Michael Kantor: So, tell us how, what’s central to the Broadway musical, and how does it reflect our culture in some way?
Philip Furia: The most central thing in the musical are the songs. That’s what lives. That’s would endures. Songs go on to become independently popular for people who never even saw the show. And I think that song of all art forms is the most beloved. I mean, people feel about a song a way they don’t feel about a novel, about a painting, about symphony. They take a song into their heart. It’s our song. That’s my song. There’s something about song that makes people identify with it. So if you look at the songs that came out of the Broadway musical, which for many years, for most of the 20th century, where the popular songs of the day… You can chart the nation’s emotional history through those songs. And I think that’s the great contribution that Broadway gave. It really was a barometer for America’s sensibility for much of the 20th century. At the center of the Broadway musical are the songs. I mean, the songs are beloved by people who may never even have seen the show. They became independently popular songs for much of the 20th century. And I think that song of all art forms is the most beloved. And people take a song into their hearts. They feel about song the way they don’t feel about a novel they like or a movie they like, or a painting. My song, it’s our song. People identify with a song in a way they don’t identify with any other art form. And for much of the 20th century, the popular songs of the day came out of the Broadway musical. And so the great contribution of the Broadway musical is that it’s a barometer through the songs of America’s emotional life. It’s how people felt for much in the century that is registered by. The Broadway song.
Michael Kantor: Now, Irving Berlin spans so many different musical styles and so on, it’s hard to contextualize it, but try and use Jerome Kern to do just that.
Philip Furia: As Jerome Kern said of Irving Berlin when he was asked…
Michael Kantor: That’s interesting.
Philip Furia: Oh, okay, Irving Berlin really has the greatest range of any songwriter. And another great songwriter, Jerome Kern, was once asked to place Irving Berlin in the history of American song. And Kern said, Irvin Berlin has no place in American music. Irving berlin is American music.”
Michael Kantor: When Berlin grew up on the Lower East Side of New York, there was sort of really no Broadway musical to speak of. There was the artsy imports, operetta, Gilbert and so on, and ethnic musical entertainments. Tell us how he grew up sort of automatically embracing the ethnic stuff.
Philip Furia: Well, Irving Berlin grew up at a time when the ethnic minorities in New York City were blending into a melting pot, and his audience was filled with Germans, Irish, Italians, blacks, Jews. And the songs and the comedy were appealing to those groups. Yeah, Broadway at the beginning of the 20th century is really… The field of European operetta, where you find popular song is not in the Broadway musical, but popular song is coming out of variety shows, it’s coming out of the minstrel tradition, it is coming out of vaudeville. And there, the audience are the ethnic minorities who have moved into New York City. And so one way to appeal to those minorities is to have comic sketches and songs. That caricature ethnic stereotypes. They would not be politically correct today. But at the time, the very people who are being caricatured are enjoying it. I mean, yes, they’re being made fun of. They’re Italian jokes, Irish jokes, Jewish jokes. But by being made of on stage, they are being included in America. And that’s the appeal behind so many of those That Irving Berlin wrote. He wrote songs about Italians, Dorando, who lost the Olympic marathon because he ate stew instead of spaghetti. He wrote song characterizing Jewish minorities. Again, they’re caricature songs, but the very fact that they’re being performed, that they are being noticed, is a way of being included into the American melting pot.
Michael Kantor: As the Broadway musicals emerging, as performers like Fanny Brice are coming along, who is Fanny Brice, and why did she go to Irving Berlin, and what does she get from it?
Philip Furia: Fanny Brice wanted an ethnic song. She wanted to do a Jewish song. She went to Irving Berlin and asked him for one, and he sat down and about half an hour wrote, Sadie Salome, Go Home. Now Berlin always had an ear for what was very current. And at the time, the opera, Salome was all the rage because the star did the great dance of the seven. A little bit of nudity, a little bit of cheesecake in opera. And so Berlin wrote a song about a little Jewish girl who does the same dance. But he always had this uncanny sense of the character from whom to present a song. And he chooses his character, Sadie’s boyfriend, Mo’s, who goes and sees his girlfriend Sadie doing a dance, stripping. And in the lyric… Mo says, Sadie, you better go home and get your dresses. Everybody’s got the opera glasses. They’re looking at you. And he says, oy, what a sad disgrace. Nobody’s looking at your face. They’re watching her strip. So Berlin gives this great song to Fanny Brice that just caricatures this poor boyfriend, Mo, looking at his girlfriend Sadie as she’s a stripper.
