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When Comden and Green wrote the MGM screenplay in 1950, they were handed a batch of songs and told to incorporate them into an original story called Singin' in the Rain

[[image: black and white photograph of Twyla Tharp sitting on a stool with her knees hugged up to her chest and her feet braced on the back of a chair]]

[[caption]] Twyla Tharp, the director/choreographer of the Broadway musical Singin' in the Rain now playing at the Gershwin Theatre [[/caption]]

Lockwood, "I think the Broadway version will have what the movie couldn't have: spontaneity, the life right there in front of you. Whenever we rehearse the final scene, where Mary D'Arcy, as Kathy, runs down the aisle and I go, 'Stop her, stop that girl running down the aisle...,' we never get through it. We start to cry, and it's hard to sing that last song. Seeing that scene in the movie, you think, 'That's nice.' But here you actually see the relationships going on. There's more of an honesty, an immediacy, and you feel a part of it. That's what Broadway has that movies don't."

Singin' in the Rain is, of course, a story about the movies; specifically, that tumultuous period when Hollywood was making the changeover from silent films to talkies. Careers came to an abrupt end when it was discovered that those gorgeous faces had impossible voices. Lina Lamont (played by Faye Grant on Broadway), the prototypical dumb blonde, is a compendium of every casualty of the period. Although the characters and incidents are all invented, much of what takes place echoes actual events.

"When you watch old pictures you can see the actors walking to a vase because that's where the mike's hidden," says Comden. "And you can also see some of the sound problems - footsteps and paper crackling to sound like thunderstorms."

"When Don Lockwood makes his first talkie and uses his own dialogue - 'I love you, I love you, I love you' - that's based on the disaster that overtook John Gilbert, who was the greatest star at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in those early days," reveals Green. "His career unjustly came to an end, and he died tragically. There is a tragic theme underlying all of this which we wanted not to disregard, but rather to show how absurd it all was."

None of this occurred to Comden or Green when they went to work on the screenplay at MGM in May 1950. They were under contract to the studio and, they recall, producer Arthur Freed handed them a pile of sheet music and said, "These are my songs with Nacio Herb Brown. Get them into an original story called Singin' in the Rain."

"We had enormous problems in writing it," remembers Comden. "Roger Edens, who was the associate producer and musical supervisor, would play the songs over and over again for us. We had no idea what the story was going to be. We didn't know who the star was going to be. We wanted Gene Kelly, but he was busy shooting An American in Paris and didn't get in on the project till much later. For a long time we didn't know where to begin.

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We finally decided that the best era for the songs was the era in which they were written, which was around 1929, 1930. So we decided to set the story in that period."

"We both know that period and love that period," interjects Green. "We did no actual research on the picture. None. The beginning was like a jigsaw puzzle. We had to make up a story and characters and fit in all the songs along the way. [They contributed one of their own, "Moses Supposes," with Edens.] The only thing we knew for sure was that somewhere there had to be a scene where it was raining, and the hero would be singing and dancing."

That number is being retained intact on Broadway. Although Tharp undoubtedly wants to leave her imprint on the show, she realizes it would be foolish to tamper with certain sequences. "We tried to do different things with the title song," Correia admits, "and we kept coming back to the same conclusion: it's very hard to redo a classic. People will always be looking for certain things - 'Didn't Gene Kelly twirl the umbrella there?' So we went back to the original, and I think that will play a lot better than anything we would have done." [[image: right-pointing arrow]]

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