Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre by Ethan Mordden

Author:Ethan Mordden [Mordden, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

After West Side Story

Richard Bissell’s 1953 novel about life in a pajama factory, 7½ Cents, became The Pajama Game, a standard-make George Abbott musical—fast and funny, with a weakening of plot concentration in Act Two beefed up by a performance piece, in this case the aforementioned “Steam Heat,” presented as entertainment at a union rally. Bissell himself collaborated on the script with Abbott, and the novelist then got a novel out of the experience of putting on a musical. The amiably tough-as-bullets Abbott was irresistible as a model for one Richard Hackett, “the great man of the theater,” but otherwise Bissell invented his characters. Certainly, The Pajama Game’s songwriters, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, were nothing like Rudy Lorraine, the frantically womanizing songwriter of Bissell’s novel, obsessed with the concoction of simplistic hit tunes for Bissell’s fictional show, The Girl From Indiana.

Bissell called his book Say, Darling, and this, too, was adapted for Broadway, as not a musical but a spoken comedy with songs and incidental musical bits. However, those songs were by Jule Styne and Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who were not known for incidental bits. RCA Victor decided to give Say, Darling a cast album, expanding the musical spots as full-out numbers and jumping the sound from the two-piano accompaniment used in the theatre to a complete orchestration by Victor’s house arranger, Sid Ramin. And, says Steven Suskin in The Sound of Broadway Music, from the moment Styne heard Ramin’s Say, Darling overture, he was flabbergasted. Ramin (assisted, says Suskin, by an unbilled Robert Ginzler) seemed to throw every instrument into the mix all at once, starting with a brass fanfare and going on to standout moments for xylophone, snare drum, a brass choir, and banjo leading into the first tune, the rollicking march “Something’s Always Happening on the River.” The strings didn’t come into major play till the second tune, the slow waltz “Dance Only With Me,” and for the transition into the third tune, “The Husking Bee,” Ramin brought in the brass “triangle.”* Now, none of this was entirely new to Styne’s ears. The Lena Horne show Jamaica, just the year before, exploded with brass tricks, especially in the overture, and Styne’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, scored by Don Walker, has a very imaginative overture, using the brass triangle most excitingly in its coda. Nevertheless, something about all that brass resolve in Ramin’s Say, Darling charts thrilled Styne. Perhaps it was because the Say, Darling music, a mere accessory in the theatre, suddenly sounded like a string of hit tunes. What matters here is that Styne may well have heard in “Ramin’s Say, Darling” the template for how Styne’s next musical should sound. That musical was Gypsy (1959), and with Gypsy we seem to move away from the strings-dominated R & H score to the brass-dominated scores of the 1960s and after.

Gypsy has long held pride of place even on the short list of perfect shows, because, compared with, say, Brigadoon or Hello, Dolly!, the character relationships are so sternly yet so richly drawn.

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