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[0:25] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that takes you deep inside the history of the Broadway musical with a special emphasis on the immigrant, Jewish, queer, and Black artists who invented it. Today, Albert Evans returns for part two of our exploration of the double songs of Broadway. If you missed part one, you may want to catch up with that before listening to this one. As always, I need to send my sincere thanks to the many patrons of Broadway Nation whose generous support really helps to make this show possible. I really couldn't do it without them. If you love musical theater and would love to support the work of Broadway Nation, there'll be information at the end of the episode about how you too can become a patron. Now let's dive into an episode I'm calling Meredith Willson and the Double Songs of Broadway, Part Two.

[1:21] Albert Evans: The first composer-lyricist team to try this after Berlin's debut of this in 1914 was in the 1920 show called The Night Boat, written by Jerome Kern and Anne Caldwell. And this is again another of these jukebox double songs because here they write a song called "Left All Alone Again Blues" that goes with the traditional Scottish song "Bluebells of Scotland." This is a song I was very unfamiliar with, even though it was interpolated into the revival of Very Good Eddie in 1975, which I actually did see and have heard the album many times. But for some reason, the song was not on my radar.

[2:01] David Armstrong: Again, it was one of the songs that my family sang in the car.

[2:01] Albert Evans: Again, you have been keeping some of these double songs alive over these years.

[2:07] David Armstrong: I had been. Where's my royalty? No, we used to sing in the car. A strange family.

[2:22] ♪ Musical number ♪

[3:54] Albert Evans: So it ends up in Very Good Eddie, but not the original Very Good Eddie, but in the revival in the seventies.

[3:59] David Armstrong: Right, which like most of those revivals during the nostalgia craze would augment the score with other songs by the same composer from other shows to sort of put more hits and fill out the shows, which often had not as many songs as we expect to be in a musical today. Other Silver Age composers who try this, we talked about the Gershwins who sort of do it. We've decided not to put the song "Mine" into this category, but it is adjacent to it. But Cole Porter does this quite notably in the song "Bon Voyage" from Anything Goes.

[4:34] Albert Evans: I wasn't aware that this was a double song until the Patti LuPone revival because I think you and I, Albert, share this. We grew up with the 1960s off-Broadway recording, which is still my favorite. And in fact, when I've directed Anything Goes, I've done it a couple times, I prefer using that version to the more recent version.

[4:53] David Armstrong: Yeah, I think that version is so satisfying. It's just all great songs. The book clips along.

[5:03] Albert Evans: But again, it's like we were baby ducklings following mama and we just will never accept anything else.

[5:08] David Armstrong: Exactly. And what they didn't include there, which in some ways is a disappointment once I discovered it, was that "Bon Voyage," one of the early songs in the show, was written to go with another song called "There's No Cure Like Travel." And we do get to hear that on the subsequent recordings of Anything Goes, both the Patti LuPone, the Sutton Foster version, etc., that they've included that sequence as it was originally done in the original Broadway show.

[5:38] ♪ Musical number ♪

[7:16] Albert Evans: I've been thinking about that lately. Why didn't they use it in the '60s?

[7:21] David Armstrong: But I think it might have been that they just simply didn't have enough people for the chorus for both songs. Singing the counter melody probably was just not feasible off-Broadway.

[7:31] Albert Evans: I think that's absolutely right. They just didn't have a big enough cast to pull that off.

[7:58] David Armstrong: A low turn and in no time you'll be singing Home Sweet Home.

[8:02] Albert Evans: Oh yeah.

[8:08] David Armstrong: But to our knowledge, Cole Porter never does this again.

[8:11] Albert Evans: Yeah, I don't think he does.

[8:13] David Armstrong: For some reason, I find that odd.

[8:15] Albert Evans: He didn't want to replicate that.

[8:17] David Armstrong: But maybe he just thought, well, I'm going to prove I can do it, and I did it, and moving on. Who knows?

