The Power Broker - The Musical, Part Three: “Robert Moses, Guy Lombardo, and the Teenie Weenie Genie”
Or “In the words of Abe Lincoln, 'you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!'”
Above: the cover for the 45 RPM EP boxed set edition of the Arabian Nights cast album; and here is a link to a YouTube playlist containing the whole schmeer.
Okay - not exactly a Broadway musical adaptation of The Power Broker - although that’s not a bad idea! (Marc Shaiman, Maury Yeston, Jason Robert Brown - are you reading? This would be a great production for Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom.) Rather, I’ve been reading Robert Caro’s masterful biography - in fact, I just wrote a story for The New York Sun about my experiences both with the book itself and a wonderful new podcast series from 99 Percent Invisible that does a wonderfully deep dive into Caro’s masterpiece. This short substack series is about musical references to and from The Power Broker and Robert Moses of the kind which I am proud to say are much too miniscule and trivial for even the Mighty Bob Caro himself to have paid any attention to. (Special thanks to the late and much-missed Roger Sturtevant for calling my attention to both The Decca All Star Revue 78s and the original cast album to Arabian Nights.)
Check out The 99% Invisible Power Broker Book Club here.
Check out my New York Sun essay on The Power Broker and 99 Percent Invisible here!
The most horrifyingly sad portion of The Power Broker may be Robert Caro’s very vivid description of how Robert Moses brutally decimated one of the most vibrant neighborhoods in New York, the East Tremont section of the Bronx - in fact, Moses may be one of the reasons that essentially there are no more ethnic neighborhoods in New York - even Chinatown and Little Italy now exist primarily as dining destinations, mostly for tourists. Yet in the middle of that chapter (#37, if you’re reading along) he finds time to quote from Fiddler On the Roof - a little bit of levity in what must be the most harrowingly bleak episode in the Moses saga. (Next time I speak to Bob, I shall ask him if that quote was the idea of the “other” Bob - somehow it seems more Gottlieb than Caro to me.)
Conversely, the lightest and breeziest part of the book is Caro’s description of the elaborate ways and means by which Moses would entertain at Jones Beach. He also makes the point that, to continue the musical theater analogy, although Moses himself was a trickster, a shaman, and a huckster - like Billy Flynn, he knew how to give ‘em the old razzle dazzle - his ideas about music and show biz were even more outdated than his notions about cars and highways. Caro shows decisively how Moses was stuck in an early 20th-century mindset, he kept bulldozing communities to build expressways and shortchanging rapid transit when he should have been preserving neighborhoods and constructing rail lines.
Likewise, his idea of great music and theater was rooted in the mid-1920s, although Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians were fairly behind the times even in the Jazz Age. To be fair, despite the group’s name and the birth of the Lombardo brothers in Ontario, for most of their conjoined career, the family and the band were closely connected to Long Island, where the Lombardos lived and where the eldest, Gaetano, patriarch of the Lombardos, famously raced his speedboat.
Caro shows that Moses could ably build stadiums, but he had no idea how to fill them - none of his sports events and public-facing entertainments were remotely successful. Visiting dignitaries enjoyed the experience, but the public wasn’t willing to pay for very old-fashioned productions of old-fashioned shows - especially in that this was the height of Broadway at its most innovative - even in what seems to have been an extremely beautiful open-air theater.
In 1952, Moses and his team opened the new Marine Theater at Jones Beach, all 8,200 seats of it - a venue of considerably more capacity than any other in the city, even Radio City Music Hall. For the first two seasons, Michael Todd, a producer increasingly noted for his gift for spectacle, presented A Night in Venice, an 1883 operetta by Johann Strauss more recently revised by future film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and a work which enjoyed a long history of open air performances.
Then, in 1954, the Lombardo Brothers wrote and produced an original musical comedy, titled Arabian Nights: A New Musical Extravaganza. As operetta historian Richard Traubner (in his definitive notes for the 2008 British CD edition of the Arabian Nights original cast album) tells the tale, Arabian Nights was conceived as a sort-of substitute for Kismet. Kismet, then playing at the Ziegfeld Theater, was a major hit of the 1953-54 season and won the Tony Award for Best Musical that year. The Lombardos’ first idea was to present a kind of summer stock production of Kismet - even while the original Broadway production was still running 35 miles away in Times Square - but when the rights weren’t available, the brothers decided to present their own take on similar material.
