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Irving Berlin and Broadway's Double Songs, part 1

Welcome to Season Four! Broadway Nation is back with a new season of all-new episodes that will take you deep inside the history of the Broadway musical with a special emphasis on the Immigrant Jewish, Queer, and Black artists who invented it... Read More

From the show: BROADWAY NATION

44 mins
Oct 14

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Welcome to Season Four!

Broadway Nation is back with a new season of all-new episodes that will take you deep inside the history of the Broadway musical with a special emphasis on the Immigrant Jewish, Queer, and Black artists who invented it.

I have a fantastic slate of guests and topics lined up over the coming weeks and months, and today we kick it all off with the return of my frequent co-host and partner in crime, Albert Evans, and the first in a series of episodes exploring the Double Songs of Broadway.

These show-stopping musical stunts span the entire history of the Broadway musical and have been utilized by many of the greatest songwriters, from Irving Berlin to Meredith Willson to Jerry Herman to Sondheim, Schwartz, and Miranda.

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This episode is made possible in part by the generous support of our Patron Club Members, including our newest patron, PAULA & STEVE REYNOLDS.

If you are a fan of Broadway Nation, I invite you to become a PATRON! For as little as $7.00 a month, you can receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of many of the discussions that I have with my guests — in fact, I often record nearly twice as much conversation as ends up in the edited versions. You will also have access to additional, in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host, Albert Evans, that have not been featured on the podcast. And all patrons receive special “on-air” shout-outs and acknowledgement of your vital support of this podcast.

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Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] David Armstrong: Hi everybody, this is David Armstrong and I couldn't be more excited to tell you that Broadway Nation is back for a new season with all new episodes that will, as always, take you deep inside the history of the Broadway musical, with a special emphasis on the immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artist who invented it.

[0:38] David Armstrong: I have a fantastic slate of guests and topics lined up over the coming weeks and months, and today we're going to kick it off with the return of my frequent co-host and partner in crime Albert Evans, and I call this episode Irving Berlin and the Double Songs of Broadway.

[0:56] David Armstrong: Before we begin, I want to dedicate this episode to the memory of Anne Welsh, a longtime patron of Broadway Nation, whose generous support over the years has helped to make this podcast possible.

[1:09] David Armstrong: If you would like 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. Here we go.

[1:19] David Armstrong: Welcome, Albert.

[1:20] Albert Evans: I'm so glad to be back and talking about, of course, musicals, but it's an interesting topic today.

[1:26] David Armstrong: The topic that Albert is alluding to is one that has largely been invented by one of those Jewish immigrant inventors of the Broadway musical, specifically Irving Berlin, although as we'll find, it has been embraced by many, many composers of the Broadway musical going all the way back to 1914 and all the way up to today, and that is what we're calling the Double Song.

[1:51] David Armstrong: Today's episode is the Double Songs of Broadway. So I guess, Albert, we have to start by defining what is a double song and what is not a double song.

[2:02] Albert Evans: Well, a double song, when I went to school back in the 14th century, they called it a quadlibet, of all things, and it originated in Europe, actually in the 1400s, so I guess that's the 15th century. Quadlibet simply means whatever you want to do. They would take folk songs mainly, and they would combine them, playing them at the same time as a sacred song or something that they wrote, but it was sort of like a popular game. This was before crosswords, but it wasn't until the 1600s that anyone actually published a rigorous definition of the quadlibet, and it became described as sort of a mixture of diverse elements quoted from here and there, sacred, secular, whatever, so it was kind of naughty in that way, it would use a sacred melody with a very secular, like, sailor song or something.

And when I was in university in the 1700s, my professors liked to toss the term around, especially in front of theater students when they were teaching musicals, so they would insist that we weren't singing just these clever songs where you sang two songs at once, but you're singing a quadlibet, because professors are like that. But as you say, David, we now have the much more understandable term, double song.

[3:18] Albert Evans: So a quadlibet is sort of like a mashup, in a way.

[3:22] David Armstrong: Is that something?

