[Continuing with the theme of “Odds & Ends,” this time returning to short articles on theater, I have collected four pieces from American Theatre. Some of the articles were published in the print edition of AT, but others appeared only on the magazine’s website.]
“MAKING A MUSICAL ‘PRELUDE TO A KISS’”by Ashley Lee
[Some readers will remember the 1988 musical Prelude to a Kiss and its successful 1990-91 Broadway run. Now playwright Craig Lucas has musicalized it and it’s had it world première in Orange County, California, in the theater which 37 years ago commissioned the play and débuted it.
[American Theatre of 1 May 2024, in a feature called “On the Scene,” looks at how Lucas turned the straight play into a musical—and how he felt about doing so.]
Craig Lucas’s fanciful, freighted romance returns to the theatre that commissioned it, South Coast Repertory, this time with songs attached.
In 1988, South Coast Repertory [Costa Mesa, California] debuted a play they’d commissioned, Craig Lucas’s [b. 1951] Prelude to a Kiss, in which a newlywed couple’s love is tested when the young bride suddenly swaps bodies with a mysterious old man. The play went on to become an Off-Broadway and Broadway hit, a Tony nominee for Best Play, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a popular regional theatre staple, and the source of a film adaptation with Alec Baldwin and Meg Ryan [Twentieth Century Fox, 1992; directed by Norman René].
[The play Prelude to a Kiss premièred on 15 January-18 February 1988 at SCR directed by Norman René with Lisa Zane as Rita Boyle and Mark Arnott as Peter Hoskins. The script and staging were revised and the play reopened Off-Broadway at New York City’s Circle Repertory Company on 14 March 1990, with René directing Alec Baldwin and Mary-Louise Parker in the lead roles.
[The Off-Broadway production ran until 19 April 1990 for 57 performances (including previews), winning three 1990 Obie Awards (Best New American Play, Direction, and Performance – Alec Baldwin), and a 1990 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play.
[Prelude transferred to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre, opening on 1 May 1990 and running until 19 May 1991 (440 regular performances), garnering nominations for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, two 1990 Tony Awards (Best Play and Best Actress in a Play – Mary-Louise Parker), and three 1990 Drama Desk Awards (Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Actress in a Play – Parker, and Outstanding Director of a Play). René again directed, but Timothy Hutton replaced Baldwin as Peter.
[The play was revived on Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2007 (8 March-29 April) at the American Airlines Theatre for 23 previews and 61 regular performances.]
Now, more than 35 years later, this 70-minute adult fairy tale is back at its original Orange County theatre—this time as a two-hour musical.
While plenty of playwrights have transformed their own plays into musicals (Kimberly Akimbo [Booth Theatre; 10 November 2022-28 April 2024], Purlie! [Broadway Theatre; 15 March 1970-6 November 1971]), and while Lucas has written his share of books for musicals (including the recent Days of Wine and Roses [Studio 54; 28 January-31 March 2024]), he admitted in a recent interview that this Prelude musical wasn’t his idea. Given that the seemingly whimsical fairy tale plot of the play, written at the height of the AIDS crisis [1981-95], was in fact inspired by Lucas’s grief as he watched a loved one become physically unrecognizable in what seemed like the span of an instant, he was hardly eager to go there again.
“I just wasn’t sure I wanted to revisit those years—they were extraordinarily horrible, most of my world was decimated, and the majority of my closest allies, friends, and loved ones were killed,” Lucas recalled. “The idea of going back and trying to retell a story that looked at mortality and catastrophic loss, even in terms of a romance, is hard. There had to be something actually worth diving back into, and the music had to bring out aspects of the material that the play didn’t dig into.”
Lucas was approached by lyricist Sean Hartley about the possibility of a musical adaptation 10 years ago, and was won over when he heard the first song, written by Hartley and composer-lyricist Daniel Messé.
For his part, Messé thinks that the story’s combination of realism and fantasy makes it “a perfect choice for a musical. The play is grounded in reality, but there’s this element of magic that anyone who’s been in love would recognize, where the entire world feels full of possibility. That’s exactly what you want in a musical—a suspension of disbelief, because people are singing, and a heightened sense of emotion that’s grounded in characters that feel very real.”
