Beyond the Cotton Blossom: Kern and Hammerstein

This is a guest blog from former Oakland Tribune Theater Critic Robert Taylor:

Show Boat may have been a turning point in the American musical theater, and in the careers of composer Jerome Kern and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, but it was not the only show they created.

Kern worked with many, lyricists during his 40-year stage and screen career, among them Dorothy Fields, Ira Gershwin and Johnny Mercer. So the partnership Kern and Hammerstein doesn’t pop up in the memory as easily as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, or Kander and Ebb.

In fact, Hammerstein and Kern created seven musicals—just two fewer than Hammerstein wrote with Richard Rodgers. But only five of those reached New York, and only four were hits. Still, even the nearly forgotten Sweet Adeline was one of the hottest tickets on Broadway before the 1929 stock market crash. And Very Warm for May, which ran for only 59 performances in 1939, introduced “All the Things You Are.”   Even rival Broadway composers have described "All the Things You Are" as the greatest song ever written.

Kern had a 15-year head start in the theater when he paired with Hammerstein (and Otto Harbach) for their first show, Sunny, in 1925. It was a vehicle for dancing star Marilyn Miller (following her Sally of 1920), but it brought out the best in the new partners. “They worked together as if born for this collaboration,” notes Hammerstein’s biographer Hugh Fordin. The show’s long-lasting hit song was “Who?”

Kern was immediately attracted to Edna Ferber’s best-selling novel Show Boat for their next collaboration in 1927, and Hammerstein needed no persuading. Theater historian Gerald Bordman still considers the landmark show the high point in Kern and Hammerstein’s careers, yet some of the critics left their names out of their reviews, lauding the show’s arrival as a Florenz Ziegfeld production.

Another theater historian, William Zinsser, claims that after Show Boat, Kern “went right back to composing Viennese-style musicals.” But his melodies continued to soar. Sweet Adeline, his third show with Hammerstein, re-created the Gay ’90s with “Spring is Here” and Helen Morgan introducing “Why Was I Born?”

Kern and Hammerstein’s Music in the Air, in 1932, was an operetta at first glance, set in Bavaria, but some critics considered it as revolutionary as Show Boat for merging book and score. “The Song is You” and “I’ve told Every Little Star”—a tune based on a birdcall Kern heard in Nantucket—became standards.

The hit songs, the standards, kept coming, but that was the end of the hit shows for the partnership as Kern settled comfortably in Beverly Hills to write for Hollywood musicals.

Kern’s cross-country shuttle was interrupted by their collaboration on Three Sisters, which ran 72 performances in London (introducing “I Won’t Dance,” which became a hit after it was used in the film Roberta.)  Their Gentlemen Unafraid, set at West Point during the Civil War, got a tryout at the St. Louis Municipal Opera in 1938 but got no farther. One song, “Your Dream,” ended up in the movie One Night in the Tropics, a 1940 Abbott and Costello vehicle.

Very Warm for May got them back on Broadway in 1939, if briefly. The musical’s problems have generally been blamed on producer Max Gordon and director Vincente Minnelli, who urged Hammerstein to strip down a book that had won applause in its out-of-town tryout. At least the cast was intact—among them Eve Arden, Avon Long, and in smaller roles, June Allyson and Vera Ellen.

Although a review’s headline called Very Warm for May “not so hot for November,” the final Kern-Hammerstein collaboration lives on. It was revived in New York by Equity Library Theater in 1985 and in a concert performance in 1994, as well as by 42nd Street Moon in 1995.

Who wouldn’t want to hear that Jerome Kern score again, if only for “All the Things You Are”? It’s one of his and Hammerstein’s most indelible songs, yet Kern didn’t think it would be a hit because it was so complicated melodically.

It’s the most perfectly constructed of all popular standards, says William Zinsser in Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs. “Kern effortlessly moves through five keys in 32 bars without breaking a sweat.”

“All the Things You Are” has no end of champions, including singer and pianist Max Morath, who calls it “a superb standard” but challenging “with a 12-note range likely to mortify most singers.” And it was composer Arthur Schwartz who called it “the greatest song ever written.”

Thank you again to Robert Taylor for this guest blog.  For your chance to hear Jerome Kern's original vocal arrangement of "All the Things You Are," come see Very Warm for May at the Eureka Theater running May 5-23.  For tickets call (415) 255-8207 or buy online.

Three Sisters: A Restoration

I am thrilled to announce (and scoup all the news agencies!) that 42nd Street Moon, Artistic Director Greg MacKellan, and Musical Director Dave Dobrusky have received a 2010 NEA Grant for $25,000.

The grant is being awarded to restore the script and score of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's lost work Three Sisters. In 1995, Moon put together a concert reading of Three Sisters. Although it was minimally staged, and the script was a skeletal narrative of the show, Variety acknowledged the glory of Kern’s score, “But the prize here is Kern’s extant music. This material was ideal for his way with a wistful ballad, and several are gorgeous…” Of the script, Variety noted, “This drama-with-songs seems more in line with the fabled team’s earlier Show Boat than their more frivolous ‘30’s vehicles.”


Artistic Director Greg MacKellan intends to go back to the original source material and re-store and construct a working production script. The basis of our 1995 score consisted of several songs with published sheet music, some piano selections published in England, and some transcriptions from a cast recording. Musical Director Dave Dobrusky will finish the score restoration and create a new, readable piano-vocal score as well as new chamber orchestrations for piano, woodwinds, and strings to present the score.

From our original concert press release:

Not based on Chekhov's work, this Three Sisters follows three very different siblings through their romantic adventures during the first two decades of the century. The three girls hold different marital aspirations, with the eldest sister, a great galumphing girl named Tiny, in love with a sturdy constable; Dorrie, the middle child dreaming of marriage to a wealthy man; and the youngest, Mary, smitten by a young busker named Gypsy Hood. Marriages, mistaken identities and World War I ensue, with the girls' hapless photographer father trying to manage it all.


Premiering April 9, 1934 at the Drury Lane Theater in London, Three Sisters was mounted with the intention of bringing it to the states after a successful London run, but mixed reviews closed the show after two months -- at the time, the shortest run in the history of the Drury Lane Theater. Kern had worked previously in London with great success. Shows such as Cabaret Girl, Beauty Prize and Blue Eyes, written with British lyricists and book writers such as P.G. Wodehouse, had been very well received by London critics and audiences alike. "Three Sisters was Kern's first production in London that was written with another American, Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote the lyrics and book," says 42nd St. Moon producer Greg MacKellan. According to MacKellan, "New York critics who traveled to London to see the show adored it, but London critics were less enthusiastic -- perhaps offended that two Americans would dare to write a musical with British characters and a British story." While David Fairweather of the U.S. magazine Theatre World wrote, "It is difficult to account for the failure of Three Sisters, for it is a charming, original production with by far the best music of any light opera within recent history," British critic W.A. Darlington sniffed "the music...is pleasant and cleverly handled, but not original."

I know I speak for everyone here when I say Congratulations to Greg and Dave and how excited we are to see the American Premiere production of a Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein show!

Three Sisters will be part of Moon's 2011-2012 season. To subscribe for next season click here.