Q & A: 12/16/05
A: In addition to the recent movie versions of Rent, The Producers, and The Phantom of the Opera, the films of Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Grease, Annie, The Wiz, Godspell, A Chorus Line and The Fantasticks were also released during the run of the original Broadway or off-Broadway productions.
Q: As I am perhaps the only fan of the Bacharach-David score for the musical film version of Lost Horizon, I am intrigued by the first musical version of Lost Horizon, the Broadway musical flop Shangri-La. Do any recordings exist? Have you heard any of the score?-Bob Bennett
A: For a show that lasted twenty-one performances and went unrecorded, there's a fair amount of documentation of the 1956 Broadway musical disaster Shangri-La. A fairly cloudy audio tape exists of twelve songs, recorded live at the Winter Garden and featuring the Broadway cast, which included Dennis King, Harold Lang, Jack Cassidy, and Alice Ghostley.
Also helpful is the fact that the musical Shangri-La got a 1960 TV production which includes nine of the original stage songs plus a few new ones, all by Harry Warren and James Hilton. Ghostley recreated her Broadway role in the TV production, which also starred Richard Basehart, Claude Rains, Gene Nelson, and Helen Gallagher.
The big Shangri-La ballet can be sampled on the Lehman Engel-conducted Ballet on Broadway CD.
Q: I have always enjoyed the work of Charles Strouse, and wish this composer would get back to Broadway soon. I recently came across a videotape I had made years ago of an animated TV musical he wrote called Lyle. Was this musical ever done on stage?---Ned Ryan
A: Strouse wrote both the music and lyrics for Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, a 1987 animated musical for HBO, based on the children's book The House on East 88th Street by Bernard Waber. It concerned a family that moved into a Manhattan apartment and found a performing crocodile in the bathtub. Lyle's former owner, vaudevillian Hector P. Valenti, comes to reclaim Lyle and to take him on tour. But the reptile is unhappy, and Valenti eventually returns him to 88th Street.
Narrated by Tony Randall, the half-hour program featured the voice of Liz Callaway in the catchy songs. In 1989, the cartoon was turned into a stage musical, called Lyle, and featuring an actor performing in an alligator suit. Premiered at Chicago's Forum Theatre in the fall of 1989, Lyle had songs by Strouse and a book by Strouse and his Annie collaborator, Thomas Meehan. With the addition of numerous new songs, Lyle was expanded to two acts and a full evening. But the critical reception was unfavorable, and the show joined the ranks of Strouse projects that never made it to New York.
Curiously enough, Strouse and HBO were not the first to musicalize the Waber book. In 1970, an off-Broadway musical called Lyle, featuring Carleton Carpenter and with a score by Janet Gari and Toby Garson, played the McAlpin Rooftop Theatre. It lasted four performances.
Q: Do you recommend the London concert recording of Mack and Mabel? I already have the Broadway and London actual production recordings.---Harry D.
A: Mack and Mabel had an unusual history in England. First there was a Nottingham Playhouse production starring Denis Quilley and Imelda Staunton, and that was followed by a couple of concert productions. When ice skating champs Torville and Dean skated to the show's overture, the original Broadway cast album was reissued in England to considerable interest.
In February 1988, there was a new concert version at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and it was this benefit performance that was captured live by First Night Records. For this performance, the three leading roles were divided up among several singers: There are three Macks George Hearn, Stubby Kaye, and Quilley, four Mabels Paige O'Hara, Frances Ruffelle, Debbie Shapiro Gravitte, and Georgia Brown, and two Lotties Tommy Tune, Gravitte. Herman himself narrates and begins several of the numbers.
The use of multiple leads diffuses the effect of the score, but the cast is generally well-chosen, with the ladies outshining the men. The London concert recording offered a newly composed entr'acte; the show's original entr'acte was heard on the 1974 Broadway cast recording as the overture, since the original production had no overture. And "Hit 'Em on the Head," a song dropped prior to Broadway and replaced by "My Heart Leaps Up," was restored for the concert, just as it now is in most productions.
In general, the London concert recording is enjoyable but in no way supplants the Broadway original, with its peerless leads.
Q: I was recently watching the old Judy Garland movie In the Good Old Summertime, and noticed that it had a plot similar to that of the musical She Loves Me. Isn't it odd that this story was made into a musical for the movies, then made into a different stage musical?---Ed Ramsey
A: That is unusual, although it has happened several times. For example, Eugene O'Neill's play Ah, Wilderness! was first a movie musical called Summer Holiday, and later the Broadway musical Take Me Along.
Miklos Laszlo's Hungarian play Parfumerie was first seen in Budapest in 1937. Three years later, it was the basis for the superb American film The Shop Around the Corner, with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. In 1949, Laszlo's play was the basis for the musical film In the Good Old Summertime. In 1963, it became the Broadway musical She Loves Me. And the adaptations didn't end there: You've Got Mail in 1998 was yet another version of the Parfumerie story.
