Musical Mondays: Bob Merrill

moments, he had moments...

Imagine for a moment that you have taken the curious decision to adapt a Eugene O’Neill play into a musical comedy. (As Fred Ebb would write in Curtains, “I put on The Iceman Cometh and nobody cameth!” Imagine The Iceman Cometh with songs. Precisely).

Nonetheless, you press ahead with this quixotic endeavour. But you’re going to need a really good composer or songwriting team to make this work. This is the 1950s, so… Rodgers and Hammerstein? Lerner and Loewe? Frank Loesser? not available? well then, Johnny Mercer? Comden and Green?

Or you could turn to the man whose most famous work was ‘(How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window?’

And so it came to pass that Anna Christie came to Broadway in 1957 as New Girl in Town with Bob Merrill writing music and lyrics. And it worked!

Well, it ran, possibly because it was a successful star vehicle for Gwen Verdon, fresh from Damn Yankees. And I also like it because ‘Ven I Valse’ was used at AMDA to teach us something, although I can’t remember what. The waltz, probably.

Gwen Verdon choreographed by Bob Fosse meant more dance than was strictly justified by the original material, but it was all supported by a score better than might have been expected from the man behind ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked A Cake.’ Only six numbers were related to character or plot, however, which makes the score varied but not especially coherent. Still, ‘On the Farm’ is unexpectedly dark and ‘Sunshine Girl’ has banjo accompaniment for a male chorus that all probably ought to have been in Tenderloin. The standout is the comedy number ‘Flings’ for three middle-aged women:

“You don’t want a guy who’s all inspired / Please believe me, you get tired / Let him snooze off / with his shoes off / it’s all right.”

Buoyed by this, Merrill was chosen by producer David Merrick (yes, him again) to compose the score for his O’Neill adaptation when the original composer, the great John Latouche, died far too soon. Ah, Wilderness! was at least funny, in an O’Neill sense, and so was Take Me Along. How funny it was depended somewhat on each audience member’s affection for Jackie Gleason, who played the (to use a word nobody would have used in 1959) funcle¹ of Richard Miller, the fictional version of the author. His comically unreliable roguish drunk sounds a bit like Gleason’s regular schtick, but at least it was in character and he won the Tony, proving once again that not being a singer was in no way a barrier to success in musical theatre. ‘Sid, Ol’ Kid’ is an account of his supposedly hilarious japes that made him sound like a bit of a git and his friends sound like sycophants, a suspicion not entirely allayed by this tv appearance:²

However, Merrill produced an “ably integrated” score that illuminated the characters, from ‘Staying Young’ (father) to ‘We’re Home’ (mother) to ‘Nine O’Clock’ (teenage son). The title song is great fun, a duet for Gleason and the comparatively staid Walter Pidgeon, and ‘Volunteer Fireman Picnic’ is slyly subversive (“with some Elks and some Mooses, some Eagles and some Gooses / and some ladies with a liberal point of view”).

Carnival was about a carnival, really about a puppeteer who can only express himself through his puppets. It was, as Ethan Mordden puts it, “one of the best of the sixties musicals that is not an acknowledged classic.” (As I said last week: second-class first-rate or first-rate second-class). The score had both variety - it is a carnival, after all - and character and expansion of the dimensions introduced in Take Me Along. And the show had Jerry Orbach, which always helped.

This is the entirety of ‘Love Makes the World Go Round’:

“Love makes the world go ‘round
Love makes the world go ‘round
Somebody soon will love you
If no one loves you now

High in some silent sky
Love sings a silver song
Making the earth whirl softly
Love makes the world go ‘round

High in some silent sky
Love sings a silver song
Making the earth whirl softly
Love makes the world go ‘round”

That’s a great song with a mere six discrete lines. That takes not only skill but also courage, on the part of Merrill and the director, to believe that those six lines say everything that needs to be said.

‘Very Nice Man’ deploys a ludic use of language we haven’t really heard before:

“What very nice doilies
Made of very fine lace
How in heaven was this one slipped in
Stitched up, snipped in
Still it’s ripped in a very nice place”

And ‘Mira’ so touching that it’s almost a complete autobiography:

“I come from the town of Mira
Beyond the bridges of St. Claire
I guess you’ve never heard of Mira
It’s very small but still it’s there
They have the very greenest trees
And skies as bright as flame
But what I liked the best in Mira
Is everybody knew my name”

Carnival is a favourite with American high schools, if YouTube is any guide.

Every Merrill show had run longer than the last, a run that would be gloriously extended with his fourth hit in a row. Funny Girl had a peculiar gestation that wound up with Jule Styne writing the music and Merrill the lyrics for the story of Fanny Brice of the Ziegfeld Follies, famously brought back to life by Barbra Streisand.

I have an aversion to Streisand but am entirely prepared to accept that she was theatrical magic. (At least sometimes: John Kenrick wrote that she seemed unable to maintain her performance from one show to the next. Ethan Mordden agrees but adds that the OBC recording contains “the greatest eleven song spots by one singer in cast-album history”). The consensus says that Merrill and Styne’s score is one of the best, but I’m not won over by lyrics like:

“People--people who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world,
We're children, needing other children
And yet letting our grown-up pride
Hide all the need inside,
Acting more like children
Than children”

This is cardboard, proto-sixties therapy lingo. Couldn’t Merrill have thought of another three-syllable word besides ‘luckiest’? And the best song, the up-and-at-’em ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade,’ has lyrics so odd that it’s best to let them slide by and go with the music:

“One roll for the whole shebang,
One throw, that bell will go clang”

And I’ve always been annoyed by:

“Don't tell me not to fly--
I've simply got to.
If someone takes a spill,
It's me and not you”

Because the stress falls on got and not, but ‘not’ doesn’t need any emphasis. Nobody ever said it was going to be ‘you.’

Lea Michele tearing it up

Bloom & Vlastnik claim that ‘You Are Woman’ reveals “the verbal dexterity and bite of an artist in complete control of his craft.” Well, I like ‘You Are Woman,’ but

“You are woman, I am man,
You are smaller, so I can be taller than,
You are softer to the touch,
It's a feeling I like feeling very much”

- is cute rather than brilliant (although the sentiment is admittedly in need of a revival) and

“In my soul I feel an inner lack,
Just suppose he wants his dinner back?”

tortures syntax - tortures the language - for the sake of the rhyme.

Still, 1348 performances, eight Tony nominations and eight Oscar nominations for the film adaptation isn’t bad.

And, as is the way of showbiz careers, it was downhill thereon. Breakfast at Tiffany’s we know about. Henry, Sweet Henry has its devotees (“a half-great score,” say Bloom & Vlastnik) but closed after 80 performances. Prettybelle had Angela Lansbury, but a show about madness, racism and revenge sex was always going to be a difficult sell in the days before the internet; it closed in Boston. Sugar, an adaptation of Some Like It Hot, was a more promising idea that ran 505 performances; it seems nonetheless to have vanished without trace. (TIME sniped that Merrill’s lyrics were “the labored products of a man hovering over a rhyming dictionary”). And The Prince of Grand Street failed in its objective to return Robert Preston to Broadway; it too closed in Boston.

All the shows in the above paragraph garnered qualified praise for Merrill, which I could quote at length, without ever really challenging the considered assessment that he doesn’t quite belong in the highest heights. But, given the infinite number of songwriters who will never be mentioned in this forum, that’s not bad.

Tony Roberts, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Bette Midler, in ‘The Beauty That Drives Men Mad,’ from Sugar.

1. Fun uncle, in case you were wondering.

2. Theatre doesn’t always translate well onto television, of course.