Theater Program Notes: Million Dollar Quartet

 Published February 24, 2023, for Revival Theatre Company's production of Million Dollar Quartet

A Million to Two

Sam Phillips broke two formidable barriers on his way to the Million Dollar Quartet

By Jake Stigers

By the time the events of the fabled Million Dollar Quartet occurred, producer Sam Phillips had made an indelible name for himself as a recording impresario, a discoverer of future music legends … and a progressive thinker who effected remarkable changes in an industry, a culture and even a nation that were largely locked in a white-Christian-male hegemony.

When Phillips introduces himself at the beginning of the Million Dollar Quartet musical, he admits he “prob’ly could’a been a big wheel here. But there’s a cussedness ‘bout me.” That “here” was Memphis, TN, where in 1950 he’d opened the Memphis Recording Service—a cheap, hardly-any-frills storefront recording studio. Under the slogan “We Record Anything-Anywhere-Anytime,” he gave literally anyone who walked in off the street the opportunity to make an acetate recording of a song or a special message for a loved one.

But Phillips’ long game extended far beyond capturing endless renditions of “Happy Birthday” for people’s grandmothers.

In 1939, Phillips and his brother took a road trip that passed through Memphis, where he became enamored with the music of Beale Street. Yet-to-be blues and jazz legends like Louis Armstrong and B.B. King were helping define Beale Street as a vibrant, robust music scene celebrating and nurturing music by black artists … music that captured Phillips’ heart and forever defined his musical tastes and sensibilities.

Having grown up farming with his family in Alabama, Phillips was already deeply familiar with the gospel music he heard reverberating from black churches and with the songs he heard black sharecroppers sing as he worked alongside them. The world of Beale Street cemented his lifelong fascination with—and keen ear for—the music created and performed by black amateurs and artists alike.

Phillips started his career in the early 1940s as a deejay and radio engineer at station WLAY in Alabama. Unlike the prevailing standard that dictated stations restrict their programming to music only by black artists or only by white artists, WLAY employed an uncommon “open format” that at night broadcast a mix of music by both white and black artists—a practice that inspired Phillips to hammer at that artificial race barrier the rest of his career.

He moved to Memphis—home of his beloved Beale Street music scene—in 1945 to command the airwaves as an announcer and sound engineer for WREC, which gave him a bigger audience and broader access to the music, musicians and—most importantly—fellow deejays he’d work closely with as he established and built his recording empire.

By the time he left radio and opened his Memphis Recording Service studio, he’d amassed a network of industry connections and become a beacon for struggling artists—especially black artists—who wanted to get their work recorded and hopefully broadcast across the airwaves. To help facilitate this goal, Phillips launched his own label in 1952: The Sun Record Company.

In addition to creating the recording studio’s bread-and-butter “Anything-Anywhere-Anytime” recordings, Phillips and Sun Records slowly built a roster of music up-and-comers like Junior Parker, Howlin’ Wolf, and a 19-year-old songwriter and music impresario named Ike Turner.

A genuine fan of the black Beale Street artists and the music they created—particularly the blues—Phillips had hoped to both preserve their work and eventually push through restrictive race barriers to get their songs played on white radio stations instead of just black-only stations and late-night open-format programming.

But he couldn’t get anything he recorded to be played on the white stations—even with a decade of industry connections. “There were a LOTTA years when dee-jays wouldn’t play none a’my records. Back then I’d PAY ‘em, but they still wouldn’t play ‘em,” he explains in the Million Dollar Quartet musical.

So he devised a workaround.

Again, a quote from one of his fourth-wall monologues in the musical: “How would it be if I could find me a white kid who could light a fire under a song like the great Negro singers?”

Sam Phillips wasn’t the first person to put black music in the hands of white artists. And while there are endless discussions to be had about white artists appropriating black music, culture and their attendant successes, the narrative can honestly be parsed to allow that Sam Phillips was among an early few who were more interested in getting the music he loved to wider audiences and navigating a racist culture and industry to the best of his ability to make that happen. He saw music as a mechanism of democracy, and he wasn’t above tinkering with elections to give the people what he knew they wanted.

“As Sam saw it,” biographer Peter Guralnick writes, “what he was doing was to help open doors through which black artists and white artists alike—poor people deprived of education and opportunity but possessed of innate wisdom, talent, and imagination—might someday pass.” He brought to Sun an underpinned mission to make recordings that “would help knock down the wall between black and white musicians and markets” and contribute to the fall of racial segregation.

