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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artists invented the Broadway musical. I'm David Armstrong, and my guest again today is my longtime colleague, Albert Evans. If you listen to this podcast, you know him well. And today we're going to talk about a big hit musical of the 1930s that I highly doubt that anyone listening to this has ever seen a live production of. And that show is THE GREAT WALTZ. It opened on Broadway in 1934 and became one of the longest-running musicals of the decade. Hello, Albert. Thank you so much for joining me to talk about THE GREAT WALTZ. Have you ever seen it?

[0:55] Albert Evans: I have never seen THE GREAT WALTZ on the great stage. I've seen a number of movie versions, which I think we're going to discuss later, but no, I've never seen it.

[1:05] David Armstrong: And you personally have had a lot of experiences with operettas, probably more than most people.

[1:09] Albert Evans: Yeah, I worked for a number of years at Paper Mill Playhouse, which is in New Jersey, in a rather conservative area. A huge theater, really well-equipped, but their audience seemed to like the old operettas and then sort of insisted that we do one every couple of years.

[1:26] David Armstrong: Well, we put on THE MERRY WIDOW.

[1:28] Albert Evans: Which you did new lyrics for, as I remember.

[1:30] David Armstrong: I wrote new lyrics for THE MERRY WIDOW.

[1:33] Albert Evans: Terrific lyrics.

[1:34] David Armstrong: Thank you. I remember a few of them because I went to see them. I didn't work on them, but NAUGHTY MARIETTA, I believe you did.

[1:40] Albert Evans: Yes, NAUGHTY MARIETTA.

[1:42] David Armstrong: And THE DESERT SONG.

[1:43] Albert Evans: THE DESERT SONG. That was a terrific production. THE STUDENT PRINCE and a couple of others.

[1:49] Albert Evans: They tend to blend together, I've got to say, because the plots are sort of similar. And I've always actually liked operettas, even though there is a certain sameness to them. But I was trained classically, so of course I really enjoyed the music, because a lot of the music is timeless, more so than the shows are.

[2:07] David Armstrong: What I think people will be surprised to hear is that these operettas were being done in major theaters. Those shows from Paper Mill were replicated at the Fifth Avenue Theater in Seattle before I was there, at Theater Under the Stars in Houston, and at the big musical theater companies all around the country. So there was an audience for these sort of classic 1920s operettas well into the 1990s.

[2:32] Albert Evans: Oh, there absolutely was.

[2:34] David Armstrong: So this is the second in our occasional series of episodes that we're calling In Search of Lost Broadway. I guess the thesis of that is that we are trying to rediscover musicals that were very significant and influential Broadway hits in their day, but now have almost disappeared from almost all discussion of Broadway's past and receive only the briefest mentions in the history books.

[2:59] David Armstrong: And I have to admit that even in my own book, Broadway Nation, I checked it this afternoon because I wasn't positive about this, there's not a single mention of The Great Waltz, even though I extensively highlight the careers and legacy of two of its principal performers, Moss Hart, and especially an artist that I've come to believe is one of the most important and one of the most under-acknowledged queer inventors of the Broadway musical, Hassard Short.

[3:26] Albert Evans: If you've read my book, you have an awareness of who Hassard Short was, but frankly, it's somebody that neither you or I knew much about before I started doing the research for this book.

[3:36] David Armstrong: Well, this has been such an interesting project that we're continuing because these are shows, as you said, that we have never seen. So we have to sort of reconstruct in our head what they were really like.

[3:44] Albert Evans: And like, say Rio Rita, I've never seen Rio Rita, but doing research on it was very fascinating. And there's a movie, there's actually two movies, but the second one has nothing to do with Rio Rita, just was a title that people still knew and all of a sudden Abbott and Costello are in it.

[4:05] Albert Evans: But it's fun just doing this detective work and trying to piece it back and finding old scripts and just trying to get back to some understanding, if maybe not a deep understanding of what it was like to be there on the first night.

[4:18] David Armstrong: And you also discover, oh, that's what this song is from, because a lot of the songs have long outlasted the shows and that's the way it was designed in the 20s and 30s anyway. Shows weren't expected to last. The music was what was going to make money for everyone.

[4:34] Albert Evans: Absolutely.

[4:35] David Armstrong: And just to build on what Albert just said, what we're attempting to do, at least until someone invents a time machine and we can go back in time, is to get as close as possible to understanding and even maybe sort of experiencing the original Broadway production of, in this case, The Great Waltz, as we possibly can. Trying to understand what was it that made it such a sensation? What made it such a hit? What did we miss by not seeing it and by not having seen it revived over the years? And what are the resources out in the world that can help us and maybe somebody else who might be interested in achieving at least some of that goal of trying to rediscover it?

