The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (43 page)

11. La Vie Bohème

Rent

Jonathan Larson’s score—and the show that contained it—created such a sensation when it was first presented in 1996 that it took years before you could really listen to it as just another show album, which is what it is. There is some terrific writing, and some hammered-together chunks (Larson died just as he was completing the work), and a host of young voices who were making their first marks in the theater with this show. That spirit of reckless abandon is captured on the album, but for a score that perfectly captured its time and place it has, like
Company
, become something of a period piece. There’s also a movie soundtrack, but why would you?

17. I Thought You Did It for Me, Momma

Fiddler on the Roof

Another much-recorded score—I count five obtainable versions as of this moment. But why wouldn’t you go with Zero Mostel and the original cast? This and the original
Forum
recording preserve two great performances by a unique theater star who never flourished in any other medium. And the score, by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, is ageless and deeply idiomatic. “If I Were a Rich Man” is as good a performance of as good a song as has been written for Broadway.

Caroline, or Change

This show had trouble convincing the critics—which puts it in a category with
Porgy and Bess
,
Pal Joey
,
Follies
, and a handful of others that were so fearless in their convictions and made of such inventive materials that it took years for the world to catch up. Sadly, the world has yet to catch up to
Caroline
in the same way as the others. It’s rarely performed in major productions, and rarely written about. But it’s a masterpiece, and Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner’s score is well captured on this 2004 cast album. As with
The Light in the Piazza
, the score is not easy and hardly replete with what we used to call “take-home tunes.” But it’s galvanic where
Piazza
is full of grace, and Tonya Pinkins is a force of nature in the title role. Chuck Cooper’s performance as a city bus (that’s right) burdened down by carrying the news of JFK’s assassination is also a memorable moment in a score that is full of them.

The King and I

This is among the all-time champions in numbers of recordings; there are twelve that I can find. A lot of them are good. Donna Murphy starred in a successful production in 1996, and there’s even a cast album of an animated version. Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner appear on the original, which—rarely for me—is not my favorite. It sounds shallow (Decca again) for a deeply opulent show, and Lawrence, who was apparently an incandescent performer in her prime, doesn’t have much of a voice left—she was ill and died during the original run of the show. There’s a Barbara Cook version and a Julie Andrews, but for me the most satisfying so far is the Thomas Shepard–produced recording of a revival that starred Constance Towers and Brynner in 1977. It captures the theatricality of the show (Columbia again) and contains just enough dialogue and connective tissue to make you feel like you’ve been there.

Hairspray

There’s a soundtrack, of course, but I much prefer the original cast. Marissa Jaret Winokur is incredibly winning as Tracy Turnblad, and Harvey Fierstein is, well, Harvey Fierstein. A singer he is not, but few entertainers come across better on a cast album. He’s like a gay Jimmy Durante. Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s score sounds as fresh as paint considering that it’s made up of clever pastiches of early-’60s pop songs. But this isn’t
Grease
—it has a subversive streak, and brains. And the final song, “You Can’t Stop the Beat,” is miraculous in its ability to sustain the resolution of all those subplots without losing energy.

18. You Can’t Stop the Beat

The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936

Michael Strunsky, executive director of the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts, agreed to have the orchestrations of this rare complete
Follies
score restored to mint condition, under the supervision of the trust’s Mark Trent Goldberg and Encores! founding music director Rob Fisher. Encores! then produced the show itself, which proved somewhat problematic, as the sketches were dated and some of the casting was imperfect. But the production got recorded, and the recording is sensational. Like
The New Moon
, it’s a trip in a time machine to a period of very sophisticated “disposable” entertainment with great sheen and wit. There are a couple of forgotten gems of the period, like “My Red-Letter Day” and “Words Without Music,” and one standard—“I Can’t Get Started.” The whole thing is an opulent trip back to the days when you would have applauded the show at 11:00 p.m. and then gone upstairs to the roof garden for a champagne supper and … the Midnight Frolic. Who stepped in and put an end to all that? It doesn’t seem fair.

