggling of the schedule early on. Metereological records for Augusta, Maine (the closest available for Boothbay Harbor, albeit inland) report that it  rained quite heavily (0.2 inches or more) on 19 and 23 August, and 12, 24, 28, and 30 September, but there were plenty of clear days in between; see the climate database at w2.weather.gov/climate/xmacis.php?wfo=gyx. In September, the daily temperatures tended to be in the 60s (Fahrenheit) or higher. However, such data do not provide evidence of other factors that might have influenced shooting, such as cloud cover. 47. Henry Ephron said that he also wanted to film the ballet on the actual beach but that it would have been too difficult and expensive to roll the sand smooth for each take; We Thought We Could Do Anything, 168. 48. Ephron, We Thought We Could Do Anything, 145. 49. For example, Hammerstein first planned for Carrie to have a rival suitor, Dwight, creating a triangle in the manner of Ado Annie, Will Parker, and Ali Hakim in Oklahoma!; see Carter, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Carousel,’ 40. 50. They are discussed in Carter, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Carousel,’ 84–86. 51. The English translation was credited to Benjamin F. Glazer, although in fact most of it was done (from the German) by Lorenz Hart; see Carter, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Carousel,’ 10.

carousel on the silver screen   541 52. Henry Ephron is noted as making this argument in ‘New England Clambake Staged for Carousel,’ New York Herald Tribune, 16 October 1955, where he also credits the idea for the flashback treatment to Darryl  F.  Zanuck. Bosley Crowther made a similar point about Billy’s death in his review of the film, ‘Screen: Carousel Is Worthy of Stage Original,’ New York Times, 17 February 1956. He also found some of the settings for the songs odd (including the ‘heavy surf pounding’ behind Billy Bigelow in ‘Soliloquy’), although in general his review was highly favourable. 53. This must have happened late: these two numbers are in fact noted as present in Fred Hift’s review of the film in Variety, 22 February 1956; Hift in turn must have been relying at least in part on a press release. 5 4. Carousel was nominated for awards by the Directors Guild and Writers Guild (but did not win); The King and I was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won five, including Best Actor (Yul Brynner). Around the World in Eighty Days won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture, although The King and I gained the Golden Globe Award as the Best Motion Picture: Comedy or Musical. The review of The King and I in Variety (4 July 1956) deemed it ‘Blockbuster of the year. One of the all-time greats among musicals. Sure to wow all classes and nations. Socko in all departments: story, performance, production, score.’ 55. Arlene Croce, ‘Film Musicals: A Crisis of Form,’ Film Culture 2, no. 2 (issue no. 8; 1956): 25–26, at p. 25.

CHAPTER 24

Ca rol Bu r n et t a n d the En ds of Va r iet y Parody, Nostalgia, and Analysis of the American Musical Robynn J. Stilwell

The television variety show was the last gasp of the vaudeville ticket. It was also a­ rguably the most distinctive genre of television for the first thirty to forty years of the medium. The first huge American television star was made in a variety show: Milton Berle, host of NBC’s Texaco Star Theatre (1948–55). The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–71) reigned for years as a place to be seen and heard for entertainers. Popular culture mostly remembers the singers (Elvis, the Beatles, maybe even Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, or Bobby Darin); but many variety shows also staged scenes from current Broadway shows, or at least hosted the singers to perform the show’s hits, scattered among comedy segments, ballet and jazz dance, classical performance, and the occasional novelty act. In 1957, initially on The Tonight Show and then in prime time on The Ed Sullivan Show, a young cabaret singer and comedienne named Carol Burnett made her first big splash by singing ‘I Made a Fool of Myself over John Foster Dulles.’ After starring on Broadway in the fairy-tale parody musical Once upon a Mattress (1959), for which she was ­nominated for a Tony Award, she became a regular on The Garry Moore Show, garnering an Emmy in her last year, 1962. It would be another five years before Burnett would get her own show, although by the time The Carol Burnett Show premiered, a generational shift in the television—and wider entertainment—industry was under way. When The Carol Burnett Show premiered in 1967, there were eleven other variety shows on American network television in primetime:1 The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–71) The Red Skelton Hour (1951–71) The Lawrence Welk Show (1955–82) The Andy Williams Show (1962–69)

544   musical theatre screen adaptations The Hollywood Palace (1964–70) The Dean Martin Show (1965–74) The Jackie Gleason Show (1966–70) The Pat Boone Show (1967–68) The Jerry Lewis Show (1967–69) The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967–70) Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1967–73) The Carol Burnett Show (1967–78)

By the time The Carol Burnett Show left the air in 1978, the only other variety show was the youth-oriented Donny & Marie Show, which would end in the next year. Some shows, like The Lawrence Welk Show (originally ABC) and Hee Haw (originally CBS) had moved into syndication, along with the still-running, Dolly-less Porter Wagoner Show and The Muppet Show (1976–79), modelled even more literally on the theatrical roots of vaudeville while also operating as a backstage musical. Saturday Night Live had debuted in 1975, and the cable television revolution was on the horizon, but times were changing even at the beginning of The Carol Burnett Show’s run. A look at the preceding list reveals that many of the variety shows ended in the next few years, most of them by 1971, particularly those fronted by performers from an earlier generation. In the 1966–67 season, the year before the Burnett show premiered, ABC had made a big push to relaunch a Milton Berle variety show, but the gamble failed; the medium’s first star did not reach new audiences. Both of the more youth-oriented shows that debuted in 1967, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (the format of which explicitly recalled vaudeville and burlesque) and especially The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour often ran afoul of censors in an era of changing mores and a generationally charged political atmosphere.2 The success of The Carol Burnett Show is certainly down to the musical, comedic, and acting talents of its star,3 and to the chemistry among her regular players: Harvey Korman, Lyle Waggoner, Vicki Lawrence, and Tim Conway. But the show also negotiated this generational shift through a combination of contemporary reference that was nonpolitical and a nostalgia that was warm but witty. The comedy style of the show relied heavily on parody of other media forms: the annual spoofs of the most memorable television commercials and the soap opera ‘As the Stomach Turns’ were recurring skits, and in later seasons, the family situation comedy was reworked into the surprisingly trenchant, sometimes genuinely melancholic ‘Family’ sketches. The show was also an opportunity for Burnett to do what she had always wanted to do—be in the classic ­movies she had adored growing up. Burnett and her younger sister, Chrissie, lived with their grandmother in Hollywood from a young age because of their parents’ alcoholism.4 Going to the movies was a way of escaping a life of some deprivation. As a child, Carol Burnett wanted to be Betty Grable. As an adult, Carol Burnett got to be Grable. And Joan Crawford, Vivien Leigh, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, and so many others (including a version of herself and her sister Chris, then played by Vicki Lawrence,5 in a recurring sketch about modern life taking unexpected turns). The parodies were sharp, particularly about music and performance, but never mean; there was affection as well

carol burnett and the ends of variety   545 as substantial knowingness: Joan Crawford reportedly loved ‘Mildred Fierce,’ though was a little more ambivalent about ‘Torchy Song.’ ‘Went with the Wind’ has widely been considered one of the greatest moments of American television, garnering one of the longest and most sustained studio-audience laughs in history when ‘Starlett’ appears at the top of the ‘Terra’ staircase wearing a dress made out of the curtains, with the stillattached curtain rod balanced across her shoulders. To the astonished exclamation of appreciation from ‘Brat Butler,’ she responds, ‘I saw it in the window, and I just couldn’t resist it.’ The parody itself has become a classic. The hour-long show’s format by the 1970s had become semistandardized. The ‘bump up the lights’ sequence, during which Burnett answered questions from the audience, opened the show, and a series of shorter comedy sketches and musical numbers featured in the first half. The second half was more likely to feature extended, two-act parodies of films. While most of the film parodies were of individual films like ‘The Little Foxies’ or ‘Rancid Harvest,’ some were tributes to various eras or studios, such as one of the best-remembered skits, a tribute to the 1930s Universal monster cycle (the gypsy fortune teller has two sons, a rock star and a werewolf, and on a full moon, she can’t tell them apart). Musicals were a good proportion of the full-length parodies, almost all written by Artie Malvin and/or the team of Ken and Mitzie Welch.6 Some were direct parodies of individual films (‘When My Baby Laughs at Me,’ ‘Beach Blanket Boo-Boo’). ‘Babes in Barns’ is primarily a parody of Babes in Arms, but incorporates elements from other Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland films, and ‘High Hat’ is a synthesis of the AstaireRogers RKO cycle. Other sketches compile the works of individual composers (Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, for instance) and ­ usicals around them, not unlike the musicals of MGM’s Freed Unit write original m in the early 1950s (An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, and The Band Wagon all follow the same format). These sketches engage with the concept of adaptation in at least two, intersecting ways: the materials (book, songs, design, choreographic style), and medium. We talk, rightly, about film and theatre as divergent media with their own specificity; television, for a variety of historical and disciplinary reasons, has much less definition as a specific medium—arguably, this is not surprising, because television is less a specific medium than a window through which we can see adaptations of other, older media, like film, theatre, and even radio.7 Television shares some traits with theatre (liveness, temporal immediacy, and usually a stage-bound set, either in a theatrical or soundstage setting); it also shares traits with cinema (the ability to record and edit, the framing eye of the camera and its ability for motion, the notional access to location changes). But television also has shortcomings that neither of the older media do: in the context of the United States, the commercial demand for advertising breaks, roughly every fifteen minutes; fewer technological and financial resources for sets, costumes, and writers, composers, and choreographers; and less time for rehearsal and potentially less time for the final product. Thus, a television adaptation is conceptually equidistant from both television

546   musical theatre screen adaptations and film, and arguably a smaller leap from one or the other than from theatre to film or vice versa. These limitations have historically tended to outweigh any advantages, such as the ability to reach millions at the same instant. A variety show will have even tighter constraints than a full, free-standing television production, particularly in terms of time. The sets are built on a proscenium stage and performed live before a studio audience, shot on videotape for later editing.8 Although most of The Carol Burnett Show extended parodies were of films, some of those films were themselves adaptations of theatrical productions, like ‘Hold Me, Hamlet.’ Others are based on vague generic parameters like ‘Italian cinema’—‘La Caperucita Roja’ is based on Mexican folk theatre. Another fairy-tale adaptation, ‘Cinderella Gets It On,’ bears the impressions not just of theatrical rock musicals but also of popular musical performance on contemporary television and the then-current Blaxploitation cycle of films. These various modes of presentation (film, Broadway, folk theatre, vaudeville, rock musicals, variety shows, rock music shows) are in constant flux, flow, and conversation throughout these parody adaptations. But each is surprisingly precise and consistent in its parodic palette, including musical style, acting and musical performance, set and costume design, narrative structure, and even camera work.

On Parody as Adaptation On the one hand, it seems obvious—in order to function as a parody, a text must contain a structural and/or stylistic replication of the work being parodied. It is thus a sort of adaptation. But it is worth taking a moment before diving into the analyses of the three Carol Burnett ‘musicals’ to more precisely define the terms ‘adaptation’ and ‘parody’ and what forms they may take. Not surprisingly, one of the most critical theorists of parody, Linda Hutcheon, has also become a theorist of adaptation. Following a line of argument that we also find in Robert Stam’s influential ‘Beyond Fidelity’ essay,9 Hutcheon considers adaptation (whether parodic or not) a process of engagement with an original text, not merely a transcription or even a translation. As Paul Edwards summarizes in his review of Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation, The distinctiveness of the new artistic product is its invocation, rather than suppression or erasure, of its source: ‘To deal with adaptations as adaptations is to think of them as . . . inherently “palimpsestuous” works, haunted at all times by their adapted texts.’ . . . An interpretive and critical activity must precede the creative activity of adaptation. For this reason, Hutcheon invites us to view adaptation as a process as well as a product or formal entity; the process entails questions of an adapter’s motive and intention.10

This conceptualization recognizes a significant overlap in adaptation and parody. It also permits, if not requires, a view of parody as a form of analysis.

carol burnett and the ends of variety   547 Hutcheon’s early work on parody had emerged in the mid-1980s, a few years after the end of The Carol Burnett Show, and although she is dealing primarily with what might be termed ‘high art’ in an earlier era, what she has to say about parody resonates quite strongly with the ethos of The Carol Burnett Show. In response to other postmodernist theorists like Frederic Jameson, Hutcheon takes exception to the concept of ‘blank ­parody,’ insisting on both an engagement with history and a range of affective response: What I mean by ‘parody’ here is not the ridiculing imitation of the standard theories and definitions that are rooted in eighteenth-century theories of wit. The collective weight of parodic practice suggests a redefinition of parody as repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity. In historiographic metafiction, in film, in painting, in music, and in architecture, this parody paradoxically enacts both change and cultural continuity: the Greek prefix para can mean both ‘counter’ or ‘against’ AND ‘near’ or ‘beside.’ Jameson argues that in postmodernism ‘parody finds itself without a vocation,’ replaced by pastiche, which he (bound by a definition of parody as ridiculing imitation) sees as more neutral or blank parody. But the looking to both the aesthetic and historical past in postmodernist architecture is anything but what Jameson describes as pastiche, that is, ‘the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion.’ There is absolutely nothing random or ‘without principle’ in the parodic recall and re-examination of the past by architects like Charles Moore or Ricardo Bofill. To include irony and play is never necessarily to exclude seriousness and purpose in postmodernist art. To misunderstand this is to misunderstand the nature of much contemporary aesthetic production—even if it does make for neater theorizing.11 [Emphasis mine]

Hutcheon thus ‘de-flattens’ both history and specificity, a flattening one often finds in postmodern theory, as in Jameson’s ‘blank’-ing. The past as referent is not bracketed or effaced, as Jameson would like to believe: it is incorporated and modified, given new and different life and meaning.12

The concern with history will almost necessarily bring up the idea of nostalgia, a ­concept Hutcheon herself had resisted in a couple of decades of theorizing: I confess to suffering from an utter lack of nostalgia. But clearly there was also an intellectual issue at stake, since many had repeatedly insisted on the power of postmodern nostalgia.13 . . . In other words, despite very strong reservations (based in part on personality limitations), I do know that I should never underestimate the power of nostalgia, especially its visceral physicality and emotional impact. But that power comes in part from its structural doubling-up of two different times, an inadequate present and an idealized past. But this is where I must return to that other obsession of mine—irony—for irony too is doubled: two meanings, the ‘said’ and the ‘unsaid,’ rub together to create irony—and it too packs considerable punch. People do not usually get upset about metaphor or synecdoche, but they certainly do get worked up about irony.14

548   musical theatre screen adaptations So Hutcheon proposes that nostalgia and irony have much in common, structurally, including that they are incomplete, or perhaps better, inert, without an audience: Irony is not something in an object that you either ‘get’ or fail to ‘get’: irony ‘happens’ for you (or, better, you make it ‘happen’) when two meanings, one said and the other unsaid, come together, usually with a certain critical edge. Likewise, nostalgia is not something you ‘perceive’ in an object; it is what you ‘feel’ when two different ­temporal moments, past and present, come together for you and, often, carry considerable emotional weight. In both cases, it is the element of response—of active participation, both intellectual and affective—that makes for the power.15

What is powerful in this configuration is not just that it recognizes the work of the audience, no longer the passive receptor of an authorial product. The audience activates connections that an author (individual or corporate/collaborative, in the case of any form of film or television) lays into a work, and a good amount of the response one has to the work is the product of one’s own intellectual and emotional participation. This recognition of the emotional aspect is important in Hutcheon’s work; most postmodern theorists have proposed a kind of ‘postmodern cool,’ inherent in the detachment of Jameson’s ‘blank parody.’ And yet the affect of the play can be anything from sentimental nostalgia to exhilaration; the emotional joy—a kind of mental runner’s high—that comes from intellectual processes is often disregarded, to the point that there is no specific name for it, although I think most of us recognize it. This interplay between nostalgia, parody, and analysis is a key element of the musical sketches produced by The Carol Burnett Show. Yes, they are funny; but they are often funny because of the way in which they know how the models work, what the key points of pressure are in the structure and tone that the writers and performers can prod for humour, or a humorous but still highly aware nostalgia. They replicate the models so well that they can stand alone, working even if one is unfamiliar with the model or if the parodies are largely original works based on old forms. And yet, they are also very specific about those models. They are knowing in a way that invokes nostalgia but rarely, if ever, trade in mere sentimentality, unless they engage sentimentality itself for humour in the framing of the parodies for the television show.

‘Hold Me Hamlet’ Of the three parodies addressed here, ‘Hold Me, Hamlet’16 has the most obvious and particular precedent: the Cole Porter musical Kiss Me, Kate, first a Broadway production in 1948 and subsequently made into a (3D) film in 1953. Kiss Me, Kate is itself an adaptation of the Shakespearean comedy The Taming of the Shrew. The Burnett Show parody functions on a number of levels: it is a parody of Shakespeare, but turning one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedies into a musical comedy is a more significant ­transformation than from what is, despite its archaic sexism, a romantic comedy.

carol burnett and the ends of variety   549 The parody carries through in the alliterative title, but the sketch eschews the double onstage/backstage narrative; given the time frame of television production, that would be perhaps the easiest feature of Kiss Me, Kate to jettison. However, the sketch is introduced as if it is an episode of Masterpiece Theater (PBS 1971–), a strategy that at least gestures towards the doubling while also emphasizing the ‘classical’ and ‘high art’ connotations of Shakespeare for modern audiences. It also heightens the comedy by lifting up the sketch in preparation for lowering the tone. The reliance on knowledge of Hamlet, and even its performing traditions, is ­unusually strong in this sketch: ‘Alistair Cookie’ (Harvey Korman spoofs the Masterpiece Theatre video example 24.1) gives the briefest of synopses about host Alistair Cooke17; see Hamlet’s father’s death and Hamlet’s suspicion of Claudius, who has married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, but the narrative of the sketch is telescoped to a significant degree, with most of the run-time taken up in song; some dialogue sequences last barely more than an exchange. The music is wholly original, although with a clear nod toward Cole Porter, and a sideways glance at Noël Coward, stylistically. The performers referenced include at minimum Coward, Al Jolson, Rex Harrison, Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, and Gene Kelly. Unlike some of the musical sketches, which essentially follow the flow of the storyline for structure, ‘Hold Me, Hamlet’ is structured very much like a ‘real’ musical would be, with a clearly defined first act, then a second act that is truncated by a simple plot resolution, itself a parody of both the convolutions of a Shakespearean drama and the clearing up of misunderstandings/coincidences common in musical comedy. Just as Kiss Me, Kate was Porter’s transition from number-oriented musical comedies to more integrated book musicals, the sketch hovers between the two models. The first act plays out the overlapping Freudian triangles between Hamlet, Sr/Gertrude/Hamlet and Gertrude/Hamlet/Ophelia, and the second act resolves the last little bit of adolescent psychological business with Hamlet before a big ensemble finale (see Table 24.1).

Table 24.1  Number Breakdown of ‘Hold Me, Hamlet’ Chorus Ghost Gertrude Hamlet Ophelia Ghost & Chorus

Claudius Hamlet & Ophelia Ensemble

ACT 1 ‘Something Stinks in the State of Denmark, Something Smells in Elsinore’ ‘I Never Had it So Good’ ‘Don’t You Love Your Mama Anymore’ ‘G-E-R-T-R-U-D-E’ ‘Oh, That This Too, Too Solid Flesh Would Melt’ ‘I Never Had It So Good’ ACT 2 ‘Nobody Does It Like a Dane’ ‘I Never Had It So Good’ ‘All Is Well in the State of Denmark, Nothing’s Rotten Anymore’

Burlesque Burlesque Red-hot mama Sentimental ballad Torch song Burlesque Chorus finale Patter song Duet Ensemble chorus finale

550   musical theatre screen adaptations The prologue introduces guest star Carl Reiner as the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father. With his pale makeup and his armour accessorized by floating bits of white chiffon to signify his ghostliness, he recalls Lionel Jeffries’s dithering King Pellinore in the 1967 film of Camelot. He promptly is joined onstage by ‘the changing of the guard,’ a chorus of female ­dancers in skimpy ‘armour’ costumes with exaggerated feather-boa horsetail helmets video example 24.2). They perform a military drill, ornamented by burlesque (see hip-grinds and a pole-slide along their lance shafts while they sing ‘Something Stinks in the State of Denmark . . . Something Smells in Elsinore.’ The march-like style recalls Porter’s ‘Another Opening, Another Show’ from Kiss Me, Kate, particularly the opening rhythm on ‘Something stinks’—a slight enough resemblance not to be a copy of ‘’nother op’nin’, ’ but to trigger the original in the audience’s knowing ear (see video example 24.3). The Ghost punctuates the end of the short chorus with a rim-shot like ‘Boo!’ and the guards gather around him as he sits on a chair. Two of them sit on his lap as he sings, ‘I Never Had It So Good,’ a jaunty tune (‘Since Gert did me in, I’ve been living in sin . . .) (see video example 24.4). His (bad) Cockney accent recalls Alfred Doolittle singing ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’ from My Fair Lady (1964). The guards provide vocal ‘wah-wah-wah’ responses to his lines, and join him in a chorus line finale from ‘We’ll hey nonny-nonny ’till I’m weak in the knees’ to the end of the chorus when they cluster around him once more. As they leave, the chorus does unison dips and bumps, chanting, ‘Meet you at the rampart in half an hour!’ With his teasing pinches and tickles, and the squeals and titters from the chorus, the whole number is redolent of burlesque. Both chorus and Ghost exit (see video example 24.5). Heralds with long trumpets announce King Claudius (Harvey Korman) and Queen Gertrude (Vicki Lawrence). Claudius dismisses the heralds with a wave of the hand, ‘Trumpets, blow!’ but as Claudius and Gertrude move to embrace and kiss, plangent modernist strings interrupt, cueing them to look across the stage to see that Hamlet (played by guest star Ken Berry) has taken up a ‘thinker’s pose’ in the chair deserted by the Ghost. He is the typical mid-twentieth-century Hamlet, a handsome youth in plain black tights and doublet. The extended tonality of the strings and their starkness recall any number of modern stagings of Shakespeare, although perhaps particularly the National Theatre productions that were sometimes themselves shown on PBS. Whereas the staging has until this point been profoundly theatrical—characters ­facing front (even when standing in profile), with the only camera work moving slightly from side to side to keep the chorus’s movements in shot or to cut in for ‘takes’ from the Ghost—the dismissal of the heralds and reduction of forces to Claudius, Gertrude, and Hamlet introduce a slight change to the camera work. It becomes more fluid; not cinematic by any means, but cutting between the couple and Hamlet on a diagonal, and relying on closer framing that eliminates the full-body shots of the opening. Although not quite shot-reverse shot alternation, it does have the effect of bringing the camera/audience onstage (see video example 24.6). When they notice Hamlet—apparently cued by the strings, a tactic that pierces any cinematic semblance of a nondiegetic state—Gertrude and Claudius quickly agree that

carol burnett and the ends of variety   551 Claudius should leave, and Gertrude shoos him offstage, closing the curtained doorway behind him as the camera cuts to Hamlet. He ruminates, ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question,’ as Gertrude crosses to him, putting her hands on his shoulder and arm with concern, commenting, ‘My son, the brooder!’ And beneath her exclamation, ‘Oh, Hamlet,’ the strings change into the introduction for her song, ‘Don’t You Love Your Mama Anymore’ (see video example 24.7). This song plays up the popularity of twentieth-century stagings of Hamlet with deep Freudian interpretations of the relationship between Gertrude and Hamlet. Vicki Lawrence, then twenty-five-years-old, was beginning to find her voice as a comedian, and somewhat ironically, she went from playing Burnett’s kid sister to specializing in older women; she often did it without makeup, as her most famous role as ‘Mama’ in the tragicomic southern ‘Family’ episodes, with just a wig, some padding, and a particular way of holding her face. As Gertrude, she sings, ‘Don’t You Love Your Mama Anymore’ in the musical style of a red-hot mama à la Sophie Tucker, amplified by blaring horns and a simple, but highly syncopated melodic/speech line. Her vocal style, however, is a parody of opera/operetta dame, with a constantly breaking voice reminiscent of (an  exaggerated version of) musical comedienne Anna Russell. Ironically, of course, this is much harder to sing than even a straightforward wavering vibrato, but it adds to the sense of Gertrude’s ‘age,’ as does her physical style, which parodies Queen Elizabeth II in her distinctive ways of moving her hands. The camera primarily maintains a Madonna-like framing of the mother and son (see Figure 24.1a), but at the end, where Gertrude extends the chorus, ‘Don’t you love your mama, why don’t you love your mama . . .’ while doing simple sidesteps with jazz hands, the camera moves out to catch her ‘big finish’ (see video example 24.8). After a beat for applause, Hamlet rises to take her hands and guide her into the chair as the camera returns to frame them from the other direction. He sits in her lap, reversing their previous pose (see Figure 24.1b), singing ‘G-E-R-T-R-U-D-E’ as a parody of the sentimental song ‘M-O-T-H-E-R (A word that means the world to me).’ The 1915 song

Figure 24.1  (a) Gertrude and Hamlet in Madonna and Child pose at the end of Gertrude ­singing  ‘Don’t You Love Your Mama Anymore’; (b) reversal of position as Hamlet sings ‘G-E-R-T-R-U-D-E’ and draws attention to her décolletage

552   musical theatre screen adaptations by Howard Johnson and Theodore F. Morse had been popularized by vaudeville star Eva Tanguay and recorded in 1950 by country star Eddy Arnold, whose smooth Nashville sound aided significant popular crossover over the next two decades. Hamlet performs the song starting in Gertrude’s lap, touching her nose and chin as if in a toddler’s bodypart-learning game as he spells her name; as he moves down to her chin, towards her cleavage on ‘U’, she slaps his hand away playfully, but her smile is affectionate and familiar, underlining the sexualized reading of their relationship (see video example 24.9). As did Gertrude, Hamlet gets up for a few dance moves during the bridge of his song, briefly going down on one knee to lay his head in her lap (see video example 24.10), then helping lever her up out of the chair with pretended labour for a short tap duet, aided by the pages who come in to handle her train and sweep her upstairs/downstage to watch his little solo that highlights a Jolsonesque ‘Mammy’ gesture on one knee, towards the camera but away from the theatrically front-facing chorus; Gertrude mediates between the two (see Figure 24.2a). Although evoking Jolson and perhaps Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as Gertrude rejoins Hamlet for a brief dance duet, Berry’s slim but muscular build, his balletic dance style, and the white collar and cuffs on his stereotypically

Figure 24.2  The different media modes of presentation in ‘Hold Me, Hamlet.’ (a) A diagonal cinematic angle on Hamlet, while the chorus faces the theatrical front; Gertrude cheats between the two; (b) Ophelia sings as if on a television variety show; (c) the wider shot mimics the set up of a jazz band and torch singer in a nightclub; (d) the entire cast in a square, frontal theatrical mode.

carol burnett and the ends of variety   553 all-black Hamlet costume recall Gene Kelly in the final ballet from An American in Paris (1951). During this dance sequence, the intimate setting has been increasingly ­‘re-theatricalized,’ with a front-facing staging. Hamlet even stage-whispers his interjection ‘Little Hamlet,’ behind a shielding hand, towards the audience at an angle that breaks the fourth wall with the studio audience, but not the camera (see video example 24.11). That Gertrude and Hamlet exchange solos at the opening of the act would normally suggest a romantic pairing, and Gertrude is situated between Hamlets Senior and Junior in a symbolic love triangle. The triangles then rotate around Hamlet to introduce Ophelia. Hamlet melodramatically mopes back to the side of the stage, where he sits at the harpsichord against the splayed wall. As he plays a melancholy introduction, the ‘harpsichord’ sounds remarkably like a reedy regal organ, and the sound appears to summon Ophelia (Burnett) who sneaks in and covers his eyes, asking, ‘Guess who?’ ‘Mummy!’ he cries eagerly, and she shrinks back with a hurt, ‘No!’ With a disappointed, ‘Oh, it’s you, Ophelia,’ Hamlet turns back to the keyboard (see video example 24.12). Undeterred, Ophelia continues to try to embrace him from behind and launches into the tumbling phrase, ‘Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt into my arms,’ with an unexpected, large leap down on ‘arms’ that plays with Burnett’s chesty tenor range. She thus co-opts Hamlet’s soliloquy, in which he laments his mother’s marriage to Claudius (‘Frailty, thy name is woman’), into a lament for Hamlet’s self-absorption (see video example 24.13). Ophelia leaves Hamlet’s side as he continues to accompany her, and walks to the curve of the harpsichord. From outside the frame, she is handed a corded microphone and with a snap of her fingers, she changes the lighting to a pale pink spotlight. This completes the classic image of a nightclub torch singer, and as she sings, ‘I’m in love with the boy in black, but the boy in black is blue,’ the ‘harpsichord’ no longer sounds like a regal, but a piano. The camera focuses in on Ophelia, framing her as if she were on a television variety show (see Figure 24.2b). The music falls into a bluesy strut, and a cutaway shows Ophelia, Hamlet, and the heralds who have arrived, from the other direction, with the pages using their hands to provide the ‘wawa’ effect on the extra-long trumpets (see Figure 24.2c). But the ‘tv show’ shot is the predominant mode of framing the number. The bridge of the song resembles the verse of Porter’s ‘Night and Day,’ with the monotone, syncopated melody over shifting chords; the ‘beat beat beat of the tom-tom’ replaced by the ‘pit pitty pit pitty pitty pat’ of Ophelia’s heart (see video example 24.14). As the intensity builds, the song and the performance slide from generic torch song to a parody of ‘The Man Who Got Away’ from A Star Is Born (1954), with Burnett taking on more and more aspects of Judy Garland’s mannered performance,18 from the hand gestures to the emotional shaking of her body, to the vocal vibrato and portamento, particularly the deep drop of range before rising in a belt for the finish. Ophelia slides up seductively to sit onto the piano, but it breaks under her weight at the peak of the phrase. Ophelia merely leans back and relaxes, while Hamlet stands to ‘direct’ the end flourish of the horns like a big band (see video example 24.15). As Hamlet turns back to the keyboard, Ophelia stretches out to plead, one more time, ‘Hold me, Hamlet,’ and he merely replies, ‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ and shoves the harpsichord offstage/offscreen.

554   musical theatre screen adaptations The Ghost returns to the stage, with the giggling gaggle of guards, and Hamlet is ecstatic to see his father. He asks if he should avenge his death, and the Ghost brushes it off with a bluff, ‘Oh, bug off, my boy, I’ve never had it so good,’ the slightest hint of a reprise before he chases off after his ‘bevy of birdies’ and Hamlet sinks melodramatically into the chair.19 ‘Oh, woe is me, I have no one to avenge. My father is happy.’ ‘Then,’ says Claudius, with studied eloquence, as he slips through the curtained door. ‘Let him rest in peace.’ ‘Stepdaddy’ Claudius suggests that Hamlet should fill his time by giving Ophelia a ‘tumble in the hey-nonny-nonny.’ Hamlet admits that he doesn’t know how, which cues Claudius’s surprise (and a string of takes from Korman) and his patter song, ‘There’s No One Who Can Do It Like a Dane,’ which carries numerous echoes of other songs like Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It,’ Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame,’ Noël Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen,’ and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s ‘The Rain in Spain’ and ‘A Hymn to Him’ from My Fair Lady, these latter influences heightened by Korman’s performance of Claudius as Rex Harrison20 (see video example 24.16). Encouraged, Hamlet joins in for the end of the song, then Hamlet turns to a reentering Ophelia with, ‘The boy in black isn’t blue, he’s ready for you!’ and on the ‘wawa’ interjections waggles his hips suggestively, prompting Ophelia to respond, ‘I never had it so good!’ (see video example 24.17). They recast the opening Ghost + Chorus number into a duet, redistributing some of the lines between them to subtly reshape the lecherous original into a still-sexual but less predatory version. They are framed in a medium close-up two-shot for most of the number, but the camera moves out to frame the entire stage for the finale. As Claudius and Gertrude reenter, Gertrude comments, ‘Well, I always say, “All’s well that ends,” ’ which launches the ensemble into ‘All Is Well in the State of Denmark, Nothing’s Rotten Anymore,’ a reworking of the opening chorus that features now three couples (Claudius and Gertrude, Hamlet and Ophelia, the Ghost and the Captain of the Guards). The theatrical blocking of the number is heightened by Ophelia rhyming ‘mellow’ in the lyrics with ‘Don’t forget, next week, Othello,’ the closest the sketch comes to recognizing internally the onstage/back-stage doubling of the original model Kiss Me, Kate (see Figure 24.2d and video example 24.18). It also provides a big ensemble for the finale of the Burnett show (as do many of the musicals) (see video example 24.19). After a commercial break, the short curtain-call ending of the television show always features Burnett singing her signature song, ‘I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together’ and the cast, still in costume, signing Burnett’s autograph book, as the credits roll.

La Caperucita Roja Fairy tales were a staple of The Carol Burnett Show parodies, like ‘Snow White: 15 Years Later.’ Fairy tales are also a common basis for musicals and for folk theatre, and the three converge in ‘La Caperucita Roja,’21 an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood as if staged

carol burnett and the ends of variety   555 by a Mexican folk theatre troupe. In southern California of the 1970s, this folk art would have been somewhat familiar from at least two contexts. The year of the sketch, 1974, marked the closure of an institution: the folk art festival and cultural centre at Padua Hills, about thirty minutes from Los Angeles, had hosted a dinner theatre based in Mexican folk traditions since the 1930s, performing for audiences largely composed of the Angeleno creative and middle classes.22 And El Teatro Campesino, a folk theatre troupe founded in 1969 and born from the agricultural workers’ rights movement led by César Chavez, was swiftly rising in artistic circles as well as popular awareness.23 While this referent may be distinctly local to southern California, it is overlaid with cinematic and vaudevillean stereotypes24 and Burnett’s parody of the then-popular variety star Charo (who is Spanish American, not Mexican, although that elision is an exasperatingly common ethnic blurring). Charo’s enthusiastic sexuality, tempered by an appealing naïveté (whether genuine or carefully constructed), highlights the subtext of sexual awakening in the story which is likewise bolstered by the burlesque touches to the adaptation. ‘La Caperucita Roja’ is arguably the most theatrical adaptation of any sort done by The Carol Burnett Show. The sketch is introduced by Burnett as if the company were a real theatrical troupe: ‘In their first appearance on American television, the world-famous Mexican theatrical troupe, Los Muchachitos and Las Muchachitas de Mexico, with their very spectacular musical version of Little Red Riding Hood, or as they say it, “La Caperucita Roja.” ’ The sketch then opens with an unusual full-stage image, including column-like pillars at the sides of the stage; a red curtain opens to an inner curtain announcing the troupe (see Figure  24.3a), and then those curtains open to reveal ­dancers accompanying a covered wagon rolling onstage, emphasizing the idea of the show as being put on by a travelling theatrical company, so there is the evocation of a stage-within-a-stage inside the show-within-the-show. We get a rare look at the whole stage at several points during the sketch, including the proscenium arch, the curtains, and the apron to the side in front of the wings. At the end of the sketch, we even see the house; as with ‘Hold Me, Hamlet,’ the sketch demonstrates a pull-back to the theatrical after a more intimate cinematic/televisual centre of the playlet, but in this case it goes not just to the whole proscenium arch (as at the beginning), but reaches even into the audience, as cookies are tossed into their midst25 (see Figure 24.3d). Within the play, Vicki Lawrence—dressed as a flamenco dancer and lisping as if with a Castilian Spanish accent— is the narrator and translator of the internal theatrical play. The Translator is always present on stage in the first act, speaking to the audience, or occasionally on the apron in front of the wings, where she can directly address the audience at home via the camera. One of the traits of the dinner theatre at Padua Hills had been an internal translator for the plays,26 and the convention is well played for laughs in the sketch. The Translator begins by introducing the various characters and the actors who will play them as they emerge from the caravan: the brave matador, Don Gorgioso is played by ‘the handomest actor in all of Mexico, Lylito Corredo’; the part of the grandmother is played by her own papa, Harvelito Kormano, who comes out in male garb; and the bull is played by ‘animal impersonator Carlo Reinero,’ who comes on in an outfit similar to Korman’s, with a colourful serape over his shoulder and a large ring he places

556   musical theatre screen adaptations

Figure 24.3  The ostentatious theatricality of ‘La Caperucita Roja.’ (a) The camera frames the entire proscenium, including the side aprons, and a curtain behind the red curtains carries the logo of the ‘traveling theatrical troupe’ mounting the production; (b) Dancers set up tree flats, and a drop with ‘leaves’ descends to set the scene in the forest; (c) the Translator mimics Caperucita’s gestures as she translates; (d) at the end of the internal play and the sketch, the ­camera returns to show the entire stage and Carol/Charo/Caperucita tossing tortitas to The Carol Burnett Show audience.

ostentatiously in his nose as he paws the ground. The nose ring will be an object of much humorous ‘business’ in the play, as the bull replaces the wolf in this telling of the tale. While all of the actors are introduced with humorously (and badly) Hispanicized versions of their real names, ‘La Caperucita Roja’ is played by ‘Charo,’ thus Burnett is using an intervening impersonation for her role. As costume designer Bob Mackie noted, Burnett never thought of herself as attractive or sexy, but playing a character like Charo allowed her to play it for laughs. Mackie’s costume for ‘Charo’ as La Caperucita Roja includes very low-rise polka-dotted white trousers with flamenco flounces and a white lace push-up bra with a low décolletage under a hip-length red silk cape, a remarkably revealing outfit for 1970s television. Its daring may be a function similar to Burnett’s deflection of sexuality via Charo: if the costume is an exaggeration of a Charo costume, it becomes more parody than ‘sexy.’ The Translator kicks off proceedings with, ‘Our story starts with a fiesta—what else? At the Fiesta, the girls come to see Don Gorgioso fight the bull. But the boys come for a

carol burnett and the ends of variety   557 glimpse of La Caperucita Roja, Little Red Riding Hood, because the boys can’t wait to taste Caperucita’s tortitas.’ The opening musical number ‘La Caperucita’s Tortitas’ is in the style of a son jarocho, and as the Translator informs us from the stage apron, ‘Tortitas are small cookies, and Caperucita’s tortitas are the sweetest tortitas in town.’ The alliteration and allusion creates a not-very-subtle—but also not terribly crass—correlation between Caperucita’s tortitas and her breasts. The Translator’s ostentatiously theatrical presence generates a great deal of the comedy in the sketch. She sutures elisions in the story, but in doing so, draws attention to them: after the opening scene, she declares, ‘And so a change of scenery is necessary to continue our story.’ The caravan is wheeled off to stage left as dancers enter from stage right, carrying flat ‘tree’ set pieces, and a partial painted backdrop scrolls down from above to fill in the ‘leaves’ (see Figure 24.3b). The Translator walks over and stands next to a ‘tree,’ echoing her opening line, ‘This is a forest. What else?’ However, the primary source of comedy is in her function as Translator, even though the simple Spanish is generally correct and comprehensible to an American—especially Californian—audience. Her participation is recognized by the characters in the play, and at times regarded as an intrusion or an upstaging. At the end of the first song, Don Gorgioso the bullfighter comes in to solicit a ­tortita from Caperucita’s basket, and she refuses, as she has throughout the number. She says to the bullfighter, ‘Nonononononono, canto . . . porque,’ and clears her throat, but as she opens her mouth to sing, the Translator mimics her rhythm precisely with, ‘Nonononononono, I sing to you . . . why,’ and clears her throat. Burnett as ‘Charo,’ the actress playing Caperucita, gives her a long look at the intrusion onto her performance, and a medium close-up two-shot isolates the interaction between the two women from the bullfighter, highlighting the interruption, then the frame returns to the three for the number. In her song about her Abuelita, Caperucita begins singing to Don Gorgioso in a very low register, which is also mimicked by the Translator when she speaks the translation, and when Caperucita mimes ‘casita’ by drawing a simple house with her finger in the air, the Translator does the same on ‘little house’ (see Figure 24.3c). On the second stanza, the Translator translates, ‘mi Abuelita’ as ‘same grandmother’ while kneeling as Caperucita has, and ‘Necessita mi tortita,’ becomes an overly clinical ‘She requires a cookie.’ The next line is broken into two short phraselets, beginning with Caperucita inexplicably singing, ‘Or else’—of course, this is not really inexplicable; it is a concept probably too difficult to convey in schoolbook Spanish, but creates another moment of tension as the Translator merely repeats the English phrase and the two exchange a slightly challenging look, with the Translator raising an eyebrow and cocking her head in a ‘so what?’ gesture. By this time, the two kneeling women are entirely the focus of the number, with Don Gorgioso only represented by the hand to which Caperucita clings, singing emotively, ‘Se muere’ [‘she will pass away’], ‘se muere’ [‘she will pass away,’ repeats the Translator, bored, with a slight, rolling, ‘get on with it’ gesture of her hand], and on the last repetition of ‘Se muere,’ Caperucita puts her hand over the Translator’s mouth and sings directly out to the audience.

