Out of sleek new high fidelity sets in the chrome-plated 1950s blasted a big-band fanfare. Then came the swinging voice of authority crooning:
Night and day you are the one,
Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.
Whether near to me or far,
It’s no matter, darling, where you are,
I think of you night and day.Day and night why is it so
That this longing for you follows wherever I go?
In the roaring traffic’s boom,
In the silence of my lonely room,
I think of you night and day.
Frank Sinatra was reinventing a Cole Porter classic on his long-playing album A Swinging Affair, masterfully arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle. Sinatra’s sizzling journey through 15 numbers from the great American songbook featured many from stage shows: “Night and Day,” originally composed for Fred Astaire, was from Porter’s Gay Divorcée; two other Porter gems, “At Long Last Love” and “From This Moment On,” from two Porter flops, You Never Know and Out Of This World. “I Wish I Were in Love Again” hailed from Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms; “I Won’t Dance” from Kern’s Roberta, “I Got Plenty of Nothing” from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.
Typical for a singer of the day, Sinatra, who had grown up during the war years in that most melodic of musical theatre decades, turned show songs into Hit Parade favorites.
Through the golden age of musicals when composers regularly aimed a good portion of their work at radio markets, hundreds of songs destined for popularity would come from shows that lost money. Hummable tunes would always be easier for writers to produce than the scripts capable of joining them in narrative wedlock. This still-perplexing paradox goes back at least to the turn of the century when producers, with their eyes on the audience, assembled shows like candy merchants offering samplers. Script continuity was often nonexistent.
To illustrate: The contract for Ukulele Ike (Cliff Edwards) to appear in Jerome Kern’s 1925 hit Sunny stipulated that Edwards would perform his specialty act between 10 and 10:15 P.M., so the script had to be tailored to facilitate the eccentric agreement.1 Numerous composers were randomly engaged to provide song interpolations. That is how they, not offended in the least, made their living.
Things changed by the 1950s, when a composer who would not or could not function in both spheres—theatre scoring and popular music—was likely doomed to failure. No wonder the stage show eluded the grasp of more than a few talented pop songwriters, who lost their footing in the tricky zone where story and song must intersect with persuasive force. None seems to have been more vexed in his desire to master it than the prodigiously unsuccessful Vernon Duke, a superb melodist justly revered by many, and most famously remembered for “Autumn in New York.” That song came out of a 1934 disappointment, Thumbs Up, that went thumbs down quickly, even with the comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough in the cast. The words, written by Duke as well, are as eloquent as the melody itself, evoking so unapologetically the urban poetry of the huge metropolis.
Of the fourteen complete show scores that Vernon Duke composed, only three were attached to successful ventures. His known refusal to compromise personal standards for commercial considerations did not help. Only a precious few of Duke’s songs—among them “Taking a Chance on Love,” “Irresistible You,” and “April in Paris”—became standards. His only full score available for near-complete perusal is 1940’s Cabin in the Sky, full of generously endowed compositions from early soul to blues to swing, all given a fine boost by John Latouche’s splendid lyrics. And without the fine songs Duke wrote with lyric writer Ogden Nash for the 1955 off-Broadway fizzle The Littlest Revue, on which a number of other songwriters labored, the score would not have amounted to much at all.
Very little of Vernon Duke’s music, unfortunately, made it onto vinyl, so we are left to ponder the enthusiasms of his professional admirers, one being the late revue and record producer Ben Bagley, who called Duke flat-out the finest theatre composer ever,2 but whose “Revisited” album of some unknown Duke songs unintentionally conveys otherwise. Only a few of the numbers rise above the pleasantly mediocre to match the Bagley ballyhoo. The star discovery is surely “Words Without Music,” written with an Ira Gershwin lyric for Ziegfeld Follies of 1936.
Even then, a talent for reaching the Hit Parade was rarely enough. There were numerous songsmiths who also found musical theatre a journey fraught with heartache and failure. Blame it, as they usually did, on ill-conceived librettos hastily mashed together, sometimes to showcase a cache of undiscovered gems from some composer’s trunk.
Pop king Leroy Anderson struck out in his two attempts at stage fame. Wonderful Town was originally to have been composed by Anderson, with lyrics by Arnold Horwitt—until the composer ran into creative disharmony with the authors, one of them Joseph Fields (also the director), the other Jerome Chodorov. The assignment ended up on the piano of Leonard Bernstein, where trusted cohorts Comden and Green gathered to apply their amusing verse.
