WISH LIST

While I continue to pour through websites that carry these things, there are a few I'm actively looking for, so if you have a lead on any of the following titles, let me know.

ASK THE PROFESSOR (Lee/Clark)
MAGAZINE PRINCESS (Lee/Clark)
HOLLYWOOD BOUND (Wilson/Bradley)
DON ALFONSO'S TREASURE (Morgan/Penn)
TUNE IN (Bradley/Wilson)
A NAUTICAL KNOT (Inch) -- just the libretto; I have the score
MAM'ZELLE TAPS (Penn) -- again, just the libretto, please
THE GOLDEN TRAIL (Cadman)

Should you have any others not necessarily on this list, let's hear about it.

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DRAWFS (1938) comes to us from the team of Theodosia Paynter and G. A. Grant-Schaefer, whose work we've reviewed before. Paynter was a recognizable name in the genre as well, mostly in adaptations of fairy tales and popular novels such as Tom Sawyer (an adaptation to be discussed later). Designed for a mixture of middle- and high-schoolers, SNOW WHITE is remarkable for the fact that the lead doesnt really appear onstage until Act Two.

It's sometime in the Middle Ages, and Queen Winnifred has recently given birth to the Princess Snow White. But upon the princess's introduction to the world (in the form of a large doll), the harbinger of death, Frosty Fate, appears and tells the queen her hour has come. She in turn tells her husband to wait seven years, then to marry again so that Snow White will have a mother.

Unfortunately, the king's grief led him to some pretty bad judgment, if the second scene is any indication. It's seven years later, and he's married, per his dead wife's wishes — but to a vain and pompous woman named Tiger Lily, who has a magic mirror that tells her, yes, she's the fairest of them all.

Well, until the mirror meets Snow White, then all bets are off. And of course Queen Tiger Lily is just furious when the mirror tells her that she's now the runner-up in the kingdom's beauty contest. So Tiger Lily does what any sensible-yet-egocentric ruler would do: she hires a terrible woodsman (who, as he tells the audience, is just pretending to be terrible — he's actually a rather nice guy) who is to take Snow White into the forest and return... without her.

He's no sooner gone than the King shows up, wondering where his daughter's gotten to. Queen Tiger Lily tells him she was looking a little pale, so she sent Snow White into the forest for a little walk.

KING. What? Alone? Do you not know that the forest is infested with wild beasts?

QUEEN. Oh, she wasnt alone. A kind and gentle woodsman, who knows the forest well, accompanied her.

KING. What woodsman?

QUEEN. I have no idea; I never saw him before.

KING. You sent Snow White into the woods with a stranger? Your act astounds me! It could only have been prompted by the treachery of a black heart! (QUEEN laughs maliciously.)

Well, now that he's finally figured that out, he sends her to the dungeon while ordering everyone else to go into the woods and find his daughter. And on that, the first act ends.

Act Two is a few weeks later, in the house of the seven dwarfs, who are completely and utterly inept when it comes to the most basic of housekeeping skills. Still, they manage to get it together, take up their pickaxes, and head off to the mines (without whistling, I might add). Once they've left, the woodsman and Snow White appear.

(Okay, just as a note: the script is very specific that Act Two is "a few weeks later" than Act One. What have these two been doing during all that time?)

He tells her she cant go back to the castle, that she has to remain here. But to convince the Queen that she's dead, he's going to take Snow White's kerchief and stain it with blood... never realizing, of course, that now the King is gonna be all over him for letting it happen.

There's a brief intermezzo, and when we come back, she's gone. The dwarfs rattle in, surprised and suspicious at the smell of cooked food coming from the kitchen. They strike a deal with Snow White: they'll protect her if she does the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the vacuuming, the mowing, the sewing and darning, take out the garbage, peel the potatoes... Well, this thing was written in 1938, right? Still, beggars cant be choosers, so she takes the job. But they're no sooner into their celebration of the free household help when there's a loud knock at the door: it's Queen Tiger Lily, who's somehow managed to escape the dungeon and is out looking for Snow White (I gather the woodsman's ruse didnt work for her either). The dwarfs chase her down the hill, and we take another short break.

