Sonneck Society for American Music

Bulletin, Volume XXIII, no. 3 (Fall 1997)

Images of Arthurian Britain in the American Musical Theater: A Connecticut Yankee and Camelot

William A. Everett, Washburn University

Since Nennius first mentioned King Arthur in his nineth century Historia Brittonum to 1469, when Sir Thomas Malory collected six centuries of stories into Morte d'Arthur, and even to today, the mythological king has been a favored subject for writers, visual artists, composers, and, in the twentieth century, film directors. Each creator in turn reinterpreted the Arthurian legend, transforming it to fit his or her contemporaneious situation.

Broadway composers are not exempt from this practice. Although several works based on the legend appeared on Broadway during the twentieth century, only two achieved success with audiences and critics and entered the standard repertoire of the American musical theater: Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's A Connecticut Yankee (1927; revived with additional material, 1943) and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's Camelot (1960). Each of these stage works was an adaptation of a literary work; Rodgers and Hart based their collaborative effort on Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, while Lerner and Loewe looked to T.H. White's The Once and Future King for inspiration. In each show, the creators sought to contemporize Arthurian Britain and the time of chivalry for the musical-theater audiences of their eras. Rather than attempt to creat an imaginary sixth-century British musical style, Rogers and Hart and, later, Lerner and Loewe created musical numbers in the current Broadway idioms of their eras. Rodgers and Hart made the time of Arthur relevant to their audicnes through the inclusion of contemporary linguistic and social references. Thus, the legendary time of King Arthur became decidedly modern. As we shall see, the relationship of Lerner and Loewe's creation to its era was perhaps more complex; the show may have had a shaping effect on the language and, therefor, political policies espoused by John F. Kennedy.

Mark Twain, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), used the time of arthur as a backdrop for strong social commentary on the nineteenth century. The prevailing comic tone, but with a serious underpinning, make Twain's novel a solid choice for a musical comedy during the 1920s. It was not the novel directly, but rather a film version from 1921, which served as the inspiration for the musical. According to Richard Rodgers:

Musical comedies were meant to be upbeat and fast-paced, with distinctive musical numbers in a popular style, and Rodgers and Hart provided some of the best examples of the genre. As creators of eleven shows before A Connecticut Yankee, including Poor LIttle Ritz Girl and two versions of The Garrick Gaieties (1925, 1926), they had already proven themselves to be a successful Broadway team. In the version of Twain's book which opened at New York's Vanderbilt Theater on 3 November 1927, William Gaxton starred as Hank Martin, sharing the spotlight with Nina Bryant as Morgan le Fay, Constance Carpenter as Alice/Sandy, and Paul Everton as King Arthur. The production ran for 418 performances.

Librettist Herbert Fields transformed several aspects of the novel for the musical stage. He maintained the overall premise of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a person misplaced in time, but created a new story incorporating some of Twain's characters. Hank Martin (not Hank Morgan, as in the novel) is about to marry Fay, when his ex-fiancee Alice arrives on the scene. When Fay discovers Hank and Alice, she hits Hank over the head with a champagne bottle, and he awakens during the time of King Arthur. Alice becomes Alisande (Sandy), his love interest, while Fay is none other than the enchantress Morgan le Fay. Because of his "modern" clothing, Hank is accused of being an enchanter and threatened with execution by burning. Hank escapes this fate by recalling his knowledge of astronomy and, as in the novel, correctly predicting an eclipse. Also, following the general premise of the novel, Hank than proceeds to modernize King Arthur's court. When Morgan le Fay causes more trouble, the only escape for Hank is to awaken from his dream.

Hart and Rodgers made the time of Arthur attractive to theater-goers of the 1920s by creating songs which had both brilliant lyrics and a captivating popular musical style. Additionally, Hart's penchant for creative and witty language is evident in the several of his lyrics. In "Thou Swell," for example, he effectively combined antiquated English expressions (Elizabethan, as in the novel, rather than the language which would have been spoken in the sixth century) with contemporary slang.

