On the Town, Wonderful Town, and Bells are Ringing
by Terry Dunford (April 2015)
Come on down to the Village Vortex,
Home of the new jazz age – Swing!
Rock and roll to the beat beat beat.
Wonderful Town (1953), music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green [1]
“One day in 1938, Max was sitting in his little basement, his Village Vanguard, when these three kids came down the stairs.”
Lorraine Gordon, Alive at the Village Vanguard (2006)[2]
Preface
During the final days of 1949, Hollywood released the movie version of the Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Jerome Robbins 1944Broadway musical comedy, On the Town, a momentous gesture.[3] With Leonard Bernstein, the first American-born and American-trained (Curtis Institute) world-class conductor in the vanguard, the movie helped to confirm that post-World War II America, and more specifically New York City, was the new cultural center of the world. The ‘Fifties had arrived.
Leonard Bernstein had achieved overnight fame in the now legendary performance on November 13, 1943, that forced Bernstein, newly appointed assistant director of the New York Philharmonic, and all of 25 years old, to substitute at the last minute for the highly anticipated guest conductor, Bruno Walter, who had fallen ill. Without a rehearsal, Leonard Bernstein led the orchestra on a Carnegie Hall program broadcast live on CBS radio. The story has a fairy tale ending, and Bernstein was more than praised by his peers; he was famous. The dominance of American culture was demonstrated when Leonard Bernstein toured Europe in 1947 – 48 as guest conductor, occasionally performing his own orchestral compositions, including a trip to the yet-to-be-born state of Israel to conduct the Palestine Philharmonic (as it was then called). Leonard Bernstein was now a world figure.
On the Town is the first of a trilogy of New York comical musicals by Betty Comden and Adolph Green that included Wonderful Town (1953) with music by Leonard Bernstein and Bells are Ringing (1956) with music by Jule Styne. On the Town demonstrated the innovative spirit of New York, part of a remarkable era of innovative American theater (Oklahoma! to South Pacific). At the same time, the Great White Way still paid its electrical bills with the European traditions of the costumed operetta: Broadway in the 1940s staged Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, Trial by Jury, The Pirates of Penzance, and The GondoliersMerry Widow, and Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince, The New Moon, and Blossom TimeDeep in My Heart, soon after his death in 1950.
In contrast to the European operetta or the rural America types of Oklahoma! and its cringe-inducing dialog in drawl (potatoes rhymes with tomatoes as ‘taters and ta-maters), the New York trilogy of musical comedies by Betty Comden and Adolph Green exhibit an innovative theater du terroir: from the soil (er . . the streets) of New York, home-grown, in real time, self-referential, and satiric of itself (the American entertainment industry), structured with an insider/outsider friction in which the audience is not sure whether it is in on the satire or the subject of it. Betty Comden and Adolph Green rely on Jonathan Swift’s maxim that satire is a mirror in which one sees everybody but himself. Additionally, the New York musical comedies of Betty Comden and Adolph Green capture the post World War II cultural exuberance (while at the same time making fun of it) that culminated into the ‘Fifties. “Modernism is distinctively urban,” observes Hugh Kenner.[4] With On the Town we witness one more example of the herald of New York’s role as the center and source of Modernism.
Nobody knows exactly when the ‘Fifties began (like all great myths “there are variations of the story,” Lorraine Gordon correctly observes[5]where the ‘Fifties began: New York, Greenwich Village actually, at 178 Seventh Avenue South, in Max Gordon’s comedy-jazz-blues-folk music-poetry reading night club, the Village Vanguard [6] memorialized in Wonderful Town as The Village Vortex.
Those three kids scampering down the steps to the Village Vanguard included Elizabeth Cohen (from Brooklyn), age 22 in 1939, Judith Tuvim, 18 (from Queens), and a 24-year old male companion singer and song-writer named Green from the Bronx. They auditioned for Max Gordon with the skits, songs, spoofs, and topical comedy that their troupe had developed. Max hired them to perform once a week, but soon were doing two shows a night for five days a week to the praise of, among others, The New Republic (August 30, 1939) in a piece called the “Vanguard Underground.”[7] They called themselves the Revuers .[8] According to Max Gordon’s wife, “The Revuers became the greatest hit the Vanguard ever saw.”[9]
and we now know the principal players, the three kids, Betty Comden, Judy Holliday, and Adolph Green
The Revuers (Ca. 1939) Adolph Green, John Frank, Betty Comden, Alvin Hammer, and Judy Holliday
The Revuers soon became a favorite among New Yorkers, including a 21 year-old aspiring composer (unknown outside a few musical conservatories) named Leonard Bernstein.
Having graduated from Harvard in 1939 (where he produced a students’ performance of the newly composed opera, The Cradle Will Rock [1937] which made its composer, Mark Blitzstein, a life-long friend[10]), Leonard Bernstein moved to Greenwich Village where he shared an apartment on East 9th Street with Adolph Green whom Bernstein had met years earlier at a music summer camp. Soon Bernstein “became something of a fixture at the [Village] Vanguard”[11] not only as an appreciative member of the every-growing audience, but as a participant as well. Betty Comden tells the story of Leonard Bernstein’s staying after hours with the Revuers accompanying them on the piano and singing their songs remembering the words better than they did.[12] Bernstein also introduced The Revuers to everyone he could drag with him to the Village Vanguard, including a new friend, the 21 year-old Jerome Rabinowitz.
Let’s call it the Leonard Bernstein circle — all those then nobodies: Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Judy Holliday, Jerome Rabinowitz (changing his name to Jerome Robbins), Mark Blitzstein, and Leonard Bernstein himself, all of whom — sometimes together and sometimes individually — would go on to craft some of the most memorable songs, shows, and performances in New York musical theater during the ‘Fifties, including Fancy Free (1944), On the Town (1944), Peter Pan (1950), Wonderful Town (1953), Peter Pan (1954), The Threepenny Opera (1954), Bells are Ringing (1956), West Side Story (1957), Do Re Mi (1960), and so much more. One of America’s great (and unacknowledged) artistic movements. Judy Holliday, of course, went on to be a Hollywood star having been discovered by Max Gordon. Both of them.[13]
The success of Fancy Free led to its transformation into a musical comedy. Leonard Bernstein agreed to write the score if he could get Betty Comden and Adolph Green to write the book and lyrics.[14]
Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green in 1944
One: Feast Day in On the Town
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Opening Date: |
Dec 28, 1944 |
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Closing Date: |
Feb 02, 1946 |
Total Performances: |
462 |
Category: Musical, Comedy, Original, Broadway
Setting: New York City, 1944 – wartime
Where has the time all gone to?
Haven’t done half the things we want to.
Oh, well, we’ll catch up
Some other time.
On the Town (1944) music by Leonard Bernstein, book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, choreography and story by Jerome Robbins
I know a place where dreams are born,
and time is never planned.
It’s not on any chart,
You must find it with your heart.
Never Never Land.
Peter Pan (1954) directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Jule Styne.[15]
On the Town takes place in New York City during World War II opening with a somnolent Brooklyn Navy-Yard dock worker strolling the in-between world of sleep and wake at exactly three minutes to six am on a warm June day, June 1st, 1944, to be exact.[16]
I feel like I’m not out of bed yet.
(yawns)
Oh, the sun is warm,
But my blanket’s warmer.
Sleep, sleep in your lady’s arms.
Are the events portrayed in On the Town merely a dream of a workman on the waterfront longing to return to bed with his wife?
I left my old woman still sleeping.
M-m-m-m-m-m-m-
Oh, the air is sweet,
But my woman’s sweeter.
Sleep, sleep in your lady’s arms.
Maybe it is just a dream as Mrs. Darling suggests the source of events in Peter Pan. And if On the Town is dreamlike, the easier it is to accept it as fantasy, and explains the dream ballet in Act Two (following the precedent of the dream ballet featured in Oklahoma!). As everybody knows, On the Town originated from the Leonard Bernstein / Jerome Robbins 1944 ballet, Fancy Free. The phrase, “fancy-free,” fittingly, occurs in Shakespeare’s’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II.i.164).[17] Bell are Ringing, by the way and not accidentally, opens with “the sound of the midsummer night.”
