Kurt Weills One Touch of Venus and the Arts of Appropriation

Daniel Gundlach

Staatsoperette Dresden / Operetta Inquiry Center

viii December, 2020

When Staatsoperette Dresden presented Kurt Weill'south I Bear on of Venus as part of their "Broadway in Dresden" serial, in a translation by Roman Hinze and a staging past Matthias Davids, they as well prepared a first-ever German recording of Ein Hauch von Venus.Information technology features Johanna Spantzel in the title role, Peter Christian Feigel conducts the large size orchestra. At present, a collection of essays has been published, analyzing various aspects of the show. One of the essays is by Daniel Gundlach, describing the genesis of this piece and comparing it to other famous Broadway successes, such as Osculation Me, Kate and On the Town. That essay only appeared in a German language translation until at present, we nowadays the original English version here, in which the author also asks about the operetta aspects of One Touch on of Venus.

The book „…wie leise Liebe sein soll" almost Weill's "1 Touch of Venus," published past Staatsoperette Dresden.

1 Touch of Venus is unique amidst Kurt Weill's input as his i truthful musical comedy. As David Savran has noted, "[west]ith its deceptively light comedy and score, Venus might just be the greatest musical Cole Porter never wrote." [1] The Weill scholar bruce mcclung has likewise observed that Venus, "as shut as he came to a regulation musical comedy… perhaps not coincidentally… enjoyed the longest continuous Broadway run of his American shows." [2]

If Venus is Weill's just Broadway musical comedy, how exercise we assess his other contributions to the American stage? His commencement theater slice composed expressly for Broadway, 1936'southward Johnny Johnson, a collaboration with the Paul Green, is described as a "musical play"; though Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) is also described as a "musical one-act," its setting and themes are hardly the calorie-free-hearted fluff of standard "musical one-act"; The Firebrand of Florence (1944) is a full-blown operetta; Street Scene (1947), in some ways Weill's about ambitious Broadway work, is described in the published score every bit an "American opera" and has come to be so regarded; the neglected masterpiece Love Life (1948) is a unique revisioning of vaudeville; and Lost in the Stars (1949), Weill'south last completed theater piece of work, is a "musical tragedy."

This leaves the uniquely structured Lady in the Dark (1941), which defies easy nomenclature, in that near all the music occurs within the context of iii mini-operas which occur as enactments of the heroine's subconscious. Though 1 Touch of Venus is on the surface the most conventional of Weill's Broadway outings, it nevertheless is a piece that is full of delicious surprises.

Sheet music comprehend for "Ane Bear upon of Venus" showing Mary Martin in the title role.

Perhaps it would exist useful to analyze what exactly constitutes a musical comedy. The simplest definition would be a stage play, normally with relatively light subject thing, to which non-through-composed music is added. Musical comedy is a refinement, a melding fifty-fifty, of ii earlier forms, the revue and the operetta. The revue stems directly from vaudeville, in which unrelated sketches and musical numbers were strung together to class an evening'south entertainment. Certainly the most famous example is the various versions of the Ziegfeld Follies, which ran on Broadway yearly from 1907 through 1931, with meaning recurrences in 1934 and 1936 (after the producer Florenz Ziegfeld's death).

Ziegfeld modeled his shows later on the Folies Bergère in Paris; a common component of both the Folies and the Follies were the chorus lines of showgirls, in Paris mostly unclad, as well every bit the musical and comedy sketches of stars, which in New York included such favorites as Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Westward. C. Fields, and Marilyn Miller.

Probably the nigh sophisticated iteration of the Ziegfeld Follies was the 1936 edition, which featured songs by Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin and featured, amidst others, Bob Hope and Joséphine Baker besides as Brice, a perennial Follies stalwart. Practitioners of the musical revue never aimed for a unifying plot or theme, different operetta, which developed out of the French opéra comique, which used spoken dialogue rather than sung recitative to connect the musical numbers. Jacques Offenbach was definitely the most celebrated and sophisticated of French operetta composers, though Gounod, Bizet, Chabrier, Messager, Massé and others likewise contributed to the form.

Jacques Offenbach riding his success, a caricature from a Paris newspaper.

Eventually the genre traveled to Vienna too, where information technology was adult and perhaps surpassed by Johann Strauss Ii, as well equally other skilled composers such as Franz von Suppé and Karl Millöcker likewise as, in succeeding generations, the Hungarians Franz (Ferenc) Lehár and Emmerich (Imre) Kálmán.

Operetta became popular in England as well with the unique contributions of Westward. Southward. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, whose works, similar Offenbach's, usually featured pointed satire of contemporary culture.

At the stop of the 19th century the genre constitute its way to Frg, where it took root in Berlin in item, with composers such as Paul Lincke, Walter Kollo, and Eduard Künneke.

The dashing young composer Paul Lincke.

In the first decade of the twentieth century operettas past Kálmán and Lehár began to be produced on Broadway at the same time as original American works (albeit often past not-native composers) appeared, primarily by Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg, and Rudolf Friml. Though original piece of work of Romberg continued to be produced on Broadway even subsequently his death in 1951 (see The Girl in Pinkish Tights, 1954), generally operetta productions on Broadway had slowed to a trickle by the mid-1930s.

In general this material had quainter, even old-fashioned discipline matter in a musical language that was similarly backward-looking. In his seminal piece of work Show Boat (1927) Jerome Kern provided a link between an operetta plot and the jazzier, breezier songs that were being produced past the Gershwins and Cole Porter.

Original sail music cover for the 1927 hitting "Evidence Boat."

Though Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1943 blast hit Oklahoma! is often called the commencement integrated musical (that is, the first musical to seamlessly segue from dialogue to dance to song and back again and to utilise both song and dance to advance the plot), other scholars consider Testify Boat to more accurately occupy that position. (Interestingly, Oscar Hammerstein II was also the lyricist for the earlier piece of work.)

