Concert Operetta salutes Eddy and MacDonald

MacDonald was born in Philadelphia and attended West Philadelphia High School. Eddy came to Philadelphia as a youngster from Rhode Island and worked as a reporter for the Evening Bulletin, the same paper where I got my journalistic start.

In the early 1930s Eddy earned his living as an opera singer, but during the daytime he hung out with Curtis Institute students like Rose Bampton, dated the dancer-choreographer Catherine Littlefield and patronized my father’s optical store at 1624 Spruce Street (Nelson liked to use the telescope inside the front window). He made his Hollywood debut in 1934 and was teamed with MacDonald in a series of highly successful films.

Mandated abortion

Although MacDonald was two years younger, she started her singing career earlier and became a movie star before Eddy got to Hollywood. MacDonald made her mark in Broadway musicals then made films with leading men Maurice Chevalier and Ramon Navarro before she was teamed with Eddy. Although she seemed icily sophisticated in her movies, the songwriter Robert Wright told me she was down-to-earth in person; the conductor Sylvan Levin added that she had a sexy figure that Hollywood kept tightly under wraps.

During the shooting of Rose Marie, at Lake Tahoe in 1934, MacDonald and Eddy launched a passionate romance. According to the author Sharon Rich, MacDonald became pregnant and the M-G-M studio boss Louis B. Mayer forced her to have an abortion. During a studio-mandated separation, MacDonald married actor Gene Raymond, who resembled Eddy, and Eddy married Ann Franklin.

New generation

Daniel Pantano, director of Concert Operetta Theater, dedicates himself to restoring and preserving the operetta music that was popular in the first half of the 20th Century—the staples of the Mac-Eddy films. In the process of introducing the genre to attractive young professionals, the music of Nelson and Jeanette is passed along to new generations.

At the company’s most recent presentation, baritone Eric Dubin gave a fine approximation of the Eddy style in “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” and "Stout-hearted Men." Jennifer Holbrook and Paul Corujo sang individual solo numbers, then joined in the nostalgic “I’ll See You Again.” Continuing in that vein, Dubin and Jessica Lennick crooned, “Will You Remember?”

Corujo was impressive when he sang one of the most challenging of all show tunes, “Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise.” Then the cast joined in “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” and turned that Romberg-Hammerstein song into an audience sing-along. Some of the people singing around me were born long after that song’s 1935 release.

Eddy’s regret

José Meléndez, music director and pianist, deserves credit for not only playing well but for coaching these young singers in a bygone style.

How Eddy would feel about this revival is another question. Much later he said, “I’d like to be remembered for my serious work instead of just that silly June-moon-spoon stuff,” he remarked shortly before his death in 1967. “I had a good serious career before I hit the movies. Then things changed and I had to sing songs like ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’ and ‘Rose Marie, I Love You,’ and these songs are the ones that are most requested. I hope that, after I’m gone, people will remember me for more than that.”