and musical shows has been clearly marked; the bad old days were
slowly forgotten and whatever was suggestive had to become subtle;
and gradually, as the surface polish grew brighter, the suggestive
humours underneath were forgotten; our revues became denatured in more
senses than one. There is one _risqué_ moment in the whole of a recent
_Follies_, and that is one more than usual. The twittering about love
and a kiss goes on; but the Great Reality of Sex is (quite properly, I
am sure) forgotten. And in an encore stanza of _He May Be Your Man, But
He Comes to See Me--Sometimes_, as sung at the Plantation, the whole
conventionalized fabric of our popular love songs was flung aside and
the gay reality exposed. This amorous frankness is part of a simple
realism--a sophisticated realism couldn’t occur in a musical show,
unless in the manner of Offenbach’s _La Belle Hélène_. It is a fitting
counterpart to the exaggerated postures, the slightly lubricious
gestures and movements, of the dance. Another simplicity, and a very
good one, is in such a song as that about a dog from Tennessee in _Oh,
Joy_--a song which with that one quality, and against indifferent music
and unexceptional words, broke up the show.
Behind the frankness and the violence and the simplicity there is found
the most important factor of all--the music. And behind that stands
a figure exceedingly attractive and, in its tragedy, almost moving,
that of the late Jim Europe. Of the music itself--of jazz and the use
of spirituals and the whole question of our national music--this is
clearly not the place to write. One wishes to mention a name or two:
Shelton Brooks, least _habile_ of pseudo-Balieffs, wrote long ago _The
Darktown Strutters’ Ball_, which ought not to be forgotten; Creamer
and Layton composed all of _Strut, Miss Lizzie_, and therein appeared
_Sweet Angeline_, as complex a piece of syncopation as Mr Berlin ever
composed. What portion of _Shuffle Along_ was composed by Noble Sissle
and Eubie Blake I do not know, but Sissle in action and Blake at the
piano were wholly satisfying and expert. And all of these composers,
and all of the jazz bands who play for them, have the ineffable
advantage of being assured, in advance, of dancers who in fancy or
straight dancing have the essential feelings for rhythm and broken
rhythm in their bones.
And that interior response to syncopation Jim Europe had to the highest
possible degree. He had been, before the war, the band leader at the
Castles’; I am told by one who knows of such matters that his actual
vogue was passing when the war came. He returned with the 369th U. S.
Infantry “Hell-Fighters” Band and for a few Sunday nights in March,
1919, he packed the old Manhattan Opera House to the doors.
Say that what he played had nothing to do with music; say that to
mention the name of a conductor in the same breath with his name is
an atrocity of taste--I cannot help believing that Jim Europe had the
essential quality of music in him, and that, in his field, however
far from any other it may have been, he was as great as Karl Muck in
his. He did have contrast; it was out of the contracting stresses
of a regular beat and a divergent that he created his effects. The
hand kept perfect time, and his right knee, with a sharp and subtle
little motion, stressed the acceleration or retard of the syncope. His
dynamics were beautiful because he knew the value of noise and knew
how to produce it and how to make it effective; he knew how to keep
perfectly a running commentary of wit over the masses of his sound; and
the ease and smoothness of his own performance as conductor had all
the qualities of greatness. He rebuked a drummer in his band for some
infraction of discipline and was killed.
Whatever the negro show has to give to the perfected Broadway
production has its sources fairly deep in the negro consciousness,
and I put Jim Europe forth as its symbol because in him nearly all
that is most precious came to the surface. He seemed sensitive to the
ecstasy and pathos of the spirituals as he was to the ecstasy and joy
of jazz. He was, as conductor, vigorous and unaffected and clean. In
_Shuffle Along_, Messrs Sissle and Blake paid honour to his memory,
but the unacknowledged debt of the others is greater. I am inclined to
think that, if sterility does not set in for the more notable Broadway
product, it will be because something of what Jim Europe had to give
has been quintessentialized by his successors and adopted.
_Plan For a Lyric
Theatre in America_
PLAN FOR A LYRIC THEATRE IN AMERICA
I am going to establish a lyric theatre in America. Not an art theatre
and not a temple of the drama, and not an experimental theatre. A
lyric theatre where there will always be Mozart and Jerome Kern and
Gilbert-and-Sullivan and Lehar--and NEVER by any chance Puccini or
the Ring or Ibsen. I shall avoid the good things and the bad alike in
the serious forms; I shall have Russian Ballets and American ballets.