Cole Porter occupies a unique position in this pantheon in that, unlike everyone except Irving Berlin, he equanimous both music and lyrics to his songs, and unlike near all composers of musicals including Berlin, he was non Jewish. In improver to his ii most famous musicals, Annihilation Goes (1934) and Kiss Me, Kate (1948; first produced in Deutschland in 1955 and ane of the most popular American musicals hither e'er since), his other shows include Leave information technology to Me! (1938; Mary Martin's first Broadway role, discussed below); Gay Divorce (1932; Fred Astaire'due south terminal Broadway show and his only without his sis Adele); Nymph Errant (1933; only produced in London's West End, but Porter'southward personal favorite amongst his shows); three further shows that starred Ethel Merman: Red, Hot and Bluish (1936), DuBarry Was a Lady (1939), Something for the Boys (1943); and three late-career post-Kate shows: Out of this Earth (1950), Can-Tin can (1953), and Silk Stockings (1955), the last his final Broadway bear witness, which starred Don Ameche and Hildegard Knef, the spelling of her surname Americanized as Neff.

Except for Annihilation Goes and Kiss Me, Kate, Porter'due south reputation rests primarily on individual songs celebrated for their urbanity, piquant wordplay, surprisingly rhyming schemes, and double entendres. These are often listing songs ("You're the Summit," "Always True To You In My Fashion") or narrative songs ("Miss Otis Regrets," "The Tale of the Oyster").

Ane might take particular note here of the unsuccessful Out of this Earth, based as it is on Amphytrion, making it the one Porter musical in which Greek gods and goddesses make an appearance. Though the tone of this piece is closer to slapstick than Venus's sleek sophistication, information technology is interesting to compare the Porter list vocal "Cherry Pies Ought To Exist You" in which two dissimilar couples, i amorous ("Cherry pies ought to be y'all / Autumn skies ought to exist you… All of Beethoven's Nine ought to be you / Every Volition Shakespeare line ought to exist you") and one warring ("Withered grass ought to be you / Lethal gas ought to be you… Florida when information technology rains ought to be you / Pinchers in subway trains ought to be you") paint comparisons of the other.

Compare this to the negative similes that Ogden Nash, Venus's lyricist, uses in "How Much I Love You" ("I love yous more than a wasp tin sting / And more than a hangnail hurts… / As a dachshund abhors revolving doors / That's how y'all are loved by me"). Weill'south intention in Venus might not take been to directly emulate Porter, but, in this piece of work he comes closest to Porter's trademarks, while still retaining the hallmarks of his own particular style.

Afterward the enormous success of Lady in the Dark Weill was over again in search of a new subject for his next theater piece and, typically, he found inspiration in an unusual identify: a British satirical novel entitled The Tinted Venus by Thomas Anstey Guthrie, known professionally by the pseudonym F. Anstey. [3]

In the novel a barber named Leander Tweddle places an engagement band by way of comparison onto the finger of a statue of Aphrodite situated in an off-flavour pleasance garden. As a result the statue comes to periodic life every evening and involves Leander in a serial of misadventures involving the police, a pair of thieves, his fiancée and her mother, and a pair of sisters, one of whom is engaged to his best friend and the other of whom he was one time casually courting. These elements form the basis of what was to become One Affect of Venus, though the setting, tone, and themes differ essentially from the source material.

The Venus de Milo in Paris, surrounded by tourists. (Photograph: Miquel Rossy / Unsplash)

According to Stephen Hinton, it was Irene Sharaff, the costume designer for Lady in the Dark, who offset brought The Tinted Venus to Weill'due south attention. [four] Weill was quite taken with the suggestion, initially "envision[ing] it equally a neo-Offenbachian operetta" [5] and he suggested the material to the independent producer Cheryl Crawford.

Crawford was one of the about important producers in mid-century American theatre and ane of just a scattering of women. She had worked her style up through the ranks of the Theatre Guild, where she met Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, with whom she had formed the Grouping Theatre in 1931, a leftist theatrical collective which adhered to the principles of Stanislavski and which produced, among other things, early productions of the work of Clifford Odets. Crawford and Weill had worked together previously on Weill's kickoff piece of work for the Broadway stage, the aforementioned Johnny Johnson, which was Crawford'southward last product with the Group Theatre before she left to become an contained theatrical producer.

A photograph from the original production of "Johnny Johnson," 1936. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Weill had given Crawford informal musical advice when she mounted a revised Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess in 1942, which, unlike the 1935 premiere on Broadway, was enormously successful. (Weill'south exposure to the Gershwins' piece of work was influential in his desire to produce an American opera, which finally came to fruition in Street Scene.) Crawford and Weill agreed to engage Bella Spewack to write the book of the musical, which was to be entitled One Man's Venus, while Ogden Nash was engaged to write the lyrics.

Apart from his contribution to Venus, Nash is most known for his lite, humorous verse, hundreds of which appeared in The New Yorker between 1930 and 1971, the twelvemonth of his death. [6] Along with her husband Sam, Bella Spewack's most famous contribution to musical theatre came with the book to Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate in 1948.

Upon receipt of her final typhoon of the script, Weill and Crawford were dissatisfied with her work and Bella was dramatically fired. At this bespeak Nash took over the writing of the book and suggested a colleague of his at The New Yorker, Due south. J. Perelman, equally his collaborator. Perelman is remembered today primarily equally the co-writer of two Marx Brothers comedies, Monkey Business concern (1931) and Equus caballus Feathers (1932). During his lifetime his humorous vignettes were published in The New Yorker and collected in many acknowledged books. Sometimes in collaboration with his wife Laura, [7] he wrote numerous Broadway plays between 1932 and 1963.

Perelman and Nash's script, renamed 1 Touch of Venus, updated the activity to gimmicky (that is World State of war II-era) New York Urban center. The profession of Anstey's barber was retained, though he now sports the name Rodney Hatch. The conceit of a statue of Venus coming to life was retained, though all the particulars thereof, including her basic graphic symbol, were inverse from the novella. Leander's fiancée, named Matilda Collum, is good-natured and well-suited to him. Perelman, on the other paw, transforms her into a shrewish and demanding harridan named Gloria Kramer. He also introduces a foil to the hairdresser, a wealthy and eccentric art collector named Whitelaw Savory, who disdains whatever art that is not cutting edge.

