For all these positive developments, this era was far from perfect. Theater snobs like to imagine these decades (particularly the Fifties) as some kind of theoretically perfect alternative to the supposed tawdriness of modern Broadway, to the point where calling this era “The Golden Age of Broadway” has become common parlance even among people who aren’t theater snobs. It does look like more was being accomplished in terms of producing classic shows, but that’s mostly due to the tempo of production being much faster in those days…they were producing far more shows each season back then, so of course they had five or six major titles in a year as opposed to one or two. The difference was economic, not artistic…and what the theater snobs don’t want to remember is that the tempo for producing absolute garbage was just as quick in comparison to today.
Six shows in particular prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt, and are fun to bring up when you encounter a theater snob gushing about the Fifties “Golden Age”…Buttrio Square, Hit the Trail, Portofino, Happy Town, Ankles Aweigh, and Whoop-Up. The first four are known to today’s theatergoers only by reputation, but they are widely agreed by the experts in the subject to be the four worst musicals of all time…yes, worse than any of the modern disasters that theater snobs routinely point to as signs of Broadway’s artistic apocalypse. According to the unlucky few who saw them, the first two were perhaps the stodgiest, most blatantly inept Operettas of all time, while the latter two were basically just an insane string of random nonsense.
As for Ankles Aweigh and Whoop-Up, they actually lasted long enough for cast albums to be made, and between them they represent the Gold standard of hilariously awful Broadway fun-trash, sending generations of listeners into hysterics with their garishly horrible numbers. Ankles Aweigh, with a score by Sammy Fain (who had a fine career in Hollywood but never had much luck with stage musicals), features an indescribably cheesy opening, “Italy” (‘where the air is filled with pizza pie perfume’). This is followed by “Headin’ For the Bottom Blues” (which sounds for all the world like a drag-queen showcase), what may be the stupidest drinking song of all time, “Here’s to Dear Old Us”, and an Eleven-O’Clock song (literally called “An Eleven-O’Clock Song”) that cuts itself off before it climaxes. True, the tunes themselves are catchy, which helps explain the show’s value as an immortally terrible gem, but even the more tolerable items like the bouncy “Walk Like a Sailor” and the double-entendre comedy song “Nothing Can Replace a Man” can’t really be considered ‘good songs’ in the classic sense of the word.
Whoop-Up, based on the same novel as the equally terrible Elvis vehicle Stay Away Joe from the Sixties, had a somewhat classier team of songwriters. Composer Moose Charlap wrote several of the classic tunes in the Mary Martin Peter Pan musical, including “I Won’t Grow Up”, “I Gotta Crow”, and “I’m Flying”. His lyricist, Normal Gimbel, would go on to pen the lyrics to several enduring Pop standards, including “The Girl from Ipanema”, “Killing Me Softly with His Song”, and “I Will Wait for You”. And the score they contributed to Whoop-Up has its moments, with songs like “When the Tall Man Talks” and “Quarrel-Tet” actually being halfway decent. The show even produced a minor semi-standard with the overlapping charm duet “Flattery”. But there’s enough material in the score that makes you wonder what kind of drugs the writers were taking to doom the entire enterprise. “Nobody Throw Those Bull” and “Til the Big Fat Moon Falls Down” in particular defy description, and numbers like “Chief Rocky Boy” and “The Best of What This Country’s Got (was taken from the Indians)” are politically incorrect enough to shock even the most devoted historical relativist. One of the numbers, the crass redneck come-on “Love Eyes”, even seems to have pioneered the “Bro-Country” genre a good fifty years before it became the scourge of Country radio.
And lest you think all the terrible shows of this “Golden Age” were just bottom-dwelling flops written by nobodies and also-rans, there was plenty of embarrassing trash back then that involved major and even legendary names. Take, for example, the only Ethel Merman flop to actually come to Broadway with her in it, Happy Hunting (Merman normally had a near-infallible nose for sniffing out doomed shows and had quit more than one of them during rehearsals or tryouts, but her instincts seem to have failed her this time). The book, basically a happy-ending version of the plot of Stella Dallas set at a then-topical royal wedding, was one of the worst of the decade, and the score, by a pair of amateur songwriters who never did anything else of consequence, was so weak that even Merman couldn’t do much with it.
Merman got three good numbers…the opening showstopper “Gee, But It’s Good to be Here”, the clever “Mr. Livingstone (I Presume)”, and the minor Pop hit “Mutual Admiration Society”…and one passable number (the generic but inoffensive “This is What I Call Love”). But the rest of her numbers constitute the worst material of her career…the maudlin ballads “The Game of Love” and “I’m a Funny Dame”, the flat-out bizarre “A New-Fangled Tango”, and the corny title-song. The numbers for the other characters were even worse, such as “If’n”, which sounds like a filler song from a bad Elvis movie, or “Everyone Who’s Who’s Who”, which plays like an Abbott and Costello routine without the punchline. On top of that, Merman and her leading man, Fernando Lamas, hated each other so much that they proved utterly incapable of hiding it in their performances.
