Tops and Bottoms

You’ve probably already heard that Columbia’s cast recording of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revisal of The Pajama Game, starring Harry Connick Jr. and Kelli O’Hara, can only be purchased as part of a package with a separate CD that features the same two singers performing songs from Thou Shalt Not, the 2001 flop with a score by Connick. Harry on Broadway: Act I sets a dangerous precedent, but if you’re morally or financially offended by it, you should find a way to obtain the highly enjoyable Pajama Game tracks alone — perhaps through legal downloading.

For all intents and purposes, Connick’s performance as Sid Sorokin is the Richard Adler-Jerry Ross-George Abbott-Richard Bissell musical is the raison d’etre of the stage production and the recording, so it’s a pleasure to report that he sounds terrific. On stage in The Pajama Game, Connick is somewhat stiff at times, but that sure doesn’t come across on the CD; he’s relaxed, smooth, warm, and sexy as all get-out, especially in the ballads “A New Town is a Blue Town” and “Hey There.” More great news is that he’s superbly partnered by the Babe Willams of O’Hara, one of Broadway’s foremost young sopranos (The Light in the Piazza, My Life With Albertine, etc.), who here proves that she can also belt songs like “I’m Not at All in Love” with verve.

Michael McKean is wonderfully droll as “time study man” Vernon Hines — and it’s a plus that, hearing his performance on CD, you won’t be distracted by the silly, mad scientist hairdo he sports in the show. Roz Ryan is an utter delight in her “I’ll Never Be Jealous Again” duet with McKean, while Peter Benson is cute and energetic as Prez in “Her Is” and “Seven and a Half Cents.” Megan Lawrence as Gladys is great fun in “Hernando’s Hideaway,” a track that’s also noteworthy for Connick’s interpolated piano/vocal tour de force. (By the way: I only received an advance copy of the recording, without the full packaging, but I’m told that the track list in the booklet doesn’t specify which characters/performers sing the various songs. This is an odd omission, especially on the part of Columbia, a company that used to know all there was to know about cast albums. But I guess it was a different company then.)

The new orchestrations, by Dick Lieb and Danny Troob, are fine — but since they’re not all that different stylistically from the originals, one has to wonder why director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall and musical director Rob Berman didn’t just stick with the orchestrations that Don Walker so skillfully wrought in 1954, even if they would have had to be reduced for the smaller orchestral forces of this production. Whatever quarrels one may have with the recording, musical theater buffs will probably want to own it if only because it includes two songs by Adler (“If You Win, You Lose,” “The Three of Us”) and one by Adler & Ross (“The World Around Us”) that were added to the show for this production.

As for Thou Shalt Not, there’s not much to say that hasn’t been said already. David Finkle, in his review of the show’s original cast album in the TheaterMania Guide to Musical Theater Recordings, accurately labels Connick’s songs for this failed musical about lust, infidelity, and murder in 1940s New Orleans as “pallid” and “dismal.” On the plus side, they do sound better as sung by Connick and O’Hara than by the leads on the previous recording, Craig Bierko and Kate Levering.

The disc’s opening track is titled “Oh My Dear (Something’s Gone Wrong),” a feeling that applies to the project as a whole. Connick’s music is pleasant enough in a bland, generic-jazz sort of way, but his lyrics are clumsy (“The caution that we’ve thrown to the wind is being blown”) or dunningly repetitious (“Such love, such love, too bad I never had such love, such love, such love, I’m glad I never had such love”) or both (“This is how it feels, this is how it feels, when you have nothing to live for; this is how it feels, heartache and all, I like love more.”)

Despite the vocal contributions of Connick and O’Hara, what Finkle wrote about the cast album also applies to the new recording: “No one who listens to Thou Shalt Not once will want to listen twice.” Best to consider the extra money you pay for this CD a heavy tax on the Pajama Game disc, which — to state the obvious — has far greater appeal.