There is i slice of ancient fine art that Savory does not disdain, and that is a statue of the Anatolian Venus, which he saw years before and which reminds him of the girl that got away. In an effort to recapture the memory of that lost love, he has his two thugs, Taxi and Stanley, obtain the statue for him in Smyrna and ship it to his art gallery.

Seated Woman of Çatal Höyük: the head is a restoration, Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. (Photo: Wikipedia)

The moment after the statue arrives, the barber Rodney Hatch shows up to give Savory a shave and a trim and, left momentarily alone with the statue, spontaneously slips the engagement band he has purchased for Gloria Kramer onto the statue'south finger. At this point the statue comes to life and announces her undying devotion to the human who has released her torso from its enslavement in marble. In spite of Rodney'due south entreaties, Venus refuses to return the ring which has brought her back to life.

Every bit well as being the goddess of dearest, this Venus is also a pragmatist: in her first encounter in corporeal course with Savory (who, though he does not recognize her as his statue, which he believes has been stolen by Hatch, is struck by her resemblance to his lost love), she delivers one of the most famous lines of the piece, "Dearest isn't the dying moan of a distant violin – information technology's the triumphant twang of a bedspring." [eight]

To act as a foil to Venus, Perelman and Nash also crafted a secondary female role, Whitelaw'southward competent, efficient, and sassy assistant named Molly Grant. It's the sort of wisecracking office that would have been played in Hollywood past Eve Arden. [9] Molly delivers the two songs that are the comic highlights of the piece, the championship tune (which contains the evidence's wittiest lyric, "Mix a piddling affect of goddess / With a footling touch of dryad / And life is just a goddess damsel cinch") and the caustic "Very, Very, Very" (which in its targeting of "the contrasting moral values of the very, very rich and the common folk" [10] addresses the same concerns that Weill and Brecht addressed in their joint creations).

As Ethan Mordden puts it, "[south]he's the only reasonable person in the whole play, and she helps ground the fantasy in that she's the sole character to figure out that [Venus] is the missing statue. She isn't even shocked: she'south amused." [xi] She tells Rodney that Venus "was the nicest goddess I e'er met."

Though Venus confesses to Rodney that his "ring only brought us together. It had no ability to make me love you," in the end that honey is not enough to resolve the enormous differences betwixt an ordinary barber who longs for a life in the suburbs and the goddess of love come to life. (In fact, Rodney's dream of life in the suburbs described in "Wooden Nuptials" is an evocation avant la lettre of conformity of suburban life that became a way of life in the US in the 1950'due south.) Venus returns to her roots and Rodney is left alone to mourn her desertion. Until, that is, Venus'due south contemporary double shows up for classes at the Whitelaw Savory Foundation of Modernistic Fine art and the two are instantly fatigued together every bit the curtain falls.

Attitudes amidst the cognoscenti in the world of modern art are satirized in the musical's opening number, "New Art Is True Art," with lines such every bit "New art is truthful art / The old masters slew art… / How are they to be trusted? / They must have been maladjusted… / The all-time of ancient Greece / They were centuries behind Matisse." Sophisticated patrons of the arts would have been cognizant of the increased cultural visibility of contemporary visual art, cheers in large part to the opening of the new Museum of Modern Fine art in 1939, and the media presence of its managing director Alfred H. Barr, a self-styled tastemaker.

In Venus's book, Alfred H. Barr and the MoMA are clear stand-ins for Whitelaw Savory and his self-named Foundation of Modern Fine art. In 1929 at the age of but 29 Barr was named the managing director of the Museum of Modernistic Art, which opened the doors of its new home in 1939. Like his fictional analogue, Barr was both a curator and an teacher in fine art history, having taught undergraduate art history at Vassar, Wellesley, and Princeton between 1923 and 1927. Indeed, i of his courses at Wellesley was chosen "Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting," a subject ane could well imagine Savory teaching. In his position at MoMA Barr was responsible for important exhibitions on Picasso, van Gogh, Cubism, Dada, photography, mod architecture, the American and European avant garde and Bauhaus.

Co-ordinate to Naomi Blumberg, Barr was "a run a risk taker and a polemical effigy; amidst his colleagues he was known for having a dictatorial manner and an unrelentingly dogmatic approach." [12] Perhaps every bit a result of his contentiousness, in 1943 he was removed from his directorial mail at MoMA, though he remained with the institution in an important acquisitional function until 1967.

Theatregoers in 1943 might have derived amusement and satisfaction at recognizing Barr in the elitist Savory—a type who is anything but savory—who is given self-important lines such every bit "I shall fight on, gallant Don Quixote that I am… until the hydrated monster of bad taste lies dead on the doily of every tea shoppe in the country!" One must wonder, given Savory's dismissal of whatever fine art that is not "mod," at his determination to acquire the Anatolian Venus statue. The unproblematic reason, as he confesses to Molly, is that the effigy depicted reminds him of a lost love. As he tells her, "That's quite a tragedy for a collector, Molly. I lost the girl but at to the lowest degree I've got the statue."

In fact, when Savory sings the song "Westwind," the musical material is based on the music first heard when the statue of Venus comes to life. The use of triplet quarter notes (an important component of several of Venus'southward songs, equally will be discussed afterwards) combines with ambiguous harmonies "to express a sense of intense yearning." [thirteen]

Equally Geoffrey Holden Block describes the genesis of the music illustrating Savory's Venus fixation:

In the midst of his sketches for Lady[in the Dark], including a draft for "My Ship," Weill sketched a tune that with some modifications would eventually become "Westwind." In the early stages Weill used its tune solely for the "Venus Entrance" music (and he would go along to characterization this tune as such throughout his orchestral score). Long after the unabridged bear witness had taken shape, the music of the future "Westwind" was yet reserved for Venus. At a relatively late stage Weill decided to show Savory's total captivation with Venus musically by adopting her tune as his own. After their beginning meeting his identity is now fully submerged in the adult female he idealizes. [14]

In dissimilarity to her label in Weill'southward music, the title graphic symbol in The Tinted Venus is a threatening, vengeful, vindictive figure who alternates between her daytime marmoreal form and her increasingly dangerous resumption every evening of apotheosis in flesh and blood. Tweddle, as the object of her affections, is very much in the line of burn down. This forms a stark contrast with Weill, Nash, and Perelman's Venus: she may have an imperious streak such as befits any goddess (she does, after all, cause Mrs. Moats, Rodney's landlady, to keel over in a faint, and, worse, Gloria to disappear without a trace, which gets Rodney arrested at the first act curtain for Gloria'southward suspected murder), simply mostly she is only an amorous (if superhuman) gal who is trying to notice her place in gimmicky New York and volition do anything inside her considerable power to get her man to succumb to her.

