CDs: A British Musical Rarity

In 1959, Peter Greenwell composed the music for one of the richest and most fascinating of all West End scores, the Soho-set The Crooked Mile. Four years earlier, Greenwell had made his West End debut with a more modest effort called Twenty Minutes South. The show premiered at the intimate Players Theatre, Twenty Minutes South being the first musical the company had presented since triumphing with The Boy Friend two years earlier.

Twenty Minutes South was one of a number of small-scale, contemporary British musicals inspired by the recent London success of Salad Days. Twenty Minutes South was, however, more realistic and less whimsical than its predecessor.

As Adrian Wright writes in the notes for Must Close Saturday's CD premiere of Twenty Minutes South, it was "a show about ordinary people, the boys and girls who travelled up from the suburbs every day on the train to work in London offices." It dealt with the amorous relationships of a group of young office workers, focusing on a family, the Bannisters, who live in surburban Addison Park, twenty minutes south of London, and whose quiet life is disrupted by the visit of the family's well-meaning but interfering cousin Kitty.

With book and lyrics by Maurice Browning, Twenty Minutes South transferred from the Players to the West End, opening in July, 1955 at St. Martin's Theatre. With Daphne Anderson and Louie Ramsey the leading ladies, the show boasted no major West End musical names. The critic for The Stage wrote that "rarely has suburbia been presented on the stage, particularly in a musical, with more decent affection, balanced satire, and freedom from snobbery." Plays and Players offered this prediction: "This might not be the answer to Oklahoma!, but it should settle down to a cosy run in the West End and last as long as Salad Days."

But that was not to be: Twenty Minutes South managed only a three-month run, leaving behind an Oriole LP that was long among the rarest of London cast recordings. The recording is notable for outlining the plot by including a considerable amount of connective dialogue. There's a promising opening chorus saluting the train to London, "The 8.27," followed by charming items like "I Like People," "Sunday Girl," and "Easy to Say." The score is bouncy, tinkly, and often catchy, but it falls into the pleasant-but-unexciting category. While Twenty Minutes South captures a period in time, it's less than gripping.

True, the very lightweight subject matter didn't call for an ambitious score like The Crooked Mile's. Still, there are few traces of the thrilling Crooked Mile composer in Twenty Minutes South. As Greenwell admits of his Twenty Minutes South score, "I wrote what people expected to hear, and I didn't do my own thing...I didn't put myself into it."

But having possessed for years a scratchy copy of that Oriole LP, I'm glad to have Twenty Minutes South on CD. The CD bonus is a six-song medley from the score featuring orchestrator Peter Knight's chorus and orchestra.

With copywrights expiring in the U.K. after fifty years, there can be more than one British label issuing the same recording. In a recent piece on the latest releases from the U.K. Sepia label, I discussed Sepia's new release of the delightful original London cast recording of Salad Days. Simultaneously, the same recording has been issued by Must Close Saturday, but Must Close Saturday's version boasts an odd and intriguing bonus.

This is a half-hour excerpt from a live tape made from the wings during the 625th performance of Salad Days in February, 1956, the last night to feature the entire original cast. We get dialogue and music from the second act, and while the words can be hard to make out, the tape, which sounds good for '56, indicates the audience enthusiasm that made the show so popular. It ran 2,283 performances.

But more significantly, the live excerpts include two numbers not included on the Salad Days cast album. These are performed by Dorothy Reynolds, who was also the co-author of book and lyrics with composer Julian Slade. It seems that Reynolds doubted her vocal abilites so much that she refused to preserve her songs on the recording. But on the tape we get to hear her as a night club performer singing "Sand in My Eyes," and as one of the mothers of the central romantic pair in the duet with Yvonne Coulette "We Don't Understand Our Children." These numbers make excellent additions to the cast album tracks.

HUGH SINGS MARTIN PS Classics

Recordings in the Library of Congress' Songwriter Series have already included Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, E.Y. Harburg, Irving Berlin, and Sammy Fain singing and playing their compositions. The series has now moved to PS Classics, and the latest entry is Hugh Sings Martin, devoted to the vocals, music, and lyrics of another top-notch songwriter.

Martin is undoubtedly best known for having written, along with Ralph Blane, the songs for the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis. As Martin, who is still very much with us, explains in the liner notes for Hugh Sings Martin, when Martin and Blane worked on a project, "We didn't collaborate; each of us would write a complete song, words and music, and we would attach both names to it." The songs on Hugh Sings Martin are exclusively the work of Martin, even though Blane's name is invariably attached.

The most celebrated Martin-Blane Broadway contribution was Best Foot Forward 1941, a George Abbott show co-produced without credit by Richard Rodgers, who became final arbiter on the question of which songs would stay in the show and which songs would have to go.

With Timothy Gray, Martin wrote the Broadway musical High Spirits 1964 as well as a London hit, Love from Judy, that never made it to Broadway. On his own, Martin wrote the enjoyable Broadway scores for Look, Ma, I'm Dancin'! and Make a Wish. And of course Martin was represented on Broadway again in 1989, when he worked on a number of new songs for the New York stage premiere of Meet Me in St. Louis.

In film, Martin contributed songs to Best Foot Forward, For Me and My Gal, Ziegfeld Follies, Good News, and, with Blane, The Girl Rush and The Girl Most Likely. And Martin did the songs for the 1958 television musical Hans Brinker, starring an ice-skating Tab Hunter.

Almost all of these projects are represented on Hugh Sings Martin. But Martin was more than just a songwriter, so the new CD also features Martin the vocalist, alone and as a member of The Martins, a swing vocal quartet 1939-1941 that included Blane and sisters Phyllis and Jo Jean Rogers. The disc also documents the fact that Martin was one of the top vocal arrangers of Broadway musicals, his shows including The Boys from Syracuse, Too Many Girls, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Hugh Sings Martin consists mostly of private demo recordings and radio broadcasts from the 1940s, recorded on 78 rpm acetates and nicely cleaned up for this CD release. There are a few tracks by other songwriters, performed by the Martins or with Martin's vocal arrangements. But it's largely Martin singing and playing his own songs and arrangements. And if you've heard Martin on such CDs as Martin and Blane Sing Martin and Blane DRG, Michael Feinstein's The Hugh Martin Songbook Nonesuch, or the cast album of Look, Ma, I'm Dancin'!, you know that Martin is a delightful singer as well as a nifty arranger. In addition to the four Martins, there are also appearances by Mitzi Green Babes in Arms and Mel Torme.

In the booklet, Martin offers helpful annotation of each number. With one exception --the autobiographical "The Story of My Life"-- all of these songs were written for stage or screen projects. The closing track, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," was recorded as recently as April, 2005. Hugh Sings Martin is a thoroughly pleasant addition to the valuable Songwriter Series.