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[0:51] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of the Broadway musical with a special emphasis on the immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artist who invented it. I'm David Armstrong, and never fear, Richard Schoch and I will be back very soon with parts three and four of our discussion of his recent book, How Sondheim Can Change Your Life. In the meantime, however, I'm thrilled to share with you the first of what I think will be an occasional new series of episodes that I'm calling In Search of Lost Broadway. And this week, my guest Albert Evans and I will try to rediscover the hit 1927 musical, Rio Rita. I'm going to jump us right into the episode because I think Albert and I do a pretty good job of explaining what this is all about right at the top. Here we go.

[1:41] David Armstrong: Hello, Albert.

[1:42] Albert Evans: Hi, David.

[1:43] David Armstrong: So, we're here today to talk about Rio Rita, a musical from 1927, opened in February 2nd, actually, 1927, and ran through April 7th, 1928, 494 performances.

[1:58] Albert Evans: Wow.

[1:59] David Armstrong: This is a big hit show.

[2:01] Albert Evans: That's amazing.

[2:02] David Armstrong: It's a show that no one knows hardly anything about today. And part of what we're trying to do with what I think will end up being a series of rediscovering lost musicals is try to figure out how can we get as close to Rio Rita as we possibly can without a time machine, which so far has not been invented. So, let's just talk a little bit about the stage version of this and we'll talk about how we can try to rediscover it and find it again.

[2:30] Albert Evans: It was produced by Ziegfeld, Florence Ziegfeld Jr. It had a book by Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson, music by Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy, staged by someone named John Harwood, who I don't know much about, and choreographed by Sammy Lee and Albertina Rosch.

[2:46] David Armstrong: Oh.

[2:47] Albert Evans: And Sammy Lee and Albertina Rosch, we do know a bit about. Sammy Lee went on to do a lot of movies. He became a, in the early days of Hollywood, he did a lot of movies and Albertina Rosch did movies as well, but she's very well known on Broadway and of course is sort of featured in my book. It was fun to rediscover some of these lost choreographers.

[3:05] David Armstrong: Yeah, she had her own dance company, didn't she, and sort of...

[3:09] Albert Evans: The Albertina Rosch Dancers. She was one of the pioneers of that and probably a sort of proto Rockettes in a way, in terms of what she was doing. But she did all kinds of styles. Of course, McCarthy and Tierney, we probably know mostly from Irene, which was a giant hit. It was the first show to run more than 600 performances, I believe. It was the longest running show for 18 years after it opened.

[3:38] David Armstrong: Wow.

[3:39] Albert Evans: Yeah, so it was a game changer. 1919 is when Irene opened. So it really sort of kicks off the 1920s and, in my view, kicks off the Silver Age of Broadway.

[3:50] David Armstrong: Well, like you said, Rio Rita had lyrics by Joseph McCarthy and music by Harry Tierney, and they worked together a few times, but they also worked separately. They're not names that have really lasted in the pantheon of great show writers, but they did have some huge hits.

[4:07] Albert Evans: And partly they're not well known because they traded partners at times.

[4:11] David Armstrong: Yeah, they weren't like a fixed team. They kind of just jobbed around. But I think McCarthy's biggest hit, he was the lyricist, was I'm Always Chasing Rainbows from a show called something like Oh, Look or Hey, There, you know, a show that's completely forgotten. And that, of course, is music that's adapted from Chopin, although it does have some Broadway show writer credited with it. But it's basically what we now think of as the rainbow impromptu.

[4:40] Albert Evans: I think it's an impromptu.

[4:46] David Armstrong: That was a huge hit, even through the 1950s. It was a standard standard that every singer with who had a really good voice, they would tackle that because it's kind of a show off piece, but it's not too difficult.

[4:59] Albert Evans: And of course, their big hit from Irene was Alice Bluegown, which is still another song that you would hear. You don't hear it today, but when we were kids, that song was still around.

[5:12] David Armstrong: You would, but it's not. It's not a song that just everyone can sing because it's about a girl who's remembering this beautiful dress that she once wore and she wore it until it fell apart. So it's not like a love song that anyone could sing, right?

[5:25] Albert Evans: Yeah, it has a limited. Frank Sinatra couldn't record it.

[5:28] David Armstrong: Yeah, but it has a beautiful melody and it did last as an instrumental more than anything. So let's talk a little bit about the story and the plot of Rio Rita. I find what's so fascinating about the show as I'm rediscovering it, is that it's sort of a cross between an operetta and a musical comedy. It's like the two things sort of spliced together, not merged the way we would get with the way I think of it, that Rodgers and Hammerstein would later do, which is sort of merging the two.

[5:54] Albert Evans: This is like there's a scene of operetta and then there's a scene of musical comedy and then there's a scene of operetta.

[6:02] David Armstrong: Yeah, and they're strictly separated.

[6:05] Albert Evans: And it's a Western.

[6:06] David Armstrong: Yeah, it takes place along the Rio Grande, on both sides of the Rio Grande.

[6:10] Albert Evans: Texas and Mexico, yeah, the Texas and Mexico side. And that actually figures into the plot.

[6:16] David Armstrong: The plot resolves when the boat that they're on is released from its moorings and drifts over to the American side so they can arrest the villain.

[6:27] Albert Evans: Because now they're on American soil. And it has both American and Mexican characters.

[6:33] David Armstrong: Yeah, the men's chorus, I'm sure they doubled as Mexicans, but they're basically Texas Rangers.

[6:38] Albert Evans: Right, and the leading man is the captain of the Texas Rangers.

[6:43] David Armstrong: And then Rio has a rancho on the other side of the Rio Grande.

[6:47] Albert Evans: That's an interesting character because she's half Mexican and half Irish, according to the script. And it was interesting, and we'll talk about the movie in a minute, which is a very faithful rendition, probably one of the most faithful renditions of an early musical that there is.

[7:03] David Armstrong: For better and for worse, I had a chance to get the original script, or as close to the original script as you can get the licensed script. If you were going to do Rio Rita today, this is what they would license you.

[7:14] Albert Evans: Which you're not going to do.

