The Broadway Musicals of 1955

The “Broadway by the Year” series, as presented at Town Hall by Scott Siegel, serves—besides selling tickets and indulging audience nostalgia—a greater purpose. By offering songs from one specific year, mostly from hit shows but also from flops (and not necessarily the best-remembered songs from those shows), the concerts fulfill a social-historical function as well.

Songs tell us something about a given time. This is what people who wrote them thought pertinent, and this is what their audiences, if the shows were hits, confirmed as relevant. So, besides enjoying the songs on The Broadway Musicals of 1955 as such—and many of them, remembered or forgotten, are worth hearing or rehearing—we can deduce from this disc something about the way we were in 1955, if we were old enough to count. Or, if we were too young, what our parents were like in that year of grace, Eisenhower and middle-class America at its bourgeois best. Or worst.

So take the three most successful shows represented here: Damn Yankees (1,018 performances), Silk Stockings (478), and Plain and Fancy (461), and bear in mind that in the economics of that time, it took fewer performances to achieve a successful run and pay back the investors.

At first glance, the three shows may have little in common. Damn Yankees is the Faust story in baseball uniform. A middle-aged married man almost sells his soul to the Devil to get his Washington Senators from the league's bottom to the top by defeating the Yankees. The Devil not only makes him young and a baseball star, he also provides him with one of his hags turned into a sexpot girlfriend. (Her song, “Whatever Lola Wants,” is sung too affectedly by Rachelle Rak.) Our hero can't forget his wife and the satisfactions of a staid status quo. He reneges, returns home and, resigned, watches his team lose.

The moral? The dullness of the Eisenhower era is to be endured with equanimity. But even when the Senators are winning, it is through democratic team effort, in “Heart,” as rendered by the entire company: Dee Hoty, Raymond Jaramillo McLeod, Sal Viviano, Liz Larsen, Connie Pachl, Justin Bohon, Alexander Gemignani, Rak, Emily Skinner and Bryan Batt. “It's fine to be a genius, of course,” one lyric concedes; but heart, shared by all of us, is a better thing yet.

Silk Stockings, Cole Porter's swan song (based on a superior movie, Ninotchka), informed us that Communist agents are totally comic figures yearning for the good capitalist life, and that a fierce female commissar ends up as putty in the democratic hands of a French amorist. Porter's gifts are waning—what obvious rhymes in “Paris Loves Lovers,” well sung by Hoty; what feeble satire in “Stereophonic Sound,” sung by the company. But the old tunesmith could still give us the melodious ballad “All of You,” adequately sung by Viviano. The show, clearly, was meant as a nostrum for Cold War jitters.

Plain and Fancy has two sophisticated, sparring New York lovers land in a Pennsylvania Dutch community. It turns out the Amish have quite some lessons for the city slickers, but the reverse is also true. Everyone can learn from everyone else in a democracy, with love, of course, the great leveler. A pretty song, “Young and Foolish,” nicely sung by Gemignani, extolling the joys of childhood—“smiling in the sunlight, laughing in the rain”—expresses the yearning for naive innocence the '50s, as a decade, promulgated.

There are songs here you won't encounter elsewhere. “Why Does It Have to Be You?” is quite a charming number from The Vamp (in which, believe it or not, the siren Theda Bara was enacted by Carol Channing), and “Honeymoon,” aptly delivered by Bohon from a silly show cutesily entitled Ankles Aweigh, daringly (!) advocates premarital sex.

It is useful to learn that even genius can nod off, as do Rodgers and Hammerstein in their failed Pipe Dream. The tolerable “All at Once You Love Her,” not aided by Viviano's rendition, and the much lesser “Everybody's Got a Home But Me,” handled somewhat better by McLeod, could easily be the work of skilled R&H imitators.

To be sure, the trouble with a concert like this one is that the singers, unlike in a show, have no props to aid them and no expert director to police them. The result is a tendency to overcompensate and overemote, to which even the good Hoty and Skinner—let alone the annoying Pachl and Rak—partly fall prey to.

Siegel's comments help to set the scene when they are not unduly cute; but more extensive booklet notes could have been of even greater use.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.