With playgoing on hiatus, the contributors to New York Stage Review have decided to provide our readers with alternate discussions of theater: think pieces, book/music/video reviews, and the like. We would much rather be reviewing live theater, and we look forward to the day when the curtain rises once again.
The following was written for an audience talkback discussion of the City Center Encores production of Love Life, which was scheduled to open on March 24, 2020 but didn’t.
It started with a producer named Cheryl Crawford, managing director of a progressive, communal theatre group called the Group Theatre. They specialized in searing new plays written by their members, including Sidney Kingsley’s 1934 Pulitzer-winner Men in White and 1935’s Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets.
They next decided to try a musical. Cheryl, along with her partners Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, offered the job to the emigrant composer Kurt Weill, who had just arrived in America. The show, an anti-war satire called Johnny Johnson with book and lyrics by Paul Green, was unwieldy and quickly closed.
In 1941, Weill had his first Broadway hit: Lady in the Dark, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and starring Gertrude Lawrence. Crawford, meanwhile, had left the Group Theatre and had a significant commercial hit with her revised 1942 version of Porgy and Bess. Hearing that Crawford was looking to produce an original musical, Weill invited her to join him on what would become One Touch of Venus, with lyrics by Ogden Nash and starring Mary Martin.
This gave Weill—who came to the States penniless, unable to access his earnings for The Threepenny Opera and other works—two consecutive hit Broadway musicals. These turned out to be his only two Broadway hits; his four subsequent musicals, prior to his death in 1950, failed. Two of them, nevertheless, have highly distinguished scores: Street Scene and Lost in the Stars.
In 1947, meanwhile, Crawford had what would be her biggest success ever with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Brigadoon. Lerner and Crawford were ready to jump into another musical. Loewe, though, turned them down; he seems to have disliked working with Lerner, reuniting only when his bank account required. Crawford said, I’m sure Kurt would love to do it.
So we had the new team, briefly, of Lerner and Weill writing a show initially titled A Dish for the Gods. Which sounds, maybe, a little pretentious? Love Life was self-described as a “musical vaudeville,” following a wife and husband struggling with marriage over the course of 160 years of American history, perhaps influenced in part by Thornton Wilder’s 1942 Pulitzer-winner, The Skin of Our Teeth. That had been directed by a former Group bit player—he appeared in Johnny Johnson as a mental patient called “Dr. Frewd”—named Elia Kazan.
1948’s Love Life and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s 1947 musical Allegro have been considered the starting point for what came to be known along Broadway as the concept musical. You can find vestiges of both in shows like Follies, Cabaret, and Chicago. But in the case of Love Life (as well as Allegro), the concept was hazy. Just what was Love Life trying to say?
Somewhat complicating the problem was Lerner himself: a talented but hard-headed man who became notorious for his own marital history, racking up not two or three but seven divorces. This is the man writing a musical about marital bliss in America?
Which suggests one of the many differences between Lerner and Loewe. With the success of Brigadoon, both left their first wives. Lerner for the leading lady of Brigadoon, and Loewe for… well, her understudy. Loewe did not marry again, as it happens; but by the time he broke up with the understudy—just after she starred in the 1957 Broadway revival of Brigadoon—Lerner was already on marriage #4.
But that takes us away from Love Life. The show was roundly received as a somewhat interesting musical which clearly didn’t work. I found a quote from Loewe, actually, who called it: “Bad.”
Weill couldn’t write an uninteresting score, but this one didn’t create much excitement. Two of the songs, “Here I’ll Stay” and “Green-up Time,” attained some popularity, while “Love Song” is altogether lovely in a melancholically lonely way.
The show is also notable for its director: that same Elia Kazan from Johnny Johnson. In the course of his fabled career, he directed only two musicals, both for his friend Cheryl Crawford: One Touch of Venus and Love Life. Not especially well, from all accounts, but musicals were not his métier. (Kazan fit Love Life in between a little play called A Streetcar Named Desire and another little play called Death of a Salesman.) As for the enduring friendship between Kazan and Crawford, they joined with another Group Theatre actor-turned-director—Bobby Lewis, who directed Brigadoon—to form their own new theater group, which they called The Actors Studio.
Some claim that part of the reason for Love Life‘s obscurity was the 1948 recording strike, which prevented them from making a cast album. Although I could easily list dozens of musicals of the period, which did produce cast albums, which remain just as obscure as Love Life. In any event, Love Life, unseen in New York since it closed seventy years ago, is overdue for a second chance.
But let’s give the last word on Love Life to Mr. Lerner. “Unfortunately,” he later explained, “there is no way to make a downhill story go uphill.”
