The Group Theatre's 'Johnny Johnson'

(19 November 1936-16 January 1937)

[When I was a grad student at New York University, I wrote a paper in May 1984 for a class called 20th-Century Mise-en-Scene, an examination of the staging techniques in modern Western theater taught by the late Michael Kirby  (1931-97).  The paper was a reconstruction of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson, the company’s only musical, with book and lyrics by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill.  The play ran at Broadway’s 44th Street Theatre from 19 November 1936—83 years ago tomorrow—to 16 January 1937.  

[In the course of my research, I read all the reviews I could locate and as many accounts from participants and later scholars as I could find.  I pored over photographs of the production and studied the ground plans of set designer Donald Oenslager.  

[I made slides of the photos and took them with me to Brooklyn (along with a rented portable projector) to interview Tony Kraber, one of the few cast members then still alive, so he could render commentary on the pictures, which I hoped would jog his memory of the then-47-year-old production.  I was also fortunate that at that time, I was acquainted with Sam Leve, a retired set designer, who had been Oenslager’s assistant.  In the end, I pieced together a description of the production from all these sources, picking out performance and staging details wherever I could glean them.  

[Kirby, then the editor of The Drama Review, proposed that I submit the paper to the journal, which was planning a Group Theatre issue, and the reconstruction was published as “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson (1936)” in the winter issue of 1984 (28.4 – T104).  It was my first published article.

[This post is a combination of my original typescript and the TDR version.  I have also revised it a little for Rick On Theater.]

Introduction

On Thursday, 19 November 1936, the Group Theatre (1931-41) opened its only musical play.  Johnny Johnson, with book and lyrics by Paul Green (1894-1981) and music by Kurt Weill (1900-50), played at the 44th Street Theatre on Broadway for a scant nine weeks—a total of only 68 performances—closing after the matinee and evening shows on Saturday, 16 January 1937.  It was an unusual play in many respects, and certainly would have had a startling effect on its audiences, who couldn’t really have known what to expect. 

According to Green:

The story of the legend—that is what I like to call the play—is the musical autobiography of a common soldier whose natural common sense runs counter to a sophisticated civilization.  The first act is a comedy, the second a tragedy and the third a satire.  That sounds crazy and maybe I can’t get away with it but that is what I have tried to write.

Green communicated his antiwar message in a succession of expressionistic scenes, pervaded by songs, ballads, marches, and hymns by Kurt Weill.

The play, subtitled “The Biography of a Common Man,” told the story of Johnny Johnson, an honest, truth-loving fellow who volunteered to be a soldier in the “war to end all wars.”  Green explained his choice of the leading character’s name in the News-Week review: “The character is named Johnny Johnson because war records show that there were 30,000 Johnsons in the American Army.  Three thousand of them were John Johnsons.” 

Johnny, a tombstone-carver, is introduced at the dedication of a peace monument he’d carved, just at the moment President Woodrow Wilson proclaims war.  His romantic fiancée, Minny Belle Tompkins, is enraptured by the glories of prospective martial heroism, and Johnny goes off to enlist at the local recruiting office. 

He’s put through army training with some difficulty and shipped off to France.  At the front, he contracts a private peace with a young German soldier, whom Johnny sends back to carry a message of peace and brotherhood to the other German soldiers. 

Wounded, Johnny is sent to a hospital from which he escapes with a canister of laughing gas.  He doses the Allied Supreme Command with the gas and temporarily succeeds in calling off the war.  He’s sent home to a lunatic asylum where a mad psychiatrist diagnoses him with as suffering from “peace monomania.”  Finally released, Johnny’s reduced to selling toys on a street corner—not very successfully, however, since he doesn’t carry tin soldiers.

The Origins of the Project

Johnny Johnson was a departure from the Group Theatre’s usual realistic and naturalistic productions coming “out of the Group Theatre’s suggestion, stimulation and actual assistance.”  The idea was spawned early in 1936 after Kurt Weill arrived in America.  The Group had become intrigued with Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, and they befriended him.  Stella Adler (1901-92) eventually suggested Weill write a musical play for the Group, and Weill proposed an American version of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, which had been done with some success in Germany by Erwin Piscator in 1927.

Harold Clurman (1901-80) visited Paul Green, who’d written the Group’s first play, The House of Connelly (1931), at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  While he was there, Clurman learned that Green had fought in France in World War I and “had an intimate acquaintance with the American soldier of that day.”  He passed on Weill’s proposal, and Green expressed interest.

Returning to New York, Clurman told Cheryl Crawford (1902-86), who, with Clurman  and Lee Strasberg (1901-82), made up the Group’s ruling triumvirate, that Green was the playwright for the job.  When Green definitely agreed to collaborate, Crawford and Weill went to Chapel Hill to start work on the scenario.  Crawford served as “coordinator” and the project became her “adopted child.”

Money being in short supply, the Group customarily spent the summer at an adult camp.  This time it was Pinebrook Club Camp in Nichols, Connecticut.  Clurman was named managing director of the Group, assuming authority over executive decisions.  As he and the Group tried to work out some internal problems, they awaited the arrival of the playwright who’d promised them scripts.

When Green arrived  with his script of Johnny Johnson, it was still unfinished.  It needed more work, and Green took it back to Chapel Hill.  At the summer’s end, Green returned to Pinebrook with the finished rehearsal script, and work began only a week or so before the Group moved back to New York.

The Music

The play that Paul Green wrote for Kurt Weill’s music was what he had come to call “‘symphonic drama’ . . . a ‘sounding together’ in the true meaning of the Greek word.”  From the very start, he said, “I wanted a musical score to be part of the script,” for “without music there could be no war . . . .  Music has always been an integral part of fighting.” 

