Four Decades of the American Musical

Oklahoma! on Broadway in the 1940s.

Half a century ago The Modern Library published Six Plays by Rodgers & Hammerstein and the complete libretti of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas; when I was in grade school, those two books were the earliest purchases I made for my own library of musical-theatre scripts. I recalled my excitement at having these musicals at my fingertips when I received my copy of The Library of America’s new two-volume collection American Musicals.  It’s expertly edited by Laurence Maslon (who was responsible for Kaufman and Co.: Broadway Comedies, their aggregate of George S. Kaufman collaborations) and handsomely packaged, with gorgeous production photos – most of which I’ve never seen before – and copies of show posters and sheet music. Each of the volumes contains the books and lyrics of eight musicals, arranged chronologically and divided roughly into decades, 1927-1949 and 1950-1969.

Shy: The Life of Mary Rodgers

Carol Burnett and Joe Bova in the original Broadway production of Once Upon a Mattress (1959).

Mary Rodgers, the daughter of the legendary Broadway (and occasionally Hollywood) composer Richard Rodgers, wrote the music for the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress. Aside from The Mad Show, a downtown revue she contributed to that ran for a year, Mattress was her only hit show, but she worked on many other stage musicals that flopped (often out of town) as well as a handful of TV musicals. She also wrote the Freaky Friday children’s books, assisted Leonard Bernstein on the Young People’s Concerts on TV, chaired or served on the boards of many schools and other organizations, and raised five kids; a sixth died tragically in childhood. (One of them, Adam Guettel, is the composer-lyricist of The Light in the Piazza, which I join my Critics at Large colleague Joe Mader in calling the best musical written in the twenty-first century.) This life, which Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell would have pronounced “crowded with incident,” is memorialized in Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), which Rodgers co-wrote with the current New York Times theatre critic Jesse Green and on which he provided the finishing touches after she died, at the age of eighty-three, in 2014. (Green was then reviewing plays for New York Magazine.)

Something Old, Something New: The King and I & Something Rotten!

Ken Watanabe and Kelli O'Hara in The King and I, at the Lincoln Center. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The first five or ten minutes of Bartlett Sher’s new production of The King and I are spectacular. The ship carrying Anna Leonowens (Kelli O’Hara) and her son Louis (Jake Lucas) to Siam, where she has been contracted to teach the royal children, glides across the stage of the Vivian Beaumont (at Lincoln Center), then makes a slow right-angled turn and moves toward the audience, shrouded in steam, while representatives of the court march down the aisles to meet it. The thirty-piece orchestra underneath the thrust renders the Richard Rodgers music with the robustness that can only be nostalgic for New York theatregoers who are middle-aged or older. And you feel blanketed by the sumptuousness of Michael Yeargan’s sets, Catherine Zuber’s costumes and Donald Holder’s lighting. Seeing the show at a Wednesday matinee late in previews, I thought to myself, “Is it possible that Sher is going to make me care about The King and I the way he made me care about South Pacific?” (His South Pacific, which opened at the Beaumont in 2008, is the best production of a musical I’ve ever seen.)

An Unexpected Problem: Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific

The touring production of the 2008 Tony-winning revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's South Pacific wrapped its second Toronto production in a year yesterday (it's part of the local company's, Dancap, subscription series). Normally, I wouldn't bother reviewing a show that has closed, but since it will likely set up tent in another city soon (though that city has not yet been announced), I felt there was an issue I had to address.

Full disclosure: I've never been a fan of musical theatre, whether it's on stage or on film, with the exception of Singin' in the Rain (1951), so I attended a little reluctantly. Based on James A. Michener's World War Two-set Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, or rather series of linked stories, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), the musical tells the story of Ensign Nellie Forbush, an American nurse stationed on a fictitious island near the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. She's attached to a Navy command post located there. The military men and nurses have not seen combat and while away their time flirting, falling in love and carousing. Well, the men do the carousing, in such songs as “There's Nothing Like a Dame” and “Bloody Mary.” Nellie has fallen in love with an ex-expatriate French man, Emile de Becque. De Becque is a plantation owner on the island who has more than one secret. She's conflicted because de Becque's mysteries are irritating and he's a lot older than her. They sing about their love, break up, fall back in love, break up, make up, bicker, are separated and then finally reunite. The subplot features a navy flier, Lieutenant Cable, who has fallen in love with a local Polynesian girl.

