Broadway Archives - Behind the Music

The Fascinating Story behind “Fascinating Rhythm”

April 4, 2025March 29, 2025 by debisimons

1919 publicity photo of Adele and Fred Astaire, accessed via Wikipedia.

Have you ever had the experience of paying attention to the lyrics of a familiar song and thinking, “Hmmm. This doesn’t say what I’d always thought it did”? You might take a look at my post about the song “Oh the Days of the Kerry Dancing” in which this same realization took place for me.¹

Anyway, you’d think from the title of this song that it would be about how wonderful it is to be in thrall to a particular set of notes or to musical rhythm in general, but that’s not really what the words say. Here’s perhaps the clearest statement about the rhythm’s deleterious effects on the speaker:

I know that once it didn’t matter, but now you’re doing wrong;
When you start to patter, I’m so unhappy.
Won’t you take a day off?
Decide to run along somewhere far away off, and make it snappy!
Oh, how I long to be the man I used to be!
Fascinating rhythm, oh, won’t you stop picking on me?

Let me say first off that the song itself has very little to do with the plot of either the 1924 stage musical Lady, Be Good! or the 1941 film Lady Be Good in which it appears. I’m not even going to try for a plot summary of either one; suffice it to say that the song provides an excuse for a big dance number in each. In the stage version Fred Astaire and his sister Adele performed their dance midway through and then as the grand finale. In the movie the great Eleanor Powell gave an astounding tap routine.

A Problematic Musical with a Stormy Theme Song–“When You Walk through a Storm”

February 6, 2024January 22, 2024 by debisimons

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Would a musical be produced today that’s built around the idea of sticking with an abusive spouse no matter what and to some extent normalizing the abuse? Could it include the line, “Has it ever happened to you? Has anyone ever hit you — without hurtin’?” To which the answer is yes: “It is possible, dear, fer someone to hit you — hit you hard — and not hurt at all.” And that line is delivered from a mother to a daughter, thus paving the way for perpetuating the cycle of abuse. Honestly! The musical is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 Carousel, and it’s an odd duck, often labeled as a “problem” musical or even as “the wife-beater musical.” Billy Bigelow, said wife-beater and main villain, echoes other characters in popular theater such as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and John Wayne’s character in the film McLintock!, to name just a couple, who hit their wives and not only get away with it but whose wives respond lovingly. (I am horrified by the spanking scene at the end of McLintock!, and apparently it’s not the only such scene in the movie.) When he’s asked about his abuse by the Starkeeper, head man in heaven’s waiting room, Billy Bigelow says he does not beat his wife. “I wouldn’t beat a little thing like that — I hit her,” he explains. But to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this paragraph: Yes, indeed, Carousel is performed today, sometimes with the problematic lines cut and sometimes with them included. One production compromised by having the dead Billy shake his head “No!” in response to the “not hurt at all” line. That’s perhaps the best way to deal with the issue, since just cutting those few lines in no way erases the overall arc of the plot. Indeed, Carousel was considered groundbreaking at the time of its original production because of its anti-hero lead male character and its tragic plot. Rodgers and Hammerstein had already broken new ground in their first collaboration, Oklahoma!, which used the songs to advance a well-developed plot, and Hammerstein had included controversial ideas about racism in his collaboration with Jerome Kern for Show Boat.

A Hanukkah Song with Universal Appeal–“We Are Lights”

October 31, 2025October 29, 2023 by debisimons

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I started out this post with what I assumed would be an easy-to-answer question: Why did Stephen Schwartz end up collaborating with someone named Steve Young for this song, writing the music but having Young write the lyrics? Schwartz is somewhat of a Broadway legend, having had at one point three hit Broadway shows running at once (Pippin, Godspell, and The Magic Show). In 2003 Schwartz wrote the music and lyrics for the musical Wicked, which just celebrated its 20th year on Broadway. Yes, 20. So there was no shortage of material about Schwartz, but I couldn’t find anything about his writing this specific song. And I became somewhat obsessed with finding out who this Steve Young was. While I don’t typically share my research process, such as it is, about these posts, this one seemed interesting enough to include here. First I googled “Steve Young” and came up with a Wikipedia entry about someone of that name who was very famous for something called the “outlaw movement” in country music. Hmmm. That didn’t sound too promising. After a delightful e-mail exchange with Young’s son, Jubal Lee* (Young died in 2016), we concluded that I had the wrong Steve Young. Jubal said that he was sure his dad wouldn’t have been able to keep quiet about working with the creator of Wicked and therefore miss out on a chance to impress his granddaughter.

