You know that scene in Shakespeare's Othello when the clueless galoot smothers Desdemona? Wouldn't it be better -- doncha think? -- if she pulled a stiletto out of her garter and stabbed him. And then ran down the hall and offed his chum, too? Happy ending! And politically correct.
Get Burbage on the phone now.
I reached the end of my rope with the furor over "Baby, It's Cold Outside" also here.
It turns out that the duet -- which my mother, who could spot smut in a song at 20 paces, loved -- is about date rape. Hashtag Me, Too, it's gotta go. I shall not engage in close textual analysis, since you can hardly be sentient without already having been subjected to it. But I will say that the Most Offending Line -- "Say, what's in this drink?" -- was a cliche everyone used whenever they said or heard something silly or accidentally mispronounced a word. I think I first fell back on it while drinking ginger ale at the age of 9.
I know the Moderns weren't around when I was 9, but, glorioski! throttling the song is more an assault on history than protection for sensitive co-eds. As far as that goes, the song never deserved to be hyperventilated over. It's just a clever duet, not a Heritage.
All right. What's behind this is the appalling Broadway reboot of My Fair Lady.
The 2018 version of the musical opened in April. The changes made were noted then, also very nicely here.. They didn't cause as much of a row as "Cold Outside," But they should have.
Y'see, Eliza Doolittle is not #Me,Too in the original telling. So to fix that, she has to be much tougher and wilier. You can bet the new Eliza does have a stiletto in her garter because she has dealt before with the likes of ... Henry Higgins! Poor Professor Higgins, Predatory Professor Higgins! Unfortunately, there is no evidence in the script that Higgins ever looked at another woman, and, in fact, he didn't actually look at Eliza until after the Embassy Ball. He only heard her.
So she storms out. Instead of fetching his slippers, she does to Henry what Nora did to Torvald.
But, see, Nora and Torvald were in a tortured serious drama by Henrik Ibsen. My Fair Lady is an, um, musical comedy? When G. B. Shaw wrote the original straight comedy, he let Eliza go, too. Audiences were less than happy at that even at the time, so he wrote a post-log explaining that she got the flower shop she always wanted and so was able to support Freddie, whom she married. The revival ending is closer, of course, to Shaw than to Lerner & Lowe.
But, see, Shaw wasn't writing a musical comedy. He surely was right that Eliza & Henry are not a match made in heaven. He was surely right that the Lerner & Loewe's ending was an impossible reach. But Lerner and Loewe were sure that reality is no substitute for romance. I am sure that in his day socialist critics were all over the script looking offenses by Shaw against the downtrodden -- not looking for an excuse to have them sing a rousing "Get Me to the Church on Time." And today we have feminist critics making sure Eliza comes out the winner.
But, as Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune said, the improvements mean "no hearts change. There is no love in the air." Who wants to pay Broadway prices for that?
I think we used to dance modestly to this at Chicago Sock Hops in the dead of winter. Was it Patti Page and Perry Como?
ReplyDeleteWhen Global Warming really kicks in, the phrase "cold outside" may need some explanation. Just kidding. It'll be cold outside somewhere at some times. The year dumbass senators can't make a snowball in the Winter is the year there won't be any dumbass senators or anyone else, for that matter.
ReplyDeleteRe: Baby It's Cold Outside
ReplyDelete1. Ricardo Montalban sang?
2. The lyrics aren't particularly about a Christmas or holiday song. I guess it became associated with the season because it's cold outside?
3. In terms of his craft, one of Loesser's specialties was the duet - and in particular the duet in which the two participants were singing to cross purposes. I am not sure there is an example in his best-known stage work, "Guys and Dolls" - although there is a trio, the Fugue for Tinhorns, featuring three touts pushing their respective horse picks. (Loesser, who I believe was largely self-taught, was said to have become a student of Bach in his later years; he clearly had a thing for polyphany.) His first big stage hit, "Where's Charlie", had an example of the cross-purposes duet, "Make a Miracle" (no more remembered than the show it was in). His other monster hit, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying", had at least two, maybe three, duets, "It's Been a Long Day" being the closest in spirit to "Baby It's Cold Outside". What's interesting about "Baby It's Cold Outside" is that it predated Loesser's stage success; it was sort of a prequel to his mastery of that odd corner of Broadway Musicaliana, the comic duet.
4. I agree with the song's defenders (primarily Loesser's children, it seems) that the song almost surely wasn't intended to be predatory. On the other hand, Loesser is from an unwoke age, and quite a bit of his work doesn't stand up well to scrutiny by contemporary standards (a piece from "How To Succeed" called "A Secretary Is Not A Toy" being especially cringeworthy these days).
5. Tom, I'll take your word for it that "What's in this drink?" was an anodyne wisecrack, and the female in the duet probably meant it in an arch way. But versions of roofies, even though they weren't called roofies back then, were around. I don't doubt that Mickey Finns were in the toolkit of date rapists in those days.
6. There is something very period, but also very true, about the piece. Young men can be assertive, and young women can be of two minds. I'm sure that is why it is so popular.
There were a whole bunch of versions. I think Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark is the one I remember. Ricardo Montalban (!) and Esther Williams (!) did it, and I think that's the version that brought the song back. Homer and Jethro did it with June Carter. (Homer and Jethro were featured on the WLS National Barn Dance that came out of Chicago; June Carter is of country music's royal family. She married Johnny Cash; she also rounded up a banjo for me once. The line I remember from that is, "Put some Eddy Arnold records on while I pour.")
