Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert | "The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze" from The Mikado / 1885

my favorite musical theater songs: “the sun whose rays are all ablaze”

by Douglas Messerli

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5EAIcGitAM

Composers: Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert

The D’Oyly Carte Company

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icgbv0yWdX0

Composers: Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert

Performer: Valerie Masterson (from the film version of The Mikado, 1966)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOW7Excq1w

Composers: Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert

Performer: Leslie Garrett

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpVPGk257Tc

Composers: Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert

Performer: Norma Burrowes, 1973

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0ZUsel7lgw

Composers: Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert

Performer: Barbara Hendricks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP2qJXT3olM

Composers: Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert

Performer Shirley Henderson (from the film Topsy-Turvy, 1999)

One of the most beautiful musical compositions by Arthur Sullivan along with what you might almost describe as “lilting lyrics” from the often rambunctious W.S. Gilbert is the ur-feminist work, “The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze” from their great musical The Mikado of 1885, which ran for 672 performances at the Savoy Theatre. The lyrics, in this case, are particularly fascinating, given the patriarchal society of the day and even the chauvinism of the lyricist himself. In this work the Japanese maiden, Yum-Yum sings not only of her beauty but of her intentions to rule the earth and the sun and moon do the skies. If nothing else, as she herself admits, she is certainly “not shy.”

 

The sun, whose rays

Are all ablaze

With ever-living glory,

Does not deny

His majesty —

He scorns to tell a story!

He don't exclaim,

"I blush for shame,

So kindly be indulgent."

But, fierce and bold,

In fiery gold,

He glories all effulgent!

 

I mean to rule the earth,

As he the sky —

We really know our worth,

The sun and I!

I mean to rule the earth,

As he the sky —

We really know our worth,

The sun and I!

      Every soprano of importance has probably interpreted this lovely song of entitlement, so it is difficult to even know where to begin in selecting a discology as I have above. Valerie Masterson, who often performed on stage and on film, is excellent. And sopranos Leslie Garrett, Norma Burrowes (despite the utterly kitsch scenery in which she sits), and Barbara Hendricks sing it equally well, some with fuller-bodied voices, but all with great delicacy and fine interpretation. My personal favorite, however, is Shirley Henderson in Topsy-Turvy, playing a drugged Yum-Yum, staring into her own mirror before singing the song on stage. Only she sings it like she truly means it:

Ah, pray make no mistake,

We are not shy;

We're very wide awake,

The moon and I!

Ah, pray make no mistake,

We are not shy;

We're very wide awake,

The moon and I!

 

And here Gilbert’s ironies truly come through since, obviously, the character in the movie is far from wide awake in her own life, given her drug addiction.

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2018

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

Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolph Green | On the the Town / 1944

some other time

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leonard Bernstein (music), Betty Comden and Adolph Green (book and lyrics) On the Town / Adelphi Theater, New York / December 28, 1944

 

Given a 24-hour shore leave, three sailor friends—Gabey, Ozzie and Chip—are let loose on the city of New York. All want to “see the sites,” particularly Chip, but they also seeking “romance and danger”: after all, it’s World War II, and the men have been long at sea. A helluva town, New York—where the “Bronx is up” (suggesting not only northern-most borough of the city but the vulgar cheer of contempt) and the “Battery’s down” (suggesting both the southern tip of Manhattan and a source of lagging energy), where one must endure an unbearable pace and “seven millions…screaming for space”—is ready and willing to greet them. Indeed the New York of On the Town, which premiered in 1944. is a city in love with strangers, a community that quickly embraces its visitors. No sooner is Ivy Smith named the subway system’s “Miss Turnstiles” of the month, than Gabey falls in love with her poster image.

       Brunhilde Esterhazy (the incomparable Nancy Walker in the original production), a taxi driver, invites Chip “up to her place.” Only after convincing him that the New York he is desperate to see—a city of the Hippodrome, “Tobacco Road,” and the Manhattan Aquarium—no longer exists, does he accept her offer, and is she able to prove that she cannot only make love but can cook too!

      Ozzie, meanwhile, has mistakenly visited the Museum of Natural History in search of Gabey’s Ivy (the poster has described her as studying painting at a museum); there he encounters Claire de Loon, a would-be anthropologist in search of a “sub-super-dolicocephalic head”—and any man attached. The two—in the original, the musical’s book and lyric writers Betty Green and Adolph Comden—quickly discover that they are kindred souls, people who easily get “Carried Away,” and, ultimately, as proof of their malady, destroy the museum’s rare dinosaur.

