The DVD Report #18

We’re going to take a little digression this week, folks.

Before there were DVDs there were CDs. Before there were movies available for home consumption, there were records. From the introduction of the LP, in the late 1940s, to well into the 1980s, one of the most popular recording genres was the original cast album.

Let’s list Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Finian’s Rainbow, Brigaoon, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, The King and I, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, My Fair Lady, The Most Happy Fella, West Side Story, The Music Man, Gypsy, The Sound of Music, Camelot, Oliver!, Hello, Dolly, Fiddler on the Roof, Man of La Mancha, Cabaret, Company, Follies, A Chorus Line, Chicago, Sweeney Todd and Les Miserables as the thirty best-loved Broadway musicals through the 1980s. Certainly they are the most prolific in terms of the number of times they’ve been revived on Broadway, in regional theatres, on film and in studio cast albums.

For every three of these well known shows, there are at least two lesser known, but equally-memorable ones that I love to listen to on CD. Unfortunately some of them are already considered rarities, commanding outrageous sums on Amazon and e-bay so if you’re interested, grab ’em before the prices go even higher.

The musicians’ strike of 1948 kept Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley? from being recorded, though several singles including Ray Bolger’s “Once in Love With Amy” were released prior to the opening of the show and the subsequent strike. Fortunately the 1958 London Cast Recording of the musical version of Charley’s Aunt is available with the entire wonderful score intact. Every song is a gem from “The New Ashmoleon Marching Society & Student Conservatory Band” to “My Darling, My Darling” to “Make a Miracle” to “Lovelier Than Ever” to “Pernambuco” and of course, “Once in Love With Amy” done full justice by Norman Wisdom.

Shirley Booth won the New York Drama Critics poll of leading actresses in a musical for her portrayal of Aunt Cissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, no small achievement considering her competition included Getrude Lawrence in The King and I, Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam and Vivian Blaine in Guys and Dolls. While the story emphasis of the musical is still on twelve-year-old Francie, it’s her older relatives who take center stage in the musical numbers and they’re all terrific singing Dorothy Fields’ lyrics to Arthur Schwartz’s music. Highlights include Booth’s “Love Is the Reason”, papa Johnny Johnston’s “I’ll Buy You a Star” and mama Marcia Van Dyke’s “Look Who’s Dancing”. You’ll be dancing, too, as well as singing along with this unfairly forgotten masterwork if you give it a chance.

Pagnol’s trilogy of Fanny, Cesar and Marius was the basis for Harold Rome’s majestic Fanny, the music of which was kept for the film version several years later, although the lyrics were sadly jettisoned. Ezio Pinza lent his authoritative voice to the role of Cesar, father of the sailor who goes off to sea leaving his girl Fanny behind. Walter Slezak had the role of his career as Panisse, the wealthy merchant and friend of Cesar who marries the pregnant Fanny. William Tabbert is the sailor Marius and a young Florence Henderson is Fanny. All are given wonderful songs to sing. Among the highlights are Pinza’s “Welcome Home”, Slezak’s “Panisse and Son”, Tabbert’s title song and Henderson’s “Be Kind to Your Parents” which sends the audience out on a high note.

One wouldn’t necessarily think a story about sophisticated New Yorkers stranded in Amish country would make for a captivating musical, but Plain and Fancy is exactly that. The score by Albert Hague and Arnold B. Horwitt is a constant delight, much of it provided by Shirl Conway (“It’s Helluva Way to Run a Love Affair”) and Barbara Cook (“This Is All Very New to Me”), though it is David Daniels and Gloria Marlowe who get to sing the show’s best known tune, “Young and Foolish”. Other highlights include “Plain We Live”, “Follow Your Heart” and “Take Your Time and Take Your Pick”.

Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie was the basis for New Girl in Town which wisely puts the emphasis on the relationship between Anna and waterfront hag Marthy, played by Gwen Verdon and Thelma Ritter respectively, in roles for which they shared the Tony for best actress. Highlights of the Bob Merrill score include Verdon’s “It’s Good to Be Alive”, George Wallace’s “Look at ‘Er”, the Verdon-Cameron Prudd’homme duet, “Ven I Valse”, Ritter’s “Chess and Checkers” and best of all, Ritter’s “Flings” – “flings is wonderful things but they gotta be flung by the young”.