The Queen's a determined woman; over the next couple of scenes, she tries to suffocate Snow White with magic lacings for her blouse and then brings the poison apple that sorta/kinda does the deed. The drawfs return, lay her out for burial, and sing a lament for their now-dead housekeeper...

... as a handsome prince shows up, looking for someplace to rest for the night. And they now conveniently have a bed empty. He looks at the dead girl on the table and asks if he can take the body and bury it in the garden behind his castle. They say sure, no problem, and to seal the deal, he kisses the dead girl.

And even though she's not Sleeping Beauty, Snow White wakes up anyway. This being a fairy tale, the prince immediately proposes; she accepts; and we rush into the Act Two finale to let everyone know that Snow White's alive and about to marry off really, really well.

Act Three is at the Prince's place, where the wedding rehearsal is about to begin. Snow White's distraught because the Queen intercepted the invitation meant for the King, but when Tiger Lily shows up to make one more attempt at murdering Snow White, the drawfs grab her up and put her feet in a pair of red-hot metal dancing shoes, then send her out the door. But the King, having found the invitation in his wife's wastebasket, does arrive, and it's decided to move things on to a real wedding. And so with much singing and dancing and happiness towards vertically-challenged protectors, SNOW WHITE ends.

Now, not unsurprisingly, there's a lot of Disney-style flavour in this adaptation: talking animals and wee fee folks dress out the cast, even if the story has plot holes the size of small moons circling Jupiter — not the least of which is what to make of the relationship between the king and Tiger Lily. Remember, he sent her to the dungeon... but she apparently got out to wreak havoc. Even though he knows (or rather believes) the she sent his daughter to her death, he keeps her around — with a royal hairdresser no less.

Well, no one ever said that operetta royalty was especially bright.

Still, it appears Tiger Lily, with her vaguely Oriental-sounding name, can run circles around everyone in the kingdom, since she seems to be about the only one who can track Snow White to the dwarfs' cottage: the woodsman wouldnt have had enough time to get back and tell her anything, so I gather it must be chalked up to her mysterious Oriental powers... and maybe the mirror.

In the directing notes, it's written that the pacing of this should be "brisk", which I gather is how you plow through so the audience doesnt notice all the errors and omissions. Who knows, perhaps Paynter expected them to come in with a still firm memory of the Disney film, which would allow her to slack off a bit. Still, from a plotting point of view, a lot of this borders on the unforgivable, which makes me suspicious of what to expect from TOM SAWYER.

Side note: my copy of SNOW WHITE was previously owned by "Barry", who played the part of Nutty the Squirrel. Tiger Lily was played by "Norma Jeane": please note the odd spelling of the second name. I've only seen that once before, from a certain sex-pot actress who would have been 11 when this production was mounted. There's nothing, of course, definitive in thinking that this was perhaps Marilyn Monroe's first acting gig, but it's fun to think about.

The Saucy Hollandaise

Secrecy is at the core of THE SAUCY HOLLANDAISE (1930) by Paul Bliss (cover art by Corina Melder-Collier), although the secret itself... well, like all secrets, you'll have to wait a bit to find it out.

That's not to say it's a good secret. Just that you have to wait.

We're in Holland, in the Royal Gardens. A ship from another country (never specified, but I think it's supposed to be England) has just arrived, and the sailors share their love for sailing the oceans and having a girl in every port. But the Prince who has commissioned this voyage has larger things in mind: to woo the Princess of Holland so he can learn the important State Secret she holds.

For their part, the narcoleptic King of Holland and his wife the Queen (who actually runs Holland with a semi-iron fist) dont want anyone to learn the secret, so they've arranged for the Princess to be shadowed by a tinker named Hans.

Still, the Prince is more than a little relentless and eventually wins the heart of the Princess, who tells him all about the important secret just before the curtain falls.

