I think I can say with confidence that you’ve never heard of Gussie L. Davis. But if you’re a serious student of American theater, you’ve encountered at least a fragment of his most famous piece of writing. You may even have encountered it multiple times. Mr. Davis, you see, led a short but fascinating life (1863–1899), in the course of which he wrote and published nearly 300 songs, several of which became wildly popular. And the most successful of them all, a notoriously tear-jerking ballad called “In the Baggage Coach Ahead,” embedded itself firmly in the memory of the young Eugene O’Neill; so decades later, when he came to write A Moon for the Misbegotten, he linked the old song to his protagonist, James Tyrone, and wove it into his climactic monologue, the recollection of his traumatic cross-country ride on the train bearing his mother’s corpse home for burial. Describing his agony to Josie Hogan, he even sings a snippet of the song’s refrain. Or at least, O’Neill asks him to—for I can’t recall that, in many Moons over the decades, I ever heard a James Tyrone who had actually learned the tune and sang it accurately (Jason Robards, though not really a singer at all, came closest). Nor, oddly, have I ever seen a production of A Moon for the Misbegotten in which the song was used as incidental music. The only modern recording I know of it—a very fine one, by the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, with her husband, composer William Bolcom, at the piano—has never even made it onto one of the duo’s many CDs of classic American songs. (Morris’ rendition can, though, easily be found on YouTube.)
O’Neill’s affection for the Tin Pan Alley songs of his boyhood found expression in many of his later plays. In the roadhouse scene of Ah, Wilderness!, Richard Miller is shocked—and desperately pretending not to be—when one of the house’s ladies of the evening sings a coarse parody of William Jerome and Jean Schwartz’s “Bedelia” (1903). Even more remarkable, and demonstrating O’Neill’s near-encyclopedic recollection for the tunes of that ancient time, is the notorious “quodlibet” in the stage direction that closes The Iceman Cometh. Hickey has been arrested for his wife’s murder, and his removal by the police has freed his alcoholic pals to feel their liquor again. Proffering drinks on the house, barkeep Harry Hope begs for somebody to sing. What follows is an incoherent bedlam—painstakingly charted by O’Neill in a detailed stage direction—in which each person onstage simultaneously bursts into a different song. Apart from the onetime college boy Willie Oban, who reiterates the bawdy folk song he has sung earlier, and the Mitteleuropean anarchist Hugo Kalmar, who sings the French Revolution-era “Carmagnole,” all the songs are popular standards of the 1885–1915 era, ranging from the tearful “Break the News to Mother” to jaunty ragtime ditties such as “The Oceana Roll” and “Everybody’s Doing It.” There is no way for the audience to decipher individual songs, and the bedlam cuts off as unexpectedly as it began, with only Hugo still singing, but the moment as prescribed in the stage direction remains—a dark affirmation of O’Neill’s love for the popular songs of the past. (Not surprisingly, he delighted in the casting of song-and-dance men from the vaudeville era in his leading roles—George M. Cohan in Ah, Wilderness! and James Barton in The Iceman Cometh—even though their vaudevillian habit of ad-libbing when they couldn’t remember their lines drove him to fury.)
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The use of a familiar song as a link, not only to the era in which a play is set, but to its characters’ preoccupations, goes back a long way. One remembers Falkland, in Sheridan’s The Rivals, seething with grief when he learns that, instead of melancholy songs about her absent lover, his adored Julia has been heard singing that sprightly late-18th-century hit “My Heart’s My Own, My Will Is Free.” George Bernard Shaw, in 1905, gave the practice a new absurdist twist when he wrote, for a charity fundraiser, the one-act spoof melodrama, Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction: He worked into its farcical action the then-recent (and still familiar) ragtime hit “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” Only far from having any meaningful link to the characters or situation, the song is used as another blatant absurdity: The heroine hears the (offstage) heavenly choir singing it, and asks, “Why should angels call me Bill Bailey? My name is Magnesia Fitztollemache.” Shaw explains in a production note that “as the Bill Bailey song has not proved immortal, any equally appropriate ditty of the moment may be substituted.” Ironically, the song’s familiarity has long outlasted that of the play.