558   musical theatre screen adaptations A similar by-play features in the introduction of the bull in the forest, who arrives with a flamenco flourish of his arms. The Translator translates his extended cante hondo melisma as ‘That is a bull.’ He performs another melisma, which she translates as, ‘That is a hungry bull,’ and he burps in the middle of the next melisma, but recovers gracefully, so she walks over to put a familiar hand on his arm and chest, praising him, ‘Very nice!’ The actor/Bull shrugs slightly, ‘’S all right, I’ve done better,’ in a low voice, not quite a stage whisper. The interjection ‘Very nice’ (or ‘bery nice’ in imitation of a Castilian accent) as a compliment from actor to actor, rather than character to character, recurs between Caperucita and the Bull when they execute an extended diminuendo fermata together in their duet, before their cadential last words; and in a later duet, blending his ‘Mi estomaco’ and her ‘Mi abuelita’ songs, they turn toward each other on a similar held note. Her nose goes into his mouth, and she says, ‘Very nice,’ in a nasal voice in the rest before the cadence. The other main source of comedy, which at times overlaps with the calling out of theatricality, are comedy tropes from vaudeville and burlesque. One could argue that the mixing of Spanish and Mexican, and various regional Mexican styles, is a comic stereotype, although the issue of ethnicity is particularly fraught among Californios,27 and other common gross stereotypes, such as laziness or jokes about food, are evaded. However, two familiar, more problematic tropes about gender and sexuality are engaged, in the characters of Don Gorgioso and Abuelita. Don Gorgioso, played by the Rock-Hudson-like Lyle Waggoner, is portrayed as the desirable macho bullfighter (his bright pink and purple outfit is not appreciably more garish than any of Bob Mackie’s other 1970s styles). We do not hear his voice until the near the end of the first act, and as a matter of timing to highlight the ‘joke,’ the Translator actually preempts his line: ‘The brave Don Gorgioso asks “Where is the bull?” ’ and Don Gorgioso stamps his foot petulantly, asking, ‘Donde esta el toro!’ in a stereotypically sissy accent. He also delivers the words with a distinctly American English accent, which is recalled in the later scene when Caperucita flees the bull. The other vaudeville stereotype is less pernicious and a favourite character among The Carol Burnett Show portrayals. ‘Abuelita’ is played by Harvelito Kormano, but she is also Harvey Korman in his pneumatic ‘Mother Marcus’ drag, with an exaggerated comb and mantilla. A Yiddish pantomime dame with an enormous bosom and other rounded attributes, tightly wrapped in an upholstery-like floral dress, Mother Marcus was first introduced as a character in the show’s spoof soap opera, ‘As the Stomach Turns,’ but she became a recurring character for Korman, often (as in both ‘La Caperucita Roja’ and ‘Cinderella Gets It On’) as a double portrayal: as Korman playing Mother Marcus playing another character. As Abuelita, Mother Marcus’s usual floral housedress is embellished by flamenco ruffles in another floral print altogether, making the double portrayal a visual joke as well. ‘Harvelito’ has a Castilian lisp, like his ‘daughter,’ and when he raises his arms, we can also see that what appear to be black tights are just black dress socks, exposing pale skin between sock and skirt ruffle. Playing into the vaudevillean stereotype of the randy older woman, Abuelita has a suggestive flamenco-style solo, ‘My Castanets,’ which draws attention to the lightness of

carol burnett and the ends of variety   559 Korman’s movements in his voluminous padding, but also suggests burlesque when he brings the castanets close to his expansive ‘breasts’ to click them in accentuating the ends of phrases while shimmying his shoulders. Her song is about loneliness and boredom, so she plays her ‘castanets,’ further hinting at a euphemism for masturbation. When the bull has draped Abuelita’s mantilla over his horns and taken her place in the bed, he sings to Caperucita, with the lisp, ‘I am thick/I have a dithease/I think. . . . I think I am contagiouth/I don’t even have the strength to play my cathtanets,’ and he makes the castanet gestures near his ‘bosom’ the way Abuelita did. The burlesque sexuality is played out in the dialogue between Caperucita and the Bull, although her innocence is defused and the tables are turned as she discovers his tail as she goes to sit on his bed. With only a slight roll of her eyes, Caperucita begins a seductive, ‘Abuelita what big eyes you have,’ punctuating the end of the phrase by touching his tufted tail to his nose teasingly. ‘The better to taste and see your tortitas!’ The dialogue blunder by Reiner (taste is not appropriate to ‘eyes,’ although it cuts to the sexual innuendo even more directly) is taken into stride with only a slight grin in reaction by Burnett as Reiner mugs in mock horror to the audience at his mistake. Eventually, Caperucita undrapes the mantilla from one of the Bull’s horns and sings, ‘Abuelita, how HORNY you are,’ and the Bull replies, ‘You got it!’ Caperucita snatches her basket from his grip and flees through the door. The bedroom set rolls offstage left as Caperucita ‘wanders’ in the ‘forest’ and is discovered by the townsfolk/dancers, along with Don Gorgioso. She encounters Don Gorgioso in the ‘forest’ and cries, ‘El toro es en la casa de mi abuelita!’ Don Gorgioso replies, ‘No comprendo.’ Caperucita sighs heavily and says in a flat American accent, ‘The Bull is in the House of my grandmother.’ ‘The Bull —’ asks Don Gorgioso incredulously, and Caperucita responds, ‘Si!’ ‘Is in there?’ ‘Si.’ ‘Ha ha,’ he laughs theatrically, looking around at the townsfolk before gesturing melodramatically. ‘I will kill him.’ He takes off his cape and adjusts it as the Bull leaps out balletically, demanding, ‘Where are the tortitas?’ Don Gorgioso reacts in terror, fleeing offstage. Caperucita comes forward, addressing the audience directly, ‘Matador es pollo, fweh!’ The Translator comes in, for the first time in the second act, and translates, ‘The bullfighter is chicken, fooey.’ Caperucita then taunts the Bull with her own little cape. After the first pass to stage left, the Bull comments, ‘Eh, you’re crazy, lady. . . . [D]don’t fight ladies,’ he protests. ‘I’m no lady,’ she asserts, and she eventually defeats him. Putting her foot on his back, to pose as if a big game hunter with a trophy, she asks the encircling dancers/townsfolk. ‘Should I kill him or let him live?’ ‘Kill him,’ they chant, until Abuelita breaks the ring. ‘No!’ she protests, with the punctuation of the castanets. ‘Let him live.’ She pauses, then shimmies her shoulders as she adds, ‘With me!’ As they embrace, the Translator steps back in to join Caperucita, for a reprise of the Abuelita song, and in the language of the theatrical musical, this finale suggests subversion of musical/romantic comedy

560   musical theatre screen adaptations narrative resolution. The leading man has fled (and is portrayed as homosexual), leaving only the comic second leads as a couple: The Bull/Abuelita. It would be a stretch to read the other pairing, Caperucita/Translator, in any homoerotic fashion; they are almost antagonists throughout most of the performance, but they are also the two most ­important characters in the sketch, one the protagonist of the story and one the primary discursive agent. Although, as noted with ‘Hold Me, Hamlet,’ it is standard for the ‘curtain call’ segment of The Carol Burnett Show to include the performers in the costumes of the previous segment, this sketch shows unusual theatrical bleed-through: Burnett sings the first two lines of ‘I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,’ in literal and rhythmically awkward Spanish, translated by Lawrence, and then the entire company sings the signature farewell song. As the music plays out the credit sequence, the autograph book signing is accompanied by a further extension of the ‘curtain call’ of the Mexican troupe: Lawrence takes the basket and tosses more cookies to the audience (see Figure 24.3d), and Burnett plays ‘bull’ to Waggoner’s bullfighter.

Cinderella Gets It On The Wiz, an all–African American, urban revisioning of The Wizard of Oz debuted to great success, critically and commercially, on Broadway in January 1975. It is the clearest referent for ‘Cinderella Gets It On,’28 but not the only one. American popular culture was gradually and belatedly mainstreaming African American performers and culture. The Carol Burnett Show’s CBS network introduced two highly popular sitcoms featuring predominantly African-American casts within a year of each other, Good Times (1974–79) and The Jeffersons (1975–85).29 Cinematically, the Blaxploitation cycle was beginning a decline from a peak of production in 1973 and 1974, although it was probably not yet visible (the biggest drop off was between 1974, when about ten films in the genre/cycle were released, and 1975, when it was about five). In music, the early 1970s saw a late burst of creativity from Motown and Stax, and 1975 was the year that an underground musical style called disco, gestated in the black and Latino gay dance subculture, would burst into the mainstream with Van McCoy’s hit, ‘The Hustle.’ The Pointer Sisters, a wildly eclectic singing group of ‘preacher’s kids’30 from Oakland, had had their first hit in 1973. They sang gospel, were backup singers for Grace Slick, Boz Scaggs, and other Bay Area rock musicians, recorded the ‘Pinball Number Count’ segments for Sesame Street, and performed in classic blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, and swing styles while being the first African American group to perform at the Grand Ol’ Opry and to score a country music Grammy. This was all before their guest-starring stint on The Carol Burnett Show in November of 1975 (and long before their greatest success in the early to mid1980s as a techno-pop group with hits like ‘Automatic,’ ‘Jump (For My Love),’ and ‘I’m So Excited’). With three guest stars who are primarily known as a group, fitting them into an extended sketch is not necessarily easy, but making three sisters into the stepsisters of

carol burnett and the ends of variety   561 Cinderella is easy math, especially since fairy tales were a popular source for several extended sketches. Burnett introduces the segment with reference to earlier adaptations of Cinderella, including the opera by Rossini and the television musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein31 but what follows is primarily a television show—a situation comedy in act 1 and a musical performance/dance show like Soul Train in act 2. The opening of the sketch blurs medium specificity, with a mix of the theatrical—the image is of a Playbill—and the cinematic. Like many fairy-tale films, westerns, and future Disney musicals, the opening of the storybook—in this case, the Playbill—eases us into the mythical world. The voiceover announcer (Waggoner) introduces us to scene 1 ‘The Pad’—the mother figure (Lawrence, again in a matronly but more sexualized role), and her ‘three funky daughters from her first stud.’ The Stepmother is filing her nails and the three daughters are painting their toenails, listening to a transistor radio, and playing bongos, respectively, as they sing, ‘Life is a super gig,’ with the Stepmother chiming in, ‘I can dig it, I can dig it’ (see Figure 24.4a). The living room set-up has the outwardly skewed dimensions of a typical sit-com set (to present more ouwardly to the studio audience and provide more space in which the cameras may move), although it is unclear how much of the contemporaneous audience would catch the resemblance to Shelley Winters’s role as ‘Mommy,’ the white drug kingpin in the hit Blaxploitation film

Figure 24.4  Blaxploitation, Disney, and Soul Train: The Many References of ‘Cinderella Gets It On.’ (a) Vicki Lawrence and The Pointer Sisters as the ‘steps’; (b) Mother Marcus appears as the Fairy Godmother; (c) Elfin John plays the disco; (d) the set of the disco with the contemporary popular music television show Soul Train.

562   musical theatre screen adaptations Cleopatra Jones (1973). It may be only a knowing wink, even a complete coincidence (I doubt it), as the announcer passes quickly to the introduction of the lead, played by Burnett. ‘The Mother also had a stepdaughter who came with the second dude. This chick’s name was Cinderella. The Stepmother and the Stepsisters were all cool, with-it chicks, but Cinderella was the flip side. She was square.’ In comparison to the neon-coloured fashions of the Stepmother and Stepsisters, Cinderella is dressed in a floral blouse, a red checked gingham apron, green anklets, and saddle oxfords. She has an unflattering red bob, and her light green jumper is nearly the same shade as the walls, making her almost literally fade into the background. Her vocal delivery resembles Shirley Temple’s, making her seem even more juvenile compared to the others, who had ‘laid bread’ on her to go down to the disco to get tickets for the rock concert that night. She got the four last tickets, and the Stepmother takes the fourth, leaving Cinderella to pout. She, too, had wanted to see ‘Elfin John.’ When they leave, she cries and taunts herself as a ‘drip’ and a ‘square,’ drawing the shape in the air with her forefingers. Her ‘I wish’ song is comically literal: ‘I wish!’ she trills operatically, à la Disney’s Snow White. The paradoxically overtrained little girl voice sinks in a long portamento down to a waltz, her precise, slightly English-accented delivery reminiscent of Burnett’s longtime friend Julie Andrews, who was both Mary Poppins and the first television musical Cinderella (1957): ‘I wish I were foxy, I wish I were slick, I wish I were some kind of superchick, a chick who would blow your mind— Tina Turner and Cher combined.’ On the last phrase, her voice deepens bluesily. She sings another stanza, then walks away from the camera, hands behind her back, then turns back to Snow White: she twists to sing, ‘I wish . . .’ and a flute trill and nasal voice echo from offstage left. She puts her hand to her ear, it repeats, they exchange and finally perform the figure in harmony. A flash bomb goes off in the doorway, and a vision in baby blue sparkles with fairy wings appears. It is Harvey Korman as Mother Marcus as the Fairy Godmother (see Figure 24.4b). Cinderella does several takes, ‘What are you . . . I mean, who are you?’ ‘You’re expecting maybe Tinklebell?’ responds the Fairy Godmother in a thick Yiddish accent. ‘But first, let me sit, my wings are killing me.’ She’s performed three miracles already today: ‘What miracles I’ve wrought! I got a doctor to make a housecall. I got mein Sohn to visit me. And I saved NYC from bankrupture.’ Korman’s delivery does the near-impossible in this sketch: he almost breaks up Burnett, but she makes her laugh into a high-pitched Snow White titter, and Korman pinches her cheek, which seems to be an anticipation of a bit of business from a couple of lines later. ‘Could you make me into a hip chick?’ asks Cinderella. ‘You want me to make you into a Lipschitz?’ The Fairy Godmother seems taken aback. Cinderella titters, and the Fairy Godmother pinches her cheek again, but this time Burnett responds, ‘Ooh,’ as if her cheek is sore from repeated tweaks. A burst of klezmer dance music accompanies the Fairy Godmother as she declares, ‘You are what you wish!’ Two 45-rpm records (Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo) and a pumpernickel become a chopper motorcycle with a sidecar. Cinderella is turned into a

carol burnett and the ends of variety   563 foxy strawberry blonde in a white jumpsuit with a revealing white wrap top, and the Fairy Godmother warns her to return by the stroke of 12. ‘12 midnight?’ asks Cinderella, and the Fairy Godmother responds, ‘Are you meshugena? Rock functions don’t begin until 12 midnight, you must leave by 12 noon.’ And they are off to the disco, with the Fairy Godmother driving ‘one of these Japanese motorcycles—a Yarmulke!’ Act 2 takes place at the ‘rock concert,’ where Tim Conway plays Elfin John in Pinball Wizard platform boots, sequined jumpsuit, exaggerated top hat, and glasses. He plays a piano with his name in rhinestones on the side (see Figure 24.4c). The plain cyclorama with strips of lights, the orange-tinged studio lights, and broad, empty stage for dancing is strongly reminiscent of the set for the classic American dance show Soul Train (1971–2006) (see Figure 24.4d), the perfect setting for the act in which Cinderella makes up a dance that becomes an immediate hit. The ‘Schlump’ melodically parodies Bill Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock around the Clock,’ which was experiencing a bump of popularity from serving as the theme song of the then-new and wildly popular 1950s-nostalgia sitcom Happy Days (1974–84). ‘Schlump around the Clock Tonight’ draws the attention of Elfin John and passes the hours until the stroke of 12:00. Cinderella tosses him one of her silver platform shoes as she leaves, which in turns becomes a bit of comedy when he comes to their sitcom living room (‘the last pad’ in his search for his lost chick) and Cinderella is wearing her green-and-gingham outfit, with one saddle oxford and one silver platform shoe. He is, however, unimpressed by her as a ‘square,’ and leaves, with a vague, ‘Glad you got your shoe back.’ Cinderella is heartbroken, but the Fairy Godmother tells her warmly, ‘There’s other gefilte fish in the sea.’ Cinderella responds with a distinctly Templesque ‘But I want him!’ (Burnett will sing ‘I’m So Glad . . .’ with a medley of the different voices she has used in the sketch.) The Fairy Godmother agrees, ‘You were meant for each other,’ and magics Elfin John back as a dweeby household product salesman for a happily ever after. This last-minute subversion is striking because even the name ‘Cinderella’ immediately conjures a rise of class (socially and aesthetically). It is a simple inversion— a common trait of many parodies—but does not simply flip gender or position; it undermines the essential desire for status in exchange for a more realistic relationship. At the risk of claiming too much, I am reminded of the work of Anna E. Altman on parody in feminist fairy tales. She makes a distinction between parody (inversion) and poesis, even though she recognizes that it is not a stark opposition: Poesis, in contrast, looks forward, creates new meaning. The term poesis is not a tidy or commonly recognized antithesis to the term parody. It does not identify a genre, and the two terms are not mutually exclusive. But I need a word to set against ‘parody,’ to stand for what is not parody. The first meaning of the Greek word poesis is ‘a making: a forming, creating,’ and in that sense I juxtapose it to the critical nature of parody. Feminist fairy tales that are poesis rather than parody use the form of the fairy tale without commenting on it. Or, at least, commentary is not the main point.32

The end of Cinderella is inverted, but it does not ridicule like classic parody; it achieves the goal of the original (an implied marriage) without the trappings of acquisitiveness

564   musical theatre screen adaptations and social climbing demonstrated by the Stepsisters and the Stepmother, who attempts to suck up to Cinderella when she thinks her stepdaughter will be hooking up with Elfin John. Nor is the skit about nostalgia, as much as it traffics in nostalgia. It does not even poke fun at disco, the excesses of which offer several opportunities. ‘Cinderella Gets It On,’ like the composite Astaire-Rogers musical ‘High Hat’ and some of the ­original musicals that The Carol Burnett Show composed from preexisting songs, approaches poesis. They take the form of the musical, and they often do comment on it, but they are also genuine expressions of the form and the creators’ deep love and understanding of it.

Parody as Time Capsule But there is a rather obvious contradiction here: nostalgia requires the availability of evidence of the past, and it is precisely the electronic and mechanical reproduction of images of the past that plays such an important role in the structuring of the nostalgic imagination today, furnishing it with the possibility of ‘compelling vitality.’ . . . [A]s Andreas Huyssen33 has convincingly argued . . .: ‘The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen,’ making the past simultaneous with the present in a new way.34

For a generation, perhaps two, of Americans with only the three major broadcast networks and sometimes PBS, in a time before home video, Carol Burnett’s parodies were familiar before the originals were. We learned about old movies ‘backwards’ through the lens of Burnett—I know I saw ‘Mildred Fierce,’ ‘Rebecky,’ ‘Rancid Harvest,’ and ‘The Little Foxies’ before I ever saw the sources for the parodies. But the sketches ruined none of my enjoyment; if anything, they heightened my awareness of certain plot points or performances. This effect is not even exclusive to audiences: cast member Vicki Lawrence was eighteen when the show started, and in an era without VHS tape or Turner Classic Movies, she was often unaware of the movies, characters, and actors she was called upon to parody; Korman became her tutor. This collegial and even familial chemistry of the show’s performers was part of the appeal: over time, a feature of the show that became an attraction unto itself was Tim Conway attempting to break up Harvey Korman. In later years, they even made a nightclub act of that dynamic. The parodies worked at numerous levels, as individual texts, genres, and media/ venue: another recurrent skit was the adventures of ‘Funt & Mundane,’ a theatrical supercouple based on Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and in one episode their intimate drawing room drama was staged at an outdoor amphitheatre, with the comedy coming from the scale of the large stage and the foibles of outdoor performance, including airplane flyovers and insects. Other aspects cut cross-sections, like Korman’s affinity for Colman or Burnett’s for Garland carrying through sketches where they might not be obvious insertions. Mother Marcus’s various incarnations as Fairy Godmother,

carol burnett and the ends of variety   565 Caperucita’s Abuelita, and numerous other figures is an obvious case, layered onto her historical mash-up of Yiddish (grand)mother and pantomime dame types. The Carol Burnett Show was a time capsule of sorts. It revived, adapted, and ­reencapsulated earlier entertainment forms with nostalgia that did not temper its wit. But the parody that evokes nostalgia also becomes something more specific and coherent. Costume designer Bob Mackie has pointed out that there are no Carol drag artists; she is, in essence, already one of them, a chameleon, but also inimitable. Comedian Jerry Lewis compares Burnett to his old partner Dean Martin as a classic entertainer: ‘We want them as pure as we can get them.’ Burnett is thus arguably a ­figure of poesis, not parody.

Notes 1. This does not count afternoon or late-night talk shows like The Mike Douglas Show or The Tonight Show, which often featured musical performances. It also does not count syndication: in 1968, the most popular variety show in syndication was The Porter Wagoner Show (1960–81), which would launch the career of Dolly Parton (1967–75), much as her three years on The Garry Moore Show had launched Burnett. 2. In an October 1968 New York Times article, creator George Schlatter commented about the critics’ and censors’ accusations of ‘tastelessness’: ‘Tasteless? The picture of a Vietcong prisoner being shot in the head ran in every newspaper in the world, and nobody reviewed them for a lack of taste. If that is good taste and a joke about the Pill is bad taste, then I will take our particular brand of bad taste any day. I find every hatchet murder being gone into in great detail, which is not only bad taste but lacking in humour. When we’re in bad taste, at least we’re funny’ (cited in https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/arts/television/remembering-rowan-martins-laugh-in.html, accessed 10 July 2017). 3. Burnett would go on to win Emmy Awards for dramatic roles in Friendly Fire (1979) and an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2009), to add to her four awards for musical, comedy, and variety performances. 4. Throughout the chapter, unless otherwise specified, production and biographical information, as well as interview quotes, comes from the DVD extras of the Time-Life ­compilation of The Carol Burnett Show. 5. Lawrence, in fact, legendarily got the job because people thought she looked like Burnett, and the multiple references to the then-seventeen-year-old Lawrence piqued Burnett’s curiosity. 6. The Welches are the parents of Americana alt-folk singer-songwriter Gillian Welch, which hints at a similarity of musical specificity and authenticity, if to completely different repertoires. 7. I explore this argument in more detail in a forthcoming book about television, space, and sound. 8. The show traditionally would run two performances on a Friday night—a show recorded at 9:00 pm as the broadcast version, but also a 6:00 pm version that was essentially a dress rehearsal but recorded for ‘safety,’ a source of editing materials should anything go wrong with the main performance. 9. Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,’ James Naremore, Film Adaptation (2000): 54–76. 10. Paul Edwards, ‘Adaptation: Two Theories,’ Text and Performance Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2007): 5–6.

566   musical theatre screen adaptations 11. Linda Hutcheon, ‘The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History,’ Cultural Critique 5 (1986): 185–186. 12. Hutcheon, ‘The Politics of Postmodernism,’ 181. 13. Linda Hutcheon, and Mario J Valdés, ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: A Dialogue,’ Poligrafías. Revista de Teoría Literaria y Literatura comparada 3 (1998): 18. 14. Hutcheon, and Valdés, ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,’ 21. 15. Hutcheon, and Valdés, ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern, 22. 16. Episode 812; aired 14 December 1974. 17. The Cookie Monster similarly plays ‘Alistair Cookie,’ on Sesame Street, although Korman’s portrayal appears to predate that more famous one by several years, http://muppet.wikia. com/wiki/Alistair_Cookie, accessed 18 July 2017. 18. Berry and Burnett also star as Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Babes in Barns, and a similar duet draws attention to the ‘audio dissolve’ that Rick Altman describes as typical of a film musical: diegetic sound, such as the piano, is superimposed onto nondiegetic sound as a transition to a full-blown performance. As Berry as ‘Rooney’ accompanies Burnett as ‘Garland’ on the piano, conveniently set up on the verandah, she comments, ‘I love it when you play, it sounds like a whole orchestra!’ Burnett seems to have a particular affinity for Garland, in part because their voice range and style is not dissimilar, but it seems that the vulnerability in Garland’s persona resonates with a similar vulnerability in Burnett’s that she used comedy to deflect. 19. Normally, these full-length musicals are divided into acts, with advertising intermissions, but ‘Hold Me, Hamlet’ clocks in at a brisk 14:25. 20. The song even has a gay ‘in-joke’ not likely to ping broad audiences (or censors) in 1974, but recognizable by musical theatre aficionados and those keyed into the subculture: Claudius strings out adverbs about how Danes ‘do it,’ and Hamlet interrupts to echo, ‘Daily? Gaily?’ Claudius takes a beat and replies, ‘Some,’ before launching back into the song. 21. Episode 716; aired 19 January 1974. 22. For more details, see Kenneth  H.  Marcus, ‘Mexican Folk Music and Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Southern California: The Ramona Pageant and the Mexican Players,’ Journal of the Society for American Music 9, no. 1 (2015), and Pauline  B.  Deuel, ‘The Commedia Dell’Arte in a Mexican Folk Theatre,’ Hispania 47, no. 3 (1964). 23. The first widely known El Teatro Campesino play, Zoot Suit, written by founder Luis Valdez, premiered in 1978 and launched the career of Mexican American actor Edward James Olmos. A movie of Zoot Suit followed in 1981, with Valdez’s treatment of the life of early rock ’n’ roll star Ritchie Valens, the hit film La Bamba, following in 1987. 24. Pauline Deuel argues that the Mexican Players created an analogue to the commedia dell’arte in Renaissance Italy by relying on character stereotypes, which are, of course, often found in fairy tales (Deuel, ‘The Commedia Dell’Arte in a Mexican Folk Theatre’). 25. This effect is not unlike the typical ‘stagebound’ Busby Berkeley number, where the surrealistic and expansive nondiegetic space of the number is anchored into a theatrical stage at the beginning and end. 26. See Deuel, ‘The Commedia Dell’Arte in a Mexican Folk Theatre.’ 27. For more legal and historical details, see Marcus, ‘Mexican Folk Music and Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Southern California.’ 28. Episode 914, aired 29 November 1975. 29. The NBC show Julia (1968–71) featured a black single mother, but most of the other characters were white and the stories were more conventional sit-com stories with less of a political charge.

carol burnett and the ends of variety   567 30. ‘PKs,’ or ‘preacher’s kids’ are familiar expressions in southern American culture, in particular, and have a certain air about them (Tori Amos and Amy Lee of Evanescence are also PKs). 31. ABC would air an original, all–African American version, known as Cindy or Cinderella in Harlem, a few years later in 1978. 32. Anna  E.  Altman, ‘Parody and Poesis in Feminist Fairy Tales,’ Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 20, no. 1 (2007): 23. 33. Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 253. 34. Hutcheon and Valdés, ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: A Dialogue,’ 20.

chapter 25

Fl a m boya nce , Exu ber a nce , a n d Sch m a ltz Half a Sixpence and the Broadway Adaptation in 1960s Hollywood Amanda Mcqueen

Histories of the Hollywood musical often posit a decline of the genre in the 1960s and 1970s, brought about in no small part by big-budget adaptations of Broadway shows. Citing a combination of negative reviews and disappointing financial returns, many film historians and genre scholars have concluded that these adaptations fundamentally ‘misread public interest,’ pushing the film industry into recession and the musical genre into obsolescence.1 Such claims may seem especially accurate in the case of Paramount’s 1967 roadshow adaptation of Half a Sixpence. Set in Edwardian England, Sixpence tells of Arthur Kipps (played by Tommy Steele on both stage and screen), a draper’s apprentice who unexpectedly inherits, loses, and regains a fortune, learning in the process the value of true love and friendship. The stage musical’s obvious moral, romance-centric plot, and stock character types were transferred to the screen mostly intact, leading a number of influential critics, including Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times and Renata Adler of the New York Times, to declare that Sixpence was ‘simpleminded, square, old-fashioned,’ and ‘lavishly, exuberantly out of touch’ with the attitudes of the late 1960s.2 Audiences perhaps agreed; the film performed poorly at the box office, breaking even only because of a strong showing in the United Kingdom.3 Yet although Half a Sixpence was hardly the smash success Paramount intended, it was not—as is often suggested—a completely misguided production. Rather, it is a product of its immediate industrial context, its form and content shaped by conditions in Hollywood after the breakup of the studio system. First, Sixpence is part of the cycle of blockbuster Broadway adaptations that emerged in the mid-1950s as a risk-reduction

570   musical theatre screen adaptations strategy. Through lavish spectacle and fidelity to their pre-sold stage properties, these adaptations were designed to boost the film musical’s financial and cultural viability in a changing and uncertain marketplace. At the same time, director George Sidney and his artistic team give Sixpence a distinctly contemporary visual style, akin to that found in the low-budget, youth-oriented films of the Hollywood Renaissance, such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Graduate (1967). This fusion of the established prestige adaptation formula and the burgeoning Renaissance aesthetic resulted in a curious mixture of old-fashioned schmaltz and modern stylistic play, yet the choice to combine them had industrial logic. Far from demonstrating generic decline, then, the adaptation of Half a Sixpence evidences how 1960s Hollywood combined different commercial and aesthetic strategies in an effort to reshape the film musical for a new industrial climate and prolong the genre’s marketability into the 1970s.

Half a Sixpence and the Cycle of Prestige Adaptations Though Hollywood has always drawn from Broadway to varying degrees in its production of film musicals, the genre’s struggles in the 1950s led the industry to approach stage adaptations in a new way. The dissolution of the major studios’ production units, which had reduced overhead and increased efficiency, made the musical—an inherently expensive and complicated genre—particularly susceptible to inflating production costs, with budgets quadrupling by the early 1960s.4 Musicals were also underperforming at the box office, a problem exacerbated by the growing importance of the ­international market. As domestic audience attendance declined in the decades following World War II, more of Hollywood’s income came from abroad, and producers started giving greater thought to foreign audience tastes.5 But musicals had long proven unpopular outside of English-speaking countries, and it was estimated that they had an international market potential of only about 60 percent to 65 percent of that expected by films in other genres.6 By the late 1950s, then, it was clear that film musicals, as they had been made under the studio system, were no longer viable, leaving Hollywood with two options: abandon the genre or rework it to fit the changing industrial climate. Many believed that the musical was unique to Hollywood and was thus the first line of defense against both ­television and foreign imports, but since current conditions posed significant challenges for the genre, sustaining it would require a variety of new strategies.7 One such strategy was the production of large-scale, faithful Broadway adaptations like Half a Sixpence. The impetus for this type of film musical arose from the industry’s larger interest in blockbuster filmmaking and its corresponding dependence on pre-sold properties. In an effort to remain competitive against the onslaught of television and other leisure activities in the early 1950s, Hollywood began concentrating on fewer but more expensive

half a sixpence and the broadway adaptation   571 films.8 Designed and marketed as special events, these blockbusters aimed to draw people back to the movies with the promise of a unique entertainment experience. Musicals naturally lent themselves to such prestige treatment, and like other blockbusters of the period, top-tier musicals increasingly featured running times of two-and-a-half to three hours (often including an overture and intermission); technological advancements like color, widescreen, stereo sound, and wide-gauge formats; and lavish production designs, and/or exotic locations. Naturally, executing spectacle on this scale required a budget at least two or three times that of an ordinary film product, which from the mid-1960s to the turn of the decade averaged between $2 and $3 million.9 Budgets for prestige adaptations generally started around $6 million and could rise as high as $25 million. By the 1960s, most blockbusters were roadshow releases. With higher ticket prices and reserved seating, following the model of live theatre, roadshow films played in top-tier first-run houses, and were aimed at a broad audience.10 Yet, while blockbusters could potentially yield enormous profits, greater investment in each individual film also meant that studios had more to lose if an expensive production flopped. To offset this financial risk, filmmakers relied heavily on pre-sold source material, and by the mid-1950s, Variety had noted a significant uptick in films based on popular stories, novels, and plays.11 For the musical, Broadway was the most logical and frequently utilized source of pre-sold properties. A successful stage musical would have a long run on Broadway and then spawn regional and touring companies to further extend its life and popularity. The flourishing of original cast albums in the 1940s and 1950s also helped spread familiarity with these shows beyond New York City, and theatrical hits often found national exposure through popular television programs and radio play.12 Broadway musicals could thus potentially reach a large sector of the American public, and a substantial investment in a film musical would seem less risky if audiences were already aware of both the story and the songs. It was also hypothesized that adaptations would do better in the troublesome foreign markets. Not only were Broadway musicals thought to have the stronger, more sophisticated narratives international audiences preferred, but they were also routinely exported abroad, where they were restaged with local casts in local languages.13 The fact that a given Broadway show would be tested in foreign markets prior to the release of a film version could thus seem like extra insurance on a genre that remained one of Hollywood’s most challenging exports. The perceived importance of the pre-sold property to a musical’s marketability encouraged producers to adapt Broadway shows to the screen with greater fidelity. In earlier decades, it was not uncommon for an adaptation to cut over half of the show’s musical numbers and feature a substantially rewritten plot, but in the 1950s, Hollywood began making fewer changes during the adaptation process.14 While filmmakers ‘opened up’ adaptations through location shooting, larger casts, cinematography, and editing, they simultaneously brought to the screen all the identifiable and marketable elements of the stage version. Partially incentivizing this more faithful approach were the rising prices for film rights. Inflating production costs in the theatre industry in the 1950s and 1960s made it difficult for producers to secure financing, and the influx of cash that came from selling to Hollywood could be crucial in repaying the substantial

572   musical theatre screen adaptations investments required for mounting a new musical.15 Rights holders for hit plays were thus in a strong position to negotiate for the best deal—usually a lump sum plus a percentage of the film’s gross over a certain amount.16 By the 1960s, the standard purchase price for a stage musical was $1 million, but many sold for significantly more, which likely encouraged studios to retain as much of the original show as possible. After all, why pay more than $1 million for a musical only to cut it to pieces? Yet fidelity was also a promotional strategy. As director-producer Norman Jewison noted regarding the adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), ‘The title [of the stage play] is what we are really selling.’17 That is, retaining the key elements of the stage original was thought to appeal to those already familiar with the musical through the Broadway version, the original cast album, and/or a touring company, and make them more likely to see the adaptation. Indeed, part of the prestige of these films was their promise of an experience analogous to that of seeing the show on Broadway. At the same time, the new standards of blockbuster filmmaking meant these musicals could be bigger and more spectacular than any theatrical production. In short, prestige adaptations positioned the musical as a special event, a unique entertainment experience that could only be found at the movies. In the early 1950s, the Hollywood musical was already moving towards more faithful adaptations and greater spectacle, but the back-to-back successes of Guys and Dolls (1955) and Oklahoma! (1955), which pushed both spectacle and fidelity to greater heights than their immediate predecessors, proved the viability of the prestige adaptation formula. Over the next decade and a half, Hollywood producers continued imitating these two musicals in hopes of replicating their strong box office performances, and a cycle of big-budget, faithful adaptations emerged.18 The cycle reached its peak in the late 1960s with an increased burst of production following the phenomenal success of The Sound of Music (1965). Four adaptations were released annually between 1967 and 1969, leading New York Times critic Vincent Canby to refer to prestige musicals as an  ‘industry-within-an-industry.’19 Half a Sixpence appeared during the peak of the prestige adaptation cycle. Based on the H. G. Wells novel Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905), the musical wraps class critique in a love triangle. After inheriting a surprise fortune, draper’s apprentice Arthur Kipps is thrust into high society. He jilts his working-class sweetheart Ann Pornick for the wealthy Helen Walsingham, but the snobbery of the Walsingham set makes Kipps realize it is Ann he loves, and they marry. Shortly thereafter, Helen’s brother Hubert swindles Kipps out of his money. Kipps realizes what truly matters in life and is rewarded with another financial windfall, this time the dividends from an investment in his friend Harry Chitterlow’s successful play. The musical premiered in London’s West End in March 1963. It was voted the best new British musical by the London critics and ran for an impressive 678 performances, closing in October 1964.20 Sixpence transferred to Broadway in April 1965. A few of the songs deemed unsuitable for American audiences were cut, while others were expanded into more lavish production numbers with new choreography by Onna White.21 Reviews for this iteration were somewhat mixed, but the show thrived on word of mouth, becoming a sleeper hit and receiving

half a sixpence and the broadway adaptation   573 nine Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical.22 The original Broadway cast album from RCA Victor, released in May 1965, eventually averaged about 500 disk sales per stage performance.23 Sixpence was an ideal property for Paramount to adapt: its family-friendly story made it suitable for the roadshow audience, and although it was popular, it was not a blockbuster smash, which made it inexpensive to acquire. Cost was an issue for the studio, which had been struggling financially throughout the decade. Its box office successes had been few, and its production output had dropped due to internal power struggles and management changes pending the 1966 Gulf + Western takeover.24 Sixpence allowed Paramount to participate in the profitable prestige adaptation cycle without the same degree of risk posed by projects like Camelot (Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1967) or Hello, Dolly! (20th Century Fox, 1969), which were significantly more expensive to both acquire and produce.25 Paramount secured the rights for Sixpence in November 1965 for only $250,000.26 Production started in September 1966, and though the film ran considerably over budget, it still only cost Paramount a reasonable $6 million.27 Even with this modest budget, Paramount planned Sixpence as a lavish roadshow musical, in keeping with the norms of the prestige cycle. The film’s world premiere in London in December 1967 and its American premieres in New York City and Los Angeles in February 1968 were all high-profile charity banquets.28 Between February and April, Sixpence was scheduled for thirty-one domestic roadshow engagements.29 Paramount also launched a sizeable publicity campaign, which included a five-week, nineteen-city promotional tour by director George Sidney, book and record tie-ins, novelty sixpence souvenirs, and a promotional featurette.30 As with other musicals in the prestige adaptation cycle, part of what made Sixpence a special event was its fidelity to its source material. The screenplay, written by Dorothy Kingsley, a longtime collaborator of Sidney’s with previous experience transferring Broadway musicals to film, adheres on the whole to Beverley Cross’s book, and so the film runs 146 minutes with an intermission. However, in response to critics who found the musical a bit lightweight, five of the song-and-dance numbers were cut and two new ones were substituted: ‘The Race Is On’ and ‘This Is My World.’ Prestige adaptations commonly included at least one new song for Academy Award consideration, usually penned by the original theatrical songwriter; Sixpence’s new songs were also written by David Heneker, in collaboration with Irwin Kostal, the film’s music supervisor and arranger. However, the film made sure to retain those songs from the Broadway show that had been consistently singled out, including its three showstoppers, ‘Money to Burn,’ ‘If the Rain’s Got to Fall,’ and ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop.’ Paramount’s promotional campaign then emphasized this aspect of fidelity through advertisements that referenced the film’s theatrical origins and promised movie audiences that they, too, could ‘Hear the Showstoppers.’31 Most central to Paramount’s fidelity strategy, though, was Tommy Steele as Arthur Kipps. Steele rose to prominence in the mid-1950s as Britain’s first rock star, and he had appeared on numerous television programs and in several low-budget musical films aimed at the British youth market, including The Tommy Steele Story (1957) and The

574   musical theatre screen adaptations Duke Wore Jeans (1958). Thanks in part to collaborations with songwriters like Lionel Bart, Steele soon became part of Britain’s mainstream entertainment industry. Half a Sixpence, which firmly cemented his shift from rock ’n’ roller to traditional song-anddance man, was written as a star vehicle for him.32 Steele accompanied his musical from London to Broadway, and his performance was overwhelmingly praised in both stage iterations, with critics often describing his natural talent and charisma at some length. Variety, for instance declared Steele ‘an eye-opener,’ while a feature in the New York Times called him ‘a song-and-dance man whose mastery is currently unsurpassed by any other performer in the field.’33 Some, like Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin, went so far as to argue that the Broadway show had only been ‘saved from a quick death . . . by the broad, brash lightfoot ebullience and engaging easiness of Tommy Steele.’34 When Steele took a short break from Broadway in August 1965, box office proceeds dropped about $10,000, and when he left the show entirely in the spring of 1966, many critics felt the musical had ‘lost some of its charm and vitality. . . . What was an exciting show is just okay now.’35 Steele was Sixpence’s most noteworthy element, so Paramount’s negotiations for the rights naturally included his participation.36 In their effort to re-create the Broadway experience, prestige adaptations commonly featured some members of the theatrical cast reprising their roles. In addition to Steele, Sixpence retained Grover Dale as fellow apprentice Pearce and Marti Webb as the singing voice of Ann, played onscreen by Julia Foster. Webb had originated the role in the West End production, and so her ghosting ensured that the quality and style of the character’s musical performance adhered to that of the stage original.37 Yet when a stage musical was known for a strong lead—such as Robert Morse in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1966) or Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1967)—both the fidelity and the success of the film version were thought to depend on having the original actor recreate his or her star-making role.38 Given how central Steele’s performance was to Half a Sixpence’s reputation, the property would likely have been considered less valuable without him. Paramount thus put Tommy Steele at the centre of the film’s promotional campaign. Articles distributed via the film’s official press book cover everything from Steele’s rise to fame, to his penchant for football, to his forthcoming collection of poetry, and he ­dominates the film’s print advertising.39 The four primary layouts used for newspaper ads, lobby cards, and posters all depict a collage of scenes from the film, either illustrations or photographic stills, at the centre of which is a larger image of Steele dressed in the white suit from the showstopper number ‘If the Rain’s Got to Fall,’ and flashing his trademark toothy grin. The star also appears in all of the smaller collage scenes, making him the most prominent element in terms of both size and frequency. One layout— featuring a background grid of line-drawings of Steele, on top of which are the central ‘Rain’s Got to Fall’ image and an illustrated collage clustered around a straw boating hat—depicts him thirteen times, leaving no doubt that this is his musical (Figure 25.1). Significantly, Paramount’s artwork echoes that used for the Broadway show, which also depicts Steele leaping joyfully in his white suit. Many prestige adaptations signalled fidelity to their source in this way, by imitating the advertising of the stage production.

half a sixpence and the broadway adaptation   575

Figure 25.1 Print advertising for Half a Sixpence assures fidelity to the stage show by emphasizing Tommy Steele, the musical’s most marketable element. Credit: Paramount Film Service Ltd. Half a Sixpence Paramount Press Book and Merchandising Manual. 1967. Author’s personal collection.

