YOUR CHANCE TO BE A SWINGER By Peter Filichia
Shall we celebrate the 275th anniversary of the first time that a Broadway musical had a song with the word “swing” in its title?
First-nighters who attended the December 3, 1750, performance of THE BEGGAR’S OPERA heard “Since I Must Swing, I Scorn, I Scorn to Wince or Whine.”
That’s not the “swing” you were expecting, was it? For lyricist John Gay was using “swing” as the colloquial term for hanging by the neck.
It was the fate that the notorious Macheath was expecting. You may know him better as Mack the Knife, after THE BEGGAR’S OPERA morphed into THE THREEPENNY OPERA.
As for right now, let’s embrace the more popular meaning of “Swing,” because December also marks another anniversary of swing – namely SWING, the revue that celebrated the dominant music of the 1930s and 1940s.
The 1999-2000 Tony-nominated musical began with a 1931 song whose title make grammarians blanch: “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” Who’d expect two linguistic mistakes in any song title’s first eight words? But Duke Ellington’s music goes a long way to making us forgive Irving Mills’ lyrics. No wonder that SWING conceiver/director/choreographer Lynne Taylor Corbett started her musical with this dynamic piece.
An important date in the swing era was August 21, 1935. According to eminent music historian Will Friedwald, those present at Los Angeles’ Palomar Ballroom weren’t particularly responding to the sweet sounds of Benny Goodman’s band. “Some say that its drummer Gene Krupa said they had nothing to lose by trying swing music,” says Friedwald. “Others say that Goodman himself made the suggestion.”
Whatever the case, the band started playing such songs as “Stompin’ at the Savoy” which indeed got the spectators stompin’. Hence, Ms. Taylor Corbett knew that this song too belonged in SWING.
Notice, though, how “Stompin’ at the Savoy” is credited in SWING: “Music by Benny Goodman, Edgar Sampson and Chick Webb; lyrics by Ann Hampton Callaway and Andy Razaf.”
Wait – “Stompin’ at the Savoy” was written in 1934, decades before Ms. Callaway came on the scene. What she did do in 1999, though, was add a few of her smart lyrical perceptions to the song. She also did some lyric-massaging for “I Won’t Dance.”
Was it heresy for Callaway to rewrite Dorothy Fields’ original lyrics? Well, Oscar Hammerstein was the first to write lyrics for “I Won’t Dance” for his 1934 musical THREE SISTERS (which had nothing to do with Chekhov). The show didn’t do well, so when a new song was needed for the 1935 film of ROBERTA, Fields went to work and made a hit out of a Jerome Kern tune that hadn’t previously impressed many. “I Won’t Dance” has since been included in virtually every iteration of ROBERTA (which explains why it’s on the excellent 1952 studio cast album).
In SWING, Callaway sang “I Won’t Dance” with Everett Bradley. They also performed “Bli-Blip,” a song from Duke Ellington’s 1941 musical JUMP FOR JOY. Don’t look for an original cast album for that one; the show played nine weeks in Los Angeles but never came to Broadway.
Callaway added some lyrics to “Bli-Blip,” too. But every note and word are hers in “Two and Four.” It tells of a student eager to learn how to swing, and a teacher who’s on the scene to provide the necessary instruction.
Everett Bradley, too, contributed music to two new songs, but the rest of SWING honored hit songs from the era. Still, even taking the new tunes into consideration, SWING still qualifies as a jukebox musical.
In fact, it has a better claim to the term than many musicals that brand themselves as such. We’ve come to use the term to mean a musical that uses previously written songs. Many of those, however, didn’t have songs that really ever made it into jukeboxes, because they simply didn’t have the popularity to warrant inclusion in them.
SWING, though, has plenty of gold-plated hits that caused many living before, during or after World War II to put another nickel in what was known as a Nickelodeon: “In the Mood,” which sold well over a million records for the Glenn Miller Orchestra, is a good case in point.
The first act of SWING ended with another familiar song: “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” To go off on a tangent here, that’s good advice for musical theater enthusiasts: don’t sit under the apple tree, but play the cast album of THE APPLE TREE, the 1966 musical that musicalized not one, not two, but three short stories.
True, none of its songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick could be said to swing, but there are plenty of fine ones sung by Barbara Harris (who won a Tony for the show), and a then-rising star who eventually rose to every occasion: Alan Alda.
Back to SWING: “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” and the also-included “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” were enormous hits for the trio known as The Andrews Sisters; these two recordings accounted for many of the 100 million records sold by the trio.
LaVerne Andrews died in 1967, but survivors Patty and Maxene could still be billed as The Andrews Sisters when they did the fun-filled 1974 musical OVER HERE! That original cast recording is also well worth hearing, with plenty of original songs that echo the sisters’ titanic hits.
“Blues in the Night” was originally written for a 1941 film called HOT NOCTURNE. However, when the film’s brass heard the song that Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer wrote, they so fell in love with it that they renamed the film in its honor.
Callaway sings it here, and her rendition must be one of the reasons that she received a Tony nomination as Best Featured Actress in a Musical.
She wasn’t the only SWING cast member to be so honored. Laura Benanti received her first (but certainly not her last) Tony nomination. Here’s betting that her rendition of “Cry Me a River” made her leapfrog over the season’s other contenders. In this song where a lover wants to return, Benanti makes clear that the penitent’s tears would have to fill a river as long as the Nile and as wide as the Amazon before she’ll even consider a second chance.
“Sing, Sing, Sing,” which is included in an eleven o’clock medley, can of course be heard on the cast album any time you’d like. But if you’d care to see what it looked like, it’s one of the many choreographed numbers in the current York Theatre Company superb production GOTTA DANCE!, running through December 28.
One more aside: Care to hear a completely different song called “Swing”? Well, the TV soundtrack album of WONDERFUL TOWN will happily oblige.
In this 1953 Tony-winning musical that’s set in 1935, Tony-winner Rosalind Russell gives credit to the then-new music in a terrific song by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green.
The threesome did substantiate the theory that Cyrill N. Parkinson put forth in 1955: “Work takes as long as the time you have to do it.”
For they took over from another team whose work was found lacking. These ON THE TOWN veterans had to write more than a dozen songs in less than a month’s time – and did.
Granted, “Swing” in WONDERFUL TOWN was 203 years too late to be the first song in a Broadway musical with that word in the title, but as the 1999 musical proved, it certainly wasn’t the last.
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.
