WHEN HE WAS asked how he was going to approach the song-and-dance centrepiece of
Singin’ in the Rain, Gene Kelly replied: “It’s going to be raining and I’m going to be singing. I’m going to have a glorious feeling and I’m going to be happy again.”
Ask that same question to the former Royal Ballet star turned song-and-dance man Adam Cooper for his new stage version of the 1952 MGM musical, at Sadler’s Wells in London, and he’s equally buoyant: “There’s no point me trying to be Gene Kelly. I’m physically different. The way I move is nothing like him. So I’m enjoying choreographing the show my way, though you can’t ignore such a perfect film.”
The movie, directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen, has had earlier stage incarnations. Tommy Steele was a riot of misdirected energy at the London Palladium in 1983. The star of Jude Kelly’s 1999 West Yorkshire Playhouse production turned out to be the constantly surprising choreography of Stephen Mear.
There will be few surprises regarding the plot and script at Sadler’s Wells. “So many film musicals fall flat between the numbers,” says the director, Paul Kerryson, reunited with Cooper after their success with On Your Toes last summer. “With Singin’ in the Rain the script is as witty as the songs. It’s a seamless blend.”
The film’s origins are not so seamless. In 1952, MGM’s Arthur Freed was Hollywood’s top producer of musicals. But he had started out in the Twenties as a lyricist and wanted to give old numbers that he’d written with the composer Nacio Herb Brown — You Are My Lucky Star, Broadway Rhythm, All I Do is Dream of You — a boost.
So he called in Betty Comden and Adolph Green, writers of On the Town and much else, to find a way to lace together these old songs. They tried various scenarios — Howard Keel as a singing cowboy? — before they stumbled upon the obvious. As all the numbers had been written for the early talkies, why not do a story about the early talkies?
Comden and Green came up with a comedy about Twenties Hollywood struggling to respond to the success of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. Their principal characters, Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont (Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen), are the leading silent stars of the day, but nobody wants silents any more and the studio has to figure out a quick way to transform their current production, The Duelling Cavalier, into a talkie. “The Duelling Mammy?” suggests Cosmo, Don’s best friend (Donald O’Connor).
The script managed to weave the songs into the story, in a way that enhanced the plot and underscored the characters’ feelings. Nowhere was this approach more prevalent than in the film’s title showstopper. It was shot one August day (plus half a day’s retakes) before 5pm, when the local residents would turn on their lawn sprinklers and reduced the studio’s water pressure to a dribble.
It’s a scene that the film-makers nearly got wrong. Originally Comden and Green had placed it later in the film as a number for Don, Cosmo and Don’s girlfriend Kathy (Debbie Reynolds). It was Kelly who wanted it earlier as a solo, after Don and Kathy realise that they’re falling in love.
Kelly was right. Don is, after all, singin’ in the rain because he’s in love and so doesn’t mind being sodden. But why did Arthur Freed write a song about warbling in a downpour? Because he grew up in Seattle, which, as we all know from Frasier, is almost as rainy as England.
Singin’ in the Rain is now regarded as one of the greatest movie musicals but originally the critics weren’t impressed. “Without much warmth and wit,” said Time. “Sluggish,” thought Newsweek. Excuse me? Hadn’t they seen O’Connor risking life and limb for the knockabout number Make ’Em Laugh (a shameless rip-off of Cole Porter’s Be a Clown), or appreciated a plucky Reynolds dancing up and over the sofa in Good Morning?
The movie was only a moderate success ($7.7 million on release) and it wasn’t until the Seventies, after featuring in the MGM compilation film That’s Entertainment and on TV, that interest was renewed in the film. Back in the Fifties, it had been yanked from cinemas to make room for An American in Paris, which had just enjoyed Oscar success. It’s a shame, because An American in Paris is Hollywood’s self-conscious attempt at art, whereas Singin’ in the Rain is written with affection not affectation. The film never forgets that it’s about snappy entertainment — it’s serious about being funny. After all, part of its inspiration was the tragedy of the silent star John Gilbert, whose career vanished when the talkies revealed him as just a pretty face.
In the film, it’s the nails-on-a-blackboard whine of screen goddess Lina (played by Ronni Ancona at Sadler’s Wells) that threatens her career. But she does get the best lines: “What do they think I am? Dumb or something? Why, I make more money than Calvin Coolidge put together.”
The only time the film tacks on its musical pleasures is for the final Broadway Melody ballet, the climax of the film within the film. Seeking to top the finale of An American in Paris, Kelly was even more of a perfectionist.
An 18-year-old Reynolds, struggling with a western accent and the dancing, found the shoot tough going — “Singin’ in the Rain and childbirth were the hardest things I ever had to do in my life”. Her singing voice was dubbed (by Betty Noyes) but, more bizarrely, in certain sequences her speaking voice was dubbed by Jean Hagen . . . who onscreen was playing the whiny star that Reynolds’s character was dubbing! It doesn’t get more postmodern than that.
For Kelly’s ballet climax, he drafted in the leggy Cyd Charisse for the complex pas de deux while aircraft motors blew her 50ft scarf in time to the music.
One senses that Adam Cooper is itching to stamp his own style on this sequence: “One can’t help but reference the film in certain numbers. With others I’m starting from scratch. At this stage I don’t know how the title number is going to turn out.” Why not? “I’ve yet to get my feet wet.”
- Singin’ in the Rain runs from July 29 at Sadler’s Wells, EC1 (0870 7377737) and from Sept 8 at Leicester Haymarket (0870 3303131)
STORMY WEATHER ON SET
- Cyd Charisse had to smoke for her vampy dance scene. She apparently never touched a cigarette again.