Dust Bowl: Oklahoma!

 Rebecca Naomi Jones and Damon Daunno in Oklahoma!. (Photo: Teddy Wolff)

Daniel Fish’s new, stripped-down production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, which has moved from St. Ann’s Warehouse to Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, is being hailed as brilliant and revolutionary, much like the original 1943 version, even though that didn’t do anything that the 1927 Kern and Hammerstein Show Boat (or for that matter, the 1940 Rodgers and Hart Pal Joey), hadn’t done before and better.

Revolutionary? Let’s start at the end: in this Oklahoma!, after the cast has sung the title song, our heroes, the bronco-buster Curly (played by Damon Daunno, so slight he looks like he’d split in two if he ever sat astride a horse) and Laurey (a very angry Rebecca Naomi Jones) are dressed in white for their wedding, when Jud Fry (Patrick Vaill) crashes in and offers Curly a gift, conditional upon his getting to kiss the bride. Jud and Laurey French-kiss, despite Jud's having previously tried to rape her and threatened her and her family. Curly opens the gift, and it’s a gun (not the booby-trapped “Little Wonder” traditional to stodgy stagings of yore). Jud then stands about ten feet in front of Curley and spreads his arms. Curly shoots him. Curly’s gun is rigged so that Curly (yes, Curly) is spattered with copious amounts of blood, his face crimson and dripping, his white (modern-dress) cowboy suit now mostly red, with a significant portion of blood spattering his bride. Jud is still standing. The rest of the eleven-person cast, who have been sitting around in chairs watching this, intone the next four or five minutes of dialogue with no affect. “Is he dead? He looks dead.” (Uh, he’s still standing, so no, he isn’t dead.) After too much of this, Judd goes upstage and lies down on the floor. Aunt Eller (the redoubtable Mary Testa) then bullies the local marshal and judge into a kangaroo-court trial that finds Curly innocent by reason of self-defense; the ensemble reprises the title tune; and as they sing of the grandness of the land they belong to and the new union they hope to join, Laurey sobs in sorrow, others writhe in misery, some stomp in anger, and Curly plays the guitar in his blood-stained clothes. All is corrupt, all is unclean, all is rot.

Wait, what?

Trying to Make the Old New Again in Oklahoma! and A Star Is Born

Jordan Barbour and Jonathan Luke Stevens in Oklahoma! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival  (Photo: Jenny Graham)

Every few years or so someone mounts a major revival of Oklahoma! (1943) or Carousel (1945) on Broadway or in the West End – or in the West End and then on Broadway – and critics fall over themselves proclaiming that this rendition of a Rodgers and Hammerstein blockbuster is fresh and relevant and reaffirms their rock-bound standing in the musical-theatre canon. But no production in my experience has managed to transcend the tinny, pedantic banalities of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics or the embarrassing pseudo-populist vernacular, which makes the fake poetry in The Grapes of Wrath sound like Walt Whitman by comparison. God knows I should have known better, but I checked in on the latest Broadway Carousel, directed by Jack O’Brien. But though the choreographer, Joshua Peck, came up with one thrilling number (“Blow High, Blow Low,” showcasing the dazzling high stepping of Amar Ramasar as Jigger Craigin), the dialogue, with its hopeless attempt at mimicking the sound of turn-of-the-century Mainers, sank the performances of the talented cast, Jessie Mueller, Joshua Henry, Lindsay Mendez and Renee Fleming among them. (Plus there was no fucking carousel.)

