Song Lyric of the Day (Irving Berlin, on Why ‘There's No People Like Show People’)

“There's no people like show people, they smile when they are low

Angels come from everywhere with lots of jack, and when you lose it, there's no attack

Where could you get money that you don't give back? Let’s go on with the show.”—“There's No Business Like Show Business,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin  (1888-1989), from his musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946)

Theater Review: Irving Berlin’s ‘Holiday Inn,’ Presented by the Roundabout Theatre Co.

The Roundabout Theatre Co.. advertises Holiday Inn as “The New Irving Berlin Musical,” but it’s hard to see what’s “new” about it.  It’s more like a car reassembled from an assortment of parts, then given a spiffy paint job. In spirit, it’s even less modern, with a lightweight plot that’s a throwback to the pre-Cabaret, pre-Sondheim era.

But the engine of this production—the lyrics and melodies of Irving Berlin—remains in remarkably good shape, efficiently driving the show forward. At the end of the show, I doubt that you’d find anyone complaining about what they’d just seen at Studio 54.

Holiday Inn is based, more or less, on the 1942 movie of the same. The latter is about a popular three-person vaudeville song-and-dance team who split up when members Jim Hardy (played by Bing Crosby) and Lila Dixon (Virginia Dale) plan to marry and become Connecticut farmers. 

But before the nuptials, Lila gets cold feet, confesses that the farm life is not for her and goes off with the third member of the team, Ted Hanover (Fred Astaire). Jim continues to like the idea of farm life, but can’t see how to make a going concern of it until he lights on the idea of an inn on the property that will only remain open for the 15 holidays of the year. He is harmonizing quite nicely, personally and professionally, with Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds), his co-star in this new venture, when Ted—cast adrift by Lila—re-enters the picture….

The movie, which introduced to audiences Bing Crosby’s holiday staple, “White Christmas,” is arelaxed, charming, unpretentious production that I enjoyed immensely when I saw it 40 years ago. I can’t say the same about the 1954 film that tried to milk the tune at its center for all it was worth, White Christmas, with Danny Kaye replacing Astaire as Crosby’s co-star.

In this “revisal” (a fancy entertainment industry term for a production whose “revival” often involves a new, less politically incorrect book), the Broadway show’s creative team, Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge, tinkered with a few elements of the plot, then corralled tunes from a whole gamut of Berlin musicals (e.g., “Blue Skies,” “Easter Parade,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Shaking the Blues Away”), before road-testing the product at the estimable Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut and The Muny in St. Louis before starting its current run in New York in October.

Bryce Pinkham and Corbin Bleu (the latter best remembered for his role on High School Musical) have assumed the crucial—and thankless—roles of Crosby and Astaire. They won’t make anyone forget those two musical-comedy icons (my God, who ever could?), but they perform quite creditably. 

Pinkham, gifted with a pleasant voice, smoothly handled the vocals on “White Christmas,” while Bleu—an extraordinary dancer—pulled off the firecracker dance sequence that served as an Astaire showstopper on the big screen. Lora Lee Gayer and Megan Sikora lent their talents—a lovely voice and dazzling footwork, respectively--to the roles of Linda and Lila, and Megan Lawrence provided an excellent comic foil as a female who can handle farm chores and tools as well as any man. (The role on film was played by a male.)

Greenberg and choreographer Denis Jones offer one musical number after another that not only make the 2 hours and 15 minutes of the show pass in no time, but also leave the audience on a high over the dazzling skill displayed onstage.

Holiday Inn runs through January 15, but it would be a shame for anyone with free time—and an accommodating Mother Nature—to pass it up the opportunity to see it between now and the new year. The film premiered in U.S. theaters in August 1942, when WWII made American audiences desperate for escapism. The musical arrived on Broadway this year amid its own moment of uncertainty—an election of extraordinary rancor and divisiveness. 

At the matinee performance I attended, many audience members remarked on how good it felt to be inside an environment where all of that slipped away. I have a feeling that, if the Roundabout revives this again not that long from now—say, another four years, in the next election cycle—it will find a similarly rapturous reception for this “new”-old musical.

Song Lyric of the Day (Irving Berlin and the Melancholy of “White Christmas”)

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know…”—Irving Berlin, “White Christmas,” originally composed for the 1942 film Holiday Inn, later the centerpiece for White Christmas (1954)

(Yesterday, “The Leonard Lopate Show” on the local public radio station, WNYC-FM, featured Kerry O’Malley and Stephen Bogardus, co-stars of the musical adaptation of the Berlin film that’s now playing on Broadway. What made Berlin’s songs so special? Lopate asked.

