DURING A THIRTY-FIVE-DAY STRETCH from the end of November 1925 to the dawn of the new year, three new Gershwin works were premiered in New York: the Concerto in F, the musical comedy Tip-Toes, and Song of the Flame, an operetta produced by Arthur Hammerstein. Moreover, Blue Monday was revived in new dress as 135th Street, led by Paul Whiteman in a concert celebrating jazz at Carnegie Hall. Ferde Grofé rescored the orchestration by Will Vodery that in 1922 had been played by the Scandals’ pit orchestra, and Buddy DeSylva, lacking a complete copy of Blue Monday, rewrote the words as best he could remember them. Gershwin’s one-two punch of artistic command and audience appeal had proved potent enough to cross the lines dividing his various sponsors, but only a composer with a unique blend of skill and confidence would have undertaken such a schedule. As DeSylva wrote him on November 25, “You are surely on the crest of a wave.”1
Produced by Aarons and Freedley, Tip-Toes is somewhat unusual in being built around a female character, “Tip-Toes” Kaye. Written by Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson, the show centers on the kind of young Americans, searching for love and money, who romp onstage in Lady, Be Good! and Tell Me More.
The main difference, however, is that Tip-Toes and her two relatives, Al and Hen Kaye, are a vaudeville trio bred from hardscrabble urban stock. Hailing from the seedy environs of New York City (“Greenpoint, near the gas tanks”), the Three Kayes have traveled to Palm Beach, Florida, to entertain at a lavish party. Tip-Toes is played by Queenie Smith, a skilled dancer, adequate singer, and appealing ingénue, and her partners are comedians who dance. (Hen Kaye claims that the soles of his shoes have worn so thin that when he stands on a coin, he knows whether it’s heads or tails.) The plot hinges on the Kayes’ effort to pass off Tip-Toes as a member of New York high society, in hopes of matching her romantically with an unattached millionaire. Step 1 happens soon enough when Tip-Toes meets Steve Burton, a wealthy young innocent. While Tip-Toes impersonates a rich girl, Steve, eager to be loved for himself and not for his $7 million business, pretends to have lost his fortune. In the end, despite a car accident, the heroine’s bout of amnesia, and endless examples of the Kaye family’s lack of courtliness, Tip-Toes and Steve embrace their true identities and vow eternal devotion.
Parallels with Lady, Be Good! include a star who’s primarily a dancer, several effective dance numbers directed by Sammy Lee, and Gershwin’s sparkling, energetic score. Beginning its tryout in Washington on November 24, Tip-Toes spent a month on the road before opening on December 28 in New York. It clicked in all four tryout cities, enjoyed a successful run on Broadway, toured nationally, and in 1926 crossed the Atlantic and won approval on the London stage.
The show also proved to be Ira Gershwin’s personal moment of professional arrival. In Lady, Be Good!, Ira judged that he had “adequately fitted some sparkling tunes, and several singable love songs and rhythm numbers had resulted,” but he still felt that these songs owed their success mainly to the music. His aspirations ran higher, and it is telling that he took the comic song as the true test of the lyricist’s craftsmanship. He singled out one number in particular from Tip-Toes, the trio “These Charming People,” sung by the Three Kayes as they pretend to be members of the socially lofty Van Rensselaer clan from New York. Though comically inept at impersonating society folk, Tip-Toes, Al, and Hen exude confidence. The verse’s words flow with fluent predictability, in an aabccb rhyme scheme that invited the audience to respond on cue with a laugh:
AL: |
We must make it our ambition |
HEN: |
When those million-dollar blokes pass, |
Beyond such laugh lines, Ira’s lyrics also fill in the outlines of the characters cavorting onstage.2 When the Three Kayes arrive in Palm Beach, they are greeted by Rollo Metcalf, whose wife Sylvia has hired them to entertain at a party in honor of her brother Steve Burton. The unexpected appearance of Tip-Toes jars Rollo, who once made a pass at her up north. Fearing now that Sylvia will learn of his indiscretion, he informs the Kayes that the party has been canceled, but they decide to stay anyway. Tip-Toes sings “Looking for a Boy,” a soliloquy reflecting a love life that has so far been unfulfilling and demonstrating the expressive power of legato music.
A more enlivened song, sung by Tip-Toes and Steve together, is “That Certain Feeling,” a sequel of sorts to “Looking for a Boy” and one crackling with vitality. The song lives on rests and repeated notes; a short eighth-note rest before some lines in the a sections of an aaba refrain produces an effect that has been described as “kicking” the rhythm. In the bridge, where the harmony sounds stuck for three bars, Ira has Steve admit that Tip-Toes’ easy charm has left him speechless. The couple’s final duet takes place on a yacht, after her Van Rensselaer masquerade has been exposed. Steve has hosted a party, and all the guests except Tip-Toes have gone home. Having found separate beds to sleep in, remaining loyal to musical comedy’s moral code, the pair sing “Nightie-Night,” giving Ira a chance to add lullaby-making to his portfolio.