Running parallel to this numbingly obvious story is a series of gag scenes involving a doctor who, through a process he calls "trephining" manages to mix up the brains of the King and the Prince's ship's captain, who was about to organize a mutiny if the Prince didnt allow the men to stay in Holland. As a result, the mutineer becomes docile (and sleepy), while the King is transformed into a ragin' ruler, cutting through protocols with a razor-sharp sword in order to get all the storylines completed before the final curtain.

The secret? Okay, remember Hans Brinker, who saved Holland from drowning by supposedly putting his finger in the dyke? Nope, didnt happen. Instead, he reversed the engines in the windmills, which sent the water away from Holland instead of into it. For some reason I still havent quite figured out, if everyone knew this, it'd be a problem. I'm not sure how. I suppose it might involve the windmills generating such a force that they would blow back the ships of any invader who might come along. But that's a guess, because Bliss is... well, blissfully silent on the issue.

And perhaps I'm not supposed to. Bliss wrote THE SAUCY HOLLANDAISE as a kind of broad, vaudeville-style comedy, with character roles all over the place — the title should be your first clue about how seriously he takes the story. Everyone except for the two leads gets to participate in some very low comedy: Hans, for example, has a relentless stutter that only goes away when he sings. The doctor is afforded countless opportunities for improvised slapstick, particularly during the operation scene when he mistakenly transfers part of Joe's and the King's brains "without losing a single drop of blood!", as he reassures us. The Queen laughably runs roughshod over everything — think Carol Burnett as Maggie Thatcher here. If nothing else, Bliss does write some delightfully whacked out scenes for his oddball characters.

But the problem is, that's all he does. The score, even by juvenile operetta standards, is paper thin, and it seems that even the publisher had issues with the final product, as there's a moment in the first act when an entertainment is to be performed for the Prince. It's noted that you can ignore the "English Dance" in the score and use just anything else you want. I dont know about you, but that seems a bit cold. Or slapdash on the part of the composer. Or maybe both.

Still, that chill is merited, to some degree. The music aside, the lyrics use the same device — the "story song" — a little too frequently for the numbers to have any real impact. Hans tells us about being a tinker. The Princess tells us about being a princess. The Queen... well, you get the idea. Even the doctor gets a star turn, but it's doled out in the same three-verse/one-chorus architecture Bliss uses for everything else. When he's not using the device, usually during the large ensemble numbers, he writes four lines and has the chorus repeat them... over and over again, to the point where you no longer care about the life of a sailor on the open seas.

Ultimately, THE SAUCY HOLLANDAISE doesnt quite know what it wants to be, whether vaudeville act or romance. And in the process, it turns out to be neither. For that matter, by the end we dont even know for sure if the Prince actually got the Princess. Perhaps we're not supposed to know.

Not that it would make all that much difference anyway.

Sadly...

... it seems that Willlis Music, one of the last publishers and distributors of these little shows, has moved its sheet music inventory to Hal Leonard, and the latter has decided not to carry them.

Not unexpected, of course, but still... very sad.

Orphans

For a while, some educational publishers chose to release the script and the vocal score separately, even though you bought them as a set. While I'm sure that was a great idea in 1930, it's left some major holes today, mostly because the scores had longer lives as antiques than the libretti. As such, I have a few that are songs only, leaving the actual storylines a mystery.

It's not surprising, actually. Most operetta librettists, even the professionals, didnt intend for their work to last beyond the final performance. They knew that all they were providing was a verbal clothesline for the music to hang onto. In some cases, what materials we do have conflict with the published scores, which themselves have been revised and changed, mostly just to retain copyright control. For example, THE QUAKER GIRL (1910), by Lionel Monckton, James Tanner, Adrian Ross, and Percy Greenback, saw the removal of a single song from Act Two, which seemed sufficient for Chappell to put in a new copyright claim in 1956, which allows them to retain control of this rarely performed work until apparently... oh... sometime in the 23rd century. Interestingly, the score available at the Internet Archive is earlier than the '56 version and has all of Monckton's work. So would Chappell get all bent out of shape if one performed the 1910 version, even though some of the music is now contained in the "re-edited" score? Probably so.

