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[0:18] Robert W. Schneider: Hi, I'm Robert W. Schneider, and welcome to Fifty Key Stage Musicals: The Podcast, a companion piece to the Routledge Press publication Fifty Key Stage Musicals, which is available for purchase by going to Routledge.com or clicking the link below in today's show description.

[0:33] Robert W. Schneider: Today's episode focuses on chapter 10, the 1940 production of PAL JOEY.

[0:39] Robert W. Schneider: And with us today is the author of that chapter, Professor Lawrence Maslon of New York University.

[0:45] Robert W. Schneider: Professor Maslon is an arts professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, as well as an associate chair of the Graduate Acting Program. His books include Broadway to Main Street: How Show Music Enchanted America, and the updated third edition companion volume to the PBS series Broadway: The American Musical. He edited the two-volume set American Musicals, 1927 to 1969, published by the Library of America, and he has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker.

[1:18] Robert W. Schneider: Lawrence, I am so honored that you are joining us today.

[1:21] Laurence Maslon: Well, I'm thrilled to, and your project is first rate, so I'm very chuffed, as the British might say, to be involved.

[1:28] Robert W. Schneider: Coming from you, that is a great honor. Your books are absolutely fantastic. Your podcast is amazing. And listeners, just so you're aware, for each of the chapters that we cover in this book, under the show description for each of the episodes on the podcast, if Lawrence has covered it on his brilliant podcast, you can have access to that as well. They are so interesting and so fascinating.

[1:53] Robert W. Schneider: Lawrence, my first question for you is why do you think PAL JOEY is a key musical?

[2:01] Laurence Maslon: Well, it's very hard in a way, when you have pioneers of any art field, and certainly your book is obviously dealing with pioneers in the American musical theater. Sometimes seminal projects, you know, things like, oh, I don't know, the film of The Godfather might be one example as well. They revolutionize the field so quickly and so proficiently that it's hard to go back in time and imagine what it must have been like to see these things in their original context. And I think PAL JOEY is an excellent example of that. I mean, if I said to you, hey, I got a great musical, and it's set often in a nightclub, and it's about a guy who has an affair with an older woman while he's chasing a younger woman, and he's working his way through the ranks of the chorus girls and people smoke and people drink and they behave badly to each other.

You'd start yawning, I think, halfway through my description, because we've seen so many musicals and so many movies since Christmas of 1940 when PAL JOEY appeared. And it's sort of revolutionized the field. It changed so much. Richard Rodgers himself said that PAL JOEY was the first musical about the facts of life. And obviously, we have hundreds of musicals subsequently about the facts of life. So it's very hard to go back and pull the camera back a little bit and understand how revolutionary it was in its day.

[3:40] Laurence Maslon: We asked this to all of our authors, which is, you know, you had a list of the shows that were included in this book, and this is the one that you gravitated towards. Why did you want to tell the story of PAL JOEY?

[3:51] Laurence Maslon: Well, because the other two choices I really, really wanted were already given away.

[3:55] Robert W. Schneider: But which were, I'm curious now.

[3:59] Laurence Maslon: Well, of I Sing.

[4:00] Robert W. Schneider: Uh huh.

[4:01] Laurence Maslon: Because I'm the literary executor of the George Kaufman estate. So that's a very meaningful show to me that I've actually worked on several times in a number of different productions, and I forget what the other one was. But I'm very happy to work with PAL JOEY because, you know, we all have our favorite shows, which are often idiosyncratic. For me, I mean, I always ask my students what their favorite show is, and you know, with kids today, it's usually, you know, the last five years or Sweeney Todd or Into the Woods or something. And you know, my favorite shows were I guess 1776, which is the first show I ever saw, not in 1776, but 1969, and On the 20th Century, which is beloved by cognoscenti, but obviously not well known by the masses.

And then I have another sort of subcategory, which you may as well, what are shows with perfect scores? And for me, PAL JOEY, you know, if it's not a perfect score, I don't know what show necessarily is. And you know, you rank, you know, is every number a winner. Certainly something like Kiss Me, Kate, I think would be in that category. Or Carousel, well, Carousel has a couple numbers I don't know that I need to hear again. But Pal Joey, every number is just first rate. Even the ones that are sort of sleazy and second rate or sleazy and second rate for a dramatic purpose and work really well. And it's also an eternal score. I mean, people are singing "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" to this day.

