Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise by Steichen James;

Author:Steichen, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

In keeping with Rodgers and Hart’s “no formula” formula, Babes in Arms offered something different from their previous show, and the most significant element of contrast was its young and mostly unknown cast. Set in the fictional town of Seaport, Long Island, the musical writes adults out of the picture almost completely, focused on what transpires when the children of struggling vaudevillians are left behind after their parents are enlisted to join a WPA-sponsored tour. When faced with the prospect of having to move to a New Deal “work farm,” the youngsters decide to prove that they can fend for themselves by, of course, putting on a show. Through several plot twists involving their performance efforts and the deus ex machina emergency crash landing of a famous French aviator, the “babes” are in the end allowed to stay at home. Today Babes in Arms is mostly celebrated for the many iconic songs that it contributed to the American songbook, among them “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “I Wish I Were in Love Again.” While the subsequent film adaptation starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney preserved only the barest contours of the musical’s plot and only a few of its songs, in its original form the musical represented something more weighty in tone. It was praised by some as achieving the elusive high-low synthesis longed for by the aspiring composer Sidney Cohn of On Your Toes, “halfway between Debussy and the modern American idiom.”10 As scholar Andrea Most has noted, the stage version was far from a feel-good vehicle for hit tunes or musical sophistication but stands as a rich document of the left-wing political ethos of the 1930s, with its youthful characters engaging in quite adult debates about political topics.11 At many turns the plot hinges on the question of where certain characters stand on the issue of racial segregation and the regional conflicts between northerners and southerners.

For Balanchine, Babes in Arms confirmed the status he had earned through his work for On Your Toes as a successful choreographer for the Broadway stage and even beyond. The backstage ethos of the musical afforded numerous opportunities for inventive spectacle, many of which foregrounded dance, and like the numbers in On Your Toes, these were closely integrated into the musical’s plot, including what many consider the first “dream ballet” in a Broadway musical. These dances brought Balanchine even more exposure to American dancers, in particular tap dancers Duke McHale and the Nicholas Brothers, whom he had previously encountered through his work on the Ziegfeld Follies.

Youthful talent was a key selling point of the show, and it was noted that its genteel producer Dwight Deere Wiman had evidently “robbed every talented cradle in the land” to assemble his cast.12 But although the cast had “the charm and buoyancy of youth,” there was nevertheless “nothing amateurish about them,” in part thanks to the guidance of “oldsters who know their business.”13 Writing in Theatre Arts Monthly, Edith Isaacs praised the youthful

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