Anderson’s only Broadway outing to reach opening night, where it clung to the boards of the Lunt Fontanne Theatre like an unwanted house guest for five months, was the much anticipated Goldilocks. A leading drama critic, Walter Kerr, was one of its writers. On balance, Anderson composed, in the Anderson vein, a few very appealing numbers, on which, unfortunately, rode the amateurish words it took not one, not even two, but three writers to produce—John Ford, Walter and Jean Kerr. Notwithstanding the hackneyed verse, Anderson’s “Lazy Moon” was a toe-tapping charmer in the older Kern style. So were “Give the Little Lady” and “The Pussy Foot.” Anderson’s delightful tunes would never grace another Broadway stage. A pity.
Another popular songwriter not lucky on 42nd Street was lyric genius Johnny Mercer, whose finest work (“Laura,” “Skylark,” “Something’s Gotta Give” among countless treasures) was written for film or records. On stage projects, his talents tended to dissipate under the demands of narrative and character. His only Broadway success was Li’l Abner, written with composer Gene De Paul. He had earlier contributed both music and lyrics for the Phil Silvers 1951 almost-hit, Top Banana. With five raves on the marquee, it was a profit maker with a future—until Silvers took a much needed summer vacation and audiences decided to boycott his replacement, Jack Carter. Producers Paula Stone and Mike Sloan lost so much money while Silvers was out relaxing that they had to close down Banana before he could return.
Mercer courted anonymity with composer Robert Emmett Dolan on two varied offerings. The first, Texas Li’l Darling, was a work full of engaging songs not only forgotten but ignored by most tuner tomes. Perhaps it simply got lost in the late 1940s shuffle when shows like South Pacific were opening. According to Variety, which spotted strong commercial prospects out of town but which deemed the show on opening night not yet ready for Broadway, “deplorable” direction and production doomed an “amusing” book, “standout lyrics” and “several sure fire hit hummers”3—all greeted acrimoniously by six pans, one favorable notice and one no-opinion. And still, it lasted for 300 performances.
With the same obscure composer, Mercer embarked fourteen years later on another musical, Foxy, adapted loosely from Ben Johnson’s 1616 play Volpone and conceived as a vehicle for Bert Lahr, who quibbled endlessly with the writers over his constant improvisations. Despite moments of hilarity, promising reviews, and a Tony for the aging clown star, the Bert Lahr show depended too much on Lahr, whose popularity with the public by then was well on the wane. Producer David Merrick closed down after 72 underattended performances.
Mercer’s best work by far was with composer Harold Arlen. Their rich contributions to the 1946 box office yawner St. Louis Woman, a work fraught with book problems and a gloomy similarity to Porgy and Bess, included the aforequoted “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” as well as “Leavin’ Time,” “Riding on the Moon,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and, before it was dropped, the pensive “I Wonder What Became of Me,” later recorded by Lena Horne. In 1959, Mercer returned to Broadway with a fine set of tunes for Saratoga, a new musical plagued with too many settings, revengeful characters and leaden pacing, according to flop show coroner Ken Mandelbaum.4
For Johnny Mercer, the big Broadway hit remained forever out of reach. Once during an interview while praising shows like West Side Story and The King and I, he remarked, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, to come in with a show like that? But it’s tough as hell to come by one, I can tell you … so I’ll just keep looking.”5
Bright attractive tunes—even great scores—are no guarantee against inept materials or confusingly wrought stagings. Contained in the Vincent Youmans 1929 effort Great Day (dubbed “great delay” owing to prolonged out-of-town rewrites and personnel changes) are three of the composer’s finest creations, the title number, “More Than You Know” and “Without a Song.” All of which caused Alan Jay Lerner to lament, “No failure in the history of Broadway ever produced so many great songs.”6
One thing that Jamaica, another Harold Arlen musical with plenty to sing about, could not be accused of was stilted pacing or confusing locales. For this modestly profitable 1957 David Merrick contrivance, Arlen turned back to E.Y. Harburg, with whom he had worked in the past on Bloomer Girl and the film classic The Wizard of Oz. They devised an offering full of poetry, sensuality, and typical Harburg anti-consumerism satire. They may, in fact, have been headed up a better runway before Harry Belafonte, for whom the work was conceived, fell ill and withdrew. Drastic revisions were made to facilitate Belafonte’s replacement, Lena Horne—yes, that’s the kind of a show this was—against the grudging cooperation of two flabbergasted writers, co-librettists Harburg and Fred Saidy. Ms. Horne, three raves, a book that stayed out of Horne’s way and some strong musical payoffs kept Jamaica on the Imperial Theatre marquee for well into the next season. As they sometimes say, that’s entertainment.