It’s sad that a great Pultizer Prize-winning musical and Tony co-winner (with The Sound of Music) could be considered obscure less than fifty years later, but such is the fate of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s Fiorello!, the far-from-stuffy musical about the rise of New York’s fabled Mayor La Guardia. Originally intended as the breakout solo vehicle for Lou Costello, his sudden death during tryouts catapulted his understudy, Tom Bosley, to stardom as the diminutive politician. Bosley is pitch perfect singing “The Name’s La Guardia” but most of the songs are left to the professional singers, with Howard Da Silva leading the crooked politicians in “Little Tin Box”, Ellen Hanley as the first Mrs. La Guardia singing the lovely swan song “When Did I Fall in Love”, and Patricia Wilson as Fiorello’s loyal secretary and the future second Mrs. La Guardia singing the lament, “The Very Next Man”. Other highlights include Pat Stanley’s “I Love a Cop” and Eileen Rodgers’ “Gentleman Jimmy”, a campaign ode to La Guardia nemesis James J. Walker.

Taking a beloved screen musical and replacing the music isn’t exactly a recipe for success, but when the musical is Lili with one unforgettable song (“Hi Lili Hi Lo”) and the stage version replaces it with an equally unforgettable one (“Love Makes the World Go ‘Round”) success comes easily. Bob Merrill’s Carnival benefits not only from a captivating score, but from the marvelous cast employed to sing it. As naïve waif Lili, Anna Maria Alberghetti is sheer magic singing such songs as “Mira” and “Yes, My Heart”. Jerry Orbach, in his first Broadway musical, as the crippled puppeteer who secretly loves her, is given such equally memorable songs as “I’ve Got to Find a Reason”, “Her Face” and of course “Love Makes the World Go ‘Round”. James Mitchell and Kaye Ballard provide comic relief with “Always, Always You”.

Noel Coward’s last musical, Sail Away, was a showcase for star Elaine Stritch. Set aboard a cruise ship, Stritch is the social director who falls for a younger passenger. Coward’s wit shines through his rich melodies in such songs as “Come to Me”, “Sail Away”, “The Passenger’s Always Right”, “Go Slow, Johnny” and especially “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?” The Original Cast Recording annoyingly covers up the word “ass” in the latter, but it is heard loud and clear in the London Cast Recording of a year later. That recording also restores some of the more risqué lyrics in a few of the other songs, but overall both recordings are a treasure worth seeking out.

Coward’s Blithe Spirit was the basis of Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray’s High Spirits, a gloriously daft and deft musical about the here and now as well as the hereafter. The show’s four stars are all given great numbers to sing – the best of them being Edward Woodward’s “If I Gave You”, Louise Troy’s “Was She Prettier Than I?”, Tammy Grimes’ “Home Sweet Heaven” and Beatrice Lillie’s “The Bicycle Song”, “Go Into Your Trance” and “Something Is Coming to Tea”. Grimes, Woodward and Troy share the penultimate “What in the World Did You Want?” and the entire company sends the audience out with “Something Tells Me”. It’s sheer bliss.

A smash hit musical about America’s early days wouldn’t appear until four years later when Sherman Edwards’ 1776 took Broadway by storm, but Ben Franklin in Paris, which got there first shouldn’t have been as easily dismissed as it was. The musical by Sidney Michaels and Mark Sandrich Jr. provided Robert Preston with one of his best roles as the irascible Renaissance man of the title. He is complemented by Franklin Kiser as his grandson, the teenage Franklin Temple, and Ulla Sallert as one of the four women the 69-year-old statesman had affairs with while on a diplomatic mission to Paris. Highlights include “What Became of Old Temple”, “To Be Alone With You”, “God Bless the Human Elbow” and the lovely ballad, “Look for Small Pleasures” – “look for small pleasures and not for lightning to tame, look for small treasures and not for fortune or fame.”

