Though you’ve probably never heard of it, “Early to Bed” is one of the major missing links in American musical history.
The 1943 Broadway musical represents the sole occasion that the pianist, composer and entertainer Thomas Waller, known as Fats, wrote the entire score for a “book” show, and it’s also one of the very few written by an African African composer during the entire decade. Yet “Early to Bed” — a hit during the World War II era about a Madame in Martinique who tries to pass off her bordello as a finishing school for refined young ladies — has all but disappeared. No official libretto or score exists. There never was a cast album, a revival or an Encores!-style concert performance.
Now the author and Columbia University professor John McWhorter is mounting two performances of the show as concerts at the Triad Theater in Manhattan, on Nov. 21 and Dec. 5. “I was always intrigued that Fats Waller wrote the music for a white show” — something other than a Black cast production — “and that it was a hit and that it toured and that somehow nobody has ever heard of it,” he said in an interview. While several biographies of Waller have been published, he noted that none gives more than a passing glance to the show, which was a late-life triumph.
Ed Kirkeby, who served as Waller’s manager in the final years of the pianist’s life, gave his account of “Early to Bed” in his 1966 biography of Waller. The producer Richard Kollmar (who would also play a role onstage) wanted to hire Waller to perform a few songs in the show. But upon learning that Kollmar had the librettist George Marion Jr. signed up to handle the book and lyrics — but as of yet no composer — Kirkeby persuaded Kollmar to hire Waller to write the music.
“Marion worked on the book and lyrics in California while Dad scored the show in New York,” Waller’s son Maurice wrote in his 1977 biography of his father. “I remember packets of neatly-typed lyrics arriving and Pop setting to work on new material or changing already-written numbers.”
Everyone remembers Waller finishing his work in a timely and professional manner. But Waller, who was known as an unstoppable party animal, was generally regarded as too unreliable to show up for eight performances a week, so the producer reluctantly gave his part to Bob Howard, a singer-pianist who later was one of the first African Americans to host his own TV series.
After “Early to Bed” opened in Boston — Kirkeby related that the hotel he had booked there refused to admit Waller and his wife because they were Black — and then successfully premiered on Broadway on June 17, Waller went back on the road. He died of influenza exacerbated by his alcoholism at age 39 on Dec. 15, on a train outside of Kansas City.
Ben West, the author and historian who writes The Musical Theater Report, noted in an interview that though all-Black musicals were popular in the 1920s and early ’30s, the later ’30s and the ’40s became “a transitional moment, when we see fewer Black-centric shows.” “Early to Bed” ran 382 performances until May 1944 — a hit by the metrics of the day — but this was a time when original cast albums were rare. Because the country was in the middle of a musician’s strike on recordings, no jazz or pop “cover” singles were made, although Waller himself, seemingly inebriated at the time, played brief versions of four tunes for V-Disc, a program distributing recordings to United States servicemen.
In 2009, Mel Miller, whose long-running Musicals Tonight series puts obscure works onstage in New York, tracked down a draft of the libretto when he found Marion’s daughter. He was bemoaning the lack of the music to some friends at the West Way diner when an elderly man who had overheard him walked up to the table and informed Miller that he was Harold Cromer, who had been a featured dancer in the show. Cromer, who was then 87, remembered some of the tunes after seeing the words, and Miller had his pianist transcribe them from Cromer’s memory.
McWhorter, who had heard roughly five minutes of music from the score on the 1980 album “Ben Bagley’s Everyone Else Revisited,” did some more sleuthing. “I picked up where Mel left off,” he said. He tracked down Waller’s sketches for the show in the New Jersey basement of his son’s lawyer; he examined a trunk of Marion’s papers. The researcher Alex Hassan found a missing song in the papers of Don Walker, a Broadway orchestrator of the period who is not known to have worked on this show.
“I think that this could be presented in a way that might get somebody interested in recreating orchestrations and doing a recording,” said McWhorter, who also writes a column for The New York Times. While going over the music with the singers performing at the Triad, including the Broadway veteran Katy Grenfell, he added, “I kept saying to myself, ‘Wow, these are good!’”
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