my favorite
musical theater songs: “how are things in glocca mora?”
by Douglas Messerli
E. Y. Harburg and Burton Lane, Finian’s Rainbow / 1947
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZFT_i-AdSI
Performer: Ella Logan, original
production recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4v0B-oHsGk
E. Y. Harburg and Burton Lane, Finian’s Rainbow / 1947
Performer: Petula Clark, from the
film, Finian’s Rainbow, 1968
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixPewOMvEK0
E. Y. Harburg and Burton Lane, Finian’s Rainbow / 1947
Performer: Rosemary Clooney, Show Tunes, 1994
The story of the 1947 musical by E.
Y. Harburg and Burton Lane might almost have jumped out of today’s newspapers:
it features an immigrant family, where the elderly Irish Finian McLonergan,
decides to decamp in the American South—a kind of Kentucky mixed with
Mississippi—with his daughter Sharon, along with a somewhat fiendish Irish
leprechaun, from who he’s stolen a pot of gold, which he intends to bury in
Fort Knox.
The local factory workers are being attacked by the bigoted authorities,
who are definitely in control of the Jim Crow politics of the day. There could
never have been a more political musical ever created (well there is now Hamilton), and Harburg, Fred Saidy, and
composer Burton Lane meant every word of their impassioned plea about bigotry,
anti-immigration behavior, and every other prejudice that their musical shouted
out.
If Finian’s Rainbow is an
incredulous mix of politics, nonsense, and utter fluff, it still today speaks
out for a kind of musical theater that we might wish for, one in which a
passionate political viewpoint is infused with great musical theater.
Created in the year I was born, it seems to be a work which I might
never been able to resist. I appeared in the high school production as the only
black-faced figure of my all-white school production (no black attended my
Marion, Iowa school), and I later played a dancer and singer in this work in
the University of Wisconsin production, several years later. Obviously, I have
a very special relationship with this musical that makes it almost impossible
for me to separate if from my very identity. And even today, as crazy as its
story seems to me, I love it with an intensity that probably has little to do
with its real qualities.
When, years later, at an event which I hosted (and partially funded)
celebrating the career of Jerome Lawrence, I experienced Burton Lane playing a
song from the work in person, I realized that I had assimilated Finian’s Rainbow in a way that no one in
the room, in New York’s famed Algonquin Hotel, might have ever realized. Even
the presence of Michael Feinstein, Jerry Herman, and many other luminaries,
could not match that moment.
Og, Finian’s angry
leprechaun, was there as far as I
was concerned (and I later discovered that figure of my college production was indeed there [see My Year 2005]) or, at least, nearby.*
Early in this play, the newly arrived
Sharon, sings a passionate song about her longing to return home, “How Are
Things in Glocca Mora?” which tears at your heart. We know, immediately, she is
not yet comfortable in her new world, although she has just met the handsome
local union leader, Woody Mahoney, and soon falls in love. But Sharon’s song
exists as an almost inexpressible longing for her homeland, something almost
all of Americans must have felt upon their travels to the new home in the USA.
It’s a terribly touching expression of alienation that seldom gets expressed in
the American musical, one that ought to be attended to in order to understand
what immigrants, legal and illegal, might feel about their new experience in
the country which supposedly accepts all strangers.
I hear a bird, a Londonderry bird,
It well may be he's bringing me a
cheering word.
I hear a breeze, a River Shannon
breeze,
It well may be it's followed me
across the seas.
Then tell me please
How are things in Glocca Morra?
And, of course, as Finian’s
Rainbow reveals, it’s never an easy transition, although, Sharon, her
father, and even the strange Og do find a way to assimilate themselves even in
the prejudiced deep South, a situation which Og helps to take care of by
transforming the local white Senator into a black man. O how I might wish for
such a transformation for the Kentucky-born Senator today!
The original Sharon in the musical, Ella
Logan, sings this song quite beautifully. But it is fascinating how, later, the
superlative singer Rosemary Clooney takes this simple piece of nostalgia into a
new jazz-oriented work. Glocca Mora suddenly seems to have been transferred to
the new world in which Sharon finds herself.
In the 1968 movie, directed The
Godfather’s Francis Ford Coppola,
English singer Petula Clark sang the same song so brilliantly that she
certainly must be recognized as among its best interpreters.
*As I mention in that volume, I accidentally
came into contact with my Wisconsin theatrical cohort in a gay psycho-sexual
situation in a Brooklyn, New York apartment—to which I possibly had not even
been invited—several years later. Strange coincidences also happen to me.