And despite deeply established racial barriers, Phillips’ philosophy and business model worked. In its 16-year run, Sun Records produced more rock-and-roll records—including an impressive 226 singles—than any other record label of its time. He slowly changed opinions, broke down barriers and got black artists to the table … and on the white airwaves.

The white singers and musicians Phillips discovered and promoted through Sun Records are a veritable who’s-who of 1950s icons including Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, Sonny Burgess and the four men he assembled on a fateful December night in 1956: Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and a fresh-faced Jerry Lee Lewis.

Not content with using black voices and music to disrupt current radio standards—and flush with cash from recently selling Elvis Presley to RCA Records—Phillips broke through another radio barrier in 1955 when he launched an all-female radio station with the delightful call letters WHER.

Radio stations weren’t entirely devoid of women’s voices at the time—many stations had one female announcer to cover homemaking, society events and other things traditionally seen as of interest only to women—but an all-women-all-the-time format was truly transformative and profoundly groundbreaking.

Staffed entirely with women both on-air and off, WHER was both progressive for its time and now very cringey from our modern perspective. The station broadcast from a studio he patronizingly called The Doll Bin in the nation’s third-ever Holiday Inn. (Phillips was one of the original investors in this innovative hotel-franchise concept, and it eventually earned him a fortune.) But—again from our modern perspective—the misogyny gets worse: He painted the studio pink and purple and decorated it with bras and panties hanging from a clothesline. I wish I were making that up.

To round out the cringe, he managed to objectify the invisible faces behind the radio voices with the slogan “1000 Beautiful Watts.”

But still: Women. On the radio. In the South. In the 1950s, when women weren’t even allowed to open bank accounts in their own names. Phillips was incredibly progressive, incredibly brave and—if you’ll excuse the gratuitously gendered expression—incredibly ballsy.

WHER was such a hit that it quickly inspired women-only stations to pop up around the country. It broadcast continuously from 1955 until 1973, two years after the National Press Club opened its membership to women and started making the concept of women-only radio less and less remarkable.

The Million Dollar events of December 4, 1956, propelled Phillips and Sun Records into a heyday that lasted through the end of the decade. But as rock and roll slowly disappeared under the waves of pop, funk, folk, psychedelic and the other rock genres that defined the 1960s, Phillips quietly disappeared from the public eye. The artists he discovered and launched into stardom continued to produce iconic music—and the race and gender barriers he challenged continued to crumble—but Phillips turned his attention to other broadcasting, investment and development interests.

And the music he loved and the industry he changed continue to rock and roll forward as his million-dollar legacy.

Jake Stigers is a frequent contributor to theater programs in the Corridor and can often be seen on stages in the Cedar Rapids area. His program notes and essays on art, history, mental illness and anything else he finds interesting are archived on TheOneWhoMumbles.blogspot.com

Theater Program Notes: Titanic

The RMS Titanic: At once a triumph of engineering and a metaphor for the the hubris of an era sailing at full speed
By Jake Stigers

The RMS Titanic was already a legend when it unmoored from terra firma and embarked on its storied first–and last–voyage across the Atlantic in 1912.

Weighing 46,328 tons, towering 104 feet high and built to accommodate 3,547 people–though only an estimated 2,224 people sailed on its maiden voyage–it was “the largest moving object in the world,” as chief naval architect Thomas Andrews declares with pride and an unmistakable air of hubris in his soliloquy prologue to the musical Titanic.

The second of the White Star Line’s three Olympic-class liners (the eponymous Olympic had launched in 1911 and the Britannic was just beginning construction with an eventual 1915 launch), Titanic represented an apotheosis of human achievement and pride: “At once a poem, and the perfection of physical engineering,” as Andrews boasts at the beginning of the musical and eventually the ship’s entire passenger manifest laments from a grim new perspective at the end.

Titanic and her Olympic-class sisters also represented a triumph in White Star Line’s luxury-liner race with rival Cunard, builders of the now dwarfed RMS Lusitania and RMS Mauretania.

But size, human achievement and Titanic’s catastrophic, conviction-defying demise–White Star Line never officially declared the ship to be unsinkable, but owner J. Bruce Ismay had reportedly declared that Titanic was so safe that it was its own lifeboat–weren’t the only catalysts that launched the ship and its wreck into the pantheon of disaster mythology. The culture that built it–and in many ways went down with it–also played a conspicuous role.

