The Happy Time: ranking Kander & Ebb Musicals

 My journey into the musical world of Kander & Ebb continues on YouTube! Watch the video, or, if you’d prefer, read my script below. 

Intro

After last week’s discussion of an iconic musical, today we’re traveling back to the realm of obscure flops. I’ve been ranking every Kander and Ebb musical based on listening to the original Broadway cast album. I have videos on my channel discussing Flora the Red Menace and Cabaret already, so be sure to check those out as we turn our attention to the third show by John Kander and Fred Ebb to hit Broadway, 1968’s The Happy Time. 

I had heard of this show but I never before listened to this album, and I didn’t even know any of the songs. Everything I did know about this show came from reading William Goldman’s classic book The Season. If you haven’t read this, I highly recommend it. Written by the screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, The Season is a non-fiction book about all the productions that opened on Broadway in the 1967-68 season. It touches on every show that opened and tried to open and every aspect of the industry. As with all of Goldman’s nonfiction  books, it’s one of the most entertaining, insider-y looks into show business that you’ll ever read. Having said that, Goldman draws his conclusions from interviews with the subjects, yes, but also, a good deal of his personal opinion, which he plainly relays as fact. Which makes it at times a challenging read. Like when he boldly declares Sandy Dennis was terrible in some play she was doing. Well, I wasn’t there in 1967 to see that play for myself, so I guess I’ll take his word for it? And that’s not even mentioning the wild chapter on homosexuals. 

But when you are discussing shows from 60 years ago, there often isn’t a ton of information about their creation out there, unless they were super successful like Cabaret. So, it’s to our tremendous benefit that The Happy Time is included in this book, and I will be referencing it. It’s been a while since I’ve read the whole thing, i only revisited the chapter on The Happy Time for this video, but as far I can remember, Goldman talks about Kander and Ebb but he never mentions that he knew Kander quite well and wrote a musical with him, pre-Ebb. That was 1962’s A Family Affair. I find that omission odd. 

 

Premise

The Happy Time is a memory play where photographer Jacques Bonnard reflects on a pivotal moment in his life, a return visit he made to his home town of Saint Pierre, Canada, long after leaving it as a teenager to become a world-traveling photographer. His family, which includes his brothers and their wives and children and his larger-than-life father, love him but know that where Jacques goes, chaos ensues. Jacques’s teenage nephew Bibi bonds with him and wants him to take him away from home, causing a rift in the family. Eventually the father forces Jacques to admit to Bibi that his seemingly glamorous life is actually empty and devoid of meaningful relationships. He also briefly rekindles a romance with his childhood sweetheart, the schoolteacher Laurie. 

Background

The Happy Time premiered on Broadway at the Broadway Theatre in January 1968 and closed in September of that year after playing 286 performances and 23 previews. So, it lost money but it did run for a little while, certainly longer than the two months Flora the Red Menace lasted. 

Robert Goulet starred as Jacques, the photographer. David Wayne was Jacques’s father, and 16 year old Mike Rupert was the nephew Bibi. The cast also included Julie Gregg as Laurie, and as less plot-relevant members of the Bonnard family, Charles Durning and June Squibb. You barely can hear her on the album, but it’s so cool that we can talk about someone who was in a show in 1968 and just this past year too. What a career she has had. 

David Merrick was the producer, Gower Champion the director and choreographer, and N. Richard Nash wrote the book, after the play by Samuel Taylor and the novel Robert L. Fontaine. I’m not familiar with the original novel nor the straight play adaptation of it, which was turned into a movie in the ‘50s, but according to Goldman, the musical version basically only retains the setting and character names. In Goldman’s telling, Merrick owned the rights to the property and approached Nash about making it into a musical. Nash wasn’t interested in The Happy Time, but had an idea for the story of an original show. Merrick, eager to do something with the rights he had paid for, suggested Nash graft his story onto The Happy Time, changing it from a young boy’s coming of age journey to an older man’s return to his home town. Nash invented the photographer angle and essentially the entire character of Jacques. Bibi was the protagonist of the earlier incarnations. 