The chief thing is that it will be a theatre devoted to _all_ the
forms of light musical entertainment and to nothing else. My theatre
will put an end to those disheartening revivals (or resurrections) of
popular musical shows because the shows will be kept alive, just as
“grand” operas are kept alive by appearing in a repertory. Into the
repertory I shall incorporate--as soon as their independent existence
is at an end--such successes as _The Night Boat_ and such failures
as _The Land of Joy_. There will never be a chance for _fashion_ to
destroy things essentially good. I shall produce new pieces, too; and
if they are good they will run along with frequent presentations until
they are absorbed in the general scheme. And I think I shall have
pastiches frequently--of revues and topical productions which aren’t,
as entireties, capable of continuing.
That is the abridgement of a scheme, and I say I shall do it in the
hope that someone else, even if it be the Messrs Shubert, will do it
instead. Because I like musical comedy and it annoys me that I can
hear _Un bel di_ (which I want never to hear again) fifteen times a
season, and cannot hear _The Sun Shines Brighter_ or _The Ragtime
Melodrama_ ever again. And I know that our present type of musical
comedy is so good, so vigorous and snappy, that it tends to kill
off its predecessors; a repertory is the only thing; and the usual
objections to repertory will fail here, because in this case the
devotees of musical shows will know in advance that “it is going to be
a good show.” I don’t know whether the bill should change every day or
every week; I feel certain that there ought to be half a dozen centres
across the continent, and two or three touring companies. Further
details I cannot give now. I shall try to find some means, however,
of distinguishing between the second-act finale of _The Mottled Mask_
(“On to the ball at the palace of Prince Gregory”) from the second-act
finale of _The Madcap in Motley_ (“On to the ball at the palace of
Prince Gregory”). It is not part of my scheme to keep bad shows alive.
The rare entertainment such a theatre will afford can be guessed if
you look for a moment at the changes in musical shows since 1900. We
were then coming out of the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition and (after a
great vogue of extravaganza) coming into the Viennese mode. It is the
fashion now, especially in France, to belittle the Viennese operetta,
to call its waltz song heavy and its structure a bore. Possibly these
things are true; but Vienna has been the home of operetta for over a
century and has done well by itself most of the time. Illumination of
this predominant influence you can get by going to the Redoutensaal
and hearing a performance of _The Marriage of Figaro_, and within the
next few days hearing _Die Fledermaus_ and whatever new piece Lehar
or Fall or Oscar Straus has composed. For what one seldom knows from
its loftier production is that _Figaro_ is in essence and detail a
musical comedy and that almost all we know of the form stems from the
combination effected there by a great composer, a fine dramatist, and
an exceptionally skilful librettist.[14] The imperial ballroom with
its tapestried walls, its small stage on which only conventionalized
scenery can be set, its divided stairway coming down on the stage, is a
setting admirably contrived to give the whole loveliness of operetta.
The last scene is in the garden of the count: six boxed trees and
moonlight create the effect. And at the last moment, the happy ending,
the electric lights are thrown on, the vast crystal chandelier lighting
up over the garden, and the event recedes into its real, its secondary
framework, as entertainment. One recognizes it for what it is--the
gay and exquisite counterpart of grand opera, from which neither the
Savoy nor the Viennese operetta ever departed. Musically the Viennese
type corresponds more clearly to Italian, the Gilbert and Sullivan to
French opera. The absurd conventions of production are taken bodily
from the older and more respected type. The same thing is as obviously
true in Cimarosa’s _Marriage Secret_ as it is in _The Chocolate
Soldier_--the latter being, except for a weaker libretto, a perfect
parallel to _Figaro_. (And nearly as worthy of the perpetual life which
is apparently to be denied it.)
It is still unnecessary to describe the Viennese operetta in detail,
for immediately after the war it came again into vogue and one or two
excellent examples--_The Last Waltz_ was one of them--re-established
some of its ancient prestige. It is at bottom produced _for the music_.
