|
Ethel
Merman made her Broadway debut in George Gershwin's Girl
Crazy (1930), causing a sensation with her performance of "I Got
Rhythm!" She went from there to appear in George White's
Scandals of 1931 (opposite Ray Bolger, Ethel Barrymore Colt, and Rudy
Vallee), in which she introduced DeSylva, Brown, & Henderson's
"Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries" to the world. Her next
big score was as Reno Sweeney in Cole Porter's Anything Goes
(1936), where she belted out such hits as "I Get a Kick Out of
You" and "You're the Top!," thus beginning the long
Porter-Merman string of hits (Porter lovingly referred to her as "The
Golden Fog Horn"). The Porter-Merman list was as follows: Red,
Hot, & Blue (with Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, and Vivian Vance), DuBarry
Was a Lady (singing "Friendship" with Bert Lahr and Betty
Grable), Panama Hattie (with Betty Hutton), and Something For
the Boys. In between, we got Joshua Logan's Stars in Your
Eyes with Jimmy Durante and songs by Arthur Schwartz and Dorothy
Fields. Rodgers & Hammerstein presented Ethel as historical
sharpshooter Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun
(1946), which led to a second Irving Berlin gem, Call Me Madam
(1953), in which she played Mrs. Sally Adams, a Washington, D.C. socialite
not-too-loosely based on Perle Mesta. The one flop of her career
came in the form of Happy Hunting (1956), but La Merm bounced
right back to give the greatest performance of her career: as Rose in Gypsy (1959).
Under the direction of Jerome Robbins, singing Jule Styne and
Stephen Sondheim's score, and acting in a script that Arthur Laurents had
based on the memoirs of stripper Gypsy
Rose Lee, it was with this role that (in the words of John M. Clum)
"a one-trick pony became a real artist." This was the last
role that Ethel created on the stage, but in the late 1960s, she stepped
into the role of Dolly Levi (a role originally written for her that she
had initially turned down) in Jerry Herman's Hello, Dolly! At
this point the microphone had invaded the Broadway stage, but La Merm
refused to wear one-- and, indeed, she didn’t need one. She never had. |