Dreamland is awakened when On the Town explodes with three US Navy sailors set free for twenty-four hours to explore the Never-Never island of Manhattan in 1944 (like the three Darling children leaving an island only to end up on Captain Hook’s ship).[18] As Marshall Berman keenly observes, the most famous trio of sailors on the island of Manhattan during World War II, including one of them kissing the nurse in Times Square on VJ Day, were photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt on August 14, 1945, while On the Town was showing at the Martin Beck Theater (now named the Al Hirschfield Theater) on West 45th Street.[19]
Time is of the essence which happens to be the musical’s theme: time out of time, a time under the Lord of Misrule. [20] As C. L. Barber explains in his Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy “ . . . there is always a sense of solidarity about pleasure, a communion embracing the merrymakers in the play and the audience, who have gone on holiday in going to a comedy ” (pp. 8-9). The Lord of Misrule, in other words, suspends conventional social rules governing human appetites for food, sex, dance, and play. Hence On the Town is a fantasy that excuses its gags, puns, ribald jokes, song and dance, and the chance meeting of pliant young women.[21] Similarly, we will discover in Bells Are Ringing the stage direction calling for a “carnival spirit” as subway riders break out into a party during the “Hello” scene. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus, Duke of Athens, orders Philostrate, Master of the Revels,
Go, Philostrate,
Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments,
Awake the pert and nimble spirits of mirth . . . . (I.i.11-13)
The three sailors, Gabey, Chip, and Ozzie, think that New York is a fairyland where people travel under the ground. It’s a magical place which you must name twice for good luck:
New York, New York, a helluva town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.
The people ride in a hole in the groun’.
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town.
Chip consults a New York guide book as the trio plan their day: “There are 20,000 streets in New York City, not counting MacDougall Alley in the heart of Green-witch Village . . .” and sings:
The famous places to visit are so many,
Or so the guide books say.
I promised daddy I wouldn’t miss on any,
And we have just one day.
Gotta see the whole town
Right from Yonkers on down to the bay . . . .
This, the best-known song from On the Town, establishes the location, setting (there is a difference), and the Comden-Green’s characteristic self-referential humor. The three sailors are saying in so many words: “You folks in the audience are mostly out-of –towners, the provincials, coming to New York to take in a show. The three sailors are out-of towners coming to New York to be the show.”
Manhattan women are dressed in silk and satin,
Or so the fellas say,
There’s just one thing that’s important in Manhattan,
When you have just one day
Gotta pick up a date – . . . on your way.
New York, New York, a helluva town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.
The people ride in a hole in the groun’.
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town!!
On the Town centers on three couples (not unlike A Midsummer Night’s Dream[22]):
Chip and Hilda (or Hildy)
Ozzie and Claire
Gabe and Ivy Smith, also known as Miss Turnstiles (the June cover girl promoting the New York subways)
In On the Town musical puns abound. The lady cab driver (a unique war-time occupation) attracted to Chip is named Brunhilde Esterhazy, capturing both the heroine of Wagner’s Ring and Count Esterhazy, the patron of Joseph Hayden. Chip’s full name is John Offenblock, both a pun for off his block and an allusion to a composer of operettas, Jacques Offenbach.[23] The anthropologist smitten by Ozzie is named Claire de Loone, alluding to the well-known movement from Claude Debussy’s Suite bergamaque. Claire de Loone severs as well as a satiric jab at Clare Boothe Luce, a key speaker at that year’s (1944’s) Republican National Convention.
Chip and Hilda
On the Town allows us only half the conventional young couple of operettas: instead of the juvenile and the ingénue, we have the juvenile sailor and the lecherous female. Chip (played by Chris Alexander), the juvenile with an out-of date New York City guide book, determines to see the famous sights of New York while all Hilda (Nancy Walker) is interested in are the sights of Chip. She turns away riders for her taxi cab to ensure she’s alone with Chip and tells her fare to sit up front. “This ride is on me” which may be taken literally. Everything Chip (from Peoria, Illinois), wants to see while in New York, according to his 1934 tourist guide book, no longer exists. That’s New York for you. When Chip tells Hildy that he wants to see the Hippodrome, an immense theater torn down in 1939, Hildy informs Chip that “I haven’t got 5,000 seats, but the one I got is a honey.”[24] What follows is a satire on provincial theater goers who bring their relatives to the Big City for a show.
Chip:
On, no lady. I’d rather see the Forrest Theatre
When I was home I saw the plays
The ladies’ drama circle showed.
Now I’m here, I want to get
Some tickets for “Tobacco Road.”
Hildy:
That show has closed up shop,
The actors washed their feet
And called it “Angel Street.”
Tobacco Road, a staged version of Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 proletariat novel of the same title, ran on Broadway from 1932 to 1941, mostly at the Forrest Theatre on West 49th Street (now the Eugene O’Neill Theater – which has yet to stage a play by Eugene O’Neill, but then who would come?). Tobacco Road remains the second longest running dramatic play in Broadway history (only the near contemporary Life with Father ran longer). Tobacco Road received Leftist praise for its depiction of class conflict and “attracted an audience seeking a voyeuristic thrill.”[25] Tobacco Road was indeed replaced by Angel Street (1941 to the present, i.e., 1944). Today we know the long-running Angel Street as Gaslight, as it was called in the 1944 film version with Ingrid Bergman; thus both the play and the movie were going strong when On the Town opened December 28, 1944. That the bare- footed actors playing hillbillies in Tobacco Road “washed their feet and called it ‘Angel Street’” confirms Comden and Green’s satire of Broadway’s appetite for melodrama and spectacle. Today the out-of-towners seek tickets to Cats.[26]
The primary vehicle for comedy in On the Town is the double entendre employed lavishly when Hildy finally gets Chip to come up to her place. Chip’s hungry, but Hildy has only sex on her mind.
CHIP: What’s the specialty of the House?
HILDY: Me!!
Laugh line and song cue.
I’m a man’s ideal of a perfect meal
Right down to the demi-tasse.
I’m a pot of joy for a hungry boy,
Baby, I’m cooking with gas!
For a candied sweet
Or a pickled beet,
Step up to my smorgasbord.
Walk around until
You get your fill.
Baby, you won’t ever be bored!
Oh, I’m an hors d’oeuvre
A jelly preserve,
Not in the recipe book,
And what’s more, baby, I can cook!
The joke is that as Hildy promises Chip sexual adventures in the terms of food she adds that on top of that I can also cook in an era when both food and men were subject to war-time rationing. Hildy explains with comic internal rhymes that
Oh I’m a paté,
A marron glacé,
A dish you wish you had took.
And what’s more, baby, I can cook!![27]
Ozzie and Claire
Ozzie and Claire meet at the New York Museum of Natural History to provide an excuse to poke fun at the pretentions of academics, in this case a “fussy little professional type, Waldo Figment,” who informs Ozzie that his (Figment’s) exhibit in the Museum of a dinosaur skeleton was reconstructed “without any clue whatsoever – except for one tiny bone – found during a picnic in Westchester – in the bushes.” (Rather like literary theory in the 1970s.) The setup allows Betty Comden (as Clair de Loone) and Adolph Green (Ozzie) to perform a skit, she as an anthropologist (they mean paleontologist, but never mind), and he, a cave man. Claire de Loone scientifically concludes that Ozzie is a modern version of “Pithecanthropus Erectus — in a sailor suit! . . . . with a Sub-super-dolico cephalic head.” (The Hollywood censors apparently didn’t catch the blue meanings of “erectus” and “-phallic” retained in the 1949 movie of On the Town.) Sizing up Ozzie (literally, with a measuring tape) to compare him to a cave man’s features, Claire and Ozzie sing a mock operetta duet, “I Get Carried Away” satirizing academic clichés uttered by those who want to appear well-versed on the latest intellectual trends:
Modern man, what is it?
Just a collection of complexes and erotic [“neurotic” in the published version] impulses
That occasionally break through.
. . .
I try hard to stay controlled
But I get carried away,
Try to act aloof and cold,
But [dropping an octave] I get carried away.
