Broadway Before It Was Forbidden

I’ve been having a ball with Tommy Krasner’s painstaking restoration of the 1934 Broadway review Life Begins at 8:40, a long-forgotten jewel of a show with a score by Harold Arlen, E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, and Ira Gershwin. Now there’s a gold-medal team for you: Arlen and Harburg were soon to achieve immortality via The Wizard of Oz, while Ira Gershwin had some free time on his hands before establishing his own lux aeterna, while brother George immersed himself in research for Porgy and Bess.

Life Begins at 8:40: delectable, delicious, and delightful

The resultant review turned out to be a delectable sendup of musical theater, jam-packed with sly references, song cues, and parodies of then-famous, now-forgotten folk and their foibles. Both Harburg and Gershwin were world-class wits who honed their wordplay to samurai-sword sharpness, so there’s not a dull rhyme anywhere. The album jacket is kind enough to include a handy glossary, so in case you’re befuddled by "Liggetts", "Samuel Seabury", "Fanchon and Marco", or "Violet Rays", you can look them up. (In order: a fast-food chain, a judge who ousted a New York mayor, a ballroom dance team, a faddish but useless electric cure-all.) And yes, I had to look all of those up, but I did recognize other references: Jimmy Walker, Fiorella La Guardia, The Five-Foot Shelf, Evelyn Nesbit, Lydia Pinkham’s tonic, the Sisters of the Eastern Star, the Knights of Pythias, the Redmen, and the Woodmen. Precisely why I recognized them is another matter, but there’s a wide reading habit for you.

Harold Arlen? Well…he may not be as well remembered as Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, or Richard Rodgers but nonetheless he ranks right up there with the all-time best. Stormy Weather, The Man the Got Away, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, It’s Only a Paper Moon, and tons more. He even has some fun parodying his own hits—including a sly dig to Stormy Weather in the patter song I Couldn’t Hold My Man.

For those whose knowledge of the 1930s is restricted to Hollywood flicks and the prissy dictates of the Hayes Office, the occasional rauchiness of the lyrics may offer some surprises:

I spend hours and hours
Rehearsing and playing the goddamndest flowers!

When the tenor with the apparatus known as vocal
Starts to bore the hell out of the front-row yokel…

When a Lesbian was an islander
and not your
Wife’s best friend

Long before "Cabaret’s" menage-à-trois Three Ladies, we get two guys and one gal:

Night and day, ma cherie,
Me for you and you,
And you and you for me. …

C’est la vie!
C’est Paree!
In a cute little love nest for three. …

And I’m not even going to go into the meticulous mispronunciations of "Balzac" in the delectable Quartet Erotica. Just remember that the guy doing the mispronouncing was Bert Lahr—soon to join Harburg and Arlen on the Immortality Express as The Wizard of Oz‘s Cowardly Lion. (Scarecrow Ray Bolger was another Life Begins at 8:40 lead; that must have been quite a reunion at MGM a few years later.)

Even when I was a kid growing up, Broadway shows (or the national tour/summer stock versions that I usually saw) featured good-sized orchestras. Real orchestras—you know, the ones with violins and woodwinds and brass and percussion, the ones with people sitting on chairs and playing acoustic instruments while reading music off a music stand, the ones with a conductor directing the proceedings. Unless my memory fails me, Fort Worth’s Casa Mañana didn’t amplify the orchestra, although they probably used some discreet microphones for the folks on stage; the theater is a geodesic dome and I can’t imagine the sound going anywhere but up, up, and away. But it was a real, full-sized orchestra. Gypsy with its brassy glitz, Carousel with its Schubertian wash of sound, South Pacific with its Brahmsian glow, Camelot with its Ravelian splendor. No synthesizers, no Macbook Pro running MainStage, no rock bands. I probably sound like an old fart rocking on the front porch and bemoaning the crassness of modern life, but dang it all, those orchestras were wonderful. (The recent revival of South Pacific went for it and paid for the whole orchestral enchilada, and the audience absolutely ate it up.)

Back in the 1930s a trio of orchestrators ruled the 42nd Street roost: Hans Spialek, Robert Russell Bennett, and Don Walker. As it turns out, all three of them worked on Life Begins at 8:40. Spialek was particularly good with swing-band sounds; that 1930s art-deco tube-radio dance-band with its saxophones and hi-hat cymbals—that’s Spialek. I suppose we all know some of Bennett’s work, provided we’ve ever heard a Rodgers & Hammerstein show. And Don Walker? He was responsible for Carousel, one of Broadway’s all-time orchestral masterpieces.

The Krasner recording restores those marvelous orchestrations to their full glory, and the crackerjack players under Aaron Gandy’s direction bring those long-silent sounds back to glistening life. Sometimes the orchestral passages—overture, dance parts of "You’re a Builder-Upper" and "Let’s Take a Walk Around the Block"—turn out to be the highlights of the entire album, at least to an instrumental wonk like me. The vocal performances are uniformly superb, although nobody can possibly replace Bert Lahr’s bow-wowza bravura. Brad Oscar makes a game show of it, though, and my hat’s off to anyone who attempts to stand in those big shoes—and pardon my mixed-wardrobe metaphor.

In short, another addition to an expanding list of resurrected Broadway shows—those Gershwin estate restorations on Nonesuch, the City Center revivals, MTT’s Gershwin shows, John McGlinn’s wonderful series. Even if Life Begins at 8:40 is just a mixed-nuts grab-bag instead of a cultural monument like Show Boat, it’s a treasure.

Incidentally, the first performance Life Begins at 8:40 began at 8:50.