576   musical theatre screen adaptations Ultimately, Tommy Steele was one of the few aspects of the film to garner widespread praise, and even those who disliked the musical acknowledged his talents. Roger Ebert, for instance, concluded that Steele was ‘just the performer for this sort of schmaltz. He is, in fact, a very good song-and-dance man, the only member of his generation who bears comparison with Gene Kelly.’40 Charles Champlin thought the film was long and wearying, but still declared that ‘Tommy Steele is a wonder and he gives a dazzling, perfected performance.’41 Yet casting Steele was entirely in keeping with the norms of the prestige adaptation cycle. The perceived necessity of maintaining fidelity to the pre-sold property meant recreating the marketable elements of the Broadway original on screen, and in the case of Half a Sixpence, the single most marketable element was Tommy Steele. With fidelity assured through screenplay, songs, and especially casting, Paramount set about expanding Sixpence into a blockbuster film. Prestige adaptations sought to create spectacle by transforming their stage properties into something cinematic, offering audiences what theatre and television could not. For Sixpence, this meant colour and widescreen—both standard for blockbusters of all genres—and location shooting in England. Filming overseas, or runaway production, had become a trend in blockbuster filmmaking, as it could cut costs, attract audiences through exotic and/or realistic settings, and increase a film’s international market potential.42 In the mid-1960s, the United Kingdom became a popular runaway destination, as filmmakers sought to capitalize on London’s status as ‘the centre of young, fashionable, pop-music-dominated culture,’ and American investment in British filmmaking so accelerated through the latter half of the decade, that by 1967, nearly 80 percent of UK films were made with US money.43 Under its new Gulf + Western management, Paramount had moved aggressively into overseas production, and Sixpence was one of eighteen British features the studio had under way in 1967.44 With location shooting in Eastbourne, Oxford, Henley on Thames, and Tunbridge Wells, and interiors filmed at Shepperton Studios and Associated British at Elstree, Sixpence was the first Hollywood musical to be shot entirely in the United Kingdom.45 Filming Sixpence in England meant the requisite period detail—from gas lamps, to bathing suits, to vintage cars, carriages, and horse-buses—could be recreated not only at a lower cost but also with greater authenticity than would be possible in Hollywood.46 The realistic Edwardian costumes and settings then became another of the film’s promotional angles. Not only would Sixpence provide moviegoers the sheer entertainment of a big, Broadway musical, Paramount promised, but it also offered a ‘rare view of some of England’s most historic and beautiful backgrounds, all photographed in colors that literally glow.’47 As was common with runaway productions, journalists were invited to junkets on location, which helped generate publicity focused on the film’s uniquely meticulous production design.48 Writing from Tunbridge Wells, for instance, Sally K. Marks told readers of the Los Angeles Times how the period props and set dressings were procured from ‘some 150 different collectors and antique shops,’ and how a 1902 Harrods store catalogue and an 1890 drapers inventory were used to ensure ­accurate pricing and terminology for the items in Shalford’s Emporium, where Kipps is apprenticed.49 Another way that prestige adaptations sought to create cinematic spectacle was with large-scale production numbers. With realistic and often exotic backdrops, enormous

half a sixpence and the broadway adaptation   577 sets, and huge musical ensembles, filmmakers sought not only to go beyond what would be possible on the theatrical stage but also to push the musical genre to new blockbuster proportions. For these reasons, Sixpence’s three showstopper numbers—‘Money to Burn,’ ‘If the Rain’s Got to Fall,’ and ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop’—are expansive set pieces, each over seven minutes in length and featuring upwards of two dozen singers and dancers. Several numbers, moreover, are staged outdoors, showcasing quintessentially English locations like the River Thames and the seaside resort at Bournemouth. Shooting songand-dance numbers on location was then promoted as its own form of spectacle, something that made Sixpence a film musical ‘with a difference.’ Unlike most musicals, one press book article explains, which are ‘confined to the soundstage,’ Sixpence ‘is a musical that moves, using natural backgrounds as its settings.’50 Finally, cinematography and editing add an additional layer of spectacle to Sixpence’s authentic locations and large-scale production numbers. For example, the scenes shot at Blenheim Palace, residence of the Duke of Marlborough and birthplace of Winston Churchill, rely heavily on long-shot scales, high angles, and wide-angle lenses to emphasize the building’s size, while tracks, tilts, and cranes highlight the interior’s ornate marble, brass fixtures, and painted ceiling murals. In the musical numbers, mobile framing and editing ensure uniquely cinematic views of the choreography, while special effects further distance the film from its theatrical origins. The dream ballet ‘This Is My World,’ for instance, in which Kipps reflects on the loss of his inheritance, uses dissolves and superimposition to produce ghostly figures who appear and disappear, first celebrating his good fortune and then mocking his aspirations of class mobility. Kipps himself floats suspended in the air, and glides uncannily across the floor. The entire scene is filmed through a haze (likely done with a diffusion filter or perhaps more simply by putting Vaseline on the lens), creating blurred figures and abstractions of light that amplify the otherworldly atmosphere, as can be seen in video example 25.1 and Figure 25.2.

Figure 25.2  Cinematic special effects during ‘This is My World’ help to transform the stage musical into a blockbuster film. Credit: Half a Sixpence. Co-produced and directed by George Sidney. 145 min. Par. 1967. DVD.

578   musical theatre screen adaptations By the early 1970s, critics increasingly felt that adherence to the stage property and over-sized musical numbers made prestige adaptations bloated and slow, and indeed by that time the cycle was coming to an end. For producers in the 1960s, however, fidelity and spectacle were well-established risk-reduction strategies, proven to help the musical genre succeed in the new post-studio era by transforming it into a special event. Though Sixpence would ultimately not yield blockbuster returns, Paramount’s decisions when adapting the musical to the screen were entirely in keeping with industrial norms.

Half a Sixpence and the Hollywood Renaissance Aesthetic It was likewise an awareness of current industrial trends that shaped Half a Sixpence’s overall visual style. The roadshow adaptation was released the same year as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Graduate (1967), two films said to have helped usher in the Hollywood Renaissance. Aimed primarily at the reliable youth audience, this group of low-budget films became known for cynical, violent, and sexually explicit content, and for a novel deviation from the classical Hollywood style.51 Though Sixpence obviously differs from the Renaissance films in tone and subject matter, it adopts a similar aesthetic, which gives its nostalgic romance a distinctly late-1960s look. Of course, new modes of production and developments in technology following the break-up of the studio system had brought about industry-wide shifts in Hollywood film style, including the use of colour, widescreen, and location shooting that began as distinguishing features of the blockbusters.52 In addition, as David Bordwell explains in The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, the 1960s also witnessed accelerated editing rates, closer shot scales, greater reliance on wide-angle and telephoto lenses, and more pervasive mobile framing, particularly zooms and hand-held ­camerawork.53 These stylistic techniques were not entirely new, but they became more salient in the immediate post-studio period, and they can be found to varying degrees across all of Hollywood’s output. Certain films, though, employed these devices more frequently and overtly, and thus were grouped together as evidence of a new American film style, eventually known as the Hollywood Renaissance.54 Renaissance filmmakers were particularly influenced by a new ‘film consciousness,’ or a larger awareness of film history and film culture, that arose in the decades following World War II.55 With the greater circulation of studio film libraries through high-profile reissues and television broadcasts, an influx of foreign imports and a corresponding boom in art house exhibition, the proliferation of domestic and international film festivals, and the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline, cinephiles and the general public alike now had greater access to classical Hollywood cinema and to a variety of alternative filmmaking traditions.56 In the late 1960s, this heightened film consciousness began to influence mainstream Hollywood, as a new group of filmmakers appropriated stylistic and narrative techniques

half a sixpence and the broadway adaptation   579 from European art cinema, cinéma vérité documentaries, experimental films, New York City–based independent filmmaking, old Hollywood films, and even t­elevision.57 In particular, the Renaissance films favoured telephoto lenses, and thus flat, shallow-focus compositions, unusual camera placements, arcing camera movements, zooms, and jarring editing devices like jump cuts, freeze frames, and ‘flash cutting’—quick bursts of shots composed of only three to six frames.58 Many of these films also feature sequences set to nondiegetic pop music, perhaps best represented by the Simon and Garfunkel songs used to convey character subjectivity in The Graduate.59 Overall, the Renaissance films tend to draw attention to their style, creating an aesthetic more typical of art cinema than of average Hollywood fare.60 On the whole, the Hollywood musical and the films of the Hollywood Renaissance are viewed as binary opposites, evidence of how old and new, obsolescence and innovation, briefly coexisted—but did not overlap—during a period of industrial transition.61 Yet while there are certainly musicals that adhere to a more classical style, such as the adaptation of Hello, Dolly! (1969), many others were influenced by the same film consciousness that shaped the Renaissance aesthetic. Regarding the adaptation of Camelot (1967), for example, director Joshua Logan reportedly stated that he intended to make use of ‘all the modern techniques of photography, cutting, sound recording, set decoration and laboratory work that some Italian, English, and French directors have made enormous strides in recently.’62 Formal experimentation was not uniform across the musical genre, just as it was not uniform across Hollywood filmmaking more broadly, but that experimentation was taking place, including in prestige adaptations like Half a Sixpence.63 Released the same month as The Graduate, Sixpence owes much of its affinity with the Renaissance aesthetic to its director’s sensibilities. Under contract at MGM through his early career, George Sidney had gravitated towards musicals, eventually directing some of the studio’s best-known entries in the genre, including Anchors Aweigh (1945), starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, and The Harvey Girls (1946), starring Judy Garland. He worked steadily through the 1950s and 1960s as an independent director-producer, and by mid-decade had one of the industry’s strongest box office records.64 Sidney also had an affinity for Broadway adaptations, having brought Annie Get Your Gun (1950), Show Boat (1951), Kiss Me Kate (1953, in 3D), Pal Joey (1957), and Bye Bye Birdie (1963) to the screen. For these reasons, Sidney likely seemed the ideal choice to direct Half a Sixpence, and in 1965, he signed a multiple picture distribution deal with Paramount, though only two films resulted: The Swinger (1966), a psychedelic comedy starring Ann-Margret, and Sixpence, which ended up being his final film.65 Yet, although Sidney was undoubtedly an established part of Hollywood’s ‘old guard’ when he signed onto Sixpence, he was also a director known for an almost formalist approach to filmmaking, and he reportedly preferred musicals because they allowed for greater stylistic play.66 His directorial aesthetic is an eclectic one, drawing influence from ‘nearly every movement, old and new, in film, theater, music, dance and fine arts,’ and often reflexively pushing against contemporary norms with devices like slow and fast motion, still photography, superimpositions, overhead shots, and montage editing.67 Crane shots were one of his specialities, leading critic George Morris to write in Film Comment in 1977 that ‘What the track was to Max Ophuls, the crane is to Sidney.’68

580   musical theatre screen adaptations In fact, as Morris’s article indicates, Sidney’s aesthetic choices were interesting enough for early proponents of auteur theory, most notably Andrew Sarris, to view him as one of Hollywood’s most significant directors.69 Whether directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni directly influenced Sidney in the same way they inspired the Renaissance filmmakers is uncertain, but his larger formalist tendencies are in keeping with the late 1960s vogue for stylistic experimentation, and Sixpence makes frequent use of the specific techniques associated with the young American film movement. It is also worth noting that Sixpence’s cinematographer was Geoffrey Unsworth, who later shot Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), while its coeditor was Frank Santillo, who worked with Sam Peckinpah on Ride the High Country (1962) and The Battle of Cable Hogue (1970). Both Unsworth and Santillo, then, were (or would become) affiliated with key figures in New Hollywood cinema, and their influence on Half a Sixpence’s modern style should not be overlooked. Though contemporary stylistic techniques—particularly the use of very wide and very long lenses—can be found throughout Sixpence, they are particularly pronounced in the musical numbers, perhaps because Sidney, like many film musical directors, viewed song-and-dance sequences as an opportunity for formal play.70 Many numbers, for instance, feature unconventional compositions that draw attention to the position of the camera. Canted angles are frequently used for emphasis, as in the climax of ‘I’m Not Talking to You,’ in which Ann’s musical scolding of Kipps for having missed their date is punctuated by reaction shots of Kipps’s coworkers at noticeably oblique angles. It is also common for objects in the foreground to frame or even obscure the dramatic action. The final chorus of ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop,’ set in a large pub during Kipps and Ann’s wedding reception, features a flurry of such compositions, including a low-angle shot peering up at the dancing guests from behind a curtain in an alcove, and a medium-long shot of Kipps, Ann, and their wedding party partially blocked by a pair of legs dancing on the bar in the centre foreground (Figure 25.3). Mobile framing is also prevalent in Sixpence. Tracking shots, arcs, and Sidney’s signature cranes are the most frequent types of camera movement, but the film also makes isolated use of whip pans, evident in ‘If the Rain’s Got to Fall,’ and includes some brief handheld camerawork, most noticeably in ‘I’m Not Talking to You,’ filmed on the beach at Bournemouth. It is the musical’s reliance on zooms, however, that really marks its affinity with the emerging Hollywood style. Sidney was, in fact, an early adopter of zoom lenses, using them sporadically in the 1950s in films like Pal Joey (1957). In Sixpence, he favours quick zooms, creating noticeable shifts in perspective that tend to function either as musical punctuation, as with the quick push-in on Kipps on the final downbeat of ‘Money to Burn,’ or as visual rhymes or jokes. A quick zoom in, for instance, simulates Pearce’s (Grover Dale) attention to singer Laura Livermore’s (Aleta Morrison) ample bosom, while a quick zoom out anticipates the backwards thrust of a starting cannon firing at the regatta. Half a Sixpence employs similarly overt editing techniques. Some of these devices were long-standing favourites of Sidney’s, such as using a false match cut to cover a r­ adical change in space.71 During the romantic duet ‘Half a Sixpence,’ Kipps and Ann, framed in a long shot, kiss in front of the pavilion on the pier (Figure 25.4a). A match-on-action

half a sixpence and the broadway adaptation   581

Figure 25.3  A wedding guest dancing on the bar in the foreground partially obscures the action and draws attention to the camera position in ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop.’ Credit: Half a Sixpence. Co-produced and directed by George Sidney. 145 min. Par. 1967. DVD.

links this shot to a close-up of the couple (Figure 25.4b), but a zoom out then reveals that Kipps and Ann have magically moved to the other side of the pavilion (Figure 25.4c). Dramatic shifts in space are also achieved through wipe-by cuts, in which an object passes in front of the camera, disguising the cut to a new shot. In ‘The Rain’s Got to Fall,’ for instance, Kipps, framed in a medium close-up, passes his straw boater hat directly in front of the lens, and when the frame clears, the camera position has changed and three male dancers leap towards the camera in a long shot. Beyond effecting spatial transformations, however, Sixpence also uses editing to break the cinematic illusion, drawing attention to the film’s construction. For example, ‘Money to Burn,’ in which Kipps celebrates using his inheritance to buy a banjo, climaxes with a series of rhythmic, axial jump cuts, each providing a slightly longer view of the ensemble parading across a large theatre stage. Though the cuts are linked by rough matches on action, bits of choreography are omitted with each new framing, making the editing noticeable in a way that classical narrative filmmaking generally considers ‘incorrect.’ An even more reflexive technique shows a typical day at Shalford’s Emporium, with the apprentices and shop girls assisting customers, while Kipps surreptitiously tries to read a letter from Ann and avoid the miserly Mr Shalford. The entire scene comprises a series of still images presented in quick succession, creating the impression of halting, fragmented movement. Of course, this is what cinema is: a rapid series of images that the human eye and brain render as continuous motion. The Emporium scene thus humorously deconstructs the very nature of the filmic medium. It is in the regatta scene, though, that Half a Sixpence most comprehensively employs modern stylistic techniques, and perhaps tellingly, it was this scene that contemporary critics liked best.72 The race becomes a key narrative turning point when Kipps is asked to row with Hubert Walsingham and thus compete against his fellow apprentices. Should Kipps help Hubert win the race, he will secure both his place in high society and Helen’s affections, but in so doing, he will betray his lifelong friends and the devoted

582   musical theatre screen adaptations (a)

(b)

(c)

Figures 25.4a–c  In ‘Half a Sixpence,’ a match-on-action from a long shot to a close-up hides a change in space. A zoom out then reveals that Kipps and Ann have impossibly jumped to the other side of the pavilion. Credit: Half a Sixpence. Co-produced and directed by George Sidney. 145 min. Par. 1967. DVD.

half a sixpence and the broadway adaptation   583 Ann. Overall, the sequence alternates between the rowers on the Thames and the spectators on the sidelines, but as it progresses, it increasingly strays from Kipps and his personal drama to feature shots of couples enjoying a small fairground or making out in the tall grass. Nearly every shot in this montage is mobile. Tracking shots follow the boats from the shoreline, or dolly ahead of the Shalford shop girls on their bicycles, as they root for the apprentices. A camera mounted on the spinning carousel creates a dizzying effect, while another mounted near the stern of Kipps’s boat is repeatedly splashed with water from his oar (Figure 25.5). Wide and telephoto lenses are routinely alternated, with zooms and rack focuses shifting attention between planes, as when a zoom out from an extreme long shot of the boats on the river brings into the left foreground a couple kissing behind a tree. As the boats near the finish line, with Kipps and Walsingham pulling ahead to win, the editing pace accelerates. The regatta occupies four-and-a-half minutes of screen time, but has 121 shots averaging 1.9 seconds in length, a noticeably quick editing pace for the period.73 The entire sequence is dynamic, building the appropriate tension over the outcome of the race, while also providing comic asides and even brief moments of pathos, as when a rack focus from Ann to Helen, accompanied by a fading out of Ann’s cries of encouragement to Kipps, foreshadows that Helen is about to (temporarily) secure Kipps’s romantic affection, seen in video example 25.1. Significantly, the regatta is accompanied by the song ‘The Race Is On.’ Written specifically for the film and performed by Kipps in voiceover, the song’s lyrics provide his stream of consciousness as he considers what he stands to both gain and lose should he win the race. As mentioned, Renaissance films like The Graduate helped popularize the use of montage sequences accompanied by nondiegetic pop songs commenting on plot or character, and by the early 1970s, many film musicals were presenting songs through voiceover in explicit imitation.74 Arthur  P.  Jacobs, producer of Goodbye Mr Chips (1969), explained to Variety that voiceover songs could ‘comment on

Figure 25.5  Unusual camera angles contribute to the modern dynamism of the regatta scene. Here, water splashes over a camera mounted alongside the boat. Credit: Half a Sixpence. Co-produced and directed by George Sidney. 145 min. Par. 1967. DVD.

584   musical theatre screen adaptations the action, just like in “The Graduate,” ’ and he claimed they would modernize the genre by eliminating its ‘oldfashioned’ convention of characters bursting into song to express their thoughts and feelings.75 A few earlier musicals, including It’s Always Fair Weather (1955) and Gigi (1958), use voiceover songs, and montage sequences in some form can be found throughout the genre’s history. However, musical numbers combining the two devices become noticeably more frequent after 1967, their increased use likely motivated not only by the Renaissance films but also by Richard Lester’s Beatles films (A Hard Day’s Night [1964] and Help! [1965]), which were celebrated for their fast-cut, proto-music video sequences. Presenting ‘The Race Is On’ as a voiceover song laid over a montage thus anticipates what would soon become an aesthetic trend in the musical genre, and it can be hypothesized that this scene was designed to link Sixpence with an emerging popular method for joining music and image on screen. Admittedly, stylistic techniques like jump cuts and zooms create a different overall effect in Sixpence than they do in the often cynical Renaissance films precisely because Sixpence is markedly different in tone. The rapid, disjunctive editing used to present graphic violence in films like Bonnie and Clyde or The Wild Bunch (1969) is here used to celebrate buying a banjo or to generate excitement over a boat race. Perhaps it was this unlikely pairing of modern aesthetics and traditional musical comedy that contemporary critics disliked. Most, including Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times, Archer Winston of the New York Post, and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, found the film over-directed and busy, privileging style over substance.76 Renata Adler of the New York Times acknowledged that much of the film was beautifully shot, but concluded that Sidney’s ‘wildly active’ direction was likely to interest only those ‘in a state that I think is best described as stoned.’77 Adler’s comment gestures towards a likely motivation for Sixpence’s eclectic visual style: to attract the valuable youth audience. If young people—stoned or otherwise— were turning out to see films with novel, art-cinema-derived aesthetics, imparting such an aesthetic to Sixpence could give it a much-needed edge over its competition. In fact, the studio pressbook suggests that Paramount did try to market Sixpence as a Swinging Sixties film, as an alternate advertising layout features Steele surrounded by the corseted chorus girls from ‘Money to Burn’ and the tagline ‘The Sock It to Me Musical Smash of the Year.’78 Given the film’s disappointing financial returns, it is unlikely that the youth audience attended Sixpence in any great number. Nevertheless, the film’s overall aesthetic is best understood as an industrially motivated strategy. Aesthetic norms were shifting in Hollywood, and Sixpence demonstrates how the musical, no less than any other genre, sought to capitalize on stylistic novelty to capture a specific demographic.

Conclusion Half a Sixpence opened strong, making Variety’s list of the top twelve grossing films for both March and April 1968, but consistent underperformance soon caused Paramount to cancel the film’s remaining roadshow engagements and put it into general release.79

half a sixpence and the broadway adaptation   585 Sixpence managed to break even thanks to its popularity in the United Kingdom, where Tommy Steele was better known and where the critique of class hierarchies perhaps had greater resonance, but it was hardly the blockbuster success for which Paramount had hoped.80 Part of the problem was that Sixpence was competing for an increasingly smaller audience against a glut of big-budget roadshow musicals, many of which were adapted from better-known Broadway originals. Indeed, within a few years, the prestige cycle of adaptations would run its course, as all film cycles do.81 As lavish, faithful productions repeatedly underperformed at the box office, Hollywood responded by reshaping the musical genre once again, this time lowering budgets and focusing on rock musicals aimed more directly at the youth audience.82 Roadshowing was also no longer the attraction it had been earlier in the decade, and industry insiders began to question whether it was the films or the method of distribution that was causing so many expensive productions to struggle at the box office. Paramount later concluded that roadshowing Sixpence had been a mistake, hypothesizing that because of the musical’s comparatively small budget, it would have performed better in general release during a major holiday like Easter.83 In its odd way, though, Half a Sixpence makes industrial sense and helps nuance the common claim that the musical genre in the immediate post-studio period fell into decline simply because it was out of touch with filmmaking trends and audience ­expectations. On the contrary, Sixpence is the way it is precisely because of Paramount’s attempts to position the musical in line with multiple contemporary trends. Sixpence’s curious mixture of blockbuster spectacle, fidelity to its Broadway source material, and stylistic experimentation evidence Hollywood’s long-standing interest in combining filmmaking strategies in the hopes of attracting as wide an audience as possible. For Paramount, wedding the established prestige cycle of adaptations, known to be popular with families, to the youth-oriented aesthetic of the emerging Hollywood Renaissance likely seemed smart, and indeed Sixpence was neither the first nor the last musical to try it. Camelot (1967), Finian’s Rainbow (1968), Sweet Charity (1969), and Fiddler on the Roof (1971) likewise fuse these two production trends. They, like Half a Sixpence, demonstrate that the changes the Hollywood musical underwent after the break-up of the studio system were not missteps towards decline, but rather calculated attempts by the film industry to reshape the genre to the needs of a changing marketplace.

Notes 1. Matthew Kennedy, Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 119. See also, for example, David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979, History of the American Cinema, vol. 9 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Thomas Hischak, Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical When It Went to Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004); Julie Hubbert, ‘The Recession Soundtrack: From Albums to Auteurs, Songs to Serialism (1960–1977)—Introduction,’ in Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011): 289–314; Ethan Mordden, The Hollywood Musical (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981).

586   musical theatre screen adaptations 2. Roger Ebert, review of Half a Sixpence, Chicago Sun-Times, 23 May 1968. http://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/half-a-sixpence-1968; Renata Adler, ‘Screen: Out of Focus, Out of Touch,’ review of Half a Sixpence, New York Times, 21 February 1968, p. 60. 3. Stuart Byron, ‘Roadshow: Glory or Gory?’ Variety, 5 February 1969, pp. 3, 34. 4. Steven Cohan, ‘Introduction: Musicals of the Studio Era,’ in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (London: Routledge, 2002), 13; Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959, History of the American Cinema, vol. 7 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 219, 222; ‘Film Musicals Victimized by Current Inflation,’ Variety, 22 April 1959, p. 3; ‘Ignore Europe, Shoot Tuners,’ Variety, 7 June 1961, p. 7. 5. Lev, The Fifties, 8, 147; Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960–1969, History of American Cinema, vol. 8 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 10, 40; ‘Films Out of World Touch,’ Variety, 9 February 1955, p. 23; ‘H’wood Figures Foreign Taste Factor in Story,’ Variety, 10 August 1955, pp. 3, 16. 6. ‘Musical Films Hard Sell Abroad,’ Variety, 30 November 1955, pp. 1, 15; ‘Europe Yawns; Tunepix Off,’ Variety, 26 April 1962, p. 28. 7. ‘Video Dead against Screen Musicals, Yet Studios Neglect ’Em - Geo. Stoll,’ Variety, 15 February 1958, p. 17; ‘H’wood’s Last Stand: Musicals,’ Variety, 9 August 1967, p. 22. 8. Lev, The Fifties, 107–125. 9. Steve Neale, ‘Hollywood Blockbusters: Historical Dimensions,’ in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer (London: Routledge, 2003), 50; Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry, vol. 2: 1951–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 132. 10. Neale, ‘Hollywood Blockbusters,’ 50–51; Balio, United Artists, 207–208. 11. Balio, United Artists, 125; ‘Legit-to-Films Trend Still Hefty; 5 B’way Examples,’ Variety, 13 July 1955, pp. 3, 22; ‘Hit Plays, Novels Priced Sky-High for Hollywood,’ Variety, 10 August 1955, p. 1. 12. Mark  N.  Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 4; George Reddick, ‘The Evolution of the Original Cast Album,’ in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 184–186. 13. Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth  L.  Wollman, ‘After the ‘Golden Age,’ in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 113; ‘U.S.  Musicals Not Always “Poison,” ’ Variety, 24 October 1956, p. 5; George Marton, ‘ “Bottle It”—Prescription for Marketing Int’l Hits,’ Variety, 7 January 1959, pp. 13, 54. 14. Thomas Hischak, Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical When It Went to Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 1–2, 19–20; Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, ‘The Filmed Musical,’ in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 140. 15. Sternfeld and Wollman, ‘After the “Golden Age,” ’ 112–113; Frank Segers, ‘Angels, Angles & Anxiety,’ Variety, 5 January 1972, pp. 141, 156; Grant, Rise and Fall, 306–307. 16. ‘Hit Plays, Novels Priced Sky-High for Hollywood,’ Variety, 10 August 1955, p. 1. 17. Letter from Norman Jewison to Fred Goldberg, Vice President, United Artists, Norman Jewison Collection, box 33, folder 4, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. 18. Amanda Ann Klein, American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 11.

half a sixpence and the broadway adaptation   587 19. Vincent Canby, ‘ “Fiddler” on a Grand Scale,’ New York Times, 4 November 1971, p. 52. 20. Rich., ‘Shows Abroad: Half a Sixpence,’ Variety, 10 April 1963, p. 60; ‘London “Sixpence” Foldo; Due for B’way in March,’ Variety, 14 October 1964, p. 61; Harold Myers, ‘London Crix Pick “Succeed,” ’ Variety, 3 July 1963, pp. 53, 56; Harold Myers, ‘What London and Broadway Both Prefer: Boff Musicals,’ Variety, 6 January 1966, p. 243. 21. ‘Writing New Songs for “Half-Sixpence” on B’way,’ Variety, 4 November 1964, p. 62; Hobe., ‘Shows on Broadway: Half a Sixpence,’ Variety, 28 April 1965, p. 62. 22. ‘Victor’s Quest for New Cast Album Stuff Sparked “Sixpence” B’way Click,’ Variety, 28 July 1968, pp. 91–92; Jesse Gross, ‘Zero, Matthau B’way “Bests,” ’ Variety, 9 June 1965, pp. 1, 62. 23. ‘Victor’s Quest for New Cast Album Stuff Sparked “Sixpence” B’way Click,’ Variety, 28 July 1968, pp. 91–92. 2 4. David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979, History of the American Cinema, vol. 9 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 305; ‘Paramount Production Pace Despite Its Own “War-Drain” of Resources,’ Variety, 10 November 1965, pp. 7, 18; ‘Par at Americana, G&W at Houston Seeking Merger Approval on Oct. 19; 154-pp Proxy Statement Backgrounds,’ Variety, 21 September 1966, pp. 3, 17. 25. The film rights for Camelot sold for $2 million and the final budget was $15 million. The rights for Dolly also sold for $2 million, and the final budget ran up to $25 million (Kennedy, Roadshow, 26, 63, 86). 26. ‘Chatter: Hollywood,’ Variety, 11 August 1965, p. 54; ‘ “Half a Sixpence,” with Steele, to Par.,’ Variety, 24 November 1965, p. 4; Kennedy, Roadshow, 117. 27. ‘Hollywood Production Pulse,’ Variety, 28 September 1966, p. 22; John Mundy, The British Musical Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 212; ‘Tunepix: High Risk,’ Variety, 8 January 1969, p. 15. 28. ‘Chatter: London,’ Variety, 1 November 1967, p. 61; ‘New York Sound Track,’ Variety, 8 November 1967, p. 20; Advertisement, Variety, 3 January 1968, pp. 13–16; ‘Film Party to Aid Kennedy Games,’ New York Times, 16 February 1968, p. 25; ‘New York Sound Track,’ Variety, 21 February 1968, p. 26. 29. Advertisement, Variety, 3 January 1968, pp. 13–16. 30. ‘New York Sound Track,’ Variety, 7 February 1968, p. 20; Paramount Film Service Ltd, Half a Sixpence Paramount Press Book and Merchandising Manual, 1967, 2–3, author’s personal collection; ‘New York Sound Track,’ Variety, 28 June 1967, p. 16; ‘New York Sound Track,’ Variety, 6 March 1968, p. 30. 31. Sixpence Press Book, 9–12, 14–18. 32. Mundy, British Musical Film, 166–176, 213. 33. Hope., ‘Shows on Broadway: Half a Sixpence,’ Variety, 28 April 1965, p. 62; Allen Hughes, ‘A Most Convincing Dancer,’ New York Times, 29 August 1965, p. X12. 34. Charles Champlin, ‘Movie Review: “Half a Sixpence” Opens at Chinese,’ review of Half a Sixpence, Los Angeles Times, 23 February 1968, p. C7. 35. Jesse Gross, ‘This Is Replacement and Holiday Time for B’way’s Show Casts, Too,’ Variety, 18 August 1965, p. 53; Tomo., ‘Legit Followup: Half a Sixpence (Broadhurst, N.Y.),’ Variety, 30 March 1966, p. 86. 36. ‘Chatter: Hollywood,’ Variety, 11 August 1965, p. 54. 37. ‘Ask Voice-Doubles Forego Publicity; Did Marni Cost Audrey an Oscar?’ Variety, 28 February 1968, p.1; Tim Anderson, ‘Which Voice Best Becomes the Property? Tie-Ups, Intertexts, and Versioning in the Production of My Fair Lady,’ Spectator 17, no. 2 (Spring/ Summer 1997): 76–77.

588   musical theatre screen adaptations 38. Murf., review of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, Variety Film Reviews, 1907–1980, vol. 11, 1964–1967 (New York: Garland, 1983); Abel., review of Funny Girl, Variety, 25 September 1968, Variety Film Reviews, 1907–1980, vol. 12, 1968–1970 (New York: Garland, 1983). 39. ‘20 Years of “Sudden” Success,’ Sixpence Press Book, 7; ‘Football Mania Drives Sixpence Crew Crazy,’ Sixpence Press Book, 6; ‘Cockney Poet,’ Sixpence Press Book, 8. 40. Ebert, review of Half a Sixpence. 41. Champlin, review of Half a Sixpence. 4 2. Monaco, The Sixties, 11–15. 4 3. Mundy, British Musical Film, 210–211. 44. ‘Par O’Seas Hatch by Dozens,’ Variety, 26 April 1967, pp. 3, 36. 45. ‘  “Sixpence” Pic Fussy on Turn-of-Century Decor at British Locations,’ Variety, 28 September 1966, p. 25; ‘International Sound Track: London,’ Variety, 29 March 1967, p. 29; Robert F. Hawkins, ‘Filmusicals’ O’Seas Accent,’ Variety, 3 May 1967, pp. 5, 78. 46. ‘ “Sixpence” Pic Fussy on Turn-of-Century Decor at British Locations,’ Variety, 28 September 1966, p. 25. 47. ‘Living Backgrounds Predominate “Sixpence,” ’ Sixpence Press Book, 6. 4 8. Balio, United Artists, 206–207. 49. Sally K. Marks, ‘ “Half a Sixpence” Worth Every Penny,’ Los Angeles Times, 10 January 1967, p. D10. 50. ‘Living Backgrounds Predominate “Sixpence,” ’ Sixpence Press Book, 6. 51. Monaco, The Sixties, 182–186; Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of New Hollywood (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 1–4. 52. Monaco, The Sixties, 67, 71, 74. 53. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 121–144. 5 4. Bordwell, Hollywood Tells It, 146–147, 158; Steve Neale, ‘ “The Last Good Time We Ever Had?”: Revising the Hollywood Renaissance,’ in Contemporary American Cinema, ed. Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond (Maidenhead, Berkshire: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 91. 55. See, for example, Noël Carroll, ‘The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond),’ October (Spring 1982): 51–81; John Belton and Lyle Tector, ‘The Bionic Eye,’ Film Comment (September/October 1980): 11–14, 16–17, 79; Jackson Burgess, ‘Review of McCabe and Mrs. Miller,’ Film Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Winter 1971–1972): 49–53. 5 6. Eric Hoyt, Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 113–119, 176, 180–184, 191; Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 327–328, 404; Monaco, The Sixties, 44, 54–58; David  A.  Cook, ‘Auteur Cinema and the “Film Generation,” ’ in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 13–14. 57. Neale, ‘Last Good Time,’ 92; Thompson and Bordwell, Film History, 478, 484–486; Cook, ‘Auteur Cinema,’ 13–14; Hoyt, Hollywood Vault, 151, 189, 194. 58. Bordwell, Hollywood Tells It, 141–144; Monaco, The Sixties, 70, 74–76, 82, 86–87, 70; Thompson and Bordwell, Film History, 475–476. 59. Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson, The Songs of Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 236–240; Jeff Smith, Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press,1998), 158–160.

half a sixpence and the broadway adaptation   589 60. Bordwell, Hollywood Tells It, 120; Monaco, The Sixties, 84; Thompson and Bordwell, Film History, 478. 61. Neale, ‘Last Good Time,’ 99–100, 107; Mark Shiel, ‘American Cinema, 1965–70,’ in Contemporary American Cinema, ed. Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond (Maidenhead, Berkshire: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 12–26; Harris, Pictures at a Revolution, 3, 421; Kennedy, Roadshow, 125. 62. Quoted in Kennedy, Roadshow, 31. 63. Bordwell, Hollywood Tells It, 158. 64. ‘Sidney #1,’ Variety, 4 January 1967, p. 71. 65. Eric Monder, George Sidney: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 19, 36–49. 66. Monder, George Sidney, 5. 67. Monder, George Sidney, 8–16. 68. George Morris, ‘George Sidney: A Matter of Taste,’ Film Comment 13, no. 6 (November– December 1977): 57. 69. Andrew Sarris, ‘George Sidney,’ in American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968; Cambridge: DaCapo Press, 1996), 185. 70. Monder, George Sidney, 16–17. 7 1. Monder, George Sidney, 19. 72. Champlin, review of Half a Sixpence; Otta., review of Half a Sixpence, Variety, 27 December 1967, p. 6; Adler, review of Half a Sixpence. 73. Bordwell, Hollywood Tells It, 121. 74. Thompson and Bordwell, Film History, 476; Furia and Patterson, Songs of Hollywood, 236–237; Smith, Sounds of Commerce, 158–160. 75. Stuart Byron, ‘Jacobs: “Mr. Chips” Sez Goodbye to Oldfashioned Filmusical Format,’ Variety, 11 September 1968, p. 21. 76. Monder, George Sidney, 234; Ebert, review of Half a Sixpence; Champlin, review of Half a Sixpence. 77. Adler, review of Half a Sixpence. 78. Print Advertisement, Sixpence Press Book, 2. 79. ‘National Boxoffice Survey,’ Variety, 28 February 1968, p. 15; ‘March’s Golden Dozen in U.S.,’ Variety, 3 April 1968, p. 19; ‘Top U.S. April Grossers,’ Variety, 8 May 1968, p. 11; ‘New York Sound Track,’ Variety, 8 May 1968, p. 32; ‘Clutch of Roadshows in Offing; Detail Par’s Marketing Plans for Its Youth-Oriented “Romeo & Juliet,” ’ Variety, 14 August 1968, pp. 5, 26. 80. Stuart Byron, ‘Roadshow: Glory or Gory?’ Variety, 5 February 1969, pp. 3, 34; Mundy, British Musical Film, 214. 81. Klein, American Film Cycles, 35. 82. Hollywood had been producing teen-oriented musicals featuring popular music, including rock ‘n’ roll, since the mid-1950s. These were mainly low-budget quickies for drive-ins (e.g., American International Pictures’ Beach Party series), whereas the rock musicals of the 1970s were generally mid-budget productions, aimed at older teens and young adults (e.g., A Star is Born [1976]). 83. Stuart Byron, ‘Roadshow: Glory or Gory?’ Variety, 5 February 1969, pp. 3, 34.

chapter 26

The Producers a n d   H a irspr ay The Hazards and Rewards of Recursive Adaptation Dean Adams

Broadway musicals have long relied on adaptation for source material. Relatively few musicals, like A Chorus Line or Book of Mormon, have been created from scratch; most have great novels (Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera), plays (Green Grow the Lilacs [Oklahoma!], Liliom [Carousel]), or films (Billy Elliot, Smiles of a Summer Night [A Little Night Music]) as their source material. While adapting movie scripts into Broadway musicals is nothing new, as Broadway musicals have become more expensive to produce and have had more corporate influence over their financing, producers have taken fewer risks in the selection of material for adaptation. The influence of the Walt Disney Company, with successful musicals appropriate for families based on its film library (Beauty and the Beast, Newsies, The Lion King), has led other producing entities to look at shifting Broadway audience demographics to guide and possibly predict which shows will do well. Similarly, Hollywood has long depended on Broadway for source material and talent for its musicals. The early years of Hollywood took Broadway shows, stars, and writers and quickly produced cinematic adaptations. The 1936 film version of Anything Goes, for example, was released fourteen months after the Broadway opening. In the last four decades, however, only a handful of Broadway musicals have made the transition to film. A string of Hollywood musical bombs of the late 1960s, including Doctor Doolittle (1967), Finian’s Rainbow (1968), Hello Dolly (1969), and Paint Your Wagon (1969)—each of which lost millions of dollars—set a pattern that made Hollywood producers think

592   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations twice about producing a big-budget musical.1 Matthew Kennedy commented on this in Roadshow: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s: What happened to that once supreme film genre? I have reconciled my childhood memories of the late 1960s musicals with the adult realization that most of them aren’t very good. The misjudgments piled up like a freeway collision disaster. Broadway adaptations were often literal and stage bound, as though anything too cinematic would destroy rather than enhance artistic integrity. People who had no business starring in musicals were hired simply because they were movie stars. And genuine talent in front of and behind the camera was not well used, much less nurtured as it was in the Studio Era.2

In this century, there were fewer than twenty-five live-action musical films from 2000 to 2015, in part because the genre, like the western, has fallen out of favour. Perhaps contemporary film audiences are used to the hyper-realistic environments that are rendered in even the most outlandish science-fiction worlds and struggle to accept musical theatre’s more metaphoric convention of having characters sing their emotional thoughts. Another theory is that since the beginnings of rock and roll (and now hip hop), movie musicals have failed to embrace new musical styles that have greater popular appeal. Conversely, during the past two decades Broadway has turned much more often to the movies for content. From 2000 to 2015, there were some 185 Broadway musicals produced; forty-nine of these were revivals.3 The familiarity of hit musicals from the past is one way of encouraging a larger box office advance from an increasingly fickle audience.4 Of the remaining productions, forty-five were based on Hollywood films— about 30 percent of the total and 40 percent of the nonrevival new musical productions. Since the early 1990s this pattern has accelerated with the advent of Walt Disney stage productions of its animated films: Beauty and the Beast (1994), The Lion King (1997), Tarzan (2006), The Little Mermaid (2008), and Aladdin (2014). While many recent Broadway musicals have been derived from nonmusical films (Big Fish (2013), Kinky Boots (2012), Bring It On: The Musical (2011), Billy Elliot (2008), Legally Blonde (2007), Big (1996), few of these works have made it back to the cinema as musicals. Such ‘recursive transfers’ as Sweet Charity, Silk Stockings, A Little Night Music, Nine, and Little Shop of Horrors had their roots in cinema, became successful Broadway musicals, and returned to the multiplex in musical form. Nearly all lost money as musical films. Still, in the early 2000s, buoyed by the success of the movie musical version of Chicago, both Hairspray and The Producers, originally based on nonmusical films of the same titles, inspired new Hollywood musical versions even while the original stage versions were still playing on the Great White Way. A comparison of the film and Broadway incarnations of Hairspray and The Producers reveals contrasting patterns of content, performance adaptation, casting, length, and audience demographics. The success or failure of each version reflects the changing tastes of the American musical audience in the twenty-first century and the challenges

The Producers and Hairspray   593 of the musical theatre marketplace. An analysis of the history, artists, and cultures of these films and stage productions reveals the particular risks from recursive transfers. Why was the Hollywood musical adaptation of Hairspray so successful while The Producers was not? Are there common elements that can predict the success of a Hollywood to Broadway to Hollywood musical journey?

Initial Sources The Producers was Mel Brooks’s first film in 1968. The story follows the exploits of Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom as they dupe investors into collectively investing more than 100 percent in an intentional flop. The plan backfires when the musical they create, a tribute called Springtime for Hitler, becomes a hit and they are unable to pay back investors the earnings on the oversold shares. Brooks had been a writer for Sid Caesar and others in the Golden Age of Television, and later in the 1970s would create a string of film parodies that were both critical and box office successes, including Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. The original film of The Producers, however, was not universally well received. Renata Adler in the New York Times called the film ‘shoddy and gross and cruel.’5 Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic wrote that the film ‘bloats into sogginess’6 and the venerable Pauline Kael called the effort ‘amateurishly crude.’7 Yet over the years, the film has gained in stature and reputation and has nurtured a cult following. The American Film Institute has placed it as number eleven in its ‘top one hundred funniest films.’8 Brooks won the Academy Award for his screenplay, and Gene Wilder was nominated for best supporting actor. The performances of Wilder and Zero Mostel, both accomplished stage actors, were loud, theatrical, and over the top. This contrasts with the late 1960s’ shift in cinematic acting styles in Hollywood films, with Cool Hand Luke, In the Heat of the Night, and The Graduate all highlighting the method acting style brought to cinematic prominence by Marlon Brando and James Dean a decade earlier. A new Hollywood ratings system also encouraged a more sophisticated variety of films with adult themes. Conversely, in The Producers, Brooks, Wilder, and Mostel were reviving a much earlier acting style—the broad vaudeville techniques of the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, and Laurel and Hardy. While The Producers was relatively inexpensive to make—somewhat less than $1 million—it made only a small profit on its initial release, earning $1.2 million from a handful of screens. It has subsequently done reasonably well in rentals, DVDs and rereleases, earning shy of $2 million—hardly a flop, but not a runaway success either.9 While Mel Brooks worked his way into the mainstream, John Waters would describe himself as a Hollywood outsider. His early films gave birth to an acting company he called ‘The Dreamlanders’ that were featured in cult films ranging from the outrageous Pink Flamingos in the 1970s to the more mainstream Polyester and Hairspray. The latter was

594   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations created on a budget of $2 million, a substantial amount for a John Waters film and significantly larger than many of his earlier works—Pink Flamingos was reportedly made on a budget of $10,00010—but much less than the studio blockbusters of the 1970s and 1980s. The quirky Beetlejuice, also released in 1988, had a budget of $15 million.11 Like many of Waters’s films, Hairspray was set in his hometown of Baltimore, in this case in 1963. The film focused on Tracy Turnblad, a plump but engaging young woman who dreams of being on The Corny Collins Show, a segregated teen dance programme that devotes one show a month to ‘Negro Day.’ Waters based the programme on the ‘Buddy Deane Show,’ the real-life Baltimore dance show that he had danced on in the early sixties.12 After Tracy dances her way onto the show, her experiences with prejudice in both television and at her school led her to protest the idea of ‘separate but equal.’ In the original film, her mother Edna is played by Divine, who also plays the bigot Arvin Hodgepile. While Hairspray is generally considered one of Waters’s most accessible films (and one of the few to receive a PG rating—most range between R and X), it still has many camp moments, such as when the director appears as a crazed psychiatrist zapping Penny with a psychedelic cattle prod. Commercially, the film did moderately well, earning over $6 million and receiving generally positive reviews. Janet Maslin in the New York Times noted that the film was ‘bright and bouncy’ with ‘the actors at their best when they avoid exaggeration and remain weirdly sincere.’13 While the original Hairspray was a comedy, it has serious themes—though delivered in John Waters fashion: ‘For me it was always: the outsider wins, and integration prevails. The fat girl stood for gay, black, crippled—all outsiders that society rejects.’14 Even though Waters claimed he wasn’t trying to create a commercial hit, it had been eight years since he made Polyester, and he was looking to do something ‘different.’ So even though the film is quirky, its dance-show setting and kids as heroes helped build a modest ‘family’ following beyond the faithful Waters audience. The release also coincided with the beginnings of a robust VHS rental market, and in 1989 Hairspray was released on VHS and was available in rental stores, which helped build its following. In fact, producer Margot Lion first got the idea to produce the film as a Broadway musical when she rented a ten-year-old VHS copy of the film.15 Both Hairspray and The Producers were low-budget cult films that were modestly successful but then became Broadway musical hits. Using cult films as source material is no guarantee for Broadway success: for every successful Little Shop of Horrors, there is a box office failure like Cry-Baby. Cult films provide musical creators with key ingredients: larger-than-life characters with big emotional moments and plots that can be condensed into a two-act musical form. Successful cult films also have a devoted fan base that help introduce the work to a mainstream audience. The adaptation process to create twentyfirst-century Broadway musical adaptations and then recursive Hollywood musical versions illustrates the many commercial and aesthetic choices that must be made to find an audience for each version. The creators of these musical stage shows and films took markedly different paths.

