If I could have but one wish granted from the world of higher entertainment, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II would be back working on a new musical. I was lucky to be alive and attentive during the creation of their last four works. Still vivid are my recollections of advance news reports announcing subject matter, song titles, and stars signed. Still vivid are the first out-of-town reviews in Variety—in particular the one which began “Sensational musical is on its way to Broadway” when The Sound of Music opened in New Haven. How fond are my memories of waiting anxiously to hear the songs for the first time, staying tuned to the radio for new releases that might bear their titles.
Then the ultimate thrill: listening to the recorded score, usually on a Sunday evening broadcast a week or so before the original cast album arrived at our local record store. There, I savored its newness in my hands. Once home, the album was the star of the house, morning, noon and night. And what a glorious note the masters would go out on! I would live to see my high estimation of The Sound of Music—their final opus—rousingly affirmed forty years later when audiences attended sing-along versions of the movie.
How did such an addiction begin? As far as I can recall, it was one evening in Santa Rosa, California, in front of the old console radio in the bedroom I shared with my older brother, Dick, when I heard Mary Martin singing “A Cockeyed Optimist” from the original cast album of South Pacific. Something quite extraordinary happened, for my young ears were riveted to the artfully constructed verse and the haunting music. Perhaps at that fateful moment the elevated world of Broadway songwriting claimed a part of my soul.
It might have proved only a passing infatuation had not my brother, Dick, gone to San Francisco a few years later and been unexpectedly swept away by a touring production of Carousel. As a result, he started bringing home show albums. In retrospect, his keen enthusiasms seem to have helped nurture the seed that Mary, Dick and Oscar planted. What a time to fall in love with musical theatre. What a century. I am left with indelible memories of a greatness not guaranteed every age.
Those years of enchanted craftsmanship would not last forever. No “golden age” does. I had grown up during the last act, and it would take me many years to realize and appreciate that the first act had been even better. By that time, I had learned to endure something even more dispiriting than the arguable decline in a great American art form: a suicidal cynicism among insiders and hard-core fans against post–golden age developments. Many who lived through the halcyon days would turn intolerant and bitter as the faces and voices of singing shows changed, unable or unwilling to allow the occasional new musical with valid offerings into their closed hearts. Yet I can tell you this: If my most thrilling moment was watching Mary Martin sing “I’m in Love With a Wonderful Guy” when South Pacific played the Curran Theatre in San Francisco in 1957, probably the second greatest thrill was delivered from the same stage over forty years later when Petula Clark sang “As If We Never Said Goodbye” in a post–golden age show, Sunset Boulevard.
Perhaps the good new shows are fewer and farther between than they were in the 1940s and 1950s. Nonetheless, real musical theatre has not completely given way to mindless spectacle. Originality still struggles, now and then, to assert itself in fresh formats. And sometimes, still, the results can be compelling. If American writers lost their way the last quarter of the twentieth century, it was not for lack of a desire to experiment and extend or even—heaven, forbid—to entertain.
Creative forces from foreign shores would come at least to their temporary if unwelcome rescue. For a number of years the names Andrew Lloyd Webber and Steven Sondheim were considered the only two options on Broadway. How sadly limiting that was; it surely took some kind of toll on alternative voices striving to break free of cliché expectations. And truth be told, of late Broadway hasn’t allowed in many new voices with strong visions of their own. When the producer assumes too much power over the act of creation itself, beware. Alan Jay Lerner was onto something when he wrote, “The theatre flourishes when it is a writer’s theatre.”
Once the final curtain falls and the lights and sets are struck, what remains are the cast albums—the tangible and permanent reminders of variable fortunes along 42nd Street. Cast albums live on to charm and exhilarate—and to annoy and irritate. We are confounded by the contradictory lessons they impart: How could such a marvelous set of songs have gone to bed with so dreadful a script? How could so legendary a success contain such mediocre words and music? We listen to magic and lament early closings. We endure banalities and are at a loss to understand why audiences rushed to embrace them in the first place. But those songs are only a fraction of what theatregoers experienced in the first place—a mere echo of a long-lost enterprise whose particular makeup in all its complexities can never be recaptured. Such is the fleeting beauty of the “living theatre.”
And we are forced to deal with the elusive realities: A musical is an amalgam of many interchangeable components, including timing, luck, the production, and a producer’s marketing savvy. A musical will rise or fall on the intricacies of collaboration—in collaboration with fate itself. Orchestra conductor turned educator Lehman Engle once argued naively for the libretto being perfect before rehearsals commenced as the only way of insuring regular success; that Mr. Engle was not subsequently engaged by the Shuberts to review incoming scripts suggests how far off the mark he was. Far smarter was Oscar Hammerstein, who acknowledged the irrationality of the outcome no matter how much thought had gone into it, and deferred humbly to “the intangibles,” those elusive spiritual qualities that unexpectedly emerge between the lines of dialogue and verse. Having suffered his share of humiliating flops, Hammerstein would surely know. We read of celebrities who “saved” the run; of miscast stars who dogged the run; of directors blamed for turkeys; of directors acclaimed for “salvage jobs,” as if anybody could have known for certain that the show would fail without an Abbott or a Prince at the helm. (They, too, directed turkeys.) We read of patchwork trivialities cheered by standing ovations; of trenchant, form-advancing work begging for patrons. The explanations advanced are about as sound as stock market predictions. Those maddening intangibles … yes, Mr. Hammerstein.