The show’s one full-fledged dance number in the mold of “Fascinating Rhythm” and “Kickin’ the Clouds Away” is “Sweet and Low-Down,” sung by Denise, a dance teacher hired to coach Steve, her colleague Binnie, and Al Kaye at the Blues Café, where the band plays “nothing but the low down.” This song about dancing is steeped in the spirit of modern jazz, with a dose of the Charleston rhythm thrown in. Ira took pride in the verbal twist behind the title phrase. His starting point, “Sweet and Low” by Victorian composer Joseph Barnby, was a classic English lullaby with words by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, well known in the Anglo-American world. The connotative gap between the lullaby’s gentle sweet-and-low and the Blues Café’s earthy, sensual sweet-and-low-down delivered its own delight. As noted earlier, the song also shares a gesture with the Concerto in F—the archlike bassoon opening, whose rhythm is duplicated in such phrases as “Grab a cab and go down.”
If Tip-Toes marked the end of Ira’s apprenticeship, his confidence must also have been fortified by a letter he received several months into the show’s New York run. The writer was Lorenz Hart, who had recently won praise for the lyrics of The Garrick Gaieties, with music by Richard Rodgers. Ira’s lyrics, he wrote,
gave me as much pleasure as Mr. George Gershwin’s music, and the utterly charming performance of Miss Queenie Smith. I have heard none so good this many a day. Such delicacies as your jingles prove that songs can be both popular and intelligent. May I take the liberty of saying that your rhymes show a healthy improvement over those in Lady, Be Good! You have helped a lot to make an evening delightful to me—and I am very grateful. Thank you! And may your success continue!3
Critical response during the tryout phase was for the most part enthusiastic. The production had “class written all over it, from the costuming to the stage settings—and back again,” wrote John J. Daly in a Washington newspaper.4 Critic Leonard Hall called Sammy Lee the real star of the show for having staged “some of the most elegant dance numbers ever seen under roof, canvas or the blue canopy of Heaven—with the assistance of a super-chorus of active and ambitious pippins.” Hall judged Gershwin’s music “now pretty, now itchy, with the strange broken rhythms he fancies.”5 In Philadelphia, a critic wrote of “These Charming People” that it possessed “the best lines of any patter song since P. G. Wodehouse stopped turning out lyrics for Jerome Kern’s tunes.”6 The show was in Newark when Gershwin premiered his Concerto in F in Carnegie Hall, and Queenie Smith took the trouble to send a telegram to the composer from across the river: “NIZE BABY EAT OP ALL THE MUSIC LOVERS HEARTS.”7
When Tip-Toes opened in New York at the Liberty Theatre on December 28, the critics gave it a slightly less unanimous embrace. The Times found Gershwin’s music “average pretty-pretty,” ruled the cast “serviceable,” and rapped the librettists for not giving the performers better lines—especially the comedians.8 But Alexander Woollcott, writing for the New York World, saw Tip-Toes as “Gershwin’s evening” above all else.
Bright and gay and good-looking the new musical comedy which came to the Liberty last night is made altogether captivating by the pretty, rebel, infectious music of George Gershwin—all told the best score he has written in his days in the theatre, all told, I think, the best score any one has written for our town this season.
He praised “These Charming People” for “its unblinking determination to rhyme ‘enjoy it’ with ‘Detroit.’ ” From his perspective, however, the show reached a high point “when, to the lisping of a hundred tapping feet in ‘Sweet and Low-Down,’ a forest of trombones suddenly added their moans. Then the Liberty Theatre quietly but firmly went mad.”9
A discovery made in 1982, when many of the orchestra parts from the show’s first run were found in a New Jersey warehouse, has allowed modern listeners to hear what Tip-Toes may have sounded like in a theater of the day. In 1998, to mark the hundredth anniversary of Gershwin’s birth, Carnegie Hall, in cooperation with the Library of Congress, put on a concert version that amounted to a reconstruction based on original sources. Rob Fisher conducted the performance, which was then recorded and commercially distributed.10 In a booklet issued with the recording, Fisher describes the scholarly demands of the reconstruction, which began
by reconciling original programs and scripts with the existing musical materials. The orchestra parts were transcribed into a full score, which revealed some places where instruments were missing measures. Any blank spots were then filled in. Often, where the scoring was incomplete in one part of the show, the missing elements were found in another passage.
