For a Lyric Theater in America

A Disclosure of the Strategic Moves in a Proposed Attack Upon the Community

GILBERT SELDES

I AM going to establish a lyric theater in America. Not an art theater and not a temple of the drama, and not an experimental theater. A lyric theater where there will always be Mozart and Jerome Kern, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Lehar—and never by any chance Puccini, or the Ring, or Ibsen. I will avoid the good things and the bad alike in the serious forms; I shall have Russian Ballets and American Ballets. It will be a theater devoted to all the forms of light musical entertainment, and to nothing else.

My theater will put an end to those disheartening revivals (or resurrections) of popular musical shows, because the shows will be kept alive, just as "grand" operas are kept alive by appearing in a repertory. Into the repertory I shall incorporate—as soon as their independent existence is at an end—such successes as The Night Boat and such failures as The Land of Joy. There will never be a chance for fashion to destroy things essentially good. I shall produce new pieces, too; and if they are good they will run along with frequent presentations until they are absorbed in the general scheme. And I think I shall have pastiches frequently—of revues and topical productions which are only partly good.

The Plan of the Conspiracy

THAT is the abridgment of a scheme; and say I shall do it in the hope that someone else, even if it be the Messrs. Shubert, will do it instead. Because I like musical comedy and it annoys me that I can hear Un bcl di (which I want never to hear again) fifteen times a season, and cannot hear The Sun Shines Brighter or The Ragtime Melodrama ever again. And I know that our present type of musical comedy is so good, so vigorous and snappy, that it tends to kill off its predecessors; a repertory is the only thing; and the usual objections to repertory will fail here because in this case the devotees of musical shows will know in advance that "it is going to be a good show". I don't know whether the bill should change every day or every week; I feel certain that there ought to be half a dozen centers across the continent, and two or three touring companies.

Further details I cannot give now. I shall try to find some means, however, of distinguishing between the second act finale of The Mottled Mask ("On to the Bail at the Palace of Prince Gregory") from the second act finale of The Madcap in Motley, which has the same refrain. It is not part of my scheme to keep indifferent shows alive.

"Figaro" a Superb Musical Comedy

THE rare entertainment such a theater will afford can be guessed if you look for a moment at the changes in musical shows since 1900. We were then coming out of the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition and (after a great vogue of extravaganza) coming into the Viennese mode. It is the fashion now, especially in France, to belittle the Viennese operetta, to call its waltz song heavy and its structure tiresome. Possibly these things are true; but Vienna has been the home of operetta for over a century, and has done well by itself most of the time. Illumination of this predominant influence you can get by going to the Redoutensaal and hearing a performance of The Marriage of Figaro, and within the next few days hearing Die Fledermaus and whatever new piece Lehar or Fall or Oscar Strauss has composed.

For what one seldom knows from its loftier productions is that Figaro is in essence and detail a musical comedy, and that almost all we know of the form stems from the combination effected there by a great composer, a fine dramatist, and an exceptionally skilful librettist. The imperial ball-room, with its tapestried walls, its small stage on which only conventionalized scenery can be set, its divided stairway coming down on the stage, is a setting admirably contrived to give the whole loveliness of operetta. The last scene is in the garden of the Count: six boxed trees and moonlight create the effect. And at the last moment, the happy ending; the electric lights are thrown on, the vast crystal chandelier lighting up over the garden, and the event recedes into its real, its secondary framework, as entertainment. One recognizes it for what it is—the gay and exquisite counterpart of grand opera, from which neither the Savoy nor the Viennese operetta ever departed.

Musically, the Viennese type corresponds more closely to Italian, the Gilbert and Sullivan to French opera. The absurd conventions of production are taken bodily from the older and more respected type. The same thing is as obviously true in Cimarosa's Marriage Secret as it is in The Chocolate Soldier, the latter being, except for a weaker libretto, a perfect parallel to Figaro. And it is nearly as worthy of perpetual life.