And there are just so many gems inside it as well. And it's often, you know, people try to revive it. It's difficult for reasons we can discuss. But it's just such a pleasure. I mean, PAL JOEY has an interesting career, recording career, but anytime you hear a song from it, anytime you hear that Chicago, you just know you're in for a thrill. You know you're in for two of the best practitioners in Broadway history, really operating at the top of their game. I don't think certainly Rogers and Hart ever did a score, certainly subsequent to PAL JOEY, but even before PAL JOEY, I don't think there's really a score that compares to that. It is top, top shelf in musical theater history.

[6:29] Laurence Maslon: You know, I think Rogers, this is the only show by Rogers and Hart that's included in this book. Can you tell us a little bit about their history together and what you might say is their greatest contribution to American musical theater?

[6:43] Laurence Maslon: Golly. Well, Rogers and Hart really had three careers, I would say. They met in 1919. Hart had been kind of a Broadway hack, actually. He translated a lot of plays from Hungarian, which he knew from his family for the theater guild. I think I've never proved it, but I think he had a hand in translating Molnar's Lillium into Carousel in the 1920s. Bernard Glazer is credited it, but I think they actually worked together on it. So there's a Rogers and Hammerstein connection from the get-go. But be that as it may, he was an older, wiser hand in the field. And by 1919, Rogers was still a teenager, frankly, entering the field, and they hit it off. And Rogers' facility for melody and enchantment and being able to cover any genre met very well with Hart's lyrical perceptions.

He was a kind of essayist in lyrics. He took on love in a very kind of perpendicular way. Nothing ever quite turned out right in a Rogers and Hart song. And I think that appealed to generations of people who certainly in the 1920s, who felt like misfits or love didn't work out the way they wanted it to. And yet there were huge moments of ebullience and joy in their music. And as most listeners will know, in 1925, after struggling and almost giving up the business for five, six years, they had a huge hit with the song "Manhattan" in the Garrick Gaieties, which became a national hit, which is a duet, by the way, rarely performed as a duet. It's often performed mostly by soloists. There's a wonderful, maybe it's on YouTube, but Peggy Lee and Steve Lawrence sing a duet of "Manhattan" as written on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1962 with Rogers conducting, which is just tremendous.

Anyway, so from 25 to about 31, they were along with the Gershwins and Berlin, the great songwriters of the 1920s. And the shows they wrote by and large were stinko, but the songs they wrote were popular and ebullient and interesting, and then they went to Hollywood for this kind of interregnum from I think 31 to about 35. And there's a fame and they just were the kings of Broadway. And then in Hollywood they were kind of, they were hardly hacks, but they were in their bungalow and some producer from Paramount would ring up and said, "Boys, I need a song about, you know, a nightclub singer who wants to be in love," and they would bang it out and they wouldn't even know what movie it was in or what the movie was about until they showed up at the premiere.

And that was not them. They were theater creatures, especially Rogers was a theater creature and Hart was a Manhattan creature. And they got bored and supposedly Rogers was sitting by a pool and read Variety or one of the trade papers and said, "Whatever happened to Rogers and Hart?" and he said, "Oh, time to go," and they took the Super Chief back to Manhattan. And from 1935 to 1943 when Hart dies and their partnership dissolves, well dissolves and Hart dies in that order, they were just churning out tremendous shows of invention. Jumbo, which was a circus show which has "Little Girl Blue" in it; Babes in Arms, which may have also one of the greatest scores of all time; "Where or When," "My Funny Valentine," "Boys from Syracuse," "This Can't Be Love," "I'd Rather Be Right," a parody about Franklin Roosevelt with George M. Cohan, my God, which has "Have You Met Miss Jones," and even shows that stink like Higher and Higher, which is kind of an upstairs downstairs musical set in a Manhattan penthouse.

Has "It Never Entered My Mind" in it? By Jupiter, 1942, you know, has these nobody's heart and so on and so forth. So they were the most adventurous team with the biggest hits. And it's really kind of a shame for all sorts of reasons, some of which have to deal with World War II, and some of which have to do with Larry Hart's inability to be disciplined at work on any level, and Rogers being an A-type personality who was always working and always wanted to work, that their partnership dissolved, but it might have been inevitable anyway, due to changing times in the 1940s.

