5
The Invention of the Satiric Musical
How Can You Tell an American?
The very first musical told of rival criminal gangs, of the joys of the thief and
the killer, of whores, of corruption so comprehensive that there is not a single
decent character in the entire show. It was a sensation: The Beggar’s Opera,
first performed in London in 1728, as I’ve already noted, and still vital
today.
John Gay wrote the book and lyrics (to use modern parlance), and there
was no composer: Gay applied new lyrics to pre-existing tunes. Historians
emphasize its spoof of Italian opera, then most popular among the rank and
fashion of the town. As well, Gay meant to assail the administration of the
country’s unofficial ruler, Robert Walpole, the very model of the one per
center made of graft and secret sweetheart deals for his cronies.
Even so, The Beggar’s Opera must have delighted Londoners mainly
because it really was their first musical, with a script punctuated by situation
and character songs in the popular style. Better, those first audiences must
have been tickled to hear innocent melodies wedded to sarcastic and even
licentious lyrics, as when this jolly trifle:
Oh, London is a fine town,
And a gallant city,
’Tis governed by the Scarlet Gown,
Come listen to my ditty …
turned up in the Gay version as this parents’ lament:
Our Polly is a sad slut!
Nor heeds what we have taught her.
I wonder any man alive
Will ever rear a daughter!
The dialogue, too, was deliciously shocking, now scathing in irony, as in this
bit from a fence and informer:
: Like great statesman, we encourage those who betray their friends …
and now brutally philosophical on the ins and outs of the social contract:
: The [financially] comfortable estate of widowhood, is the only hope that keeps up a
wife’s spirits.
In short, the English-speaking musical has been critical of the establishment
and its protocols right from the start, not least in its protection of minorities.
Women were given great latitude as performers, though it was popularly
supposed that all actresses of less than Shakespearean prominence were
prostitutes—thus the so-called wicked stage. And Ned Harrigan and Tony
Hart’s depictions of the Irish in the 1880s followed hard upon New York
leaders’ destruction of Manhattan’s “Boss” William M. Tweed—possibly,
some historians now believe, because he was letting the Irish share power in
a city till then run exclusively by WASP bankers and the socially
consequential Knickerbocker caste. Comparably, Florenz Ziegfeld
challenged an unwritten racial-segregation law by hiring black Bert Williams
for the white Follies throughout the 1910s—and this was not stunt casting,
though Ziegfeld was notorious for pulling off PR didoes. What attracted him
to Williams was the latter’s versatility in both sketch comedy and song, with
a gift for dry underplaying cut with pathos and wonder.
We tend to forget how nonconformist the American musical really is,
because for its first century (starting roughly in the 1860s) its songs were the
national melody—“After the Ball,” “Night and Day,” “My Heart Stood Still.”
Storytelling songs, dance numbers, love ballads: the accompaniment of life.
How could something so popular be subversive?
Besides, the American musical show’s most apparent ancestor was the
Gilbert and Sullivan titles, so Victorian in tone, with their switched-babies
plots, their grand dame of a contralto bossing everyone around, their
whoopsiedoodle comedian with the funny hopping dance. These are lovable,
not revolutionary, works. Yet they quite openly pass remarks about the
incompetence or shady dealings of the elites—the pack of idiots making up
Iolanthe’s House of Lords or the pompous official in The Mikado
rationalizing his etiquette in the taking of bribes. He even gave his
character’s name to a type, the self-important grandee, a term still in use
today: a Pooh-Bah. “I can’t help it,” says Pooh-Bah. “I was born sneering.”
Granted, there was always a fear of state censorship in those days. The
Beggar’s Opera so offended Robert Walpole that its sequel, Polly, was,
though published, banned from stage production, and Gilbert and Sullivan,
despite a phenomenal popularity, were inclined to self-censorship rather than
irritate the authorities too much. In their penultimate piece, Utopia (Limited)
(1893), on the Anglicization of a South Pacific island, Gilbert poked fun at
all sorts of aspects of English life. Yet when the local princess, an alumna of
Girton College, Cambridge, merrily recommends that her homeland adopt the
political party system, Gilbert was crossing a line:
: No political measures will endure, because one Party will assuredly undo all that
the other Party has done. … Inexperienced civilians will govern your Army and your Navy; no
social reforms will be attempted because out of vice, squalor and drunkenness no political capital
is to be made. …
Gilbert and Sullivan expert Leslie Baily tells us that one newspaper called
this “the bitterest speech” of Gilbert’s career, and in the end Gilbert cut the
second half (after my first ellipsis) of the lines quoted above, not only in the
stage performances but in the published text as well.
Clearly, some saw a danger in an unfettered music theatre. Yet when we
cross the ocean to the United States, we find the enemies of the musical stage
concerned entirely with sexual immodesty—ballet girls in tights, women
characters expressing unmaidenly interests, or the insinuating maxixe danced
(in a Ziegfeld show) by a young lady and her beau, the latter also a woman,
dressed as a man. Ministers thundered from their pulpits at these sexy capers,
but because the musical was thought to be empty-headed frolic, its politics
did not truly register.1
All the same, a progressive worldview kept peeking out from behind the
sheer gaiety of musicals. Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse’s “We’re
Crooks,” in Miss 1917, troubles to tell us just where a self-respecting felon
establishes his limits:
Our crimes at times are things to shudder at,
But we’ve never been in Congress, for we draw the line at that.