[5:19] David Armstrong: So we've tried to identify firsthand accounts, reviews, scholarship, recordings, films, videos, etc. What I think is really interesting is that, like the first musical we talked about, which was Rio Rita, which we explored in episode 181, if you're interested in going back and hearing that, The Great Waltz maintained a surprisingly strong cultural currency throughout most of the 20th century, including, as Albert just indicated, three movie versions and a live television production.

[5:50] David Armstrong: The other reason that I picked this show for us to focus on right now is because just a few weeks ago, October 25th, 2025, marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Johann Strauss II, who, even though he died in 1899, had an amazingly significant presence on Broadway during the 20th century.

[6:13] Albert Evans: And David and I looked at this the other day, 27 shows featuring his music between 1882, when he was still alive, and 1990.

[6:23] David Armstrong: And we'll go through that list probably in the next episode.

[6:26] Albert Evans: Well, also, because he wasn't alive when the show was put together. So in a way, it's a jukebox musical.

[6:31] David Armstrong: Absolutely. In a lot of ways, it was put together first in 1930 with the idea that we've got all these great tunes, we want to now take them and turn them into a show. Unlike most jukebox musicals, these tunes did not have lyrics to begin with. So that was another added aspect to that.

[6:48] Albert Evans: So let's look at that. The very first incarnation of what would become The Great Waltz was a German language operetta titled Waltzer aus Wien, or in other words, Waltz is from Vienna.

[7:01] David Armstrong: Exactly. Which is easier for us to represent.

[7:06] Albert Evans: And indeed, that will become the English title of it.

[7:08] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[7:09] Albert Evans: This was presented in Vienna in 1930, in what appears by the reports to be a fairly small scale production, which will not remain afterwards. And in fact, it only seems to have had a chorus of six performers. It was written by three Viennese operetta regulars, A.M. Wildner, Hans Reichart and Ernst Mariska, who devised a semi-fictional story of how Johann Strauss Jr. himself rose to immortal fame as the waltz king, despite his own jealous father's efforts to sabotage his musical career.

[7:46] Albert Evans: So again, as you said, it was sort of like a jukebox musical, sort of like Jersey Boys in a way.

[7:51] David Armstrong: We're going to take the story of a...

[7:52] Albert Evans: Yeah, it's a story that follows the career of actually two waltz writers, a father and son and their rivalry.

[8:00] Albert Evans: The rivalry is quite amped up in The Great Waltz, but nevertheless, it did exist. So they're taking elements from the real life story and then fictionalizing them, expanding on them. The love story part of it seems to be entirely fictional and bear almost no relationship to Strauss's real life.

[8:18] Albert Evans: Wildner and Reichart had previously written the book and lyrics for the German-language operetta that in 1923 had become the Broadway smash hit Blossom Time.

[8:29] David Armstrong: So they have already had a show that was a giant hit, and Blossom Time is probably another topic we could explore in this series of lost musicals.

[8:38] Albert Evans: That show was revived over and over again by the Schubert's, it sort of famously was the show they would keep all the costumes and props in storage, and then they'd send it out on the road when they needed money.

[8:49] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[8:50] Albert Evans: It became just a gag, like in Broadway.

[8:52] David Armstrong: It looks like The Curse of Blossom Time.

[8:57] Albert Evans: And that is also a jukebox musical, because that's the story of Fran Schubert.

[9:05] David Armstrong: So they had already tried this once very successfully, where again, they had to take Schubert tunes, Schubert's classical music, and incorporate that into a story and make songs out of the music.

[9:17] Albert Evans: So they were clearly now trying to replicate that success, and if anything, they even topped that success with this show. For Wölzer Aus Wien, the writing team created new songs, adding lyrics to the timeless melodies of both of the Johann Strauss's father and son, and the music was adapted by a young Jewish-Austrian musical prodigy named Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

[9:42] David Armstrong: Now why is that name familiar to us, Albert?

[9:45] Albert Evans: Well, Korngold was a very serious, very successful classical composer, but in the 1930s, he decided to get out of Austria, and he knocked around and eventually ended up in Hollywood, where he wrote the film scores for a number of gigantic, mainly swashbucklers, like Captain Blood and Robin Hood, and because he had this, sort of an old-fashioned sensibility, but a very theatrical sensibility, he sort of invented what we know of as adventure film music.

