ON THE RECORD: LPs not on CD, Part Three—Off-Broadway Shows

By Steven Suskin
September 28, 2009


We finish our survey of cast albums that we would like to see transferred to CD with a stop Off-Broadway. Riverwind, anybody?

*

Let's examine two especially strong scores for long-forgotten musicals. Both were written by first-time composer-lyricists, who came to town with these highly impressive showings. Both musicals had decent runs for the time, after which the two songwriters in question all but disappeared.

When I went to store away my LP collection for the final time, I noticed Man with a Load of Mischief [Kapp KRL 4508] still unsealed (with a $1.99 remainder sticker). A six-character 1966 musical set in the early 1800s based on a negligible two-week failure of a 1925 play, Mischief had all the markings of an excessively dreary listen; and the "antique" cover artwork was so unpromising that I simply never bothered to split the seam and put it on. Back in 2003, the York Theatre presented a concert version of the show for a benefit, leading one to wonder — Why? When I went to review the resulting recording, though, I was surprised to find an infinitely worthy score. I decided it was worth my while to track down the original LP, and was rewarded: Man with a Load of Mischief quickly made it onto my most favored list of '60s musicals. Nobody seems to do the show, nobody seems to know it (except highly discerning collectors). Put this one on CD, I say.

The story tells of six people in a country inn: a Lady, fleeing from her lover (the Prince, who is spoken of but not present); a traveling Lord, who stops to help and tries to seduce her; their servants, one each; and a married pair of innkeepers. What makes this all not only palatable but exhilarating is the work of one John Clifton, who wrote the music and is credited as co-lyricist with librettist Ben Tarver. Where Clifton came from, and where he went, I don't know; but he provided a wonderfully inventive and, in places, wonderfully romantic score. (Actually, a jaunt around the Internet tells us that Clifton came from Pittsburgh; played an early summer stock tour of The Fantasticks that featured Liza Minnelli and Elliott Gould; and wrote Mischief while serving as rehearsal pianist for Man of La Mancha. Subsequent theatre work included composing new songs for Phyllis Newman's My Mother was a Fortune Teller and writing the music for the 1981 Off-Broadway failure El Bravo.) Leading the way are two soaring beauties, "Come to the Masquerade" and "Make Way for My Lady." The surprise of the LP, along with the excellence of the score, is the identity of the tenor who sings them so persuasively in the role of the servant who gets the Lady: Reid Shelton, of all people. We know him from his chorus days ("Wouldn't It Be Loverly," in which his doctor recommends a quiet summer by the sea) and from his Tony-nominated turn as Daddy Warbucks in Annie. But as a romantic lover? Here, Mr. Shelton is very convincing.

Singing opposite Shelton in what is probably the leading role of this ensemble piece is Virginia Vestoff, best-known to theatre fans for her Abigail Adams in 1776. She is very good here — actually, it seems like she was always very good — and helps make this such a special piece of Mischief. Alice Cannon, as the Lady's maid, scores with "Once You've Had a Little Taste," while Mr. Clifton gives some of his most charming numbers to the old folks ("Any Other Way," "What Style"). Playing Mr. Shelton's master, and not exactly standing out, is Raymond Thorne, who later joined Reid in Annie as FDR. There is also the touching "Lover Lost," the lovely "A Wonder," an atmospheric "Hulla-baloo-balay," and a grand sextet called "Romance!"

Man with a Load of Mischief opened on Nov. 6, 1966 — between The Apple Tree and Cabaret — at the Jan Hus on the Upper East Side and ran for seven months, which was not bad for Off-Broadway at the time. The original cast album, on Kapp Records (which also recorded Man of La Mancha) is, indeed, quite wonderful. The recent studio cast recording [Original Cast OCR 6100] has expanded material and composer Clifton singing the role of the tavern keeper; it is hampered, though, by the synthetic sounds of a synth. The original 1966 production featured Clifton's fine orchestrations for piano, flute, clarinet and cello.

How did Mischief manage to slip out of the collective memory and disappear? Don't know, but here's a score that you'll want to search out.

*

An equally important recording is the enchanting Riverwind [London AMS 78001]. This came from John Jennings, of small-town Indiana; the show opened Dec. 12, 1962, at the Actor's Playhouse and ran for more than a year (443 performances, to be exact). It is somewhat more problematic for today's audiences; the book was never one of its strong points, and some of the relationships might seem hopelessly dated to current audiences. (Women, in Riverwind, were meant to sit around cooking, cleaning, and putting up preserves.) But don't hold that against the score, which might be described as Greenwillow without the whimsy. A high compliment; Frank Loesser, in fact, had one of his companies publish the music.

