CONVERSATION PIECES By Peter Filichia
The week before Christmas always has me thinking about Betty Comden.
It all has to do with what she once told me about those seven arduous days she spent in 1952.
Comden, lifetime collaborator Adolph Green and their sometimes collaborator Leonard Bernstein had been invited, of course, to many lavish show-biz parties. They had to decline every one of them.
Instead, they were working non-stop on WONDERFUL TOWN, the musical version of MY SISTER EILEEN. Only weeks before, the three had been begged to write a new score to replace the one that few had liked. The nay-sayers included Rosalind Russell, set to reprise the role she’d played in the film of the hit comedy: Eileen Sherwood’s less glamorous sister, Ruth.
Comden told me that she and Green were frequently exhausted, but if Bernstein was, he didn’t show it. She said that she fervently believed that if the composer had been approached to musicalize the play from the outset, he would have declined. What stoked his interest was the tight deadline; Bernstein wanted to see if he could meet the challenge (and believed he could).
But rehearsals had already begun, and here they were, still writing the ambitious sequence that would come to be known as “Conversation Piece.” It would take place at a quickly arranged dinner party where the Sherwood sisters’ guests know little-to-nothing about each other. Ruth’s attempt to interest everyone in MOBY DICK won’t inspire anyone to make a trip to the library. Frank tells an overlong story about the drug store where he’s a soda jerk; the tedious tale makes everyone decide that the second word of his occupation is the apt one.
Another visitor’s story would turn vulgar if he hadn’t been quickly interrupted by a bit of a song.
And that was the way “Conversation Piece” would go. Snippets of music and lyrics would blend with dialogue. The result was more than a mere song; let’s call it a musical scene.
Comden said that during the writing, she and Green worried that the critics would accuse them of shirking their lyrical duties by letting the dialogue do the heavy lifting. They hoped that the enthusiastic reception that had been given 21 months earlier to the similarly structured “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” – Tuptim’s Siamese take on UNCLE TOM’S CABIN that alternated sung and spoken words – would pave the way for their work’s acceptance.
Not to worry. As Steven Suskin reported in OPENING NIGHTS ON BROADWAY, WONDERFUL TOWN was one of the very few musicals to ever receive unanimous raves from the critics for New York’s daily newspapers – all seven (!) of them. So, the famous theory that work takes as long as the time you have to do it, in this case, turned out to be true.
WONDERFUL TOWN eventually captured five Tonys, including Best Musical. True, that pales in comparison to the numbers that THE PRODUCERS and HAMILTON racked up, but the awards in 1953 didn’t have nearly as many categories as today.
Broadway has some other notable examples of such conversation pieces. Eleven years after WONDERFUL TOWN, ANYONE CAN WHISTLE offered “Simple.”
Those who grew up in the long-playing record era had an eyebrow-raising reaction when they placed WHISTLE’s vinyl record on the phonograph. Instead of the six, seven or eight empty-space bands between the usual number of songs, there were only three. A mere four songs occupied the first side, for “Simple” was an inordinately fat track that turned out to be nearly 13 minutes long.
(It takes J. Bowden Hapgood that much time to determine if a town’s Most Important People are sane or crazy – or both.)
How much was dialogue and how much song? To find out, I pulled out that cast album (although I have a great fondness for the concert version that followed in 1995). Of “Simple’s” 12:58 running time, only 4:18 is actually sung; the rest is spoken.
A side note: Sondheim often said that one reason he didn’t much like opera was that it had so much recitative that the writer was “too lazy” – yes, his words – to craft into lyrics. And yet…
Another 11 years after WHISTLE, A CHORUS LINE had “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love.” If you only knew the 1975 recording before you saw the musical, this conversation piece offered a different kind of surprise from “Simple.” Because vinyl simply couldn’t accommodate all that much time, listeners were given only six minutes and 45 seconds of a much longer sequence.
Not until the show’s CD release in the early ‘80s did we get learn that more had actually been recorded at the original June 2, 1975, session; “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello, Love” now weighed in 9:15. It allowed us to hear more from height-challenged Connie, the secretive Paul and the libidinous Greg.
Whether musical theater fans had already learned in the theater or on the CD that the sequence was substantially longer, many had to have been impressed by the expert editing of that first release; it didn’t make the piece sound truncated at all.
And what a surprise that Diana Morales’ “Nothing” was not a stand-alone song, but was part of “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello, Love.” Not until the 2006 Broadway revival cast album was it put in its rightful place, making for an 18:47 sequence over four tracks.
Now listeners experienced Mark’s erotic dreams, Judy’s anguish at missing a chance at an audition for a TV show, Don’s devirginization from an aging stripper, and Connie’s reminiscing about her time in the original Broadway production of THE KING AND I (as cast member Baayork Lee had). Finally, we got precisely what auteur Michael Bennett, composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricist Edward Kleban had intended.
The 20th century still had at least one more conversation piece of note: “The Duck Joke” in Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1992 musical MY FAVORITE YEAR.
K.C. Downing works for 1954’s biggest hit TV comedy show. And while Benjy Stone, one of its witty writers, is interested in her, she fears that her inability to be funny would doom the relationship.
So, Alice Miller, another of the show’s excellent comic writers, will teach K.C. how to deliver a joke. Alice – portrayed by Andrea Martin, who’d win a Tony for this performance – painstakingly recites a joke, which K.C. sings back to her, but with clueless mistake after mistake after mistake.
Alice tries hard after each of K.C.’s gaffes to be lenient and supportive, but we all have a breaking point. And you may well break up when you hear Alice’s final response that certainly ends this conversation piece.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His new day-by-day wall calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY – 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available on Amazon and The Drama Book Shop.
