Tired old Ozzie and Harriet cracks aside, not all 1950s musicals were reality-deficient Rodgers and Hammerstein sound-alikes. Consider, for example, Leonard Sillman’s sophisticated revue which John Murray Anderson directed, New Faces of ’52. In Variety’s estimation, “brilliantly conceived,” the material “skillfully edited,”1 the show surveyed the gamut of love from adolescent infatuation to clumsy adult infidelities.
Comedienne Alice Ghostley confessed in “Boston Beguine” of having fallen for the wrong guy, now variously suspected of expedient behavior including petty theft but, worst of all, falling asleep between the sheets. Virginia de Luce played a businessman’s mistress with smug ennui, confessing that for him she was a tax write-off. June Carroll, delivering with wistful regret Murray Grand and Elisse Boyd’s stinging “Guess Who I Saw Today,” recounted for her husband having observed two happy lovers while dining out that afternoon—one of them being him.
French charmer Robert Clary played, one moment, a school boy pining over his teacher, Miss Logan; the next, in “It’s Raining Memories,” a grown up wallowing in self-pity over another failed affair. World traveled sex kitten Eartha Kitt yawned her way through “Monotonous.” Ronny Graham sang “Take Off That Mask!” to Alice Ghostley at a masquerade—until the wish was granted, at which moment the repulsed Graham reversed course, exhorting Miss Ghostley to put that mask back on. Even the initially lyrical “Love Is a Simple Thing” got turned on its romantic head when sung “through the eyes” of a Charles Adams character.
Contrary to legions of apologists, the 1950s were rife with enlightened culture—think Tennessee Williams in theatre, Leonard Bernstein’s young people’s concerts on TV. Nevertheless, Broadway remained mostly in step with the Eisenhower era, making certain that the image of heterosexual happiness occupied center stage in virtually every musical. If not everyone truly believed that love was just somewhere around the corner or up over the crest of a purple hill, most theatergoers still appreciated being moved by the notion.
New Faces of ’52: Robert Clary (left), Eartha Kitt and Paul Lynde.
While this aesthetic satisfied mainstream audiences, it dogged more potentially realistic shows, forcing artistic compromises that proved fatal. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Pipe Dream is a perfect example, with its sad little quasi-prostitute—if that’s what Suzy really was—appearing to find good wholesome love ironically in the arms of a bohemian self-taught marine biologist who toils outside academia, preferring the company of uncouth bums and cannery workers. Victor Young and Stella Unger achieved much the same feel of romantic redemption through their melodically fertile Seventh Heaven. It is about a street walker, Diane, who becomes involved with Chino, receiving from him a promise of marriage that must be postponed by his going off to fight a war. Years later, Chico, now blinded, returns and the two are happily reconciled. The infectiously warm score, so typical of 1950s tuners, contains as buoyantly wonderful a song as you are likely ever to hear in a theatre, “Sun At My Window, Love At My Door.” It is full of Mary Martin and Dick and Oscar.
Patrons paid good money to be so inspired, and resented it when inspiration waned. Between the cheerful numbers in Seventh Heaven, there were others not so uplifting, and the show expired after only five weeks in 1955 at the ANTA Theatre. Its watered-down portrait of prostitution failed to impressed the critics. Reported Walter Kerr, “The one thing that Seventh Heaven had all the years in memory, anyway—is a fond, schmaltzy innocence, an honest and wistful and appealing grade of corn. This is the quality that librettists Victor Young and Stella Unger have apparently been afraid of, and they have pared it away to make room for a commodity often referred to as ‘sex.’ For all its determination to seem new-hat and reasonably red hot, Seventh Heaven does not really capture the sort of sizzle that has been known to drive good family men to fatal distraction.”2
Selling so ambiguous a vision was near-impossible in the fifties. Most Americans felt far more corny than callous towards life and love, still basking in the euphoric post–World War II days of wine and barbecue gratitude. Leonard Sillman navigated the tricky terrain with limited success. Of the only two editions of New Faces which he could raise the money to produce during the 1950s, the ’52 opus turned a respectably modest profit on a 365 performance run. Sillman’s 1956 bash, not nearly as well received—plenty enjoyable to experience from a record player—lasted only six months though it supplied basically the same smart blend of exemplary behavior and mischief.