Weill’s music, the first he wrote for the American stage, was based on American folk and popular songs.  It ranged over several genres, but filtered through his own European sensibilities.  It was variously described as “haunting,” “tuneful, gay and touching,” “lovely,” “seemingly careless, really profoundly sensitive,” “weird,” and “dramatic.”

The musical style itself wasn’t as striking as the way it was interwoven with the book.  A Group advertising flyer for the production explained:

While this is a play with songs, it is not a musical show.  The singing arises naturally from the situations of the imaginative story and the verses of the song flow as simply as the prose of the speech.

In  a theater more accustomed to operettas (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat, generally considered the first American book musical, was presented only nine years earlier) and revues, such a production would doubtlessly attract attention.  The Brooklyn Eagle remarked, “All through the proceedings, the players stop at intervals to sing . . .,” and the New York Post called it “a new form in Broadway theatre . . . in that it introduces songs and incidental music regularly through the performance in an artless, haphazard manner . . . .”  The clearest description of how Weill’s music melded with Green’s script is provided by composer Marc Blitzstein:

. . . Weill has practically added a new form to the musical theatre.  It is not opera, although it partakes of the ‘number’ form of Mozart.  And it is decidedly not revue-form.  It owes something to the movies, but it is much more attached to the script.  Take the spot where the exasperated Sergeant tries to put Johnny through all the military paces, and winds up saying—“and you won’t learn, and so the hell with you!” [Act I, scene 4].  As he starts (speaking), the music insinuates itself into his speech, and his enumeration of the maneuvers gains momentum and dash by becoming rhythmical and percussive—until the final expletive, when the music drops out.

As for the performance of Weill’s music, critics nearly unanimously agreed that the Group’s actors weren’t trained singers.  The New York Sun said simply, “They act better than they sing.”  The production’s intent, however, was to present ordinary characters who sing—not professional singers.  The Group had no intention of presenting, nor did Green and Weill write, the usual sort of musical comedy.  Green intended to make the music an integral element of the play—his meaning of “symphonic drama.”  Speaking of Roll Sweet Chariot (1934), his first attempt at this kind of play, Green explained:

I found that in trying to express the inner lives and turmoilings . . . I was having to call upon nearly all the available elements in modern theatrical art . . . .  Folk song and poetry were needed here.  Likewise dance and pantomime and chorus voices.

Lehman Engel (1910-82), musical director of the production, described his encounter with the cast in rehearsal: “There were no singers in the cast, and the songs were worked on chiefly from an acting point of view.”  This, in fact, was precisely what Green wanted and what Weill had written.  As proof of this, there are two independent pieces of evidence. 

In the 1957 MGM Heliodor recording of Johnny Johnson, performers not generally known as singers were cast in the lead roles.  The record producers were probably trying to be true to the Green and Weill’s intentions using people such as Burgess Meredith (1907-97), who sang Johnny, over “legit” singers.  In addition, Lotte Lenya (1898-1981)—who was married to Kurt Weill—also sang on the record, and her unique performance style sounds unmusical to the uninitiated, as were 1936 critics. 

Even the musically knowledgeable could misjudge this new this new style, as Lehman Engel noted with some embarrassment.  He had just met the Weills, and didn’t know that Mrs. Weill was Lotte Lenya.  They were having tea at Engel’s Greenwich Village apartment:

In my desperate need to make conversation, I spoke of The Threepenny Opera with sincere enthusiasm but added that the female singer on a recording I had was terrible!  The Weills smiled indulgently and said that I must have the French recording.  No, I persisted, I had the German one.  It was then I found out that the singer was Lotte Lenya, my guest!  In my young life I held pear-shape vocal tones sacred, and it was to be many years before I could comprehend any other kind of singing.  When I did, I was to worship at the shrine of Lotte Lenya.

With this realization, it’s understandable that the Group would not bring in outside singers to enhance their vocal quality and that as “actors first and singers second, they would have delighted [Bertolt] Brecht with their lack of musical sophistication.” 

The Sets

As soon as the Group returned to New York, construction began on the scenery.  Donald Oenslager (1902-75), who’d been engaged as set designer, determined that “the first act . . . required poetic realism . . . .  The second act . . . employed expressionism . . . .  The third act . . . required distorted settings.”  There were problems, however, putting his concepts into practice. 

First, after Oenslager had made plans for the set according to his own design principles—an outgrowth of the New Stagecraft of Adolphe Appia and E. Gordon Craig—the Group directorate insisted he reconceive the production from an expressionistic point of view.  This caused some difficulty for Oenslager, who was not particularly interested in Expressionism. 

The second problem developed when Oenslager, in a hurry between appointments, left his new drawings in a drug store.  Having lost his second set of plans, he quickly drew a third set in time for construction to begin.  He felt his last-minute rush might have given his designs some serendipitous spontaneity. 

The production was out-of-the-ordinary for the Group, whose reputation had been built on Realism and Naturalism.  Johnny Johnson was “the only Group play that turned away from naturalism in all its elements . . . .”  Lee Strasberg, however, maintained that this was not as unusual as the public thought: “In many of our shows, we really used the principles of abstract art . . . .  [I]n productions like . . . Johnny Johnson, we used modern art forms.”  The overall effect of Oenslager’s “geometric setting”—which suited Green’s three-divisional script—was striking:

The warped perspective created by the exaggeratedly raked floor of the interior platform setting for this play, somewhat derivative of [Nikolai] Akimov’s work in the Soviet theatre after the First World War, helped create the mad whimsy of the play.

This, of course, was not how every critic saw it.  Blitzstein, who admired the music so much, didn’t respond to what he called “the hodgepodge scenic styles in the staging of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson . . . .” 

