Summer fun

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I’ve spent some electrons here in the past commenting on the how Masterworks Broadway has been releasing a lot of material that disappeared from the catalogs when everything went digital many years ago. They’re available as downloads through all major digital service providers and as disc-on-demand, with the original cover art and liner notes, via Arkivmusic.com and Amazon.com. All releases are accompanied by new album pages and photos on MasterworksBroadway.com.

The August 9th releases are: the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Say, Darling; the Original Off-Broadway Cast Recordings of The Mad Show (a musical inspired by Mad Magazine and probably best remembered now for the song Stephen Sondheim wrote for it, "The Boy From..."), Ernest in Love (a musical version of The Importance of Being Ernest), Now Is the Time for All Good Men, The Nervous Set; and the studio concept album of archy and mehitabel: a back-alley opera (later retitled Shinbone Alley for Broadway).

Coming up on August 23rd is a real oddity: Half-Past Wednesday, the Off-Broadway musical from 1962. A modern take on the classic fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, it starred Dom DeLuise, who was hailed by The New York Times as “a comic genius,” for his performance as the King. In a 2009 interview, the late DeLuise recognized this show as the catalyst for finding his first agent. Featuring music by Robert Colby and lyrics by Robert Colby and Nita Jonas, Half-Past Wednesday was re-titled Rumpelstiltskin for the recording.

The Nervous Set has, of course, has particular resonance for those of us in St. Louis since it written, in part, by St. Louisans Jay and Fran Landesman. The show was first produced at the Crystal Palace in our own Gaslight Square entertainment district in 1959. New Line Theatre produced a much-admired revival a few years back, and director Scott Miller’s article on the show makes interesting reading. It’s good to have the OCR available again.

The real gem in this batch of releases, at least for me, is archy and mehitabel: a back-alley opera. The show is based on the newspaper columnist Don Marquis’s irresistibly whimsical stories about archy, a literary cockroach hopelessly in love with the free-spirited cat mehitabel. The stories are told in first person by archy, who can only type by jumping on the typewriter keys – hence the lack of capitalization and the quixotic punctuation.

The casting of Eddie Bracken as archy and Carol Channing as mehitabel was sheer genius and the album has been a prize for collectors for decades. Until this release, my only copy was a somewhat shopworn LP inherited from a friend just before he took his final curtain call on this planet. It’s good to have a nice, new digital version.