In one the music may be chiefly sung, in another danced. Everything
else--_décor_, story, humorous episodes--is secondary. Recently an
effort has been made to change this. Oscar Straus’ _Törichte Jungfrau_
at the Grossesschauspielhaus (Reinhardt’s catacombs in Berlin) was all
production--and nearly all dreadful. Lehar’s latest, _Das Gelbe Jacke_
(not, however, our _Yellow Jacket_) is entirely in the pure Viennese
mode, and the Vienna production (February, 1923) indicates how Viennese
operetta is improved in transit to our shores. For our production of
musical comedy is almost equal to our production of revue, which is
incontestably the finest in the world. With their emphasis on music the
Viennese shows naturally centre about the famous waltz-song; and one
good waltz has been able to make a show a success. Rudolf Friml made a
success of _High Jinks_ with a fox-trot.
The English type as we know it, including Caryll and Monckton and
Rubens, has had for thirty years the Savoy tradition. This requires
a plot of more frivolity than the Viennese, and lyrics of greater
humour. The successes have been moderate--“I’ve got a motto” is no
masterpiece. The degree of fun has been higher and the seductiveness
of the music less. It was perfectly natural that (with _Adele_ to
help them on) a combination of virtues should take place in America
in the beautiful _Princess Shows_ of Comstock and Gest, where the
talents of P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and Jerome Kern, stage-managed
perfectly by Robert Milton, produced a fresh and attractive type of
musical show which for five years progressed in popularity--but had
few imitators--and suddenly seemed to disappear. It was, in fact,
transformed into something else, something good. But one should look at
the original closely to discern its exceptional virtues.
Each of the Princess shows had a reasonable, but not serious, plot.
The advantage of a plot isn’t, as one often hears, that it gives the
appearance of reality to the piece, for who should expect that? There
is no reason why a musical comedy should not be wholly preposterous,
dramatically or psychologically, provided, like _Iolanthe_, it has a
logic of its own. No. The advantage is that when there is a definitely
perceptible structure everything else arrives with greater intensity
of effect. The best of the Princess shows had the weakest plot, for
_Leave It to Jane_ was based on Ade’s _College Widow_, which has no
great quality. Since songs and dances had to take up much time, this
plot was gratifyingly reduced to a few essential lines and played
without sentiment. The result was a rush of action in which everything
found place. The later pieces were on librettos by Guy Bolton,
suggesting French farces, and full of neat arrangements. None of them
was stupid. They all gave place for Mr Wodehouse’s exceptional talents
as a lyric-writer. He is as an English humorist superior to most, and
as a master of complicated, original, amusing rhymes is the best man
in the business. A special quality of making fun is discernible in all
his lyrics, and he does good parodies, like _When It’s Nesting Time
in Flatbush_. The Princess type made rather a fetish of simplicity (I
quote from memory):
Although the thing that’s smart is
To stay out all night on parties,
I’ll be sitting, with my knitting,
In the good old-fashioned way,
and of sentiment:
The breeze in the trees brings a scent of orange blossoms
And the skies turn soft and blue,
When there’s no one around except the girl you love
And the girl you love loves you,
which was often not amorous and rose to as fine a thing as _The Siren
Song_:
Come to us, we’ve waited so long for you,
Every day we make a new song for you;
Come, come, to us, we love you so.
Leave behind the world and its fretting
And we will give you rest and forgetting,
So sang the sirens ages and ages ago.
There was also patter as in the Cleopatra song:
And when she tired, as girls will do,
Of Bill or Jack or Jim,
The time had come, his friends all knew,
To say good-by to him.
She would not stand by any means
Regretful, stormy, farewell scenes,
To such low stuff she would not stoop
So she just put poison in the soup.
When out with Cleopatterer
Men always made their wills;
They knew they had no time to waste.
When the gumbo had that funny taste
They’d take her hand and squeeze it
And murmur, “Oh, you kid!”
But they none of ’em liked to start to feed
Till Cleopatterer did.
and in each of these types Wodehouse was faultless.