Michael Kantor: So Fanny Brice, what else is she known for? She sort of finds a kindred soul in Berlin, right?
Philip Furia: Yeah, Fanny Brice found a kindred soul in Irving Berlin, but she also adored working for Ziegfeld in Ziegfeld’s Follies. She was in Follys for many, many years, and she had an incredible range. She was, on the one hand, the funny Jewish ethnic comedian who would do Irving Berling songs like Yiddle on Your Fiddle, Play Me Some Ragtime about the Jewish. Fiddler at Jewish weddings. But she could also break your heart with singing monhom songs, my man songs, about the woman who loves her man no matter how badly she treats him. Although sometimes after she sang the song, she would say to the audience, I could never love such a guy like this myself that I sing about. But it makes for a good song.
Michael Kantor: Great. Let’s just grab that last part. If we do, we have great footage of her doing it. So just pick that up as a separate story. The great thing about Fannie Brice is even after she’d sing a song like this. Imagine, we’ve just heard…
Philip Furia: Oh, he treats her. I’m sorry. Okay.
Michael Kantor: Here we go. My man.
Philip Furia: Now the great thing about Fanny Brice is that on the one hand she would sing a song, like My Man, about how she loves this guy who treats her so badly. But then after she’d sing it, she’d say to the audience, you know, that’s in the song. Can you imagine? I would never take such treatment from a louse like that in real life.
Michael Kantor: Great. Tell me about Florence Ziegfeld, as I used to word an amalgamator, synthesizer. He takes all this different ethnic, Bert Williams, a black guy, Fanny Bryce, Cantor, music from Kern, Berlin, Herbert, and he sort of weaves it all together.
Philip Furia: Yeah, Flo Ziegfeld was like, I guess, the Broadway equivalent of the melting pot itself. That is, he recognized that this was an age where all these different ethnic communities were coming together, different kinds of music, and he would wed it together. He would include operetta music by Victor Herbert. He would include Jewish comedians like Eddie Cantor. And Fanny Brice, he would bring together black stars, like Burt Williams. He would mix ragtime music in. And the Ziegfeld Follies really were an amalgamation of everything that was happening in America, in New York at that time. And it was a container in one evening where you could sit down and feel all those different ethnic impulses. Alexander’s Ragtime Band is a landmark song, because it’s hard for us to imagine now. But Ragtime, in 1910, was scandalous. It was like rap music. It spelled the end of civilization as we knew it. I mean, people denounced it from pulpits. There were newspaper editorials against Ragtime. It was the mixing of classes. It was immigrants. It was Jews. It was blacks coming into American WASP. Ragtime songs were thought to be scandalous, but in 1911, Irving Berlin writes a ragtime song, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, that suddenly makes ragtime safe for America. It’s not threatening. It’s come on along. Come on along, let me take you to the man. Ragtime is now welcoming, and even relates it to older American culture. If you want to hear that swanee river, it goes back to Stephen Foster. He makes it an American middle-class pastime. And once he has this enormous hit, Alexander’s Ragtime Band in 1911, Broadway opens its doors to Irving Berlin and to Ragtime. In a couple of years, he’s invited to write a Ragtime score, his first score for Broadway musical, called Watch Your Step, which stars Vernon and Irene Castle, who have been doing the same thing with the barbaric dances that, along with Ragtime, have again threatened middle-class American culture. They’ve tamed them down. There were originally black dances from the Barbary coast in San Francisco. The castles make those dances polite, make them safe for American middle-class consumption. So ragtime and those dances become mainstream by the time of Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Who is George M. Cohan? George M Cohan comes out of Vaudeville, but what he wants is to do Broadway musicals. And in 1904, 1905, he is the only pure American voice in the Broadway musical. And we’ve got to remember, this time, the Broadway musical is very much oriented to operetta, European operetta. Viennese schmaltz, often Rurotania with princes and princesses. Cohen is the lone American voice. And musically, his sources are ragtime, which was scandalous music at the time, but Cohen is writing Broadway scores with ragtime songs in it, and they have syncopation. They come off the beat. It’s not, you’re a grand old flag, it’s, you are a grand old flag. You’re a high flying flag. He is putting that ragtime syncopations into songs. And using the music and the irregular beats of ragtime to distort. The lyrics, he takes a very insignificant word like of, O-F, which in the English language happens to be one of only five rhymes for love, dove, shove, glove, above, of. It’s very hard to write a love song in English because you’ve only got those five rhymes. And he takes the word of and does, you’re the emblem of the land I love, the home of, the free and the brave. And this is wonderfully refreshing. Compared to A Sweet Mystery of Life, which is what you’re hearing in Broadway, Cone is picking up the American language, the tiniest words in the language, and using the beat of ragtime, syncopated music, in order to create a really wonderfully vernacular American song on Broadway. And he’s the only one who’s doing it.