Lynn Ahrens’ Wonderful Career with Musical Words

October 29, 2023March 2, 2022 by debisimons

Cover of cast recording, accessed via Wikipedia and used here in accordance with fair use guidelines.

What would you say about a career that started with a chance encounter in an advertising company’s break room and has since spanned over 50 years? I’d call it remarkable, and that term certainly applies to Lynn Ahrens, who was 22 years old and bored silly with her secretarial job in 1970. So she started bringing her guitar to work with her to break up the monotony by singing and playing over her lunch hour. One of the company’s executives walked by and heard her. He had gotten involved with an educational project called “Schoolhouse Rock” and thought she might be able to write a song for it. She ended up writing several songs for the series, with the first being “The Preamble.” (These three-minute animated shorts originally ran from 1973-1984, but the pilot was produced in 1971, about the time that Ahrens got her big break.) As she says in an interview, “It was dumb luck—being in the right place at the right time with the right person passing by.” (“’Schoolhouse Rock’ interview: songwriter/singer Lynn Ahrens”) The songs she wrote and sang for that project got her out of the secretarial pool and into creative work. (If you’re reading this and you don’t know what a secretarial pool is, well, you’re just too young.) She went on to a career as a copywriter, as a freelance TV writer, a jingle writer, a television producer of many network shows for young people (including a stint at “Captain Kangaroo,” one of my childhood faves), and ultimately a musical theater writer. But, as she says, “It all started there.”

Sweet Charity’s Sisterly Sourcing and Songs

August 21, 2023February 10, 2022 by debisimons

Actress Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria; licensed under Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode

The Sourcing

The Broadway musical Sweet Charity opened in 1966 to rave reviews, sweeping up nine Tony nominations and winning one, lasting for a respectable 600+ performances and then being revived many times, both in the US and abroad. Bob Fosse won the Tony for choreography and then ended up directing the film version, his directorial debut in that genre. Everybody could be pretty happy about how this story about “a girl who wanted to be loved” turned out. But where did the idea for the whole thing come from in the first place?

All sources I’ve consulted agree that the precursor to the plot of Sweet Charity was the 1957 film by famous Italian director Federico Fellini called Nights of Cabiria, which concerns an ever-hopeful prostitute who never loses her optimism that someday she’ll find true love and happiness. And where did he get the idea for the plot, you ask? Well, often the source of ideas is completely unknown, even to the artist him/herself. (One of the most irritating questions you can ask an author is, “Where do you get the ideas for your books?” The only legitimate answer is usually a shrug, perhaps accompanied by an eye roll.) But for this story we do have at least somewhat of a source, probably gleaned from Fellini’s letters or other papers. It’s not terribly upbeat: “The film took its inspiration from news reports of a woman’s severed head retrieved in a lake and stories by Wanda, a shantytown prostitute Fellini met” on the set of a previous movie. (Wikipedia) The mystery of creativity, of course, is that lots of other people had read that head-in-the-lake story, and Wanda probably talked to lots of other people on the film set. But only Fellini got the idea of making those disparate elements into a movie. He started the film with his main character ending up in the river, not a lake, and still in possession of her head—but having been pushed in by her cad of a boyfriend who then stole all of her money. The story went on from there with Cabiria going from cad to cad; at the end she was left alone but still hopeful.

The Many Creative Wellsprings for the Musical “Guys and Dolls”

February 9, 2021January 27, 2021 by debisimons

English: Portion of title page of Guys and Dolls, Libretto and Vocal book, printed by Music Theatre International, 1978.

