CDs: Girl of the Moment
The English label Sepia has been doing well by late '40s and early '50s cast-album titles from the RCA catalogue, having issued CDs of High Button Shoes, Two's Company, Seventeen, Make a Wish, and Hazel Flagg. Now the label gives us a CD combination of RCA Victor's '50s cast recordings of two NBC-TV productions of works by Kurt Weill.
Lady in the Dark concerns Liza Elliott, the editor of "Allure" magazine in New York, who finds herself at an emotional impasse, unable to make decisions, and torn between the men in her life, who include her married lover, a movie star, and a magazine associate. Liza seeks psychiatric help, and the dreams she relates to Dr. Brooks become Lady in the Dark's musical sequences. In fact, with the exception of Liza's final, breakthrough song, "My Ship," the show's music was confined to three lavishly-mounted dream sequences.
Book writer Moss Hart based the show on his own experiences with psychoanalysis. Hart originally conceived the show as a straight-play vehicle for Katharine Cornell. But when he realized that the dream sequences would be better embodied through music, he sought out composer Kurt Weill and lyricist Ira Gershwin to collaborate. Playing Liza, and, by all accounts, giving one of the consummate musical-theatre performances of all time, was Gertrude Lawrence.
Lady in the Dark is one of the more fascinating musicals of its era, a landmark in the development of the serious musical play, and a superb score, filled with invention yet not without hit songs. The self-described "play with music" opened at the Alvin now the Neil Simon Theatre on January 23, 1941. It ran 467 performances, the run shortened only by the fact that Lawrence was irreplaceable.
Although it's a key work in the history of the American musical theatre, Lady in the Dark has never had a Broadway revival. Part of the reason may be the problematic conclusion, in which Liza cedes some of her power at the magazine to find fulfillment as a woman. But Lady in the Dark has had two New York concert returns, one in 1969 at Philharmonic Hall, starring Angela Lansbury, and another during the first season of Encores!, in 1994, starring Christine Ebersole.
The show is well-represented on disc. There are RCA's six sides with Lawrence, and Columbia's six sides with Lawrence's co-star, Danny Kaye, who made a big hit playing the magazine's effiminate photographer and delivering a tongue-twisting salute to "Tschaikowsky" and other Russian composers.
In 1963, Columbia released a full-length, studio-cast set starring operatic mezzo Rise Stevens, supported by Adolph Green. The only complete recording of the score, featuring all of the original Weill orchestrations, is JAY's 1998 CD of the Royal National Theatre's London premiere production, starring Maria Friedman.
The AEI label released two versions of Lady in the Dark, the first taken from a 1950 radio broadcast with Lawrence, the second featuring excerpts taken directly from the soundtrack of the surviving kinescope of the September 25, 1954 NBC-TV production of Lady in the Dark, starring Ann Sothern and produced and directed by Max Liebman.
But the '54 TV production also produced a real recording, an RCA Victor studio set recorded shortly after the telecast and featuring from the production Sothern and Carleton Carpenter in the Kaye role, with the remainder of the soloists unidentified. In terms of completeness and authenticity, this recording can't compete with the Columbia '63 or JAY '98 versions. It's missing any number of passages, along with the songs "Huxley" and "The Princess of Pure Delight." The TV production was only ninety minutes, including commercials. And Weill's orchestrations have been replaced by zesty, '50s-style new ones by Irwin Kostal.
But the recording is enjoyable nonetheless, thanks mostly to Sothern, who's a sophisticated delight as Liza and who reveals a wiry contralto that suits the music well. Sothern later managed a superb Rose in Gypsy on a stock tour. Carpenter makes an excellent foil. Note that the "Ballet" track on the Victor Lady in the Dark is a piece created for the TV version, and not part of the original stage score.
For decades, RCA Victor's Ann Sothern Lady in the Dark was among the rarest and most sought-after of show recordings. So it's good that Sepia has brought it back. Now it would be nice to see a commercial release of the actual TV production, which still exists in good form on kinescope.
With a libretto by Arnold Sungaard, Down in the Valley is a one-act, half-hour folk opera, initially conceived as an opera for radio. Weill's score combines original music with the melody of actual folk songs, like the title number. As Weill described it, "the natural basis for the creation of an American music is the American folk song. Down in the Valley is a new way of making the folk song the basic element of an American art form...a ballad opera which exploits the old American habit of storytelling and presents the folk song in its most natural surroundings."
Written in the mid-'40s, the piece was not immediately picked up for broadcast. A few years later, it was reconceived as an opera that could easily be mounted by school groups, and, in slightly expanded form, it became a sizable success. The world premiere was a student production at the University of Indiana in 1948, with the leading female role taken by guest star Marion Bell, fresh from Broadway's Brigadoon. A month later, Down in the Valley had its radio premiere, in a University of Michigan production.
More prestigiously, the piece was chosen to be the first original, American opera to be telecast by NBC-TV's Opera Theatre. Eleven days after the 1950 telecast, RCA made this TV-cast recording of Down in the Valley, which also stars Bell. A competing Decca recording stars Alfred Drake.
Although Down in the Valley has dialogue, it's continuously underscored, so that the music never stops. As in Weill's Lost in the Stars, the action is narrated by a Leader and a chorus. The opera tells of the doomed romance between Jennie Parsons and Brack Weaver, who escapes from prison for one final meeting with Jennie before he's hanged. In flashback, we see the first meeting of Jennie and Brack, and the incident that led to his execution: Brack's accidental murder of Thomas Bouché, a business associate of Jennie's father who was also attempting to woo Jennie.
This simple, handsome work gets a vivid performance here. And as a final bonus on this generous disc, we get Bell's rare 1947 single of "If I Loved You" and "They Say It's Wonderful."