This Day in Theater History (‘Finian’s Rainbow,’ Filled with Irish Blarney, Opens)

January 10, 1947--From Edward Harrigan and partner Tony Hart in the 19^th century to George M. Cohan in the first few decades of the 20^th century, Irish-Americans have made major contributions to advancing the American musical. But perhaps the one that has helped perpetuate their image of whimsy, Finian’s Rainbow, involved no Celtic songwriters at all. The creators, E.Y. “Yip” Harburg and Burton Lane, were products of the Tin Pan Alley tradition, dominated largely by descendants of immigrant Jews.

When the musical was turned into a film 20 years later, it featured three other exceptionally well-known individuals of Irish descent: Petula Clark (then at the height of her career),  director Francis Ford Coppola (then beginning his), and Frederick Austerlitz, a.k.a. Fred Astaire (near the end of his, in this last musical of his).

You'll have to pardon the heavy-handed irony in the last paragraph, but in a way, it mirrors the libretto of this show, which is actually a satire on racism in the American South. The setting is an American state called Missitucky, and the show's race-baiting Senator Billboard Rawkins would, in the 1940s, have been a recognizable lampoon of Senator Theodore Bilbo. For his sins, he is turned into a black man, where he comes to see the errors of his ways.

In contrast, the primary image of the Irish in this musical is similar to what historian Terry Golway, author of The Irish in America, a companion volume to the PBS documentary series The Long Voyage Home, called “Hollywood's idea of acceptably Irish movies": i.e., "affable blarney that spoke to sentiment, not reality.” Finian's Rainbow premiered at a point when Ireland, though untouched by WWII (in which it stayed neutral), was also an economic backwater of Europe--in fact, still a year away from, at last, formally declaring independence from Great Britain. The rather dour aspects of the time were chronicled memorably in Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Angela's Ashes.

Okay, so what if, as Wilfred Sheed wrote in his once-over-easy survey of the Great American Songbook, The House That George Built: "Although Harburg loved the idea of Ireland, his lyrics never really got out of the harbor [New York's, that is], or all that far from McSorley's Wonderful Saloon either."

Well, I suppose that the sly leprechuans and redheaded colleens of Finian's Rainbow are far better stereotypes than drunks, which  represents a far more pervasive--and enduring--image.

Moreover, I’m not sure that other non-Irish songwriters would have made a better job of this show. Harburg and Lane, at least, had an essentially sunny vision of life (“Look to the Rainbow”). In contrast, given the opportunity, Stephen Sondheim, I think, would have adapted Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, which would have made an appropriate Celtic bookend to his British-set musical bloodbath Sweeney Todd.

One trait that the public frequently associates with Irish-Americans is the gift of the gab. Ironically, Harburg and Lane did not possess this, at least with each other throughout much of the production of this show, which premiered on this date at the 46^th Street Theatre. A silly wisecrack made to cast members by lyricist and co-librettist Harburg about his partner ("Don't listen to him; he's only the piano player") on the first day of rehearsals led Lane to stop speaking to his friend throughout much of the musical’s 725-performance run. It's probably just as well, then, that none of the three Tony Awards the show earned in that initial run--for orchestra conductor, featured actor and choreography--involved the songwriting team, as it would have made for some awkward moments onstage.

Well, it didn't matter, I guess. The two collaborators, both Hollywood pros (Harburg wrote the dazzlingly witty lyrics to The Wizard of Oz), were thoroughgoing professionals who created a whole raft of songs so imperishable that they've even survived the libretto, now commonly regarded as blunt and anachronistic. Many of the 11 songs became standards, including "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?", "Old Devil Moon," "Necessity," "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich,"
"Look to the Rainbow," "If This Isn't Love," and "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love."

The current Broadway season, as outlined in a New York Times article from the other day about composer estates authorizing revised librettos, proves that faulty "books" such as this one are no obstacle to re-mounting shows with such glorious tunes. Even New York's fine Irish Repertory Theater, despite the musical's Celtic stereotypes, staged a revival not that long ago with Melissa Errico. Broadway witnessed a 2009 production with Cheyenne Jackson. I myself saw a very, very fine version performed in Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theater back in the fall of 2005.