The Party’s Over, by Judy Holliday
Composed by Jule Styne, Adolph Green, Betty Comden.
Jule Styne has never enjoyed the acclaim bestowed upon Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter. Yet, as sportsmen say, look in the book. He composed the music for Gypsy, which is worth 100 runs on any scorecard. Funny Girl was his, too, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Time After Time, Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry, Three Coins in the Fountain, Just in Time, It’s Magic (Doris Day – oh yes!), I Fall in Love Too Easily. All classics, from the same stable. Styne, born in London, yet an American songwriter from his napper to his feet, gets a place in the First XI any day.
Gypsy is his masterpiece, and many would argue it is the supreme masterpiece of American musical theatre. You can make a strong case for Guys and Dolls and West Side Story, and for sheer delight nothing tops Anything Goes, but Gypsy is Broadway’s tribute to itself, made all the greater for its lack of sentimentality.
In fact it ends on a melancholic note as Rose, Gypsy’s mother, performs her celebrated ‘turn’. Why not me? Because, as Stephen Sondheim’s lyric for Gotta Get A Gimmick makes clear, ‘you either have it – or you’ve had it’.
Sondheim, buoyed by his success with West Side Story, wanted to write the music for Gypsy, as well as the words, but Ethel Merman, lined up to play Rose, withheld her vote. She was the best-paid star on Broadway, and wanted Styne, a fully-fledged composer, to write another hit show.
Why was Merman the best-paid star? She had a good answer: ‘I always go on’. Six decades later, Imelda Staunton made the role her own in a London revival, which knocked Sondheim for six. Privately he said it was the finest performance he had seen. But then Staunton is a superb actress, and Rose is a meaty part for a mummer.
Gypsy is Janus-faced, paying tribute to a Broadway tradition, while giving Sondheim the clout, as the co-maker of two triumphant hits, to spread his feathers in the decade which followed. He changed musical theatre as profoundly as his sponsor (and surrogate father) Oscar Hammerstein, and it was Hammerstein who persuaded him to work with Styne on Gypsy when Sondheim’s impulse was to withdraw.
What a score it is! The overture is unique because it sounds fresh while in every breath it seems to borrow from the old vaudeville tradition. That song sounds familiar, you think, as the tunes come and go (Small World, You’ll Never Get Away From Me), yet it is all Styne’s work. It is a masterly achievement, creating something new even as he was recreating a world that was vanishing. After rock’n’roll the musical theatre could never sound quite the same again.
Jerome Robbins, who directed West Side Story and Gypsy, was also at the helm for Bells Are Ringing, the show that hit Broadway in November 1956, 10 months before he, Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents mounted West Side Story. The wordsmiths on Bells Are Ringing were Adolph Green and Betty Comden, who had collaborated with Bernstein on Wonderful Town and On The Town, and written the book for Singin’ in the Rain. Talk about a small world.
The Party’s Over was sung on stage and in the film which followed four years later, by Judy Holliday. It’s a touching song, just right for her light voice, coloured by hope (‘it seemed to be right just being with him’) and sadness (‘they’ve burst your pretty balloon, and taken the moon away’). Sadness wins, but such sweet sadness:
‘It’s time to wind up
The masquerade,
Just make your mind up,
The piper must be paid’.
Then, to remove all doubts:
‘Now you must wake up,
All dreams must end,
Take off your make-up,
The party’s over,
It’s all over,
My friend’.
A clever final verse, that. Green and Comden could have closed the song after ‘make-up’ with a rhyme for ‘end’. By bringing back the title, which is the first line of the song, and adding a repetition for emphasis, the concluding line gains from the suspension, while we dab our eyes. Holliday, a critic once wrote, was ‘doll-like’, and nobody wants to see a broken doll.
Styne went on to compose Funny Girl, which made a star of Barbra Streisand. So every time you hear her sing People, you hear him.
Sondheim eventually got to write a show of his own in 1962, with A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. He truly became ‘Stephen Sondheim’ in 1970 with Company, which transformed musical theatre as much as Showboat and Oklahoma! Steve was an Anglophile, and his best show may well be Sweeney Todd (1979), about the demon barber of Fleet Street. Performed in parish halls and opera houses, it has become a much-loved part of the repertory on both sides of the Atlantic.
Bob Fosse, the choreographer on Bells Are Ringing, became a hot-shot director on stage and screen, with Sweet Charity, Chicago, and Cabaret, which brought him an Oscar in 1972.
Judy Holliday died from breast cancer in 1965, at the age of 43. She won an Oscar, too, as best leading actress in Born Yesterday (1950). But she will be remembered mainly for the lovely song she lit up in Bells Are Ringing.
Hendo’s Dozen So Far:
Chet Baker, I Get Along Without You Very Well by Hoagy Carmichael
Ella Fitzgerald: It Never Entered My Mind, by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart
Frank Sinatra, Ill Wind by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler
Judy Garland, Do It Again by George Gershwin and Buddy Da Sylva
Bobby Darin: Once Upon A Time, by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams.
Fred Astaire: I’m Old Fashioned; Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer.
Lena Horne: It Could Happen to You; Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke.
Tony Bennett: I Walk A Little Faster; Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh.
Peggy Lee: Then I’ll Be Tired of You; Arthur Schwartz and Yip Harburg.