She Loves Me

The original cast album, issued on a double LP by MGM (a company that didn’t do much in the way of Broadway albums), is a joy from start to finish. It’s arguably Bock and Harnick’s best score, featuring Barbara Cook singing “Ice Cream” and the artlessly irresistible Barbara Baxley delivering one of the best story songs ever written, “A Trip to the Library.” Jack Cassidy, playing the cad, has a lounge-lizard charm, and the orchestrator, Don Walker, makes great use of the accordion since the show was set in Budapest, and played at the Eugene O’Neill, where the pit wasn’t big enough to accommodate a grand piano with the rest of the band. I take a deep breath before writing these words, but this, I think, is a perfect cast album.

The Missing Links

Acknowledging the eccentricity of the above list of show albums, I was easily able to find an additional forty or so titles that deserve attention. But writing about all of them seemed excessive and a little self-indulgent, so I’ve limited myself to a list of twenty that simply can’t be ignored, even though they are not quoted in the book.

Annie Get Your Gun

There are twelve different recordings I can find, but Merman is who you really want to hear sing this score. The original is fine, but I actually prefer the 1966 Lincoln Center production. She was way too old to play the role by this time, but you’d never know it by the recording, and it includes “An Old Fashioned Wedding,” which Berlin wrote especially so that she’d have something new to sing in an old show.

Brigadoon

Well suited to the Hollywood treatment—it’s a great romantic fantasy—this is one of the few where I would choose the soundtrack over the original cast, but both are pleasurable. There are also at least two studio albums that feature virtually the complete score, one of them with Rebecca Luker, who, after Barbara Cook in her prime, has the most seductive soprano in the history of modern-day Broadway. If you love this score, it’s thrilling to hear her sing it.

Bye Bye Birdie

The original cast album features Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera and some great orchestrations by Robert “Red” Ginzler, including four flutes playing behind “Put On a Happy Face.” This is the orchestration that made a young jazz cat named Jonathan Tunick decide he wanted to work on Broadway, and that was good news. Ginzler died young, just as he was emerging as a Broadway powerhouse, but the work he left behind—
Birdie
,
How to Succeed
,
Wildcat
, and many parts of
Gypsy
, just for starters—is always distinctive and often thrilling.

Candide

A Bernstein masterpiece—the score, not the show—and the original cast has great energy and wit, though it’s pretty highbrow. The stripped-down 1974 Hal Prince production is much hipper, though it’s hard not to long for that great big orchestra. They make good side-by-side listening, each representing an era. It’s Broadway taking itself very seriously in the ’50s versus Broadway trying really hard to embrace hippiedom in the ’70s. And the winner is …

Chicago

Kander and Ebb doing Bob Fosse’s cynical but brilliant bidding. The original cast album is great, but so is the recording of the revival-that-threatens-to-run-forever. Take your pick. The original may be the better album, but the show in the ’70s seemed too cynical for words and was only a moderate success. Then the revival happened, opening right on top of the O. J. Simpson verdict, and suddenly the material seemed right in line with the times. Fosse, it turned out, knew exactly where American jurisprudence was going; he just got there ahead of schedule.

Damn Yankees

Who knows what delights the team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross would have turned out if Ross hadn’t died at twenty-nine, right after this show opened. This and their debut,
The Pajama Game
, were icons of the ’50s, and deservedly so. The original cast album, with Gwen Verdon and Ray Walston, is the one to get. The two Adler and Ross shows were like self-contained ’50s hit parades—a ballad, a Latin number, a cowboy number (in
The
Pajama Game
, anyhow), a sexy dance specialty, a comedy novelty item—you might as well have been listening to the radio.

Finian’s Rainbow

The original cast album is wonderfully seductive, but the sound is better and the score more complete and better sung on the 2010 revival album. Take your pick—it’s a crazily inventive, witty, and romantic score, certainly Burton Lane’s best Broadway work (he wrote some terrific movie songs as well), and the lyrics, by Yip Harburg, are in a class by themselves.

