The Ballad of John Latouche by Howard Pollack

Author:Howard Pollack [Pollack, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190458317
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Although Golden Ladder essentially dispensed with Latouche’s lyrics, the show retained the daughters-in-law melodrama that he seems to have penned, while the overhauled words to “Store-bought Suit” and “We Got a Star”—now, “Bran’ New Look” and “I See a Star”—plainly showed traces of his work as well.

The similarly extended saga of The Happy Dollar proved more straightforward, at least in terms of authorship. The show seems to have originated with its bookwriter, Lee Falk (born Leon Gross, 1911–1999), best known as the creator and author of the successful newspaper comic strips Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom, but also active in the theater as author, producer, and director. In 1947, Falk wrote a musical comedy script, Hero Hill, which would become the basis of The Happy Dollar, and which piqued the interest of fledgling producer James Dunn (1901–1967), an accomplished actor who considered starring in the show himself.

For this reimagining of the Faust story as a western, Dunn hoped to reunite the team of composer Harold Arlen and lyricist E. Y. Harburg, sensing some connection between Falk’s play and Arlen and Harburg’s Bloomer Girl (1944)—and perhaps, too, with Finian’s Rainbow (1947), a recent hit by Harburg and Burton Lane. However, with Harburg unavailable, Dunn recruited by the end of 1947 an enthusiastic Latouche, whose Cabin in the Sky with Vernon Duke resembled this new vehicle even more closely. Indeed, when Latouche proposed to Duke that they collaborate on this show, the latter, although he liked Falk’s book, turned down the offer by explaining that they had “already concocted a colored ‘Cabin in the Sky’ … Why bother with a white one?” In the end, as Duke further recalled, Latouche “handed the book” to William Friml, “who wrote a charming score to a great set of lyrics.”33

Still only in his twenties, pianist, arranger, and composer William Friml (1921–1973)—the “gifted son,” as Duke wrote, of operetta composer Rudolf Friml and his third wife, actress Elsie Lawson—had studied music from an early age, giving piano recitals while still a boy. After some time at the University of Southern California, service in the army, and marriage to actress Shelby Payne, Friml established himself largely in Los Angeles as an arranger for a number of popular singers, although he maintained some involvement with the theater as well, including helping composer Burton Lane revamp the Broadway musical Flahooley as Jollyanna in 1952. According to his son, also named William, financial worries and chronic pain drove him to take his life at age fifty-one.34

Latouche and Friml collaborated on the score during the first half of 1948, and according to one source, completed the work—retitled The Happy Dollar—in June, with a production by Dunn in association with Don Medford, later a noted television director, and James Colligan, a theater manager, announced for the fall; but postponement followed postponement. In November, the press mentioned a possible leading role for operetta baritone Earl Wrightson; in December, a planned West Coast tryout with film stars Eddie Bracken and Vivian Blaine (the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.