Obscure Recordings: Cabaret Girls
In the '50s and early '60s, Kirk turned to television and nightclubs, and the Plaza album preserves Kirk's eighth engagement at the famed hotel's chic Persian Room. A typical "star" club act, designed to be toured all over the country the notes tell us that it even played the Hilton hotels of San Juan and Havana, Kirk was backed by four singing-dancing boys, one of whom was Scooter Teague, who would go on to Broadway's 110 in the Shade.
The act opens with a piece of "special material" by David Saxon and Kirk's husband, Robert Wells, a typical act opener called "I Travel Light." The sleeve photo tells us that at least half a dozen pieces of luggage were employed in this number about a gal's bare necessities.
Kirk had a lush contralto belt, and after the fairly frenetic opening, she swings into a vibrant "I'm Sitting on Top of the World," a sultry "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home to," and an emphatic "How Come You Do Me Like You Do?" You might not have thought the title song from "Anything Goes" required new lyrics, but Wells and Saxon provided them, not only for the choruses, but in a new verse and release, all paying tribute to the free spirit that is Lisa.
There's one recent hit, "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo," then one salute to the Broadway career, Kiss Me, Kate's "Why Can't You Behave?" More special material, very much of its time, follows in the naughty "Good Little Girls," which opens with a verse about how a girl needs a guy to buy her mink. The song goes on to relate how good little girls go to heaven, but smart little girls go to Bergdorf's, Bonwit's, and Saks.
Such a number would now be deemed sexist and politically incorrect, and the latter description would also apply to Kirk's final song. The eleven o'clock spot is a salute to "Far Away Places," and opens with "The Riviera" from The Boy Friend, with Lisa's boys again out in full force. Then, in yet another change of Jean Louis outfit, Kirk adopts full Asian drag from the photo, she looks like she's ready to play Mrs. Meers in Thoroughly Modern Millie for a solemn rendition of "Limehouse Blues," a song also performed by Julie Andrews in Star!
LPs weren't quite long enough to preserve these club acts in their entirety. I suspect there may have been one more far away place in that closing sequence, and we also get none of Kirk's audience palaver or expressions of gratitude when the show is over.
There's much more patter and audience interaction on Let Me Entertain You: Dolores Gray at the Talk of the Town. This Philips LP captures the great Broadway belter in prime form at London's most glamorous theatre-restaurant, the Talk of the Town, in 1963, a few years after Gray's Broadway run in Destry Rides Again and a few years before her return in Sherry! Gray was a London favorite from her three years spent there starring in Annie Get Your Gun. In the '70s, Gray would return to London to replace Angela Lansbury in Gypsy. In the '80s, she made a final West End appearance, singing "I'm Still Here" in Follies.
In sensational voice in '63, Gray opens with a current show tune, "Once in a Lifetime," when "a girl has a moment." She pays tribute to the venue and the crowd with "Around the World," followed by a powerful "Cry Me a River." Warning the crowd with the words "Hang on to your hats, here's where the fun starts," she repeats her Designing Woman song, "There'll Be Some Changes Made," during which she elicits participation from a male audience member, who helps her unzip part of an outfit.
With "Lucky Day," Gray recreates a problematic appearance flubbed light and sound cues at the JFK inaugural ball. Then Gray and her pair of boys stage a salute to the folk music craze with a rousing rendition of a Southern spiritual, "Mornin' Train."
Following a mellow medley including "A Foggy Day," "It Never Entered My Mind," and "S'posin'," Gray arrives at her biggest set piece, a salute to the straw-hat circuit back home in America and to the four musicals that she performed the previous summer in stock, at venues like the St. Louis Muny. During Gray's costume changes, the boys spell the star by introducing each show with special lyrics to "That's Entertainment." In succession, Gray performs "C'est Magnifique," "My Ship," "Shall We Dance?" just try to imagine Gray's Mrs. Anna in The King and I, and "You Can't Get a Man With a Gun."
For an eleven o'clock vocal display piece, there's an item called "Toreador," which Gray continued to feature in her '70s cabaret appearances at New York's Brothers and Sisters club. Gray ends her Talk of the Town show with a sincere "I Wish You Love."