[7:15] David Armstrong: Which you're probably not going to do. But it is available to be done. What's in the movie is almost word for word from the script. The sequences are rearranged a little bit to make a movie. And there's a lot more in the original musical than there is in the movie. And even with the movie, we found out that there was another half an hour of the movie when it was originally released. So the version we're watching now is shorter than what audiences originally saw, and certainly shorter than the musical.

[7:45] Albert Evans: Yeah, and that longer version has been lost, so you actually can't see that.

[7:50] David Armstrong: Yeah, there's pieces of it around, but even they're sort of fuzzy and hard to watch. A couple of songs that were cut are in there.

[7:56] Albert Evans: What I found was really interesting against what people, I think, when we look back and think about Broadway in the past, is there are many, many Spanish names among the cast of Rio Rita in its original Broadway production. Both in the ensemble and in the principals.

[8:14] David Armstrong: Not names that we know today, but if we're judging from names, it appears that these are people of, who have Spanish names. Are they Mexicans? Are they, I don't know what their nationalities actually were, but there's a person named George Anez in the ensemble, and Antonio Aurelio.

[8:30] Albert Evans: Aurelio.

[8:31] David Armstrong: Exactly. Antonio Aurelio in the ensemble.

[8:34] Albert Evans: That's what my high school Spanish teacher would have pronounced it.

[8:39] David Armstrong: Exactly.

[8:40] Albert Evans: So it wasn't just offensive caricatures of white people slapping on Mexican makeup. There was some of that, and there's some of that in the movie. But even in the movie, the Mexican characters are played by Mexicans to a great extent. Here's a few more names. Victor Bragamonte, Alcides Brizano. My Spanish is terrible. I should have Albert read these.

[9:01] David Armstrong: It's a sizable number of members of the cast, and it's of course a big cast. It's a Ziegfeld show, so there's 50 people in the show. But a sizable number of them seem to be Latinx, Hispanic, whatever words are appropriate for using there.

[9:17] Albert Evans: And I find that's really interesting, because it counters what people think about the past. Any ethnicity that was portrayed on Broadway is often thought of today as having been only played by white people, as you said.

[9:29] David Armstrong: Yeah, sort of burlesqued or made fun of, but I think there are actual characters in this.

[9:34] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[9:35] David Armstrong: And some of them are heroes, some of them are villains, and some of them are just in the chorus, but they're not made fun of.

[9:40] Albert Evans: Yeah. And I have to say that reading the original script, there's more questionable lines and things in that script than there are in the movie version. So some of it got weeded out maybe just for time. I don't know whether it was because they were purposely weeding out things that might be offensive, or whether that was just the way it worked out. But of course, anything written in 1927 is going to have problematic elements to it. It just was the way things were done at the time.

[10:06] David Armstrong: Sure.

[10:09] Albert Evans: Let's now talk about the principal cast, however. And probably most notable is that this is a show that introduced the comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey.

[10:20] David Armstrong: Burt Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, I believe.

[10:23] Albert Evans: That's right. And Ziegfeld actually put them together for this show.

[10:27] David Armstrong: Uh-huh.

[10:28] Albert Evans: I think they had both been vaudeville performers, stage performers in other things. Somehow they were matched up to play the two comic leads in the show. And then they went with this show to Hollywood when the movie was made. They were retained to play their roles.

[10:45] David Armstrong: And then they became movie stars.

[10:47] Albert Evans: Yeah. Made a lot of movies.

[10:49] David Armstrong: Yeah. Wheeler and Woolsey movies is a genre of movies.

[10:52] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[10:53] David Armstrong: So that's very interesting.

[10:55] Albert Evans: So one of them was sort of almost like a Groucho Marx character, like a wisecracking Wheeler dealer, a little shady. And the other one was kind of a baby-faced leading man who's kind of dumb, but he's the romantic second lead.

[11:10] David Armstrong: Right. And he dances and sings.

[11:12] Albert Evans: Yeah. He dances quite well.

[11:13] David Armstrong: Yeah. He's a really terrific dancer. He's sort of like Ray Bolger in a way, to a certain extent. But then they have comedy scenes that are sort of a version of so many comedy duos. And, you know, this really comes from way back, both from The Minstrel Show and also in a very similar dynamic, which we see in Harrigan and Hart and Weber and Fields, that sort of dynamic of one of the characters is sort of a conniving shyster and the other one is sort of a not so bright, gullible schlemiel in a way.

[11:47] Albert Evans: And they're not necessarily best friends. That's the odd thing. It's like, why are these two people even talking to each other?

[11:53] David Armstrong: But they're always together. They're somehow a team, even though, right, even this plot of this, they're, well, one's his lawyer. Woolsey is the lawyer to Burt Wheeler in the plot of this. Burt Wheeler has just been married and he's also just been divorced. And he's discovered on his wedding night that his divorce is not valid.

[12:12] Albert Evans: Because he was married in Mexico and I think had divorced in Mexico.

[12:17] David Armstrong: And that won't be recognized in the United States.

[12:19] Albert Evans: Yeah, for some reason.

[12:21] David Armstrong: So he has to tell his bride on his wedding night that he's going to go on a hunting trip.

[12:26] Albert Evans: Because he's just discovered that he's not actually divorced.

[12:30] David Armstrong: And that whole plot is very similar to me, sort of like Whoopi.

[12:33] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[12:34] David Armstrong: There were a lot of divorce marriage plots around this time because I think they were racy and they were fun and they were also satirical in a way because divorce was very hard to get for women, especially at that point. And it was a way to talk about sex in a way. And there's a lot of delightfully sort of risque dialogue in this, especially in that scene that the two of them have when they're talking about how is he going to tell his wife on his wedding night?

[13:03] Albert Evans: Yeah. And like, couldn't I tell her in the morning?

[13:05] David Armstrong: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually quite fun. And as we'll talk about when we get to talk about the movie, quite a bit of the humor holds up. And then some of it is just like there is that drunk scene in the movie, which is also in the play, which is just unwatchable. It does not work at all. But a lot of the rest of it is quite funny and some good lines.

[13:26] David Armstrong: The leading woman's name is Rita Ferguson, which I think is reflecting this idea that she's supposed to be half Spanish and half Irish, which is made more clear in the play version than it is in the movie version.

