Lost Musicals returns again this year to Sadler's Wells' Lilian Baylis Studio, featuring a long-forgotten revue originally written for Fred Astaire, a musical about Coco Chanel with music by André Previn, and Mexican Hayride, a rediscovered Broadway hit by Cole Porter.
Established by director Ian Marshall Fisher in 1989, Lost Musicals presents semi-staged productions of rarely performed works. Fisher has reconstructed and produced over 70 different shows over the years including work by Stephen Sondheim, Orson Welles, Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash, Richard Rodgers, John Steinbeck and the Gershwins.
First up this year is The Band Wagon (weekends only from 27 March to 17 April 2011). Written in 1931 by Arthur Schwartz (music), Howard Dietz (lyrics and book) and George S Kaufman (book) as a revue for siblings Fred and Adele Astaire, the score includes “Dancing In The Dark”, “I Love Louisa”, and “High And Low”. MGM used a few of the songs in a subsequent a film, with the same title, but the sketches haven't been seen since the original run.It's followed, from 15 May to 12 June (weekends only), by Coco, a musical featuring music by André Previn and a book by Alan Jay Lerner. In 1969, Lerner (My Fair Lady) and Previn wrote this as a vehicle for Katherine Hepburn (a role later played by Danielle Darrieux and Ginger Rogers) but also for Coco Chanel herself.
Coco is about Chanel’s dilemma, which occurred in her 60s, as she attempted to maintain her worldclass status as a fashion leader while newer, younger designers began to usurp her place. This will be the show's European premiere.
This year's Lost Musicals' season concludes with Mexican Hayride (Sundays only from 5 June to 7 August), a "forgotten hit" with music and lyrics by Cole Porter and a book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields. Written in 1944, it's the uplifting tale of a fifth rate racketeer, Joe Bascom, who mistakenly becomes a Mexican hero.
It originally starred Bobby Clark and June Havoc (the original 'Baby June', whose early life is essayed in the musical Gypsy) and spawned the hit song “I Love You”, though it hasn't been seen since its original run.
Cole Porter – True Grit
Cole Porter’s love for the theater was due at least in part to his love of the absurd. There were the squabbles among backers, directors, writers and producers; there was the unpredictability of the audience (when death threats greeted the cast and writers of Jubilee in Boston, only Porter was amused); there was the outrageous opulence of opening nights. He loved the theater but he had no ambition for it. He did not see each production as a chance to advance the state of the art or even of his art. He was a steady-state composer, not an evolutionary one. Gershwin, Kern and Rodgers were all attracted to grand designs. Not Porter.
He was well-suited to the kind of puzzle-making and problem solving that goes into the creation of complex pieces of art. Yet he refused to travel that road. Over the years his songs became less daring, both lyrically and musically, and toward the end they were very simple—a simplicity that was occasionally beautiful, as in "True Love," but which was more often only simpleminded. The spareness of many of those later songs was not calculated. That kind of economy was really just an absence of the energy that complexity and fullness require.
This lack of energy was largely due to a debilitating physical condition brought on by a freak accident in September of 1937. Attending a riding party at the Oyster Bay home of Countess Edith di Zoppola, his skittish horse reared up, fell backward and crushed Porter's legs. While a companion went to get help the composer, convinced that he was not seriously hurt, proceeded to complete the lyric of "You Never Know”—or so he later claimed. That part of the story may or may not be true but there is nothing apocryphal about Porter's courage. Despite almost constant pain and an endless fear of disfigurement and amputation, he continued to work for another twenty years. He went on to write great songs—albeit at a less prodigious rate—and even topped himself with his greatest Broadway work, Kiss Me Kate.