What might have passed in earlier times—miscellaneous jokes, leggy high-kicking dames, interpolated songs—came upon increasingly less forgiving audiences and critics into the “golden age.” The “integrated book” came to represent the expected standard. Songwriters faced a more daunting task: how to make their material both textually relevant and commercially viable. Patrons came to demand logical plot development, and they also desired melodically accessible scores. Because a new Broadway musical typically landed a tune or two on radio music programs, the public subconsciously equated hit-producing scores with a hit show, even though such was not always the case.
During the ’50s and beyond, when a new musical opened in New York, a major incentive for show composers to fashion popular songs was the The Ed Sullivan Show, televised on Sunday evenings, which regularly showcased numbers from just-opened musicals. Sullivan, who offered tremendous coast-to-coast exposure and who favored songs of popular appeal, might invite a cast back to appear a second time. Thus was the entire nation continually confronted with Broadway entertainment. When members of the original cast of Frank Loesser’s serious folk opera The Most Happy Fella sang for Sullivan, the upbeat rendition of the atypically bright “Standing on the Corner” no doubt helped propel the number onto the radio airwaves and stimulate more ticket sales for the musical itself. Even Oscar Hammerstein proudly acknowledged trying to stay always in step with the times by monitoring Hit Parade trends of the day. He allowed them their necessary influence over his work.
Two of the shrewdest songwriters of 1950s musicals were Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, who bridged the growing chasm between stage and popular music with two back-to-back hits, Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. Both scores, especially the rousing Pajama Game, played well in both mediums. Three big Pajama Game originals—Rosemary Clooney’s number one hit single, “Hey, There,” “Steam Heat” and “Hernando’s Hideaway” (lasting for 117 weeks on the charts)—gave America plenty to sing about. From Yankees came “Whatever Lola Wants,” which Sarah Vaughan carried to the 12th position. Adler and Ross duplicated in spirit the wide-ranging appeal of Show Boat in its own day. Their accomplished partnership was tragically short-lived; Ross died of a bronchial ailment only six months after the premiere of Damn Yankees.
Not all writers with the same commercial instincts enjoyed success. Another score much in the winning Adler-Ross mold, Happy Hunting, with Ethel Merman behind it, did not bring similar fame and royalties to its neophyte composer, Harold Karr, moonlighting away from his day job as dentist, or lyricist Matt Dubey, day job unknown. Merman, who claimed to have “discovered”7 Karr and Dubey, did her cracking best at the Majestic Theatre to put over their zany send-up of the wedding of Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier. In the spoof, which was co-authored by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, a Philly matron barred from attending the Monaco nuptials sets out in spoilsport fashion to stage a rival wedding ceremony for her own daughter.
A majority of the critics were just as amused as Robert Coleman, who called the show “tuneful, sassy, and satiric … it’s a smasher, old bean, a smasher!”8 Not quite. At a respectable Merman-sustained run of 412 performances, still short of a profit, Happy Hunting did manage to send a pair of high-octane novelty numbers—”A New Fangled Tango” and “Mutual Admiration Society”—onto radio play lists for a spell. And the roof-raising anthem that Merman belted out upon first hitting the stage, “Gee, But It’s Good to Be Here!” was so effective that she would use it to open her touring concert act in later years.
Musical theatre is full of cruel contradictions. Rarely in the modern era would the presence of a popular song in a show spell the difference between profit or loss. Consider, Exhibit Number One, that West Side Story—probably the most dynamic and exciting Broadway score ever composed—did not generate a single song that reached into top 100 territory. Not, in fact, until the movie version came out did the score find a tiny opening into popular favor, when Roger Williams’s version of “Maria” squeaked through to the number 48 slot on the Billboard charts. Consider, also, Exhibit Number Two: Both Pipe Dream and Me and Juliet, neither show considered by any means a Rodgers and Hammerstein success, produced hit and near-hit tunes.
Composers on occasion have to cut pop-oriented numbers when they glaringly fail to fit in anywhere. Deadbeat look-at-me songs can actually hinder the action and frustrate audience patience. Then there are, rarely, the irrelevant songs with obvious commercial appeal that pull audiences into mediocre shows. Experts speculate that Harold Rome’s thoroughly mediocre Wish You Were Here achieved its unexpected solvency by having a wonderful title song that captured the hearts of radio listeners everywhere (as well as by offering, built into the set, a real swimming pool complete with water). Rome redeemed an otherwise abysmal score by the several fine numbers that end it, from the joyful “Summer Afternoon” to the oh-so-elevating “Wish You Were Here.” Better to save the best for last. By then, however, the critics were not the least fooled, and most of them registered disfavor. Wish You Were Here has not been heard from since.
