March 28, 2025: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler

You would think that the only musical ever conceived and written by Alan Jay Lerner (Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot) and composer Kurt Weill (Threepenny Opera, One Touch of Venus, Lady in the Dark), which ran seven months in its original 1948 production, would have had a revival by now. But think again. It's taken seventy-seven years for New York City to be treated to Love Life, currently running for one week only at City Center's Encores!—a dream come true for many theatre aficionados. After all, with Encores! original mission statement all about bringing neglected musicals back to life, few have been as neglected or forgotten as Love Life. As to why it's taken so long, there are several reasons. So, let's get into it.

First off, unlike most musicals written by major figures like Lerner and Weill, there was never an original cast recording of Love Life. That's because it opened during the embattled musician's strike of 1948 over the issue of royalties for musicians on recorded performances. The fight between the American Federation of Musicians and the recording industry lasted nearly a year, meaning there were no original cast recordings of not only Love Life, but such shows as Frank Loesser's first stage musical, Where's Charley? and the successful revues of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz's Inside U.S.A. and Charles Gaynor's Lend an Ear, which featured a breakout performance by a young Carol Channing. If you're wondering how Kiss Me, Kate—the season's biggest hit—managed to get recorded, the nearly year-long strike ended just two weeks before its December 30th opening.

Further complicating potential for revivals is that Love Life is a very strange show. In addition to its plot about the history of a marriage (a long history—more on that later), it's written as "a vaudeville," using elements of that once tried-and-true tradition with the use of interstitial numbers that serve as commentary on the action (mostly performed in front of the curtain, the reason being that it often covers the sets that are being changed behind it). The week it opened in October of 1948, Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner wrote a humor column that appeared in the Sunday New York Times titled "Two on the Street." In it, a stranger called "Man" falls into a conversation with the two creators of their new musical in front of the 46th Street Theatre (now the Richard Rodgers) where it was playing. Here's just a hint of the tongue-in-cheek dialogue that Lerner and Weill thought a) would be funny and b) might help explain and sell their unorthodox new musical:

Man: Is it like a lot of little plays strung together?

Weill: Not exactly. One sketch is a musical play, one is an American ballad, one is a straight comedy, one is satire, one is danced, one is musical comedy, one is dramatic. All different styles.

Man: How do they all fit together?

Lerner: With vaudeville.

Weill: Isn’t that simple?

Man: No. You mean it all has a form?

Weill: Yes, in a formless way.

Lerner: That gives it a very real form.

Now it's all well and good to be flippant like this if you've got something really smart, efficient, and extremely well written to back it up. Only Lerner and Weill didn't. Critics weren’t too kind; it lost the all-important New York Times ("cute, complex, and joyless"), although a few raved ("the most intelligent and adult musical yet offered on the American stage," wrote George Freedley in New York Morning Telegraph). Perhaps its major drawback had to do with its the two main characters, husband and wife Samuel and Susan Cooper, not aging one iota during the evening's 150 year-span. Yes, it starts in 1791 and ends in what was then the present day, 1948. And not only do Sam and Susan stay the same age, but so do their two small children as well.

There's little question that Lerner was influenced by Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, which won the Pulitzer Prize six years earlier, and shared a similar ageless and non-linear trajectory. It's no accident that Love Life wound up being directed by Elia Kazan, who was also responsible for staging Wilder's play. Master director that he was, Kazan was not known for musicals. He had helmed Weill's One Touch of Venus in 1943, but Love Life marked the end of Kazan's flirtation with the form. It came as a total shock to me while doing research for this column that in his 846-page autobiography, A Life, Kazan doesn't mention Love Life at all. Side note: I sent this factoid to my son who wrote back: "“Well, Kazan directed it in between Streetcar and Salesman, so it makes sense he mentions the two pillars of American drama and not the musical in between, even if that one had a huge influence in its own way."

And that influence is most notable in the work of Harold Prince, who changed the way musicals would be conceived in so many ways after his groundbreaking Cabaret in 1967, nearly twenty years after his having seen Love Life. Bumping into director Lonny Price the night I attended Encores!, he told me that over the many years he shared a friendship and working relationship with Prince that "Hal never stopped talking about his experience seeing Love Life." And certainly, with Cabaret's use of its songs to highlight and comment on the action, Prince struck gold. He also went back to the mine at least twice soon thereafter with the fragmented musicals Company and, of course, Follies. Also, and not for nothing, 1948's Love Life was designed by Boris Aronson, who Prince purposefully sought out for Cabaret, his first success as a director, and the first of six ingenious collaborations Prince staged with the visionary Aronson, five of which won him Scenic Design Tony Awards.

Commenting on its form and structure, theatre historian Ethan Mordden brilliantly described Love Life, "as if the rise and fall of a typical American marriage were to occur while the radio was on." Depressingly, one of its main problems is the same as Follies, in that that it deeply criticizes marriage as an ideal; something most theatergoers are not interested in, especially on a Friday night seated next to their spouse after a long work week. Any show that features a "Divorce Ballet" is playing with fire.

By now you must be wondering what I thought of this Love Life, directed by the two-time Tony-winning actress Victoria Clark, who co-adapted Lerner's book with Emmy-winning television writer (and novelist), Joe Keenan. To be honest, I was both thrilled to be there and a trifle bored. It's simply not a good show and some of the choices in changes made to the flow of the show in its staging and choreography, are questionable ones. It does have, as always, a wonderful full-size orchestra, this time under the baton of Rob Berman, conductor of more than 30 Encores! productions. It sounded like heaven. And there's nothing not to love about its Sam and Susan Cooper, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Kate Baldwin, two of the best leading men and women in the theatre. So, there's that.

Essentially a two-person show, they made the evening not only bearable, but at times, memorable. Short-changed by the characters not being written with enough to sustain a 2 hour, 45-minute running time, both Baldwin and Mitchell were still able to distinguish themselves as singers and actors as they reliably do. As for the score, the main reason to bring the musical back after nearly eight decades, I was disappointed in the quality of Weill's music and Lerner's lyrics. Perhaps they simply didn't make that great a match (Frederick Loewe, Lerner's then-partner in 1948, turned down Lerner's pitch for Love Life). Nothing really stood out for me, save one number sung by a character called "Hobo," who comes out for one song and then leaves the stage for practically the rest of the show, until returning at the end to preside as a sort of Master of Ceremonies over a confusing and over-thought finale. The Hobo's "Love Song," beautifully sung by John Edwards, strangely enough has a voice nearly identical to that of Brian Stokes Mitchell. Go figure.

To close, I will never say never to anyone with the goal of attempting another of these vaudeville-style shows because they can still work. I consider The Scottsboro Boys (2010) one of the best musicals this century (so far). So, I applaud Encores! for bringing this one back. And even if Love Life didn't have me exiting City Center with memorable songs swirling inside my head, I won't ever forget being granted the opportunity to see this truly forgotten musical.

Oh, and one last thing my research uncovered. What are the odds that this Victoria Clark-led revival should have had an actor in the ensemble of its 1948 production whose name was . . . Victor Clarke?

Ron Fassler is the author of the recently published The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings and Replacements. For news and "Theatre Yesterday and Today" columns when they break, please hit the FOLLOW button.