Like O’Neill, and at a time when he couldn’t have known the content of the written but not yet produced A Moon for the Misbegotten, Tennessee Williams uses the device of a popular tune stuck in the main character’s head by its link to a traumatic moment: In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois’ memory of her husband’s suicide is perpetually linked to a jingly mid-19th-century dance tune, originally from Poland and known as “La Varsoviana,” which had a 1940s vogue, particularly in the South, in a pop adaptation called “Put Your Little Foot Right Out.” Woven into the incidental music that underscores Blanche’s narration of her story to the uneasy but sympathetic Mitch, the tune becomes an artifact, a part of the past that Blanche desperately needs to escape.
Arthur Miller found a different kind of mental hang-up for an old song in A View from the Bridge. Here the song, once again, is an old tune fairly recently revived, Johnny S. Black’s “Paper Doll” (written 1915 but not published till 1930), a hit for the Mills Brothers in 1943–44, whose popular recording turned the song into a perennial. In Miller’s drama, the person fixated on the song is not the young immigrant Rodolpho, who sings it for the entertainment of his fellow longshoremen, but the protagonist, Eddie Carbone, in whose home Rodolpho is living. An illegal immigrant, Rodolpho has evolved a mutual affection with Eddie’s foster daughter, Catherine, for whom Eddie harbors a secret passion. The song is one of many items that Eddie uses in a vain attempt to impugn Rodolpho’s masculinity and so discredit him in Catherine’s eyes; at one point he even dismissively calls him a “paper doll.” But his efforts lead nowhere except to a growing frustration and fury on his part, which precipitates the final tragedy.
A play that may very possibly have grown out of the recording of an old song is August Wilson’s astonishing debut work, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Not only is the play’s title identical to that of the song the characters are supposedly there to record, but much of the action revolves around the difficulties of recording its spoken introduction, with its lewdly punning last line: “All right boys, you done seen the rest/ Now we’re gonna show you the best/ Ma Rainey’s gonna show you her Black Bottom.” (The name of the then-popular dance was apparently derived from barefoot dancing in the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta.) In historical fact, these lines are tossed off casually on the actual recording and were probably spoken by the bandleader. Wilson imagines Ma using the occasion to help her nephew, Clarence, get over the terrible stutter with which he is afflicted—and which of course means the recording will require a multitude of takes. This is not the central subject of the play, which focuses chiefly on the growing conflict between the young trumpet player Levee and his fellow musicians, but it serves to dramatize Ma’s benevolent authoritarianism as well as to heighten the frustrations of what Wilson imagines as a particularly fraught day in the recording studio. It also allows the audience to seize on an iconic figure of black musical history as a key for what amounts to a panorama of the decade’s cultural attitudes, toward blacks and within the black community. (In other plays of his Twentieth Century Cycle, Wilson took his titles from Romare Bearden paintings to fulfill a similar iconic function.)
Probably the oddest use of an old familiar song as a pivot to the action of a play—or perhaps the slyest—occurs in Noël Coward’s 1941 supernatural farce-comedy, Blithe Spirit. Here, the song—Irving Berlin’s well-known and much-loved “Always”—becomes the accidental means of summoning the spirit of Elvira, the wickedly glamorous and capricious first wife of the hero, writer Charles Condomine. Charles is working on a mystery novel in which the murderer is a fake medium, and he has invited a real one, the local eccentric Madame Arcati, to hold an after-dinner seance in his home. Over his objections, she seizes on “Always” as suitable music, and as it happens to have been Elvira’s favorite song, she naturally assumes that Charles wants her back. Her return, inevitably, complicates his already tense relationship with his second wife, Ruth. And when he tries to enlist Madame Arcati’s help in banishing Elvira’s ghost, he has to confess his motives for the seance, and only succeeds in infuriating her.
The use of “Always,” a gigantically popular worldwide success but regarded by sophisticates as obnoxiously sentimental, amounts to a running gag, its faintly cloying simple tune set against the catfights and crockery-breaking of the farcical passages. As Coward probably knew, the song had begun life with a troubled history: Written by Berlin for use in the 1925 Broadway musical, The Cocoanuts, which starred the Marx Brothers, the song was rejected by the show’s book writer and director, George S. Kaufman, who told Berlin that he found the lyric, “I’ll be loving you always,” unrealistic. He suggested it might be changed to “I’ll be loving you Wednesday.” Berlin, in ire, withdrew the song, publishing it separately and thereby proving Kaufman wrong, since its runaway success made it one of the high points of Berlin’s career. (And The Cocoanuts could probably have used a ballad with the emotional strength of “Always” to offset the Marxes’ lunatic shenanigans and compulsive ad-libs. A story alleges that Kaufman, standing at the back of the house one night, grabbed a friend’s arm in shock, exclaiming, “My God! I think I just heard one of the original lines!”)
