The passing of Jerome Kern in 1945 was mourned by the entire nation. The composer of Show Boat, Kern was only 60 years old when he died, leaving behind a towering canon of popular songs from both film and stage scores with which virtually every American citizen identified.
A special afternoon bicoastal radio tribute to Kern’s passing brought to the microphones a number of nationally known singers, including Dinah Shore, Jack Smith, Patrice Munsel and Nelson Eddy. The presence in particular of teen idol Frank Sinatra reflected the timeless appeal of so many wonderful Jerome Kern standards, many of which Sinatra had grown famous singing. Announced Nelson Eddy, introducing the 29-year-old crooner:
“We might have taken more than just this hour and still not have exhausted all of the songs from Mr. Kern’s many scores, nor run short of friends who wanted to do honors in their musical way. But those whom we do have here have all chosen their own Kern songs, and so I’m going to ask the young man now standing next to Patrice in New York why he has chosen his particular songs. What about it, Frank Sinatra?”
“Well, Nelson,” Sinatra replied, “I’m going to sing ‘The Song Is You.’ In the first place, it’s my favorite among Mr. Kern’s songs. And then again, this is a musical tribute to him, and our thanks for his having given us all this wonderful melody. So every time anybody whistles or hums a tune of Jerry’s, for me, well, he’s not gone. He’s in the music, in the song. That’s why I’ve asked to sing ‘The Song Is You.’”
Next came the song’s lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II. “Now, before proceeding,” he began, “it is with great pride that I read the following telegram from the president of the United States: ‘I am among the grateful millions who have played and listened to the music of Jerome Kern, and I wish to be among those of his fellow Americans who pay him tribute today. His melodies surviving will live in our voices and warm our hearts for many years to come. For they are the kind of simple honest songs that belong to no time or fashion. The man who gave them to us has earned a lasting place in his nation’s memory. Signed, Harry S Truman.’”1
Earlier in the program, Hildegarde sang “The Last Time I Saw Paris”; Dinah Shore, “Bill”; Jack Smith, “Who.” Nelson Eddy chose “All the Things You Are,” one of the most cherished of Kern’s compositions (with words by Hammerstein), originally written for the musical Very Warm for May which lasted all of fifty-nine performances on Broadway.
For all his melodic gifts, Jerome Kern had faced the same daunting disappointments that have dogged virtually all other composers answering the call of musical theatre. At the time of his sudden passing, he was in New York overseeing rehearsals for a revival of Show Boat, from which surely he drew some solace and pride, for he had lived infamously through a series of failed ventures in recent years. Following Kern’s death, the never-perfect Show Boat once again opened to generous respect for its immense attributes of melody and spirit. “It is what every musical should be—and no other has ever been,” wrote John Chapman. Declared Louis Kronenberger, “Our memories didn’t lie. Show Boat is great stuff…. The story may be all schmaltz and corn and hokum, full of romantic trappings and sentimental gestures and melodramatic flourishes. But it is all of a piece, and it holds our interest.”
“Show Boat is still magnificent,” declared Ward Morehouse. “It was in 1927 and it was in 1932 [when revived], and it always will be. Here’s a musical play with beauty, pathos, nostalgia, panoramic patterns, and a Jerome Kern score that will endure for as long as the theatre exists.”2
At the end of the twentieth century, one could inevitably conclude that perfection in musical theatre writing is a rarely obtainable goal. The arguable exceptions, led by The King and I and My Fair Lady, are miraculously few, indeed. How many musicals can claim the total mastery of a Rembrandt or Rivera, a Dickinson, a Balanchine or Stravinsky? The same enraptured Show Boat reviewers who voted with their hearts also noted weaknesses with their minds. One was Morehouse, qualifying his essential joy: “If the story now runs down and runs somewhat to patness in its final phases, if portions of the narrative now seem a bit labored and if a few of the present players are not up to the form of their predecessors, those faults are but minor.”
