When Broadway Went to Hollywood

Abstract

By the late 1920s, Broadway was thriving, and New York had produced dozens of prodigious songwriting talents: Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, and Jerry Herman, to name a few. When The Jazz Singer became the first film to integrate synchronized music in 1927, many ambitious pioneers of the Great White Way were enticed westward by the studios' promises of national exposure and top dollar success. But what happens when writers native to the business of Broadway run into the very different business of Hollywood? Hollywood had its producer despots, its stacking of writing teams on a single project, its use of five or six songs per story where Broadway fit in a dozen, and it was uncomfortable with characters bursting into song on the street, your living room, or "a cottage small by a waterfall." Did the movies give theatre writers a chance to expand their art, or did mass marketing ruin the musical's quintessential charm? Is it possible to trace the history of the musical through both stage and screen manifestations, or did Broadway and Hollywood give rise to two wholly irreconcilable art forms? And, finally, did any New York writer or writing team create a film musical as enthralling and timeless as their work for the stage? In When Broadway Went to Hollywood, writer and celebrated steward of musical theatre Ethan Mordden directs his unmistakable wit and whimsy to these challenging questions and more.The Wizard of Oz, Gigi, Top Hat, High Society - some of the most popular movie musicals ever made were written by Broadway songwriters. The Sound of Music, Chicago, West Side Story, The Music Man, Grease - some of the other most popular movie musicals were adaptations of Broadway shows. From the very first talkies to the present, Broadway's composers and lyricists have given much of their best work to the movies - but with varying results. In the 1930s, Rodgers and Hart's Love Me Tonight, with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald at their sexiest, is a masterpiece of fairytale sophistication. But Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, an Al Jolson vehicle about tramps in Central Park, is one of the outstanding flops, partly because Rodgers and Hart wrote it as a kind of opera that is spoken instead of sung. Or take the big films based on Broadway shows in the 1960s. After The Sound of Music, Hollywood sought to fill the screen with lots of scenery, lots of drama, and lots of Julie Andrews. But Camelot and Hello, Dolly! had too much scenery, Paint Your Wagon was the hippie musical, and Song of Norway was simply loony. Even Julie Andrews couldn't save the Broadway bio film called Star!, all about the adventures of Gertrude Lawrence. Who? As historians have begun to consider the movie musical along with the stage musical, Ethan Mordden explores just how influential such writers as Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and Stephen Sondheim have been when they moved from Broadway to Hollywood. Are the welcomed? Do they get to experiment, using the freedom of the camera to expand the very geography of song? Or do movie producers resent that New York sophistication? Broadway excels in the bittersweet "Send in the Clowns." But Hollywood wants it simple: "White Christmas." With his usual combination of scholarship and wicked wit, Ethan Mordden tantalizes us with anecdotes and fresh observations. He discusses many unusual titles as well - Viennese Nights, The Boys From Syracuse, Anything Goes, with Ethel Merman preserving her classic stage part as Reno Sweeney, the swinging evangelist. The first of its kind, this book is made for the moviegoer and theatre buff alike. (source éditeur)

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