The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: MGM musical

  • Caro Roma

    Female songwriters were relatively rare in Tin Pan Alley, but Carrie Northey (1866-1937) had a reputation as one of the most talented.

    Roma made her stage debut aged three, and was later sent by her family to train at the New England Conservatory of Music. While still in her teens, she apparently conducted an orchestra in Canada, and was a gifted singer and pianist. 

    Caro Roma wrote a variety of types of song, including setting her own poetry to music. She wrote ‘coon’ songs in an exaggerated African-American idiom (popular at the time, less so now), songs with a religious theme, and sea songs.

    Roma collaborated with composer Ernest Ball, and their ‘In the Garden of My Heart’ is featured in Broadway to Hollywood.  

  • Ernest Ball

    At the time of his death, the New Yorker described Ernest Roland Ball (1878-1927) as the most able ballad writer of his time, though scarcely known outside the profession.

    Ball specialized in Irish ballads (though born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio), the two most famous being ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ and ‘Mother Machree’. Both songs were collaborations with lyricist Chauncey Olcott, with George Graff Jr contributing to the former and Rida Johnson Young to the latter.

    Numbers composed by Ball appear in four MGM musicals. In Broadway to Hollywood, Nelson Eddy sings ‘In the Garden of My Heart’, written with Caro Roma. An uncredited boy sings ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ in Stage Mother and Jeanette MacDonald performs ‘Love Me and the World is Mine’ in San Francisco. Finally, it is back to Nelson Eddy for a rendition of ‘Irish Eyes’ in Let Freedom Ring.

  • Anton Rubinstein

    Russian Anton Grigorjewitsch Rubinstein (1829-94) was a concert pianist, composer, teacher and founder of the St Petersburg Conservatory of Music.

    Rubinstein was a key figure in the Romantic Era, writing operas, symphonies and many piano pieces. His most famous composition is probably ‘Melody in F’, written in 1852. This music was the basis for a ballet sequence in the abandoned MGM revue The March of Time, performed by the Albertina Rasch troupe. Some of the footage was later incorporated into Broadway to Hollywood. 

  • Edgar Smith

    Edgar McPhail Smith (1857-1938) was a librettist, occasional actor, and songwriter who contributed to an estimated 150 Broadway productions over a period of forty years. Much of his work was for the comedians and impresarios Joe Weber and Lew Fields, and his songs were performed by some of the biggest musical and comedy stars of the day, including Al Jolson and Marie Dressler.

    Smith contributed the lyrics to only one standard. ‘Ma Blushin’ Rosie’ was written with John Goldberg, and is featured in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood, which also shows one of Smith’s shows, Whoop-Dee-Do playing at one of Weber and Field’s theatres.

    ‘Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl’, written for Dressler, is performed by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Strike Up the Band.

  • John Stromberg

    Canadian John Stramborg (1858-1902) was a Broadway songwriter who worked regularly on the shows produced by the comedy duo Weber and Fields.

    ‘Honey’ Stromberg started out as an arranger in Tin Pan Alley, but was, from the outset, the composer of popular songs. His first hit was ‘My Best Girl’s a Corker’, published in 1895. Weber and Fields hired him in 1896, pairing him with several lyricists, but most significantly with Edgar Smith. Their best-known number was ‘Ma Blushin’ Rosie’, which featured in Metro’s Broadway to Hollywood. 

    Stromberg had serious mental health problems, and died by his own hand in 1902, while at the height of his success.

  • Weber & Fields

    Joseph Morris Weber (1867-1942) and Moses Schoenfeld (1867-1941) were a highly influential comedy duo at the turn of the twentieth century, in both vaudeville and musical theatre. They were best known for a ‘Dutch’ dialect act, in which they played German immigrants torturing the English language. Both performers were themselves the children of Polish immigrants.

    Weber and Fields also became impresarios, staging shows that centred on their own act, while also putting together road shows that toured the country.

    Joe Weber and Lew Fields were amongst the old vaudeville acts that filmed material for the abandoned MGM musical The March of Time. Part of their sequence can be seen at the beginning of Broadway to Hollywood, although, given they are in a horse costume, there is no way of actually verifying it is them. Both men would have been in their seventies at the time. Joe Weber also appears briefly as a character in Broadway to Hollywood, played by Leo White.

