The summertime seems to be the right time for show biz books. I've got a stack of new ones next to my bed. I've just read one that focuses on the little-documented early work of Rodgers and Hart, while another celebrates with great thoroughness the prolific life and shows of that songwriter turned showman, Cy Coleman.
Broadway composer Cy Coleman wasn't depressive, agonizing, or drug-abusing. He was good-natured, generous, remarkably productive, and quite a composing chameleon. All of this is recounted in lively fashion in the composer's first biography, You Fascinate Me So �" The Life and Times of Cy Coleman (Applause Books, $32.99). Author Andy Propst has worked on Broadway and written about it previously. He knows his stuff.
Coleman was a child prodigy at the piano, and between the ages of six and nine gave recitals at the most famed orchestra halls you can name. But he had a hankering for pop music, especially jazz. So during the 1950s, while his trio played in New York's most tony supper clubs, he launched his tunesmith career by composing such masterful songs as "Witchcraft," "The Best Is Yet to Come," "When in Rome," and " You Fascinate Me So," to the acutely sophisticated lyrics of Carolyn Leigh (and wouldn't a bio of this sometimes prickly dame be swell?).
Then Coleman turned to shows. With Leigh, he wrote Little Me, but he tired of her turbulent behavior. So when he met Dorothy Fields at a party, he bluntly asked her if she'd like to collaborate with him. She answered, "Thank god somebody asked!" Together, they wrote Sweet Charity, then Seesaw. In the years between subsequent shows, Coleman performed, published, arranged, managed singers, and recorded a constant stream of albums and singles; the detailed discussion of each of these made me glaze over, but Propst is soon back on track, with insider looks at the making of and subsequent success of shows whose scores were entirely different from each other: Little Me, I Love My Wife, On the 20th Century, City of Angels, The Will Rogers Follies.
At his death in 2004 at the age of 75, Coleman was working on three shows, including one about Napoleon Bonaparte. And the one Coleman show that I sure regret never got past the planning stages would be the one about Julian Eltinge, the premiere female impersonator of the early 20th century.
I was incredulous at Propst's recounting of the not one but two times that Coleman put a new song into a show overnight. Those overnighters are myths, I thought. And I was put right by a time-table in Dominic Symonds' We'll Have Manhattan �" The Early Work of Rodgers & Hart (Oxford, $34.95) that shows how R&H did, in fact, accomplish such a feat. And out of town, at that.
Some of the Broadway Legacy books in the Oxford University series have been pedestrian, or ploddingly academic. Not so this one. Oh, it includes a fair amount of compositional analysis (with score reproductions) that is stiff going for us non-musicologists. But these passages are easily skimmed or skipped, and the rest of the book, consisting of Symonds' sharp-eyed and detail-rich recounting of the adolescent team's collegiate and first main-stem shows, is the real hard tack for Broadway fans. These shows of the 1920s �" Dearest Enemy, Lido Lady, Peggy-Ann, Betsy, and eight others �" have been given abbreviated treatment in previous books, but certainly never been allowed Symonds' full chapter for each. His in-depth act of theatre archeology runs from fascinating to exciting.
Rodgers and Hart might seem stylistically mismatched. Where Rodgers came from a love of Victor Herbert, Hart came from P.G. Wodehouse. Yet this combination proved successful �" tart lyrics palliated by graceful melody. Here's a reassessment typical of Symonds. The song "We'll Have Manhattan" (the Bronx and Staten Island, too) isn't from The Garrick Gaieties, as is commonly thought, but from the (entirely unknown) 1922 Winkle Town, where it's the first announcement of the R&H we'd come to know: clever, romantic, poignant. Its use in Winkle Town also indicated the team's career-long effort for their songs to be an expression of plot and character, rather than being a rendition of a song. Symonds' greatest boon is his chapter covering Chee-Chee . The show's plot hinged on castration, climaxing with the hero nearly getting his balls chopped off. Having to think about testicles for a full evening discomforted audiences, and the show flopped. Symonds exhumes it for our delight (Betty Comden's recording of the show's sweet songs is also delightful, but good luck finding it).
We'll Have Manhattan makes me look forward to next year, when Symonds will cover R&H in the 1930s.