[13:39] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[13:40] David Armstrong: Although we found out, interestingly, that B.B. Daniels, who plays Rita in the movie, also had some Spanish or Mexican...

[13:48] Albert Evans: She had some background.

[13:50] David Armstrong: Yeah, some...

[13:51] Albert Evans: She doesn't have a very authentic accent, so I don't think she...

[13:54] David Armstrong: Grew up in that world.

[13:55] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[13:56] David Armstrong: But it seems like she lobbied to play that part.

[13:58] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[13:59] David Armstrong: And it seems like part of her lobbying to play it was, I actually have Mexican heritage or Spanish heritage of some kind.

[14:06] Albert Evans: But on Broadway, the part was played by...

[14:09] David Armstrong: Ethelyn Terry.

[14:11] Albert Evans: Ethelyn Terry. And that's a name we see in other things.

[14:16] David Armstrong: What other parts did she play?

[14:18] Albert Evans: According to the IBDB, Ethelyn Terry was in four Broadway musicals. Honeydew in 1920, Kid Boots in 1923, Rio Rita in 1927.

[14:30] Albert Evans: And Nina Rosa in 1930. Kid Boots and RIO RITA being the two big hits there.

[14:37] David Armstrong: It's interesting, in Kid Boots she played a character named Carmen Mendoza.

[14:42] Albert Evans: So that's very interesting. And wasn't that Eddie Cantor? That's Eddie Cantor, yeah.

[14:47] David Armstrong: Eddie Cantor is the star of that. And in Nina Rosa she played the title character. So it's very interesting. She seems to play Latinx characters in three of the shows that she's in. In Honeydew she played a character named Muriel, so that may be different. She's sort of the Rachel Zegler of her day. That could be. Like you wouldn't quite know she was Hispanic in any way, but...

[15:08] Albert Evans: Yeah, yeah. So that's interesting. I don't know much about her personally. We'll have to look her up and see. She clearly was the leading lady of the 1920s in several shows. And then the captain of the Texas Rangers, Captain Jim Stewart, is played by J. Harold Murray.

[15:22] David Armstrong: That's not a name that has much resonance now.

[15:28] Albert Evans: Yeah, I don't know. That name does not ring a bell for me. J. Harold Murray is actually, again according to the IBDB, is in 14 Broadway musicals from 1921 to 1934. 35, the show closes. And those shows, I won't read them all, but it starts with The Passing Show of 1921, and he's in shows such as The Whirl of New York, Vogues of 1924, Captain Jinx, I assume a musical version of Captain Jinx of the Horse Marines, Castles in the Air, Rio Rita, East Wind, Face the Music, and Thumbs Up. This is his last show. So some big shows in there.

[15:46] David Armstrong: Totally. But again, he's a type, and when you need that type, you...

[15:51] Albert Evans: A big operetta baritone. Like a tenor, I guess. If he sang it in the same keys that the movie actor sings it in.

[15:58] David Armstrong: Yeah, he gets up there.

[16:00] Albert Evans: Yeah, it seems more like a baritone or something. It's pretty high. We'll talk about the cast of the movie later. So this is, again, another solid Broadway performer. I don't know if you call him a star, but a well-known Broadway performer. And someone who can be depended on.

[16:13] David Armstrong: Totally. Not like someone's boyfriend.

[16:15] Albert Evans: Yeah, he's a go-to performer, absolutely. But the character is one of those big stalwart tenor baritones. Big, tall, handsome, good-looking, with a loud voice.

[17:46] David Armstrong: Of course, these two characters are where the operetta element comes in, and it seems very, very similar. You can't help but think that the authors were echoing the Desert Song.

[17:59] Albert Evans: Yeah, so the Desert Song is a big, giant hit of the 1920s, and now this show is echoing it. You know, that certainly wasn't new, the operetta trope of the leader of a military group of some kind, singing big, stirring military songs. But what's really like the Desert Song is that there's a bandit, a sort of thief, called the Kinkachu, who they're trying to find.

[18:26] David Armstrong: In Rio Rita.

[18:31] Albert Evans: In Rio Rita, there's a thief called the Kinkachu. We're never sure who the Kinkachu is, and we think that Jim might actually be the Kinkachu. He's sort of being framed to be the Kinkachu.

[18:41] David Armstrong: Yeah, and then Rita's brother's being framed to be the Kinkachu. And spoiler alert, it turns out that the villain of the piece is actually the Kinkachu. What we're trying to accomplish with this project, I think, is now, first of all, identifying Rio Rita as this big hit Ziegfeld show of the 1920s that was as famous as many other shows that we seem to know better, or that we know about. Whether we've ever seen them, we just know more about them, and they've gotten more attention. And this show was just as big a hit, if not a bigger hit, and yet has sort of faded away almost entirely.

[19:24] Albert Evans: But one thing is that it was an extremely lavish Ziegfeld production. So I think a lot of it was just the stunning sets and costumes, and I believe it opened the new Ziegfeld Theater.

[19:36] David Armstrong: That's correct. So he put tons of money into this.

[19:40] Albert Evans: Yeah. So it was a spectacle. And you read the reviews, and you see everyone comments on the event of it. It was an event to go see Rio Rita.

[19:51] David Armstrong: Yeah. Probably surpassing the material itself.

[19:55] Albert Evans: Yeah, because actually the script isn't very compelling in either the show or the movie. It's a little bit like, okay, there's a story, and I guess you have to have a story, but you're not really invested in the characters much. And the score is perfectly functional, but I've never heard of anyone doing a revival of Rio Rita. So it's not with the, you know, like the Desert Song, or Rosemary, or the Student Prince, or the ones that actually occasionally do get done.

[20:16] David Armstrong: That lived on.

[20:21] Albert Evans: Yeah. I'm always interested in the Student Prince and even the Desert Song. They had multiple movie versions into the 1950s, and were produced all the time. Again, back in the 50s and the 60s, and even into the 80s, there were productions of those at big theaters. But Rio Rita did not live on in that way. Let's talk about the song. Let's talk about the score. Okay. What are the big songs in Rio Rita?

[20:42] Albert Evans: Well, believe it or not, the song Rio Rita was a big hit. The Rangers Chorus is one that's a big, like, marching song about, like, you know, here come the Rangers. It's in that vein of, like, Stout-Hearted Men are one of those.