[8:22] Albert Evans: Yeah, well, I do think that the shadow of Berlin fell heavily on a lot of songwriters, and they didn't want to compete, and they didn't want to seem to be copying him, to stay out of his lane basically.

[8:35] David Armstrong: So that's 1934. Now we jump to the Golden Age of Broadway, and the first example of this we found, and again I invite people who listen to this, if you know of other examples Albert and I have missed, please let us know. Although we've done a pretty thorough search of this, I'm sure there are examples out there that we have missed somewhere or other. But now we're jumping to 1954, to a musical called By the Beautiful Sea, with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by the great Dorothy Fields. And here we have another of these jukebox double songs with a song called Coney Island Boat that's written to go with the traditional In the Good Old Summertime.

[9:23] Albert Evans: Meet me at eight o'clock down by the river dock, and we'll hop that Coney Island boat. Paddles a-turnin' and water a-churnin' and we're here at Coney and razzle-dazzle Coney. Up on deck you'll pose for a snapshot in your pretty little pigamoo. Love you with a dress on, at the beach with less on. Focus, focus, I won't focus. I'm goin' all ashore, I got a cravin' for cotton candy and alcohol and zinc, oysters and orange juice, hot dogs with Charlie Bruce. My eyes are gettin' lazy, my tummy thinks I'm crazy when I spent my very last cent to treat you to a ten-course table he hoped. Then we'll go home again, home on a summertime Coney Island holiday boat.

[10:10] David Armstrong: I think I'm quite unusual in that I can say I staged this number because I think I'm one of the very few people who choreographed a production of By the Beautiful Sea back when I was in high school. I choreographed a community theater production in Cincinnati who for some reason had decided to do the musical By the Beautiful Sea. So this is a score that actually brings up a lot of memories for me. It's not an A-list score by any means, but it's very enjoyable, and this particular musical sequence is actually quite fun. The show is set at the turn of the century, the sort of gay 90s kind of feel. So of course, if you want to bring the audience into that world, you're going to sing In the Good Old Summertime, and in this case, they then wrote a song for the star of the show, Shirley Booth, to sing about being on the beach at Coney Island in the good old summertime.

[10:53] Albert Evans: In the good old summertime.

[11:20] David Armstrong: Oh, and down the shady lane of your baby mind.

[11:33] Albert Evans: And, and he holds on.

[11:38] David Armstrong: Oh, and down the shady lane of your baby mind.

[11:48] Albert Evans: Oh, and down the shady lane of your baby mind.

[11:56] David Armstrong: Just a year later, in 1955, Adler and Ross will roll out one of these double songs as the opening number to their Tony Award-winning musical Damn Yankees. And the opening number is six months out of every year, where they very effectively use a double song to dramatize this situation that is really the crux of the show, which is the obsession of the men with baseball during the summer and the women, the long-suffering wives, what they have to endure.

[12:29] Albert Evans: When we met in 1938, it was November.

[12:40] David Armstrong: When I said that I would be his mate, it was December.

[12:50] Albert Evans: I reasoned he would be the greatest husband that a girl had ever found. That's what I reasoned.

[13:01] David Armstrong: That's what I reasoned.

[13:06] Albert Evans: Then April rolled around. Strike three, ball four, walk around, we'll tie the score. You're blind, ump, you're blind, ump, you must be out of your mind, ump. Six months out of every year, I might as well be made of stone. Six months out of every year, when I'm with him, I'm alone.

[13:33] David Armstrong: And it's really sort of an establishing song for both the main characters, Joe, who will become Joe Hardy, and his wife, who is really the romantic lead of the show. And it sets up the obsession that the men have with the Washington Senators and the hate for the damn Yankees.

[13:52] Albert Evans: Yeah, and the hate for the damn Yankees, who always win the World Series. But you're absolutely right, it sets up the situation that the Senators are always losing, which is the problem that the plot needs to solve. How do we keep the Senators from losing every time? Something needs to happen, and of course, then the inciting incident will be when Joe is transformed into Joe Hardy by selling his soul to the devil so that the Senators can win.

