Obscure Recordings: Cool Off!
Like Damn Yankees, Cool Off! was partly inspired by the Faust legend. Its book was by Jerome Weidman, co-author with George Abbott of the books for Fiorello! and Tenderloin and sole author of the sharp script for I Can Get It For You Wholesale. Jerome Weidman was the father of John Weidman, the librettist of Assassins, Pacific Overtures, Bounce, Big, Contact, and the revised Anything Goes. The music and lyrics for Cool Off! were the work of Howard Blankman, songwriter of that other Pennsylvania Dutch musical, off-Broadway's By Hex 1956.
Cool Off! featured just four performers. The mature pair were English stars Stanley Holloway and Hermione Baddeley. Music-hall and screen veteran Holloway had made a splash on Broadway as Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady; at the time of Cool Off!, Holloway was poised to become even better known through the fall '64 release of the Fair Lady film. Baddeley had recently played Broadway in the plays A Taste of Honey as Angela Lansbury's replacement and Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Years later, she would become better known to U.S. audiences as housekeeper Mrs. Naugatuck on TV's Maude.
The show's young leading man was Stuart Damon, who had recently appeared in the hit off-Broadway revival of The Boys from Syracuse. Damon's credits already included The Unsinkable Molly Brown opposite Jane Powell and Irma La Douce opposite Juliet Prowse. A year after Cool Off!, Damon would be Prince Charming in the TV remake of Cinderella and take principal roles in Broadway's Do I Hear a Waltz? and London's Charlie Girl.
Opposite Damon in Cool Off! was newcomer Sheila Sullivan. One year after Cool Off!, Sullivan would replace Kathryn Hays in the tryout of Hot September, the musical version of Picnic that, like Cool Off!, would close on the road. Immediately following the demise of Cool Off!, Sullivan went into Golden Boy, as understudy to leading lady Paula Wayne. Baddeley's Cool Off! understudy was the gifted Jane Connell. Sullivan was covered in Cool Off! by Margery Gray, wife of Fiorello!/Tenderloin lyricist Sheldon Harnick.
With the exception of Sullivan, the actors in Cool Off! played multiple roles. Directing was Herbert Machiz, who had no experience with musicals and was best known for directing Tennessee Williams plays, including Milk Train with Baddeley and the notorious 1956 City Center revival of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Tallulah Bankhead. Bankhead's gay following came prepared to laugh at her antics, and found ways to do so in spite of Bankhead's best efforts to take things seriously.
If Cool Off! was an original fantasy, it was a pretty awful one, becoming increasingly convoluted as it went along. The plot went something like this: In their West 12th Street apartment, Clara Sullivan and Ed Farrish Damon are quarreling bitterly. He's an aspiring writer whose wife longs to live in "Suburbia." Clara says she'd sell her soul if they could find their way back to what they once had together "Can This Be Why We Came Here?". Bessie Linstrom Baddeley, wife of Lester Linstrom Holloway, appears and explains that Lester signed a treaty with the devil to establish a "cooling off" division where those who wish to sell their souls can reconsider and, if so desired, back out of the arrangement.
Meanwhile, YM2 also played by Damon, an emissary from the devil, arrives and takes Clara out for the evening. Soul-savers Bessie and Lester want to make YM2 remember who he was before he began to work for the devil and thus make him human again. But it seems that the Linstroms must prevent YM2 and Clara from leaving the building, or their "cooling off" division could be destroyed. So Lester and Bessie begin a series of impersonations designed to distract the young couple.
In one of her incarnations, Bessie impersonates an interior decorator "Bessie's Bossa Nova". Clara confronts Bessie, accusing her and Lester of trying to rack up higher numbers than the devil, and stating that unless they can make her life better, she'll go with the devil and marry YM2.
After Lester impersonates a photographer, Clara recalls her first meeting with Ed, and YM2 remembers the man he once was. Clara and Ed are reunited "A Dream Ago", and Bessie and Lester can continue to offer their second chance to those who think they want to sell their souls.
After a New Haven engagement was scratched, Cool Off! had its world premiere at Philadelphia's Forrest Theatre on March 31, 1964. In The Bulletin, critic Ernest Schier described the evening as "an unmitigated disaster...in the rampant confusion on stage, nobody quite seems to know what is going on, least of all the performers." Henry Murdock of The Inquirer wrote, "Cool Off! could be described as a morality play with music, the apparent moral being that one shouldn't write a morality play with music like Cool Off!" Variety's critic noted, "The show was unready at the preem, with the cast up in the air, the scenery in shambles and the audience receiving everything with a mortuary chill."
Four days later, Cool Off! was over. Columbia Records had signed Cool Off!, and an ad for the cast recording ran in the Philadelphia Playbill. Needless to say, the recording was cancelled along with the show. But a demo of eleven songs from Cool Off!, almost the entire score, exists, and it features Damon, Sullivan, Holloway, and Blankman. It's missing the title song, although one imagines that the song called "Warm Up" might have had the same tune as the title number.
There's a bright "At My Age" for the mature pair, and Sullivan's opening statement, "Suburbia," is pleasing. In general, the music is better than the lyrics. But a few attractive things aside, it's not a very interesting score. True, it's more coherent than Weidman's surprisingly cockeyed libretto. But to even begin to work, Cool Off! would have needed less conventional, by-the-numbers songs, something more along the lines of what Stephen Sondheim provided for Anyone Can Whistle.
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