In 2004, the satirical newspaper The Onion published a wry, tongue-in-cheek special edition devoted to deconstructing the mythology and legend surrounding the Titanic sinking. It smartly–if not callously–summarized its perspective under a banner headline and multiple subheads that pulled no punches 90 years after the fact:

WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICE-BERG

Titanic, Representation of Man’s Hubris, Sinks in North Atlantic

1,500 Dead in Symbolic Tragedy

Well-to-Do Dowager Gets Hair Disheveled for First Time

Stewards Kindly Ask Third-Class Passengers to Drown

The seeds of Titanic’s hubris were planted two centuries before she set sail

The first Industrial Revolution began around 1760 with the discovery of new, more efficient, more affordable manufacturing processes for everything from producing textiles to generating power from steam. It slowly but surely transformed economies and population centers in Britain, throughout Europe and across the Atlantic in the newly established United States. Along the way, it raised the standard of living across almost all populations and demographics … while it also laid foundations for an eventual explosive growth of capitalist wealth and economic disparity that very measurably thrives to this day.

New discoveries and inventions for streamlining the mass manufacturing of steel in the 1850s kick-started what is now considered the second Industrial Revolution in Europe and America. This more efficient production of steel vastly improved developments in railroads, shipping and manufacturing and eventually spread to the developments of the electricity, chemical and petroleum industries. It continued to transform the ways people lived and businesses operated … but it also continued to broaden the growing chasm between wealth and poverty.

In 1873, American writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today to satirize the greed and political corruption wrought from a century of Industrial Revolution spoils in post-Civil War America. It shone harsh light and judgment on the nation’s deeply entrenched graft, materialism, and obsession with money and power. But perhaps more memorably, it gave a name for this period of dramatic, arguably obscene stratification between rich and poor.

Across the pond, Britain’s Victorian Era and France’s Belle Époque mirrored the Gilded Age’s remarkable innovations in technology, manufacturing, science, medicine and even the arts–all with improvements in the standards of living for many populations. And all without remedying the staggering economic disparities between the wealthy and the impoverished.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, the Edwardians–named for her successor, King Edward VII–started relaxing the social strictures and pieties of Victoria’s influence and ushered in what American author Samuel Hynes eventually described as “a leisurely time when women wore picture hats and did not vote, when the rich were not ashamed to live conspicuously, and the sun really never set on the British flag.”


Titanic brought this Zeitgeist to life in bold, statement scale

It was in this spirit of financial, cultural and social hubris that the massive ship Titanic was conceived of and born.

Taking inspiration from London’s 5-Star Ritz Hotel, Titanic’s designers finished First and Second Class staterooms and public spaces in a range of fashionable styles from Empire stateliness to the florid indulgences of Louis XV. A squash court, a Turkish bath and 24-hour telegraph service offered novel diversions.

Thomas Andrews even added a relatively unnecessary fourth smokestack to give the ship a more grand, imposing profile.

And into the good ship Titanic strode three stratifications of passenger ready to traverse the Atlantic in the circumstances their money–or lack of it–had made them accustomed:

First Class
Titanic’s First Class manifest was a venerable Who’s Who of Edwardian society and the keepers of the Western Hemisphere’s wealth and influence. At least a generation out from the Gilded Age forebears who built their family wealth and social status, the Titanic First Class passengers enjoyed lives of privilege and leisure tempered only by intricate and often labyrinthine social rituals that demonstrated good breeding, old money and civilized superiority to the lower, more vulgar classes.

That is not to say this population did nothing beyond living off the passive income of generational wealth. Many family patriarchs–and sometimes widowed matriarchs–still kept their businesses running efficiently and profitably, but they were also actively involved in exploiting the working classes, fighting unions, building monopolies, and heavily influencing the political and financial systems that kept their family dynasties in wealth and power.

It is certainly fair to say that these families and icons of business also contributed immense amounts of money to build museums, libraries, concert halls and other civic amenities, but not without preserving the wealth and privilege they and were accustomed to enjoying.

The men of First Class gleefully clarify this perpetuation of wealth and power in a lyric sung early in the Titanic musical: “Remarkable U.S. Steel is splitting shares at five to four! Monopoly makes the industry far better than before!”