Kaufman, along with his frequent writing partner, Moss Hart, was also a party to the unusual case of a single song being written specifically to fit the action of an otherwise nonmusical play, the 1939 comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner. Here the initial idea was probably Hart’s: The character who sings the song (which he has supposedly written) is Beverly Carlton, clearly a representation of Noël Coward, whose elegant assurance made him something of a fixation as well as a role model for Hart, who had previously depicted Coward as the dapper playwright-actor Eric Dare in the 1933 musical Jubilee, which featured a score by Cole Porter. To create the song with which Carlton diverts the grumpy Sheridan Whiteside in Dinner, Kaufman and Hart turned again to Cole Porter, who obliged with an even more cunning and elegant parody of a Coward song, “What Am I to Do?,” which the songwriter puckishly signed “Noel Porter.”
A similar problem was solved in a more unconventional way in 1946, when Helen Hayes starred on Broadway in Anita Loos’ gentle comedy Happy Birthday, about a timid librarian who finds that tipsiness can bring happiness when, having ventured into a seedy local bar for dramaturgically shaky reasons, she samples an alcoholic beverage for the first time and falls happily in with the bar’s raffish but good-natured denizens. The script provided space for Hayes, not usually thought of as a singer, to burble out a cheerful song when she gets tiddly. Not having one on hand that suited the character, Loos and director Joshua Logan did the sensible thing: They asked their producers to write one. Improbable as that sounds, their request was eminently sensible, because their producers happened to be Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, at the height of their fame as the creators of Oklahoma! and Carousel. The gentlemen obliged with a sweetly eccentric number called “I Haven’t Got a Worry in the World,” which Ms. Hayes warbled appealingly through a long string of sold-out performances. Both Loos’ play, of which the critics thought little, and the song it contained have largely vanished from theatrical memory, though the latter occasionally turns up in R&H compilations, including a charming CD rendition by Bernadette Peters.
Though she had a leading role in the play involved, Hayes rates only a peripheral mention in the story of what is probably the most famous song written for a European nonmusical play in the last century. The play in question was Time Remembered (1957), Patricia Moyes’ translation of Jean Anouilh’s Léocadia. When Léocadia had made its Paris debut, with tragically bad timing, shortly before the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940, it had starred Yvonne Printemps, equally celebrated as singer and actress, and had boasted incidental music by no less than Francis Poulenc, one of Paris’ most eminent classical composers. Printemps duly recorded the score’s one song, an elegant French-style waltz called “Les chemins de l’amour” (The Pathways of Love) before the show’s box office, like France itself, fell to the invading forces.
By the time Anouilh’s postwar vogue had begun to capture London and New York, Poulenc’s connection to Léocadia seems to have been forgotten. At any rate, the dressy and much-praised 1957 New York production of Time Remembered, directed by Albert Marre (perhaps better known now for directing large-scale musicals like Kismet and Man of La Mancha), passed up Poulenc’s incidental score, commissioning a new one from Vernon Duke, who also supplied lyrics for the score’s two songs—a title song for the adaptation and a pretty ballad called “Ages Ago.” (The latter has been taken up as a concert encore by mezzo Susan Graham.) Marre’s production was clearly a classy affair, with Hayes, Richard Burton, and Susan Strasberg in its central roles. The lavish designs were by Oliver Smith (sets) and Miles White (costumes), their eminence at the time reaffirmed for Broadway-ites scanning the Playbill credits today by the names of their helpers: Smith’s assistant set designer was Robert O’Hearn, later famous for some of the Metropolitan Opera’s grander productions, while White’s costume assistant was the beloved Florence Klotz, later famous for sumptuously designed Prince-Sondheim musicals like Follies and Pacific Overtures. Despite critical praise, the show had a lackluster run. Possibly the missing ingredient was Poulenc’s plangent melody, which, while Anouilh’s stature has faded, has only increased in popularity, audible on countless recordings and, for many sopranos including Jessye Norman, an inevitable concert encore.
Part 2 of this column will appear next month.