Additionally, Stephen Hinton has suggested that Weill may have felt fatigued to Anstey'southward original The Tinted Venus because of his "lifelong sympathy for female characters who view themselves as outsiders." [15] Indeed, he cites examples extending nearly Weill'southward unabridged output, from Royal Palace to Lost in the Stars that foreground such women. An aboriginal goddess unable to make sense of the gimmicky Manhattan into which she has been of a sudden reincarnated (see in particular her starting time song "I'thousand a Stranger Here Myself") would fit in comfortably (or not) in that visitor.

For their Venus, Weill and Crawford had a very specific star in mind: the glamorous German expat icon Marlene Dietrich. Weill had earlier, in fact, at Dietrich's asking, offered her two gratis-standing songs ("Es regnet" and "Der Abschiedsbrief"), which she unfortunately never performed. [16] While first the Spewacks, and later Perelman and Nash, worked to create a feasible volume, Crawford and Weill went through an elaborate courtship ritual to convince Dietrich to portray Venus. Though Crawford did manage to become her to sign a contract to commit to the testify, in the end, Dietrich rejected the function, stating that she found it "also vulgar and profane." She further stated that, as the mother of a nineteen-yr-one-time daughter, she could hardly exist expected to exist publicly exhibit her legs (though when her girl was younger this was never a deterrent).

Thus Weill and Crawford found themselves with fourth dimension closing in on them and no star for their show. Someone suggested Mary Martin, whose sole Broadway credit was a secondary role in Cole Porter's Go out It to Me (1938), which, coincidentally, was based on a play by Sam and Bella Spewack, and which starred Sophie Tucker and the comedy team of William Gaxton and Victor Moore (who in their mean solar day headlined an astonishing number of hits, including Annihilation Goes, Louisiana Purchase, and the Gershwin'south two political satires, Of Thee I Sing and Let 'Em Consume Cake).

In a secondary office, Martin became famous for her performance of the suggestive "My Center Belongs to Daddy." It has been suggested that incongruous innocence of her commitment stemmed from her lack of agreement of the smutty undertones of the text. Martin's performance netted her the cover of Life magazine and led her to Hollywood, where she spent several years as an underused MGM contract player.

Frustrated, and seeking to reestablish herself on the Broadway scene, she moved back to New York in 1942 with Richard Halliday, her husband-manager and daughter (leaving behind her son from a previous spousal relationship, Larry Hagman, to be raised by her ain female parent) in pursuit of a Broadway vehicle. She and Halliday had already gambled and lost on ii musicals which had died in out-of-boondocks tryouts (also as turning downwardly the lead in what was to become Oklahoma!), just even after an initially reluctant Crawford offered her the part she was not at all convinced that she was the right fit for the function.

Finally a trip to the Metropolitan Museum to detect the broad range of Venus statues convinced her that she might actually exist pretty and sexy plenty to play the goddess of love. Hearing Kurt Weill play the vocal "That's Him" for her cemented her decision.

Three external influences helped shape Mary Martin's performance and make her a Broadway icon in this, her first starring role. When Elia Kazan, Venus'southward director, whose previous professional feel in musicals had been as an actor in the original product of Weill'southward Johnny Johnson, asked Martin how she intended to approach the role, she was at a loss for words. Finally she told him that in her moving-picture show work she had ever discovered her character by first finding her walk. This was certainly to be the case with Venus. In this she had the assistance of ii extraordinary women whose contributions to the slice helped lift it far to a higher place standard musical fare. First of these was Agnes de Mille, fresh off her triumph in Oklahoma!

American dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille (1905-1993) playing 'The Priggish Virgin' in the ballet "Three Virgins and a Devil" on Broadway, 1941. (Photo: United States Library of Congress)

Even if, every bit discussed earlier, it is non actually the first integrated musical, with de Mille's choreography, narrative trip the light fantastic toe is foregrounded more than in any musical that had preceded information technology. In One Impact of Venus, trip the light fantastic toe plays an equally significant, though less iconoclastic, office. De Mille took it upon herself to assist Martin find the right physique du role. She placed a slap-up emphasis on Venus's legato movements. Particularly in the first extended ballet piece, "Forty Minutes for Lunch," which takes place in the arcade of Rockefeller Middle, a strong physical contrast is established between Venus's languorous movements and those of the commuters and workers who dash around her. Co-ordinate to Kara Anne Gardner,

[f]or the concept of the testify to come beyond to audiences, Venus had to appear dissimilar from all of the characters on the stage. She was a shrewd observer, commenting on the strange means of whose who surrounded her. She had to stand up differently, walk differently, appear aloof. It took Martin some time to develop these qualities, just when Venus opened on Broadway, Martin captivated audiences in all her songs and dances. She undeniably became the show'south star, which worked very effectively since she was portraying a goddess who existed in a realm far in a higher place that of mere mortals. De Mille played an instrumental part in helping Martin succeed. [17]

One of the dancing commuters in the "40 Minutes" ballet who appeared again in the terminal "Venus in Ozone Heights" and "Bacchanale" numbers was the now-legendary Sono Osato. Osato, born in the United states of america to a Japanese-built-in male parent and an American mother of French and Irish heritage, had begun her career at fourteen in the 1930s equally the youngest dancer in the history of the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo and continued with the Ballet Theatre (currently known every bit American Ballet Theatre). She was making her Broadway debut as the Première Danseuse in Venus. Immediately afterward Venus Osato would go on to brand Broadway history performing the role of Ivy Smith the "Exotic Miss Turnstiles" in On the Town, the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green wartime hit.

