CDs: Bette on Broadway
"Just turn me loose on old Broadway," sings screen legend Bette Davis, as she tears into her first number in the 1952 Broadway musical revue Two's Company. And there's no mistaking the fact that one is hearing classic camp as Davis croaks her way through that opening song and her other numbers on RCA Victor's cast recording.
Among Broadway cast albums unavailable on CD, Two's Company has long been at the top of the list of the most desired. The original LP was a major collector's item from the late '50s to the late '70s, when it was reissued on LP by RCA. But RCA never got around to issuing Two's Company on CD, so it has fallen to the enterprising English label called Sepia to do the honors.
Although Davis liked to sing, musical stage shows were not where this great film actress was most comfortable. With the star making her first theatrical appearance in twenty years, Two's Company was one of the last big Broadway revues, and it was a show that made headlines throughout a tortuous road tryout that extended from Detroit, where Davis began missing performances, on through Pittsburgh and Boston.
Play doctors like Joshua Logan, Arthur Laurents, George Abbott, and Moss Hart were said to have gone out of town to help out. Two featured players, comic David Burns and golden-throated soprano Ellen Hanley, joined the show during the tryout. Leading man Hiram Sherman turned in his notice then rescinded it. Veteran director John Murray Anderson, who had recently staged the hit Broadway revue New Faces of 1952, came in to supervise the staging. The New York opening was postponed ten days when Davis again became ill.
On December 15, 1952, Two's Company had its long-awaited Broadway premiere, at the Alvin Theatre. The dances and musical numbers were staged by the great Jerome Robbins, with film director Jules Dassin Magdalena, Illya, Darling staging the sketches. In addition to Sherman, Burns, and Hanley, Davis's supporting cast included ballerinas Nora Kaye and Maria Karnilova the latter would work with Robbins again in Gypsy and Fiddler on the Roof, dancers Buzz Miller and Bill Callahan, Stanley Prager who would direct Karnilova in Bravo Giovanni and flop regular and Karnilova's husband George S. Irving. Tina Louise was in the chorus.
The music was mostly by Vernon Duke, the composer of Cabin in the Sky but also of numerous flops The Lady Comes Across, Sadie Thompson, The Pink Jungle, Zenda. The lyrics were by Ogden Nash and Sammy Cahn. Two of the big songs, "Roundabout" and "Just Like a Man," had first been heard in Sweet Bye and Bye, a 1946 Duke-Nash musical that co-starred Dolores Gray and closed out of town. Sheldon Harnick contributed Sherman's solo number, "A Man's Home"; another Harnick number, "Merry Minuet," was cut but wound up in the following season's John Murray Anderson's Almanac.
Two's Company's reviews were mixed to negative, but the presence of Davis made it an event, so the show played to full houses as long as Davis was on stage. But the star never managed to appear in her stage shows for very long: After Two's Company, there was Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana, in which Davis was replaced fairly early in the run by Shelley Winters. When Davis tried musical theatre again, the result was Miss Moffat 1974, which closed out of town due to Davis's illness. In the case of Two's Company, Davis continued to miss shows after the opening, and when she was hospitalized with a jaw infection, Two's Company was forced to close after only ninety performances. Like the Lucille Ball vehicle Wildcat, Two's Company is a flop that would have run longer had the star not taken sick. Sherman managed to take the 1953 Tony for featured actor in a musical.
The camp highlights of the cast album are the above-mentioned opener, "Turn Me Loose on Broadway" where "a coveted Oscar is Hammerstein", and the star's closing spot, the torch number "Just Like a Man." In between, Davis leads two big, labored production numbers, the first, "Roll Along, Sadie," a Sadie Thompson spoof, the second "Purple Rose," a country-western number in which Davis was got up as a gap-toothed, pipe-smoking hillbilly. Davis's presence on the disc is limited to four numbers because the recording includes none of the sketches in which she also appeared.
There's a catchy opening number for Bill Callahan and the ensemble, "Theatre Is a Lady," and Peter Kelley leads two attractive, romantic items, "It Just Occurred to Me" and "Out of the Clear Blue Sky." But the disc's vocal standout is Hanley, singing two numbers, "Roundabout" and "Haunted Hot Spot," that led into ballets for Kaye and the other dancers. The scenario for the "Roundabout" dance was devised by Robbins and Horton Foote.
Davis's foghorn, staccato delivery of her music has long made her Two's Company tracks suitable party listening, virtually guaranteed to convulse listeners. For many, those tracks make Two's Company required listening, so it's good that Sepia has brought it back. Sepia releases Two's Company on April 5.
The Two's Company CD is filled out with Duke bonuses. There are 1953 recordings of the composer playing his work at the piano, with occasional vocals by Dorothy Richards and Huguette Ferly. And there's Nancy Walker in a fine rendition of the Duke-Ira Gershwin "I Can't Get Started."
JOYCE GRENFELL REQUESTS THE PLEASURE Sepia
One of England's beloved entertainers, Joyce Grenfell 1910-1979's hallmark was versatility. Writing her own material, she was a singer of songs and a performer of monologues that functioned as miniature plays. She was a film actress, best remembered for her role as the hockey mistress in the St. Trinians series, about the zany goings on at an English girl's school. She appeared in revues and in her own solo shows. She was a superb mimic who, as a TV panelist, could hold forth on subjects like music. Based on her observation of people, her humor was universal, poking fun in a way that was sharp but never malicious.
Grenfell began performing her own monologues in the 1939 West End show The Little Revue. Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure is the cast album of an intimate revue that opened at London's Fortune Theatre in June, 1954, and went on to play Broadway's now-demolished Bijou Theatre on West 45th Street in the fall of 1955. Although the show was clearly built around Grenfell's talents, it was the last revue Grenfell did with other performers, in this case three dancers who alternated with the star's songs music mostly by Richard Addinsell and solo sketches.
The recording allows one to hear Grenfell's light soprano in numbers like the wistful "Three Brothers," about a spinster who devoted herself to slaving for her three brothers; "Mrs. Mendlicote," about a society hostess deserted by her husband; "Hostess," in which the subject compares her mother's leisured existence to her own; "Palais Dancer," about young cockney couples at a '50s dance hall; and the simple romantic number "Ordinary Morning," the only track here where Grenfell is joined by another performer Irving Davies, who sang "Who Do You Love, I Hope?" in the London production of Annie Get Your Gun. Then there's an extended sequence of traditional Southern numbers taught to Grenfell by her mother, an American from Virginia.
And the recording includes two spoken monologues, one a daughter making an attempt at "Understanding Mother," the other about a special night in the life of "Shirley's Girl Friend."
About fifteen years ago, another popular English performer, Maureen Lipman Aunt Eller in the National Theatre video of Oklahoma!, wrote and starred in an acclaimed, solo tribute to Grenfell, entitled Re: Joyce, in which Lipman traced the subject's life and recreated her songs and sketches. After a successful West End run, Lipman performed Re: Joyce at New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre.
Also for release on April 5, Sepia's Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure serves as a pleasant reminder of a multi-talented and infinitely civilized performer. The CD bonuses offer seven additional Grenfell recordings, including songs from the revues Sigh No More Noel Coward and Penny Plain, plus two novelty duets with Norman Wisdom. Those tracks are followed by six rare recordings featuring another great English, female, solo and revue performer, Beatrice Lillie. These were recorded in New York City in 1947, and find Lillie in typically droll form. The remastering on both the Two's Company and Grenfell/Lillie discs results in excellent sound.