[14:20] Albert Evans: Six months out of every year, when we cook for them, it never pays. Instead of praising our goulash, they're appraising the blaze of...

[14:28] Albert Evans: I've always enjoyed this number. This is one of those ones that might fall in the cracks a little bit because I don't know that the "Strike Three, Ball Four" section really rates as its own song, but it is performed separately from the main song, from the "Six Months Out of Every Year" section. So it does qualify technically as a double song for our purposes. And both songs, both the women's song and the men's song, they're about this very specific situation. They set up the show. It's like you don't have to have exposition; it is the exposition. And it illuminates these two contrasting points of view very dramatically, effectively. It's wonderful playwriting.

[15:31] David Armstrong: So now we're going to come to, I think, the person I would consider the second great master of the double song, certainly the second Broadway composer who seems to be obsessed with it nearly to the point of Irving Berlin. And that would be Meredith Willson. People tend to think of Meredith Willson as sort of one of the characters in The Music Man, and it is indeed about his younger life. But they think of him as sort of a musical naive person, which this score is extremely intelligently musically written because Meredith Willson was a world champion flute and piccolo player, and he played with the John Philip Sousa band early in life. Then he played with the New York Philharmonic under Toscanini, and he wrote symphonies and he wrote tone poems, and then he started working in television, being the music director of some big television shows. He knew his music, so he certainly could write a double song with one hand tied behind his back.

[16:31] Albert Evans: And how that goes into the background and accomplishments of Meredith Willson extensively in an early podcast, episode 19, that we just re-released on YouTube as a YouTube documentary. And I encourage you to go there to hear much more about Meredith Willson's career, his abilities, and even this show that we're talking about right now, especially the show we're talking about, The Music Man. He took this accomplishment and he will then create a stunt on the level of what Irving Berlin was doing. And he does it a couple of times in the show. He started out doing it three times in the show, but in the final results, we have two of these in the show.

[17:12] David Armstrong: Let's first talk about the jukebox version of the double song that he uses, which is "Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little," which is written to go with the traditional song, "Good Night Ladies." So he's taking a barbershop quartet song from the period and then writing this counterpoint double song to go with it. And again, we hear them separately in the show. We hear "Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little," and then we hear the school board sing "Good Night Ladies," and then the two things go together, which is very satisfying. And the two melodies are very different because "Good Night Ladies" is like long held notes. "Good night ladies," and against that, the gossipy women are singing "Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little, Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little, Pick-a-Little More." It's very easy to keep them separate.

[18:00] Albert Evans: And I think one thing that we haven't mentioned about double songs is that a lot of times the combination of the two songs aren't as confusing as they might be because one is being sung by men and then the other is sung by women or a man and a woman. So they're separated by an octave. So you don't have everyone singing in the same range. And as you said, most often they're in two different meters. One will be long held lyrical notes and the other one will be a pattery kind of rhythmic song. So again, you can hear the two things together. That's not always the case. And in fact, his big achievement in this regard in The Music Man runs counter to that because it's two melodic songs that go together.

This is, of course, "Lida Rose" and "Will I Ever Tell You," where we have the school board again who have been turned into a barbershop quartet by Harold Hill walking through the streets of River City while Marion, who is starting to acknowledge her love for Harold Hill, is on her porch singing "Will I Ever Tell Him." And these two songs, again, one of the high points of the show in the second act of The Music Man. But here we have two lyrical songs somehow still go perfectly together.

[19:19] David Armstrong: Yeah, it's one of those moments when the audience holds their breath because it's so beautiful and it comes at perfect place in the second act where we get to sit back and relax and actually think about this budding relationship instead of just seeing it done in dialogue. The men have fallen in love with singing and Marion has fallen in love with Harold.