[10:19] David Armstrong: He would be somebody that, like John Williams, would look up to and would emulate.

[10:23] Albert Evans: I've actually read that he absolutely does, he gives a great deal of credit. You and I were talking about this this afternoon, it's a small handful of movie music composers who are writing the soundtrack music, the underscoring, as we would call it in the theater, the background music, that become very, very famous names, and Korngold is one of them.

[10:45] David Armstrong: Yeah, I think he worked mainly at Warner Brothers, right?

[10:48] Albert Evans: I think that's right.

[10:49] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[10:50] Albert Evans: But he has an ongoing association with this show, The Great Waltz, and in fact, with Strauss, I was doing a little research on him, and he adapted several Strauss operettas, actual operettas that Strauss had written and not really finished or that needed to be retooled, and he was the one who did them after Strauss's death. He was very involved in this music, and then as we'll hear as we go on, he will continue to be involved with The Great Waltz throughout the 20th century as it has its various incarnations.

[11:18] David Armstrong: Yeah, he always was with it.

[11:20] Albert Evans: Now exactly how Hassard Short became involved with the project is not really clear. We need somebody to write a biography of Hassard Short.

[11:29] David Armstrong: I would love that.

[11:30] Albert Evans: That would be something that I think we're really missing as a great inventor of the Broadway musical who is also sort of lost to us at this point. We know his name well, and we can certainly identify the shows he worked on, but his personal life I think on purpose was kept vague because he was gay.

[11:48] Albert Evans: People have identified that he had a longtime boyfriend named Billy Ladd, who he traveled with, and not too long ago I found a newspaper clipping of a society column in Florida, like in Palm Beach, where it says Hassard Short and Billy Ladd are taking a house in Palm Beach for the season kind of thing. So this was out in the open as much as you could possibly be in the 1920s and 30s. I found that was fascinating.

[12:15] David Armstrong: And as I talk about this in my book, Hassard Short would often, maybe yearly, take a trip to Europe, often accompanied by Billy Ladd, Moss Hart, and Irving Berlin and their families, and they would be part vacation and part scouting properties and ideas to bring back to Broadway.

[12:35] Albert Evans: So I suspect he became aware of this show on one of those trips. In any event, in 1931, between his triumphant Broadway stagings of the classic reviews, The Bandwagon and Face the Music, Hassard Short conceived and staged an English-language version of the show in London, now titled Waltzes from Vienna.

[12:57] Albert Evans: Now it had English lyrics by a gentleman named Desmond Carter, who had written lyrics with George Gershwin on the shows that Gershwin did in London.

[13:06] Albert Evans: London. He did a couple shows specifically for London. So, Desmond Carter's job was to create a new set of lyrics to the Strauss tunes.

[13:15] ♪ Musical number: "Need You Ask How Songs Are Made" — performed by Albert Evans ♪

[15:27] Albert Evans: That show, this London production, was a triumph. It was hailed by critics and I put together an amalgamation of the various critical responses to the show. They called it a superb feast of music and spectacle, a triumph of stagecraft, and a wonder show filled with lovely music, lighting, scenic effects, and ballet. But the real hero of the evening, so far as living people is concerned, was undoubtedly Mr. Hassard Short, whose production is in its own way quite a new thing. It has a sense of beauty and character about it at every point, quite apart from its moving stages and mysterious lights, and deserves to be seen and heard and enjoyed by all who have the chance. It was such a sensation it ran 607 performances in London. That led to, in 1934, being adapted into a film directed by an emerging new film director named Alfred Hitchcock.

[16:27] David Armstrong: Don't go away. Albert and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[16:34] David Armstrong: Hi, this is David Armstrong, and if you're enjoying this episode, I strongly suspect that you will want to read my new book, Broadway Nation, How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. On sale now wherever books are sold, and I'm very happy to report that the early reviews have been terrific. The esteemed author Geoffrey Bloch says that Broadway Nation is a fascinating, comprehensive, and timely gem of a book that more than lives up to its promise of delivering no less than five books in one. Kudos to David Armstrong. And Tony Award-winning lyricist David Zippel says that David Armstrong's insightful history of the evolution of the Broadway Musical and its creators is captivating and comprehensive as well as indispensable.

The book is, of course, available on Amazon, but I recommend that you go to the publisher's website, bloomsbury.com, where you will currently receive a 10% discount. Again, like the podcast that inspired it, the book is titled Broadway Nation, How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. Now, back to the show. That led to, in 1934, being adapted into a film directed by an emerging new film director named Alfred Hitchcock. Doing a genre that you do not associate Alfred Hitchcock with. It was his only musical, but it is fascinating in its own right. Albert and I watched this, so in some ways this is one of the touchstones for getting close to The Great Waltz. This, I think, is as close as we can get to this initial London production to Waltz's in Vienna.