[11:31] Robert W. Schneider: And let's talk about a collaborator, collaborator that is often with Rogers and Hart, uh, but his name is sort of to fade in our history books as time goes on, or at least my students are not as familiar with him.

[11:44] Robert W. Schneider: And that's George Abbott, Mr. Abbott, and what he contributed, not only to Rogers and Hart musicals, but PAL JOEY specifically.

[11:52] Laurence Maslon: Well, in a weird way, I think George Abbott would be thrilled to hear that he's faded from history, in the sense that I don't think he ever would have been proud, like a Harold Prince or or uh or uh uh you know, Trevor Nunn or something, to feel, or Bob Fosse, maybe that's a better example, that he had a heavy hand as a director. Um, and he had something which I know you know called the Abbott Touch, which was a kind of seamless, um almost preternatural ability to know when the right moments of a show were, which songs worked when, how to do an exit, how to turn and land your joke, where to stage someone, and um, you know, before they exited for the joke to land and so on and so forth. And he was no nonsense, and uh he was the height.

I mean, to this day, he's referred to as the sort of height of professionalism. He was always known as Mr. Abbott. You didn't call him George, according to Ethel Merman, unless you were sleeping with him at the time. Uh and he slept with many chorus girls. Anyway, uh story for another time, but he had this kind of ruthless discipline, uh, which I think Rogers liked very much. You know, Rogers obviously had a career that extended into the 1970s. He had easily, in my opinion, uh the most fertile career of any Broadway composer, uh, not just longevity, but but fertility. And and he worked with Jerry Robbins, he worked with George Abbott, he worked with Robert Alton, he worked with Ruben Mamoulian.

I mean, he worked with if there was a first class director in Rogers' lifetime, he was um lucky enough to work with him. Uh and her, I mean, and Agnes de Mille, a great choreographer director as well. So he worked with the best. And I think uh Abbott knew how to streamline things, and what's also important in terms of PAL JOEY, he had taste. And um Abbott sort of knew when too much was too much, what an audience could take in terms of again, uh a sensibility of an earlier generation of an earlier decade. And um, he knew when to toss things out, and he knew when to put money on things. I mean, PAL JOEY had a huge act one dream ballet. I mean, maybe it's not so much a dream ballet as a what would I say, a uh uh no, it's not a nightmare ballet, but it's not a dream ballet in the way that we we understand it with Oklahoma or Carousel.

And Pal Joey says, I could just imagine what my nightclub might be like, and guess what? There's the nightclub. He dreams what it might be like. And it was uh Malziner, I think, who did the set, and it cost a lot of money. And Abbott's didn't want to do it, but he said, you know what? Act one, the end of act one needed it. So he was he just sort of knew, uh, as people say in the directing profession, how to judge his effects, and he knew when to make things sort of sparkly, and he certainly knew how to cast people, and he certainly knew how to trim a show to uh its running time. So he has, as you quite rightly say, this great invisible hand in so many musicals. Um, Josh Logan was also a big collaborator with with them during this period as well, and George Balanchine, so two other names from the 40s, 30s and 40s, we shouldn't forget, but they were the tops, no no pun intended.

They were they were the height of their profession, and they wanted to work with Rogers and Hart. And Rogers and Hart were happy to work. I think everybody was happy to work with them except uh George M. Cohan, um, who who felt that that he could write a better score than they could, but he felt that about every show he ever sat through that he wasn't in. So there you are.

[15:33] Robert W. Schneider: Can you tell me a little bit about the uh source material? Which I'm assuming on first read does not naturally cry out to add songs to it, but maybe I'm wrong.

[15:44] Laurence Maslon: Well, you know, uh, I don't know what that means. You know, nowadays that's an interesting question. Like, who would ever think you could have made a musical about an impressionist painter or a serial killer in Victorian England? So that notion of what makes a musical uh is always an eternal one. I think what's fascinating in the case of PAL JOEY is the author actually went to Rogers and Hart. Um, we know, for instance, with Showboat, which was serialized in magazines in 1926, that uh Jerome Kern read a chapter or chapter or two in magazine form. And you know, here was a showboat and singers and American history and the the race issue, and he just fell in love with it. And he and Hammerstein, Oscar Hammerstein had a tough time um getting Edna Ferber to sign on the dotted line because she couldn't understand in 1926 how this serious novel over many generations with a lot of issues of uh miscegenation and alcoholism, et cetera, et cetera, could possibly be a musical.