[19:35] ♪ Musical number: "Lida Rose" and "Will I Ever Tell You" — performed by the cast of The Music Man ♪

[21:07] David Armstrong: This is going to be only two of three times that Meredith Willson was going to do this in The Music Man. Because two other songs that are still in the show and will be in the show on opening night were written to go with one another as double songs. But the double song aspect of it eventually got eliminated. What were those songs, Albert?

[21:25] Albert Evans: Don't go away. Albert and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[21:31] David Armstrong: Hi. This is David Armstrong. And I'm thrilled to announce a new and exciting initiative. Broadway Nation is teaming up with Like Minds Travel to create unique Broadway and Broadway history-related travel experiences designed especially for intrepid lovers of musical theater. Yes, musical theater happens around the world. And our first adventure will take us to two historic and legendary capitals of musical theater, Vienna and Budapest. This coming spring, from May 16 to 27, we will experience the many wonders of these spectacular cities, including world-class performances of six musicals and operettas, both classic and new. You can find the full itinerary at likemindstravel.com, but here's just a brief preview of what we have planned.

Nine nights of accommodations in four-star hotels, three productions at the acclaimed Vienna Volksoper, including a new production of Hello, Dolly! and the rare opportunities to see The White Horse Inn, the 1936 Broadway hit that even during the Depression became an international sensation, and Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Seven Deadly Sins, presented on a double bill with Puccini's comic opera Gianni Schicchi. We'll also see Maria Theresia, the musical, at Vienna's Rönecker Theater. This epic new musical is billed as a vivid portrait of power, passion, and historical change, and it tells the story of one of the most influential monarchs of the 18th century. We'll then travel to Budapest to see two productions at the Budapest Operetta and Erkel Theaters.

Now, these renowned companies have not yet released their spring schedules, but based on their repertoire, the possibilities are very exciting and include an all-new non-replica staging of Wicked, a new musical based on The Three Musketeers that's been a hit all across Europe, the musical version of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca that infamously never came to Broadway, and several classic operettas such as The Queen of Jardas by Emmerich Kallmann, produced on Broadway in 1917 as The Riviera Girl. And of course, we'll also have time to take in the many wonders of these amazing destinations. You can find a detailed itinerary and pricing at likemindstravel.com. That's L-I-K-E-M-I-N-D-S travel.com. I can't wait to take you to Europe on a musical theater adventure. Come along!

[24:14] David Armstrong: What were those songs, Albert?

[24:16] Albert Evans: They were "The Sadder But Wiser Girl," which is Harold Hill's sort of I Am song that comes near the beginning of the show. It's basically about, I want a woman with experience. I mean, it's him being sort of a cad, and then she is singing "My White Night." They sort of go together. And luckily, Meredith Willson himself made a record called And Then I Wrote the Music Man, in which he and his wife, Rini, who's a beautiful soprano, they record this song.

[26:36] David Armstrong: So we get to hear this even though we don't get to hear it in the show. Why did they take it out? Why didn't it happen?

[26:42] Albert Evans: I think it was originally going to be the first act curtain. You have these two different points of view. It's like, how can they possibly mesh in the end of the show? You know, so it's leaving us in sort of a cliffhanger in their relationship. But it's not leaving us with a good, you know, let's march out to intermission and have an orange drink. And so he wrote "The Wells Fargo Wagon." But it's a very short song. But it seems like a big production number because there's a big thing happening. And so I think it's a perfect act one closer.

[27:12] David Armstrong: Well, and in fact, the climax of "The Wells Fargo Wagon" is Winthrop suddenly being released and being able to talk and sing and let go of his shame, which is all because Harold Hill is transforming the town and transforming Winthrop. So it really is an incredibly dramatic moment in a way that I don't think this double song would have been nearly as dramatic. But it's interesting to know that those two songs and certainly when you hear them, even though you're hearing one at the beginning of the act and one much later in the act, you don't think, oh, those two songs are going to go together. Those two songs were written to go together. There's no indication of that. In fact, it's kind of stark like when you hear them together. They do go together, but in a very composer-y way, not in just an easy sing-along-y way.