The orchestra included flute, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two French horns, two trumpets, trombones, two pianos, percussion, six violins, two violas, cello, and double bass. The piano parts, which made the timbre unique, were the least complete part of the score.
In some numbers, a part was found for one or the other of the two pianos. Arden and Ohman recorded four of the songs from Tip-Toes with their own orchestra, featuring extensive duo-piano passages. These were transcribed and used at various points in the score. There were also recordings of George Gershwin playing some of these songs, which provided pianistic ideas that were incorporated. When there were no clues at all, one of our two pianists, Joseph Thalken, wrote duo-parts that he and John Musto later perfected.
The existence of a recording of the music of Tip-Toes by musicians who have enacted the show for live audiences adds a fresh Gershwinian element to the realm of America’s theatrical soundscape.
AS IF the December calendar to which Gershwin had committed himself was not already hard to imagine, he also signed a contract that month with producer Arthur Hammerstein to complete—with librettist Otto Harbach, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (Arthur’s nephew), and composer Herbert Stothart—the score for a new operetta, with a huge cast and a European setting. Of the eleven new numbers supplied for Song of the Flame, which opened on Broadway before the end of the year, Gershwin and Stothart each composed three, and they shared credit for the remaining five. The score also included folk songs, especially in the arrangements sung by the Russian Art Choir, a New York City chorus more than fifty voices strong. Song of the Flame was intended to follow Arthur Hammerstein’s highly successful Rose-Marie, a 1924 show whose creative team included Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Harbach as colibrettists and lyricists, and Rudolf Friml and Stothart as cocomposers. Friml was at first on board to help write the score for Song of the Flame, but he pulled out of the project, and Gershwin was hired to replace him. How he managed the month of December remains a puzzle, but one truth emerges loud and clear: with half a dozen performances of the brand-new Concerto in F on his docket, he was surely free of performance anxiety.
Song of the Flame is a story of the Russian Revolution. Aniuta, an aristocrat posing as a washerwoman, becomes a figure akin to Joan of Arc, with her charismatic presence and idealism inspiring the Russian people to revolt against their rulers; her song of rebellion, “The Song of the Flame,” is woven through the story. She falls in love with Volodya, a Russian prince, even though they stand on opposite sides of the divide that sparks the Revolution. Act I ends as open conflict breaks out, and Act II takes place two years later on New Year’s Eve in Paris, where many displaced Russians now live, including Volodya. Aniuta, who had remained in Russia, arrives and is reunited with Volodya. The pair vow to return to Russia to fight together for the rights of the people.
Gershwin’s involvement marks his only theatrical effort with Oscar Hammerstein, who would become one of musical theater’s most influential figures. The Prologue he wrote with Harbach shows the distance between this work’s sensibility and Gershwin’s usual theatrical turf. The place is a street in Moscow; the time is an evening in March 1917. Konstantin, a revolutionary-minded character, is loudly regaling two men with his belief that a folk song being sung in a nearby hall is irrelevant to the times. “What Russia needs to learn is a new song,” he proclaims, “a song that will help us bear the political snows that are chilling the hearts of our people.” Aniuta, played by Tessa Kosta, takes over the platform: “Russia has had enough of wailing—she needs to learn a new song of life—of courage and of freedom!” As she begins “The Song of the Flame,” her singing inspires her countrymen, who, long mired in oppression, yearn for freedom. The singers appearing onstage in this scene number roughly sixty, most of them members of the Russian Art Choir. As the number of singers grows, so does the song’s power to change history.11 The setting, the subject, the language, and the thinking of the characters—all were foreign to musical comedies of the day.
Out of context and unattributed, Aniuta’s “Song of the Flame” seems improbable. With its wide melodic range—an eleventh; minor-mode tonality; melodies that flirt with exotic augmented-second intervals; a climax marked “con fuoco, quasi eroico” (with fire, and heroically); and a refrain grounded in emotional display, the character of the music is hard to square with earlier melodies by Gershwin. And given that from mid-1924 on, the idea of a Gershwin song came to imply music and words in combination, fashioned by George and Ira, a number delivering such hortatory statements as “On! On! Follow the Flame!” could hardly seem less Gershwinian. Perhaps some of the number’s non-Gershwinian traits can be traced to Stothart. More to the point, though, the song belongs to an operetta as opposed to a musical comedy. The composers wrote music in a style that would pass as “Russian,” for voices of the Russian choir as well as for the operatic voice of Tessa Kosta. This was not the first time Gershwin had met a challenge along these lines; his revue scores had called for songs in a variety of styles, whether that of a South Sea Island or an oriental shrine.12
In another Stothart and Gershwin collaboration, “Cossack Love Song (Don’t Forget Me),” sung by Aniuta and Volodya, the verse’s lighter character departs from the refrain enough in style to suggest that verse and refrain were composed by different hands: the lilting verse, with each voice in this four-voice arrangement enjoying its own countermelodic moment, by Gershwin; and the forward-driving refrain, with its quarter-note empasis, by Stothart.
