The times, they were a-changin'

Who: Masterworks Broadway
What: Julie and Carol: Live at Carnegie Hall and Julie and Carol: Live at Lincoln Center (Original Soundtracks)

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The combined release of the original soundtrack recordings of Julie and Carol: Live at Carnegie Hall and Julie and Carol: Live at Lincoln Center on Masterworks Broadway is a historically significant event, and not just because of the importance of the two stars, Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett.

When the first of these two CBS television specials (the Carnegie Hall) was recorded in 1962, Andrews (age 27) and Burnett (age 29) were rising Broadway stars. Ms. Andrews had two solid hits behind her (The Boy Friend in 1954 and Camelot in 1961) and one blockbuster (My Fair Lady in 1956) while Ms. Burnett had burst upon the scene in Once Upon a Mattress in 1959. At a time when Broadway was still a major source of hit songs, that meant that both were also rising national celebrities. Their music director, Irwin Kostal, was also a product of the theatre scene, as was their scriptwriter, Mike Nichols (known then primarily for his work with Elaine May).

By the time the Lincoln Center concert was broadcast in 1971, the landscape of American pop culture had changed dramatically. Thanks to radio, recordings and (according to some) payola, Broadway had been eclipsed in the music world by the pop/rock singer/songwriter and elsewhere by film and television. Andrews had largely abandoned theatre for movies (as had Nichols and Kostal) and Burnett for television. Broadway would have its ups and down, but it would never be the force in popular culture that it once was.

You can hear the difference in the big medley numbers in each show. For the 1962 Carnegie Hall concert, it’s a “History of Musical Comedy”, a ten-minute whirlwind tour beginning with some vaudeville era classics and culminating in “A Boy Like That” from West Side Story (music by Leonard Bernstein, age 44) with Andrews as Maria and Burnett abandoning her comic persona to play it straight as Anita. For the 1971 Lincoln Center show, by way of contrast, a thirteen minute “Medley of the 60s” features songs by The Beatles, Sonny and Cher, Glen Campbell, Joni Mitchell, The Fifth Dimension, and Petula Clark. The times, they were a-changin’.

Historical significance aside, however, Julie and Carol is an entertaining look at a pair of musical theatre giants at the peak of their powers. I was especially taken with “You’re So London”, in which Ms. Andrews and Ms. Burnett make fun of their contrasting public faces; Ms. Andrews’s lovely elaboration of “Oh Dear What Can The Matter Be”; and “From Russia: The Nausiev Ballet”, a loopy parody of Russian folk ballet. Some bits that clearly relied heavily of sight gags (such as a ballet send-up from the Lincoln Center show) fall a bit flat on the recording, but on the whole this is a welcome addition to the catalog.

Julie and Carol: Live at Carnegie Hall and Julie and Carol: Live at Lincoln Center is available for purchase now on CD (as specially priced two-disc set) and digital download exclusively via www.MasterworksBroadway.com. The double set will be available from all retailers and digital service providers on May 8, 2012.

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.

This showed up in my inbox today.  Masterworks Broadway has been releasing a lot of material that disappeared from the catalogs when everything went digital many years ago.  Here's the latest set, including some very obscure goodies.  It's interesting that arkivmusic.com in involved as they are primarily a classical music label (they're owned by Steinway - not to be confused, apparently, with Deutsche Grammophon's Archiv Produktion label).
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MASTERWORKS BROADWAY

ANNOUNCES SUMMER 2011 RELEASES


Three Forgotten Gems Available For The First Time As Disc-On-Demand and Digital Download

More Original Master Recordings Make Their Digital Premiere 

MASTERWORKS BROADWAY, recently praised by the Wall Street Journal for its ongoing reissue campaign, continues to make good on its promise to open its vaults with three classic cast recordings previously unavailable in the CD era. The Saint of Bleecker Street (1955 Original Broadway Cast), Half-Past Wednesday (1962 Off-Broadway Cast) and Divine Hair/Mass in F (1971) will be 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.  Also coming this summer are ten recordings available digitally for the first time utilizing the approved master tapes, including Say, Darling, and two live recordings from Noël Coward.  All releases will be accompanied by new album pages and photos on MasterworksBroadway.com.

The July 19 reissue of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Saint of Bleecker Street by composer/librettist Gian Carlo Menotti (Amahl and the Night Visitors) is one of only two operas ever to win the “Best Musical” citation of the New York Drama Critics Circle.  Sung in English, this powerfully original, melodic musical drama is set in New York’s Little Italy.  It is about a young girl who suffers the stigmata and hears voices, and her brother – an atheist who seeks a more conventional answer to her problems - who can do nothing to keep his neighbors from believing his sister is a saint. Featuring riveting performances from soprano Gabriele Ruggiero and tenor David Poleri, this forgotten gem was recorded under Menotti’s supervision, and conducted by Thomas Schippers, who won a Tony Award for his work.

Half-Past Wednesday, the Off-Broadway musical from 1962, is a true curiosity from the vault.  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, which will be available August 23.

In April of 1971, as Hair was celebrating the show’s third anniversary on Broadway, the Bishop of New York invited Hair to participate in a celebration of the Holy Eucharist with a Mass performed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  The Mass included selections from the Broadway musical as well as a new work by its composer Galt MacDermot titled Mass in F.  It was performed by The Choir of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, St. Martin’s Choir, St. Mary’s Choir, Delores Hall, J. Faulton Hodge, Jack W. Jones, Reverend Richard R. Kirk, Reverend Richard Ragni, Reverend Howard Stone & the Broadway Cast of Hair.  Divine Hair/Mass in F, available September 20, is the live recording of that extraordinary event.