By the Beautiful Sea, a star vehicle for legendary comic actress Shirley Booth, wasn’t much better. In addition to its empty, unfunny and inconsistently-written book, it features a score even more barren than that of Happy Hunting. This is particularly disappointing given that, unlike that show, it was scored by a top-level composer and lyricist. Arthur Schwartz and Dorothy Fields were both seasoned and distinguished veterans of the Musical-Theater canon, and they had written a perfectly lovely score for an earlier Shirley Booth vehicle, the musical adaptation of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but their work here is vapid and inane.
The score featured four completely irrelevant production numbers, three of them utterly generic and the fourth (“Hooray for George the Third”) downright bizarre. It also included a groan-inducing comic set piece for Booth, “I’d Rather Wake Up by Myself”, two overripe romantic ballads for the leading man, and a pair of tacky novelty numbers for a Black housekeeper whose racial sensitivity could be questioned even by Fifties standards. The only decent song in the show was “Old Enough to Love”, and that’s only because its tune was taken from a cut song from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn called “Tuscaloosa”.
Oh, Captain also deserves a mention here, though in this case the show is more notorious for its backstage antics and what they inspired than anything about the actual show. The musical in itself is actually quite a bit more respectable than the others I’ve named so far. Yes, it was a silly, vulgar Musical sitcom that was a reductive adaptation of a much classier and more intelligent movie (The Captain’s Paradise), but the score was highly enjoyable, the cast was full of talent, and the show was surprisingly non-sexist by the standards of Fifties Musical sex comedies, even retaining a hint of the forward-looking gender politics of the original movie. What makes the show truly infamous is that it was the inspiration for the plot of Mel Brooks’ The Producers. Obviously the show was hardly a Springtime for Hitler-level comic disaster, but one of the show’s producers was caught selling phony shares of the show’s potential profits, and ultimately wound up in jail for it, something that has been tacitly acknowledged by Broadway insiders as a likely source of inspiration for Brooks’ film and subsequent musical.
Frankly, even some of the hits of this era weren’t significantly more substantial than those of the Twenties and Thirties. Take the Judy Holliday vehicle Bells Are Ringing: it had a luminous star performance and, like its predecessor in the Comden and Green canon, Wonderful Town, it featured some truly ingenious comedy numbers. However, the plot reached levels of absurdity that are almost impossible to take seriously today, and the songs were tailored less to an actual character and more to Holliday herself. As proof of this, note that Wonderful Town can be revived without Rosalind Russell (indeed, Donna Murphy in the 2003 revival arguably gave a better performance than Russell herself), but Bells Are Ringing has never been successfully revived because it just doesn’t work without Holliday. In spite of its iconic star and fine score, it’s essentially an empty star vehicle, a relic of the Twenties and Thirties that was out of place in the deeper and more rational Fifties.
Call Me Madam was even weaker, with a plot that, while topical at the time, was ultimately little more than an excuse for an Ethel Merman star turn, and a melodious but oddly generic score from Irving Berlin in his declining years (although it did produce three still-recognizable songs: “The Hostess With the Mostes’”, “You’re Just In Love”, and the campaign song for President Eisenhower, “They Like Ike”).
Slightly more respectable, but still an example of this phenomenon, is the second hit for the team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Damn Yankees. Both of Adler and Ross’ hits were masterminded by director George Abbott, who had been the dean of old-style Musical Comedy but was becoming increasingly irrelevant in this new era. Granted, as we’ve previously discussed, The Pajama Game managed to transcend its potboiler beginnings and emerge as a genuine classic.
Damn Yankees, however, did not achieve this feat…its score left behind a few still-recognizable semi-standards, but there’s a reason no-one really performs it anymore. On paper, it had a much more interesting story than The Pajama Game…a middle-aged man makes a deal with the Devil (here going by the name of Mr. Applegate) in order to enable his favorite baseball team to win the Pennant, and is transformed into a young, unstoppably gifted baseball player. Despite the aid of Lola, a Satanic temptress who is sent to seduce him but instead falls in love with him, he very nearly loses his soul, but is ultimately saved by his genuine love for the wife he left behind.
Unfortunately, this colorful story was told by way of a cluttered, sloppily-written book that made it seem far more conventional and mundane than it actually was. And the score was much more uneven than that of The Pajama Game. There were gems, to be sure…the irresistible cheer-up ditty “You’ve Gotta Have Heart” was a massive hit for a reason. And Lola’s signature numbers “A Little Brains, a Little Talent” and “Whatever Lola Wants” represent some of the best Musical Comedy writing of their time, as does Applegate’s deadpan villain song “Those Were the Good Old Days”.