In notices for both Venus and On the Boondocks, Osato'southward physical beauty and luminous presence are highlighted, as well as her exoticism. It was indeed highly unusual for a young woman of Japanese heritage to exist featured onstage post-obit the Japanese assail on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. This is farther highlighted by the fact that the following 24-hour interval Osato's father Shoji, a photographer, was arrested at his home on the trumped-upward suspicion of him existence a spy. He was subsequently permitted to leave his homebase of Chicago only under special dispensation (permission to attend his daughter'due south Broadway debut was denied). [18]

For a brief fourth dimension Osato was obliged to perform nether her mother'south maiden name (Fitzgerald) because of the enormous backfire against the Japanese, citizens or not. In this context, it is indeed extraordinary that she was chosen by de Mille, Crawford, and Weill to make her Broadway debut in 1 Bear upon of Venus, and to be awarded such accolades for her work. [xix]

Osato, more well-versed in motility than Martin (to say the least), offered to assist her colleague during breaks in rehearsal with finding the proper physicality for Venus, an offering Martin gladly accustomed. With Osato's help, "Martin learned how to throw her shoulders dorsum, open her artillery wide, tuck in her bottom, and institute her feet firmly." [20] The onstage interactions of Venus and Osato will be farther considered below.

A farther substantial influence on Martin'south functioning came through the intervention of the American fashion designer Mainbocher (né Principal Rousseau Bocher). The designer, in his mid-fifties, had returned from Paris to the U.s. in 1940 after establishing himself as an influential couturier with an important clientele which included the Duchess of Windsor, amongst others.

Having already costumed Leonora Corbett for her appearance as Elvira, the ghost in Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit in 1941, [21] Mainbocher was engaged to design gowns for Mary Martin to increase her appearance of godliness. He created xiv dissimilar costumes for the actress and for the rest of his life became her personal and professional designer, famously creating her costumes for The Audio of Music (1959), as well every bit Ethel Merman's for Call Me Madam and Rosalind Russell's in Wonderful Town. Instead of downplaying Martin's long neck, Mainbocher emphasized it, too as exposing as much of her bare skin as he maybe could, particularly her back, every bit, he stated, "a concession to the fact that after all, Venus is never a clothed lady." [22]

The extra Ruth Gordon described the entreatment of Mainbocher'due south couture in a contour on the designer in the New York Times: "He conceals, disguises, enhances, just never makes a fuss nigh it." [23] In addition, depending on which story one believes, either Mainbocher, Elia Kazan, or Lotte Lenya was responsible for the staging of Venus'southward vocal "That's Him."

In Martin's version of the story, when trying to convince Mainbocher to act as her costume designer, Martin pulled up a chair straight in front of him, sabbatum downwardly side-saddle and sang the song to him, at which he purportedly exclaimed that he would indeed costume her on the condition that she would always perform the song exactly as she had done for him.

According to Kazan in his autobiography, the idea was his alone. In a third version of the story, [24] it was Lenya herself who gave aid, at her request, to the relatively inexperienced Martin in finding the nigh effective style to put the vocal across. Whoever was responsible for staging it this mode, it was an extraordinarily intimate moment and helped contribute to the success of both the song and the show.

Osato's danced roles in the two Venus ballets served to advance the plot in important means. In the commencement, entitled "Forty Minutes for Tiffin," she portrays a harried office worker whom Venus takes under her fly, revealing the art of seduction in several piece of cake lessons. Osato'southward graphic symbol takes advantage of these gestures when a sailor appears and the harried worker is transformed into a seductive nymph. When the forty-minute lunch break is over, the other workers, who have paused to observe the seductive come across betwixt the two, resume their frenzied demeanor and, with a contemplative backward glance, Osato's character rejoins their ranks. Every bit Kara Anne Gardner observes,

[t]his brand of humor that de Mille capitalized on in "Twoscore Minutes" fit perfectly with the tone set by Weill and Nash in their comic songs. Simply there was something deeper under the ballet'south surface. De Mille's choreography, coupled with Weill's music, makes us long for what Venus has to offer; not just her seductiveness, but her slower pace and her grace of move. [25]

In the second extended ballet, "Venus in Ozone Heights" and the "Bacchanale" that immediately follows, the tables are turned in the relationship betwixt Osato and Venus. In this narrative ballet, Venus ponders the utter confirmity of what married life with Rodney volition be like and the imagined reality is not to her liking. In this sequence, Osato appears equally a goddess beckoning Venus back to her position of delectable dominance in aboriginal Hellenic republic. Eventually in the "Bacchanale" portion, gods, goddesses, nymphs, and satyrs overtake suburbia; at the conclusion an aviator carries Venus abroad from her humdrum life equally a housewife dorsum in time to her origins as a deity.

Agnes de Mille took an unusually strong lead in the overall shape of One Touch of Venus, including the music itself. During rehearsals she is said to take suggested to Weill that a sea shanty was needed at the end of Osato'due south run into with the sailor. Weill obliged her by incorporating the traditional tune "What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor," 1 of but 2 points in the score of "literally quoted vernacular music." [26]

Elia Kazan, the ostensible managing director of the product, plant his role finer usurped past de Mille. In his book Kazan on Directing, he describes his take on the state of affairs:

I believe Miss de Mille, whose dances were brilliant, was the well-nigh dominating personality I ever worked with, so dominating in fact that I was reduced to a kind of phase manager who watched her piece of work in amazement and bundled the lights and stage space to her behest. I before long became weary of this kind of subservient role, and after my adjacent musical [Weill's Love Life (1948)] I decided to admit that this was non my all-time field. [27]

