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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the extraordinary story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African-Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode TRUDE RITMANN & THE WOMEN THAT INVENTED BROADWAY. For this episode, I'm going to diverge from my usual format so that we can discuss in depth a woman who's incredibly significant to the history of Broadway, but who has also received very little recognition for her work. Her name is Trude Ritmann, and I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with my friend and colleague, Albert Evans, to discuss her incredible career. It is my great pleasure to welcome back to the show, Albert Evans.

[1:03] Albert Evans: Hi, David.

[1:04] David Armstrong: Thank you for joining us today, Albert, because I want to talk about a person who I think you know quite a bit about, unlike most of these other women that I've been talking about in this podcast who would be front and center on the playbill of a Broadway show as the composer or lyricist or choreographer. This is a woman whose name you would see in very small print in most playbills. Her name was Trude Ritmann. Even though you may not know her name, she contributed to more than 33 Broadway musicals between the 1930s and the 1970s, an incredibly long career. Albert, just tell us some of the shows that she worked on.

[1:38] Albert Evans: Well, let's see. She did Carousel, Brigadoon, South Pacific, Finian's Rainbow. Really, after Carousel, all of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows. She also did My Fair Lady, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Peter Pan. The list just goes on and on. She was a key collaborator, as you said, with Rodgers and Hammerstein, with Lerner and Lowe, and especially with the choreographers Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins. But let's try to explain what her contribution was. She was billed often as the dance arranger. How would you describe the job of a dance arranger? What do they do?

[2:11] Albert Evans: Well, of course, they arrange the dance music, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. The dance arranger will also usually be responsible for all of the music in the show that is not sung. Underscoring transition music between the scenes.

[2:24] David Armstrong: Exactly. And then, of course, the big dances, like if there's a big ballet, that's the job of the dance arranger. And what I think people, again, if you're not intimately involved in making a show, you might not understand that a big Broadway show, even in those days, would have multiple rooms rehearsing at the same time. And in one room would be the principal actors, the supporting actors, usually the director and the composer and lyricist working on the book and the big songs from the show. In another room would be the dancers and the choreographer, and then the principal performers as needed, who would then be working on all the dances and the choreography for the show, working very separately. Why, Albert, wouldn't a composer write the whole show himself?

[3:16] Albert Evans: Well, once a Broadway show is scheduled, it has to go up really fast. It has to come together quickly. And the composer, even if he has the skills to do that kind of arranging, dance arranging and incidental music, the composer generally has to be with the director because they're gonna make changes all day. They might need to write new songs.

[3:36] David Armstrong: Exactly. And they need to see how their songs are fitting in the show. Basically, they can't just go off and disappear for the whole day with the choreographer. So that's where someone like Trudy Rittman comes in. She will go with the choreographer and the dancers, and she'll sit at the piano while they're making up the dances. She's also making up the music, right?

[4:03] Albert Evans: Yeah, so she'll see what Jerome Robbins needs, what the dancers are doing, when they lift their hand, when it's got to get big or loud or romantic, whatever. And Jerome Robbins might say, I need eight bars of a tango here, and she comes up with eight bars of a tango. She will just improvise it. She'll write it on the spot, essentially. Now, she may go back and revise it, but she will do something right at the moment. So it requires a lot of skills. It requires a deep understanding of music and music composition. It requires improvisational skills. It also requires being a team member. You can't bring an ego to this because the choreographer may say, no, no, no, I don't like that, or I'm going to cut that part of the dance. And your work for the last three hours is gone, and you just have to go with it. And you're really at the service of both the choreographer and the composer.

[4:54] David Armstrong: Mm-hmm. So now that we understand a little better what a dance arranger actually does, let's bring this back to Trudy. She was born in Germany in 1908.

[5:02] Albert Evans: That's right. And she was a sort of a child prodigy on the piano, and she quickly became being groomed to be a concert pianist, as well as a composer.

[5:08] Albert Evans: That's right, and she actually had a very promising start to her concert career. She was even hailed as Germany's most brilliant woman composer. But of course, with the rise of the Nazis, and she had Jewish heritage in her family, she had to get out of Germany, as so many people had to do. And she left in 1933. Eventually, she found her way to America. By 1937, she was in the United States. She worked for American Ballet Caravan, which was the precursor to the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine. She worked with Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thompson, Mark Blitzstein. She quickly fell into the top tier of New York music. And I assume through her work with the modern dance world, she met Agnes de Mille, and she started accompanying, working with her on her concert pieces.

And that led to her first Broadway show, which was Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash's musical One Touch of Venus. Agnes de Mille had, of course, already famously done Oklahoma, but Trudy did not work on that show. But she did work on Carousel, which was the second collaboration between Agnes de Mille and Rodgers and Hammerstein. And she had a tremendous impact on that show. What are some of the things that we would know, we could understand that she, that were her contribution?