[20:57] David Armstrong: Yeah. It's very similar to those, to any of those other Ranger hits, or even the one from the spoof later in Little Mary Sunshine.

[21:02] Albert Evans: Yeah. And then, oddly enough, of course, every show has to have the new dance sensation, and the new dance sensation in Rio Rita was the Kinkajou. It's the stupidest lyric you've ever heard about, when you do the Kinkajou, you dance before you think you do, or something like that.

[21:22] Albert Evans: When you do the Kinkajou, you dance before you think you do. You clown around, you're feeling oh so lazy for, you know, you're shouting whoops-a-daisy first, you feel a kink or two, but here's the kick for you. Your one desire is to acquire. Each movement of the stingy dance will thrill you through. Oh, I know it will entrance you when you do the Kinkajou.

[21:49] David Armstrong: But the tune actually stayed in dance bands. It's da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da. It's just a bouncy little tune.

[22:00] Albert Evans: So, as an instrumental, it hung around for a while.

[22:02] David Armstrong: Yeah, it did hang around, and so did Rio Rita. That stayed in dance band, not as a song, but as an instrumental. And there were swing versions of it, and, you know, when you needed something with a vaguely Hispanic tone to it, you would pull out Rio Rita.

[22:17] Albert Evans: And so what's fascinating is that Rio Rita sounds like it comes from an operetta. It's totally out of any of the operettas of the period. Whereas the Kinkajou sounds like it's from Good News or something, like a college musical or something.

[22:31] David Armstrong: And then there's comedy songs for Woolsey, and the comic female lead is named Dolly Bean because she's married to Burt Wheeler, whose last name is Bean.

[22:42] Albert Evans: Even though he wasn't divorced, but yeah.

[22:45] David Armstrong: And later his ex-wife will show up as a character to complicate things. And in the movie, there's quite a funny scene where they're sitting at tables, which I assume is right out of the stage because it looks like it's filmed on the stage, practically.

[22:59] Albert Evans: And Woolsey is having dinner with the ex-wife, and Burt Wheeler's having dinner with the new wife, and they don't know they're both there. Somewhat unbelievably, but also has some good funny jokes in it.

[23:11] David Armstrong: Wheeler is romancing the ex-wife or the present wife, because she's just inherited $3 million. So he's only in it for the money.

[23:21] Albert Evans: Yeah, exactly.

[23:22] David Armstrong: And she seems fine with that.

[23:25] Albert Evans: Dolly and Chick Bean, who are Wheeler and the female comic lead, have a series of songs, a series of comic duets and dances that they do. They're, again, like right out of Good News, or right out of one of the contemporary musical comedies of the period.

[23:42] David Armstrong: I find just that dichotomy so interesting, that we have both these things back-to-back. We'll have these operatic, romantic songs that seem like they're in a period, but of course the show's set in the 1920s.

[23:54] Albert Evans: And even Prohibition figures into the story, because that's partly why this nightclub is on the other side of the river, so you can go over there and drink. Americans can go drink on the other side of the river, at least in the movie, but I think so in the play, too. The setting of that, it's like a pirate ship, and the nightclub has a pirate theme to it.

[24:16] David Armstrong: And considering that the second act opener of the Broadway show was called Yo-Ho and a Bottle of Rum, I'm assuming that was also in the stage musical.

[24:25] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[24:26] David Armstrong: I have to go back and check the script on that, but it seems like it.

[24:29] Albert Evans: Talk a little bit about those comic songs.

[24:31] David Armstrong: Well, they tend to be, I think both of them are more like, let's fight and then let's make up songs. And some of them get kind of rough. Like in one of them, Burt Wheeler, who's supposed to be this kind of sap and a nice guy on a pushover, he actually starts slapping her because he's imagining her not doing his eggs right at breakfast.

[24:53] Albert Evans: I have to say, it's a very sort of disturbing moment.

[24:55] David Armstrong: Out of nowhere.

[24:56] Albert Evans: It's two little moments, like 30 seconds of the movie, but it does like, what the hell are they doing?

[25:01] David Armstrong: And there's two. There's something else that he's imagining she'll do wrong, like his toast will be wrong.

[25:06] Albert Evans: Yeah, yeah.

[25:07] David Armstrong: And both times he really hauls off and slaps her, and she goes away. She says, I don't ever want to speak to you again. And then like 30 seconds later, she's back. Do you forgive me? Yes, I do.

[25:19] Albert Evans: Although remember, she really slugged him right before.

[25:21] David Armstrong: Yeah, she does slug him, but that's not quite the same effect. You want to slug him too.

[25:27] Albert Evans: Yeah, it's true. And then they sing a comic love song.

[25:31] David Armstrong: Yeah, and do a little dance.

[25:33] Albert Evans: Partly what I enjoyed about watching this movie is that it's so evident of what these musicals are like. They sing this sort of sincere love song. And then all of a sudden the music picks up and they do this dance out of nowhere for no reason whatsoever.

[25:48] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[25:49] Albert Evans: Which is quite entertaining.

[25:50] David Armstrong: And it's filmed like we're watching them in a proscenium on the stage.

[25:54] Albert Evans: Exactly. So I would say about half the score is retained in the movie.

[25:59] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[26:00] Albert Evans: But there are no new songs added. It is the score of the Broadway musical, which is unheard of basically in most of these early Broadway adaptations.

[26:12] David Armstrong: Well, it's unheard of until like Oklahoma.

[26:17] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[26:18] David Armstrong: You know, where they actually bring the Broadway success to the film screen.

[26:23] Albert Evans: Which seems to be what they were trying to do with Rio Rita.

[26:26] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[26:27] Albert Evans: And in fact, Richard Barrios in his book says there wasn't again until Oklahoma that anybody tried to be as faithful to a musical as they were in Rio Rita. And partly this was the way Hollywood was. It's all about money in Hollywood to a great extent. Most people would never see the show that was on Broadway, but they might know the title. So basically they were buying the title and they were buying whatever hit songs, one or two hit songs that were connected to that title.

[26:55] David Armstrong: And then they were doing whatever they wanted to do.

[26:58] Albert Evans: Because they had studio songwriters. The studios wanted to have their own songwriters, right? Because that meant they would make the royalties.