Kurt Weill and de Mille announced to have had an uncommonly expert working relationship and complemented each other'due south strengths. What is indisputable is the unusually high level of Weill'southward interest in every aspect of the kickoff product. He was, as Mark N. Grant describes, "non only its composer and orchestrator but its de facto co-director and creative co-auteur." [28] In his selection of bailiwick affair, in his (albeit unsuccessful) courting of Marlene Dietrich for his Venus, in his agile role in the shaping of the script, in his at the time unique office as orchestrator of his own score also as serving every bit his own dance arranger, in his contribution to the lyrics of the score (it was he who suggested to Nash the employ of the line from Shakespeare's As You Like It—"Speak low, if you speak honey" [29]—in what has become the show'due south undying popular standard), Weill did much more than merely provide the tunes for the show. Co-ordinate to Grant, "Venus is perhaps the first show where the composer became the 'muscle'—a case study in backstage Realpolitik, with Weill outflanking the manager and guiding not only the creative squad only ultimately the show itself." [30] Further, Grant observes that Weill "was at middle a human of the theater, and his stated goal was to become the leading composer of the American stage, eclipsing Richard Rodgers, whom he regarded as his junior." [31]

Alongside Martin and Osato, who were widely considered the chief stars of the evidence several other prominent performers were featured. Portraying the barber Rodney Hatch was the radio and film performer Kenny Baker, whose credits include, in 1939, both the D'Oyly Carte film version of The Mikado and the Marx Brothers' At the Circus (also released 1939). According to Cheryl Crawford'southward biographer, Milly S. Berenger, his displays of anti-Semitism caused friction betwixt him and Perelman. [32] Upon retiring from performing shortly after actualization in Venus, Baker became a Christian Science practitioner.

John Boles, who appeared as Whitelaw Savory, was an actor who had begun his career on Broadway in the 1920s before becoming a Hollywood leading man, is probably best remembered today for his appearance as Victor Moritz in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931). Other memorable film roles included the early moving-picture show musicals Rio Rita and The Desert Song (both 1929), iii Shirley Temple vehicles, and equally the male lead opposite such stars as Irene Dunne, Gloria Swanson, Barbara Stanwyck, and Rosalind Russell. By the early 1940'southward his film career had virtually dried up and he returned to Broadway to take on the role of Savory Whitelaw, his concluding advent on the Groovy White Mode and i of his concluding as an thespian.

Teddy Hart, who played the secondary role of Taxi Blackness, one of the ii thugs responsible for carrying out Savory's dirty work was the blood brother of the lyricist Lorenz Hart. A diminutive figure, Hart had a successful career on stage (where he portrayed roles in, amid others, the Rodgers and Hart show The Boys from Syracuse and Gogol's The Inspector General) and screen. His biggest success was in the Runyonesque Three Men and a Horse, which he originated on Broadway and for which he won a Screen Actors Club for the motion-picture show version.

Taxi'south cohort, the laconic Stanley, was played by Harry Clark, a old concrete education teacher and factory worker whose first success in the union sponsored musical revue Pins and Needles in 1937 inspired him to take up a career as a professional person actor, during which he portrayed comic roles in B films, on phase, and on tv set. Clark besides appeared in the original production of Buss Me, Kate, in which, as Marker Northward. Grant notes, he sang in "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," a number Cole Porter "does seem to have modeled" on Venus'southward "The Problem with Women." [33]

For the role of Molly, Crawford and Weill hit the jackpot with the casting of Paula Laurence. Laurence was fresh off her successful Broadway advent portraying the sidekick stripper named Chiquita Hart opposite Ethel Merman in Something for the Boys, Cole Porter's wartime musical comedy. She garnered superb notices for Venus, and for her commitment of the two comic numbers previously described. [34] Throughout her long career, which began on Broadway as Helen of Troy in Orson Welles's Federal Theatre Product production of Marlowe'due south Doctor Faustus, Paula Laurence appeared in a range of entertainments, singing in such glamorous boites as Le Ruban Bleu and playing supporting roles in Junior Miss, Cyrano de Bergerac, Volpone, Ivanov, and Funny Daughter. In 1953 she married the theatrical producer Charles Bowden, [35] whose Broadway credits included everything from Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti to Lily Tomlin's i-woman Broadway show to numerous works of Tennessee Williams, the near of import of which was The Night of the Iguana, in which Laurence herself understudied Bette Davis. [36]

Later in life she also gained acclamation as a journalist and appeared in a few choice film roles and guest spots on tv, including the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows.

Noteworthy is the breadth of musical styles that Weill deployed in One Touch of Venus. The two ballets discussed earlier also equally the three additional extended dance sequences form the structural backbone of the show. The stylistic range deployed in the songs themselves is extraordinary for whatsoever Broadway musical, especially for one as outwardly conventional equally this one. In the comic songs alone, we veer from Molly's informal, sassy observations in "One Touch of Venus" to the more staccato emissions of her "Very, Very, Very" to Rodney'due south characteristically more awkward and innocent comic tones in "How Much I Love You" and its musically identical merely emotional inverse "That'south How I Am Sick of Dear."

The other purely comic songs range from "Manner Out West in Jersey" to "The Problem with Women" each of which represents a dissimilar musical genre. "Jersey" may not be a familiar vocal blazon to gimmicky audiences, but it represents a Western parody along the lines of "Bronco Busters" from George and Ira Gershwin's Daughter Crazy (1930) or "Style 21 Out W on West End Avenue" from Rodgers and Hart's Babes in Arms (1937) or fifty-fifty Cole Porter's "Don't Debate Me In" (beginning heard in the 1934 flick Adios Argentina).

Stephen Hinton also suggests that Weill and Nash might have been taking directly aim at "smash hit of the previous season, Oklahoma!" in this "patronizing, urban center-centric parody of [its] country-bumpkin globe." [37] In a non-unlike vein, "The Problem with Women" is a barbershop quartet number in which the inherent sexism of the overall theme in a conservative musical language is commencement by the final proto-feminist observation "the trouble with women is men."

The other comic number "New Art Is True Fine art" reflects the views about Modernistic Art discussed before. Certainly the virtually peculiar number in the musical is "Doctor Crippen." The conceit of the start human action finale is that Rodney is suspected of having murdered Gloria and Savory holds an (apparently impromptu) "Artist's Ball" at which the centerpiece is a staged musical re-enactment of the 1910 law-breaking of the real-life murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen. The music foreshadows "Progress" in Love Life and straight evokes "The Saga of Jenny" from Lady in the Dark, though it lacked the dazzling star power that Gertrude Lawrence brought to the latter number.