Second Class
While the demarcations between Edwardian First Class and Second Class were absolute when buying tickets on a luxury ocean liner, they were far more fluid in the real world.

Titanic’s Second Class passengers still spent a great deal of money and expected a great deal of opulence and privilege on their voyage. But for reasons extending from budget constraints to a modest lack of interest in the conspicuous pomp and circumstance of First Class, these passengers still enjoyed extravagant accommodations without extravagant costs–and still without encountering passengers of the Third Class.

That is not to say there weren’t curious lookie-loos and brazen social climbers peering around the metaphorical–and physical–walls dividing First from Second Class.

In a clever bit of narrative construction, the Titanic musical embodies this Second Class ambition in the character of Alice Beane. Based loosely on the actual passenger Ethel Beane, Alice breathlessly and without a trace of shame bombards her beleaguered husband with facts and gossip she’s memorized about the First Class passengers as they board the ship.

It’s a neat writing trick for a number of reasons: It very clearly illustrates the tacky social-climbing aspirations that many Second Class passengers had, it comically delineates the Second Class climbers from the First class noblesse, and it introduces a lot of information about a lot of passengers to the audience without forced or ponderous exposition.

And if Alice Beane’s brazen antics don’t fully establish this demarcation in the first act, John Jacob Astor IV spells it out explicitly in the second act: “A few too many climbers. … Lately I’ve noticed that anyone with a few million dollars considers himself rich.”

Third Class
While First and Second Class passengers traveled with varying degrees of conspicuous privilege and wealth, Third Class passengers traveled with a more urgent sense of purpose: escaping lives of poverty, crime and hopelessness in Europe (and beyond) and emigrating to experience the storied opportunities and dreams of living in America.

These European immigrants were traveling at the end of what historians now call the New Immigration wave, which started in the late 19th Century when President Benjamin Harrison designated Ellis Island in New York Harbor as a federal immigration station.

Earlier immigration waves established a cross-cultural tradition of coming to America to establish new lives, housing and income sources–usually in Irish, German, Jewish and other ethnic enclaves–and then summoning remaining family members to cross the Atlantic to reunite in the New World. With Ellis Island protocols and record-keeping in place, immigration became more efficient, and the numbers of reuniting family members surged well into the 20th Century.

Despite the dangers of tenement life and the poverty wages of Industrial Revolution employment, the spirit of American opportunity still lived in these immigrants’ hearts and imaginations. But as the decades around the turn of the century saw a growing establishment of business owners, professionals and even politicians rising from these enclaves, the lure of legitimate American opportunity became stronger and stronger, drawing more and more people through Ellis Island and driving the exponentially explosive growth of New York City and other urban centers.

And while the White Star Line built its reputation and socioeconomic iconography on the opulent accommodations it provided its high-profile, high-wealth passengers, its primary source of revenue was actually from its Third Class passengers. These passengers were far more economical to house and feed, and their accommodations were designed to maximize the number of people who could occupy any given amount of space.

That’s not to say they were in any way unlivable. To attract Third Class passengers away from competitors who also used this business model, the White Star Line outfitted Titanic and its Olympic-class sister ships with sleeping, eating and public accommodations that had never been seen or experienced by most of its passengers. There were flushing toilets, warm running water, steady meals, comfortable beds and even bathtubs–though the entirety of Third Class had literally two bathtubs: one for all the women to share and one for all the men to share.

Titanic’s Third Class passengers encapsulate this mix of excitement, awe and wonder in a moving set of lyrics as they board the ship at the beginning of the show:

Get me aboard
Call out my name
It’s to America we aim
To find a better life
We prayed to make this trip!

Let all our children’s children know
That this day long ago
We dreamt of them
And came aboard this ship!

These are the cultural waters–both metaphoric and literal–that Titanic navigated as she headed west into the Atlantic

History has given us an understanding of the mechanics and enormity of Titanic’s demise through newspaper accounts, books, movies, YouTube channels and devoted internet sites.

Titanic the musical takes us on a more introspective journey with the ship and its passengers and explores the very human side of the tragedy through a prism of privilege and want, hubris and awe, and shared dreams of a future that’s both collective and jarringly unequal.

SIDEBAR: Why do we use female pronouns for ships?

Throughout recorded history, people have referred to ships as she and her and grouped them with sister ships and sent them on maiden voyages and led flotillas on mother ships … but why?