[28:00] Albert Evans: Yeah, it doesn't have the same satisfaction as the other versions of this that he wrote. He clearly loves this idea, loves the stunt of this, and he will repeat it then in his next musical, his second most successful Broadway musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, with the opening number, which is Molly Brown's establishing number, which she sings with her brothers, her sort of cantankerous brothers that she's always fighting with. They have a very rough-and-ready relationship.

[28:30] David Armstrong: They're scrappy.

[28:32] Albert Evans: They're scrappy, exactly. And there she sings, "I'm going to learn to read and write," and they have a very satisfying counter-melody, making fun of her, critiquing her, and then the two things go together.

[28:34] ♪ Musical number: "I'm Going to Learn to Read and Write" — performed by the cast of The Unsinkable Molly Brown ♪

[28:57] ♪ Musical number: "I'm Gonna Move" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[31:14] David Armstrong: She's getting all of her attention, and yet there's these roughnecks surrounding her, making fun of her. So we get, she's going to have quite a struggle if she's going to get a house with a big brass bed. This is not going to be an easy thing for her to do, and they're critiquing her for even thinking about it.

[31:33] Albert Evans: Exactly. So it's really like the Irving Berlin song about having, you know, contrasting ideas of how life should be lived.

[31:41] David Armstrong: Absolutely. Wilson will do this one more time, much less effectively in my estimation, in the musical Here's Love in 1963, where here he writes a song called "Pinecones and Hollyberries" to double with his own song that he wrote, so not a traditional song, but his own pop song, "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," which he had written years before this musical was produced. So I find that's interesting. And why did he decide to do this? I suspect it's because people felt you're writing a musical about the Christmas season based on Miracle on 34th Street. How can you not put your own hit song "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" into the score, which I think he resisted until he found this sort of way to do it?

[32:26] Albert Evans: Yeah, he thought, well, I'll write a counter melody, but it doesn't seem like his heart's in it. The counter melody just seems sort of, oh, I'll write it. I'll sit down, I'll write it. I think the producer forced him to do it, frankly. He really wanted to write an original score. I think he felt it was giving up and saying, you know, but from a producer point of view, of course, you have to use this.

[32:48] David Armstrong: Exactly. And I think from an audience satisfaction point, although I don't think this song really fulfills it, but you've got a hit song to put into a show that you want to have hit songs, and this one's pre-written to go with the situation. So that's Meredith Wilson, who does it in all three of his hit Broadway shows. But this is not the end of this being used in the Golden Age of Broadway because several other great songwriters will also presumably be inspired by Berlin to want to try this themselves. We have Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim who do it, although we never get to hear it except on the bonus tracks that were created for one of the cast albums of the show. This is of course Gypsy, where I think many people will not be aware this song "Small World" originally was written as a double song to go with a song called "Mama's Talkin' Soft," in which you had Rose singing her part of the song and then the two kids, Louise and June, singing a counterpoint song called "Mama's Talkin' Soft."

[33:55] Albert Evans: Lucky, you're a man who likes children. That's an important sign.

[34:05] David Armstrong: Lucky, I'm a woman with children. Small world, isn't it? Funny, isn't it? Small and funny and fine. Mama's talkin' soft. Mama's got a plan. Mama's eyes are wide. Mama's seen a man. Mama's blushin' pink, fluffin' up her hair. Mama has a smile, and she has a smile. No one else has a prayer. Mama's talkin' low. Mama's got a grin. Mama's movin' slow. Mama's movin' in. That's when Mama's done. Not a soul survives. Mama's talkin' soft. Everybody run for your lives.

[35:32] David Armstrong: We've heard different stories about why this didn't end up in the show. What do you know about this, Albert?

