My Funny Valentine

Last night featured a 2 1/2+ hour immersion into the wonderful world of Rodgers & Hart. This was another retrospective at the Smithsonian put together by Robert Wyatt, whose programs are enjoyable although he loses track of time, so had to end with Babes in Arms and never got to The Boys From Syracuse and Pal Joey. Eileen adds that he commits every fault every presenter fears--knocks out the video, puts on the wrong CD number, and ignores the clock.

Nevertheless, his audio and video clips, plus his gloss on the careers of Dick Rodgers and Larry Hart, make the evenings memorable. He started with two blockbusters--Lena Horne doing "My Funny Valentine" -- probably the saddest and most delightful lyrics Hart ever wrote and then his last song, "To Keep My Love Alive," which features the most sublimely wicked lyrics probably ever sung on Broadway--in this case, by Hart's great friend, Vivienne Segal. He didn't get to it but she was the original singer of "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" in Pal Joey. I also would have loved to have heard some stories of the interplay between Rodgers & Hart and John O'Hara, from whose stories, of course, Pal Joey derived.

I knew Hart was a strange case but did not realize that from 1935 on until he died in 1943 (at 48), he sank farther and farther into alcoholism. Wyatt did not mention that both Rodgers and Hart were bi (as was Cole Porter), but in Hart's case, he was so short with such a large head that he never did find the love he sought and that search is at the heart of his lyrics. It also seems clear that he was a true genius, in view of the speed with which he wrote. Rodgers was, too, and also not the nicest guy on the block, despite the ease with which he turned out melody after melody, first with Hart, then on a heavier basis with Oscar Hammerstein II, and lastly on his own, as he composed from age 14 until his 70s.

But the songs...There's a Small Hotel and I Don't Remember When and Blue Moon and Mountain Greenery (which he didn't get to, either. The picture you get, too, of Broadway in the 20s and even later in the 30s, even after talking pictures began to diminish the huge number of productions (264 in one year in the 20s!) on the New York stage. There's so many songs that when you hear them, you remark that you never knew that was by Rodgers & Hart. Remember Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan dancing up the proscenium as FDR in I'd Rather Be Right? Yes, they wrote it.

They did shows with Balanchine as choreographer and were a bit in awe of his reputation until he told them he'd design the dance in any way they wrote the music and lyrics. As with the other composers and lyricists, they had an early 30s period in Hollywood, when the stage was in the doldrums. There too, they succeeded. Of course, for their first five years, they had only flops until The Garrick Gaieties sprung them in 1925 with We'll Take Manhattan, written originally for some summer camp musical or Columbia varsity show.

They even were the first with an integrated show--integrating the songs and the plot, that is. It was a flop, alas, called Chee-Chee, so we had to wait for the Rodgers & Hammerstein kick-off, Oklahoma, for the first successful one. Hart, incidentally, who was dead before Oklahoma opened, turned down the chance to do it, based on Green Grow the Lilacs. I like to think he thought he was too corny, not that some of his own shows weren't. They did Billy Rose's Jumbo at the old Hippodrome. Wyatt doesn't know New York that well, so we shouted out that it was located at 44th St. and Sixth Ave. I didn't have the heart to add that for about a half-century it's been a parking garage.

Larry Hart's nephew was in the audience. There was also mention of Larry's brother, the comedian Teddy Hart, one of the many memorable stage folks I once was introduced to at The Lambs with my dad. He had been an original star in The Boys From Syracuse, and outlived his brother by about 35 years.

Always That Profession

It was a rare wonderful evening in the theater, the Shakespeare Theatre Company in D.C., that is, doing Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, the other night. First, the play is one of his good ones. He wrote it in 1893, but the censors kept it off the London stage until the 1920s and even New York City took a decade to get it on the boards in 1905.

The leading ladies were Elizabeth Ashley as the title character and Amanda Quaid as her daughter, a "new woman" graduated but lately from Cambridge and upset that her mother is still engaged in her profession of running houses in various European cities. Two great company regulars--Ted van Griethuysen and David Sabin--played two principal male roles superbly.

It was great entertainment, including some music hall turns by a young woman named Caitlin Diana Doyle as the young Mrs. Warren. I recall Ashley in her youthful days playing Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; while she no longer can play those kinds of roles, she still has a strong capacity to hold your attention on stage.

Shaw's arguments are hardly as controversial today but the fulcrum now falls on whether Mrs. W. should have stayed in her business, even if you give her a thumbs-up on how she got into it and used it to make her way in the world. Both women relate well to our contemporary issue of workaholism--neither has any interest other than a narrow focus on her career, as both the architect hoping for some show of interest in the finer things such as art learns, as does a baronet who has always known how to enjoy his money.

It's nice to see that The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest is now atop the best-seller list in the U.S. (or in The Times anyway). I for one have thoroughly enjoyed Larsson's Millenium series and managed to get hold of this third volume during one of my overseas jaunts before it was published here in May. Both his leading characters are highly attracting but the really great one is Lisbeth Salander, the 25-year-old bi Goth girl who is a genius computer hacker.

Another event of note was attending the Nationals opener versus the White Sox here Friday night to see seven innings pitched by Stephen Strasburg, the phenom. He was quite impressive but the Nats are so hitless that the one run he allowed stood unanswered for six more innings (the equalizer left him without decision rather than the loser) and then Chicago managed to score on a Nationals error in the 11th. The Nats are in a bigtime slump--another witness from upstairs in box 208 was Pale Hose fan Barack Obama and his girls, unnanounced in the stadium but noticed by some fans sitting behind me near the dugout.

Obama's Success Story

You might think from much of the media lately that President Obama hasn't been accomplishing much. Yes, health care took a long time but no one until now got very far and whatever its shortcomings, he got it done. It looks likely that financial reform will get through, too, thanks much to Goldman Sachs and their unabashed defense of giving advice out of two sides of their mouths. Two good Supreme Court justices--I assume Kagan will make it past the gauntlet of nonsense issues--will be on the bench this fall, making it looking good for when he gets to replace one of the stinkers. And in a hundred agencies that never get reported on, people are trying to undo the corporate welfare showered on the supposedly regulated industries by Bush's corporate agents.

But when you listen to tv or read the papers, even the Times and the Post, you'd think the man is mired in endless problems. Well, yes, there are incredible challenges. How would you like to balance retaining an important ally such as Turkey when Israel needlessly riles the whole world and we have some closed-minded types (I'm holding back, believe me) here siding with Netanyahu over the U.S. And then there's the Gulf, Mexico this time, not Persian. So-called pundits want us to keep relying on lying BP--despite total lack of evidence to support any basis for trusting corporations more than our government. Alas, the not-yet-reformed regulatory agency was still in the hands of corpsymps--and technically, tell me what else the government could have done when corporations enter an untreaded area without adequate backup plans.

So I for one am tired of hearing about economic royalists (remember FDR's great phrase), Tea Party yoyos, phoney populists, and all kinds of reactionaries being treated respectfully by the media that gives the President all this heat. This is the result of media concentration--the reactionaries yell about media being liberal but Rupert Murdoch owns a whole lot of it and he just peddles this nonsense.

We had eight years of non-regulation, corporate giveaways, trickle-down economics, and the world turned against us--ending in the biggest crash since the 1930s. One might think that people would think about where their best interests lie--not with the corporations who would happily ship your job away. I've enjoyed seeing the responses to this put out by the Coffee Party. Check it out on your nearest social media outlet.