“Show Boat continues to suffer from its old ‘last-act trouble,’ as its first producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, used to call it,” conceded Robert Garland. “The operetta still starts a story it never really finishes. From the moment Magnolia and Gaylord are married at the conclusion of the opening stanza, the Mississippi River saga hides behinds its music and sings its plot around in all directions. A midway, a music hall, a convent, a boardinghouse, and, at long last, back to the levee again.” Still, Garland granted this fabled musical gem its enduring legacy: “The immortal Jerome Kern score maintains its magical appeal. It was, it is, it always will be Show Boat’s crowning glory.”3
The same argument could be made against the medium itself—against countless ill-realized librettos born out of good intentions but rendered either too contrived or too maudlin, or underwritten, or overwritten, or out of focus, or conceptually obscure, and saved time and again by songs, scenery, clowns and showmanship. The situation remained as perplexing in 1999 as it was back before and after Show Boat opened, and clear up through the golden age. Musical stages are littered with those charming juvenile showoffs who simply refuse the efforts of others to dress them up with proper adult attitudes.
Another giant that would continue earning respect for its songs, if not for its originally heralded book, was Oklahoma, the show that had pushed the “integrated musical” idea into formidable maturity. When first presented, it won glowing notices. When revived 36 years later, it was both cheered and panned. Howard Kissel complained about the “often dated material.” Walter Kerr proposed dialogue pruning: “The entertainment is now too long, by a good twenty minutes. No one should touch the music, though. All that incredible music.”4 Rarely does anyone dare touch the music. Critical displeasure is almost always aimed at perceived script shortcomings. The evolution of the book musical from the 1940s forward did alleviate to a degree the problem of trivial material, and more shows from the postwar era are brought back successfully than ones from earlier periods. Yet creators still faced the same old problem every time they attempted something new: how to wed music and story with seamless persuasion and force every beat of the way.
During Jerome Kern’s day, musicals and popular music were one in the same. No wonder the composer of “Old Man River” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was so lovingly remembered at his passing. He had been a prime contributor to American culture, helping through his music to bring people of all stripes and persuasions together. And had he lived long enough, Kern likely would have rued the day when rock and roll and the social upheaval of the ’60s hastened the splintering apart of the once-homogenous class of Americans who had embraced his songs. Before the rights-obsessed cultural wars of the ’60s—and before the advent of cable TV and the Internet—there was, remember, only one Hit Parade, only three major television networks, and a sense among the citizenry of belonging to only one melting pot.
During the radio tribute, after Jack Smith sang “Who,” Nelson Eddy commented on the song’s having been first introduced in Sunny, which opened in 1925 at the “old” Amsterdam Theatre, “now a movie house.” Nearly half a century later in a parallel twist of fate, the “new” Amsterdam, having been converted back into a legit house by Walt Disney, was playing host to Beauty and the Beast, a stage musical adapted from a film. There always is, at the last moment, someone to revitalize and make new all over again a form of entertainment whose imminent demise has long been predicted.
How long can it survive on these last-minute rescues? The aging pop stars of yesterday—the over-the-hill rockers who may still have some hidden music inside their keyboards—have not done well in their interactions with musical theatre. The dreary outcome of Paul Simon’s hopelessly uncommercial bomb Capeman tells the story of the naivete (or arrogance) of a famed songwriter-singer believing that by merely composing a batch of new songs, no matter how questionable the dramatic premise, the whole thing would somehow work because of the lure of his name alone. Perhaps Paul McCartney and others of his ilk sensed the gloomy odds against setting foot in the theatre, where good songs are often wasted on unsalable material, and resisted all offers.
It grows ever more difficult to mount a new work that can bridge all the splintered audience categories in this insanely individualistic land of ours. Just as the major television networks continue to see their audience base erode as more people select from an increasing plethora of cable outlets, so do Broadway producers struggle with the demographics explosion. How to please audiences so dissidently diverse? Evidently, not on sleaze and controversy alone. Take a look at Hollywood: Despite relentless competition from the internet and cable TV, the booming motion picture industry repeatedly finds new ways to restate universal themes—Titanic’s heroic love story; the quirky, marriage-affirming My Best Friend’s Wedding; the soaring parental love inherent in Life Is Beautiful; the touching relationship of a drifting musician and a deaf mute in Woody Allen’s Felliniesque Sweet and Lowdown.