[35:37] Albert Evans: Well, I've been trying to track it down. I know that I read somewhere the staging of it was that Ethel Merman was singing this song to Herbie, trying to win him over to joining their family, basically. Then somehow the girls, the way I first read it was the girls were up on top of a platform looking down into that scene and singing, oh, here she goes again. She's pulling the wool over another man's eyes. But one of the girls, the girl who played younger Louise, Baby Louise, was terrified of heights. And so when they staged it, when they first put them up on this platform, she broke down crying. She was hysterical and just weeping. And they thought, let's just cut that. We don't need that. We can concentrate on Rose and Herbie.

[36:29] David Armstrong: I think that no one ever tried to put this back into the show in the many revivals. They cut it in Philadelphia, and they also cut several other short bits that didn't seem necessary. And I think they just thought, we don't need it. Sondheim talks about it in the first of his, what is it, Finishing the Hat? The first volume. He actually talks about it because the lyric is in there, and he explains it, but not in detail. But basically, they decided, let's not make little Louise cry. But then even years later, with the different casts and different sets, Sondheim and Stein and Lawrence, none of them put it back into the show. Whether they thought about it or not, I don't know, but they must have decided, well, this show works really well without it, so we don't need it.

Where you hear it is on the Patti LuPone cast recording. It's included as an extra, but it has an orchestration, and then you hear two girls who sound exactly alike singing it. It's satisfying to finally get to hear it.

[37:25] Albert Evans: You're a man who likes children. That's an important thought.

[38:11] David Armstrong: But see, the thing Sondheim was angry about is he used that "Mama's talkin' soft, Mama's got a" in Rose's turn, and now it's not referring to anything. And he wanted to cut it, but this was like a week before they opened, and Ethel did her, called me Ms. Spurs, and said, this show, it's frozen, you know, we're just gonna do it, you know, I'm not gonna learn anything new. So that is fascinating that we still hear "Mama's talkin' soft," and we know that very well. That's certainly something in everyone's ear who loves Gypsy, but it was supposed to be referring to something like all those other pieces of Rose's turn were supposed to be echoes and callbacks to other things that we heard in the show.

Very interesting. So Rose's turn, of course, was written before they cut the "Mama's talkin' soft," and Sondheim said he was willing to rewrite it so she could have her breakdown in some other way, but it's just so good having those repeated mamas and them, that strange way that Ethel Merman goes and goes, "Mama, Mama, Mama."

[39:11] Albert Evans: Yeah, I think we'd be disappointed if that were gone. Of course, we wouldn't know because it would have been something else people fell in love with. But yeah, that's so interesting. It's hard to imagine taking that out of the show.

[39:21] David Armstrong: So that was 1959. Now, in 1962, Lionel Bart, the great British songwriter, again, who writes music and lyrics, will use this technique in Oliver in the song "Be Back Soon." And again, it's the traditional version of this. We hear the first part of the song with Fagin, then we hear the kids sing their part, and then we hear it all go together as they march off into the streets of London. But the odd thing about this one is that you can hear the songs together and still keep them separate in your mind. But I think that, again, is because there's Fagin, and then there's these boys with treble voices going, "We must disappear, we'll come back here." So despite the fact that the songs sort of have a similar rhythm, like a fast, you can go, but be back soon, and we must disappear, we'll come back here, they're both very notey.

And to me, that's always the miracle of these songs, is that when the songs are performed together, you can hear both songs, and they're not fighting with each other. They're not on top of each other. They're not in conflict with each other.

[40:29] David Armstrong: This is now going to bring us to three songs of the Golden Age of Broadway, one of them from off-Broadway, but still during this period that I think deserve extra credits that get the gold star for extra effort, added value because they're using more than two songs to do this trick. And that's where Albert and I will pick up our conversation on the next episode of Broadway Nation as we continue our exploration of the double songs of Broadway.

[41:35] 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 receive 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.

[42:21] David Armstrong: 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. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time. Bye.

[43:05] David Armstrong: So long.