Michael Kantor: So, tell me about Kohan and how, you know, we all think of this song, You’re a Grand Old Flag on Fourth of July. Back then.
Philip Furia: Yeah, right now, we look back on a song like, You’re a Grand Old Flag, as being very sweetly patriotic. But you have to remember, when it was written, Cohen was drawing on the idiom of ragtime, which is scandalous music. And initially, the song was called, You’re A Grand Old Rag, and people protested. And this is what ragtime was doing. It was tearing apart American culture. He was calling the flag a rag. Cohen, by imbibing ragtime, really created a whole character, a persona for himself that was very modern, very American, very New York. It was brash. It was pushy. It was aggressive. It was flip. It was cynical. It was funny. And he created this character as his own persona on stage, but it really became kind of the emblem of Broadway itself.
Michael Kantor: Coen coming as he did sort of before talkies were around, there’s really no great record of him.
Philip Furia: There’s no great record of Cohen in performance, but he created a character, this wonderfully American, New York, energetic character that was in turn copied by James Cagney, who for all of his gangster films had started out as a dancer, and he was a performer, a vaudevillian like Cohen. And in the great movie, the only really good movie about a songwriter. Is Yankee Doodle Dandy, Irving Berlin said that. That’s one great movie about a songwriter was the one about George M. Cohen. And Cagney managed to capture this stage persona that Cohen created, the aggressive, the energetic, the flippant, the sarcastic New Yorker, George M Cohen.
Michael Kantor: That’s fine.
Philip Furia: Can you work? You want me to do that again?
Michael Kantor: Yeah, just the last part.
Philip Furia: Cagney managed to capture this American character, this New Yorker, this flippant, energetic, sarcastic, cynical George M. Cohen. Al Jolson embodied Broadway in the early 20th century. He took his energy from ragtime. Again, this scandalous music. The first song he sang on Broadway was a song called Paris is a paradise for coons, which was. A racial term for blacks, and the song was written by none other than Jerome Kern. You don’t think of Jerome Kern as this elegant Broadway composer. The first song he did for Jolson was Paris is a Paradise for Coons. Jolton exuded this kind of energy that made him relate to the audience. In fact, he was the first performer who had a runway built. Out in the audience, like a thrust stage, so he could get out there and really be in contact with the audience. And he would do things like, when he sang a great song from 1913, you made me love you. He would really get into the American vernacular, he’d drop on his knees and say, give me, give me what I cry for, you know you got the kind of kisses that I’d die for. This is this exuberant performer whose heart would go out to the audience. So that more than any other performer from that time, I think he was absolutely beloved by people.
Michael Kantor: So when we think of Shobo, we think of this sprawling epic tale from the novel that Oscar Hammerstein got pulled in. But we don’t think about it.
Philip Furia: When you think about Showboat, you think of this wonderful epic musical, the first really musical drama that came out of Broadway. It’s not a comedy. It’s a very serious story, even tragic story. We think of the great music, but we don’t remember what a great book it was that was written by Oscar Hammerstein, who adapted Edna Ferber’s novel, and the great lyrics, which is always what is forgotten, I think, about Broadway musicals. In fact, there’s this wonderful story that Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein was at a party. And there was a piano player. And the piano player played Old Man River. And she heard somebody say, oh, Old Man River, what a great Kern song. And she’d had enough. She went over to the guy and said, excuse me, but Jerome Kern did not write Old Man river. The guy said, well, of course he did. It’s from Showboat. She said, no. What Mr. Kern wrote was, dumb, dumb. My husband wrote, oh, man. In the 1920s, a new generation comes into the Broadway musical. These are not immigrants. These are the children of immigrants, young kids like Ira Gershwin and Larry Hart, who have grown up with the English language, a language that their parents couldn’t speak very well. And they really had an appreciation for it. And they’ve grown up in New York and have gotten a sense of a vernacular, colloquial idiom. But they’ve also gone to school. They’ve gone to Columbia. They’ve read poetry. They’ve red light verse by people like Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley in the New Yorker so they have a sophistication to them and urbanity a real citified sense of wit and Slang and they begin writing songs like Manhattan We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten, Island 2, very clever rhymes, or very slangy lyrics like, fascinating rhythm, you got me all aglow, fascinating rhythm I’m all a quiver. You got me shaking like a fliver. There was an old rattling car in the 1920s. So they inject this kind of sophisticated vernacular wit into the music because it’s the second generation of the immigrants in New York.