According to Goldman, Kander and Ebb wrote several songs for the show on spec before Cabaret had opened in November 1966. Merrick wanted Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields to do the songs, but they weren’t interested and Kander and Ebb were hired. Goldman lays the blame for the show being a flop at the feet of Champion, the director, who Goldman says was the “muscle,”  or the decision maker, of the production. 

Champion’s biggest contribution was the idea to have the photographs that Jacques takes with his camera be visible to the audience, projected onto a large screen, called a clyclorama. This was high tech stuff in 1968, and it was expensive and difficult to achieve. Under Champion, the piece turned into a memory play, set in Jacques’s photography studio. The projected photographs would prompt Jacques’s telling of the story of his return home to the audience, and necessary set pieces would then come onto the stage via a turntable. Goldman says,” the projections simply overpowered the small size and feel of the show. It was as if a boy and a girl were put in front of a Cinerama screen; they would be dwarfed even when the Cinerama screen was blank. Put a picture on the screen, and who’d look at the boy and girl?” 

Goldman also says that Robert Goulet was miscast as Jacques and that pretty much everyone involved felt that way except for Champion. That part required someone with “mileage” and Goulet was too young to play that. Goldman also credits Champion with diluting Nash’s themes and softening the character of Jacques. The way Nash originally conceived of it, Jacques would not merely be lying about his motives for returning to Saint Pierre, he would be lying about everything. He was a fraud, pretending to be a successful photographer. Champion thought that would make him too unlikeable, so he changed it and also requested an epilogue inserted where the present day Jacques tells the audience that he did, in fact, start a family of his own. 

Clive Barnes, in his review in the New York Times, calls out this tacked-on happy ending, while generally praising the show and calling Goulet “splendid.” Also, about this review, Barnes spends two and a half paragraphs talking about how he was late to this show on opening night because his flight was delayed. Apparently, the producers held the curtain for 30 minutes waiting for him and he still got there 10 minutes after they started, and he reviewed it anyway! What a different world it was when they would hold the curtain because a particular critic was running late. But, of course, back then, a review in the Times was make or break for a show. 

Walter Kerr in the same paper a few days later, was less kind to The Happy Time.  “Champion has also made use of projected slide-film, slapping snapshots of quaint villagers all over a cyclorama that would have drowned "Blow-Up,” he wrote, referencing the Antonioni film about a photographer to which several critics compared the photography theme of The Happy Time. Kerr continues, “But here the technique creates a vast cavern, accenting the hole at the heart of things: it makes the stage inside it seem dark and gloomy, it pulls attention violently away from Robert Goulet when he is singing… it denies the play the one thing it must have if it is to evoke anything at all—the sense of a solid milieu, with rock underfoot and real smoke coming from chimneys.” Of Kander and Ebb’s work, Kerr said, it was  “lacking that first twist of mind that led them into composing the brittle, sneaky score for "Cabaret,”…. They become more ordinary, though still musically interesting, when they are asked to supply up-beat tunes for filler.”

Despite the mixed reviews, the show won 3 Tony Awards, Goulet for Best Actor, and Champion for Director and Choreography. Wayne, Rupert, and Gregg all also received nominations. This is the third KAnder and Ebb we’ve discussed and the third show to win a Tony for at least one of the performers, which speaks to Kander and Ebb’s great ability to write to the talents of specific performers. Although Goldman said Goulet was miscast and that the writers thought so, he got great notices and a Tony from this show.  I suppose the difference is people who weren’t involved in the creation of the show didn’t know Nash’s original intention. 

