| re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 05:16 pm EST 12/27/18 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 05:14 pm EST 12/27/18 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - Jax 03:54 am EST 12/27/18 | |
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| Jax, you wrote, “You have to consider that he may have felt the opening sequence killed the show precisely because he wasn't asked to orchestrate it.” From what source are you getting this info? I’m wondering if you’ve been looking at the Here's Love section of Suskin's The Sound of Broadway Music, which I was looking at, but it doesn’t say that there. If Suskin is right, Walker did all of the opening parade sequence except the climax (the “Adeste Fidelis Finale”). Do you have different info from some other source? Walker almost surely would have been making the decisions as to who orchestrated what. By this time, he was farming out relatively little of the scores on which he was credited as orchestrator. My guess would be that he asked Elliot Lawrence to do that sequence to take some of the load off himself. Lawrence liked to orchestrate, and often had a hand in the orchestrations of the shows for which he was the musical director. During this period, Walker usually had the little-known Arnold Goland do the stuff he didn’t want to do or didn’t have time for, but in this case I would imagine that Lawrence asked to be allowed to do that stuff. My guess is that Walker then did not like what Lawrence did because he felt it was out of style with the rest of the sequence and with the rest of the show, but the others did like it. In the letter to Ostrow, it sounds like Walker himself did some of the “goosing it up” work that resulted in what he felt was a “brassy, blatant score,” and he then regretted having succumbed to what sounds like pressure to do this in order to fill the Fisher. Perhaps Michael Kidd was pushing them in that direction (hence the Phil Lang remark). Anyway, if you have different info on this, please let me know. Ostrow's remarks quoted in Suskin, if indeed you also were looking at them or are aware of them, are odd (as his remarks so often are, and in his books he gets major facts wrong). At first he seems to be saying something like "Don was right when the rest of us were wrong. We were celebrating the out-of-town reviews, but he knew something was wrong." But then he suggests that Walker was mostly upset about the erosion of his relationship with Frank Loesser. Maybe he was, but Walker was right that something was wrong, which Ostrow seems to acknowledge. And then Peter Howard is quoted. As with Ostrow, Howard starts by saying that the show should have been better. It's not clear that Howard knew specifically what Walker had written to Ostrow. I’m not sure if you’re interpreting what Howard said as suggesting that Walker was bitter because he wanted to be involved in creating the dance music for the parade sequence. But Walker would not have been involved in doing that sort of thing. He wasn’t a dance arranger. Howard often did dance arrangements and incidental underscoring, but he didn't orchestrate (or if he did occasionally dabble, he didn't do any of it this time). Walker could be a bitter guy, but in this case the points he made in his letter to Ostrow are similar to points that have been made by other people about other shows. It reminds me of two cases. First, Sheldon Harnick talking about how Tessie O'Shea's sequence in The Girl Who Came to Supper killed that show because no one wanted to go back to the story after that. Walter Kerr even said something like that in his review, while praising her sequence, although unlike Harnick, Kerr did not seem to think that the problem was that the sequence was essentially irrelevant. (It seems to me that they should have introduced her briefly in act one, but had her big sequence halfway through act two. Of course, the show would still have had big problems.) The other is something Peter Hunt has said about 1776 when it was out of town, although I'm not sure his discussion of this has been published. He said that the scene with the Continentalers shooting the ducks had to be cut because it was so exciting to the audience that everything afterward seemed dull. It's a sad rule, but an important one (and one that, according to Hunt, Jerome Robbins knew well): Sometimes the creators of a musical have to cut something that the audience seems to love because it's ultimately harmful to the show as a whole. Of course, maybe if what followed the opening sequence in Here's Love had been better, the opening sequence would have been just fine. |
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