Now in its world premiere through May 4 [opened 5 April 2024] as part of South Coast Repertory’s Pacific Playwrights Festival [3-5 May 2024], this Prelude resets the story in the present, where the character Peter, who initially worked in publishing, now works in data analytics. [The original non-musical was set in the 1980s, the period in which Lucas wrote it. The 2007 Broadway revival was set in that “present.”]
“I asked Craig about the new time period, and he said that true love in a technological world is worth fighting for, even more than before,” said Chris McCarrell, who plays the cautious, solitary Peter. “It’s interesting to think about how social media and cell phones affect this love story, and what it means to really know the person you believe is meant for you.
As in the original, Rita is still a bartender and graphic designer—and a romantic fatalist. Said Hannah Corneau, who plays, her, “Rita is very fearful and riddled with anxiety about the present world, so it’s hard for her to see life as an opportunity to seize.”
When Mary-Louise Parker played Rita in the 1990 Broadway production, Lucas recalled, “People thought Rita was a charming kook because she was so afraid of the world being destroyed. Flash forward to 2024, Rita doesn’t seem crazy at all. She seems correctly alarmed by the state of the world—she is the most sane person in the play!”
The musical also expands on the events leading up to that fateful kiss, because, as Lucas admitted, in the play Peter and Rita “fall in love very quickly, and they actually get married much too quickly.” Peter and Rita’s meet-cute conversations and wedding-day encouragements are now set to a whimsical, piano-driven score, though Peter’s first meeting with Rita’s parents gets a particularly comical banjo number.
Their scenes also feature an ensemble that sweeps across the stage like a chorus of fates, pushing them together and even pulling them apart at times. “Anyone who has been in a relationship knows it isn’t just built,” said Lucas. “Even without an illness or the kind of terror Rita has, relationships are really hard and take work. The ensemble says: We’re gonna test these people, we’re gonna put them through the wringer to learn what love really costs. What are you willing to do for your love, even if you don’t know what it’ll cost you yet?”
After an anonymous old man ascends from the audience to the stage and shares a kiss with the bride, their switched souls are represented musically: Rita, who had been crooning moody contemporary ballads, suddenly breaks out into a toe-tapping tune packed with jokes and optimistic truisms. The songs of the aged stranger—whose name, we learn, is Julius, and is played by Jonathan Gillard Daly—“have a much more classic feel,” said Messé. “His musical vocabulary is much more old-fashioned.”
One number, “The Man He Used to Be,” called for particular care, as Julius’s daughter mourns the father she knew before the onset of various health problems, and the relationship they shared that no longer exists. “That wasn’t really explored in the play to the degree that you can do with a song,” said Lucas. “It’s a look at mortality in a way that young people don’t like to and don’t want to do. It’s wonderful that [Hartley and Messé] were able to dramatize that, especially since it’s something audiences might be able to relate to on a personal level.”
While much has been added to Prelude to a Kiss for this musical adaptation, some things have been trimmed—like a bit in which the male characters attempt to secure Rita in order to reverse the body swap. As Lucas put it, “In 2024, nobody wants to see two guys with rope getting ready to tie up a woman—it’s sort of obnoxious, and I think that the humor back then was slightly too easy.”
The playwright continued: “I’m generally not someone who likes to revisit what I’ve done before, and it’s very hard for me to pull apart something I made before and rethink it,” he continued. “But it’s fun to be in a room with artists of a new generation, talking about expectations and awareness. And what I’ve learned over the years is, you’d be an idiot not to listen.”
Echoing some of the themes that the show brings to light, Lucas admitted, “That’s why people get annoyed with people of a certain age. They dig their heels in, they refuse to listen, and they refuse to grow.”
[Ashley Lee (she/her) is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about theater, movies, television, and the bustling intersection of the stage and the screen.]
* * * *“5 THINGS THEATRE CRITICISM TAUGHT ME ABOUT PLAYWRITING”by Kelundra Smith
[In American Theatre of 31 July 2024, in a “First Person” feature, managing editor Kelundra Smith, who’s done a gig or two as a freelance theater reviewer, looks at what she learned about playwriting from writing reviews. Her new play, The Wash, is in the midst of its “rolling première as you read this, so if there’s anything to gain as a dramatist from writing reviews, she’s someone who can find it.]
Our managing editor reflects on how the skills she picked up doing arts journalism inform her approach to storytelling in another medium.
“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic,” said Oscar Wilde.
