"My Funny Valentine"

Rodgers and Hart

Rodgers and Hart had been collaborating as a successful songwriting team for 18 years when they wrote our Song of the Week for a Broadway show called “Babes in Arms.” As was their habit, Lorenz Hart first wrote the lyric, and then Richard Rogers set it to music in his evocative and expressive way. By the early 1930’s the film industry had left silent film behind and was hitting its stride with sound pictures which could be peddled directly to patrons, literally where they lived, for a 25-cent ticket. And with the Great Depression also in full swing, with many out of work and everyone living on very little, Broadway was rightly concerned that their musical theater would not be able to continue to attract audiences as it had been doing with its largely Vaudeville-inspired song and dance productions, in person, in The City, and offered at a good deal more than 25 cents per seat. Some feared that movies with sound would put musical theater out of business.

If you grew up as I did, in an era when Broadway musicals were known to run for years — and by now some have run for decades — it may surprise you to know that the longest-running Broadway musical in the 1930’s ran for only a little over 400 days, perhaps 15-16 months. The average run for such shows was under 200 days. Yet, despite the competition from the 25-cent movie ticket, Broadway in the 1930’s was supporting a host of musicals featuring some extraordinary talents. The Gershwins and Irving Berlin produced six successful shows between 1930 and 1938. Rogers and Hart, having tried Hollywood for a few years and found it less than welcoming, returned to Broadway in the mid 1930’s and produced eight musicals before the end of the decade. And by the early 1940’s, Broadway musicals were coming into their own on both coasts, with stronger story lines which did more than simply string together a bunch of great songs. After the sudden death of Larry Hart in 1943 , Richard Rogers began what would be a legendary collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein, producing musicals for Broadway which would became major motion picture successes as well. We’ll be looking at many songs from the musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Age in the months to come, I hope. But for today, let’s turn back to our Song of the Week.

“My Funny Valentine” was composed to be sung by the female to the male lead in a Broadway show about teenagers trying to stage a play while their parents were gone away on the theatrical circuit, having left the teens to fend for themselves. As successful as they were, Rogers and Hart could hardly have imagined that a song they had written for a cast of teenagers would “grow up” to be one of the most-recorded songs of all time, a jewel in the crown of jazz standards. No fewer than 1,600 versions of this song have been recorded by singers, performers and aficionados who have performed and loved the song for coming up on a century. I had hoped today to share the first studio recording of “My Funny Valentine,” as sung by a seventeen-year old girl with a great voice, Mitzi Green, a former child actor who played female lead in “Babes in Arms.” I admit to a particular fondness for recordings by actors who have performed a song night after night on Broadway, under the direction of the composers themselves.

Sadly that recording is not available. So I chose instead one that I found which seems to me to be most true to the song as Rogers and Hart wrote it, sung by Julie Blazer, whose recording is simply wonderful, start to finish. Pay close attention to “the verse” (the lead-in before the song proper). In it, Larry Hart shows that HE was familiar with the tradition which Tony mentioned in our latest Word of the Week, the association of February 14th, Valentine’s Day, with the day when the birds were said to have chosen their mates for spring. In fact, “the verse” which precedes Hart’s lyric is all about a “feathered” fellow with tousled “hair” and a “dopey” demeanor — a rather funny Valentine, indeed!

Behold the way our fine-feathered friend
His virtue doth parade.
Thou knowest not, my dim-witted friend,
The picture thou hast made.

Thy vacant brow and thy tousled hair
Conceal thy good intent.
Thou noble, upright, truthful, sincere
And slightly dopey gent — You’re…

My funny Valentine,
Sweet, comic Valentine,
You make me smile with my heart.
Your looks are laughable,
Unphotographable,
Yet you’re my fav’rite work of art.

Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak,
Are you smart?

But don’t change a hair for me,
Not if you care for me.
Stay, little Valentine, stay.
Each day is Valentine’s day.

And as an aside, I’m particularly proud to say that in this version Julie Blazer is accompanied by some talented musicians from the New Jersey Symphony, just a hip and a hop across the river from Manhattan. Hoorah for my home state!

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