And what had the titans of Times Square to offer audiences as a new millennium approached? More strip tease and drag. More lynchings and misogyny, drug overdoses and S&M. More offbeat losers locked in ambivalent distress. While hundreds of new multiplex movie houses went up from sea to sea, Broadway patted itself on the back for being ever so hip, making ticket buyers the unwitting brunt of its self-defeating brilliance. They got Side Show. They got Passion. They got The Life and they got Parade. And, if that was not enough, the new century just around the corner promised them two competing new productions of The Wild Party, each based on the 1928 poem by Joseph Moncure March about a roaring twenties orgy. The plot concerns Queenie, a sexually active chorus girl with a penchant for extra-rough love, who, called a slut by her misogynist lover, Burrs, gets even by having a party for the purpose of bedding another man in Burrs’ face. To this sexual merry-go-round come society’s free and fallen spirits, specialists all in debauchery—whores and underage delinquents, free spirits and boxers and scumbags. Lust, mayhem and homicide were promised. And that was the state of the adult American musical theatre at the dawning of the year 2000.
Nonetheless, at century’s end, Broadway itself—if not the “musical theatre” according to purists—was not doing shabbily. Long-running hits from the Brits and film-to-stage family amusements from Burbank, California, kept theatres aglow, thanks to the return of half-way hummable tunes and epic tales of romantic consequence that resonated with a broad cross-section of the tourists who purchase most of the tickets. Thanks also to the arrival of golden age shows on return visits, shows whose older sentiments were as acceptable to contemporary crowds as are the quaint comedic charms of I Love Lucy reruns or a Frank Capra film.
The future remains tenuous. Where are tomorrow’s Broadway babies? Not since the New York premiere in 1991 of Miss Saigon had there been a new blockbuster import from the West End. And Cats, which had been around for 18 years and seen by more than 10 million persons (one of them, 670 times!), was finally slated to close, on June 25, 2000, after 7,397 performances. In 1998, Vincent Canby, lamenting the caustic reception accorded Paul Simon’s Capeman, took time to survey the overall scene in neighboring playhouses, and he saw a bleak horizon. “To the consternation of the theatre community, it’s the Disney Company, the corporate giant whose name is synonymous with faceless clout, that has turned out to be the most eccentric and successful of the new producer entities…. The success of Lion King not withstanding, the Broadway musical is no further along now than it was last September, or 10 years ago, when Phantom of the Opera opened.”5
And so they brought on more time-tested shows from out of the past. “Yet another standout season on Broadway for musical revivals!” announced one of the hosts at the Tony Awards telecast on June 6, 1999. This time up, four shows were nominated for Best Revival—Peter Pan, Little Me, Annie Get Your Gun, and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Of the musical numbers presented from each of the entries, a bright new number for Charlie Brown, by Andrew Lippa, the composer of one of the versions of Wild Party, provided the sort of polished exuberance the public still enjoyed encountering in a theatre. And of the new musicals up for Tonys, a song performed from Frank Wildhorn’s third tuner to make it to Broadway, Civil War, strained like a cheesy warm-up number for a Jimmy Swaggart revival.
“No, This Isn’t Over,” a song of hope performed by the imprisoned hero in Parade expressing his reaction to the news of a reprieve, sounded oddly forced and out of place … and terribly distant in tone from the rousing dance number out of Fosse, a high-energy retrospective of the late choreographer’s work that landed a Tony for Best New Musical.
And there were more sour notes to come. When the Tony for best director of a musical was bestowed upon British choreographer Matthew Bourne for his staging of Peter Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” a few disbelieving gasps were heard. Bourne had won the hearts of New Yorkers with an all-male in-drag cast, and they returned the thrill by dumbfounding him with the Tony honor for his work on a ballet, itself ruled ineligible for consideration as Best Musical. Desperation, it’s been said, is not pretty. Even less so at the Tonys. “I’m absolutely astonished,” confessed the astonished Englishman. “Best director of a musical that’s not even a musical!”