For the better part of the last decade, I was a freelance theatre critic in Atlanta. I spent many nights and weekends in the aisle seat watching stories unfold onstage and then participating in musings about what I’d seen with strangers.
That decade also highlighted for me the stories I wasn’t seeing: about poor people, people of color, people living with disabilities, or transgender or nonbinary folks.
That is part of what motivated me to write The Wash, about the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881. During this important but often overlooked event in American history, Black laundresses in Atlanta refused to wash clothes until they were granted the power to set their own rates and control their wages. They faced resistance from their customers, the government, and within their own ranks. But they ultimately prevailed, growing from a few dozen women on strike to more than 3,000 in less than three weeks.
My other motivation to write The Wash, which took me six years on and off (with a lot of time off) to finish, is that I have often rolled my eyes at the tendency of theatres to depict Black life as past life. But for me this story resonates so much with the present, speaking to the labor movements currently gathering strength in the auto, service, and theatre industries. (The Wash is currently in the midst of an eight-week run in Atlanta, co-produced by Synchronicity Theatre [7-30 June 2024] and Impact Theatre [11-18 July 2024]. In 2025, the play will be at the Black Rep in St. Louis, March 12-30, 2025, and co-produced by Perceptions Theatre [Chicago; Winter 2025] and Prop Thtr, October 2025.)
[The Wash is part of the National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere program. Along with the performance dates listed above, there’s also been a RWP at the Impact Theatre at the Academy in Hapeville, Georgia, 10-28 July 2024.]
Stepping from critic to playwright has been an exhilarating and terrifying experience. I was only half-joking with a mentor when I said that if the play was bad I’d have to move to a different state and live in anonymity. In all seriousness, the process of developing this world premiere play has shown me that playwrights and critics have more in common than they think. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from about playwriting from theatre criticism (and vice versa):
1. You have to have a strong pitch. In journalism, whenever a writer pitches an editor, the editor usually asks, what’s the angle—what’s the hook? Why this story now? I’ve heard that Tarell Alvin McCraney [see posts on Rick On Theater: “Choir Boy (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)” (24 January 2015) and “‘Connoisseur of Grief’” by Carvell Wallace (4 February 2019)] often asked students at Yale Drama School, why is this a play? When it came to The Wash, I knew that I could never get an assignment from a daily paper to write an article connecting a largely forgotten labor strike to labor movements of today while also putting the world of 1881 in its proper context. The story needed more space; it needed the intimacy and immediacy of theatre. I can summarize the play in an elevator, but I’m hoping the experience of the play stays with people far longer.
2. People have to care about who the characters are before they care about what they do. As someone whose journalism education was primarily in magazines, I developed the habit of writing longform pieces early. But as the speed of information has increased rapidly in the last decade, many news outlets have stopped publishing long pieces. These days, reviews are 400-600 words if you’re lucky. Still, I’ve learned that people will read long if the characters are compelling. The same is true for theatre and other media. TV creator Shonda Rhimes [member of Television Hall of Fame; showrunner of Grey’s Anatomy (2005-present), its spin-off Private Practice (2007-13), and Scandal (2012-18)] often talks about starting with characters who make strong choices. If you can make people fall in love with a person, they’ll read (or watch) till the end.
3. The story you start out telling and the one you end up telling may not be the same. The best storytellers are the curious ones. I can’t tell you how many times I went into an interview or a review expecting one thing and leaving with something altogether different. New discoveries are a part of the joy of connecting through stories. When I started writing The Wash, I resisted it being an ensemble piece, but it is one. I think playwrights especially are best served when they focus on the writing and let the story be what it’s going to be.
4. Everything is better with editors. Dramaturgs never get the credit they deserve, so let me shout out the teams at Essential Theatre and Hush Harbor Lab [both in Atlanta] as well as my dramaturg for The Wash, Antonia McCain, for helping me make the 110-page article I started out with into 94-page script. The director Brenda Porter and producers at Synchronicity Theatre challenged me repeatedly to answer the question, what are you trying to convey here? I’ve noticed that playwrights like Lucas Hnath give you all the mitigating circumstances in the first 10 pages, then we spend the remaining time untangling them. The same is true for journalists: Your first two paragraphs have to tell people the whole point. You can’t meander or be too precious about the words. Editors (and dramaturgs) are there to help you see that.