[18:15] Albert Evans: Absolutely, because it actually sticks to the story, such as it is, of Waltz's from Vienna. Alfred Hitchcock had no intention of making a musical, so what he did was ditch all the songs. And he just filmed it as though, I mean, there are songs in it, but they're the songs that they're writing in the story. They're not plot songs. Yeah, there's some singing in the movie, but very little singing. There's, of course, a lot of orchestral playing, because the story is about Strauss Sr.'s orchestra and Strauss Jr. founding his own orchestra and writing the Blue Danube as the main event, and seems to be very close to the events of the original script as it was done in London before Moss Hart becomes involved for Broadway.

And in fact, I looked at the movie credits again today. In the title sequence, it says, based on the great Alhambra success, the Alhambra Theater is where it played in London. But what's interesting is there's no credit for Desmond Carter at all, and only the original Austrian team, including Korngold, gets billed. The British English language writers do not get billed for this film. The one Broadway connection is, it does say, scenario by Guy Bolton, who was not involved in the British stage production, but of course is a Broadway name that we know from that same year that The Great Waltz will open. He will have credit, at least to some extent, for Anything Goes that opens just a month later.

[19:48] David Armstrong: We read somewhere that, this was very confusing, so talk a little bit about that, Albert. Somebody said that they couldn't afford to acquire the songs to make the film, which seems, I don't quite understand that.

[19:58] Albert Evans: I'm sorry to say that's some... don't. Let's just go back and see how Hitchcock got involved in this. Hitchcock had made a number of silent films, and then he did some sound films, a few, but they were returning less and less in terms of grosses. So the British film company decided to drop him, to take him off contract. Now he was unemployed, and Gaumont, the French film concern, had opened to British Gaumont, and they said, well, would you like to make a movie for us? And he said, sure, I have all these good ideas. No, no, no, no. We have the ideas. We have these five projects lined up. Would you like to do one of these? And he read them, and his heart dropped. They had nothing to do with espionage, or Jack the Ripper, or all of the things that we associate with Alfred Hitchcock.

But he finally decided, okay, I will do this, because I have bills to pay. I have not made a lot of money in the movies. So he said, okay. Alma agreed, his wife. So he started working on it, and either the first thing he did was decide, I will do this as a sort of comedy drama, like a biopic, and just get rid of all these songs, because I don't know how to stage songs. Or it had turned out that they had signed for the title and the script, but not the songs. And that would considerably up the budget, having to pay for the songs. Whether or not it was Hitchcock's idea or the studio's idea, they went along with the idea, well, let's just get rid of the songs. There will be lots of music in it.

Now, the great thing about its influence on Hitchcock is that, of course, we know that in all of Hitchcock's movies, music is very, very important. He wanted the soundtrack to be almost a narrator, or another character, or something that told the audience what was happening. What had frustrated him about making silent films was, they were silent films, and then they would go out to play all over the country, and he had no control over what music was going to accompany them. It could just be a piano player playing ragtime, or just, you know, whatever. Whatever the music director, or pianist, or orchestra leader at the theater decided, that's what would play during a Hitchcock movie. And that drove him nuts, because he was a control freak.

One thing he really got to experiment with in this is that the scenes are actually cut to the music, or the music is cut to the scenes. I don't know which way it would go, but the music really helps to tell the story. I think in this case, he probably had to, much of the time, cut to the music, because they're very famous pieces of music that you can't just fool around with. There are these Strauss waltzes that we know how they go, and then the scenes would often have to be cut to that. The visuals would be cut to that.

[22:49] Albert Evans: Well, and even then, Hitchcock's technique was to map out the entire film, scene by scene, shot by shot, cut by cut, before they even started filming.

[22:56] David Armstrong: Right. Which, of course, would drive the producers crazy, because they couldn't re-edit it, because all he filmed was what he wanted. He only shot what he wanted to be on the film.

[23:06] Albert Evans: Yeah. They would have to go back into the studio and do new scenes if they wanted it. Of course, they weren't going to do that. So, he got a chance to actually play with music in this movie, in a way that he had done some sound films, but there was nothing like this. And, in fact, his very next movie, I believe, is the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

[23:26] David Armstrong: Yeah. And I don't remember that version. I know the music figures very strongly in the second version of that movie. This then leads to these first couple movies. I think The 39 Steps is the one after that. So, this is the movie right before he starts making his classic signature films.

