Musical Mondays: Rodgers after Hammerstein (Part II)

The Seventies

I must begin with an apology; I have not maintained the standards you, dear readers, have come to expect.

Three weeks ago, referring to Pipe Dream, I wrote that East of Eden was too operatic to be adapted as a musical. Considering the number of times I’ve read Ken Mandelbaum’s Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops, it was embarrassing to forget that Here’s Where I Belong, a musical version of East of Eden, opened and closed on Broadway on 3 March 1968. That said, any show including “a ballet and song about the packing and shipping of lettuce” is probably best forgotten.

Back to Richard Rodgers, then. Having endured rather than enjoyed working with Sondheim, his next lyricist was Martin Charnin, who had been one of the original Jets in West Side Story before embarking on a career writing insufficiently-good lyrics for insufficiently-good shows and making his fortune from Annie. Nobody ever said that life was going to be fair.

Producers like the Bible: good stories and no copyright. Clifford Odets had already put Noah through a Bronx filter, so Odets’ play became Two by Two, with Danny Kaye as Noah. Two by Two (1970) is one of those guilty pleasures; the score entertains me, even if it’s not Waltz quality. There is, however, a very early annoyance in the first number, ‘Why Me?’, when Noah asks of Jehovah “forty days and forty what?” This is ridiculous; no word other than ‘nights’ could possibly have partnered ‘days’ and it’s not as though Jehovah couldn’t have made Himself heard. If anyone is struggling to be understood it’s Kaye, who seems to be stuck in the wrong key.

Occasional strangulated vocals aside, the score has its moments. ‘Put Him Away’ is genuinely funny, as his sons and daughters-in-law deal with Noah’s news that Jehovah has commanded him to build an Ark:

“‘There’s a lovely little home, just a mile outside of Nod

Where with all the other loonies he can sit and talk to God

He’s a fruitcake’ / ‘He’s your father!’ / ‘He is also very odd -

Put him away, put him away, put him away!’”

Nobody actually likes Two by Two and, if remembered at all, it’s because of Kaye’s outrageous egotistical antics that gave the show a peculiar appeal. Some of it “sounds like a drudgefest,” grouses Ethan Mordden; “even the main ballad, ‘I Do Not Know A Day I Did Not Love You’… soars: but laboriously.”

He has a point; the song sounds like ‘the generic love ballad from a Broadway show’ and Rodgers is in one of his heavier-handed moods. But Charnin is up to or even beyond expectation for this sort of thing:

“I do not know a day I did not need you
For sharing every moment that I spent
I needed you before I ever knew you
Before I knew what needing someone meant”

John Kenrick praises the show for Charnin’s “fine lyrics,” which is pushing it. The title song is meant to be jolly, but

“will you hug and smooch? you will / bet your boots you will / if she’s cute you will / feels so mutual” tortures the language for the sake of the joke (such as it is).

Still, it passes the time quite easily. ‘The Golden Ram’ finds Madeleine Kahn sailing on the high Cs, ‘When It Dries’ is (pace Mordden) a sprightly hoedown¹ and ‘Hey, Girlie’ is even touching. Two by Two isn’t great, I’m not sure it’s even particularly good, but you could do worse.

And indeed Rodgers went on to prove that worse could indeed be done with Rex (1976), the Henry VIII musical, which has the kind of score you realise you were once listening to. To call it wallpaper music would be deeply insulting to Rodgers, but it is rather minstrelsy. The only song I can ever remember is ‘As Once I Loved You,’ for the heroic Catherine of Aragon:

“The priceless tapestry
We wove as one
That crowded canvas
Remains half-done
Don't bid me say goodbye to you
I won't know how
As once I loved you
I love you now”

‘Away From You’ has its fans:

“Away from you
The world is lifeless
As though creation
Had gone awry
The trees are bare
There are no flowers
The fields are thirsty
The streams are dry”

It’s not exactly the same song (in full, ‘Away From You’ is a duet), but the resemblance is part of the problem with the score. Mordden thinks lyricist Sheldon Harnick, whom we have praised to the skies for Fiorello! and Fiddler in the Roof, was “utterly out of his element in a tale without charm,” and the score does have a slightly forced quality; variations on a theme of Masterpiece Theatre.

More positively, Harnick contributed “masterful lyrics” (Harnick) and, more ambiguously, “simpler lyrics than were his wont” (Mandelbaum). They look all right on the page but Harnick seems to have been trapped in a stately measure; that’s absolutely fine if your alternative is Six, the girl-power shoutfest for Henry’s wives, but indicates the problem with the whole show. It’s a challenge to present historical figures in a musical, but the previous few years had seen 1776 and Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway so Henry VIII ought not to have been impossible. One means adopted by librettist Sherman Yellen was to get rid of two wives during the interval, the sort of technique Henry might have approved.

Rex isn’t bad, I just can’t imagine why you’d spend an hour listening to it unless you were required to do so. Nobody liked it and it closed in six weeks. Nicol Williamson was fine as Henry, but it may not have helped when he slapped a dancer one night during bows (supposedly he misheard ‘that’s a wrap’ as ‘that was crap’; critics might have agreed with both). Barbara Andres as Catherine “had to wear close-fitting headgear that looked like the frame of a cuckoo clock.”² And so on.

Ed Evanko, who played Mark Smeaton, later became a priest in the Ukrainian Catholic Church. That has nothing to do with the show but is quite interesting.

Nobody blamed Rodgers for the failure of Rex, the shortest run of his post-Hart career. When it came to I Remember Mama (1979), however… nobody really blamed Rodgers, although he was very sick and would die later the same year. Martin Charnin, both lyricist and director before he was removed, blamed Liv Ullmann, the beautiful Swede who was venturing into Broadway musicals. Whoever’s fault it was, the show descended into obscurity so quickly that the lyrics are nowhere to be found and they didn’t even record a cast album. “The score was even more variable than that for Rex,” wrote Mordden, which is a truly alarming prospect.

The score was recorded a few years later - with Sally Ann Howes in place of Ullmann - and is available on Spotify. It’s not difficult to listen to, in fact, with the possible exception of a load of presumably adorable moppets squawking ‘Ev’ry Day Comes Something Beautiful.’

As the show’s producer also produced the Tony Awards for 1979, I Remember Mama was snuck onto the telecast despite being ineligible. The excerpt - ‘A Little Bit More’ - doesn’t make it seem too bad and Ullmann is fine; not amazing, but she sings no worse than Lauren Bacall:

“Though the way is long and steep / You won’t falter if your faith is deep” is a horrible piece of lyric-writing, however, for which Raymond Jessel, not the exiled Charnin, must take the blame. ‘A Writer Writes At Night’ attracted some praise for Rodgers, evoking the giddiness of the Young Author who would turn out to write the memoir on which the musical would be based:

“Nothing is tragic in sunshine / Love doesn’t flourish at noon. Evening instead -”

“Katrin, you go to bed!”

“Mama, writers need the moon!”

Stage convention requires us to forget that any sung argument at this time of night would wake the entire house.

I Remember Mama had succeeded in every conceivable medium - book, play, television - but foundered as a musical. What it lacked, concluded Mordden, “was Oscar Hammerstein.” Maybe it’s too cheap to say that Rodgers lacked Oscar Hammerstein, but consider his career as a three-act play: first act Hart, young and buoyant; second act Hammerstein, mature and wise; third act…

Well, you’d cut the third act before you got to Broadway.

1. To channel my inner Cole Porter, it’s always good to have a sprightly hoedown.

2. Mordden, One More Kiss