The scenery was mostly drab colors, gradations of black and white with a “sepia tint.”  The only sets with bright colors were the most starkly mad scenes: the Allied Supreme Command at the Château de Cent Fontaines, which had red, white, and gold appointments; the psychiatrist’s office, with its “red and white desk slanting at an angle of forty-five degrees . . .”; and  in the forensic arena in the insane asylum, also appointed in red and gold, and draped with American flags. 

In the remaining scenes, color was mostly absent, except for the opening celebration scene where color accent was provided by costume pieces such as ribbons and bows, mostly on the little girls.   

Furthermore, to enhance this subdued appearance, the show was spot-lit, illuminating small areas of the stage while leaving the rest in ambiguous darkness.   Even the indoor scenes had the appearance of being lit from one source that pinpointed a particular spot on the set, such as the psychiatrist’s raked desk, with the rest of the stage in increasing shadows receding into darkness.

This shadow effect was exaggerated by the vast stage at the 44th Street Theatre.  By all estimations, the theater was too big for the show.  The large musical house, with its 20- by 30-foot proscenium opening, necessitated that Oenslager design sets too big for the play.  Even with the vast sets, however, the stage area had to be reduced for what was primarily an intimate show, and this was done with lighting, enhancing the ambiguity of the space surrounding the performers.

The Rehearsals

Shortly after returning to New York, Clurman found that his duties as managing director as well as some personal difficulties were overwhelming, and he relinquished the directorship of Johnny Johnson to Lee Strasberg.  Rehearsals had already begun at Pinebrook with the Group’s usual discussions about meaning and content with Green and Weill, who were both in residence by this time.  Sessions continued in New York at the Belmont Theatre, a small house on 48th Street, with improvisations and experimentation.

The Group acting style, a heightened Realism, had by this time been set, and Strasberg saw no cause to develop a different style for Johnny Johnson.  (It’s worth noting here that Strasberg was one of the principle developers of the Stanislavsky-derived acting style known as the Method.)  Sam Leve (1908-99), Oenslager’s former student at the Yale School of Drama and assistant for Johnny Johnson, recalled that though the sets and physical production were heavily expressionistic, the acting, for the most part, was realistic.  In fact, only the “eccentrics” of the play were in any way exaggerated—the High Command, the psychiatrist, and the Brothers in the asylum debating society.

The music, too, was rehearsed in the Group’s usual manner.  Lehman Engel recalled:

The preparation of Johnny was unique among musical shows,  Since it was done with actors saturated in the Stanislavsky Method according to the gospel of Lee Strasberg, the show was studied, improvised, and dissected for  period of about three months prior to the beginning of actual rehearsals.

Many of the songs, in fact, were not even assigned to specific actors until just before performances began.  The whole cast learned and rehearsed the score, except a few songs that had been specifically written for certain performers, such as Private Harwood’s “Cowboy Song: The Rio Grande,” which had been written for Tony Kraber (1905-86).

The ensemble work that the Group had established over the five years of their existence was evident in their rehearsals, as well as the subsequent performances.  Again, Lehman Engel recalled that the company members “were especially considerate of each other’s neuroses and idiosyncrasies, which were legion.”

Then the production moved from the 500-seat Belmont to the 1400-seat 44th Street Theatre.  Lehman Engel described the consequences:

I recall one dress rehearsal when the actors had to encounter Donald Oenslager’s scenery for the first time.  The chief problem suddenly became one of self-preservation in climbing out of World War I trenches and of making costume changes with no allowable time.  The acting problem then became secondary despite the protest of the director.

In this state, Johnny Johnson went into previews.

The Previews

The show was conceived and rehearsed on an intimate scale.  Spectators at Belmont rehearsals were “very moved.”  In the smaller theater, “the production seemed charming: informal, unpretentious and sweet.”  But the company had no choice—only the 44th Street Theatre was available.  Johnny Johnson moved in and was “suddenly dwarfed and the light-handed informality of the performance lost its effectiveness.” 

Clurman’s fears of the effects of the larger theater were borne out: “Our actors’ voices sounded so small they were occasionally inaudible; Donald Oenslager’s sets . . . now appeared monstrous; the performances now looked amateurish.” 

The move to an unfamiliar space, the large set—19 scenes—and the Group’s financial problems all conspired to make the previews a disaster.  The orchestra was under-rehearsed, the actors got lost; “after the first five minutes . . . half the audience left.  By the end of the performance there were no more than twenty people in the auditorium.”

The opening was delayed for two days.  Musical numbers were cut and sets were abandoned (“New York Harbor” and “A road somewhere in France”).  The company stayed up every night till early morning “polishing, cutting and revising . . . .”  According to Clurman, the show improved each night, and by opening night had gone from 19 scenes to 13.  Clurman was astounded: “The performance went smoothly, and the audience appeared wildly enthusiastic.” 

The Response

The press response to Johnny Johnson ”was critically favorable, but discouraged all but the cognoscenti from seeing it.”  The audiences, however, generally enjoyed the show so much, many returned several times.  In the words of the New York Post reviewer, the audience “stood up and whooped loud applause for a good ten minutes . . . when the curtain fell on the opening of ‘Johnny Johnson’ . . . .”  Paul Green came out on stage to more applause, and Clifford Odets, Walter Huston, and Burgess Meredith were “overheard bellylaughing at the gags.” 

Of course, not everyone was this enthusiastic.  Some didn’t care for the comedy that ran through the play.  Some found the play touching; some laughed at the humor.  One reviewer said that “like a revue-goer, you enjoy some [scenes] and are bored stiff by others.”