There are two new versions of Oklahoma! these days, one on each coast. I skipped Daniel Fish’s at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (which prompted The New York Times’s Ben Brantley and Jesse Green, in “conversation” on the front page of the arts section, to outdo each other with kudos) but sat through Bill Rauch’s, which is selling out the big house at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, where Rauch is artistic director. Rauch and Fish seem to be in competition for the most up-to-date twenty-first-century revival of a classic musical. At St. Ann’s Ado Annie is in a wheelchair, but Rauch has cast a man, Jonathan Luke Stevens, as Ado Andy, and a woman, Tatiana Wechsler, as Curly. Two same-sex couples versus one disabled actor: Rauch wins the virtue sweepstakes hands down.

Side Show and Allegro: Another Go-Round

Ryan Silverman, Emily Padgett, Erin Davie and Matthew Hydzik in Side Show (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Opening on Broadway in 1997, Side Show lasted only about three months; the current revival, staged by Bill Condon, is the first version I’ve had a chance to see. Written by Henry Krieger (music) and Bill Russell (book and lyrics), it’s a semi-fictionalized account of the lives of the conjoined twins Violet and Daisy Hilton, born in England to an unmarried barmaid and then displayed in America by abusive adoptive parents. In the musical, an unemployed talent scout named Terry Connor sees them in a side show in San Antonio in the early days of the Depression, gets his song-and-dance-man pal Buddy Foster to teach them to sing and dance, and encourages them to sue the proprietor – Sir, their foster father – for their freedom. They win, and Terry puts them on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit.

Classic Post-War American Musicals: South Pacific and Kiss Me, Kate

Joan Almedilla singing "Bali H'ai" to Cameron Loyal and the sailors in South Pacific.

Of the trio of Rodgers and Hammerstein mega-hits from the 1940s, South Pacific (1949) gets the fewest productions. Even Carousel, with its rigorous vocal demands and its onstage carousel, is revived more often. (Oklahoma! seems to show up somewhere every season.) South Pacific has a big, mostly male cast and the machinations of the plot, adapted from stories in James Michener’s World War II novel Tales of the South Pacific, are complicated, especially in the second act, when the two major male characters, a French planter named Émile de Becque and Navy Lieutenant Joe Cable, are carrying on a covert military operation on one of the smaller islands. But it’s the most interesting of the three shows because of its theme and because the Arksansas-born protagonist, Navy Nurse Nellie Forbush, is the most unusual heroine in any musical of its era. Though R&H wrote two of their most relentlessly upbeat songs for her, “A Cockeyed Optimist” and “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy,” Hammerstein and Joshua Logan, who co-wrote the book, expose the darker side of her character. She falls in love with de Becque but runs away from him when she discovers that he fathered two children with his late Polynesian mistress. Her story is echoed by Cable’s:  he tumbles for a young islander named Liat but realizes that he could never bring a woman of color home to his family in Philadelphia.

The new production of South Pacific at the Goodspeed Opera House doesn’t balance these challenging elements successfully. It’s not very appealing to look at – the staging is static except when the director, Chay Yew, moves the actors around in parallel lines, and the set by veteran Alexander Dodge is surprisingly scrappy. (The choreography by Parker Esse is better, and Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design is better still.) And though the voices are good, the acting mostly isn’t. Rodgers and Hammerstein strove toward a greater realism in musical theatre, and though the dialogue doesn’t exactly soar, it tries hard to be gritty rather than synthetic. But here the chorus of Seabees is broad and caricatured and the musical performances are big and self-conscious. The exception is Joan Almedilla as Bloody Mary, Liat’s mother: though Almedilla has a beautiful instrument, she sings the lustrous “Bali H’ai” and even the icky “Happy Talk” to privilege acting values over vocal showiness. The night I saw the show the understudies, Hannah Jewel Kohn and Eric Briarley, were covering Nellie and Émile, and both sang well; I don’t know if the usual leads, Danielle Wade and Omar Lopez-Cepero, have been any more successful in bringing this relationship to life. I would have directed Kevin Quillon as Luther Billis, the clownish sailor who turns out to be an unexpectedly hero, to understate a little more, but he’s fun to watch. The big problem is the young couple, Cable (Cameron Loyal) and Liat (Alex Humphreys):  he’s a cardboard cut-out with a nice voice and she doesn’t even begin to suggest a character.

