This is part 2 of a two-part column; read part 1 here.
The idea of Yvonne Printemps and Francis Poulenc collaborating on a play by Jean Anouilh makes a useful reminder that, by inviting Helen Hayes to sing, Happy Birthday’s creators were really following a longstanding theatrical tradition more usually associated with the dual-capacity stars who travel back and forth between legit plays and musicals. Even in the most somber dramas, such stars were expected to give their musical fans at least a small taste of their way with a song.
Gertrude Lawrence, for instance, enjoyed multiple occasions of that kind. Probably the best-loved such instance came in a play that, like the song in question, was tailored to Lawrence by her costar, the multitalented Noël Coward. As with the use of “Always” in Blithe Spirit, in his now-perennial Private Lives, the speedy verbal exchanges and the slapstick brawls they lead to are offset by the tremulous and touching sentiments of “Someday I’ll Find You,” irrevocably fixed not only to the script of Private Lives but also to the heart of anyone who’s heard Lawrence’s recording of it.
On a lesser occasion, Lawrence left behind a charming recorded memento of her performance, opposite the dashing Douglas Fairbanks Jr., in the London production of Clemence Dane’s 1934 romantic trifle, Moonlight Is Silver. The recording’s two emotionally contrasting dialogue scenes are bridged by stanzas of a title song, sweetly crooned by Lawrence, with words by Dane and music by Richard Addinsell (later famous as the film composer who created the “Warsaw Concerto”).
In a similar but considerably less trifling situation, of which unhappily no recording exists, the great Ethel Waters, essaying her first legit role, as the doomed heroine of DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s stark drama Mamba’s Daughters (1939), bemoaned her imprisonment in “Lonesome Walls,” a quasi-blues song with lyrics by DuBose Heyward and music by Jerome Kern. Though famed as a singing star through recordings, radio, and vaudeville as well as a long series of Broadway musical revues, Waters was not the only notable vocalist onstage in Mamba’s Daughters: Her supporting cast included the splendid blues singer Alberta Hunter, as well as several alumni of Heyward’s earlier foray into musical theater, Porgy and Bess, including Helen Dowdy, who had created the role of the Strawberry Woman; Georgette Harvey, the original Maria; and the performer-composer J. Rosamond Johnson, who had assisted Gershwin in the opera’s musical preparation. (Mamba’s Daughters wasn’t short in the acting department either: its cast also included José Ferrer and Canada Lee.)
As most of the above examples suggest, songs written for a particular non-musical play rarely have much of an independent life. Their existence is tied to the survivability of the play they were written for—a short duration in the case of works like Mamba’s Daughters and Moonlight Is Silver, a more robust and longer-lasting life span with The Man Who Came to Dinner and Private Lives. Very few hit songs have fought their way out of the context of a play to which they were at best only a peripheral added attraction.
One of these rare birds, however, may stand as the exception that proves the rule. In 1932, the flamboyant entrepreneur Billy Rose, who dabbled in songwriting as well as producing Broadway shows and other forms of extravaganza such as aquacades, offered New York theatergoers a raucous comedy by the ex-newspapermen Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler. As those in the know might have expected from the roaring successes Hecht had in collaboration with Charles MacArthur on The Front Page and Twentieth Century, this new effort, a romance with farcical overtones called The Great Magoo, was crowded with action, noise, and eccentric, carny-trash characters appropriate to its Coney Island setting. What it didn’t have was a song. Accordingly, Rose commissioned one from a pair of songwriting pals Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, taking a hand in the lyrics himself, as was his wont. (His Tin Pan Alley colleagues tended to regard Rose somewhat with suspicion, distrusting his habit of riding to success, as it were, on other songwriters’ backs.)
The song that Arlen and Harburg provided, with or without Rose’s credited assistance, not only captured the spirit of Hecht and Fowler’s comedy but also touched Americans’ hearts by addressing a theme, perpetual in our culture, that must have struck home with particular force during those desperate Depression years: the idea that everything’s phony except one person’s belief in another’s love. “It’s Only a Paper Moon” went into Arlen and Harburg’s catalog of standards, wending its way across the decades through multiple film uses (including Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, which it serves as a virtual matrix), and innumerable recordings. Probably it’s only in the two youngest generations alive today that you couldn’t find a large number of people who recall at least a fragment of its lyrics.