How good does the score have to be? Not very, although rarely does a successful show come with the persistently lackluster songs of a Once Upon a Mattress. Conversely, many good to outstanding scores have gone down in utter ruin under the hulk of troubled librettos or fatally unlucky productions—or politics. Flahooley, a 1951 flop obscure to all but the most fastidious cast album collectors, is an utterly charming songfest, created under crisp inspiration by Sammy Fain and E. Y. Harburg. Their high-flying choruses put to shame many pedestrian scores that have enjoyed long life on the stage by virtue of the crowd-pleasing shows they were lucky to serve.
The Harburg satire, written in collaboration with Fred Saidy, poked hilarious fun at senseless merchandising. Some felt Flahooley to be dangerously subversive for the times, rubbing uneasily up against virtuous 1950s patriotism and a booming consumer-driven economy. In the post-mortem analysis of Ken Mandelbaum, Harburg got accused of anti–Americanism. The self-assured socialist evidently could not break the habit. Critic John Chapman loved what he saw and heard—“tuneful, extraordinary, beautiful and definitely imaginative.” Mr. Atkinson did not, dubbing its plot “one of the most complicated, verbose and humorless of the season.”9 Fine score plus unwanted politics equaled gloomy reviews and 40 performances.
Now, of countless so-so scores attached to money-making properties, surely the cobbled together patchwork for Peter Pan must head the list. Irritatingly disjointed at the seams and with a slightly stale air of exuberant blandness, it resurfaces on the touring circuit more frequently than NASA can land photo equipment on distant planets. And for all its allusion to human flight, Peter Pan feels remarkably stagebound. Credit the show’s original producer, Los Angeles Civic Light Opera impresario Edwin Lester, who in the beginning sensed a deficiency in the original numbers provided by Moose Charlap and Carolyn Lee, dumped about half of them and called in Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green to provide better replacement parts. That they did, though not without a resulting schism in styles. The manufactured result is decently workable.
Jule Styne, who composed most of the best numbers for Peter Pan (among them “Never Land,” “Wendy,” “Ugg-A-Wugg,” “Hook’s Waltz”) demonstrated then, as he ordinarily did during the course of his checkered career, the knack for moving things along. The last of the older-era pop composers to stay productively engaged on Broadway stages well after his peers had faded from the scene, Styne’s prolific career predated Sinatra’s and lasted nearly as long. He came into the theatre during the ’40s from popular music, which is a big reason why he enjoyed his fair share of success as opposed to the fate that befell the Vernon Dukes of the world. It helps to have the beat of the public in your heart. London born, Styne grew up in Chicago, on the south side. He organized a swing band, and in 1926 he composed his first hit, “Sunday,” to a lyric by Ned Miller. Eight years later, he transferred to New York City, where he worked as a vocal coach. In 1938, just when Frank Sinatra was getting noticed, Styne went out west to Tinseltown to be a vocal coach for Fox Pictures at $900.00 a week. Shirley Temple was one of his charges.
What Styne really longed to do was compose, so he took a drastic pay cut—down to $165.00—for the opportunity to write cowboy songs at Republic Pictures for Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and their respective horses. In 1941, Styne set a Frank Loesser lyric to music and had another hit, “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You, Baby.” That same year, he sold a tune to Ice Capades.
Styne teamed up with Sammy Cahn to compose a string of hits for the radio and movies. They answered the call of Broadway in 1944, creating words and music for Glad to See You, a sentiment not mutually shared by audiences in Philadelphia, where it closed. Three years later, however, the same team set the cash registers a-jingle with High Button Shoes, half of whose songs, even with insipid words, are mighty good, indeed. Styne got hooked on stage shows, said goodbye to Hollywood prosperity, and America is the luckier for it. Cahn returned to Southern California to work in film, and again we are the luckier. Styne’s next tuner, another big hit, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, had much better words by veteran Leo Robin.
Jule Styne ended up a lifelong slave to musical theatre, where his keen talents often were compromised in the service of practical, sometimes hastily assembled properties. He is most famously known for his and Stephen Sondheim’s masterwork, Gypsy; for Bells Are Ringing, a collaboration with Comden and Green; and, finally, for Funny Girl, which he wrote with Bob Merrill. At various times in between, he would dash off tunes for the movies; his lushly romantic “Three Coins in a Fountain” is arguably the finest melody he ever turned out.
