110 in the Shade - 2007 Broadway Revival Cast Recording
[IMG:L]PS Classics
Available June 5, 2007
The really great tragedies are not all gloom; the truly fine comedies are also a bit wistful. It is this blend of the humorous and the wrenching that energizes the musical 110 in the Shade, with a book adapted by N. Richard Nash from his play The Rainmaker, and with music and lyrics by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, respectively. It is full of terrific songs: rousing or tender, rambunctious or deeply felt. But the story, despite its happy ending, often skirts heartbreak.
Schmidt and Jones had a huge hit in The Fantasticks, a crowd-pleaser if ever there was one. This placed a tremendous burden on the suddenly skyrocketing team: Could there be a successful repeat after such a big-bang beginning? Countless are the one-trick ponies, the flash-in-the-pan wonders.
But they did it. 110 in the Shade was a hit despite Howard Taubman's putdown in the New York Times, "more arid than the western landscape," as quoted in Peter Filichia's excellent booklet note. It ran for 330 performances, despite a fall by leading lady Inga Swenson, which made her miss the final 15 weeks as the show's leading character, Lizzie Curry. But not quite a hit for dummies or dumb reviewers, insuring a fantastic year-in, year-out run.
Now, however, the Roundabout Theatre's smashing revival and its superb original-cast recording may change all that. This production has it all, and the CD does it the kind of justice only the very best recordings can.
[IMG:R]Along comes Starbuck, a self-proclaimed rainmaker, who gets a hundred dollars from H.C. for rain in 24 hours. Though exuding confidence, this buoyant confidence man (real name Smith!) is just as lonely as Lizzie. But in a wonderful song, "Evenin' Star" (inexplicably omitted from the 1963 original production), he proves capable of deriving solace from the evening star, which he perceives as likewise alone in some ineffable search, but making the most of freedom to travel light through the sky.
The song is typical of this 19-song score (plus some canny reprises), whose every number is remarkable. These are songs that do not meretriciously solicit excerption and annexation by every two-bit lounge singer or self-inflated pop star. Rather, they concentrate on dramatically advancing the story or rivetingly revealing and developing character. Starbuck, who never before brought rain, brings about Lizzie's emotional emancipation and lucks out into a downpour. He slowly coaxes the resisting Lizzie into a night of love, which gives her the needed womanly self-confidence, and also makes File jealous enough to become a wooer.
What makes songs like "A Man and a Woman," "Everything Beautiful," "Simple Little Things" and "Is It Really Me?" especially marvelous is their concision: the quickness with which they make their point and move on, leaving us happy but hungry for more, which we get from the next one, just as lovely and just as terse.
But such subtly spare numbers call for great interpreters, such as they get here. Audra McDonald gives a performance as perfect histrionically as it is vocally. She rides the rollercoaster of Lizzie's budding and dashed hopes, of her shattering despair and shining transformation with the assurance of the consummate artist, with vocal coloring and emotional penetrancy to elicit our tears of compassion and ultimate joy with equally unfussy truthfulness. And she gets exemplary support from Steve Kazee's swaggering yet sensitive Starbuck, Christopher Innvar's slowly simmering File, and the incomparable John Cullum's understatedly heartwarming H.C.
All the others, directed by Lonny Price, make flawless contributions. Backed up by Jonathan Tunick's masterly orchestrations, expertly played under Paul Gemignani's unerring baton, this 110 in the Shade emerges as one of those rare discs that repeated rehearings can only, inexhaustibly, enhance.