Constructing Musicals: Jack Viertel’s The Secret Life of the American Musical

Cast of Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, 1977. (Photo: Bobby Bank)

Jack Viertel’s new book The Secret Life of the American Musical (Sarah Crichton Books) is a gift for those of us who love musical theatre; I read it over just a couple of days and would have devoured it in a single sitting if time had allowed. Viertel, a one-time dramaturg, drama critic and arts editor who is now, among many other accomplishments, the artistic director of City Center’s Encores! series, has taught musical theatre at NYU’s Tisch School for the last ten years, and this volume emerged from his classes as well as from his extensive experience with musicals over the past three decades. I suspect it would be impossible to find anyone who knows more about the subject, and in The Secret Life of the American Musical he offers a comprehensive master class in how good musicals are constructed. Even for those of us who have seen and listened to hundreds of musicals, the book is a series of revelations – mostly because of his method of juxtaposing shows that are vastly different in style, tone and subject matter to show how the same principles operate across the spectrum.

West Side Story: Rumble in the Rubble

David Alvarez Ariana DeBose in West Side Story (2021).

The enthusiasm over Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, the street-gang retelling of Romeo and Juliet that opened on Broadway in 1957 and was first filmed by Robert Wise in 1961, reminds me of the outpouring of praise that greets Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 Carousel every time it generates another Broadway revival. Just imagine, runs the usual buzz, someone wrote this serious, important musical back in the dark ages when musicals were frivolous! How modern, how prescient! How daring to kill off the protagonist, to incorporate domestic abuse, to put disaffected youth on the stage! How fresh it still seems, how up-to-the-minute! Well, I see no reason to condescend to lighthearted musicals, especially when they come equipped with scores by Kern, the Gershwins, Porter, Berlin and Rodgers and Hart. But the truth is that the American musical took its first resounding step past frivolity when Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote Show Boat, with its tragic racial subplot, exactly three decades before West Side Story. And that’s a good musical. 

Shadows in the Night: Dylan’s Sinatra

Photo: Fred Tanneau/AFP/Getty

The title of Bob Dylan’s latest CD, Shadows in the Night, may sound sinister until you listen to it and realize that the allusion is to the shades of romantic despair, not the shadows of film noir. This is Dylan’s Sinatra album: every song on it was recorded at one time by The Voice, though you have to be a genuine aficionado to recognize some of the cuts. They include only two by the most celebrated composers in the Great American Songbook: one by Irving Berlin (“What’ll I Do”), one by Rodgers and Hammerstein (“Some Enchanted Evening”). And though Dylan is going for the feel of the doomed-romantic concept albums Sinatra recorded for Capitol in the fifties, with evocative names like No One Cares and Point of No Return, In the Wee Small Hours and Only the Lonely, only a couple of the songs he’s selected actually appeared on them. Instead he draws on a variety of Sinatra ballads to assemble his own version of a Sinatra concept album. The project is a surprise in many ways. But not because you don’t expect that he’d love these songs; if you’ve read his autobiography, Chronicles, then you know that the breadth of his musical tastes stretches even beyond the genres for which he’s famous: rock, folk, country, blues. It’s a surprise partly because he’s never tried anything like it before – and because, approaching these numbers for the first time, he gets spookily close to them. Dylan isn’t trying to be Sinatra, but by the mysterious process of digging a trench for himself inside the heart-bruised lyrics and aching melody lines, he ends up inhabiting the emotions of every one of these songs.

The Marriage Musical: Stephen Sondheim's Company

For Stephen Sondheim aficionados, Company is beloved as the watershed musical that established him as a musical-theatre innovator. In a number of his early musicals he supplied the lyrics for the music of older, established composers (Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story, Jule Styne on Gypsy, Richard Rodgers on Do I Hear a Waltz?). His professional debut as a composer-lyricist was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962, but that was an old-fashioned vaudeville along the lines of Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse – and bizarrely, though the score was ingenious, Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove’s libretto received all the attention. (His other solo effort, a strained, distinctly sixties satirical farce called Anyone Can Whistle, closed after 11 performances. The Encores! series of concert-style musical revivals at New York’s City Center staged it two seasons ago with a superlative cast, but engaging as the production was you could see exactly why the show had bombed in 1964.)