[3:23] Albert Evans: It is. A mashup, of course, is this more recent term that people have used for what we used to call a medley. And I don't know why we don't still call it a medley, but I guess some people would wonder why we don't still call it a quadlibet. But let's go back to the quadlibet, it makes us not classy. But I think a quadlibet is always two different tunes played at the same time, whereas a medley could be sequentially this song and that song and the other song. For our purposes, in defining this for the Broadway sphere, we're calling it the double song and we're getting very specific about what that means.

[4:01] Albert Evans: This is not just counterpoint or countermelody, which we encounter many places in the Broadway world. How might we find a counterpoint or a countermelody that we wouldn't include as a double song?

[4:15] David Armstrong: We were talking the other day about one song that I never liked until I realized that it had a dramatic purpose was the Gershwin song, Mine, which appeared in Let Him Eat Cake, which is the sequel to the super hit of the I Sing that Let Him Eat Cake disappeared. But it did leave a few songs like Mine, and it had just a lovely melody and a sort of cliched verse. If you remember, it goes, Mine, love is mine, two, three, four, five, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, whether it's rain or storm or shine.

[4:47] Albert Evans: Rain or storm or shine, like, oh, no one thought of that before. But the point of it is that it's supposed to be just a spin-off song that the political figures are singing. The former president and his wife are trying to win the favor of the public. What worked before for them was to sing a love song and to actually get married when he was elected to the White House. So this worked before. So now they're singing another just sort of boilerplate love song. So they sing, Mine, love is mine. And then the chorus sort of breaks the fourth wall and sings to the audience, the point they're making in this song is that they more than get along, blah, blah, blah. And it goes on like that. But that's not something you would ever sing as a separate song.

It's just something that goes with the main melody. It's a countermelody. That is one of the criteria that we're using today, is that a double song, for the purposes as we're identifying, is two separate songs that are sung individually and then somehow through the magic of musical theater, then are sung simultaneously. And you can actually understand them, appreciate them, hear both songs, even though they're sung one on top of each other, which is the stunt.

[6:11] Albert Evans: And this is indeed a stunt. And we're giving it credit for being a stunt in that it always amazes the audience because you go, wow, how did they do that?

[6:20] David Armstrong: Yes. And there's a gray area between a song with the countermelody and a double song. And we'll talk about that as we explore some of these songs. Sometimes it's like, well, I don't know if I would sing that as a separate song. And yet it has all of the attributes of a separate song. And in fact, that Gershwin song, Mine, we put on our list and sort of moved it around as we discussed, does it qualify or not as a double song? And I think it's one of those that falls into the gray area. But we're putting it out of contention because the part two doesn't really stand up as its own song. And I found when I was looking for musical examples on YouTube where I get all my musical examples is that actually most recordings of mine don't include that countermelody. They just sing it as a love song.

[7:08] Albert Evans: Right. It's not intrinsic to that song anyway. The other criteria that I think we want to identify is that because musical theater is a dramatic art form and a storytelling art form, this technique is most effective when the two parts of the double song dramatize different points of view or define different characters. And that's clear right from the very beginning, because what we're going to identify as not the inventor of this, but certainly the popularizer of this, the one who made this something to talk about, of course, is Irving Berlin, who will do this in his very first Broadway show for which he wrote the entire score and then will continue to do it throughout his entire career very effectively.

[7:54] Albert Evans: And of great note, he will not be the only one, but he definitely is the what would you say the popularizer?

[8:00] David Armstrong: I think it's even more than that. Yeah, I think he was the one that made other composers say, hey, I could do that. And it became a standard sort of trope in musical theater because it always got a good response even in a flop show. If there was one of these songs, the audience would still love it because it's so clever. Now, of course, Berlin did not invent this idea, as you said, it goes back into classical music terms to 13th, 14th century or so. But even in theatrical terms, Berlin didn't invent it. And we see it done on multiple occasions in the work of Gilbert and Sullivan. And of course, Gilbert and Sullivan had a tremendous influence on Irving Berlin and the Gershwins and all the early writers, maybe all writers ever of the Broadway musical has somehow been influenced by Gilbert and Sullivan.

And they were from the musical generation immediately preceding what we think of as the flowering of the Broadway musical. So they wrote in like the 1880s, what I think was their biggest decade, but continue to write into the 90s until Sullivan got tired and said, I want to write onward Christian soldiers or something. He doesn't feel like it was dignified enough.

[9:12] Albert Evans: Well, they did not get along quite.