Except for Aniuta’s brief “The Signal,” the operetta’s only published number composed by Gershwin alone—a rare chance to visit his family’s ethnic heritage—is “Midnight Bells,” heralding the arrival of the new year in Paris. Here the music abandons the Russian mannerisms and key of G minor that have pervaded much of the score to this point. As bells ring out across the city, the expatriate Russian community toasts the new year, and Aniuta, newly arrived from the motherland, sings this well-made number. Gershwin starts the verse with vocal onomatopoeia: “Ding Dong Ding Dong,” each syllable sustained for four beats. When the refrain arrives, the whole notes move into the orchestra, the squareness of a bell-tolling rhythm softened by a melody line replete with triplets.
Nostalgia for the homeland reappears with a “Blossom Ballet,” in which the fifty-three-member American Ballet Company shared the stage with dancer Ula Sharon. Brooks Atkinson of the Times described it as perhaps the signature scene of an impressive theatrical performance:
On the dance floor of a Parisian cabaret whirls an entrancing ballet, symbolic of Russia’s long Winter of adversity and the first flush of vernal peace. As soon as the gleaming white costumes of that number have vanished, two segments of the rear settings part, discovering a Russian choir in the rich trappings of the peasantry. And with perfect attack and enunciation they sing folk-tunes of their vast and youthful land. Rarely does “Song of the Flame” blend the elements of music and scenery so effectively.13
Half a dozen folk songs were arranged for this climactic performance by the Russian Art Choir: “I Was There,” “The Song of Gold,” “Song of the Field,” “Village Pines,” “A Christmas Carol,” and “Down the Mother Volga.”
Song of the Flame, cited as “a romantic opera,” drew positive, often highly enthusiastic reviews. Opening at the 44th Street Theatre on December 30, it ran on Broadway until July 10, 1926, logging 219 performances in all. Frank Vreeland of the World-Telegram noted that, with the opening of Tip-Toes on Broadway, the days from December 25 to January 1 could be called “Gershwin week just as much as Christmas Week.”
BLUE MONDAY’S reappearance as 135th Street at Carnegie Hall on the evening of December 29 was eagerly anticipated. It closed a Paul Whiteman Orchestra concert that, together with the customary novelties, included new works by composer-critic Deems Taylor—a suite entitled Circus Day: Eight Pictures from Memory—and by Ferde Grofé—Mississippi (A Tone Journey). 135th Street’s only substantial difference from the 1922 version was the new arrangement for the Whiteman band, which offered greater sound variety—trumpets, trombones, tuba, timpani, strings, banjo, two pianos, and celeste—than had Will Vodery’s version for the pit orchestra of the Scandals. Aside from the title, however, perhaps the biggest change was the standing of the composer, now a star who had publicly declared an interest in writing a full-length jazz opera. Whiteman had hired a cast that featured Blossom Seeley, a vaudeville headliner, as Vi and tenor Charles Hart as Joe, her lover. Seeley’s husband, vaudevillian Benny Fields, played the role of Sam, and Jack McGowan, in the character of Tom, sang the Prologue, the part of the work closest to recitative, as he had in 1922. Racial representation was handled as it had been in the Scandals: the all-white cast played their roles in blackface.
A New York Times review affirmed that an aura of expectation and fulfillment hovered over the evening: the song Joe sang as his life ebbed away “echoed later in a street full of limousines [that] came surging to the carriage calls.”14 But other witnesses were less impressed. To S. Jay Kaufman of the Telegram, the drama seemed “so short that it never really began.”15 The Sun critic, probably W. J. Henderson, who had been much impressed by Gershwin’s earlier opuses, wrote that the music “served simply as an unimpressive accompaniment for an old hokum vaudeville skit that was hoary with age.”16 Olin Downes of the Times heard some good melodies, “genuinely dramatic passages,” appropriate uses of dissonance, and he liked the way Gershwin “breaks up his duple rhythms and employs scraps and fragments in a manner that is free, emotional, theatrical.” He too found the libretto nothing more than a vaudeville sketch. But for all its flaws, Downes saw in 135th Street a potential “for more than operetta, which is its main importance to Mr. Gershwin.”17 The Whiteman concert was repeated on New Year’s Day 1926, and as far as we know, it marked the last performance of Blue Monday / 135th Street during the composer’s lifetime.