Kismet utilized 19th century music - songwriters Robert Wright and George Forrest adopted the melodies of Czarist composer Alexander Borodin - but was not in the least old-fashioned: it was a highly modern book musical in which song, story, music, comedy, drama, and dance were seamlessly integrated in the best post-Rodgers & Hammerstein tradition.
Somehow the Lombardos missed that part; when they attempted their own version, crammed in was a lot of old-school vaudeville-style shtick set in old Bagdad. Arabian Nights was largely an excuse for chorus girls to parade around in harem drag and, at the climax of the tale of “Sinbad the Sailor,” to bring in a 70-foot floating whale puppet-prop. The most memorable number was titled “Teenie Weenie Genie”; not exactly Lerner & Loewe or Leonard Bernstein.
Arabian Nights was a family production. Carmen Lombardo was long a successful pop songwriter (“Coquette,” “Sweethearts on Parade,” "Boo Hoo (You've Got Me Crying For You),” "Seems Like Old Times,” "Get Out Those Old Records," among others) and he re-teamed with brother-in-law John Jacob Loeb, his collaborator on the highly aquatic hit, “"A Sailboat in the Moonlight," to do words and music for Arabian Nights. The book was by George Marion Jr., best known to jazz fans as Fats Waller’s collaborator on his one book show, Early To Bed (1943) but also the author of the book to the Rodgers & Hart classic Too Many Girls (1939).
In South Pacific, Rodgers & Hammerstein had set a precedent by casting the great opera baritone Ezio Pinza as the central leading man, and they would try that trick less successfully in 1955 by hiring soprano Helen Traubel as one of the leads in Pipe Dream. The Lombardos gave it a shot by bringing in one of the biggest singers of the mid-century - in more than one sense of the term - the highly popular Danish heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. As the two romantic leads, they cast Helena Scott, who had been a regular member of the R&H stock company, and who, in the Arabian Nights album, could easily be mistaken for Doretta Morrow or Ann Blythe in Kismet or Jane Powell in anything, opposite tenor William Chapman, later with New York City Opera.
Because of the size of the production, as well as the oversized salary of the oversized name-about-the-headline star, and and the enormous capacity of the venue, it was literally impossible for Arabian Nights, or virtually any other presentation in the Marine Theater, to turn a profit. That they could only run the show from June to September certainly didn’t help, even when they brought it back it the following summer.
In short, Arabian Nights wasn’t a success commercially and hardly a landmark work in the annals of musical theater; I can’t imagine City Center Encores! restaging it anytime soon. Still, thanks to the brothers’ longtime relationship with Decca Records, this non-Broadway show was actually recorded - twice, even, by the actual original cast and again in a dance band “cover” album by The Royal Canadians. It might be a stretch to call Arabian Nights a cult show, but I have met many musical theater buffs who love it - much the same way there’s a subset of musical theater buffs who love industrial shows - and I have to admit to loving it myself.
I was first turned on to Arabian Nights by the late Roger Sturtevant - and my enjoyment of the show album(s) was much enhanced by his habit of singing along - at full voce - with the entire score. And you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a 6’ 6”, 250+ pound, fully grown adult male singing about being a teeny weeny genie. A few years after Roger’s death, Sepia Records of England issued a CD that combined both albums, plus a few bonus tracks, among them Margaret Whiting doing an interpretation of “How Long Has It Been?”
I highly recommend the 2008 Sepia CD, if you can find it, and I’ll highlight a few outstanding tracks here. (Here’s their website.)
It might be possible to more fully enjoy Arabian Nights in 2024 than it was 70 years ago when it opened at Jones Beach - at that time it seemed hopefully old-fashioned, but today that seems more like an asset. The songs could have all been written in the 1920s or ‘30s, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The first number after the overture, “What a Pity,” is one of several songs that attempts at least a faux-Middle Eastern mood - rather like warmed-over Kismet. The title song, “A Thousand And One Nights,” a love duet between Scott and Chapman, also has an operetta feeling - it reminds me of the kind of thing that Cole Porter might have written as a semi-spoof of the genre, like “Wunderbar” in Kiss Me, Kate!
Of course the 70-foot prop whale was going to get his own number! “Whale of a Story” is the Lombardos’ answer to “Blow High, Blow Low,” in Carousel, a manufactured sea chanty - the kind of thing that Guy Mitchell was bringing to the hit parade with regularity in this period.
