World Theater, Opera, and Performance

Listening yesterday to over 10 versions of Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s central song in their Sprechstimme operetta, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930), I realized that this just pre-Hitler work (the music was composed in the late 1920s), was perhaps the culmination of the Weimar Republic’s cynical visions of the need for alcohol, love, and, most importantly, money. There has never been a more cynical song, particularly in its bid of goodbye to the “moon over Alabama,” which remains also simply a beautiful ballad. It’s a song that you can hate and love equally, yet you want to listen to over and over again. And apparently anyone, with a good voice and the guts to perform such a raunchy piece, has attempted it.

Lotte Lenya, the original singer, still sounds best to me, with her raspy German cabaret voice; she was after all the composer’s wife, a perfect interpreter, which, in one recording, Weill performs alongside her. But you can’t not love David Bowie’ (I have included only one of at least performances by Bowie), Marianne Faithfull’s, and Audra McDonald’s later performance of it.

Nina Simone tunes it down, actually using the Sprechstimme techniques to tell the story of the early choruses, before suddenly breaking into her wonderful renditions of the “Moon of Alabama” interjections. She’s also such a wonderful pianist that she can torture all the dissonance out of the song. The Doors’ version may be one of the best! Patti Lupone (whose version I’ve not included) turns it, alas, into a winking travesty. But Nina Hagen does an almost drag version, which is perhaps not a bad interpretation of the women who want whiskey, pretty boys, and dollars as fast as they can get them—or they will die:

Oh, show us the way to the next whiskey bar!

Oh don't ask why,

Oh don't ask why!

For we must find the next whiskey bar

For if we don't find the next whiskey bar,

I tell you we must die!

Oh moon of Alabama

We now must say goodbye

We've lost our good old mamma

And must have whiskey

Oh, you know why.

Oh show us the way to the next pretty boy!

Oh don't ask why

Oh, don't ask why!

For we must find the next pretty boy

For if we don't find the next pretty boy

I tell you we must die!

Oh moon of Alabama

We now must say goodbye

We've lost our good old mama

And must have boys

Oh, you know why.

Oh show us the way to the next little dollar!

Oh don't ask why,

oh don't ask why!

For we must find the next little dollar

For if we don't find the next little dollar

I tell you we must die!

Oh moon of Alabama

We now must say goodbye

We've lost our good old mama

And must have dollars

Oh, you know why.

This is a world in which everything important of the past has died, and the survivors expect that they won’t survive either, the fact of which, obviously was borne out in Hitler’s World War II destructions of his own people; yet here, the same fate is projected onto the American experience.

It’s utterly amazing to me how such a truly ugly view of the world is rendered tragically beautiful in Kurt Weill’s version, with its memory of the moon of Alabama constantly vying with the terrible demands of human sexuality, drugs, and need of money. This song is a lesson in human failure and depravity without consigning its singers to Hell. No American-born writer could possibly write such a remarkable piece of music, I am certain. It came right out of the raw Weimar experience, even though it pretends to be in a fantasy America somewhere between Alaska and Alabama.

Los Angeles, February 27, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2018).

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh | "Hey, Look Me Over!" from Wildcat / 1960

my favorite musical theater songs: “hey, look me over!”

by Douglas Messerli

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGlMdP3WdJg

Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, Wildcat, 1960

Performers: Lucille Ball and Paula Stewart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9H5gEqCMJM

Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, Wildcat, 1960

Performer: Rosemary Clooney, 1960

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrWTSpRtShg

Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, Wildcat, 1960

Performer: Judy Garland, from her TV show,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNCP3eB9EKU

Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, Wildcat, 1960

Performers: Lucille Ball, Valerie Harper, and Dinah Shore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU8kiUv-d9g

Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, Wildcat, 1960

Performer: Bea Arthur, PBS 1982

If most of my readers might hold up their hands when asked they had ever heard of the Broadway musical Wildcat by N. Richard Nash (book) and the then debuting team of composer Cy Coleman and lyricist Carolyn Leigh, perhaps I might remind them that the entire production was centered around then 48-year-old comedian Lucille Ball, making her Broadway debut, a production in which her production company Desilu invested a substantial sum.