     For a short while, the friendly city is experienced by Gabey, wandering through Central Park, as “A Lonely Town”; but that feeling soon disappears when he discovers his long-sought Ivy at a Carnegie Hall studio, and she, immediately smitten with him, promises to meet him in Times Square at 11 PM. Due to previous commitments (enforced performances as a cooch dancer on Coney Island to pay for her ballet dancing lesson debts) Ivy is a no-show; but his friends and their dates, (along with a unsuitable substitute date for Gabey, Lucy Schmeeler) head out for a night on the town.

     Once more, Gabey perceives the lively city as a lonely place, but his friends cheer him up with their love and zaniness. When he discovers that Ivy is working on Coney Island, he quickly speeds off, via subway and nightmare ballet, to find her, while the others, recognizing that their 24 hours are almost over, sing Bernstein’s lovely lament to the end of their short-lived romances, “Some Other Time” (“This day was just a token, / Too many words are still unspoken. / Oh, well, we’ll catch up / Some other time.”).

     Gabey and Ivy are quickly reunited just in time for the all three sailors to return to their ship, replaced by a new trio on their way to see the “wonderful town.”

     I recount this plot, since many readers may have only seen the enjoyable, but less than perfect movie version which not only devotes a great deal of its energies on the characters’ attempts to escape authority, but also deletes the majority of the most charming of the original’s music and lyrics: “Carried Away,” “Lonely Town,” “Lucky to Be Me,” and “Some Other Time.” What I am most interested in conveying about the original is the near absolute excitement about the city itself. On the Town is a valentine to New York, a city presented as, perhaps, vulgar and fast-paced, but also loving, accepting, embracing. As Comden and Green write: New York is “a visitor’s place,” a world which loves outsiders.

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2005

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, no. 1 (January 2006)

 

Meg Stuart | Hunter / 2017

what is dance?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Meg Stuart Hunter / Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) / the performance I attended, with Pablo Capra, was on Saturday, January 29, 2017

 

Although she was born in New Orleans and danced with several companies in New York, choreographer and performer Meg Stuart now lives in Belgium where she has worked on over 30 productions, including Visitors Only, Built to Last, UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP, and, with Phillipp Gehmacher, Maybe Forever, performed at Redcat in 2009.

       The performance I saw the other evening at Redcat, Hunter, is like several of her other works, an exploration of her own body—both her outer physical body and the internal body of her heart and mind.

       The evening began with the dancer cutting up a wide range of images and pinning them to a paper to form a loosely-composed collage, projected from the cutting table. After the audience settled into their seats, she stood briefly before taking her body to the dance floor where she explored numerous positions from shaking, rolling, and possibly, imagining herself as a child in the snow making snow angels.

      From a standing position she began exploring other parts of her body, arms, legs, breasts, and, in one long comic interlude played out with a large colorful penis shaped doll, even her vagina shaking and writhing in the spasms of sex. At one point she shouted out a kind of shamanist chant, and at another, carried a large Plexiglas frame which transformed the color of her body and the surrounding space of the stage.

       When one finally felt that, after all of these numerous movements, she must be exhausted, Stuart picked up a microphone and began a kind of long monologue about speaking itself, a future devoted to political marches, and aspects of her past life, including the meaning of her own name—all of these seemingly improvisatory, which helped, like the movements before it, to create a immense rapport with the audience, implicitly suggesting that if she were on the “hunt” for who she was, is, and will be, that we must, at least mentally, join her.

     As Stuart seems to be constantly asking, “What, after all, is dance?” Most dances also have partners, and, as literary theorist Marjorie Perloff has reminded us, there is also a “dance of the intellect.”

      Finishing her free form talk, Stuart set up a series of audio experiments and small and larger videos that projected various abstract shapes across her breast and face. Finally, she quietly begin to put her things away, while a voice called out that the most important decision one can make is to change one’s mind, hinting that the hunter might, at any moment, return to the hunt and explore other bodily surfaces.