Do I Hear a Waltz?: An Encores! Misstep

Melissa Errico and Richard Troxell in Do I Hear a Waltz? (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

Stephen Sondheim’s only collaboration with Richard Rodgers was the 1965 musical Do I Hear a Waltz?, adapted by Arthur Laurents from his 1952 Broadway success The Time of the Cuckoo. Shirley Booth had starred in the play, as a lonely Midwesterner who comes to Venice on vacation in the hopes of enjoying a romantic fling, and Katharine Hepburn took over the role in David Lean’s 1955 film version, Summertime. Though Sondheim’s early musicals were partnerships with other composers – West Side Story with Leonard Bernstein and Gypsy with Jule Styne – he had established himself as a composer-lyricist with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Anyone Can Whistle at the beginning of the sixties. But Rodgers was, of course, the fabled writing partner of Sondheim’s adolescent mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, and Laurents was the man who wrote the book for Gypsy, so he agreed to the collaboration. But these two men of strikingly different sensibilities didn’t get along, and though the musical had a modest run it didn’t make much of an impression. (Neither did the leading lady, Elizabeth Allen.) And Sondheim has never thought much of it; in interviews and in his book Finishing the Hat he’s referred to it, quoting his friend, Rodgers’ daughter Mary a “why?” musical – as in “Why bother turning this material into a musical?”

Last weekend’s revival by Encores! marks the first time Do I Hear a Waltz? has been produced in New York since the original production. I saw the show as a teenager and know the cast album well, and I’ve always thought that the material was interesting and the score had considerable charm. Except for a couple of songs in No Strings, it’s the only late Rodgers score worth listening to; the ballads are especially lovely. Leona, the protagonist, thinks of herself as independent and resilient, but she’s febrile, with an all-or-nothing romantic fervor and fragile sensibilities; “Why is it I get so easily hurt?” she asks herself in one lyric, and the answer seems to be that she alternates between asking too much and not having the flexibility or the courage to accept what she’s offered if it’s not perfect. “Throw the dream away,” the Venetian shopkeeper Renato Di Rossi, who courts her, pleads in another song; he’s married, but in a union that has long since passed from passion into a state of mutual respect, and he doesn’t have money. The musical pits Leona’s Yankee puritanism with a more relaxed European attitude toward sex, embodied not only in Renato but also in Signora Fioria, the middle-aged proprietor of the pensione where Leona stays with two American couples. Signora Fioria seduces the younger of the two men, a painter named Eddie Yeager, whose marriage to the naïve, trusting Jennifer has begun to fray at the edges. When Leona spots Eddie going off in a gondola with the hotelkeeper, her moral shock is piled on top of her difficulties in taking Renato as he is, for good and for ill. The second act is overloaded: Laurents introduces one too many plot strands and the climactic scene teeters on the edge of melodrama, or perhaps goes over that edge, depending on your point of view and, I would think, the quality of the production.

Heart and Soul: Camelot & After Midnight

It’s still taken for granted that the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein altered the American musical theatre, but to my mind none of their collaborations stands on equal footing with those of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who overlapped with them. That’s because, even when Rodgers’s music was at its most lush (South Pacific) or most heart-rending (Carousel), Hammerstein’s words, with their resolute banality and didacticism, kept pulling it down to their populist, fake-real-folks level, whereas Lerner’s extraordinarily literate lyrics elevated Loewe’s beautiful tunes. The Austrian-born Loewe, like Jerome Kern and Kurt Weill, brought the melodic legacy of the fin-de-siècle European operettas, with their swirl of melancholy, to the American stage; you can hear it in ballads like “There But for You Go I” and “From This Day On” (Brigadoon), “I Still See Elisa” and “Another Autumn” (Paint Your Wagon), “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (My Fair Lady), “Before I Gaze at You Again” and “I Loved You Once in Silence” (Camelot). And Lerner, who bore the witty influence of Cole Porter and especially Ira Gershwin but was more of a thinker than either, strove to match him. They were at par on the 1956 My Fair Lady, which is still, I think, the zenith in American lyric writing, and again on the 1960 Camelot, their musical about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which is currently being revived by Boston’s New Rep Theatre.