Of twenty shows composed completely by Styne, seven of them were money makers and an impressive number of the rest enjoyed respectable though profitless runs. Although he had only two hits with Comden and Green—Bells and an earlier effort, Two on the Aisle—yet Styne went back to Betty and Adolph time and time again, and the results were naggingly uneven at best. There was one notable exception in the money-losing Hallelujah, Baby! their stylish and sensual black musical which surveyed a sixty-year period of race relations between whites and blacks and which starred Leslie Uggams instead of Lena Horne as originally planned. With a book by Arthur Laurents that some of the critics found trite and liberally condescending, the show received wildly mixed notices, but won Tonys for Styne, Comden and Green. It held on for nearly three hundred performances at the Martin Beck Theatre.
The Styne, Comden and Green musicals can sound carelessly created, as if motivated only by firm revenue-generating deadlines. Do Re Mi, which logged an impressive though profitless 400 performance run, was one of their best efforts after Bells Are Ringing. It too suffers, though, from glaring inconsistencies. The same score that gave us “Make Someone Happy” also gave us too many substandard moments, like the wordy and vacuous “Adventure,” or the sprawling “All of My Life,” a potentially moving soliloquy that fritters away its impact on extraneous wordiness. Fade Out, Fade In begins with such promise—”Oh, Those Thirties,” “It’s Good to Be Back Home,” and the uproariously funny “Fear”—and then goes down hill with second rate numbers. Say, Darling doesn’t say nearly enough beyond the superficial recreation of a few square dance and big band numbers. The peculiar billing which gave the three collaborators credit for both music and lyrics suggested that they wished to avoid taking credit for specific violations of craft.
During the same period, Styne had better luck at the box office working with Bob Merrill, whose Funny Girl lyrics inspired some of his best music, even if it all seemed so pervasively sad—true to the story of Fanny Brice and her depressing short-lived affairs. Walter Kerr wrote that “inspiration wanes, and craft must make do in its place.”10 That craft gave the world one of the most honest love songs ever written, “People.” And it gave the Winter Garden theatre a three-year hit. Barbara Streisand, who starred, repeated her role in the 1968 film version.
Following his muse to the last dying day, Styne composed a full nine more musicals after Funny Girl. Included during this drive was the composer’s first and only opus with lyric great E.Y. Harburg, the 32-performance blowout Darling of the Day, a work, in its opening segments, of unexpected charm and grace in the My Fair Lady mode—if only Styne and Harburg could have sustained themselves beyond the first seven ingratiating numbers. Of Styne’s eight other shows, only one of them, another collaboration with Bob Merrill called Sugar, made money. And then came a domino succession of near hits and, in the end, all-out folds. Red Shoes, composed when he was nearly ninety, marked Mr. Styne’s final Broadway show. Less than a year following its disastrous opening, Styne died in New York City, on September 20, 1994.
One year before Red Shoes premiered, Frank Sinatra went back into the recording studio for the first time in a decade to lay down the tracks for his parts on Duets. Sinatra invited a number of contemporary singers to join him. Through advanced studio technology and dubbing techniques, Barbara Streisand, Luther Vandross, Carly Simon, Anita Baker, and others of the platinum class were invited to record their tracks separately. The tracks were meticulously merged, and the world heard Sinatra singing “The Lady Is a Tramp” with Vandross, “Come Rain or Come Shine” with Gloria Estefan, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” with Natalie Cole, and so on. Within weeks of its release as a CD, Duets sold one million copies, and soon it topped the Billboard charts.
While Jule Styne’s Red Shoes could only offer the world the sadly diminished talents of a once fine pop-turned-show composer, Frank Sinatra’s Duets offered that same world the songs of a bygone era in musical theatre when all America sang the tunes of Times Square. Most of Duets’ songs had been around for over thirty years, and a new generation would now experience them, thanks to Sinatra’s ingenious marketing. The surprising success of Duets was followed, one year later, by Duets II. Came more excellent tunes, in 1994, from the Broadway canon of yesteryear. Sinatra and Chrissie Hynde sang “Luck Be a Lady.” Patti LaBelle lent her voice to “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” Sonny Bono to “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” Jimmy Buffett to “Mack the Knife.” While Frank sang “My Funny Valentine,” Lorrie Morgan sang in counter melody, “How Do You Keep the Music Going,” a fitting tribute to a singer who had spent most of his life finding ways to keep classic show tunes alive in the popular imagination.
In the end, Sinatra’s Broadway may have passed into history. Not so its music. Not the lingering magic that the Voice still seemed able to mine from the songs of Arlen and Duke and Rodgers and Hart. A good song will nearly sell itself. And so, at the age of nearly 80, Frank Sinatra was still Number One, Top of the Heap, King of the Hill, when he sang …
Night and day under the hide of me
There’s an oh, such a hungry yearning
Burning inside of me.
And it’s torment won’t be through
’Til you let me spend my life making love to you,
Day and night,
Night and day.