with other Weill/Gershwin songs is better than most plots in
the legitimate theatre, which have no Weill/Gershwin songs
at all.^13
How did Liza remember the song in time to sing it with
Charlie? Throughout her adult life she has been unable to re-
cover the childhood song, but the breakthrough has occurred in
the therapy sessions by which she has been trying to straighten
out her psychic life. All the songs in the show, before “My Ship”
comes out of repression, relate to her therapy sessions or her
mental distress. The lights dim on Liza in her book location,
where she is talking to the therapist or undergoing a hallucina-
tion. When the lights come up, the stage has revolved or the
traveler curtain has parted, revealing the full stage set for the
fantasy numbers, which are colorful, splashy musical extrava-
ganzas. Liza herself is the star of these inserts. She is caught up
in the anxious jubilation-nightmare of her glamorous life. We
cannot see her book-location, so the actress slips away and reap-
pears in the dreams.
The first three sequences represent the dreams themselves.
In her real life, Liza is drab in dress and dispassionate in the af-
fair she is conducting with a married man. Her dreams—the
Glamour Dream, the Wedding Dream, the Circus Dream—
taunt her desires for fashion, ridicule her anxiety over mar-
riage, put her on trial for the indecisive life she is leading (this
is the Circus Dream). They maintain a flagrant show-business
disregard for the workings of the unconscious, which cannot
be said to operate according to the formats of American pop
tunes. Liza’s “One Life to Live” in the Glamour Dream is a
standard verse–chorus combination, with the stanzas of the
chorus in the AABA form. Her duet with Randy in the Wed-
ding Dream, “This Is New,” has a stanza pattern of ABAC. Yet
there is something to this fooling about with the unconscious,
for a song—any song, including any pop tune—is prepared
to articulate feelings left obscure in social discourse. In the
120 CHAPTER FIVE
(^13) For a full discussion of the show, with an emphasis on the lyrics, see Fu-
ria, Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist, pp. 160–75. See also Block, Enchanted
Evenings: The Broadway Musical fromShow Boat to Sondheim, pp. 133–58, and
Mordden, Beautiful Mornin’, pp. 61–69.