But September of 1937 is an undeniable line of demarcation in Porter's professional life. With the accident came the end of what his friend and editor, Dr. Albert Sirmay, called Porter's "glory years." Those years totaled a mere decade, beginning in 1927 when Porter was already thirty-six years old. He had waited a long time for success—much longer than any of the other writers discussed in this book. And then, a brief decade after it came, there was the fateful accident. One can devise theories to explain why Porter was so late in gaining acceptance on Broadway. Perhaps he had erred in writing songs for his wealthy social circle. But if that is so, how does one account for the popularity of his work of the mid-1930s? Another theory is that until the late 1920s Broadway audiences were too unsophisticated to appreciate Porter's drollery. But that fails to explain why they took to the words of such sophisticates as Larry Hart, Noel Coward and Ira Gershwin. The truth is that no one can say why it took Porter so long to get started. Even the fact that he had written nothing very memorable prior to the late '20s does not provide an answer because Berlin, Kern and Gershwin were all successful on Broadway before they had written anything very good. It was the same state of affairs in the 1960s when the best work of the Beatles, Dylan and the Stones came after they had made it big. Who is to say that their great songs were not inspired by or at least given impetus from such early kudos? And who is to say that the same thing would not have happened to Porter in the 1910s had he received some initial recognition?
Not that his talent was ever entirely ignored. As a sophomore at Yale he was already getting some notice with his songs; a football song, "Bull Dog," is still sung on that campus. In 1915, at the age of 24, he wrote songs which made it to Broadway. Two were interpolated into Kern's Miss Information and one was in Romberg's Hands-Up. But nothing came of them. The next year he wrote the score for a Broadway show of his own, See America First. But it was panned by the critics, one of whom said, "See America first last." At the time Porter was 25 years old—still young, but he was probably aware that Berlin had achieved world renown by that age with "Alexander's Ragtime Band." (Berlin was just three years older than Porter.)
Having failed to make it on Broadway, Porter turned to Europe. In the fall of 1917 he sailed for France and on April 20, 1918, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. Just what duty Porter really saw in that capacity is obscured in legend (among songwriters, he was second only to Dylan in making up stories about himself) but, after being mustered out a year later, he continued his musical education in France. Europe was his home base for the next ten years. There he met and married Mrs. Linda Lee Thomas, a wealthy divorcee (her first husband, Ned Thomas, an industrialist, had the distinction of being the first U.S. motorist to kill a pedestrian) who was eight years his senior. She and Porter's society friends, most notably Elsa Maxwell, did all they could to promote his songs. But through most of the '20s Porter's music was known only to connoisseurs—his was like Randy Newman's situation in the 1960s and 1970s. A Porter show called The Mayfair and Montmartre failed in London in 1922. A song called "The Ragtime Pipes of Pan" failed when it was used on Broadway that same year. In 1923 his one effort at highbrow composition, the ballet Within the Quota, also failed. In 1924 he had another Broadway flop, this one entitled The Greenwich Village Follies. Appropriately enough, his next attempt to break into the big time consisted of three songs contributed to a play entitled Out of Luck, put on by the Yale Dramatic Association. His career really got off the ground in 1928 with "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love," featured in the Broadway show Paris, which opened in Irving Berlin's Music Box Theatre (with a strong boost from Berlin himself). Then, juices flowing, Porter went full-speed into his best decade.
Most songwriters have a period when their talent is at its most concentrated and when it burns its brightest. Gershwin's occurred at the end of his life, between Porgy and Bess in 1935 and his death in 1937. Berlin's was between 1932 and 1936 when, in quick succession, he produced the scores for As Thousands Cheer, Top Hat and Follow the Fleet. In the 1960s there were the examples of Holland-Dozier-Holland and their remarkable output between 1963 and 1967, of the Beatles, whose flame was white hot throughout their recording career together, and Bob Dylan, who was similarly infallible between 1965 and 1969. Porter's greatness was never so inexorable; even at the height of his career he wrote duds. Nor were all of his shows in those years hits (Jubilee, for example, was a box office failure in 1935, as was Red, Hot and Blue in 1936). But every project that he worked on produced a few true pearls. Anything Goes of 1934 was the apex. Out of this show came the title tune as well as "Blow, Gabriel, Blow," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "All Through the Night" and "You're the Top." From Jubilee came "Just One of Those Things" and "Begin the Beguine." From the film Born to Dance (1936) came "Easy to Love" and "I've Got You Under My Skin." From Red, Hot and Blue came "Down in the Depths" and "It's De-Lovely." From the film Rosalie (1937) came "In the Still of the Night."