The short answer is there is no clear answer. Or at least there are many possible answers, including these:

For centuries and millennia, sailors have traditionally been men who’ve often named ships after important women in their lives as a way to keep them symbolically close on long voyages.

Sailors have dedicated ships to goddesses and mother figures (like Christopher Columbus’ La Santa María and the now-retired RMS Queen Mary) to petition for safe passage on journeys.

Ships have been seen as metaphoric mothers caring for the sailor in her womb.

The Latin word for ship is navis, whose linguistic feminine gendering eventually translated to a more literal interpretation of seeing ships as feminine.

SIDEBAR: Cedar Rapids’ Brucemore Historic Site has a Titanic connection

George and Irene Douglas, who lived in Brucemore from 1906 to 1937, have a tragic connection to the Titanic sinking: George’s brother and sister-in-law, Walter and Mahala Douglas, and Mahala’s maid, Bertha LeRoy, were sailing home on Titanic after a three-month trip to Europe to celebrate George’s retirement and to buy furnishings for their Minnesota home.

Mahala and Bertha survived the sinking, but Walter–feeling an obligation to be a gentleman and not board a lifeboat–did not. His body was recovered (and identified by the monograms on his shirt and cigarette case), and he and Mahala are now entombed in the Douglas family vault in Cedar Rapids’ Oak Hill Cemetery.

Jake Stigers is a frequent contributor to theater programs in the Corridor and can often be seen on stages in the Cedar Rapids area. His longtime fascination with the Titanic disaster and with Gilded Age-era history made the opportunity to write program notes for this production especially thrilling for him.

Theater program notes: End of the Rainbow

Judy Garland and a lifetime of chasing rainbows
by Jake Stigers

By December 1968, Judy Garland’s personal and professional résumé had amassed 30+ movies, hundreds of singles and albums, two Academy Award nominations, one Academy Juvenile Award, two Golden Globes, one Grammy, one Special Tony Award, two canceled studio contracts, four (and about to be five) husbands, three children, a lifetime addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates, multiple stints in rehab, crushing debt, and more highs and lows and crashes and comebacks than one lifetime can reasonably be expected to hold.

End of the Rainbow offers a theatrical take—and is there honestly any way other than theatrical to document Judy Garland’s life?—on the events surrounding what ended up being her final comeback attempt in a series of 1969 concerts at London’s Talk of the Town nightclub.


Once in a lullaby

Born Frances Ethel Gumm in 1922 to parents who had openly not welcomed their unexpected pregnancy, the future Judy Garland got her first enticing taste of performing at age 2 when she sang “Jingle Bells” on the stage of her family’s Minnesota theater. She and her two older siblings soon formed an act they called the Gumm Sisters, and they found a respectable amount of success touring the vaudeville circuit and even appearing in MGM movie shorts.

There’s a delightful theater legend that a Chicago playbill had misspelled their act as The Glum Sisters, which was the impetus for the girls to find a more glamorous stage name. The source of the name Garland has been attributed to everything from the character Lily Garland in Twentieth Century to drama critic Robert Garland to a casual comparison of the girls’ beauty to a garland of flowers. In any case, The Garland Sisters they became. And the future Judy went even farther by adopting a glamorous new first name from a popular Hoagy Carmichael song.

The trio broke up in 1934 when the eldest Garland-née-Gumm sister eloped to Nevada with a musician and the rising-star Judy Garland found herself invited to audition for Louis B. Mayer in California. She belted her way through “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart!” and—as the stories go—was immediately offered an MGM contract without a screen test.

Judy was 13 years old, 4 feet 11 inches tall (which she’d be for the rest of her life) and immediately made to be aware that she was nowhere near as beautiful or glamorous as the other up-and-coming movie stars—like Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor—with whom she shared an MGM classroom. She was the cute girl next door with little in the way of major movie-star potential except for one thing: her voice. The cherubic, pint-sized teen had an impressive set of pipes and a natural aptitude for emotional performance that made her seem wiser and more worldly than her years every time she opened her mouth.

But to Mayer, her looks—specifically her weight—made her a hard sell to a movie-going public (he called her “my little hunchback”), and his studio put her on near-starvation diets of soup and lettuce to slim her down. And once young Judy had earned enough public adoration to make her a bankable star, MGM pumped her full of amphetamines to keep her awake long enough to work her to death and barbiturates to give her short fits of sleep at night.

In the process, they also gave her a lifetime of drug addictions and crippling self-esteem issues.


