42nd Street: Taking It from the Top. And to the Top!
The history of a great Broadway musical about Broadway musicals
As observed and researched by Kevin Lane Dearinger
On July 10, The Lexington Theatre Company will present the inaugural production of its tenth season. Lavishly and lovingly produced, 42nd Street will mark a triumphant return of Musical Comedy to the Opera House stage.
Yes, Musical Comedy!
“Get out your tap shoes, Frances!”
Sequins, feathers, rhinestones, laughs, tunes, full orchestra, breath-taking talent, and spectacular dancing, with an avalanche of tapping feet!
Bright costumes, bright lights, and bright performers.
And heart!
Lots and lots of heart!
A celebration. A happiness.
Theatrical bliss!
42nd Street is a musical about the visceral joy of musicals, a first-class reminder of the palpable excitement that can lift you out of your seat and send your spirits to the skies. It is a musical about putting on a musical called Pretty Lady.
And it will all be pretty darn wonderful.
After all, it’s The Lexington Theatre Company. The Lex knows its way around a musical.
But before the joyful stage musical came a hard-shelled film.
Before that film came a hard-hearted book.
It’s been a long journey.
42nd Street, the novel, was published in 1932. The author was Boston-born Bradford Ropes (1905-1966), a hoofer and adagio dancer. As “Billy Bradford,” he was especially well-known for his high kicks. His talent and ambition took him to Broadway, Paris and London, and on tour across America and Europe. He had a great career.
While it lasted.
Suddenly, the Twenties stopped roaring, and the golden days of vaudeville began to fade. (Ask Mama Rose in Gypsy!) First-class bookings also faded, and Billy found himself playing a four-a-day schedule in second-tier venues. Backstage, between shows, he set out to write a realistic novel about what it was really like to put on a Broadway musical.
Down and dirty. No holds barred.
Out of experience and imagination, Ropes conjured up a cauldron of ambitious, ruthless characters: a demanding director, a selfish leading lady, her mercenary boyfriend, a cynical juvenile, a neophyte who learns fast, and a sassy ensemble of over-worked dancers. The novel’s cast of characters were not sugar-dusted confections in an idealized show business
Three gritty backstage novels by Bradford Ropes
Ropes gets the details right: the backstage slang, the onstage sweat, the survival instincts, the fragile egos, the sharp edges of an edgy art, and the racy tangle of backstage romances that can be more business than show. The novel is gritty, witty, shocking, insightful, and astonishingly truthful. Its energy is irresistible.
Almost certainly, Bradford Ropes wrote his novel with the silver screen in mind.
Warner Brothers Studios bought the story while it was still in galley proofs and put it immediately into production.
Warners was known for its stark, life-is-tough films, and Ropes’ novel seemed a perfect fit. So much so that this story about staging a light-hearted musical was, at first, not going to be much of a musical, but more of a dark drama. Very Warner Brothers.
But it grew into something more.
Harry Warren and Al Dubin added songs, including some instant hits, and characters got a bit of a makeover. The director developed a sympathy-inducing illness, although he still brow-beat his actors. Dorothy Brock, the steely leading lady, earned her redemption in the film and in the warm performance of actress Bebe Daniels. The sexual politics were still there—the film was made before the infamous Production Code began pasting fig-leaves all over Hollywood’s indiscretions—but with the heat turned down from high to simmer. Boyfriend Pat Denning became less of a gigolo, and seedy juvenile Billy Lawlor became a twinkly-eyed flirt with good hair, played by Dick Powell. Neophyte Peggy Sawyer was played by a newcomer to film, the legendary Ruby Keeler, she of the heavy feet, flat delivery of dialogue, endearing smile, and endless-endless charm. The ensemble served up a full meal of wise-cracks, many of them flung out with a side order of side-eye by the great Una Merkel and by soon-to-be-star Ginger Rogers, fairly fresh from her Broadway success in the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy—and wearing a monocle.
Colorized lobby card for the black-and-white film 42nd Street
Warner Brothers did more than scrub down the novel’s characters. In a crucial move, the studio transferred the story from the Twenties to the early Thirties. The movie became a contemporary tale, set in the depths of the Great Depression, when getting and keeping a job, on stage or off, could be a matter of life and death. The 1933 audiences knew that the characters in the movie shared their worries about the economic and social chaos around them.
The secret sauce, however, turned out the be the movie’s choreographer.
Busby Berkeley (1895-1976) had a background in precision military drills, and he brought that fastidiousness to film, creating a whole new choreographic vocabulary for the screen. Hollywood had only been exploring the uses of sound for a few years, and its earliest attempts at musicals had often been plagued by poor sound quality and static camera work. Berkeley refashioned the whole genre. His roving camera and overhead shots of kaleidoscopic patterns of human bodies (usually female legs) became his hallmarks. He went “big,” he but made sure that his audiences stayed up close for the excitement.
Warner Brothers scored a huge success with 42nd Street and followed up with a lineup of backstage stories, glitz and grit in black and white. Look up Golddiggers of 1933 and Busby Berkley’s production number, “Remember My Forgotten Man.” You will see musical theatre coming of age with devastating social commentary.
MGM set up its own style in musicals, with color and sentiment and Judy Garland. 20th Century Fox, RKO, and other studios followed the demand. The genre flourished for the next quarter-of-a-century, but the older films, released for a time-stamped first-run and only occasionally re-released, were shut up in the studio vaults.
Then came television, with its voracious appetite for content and air-time to fill up late at night and on Saturday afternoons.