The Producers and Hairspray   595

Structure and Adaptation in The Producers Mel Brooks, encouraged by such titans as Jerry Herman and David Geffen,16 began writing a musical version of The Producers in 1998, thirty years after the film had premiered. The musical numbers ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and ‘Prisoners of Love’ were kept largely intact, and Brooks created seventeen new musical numbers that would adapt the storytelling into the standard two-act musical theatre form. The timeframe was changed from the original film’s contemporary 1968 setting to 1959, putting the show squarely during the Broadway’s musical ‘Golden Age.’ Many of the jokes in the lyrics pay homage to Broadway’s great stars and hits. The now-anachronistic 1968 character of Lorenzo St Dubois (LSD), the hippie who plays Hitler in the play-within-a-play, is eliminated and the ‘playwright’ Franz is cast as Hitler. The shift in period reflects the shift of tone as well. The darker comedy of the original 1968 film is replaced by a much brighter atmosphere and visual style. The small, cramped quarters of Bialystock’s office in the 1968 film is replaced with a grander, more elegant space. Meehan and Brooks also write more adult jokes for the libretto in the 2001 stage version; for example, the sexual game Max and his little old lady play in the 1968 film is ‘The Innocent Little Milkmaid and the Naughty Stable Boy.’ Onstage in 2001, it’s ‘The Virgin Milkmaid and the Well-Hung Stable Boy.’ The opening number in both musicals creates the world of the play and answers the traditional question, ‘What is this play about?’17 The Producers film and stage musical versions begin in 1959 on Shubert Alley with Max Bialystock presenting another (spoof) flop, ‘Funny Boy.’ The ‘Opening Night’ number segues into the ‘The King of Broadway’ solo where Bialystock declares that ‘I will be on top again, hey!’ Max’s ‘The King of Broadway’ lament was filmed, but not used in the final version of the 2005 movie adaptation. Stroman explained that ‘The King of Broadway’ was removed because ‘I felt we needed to get to the line where the whole plot begins as soon as possible.’18 This, along with the cutting of the late-in-act 2 ‘Where Did We Go Right,’ demonstrated that the movie musical version would start faster and end sooner than the Broadway version. These ‘bookend’ cuts, however, were the only substantial changes to the book and score from the Broadway musical version. The act 1, scene 2 exposition scene is virtually identical to the original film, and it is the longest nonmusical section of the Broadway version. This serves to introduce the lead male characters, their quirks and charm, and to clarify the conceit of the plot: that producing a bomb can be more profitable than a hit show, provided it’s oversold to investors and closes quickly. Since stage musicals traditionally generally require two-act structures, the Broadway ‘Springtime in Hitler’ showstopper/climax must occur as late as possible in the second act to minimize the falling action. The build of the first act focuses on bringing the creators of the sure-fire flop together and raising the money from the ‘little old lady’

596   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations investors. Stroman’s Broadway act 1 musical finale is an ingenious dancing chorus of old women and their walkers, with Max collecting checks from them as they line up and collapse on each other in a domino fashion. Meehan and Brooks honor the traditional musical theatre structure in the Broadway version while parodying it for the final act 1 tableau (this moment is cut in the film): ROGER, CARMEN, and THE TEAM now suddenly appear in spotlight and join ULA, FRANZ, and MAX and LEO in simultaneously singing four separate parts in a manner similar to the quintet at the end of Act One in West Side Story.19

Act 2 opens with Ula’s redecoration of the office in all white, an opportunity to ‘clean up’ the mess from act 1 as well as provide an appropriate environment for Leo and Ula to flirt like teenagers and dance like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. This provides the beginning of the split between Max and Leo that becomes the true tension of the second act. Springtime for Hitler is auditioned and prepared, and finally the show-within-a-show is presented in act 2, scene 4. The inevitable ‘success’ of the show creates the comic climax but does not resolve the plot. The 1968 source film takes only fourteen minutes to tie up loose ends: the reading of the reviews, Franz’s attempted shooting of Leo and Max followed by his attempted suicide, Max’s instructions to ‘kill the actors,’ the attempt to blow up the theatre, the courtroom scene, and the ‘Prisoners of Love’ finale—and there is even time for Ula’s bikini dance. Mercifully, the musical versions cut both Ula’s bikini dance and the attempt to blow up the theatre, and replaced them instead with Ula and Leo’s decision to escape to Rio after Max is arrested. The musical versions also double the amount of time to the conclusion (about twenty-eight minutes) and provide Max with an eleven o’clock number in the holding cell where he can sing ‘Betrayed,’ recounting all of the events of the show in rapid-fire fashion, while reemphasizing the betrayal of his (business) partner. The love triangle is resolved after Leo returns and is sentenced to prison with Max where they can create the show ‘Prisoners of Love’ in anticipation of their inevitable opening at the Shubert Theatre after they are released. The final image is of Max and Leo walking into the sunset together, their ‘bromance’ preserved since Ula exited with the ‘Prisoners of Love’ chorus. Susan Stroman restaged her original work for film, and many of the original creative team (including costume designer William Ivey Long) reprised their Broadway visual contributions for film. Stroman chose Old Hollywood head-to-toe framing of musical numbers, including a Busby Berkeley over-the-head shot for ‘Springtime for Hitler,’ reprising the framing from the original 1968 film (see video example 26.1). While the film ‘opened up’ to feature New York City landmarks, most visual moments, such as the old ladies with walkers and the water fountain fanfare, were exact replicas of the Broadway adaptation. There were techniques reminiscent of classic Hollywood musicals, yet there were few self-referential textual moments that were based in cinema; instead, the inside jokes and visual puns remained Broadway-centric. Mel Brooks’s writing often features male duos, with one experienced tyrant and one weak or neurotic man, working together to overcome some major obstacle to triumph

The Producers and Hairspray   597 against society—even if that means committing a crime. This pattern emerges in Twelve Chairs, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. Women in this world are unapologetic stereotypes, either sex objects or grotesque older women. Ula in the original film is nothing more than an object of desire as she flirts with both Max and Leo by dancing seductively to 1960s funk music, and later strips down to nothing more than a bikini. Her two-dimensional type is replaced by a (slightly) more developed character in the musical versions by giving Ula more motivation (to be in the show) and more interaction with the two men (Max leers while Leo learns to flirt). Eventually, Leo marries Ula and they run off to Rio, but Leo’s conscience for his ‘business partner’ brings him to the courtroom to try to save Max. While the ‘blond bombshell’ type evolved to a more complete character in the musical versions, the gay characters did not. Stuart Kaminsky points out that Brooks’s frequent use of outrageous and flamboyant gay stereotypes distracts the audience from any suspicion that male leads have any sexual tension between them: It is interesting that Brooks always tries to distance himself from the homosexual implications of his central theme [characters] by including scenes in which overtly homosexual characters are ridiculed. It is particularly striking that these characters are, in The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and The Twelve Chairs, stage or film directors.20

While Brooks claims to be an equal opportunity offender, the black and Jewish characters in his films are often more generously written, and they often prevail over the absurd circumstances. In the Broadway musical version of The Producers, the Black Man Accountant opens the ‘unhappy’ section of ‘I Want to Be a Producer’ by singing in ‘Old Man River’–style: OH, I DEBTS ALL DE MORNIN’ AN’I CREDITS ALL DE EB’NIN UNTIL DEM LEDGERS BE RIGHTTTT . . .21

In the 2005 movie version, this introduction was cut, even though the Black Accountant is seated in the same place in the movie as he was on Broadway. While Broadway audiences would appreciate the Show Boat reference and parody, the effect might be lost on (or misinterpreted by) the 2005 movie audience. However, there was no toning down the gay stereotypes between the 1968 film, the Broadway adaptation, and the 2005 film. The characters Roger de Bris and Carmen Ghia, played in the musical adaptations by Gary Beach and Roger Bart, are flamboyant gay characters who reach the pinnacle of absurdity in the musical number ‘Keep It Gay’ that includes the anachronistic appearance of The Village People’s sailor, cop, biker, and Indian characters in the final dance. Even though Broadway has long been associated with gay men who are its principal artists, creators, and performers, shows as recent as Book of Mormon (Elder McKinley), Something Rotten (Brother Jeremiah), and Spamalot (Lancelot) continue the tradition of broad comedy that The Producers showcases at the expense of the gay characters in the show. Responding to this kind of humour, Nathan

598   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations Lane said, ‘There are people who can’t wait to be offended. Then they wonder why they are not invited to more parties. Who has time for that? Mel’s take on homosexuals is that we’re these flamboyant extraterrestrials.’22 Brooks reflected in 2014 on shifting audience attitudes and how Hollywood plays it much safer: The prejudices or whatever, the restrictions, should have thoroughly diluted by now, and here we are—it’s amazing. We’re playing it safe. I don’t think the individual person is playing it safe, but I think the organizations—let’s call them television networks or studios—they’re playing it safe. They don’t want to get sued. They don’t want to lose the Latino endorsement or the black endorsement or the Jewish endorsement.23

Brooks doesn’t include the ‘LGBT endorsement’ in his list, but another film released in the same year as The Producers in 2005, Brokeback Mountain, showed that audiences might be ready for a more serious embodiment of gay characters: it grossed over $177 million worldwide on a budget of $14 million.24

Structure and Adaptation in Hairspray While Mel Brooks supervised every word and lyric in The Producers, John Waters declined the option to write the book for Hairspray when producer Margo Lion approached him in the spring of 1999: ‘What I realized was that the play had to become something different from the movie for it to work. It had to cross over into something else. I think I would have been crazy to do that [write the book] . . . and I think the writers did a great job. I was in the middle of writing a movie.’25 The Broadway Hairspray shares one of The Producers’ book authors, Thomas Meehan, who, with Mark O’Donnell, refashioned the original film into a two-act musical. Songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman created a score of twenty-one musical numbers that replaced the original movie’s dance tracks. The score pays homage to early sixties rhythm-and-blues and pop music but also infuses it with a big Broadway sound. Its transition to the Broadway stage as a musical in 2003 cleverly toned down some of the more subversive parts of the original film while highlighting the politics of race, gender, and sexuality in a nonconfrontational musical theatre idiom. New Line Cinema, which holds the rights to the original film, became interested in developing the Broadway show into a musical film soon after the show won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical.26 Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, the successful producers of the Oscar-winning Chicago, were hired to supervise the production. Their experience in producing screen versions of Broadway shows includes the live television broadcasts of The Sound of Music and The Wiz Live! They also supervised the 2016 television

The Producers and Hairspray   599 adaptation of Hairspray Live! Hairspray’s original book authors Thomas Meeham and Mark O’Donnell wrote the first screenplay draft, but they were replaced for the 2007 film version by Leslie Dixon,27 a screenwriter with extensive experience in family comedies (Overboard, Mrs Doubtfire). Her script remained faithful to the plot of the Broadway show but removed much of the campiness. Hiring Dixon was the first of many decisions to select Hollywood professionals instead of the original Broadway creative team to supervise the making of the film. Production began in late 2004, about the same time as The Producers. Adam Shankman, a director/choreographer with roots in music videos, was hired to stage the new version, and he met with John Waters early in the process. Waters gave him the same advice on adaptation that he had given the Broadway team, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t do what the play did. You've gotta do your own thing.’28 While the 1968 version of The Producers contained two original songs by Mel Brooks, and both were retained in the musical versions, John Waters’s Hairspray featured twenty-eight popular songs in its soundtrack, ranging from ‘Day-O’ to ‘The Madison.’ For the Broadway musical, these recorded songs were jettisoned and a new score was created by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. The structure for the new Hairspray, like The Producers, followed traditional conventions of musical theatre construction. Unlike The Producers, there were more substantial plot and character changes in the Broadway musical: Velma von Tussle becomes a composite of Amber’s Mother, Tammy the Stage Manager, and Arvin Hodgepile (Divine’s male alter ego). The race riot that ends act 1 in the musical version (‘Big, Blond, and Beautiful’) sets up the ‘Big Dollhouse’ opening for act 2. Tracy escapes from prison rather than getting a governor’s pardon. Seaweed frees Penny from her bedroom prison creating the ‘Without Love’ song opportunity. The 2007 Hairspray musical film opens with a West Side Story–like flyover of the city. The opening number, ‘Good Morning Baltimore,’ reveals everything we need to know about the world surrounding the musical and its protagonist Tracy. In the 2007 film, director Shankman has Tracy arriving at school on top of a garbage truck mirroring the way that Barbra Streisand appears on a New York Harbor tugboat while singing ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ in Funny Girl. Unlike the musical version of The Producers, the visual references point to Golden Age film musicals, not stage productions. Dana Heller, in her comprehensive critical edition Hairspray, catalogues a number of similar cinematic reference points, including ‘Without Love’ which recalls Judy Garland’s love note to Clark Gable ‘You Made Me Love You.’ The 2007 film musical ending resolves a number of plot moments differently: Little Inez winning, Velma getting fired, and Amber appearing to spark an interest in an African American boy were all crucial and symbolic moments for the new film version. Tracy’s ‘victory’ in this version is winning Link to conclude the heteronormative fantasy that love transcends size, and Little Inez’s surprise victory (a surprise even to those who know the Broadway show) concludes the fantasy that soon skin colour won’t matter in America. This adaptive evolution and significant changes in Hairspray are in sharp contrast to the adaptations of The Producers, which stick closely to the original. Some adaptation theorists state that fidelity is the most important criterion to use in analyzing adaptations

600   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations (Leitch 2003). Leitch argues, however, that ‘Fidelity to its source text—whether it is conceived as success in re-creating specific textual details or the effect of the whole—is a hopelessly fallacious measure of a given adaptation’s value because it is unattainable, undesirable, and theoretically possible only in a trivial sense.’29 Given Hairspray’s successes at each stage of significant adaptation and The Producers’ failure as a faithful reproduction, faithfulness to the source material(s) is not necessary for popular success.

Running Times and Audiences The 1965 musical film adaptation of The Sound of Music was the capstone of many successful Rodgers and Hammerstein movie adaptations of their Broadway hits, and its record-setting box office became a hopeful benchmark for musical films that followed. While the R&H adaptations might cut the occasional musical number (e.g., ‘Lonely Room’ in Oklahoma!), the plot and song structure would remain essentially intact. This meant that the film adaptations might run as long as the Broadway original. Television, the rise of the multiplex, and audience habits would change this model over the course of several decades to shorter, tighter film adaptations of Broadway shows. The running time for the 2001 Broadway The Producers was typical for live musicals of the last two decades, about two hours, thirty-five minutes not including intermission. An analysis of the twenty-five top-grossing Broadway musicals of all time (a list that includes both The Producers and Hairspray)30 reveals that the average running time of a Broadway musical is two hours and thirty minutes, not including intermission. The running time for the 1968 The Producers film was eighty-eight minutes, a relatively short time, but not atypical of the period or what a new filmmaker would be able to convince a studio to finance. The 2005 musical film version, however, clocks in at 134 minutes, a substantial length relative to other movie musicals: of the top ten highest-grossing movie musicals since 1975, the average running time was 115 minutes,31 nineteen minutes shorter than The Producers. Only the epic Les Misérables was longer (160 minutes). The 2007 Hairspray musical film is almost an hour shorter than the Broadway version, about 116 minutes, and is more in line with the typical length of Broadway musical film adaptations in the 2000s. As noted earlier, Dixon and Shankman were encouraged to ‘do your own thing,’ and the film was structured in a way that some musical numbers were cut (‘Mama I’m a Big Girl Now,’ ‘The Big Dollhouse’) and others reduced in length (‘It Takes Two’), serving to streamline the music and plot and reduce the running time. Cinematic audiences often have not seen the Broadway original and are more accepting (or ignorant) of the changes Hollywood makes to the source material; at the same time, these audiences apparently do seem to care about the length of the adaptation. From 1960 to 1969, nineteen films were produced based on Broadway musicals, with the average running time of 141 minutes. The second-longest film was The Sound of Music, the highest-grossing musical of all time despite its running time of 174 minutes.32 Conversely, there were only nine Broadway musical-to-film transfers in the 2000–9

The Producers and Hairspray   601 Running Times to Net Revenue 1960–1969

90 80

170

70

160

60

150

50

140

40

130

30

120

Net Box Office ($M)

Running Times (in minutes)

180

20

110

10

100

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Films: 1. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 2. Bye Bye Birdie, 3. How to Succeed in Business..., 4. Bells are Ringing, 5. Unsinkable Molly Brown, 6. Can Can, 7. Flower Drum Song, 8. Gypsy, 9. Finian's Rainbow, 10. Hello Dolly!, 11. Sweet Charity, 12. Funny Girl, 13. The Music Man, 14. West Side Story, 15. Oliver!, 16. Paint Your Wagon, 17. My Fair Lady, 18. Sound of Music, 19. Camelot Net Box Office ($M)

Running Times (minutes)

575

145

475

140

375

135

275

130

175

120

75

115

Running Times (in minutes)

Net Box Office ($M)

Running Times to Net Revenue 2000–2009

110 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Films: 1. Mamma Mia!, 2. Chicago, 3. Hairspray, 4. Sweeney Todd, 5. Nine, 6. Dreamgirls, 7. The Producers, 8. Rent, 9. Phantom of the Opera –25

Running Times (minutes)

Net Box Office ($M)

Figure 26.1  Comparison of running times to net revenue in Broadway musical films in the 1960s and 2000s

602   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations decade, and the average running time was 125 minutes, sixteen minutes shorter than the average of the 1960s. The three highest-grossing musicals of the decade had the shortest running times: Mamma Mia! (109 minutes), Chicago (113 minutes), and Hairspray (116 minutes). While length alone is not a metric for quality, it is interesting to note that the relationship of running times to box office earnings reversed from the 1960s to the 2000s (Figure 26.1). Musical films under 120 minutes in the 2000s were twice as likely to return big box office numbers (average = $229 million net) than those that were longer, whereas musical films over 141 minutes in the 1960s were twice as likely to show a substantial profit (average = $54 million net). The roadshow theatrical releases of the 1950s through the early 1970s contributed to this phenomenon by presenting musical films in reserved-seat engagements in major markets like New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC. These tended to be longer films (the original roadshow print of the nonmusical Gone with the Wind ran almost four hours), and were shown with an intermission, much like a Broadway show. Because of the long running times, theatres could book only one or two showings a day, limiting their income. For most musical roadshow releases, there was an overture, an entr’acte, and exit music. Musicals that had successful roadshow releases included Oklahoma! (1955), South Pacific (1958), My Fair Lady (1964), Sound of Music (1965), Oliver! (1968), Funny Girl (1968), and Fiddler on the Roof (1971).33 By the time the 1972 film of Cabaret was released (124 minutes long), multiplexes were becoming the norm, and shorter running times prevailed. In the new millennium, it would appear that audiences still prefer shorter musical film adaptations.

Casting Strategies in Musical Film Adaptations Replacing the originators of Broadway musical roles in the film adaptations with ‘bankable Hollywood stars’ is nothing new, and it has led to some interesting casting and miscasting over the years: West Side Story (Natalie Wood replacing Carol Lawrence), My Fair Lady (Audrey Hepburn replacing Julie Andrews), The Sound of Music (Julie Andrews replacing Mary Martin), and Hello Dolly! (Barbra Streisand replacing Carol Channing). In each case, Hollywood executives weighed potential ‘star buzz’ with the creative achievement of the original cast member. Marketing studies34 have looked at ‘star buzz’ as a method for hedging a movie’s success. ‘Film buzz’ refers to the word of mouth that a film receives after it opens while ‘star buzz’ is more likely to enhance a film’s prospects before it opens.35 A star’s power can reduce the ‘terror of the box office’36 Arthur De Vany theorizes that only a handful of stars are associated with higher revenue for their films, and most of these are not Broadway stars.37 As an example, the 2005 film of Rent retained much of its original Broadway cast. The Broadway production had a devoted following of ‘Rentheads’ who would see the

The Producers and Hairspray   603 show numerous times,38 and even though this was a very ‘New York’ show, it also did well on tour in major urban areas. The film, however, was a costly failure, earning only $31 million of its $40 million budget.39 On the other hand, the Mamma Mia! film, despite receiving mixed notices for the casting of nonmusical stars like Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan,40 was a huge success, earning over $600 million on a budget of $52 million.41 While the tone and content of these two musicals is quite different and can account in part for the commercial potential, the strategy of keeping original Broadway casts for movie adaptations has not paid off in the twenty-first century. Mel Brooks was responsible for approving the casting of all three versions of The Producers.42 In 2001 he turned to Nathan Lane and Mathew Broderick at the end of the cast album recording session and proclaimed, ‘We’ve got to make this [production] into a film!’43 By recording the performances and musical numbers much as they had appeared on Broadway, the chemistry between Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick could be further exploited and preserved. Lane’s response to Brooks’s idea was, ‘. . . with Danny DeVito as Max and Ben Stiller as Leo,’ to which Brooks’s immediate reply was ‘No, you guys do it!’44 With few exceptions, the original Broadway cast reprised their characters in the 2005 film. This idea of ‘preservation’ of the cast (and production) prevented the recursive film version from becoming a reimagined interpretation. The only exceptions were that Brad Oscar was replaced as Franz Liebkind by Will Ferrell, and Cady Huffman was replaced by Uma Thurman in the film. While Thurman and Ferrell lent a certain amount of Hollywood firepower favoured by the studio, they were not in leading roles. There is no question that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick have Broadway star power: their reunion in Broadway’s revival of The Odd Couple (2005–6) and It’s Only a Play (2014–15) helped ensure enormous advance sales. Playbill reported that The Odd Couple sold $7 million in tickets on its first day of public sales.45 Their ‘star buzz’ as a team, however, did not extend into films. This is further illustrated in a comparison of the marketing materials seen in video example 26.2, where Thurman is front and centre in the film’s poster. Unlike The Producers, the casting of the 2007 Hairspray followed the Hollywood tradition of replacing original stage cast members with more familiar Hollywood stars. John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Zac Efron, and Amanda Bynes were cast in featured roles. The latter two were chosen because of their teen appeal: Efron had recently appeared in Disney’s highly successful High School Musical and Bynes had a large television and film teen base. Consistent over all three versions of Hairspray, an unknown actress, in this case Nikki Blonsky, was ‘introduced’ into the lead role of Tracy. This emphasizes the ‘outsider’ quality that she represents and reinforces her innocence. Queen Latifah, who had been nominated as Best Supporting Actress in the 2002 Chicago film production, was cast as Motormouth Mabel. Latifah, a Grammy-winning hip-hop artist who is as adept with traditional pop vocals as she is with rap, helped reinforce the feminist message of the film and reach a broader music audience. Her rap and hip-hop work in the 1990s had caught the notice of critics and scholars alike, and Robin Roberts in the African American Review had praised Latifah’s ‘Ladies First’ video: ‘This dramatic and powerful rendering of an African American feminist message

604   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations through a rap music video shows that even so unpropitious a setting as music videos or rap can be turned to feminist ends.’46 Consistent in the three Hairspray versions is the casting of Tracy Turnblad’s mother Edna by a male actor. In John Waters’s original, Divine maintained the ‘Dreamlanders’ tradition of playing both a male and a female character in the same film, characters that represent the polar opposite of the other. His portrayal of Edna in drag is both campy and honest; ‘she satirizes the myth of femininity, in particular the symbolic representation of motherhood marked by its repression of desire.’47 Hairspray is a study of contrasts in its three mothers: the maternal Edna, the affectionate and open-minded yet outspoken Motormouth Mabel, and the cold and uncompromising Velma. The New York Times review noted, ‘There's something touchingly humble about Mr Fierstein’s performance, as there was about Divine’s in the movie.’48 Fierstein’s Edna shared many of Gypsy’s Mama Rose’s qualities: she was loving to Tracy, but she was a physical force to reckon with later in the story. Fierstein’s gravelly voice and powerful stage presence provided a similar kind of gender double meaning to his/her relationship to her husband as well as to Tracy. Like Divine’s performance, the interpretation could challenge heteronormative assumptions without offending the tourists: Hairspray’s now a tourist-friendly show; its second tour is out now, selling out in places like Tulsa, and all these places. So obviously, it took a little name recognition to get it out there, but it does great business. It does great business in New York for mainly kids and families—mothers and families, what you would probably call “red state folks,” I guess.49

John Travolta was a surprise casting choice in the 2007 musical film since many had expected another gay man to play Edna as this casting offered the queer illusion of a happy marriage of two men. Waters stated in 2004, ‘It encourages men to be married and have a functional marriage. [Same-sex marriage] isn't actually a part of the plot. [In the story] it's a marriage between a woman and a man, but everybody knows that [the woman] is a man. All of those things are really exciting if you can make them appeal to a whole family.’50 The casting of John Travolta, however, was more reminiscent of the casting of Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire: his latex-enhanced face is soft, and his performance is studied. While charming, Travolta misses all of the queer power of the previous two interpretations. His masculinity is buried in an elaborate fat suit and makeup, and he speaks in a tempered feminine voice. This is the most ‘family-friendly’ of the three interpretations because it doesn’t challenge the heteronormative status quo (see video example 26.3). Director Adam Shankman said he cast Travolta in part because he is a musical film icon, having appeared in Grease, one of the most commercially successful Hollywood musicals, and Saturday Night Fever, a nonmusical film that nonetheless showcased Travolta’s skill as a dancer. Shankman has stated that he saw Travolta as Edna as a dancing Hippo from Fantasia, one who could ‘dance on clouds.’51 The commercial considerations

The Producers and Hairspray   605 are clear: Travolta’s star power is ranked by ‘The Numbers’ at 37th place, while Harvey Fierstein’s ranks at 1,383.52 ‘Star buzz’ as a casting strategy paid off in the movie adaptation of Hairspray but not in The Producers. Even though Harvey Fierstein’s Broadway Edna received rave notices equal to those of Lane and Broderick, the casting of John Travolta created ‘buzz’ about the film along with an ensemble cast of movie, music industry, and television stars. Uma Thurman is draped provocatively across the desk in the posters for the 2005 version of The Producers, but she and Will Ferrell (‘The Numbers’ = #86) were in secondary roles, and Nathan Lane (#737) and Matthew Broderick (#543), while veterans of both stage and screen, did not create the same ‘buzz’ that they did on Broadway.

Conclusion: Finding an Audience for Stage-to-Screen Adaptations Beyond the aesthetic, structural, and cultural differences among the two Broadway shows and four films, the success or failure of each of the productions can also be attributed to the target audience demographics. The original film of The Producers was made in 1968, a year when substantial changes were happening culturally and socially in the United States, reflected in the habits of ticket buyers. The Motion Picture Association of American had just introduced a rating system,53 and more sophisticated films were being aimed at younger audiences. Forty-eight percent of the moviegoing audience that year were between sixteen and twenty-four years old.54 The top-grossing films of that year were 2001: A Space Odyssey (gross: $56 million), the musical Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand ($52 million), and Disney’s The Love Bug ($51 million). The Producers film of 1968 was aimed at an older demographic, one that would remember and had enjoyed the Sid Caesar–style television comedies of the fifties. Neil Simon, who was also part of the Show of Shows team, had his play The Odd Couple transformed into a film in 1968 to great acclaim and box office: it was the fourth highestgrossing film of the year ($44 million). Both films feature male leads of opposite types, but The Producers is about two men and a swindle, while The Odd Couple focuses on two men trying to reset their lives after divorce. The Odd Couple also had the advantage of being based on a hit Broadway play that gave it name recognition at the box office. Since the early 2000s, tourists have purchased 66 percent of all Broadway tickets, and their average age is 42.5. Fifty- to sixty-year-olds comprise the largest single group of theatregoers. The older audience would have had a memory of the Mel Brooks movies of the 1960s and 1970s as well as knowledge of the Golden Age of musicals from the 1940s through the early 1960s. This nostalgia would have driven the audiences to see the Broadway adaptation of The Producers supervised by Mel Brooks that recycled the same plot and characters as the original film while sending up the traditions of musical theatre.

606   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations Audience Demographics 2008 30 25 2–17 18–24 25–39 40–49 50–59 60+

20 15 10 5 0 Broadway Audience

US Cinema Audience

Figure 26.2  Audience Demographics of Broadway and Cinema Audiences - 2008

These ticker buyers, older and affluent, helped drive up demand for the show and inspired the producers to introduce ‘premium seating’ with fifty prime seats at each performance at a cost of $480 each.55 While the well-heeled older patrons who could afford tickets made the Broadway show an expensive commodity, this over-fifty demographic accounted for only 21 percent of the moviegoing audience in 2008 (Figure 26.2). While reviewers pointed to the 2005 musical film’s lack of success because it was too much of a ‘faithful’ rendition of the Broadway hit rather than a unique cinematic adaptation, there is no evidence that there was a substantial target audience for this kind of film in the first place. A big-screen musical cannot be successfully marketed to only 21 percent of the potential marketplace. The Broadway show’s success also seemed to rely on the leading characters’ chemistry. Jesse McKinley wrote in the New York Times in November 2003 that attendance at the  Broadway Producers had dropped precipitately after Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick had left the show. When Broderick and Lane returned for a four-month encore in early 2004, tickets were sold out for their entire engagement. Then sales fell again.56 The audience that supported the show was also considered: One theory, especially prevalent among insiders, is that, with its low-brow Mel Brooks humor and winking high-brow references, ‘The Producers’ is designed to appeal to show-biz savvy literates. And that demographic, the thinking goes, is growing smaller by the day.   ‘I’m going to be blunt,’ said Rocco Landesman, the President of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns the St. James. ‘The show is good, the audiences are bad. It never occurred to me that this show was pitched too high for a Broadway audience.’ With today’s Broadway audience largely made of out-of-towners and tourists, he said, ‘two-thirds of the show sails entirely over the heads of the audience.’ And the fewer people who get the jokes, the fewer people who tell their friends to go.57

Sociologist Herbert Gans in his 1974 book Popular Culture and High Culture theorizes: ‘Broadway musicals used to be written for the upper-middle public, but today this is only occasionally the case, although its younger members are probably the major

The Producers and Hairspray   607 consumers of folk music and melodic rock.’58 Conversely, he reasons that film musicals are for the lower-middle class as ‘[they] remain loyal to American films, although they may only go to see big musicals and other spectaculars.’59 While the broad humour of the original version of The Producers might appeal to a divergent audience, the Broadway and movie-musical references in the 2005 film version might also ‘sail over the heads of the audience,’ particularly the ‘lower-middle class’ movie audience outside of New York City. That same audience might also recognize that Hairspray celebrates the lower-middle class underdogs while The Producers abuses them. Hairspray was a breakout success for John Waters in 1987 and was part of a movement of outrageous cult films of the 1970s and 1980s. Like the 1968 movie of The Producers (and Little Shop of Horrors), it was a low-budget film. Hairspray, however relied on camp, nostalgia, and a quirky sense of humour. It found a niche audience in the larger, underthirty demographic. The Broadway production of the Hairspray musical had the nostalgic fifties-style popular songs and nostalgia from the pre-Beatles 1960s to appeal to the older audience while it thematically focused on the youthful hopes and dreams of the teenage characters for the younger audience. This was the Grease for the new millennium: it could feature contemporary pop stars while (unlike Grease) offering retrospective social commentary. The adaptation of the musical film in 2007 kept the heart and spirit of the original production, but was squarely aimed at the younger demographic: The secret of the new film . . . is best summed up in a word: ‘Reinvention,’ says producer Craig Zadan, who, with Neil Meron, guided 2002’s ‘Chicago’ to six Oscars. ‘The movie musicals that have failed [in the past] simply filmed the Broadway show they were based on. We don’t do that,’ Zadan says. ‘You honor the show, but then you say, “Well this is great, but that won’t work.” You reinvent it for people who don’t know the show.’60

The current crop of planned Hollywood musicals—The Book of Mormon, Spring Awakening, Avenue Q, and Wicked—are all aimed at this younger demographic. The recent film adaptation of Into the Woods highlights one of Stephen Sondheim’s most commercial works, and while it pulls from classic fairy tales, it is a contemporary piece. Following in the footsteps of Hairspray, the recent film adaptation demonstrates that using stars (Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep), targeting a family audience by editing out potentially salacious content, and staying relatively short (124 minutes) can be a successful formula. The anticipated film production of Gypsy with Barbra Streisand, which would presumably attract an older audience, has been put on hold twice since 2012. Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese has stated, ‘The difficult problem [with Gypsy] is making it cinematic,’61 but whether it could reach a younger audience and earn back its $50 million budget on a film with an aging star must certainly be a concern. Even though 40 percent of Broadway musicals since 2000 have been based on film sources, the Hollywood musical films planned or in production in 2017 are either original works or adaptations of plays and books and not originally based on a film. Of the most recent Broadway musicals based on films—Once, Bullets over Broadway, Rocky, Ghost,

608   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations Kinky Boots, Bring It On: The Musical, Legally Blonde: The Musical, Carrie: The Musical— none is currently slated for recursive musical film adaptations. The Walt Disney Company, however, has seen the commercial potential in its film library and has created a new kind of recursive adaptation of at least two of its animated films that have had Broadway success: Beauty and the Beast (2017) and The Lion King (2019). By creating live-action-with-computer-generated-imagery films based on the Broadway and Hollywood hits, a new breed of film-to-stage-to-film adaptations featuring contemporary stars, target demographics, and shorter running times emerges. Hairspray’s success and The Producers’ movie musical failure have cemented a new exemplar of recursive adaptation that promises to be a turning point in future Hollywood musicals.

Notes 1. According to TheNumbers.com, Hello Dolly! (domestic gross: $33.2 million; budget $25 million) and Paint Your Wagon (domestic gross $31.68 million; budget $20 million) were both in the ‘highest grossing’ lists of their years, but the expensive budgets (plus marketing and distribution costs) meant that their backers lost money. 2. Matthew Kennedy, Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 6. 3. I counted these shows using Playbill.com databases, and I am indebted to Ken Davenport’s theproducersperspective.com work noted below to confirm my counts. 4. I’ve used Broadway.com and Playbill.com databases for my count. I also recommend producer Howard Sherman’s ‘Do Revivals Inhibit New Broadway Musicals?’ (http://www. hesherman.com/2012/07/10/do-revivals-inhibit-new-broadway-musicals/ and Ken Daven­ port’s ‘Does a Revival’s Success Depend on the Success of the Original?’ (https://www. theproducersperspective.com/my_weblog/2015/11/50-years-of-broadway-musicalsource-material-a-by-the-numbers-infographic.html for analysis on revivals and the statistical advantage they have over new shows. 5. Renata Adler, ‘The Producers,’ New York Times, 9 March 1968, p. A38. 6. Stanley Kauffmann, ‘The Producers,’ New Republic 158, no. 15 (April 1968): 24. 7. Pauline Kael, Going Steady (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1970), 66. 8. American Film Institute, ‘AFI’s 100 Years . . . 100 Laughs,’ http://www.afi.com/100Years/ laughs.aspx, accessed 30 June 2016. 9. Damon Wise, ‘The Making of The Producers,’ Guardian, 15 August 2008, https://www. theguardian.com/film/2008/aug/16/comedy.theproducers, accessed 12 February 17. 1 0. ‘Box Office: Polyester,’ Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069089/, accessed 12 February 2017. 11. ‘Box Office: Beetlejuice,’ Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094721/, accessed 12 February 2017. 12. Jessica Goldstein, ‘On Hairspray’s 25th Anniversary “Buddy Deane” Committee Looks Back,’ Washington Post, 18 January 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/ tv/on-hairsprays-25th-anniversary-buddydeane-committee-looks-back/2013/01/ 17/a45a1cc2-5c23-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html?utm_term=.8516f36a010e, accessed 12 February 2017.

The Producers and Hairspray   609 13. Janet Maslin, ‘Film: “Hairspray” Comedy from John Waters,’ New York Times, 28 February 1988, p. C17. 14. J. Wynn Rousuck, ‘A Conversation with John Waters and Margo Lion,’ in Marc Shaiman, Thomas Meehan, Scott Wittman and Mark O'Donnell, Hairspray: The Roots (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), 12. 15. Rousuck, ‘A Conversation with John Waters and Margo Lion,’ 8. 16. Mel Brooks and Tom Mehan, The Producers: The Book, Lyrics, and Story behind the Biggest Hit in Broadway History! How We Did It (New York: Roundtable Press, 2001), 19. 17. Jerome Robbins popularized the opening number ‘rules’ in his influence in the creation of ‘Comedy Tonight’ as a show doctor on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the creation of ‘Tradition’ for Fiddler on the Roof. See Altman and Kaufman, The Making of a Musical: Fiddler on the Roof (New York: Crown, 1971). 18. Michael Buckley, ‘Stage to Screens: “The Producers” Film—Chatting with Stroman and Beach,’ Playbill.com, 20 November 2005, http://www.playbill.com/article/stage-toscreens-the-producers-film-chatting-with-stroman-and-beach-com-129302, accessed 15 January 2017. 19. Brooks and Meehan, The Producers, 154. 20. Stuart  M.  Kaminsky, ‘Mel Brooks—Director,’ http://www.filmreference.com/DirectorsBe-Bu/Brooks-Mel.html, accessed 1 February 2017. 21. Brooks and Meehan, The Producers, 97. 22. ‘Nathan Lane: Hollywood, Homophobia and Mel Brooks,’ Independent, 17 December 2005, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/nathan-lane-hollywood-homophobia-and-mel-brooks-519486.html, accessed 2 February 2017. 23. Jeff Labrecque, ‘Blazing Saddles at 40: A Conversation with Mel Brooks,’ Entertainment, 1 May 2014, http://ew.com/article/2014/05/01/blazing-saddles-mel-brooks/, accessed 15 January 2017. 2 4. ‘Box Office: Brokeback Mountain,’ Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0388795/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus, accessed 5 February 2017. 25. Marc Shaiman, Thomas Meehan, Scott Wittman and Mark O'Donnell, Hairspray: The Roots, 7. 2 6. Dana Heller, Hairspray (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 122. 27. Heller, Hairspray, 123. 28. Adam Shankman, ‘Putting New Moves on Hairspray,’ interview with Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, 19 July 2007, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=12093815, accessed 15 December 2016. 29. Thomas Leitch, ‘Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,’ Criticism 45, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 161. 30. I have used the Internet Broadway Database (IBDb.com) and the original Playbills to calculate running times. 31. I used Box Office Mojo to calculate gross income and the Internet Movie Database to look up running times. 32. The longest is Camelot, which at 179 minutes is still substantially shorter than the original Broadway show that ran well over three hours. 33. Matthew Kennedy theorizes in Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s that Hollywood tried too hard to replicate the success of Sound of Music and ended up with failures like Camelot.

610   Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations 34. A. S. Ravid, ‘Information, Blockbusters, and Stars: A Study of the Film Industry,’ Journal of Business 72, no. 4 (October 1999): 463–492. 35. Ekaterina Karniouchina, ‘Impact of Star and Movie Buzz on Motion Picture Distribution and Box Office Revenue,’ International Journal of Research in Marketing 28, no. 1 (2011): 62–74. 36. Arthur De Vray, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (New York: Routledge, 2004), 242–268. 37. De Vany, Hollywood Economics, 92. 38. Kay Hymowitz, ‘Among the “Rentheads,”’ Wall Street Journal, 13 June 2008, p. W.11. 39. Boxoffice mojo.com, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=rent.htm, accessed 17 February 2017. 40. In his New York Times review (18 July 2008, p. E1) of the film, A. O. Scott stated, ‘It is safe to say that Ms. Streep gives the worst performance of her career.’ 41. Boxofficemojo.com. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=mammamia.htm, accessed 17 February 2017. 42. Brooks and Meehan, The Producers, 35. 4 3. Mel Brooks, Recording the Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks (Masterworks Broadway, DVD), 1:22:33. 4 4. Brooks, Recording the Producers, 1:22:45. 45. Robert Simonson. ‘Odd Couple Sells $7 Million in Tickets in First Day of Sales,’ Playbill. com, 7 June 2005, http://www.playbill.com/article/odd-couple-sells-7-million-in-ticketsin-first-day-of-sales-com-126359, accessed 4 February 2017. 46. Robin Roberts. ‘“Ladies First”: Queen Latifah’s Afrocentric Feminist Video,’ African American Review 28, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 257. 47. Angela Stukator, ‘“It’s Not Over . . .”: Comedy and Body Politics,’ in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 209. 48. Ben Brantley, ‘Theatre Review: Through Hot Pink Glasses, a World That’s Nice,’ New York Times, 16 August 2002, p. E1. 49. ‘Interview: Adam Epstein; Producer of Hairspray, Wedding Singer,’ Broadway Bullet, posted 19 June 2007, http://www.broadwaybullet.com/?p=147. 50. Chris Davis, ‘The Man Who Hated Musicals,’ Memphis Flyer, 17 December 2004, http://www. memphisflyer.com/memphis/the-man-who-hated-musicals/Content?oid=1115686, accessed 10 January 2017. 51. Shankman, ‘Putting New Moves on Hairspray.’ 52. http://www.the-numbers.com/people/. This aggregator calculates star power based on average box office and number of films. 53. The original Motion Picture Association ratings system was introduced in November 1968 as a replacement for the 1930s Motion Picture Production Code in order to provide greater flexibility to filmmakers who wanted to make more sophisticated films while (voluntarily) restricting the age groups that could gain admission. The first ratings included M (Mature: parental discretion advised) and R (Restricted: persons under sixteen admitted only with a parent or guardian). 54. A 1968 Yankelovich and Associates survey that had been commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) concluded that ‘being young and single is the overriding demographic for being a frequent and enthusiastic movie-goer.’ 55. Jesse McKinley, ‘For the Asking, a $480 Seat,’ New York Times, 26 October 2001, p. A1.