Gray's in terrific voice throughout, and particularly amusing are her spoken comments about what it means to an artist to play before such a warm audience, remarks that have inevitably found their way into the soundtrack of the shows of Lypsinka.
Turning to a different sort of act, there's Kaye Ballard Live?, an LP released by United Artists in the early '60s the cover bills Ballard as the "comedy star of the Broadway hit musical Carnival". The disc was recorded during Ballard's engagement at the chic Greenwich Village boite known as the Blue Angel. While Ballard can sing with the best of them, the emphasis here is on comedy.
She opens with the standard "Autumn Leaves," but with a special lyric about a hurricane. Ballard's humor was a successful hybrid of sophistication and silliness, so there are jokes about such arcane matters as the reason why actress Gladys Cooper's sister never made it as a stage performer. Seems she thought she was being hissed every time she stepped on stage; in fact, audience members were whispering, "That's Gladys Cooper's sister." Then there's a lengthy routine about a school for mothers, where they're taught how to make their children feel guilty if they don't pass the class, they're demoted to aunts.
Three pieces of special material follow. The first is a Ballard regular, some whimsical nonsense about a "Teeny Tiny" parallel universe. Then there's a Fred Ebb-Paul Klein song in which a well-to-do Park Avenue resident celebrates Christmas by singing a carol in praise of her financial portfolio. Then it's "I Just Kissed My Nose Good Night," which Ballard calls an "insane" number. And there are more jokes, including the one about the martian who landed at a Hollywood studio and said to director Elia Kazan, "Take me to your leader." Kazan's advice: "Not bad. Take it again. You're a little tense."
Ballard introduces her supporting trio of musicians, including Arthur Siegel, Ballard's longtime accompanist, at the piano. She announces her intention to sing "a medley of his hit," but before she winds up the LP with a straightforward, belty rendition of Siegel's "Love Is a Simple Thing" New Faces of 1952, she imitates three ladies as they might introduce the number: Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Julie Harris. Who else but Ballard would think to imitate Julie Harris?
Finally, yet another type of act, a brand that proliferated in intimate clubs in the '70s and '80s, the Broadway lady, near the end of her career, demonstrating that she could still deliver the goods while offering a retrospective of her glory days.
AEI released Vivian Blaine Sings for You, recorded in 1983 when the Guys and Dolls star played a brief engagement at the Gardenia Club in Hollywood. Following this engagement, Blaine would return to Broadway only for a two-week fill-in for Lila Kedrova in the revival of Zorba. If the upper range had thinned out, Blaine was still in fairly good voice for her L.A. set, and her act is loaded with show tunes.
Blaine opens each half of the act with a piece of typical special material. In the first, she declares, "There Ain't Gonna Be an Opening Number!" For her return in the second half, it's "I'm Back." Blaine relates the story of her honeymoon with an ex-husband as a way of getting into Seesaw's "Nobody Does It Like Me." She declares "I Only Wanna Laugh," introduced by Julie Wilson in the Broadway flop Jimmy, to be one of the best "saloon songs" of recent years.
There follows a medley of songs from roles she performed in stock, including "Before the Parade Passes By," "Bewitched," and "Everything's Coming Up Roses." Then there's one she sang on Broadway: Blaine followed Elaine Stritch and Jane Russell to become the third Joanne in the original Broadway Company. Her "Ladies Who Lunch" is solid, and it's the disc's most valuable track.
In the second half, there's a salute to her years in 20th Century-Fox musical films, including two songs from her best picture, Rodgers and Hammerstein's State Fair. Looking back on her screen career leads her to exclaim "Who's That Girl?," an appropriate number from Applause.
Saved for next to closing is the inevitable Guys and Dolls medley. She declares the opening night of that show to be the one night in her life she'd like to relive, sings that Frank Loesser "never will have a successor," then performs "A Bushel and a Peck," "Take Back Your Mink," and, of course, "Adelaide's Lament," with which she had scored heavily on the twenty-fifth-anniversary Tony Awards retrospective twelve years earlier. To wind things up, there's one of those heartfelt bow-off numbers, describing the audience as "The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me."