The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (42 page)

Little Me

This is, for me, Cy Coleman’s best score (
Sweet Charity
, I know, I know, and
City of Angels
and
On the Twentieth Century
), and it features a great set of comedy lyrics by the vastly underrated Carolyn Leigh. Sid Caesar and a cadre of supporting clowns bring a great and now long-lost kind of theatrical energy to the whole record, and Nancy Andrews and Virginia Martin share one of the show’s only sentimental moments, the charming “Here’s to Us.” Swen Swenson’s “I’ve Got Your Number” was the hit, but Caesar, and Coleman, and Leigh’s ways with comedy pastiche were the joys of the event. Would that more of the dance music had been recorded, but this show, like
Forum
, presented the last great days of vaudeville comedy on Broadway, and it’s worth hearing. Interestingly, there is also a British album, which demonstrates the complete bewilderment of the English in the face of this kind of material.

Flora the Red Menace

Kander and Ebb’s first Broadway score as a team, Liza Minnelli’s Tony-winning Broadway debut (at eighteen!), and a charming, lightweight score. The show flopped, and deservedly so, but it was full of promise, quickly fulfilled by
Cabaret
. The album is adorable.

Funny Girl

There are many devotees of the movie soundtrack, but I prefer the more compact (and brilliant) Ralph Burns orchestrations for the cast album. Jule Styne’s music for the first half of the show speaks volumes about his early days as a jazz and barrelhouse pianist. Then the famous ballads start to stack up. Streisand is young and not the least bit self-indulgent yet, and it makes for a great show album. The overture, which does not quite equal
Gypsy
’s, was apparently put together in secret by Styne and Burns, who pretended that they hadn’t figured it out until the last minute so that the director-choreographer, Jerome Robbins (who had stepped in in Philadelphia), wouldn’t have time to try to change it. A contentious show, this one, with lots of screaming going on behind the scenes, but an undeniably great score and a terrific album, especially for Capitol.

Camelot

Take your pick of the London or New York cast album. Pomp and circumstance and some lovely songs carried off with great earnestness. And a bit of a bore, I think.

West Side Story

There are many recordings to choose from—the original cast, a studio album featuring real opera voices, another conducted by Bernstein, the film soundtrack, and more. As usual, I cling to the original cast album (Columbia and Lieberson at their best), but of course the soundtrack is what became famous, and it has its many fans. I’m always uncomfortable with those metasize Hollywood orchestras playing show music, even Bernstein’s, but I can understand those who swoon over it. It has grandeur, though I’m not sure that’s a quality that benefits
West Side Story
. As for the studio cast albums, the most peculiar features Kiri Te Kanawa and another presents the Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo. Neither sounds comfortable and neither recording sounds like idiomatic theater music. And, as is almost always the case with “studio” albums, there isn’t a whiff of an actual theatrical production to be found, because there was none. Somehow the original cast albums, even when featuring inferior singers, always seem to carry a different energy because, when the recording is being made, the performers are playing the roles nightly in a particular style in a particular version of the show. Without all that rehearsal and all that performance energy behind them, even superior singers never seem to connect to the material in the same way, which is hardly surprising. This doesn’t make studio albums unworthy, just usually disappointing.

Annie

The cast album does the show proud. This is a score that is sniffed at by some, but I find it irresistible—charming, tuneful, and actually touching. It’s light material, but it celebrates an American spirit in an unashamed way. Dorothy Loudon finally broke out as Miss Hannigan, Andrea McArdle became the subject of endless parody and ridicule, which couldn’t stop her, or “Tomorrow,” from becoming ubiquitous, and Reid Shelton sings Daddy Warbucks beautifully. It’s all on the record.