Delete"Make a Miracle" was on the B side of Ray Bolger's "Once in Love with Amy," which is remembered. "How to Succeed" had the college fight song of all college fight songs, "Stand, Old Ivy," with Rudy Vallee holding up one end.
And, Jim, your No. 6 is right on.
Tom that is very interesting about "Make a Miracle". "Once in Love with Amy" is a great song - it's in my shower repertoire.
DeleteI have to listen to terrible Muzak at work and can tell you that there are four or five different versions of this song playing and in at least two of them, both of the singers are women.
DeleteTom, we need to know much more about about June Carter and the banjo - please spill.
DeleteAnd I am right with you on "Stand, Old Ivy". "Rip, rip, rip the chipmunks off the field!". And it's another signature Loesser duet. Here is Daniel Radcliffe (from Harry Potter) and John Larroquette (from pretty much everything) singing it. Loesser gets the college marching band sound pitch perfect. The whole scene (bonding with the boss over alma mater) is one of those passages about which one can't decide, Is it satire or is it just a portrait of how the world actually works? Great stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZPB83_ApqY
Ah, thanks for the trip down memory lane. I liked the "Comment" that the one dislike must be a chimpunk.
DeleteI happened to be backstage of the Grand Ole Opry in 1952 (very very long story), and June started talking to me. I was 14; she was 19 and soon to marry Carl Smith. Smith did not seem to be in a good mood, which may be why she struck up this conversation. Anyhow, it came out that I played banjo, and she asked if I had it with me. (Like I was going to wander into the Ryman Auditorium with it. I know my limits.) So nothing would stop her, but she borrowed one from one of Little Jimmie Dickens' backup players, and we noodled a couple of tunes -- she on guitar -- together.
I fear that we as a nation are losing our sense of humor. (Who tells jokes? Who would dare?)
ReplyDeleteBut more fundamentally, I see this as part of the continuing assault on American history. People don’t like history. People don’t like the fact that our ancestors once thought or acted according to different principles from today’s. They believe that their duty today is to correct the errors of the past. It reflects a deeply disturbing trend toward having a closed mind and an insistence on being right--as though there were only one way to be right. Ironically we, as a society, seem to be moving--voluntarily--in the direction of “1984.” Make a “mistake" and you become a nonperson. Express a forbidden idea and get sent to reeducation camp. Big Brother is watching, and the thought police are listening.
Bob Ginsberg, I don't know if you happen to be a reader of the NY Times, but your comment about the assault on history reminds me that Ross Douthat has written a couple of columns, prompted by the death of George HW Bush, that with the fading away of the old WASP ruling class and its replacement by the new meritocracy, which is a good deal more diverse but also seems to lack the patricians' strong sense of noblesse oblige and commitment to stewardship of the nation and culture, not everything is better than before. Predictably, Douthat's views are themselves now under assault for being insufficiently in-line with the prevailing wisdom of the meritocracy.
Deletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/sunday/wasps-meritocracy-ross-douthat.html
As it happens I did see Douthat’s columns and I didn’t seriously disagree.
DeleteBut a point about the song. Nowhere in the song does the guy impose his will on the doll. And it’s clear she can walk out the door (and into the snow) whenever she wants. He’s pleading with her to stay, and she seems torn. Whatever may be going on, it’s not date rape!
And a word about Where’s Charley. When I was about 10 or 11, my beloved Aunt Bertha took me to a matinee to see “Where’s Charley.” And while most of my childhood has receded into oblivion, I do remember seeing Ray Bolger do a softshoe and sing “Once in Love with Amy.” And as a footnote: Charley spends much of the show in drag, pretending to be his own aunt. How would that go over today?
Bob, I hope this doesn't push your memory too far, but did Bolger lead a singalong during that number? There is a point on the record where he does (probably using a studio audience; I doubt recording equipment was up to doing it in a live performance in those days). Eddie Cantor did it all the time when a show started to drag, so it wouldn't have been too unusual for a '40s audience. But I've always wondered if that part was in the show.
DeleteBob Ginsburg:"People don’t like the fact that our ancestors once thought or acted according to different principles from today’s. They believe that their duty today is to correct the errors of the past."
ReplyDeleteSecond the motion! The mad state of today in the far-flung media penumbra: hardly any principles people will chew on, nor any recognition that there were principles on which people once based words and deeds. Not all defensible, but often arguable.
What Bob said, third the motion. People are so busy considering the errors of the past that they don't acknowledge the beams in the eye of the present.
DeleteThe My Fair Lady thing is pretty interesting. Not having seen the version under discussion, I guess I'm not sure what to think about it. At the risk of sacrilege, I have to admit that, at least on screen with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn, it's not one of my faves. (The cockney dad - he just never charmed me. I chalk it up to a defect on my part.) Love the score. I've never seen nor read Pygmalion, so I don't know how MFL departed from Shaw's vision, but as described in the Vulture review, what this director has done with Eliza's character sounds like it could be within the Shavian orbit.
ReplyDeleteJim, What do you have against the undeserving poor? Both Stanley Holloway and George Rose (1976 revival) won Tonys for the role. I had trouble with the movie, too; if Audrey Hepburn was ever at Covent Garden at the crack of dawn, it was for a photo shoot, and she had a trailer.
DeleteTom, that was sort of my take on Hepburn, too. She was a highly-honored actor, so I'll stipulate that she could act, and I've read somewhere that she was a pro's pro in terms of her preparation and discipline - she could do the same scene in exactly the same way, many times in a row if necessary. I'm sure it didn't hurt that she was waif-thin and was one of those beautiful people who could make any clothing or accessories look fashionable by dint of them adorning her.
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