Richard Linklater | Blue Moon / 2025

the party’s over

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Kaplow (screenplay), Richard Linklater (director) Blue Moon / 2025

 

Not since Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice of 1930 have we seen quite such a monodrama as Richard Linklater’s 2025 film Blue Moon. Yes, there have been numerous staged monologues on and off Broadway, long staged performances in which all the characters were played by the same actor such as the brilliant David Greenspan and others, along with the spun-out stories of recent monologists such as Spalding Gray; but very few films have allowed a single character to go on, almost single-handedly, for the 100 minutes of Blue Moon in which Lorenz Hart (performed almost miraculously by Ethan Hawke) has the floor. It is more than ironic that this great performance, whatever part of it may actually may be true, was also Hart's last. He would die, after drunkenly collapsing to the sidewalk near a bar on 8th Avenue in the pouring rain, of pneumonia a few months later.

     But tonight is March 31, 1943, the night the Broadway musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II opened at the St. James Theater and changed the American theater musical forever, and Rodgers’s former and still possibly current lyricist collaborator, Lorenz Hart is in attendance. But the minute the chorus belts out the final titular song, he bolts, rushing off to the famed Sardi’s bar and restaurant before creators Rodgers and Hammerstein, cast members, and other invitees can finish up their backstage congratulations, change their costumes, and make their way to the upstairs dining room at Sardi’s to await the reviews.

    In the empty bar, a closed sign posted on the door, Hart lets loose, at first mostly to bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and the pianist Morty Rifkin (Jonah Lees), whom Hart quickly renames Knuckles. Beginning with a quick discussion of Casablanca, evidently a regular topic of conversation of Hart and Eddie, Hart is quick to repeat his favorite line from the film, “Nobody ever loved me that much”—a key element of Robert Kaplow’s themes in Blue Moon. He goes on to praise the acting abilities of another figure short of stature (Hart is terribly self-conscious about his own 4 foot, 10 inches height), but of great acting range, Claude Rains, who also, despite his constant dabbling with the ladies, admits his love for Rick and at the end of the film joins up with him to travel to Brazzaville, while Rick expresses the coded homosexuality of the line: "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

     The latter is the perfect line for the closeted Hart, who gets the whole sexual thing out the way almost immediately, admitting that when it comes to sex he is not only "ambisextrous"—able to jerk off with either hand—but omnisexual, arguing that such a condition is necessary to be able to write for both genders. Transsexuality was not a major topic in his day, nor for that matter was homosexuality something to be openly talked about, when even the gayest of men still dreamt of possibly conquering the opposite sex, whatever “conquering” for someone like Hart meant.

    The woman, in this case, is the quite tall Elizabeth Weiland (Elizabeth Qualley), a Yale student whom Hart has mentored and with whom he has spent a romantic (but totally sexless) weekend in Vermont. Among his many fantasies—and this is a man who, although pretending to be a cynical realist is filled with fantastical dreams—is that since she is also joining the party at Sardi’s (her mother is officially involved in the organization that has produced Oklahoma!, the Theatre Guild), perhaps tonight is the night she might….well even Hart is not sure of what he really wants from the girl. His admiration of her, nonetheless, is astounding, and throughout his long monologue, he can hardly find the right words to describe her, getting help from another, quite silent man in the corner, who just happens to be author E. B. White, who having just abandoned his journalistic career is stymied in his attempts to begin a children’s tale.

      Quite explicably, Hart takes out to time to tell White a story about a constantly returning mouse who lives in his apartment, which of course, leads to the noted children’s author’s renowned Stuart Little—all fiction screenwriter Kaplow admits, but it feels possible given the vast array of topics Hart encompasses on his grand voyage of the large and comfy Sardi’s bar, as if he were already on his way to explore the vast territory of Marco Polo, a far more perfect subject he later argues to Rodgers for a serious musical than a bunch of farmers and cowboys. Rodgers had early on asked him, despite their problems due to Hart’s alcoholism, to collaborate with him on the adaptation of Lynn Riggs’ play Green Grow the Lilacs (the source of Oklahoma!’s libretto), but his long-time collaborator turned him down flat.

     And what does he think of the musical, asks Eddie? It’s brilliant, a real breakthrough, destined for a long hit run, and will be performed in US high schools forever after, Hart declaims to Eddie, later repeating these praises to the composer, lyricist, and the crowd gathered to celebrate Oklahoma’s premiere; but it’s also...how to best express it...an unbelievable pastiche as corny as the elephant that Hammerstein has planted in the middle of Aunt Eller’s cornfield, or—had Hart been as truly prescient as he appears to be on this special night—“as corny as Kansas in August,” a line from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s later South Pacific. For Hart the work is easy and safe, unlike the daringly witty, sardonic, and sexual revelations he whipped up for Rodgers in their collaborations such as Pal Joey.

     Sure, he admits to Eddie, he’s envious; who wouldn’t be? But if nothing else, Hart is honest. On the staircase, as Rodgers (Andrew Scott) attempts to escape to the dinner he’s hosting, his former collaboration admits most of his reservations:

 

richard rodgers: Oklahoma! is too easy? The guy actually getting the girl in the end is too easy?

     You've just eliminated every successful musical comedy ever written, Larry.

lorenz hart: It's too easy for me.

rodgers: Did you hear the audience tonight?

hart: Yes.

rodgers: Sixteen hundred people didn't think it was too easy. You're telling me 1,600 people were   

     wrong?

hart: I'm just saying you and I can do something so much more emotionally complicated. We   

     don't have to pander to what...

rodgers: Oscar and I are pandering?

hart: No, I didn't say that.

rodgers: Irving Berlin is pandering?

hart: I love Berlin.

rodgers: "White Christmas" is pandering?

hart: Well, I don't believe "White Christmas."

rodgers: OK.