4. If I Loved You

Carousel

This is tough. I count nine cast recordings of
Carousel
, including one, like
Fiddler
, in Japanese. The original cast album from 1945 features the incomparable John Raitt singing “Soliloquy,” and the equally heartbreaking Jan Clayton singing “What’s the Use of Wond’rin?,” but it leaves out most of the musical part of the bench scene—the limitations of those 78 rpm discs again. The 1965 revival cast, from a production at Lincoln Center, gives you the bench scene and an older John Raitt, but no Jan Clayton. Probably the finest production of the show itself, Nick Hytner’s astonishing 1992 staging seen first in London and then at Lincoln Center, featured the best-acted Billy and Julie ever recorded but, alas, the least vocally impressive. On the other hand, Audra McDonald played Carrie Pipperidge in the Lincoln Center run, and she can certainly sing it—almost too well. And the two studio cast albums, one from 1955 and one from 1987, are all about singing—no acting required or demonstrated. Name your poison. For one of the greatest of all musical theater scores, there is no definitive recording.

The New Moon

New York City Center’s Encores! series presented this Sigmund Romberg operetta in 2003, which occasioned the first full recording of a score that typifies the operettas of the first part of the twentieth century. There are a few incomplete recordings from earlier decades, but if you want to hear something that likely resembles what a Broadway operetta sounded like in 1927, this is essential listening. Although it features a couple of opera singers, Rodney Gilfry and Brandon Jovanovich, it has no scent of the opera house about it—it’s antique Broadway. The melodies are almost foolishly lush, the chorus often enters for no discernible reason, and the whole thing is blissfully idiotic, beginning with the leading lady’s declaration that she wants to live bravely and freely like one of those wooden figurehead goddesses that adorn the bows of eighteenth-century schooners.
“Let me be like the girl on the prow!”
Christiane Noll sings, ecstatically. The whole thing is almost too good to be true.

Guys and Dolls

Two choices here, both good. The original cast, featuring that flat Decca sound, also features Viviane Blaine doing “Adelaide’s Lament,” Stubby Kaye singing “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat,” and the tone-deaf but wonderful Sam Levene joining Blaine for “Sue Me.” On the other hand, the 1992 revival, which featured Nathan Lane and Faith Prince, matched the original performers and in some ways outpaced them. It contains “Adelaide’s Second Lament,” which is absent from the first album, and a saxophone solo under the dialogue before “My Time of Day” is played by Benny Goodman alumnus Red Press; it’s worth hearing. I don’t think you can live without both recordings. There are others as well, but you can live without those.

Into the Woods

The original cast album is terrific, and the current issue of it contains bonus tracks—demo recordings and the like—but the soundtrack recording isn’t bad either. The score has aged beautifully. Back in 1987, it sounded to some as if Sondheim was reluctant to finish a thought or put a proper button on a number, but in the intervening years, this has proved to be just another example of his restlessness needing other ears to catch up. Bernadette Peters is in top form, and Joanna Gleason gives a memorable contemporary twist to the role of the Baker’s Wife that comes across on the recording. There is a revival album featuring a lovely performance by Laura Benanti as Cinderella, but overall, the original is better.

City of Angels

The composer Cy Coleman made two great personnel decisions when he wrote this send-up of Raymond Chandler–style noir thrillers: he hired the great jazz arranger Billy Byers to orchestrate, and the tight harmony group Manhattan Transfer’s music director, Yaron Gershovsky, to do the vocal arrangements. The result is a cast album that actually sounds like jazzmen had their hands on it; the ballads have the chromatic quality of Ellington and Strayhorn, and much of it sounds a little like a movie soundtrack from RKO or Warner Bros. in their best black-and-white years. It’s an acquired taste, but I had no trouble acquiring it. And James Naughton, on the original cast album, gets the rhythms and wry, detached attitude of a Philip Marlowe or a Sam Spade perfectly. The show—like its score—is a genuine original.

The Wedding Singer

Why is
The Wedding Singer
a part of this collection while similar, and in some cases more commercially successful, pop-rock shows like
Legally Blonde
and
Kinky Boots
are absent? The simple reason is that I worked on
The Wedding Singer
, and I’m the one with the pen. But in truth, I think the sweet, often funny score from the composer Matt Sklar and the lyricist Chad Beguelin is more delicate and more fully realized than the scores for many more successful shows. It’s underappreciated, though no one would qualify it as a masterwork.