  • William H Penn

    British-born William Henry Penn (1868-1929) would have to be described as an obscure composer and arranger of popular music from the early twentieth century.

    Penn is one of those composers who hangs on to a small place in musical history by virtue of a single song. In his case, this was ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’, which he wrote in 1906, with lyrics by Albert H Fitz. Penn’s music was featured in Broadway to Hollywood, though the dance number appears to have been filmed for The March of Time.

  • Edgar Allan Woolf

    Edgar Allan Woolf (1881-1943) was a successful screenwriter, dramatist and songwriter whose fame now rests firmly on being co-writer of the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz. He and regular collaborator Florence Ryerson developed a draft produced by Noel Langley, introducing the character of Professor Marvel into the Kansas scenes.

    After graduating from university, Woolf was briefly an actor before turning to writing material for vaudeville performers. He also wrote the book for the 1906 musical comedy Mam’zelle Champagne, which became infamous when a performance was interrupted by the murder of Stanford White, as depicted in The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing (1955).

    After a quarter of a century writing for Broadway, Woolf, who had previously dabbled in screenwriting for silent films in New York,signed a contract to join MGM. Pictures he worked on included Freaks, Grand Hotel and John Ford’s Flesh (all 1932).

    In addition to The Wizard of Oz, Woolf worked on seven other MGM musicals, beginning with Broadway to Hollywood, for which he also wrote a song. Subsequent pictures were Hollywood Party, The Night is Young, Everybody Sing and Ice Follies of 1939. After Oz came Babes in Arms and the posthumously-released Ziegfeld Follies.

  • Jules White

    Julius Weiss (1900-85) liked to think of himself as the Fourth Stooge, having been producer and/or director on well over half of their output. He claimed to have heavily influenced and shaped their comedy.

    White acted in a couple of films as a teenager, including The Birth of a Nation (1915). He was then a general dogsbody around various studios, ending up as an editor at Educational Pictures, where his brother Jack was producing comedies. White co-directed his first short film in 1924.

    Jules White moved to MGM in 1930, where he wrote and directed short comedies, including the Dogville Comedies, satires starring trained dogs. He also co-directed Sidewalks of New York, starring Buster Keaton.

    In 1933, White moved on again, this time to Columbia, where he was put in charge of the studio’s short subjects. Over the next couple of decades he produced over 360 pictures, and also acted as director on around 240, as well as contributing to their screenplays. It is claimed that by the 1950s he could put out a new short comedy with a single day’s shooting, largely by cannibalizing from earlier films.

    Columbia stopped making shorts in 1957, but White went on to direct a couple of Three Stooges’ feature films.

    Shortly before moving to Columbia in 1933, White shot retakes for Broadway to Hollywood, which featured two of the Stooges, More and Curly Howard.

  • Broadway to Hollywood

    The Crew

    Willard MackDirector
    Jules WhiteDirector (uncredited)
    Willard MackScreenplay
    Edgar Allan WoolfScreenplay
    Robert E HopkinsDialogue (uncredited)
    Gus EdwardsSongwriter (uncredited)
    Al GoodhartComposer (uncredited)
    Edgar Allan WoolfLyricist (uncredited)
    William H PennComposer (uncredited)
    Dimitri TiomkinComposer (uncredited)
    John StrombergSongwriter (uncredited)
    Edgar SmithSongwriter (uncredited)
    Fred E AhlertSongwriter (uncredited)
    Anton RubinsteinComposer (uncredited)
    Ernest BallSongwriter (uncredited)
    Caro RomaSongwriter (uncredited)
    William AxtComposer (uncredited)
    Harry RapfAssociate Producer
    Norbert BrodineCinematographer
    William DanielsCinematographer
    William S GrayEditor
    Ben LewisEditor (uncredited)
    Stan RogersArt Director
    Edwin B WillisSet Decorator
    John WatersAssistant Director (uncredited)
    Douglas ShearerSound Recording Director
    Sammy LeeChoreographer
    Albertina RaschChoreographer
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