Or, in the title song of Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash’s One Touch of Venus
(1943), we hear “The world belongs to men and women”—true enough
—“but the banks belong to men,” a surprise topper that reminds us who has
all the power. And it’s the babbitts, not the sheiks. For, as a lyric in The
Golden Apple (1953) explains, when war talk is in the air, “Old men always
do the shouting” while “Young men have to do the shooting.”
So there is a thread of pungent social observation sewn into the tapestry
of the musical’s history. Not till the 1920s, however, did anyone attempt a
full-scale narrative musical satire, and on a risky subject, willful militarism.
This show was Strike Up the Band (1927), with a book by George S.
Kaufman and a score by George and Ira Gershwin. An ensemble piece,
Strike Up the Band gives us the sheik, flapper, babbitt, and salesman figures.
It was the ultimate twenties musical—and it founded a line of musicalcomedy
satires that leads straight to Chicago.
The sheik is Jim, a reporter, but true-blue and moral. A hero. The flapper
is headstrong Joan, who loves but incessantly bickers with Jim. Joan’s father,
Horace Fletcher, an industrialist in the cheese business, is the babbitt, and he
drives the plot. It seems that America’s protective tariff has locked
Switzerland’s cheese out of our market, so this means war! All the male
leads get involved, including a certain Col. Holmes. He’s the salesman
figure, and what he sells is conflagration:
: Costs a lot of money, war does. What do you think we ought to have, a little war or a
big one?
Fletcher suggests they get investors to back the war as if it were a theatrical
production:
: I could see the steel people, Y.M.C.A., all those folks. … Gives them a lot of
advertising.
This look at elites viewing death and destruction as a source of profit was
very bold for the era; men were imprisoned during the previous wartime for
saying as much, including the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, who ran for
president while locked up in a federal penitentiary, in 1920. He polled
919,799 votes, not that much less than William Z. Foster.
But that’s the real world. In Strike Up the Band, Jim, resourceful as all
sheiks were, devises the strategy for a decisive battle and peace breaks out.
Then, just before the final curtain, Russia protests the caviar tariff, and this
means war!
As I’ve said, such debunking was the favorite indoor sport of the 1920s;
satire was its ideal playing field. What makes Strike Up the Band special
(and bonds it with Chicago) is the way the score supported the lampoon.
This wasn’t a satire with songs: it was a fully musicalized satire, a hurdygurdy
Jeremiad monitored by a zany chorus to echo, converse with, and
sometimes defy the principals in spoof-operetta musical scenes. And Ira’s
lyrics match Kaufman’s irony: in the title number, war is called a “patriotic
pastime,” and if “We don’t know what we’re fighting for,” that’s fine because
“We didn’t know the last time.”
Alas, problems bedeviled the show early on, partly because producer
Edgar Selwyn didn’t assemble a first-rate cast. All the non-sweetheart roles
needed comics of particular kinds, not always easy to find. Thus, Kaufman
saw Fletcher as the evening’s straight man, a dim bulb—but he has too many
silly lines to be played straight. And the rest of Selwyn’s crew were unfunny
or miscast. Here’s one example: the Col. Holmes, a behind-the-scenes fixer
of deadly authority wearing a folksy mask, was Lew Hearn, neither deadly
nor folksy, and known mainly for his outré vocalism suggesting a mad goat
singing “Nessun Dorma.” Holmes disappears in a crowd; Lew Hearn stood
out in one.
Then, too, George S. Kaufman tended to plot chaotically (which is why he
almost always wrote his scripts with collaborators). He was funny, though.
Here’s Fletcher and an underling considering National Cheese Week:
: There was a very large celebration in Des Moines, Iowa.
: A very big cheese town.
: The parade was led by a naked girl symbolizing law and order and was followed by
the entire male population.
: That shows how popular cheese is.
Still, by the Philadelphia tryout, some of the leads were quitting, because the
show was playing so badly. Was it the scathing commentary? Was it because
much of the cast couldn’t sing well enough to justify the music? There’s a
tale, retold in various versions, in which Kaufman and Ira Gershwin are
standing outside the theatre when two distinguished older gentlemen
disembark from a taxicab and head into the house. “That’s Gilbert and
Sullivan,” Ira tells Kaufman, “coming to fix the second act.”
To which Kaufman replies, “Why don’t you write jokes like that in your
lyrics?”
Selwyn closed the production, but he persevered. He had Morrie Ryskind
rework the book, now to build the action around an emerging star-comic duo,
Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough. Friends since childhood, the pair
maintained an unusual partnership, as McCullough was less a straight man
than a participant in the jesting, romping around in outlandish outfits,
especially a collegiate raccoon coat. Clark was known for his cigar, cane,
painted-on eyeglasses, and extremely fancy duds, and his lines were dotted
with allusions to the latest shows and movies, names in the news, and so on.
So the team was easy to write for, as when Fletcher’s receptionist bars
Clark’s way. “Sweet Adeline!” Clark cries, adding, in a reference to Rudy
Vallee’s newest song hit, “Believe it or not, I’m the vagabond lover.” Later,
Jim says he has some bad news, and Clark replies, “Don’t tell me my tailor
died.” As so often with this generation of drolls, from Bert Lahr to Eddie
Cantor, the laughs inhered in not the lines but the delivery.
But did Ryskind bowdlerize Kaufman’s sociopolitics? The new script
reconfigured the war adventure as a dream: Fletcher suffers a mild heart
attack, is sedated, and falls asleep at his desk as the violins shimmer over a
belligerent theme for horns and violas and the woodwinds gush overhead.