Gaby and Miss Turnstiles (Ivy Smith)
On a hunch, Gaby (played by John Battles) seeks Miss Turnstiles in the practice rooms of Carnegie Hall, allowing Bernstein-Comden-Green-Robbins to poke fun at show business, even serious show business, even themselves. Gabe navigates the corridors of Carnegie Hall just as in the fall of 1943 Jerome Robbins sought out Leonard Bernstein, who lived in Carnegie Hall then, Room 803, to talk over Bernstein’s writing a score for Fancy Free.[28]
Carnegie Hall’s upper floor studios and apartments, one of which (Room 803), was once Leonard Bernstein’s when Bernstein paid bills by playing piano for singers and dancers at practice.
Photograph by Josef Astor
http://nymag.com/homedesign/greatrooms/42385/
As Gabe wanders about the studios of Carnegie Hall, the stage fills with an eager actor hamming up lines from Richard II, an opera hopeful singing Brunnhilde’s “Call of the Walkyrie” (incidentally calling attention to the name of Chip’s new-found girl friend), and finally two Carnegie musicians telling the following: a self-referential joke that the original audience would have caught immediately:
First Musician: You call him a conductor? He used the baton like a meat cleaver.
Second Musician: You know that fourth bar after H – They ought to let me conduct the orchestra. I’d show them how to do it.
The musicians are referring, of course, to the now legendary event that took place a year earlier at Carnegie Hall when Leonard Bernstein substituted at the last moment for visiting conductor Bruno Walter.
Gabe finally stumbles upon Miss Turnstiles, Ivy Smith (played by Sono Osato), during singing lessons under the instruction of Madame Maude P. Dilly accompanying Ivy on the piano. Before he became famous, Leonard Bernstein, like Madame Dilly (Lenny / Dilly), worked at Carnegie Hall by playing the piano not on stage but in Carnegie Hall’s less glamorous practice rooms.
At the end of On the Town, like the end of Peter Pan, we return to where we began as if no time has passed, triggering one of the best Betty Comden-Adolph Green-Leonard Bernstein songs, and poignantly suited to those living through the war years: “Some Other Time.” You are only allowed one day in Neverland.
Twenty-four hours can go so fast,
You look around, the day has passed.
When you’re in love
Time is precious stuff;
Even a lifetime isn’t enough.
Where has the time all gone to?
Haven’t done half the things we want to.
Oh, well, we’ll catch up
Some other time.
And of course there is never some other time, unless it’s never-never time; but that doesn’t stop Betty Comden and Adolf Green writing these lovely lyrics in dactyls for Peter Pan (1954):
Once upon a time and long ago
I heard someone singing
Soft and low
Now when day is done
And night is near
I recall this song I used to hear
My child, my very own,
Don’t be afraid, you’re not alone
Sleep until the dawn
For all is well
Long ago this song was sung to me
Now it’s just a distant melody
Somewhere from the past I used to know
Once upon a time
And long ago…
Two: Parody in Wonderful Town
Wonderful Town
Winter Garden Theatre, (2/25/1953 – 7/3/1954)
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Opening Date: |
Feb 25, 1953 |
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Closing Date: |
Jul 3, 1954 |
Total Performances: |
559 |
There they go
Down the stairs.
Now they will live
In Greenwich Village.
Wonderful Town (1953), music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
A million kids just like you
Come to town every day
With stars in their eyes.
They’re going to conquer the city,
They’re going to grab off the Pulitzer Prize,
But it’s a terrible pity,
Because they’re in for a bitter surprise.
Wonderful Town (1953), music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
It is misleading (as so many do) to characterize Wonderful Town (1953) as a musical version of the Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov play, My Sister Eileen (1940 – 1943), which in turn is based on New Yorker short stories by Ruth McKenney.[29] Except for the skeletal setting and characters’ names (notable Ruth and her sister Eileen) taken from the play My Sister Eileen, the Comden – Green Wonderful Town presents a completely original book (for which they get no credit) with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolf Green and music by Leonard Bernstein. In spite of the play’s setting in 1935 Greenwich Village — in homage to the Village Vanguard’s founding in 1935 — Wonderful Town is filled with self-referential in-jokes and parodies of contemporary American culture of the ‘Fifties.
Even the title for Wonderful Town is an in-joke. The best known song from On the Town,
New York, New York, a helluva town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.
The people ride in a hole in the groun’.
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town!!
was Bowdlerized in the 1949 movie:
New York, New York, a wonderful town,
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.
The people ride in a hole in the groun’.
New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town!!
Wonderful Town’s opening number seems deliberately confusing to the audience, ambiguously taunting the audience as typical New York sight-seers or flattering the audience for being in on the satire as a uniformed guide directs a crowd of out-of-towners on stage watching the show that the audience is also watching:
GUIDE: Come along
On your left,
Washington Square,
Right in the heart of Greenwich Village . . .
TOURISTS:
My, what charm,
My, what grace
Poets and peasants on Waverly Place.
Then the Greenwich Village locals join the tourists making sport of themselves:
ALL:
Look! Look!
Poets! Actors! Dancers! Writers
Here we live,
Here we love,
This is the place foe self-expression.
Life is mad,
Life is sweet.
Interesting people living on Christopher Street!
Come along and follow me, says the tour guide.
Come along,
Follow me.
Now we will see MacDougal Alley,
Patchen [sic] Place,
Minetta Lane,
Bank Street and
Church Street and
John Street
And Jane.
Patchin Place in the 1930s
Berenice Abbott, Changing New York (1939)
MacDougal Alley in 1936
Berenice Abbott, Changing New York (1939)
[Behind MacDougal Alley stands the extant 1929 One Fifth Avenue building at Washington Square.]
(The Greenwich Village guide also serves a theatrical purpose of introducing to the audience – the real audience — the chief characters in the play:
Here’s a famous Village type:
Mr. Appopolous, modern painter,
Better known on this beat,
As the lovable landlord of Christopher Street.)
The corner of Christopher Street and Bleecker Street (ca. 1935)
Berenice Abbott, Changing New York (1939)
Appopolous won’t show his latest painting because “it’s still an embryo. Let it kick and breathe first,” a parody of talks the jargon of art criticisms of the 1940s and 50s about organic forms reflecting a Bergsonian élan vital evident in the biomorphic images in paintings by Willem de Kooning, sculptures of Isamu Noguchi, and Alexander Calder’s mobiles[30] like the one hanging from the ceiling of the Village Vortex (S.D., p. 182). For example, no less an authority than Clement Greenfield wrote in The Nation (June 9, 1945) that current art finds its influence in the “surrealist ‘biomorphism’ . . . [that gives] the elements of abstract painting a look of organic substances.”
We are treated to a satiric parade of Greenwich Village types, a Yogi who chants “Love thy neighbor!” dancers “And one – and two — and three,” and a “philosopher” yelling “Down with Wall Street! Down with Wall Street!” Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.
The theatricality continues: modern painter Appopolous (played by Henry Lascoe) typifies celebrity self-importance and urban superiority over provincials from anywhere west of the Hudson River:
APPOPOLOUS: Here’s your property. The incident is closed. Case dismissed.
RUTH: Who are you, Felix Franfurter?
APPOPOLOUS (laughs): You can tell they’re out-of-towners. They don’t know me!
EILEEN: We don’t know anyone. We just got in from Columbus [Ohio] today.
Who does not sympathize with Eileen’s notion that talent is never enough? You have to know somebody, somebody important. By the way, the reference to the comically mangled name of Felix Frankfurter is one of many anachronisms in a play putatively set in 1935. Justice Frankfurter did not become a judge until Franklin Roosevelt appointed him to the US Supreme Court in 1939.
Eileen’s sister, Ruth Sherwood (played by Rosalind Russell in the original cast; Edie Adams played Eileen), has come to New York to be a writer, and in the scene flogging her work for the editor of Manhatter Magazine (i.e., The New Yorker), Mr. Baker (played by George Gaynes) informs Ruth in the song “What a Waste “ that
A million kids just like you
Come to town every day
With stars in their eyes.
They’re going to conquer the city,
They’re going to grab off the Pulitzer Prize,
But it’s a terrible pity,
Because they’re in for a bitter surprise.