First, let’s define a few terms that will help along the way in outlining the wellsprings mentioned in the title above, particularly “libretto” or “lyrics” vs. “book.” I’ve run into these terms before and never quite gotten them straight. So the “libretto” (literally “little book” in Italian and typically used for opera) is the text of the sung parts, including the individual songs (or arias, again used primarily in opera) and any recitatives (that is, sung exposition). While an opera is usually all sung (but there are certainly exceptions such as The Magic Flute), musical theater typically has spoken parts as well. So the “book” is the compendium of everything the performers say or sing, as well as the stage directions. And thus the stage is set (ahem) for endless combinations, borrowings and re-workings. You’ll hear about someone getting an idea for a musical or an opera from seeing a play or reading a book and then going through the long and sometimes tortured process that will turn one format into another. Unless the creative mind behind it all is capable of doing everything—the words, the music, the staging—various roles have to be farmed out.

What Serious Moral/Social Issue Is Addressed in the Musical “South Pacific”?

February 9, 2021January 22, 2021 by debisimons

Original Broadway poster, 1949, accessed via Wikipedia

And the answer is: racial prejudice. If you don’t know the plot of this musical and think it’s just something lighthearted, you might be surprised by its content. The location is an island in the (where else?) south Pacific during World War II. The central conflict between the two main characters, Nellie the Naval nurse and Emile, the French planter with whom she falls in love, is that Nellie finds it very difficult to accept that Emile has been married before to a “dark-skinned Polynesian” and has two “mixed race” children. It’s only after Emile is almost killed in a secret mission to spy on the Japanese forces that Nellie realizes how much she loves him and his children. Another character, the Naval officer Cable, falls in love with a Polynesian girl, Liat, and that romance is also considered pretty scandalous. He decides that he can’t marry her because of how his family back home would react. He’s killed during the spy mission. But before he goes off to that fate he sings a very famous (and controversial at the time) song about how prejudice develops: “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught.”

Is Candide Really Candid?

December 15, 2020September 17, 2019 by debisimons

This is one of those posts in which I could go on and on and on. I could talk about the original novel Candide by the 18^th-century French satirist Voltaire, or the character of Candide in the novel, or the musical in its many iterations overseen by Leonard Bernstein, from which our selection is taken. I’ll try to hit each of these areas just a little.

So, to answer my rather silly question in relation to the above: No. Candide is not candid, but Candide is. Little grammatical joke there.

Voltaire’s novel is not in the least candid; that is, it is not naïve, gullible, sincere, or innocent. We use the word today in a slightly different sense; if you say to someone, “I’m going to be candid with you,” you usually mean “I’m going to say something tactless to you.” But you can see how this idea derives from the original definition. If you’re very frank and open yourself you’ll tend to be that way with other people. The novel itself, however, is biting, bitter and sarcastic, full of truly awful events. Even for modern readers, steeped in horror movies and violent video games, it doesn’t make for pleasant reading. (I personally could barely get through the synopsis on Wikipedia.)

Three Lovely but Bittersweet Autumn-Themed Songs

August 26, 2025August 26, 2019 by debisimons

Introduction to the Medley

Ah, autumn! On the one hand it’s the start of crisp, invigorating fall weather and the new school year; on the other it’s the end of summer and the inevitable slide towards winter. I’ve always loved fall, but as a gardener I also mourn the end of the growing season, trying to comfort myself with the refrain, “Next year!”

Three pieces of film/stage music capture this two-sided aspect of autumn: “The Summer Knows” from Summer of ’42 (1971), “Les Feuilles Mortes”/”The Autumn Leaves” from the post-WWII French film Les Portes de la Nuit (The Gates of the Night), and “September Song,” originally written for the 1936 Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday and later used in the 1950 film September Affair.

I could write an entire post about each of these beautiful pieces, but since I originally sang them as a medley I’m combining them into one. (See info at the bottom of this post about the medley and its performance.)

In which I follow the quest to find out the origin of “The Quest”

December 15, 2020April 28, 2018 by debisimons

I’m always interested in the origins of things: the why. So for the selection “The Impossible Dream” (titled “The Quest” in the actual script) from Man of La Mancha that I’ve sung with my own choir I wanted to know why on earth a popular Broadway show had been made from a 400-year-old, 700-page novel, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Doesn’t sound all that likely, does it? And yet it happened. (There are lots of other unlikely origins for Broadway musicals, though—Kiss Me, Kate is based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.)