[9:14] David Armstrong: They did not get along. Both of them were extremely cantankerous. But it was an artistic marriage like none other. And we find this in many of their operettas, but probably most famously in the Pirates of Penzance. And of course, the songs in Pirates of Penzance use sort of the opera technique of the songs are identified by whatever the first line of the song is not by a title, basically.

[9:40] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[9:41] David Armstrong: So this is the song that probably people remember the most is when the foeman bears his steel. And it comes at that moment when the policemen, what became sort of keystone cops in that famous revival of Pirates of Penzance, but who were always comic policemen, are supposed to go off and fight the pirates and of course are terrified.

[10:15] Albert Evans: First, the policemen sing their section and then the women are urging them on to go off and die in glory.

[11:08] David Armstrong: And then, like magic, those two sections come together to create a very exciting sort of it's not the finale of the show or even the finale of the act, but a sort of climax of this production number.

[12:05] Albert Evans: So we will come back to this subject of how this is used in a production number as opposed to in a duet later in our conversation.

[12:23] David Armstrong: Yeah. All right. So now let's get to Mr. Berlin. This is his first Broadway show, as we said, that he writes the entire score for, not the first Broadway show to feature one of his songs, but the first time he's now writing all the songs in the show. And the show is called Watch Your Step. It's in 1914 and it stars Vernon and Irene Castle and it becomes a sensation. They are at the height of their popularity and they've moved from this nightclub and ballroom world into a Broadway show that they are at the center of and Berlin has been engaged to write and he's sort of known at this time, not correctly, but known as the ragtime king. I think he's chosen for this because this idea of putting him together with the Castles and their style of dancing will have a tremendous amount of impact.

[13:12] David Armstrong: What is this song? I'm amazed that it's not only the first of these songs we can identify, but absolutely one of the best and one of the most well known. It's impossible to know where Irving Berlin got this idea, but it's reasonable to speculate that he got the idea from Gilbert and Sullivan, because certainly he would have known the Gilbert and Sullivan works. It's a song that stayed popular now for way over 100 years. It was still a popular song to record up to the 50s and starting in the 1910s through the 1950s. Every decade had recordings in different, you know, big band or jazz or Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney kind of thing.

[13:51] Albert Evans: Exactly.

[13:52] David Armstrong: So the first song we're talking about is Play a Simple Melody, which to a great extent sort of invents the trope that we're talking about, at least for the musical theater aspect of it, of a beautiful, lilting, waltz style melody, not literally a waltz in this case, then contrasted with a very ragtime style melody. And then, of course, the two parts go together. And theatrically, it's putting two characters on stage with differing points of view. The first character is saying, won't you play a simple melody like my mother sang to me? One good old fashioned harmony, et cetera, et cetera. And then the other one is saying, no, I don't want to hear that. I want to hear.

[15:06] ♪ Musical number: "Play a Simple Melody" — performed by Unknown ♪

[15:55] David Armstrong: In some ways, I believe it's sort of bringing forward a central conflict that's happening in the musical world at this time, which is this fight between the traditional, old-fashioned way of music and the new, aggressive, threatening ragtime that was happening at this time between white music and black music to a certain extent, between European music and African-American music.

[16:22] Albert Evans: And it was the same conflict that later would happen with rock and roll.

[16:26] David Armstrong: Well, jazz and then rock and roll. Absolutely.

[16:28] Albert Evans: It was like, take that music out of my house, you know, because the older people didn't like it. I mean, of course, there are exceptions, but the parents didn't like it. The kids loved it. You know, that's the basic split.

[16:40] David Armstrong: Absolutely.

[16:41] Albert Evans: It's a generation gap.

[16:42] David Armstrong: It's always paired with dancing that is viewed as being dirty, basically. This style of dancing is somehow too sexual and too obscene. And one of the things that the Castles did, Vernon and Irene Castle, was to sort of make these black dances, the one step and the two step and the bunny hug and the grizzly bear, all those things that they made popular. They made them popular by cleaning them up, by refining them and making them acceptable in the ballroom. But basically, they're taking the black dances from the black dance halls and sort of scrubbing them down a little bit to make them acceptable in white culture.