     A quiet walk off stage ended the evening, except for the long applause of the sell-out crowd and several graceful bows from the dancer.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2017

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

     

Frank Loesser | "Adelaide's Lament" from Guys and Dolls / 1950

my favorite musical theater songs: “adelaide’s lament”

by Douglas Messerli

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Umq4dK95c

Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls / 1950

Performer: Vivien Blaine in the 1955 film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLdCahQz5tY

Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls / 1950

Performer: Faith Prince in the 1992 Broadway revival

The singer of this hilarious song, Miss Adelaide (Vivien Blaine)—who works as the head chorus girl in a nightclub, The Hot Spot, where the routines are straight out of burlesque—has a serious problem: for years she has sniffled, sneezed and coughed her way through life without any of the “Vitamin A’s” or “Bromo Fizzes” having any effect in relieving her illness. In this wonderful song, she realizes, while reading a book on the subject, that her endless cold represents a series of “psychosomatic symptoms” with regard to still being single after 14 years of dating her boyfriend, gambler Nathan Detroit, who simply will not give up his calling to marry her, despite several abortive trips to Niagara Falls, always ending in the racing tracks of Saratoga.

     Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls, one of the best of the American musical stage, is filled with brilliant songs and lyrics; but this one, in particular, is his very wittiest, with unexpected twists of medical jargon and its attendant rhymes:

 

You can spray her wherever you figure

The streptococci lurk

You can give her a shot

For whatever she's got

But it just won't work

If she's tired of getting the fish-eye

From the hotel clerk

A person

Can develop a cold

 

Part of the humor, of course, is based on the fact that this uneducated chorus girl is reading a medical text, replete with footnotes, and, in the process, diagnosing her own problems. Rhymes such as “lurk” / “work” / “clerk,” moreover, can only be comprehended through the aural lens of the New York-Brooklyn accent made up by author Damon Runyon.

     Loesser might have given us just one of two of these clever stanzas, but “Adelaide’s Lament,” like so many of his Guys and Dolls songs tells an entire story, spinning out in a series of nearly 12 narrative stanzas. Just when you think there could be no funnier line than the one about where “the streptococci lurk,” he jerks you into a new world where Miss Adelaide discovers:

 

You can feed her all day

With the Vitamin A

And the Bromo Fizz

But the medicine never

Gets anywhere near

Where the trouble is

If she's getting a kind

Of name for herself

And the name ain't "his"

A person

Can develop a cough

 

Here the “Fizz” / “is” / “his” says it all. It’s not her problem that she’s got an endless cough, but Nathan’s constant ‘putting off” the marriage.

     The great comic actress Vivien Blaine sang it on stage and in the movie both, creating such a memorable performance that it might never have been matched—that is until Faith Prince sang it in the 1992 Broadway revival. If Blaine’s version is more believable, making her entirely sympathetic, Prince’s husky, more comedic mugging makes you love her just because she can get away with it without turning Miss Adelaide into a cardboard figure.

     Indeed, this song is so central to the story that it explains not only Nathan’s and Adelaide’s dilemmas but spills over into the primary lovers’ lives as well, paralleling gambler Sky Masterson’s romance with the Save-the-Soul-Mission preacher, Sergeant Sarah Brown. It’s hard to imagine that in Loesser’s original version, there was no Adelaide. He added the role just to accommodate Blaine’s talents.

 

Los Angeles, August 8, 2017

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

Burton Lane and E. Y. Harburg | "How Are Things in Glocca Mora?" from Finian's Rainbow / 1947

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.   

 

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht | "Moon Over Alabama" ("Alabama Song") from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny / 1930

 

my favorite broadway musical theater songs: “moon over alabama” (“alabama song”)

by Douglas Messerli

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98uXevPGbYc

Composers: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Performers: Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester, 1927

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGUjGPrfA6U

Composers: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

Performers: Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, 1930

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-5ata4jDyk

Composers: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Performer: Lotte Lenya, 1930

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T59ej_TlXE

Composers: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Performer: Marianne Faithfull

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AHV3611XWY

Composers: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Performer: Nina Hagen, 1992

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

Composers: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Performer: Nina Simone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAK5blgfKWM

Composers: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Performers: The Doors, 2001

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ibH-BkZg0o

Composers: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Performer: David Bowie, 2002

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB96fWJcT_Q

Composers: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Performer: Ute Lemper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi-hEFKs9gk

Composers: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill

Performer: Audra McDonald

 

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).