Q: I've seen it stated that Finian's Rainbow was Columbia Records' first original cast recording, in 1947. But what about Columbia's recording of the 1946 revival of Show Boat?---Jerome Moore
A: You are correct. The '46 Broadway revival of Show Boat was Columbia's first full-length cast album. Finian's Rainbow gets cited more often because it was the first new musical for which Columbia made the cast album. For the record, Columbia's Kiss Me, Kate was the first cast album released directly on LP, and Bells Are Ringing was Columbia's first cast album recorded in stereo.
Q: Is the London cast recording of Side by Side by Sondheim on RCA the only recording of the show?---Dennis R.
A: I know of two other commercially released cast recordings of Side by Side by Sondheim. The Australian cast with Jill Perryman, star of Australian productions of Funny Girl, I Do! I Do!, Annie, and Hello, Dolly! is on RCA and, like the London recording, got two LPs. The other cast recording, a single RAM LP, is the Irish cast recording that goes by the title Songs of Sondheim and stars West End musical star Gemma Craven They're Playing Our Song, Trelawny, Song and Dance, South Pacific, Taboo.
Q: Other than Legs Diamond, did Peter Allen ever appear on Broadway?---Terry Roberts
A: In 1971, an unknown Allen appeared in the rock opera Soon, which played the Ritz Theatre now the Walter Kerr. The score was by Joseph M. Kookoolis and Scott Fagan. What makes Soon notable was its cast, which, in addition to Allen, included Richard Gere, Barry Bostwick, and Nell Carter. Soon lasted three performances.
In 1979 at the Biltmore Theatre, Peter Allen, now an established singing and concert star, was the attraction of Up In One, a revue that was basically a nightclub/concert performance by Allen. Allen was joined in the show by Lenora Nemetz, who had recently replaced Chita Rivera in Chicago. Marc Shaiman was musical director and arranger, and Bruce Vilanch supplied additional material. Up in One played forty-six performances.
Q: I recently came across a recording of Sophie on AEI Records. Featuring the show's logo artwork on the cover, it appears to be a cast album, yet the credits are ambiguous. What is the status of this album?---Arthur Holland
A: The 1963 Broadway musical about the life of singer Sophie Tucker, Sophie lasted eight performances at the Winter Garden Theatre. AEI's 1980 Sophie LP was simply a commercial release of the show's demo recording. But with that cover, it looks exactly like a cast album. And that demo does at least feature the show's actual leading lady, Libi Staiger, in five of the songs. The demo recording also features the show's composer-lyricist, Steve Allen, singing one number, while Linda Lavin is heard in another.
Q: You once mentioned that a cast recording of Mitch Leigh's Chu Chem exists. Has it ever been released?---Steven F.
A: It was a nice idea for the Jewish Repertory Theatre to mount a small-scale revival of the 1966 road casualty Chu Chem for a limited engagement before a subscription audience. It was not such a good idea for Chu Chem composer Leigh to take that sweet little production uptown to Broadway, where it was woefully out of place and evinced little audience interest.
Leigh also decided to record the show, independent of a record company, and distribute it, in cassette form only, to Tony Award voters. This plan hit a snag when the Tony nominating committee made clear its feelings for Chu Chem by completely shutting it out of the race. The show's press agent was kind enough to send me one of the already-made cassettes.
The recording, like the show when it was downtown, is silly fun. All of Leigh's shows, even the flops like Home, Sweet Homer, Cry for Us All, and Sarava, contain at least a few good tunes.
To this day, the Chu-Chem recording, featuring the original Broadway cast, has not been commercially released. But you never know.
Q: Even though Teddy and Alice was a fast flop on Broadway in 1987, I still retain fond memories of the show. Years ago, you mentioned a recording that featured songs from it. Can you remind me what that was?---Larry
A: A musical about President Theodore Roosevelt's relationship with his daughter Alice, Teddy and Alice featured both well-known and obscure music by John Philip Sousa, as adapted by Richard Kapp. Kapp also composed some new tunes for the show which blended seamlessly with the all- or part-Sousa tunes. Hal Hackady was the lyricist.
No cast album was made, but in 1989, a CD called Sousa for Orchestra appeared on the Essay label, and it featured six songs from the show. They were heard in orchestrations by Philip J. Lang created for performances in concert prior to the show's actual production. Jim Tyler did the Broadway orchestrations.
Composer Kapp leads his own orchestra, and the soloists are Gordon Stanley, who was Teddy in all the concerts and workshops of the show and who understudied Len Cariou while also appearing in a small role in the Broadway production; Meg Bussert, of the '80s Broadway revivals of Brigadoon and The Music Man, who also performed in the pre-production concerts she's currently standing by for Judy Kaye in Souvenir; and Ron Raines, who played on Broadway the role he sings on the recording. Actually, Raines only gets to do one number on the recording, so that qualifies as the only Broadway cast performance on the disc. But the six numbers make for pleasant listening. Sousa for Orchestra is filled out with two of the composer's orchestral suites.