Romance in the key of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and how to sell it—or, how to sell the getting around it? Guys and Dolls in development started out on a lovely note, something in the vein of what Dick and Oscar might have plotted. After eleven writers came up with unsatisfactory individual librettos, producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin engaged radio and TV comedy writer Abe Burrows to supply something aimed more for laughs that would fit the songs already composed by Frank Loesser.
In truth, American musical theatre had rarely been a purveyor of high moral values. During the ’50s, however, the McCarthy Senate hearings turned the American landscape into a place of fearful conformity and outwardly virtuous conduct—another reason for song and dance shows to soft-pedal controversial subject matter and lower their final curtains on morally uplifting outcomes. One can only speculate to what extent Oscar Hammerstein’s tepid approach to adapting John Steinbeck’s raffish cannery row novel into Pipe Dream may have been driven by his own fear of being summoned to Washington to testify about possible ties to un–American activities.
Miss Adelaide (Vivian Blaine) and Nathan Detroit (Sam Levene) in a scene from Guys and Dolls.
Unlike the more daring work turned out by Rodgers and Hammerstein, the collaborations of their leading colleagues in sentiment, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick (“Fritz”) Loewe, altogether avoided dealing with contemporary stateside topics. Lerner & Loewe set their musicals in historically or geographically distant locales or exotically imagined places. About the closest they came to passing any comment on the American experience were the brief New York scenes in their fantasy classic, Brigadoon—put there to dramatize, in comparison to a quaint Scottish village, just how numbingly superficial a corporate-driven society can become. By the show’s end, American tourist Tommy Albright renounces the business world and returns to Brigadoon, there to claim his true love and to enjoy everlasting marital happiness in the surreal sleepless void of a village that wakes up for only one day every one hundred years.
Frederick Loewe and Alan J. Lerner.
On their way to Brigadoon’s lucky opening night in 1947 at the Ziegfeld Theatre, Lerner and Loewe had already written two shows together, neither of which clicked: What’s Up, a 1943 wartime musical directed by George Balanchine, and the promising The Day Before Spring, a 1948 venture that did not survive split notices. After Brigadoon, they returned to Broadway with another troubled original, Paint Your Wagon, which lasted nine months, was eventually made into a troubled movie and left behind some wonderful songs that captured vividly the drama and color of the Gold Rush days in which the story was set. “I Talk to the Trees,” a soft Latin-intoned beguine, foreshadowed how flexible Lerner and Loewe would be in dealing with a wide array of times and places.
Nonetheless, Paint Your Wagon struck most of the reviewers as leaden and humorless, a slight that seems to have instigated in Mr. Lerner a rapid transformation into one of the theatre’s most witty lyricists. His and Mr. Lowe’s next undertaking and the team’s second show to earn unanimous raves, My Fair Lady, was about as perfectly wrought a musical as ever there was. “It does not bully us with noise,” remarked Kenneth Tynan. “The tone throughout is intimate, light and lyrical…. The authors have trusted Shaw, and we, accordingly, trust them.”3 The show’s comedy entries are brilliantly steeped in the idiosyncracies of the characters. In “A Hymn to Him,” for example, Henry Higgins shares his exasperation about women with his friend, Col. Pickering, wishing that they could behave more like his amiable male friends—who, he assumes, would never throw a fit were he to take out another man. Yet the show does not lack for romance: The joyous “On the Street Where You Live,” which got radio airplay galore and helped advertise Lady’s superior score, was atypically lush among otherwise sardonic songs.
At the center of this very offbeat musical was the cantankerous relationship between Henry Higgins, a jaded linguist, and Eliza Doolittle, a common flower girl hauled out of the gutter by Higgins on a dare to make her a proper-speaking English lady. Along the gilded way, the rumblings of a growing platonic attachment between the two feed the narrative with chemistry and conflict. “I’ve grown accustomed to her face,” Henry Higgins acknowledges to himself in the end, shortly before mustering up the humility and courage to invite Eliza Doolittle to stay on. She accepts, and, true to the fifties (though not to the ending of George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion, upon which the musical is based), romance at least shines promisingly ahead by last curtain.
What, might we ponder, could Lerner and Loewe have ever done to equal or surpass My Fair Lady? Give Mr. Lerner credit for trying. And trying. And trying. He threw himself into T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, a novel full of romance and intrigue and loftily fought principles of honor in times of war. And in his overly fervent adaptation called Camelot, Mr Lerner managed to render it as piously solemn as a Lutheran church service. On higher ground, it came with heavily melodic ballads and some very funny songs. Trapped in a libretto overloaded with Mr. Lerner’s heart-entrenched yearnings, the songs come piercing through like imprisoned birds gasping, upon release, for fresh air. Still, Camelot had two big things in its favor: 1950s audiences and the names Lerner and Loewe.
Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
Other composers and writers, as well, took their cues from the Rodgers and Hammerstein–Lerner and Loewe syndrome. Tunesmith Albert Hague realized his longest-running success in 1955 at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, when he, in concert with lyricist Arnold B. Horwitt and book writers Joseph Stein and Will Glickman, delivered up the lovely, entrancing Plain and Fancy. With Barbara Cook in the cast—a big reason the reviews were so sunny—the musical bore a spiritual similarity to Brigadoon in the way it thrust two jaded New Yorkers into a far off world—in this instance, to Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, land of the Amish. Though now considered hopelessly dated for revival prospects, Plain and Fancy offered gracefully crafted songs, including a radio favorite, “Young and Foolish.”
Harold Rome’s weakest score was fashioned for his most romantic book show and his biggest box office success, Fanny. Not without a few tuneful highlights, it is nevertheless largely mediocre, on the stuffy side and a distant cry from the lilting charm of Rome’s Call Me Mister or the blitzing brilliance of his later work, Destry Rides Again. Accepting the Fanny assignment, Rome did the show that David Merrick, producing the first of some 27 musicals that he would bring to the stage, had originally wanted Dick and Oscar to do. And had Dick and Oscar said “yes,” maybe the result would have had more bounce. Maybe the reviews would not have been so dismally mixed. “Sad to report,” reported John McClain, “Fanny is a serious disappointment…. It is big and beautiful, but it is also hollow.”4
Frank Loesser also turned to matters of the heart in his operatically expansive Most Happy Fella, a dramatic departure for the composer of such lighthearted comedies as Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Remarkably rich in atmosphere, the Fella score contained thirty separate numbers, and from it just one pop hit, “Standing on the Corner,” emerged. The older man–younger woman tale marked a turn off the beaten path for Loesser. Into the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein he went, and the lyrical if slightly stilted result, while a moderate success, did not capture the same large crowds of Loesser’s better attended works. Wrote Brooks Atkinson, “Mr. Loesser has caught the anguish and the love in some exalting music. Broadway is used to the heart. It is not accustomed to evocations of the soul.” Walter Kerr sensed a degree of contrivance, finding the musical “heavy with its own inventiveness.”5
Meredith Willson made it aboard the Rodgers and Hammerstein bandwagon with his rousing The Music Man, an ode to small-town life in middle America. And also in the upbeat category, Sandy Wilson’s triumphantly melodic The Boy Friend, reminiscent in its buoyancy to Kern’s Very Good Eddie and the first successful West End import since the 1920s, stayed around long enough to turn a perky profit in 1954, and to remind Yankee audiences that the British could still stir up a corking good evening’s fun. The reviewers loved it, and when The Boy Friend was revived two years later off–Broadway where it more naturally belonged, it racked up a run nearly twice the length of its original stay.
Not by historical accident did The Boy Friend outlast The Most Happy Fella at the box office. In a musical show, levity was easier to sell than pathos. She Loves Me, the widely revered Bock and Harnick classic that has enjoyed post–Broadway life in regional and community playhouses around the country, did not succeed when first it tried, nor did it when it tried and tried and tried again. She Loves Me offers an intimate love story set in a cosmetics shop and a generously endowed score. Why have mainstream crowds never responded in force? “Too romantic,” according to Steven Suskin, “too good for the average man.”6 Walter Kerr, there on opening night in 1963 at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, complained of plotting top-heavy in exposition and of a libretto too narrowly focused. And on larger stages, this rich little confection has been observed to get lost and wither away—like a quartet of puppeteers thrown to the mercy of a huge concert hall without amplification.