Thriller: Donna Murphy on the Musical Stage

Donna Murphy in LoveMusik in 2007

We seem to be living in a golden age of musical-theatre women. The one whose name is most often on everyone’s lips is Kelli O’Hara, with her simon-pure soprano embroidered by often startlingly impassioned phrasing, whether the character she’s playing is fragile (The Light in the Piazza) or essentially conventional (South Pacific). Victoria Clark has a wide emotional range and suggests a complex response to the world deriving from accumulated experience; as O’Hara’s mother in Piazza, perhaps the best musical-theatre role ever written for a middle-aged actress, she managed to balance romantic skepticism (based on her own disappointing marriage) and optimism (based on an awakening awareness of the romantic possibilities for her damaged daughter). On the other end of the scale of middle-aged performers, Patti LuPone is a diva with grit in place of glamour, a gleaming sense of irony and an unerring instinct for how to make a song dramatic, whether in the old-fashioned Broadway manner (Gypsy) or in the Brechtian style (Sweeney Todd). Marin Mazzie, who’s been around since Ragtime and the marvelous Kathleen Marshall production of Kiss Me, Kate, has a warm soprano and an expansive presence that effortlessly fills a Broadway house. Sutton Foster has a more streamlined personality – she’s colder but more dazzling, and the best lead dancer around, as she demonstrated most recently in Marshall’s Anything Goes. Celia Keenan-Bolger is diminutive but she has a powerful core of feeling; she’s mostly attracted notice in comic roles (recently Peter and the Starcatcher), but she can be amazing in dramatic ones that call for arias of longing – Merrily We Roll Along, the Encores! revival of that Marc Blitzstein rarity Juno. Laura Benanti has a frisky, inventive wit: her show-stopping “Model Behavior” in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is the funniest musical performance I can remember seeing on a stage since Angela Lansbury introduced “The Worst Pies in London” in the original cast of Sweeney Todd nearly three and a half decades ago. Among the clowns, Faith Prince seems to have been largely forgotten – she’s become a cabaret performer – but when she starred in a revival of Bells Are Ringing on Broadway in 2001, she proved to be almost a match for the original star, the late Judy Holliday, plus she made the lilting Jule Styne melodies sound sweeter than they ever had before. Kristin Chenoweth can be hilarious, but vocally there’s almost nothing she can’t pull off (her album, Let Yourself Go, is a virtuoso accomplishment), and she was heartbreaking in the revival of the Bacharach-David Promises, Promises a couple of seasons ago. And any era that produces Audra McDonald, owner of the most versatile and most expressive dramatic singing voice since Barbra Streisand, would need to be considered a golden age by definition.

I’d be hard put to pick a favorite, but no one thrills me more on stage than Donna Murphy. Movie buffs who recognize her name from the tiny parts she’s essayed in blockbusters like Spider-Man 2 and The Bourne Legacy have no idea what she’s like on stage, where she’s always a headliner. I first saw her in a production of Pal Joey at Boston’s Huntington Theatre in 1992, as Vera, the brittle, knowing older woman who keeps the ambitious womanizer Joey, but throws him out on his ass when he proves to be more trouble than she figures he’s worth. Vera is the high-comic element in the low-down, hard-boiled John O’Hara/Rodgers and Hart material, and Murphy’s confidence in the role was almost alarming; you wondered where she could have acquired it before she’d even turned thirty-five. Two years later she had her first Broadway lead, in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Passion. Since then she’s been seen as Anna in The King and I (my impatience with Rodgers and Hammerstein kept me away from that one); as Ruth in Wonderful Town (first at Encores! and then in a full-scale Broadway expansion, both directed by Kathleen Marshall); as Lotte Lenya in Lovemusik; with Victoria Clark in Follies; in a misbegotten and short-lived original piece called The People in the Picture; and as the Witch in Into the Woods, in Central Park last summer. She was a sensationally effective as Phyllis in Follies – sardonic yet wistful, giving that self-consciously clever poison-pen letter “Could I Leave You” much more a kick than it deserved, and exuberantly leggy, like a sleek version of Charlotte Greenwood, in “The Story of Lucy and Jessie.” But her finest work has been in Passion, Wonderful Town and Lovemusik.