[17:22] Albert Evans: Many of the songs we'll talk about have faded away in their popularity. But this one has stayed at least as much as any song from 1914 has stayed part of the conversation.

[17:35] David Armstrong: What makes it so effective still today? Why has it not gone away?

[17:40] Albert Evans: Well, it's just if someone from Generation Z heard the song, they would be delighted because it's sort of irresistible. It's embodying that struggle between the old fashioned and the modern. And I think people can relate to that. I also think that it's sort of astounding that Irving Berlin wrote it because, as most of you probably know, Irving Berlin couldn't read or write music.

[18:03] David Armstrong: He had no musical education whatsoever.

[18:05] Albert Evans: He had no musical education. Later in his career, he sort of picked up a few things, but he also had a piano. He could only comfortably play on the black keys of the piano, which are five out of the octave of eight notes.

[18:19] David Armstrong: And he did that because those are the raised keys, so it's easy to see. You know what they are. You're not just looking at the sea of white keys and thinking, what the hell? Against all odds, he could not only write really complicated songs, especially as his career progressed, he wrote extremely sophisticated songs, music and lyrics.

[18:39] Albert Evans: Did someone like Irving Berlin, who was an immigrant, had no education, was on the streets by the time he was a young teenager. Where did this come from? And not just to write a song, but to write two songs that go together. Because how did he keep that separate in his mind? He couldn't just like play one on the piano fluently and then sing the other one against him because he could barely sing either. It's just it's sort of a mystery. But that's, I guess, genius is always a mystery.

[19:08] David Armstrong: Somehow he's hearing it in his head, even if he can't write it down. Now, he always worked with some kind of a man who answers somebody who helped him to write these things down.

[19:18] Albert Evans: And he either would sing them to them and then they would start to write down. And, you know, work his way through it. But it is amazing that he could hear simultaneously how this was going to work.

[19:30] David Armstrong: And he wrote these songs at night when everyone else was asleep. He didn't have an assistant there sitting next to him. He had to keep in his mind both these melodies until the next morning, at least when the guy would come over.

[19:43] Albert Evans: And there's no tape recorders to sing the tune into. So you can remember the next day. There's nothing to help except this guy to just all be in his head.

[20:38] David Armstrong: Don't go away. Albert and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[20:44] 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 likemindstravel.com. I can't wait to take you to Europe on a musical theater adventure. Come along.

[23:28] David Armstrong: So clearly this was a success. He repeats it the following season, at least repeats the stunt of this the following season with a show called Stop, Look and Listen in 1915. And here he does it with a song called When I Get Back to the USA, which is one song, but it's created to go with My Country Tis of Thee, which brings up a sort of subcategory of these double songs, which we're calling half jukebox double songs.

[23:57] Albert Evans: And of course, they didn't have jukeboxes back then, but we're just using it to mean that a song that's already popular, that everyone knows just through the air.

[24:07] David Armstrong: It's just convenient because now we have whole shows made out of jukebox songs.

[24:11] Albert Evans: And again, we don't have jukeboxes anymore.

[24:13] David Armstrong: Now we don't have them anymore.

[24:15] Albert Evans: Now we're in the post jukebox era.

[24:17] David Armstrong: Yeah, this is a technique, again, Berlin is not inventing here probably, but is at least in terms of the Broadway world is bringing forward. And we'll see that other composers will do this as well. Berlin will do it again as well, where they write a new song that goes with, which is sort of a folk song of some kind, some kind of early pop song or traditional song of some kind.

[24:42] Albert Evans: So in this case, the song goes with My Country Tis of Thee. And as one critic noted, he said that Joseph Santly sang several solos, especially pleasing the audience with When I Get Back to the USA, the scene being set on an ocean liner.

[24:59] David Armstrong: So this is a dramatic scene where this character, played by an actor named Joseph Santly, who I don't know much about, was returning to the United States on an ocean liner and sings a song When I Get Back to the USA. And I assume that the chorus sang My Country Tis of Thee in counterpoint to him.

[25:17] Albert Evans: Maybe the other passengers, I assume.

[25:19] David Armstrong: Exactly. Yeah.

[25:20] Albert Evans: But again, again, notable enough that it got mentioned in the reviews. And it's actually when you go back to read reviews of these older shows, not every song certainly gets mentioned. In fact, very few songs get mentioned. So if it does, it must have stood out as something that had a lot of impact.