American Pre-Eminence in Musical Production

IT is still unnecessary to describe the Viennese operetta in detail, for immediately after the war it came again into vogue and one or two excellent examples—The Last Waltz was one of them—re-established some of its ancient prestige. It is at bottom produced for the music. In one the music may be chiefly sung, in another danced. Everything else—decor, story, humorous episodes—is secondary. Recently an effort has been made to change this. Oscar Strauss' Torichte Jungfrau at the Grossesschauspielhaus (Reinhardt's catacombs in Berlin) was all production—and nearly all dreadful. Lehar's latest, Das Gelbe Jacke (not, however, our Yellow Jacket) is entirely in the pure Viennese mode, and the Vienna production (February, 1923) indicates how Viennese operetta is improved in transit to our shores. For our production of musical comedy is almost equal to our production of revue, which is incontestably the finest in the world. With their emphasis on music the Viennese shows naturally center about the famous waltz-song; and one good waltz has been able to make a show a success. Rudolf Friml made a success of High Jinks with a fox-trot.

The English type as we know it, including Caryll and Monckton and Rubens, has had for thirty years the Savoy tradition. This requires a plot of more frivolity than the Viennese, and lyrics of greater humor. The successes have been moderate—Tve Got a Motto is no masterpiece. The degree of fun has been higher and the seductiveness of the music less. It was perfectly natural that (with Adele to help them on) a combination of virtues should take place in America in the beautiful Princess shows of Comstock and Gest, where the talents of P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and Jerome Kern produced afresh and attractive type of musical show which for five years progressed in popularity—but had few imitatorsand suddenly seemed to disappear. It was, in fact, transformed into something else, something good.

Melodic Memories of the Princess

FACH of the Princess shows had a reasonable, but not serious, plot. The advantage of a plot isn't, as one often hears, that it gives the appearance of reality to the piece, for who should expect that? There is no reason why a musical comedy should not be wholly preposterous, dramatically or psychologically, provided, like Iolanthc, it has a logic of its own. No, the advantage is that when there is a definitely perceptible structure, everything else arrives with greater intensity of effect. The best of the Princess shows had the weakest plot, for Leave it to Jane was based on Ade's College Widow, which has no great quality. Since songs and dances had to take up much time, this plot was gratifyingly reduced to a few essential lines and played without sentiment. The result was a rush of action in which everything found place. The later pieces were on librettos by Guy Bolton, suggesting French farces, and full of neat arrangements. None of them was stupid. They all gave place for Mr. Wodehouse's exceptional talents as a lyricwriter. He is, as an English humorist, superior to most, and as a master of complicated, original, amusing rhymes he is the best man in the business. A special quality of making fun is discernible in all his lyrics, and he does good parodies, like When It's Nesting Time in Flatbush. The Princess type made rather a fetish of simplicity.

Kern's Adroit Manipulations

FORTUNATELY for him and for us, these songs were set to a music which, in addition to being delightful, let the words appear, and occasionally was so fluent, so inevitable, that it made the words seem even simpler and more conversational than they are. Jerome Kern composed nearly all of the Princess shows, and the collected scores are impressive. He is the most erudite of our simple composers, and he manipulates material with inordinate skill. He can adapt a German folksong (Freut euch das Leben underlies Phoebe Snow); he didn't do so well by Kingdom Cornin', which was botched and cut; he also understands Sullivan. But his best work, The Siren Song, The Little Ships, The Sun Shines Brighter, have a melodious line, a structure, and a general tidiness of execution which are all their own. The Siren Song corresponds exactly to the Viennese waltz, but both the words and the music are impersonal; they are a gentle hymn to seduction, wdth humor. Scattered between languorous rhythms are bursts of gaiety, like a handful of pebbles thrown against a window —which doesn't open, for the song ends in a tender melancholy. It is a real achievement.

The Princess shows never had any great stars; instead, they had the one quality which always makes for success, esprit de corps. In each the company was aware of the nature and quality of the piece it was playing, and it worked in variations of that genial and sophisticated atmosphere. It was simply against the tone of the Princess shows to be dull; and I, who like nearly all musical shows, found in them my greatest delight.

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The Dillingham Productions THEY passed into something else, because they were exquisitely proportioned on a small scale—the scale, by the way, of The Beggar's Opera, which they resembled—and the whole tendency of the time was toward elaboration. They involved small choruses, little eccentric dancing, and required no humorist hors de texte. I count it a triumph for Mr. Dillingham as well as for the others concerned, that they have been able to preserve so much of the Princess in some of the Globe productions. The best of these, I think, is Good Morning, Dearie. It has an adequate plot; it has room for Harlan Dixon, a fine dancer; for Ada Lewis, an expert broad comddienne; for Maurice and his partner; for a large dancing chorus, and for tricks; better still, it did little to hinder Jerome Kern. It was here that Kern took the most famous of waltzes and implicated it masterfully in a blues; and here that all the seductiveness and gaiety of the Princess music returned with Ka-lu-a and Didn't You Believe? There were a few faults in the production; the decor lacked freshness, although it did not actually offend; and the Chinese scene was hackneyed. But on the whole it is the best musical comedy I have seen since the Princess shows.