Well, here it was the other way around by 1939, 1940, John O'Hara, who was one of the leading short story writers and essayists of his day. I mean, he had something in the New Yorker practically every month, um, wrote these series of wonderfully complex first-hand short stories about a third-rate nightclub singer in Chicago, uh, who's writing to his friend, and they're full of misspellings and malapropisms, and basically there are all these tales of how he tried to further his career or score with this girl or make some money on the side and is always sort of failing, etc. etc. And he actually thought that could work as a musical. So he reached out to them. He was probably extremely lucky in the fact that it that it wasn't Rogers and Hammerstein he was reaching out to he was reaching out to Rogers and Hart and Larry Hart was absolutely uh uh a denizen of all the bars along Eighth Avenue and crappy nightclubs and and uh and and uh shysters and pickup artists and all that kind of thing so he knew the milieu and he was like great great I would love to write about that because writing about you know Shakespearean characters or FDR or kids on a work farm out on Long Island and babes in arms that's great but what a chance to work on something I really know about and I think Rogers in the same way although he was the family man and and he had his own issues but he wasn't carousing at uh bars on 48th street until four in the morning the way Larry Hart was but he also knew that this was an adult material and um whenever Rogers had a chance to reach to a higher shelf um something that would expand the horizons of the American musical he always went for it.

So it was felicitous and um uh it certainly already had um what we call a a diegetic scenario to it so it was set in a nightclub and and we can get into the what they wrote for that but you know already it was like oh it's got some entertainment value because it's set in a nightclub it seemed like a natural. The only thing that to them, the only thing that was not a natural to the theater going public was how sleazy the the milieu was and how uh reprehensible the leading character was. And thank goodness, you know, they wrote it. And uh, I don't know who, Yip Harburg and Burton Lane didn't write it, because they had the skill and the sophistication to put it over.

[19:40] Laurence Maslon: Uh many historians say that Joey is musical theater's first anti-hero. Is that a statement that you would agree with?

[19:48] Laurence Maslon: Uh I I think he's certainly the first uh leading character. I mean, he's on stage practically the whole show, um, who asks for our sympathy in spite of his anti-heroic characterizations. I mean, certainly, certainly there are characters who are villains, and I mean, well, you know, just pick one out of the air, like Sportin' Life in Porgy and Bess, or you know, golly, the the Diana Devereaux and the French ambassador in I Sing or something who who create plot complications. But I would say Joey is the first character who is a prism through which we are asked to look at the action of the play. And in that way, again, it's he's not again, he's not a serial killer, he doesn't beat his wife, he doesn't chop up people and eat them.

So, you know, by comparison to some of the characters we saw in the in the 1970s and 80s, he's he's a um uh a perfectly behaved citizen. But by the contrast of the fair-haired lantern, lantern jawed heroes of most musicals from you know, the 20s, 30s, uh 20s and 30s, because the show really um kicks off the 1940s pretty much, he was definitely an outlier. And and um the conviction with which Rogers and Hart and O'Hara, who wrote the book, and Abbott, and Gene Kelly, frankly, uh, who played the who played Joey committed to that and didn't apologize for his behavior or have him reform uh in some kind of way is very admirable and required a lot of courage back in 1940.

[21:31] Robert W. Schneider: Can you tell us a little bit about what the audience's reaction was to this new story that was being told?

[21:37] Laurence Maslon: Well, Vivienne Segal, who played uh Vera Simpson, uh, same initials by the way, uh, rather curiously, um uh was in the original production, and she did a very famous revival in in 19 um 52 that we could talk about uh maybe later. But she said in 52 that everybody in the audience knew what was going on, they were thrilled at what was going on in this play, and it's not just the sexual shenanigans, there are gangsters in it, and there's a very um almost uh uh pre-code Hollywood uh sharpness to the dialogue, the put-downs, the insults. In the first page of the play, Joey auditions for a nightclub. And and literally within the first five minutes of the show, the guy who's hiring him, the the owner of the club asks him if he's into cocaine, if he's into marijuana, does he sleep with little boys? Does he screw all the chorus girls?