The Producers and Hairspray   611 56. According to the Internet Broadway Database, attendance fell beginning March 2002 after Lane and Broderick left, dropping to a low of 61 percent the week of 7 September 2003. Attendance jumped back to 100 percent from January to April 2004 when they returned. Sales steadily declined afterwards until the show closed in 2007. 57. Jesse McKinley, ‘The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Blockbuster,’ New York Times, 2 November 2003, p. AR1. 58. Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 83. 59. Gans, Popular Culture, 86. 60. Brantley Bardin, ‘The Mane Event,’ New York Daily News, 15 July 2007, http://www. nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/mane-event-article-1.267872, accessed 10 February 2017. 61. Robert Viagas and Michael Gioia, ‘Barbara Streisand Gypsy Film Script Loses Backer/ Distributor,’ Playbill.com, 3 August 2016), http://www.playbill.com/article/barbra-streisandgypsy-film-script-loses-backer-distributor, accessed 4 February 2017.

chapter 27

R escor i ng A n y thi ng G oes i n 1930s Hol ly wood Allison Robbins

On 24 January 1936, Paramount released Anything Goes, a musical starring Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman. Based on the Broadway show of the same name, it met with frustration from Richard Watts Jr, a New York Herald Tribune film critic familiar with the stage version: [T]he cinema edition of ‘Anything Goes’ is, despite its attractive pictorial background, a dull and commonplace musical comedy, with several good songs and a great mass of ineffective comedy and romance. Since on the stage it was one of the outstanding musical shows of recent seasons, I think that I may not be altogether wrong in blaming its decline on the failure of the picture to follow the original edition more carefully.1

Watts’s main complaint was the film’s purging of Cole Porter’s ‘distinguished and exhilarating’ music; gone were ‘All through the Night,’ ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow,’ and other songs. Watts’s critique of Anything Goes mirrors many accounts of Broadway-to-Hollywood musical adaptations, which are typically judged by their fidelity to a cherished songwriter’s original score. Most damning is when the studios replace the music of a Broadway giant with tunes by Hollywood songwriters. ‘In Hollywood nothing is sacred, especially a New York songwriter,’ Thomas Hischak grumbles; ‘Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, and all the great songwriters saw their Broadway scores ­skewered beyond recognition.’2 Why Hollywood producers altered Broadway’s music in the 1930s is rather straightforward. In order to avoid expensive synchronization licences and to profit from sheet music and record sales, the film industry had made a substantial investment in music publishing companies in the late 1920s. Newly written songs by Hollywood songwriters were then copyrighted to in-house publishing firms, and the

614   musical theatre screen adaptations studios subsequently made money from songs plugged in their films. There was thus financial incentive to drop an old score and add a new one when a studio bought and adapted a stage property. That said, the studios’ financial motivations were intertwined with an aesthetic ­division within the songwriting community itself, and in many ways, the Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley mergers finalized rather than initiated Broadway’s separation from a popular music industry focused primarily on stand-alone, hit songs. Below, I detail how this economic, aesthetic, and cultural context shaped Paramount’s film adaptation of Anything Goes. At the studio, the musical confronted a production environment in which interpolations were common, song sales mattered more than wit, and risqué content was frowned upon, a combination that proved deadly for Porter’s score. I detail the cuts and revisions to his music as well as the songs that the studio added after music department head Nathaniel Finston assigned Leo Robin, Richard Whiting, and other songwriters to the film. The resulting adaptation epitomizes Hollywood’s commercial approach to making musicals, much as the stage version reflects Broadway’s increasing disinterest in songs that appealed to as broad an audience as possible. Hollywood’s devotion to and Broadway’s divorce from hit songwriting makes faithful film adaptations unlikely, I argue, especially when ‘fidelity’ is defined by allegiance to Broadway’s canonized songwriters rather than the commercial goals of Hollywood’s tunesmiths.

Paramount, Music Publishing, and Studio Songwriters In the summer of 1928, seven years before Paramount would begin production on Anything Goes, the studio offered to buy the song catalogues of Harms and Robbins Music, then the two largest music publishing companies in the United States.3 The studio’s bid, the first of its kind in Hollywood, ultimately failed, but in August of the same year, the studio struck a more modest deal with Harms, in which Paramount and the publishing firm together created Famous Music Corp. The first songs entered into the Famous catalogue were theme songs associated with moving pictures; Paramount and Harms agreed to split evenly any royalties earned from sheet music sales and licencing fees.4 In 1929, however, Warner Bros. purchased Harms and its associated firms, including Famous Music Corp., which complicated Paramount’s original deal with the publishing company. Paramount reacted by purchasing 80 percent of the stock of Spier & Coslow, Inc., a small independent publishing company headed by Larry Spier and Sam Coslow.5 This purchase and other labyrinthine deals between the studios and publishing houses affected how individual songwriters like Spier and Coslow obtained contracts in Hollywood. At first, lyricists and composers who went west following the Tin Pan Alley mergers moved from studio to studio, in part because songwriter contracts in the film industry were only six- or twelve-month agreements. But following the Warner

rescoring anything goes   615 Bros.-Harms deal, many songwriters saw their agreements revised, and in the early 1930s, each studio contracted a more or less stable group of songwriters as studio music departments were established and associated publishing houses stabilized. At Paramount, Nathaniel Finston hired Coslow (who received a five-year contract with the studio when it acquired his publishing firm), Leo Robin, Richard Whiting, Gus Kahn, Fred Ahlert, Roy Turk, and Walter Donaldson.6 Cole Porter was not a member of this cohort; in the 1920s Harms published his songs, and after 1935 he worked with Max Dreyfus’s Chappell, Inc., a publishing house that remained independent from the Hollywood studios.7 The film and music industry mergers affected not only which studios hired which songwriters but also the songs they produced for Hollywood films. For starters, different studios had access to different existing catalogues—Warner Bros., for example, could use the music of George Cohan, Victor Herbert, and Sigmund Romberg free of charge after a deal with Witmark.8 The main goal of Hollywood’s acquisition of publishers, however, was to control copyright of new songs plugged in their pictures. In adaptations of stage works, this focus resulted in shredded Broadway scores, as studio songwriters replaced existing songs with their own. It also affected the kinds of songs they added. Though the stage and screen shared the same popular song conventions, there were nonetheless important stylistic differences between Broadway and Hollywood songs.9 The film industry, with its close ties to music publishers, continued to rely on Tin Pan Alley’s approach to songwriting, while Broadway songwriters, especially those who worked on book musicals, deliberately moved away from a broadly popular aesthetic. ‘In effect,’ Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson note, ‘writing songs for Hollywood was less like writing for a Broadway musical and more like working on Tin Pan Alley.’10 Broadway’s stylistic separation from Tin Pan Alley was apparent as early as the 1910s, when some publishers claimed that stage hits were more of a gamble. A song that went over on the stage could potentially sell sheet music and earn profit for a publisher, but it was not what Edward M. Wickes, author of Writing the Popular Song (1916), referred to as a ‘natural hit’ that ‘could be made popular by any up-to-date publisher.’11 ‘In saying that a stage song does not sell,’ Wickes explains, ‘I mean that the average stage song is like a hundred-to-one-shot in a horse race. There is always a slim chance for either to win out, but few like to bank on the chance.’12 Notably, what made a stage song risky was not its structure, which Wickes describes as similar to a ‘straight comic song,’ with ‘short verses, extra choruses, and obvious puns in the lines preceding the repetition of the title at the end of the chorus.’ There was, however, a difference in the overall quality, in that in ‘the majority of cases the stage song is a cleverly written piece of work, containing some very good lines.’13 In the 1920s and 1930s, the clever quality of stage songs, also referred to as production songs, became more pronounced. In The Art of Song Writing (1928), Al Dubin explains that though production songs and hit songs encompass the same genres—ballads, novelty songs, comedy songs, dance songs, semi-classic songs, and patriotic songs— production songs ‘have a style that is somewhat different from the average popular song which can be noted only by studying them carefully.’14 Abner Silver and Robert Bruce’s

616   musical theatre screen adaptations How to Write and Sell a Song Hit (1939) offers more detail on this stylistic difference. Production songs, they argue, were distinguished by qualities that conveyed professionalism, artistry, and complexity. They altered the standard 32-bar form and used the ABAC song form more often than the average AABA hit, because that pattern ‘has the advantage of enabling the writer to give an unusual ‘punch’ ending to the song.’15 The ­lyrics were often ‘more outstanding than the tune’ and contain ‘tricky and clever rhyming schemes’—Silver and Bruce cite Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’ as an example, as well as the songs by Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and Irving Berlin.16 Finally, production songs required ‘a trained singer to give the melody full justice.’17 ‘The amateur should steer away from attempting to write this type of song,’ Silver and Bruce write. ‘It is obvious that the producer of a musical show or a musical picture would insist upon having recognized professional writers work on the musical score.’18 The shift towards sophistication on the stage has been observed by scholars of the musical and is typically attributed to changes in stage productions. In the 1910s, ­up-and-coming songwriters usually interpolated songs into existing shows, but by 1920, Geoffrey Block notes, ‘Berlin, Kern, and Gershwin had also composed Broadway scores of their own.’19 Most of these scores were associated with a story, requiring songs that were ‘conceived or revised for specific characters in specific situations.’20 Narrative complexity thus led to musical complexity, Block argues, as songwriters supported character and plot development. Similarly, Phil Furia argues that the ‘self-contained songs and sketches’ of 1920s and 1930s revues encouraged attention to ‘particularized character or situation,’ which led to ‘wit and sophistication’ in lyrics and music.21 Like Block, he suggests that the format of stage productions—in this case revues rather than book shows—created a shift in musical and lyrical style. Writing in 1930, Tin Pan Alley chronicler Isaac Goldberg had a different i­ nterpretation. He attributed the increasing sophistication of Broadway lyrics not to book shows or witty revues but to the aesthetic goals of ‘modern’ songwriters like Porter, Hart, Ira Gershwin, Howard Dietz, Paul James, and Dorothy Fields. These men and women belonged to what Goldberg called an ‘undiscriminating cult of sophistication,’ and with their ‘sometimes distressingly self-conscious’ lyrics, they hoped to restore ‘the words to something like the importance that they had in the flourishing period of our higher class musical show.’ Their efforts, Goldberg writes, ‘may yet help to improve dialogue, and so lead to plot and to a more organic conception of what we loosely call comic opera.’22 But there were consequences in striving for a highbrow art. ‘So doing,’ Goldberg warns, ‘they endanger their popularity, as truly good words always endanger a song in Tin Pan Alley. They make, as truly good music makes, for smaller and better audiences. This may be art, after a fashion, but as business it is no fashion at all. Wherever we find a pronounced quality in words or music we may be sure that we have begun the ascent from Tin Pan Alley.’23 Here, Goldberg identifies the divide that would define Hollywood and Broadway throughout the 1930s: the wit and sophistication of Broadway was rarely at home in the blatantly commercial setting of Hollywood’s Tin Pan Alley. A desire to write highbrow songs likely had special significance for Broadway ­songwriters who were Jewish, as their ethnic identity remained closely associated with

rescoring anything goes   617 commercial entertainment. As Andrea Most notes, the most successful Broadway ­songwriters were the ‘Ivy League-educated, ‘uptown’ Jews,’24 and for them, achieving a sophisticated aesthetic on Broadway parallelled their rise in sociocultural status. Most writes, ‘As they achieved success, they moved from urban Jewish neighborhoods to exclusive (and often restricted) addresses in Manhattan, Long Island, Connecticut, and rural Pennsylvania. During the Depression and war years, they largely distanced themselves from Jewish organizational and religious life.’25 This distancing from some aspects of Jewish experience included, it seems, an aesthetic distance from Tin Pan Alley, where many first-generation Jews got their start in show business. Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, and Richard Rodgers likely sought the labels they earned in one of Louis Sobol’s ‘Voice of Broadway’ columns: Fields was called ‘most sophisticated,’ Kern, ‘most erudite,’ and Rodgers, ‘most elite.’26 Not all Jewish Americans felt the need or desire to separate themselves from Tin Pan Alley, and for those who continued to work in ‘lowbrow’ entertainment outlets like Hollywood, the upward mobility of Fields, Kern, and Rodgers was as much a break from Jewish identity as it was a source of inspiration. Rodgers’s initial meeting with Jack Warner underscores that the Jewish producers in Hollywood were well aware and somewhat wary of songwriters’ aspirations. Upon welcoming him and Lorenz Hart to Hollywood in the 1930s, Rodgers remembers that Warner greeted them ‘in the thickest Yiddish accent I’ve ever heard. “I dun’t van’t none of your highbrow sunk-making,” he warned us as his smile quickly vanished.’27 It was a joke, but one with a bite. Kurt Weill experienced a similar reprimand in 1937 from producer Walter Wanger, who told Weill his music was not ‘popular enough’ for his picture. When Weill told Wanger that he could write ‘as popular songs’ as Ralph Erwin and Robert Stoltz ‘but better,’ Wanger replied, ‘To hell with better, I don’t want better.’28 Broadway retained clear highbrow associations for songwriters who were not Jewish as well. Al Dubin’s daughter Patricia McGuire remembers Dubin saying that he too could have written ‘nothing but sophisticated lyrics’ like Porter if he ‘had been a millionaire’s son.’ ‘Cole Porter didn’t have to please Warner Brothers,’ Dubin complained; ‘I have to write lyrics that the general public will buy; songs that have commercial appeal; that make money. If I could have written whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, I might have been a lot better lyric writer.’29 By the early 1930s, songwriters who worked on opposite sides of the highbrow-lowbrow divide started having a difficult time working together. The collaboration between Richard Whiting and Oscar Hammerstein on the book show Free for All (1931) is a case in point. Whiting had established himself as a Tin Pan Alley songwriter in the 1910s and 1920s and had been on staff at Paramount since 1929 writing hits for Maurice Chevalier, and Hammerstein had recently collaborated with Kern on several book shows in the 1920s. Whiting claimed Hammerstein was difficult to work with, however, because he did not write lyrics that ‘meant something in every line.’ Robert Russell Bennett clarifies, [Whiting] probably meant that every line of a pop lyric has to make its own point. ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon’ means all it will ever mean as long as it lives. ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ and you go and cash your ticket. ‘Ain’t She Sweet!’ That’s all you

618   musical theatre screen adaptations need to know or ever will know. In Oscar’s theater you have time to develop your story: ‘Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly. I gotta love one man till I die. Can’t help lovin’ that man of mine.’30

Hammerstein was, in other words, the modern lyricist described by Isaac Goldberg. ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man’ has a catch like any other Tin Pan Alley hit, but it resonates because of the allusions to inevitability that build to the hook: fish swim, birds fly, I love. Whiting, by contrast, preferred lyrics that did not need an elaborate buildup. The film studios, with their associated publishing firms, were happy to exploit the rift in the songwriting community, as most Hollywood songwriters wanted hits as badly as the studios that hired them. Sam Coslow describes what Hollywood meant to him: By means of the film, the song was pounded into the ears and brains of millions of people—literally captive audiences. With radio, you could keep on talking, reading, playing cards, or doing any number of things that might take your attention away from the music. But in a movie house, you had no choice but to listen—and we made damn sure that [a song] was reprised vocally a few times in the film,  and scored orchestrally at the hint of any love scene. It was far and away the most e­ ffective form of songplugging the public had ever been exposed to, and the Hollywood music crowd capitalized on it to the hilt. . . . Instant hits—the songwriter’s Utopia!31

Broadway songwriters interested in book musicals found Hollywood anything but a utopia. ‘He never told me in so many words, but Jerry Kern must have been miserable in Hollywood, and I know Oscar Hammerstein was,’ Richard Rodgers writes in his ­autobiography. ‘The people who succeeded in moving pictures—and I’m talking primarily about lyricists and composers—were those who did not have an extended background in the theatre.’32 Rodgers speaks from his own experience. He and Hart had contributed songs to Paramount’s 1932 film Love Me Tonight, a musical that remains beloved by critics for a score that blurs the boundary between spoken and sung dialogue in order to give ‘the entire film a firmer musical structure,’ in Rodgers’s words.33 The film was less impressive, however, from a commercial perspective. Paramount’s music department head Nathaniel Finston received stats on song sales from Love Me Tonight along with other musicals produced at the studio between 1929 and 1933. ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’, the top song from Love Me Tonight, sold fewer than 40,000 copies (see Table 27.1). Only one film produced in the same five-year period, the lackluster Paramount on Parade, had a less impressive return. By contrast, The Big Broadcast, a musical starring Bing Crosby and released the same year as Love Me Tonight, sold over 200,000 copies of Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger’s song ‘Please.’34 Love Me Tonight may have been a critical darling, but the bottom line was that Rodgers and Hart did not produce a mega-hit for the studio. That Paramount turned to musicals featuring Bing Crosby singing hit songs made financial sense. This quantitative focus on song sales also points to how Hollywood songwriters were assigned to films. Department heads like Finston took a songwriter’s artistic strengths

rescoring anything goes   619

Table 27.1  Top-selling songs in Paramount musicals, 1929–1933 Production

Year

Song title

Composer

Lyricist

No. Copies sold

Innocents of Paris

1929

‘Louise’

Whiting

Robin

385,058

Sweetie

1929

‘My Sweeter Than Sweet’

Whiting

Marion, Jr.

175,315

Love Parade

1929

‘Dream Lover’

Schertzinger

Grey

The Big Pond

1930

‘You Brought a New King of Love to Me’

Fain, Kahal & Norman

Honey

1930

‘Sing You Sinners’

Harling

Coslow

110,229

Paramount on Parade

1930

‘Sweeping the Clouds Away’

Coslow

Coslow

36,221

Monte Carlo

1930

‘Beyond the Blue Horizon’

Harling & Whiting

Robin

80,957

Playboy of Paris

1930

‘My Ideal’

Whiting & Chase

Robin

64,309

The Big Broadcast

1932

‘Please’

Rainger

Robin

216,035

One Hour With You

1932

‘One Hour With You’

Whiting

Robin

75,100

Love Me Tonight

1932

‘Isn’t It Romantic?’

Rodgers

Hart

Hello, Everybody

1933

‘Moon Song’

70,146 275,750

Coslow

37,266 117,084

into account when delegating production assignments, but the biggest factor was a songwriter’s capacity to write a top-selling tune. Those writers who made a studio the most money were rewarded with more films and higher salaries in hopes of replicating past successes. In 1934, only one Paramount film, the Bing Crosby vehicle She Loves Me Not, boasted especially strong song sales: collectively, the four songs featured in the film—‘Straight from the Shoulder, Right from the Heart,’ ‘I’m Hummin’, I’m Whistlin’, I’m Singin’,’ ‘Put a Little Rhythm in Everything You Do,’ and ‘Love in Bloom’—sold more than 350,000 copies.35 The two songwriting teams who worked on that picture, Robin and Rainger and Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, were already at the top of the studio’s payroll and had received several production assignments (see Table  27.2).36 When Paramount purchased the rights to Anything Goes in January of 1935, the studio saw no reason to disrupt this system. Producers informed Finston that ‘it may be necessary to select songs written by our writers for Bing Crosby’37 rather than hire Cole Porter to write new songs, as they had planned to do. Robin and Richard Whiting, who had written songs for the crooner in several other films, were assigned to Anything Goes on 9 August 1935;38 they worked with Frederick Hollander to create three new songs, while Hoagy Carmichael and Edward Heyman sold the studio one more.39 Paramount clearly hoped to put more song hits in the mouth of their best songplugger.

620   musical theatre screen adaptations

Table 27.2  Songwriter salaries at Paramount, 1934 Songwriter

Mack Gordon Ralph Rainger Leo Robin Harry Revel Arthur Johnston Sam Coslow Lorenz Hart Richard Rodgers Ray Noble Richard Whiting Sam Fain Irving Kahal Ann Ronnell

Total Salary Earned

No. Productions Assigned

44,300.00 30,800.00 25,783.32 24,200.00 21,000.00 19,525.00 7,500.00 7,500.00 7,500.00 6,750.00 2,250.00 2,250.00 1,500.00

12 16 14 12 11 14 1 1 3 3 1 1 1

Anything Goes from Stage to Screen For Paramount, the prospect of an Anything Goes film adaptation had undeniable commercial appeal: with more than 400 performances on Broadway, the stage show was a financial and critical success. Brooks Atkinson writing for the New York Times called it ‘a thundering good musical show’ and ‘hilarious and dynamic entertainment.’40 The Los Angeles Times critic was equally effusive: ‘ “Anything Goes” is one of those pat successes, the kind that a first-night audience senses immediately, the kind that producers dream of in their more optimistic vagaries.’41 The actual producer in this case was Vinton Freedley, an experienced Broadway veteran who with Alexander Aarons had overseen the popular Gershwin musical comedies of the 1920s. In Anything Goes, he had a Cole Porter score and a dynamite cast that included Ethel Merman, William Gaxton, and Victor Moore. The show’s status as a hit belies the fact that it was, as Geoffrey Block writes, ‘hastily, perhaps even frantically, put together.’42 The book was not finished when rehearsals began on 8 October 1934. Freedley had received two drafts from Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse; these scripts, whose working titles included Crazy Week and Hard to Get, told a story that included a bomb threat on an ocean liner. An oft-told anecdote claims that the tragic, real-life sinking off the coast of New Jersey of the SS Morro Castle led Freedley to demand revisions. Bolton and Wodehouse biographer Lee Davis convincingly argues, however, that Freedley’s hope for a Hollywood adaptation—before the Broadway show even had been staged—led him to seek changes.43 Like several other Broadway shows in the early 1930s, the first Bolton-Wodehouse draft of Anything Goes was a Hollywood satire: it featured an ex-Hollywood scenario writer as one of the main

rescoring anything goes   621 characters, and Bolton and Wodehouse, drawing from their own experiences in the studios, peppered the book with digs at and jokes about the film industry.44 Freedley, according to Bolton, objected.45 Bolton and Wodehouse’s second draft removed the Hollywood treatment, kept the ocean liner catastrophe, and was once again turned down by Freedley, this time because it was, as Davis writes, ‘a hopeless mess.’46 Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse completed the third rewrite, which kept only the basic outline of the first two drafts.47 The completed Lindsay-Crouse book for Anything Goes takes place on the SS American as it travels from New York to London. The two main characters are Reno Sweeney (Merman), an evangelist turned entertainer, and Billy Crocker (Gaxton), who despite his affection for Reno, deflects her advances. Before the ship departs, Billy travels to the dock to see Reno, who is booked to perform onboard; he stows away on the ship once he realizes that Hope Harcourt (Bettina Hall) is one of the ship’s passengers. Hope, an American heiress, is engaged to Sir Evelyn Oakleigh (Leslie Barrie), a British nobleman who seems more interested in studying American slang than in interacting with his fiancée. In order to stay on the boat, Billy accepts the help of Moonface Martin (Moore), a gangster who is travelling undercover as a priest. Unbeknownst to Billy, Moonface gives him the ticket and passport of another gangster who never made it onboard, Snake Eyes Johnson, the FBI’s Public Enemy Number One. Billy, mistaken for Snake Eyes, must prove his innocence in order to win Hope. By show’s end, Billy pairs romantically with Hope and Reno with Sir Evelyn. Freedley negotiated with Paramount less than two months after the show’s opening on 21 November 1934, unsurprising given that he had asked for a studio-friendly book. According to a Variety report, Freedley received ‘eighty-five thousand dollars, plus 10 per cent of gross, once rentals passed the one-million-dollar mark.’48 The Hartford Courant called the deal ‘the major theatrical buy of the season’ and reported that ‘W.C. Fields will re-create the part played by Victor Moore; Bing Crosby will assume the role played by William Gaxton and Queenie Smith is up for the Ethel Merman part. Cole Porter’s music, including ‘You’re the Top,’ is part of the purchase, with Porter contracted to write three new numbers for the screen presentation.’49 Of these proposed production details, only one, Bing Crosby’s role, would come true. Production on the film version of Anything Goes began in the late summer of 1935. Directed by Lewis Milestone, it used a shooting script by Walter DeLeon, Sidney Salkow, John C. Moffitt, and Francis Martin that Thomas Hischak describes as ‘pretty much an abridged version of the stage libretto.’50 Some of the stage show’s original dialogue is included more or less verbatim, like the pun-filled conversation between Moonface and high society matron Mrs Wentworth. Most cuts were an effort to please the Hays Office, Hollywood’s self-imposed censorship office that in 1934 gained new power under Joseph Breen. His office requested, for example, that the show’s memorable phrase ‘hot pants’ be removed, as well as comedic situations deemed questionable.51 All of the characters transferred more or less intact, with only a few minor changes. Hope is no longer an American debutante, for example, but rather ‘an English heiress on the run,’52 and Sir Evelyn is her handler, charged with bringing her home to marry a man whom she does

622   musical theatre screen adaptations not love. The relationships between characters remain the same: Reno is still sweet on Billy yet ends up with Sir Evelyn, and Billy wins over Hope by the time the credits roll. The film adaptation had an almost entirely new cast. British-born actress and singer Ida Lupino won the role of Hope, perhaps explaining why the character’s nationality switched from American to British, and comedic actor Charles Ruggles took the role of Moonface. Crosby was cast as Billy and received top billing above Merman, who reprised her role as Reno. The studio’s marketing of the film focused on him, often at the expense of her: studio press releases, according to Caryl Flinn, ‘maintained that Ethel had an unrequited crush on Crosby and other nonsense,’53 depicting Merman as yet another woman swooning over the crooner’s charms rather than as an established star in her own right. Clearly, the studio was tapping into Crosby’s celebrity persona that it cemented in his feature films leading up to Anything Goes, especially She Loves Me Not (1934), Here Is My Heart (1934), and Mississippi (1935). All of these films depict Crosby as a good-natured singer (or songwriter, in the case of She Loves Me Not), who wins over the girl with a sincere and well-timed croon.54 With a cost of $1.1 million, Anything Goes was reportedly Paramount’s most expensive Crosby production up to that point,55 and as such, it is best understood as one in a series of Bing Crosby films as much as an adaptation of the stage show. Indeed, if the stage production revolved around Merman, the film version of Anything Goes orbits around Crosby (see Table 27.3).56 The film cuts five Porter songs that do not feature Crosby’s character Billy, including the ensemble numbers ‘Bon Voyage’ (act 1, scene 2), ‘Where Are the Men?’ (act 1, scene 4), and ‘Public Enemy Number One’ (act 2, scene 1), as well as the solos for Moonface and Hope, ‘Be Like the Bluebird’ (act 2, scene 2) and ‘The Gypsy in Me’ (act 2, scene 3). One Porter song, ‘Sailor’s Chantey,’ was revised to include Crosby’s character in its reprise. Three of the new songs—‘Sailor, Beware,’ ‘Moon Burn,’ and ‘My Heart and I’—were added specifically for Crosby’s crooning persona; these were the songs that the studio hoped had hit potential, and they also served to replace Billy and Hope’s duet ‘All through the Night,’ reportedly cut for censorship reasons discussed below. The remainder of the film’s score gives Merman a chance to perform the stage show’s most popular songs, including ‘Anything Goes,’ ‘I Get a Kick Out of You,’ and ‘You’re the Top.’ All of these Porter songs were revised, however, and Crosby figures prominently in the latter. The new finale number, ‘Shanghai-De-Ho,’ features both Merman and Crosby. The revisions to the Porter songs retained in the film were mostly the result of demands from the Hays Office, which was not receptive to Porter’s risqué lyrics. Richard Watts Jr, whose review opens this chapter, points out the most noticeable lyric change: in ‘I Get a Kick Out of You,’ he complains, ‘the timorous manufacturers refuse to allow Miss Merman to sing anything about cocaine, and make her use the radio’s bowdlerized substitute about “that perfume from Spain.” ’57 It was Breen and his employees who deemed the sniff of cocaine problematic.58 There were similar revisions to ‘Sailor’s Chantey.’ The film retains that song’s first verse and refrain, changing the word ‘hell’ to ‘heck,’ but the reprise of the song drops the adulterous second verse, in which a sailor ‘hankerin’ for the

rescoring anything goes   623

Table 27.3  Song order in stage and film versions of Anything Goes Stage: Anything Goes (1934)

Film: Anything Goes (1936)

Act I Scene 1: ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ (Reno)

‘Anything Goes’ (Reno)

Scene 2: ‘Bon Voyage’ (Boys/Girls)

‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ (Reno)

‘All through the Night’ (Billy/Hope/Sailors)

‘Sailor’s Chantey’ (Four Sailors)

Scene 3: ’Sailor’s Chantey’ (Four Sailors)

‘Sailor Beware’ (Billy)

Scene 4: ’Where Are the Men?’ (1st & 2nd Girls/Girls’ Chorus)

Reprise: ‘Sailor’s Chantey’ (Billy/Four Sailors)

’You’re the Top’ (Reno/Billy)

‘My Heart and I’ (Billy)

Scene 5: Reprise: ‘Sailor’s Chantey’ (Four Sailors)

‘You’re the Top’ (Reno/Billy)

Scene 6: ‘Anything Goes’ (Reno/Four Sailors)

Reprise: ‘You’re the Top’ (Reno/Billy/Moonface)

Reprise: ‘You’re the Top‘ (Reno)

‘Shanghai-De-Ho’ (Reno/Billy/Chorus)

‘Moon Burn’ (Billy)

Act II Scene 1: ‘Public Enemy Number One’ (Four Sailors/Passengers) ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow’ (Reno/Company) Scene 2: ‘Be Like the Bluebird’ (Moonface) Reprise: ‘All through the Night’ (Hope/Billy) Reprise: ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ Scene 3: ‘The Gypsy in Me’ (Hope) Reprise: ‘Anything Goes’ (All)

dames’ is encouraged to seek out ‘certain passengers’ wives.’ In its place, a newly written verse has the sailors complain of being out at sea.59 If minor tweaks saved ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ and ‘Sailor’s Chantey,’ the title song ‘Anything Goes’ was beyond help: the Hays Office worried that even naming the film Anything Goes ‘might be objected to’ given the ‘flavour’ of the title song’s lyrics.60 Paramount producers tried their best to make the song work and hired the poet and lyricist Brian Hooker to revise the song. But as Gary Giddins notes, ‘despite three rewrites and submissions,’ ‘Anything Goes’ never receives a full performance in the film; Merman sings only the first phrase during the opening credits.61 The censors also had problems with ‘All through the Night’ and Reno’s ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow.’ The first was deemed too suggestive in its description of love and ‘ecstasy,’ and the latter, they worried, might be interpreted as a burlesque of religion.62 The film version discards both. Given Paramount’s dedication to Crosby and its own songwriters, producers might have done so anyway.63 Indeed, the Hays Office cannot claim all of the changes made by the studio. Breen did not target ‘You’re the Top,’ for example, and yet the studio made significant lyrical

624   musical theatre screen adaptations revisions to the song. Here, the changes suggest that the studio perceived Porter’s trademark sophistication as a problem. In the film, Merman and Crosby’s performance retains the initial verse of the song but deletes the majority of the eight original choruses. In their place are four mostly new refrains contributed by Porter’s second cousin lyricist Ted Fetter.64 Fetter drops most of the European references in Porter’s lyrics. Gone are the Colosseum, the Louvre, Strauss, Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa, and Camembert, and added are references to St. Louis pitcher Dizzy Dean, Niagara Falls, Boston beans, and Paramount star Mae West. One new pop culture reference seems especially crafted for Crosby: Merman sings, ‘You’re Paul Whiteman’s tummy,’ to which Crosby responds, ‘Oh, you should see him!’ (Crosby, who in 1926 signed with the Rhythm Boys in Whiteman’s band, had seen Whiteman’s tummy.) The film version of ‘You’re the Top’ does include some of the Porter’s original highbrow references—Botticelli, Keats, and Shelley still get a shout out—but overall, Fetter aims at a middlebrow American demographic, not at Porter’s typical New York audience, which Miles Krueger has described as a ‘constricted group of cognoscenti, who went to the same night spots, read the same newspaper columns, and spent weekends at the same estates.’65 The added choruses of ‘You’re the Top’ also tap into another popular culture ­phenomenon—that of writing new lyrics for Porter’s song. As promotion for the stage production, Freedley had set up songwriting competitions in which fans could submit additional refrains to Porter’s hit songs, the prizes being free tickets to the show.66 This fan activity apparently went far beyond Freedley’s initial contests. Ten months after the show premiered, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson describes how ‘You’re the Top’ in particular was subject to creative extrapolations: ‘Now that Mr. Porter has set the pattern of it,’ he writes, ‘every one enjoys composing additional verses for private consumption—satiric, humorous or ribald, as the case may be.’67 Merman and Crosby’s screen performance of ‘You’re the Top’ participates in this game, as can be seen in video example 27.1. Merman opens the first refrain by singing that Crosby is ‘the Swanee River,’ a line from Porter’s act 1 reprise of the song. She then adds new lyrics about a V8 flivver, the walls of China, and Santa Claus. Crosby exclaims, ‘Make more!’ after she finishes her new refrain, and she appeases him. There is no embarrassment in rewriting Porter’s song, because, after all, audience members were doing it too. Nor was Paramount apologetic about adding new songs to the film. In a way, Crosby needed new songs, given that most of Porter’s score had been handcrafted for the ­original Broadway cast. As Porter told Merman biographer Peter Martin, ‘I really ­tailor-made [my songs] for her because I know her range so well.’68 He particularly appreciated Merman’s nuanced rhythmic delivery and her diction, qualities that suited the syncopation and fast-paced lyrics of ‘You’re the Top,’ ‘Anything Goes,’ and ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow.’ Crosby had an excellent sense of rhythm too, as proved by his jazzinflected scatting in the ‘Dinah’ number from The Big Broadcast (1932). But he was not known for delivering a tumble of lyrics in quick succession; his crooning style was laid back and more suited to songs that left space for his trademark Irish mordent. With this crooning style in mind, ‘All through the Night’ was not a great fit for Crosby either. Porter wrote the song especially for the original Billy, William Gaxton, who needed a

rescoring anything goes   625 song with a limited range.69 As I suggest below, the new song ‘My Heart and I’ suits Crosby much better than Porter’s song.70 If Crosby needed songs that fit his singing style, he also needed more to sing than Porter’s score offered his character Billy. Three of the film’s new songs—‘Sailor Beware’ by Leo Robin and Richard Whiting, ‘Moon Burn’ by Edward Heyman and Hoagy Carmichael, and ‘My Heart and I’ by Robin and Frederick Hollander—fit the bill. Collectively, these songs depict Billy’s slow but sure wooing of Hope, creating a familiar crooning narrative that is present in nearly every Crosby film of the early to mid-1930s. The numbers also effectively plug the studio’s newly copyrighted music: no other star performance interrupts the succession of Crosby songs in the middle portion of the film’s total running time. For the first Crosby song, ‘Sailor Beware,’ Robin and Whiting’s title is suspiciously similar to Porter’s ‘Buddie, Beware,’ a song that was originally sung in act 2 of the stage production before it was replaced by a reprise of ‘I Get a Kick Out of You.’71 In the stage show, the song was Reno’s warning to men that she would be an expensive wife, one who requires first-row seats at a show and wine with dinner. Robin and Whiting’s rewrite of the song is now a warning from Billy to the sailors, as can be heard in video example 27.2. He describes the ‘Oriental’ and ‘Continental’ girls who live in the East and the West; the musical arrangement, in which drums bang out a ‘primitive’ rhythm, suggests that while these women may be appealing, they are also dangerous. The best women for the sailors are at home, and as Crosby reminds them that ‘some bonnie lies over the ocean,’ the melody quotes the familiar tune ‘My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.’ In using this musical quotation, Robin and Whiting construct a catchy song that already feels familiar to listeners. Though directed at the ship’s sailors, ‘Sailor Beware’ is the first song in which Hope hears Billy’s voice. He sings outside of her cabin, perched from a crow’s nest as he addresses the men on deck; she lies asleep her in cabin, dressed in a revealing nightgown and resting her head on a ruffled pillow (see video example 27.3). The camera cuts to a close-up of her just after Billy sings the ‘My Bonnie’ reference, indicating visually that she is Billy’s bonnie. As his voice spills into her room, she opens her eyes, cocks her head slightly as she listens, and cracks a knowing smile, entranced by the man outside her window. This sequence parallels earlier Crosby numbers like ‘With Every Breath I Take’ in Here Is My Heart (1934) and the reprise of ‘Soon’ in Mississippi (1935), which show Crosby’s voice, not his physical body, cracking the veneer of feminine propriety and awakening a woman’s sexuality. Paramount was playing with Crosby’s identity as a crooner who seduced women via the radio and recordings. After a female character falls in love with Crosby’s voice, she then has to experience his charms in person. Crosby films are thus filled with romantic serenades in which he sits close to a woman and pleads his case. Anything Goes is no exception, with Billy singing directly to Hope in both ‘Moon Burn’ and in ‘My Heart and I.’ The first number gets him close but not quite close enough. Hope sees Billy from her cabin as he paints the ship’s porthole windows while perched on a suspended platform over the sea. She peers out of her window, and at the sight of her, he impulsively pulls the platform up to her

626   musical theatre screen adaptations level and launches into ‘Moon Burn’ (see video example 27.4), a song that details how he will be burned by the moonlight as she embraces and kisses him that evening. As Billy leans into her cabin through the window, Hope powders her nose, checks herself in the mirror, and dons a hat, enjoying his attention. She does not reply whether she will join him under the moon, but she is clearly open to his advances. In ‘My Heart and I,’ Billy completes his seduction of Hope in the privacy of a lifeboat. The song has all the trademarks of a crooning ballad: it is performed at a slower tempo than the previous two numbers, and it features an octave drop in the A phrase, which allows Crosby to slide seductively into sustained notes that showcase his lower register. Initially, the song is filmed in a two-shot; Hope and Billy sit next to each other as Billy leans into her. But for a repeat of the song, the camera moves to a close-up of Hope’s face as she gazes into the distance, immersed in his voice. She turns to him when he kisses her, marking the end of the number, the shot, and the scene itself, as seen in video example 27.5. After three Crosby songs, Hope has fallen for Billy. Each of these new Crosby songs features an easy-to-sing melody, generalized lyrics, and an oft-repeated hook, but Robin and Hollander’s ‘My Heart and I’ was designed to be the film’s bestseller. In addition to Crosby’s onscreen performance, it is also referenced in dialogue throughout the film, arranged as underscoring, and used as the film’s closing musical tag. Superficially, ‘My Heart and I’ shares many characteristics with Porter’s cut song, ‘All through the Night.’ The lyrics of both relate to the relationship of Billy and Hope, and they share an AABA form in which the second and third A phrases differ slightly from the first. The songs’ similarities prove less important, however, than their differences, which demonstrate what separates a Hollywood hit from a sophisticated Broadway song. Leo Robin wrote pop lyrics in which the meaning was clear and to the point. Certainly, the conceit of ‘My Heart and I’ is apparent in the song’s opening phrase: Billy sings that he has conferred with his heart about his feelings for Hope and then professes his love to her. Robin’s rhymes (charms-arms, start-heart, and true-you) are predictable, but nonetheless, the song is a bit coy. His heart, defined as a separate entity, gives Billy a team member of sorts; he never has to sing the vulnerable phrase, ‘I love you,’ and instead can couch his feelings with the phrase, ‘We’re so in love with you.’ By contrast, Porter’s song is more suggestive in its depiction of love and reveals the significance of the phrase ‘all through the night’ only at the end of the chorus. At first, the song appears to describe an intimate meeting between Billy and Hope that lasts all night. Porter incorporates several internal rhymes (night-delight, night-height, above-love) before making an especially creative rhyme at end of the first two A phrases (me with ecstasy). Only in the last A phrase does Porter clarify that Billy and Hope’s meeting is imagined rather than real, lasting all through the night because it occurs in a dream. As Raymond Knapp writes, the song is ultimately ‘about being apart,’ even though it purports to describe the most intimate of encounters.72 The melodies of ‘My Heart and I’ and ‘All through the Night’ suit their respective ­lyrics. ‘My Heart and I’ is easy to sing. The opening phrase spans the range of an octave and contains only diatonic pitches, which rest comfortably within a standard progression

rescoring anything goes   627 that moves from I to ii7 to V. This harmonic predictability helps the amateur singer to stay in tune. ‘All through the Night,’ written for the limited range of Gaxton, was also supposed to be easy to sing, but like Porter’s witty lyrics, presents its own difficulties. As Knapp observes, the tune consists of ‘an obsessively descending chromatic scale’ that often maintains ‘an aching major-seventh or minor-ninth dissonance with the bass as it falls.’ The result, Knapp notes, is that one loses ‘the reality of the home key along the way,’73 and only at the end of the first phrase, when the melody finally breaks away from the descending half steps and leaps upward to the fifth scale degree, does a clear sense of harmonic stability return. The chromatic melody and harmony make sense from a ­lyrical and narrative perspective, as they convey the disorientation of desire that Billy and Hope feel. But from a commercial perspective, the song is not easy to hum. Moreover, the hook of ‘My Heart and I’ is far more memorable than the hook of ‘All through the Night.’ Robin repeats the song’s title at the beginning of every A phrase, and each time, Hollander pairs ‘my heart and I’ with the same melodic shape: an ascending third for ‘my heart,’ and then an octave lower, an ascending second for ‘and I.’ The octave displacement creates a lovely call-and-response effect, as if the heart calls out first and is answered by the head; it also makes the hook stand out from the rather mundane stepwise melody that fills the rest of each A phrase. Compare that hook construction with the A phrases of ‘All through the Night.’ Porter uses the title lyrics at the beginning of the first and second A phrases, but rather than highlight them melodically, he essentially buries the hook’s lyrics in the sinking chromatic melody. The half-step descent that sets ‘all through the night’ is similar to the half-step descent of the following lyrics ‘I delight’ and ‘in your love.’ The A phrase, as a result, does not offer a tuneful motive that is easily detached from its context. Nor does Porter offer his listeners many repetitions of the hook. In the last A phrase, the final iteration of the song’s title is set to a short melodic turn that ends on the upper tonic, the highest pitch in the song. Knapp argues that this final melodic cadence ‘completes an ascending registral shaping across the “A” phrases’ that peaks at the end of the chorus.74 But as satisfying as that registral shaping might be, changing the hook’s contour in its final appearance diminishes the song’s ability to plug itself. Like ‘My Heart and I,’ the other songs added to Paramount’s Anything Goes were designed to get in the ears of the audience. Even so, producers did not leave their appeal to chance, and in Sam Coslow’s words, they ‘made damn sure’ to repeat and reprise the songs whenever possible. The choruses of ‘Moon Burn’ and ‘My Heart and I’ are each repeated in their initial performances, giving listeners the chance to hear the lyrics twice. The latter song’s repeat even gets narrative reinforcement from Hope: ‘Could we hear it again,’ she implores, ‘‘My Heart and I’?’ The song that gets the most repetitions is ‘Sailor Beware.’ Crosby sings the chorus twice, and male and female vocal choruses join him for two more repeats. The quadruple plugging of this song seemed to work on Richard Watts Jr, the New York Herald Tribune critic who was otherwise unimpressed by Paramount’s treatment of Porter’s score. Watts conceded, ‘It should be reported on the picture’s behalf, though, that there is a good new song called “Sailor, Beware.” ’75 Even a Porter fan, it seems, was susceptible to the plugging of Hollywood.