Wall Street and the financial world of the stock market would seem to make for a pretty dull show. Not so. Carolyn Leigh and Elmer Bernstein’s send-up of that world, How Now, Dow Jones, is anything but. The show opens with Brenda Vaccaro providing lessons on how the market works with “A-B-C” and closes with a reprise of Tony Roberts’ anthem “Step to the Rear” – “will everyone here kindly step to the rear and let a winner lead the way!” In between, you get Roberts going from wimp to charmer in “Gawk, Tousle and Shucks”, dueting with leading lady Marlyn Mason in “The Pleasure’s About to Be Mine”, Mason dueting with Vaccaro in “They Don’t Make ‘Em Like That Anymore”, broker Hiram Sherman worrying about “A Little Investigation” and Vaccaro worrying about her brassiere in “He’s Here”.

Based on the hit play and film of the same name, Kander and Ebb’s The Happy Time had the misfortune of opening on Broadway in the wake of two trendy off-Broadway rock musicals, Hair and Your Own Thing, which rendered it immediately culturally obsolete, providing it with the distinction of becoming the first Broadway production to lose $1 million. A pity because the score is one of the most vibrant of the era, with Robert Goulet and David Wayne in fine voice, supported by Mike (later Michael) Rupert and Julie Gregg, all of whom are given wonderful songs to sing. Highlights include “I Don’t Remember You”, “(Walking) Among My Yesterdays”, “Seeing Things” – “you and I have a different way of seeing things” – “A Certain Girl” and best of all, Wayne’s “Life of the Party” – “if you want your bell to really be rung, you’d better have me there, the life of the party to bring the party to life!”

One of the most lyrical of all musicals was Jule Styne and E.Y. Harburg’s Darling of the Day, the musical version of Holy Matrimony about the reclusive artist who gets a new lease on life when his valet dies and the dead man is mistaken for the artist. As the artist, Vincent Price proves to have a pleasant talk-singing voice in the tradition of Rex Harrison and Robert Preston, and does very well with such tongue-twisters as “To Get Out of This World Alive”, “I’ve Got a Rainbow Working for Me” and “Butler in the Abbey” and does quite well, too, with the love song “Sunset Tree”. The real treasure, though, is Patricia Routledge in her Tony-winning role as the young widow who had been corresponding with the dead valet. Every one of her songs, “It’s Enough to Make a Lady Fall in Love”, “A Gentleman’s Gentleman”, “Let’s See What Happens”, “That Something Extra Special”, “What Makes a Marriage Happy” and “Not on Your Nellie” are exquisitely done. Styne’s score is one of his best and Harburg’s lyrics are very much in a class with his more famous ones for The Wizard of Oz and Finian’s Rainbow.

The musical version of All About Eve, called Applause, might just have easily been called “All About Margo” as unlike the beloved film, it makes no bones about who the central character really is. Lauren Bacall, whose screen career really wasn’t that impressive, makes us believe that she was the greatest of stars through sheer force of will and her throatily-inspired singing of such songs as “Welcome to the Theatre”, “Being Alive” and “Something Greater”. As with the film, the men, even Len Cariou as the one Margo and Eve fight over, are clearly subordinate to the women in this show business fable. The score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams provides Penny Fuller as Eve with a couple of good songs, most notably “The Best Night of My Life”, but the real finds of the show are Bonnie Franklin and Lee Roy Reams as gypsies. Franklin gets to belt out the raucous title tune and together they parody Eve’s newfound success in “She’s No Longer a Gypsy” – “gonna get those crazy invitations now to Truman Capote’s balls.”

Pop, rhythm and blues, and Broadway show tunes fused to make Purlie, the musical version of Purlie Victorious, one of the most infectious musicals of all time. The jubilant musical by Gary Geld and Peter Udell gets off to a perfect start with “Walk Him Up the Stairs” and never lets go. Cleavon Little is perfectly cast as the “New Fangled Preacher Man” and Melba Moore sparkles throughout, especially in “I Got Love”. Sherman Hemsley provides comic relief with “Skinnin’ a Cat” and the wondrous score also includes such melodic treasures as “The Harder They Fall”, “Down Home”, “First Thing Monday Morning”, “He Can Do It” and the joyous “The World Is Comin’ to a Start”.

