Sail Away - Original Broadway Cast Recording

You may wonder why the original cast album of Noel Coward's Sail Away on DRG requires two CDs. Because good as the original cast, headed by the incomparable Elaine Stritch, was, for a Noel Coward show, an original-creator recording is invaluable too. So we get the second CD, which, aside from Noel the brilliant performer, provides the unexpurgated lyrics. On the original cast recording, some concessions were made to meet the then prevailing broadcast standards. So the word "ass" was drowned out, and such things as "son of a bitch" and "goddamned" received anodyne surrogates. Even "junky" became "drunky."

Sail Away opened on Broadway, after out-of-town tryouts, on October 3, 1961, and chalked up only 167, shamefully insufficient, performances. True, this was the Coward show that underwent the most, dare I say, sea changes. A whole subplot involving old internecine spouses was dropped, and even the main plot no longer featured a divorcing couple. Trunk songs, updated, were trotted out, and lyrics that didn't quite work in Boston or Philadelphia were summarily revised. If you own the invaluable book, Noel Coward: The Complete Lyrics, superbly edited and annotated by Barry Day, you will want to follow the records with it in hand, and mark some amusing transformations.

Coward's antepenultimate show has a fine score, with not a weak link in it. But neither, with arguably one or two exceptions, does it have such perennial favorites as "Someday I'll Find You" or "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." But not to worry: Even slightly-less-than-best Coward easily surpasses many another's best.

Here, as elsewhere in Coward, chromaticism is put to splendid use. Unexpected modulations that may make the songs harder to sing are thrilling to hear. There is also supreme verbal sophistication of the kind we get today from Stephen Sondheim. Coward can dazzle with wit and mesmerize with poignance, and is a sovereign rhymer: unpredictable end rhymes (e.g. "fetch up" and "ketchup," "mayonnaise is" and "useful phrases" are typical examples), pampering inner rhymes, even cunningly delayed rhymes abound for the first hearer's pleasure, with plenty left over for the repeated listener's delighted discovery.

The show, about American tourists cruising the Mediterranean on an English liner, allows Coward to indulge the most delectable of vices, snobbery. Not only the British purser (Charles Braswell), but also Mimi Paragon (Stritch), the American cruise director, excel at it. She, mature woman though she is, gets involved with the much younger, recently jilted and newly impassioned socialite, Johnny van Mier (James Hurst), and there are also, exuding endearing charm, the young lovers Nancy Foyle and Barnaby Slade (Patricia Hart and Grover Dale).

Snobbishness scintillates in such songs as Mimi's "Why Do the Wrong People Travel?" and the purser's sarcastic instructions to the cabin boys, "The Passenger's Always Right" ("…nurse him/ Curse him/ Only when the bastard's out of sight./ Remember, boys/The goddamned passenger's always right.") In "A Long, Long Way from America," Mimi sings: "Let the standard guide books/Be your bedside books/And don't read snide books/ Like The Lays of Ancient Rome,"-ironically, anything but snide, but here with a double entendre on "Lays." And again: "Be prepared to face the worst/While guitars are strumming/'The Yanks Are Coming'/You'll find the plumbing/Rather frightening at first."

Stritch invests the sly songs with something like an audible wink or a swig of gin on the tongue. But she can also be wrenching. Coward had been worried about how she'd do with the ballad "Something Very Strange," conceived for a "classical romantic leading lady." Well, he found her rendition "nothing short of miraculous…so moving that I almost cried."

As for Coward's own singing, Noel is the quintessential insinuatingly whispering baritone, oozing sophistication, whether in subtly deliquescing vowels, pop-gun consonants or entire syllables in stinging staccato. His rolled R's are particularly crackling; even Rice Krispies would envy his "orgy of remembrance and rue" in "Bronxville Darby and Joan."

There are also a couple of winsome bloopers. In "Come to Me," Stritch, as Mimi, sings "My tiny frozen heart," where "hand" is intended, alluding to the "gelida manina" of Puccini's Mimi. And, oddly, both Stritch and Coward turn the island of Hispaniola into "Hispianola," making it inadvertently more musical.

Praise is also due the terrific orchestrations of Irwin Kostal and dance arrangements of Peter Matz, the latter also accompanying Coward, on the second CD, with his orchestra.

Permit me to answer the question raised in "Millions of tourists are churning up the gravel/While they gaze at St. Peter's dome/But why oh why do the wrong people travel/When the right people stay at home?" The answer, quite simply, is so that Coward can transmute this into Sail Away, which the two CDs magisterially capture to the delight of this and all coming generations.