[27:03] David Armstrong: They owned those songs. The studio owned the songs, not the songwriters.

[27:10] Albert Evans: So it was to their advantage to take Anything Goes as an example from the early 30s. What's like the movies like 1935 or something like that.

[27:19] David Armstrong: 34, 35.

[27:20] Albert Evans: And just replace the Cole Porter songs with really inferior material.

[27:24] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[27:25] Albert Evans: The only songs still in that movie from the stage show are the title song, which even that is kind of barely there, as I remember. I Get a Kick Out of You and You're the Top.

[27:35] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[27:36] Albert Evans: All three of them sort of truncated and with less risque lyrics, not by Cole Porter.

[27:41] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[27:42] Albert Evans: And then a whole slew of other songs for Bing Crosby mostly that, as you said, are just not terribly distinguished.

[27:50] David Armstrong: No.

[27:51] Albert Evans: But they made more money that way.

[27:52] David Armstrong: Right.

[27:53] Albert Evans: And so that's why they did it. They didn't want to have songs that only Cole Porter was going to make money from because they were from the stage show. I think that's one of the distinctive things about this particular movie is it is preserving the stage show in a way that you won't see again for four years.

[28:11] David Armstrong: So watching it today actually can feel like, oh, this is what a stage musical was like.

[28:17] Albert Evans: And the movie was 1929.

[28:19] David Armstrong: But the show was 27, right?

[28:21] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[28:22] David Armstrong: Closed in 28.

[28:23] Albert Evans: So it's very immediate.

[28:24] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[28:25] Albert Evans: So you would see, oh, this is a late 1920s Broadway musical cut down. And there's some outdoor scenes with people riding on horses and stuff that probably weren't in the original.

[28:36] David Armstrong: But basically, it's like watching a stage show.

[28:39] Albert Evans: And partly that's why I think it's so interesting to watch.

[28:45] David Armstrong: I can't say that it's a great movie by any means.

[28:48] Albert Evans: No, it's kind of.

[28:49] David Armstrong: I had to start it two or three times before I stuck with it.

[28:52] Albert Evans: So it's sort of this weird dichotomy in a way.

[28:55] David Armstrong: In terms of movie making, it's not good.

[29:01] Albert Evans: The show was like in that period. If that's your main interest, which it is for me, then I thought it was fantastic because it is filmed in a way that is almost like a video capture of a Broadway show today. Even though it's not being performed on a stage, it's being done on sound stages and on location, still the camera is acting like it's in the audience and the performers are playing to the audience as if they're on the stage playing out into the house. And even when they do the big love duet, when they sing RIO RITA in the first part of the movie, they're both singing straight front just the way they would sing on stage. He's singing the main tune and she's singing a counter melody.

[29:44] ♪ Musical number: "RIO RITA" — performed by Albert Evans and David Armstrong ♪

[31:03] David Armstrong: Don't go away. Albert Evans and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[31:12] David Armstrong: Hi, this is David Armstrong, and if you're enjoying this episode, I strongly suspect that you will want to read my new book, Broadway Nation, How Immigrant Jewish Queer and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical, which is on sale now wherever books are sold, and I'm very happy to report that the early reviews have been terrific. The esteemed author Jeffrey Block says that Broadway Nation is a fascinating, comprehensive, and timely gem of a book that more than lives up to its promise of delivering no less than five books in one. Kudos to David Armstrong. And Tony Award-winning lyricist David Zippel says that David Armstrong's insightful history of the evolution of the Broadway musical and its creators is captivating and comprehensive as well as indispensable.

The book is, of course, available on Amazon, but I recommend that you go to the publisher's website, bloomsbury.com, where you will currently receive a 10% discount. Again, like the podcast that inspired it, the book is titled Broadway Nation, How Immigrant Jewish Queer and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. Now, back to the show.

[32:23] Albert Evans: And one thing we read, although we didn't find this scene in the movie, but maybe it was a scene that got cut, is I think Richard Barrios again tells us that later in the 1950s, when they're making Singing in the Rain, the costume designer who had done RIO RITA back in the 1920s remembered that B.B. Daniels had a fan that they had to then figure out how to make silent because it kept making too much noise.

[32:46] David Armstrong: Yeah, and when she would snap it shut, we would hear that. It was recorded live.

[32:51] Albert Evans: Yeah, everything was recorded live then. So it's not as they would later when they pre-record things. This is all presumably being sung live on the set at the time. So it's interesting to find out that reference for Singing in the Rain, where that came from. Although we didn't see her with a fan in the movie, but again, maybe there's a half an hour that's not there anymore. So that could be from that. That's why I recommend watching this movie if that's your interest. But if you're interested to see a great piece of filmmaking, the way you will see just a few years later, and part of this is because it's on that cusp of they're trying to figure out how to make sound movies. And a lot of those movies during this period are unwatchable. There's so many movies in 1929, because that's when the wave broke.

[33:42] David Armstrong: Yeah, pretty much most theaters were wired for sound by that point. And the difference between the movies made early in 1929 and late in 1929 is really, you don't know what you're going to get when you watch a movie of 1929. Because even like the movie The Desert Song, you can't hear it. It's unwatchable. This movie is very watchable. It doesn't have the technical problems that you see in other movies from the period.

[34:06] Albert Evans: Now, we should say that part of the success, the immediate success of sound movies and sound musicals was their novelty. But they were still, the first few years, they were generally very bad movies. And the public got so tired of them that it was like even movies that were being filmed to be musicals, they said, take the numbers out. They were box office poison. And just a couple years later...

[34:30] David Armstrong: Yeah, exactly. By the early 30s. Because I think even the audiences at the time recognized, wait a minute, this is different, but it's not all that entertaining.

[34:39] Albert Evans: And RIO RITA, the movie, is a giant hit.

[34:41] David Armstrong: Yeah. It was a big hit movie, beloved by audiences. And I think it's because you felt like you were in the theater watching a Broadway musical. And most people had never seen a Broadway musical. And it's a very opulent, Ziegfeld-type production. It's an Eiffel. Now, the prints that are available are not a pleasure to watch, but you still can see, wow, when this was beautifully photographed, you know, it would be, you'd be quite content to just sit and look at it.