Kenward Elmslie and Claibe Richardson’s score for the musical version of Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp is so rich and vital it’s difficult to understand how this show flopped. Golden-voiced Barbara Cook never sounded better than as the fanciful spinster singing “Dropsy Cure Weather”, “Yellow Drum”, “Chain of Love” and “Reach Out” – “reach out and touch a flower opening in Spring, reach out and take my hand”. She’s matched by Russ Thacker as her feisty nephew singing about “Floozies” and “This One Day”, servant-companion Carol Brice reminiscing about lost loves in “Marry With Me” and offering emotional support in “If There’s Love Enough”, and practical sister Ruth Ford on the verge of a nervous breakdown in “What Do I Do Now?” All that, and you get evangelist Karen Morrow telling the story of her life in “The Babylove Miracle Show”.

Well-publicized backstage machinations that resulted in the firing of several leading ladies before Bernadette Peters was cast as tragic silent screen star Mabel Normand in Jerry Herman’s Mack & Mabel didn’t help the show in its initial Broadway run and in fact, the show has never been revived on Broadway. Use of the overture by 1984 Gold Medal Olympic champions Torvill and Dean resulted in newfound admiration for the show and it was given a concert recording in London in 1988 providing new admirers with what some of us knew already, that this was one of the best shows of the 1970s. The score is consistently pleasing, but no more so than in Robert Preston’s soliloquy as Mack Sennett, “I Won’t Send Roses” and Mabel’s “Time Heals Everything”. Almost as good are Lisa Kirk’s “Tap Your Troubles Away”, Stanley Simmonds’ “When Mabel Comes in the Room” and Preston’s “I Promise You a Happy Ending”.

Scarcely getting any more respect than the film of the same name on which it was based, Geld and Udell’s Civil War musical, Shenandoah, is a complex and moving work of art. From its rousing opening number “Raise the Flag of Dixie” to its emotional close with the hymn “Pass the Cross to Me”, the score brims with magical moments. Best are John Cullum’s angry “I’ve Heard It All Before”, his soliloquy at his late wife’s graveside in “Mediatation”, “Violets and Silverbells” sung by the doomed Joel Higgins and Penelope Milford, and Donna Theodroe and Chip Ford’s thrilling “Freedom” – “freedom isn’t in a state like Maine or Virginia, freedom’s in a state of mind.”

It’s difficult to fathom why The Baker’s Wife, based on the acclaimed French film of the same name, with an exhilarating score by Stephen Schwartz failed to make it to Broadway, but fortunately we have the Los Angeles Cast recording, with Paul Sorvino as the cuckolded baker, Patti LuPone as his wandering wife and Kurt Peterson as the young stud she leaves him for, to thrill to. Every song is a treat from the opening “Chanson” sung by Teri Ralston to Sorvino and LuPone’s “Merci, Madame” and “Gifts of Love” to Peterson’s sly “Proud Lady” to LuPone’s soaring “Meadowlark” and plaintive “Where Is the Warmth?” to Sorvino’s heartbreaking “Any Day Now” and “If I Have to Live Alone”. There isn’t a dry eye in the house when LuPone makes her inevitable return to the reprise of “Gifts of Love”.

Based on the French farce of the same name, Jerry Herman’s La Cage aux Folles seemed like it would become a perennial, but a scarce two decades have proven to be unkind to Herman’s last Broadway musical. Hopes of a film version were dashed when Mike Nichols decided to make a straight comedy version instead and the Broadway revival of a few years ago flopped badly. Still, we have the Original Cast Recording with Gene Barry, joining a long line of actors who talk-sing well enough to get by, as the nightclub owner and George Hearn in the performance of his life as his drag queen-lover, Albin. Highlights of the impeccable score include “Song on the Sand”, “With Anne on My Arm”, “The Best of Times” and Hearn’s anthem, “I Am What I Am”.

At the other end of the spectrum, the worst recordings of Broadway musicals available on CD are Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen’s Skyscraper in which a croaking Julie Harris tries to fend off mid-town Manhattan developers; Grossman and Hackady’s Minnie’s Boys in which a shrill Shelley Winters is miscast as the mother of the Marx Bros.; Jule Styne and Bob Merrill’s Sugar, a lifeless imitation of Some Like It Hot; Kander and Ebb’s The Act in which Liza Minnelli tries hard but comes off as merely loud and obnoxious; and Jimmy McHugh’s Sugar Babies, a lackluster burlesque musical despite the presence of Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller.

Peter J. Patrick (September 4, 2007)