Fred Asaire and Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon film, 1953.

By the 1930s, the theater and film capitals of America were separated by an entire continent. In the early days of the Great Depression, artists had to make a choice: stay in New York, with its harsh winters and gray, shuffling breadlines, working for a business staggering from layoffs and cutbacks; or move to Hollywood, where it was sunny all year round, smelled ofeucalyptus, and money was thrown at you in fistfuls by studio executives. Which would you choose? It is, of course, a trick question. Although the motion picture studios jumped at the chance to add musicals to their rosters after the introduction of sound with The Jazz Singer in 1927, it was several years before they mastered the technology of filming a musical successfully. Sound reproduction was tinny and false, and camera movement severely limited.

Scene from 42nd Street

None of this kept the Hollywood studios from exploiting the novelty of sound musicals. They acquired and filmed an enormous amount of material from 1927 to 1932. Film musicals were either portmanteau revues like King of Jazz, Hollywood Revue of 1929, or Paramount on Parade; awkwardly filmed stage adaptations like The Cocoanuts, Sally, or Show Boat (1929); or newly crafted stories, often with a backstage theme that glamorized that cosmopolitan city on the East Coast (The Broadway Melody, Broadway Babes, Footlights and Fools). Unfortunately, Hollywood glutted the market with an inferior product, and by the early '30s, audiences were turned off by the technical limitations of the film musical. A former marine drill instructor and Broadway dance director named Busby Berkeley turned all this around. In 1933, he conceived the dances to the quintessential backstage film musical, 42nd Street. His visual skill at manipulating both chorus girls and the camera finally made a string of backstage yarns successful for Warner Bros. Soon, the other studios were churning out their own musical styles (Paramount, elegant and sophisticated; MGM, glossy and overblown; RKO, Astaire and Rogers), and the Hollywood musical reached its heyday with a barrage of original musicals that would enrapture depression-era America.

Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire from The Band Wagon film

Every major Broadway songwriter was under some kind of film contract by the early 1930s. Irving Berlin was initially distrustful of film technology and studio interference, but he was lured back to write Top Hat for Astaire and Rogers and began a healthy relationship with various studios. (The greatest hit he — anyone — ever wrote, White Christmas, came out of the 1942 film Holiday Inn). The Gershwins loved the lifestyle of Hollywood but frequently commuted back and forth to the East Coast until George's negative reviews on Porgy and Bess sent him back into the arms of RKO. Jerome Kern, never one to suffer fools, surprisingly liked Hollywood. He teamed up with various studio-contracted lyricists like Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, even Ira Gershwin, and produced some of his most extraordinary songs: “The Way You Look Tonight," “I'm Old-Fashioned," and “Long Ago and Far Away." Cole Porter was easily amenable to the assembly-line method of creating songs in Hollywood; he was always content to toss out one song and start over again on another.

Fred Astaire, Nanette Fabray and Jack Buchanan in The Band Wagon film, 1953

But Hollywood never had the one thing Broadway reveled in: creative freedom. In addition to interference by studio chiefs and producers, Hollywood had its own form of self-censorship. The Production Code, better known as the Hays Code, was introduced in 1934. Even if film producers wanted sophisticated Broadway material reproduced intact on its sound stages, the Hays Code made that impossible.

Hollywood soon relied on its own stable of songwriters. Harold Arlen’s and Johnny Mercer’s “Blues in the Night," “One for My Baby," and “That Old Black Magic" came from some utterly forgettable movies. Sadly, their one great ambition was to write a hit Broadway musical. It never happened. The most spectacular songwriting team in Hollywood was Harry Warren and Al Dubin, who created the scores for the Busby Berkeley movies with such legendary numbers as “I Only Have Eyes for You" and “Lullaby of Broadway." Other writers like Dorothy Fields, Frank Loesser, and Jule Styne were nurtured by the studio system and able to extend their successes to Broadway in the late 1940s and 1950s when Hollywood musical production was slowing down.

When Hollywood did buy the rights to a Broadway property, it rarely, if ever, made its way to celluloid intact. Wholesale revisionism was typical of Hollywood, especially with shows from the 1930s, but even small changes in the book musicals of the 1940s and 1950s changed their tone: the 1950 version of On the Town throws away the World War II setting so crucial to its meaning; Kiss Me, Kate in 1953 kept most of the score, but idiotically has someone pretending to be Cole Porter sort of introducing the movie.

Broadway producers, songwriters, and librettists learned to cry all the way to the bank as film options on their material became more and more frequent in the 1950s. Record sums for the rights to shows like My Fair Lady topped out at $5 million. Hollywood would have the last laugh on its East Coast detractors, flooding Broadway in the 1980s and 1990s with stage versions of original Hollywood musicals such as Gigi, 42nd Street, Singing in the Rain, Meet Me in St. Louis,and Footloose, as well as Disney animated films like The Lion King.

— Laurence Maslon is the associate arts professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. With Michael Kantor, Maslon is the co-author of the companion volume, BROADWAY: THE AMERICAN MUSICAL, published in 2004 by Bulfinch Press.

The Band Wagon was originally conceived as a musical revue by composer Arthur Schwartz and lyricist Howard Dietz and premiered on Broadway on June 3, 1931. It featured the talents of Fred Astaire and his sister Adele, as well as actors Frank Morgan, Helen Broderick, and Philip Loeb. Schwartz and Dietz wrote some of their most memorable songs for The Band Wagon, including “Dancing in the Dark" and “Something to Remember You By." Unlike the traditional musical format, The Band Wagon did not tell an ongoing story; instead, it featured individual skits that were written by playwright and humorist George S. Kaufman. (See below for a history of the musical revue.)

