Song Lyric of the Day (Ira Gershwin, Showing How to Recall Russian Composers)

“There's Malichevsky, Rubinstein, Arensky and Tchaikovsky,

Sapelnikoff, Dimitrieff, Tscherepnin, Kryjanowsky…”—“Tchaikovsky (and Other Russians),” from the musical Lady in the Dark, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music by Kurt Weill, book and direction by Moss Hart (1941)

I could go on and on like this. But aside from copyright restrictions, a little bit of this goes a long way—or, as the intro to the song goes, it’s enough to “give me brain concussion.”

Now imagine this, but instead of just eight tongue-twisting Russian names, you have more than 50—and sung in less than 40 seconds!

That was the frightening technical challenge facing Danny Kaye (pictured) in Lady in the Dark, which premiered at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre 75 years ago today. The star of the show, Gertrude Lawrence, had her own second-act showstopper in “The Saga of Jenny,” but Kaye, a supporting player, came close to upstaging her with this number.

I had always thought that “Getting Married Today,” the Stephen Sondheim number from Company, sung by a bride-to-be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, was the most astonishingly fast song I had ever heard until I got a load of this. The task facing Kaye may have been greater because those words had at least three, often four, syllables, often with an "s." Now, multiple that in a compressed time frame when you barely have time to catch your breath, and you’ll have an idea of what was involved.

(If you still can’t imagine this, then listen to this YouTube clip of Kaye reenacting the number for radio some years later.)

Lady in the Dark would have been an event to remember in any case. It marked Ira Gershwin’s return to Broadway for the first time since his brother George had passed away tragically from a brain tumor four years before. It starred Lawrence, a transatlantic star of the stage. And, in depicting a magazine editor’s monologues to her psychotherapist as songs, playwright-director Moss Hart helped musical theater take further advances along the road paved by Show Boat and Pal Joey.

But the presence of Kaye was something else entirely. His performance helped get him discovered by the wife of producer Samuel Goldwyn, who soon brought him out to Hollywood and got him under contract. Though he appeared on TV in later years, and even returned to Broadway in the 1970 Richard Rodgers musical Two by Two, it is through the cinema, in the likes of White Christmas, The Court Jester, and Hans Christian Andersen (scripted by Hart), for which he is best known today.

I may well have come across the star in a rather unusual setting. In the mid-1970s, I was with my brother and a friend on a road trip to New England when our car pulled right behind a limo slowing down at a Connecticut toll plaza. “Look!” my friend said, pointing to the vanity license plate of the limo. It read DANNY K.

This Day in Theater History (Weill’s Musical/Opera ‘Street Scene’ Closes)

May 17, 1947—After 148 performances, Kurt Weill’s Street Scene closed at New York’s Adelphi Theatre, but what remained open was the question of whether the composer of The Threepenny Opera had created a musical, an opera, or some hybrid of the two.

Up to that time, the closest analogue to Weill’s work was the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, and though it exceeded the number of performances for that earlier controversial work, Street Scene still was judged a commercial, though not artistic, failure. 

The producers of Weill’s later collaboration with Maxwell Anderson, Lost in the Stars, would term that work “A Musical Tragedy,” but it could have applied with equal, perhaps even greater justice, to the adaptation of Elmer Rice’s searing 1929 drama.

For all the great talents involved (Rice wrote the book; poet Langston Hughes, the lyrics), this piece of musical theater, about the grinding poverty and despair that fuel a love triangle on New York's Lower East Side, offered little comfort to audiences craving good cheer after defeating Fascism and facing a prolonged, uncertain struggle against a recent ally.

I saw this work not on Broadway, but in what was probably a more congenial setting: the opera stage—specifically, New York City Opera, in 1979, when my college music humanities class made a field trip to that Lincoln Center institution.

Like many in my class, I had not only never heard of a Weill song aside from cover versions of “Mack the Knife” and “The Alabama Song” by, respectively, Bobby Darin and The Doors, but had never even seen an opera to that point. 

In many ways, this particular one—including an English-language text and lyrics that could be understood with little, if any difficulty, not to mention at least a few hummable, even toe-tapping tunes that could have come right out of Tin Pan Alley—was atypical of such fare. But it did broaden our understanding of what the genre could be.

That question has come to the fore repeatedly over the years. Not only have recordings of landmark musicals sometimes featured opera stars (West Side Story, My Fair Lady), but several musicals have found their way into opera repertory companies, including Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella and Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. 

The battle over this was joined even more forcefully this year, as the estate of George and Ira Gershwin authorized cuts and other alterations to Porgy and Bess destined to make it more compatible with the musical genre than opera.

For Street Scene, Weill—who had fled Nazi Germany with wife Lotte Lenya in 1933—brought to bear elements of what he termed “Broadway opera.” Appropriately enough for a stage property set in a polyglot culture, Street Scene includes elements of Broadway, jazz, blues, and Puccini-esque idioms.   

When Weill died three years later, fellow composer Virgil Thomson hailed him, in one of his music columns, as "the most original single workman in the whole musical theater, internationally considered, during the last quarter century... Every work was a new model, a new shape, a new solution to dramatic problems." 

It’s a shame Weill did not live long enough to complete the project on which he was concentrating at the time of his death: an adaptation of another property about class and racial-ethnic conflict in America: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Since his death, Street Scene has been mounted more often as an opera instead of a musical. (See, for instance, this YouTube clip of a 1989 performance of its showstopper tune, "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed," from the English National Opera.)

This Day in Literary History (John Gay)

March 18, 1729—Writing to friend and fellow satirist Jonathan Swift, playwright John Gay recounted a veritable physical plague of locusts that had afflicted him—“fever, asthma, and pleurisy”—as well as the reaction to his latest cause celebre: "For writing in the cause of virtue, and against the fashionable vices, I am looked upon at present as the most obnoxious person, almost, in England.”

The cause of all this commotion was The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a musical entertainment ostensibly featuring pickpockets, shoplifters and thieves which actually functioned as a none-too-disguised satire on the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, the first British Prime Minister—and, with 20 years in office, probably still the master at using bribery to stay in power.

As Gay was writing to Swift, the sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, Polly, may have attracted the wrathful eye of Walpole, because the Lord Chamberlain flexed his muscle in banning it. As with other attempts at censorship over the years, all this action did was fan interest in the product. "You see my fortune (as I hope my virtue will) increases by oppression,” Gay informed Swift. “I go to no Courts, I drink no wine; and am calumniated even by Ministers of State; and yet am in good spirits.”

The new play brought in a good deal of money for Gay, who had only three years to live after this. However, that time was well-spent, under the affectionate (and, I think more important, rich) patronage of the Duchess of Queensberry.

In the course I took on Restoration literature at Columbia University more than a quarter-century ago, Gay did not impress me so much as his peers Swift or Alexander Pope. Even the LP (yes, this was the Neolithic Age!) of The Beggar’s Opera brought in by our estimable professor, Michael Seidel, did little to lift the playwright in my eyes. (My opinion of Gay rose somewhat after reading his Fables.)

But just think—without The Beggar’s Opera we would not have its cheerfully cynical Weimar Germany reworking, The Threepenny Opera, written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. And without that, we would not have Lotte Lenya (Weill’s muse and widow) as the diabolical Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love (or Mindy Sterling’s Frau Farbissina –closer to the real Lenya than to parody--in the Austin Powers movies); Louis Armstrong working his Dixieland magic on “Mack the Knife”; or, of course, spinning the same song, Bobby Darin (who is probably still blessing the show, somewhere beyond the sea).