[35:09] Albert Evans: On a big screen, yeah. And, you know, Ziegfeld, how exactly involved he is in the movie, it's hard to tell, but his name is the first thing you see. It is the Ziegfeld production. There are elements of it that are trying to sort of echo the Ziegfeld aura. There's a big wedding scene at the end with these giant costumes and girls dressed in lace. And that certainly feels like, oh, that's a Ziegfeld saying, do this.

[35:35] David Armstrong: And they're largely just sort of parading around, showing off their costumes.

[35:39] Albert Evans: Yeah, exactly. There's also dancing girls, but there's also these Ziegfeld sort of mannequin girls.

[35:45] David Armstrong: Yeah. Oh, let's talk a little about the cast of the movie. So we know that Wheeler and Woolsey are direct from Broadway. They go into it, they're doing almost word for word the routines and songs and presumably the dances, although the person named as the choreographer in the movie is different. What I wonder is how much of that choreography from Broadway was retained in the movie, even though the Broadway choreographers are not credited for it?

[36:11] Albert Evans: Yeah. Well, I'll bet that the Wheeler and Woolsey routines were pretty much what they did on stage, because why not?

[36:18] David Armstrong: Well, and in those days, a lot of times the performers did their own choreography for their own numbers.

[36:23] Albert Evans: Yeah, they do trick things.

[36:25] David Armstrong: Yeah, he's an eccentric dancer and he's going to do what he does. In terms of the big production numbers, it's hard to know. Was it somebody just sort of restaging what was done on Broadway?

[36:35] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[36:35] David Armstrong: And I haven't been able to figure that out yet. So we were talking about the cast. Wheeler and Woolsey recreating their Broadway performances, but the two romantic leads are movie stars who are fairly established. The romantic lead who plays the captain of the Texas Rangers is John Bowles. Is that his name?

[36:54] Albert Evans: Yeah, John Bowles, who I think was in The Desert Song as well.

[36:58] David Armstrong: He was the lead in The Desert Song.

[36:59] Albert Evans: He was sort of the operetta male lead of the time.

[37:03] David Armstrong: Yeah. So John Bowles was a Broadway performer. He was in three Broadway shows prior to doing this movie. He was in something called Little Jesse James in 1923, in Mercenary Mary in 1925, and Kitty's Kisses in 1926. And then he will come back and be in One Touch of Venus in 1945. So that's interesting. He's established as a Broadway performer before he comes to the movies, like so many people, especially as the Depression hit. He goes to Hollywood, and it seems like he's in quite a few silent movies before the talkies come in. So he seems to have some success. And then it looks like his first talkie is The Desert Song, where he's playing the Red Shadow. He's the romantic lead and this very similar character to who he'll play later that same year in RIO RITA.

Those movies are both made in the same year. And it's interesting, the next year he plays a character named Captain Stanton in Song of the West. And then he's in another movie called Captain of the Guard, also in 1930. But movies we would remember him from include King of Jazz, which is a big movie in 1930. He's in Frankenstein in 1931.

[38:18] Albert Evans: He plays Victor Moritz. I don't know who that is.

[38:21] David Armstrong: So it looks like, just looking at this list, it looks like he played leads in not big studio movies and supporting characters in larger budgeted movies. And then he's in more than a dozen movies here.

[38:36] Albert Evans: Oh, yeah. He's in movies. Every year in the 30s, he's in a movie.

[38:39] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[38:40] Albert Evans: Looks like he did about 10 in 1934.

[38:42] David Armstrong: Yeah. Well, that was that day where if you were on contract, you just went from movie to movie. You look at Joan Bondell, who does like 14 movies in one year.

[38:52] Albert Evans: But he's in several of the Shirley Temple movies. He's in Curly Top. He's in The Littlest Rebel. And we'll have to go back and check those out and just see. I've seen all those movies as a kid. And even more recently, he doesn't stick out to me as remembering who he is. And then his movie career seems to wrap up in the 50s. So he has a career into the 50s. His last movie is called Babes in Baghdad in 1952.

[39:16] Albert Evans: Don't know what that is. We'll have to check that out. I'm sure there's some problematic elements to that one.

[39:21] David Armstrong: It also has a Spanish version, Muchachos de Bagdad.

[39:25] Albert Evans: Yes, I see that.

[39:26] David Armstrong: But yeah, so he had a perfectly respectable career. He never became a top star.

[39:31] Albert Evans: Right. But then went back to Broadway in a big hit in the 1950s.

[39:36] David Armstrong: Yeah. That's really interesting. The female lead is B.B. Daniels, which is a name that probably is familiar to a lot of people. Tell us the story. You did a deep dive on B.B. Daniels.

[39:47] Albert Evans: Well, B.B. Daniels started out in the silent movies as Harold Lloyd's leading lady in, like, several movies.

[39:55] David Armstrong: So these are comic movies?

[39:56] Albert Evans: Comic movies, yeah. Then she did more silence of various sorts. But then she was caught in the Singing in the Rain trap, much like Lena Lamott in Singing in the Rain, when movies went to sound. A lot of them were just fired, basically, because they'd say, oh, well, you're a silent movie star, but you can't sing. We need singers. Now, it turns out she was a singer, but she could not convince — which was it, RKO?

[40:20] David Armstrong: I think it was RKO.

[40:22] Albert Evans: Yeah. So they didn't want her. They wouldn't even test her. They just said, no, B.B., you're done. And so she went on a campaign to get this role because she knew she could sing it, because it was not a big-budget studio. This was, like, going to break their budget. She said, hire me, and I will do it for royalties. Just give me a small salary, but cut me a piece of the royalties. And they did. That's what they did, and it turned out she has a beautiful singing voice. And the movie became a big hit, and all the reviews talk about her, about how wonderful she is. She was the breakout star of this. So she, on her own volition, reinvented herself. And just to clarify this, too, this is Radio Pictures makes this movie.

[41:02] David Armstrong: Yeah, which would become RKO.

[41:03] Albert Evans: Which would later become RKO, I think, like the next year or something. So I don't remember who the studio she was with before that, but...

[41:12] David Armstrong: Yeah, I don't remember. I wasn't born yet.