5. The community you build will be the audience you have. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve heard theatre leaders make is to think they’re competing with Netflix. In my opinion, the real competition for live theatre audiences is third places: coffee shops, bars, local hangs, parks, houses of worship, and other spaces where people feel a sense of home and community. Earlier in my career, I did marketing and community engagement for nonprofit theatres, and I figured out quickly that the show has to be more than a show to really engage a community, and that engagement has to be constant. I carried that knowledge into my journalism career, where I didn’t just go see shows I was reviewing; I saw as much as I could.
For The Wash, it was important for me to collaborate with theatres that understand the importance of community engagement. Synchronicity Theatre does pay-what-you-can performances every Wednesday. Impact Theatre offers a senior matinee as well as a free event in their neighborhood that people can attend whether they’re seeing the show or not. In addition, for The Wash, our sound designer Kacie Willis Lauders tapped into her network to host entrepreneur nights for folks to meetup before the show.
During one pay-what-you-can performance, we donated a portion of ticket sales to the Tiny Blessings Foundation, a local nonprofit that provides care packages to new mothers who are unhoused. We also hosted an event called Indigo Night, where we invited local, up-and-coming chefs to sell food in the lobby an hour before the show. They didn’t have to pay a tabling fee or share profit with the theatre, and audience members didn’t have to think about dinner.
All of these events were successful because we had already built the relationships to make them so. When you show people that you’re invested in their thriving, they’ll reciprocate and become invested in yours. That’s a lesson I take with me into all my work, on the page or the stage.
[Kelundra Smith is a playwright, theater reviewer, and journalist who’s worked in marketing and community engagement for theaters. She’s written for the New York Times, Broadway World, the Bitter Southerner, Atlanta magazine, and is a writer at Emory University. She’s the Theatre Communication’s Group’s publications director, guiding strategy for TCG Books, ARTSEARCH, and American Theatre magazine. Smith comes from the Atlanta metro area.]
* * * *“PERFECT PROP PIE”
[It seems the 18-year-old Broadway hit Waitress is having a revival across the country—and if there’s a Waitress, there’s gotta be pies! It hasn’t escaped notice that the musical depends a lot of the sight and smell of a whole lotta different pies. (If you don’t know that already, have a look back at Michael Paulson’s 2016 New York Times report “Sounds Like a Musical, Smells Like Pie” (27 April)—or, as it’s headlined on the website: “Fresh-Baked Pie Has Aromatic Role in ‘Waitress’ Musical.”
[All those performances of life in Joe's Pie Diner, though, require the prop folks at the theaters to make a lot of pies—some the actors have to eat and some are just for show. Kelundra Smith's back, then, with a report from the Fall 2024 issue of American Theatre (posted online on 11 September 2024) from the “Previews” feature. I say she’s pulled out a plumb!]
What theatres are cooking up for ‘Waitress,’ the Sara Bareilles/Jessie Nelson musical that’s popping up at several theatres in the coming season.
The musical Waitress charmed Broadway audiences in its 2016-21 run (following its 2015 premiere at American Repertory Theater). Now regional theatres are dipping their spoons for a taste. The story of Jenna, a young woman stuck in a bad marriage and a dead-end job at a small-town diner who finds solace in baking, started as an independent film starring Keri Russell and eventually made its way to the stage with catchy tunes by Grammy winner Sara Bareilles. As the 2024-25 season unfolds, 10 theatres are producing the endearing musical, which comes with the creative challenge and opportunity of depicting more than two dozen prop pies onstage, plus some edible ones.
[Waitress is a musical with music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles and a book by Jessie Nelson, based on the 2007 film (produced by Night & Day Pictures; distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures). The musical tried out at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August 2015 and then premiered at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Broadway 24 April 2016 and running till 5 January 2020 (33 previews and 1,544 regular performances). Diane Paulus directed, and the production was nominated for four 2016 Tony Award (Best Musical, Best Original Score Written for the Theatre – music and lyrics by Bareilles, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical – Jessie Mueller, Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical – Christopher Fitzgerald).
[The show returned to the Broadway boards from 2 September-20 December 2021 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for an additional 122 performances.]
