BWW Exclusive: Conversations and Music with Michael Feinstein- 42nd Street

Surely you know that theme or you're not from this planet

I'm Michael Feinstein and this is Songs and Conversations with me. This piece of music is probably the most iconic Broadway melody

but it was written for a motion picture called 42nd Street, which is the name of the Broadway musical

that happened many years after the film. The film was produced in 1932 by Warner Brothers

and the Broadway version of 42nd Street opened on the Great White Way in, I think, August of 1980

Do you know who composed that song? Do you know who composed the score of 42nd Street

Well, shortly after the show opened in 1980, I traveled to New York to see it, and I noticed that there was very little mention of the person who composed the music for the show, even in the souvenir program for the show

So I stood in the lobby as people were leaving, having seen one of the great entertainments of that time on Broadway

with all these iconic songs in it. And I asked people as they were exiting

do you know the name of the composer of the show? No

Excuse me, do you have any idea who wrote these songs? No, no idea. Not one person knew who wrote the songs for 42nd Street

And that was something that was a lifelong problem for its composer

Harry Warren. Harry Warren was my friend. He was born in Brooklyn, New York

Christmas Eve 1893 and he died in Los Angeles in 1981 and I got to know him in the last two years of his life when he was in his late 80s and I was in my early 20s

And there's a lot to be said about Harry Warren, but I'm going to pretty much confine this to 42nd Street in his early career because I want to do more about my friend

Harry eventually won three Academy Awards for writing Lollaby Broadway. You'll never know

and on the Ancheson Topeka and the Santa Fe. He almost always wrote the music until later in his life

and his lyric collaborators for the score of 42nd Street were Al Dubin

Later, he worked a lot with Johnny Mercer. He worked with Gus Kahn

He worked with Dorothy Fields, with Ira Gershwin, Leo Robin, and Mac Gordon, who was one of his longtime collaborators

And so, Harry was a true musical chameleon. The funny thing about Harry

is that he never wanted to go to Hollywood to write film scores

He was very content working in New York on Tin Pan Alley

in writing for Broadway reviews and was incredibly successful. And yet, the call of Hollywood was something

that he couldn't resist. And by the time that he was asked to write the score

for 42nd Street, this is the cover of the logo for the 1980 Broadway musical

But by the time he was asked to write the score for this film

Hollywood musicals were out of favor. They had tanked with the public because they were filmed in a static fashion

The producers and directors and choreographers in Hollywood hadn't figured out the creative ways to use the camera to make musical films interesting

So they would film a musical number static, usually in a wide shot maybe with a close up here and there, and nothing ever moved

So people became very bored with these films, with the simple, with the simple plots and also with songs that sometimes were not top drawer And so by the time Harry was asked to work on 42nd Street in Hollywood it was a big risk for a studio to even write a musical film Let me show you some of the sheet

music from that first iteration of 42nd Street. This pile of music is all songs with

music by Harry Warren. So here's the original cover of sheet music for

42nd Street. Very, very handsome, isn't it? The stars were Warner Baxter, B. B. Daniels, George Brent, Ruby Keeler

Ginger Rogers, Dick Powell, Una Merkel, Guy Kibby. So that goes in the next stack there

So, Harry Warren, here's a picture of him in 1930. This is a metronomy magazine

and this is right before he had his major Hollywood success. He had become so well known on Tin Pan Alley between 1920

when he wrote his first song and this issue in 1930 that they put him on the cover of Metronome

His early hits included Rose of the Rio Grande, I love my baby, my baby loves me home in Pasadena

I found a million-dollar baby in a five-and-tencent store that he wrote for a Broadway review called Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt

1930, then he wrote for a review called Sweet and Low. In 1931, he wrote the score for the Laugh

Parade, which included a big hit for him called Your My Everything. Let's see if we have it here, no

But these were all book songs that prepared Harry for writing the same kinds of book songs

for Hollywood musicals. While most songwriters were writing sort of generic songs

Harry had a dramatic sense, and with Al Dubin, who was the most incredible lyricist

and one of his favorite collaborators, were able to fashion songs that had

dramatic content. These are studio copies of some of the early Warner Brothers' songs

This is what the studio copies looked like before they were actually

published. They were on these sort of purple mimographed sheets. These are all things that he wrote in the 1930s for various movies. He wrote for dozens of

films at Warner Brothers between 1932 and 1939. Broadway Cinderella, I think this was cut

from a movie that starred Jane Froman. He was just so so prolific. Here are some song

folios of songs by Harry Warren. This is a picture of Harry in the 1940s when this book was printed. So many hits, so many big hits