The Performance

The diversity and strength of the reactions from both reviewers and theatergoers was due as much to the production’s uniqueness as to its quality.  Paul Green’s new form—the “symphonic drama”; Kurt Weill’s “non-musical” score; the ingenuousness of the performance, particularly the singing; and the three-styled expressionistic sets combined to make an event unprecedented on Broadway.  Like it or not, it was different.  In a promotional piece, Lee Strasberg wrote:

We meant to do an American folk legend, full of the humors of old vaudeville and the provincial family album, sharpened with poetic comments on the madness of contemporary life.  We felt that fantasy, extravagance, and dramatic music were intrinsic to such an exciting and ambitious experiment.

An advertising flyer for the show concluded that “the Group Theatre believes Johnny Johnson to be the most unusual and entertaining play it has presented thus far.”  There’s little doubt this was the case.

Paul Green’s attempt to combine various theatrical elements while juxtaposing dramatic genres didn’t always sit well with spectators.  The New York Post complained that “the play . . . leaps from straight drama to the maddest sort of farce and hence into pure fantasy with great abandon.” 

Others found the mélange pleasing: “The piece is built of dialogue, movement, scene, music, all together.  It is a promising—and needed—example of theatre that passes from one to the other of these with equal ease.” 

Despite the diversity of material and the number of scene-changes—which rose from 12 to 13 between opening and closing—an attempt was obviously made to keep the production in motion.    An unidentified reviewer in a weekly review of current plays called Margaret Wentworth's Sign Post remarked on the “quick-changing scenes” and Douglas Gilbert of the New York World said, “Lee Strasberg has staged the piece with a feverish continuity that matches the script.” 

The show’s pace seems due in part to a revolving set.  Though no reviewer mentioned this fact, the Alfredo Valente photographs of the set and Donald Oenslager’s floor-plans clearly show a turntable.  The sets shown in the drawings were specifically designed for a revolve with several back-to-back scenes indicated. 

Oenslager’s sketches suggest that sets were changed behind a blind—a painted backdrop, simple drape, or tall piece of constructed scenery—while a scene was in progress on the other side.  Sam Leve confirmed that this was the case.

What the audience saw was a central set piece—ranging from the complete, realistic front porch of the Tompkins home in Act I, scene 2, to a simple ramp with a painted backdrop for the camp drill-ground in Act I, scene 5—with the rest of the stage closed off by returns and two sets of wings.

In more complex sets, such as the porch, the recruiting office (Act I, scene 3), and the front-line trench (Act II, scene 1), small set pieces were run out from the wings.  It’s obvious from this set-up why spot-lighting was both necessary and desirable to close down the huge stage of the 44th Street Theatre.

The scenes changed so quickly that Russell Collins (1897-1965), who played Johnny, couldn’t completely change from his civilian costume in Act I, scene 3, to a full uniform in scene 4.  Photographs clearly show he was still wearing his civilian trousers under his military tunic until Act II.  It’s possible that some scenes might have revolved into view as the previous scene was ending.  Some photographs of Act I, scene 1, are taken with the scene 2 front porch in the background.

(This isn’t confirmed by any source.  Another explanation, perhaps more likely, is that some photographs of this scene weren’t taken in performance, and for one reason or another were shot before the scene 2 set.  Remember, though, that Lehman Engel recalled actors “making costume changes with no allowable time” in dress rehearsal.)

The acting, as has already been suggested, was primarily realistic.  Like Sam Leve, who witnessed several rehearsals, critics found this detracted from the performance when too much Realism “inhibited freedom of treatment”: “A certain heaviness was apparent in the production of Johnny Johnson, and despite the fine fantastication of Lee Strasberg’s production idea many performances seemed slack and pedestrian.”  The most blatant indictment of this problem came from John Mason Brown, who felt the Group Theatre’s actors

. . . set about the business of being funny with as much self-consciousness as if they were . . . a Greek chorus . . . . 

They reach for the ridiculous with a grim seriousness which does not add to the lightness of the lighter portions of “Johnny Johnson.”  They are all desperately in earnest.

The play opened on the dedication of Johnny’s monument to peace.  The script describes the scene: “The ground is covered with a carpet of green grass, and at the right a quaint young arbor-vitae tree is growing.”  Photographs of this scene show little of such realistic touches.  A certain backdrop bisected the turntable, and except for the Mayor’s bunting-draped “soap-box,” the stage was bare.  Several shots of this scene, including the Mayor speaking from his soap-box, and the confrontation of Johnny and Minny Belle with his rival Anguish Howington, were taken in front of the porch set for scene 2.  There was no documented explanation of this occurrence.

The porch setting was apparently substituted for the living room location described in the script.  The little evidence afforded by photographic records indicates the scene proceeded predictably in all other respects.  Both the setting and performances appeared essentially realistic in detail. 

The same was true of scene 3 in the recruiting office, except that the office was number 596673 in performance, instead of 18659 as indicated in the script.  (This change was apparently also made after the previews, as the 17 November program used the same number as the script; the opening-night program made the alteration.)  

Scene 4 seems to have been added in performance (or deleted from the published script).  It was set at an army training ground:

But the army takes [Johnny].  Then we see him being made into a soldier.  He can’t learn very well because the regulations sound silly to him, and besides he’s left-handed.  Everything is harder in the Army for a left-hander . . . .  He is finally taken off to war, against the better judgement of the whole army, because he seems to have won more favors from a favor-dispensing woman war worker than his sergeant and his captain.

The set for the scene was a virtually bare stage, with a raked platform across the center of the turntable, bisected by a drop painted with a row of military barracks.

