Encores! - New York City Center

at 18: A Mid-Century Celebration
By Jack Viertel
Bells Are Ringing
November 18 – 21, 2010
Lost in the Stars
February 3 – 6, 2011
Where’s Charley?
March 17 – 20, 2011
O
ne of the frequent goals of an Encores! season is to create diversity
through chronology – showing the breadth of the musical theater’s
range over many decades. Not this year.
All of this season’s offerings were produced within an eight-year period.
Those eight years (1948-1956), however, were among the busiest, most secure,
ambitious and successful years the theater ever had, producing, among others, Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, The King and I, Guys and Dolls and My Fair
Lady. Encores!, of course, concentrates on the less well-known and the more
diverse. And even within the homogeneous world of booming post-war
Broadway, there was plenty of variety. Hence our upcoming season of shows:
Bells Are Ringing, Lost in the Stars and Where’s Charley?
For the creators and star of Bells
Are Ringing, 1956 was a reunion
year. Betty Comden, Adolph
Green and Judy Holliday had
begun their professional lives
together in the waning days
of the Great Depression as
part of a downtown troupe
called The Revuers. By the
mid-‘50s, Holliday had become a star in Born Yesterday (the play and its film
adaptation) and Betty and
Adolph, as they were universally known, had broken
out with On the Town, gone
to Hollywood and written the
screenplays for The Band Wagon and Singing in the Rain.
The inspiration for Bells, according to composer Jule Styne’s
biographer Theodore Taylor, was
actually nothing more than an illustration on the back of the New York
Yellow Pages – a caricature of a young
telephone operator hopelessly entangled in switchboard wires. Plopping
the phone book down on Styne’s piano one morning, Green said to Styne,
“Here’s our new musical. We’ll write a
great part for Judy.”
The results are a lot like that – Bells
Are Ringing feels like a vacation lark for
writers at the top of their game and a star
who knows securely that the work is being tailored to her gifts. In some senses
it tips its hat to the days of The Revuers,
with a stockpile of zany supporting
characters and situations, a plot that’s
more like a thread, and a passion for
comedy and romance above meaning.
Throw in a score that includes “The
Party’s Over”, “Just in Time” and “Long
Before I Knew You” and Bells, despite
mixed reviews, could hardly have failed.
It was, in fact, the virtual definition of
a tired businessman’s delight, but done
with such craft and style that it rises
above its own ambitions.
B y c o n t r a s t , Los t in t he St ar s is
among the most ambitious projects ever
attempted for Broadway. Playwright
Maxwell Anderson was handed a copy
of Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved
Country, by Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein II
on an ocean voyage just after its publication. By the time the ship landed,
Anderson was convinced that Paton’s
eloquent, powerful novel of racial unrest in South Africa could be musicalized. And because it contained so many
parallels to race relations in the United
States, he reasoned that it should be
done in a mainstream context, on
Broadway. Anderson turned to frequent collaborator Kurt Weill, and the
two set about transforming the dense
atmosphere and complex characters of
Paton’s novel into a musical play.
Weill, concerned that the influences
in his score might too closely resemble
African-American gospel and blues
music, acquired field recordings of
Zulu music direct from Africa, only to
discover – not surprisingly to us today
– that there was a distinction without a
significant difference. He and Anderson also reached back to an unfinished
musical they had worked on a decade
earlier, Ulysses Africanus, cannibalizing
some of that score for the new one,
including the dazzlingly beautiful and
heartbreaking title song, “Lost in the
Stars.” In the end, the score emerged
sounding like nothing so much as Kurt
Weill, in a darkly poetic mood, suitable
to the tale of an anguished rural black
father dealing with his son’s absorption
into a world of crime in Johannesburg.
Although not a popular hit, Lost in
the Stars stunned many of the critics
and managed a respectable run. It left
behind a reputation created by the
many sparks of greatness in its score
and its daring attempt to forge a new
musical theater that elevated Broadway to the level of real tragedy.
Produced a year earlier than Lost in
the Stars, Where’s Charley? was a marriage of expertise and complete inexperience. The newly minted producing
team of Cy Feuer and Ernest H. Martin
entered the Broadway field in the late
‘40s and Feuer, who had been a some- Ray Bolger, who turned its hit song
time trumpeter and musical director “Once in Love with Amy” into a national
at RKO in Hollywood, brought along sing-along phenomenon.
Frank Loesser, who was a well-known Unfortunately, 1948-49 was also the
movie songwriter but had never tried a season that the musicians’ union and
Broadway show. (Loesser had begun his the recording industry had a dispute
career as a lyricist, collaborating with, that resulted in the banning of all origamong others, Bells Are Ringing’s Jule inal cast albums. As a result, Where’s
Styne.)
Charley?’s reputation, and that of Frank
They took Brandon Thomas’s 1892 Loesser’s momentous entrance into the
hit comedy Charley’s Aunt and gave world of Broadway, has suffered an unit to George Abbott to adapt and di- deserved obscurity. It was his next show,
rect. Abbott was hardly inexperienced Guys and Dolls, that put him on the
– he’d been working on Broadway since map as a Broadway immortal.
1914 and would continue well into This was Broadway in the late ‘40s
the 1980s.
and early to mid-‘50s, a place where
Feuer and Martin were tough busi- art and commerce, busman’s holiday
nessmen with a reputation for stubborn- and limitless artistic ambition lived in
ness and hostility. (George S. Kaufman happy (if often contentious) proximity,
once cracked that Feuer and Martin secure in the knowledge that there
were “Hitler rolled into two.”) Loesser were shows for every taste and preferalso had a wild energy and a fierce ence. It’s a distinct pleasure for Encores!
temper. Abbott, while not a screamer, to be able to walk among the giants as
could be imperious and chilly, and was they work and play.
the unquestioned boss of everything
he did. Surprisingly, the show they Jack Viertel is Artistic Director of Encores!
fashioned was warm, bright, charming and completely inviting. Not a big
brassy affair like Bells or a brooding
social drama like Stars, it featured a
lightness of touch and insouciance
that made it a memorable
hit of the 1948-49 season –
a chamber comedy with
songs. It also featured