At Nashville Repertory Theatre in Tennessee, where Waitress runs Sept. 13-22 [2024], prop designer Marlee Shelton and technical director/scenic designer Gary Hoff have been experimenting with insulation, air-dried clay, and foam to capture the texture of the stage pies. Shelton said she’s also been playing with shredded cork for savory pie filling and sawdust for coconut shavings. Added Hoff, “The really fun thing about making fake food is that you get to look at your world in a different way.”
Foam is also on the menu at Northern Stage in White River Junction, Vt., where properties manager Ellen Houlden is using joint compound to depict whipped cream spirals and gluing plastic fruit onto the surface. (The musical will hit the stage there March 12-April 13, 2025.) Though making fake food is one of Houlden’s favorite things to do, sometimes real food is the most economical option. “For Sweat [2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner by Lynn Nottage] I had to make a full cake for every single performance because of the scene where one of the characters takes a fistful of cake,” she recalled. “It made me feel like I connected with the cast in a different way.”
At Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville, Ga., where Waitress will be onstage May 22-June 22, 2025, production manager Katie Chambers and props designer Kristin Talley are also turning to insulating foam for the prop pies. But many of their conversations have been about consumables. For other shows, Chambers said she used whipped cream without filling so actors could eat quickly, then belt out a song. Another time she used instant mashed potatoes for cupcake frosting because the actors didn’t want to eat sweets.
No matter the ingredients, all the designers agree that the most important thing is to make audiences feel like they’re in the diner with Jenna and on the journey with her.
“You can always get yourself out and make a different decision,” Houlden said of the show’s takeaway.
“Sometimes we forget that and we get stuck in our routine. People should feel encouraged to follow their dreams and make big moves.”
* * * *“ANN RONELL: COUNT HER IN”
[If theater history interests you, this excerpt from a new book by Jennifer Ashley Tepper may be the most interesting of my short selections. The piece in the American Theatre of 12 November 2024 is about the first female composer to write all the music and the lyrics for a Broadway show—back in 1944.]
In an excerpt from the new book ‘Women Writing Musicals,’ we learn about the songwriter who became the first woman to write music and lyrics for a full Broadway score, in 1942.
Tepper’s new book is Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy that the History Books Left Out, (Rowan & Littlefield, 2024).
Like Kay Swift [1897-1993], Ann Ronell [1906-93] benefited from the friendship and mentorship of George Gershwin [1898-1937]. She met him while she was a student at Radcliffe when she had the opportunity to interview him for a project. Gershwin encouraged Ann Rosenblatt to change her name to Ann Ronell. After all, he himself had been born Jacob Gershowitz. He also suggested she get training by acting as rehearsal pianist for a show, then hired her for his own musical Rosalie in 1928. She was 21 years old.
In 1931, she made her Broadway debut as a writer when she collaborated with Muriel Pollock [1895-1971] on a song for Shoot the Works! This show was an effort by Heywood Broun [1888-1939] to get actors and writers working, just after the Great Depression hit and people were in a panic. Shoot the Works! featured the contributions of many well-established writers alongside brand-new folks. Ronell got to be one of them after she heard about the project and just showed up at the theatre, trying to get her songs heard and considered. The one that ended up being picked, “Let’s Go Out in the Open Air,” was performed by rising star Imogene Coca [1908-2001].
Ronell hit Tin Pan Alley and began to sell her songs there. In the early 1930s she became successful with “Baby’s Birthday Party,” “Rain on the Roof,” “Give Me Back My Heart,” and “Willow Weep for Me.” Then she began writing songs for films and achieved her most enduring song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” co-written with Frank Churchill [1901-42], which was featured in 1933’s Three Little Pigs. This became the first hit song from a Disney film. She started composing for projects overseas as well.
[Tin Pan Alley was the section of New York City along 28th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues where thousands of commercial popular songs were written during the late 19th to the early 20th century. The name became synonymous with the songwriting and publishing business which was built around the songs produced there. The name is purported to be a reference to the constant sound of pianos as songwriters hammered out their tunes.]
A 1933 article in the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune captured Ronell’s rise to success: “Tin Pan Alley still is man’s domain. But sunny, smiling, determined little 23-year-old Ann Ronell, from Omaha, Nebraska, has crashed it! She has made good in a big way with four popular song hits and a score of others. Even the most anti-feminist old member of Tin Pan Alley had to relent and with one accord she has been acclaimed as one of its own.”