And their stories all follow one line . . .
Chorus: What a waste,
What a waste,
What a waste of money and time!
Each stanza of “What a Waste” depicts the failure of a would-be writer, painter, actress, and singer wanting to make it in New York, such as
Girl from Mobile.
Versatile actress,
Tragic or comic,
Any old play,
Suffered and starved,
Met Stanislavsky,
He said the world would
Cheer her one day.
Came to New York,
Repertoire ready,
Chekhov’s and Shakespeare’s and Wilde’s.
Now, they watch her flipping flapjacks at Childs’.[31]
Chorus: What a waste,
What a waste,
What a waste of money and time!
Unimpressed with the advice, Ruth is sure that she’s the exception and supplies Mr. Baker with three of her manuscripts that parody(1) Ernest Hemingway, (2) Cole Porter, and (3) Tennessee Williams or Marc Blitzstein or both.
First, Hemingway
BAKER (Reading) “For Whom the Lion Roars” – by Ruth Sherwood. [Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in 1940] in a parody of Hemingway’s exalted prose: short sentences in repetitive monosyllabic words, the simple copula, employing meiosis that only hints of any significance. Here’s Comden and Green’s parody:
“It was a fine day for lion hunt. Yes, it was a good clean day for an African lion hunt – a good clean day for a fine clean hunt.”
Compare the real Hemmingway (from the short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” [1933]):
“You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves.”
Mr. Baker is not impressed, so Ruth hands him yet another manuscript, a comedy she calls, Exit Laughing, a parody of a Cole Porter musical, satirizing Broadways indulgent self praise where everybody is perfect as long as they were still important, a satire of Broadway idolatry where the repetitive “everyone agreed” exposes its own sophistry:
Everyone agreed that Tracy Farraday was marvelous. Everyone agreed that this was her greatest acting triumph. Everyone agreed that her breathtaking performance in “Kiss Me, Herman” was the climax of a great career.
The “Kiss Me, Herman” is a rye reference to Cole Porter’s 1948 Kiss Me Kate and to Ethel Merman (Herman/Merman) who appeared in several Cole Porter musicals, notably Anything Goes (1934). Kiss Me Kate was Porter’s greatest Broadway success with 1,077 performances.
And while Wonderful Town was playing at the Winter Garden Theatre (West 50th Street), Cole Porter’s Can-Can played at the Schubert (West 44th Street).
Baker dismisses that manuscript and reluctantly reads aloud from Ruth’s “Twentieth–Century Blues,”
It was squalid in that one room flat in Williamsburg without the windows, with the gray peeling plaster and the sound of rats scurrying inside the walls and the scratching phonograph across the hall . . . the gray rat pains of hunger yeah the twentieth-century hunger . . . .
One candidate for the subject of this parody is Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire brought to the Broadway stage by Elia Kazan December 3, 1947 to December 17, 1949 for 855 performances, then a 1951 movie, also directed by Kazan, making Marlon Brando famous. Here is Williams’s atmospheric setting for A Street Car Named Desire that Comden and Green may have had in mind for their parody:
SCENE ONE The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street in New Orleans which is named Elysian Fields . . the houses are mostly white frame, weathered grey, with rickety outside stairs . . . This building contains two flats, upstairs and down. Faded white stairs ascend to the entrances of both. . . . a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played . . . .
Tennessee Williams, Plays 1937 – 1955, Library of America p.469.
Ruth’s stage directions seem to confirm the allusion to Streetcar:
[s.d.] DANNY enters, a ragged proletarian figure in his undershirt, in the depths of his despair and hunger. He is followed by ESSIE . . . , ludicrously ragged and obviously somewhat with child.
Danny, of course, is Marlon Brando famously dressed in an under-shirt playing Stanley (Danny/Stanley) Kowalski; Essie, the pregnant Stella.
Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski
Yet another possible candidate being parodied in Ruth’s “Twentieth–Century Blues”
is The Cradle Will Rock (1937), book, lyrics, and music by Marc Blitzstein (inspired by the music of Kurt Weill as Blitzstein acknowledged[32] and dedicated to Bertold Brecht). Comden and Green have Ruth state that her “Twentieth-Century Blues” has its characters “speak in the singsong Brooklynese used in the social-problem dramas of the ‘30s.” The Cradle Will Rock was surely a product of the “socially engaged theater” that Blitzstein’s biographer notes was “at its height in the 1930s”[33] Leftist theater collectives, notably Group Theatre that launched the careers of, among others, Elia Kazan and several original cast members of A Cradle Will Rock, Will Geer and Howard Da Silva, pumped out Communist melodramas pitting evil capitalists against victimized workers bereft of union solidarity.[34] The Federal Theatre Project (FTP), funded by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) produced A Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Wells who had been hired into the FTP by John Houseman. This collaboration led to one of Broadway’s most remarkable events on June 16, 1937. After months of rehearsals, the production of The Cradle Will Rock scheduled to open at the Maxine Elliott Theater at 109 West 39th Street (demolished in 1960) was cancelled by Federal Theater Project as part of budget cuts, though its participants complained of government censorship, that government agency being run by none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s éminence grise, Harry Hopkins. To make matters worse, labor unions refused to allow non-equity actors to perform in a pro-union play while the musicians’ union refused to suspend the rules that would have put a band in the pit. What happened next is to this day a Left-Wing legend.[35]
On that hot New York June night in 1937 as ticket holders stood before the padlocked doors to the theater, John Housman and Orson Wells secured the use of a non-governmental theater, the Venice Theatre at 932 Seventh Avenue at 58th Street (demolished in 1962). The audience and cast marched some twenty blocks to the Venice Theatre, hauling an upright piano for Mark Blitzstein to play on stage while the cast sang from the seats. All this is joyously reenacted in Tim Robbins’s entertaining (if a heavy-handed polemic, even by Hollywood standards) 1999 movie, The Cradle Will Rock, itself a bit of agitprop drama, fittingly.
Comden and Green’s stage direction for Ruth’s Twentieth-Century Blues are as follows:
They speak in the singsong Brooklynese used in the social-problem dramas of the ‘30s.
ESSIE: (Dully) Danny – when we gonna get married?
DANNY: When – when – when – always naggin’ –
ESSIE: They’re talkin’ – the neighbors are talkin’. Mama looks at me funny like.
DANNY: It takes money, dream boat, to get married. The green stuff with the pictures of Lincoln.
ESSIE: Lincoln should see me know. Remember how swell life was gonna be? We was gonna have everything – a four-star trip to the moon – diamonds – yachts – shoes!
Compare the above parody with Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock and its class-conscious themes and Eugene O’Neill–like working class stage dialect:
GUS: Sadie, Sadie, you gotta nice dress already. What you wanna, yak all my money?
SADIE: I know, but, Gus . . .
GUS: Is it a pretty dress?
SADIE: Oh, Gus, if you could only see me in it!
GUS: Alrit. Maybe they mak me head guy at the mill, and I get plenty money, ha, ha, ha.
S.D. They sit at [a drugstore] fountain.
GUS: What you tak, some ting?
SADIE: Vanilla ice cream soda, with two scoops.
GUS: Me, nutting; aw christ a Cok-Cola . . . Sadie, you gonna have kid soon?
— Marc Blitzstein, The Cradle Will Rock (NY: Random House, 1938), p.81.
Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green were all fiends of Marc Blitzstein and admirers of The Cradle Will Rock, all an in-joke among friends. Indeed, when Leonard Bernstein memorialized Blitzstein upon his death in 1964, Betty Comden and Adolph Green (and Green’s wife Phyllis Newman) joined members of the original cast for a concert performance of The Cradle Will Rock at the Lincoln Center on April 19, 1964. [36]
Leonard Bernstein helped Mark Blitzstein to become a musical theater success (and rich to boot) by performing a concert production of Blitzstein’s version of the Bertold Brecht / Kurt Weill The Threepenny Opera at the Creative Arts Fest at Brandeis University June 12 -15, 1952 organized by Bernstein.[37] Bernstein was able to secure Lotte Lenya to recreate her original performance as Jenny in the 1928 production of The Threepenny Opera in Berlin. Encouraged by Bernstein’s endorsement of the Blitzstein Threepenny Opera, backers were found to stage a limited run of The Threepenny Opera in the Greenwich Village Theater de Lys on (where else?) Christopher Street.[38] Scheduled for a twelve week run, the “Weill – Blitzstein” (as the marquee sign announced) The Threepenny Opera ran packed houses from 1954 to 1961 for 2,707 performances, at that time the longest running musical in American history.[39] It is this version of The Threepeny Opera that was popularized by Louis Armstrong’s 1956 single hit record of “Mack the Knife,” followed in 1959 by Bobby Darin’s best selling version, and numerous other recordings, including one by Sonny Rollins. Sadly, Kurt Weill never lived to witness his glory; he died in 1950 at the age of 50.
