Dear Reader: My humblest apologies for my extended absence from the blogosphere. I've been caught up in teaching, and the semester has really gone into high gear. But one of the things that has been keeping me busy might be of interest to some of you. Here's the director's note from my staged reading this semester. The shows are Thursday April 4th at 8:15 pm and Saturday April 6th at 8 pm. If you're in the Boston area and are interested in attending, drop me a line. --C.C.
Welcome to Sunny.
This
is the ninth in a series of staged readings that I launched in the fall of 2009
as part of my course in the history of musical theater at the Boston
Conservatory. The idea behind the series was to expose students to historically
significant but underperformed musicals as part of their overall introduction
to, and immersion in, the musical-theater form. In the past four years, we’ve
covered a wide range of important yet forgotten musicals, and along the way the
students have been able to roll up their sleeves and delve into the respective
genres that the shows represent.
Here
are the shows from the series so far: Little Johnny Jones, Very Good Eddie, As Thousands Cheer, Allegro, Bloomer Girl, The Cradle Will Rock, Something for the Boys, A Connecticut Yankee, and now Sunny.
Because
we performed A Connecticut Yankee in
the fall, which gave us a glimpse of Rodgers before Hammerstein, I wanted to do
something in the spring that represented Hammerstein before Rodgers. And I knew
that the best show to do that would be Sunny
(1925), Hammerstein’s first
collaboration with composer Jerome Kern, shortly before they would work
together on the ground-breaking show, Show
Boat (1927). Beyond that historic match-up of talent, Sunny also represents a significant subgenre of 1920s musical
comedy: the rags-to-riches Cinderella story.
Sunny came to Broadway in 1925, a
time when musicals were fast, fun, and forgettable. Creators usually only labored
on these shows for a few months, and were frequently working on more than one
show at the same time. The economics of the time allowed for producers to make
a profit with as few as 100 performances, and then shows would close and make
way for the next disposable musical.
Sunny ran for 507 performances, which is astonishing, at least based on the
criteria of the day. But then, the show pretty much disappeared like most every
other musical from the 1920s, with the exception of Show Boat, Good News, and
No, No, Nanette. And even these shows
have only survived after major and
continuous revisions.
The
era of frivolous, frothy, ephemeral musicals was undeniably fun while it lasted,
particularly for fans of madcap comedy and high-toned operetta. The same week
that Sunny opened in New York,
Broadway also saw the debuts of the aforementioned No, No, Nanette , Rodgers and Hart’s Dearest Enemy, and Rudolph Friml’s The Vagabond King. These shows joined the already-running Rose-Marie
(Friml, Hammerstein), The Student Prince
(Romberg), The Cocoanuts (Irving
Berlin, writing for The Marx Brothers) and Tip-Toes
(The Gershwins).
Sunny itself represents a case study of sorts that
illuminates how the typical show was cobbled together at the time. Frequently
the shows were cast before they were written, and each of the stars would typically
have his or her demands, putting the writers in the awkward position of trying
to accommodate everybody and still have a workable show.
For
example, the star of Sunny was the
radiant Marilyn Miller, a major stage star at the time, and a favorite of
Florenz Ziegfeld. Miller had scored a triumph five years earlier with Jerome
Kern’s Sally (1920), and had since
become Broadway’s little darling. Legend
has it that, after Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein played the score to Sunny for Miller, she replied, “Never
mind that, honey, when do I get to do my tap specialty?” (Miller’s dance
numbers were choreographed by a young vaudeville and stage performer named Fred
Astaire. Whatever happened to him?)
Miller’s
contract also called for her to appear in jodhpurs (aka riding pants) at some
point in the show, even before anyone involved knew what the show was going to
be about. Why? Because Miller thought she looked rather fetching in a riding
habit. The authors obliged by inserting a fun but gratuitous fox-hunt scene,
although admittedly the scene does bring about the show’s denouement.