The Statue of Liberty scene, originally scene 4, was cut after previews but reinstated sometime during the show’s run as Act I, scene 5.  In the scene, after Johnny sang a declaration of his peaceful intentions and his faithfulness to Minny Belle (“Johnny’s Speech”) to the Statue, the Statue sang a response of haunting sentiment (“Song of the Goddess”).  The song was omitted from the published version and there are no photographs of the scene.

In Act II, the first scene, set on “A road somewhere in France,” was apparently cut as a separate set, and the moment—virtually without dialogue, but with a column of wounded French soldiers returning from the front (“Song of the Wounded”)—was performed as part of the next scene, “The front line trench.”  In this new scene 1, an English Sergeant sang about “Tea.”  The program and published script list Jules (later John) Garfield (1913-52) as having played the part. 

As photographs clearly show, and Kraber clearly remembered, the role was played by Luther Adler (1903-84), and at least one reviewer recorded this reaction to the moment: “. . . and one perfectly atrocious [performance] by the Group’s best actor, Luther Adler.  He is for a few terrible moments a Cockney sergeant.”  The scene ended with Johnny in the trench with his company, who “. . . writhe their limbs in troubled sleep. [while] three great cannon bathed in green light rise over the parapet, and ghoulishly croak a lament . . . .”

In the hospital (Act II, scene 3, in production; scene 4 in the script), the set was minimal: a folding screen and a hospital bed set on the forward quarter of the turntable backed by the same drape used to divide the stage in Act I, scene 1.  The rest of the space appears ambiguous, though one photograph shows empty beds protruding from behind the drape divider.

The Château de Cent Fontaines (Act II, scene 4), set of the Allied Supreme Command, was the first brightly colored set in the show.  A very stylized drop of red and gold panels and a set piece resembling a large fan at the center rear formed the back “wall” of the set, bisecting the turntable.  The commanders all sat in plush-covered chairs of ornate design as they outbid each other for the number of casualties their forces would suffer.  There was an apparent attempt to make the actors in this scene look like their historical counterparts—although the characters are not named either in the script or in the program.

The scene designated in the scripts and the preview program as scene 7 didn’t exist as a separate scene by opening.  It may have been incorporated into the previous scene (“The edge of a great battlefield”).  This scene was a striking visual and musical moment that Charles Dexter of the Daily Worker described: “. . . in the climax, an English [sic – the script and program both say “American”] and a German minister [pray] as the bayonettes flash in the dark . . . .” 

In fact, the two priests chant and sing the same prayer in counterpoint, each in his own language.  (Only the English version of the prayer is in the published script, though the stage directions indicate that the German Priest utters the prayer in German.)  By opening night, this was the last scene in Act II.  The second New York Harbor scene was dropped and remained deleted throughout the run.

Act III opened in the State Hospital in the office of Dr. Mahodan: “. . . The examining psychiatrist was barricaded behind an enormous, crazily-aslant table and, as played by [Morris] Carnovsky [1897-1992] with deliberately jerky and angular gestures and body movements, seemed decidedly crazier than the patient . . . .”  This was the second scene with bright colors.  The raked red-and-white desk, placed in the set’s left front corner (on the turntable), sloped from five feet on the rear left down to three inches at center stage.  The lighting was very bright only on the desk; the rest of the set dimmed considerably.

The third colorful scene was Act III, scene 2, set in “the forensic arena in the house of balm.”  The set, with its sharply angled rear wall, was festooned with flags and brightly lit.  As the Adelphi Debating Society engaged in its discussion “Albert Van Deckers [sic - Dekkers] . . . as a mad gentleman . . . knits while the Senate is in session . . . .”

Finally released from the asylum, Johnny was reduced to selling toys “along a street symbolically leading nowhere.”  The stage was very dimly lit and nearly bare, with only a banistered flight of steps at the front right and an unlit lamppost at the front left.  The light seemed to have emanated from off stage in the rear right corner, leaving the playing area in deep shadows.

The floor plan of the scene shows the slanting rear wall was the same as the walls of Act III, scenes 1 and 2.  It bisected the turntable from eight o’clock to two o’clock in all three scenes, giving further evidence of the use of the revolving stage.

The play’s final moment is indicative of how blackouts were used between the many scenes:

The Paul Green-Kurt Weill musical Johnny Johnson borrows the [Charlie] Chaplin fade-out as its hero, momentarily defeated, goes off whistling, “a little more clearly now, a little more bravely” or (on the record) singing “We’ll never lose our faith and hope and trust in all mankind . . . .”

Conclusion

Visually, thematically, and musically unusual, Johnny Johnson was undoubtedly a controversial event, even among those who simply didn’t care for it.  It spawned discussion among leftists, pacifists, humanists, and adherents of many other causes and philosophies, each espousing Johnny Johnson’s point of view as their own.  Audiences were less confused by the play than critics: “Almost everyone who saw Johnny Johnson was charmed by it. . . .  [I]t had a subtlety and wit which were thoroughly engaging.”

Had the theater been smaller, the success of the production would probably have been assured, not only from a financial standpoint, but a critical one as well: “In a theatre suited to its scale, it would have come across with much greater bite; on that huge stage, it seemed weak.”  (Kraber estimated that the production came within $1,000 of its “nut” every week.  They just couldn’t fill the 1,463 seats of the 44th Street Theatre.

Johnny Johnson was an excellent example of Paul Green’s feeling that “The narrow confines of the usual Broadway play are not fitted to the dramatic needs of the American people.  They cannot contain the richness of our tradition, folkways, singing, dancing and poetry.”  It’s ironic that the thing most responsible for Johnny Johnson’s failure wasn’t a theater too small to contain it, but one too big for it to fill.

