“BEWITCHED, BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED” (1940)

Pal Joey was the last of a series of innovative musicals produced by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart between 1935 and 1940 and was their boldest creation. The plot was based on a series of stories written for The New Yorker magazine by John O’Hara that featured a sleazy nightclub song and dance man, Joey Evans. An unsympathetic anti-hero, the scheming Joey is a striking departure from the usual musical comedy leading man of the 1920s and 1930s. Joey dreams of owning a nightclub. He discards his girlfriend and lies his way into an affair with Vera Simpson, an older woman with a wealthy husband. Vera, a jaded socialite who is bored with her marriage and has a taste for younger men, succumbs to his charms and begins to support him. He convinces Vera to purchase a club for him, which he names Chez Joey. Near the end of the play, when threatened with blackmail and scandal because of her affair with Joey, Vera discards him. Most of the other characters are as manipulative and self-centered as Joey and Vera. Richard Rodgers had this to say about writing the musical: “It was a weird experience to be putting on a musical show in which none of the characters (with the exception of the ingenue) had even a bowing acquaintance with decency. It seemed time to us, however, that musical comedy get out of its cradle and start standing on its own feet, looking at the facts of life.”
Although Rodgers and Hart were ready to tackle adult themes in musical comedy in 1940, audiences and reviewers were less ready. The show opened with Gene Kelly and Vivienne Segal in the lead roles of Joey and Vera. While their individual performances were praised, the show received mixed reviews and was only moderately successful, closing after 374 performances. Brooks Atkinson, the NY Times theater critic, famously commented: “Although Pal Joey is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”
“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (official title “Bewitched”) was the best-known song from the Pal Joey score and was Lorenz Hart’s last great hit. The song gave full expression to his cynical view of human nature. In the show Vera Simpson sings “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” when, after a drunken romp, she awakens with Joey lying in the bed beside her. Critic Atkinson described the song as having “….scabrous lyrics by Lorenz Hart to one of Richard Rodgers's most haunting tunes,” but Noel Katz at www.musicalwriters.com gives a more detailed explanation of why the song offended the sensibilities of many theatergoers in 1940. “In our age of sexual frankness, we might expect that a musical comedy from before World War II will tip-toe around such issues. While Pal Joey uses no four-letter words, it makes the relationship very clear: “We've separate bedrooms... one for play and one for show.” Other media in the forties and fifties couldn't be as explicit as Broadway, and many of Hart's lyrics were altered for radio and film consumption. Even the published sheet music takes all the zing out of “Bewitched,” which includes quips such as “horizontally speaking, he's at his very best.” And many a singer has been misled into interpreting “Bewitched” as a love song. It is not. It's a woman detailing the reason she enjoys making love to a younger man. “Where it counts, he's adept enough.” The song's many solid jokes are always followed by the phrase “bewitched, bothered and bewildered.” The character is talking about the three phases of an affair. At first, you're bewitched by a kind of attraction. Then, you're hot and bothered, exploring each other physically. Finally, the attraction passes and you're left bewildered. Vera tells us she's all these things at once.” Not since the musical Showboat in 1927 had a musical comedy featured such gritty realism and Rodgers recalled that half of the first-night audience “sat there in stony, stunned silence.”
If the audience and critics could have set aside their distaste for the story, they would have heard one of Rodgers and Hart’s finest scores. Helen Forrest with the Benny Goodman Orchestra first recorded “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” in 1941, but jazz musicians didn’t routinely cover the song until 1949-1950. At that time several recordings entered the Billboard charts, including ones by Doris Day, Mel Torme, Larry Green, Gordon Jenkins and Bill Snyder. Though the song was intimately associated with a character in a specific dramatic situation, it was able to become independently popular. Its popularity caused Pal Joey to be revived on Broadway in 1952, and this time the play was a smash hit that ran for 542 performances. World War II had changed American sensibilities and no one found the play even mildly distasteful, including Atkinson. In 1957 a movie entitled Pal Joey was made that starred Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth. It was based loosely on the original play, but with less gritty dialogue and Joey and Vera were made to be much more sympathetic characters. The lyrics to Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered were changed to remove the most flagrant sexual allusions and Rodgers and Hart tunes were added to the film score that were not in the original play. The film also had a happy ending, which the play did not have. Sinatra won a Golden Globe Award for his portrayal of Joey, and many critics considered it his definitive role. It was an instant success with both the critics and the general public and became one of the ten highest earning films that year.
In 2008 Pal Joey is ready to beguile again; a revival is scheduled to open on Broadway on December 11with Christian Hoff and Stockard Channing in the lead roles of Joey and Veraby.