As Ruth wants to breaking into publishing, Eileen wants to break into theater, and by chance they meet Speedy Valenti who “runs that advanced night club – the Village Vortex.” While the Village Vortex pays homage to Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard, (Vortex/ Vanguard; Vanguard/Vortex) Wonderful Town’s owner of the Village Vortex, Speedy Valenti, is but a comic simulacrum of Max Gordon. Speedy is a hipster saying things like “Skeet –skat—skattle-e-o-eo,” an imitation of the public’s misinformed image of a New York City night-club owner, dressed in a 1940s zoot suit. No, Max, by all appearances, was a businessman, worn a businessman’s suit, and made it his job to draw customers to his club. Asked why he booked the troublesome comedian Lenny Bruce, Max Gordon replied, “He fills the room, stupid” [40] Born in Lithuania, Max Gordon grew up in Portland, Oregon. When Ruth explains to her sister Eileen that Speedy Valenti “ . . . is a very interesting boy. He had a cow and studied dairy farming at Rutgers and then got into the nightclub business.” Ruth, out of character and suddenly a sophisticated New Yorker, makes fun of Max Gordon’s rural upbringing. Yes, Max Gordon grew up in Oregon and attended Portland, Oregon’s Reed College (Reed/Rutgers; Rutgers/Reed) about as far from Greenwich Village in America as you can get and still stay dry. The Purple Cow referenced in Act Two, Scene Two of Wonderful Town may yet be another bovine in-joke about Max Gordon’s provincial origins and his other night club, The Blue Angel at 152 East Fifty-Fifth Street, that opened in 1943.[41]
The final scene of Wonderful Town takes place in The Village Vortex and includes a ragtime composition by Elmer Bernstein, “Wrong Note Rag” (nothing has gone right with the Ruth and her sister Eileen), improvisational scat, and a Count Basie-like swing orchestra: a sampler of late 1940s jazz you could have heard at the Village Vanguard. Also included is the Bernstein wonderful “It’s Love,” the 11:00 o’clock song designed to bring the audience to its feet.
Later, Ruth performs a song-and-dance number with the Hep Cats of the Village capturing in 1953 the jargon of what would soon become the signature of the Beat Culture and the nascent popular music that would come to be known as Rock ‘n Roll:
Come on down to the Village Vortex,
Home of the new jazz age – Swing!
Rock and roll to the beat beat beat.
Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard did indeed have a remarkable history of presenting, and sometimes introducing, now legendary figures in Jazz (Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Errol Gardner, Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Gerry Mulligan, Charlie Mingus, Bill Evans), too many to mention.[42] That tiny little spot on 178 Seventh Avenue South (it seats some 120 patrons) is what Nat Hentoff calls the “Camelot of jazz rooms” and had lasted decades because, according to Hentoff, Max Gordon had an “inner ear” and did not accept “the hype of booking agents and disc jockeys.”[43] The Village Vanguard became so much a part of American jazz that “Live at the Village Vanguard . . .” became and remains a totemic title for Jazz recordings.[44]
The Village Vanguard is also credited as the first home of what came to be called Folk Music. While the Baby Boomers think that they discovered folk music in the 1960s, Max Gordon had introduced folk music at the Village Vanguard when Baby Boomers were still . . . er . . . babies or not even born.[45] Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard (and his Blue Angel on East 55nd Street) were the prime source for folk music in the 1940s, according to Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940 – 1970[46], featuring Richard Dyer-Bennet, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), among others. Max Gordon had the advantage of being tutored in folk music by Woody Guthrie.[47]
As a musical term, “Rock ‘n Roll” didn’t enter the English language until around 1954 (Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989).[48] We don’t know when Rock ‘n Roll was invented, but we know where: 300 Prospect Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio (“Why, Oh Why, oh why, oh/ Why did I ever leave Ohio?” sing Ruth and Eileen), the site of The Record Rendezvous whose owner, Leo Mintz, — so the story goes — provided the records played by Cleveland radio music producers (Disc Jockeys) Alan Freed and Bill Randle (who is said to have discovered Elvis Presley) in 1951 – 1955 or so that teenagers called “rock ‘n roll.” [49]
300 Prospect Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio
Circa 1951
Three: Satire in Bells are Ringing
Bells Are Ringing
|
Opening Date: |
Nov 29, 1956 |
|
|
|
Closing Date: |
Mar 7, 1959 |
Total Performances: |
924 |
Category: Musical, Comedy, Original, Broadway
Description: A musical comedy in two acts.
Setting: 1956. New York City.
One day [in 1956] I received two tickets in the mail from Judy [Holliday]. They were for the opening of Bells Are Ringing at the Shubert Theater, a new musical comedy, written for her by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, with music by Jule Styne.
I went backstage after the show, embraced Judy, and ran into Betty and Adolph.
“We’re together again, I remember Judy saying to me. “Us kids are together again.”
Max Gordon, Live at the Village Vanguard [50]
“Which story was it?”
“About the prince who couldn’t find a lady who wore the glass slipper.”
“Peter,” said Wendy excitedly, “that was Cinderella, and he found her, and they lived happily ever after.”
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1911)[51]
Bells Are Ringing (1956) brings together the gang who gave us Mary Martin’s Peter Pan (1954): Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Jule Styne, and Jerome Robbins. And to boot, Judy Holliday as the star of the show. Bells are Ringing is Bettie Comden and Adolph Green’s most successful of the three New York Musical comedies with 924 performances and saw it survive more or less intact in a 1960 Hollywood movie directed by Vincente Minneli which — thankfully — retained Judy Holliday in what would be her last movie.[52]
The satiric tread through Bells Are Ringing is that everybody wants to be in show business and that everyone in show business is important. Blake Barton (played by Frank Aletter in the original show) is an inspiring actor affecting the mannerisms of Marlon Brando (Brando/Barton; Barton/Brando). The dentist, Dr. Kitchell (Bernie West) is a song writer with a talent for kitsch – hence his name. Jeffery Moss (Sidney Chaplin) is a playwright currently producing blank pages. The “purveyor of classical music,” J. Sandor Prantz (Eddie Lawrence), turns out to be the leader of the largest illegal off-track betting racket in the East Coast. Of course other characters in Bells are Ringing are impersonators too. All subscribe to the same answering service (in the century before voice mail) that employs the single, young, overly empathetic switchboard operator Ella Peterson who takes on a Miss Lonleyhearts attachment to her answering service clients. Ella is played by Judy Holliday, who, according to her biographers actually had a job as a telephone switch board operator upon graduating from high school. Drawn to the theater, she got this job at Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater group housed in The Empire Theatre on 41st Street (demolished In 1953).[53]
Bells Are Ringing is a Cinderella story, Wendy’s favorite story for the Lost Boys. Judy Holliday plays Ella (as in Cinderella) who has fallen in love with Jeff Moss, a soporific playwright with writer’s block whom she knows only as a voice on the phone. Ella’s fellow worker Gwynne (Pat Wilkes) thinks that Moss is lazy, calling him the “Sleeping Prince.” Ella admits that she has fallen in love with the voice on the other end of a telephone line and sings
I’m in love
With a man –
Plaza O-double four, double three
It’s a perfect relationship –
I can’t see him – He can’t see me.
I’m in love
with a voice
Plaza O-double four, double three
What a perfect relationship
I talk to him and he talks to me.
What does he look like?
My sleeping prince?