(Gershwin liked the effect so much he had it included in the show’s
overture.) Further, Ryskind changed Fletcher’s product from cheese to
chocolate.
However, does all this really sweeten anything? Because, contrary to
legend, Ryskind did not soothe Kaufman’s satire. Just for example, the scene
I just quoted between Fletcher and Col. Holmes in which they conspire to
“stage” a war—easily the most dangerous passage in Kaufman’s original
book—was tweaked a tiny bit but survived as Kaufman intended it in
Ryskind’s final script, dated November 8, 1929, a few weeks before
rehearsals began. In short, what put this new Strike Up the Band (1930) over
was a vastly better staging: the two star jesters, more accomplished singers,
and a revised score with two hit titles, “Soon” and “I’ve Got a Crush on You
[sweetie pie].”
So here was a satire that didn’t close Saturday night. Thus heartened,
Kaufman, Ryskind, and the Gershwins wrote two more political spoofs, Of
Thee I Sing (1931) and a sequel called Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933),
respectively on a presidential campaign and ensuing failed impeachment and
then on a revolutionary uprising. Of Thee I Sing’s working title was
Tweedledee, on the notion that all presidential candidates are as alike as
Lewis Carroll’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
True, some do strive to appear unnuanced, to appeal to the broadest
possible electorate. “Talk less,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Aaron Burr advises
the young Alexander Hamilton. “Smile more.” Such is the way upward:
“Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for.” Yet we still
entertain such personable candidates as Theodore Roosevelt and John
Fitzgerald Kennedy. They talk more.
Interestingly, so do virtually all the principals in the American musical.
More often than not quixotic and flamboyant, they can’t wait to tell us of their
moods, to sing about their plans, to let us know not only what they’re for or
against but also how wonderful it feels to be in a musical. Ethel Merman
shares joy in “Riding High” or “I’m Throwing a Ball Tonight.” Pal Joey and
his soigné protectrice duet in a lightly bragging gavotte on their “den of
iniquity.” Puccini’s Rodolpho and Mimi, transported from La Bohème to
New York’s East Village in Rent, re-enact the opera’s dainty meeting scene
in more worldly terms that just as eloquently plead the cause of love.
These are rich characters, and it’s worth noting that, once Oklahoma! and
Carousel boasted extremely arresting individuals after decades of standardmake
sheiks and flappers, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s third show, Allegro,
failed to please in part because its people, especially its gentle doctor
protagonist, were bafflingly earthbound. Even music didn’t lift them.
True, it is less the people in Of Thee I Sing than the very funny script that
keeps the story popping, as when the French Ambassador marches in with a
plot twist and the authors playfully nudge the French war debt:
: I have received another note from my country.
: … We’ve got a lot of notes from your country, and some of them were due ten
years ago.
: But this is not a promise to pay—this is serious.
It is the astonishing score, though, that gives the show its tang, for, even more
than in Strike Up the Band, the music takes part in the satire, as in a spoofy
Viennese waltz at an extremely dramatic moment, or in a torchlight parade
stippled with worldless vocal bits of familiar old melodies. The Gershwins
are doing what Kaufman and Ryskind are doing, something that before them
only Offenbach and Sullivan did well and often: creating music that laughs.
Among his innovations, Gershwin cast aside the overture model as a
medley of the principal tunes. Jerome Kern seems to have been the first to
revolutionize the overture, most notably in Show Boat (1927), which
presents a kind of tone poem on racial tension. For Of Thee I Sing, Gershwin
does quote his two prime melodies, the title song and “Who Cares?,” but this
five-minute sinfonia is really an étude on one excited dotted-eighth-note
theme from “Because, Because,” a number for reporters covering an Atlantic
City beauty pageant and reprised by the show’s villain, Diana Devereaux.
The song’s A strain consists of two adjacent pitches relentlessly teetering
back and forth; speeded up, they provide a nervous bonding element for the
entire overture. It mirrors the restless energy of the show as a whole, as the
contest winner becomes the First Lady while the luscious Ms. Devereaux
keeps horning in like Katisha in The Mikado.2 Gershwin seems fascinated by
this scatterbrained little riff, using it to irritate “Who Cares?” and then
varying it propulsively as if preparing another of the classical pieces like the
Rhapsody in Blue with which he was changing the history of American
concert music. To repeat—and, again, to prepare the way for how Chicago
makes its points—the truly facetious musical needs a facetious score.
Let’s get our bearings on this important matter by interrupting the
chronology to consider a truly fulfilled satiric score that will likely be
familiar to my readers, that to Frank Loesser’s How To Succeed in Business
Without Really Trying (1961). A sell-out hit running three and a half years,
How To Succeed tilted all its elements toward the goofy idea of a rascal
plotting his way to the top of a big industrial firm. The sets, for example,
were colored-in line drawings; the workers were screwballs, while the boss,
Rudy Vallee, underplayed in a kind of oblivious monotone; the protagonist,
Robert Morse, was lovable despite his treacherous persona; and a recorded
voice, detailing the title’s do-it-yourself lessons in self-advancement, was
Carl Princi, the very model of the suave radio announcer who brings dignity
and omniscience to everything, a Stepford voice hovering benignly over the
drastic tizzies of real life. (Revivals have used Walter Cronkite and
Anderson Cooper.)