[6:25] Albert Evans: Well, of course, the ballet. There's a big ballet in the second act where Billy is up in heaven, and he sees what's been happening down on earth for the past 16 years or whatever. He looks down at his daughter Louise, who is the center character that really introduces that character, that ballet defines that character.

[6:42] David Armstrong: Right. And it uses themes from a lot of the songs in the show. But on the other hand, it's a storytelling ballet. So the music has to do half of the job of telling the story.

[7:01] Albert Evans: Well, that's one of the things that we didn't touch on earlier was that part of this job, and you were talking about all the things that go into this job, being a dramatist is part of it too.

[7:11] David Armstrong: Exactly. You have to evoke the mood, evoke the feelings, that a lot of that is coming from the music. And you're creating that music for those specific dramatic moments and dramatic effects.

[7:16] Albert Evans: Right. And another piece in Carousel would be the Sailor's Hornpipe Dance to Blow High, Blow Low, which is a pretty simple tune. It just sounds like a sailor shanty. It's very, probably the best sailor shanty you'll ever hear. But then it turns into a series of show-off dances.

[7:35] David Armstrong: An elaborate extension of this simple little tune.

[7:43] Albert Evans: Exactly. Which builds to a big, giant climax, and that would all be Trudy's work as well. In fact, Agnes de Mille, who later didn't always have kind things to say about Richard Rodgers, contended that he never could have written that himself, that Trudy was the one, not only who created it, but the only one who could create that. But clearly Richard Rodgers thought Trudy Rittman was of great value because they would continue to work together throughout the career of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and even past that, he actually worked with Trudy Rittman longer than he worked with Oscar Hammerstein. She was invaluable to him. Their next show was South Pacific that they worked together on, and there she took on a new job. There really weren't any dances in South Pacific, so what did she do there?

[8:29] Albert Evans: Her contribution was big drama. Putting the emotions of the characters, even when they couldn't formulate them themselves, didn't really even understand what they were feeling. For instance, early in the show, there's a song between Nellie and Emile where they alternate singing. They alternate singing their thoughts. It's called Twin Soliloquies. It's this wonder how I'd feel sitting on a hillside, and he's thinking, this is what I need, this is what I've longed for. But it's just this da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da tune. Very, very simple, that's repeated over and over. Then their eyes sort of lock. They come close to each other. They link their arms and lift their brandy glasses. We hear a section that's actually called Unspoken Thoughts because that's exactly what it is. It takes this da-da-da-da-da and starts building it and building it into this huge, almost Wagnerian climax.

[9:31] David Armstrong: Climax.

[9:32] Albert Evans: In every sense of the word. In every sense of the word. After it's over, if it does its job, which it certainly did, the audience is just left stunned. In a way, they wouldn't have been stunned if they just sang da-da-da-da-da a few times. When even Josh Logan talks about that in his autobiography, he mentions that that was something that they came up with in rehearsal. They had finished the song that Rogers wrote, and Logan felt like, well, we need more. We can't end there. He staged it to bring the two of them together and stand facing each other with their brandy snifters. Trudy Rittman came up with this extension of the song that really, as he said, he thought that's where the show became great, was that moment was so theatrical and so moving.

[10:23] Albert Evans: And all during South Pacific, so many, almost the entirety of South Pacific is underscored. It's very unusual in that way. There's very few other shows, but it's almost like a movie. There is scoring under most of the scenes and a lot of the dialogue throughout. It's sort of filled in. And again, Trudy Rittman, working with Josh Logan for the most part, did all of that. So a lot of this has come out in recent years. I think that most people at the time did not know about Trudy Rittman and didn't know what her contribution was to this. In fact, her billing on South Pacific was assistant to Mr. Rogers, is how she was billed.

[11:17] David Armstrong: It sounds like she sharpens his pencils.

[11:24] Albert Evans: Followed him around and got him coffee. And yet she had made this contribution. And over the years, the Rogers and Hammerstein organization and many of the biographers and books have been more upfront with what Trudy Rittman actually contributed to these shows.

[11:40] David Armstrong: Exactly. And that's not to take anything away from Richard Rogers. He was also a great musical dramatist. I think the only thing that wasn't great about Richard Rogers, and he's the greatest and most central person in the history of the Broadway musical, is that he couldn't share the credit with some other people who helped him out.

[11:58] Albert Evans: Well, which brings us to The King and I, where Trudy's largest contribution to a Rogers and Hammerstein show happened. Again, working with Jerome Robbins, the central piece of Act Two is the small house of Uncle Thomas Ballet.

[12:09] Albert Evans: Your majesty and honorable guests, I beg to put before you small house of Uncle Thomas.

