Bill Hunter. ”Sousa Sleuths.“ In American Way magazine (October 1984), pp. 143–147.
William Martin has moved from the theater wings to the archives to track down the missing dialogue from The Charlatan, an operetta written 86 years ago by John Philip Sousa. With a little more gumshoeing, he will have restored the majority of the show’s lost lines.
Normally Martin is a director, not a detective. Early in his show-biz career, he directed Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe and Princess Ida at the Village Light Opera Company in New York City, then Song of Norway and Student Prince on the summer-stock circuit. Moving to Broadway, he was assistant to the producers of Noel Coward in Two Keys, assistant to playwright Edward Albee in the direction of Seascape, and then director of a rock opera, The Lieutenant.
Off and on for the past two years, while he’s been directing college productions across the country, Martin has been reconstructing The Charlatan. He sees his work drawing to a finale sometime this summer and hopes his efforts not only will revive the public’s interest in Sousa but also prove the composer’s talents went beyond band music.
“The Charlatan doesn’t have much dialogue,” says Martin, noting that his chore isn’t like tracking down a 100-page script from scratch. “The format for Sousa operettas was like two pages of script, a song, two more pages of script, a song, et cetera, and then a finale — a march, of course.”
Some of the show’s missing lines are suggested in the existing lyrics, but Martin has devised some ingenious ways — through drama reviews in old newspapers, souvenir programs, and other sources — of tracking down the ones that aren’t so obvious.
When Martin has a draft of the comic opera’s three acts, a colleague, composer-conductor Jerrold Fisher, who actually got the gumshoeing going, will reenter the picture. Says Fisher:
“I’ll head for Washington, D.C., for about a week of copying and creating orchestrations from materials in a Sousa trunk stored in the Library of Congress. This is where the work really becomes fun.”
Together, Fisher, 45, and Martin, 46, will have re-created a “playable” version of Sousa’s second-most successful operetta (after El Capitan). It will be historically true to the original 1898 production and, they hope, entertaining to contemporary audiences. They hope that with a little bit of luck, a major opera company will stage it.
Why all this interest in re-creating a production from the late Nineteenth Century?
Martin and Fisher are musicologists, or folks who take a scholarly approach to the study of music. As such, they discovered a few years ago that the original script for The Charlatan and several other Sousa shows had been lost to history. Much of the grand band master’s works and memorabilia are stored in that trunk the Sousa heirs turned over to the Library of Congress after his death in 1932, but some important manuscripts aren’t there. Lots of musical scores and orchestrations are preserved and accessible, but the dialogue that ties one musical number to another in at least eight shows is nowhere to be found in full manuscript form.
That’s probably because historians cared more about preserving Sousa’s marches than his Broadway shows, say the two musicologists. The John Church Company, distributors of theater music, published only 7 Sousa operettas. He wrote at least 15.
“Most people don’t associate Sousa with operettas,” explains Martin, who combines his scholarly interest in “the March King” with teaching American musical-theater history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and guest directing at Auburn University in Alabama, Boston University in Massachusetts, Viterbo College in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and other university and college playhouses around the United States. Martin continues:
“Folks remember him as the composer of ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever,’ ‘Semper Fidelis,’ ‘El Capitan,’ and 137 other marches. They forget he also wrote El Capitan, a highly successful operetta, and 14 others, at least half of which Sousa decimated by shifting songs from one operetta to another over the years.”
(Sousa also wrote three novels, an autobiography called Marching Along, and treatises on trumpet and violin.)
Martin thinks it’s time for America to rediscover Sousa’s operetta expertise.
“Bill’s found pieces where you’d never expect to find them,” says Fisher, who wears many musical hats, among them composer, conductor, opera singer, and lecturer.
Martin acknowledges that he has found bits and pieces of dialogue from the original production in newspaper reviews and theater programs and in libraries at Lincoln Center and in theater departments of colleges and universities throughout the land. The show toured the United States and Europe for 16 months after its New York City run.) Says Martin:
“Our ultimate goal is to get a major, first-class production of The Charlatan at the New York City Opera or the equivalent and to make the script and score accessible to various opera companies which would include it in their repertory. Gilbert and Sullivan societies often perform Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg, or [Jacques] Offenbach operettas when they are looking for more variety in their seasons. Why not do Sousa? Summer theaters sometimes do one light opera each season. Instead of Student Prince, why not The Charlatan?” Explains Fisher:
“The project started out as a hobby. We thought maybe we’d go get some college to do a historical production of it. Now our plans are bigger.”
The impetus for the project was Bob Sherman’s “Listening Room,” a talk show that Fisher heard on WQXR, a New York City radio station, in the summer of 1978. He says: “I was driving down the highway listening to Sherman interview Keith Brion, then director of bands at Yale University. They were discussing Brion’s Sousa concert productions, where he had the Yale band all dressed up in uniforms of the times and he donned Sousa’s trademarks, white gloves and a pince-nez.
“Brion mentioned that Sousa wrote operettas, and the conversation went right on without any elaboration. I thought to myself, ‘I wonder what they were like?’ and started to do some detective work.”