After 1937 Porter continued to write great songs, but less frequently. His 1938 opus, You Never Know, which closed after only 78 performances, produced "At Long Last 'Love" but nothing else that is still remembered. Leave It to Me opened on Broadway the same year and was a success, but it too is memorable for just one song, "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," introduced by the very young Mary Martin (so young, in fact, that she was unaware of the song's sexual implications). Porter's next project was a film, Broadway Melody of 1940, also remembered now for only one song, "I Concentrate on You," as was his last Broadway show of the decade, DuBarry Was a Lady, which contained "Friendship."
The early 1940s were almost as rough on Porter as they were on the rest of the world. In October of 1940 his show Panama Hattie opened on Broadway and, though a success, it produced no outstanding songs. The same can be said of his work for the 1941 film You'll Never Get Rich. Consoling himself with travel—a drive across the United States and Canada, a voyage to the South Seas, a trip to Latin America where he baked his legs in the equatorial sun—Porter tried to keep a step ahead of despondency. But the nation was at war and the public had little taste for dry wit and sophisticated love, preferring instead simple and emotionally direct songs, such as Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal's "I'll Be Seeing You" or Berlin's "White Christmas." Though Porter expressed a desire to write "less of the brittle bright poesy with which I've been associated," he was unwilling or unable to align his material with the basic emotions which were then gripping the American public. There was no way that he was going to come up with anything Like Berlin's This Is the Army, a show which featured soldiers on stage and went on tour across America and Europe to raise funds for the Allied cause. He did gear two songs for the armed forces, "Glide, Glider, Glide" and "Sailors of the Sky," but neither was effective. Though he praised Berlin's war contributions he himself spent much of his time circumventing rationing and hoarding scarce commodities.
In 1941 there was another Broadway show, Let's Face It, which, though moderately successful, produced no hits. Porter was deeply distressed by this. It was obvious by now that the quality of his songs had declined sharply. Moreover, there was much illness to contend with. He had developed a bone growth in his weary left leg and his wife had tuberculosis. He withdrew to his home in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he read Dick Tracy, listened to Stella Dallas on the radio and bought paintings from an elderly neighbor who would later become known as Grandma Moses. His one project in 1942, a film entitled Something to Shout About, boasted one good tune, "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" but his next play, Something for the Boys, was consistently mediocre. That same year Warner Brothers decided not to use any of the numbers he had written for Mississippi Belle, abandoning that film project entirely. In 1944 he was back on Broadway with Mexican Hayride but it too lacked outstanding songs. Porter's best effort in the score, "I Love You," had been written on a bet. His friend Monty Woolley had wagered $25 that Porter could not make a hit out of such a trite phrase. Porter got his money when the song topped the hit parade but he knew that it did not measure up to the songs he had been writing in the 1930s. Another break in the clouds came when "Don't Fence Me In" was successfully introduced by Roy Rogers in the film Hollywood Canteen (it was sobering, however, to realize that the song had actually been written in 1934). But 1944 ended with what Porter was to call his most miserable experience in the Broadway theater. This was Seven Lively Arts, a series of sketches produced by Billy Rose. It and the material he wrote for it failed miserably and, shortly thereafter, Porter was in the hospital for his 31st operation.
He wrote no new songs in 1945, although his screen biography, starring Cary Grant, was completed by Warner Brothers that year. He did come up with a new Broadway score in 1946. This was Around the World in 80 Days, based on the Jules Verne novel and directed by Orson Welles (not to be confused with the film made ten years later, music by Victor Young). But it was a bona fide disaster. Beginning with a simple, attractive premise, it, like so many Broadway shows, developed a fatal centrifugal force. Casting changes, script rewrites, producer troubles and show doctors all worked to toss out the original idea. It also suffered from one of Porter's poorest scores. At this point the consensus was that he was finished. He was 55 years old, in poor health and spirits, and he seemed to have already had his day in the sun. In 1947, twenty years since his first success and ten since his accident, no new offers of work came his way.
In 1948, however, he was back. The spring saw the release of a Vincente Minnelli picture, The Pirate, and for it Porter wrote one of his standards, "Be a Clown." Then, on the penultimate day of that year, Kiss Me Kate opened in New York. With the possible exception of Anything Goes, it was the best score he ever wrote.
