CDs: Sister Act

As of tomorrow, the wait is over and the silly season is upon us. That's when Decca Broadway issues on CD the cast recording of the beloved trash classic Ankles Aweigh.

Opening at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on April 18, 1955, Ankles Aweigh's book was the work of Guy Bolton and Eddie Davis. Bolton's career extended back to World War I and the authorship of such musicals as Leave It to Jane, Very Good Eddie, Oh, Kay!, Lady Be Good, and Anything Goes. The lyrics were by Dan Shapiro; Bolton, Davis, and Shapiro had had an undeserved hit with the two-year run of a wartime frolic called Follow the Girls 1944. Ankles Aweigh's music was by Sammy Fain, whose popular film songs include "Secret Love" and "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing."

The brainchild of co-producer Fred F. Finklehoffe, Ankles Aweigh was first planned for Mickey Rooney's stage debut, with Mitzi Gaynor and Eddie Bracken to be his co-stars. When this didn't happen, Finklehoffe announced it for Eddie Foy, Jr. and Elaine Stritch. Ultimately, the show became a vehicle for Betty and Jane Kean, a pair of raucous singing comediennes Jane had the voice, Betty was the clown who were popular on television and at nightclubs like the Copacabana. The show's backers included Oscar Hammerstein II, whose brother Reginald was a co-producer; Richard Rodgers; and Jimmy Durante.

Jane Kean played Wynne, a movie star making a film in Sicily, who, against the terms of her contract, is secretly married to an American Navy pilot Mark Dawson. With the aid of her sister and stand-in, Elsey Betty Kean, and two of the pilot's Navy pals, Dinky Lew Parker and Spud Gabriel Dell, Wynne, disguised as a boy pilot, manages to sneak aboard her husband's aircraft carrier for a honeymoon. When the ship sails for Morocco, the girls and guys become enmeshed in a spy ring.

The preposterous plot marked Ankles Aweigh as an unabashed throwback to musicals of the '30s, with stock characters and burlesque jokes, pretty chorus girls, and enough holes in the plot to allow the Kean Sisters the opportunity to perform chunks of their club act, including impersonations of Mary Martin's Peter Pan, the Gabors, and Marlene Dietrich. To a Broadway used to the flawless integration of shows like South Pacific, The King and I, and Guys and Dolls, Ankles Aweigh seemed a shockingly dated effort.

Production problems began right away, with director John C. Wilson Kiss Me, Kate, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Make a Wish replaced by Finklehoffe. During rehearsals, comic lead Myron McCormick Luther Billis in South Pacific was replaced by Parker. During the New Haven tryout, vocalist Sonny Tufts was replaced as leading man by Dawson. Jerome Robbins was persuaded to spend two weeks in Boston, helping out with the staging.

Ankles Aweigh was bound to upset discerning critics. In The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson put it thusly: "Any threats of progress made in the last ten or fifteen years by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, Abe Burrows and their colleagues have been successfully averted by Ankles Aweigh....It leaves off where modern musical comedy began....As things go on Broadway, it is difficult to find a show that contains no talent. But Ankles Aweigh has a certain fascination in that respect." Not to be outdone, Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune was even sharper: "Some of us have been complaining lately for a return to the old-fashioned, slam-bang, gags-and-girls musical comedy. Some of us should be shot."

In The Post, Richard Watts felt that "it all seemed like the revival of an ancient musical show not worth reviving." Expressing a similar view was John McClain in The Journal American: "This is meant to be a real old-time girlie show, with big sets, bright music and a pleasant workable plot that will keep things in motion. What emerges, however, is something too banal to have the charm of nostalgia, too corny for modern standards."

A closing notice went up a few days after the opening. But the owner of the Hellinger, Anthony Brady Farrell, liked the show and decided to take it over, forcing the three original producers out. On the LP cover, Farrell's name appears as sole producer. Columnists Walter Winchell rumored to have a girlfriend in the chorus and Ed Sullivan, along with TV stars Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, rallied behind the show, plugging it in print and on the airwaves. Ankles Aweigh was depicted as a good, old-fashioned, gags-and-gams extravaganza that the New York critics were simply too highbrow to enjoy.

But all the good publicity did not sufficiently help at the box office. Equity permitted Farrell to institute salary cuts, but Jane Kean, Dawson, and Thelma Carpenter refused to accept them and were replaced, leaving Betty Kean to perform with her sister's understudy. Ankles Aweigh limped along through 176 performances, closing at a loss of $340,000 on a $275,000 investment. Plain and Fancy, which was forced to move to the Winter Garden to make way at the Hellinger for Ankles Aweigh, was invited back to the Hellinger when Ankles Aweigh expired. Plain and Fancy remained at the Hellinger until My Fair Lady took over.

Fain's Broadway career consisted of such flops as Toplitzsky of Notre Dame, Flahooley, Christine, and Something More!, but he was a gifted composer. So Decca's cast album of Ankles Aweigh has always been the sort of thing that musical theatre devotees have enjoyed playing in the privacy of their homes, well aware that it was no Carousel but unable to resist singing along with such catchy items as "Walk Like a Sailor" Jane Kean, Parker, Dell, "Here's to Dear Old Us," Betty Kean, Parker, Dell, and "Nothing Can Replace a Man" Jane. There are two ineffably tacky local-color numbers, the opening "Italy" and "La Festa," and the trashy "Headin' for the Bottom Blues," sung in the show by Carpenter but on the recording by another cast member, Betty George. There are two routine romantic duets for Jane Kean and Dawson, "Nothing at All" and "His and Hers," as well as a silly one, "Kiss Me and Kill Me With Love." Betty Kean has a mediocre comic ode to the "Honeymoon." Because the sisters' opening number, "Old Fashioned Mothers," wasn't recorded, Betty and Jane only get to sing together at the end, in "Eleven O'Clock Song," which is cut off on the album by the finale.

Reissued on LP by AEI but never before on CD, the Ankles Aweigh album is indefensible but irresistibly cheesy fun. One would have thought that Decca's cast recording would forever stand as the only trace of Ankles Aweigh. Incredibly, the distinguished Goodspeed Opera House revived the show in the summer of 1988. Realizing that it could not be brought back as is, Goodspeed commissioned a full-scale revisal, with Charles Busch, celebrated for the Theater-in-Limbo epics Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Psycho Beach Party, writing an almost entirely new book.

Busch, who would go on to have little success revising the books of House of Flowers and Taboo, made both sisters movie stars, renaming them Gloria and Lorraine Marlowe and conceiving them along the lines of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The adaptation de-emphasized the sailors-at-sea business and focused on a '50s film company shooting a picture, with several of the more questionable songs made into numbers from the Marlowe Sisters' movie. To add some Cold War flavor, the previously straightforward character of Captain Zimmerman became the surprise villain, a Soviet mole. One Sammy Fain standard, "I Can Dream, Can't I?," was interpolated. D'Jamin Bartlett A Little Night Music's original Petra and Lynnette Perry Ragtime were the sisters, and the cast included Peter Bartlett and Bob Cuccioli.

Fain gave the production his stamp of approval, saying that it was a considerable improvement on the original. But local critics did their homework, checked out the original reviews, and questioned the wisdom of doing such a disreputable show. So Ankles Aweigh isn't likely to get tried again. But it can be forever laughed at and enjoyed on this new disc.

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