[22:42] Laurence Maslon: And you go, my God. But the adults in the audience were thrilled that it was adult material, but as Vivienne Segal said, they couldn't quite admit it in public, right? They couldn't quite own up to it. And very, very, very, very famously, um, the reviews were better than mixed. Um, Wolcott Gibbs in the New Yorker said, you know, it's finally time to rejoice that musical comedy has finally grown up. Um, but Brooks Atkinson, who is the very powerful and somewhat um, fussy critic for the New York Times said, you know, this is great, this person's great, and this music is great. But can you draw sweet water from such a foul well? So he was sort of tutting a bit about the milieu and whether that was quote unquote suitable for musical.

Now remember, remember, remember in 1940, and all the way up to 1940, there were no such things as family musicals for Pete's sake. You wouldn't dream of taking your family to a Broadway musical. Um, but still it was felt that had crossed some sort of moral line in what musicals could do, which is sort of insane when you think of something like Porgy and Bess or even The Cradle Will Rock or Knickerbocker Holiday, which all preceded PAL JOEY, but there it was. And the bad rap on PAL JOEY was somehow Atkinson closed it, uh, or Atkinson's finger wagging uh made it a flop. It was not a flop, it ran uh close to a year, which back then was pretty good. I think it made its money, was sold to Columbia Pictures immediately.

Um, actually went into um, you know, had a pretty decent, but not necessarily fertile summer stock life as well. Um, so the notion that Atkinson's review uh killed it is absolutely wrong, and it had a second life, which we can talk about, but um, I think that's sort of blown out of proportion. I think PAL JOEY was, you know, the show you didn't dare tell your mother you liked back in 1940. Um, and uh, it wasn't recorded uh because of a uh, uh radio strike, which was dead, which was a big hurt. I mean, um, had there not been a radio strike and had Gene Kelly and Vivienne Segal and Co. gotten into the recording studio and put out some of these songs, it might have uh enhanced its reputation uh more in the 1940s.

[25:21] Robert W. Schneider: Can you tell us a little bit more about who Vivienne Segal was and where she falls in the history of musical theater amongst leading ladies?

[25:31] Laurence Maslon: Well, um, I will say that Vivienne Segal in some ways is, as Shakespeare would say, caviar to the general. Um, I was lucky, extremely lucky. I grew up in Long Island, and uh, my English teacher, the guy who directed, you know, the musical every year, as every high school in America has the guy, now it's the gal, too as well, but who directs the musical every year was not only a musical theater fan, his favorite musical was PAL JOEY, and his favorite actor of any kind ever was Vivienne Segal or Vivienne as he referred to her. So I knew about Vivienne Segal from the ninth grade on, you know, go figure. And it turns out that my grandfather was one of the investors in the, you know, 1952 revival.

So when my English teacher found that out, I was like the biggest celebrity in the world. And you know, I we grew up with the Columbia Vivienne Segal album. Long way of saying, you know, she was a kind of Donna Murphy meets Bernadette Peters kind of type. I mean, uh, she was pretty, but not a great beauty. She was not particularly tall. She started out as a soprano in a lot of operettas in the 20s. I think she was in, you might correct me. I think she was in Desert Song at one point. Um, and she was in an early Rogers and Hart musical, I think in the 20s. And Larry Hart fell in love with her. Larry Hart was not inclined to falling in love with women, but he adored her. And she had and always wanted to write stuff for her.

There's a rumor that, you know, he probably was in his cups and proposed marriage to her, and she sort of gently laughed and moved on. But she had a particular grace, she had a particular style, and um, she was the older woman in this. She was very sexualized in PAL JOEY. She was the married woman that Joey had an affair with. And uh, you know, she made a couple of crappy movies. And as far as I think she may have married somebody with money, I don't know, but she she didn't really, she didn't really um, uh make that she wasn't a huge celebrity in the way um Merman was, say, or even Mary Morton. She didn't make many movies, and by the time the war was over, the kind of musical that she made her career in no longer existed.

Um, so it was kind of a miracle that she was in the revival uh in 1952, you know, 12 years later, or 10 years later, if you include recording the studio album. Um, and she is really, for those people who saw her, was extremely memorable, but um doesn't really have that moment in the sun that you can point to, like even a Nancy Walker or something. Who's now who the hell is Nancy Walker? Oh, Nancy Walker, she's the bounty. Oh, okay, I know who that is. I mean, she's utterly lost to popular culture, which is a shame.