So the staging was excellent—but the main point is that How To
Succeed’s score reflected this mocking craziness, from the musical
suggestion of the addict’s withdrawal when the coffee maker fritzes out, in
“Coffee Break,” to the parody of a revivalist rave-up in “Brotherhood of
Man.” We even get a dopey touch of the classical in a love song,
“Rosemary,” when the three title notes provoke an orchestral tutti echo
worthy of Puccini, followed by the opening measures of Grieg’s Piano
Concerto. Some of the numbers are simple take-offs—“Grand Old Ivy” of the
college fight song and “Love From a Heart of Gold” of the Gilded Age
ballad. But “I Believe in You” turns the traditional Boy Loves Girl hymn into
Boy Loves Self. Morse sang it in the executive men’s wash room, as a group
of his fellow suits used their electric shavers to smooth the cheek for an
afternoon conference, the shaving scored for kazoos.
In all, a salty intelligence guides How To Succeed’s score just as it does
the book and the original design: all the departments of the production were
harmonized. However, this is not always the case in musical satires, as
witness Irving Berlin and Moss Hart’s Face the Music (1932), which
arrived concurrently with the three Gershwin political shows.
Face the Music, too, was political, a reaction to the corruption in the
administration of New York’s Mayor James J. Walker, and Hart is mordant
but Berlin is his usual amiable self. He lacks the fantasy of Gershwin’s
busybody choruses or Loesser’s Heckle and Jeckle cutups. “(Castle in Spain)
On a Roof in Manhattan” graced Face the Music with a Latin number danced
in a mirrored setting, the design and choreography by outstanding specialists
of the time, respectively Albert R. Johnson and Albertina Rasch. This is
beautiful art, romantic art: it doesn’t belong in a satire. Yes, some of Face
the Music’s numbers second Hart’s spoof, as in “Lunching at the Automat,”
picturing the leadership class, from “the Rock’fellers” to “Missus [August]
Belmont,” enjoying fast food. Still, the score in general is what Berlin might
have written for any musical comedy.
So the very genre of the musical satire was newborn and tender at the
time—and that may be why there was no musical version of Chicago then.
Or was it because of all that “Chicago as the ultimate American city”
baggage, the unbridled capitalism on one hand and anarchy on the other?
Because while twenties musical comedy seemed almost improvisationally
chaotic in its plotting, it worshipped the authoritarian idylls of love and
marriage as givens in every American life. Only villains remained bachelors.
And what about Chicago’s murder factor? There had been killings in
Rose-Marie (1924), by an adulteress no less, but only to save her lover from
her enraged husband; in Deep River (1926), in a duel; in Rainbow (1928), in
self-defense. But these were serious musicals; Deep River hasn’t a single
laugh in any of its three acts. Chicago, after all, is a comedy with a killing.
Nor was Maurine Watkins’ assault on that other authoritarian idyll, the
American way of justice, suitable for adaptation. When twenties musicals
used plays as source material, they were invariably skylarking farces about
mistaken identity or the like. Besides, was any musical-comedy star capable
of actuating a character as rough and selfish as Roxie Hart?
There was one: Marilyn Miller. An elfin blond dancer and the particular
pet of Florenz Ziegfeld in both book shows and revues, Miller had been
Broadway’s official Cinderella ever since the aforementioned Sally, playing
a waitress who crashes the Follies. Singing in the Victorian heroine’s headvoice
soprano and adept in both hoofing and ballet (that is, in populist and
elite strains of dance) Miller personified the melting maid of the happy stage
with infusions of flapper—the bobbed hair, the ambition. We remember her
establishing number in Sally, “[I wish I could be like] Joan of Arc”:
determined yet wistful, a lovely wonder.
But that was the public Miller. Offstage, she was intensely self-oriented
and sensually appetitive: a Roxie Hart. And Miller had Roxie’s temper.
When Ziegfeld brought his little girl, Patricia, to a matinee of Sally and father
and daughter paid a visit to Miller’s dressing room, Patty found the magical
star in a highly unmagical mood, and when the Ziegfelds beat a hasty retreat,
a jar of cold cream flew crashing against the closed door.
Though only five, Patty caught the contradiction between art and life. “It’s
different back here, isn’t it?” she observed: for she had seen Roxie Hart for
fair. So wouldn’t Miller have been a sensation in a musical Chicago, turning
the musical-comedy damsel icon inside out? Or was Broadway ready to see
Public Sweetheart Number One turn killer? Would Ziegfeld or Charles
Dillingham, Miller’s contracted producers throughout the 1920s, have
allowed Dolly Dearest onstage in such a predatory role?
The musical simply wasn’t that rich a form then. But the narrative satires
as such kept coming, two presenting the public with replicas of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, a very easy way to dress one’s show with an
extraordinary character. The first of the two, I’d Rather Be Right (1937),
was the Absolutely Guaranteed Smash, not because of the second-rate
Rodgers and Hart score, but because of a very amusing Kaufman and Hart
script and the outstanding star turn of the decade, by George M. Cohan, in a
role—everybody suddenly realized—he was born to play. In rimless
spectacles and a morning coat over striped dark trousers, Cohan was
Roosevelt’s double. (The show didn’t put the actor in Roosevelt’s
wheelchair, but then few of the public knew how crippled the President
really was.)