Tim’s Take

When I hit play on this album, I was prepared to find out why it was an obscure flop, and instead, I fell in love with it. It’s a beautiful score. Because I did not see the show, I can’t really argue with the general assessment, including by Kander and Ebb, that the technology overwhelmed the show, but it’s an argument that doesn’t look the same from the perspective of 2026. People in 1968 didn’t have experience seeing shows with projections, but I do. I have seen shows with beautiful projections, ugly, garish projections, overused projections, underused projections, projections that mysteriously flew in on a tiny screen for one scene and then vanished. I’m not sure I’ve ever walked out a show saying the projections were too big for the story. 

It’s really about what you do with the projections, and the accounts of The Happy Time make them seem sparing and thematically relevant. They weren’t used to represent signs or backdrops or other pieces of scenery as is so often lazily done nowadays. So I can’t really get on board with that being the reason the show failed. Unless the argument is that because of the cyclorama, a larger stage was needed to house it and thus the show was forced into the Broadway Theatre, which is admittedly, a large theatre for this kind of thing. 

It strikes me how close Champion, for all the criticism he gets in the stories told about this show, got to the future of musicals. Not only the projections, either. There wasn’t a curtain down as the audience walked into the theatre, which is done all the time now but was the subject of jokes in 1968. In the Los Angeles tryout, the orchestra wasn’t in the pit, which is also something else done all the time now that was an innovation back then. 

Does this show take for granted that people who find fulfillment in their careers over having a wife and kids are inherently less happy than they could be? Yes, it does, and that’s obviously something I don’t agree with, but it doesn’t do it more than any movie you’d find on the Hallmark Channel. 

The material is almost in a Rogers and Hammerstein vein, with its provincial setting and nostalgic point of view, and on the surface Kander & Ebb’s cynical and edgy reputation makes them seem like a poor fit. But Nash’s book and characters, even with the changes demanded by Champion, really temper any potential shmaltz, and the result is bittersweet. The ending, with Jacques going off alone, is actually pretty sad, although it’s framed as a necessary chapter for his personal growth. Kander & Ebb capture the tone well, it’s not too light and it’s not too dark either. They inject a note of melancholy here and there. Take the song “(Walking) Among my Yesterdays,” where Ebb’s lyric has nostalgia so palpable it’s almost dewy, but Kander’s music emphasizes the sadness. When Goulet reaches the word “yesterdays,” the music doesn’t swell and build, it does the opposite, so that the singer almost has to toss off that word. 

I wouldn’t exactly call myself a Robert Goulet fan, I’ve never listened to his records, but Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot is one of my favorite musicals, and Goulet’s songs on that cast recording are some of my favorites. His voice is so robust, in a way that you just don’t hear at all anymore. I’m sure a lot of modern listeners will think it’s too much and he’s over singing, but, to me, it works. It’s what I want out of a Broadway sound, actually. His big act two duet with Julie Gregg, “Seeing Things,” is sweeping in that Golden Age way a song could be. Gregg displays a crisp, clear soprano that’s absolutely beautiful. It’s two vocal types that Kander and Ebb rarely wrote for. Neither female lead part in the two shows I have already covered required a soprano. It doesn’t make the show feel current, either today or 1968. 

But the throwback musical quality is absolutely filtered through the lens of Kander & Ebb. “Seeing Things” isn’t actually a love song, it’s a breakup song, the moment that Jacques and Laurie realize they are simply incompatible due to their differing worldviews. Again, it’s not a happy ending. The framing device of an older Jacques looking back to this visit goes a long way toward achieving this balance and making this a good fit for Kander & Ebb, and that was Champion’s suggestion

Elsewhere in the varied score are songs that are pure Kander & Ebb. “The Life of a Party,” the showstopper for Wayne’s Grandpere, is really fun. I’m surprised it isn’t done more often these days, it’s the perfect showcase for a charismatic star. And Wayne definitely fits that bill. His other big song, “A Certain Girl,” which eventually includes all three generations, is another winner. If it doesn’t move the story forward a ton, it at least does what a show tune ought to and entertains. 