The somnolent playwright Jeffery Moss is no doubt named after long-time Broadway playwright Moss Hart, who at the time was directing a brand new musical My Fair Lady, also a Cinderella story. The Cinderella motif is established early in Bells are Ringing when we learn that yet another answering service client, coloratura Rosina Grimaldi, (the 1956 audience of Bells are Ringing would immediately catch the comic reference to Met Opera’s Renata Tebaldi) sends a ball gown to Ella in gratitude for her mustard plaster cure. “Hey, Madame Grimaldi’s sending me a ball gown for Traviata. (Pause – suddenly disconsolate) When will I ever wear it?” Of course, we all know that old theatrical trick in which a ball gown shown in Act One goes on in Act Two.[54]
As we saw in On The Town and Wonderful Town, music allusions abound in Bells are Ringing. Ella tells Moss when she first sees him in the flesh that her name is Melisande as in Pélleas and Mélisande. Sandor Pranz leads his bookies in a chorus (Sandor claims that he “studied under the immortal Tsitsinger”), explaining the musical code to conceal betting on horses:
Sandor: Gentlemen, look at your charts!
What is Beethoven?
Bookie: Belmont Park!
Sandor: Where’s Puccini?
Bookie: Pimlico!
Sandor: Who is Humperdinck?
Bokkie: Hollywood!
. . . . . . .
To the laugh line:
Sandor: What is Handel?
All: [Imitating Handel’s Messiah chorus] Hialeah! Hialeah!
Oh what a system.
Bells are Ringing also satirizes American stage and screen. In Act One, Scene 12 Ella visits the Lost Boys in a drugstore malt shop to recruit Blake Barton to try out for Jeff Moss’s unfinished play, The Midas Touch, but the scene exists for no discernible reason than to make fun of Marlon Brando imitators in leather jackets and blue jean pants as Marlon Brando wore in the 1953 movie The Wild One (released just two years before Bells are Ringing opened on Broadway[55]). The movie showcases Marlon Brando coming off his success with the Elia Kazan movie, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).
Boys who won’t grow up:
A scene from The Wild One (1953) parodied in Bells are Ringing
To fit in, Ella, dresses like one of the malt shop wild ones seen “reading Variety . . .” and mimics their speech with marbles in her month mocking the tough guy argot from the movies, says :
Ella: Hey, Fellaaa! Gimme unhh double banana split –
(In the 1960 movie version of Bells are Ringing, the malt shop is replaced by a Beatnik coffee shop, but the Brando imitation survives.) Blake Barton (Barton / Brando; Brando / Barton) admits that he did not take the opportunity to try out for The Midas Touch, explaining that “I coulda been a contender,” referencing, of course, the now famous back seat scene in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) with Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando.
The back seat scene in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954)
Betty Comden and Adolph Green daringly poked fun at their contemporaries in theater and film (and apparently got away with it). For example. Comden and Green wrote the screenplay for The Band Wagon, (1953), starring Fred Astaire, but songs were provided by the Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz song-writing team that had staged the Band Wagon revue in 1931 with Adele Astaire and her lesser-known brother Fred.
Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s screenplay for The Band Wagon (1953)
In the movie, Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant play a husband and wife song-writer team (fashioned after Comden and Green — who were not married to each other by the way). Band Wagon satirizes dictatorial stage and movie directors exhibiting artistic affectations. In The Band Wagon the director is one John Buchanan (played by Jeffry Cordova) coming off his highbrow success of Oedipus Rex. John Buchanan may be a caricature of Orson Wells, Elia Kazan, or even Vincente Minneli, the real director The Band Wagon. The reference to Oedipus Rex also appears in Bells are Ringing. In Act One, Scene 14 of Bells are Ringing the stage directions reads
Suddenly Ella let out a hoarse animal scream, reminiscent of Sir Laurence Olivier’s famous anguished cry in Oedipus Rex, and dashes out.
Comden and Green are making fun of Sir Laurence Olivier’s “famous howl” (as Sir Alec Guinness called it) in the Old Vic’s production of Oedipus Rex taken to Broadway in 1946.
Our best bet is that the John Buchanan of The Band Wagon is a parody of Elia Kazan when Fred Astaire complains that “I’m not Marlon Brando.”
The Band Wagon (1953)
Bells are Ringing even calls for “an Elvis Presley-type singer” which may be the first recorded Elvis impersonator, now a Las Vegas staple.[56] Comden and Green are prescient in recognizing an Elvis Presley type, as he would soon serve as a model for teen-aged boys for decades.
Elvis Presley on the Dorsey Brothers’ television program, Stage Show 1956
It should come as no surprise then that one of the most memorable scenes in Bells are Ringing is the “Drop a Name” list song referencing contemporary celebrities. The event, which allows Ella (Cinderella-like) to wear her gown from La Triviada is “. . .some big fancy society ball” for “Ali Khan, Betty Kean and Harry Cohn.”
As Ella tries in vain to keep up with a crowd of the wonderful people practicing name-dropping which Comden and Green rhyme to comic effect exposing the pretentiousness.
MAN: I tell you it was dear diary night. Mary and Ethel sang for hours around the fire place –
(TO ELLA, who has, somehow, joined them.)
Oh, hello,
ELLA: Hello. Mary and Ethel who?
FELLOW: Mary Martin and Ethel Merman.
ELLA: (Feeling idiotic) Oh.
ANOTHER MAN: Well, it was a pretty memorable gathering. All those wonderful people who’d been in the Theatre [sic] fifty years or more – Mary and Ethel and –
ELLA: (Eagerly, with great confidence) Mary Martin and Ethel Merman!
MAN: No, Mary Pickford and Ethel Barrymore.
ELLA: (Really confused) Oh.
BUTLER: (He has been watching and notes Ella’s confusion and discomfort) Don’t be flustered, miss. Just do what the others do. Just drop a name.
. . .
ALL: [singing]
Jose Ferrer and Janet Blair and Fred Astaire and Vincent [sic] Minelli
Daniel Mann and Lynn Fontanna, Elia Kazan, the former Grace Kelly
Louie Shurr and Courtney Burr and Irving Lazar
Anthony Quinn –
ELLA (Triumphantly) [but disastrously]
And Rin-Tin-Tin!
The name-dropping extends to the sophisticated New Yorkers’ submission to being told where to eat and what to wear.
[Guest]Luncheon was fun at Twenty One,
Then I had to run for drinks at the Plaza
Dined with Jean, Le Pavillon.
Then flew right on to St. Mark’s Piazza.
. . .
Took a group for onion soup at dawn to Les Halles —
It never shuts –
ELLA: Like Chock-Full-O’Nuts!
[Guest] MY Christian Dior I wore then tore [triple rhyme],
Got fitted for a new Balenciaga,
Then to Jacques Fath for just one hat –
Got something that will drive you ga-ga –
. . . Things with good lines –
ELLA: Like things from Klein’s
(There is shocked silence, the ELLA continues grandly)
I do all my shopping there with Mary and Ethel!
[Guest] Mary and Ethel who?
ELLA: [stops singing] Mary Schwartz and Ethel Hotchkiss.
It’s temping a half century later to discount the effect of the satire, especially the fascination with celebrities we’ve never heard of, but Ella’s admission that she shops at Klein’s is today’s equivalent of shopping at Wal-Mart. Try that during a faculty soiree in Ann Arbor or Georgetown and gauge the reaction.[57]
Union Square in Changing New York (1939)
For the “Best Dressed Women”
Where Ella, Mary Schwartz, and Ethel Hotchkiss shop.
And while the purpose if the “Drop a Name” song to satirize the name droppers it not too subtly satires the names named, people who are famous for being famous, such as Ali Kahn (whoever he was). Sic transit gloria mundi.
Similarly, if Bells are Ringing were to be revived today, who would dare to update the names on the name-dropping list? What celebrity wants to satirize fellow celebrities? Updating would not be difficult. All one would have to do is find a year’s worth of Town & Country and Architecture Digest. Or is it too challenging to find rhymes for Sean Penn or Nelson Mandela? In fact Bells are Ringing was revived on Broadway in 2001, but the 1956 lyrics of “Drop a Name” remained unchanged except substituting the name of Ethel Waters for Ethel Merman. [58] Which only proves the point: Ethel Wasters was clearly added for chic diversity.