The Book of Mormon

The original cast album captures the spirit, the performances, and the sheer skill of what is probably the most expert musical comedy of recent years. Along with
The Producers
and
Hairspray
,
Mormon
represents the tradition that
How to Succeed in Business
and
Forum
held aloft during the ’60s, and
Guys and Dolls
and
Kiss Me,
Kate
represented in the ’50s. If you track the progress of this kind of musical comedy, you can see tastes expanding (or collapsing) from the witty to the sly to the vulgar to the downright obscene, and it’s an enjoyable ride, assuming you have broad standards—or none.
Mormon
, whatever one may think of its morals, makes a wonderful album.

5. Put On Your Sunday Clothes

Li’l Abner

We all have our guilty pleasures, and this is mine. Both the original cast album and the film soundtrack are first-rate, and while Al Capp’s comic strip characters may seem funny only to people old enough to have been around when the strip was in its prime in the mid-’50s, there’s no gainsaying Gene de Paul’s tuneful score or Johnny Mercer’s offhandedly brilliant comic lyrics. You can hardly top the villainous galoot of the piece introducing himself as follows:

Step aside for Earthquake McGoon,

Bustin’ out all over like June.

I stands on the corner

Enormous and ornery,

Makin’ the fairer sex swoon.

In addition to a good in-joke about
Carousel
(not a show the denizens of Dogpatch would likely be familiar with, although audiences at
Li’l Abner
certainly were), Mercer makes a wonderful rhyming mouthful out of “I stands on the corner, enormous and ornery”: “corner” with the beginning of “enormous,” and “corner / E——” with “ornery.” Earthquake McGoon appears to be a hillbilly Ogden Nash.

6. Bushwhacking 1

Cabaret

Kander and Ebb’s breakout score has been much recorded—seven times that I’m aware of—and at least three of them are worth hearing. The original cast features the excitement of a groundbreaking if imperfect show, and—in 1966—the beginning of Hal Prince’s reign as the most innovative director on Broadway. Don Walker’s flavorful orchestrations are memorable, as are the performances of Lotte Lenya and Jack Gilford, both toward the end of their careers. And let’s not forget Joel Gray!

The first-rate soundtrack album features Liza Minnelli, and the revised version of the show, codirected by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall, got a good recording featuring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson in 1998. The score itself is always a pleasure to encounter, in whatever form, bristling with audacity, with welcome doses of sentiment along the way.

7. Bushwhacking 2

Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Another show of which there are at least seven recordings, with more on the way, no doubt. The double-CD original cast recording is flawless, and the only one you’ll ever need, though
Sweeney
fanatics enjoy comparing it with other productions, including the director John Doyle’s cut-down version in which the actors play their own instruments. But the original—with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou—is the only one I ever reach for.

It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman

Eddie Sauter, who spent the mid-’50s co-leading the wildly eccentric jazz aggregation known as the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, drew the orchestration assignment for this Hal Prince–directed oddball of a show, and Sauter’s work is reason enough to own the album. The show features two overtures (the one before the second act can hardly be called an entr’acte) and about as much orchestral wit and invention as a Broadway musical can handle. The score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams is their best after
Bye Bye Birdie
(
Golden Boy
runs a close third), and Jack Cassidy is in a class by himself as the evil columnist loosely based on Walter Winchell, while Linda Lavin made her Broadway debut singing the show’s only even mildly well-known song, “You’ve Got Possibilities.” A simple listen to the first overture may make you want to pick up a Sauter-Finegan recording as well. It’s always worth revisiting “Doodletown Fifers.”

9. Adelaide’s Lament

The Light in the Piazza

John Kander, who has written some of the most irresistible and memorable tunes of the last half century, once said that he loved Adam Guettel’s far-from-easy score for
The Light in the Piazza
so much that he’d “like to bathe in it.” That’s high praise, imaginatively put, from a man of taste and talent, and it makes a certain amount of sense. The score feels liquid somehow, and it is beautifully represented on its cast album—a translucent-sounding, delicate recording featuring Victoria Clark
and
Kelli O’Hara, two of Broadway’s premier voices, with appearances by Sarah Uriarte Berry and Patti Cohenour to boot; it’s a boatload of wonderful sopranos, and a justly celebrated score, handsomely preserved.