Billed as “a musical revue,” I’d Rather Be Right was more of an
episodic book show: to enable two kids to afford to get married, the
President tries to balance the budget, each new attempt creating a new comic
or musical “act.” They all fail, but the kids decide to marry anyway. Besides,
most of what happens turns out to have been a dream, with FDR strolling
through New York’s Central Park without a security detail, his actual cabinet
materializing in song befitting a Gilbert and Sullivan touring company, the
nine Supreme Court judges (all in Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes’
beard) popping out from behind bits of the scenery crying, “No, you don’t!”
when the President tries to pass a law, and captains of industry getting in on
one of Roosevelt’s welfare-for-work programs by manning picks and shovels
to transfer a little twig from one spot to another.
The zaniest bit was the cabinet’s radio show, the White House Jamboree,
with “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Hillbilly Swing Orchestra,” Postmaster
General James Farley as emcee, Secretary of State Cordell Hull telling a
“Pat and Mike” Irish joke, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins sharing
insider D. C. dish while someone tapped a telegraph key in the style of
Walter Winchell’s radio spots (“Fashion note: Senator William E. Borah
[FDR’s worst enemy in Congress] sleeps in just his pajama tops”), and
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. flavoring “A Baby Bond For
Baby” with the vapid honey of the airwave crooner. Clearly, I’d Rather Be
Right is an unusual work, yet it is as if the score submits to the book rather
than matches it.
The librettist-lyricist of the other musical about FDR, Maxwell Anderson,
was not a Rooseveltian. On the contrary, Anderson saw the President as a
war-mongering fascist, which led the audience to assume Anderson had in
mind not Roosevelt but Adolf Hitler. This show was Knickerbocker Holiday
(1938), with émigré composer Kurt Weill, and the setting was old Nieuw
Amsterdam. Anderson’s Roosevelt was Pieter Stuyvesant, played by Walter
Huston in the first great musical turn by a star not associated with musicals.
Reveling in his trick pegleg costume, copping the show’s main ballad,
“September Song,” joining a line of cuties in a “Dutch Dance” of mixed
meter, varied by , to suggest the clomping wooden leg, and slyly
euphemizing to tart up his tyranny (controlling the economy to favor the
oligarchy is “a slight financial sophistication”), Huston had a ball. And he
knew who his nemesis was almost from the moment he stepped on stage: the
show’s First Couple boy, Brom Broek. He’s what happened to the sheik
when he got political; his idea of team sports is revolution.
So this is the beginning of the musical’s series of rough diamonds,
attractive and powerful men who, in one way or another, refuse to fit into the
prevailing social landscape—Carousel’s Billy Bigelow, Brigadoon’s
Tommy Albright, The Pajama Game’s Sid Sorokin, 1776’s John Adams,
Sunday in the Park With George’s Seurat. Brom is a conscientious objector,
born to exasperate fascists:
: Democracy? What’s a democracy?
: It’s—where you’re governed by amateurs. It’s—a free country.
: Ridiculous. … Arrest him!
And there will be no trial:
: Trial, hell! When a man’s guilty what the hell good’s a trial!
Knickerbocker Holiday is a funny but secretly bitter piece, for Anderson
really did think that power attracted the worst people as a rule. As he
explained in his preface to the show’s published text, “Government … must
be drastically limited in its scope, because it … will automatically become a
monopoly in crime and devour the civilization over which it presides.” As if
adducing proof of Anderson’s observation, in 2016 the President of
Germany, Joachim Gauck, said in a television interview, “Die Eliten sind gar
nicht das Problem—die Bevölkerungen sind das Problem.” (The elites are
not at all the problem—the people are the problem.)
Heretofore, musicals were written to give the public a break from the
struggles of life; Maxwell Anderson wrote Knickerbocker Holiday to force
the public to confront the struggles of life. This gave the show a distinctive
tang next to its contemporaries The Boys from Syracuse, Du Barry Was a
Lady, and Hellzapoppin. Further, Kurt Weill was the ideal musician to give
Anderson’s lyrics music with spice and bite, in that unique Weillian
orchestration suggesting the dance band engaged for Sadie Hawkins Night in
Mother Courage’s bordello. And while “September Song” was the hit, the
show’s key number was “How Can You Tell an American?,” as it aligns with
Anderson’s belief that we as a people instinctively refuse to obey: because
obedience is in itself anti-democratic.
It’s the Chicago thing, the Prohibition thing: America is anarchy at its
best. The libertarian Anderson thought even the Social Security Act (just
three years old at the time) “bureaucratic absolutism”—but “How Can You
Tell an American?” doesn’t go that far. Rather, it says—no, proclaims—that
we insist on living “without the supervision of a governmental plan, and
that’s an American!” Weill gave the lyrics a swinging tune with a healthy
undertone of willfulness in it, so the music sounds like the words.
And there it is: a musical with politics. The aim of this chapter is to
monitor the development of the kind of show that will lead us to Chicago: the
commentative musical, individualized in not just story and characters but its
music as well, singing in its own unique idiom. Up to this point, in the 1930s,
virtually every American musical employs the popular song style of the day.
Richard Rodgers was different from Cole Porter, yes. Still, even at their most
imaginative, such writers use the available forms, which gives the musical in
general a shallow texture. We want to hear outlandish music to match the
outlandish dramaturgy.
So now we come to a pair from the late-middle 1930s that marked the
satiric musical’s first absolute deviations from popular-music norms, Kurt
Weill and Paul Green’s Johnny Johnson (1936) and Marc Blitzstein’s The
Cradle Will Rock (1937). These two very different pieces seem like
partners, as both are political and use exaggeration and mannerism. Neither
show is entirely a satire, and they certainly cannot be seen as forerunners of
the Chicago musical per se. Its template is show biz, glamorous and slick.
