Here's a new book that's bound to beguile musical buffs. Ethan Mordden's When Broadway Went to Hollywood (Oxford University Press; $29.95) details, with the author's usual deep research and enviable style, Broadway's mostly masochistic relationship with Hollywood. Mordden's witty descriptions, succinct summations and wealth of new-to-me facts proclaim once again his indisputable position as the Broadway musical's most eloquent and erudite essayist.
Mordden mentions Jeanette McDonald's "notoriously Turkish diction," and says Kenny Baker is "pleasantly empty." Of The Goldwyn Follies, he writes that "The Goldwyn Folly might be a better title for this mishmash." And here's his explanation of why the dressing room scene in Judy Garland's A Star is Born isn't the "Rose's Turn" it would have been on B'way. "H'wood has always preferred to run its business hours in dialogue. Music is the coffee break."
I love more than anything a good tune or dance that advances narrative, like "The Portland Fancy" in Summer Stock . My all-time favorite is Cole Porter's "Hey, Babe, Hey" from Born to Dance, in which he cleaves his upper crust and cuts loose with the very apogee of a populist number. Mordden seconds my joy when he calls it "a showpiece."
The book begins with an overview of the early H'wood musical, then devotes full chapters to the major B'way composers whose work H'wood mostly hampered. It's a chronicle of how H'wood abuses, misuses, and misunderstands the B'way composers they felt obliged to hire as symbols of class. H'wood wanted to be elite. But even more, it wanted to be popular. "H'wood's love of New York's prestige and originality [was] outweighed by its fear of alienating what we now call the red-state countryside"
What it wanted was the hits of Tin Pan Alley, not the art of B'way. It wasn't eager or able to yield its usual standards and prejudices. On B'way, the composer is king. In H'wood, it's the producer. Usually that's a man of little taste whose main interest is the bottom line.
Mordden examines how B'way composers foundered, unable to exert the authority they were accustomed to. "De Sylva, Brown and Henderson simply broke up the act. Irving Berlin was seldom able to persuade H'wood commanders to let him in on planning or executing a project, and Gershwin got only 'Shall We Dance' as a model of how songs perfect narration."
B'way wasn't entirely impotent in H'wood, though, and Mordden traces how H'wood's brush with B'way ultimately re-oriented it from the revue-sical, with its drop-in songs, to the movie musical, with its integrated score intentions.
Perhaps reflecting the scholarly intentions of Oxford University Press, the book does have some musicological jargon that's so dense that it can't succeed in letting us "hear" through words a song's effectiveness. I never thought I'd argue Mordden on elements of style, but where's Whitney Balliet when we need him?
While most of Mordden's exegeses make us run for the DVD shelf (the one at my house has collected every musical title possible, as well as some bootlegs that ain't), sometimes they make us wrack our brain. Wasn't there what Mordden calls the Vulnerable Male in any musical before, as he claims, Rodgers and Hammerstein revealed him as late as 1945 in Carousel 's Billy Bigelow?
Something I prize in Mordden is how he lets it known that he's a gay writer. He notes Lorenz Hart's appreciation of H'wood's nightlife. "Its shady gay component must have tickled. New York was bound up in subterfuges; in Los Angeles, gay life hid in plain sight." And you've never read before now a lyric Mordden exhumes from the numerous numbers cut from Hollywood Party. Hart wrote it to twit Marlene Dietrich's rumored bisexuality. "People ask me dearie, ain't you Wallace Beery?"