The snooty New Yorkers let Ella know that she is above her station, and she flees the ball and Jeff Moss to sing a song fitting Cinderella:
The party’s over –
It’s time to call it a day –
No matter how you pretend
You knew it would end this way
It’s time to wind up the masquerade –
Just make your mind up –
The piper must be paid.,
The party’s over –
The candles flicker and dim –
You danced and dreamed through the night –
It seemed to be right, just being with him.
Now you must wake up –
All dreams must end –
Take off your make up –
The party’s over –
It’s all over, my friend.
Betty Comden and Adolph Green had a genius for recognizing cultural images that endure as an era’s totemic conventions, the most significant convention being New York City as the cultural vanguard of the age. A sense of place, New York in the ‘Fifties, its sights and sounds, Carnegie Hall and Coney Island, Wanamakers’ Store and Klein’s, Lindy’s and the Twenty One, Nedicks, and Child’s and Chock Full O’Nuts, salami and sponge cake and a pickled beet, Christopher Street, Patchin Place, crowded subways, the sounds of typewriters and telephones, cha-cha, swing, the Conga, the rag, a taxicab grinding gears. Variously we know the season, the date, deadlines, schedules, meetings, auditions, work time and just in time when the party’s over and it’s time to call it a day that has twenty-four hours. People have to earn money and pay the rent, singing lessons, and the bar check.
The musical comedies of Comden and Green all have a fairy-tale spirit, but there is also the spoil sports trying to put an end to the revels: Madame Maude P. Dilly, Judge Pitkin W. Bridgework, and the Miss Grundy calling the cops on the sailors in On the TownWonderful TownBells are Ringing, even Jeff Moss himself and his snobbish associates singing the “Drop a Name” song, the right people look down at Ella. In all three of Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s New York musical comedies the most sympathetic characters run into trouble with the authorities and are at times arrested.
Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s law versus love.
DISOGRAPHY
On the Town London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, Deutsche Grammophon, 1993 D173784.
Wonderful Town Conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, 1998, Abbey Road Recording Studios. London: 1998. EMI Records, Ltd.
Bells are Ringing, 2001 Broadway Revival, Fynsworth Alley HDCD, (Universal City, CA: 2001).
NOTES
[1] The New York Musicals of Comden & Green: On the Town, Wonderful Town, Bells are Ringing (New York: Applause Books, 1997), p. 167. All quotations come from this edition.
[2] Lorraine Gordon (as told to Barry Singer), Alive at the Village Vanguard (Milwaukee: 2006), p. 99. The book’s title is a play on words referring to the dozens of recordings (originally for long-playing vinyl records) with the title “Live at the Village Vanguard.”
[3] In spite of Leonard Bernstein’s celebrity status, the movie abandoned some of the best music from the Broadway original. See Thomas Hischak’s insightful comments in Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical When it Went to Hollywood (Lanham, Maryland: 2004), pp. 15 -16.
[4] Hugh Kenner, The Mechanical Muse (New York: 1987), p. 14.
[5] Lorraine Gordon, p. 100.
[6] Where it still stands today. http://www.villagevanguard.com/
[7] Alice Robinson, Betty Comden and Adolph Green: A Bio – Bibliography [Westport, CN: 1994]
[8] A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, CD -2-5177 (1977); Alice Robinson, Betty Comden and Adolph Green: A Bio – Bibliography [Westport, CN: 1994], p. 6). Another version of this story has Comden joining the troupe after its first three weeks struggling to make a go at it at the Village Vanguard. See Gary Carey, Judy Holliday: An Intimate Life Story (New York: 1982), pp. 224-27.
[9] Alive at the Village Vanguard , p. 100.
[10] Eric Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (New York: 1989), p. 178.
[11] Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein (New York: 1994), pp. 52 – 58.
[12]A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, CD -2-5177 (1977).
[13] Two Max Gordons each claim that he discovered Judy Holliday.
One is the impresario Max Gordon, founder of the indispensable Village Vanguard, born in Lithuania and reared in Portland, Oregon.
The other Max Gordon was originally named Mechel Salpete by his Polish-born parents. Gordon was born and grew up in New York City, and became a theatrical producer. He bankrolled a play called Born Yesterday (now all but forgotten), one of Broadway’s longest running dramas that played for an astonishing 1,642 performances from 1946 – 1949 and which made Judy Holliday a Broadway star (Max Gordon, Max Gordon Presents [n.p.: 1963], p. 78). His most famous production was the long-running play My Sister Eileen, the “book” for Bernstein-Comden-Green’s Wonderful Town. It is this Max Gordon Cole Porter includes in his 1934 song “Anything Goes:”
When Rockefeller still can board en-
Ough money to let Max Gordon
Produce his shows,
Anything goes.
Robert Kimball, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter (New York:1992), p. 172.
[14] Burton, p. 129.
[15] Jule Styne, The Songs of Jule Styne (Milwaukee: 1989), p.150.
[16] We are told later in the play the Ivy Smith is Miss Turnstiles for June starting the day of the plays’ actions.. World War II is referenced obloquy on several occasions, notably when Ozzie says of Gabe “He’s a Navel hero. He deserves a girl like that.”
[17] Citing the Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet. Creating Fancy Free is chronicled in Deborah Jowitt, Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (New York: 2004), pp. 73 -75.
[18] Peter Pan was apparently inspired by The Coral Island (1853) by R. M. Ballantyne about three boys ship-wreaked on an island.
[19] A fascinating (and erudite) essay on sailors in New York as a trope is provided by Marshall Berman in his book titled, what else? On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (New York: 2006), especially Chapter 3, “A Human Eye: Sailors in the Square.”
Richard Goldstein writes a fascinating story of New York during World War Two in a book whose title naturally alludes to On the Town’s best known song, hence (what else?) Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II (New York: 2010). In it we learn that the Brooklyn Navel Yard was the largest shipyard in the world with 75,000 workers (p. 66). It closed in 1966.
The 1944 setting in the Brooklyn Navel Yard was not unusual. Comden and Green surly knew that The American Theatre [sic] Wing produced Lunch Hour Follies to entertain war-industry workers with shows created by Moss Hart and Kurt Weill, among others. See David Farneth, et al., Kurt Weill, a life in Pictures and Documents (Woodstock, NY: 2000).
[20] In his Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: 1959), C. L. Barber argues that Shakespeare’s “comedy presents holiday magic as imagination, games as expressive gestures. At high moments it brings into focus, as part of the play, the significance of the saturnalia form itself as a paradoxical human need, problem, and resource” (p. 15). Holidays, including Twelfth Night and May Day, are an escape from time, a tiny eternity that paradoxically recognizes time’s passing. The festive, according to Barber, allow men and women to subscribe to the authority of the Lord of Misrule, a relic of May Day, “applied to the captain of summer Sunday drinking and dancing by the young men of the parish, a leader whose role was not necessarily distinct from the Robin or King of Maying” (p. 24). About the time Barber was writing Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, Mikhail Bakhtin was writing Rabelais and his World in which Bakhtin called attention to the carnival ethos of Renaissance Europe that Rabelais (according to Bakhtin) structured Gargantua and Pantagruel. “Rabelais’ novel is the most festive work in world literature” Bakhtin asserts in Rabelais and His World, trans., Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, Indiana: 1984 [originally 1968]), p. 275. And goes on: “ . . . the feast means liberation from all that is utilitarian . . . it is a temporary transfer to the utopian world” (p. 276). It is unlikely that Barber and Bakhtin were aware of each other’s work.
[21] “. . . any repetition of an archetypal gesture, suspends duration, abolishes profane time, and participates in mythical time.” p. 36 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: the Myth of the Eternal Return , trans Willard R. Trask, (NY:1959 [orig pub 1949]), p. 36.
[22] Depending on how you count them: Hippolyta and Theseseus; Hermia and Lysander; and Helena and Demetrius; but you could include Titania and Oberon.
[23] Jacques Offenbach’s Helen Goes to Troy and La Vie Parisienne were in repertory on Broadway in 1944 and 1945.
