Theater News

Making the Cut

Filichia lists some songs that he wishes had been included on the cast albums of various shows.

I may have issues with the authors of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee for drawing their characters as losers, dorks, and nerds, but that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the show’s cast album. I adore “My Friend, the Dictionary,” “Magic Foot,” “Woe Is Me,” and most of the other songs. However, I was disappointed to find that the sequence at the very end of the show wherein each character tells what happens to him or her years later was omitted from the CD. It couldn’t be for lack of space: at 48 minutes, this entire recording could have easily fit on even an old-fangled LP. Maybe the powers-that-be just didn’t want to give too much away. (Did they consider a track like the one on Dirty Rotten Scoundrels that warns us not to listen further if we don’t want to know how things turn out?)

Of course, material missing from on an album is hardly new. What many consider the first real original cast album,-Oklahoma!, initially left off four of that show’s songs. The oversight was later remedied with the release of Oklahoma! Volume II, for which Alfred Drake, the original Curly, had to sing Jud Fry’s solo “Lonely Room” because Howard DaSilva was unavailable. And because that cut was later incorporated onto the CD of Oklahoma, “Lonely Room” accidentally seems to display a very different side of Curly than the guy we’ve come to know. (Frankly, it makes him and the show more interesting.)

The album of the 1966 musical A Time for Singing (based on How Green Was My Valley) left off two songs and truncated most of the others. The Cry for Us All recording lacks four songs. The Golden Apple album omits much of that show’s almost continuous music, while Inner City had only 28 of its 53 songs recorded. (If 53 sounds like a huge number of songs, be apprised that most of them are like the term papers that Kate Monster corrects in Avenue Q: Very short.

On the list of the things that I will not miss (if I may quote a lyric from the infamous movie musical Lost Horizon) is “Everything’s Easy When You Know How” from It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman, in which a group of acrobats known as The Flying Lings do tricks and then complain that Superman is putting them out of work. But what songs do I miss that weren’t included on cast albums? Here are some:

  • Everything that was cut from the original Follies, from “Rain on the Roof” to “Loveland” and including the unpardonably excised sections of “Beautiful Girls” and “I’m Still Here.”
  • The eight songs that didn’t make the 1947 original cast album of Allegro. What a shame that the Encores! production of this show wasn’t recorded!
  • “Hollywood, California” from The Act, the 1977 Kander and Ebb show in which Michele Craig (played by Liza Minnelli) is on the phone at one point, telling her equally shallow friends about the party she’s been to: “My dear, the wedding was a joke. Miranda lit a joint under Rocco’s needlepoint, and the tent went up in smoke.”
  • “Psalm 151” (a.k.a. “The Confessional Scene”) from Sweet Smell of Success, in which J.J. Hunsecker is in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, making Sidney Falco swear that he will keep an eye on J.J’s sister Susan.
  • “And” from A Chorus Line, in which the auditioners sing “What will I say?” after being told they’ll have to reveal a great deal about themselves. (By the way, when the LP of A Chorus Line was issued in July 1975, I found “Hello 12, Hello 13, Hello Love,” just perfect as is — only to discover, when I saw the show the following month, that it had been abridged. On the CD edition of the recording, issued years later, more of the number was included — but I have to say that the fuller version sounds odd to me, and I suspect that it always will.)

  • “Don’t Do It Again” and its reprise from A Class Act. Both Ed Kleban’s boss, Felicia (Sara Ramirez), and his mentor, Lehman Engel (Patrick Quinn), give him some advice — not that Ed is the kind of guy who’s likely to take it.

  • “How Lucky You Are” from Seussical. How unlucky we were not to get a full recording of this song, which builds beautifully. It has a jaunty little melody and lots of charming lyrics that we don’t hear on the album — lyrics that lead us right to intermission.
  • “I Know a Girl” from Chicago. Yes, we now have plenty of recordings of this second-act opener, but I want to hear Chita Rivera — the original Velma Kelly — — doing it.
  • In “You Won’t Be an Orphan for Long” from Annie, I’d love to hear what happens onstage: The stirring march stops and Daddy Warbucks softly sings, “What a thing to occur: finding them, losing her. No, you won’t be an orphan for long.” That he’s willing to give up Annie so that she can be happy makes us love him.
  • Near the end of the title song in Mame, amidst all the jubilation surrounding the engagement of little Patrick Dennis’s aunt to Beau Burnside, Patrick softly sings a bit of his love song to her: “And if someday another beau comes along, determined to take my place…” Then he finds himself unable to continue. It’s tremendously moving.


Of course, there is the possibility that some or all of these songs or elements were indeed recorded. After all, there was a time when we didn’t think that “One More Kiss” (Follies), “Sleep-Tite” (The Pajama Game), “Only a Moment Ago” (No, No, Nanette), or “I Have Written a Play” (On the Twentieth Century) had been set down in the studio, but they were and they all eventually emerged. So perhaps my favorites are sitting in the vaults, just waiting for an enterprising executive or interested party who’ll put them out there.

Then there are those little snippets of dialogue that I wish had been recorded. Most of them are missing from Columbia recordings, because Goddard Lieberson, the head honcho at that label during the Golden Age of Cast Albums, didn’t like songs to be introduced or interrupted by speech. So we have neither that nice exchange between Arthur and Guenevere in the middle of the title song of Camelot nor the charming dialogue between Jeff Moss and Melisande Scott — whoops, Ella Peterson — in “Just in Time” on the Bells Are Ringing album. But the spoken lines I miss most were those not found on the original cast recording of 42nd Street, when Julian Marsh tells Peggy Sawyer that the “most glorious words in the English language” are “musical comedy.” Bless the revival cast album for including this little speech, but I still wish it had been recorded as spoken by Jerry Orbach.

So, those are mine. What are yours? When I asked my buddies Marc Miller and Matthew Murray what they’d like, the former said the extra songs from Inside U.S.A., the latter mentioned “Black Bottom” from the Michael John LaChiusa version of The Wild Party, and both wanted “The Joust” from Camelot. Do write and tell me what you’ve most missed on cast albums — or, in other words, what cuts you’re sorry didn’t make the cut

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]