[25:36] ♪ Musical number ♪

[26:31] David Armstrong: Berlin is not done with this by far. We jump now to 1922 and the Music Box Review of 1922. And he creates a song called Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil, a song which is certainly not one of the top 50 Irving Berlin songs, but a song that has stayed around and has been with us a bit.

[26:51] Albert Evans: Well, it was very famous in the household that I grew up in because I happened to have the sheet music to it. And my younger brother and I used to sing this all the time. So to me, it's a standard and it's a good song.

[27:04] David Armstrong: And it reflects the jazz age, which was happening now. It's a more jazzy song that he's been writing.

[27:09] Albert Evans: Well, he's jumped ten years now, practically.

[27:12] David Armstrong: Yeah, it's more like, you know, you can imagine it on a saxophone. And it is like many jazz songs, dealing with sin to a grace. It's the devil and this idea that jazz music is naughty and the devil's music to a certain extent, which moralists were very serious about that it was the devil's music. But of course, then people would use those words to have fun with it and to throw those words back at the people who look down on jazz or thought it was the devil's music.

[27:41] Albert Evans: Yeah, that was still a little pushing the boundaries to actually sing about. The last couple of lines are pack up your sins and go to the devil and you'll never have to go to bed at all.

[28:35] ♪ Musical number ♪

[29:10] ♪ Musical number: "Satan's Melody" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[29:55] David Armstrong: Berlin then, and we're going to stay on Berlin. We're going to go through Berlin's whole track before we go back and talk about some of the other people who do this. So we're going to go from what I call the Genesis period of Broadway with "Play a Simple Melody." Now we're moving into the Silver Age of the 1920s, just two years after "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil." Berlin will, in his Music Box Review of 1924, use this technique again with a song called "Call of the South" slash "Old Folks at Home." And this is another of those jukebox double songs where he's written a new song called "Call of the South" that goes with the Stephen Foster traditional song "Old Folks at Home," also known as "Swanee River."

And Stephen Foster was a hero to Berlin. He actually had a picture of him on his office wall. And Stephen Foster was the man who, even though he died penniless, he was the man who was the first commercially successful songwriter. Like, that's all he did in life, plus drinking. And he was Berlin's model. And we're talking about a man who wrote in the 1850s. Right. But that's whose songwriting career Berlin wanted to emulate. And part of what probably he wanted to emulate was a songwriter whose songs were still being sung more than half a century later.

[31:17] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[31:18] David Armstrong: And of course, Stephen Foster would have an impact on all the Broadway songwriters just because his songs are so engaging, so catchy, so funny in some cases. He goes from sentiment to humor among these songs. And yet they just stayed in the American consciousness for, I mean, now for centuries. This song was also noted by the critics. And the Brooklyn Citizen singled it out as one of many numbers of merit in the show. So now we're going to jump to 1950. So we're now into the golden age of Broadway. In the show, "Call Me Madam," Berlin creates another of these double songs, perhaps his greatest, perhaps his most famous, "You're Just in Love," which was the showstopping high point of that musical. Well, it's a Broadway legend that "Call Me Madam" was shaping up nicely. It had Broadway's biggest star, Ethel Merman, but she didn't really have a number to really cement the popularity of the show.

[32:19] Albert Evans: In the second act, especially.

[32:21] David Armstrong: In the second act, it sort of slumped. There was a scene with her. She was an ambassadress to a small European country. They call it Lichtenberg, right? Or is that the real?

[32:32] Albert Evans: Oh, yeah, Lichtenstein.

[32:33] David Armstrong: Lichtenstein is the real one, isn't it?

[32:36] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[32:37] David Armstrong: Yeah, this was Lichtenberg. It was just a small little country. And she became the ambassador to Lichtenberg. And she brought her American aide, a young man. She was an attaché.

[32:48] Albert Evans: An attaché who was played by Russell Knight, who had a Broadway career.