The plot tells of a rundown tourist camp (called Riverwind) on the banks of the Wabash. The personae include the landlady (Helon Blount) and her teenage daughter (Dawn Nickerson); the teenaged hired boy (Martin J. Cassidy), who seems to be a stand-in for composer-lyricist Jennings; an unwed couple (Brooks Morton and Lovelady Powell) who live on the premises in sin; and another couple (Lawrence Brooks and Elizabeth Parrish) who return to Riverwind — the site of their honeymoon — to try to rekindle their broken marriage. As can be easily divined, the hired boy loves the girl but cannot tell her so (he actually sings a song called "I Cannot Tell Her So") so the girl — looking for adventure in the lively "I Want a Surprise," which signals early on that there is life in this score —latches onto the worldly middle-aged man who is tired of his wife. Or only thinks he is; while he toys at romance with the teen (like El Gallo and Luisa going "Round and Round" in The Fantasticks), he realizes at curtain's fall that he really does love his wife ("I'd Forgotten How Beautiful She Is").

It is the songs that make Riverwind so very special. Best of the lot are a lively, bouncing waltz, "Pardon Me While I Dance"; an astoundingly good quartet called "Wishing Song," which is something like South Pacific's "Twin Soliloquies" times two; and another wonderful waltz duet, "Sew the Buttons On," which sweeps along in the best Richard Rodgers manner (a la "Lover" or "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World"). There are also a pair of amusing songs for the comedy couple, "American Family Plan" and "Almost, but Not Quite." Add to the list the gentle hymn that serves as the title song and the girl's opening song, referred to above.

I don't expect that I'll ever get around to writing the David Merrick biography I started researching years ago, but let me point out that the girl in Riverwind, Dawn Nickerson, is the one that got away. Had Merrick made her wife #2, as sources tell me he seems to have seriously contemplated in 1962 (while she was standing by for Carol Lawrence in Subways Are for Sleeping), he might have saved himself from 40 years of turmoil. Or perhaps not.

Abba Bogin, Frank Loesser's right-hand-man at the time, orchestrated Riverwind and provided expanded arrangements for the recording. And very nice ones, alternatively woodsy and swinging. John Jennings, meanwhile, not only wrote the songs for Riverwind; he wrote the libretto (originally credited as "Joseph Benjamin") and co-produced it as well. The show opened during the 1962 newspaper strike, causing the good reviews to go mostly unread; news reports tell of the author publicizing the show by singing the songs from a flatbed truck in Shubert Alley. Riverwind was a success in its day, but appears to be the only major work by Jennings (who died in 1988).

Our third Off-Broadway doesn't quite come up to the musical heights of the others, as it is a less ambitious undertaking, but it more than earns its place. Composer Jacques Urbont and lyricist-librettist Bruce Geller took Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 comedy The Rivals — Mrs. Malaprop and all — and added songs, calling it All in Love [Mercury OCS 6204]. The result was a bright comedic romp, which opened in November 1961 at the Martinique for a four-month run. Sparkling is a good word to describe this charming score, which is typified by two delectable numbers "What Can It Be?" and "I Found Him." (Both are sung, and delightfully so, by someone named Christina Gillespie, who seems to have disappeared from the New York theatre after this show.)

David Atkinson, as Jack Absolute, takes the singing honors with two nice ballads, "I Love a Fool" and "Don't Ask Me," along with a duet with his father (Lee Cass), "The Lady Was Made to Be Loved." (Atkinson played the romantic lead in The Girl in Pink Tights, and was one of the Don Quixote replacements in Man of La Mancha; Gaylea Byrne, an alternate Aldonza, plays heroine Lydia Languish.) Mimi Randolph sings Mrs. Malaprop, with material that doesn't quite rock the listeners (at least on the cast recording). Far better in the comedy department is the Bob Acres of the affair, a distinctive young comedian named Dom De Luise.

Orchestrations for the show were by newcomer Jonathan Tunick. (Composer Urbont once told me that the expanded orchestrations used on the recording are not by Tunick, apparently because the record label refused to pay him.) As for lyricist-librettist Geller, he was soon off to Hollywood where in 1966 he created the long-running adventure series "Mission: Impossible." Which is why fans of All in Love might have occasionally heard songs from the show used as "Mission: Impossible" underscoring.

