Musical Mondays: Autumn
And the days turn to gold
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
For all his qualities, John Keats did not write for musical theatre. No matter how well set, ‘Ode to Autumn’ would not ‘land’ in a regular show. Lyrics are not poetry.
Autumn is a lovely season, laden with hints of nostalgia and scents of change. It is, of all seasons, poorly served by musical theatre.
Top of the musicals’ seasonal hit parade would be a song we’ve met before, ‘September Song’ from Knickerbocker Holiday, which extols the virtues of experience over callow youth:
“If you could examine the goods they bring
They have little to offer but the songs they sing
And a plentiful waste of time of day
A plentiful waste of time”
Not much of an argument to youth, admittedly, but reassuring to those of us concerned that we might have seen the last days of summer.1 Less comforting is Maxwell Anderson’s famously poignant, smokey image:
“When the Autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn't got time for the waiting game”
When you have nothing but time, you can afford to waste it. W
We also recently noted ‘Forever Autumn,’ which isn’t really from a musical but is a decent song that starts with a primary-school statement of fact -
“The summer sun is fading as the year grows old
And darker days are drawing near”
- and fortunately improves into a telling metaphor:
“My life will be forever autumn
'Cause you're not here.”
As another Romantic wrote, ‘if winter comes / can spring be far behind?’ The effect of ‘Forever Autumn’ is to deny that possibility, a soul-deadening prospect.
After that, we’re really struggling. Anyone thinking of staging a fund-raising event of Autumn-themed Broadway songs would be advised to wait until Christmas.
‘Autumn in New York,’ a jazz standard by Vernon Duke,2 actually counts because it saw the light in a 1934 revue, Thumbs Up, now forgotten apart from that and ‘Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.’
[Sidebar: my contributions to a ‘1066 Songbook’ were amongst my wittier moments. As well as ‘Zing! Went the Strings of My Archer’, it included ‘Love Me Odo’, ‘Oh Harold,’ ‘Blue Bayeux’ and ‘Man, I Feel Like a Yeoman.’ But I digress].3
Call me picky, but ‘Autumn in New York’ reads rather like a clunky translation from the original, a sensation familiar to all ABBA fans:
“Glittering crowds and shimmering clouds
In canyons of steel
They're making me feel
I'm home”
Canyons of steel is an arresting image of the view down one of Manhattan’s avenues, one of the great American vistas, but glittering crowds…?
“It's autumn in New York
That brings the promise of new love
Autumn in New York
Is often mingled with pain”
Bring us down to earth why don’t you, Vernon?
“This autumn in New York
Transforms the slums into Mayfair”
It really doesn’t. The conceit is nice, but the disparity is too great for comfort.
Insofar as there’s an Autumn standard (and the verse from ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’ doesn’t count), it might be ‘Another Autumn’ from Lerner & Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon. The very title evokes immediate disappointment. Nobody is going to write about ‘another autumn’ with enthusiasm; it suggests that something hoped for has not yet happened. It is, as they say, the hope that kills you:
“Another autumn, I've known the chill before But every autumn I feel it more and more For you can dream in spring when every hope is high But when the fall comes in they all begin to fade and die”
That catches the autumnal motif very neatly, exacerbating the melancholy with the mixture of resignation and bitterness, the sense that it might even be preferable to give up entirely rather than endure the cycle of spring and ‘another autumn.’ This song deserves to be better-known. I blame Lee Marvin (for recording Wand’rin’ Star).
Probably known only to real geeks aficionados4 and the Marie’s Crisis crowd is ‘Autumn’ from the musical Titanic. Maury Yeston has a better sense than most of what to do with the standard tropes:
“All through each languorous season
We ebb and flow
Romance, defying all reason
Will come, then go
Still, perhaps this Autumn
Love won't retreat in the Autumn
All that we have won't be past
...Won't be past
Let breezes blow
And turn cold
As we continue growing old
This Autumn
Love newly found
May yet last”
Admittedly he’s doing this at least partly because the song, along with Act One, along with the voyage, comes to an abrupt end when the ship hits an iceberg.
Thank you, Milwaukee Rep!
But there is a first-rate autumn song to be found, deep in the weeds of musical theatre where, to our surprise, we find Kelli O’Hara. What is she doing deep in the weeds? well, she’s spending five weeks of 2013 in Far From Heaven, the musical adaptation of the 2002 film. I spent four Autumns in Connecticut and Autumn in Connecticut can be a beautiful thing (I would say is a beautiful thing, but there are parts of New Haven and all of Bridgeport that cannot by any means be forced into that description).
‘Autumn in Connecticut’ is particularly brilliant because it sounds ever-so-slightly like a pastiche of Rodgers & Hammerstein. The white-fence trimmed-lawn cookie-baking functional community is, all mockery aside (thanks a lot, Ira Levin5), a really nice place to live. It’s never as good as it looks on the surface, of course, as R&H knew very well; but the pretence is a valid target, or rather those who claim the pretence is real and don’t acknowledge the hard work and restraint involved in maintaining the community as functional. (Hypocrisy, in short, being tribute that vice pays to virtue).
The song opens the show and is the heroine’s paean to the season. She has a happy life, which naturally sets us up for its destruction:
“It’s Autumn in Connecticut / my favorite time of year / come Autumn in Connecticut / the air is crisp and clear”
- which is less generic than it appears, given Scott Frankel’s music and Kelli O’Hara’s voice.
It also has a quirk endemic to musicals of the 2000s, which is unnecessary rhyming in the middle of a line that distracts instead of enhancing the thought. It would be as though Oscar Hammerstein had written ‘some enchanted evening / you will meet and greet a stranger.’
“Lay your father’s suit out / then scoot out / and rake the lawn in time for Hallowe’en” and “nature is evolving, dissolving” are minor irritations, admittedly, because Michael Korie’s lyrics achieve both sincerity and a knowing sense of unreality. The very first words are “pretty as a postcard,” and that’s precisely the point; it’s only as pretty as a 2D postcard. The nod towards R&H is apparent in the chorus of neighbourhood ladies extolling the virtues of colour-matching and organised gardens. It’s all a little too… perfect.
As you can see, it looks a little like they’re doing a parody of Our Town:
Next stop, Thanksgiving…
Which I do not accept, by the way. It’s a long long while from May to December.
Real name Vladimir Dukelsky - another Russian composer of the American songbook!
Further contributions, etc etc. ‘Blue Bayeux’ was from Harold King’s album Tapestry.
I’ve spent years writing the plural as ‘aficionadi’ but it turns out to be Spanish, not Italian. Oops.
For The Stepford Wives, set in Fairfield County, CT.