[32:53] David Armstrong: And Merman was supposed to have a solo spot. And she'd already had about 10 solo spots by this point because it was her show. And someone suggested to her, I've heard that someone suggested to her, and I've also heard that she herself said, you know what I need? I need a number with the kid because that always works. Because she was in her middle age, and he was in his 20s. So now she's giving motherly advice to a younger man. Again, it has a dramatic context because he just doesn't know what's wrong with her. He thinks she's sick because he's dizzy. He can't sleep. And she says to him, listen, you're not sick. You're just in love. And he goes, oh, that's what it is. So they each have, he has his, "I hear singing, but there's no one there."

And she sings, you know, you don't need to shrink. You just need to get it out of your, you need to acknowledge what you're feeling. And I think your point there is very well taken that this is a dramatic scene that Berlin has created, or at least a dramatic situation where we have the Merman character taking care of mothering, giving advice to the younger, less experienced person. And it's sort of like a therapy session in a way, sort of a very loud therapy session. And the style of therapy that Berlin has given Ethel Merman is sort of just get over it. But it works.

[34:15] Albert Evans: Exactly.

[34:16] David Armstrong: Which is very much in character for both the character in the play and for Ethel herself, which are basically one character fused together. And it indeed was one of those numbers, which is hard for us to imagine today. But we're still in the era of an encore where a number goes over so big that they then have to do it again. The audience demands that the performers repeat it again. And this is one of those songs, even in the movie, they do the encore of it.

[35:00] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[36:17] ♪ Musical number: "You're Just in Love" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[37:01] David Armstrong: Berlin will try this again in 1962 with his not successful musical "Mr. President" with a not very memorable song called "Empty Pockets Full of Love." In some ways, it feels a little desperate to me in that show. I don't know whether it was there from the beginning or whether when the show was in trouble, they thought, let's put one of those double songs in because that'll help. It's fine. It's an enjoyable, but it doesn't. I think because our expectations are so high with these double songs, we don't really respond to that song. However, four years later, with the revival of "Annie Get Your Gun" at Lincoln Center, which I believe is the final show he will work on on Broadway, and I think the final song that he will write for Broadway is another of these triumphant double songs, "Old Fashioned Wedding," which to me, I was always surprised to hear that it hadn't originally been written for the show, for the original production, because it just seems so perfect and so inevitable that these characters would have one of those songs and the song fits so perfectly into the situation.

And again, they're contrasting points of view. He wants just a simple wedding for an old fashioned bride and groom, and she wants a wedding with a big church and champagne and flower girls. So again, you have a dramatic situation, even though they're both talking about their upcoming nuptials.

[38:27] Albert Evans: And it very much bookends Berlin's career because we start with these two contrasting ideas of a simple melody and then a ragtime tune. And now we have, "I want an old fashioned wedding" and "I want all the bells and whistles."

[39:18] ♪ Musical number: "Old Fashioned Wedding" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[40:17] David Armstrong: I find it quite remarkable that in his very first full score for a Broadway musical, he writes a simple melody. And in his final show for Broadway, he writes "Old Fashioned Wedding." You couldn't more perfectly sort of bookend your career. I doubt that he even necessarily thought it was his final show for Broadway, but certainly he was getting up there at this point, although he'd gone to live quite a while longer. I just think it's kind of amazing that those two songs exist, and then all the songs in between. It's sort of his signature type of song.

[40:50] Albert Evans: So it's exactly it is. It's amazing that he could bookend. Now, of course, Berlin was not the only person to do this, and he probably inspired other people, although not as many people as you would think. Albert and I have both sat with the list thinking, why didn't Rodgers Hammerstein ever do this? Why didn't Rodgers and Hart ever do this? The list of songwriters who didn't attempt to do this is probably longer than the list of songwriters who did. It could be that they just felt it was Berlin's thing, and they didn't want to compete in that category. It's hard to know why it wasn't done more. The first composer lyricist team to try this after Berlin's debut of this in 1914 was in a 1920 show called "The Night Boat," written by Jerome Kern and Anne Caldwell. 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.

[42:42] David Armstrong: If you love this podcast and would like to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, then I invite you to become a patron of Broadway Nation. For as little as $7 a month, you can receive access to a treasure trove of exclusive features, including new, specially produced episodes that are available only to patrons. And this includes a five-part series on the Broadway musicals that received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. And all patrons receive shout-outs and acknowledgements in recognition of your vital support. To join, go to broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech, that's all one word, broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.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. Thank you.

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