But the script? We're actually lucky in this case, because the script is available pretty readily online, both the original 1910 version and a pared-down one prepared in the 1980s. Still, there are areas where both conflict with the published vocal scores... granted, in small ways, but enough to be a bit of a headache. Traditionally, the published scores had "extra songs", added to the end, numbers that were cut during rehearsal — or even after opening night — or written when a new performer came into the production. The fact that the available scripts werent likewise updated is cast aside, because the librettists never seriously thought their work merited preserving. These were cast-off plots, built to order around a series of songs... and it was the songs the audience wanted, not the story.

Still, at least in this case, the script exists, and with a little rewrite, it can be adapted to fit the existing score, so I suppose we should be happy to have at least that much. Not so for some of the works in my collection. So we'll muddle through, as best we can, with what materials as they do exist.

EVERYSOUL (1912), by the Reverend J.F.X. O'Conor, is a religious pageant, not to be confused with the morality play of (almost) the same name. In this one, Everysoul is seeking the Land of the Sunrise Sea, where he will find happiness. He's guided by an Angel, who shows him how to distinguish between the voices of nature and the Evil Spirits that sow only confusion. The powers of Darkness are defeated by the Angel and her Good Spirits, and Everysoul finds he can communicate with the flowers and birds. Sorrow comes to Everysoul, but she's pushed back by Gladness and Hope. A few more metaphorical scenes later, and he arrives at the Golden Shore, where the gleaming waves "light up the vision of glory".

I have no idea what the libretto must have been like, but it appears that, were it staged, this would have been a major production, with no less than nine choruses required on top of a score of named characters. O'Conor is very specific that this is not to be performed as a cantata but as a fully staged work. As such, with a complete cast, this would have run close to 100, minimum, not including the orchestra.

Musically, it's... well, very Jesuit. O'Conor was no doubt a man of very deep faith but almost negligible musicianship. The songs are all almost relentlessly cut time, save for the occasional (and very brief) foray into 6/8. But beyond that, virtually the entire score is written, enigmatically enough, in b-flat major. I'm not that well-versed in church music to know if there was some particular symbolism attached to that particular key, but it was a bit surprising.

So, right off the bat, is this something where the libretto even deserves to be preserved after almost a century? Probably not — it was no doubt didactic as all get-out, filled with its own smug religious superiority. But the problem is, we'll never know. And one more little gap appears in our theatre history.

A NAUTICAL KNOT (1909) (no cover available), by Maude Elizabeth Inch and W. Rhys-Herbert (who gave us the painfully dreadful WILD ROSE) has at least a bit more information available, from professional productions in London of the time. Also known as "The Belle of Barnstapoole", it appears to have been a romantic comedy in which the haughty belle of Barnstapoole finds herself serving Her Majesty as a tar on a sailing ship. She gets involved with the first mate of the HMS Bounding Billow, and (somehow) hilarity ensues. Think TWELFTH NIGHT on the high seas, I suppose. Running counterpoint to their naval infatuations is the story of a young village girl and a wandering artist, but it's difficult to know exactly how that one sorts out because the score gives no real indication.

Musically, KNOT is much more interesting than WILD ROSE, possibly because Rhys-Herbert could focus on just the music in this case. Rather than the typical operetta fare, he's filled the score with hornpipes and jigs and country songs, but each has been given a little musical push. The finale, with its nine vocal lines, is almost ravishingly beautiful, but the rest are lovely simply unto themselves, with no specific purpose than just being lovely (Again, shades of WILD ROSE). I have a vague suspicion this was a lot more comic a show than the score will admit.

Finally, THE COUNT AND THE CO-ED (1930), by Geoffrey Morgan and Geoffrey O'Hara, is in many respects, the greatest loss of all. Yes, it's a simple college musical, but it's Geoffrey Morgan, folks, one of the few librettists in this format who had a consistently off-base take to almost everything he wrote. I'm guessing that the script is fairly straight-forward college material: pretty girl meets rich (pretending to be poor) guy and, after a few totally unnecessary complications, lives happily ever after. Colour me seriously disappointed at this loss.