Doing a musical version of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew had not been Porter's idea. In fact, he had at first refused to join the project, preferring the idea of a soap-opera-ish musical based on the Miss America beauty pageant. Porter had to be talked into his masterpiece, just as Irving Berlin had to be talked into writing Annie Get Your Gun. And when he finally did get to work on the project, he was suffering from pain so intense that it sometimes caused him to lose consciousness. Somehow, he was able to write such songs as "Another Op'nin', Another Show" (its main strain is closely related to that of Gershwin's Introduction to Porgy and Bess and to Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business"), "Wunderbar" (although this consisted of new words only; Porter had written the tune in 1934 for Anything Goes and its original title had been "Waltz Me Down the Aisle"), "So in Love," "We Open in Venice," "Too Darn Hot" and "Where Is the Life That Late I Led."
Kiss Me Kate, which inaugurated the final decade of Porter's creative life, seemed at first to be a stunning rebirth. And it is true that he never again suffered from so dreary a period as that which befell him in the early 1940s. But the pleasure from this success did not last long. In 1949 his weight, normally 150, was down to 131 and he complained of looking like a withered grape. The next year, after the failure of Out of This World (its one classic song, "From This Moment On," was dropped from the show before opening night), his weight slipped to 124. He suffered from severe depression, was convinced that his talent was gone, feared that he would receive no new offers of employment. Friends watched him closely in case he attempted suicide. In October he was admitted to Doctors' Hospital in New York for electric shock treatments.
As if all that weren't enough, Porter also had to contend with the death of his mother and the terminal illness of his wife. Nevertheless, he was back on Broadway in 1953 with a successful show, Can-Can, whose score was a good one, containing such standards as "C'est Magnifique," "It's All Right with Me" and "I Love Paris." In this work Porter undertook the task of writing songs in the style of the 1890s' French music hall and, to do so, he went back to his old habit of studying up, this time reading and absorbing musical scores printed in that era.
In 1955 he wrote another work for Broadway, Silk Stockings. Its score, save for the hit song, "All of You," was not noteworthy. But in 1956 came the very fine film score for High Society. It included "High Society Calypso," "I Love You, Samantha," "You're Sensational," "Now You Has Jazz" and "True Love." Of the latter, Max Dreyfus wrote Porter to say "it is truly a simple, beautiful, tasteful composition worthy of a Franz Schubert." It is all that but, as things turned out, it was Porter's last hit. He wrote two more scores, a film, Les Girls and a television production, Aladdin, but neither contained anything memorable. So it is with High Society that his career as an effective writer closed. Thirty years had passed since his first great success, twenty since his riding accident, ten since Kiss Me Kate. The years after 1957 were taken up with a prodigious list of health problems, including an ulcer operation in 1957 and the amputation of his right leg in 1958. The amputation may have saved Porter's life but it sent him into a permanent depression. By November of 1960 he was down to 80 pounds. In 1963 he was severely burned while smoking in bed. Shortly thereafter, while listening to a recording of one of his show scores, he was heard to say, "How did I ever do it?"
There is no answer to that question. Nor can it be known whether Porter's catalogue of great songs would have been fattened had Broadway accepted him sooner, or had he refused to mount that nag at the Countess's home in Oyster Bay. But even if his career had not been so truncated, his music would almost certainly have remained earthbound; it would not have taken off as did that of Gershwin and, later, the Beatles. Unlike them, Porter was not fascinated by the possibilities inherent in a musical idea. The idea itself was sufficient for him. He loved the theater well enough but he did not have the kind of mystical attachment to it that helped Rodgers transcend similar limitations. Rodgers was not a greater musician than Porter, but he was able to extend himself through his empathy with exotic characters and situations. Porter, for all his bravery, did not have that kind of heart. He also had trouble with the other requirement for productive longevity—that is, staying in touch with the source of his original inspiration. The high-spirited, razor-sharp wit of his early songs, both lyrical and musical, became elusive in his later work. It did not disappear entirely: the sexual naughtiness of "But in the Morning, No!" (1939) was matched by "All of You" (1955). Yet Porter's style, which had at one time been the most original and inimitable among the great show writers, became watered down. Ill health was certainly a factor. But his failure to become more than he had been made it inevitable that he would become less.