Michael Kantor: Great. Speak to sort of revolution, how the Gershwins, when they team up, George is revolutionizing music, taking sort of jazz, putting it in a show in a different way than, say, Berlin had done. And Ira’s doing the exact same thing in the lyrics.
Philip Furia: Yes. George Gershwin is writing a very different kind of music from, say, Jerome Kern. He says his music has a stenciled style to it. It’s very staccato, very abrupt, very indebted to ragtime and syncopation. Ira Gershun used to say, it’s so hard to write a lyric to George’s music, because the music always came first. He says, his phrases are so short, they give you little room to turn around. As a lyricist, George gives him a phrase, da-da-dum, da-dada-dumm. So Ira Gershwin with his sense of the American vernacular collapses that into a very slangy expression. It’s wonderful, it’s marvelous. So the brother, one brother’s music is very truncated and the other brother comes in with a lyrical line that drawing on the American Vernacular is as abrupt. As that staccato style of George’s. A lot of what you saw on Broadway were not musicals, the way we think of them today, as book shows with a story and a plot. They were very loosely structured reviews. They could be Ziegfeld follies. They could George White scandals. They could an all-black review, the Blackbirds. And what these reviews did was they didn’t have a story. They had a lot of sketches, a lot skits, but then a lot of individual songs. And so it made the song all that more important, because it was standing there alone. And a song like Swanee, George Gershwin’s first big hit, had no relation to any characters or to any story. But it was just there, isolated for Al Jolson to sing as an independent number.
Michael Kantor: What about Berlin Music Box?
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin.
Michael Kantor: Isn’t it? It’s sort of like there’s a new generation, but he doesn’t want to he’s not gonna give up the ghost
Philip Furia: No, Irving Berlin, who wrote a lot of songs for Ziegfeld’s Follies, built his own theater, the Music Box Theater, which is still standing in New York. And he put on his own reviews where he would write the songs and sometimes the sketches. And a lot his great songs from the 1920s, like Always and Remember and What’ll I Do, were songs that he wrote but not for book musicals, but for these freestanding reviews. So again, it’s a case of where the reviews really showcased a song in a way that the later musicals the book musical didn’t.
Michael Kantor: Great. And just hit me with the showcase of the song and the performer, as I quote, you know. So at the age of not just, it’s an age of both songwriters and their star performers, the Cantor, the Jolson, the Stair, the whomever.
Philip Furia: Right. In the reviews of the 1920s, performers, like songs, were foremost. They weren’t playing characters in a book musical, where they had to really put aside their star identity. They were the star. Yeah. In 1920s what you often saw on Broadway were not musicals the way we think of them today, where there’s a story and actors playing characters. They were loosely structured reviews. That featured songs and also the stars. And the stars played themselves. And songs were written to them. Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, they spoke directly to the audience from who they were. They were not playing characters. They were being themselves. And they had an enormous rapport with audiences. And that rapport fed into, in 1927, the advent of the Rockies. We look back at the first musical, the first film, actually, that had sound in it, which was The Jazz Singer, which featured Al Jolson. And it’s not a talkie. It was a silent movie. Hollywood producers were not then and are not now visionaries. Movies were silent movies. When the Warner Brothers got the technology of sound, they didn’t think about inventing talkies. In fact, Jack Warner supposedly said… No one wants to hear actors talk. They were making a silent movie. But what they thought was, with the sound technology, if they could attach a soundtrack to the silent film, theater owners would pay more because that meant they did not have to hire a piano player to accompany a silent movie. It was that narrow-minded. As I say, not visionary at all. Just a way to make more money. But they got a performer, Al Jolson, in there. Who was singing a surefire hit by Irving Berlin, Blue Skies. And with his rapport with the audience, with Jolson’s reaching out to the audience. When he sang Blue Skyes on film in The Jazz Singer, he started talking. And nobody was ready for it, certainly not the woman who was playing opposite him, Eugenie Besser. And she’s a great actress, but she doesn’t know what to do. Jolton sang, but after he sang, he started talking, and when people walked out of that movie, The Jazz may have been a silent movie. But that’s when the talkies were born. Out of that star vehicle, that review performer, reaching out to the audience, even from a film. When sound came into movies, it completely changed the character of film. Silent films take you to another world. They’re very, very fantasy-filled. When sound come in, movies became very realistic. And movie producers thought, if somebody sings a song in a realistic movie, there’s got to be an excuse for them singing. They can’t just burst into song. And then go back to dialog without even the cushion of applause that eases that transition on stage. So they said, we’re going to have to make movies about people putting on Broadway shows. They were called backstage movies, 42nd Street Broadway Melody. Hollywood is making movies about people putting on Broadway show, because that’s the way actors have an excuse to sing, because they’re putting on a Broadway show. They’re rehearsing. Or they’re performing, and they had on-screen audiences, so that the first years of the Hollywood musical are basically about Broadway.
