ON THE RECORD: Rodgers & Hammerstein's Nearly-Forgotten Allegro
By Steven Suskin
15 Feb 2009
Wilson, Butz, Callaway and Benanti are all very much in evidence on the two-CD album, playing book scenes as well as singing their songs. (The album includes dialogue over music, of which there is plenty, but not the entire libretto.) Poor Joe's father and mother are performed by the aforementioned Mr. Gunn and Ms. McDonald, who share vocal honors for the enterprise with Ms. Callaway. The only weak link is Marni Nixon as Grandma; I keep listening for someone like Celeste Holm, who performed the role at Encores!, but hear something closer to Irene Ryan of Pippin. Judith Blazer, Maureen Brennan, Ashley Brown and Kathy Morath join Ms. Benanti for the "Money Isn't Everything" quintet, while Danny Burstein plays the mostly-speaking role of Benanti's father. Effective cameo appearances come from the likes of Bernie Gersten, Schuyler Chapin, Howard Kissel, John Simon and Oscar Hammerstein (pulled from an old dictaphone belt). Stephen Sondheim, who was a teenaged gofer on the original production, here gets to deliver Oscar's climactic speech ("a man's brain is sometimes cleared by the sudden light of one word...").
Allegro tells the age old tale of the bright idealistic country boy who takes his talents and dreams to the big city, finding great success at the cost of his integrity. At least so it appears; the author himself stated that "it is the law of our civilization that as soon as a man proves he can contribute to the well-being of the world, there be created an immediate conspiracy to destroy his usefulness, a conspiracy in which he is usually a willing collaborator." Rather than place his hero in a family of theatrical impresarios, he chose to use the medical profession (borrowed, perhaps, from the Rodgers clan). Hammerstein did not hide the fact that various aspects of the tale were autobiographical. Tellingly, the climax occurs when poor Joe discovers that his wife Jennie is having an affair with one of his colleagues. This, indeed, happened to poor Oscar following the first success of Show Boat.
This betrayal is not insignificant in terms of Allegro; one of the major problems in the plot is the handling of Jennie. Oscar chivalrously doesn't say a mean word about her, over two acts; but we never do see her attributes. Why is Joe so dedicated to her? Why is he so in love with her (or what passes for love)? Why does Oscar give Joe a bright and shining anthem to Jennie's attributes, "You Are Never Away," a song that rings clear and true, without a hint of deceit? "You're a star in the lace of a wild willow tree," he sings, but the librettist certainly doesn't write Jennie that way. He doesn't criticize, no doubt out of feelings of guilt over his own weaknesses as a husband; but just what does Jennie mean to Joe? He is infatuated with her, certainly, but the audience isn't.
On a happier note, let us shoehorn into this review an anecdote related by de Mille, which will probably make sense only to readers who are familiar with the song "Joseph Taylor, Jr.": Walking away from a frustrating production meeting with Theatre Guild producers Lawrence Langner and the blue-haired Theresa Helburn, Oscar and Dick made up this parody lyric about them: "Her brain is fuzzy / Her hair is blue / She'll change her mind / She often do / She's all of that and looney too / But Lawrence Langner's — loonier."
All said, this new recording of Allegro is everything that we might desire, and everything that Dick and Oscar might desire too. Does this finally rehabilitate Allegro and elevate it to the level of Carousel and South Pacific? Well, no; now that we can hear Allegro in all its glory, I expect that it retains its place in the sixth or seventh slot on the list of the nine stage musicals of R&H. The problem, it seems to me, is not in the writing but in the conception. Allegro is loaded with music, but too much of it is music for ballet; Ms. de Mille seems to have insisted in illustrating the action, every step of the way, in dance. There are only nine full-scale songs, by my count; very good-to-excellent songs, mind you. But only nine, while something like South Pacific has ten in the first act alone. (Resultingly, much of the music comes not from Rodgers but from expert dance arranger Trude Rittman.) Midway in the first act of Allegro, when things slow down to a deathly pace, Ms. de Mille and Ms. Rittman give us the "College Dance," consisting of eight minutes-worth of variations on the old Rodgers & Hart standard "Mountain Greenery." And that's one of the problems with Allegro.
But not a problem in terms of the new CD. Here we get Rodgers and Hammerstein's
Allegro, all right, in full and glorious form. Listen to Audra McDonald sing "Come Home" — put it on repeat play, why don't you — and be content.
(Steven Suskin is author of the forthcoming "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations" (Oxford) as well as "Second Act Trouble," "Show Tunes," and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached at Ssuskin@aol.com)
