CDs: Let's Go Eat Worms in the Garden

The Broadway musical Fine and Dandy opened to rave reviews at the Erlanger now the St. James Theatre on September 23, 1930, and went on to become a 255-performance hit.

The chief reason for the show's success was its beloved star clown, Joe Cook. Donald Ogden Stewart's book had Cook playing a factory manager named Joe Squibb. Leaving almost all of the singing to his fellow players, Cook found time during the evening to do acrobatics, juggle, play musical instruments and golf, invent and demonstrate complicated, Rube Goldberg-style contraptions, and perform any number of other vaudeville routines. Cook's stooge was Dave Chasen, who would eventually be better known for his celebrated restaurant in Bevery Hills.

Something of a sequel to Cook's previous hit Rain or Shine, Fine and Dandy seems to have had little life beyond its use as a Cook vehicle. But it now has its first recording, courtesy of the enterprising PS Classics label. This is actually the first recording from the not-for-profit PS Classics Inc. branch, dedicated to the preservation of American musical-theatre scores.

What with Cook's antics, Fine and Dandy didn't seem to need a strong score, but it got one, written by one of the few female musical-theatre composers ever to have significant impact on Broadway, Kay Swift. Writing the words to Swift's tunes was her husband, James Paul Warburg, a banker who wrote verse and who used the pseudonym Paul James for his stage songs.

In 1925, Swift had met George Gershwin, and was soon his professional colleague and his lover. Working together on Fine and Dandy was, for the Warburgs, an attempt to save their marriage, which ended in divorce four years after Fine and Dandy. Swift had previously contributed material to revues, but Fine and Dandy was her first and only book show. She returned to Broadway in 1952 to write some songs for Cornelia Otis Skinner's solo show Paris '90 the Columbia cast album has been reissued by DRG.

Most of the original musical materials for Fine and Dandy, including almost all of Hans Spialek's orchestrations, were lost. In the '80s, Swift began to reconstruct the show, assisted by Russell Warner, who continued to work on the project after Swift's death in 1993. For PS Classic's premiere recording, a twenty-eight-piece band plays orchestrations by Warner and Larry Moore, along with one surviving Spialek arrangement. Conducting Fine and Dandy is Aaron Gandy, who conducted PS Classics' fine recording of an even more obscure work, Vincent Youmans' Through the Years.

A musical-theatre comic himself, Mario Cantone adeptly shares Cook's only number, the title-song duet. Carolee Carmello is leading lady Nancy, Joe's love interest; the young romantic pair is sung by Gavin Creel and Jennifer Laura Thompson; and Andrea Burns leads the two numbers accorded the show's dancing lead, who in 1930 was a pre-Hollywood Eleanor Powell. Mark Linn-Baker is the assistant factory manager who leads a pair of ensembles. And Anne Kaufman who handles the estate of her father, George S. Kaufman makes two spoken appearances in the non-singing role of the company owner.

For a show that was essentially an excuse for a clown to display his wares, the level of the material is surprisingly high, the lyrics clever and intricately rhymed. Creel and Thompson have a catchy duet in "Rich or Poor," while Carmello and Cantone share the irresistible title song, featuring a familiar tune and a lyric that makes reference to Gershwin. Creel supplies a superb rendition of the delightful, lilting solo "Starting at the Bottom." Burns, who played Carmello's role on the tour of Parade, has two toe-tappers in "I'll Hit a New High" and the show's big dance routine, "The Jig-Hop."

Carmello offers a strong account of the elegant ballad "Can This Be Love?," a number reprised by Creel and Thompson. There's a nifty brother-sister duet of commiseration, "Let's Go Eat Worms in the Garden," for Creel and Carmello. And Carmello belts to a fare-thee-well Nancy's eleven o'clock blues, "Nobody Breaks My Heart."

In addition to a synopsis and lyrics, there are helpful essays by co-producers Tommy Krasker and Philip Chaffin; Katharine Weber, granddaughter of Swift and Warburg; and Barry Singer. Fine and Dandy may not be a lost masterwork, but it's a score of charm and quality. A full length recording of Fine and Dandy was completely unexpected, but it was worth doing.

As a bonus, the recording is topped off with four other Swift-James compositions, including one of their best, "Can't We Be Friends?" from The Little Show. They're performed by cabaret artists Natalie Douglas, Jack Donahue, Ann Hampton Callaway, and husband-and-wife John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey.

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