O'Neill on the Musical Theater Stage
2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.37.2.168
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoFor some familiar—and two perhaps less familiar—indications of Eugene O'Neill's re-emergence into prominence in the middle of the twentieth century, I want to take you back to the 1950s. On November 27, 1953, O'Neill died in a Boston hotel, uttering his famous last words, “Born in a hotel room—and God damn it, died in a hotel room.” His work had not been seen in New York since 1946 when The Iceman Cometh played on Broadway. While it is probably an exaggeration to say he was forgotten, he certainly was not on the top of anyone's list of playwrights whose work might insure box office success. Then, in May 1956, Theodore Mann, Leigh Connell, and José Quintero produced their famously successful revival of Iceman at New York's Circle in the Square, directed by Quintero and starring Jason Robards as Hickey. It became an off-Broadway hit—it has been said to have started the off-Broadway movement—and brought O'Neill back before the theater public. That revival in turn was the major factor in convincing O'Neill's widow, Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, to give Mann and Quintero permission to present the American premiere of Long Day's Journey Into Night in November 1956, ten months after its world premiere at Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre. Long Day's Journey, of course, won O'Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize; he was now most certainly front and center in the American theater.The 1950s was also the heyday of the American musical. Two of the signature musicals of the decade, produced in successive years, were The Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955); both were the work of a young songwriting team, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, and were directed by the legendary George Abbott and coproduced by his young protégé Harold Prince. Damn Yankees also introduced a talented young choreographer, Bob Fosse, and a charismatic actress/singer/dancer, Gwen Verdon, playing Lola, the Devil's soft-hearted assistant. Both shows were hits, each running for over 1,000 performances; so Abbott, Prince, Fosse, and Verdon were eager to capitalize on their success by presenting another blockbuster.They made a choice that seemed unlikely but one which, given O'Neill's re-emergence in 1956, now seems not that startling: O'Neill's 1921 play, “Anna Christie.” It gave Verdon the opportunity to play another “fallen” woman with a soft side—a type she was to reprise successfully in the later musicals Sweet Charity (1966) and Chicago (1975). Because Jerry Ross had suddenly died soon after Damn Yankees opened, Abbott and Prince turned to one of the more successful pop songwriters of the period, though new to musical theater, Bob Merrill. New Girl in Town opened in May 1957; starring Verdon and veteran movie actress Thelma Ritter as Marthy, it ran for 431 performances (just about twice as long as “Anna Christie”). Verdon and Ritter tied for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, the first such deadlock in Tony history; the show was also nominated for Tonys in three other categories, including Best Musical, and Fosse for Choreography.As so often seems to be the case in the highly collaborative art of musical theater, one part of the creative team dominated the production of New Girl in Town. In this case, it was Fosse and Verdon, who determined the contours of the show—although Ritter, probably because of her status as a film star, ended up receiving a great deal more attention than her character had in O'Neill's original, where she disappears after the first act. While New Girl in Town retained O'Neill's basic triangle of Anna, Chris, and Mat, the three principals were upstaged by a series of energetic chorus numbers that enabled Fosse to display his choreographic talents. The most notorious of Fosse's dance interjections involved a solo for Verdon (whom he would marry in 1960) in a dream ballet (Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! [1943] and Carousel [1945] had established the precedent for such sequences), set in a bordello, in which Anna thinks back over her career as a prostitute. During the show's pre-Broadway tryout, the New Haven police labeled the dance indecent and ordered the theater padlocked unless it was deleted, but Fosse brought it back for the New York opening—a move that apparently caused a permanent rift between Fosse and Abbott.In terms of its plot, New Girl in Town not surprisingly deviated from O'Neill's original, most notably in its conclusion: after Anna and Mat seemingly part forever when she reveals her past, she moves to Staten Island to work on a farm. A year later, when Mat and Anna, with the latter fully “recuperated,” meet again, Chris tries to discourage Mat by telling him that Anna is married, but Anna, with the assistance of Marthy, convinces Mat that she is not and they are reunited.In 1959 David Merrick, at that point the most successful musical theater producer in New York, and who, as a young man, had been charmed by George M. Cohan in Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and was perhaps at least encouraged by the long run of a musical adaptation of an O'Neill play two years earlier, decided to adapt O'Neill's nostalgic comedy. He had difficulty finding the right composer; he originally commissioned John Latouche, who had achieved some success with The Golden Apple (an adaptation of The Odyssey) in 1954, but eventually decided that Bob Merrill, based on his work on New Girl in Town, was the right man for the assignment. Typical of Merrick, he assembled an all-star cast for Take Me Along, which opened in October and was also highly successful; it ran for 448 performances. He convinced Jackie Gleason, who was a major television star at the time, to play Uncle Sid. Walter Pidgeon, an established movie star who had never acted on Broadway, played Nat Miller. A young actor named Robert Morse, who had made a successful Broadway debut in Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker (1955), played Richard. Una Merkel, also a well-known film star, played Essie Miller, and a seasoned, talented musical theater actress, Eileen Herlie, played Lily.As with New Girl in Town, Take Me Along took a number of liberties with O'Neill's original play to satisfy the requirements of the musical theater of the 1950s. Almost obligatorily, in Take Me Along Lily and Sid get married after he promises to stop drinking if she will accept his proposal. Lily is a neighbor, rather than Essie's sister living with the Miller family; Richard goes off to college after finding out that Mildred's father forced her to break up with him (they do have their late-night reconciliation on the beach). As in New Girl in Town, there is a dream ballet; Richard, when he goes to a bar to meet a prostitute and get drunk, dreams of being pursued by Salomé and other characters from the risqué books he has been reading. Jackie Gleason won a Tony Award for his performance; Morse, Pidgeon, Herlie, director Peter Glenville, music director Lehman Engel, choreographer Oona White, costume designer Miles White, and stage technician Al Alloy were all nominated, as was the show itself as Best Musical.The fact that two long-running musicals based on O'Neill plays ran on Broadway in the last half of the 1950s testifies to the durability of the playwright's enhanced reputation. Because musicals, particularly those featuring “stars,” at that time as well as today, attract larger audiences and, in general, have greater success on Broadway, New Girl in Town and Take Me Along undoubtedly introduced many New Yorkers to O'Neill's work—albeit softened and sanitized—in more accessible packages than had the intellectually challenging productions of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. There are signs in his biography that O'Neill understood the pleasures of a good musical—he saw Sissle and Blake's Shuffle Along twice in 1921–1922 and Buddy DeSylva's Good News twice in 1927—so perhaps he would have appreciated the irony.
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