Still, there are a few fascinating points still be uncovered by just looking at the score. For example, Marjorie (the titular co-ed) is a soprano, while her love interest Hamilton is a high tenor, not the expected mid-to-high baritone one finds in the shows Morgan wrote with Frederick Johnson. O'Hara reserves the lower male voice for a secondary character who happens to be a motor cop (who, I think, is part of the secondary romantic couple), which says something, I think, about how he saw voice as a portrayal of masculinity.

There's also a number in the second act, a quartet for Marjorie, Hamilton, and two secondary characters:

It's sad but it's funny
How frequently money
Will furnish us joy and delight
It's awfully handy
For flowers and candy
And for lights that are bright

If you had a nickel
And I had a nickel
Between us we'd both have a dime
But now in our pockets
We've nothing but hands
And we've nothing to spend but time

It's a very charming and sweet lyric, with just the right turn at the end... if only I knew how it fit into the plot! Knowing Morgan's other work, I'm sure it had quite the setting.

Any information any reader might have about these three works would be greatly appreciated.

It's difficult to believe...

... that I've been writing this little blog for over a year now, and yet there we are: the first post was back in June of 08. How time flies.

So I felt it appropriate to stop a moment and just muse a bit about this bunch of lyricists and composers who brought so much consternation and, at the same time, joy to a generation of students. Having worked through enough of these scores, I realize we're talking about music that, quite simply, has not weathered well... at least not in the eyes of the theatre and/or music community. Any apparent value it might have as music has been superceded by the inescapable fact that it was written for a negligible purpose. I recently posted a short bio of Arthur Penn on a board dedicated to classical music, and it was greeted with a collective dismissive roll of the eyes. Never mind that the man was good at his craft -- he's simply not on the invitation list anymore.

And I find that sad. After all, Penn and Frederick Johnson and even the slightly batty Estelle Clark did their part to move high school theatre to a higher level, in essence paving the way for the endless performances we have today of RENT and GREASE and WICKED. Before these folks, there was no real school theatre per se, certainly not at the high school level: theatre, like the other arts, was viewed as a waste of time when there were more serious subjects at hand (The more things change, huh?). I dont know whose idea it might have been to write something original for the educational market, but from whatever humble start it might have had, it grew and developed and, for a while, flourished until it was shoved out of the way by cheap knock-offs of Broadway shows. One has only to look at the debacle that was early 50s MERRY WIDOW by Charles George to see how far we plummeted in such a short period of time.

I started writing these firmly thinking that what we have here deserved to be lost, what with their quaint little plots and thin little music and cardboard little characters... and yes, many of them do deserve to be sent into the dustbin of history. But sixty or seventy of these later, I've developed a real affection for not only the works but the people who put them together. Sure, there're lotsa clunkers in the list, but at the same time there's some highly polished work that merits new attention, rather than being shoved into the back shelves of the musty wing of the library and the bargain basement section of eBay. It's sad, in its way, that no one seems to see fit to give these another try, but then I suppose there's a relatively easy answer to that.

I wrote earlier on that these shows came to you as pretty much just words on a page. There were few indications of how something was to be produced beyond the stage manager's guide — assuming the school thought it necessary to spend the extra cash on one in the first place. No cast albums. No YouTube videos. Just the words on the page, which meant you had to find your own way through the material. You had to find your own sound to the music, your own look to the scenery and costumes, your own rhythms to the choreography, and your own interpretations for the characters. And the result was something uniquely your own, not a bad photocopy of "how they did it in New York".

But you had to work to get it. I suppose it shouldnt be surprising that these little works had their glory days during the Depression, when the national attitude towards solving a problem was to just get in there and work it out for yourself, not look to someone else to solve it for you. These operettas and the accompanying books on how to produce them, as minor and dismissable as they may be now, pushed the students into finding things on their own and, along the way, learning to make the most out of what they had at hand. We would no doubt laugh now at the idea of making a costume from crepe paper, but I'd happily bet that in 1931 the little actress wearing it felt as wonderful as her latter-day equivalent does today in her professionally-sewn, expensive New York rental.

