By Steven Suskin
01 Sep 2008

Jerry Herman Digital Collection [Masterworks/Arkiv]
Masterworks Broadway has seen fit to celebrate their catalogue of Jerry Herman musicals by preparing a grand digital release of nine Jerry CDs. They have pegged the event to the 25th anniversary of the opening of La Cage Aux Folles, but no such landmark is necessary. It's always time to listen to a show tune, and it's always time to recirculate items from the catalogue. The Messrs. Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Sondheim are well represented in the catalogue, but Masterworks has loads of Styne and Loesser and their ilk sitting on the shelf. Let us hope that this Herman splurge is only the start of something.

Before we get to the specifics, let us explain that this is a digital collection, with the nine albums available for download from the various on-line digital providers. For readers who like to get real, honest-to-goodness CDs they can hold in their hand, this collection is simultaneously available from the on-line retailer ArkivMusic. If you prefer to shop at your local record store, or what passes for your local record store, you are out of luck.

Leading the parade, of course, is Jerry's biggest hit, Hello, Dolly! And not just the original Broadway cast album, represented here by the "Broadway Deluxe Collector's Edition" which was remastered, expanded and released by BMG in 2003. Among the other eight items are the 1965 London Cast Album, starring America's own Mary Martin, and the 1967 Broadway replacement cast album, starring Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway. Which makes for a lot of Dolly.

Carol Channing played Dolly over and over and over and over again, over the decades. For me, she is the one and only Dolly; but then, I was fortunate enough to see her ten days after the Broadway opening. My father read the overnight reviews on the train, walked up to the St. James from Penn Station, waited until the box office opened at 10 AM, and nabbed a pair on the aisle for my 11th birthday. Which is how you got theatre tickets in those days before phone sales, credit card sales, discount codes, on-line sales or you name it. You went to the box office, joined the line around the corner, and walked away with those brightly colored cardboard ducats. $9.40, with no restoration charge.

People who saw Carol do Hello, Dolly! in 1964 or 1966 or 1978 or 1995 saw the same performer but not, exactly, the same performance. Dolly, in those first days, was an absolute splendiferous riot (and as a bonus, it included that uproariously colorful, if expendable, "Come and Be My Butterfly" number). Carol seemed to be making it up as she went along, with the most outlandish things emerging from that outsized personage promenading across the stage. And mind you, before the original cast album was released those dulcet baritone tones were astonishing. I have rarely seen anything quite like Carol as Dolly in January 1964, and no subsequent Dollys — including those with Ms. Channing herself in the red dress — have measured up.

Mary Martin played the role in the International Company, which opened in London in December 1965. (Producer David Merrick had garnered international headlines six weeks earlier by taking Mary and the show for a surprise visit to play for the U.S. troops in Vietnam.) Ms. Martin, by 1965, was 52 years old. While she had only recently been playing that teenager Maria in the 1959 musical The Sound of Music, she was no spring chicken. The coyness that had already been creeping into her performances is very much apparent in her Dolly, and for me it takes away from the character (who is supposed to be "damned exasperating," not a kittenish descendant of Peter Pan). Be that as it may, the London Hello, Dolly! is the only one of the nine items in this Jerry Herman Celebration that is herewith making its CD debut; the LP was long retired, and methinks for good reason. But collectors need to collect, and Mary Martin fans need more Mary Martin. The star is supported by Loring Smith, who created the role of Horace in the first place, opposite Ruth Gordon in Merrick's 1956 production of Thornton Wilder's comedy The Matchmaker.

Pearl Bailey is something else again. As has been oft-related, Merrick took a four-year-old show that was beginning to flag and turned it into Broadway's biggest hit all over again by replacing the tired and dusty production (then starring Betty Grable) with a remarkably energetic new company starring Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway. Bailey was quite remarkable, all told, and I can understand people who never saw Carol — or who only saw Carol in later years — wondering how anyone could match dear sweet Pearlie Mae. I myself found her performance to be uproariously enjoyable in the theatre. The recorded performance, though, leaves me somewhat colder. Ms. Bailey seems to be having a high old time of it on the album, but she is somewhat more Bailey and less Dolly. Calloway too, in his limited spots, seems to be out on a spin of his own. Countering this is Emily Yancy, giving the finest rendition of Irene Molloy (the milliner with those ribbons down her back) that I've either seen or heard. Yancy never developed the career that she might well have deserved, but she was extremely good in her two major Broadway roles: as Seena in the Bernstein-Lerner 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and opposite Dick Kiley in the record-smashing 1977 revival of Man of La Mancha.

The other prize of the Bailey album is a far more complete rendition of "Dancing" than we get on other recordings. This was a totally dazzling number in the theatre, with a good part of the dazzle coming from Peter Howard's dance arrangement. Like his peers, Peter could take a two-minute song and weave it into an extended sequence. ("Dancing," in the theatre, ran about 7:15.) Unlike the other arrangers, though, he saw it as his job to always keep the composer's melody prominent. The Bailey recording doesn't give us the whole thing, but we get a better idea of what it was than on the other recordings. On the other hand, Bailey's version begins with a full Dolly overture (arranged and orchestrated by Glenn Osser) that is, all told, pretty lousy. The Broadway Dolly was performed without an overture; Gower Champion cut it during the tryout, replacing it with a mere stretch of the title song (as heard on the Channing and Martin recordings). Two other authorized overtures have been written and used for subsequent productions, but the one on the 1967 recording—which was apparently commissioned by RCA to (hopefully) bring extra value to their third recording of the score in four years — sounds very much unlike Jerry Herman's Hello, Dolly!

Reigning over the other items in the group is Angela Lansbury in Mame, which gets my vote as the most satisfying and enjoyable recording of a Herman musical. Also on the list is the original cast album of Dear World, as previously released by Sony but with an added track of the composer playing "And I Was Beautiful" (and very nicely); The Grand Tour, which had only a limited release back in 2002; La Cage aux Folles; and "Jerry Herman's Broadway," the 1992 album with Don Pippin leading a full orchestra in Herman hits. Finally, we have the original cast album of Herman's first Broadway musical, Milk and Honey. Which, oddly enough, was also released just two months ago by DRG. Clearly, someone in the licensing department got confused. As best I can tell, listening to both recordings with separate ears, they use the remastered version from the original BMG release. (All of these CDs, with the exception of the first-time release of the Mary Martin, seem to use existing versions. The Arkiv versions that I examined reproduce the earlier liner notes, although in simplified form.) As for the overall Herman oeuvre, the major item that is missing in this celebration is the indispensable Mack & Mabel, which resides in a different catalog.

(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)