Obscure Recordings: By Hex and Love and Let Love
From January 27, 1955 to March 3, 1956, Broadway played host to a delightful hit called Plain and Fancy. It concerned the encounter between a pair of sophisticated New Yorkers and the Amish people they meet in Pennsylvania Dutch territory. A religious sect, the Amish were mostly farmers with sizable families who spoke a combination of English and Pennsylvania German dialect.
In February 1955, the producers and authors of Plain and Fancy had been sued by the writers of a 1952 play about the Amish called Wonderful Good that had been transformed into a musical, By Hex, produced in 1953 in summer stock in Lancaster, where the show took place. The plaintiffs claimed that Plain and Fancy had been copied from their show. For his part, Plain and Fancy producer Richard Kollmar said he had seen By Hex and decided it was exactly the sort of thing he was trying to avoid.
But three months after Plain and Fancy closed in New York, By Hex arrived in town, at off-Broadway's intimate Tempo Playhouse. Unlike Plain and Fancy, its story featured no outsiders from the big city; the show was simple, quiet, and entirely unbrassy.
By Hex had a book by John Rengier, music and lyrics by Howard Blankman, and additional lyrics by Rengier and Richard Gehman, who was also credited with suggesting the idea for the show. The central characters in By Hex are two rebellious young people. Nancy is the oldest child of a widowed bishop. Forced since her mother's death to take care of a large family, she is tired of working all the time, and is already past the age when most Amish girls wed. Jonas is an unmarried orphan who craves wordly things and believes that the Amish are wrong to isolate themselves from the rest of the world.
When Jonas goes so far as to purchase a tractor and Nancy has a momentary flirtaion with an outsider, the Bishop officially "shuns" both Nancy and Jonas. The Amish policy of ostracizing members of the community, shunning also figured prominently in Plain and Fancy. A shunned Jonas wrecks his tractor and gradually comes to appreciate the Amish ways. He asks Nancy to marry him, and both repent and rejoin the community.
The young leads were played by a pair of strong singers. Nancy was Wynne Miller, who soon went on to replace Edith Adams in Li'l Abner, and would later create roles in Broadway's A Thurber Carnival and Tenderloin. Jonas was Ken Cantril, the young hero in the London production of Paint Your Wagon.
By Hex was reviewed in The New York Times by second stringer Arthur Gelb, who alluded to the earlier Amish musical by stating that By Hex "may not be as fancy as the recent Broadway musical on the same theme, but it has a lot to recommend it." Even with a favorable Times review, though, By Hex failed to catch on, and folded after forty performances. Because of its home-spun simplicity, the show had a brief life in stock and amateur groups. And a studio-recorded tape of the score, sung by the original cast, was made and later transcribed onto a private LP.
Both Amish musicals share a couple of phrases in the lyrics "wonderful good," "it wonders me". But otherwise the shows are sharply different. Where Plain and Fancy was a sophisticated Broadway entertainment, By Hex is a serious, simplistic, primitive piece that reads like a solemn tract promoting and justifying a way of life. Plain and Fancy's score is delightful '50s Broadway, one of the most enjoyable of its time. By Hex is sung to the sole, church-like accompaniment of an organ. As heard on a scratchy LP, the score is gloomy and plodding. The serious numbers are operatic and dull, while the lighter ones are jaunty but extremely elementary. Near the end of the show, Miller and Cantril share an attractive duet, "Something New." But there's no getting around the fact that Plain and Fancy had already covered the Amish in vastly more enjoyable fashion.
The disappointing '67-'68 musical season was enlivened on January 13, 1968, when an effervescent show called Your Own Thing opened off-Broadway, at the Orpheum Theatre, where Stomp now resides. It was Your Own Thing's clever notion to take Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and update it to the present, eliminating Malvolio and other comic characters while placing the principals in a contemporary world of unisex fashions, gender confusion, and sexual experimentation.
Although it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle's Best Musical prize, Your Own Thing, like the original Little Shop of Horrors, did not go on to Broadway, remaining in the East Village for a run of 937 performances.
Ten days before the opening of Your Own Thing, another off-Broadway musical based on Twelfth Night opened, this one in the West Village, at the Sheridan Square Playhouse. It was called Love and Let Love, and, unlike Your Own Thing, it was a straightforward adaptation of Shakespeare, featuring Marcia Rodd as Viola, John Cunningham as Orsino, and Virginia Vestoff as Olivia. The comedy team of Tony Hendra and Nic Ullett were Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Michael O'Sullivan, who had played the demented scientist in It's Superman.... and had won praise for his Broadway Tartuffe, was Malvolio.
The adaptation and direction were by John Lollos, who co-wrote the lyrics with Don Christopher. Stanley Jay Gelber provided the music. The show's fidelity to Shakepeare was ultimately its undoing, as the pleasant ditties were never up to the level of the Shakespearean dialogue that remained. As a result, there didn't seem to be a compelling reason for Love and Let Love's existence. It closed the day after Your Own Thing opened, playing just fourteen performances.
But as with By Hex, the cast of Love and Let Love went into a studio to make a recording that was privately distributed. And unlike By Hex, this one is undistinguished but at least listenable, evincing the tinkly sound of so many '60s off-Broadway musicalizations of classic plays. The material for the comic characters is weak, but the rest is better. The most attractive songs are Orsino's "If She Could Only Feel the Same" and Viola's "Will He Ever Know?" Vestoff, who would shine on Broadway the following year in 1776, does wonders with "I Like It" and "I Will Have Him."
Marian Mercer, who created the role of Olivia in Your Own Thing and would go on to win a Tony the following year for Promises, Promises, left the cast of Your Own Thing shortly after the opening, probably because her part had been substantially reduced during previews. Mercer was replaced in Your Own Thing by none other than Love and Let Love's leading lady, Marcia Rodd. And it was Rodd who got to preserve the role of Olivia on Your Own Thing's RCA Victor cast album.
Twelfth Night would go on to make two additional musical appearances, both on Broadway and both unsuccessful. In 1976, there was the short-lived, ill-advised George Abbott production of Music Is, which had some attractive Richard Adler songs. And in 1997, the songs of Duke Ellington were used in a Harlem resetting called Play On!
________________________________________________
For upcoming Q & A columns, please send questions by clicking on the byline above kenmanbway@aol.com