CDs: God Bless Us, Everyone

There have been any number of musical versions of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, including Broadway's all-black Comin' Uptown; a Michel Legrand/Sheldon Harnick stage show that toured with Richard Kiley; and TV musicals including Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol and The Stingiest Man in Town.

Written for an elaborate staging at Madison Square Garden, a new musical version of A Christmas Carol arrived in New York for the holiday season of 1994. It boasted quality writers in composer Alan Menken and lyricist/co-librettist Lynn Ahrens, and was repeated for the next nine holiday seasons. With Madison Square Garden having retired its annual presentations, the Menken-Ahrens Christmas Carol was picked up for television, receiving an elaborate NBC holiday-movie special in late 2004.

The cast included musical theatre veterans like Jason Alexander, Jane Krakowski, and Jesse L. Martin, and even its Scrooge, Kelsey Grammer, boasted Sweeney Todd among his credits. Filmed in England, the movie also featured an interesting contingent of British musical-theatre talent, including brief appearances by Ruthie Henshall, Linzi Hateley, Claire Moore, and Julie Alanah-Brighten. Directing the production was Arthur Alan Seidelman, who has staged several L.A. Reprise! concerts, including Krakowski's Mack & Mabel. The orchestrations are by Michael Starobin, who was co-orchestrator of the Madison Square Garden production, and the teleplay, which stuck closely to the stage version, was by Ahrens.

This new Christmas Carol movie can be added to the list of recent films based on fairly long-running New York stage musicals. And unlike so many such transfers, virtually all of the lengthy score is included in the film. The Menken-Ahrens score was generally underrated during this Christmas Carol's stage life, but it supplied most of whatever charm and heart the mediocre TV film possessed. Because the Madison Square Garden Christmas Carol was recorded by Columbia after its first season, JAY's soundtrack album of the TV film preserves some changes made to the material after that initial year.

As a public-domain property, A Christmas Carol will no doubt continue to be the subject of new adaptations. But now that the Menken-Ahrens version is available, it's likely to receive many stagings. At seventy-one minutes, the new soundtrack CD preserves much of the ninety-minute minus commercials film, and, if it doesn't always make for gripping listening, this remains an attractive score. No doubt a DVD release of the actual film will follow.

CHILDREN'S LETTERS TO GOD JAY

Developed in readings at York Theatre Company and in a couple of regional productions, Children's Letters to God is based on an international bestseller by Stuart Hample and Eric Marshall which consists of letters that cover, as the CD notes state, "a wide range of beliefs, desires, questions, and doubts common to all children."

With a book by Hample, the musical version added a throughline by creating five distinct characters, all played by children. The music is by David Evans, who wrote a fine score for the off-Broadway musical Birds of Paradise, and the lyrics are by Douglas J. Cohen, whose musicals include No Way to Treat a Lady, The Gig, and The Opposite of Sex, the latter seen last year on the West Coast and perhaps Broadway bound.

Children's Letters to God had its New York premiere at the Lamb's Theatre in the summer of 2004, and it's the cast of that production that is preserved on JAY's new recording.

There are interrogative songs about turtles, rain, ants, holidays, faith, daydreams, divorce, only children, being bad at sports, and being thirteen. Accompanied by four musicians, the vocals by the five young performers are just fine. With traces of The Me Nobody Knows and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Children's Letters to God sounds like a sweetly winning family musical, with adept lyrics and appealing melodies.

FRANC D'AMBROSIO'S BROADWAY LML

Franc D'Ambrosio's more-than-six-year reign as Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera on tour and in San Francisco apparently allows him the title of the longest-running of all Phantoms. D'Ambrosio played Al Pacino's opera-singing son in The Godfather III, and was Henrik in the Los Angeles staging of A Little Night Music that starred John McMartin, Lois Nettleton, and Glynis Johns. More recently, D'Ambrosio had the lead in the U.S. national tour of Barry Manilow's Copacabana.

D'Ambrosio is currently on a seventy-six-city concert tour, and his first solo CD is structured like a concert. After a Broadway standard "Almost Like Being in Love" as opener, the singer does a pair of old-Broadway songs, "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" and "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise," with D'Ambrosio's florid style well-suited to such material. Then there's a nod to his film, with the love theme from Godfather III, and a lovely "Not While I'm Around."

That's followed by the centerpiece of the program, a nine-song medley from Bob Fosse musicals, highlighted by a stirring "Corner of the Sky." D'Ambrosio then shifts to contemporary Broadway, with a belty "This Is the Moment," a pretty "Bring Him Home," and two salutes to his stage roles, "Who Needs to Dream?" Copacabana and a handsome "Music of the Night." For bonus tracks, there are "Bring Him Home" in French, and "What Kind of Fool Am I?," the latter a song D'Ambrosio performed on NBC's recent "Brian Boitano's Skating Spectacular."

D'Ambrosio's distinctive high baritone/tenor mix makes this an appealing recital.

SALLY MAYES: VALENTINE Bayview

In the liner notes for her new CD Valentine, Sally Mayes amusingly relates that the disc was motivated by her mother's wondering why her daughter never sings songs that people are familiar with. It seems that her three previous solo discs, including a choice one devoted to the work of Comden and Green, feature decidedly esoteric material.

So this time around, Mayes is singing mostly standards, including such show songs as "My Romance," "Here's That Rainy Day," "My Funny Valentine," and "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good." There are also film numbers "No Love, No Nothin'," "The More I See You", and a few jazzier items, like a combination of the Cy Coleman-Carolyn Leigh songs "The Best Is Yet to Come" and "You Fascinate Me So."

Mayes is accompanied by a piano musical director Jeffrey Klitz, bass Mayes' husband, Robert Renino, and drums Warren Odze. While most of the arrangements are by Klitz, Billy Stritch did the Coleman pairing as well as "My Funny Valentine," and Stritch joins Mayes on the vocals for the latter song.

In addition to her occasional New York theatre appearances She Loves Me, Closer Than Ever, Welcome to the Club, Urban Cowboy, the upcoming Steel Magnolias, Mayes has long been established as one of our better cabaret and recording vocalists.

Most of the new set emphasizes Mayes the jazz singer. It's an area in which she has always excelled, and she continues to do so in this admirable, classy set.