Thou sell! Thou witty!
Thou sweet! Thou grand!
Wouldst kiss me pretty?
Wouldst hold my hand?
Both thine eyes are cute too;
What they do to me.
Hear me holler I choose
a Sweet lollapaloosa in thee

Lyrics such as these made the time of King Arthur accessible to audiences of the 1920s, but the lyrics were not the only bridge between the two centuries; "Thou Swell" is a typical 1920s Tin Pan Alley verse-refrain ballad in moderate tempo. The sustained melodic line over a more active, though gently moving, accompaniment when combined with Hart's lyrics emphasizes Hank Martin's modernizing influence on Arthur's court. Rodgers and Hart, therefore, were 1920s equivalents of Twain's character Hank Morgan -- they introduced up-to-date slang and musical language into their depiction of the sixth century, jsut as Morgan had introduced nineteenth-century inventions.

A Connecticut Yankee was a popular show during the late 1920s, largely because of its musical style and its libretto. It examplified the best that musical comedy had to offer -- a popular score with a libretto which on one hand offered escapism (the time of King Arthur) and on the other hand included ordinary people (Hank Martin) as characters. For Rodgers and Hart, the contemporary setting of the "modern" scenes, namely the opening and closing before and after Hank's time travels, demonstrated the "everyday" character of the show, an important part of 1920s musical comedy. This was not the "nevermore" world of operetta, but rather the upbeat and brash world of musical comedy; Rodgers and Hart knoew their market and wrote accordingly.

For the 1943 revision of A Connecticut Yankee Rodgers and Hart added two new numbers: "Can't You Do a Friend a Favor?" and the enduring "To Keep My Love Alive."² The show reopened on 17 November 1943 at the Martin Beck Theater and played for 135 performances. In additon to new musical numbers, the libretto was updated so that all three of the principals were in the armed forces, thus paying homage to the then-current war effort. No substantial changes occured in th dramatic plot.³ While both versions of A Connecticut Yankee reflected aspects of the time in which they were created, the idealistic images in next Arthurian creation wuold capture the imagination of a large part of America.

After the successes of the state musical My Fair Lady and the film Gigi, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe embarked upon a new project in the late 1950s: the transformation of T>H. White's epic retelling of the Arthurian legend, The Once and Future King (1958) into the musical Camelot. White's novel actually consisted of four separate books: The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind. IN securing rights for the show, Irving Cohen, on behalf of Lerner and Loewe, ran into a bit of difficulty: Walt Disney had already purchased the rights to make an animated film of The Sword in the Stone, which had already been published as a separate volume.⁴ Cohen succeeded in gaining permission to adapt the remaining three books for the new show. Hence, Arthur's boyhood, the subject of The Sword in the Stone, is told only in the form of memories in Camelot.

Lerner and Loewe did not use Camelot as a foil for contemporary issues, but rather created a utopian land of chivalry and honor that was destroyed by acts of selfishness. Unlike A Connecticut Yankee, Camelot follows its literary model. The show opened, after a treacherous tryout period, at the Majestic Theater in New York on 3 December 1960 and ran for 874 performances before closing on 5 January 1963. Richard Burton made his musical debut as King Arthur, and Julie Andrews, a personal friend of White's whom Lerner and Loewe had brought form England to star in My Fair Lady, played Guenevere. Robert Goulet made his New York debut in the role of Lancelot, and veteran actor Roddy McDowell played Arthur's bastard son Mordred.

The overall design of the show was a long first act culminating in a dramatic climax in the finale followed by a relatively short second act in which the conflict presented in the first act is resolved.⁵ Loewe's lush, flowing and romantic musical score possesses a number of distictive features, including a style of speech-singing use for dramatic effect and use of Leitmotif. Lancelot's love song, "If Ever I Would Leave You," became one of most popular songs of the era, at least in part because of its sentimental lyrics, but also because of its soaring legato melody. Features such as these made the show an instant success, transporting Arthur's reign to the 1960s. Lerner and Loewe thus accomplished what Rodgers and Hart had done nearly four decades earlier; they created a musically contemporary version of Arthurian times.