The dreams that you dare to dream

In 1939, Garland was catapulted from bankable child star to mega-bankable movie star by playing Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz and—more specifically—by singing “Over the Rainbow,” a simple, soaring soliloquy inspired by Dorothy’s Auntie Em telling her to “find yourself a place where you won't get into any trouble.” The song became a breakout hit and a personal anthem of both hope and introspection for Garland that kept finding newer—sometimes profound, oftentimes heartbreaking—shades of meaning as her life and career careened through endless cycles of soaring successes, epic crashes and triumphant comebacks.

The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms—both released in 1939—earned Garland an Academy Juvenile Award, which surprisingly ended up being the only Oscar she ever won. But her star skyrocketed from there through iconic pairings with Mickey Rooney; iconic movies like Meet Me in St. Louis; and iconic affairs with other stars both single and married including Johnny Mercer, Tyrone Power and Orson Welles.

But her escalating problems with addiction and, later, mental illness eventually made her so unreliable and expensively absent from filmings that she was fired from three high-profile movies in pretty rapid succession: 1949’s The Barkleys of Broadway (replaced by Ginger Rogers), 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun (replaced by Betty Hutton) and 1951’s Royal Wedding (replaced by Jane Powell). And in 1950, she was unceremoniously kicked out of MGM.


Troubles melt like lemon drops

Over the next two decades, Garland’s life and career raced up one mountain and careened down the next:

She headlined sold-out concerts and tours in London’s Palladium, Manhattan’s Palace Theatre, Las Vegas’s New Frontier Hotel and Carnegie Hall—the last of which produced a two-record album that spent 13 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart and won four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and Best Female Vocal of the Year.

She survived a number of suicide attempts, committed herself to repeated stays in mental hospitals, and developed acute hepatitis that threatened to leave her an invalid who would never sing again.

She made a grand comeback with her 1954 remake of A Star is Born, which earned her an Academy Award nomination. She was thought to be such a shoo-in that even though she was recovering from the birth of her son Joey, television crews set up cameras in her hospital room to televise her acceptance speech the night of the ceremony. They reported packed up and left her alone in her room before the surprise winner—Grace Kelly, for The Country Girl—even got to the stage to accept her trophy.

She signed a contract with Random House to write an autobiography with the working title The Judy Garland Story but was unable to stay focused and on-task to finish it in the nine years until her death.

She launched a successful TV variety show on CBS called The Judy Garland Show that received critical acclaim but was canceled due to poor ratings (it was slotted against NBC’s juggernaut Bonanza) and industry politics. While introducing a young Barbra Streisand to the nation on her show, she candidly told Streisand “Don’t let them do to you what they did to me. … Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a blizzard. An absolute blizzard.”

She was cast as the desperately aging, shamelessly man-hungry Helen Lawson in the 1967 movie Valley of the Dolls, but her alcoholism and unreliability—compounded by her cruel treatment by director Mark Robson, who saw her only as a source of scandal-inspired publicity—got her fired soon after production began.

She found herself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that she could never resurface from thanks to failed investments in movie projects, unscrupulous managers, gambling husbands, skyrocketing interest on back taxes and her own failures at managing her money. She even had to sell her Brentwood home at a loss to help dig herself out of it.


Happy little bluebirds fly

Garland’s lifetime quest for approval, love and stability also led to five marriages and four divorces with musician David Rose (she was 19; he was 31), director Vincente Minnelli (with whom she had daughter Liza), tour manager and producer Sidney Luft (with whom she had daughter Lorna and son Joey), actor Mark Herron (they both accused each other of domestic abuse and the marriage ended within six months), and disco manager and opportunist Mickey Deans (whom she married a month after her Talk of the Town concerts).


When all the world is a hopeless jumble …

So Garland approached her five-week concert engagement at London’s Talk of the Town—which inspired the narrative of End of the Rainbow—as a triumphant return to the adoring audiences of her 1951 Palladium concerts, as a yet-again comeback that proved she still had it … and as a source of desperately needed income to finally extricate herself from her crippling debt and start a new life with her children.

The concerts were—as End of the Rainbow playwright Peter Quilter describes it—an “emotional car crash.” She staggered and slurred—often in the sequined orange brocade suit she kept from Valley of the Dolls—through her performances. The sold-out audiences often threw food at her to show their anger over her on-stage messiness and infuriating lateness.