Even
more ridiculous, another performer in Sunny,
Cliff Edwards (who many of you may know as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Walt
Disney’s “Pinocchio”) had a codicil in his contract guaranteeing that he would
be alone on-stage between 10:00 and 10:15 p.m. performing his ukulele
specialty. (In vaudeville, Edwards was also known as “Ukulele Ike.”) So, in the
middle of act two, apropos of nothing whatsoever, Edwards would come on stage
and sing “Paddlin’ Madeline Home,” which was written by Harry W. Woods rather
than the Sunny team. When Edwards
left the show, his bit was replaced by a harmonica specialty with Borrah
Minevitch.
Somehow, the Sunny creators were able to fit everything together in workable,
although uninspired, plot: an English circus performer, Sunny, encounters two
American soldiers whom she befriended when she was entraining during World War
I. She has fallen in love with Tom, one of the soldiers, so she stows away on the
ocean liner that Tom and his friends are taking back home to America. When
Sunny gets caught as a stowaway, she marries Tom’s best friend Jim for American
citizenship so she won’t be deported.
And havoc ensues, as they say. In the
American version of the show, Sunny divorces Jim and ends up with Tom at the
end of the show. In other productions, she and Jim decide to stay with each
other. (Which ending will we see tonight, I wonder…)
Sunny’s greatest and lasting significance lies in having
brought about the first collaboration of Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. What’s
more, the experienced Otto Harbach acted as a mentor to the fledgling
Hammerstein, setting the standard for mentorship that Hammerstein would
famously continue with Stephen Sondheim. In fact, Hammerstein became more than
just a mentor to Sondheim. He became a sort of surrogate father. Sondheim would
then continue the cycle with Jonathan Larsen, Jason Robert Brown and others. In
a way, we have Otto Harbach to thank for setting this vital mentorship cycle
into motion.
Kern and Hammerstein would continue to
collaborate together over the years, both on full-scale Broadway productions (Sweet Adeline, The Cat and The Fiddle, Music in the Air, Very Warm for May) as
well as songs for Hollywood and the hit parade (“I Won’t Dance,” “The Last Time
I Saw Paris,” etc.).
Hearing the lyrics to the songs for Sunny, one gets the impression of a very
promising but still developing young lyricist in Oscar Hammerstein. (Of course,
Harbach and Hammerstein collaborated on the lyrics, so it’s difficult to
discern which words belong to which man.) Some of the songs feature scansion
that is slightly off. The song “D’Ye Love Me” contains a line that goes “Do you
promise to love me always?” with the emphasis on the second syllable of “always.”
(Actually the original lyric features the archaic word “alway,” which we have
changed here for the sake of clarity.)
Similarly, in “When We Get Our Divorce,”
the lyric includes the phrase “interlocutory decree” (which is simply a
temporary judgment from a court of law). The rhythm of the music has the singer
stressing the word as “in-TER-low-cue-TOR-ee,” whereas the actual pronunciation
would be more likely to be “in-ter-LOC-you-tor-ee.” There, is however, a rather
clever trick rhyme in the song, paring “testify” with “best if I,” which together with the above produces a
portrait of an ambitious artist trying new things and finding his feet in the
form that he would eventually revolutionize.
Yet, despite its flaws, Sunny is a delight. It’s all a bit silly,
but it’s really rather fun. The show also contains some of Jerome Kern’s
sprightly yet forgotten tunes, and gives us a glimpse not merely into the
carefree, madcap lifestyle of the 1920s, but also into the way in which that
lifestyle was reflected in the musicals of the time. We can also witness one of
the masters of the form cutting his teeth and moving towards a brand of musical
theater that would bring the form from mere entertainment to actual art.
In the 1920s, neither the fizzy musical
comedies nor the foppish operettas had succeeded in providing relevant, credible
drama beyond the admittedly appealing attributes of each genre. It would take
Oscar Hammerstein, a man who had received his apprenticeship in both musical
comedy and operetta, to fuse the two together and thereby create the modern,
integrated musical play.
Welcome. And please enjoy
Sunny.
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