Music, Music, Music: The Most Happy Fella, Merrily We Roll Along and Baritones Unbound

Marnie Parris & Bill Nolte in The Most Happy Fella

Six years passed between Frank Loesser’s hugely successful Guys and Dolls and his next Broadway show, The Most Happy Fella, and the two projects couldn’t have been more different. Guys and Dolls was an effort to find a musical-comedy equivalent for the quirky idiom of Damon Runyon’s stories, where gamblers and gangsters are interchangeable (and basically benign), wear fedoras and pin-stripe suits, and speak without contractions. Loesser’s score is lyrical, but it’s comprised mostly of comic numbers – solos (“Adelaide’s Lament”) duets (“Sue Me,” “Marry the Man Today”) the title song, call-and-response numbers  (“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” and the two Hot Box showgirl tunes), even a counterpoint trio (“Fugue for Tinhorns”). The Most Happy Fella has a lush romantic score, and there’s so much of it that the original cast recording was released in two versions, a single LP of highlights and a complete three-LP set, in the style of opera recordings. Technically the show is an operetta, since it does contain dialogue sections (which were also written by Loesser). And though it may not be up to Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, the two Broadway musicals that are not only extensive enough but also complex enough musically to qualify as operas, it’s extremely ambitious – and surpassingly beautiful. (In fact, the New York City Opera used to keep it in their repertory.) Loesser based it on a 1924 play by Sidney Howard called They Knew What They Wanted – a hit despite that unwieldy title – that starred Richard Bennett and the legendary stage actress Pauline Lord and was filmed three times over the next decade and a half.

Coming of Age as an Apologue – and the Reverse

Elliott Heffernan and Saiorse Ronan in Steve McQueen's Blitz. (Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Apple TV+.)

Steve McQueen’s film Blitz, set in September 1940, in the early days of Hitler’s incessant bombing of London, is an obvious labor of love. It takes place over just a couple of days, during which Rita (Saiorse Ronan), an armaments factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), on a train bound for the countryside with other children but he jumps out and tries to make his way back to Stepney, the working-class neighborhood where he lives with Rita and her father (Paul Weller); he never knew his father, who is African and was deported unjustly after a street fight. Production designer Adam Stockhausen’s recreations of the period are gorgeous, as is the cinematography by Yorick Le Soux, the favorite collaborator of the French director Olivier Assayas. The editing by Peter Sciberras is masterful: it actualizes McQueen’s remarkable sense of rhythm, which was showcased in his Small Axe series and especially in Lovers Rock. The film is propelled forward, moving back and forth between Rita and her wayward boy with remarkable fluidity and from one London location to another so that the continuity is simultaneously whole-cloth and fragmented. It contains a number of beautifully constructed setpieces that rank with the finest work that has been done with this period in film. And along the way McQueen takes care to pay homage to some of its predecessors: Hope and Glory, Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, Atonement. (There’s also a subplot out of Oliver Twist and a speech in an underground shelter by a left-wing character, played by Leigh Gill, who seems to have been inspired by Agate in Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty.)