Through it all, that fetching infant, that child of irresistible charm who refuses to grow up—that is to say, the musical—invariably finds at the last moment a way back to the hearts of the public. A strut. A grin. A joke. A pratfall. A Mel Brooks. Even a great story. And the theatre stays a theatre instead of a super mall or an insurance building. And the crowds keep coming. And, too, tons of other shows the same season lose money and fade ingloriously into an early darkness. And Variety comes up with a promising new slant and headline for the next season ahead. These days the theatre owners who rent make predictable profits. Producers, many of whom seem to specialize in income tax write-off operations, keep alive at least the image of old Broadway as a booming place.
This is a book about old Broadway and new, image and reality, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. Where does such a book come from? From a decade of listening to over three hundred cast albums, each graded song by song on at least two separate occasions. From the notes made, the story lines studied, the reviews examined and the themes compared. Then from a consideration of the scores in chronological order, out of which a landscape of American culture and the attendant changing patterns in musical theatre art began to take shape in my mind. These larger impressions shaped the narrative; that done, I immersed myself in Broadway histories and biographies, intent upon telling the story from a healthy range of viewpoints. Sources of those viewpoints include my own impressions of the 90 or so musicals I have seen in one form or another; first night reviews and box office records; revival history, if any; the creators themselves, whose quoted comments can offer rare first-hand insights; and selected authors and scholars who have been looking back thoughtfully ever since.
Vastly helpful were Steve Suskin’s monumentally rich reference books, Show Tunes and Broadway Opening Nights—virtual libraries unto themselves. By serendipity, other valuable materials have come my way. Two Los Angeles friends were
wonderfully generous: Rick Talcove gave me a wealth of TV-based specials on musical theatre, including Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original Cinderella, and Michael Kohl supplied rare tapes of songs not included on cast albums and shared with me his copy of a little-known set of interviews with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. But interviewed when, where, and by whom? Thanks to Linda Watson, a reference librarian at the San Francisco Public Library, the identity of the interviewer, Tony Thomas, and his radio station were located one late Saturday afternoon. After a fruitless search on my part, from institution to institution and across miles of New York Times microfilm, Ms. Watson located the information on her pc within five efficient minutes.
About the lyrics quoted in this book: The omission of verse by some of the giants should not be construed as a conscious slight on my part. The task of securing permissions to quote from song lyrics is one of the most daunting obstacle courses known to an author, and for practical and economic reasons, one finds himself forced to make selections contingent largely upon ease of access, cost per verse, red tape involved, degrees of manuscript review required, and the reliability of negotiations with the respective copyright holders. Perhaps one day a pioneering attorney will persuade the United States Congress to amend vaguely defined “fair use” statutes, so that authors can safely and freely quote a fixed number of lines or a set percentage of words per song lyric without fear, justly shared by publishers, of unnecessary and unfounded litigation.
At any rate, I am happy to say that in my quest for permissions, a few friendly voices came out from behind telephone answering machines to offer welcome cooperation: Hal David and Jim David, Tim Rice, David Robinson of the Really Useful Group in London, and Rosemarie Gawelko of Warner Bros. Publications in Miami.
James Schlader of Oakland, who has produced and directed a multitude of musicals for over thirty years—after a career acting and singing on Broadway in many of them—kindly examined the manuscript for basic factual accuracy. Choreographer Harriet Schlader, wife of James and another Broadway veteran, helpfully answered all my telephone calls. At Photofest, Howard Mandelbaum and Eric Spilker were a breeze to work with on the fine illustrations that grace these pages.
Finally, my excursions across microfilm through back issues of Variety were especially enjoyable, for occasionally I would come upon a notice penned by Abel Green, the late editor of Variety and the man to whom this book is affectionately dedicated. Mr. Green was the first to publish me in his pages (under my then-used full name, David Lewis Hammarstrom). Less than a year after my first Variety byline, Mr. Green passed away. An amiable soul whose voice I never heard, whose face I never saw and hand I never shook, to me Abel Green will always be a giant—like the giants of his era who nearly spilled blood, laboring around the clock sometimes, to get a new musical out of town in working order for opening night. To create the songs that would enchant young ears attuned to scratchy old radios as far away as Santa Rosa.
David Lewis
January 2002