[23:41] Albert Evans: You're right. It's been a long time since I saw that 30s version of Man Who Knew Too Much, but the one that we know ends with a murder that is going to happen on a timpani beat in Albert Hall, right?

[24:03] David Armstrong: Right. And, of course, it has Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera throughout the movie as well. We had a chance to watch this movie. Waltz is from Vienna, the Hitchcock version. I found it to be a very engaging, very entertaining movie.

[24:08] Albert Evans: It really is. It really is. There's a lot of humor. I had no idea they would do that. It opens with a fire in a building that is only there to get two characters together across the street in a dress shop because they're escaping the fire. It makes for an exciting beginning.

[24:26] David Armstrong: And almost sort of a slapstick. There's a lot of almost sort of Mack Sennett slapstick comedy in this movie, which I don't always expect from Hitchcock.

[24:34] Albert Evans: Oh, yeah. Because the people in the burning building are not actually concerned that there's a fire going on.

[24:40] David Armstrong: Exactly. There's a lot of jokiness in that whole thing. But it does have the elements of the story that were in the original stage version. It has the main characters, Strauss Jr., Strauss Sr., the romantic interest, the first romantic interest, which is the young woman whose father owns the bakery, basically. And then the Countess, of course, it's a love triangle to a certain extent. And the Countess's purpose ultimately is to manipulate the situation. So Strauss Sr. is late to the concert, and Strauss Jr. has to take over and, of course, premieres the Blue Danube Waltz in that moment and becomes a triumph. And then the Countess graciously relinquishes her hold over Strauss Jr. so that Rezzy, the young innocent girl, can marry him. And it's strange because she's in love with Strauss Jr., but she doesn't want him to be a composer. She wants him to come work in her father's bakery. It's hard to root for her because, no, we want him to go out and be a composer.

[25:47] Albert Evans: Absolutely. And the locations all seem to reflect the original locations of the show. I was looking at the original playbill. We haven't been able to lay our hands on the original scripts, unfortunately, the original 1930s Broadway script. There is a script you can read, but it's from a later incarnation that comes in the 1940s. So we'll talk more about that when we get to it. Anything else you want to say about the film?

[26:12] Albert Evans: I think people should see it. It's not very highly rated because I think people are expecting either a lavish operetta or a Hitchcock movie. And it's neither one of those, but it is as a movie itself. And in the context of the timeline of Hitchcock movies, if you're interested in that, it's very interesting.

[26:33] David Armstrong: Yeah, I think you're exactly right. If you're thinking it's going to be MGM, Nelson Eddy, Jeanette McDonald style operetta, it is not that at all. And if you think, let's watch this Hitchcock movie, you're not going to get a Hitchcock movie. You're going to get a movie made by Hitchcock quite well, but a different kind of thing. That movie opens almost just as the original London production is ending its run. It's a very long run. But during the run in 1931, Moss Hart was traveling to Europe and Hazard Short asked him to see the show in London, playing now in its second year, to assess the possibilities of bringing production to America. Though it's interesting because nothing in Moss Hart's resume at that point suggested that he would have any expertise in the world of Viennese Waltz.

And he indeed saw the show, said he thought it was sort of just operetta falderol and moved on to the continent without thinking much about it. A year later, the show was still going strong and Short was still determined to bring the musical to America and still certain that Moss was the writer to enliven it with humor for the Broadway audience. He knew it needed a facelift to really land on Broadway.

[27:42] Albert Evans: It's interesting because it seems like most of the staging ideas were already incorporated, at least versions of it were in this London production, but the script he felt needed Moss Hart's sort of Broadway expertise. Then at the same time as he's working on Moss Hart, he convinces the producer Max Gordon, which was a very famous producing name at the time. We don't talk much about Max Gordon in the same way we talk about the Schubert's or Ziegfeld or other producers from this era, but he was a big deal. Hazard Short convinces him that this could be the most stupendous operetta in Broadway history, and he is correct. It turns out to be that. As one author put it, depression audiences would soon seek escape from harsh reality in the sentimental, and hardly anything was farther from reality than the story of Father Strauss competing with Son Strauss and composing the beautiful Blue Danube.