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On Fidelity In his comments on Paramount’s changes to Porter’s score, Watts argues he is justified in criticizing the film for not following the stage version more clearly. Fidelity here, as in other critiques of Hollywood adaptations of stage musicals, is defined as faithfulness to the original score. It is worth asking, however, if Broadway itself abides by the same standards that it expects from Hollywood. Stage musicals are, after all, in a constant state of revision during rehearsals, try-outs, initial Broadway runs, and subsequent revivals. Criticizing Paramount’s Anything Goes for not being faithful to Porter’s original score is less persuasive when one considers that in the second half of the twentieth century, Broadway and the West End were not particularly faithful to the 1934 stage production, either. The revivals of Anything Goes were shaped by the Rodgers and Hammerstein model that developed in the 1940s and 1950s. These postwar musicals typically feature serious plots borrowed from existing plays and novels; characters who have clear psychological motivations; and so-called integrated scores, in which songs relate to the plots and characters at hand. Anything Goes does not fit this model at all. Its plot is satiric, comedic, and haphazard; its characters don disguises and make wisecracks as much as they express their true feelings; and most of the songs, though tied to the story, were crafted for the performers as much as the characters. In an attempt to fix these issues, Block notes, ‘producers and directors for the past thirty years’ have continually revised the book and interpolated additional songs.76 Some of the problems perceived in the 1934 book are relatively easy fixes. Most Broadway revivals update the dialogue to remove the 1930s topical humour as well as the racially insensitive treatment of the show’s two Chinese characters. Deficiencies in the show’s characters and plot take more work. The relationship between Reno and Sir Evelyn is especially vexing. In the original production, Sir Evelyn is depicted as effeminate and does not sing, while Reno is boisterous and has the major hits of the show. That they end up together does not abide by modern expectations of musical comedies.77 To make the relationship more persuasive, the 1962 revival gives Evelyn a risqué duet with Reno (‘Let’s Misbehave,’ originally written for Porter’s 1928 show Paris), and the 1987 revival gives him his own solo (‘The Gypsy in Me,’ a song sung by Hope in the 1934 production). The 1987 revival treats the other main characters ‘more seriously’ as well: Timothy Crouse, who worked with John Weidman on the revised book, explained, ‘If there is one emotional ingredient we’ve added, it’s passion for the characters,’78 and director Jerry Zaks described Reno, Billy, Hope, and Sir Evelyn as ‘people dealing with the ramifications of trying to fall in love,’ citing the show’s working title Hard to Get as support for his interpretation. ‘Even though so many improbable things go on,’ Zaks noted, ‘we strove to ground everything in a recognizable reality.’79 Is the 1936 film version more or less faithful than these stage revivals? Paramount’s Anything Goes retains much of the 1934 production’s humour, even with the changes requested by the Hays Office, so in terms of the book, it is far more faithful than the stage

rescoring anything goes   629 revivals. But the sticking point for the film adaptation remains Porter’s music: it contains less of it, while the stage revivals add more of it. The 1962 revival of Anything Goes, Block points out, ‘incorporated no less than six songs out of a total of fourteen from other Porter shows,’80 though no mention of these additions is made in Lewis Funke’s Times review of the show. Reporting on the 1987 revival, Times critic Stephen Holden writes that it is ‘quite a different creature from the 1934 romp’ but does not judge it more harshly as a result. Frank Rich’s review of the same show calls its interpolation of Porter songs as ‘keeping with contemporary practice.’81 The 1936 film version’s interpolations are completely typical of 1930s Hollywood practice, and yet its status as a faithful adaptation remains in question. At issue, of course, are the authors of the new music: Leo Robin, Richard Whiting, and Frederick Hollander are not Cole Porter. In discussions of fidelity, the focus on the original songwriter and his music relates to the canonization of Broadway songwriters, the very men and women who throughout the 1930s strove to differentiate their music from what they perceived as the lowbrow commercialism of the film studios. In this light, the call for fidelity to a stage score moves beyond a simple desire to see a beloved Broadway production represented accurately onscreen and entangles itself with the aesthetic ideology of highbrow art. Such a belief may suggest a moral high ground in which the art of the stage trumps the money of the screen, but it also downplays the fact that Broadway songwriters used the rhetoric of art for their own promotional and commercial agendas. The ascent from Tin Pan Alley that began in the 1930s was deliberate, and it continued into the 1940s when the notion of ‘integration’ became attached to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Integration, as James O’Leary has demonstrated, was ‘never simply a formal principle to begin with. It was a performative act of cultural positioning.’82 In invoking it, he argues, Rodgers and Hammerstein were able ‘to situate the show in an expansive cultural field that included not only middlebrow Broadway but also highbrow art.’83 The call for faithful Hollywood adaptations of beloved stage scores relies on a similar cultural positioning, in which Broadway aficionados separate themselves from the mainstream, popular aesthetics of Hollywood. There are, of course, contradictions in this cultural positioning. Broadway songwriters and producers have always had significant commercial interests in the success of their shows, because they, like Hollywood songwriters, want to make money from their efforts. The commercial success of Broadway, moreover, remains closely tied to Hollywood. In the case of Anything Goes, these ties are clear in Vinton Freedley’s careful guidance of the show’s book, in which he rejected a Hollywood satire in hopes of developing a product that could be sold to the film industry down the road. And as Paramount’s resulting adaptation of Anything Goes demonstrates, anything does not actually go in Hollywood: the industry has its own standards, different from those of the stage, which it follows consistently and methodically. Broadway and Hollywood both desire hits, and to hedge bets, each relies on the conventions and stylistic elements associated with their chosen platform, whether the stage or the screen. In this light, Paramount’s Anything Goes is entirely faithful, not to Cole Porter, but to its star Bing Crosby and to the studio’s hit songwriters.

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Notes 1. Richard Watts Jr, ‘ “Anything Goes”—Paramount,’ New York Herald Tribune, 6 February 1936. 2. Thomas Hischak, Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical When It Went to Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 3. 3. For an excellent history of the Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley mergers, see the second chapter of Katherine Spring’s Saying It with Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 4. Spring, Saying It with Songs, 54–55. 5. Spring, Saying It with Songs, 59–60. 6. Spring, Saying It with Songs, 61–63. In addition to a salary, Coslow was also offered ‘a handsome weekly drawing account against royalties.’ Coslow, Cocktails for Two: The Many Lives of Giant Songwriter Sam Coslow (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1977), 96. 7. Robert Kimball, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 475. 8. Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 109. 9. Other scholars have argued that in terms of formal conventions, there are no notable differences between Broadway and Hollywood songs. Spring writes that ‘the popular song form that was characteristic of the 1920s Tin Pan Alley and Broadway productions ­continued to dominate the output of songwriters who were writing for both stage and film.’ Spring, Saying It with Songs, 61. Charles Hamm makes a similar argument, writing that there is ‘no way to tell, from listening to a song by Irving Berlin or any of his contemporaries, whether it was written for vaudeville, musical comedy, the movies, or simply composed for radio play and possibly recording.’ Hamm, Yesterdays, Popular Song in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 339. My point is that though formal conventions stayed more or less the same, there is a stylistic difference between songs composed by those songwriters who worked primarily in Hollywood and those songwriters who worked primarily in New York. 10. Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson, The Songs of Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10. 11. Edward M. Wickes, Writing the Popular Song (Springfield, MA: Home Correspondence School, 1916), 113. Daniel Goldmark, in his survey of fifty songwriting manuals published between 1899 and the late 1930s, argues that these guides offer a clear picture of how the industry wanted outsiders to see their work. See Goldmark, ‘ “Making Songs Pay”: Tin Pan Alley’s Formula for Success,’ Musical Quarterly 98, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2015): 3–28. For a thorough account of the rise of Tin Pan Alley, see David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 12. Wickes, Writing the Popular Song, 34. 13. Wickes, Writing the Popular Song, 34–35. 14. Al Dubin, The Art of Song Writing (New York: Majestic Music Company, 1928), 9–10. Dubin wrote this book very quickly to earn extra cash, which may explain his brief description of production songs. See Patricia Dubin McGuire, Lullaby of Broadway, Life and Times of Al Dubin (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1983), 94–95. 15. Abner Silver and Robert Bruce, How to Write and Sell a Song Hit (New York: Prentice Hall, 1939), 54–55. 16. Silver and Bruce, How to Write and Sell a Song Hit, 9–10, 27. 17. Silver and Bruce, How to Write and Sell a Song Hit, 66–67. 18. Silver and Bruce, How to Write and Sell a Song Hit, 66–67.

rescoring anything goes   631 19. Block, ‘The Melody (and the Words) Linger On: American Musical Comedies of the 1920s and 1930s,’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, ed. William  A.  Everett and Paul R. Laird (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 109. 20. Block, ‘The Melody (and the Words) Linger On,’ 116. 21. Philip Furia, ‘Sinatra on Broadway,’ in Frank Sinatra and Popular Culture, ed. Leonard Mustazza (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 163, 165. 22. Isaac Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley, a Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket (New York: John Day, 1930), 231. For more information on Goldberg, see Ryan Banagale, ‘Isaac Goldberg: Assessing Agency in American Music Biography,’ American Music Review 34, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 8–9, 15. 23. Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley, 232. 2 4. Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 8. 25. Most, Making Americans, 27. 26. Quoted in Charlotte Greenspan, Pick Yourself Up: Dorothy Fields and the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 70. Greenspan cites an undated clipping in the Dorothy Fields scrapbook held at the Museum of the City of New York. 27. Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages, an Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1975), 138. 2 8. Kurt Weill, Speak Low (When You Speak of Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, ed. and trans. Lys Symonette and Kim  H.  Kowalke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 220. 2 9. McGuire, Lullaby of Broadway, 147. 30. Russell Bennett, The Broadway Sound, the Autobiography and Selected Essays of Robert  Russell Bennett, ed. George  J.  Ferencz (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1999), 125–126. 31. Coslow, Cocktails for Two, 98. 32. Rodgers, Musical Stages, 166. 33. Rodgers, Musical Stages, 156. 34. The information for Table 27.1 is compiled from a Paramount Interoffice Memo, dated 9 May 1933, in the Nathaniel Finston Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, box 1, folder 10–1 Exhibits, Estimates & Costs—Paramount. 35. ‘Song Writers Assignments and Costs (From January 1st, 1929 to December 1, 1934),’ box 1, Nathaniel Finston Papers, AHC. The 1934 films that had the next highest songs sales were We’re Not Dressing (more than 230,000 song sales), which was also a Bing Crosby film, and Murder at the Vanities (more than 150,000 song sales). 36. Data in Table 27.2 come from ‘Song Writers Total Earnings and Number of Assignments (From January 1st, 1929, to January 1st, 1935),’ box 1, Nathaniel Finston Papers, AHC. 37. Inter-office communication with subject, ‘Producers’ Tentative Plans for Musical Productions,’ 23 August 1935, box 1, Nathaniel Finston Papers, AHC. 38. Inter-office communication with subject, ‘Producers’ Tentative Plans for Musical Productions.’ 39. Gary Giddins notes that ‘Moonburn’ was Carmichael’s ‘first movie sale.’ Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, the Early Years, 1903–1940 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 392. 40. Brooks Atkinson, ‘The Play: “Anything Goes” as Long as Victor Moore, Ethel Merman and William Gaxton Are Present,’ New York Times, 22 November 1934. 41. ‘ “Anything Goes” Scores Real Success on Broadway,’ Los Angeles Times, 28 November 1934. 4 2. Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44. My summary of the show’s production

632   musical theatre screen adaptations history draws from Block’s account as well as the description Caryl Flinn offers in Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 66–73. 43. Other sources support Davis’s account of the rewrites, as Block describes in Enchanted Evenings, 43–44. Porter biographer George Eells writes that Freedley had always thought the Bolton-Wodehouse book was tasteless and used the Morro disaster as an excuse to  seek another rewrite. Eells, The Life that Late He Led: A Biography of Cole Porter (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 110–111. 44. Examples of stage plays and musicals that had satirized Hollywood include George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Once in a Lifetime (1930), Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s America’s Sweetheart (1931), and Sam and Bella Spivack’s, Boy Meets Girl (1935). Charlotte Greenspan briefly discusses these shows in Pick Yourself Up: Dorothy Fields and the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 80–82, 120–126. 45. Quoted in Lee Davis, Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern: The Men Who Made Musical Comedy (New York: James H. Heineman, 1993), 331. 46. Davis, Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern, 332. 47. Davis, Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern, 334–336. 48. Quoted in Flinn, Brass Diva, 74. Gary Giddins gives a conflicting report of the deal, writing that the movie rights cost $100,000. Giddins, Bing Crosby, 391. 49. ‘Paramount Studios Win “Anything Goes,” ’ Hartford Courant, 20 January 1935. 50. Hischak, Through the Screen Door, 28. 51. One scene was cut, for example, because ‘it could be construed . . . that a woman passenger was asking directions to the ladies’ room.’ Giddins, Bing Crosby, 392. 52. Hischak, Through the Screen Door, 29. 53. Flinn, Brass Diva, 75. 54. Crosby’s film shorts, in which he usually plays some version of himself, established his masculine crooning persona in the early 1930s. Allison McCracken details these shorts and some of his other films from the early 1930s in Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 288–303. 55. Giddins, Bing Crosby, 391. 56. This outline of the 1934 stage version is adapted from Geoffrey Block’s breakdown of the show in Enchanted Evenings, 325. 57. Watts, ‘ “Anything Goes”—Paramount.’ 58. The letter describing this objection is noted by Giddins, Bing Crosby, 392. Giddins cites a letter Joseph Breen sent to Paramount executive John Hammell, 9 September 1935, MPAA Production Code Administration Files, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). 59. To my knowledge, there is no archival evidence that the Hays Office requested these changes. I observed these changes when comparing the film performances of ‘Sailor’s Chantey’ with Porter’s original lyrics for the show, available in Kimball, The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, 166–176. 60. Quoted in Flinn, Brass Diva, 74. Flinn cites a letter signed K.  L., 29 July 1936, MPAA Production Code Administration Files, AMPAS. 61. Giddins, Bing Crosby, 392. The objection to ‘Anything Goes’ is from a letter from Joseph Breen to Paramount executive John Hammell, 9 September 1935, MPAA Production Code Administration Files, AMPAS.

rescoring anything goes   633 62. Flinn, Brass Diva, 75, and Giddins, Bing Crosby, 392. Flinn cites a letter from Vincent Hart to Joseph Breen, 10 January 1935, MPAA Production Code Administration Files, AMPAS. 63. Notably, Paramount did not follow all of the censors’ suggestions. The Hays Office had flagged Robin and Hollander’s ‘Shanghai-De-Ho’ because of the ‘plainly vulgar meaning’ in the lyrics, ‘Soon the chows and Pekinese will stay away from cherry trees.’ The line remains in the film, however, sung cheekily by Merman. Giddins, Bing Crosby, 392. Giddins cites a letter from Joseph Breen to Paramount executive John Hammell, 9 September 1935, MPAA Production Code Administration Files, AMPAS. 64. Flinn, Brass Diva, 75. Ted Fetter’s role in the rewrite to ‘You’re the Top’ is also discussed in William McBride, Cole Porter, a Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). 65. Quoted in Block, Enchanted Evenings, 50. 66. Flinn, Brass Diva, 72. 67. Brooks Atkinson, ‘Catching Up on Song: Ethel Merman, Cole Porter, and a Couple of Tunes from “Anything Goes,” ’ New York Times, 15 September 1935. 68. Quoted in Flinn, Brass Diva, 69. 69. Initially, Gaxton was supposed to sing Porter’s ‘Easy to Love’ for the act 1 love duet, but that song was deemed too difficult for him. Porter composed ‘All through the Night,’ as a replacement. Block, Enchanted Evenings, 45. Porter’s ‘Easy to Love’ was later sung by Jimmy Stewart in the Eleanor Powell musical Born to Dance (1936). 70. Ethan Mordden argues that ‘All through the Night’ ‘would have sounded great on Bing Crosby,’ but Crosby’s glacial performance of the song in the 1956 film adaption of Anything Goes is not particularly engaging. Mordden, When Broadway Went to Hollywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 122. 7 1. Block, Enchanted Evenings, 325. 7 2. Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 93. 73. Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, 93. 74. Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, 94. 75. Watts, ‘ “Anything Goes”—Paramount.’ 7 6. Block, Enchanted Evenings, 45. 77. Knapp posits that Porter suggests a ‘semi-closeted homosexual dimension’ throughout the songs of Anything Goes, a subtext that ‘goes a long way toward explaining why Sir Evelyn himself gets no song to sing, which he would surely have gotten if we were meant to believe that, in the end, he truly “gets the girl” in the conventional sense.’ Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, 89–90. 78. ‘Son Helping to Update Crouse’s “Anything Goes,” ’ New York Times, 25 August 1987. Also quoted in Block, Enchanted Evenings, 50. 79. Stephen Holden, ‘A Glimpse of Olden Days, Via Cole Porter,’ New York Times, 18 October 1987. Also quoted in Block, Enchanted Evenings, 50. 80. Block, Enchanted Evenings, 47. 81. Lewis Funke, ‘Theatre: “Anything Goes,” Revival of Musical Opens at Orpheum,’ New York Times, 16 May 1962; Frank Rich, ‘The Stage: “Anything Goes,” ’ New York Times, 20 October 1987; and Stephen Holden, ‘A Glimpse of Olden Days, Via Cole Porter.’ 8 2. O’Leary, ‘Oklahoma!, “Lousy Publicity,” and the Politics of Formal Integration in the American Musical Theater,’ Journal of Musicology 31, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 180. 83. O’Leary, ‘Oklahoma!, “Lousy Publicity,”’ 144.

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636   select bibliography Cohan, Steven, ed. The Sound of Musicals. London: BFI, 2010. Croce, Arlene The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. Davis, Lorrie, with Rachel Gallagher. Letting Down My Hair; Two Years with the Love Rock Tribe—from Dawning to Downing of Aquarius. New York: A. Fields Books, 1973. Decker, Todd. Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. de Giere, Carol. Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked. New York: Applause and Cinema Books, 2008. de Giere, Carol. The Godspell Experience: Inside a Transformative Musical. Bethel, CT: Scene 1 Publishing, 2014. De Mille, Agnes. Dance to the Piper. Introduction by J. Acocella. New York: New York Review Books, 2015 [1952]. Delamater, Jerome. Dance in the Hollywood Musical. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981. Doherty, Thomas. Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Donnelly, K.J., and Elizabeth Carroll, eds., Contemporary Musical Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Dyer, Richard. Only Entertainment, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Easton, Carol. No Intermissions: The Life of Agnes De Mille. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Eddie Mannix Ledger. Los Angeles, Margaret Herrick Library, Center for Motion Picture Study. Editors of Consumer Guide with Phillip J. Kaplan. The Best, Worst and Most Unusual: Hollywood Musicals. New York: Beekman House, 1983. Edwards, Paul. ‘Adaptation: Two Theories.’ Text and Performance Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2007): 369–377. Eller, Claudia. ‘Crying’s Over, “Evita” Finds Backers.’ Los Angeles Times, 11 December 1993. Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Evans, Peter William. Top Hat. London: Wiley, 2010. Everett, William A., and Paul R. Laird, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 3rd. ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Everett, William A. Sigmund Romberg. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Fehr, Richard, and Frederick  G.  Vogel. Lullabies of Hollywood: Movie Music and the Movie Musical, 1915–1992. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993. Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. Fisher, James. Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Fordin, Hugh. M-G-M’s Greatest Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996 [1975]. Forman, Miloš, with Jan Novak. Turnaround: A Memoir. Villard/Random House, 1993. Forrest, Jennifer, and Leonard R. Koos, eds. Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002. Forte, Allen. The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era 1924–1950. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Franceschina, John. Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Furia, Philip, and Laurie Patterson. The Songs of Hollywood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

select bibliography   637 Gardner, Kara A. Agnes De Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Ganz, Andrew. ‘In Upcoming Revival of Evita, Che Will Be the “Everyman,” Not Che Guevara.’ February 2012. Playbill.com. Gänzl, Kurt. Ganzl’s Book of the Broadway Musical. New York: Schirmer Books, 1995. Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. Giddins, Gary. Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, the Early Years, 1903–1940. Boston: Little, Brown, 2001. Gilbert, James. Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Gontier, David F. Jr, and Timothy L. O’Brien. ‘13. Evita, 1996.’ In The Films of Alan Parker, 1976–2003. Jefferson, NC: McFarlandgringoinbuenosaires.com. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Goldmark, Daniel. ‘Adapting  The Jazz Singer  from Short Story to Screen: A Musical Profile.’ Journal of the American Musicological Society 70, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 767–817. Grant, Mark  N. The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004. Gray, Susan. Writers on Directors. New York: Watson-Guptil, 1999. Green, Stanley. The World of Musical Comedy. New York: Ziff-Davis, 1960. Grode, Eric. Hair: The Story of the Show that Defined a Generation. Foreword by James Rado. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2010. Hall, Sheldon. ‘Tall Revenue Features: The Genealogy of the Modern Blockbuster.’ In Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, edited by Steve Neale, 11–26. London: BFI, 2002. Harris, Mark. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of New Hollywood. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Harvey, Stephen. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Foreword by L. Minnelli. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Harper and Row, 1989. Hemming, Roy. The Melody Lingers On: The Great Songwriters and Their Movie Musicals. New York: Newmarket, 1986. Hirschhorn, Clive. Gene Kelly: A Biography. London: W. H. Allen, 1974. Hischak, Thomas. Broadway Plays and Musicals: Descriptions and Essential Facts of More Than 14,000 Shows through 2007. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Hischak, Thomas  S. The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hischak, Thomas S. Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical When It Went to Hollywood. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Hirschhorn, Clive. Gene Kelly: A Biography. Foreword by F. Sinatra. London: W. H. Allen, 1974. Horn, Barbara Lee. The Age of Hair: Evolution and Impact of Broadway’s First Rock Musical. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Hubbert, Julie. ‘ “Whatever Happened to Great Movie Music?” Cinéma Vérité and Hollywood Film Music of the Early 1970s.’ American Music 21, no. 2 (2003): 180–213. Hubbert, Julie, ed. Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

638   select bibliography Hutcheon, Linda. ‘The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History.’ Cultural Critique 5 (1986): 179–207. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Hutcheon, Linda, and Mario  J.  Valdés. ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: A Dialogue.’ Poligrafías. Revista de Teoría Literaria y Literatura comparada 3 (1998–2000): 18–41. Jewell, Richard  B. ‘RKO Grosses, 1929–1951: The  C.  J.  Tevlin Ledger,’ Historic Journal of Film, Radio and Television 14 (1994): 37–49. Jones, John Bush. Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre. Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2003. Kantor, Michael, and Lawrence Maslon. Broadway: The American Musical. New York: Bulfinch Press, 2004. Kennedy, Matthew. Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Kessler, Kelly. Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical: Music, Masculinity and Mayhem. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Kimball, Robert, ed. The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. King, Geoff. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Kirle, Bruce. Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Klein, Amanda Ann. American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Knapp, Raymond, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kogan, Rick. ‘The Original “Grease” Was Born in Chicago.’ Chicago Tribune, 29 January 2016. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Laird, Paul R. The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. Lawson-Peebles, Robert, ed. Approaches to the American Musical. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1996. Leitch, Thomas. ‘Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,’ Criticism 45, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 150–153. Lerner, Alan J. The Street Where I Live: The Story of My Fair Lady, Gigi and Camelot. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978. Leve, James. American Musical Theater. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Levy, Emanuel. Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2009. Long, Robert  E. Broadway, The Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great ChoreographerDirectors, 1940 to the Present. New York: Continuum, 2001. Lovensheimer, Jim. South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Magee, Jeffrey. Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theatre. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Mast, Gerald. Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1987.

select bibliography   639 McArthur, Colin. Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003.  McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. McElhaney, Joe. The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. McElhaney, Joe, ed. Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009. McHugh, Dominic. Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. McHugh, Dominic, ed. Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist’s Letters. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. McLean, Adrienne. Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. McMillin, Scott. The Musical as Drama. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. McNally, Karen. When Frankie Went to Hollywood: Frank Sinatra and American Male Identity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Mera, Miguel. ‘Invention/Re-invention.’ Music Sound and the Moving Image 3, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 1–20. Miller, Scott. ‘Inside Evita.” 2010. New Line Theatre.org. Miller, Scott. Rebels with Applause: Broadway’s Groundbreaking Musicals. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001. Minnelli, Vincente, with H. Arce. Foreword by A. J. Lerner. Vincente Minnelli: I Remember It Well. Hollywood, CA: Samuel French, 1990 [1974]. Mordden, Ethan. The Hollywood Musical. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981. Mordden, Ethan. When Broadway Went to Hollywood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Morris, Mitchell. ‘Cabaret, America’s Weimar, and the Mythologies of the Gay Subject.’ American Music 22 (2004): 145–157. Most, Andrea. Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Mueller, John. Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films. New York: Wings, 1985. Mundy, John. Popular Music on Screen: From Hollywood Musical to Music Video. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Naremore, James, ed. Film Adaptation. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge, 2000. Nollen, Scott Allen. Abbott and Costello on the Home Front: A Critical Study of the Wartime Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Norton, Richard  C. A Chronology of American Musical Theater, vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. O’Brien, Daniel. The Frank Sinatra Film Guide. London: Batsford, 1998. O’Brien, Lucy. Madonna: Like an Icon. New York: Bantam Press, 2008. Oja, Carol  J. Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. O’Leary, James. ‘Oklahoma!, ‘Lousy Publicity,’ and the Politics of Formal Integration in the American Musical Theater.’ Journal of Musicology 31, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 139–182. Parker, Alan. ‘EVITA – Alan Parker – Director, Writer, Producer Official Website.’ Web.

640   select bibliography Patinkin, Sheldon. ‘No Legs, No Jokes, No Chance’: A History of the American Musical Theater. Evanston: Northeastern University Press, 2008. Pomerance, Murray. The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Richards, Stanley, ed. Great Rock Musicals. New York: Stein and Day, 1979. Rodosthenous, George. Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen. New York: Routledge, 2017. Rodgers, Richard. Musical Stages: An Autobiography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. Rogers, Ginger. Ginger: My Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Schreger, Charles. ‘The Second Coming of Sound,’ Film Comment 14, no. 5 (September/October 1978): 34–37. Sennett, Ted. Hollywood Musicals. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981. Sheward, David. New York review: Evita. 5 April 2012. Backstage.com. Shmoop Editorial Team. ‘Culture in the Reagan Era.’ Shmoop. Web. Sinyard, Neil. Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Slater, Thomas J. Milos Forman: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Smith, Helen. There’s a Place for Us: The Musical Theatre Works of Leonard Bernstein. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Press, 2011. Smith, Jeff. Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Spring, Katherine. Saying It with Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Stam, Robert. ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.’ In Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, 54–76. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Stam, Robert. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo, eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Starr, Larry. Gershwin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Stempel, Larry. Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Sternfeld, Jessica. The Megamusical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Stubblebine, Donald J. Broadway Sheet Music: A Comprehensive Listing, 1918–1937. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996. Studlar, Gaylyn. Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Swain, Joseph. The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002. Symonds, Dominic. We’ll Have Manhattan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Symonds, Dominic, and Millie Taylor, eds. Gestures of Musical Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Taraborelli, J. Rando. Madonna: An Intimate Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Taylor, John R., and A. Jackson. The Hollywood Musical. London: Secker and Warburg, 1971. Tharp, Twyla. Push Comes to Shove. New York: Bantam, 1992. Thelen, Lawrence. The Show Makers: Great Directors of the American Musical Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2000.

select bibliography   641 Thomas, Bob. Astaire: The Man, the Dancer. New York: St Martin’s, 1984. Thomas, Tony. The Films of Gene Kelly: Song and Dance Man. Foreword by F. Astaire. New York: Carol, 1991. Traubner, Richard. Operetta: A Theatrical History, rev. ed. New York: Routledge, 2003. Turk, Edward Baron. Hollywood Diva. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Whitfield, Sarah, ed. Rethinking Musical Theatre. Palgrave, 2019. Wilder, Alec. American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Wilk, Max. They’re Playing Our Song. New York: Zoetrope, 1986. Winer, Deborah Grace. On the Sunny Side of the Street: The Life and Lyrics of Dorothy Fields. New York: Schirmer, 1997. Wolf, Stacy. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Wolf, Stacy. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Woller, Megan. ‘ “Happ’ly-Ever-Aftering”: Changing Social and Industry Conventions in Hollywood Musical Adaptations, 1960–75.’ PhD diss., University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign, 2014. Woller, Megan. ‘The Lusty Court of Camelot (1967): Exploring Sexuality in the Hollywood Adaptation.’ Music and the Moving Image 8, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 3–18. Wollman, Elizabeth L. Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wollman, Elizabeth L. The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Wood, Michael. America in the Movies: Or, ‘Santa Maria, It Had Slipped My Mind.’ New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Yudkoff, Alan. Gene Kelly: A Life of Dance and Dreams. New York: Back Stage Books, 1999. Ziegfeld, Richard, and Paulette Ziegfeld. The Ziegfeld Touch: The Life and Times of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993. Zadan, Craig. Sondheim and Co., 2nd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

Index

Note: Figures and tables are indicated by an italic “f ”, “t” and notes are indicated by “n” following the page numbers.

A

Aarons, Alexander  620 Abbott, Bud  9, 505–508, 593 Abbott, George  17 ‘Abie Baby’  158, 167 Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto R.  83n30 Adams, Dean  10, 591 Adams, Edith  139, 146 Adams, Franklin P.  34 Adams, India  419n32 Adams, Marjory  539n39 Adler, Renata  199, 569, 584, 593 Adler, Richard  17, 517 ‘Ad-Lib Blues’  196 Admas, Dean  10 Adventures of Superman (television series) 468 ‘After the Ball’  45 ‘After You, Who?’  30 ‘Agony’  111, 118, 120 ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’  358–361 Ahlert, Fred  615 Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978)  21 ‘A.I.R.’  158, 167 Aladdin film (1992)  278, 388 film (2019)  25 stage (2014)  592 Alas, Babylon (Frank)  134 ‘Alas for You’  233, 242 Alberni, Luis  53n55 Albright, Tommy  399 Alexander, Rod  75, 469, 532, 540n43 Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938)  530 Alford, Lamar  234, 237 ‘Alice Blue Gown’  495

‘All Aboard for Broadway’  333n45 Allegro (1947)  184, 279, 291n10, 517 Allen, Jay  383 Allen, Richard J.  7, 377 ‘All for Him’  301 ‘All For the Best’  241, 244 ‘All Good Gifts’  238, 241 ‘All Is Well in the State of Denmark, Nothing’s Rotten Anymore’  554 ‘All through the Night’  613, 622–624, 626–627, 633n69 Allyson, June  525 ‘Almost Like Being in Love’  7, 399, 411, 413, 415–416 ‘The Aloof ’  77 ‘Alpha, Beta, Pi’  43 Als, Hilton  166, 180nn71, 89 Alston, Barbara  213 Altman, Anna E.  563 Altman, Rick  332n36, 566n18 Alton, Bob  270n7 Alvarado, Don  503 ‘Always True to You (In My Fashion)’  284, 286 Amadeus (1984)  157, 174, 176n21 The American Idea (1908)  317 An American in Paris (1951)  17–18, 411–412, 421n78, 427, 545, 553 America’s Sweetheart (1931)  632n44 Amos, Tori  567n30 Anchors Aweigh (1945)  538n26, 579 Andrew, Dudley  86, 100 Andrews, Julie  18, 81n15, 423–424, 562, 602 ‘And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out)’ 391

644   Index The Andy Williams Show (television)  543 Anna and the King of Siam (1946)  520 Annie  1, 8, 473–489 film (1982)  20, 385, 473, 476–486, 479t film (2014)  23, 473, 476–488, 479t stage (1977)  385, 473, 476–478, 479t television (1999)  25, 473, 476–486, 479t Annie Get Your Gun film (1950)  2, 16–17, 527, 579 stage (1946)  43, 516, 518 television (1967)  24 ‘Another Autumn’  301 ‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show’  5, 277–280, 282, 550 ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’  7, 378, 390 Ansell, John  471n18 Antonioni, Michelangelo  580 ‘Any Moment’  121 Anything Goes film (1936)  10, 30, 35, 591, 613–629 film (1956)  341 stage (1934)  14, 30, 341 television (1954)  24, 525 ‘Anything Goes’  338 Anzell, Hy  215 Applause (1970)  18 Applause (1973)  24 ‘Aquarius’  156, 166–169 Archerd, Army  425 ‘Are You There?’  493, 497, 503 Ari, Bob  231–232 Ariadna, Nina  123n3 Ariosto: Orlando furioso 206 Arlen, Harold  9, 15, 50n5, 506, 511n23 ‘Armful of Trouble’  33 Armstrong, Louis  4, 186, 196–197, 438 Arnold, Eddy  552 Around the World in 80 Days (1956)  521, 541n54 Arthur, Johnny  454 Ashman, Howard  4, 21, 205, 207–208, 212–213, 215, 217, 221, 227n76, 387 ‘As if We Never Said Goodbye’  379 ‘As Lovely as You Seem’  457 ‘Asmar El Loon’  464 Astaire, Fred  30, 39–41, 43–45, 49, 51n27, 71, 101, 199–200, 356, 361, 377, 524, 530

Athena (1954)  524 Atkinson, J. Brooks  138, 495, 620, 624 At Long Last Love (1975)  384 Attenborough, Richard  20 Atwood, Colleen  115 Auerbach, Erich  57 ‘Automatic’ 560 ‘Ave Maria’  370 Avenue Q (2003)  607 Avery, Tex  115 Ayckbourn, Alan  378 Ayers, Lemuel  275–276, 519 Aykroyd, Dan  226n58 Aylesworth, Thomas G.  476 ‘Azuri’s Dance’  456

B

Babes in Arms film (1939)  15, 30, 50n4 stage (1937)  5, 15, 255, 261, 268, 545 Bacall, Lauren  18, 24, 522 Baccalone, Salvatore  469 Bach, J. S.  246 Bacharach, Burt  233 ‘Back Home Again in Indiana’  43 Bailey, Pearl  425 Ball, Lucille  20, 46, 261 ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’  481 Banderas, Antonio  24, 389–390, 393 The Band Wagon (1953)  17, 132, 412, 419n32, 545 Banfield, Stephen  14, 31, 47 Baranski, Christine  123n3 Barnes, Cheryl  171 Barnes, Clive  381 Barnet, Nilo  506 Barrie, Leslie  621 Barry, Frank  495 Bart, Lionel  574 Bart, Roger  597 Barton, James  299 Baryshnikov, Mikhail  164 Bass, Saul  214 Bates, Florence  88 Bates, Kathy  159, 489, 492n41 Batman (1987, 1990, 1993, 1997)  73 Batman: The Dark Knight Trilogy (2003, 2006, 2012) 73

Index   645 ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’  326 The Battle of Cable Hogue (1970)  580 Bavaar, Tony  299 Bazin, André  57 Beach, Gary  597 ‘Be a Clown’  282 Beale, Simon Russell  121 Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)  492n48 Beaton, Cecil  427 ‘Beautiful City’  238, 242 Beauty and the Beast film (1991)  388, 392 film (2017)  25, 608 stage (1994)  592 Beechey, Annalene  51n9 Bee Gees  384 Beetlejuice (1988)  594 ‘Before I Gaze at You Again’  60 ‘Before the Parade Passes By’  437, 441 ‘The Begat’  69 Behlmer, Rudy  323 Belasco, David  358 ‘Be Like the Bluebird’  622 Bell, Gertrude  452 Bell, Marion  398 Bells Are Ringing (1960)  3, 87, 94–102 ‘Bell Song’  512n37 Bennett, Robert Russell  51n9, 617–618 Bennett, Tony  129 The Benny Goodman Story (1956)  525 Berg, Louis  522 Berger, Arthur Asa  129, 161 Berkeley, Busby  326, 526, 566n25, 596 Berle, Milton  544 Berlin, Irving  13–14, 16–17, 40, 356, 516–518, 523, 616 Berman, Marshall  88 Berman, Pandro  40, 45, 505 Berman, Rob  51n9 Bernstein, Leonard  5, 16, 50n6, 87, 90, 103n13, 229–230, 517. See also specific productions by title Bernstein, Shirley  230 Berry, Chuck  525 Berry, Ken  550, 566n18 Beruh, Joe  230, 233, 235 The Best Things in Life Are Free (1956)  525

‘Betrayed’ 596 ‘Beware of the City’  390 ‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered’  254–255, 267–268 Biddle, Francis  325 Bierce, Ambrose  206 Big (1996)  592 The Big Broadcast (1932)  618, 624 ‘The Big Dollhouse’  600 Big Fish (2013)  592 ‘Big Spender’  77–78 Bilbo, Theodore  183 Bill Haley & His Comets  525, 563 Billington, Michael  217 Billy Elliot (2008)  592 Birkett, Danielle  4, 183 The Birth of a Nation (Griffith)  129 Bitter Sweet film (1940)  15, 355–373, 376n12 stage (1929)  355 Bizet, Georges  453, 472n44 ‘Black Boys’  166 Black Peter (1964)  161 Blaine, Vivian  17, 518 Blake, Eubie  50n5 Blakemore, Michael  278, 286 Blanchard, Tammy  123n3 Blanchett, Cate  29 Bland, James  373 Blazing Saddles (1974)  597 ‘Bless the Lord’  237, 241 Block, Geoffrey  2, 14–15, 29, 267, 276, 294, 490n21, 616, 620, 628–629 Bloomer Girl (1956)  24 Blossom Time (1921)  448 ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow’  613, 623–624 ‘Blow High, Blow Low’  532, 535 Blue Eyes (1928)  44 The Blue Paradise (1915)  470n3 ‘Blue White and Red’  167 Blunt, Emily  23, 111, 118 Blyth, Ann  525 Body of Evidence (1993)  388 Bois, Curt  462 ‘Bold Women’  450 Boles, John  454, 503–504 Bolick, Duane  232–233

646   Index Bolton, Guy  495–496, 621 Bonham Carter, Helena  22 Bonnesar, Dave  463, 467 Bonnie and Clyde (1967)  570, 578, 584 ‘Bon Voyage’  622 Bordman, Gerald  482, 510n11 Bordwell, David  578 Born to Dance (1936)  348, 633n69 Bosler, Virginia  399 The Boy Friend (1954)  517 The Boy friend (1971)  383 Boyle, Barbara  209 Boyle, Johnny  323 ‘A Boy Like That’  76 Boy Meets Girl (1935)  632n44 The Boys from Syracuse (1940)  15 Braha, Herb  232, 234 Brando, Marlon  18, 66, 98, 254, 270n6, 518, 532, 593 ‘Brazilian Dance’  506 Breathless (1960)  300 Brecht, Bertolt  380 Breen, Joseph  255, 273n41, 622–623, 632n58 Brennert, Alan  223 Brett, Jeremy  296 Brickman, Paul  217 Brigadoon film (1954)  7, 16, 184, 302, 310, 382, 395–418, 427, 518, 523–524, 527 stage (1947)  7, 517 television (1966)  24, 400 Bright, Richard  162 Bring It On: The Musical (2011)  592, 608 Britton, Pamela  538n26 ‘Broadway Ballet’  403 ‘Broadway Melody’  283 Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)  349 ‘Broadway Rhythm’  50n5 Broderick, Matthew  23, 25, 603, 605–606, 611n56 Brokeback Mountain (2005)  598 Brooks, David  398, 410, 415 Brooks, Mel  593, 595–596, 598–599, 603, 605 Brooks, Peter  231 Brosnan, Pierce  603 Brown, Joe E.  505 Brown, Lew  525

Brown, Nacio Herb  50n5 Browne, Sarah  165 Bruce, Robert  615–616 Brukenfeld, Dirk  234–235 Bruneau, Ralph  215 ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’  6, 337, 340–341, 343–344f, 348, 350 Bryant, Timothy Joseph  243, 248n82 Brynner, Yul  18, 526, 541n54 Buchan, John  30 Buchman, Andrew  4, 151 Buckner, Robert  318, 322, 324–325, 332n41, 457–458, 463 ‘Buenos Aires’  390 Bukatman, Scott  88 Bulter, Kerry  223 Bundle of Joy (1956)  525 Burnett, Carol  24–25, 489, 492n41, 543, 566n18. See also The Carol Burnett Show Burrows, Abe  337–338 Burton, Richard  18, 427 Burton, Tim  73, 481 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)  302, 306 Butler, Gerard  24 Butler, Michael  162, 179n54 Butt, George  511n18 Bwana Devil (1952)  522 Bye Bye Birdie film (1963)  579 film (1995)  25 ‘By My Side’  233, 242 Bynes, Amanda  603

C

Cabaret (1972)  2, 19–20, 30, 47, 57, 76, 127, 383, 385, 428, 602 Cabin in the Sky (1943)  15 Cabot, Bruce  460 Caccini, Francesca: La liberazione di Ruggerio dall’isola d’Alcina 206 Caesar, Sid  593, 605 Cagney, James  6, 315, 323–324, 326–327, 332n41 Cagney, William  315, 324–326, 332n41 Cahn, Sammy  472n63, 527 The Caine Mutiny (1954)  524