Fortunately for him and for us these songs were set to a music which in
addition to being delightful let the words appear, and occasionally
was so fluent, so inevitable, that it made the words seem even simpler
and more conversational than they are. Jerome Kern composed nearly all
of the Princess shows and the collected scores are impressive. He is
the most erudite of our simple composers and he manipulates material
with inordinate skill. He can adapt German folksong (_Freut euch das
Leben_ underlies _Phoebe Snow_); he didn’t do so well by _Kingdom
Comin’_, which was botched and cut; he also understands Sullivan. But
his best work, _The Siren Song_, _The Little Ships_, _The Sun Shines
Brighter_, have a melodious line, a structure, and a general tidiness
of execution which are all their own. _The Siren Song_ corresponds
exactly to the Viennese waltz, but both the words and the music are
impersonal; they are a gentle hymn to seduction, with humour. Scattered
between languorous rhythms are bursts of gaiety, like a handful of
pebbles thrown against a window--which doesn’t open--for the song ends
in a tender melancholy. It is a real achievement. Compare the lines
I have quoted above with “Come, come, I love you only,” from _The
Chocolate Soldier_--phrases you would expect to arrive at the same
musical conclusion. The crash of “_Oh, Hero Mine!_” in the second is
good drama, saved from being too obvious by being sung to the coward
Sergius and not to the protagonist Bluntschli. But in comparison the
gentle ending of _The Siren Song_ is, as song, superior: “So sang the
Sirens, ages and ages ago”--and you take it or leave it. The music, at
least, is not forcing your hand.
The Princess shows never had any great stars; instead, they had the
one quality which always makes for success--_esprit de corps_. In each
the company was aware of the nature and quality of the piece it was
playing, and it worked in variations of that genial and sophisticated
atmosphere. It was simply against the tone of the Princess shows to
be dull; and I, who like nearly all musical shows, found in them my
greatest delight.
They passed into something else because they were exquisitely
proportioned on a small scale--the scale, by the way of _The Beggar’s
Opera_, which they resembled--and the whole tendency of the time was
toward elaboration. They involved small choruses, little eccentric
dancing, and required no humorist _hors de texte_. I count it a triumph
for Mr Dillingham, as well as for the others concerned, that they have
been able to preserve so much of the Princess in some of the Globe
productions. The best of these, I think, is _Good-morning, Dearie_. It
has an adequate plot; it has room for Harland Dixon, a fine dancer; for
Ada Lewis, an expert broad comedienne; for Maurice and his partner,
whose name I don’t remember; for a large dancing chorus and for stunts;
better still it did little to hinder Jerome Kern. It was here that he
took the most famous of waltzes and implicated it masterfully in a
blues; and here that all the seductiveness and gaiety of the Princess
music returned with _Ka-lu-a_ and _Didn’t You Believe?_ There were a
few faults in the production; the _décor_ lacked freshness, although
it didn’t actually offend; the Chinese scene was hackneyed. But on the
whole it is the best musical comedy I have seen since the Princess
shows.
What forced us to be elaborate was not the memory of the Viennese
type, but the growing complexity of revue, always cutting into musical
comedy. It should be noted that _Around the Map_ (which I hold the best
musical comedy--not operetta--I saw before the Princess shows) first
brought Joseph Urban into the field, taking him from the Boston Opera
House and pushing him on the way to Ziegfeld, where he was tardily
recognized by the Metropolitan for whom he has made _Oberon!_ _Around
the Map_ had some twenty scenes, it dealt with a trip around the world
in search of safety socks, and was all gay (with Else Alder), all good
music (Caryll) and only the beginning of elaboration. But Mr Berlin’s
two shows and a host of others indicated that to survive musical
comedy would have to appear lavish. Comparatively simple shows still
occur--_Tangerine_ was one; but we seem to be in for something fairly
elaborate--in music as in the Le-Baron-Kreisler pieces, in _décor_
as in the Shubert-Century productions, in stars and stunts as in
Dillingham’s.
I do not pretend to cover the ground, and to name the names, in this
sketch; not even to characterize all the types. I don’t know what to
say about _Mary_, in which George M. Cohan worked a chorus into a
state of frantic energy and Louis Hirsch provided _The Love Nest;_
nor of twenty other individual successes. One composer remains whose
work is often so good, whose case is so illuminating, that he must be
considered. That is Victor Herbert. It should be said at once that even
long after his early successes he composed a fine musical comedy, _The
Only Girl_. The difficulty about Mr Herbert is that he has succumbed to
the American habit of thinking that grand opera is great opera. I have
heard him at one of his _premières_ speaking from the conductor’s dais
to assure the audience that the present piece was in the high line of
operetta, that more pieces like it would put an end to the vulgarity
of musical shows. The regrettable fact was that _The Madcap Duchess_
put an end to nothing but itself; I recall the name, that Ann Swinburne
was in it, and that it had a good patter song; the rest was doleful.
