There is an arresting tidbit about Leonard Bernstein and “West Side Story” near the beginning of “Broadway Melody” (Benzinger and Frank, 492 pages), written by Jack Viertel, whose illustrious and varied career in the theater includes his immensely informative “The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built.” But this new book is a novel, Viertel’s first, which focuses on the lives of three fictional characters — Ike, a trumpet player; Vincent, a stagehand; and Aurora, a performer.
Ike played trumpet for “West Side Story,” which has no viola parts in the score, we’re told, because before Bernstein’s musical landed in the Winter Garden theater, there was “a flop called Shangri-La” there that Bernstein attended, “and found the house viola players in the pit so lousy that he directed his orchestrators to write the musical charts for his new show without violas.”
Ike is a made-up character. I wondered: Is the viola story true?
I stopped reading the novel to do a quick Internet search. There really was a musical called “Shangri-La” that flopped (21 performances in 1956.) And there really are no violas in “West Side Story.” But an article in Gramophone magazine said that Bernstein got rid of the violas and harp to make room in the relatively small orchestra pit for all the brass and Latin-American percussion instruments needed for the score; there was no mention of Bernstein hating the specific viola players. So was the viola-hating story in the book based on insider knowledge by Viertel the long-time theater executive and producer, or was Viertel as novelist just making up a cheeky fictional origin story for the absence of violas?
Not content with what I discovered online, I reached out to the author through his representative. His relayed response: “It’s true that he hated the viola players so much at the Winter Garden that he refused to have viola parts in the WSS score. Whether the show he saw was Shangri La or not I have no idea. It seems like a logical show time-wise, but I don’t know for sure.”
Not every reader will be able to question the author directly, and even I couldn’t keep going back to him for each passage that made me wonder whether it was one in which he was playing “fast and loose” or one in which he was being “approximately accurate” — to quote from his brief foreword explaining his approach to the information about Broadway in this work of fiction.
Let that serve as a caveat: “Broadway Melody” is an entertaining read, but theater lovers attracted to it as a source of authentic Broadway history or even just reliable dish should be prepared to make side trips to Google and IBDB and YouTube for verification or correction or, at the very least, elaboration.
I made such trips frequently; the book is full of theater lore, people, places, and plays that may or may not be true. Some, like the Bernstein story, use real names. Such celebrated figures as Ethel Waters, Joseph Papp, and Jerry Herman make cameos in the book. There are a few pages about well-known theater-related events, such as the demolition in 1982 of the five old theaters between 45th and 46th Street, replaced by a hotel now called the Marriott Marquis, a “formless gray bunker… Soviet in style, ugly and threatening”
There is even some literary analysis. There are a couple of pages on the significance of two lines of dialogue in a revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, which did not mistake the play as “a sentimental paean to small-town life” but rather recognized it as a “clear-eyed examination of the struggling and emotionally unfulfilled world that America had seemed to become.”
Viertel enthusiastically sprinkles his narrative with the titles of little-remembered flops (which I looked up; the following parenthetical dates and number of performances are not in the novel): Kander and Ebb’s “70, Girls, 70” (35 performances in 1971), “The Fig Leaves Are Falling,” (four performances in 1969) Duke Ellington’s “Pousse-Café” (three performances in 1966.) All three main characters work on “Nowhere to Go But Up” which was indeed at the Winter Garden for nine performances in 1962, but its composer was Sol Berkowitz, not, as in the novel, Sid Lupowitz, Ike’s old army buddy, with whom he had formed a band during World War II to play at military functions.
All of these allusions are worked into the novel as part of the lives and perspectives of the three main characters, which always take central place in its pages.
As a five-year-old, Aurora Feik was propped on top of a Magnavox console record player, which was playing Ethel Waters singing “Taking A Chance on Love.” This moment inspires her to become a singer, renaming herself Aurora Shelton — and , after some success on Broadway, she eventually makes a special trip to visit Miss Waters, in order to thank her.
As a young teenager, Vincent Donnelly got a job through his Irish immigrant father at a light factory, where he invented a way of cooling theatrical spotlights – an idea that his boss stole, but which led this lad with a mechanical knack and a gift for enterprise and making useful connections to a job as a union spotlight operator as well as a whole host of other adventures and opportunities, .
Zachary Harris was born Itzhak Horowitz to a wealthy immigrant father who dies young, and a widowed mother who decides that she and her only son should live an expatriate life in pre-war Europe. Ike is inspired to take up the trumpet (he already excelled at piano) when he listens to the great trumpeter Tommy Ladnier (another actual figure) in a Paris club.
Both Vincent and Ike eventually fall in love with Aurora, a love triangle that is evidently seen as the most marketable aspect of the book, but that I found less interesting than the details of their journeys to Broadway, and the ways their lives crisscross with each other and with a cast of colorful characters over the long haul; the timeline covers some 70 years, from the 1930s up to about a decade ago, with periodic descriptions of the theater district in different eras. (As Ike at one point observes, the area veered from “the true glamour in the forties” to ”the true hell in the seventies.”)
Some of these characters are recognizable figures or are at least familiar theater types, but there is an obvious effort to get a wide demographic; it’s no accident that Viertel chooses to focus on a spotlight operator who works high up in the air and a trumpet player who works deep down in the pit – the furthest apart physically in the theater, and just as far apart in their perspectives on theater and on life.
“Broadway Melody” is heavily plotted, and meticulously structured; things planted casually early on bear surprising fruit later. This shouldn’t come as a surprise for an author who wrote an entire book analyzing the structure of Broadway musicals. But there is also a nagging sense at times that Viertel is checking off items from an obligatory list of what a popular novel should offer, and what one with “Broadway” in the title must include. There are sex scenes, a fatal car crash, a career-ending stage injury, a police raid, a front page scandal, a triumphant opening night, a comeback. Viertel is not at his strongest in his depiction of homosexuals, even during the AIDS crisis; they’re here, but mostly feel on the periphery of this narrative about an industry in which members of the LGBT community are actually at the center. (Perhaps needless to say, all the sex scenes are heterosexual.)
“Broadway Melody” is strewn with implausible romance. To be fair, perhaps most romance is implausible, but happens anyway, especially among showbiz folks; one in the novel says: “In our business, hearts break every night and put themselves back together again before the matinee.” There are also terrifically engaging scenes – well-paced, wry, dramatic – and scenes among people as young as five and as old as 90 that drive home what a life in the theater means. Over the course of their lives, these characters seem to spend relatively little time on stage, or backstage, and more time dealing with the mundane and the unexpected like anybody else. But for many of them, whatever may be happening to them outside in the world, theirs is a life in the theater because that’s what’s inside them.