Michael Kantor: So Jack Warner, no.
Philip Furia: Jack Warner was no visionary. He supposedly said when they told him about the advent of sound technology, well, nobody’s going to want to pay to hear actors talk. He was making a silent movie. But he knew that he had Broadway’s biggest performer in Al Jolson. And he had a surefire hit from the year before in Blue Skies by Broadway’s big songwriter Irving Berlin. So he put the two together, but he did not know that Olsen. With his tradition of reaching out to Broadway audiences, would do the same when you put him on film. Jolson sang Blue Skies, and the rest of The Jazz Singer was a silent movie. But then Jolton did something nobody had ever done before in film. He started talking, exactly the way he talked to Broadway audience when he performed in reviews. And although the movie reverted back to silent movie, once Jolston had talked, it forever changed the history. Of the Hollywood film. That Broadway injection of singing and talking to the audience really gave birth to the talkies.
Michael Kantor: 20S is a time of new music and new lyrics, language, but it’s also a time with sort of new openness, isn’t it?
Philip Furia: Yeah, it’s really in the 1920s that America throws off Victorian values, Victorian morality. We’ve been through World War I, and now there’s a time of liberation. Women start dressing differently. People begin, and women start doing things like smoking in public. They can go into bars. It’s a a time liberated sensibilities and A feeling that life is full of youth and vigor and the music of the 1920s, jazz, really calls the beat of a new age. And the songs that are coming out of Broadway really are registering this kind of shift in the American sensibility, this injection of modernism, of urbanity, of sophistication. Or at least people trying to sound sophisticated. And you begin getting something you’ve never had in music before, in popular song before. And that is little innuendos of sexual freedom. And there are little code words that become associated with sexuality in songs. One of them is do. George and I were Gershwin wrote a song, do, do do, what you done, done, before. Or Buddy De Silva writes a song with Gershwin. Oh, please, do it again. And then Cole Porter, who’s the naughtiest of all the songwriters, breaks into Broadway with a song, Let’s Do It. Birds do it, bees do it. Chimpanzees do it! Let’s do it but then he cleans it up. Let’s fall in love.
Michael Kantor: Great, one more, and maybe the biggest is you have new language, both radio and the press is embracing the new language and Walter Winchell’s, and so there’s a cross-fertilization between Winchel and the Broadway musical.
Philip Furia: The 20s are also a great age of language. H.L. Mencken says, who does a book called The American Language in 1919, this is an era when Americans really become conscious of how wonderfully vibrant their language is. And the language is being registered by songwriters, but also by journalists, and writers like Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell. And you begin getting, particularly around a new argot that is coming out, you’re getting words like turkey. Fan these wonderful words that are coming out of Broadway and then disseminated by radio and syndicated newspapers around the country. So that Walter Winchell can take a term like whoopee, which is a code word for sex. And then a Broadway songwriter, Gus Kahn, can write a song for Eddie Cantor called Makin’ Whoopee. And it just is a wonderful time in which The language that is coming out of Broadway is getting registered in journalism, is being heard on the radio, and is coming into the songs that are becoming the popular songs of America.
Michael Kantor: Tell me about Oscar Hammerstein as the right person to help the form of the Broadway musical move along each other.