The curt-circuited Gothic horror of "Doctor Crippen" certainly represents an creative claiming to those who seek to revive One Touch of Venus, with the curtain falling on the corpse of Crippen appearing out of nowhere to sing the words "I gave not only my life / Only that of my married woman / For the love of Ethel Le Neve!" Interestingly, Mark N. Grant asserts that this number anticipates by a generation the Music Hall-G Guignol way of Sweeney Todd. [38]

By dissimilarity to this outlier of a number, Venus'south music forms the emotional center of the musical. The quarter note triplets employed in the "Venus Awakening" theme discussed in relation to "Westwind" are important musical building blocks in two of Venus'south other songs, including her opening number "I'm a Stranger Hither Myself."

Here the championship character is given not just a series of snappy rhetorical questions past Nash, just an unusual song structure past Weill, set to a snappy syncopated beat. Stephen Hinton elucides:

[T]he overall course of the vocal resists conventional categorization. Whereas the opening strophe more or less adheres to the thirty-two measure model with an viii-measure out span/release passage, the following sections effectively elide the beginning and end of the chorus while expanding the bridge component. In other words, each of the three choruses in Venus's verseless song has its ain unique release, each more aesthetic than the concluding. [39]

Venus's second vocal, "Foolish Heart," finds her still full of questions virtually this new earth into which she has been thrust. She is trying to detect why Rodney appears to exist allowed to her divine charms. Her doubts are expressed in three-quarter time, the linguistic communication of pure operetta, in stark contrast to the syncopations of her first song. Venus questions her allure to Rodney and the vagaries of romantic dearest ("Poor foolish heart / Crying for i who ignores you lot… / Flying from i who adores you").

Venus'due south last song, "That's Him," deliciously ungrammatical equally information technology is, is, according to Geoffrey Holden Cake, "representative of Weill'southward earlier ideal past distancing the singer from the object and providing a commentary on love rather than an experience of it. Venus even speaks of her love object in the 3rd person." [forty] Her thing with Rodney has finally been consummated and the goddess is, at least at this moment, delighted with her lover's pure ordinariness ("He'due south as simple as a swim in summer, / Non arty, not actory / He's similar a plumber when you demand a plumber / He'southward satisfactory.")

A possible reason for this distancing is Venus's "ambiguity towards Rodney… despite his endearing qualities, [he] remains an unlikely romantic partner, especially for a Venus." [41] A significant part of this song's appeal, according to Mark Northward. Grant, is the "kaleidoscopic orchestration… nigh as if the orchestra is itself an actor mirroring Venus's lines." [42] In performance the ambivalence inherent in this song tin express itself as a mannerly insouciance. [43]

In contrast, Venus'due south duet with Rodney, "Speak Low" is perhaps the greatest love vocal in the unabridged Weill catechism. Set to an attracting rumba beat, the melodic contours emphasize the quarter note triplets encountered in "Stranger Here Myself" and the "Venus Awakening" theme, which expand confronting the syncopations of the accompaniment. The longing implied in the music finds its ultimate expression in the text, which reveals the existential malaise of the dearest between human and mortal as a struggle confronting time and mortality ("Our summer twenty-four hour period withers away too soon… Our moment is swift, like ships adrift we're swept apart besides soon… Fourth dimension is then old and beloved so cursory / Love is pure gold and time a thief… The curtain descends, ev'rything ends also presently") Indeed, the truth of this lyric extends to all love relationships, and this existential malaise expressed against the undulations of Weill'due south incessantly seductive tune accounts for its continuing popularity.

Opening night notices for One Touch of Venus were almost entirely favorable, fifty-fifty ecstatic, but when awards flavour came around, the show did not sweep the field. The forerunner to the Tony Awards, which were first awarded in 1946, was the Donaldson Awards, which ran from 1944-1955. I Touch of Venus was cited for various Donaldson Awards, including i for Mary Martin for Actress in a Musical, Agnes de Mille for Trip the light fantastic Management, Sono Osato for Female Dancer, and Kenny Baker for Supporting Actor in a Musical. Interestingly it won no musical awards. All-time Musical was awarded to Carmen Jones, which also won 2 awards for Oscar Hammerstein 2 for both Book and Lyrics. Kurt Weill lost for Score to Georges Bizet (!) for Carmen Jones, which too won for Sets and for Costumes. Peradventure not surprisingly, Elia Kazan was also overlooked for the Managing director of a Musical citation.

Though they appear to be strange bedfellows, Ane Impact of Venus and Carmen Jones practise share one similarity: they fall, at to the lowest degree peripherally, into the subgenre of World War Two musicals. (1 must remember that Carmen works in a munitions factory and Joe, Bizet'south Don José, is stationed in the Air Force.) Other works produced during this period that fall into this category include Cole Porter'south aforementioned Something for the Boys, Irving Berlin's revue This is the Army (1942, filmed 1943, itself a retooling of his WWI revue Yip Yip Yaphank) and of course On the Town, produced in Broadway in 1944, based in turn on a scenario used in Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins's ballet Fancy Free.

Though it is not primarily concerned with military personnel, as are the other pieces, Venus does bear certain earmarks of these other works. As Stephen Hinton points out, background characters, including the crewman with whom Sono Osato dances in "Twoscore Minutes for Lunch" and the aviator who spirits Venus away at the determination of the "Bacchanale," appear throughout the piece. [44] In the context of the dubiousness of war, songs like "I'm a Stranger Hither Myself" and, peculiarly, "Speak Low" acquire an almost unbearable poignancy, peculiarly when deriving from the pen of a composer who was living out the final years of his all-too-brusk life in imposed exile from his country of origin.

Information technology is perchance surprising that the seemingly lightweight One Touch of Venus achieves the same musical sophistication and philosophical profundity of his other less formulaic American piece of work. Information technology is sincerely to be hoped that the Staatsoperette's revival of Venus, "aureate age Broadway'south answer to the racy sexual activity comedy of filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch" [45] puts the prevarication to Geoffrey Holden Block'southward assessment that "Weill'due south popularly designed American works remain unrevived and perhaps unrevivable." [46]

[1] David Savran, "Operation Review: 1 Bear on of Venus in Dessau," Kurt Weill Newsletter, Volume 28:1 (Spring 2010), 18.