Instead, Johnny Johnson and The Cradle Will Rock adhere to the line of
socially progressive drama that disdained the allure and kicks of the
Broadway show shops.
Thus, at one point during Johnny Johnson’s rehearsals, when a member
of the company made a suggestion to the director about how to pep up the
climax of a number that wasn’t going over well, the director shut him up with
“Don’t come around here with your vaudeville tricks!”
Johnny Johnson—and Cradle as well—were conceived to adopt
performing styles alien to what the public expected of musicals. It was the
Group Theatre—progenitor of the American version of Stanislafsky known
as “The Method”—that produced Johnny Johnson, so its cast would be not
entertainers but human beings, startling in their honesty. The very word
musical meant Ethel Merman, Bert Lahr, and a chorus of cute kids who were
Very Happy All the Time. Johnny Johnson, however, follows the adventures
of a shy and naive—really, an unformed—young man who enlists in World
War I and, shell-shocked, tries to pacify the Allied generals with laughing
gas. It’s a grim but poignant work, a kind of screwball tragedy, for Paul
Green—like Kurt Weill’s next collaborator, Maxwell Anderson—was a
playwright rather than a musical-comedy guy. Not knowing the form’s rules,
Green breaks them all, creating a musical unlike any other.
For his part, Weill was more or less fresh off the boat from Europe at this
point, and, far more than in the succeeding Knickerbocker Holiday, Johnny
Johnson luxuriated in the Symphonie-mit-Jazz soundscape expected of an
enfant terrible in Weimar Germany. This is deliciously creepy music; the
prelude’s first notes suggest an ethnic-cleansing roundup of innocents, and the
score as a whole is so drastically imaginative that, watching the show unfold,
one has no idea what the next number will be about—a mother confiding fey
autobiographical arcana as she works at her sewing machine; an army
captain singing a tango about a burglar and his entranced woman victim; the
history of psychiatry outlined by a mad psychiatrist. Such surprises never
occurred in other musicals, because standard libretto writing called for genre
numbers, from love ballads to the New Dance Sensation, and the cues were
blatant, as when college co-ed Flo sets up Good News!’s title tune:
: I’ve had a dozen omens of good luck, so Good News must be on his way.
Johnny Johnson isn’t a “title tune” kind of show, but it does have “Song of the
Guns,” as the muzzles of three huge cannons appear in the darkness of noman’s
land, pushing forward over the heads of sleeping soldiers with a
lullaby of death. The entire evening is like that: a musical about a
nonconformist that must therefore be nonconformist itself.
Unfortunately, the Group, brilliant actors though they were, did not field
the necessary vocal talent. Remember Johnny Johnson’s director a bit ago,
snarking about “vaudeville tricks”? That was Lee Strasberg, a guru of acting
naturalism but musically ignorant and professionally stubborn. Worse, the
actress struggling with the song in question was his wife, Paula, and he was
giving her no help whatsoever.
And that was Johnny Johnson: the most miscast musical in history. Are
the intriguing musical satires bound to be this primitive, wary of Big
Broadway’s ritzy dexterity, its Dream Ballets (for art) and its chorus lines
(for beauty)? Yet Chicago, arguably our most potent satire, will be the utmost
in Big Broadway expertise, as the utmost Bob Fosse musical, exposing the
fraud of razzle dazzle even as it revels in razzle dazzle. Because Fosse was
Mr. Show Biz; but Fosse had edge.
The edgiest of all the commentative shows is Johnny Johnson’s evil twin,
The Cradle Will Rock, also a product of the independent theatre community,
though backed by the state, under one of President Roosevelt’s safety nets for
the arts, the Federal Theatre. Johnny Johnson is a piteous Bildungsroman
mixed of the comic and the mournful, but The Cradle Will Rock is a
carmagnole: Unionization or Revolution! And Cradle’s cast was another
gang that didn’t really sing, partly because the Federal Theatre’s casting pool
took in the lowest echelons of the professional acting ranks and a lot of
hopeful amateurs as well. Though this is seldom mentioned today, the
established Broadway community intensely resented this subsidy for rival
productions while seasoned Broadway pros continued to suffer in a
Depression economy.
That might be why Actors Equity forbade the Cradle cast from playing on
a substitute stage when the production lost its theatre, because of Cradle’s
incendiary look at a Chicago-style confrontation of management versus labor
in the fictional Steeltown, U.S.A. In a colorful switcheroo, the company
found an empty playhouse and the actors defied Equity passive-aggressively
by performing from seats in the auditorium in perhaps the most famous first
night of all time.
Thus, Cradle flourishes in revival (as Johnny Johnson does not), as a
historical tourist stop rather than as a beloved classic. It’s a purposely offkilter
piece, for author Blitzstein uses stick figures, off-accents in the lyrics,
and comic-book character names3 in a stark scenario with irony rather than
drollery and no dance numbers. Further, as the more or less original-cast 78s
reveal, Orson Welles, the show’s director, coached the decent characters to
seem “normal” but Mr. Mister and his minions to overplay in caricature,
giving the show a fantastical air even within its true and timeless look at how
the rich buy their allies and enslave and murder everyone else. Oddly,
Blitzstein, a lifelong Communist, saw this only in America, though in
Cradle’s 1937 this was exactly how Stalin was running Russia.