From what was hardly even a season. Left unastonished by the bizarre Tony telecast, watched by 28 percent fewer folks than the previous year’s, were members of the cast and company of the fourth new tuner nominated for a Tony, Ain’t Nothing But the Blues. Deprived of their promised prime-time appearance due to unforseen time constraints, they went public with their displeasure, arguing that the exposure would likely have boosted their business, and threatening to file a lawsuit. Dave Letterman, who joked about the abysmally uneventful Tonys (“I fell asleep; did Hair get any awards?”), made hay out of the conflict, inviting members from Ain’t to perform on his late night show.
The last Tony Awards presentation of the century was overwhelmed by the superior glories of better seasons gone by. America’s three most honored playwrights, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, all represented on Broadway that year, were all nominated for Best Revival of a Play. The honor went to Arthur Miller, whose acceptance speech included a plea to producers to take greater risks. Miller also acknowledged the savvy of producers in finding ways to keep a rich canon of shows, both serious and sung, commercially alive. “For the marvelous revivals on Broadway, I know we are all grateful and very proud.”
On November 12, 1900, an early British import, Florodora, with songs by Leslie Stuart, Paul Rubens and Frank Clement and a book by Owen Hall, opened at the Casino Theatre, where it settled in for a 553 performance run, bettering its London box office. Rivaling Gilbert and Sullivan, the light-hearted charmer, featured the Florodora sextette, ladies who twirled parasols, swept about in their floor-length gowns, and danced with six properly top-hatted partners. All glib garnishment for a story about the maker of Florodora perfume in the Philippines, Cyrus Gilfain, who longs to wed Dolores, the daughter of a man he has wronged. In a 1920 off–Broadway revival, Florodora lasted through 150 showings.
On December 6, 1999, at Lincoln Center, the last new musical of the century, Marie Christine, opened. It was a retelling of the Medea myth, with music and lyrics by 37-year-old Michael John LaChiusa—according to Time magazine’s Richard Zoglin, “one of the most acclaimed of the post–Sondheim composers.”6 Marie was the tale, set in New Orleans in the 1890s, of a woman of mixed-race Creole parents. Haunted by her white father’s rejection, Marie practiced voodoo, on one occasion turning to spaghetti the arms and legs of her maid; on another, casting an erotic spell over a Caucasian sea captain, into whose arms she rapturously slipped, long enough to bear him two children.
Eagerly anticipated by New Yorkers, it received, in Zoglin’s estimation, “an extraordinary buildup from the New York Times.”7 That paper lavished no fewer than three major features stories on the show during previews, and then, once it opened, agonized over that which it had so passionately hyped, causing its critic, Vincent Canby, to lament a lack of “spontaneity,” music that failed to “successfully embrace the primal narrative,” and, in total, an evening that left him “simply exhausted and a little confused.”8
“Just in time for the holidays,” reported Variety, “another dark and ambitious new musical lumbers onto the stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre … a fatally dispassionate musical about passion run amok … utterly artless in its story storytelling…. What LaChiusa needs the most is a collaborator with a dramatic vision that can more artfully harness his musical gifts…. That, above all, is the voodoo missing from Marie Christine.”9 The reviews were discouragingly mixed; the music, they said, was difficult; and the run was not extended. Within less than a month, Marie Christine had closed.
Is the musical theatre dying? Personally, I do not believe it is, for the all-too-obvious reason that songs are not going out of business and doubtlessly never will. Neither will the timeless lure of dramatic story telling. Inevitably, the two will now and then find each other in stageworthy ways that move an audience to empathy and laughter or tears. It all depends, of course, on how effectively tomorrow’s composers, lyricists and librettists can merge music with narrative. Some of them, probably only a precious few, will succeed. And their successes will be the stuff of a producer’s dream.
The American musical can’t go back. That is certain. It can only go forward. And in going forward, may it recover some of the magic lost, the talent misused, and the greater traditions left insecurely behind. Most of all, may it lure tomorrow’s finest composers and writers back to the stage.