[28:46] David Armstrong: Eventually, Moss Hart agrees to write the English version of the Austrian original, even though, as he wrote, for years I've been dodging operettas in every shape, form, and manifestation. He's the one who renamed the show The Great Waltz. Keep in mind that this is the height of the depression we're in now. This is probably happening in 1933 is when the show's getting worked on and getting written, and the production is coming together. Somehow, Max Gordon convinces the Rockefellers, yes, those Rockefellers who have already built Rockefeller Center, and as part of Rockefeller Center, there are two theaters. There's Radio City Music Hall, which is still there, and there's the Roxy, which we know a little bit about.

[29:33] Albert Evans: Who wrote the song about the Roxy Music Hall? Is that Rogers and Hart?

[29:38] David Armstrong: Yeah, I mean, it was just the Roxy, and they combined the two and said, you'll have a great time at the Roxy Music Hall because the fountains never stop flowing, just all this lavishness. Although it's slightly off our main topic, I thought it would be worthwhile to play a bit of that Rogers and Hart song at the Roxy Music Hall as performed here by Dorothy Loudon. The satirical lyrics certainly illustrate the notoriety and attention that the Roxy Theater received prior to being renamed the Center Theater and becoming the home of The Great Waltz.

[30:07] ♪ Musical number: "At the Roxy Music Hall" — performed by Dorothy Loudon ♪

[32:25] David Armstrong: Cole Porter also mentions the Roxy in the famous lyric you're the pants on the Roxy usher which I think people get confused about that now but I believe those were female ushers wearing very tight pants is what he was referring to.

[32:36] Albert Evans: I think the Roxy ushers were actually men and they wore very tight pants and that might have gotten Cole Porter's attention.

[32:47] David Armstrong: I'm sure it would have. That's good. We'll have to do a little research on that and see. Yeah, I've actually seen a photograph somewhere of a Roxy usher. They look tall and everything's in the right place. The pants are keeping them in the right place.

[33:03] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[33:04] David Armstrong: Albert was of course correct. The Roxy ushers were an all-male team and I'll be posting some images of them in uniform on the Broadway Nation Facebook page. Anyway, the Roxy has been a movie theater. Max Gordon convinces the Rockefellers to revamp their Roxy movie theater which has nearly 4,000 seats and it had an orchestra capacity greater than the entire New Amsterdam theater. This is the theater that he convinces them to revamp, reconstruct in many ways for the Great Waltz and somehow he convinces them to bankroll the show as well. Again, in the middle of the Great Depression to invest half a million dollars in this show and that becomes the talk of Broadway.

[34:03] Albert Evans: Cole Porter, who always liked a topical reference, a month later when Anything Goes opens in that original lyric to the song Anything Goes there is a stanza that goes, when Rockefellers still can hoard enough money to let Max Gordon produce his shows, anything goes.

[34:11] David Armstrong: Which gets blank stares. We don't know what he's talking about but it's topical which was of course Cole Porter's stock and trade. When you and I didn't know what that was until we did the research on this, we knew that lyric. We knew it was there but we didn't understand it was specifically about the Great Waltz.

[34:27] Albert Evans: About the Great Waltz, yeah. And again, Anything Goes opens 30 days after the Great Waltz opens. I'm sure the audience was falling out of their chairs to hear this topical, ripped from the headlines, reference.

[34:39] David Armstrong: In his biography of Moss Hart called Dazzler, Stephen Bach writes that if the Rockefellers were swayed by Gordon's confidence, they must have been bowled over by Short's. The director had no desire to merely repeat his London production. He began at once to inflate Vienna's Chorus of Six into something that on a 38-foot stage on 6th Avenue would require 94 stagehands, 56 musicians, and 136 actors wearing over 500 costumes. The direct cost to the Rockefellers of refitting the theater with turntables, stage elevators, and 10 tons of scenery was $141,000. That would be the equivalent of $3 million today, including eight magnificent massive chandeliers about which we'll hear more soon.

[35:28] Albert Evans: He also goes on to say that whatever the Great Waltz lacked in drama, it apparently made up for in spectacle.

[35:34] David Armstrong: So I looked into this and here's another mash-up of descriptions of this final scene in the Great Waltz. The Great Waltz could certainly lay claim to having the most spectacular theatrical climax of the decade. The scene is Domeyer's Garden in Vienna. First, a brass band parades across the stage and there's a fireworks display simulated by 5,000 tiny bulbs responding to 1,000 tiny switches on a massive light control board especially designed and installed for the occasion. Everyone is awaiting the arrival of the Waltz King, Johann Strauss Sr., who is to conduct. But a Russian countess has made sure that he will not be there, and she convinces the restaurant owner that Strauss's son will be the perfect replacement. Young Strauss strides to the podium of the actual orchestra pit in the theater and strikes up the shimmering strains of the Blue Danube.

