Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber by Block, Geoffrey (good story books to read .TXT) 📕

of completeness and altered tempos. Inspired by Kaufman’s admonition to “take a deep breath and set up your story,” the opening devotes itself entirely through narrative ballet and mime to capturing the colorful world of Runyon’s stories. The scene description in the libretto and the published vocal score details an intricate comic interaction of con artists, pickpockets, a man who pretends to be a blind merchant, naive tourists, bobby soxers, and a prizefighter who is inadvertently knocked down by the unimposing Benny Southstreet, the only named character to appear in this elaborate sequence. At the end of “Runyonland” we meet two other tinhorns, Rusty Charlie and Nicely-Nicely Johnson, the latter of whom will emerge, after Sky, as the leading male singer of the evening. In a transition that literally does not skip a beat, the trio introduce the first song of the show, “Fugue for Tinhorns.”

Tinhorns are gamblers who pretend to be wealthier than they are. Burrows’s and Loesser’s tinhorns match this description with their pretense to a verbal and musical sophistication they do not possess. The verbal pretensions are evident throughout their dialogue, the musical ones are most clearly revealed in their opening song. Even the word “fugue” is pretentious, referring to a musical form associated with J. S. Bach in which similar melodic lines, introduced at the outset in staggered entrances of a principal melody (known as the fugue subject), are then heard simultaneously. True to type, what Rusty, Nicely-Nicely, and Benny sing is in fact not a fugue at all but a form that pretends to be a fugue, the lowlier round, known to all from “Three Blind Mice” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

In the first of many departures from a fugue, the participants in a round begin by singing the identical (rather than a similar) musical line, albeit also in staggered entrances. The whole tune of Loesser’s “fugue” consists of twelve measures of melody, with the final eight measures containing additional repetition. Despite their relative simplicity, rounds are tricky to create, since they must be composed vertically (the harmonic dimension) as well as horizontally (the melodic dimension). In “Fugue for Tinhorns” Loesser therefore has constructed his twelve-bar tune so that it can be subdivided into three four-bar phrases (one complete phrase is shown in Example 11.2); each phrase is constructed so that it can be sung simultaneously with any of the others. In order to squeeze a horizontal twelve-bar melody comfortably into a vertical four-bar straitjacket, the harmony must not change. The entire musical content therefore consists of repetitions of harmonically identical four-bar phrases, alternated among the three participants, each of whom argues in favor of his chosen horse, Paul Revere, Valentine, and Epitaph.

Guys and Dolls, Crap game in the sewer in act II. Robert Alda throwing the dice, Stubby Kaye kneeling to the left, Sam Levene to the right (1950). Museum of the City of New York. Theater Collection.

Even though Loesser does not produce a real fugue, he does offer a degree of real counterpoint that is unusual in a Broadway musical, especially a musical comedy. In fact, the only substantial use of counterpoint among earlier musicals surveyed in this volume occurs, not surprisingly, in Porgy and Bess (a technique also demonstrated in earlier Gershwin shows not discussed here, perhaps most notably in “Mine” from Let ’Em Eat Cake). Prominent but relatively isolated additional examples can be found in Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock (scene 10) and Bernstein’s Candide (“The Venice Gavotte”) and West Side Story (the “Tonight” quintet). After 1970 this device would become more prominent in Sondheim (e.g., the combination of “Now,” “Later,” and “Soon” in A Little Night Music). Even straightforward harmonization between two principals is exceptional in the musicals of Kern, Rodgers, Porter, and Loewe. Interestingly, the only Broadway composer to rival Loesser at the counterpoint game was Berlin, another lyricist-composer with less formal musical training than the other composers discussed in the present survey, Loesser included. In songs that ranged throughout his career, most famously “Play a Simple Melody” from Watch Your Step (1914), “You’re Just in Love” from Call Me Madam (1950), and his final hurrah as a composer, “An Old-Fashioned Wedding” from the 1966 revival of Annie Get Your Gun, Berlin created extraordinary pairs of melodies that could be sung simultaneously.

Example 11.2. “Fugue for Tinhorns” (one complete statement of three-part round)

Loesser’s predilection for counterpoint or overlapping musical lines can be observed as early as “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” In Where’s Charley? Loesser used counterpoint prominently in “Make a Miracle,” and he would continue to present simultaneous melodies in ingenious new ways in more than a few songs in Hans Christian Andersen, The Most Happy Fella, and How to Succeed. Since it is usually hard to sing simultaneous melodic lines (or even harmony), actor-oriented musicals, especially those inhabiting musical comedy stages, use counterpoint relatively rarely, at least before Sondheim.

After the unison cadence that concludes “Fugue for Tinhorns,” the orchestra is instructed to hold their final D until the “Mission Band starts playing on Stage” one half-step lower on C major. In this next number, “Follow the Fold” (Example 11.3), the Save-a-Soul Mission Band and a quartet of missionaries led by Sarah provide a rhythmic and textural contrast to “Fugue for Tinhorns” that could hardly be more extreme. The tinhorns inhabit a world of syncopation, counterpoint, and lots of sharps and flats, while one jarring halfstep lower the missionaries occupy a rhythmically unsyncopated, homophonic, C-majorish musical realm. The only conspicuous common denominator between these contrasting musical worlds is a shared underlying harmonic simplicity. In the fugue a measure of dominant harmony alternates with a measure of tonic harmony; the mission march also employs these two basic harmonies exclusively.17 “Follow the Fold” also illustrates a rare “appropriate” use of a hymn-like style in Loesser’s work. The concluding a cappella harmonies of the next song, “The Oldest Established,” is far more typical of Loesser’s predilection to translate the religious fervor of secular emotions