Index   647 ‘Caliente’ 506 ‘California Nights’  214 ‘Call Back in the Morning’  219 Call Me Madam film (1953)  17, 518, 523 stage (1950)  517 Camelot film (1967)  2, 18, 57–68, 293, 297–298, 302, 383, 550, 573, 579, 585, 587n25 stage (1960)  18, 58, 295, 427 ‘Camelot’ 59 Canada, Jimmy  232 Canby, Vincent  161, 244, 425–426, 572 Can-Can film (1960)  6, 342, 525, 532 stage (1953)  6, 342, 517 ‘Can-Can’  337, 342, 345, 346–348t, 348–349 Candido, Candy  44, 53n55 Candy, John  218, 226n58 Canemaker, John  186, 191–192, 196, 198 ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man’  618 Cantor, Eddie  495 Cantu, Maya  104n44, 287 Capp, Al  4, 127–132, 138, 185 Carefree (1938)  14 ‘Carino Mio’  301 Carmen Jones film (1954)  523–524 stage (1943)  471n44 Carmichael, Hoagy  619, 625 Carnegie Mellon University  231–232 The Carol Burnett Show (television)  1, 9, 543–565 Caron, Leslie  530 Carousel film (1956)  1, 9, 17, 75, 515–536 stage (1945)  9, 515 television (1967)  9, 24, 382 ‘Carousel Waltz’  534–535 Carpenter, Karen  380 Carrie: The Musical (1988)  608 Carrière, Jean-Claude  151, 162 Carrie: the Musical (1988)  223 Carroll, John  506 ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny’  373 Carson, Doris  45

Carter, Howard  450 Carter, Jimmy  381 Carter, Tim  9, 515 Carter Family  129 Cartmell, Deborah  475 Casey, Warren  384 Cash, Johnny  231 Casper, Joseph Andrew  88, 90–91 Castells, Manuel  98 The Cat and the Fiddle (1934)  14–15, 30, 41, 45, 47 Cat Ballou (1965)  300 Catlett, Walter  511n17 Cervantes: Don Quixote 72 ‘C‘est Moi’  59–60, 66 Champlin, Charles  574, 576, 584 Channing, Carol  215, 425, 431, 602 Channing, Stockard  267 ‘Chansonette’ 370 Chaplin, Saul  382 Charisse, Cyd  7, 283, 395, 398, 400–403, 410, 416–417, 418n5, 518, 525, 527 ‘Charity’s Soliloquy’  78 Charnin, Martin  473, 477, 481, 488 Charo 555 Chavez, César  555 Chayefsky, Paddy  298–299 Chenoweth, Kristin  25, 489 Cher 123n2 Chevalier, Maurice  13, 342, 345, 617 Chicago (2002)  1–2, 22, 30, 108, 124n4, 601 ‘Children Will Listen’  122 Chilton, Nola  164 Chitterlow, Harry  572 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)  383 A Chorus Line film (1985)  20, 385 stage (1975)  20, 278, 385, 591 Christie, Tony  380 A Christmas Story Live! (2017)  25 Cinderella (1957)  562 ‘Cinderella Gets It On’  9, 560–564 CinemaScope  9, 396, 400, 518, 520–524, 529–530, 532, 536 cinéma vérité  58, 70, 579 Cinerama  521–523, 529 ‘The City’s Yours’  488

648   Index Claire, Bernice  455 Clapton, Eric  231 Clark, Jason  488 Clark, Petula  71 Clayton, Jan, 526 ‘Clementina’ 33 Cleopatra (1963)  383 Cleopatra Jones (1973)  562 Clooney, Rosemary  129, 194, 524, 543 Close, Glenn  387 ‘Closed for Renovations’  219 Coates, Phyllis  472n71 Cochran, Steve  466 Coco (1969)  18 The Cocoanuts (1929)  30 Coe, Richard  425, 538n21 Cohan, George M.  6, 44, 315–336, 615 Cohn, Harry  254–255, 257, 259, 263, 270n6 Colby, Charles  92 Coleman, Cy  76, 178n44 College Rhythm (1934)  42 ‘College Rhythm’  52n36 Collier, John  206 Collins, Joan  525 Collins, Ray  466 ‘Colored Spade’  173 Colton, Edward  276 Coltrane, John  214 ‘Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean’  319 Columbo, Russ  361 Comden, Betty  16, 94, 97, 99, 101 ‘Come Back to Me’  441 ‘Come to Me, Bend to Me’  399, 409, 518 ‘Come to the Supermarket’  437 Cone, Lucinda  215 Conn, Didi  215 A Connecticut Yankee stage (1927)  13 stage (1943)  470n3 television (1955)  24 Connell, Richard  506 Conrad, Con  30 ‘The Continental’  30–31, 45 Conway, Lyle  219 Conway, Richard  222 Conway, Tim  544, 563–564 Conway, Tom  506

Cooke, Alistair  549 Coote, Robert  295 Coppola, Francis Ford  71, 75, 82n25, 152 Corden, James  111–112, 118, 121, 123n3 Corman, Roger  206–208, 220 Coslow, Sam  614–615, 618, 627 Costa de Lacerdo, Osvaldo  506 Costello, Lou  9, 505–506, 508, 593 ‘Count on Me’  50n6 ‘The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands’  144 ‘A Couple of Caballeros’  511n23 The Court Jester (1956)  527–528 Cover Girl (1944)  254, 410 Covington, Julie  379–380 Coward, Noel  355–356, 549, 554 Cowsills 168 Cox, Harvey: The Feast of Fools 231 Craft, Elizabeth Titrington  6, 315 Crawford, Joan  545 Crawford, Lilla  116 Crawford, Michael  426, 432 Crazy for You (1992)  21 Criswell, Kim  51n9 Croce, Arlene  40, 49, 536 Crosby, Bing  30, 132, 194, 260, 341, 361, 364, 398, 524–525, 613, 618, 621–622, 624–625 Cross, Beverley  573 Crouse, Russel  537nn2, 11, 621 Crouse, Timothy  628 Crowe, Russell  22 Crowther, Bosley  15, 275, 541n52 Crystal, Billy  226n58 Cullum, John  427 Culter, Jesse  238 Cumming, Alan  489 Cummings, Jack  275–276 Cummings, Patrick  51n9 Curtiz, Michael  315, 332n33 Cutter, Murray  472n61 Cutts, John  400

D

Daddy Long Legs (1955)  530 ‘Daddy Was a Minstrel Man’  50n5 Dailey, Dan  525 Dale, Grover  574, 580

Index   649 Damn Yankees film (1958)  17, 23, 313n15 stage (1955)  517 Damone, Vic  296 ‘The Dance of the Seven Veils’  451 ‘Dancing’ 431 ‘The Dancing Master’  319 Dangerous Game (1993)  388 Daniels, Bebe  503 Danson, Randy  231 Darin, Bobby  543 Darling Lili (1970)  384 Davis, Lee  621 Davis, Miles  195 Day, Doris  524, 539n40 ‘Day by Day’  230, 235, 240 ‘A Day in New York’  90 ‘Day-O’ 599 De Abreu, Zequinha  506 Dean, James  593 The Dean Martin Show (television)  544 Dearest Enemy stage (1925)  13 television (1955)  24 Dear Old Darling (1936)  325 Decker, Todd  7, 355 Deep in My Heart (1954)  419n32, 524 De Giere, Carol  236–238, 247n11, 248n55 Delamater, Jerome  397, 400, 405, 410–411, 414–415 DeLeon, Walter  621 Delibes, Leo  370 Del Ruth, Roy  454 DeLuca, John  118 DeMattis, Ray  225n38 Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954)  524 De Mille, Agnes  24, 74–75, 396–398, 400, 469, 532, 540n43 Dench, Judi  29 De Palma, Brian  170 De Paul, Gene  128, 132, 137, 145–146 Depp, Johnny  22–23, 115, 607 Desert Nights (1929)  470n11 The Desert Song  1, 8, 447–470 film (1929)  447, 454–455, 509, 511n21 film (1943)  447, 458–465 film (1953)  447, 465–468

stage (1926)  8, 447–448, 450, 510n13 television (1955)  447, 469 ‘The Desert Song’  452–453, 460, 463–464, 468–470 Desk Set (1957)  101 Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)  388 DeSylva, Buddy  525 Detweiler, Robert  230 Deuel, Pauline  566n24 De Vany, Arthur  602 DeVito, Danny  603 Dewey, Thomas  134 Diaz, Cameron  489, 492n41 Dickson, Barbara  380 Dickstein, Morris  50 Dietrich, Marlene  254 Dietz, Howard  616 ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’  463 Dimendberg, Edward  92 ‘Dinah’ 375n2 ‘Dinna You Know Tommy’  399 Dixon, Adele  41 Dixon, Leslie  599–600 Dixon, Mort  512n35 Dobbs, John Wesley  69 Doctor Dolittle (1967)  383, 591 Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along-blog (2008)  223 Doctorow, E. L.  157, 164 Dr. Strangelove (1962)  134 Doctor Zhivago (2011)  179n64 Dodd, Claire  49 ‘Do I Do Wrong?’  44 Domino, Fats  525 Donaldson, Walter  615 Donen, Stanley  17, 405, 418n1, 528–529 ‘Donna’ 173 ‘Donna Lee’  43 Donny & Marie Show (television)  544 Don Quixote (Cervantes)  72 ‘Don’t Ask Me Not to Sing’  44, 46 ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’  380, 391–392 ‘Don’t It Go to Show Ya Never Know’  219 Don’t Knock the Rock (1956)  525 Don’t Look Back (1967)  58 ‘Don’t Put It Down’  158 ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’  424, 433, 435, 441, 599

650   Index ‘Don’t You Love Your Mama Anymore’  551 Doolittle, Alfred  550 Dougall, Bernard  33 Douglas, Kirk  254 Douglass, Stephen  17 ‘Down with Love’  437, 440 Doyle, Arthur Conan  206 Drake, Alfred  24, 276, 287–289 Dreamgirls (2006)  24 Dresser, Paul  43, 315 Dreyfus, Max  615 ‘Drop that Name’  100 Dubin, Al  615, 617, 630n14 Duchin, Eddy  525 Dude (1972)  176n26 Duff, Warren  457 Duke, Vernon  15 The Duke Wore Jeans (1958)  573–574 Dumaresq, William  177n26 ‘Dumb Dog’  481 Dumbo (1941)  185 Duncan, Stuart  230, 233, 235–236 Dunn, Rex  455 Dunne, Irene  35f, 44–45, 47, 51n27, 520 Durbin, Deanna  375n7, 512n38, 526 Durgnat, Raymond  97 Dwyer-Ryan, Meaghan  319 Dyer, Richard  77, 257, 266, 290

E

‘Eastern and Western Love’  453, 455, 468–469 ‘An Eastern Romance’  471n18 Easter Parade (1948)  15, 17, 283 East of Eden (1955)  412 Eastwood, Clint  24, 300, 302, 304, 306 Easy Rider (1969)  306 ‘Easy Street’  480, 482, 485–486, 491n35 ‘Easy to Be Hard’  156, 166, 171–173 ‘Easy to Love’  633n69 Eaton, Pearl  503 Ebert, Roger  569, 576, 584 Eco, Umberto  339, 349, 350n8 Eddy, Nelson  7, 14, 355–374, 456, 469 The Eddy Duchin Story (1956)  525 Edens, Roger  50nn5–6, 103n13 The Ed Sullivan Show (television)  543 Edwards, Paul  546

Eells, George  632n43 Efron, Zac  603 Eisen, Cliff  6, 337 Eisner, Eric  217 ‘Elegance’ 431 El-Krim, Abd  452 Elliott, Kamilla  85–86 El Teatro Campesino  555, 566n23 Empire State Building  89, 92f, 92 Enchanted (2007)  25 Engel, Lehman  259 Ephraim, Lee  454 Ephron, Henry  530, 532–533, 539n36, 540nn45–47, 541n52 Ephron, Phoebe  530 Epstein, Julius J.  332n41 Epstein, Philip G.  332n41 Equus (1977)  162 Erlanger, A. L. “Abe”  317, 321 Ernst, Leila  254 Erwin, Ralph  617 Erwin, Trudy  261 Eskridge, Larry  231 Essex, David  389 ‘Ethel Levey’s Virginia Song’  323 Eubie! (1978)  211 Evanier, Mark  135, 139 Evans, Harry  455 ‘Ever After’  120 Everett, William  8, 447 ‘Everybody’s Got a Home but Me’  145 Evita film (1996)  7, 21, 377–393 stage (1978)  378–382 ‘Ev’ry Man Is a Stupid Man’  342 ‘Exanaplanetooch’ 166

F

Fanny (1954)  517 Fantasia (1940)  185 ‘The Farmer and the Cowman’  527 Faso, Nina  232, 247n15 Fauteux, Kevin  249n93 ‘Feed Me (Git It)’  219 Fehr, Rudi  472n69 Felix, Seymour  332n45 Fellini, Federico  76

Index   651 Ferber, Edna  34 Ferrell, Will  23, 603–604 Ferrer, José  24 Fessier, Michael  457 Fetter, Ted  624, 633n64 Feuer, Jane  86, 321, 351n13 Fiddler on the Roof (1971)  20, 383, 572, 585, 602 Fields, Dorothy  40, 45, 76, 616–617 Fields, Gracie  194 Fields, W. C.  621 ‘Fie on Goodness!’  60, 67 Fierstein, Harvey  604 ‘Fifi’s Song’  460, 463 5th Dimension (group)  168 ‘Les filles de Cadix’  370 ‘Finale (Don’t Feed the Plants)’  219 Finck, David  195 Fine, Sylvia  527 Finian’s Rainbow 183–203 film (1968)  1–2, 57, 68–71, 82n25, 383, 585, 591 stage (1947)  4, 68, 132, 183–184 unproduced animated film (1950s)  4, 185–203 Finney, Albert  478, 489 Finston, Nathaniel  10, 614–615, 618–619 The Firefly (1937)  15 ‘First Midnight’  118 Fisher, Eddie  525 A Fistful of Dollars (1964)  300 Fitzgerald, Barry  186 Fitzgerald, Ella  4, 186, 194, 196 Flaningham, Louisa  215 ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop’  573, 577, 580 ‘The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine’  161, 168 Flinn, Caryl  622 Flores, Maria  379 Flower Drum Song (1958)  537n2 Flynn, Errol  458 ‘Following the Sun Around’  502, 504, 512n27 Follow the Fleet (1936)  14, 30, 49 Fontanne, Lynn  564 For a Few Dollars More (1965)  300 Forbstein, Leo F.  463 Fordin, Hugh  85, 103n13 Forman, Miloš  4, 151–173 Forrest, George  16

Forte, Allen  46 42nd Street (1980)  21, 47 Fosse, Bob  2, 19, 22, 26n11, 47–48, 76–78, 80, 127, 289, 380, 383, 428 Foster, Hunter  223 Foster, Julia  574 Foster, Stephen  315 ‘The Fountain in the Park’  321 Fox, Maxine  384 Foxx, Jamie  489, 492n47 Foy, Eddie, Jr.  45, 97 Franceschina, John  39 Frank, Melvin  127–128, 132–133, 136, 138–146, 527 Frank, Pat  134 ‘Frank Mills’  158, 167 Freed, Arthur  15–16, 50n6, 85–86, 92, 100–101, 103n13, 382, 396, 408, 526 Freedley, Vinton  620–621, 629, 632n43 Freedman, Gerald  159 The French Connection (1971)  236 ‘French Military Marching Song’  455, 461, 463 Freud, Sigmund  450 Friedberg, William  469 Friedwald, Will  408 Friendly Fire (1979)  565n3 Friml, Rudolf  355–356, 525 From Here to Eternity (1953)  186, 519 ‘From This Day On’  7, 399, 407, 409, 417, 518 ‘From This Moment On’  289 Frye, Northrop  130 Funke, Lewis  197, 629 Funny Face (1957)  18 Funny Girl film (1968)  8, 18, 385, 424–425, 428–429, 432–433, 434t, 436–437, 574, 599, 602, 605 stage (1964)  8, 385, 423–424 Funny Lady (1975)  384 Furia, Philip  615–616 Furler, Sia  488

G

Gabler, Neal  440 Gallagher, Helen  83n39, 260 Gans, Herbert  606 Ganz, Lowell  108 Gänzl, Kurt  391–392

652   Index Garber, Victor  237, 243, 478 Gardenia, Vincent  218, 220 Gardner, Ava  540n41 Gardner, Kara Anne  397 Garland, Judy  15, 50n4, 356, 377, 518, 539n40, 545, 549, 553, 566n18, 579 Garrett, Betty  88 The Garry Moore Show 565n1 Gasman, Ira  178n44 Gates, Harvey  454 Gaxton, William  620–621, 624, 627, 633n69 The Gay Divorcee (1934)  14, 30–31, 45, 49, 375n3 Gaynor, Mitzi  341, 525 ‘Gay Parisienne’  460, 463, 468 Geffen, David  4, 212, 216–217, 221, 595 Gemignani, Paul  3, 107, 109, 111–112, 123 Genette, Gérard  474 Gennaro, Liza  74 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)  17 George Washington, Jr. (1906)  6, 317, 325 Geraghty, Christine  86, 474 Gerald McBoing Boing (1950)  185 ‘Geraniums in the Winder’  535 Gere, Richard  22 Gershwin, George and Ira  13, 30, 40–41, 356, 616 ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’  550 Get Rich Quick Wallingford (1910)  325 Ghostbusters (1984)  218 ‘Giants in the Sky’  113, 118 Gibb, Barry  19 Gibb, Cynthia  123n2 Giddins, Gary  623, 632n55 Gigi (1958)  18, 29, 310, 427, 584 Gilbert, James  255 Gilda (1946)  266, 283 Gilfry, Rodney  359 Gillespie, Sarah Ashman  208, 227n70 Gilroy, Frank D.  235 The Girl Can’t Help It (1956)  525 The Girl of the Golden West (1938)  358, 367, 370–371, 374 ‘Glamorous Life’  20 Glass, William  339 Glazer, Benjamin F.  540n51 Glee (television)  25 Glickman, Will  469

‘Glory’ 488 Gluck, Will  473, 477–478, 482–483, 486–488, 491n26 Glyn, Elinor  450 Godard, Jean-Luc  300, 580 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1979)  208 ‘God’s Country’  50n5 Godspell  5, 229–246 film (1973)  235–246, 383 stage (1971)  229–235, 379 Goldberg, Isaac  616, 618 Golden, Jeannie  175n9 ‘Gold Fever’  302, 306 Goldmark, Daniel  630n11 Goldwyn, Samuel  17 Gone with the Wind (1939)  129 The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966)  300 Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969)  383, 583 ‘Good Luck Johnny’  333n45 Goodman, Benny  525 ‘Good Morning’  50n5 ‘Good Morning Baltimore’  599 ‘Good Morning Starshine’  167–168, 173 ‘Goodnight and Thank You’  378, 390 Gorbman, Claudia  80n2 Gordon, Mack  619 Gordon, Peggy  232–234, 237, 248n80 Gore, Christopher  176n26, 209 Gore, Lesley  214 Gore, Rick  209 Gorshin, Frank  97 ‘Go to Sleep’  433, 439, 441 Gottmann, Jean  98 Goulet, Robert  24, 400, 410, 413, 415, 421n81 Gounod, Charles  367 Gowns by Roberta (Miller)  33–34 Graae, Jason  51n9 Grable, Betty  425, 522 The Graduate (1967)  570, 578–579, 583 Graff, Randy  215 Grandage, Michael  380, 390, 392–393 Grand Ole Opry (radio show)  129 ‘The Grand Visier’  471n18 Grant, John  506 Gray, Alexander  455 Gray, Dolores  525 Grayson, Charles  457–458, 465

Index   653 Grayson, Kathryn  7–9, 275, 277, 286–287, 289–290, 375n7, 398, 465, 468, 472n61, 506, 512nn37, 40, 518 Graziano, John  9, 493 Grease (1978)  1–2, 19–20, 384 Grease: Live (2016)  25 ‘Grease Is the Word’  384 The Great Waltz (1938)  315 The Great Ziegfeld (1936)  315 Green, Adolph  16, 94, 97, 99, 101 Green, Johnny  398 Green, Mitzi  268 Green, Stanley  511n21 Greene, David  235–238, 240–241, 245 Greene, Ellen  214–215, 218 Greenspan, Charlotte  632n44 Greer, Jo Ann  265, 268 Grey, Gilda  375n2 Grey, Joel  19 Griffin, John Howard  69 Griffin, Sean  281–282 Griffith, Charles  206 Griffith, D. W.  129 Gross, Michael  225n38 Grotowski, Jerzy  231, 247n15 Guare, John  163, 176n26 ‘Guenevere’ 67 Guest, Christopher  218 Guevera, Che  379, 389 Gunton, Bob  380 Gussow, Mel  211 Gustafsen, John  399 Gustafson, Richard  315, 332n34 Guys and Dolls film (1955)  17, 66, 75, 186, 270n6, 382, 518, 532, 572 stage (1950)  132, 346, 377, 517 Gwynne, Fred  164 Gypsy stage (1959)  346, 430 television (1993)  21, 25 ‘The Gypsy in Me’  622, 628

H

Haines, H. E.  471n18 Hair film (1979)  4, 30, 128, 151–174, 153t, 384

stage (1967)  4, 153t, 160t, 208 stage (1968)  4, 128, 153t, 160t Hairspray film (1988)  10, 593–594, 600–602, 607 film (2007)  10, 23, 599–604 stage (2003)  10, 598–602 television (2016)  25, 599 Half a Sixpence film (1967)  9–10, 569–585 stage (1963)  9–10, 572–573 ‘The Half of It Dearie Blues’  42 Hall, Bettina  621 Hall, Juanita  526, 538n27 Hall, Mordaunt  504–505, 511n25 Hallberg, Nicole  82n20 Halliday, Robert  449, 470n3 Hamburger, Jay  233 Hamlisch, Marvin  21 Hamm, Charles  630n9 Hammell, John  632n58 Hammerstein, Oscar, II  13, 17, 31, 70, 184, 360, 447–448, 451, 457, 515–536, 618. See also specific productions by title ‘Hand Me Down That Can o’ Beans’  307 Hanley, Katie  237, 239, 241–242 ‘Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe’  15 Happy Days 563 ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’  440 ‘Happy Hunting Horn’  255 Harbach, Otto  30, 32–33, 448 Harburg, Yip  4, 9, 15, 50n5, 183, 185–187, 194, 196, 198, 506, 511n23 A Hard Day’s Night (1964)  58, 584 ‘Hard-Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)’  487 Harkrider, John  495 Harmony Lane (1935)  315 ‘Harrigan’ 323 Harris, Barbara  427, 439 Harris, Charles K.  45 Harris, Neil Patrick  123n2 Harris, Richard  66, 427 Harrison, Rex  18, 66, 520, 549 Hart, Lorenz  13–15, 30, 41, 255, 260, 267, 358, 616–617, 632n44 Hart, Margie  266 Hart, Moss  632n44 Hart, Vincent  633n62

654   Index Harvey, Stephen  397–398, 411, 419n40 The Harvey Girls (1946)  579 Haskell, David  231–232, 234, 237–238 Hassan, Jamiel  462 Hassan, Yusef ben  448 Hathaway, Anne  22 Hausman, Michael  168 Havoc, June  272n37 Hawn, Goldie  123n2, 215 Hayes, Billie  139–140 Hayes, Peter Lind  505 Hayward, Leyland  520, 537n13 Hayworth, Rita  253–254, 256–257, 263–266, 268–269, 273n49, 283 Heacock, Linnea  163 Healy, Mary  505 Hearst, William Randolph  493, 503 Heath, Dodie  402 ‘The Heather on the Hill’  7, 399, 401–407, 416–417, 418n5, 527 ‘The Heavyweight’  77 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998)  223 Hee Haw (television)  544 Heim, Alan  236 Heimann, Richard G.  236 Heindorf, Ray  332n43, 463, 472n61 ‘He Isn’t You’  438–439 Held, Wolfgang  175n11 Heller, Dana  599 Heller, Zoë: Notes on a Scandal 29 ‘Hello, Little Girl’  116 Hello Dolly! film (1969)  2, 8, 383, 385, 423–427, 431–432, 435t, 436, 573, 579, 587n25, 591, 602, 608n1 stage (1964)  424 Help! (1965)  58, 584 Henderson, Ray  525 Heneker, David  573 Henriquez, Max  155 Henry, Buck  163 Hepburn, Audrey  18, 296, 602 Hepburn, Katharine  18 Herbert, Victor  355–356, 365, 456, 615 Hercules (1997)  278, 477 Here Is My Heart (1934)  622, 625 ‘Here It Is’  302, 307–308

Herman, Jerry  426, 437, 442n14, 595 Hermann, Bernard  214 Heyman, Edward  619, 625 Hift, Fred  539n39, 541n53 Higashi, Sumiko  259 ‘The Highest Judge of All’  535 High Noon (1952)  519 Highsmith, Patricia  30 High Society (1956)  349, 525 Hiller, Arthur  180n88 Hilliard, Harriet  49 ‘Hippie Life’  158, 176n28 Hirano, Michio “Mike”  325, 329 Hirschhorn, Clive  91, 396, 410, 418n8 Hischak, Thomas  476, 510n11, 613, 621 ‘His Love Makes Me Beautiful’  430, 435 Hitchcock, Alfred  214, 423 Hobson, Laura Z.: Gentlemen’s Agreement 69 Holden, Stephen  629 ‘Hold Me Hamlet’  9, 548–554, 549t Holland–Dozier–Holland (band)  233 Hollander, Frederick  619, 625–627, 629, 633n63 Holliday, Judy  3, 87, 96, 99, 215 The Hollywood Palace (television)  544 Holmes, Tina  232 Hooker, Brian  623 Hooper, Tom  22 Hope, Bob  132 ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’  20 Horn, Barbara Lee  155, 175n12 Hornblow, Arthur, Jr.  519, 537n11, 538n17 Horne, Lena  50n4, 280, 282 Horowitz, Mark Eden  3, 107 House of Wax (1953)  522 ‘How Are Things in Glocca Morra?’  69, 197 Howe, Matt  433, 442n33 Howes, Sally Anne  400 ‘Howid Men Hina’  464 ‘How Long Has This Been Going On?’  18 How to Be Very, Very Popular (1955)  538n15 ‘How to Handle a Woman’  60 How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)  522 How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1966)  574 Hubley, Faith  184, 198, 200 Hubley, John  4, 185–186, 198 Huffman, Cady  603

Index   655 Hughes, Bethany: Gestures of Musical Theater 279 Humberstone, Bruce  465 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)  477 Hunter, Tab  17 Hurt, Jo  264–265, 273n40 Hurt, Mary Beth  164 ‘The Hustle’  560 Huston, John  476, 491n35 Hutcheon, Linda  102, 294, 474, 546–548 Huttlestone, Daniel  113 Hutton, Betty  17, 518 Huyssen, Andreas  564 ‘A Hymn to Him’  554

I

I Am a Camera (1951)  19 ‘I Am Ashamed that Women Are So Simple’ 288 ‘I Cain’t Say No’  527 ‘I Came and Wived It Wealthily in Padua’  277 ‘I Can Cook Too’  50n6 ‘I Could Write a Book’  254, 262 ‘I Didn’t Know What Time It Was’  255 ‘I Don’t Need Anything but You’  480–481 ‘I’d Rather Be Blue’  430, 434 I’d Rather Be Right (1937)  6, 318, 327–328 ‘If a Girl Isn’t Pretty’  429–430 ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’  60, 80 ‘If I Had My Druthers’  142 ‘If I Loved You’  533 ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now’  78 ‘If the Rain’s Got to Fall’  573–574, 577, 580–581 ‘If This Isn’t Love’  194–197 ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’  622–623, 625 ‘I Got Life’  161, 165 ‘I Guess This Is Goodbye’  116 ‘I Have a Little List’  337 ‘I Hope I Get It’  278 ‘I Know Things Now’  117–118 ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’  33, 37, 39, 41–43, 45–46, 49, 52n37, 283 ‘I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean’  399 ‘I’ll See You Again’  360 ‘I Loved You Once in Silence’  60 ‘I’m a Brass Band’  78 ‘Imagine’ 50n5

‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows’  495 I Married an Angel film (1942)  358 stage (1938)  358, 370 ‘I’m Bad’  221 ‘I’m Going Back’  99 ‘I’m Hummin’, I’m Whistlin’, I’m Singin’’  619 ‘I’m Just Wild about Harry’  50n5 ‘I’m Not Talking to You’  580 ‘I’m On My Way’  307–308 ‘I’m Out on the Loose To-Night’  503 ‘I’m So Excited’  560 ‘I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together’  554, 560 ‘I’m the Greatest Star’  435 ‘In Caliente’  512n35 ‘Indiana’  42–44, 46–47 ‘Indian Love Call’  359–361, 363–365 ‘I Never Had It So Good’  550 Inge, M. Thomas  130, 148n24 ‘In Our Little Den’  255 Into the Woods film (2014)  2–3, 23, 107–123 stage (1987)  3, 107, 607 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)  137 ‘I Put My Hand In’  8, 437 Irene (1919)  495 Isabel’s a Jezebel (1970)  177n26 Isenberg, Nancy  138 ‘I Sing of Love’  277 ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’  13, 23, 618 ‘I Still See Elisa’  301, 304 ‘I Talk to the Trees’  301, 304 ‘I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here’  478, 480, 487 ‘It Only Takes a Moment’  432 It’s Always Fair Weather (1955)  382, 405, 418n1, 419n32, 584 It Should Happen to You (1954)  524 It’s Only a Play (2014)  603 ‘It’s Only Your Lover Returning’  380 ‘It’s the Hard-Knock Life’  477–478, 480, 482, 487 ‘It Takes a Woman’  437 ‘It Takes Two’  118, 600 ‘I’ve Got You on My Mind’  30 ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’  297

656   Index ‘I Want to Be a Producer’  597 ‘I Was Born in Virginia’  323 ‘I Wish’  124n8 ‘I Wish I Were in Love Again’  50nn4–5 ‘I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight’ 59 ‘I Won’t Dance’  41, 43, 45–47

J

Jablonski, Edward  413, 421n78 The Jackie Gleason Show (television)  544 Jackman, Hugh  22 Jackson, Janet  124n4 Jackson, Merrell  237–238 Jackson, Michael  20 Jacobs, Arthur P.  583 Jacobs, Jim  384 Jacobs, Martha  231–232 James, Paul  616 Jameson, Frederic  547 Jameson, Richard T.  302 Jansen, Jim  225n38 Jay-Z  478, 487 The Jazz Singer (1927)  13, 377 Jeanmaire, Zizi  341, 525 ‘Jeannie’s Packin’ Up’  399 Jeeves (1975)  378 Jefferson Airplane  234 The Jeffersons (television)  560 Jeffries, Lionel  550 Jerome, M. K.  333n45 Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (1989)  21 The Jerry Lewis Show (television)  544 Jersey Boys (2005)  24 Jessica Jones (2013, 2018)  74 Jesus Christ Superstar film (1973)  20, 383 stage (1971)  5, 164, 229–231, 234, 244, 378 television (2018)  25 Jewison, Norman  20, 572 ‘Johnny One Note’  50nn4–5 Johns, Glynis  527 Johnson, ‘Chic’  505 Johnson, Christine  539n39 Johnson, Howard  552 Johnson, Van  395, 399, 418n3, 518 Jolson, Al  13, 549

Jonas, Joanne  234, 237, 239 Jones, Allan  367 Jones, Paul  379 Jones, Shirley  532–534, 539n40, 540n41 Jordan, Jeremy  24 Joseph, Edmund  332n41 Joseph, Stephen  164 Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1973)  378 Jourdan, Louis  342, 427 ‘Jubilation T. Cornpone’ 142 Jubin, Olaf  478, 489n3, 491n37 ‘The Jumping Bean’  511n14 ‘June Bride’  539n33 ‘June Is Bustin’ Out All Over’  532 ‘Just in Time’  99 ‘Just Leave Everything to Me’  8, 436, 440

K

Kael, Pauline  75–76, 482, 593 Kahn, Gus  615 ‘Kansas City’  529 Kantor, Michael  388 Kappel, Paul  225n38 Kargon, Robert  98 Kasha, Lawrence  528 Kaskowitz, Sheryl  334n72 Katz, Fred  214 Katz, Leon  232, 237 Kauffmann, Stanley  593 Kaufman, George  632n44 Kaye, Danny  276, 524, 527–528 Keel, Howard  24, 275–276, 286–287, 289–290, 518, 525, 528 ‘Keep It Gay’  597 Kellogg, Ray  540n44 Kelly, Gene  7, 16–17, 90, 93, 101, 254, 282, 377, 382, 395, 397–401, 403, 407–418, 426, 428, 431–432, 518, 524, 528, 540n41, 549, 553, 579 Kelly, Grace  525 Kelly, Moira  123n2 Kelly, Paula  83n39 Kendrick, Anna  111–112, 119, 123n3 Kennedy, John F.  145 Kennedy, Matthew  61, 383, 423, 592, 609n33 Kenyon, Jim  359

Index   657 Kern, Jerome  13–14, 16, 30–33, 40, 45–46, 356, 410, 420n68, 517, 617–618 Kerr, Walter  225n27, 380–381 Kesey, Ken  157, 163 Kessler, Kelly  81n4, 300 Kibbee, Roland  465, 472n69 Kid Boots (1923)  495, 503, 510n1 Kidd, Michael  17, 75, 132–133, 135, 139, 143, 146, 194, 426 Kidman, Nicole  22 King, Carlotta  454 King, Henry  75, 515, 529–530, 532 King, Stanley  231 King, Stephen  223 The King and, I film (1956)  17, 66, 75, 382, 515–516, 520, 524–525, 530, 536, 541n54 stage (1951)  18, 392, 515, 517 ‘The King of Broadway’  595 Kingsley, Dorothy  254–255, 269, 277, 287–288, 290, 573 Kingston Trio  302 ‘The Kinkajou’  504 Kinky Boots (2012)  592, 608 Kinsey, Alfred  276 Kirk, Lisa  24 Kirle, Bruce  307 Kismet stage (1955)  16, 525 television (1967)  24 Kissel, Howard  245 Kiss Me, Kate film (1953)  2, 5, 16, 35, 275–290, 278t, 341, 518, 527, 548, 579 stage (1948)  5, 277–279, 278t, 341, 548 television (1958)  24 television (1964)  24 television (1968)  24 Kleban, Edward  21 Klein, Earl  185 Klein, John  163 Kleiser, Randal  19 Knapp, Raymond  2, 55, 86, 295, 320, 626–627, 633n72 Knight, Arthur  245–246 Knock on Wood (1954)  527 Konkurs (1963)  159, 162

‘Kooch Dance’  468 Korman, Harvey  544, 549–550, 554, 558–559, 562, 564 Kracauer, Siegfried  85 Krane, David  109, 112, 115, 117–118, 120, 123 Kronenberger, Louis  184 Krueger, Miles  624 Kubrick, Stanley  134, 580 Kurek, Annette  215 Kurstin, Greg  488

L

La Bamba (1987)  566n23 Labonte, Richard  238 La Cage aux Folles (1983)  21 ‘La Caperucita Roja’  554–560 ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’  112 Lady, Be Good! film (1941)  15 stage (1924)  13, 495 Lady in the Dark (1944)  15 ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’  5, 50nn4–5, 255, 268 Lahti, Christine  123n2 Laing, Hugh  399–400, 419n39 Laird, Paul  5, 229 La La Land (2017)  25 La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club  230, 232–233 Lamont, Robin  231–232, 234, 237, 239 Landay, David  528 Landon, Margaret  520 Lane, Burton  183, 199, 203n55, 427 Lane, Nathan  23, 108, 215, 597–598, 603, 605–606, 611n56 Lang, Harold  259 Lang, Walter  515, 530 Langford, Frances  327 Langner, Lawrence  518 Lansbury, Angela  20 Lansbury, Edgar  230–231, 233–237, 242, 246 Lansing, David  457 Lanza, Mario  525 Lapine, James  3, 107–110, 114, 116–117, 119–120, 123, 124n9 Laredo, Joseph F.  177n35 The Last Five Years (2014)  24 ‘Last Midnight’  23, 112, 121

658   Index Latifah, Queen  603 Lauper, Cyndi  218 Laurel and Hardy  593 ‘The Law’  337–338 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (television) 565n3 Lawrence, Carol  602 Lawrence, Vicki  544, 550, 555, 560–561, 564, 565n5 Lawrence of Arabia  451 The Lawrence Welk Show (television) 543–544 Lawson-Peebles, Robert  283, 287, 290 ‘L.B.J.’ 167 A League of Their Own (1992)  388 ‘Learn Your Lessons Well’  239, 241 Led Zeppelin  234 Lee, Amy  567n30 Lee, Bill  18 Lee, Dorothy  504 Lee, Gypsy Rose  264, 266, 272n37 Lee, Sammy  495, 503 Legally Blonde: The Musical (2007)  592, 608 Lehman, Ernest  382, 431–432 Lehman, Gladys  506 Lehmann, Ernest  392 Leitch, Thomas  85, 474, 478, 600 Lemmon, Jack  254, 525 Lennart, Isobel  428 Leone, Sergio  300 Lerner, Alan Jay  16, 20, 132, 184, 199, 203n55, 291n10, 293–295, 297–299, 303, 308, 395, 427, 432, 518. See also specific productions by title Les Misérables (2012)  22, 482, 488, 492n44, 600 Lester, Richard  58, 584 ‘Let Love Go’  453, 469 ‘Let Me Entertain You’  346, 430 ‘Let’s Begin’  35, 43–44, 46–47, 53n55 ‘Let’s Do It’  6, 337, 345, 554 ‘Let’s Go to the Movies’  480–481 ‘Let’s Hear It for Me’  441 ‘Let’s Misbehave’  628 Letterman, David  226n58, 389 ‘Let the Sunshine’  155, 161, 168 Letty (1929)  509

Levant, Oscar  101 Leve, James  175n12, 177n35 Levey, Ethel  319 Levien, Sonya  520 Levy, Eugene  226n58 Lewine, Richard  349 Lewis, Hannah  539n35 Lewis, Jerry  524–525, 565 Lewis, Jimmy  180n89 Lewis, Robert  397 Lewis, Vicki  272n29 Lieberson, Goddard  259 Liebman, Max  469 The Life (1997)  178n44 ‘Life Could Not Better Be’  528 Life with Father (1939)  537n2 ‘Light of the World’  242 The Likes of Us (1965)  378 Li’l Abner  1, 3–4, 127–147 comic strip  128–132 film (1959)  138–146 stage (1956)  132–138 Liliom (1909)  520, 531, 534 Lilley, Joseph J.  143 Lindberg, Julianne  5, 253 Lindig, Edmund  225n38 Lindsay, Howard  537nn2, 11, 621 Lion, Margot  594, 598 The Lion King film (1994)  388, 477 film (2019)  25, 608 stage (1997)  592 Lippmann, Walter  264 ‘Little Girls’  478, 480, 482, 488 Little Johnny Jones (1904)  317, 509 The Little Mermaid film (1989)  108, 387–388 stage (2008)  592 upcoming film  25 A Little Night Music (1977)  20, 384 The Little Prince (1974)  20, 384 Little Shop of Horrors  1, 4, 205–223 film (1960)  207–208 film (1986)  21, 218–223 stage (1982)  211–216, 387 Litvak, Joseph  99 ‘Live and Let Live’  342

Index   659 Living It Up (1954)  524 Lloyd Webber, Andrew  5, 21, 164, 223, 229, 234, 378–379, 381, 386–389. See also specific productions by title ‘Locked in a Pink Velvet Jail’  433 Lockhart, Freda June, 398  408 Lockhart, Gene  460 Loesser, Frank  18, 377, 517 Loewe, Frederick  16, 20, 184, 293, 303, 310, 517. See also specific productions by title Logan, Ella  185, 196 Logan, Joshua  300, 302, 313n15, 515, 519–520, 530, 537n13, 579 Lombardo, Guy  562 LoMonaco, Martha S.  159, 165, 175n12 ‘Lonely Room’  127, 527, 600 ‘Lonely Town’  50n6 Long, Huey  130 Long, William Ivey  10, 596 ‘Long Ago and Far Away’  410, 421n68 ‘Long Before You Came Along’  506–507, 511n23 ‘Long Live God’  243 ‘Long Live the Night’  460, 463, 466, 468, 472n63 ‘Look to the Rainbow’  69, 197 Loose Ends (1979)  157 Lord, Robert  456 Loren, Sophia  18 Lost Horizon (1973)  384 The Lost Weekend (1945)  88 Loudon, Dorothy  492n41 Louis-Dreyfus, Julia  123n2 Louise, Tina  139 ‘Louise’s Ballet’  540n43 Love, Courtney  159 ‘Love’ 280 The Love Bug (1968)  605 ‘Love in a Home’  145 ‘Love in Bloom’  619 Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)  529 ‘Love Is Here to Stay’  411 ‘Love Is Only Love’  431, 437 ‘Loveland’ 42 Love Life (1948)  291n10 Lovely to Look At (1953)  16, 283 ‘Lovely to Look At’  45–47

Love Me Tender (1956)  525 Love Me Tonight (1932)  13–14, 41, 618 Lovensheimer, James  3–4, 127 ‘The Love of My Life’  399, 518 ‘Lover’ 13 ‘Lover, Come Back to Me’  373 Loves of a Blonde (1965)  159, 163 ‘Love Will See Us Through’  42 Lowe, Rob  123n2 Loy, Myrna  454 Luboff, Norman  472n61 Lucky Me (1954)  524 ‘Lucky to Be Me’  50n6 Ludwig, William  520 Luhrmann, Baz  21–22 Luke Cage (2014, 2018)  74 Lunt, Alfred  564 Lupino, Ida  622 LuPone, Patti  267, 380–381 ‘The Lusty Month of May’  60, 62–63 Luz, Frank  215 Lyautey, Hubert  447–448 Lynch, Kevin: The Image of the City 93

M

MacDermot, Galt  151–153, 156–158, 168–172, 180nn71, 89, 209 MacDonald, Audra  489 MacDonald, Dwight  75 MacDonald, Jeanette  7, 13–14, 355–374, 456 Mack, Ray  455 Mack, Russell  504 Mackie, Bob  556, 565 Mackintosh, Cameron  21, 212, 379 MacLachlan, Kyle  123n2 MacLaine, Shirley  78, 80, 342 MacLellan, Gene  230 Macloon, Lillian  454 MacRae, Gordon  8, 465, 468, 472n61, 532–534 ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’  554 ‘The Madison’  599 Madonna  7, 386–393 ‘Madrigal’ 43 Magee, Jeffrey  308 Magidson, Herb  30 Magnuson, Billy  118, 124n14