And the reviewers did not hold back. The Guardian said the shows seemed “like her 93rd comeback” and stated that “she evokes pity and sorrow like no other superstar. … In her we see the broken remnant of a gaudy age of showbiz which believed that glamour was a good enough substitute for genius.” Time called the performances more “seance” than “concert” and wrote a year later in her obituary that they “turned out to be the biggest flop of her life” and that she looked like a “walking casualty.”


And the raindrops tumble all around …

End of the Rainbow—though now based on the Talk of the Town concerts—didn’t start out about Judy Garland at all. Playwright Peter Quilter had written a 2001 play called Last Song of the Nightingale about a past-her-prime diva inspired by an alcoholic cruise-ship performer he had known. It starred Tracie Bennett, who said her character felt like a roman à clef for Garland in her Talk of the Town performances. Quilter reworked the play, and End of the Rainbow premiered at the Sydney Opera House in 2005. It won Caroline O’Connor three Best Actress awards for her portrayal of Garland. Bennett took over the role in 2010 when it came home to London, where the show won four Olivier Awards, including Best Actress and Best New Play. Bennett also received a Tony nomination when she brought the show to Broadway in 2012.

End of the Rainbow also inspired the 2019 movie Judy, which won Renée Zellweger a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Garland. While End of the Rainbow underscores Garland’s emotional and professional claustrophobia at this point in her life by confining the off-stage narrative to her Ritz Hotel suite, Judy builds Garland’s journey to catastrophe in slow claps with flashbacks to cruel adults, exhausting schedules, and a calculated, inevitable addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates.


When all the clouds darken up the skyway …

Garland made her final concert appearance on March 25, 1969—ten days after marrying fifth husband Mickey Deans—in Copenhagen, and she performed there with the same display of disorientation, collapse and horror she’d exhibited in London.

Three months later, on June 22, 1969, Deans discovered Garland dead in the bathroom of their run-down London rental. The death was ruled an accidental overdose of barbiturates. She was just 12 days past her 47th birthday.


There's a rainbow highway to be found …

Garland’s funeral was on June 27 in New York City, and an estimated 20,000 people showed up to pay their respects. That night, New York’s Stonewall Inn—a gay bar run by the mafia—was raided by police. Raids of gay bars were commonplace, and patrons always meekly and with shame let themselves be arrested and humiliated in the next day’s papers.

But this time the patrons fought back, throwing bricks and bottles, trapping the police in the bar, and effectively starting the march toward equality for LGBTQ+ people across the country.

Garland—in her personal story arc from fabulous screen ingénue to fierce survivor—had been an icon to gay men, who often used “friend of Dorothy” in reference to her Wizard of Oz character as code to clandistinely identify themselves to each other in public. Whether her funeral was an impetus for the Stonewall rising or just coincidentally on the same day is still passionately debated among historians and devotees, but it is nevertheless tied to the uprising in the minds and hearts of gay people to this day.


There’s a place behind the sun …

Of Garland’s endurance and resilience in the public’s—and not just gay people’s—hearts and minds, Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann once declared “I think Judy will always come back. She kids about making a lot of comebacks, but I think Judy has a kind of a thing where she has to get to the bottom of the rope and things have to get very, very rough for her. Then with an amazing inner strength that only comes of a certain genius, she comes back bigger than ever.”


There’s a place beyond the rain …

Of the profound endurance of the song “Over the Rainbow,” Judy star Renée Zellweger told Vanity Fair that people “have nostalgic feelings from childhood attached to that song, but in Judy’s life, it’s something different. She weathered so many insurmountable challenges in her life, and it’s about her maintaining hope. In spite of all her difficulties, she still carried on.”


Jake Stigers regularly writes about the arts for theaters in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City and often makes his own triumphant comebacks on their stages.

Theater program notes: Oklahoma!

Published November 21, 2019, for Revival Theatre Company's production of Oklahoma!

Oklahoma! brings a genre—and a country—up to date
by Jake Stigers

When the curtain rose for the first performance of Oklahoma! on March 31, 1943, neither the creative team and actors nor the audience members knew they were literally at a new frontier—if I may grab an obvious metaphor from the source material—of American musical theater. Until then, musicals as the American public knew them were little more than collections of songs, skits, dances and Vaudeville acts assembled loosely around a generic theme—like love, patriotism or beautiful girls with their legs showing—or sometimes no theme at all.