But the ballads were on the dull side, with “A Man Doesn’t Know” in particular being stiffer and more stilted than any Operetta ballad. This impression was only enhanced by the casting of Stephen Douglas as Joe’s younger self…Douglas, a popular leading man of the era, had a fine voice but was so stodgy that he made Nelson Eddy look like Carol Channing. Even worse, Bob Fosse’s two big dance numbers, while splendid as choreography, were attached to some of the weakest songs he would ever be offered, with “Who’s Got the Pain?” in particular ranking as one of the worst songs to be found in any enduring hit musical. Damn Yankees serves as a good reminder that even many of the canonized classics of the so-called “Golden Age” are not really as perfect as some people like to remember.
Fosse was unquestionably a genius, but he spent most of the Fifties looking for material that was worthy of his talents, and he didn’t really find it until the Sixties. His follow-up to Damn Yankees, New Girl in Town, was an awkward attempt to turn a typically tragic Eugene O’Neill play into a George Abbott-style Musical Comedy, and was one of the first really clear signs that Abbott’s approach was no longer working in the new Musical-Theatre environment. The parts of Bob Merrill’s score (his first for Broadway) that actually had something to do with the story had their moments, particularly the lovely duet “Did You Close Your Eyes?” and the strikingly bitter “On the Farm”, but since half the score consists of empty, generic Musical-Comedy filler numbers designed to “lighten” the show, there was only so much Merrill could do. Fosse’s muse and future wife Gwen Verdon was marvelous in the lead, and Fosse did contribute an impressively racy and disturbing dream ballet (even if Abbott had done his damnedest to get the ballet cut from the show), but the whole thing was far less interesting than a musical based on an O’Neill drama should have been. Fosse followed that up with Redhead, his first outing as a director, which he and Verdon basically forced into a hit with superb staging and dancing even though its ridiculous book and mediocre score showed even less compositional merit than New Girl in Town.
There were also two more stereotypical Black-centric Musical Comedies in the Shuffle Along vein in the Fifties, albeit with significantly less interesting scores than Shuffle Along and its ilk. They were Mr. Wonderful and Jamaica, two flashy but insubstantial vehicles for Sammy Davis, Jr. and Lena Horne, respectively. Both were minor hits, but they were little more than star-spotting exercises. Meanwhile, the more ambitious and authentic Black shows did generally poorly, with even lovely pieces like Harold Arlen’s St. Louis Woman and House of Flowers and Langston Hughes’ Simply Heavenly amounting to little more than cult flops. Hell, St. Louis Woman produced two of the most inescapable standards in the Great American Songbook canon in “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “Anywhere I Hang My Hat Is Home”, and it still managed to bomb…but I digress.
To close out our look at the lesser lights of the Fifties, let’s talk about what might be the two most disappointing “hits” to come from one of the “classic” names…Cole Porter’s last two stage musicals, Can-Can and Silk Stockings. Porter’s previous two scores, for Kiss Me, Kate and Out of This World, may have shown an unusual level of consistency in quality, but here he went back to his old formulas from the Twenties and Thirties—implausible, borderline nonsensical plots musicalized with a handful of hit Pop tunes surrounded by a bunch of undistinguished filler.
The book of Can-Can started off as first-rate Abe Burrows, a very funny and nicely pointed satire of censorship. Unfortunately, by the second act, the plot had completely disintegrated into random insanity, so that no-one in the audience had the slightest idea what was going on. That technique can be harnessed for deliberate artistic purposes, as it was in Yip Harburg’s Flahooley!, but here it just seemed the result of sloppy craftsmanship.
The score also caught Porter at less than his best. There were about a half-dozen songs in the show that were hits to some degree, but only two of them (“I Love Paris” and “It’s All Right with Me”) really qualify as top-rank Porter classics, although the title-song, more obscure today, does feature some of his wittiest rhyming stunts. Still, the filler numbers were extremely weak even by Porter filler standards, particularly “Every Man is a Stupid Man” and “Never, Never Be an Artist”. Even a few of the hits seem slightly questionable, with the uninspired “Ce’st Magnifique” in particular not having aged well.
Silk Stockings, Porter’s last show for Broadway, was even weaker: it featured superficially topical subject matter, a good cast, a few fine ballads, and virtually nothing else. The attempts at satirical humor regarding Stalinist Russia were so inappropriately light-hearted as to be offensive to both then-contemporary and modern sensibilities, and the score was perhaps the most uneven of Porter’s entire career, with “Satin and Silk” and the tasteless “Siberia” being among the worst songs he ever wrote. Like all the shows in this section, it persists as an inescapable reminder that, if I may quote Billy Joel, “the good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems”.