“I Don’t Remember You,” a song Jacques sings in Act One after re-encountering Laurie, is a prime example of one of Kander & Ebb’s favorite genres of songs - songs that mean the opposite of what they say. Is there a term for that? Jacques is willfully trying to avoid his memories of his youthful romance with Laurie, but, as photos of Laurie appear on the cyclorama, the audience realizes it isn’t true - he does remember. A poetic use of projections, that’s a moment I would have loved to have seen on stage.

”He’s Back,” the second number in the show, describes the family’s feelings about Jacques’s reappearance, with each member joining the song one by one, overlapping each other. It’s not the most brilliant lyric I’ve ever heard, but its structure is far more sophisticated than required by the demands of this otherwise perfunctory number. 

The title song, which opens and closes the show, is well written but it’s not one I find myself eager to listen to again, the way I was with “Life of the Party” and “Seeing Things.” It exists in the framing device, with Goulet singing it directly to the audience, inviting us to remember the happy time, and, perhaps that reason, it feels inessential to me. I felt similarly about “Wilkomenn” in Cabaret, so maybe I just want something different out of an opening number than what Kander & Ebb do. That’s worth keeping in mind as I listen to more of their shows. 

Not every number is a winner. “Catch My Garter” is a number for the chorus girls at the vaudeville theatre where Bibi’s father works as the music director. That sounds squarely within Kander & Ebb’s wheelhouse, as they loved a vaudeville pastiche. But there’s not a lot going on in this number, aside from the risqué lyrics. I’m sure there was a dance break - like all cast albums from this era, the dance music is not included -  and I’m sure it was worthwhile on stage, as Champion excelled at staging those kinds of numbers, but on the album, it does nothing. It’s not related to the main plot of the family, so it feels unnecessary. In that sense, I get why people say Champion was the wrong director for this material. Fresh off the massive success of Hello, Dolly, Champion of course wanted to stage some dance numbers. But chorus girls and a big production number weren’t what this show needed, as it was, as has been said, ultimately an intimate show.  

On the other hand, maybe the show could’ve used more of that style. The vaudeville theatre only appears as a setting for one scene, which feels like a missed opportunity for Kander & Ebb to get to play with that milieu. Of course, they would make up for it later in their careers.

It’s also a short album, only 39 minutes long, and that’s because none of the several reprises are included. Also not included was the music for the ballet sequence in the second act. The fact that there was a ballet sequence surprised me, and that’s another example of this show resembling shows from the ‘40s more than its contemporaries of the late ‘60s. 

My biggest complaint about the score, actually, is about a song that’s not here. The climax of this show is the scene when Grandpere forces Jacques to come clean about the truth of his life to Bibi. It’s a sad scene, but it’s a cathartic moment of honesty for the character, and his emotional breakthrough. It’s the crux of Nash’s themes. But there’s no song on this album that even hints this event occurred. Kander & Ebb wrote a song for this scene, but Champion cut it after the out-of-town tryout. For later productions, they wrote a new scene for this scene, but the version that premiered on Broadway has no attempt at musicalizing the most important scene in the show. And that’s a serious flaw.

I’m going to give Song of the Show to “The Life of the Party” because it is just that fun. I recognize that it’s a problem that the best part of a show is what Walter Kerr referred to as “filler,” since it’s not important to the themes, setting, or characters of the piece. But, in the specific context of my experiencing these shows as albums and not plays, that matters less to me. 

Ranking 

I am somewhat tempted to put this straight to the top. I enjoyed it that much, but I acknowledge that part of my affection is the surprise of discovery, whereas I was pretty familiar with Cabaret before I began this series. And as tuneful as The Happy Time is, it is just not as ambitious or multifaceted as Cabaret. It’s still far better than Flora the Red Menace.

Join me next time as we listen to Kander & Ebb’s second musical of 1968, an adaptation of a recent Oscar-winning film, Zorba!