Sixteen years earlier, Florenz Ziegfeld had launched Show Boat, a musical with a defined narrative and loosely contextualized songs by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern. It was a radical departure from the entertainment frippery that audiences were used to, and it was well-received enough that it ran for a year and a half. But the songs were written to be catchy and popular more than to drive the narrative, and some even got changed out for new songs that were better suited to new actors over time.

With Oklahoma!, Hammerstein—now working with composer Richard Rodgers—brought this concept to its full fruition; the show’s music and lyrics were fully integrated into the story, and instead of stopping the narrative for the sake of entertainment they advanced the plot, defined the characters and established context. And while some of the show’s musical elements seem quaint or ponderous to modern audiences, the concept at the time was nothing short of an artistic revelation.

Oklahoma! takes place in 1908, sixteen years after Oklahoma was declared a United States territory and one year before it was to become our 46th state. Inspired by Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1930 play that was in turn inspired by a folk song of the same name, Oklahoma! is at its core the story of farm girl Laurie Williams and the two suitors vying for her affections. And while through modern eyes the narrative is problematic in its attitudinal subtexts about women, race and the mentally ill, the story’s overall themes of community, potential and the excitement of destiny will seemingly always resonate with its audiences.

In addition to its blockbuster redefinition of an entire genre, Oklahoma! marked a number of other notable firsts:

It was the first collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein. Rodgers’ longtime collaborator Lorenz Hart had fallen into a state of alcoholism and unreliability, and Hammerstein was looking desperately to redeem himself after six consecutive Broadway flops. Theirs ended up being a particularly symbiotic collaboration as well—Hammerstein preferred to write lyrics before any music was composed so he could create the story he wanted, and Rodgers preferred to craft music to fit both the structure and sentiment of completed lyrics—and the two went on to create many iconic musicals together including South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music.

It was the first musical-by-any-definition choreographed by Agnes de Mille. Her ballet Rodeo, choreographed the previous year to music by Aaron Copland, had pulled her from relative obscurity and brought her to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s attention. She’d constructed Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, an international company that had moved to the United States to compete with the rival company Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), and the American-cowboy movement vocabulary she’d created for these classically trained international dancers became a useful foundation for her creation of Oklahoma! De Mille went on to choreograph decades of iconic Broadway musicals, most notably Brigadoon, for which she won the first-ever Tony Award for choreography when the awards premiered in 1947

The show had no stars. In keeping with their revolutionary idea to focus on telling a complete, holistic story through their fully integrated material, Rodgers and Hammersein took a bold step in hiring singers and actors who were dramatically appropriate for the roles instead of bringing in marquee names and bankable stars whose fame could be a distraction from the story’s rural, anonymous, hardscrabble setting.

Oklahoma!—originally titled Away We Go!—had done reasonably well with audiences in its New Haven and Boston tryouts, though producer Mike Todd famously walked out of a performance after the first act and predicted its failure with the words “No legs, no jokes, no chance.” But it was an immediate and overwhelming success on Broadway and ran for 2,212 performances and then toured the country for another ten years. Interestingly, Florence Henderson—the eventual ’70s TV mom Carol Brady—played the ingénue Laurie in the last company on the tour. When she was also cast to play Laurie opposite Gordon MacRae in a 1954 TV tribute to Rodgers and Hammerstein, she was considered a shoe-in to play Laurie opposite MacRae in the 1955 movie. But she lost out to Shirley Jones, the eventual ’70s TV mom Shirley Partridge.

Oklahoma! premiered fifteen months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged our country from a neutrality to an active participant in World War II. Nobody knew at the time that the war would be over in a year and a half, but the tide had turned for the Allies by the show’s 1943 premiere—and if the country wasn’t feeling completely optimistic, it enthusiastically embraced this musical that was bursting at the seams with the promise of new life and new opportunity and new hope told through the lens of a small town in a territory on the verge of becoming an American state.

Like the theatrical genre telling the story, our country was in the throes of mighty change. And Curly McLain, one of Laurie’s Oklahoma! suitors, sums up the shared Zeitgeist in a particularly joyous speech he makes to her in Act II as he contemplates all the exciting possibilities:

“Oh, things is changin’ right and left! Buy up mowin’ machines, cut down the prairies! Shoe yer horses, drag them plows under the sod! They’re gonna make a state out of this territory, they gonna put it in the Union! Country’s a-changin’, got to change with it!”