SPEAK TO US, OH BEAUTIFUL CAST ALBUMS By Peter Filichia
“Listen, girls, the way to catch a man is to be a natural woman…”
So said Lena Horne before she launched into “Pretty to Walk With,” her opening song in JAMAICA, which opened 67 years ago this week.
Many moons ago, when Jonathan Schwartz was a radio commentator, he played the song on his program. Then, after it finished, he said how much he enjoyed hearing Horne speak before the song started.
What intrigued me was Schwartz’s next remark. He said that he so loved all those little spoken introductions on cast albums that he wished someone would make a tape recording of all of them for him to enjoy.
I decided to be that someone.
This mammoth effort would not, however, be out of the goodness of my heart. I would ask that in return Schwartz would send me a tape recording of his daddy’s musical version of Casablanca.
Schwartz’ father was no less than composer Arthur Schwartz. We must thank him for one of the all-time great scores for A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. Such ballads as “Make the Man Love Me” and “I’ll Buy You a Star” are not to die for, but to live for.
For Casablanca, Schwartz partnered with Leo Robin, whose lyrics for GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES are still among musical theater’s best.
Exhibit A: “It’s High Time” has Dorothy thrilled to be sailing on the Ile de France. It’s 1924, when Prohibition is still very much on the scene, but there’s a loophole for ships at sea. Once they’re 12 miles away from American shores, Prohibition doesn’t apply, and everyone can drink.
So, when Dorothy sings that it’s high time, she doesn’t only mean that it’s time to get high on liquor. “It’s high time” is also an expression that sardonically means “Well, it’s about time!” regarding a situation that has finally arrived when it should have happened a long time ago.
(Clever, no?)
Schwartz and Robin were writing in the early ‘60s, when you couldn’t have hoped for a better producer than David Merrick. He’d recently produced OLIVER! and on the back cover of the original pressing of the cast album, his bio stated that CASABLANCA was on his docket.
It never happened. But perhaps Schwartz fils would be so grateful to get my tape that he’d at least send me their tape.
So, off I was listening to albums for pre-song dialogue. I decided that I’d start with OKLAHOMA!, the first official cast album to catch the fancy of the American public. I’d go chronologically through the ages with a selection or two (or more) from each cast album I had.
And I had plenty.
In the process, I learned something that I’d never noticed before: Columbia Masterworks, one predecessor of Masterworks Broadway, was the unquestioned leader in the field of cast albums, and yet had very few songs with introductory dialogue.
Much time would pass before I discovered that this was no accident, but a policy established by Goddard Lieberson. From the late ‘40s through the mid ‘70s, Lieberson was the most esteemed producer of cast albums. For better or worse, though, he staunchly believed that people listening to theatrical recordings only wanted to hear a musical’s music and not its dialogue.
Funny, because when Jack Kapp conceived of the original cast album, one of his goals was to present on record what was actually heard in the theater.
Doesn’t that mean words from the script, too?
Lieberson’s biggest crimes was omitting dialogue in the middle of two songs. First, he erred in not including the patter between Ella Peterson and Jeffrey Moss in “Just in Time” when recording BELLS ARE RINGING. Even worse was omitting the witty byplay between Arthur and Guenevere in the title song of CAMELOT.
(Luckily, the DVDs and/or soundtracks make up for these transgressions.)
The exceptions to Lieberson’s rule are few and far between, but two are noteworthy. MY FAIR LADY’s Henry Higgins, courtesy of Rex Harrison, explains a bit about his worldview before he starts singing “I’m an Ordinary Man.”
I asked Alan Jay Lerner, the song’s lyricist about this, after the workshop of DANCE A LITTLE CLOSER, his final Broadway show. “Rex wanted it that way,” he told me. That’s interesting, considering that Lieberson’s Columbia Records put up each and every dime of the $400,000 to produce the show, so you’d think he’d have the final say.
But stars do have much power, don’t they?
Four years later, Lieberson recorded BYE BYE BIRDIE. Before Conrad Birdie (read: Elvis Presley) started singing “Honestly Sincere” – arguably Broadway’s first rock ‘n’ roll song – teen Ursula dared to approach the icon and blurted out the following:
“Speak to us, O beautiful one! Tell us how you make that glorious sound that even now in anticipation of it, has reduced me to a snarling, raging, panting jungle beast!”
So why include that? Was it Lieberson’s quasi-apologizing and semi-excusing including such a song on a Masterworks label? Until that day in April 1960, his cast albums offered songs that were pretty (“Some Enchanted Evening,” Joe Josephson’s favorite song from SOUTH PACIFIC), up-tempo (“Once-a-Year-Day” from THE PAJAMA GAME), funny (“They Couldn’t Compare to You” from OUT OF THIS WORLD) and artistically ambitious (all of STREET SCENE, a genuine opera of The Little Foxes). None of those sounded anything like Conrad Birdie’s snarling, raging, panting song.
Well, whatever side of the fence you’re on concerning Lieberson’s philosophy about dialogue, you will almost certainly agree that getting all those cast albums from him was a fine trade-off. PAL JOEY jump-started a production that became the longest-running musical revival in Broadway history.
More to the point, Lieberson certainly made up for lost dialogue by including an inordinate amount in the longest cut an original Broadway cast album had ever sported, and for a musical that at that time had had the shortest run of any whose cast would enter a recording studio.
We’re talking about Stephen Sondheim’s ANYONE CAN WHISTLE, of course. In an era where a record album had six, seven or eight cuts on each side, WHISTLE had a mere four on Side One, because “Simple,” sporting both melody and dialogue, weighed in at almost 13 minutes.
Thomas Z. Shepard was Lieberson’s successor and was responsible for getting COMPANY into the recording studio. Had Lieberson and not he recorded the instant classic, would he have dropped Elaine Stritch’s now iconic delivery of “Does anyone still wear a hat?”
Does anyone still wish that he hadn’t?
Far more recently, the four producers of SHUCKED made sure that Grey Henson and Ashley D. Kelley had something to say before and during many of the songs. But then again, they were playing characters named Storytellers, weren’t they?
Anyway, not long after I had started the tape for Schwartz, I stopped, what with so many Lieberson-led cast albums failing me. However, abandoning the project was fitting, for I later learned that Arthur Schwartz and Leo Robin abandoned their CASABLANCA musical after writing a mere two songs.
Too bad, for I had visions of inviting my favorite musical theater enthusiasts to my house to hear CASABLANCA, and, after we finished listening, they would say, “Play it again, Pete!”
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY: 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
