Music from "Anything Goes"

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Music
Genre:	Broadway & Vocalists
Artist:	Cole Porter

Cole Porter (1891-1964) wrote both music and lyrics to some of the most popular tunes of mid-century America and whose musicals, such as "Anything Goes", are still being revived on "Broadway" long after most others have bit the dust. It would be impossible to do one blog or a series them on all the great songs he created at the piano in a professional career that spanned 40 years. So I'm just going to take some hits from this one show.
Here are a few of the other songs he did: "Begin the Beguine", "Night and Day", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "Love for Sale", "True Love", "Let's Misbehave", "In the Still of the Night", "At Long Last Love", "I Get A Kick Out of You", "Don't Fence Me In", et al.




Porter here does the title tune from his 1934 hit Broadway show:


Some Wikipedia Biography: "Cole Albert Porter (June 9, 1891 – October 15, 1964) was an American composer and songwriter. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, he defied the wishes of his domineering grandfather and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn towards musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike most successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote both the lyrics and the music for his songs.

After a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Porter was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 30s, but in 1947 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, Kiss Me, Kate."



Porter's life did not make for honest easy story-telling in 1945, when Cary Grant and Alexis Smith stared in the first bio film "Night and Day". For one thing Porter much preferred the intimate company of men to that of women. Most people who knew something of Porter's private life considered the film a bit of a farce in part from that omission. He did marry a Kentucky heiress named Linda Lee Thomas around 1920 and they stayed married until her death in 1954. It is generally considered that this was a marriage more of conviviality than conjugal however and Porter continued seeing men, especially in his days in Hollywood working on films starring the likes of Fred Astaire and Judy Garland.


Then there also was the question of if, as he said in some interviews, he was a member of the French Foreign Legion in 1917. (Porter's first Broadway musical, "See America First", had also debut that year.) Biographers dispute what exactly he did in France , although it is safe to say he likely joined an American-organized relief unit delivering supplies to Allied soldiers and may well have entertained troops on a portable piano at hospitals or near the front. The 1945 film errs on the side of Porter as a solider. A more recent film "De-Lovely", with Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, fore-goes the early life of Porter and picks up where he is pianist among Paris expatriate swells in the Twenties.

Porter's music, culled in places like Paris, Venice, London, combined Old World class with New world energy, as one critic noted. There is a sense that a form of popular songwriting is reaching its apex with so many of his works. He became a byword for sophistication in a medium--the Broadway Musical---that sorely needed some Continental polish and some American Middle-West vigor.

Here's the man himself, singing his most famous tune, "You're the Top" from the 1934 show, "Anything Goes". According to Bob Toomey on You Tube, "Porter composed it during a cruise on Germany's Rhine River. He asked his fellow passengers to tell him what they considered important in their lives, or important in general, and Porter worked them into the lyric."

Porter names 37 different people and places in this one, all quite deftly mixing up the pop zeitgeist.




The finale of "Anything Goes" is Blow, Gabriel, Blow". Here it is sung by Sutton Foster and the cast of the 2010 Broadway Musical revival. Ms. Sutton won a Tony for her performance as Reno Sweeney.

The Marx Brothers- Capt Spalding's Adventures in Africa/ "Animal Crackers" (1930)

In the early Seventies, the Marx Brothers films and their anarchistic collisions with authority in high society, grand shipboard cruises, the halls of government and the groves of academia were very popular on American late-night and sometimes prime-time television. The main surviving Marx Brother, Groucho, was a celebrity above celebrities and could be seen from time to time on talk-shows, expounding his own wit and talking about the great scenes in his films.

The brothers honed their talent on the vaudeville stages of America and Canada.

Oddly enough, when the brothers first played in England, their act, a tried and true spoof of a school room, did not go over well and the audience threw pennies at them! Something didn't translate in the sketch. Later, of course, their stock went up "over there" when the movies came out. .


Otherwise their career was quite successful. W.C. Fields, a comic juggler and no median wit himself, actually refused to go on stage one week in Ohio when he was booked in a vaudeville show with the Brother Marx as the opening act. They literally wore their audiences out with their mayhem. "The only act I could never follow!", the great Fields later said.

The first two of their sound films, including this one, were originally stage plays and were shot in an early sound stage for Paramount studios near New York City.
The Marxes, particularly Groucho, ad-libbed so much on stage it drove the writers of the shows around the bend! "Hold on!" the prolific scribe George S. Kaufman said from the wings at a Broadway performance of "The Coconuts" , "I think I heard a line I actually wrote!"

Buoyed by the efforts such great comic writers as Kaufman--who wrote "The Man who Came to Dinner" and many other comic and dramatic hits--as well as the equally famous S.J. Perlman, Harry Ruby and Mort Ryskind, the brothers took to Hollywood where original screenplays were put together at Paramount and later MGM studios to suit their blend of physical and wise-cracking comedy.

