By Steven Suskin
21 Jul 2008

ARABIAN NIGHTS [Sepia 1116]
The musicals of George Marion, Jr. have been all but absent from cast album CD shelves since the first cast album CD shelf was built in 1982, and suddenly the postman has simultaneously brought two! (Since we are giving Mr. Marion so many bytes, let us add that his main claims to fame are the screenplays for "The Gay Divorce" and "Love Me Tonight," plus the lyrics for "The Ladies Who Sing with the Band," which were popularized by their inclusion in Ain't Misbehavin'. He also wrote, with Johnny Green, a song that I especially like called "The Steam Is on the Beam.")

New York State power broker Robert Moses built an 8,200-seat Amphitheatre at Jones Beach in 1952. (Jones Beach was a Moses-sculpted state park on the South Shore of Long Island, midway between Manhattan and what would in later decades become that popular playground known as "the Hamptons.") The state ran the thing for two summers, with a Mike Todd-produced epic called A Night in Venice. When this Johann Strauss operetta sunk into the man-made lagoon that separated the stage from the seats, Guy Lombardo — a popular bandleader based in the neighboring village of Freeport — was brought in to run the joint, producing shows and providing music for dancing after the show. He would also ride in on a speedboat before the show, to conduct the national anthem. After a decade of discouraging results, Jones Beach stopped producing original musicals and contented themselves with revivals of standard Broadway hits. (I am still recovering from a 1981 production of Damn Yankees starring Joe Namath as Joe Hardy, so help us! I have never seen anything quite like the "Two Lost Souls" dance, during which Broadway Joe plunked himself down in a chair and let the dancers drag him through the choreography.)

The Wright & Forrest operetta Kismet, a self-described "musical Arabian night," was a sizable hit when produced at the Ziegfeld in 1953. Lombardo apparently attempted to get the show — which started on shaky ground before building into a hit — to transfer to the Marine Theatre for the summer of 1954, but without luck. So he decided to produce his own Arabian Nights, signing Danish opera star Lauritz Melchior to attract audiences and assigning his favorite songwriters — his brother Carmen and his brother-in-law John Jacob Loeb — to write the score. And along came old George Marion, Jr. providing a haphazard libretto about Scheherazade and her ilk. (Marion had previously visited this territory in 1944 with the notorious Allah Be Praised!) The haphazard Arabian Nights seems to have served its purpose; the original cast album was preserved on Decca, and the show was brought back for a second summer in 1955. Then the Lombard-Loeb-Marion opus faded away, forgotten and unlamented.

The score, as might be expected, is less than deathless and pales in comparison to Wright & Forrest's Baghdadian operetta (which did have Alexander Borodin, who presumably never set foot south of Constantinople, providing tunes). There are a couple of pert melodies for what they describe as a teeny weeny genie, namely "It's Great to Be Alive" and — yes — "Teeny Weenie Genie." These are given spirited renditions by a sprite named Hope Holiday whom I've never come across elsewhere. (She was later a Dogpatch wife and understudy to Mammy Yokum in Li'l Abner.) "A Thousand and One Nights" and "How Long Has It Been?" are pleasing enough, though not exactly "Stranger in Paradise" or "And This Is My Beloved."

Rendering yeoman service is the stalwart William Chapman, who went on to the City Opera and — on Broadway — played supporting roles in Candide and Greenwillow, and in 1977 replaced John Cullum in Shenandoah. Helena Scott is the heroine, while Melchior has little to do and does so with a heavy accent. Ralph Herbert provides the comic relief — this is the sort of affair where instead of punishing offenders in boiling oil, they make them ride the Long Island Rail Road — in a manner that makes you pine for good old Henry Calvin, the wily Wazir of Kismet. There is also a song about a whale — the highlight of the extravaganza was a 70-foot floating whale (built over a motorboat?) which swam in between the audience and the stage — led by Chapman with an assist from a strong-voiced chorister called James McCracken.

Orchestrations are by Joe Glover, one of those guys who spent 25 years in the Broadway music room without ever quite making it to the top tier. His one important musical was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, on which he had been lined up to assist Russell Bennett (who at the last moment proved unavailable). Glover generally performed sturdy work, with his assorted contributions to more familiar musicals include such numbers as "Ohio," "Drop That Name," and the imperishable "Chop Suey." The charts here are — well, muddy, as was the case with other Decca cast recordings of the time. The 12 tracks are supplemented by eight recorded as an album by Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (why Royal? why Canadian?) as well as a fine Margaret Whiting-Nelson Riddle single of the hoped-to-be-big ballad, "How Long Has It Been?"

(Steven Suskin is author of "Second Act Trouble," "Show Tunes" and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached at Ssuskin@aol.com)