Another contributor to fifties lore was composer-lyricist Bob Merrill. On Sunday night radio broadcasts of original cast albums, his shows usually came off sounding almost passive in their artificial straining to achieve just the right degree of sentimentality. New Girl in Town, with the best score of the lot; Take Me Along, a Jackie Gleason vehicle based on Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness; and Carnival all enjoyed decent investor-pleasing runs and drew generally respectable write-ups. Revivable? Carnival has been heard from now and then in the hinterlands. On Broadway, Take Me Along made a pitiful comeback attempt in 1985, failing to take anyone beyond a one-night ride. David Merrick, who produced both Take Me Along and Carnival, did not manifest in his choice of shows any particular edge or passion beyond a preference for slick, fail-safe work. Brooks Atkinson, who reviewed the opening of Take Me Along in 1958, wrote, “The music blares, the dancers prance, and Broadway goes through its regular routine—substituting energy for gaiety. Everything is in motion, but nothing moves inside the libretto.”7
Merrill did better when he concentrated on writing the lyrics to Jule Styne’s music for Funny Girl and Sugar. Once back on his own, however, supplying both words and music, Merrill endured a trio of failures, from the closed-during-previews disaster Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Henry, Sweet Henry and The Prince of Grand Street, not so grand on a Philadelphia street at the Forrest Theatre, beyond which it failed to advance.
Writing book shows about love was not a simple thing. Not for composer Arthur Schwartz, who found no success at all in the sentimental 1950s or any time thereafter. Working with lyricist Dorothy Fields, Schwartz worked his way through two romantic disappointments, the highly distinguished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which Mr. Atkinson predicted would enjoy “a long and affectionate career”8 at the Alvin Theatre and didn’t; and its successor, By the Beautiful Sea, another undertaking with Dorothy Fields who, this time out, did not support one of the theatre’s finest tunesmiths with deserving lyrics.
In 1961, Schwartz next turned to a promising reunion with his original partner, Howard Dietz. The Gay Life, their third book show, amounted to a barely passable, fairly tuneless affair, hailed by the critics yet off the boards within fourteen weeks. A second comeback attempt by the same team, two years later at the Majestic, was the rambling and disjointed Jennie, not so charitably received. The show starred Mary Martin, who portrayed an actress with her husband touring in melodramas. The fractured story, besides offering up a romantic triangle involving a playwright, also allowed Miss Martin to sing upside down while tied to a torture wheel, and to hang from a tree while struggling heroically to rescue her infant from the falls of a mountainside, all the while being pursued by a bear and a sinister man named Chang Lu. From this bundle of miscellaneous adventures, nothing other than the star was well received. “The songs can sing about the sun and the stars as much as they wish without really making a dent in the overcast,” wrote Walter Kerr, summing up impatiently. “Miss Martin forever, but not as Jennie.”9 The actress was out of work within a few miserable months, and Boston critic Kevin Kelly’s comments that the songs sounded derivative of Rodgers and Hammerstein and others resulted in Kelly’s being sued by Schwartz and Dietz.10
Brighter, glibber fare had lit up stages in the twenties and thirties, and many writers who tried matching the magic of Rodgers and Hammerstein during the golden era were either better suited to musical comedy or too simple-minded in their earnest imitations. Frank Loesser tried his hand at another serious work with the exceedingly pleasant Greenwillow, a vaguely wistful hybrid of infinite good will and down-home love that nearly drowned in its own artificial tears. The songs were poetically affecting; there were just too many of them, and so they became cloying. A bigger problem seems to have been the story—that is, if there actually was one. Frank Aston was dumbfounded to observe, “Frank Loesser’s musical can’t make up its mind what it is.” Walter Kerr had an idea, he thought: “Do it yourself folklore…. Greenwillow is nowhere … spun right out of somebody’s head instead of out of somebody’s past.”11 From Kenneth Tynan: “After Rodgers and Hammerstein’s nuns, we now have Frank Loesser’s curates…. He has reached the end of the line, and we must all wish him a rapid recovery, followed by a speedy return to the asphalt jungle.”12 Corpse inspector general Ken Mandelbaum, surveying the 95-performance derailment and noting the ironic praise showered on it by none other than Brooks Atkinson, termed Loesser’s curiously abstract creation “too quaint and precious for its own good.”13 The score, though not without a few rays of melodic redemption, certainly supports Mandelbaum’s assessment.
Lofty ideals alone will not a musical make. Meredith Willson tried adapting the movie Miracle on Thirty Fourth Street for the stage. He called his labor Here’s Love, and for it he composed several quite charming numbers. Willson’s sunny valentine to Santa Claus struck Harold Taubman as “machine tooled,” while Richard Watts, Jr., conceded, “It would be virtually un American to suggest that the sweetness and light tended to become a little oppressive. The danger of the cheery Here’s Love is that its concentration on benevolence could bring out the beast in you.”14 Willson’s good-will-towards-men showmanship elicited raves from four of the reviewers, and the show lasted nearly long enough to please its benevolent backers. Santa Claus is better left to sing inside chimney tops one night per year.