Perhaps more importantly, Camelot came to represent much more than a popular entertainment based on the chivalrous era of King Athur. In the eyes of the public, its timely ascendancy corresponded to the election and inauguration of John F. Kennedy. To many Americans, among them the new president, both Arthur's Camelot and the new administration represented an ideal world -- one filled with hope and dreams.

The similarity between the language of the musical and that of Kennedy's inaugural address is at times uncanny. The hypothesis that Kennedy consciously or unconsciously appropriated Arthurian ideals is reinforced by Jacqueline Kenney's remembrances. In an interview for Life magazine, Jacqueline stated that Camelot was among her husband's favorite shows and that he would play this record before going to bed in the evening: "The lines he loved to hear were: 'Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.'"⁶

Arthur's speech at the end of Act I contains the powerful lyrics, "This is the time of King Arthur, and we reach for the stars! This is the time of King Arthur, and violence is not strength and compassion is ;not weakness."⁷ In his inaugural address, Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon was worded, "Together let us explore the stars,"⁸ a reference to the competition between the USSR and the US in space exploration. While this reference is similar in content but not in words, the second sentect of Arthur's speech is more directly reflected in Kennedy's statements concerning the Peace Corps. Again, from his inaugural address,

To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves . . . So let us begin anew -- remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness.⁹

Thus, several Arthurian ideals, as represented in Lerner and Loewe's Camelot, found expression in the inaugural address of J.F.K. This correspondence and Kennedy's known love of the Broadway play were not lost on many Americans at the time. Unfortunately, there would be a third correspondence between Arthur and Kennedy -- the brevity of their rule.

In 1967, Warner Brothers released a film version of Camelot, which starred Richard Harris as Arthur, Vanessa Redgrave as Buenevere, and Franco Nero as Lancelot. The screenplay, written by Alan Jay Lerner, closely followed the original stage libretto. Several changes occurred in the music, however, including the deletion of Mordred's wonderfully ingenious song "The Seven Deadly Virtues." More substantial were the enhanced orchestrations and smoother singing techniques, both the result of the film medium. The popularity of the film version shows the public's increasing interest in the art of film, a medium that could enhance the presentation of Broadway entertainment through sophisticated production techniques.

Camelot, in both its stage and film manifestations, therefor, became like A Connecticut Yankee, a demonstration of the taste of the times in which it was written. The musical comedy style of A Conecticut Yankee provided its audience with the type of entertainment it desired while the romantic vein of Camelot di the same for its audience. The legacy of Camelot, however, grew through its association with the Kennedy presidency. In both shows, however, not just the dramatic content accounted for their popularity, but also their musical style. The composer and librettist bridged fourteen centuries in order to allwo characters from Arthurian Britain and audiences from twentieth-century America to come together on mutually intelligible ground. Whether it be the upbeat 1920s musical comedy style of A Connecticut Yankee or the utopian 1960s romanticism of Camelot, audiences of both eras and beyond carried with them images of Arthurian Britain through their own eyes and ears.

NOTES
1. "Mr. Rodgers' Yankee," New York Times, 21 November 1943.

2. This lyric was to be Hart's last, as he died just days after the revival opened.

3. A musical film version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (with full title) appeared in 1949. A Paramount release, the film had a screenplay by Edmund Beloin and music and lyrics by James Van Heusen and Johnny Burke. It was not, therefore, a film adaptation of the Broadway show, but rather a film based directly upon Mark Twain's novel. Likewise, its plot is substantially different from that of the Broadway show. The film is not specifically related to the stage show, except that its release date was only six years after the revival of A Connecticut Yankee mentioned above.

4. The film was released in 1963.

5. This format was the one preferred by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the most popular Broadway team of the time.

6. Quoted in Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live (New York: Norton, 1980), 221.

7. Alan Jay Lerner, Camelot (New York: Random House, 1961), 70.

8. John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961, in Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, Bicentennial Edition (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1989), 307.

9. Ibid, 307.

William A. Everett is an associate professor of music at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, where he teaches music history, music theory, film music, world music, and viola. He is treasurer of the Sonneck Society for American Music.

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Updated 1/07/98