[28:34] Robert W. Schneider: Can you tell us now about this 1952 revival, which I'm assuming brought the show back into the spotlight for a reexamination?

[28:44] Laurence Maslon: Um, yeah, I mean, this is all a kind of fascinating background story, which has a lot to do with kind of the unseen machinery of how musicals get produced and licensed and have reputations, have ongoing reputations. So um, PAL JOEY was not recorded in its original uh run. Um, there was one kind of off recording of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, I think by the Benny Goodman Orchestra, but no singers recorded it because there was a strike and they couldn't get any airplay. So it kind of vanished. And again, uh they had By Jupiter in 42, which was the biggest hit they ever had, actually. And then of course, by 43, it's Oklahoma and the revival of Connecticut Yankee by Rogers and Hart and Larry Hart dies.

And Pal Joey kind of sinks under the surface, and then after the war in the late 1940s, the long playing record comes into being, which is an amazing um phenomenon because now you can listen to 23, 25 minutes per side without getting up and on a two-sided record. So that's almost 50 minutes, which kind of is all you need to capture a good Broadway score. And um, Goddard Lieberson, who was the executive vice president of Columbia Records, had put out uh he supervised Kiss Me Kate, he was the producer on South Pacific for Columbia, which were I can't even tell you how monumental those albums were. South Pacific was was on the was number one for 62 weeks. Hello. Um, music, not in just in the cast album category.

And he decided there were scores that did not get recorded in their day, like The Bandwagon and Anything Goes. And uh, he put his money and he hired a studio and he hired a guy named Lehman Engel, who was the leading conductor, musical director of his day, and he did these studio recordings again. So what studio recordings? There's there's Jose Carreras and Gary Tacano doing West Side Story. Well, back then it didn't happen until his visionary leadership and he decided to bring in Vivienne Segal, Harold Lang, who'd been in Kiss Me Kate. I don't know why he didn't get Kelly. I assume because Kelly was in Hollywood by then, and it was a New York album on 30th Street, Columbia Studios recording.

And he recorded the score, not all of it, mind you, but enough of it so that it hit the airwaves again. And at the same time, he was inspired by the fact that again, a total fluke in 1948. A pianist named Bill Snyder um did this kind of cocktail lounge recording of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. It became a huge hit. And then Mel Tormé recorded it. He was the first guy to record it, Doris Day recorded it, Gordon Jenkins recorded it. And the song, I think at one point, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered in 1949, occupied in different renditions, the 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th charts, hits on the charts that year. Go figure. So Lieberson was no dummy. He thought, well, you know, let's frame this amazing song, which was not a standard, which was not a song that every cabaret woman singer over the age of 39 would sing constantly.

I mean, it was the I'm Still Here of its, you know, day. And uh, let's frame it with all these other great songs. He knew Rogers, he was very good friends with Rogers. His wife, Vera Zarina was in I Married an Angel, written by Rogers and Hart. So um, you know, their history went very far back, and this album did incredibly well. It was very well reviewed. Um, and of all people, Julie Stein, yes, that Julie Stein, uh, from you know, Funny Girl and Do Re Mi and Bells Are Ringing, you know, was a terrible producer, but he liked throwing his money away wherever he could. And he decided that there should be a revival. And uh, in a very weird way, the people who were in the studio album were recruited to play the leads.

And so Harold Lang and Vivienne Segal uh played uh Joey and Vera respectively. Elaine Stritch was in the show playing a small part, and um that show was a hit. It ran, I think like six months longer than the 1940 version, and Brooks Atkinson very famously came back and re-reviewed it and said, uh, I don't know what I was talking about in 1940. This is a brilliant show. But the real collaborator in 1952 were the Times. And you know, now you're post Streetcar Named Desire, and now you're you're you're dealing with uh, you know, movies. Uh well, we're a year or two before the Blackboard Jungle, but you know, things are a little more mature. And it had a hit song, which it frankly it didn't have, funnily enough.

It had a hit song in 1952 that didn't have in 1940. So it was up and running and it's become a staple ever since. And a lot of interesting people have played Joey. Steve Lawrence played it in Summerstock, uh, Bob Fosse played it in Summerstock and at City Center.