Philip Furia: Oscar Hammerstein was in many ways out of step in the 1920s. I mean, we don’t think of him as part of the jazz age. We associate that with the Gershwins or Rodgers and Hart. Hammerstein continuing the old operetta tradition, writing songs like Indian Love Call. He was thinking in terms of not the song, but the show, the book. He was one of the few lyricists. Who also wrote the book for his musicals, something Ira Gershwin didn’t do, Larry Hart didn’t that, Cole Porter certainly didn’t did that. Hammerstein was maintaining that old European operetta tradition where a song grew out of a character and what a character was feeling at a particular dramatic moment in the story. He had a wonderful flowering of that sensibility in Showboat in 1927, where songs like Old Man River were not pop songs because they’re associated with a particular character at a particular dramatic moment. And that was his great show of the 1920s. He wanted to do more shows like that, really musical drama, not frothy comedy. But the Depression came on, everybody moved out to Hollywood, and Hammerstein really languished through the 1930s. He had very few hit shows, very few hits songs. And did not work well in Hollywood, where all they wanted were independent pop songs. They didn’t want anything that was integral to character and story. And then he had this wonderful re-flowering in 1943 when Richard Rogers came to him and asked him to work with Rogers on Oklahoma. And really in 1943, Oscar Hammerstein, after more than 12, 15 years of having nothing successful on Broadway.
Michael Kantor: Oklahoma’s important in terms of introducing a new book musical, but tied with that, what other wave happened?
Philip Furia: Well, Oklahoma establishes the principle that a Broadway musical has to have songs that are integrated into story and character. Now, it goes back to Showboat in 1927. But when Oklahoma comes in in 1943, integration of song and story becomes the watchword on Broadway ever since. The great thing that happens, though, is even though these songs are so clearly tied to character and dramatic situation. You get another development, and that is recordings are made of an entire score of a Broadway musical. Now that’s happened occasionally before. I think the first one was Mark Blitstein’s The Cradle Will Rock. But when they get the cast in the recording studio who does all the songs for Oklahoma, and they put it out in a boxed set of 78 RPM records, suddenly everybody over the country has the score for Oklahoma. And songs that are completely tied to the story, like Oklahoma, or Kansas City, or I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No, these become popular. So the cast recording makes the Broadway score available to Americans who may not have seen Oklahoma, may not even have heard of the show, but they know the songs. And I can remember as a kid, growing up in the 1950s, you would hear songs on the that were so integral to a Broadway show. It was amazing that they could become independently popular, like Trouble. You got Trouble right here in River City, and it’s so tired of the music man. Or The Rain in Spain stays mainly on the plane. What could be more tied to My Fair Lady? And that became a number one song because of the cast recording.
Michael Kantor: Great. What happened when Rogers and Hart went out to Hollywood?
Philip Furia: When songwriters like Rodgers and Hart went to Hollywood, they got a tremendous shock. Because on Broadway, the songwriters were the key to the show. It was Rodgers& Hart’s Kinetic Yankee. When they got it to Hollywood they found that as Harry Warren, a Hollywood songwriter put it, songw writers were the lowest form of animal life. They had nothing to do with the production. They were given a script, sometimes not even given a script, just told to write a song about falling in love. They had no control over the production. All they did was produce songs. And they had no say in how the songs were used. So it was a terrible shock. And some songwriters, like Oscar Hammerstein, never adjusted to Hollywood. George Gershwin hated it that he was just put off in a room. And said, go write your songs and give them to us when they’re finished. So it was just the complete opposite of Broadway.
Michael Kantor: Tell me about the very last day that Richard Rogers spent before coming back to.
Philip Furia: Another songwriter who did not do well in Hollywood was Richard Rodgers. And one of the stories that encapsulates his dissatisfaction with the studio and the anonymity of songwriters is when he was going back to New York, he thought he’d stop by and say goodbye to the great producer Irving Thalberg. He walked into Thalburg’s office and said, I’m going back to new York. Talked to him for a minute, and then he realized Thalberg didn’t know who he was. Richard Rogers, Thalberg didn’t know him. The Integrated Musical, where songs are fitted into character and situation, was so established after Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma in 1943 that every Broadway show had to have this principle of integration. And Rogers and Hammerstein decided they could also produce a show that they weren’t even going to write. And they wanted to do a show about Annie Oakley. So they called on Jerome Kern, who was going to songs with the lyricist. Dorothy Fields about Annie Oakley. And Kern died suddenly, just as the show was beginning to go into production. So Rodgers and Hammerstein thought, who could we get to replace Kern? And Rodgers suggested Irving Berlin. Irving Berlin was very skeptical of these new kinds of musicals, which he called situation shows. He was a songwriter. He didn’t write the book for a musical. He just wrote the songs. And suddenly he was being asked, this old war horse, Irving Berlin, who’s pushing 60 years old, he was being asked to write songs that fit character and dramatic moment. He took the book, went home one weekend, and by the time he’d finished, he took the books home and in one weekend wrote, you can’t get a man with a gun. He wrote… Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better, songs that were perfectly suited to the character and stories of Annie Get Your Gun. It’s really miraculous. He’d never done anything like that before. And he was able in Annie Get You Gun to create a book show that rivals anything Rogers and Hammerstein could do.