Whereas two weeks later in the same house I heard _The Lady of the
Slipper_, in which Mr Herbert, setting out to write an ordinary simple
musical show, was a thoroughly competent composer, full of ingenuity
and interest and taste and invention. If he had only taken his eyes off
the Metropolitan Opera House he would probably have been the best of
the lot to-day. He suffers--although he is vastly respected--because
he failed in respect to the fine art of the musical show.
The wonderful thing about that art is that it is made up of varied
elements which are fused into something greater than themselves. There
is a song and dance by Julia Sanderson, who is not a great artist; or
the sudden apparition of a little man pursued in a harem, bounding upon
a scarlet pouffe six feet in diameter and nuzzling like a dog--Jimmy
Barton, in fact, who is one; and the rambling story told by Percival
Knight in _The Quaker Girl_ or the drunken scene by Clifton Crawford
in _The Peasant Girl_; there is _In the Night_, from _The Queen of the
Movies_ or Johnny Dooley falling out of the clerk’s desk in _Listen,
Lester_; there is Donald Brian, the perpetual _jeune premier_, or the
amazing Spanish song in _Apple Blossoms_, or a setting designed by
Norman-Bel Geddes or costumes by Helen Dryden or the _Sandman_ song
from _The Dollar Princess_, or the entrance of the Bulgarians in _The
Chocolate Soldier_ or the wickedly expert prosody of Brian Hooker. What
is it takes all of these and composes them into something beautiful and
entertaining? Skill in production is part of it, but not all, for the
same elements: colour, light, sound, movement, can be combined into
other forms which lack that particular air of urbanity, of well-being,
of rich contentment and interest which is the special atmosphere
of musical shows. I can only find a word and say that the secret
resides in it--high spirits. For a musical comedy, even a sentimental
one, must be high-spirited in execution--that was the lesson of an
unsentimental one, _The Beggar’s Opera_; and at the same time there
must be some courage, some defiance of nature and sound sense, a
feeling for fantasy, which means that the life of the spirit is high,
even when the life of the body is in chains. It is for this freedom of
the spirit, released by music as always and diverted by all the other
elements in them, that these shows are cherished. It is, naturally, as
a counter-attack on solemnity that I am going to found my theatre.
_The One-Man Show_
THE ONE-MAN SHOW
When all the other grave æsthetic questions about the stage are
answered, some profound theorist may explain the existence of the
one-man show. Since I am not a materialist, I cannot concede the
obvious solution--that a man finds enough money to produce himself in
a Broadway show--because there is something attractive and mysterious
about this type of entertainment which the explanation fails to explain.
The theory of the one-man show is apparently that there are individuals
so endowed, so versatile, and so beloved, that no other vehicle will
suffice to let them do their work. Conversely, that they are of such
quality that _they_ suffice for the strange entertainment with which
they are surrounded and that nothing else matters provided they are
long and frequent on the stage. Six men and two women are in the first
roster of the one-man show: Fred Stone, Ed Wynn, Raymond Hitchcock,
Eddie Cantor, Frank Tinney, and Al Jolson; below them, leading the
women, Elsie Janis and Nora Bayes. And omitting Jolson because he is so
great that he cannot be put in any company, the greatest one-man show
was one in which none of these appeared--it was one in which even the
man himself didn’t appear. It was a show in which one man succeeded
where all of these, this time not excluding Jolson, had failed: for he
made the whole production _his kind_ of show--and the others have never
quite managed to do more than make themselves.
The chief example of this failure is Hitchcock, whose series lapses
ever so often, leaving him stranded on the bleak shore of a _Pin Wheel
Revue_--an artistic, an intellectual, an incredibly stupid production
which Hitchy manfully tried first to save and then to abandon. There
were in the better Hitchy shows other first-rate people: one who
masqueraded as Joseph Cook and was none other than Joe Cook the
Humorist out of vaudeville and out of his element; Ray Dooley was with
Hitchy, I believe, and there were always good dancers. Hitchy kept on
the stage a long time, as _conférencier_ and as participant, and his
amiable drollery was always at the same level--just enough. He never
quite concealed the strain of making a production _go_; one always
wanted to be much more amused, and Hitchy never got beyond the episode
of the Captain of the Fire Brigade or trying to buy the middle two-cent
stamp in a sheet of a hundred. A series of vaudeville sketches doesn’t
make a one-man show, even if he plays in all of them; and the moment
Hitchcock was off, _Hitchy-koo_ went to pieces, some good and some bad,
and all trying a little too hard to be something else.
[Illustration: EDDIE CANTOR
By Roland Young]