The immortality of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” contrasts sharply with that of the play which spawned it. The Great Magoo was lambasted by New York theater critics for its coarseness as well as its wafer-thin plot. (Hecht later said, ruefully, that the critics had gone after it “like a lynching mob.”) Rare attempts to revive it have been met with an equal lack of enthusiasm. Mel Gussow, reviewing one such attempt in The New York Times, suggested that it was like an average musical comedy book of its era, but lacking a score except for the one Arlen-Harburg song. Like his predecessors in the reviewing corps of 1932, he took no delight in the once-notorious curtain line that was Hecht and Fowler’s final nose-thumbing at respectable Broadway’s prudery: As the well-bred heroine runs off with her carnival-barker boyfriend at the end, her vulgar landlady appears on the boardinghouse stairs, waving a douchebag, and shouts, “Hey, Cinderella, ya forgot yer pumpkin!”
One of the oddest surviving phenomena in this category might be described as a song not from a play though written for one. In 1956, Cheryl Crawford produced a fraught psychological drama by N. Richard Nash, whose The Rainmaker had triumphed on Broadway the year before. Its company heavy with members of the Actors Studio, then in its exciting early years, Nash’s Girls of Summer was directed by Jack Garfein, and featured Shelley Winters, Pat Hingle, Lenka Peterson, and Arthur Storch in its principal roles. Not a crew you would call on to sing (though Winters, in fact, had done a stint as Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, and would years later star in another Broadway musical, Minnie’s Boys). Still, Crawford commissioned a title song, from a young and totally unknown songwriter from whom people seem to have expected a lot. Though listed in the show’s Broadway credits, the song was cut before opening and received its only public hearings in radio commercials for the play’s brief run. Musical-theater aficionados who perked up when they saw the play’s title earlier in this paragraph of course already know that the young talent in question was Stephen Sondheim, still several years away from his early triumphs as the lyricist of Gypsy and West Side Story. Like Loos’ Happy Birthday, Nash’s play is long forgotten, but “Girls of Summer,” the Sondheim song, does crop up occasionally in Sondheim revues, a sweet, haunting divertissement that makes a good palate-cleanser between samples of the master’s more substantial work.
Perhaps the oddest item of all—and so a fitting end for this list of theater songs with such an equivocal position in the theater—is a song that, though firmly associated with a play, belongs neither to the play itself nor to its far better-known musical version. Rather, it’s a sort of tribute: a song written about a play and used to salute it in a musical review that ran contemporaneously with the play’s original production. In 1927, DuBose Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, adapted his novel, Porgy, for what proved to be a spectacular and widely acclaimed production by director Rouben Mamoulian (who later went on to direct its operatic version, the Gershwin-Heyward Porgy and Bess, as well as the original productions of both Oklahoma! and Carousel). While Porgy, the play, was running on Broadway and then on tour, imprinting a crowd of gifted black actors on the public consciousness for the first time, the makers of a revue in which black performers displayed their skill at song and dance rather than their ability with emotional drama found Porgy a suitable subject for something that was partly a compliment and partly a spoof. Accordingly, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, the songwriters for the show that came to be called Blackbirds of 1928, created “Porgy”—a song that, though having no direct links to the Heywards’ play, clearly derives all its verbal substance from the original’s plot and characters. Introduced by Adelaide Hall in the original edition of Blackbirds, which followed its long Broadway run by becoming the toast of Paris, the song was resurrected for the national tour of the show’s 1930 edition, where it was performed by Ethel Waters, who then made what’s generally considered the definitive recording of it—a merciful legacy that allows one to search the song on Google without producing a flood of references to Gershwin’s opera.
This rambling survey has, of course, barely scratched the surface of its somewhat arcane subject. No catalog of plays that have a single song built in exists, so far as I know. And I doubt that anyone would think of building a concert or a revue out of such a catalog. Directors have often tried using a period song to fix a play’s time in the audience’s min —“Greensleeves” for everything Elizabethan, “Plaisir d’amour” for the early- to mid-19th century, and so on. This is useful shorthand, but it lacks specificity. And directors’ choice of songs for plays from the first half of the 20th century can get even more arbitrary: I recall a production of Anouilh’s Thieves’ Carnival in which all the elegant people on the Riviera sang and danced “The Lambeth Walk,” a notion that surely had never occurred to Anouilh. But the topic, as I’ve indicated, has infinite ramifications. An old song can set a playwright’s mind spinning, like Proust’s madeleine, into memory or philosophy or both at once; a well-crafted new song can touch the old bases and bring the performance to an enhanced life. “Extraordinary,” as the hero of Private Lives says, “how potent cheap music is.” He is, of course, listening to a distant band playing “Someday I’ll Find You”—a song composed by the playwright and star himself. And Coward’s diffidence about the quality of his song is not merely a joke. The simplicity, even the banality, of a popular tune can be the arresting feature that gives it its strength—the power that makes ghosts want to come back and keeps unwelcome memories echoing in the brain. Think of it as a magic key that unlocks the heart of the play. The problem may be that so few plays have a heart waiting to be unlocked.