Actually, there is an entire Mister family, though Junior and Sister Mister
are goons and Mrs. Mister is the sort of ditsy grande dame that Face the
Music’s Mary Boland played in Big Broadway outings and the movies.
Blitzstein’s dame’s chauffeur-driven Pierce-Arrow plays a slight variation
on the second theme of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture (the strings’ A flat
major figure, at bar 82), and she collects creative talent. “Who says I haven’t
brought about a union of the arts?” she brags, meeting violinist Yasha and
painter Dauber in Cradle’s most comic scene. A medley of dialogue and
songs, it starts with the two mens’ duet “The Rich,” revealing the sad
paradox of arts philanthropists: they’re “so damn low” and “far-fetched,” but
utterly necessary. Yasha and Dauber need even each other, because who else
understands them? Blitzstein seethes under the jesting, however. When Mrs.
Mister asks the pair to join her husband’s euphemistically named Liberty
Committee—“You will, won’t you?” she asks, meaning “You’d better”—
they’re enthusiastic:
. : But don’t you want to know what it’s all about?
: Politics?
: Cora, we’re artists!
For perspective, consider Yasha and Dauber’s counterparts in Richard
Strauss’ opera Capriccio (1942), the composer Flamand and the poet
Olivier. They, too, are rivals for the attention of a powerful sponsor, the
Countess, but, as the two men themselves put it, they are “loving enemies,”
“friendly opponents.” Capriccio asks which opera values more, the music or
the words, and while it never answers the question, it sees Flamand and
Olivier bonded in a synergistic energy: the two arts are inseparable. Thus,
composer and poet are bonded by the intelligence of music, the lyricism of
poetry.
Yasha and Dauber, by comparison, aren’t artists: they’re money-grubbers
exploiting music and painting. But of course Capriccio is “sacred” in tone
and Cradle “profane.” Opera treats nobility, beauty, passion. The satiric
musical treats hypocrisy, egomania, greed. Capriccio longs for the harmony
of art, while Cradle wants to teach its audience to recognize the damage a
professional ruling class does to the ideal of a republic.
We have reached the early 1940s, which brings us to the next chapter in
the Chicago epic, that of the Hollywood remake with Ginger Rogers. But let
us first see how the newish form of “musical play,” building on the
breakaway worldviews of Green and Blitzstein, proceeds to the next step, in
questioning some of the most deeply held beliefs of its public.
These include especially, one, love guarantees a good marriage, and, two,
hard work guarantees a happy life. But Ian Marshall Fisher, who runs the
Lost Musicals series in London, noticed that three American shows he
revived, all from the late 1940s, seemed to be the first musicals to challenge
these beliefs—to deflate, quite deliberately, middle-class ideals. Each of the
three titles was an extremely creative endeavor, well out of the traditional
formats, and each ran for a while but proved commercially disappointing and
is seldom seen even today, in our age of rediscovery: Lerner and Loewe’s
The Day Before Spring (1945), Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro (1947),
and Weill and Lerner’s Love Life (1948).
All three are romantic-satiric pieces, one reason why they baffled some
of their audience. The Day Before Spring tells women, You may have
married the wrong man. Allegro tells men, You’re going to be tricked into
making choices that will wreck your happiness. Love Life tells both men and
women, Modern Society will drive you crazy.
What do wives want from their husbands? The hot man? In Spring, he
was played by Bill (later William) Johnson, a seductive baritone and so twofisted
that, years later, in a tour of Kismet with Zero Mostel as the Wazir,
Johnson got so fed up with Mostel’s comic ad libbing that he hauled off and
decked him, right on stage. Spring’s heroine feared this guy’s adventurism.
Yes, he’s exciting. But is he safe? Indeed, she had married a safe man, played
by John Archer, a B-film Hollywood actor and the essence of humdrum. Now
a college reunion brings her face to face with the hot man, and they run off
together. The safe man overtakes them, and, in the ensuing argument, Archer
hits on his own defense-of-marriage act by crying out that he needs his wife.
He needs her.
What woman can resist that? But would she have been happier with the
hot man? You never do know, because hot men need only themselves—and
the musical has thus finally caught up with real life. Johnny Johnson and The
Cradle Will Rock were fables. But these three forties musicals tell
naturalistic stories containing psychological puzzles. Further, they were all
artistically imaginative—Spring boasted choreography by ballet’s Anthony
Tudor and a bizarre interlude in which the heroine got advice from Plato,
Voltaire, and Freud (with a Jewish accent). The Lerner and Loewe score was
typical forties Broadway, from the bouncy waltz “This Is My Holiday” to the
graceful boogie-woogie “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou [baby].”
Nevertheless, the narrative was unique, asking the eventually eight-times
married Alan Jay Lerner’s favorite question: how do we know whom to
love?
The artistic choreography of the era enlivened also Allegro, in Agnes de
Mille’s stylizations of children’s games, a college mixer (with a startling pas
de deux by Annabelle Lyon, in toe shoes, and Harrison Muller, in taps),
young wives roughing it on a tight household budget, and the neurotic helterskelter
of contemporary life. Allegro is famously the first Big Broadway
musical without scenery, but there was actually a lot to look at—furniture
pieces, two black traveler curtains (transparent and opaque, depending on the
lighting), and back projections. The unique staging gives today’s writers so
much to describe they tend to miss how much Allegro devastates middleclass
hopes. Here’s a fine fellow, handsome and ethical and the son of a
doctor, imbued with the doctor’s wondrous healing mission. Yet somehow he
ends up with a manipulative and unfaithful wife, nursing rich
hypochondriacs.
