All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 by Ethan Mordden Page A
Authors: Ethan Mordden
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(1943). Where The Son-Daughter ’s dramatis personae are entirely Chinese, Lulu Belle ’s are black but for the local cop and, eventually, the heroine’s French admirer. All the principals have parallels in Bizet’s opera: Don José becomes George (Henry Hull), Escamillo a boxer named Butch Cooper (John Harrington), which precisely looks forward to Hammerstein’s Husky Miller, and Micaëla is altered from village sweetheart to moralizing Uncle Gustus (Lawrence Eddinger). Even Zuniga is present, as a doctor whom Lulu Belle knocks unconscious with a hypodermic before rolling him.
No question, Lulu Belle is a user and a cheat. Bizet’s heroine is admirable in her independence. She doesn’t ruin men; they ruin themselves for her. Lulu Belle, however, is a parasite. She’s attracted to George mainly for the sport of stealing him from his wife, and the more he resists the more she vamps him. His “Git away f’um me” is just so much confetti on her runway:
LULU BELLE: It’s too late now! I’m gonna cook an’ carve and chew yo’ up and swallow yo’! [Indeed, his grip on her tightens; the script calls him “intoxicated.”] Eat me like I wuz a piece o’candy! Drink me like I wuz a glass o’ wine! Kiss me! Kiss me till I’m dead and buried!
They get into “a long, wild kiss,” and George comes gasping out of it “like a drowning man.” No point in wasting time:
LULU BELLE: Wheah yo’ live?
Now we get a sample of the Belasco touch, albeit in a play written by others: a combination of absurdly posing showmanship and casual naturalism at once. The showmanship inheres in what we immediately sense will be the first-act curtain: grabbing George’s arm, Lulu Belle cries, “Let’s strut!,” leading the poor bewildered man off for an exhibition exit. Comes now the naturalization, for as the curtain very slowly starts to fall, two biddies who have spent the act commenting on the doings from their overhead windows reappear for a last shot. Says Mrs. Frisbie in the last seconds before the orchestra strikes up for the intermission, “She’s landed him, Mrs. Williams.”
This is the paradox of David Belasco, the faker of Big Moments even as he undercuts them with dead-on realism. Belasco played the old with the new at once, for instance in the near-documentary feeling of the first act, a tableau of West Fifty-ninth Street with apartment buildings, movie theatre, De Luxe Café and Bar, a real automobile, and over one hundred actors. This was virtuosity of mimesis: yet all the principals were whites in black makeup, as if in a minstrel show.
Similarly, the last five minutes of the evening comprised a murder out of louche melodrama—played, however, with minute care for the details of how such a murder might actually occur. It was as if Eleonora Duse had found work on a showboat, for the language was pure ten-twent’-thirt’ cautionary tale, as the discarded George catches up with Lulu Belle in Paris and tells her she’s coming with him … or else! “Make your choice, Lulu Belle,” he demands. “On one side’s heaven. On the other side’s Hell!”
The rhyme is distracting, but not to Lulu Belle. “Suits me,” she briskly declares. “I’ll see all mah frien’s!”
George grabs her for a kiss, but she slaps him repeatedly, even spits at him. Then she makes a curious mistake, handing him a gun so he can kill himself. But please do it in the bathroom: “I got a big ma’ble tub yo’ kin hol’ yo’ haid ovah.”
The atmosphere has changed, for it occurs to George to kill Lulu Belle instead, and suddenly the nineteenth-century posing and squawking are over. The show’s remaining moments are the kind of thing Belasco could rehearse to perfection. Belasco doesn’t want Carmen now. He wants what happens when a man kills his ex-lover.
Scared at last, Lulu Belle throws pillows and boxes of thing at George, and as he reaches her she actually dives into the bedclothes in sheer panic. As he hauls her up
No question, Lulu Belle is a user and a cheat. Bizet’s heroine is admirable in her independence. She doesn’t ruin men; they ruin themselves for her. Lulu Belle, however, is a parasite. She’s attracted to George mainly for the sport of stealing him from his wife, and the more he resists the more she vamps him. His “Git away f’um me” is just so much confetti on her runway:
LULU BELLE: It’s too late now! I’m gonna cook an’ carve and chew yo’ up and swallow yo’! [Indeed, his grip on her tightens; the script calls him “intoxicated.”] Eat me like I wuz a piece o’candy! Drink me like I wuz a glass o’ wine! Kiss me! Kiss me till I’m dead and buried!
They get into “a long, wild kiss,” and George comes gasping out of it “like a drowning man.” No point in wasting time:
LULU BELLE: Wheah yo’ live?
Now we get a sample of the Belasco touch, albeit in a play written by others: a combination of absurdly posing showmanship and casual naturalism at once. The showmanship inheres in what we immediately sense will be the first-act curtain: grabbing George’s arm, Lulu Belle cries, “Let’s strut!,” leading the poor bewildered man off for an exhibition exit. Comes now the naturalization, for as the curtain very slowly starts to fall, two biddies who have spent the act commenting on the doings from their overhead windows reappear for a last shot. Says Mrs. Frisbie in the last seconds before the orchestra strikes up for the intermission, “She’s landed him, Mrs. Williams.”
This is the paradox of David Belasco, the faker of Big Moments even as he undercuts them with dead-on realism. Belasco played the old with the new at once, for instance in the near-documentary feeling of the first act, a tableau of West Fifty-ninth Street with apartment buildings, movie theatre, De Luxe Café and Bar, a real automobile, and over one hundred actors. This was virtuosity of mimesis: yet all the principals were whites in black makeup, as if in a minstrel show.
Similarly, the last five minutes of the evening comprised a murder out of louche melodrama—played, however, with minute care for the details of how such a murder might actually occur. It was as if Eleonora Duse had found work on a showboat, for the language was pure ten-twent’-thirt’ cautionary tale, as the discarded George catches up with Lulu Belle in Paris and tells her she’s coming with him … or else! “Make your choice, Lulu Belle,” he demands. “On one side’s heaven. On the other side’s Hell!”
The rhyme is distracting, but not to Lulu Belle. “Suits me,” she briskly declares. “I’ll see all mah frien’s!”
George grabs her for a kiss, but she slaps him repeatedly, even spits at him. Then she makes a curious mistake, handing him a gun so he can kill himself. But please do it in the bathroom: “I got a big ma’ble tub yo’ kin hol’ yo’ haid ovah.”
The atmosphere has changed, for it occurs to George to kill Lulu Belle instead, and suddenly the nineteenth-century posing and squawking are over. The show’s remaining moments are the kind of thing Belasco could rehearse to perfection. Belasco doesn’t want Carmen now. He wants what happens when a man kills his ex-lover.
Scared at last, Lulu Belle throws pillows and boxes of thing at George, and as he reaches her she actually dives into the bedclothes in sheer panic. As he hauls her up
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