Ronell was quoted in the article by Julia Blanshard [ca. 1892-1934] about first meeting Gershwin when she interviewed him as a student. She shared that it was their conversation that made her resolved to make it as a songwriter herself. She also spoke about getting her start in the business.
“I found that it is impossible to even have your songs heard by the right people, unless you have a pull. Let a girl try to crash into the songwriting game and men will say, ‘Isn’t she cute,’ ‘When can I have a date,’ or ‘This is too tough a game for a nice girl like you!’” The article went on to describe Ronell’s indefatigable perseverance in show business and her entry to the professional world which was assured once Gershwin, Vincent Youmans [1898-1946], and Irving Berlin [1888-1989] heard her work and helped her get a start. The article concluded with a paragraph about her physical appearance and manner of dress.
Ronell spent much of the 1930s in Hollywood, not only writing songs but also music directing—one of the first women to do so for major Hollywood movie musicals.
Ronell’s second Broadway venture, a decade after her first, was even more distinguished. She was the sole writer of both music and lyrics for Count Me In in 1942 at the Barrymore. In this, she became the first woman to write the full score of a full-length Broadway musical by herself. Kay Swift had broken ground as the first woman to write all the music of a full-length Broadway musical by herself [Fine and Dandy, 1930], and now Ronell added lyrics to that distinction as well.
Count Me In started as a college musical. Future theatre critic Walter Kerr [1913-96] had met Leo Brady [1917-84], a professor at Catholic University [Washington, D.C.; Catholic University had a distinguished drama program], when Kerr took classes there, and the two wanted college students to have a theatre experience as close to professional as possible, so they decided to write a show for them to perform. They enlisted Ronell to write the songs. Musicals involving patriotic wartime themes were increasingly popular, so they decided to do another of those. Count Me In’s plot involves a shy businessman who wants to help the war effort at home, and who tries to enlist his family and community to join him.
Before long, the Shuberts were interested in bringing the show to a professional stage, and the college students were replaced by Broadway actors. George Abbott [1887-1995] was enlisted to direct the show in its next steps. He immediately clashed with Ronell and eventually left the show, stating that the score was inferior and that he doubted Ronell’s abilities to better it. [The book was ultimately staged by Robert Ross (1902-54)]
[Brothers Lee (1871-1953), Sam (1878-1905), and Jacob (1879-1963) Shubert founded the Shubert Organization, which dominated the theatrical business and owns 17 Broadway theaters, the most of the three largest theater-owners in New York City, plus two Off-Broadway houses and two in other cities.]
The show tried out in Boston, where Ronell’s score received excellent reviews, the show overall less so. Many thought the book was overly busy. Count Me In’s cast included Gower Champio[n] [1919-80] as one of the children of the lead character. Another future Broadway choreographer, Danny Daniels [1924-2017], was also in the cast. The rest of the illustrious company included Luella Gear [1897-1980], Charles Butterworth [1899-1946], and Jean Arthur [1900-91].
Count Me In received mediocre reviews on Broadway and ran 61 performances. In an interview years later, Ronell commented, “It was a terrific experience writing a show at last, and I understand now why there have been so few women who ever got a hearing on Broadway.”
In 1944, Ronell adapted the 1847 Friedrich Wilhelm Riese [German playwright and librettist; 1805?-79] operetta Martha [1844] for Broadway, with Vicki Baum [Austrian-born writer; 1888-1960]. It played several performances at City Center [22 February-13 May 1944]. Her last Broadway gig was composing a lullaby for the original Broadway production of [Arthur Miller’s (1915-2005)] The Crucible in 1953.
Separate from Broadway, Ronell continued to work busily as a songwriter in the following decades. Her song for the 1945 movie Story of G.I. Joe [United Artists, 1945], which was Academy Award-nominated, was the first theme song to ever play over film credits. She scored a Marx Brothers movie (Love Happy [United Artists, 1949]). She worked on a project with Judy Garland [1922-69] to musically adapt beloved songs into Garland’s style.
In a 1950 interview with Ohio’s Circleville Herald, Ronell said, “Some day I intend to compose the first American opera for film production.” The final line of the piece read, “Ten to one she does.” She never did, but her accomplishments are nevertheless impressive.
[Jennifer
Ashley Tepper is an acclaimed theater historian, author, and producer. She has been the creative and programming
director at 54 Below since 2012, and has published four volumes of The
Untold Stories of Broadway book series (Dress Circle Publishing).]
