Face the Music - 2007 Encores! Cast Recording

[IMG:L]DRG Records
Now Available

There are great musicals, good musicals and also anodyne musicals that afford intermittent pleasures. Of such is Face the Music, billed at its 1932 premiere as "A Musical Comedy Revue by Irving Berlin and Moss Hart," even though it was manifestly a book musical.

I guess the co-creators were aware that Moss Hart's book—a jolly but rather soft satire on the Depression, the New York City police department, Ziegfeld-like producers and their rather ridiculous middle-aged, nouveau riche spouses—was not all that funny and not all that much of a book. So they chose to promote its revue characteristics: the topical Berlin songs, the opulent production numbers to make you forget the Depression, the prominent singing and dancing, and even the life-size papier-mache elephant on which Mary Boland as stagestruck Mrs. Myrtle Meshbesher, with huge feathery diadem rampant, came riding into the concluding courtroom scene.

Much of that worked again in this year's semi-staged Encores! revival at City Center, even without the climactic elephant and the immediate relevance of Goulds and Biddles, Hearsts and Rockefellers reduced to "Lunching at the Automat," as the droll opening number has it.

But the problem was that a revue needed comic sketches, of which there were only two: one funny, one not. A further problem was that the songs, at minimum competent, were not for the most part the composer's formidable best—in short, Berlin and Hart were not quite Rodgers and Hart. Still, "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee" is a funny song—especially at a time when a dime was an investment—and "Soft Lights and Sweet Music" is a gorgeous ballad sung both by the lovers and, later, the chorus. There was a then-respectable run of 165 performances, a tour, and a brief return to Broadway.

Boardable on the boards, the plot reads paper-thin on paper. There are romantic young actor lovers who dream of success and marriage in "(Castles in Spain) On a Roof in Manhattan." There is the comic dance couple, with her insisting "I Don't Wanna Be Married (I Just Wanna Be Friends)—but how do you sing parantheses? There is the unnamed Streetwalker aspiring to the stage, whose life is a "Torch Song."

There is the producer, Reitman, who promises the Meshbeshers a show, Rhinestones of 1932, guaranteed to lose tax-deductible money (well ahead of The Producers), and who has a park-bench trio with two bona fide bums, "How Can I Change My Luck?" There is Meshbesher, who has illegal monies in a little tin box (well ahead of Fiorello), and Mrs. M., who can hardly wait to become a producer and start casting the chorus boys, and sings her faith in "If You Believe."

There is much more—I haven't even mentioned the baritone whose rhinestone-studded tights threaten to castrate him—and a second version of the failed Rhinestones of 1932 emphasizing nudity and counting on the publicity value of a police raid. And that final trial that, sad to say, cries out for the Marx Brothers.

In the fine cast, such hardy perennials as Judy Kaye, Lee Wilkof, and Eddie Korbich are ably complemented by Jeffry Denman, Meredith Paterson, Mylinda Hull and Felicia Finley, among others. Walter Bobbie, better known as a director, returns to acting as a rib-tickling Reisman.

Let's face it: Face the Music on CD is a must only for musical comedy completists, Berlin addicts, nostalgists, and those of us who grooved on the Encores! revival. That may just constitute a crowd.