The musical was quite interesting, with a theme not so very different from Meredith Willson’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown of the very same (1960) year. Willson’s musical went on to become a hit, while Ball’s Wildcat Jackson character, although wonderfully feisty in the original performances, became ill with a virus and chronic fatigue (going on every night is a big difference from performing in a weekly comedy series), which destined her work to the very short run of 171 performances at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre.

Coleman’s music, however, included several wonderful numbers, including the incredibly comical piece, “What Takes My Fancy,” and the lovely ballad by co-star, Keith Andes, “Tall Hope.” Sven Svenson (who later appeared in the composer’s Little Me) appeared in a minor role and later television star, Valerie Harper appeared in the chorus.

But the great number from this work, much like that of Willson’s Unsinkable Molly, spoke of the grit and survival of its major character, the “Wildcat” of the title, devoted now to finding a new oil well to make her fortune. That musical number, “Hey, Look Me Over!” was a kind complex paean to both “looking at her” and “over her,” allowing her to enter a world that was simply intolerant to such a strong feminine force, out of money and deep in debt.

Hey, look me over

Lend me an ear

Fresh out of clover

Mortgage up to here

But don't pass the plate, folks

Don't pass the cup

I figure whenever you're down and out

The only way is up.

That song was not only attuned to Ball’s continually rocky career—she was soon to divorce then husband Desi Arnaz—but to a life that might have almost been brilliantly expressed in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies’ figure who sings “I’m Still Here.”

The fact is that Ball was not “all here,” and her illness and even collapse on stage during one of her performances, suggested she was not the same Lucy who we had all been loved on television for so long. But dozens of singers, young and old, later took up her banner song, and helped to make it a big hit, among them, the consummate singers Rosemary Clooney and Judy Garland, and, later, Bea Arthur.

On a day where I have been listening to the remarkable stories of Houston people who, despite incredible odds, have still come through to survive the terrible floods that have engulfed their community, I might almost nominate this song as a marvelous expression of their conditions and fortitude.

Los Angeles, August 28, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2017).

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Marc Blitzstein | "I Wish It So" from Juno / 1959

my favorite musical theater songs: “i wish it so”

by Douglas Messerli

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QGKRdUbIs8

Marc Blitzstein: Juno, 1959

Performer: Monte Amundsen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXH_ucZteZ0

Marc Blitzstein: Juno, 1959

Performer: Rosemary Clooney, 1963

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDpNJgu7aWE

Marc Blitzstein: Juno, 1959

Performer: Dawn Upshaw, 1994

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yd5ga0G6Fs

Marc Blitzstein: Juno, 1959

Performer: Rebecca Lucker

This lovely ballad, sung quite early in Marc Blitzstein’s beautiful rendition of Sean O’Casey’s famed Irish drama, sung by the character Mary Boyle, completely reveals Blitzstein’s talents for expressing the impossible loves and frustrations within the suffering Boyle family.

The young daughter of the long-suffering matriarch (Shirley Booth) and the ne’re-do-well father (played, surprisingly by the great film star Melvyn Douglas), is so poignant that it was been performed time and again after the original production by numerous wonderful singers—I’ve included only a few, Rosemary Clooney, Dawn Upshaw, and Rebecca Lucker, to give the reader a sense of the remarkable potentialities of this song about a girl (Monte Amundsen) who doesn’t even quite know why she is suffering the pangs of love.

I’ve an unrest inside me.

Oh it’s long I’ve had

such an unrest inside me

and it’s getting real bad.

This song is a strange mix of the kind of optimistic hope of love professed by Tony early in West Side Story in “Something’s Coming,” and the kind of fear of madness for what that love might bring in Stephen Sondheim’s ballad sung by Sally in his Follies, “Losing My Mind.” The young Mary is already very afraid of “the thumping inside me,” that she “think’s I’ll go mad.”