[The original production of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson included a number of company members who went on to become well known on stage and on film.  Among these, in addition to those named in the article above, were Phoebe Brand (1907-2004), Lee J. Cobb (1911-76), Elia Kazan (1909-2003), Will Lee (1908-82), and Sanford Meisner (1905-97).

[After the original 1936-37 production of Johnny Johnson by the Group Theatre, there were several revivals of the play.  From 21 October through 28 October 1956, there was an Off-Broadway production presented at the Little Carnegie Playhouse at Carnegie Hall directed by Stella Adler and starring, among others, James Broderick as Johnny Johnson and Gene Saks as the Mad Psychiatrist.  A Broadway revival directed by José Quintero opened, after 10 previews, on 11 April 1971 at the Edison Theatre, and closed after one performance.  The cast included Ralph Williams as Johnny and Alice Cannon as Minny Belle.

[Johnny Johnson was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company on 6-15 August 1986 at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Paul Marcus.  In 2009, a concert version was staged in London by the Discovering Lost Musicals Charitable Trust, with Max Gold in the title role.

[The ReGroup Theatre Company presented two staged readings of the play directed by Estelle Parsons at the 47th Street Theatre in New York on 12 December 2011.  In November 1956, the MGM recording I mentioned above (which was unrelated to the contemporaneous Off-Broadway staging) was released and in November 1996, Erato Records released another album of Weill’s score for Johnny Johnson.

[I’ve written a little about this research and the writing of the report twice before on ROT.  First, because it was my first published essay, I included it in my discussion “Writing,” posted on 9 April 2010; then I included it in a compilation I called “Short Takes: Research Coups” on 5 August 2011 because I made  a  discovery in my research—Oenslager’s use of a turntable in the set design.]

The Rhine in Flames

As many regular readers of Rick On Theater know, I lived in Germany with my family for a number of years as a teenager.  (See my post “An American Teen In Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013.  I was also stationed in West Berlin ten years later when I was in the army.)  From 1962 to 1965, my dad, who was a Foreign Service Officer, was assigned to Koblenz, a small city in Land Rheinland-Pfalz (the state of Rhineland-Palatinate).  It had just reached 100,000 inhabitants the month my dad arrived in town.

(Back in that time, my family and I took to using many German words, names, and expressions among ourselves.  As a student at an international school in Switzerland, my schoolmates, both those who took their classes in French and those who studied in English, and I had our own lingua franca, Franglais—or franglais, as the French kids would have it.  Most people know that that’s a sort of pastiche of French and English and we spoke it among ourselves all the time.

(Well, my folks and I and other Anglophones we knew in Koblenz, including some Canadians, Brits, and other Amis, did the same thing with German, a kind of Denglisch, you might say.  So in our house, a chest was a Schrank, a common soft drink was Limonade (not lemonade, but a lemon-lime soda like 7 Up) and a fruit juice we liked was Johannesbeerensaft, even when we were speaking English.  The same went for things like the name of the state in which we were living, the Rhineland-Palatinate, which we routinely called the Rheinland-Pfalz; the Elector’s palace was the Schloss, Ehrenbreitstein was the Festung, not the fortress, the Mosel River was always the Mosel and not Moselle, and so on.

(For a topic like this one that transports me back to those years, I fall back into that habit, and rather than force myself to struggle against an old habit, I’m going to be indulging myself—and I hope you can go with it.  I’ll translate or explain those German words and terms at least once when I first use them.)

Koblenz is right on the Rhine River, the second-longest river in Central and Western Europe (after the Danube), about 60 miles north of Mainz, the largest city in the Rheinland-Pfalz and the state’s capital, and 53 miles south of Bonn, the former capital of the Bundesrepublik (Federal Republic [of Germany]) when it was known colloquially as West Germany (1949 to 1990).  Europe’s tenth-longest river, of its 760-mile length, the Rhine’s longest stretch (432 miles) flows within Germany (it starts in Switzerland and ends in Holland), rolling past mountains and cliffs (like the legendary Lorelei, about 23½ miles south of Koblenz), towns and cities, fortresses and castles—nearly 50, some restored, some partially restored, and some just ruins; one, Pfalz-bei-Kaub, sits on an island in the stream itself (28 miles south of Koblenz)—and vineyards, vineyards, vineyards. 

Koblenz is located at the point where the Mosel River flows into the Rhine, forming the Deutsches Eck (German corner) like a giant street corner (about a mile upstream from our house).  Thus the city, now at over 114,000 inhabitants and the third largest in the Rheinland-Pfalz (after Mainz and Ludwigshafen), lies between the two most important wine-producing river valleys in Germany.

Our government-supplied house was on the Rheinanlagen (now renamed the Kaiserin-Augusta-Anlagen for the first Empress of Germany, the wife of Kaiser Wilhelm I), a promenade along the river which runs downstream a little over two miles from the Deutsches Eck; no motorized vehicles except service trucks and three-wheelers are permitted on the walkway.  Our large living room windows at Rheinanlagen 12 looked out with an unobstructed view at the river essentially across the “street.”

Even when we had nothing else to do, sitting and watching the activity along the Rhine was endlessly engrossing.  Small boats of all kinds plied the waterway along with ferries crossing to and from the towns on the other bank; barges and tugs moved coal, automobiles, or other freight up and down the river. 

It was startling when we first realized that families lived on those barges, with little huts rising from the decks and evidence of family life, such as cooking smoke rising from the little chimney, a small car parked next to the tiny home, and laundry hanging out to dry alongside, visible as the boats sailed by.  Sometimes children played on the flat deck of the barge and not infrequently, there was a dog barking. 

