Pal Joey (musical) - Background

Background

Author John O'Hara offered his stories of Pal Joey to Rodgers and Hart for adaptation as a new musical. Title character Joey Evans, an unsympathetic but charming antihero, was a striking departure from the usual musical comedy formula. Joey was amoral, but he was not presented as a villain, nor did his character change for the better. Richard Rodgers said: "Joey was not disreputable because he was mean, but because he had too much imagination to behave himself, and because he was a little weak." Rodgers and Hart maintained a cynical, dark tone throughout the work and employed two distinct musical styles in the show: the deliberately tacky nightclub numbers contrasted with the more elegant songs the characters sang to express their emotions, though these expressions were more ironic than sincere. Hart's lyrics frankly described Joey and Vera's affair; "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" included (among others) the lyrics, "Horizontally speaking, he's at his very best" and "Vexed again, Perplexed again, Thank God I can be oversexed again", while "In Our Little Den (of Iniquity)" included, "We're very proper folks you know, We've separate bedrooms comme il faut. There's one for play and one for show".

As they cast the musical, Rodgers, Hart and O'Hara knew that they wanted Joey to be primarily a dancer, not a singer, and the actor who played Joey would have to be likeable in spite of Joey's unpleasant character. They chose Gene Kelly, who was at the time playing a dancing role, Harry the Hoofer, in the play The Time of Your Life. Kelly had made his Broadway debut in 1938 in the chorus of Cole Porter's Leave It to Me!; Pal Joey would be his first lead role. Rodgers and Hart wanted Vivienne Segal, who had previously starred in their 1938 musical I Married an Angel, to play the older woman with whom Joey has an affair; though O'Hara had initially considered other actresses, he was won over when he met Segal. Segal, who would be 43 when the show opened on Broadway, appreciated the opportunity to play a worldly, mature character, unlike the innocent ingenues she had played for most of her career. Using Segal's initials, O'Hara gave her character the name "Vera Simpson". O'Hara was not present during the out-of-town tryouts, and director George Abbott took over the rewriting. When the show opened in New York, the critics were divided. Richard Watts (New York Herald Tribune) called it "brilliant", but other critics and members of the theatre-going public disliked the subject matter. Nonetheless, it became the longest running Rodgers-Hart show to that time.