The Name Game

I got the album of The Musical of Musicals: The Musical and I’m enjoying the score more than I did when I saw the show as presented by the York Theatre Company. Some of this is because TMOM expertly parodies Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Andrew Lloyd Webber and his collaborators, and Kander and Ebb. But I was also greatly amused when I again heard a lyric in the Sondheim section where Jitter, our villain, muses on which method he should use to kill his opponent. After he considers a knife, a gun, a rope, and dope, he comes to the conclusion that “Hemlock is easy but too Socrates-y.”

I had to marvel that good ol’ Socrates got a mention in a musical for the third time this season. Granted, one of them occurred in a holdover production: the revival of Nine, which opened last April but wound up playing many more months in our current 2003-2004 season than it did in the 2002-2003 semester. You’ll recall that, in the middle of the “Folies Bergere” number, Stephanie sings: “The trouble with Contini? He’s the king of mediocrities — a second-rate director who believes that he is Socrates.” Then, in October, Stephen Schwartz gave us the same rhyme in this season’s biggest audience favorite, Wicked, when he had his Wizard muse: “I never saw myself as a Solomon or Socrates. I knew who I was: One of your dime-a-dozen mediocrities.”

These represent one of the aspects of show music that I most like, something seldom heard in pop or opera lyrics: Proper names show up in songs and allow for some felicitous rhymes. Two weeks ago, I heard “Xavier Cugat” — that bandleader of yore — matched with “you got” in “Just a Little Joint with a Jukebox” in the York Theatre Company’s Best Foot Forward. Meanwhile at the Encores! presentation of Pardon My English, during “Isn’t It a Pity?” — one of the most beautiful songs ever written — I noticed how Ira Gershwin had rhymed “[Heinrich] Heine” with “China” and “[Arthur] Schopenhauer” with “sour.”

Right now on Broadway, in Wonderful Town, The Wreck tells us how he could “Pass That Football” and notes that he “never learned to read / Mother Goose or Andre Gide.” (Good work, Comden and/or Green!) In Gypsy, Stephen Sondheim has Tulsa predict in his big number, “All I Need Now is the Girl,” that “this bum’ll be Beau Brummel.” A bit earlier in the show, Sondheim gets in a proper name in the middle of “If Momma Was Married” when he hooks “Fanny Brice” with “advice,” “rice,” and “twice.” (Boy, is he lucky that Fanny didn’t keep her original surname of Borach!)

In The Producers, Mel Brooks has less success rhyming “Stalin” with “fallin'” in the “Springtime for Hitler” sequence — but, after all, the Bialystock and Bloom production isn’t supposed to be any good. Brooks’s attempt to make “Brutus” sound like a match for “Judas” in “Betrayed” doesn’t fully succeed, either. But it’s very close, for some people do pronounce the name of Caesar’s assassin as “Brudas” when they’re in a hurry — and, Lord knows, any actor playing Max Bialystock is certainly in a hurry in that song.

Speaking of assassins, Sondheim goes easy on proper names in Assassins. For the first American presidential assassin, he merely rhymes “John” with “gone” and “Booth” with “truth.” The second syllable of the last name of the second assassin, “Gui-TEAU,” is paired with “go,” “no,” and “grow.” There’s not much beyond that, for we really can’t expect even Sondheim to do much rhyming with “Oswald,” “Zangara,” or “Czolgosz.”

But over the years, Sondheim has given us plenty of clever proper name rhymes to compensate. There may not be clever rhymes for “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” in Merrily We Roll Along but there is that delicious pairing of “[Leontyne] Price to sing a…” with “Meistersinger.” In A Little Night Music, Sondheim inherited the name “Armfeldt” from his source material, Smiles of a Summer Night, and he matched it with “[She may hope to make her] charm felt.” My all-time favorite example of a Sondheim rhyme using a proper name may well be “But who needs Albert Schweitzer when the lights’re low?” from Follies. And to think, that lyric was in a song that didn’t even stay in the show! (Sondheim, by the way, got his own tribute from colleague Lee Adams, who wrote “No matter how fond I’m of Stephen Sondheim” in the title song of By Strouse, which celebrated the work of Adams’s longtime collaborator Charles Strouse.)

Sondheim’s mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, didn’t often use clever wordplay. But in “Intermission Talk” in Me and Juliet, he did hook “Rosalind Russell” with “hustle” and “Yul Brynner” with “thinner.” (The latter, of course, celebrated Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. Well, charity does begin at home.)

Of course, Broadway lyricists have used proper names in rhymes for many, many years. Lorenz Hart put “Dietrich” together with “sweet trick” in “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” in Jumbo. Cole Porter decided that “the top” was not only “Mahatma Gandhi” but also “Napoleon Brandy” in Anything Goes. Jerry Herman (or Bob Merrill, depending on whom you believe) matched “Cornelius” with “really us” in “Elegance” in Hello, Dolly!, as well as “Hackl’r” and “spectac’lar” — which really does sound like a Bob Merrill rhyme, doesn’t it?

Some of these rhymes don’t look so good on the page — such as Ira Levin’s pairing of “Watson” with “trots in” in “Holmes and Watson” in Drat! The Cat! — but they do sing well. Some don’t quite work because the rhyme is a little forced: e.g., in Barnum, Michael Stewart’s pairing of “Zinnias” with “Phineas” in “There Is a Sucker Born Ev’ry Minute.” Some don’t ring true because the accent is off, as when Kenward Elmslie in The Grass Harp has Catherine sing about “some bus” in “Columbus.” (That’s awkward because we’d say “some BUS,” not “SOME bus.”) Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley try to make us believe that “Dracula” rhymes with “spectacular” in “Look at That Face” in The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd. (It did sound right to us Bostonians when the show had its pre-Broadway tryout there, since people from Eastern Massachusetts do have a tendency to drop their Rs.)

In The First — the 1981 musical that’s yet to get a recording — Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson, who was the first black in baseball, finds that another black is about to make his major league debut. So he sings, “It’s a beginning / Good luck to Larry Doby.” And with what did Martin Charnin choose to rhyme that? “Let him hit lefties, or they’ll trade him to Nairobi.” Ah, yes, the Nairobi Nationals — a team that’s in the thick of every pennant race!

But these lyrics do serve to keep these names alive. Who remembers Eva Tanguay, the leading lady of The Ziegfeld Follies of 1909? Well, I do — every time I listen to Mr. Wonderful, where her name is rhymed with “Gangway.” I also like how Harold Rome paired “Beatrice Fairfax,” an advice columnist of the ’30s, with “bare facts” in “Nobody Makes a Pass at Me” in Pins and Needles. I even like “Imagine it” rhyming with “Plantagenet” in “We Shall Do It” — a song from Thomas and the King, the London show that was a musical version of Becket. (I swear I’m not making that up.) They’re all just the tip of the lyrical iceberg — though the 1997 Broadway musical that involved an iceberg didn’t make much of an attempt to use such names as Robert Hichens, Charlotte Cardoza, Herbert J. Pitman, Caroline Neville, Charles Lightoller, Alice Beane, Thomas Andrews, Henry Etches, John Jacob Astor, and Benjamin Guggenheim.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]