[12:25] Albert Evans: Small house of Uncle Thomas. Small house of Uncle Thomas.

[12:38] Albert Evans: And it was entirely composed by Trudy Rittman, except for one short little section where she uses the tune to Hello Young Lovers. There's singing, there's music, there's dancing. It's I mean, it's such an incredible creation.

[12:52] Albert Evans: So she bid goodbye to friends and start on her escape.

[13:05] Albert Evans: Poor Eliza running and running to a rainstorm.

[13:16] Albert Evans: It must have been very tedious to put it together, frankly.

[13:19] Richard Rogers

[13:21] Albert Evans: The King and I deliberately did not do a lot of research on Siamese music of the time because he thought that the audience would simply reject it and that it would be too strange for a Broadway audience in the mid-century. Too foreign.

[13:38] Yeah, too foreign sounding. So he did something that's more along the line of the sort of Asian-inspired music that you would hear again like in a movie soundtrack. But this particular piece is supposedly written by Tuptim, the slave girl, because she has read Uncle Tom's Cabin and she thinks this will be a good way to point out to the king the error of his ways. It's not a good idea. So the music cannot sound, it has to sound the least Western of anything in the show.

[14:14] She's a Burmese character.

[14:15] Right. And the band that's supposedly accompanying this piece would be a Siamese court band, probably. Using all Eastern instruments, they wouldn't have Western instruments necessarily. So she had to find a way to meld those two worlds together.

[14:30] Yeah, she had to go out. First of all, she had to find all of these exotic instruments and in some cases, learn to play them or at least understand how they were played. And I just don't think Richard Rodgers would have any interest in writing that sort of thing. Spending the time, number one.

[14:48] Spending the time. Because this was weeks in a studio devising all this. Whereas Trudy Rittman probably loved doing it. And it's also a little one-act play that the two of them, Jerome Robbins and Trudy Rittman, are creating together.

[14:59] Yeah. So again, it's storytelling music, just like all the ballets are, only with this very unusual musical palette.

[15:07] Your majesty and honorable guests, I will tell you end of story. Is Buddha's wish that Eva come to him and thank him personally for saving of Eliza and baby. And so she died and go to arms of Buddha.

[15:59] Which brings us then to the sound of music. And we haven't talked about this yet, but in addition to being a dance arranger, she was also a vocal arranger.

[16:12] Right.

[16:13] And she had done the vocal arrangements here and there on other Rodgers and Hammerstein shows. But as I understand, she did all the vocal arrangements on the sound of music, all the music for the nuns. There's a lot of choral singing that they do.

[16:26] Right.

[16:27] And I think what would surprise most people was her contribution to Do, Re, Mi. And we'd be surprised to know that it wasn't all written by Richard Rodgers.

[16:34] So if you just think of the song Do, Re, Mi, it's very simple. There's really not much to it. There's a couple of different tunes, but it's over with very quickly if you just sing the song. Now, again, on stage, it's a storytelling thing all about how Maria teaches the children to awake to the beauty of music and the excitement of it and how fun it is to sing.

[17:13] And it has to function as a production number because in the sound of music, there's really no chorus. The children function as the chorus and their numbers are the big, quote, production numbers in the show. So it has to build and stop the show the way a production number needs to work in a musical. And yet it still has to seem fairly realistic that this is children learning to do this on the spot. And that Maria is making up and finding this way to teach them on the spot as well, improvising it.

[17:42] So that was the work of, again, the choreographer in this case was Joe Layton working with Trudy Rittman on spelling out this piece. And we know a lot about this because Peter Howard, another great dance arranger of so many shows, he actually was the assistant conductor on the show. So he's probably in that room with Trudy learning how to be a dance arranger at the same time.

[18:04] He talks about how the whole section where they do sort of the bell ringing thing. That was all made up in rehearsal as a combination of what Trudy Rittman brought into the room and what Joe Layton improvised on the spot.

[18:45] And of course, he says Richard Rodgers was thrilled with it. He says Rodgers allowed her to do whatever she liked. When we started doing the staging of it, Joe took over. He asked Trudy for certain parts to be repeated, certain embellishments. I think maybe by this time she was starting to get a little discouraged and this relationship with Rodgers was wearing on her a bit because in one of her books, Agnes DeMille says that not getting credit for this contribution to the sound of music broke Trudy Rittman's heart.

[19:14] Agnes goes on to say, she's a smart woman and you know it's dishonest. That's all it is. I don't think any artist who respected himself, really respected and trusted himself could do a thing like that. Now Agnes had her issues with Richard Rodgers and she was not reticent to talk about them. So there's a lot on record of Agnes DeMille complaining mostly about Rodgers not giving credit to Agnes DeMille and also to Trudy Rittman. But she goes out of her way to talk about what a genius he was. She just wanted him to be able to spread the credit around.