Further risking the audience’s discomfort, Allegro’s first act was romantic
and its second act satiric. Romantic: the young doctor courts his bride-to-be
in “You Are Never Away [from your home in my heart]” as the show’s
omniscient chorus sings along in an elaborate vocal arrangement and the girl
herself dances. But she does not sing. Is he the only one who loves?
Satiric: as social leaders in our favorite location, Chicago, the couple
gives At Homes, staged by de Mille with the ensemble crowded together in
the center of the stage, singing, “Yatata, yatata” and mouthing eulogies of
their empty activities.
Love Life, too, concerned a vexed marriage, here because of external
pressures from an ever-changing environment that tests the bond of Sam (Ray
Middleton) and Susan (Nanette Fabray) Cooper. It’s money troubles,
feminism, business, politics. By the second act, Sam and Susan, separated,
were so confused about why their marriage failed that Weill and Lerner
seemed confused themselves, because the story didn’t end: the Coopers were
last seen trying to reach each other from opposite ends of a tightrope. As we
wonder if they will, the curtain falls and the show is over. Okay, but what
happened?
Some of my readers may be reminded of Stephen Sondheim’s Company
(1970), and, indeed, this chapter is concerned with where satire fits into our
complex modern musicals that psychoanalyze their characters while opening
up a cultural perspective. They may even dare to quiz the evasions and
pretensions of the audience—Follies, Nine, Dreamgirls, A Doll’s Life,
Sunday in the Park With George, Marie Christine, Parade, Hamilton.
These mostly dark shows are not satires, no. On the contrary, even when they
deal in part with comic irony and exaggeration, they are romantic, drawing us
into a dream of reality.
Satire is the opposite: self-aware, didactic, Brechtian. It’s heartless, and
the closer we get to the musical Chicago, the more we will notice how its
first two movie versions emotionalized Maurine Watkins, while the musical
celebrates her caustic tone. What does Roxie utter as an exit line after she
shoots Fred Casely (three times, no less)? “Good gracious, what have I
done”? Or “I must call for an ambulance”? No:
: I gotta pee.
Or think of this merry little snippet, between prison inmate June and the
matron:
: If my husband, Wilbur, comes here … you tell him I do not want to see him.
: June, your husband is dead, you killed him.
: Oh well, forget it, then.
Or even this spoken bit in the “Cell Block Tango,” as Liz recalls being
exasperated at Bernie’s habit of popping his chewing gum. She cautions him
not to pop it again, he does, and she grabs the family shotgun to fire two
warning shots:
: Into his head.4
Strange as it may sound, while the dark, commentative modern musical is as
evolved as it could be from the musical’s earliest days, the musical satire—
and Chicago in particular—marks a return to proto-musical comedy.
Remember, The Beggar’s Opera, that mother of the musical, was a satire.
Later, Jacques Offenbach, CEO of the French school, opéra bouffe (basically
“joke opera”), was very influential in America with his “genre primitif et
gai”: silly, loony, irreverent, and sexy, as guiltless as a child and all but
lawlessly free. Offenbach’s musicals were fantastical, and satire, too, is
fantastical—a war over cheese, an army private merrily anesthetizing
warlords, a Pierce-Arrow playing Beethoven. Most of our classic titles are
not fantastical—Show Boat, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, A Chorus Line. But
Chicago is: silly, loony, irreverent, and sexy, in the Offenbach manner.
And Chicago is political as well, at least subtextually (as we’ll see in
due course). Chicago says the System is corrupt. And that would be because
the Establishment is corrupt, and we can secure our freedom only by voting
politicians out of office every generation. As Maxwell Anderson says,
“Government must never be trusted.”
But then Mark Twain responds with “If voting made any difference, they
wouldn’t let us do it.” And Joseph Stalin tops Twain with “The people who
cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide
everything.”
1. Similarly, Margaret Sanger, who pioneered the birth-control movement, was hounded by the
authorities, even though her issue was preventing unwanted pregnancies, not aborting them. At the very
same time, spokesmen for systems of government antagonistic to our own were generally left alone.
Sanger was arrested numerous times, but the Communist Party took part in presidential elections from
1924. In 1932, its candidate, William Z. Foster (nominated at a convention in, not surprisingly, Chicago)
polled 102,785 votes.
2. Leonard Bernstein made this comparison before me, on television (on Omnibus), as principals
and chorus illustrated the relationship between the two shows’ first-act finales. His point was the same
one I’m making in this book—that the “popular” nature of the music in musicals is only deceptively
simple: it can in fact draw on a sophisticated musical intelligence to make its effects.
3. Mr. Mister and Mrs. Mister run Steeltown through the intimidation of money power; their stooges
among the opinion-makers take in Reverend Salvation, Editor Daily, and Dr. Specialist. The good guys
bear more naturalistic names—Moll, Gus and Sadie Polock, Steve, and the union-organizer hero, Larry
Foreman.
4. The globally popular 1996 revival has given us many different performers as the killers, with
many different ways of putting over their spoken solos in the “Cell Block Tango,” but we often hear this
line banged out defiantly. For the original production, however, Fosse had Cheryl Clark deliver it
deadpan, apparently to show how nonchalant she still is about what she has done. In fact, Chicago’s
guilty women never show the slightest sense of remorse or even ambivalence. He had it coming; now
it’s good.