CDs: Magic Moment
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CD: THE GAY LIFE DRG
Scores from Broadway musical flops don't come much better than The Gay Life. Capitol Records' cast album of the 1961 show was issued on a Broadway Angel CD in 1993, but that version went out of print. On February 22, DRG happily restores to CD a title that deserves to stick around.
The Gay Life had music by Arthur Schwartz, with lyrics by Howard Dietz. It was the high-quality team's first show since 1948. Dietz and Schwartz had had their greatest theatrical success with revues like The Band Wagon, At Home Abroad, and Inside U.S.A. Without Dietz, Schwartz had composed Stars in Your Eyes, Park Avenue, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and By the Beautiful Sea. Just a few years prior to The Gay Life, Dietz retired from his thirty-year position as director of publicity for MGM.
With a book by Fay and Michael Kanin, The Gay Life was based on The Affairs of Anatol by Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler. Producer Kermit Bloomgarden's recent Broadway credits included the top-notch musicals The Most Happy Fella and The Music Man. Hired to stage his first Broadway show was Gerald Freedman; Freedman had been assistant director to Jerome Robbins on Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, and Gypsy.
As was the case a few years back with The Wild Party, there was a simultaneous, competing musical version of Anatol, this one with book and lyrics by Tom Jones The Fantasticks, 110 in the Shade, Harold and Maude and featuring pre-existing music by Jacques Offenbach. This Anatol musical was staged in Bermuda in 1960, with Rosemary Harris directed by her husband, Ellis Rabb. It was subsequently mounted in 1961 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Jean Pierre Aumont.
Aumont would find himself up for the role of Anatol in The Gay Life as well, but he lost it to handsome Walter Chiari, an Italian film, TV, and theatre star making his American stage debut. For his leading lady, Bloomgarden hired his Music Man Tony winner Barbara Cook. Capitol Records, which had done well with The Music Man cast album, put up half the financing for The Gay Life in exchange for the recording rights.
When The Gay Life had its world premiere in Detroit in the fall of 1961, the troubles began. Written out during the Detroit run was actress-singer Anita Gillette Mr. President, All American, who had been playing a rejected mistress of Anatol. During the show's second tryout stop, in Toronto, choreographer Herbert Ross took over the direction, although Freedman retained credit.
The Kanin's book for The Gay Life attempted to unify the episodic Schnitzler play by focusing on heroine Leisl. The story begins in Vienna in 1904, when Anatol Chiari's friend, Max Jules Munshin, discovers Anatol, on his wedding day, in his apartment with a strange woman. We flashback to how it all began, at the spa in Carlsbad, where Anatol tells Max that he's ready to settle down and marry. Max's sister, Liesl Cook, is secretly in love with the flamboyant Anatol, but Anatol is more interested in having Liesl help him find the right wife.
When Anatol's current flame Mimi dumps him for another, he gets revenge by telling her he's about to marry Liesl, then decides to go through with it. As the first act ends, Liesl is thrilled to accept Anatol's proposal, but aware that he does not have the feelings for her that she has for him.
In the second act, Anatol, having second thoughts about the wedding, encounters old flame Magda Elizabeth Allen, which brings us back to the beginning of the show, at Anatol's apartment. Liesl arrives and is about to release Anatol from his promise to marry her. But when she finds Magda in his room, she engages her in an all-out brawl. Anatol sees Liesl as a woman for the first time, and finally wants her as she has always wanted him.
Prior to The Gay Life, Cook had done The Music Man for almost two years, then delivered an acclaimed performance at City Center in The King and I. The Gay Life was her first above-the-title starring role. Liesl was a juicy part, and Cook made the most of it, receiving unanimous praise from the New York critics. In his negative review in The Herald Tribune, Walter Kerr wrote, "Whatever those other people are in, Miss Cook is in a success; her head and our hearts are high."
The New York Times' Howard Taubman wrote a favorable notice, calling the show "colorful, cheerful, and leisurely in an Old World way." But in Variety, Hobe Morrison called the show "fairly good but probably not good enough for the brutal economic conditions of today's Broadway."
The Gay Life was one of the few Broadway shows substantially revised after its Broadway opening. The first two scenes and a fine song called "Why Go Anywhere at All?" preserved on the cast recording were dropped, and the show was no longer a flashback. But these alterations were not enough to turn the tide: The Gay Life closed after 113 performances. At one point during the road tryout, director Ross considered a major revision that would have had Cook playing not only Liesl but all of the women in Anatol's life. But the plan was abandoned.
The show was at least partly a victim of the heavy musical competition on Broadway at the time; all playing during The Gay Life's run at the Shubert Theatre were How to Succeed..., Carnival, Camelot, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Do Re Mi, Irma La Douce, Milk and Honey, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, not to mention the flops Sail Away, Kean, and Let It Ride!
Most people blame the show's failure on Chiari, as Dietz does in his memoir Dancing in the Dark: "Our leading man couldn't act, dance, sing or speak English, which was a handicap." But a bigger problem was the mediocre book, on the thin side and weak in its attempts at humor.
What the show did have was a sumptuous physical production Dietz's wife, Lucinda Ballard, won a Tony for her costumes, a wonderful leading lady Cook wasn't nominated for a Tony, but then the competition was fierce in those days, and a superb score, one of the best from Dietz and Schwartz. Cook had choice songs like "Magic Moment," "Something You Never Had Before," "The Label on the Bottle," and "You're Not the Type," and her renditions of them on the recording are glorious. Chiari, who is charming if not always easy to understand, joins her for the bright "Who Can? You Can?" and the wistful "This Kind of a Girl." Comic lead Jules Munshin contributes handily in "Now I'm Ready for a Frau" and "The Bloom Is Off the Rose," while Allen scores with "Come A-Wandering With Me."
Dietz and Schwartz went on to write the score for one more Broadway show, another flop, the Mary Martin vehicle Jennie. Cook went on to her first top-billed musical assignment, in She Loves Me. The Gay Life has had no major revivals, but in 1986, it was published in an acting edition, retitled, reasonably enough, The High Life.
With Don Walker's bountiful orchestrations, The Gay Life was one of the lushest cast albums of its era. If you failed to acquire The Gay Life on CD in its '90s incarnation, you won't want to miss this second chance. It's Cook at her best. DRG's new CD reproduces from the original LP sleeve a brief essay by composer Schwartz's son Jonathan and a plot synopsis by the Kanins. But there are also new notes by Cook, in which she fondly recalls a "miscast" Chiari and the fine songs the show gave her to sing.