The great American composer Blitzstein not only brought Brecht and Weill to American audiences but composed the infamous pro-union The Cradle Will Rock, that never received its proper theater production by director Orson Welles. Later he composed a notable opera, Regina based on Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes.

Alas, his quite remarkable Juno, with a cast to die for, lasted only 16 performances on Broadway, but has been revived several times since, although never to the success the work truly deserves.

Openly gay, Blitzstein retreated to Martinique where he died in 1964.

I had somehow purchased an original Broadway recording of this rare work, but eventually gave it away to the drama professor at the University of Maryland, my friend, Jackson Bryer.

Los Angeles, August 28, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2017).

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Frank Loesser | "I Believe in You" from How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying / 1961

my favorite musical theater songs: “i believe in you”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iAZsKgHK_U

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Robert Morse, 1961 (original Broadway recording)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmV74kOzK1Y

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Michele Lee, 1967 (film version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLEXE3oT3KA

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Robert Morse, 1967 (film version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbAjOJwyAwc

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Robert Morse (Tony Awards program)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyCZN0B49Yk

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Matthew Broderick, 1995 (revival)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCXVuYcXw3M

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Daniel Radcliffe, 2011

Frank Loesser’s beautiful song from his How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying is sung twice in the 1961 Broadway production, once as a kind of love paean to the young would-be executive, former window-washer, J. Pierrepont Finch. The second time it’s sung by the now on-the-rise businessman Ponty as a love song to himself, while all around him other young executives plot his downfall with a sub-song “Gotta Get that Man,” wherein the other employees even beg the audience “Don’t let him be such a hero!”

Only Robert Morse perfectly captured the totally self-captivated, yet utterly charming character he represented, although later Matthew Broderick and the elfin Daniel Radcliffe bravely tackled the dichotomy of a man so enchanted with himself that he is simply beautiful to watch as he stands at a sink before the mirror that reflects his charming smile—to both himself and to us. Like the secretary Rosemary Pilkington (in the original stage musical Bonnie Scot and in the movie version the glorious singer Michele Lee), we love Morse despite his obvious inability, until late in the show, to share love with anyone else. When he finally does, in the beautiful crescendo of “Rosemary” and the later all-team love-a-thon “Brotherhood of Man,” he moves on to become the Chairman of the Board of the mysterious World Wide Wicket Company.

The young Morse, long before his drag queen days of Sugar and his one-man impersonation of Truman Capote in Tru, was as cute—in his heterosexual role as Finch in How To, that my old aunts might have expressed it—as a button, with even the great gay-oriented Carl Van Vechten putting him before the camera. In real life, Morse, was married, and had five children. But you might never know it, given his gay-winking delight with his audiences.

As a character, he’s utterly terrified of women, including the well-endowed Hedy LaRue. And when he finally does fall for Rosemary, it is only after she has done nearly everything in the secret book of “How to Catch a Husband” to lasso him in, at the very moment she is not so sure that she wants her trophy. Still, she’s “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm,” and is absolutely ready to retire to New Rochelle, even though, ultimately the couple move into the World Wide Wicket Suite for the Chairman of the Board.

The great composer Loesser’s songs include some very engaging pieces, including “The Company Way,” “A Secretary Is Not a Toy,” and the nearly impossible to dance, Bob Fosse’s “Coffee Break” (we’re told they simply could not recreate it for the movie). But there’s only one song you might go home humming, the smug commitment to the self so beautifully expressed in “I Believe in You.”

Executives:

Gotta stop that man,

I gotta stop that man cold . . .

Or he'll stop me.

Big deal, big rocket,

Thinks he has the world

In his pocket.

Gotta stop, gotta stop,

Gotta stop that man.

FINCH:

Now there you are;

Yes, there's that face,

That face that somehow I trust.

It may embarrass you to hear me say it,

But say it I must, say it I must:

You have the cool, clear

Eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth;

Yet there's that upturned chin

And that grin of impetuous youth.

Oh, I believe in you.

I believe in you.

Los Angeles, September 18, 2017

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (September 2017).

Monday, January 20, 2025