Perhaps it's just my own cynical point of view, but it just feels like we've lost something very precious and magical en route to the Junior version of ANNIE. I might even go far as to say we've lost what it simply means to be involved in theatre as an artform, period, but I suppose that might come across as taking on a bit too much. Nevertheless, like everything else these days, theatre — even school theatre — is now an industry, designed for producers and licensing companies to make a few more bucks off the backs of starry-eyed kids. I guess it's best to just accept it as such and move on.

THE STAGE AND THE SCHOOL

Another production handbook along the lines of those by Beach and Wilson, THE STAGE AND THE SCHOOL, by Katherine Anne Ommaney, gives a pretty decent overview to putting on a show.

Ommaney was an instructor at the North High School in Denver, Colorado, and her experience shows: this is a nearly exhaustive (and exhausting) book that covers the entire production process in enormous detail. Unlike Beach and Wilson's books, Ommaney doesnt limit herself to operetta but instead the entire gamut of the performing arts, from straight plays to musicales to pageants to even dramatic societies and how they should best be organized. Her focus is more on directing and acting -- with one chapter dedicated, in detail, to accents -- but she also inserts guidance on the art of the physical production and the craft of playwriting.

Each chapter provides exercises, some of which are... well, a little unusual (in the chapter on pantomime, she suggests going to the movies to watch George Arliss just for his hands). But her intent is obvious, to get her young actors and directors and playwrights and designers to think well beyond the traditional solution. For example, in the chapter on characterization, "laugh like a giggling schoolgirl in church; a fat man at a vaudeville show; a polite lady at a joke she has heard many times; a minister at a ladies' aid meeting." What's interesting (to me, anyway) about her choices is that they all require second level of thought -- not just a giggling schoolgirl, but one in church, which makes the exercise all the more intruiging.

Another, more complex exercise -- this one for playwrights -- starts with five clippings from the local paper. Each additional step in the exercise takes the nascent playwright deeper into the story-telling process: starting from the essential "what", s/he moves on to adding "who", "how", and "why" by working both in the micro ("write a detailed character sketch of the most interesting person you know") and the macro ("name five problems facing civilized people which you think must be solved by society"), then combining all of these various, seemingly unrelated facets into one working script.

Ommaney has a definite leaning towards the simple and direct yet comprehensive. "The average play written by high school students takes ten minutes to present, although there are sufficient possibilities in the plot for a half hour's action." She has little time for the irrelevant and trite: "the average conversation is too scattered, pointless, and dull to hold the attention of the audience" (David Mamet, take note!).

While not lavishly illustrated, THE STAGE AND THE SCHOOL has some wonderful black-and-white images of scenic design, created by Ben Kutcher. Kutcher came to the U.S. as a child and studied at the PAFA (1910-15) where he was awarded a traveling scholarship for one year of study in Europe. After serving in WWI, he worked in New York in advertising and theatrical work until 1927 and then moved to southern California. Known as an illustrator of children's books, he was a resident of Hollywood, CA until his death in 1967. His usual illustration style is heavily detailed, but in THE STAGE AND THE SCHOOL he abandons that for simpler images that reduce things to mass and shape. Nevertheless, there's a definite whimsey to his approach, even for what he considers "realistic" scenery. The endflaps, images of stylized character costumes, appear to be his work as well.

As with both the Beach and Wilson books, THE STAGE AND THE SCHOOL is an intruiging snapshot of stage production during the Depression. There's a great deal of emphasis on self-reliance and independence of thought, although Ommaney is careful to temper that with mentor-like guidance -- never pointedly pushing in one direction or another, but gently guiding around the traps and potholes.

There's also some fascinating theatre history that could put you on top of your game when it comes to trivia. For example, Ommaney goes into great detail about the Clavilux, devised by Thomas Wilfred as a means of shifting colours of light within the same instrument... a sort of early 30s version of a programmable LED or VariColor today.