Lauritz Melchior, as “The Sultan,” gets a grandiose entrance number early in Act One - the inspiration was probably Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado - and then he’s apparently gone for most of the action, returning at the end to sing two 11 o’clock numbers; “Marry the One You Love” is a lilting waltz that would suit a soprano better than a heldentenor. One gets the impression that Melchior was lounging around backstage noshing on pickled herring and other Jones Beach delicacies.
The comedy songs are worth special attention; they in particular sound like something written for an original made-for-television musical from the period, possibly Jay Livingston & Ray Evans’s Satins and Spurs (also 1954) would be a comparable point, if not quite Jule Styne’s Ruggles of Red Gap (1957). The lyrics are gloriously anachronistic - perhaps more appropriate for a TV variety show parody, like Milton Berle and Martha Raye doing an Arabian Nights musical sketch.
“The Grand Vizier's Lament” obviously takes “Was I, Wazir?” from Kismet, as its inspiration, also with a hearty dose of G & S, but with topical references Wright and Forrest would have never dreamed of:
I’d rather be
A public prosecutor
Or a Babylon commuter
Or a Brooklyn Dodgers “rooter”
Waiting for next year.Or a gypsy fortune teller
Or a buyer or a seller
Than to have to be the “feller”
Who’s the Grand Vizier.
“Babylon commuter” is a pretty good pun, since that’s a town in Long Island, and Jones Beach attendees would have also related to the line about the Brooklyn Dodgers, even if it has nothing to do with the Arabian nights. (There are also references to Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts and to Guy Lombardo himself.)
(the above link also includes Hope Holiday singing “It’s Great to Be Alive”)
Hope Holiday (born 1930) had small roles and chorus parts in several Broadway shows prior to 1954, but this was her most important turn in musical comedy, before she went on to a memorable film career that included Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1959). Still going strong at 94, she tells the story of how her father - Allen Zee nee Zaslawsky - who served alongside the Lombardos as one of the producers, changed her name at the last minute from Zee to Holiday, in honor of Judy Holliday. When she saw the printed program for the first time, she had no idea who “Hope Holiday” was.
Playing different roles in each act, “Holiday” walks off with what must be the production’s most memorable musical moments: “It’s Great to Be Alive” is a list number filled with zoological citations, with many cheerful four-legged, furry, and feathered friends singing about how happy they are not to be on the menu. The title of “Teenie Weenie Genie” will tell you all you need to know. She belts out both with zip and zing; as a teenie weenie genie she seems to have been equal parts Tinkerbell (from the 1953 Disney Peter Pan) and Sondra Lee as “Tiger Lily” from the 1954 Broadway Peter Pan. (“Folks call me ‘Mr. Two-By-Two’” is a reference to Count Basie’s long-running blues singer Jimmy Rushing, famously billed as “Mr. Five-By-Five,” and also the title of a song by Don Raye & Gene DePaul.)
The second link is from Guy Lombardo’s “cover” album of the score, with the score retooled for dancing to the Royal Canadians and vocals by Kenny Gardner and the Lombardo Trio. Needless to say, this is almost as much of a classic as the actual original cast album. (Hey, it’s got a beat and you can dance to it.) “Hokus, Pocus, Domino-Kus, look what have we here?”
Maybe after all, it’s not totally outrageous to imagine someone staging a concert production of the songs - are you listening, 54 Below? You’d have to look hard to find a more entertaining combination of faux-operetta and genuine shtick. I can just imagine the tagline now: ““Hokus, Pocus, Domino-Kus! it’s even more fun than Sunday in the Park with George!”
PS: here’s a centennial bonus track / Lucky Strike Extra - Margaret Whiting singing “How Long Has It Been” on a Capitol single:
PS: David Rosen reminded me that there was in fact a recent book musical inspired by The Power Broker, titled Bulldozer: The Ballad of Robert Moses, and it featured our good friend, the very talented Miss Molly Pope. More on that to come! (and more info here.)
Very Special thanks to the fabulous Ms. Elizabeth Zimmer, for expert proofreading of this page, and scanning for typos, mistakes, and other assorted boo-boos!
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Wow. An unexpected side trip in the story of Canada's greatest jazz band and the family behind it.
For a number of years, a the name Melchior was associated with a Chevrolet dealership outside of Philadelphia. Their “jingle” even had a a slight operatic aria flair , something like “for the finest deal and more it’s Melchior!”