Having once played Sousa’s marches in high school, Fisher recalls thinking how these other Sousa compositions “would be interesting as period pieces but might also have lasting musical worth.” He adds:
“I did a quick search, which opened my eyes to the possibilities. I was interested enough to call Bill, who was at the time directing Dark of the Moon at Boston University, to see if I could get the same kind of reaction from a fellow aficionado of musical theater. I got on the phone and said. ‘Hey, did you know that Sousa wrote operettas? Well, he did! He wrote a whole mess of them!’ ”
Further sleuthing led Fisher to John Philip Sousa III, grandson of the march master. Says Fisher: “He lives in New York and was very interested in my interest. He said he’d be happy to see his grandfather’s work revived, and he’s been cooperating with us in every way he can.”
Sousa had practically decimated seven of the eight unpublished operettas, Fisher recalls, referring to such obscure shows as Katherine (1879), Florine (1881), Desiree (1883), The Wolf (1888), The Devil’s Deputy (1893), The Irish Dragoon (1915), and The Victory (also 1915). Sousa had taken songs from each of these and moved them in and out of other shows.
Martin says that reconstruction of these operettas seemed unusually difficult. He notes that The Wolf originally contained “The Golden Cars,” a song that went into The Charlatan to replace “The Ammonia Song,” which was lifted from a one-act operetta called Queen of Hearts.
Even though Queen of Hearts was shorter and might have been easier to reconstruct than The Charlatan, says Martin, “we could never have convinced a contemporary producer to consider it; its cast of characters is a deck of cards, and calls for 52 actors and actresses — economically unsound in this day and age.”
The Sousa sleuths picked The Charlatan, originally done in 1898, “because we had nearly complete orchestrations,” says Fisher. “It also seemed the easiest to re-create because it came right after El Capitan, Sousa’s biggest hit, and drama critics compared the two and quoted the dialogue in their reviews with comments like, ‘A funny line was...,’ or ‘The actor missed the boat when he tried to get a laugh out of...,’ ” adds Martin.
Particularly helpful to Martin in restoring the original dialogue have been promotional handbills from the United States and European tours starring comedian De Wolf Hopper, the original lead, and souvenir programs from London, where it was retitled The Mystical Miss.
For example, the operetta has a scene where the charlatan’s male sidekick masquerades as a princess. A military officer falls in love with the “princess” but finds “her” manners to be crude and unladylike. “Excuse me, gentle stranger, but this is no lady!” says the soldier, referring to the demeanor of the phony princess — and drawing a laugh from the audience who knows the imposter is a man.
Martin knows this to be an exact line from the original because a program carries the line as a caption to a photo of that scene.
Martin also studied the works of playwright Charles Klein, who wrote Lion and the Mouse, The Auctioneer, The Music Master, and other shows before collaborating with Sousa on the libretto for The Charlatan. Explains Martin:
“I wanted to get a feel for Klein’s writing style. Like was it poetic, colloquial, or what?” In reading Klein’s other works, he concluded that the reconstructed dialogue would not have to develop much character. “Klein’s characters are usually thin. He’s more interested in situation comedy and intrigue. His characters are one-dimensional. He focuses more on plot complications.”
Thus Martin has been trying to maintain such character types as a handsome young Russian nobleman who, by imperial decree, must marry a princess; a scoundrel of an uncle who stands to inherit the nobleman’s fortune if the lad marries a peasant; a phony magician (charlatan) who borrows a royal name and palms off his beautiful peasant daughter as a princess; a magician’s sidekick who also is masquerading as a princess; the charlatan’s girlfriend who is masquerading as a young lad; and a grand duke who exposes everyone’s frauds by arriving with his aristocratic wife (the real princess whose name had been borrowed by the charlatan’s daughter).
Martin concedes his final script will not be word for word as Sousa and Klein created it, but it will be “true to Sousa’s style and the times.” He also plans to draft two versions — one that is as close as possible to the historical original and one that adapts it to contemporary styles so as to appeal to more than just hard-core musicologists. He explains:
”If we came up with a script that called for staging it exactly as Sousa did, a modern audience might not be entertained. But we need to draft such a script to give us the historical perspective that will help us in making a contemporary production work.”
Martin adds that he almost always takes a show’s history into consideration when he is adapting it for contemporary theatergoers. He says: “Take Shakespearean drama, for instance. The ghost scene from Richard II terrified Elizabethan audiences because they were superstitious and believed in such specters. If we staged it exactly like the bard, audiences would be bored. The special effects used in modern horror movies have jaded contemporary audiences. To compensate, we have to use different lighting and other modern stage effects to create a ghost scene that solicits fears and screams from the audience without playing on any ingrained superstition.
“The historical perspective also will help us to understand Sousa’s use of novel stage gimmickery — a baby crying from the orchestra, puppets, smoke machines, what he thought were Russian folk dances, mistaken identities and ... well, you name it. All of these stage effects can be used effectively in a contemporary production.”
Even if Martin and Fisher don’t find all the missing lines or end up changing a few to please modern audiences, the identity of The Charlatan’s composer won’t be mistaken. Like the scripts of probably every operetta he wrote, the one being reconstructed by these two sleuths will conclude with the inevitable, show-stopping Sousa trademark: a march.
Frequent-contributor Bill Hunter is a New York City free lance who covers entertainment, communication, travel, and business for American Way and many other major publications.