[two] bruce d mcclung and Paul R. Laird, "Musical sophistication on Broadway: Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein," in William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 170–1.

[3] Anstey'south first success as a writer was the 1882 story Vice Versa, in which a father and son switch bodies. This theme has been co-opted past popular culture many times since, often without crediting Anstey for the source material. The offset Vice Versa film, a British silent, appeared in 1916; a second British version from 1948 is directed by Peter Ustinov and stars Roger Livesey and Anthony Newley, while a subsequently Hollywood version dates from 1988 and is directed by Brian Gilbert and stars Gauge Reinhold and Fred Savage.

[four] Stephen Hinton, Weill'due south Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 310.

[five] Marker N. Grant, "I Bear upon of Venus: An Appreciation," The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, www.kwf.org/pages/ww-1-touch-of-venus-an-appreciation.html (accessed 13.02.2019).

[half dozen] Fascinatingly, the first of his collections of poetry, published in 1938, years before his work with Kurt Weill, is entitled I'm a Stranger Here Myself (New York: Little Brownish and Company).

[7] Laura West Perelman was the sis of the writer Nathanael West, who married Eileen McKenney, one of the two sisters in Wonderful Town, the 1953 Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical revived by the Staatsoperette Dresden in 2016. The couple were killed in a gruesome car accident on December 22, 1940, four days before the theatrical adaptation of Ruth McKenney'southward brusk story collection My Sister Eileen, the basis for Wonderful Town, opened on Broadway.

[viii] Perelman'south first work for Broadway, the musical revue Walk a Trivial Faster, starred Beatrice Lillie and featured music past Vernon Knuckles and lyrics past Yip Harburg. His last contribution to musicals was the creaky book to Cole Porter'due south final work, the 1958 TV musical Aladdin, which starred Sal Mineo, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Cyril Ritchard, and Basil Rathbone.

[9] In fact, Arden plays this very role in the pallid 1948 film version that, though information technology features the exquisite vision of Ava Gardner equally Venus, alongside Robert Walker (a non-singing Hatch, now given the first name of Eddie), the crooner Dick Haymes (in the role of Hatch's best buddy Joe Grant, plain added then he can sing a truncated version of "Speak Low," which cuts between scenes of Haymes and Gardner, dubbed by Eileen Wilson), and Tom Conway as Whitelaw, is stripped of virtually all of Weill'southward music and suffers irreparably from the excision.

[10] Geoffrey Holden Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 154.

[xi] Ethan Mordden, Beautiful Mornin': The Broadway Musical in the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 161.

[12] Naomi Blumberg, "Alfred H. Barr," Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-H-Barr-Jr. (accessed xiii.02.2019).

[13] Hinton, 314.

[14] Block, 140.

[xv] Hinton, 310.

[16] In fact, Dietrich never sang a annotation of Weill's music before a public audition, though while she was because the office of Venus she did perform "Surabaya-Johnny" privately for Weill and Crawford, to her own accompaniment on the musical saw, as well every bit later for her onstage audition for Venus, where composer and producer realized that, for Dietrich'southward vocalization to carry in the theater, discreet miking would accept to be employed.

[17] Kara Anne Gardner, Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 52–3.

[18] Ballad Oja, Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Fourth dimension of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 135.

[19] Sono Osato died on December 26, 2018 at the historic period of 99.

[20] Gardner, 53.

[21] Corbett was, coincidentally, considered for the office of Venus after Dietrich had turned down the part.

[22] Mainbocher, quoted in "Mary Martin'due south Dress," Life, November 22, 1943, 58.

[23] Quoted in Gilbert Millstein, "Mainbocher Stands for a Fitting, " New York Times, March 25, 1956, 36.

[24] Gardner, 54.

[25] Ibid., threescore

[26] Hinton, 310. Hinton incorrectly assesses this as the sole example of quoted music in the score, though the introduction to "Style Out West in New Bailiwick of jersey" unambiguously if briefly quotes the American folk song "Turkey in the Straw."

[27] Elia Kazan, Kazan on Directing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 149.

[28] Mark N. Grant, "I Bear on of Weill," liner notes to recording of One Touch of Venus (Jay Records, CDJAY21362, 2014), 12.

[29] Grant, "One Touch on of Weill,", nineteen.

[30] Grant, "Ane Touch of Venus: An Appreciation."

[31] Grant, "One Bear on of Weill," 18.

[32] Milly S. Berenger, A Gambler'due south Instinct: The Story of Broadway Producer Cheryl Crawford (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 80.

[33] Grant, "One Affect of Weill," p. 15.

[34] In 1983 she appeared under the ægis of the New Amsterdam Theatre Visitor in a concert version of 1 Touch on of Venus in New York's Town Hall reprising the office she created 40 years earlier. Her performance of "Very, Very, Very" from this unmarried concert performance can exist heard on YouTube (https://youtu.be/5j92-zkv4z8).

[35] In 1937, during his early on career as an histrion, Bowden appeared in the ensemble in performances at the Manhattan Opera House of Weill's The Eternal Route, a musical pageant commemorating the history of Jewish life directed past Max Reinhardt with book and lyrics translated from Franz Werfel'southward original German.

[36] In fact, Laurence and Bowden were so close to Williams that, as his death, he named them the guardians of his institutionalized sis Rose, the inspiration for Laura in The Glass Menagerie.

[37] Hinton, 313.

[38] Grant, "One Touch on of Venus: An Appreciation."

[39] Hinton, 313.

[40] Cake, 150–i.

[41] Block, 152.

[42] Grant, "1 Touch on of Weill," 17.

[43] The composer himself captures the charm of this vocal like no other interpreter in a demo recording graced by his mannerly German language-accented English language (https://youtu.be/UzkTIo4uECk, accessed xiv February 2019).

[44] Hinton, 307–8.

[45] Grant, "Ane Touch of Venus: An Appreciation." 29

[46] Block, 136.

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