There were also lots of cruise ships sailing from Mainz or points south—Mannheim or Basel—down to Rotterdam and back.  Koblenz was an overnight stop on the river cruises and the piers were located just downstream from our house so we could often see the tourists embarking or disembarking.  One of the hotels where the cruise passengers stopped, a few hundred yards down from our house, had the wonderfully evocative name of the Kleiner Riesen—the Little Giant. 

Koblenz is an old town, dating back to Roman times when it was called Confluentes, for the confluence of the Rhine and the Mosel.  In 1992, the city celebrated its 2000th anniversary.  Though Mainz is the state capital (and Trier, 62 miles northeast, had been the Roman regional capital), Koblenz is the site of the Schloss (palace) of the Kurfürst (Prince-Elector) of Trier, one of the 23 electors of the Holy Roman Emperor from the 13th century until the HRE was abolished in 1806. 

That Kurfürst is a connection to one of the biggest annual public celebrations in Koblenz and the surrounding area in the Middle Rhine Valley: Der Rhein in Flammen—known in English as The Rhine in Flames—an immense pyrotechnical event.  The first Rhine in Flames fireworks display took place in Koblenz in 1756 in honor of Johann IX Philipp von Waldendorf (1701-68), the Archbishop-Elector of Trier from 1756 to 1768.  According to historical records, Elector Johann Philipp, who was staying at Festung Ehrenbreitstein (the Schloss wasn’t built until 1778), towering on a cliff overlooking the river from its eastern bank, was partial to firework shows, so a pyrotechnical display burst over the castle. 

The backstory for the Rhine in Flames goes back to the final years before the common era when the Roman invaders were conquering what became the northern frontiers of the Roman Empire.  The Roman legions were barricaded behind border fortifications called lῑmitēs, constructed to protect the Romans from the “uncivilized” and “wild” Germans.  (Think of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain; it served the same purpose.) 

To get to the enemy, the indigenous German defenders had to find a way to distract the Romans, so they sent burning ships down the Rhine and confused the Roman troops.  While the Romans were in disarray, the Germans broke through the walls.  

(Sounds a little bit like the Wall in Game of Thrones that guarded the Kingdom of the North [Germania] and the rest of Westeros [Roman Empire] from the wildings and the White Walkers [Germani].  Then the Wall [Roman lῑmes] was breached and the White Walkers poured through the gap.)

The tactic of the German tribal warriors became the model for the modern celebration of the Rhine in Flames.  To honor Elector Johann Philipp after his appointment and to mark his visit to Koblenz, rockets were fired from aboard three boats positioned in the middle of the river opposite the Deutsches Eck.  Pyrotechnics were also set off from a large wooden frame set up on the Ehrenbreitstein embankment as the Elector’s boat lay anchored below the Festung.

On Thursday, 14, and Friday, 15 August 1845, Queen Victoria (1819-1901; reined from 1837) and Prince Albert (1819-61; Prince-Consort from 1840) of England visited Koblenz as part of their official trip through Germany.  (Readers may remember that Prince Albert was German, from the royal family of Saxe-Coberg and Gotha, within what is now the German state of Bavaria some 215 miles east of Koblenz.  Part of the voyage was to pay a private family visit to Albert’s home duchy, which was also Victoria’s mother’s birthplace, at the end of August and early September.  Albert celebrated his 26th birthday in Coberg on 26 August.)

The royal couple, accompanied by the King and Queen of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV (1795-1861; reined from 1840) and Elisabeth Ludovika of Bavaria (1801-73); the King of Belgium, Léopold I (1790-1865; Léopold was an uncle of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert); and the Crown Prince of Prussia, Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig (1797-1888; the king’s brother and regent from 1958 who would become Wilhelm I, the first Emperor of Germany; reined as King of Prussia from 1861 and Kaiser from 1871), were honored with firework displays in Bonn and Cologne before they continued on their Rheinreise (Rhine journey) by steamer to Schloss Stolzenfels near Koblenz, where they were to stay.  (The palace, rebuilt from a ruined 13th-century castle in 1842, belonged to King Friedrich Wilhelm.)

The story has it that Victoria was enjoying the beautiful Rhine scenery so much that she insisted on staying aboard the royal yacht, HMY [Her Majesty’s Yacht] Victoria and Albert, for the day.  In the afternoon, she was welcomed to Koblenz with gun salvos from Festung Ehrenbreitstein.  After disembarking at Stolzenfels, the royal couple were treated to another spectacular pyrotechnical show.

The tradition was continued irregularly until the 1930s; it was halted during World War II, then revived.  Today, the firework show that’s the culmination of the festival still takes place over Ehrenbreitstein.  Every year since 1956, the Rhine Valley has been gloriously lit up by red Bengal flares and fireworks.  (Bengal flares, formerly used as signals but now classified as fireworks, create a bright light, normally for some time.  They’re ground-based and create an intense flame, as opposed to a shower of sparks like a fountain.  The red aerial flame effect, reflected by the river, is what gives spectators the impression that the Rhine itself is aflame.)

The Rhine in Flames festival is held annually in Koblenz on the second Saturday in August.  There are several similar events on other dates in other towns along the river, but Koblenz’s celebration is the biggest.  Today, the Procession to Koblenz (Strecke Spay-Koblenz) starts a little over 10 miles south of Koblenz in the Bopparder Hamm, or loop in the river between the towns of Boppard and Spay.  The convoy of ships sails down river at 9:30 in the evening, beginning with a firework display over the town of Spay.  There are displays all along the route at several small Rhine towns, some at castles along the river, until the boats reach the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz at 11 p.m. when the pièce de résistance occurs, the great pyrotechnical show over Ehrenbreitstein.  (Tickets for this kind of cruise, including a meal on board, are something over €100/$110 per person.)

