Helluva Town by Richard Goldstein

Author:Richard Goldstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

BEAUTIFUL MORNIN’

AND SAILORS ON THE TOWN

It’s dawn at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Workmen sing softly and all is drowsiness. And then, at the stroke of six, sailors in their whites bounce down a gangplank and the air is vibrant. To a burst of percussive music, three of the Navy boys break into the exuberant strains of “New York, New York” and they set out for Manhattan and a frantic race against time. They are out to explore the dazzling city, but most of all to find love on a twenty-four-hour pass. It’s December 28, 1944, at the Adelphi Theatre, the opening night of On the Town.

As America entered its fourth year at war, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein collaborated on a valentine to New York and a portrait of longing and loneliness in wartime. They did it with an exhilarating blend of music, dance, and lyrics, building on the kind of meld introduced by Oklahoma! the previous year.

Broadway musicals had been giving a nod to the war, but the angles were often contrived, even with Cole Porter’s imprint.

Back in 1940, Porter’s Panama Hattie presented Ethel Merman as Hattie Maloney, a nightclub owner in the Canal Zone who while courted by a naval officer becomes entangled in a spy plot threatening vital fortifications.

Porter returned in 1941 with Let’s Face It, a musical-comedy hit in which wealthy wives, seeking revenge on their unfaithful husbands, try to steal soldiers from their sweethearts. Danny Kaye’s “Melody in 4-F,” a double-talking takeoff on a reluctant draftee’s experiences, provided the highlight.

Something for the Boys (1943), the third Porter musical with a wartime twist, starred Merman as Blossom Hart, who inherits a ranch near San Antonio that she converts into a hotel for wives visiting their airmen husbands stationed nearby. When Merman becomes attracted to a sergeant who is already engaged to a socialite, complications ensue. Merman scored with “Hey, Good Lookin’,” and Betty Garrett charmed with the ballad “I’m in Love with a Soldier Boy.” At the show’s conclusion, an Army bomber appeared on stage, tossed about in a thunderstorm.

The war found its way into the 1944 musical comedy Follow the Girls, played out at a serviceman’s club called the Starlight Canteen. The forgettable plot centered on a portly civilian (Jackie Gleason) vying with a handsome Navy officer (Frank Parker) for a buxom stripper (Gertrude Niesen).

When Something for the Boys opened on January 7, 1943, the Herald Tribune called it “bright” but noted “it shares the structural weakness of many large-scale musicals in that its dance numbers are not convincingly integrated in the plot.”

Big changes were coming.

Sleet was falling the night of March 31, 1943, but when the curtain rose at the St. James Theatre, an old woman churning butter on the porch of a farmhouse had her labors interrupted by a cowhand’s a capella baritone refrain: “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.”

Oklahoma! —music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II—became a theatrical milestone, melding story, lyrics, music, costumes, lighting, scenery, and dance to an extent never before achieved.

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