CDs: Decca Singles

This is a collection of twenty obscure singles Ethel Merman recorded for Decca Records in 1950 and 1951, around the time she appeared in Broadway's Call Me Madam. There are some show tunes, including two from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes "A Little Girl from Little Rock," "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend", two from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn "Make the Man Love Me," "Love Is the Reason", and one from Flahooley "The World Is Your Balloon".

But most of these songs qualify as novelty numbers, with titles like "I Said My Pajamas And Put on My Prayers," "She's Shimmyin' on the Beach Again," or "If You Catch a Little Cold I'll Sneeze for You." Eight of the twenty tracks are duets with Ray Bolger, while three of them find Merman reunited with her Red, Hot, and Blue! co-star Jimmy Durante.

Few people knew these twenty recordings even existed until they got their first reissue, on a 1987 British MCA LP. Now they're back, courtesy of a fine-sounding Decca Broadway CD. Needless to say, Merman is in clarion voice throughout, the singing effortless and grand. Merman tended to record the same songs again and again, so it's enjoyable to hear her in rare material that she is not identified with and did not perform elsewhere. Some of the songs are unworthy of her, but it's still fun to hear her slumming with them. If these recordings don't rank with Merman's best, the collection makes for an enjoyable footnote to the Merman discography.

THE IMMIGRANT Ghostlight

Playwright Mark Harelik, who has been playing the Italian father in Broadway's The Light in the Piazza, was paying tribute to his grandfather when he created the role of Haskell in the 1985 stage drama The Immigrant.

Having fled the pogroms of Russia, Jewish immigrant Haskell reaches the U.S. in 1909. Instead of settling in Manhattan's Lower East Side, he becomes part of the Galveston Movement, conceived and financed by Jewish philanthropist Jacob Henry Schiff, which moved 10,000 Eastern European Jews through Galveston, Texas and on into the West between 1907 and 1914.

With little in the world beyond his pushcart of bananas, Haskell meets and is sheltered by the Perrys, a childless older couple consisting of banker Milton and his wife, Ima, a devout Southern Baptist. Haskell's business grows from banana pushcart to vegetable store to dry-goods department store. Haskell is able to send for his wife, Leah, who is upset by his loss of Jewish values in the new world, and begin to raise a family. The action of the play extends from 1909 to 1943, with Haskell and Milton eventually quarelling over the U.S.' restrictive immigration policies during Hitler's pogroms. The play's themes include the difficulties of assimilation and of realizing the American dream.

Harelik's The Immigrant became one of the most produced plays in recent regional-theatre history. Next, it became a musical, with Harelik handling the book and a score contributed by the husband-and-wife team of Steven M. Alper music and Sarah Knapp lyrics. With four performers and four musicians, The Immigrant had its first New York production in Chelsea in 2000, presented by Collaborative Arts Project 21, and featuring Evan Pappas as Haskell, Walter Charles as Milton, Jacqueline Antaramian as Leah, and Cass Morgan as Ima.

The musical received a strong review from Lawrence Van Gelder in The New York Times, and went on to productions at the Denver Center Theatre Company and Coconut Grove Playhouse. In the fall of 2004, the musical version of The Immigrant returned to New York, this time in a commercial off-Broadway run at Dodger Stages that was greeted by a disappointing Times review by Neil Genzlinger and lasted only twenty-nine performances. For this second New York production, Adam Heller joined Charles, Antaramian, and Morgan in the cast.

The 2004 off-Broadway cast has now recorded the show for Ghostlight Records. Accompanied by piano, bass, violin, and reeds, the score features traces of American and Jewish folk music, Baptist hymns, Hebraic prayer, klezmer, and country. The thrice-reprised "Stars" and the Haskell-Leah duet "Travel Light" are standouts.

But much of this score consists of musical scenes containing what sounds like recitative, or dialogue mixed with music, rather than clear-cut songs with distinct melodies. Because of the dearth of tunes, one wonders if the same effect might not be communicated through Harelik's original dialogue. While the score is occasionally attractive, it's mostly heavy going, the lack of soaring melody making one question the need for musicalizing the play.