Next—and maybe last of all—to follow the path of Rodgers and Hammerstein were Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones. While students at the University of Texas, they began working on a musical that would end up being performed in dozens of countries around the world (through a staggering ten thousand productions). It opened at the off–Broadway Sullivan Street Playhouse, on May 3, 1960, and closed nearly 42 years later, on January 13, 2002. It is, of course, The Fantasticks, which fledgling producer Lore Note saw in an early version at a summer program at Barnard College in New York and, following more revisions which he requested, took to New York. It tells a heartfelt little tale of a boy and a girl who fall in and out of love through infatuation, hardship, disillusionment, and (perhaps above all) the meddling of their fathers—and end up together. The show’s enduring standard, “Try to Remember,” helped sustain it in the early years—so say those in the know. So did another hit, “Soon It’s Gonna Rain.”
And soon it would rain on Schmidt and Jones,who enjoyed commercial success over a brief three-show, six-year span, with each effort bringing down the curtain on a happily-ever-after stage picture. After The Fantasticks, they wrote the powerful 110 in the Shade, based on the play The Rainmaker, about a woman who fears encroaching spinsterhood and finally finds love; and I Do! I Do!, the Mary Martin and Robert Preston tour-de-force about married life, filled with thoughtful verse and entrancing tunes. Thereafter, Schmidt and Jones wandered without any luck through a daunting series of troubled ventures, writing and rewriting for regional stages. Celebration is their most notable failure, for the exhilarating score is deftly carved out of modern jazz phrasing. As for its reportedly smug libretto about the young and beautiful prevailing over old age and corruption, Richard Watts, Jr., dubbed it “one of those pseudo morality plays.”15 In search of invention and release from the tried and the true, Schmidt and Jones lost their romantic compass.
As the 1950s faded away, so too did the dominance of the romantic musical. Ironically, the form’s most successful proponents helped spell its doom. By the time they opened their last show, The Sound of Music, Rodgers and Hammerstein were facing yet another team of imitators who could only mimic their optimistic side: Rodgers and Hammerstein. Remember that Dick and Oscar had in better days shaded their sunny stories with characters and situations not so idealized—with loneliness and suicide, with sexual opportunism and death and imperial allusions to misogyny. Walter Kerr grew uneasy opening night on the Swiss Alps when confronted with a gaggle of giggling moppets and nuns. “Before The Sound of Music is halfway thorough its promising chores it becomes not only two sweet for words but almost too sweet for music…. The cascade of sugar is not confined to the youngsters. Miss Martin, too, must fall to her knees and fold her hands in prayer, while the breezes blow the kiddies through the windows…. the people on stage have all melted long before our hearts do.”16
Over to Lerner and Loewe: Their long-winded Camelot, which began cranking forth its knights-of-the-round-table platitudes only one year after the lonely goatherd hit town, fooled few of the critics but did deliver an attractive score and plenty of spectacle. President John F. Kennedy was said to have loved the title song, resulting, it was also said, in box office salvation. Variety called Camelot “beautiful and not very bright,” finding the score “excellent” but the “heavy, humorless book … overlong to the point of tedium.”17 Observed Howard Taubman, “Camelot is weighed down by the burden of its book…. It shifts uneasily between light-hearted fancy and uninflected reality.”18
Cupid’s eternal warrior, Alan Jay Lerner, returned five years hence with an even more improbable audience assignment, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, about a psychiatrist hypnotizing a patient and falling in love with the person she reveals herself to have been in a previous life. Fritz Loewe, by then a heart-attack survivor, was not with Lerner on this one, having opted for rest and leisure under a Palm Springs umbrella. Instead, Burton Lane had accepted the call to compose the songs following an aborted attempt by Richard Rodgers to do the same with the infuriatingly unreliable Lerner—who carried on like a heterosexual version of the late Larry Hart. The show’s absolutely brilliant score, judged by Rodgers “one of the finest either man has ever turned out,”19 could not withstand a chilly critical reception aimed at the libretto, “frail and rickety … loses itself in a fog of metaphysics,” according to Howard Taubman.20
