Midcentury musicals: My guilty pleasure
I loved the tunes and lyrics, and maybe learned a thing or two.
Bill and I recently visited Durham, North Carolina, and on the five-hour drive from DC we listened to our favorites – jazzy international fare like South African musicians Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela, Brazilian singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil, and the Cuban band Los Van Van. After a week I drove home alone, leaving Bill to return by train a few days later. As soon as I got in the car, I popped a CD in the player. It wasn’t anything high-minded, but something I could sing to as I battled traffic: Oliver!
I know every word, every note. That’s because a fair portion of my childhood was spent sprawled on the living room rug in our house in Rhode Island, spinning 1950s and ’60s musicals on the record player and singing with them. My favorites weren’t necessarily the ones you might expect.
Oliver!
Based on the 1838 novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, the story is set in the criminal underworld of early nineteenth-century London. Young Oliver is raised in a workhouse and cast out when he begs for food, then falls in with a gang of boy thieves headed by the career criminal Fagin. The musical, by the British composer Lionel Bart, premiered in 1960 in London and moved to Broadway, where I saw it in 1963 or 1964. The vinyl recording I listened to was of the original 1963 Broadway performance with Clive Revill as Fagin, Georgia Brown as Nancy, and Bruce Prochnik as Oliver.
It was my introduction to Dickens. And, perhaps, my introduction to the realities that children’s labor can be exploited for profit and that women can be violently abused by men. It also touched on the third-age theme of looking back on one’s life choices. In Reviewing the Situation, an aging Fagin wonders whether he has time to change:
I'm reviewing the situation
Can a fellow be a villain all his life?
All the trials and tribulations!
Better settle down and get meself a wife.
And a wife would cook and sew for me,
And come for me, and go for me,
And go for me, and nag at me,
The fingers she will wag at me.
The money she will take from me.
A misery, she'll make from me . . .
I think I'd better think it out again! . . .I'm reviewing the situation,
I must quickly look up everyone I know.
Titled people, with a station,
Who can help me make a real impressive show!
I will own a suite at Claridges,
And run a fleet of carriages,
And wave at all the duchesses
With friendliness, as much as is
Befitting of my new estate . . .
"Good morning to you, magistrate!"
I think I'd better think it out again! . . .
So where shall I go – somebody?
Who do I know? Nobody!
All my dearest companions
Have always been villains and thieves . . .
So at my time of life
I should start turning over new leaves?
The Threepenny Opera
Written by Bertolt Brecht with music by Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera is also set in Victorian London. It was first performed in Germany in 1928, five years before Brecht and Weill fled the Nazis and made their way to the United States. I listened to the Decca recording of the 1954 off-Broadway performance, an English adaptation by Marc Blitzstein with Lotte Lenya (Weill’s wife) as Jenny.
Macheath, or Mack the Knife, is more ruthless than Fagin, and Threepenny Opera is darker (though Mack escapes hanging in the improbably upbeat ending). The weird dissonance and atonality of Weill’s music and its satiric overtones of Weimar cabaret fascinated me. Lenya’s Pirate Jenny is a haunting critique of women’s oppression and fantasized revenge:
You gentlemen can watch while I'm scrubbin' the floors
And I'm scrubbin' the floors while you're gawkin'
And maybe once you tip me and it makes you feel swell
On a ratty waterfront in a ratty old hotel
And you never guess to who you're talkin'
You never guess to who you’re talkin'
Suddenly one night, there's a scream in the night
And you wonder, "What could that a-been?"
And you see me kinda grinnin' while I'm scrubbin'
And you wonder, "What's she got to grin?"
And a ship, a black freighter
With a skull on its masthead
Will be comin' in
Fiorello!
Opening on Broadway in 1959, Fiorello! tells the story of Fiorello La Guardia, who defied the Tammany Hall political machine to become a New York congressman in 1917 and mayor of New York City in 1934. A progressive Republican (that was a thing then), he supported women’s suffrage, organized labor, and the New Deal. Listening to this musical may have been my first exposure to the concept of unions and strikes. La Guardia was a practicing lawyer at the time of the 1909 shirtwaist strike and the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911. In Unfair, a strident if paternalistic Fiorello leads the women textile workers to become ever more militant:
Let's put a stop to the sweatshop!
That's the disease we want to cure!
Proudly we picket
The punks who pick the pockets
Of the poor hard-working poor!
While we stitch-stitch-stitch
Someone's getting rich
By the sweat of his sister's brow! . . .Fight to the finish
to win the war we're waging
For a decent . . . LIVING . . . WAGE!
I didn’t grow up in a union household, but my ten-year-old self listened intently to this. The musical also centered machine politics, which did in fact dominate the political life of Providence, my hometown, in that era. In Politics and Poker, New York Republican pols joke about their dismal prospects going up against Tammany Hall:
Gentlemen, here we are, and one thing is clear
We gotta pick a candidate for Congress this year
Gentlemen, how about some names we can use
Some qualified Republican who's willing to losePolitics and poker, politics and poker
Shuffle up the cards and find the joker
Down in the Valley
Down in the Valley isn’t a musical but a one-act folk opera written by Kurt Weill in the 1940s, originally for radio. With a libretto by Arnold Sungaard, it was first performed on stage at Indiana University in 1948. The story is set in Appalachia in the early twentieth century, a simple but sad tale of doomed young love. I listened to the Decca recording with Alfred Drake as Brack Weaver, the hero who is condemned for a murder he did not commit and meets his fate in the Birmingham, Alabama, jail.
I may have gleaned something about the nature of summary justice, but mainly the music gripped me. Weill, a German Jew then living in New York, was captivated by American folk music and wove it into his postwar work. The title song is a traditional ballad also recorded by Lead Belly, the Weavers, and other icons of American folk. There’s plenty of country in Down in the Valley, which features a prayer meeting, a hoe-down dance, a rural sheriff, and the mail train. But from the opening dissonant strains it is unmistakably Weill.
Broadway’s golden age hits could be treacly (think Sound of Music, which I confess I also liked). But many have substance, and listening to them was one of the ways I widened my world. And I’m going to stock up on CDs for our summer road trips, because singing along with musicals I’ve known since childhood really does make the miles fly by.
You must have suspected that you'd be inundated with, "Oh, yes! My favorites were..." No guilt please. Nothing like singing along with the music. The first one I learned was South Pacific, which opened on Broadway in 1949. My parents went to see it in Chicago and bought the records and I learned every word. Ezio Pinza, "Some Enchanted Evening." Mary Martin, "You've got to be taught to hate and fear, you've got to be taught from year to year, to hate all the people your relatives hate... people whose eyes are ugly made, people whose skin is a different shade, you've got to be carefully taught." Was this some mysterious foreshadowing that I would spend a decade and a half in the Pacific?
Maybe earlier, also Rogers and Hammerstein, "Oklahoma."
You might be interested to know that Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya are buried in Haverstraw, Mt. Repose Cemetery, which we drive by almost daily.
Off the top: After Black Mountain College in NC closed, artists from there came to Rockland County to a place called The Land. I don't know if Weill and Lenya were involved in Black Mountain College, but they were at The Land. Mt. Repose is a lovely cemetery on a hill that looks out to the Hudson River. Pat and I think that perhaps we will go there at the end too! BTW, I love Pirate Jenny, the Judy Collins version. I'll see if Pat remembers more about Weill and Lenya.