Follies

The original cast album was mangled by Capitol, which squeezed a very long score onto a single LP, making incomprehensible cuts and depriving us of the chance to hear complete versions of some great performances. There have been several more complete albums made since, which are better, but it’s depressing that the original cast—especially Dorothy Collins and John McMartin—didn’t get to give us the genuine article. As is the case with
Carousel
, there’s lots to choose from, but no definitive version. The British cast album has some alternative songs, but none better than the ones written for Broadway.

Hello, Dolly!

Jerry Herman’s breakout score (with some ghosted help from Bob Merrill and a title for one song supplied by Strouse and Adams) was—though no one mentioned it at the time—the perfect antidote to the Kennedy assassination, which had taken place only seven weeks earlier. As the national mood staggered under the weight of the tragedy,
Dolly!
reaffirmed that Americans were entitled to regain a sunny disposition and have fun, even though, under the surface, we were a changed people.

There are eight versions that I’m aware of. I’d take the original, which features not only Carol Channing but also David Burns and the almost-impossible-to-listen-to but beloved Charles Nelson Reilly. But I reserve a special affection for the Pearl Bailey version. She’s not Dolly, but she’s Pearl, and that’s worth hearing, as is Cab Calloway in the Burns role. The British cast album features Mary Martin, who brings a nice humanity to the role, not that it was written to feature any. But it’s quite lovely to hear it.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

The original cast features Robert Morse and Rudy Vallee, and, even more pleasurable, Red Ginzler’s mind-bending orchestrations. Listen to how he gets into “Brotherhood of Man” in the overture and you’ll know what an orchestrator can do. The score itself is angular and edgy in a way that suggests Frank Loesser was trying to get even with a newly cynical Broadway after the failure of his bucolic (and slightly anemic)
Greenwillow
. But on its own terms,
How to Succeed
is a terrific, brassy score, and Morse and Vallee seem to be having a blast.

Kiss Me, Kate

It’s hard to top Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison in the original, but the 1999 revival starring Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie gives the show quite a ride. The soundtrack album is interesting too; this was a rare Broadway film adaptation released in 3-D and recorded in stereo in the early ’50s. The soundtrack album is to some degree a celebration of the MGM Orchestra, with lots of overflowing underscoring, in that midcentury Hollywood style that some love and that certainly defines an era. And the soundtrack has Bob Fosse, Bobby Van, and Tommy Rall accompanying Ann Miller on “Tom, Dick or Harry.” That’s kind of historic, too.

A Little Night Music

Virtuosic without being showy, as lovely as it is low-key, written entirely in variations of three-quarter time, this has been better sung on recordings other than the original cast, but never better performed. Glynis Johns is heartbreakingly sexy, tart, and maternal at the same time, and all the elements—Tunick’s orchestrations, the recording production (shared by Lieberson and Shepard), and the shimmering score itself—are beautifully represented. There’s a movie soundtrack if you dare, and at least two London cast recordings, but none of them delivers this kind of pleasure.

Mame

Jerry Herman’s follow-up to
Dolly
is more machine than animal in most respects, but it’s a swell score and very well delivered on the original cast album. And when Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur declare themselves “Bosom Buddies,” there’s not much to do but smile.

The Most Happy Fella

Frank Loesser at his best, Columbia and Lieberson at their best, and one of the masterworks of Broadway. Virtually the whole show is on the original cast CD offering, and it’s a spectacular experience, gorgeously sung by Robert Weede, Jo Sullivan, and the greatest of all cult belters, Susan Johnson. Johnson should have been a star, but after playing the girl in the second couple here, she was elevated gradually to leading roles in a trio of flops and faded away. By the mid-’80s, she was teaching machine knitting in a well-appointed mobile home outside of San Diego. She made a glorious late appearance in a production of
Follies
in Long Beach, and then faded away again. But her voice in all the shows she appeared in—
Brigadoon
,
Donnybrook!
,
Whoop-Up,
and
Oh Captain!
—is immediately recognizable and a joy.