[34:07] Laurence Maslon: Um, so you know, and then it it's it's had some disastrous stage versions subsequently. Uh, there was an all-black version with Lena Horn as Vera Simpson, which never left Los Angeles in 1978, uh, on and on. But but um it really was a kind of trick of fate and technology and a shift in the times that made PAL JOEY the hit it always kind of was, but it it wasn't acknowledged to be in its day.

[34:37] Robert W. Schneider: Do you why do you think that the revivals of this show? I mean, really since 1970 forward, have not succeeded with audiences or critics.

[34:47] Laurence Maslon: Well, again, it's it's sometimes the pioneers uh hand off the baton to other more complicated material, and it's very hard to go back to that. I mean, I I think Show Boat is probably one of the few examples in Hell Prince's, you tell me, I think it's 92, right?

[35:06] Robert W. Schneider: Yeah, 93, 94, I think.

[35:09] Laurence Maslon: 93. Maybe it was 92 in Toronto and Cantu in 93, but be that as it may, early 90s revival. It's one of the few revivals of a show before Oklahoma that really kind of caught on. And Show Boat is still a problematic show to do today. Of The I Sing never got a good revival anywhere at any time. And that won the Pulitzer Prize, you know. So I think times change. I think some of PAL JOEY is a little clunky for modern audiences. I think it's what was racy in 1940 is too elusive. Um in some of the sexual shenanigans are implied rather um rather uh uh sketchily. So you have to kind of read between the lines. And it also is not quite the great narrative musical that we would see uh after World War II.

It does have moments where the show stops dead, um, so that Robert Alton's chorus girls and boys could go out and do their thing. I mean, very famous number, not famous, but it's famous for people who care about these things, but in the second act, a reporter from a newspaper interviews uh Joey, and um it's an interesting little scene where she she sees very quickly he's a fraud, and she says, never mind, I'll write it up myself, because you know, my lies will be better than your lies. And she mentions for absolutely no cogent or explainable reason that she's interviewed Gypsy Rose Lee. And she goes into this number called Zip, where she articulates what in her mind was going on in Gypsy Rose Lee's mind while she was interviewing her, using every esoteric, timely reference that Larry Hart could come up with in 1940.

So for those of us who love, you know, the majesty and the witticism of great show songs, it's fantastic. And I pity the poor fool, to quote Mr. T, who has to take that on in a revival because nobody knows Gypsy Rose Lee. Really, even from Gypsy. I mean, because this is she's talking about her life after she became a star. And and you know, uh Shostakovich and um, you know, whatever, uh all these, all these will William Saroyan will will Soroyan ever write a great play. What the heck is she talking about? So I've seen it done well. I mean, Bibi Newark did it well. Uh Elaine Stritch used to pull it out of her trunk um to sort of show her part of history, but it's not meaningful to audiences anymore.

So so that's part of that. And uh I do think that as revolutionary as PAL JOEY is, it certainly keeps several toes, if not even a foot, into those one off uh uh performer-oriented musicals of the 1920s and 30s.

[38:05] Robert W. Schneider: Have you ever seen a production of PAL JOEY that uh made you feel satisfied that they got it as close to the intention of the original authors as possible?

[38:15] Laurence Maslon: Well, uh I directed one actually. Um I was called in uh the Prince Musical Theater down in Philadelphia was doing a production with Christine Andreas as Vera Simpson, which was really super duper casting. And um I was an associate director for that theater, and it wasn't going well. So after the first preview, they fired the director, and I was brought in with I think I had 18 hours of rehearsal to redirect it. Um, and I think we had a great musical director, Christine Andreas was born to play that part. This was, I don't know, maybe 20 years ago. A guy named Trent Dawson, who's a wonderful performer, um, played Joey. And uh, you know, we just sort of cut it to the bone and try to figure out what its intentions were and make it kind of fast and a little film noiry.

I think it has that kind of film noir uh thing. Um, but you know, I I mean, just to tell you when I came in, uh, Krista Justice, I think was the woman who played Melba, who's the reporter, and the director I replaced, had her actually stripping while she was singing Zip. Um, and that made no sense to me because why would a reporter for a great Metropolitan newspaper take her clothes off and the you know, so we had to fix that.

[39:34] Robert W. Schneider: Understandable.