[36:32] Albert Evans: As the musicians play with great verve, the entire orchestra of 53 musicians in period costumes and wigs is lifted by elevator from the pit up and over the footlights and onto the stage.

[36:39] David Armstrong: Once they were in place, hydraulic pins coupled the orchestra platform to wheels and rolled the entire contraption to the back of the stage and elevated again to a balcony level, while the conductor's baton presumably never missed a beat. At the same time, the setting itself is falling into place. Eight enormous glowing chandeliers, each illuminated with 60 light bulbs, float down from above, while 10 pillars, each bearing 30 or 50 bulbous candelabras, depending on which version you read, slide in from the wings for a total of 980 electric candles. Thus, the scene is transformed from a simple garden to a glittering ballroom in which scores of bewigged, tail-coated, and ruffled dancers waltz with abandon as the new waltz king is crowned. Finally, when Papa Strauss enters from the auditorium, amazed and humbled by his son's success, the whole scene is alive with twirling figures.

[37:53] Albert Evans: That's the finale to the show that no one can stop talking about. Did you see that picture that I sent you earlier today, Albert?

[37:59] David Armstrong: Yes. I found in a book a photograph of that final scene, which does look spectacular. And then indeed, Albert and I last night were searching around and discovered that there's newsreel footage of the Great Waltz and of that final scene. Now it's sort of grainy newsreel footage from the period, but you do get a chance to see at least part of that scene played out, and of course we'll be posting that in the Broadway Nation Facebook group, which I invite anyone listening to join. We'll be linking to it in the show notes to this as well.

[38:29] Albert Evans: I then was looking at the playbill, the original playbill, and Hazard Short receives over-the-title billing.

[38:34] David Armstrong: Well, he deserves it.

[38:35] Albert Evans: Well, certainly. He seems to be the main mastermind behind this whole thing. The playbill reads, Max Gordon presents a new musical play, production conceived and directed by Hazard Short, book by Moss Hart, lyrics by Desmond Carter, music by Johann Strauss, father and son, dances and ballet by Albertina Rasch, who we haven't talked about yet, but we will as we go on. And then at the bottom of the billing, it says lighting, staging, scenic and mechanical effects created by Hazard Short. He's at the top and the bottom of the title page. This is really his triumph.

[39:14] David Armstrong: Do we have any financial records?

[39:18] David Armstrong: Whether the show made any money or not? It did. It apparently earned a profit, even during the Depression, because it ran long enough, and it had so many seats. That's the other thing to think about. So it's running almost 350 performances. To put it in perspective, Anything Goes will run just over 400 performances. So it's in that same ballpark. And during the Depression, shows running more than 100 performances are lucky. I was paging through that book Ring Bells Sing Songs about the musicals of the 1930s today, and just flop after flop after flop running 25 performances and things like that. So yes, and I think the reason it made money is because it was selling out 3,700 seats a night. And I think within that range, because the theater was so big, you could go with very inexpensive seats in the top of the balcony, and it was dynamically priced in that regard.

And with a show like this, it's not the sort of show that you need to be in the first row, because it's such a big spectacle, you probably want a little distance. Yeah, you want to be back far enough that when all those chandeliers come down, it has the impact that Hassard has designed it to have. So it's a sensation. But the reviews, as much as they talk about the spectacle, they also talk about the musical value of the show. And let's talk a little bit about why is this show happening from the beginning in 1930 in Vienna. It's happening because the music. Again, in that sort of jukebox manner, there is an audience who wants to hear these songs and wants to experience them, is the belief. And of course, that turns out to be true.

Why is that? These waltzes, these famous Strauss waltzes, now 100 years later, more than 150 years later after he wrote them, 200 years after his birth, are still among the most famous pieces of music in the world. Yeah, they're spectacularly orchestrated and extremely tuneful. You cannot get these tunes out of your head. But really, for most of the 20th century, and even now, you will get a response from a Strauss waltz because they're irresistible. And so his name still lives, well, their names still live. But it's mostly Strauss Jr. that wrote the music that we remember. Tales of the Vienna Woods, the Blue Danube, the Emperor's Waltz, again, among the most famous music in the history of music.

They just pulse with life and love and seduction. They're very seductive, which was what made the waltz very controversial. When the waltz replaced the minuet, basically, as the social dance around the time of the French Revolution, because of the French Revolution, suddenly things were about the people. And so let's have them touch each other and not just do steps I learned in dance class. Because the minuet, you didn't touch each other. And suddenly the waltz, the man is grabbing the woman around the waist and swirling her around. And it's about domination, frankly, of the male dominating the female, which may be controversial again now. But at the time, it was scandalous. It was sexy. They're constantly surprising.

