Can't Help Lovin' Those Tunes

By RICHARD CORLISS

Forget this week's meager Tony awards in the Broadway musical category. It has actually been a wonderful year for musicals. Indeed, with just a little stretching of the Tony rules, a whole stageful of prizes could have been bestowed. Best new musical: Zip! Goes a Million. Best actress: Judy Kaye as the Gay Nineties chanteuse in Sweet Adeline. Best supporting actress: Jane Connell as the inebriated Quaker aunt in Oh, Boy! Best eccentric dance: Mia Dillon for her daft balloon ballet in Music in the Air. Best orchestrations: John McGlinn for Leave It to Jane. Best book and lyrics: Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse for Oh, Lady! Lady! Best composer: Jerome Kern, for all of the above.

If the names and titles are unfamiliar, it is because the shows were produced a few blocks from the hoopla of Broadway, on the concert stages of Carnegie Recital Hall and Town Hall. Five of the musicals opened originally on Broadway between 1917 and 1932; the sixth, Zip! Goes a Million, closed out of town in 1919 (and thus could have been eligible in the Tonys' "new musical" category). All have a witty ebullience that would merit revival even if they did not boast some unforgettable songs: I've Told Every Little Star, Till the Clouds Roll By, Bill, The Song Is You, We Belong Together, dozens more. But the music is precisely the reason these delightful shows have returned to the spotlight. For this is Jerome Kern's centenary, which has cued a celebration that promises to last all year and spill over national borders.

In the U.S., the party began in January (Kern's 100th birthday was the 27th) when the Postal Service issued a new 22 cents stamp in his honor. It has kept rolling along with concerts, radio and TV tributes, and retrospectives of Kern films from Show Boat to Swing Time. This week marks the premiere of an off- & Broadway revue, Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Jerome Kern, which spans the composer's career from the turn of the century to his death in 1945. In Britain, where the composer met his first stage success (and his only wife), three more revues are wending their way toward the West End. In the past two years, half a dozen new Kern LPs have been released; recent interpreters of his songs include Joanne Woodward, Kiri Te Kanawa and, mewling All the Things You Are, Michael Jackson. Most of the tributes, though, are lovingly appropriate. They serve less to revive Kern's music than to offer proof of its enduring vitality.

Unlike many Broadway composers of Kern's day who scrambled to success out of tenements on Manhattan's Lower East Side, he was born in a comfortable midtown apartment, the son of a German-Jewish stabler. Young Jerry would never be the businessman his father hoped for. Sent out to purchase two pianos, the lad returned with 200. But he must have known his future would have more to do with sitting at pianos than haggling over them. He spent his 17th birthday attending a community-theater premiere of his own musical, a parody of Uncle Tom's Cabin. By the time he was 20 he had placed songs in both Broadway and West End shows. From then on, his personal life was happily uneventful ("I am a first-class stuffed shirt," he once said), while his professional life was one of unbounded energy and originality. In 1917 alone, Kern composed the scores for five musicals.

This was the period of Kern's "Princess Theater musicals," written with Wodehouse (pre-Jeeves) and Bolton. At a time when Continental operettas were all the rage, these "midget musical comedies" -- airy, brash and daringly American -- created a theatrical revolution to a ragtime beat. They set the tone and tempo on Broadway for the next decade and beyond. When the style changed, it was again Kern who reshaped it, along with Oscar Hammerstein II. Their 1927 Show Boat, with its sweeping seriousness and its near operatic transformation of blues and folk music, paved the Great White Way for Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma! and West Side Story.

Kern's songs became standards on their own sophisticated hummability. Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man, Long Ago and Far Away, Lovely to Look At, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Who? continue to be sung in city parks and shower stalls by folks who neither know nor care what musical produced the tunes. Yet Kern realized better than anyone else that the melodic drama in so many of his songs -- of which the majestic cresting chorus of Ol' Man River is the most famous example -- demanded a dramatic anchor only the lyric theater could provide. Of the thousand or so songs he composed, the only familiar one not written for a show or movie was The Last Time I Saw Paris. He mercilessly cut any song that did not fit its situation. Conversely, he was a great hoarder and tinkerer. Alter just a few bars of Till the Clouds Roll By and presto! it becomes Look for the Silver Lining. Invert the melody, depress the tempo and voila! the Cotton Blossom theme from Show Boat is alchemized into Ol' Man River.

Kern's itch to change and perfect is the mark of a meticulous craftsman. It is genius, though, that etches his tunes in the memory. Composer Alec Wilder, in his 1972 study American Popular Song, singled out Kern for exemplifying "the pure, uncontrived melodic line more characteristically than any other writer of American theater music." To listen to a Kern tune like They Didn't Believe Me is to realize how elegantly it obeys the laws of melody and mathematics: each succeeding phrase is both surprising and inevitable. In that one song, written for the 1914 show The Girl from Utah, Kern virtually created the prototype for the modern American ballad. From that moment (when his music was already entrancing a couple of teenagers named Richard Rodgers and George Gershwin) to this (when Composers Stephen Sondheim and Milton Babbitt have written appreciations of his work), Kern's revolution has continued unsilenced. It should last for another hundred years, and maybe for as long as anyone can carry a tune.