[19:49] And frankly, I wonder if the fact that Richard Rodgers surrounded himself with all these brilliant women, not brilliant men, but brilliant women who would do this sort of work and because of the tenor of the times, would not insist on credit.

[20:07] Absolutely. I think the patriarchy has a great deal to do with this because this is a way for him to have these incredibly talented people around him and yet not have to share the credit.

[20:18] Here's an excerpt from Trudy Rittman's contract with Rodgers and Hammerstein. And it says, you hereby sell, assign and transfer to Richard Rodgers the original music and all arrangements and adaptations of music and all other contributions by you to the musical play which may be made by you together with the copyright and renewal and or extended copyright and all rights of every kind and nature there within now and hereafter known absolutely and forever throughout the world.

[20:49] That pretty much covers it. One of the books makes a point that she was only paid $3,000 for her work on The King and I. When you do the translation, that's actually $26,000 today. It's not enough to compensate her for what she did, but it's not a terribly low amount of money given the time period. And I think that just the nature of the job had expanded at a rate that the salaries did not keep pace with.

[21:17] I think in the 1930s, a dance arranger would just do like three choruses of a tune, alternating the orchestration a little bit, and people would dance to it. But this idea of storytelling and ballets and musical plays, this was something that entered with Rodgers and Hammerstein. They really more or less invented that. I just think the job suddenly became so much more important and significant and large that people were still thinking, I'll give them $3,000.

[21:50] Right. They're just the dance arranger.

[21:52] Yeah. Completely underestimating what they did.

[21:54] Right. Unlike Agnes de Mille, there's very little written by Trudy Rittman herself in terms of talking about it. She didn't write any books. She was only interviewed a very few times. I did find an excerpt from an interview where she talks about Richard Rodgers and out here she says, and quote, I'm not a great friend of Richard Rodgers. I've done six shows with him, so I know him quite well. But I'd say this. He hands over the show and says, do. He writes the songs, that's it, and gets out.

[22:24] There's a famous quip from Richard Rodgers regarding his association with Trudy Rittman. I'm assuming it was in relationship to Small House of Thomas. Yeah, I think it was. I think it was after Richard Rodgers had let the dancers do their thing, probably in the basement. Didn't even hear this until they decided, okay, let's do the ballet. Let's have Dick and Oscar come see it for the first time. And so they put it on the stage. They did it. And Rodgers turned to her and said, it's supposed to be Rodgers and Hammerstein, not Rodgers and Rittman. But he kept it in the show.

[23:04] Joy Nation will be back right after this short break.

[23:12] And of course, Rodgers and Hammerstein were not the only legendary writing team that Trudy Rittman collaborated with. She did all of Lerner and Lowe's shows, including Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot. She worked on Finian's Rainbow and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever with Burton Lane, as well as Peter Pan and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Julie Stein.

[23:32] So these four best of the best composers of Broadway all chose Trudy Rittman to help them make their shows.

[23:39] Yeah. And as I understand it, sometimes they would even, they would sort of change their own schedule so that they could all work with her. Sometimes she was working on multiple shows at the same time.

[23:51] Yeah. Exactly. And they would try to accommodate that because they all wanted it. They didn't want to do the show without her, clearly. She was of great value to them.

[24:04] So as in demand as Trudy Rittman was, she wasn't the only great dance arranger of this period, was she?

[24:11] She was not. Not even the only great women dance arranger. There was also Genevieve Pitot, who when I was a kid, I used to see her name on some scattered albums, and one of them was Lil Abner. And I thought, what is this fancy French lady doing, writing hillbilly music for Lil Abner?

[24:45] Great dance music. Lots of dance music.

[24:46] Yeah, lots of it. I mean, it's really, in a sense, it's a dance show. But then I found out that she was from New Orleans, and so she was steeped in jazz and country music and all of this. So she was actually useful. I mean, she was great, but she was also useful because I think maybe that's an area where Trudy Rittman would not have been the first choice. She probably wasn't going to be as good on shows like Lil Abner or Guys and Dolls or working with Michael Kidd and some of those other choreographers.

[25:21] Exactly. She also had a huge range. She could do fancy, but she could also do that, just, let's do a hoedown, which Trudy could do that too, but that wasn't the center of her talent.

[25:35] Well, this is one of those unsung women of the musical theater who hopefully are getting to be a little sung today as people know more about them and we can celebrate what they did. Thank you, Albert, for sharing your insights on this.

[25:50] Well, thank you. Maybe we can get back together sometime and talk more about Genevieve Piteau.

[25:55] It would be interesting to go through her career as well. Thanks so much.

[25:58] Thank you. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong, and I want to thank my special guest, Albert Evans, as well as everybody at the Voice of Vashon on Vashon Island and at the Broadway Podcast Network.