Remembering Sondheim

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Stephen Sondheim, New York, July 10, 1961. (Photo: Richard Avedon)

Stephen Sondheim was ninety-one when he died on the day after Thanksgiving, yet it was a shock. Unreasonably, I thought he would live forever. For nearly three decades he’d been the sole surviving legendary songwriter from the golden age of musical theatre (Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe left us in 1986 and 1988 respectively; Irving Berlin in 1989; Jule Styne in 1994) – for he was still in his twenties when he collaborated with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story and with Styne on Gypsy. He was all of thirty-five when he worked with Richard Rodgers on Do I Hear a Waltz? (Arthur Laurents, who departed ten years ago, wrote the books for all three shows.) Sondheim hadn’t written a new musical since Road Show in 2003, though he was toiling for years on an adaptation of Luis Buñuel’s two final movies. But there were countless major revivals of his work – Company, with a female Bobby, is on Broadway at present – and he generally showed up for them. Revue after revue was constructed around his songs, and every milestone birthday prompted a star-studded event, all of them except his Covid-shrouded ninetieth televised on PBS. Movies were still being made of his musicals; still more are promised, even though none of them has been any good. (I haven’t seen Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, which is about to be released.) Sondheim was continually, tirelessly present, so who could ever imagine him gone?

Neglected Gem # 77: Anna and the King (1999)

Anna and the King marks the fourth time the movies have revisited Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam, based on the memoirs of the Englishwoman, Anna Leonowens, who tutored the children of Siam’s King Mongkut in the mid-nineteenth century. The first adaptation, in 1946, with Irene Dunne as a stiff-necked Anna, smiling that knocked-on-the-noggin Irene Dunne smile, and Rex Harrison done up in ballooning silk knee pants as the King, was rather preposterous. (Lee J. Cobb as Harrison’s Kralahome, or Prime Minister, with burnt amber all over his face and chest, was one of the prime kitsch elements.) But the big, handsome production was very enjoyable nonetheless. The hit Rodgers & Hammerstein musical version, The King and I, came to the screen in 1956, with Yul Brynner repeating his Broadway performance as the monarch whose efforts to bring his tiny country into the modern world has to overcome the obstacle of his own obstinacy, and Deborah Kerr taking over where stage star Gertrude Lawrence had left off. This time it felt as if everyone associated with the project had been knocked on the head. And those who associate the story of the Siamese ruler and the governess with Brynner’s cutesy pidgin English (which won him the Academy Award) and “Getting to Know You” may have little desire to check out this version, with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat in the leading roles. (Disney released a cartoon version of the musical earlier the same year – an embarrassing reminder, even for those of us who didn’t make it past the trailers, of how icky some of the songs are.) And that would be a pity, because Anna and the King, adapted by Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes and directed by Andy Tennant, does almost everything right that the earlier versions did wrong.

Poetic Absurdity: The Genius of Beatrice Lillie

Beatrice Lillie (aka Lady Peel) in Exit Smiling (1926).

There’s a tradition of eccentric English actresses who made improbably triumphant careers for themselves in the twentieth century. One was the great high-comic technician Gertrude Lawrence, who couldn’t sing a note without quavering yet became a musical-comedy star, performing songs by Noël Coward, Cole Porter, the Gershwins and Rodgers & Hammerstein. Another was Margaret Rutherford, who embodied a kind of British dottiness – an unassailable uprightness and forthrightness, like that of a nanny shepherding her charges through the park – even when she was playing Agatha Christie’s sleuth Miss Marple. But my favorite was Beatrice Lillie, who was born in Toronto in 1894 but became a star in the West End twenty years later and performed on stage and occasionally in movies and on television for just over half a century. (Her final appearance was in the ill-advised 1967 musical film Thoroughly Modern Millie, in the role of the white-slaving villainess Mrs. Meers. It was hardly a worthy valedictory, though she did get to wear chopsticks in her beehive hairdo and execute a modest tap dance to get a stubborn elevator moving.) Canadian she may have been by birth, but no one could have captured so acutely a specifically English brand of silliness, though possibly the fact that she was officially an import from elsewhere in the Dominion may partly explain the fact that her portrayal of English aristocratic hauteur was always parodic – even though in real life she married a baronet (she was Lady Peel) and lost a son, a naval officer, in World War II.