[39:35] Laurence Maslon: So, so people, I don't know, people want it to be something it's not. Um, it is what it is, and um certainly if it's orchestrated well and played by the right kind of people who get its dual nature as a musical score, it can be incredibly compelling. But but to it's an interesting question, you know, for another time. If you start what my grandmother would call potching around with the book, and you start to make a book from 1940 more knowing and more sexual and more subtextual and more um R-rated for lack of a better word, then the lyrics start to look stupid and the music start to look stupid. Because why are they why do people have a greater, you know, you find this in all sorts of things.

The revival of Oklahoma, which didn't change anything at Circle in the Square, but it starts to create a higher awareness among the characters that the score itself cannot support, because you're not gonna mess around with that score, God knows. So it's it's it's an issue. I think they the Roundabout did it maybe 10, 15 years ago, and they lost their lead, I think at the last minute and replaced him. Uh Circle in the Square did it and lost their lead. It was supposed to be Edward Vallella playing Joey, and um they lost him at the last minute. So it it also has to do with the chemistry of the two leads. Um Peter Gallagher and Patty Lapone did an okay version at Encores. Uh, but Bibi Newworth was was Melba. If Bibi Newworth had played Vera, I think you might have had a more of a successful uh uh commonality of tone, but that's also very difficult with this show.

[41:13] Robert W. Schneider: And my last question for you, Laurence is is what did PAL JOEY open the door to? What do we have today in musical theater that we can say had it not been for PAL JOEY, we wouldn't have had?

[41:19] Laurence Maslon: Well, we wouldn't have had a lot of grown-up musicals about you know sexual things. Um I think that it did open the door for couples to cohabitate. I think it opened the door for certainly Billy Bigelow to be a character who is to say the least rough around the edges. That's 1945. Um, I think maybe it opened the door even for something like 1956 Most Happy Fella, where the heroine gets pregnant by, you know, a guy who sleeps with her on her way, you know, who's not her husband on her wedding night. Um, and and you see those, I think it comes to full flower maybe a little later in the 1960s with some shows that are not, you know, uh uh revivable all the time. But what makes Sammy Run with uh the character of Sammy Glick played by Steve Lawrence?

I think in my essay I wrote every character that Jack Cassidy played in the 1960s from uh um Kodai and She Loves Me, who's clearly sleeping around. Um Max Mencken in uh It's Birds of Playing at Superman who's like hitting on Lois Lane and doing all these kind of devious things. So I I think it allows for a more graded uh and shaded hero who's not always an anti-hero. I mean, who's the biggest anti-hero of all time? Sweeney Todd, I guess, but then whoever it is, I don't know the name you may, the whoever's the guy in American Psycho, you know, 40 years later is even worse. So the term anti-hero gets sort of brooted about in a in a way that may use its usefulness, lose its usefulness past the 1960s and into the 1970s, because everybody's complicated now in a musical.

And I think that's more, that's maybe better way of putting it, that you had complicated human beings in the leads in Joey and Vera Simpson. They did things that characters and musicals maybe hinted at, but certainly didn't do on stage. There's an amazing number, which is still sort of jaw-dropping to me in act two, called Dead of Iniquity, where the characters wake up in bed and sing they have a little apartment she's paid for where they go in the afternoons or whenever they're available to have sex. And there's a chambermaid who pretends she's deaf and blind, and there's this mirror on the ceiling, and clearly they're screwing night and day. And and not only that, they don't feel guilty about it.

There's a whole wonderful melodic Rogers song about it. So I think that was that was not a secret because 99.9% of anybody in the audience who came to see PAL JOEY is probably either doing the same thing or wanted to do the same thing. But the fact that it was up there and celebrated and celebrated in such a sophisticated, enchanting, and consistently entertaining way by the Rogers and Hart Score, really let the door open and said, you know what? Musicals can be not real real, but they can at least deal with the facts of life, as Rogers put it.

[44:27] Robert W. Schneider: Laurence, thank you so much for joining us today. The chapter is brilliant. Your podcast is fantastic. Um it's been such an honor getting to speak to you. Uh, listeners, please make sure to purchase a copy of 50 Key Stage Musicals by visiting Routledge.com or by clicking in today's show description. If you want to learn more about PAL JOEY, please also review the links in the below description. I'm Robert W. Schneider, and thank you for listening to 50 Key Stage Musicals, the podcast. Bye-bye.