“Revival” art houses began to spring up, often near college campuses, where Busby Berkley found a midnight audience of younger movie lovers, fascinated by his pre-psychedelic fantasies. In 1966, the plot to 42nd Street reemerged off-Broadway in a small “camp” musical, Dames at Sea. Its ingenue, played by Bernadette Peters, was even called “Ruby,” in homage to Ms. Keeler.
In 1971, the real Ruby Keeler came out of retirement to star in a lavish Broadway revival of the 1920s hit No, No, Nannette. If her taps and dialogue were still heavy, her charm remained immense. Newspapers declared the outbreak of a “Nostalgia Craze.”
In the late Seventies, the writers Mark Bramble and Michael Stewart decided it was time for the story of a Broadway musical to finally reach Broadway. They proposed a show that was pure entertainment—bright, light, and full of heart.
Is there ever a wrong time for joy?
Bramble and Stewart pitched their brainchild to a number of producers and ended up with David Merrick, the successful, if often notorious, producer of such hits as Oliver and Hello, Dolly. Domineering and habitually gloomy, Merrick shared the show—briefly--with a few other producers, but he soon bought them out, determined to have sole say over a show that he intended to be his greatest gift to Broadway.
To direct and choreograph, Merrick turned to the genius of Gower Champion, who had so beautifully crafted Hello, Dolly into a hit. Champion was an old MGM song-and-dance man who started his career in nightclubs. Bradford Ropes would have recognized a kindred spirit. Champion was class act, and his participation guaranteed the razzle and the dazzle of musical comedy at its most crowd-pleasing.
Fosse with less pelvic isolation and less visible onstage underwear.
The cast featured Broadway royalty: Jerry Orbach at his scowling, growling, charming best; Tammy Grimes at her most eccentric, and Lee Roy Reams at his most electric.
During the pre-Broadway run in Washington, Merrick was stubborn, unwilling to let the show come into New York until it met with his standards of perfection.
Meanwhile, Gower Champion began a romantic relationship with his show’s ingenue. Later, Merrick would make the production’s “Anytime Annie” the fourth of his five wives. Bradford Ropes might have slipped such “showmances” into his novel without winking.
Well, maybe with just a wee bit of a wink.
Eventually, Merrick let 42nd Street come into Manhattan, but he delayed previews and the opening, banishing critics from the Winter Garden Theatre. The cast grew tired of playing the show without an audience and brought in their dolls and teddy bears to fill the seats.
At last, Merrick gave the green light. 42nd Street opened to a star-spangled audience that stood and cheered the elated cast.
Then the unthinkable happened.
David Merrick, chin in hand, appeared on the stage, looking gloomier than usual. To a stunned audience and horrified cast, he announced the secret he had kept to himself all evening.
“Gower Champion died this afternoon.”
To protect his fellow actors, Jerry Orbach, a peerless pro, called for the crew to ring down the curtain. Private grief was not to be shared with the public.
The next day, every newspaper in America reported Champion’s death as front-page news. 42nd Street became a shrine to the director-choreographer’s memory.
And a hit.
David Merrick predicted that the show would run forever.
The original production won many awards, including a Tony for Best Musical, and stayed for eight years on Broadway, spawned numerous touring companies, and was a hit in major cities around the world. It was revised and revived for another successful Broadway run. And for more awards.
A dark and gritty novel about producing a Broadway musical had become a thrilling salute to the history of an entire genre. Musical Comedy, “the most glorious words in the English language.”
And glorious it is!
Bradford Ropes would surely have cheered this celebration of an art form he loved. Billy Bradford would have certainly responded to the show with one of his signature high kicks. He always wanted to go out there and “come back a star.”
42nd Street glows with a contagious joy that might just send you in search of your own pair of tap shoes.
Sometimes that joy is just what the world needs most.
Or maybe “sometimes” is all the time.
Maybe right now is a good time?
And, well, wow!
Just wow!
Musical Comedy!
It makes life better.
Bonus Clip: King of Jazz (1930), for a glimpse of what a show like Pretty Lady, the musical within the musical 42nd Street, might have looked. Directed by John Murray Anderson, who, with Hassard Short, was a model for director Julian Marsh in Bradford Ropes’ novel. Full movie, with original color restored:
The Lexington Theatre Company’s production of 42nd Street plays the Lexington Opera House for six glorious performances, July 10-13. Curtain time on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evening at 7:30, Sunday at 6:30, with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 1:00.
Kevin Lane Dearinger is a retired actor, singer, and teacher. His published works include four theatre histories, six volumes of poetry, several plays, and two memoirs, Bad Sex in Kentucky and On Stage with Bette Davis: Inside the Fabulous Flop of Miss Moffat. His theatrical career took him to Broadway, on tour across the United States, Canada, and Japan, and to many of the best regional theatres in the country. Cast lists have called him Freddy, Cornelius, Motel, Albert, Henrik, Enoch, Enoch, Jr., Jim, Etienne, Courtice, Herman, Charlie, Lucas, Sam, Paul, Mac, Josiah, Frank, Billy, Sylvester, Waldo, Teenager, The Boy, Androcles, Dromio, First Bartender, Footman, Flunky, Also Featuring, Others in Cast Include, and quite a few other character names. When he was very young, he sang in a Broadway tribute to director Joshua Logan at the Imperial Theatre; his last professional performance was in a Broadway tribute to Stephen Sondheim at the New Amsterdam. He is proud of his Actors Equity Pension and counts among his blessings the privilege of sitting in on rehearsals with The Lexington Theatre Company.