Michael Kantor: So how about Oscar Hammer says, oh, just drop the G’s, just, you know.
Philip Furia: Oh, yeah
Michael Kantor: Let’s start there.
Philip Furia: Yeah, Irving Berlin was very skeptical about doing a new book show, and Oscar Hammerstein said, well, you know, we’re writing about hillbillies, Annie Get Your Gun, Annie Oakley. Just drop the G off of words. Write getting instead of getting. And so Berlin takes the script. Remember, he’s been a songwriter who’s not worked from a script before. It takes a script home one weekend. And begins to think about the characters. And it occurs to him, it’s not really about Hillbillies. This is a show about show business. This is about performers, like Annie Oakley, who was a Buffalo Bills circus. And in that one weekend, he writes, you can’t get a man with a gun. He writes, they say it’s wonderful, which is perfect for Annie, because she’s never been in love. So it’s they say, it is wonderful. And doing what comes naturally, not doing, but taking Hammerstein’s advice, doing what comes naturally. And he produces these songs that fit perfectly into the character of Annie, the show business character of Annie, and the story of Annie Get Your Gun. And at one point, they’re working on the second act, which is always the problem in the show. What are you going to do in a Broadway musical? You have a hole in the second. And there’s a script conference, and Oscar Hammerstein and the director, Josh Logan. Say, we need a song in Act Two. And just before the marksmanship contest between Annie and Frank Butler, and Berlin says, ah, you need a challenge song, a challenge song. Walks out of the conference, Josh Logan goes back to his hotel room in New York. When he walks through the door, the phone is ringing. This is like 15 minutes later. It’s Irving Berlin. Logan picks up the phone. Irving says, how about this? Anything you can do, I can do better, and sings the entire lyric to him. 15 minutes.
Michael Kantor: Right, and one last, I don’t want to forget that this is an out of man to get your gun comes the anthem of Broadway.
Philip Furia: Irving Berlin is writing these wonderful songs that fit into Annie Get Your Gun, which for him is a show about show business. And so he writes a show business song. Irving Berlin, as great as he was, was always terribly insecure. When he wrote a new song, he would go up to anybody, a stagehand, a maid in a hotel room, and sing the song right in their face and watch their eyes. And he would know from their reaction whether the song was good or not. So he pitches his show business song to Rogers and Hammerstein. There’s no business like show business like no business I know. They are so stunned that they don’t react. And Berlin walks away and thinks they didn’t like it. Puts the song somewhere in his office. A few days later, they’re going over at the production and they say, wait a minute, where’s the show business song? Berlin says, no, I could tell you guys didn’t like that. And they said, we love that song. So Berlin goes back to his office and they can’t find They can’t find the lyric to there’s no business like show business. Finally, the secretary finds it under a phone book. Berlin, so insecure, shelved it away. The song that more than any other song typifies the world of Broadway. There’s no Business like show business. Berlin was afraid that Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Michael Kantor: That was Hart’s contribution.
Philip Furia: Larry Hart was a lyricist who could take the American vernacular, ordinary, everyday speech, and by wetting it to Richard Rogers’ music, created these wonderfully vernacular songs. He could take a phrase that supposedly somebody said when he almost was in a traffic accident in a taxi cab in Paris, my heart stood still. Perfectly ordinary American expression. Larry Hart could take and wed that to music. I took one look at you. That’s all I meant to do. And then my heart stood still. Everyday American language, like you’d read in Walter Winchell or Damon Runyon, or you’d hear over the radio. It’s something out of the newspaper. American vernacular speech, America’s fascination with its own language in the 1920s, Larry Hart is the lyricist who really captured that. And Oscar Hammerstein said he took the way people talk and made it into song.