It's not the same musical texture from beginning to end. There are always orchestral changes. There's always something new to listen to. Even though you've heard it a hundred times, it still surprises you and captivates you. And one additional artifact that we found is a studio cast album. And of course, cast albums are one of the main ways that we can connect with musicals from the past. Yes, this is actually a studio cast album of waltzes from Vienna, released in 1965 by the World Record Club and starring opera singers June Bronehill and Kevin Scott. But comparing the song titles and the track order and the personnel that sing them, it's nearly identical to the opening night playbill of the Great Waltz on Broadway. So it seems that the musical aspects of Waltzes from Vienna transferred directly to the Broadway production.

[43:44] David Armstrong: We could be and we should be, but for all the time we're losing. You know patience is a virtue. To be kind would never hurt you.

[44:02] ♪ Musical number: "Look Before You Leap" — performed by June Bronehill and Kevin Scott ♪

[45:49] David Armstrong: This is the first in a series of episodes in which Albert and I will continue to explore the history and legacy of the Great Waltz, including the quite incredible cultural currency that that show will maintain throughout the entirety of the 20th century. Today I want to leave you with one of the many rave reviews, this one from the Brooklyn Citizen. Not since the old Hippodrome days has an audience been privileged to view anything quite as spectacular as the Great Waltz, which Max Gordon brought to Center Theater in Rockefeller Center on Saturday night. Everyone who was anyone in New York was there. Never in all my life have I seen so many beautifully gowned ladies. There were in fact two shows, one on the stage and one in the audience.

Billed as a love story of music, the Great Waltz, conceived and directed by Hassard Short, is a noble achievement. The book, based on a libretto written by not one but five men, has been rewritten by our own Moss Hart with lyrics by Desmond Carter. Over in London it was known as Waltzes from Vienna. Half a million dollars, it is said, has been spent on the Great Waltz. Of this I have no doubt. Lobby gossip on Saturday night had it that the Rockefellers financed the whole thing. Just how they expect to make a return on their investment is more than I can understand. It will take at least a year, provided the show runs that long, and I see no reason why it should not, before the Great Waltz shows anything like a profit.

Mr. Gordon, it would seem, has had barrels of money to play with, and the result is the Great Waltz. One of the greatest musical plays from an eye and ear standpoint ever presented on a Manhattan stage. The Great Waltz tells the romantic story of Johann Strauss, father and son. The elder Strauss, according to Mr. Hart, was jealous of his son's success and did everything in his power to halt his progress, placing innumerable obstacles in his path and discouraging the lad in everything worthwhile he attempted. The story, told leisurely, has a tendency to be dull and weighty, but here it is not the play, but the music, the dancing, the scenic and lighting effects which are the thing. Mr. Short has made good use of the three revolving stages of which the Center Theater boasts.

Massive scenes are changed before your eyes. An electrical firework display is only one of the many spectacles offered in the Great Waltz. The last scene, the ballroom in which the immortal Blue Danube waltz is played by an orchestra of at least 75 musicians, caused Saturday night's audience to stand up and cheer. These and many other eye and ear delights are what make the Great Waltz grade-A entertainment. The cast is large and talented. Also, there is a corps de ballet trained under the guiding eye of Albertina Rasch. The dance numbers alone are worth the admission price to the Center Theater. Mr. Short, as usual, has given the Great Waltz unusually beautiful lighting effects. When it comes to grouping soft colors, he has no equal. In short, Mr. Short has done it again. One could go on at length writing of the many good things the Great Waltz offers, but space here will not permit. See it, you must. Edgar Price.

[49:13] ♪ Musical number: "Blue Danube" — performed by the orchestra ♪

[50:29] David Armstrong: If you love this podcast and would like to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, I invite you to become a patron of Broadway Nation. For as little as $7 a month, you can receive access to a whole world of exclusive features, including new original episodes not available anywhere else, including a five-part series on the Broadway musicals that received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. And all patrons will receive on-air shout-outs and acknowledgments in recognition of your vital support. To join, simply go to broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. That's all one word, broadwaynationpodcast, S-U-P-E-R-C-A-S-T dot tech, or simply click the link in the show notes to this episode. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Pals Mox for his help with editing this episode, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.

[51:30] ♪ Musical number: "My Heart Is With You" — performed by the orchestra ♪