The nail-biting, jet setting, drug-dependant, compulsive serial husband Alan Jay Lerner would spend the rest of his frenetic existence without Loewe, flitting from one hopeless new venture to the next. Except for the justly panned Coco, which Katharine Hepburn single-handedly saved from red ink, all managed to lose bundles of money for their respective investors. By the time his heather on the hill was as brown as old scrapbook photos, Lerner had gone through a total of eight different composers—and that many wives. In 1969, when the United States first landed a man on the moon, Lerner landed Coco on Broadway with a near non-score by sometime composer Andre Previn. Lolita, My Love, an out-of-town floporama composed by John Barry, is intriguingly described by Lerner’s biographer, Edward Jablonski, to have offered “rhythmic, melodic, declaratory, versatile” songs, the score overall being “integrated with a vengeance.”21
That was 1971. Five years later, to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial anniversary, Lerner teamed up with Leonard Bernstein to write 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It lasted seven fitful evenings at the National Theatre following an avalanche of total disdain by the reviewers. Carmelina, an admirable venture with Burton Lane music, lasted all of 17 performances. Three years later, Lerner had his final night on Broadway with Dance a Little Closer. This play about disarmament, with music by Charles Strouse—according to Jablonski “just the sort of musical [Lerner] and Loewe had disdained in their romantic golden years”22—disarmed the next morning. While at work adapting, with composer Gerard Kenny, the classic screwball comedy film My Man Gregory, Alan Jay Lerner, one of the greatest theatre lyricists of all time, died at 67. One of his last songs for the unproduced last project was titled “Garbage Isn’t What It Used to Be.”
Neither was love. At the end of the age of the romantic musical, another of its youthful practitioners, Jerry Herman, with the two big hits Hello, Dolly! and Mame, to his name, struck out with Dear World. Finally, Herman’s penchant for feel-good show songs fell into the wrong neighborhood, prompting an increasingly impatient Clive Barnes to complain, “Looking at all three of Herman’s scores, I am beginning to harbor the suspicion that he has only written one musical—and it’s getting worse.”23 The first of three consecutive Herman flops, World’s engaging score danced obliviously around the serious issues; too much Jerry Herman again got in the way of the story.
While the final offerings by both Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe may have helped hasten the decline of sentimentalized treatments, a new generation of songwriters had already set into motion the incorporation of socially controversial behavior in the main characters. Leading the parade were Fred Ebb and John Kander, who brought their sexually ambivalent Cabaret, set in a risque Berlin night club of pre–Nazi Germany, to the Broadhurst Theatre at the opportune moment during the turbulent express-yourself 1960s. It was not timidly gift-wrapped in sanitized show songs like Pipe Dream or Seventh Heaven. The reviews were largely upbeat, and the Tony Awards it reaped en masse (including for Best Musical and Best Score) were well deserved.
And what for an encore? Kander and Ebb tried their hands at a more romantic work, The Happy Time, and they failed, especially with the critics. Martin Gottfried called the vibrant songs “old fashioned,” the libretto “instantly forgettable.” Richard Watts, Jr., termed it “a struggle between a brilliant production and a mediocre book,” while other scribes complained of hyperactive set-heavy direction by Gower Champion.24 With the mighty Merrick behind it all, The Happy Time jumped over a land mine of nasty notices and held on for an unhappy run of 286 performances.
When did cockeyed optimism exit the world of song and dance? Advance to the late year of 1979, to a time when two remaining giants, Richard Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner, both opened shows in New York, both to critical drubbing. Lerner’s Carmelina, with music by Burton Lane, has a commendably first-rate score. Clive Barnes liked what he heard, then went on to ask, “So what is wrong? Everything is according to formula…. It is just too old fashioned.”25
I Remember Mama, another older fashioned workhorse, contained a handful of effective new Richard Rodgers melodies, and it was similarly burdened by its own musty allegiance to a worn-out template. In Walter Kerr’s opinion, it bore “a dullness that can’t be shooed away.”26 It was the dullness of a form recycled one too many times. By then, the voices of social discontent had infiltrated the American musical theatre, and they had caused a shift in subject matter away from the abiding control of conventional Judeo-Christian mores. Away from the boy next door, once assumed to be naturally interested in the girl next door.
And by then, too, a radical change in the very sound of popular music had thrown the older order into even deeper disarray, redefining, as it inevitably would, the compositional tone and thrust of songs comprising a score deemed by commercial producers most likely to succeed on younger ears.
Love was no longer a simple thing.