Ms. O’Malley answered that they were so “emotional,” pointing to the vein of melancholy that ran through his songs as well as his life.

Melancholy? Berlin, the composer of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Doing What Comes Nat’rally,” “God Bless America,” and other uptempo tunes too numerous to mention? I wouldn’t have believed it about his most famous song, “White Christmas,” especially if I’d been listening to the version I heard while passing through the Port Authority Bus Station this morning—Darlene Love’s rendition, from A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector --which had its 45th anniversary this year, incidentally.

But then I looked at the lyrics to “White Christmas.” And you know what? Ms. O’Malley is right.

To start with, “White Christmas” is not about present reality. It evokes “the ones I used to know.” It’s an exercise in nostalgia by an adult remembering a world of innocence he or she can never recapture. The speaker may wish for that childlike innocence, that whiteness, but such a vision is, at best, achieved through the eyes of the young.

Even the first line of the song is indicative. The speaker is “dreaming” of a white Christmas—it is not reality. The song had its premiere in WWII, as did “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” the Buck Ram-Kim Gannon-Walter Kent song which, you might remember, saved its best line for last: “if only in my dreams.”

For American service personnel in a titanic conflict, the Currier & Ives scenes brought to mind by both these songs held a simple but powerful resonance, even if it was far removed from the bloody scenes they were witnessing day by day.)

This Day in Music History (Kate Smith Sings Berlin’s “God Bless America” for 1st Time)

November 10, 1938—For her Armistice Day radio show, singer Kate Smith premiered “God Bless America,” a castoff that even composer Irving Berlin deemed too corny. An entire generation of Americans—waging two wars to contain the threat of tyranny around the globe—came to disagree.

In 1918, while inducted into the army, Berlin—already world-famous as the prolific Tin Pin Alley composer behind “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and numerous other hits—came up with the idea for Yip! Yip! Yaphank!, a show that would star 350 soldiers. The producers convinced him it wouldn’t work, and besides, he had more than enough tunes for the show.

Berlin stuck the tune in a trunk, where it remained for 20 years. Then the request by Ms. Smith’s manager for a song led Berlin to recycle it. Maybe it was his memory of a recent trip to Europe and his understanding of how the continent was about to go off another cliff that led him to reassess the merits of the song.

The song was a huge hit, of course. In fact, the success of this patriotic hymn was so immense that before long, even this songwriter intent on his prerogatives had assigned all future royalties to the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts and the Campfire Girls.

In the 1970s, hockey’s Philadelphia Flyers believed they hit on a lucky charm: not only were fans far more respectful during “God Bless America” than they were for “The Star Spangled Banner,” but the team itself won far more games than it lost—especially during crunch time, when somehow or other, the team would drive the singer down to perform the song during the Stanley Cup finals—and the team pulled out victories!

In the years following his death, music lovers and the public at large became aware that Berlin might have been the most litigious composer in the history of the American Songbook. Jimmy Breslin had to rewrite an entire part of a novel because Berlin wouldn’t give him permission to quote three words from “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” and the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott wryly lamented in a live appearance that a revue she did in tribute to him led him to sue her for copyright infringement!

It’s hard to square such paranoia with the wide-eyed, innocent embrace of the U.S. in “God Bless America.” But the same desperate early circumstances (a family fleeing anti-Semitic Czarist Russia, loss of his father before the age of 10) that made him overly wary about his privileges also left him grateful to the land that rescued him from death, persecution, poverty and obscurity.

In a course I took this semester at Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York on “Architects of Tin Pan Alley,” our effortlessly learned instructor, Phil Atteberry, related the story of Berlin’s last public appearance. At the largest-ever sitdown dinner at the White House, at an event celebrating the return of prisoners of war, the octogenarian composer led the 1,300 guests in a singalong of “God Bless America.”

You’d think that people would be moved by the spectacle of this aging embodiment of Americana making such a poignant appearance. But this was just after the end of the Vietnam War, at the height of the Watergate scandal. The POWs presented President Nixon with a plaque reading “Our leader - our comrade, Richard the Lionhearted." John Wayne, a symbol of America in his own right, said, “I want to thank you, Mr. President, not for any one thing, but for everything.”

Seeing Berlin’s gesture not for what it was but in the context of these other incidents, critics pounced on the composer. He was so dumbfounded by the uproar that he never made a similar appearance.

Phil Atteberry noted the generational difference in attitude toward people about this song. Older Americans, he observed, tend to welcome the song unapologetically, while older ones are cynical about the tune.

Too bad. As the sight of U.S. Senators on Capitol Hill bursting into impromptu harmony on Capitol Hill demonstrates, the song still retains the power to unite under special circumstances.