Dreaming of a White Christmas on Broadway
California Dreaming
He was one of America’s most prolific songwriters, but even the great Irving Berlin wasn’t immune to writer’s block. It could stymie the composer from a few days to several months at a time. And it was lurking in the shadows as he composed the score for the 1942 film Holiday Inn.
Berlin had signed a contract with Paramount Pictures to write songs for a musical he’d pitched, about an inn that only opened on national holidays. With “Easter Parade” already in his oeuvre, he penned odes to all other holidays: “Let’s Say It with Firecrackers,” “Plenty to Be Thankful For,” “Let’s Start the New Year Right,” even “This Is a Great Country,” a Labor Day song that never made the final cut.
But the song about Christmas eluded him, and not because Berlin was Jewish. According to Laurence Bergreen’s As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, “The problem was that the Christmas song, as the high point of the show, had to be better than good; it had to be great in the way that ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ was great, or ‘God Bless America’ was great: simple, universal and unforgettable.”
Finally, Berlin brushed off an unfinished tune he’d first introduced to Fred Astaire on the set of 1935’s Top Hat and, lounging poolside at the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa in Phoenix, he started writing what would become “White Christmas.” As the heat and palm trees made him yearn for the snowy Christmases of his youth on the Lower East Side, Berlin wrote through the night and was finished by morning.
He immediately contacted his transcriber, Helmy Kresa. “I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend,” he announced. “Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.” Kresa thought, “Oh, you conceited ass.” But then Berlin played the song. By the time he reached the chorus, she agreed: Indeed, it was the greatest song ever written.
Just Like the Ones I Used to Know
The world’s greatest song didn’t have such a love-at-first-chorus effect on the rest of the world. Berlin presented it to Holiday Inn star Bing Crosby, the man who would eventually turn it into a national treasure, and all Crosby offered was, “I don’t think we have any problems with that one, Irving.” Whether that’s enthusiasm or faint praise depends on which account you read.
Released on August 4, 1942, Holiday Inn became a respectable hit, launching the song “Careful, It’s My Heart” onto the airwaves and becoming the inspiration for an international hotel chain. By contrast, “White Christmas” was mauled by both critics and colleagues, one of whom called it “cockamamie.”
In the fall, however, when Holiday Inn was screened overseas for World War II troops, “White Christmas” struck a chord. Soldiers yearning for home connected with the lyrics, and the song became a top request on Armed Forces Radio. By the end of 1942, it had spent 11 weeks at the top of the pop charts, a position it would reclaim in 1945 and again in 1946.
Eager to keep on milking this seasonal cash cow, Paramount approached Berlin in the early 50s in the hopes of creating a new holiday movie. So he cobbled together a score combining old favorites and new compositions, and patched a story together with parts from Holiday Inn and Stars on My Shoulders, an unproduced musical he’d written with Norma Krasna. As production began, Berlin sent a letter to a friend, gushing, “It is the first movie that I’ve been connected with since Holiday Inn that has the feel of a Broadway musical.” Starring Crosby and Danny Kaye, White Christmas told the story of two entertainers who used their showbiz clout to help an old war buddy save his resort from bankruptcy and find love along the way. It became the biggest box-office hit of 1954, grossing a then-impressive $12 million. Meanwhile, the song kept on selling and selling, eventually moving 100 million copies and earning a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Regarding the biggest single of his career, Crosby later said that “a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully.” Whether he was being humble or just a Scrooge depends on which account you read. Over the next six decades, “White Christmas” became one of the most popular holiday songs ever, with more than 500 recorded versions around the world.
Meet Me in St. Louis
Sometime in 2000, something peculiar happened at the Municipal Theatre in St. Louis, known as the Muny. Executive director Paul Blake was polling theatergoers on what show they’d like to see most. The winner: White Christmas, even though it’s technically not a “show.” Enamored of the movie since his childhood, Blake decided to give it another look. “The thing moves at a snail’s pace!” he says, laughing. “Many sequences are wonderful, obviously, but by and large, it needed to be restructured if it was going to work onstage.”
Blake took another poll, this time asking audiences to list their favorite moments from the movie, and began to fashion a script from the results. Beefed up with even more chestnuts from the Berlin songbook, the Muny staged a workshop production of White Christmas that year—in July. The reception was hearty enough to merit repeat performances, and convince Blake that his regional adaptation had national potential. “I phoned Walter Bobbie,” he says of the Tony-winning director of Chicago, "and I said, 'Walter, I’ve got something here that’s right up your Tin Pan Alley.'”
Thrilled by the idea of working on a Berlin musical, Bobbie said “yes” on the spot and enlisted playwright David Ives to work on the script and Randy Skinner to choreograph the show. Then producer Kevin McCollum signed on, and before anyone knew it, White Christmas had booked a theater in San Francisco.
“It was all so pure and old-fashioned, how it came together,” says Ives. “These days, everything’s so planned out and strategized for the producers’ sake. But we had a theater before we even had a script! They were sketching sets as we were writing,” he says of Anna Louizos’ lavish designs, adding with a laugh, “Then they were tossing out those sketches as we were rewriting.”
The show made its official world premiere during the 2004 holiday season at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre, earning raves and robust box office. At McCollum’s suggestion, the producers and creative team decided not to view this initial success as an out-of-town tryout. Instead, they set their sight on other towns. Seasonal productions were mounted in Los Angeles, Boston, St. Paul, Detroit and Toronto. Broadway could wait.
And May All Your Christmases Be White!
The extended breaks between productions of White Christmas resulted in a healthy creative process. Says Bobbie, “It’s not like when you workshop something, then dive right into a tryout and rush immediately to open on Broadway. We were able to go our separate ways and reconvene the next fall with a renewed energy and perspective.”
Bobbie and Ives say most of the show’s major changes happened between St. Louis and San Francisco, with small nips and tucks administered along the way. And both insist the show hasn’t undergone any special primps and preparations for its Big Apple premiere. “We’re thrilled the show is on Broadway," says Bobbie, “but coming here has never been our ultimate goal.”
Still, it’s lovely for Broadway theatergoers to get to discover this feel-good seasonal musical at last, with two of its original stars, Jeffry Denman and Meredith Patterson, in the cast. “This is not your usual holiday story,” says Ives. “It doesn’t have a Grinch. There’s no Scrooge who’s made a complete turnaround and become a saint. It’s just about a bunch of people coming to together to help someone, because that’s what decent people do.”
Besides, how can anyone remain a curmudgeon when all those wonderful Irving Berlin songs are being sung? Blake attended a recent Broadway preview and got his Grinch goosed when someone nearby hummed along to every song. “It was starting to really annoy me,” he admits, and he approached the culprit during intermission. “They were from France, and didn’t speak a word of English. Yet they knew all the melodies to Irving Berlin’s songs!” In case you’re keeping score, that’s Berlin 1, Grinch 0.