Beginning August 9, MASTERWORKS BROADWAY will also release authorized master recordings as digital downloads for the first time:

August 9 – Original Broadway Cast Recording of Say, Darling plus Original Off-Broadway Cast Recordings of The Mad Show, Ernest in Love, 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).

September 20 – Original Off-Broadway Cast Recording of By Jupiter, Original Cast Recording of Paris ’90 plus Noël Coward at Las Vegas and Noël Coward in New York

Masterworks Broadway is a label of Sony Masterworks.  For email updates and information on Masterworks Broadway please visit www.masterworksbroadway.com.

They're the Top

For those of us of a certain age, the Columbia Masterworks brand name will always hold a certain fascination. Back when recorded music was available only on black plastic with a hole in the middle, the Columbia Masterworks label was the sign of quality for the collector of theatre music. The label offered original cast albums not only of current shows but also, as the label matured, Broadway classics like Porgy and Bess and The Merry Widow recorded in the studio with all-star casts.

The many upheavals in the music business put some strains on the Masterworks line. In the conversion from analog to digital, many great recording winked out of existence, maintaining a precarious existence only on tapes dubbed from the original LPs. Some of us wondered whether or not the vast memory banks of the Masterworks collection might suffer a permanent lobotomy and be lost forever.

Ironically, the same digital revolution that doomed so many of those great recordings has, in its latest turning, led to their revival. The popularity of digital downloads – a format that the big music corporations fought tooth and nail before finally succumbing to the inevitable and embracing it – has made it possible for material with slim profit margins to emerge (blinking, metaphorically, at the light) from the No Commercial Potential dungeon.

I’ve finally found a few moments to take a dip in the torrent of reissues that Sony (the current owner of the old Columbia catalog, among others) is now releasing under the Masterworks Broadway label, and I’m happy to say the results are largely delightful. I’ll be commenting on them in a series of posts here. I’m going to start, appropriately, with the release that takes us back to the earliest days of recorded sound: Originals - Musical Comedy 1909-1935.

I’m not sure what the target demographic might be for this collection, but whatever it is, I’m right in the middle of it. My vaudeville cabaret show, Just a Song at Twilight, includes some of the tunes featured in this collection and these gems from early years of the last century have been an integral part of my musical DNA since childhood. Hearing them now is rather like encountering and old friend after a long absence.

Originally released in 1968 on RCA, Originals offers a Who’s Who of the vaudeville and early Broadway era: Blanche Ring (“Rings on My Fingers”, introduced in 1909 in The Yankee Girl), Al Jolson (“That Haunting Melody” a little oddity from Vera Violetta), Fanny Brice (her hit “Second Hand Rose” from 1921), Eddie Cantor (“Hungry Women” from Whoopee) and the redoubtable Sophie Tucker (her signature tune “Some of These Days”), among others. The great torch singer Helen Morgan is represented by that weepy classic “Why Was I Born? (from Sweet Adeline) and Eleanor Powell by the cheerful “What a Wonderful World” (not to be confused with the much later Sam Cooke hit) from At Home Abroad.

Nora Bayes is here as well, but for a change she’s playing second banana to co-star Jack Norworth (the second of her five husbands) in “Turn Off Your Light, Mr. Moon-Man” (1911, from Little Miss Fix-It), a kind of response to their first hit “Shine On Harvest Moon” from 1908.

It’s all wonderful, but for me the greatest discoveries were American and British vaudeville star Elsie Janis’s “Fo' De Lawd's Sake, Play a Waltz” (from The Slim Princess) and an odd medley of the title number and “The Rangers' Song” from Rio Rita sung in florid period style by J. Harold Murray.

The Janis number is an amusing catalog song in which she rattles off all the contemporary hits that compel her to get up and dance and from which she needs a waltz for a bit of relief. If you can correctly identify all of them, you are a fellow dyed-in-the-wool vintage Broadway fan – which means you’re likely to be equally pleased by the glimpse at a bygone era offered by the Rio Rita medley. Like most of the shows represented in this collection, Rio Rita (which made stars of the comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey) has vanished from the stage (although the 1929 film version might still be available out there somewhere). For the fan of musical theatre archeology, hearing selections from them in loving digital restorations is the closest you can get to time travel.

Originals - Musical Comedy 1909-1935 was released in January 2011 as a digital download from iTunes and other major music providers and as an Arkivmusic.com disc-on-demand with cover art. Here’s a complete track list, along with links to more information about each one. Jump into the Wayback Machine and check it out.

I've Got Rings On My Fingers (from 'The Midnight Sons')	Blanche Ring
Turn Off Your Light, Mr. Moon-Man (from 'Little Miss Fix-It')	Jack Norworth, Nora Bayes
That Haunting Melody (from 'Vera Violetta')	Al Jolson
Fo' De Lawd's Sake, Play a Waltz (from 'The Slim Princess')	Elsie Janis
Alice Blue Gown (from 'Irene')	Edith Day
Second Hand Rose (from Ziegfeld Follies of 1921')	Fanny Brice
Mr. Gallagher And Mr. Shean (from Ziegfeld Follies of 1922')	Al Shean, Ed Gallagher
Manda (from 'Chocolate Dandies')	Noble Sissle
Like He Loves Me (from 'Oh, Please!')	Beatrice Lillie
Rio Rita and The Rangers' Song (from 'Rio Rita')	J. Harold Murray
Sometimes I'm Happy (from 'Hit the Deck')	Louise Groody, Charles King
Hungry Women (from 'Whoopee')	Eddie Cantor
Why Was I Born? (from 'Sweet Adeline')	Helen Morgan
You're The Top (from 'Anything Goes')	Cole Porter
You And The Night And The Music (from 'Revenge With Music')	Libby Holman
What A Wonderful World (from 'At Home Abroad')	Eleanor Powell