Obscure Recordings: Angel and Amen Corner
Purlie had been based on a satirical Broadway comedy about race relations called Purlie Victorious. Following Purlie and Shenandoah, Rose would go on to stage two more Broadway musicals with lyrics by Udell, Angel 1978 and Amen Corner 1983. Both were based on Broadway plays, both were quick flops, and both produced full-scale cast albums that were never commercially released.
Angel had a book by Udell and Ketti Frings, based on the latter's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1957 Broadway straight-play adaptation of Thomas Wolfe's novel Look Homeward, Angel. For Angel, Rose hired his Purlie-Shenandoah songwriters again, the team of Udell and Geld, with Rose directing and producing.
Set in North Carolina in 1916, it was the story of a family, in particular an acquisitive mother who puts property ahead of her sons; a drunken father; a dying son; and another son who wants to write and get away from his family.
If it removed a couple of characters, the musical's script followed Frings' play very closely, with most of the musical's dialogue taken directly from its source. It was rather heavy subject matter for a musical, though, the sort of material that would seem to require a more operatic, serious score than the one it got. As befits the composing team of Purlie and Shenandoah, the songs are often tuneful. But they're also too simplistic for the property, and not up to the quality of the dialogue or the complexity of the characters. Not only do they add little to the play, but they wind up diluting it.
Angel's less-than-thrilling stars were Frances Sternhagen and Fred Gwynne "The Munsters" as the parents, with Don Scardino and Joel Higgins as the sons. The musical played an unconventional tryout, at the Northstage Theatre Restaurant in Glen Cove, New York, where it was called Look Homeward, Angel. Reviewing the tryout, Boston critic Kevin Kelly thought the show "good, strong, and honest enough to occupy a place in our honored musical tradition."
The musical was announced several times to play the uptown Circle in the Square, but Angel wound up at the vast Minskoff Theatre, where it was quite lost. It opened on May 10, 1978 to unanimously negative reviews. In The New York Times, critic Richard Eder said, "It is putting things too strongly to call Angel a disaster. It is a desert." The show closed after five performances. A cast album was recorded, pressed onto an LP that was placed inside a black sleeve, with the title and songwriters' names spelled out in gold letters on both the front and back covers. The label says "not for sale," and the recording was only available for a time from the show's production office. It's a perfectly pleasant, sometimes pretty score that never approaches the quality of the musical's two sources. Still, the Angel recording would surely have been worthy of release on one of the labels that specializes in obscure musicals.
One of the most forgotten Broadway musicals of the last twenty-five years, Amen Corner also produced a privately sold cast album. The 1983 musical was based on James Baldwin's play The Amen Corner, which opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in April, 1965. Written twelve years earlier, the play received mixed reviews and lasted fifty-two performances. Bea Richards had the leading role of Margaret, the self-appointed pastor of a storefront church in Harlem who is confronted with a congregation turning against her, a rebellious son turning away from religion and leaving home, and the return of the dying, jazz-musician husband she drove away ten years earlier. The cast also included Isabel Sanford, who would go on to star in "The Jeffersons." The play was produced by Mrs. Nat "King" Cole.
It's risky basing a musical on an unsuccessful play, and, unlike Purlie Victorious, The Amen Corner was not especially suited to musical adaptation. But Rose who also directed and Udell went ahead and adapted Baldwin's script into Amen Corner, trimming the title by one word but retaining the '60s setting along with sizable chunks of the play, punctuating them with rhythm-and-blues and gospel-flavored songs that rarely advanced the action. Amen Corner's score featured lyrics by Udell with music by Garry Sherman. Sherman had been one of Purlie's orchestrators, and Sherman, Udell, and Rose had collaborated on the 1979 Broadway flop Comin' Uptown, based on A Christmas Carol and starring Gregory Hines.
The musical Amen Corner was first mounted at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., then went directly to Broadway, opening at the Nederlander Theatre on November 10, 1983. During a Broadway musical season that included La Cage aux Folles, Sunday in the Park With George, Baby, The Tap Dance Kid, The Rink, and The Human Comedy, Amen Corner received unanimously negative reviews and closed after twenty-eight performances.
In his New York Times review of Amen Corner, Frank Rich asked, "Have you been craving a musical in which the characters would rather talk incessantly than sing or dance?" He went on to describe the staging as "the most sedentary I've ever seen in a Broadway musical," and felt that the musical coarsened Baldwin's characters into stereotypes. In The Daily News, Douglas Watt felt that "the songs have a way of burying what life remains in {the play}." Clive Barnes wrote in The Post that "the play rigidly refuses to open up to its new musical form. You not only have one of the talkiest musicals on record, but the talk is forever being almost irrelevantly interrupted."
Rhetta Hughes did fine work in the central role, and the cast also included Ruth Brown and Chuck Cooper. But I recall Amen Corner as difficult to sit through, the production cheap-looking and uncomfortable.
Like the Angel cast recording, the front and back covers of the Amen Corner album are identical. In the case of Amen Corner, the covers feature a photo of Hughes, the title, and the names of the songwriters, but no other credits. The recording restores one song cut after the engagement at Ford's, called "It Ain't No Fault of His." This LP was also available for a time from the show's production office.
But if the Angel album is moderately pleasant, Amen Corner is quite dreary. Hughes has a good eleven o'clock solo, "Love Dies Hard," and leads a catchy title song. The church scenes offered obvious opportunities for music, but the book songs are feeble and add little to the original play.
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