You'll never know. You'll never know just how much I love you. I had the craziest dream

Serenade and Blue. No love, no nothing. I wish I knew. My heart tells me the more I see you

You wonderful. You serenade and blue, I got a gallon Kalamazoo. Chattanooga Choochoochoo. I mean, the list of

songs is incredible. Now, when Harry went to Hollywood in 1932, he was very homesick for Broadway

and he was writing the score of songs. But the first piece of music that he had to create

was for a dramatic scene. He wrote a piece of underscore, is what they call it, when you write

music that underscores dramatic action without singing. So he wrote this piece of music that

turned out to be the first piece of music that he heard played by a large Hollywood orchestra He had heard his songs played by many dance bands and heard his songs played by Broadway Pit bands but he had never heard any of his compositions

played by a 50-piece orchestra. So when they started to play this piece of music

he was so overwhelmed by it that he started to cry. And it went like this

So that piece of music was also in 42nd Street

I'm disappointed that they didn't use it in the Broadway musical because it could very easily have had a lyric fitted to it

Another piece of music that he wrote for 42nd Street was this rehearsed

piano thing that was used in the Broadway show as well. It was called Pretty Lady, which was the name of the fictitious show in the score of 42nd Street

So 42nd Street was such a big hit in 1932 that they extended Harry Warren's contract

and he ended up staying in Hollywood for the rest of his career

He wrote score after score after score, and he kept talking about going back to New York

but he never made it back there. And he always wanted to go back to New York because he wanted to write another Broadway musical

which he succeeded in doing in the 1950s when he wrote a thing called Shangri-La

which was a musical version of Lost Horizon, and unfortunately a colossal flop

not helped by the fact that there was a newspaper strike, and the air conditioning in the theater went out

It was just one problem after another. So Harry always felt disappointed that he didn't have another Broadway success

And then David Merrick comes along in the late 1970s and he calls Harry Warren and he says

I'd like to have lunch with you. I'd like to discuss turning 42nd Street into a Broadway musical

So he meets Harry Warren at the Polo Lounge and they sit down and David said, so what do

I have to do to get the rights to turn 42nd Street into a stage musical

Harry said, well, I don't own any of the rights because the songs were all written for Warner

Brothers for hire, and they own the copyright. They own the whole thing. So David Merrick said, thank you very much

He got up and he left without buying Harry Warren lunch. So that was the beginning and the end of Harry Warren's relationship with David Merrick

David Merrick then negotiated with Warner Brothers to obtain the right to take the songs from

42nd Street and other Harry Warren motion pictures and turn them into this Broadway

musical. He financed the thing entirely on his own, and he made a deal that gave him the rights

to the songs at a very, very low royalty, and Harry Warren got hardly any money, and he was so

hurt by the fact that he felt Merrick was purposefully pushing him out of the picture, so it would

be known as David Merrick's 42nd Street. And indeed, on the cover of the record album and on the

souvenir program, you don't see Harry Warren's name anywhere. Here on this fall

you do but everything else is David Merrick 42nd Street and Harry was quite hurt by that He did not attend the opening of the show in New York because he had no desire to see David Merrick

get all of the glory as well as the Gower Champion. Incidentally, Gower Champion, he said, was very nice to him

and would call him from the road and tell him what was going on, or Gower's assistant would

But as much as Harry wanted the musical to be a success

he was always disappointed that it was something for which he was not properly acknowledged

So I went to New York, and I saw the musical, and I called him and told him all about it

and he was thrilled that it was as good as everybody said that it was

But he died brokenhearted. He was a man who was very, very successful financially and had practically everything that anyone could want

but he was deeply disappointed that he died with very few people knowing who he was

The song that I'd like to sing for you is that melody I played for you before

that was that instrumental scoring for the movie of 42nd Street. About 10 years after Harry Warren's passing

a brilliant songwriter named Murray Grand got permission from Harry Warren's estate

to write a lyric for that tune. and he called it One Love in My Life

So in remembrance of my friend Harry Warren, here it is. There's one love in my life, and that love is you

You're my love, you're my love. else will do you. I can never forget. From the moment we

my most wonderful dream started coming from the heart of my life

When I'm waiting for you. You're my reason to live. I know you're all that I desire

My partner and my friend I want to love on my mind to be able to be able to

I can never forget. I can never forget from the moment from the moment

My partner and my friend No one love in my life

Till the end I'm going to be in