660   Index ‘Maidens Typical of France’  342, 345–346 Maier, John  448 Main, Mary  379 Mains, Steve  238 ‘Main Street’  50n6, 92–93 ‘Make Believe’  286, 290 ‘Maladjusted Jester’  528 ‘Mal El Sham’  464 Malvin, Artie  545 ‘Mama I’m a Big Girl Now’  600 Mame (1974)  20, 383, 437 Mamma Mia! (2008)  601–602 Mamoulian, Rouben  41 ‘Manchester’ 173 Mandel, Babaloo  108 Mandel, Frank  448 Man in the Moon (1991)  173 Mankiewicz, Joseph  17 Mann, Barry  213 Manning, Irene  8, 458, 463, 465 Man of La Mancha (1972)  1–2, 18, 57, 71–73, 383 Mansfield, Jayne  259, 525 Mantle, Burns  510n10 ‘The Man Who Got Away’  553 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)  300 ‘Many a New Day’  539n33 Manzano, Sonia  231–232, 234, 237, 239 Marat/Sade (1967)  231 ‘Mariache’ 374 Marks, Sally K.  576 ‘Marseillaise’ 463 Marshall, Rob  3, 22–23, 27n27, 107–111, 114, 117, 119, 121–123, 429, 477, 485 Martin, Andrea  226n58 Martin, Dean  96, 313n26, 524–525, 565 Martin, Francis  621 Martin, Mary  24, 254, 270n6, 425, 431, 602 Martin, Peter  624 Martin, Steve  123n2, 218 Marvin, Lee  300 Marx, Groucho  526 Marx Brothers  505, 593 Mary Poppins (1964)  423 ‘Mary’s a Grand Old Name’  320, 323 Maslin, Janet  594 Maslon, Lawrence  388

Mass (1971)  5, 229–230 Massey, Raymond  466 Mast, Gerald  29 Masterpiece Theater (television)  549 Matthau, Walter  426 Mattox, Matt  419n40 May, Elaine Tyler  263 ‘Maybe’  478, 481–482, 484, 487–488 ‘Maybe They’re Magic’  116 Mayer, Louis B.  103n13, 376n18, 505 Maytime film (1937)  15, 355–374 stage (1917)  355, 448 Mazziotti, Mary  231 McAndrew, Marianne  432 McArthur, Colin  396, 400, 405, 409, 411, 419n30 McCabe, John  330n14 McCarthy, Joseph  495–497 McCarthy, Todd  83n30 McCormick, Gilmer  232, 234, 237–238 McCoy, Van  560 McCracken, Allison  632n54 McCullers, Carson  537n11 McElhaney, Joe  97, 101 McGilligan, Patrick  319, 327, 331n22 McGregor, Ewan  22 McGuire, Patricia  617 McHugh, Dominic  13, 295, 398, 423 McKinley, Jesse  606 McLean, Adrienne  263 McLerie, Allyn  466, 468 McLuhan, Marshall  138 McNally, Karen  256, 267–269, 271n19, 273n49 McNinch-Pazzano, Mary-Catherine  411, 420n68 McQueen, Amanda  9–10, 569 ‘Mean, Green Mother from Outer Space’  219, 221 Me and Juliet (1953)  517 Mecchi, Irene  477 Meehan, Thomas  473, 477, 595–596, 598–599 ‘The Meek Shall Inherit’  219 Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956)  525 Meet Me in St. Louis film (1944)  15, 282 stage (1942)  377

Index   661 Mellor, Steve  215 The Member of the Wedding (1952)  537n11 Mendoza, David  456 Menken, Alan  4, 21, 205, 207–208, 211–213, 223, 387 Mera, Miguel  474–475 Mercer, Johnny  128, 132, 137, 145–146 Mering, Constance  495 Merkin, Robert  214 Merlino, Gene  66 Merman, Ethel  17, 24, 31, 41, 43, 254, 425, 518, 613, 620–624 Meron, Neil  25, 108, 598 Merrick, David  427 Merrill, Bob  425, 436 The Merry Widow (1934)  15 Mexican Hayride (1948)  15 Meyerbeer, Giacomo  9, 368, 506–507, 512n37 Michener, James  537n13 Middleton, Ray  43 Midler, Bette  25 Mielziner, Jo  260 Mignini, Carolyn  215 The Mike Douglas Show (television)  565n1 Milchan, Arnon  386 Milestone, Lewis  621 Miller, Alice Duer: Gowns by Roberta 32–33 Miller, Ann  5, 89, 275, 277, 281, 283–284, 286, 289, 518, 525 Miller, Frank  74 Miller, Robert  231 Miller, Scott  381, 389 Miller, Seton I.  457 Miller, T. S.  206, 223n3 Million Dollar Mermaid (1952)  519 ‘A Million Miles Away Behind the Door’  6, 294, 302, 308 Mills, Robert  155 Milton, Robert  34 ‘Mimi’ 13 Minnelli, Liza  19, 385 Minnelli, Vincente  16, 87, 95–96, 99, 101, 382, 395, 397, 401, 403, 409, 427–428, 432, 442n26 Mintz, Sam  36 Miracle of the White Stallions (1963)  180n88 Miranda, Carmen  282

Mississippi (1935)  622, 625 ‘Mister and Missus Fitch’  30 ‘Mister Snow’  533 Mitchell, James  400 Moffitt, John C.  621 Molella, Arthur  98 Molnár, Ferenc  520, 531, 534 ‘Moments in the Woods’  121 Monaco, James  157 ‘Money to Burn’  573, 577, 580–581, 584 Monroe, Marilyn  215, 257, 259, 268, 522 Montague, Diana  51n9 Montand, Yves  8, 427, 438–439 ‘Montezuma’s Daughter’  511n14 ‘Moon Burn’  622, 625–627 Moonchildren (1971)  157, 164 ‘Moonquake Lake’  488 ‘Moonshine’ 502 Moore, Larry  51n9 Moore, Victor  620–621 Moorman, Charlotte  163 Moranis, Rick  218–219, 226n60 Mordden, Ethan  19, 23, 25, 138–139, 307, 633n70 Morehouse, Ward  319, 330n14 More Than You Deserve (1973)  164 Morgan, Dennis  8, 458–459, 465 Morison, Patricia  24, 288–289 Morocco (1930)  470n11 ‘Morocco Bound’  456 Morris, George  579–580 Morris, Mitchell  320 Morrison, Aleta  580 Morse, Robert  574 Morse, Theodore F.  552 Most, Andrea  617 Mostel, Zero  593 Moulin Rouge! (2001)  21–22 ‘The Mounties’  364–365 Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) 132 Mueller, John  40, 52n37 Mulvey, Laura  305–306 Mumford, Lewis  99 Munshin, Jules  16, 89 The Muppet Show (television)  544 Murder at the Vanities (1934)  631n35 Murfin, Jane  36

662   Index Murphy, Donna  123n3 Murphy, George  41 Murray, Bill  207, 218, 226n58 Murray, J. Harold  496, 503 Murray, Lyn  193–194 ‘Mushnik and Son’  214, 219–220 Music Box Revues (1919–24)  13 The Music Man (2003)  25 ‘The Music That Makes Me Dance’  434 ‘My Body’  161, 178n44 ‘My Conviction’  158, 167 ‘My Country, ‘Tis of Thee’  317 ‘My Cousin in Milwaukee’  42 My Fair Lady film (1964)  2, 18, 66, 293, 302, 382, 550, 602 stage (1956)  1, 18, 66, 295–296, 302, 310, 517, 554, 602 ‘My Funny Valentine’  50n5, 255, 261–263, 268 My Gal Sal (1942)  315 ‘My Heart and I’  622, 625–627 Mylett, Jeffrey  232, 234, 237–238 ‘My Man’  430, 435, 440, 442n30 ‘My Mother’s Wedding Day’  399, 518 My Name Is Barbra (1965)  423 ‘My Ship’  15

N

‘Nacht und Träume’  48 Nadel, Norman  424 ‘Namely You’  145–146 Nathan, Stephen  232, 234, 240 National Barn Dance (radio show)  129 Naughty Marietta film (1935)  15, 355–374, 456 stage (1910)  355 ‘Necessity’  69, 194, 196 Neill, Noel  468, 472n71 Nelson, Ricky  313n26 Nero, Franco  66 ‘Never, Never Be an Artist’  342 ‘New Deal for Christmas’  480–481 New Faces (1954)  524 Newman, David  178n44, 535 Newman, Randy  164 The New Moon film (1930)  455

film (1940)  15, 355–374 stage (1928)  355, 455, 470n3 Newton-John, Olivia  19, 380, 384 ‘New York, New York’  89, 92–93, 168, 528 The New Yorkers (1930)  14 Nicholson, Jack  163, 207, 427, 438 ‘Night and Day’  14, 30, 553 Night Music (1977)  20 Nights of Cabiria (1957)  76 ‘The Night Waltz’  118 Nine (2009)  23 Nixon, Marni  18 Nixon, Richard  145 No, No, Nanette (1925)  13–14, 495 Nolan, Christopher  73 ‘No More’  121 ‘No One Is Alone’  108 North, Sheree  538n15 Novak, Kim  253, 255–257, 259, 261–263 ‘Now (It’s Just the Gas)’  219 ‘Now You Has Jazz’  349 ‘NYC’ 480–481 Nye, Gerald  333n48 Nymph Errant (1933)  14 Nyro, Laura  233

O

Obama, Barack  108 O’Brien, Daniel  255 O’Brien, Richard  384 Obringer, R. J.  457 Obsession (1976)  170 Ocean (band)  230 O’Connor, Donald  341, 518, 525 The Odd Couple film (1968)  605 stage (1965)  605 stage (2005)  603 O’Donnell, Mark  598–599 O’Donoghue, Sean  51n9 O’Dwyer, William  88–89 ‘Off the Record’  328 Of Thee I Sing (1931)  15 ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’  278 O’Hara, John  253, 256, 270, 271n23, 272n35 Oh, Boy! (1917)  497 ‘Oh Happy Day’  136, 144

Index   663 Oh, Kay! (1926)  13 Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918)  497 O’Horgan, Tom  162–164 ‘Oh What a Circus’  389–390 Oja, Carol  87–88, 91 Oklahoma! film (1955)  2, 17, 75, 382, 515–516, 519–520, 523–524, 526, 529, 536, 572, 602 stage (1943)  278, 375n10, 377, 388, 397, 515, 517–519, 600 ‘Old Devil Moon’  194–196 O’Leary, Larry  319 Oliver! (1968)  22, 602 Oliver, Thelma  83n39 Olivier, Laurence  276, 290 Olmos, Edward James  566n23 Olsen, ‘Ole’  505 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever film (1970)  8, 383, 423–424, 427–428, 432–433, 436t, 438–439 stage (1965)  203n55, 424, 427 The Once and Future King (1958)  295 Once in a Lifetime (1930)  632n44 Once upon a Mattress television (1964)  24, 490n4 television (1972)  24, 490n4 television (2005)  25 Ondříček, Miroslav “Mirek”  154 ‘One Alone’  447, 453, 456, 460–461, 463–464, 466–469 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)  157, 163, 173–174 ‘One Flower Grows Alone in Your Garden’  453, 456, 459, 463–464, 466, 468 One Stolen Night (1929)  470n11 One Touch of Venus (1948)  15 ‘On Parade’  365 ‘On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away’  43 On the Beach (Shute)  134 ‘On the Steps of the Palace’  119 ‘On the Street Where You Live’  296 On the Town film (1949)  2–3, 16, 30, 50n6, 85–94, 102, 161, 168, 245, 281, 528 stage (1944)  517 ‘On the Town’  50n6 On the Waterfront (1954)  412, 524

‘On the Willows’  243 On Your Toes film (1939)  15 stage (1936)  255 Opert, Sylvia  462 Ophuls, Max  579 ‘Opportunity’ 488 The Opposite Sex (1956)  525 ‘Ora O Conga’  506 The Organization Man (Whyte)  137 Osato, Sono  87 Oscar, Brad  603 Oscar Peterson Trio  186, 194 ‘Otherwise’ 146 O’Toole, Peter  72 ‘Our Little World’  117 Out of This World (1950)  339 Overman, Lynne  459 ‘Over There’  320, 327 Oz, Frank  217–223, 227n69

P

Paige, Elaine  385 Paik, Nam Jun  163 Paint Your Wagon film (1969)  2, 6, 293–312, 383, 591, 608n1 stage (1951)  6, 517 The Pajama Game (1954)  517 The Pajama Game (1957)  17 Pal Joey film (1957)  5, 17, 253–273, 525, 579–580 stage (1940)  5, 253–255, 470n3 Palmieri, Joe  225n38 Pan, Hermes  39, 75, 270n7, 276, 284 Panama, Norman  128, 132–133, 136, 138–144, 527 Panama Hattie (1942)  15 Papp, Joe  162, 178n38 Pappas, Rick  110 ‘Parade’ 437 Pardners (1956)  525 ‘Paree’ 370 Paris (1928)  345, 628 Parker, Alan  7, 386–389, 391, 393 Parton, Dolly  565n1 ‘Party Music’  158 Pasternak, Boris  179n64 The Pat Boone Show (television)  544

664   Index Patinkin, Mandy  380, 389 Patterson, Laurie  615 Paul Sills’ Story Theatre (1970)  231 Paulus, Diane  157 Paynter, Robert  221 Peck, Gregory  69 Peckinpah, Sam  580 ‘People’  424, 429, 434, 436–437 The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)  159, 173 ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’  527 ‘A Perfect Relationship’  99 Peron, Eva  378–379, 381, 387, 389 Peron, Juan  378, 390 Persky, Lester  162 Peter Pan (2014)  25 Peters, Bernadette  124n6 Petrie, Walter  503 Pfeiffer, Michelle  23, 387, 603 The Phantom of the Opera (2004)  24 Pharr, Mary  221 Phillips, Arlene  477 ‘A Piece of Sky’  441 Pierson, Thomas  161 ‘Pinball Number Count’  560 Pine, Chris  23, 111–112 Pink Flamingos (1972)  594 Pinocchio (1940)  185 Pipe Dream (1955)  516–517 Pippin (1972)  233 The Pirate (1948)  282, 349 Pistache, Simone  345 Planquette, Robert  370 Platt, Marc  110 Playboy magazine  256–257 ‘Please’ 618 Plimpton, Martha  272n36 Plummer, Christopher  18 Pointer Sisters  560 Polan, Dana  93 Pollock, Arthur  495 Pollock, Muriel  495 Polyester (1981)  594 Pomerance, Murray  396 Pons, Lily  512n37 ‘Poor Whippoorwill’  511n23 Porter, Cole  6, 13–16, 30, 38, 275–276, 288, 337–350, 356, 517–518, 524, 613, 615

Porter, Verne Hardin  318 The Porter Wagoner Show (television)  544, 565n1 Porush, David  100–101 Powell, Eleanor  15, 633n69 Powell, Jane  375n7, 424, 524 ‘Prehistoric Man’  16, 50n6, 281 ‘Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord’  238–239, 243 Presley, Elvis  525, 543 Presnell, Harve  301, 313n15 ‘Pretty as a Picture’  375n2 Previn, André  302, 306, 308 Prince, Faith  215, 225n38 Prince, Hal  2, 47, 379–381, 388 The Princess and the Frog (2009)  278 Prinz, LeRoy  326, 332n45 ‘Prisoners of Love’  595–596 The Producers film (1968)  10, 23, 593–598, 600–602, 605 film (2005)  10, 597–598, 600–603 stage (2001)  10, 23, 595–596, 600–603 ‘Progress Is the Root of All Evil’  144–145 ‘Prologue: Into the Woods’  23 Pryce, Jonathan  391, 393 ‘Public Enemy Number One’  622 Puccini, Giacomo  358, 368 ‘Put a Little Rhythm in Everything You Do’ 619 ‘Put ‘Em Back the Way They Wuz’  136 ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes’  437 ‘Put the Blame on Mame’  266, 283 ‘Put Your Hand in the Hand’  230

Q

Queen of Hearts (1972)  378–379 Quinn, Anthony  526

R

‘The Race Is On’  573, 583–584 Rado, James  4, 151, 155–157, 162, 164, 171, 175n15 Rae, Charlotte  139, 146 Ragni, Gerome “Jerry”  4, 151, 155, 157, 162, 164, 171 Ragtime (1981)  157, 164, 173 Rainger, Ralph  618–619 ‘The Rain in Spain’  297, 554

Index   665 Raitt, John  526 Rall, Tommy  275, 286 Ramis, Harold  226n58 Rand, Sally  266 Randell, Ron  279 ‘Rangers’ March’  495 ‘Rangers’ Song’  506, 508 Rank, J. Arthur  398 Rankin, John  183, 197–198 Rapaport, Pola  175n11 Rasch, Albertina  495–496, 503 Rathbone, Basil  527 Ray, Nicholas  161 Raye, Martha  425 Reagan, Ronald  381 ‘A Real Nice Clambake’  533 Rear Window (1954)  524 Rebel Without a Cause (1955)  412 Red Garters (1954)  524 Redgrave, Vanessa  18, 64, 66, 81n15 Redmayne, Eddie  22 The Red Shadow (1932)  447, 455–456 The Red Skelton Hour (television)  543 Reed, Luther  503–504 Reed, Rex  245 Reeve, Christopher  73 Reeves, George  468 Regay, Pearl  451 ‘Le Régiment de Sambre et Meuse’  370 Reiner, Carl  550 Reinhardt, Stephen  234, 238, 243 Reinking, Ann  481 Remains to Be Seen (1953)  537n11 ‘Renaissance Fair’  62 Renavent, Georges  503 Renick, Kyle  211–212, 216, 225n41 Rent (2005)  602 Reomheld, Heinz  332n43 Replogle-Wong, Holley  326, 334n67 Revel, Harry  619 Reynolds, Debbie  525 ‘Rhana Meshwar’  464 Rhodes, Marie  426 ‘Rhythm of Life’  78 Rice, Tim  229, 234, 378–379, 381, 385, 387, 389 Rich, Frank  152, 160, 167–168, 174, 212, 629 Richards, Carol  399, 410, 419n32

Richards, David  226n42 ‘Rich Man’s Frug’  77–78 Rickman, Alan  22 Riddle, Nelson  143, 254 Ride the High Country (1962)  580 Riesman, David: The Lonely Crowd 137 ‘The Riff Song’  447, 453, 455–456, 459, 461, 463, 467–468 Riggs, Lynn  520 Rio Bravo (1959)  313n26 Rio Rita  1, 9, 493–510 film (1929)  503–505, 511n21 film (1942)  505–508 stage (1927)  493–503 ‘Rio Rita’  498, 499–502f, 500–501, 506–507 Risky Business (1983)  217 Ritz Brothers  505 Rivera, Chita  83n39 River of No Return (1954)  524 ‘River Song’  498, 498–501f, 501 Road to Utopia (1946)  132 Robbins, Allison  10, 613 Robbins, Hannah  5, 275 Robbins, Jerome  74–76, 143, 609n17 The Robe (1953)  522 Roberta (1935)  1–2, 14, 29–49, 31–32t, 38–39t, 375n3 Roberti, Lyda  33, 42 Roberts, Robin  603 Robin, Leo  10, 30, 614–615, 618–619, 625–627, 629, 633n63 Robinson, Bill  282 Robinson, Martin P.  210 Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue (1953)  527 Rock, Rock, Rock (1956)  525 Rock Around the Clock (1956)  525 ‘Rock around the Clock’  563 The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)  208, 384 The Rocky Horror Show (1973)  209, 384 Rodgers, Jimmie  129 Rodgers, Richard  13–15, 17, 30, 41, 70, 132, 184, 203n55, 255, 260, 267, 270, 358, 515–536, 616–618, 632n44. See also specific productions by title Roemheld, Heinz  463–464 Rogers, Ginger  39–45, 47, 51n27, 356, 425, 431

666   Index Rohrer, Andrew  231–232 ‘Romance’  447, 453, 456, 460–461, 463, 468–469 Romberg, Sigmund  355–356, 358, 447–448, 451–452, 457, 463, 510n13, 615 Rome, Harold  517 Rooney, Mickey  15, 50n4, 356, 545 Roosevelt, Franklin D.  318–319 Roosevelt, Theodore  326 Rosalie (1937)  30, 349 Rose Marie film (1936)  15, 355–374 film (1954)  524 stage (1924)  355 ‘Rose Marie’  364 Rosenberg, Bernard  131 Rosenstock, Milton  435 Rosley, Adrian  53n55 Ross, Diana  20 Ross, Jerry  17, 517 Ross, Judith  176n26, 209 Rossum, Emmy  24 Rotella, Carlo  91 Roth, Ann  155 Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (television)  544 Royal Wedding (1951)  528 Royce, Edward  510n1 Rudetsky, Seth  225n38 Ruggles, Charles  622 ‘Rule the World’  492n42 Russell, Anna  551 Russell, Ken  385 ‘Russian Song’  46–47 Ruttman, Walter  86 Ryan, Bill  409

S

‘The Sabre Song’  469 Sabrina (1954)  524 ‘Sadie, Sadie’  430, 433, 436 ‘Sadie Hawkins Ballet’  143 Sahara Love (1926)  470n11 Said, Edward W.  450–451 Saidy, Fred  183, 185–187, 198 ‘Sailor Beware’  30, 622, 625, 627 ‘Sailor’s Chantey’  622–623 St. Cyr, Lili  266

Saint-Saëns, Camille  451 Saint Subber, Arnold  275 Saks, Gene  20 Sakurai, Yoshin  325 Salata, Greg  225n38 Salinger, Conrad  401 Salkow, Sidney  621 Sally (1929)  509, 510n1 Salome (1905)  451 Samson et Dalila (1877)  451 Sandage, Scott A.  325, 329 Sanders, George  518 Sanders, Julie  294 ‘Sandra Dee’  19 ‘Sandy’ 481 Sanford, Charles  469 San Juan, Olga  299 Santillo, Frank  580 Sapiro, Ian  8, 473 Sarris, Andrew  580 Saturday Night Live (television)  544 ‘Save the People’  239 Savran, David  157, 338 Sawdust and Tinsel (1953)  179n69 Scaasi, Arnold  427 Scaggs, Boz  560 Schallert, Edwin  329, 536, 539n37 Scharf, Walter  425 Schary, Dore  396 Schenk, Joseph M.  519–520 Scheuer, Philip K.  516, 520–521, 523 Schickel, Richard  245 Schlatter, George  565n2 Schless, Robert  459 Scholl, Jack  333n45, 463 Schöner, Sonja  538n23 Schumacher, Joel  23–24 Schwab, Laurence  448 Schwartz, Stephen  5, 229–230, 233, 237, 241, 379 Scorsese, Martin  162 Scott, A. O.  610n40 Scott, Allan  37 Scott, Randolph  35f, 43, 49, 52n27 Sebastian (1968)  236 Seberg, Jean  300 ‘Second Hand Rose’  430, 434

Index   667 ‘Second Midnight’  119 Segal, Vivienne  254, 259, 267, 273n48, 449, 470n3 Seiter, William  51n27 Sellars, Peter  151 Selma (2014)  488 Sennwald, Andre  39 ‘Senorita’ 374 Sergeant York (1941)  323, 325 Serrano, Vincent  503 Sesame Street (television)  560, 566n17 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)  132, 523–524, 528–529, 539n33 ‘The Seven Deadly Virtues’  60, 66–67 1776 (1972)  383 Seyfried, Amanda  22 ‘Shadow Song’  9, 506 Shaffer, Paul  164, 238 Shaffer, Peter  157, 162 Shaiman, Marc  598–599 Shake, Rattle, and Rock! (1956)  525 ‘Shakin’ the Blues Away’  283 Shall We Dance (1937)  40 ‘Shall We Dance?’  392 ‘Shanghai-De-Ho’  622, 633n63 Shankman, Adam  599–600, 604 Shannon, Joshua  96 Shapiro, Mel  176n26 Sharif, Omar, 18 Shaw, George Bernard  295 Shearer, Martha  3, 85 The Sheik (1921)  451, 469 ‘She Is a Diamond’  392 ‘She Isn’t You’  427 Sheldon, Gene  44, 53n55 ‘She’ll Be Back’  117, 120–121 She Loves Me (1978)  24 She Loves Me Not (1934)  619, 622 Shelton, Reid  478 Sheridan, Ann  525 Sherman, Esther  208 Sherman, Harry  518 Sherwood, Bobby  261 Sherwood, Gale  469 Sheward, David  380 ‘She Wasn’t You’  438 Shewey, Don  216–217

Shirley, Bill  296 Shore, Dinah  146 Short, Martin  123n2, 226n58 Show Boat film (1936)  1, 30–31, 46, 527 film (1951)  16, 286, 290, 292n25, 527, 579 stage (1927)  13–14, 44, 503, 511n21 ‘Show Me’  296 Shute, Nevil: On the Beach 134 Shutter, Ricky  238 The Shuttered Room (1967)  236 Sidney, George  254, 275, 288, 290, 397–398, 570, 579–580 Siegel, Don  137 ‘Sign’ 481 Silk Stockings film (1957)  419n32 theatre (1955)  287, 517, 524 Silva, Mario  463 Silver, Abner  615–616 Silver, Lee  234 Silvers, Louis  454 Silvers, Phil  524 Simmons, Jean  18, 518 Simon, Carly  159 Simon, Neil  76–77, 469, 605 Simon, S. Sylvan  505 Simone, Lela  409 ‘Simple Joys’  59 ‘The Simple Joys of Maidenhood’  59 Sinatra, Frank  4, 16, 24, 88, 186, 194–197, 199, 202n40, 253–256, 270, 342, 345, 427, 433, 518, 524–525, 532, 540n41, 579 Sin City (2003, 2014)  74 Singer, Michael  244 Singin’ in the Rain (1952)  16–17, 41, 283, 377, 382, 403, 412–413, 418n1, 421n78, 528, 545 Sinyard, Neil  481 Sissle, Noble  50n5 ‘Skid Row’  212–214, 220 Slater, Thomas  152 Sleeping Beauty (1959)  296 Slick, Grace  560 Smash (TV show)  25 Smith, Muriel  526, 538n27 Smith, Oliver  17 Smith, Queenie  621

668   Index Smith, Susan  7, 395 ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’  34, 39, 42–43, 45–47, 48f The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (television) 544 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)  185, 203n57 Sobieski, Carol  476, 478 ‘Sodomy’ 173 ‘Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise’  364 ‘So Happy’  120 ‘So in Love’  279, 286, 289 Sokolow, Anna  179n38 So Long (1929)  509 ‘So Long, Dearie’  432, 438, 440 ‘Somebody to Love’  158 ‘Some Fun Now’  219 ‘Some of These Days’  375n2 ‘Some Other Time’  16, 50n6 ‘Something Had to Happen’  43, 45 Something Rotten (2015)  597 ‘Something Sort of Grandish’  69, 202n49 ‘Something Stinks in the State of Denmark . . . Something Smells in Elsinore’ 550 Sondheim, Stephen  3, 20, 42, 107–110, 117, 119–120, 123, 124nn10, 12, 481, 607. See also specific productions by title Song and Dance (1982)  378 Song of Norway (1970)  383 ‘Song of the Brass Key’  453 The Son of the Sheik (1926)  470n11 ‘Soon’ 625 Soul Train 563 The Sound of Music film (1965)  1, 17–18, 66, 310, 376n13, 382–384, 392, 423, 490n4, 572, 600, 602 stage (1959)  516 television (2013)  25, 490n4 television (2015)  490n4 South Pacific film (1958)  17, 70, 302, 313n15, 523, 529–530, 602 stage (1949)  515, 517 Spall, Timothy  22 Spamalot (2004)  597 Spector, Phil  213

Spencer, David  223 Spencer, Jeremy  231 Spewack, Samuel and Bella  275, 288, 339, 632n44 Spielberg, Steven  152, 216 Spier, Larry  614 Spitzer, Leo  339, 349 Sprigle, Ray  69 Spring, Katherine  630n9 Spring Awakening (2006)  607 ‘Springtime for Hitler’  595–596 Sroka, Jerry  237–238 Stam, Robert  85, 100, 474, 546 Stapleton, Jean  97 Star! (1968)  302, 383, 423 Stardust (2007)  492n42 A Star Is Born (1954)  524, 553 Stark, Abe  89, 491n35 Stark, Ray  424, 442n30 Starlight Express (1984)  223 Star Wars (1977)  20 State Fair (1945)  520 ‘Stay with Me’  119–121, 124n15 Steele, Tommy  569, 573–574, 576, 585 Steinbeck, John  516–517 Steiner, Max  467–468 Steinman, Jim  162 ‘Stereophonic Sound’  287, 525 Sternfeld, Jessica  477 Stevens, James  231 Stevenson, Adlai  137 Stewart, Ellen  164, 232 Stewart, Jimmy  300, 633n69 Stigwood, Robert  380, 384–386, 388 Stiller, Ben  603 Stilwell, Robynn  9, 543 Stoltz, Robert  617 Stone, Oliver  386 Stookey, Paul  231 Storey, Ruth  97 The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939)  315, 375n3 Stothart, Herbert  355, 369–370, 375n11, 512n35 ‘Stouthearted Men’  364–365 ‘Straight from the Shoulder, Right from the Heart’ 619 The Strange Affair (1968)  236

Index   669 Strangers on a Train (1951)  30 Straus, Oscar  458 Strauss, Johann, II  315 Strauss, Richard  451, 510n12 Streep, Meryl  23, 111–113, 117, 119, 387, 603, 607 Street, George  451 A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)  88 Streisand, Barbra  7–8, 18, 385, 423–441, 574, 602, 607 Strike Up the Band (1940)  15, 30 Stritch, Elaine  266, 273n40 Stroman, Susan  10, 23, 596 Strouse, Charles  473, 477–478, 481, 488 Stubblebine, Donald J.  510n11 The Student Prince (1954)  524 The Student Prince in Heidelberg (1924)  448 Sturges, Preston  82n19 Styne, Jule  94, 424–425, 430, 433, 442n30 Styne, Stanley  273n42 The Subject Was Roses film (1968)  236 stage (1964)  235 Subotnik, Morton  232 ‘Such Unusual Weather’  511n23 ‘Sudden Changes/Feed Me (Git It)’  219 ‘Suddenly Seymour’  219 Suhr, Linda  167 Sullivan, Ed  138 ‘Summer Nights’  20 Sunset Boulevard (1993)  379 Superman  73, 468 Superman (1976, 1978, 1981, 1987)  73 Superscope 523 ‘Suppertime’ 221 Swain, Joseph P.  247n10 ‘The Swan’  430 Swannee River (1939)  315 Sweeney, Louise  245–246 Sweeney Todd (2007)  20–22, 30, 481 Sweet Charity (1969)  57, 75–80, 302, 383, 585 ‘Sweetheart’  493, 498 ‘Sweetheart, We Need Each Other’  503–504, 512n27 Sweethearts film (1938)  15, 355–374, 375n2 stage (1913)  355 The Swinger (1966)  579

Swing Time (1936)  14, 40–41 The Sword and the Rose (1953)  527 ‘Sword Dance’  399–400, 409, 419n40, 518 Sydmonton Festival  378

T

‘Take a Number from One to Ten’  51n36 ‘Take Back Your Mink’  346 ‘Take Him’  254 ‘Take Me to the Fair’  64 Taking Off (1971)  159, 162–163, 173 Tales of the South Pacific (Michener)  537n13 Tallmer, Jeffrey  234 Tanguay, Eva  552 Tarzan (2006)  592 Taxi Driver (1976)  162 Taylor, Elizabeth  426 Taylor, James  233 Taylor, John Russell  411 Taylor, Ron  211 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Illyich  369 El Teatro Campesino  555, 566n23 Tebelak, John-Michael  229–246 Temple, Shirley  282, 526 Templeton, Faye  44 ‘Temporary Arrangement’  433 The Tender Trap (1955)  186 Terry, Ethelind  502 Texaco Star Theatre (television)  543 ‘Thank You So Much Mrs. Lowsborough-Goodby’ 337 Tharp, Twyla  151–152, 154, 156, 164–165, 173, 175n12 ‘That Great Come-and-Get-It Day’  69, 194, 196 ‘That Terrific Rainbow’  259–260 The Book of Mormon (2011)  597, 607 Them! (1954)  222 ‘Then You May Take Me to the Fair’  60 ‘Then You Will Know’  463 ‘There But for You Go I’  7, 399, 401, 407–418, 518 ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame’  554 ‘There’s a Coach Comin’ In’  307 ‘There’s a Small Hotel’  254–255 ‘There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This’ 78

670   Index There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954)  518, 523–524, 529 ‘There’s No One Who Can Do It Like a Dane’ 554 ‘They Call the Wind Maria’  301–302, 307, 313n15 Thigpen, Lynne  237, 239, 241 The 39 Steps (1935)  30 This Is Cinerama (1952)  522, 529 ‘This Is My World’  573, 577 ‘This Time of Year’  69 Thomas, Don  238 Thompson, Fred  495–496 Thompson, Howard  533, 540n46 Thompson, Jimmy  399 Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)  423 Three Dog Night  168 The Three Little Pigs (1933)  203n59 Threepenny Opera (1976)  380 Three Sisters (1934)  41 Thurman, Uma  23, 603, 605 ‘Tico, Tico’  506 Tierney, Harry  495–498, 506 Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)  17 Tiomkin, Dimitri  398 Todd, Michael  519–522 Todd-AO technology  520–524, 530, 532 ‘Tokay’ 364 ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’  284, 289 Tommy (1975)  384 The Tommy Steele Story (1957)  573 ‘Tomorrow’  478, 480–485, 484t, 487 ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’  47 The Tonight Show (television)  543, 565n1 ‘Too Darn Hot’  5, 276–277, 280–284, 288–289, 341 Too Many Girls (1939)  255 Top Banana (1954)  524 Top Hat (1935)  14, 377 Torn Curtain (1966)  423 Tosca (1900)  368, 376n18 ‘Totem Tom Tom’  373–374 ‘The Touch of Your Hand’  41, 44, 46 ‘Tower of Babble’  238–239 ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!’  364 Travolta, John  19, 23, 384, 603–604 Truffaut, François  176n22

Tsu, Susan  231–232 Tubens, Joe  155 Tucker, Sophie  549, 551 Tuner, Claramae  539n39 Tunick, Jonathan  107, 112–113, 115–116 Turk, Roy  615 ‘Turn Back, O Man’  237, 240, 242 Turner, Ike  163 Turner, Lana  261 Turner, Tina  163 Twelve Chairs (1970)  597 Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971)  176n26 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)  580, 605 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954)  524

U

The Ugly Duckling (1931)  203n59 Underwood, Carrie  25 ‘Unexpected Song’  378 The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960)  313n15 Unsworth, Geoffrey  580 Untamed (1955)  529, 538n15 ‘Uptown’  212–214, 221 Urban, Joseph  493, 495, 503, 510n2 Utt, Kenneth  236

V

‘Vagabond King’  495 The Vagabond King film (1955)  525, 527 stage (1925)  525 Vajna, Andrew G.  386 Valens, Ritchie  566n23 Valentino, Rudolph  451–452, 470n12 Vallee, Rudy  361 Valli, Frankie  19 Vance, J. D.  138 Van Dyke, Dick  18 Van Eyssen, John  236 Varèse, Edgar  214 Vaughan, Sarah  195 ‘Vendors’ Calls’  397 Vera Cruz (1954)  524 Vera-Ellen  90, 93, 518, 524 Verdon, Gwen  26n11, 76 Vereen, Ben  238 Vertigo (1958)  214

Index   671 Very Good Eddie (1915)  497 ‘A Very Nice Prince’  119 Via Galactica (1972)  177n26, 209 Vidor, Charles  410 VistaVision  522–524, 527, 529–530 Volúsia, Eros  506 Vonnegut, Kurt  208 Vreeland, Frank  496, 510n10

W

Waggoner, Lyle  544, 561 Waissman, Ken  384 ‘Waitin’ for My Dearie’  399, 403 ‘Wait Till We’re Sixty-Five’  427, 438 Walken, Christopher  603 Walker, Vivienne  155 ‘The Walking Game’  370 ‘Walking in Space’  161, 167, 178n44 Wallis, Hal  315, 324–325 Wallis, Quvenzhané  488–489, 492n48 Walsh, Richard  244 Walston, Ray  313n15 Walter, Serge  463 ‘Waltz for Eva and Che’  7, 391–392 ‘Wand’rin’ Star’  307 Wanger, Walter  617 ‘Wanting You’  359–361, 364, 374 War and Peace (1956)  296 ‘The Warmest Baby in the Bunch’  323 Warncke, Margaret  215 Warner, Harry M.  333n48 Warner, Jack L.  324, 328–329, 459, 617 Waters, John  593–594, 599, 604, 607 Watts, Richard, Jr.  613, 622, 627–628 Wayne, David  185 Wayne, John  300, 313n26 ‘Way Out West’  50n5 Weaver, Sigourney  226n60 Webb, Marti  574 ‘We Beseech Thee’  238, 242 ‘We Can Do It’  23 ‘We’d Like to Thank You’  480–481 ‘Weekend in the Country’  20 ‘We Got Annie’  480 Weidman, John  628 Weil, Cynthia  213 Weill, Kurt  50n6, 291n10, 517, 617

Weintraub, Jerry  386 Weird Romance (1992)  223 Welch, Gillian  565n6 Welch, Ken and Mitzie  545, 565n6 Weld, Tuesday  525 Welk, Lawrence  562 Weller, Michael  4, 151–153, 156–157, 159, 161, 163–164, 171 Wells, H. G.  206, 572 Welsh, Jennifer  411 ‘We Open in Venice’  279, 290 We’re Not Dressing (1934)  631n35 Wesson, Dick  466 West, Bernard  97 West, Nathanael  164 Westley, Helen  44, 52n27 Westover, Jonas  4, 205 West Side Story (1962)  1–2, 18, 57, 66, 75–76, 83n30, 382, 602 ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man?’  158, 167 ‘What Did I Have That I Don’t Have’ 439–440 ‘What Is a Man?’  270n2 ‘What’s the Use of Wond’rin’?’  534 Wheeler, Bert  503–505, 511n24 Whelehan, Imelda  475 ‘When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love’  197 ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’  326 ‘When the Children Are Asleep’  532 ‘When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich’ 197 ‘When You’re in Love, You’ll Waltz’  500 ‘Where Am I Going?’  78, 80 ‘Where Are the Men?’  622 ‘Where Did We Go Right’  595 ‘Where Do I Go?’  155 ‘Where Is the Life That Late I Led?’  289 ‘Where or When’  15, 50nn4–5 White, David Manning  131 White, Onna  20, 572 White, T. H.  295 ‘White Boys’  166 White Christmas (1954)  132, 518, 523–524, 527 Whitfield, Sarah  165 Whiting, Richard  10, 30, 614–615, 617, 619, 625, 629 Whitmore, James  69

672   Index ‘Who Am I?’  488 ‘Who Are You Now?’  434, 436 ‘Who Is There among Us Who Knows’  427, 439 ‘Whoop-Ti-Ay’ 307 ‘Who’s Got the Pain’  26n11 ‘Who Taught Her Everything She Knows’ 433 ‘Why Can’t You Behave?’  286 Whyte, William H.  137 Wicked (2003)  607 Wickes, Edward M.  615 Wiener, Norbert  98 The Wild Bunch (1969)  584 Wilder, Alec  45–46 Wilder, Gene  593 Wilkinson, Colm  379 Wilkof, Lee  214–215 Williams, Andy  296 Williams, Esther  89, 519 Williams, Hank  129 Williams, John  74 Williams, Robin  123n2, 604 Williams, Treat  158 The Will Rogers Follies (1991)  21 ‘Will You Remember?’  360–361, 363 Willson, Meredith  313n15 Wilson, Charles E.  130, 147n9 Wilson, Jack  339 Wilson, Patrick  123n3 Wilson, Sandy  517 Winchell, Walter  138 Winderl, Ronda Rice  233, 235, 243, 247n31 Winsten, Archer  245 Winston, Archer  584 Winter, Lawrence  538n23 Winters, Shelley  561 Wise, Robert  22, 76, 382 Wish You Were Here (1952)  517 ‘Witch’s Lament’  117 ‘With Every Breath I Take’  625 ‘Without Love’  599 Wittman, Scott  598–599 The Wiz film (1978)  20, 384, 560 television (2015)  25, 598 The Wizard of Oz (1939)  15, 41, 357, 526, 535

Wodehouse, P. G.  338, 378, 495, 621 Wojcik, Pamela  104n44, 441 Wolf, Stacy  77 Woller, Megan  6, 61, 293 Wollman, Elizabeth  165, 225n33 Wolverine (2007, 2011, 2017)  74 The Woman with the Whip (1952)  379 Wonderful Town (1953)  517 Wood, Ed  207 Wood, Elijah  123n2 Wood, Michael  411–413 Wood, Natalie  18, 602 Woods, Dee Dee  139, 143 Woods, Renn  180n87 Woollcott, Alexander  34 Woolsey, Robert  503–505, 511nn17, 24 Worster, Howett  359 Wright, Robert  16 Wrubel, Allie  512n35 Wyler, William  428 Wylie, Philip  131

Y

‘Ya Never Know’  214 ‘Yankee Doodle Boy’  316, 318, 323 Yankee Doodle Bugs (1954)  323 Yankee Doodle Daffy (1943)  323 Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)  6, 315–335 The Yankee Prince (1908)  317 ‘Yesterdays’  37, 43, 46–47 Yost, Dorothy  37 ‘You Are My Lucky Star’  50n5 ‘You Are Woman’  430, 433, 436 You Can’t Run Away from It (1956)  525 ‘You Have to Be Carefully Taught’  70 ‘(You’ll Never) Outfox the Fox’  528 ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’  532–533 ‘You Made Me Love You’  599 Youmans, Vincent  13 ‘You Must Love Me’  7, 21, 392–393 Young at Heart (1954)  524 Young Frankenstein (1974)  597 ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’  316, 323, 325–326 ‘You’re Always in My Arms’  503–504, 511n14 ‘You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan’  535 ‘You’re Awful’  16, 50n6 ‘You’re Devastating’  41, 44, 46

Index   673 ‘You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow’  42 ‘You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile’  480–482, 488 ‘You’re the Top’  6, 337, 339, 341, 348, 616, 621–622, 624 ‘Your Fault’  23, 121 ‘You Won’t Be an Orphan Long’  480–481 Yudkoff, Alvin  396, 398, 400

Z

Zadan, Craig  25, 108, 598 Zaks, Jerry  628 Zanuck, Darryl F.  382, 520–522, 530, 541n52 Zanuck, Richard  382–383

Zellweger, Renee  22 Zeta-Jones, Catherine  22, 24 Zhito, Lee  525, 527 Ziegfeld, Florenz  315, 493, 503, 509 Ziegfeld Follies (1946)  280 Zien, Chip  215 Zimmerman, Paul D.  245 Zinnemann, Fred  515, 519, 529–530, 537n11 ‘Zip’  254, 264–265, 266f, 266–267 Zipp, Samuel  88 Zoot Suit film (1981)  566n23 stage (1978)  566n23 Zouave Drill Team  527