On the first Saturday in May, the Rhine in Flames celebration, called The Night of Bengal Fire (Die Nacht der Bengalfeuer), is held in Bonn; in July, in the Rüdesheim-Bingen area, is the Night of Fire Magic (Die Nacht Des Feuerzaubers); in early September, at Oberwesel, The Night of a Thousand Fires (Die Nacht der Tausend Feuer) takes place; in mid-September, from Burg Katz (Castle “Cat”; there’s also neighboring Burg Maus!) near Sankt Goarshausen, Burg Rheinfels near Sankt Goar, and from the middle of the Rhine between the twin towns on either side of the river, is the Night of the Lorelei (Die Nacht der Lorelei – named for the storied rock outcropping nearby that’s the subject of many songs, poems, tales, and legends).

In 2019, the 3-day Koblenzer Sommerfest took place from Friday, 9, to Sunday, 11 August and in 2020, it will run from Friday, 7, through Sunday, 9 August.  The fare on Friday and Sunday and the daylight hours of Saturday are typical of summer festivals the world over—concessions, souvenir and craft tents and booths, amusements, food, wine, and beer purveyors, and so on.  The Ehrenbreitstein Seilbahn (cable car) runs continuously between the Deutsches Eck and the fortress ruin atop the cliff across the Rhine.

The celebration is arrayed along the banks of the Rhine and the Mosel and around the Deutsches Eck.  (There’s no entrance fee for the festival, though visitors have to pay for anything they buy at the concessions, of course.  I don’t know if the usual fare for the Seilbahn, €11/ca. $12, is waived, however.)  An eclectic music festival, the FestungsMusikFest, is underway on the grounds of Ehrenbreitstein during the Sommerfest, with more than 300 artists playing various styles of music on nine stages.  The Rhine in Flames event, the festival highlight, takes place on Saturday night.

In 1956, there were 30 ships and about 150,000 visitors at the celebration.  These days, between 60 and 80 ships travel the illuminated 10½-mile route from Spay/Braubach to Koblenz every year.  Since 2012, the Rhine in Flames in Koblenz has been a three-day program.  In 2018, up to 76 ships provided 22,000 passengers or so with wonderful views of the Rhine castles, palaces, and riverside promenades (like the Rheinanlagen, on which our house fronted), all washed in the red glow of Bengal lights.  An additional almost 250,000 visitors came to enjoy the festivities.   

 

Back in the early ’60s, when my family and I lived in Koblenz—I was 16 when I first went there to live and 18 when Dad was transferred to the embassy in Bonn—the Rhine in Flames was still a one-day event.  Believe me, that seemed plenty to me at the time.

Our house at Rheinanlagen 12 was ideally situated for the annual fireworks blow-out.  The towns along the river held wine festivals in conjunction with the celebration and on the day of the big event, and all the houses, shops, and restaurants along both sides of the river put candles in the windows that faced the water. 

Before dusk, the cruise ships sailed down the river past the townscapes, the mountains, and the cliffs.  Some of the boats offered entertainment, dinner, and drinks—mostly wine (German, of course—what else!) and probably Sekt (German sparkling wine).  When they all arrived at dusk, the boats, now all illuminated with festive lights, turned around and headed back to Koblenz in the night. 

As they arrived in Koblenz, the boats arrayed themselves along the river from Festung Ehrenbreitstein downstream past our house and held.  An immense fireworks display erupted over the fortress with the ruins silhouetted against the glow.  The show started with the Bengal flares bathing the Festung in red light; when the flares died off, the fireworks started.  The river itself burst into flame as the flares and fireworks were reflected in the water.  I’m not normally a big fan of pyrotechnics, but this was truly magical—the river, the boats, the lights in the towns, the ruins of Ehrenbrietstein.

The whole panorama was clearly visible from the small terrace of our house where we could sit on the warm summer night with a nice glass of wine—I’d love to say it was a Rhine wine, but it was just as likely to have been a Mosel or even some other German white—as the convoy arrived, all lit up itself, and got into position right in the middle of the stream opposite our house for the pyrotechnics.  I have many memories of that time in my life, as my two-part memoir attests, but the Rhine in Flames is one of the most enduring. 

All the homes and shops across the river were aglow with the lights in their windows and people strolling along the promenades on both banks, like Koblenz’s Rheinanlagen, wore little battery-powered lights in their lapels or hanging from their breast pockets.  And there we were, like the Kaiser in his box at the theater!  Eat your hearts out, New Year’s Eve revelers in Times Square!  This was a celebration!

[Last Saturday, 9 November, was the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; it was all over the news.  I mentioned above that I served in West Berlin with the army ten years after the time I lived in Koblenz, but I didn’t say that I arrived in Berlin just a few days before the 10th anniversary of the Wall’s construction—13 August 1971.  (I had gotten to Berlin on 29 July.)

[As many ROTters know, I was a Military Intelligence special agent, and  the first real MI operation in which I was involved in Berlin was the demonstration coverage of the two marches marking the day—one by leftists supporting the Wall and one by rightists opposing it.  I wrote about this in a post marking the 20th anniversary of the Wall coming down (called simply “The Berlin Wall,” posted on 29 November 2009).  It was quite an introduction to my coming 2½ years behind the front lines of the Cold War!

[I have blogged on my experience in Berlin, where the Wall was a ubiquitous presence in our lives, several times since I launched ROT.  Some of my other Berlin posts include “Berlin Station,” 19 and 22 July 2009; “Berlin Stories: Three SNAFU’s,” 18 August 2012; and the eight-part “Berlin Memoir,” 16 and 31 December 2017 and 20 January, 9 and 19 February, 11 and 29 March, and 13 April 2018.]