[41:16] Albert Evans: But then...

[41:17] David Armstrong: This establishes her then as a...

[41:19] Albert Evans: As a star. And just, like, 42nd Street was, like, 33, I think.

[41:23] David Armstrong: Yes.

[41:24] Albert Evans: So, like, just four years later, she was playing the diva in 42nd Street, the one who sprains her ankle and Ruby Keillor has to go on.

[41:32] David Armstrong: So she's sort of the villain of that movie, although she's a sympathetic villain.

[41:37] Albert Evans: Yeah, she has the famous line.

[41:38] David Armstrong: Yeah, you're going out there a chorus kid, but you're going to come back a star.

[41:42] Albert Evans: That's his line. No, I want to hate you for the rest of my life. Does she have that line, or is that only in the musical?

[41:46] David Armstrong: No, that is her.

[41:47] Albert Evans: That is her, yeah. I want you to be so good, I'll hate you for the rest of my life.

[41:51] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[41:53] Albert Evans: So she plays... What's that character's name?

[41:55] David Armstrong: Dorothy Brock.

[41:56] Albert Evans: Right. So that's how people will know B.B. Daniels. Probably the most famous movie she made among a lot of movies.

[42:04] David Armstrong: And she makes a giant impression in that movie.

[42:07] Albert Evans: But then a couple years later, she gets married to a fellow performer and moves to England and becomes a British star of the stage. So that's why she disappears from American movies, basically, after 42nd Street. And then she and her husband have like a husband and wife radio show, like a daily radio show in the UK. And they stay there through the Blitz. They don't go back to America during World War II. They stay there and they become staunch Brits. So it's an interesting story. He comes back to do casting for one of the big studios, and he's actually the one who gave... I forget his name, but he's the one who gave Marilyn Monroe her name.

[42:45] David Armstrong: And of course, her real name was...

[42:46] Albert Evans: Norma Jean Mortensen.

[42:49] David Armstrong: I knew the Norma Jean part, but I didn't know the Mortensen part.

[42:51] Albert Evans: So B.B. Daniels' husband said, no, no, no, no, no. You're going to be Marilyn Monroe.

[42:56] David Armstrong: That's so interesting. And as I've heard the story named because he had worked with Marilyn Miller. And she was a radiant star who, again, we sort of don't know these days, but that's why Marilyn Monroe was named that way. I'm looking over B.B. Daniels' filmography on the IMDb, and she's in dozens and dozens of silent movies. And of course, they would make them very quickly.

[43:22] Albert Evans: I think Harold Lloyd wanted to marry her, but she said no.

[43:26] David Armstrong: Oh, interesting. Because then they would have been a team.

[43:28] Albert Evans: Yeah, yeah.

[44:32] Albert Evans: The Stalking of B.B. Daniels.

[45:02] Albert Evans: Wheeler and Woolsey are now being replaced by Abbott and Costello.

[45:06] Albert Evans: 1942 is right in the heart of World War II.

[45:10] Albert Evans: It stars Abbott and Costello as characters named Doc and Wishy, which are not the same names.

[45:14] Albert Evans: Catherine Grayson as Rita Winslow. She has a different last name.

[45:18] Albert Evans: I'm not sure why. John Carroll as Ricardo Montero.

[45:22] Albert Evans: These characters do not line up with the original characters at all.

[45:26] Albert Evans: The only other actor I recognize here is Barry Nelson is in it.

[45:30] Albert Evans: And the plot, just to give a sense of the difference between these plots, let's just recap again the plot for the original. So on Broadway and in the movie, most of it is set in Mexico, on the Mexican side of the border, where Ria Rito lives. And somehow has a ranch. We never know quite what she's doing running this ranch. And her brother is there, who is suspected to be and we get the sense that the area is being terrorized by the Kinkajou. He is robbing and stealing things.

[46:02] Albert Evans: We know he robs a bank. At least in the movie, it starts with him robbing a bank. Captain Jim, who's the captain of the Texas Rangers, is there undercover trying to find the Kinkajou. And that's basically the plot.

[46:18] Albert Evans: And then in the play version, we start where the movie starts in its third scene, with the sort of villager number where we arrive in this town, which is controlled by the villain character, who seems to run the town and is making advances toward Rita.

[46:30] Albert Evans: So Jim and Rita have already met and are already in love, although in the movie they start with a backstory element where you see them fall in love.

[46:42] Albert Evans: And somehow they fall in love across the Rio Grande. One is in Texas, one is in Mexico. And he says, oh yes, I've seen you over there in your rancho. That's how they noticed each other prior to this.

[47:02] Albert Evans: And so the plot all revolves around finding out who the Kinkajou is and then the love story. And then the other plot is the marriage plot. As Ira Gershon would call it, the marriage plot is the story with Wheeler and Woolsey and the comic female lead. And that's all about how do we resolve this problem of you thought you were divorced but you're not really divorced and now you're married to somebody else and you're going to go to jail.

[47:38] Albert Evans: And now somehow the supposed ex-wife, who is actually still married to him, shows up in this plot. So it's a farcical kind of plot. There is a funny line about you're a bigamist. How dare you call me a bigamist of all the ridiculous fools. You're the bigamist or something like that. It's not word for word, but yeah. Jokes like that, exactly. But now I'm going to read this synopsis of the plot of the second movie version of Ria Rita.

[48:02] Albert Evans: But again, what's interesting is Ria Rita still has enough name value that they're making a movie called Ria Rita. And using some of the songs they're recalling this thing that was that famous. Now they own it too, so it's like any movie studio today where they're always remaking things they already own. But still, they wouldn't do that if they didn't think there's some reason, there's some resonance in the public.

[48:30] Albert Evans: We want to go see Ria Rita because we remember it being good. In this case, Nazi spies have infiltrated Hotel Vista del Rio, a resort on the Mexican border. They plan to use a radio broadcast by a famous guest, Ricardo Montero, to transmit coded messages to their cohorts.

[48:46] Albert Evans: Doc and Wishy, this is Abbott and Costello, are stowaways in Montero's car who steal a basket of apples that turns out to be miniature radios used by the spies. Rita Winslow, the hotel's owner and childhood sweetheart of Montero, hired Doc and Wishy as house detectives who discover the Nazi codebook and give it to Montero.