*

Our Off-Broadway scores are joined by one from the land of television. The team of Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, whom you might know from a little item called Funny Girl, followed that musical with a succession of less-distinguished projects (including Prettybelle, Sugar, and The Red Shoes). Along the way they wrote songs for a 50-minute animated special that ran Thanksgiving weekend in 1965 called "The Dangerous Christmas of Red Riding Hood" [ABC-Paramount ABCS 536]. This modernized rendition of the old fairy tale, starring 19-year-old Liza Minnelli as Red and Cyril Ritchard as the Wolf, was not a great work of art; the relatively brief score is on the sketchy side. But there are two songs which simply beg to be enjoyed. "My Red Riding Hood" is just joyous; it charms us, first, and then builds into something warmly wonderful. I can, and have, listened to it again and again. Equally delicious is something with the questionable title "Ding-a-ling, Ding-a-ling." Yes, "Ding-a-ling, Ding-a-ling." Don't fret; this is a Christmassy jaunt for Ms. Minnelli and Mr. Ritchard, and it simply takes off and remains happily aloft. Transfer an obscure LP to CD simply because of two songs? Yes, absolutely. Well worth it! (A third and decidedly lesser song, "I'm Naive," might be familiar to some listeners thanks to reuse elsewhere — including post-Broadway revisions of Sugar, the stage musicalization of "Some Like It Hot.")

*

And finally, here's one that might well astonish you. The Aloha State joined our Union in 1959, and it wasn't long before some producer decided that an authentic Hawaiian musical would be just the thing for Broadway. Well, why not? 13 Daughters was first produced at the Honolulu Community Theatre in 1956, with score and book by Eaton (Bob) Magoon, a pop songwriter descended from one of Hawaii's wealthiest families. The show was retooled and brought into the 54th Street Theatre, Broadway's least-desirable jinx-house (also known as the Adelphi and the George Abbott) on March 2, 1961; it created not a wisp of a stir, and within three weeks bid a final and permanent aloha. The improved, Broadway version was remounted in Honolulu in 1965, with a local cast, and a cast album [Mahalo 3003] was duly recorded. (The non-Magoon numbers interpolated into the Broadway version in the hopes of boosting the chance of success were excised; one of them came from a pop songwriter named Sherman Edwards, who returned to Broadway in 1969 with 1776.) The performances are questionable, some of the musical playing is notably ragged, and the score itself is not in a league with that other Broadway state-celebration musical, Oklahoma!. Even so, 13 Daughters surprisingly turns out to be pretty charming and pleasantly tuneful. Put it on the shelf next to something like Plain and Fancy, another non-A List musical which I nevertheless happily to listen to from time to time.

13 Daughters is about — well, you guessed it. He is not a poor dairyman on the desolate plains of Russia; he is a rich Chinese merchant living in Hawaii. (For Broadway, they got that prototypical Chinese actor Don Ameche — born Dominic Amici in Kenosha, WI — which did not help in the authenticity department.) The plot is, actually, semi-biographical. A Chinese merchant named Chun Afong came to Hawaii in the 1850s, married a member of the royal family, and proceeded to become the kingdom's first millionaire. Yes, he had 13 daughters; three sons, too, but they don't figure in the musical. The gals are husbandless, due to a curse on their mother for marrying a foreigner. It all works out, of course; author Magoon, in fact, was the grandson of one of the 13 title characters.

So here we have a Hawaiian cast album — talk about Off-Broadway! — of a negligible Broadway flop. Kam Fong Chun sings the leading role, heading a necessarily large cast (all those daughters, you know). The only recognizable name among the bunch, as the eldest daughter, is Tamara Long, the Oklahoma-born actress who created major roles in Dames at Sea and Lorelei. Magoon's tunes are — well, tuneful, with some real charmers among them (including "House on the Hill," "Kuli-Kuli," "Let-A-Go Your Heart," "Calabash Cousins," and especially "Puka-Puka Pants" — which might not sound promising but turns out well). The score is dressed up in professional Broadway orchestrations, from Joe Glover and Robert Russell Bennett. (My research indicates that the show is mostly by Glover, in the same proportions as their collaboration on the 1951 musical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.) The charts are clearly above the capabilities of some of the musicians; there are sections in which the strings and reeds seem to be playing underwater. Even so, 13 Daughters is an enjoyable listen that would surely find fans on CD; a few, anyway. Which makes it an extreme long shot for our list.

*

So there you have, in three columns, an assortment of 15 favored cast albums — from Broadway, London, Off-Broadway and elsewhere — that have yet to make it to CD. As stated in the first column, the last several years have seen the rescue of many such worthy titles; we can be hopeful of more coming along, one way or the other. I was especially pleased to learn, via e-mailed responses, that two of the most desired items on my list are on the remastering block as we speak. While I have been sworn to secrecy, and while plans of this sort don't always work out, fans of such things can anticipate two treasures coming their way in the next year or so.

To read the On the Record about Broadway cast albums not yet on CD, click here; to read about London shows not yet on CD, click here.

(Steven Suskin is author of "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations" as well as "Second Act Trouble," "Show Tunes" and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached at Ssuskin@aol.com.)