CDs: Suits Me Fine

Nanette Fabray's talents were about equal to those of the other top musical-theatre women of the '40s and '50s. But she didn't have the best luck with her vehicles. After taking over leads in Bloomer Girl and By Jupiter, Fabray made a hit opposite Phil Silvers in High Button Shoes 1947. But her subsequent shows were Love Life, for which she won a Tony, then the less successful Arms and the Girl, Make a Wish, and Mr. President.

Make a Wish 1951 was based on Ferenc Molnar's The Good Fairy, which had been a Broadway success in the early '30s, with Helen Hayes playing a naive usherette drawn into Parisian high-life. The first film version starred the enchanting Margaret Sullavan. And the property had even been lightly musicalized already, in the 1947 Deanna Durbin film I'll Be Yours.

If Molnar's Liliom had been turned into one of Broadway's greatest musicals, Carousel, his Good Fairy was not to have equal success as Make a Wish. The musical's book was by Hollywood screenwriter-director Preston Sturges, who had already worked on the screenplays of both the Sullavan and Durbin versions. The music and lyrics were by Hugh Martin, who had provided songs for the film classic Meet Me In St. Louis and the Broadway hit Best Foot Forward both with Ralph Blane as well as the Nancy Walker show Look Ma, I'm Dancin'. A year after Make a Wish, Martin would score a West End hit with Love from Judy, and later do Broadway's High Spirits, both with Timothy Gray.

Make a Wish was produced by Harry Rigby, High Button Shoes composer Jule Styne, and Alexander H. Cohen. It was to be the first of a string of unsuccessful Broadway musicals mounted by Cohen Courtin' Time, A Time for Singing, Baker Street, Rugantino, Dear World, Prettybelle, I Remember Mama. Directing Make a Wish was John C. Wilson Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Kiss Me, Kate, and it was the first book show choreographed by Gower Champion.

For the first time in her career, Fabray received sole billing above the title. Her leading man was Stephen Douglass, who had recently starred in the London edition of Carousel, and the company featured two of Broadway's best dancers, as well as fine singers, Harold Lang, from Kiss Me, Kate and Look Ma, I'm Dancin', and Helen Gallagher, who had appeared in High Button Shoes with Fabray. The following year, producer Styne would put Lang and Gallagher into his hit Broadway revival of Pal Joey.

Set in the present, and thus twenty years after The Good Fairy, Make a Wish changed the name of Molnar's heroine from Lu to Janette and made the character a war orphan who, in order to taste life first hand, escapes from an orphanage into the sophisticated world of Paris' Left Bank. She meets up with wealthy, lecherous meat packer Frigo a leading but non-singing role, played by Melville Cooper but falls for indigent young law student Paul Douglass. She also encounters a dance team Gallagher and Lang and joins the chorus of their Folies Labiche. Paul suspects the worst when he finds Janette in what appear to be compromising circumstances with Frigo. But Frigo fails to seduce Janette, and instead winds up providing Paul with a job.

As is often the case with unsuccessful musicals of the '50s and '60s, there were personnel changes on the road. Franklin Pangborn, the outstanding screen sissy of the 1930s, departed when his role was trimmed. Sturges left the show in Philadelphia, and Abe Burrows, riding high with the success of Guys and Dolls, came in to rewrite the book. When Wilson became ill near the end of the tryout, Burrows also took over the direction, thus beginning his career as musical-comedy director and show doctor. He would soon go on to stage Styne's revue Two on the Aisle.

Make a Wish had pleasant leads, sets, songs, and dances. But it suffered by comparison to its Broadway competition Guys and Dolls, South Pacific, The King and I, Kiss Me, Kate, Call Me Madam. Upon its opening at the Winter Garden in April, 1951, Make a Wish received three favorable reviews, three mixed ones, and an unfavorable notice from Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times. There was praise for the stars, for Raoul Pene du Bois' sets and costumes, and especially for Champion's choreography, notably "The Sale" ballet, set at the Galerie Napoleon Department Store.

Make a Wish closed after 102 performances, losing a then-sizable $305,000, $50,000 of which had been provided by RCA, whose cast album of the show quickly went out of print. The recording was reissued on LP in 1976, but it remained one of those catalogue titles that RCA never got around to putting out on CD. Now the enterprising English label Sepia has given Make a Wish its CD premiere, along with RCA's cast album of another Styne-Gallagher show from the early '50s, Hazel Flagg. Both titles will be released on July 5.

With just about everything sung by the four leads, Make a Wish features a big, brassy sound, aided by Phil Lang's orchestrations and Martin's customarily distinctive vocal arrangments. There's a lively opening number, "The Tour Must Go On." In fine voice, Fabray has a strong first number, "I Wanna Be Good 'n' Bad," and a bright waltz, "Over and Over." Douglass's vocals help another waltz, "Who Gives a Sou?," a march "Paris, France", and a ballad, "When Does This Feeling Go Away?" Fabray and Douglass share the zesty title number. Lang and Gallagher have three duets, including the best tune, "Suits Me Fine" the show's original title, "I'll Never Make a Frenchman Out of You," and "That Face!"

Make a Wish may lack big, memorable songs, but the score is consistently pleasant, and the leads are good company. Make a Wish was one of the few remaining grand-scale, golden-age Broadway musical titles not previously issued on CD, so this is a major release, as is Hazel Flagg, to be discussed here next week.

In addition to a fine remastering, Sepia's seventy-six-minute Make a Wish CD offers substantial bonuses. There's a complete 78 set four sides that Douglass, a superb baritone, recorded in 1950, during his London run in Carousel. It's called Serenade for You, and features in medley form a dozen classic love songs. That's followed by two Douglass tracks from a studio recording of The Cat and the Fiddle 1953, plus Fran Warren's cover version of "When Does This Feeling Go Away?" A popular vocalist, Warren took over the lead in Broadway's The Pajama Game.

There are even some booklet comments from Douglass, who's alive and well and living in England Crewe, Cheshire, to be precise. One quibble: The booklet cover doesn't recreate the original album-cover art in full. The logo girl no longer has a Parisian scene to look at through that open window.

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