[Laughter]

rodgers: Well, maybe audiences have changed.

hart: Well, they still love to laugh.

rodgers: They want to laugh, but not in that way.

hart: In what way?

rodgers: In your way. They want to laugh, but they also want to cry a little. They want to feel.

    Despite the difficulties he has had working with Hart on the last couple of musicals due to his drunken disappearing acts, in this instance the great composer is graceful enough to offer up a collaboration on a new version of their A Connecticut Yankee, which Hart did accomplish for the revival of 1943. In this scene, however, both Rodgers and Hart know that their real collaboration is over. Things have changed, particularly with the arrival of World War II. The light-hearted wit of the 1920s and 30s, sprinkled heartily with the Wildean aesthetics of the gay fin de siècle, have little meaning for the audiences facing Hitler. Despite the immense talents of Vivienne Segal* and dancer Vera-Ellen A Connecticut Yankee lasted only 135 performances.

    Later, in the cloak room, Hart finally gets his dream lover away for what in any other film would certainly have led to a steamy moment or two of quick sex; but here, finally, he runs out of words as (based on the letters between the real Hart and Weiland), the 20 some year-old Elizabeth gets her own short monologue as she tells the story of her own dreamboat, a young man who she finally gets alone for a sexual rendezvous which he can’t consummate. Nonetheless, she is still so much in love with him she offers him a second chance in which he performs superbly, but never calls her back. She admits, as disappointed, angry, and righteously bitter about his entire behavior as she is, she would still take up with him again in a moment if he only called. As Hart commiserates, we can’t help loving who we love even if they’re the wrong people for us. When he dares to ask Elizabeth about her feelings for him, her answer is precisely that of the other two women for whom Hart had fallen, as he has earlier joked, “I love you Larry, but not in that way.”

     When he finally introduces her, late in the film, to Rodgers, the composer is immediately taken with her beauty and invites her along to a after-party he is about to attend. In Hammerstein’s company, moreover, is a bright young 12-year-old boy named Stevie (Cilllian Sullivan). When Hammerstein introduces him to Hart, he immediately recites the theater and number of performances of Hart's last Broadway show, arguing that his lyrics have grown a little sloppy. That kid reminded me of myself at just that age, I having almost memorized the Burns Mantle playbooks I studied in the Marion, Iowa Carnegie Public Library. For those in the know, the self-enchanted Stevie is Hammerstein’s protégé Stephen Sondheim, a classmate and friend of Hammerstein’s son James in real life, and who did seek out Hammerstein as his mentor. Since Sondheim himself has reported, however, that his first Broadway opening was Carousel in 1945, we must suppose that this encounter is also one of Kaplow’s fictions.

     All the celebrities of the evening, even E. B. White have now left, and it is finally time for Hart to grab his hat and run off to his own much-touted party, which, although he was well known to have regularly hosted, is probably, in this case, also a fiction. And despite his promises and Eddie’s attempts to keep him sober, Hart still needs, to quote another wonderful songwriting duo, Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, “One more for the road.”

     Like so very many alcoholics, Hart is the first to the party and the last to leave. As critic Brian Tellarico observes in his review on the Roger Ebert site:

 

“It’s a film that invites one to reflect on the lyrics Lorenz Hart wrote for the song that gives it its title. ‘I heard somebody whisper, “Please, adore me.”’ Despite all his cynical claims otherwise, Lorenz Hart needed to be adored, too. If only someone could love him that much.”

     Yet Knuckles cannot resist sending him away with his own version of “Blue Moon,” a song whose lyrics, particularly when sung by someone like Billy Holliday or Ella Fitzgerald are still transcendent.

    I think every gay man in the world might like to have seen Hart, who most probably was what everyone suspected, a homosexual, more clearly delineated in this film as a queer. At least in Blue Moon, unlike the dreadful 1948 film Words and Music (wherein Hart, played by Mickey Rooney, falls into depression only after a woman played by Betty Garrett turns down his proposal for marriage) most of those in the know, particularly Eddie and Weiland herself presumes he is a gay man, even if one couldn’t easily admit such things in public in those days. I’d look for proof in the lyrics themselves. Who else but a gay man could write a stanza like the one from “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” sung by Vivienne Segal in Pal Joey?

 

                                 I'll sing to him, each spring to him

                                 And worship the trousers that cling to him

                                 Bewitched, bothered and bewildered—am I

 

                                 When he talks, he is seeking

                                 Words to get off his chest

                                 Horizontally speaking

                                 He's at his very best

 

                                 Vexed again, perplexed again

                                 Thank God, I can be oversexed again

                                 Bewitched, bothered and bewildered—am I

 

    Hammerstein’s lovers, you must remember, fall for each other across a crowded room, at a square dance, on a carousel, or just trying out a waltz without any need, for god’s sake, to lay down and cling to the other’s pants, let alone worship them!

 

*Segal sang one of Hart’s new songs in that rewritten revival of A Connecticut Yankee, the witty “To Keep My Love Alive,” which begins:

 

I married many men, a ton of them,

And yet I was untrue to none of them,

Because I bumped off every one of them

To keep my love alive.

 

 In Blue Moon Hart quips about just this number, as if he were already at work on the lyrics.

     Hart is reported to have once proposed marriage to Segal who turned him down, perhaps responding, just as Hart in the film quips “I love you Larry, but not in that way.”

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).