Obscure Recordings: Magdalena

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Their success with adapting the music of Edvard Grieg to the Broadway stage for Song of Norway caused composer-lyricists Robert Wright and George Forrest to be typecast. For their third Broadway musical, the team was once again asked to adapt the music of a classical composer into a theatre score. This time around, though, the composer was alive.

For the new show that would come to be called Magdalena, Norway producer Edwin Lester reunited Wright and Forrest with Homer Curran, who had written the play from which the Norway libretto was fashioned, and with Norway's leading lady, Irra Petina. The score was to be derived from the work of Brazil's Heitor Villa-Lobos, the foremost South American composer of the first half of the twentieth century, who wrote symphonies, operas, concertos, songs, and much more.

There seems to have been a failure of communication, as Villa-Lobos thought he was to write the show from scratch, while Wright and Forrest believed they were to adapt pre-existing Villa-Lobos material, just as they had done with the Grieg compositions for Norway. Ultimately, there was a compromise, with Wright and Forrest using some pre-existing material but with Villa-Lobos writing about half a new score, according to ideas set forth by Wright and Forrest. Because Villa-Lobos was ill at the time, Wright and Forrest were also obliged to write a certain amount of new music in the style of Villa-Lobos.

The score that resulted sounds unlike any heard before or since, combining folk themes of the South American jungle with a lush, operatic, eclectic style. It was orchestrated by the composer with native percussion instruments, and it demanded singers like Petina, John Raitt who had recently starred in Carousel and Dorothy Sarnoff who would go on to create principal roles in The King and I and My Darlin' Aida. Magdalena was an unclassifiable show that blended opera, operetta, musical comedy, pageant, spectacle, and oratorio into a heady synthesis of music, dance, and decor. The song titles alone "The Seed of God," "The Omen Bird," "My Bus and I," "The Forbidden Orchid," "The Singing Tree" may indicate just how bizarre a work was Magdalena.

The libretto features one of the more curious plots ever dreamed up for a Broadway musical. Set in 1912 in the Columbian jungles the title refers to the second-largest river in South America, Magdalena told of the efforts of Maria Sarnoff, the ruler of a South American Indian tribe, to obtain justice for her people, who are virtual slaves in the emerald mines of General Carabana, a dissipated, absentee landlord who spends most of his time in Paris with his mistress, Teresa Petina. Maria has been converted to Christianity, but her bus-driver boyfriend, Pedro Raitt, has not. Maria leads an insurrection by the workers, and circumstances force Maria to promise herself to Carabana, until Teresa does away with him by cooking up one of her special recipes. In the finale, Pedro is converted following a miraculous rescue from a bus accident.

Like Song of Norway, Magdalena began life in Los Angeles. When it arrived at Broadway's Ziegfeld Theatre in the fall of 1948, critics praised Howard Bay's elaborate sets, Irene Sharaff's opulent costumes, and Jack Cole's exotic choreography. Cole's assistant was Gwen Verdon. But New York aisle-sitters registered strong objections to the libretto. In The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called Magdalena "one of the most overpoweringly dull musical dramas of all time...Disentangled from the appalling libretto and lyrics, the score might be stimulating." Richard Watts in The Post felt that, "The score is unquestionably impressive....unhappily there is a book, and dismal is my word for it."

But others reacted to the show's unusual qualities. John Chapman in The Daily News called Magdalena "a flaming, opulent, disturbing and imaginative work which does not fit into any of the standard patterns...a bold and stunning departure in the musical theatre." Louis Biancolli, music critic of the World-Telegram, stated that "the score is one of the most vital and refreshing to hit the Broadway market in years. One might call it the Brazilian Oklahoma!, while adding that the equatorial master strikes out into even fresher territory as a symphonic musician."

At a cost of $300,000, Magdalena was one of Broadway's most expensive productions to date, and its operating costs were high. Audiences soon ran out, and the show closed after eighty-eight performances. Making matters worse was the fact that Magdalena went unrecorded, at least partly because of "the Petrillo ban" of 1948. At the time, some radio stations were giving up live, studio orchestras in favor of spinning LPs, which had only recently been introduced. Musicians began to believe that LPs were depriving them of work, and Petrillo, head of the musicians' union, imposed a ban that forced Broadway pit musicians to refrain from recording shows for about six months. The Petrillo ban also had something to do with the lack of recordings for a couple of more successful 1948 shows, Where's Charley? and Love Life. The ban was lifted in late '48, allowing the year's last musical, Kiss Me, Kate, to be recorded immediately.

But a recording of Magdalena did finally happen, as a result of a concert version presented at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall on November 23, 1987. In the leads were City Opera soprano Faith Esham, Broadway's Kevin Gray, George Rose as the General, and, in the Petina role, Judy Kaye, who received a lengthy ovation for her big, second-act recipe number, "Piece de Resistance." Original Magdalena star John Raitt made a cameo appearance in the role of a tribal elder, singing the plaintive title lament against the discordant sound of the "Broken Pianolita" in one of the score's highlights.

Two months after the concert, the cast and conductor Evans Haile went into the studio to record the score for CBS Records. Raitt bowed out of the recording, so opera tenor Jerry Hadley took his place. The resulting CD offers the complete, sui generis score, and it makes for a fascinating listen. Unfortunately, the disc now appears to be out of print. But that was probably bound to happen to the only recording of a work as strange and obscure as Magdalena.

And speaking of Wright and Forrest recordings, Decca Broadway has made good on its promise to correct the mistake one track repeated, and thus one track missing on its May 25 reissue of the 1944 Broadway cast recording of Song of Norway. The corrected version should now be available in stores, and can apparently be distinguished from the faulty version by its lack of a front-cover sticker. I listened to the corrected CD last night, and am happy to report that the Norway recording can now be recommended without reservation.

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