Here is one of Groucho's best bits--as the famed but likely fake African great white hunter Captain Spalding in "Animal Crackers". Enjoy.

The Tuscaloosa is a river in the state of Alabama just so you know.

Musical Dynamos: Four By Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

With a song in my heart
I behold your adorable face.
Just a song at the start
but it soon is a hymn to your grace.
When the music swells
I'm touching you hand
It tells that your're standing near, and ..
At the sound of your voice
heaven opens his portals to me.
Can I help but rejoice
that a song such as ours came to be?
But I always knew
I would live life through
with a song in my heart for you.

(Rodgers and Hart, "With a Song in My Heart" from "Spring is Here")   

Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Lorenz (Larry) Hart (1895-1943)  began their  collaboration  as Broadway and later Hollywood musical-comedy  composers in 1919, when they both met while enrolled at Columbia University in New York City.  After working on reviews and selling individual songs to stage shows, they finally broke through big time with a New York production of  "Garrick Gayities" in 1925.  Success nearly came too late for Rodgers, who almost left show business  to become a underwear salesman.  

   By the time their partnership ended with Hart's death (to a combination of double pneumonia exacerbated by alcoholism and acute depression) little over  two decades after their meeting, the duo had written 550 songs for  twenty six broadway shows and over a dozen Hollywood films. Many of the songs from these shows are still sung in cabaret shows, musical revivals and on CD by popular contemporary performers like Diana Krall and Rod Stewart. 

The American musical story form that pervaded Broadway in the 1920's was a pretty tame medium, with librettos almost entirely based on threadbare romantic boy-meets-girl plots with cardboard characters and predictable situations.  Rogers and Hart came to dominate this form and, when audiences were more receptive, transcended it with more sophisicated songs, culminating in the landmark 1941 production of "Pal Joey", based on a John O'Hara story that featured a main character who was a dislike able heel.

In 1927, one of their first major hit musicals was "The Girl Friend".  Here's the title tune by the Savoy Orpheans:

    

 

From Wikipedia:

"Time Magazine devoted a cover story to Rodgers and Hart (September 26,1938). They wrote that their success "rests on a commercial instinct that most of their rivals have apparently ignored". The article also noted the "spirit of adventure." "As Rodgers and Hart see it, what was killing musicomedy [sic] was its sameness, its tameness, its eternal rhyming of June with moon."

 "Hart's lyrics, facile, vernacular, dazzling, sometimes playful, sometimes melancholic, raised the standard for Broadway songwriting. "His ability to write cleverly and to come up with unexpected, polysyllabic rhymes was something of a trademark, but he also had the even rarer ability to write with utmost simplicity and deep emotion." Rodgers, as a creator of melodies, ranks with Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin."

Here's an apex of early American musical films--"Isn't It Romantic", from "Love Me Tonight (1932),  performed by Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier, an aging budding groom, a taxi-driver, some Hispanic extras playing gypsies, an effete songwriter, and  a lost patrol of French infantry men marching aimlessly  in the San Fernando Valley above Hollywood. If this isn't romantic, then nothing is!   

   

    

This next song is from the Rodgers and Hart Broadway hit, "On Your Toes".  Produced in 1936, it was the first Broadway show to combine jazz music with classical ballet, featuring an extended ballet sequence with the music to "Slaughter on 10th Avenue".  It was conceived originally as  a movie vehicle  for Fred Astaire, but he thought the ballet was "too highbrow" for his film fans, and he was equally reluctant to trade in his debonair image for the role of a meek professor.   

"Glad to be Unhappy" was recorded in February, 1955, for a Frank Sinatra album called "In the Wee Small Hours".  Some music critics have noted that his marital break-up with Ava Gardner helped bring a greater poignancy to his superb voice.      

 

Here is a 2002 recording of for a PBS Special saluting Richard Rodgers. "With a Song in My Heart" is performed by Ron Raines,  Rebecca Luker, Audra McDonald, Douglas Sills, Mary Testa, and Lillias White..

After Hart's death, Richard Rodgers collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein on a series of other major musicals like "The King and I", "The Sound of Music", et al.  But, in my opinion, this was his best and least pretentious  work was with with Lorenz Hart, a great lyricist not replaceable.  

 

Overture to Candide - Leonard Bernstein

Although this 1956 musical adaptation of Voltaire's novella was not well-received initially by New York critics, despite its impressive musical and literary pedigree, this overture has become a staple of symphonic programs all over the world. The show itself was later revived on Broadway in 1974 by director Harold Prince, to better success.
Here, the composer himself, the great Leonard Bernstein, conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in a definitive 1989 performance.

"Candide"

Music: Leonard Bernstein
Lyrics: Richard Wilbur
John Latouche
Dorothy Parker
Lillian Hellman
Stephen Sondheim
Leonard Bernstein
Book:
Lillian Hellman
Hugh Wheeler

http://www.answers.com/topic/candide