[49:10] Albert Evans: They are then kidnapped by the spies and left in a room with a bomb set to explode, but manage to escape. While Wishy plants the bomb in the pocket of one of the culprits. Meanwhile, the broadcast has already begun and Montero, refusing to participate in treason, fights the spies until the Texas Rangers arrive.

[49:30] Albert Evans: The spies escape by car is thwarted when the planted bomb finally explodes. So it's absolutely no other than a character named Rita who owns a ranch and the Texas Rangers figuring in at least partially. Well, they tweaked it a little. Just a little bit of change.

[49:50] Albert Evans: Are there any other places we can find Ria Rita? Well, there was a radio program in the 1950s called the Railroad Hour, which was sponsored by the Railroads of America or something, and always had Gordon McRae, and they would do like, was it half hour or 40 minute? Yeah, I think they're less than an hour version. So they would be condensations of Broadway operettas and musicals.

[50:10] Albert Evans: The adaptations for those shows were usually done by Lindsay and Krauss, I think. Broadway playwrights and book writers. And they would adapt them, but what's interesting is they're trying to do probably as little work as they possibly can. I don't mean that in a bad way, but the dialogue that's usually in that is usually drawn directly from the original scripts.

[50:34] Albert Evans: But it's as little as possible because they want to feature the song. Exactly. They have to trim it down to the barest amount. Yeah, to tie the plot together so you know what's going on. Just enough to convey what the original plot is. And some of them are ridiculous.

[50:50] Albert Evans: The showboat adaptation is really, really hard to take because there's no black characters in it at all. Julie is missing entirely from the story, which is the hinge of that story. So it's just the love story of Magnolia and Ravenel. But many of them are very entertaining. And the Ria Rita is actually pretty good, and Gordon McRae is perfect casting for that part.

[51:14] Albert Evans: And it has a couple songs that aren't in the movie. So you get a little bit more of the score there. And then the score was recorded. Oh, yeah. In the 20s, there were a number of pop dance band versions of the songs from Ria Rita. And also there was, at the time, there was something called the Victor Light Opera Company that would do two-sided 78 RPM records, but it would be the scores...

[51:38] Albert Evans: Sort of like a medley of the hits. Like a medley, yeah. Just one after another. Like six on each side or something. And it was recorded. And they were fairly faithful. They didn't do jazz band versions of them. They did seemingly theatrical versions. And that's available, too. And it's actually quite good. The sound quality of those is sometimes hard to hear.

[51:54] Albert Evans: Yeah, it's archaic. It's archaic. But if you want to hear what those songs were like close to the performance... But then I think there was also a British recording similar to that of the songs from Ria Rita. And, of course, all of the dance bands would do single versions. Maybe it would be one on one side, one on the other.

[52:10] Albert Evans: But the songs got to be well-known. My biggest disappointment is I happen to have the music somewhere. The actual sheet music, vintage sheet music, of the Kinkajou. And I can't find it. But I used to play it on the piano and sing it. And it's actually a very catchy hymn.

[52:30] Albert Evans: And then there was a song that sort of hung on for a while. It was called You're Always in My Heart, But Only in My Dreams. And this was the big, like, Nelson and Jeanette should have sung it. It was, You're always in my heart, but only in my dreams. It was one of those. But that didn't last. But the marching song and Ria Rita actually lasted into the 1950s and perhaps beyond.

[52:54] Albert Evans: I'm just looking here. So in the 1942 movie, what songs survived into the movie version? Well, there's Ria Rita, Can't Do Without That, by Tierney and McCarthy. Then there's the Rangers song.

[53:10] Albert Evans: Yeah, Song of the Rangers. Yeah. But that's all from this show. So only two songs. If you watch that movie, you will only find two songs from the original stage version. Yeah. There's a lot of songs by Harold Arlen and Jep Harburg that were either played as background music or were written for the movie but not used.

[53:30] Albert Evans: Yeah. It's hard to tell from what we're looking at how many songs there even are in the movie. So it looks like they decided that it wasn't really a musical, even with Katharine Grayson in it. And what did she sing? She had to have sang something.

[53:42] Albert Evans: Well, I don't know. There's a song from 1859 called Hombres Legeres, The Shadow Song, that's sung by Katharine Grayson at the hotel. So some pre-existing songs are incorporated into it. And that's all that it says that Katharine Grayson sings.

[54:02] Albert Evans: Well, we'll have to check that out and see. But that certainly doesn't seem to be a way in.

[54:06] Albert Evans: No, no, no, not to. It's not a window into the past. But the movie, the 1929 movie version, is a window into the past.

[54:14] Albert Evans: Yeah, definitely. It's very enjoyable as that, if that's what you're into.

[54:18] Albert Evans: Yeah. I wouldn't recommend it to people who were not trying to...

[54:22] Albert Evans: No, I wouldn't take... You've never seen a musical? Well, watch Ria Ria! They'll never want to see a musical again. But if you're trying to take a deep dive into the 1920s Broadway, this is a place where you'll see it. You'll see what a 1920s Broadway musical was like.

[54:38] Albert Evans: Yeah, and you get a touch of operetta, you get a touch of comedy, and you get a touch of Ziegfeld. Right. That's interesting. You get those three aspects of the 1920s.

[54:46] Albert Evans: Yeah, and they're all... there's not just hints of those things. There's actually the real thing. So if you are a scholar or a fanatic or an insane person, you should definitely see Ria Ria.

[55:02] David Armstrong: Absolutely. Thanks, Albert. It's been fun to talk to you about this.

[55:20] David Armstrong: If you love this podcast and want to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, I invite you to become a patron of Broadway Nation. For as little as $7 a month, you can receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of many of the interviews featured on this podcast.

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[56:04] David Armstrong: When you do the kinky do, you dance before you think you do. You clown around, you're feeling oh so lazy for, you know, you're shouting hoopsie-daisy first, you feel the kink or two. But here's a kick for you. Your one desire is to acquire. Each moment of the dainty dance will thrill you through.

[56:28] David Armstrong: Oh, I know it will entrance you when you do the kinky do.

[56:32] David Armstrong: Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Pals Mox for his help with editing this episode, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.