Obscure Recordings: The Streets of New York
The early '60s was the golden age of the off-Broadway book musical. These were small shows that would have been entirely unsuitable for Broadway transfer. A few were originals, while many others were adapted from old plays, classic Ernest in Love, from The Importance of Being Earnest, All in Love from The Rivals to semi-classic The Fantasticks, from a play by Rostand. Today I'm looking at the recording made from one of the best of the off-Broadway musical adaptations of this period; in upcoming columns, I'll examine a few other notable off-Broadway cast albums.
Surely one of the finest recorded off-Broadway scores was written by Richard B. Chodosh music and Barry Alan Grael book and lyrics for The Streets of New York, which opened on October 29, 1963, early in the season that gave Broadway Hello, Dolly!, Funny Girl, 110 in the Shade, Anyone Can Whistle, and many others.
The Streets of New York was based on a nineteenth-century melodrama of the same title by Dion Boucicault, whose nineteenth-century melodrama The Shaughraun is scheduled for an upcoming U.S. tour courtesy of the Riverdance folk. Banker Gideon Bloodgood, his rapacious daughter Alida, and a blackmailing clerk named Badger are just a few of the principal characters involved in the convoluted doings of The Streets of New York. The musical was co-produced by Gene Dingenary, later the owner of the collector's shop Footlight Records in New York City, and presented at the Maidman Theatre, later the John Houseman, on West 42nd Street.
A plot summary of The Streets of New York is spread over five pages of the CD booklet, so I won't attempt to go into detail here. Suffice it to say that the musical begins with a prologue, set twenty years before the rest of the story, in which Bloodgood, his bank failing, is preparing to escape with the money and his infant daughter, Alida. When clerk Badger arrives, he sizes up what's going on and must be bribed to remain silent. Captain Fairweather arrives to deposit $100,000 in Bloodgood's bank, to be kept in trust for his infant daughter, Lucy. It's not long before Fairweather realizes that the bank is failing. But before he can withdraw his money, he has a heart attack and dies on the spot. Along with Alida and her father, a grown-up Lucy will figure prominently in the action of the rest of the play.
Reviewing The Streets of New York in The New York Times, drama critic Howard Taubman stated that "the taste and the manners of the new musical are agreeable," noting a "rare consistency of style....lyrics are nimble and occasionally witty, the music sustains the mood of well-bred spoofing." Others were more enthusiastic, with Newsweek declaring the show "the brightest musical of this season and maybe next."
The Streets of New York lasted for 318 performances, which was a pretty decent run; off-Broadway musicals were not meant for long lives, The Fantasticks being the exception to the rule. The talented cast included Ralston Hill Bloodgood, later the Congressional secretary in the stage and screen 1776; Barbara Williams Alida, later a Broadway Aldonza in Man of La Mancha; David Cryer romantic hero Mark Livingstone, who went on to 1776, Ari, Come Summer, Evita, and Chess; and lyricist-librettist Grael himself, as the scheming Badger. The director was Joseph Hardy You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Child's Play, and Neal Kenyon Dames at Sea was the choreographer.
By all rights, The Streets of New York should have been commercially recorded. Instead, the cast got together in April 1964 to make a recording that was privately distributed on LP but not commercially released. It was produced by musical-theatre historian Miles Kreuger. I purchased one from Grael himself. In 1995, the enterprising AEI label gave the Streets of New York cast recording its first commercial release, and that CD is still available.
To the accompaniment of twin pianos, the recording reveals the score to be a sophisticated, tuneful and highly accomplished piece of work. It contains superb ensembles "Tourist Madrigal," "Where Can the Rich and Poor Be Friends?," both act finales; vivid solos Alida's "He'll Come to Me, Crawling"; sharply comic plot numbers "California" for Badger and his henchmen; and vibrant romantic material "If I May," "Arms for the Love of Me."
Listening to the recording, Chodosh and Grael sound like one of the top teams of the '60s. Their next show, Berlin Is Mine, had an unusual premiere as an experimental Lincoln Center public workshop presentation at the Forum now the Newhouse in April 1966. Jerry Orbach, Julia Migenes, and M'el Dowd had the leads. My friend Jeffrey Dunn who had arranged my purchase of the Streets LP and I were invited by Grael to attend. We loved it, and thought it might get Grael and Chodosh to Broadway, where they clearly belonged. But then Cabaret came along later that year and cornered the market on musicals set in Berlin. In the '90s, AEI made a recording of Berlin Is Mine, but its principals couldn't match the originals.
Grael died of AIDS in 1985. The Streets of New York remains available for production. When Dunn directed it at Marymount Manhattan College a few years back, the show seemed just as strong as it did to me when I was taken to see it by my father on a cold day in 1963.
It should also be noted that Chodosh and Grael failed to corner the market on musical versions of Boucicault's Streets of New York. In terms of off-Broadway, they didn't even get there first. About two years earlier January 22, 1962, at the Jan Hus House, another musical based on the same play had been mounted off-Broadway, entitled The Banker's Daughter. Taubman claimed that it featured "one of the most ambitious and flowingly melodic scores of the season," but also felt that "the production has not made up its mind whether to be deadpan or a lightfingered spoof...the book becomes tedious." With a cast including Helena Scott London Most Happy Fella, Jones Beach Song of Norway and David Daniels Plain and Fancy, The Banker's Daughter closed after sixty-eight performances, unrecorded.
In the late '70s, there was a London staging of the play with incidental songs. But in 2001, Charlotte Moore fashioned yet another musical version of The Streets of New York, this one for her Irish Repertory Theatre. It was well received, but I chose not to attend, suspecting I would have missed the Chodosh-Grael Streets score too much.