[24] The Hippodrome was built by the creators of Coney Island’s Luna Park where the three couples re-unite, On the history of The Hippodrome see Mary Henderson, The City and the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses (New York: 2004), p. 251.
Luna Park was destroyed by a fire in 1944.
[25] Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage: American Drama and the Theater of the Great Depression NY 1974, p. 136.
[26] In reality, soldiers, sailors, and marines shipped in and out of New York Harbor flocked to Oklahoma! which ran from 1943 to 1948 for 2,212 performances at the St. James Theater on West 44th Street. Uniformed servicemen were admitted free of charge. Lorraine Diehl, Over Here! New York City During World War II (New York: 2010), p. 187. According to Sono Osato, “Servicemen packed the theatre each night” to enjoy One Touch of Venus (1943 – 1945) in which Sono Osato was a premiere danseuse before appearing in On the Town as Miss Turnstiles. Sono Osato, Distant Dances (New York, 1980), p. 222. And, of course, they took in On the Town.
[27] “We must starve our sight / From lovers’ food . . . “ says Hermia to Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I.i.22 – 223). Food and sex are conflated in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), when for example Leopold Bloom slips into bed with his sleeping wife (Wait. Get the kids out of the room): “He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons o f her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere . . .” Modern Library edition (1961), p. 734. Food as metaphor: Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Middle Ages, trans by Willard Trask (NY: Bollingen (1953) [originally pub 1948] “Kitchen Humor and Other Ridicula” pp. 431 – 434. The comic and satiric use of food we see in Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night or Ben Jonson (consider Sir Epicure Mammon in; and the admonishment of forbidden meats by Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Bartholomew Fair[1614]). Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London:1947) quotes Doll Tearsheet “”I am meat for your master” (Second Henry IV, II.iv. 123) See also Bakhtin, Chapter 4, “Banquet Imagery in Rabelais” where Bakhtin elaborates that “food images are connected with those of the body and of procreation . . . p. 279.
[28] Jowitt, p. 77, Burton, p. 113 and 126.
[29][29] As is mistakenly asserted by Philip Furia and Michael Lasser, America’s Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley (New York: 2006), p.241.
[30] Magnificently illustrated in Brooke Kamin Rapaport and Kevin Stayton, Vital Forms: American Art in the Atomic Age, 1940 – 1960 (New York: 2001), exhibition catalogue for Brooklyn Museum of Art 2001- 2002 exhibit of the same name.
[31] Childs was a self-serve restaurant (Kenneth Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City [1995], p. 214) that is no longer around but captured on film in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 movie, The Wrong Man, film location at 604 5th Avenue.
[32] Howard Pollack, Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World (2012), p, 166.
[33] Pollack, p. 181.
[34] Pollack, p. 151.
[35] Rocking the cradle is apparently a phrase Communists used to describe union activism. Charles Siringo, a Pinkerton detective , wrote in his autobiography about his assignment to the Idaho copper mines in the Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, mining district where he infiltrated a miners union taken over by in Siringo’s words, “ a vicious, heartless gang of anarchists. Many of them had been rocked in the cradle of anarchy at Butte City, Montana . . . .” Charles Siringo, A Cowboy Detective: A True Story of Twenty-Two Years with a World-Famous Detective Agency (Chicago, 1912 [reprinted by University of Nebraska Press, 1988]), p. 40.
[36] Pollack, pp. 190 – 191.
[37] Burton, p. 220; Pollack p. 356; Eric Gordon, p.360.
[38] Since renamed the Lucille Lortel Theatre.
[39] This is an asterisk record, for it has to be taken into account the Theatre de Lys only seated 299 patrons at a show.
[40] Max Gordon, Live at the Village Vanguard, (New York, 1980), p. 77.
[41] The Blue Angel closed in 1963. The building was destroyed in a fire in 1975. The Blue Angel is the name of a fictional cabaret in the universally praised 1930 German movie, The Blue Angel starring Marlene Dietrich’s legs, both of them.
[42] Thelonious Monk first performed at the Village Vanguard on October 14, 1948, which became a “life-changing” event according to Robin Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original (New York: 2009), p. 145.
[43] Nat Hentoff, “Introduction,” Live at the Village Vanguard, p. 1 and 3-4.
[44] For example: A Night at the Village Vanguard Sonny Rollins, (1957); Bill Evans, Sunday at the Village Vanguard (1961); Live! At the Village Vanguard John Coltrane (1962).
[45] Even serious historians of American music accept the false notion of “the folk revival of the early 1960,” such as Francis Davis, The History of the Blues (New York: 1995), p. 165.
[46] Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940 – 1970 (Amherst, MA: 2002), pp. 53 -54.
[47] Max Gordon, Live at the Village Vanguard (New York: 1980), p.45.
[48] Rock and Roll came from a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon folk music, Christain hymns, county western one on hand and Blues on the other See Christopher Small,” American Vernacular: A Meeting of Two Worlds,” How Music Works, ed. Keith Spence (New York: 1981), pp. 293-318.
[49] Deanna Adams, Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Roots (Charleston, SC: 2010). See also the on-line Encyclopedia of Cleveland History entry on Leo Mintz: http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=ML2
[50] Max Gordon, Live at the Village Vanguard (New York, 1980), p. 39.
[51] The original title of the novel was Peter and Wendy, written after the play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904). On the history of Peter Pan literature, see Maria Tatar, ed., The Annotated Peter Pan (New York: 2011).
[52] The 1960 movie also keeps Broadway actors Jean Stapleton, Dort Clark, and Berni West from the original cast. Dean Martin (replacing Sydney Chaplin) as Jeff Moss excels in one of Martin’s most natural performances. Village Vanguard jazz saxophonist, Gerry Mulligan, has a small role added to the movie in the blind date scene.
[53] Gary Carey, Judy Holliday: An Intimate Life Story (New York: Seaview Books, 1982), p. 14 and Will Holtzman, Judy Holliday (New York: G.P. Putman’s: 1982), p. 47.
[54] The source for innumerable stories, operas, and plays, Cinderella was written by Seventeenth-Century writer Charles Perrault who also gave us Sleeping Beauty (Jeff Moss, the sleeping prince). In the ‘Fifties most Americans knew Cinderella from the Walt Disney 1950 full-length animated cartoon, Cinderella, well-received by audiences to this day. Legend has it that the success of Cinderella saved the near bankrupt Disney Studios. A Cinderella Cinderella.
So-called “Cinderella musicals” were common on Broadway in the 1920s according to John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2003), pp 57 – 61. See also Stuart Hecht, Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical (New York: 2011), who assigns as a Cinderella musical the 1964 – 1967 Funny Girl, music by Jule Styne and staring Sydney Chaplin, both from Bells are Ringing. On Marilyn Miller as the quintessential musical Cinderella see Laurence Maslon, Broadway: the American Musical (New York: 2004), pp. 82 – 84. Marilyn Miller played Peter Pan on Broadway too, of course. A bas relief statue of Marilyn Miller by Caulder (father of Alexander Caulder)
[55] Release dates of Hollywood movies can be deceiving. For example, The Wild One is conventionally referenced as a 1953 production, but in truth, the movie was released on the last day of 1953, and most movie goers in American saw the movie for the first time in 1954.
[56] As demonstrated in the Hollywood spoof 3000 Miles to Graceland (2001). The real Elvis Presley was a mere 21 year old in 1956, the year he gained national fame by appearing on the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey brothers’ New York television show, Stage Show, followed by appearances on the Steve Allen television program in New York and the Melton Berle Show from Hollywood, a couple of months before the opening of Bells are Ringing. See Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: 1994), pp 235, 259, et passim.
[57] Photographer Berenice Abbott happily recorded the S. Klein store in her 1939 Changing New York reproduced by the Museum of New York City (New York: 1997).
[58] Bells are Ringing, 2001 Broadway Revival, Fynsworth Alley HDCD, (Universal City, CA: 2001).
__________________________
Terry Dunford, who received his doctorate in English from Marquette University (USA), is a retired college dean and humanities instructor. He has published in English Literary Renaissance, Art & Academe, Academic Questions, and other journals.
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