What forced us to be elaborate was not the memory of the Viennese type, but the growing complexity of revue, always cutting into musical comedy. It should be noted that Around the Map (which I hold the best musical operetta—I saw before shows) first brought Joseph Urban into the field, taking him from the Boston Opera House and pushing him on the way to Ziegfeld, where he was tardily recognized by the Metropolitan, for whom he has made Oheron. Around the Map had some twenty scenes; it dealt with a trip round the world in search of safety socks, and was all gay (with Elsie Alder), all good music (with Caryll), and showed only the beginnings of elaboration. But Mr. Berlin's two shows and a host of others indicated that musical comedy, to survive, would have to appear lavish. Comparatively simple shows still occur, such as Tangerine; but we seem to be committed to something fairly elaborate —in music, as in the Le-Baron-Kreisler pieces; in decor, as in the Shubert-Century productions; in stars and "stunts" the Dillingham shows.

The Deem

I DO not pretend to cover the ground, and to name all the names, in this sketch; not even to characterize all the types. I don't know what to say about Mary, in which George M. Cohan worked a chorus into a state of frantic energy, and for which Hirsch composed The Love Nest; nor of twenty other individual successes. One composer remains whose work is often so good, whose case is so illuminating, that he must be considered. That is Victor Herbert. It should be said at once that, even long after his early successes, he composed a fine musical comedy, The Only Girl. The difficulty about Air. Herbert is that he has succumbed to the American habit of thinking that grand opera is great opera. I have heard him at one of his premieres, speaking from the conductor's dais to assure the audience that the present piece was in the high line of operetta, that more pieces like it would put an end to the vulgarity of musical shows. The regrettable fact was that The Madcap Princess put an end to nothing but itself; I recall, perhaps incorrectly, that Ann Swinburne was in it, and that it had a good patter song; the rest was doleful. Whereas two weeks later, in the same house, I heard The Lady of the Slipper, in which Mr. Herbert, having set out to write an ordinary simple musical show, proved himself a thoroughly competent composer, full of ingenuity, interest, taste and invention. If he had only taken his eyes off the Metropolitan Opera House, he would probably have been the best of the lot today. He suffers—although he is vastly respected—because he has failed in respect to the fine art of the musical show.

A Complicated Synthesis

THE wonderful thing about that art is that it is made up of varied elements which are fused into something greater than themselves. There is a song and dance by Julia Sanderson, who is not a great artist; or the sudden apparition of a little man pursued in a harem, bounding upon a scarlet pouffe six feet in diameter and nuzzling like a dog—Jimmy Barton, in fact; and the rambling story told by Percival Knight in The Quaker Girl; or the drunken scene by Clifton Crawford in The Peasant Girl; there is In the Night from The Queen of the Movies, or Johnny Dooley falling out of the clerk's desk in Listen, Lester; there is Donald Brian, the perpetual jcune premier, or the amazing Spanish song in Apple Blossoms, or a setting designed by Norman-Bel Geddes, or costumes by Helen Dryden, or the Little Man song from The Dollar Princess, or the entrance of the Bulgarians in The Chocolate Soldier, or the wickedly expert prosody of Brian Hooker.

What is it takes all of these and composes them into something beautiful and entertaining? Skill in production is part of it; but not all; for the same elements, color, light, sound, movement, can be combined into other forms which lack that particular air of urbanity, of well-being, of rich contentment and interest which is the special atmosphere of musical shows. I can only find a word and say that the secret resides in it: high spirits. For a musical comedy, even a sentimental one, must be high-spirited in execution—that was the lesson of an unsentimental one, The Beggar's Opera— and at the same time there must be some courage, some defiance of nature and sound sense, a feeling for fantasy which means that the life of the spirit is high even when the life of the body is in chains.

It is for this freedom of the spirit, released by music as always and diverted by all the other elements in them, that these shows are cherished. It is, naturally, as a counter attack on solemnity that I am going to found my theater.