Both Schwartz and Dietz began in other professions; Schwartz was trained as a lawyer, and Dietz had a day job as MGM's advertising manager (he created their famous lion mascot). Their eventual partnership in show business seemed fated. “When they began collaborating at the end of the 1920s,” Broadway historian Laurence Maslon recalls, “they made beautiful music together. They rode in on the coattails of the ‘Little Shows,’ intimate, sophisticated revues that gave audiences some relief from the bombast of [Florenz] Ziegfeld and [George] White.” In addition to The Band Wagon, the team wrote three other successful revues: Three's a Crowd, Flying Colors, and At Home Abroad.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green

In 1953, MGM released the film version of The Band Wagon. Although many of the original songs were featured in the movie, Schwartz and Dietz added other numbers, most notably “That’s Entertainment!,” which quickly became a Broadway standard. The Kaufman skits were traded for a screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who were coming off of another MGM favorite, Singin’ in the Rain. Casting was also overhauled; while Fred Astaire remained on the project, legendary dancer Cyd Charisse joined the production, as well as Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray, who played the husband-and-wife writing team patterned after Comden and Green themselves. The Band Wagon earned three Academy Award nominations.

— Kim Montelibano Heil

Fred and Adele Astaire in The Band Wagon "revue", 1931

In the years between the world wars, nothing on Broadway catered to Manhattan nightlife like the revue. During the RoaringTwenties, nearly 150 revues opened on Broadway. Pioneered by Florenz Ziegfeld and his elegant “Follies," revues allowed for an ever-shifting variety of songs, dances, skits, and production numbers. Idiosyncratic comics, specialty dancers, emotive singers, and chorus girls all found a home for their particular talents. Costume and scenic designers’ flash, color, topicality, and brazenness caught the spirit of the age. Revues had their conveniences, too; unlike musical comedies, you could miss the first act and it wouldn't make any difference. Revues could be assembled easily, and there was always room for an additional investor, whether it was a newly minted Wall Street broker with a crush on a showgirl or a bootlegging gangster who wanted to see his girlfriend installed at the end of a chorus line. There were so many chances for a songwriter to get his number placed in a show that the revue became the greatest incubator for popular music the country has ever seen.

After the advent of the narrative musical with Oklahoma! in 1943, it was harder to engage audience interest in a disconnected show. Television put the final nail in the coffin of the revue in 1948 by offering topical material, comedy, and dancing with a speed and economy that the Broadway stage could no longer match.

Dancing in the Dark is not playwright Douglas Carter Beane’s first movie-musical adaptation, yet his approach to writing the book for this MGM favorite had to be much different from his work on Xanadu, the 2007 Broadway hit that was based on the notoriously bad 1980 movie starring Olivia Newton-John. The Band Wagon, the movie on which Dancing in the Dark is based, was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Music (Scoring of a Musical Picture) to Adolph Deutsch, and Best Writing (Story and Screenplay) to Betty Comden and Adolph Green. It was also recently rated #17 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 25 Greatest Movie Musicals. Conversely, Xanadu was a box office flop, and was even nominated for six “Razzies” – awards for the worst acting, worst directing, etc. – including “Worst Musical.” The vastly different track records of the two movie-musicals offered Beane the opportunity to explore adaptation in a new light.

“The thing about Xanadu is,” he explains, “it is so awful, but the soundtrack was hugely successful. So most people knew the basic premise and the score. There was a certain freedom to that. Most people who see the show on Broadway now haven't even seen the movie.

“The Band Wagon is loved by people in the theatre, but most people don't know it,” Beane says of his current project.

“There is a greater level of respect in my adaptation of Dancing in the Dark. There is also a deeper and richer story I wish to tell than there ever was in Xanadu.”

The “greater level of respect” that Beane speaks of refers to his reverence to the original material, authored by Comden and Green, who were friends of Beane’s. He was fortunate to have discussed the project with Comden, who gave him a copy of the original shooting script. “In a weird way [adapting The Band Wagon is] like I’m having a conversation with an old friend,” he says of the process. “Adolph and I had spoken about The Band Wagon — he was very forthcoming about its flaws and strengths. This conversation happened long before I even considered working on it.

“Sadly,” he adds, “Betty passed away before I could show her anything I had written. But when you see the show — there are plenty of places where I make a point of referencing Betty and Adolph’s life and shows and performing style. And these moments are done with the utmost love.”

As a playwright, Beane not only made waves with Xanadu but with his play The Little Dog Laughed, which was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 2007. The four-character piece is a lot more intimate than the large-scale spectacle of both of his musical adaptations, proving his dexterity in writing both straight plays and musical theatre. He notes that there are payoffs in both genres.

“Musicals have so many different and exciting departments — you never feel alone on a musical. A play can be lonely.” He thinks about it. “But then the playwright is all powerful in a play — so it balances out. Power but loneliness.”

As for the criticism that musicals lack depth and meaning, Beane scoffs. “If [musicals] are criticized this way, it is being done by an extremely shallow person,” he says. “The Band Wagon is about a man returning home. It is about a loner becoming a part of a community for the first time. It is the prodigal son, bruised and broken and returning to his real life. And it has a great hayride number.”

So what kind of project is next on Beane’s dance card?

“I like stories that talk about who we are, in America,” he says. “No matter when it is set.

“And,” he adds cheekily, “there should be a great hayride number.”

— Kim Montelibano Heil

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