The Dialogue That Makes Them Dance
A couple of weeks ago, I noted that I missed hearing something on the cast album of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: the sequence where we’re told what happened to the characters many years later. Shari Fogler wrote in to ask how anyone could expect the sequence to be on the disc, since the sequence is primarly dialogue. Of course, we would expect someone named Fogler to go to bat for the album — and yes, indeed, it’s her Tony-winning son who’s in the musical.
But the good Ms. Fogler has a point. We first and foremost think of cast albums as sporting sung words, not spoken ones. Still, when I asked you readers out there what you most missed on cast albums, I was fascinated that many of you cited non-musical moments. Aviva Rothschild wrote, “You know what I miss from nearly all recordings? The dialogue. Why can’t there be more full recordings like The Most Happy Fella? I’d be pleased to spend the money for those I’d love to hear songs in context, and I’d really love to hear the work of actors who had limited or no exposure on a disc because they didn’t sing much. Like Jack Cassidy in She Loves Me; the CD doesn’t give one a sense of why his performance won the show’s only Tony.”
That’s another good point. Why did Thomas Mitchell win the Tony for Hazel Flagg? Damned if we can tell from the RCA Victor cast album (recently re-released by Sepia). Tony Janicki wrote in to say he wants to know. Brigadude mentioned that he’d like to hear what Paul Ford had to say in Whoop-Up, given that he didn’t have any songs to sing, and also mentioned Robert Morse’s performance in Say, Darling — some of which RCA Victor did indeed record but failed to release on the album.
More than two dozen people wrote in to say that they wish the original Carousel cast album contained the entire “bench scene.” If Decca had done it that way in 1945, when the 78 rpm (revolutions per minute) disc was the state-of-the-art technology, the company would have had to put the sequence on two sides of one record and listeners would have had to flip the disc over to hear the second half. So the limits of early technology may well be one reason why we didn’t get more dialogue on cast albums produced in the 78-era, from 1943 to 1948. But even after the so-called long-playing record (LP) emerged, dialogue was often omitted — though not solely for reasons of space. Wrote LVPBlues, “I wish that censorship didn’t abound in the days of yore and that we could hear Pat Morison calling Alfred Drake a ‘bastard’ in the Act I finale on the original cast album of Kiss Me, Kate. I don’t own the stereo album that Capitol did years later, but I doubt that it has it, either.” (Correct; the entire number is absent from both recordings.) Robert LoBiando said that he wants dialogue from the same show, but he had a much more genteel request: “I want to hear the tough guys say ‘Aw, kiss her!’ ”
Even LP recordings made as late as 1970 didn’t include all that much dialogue. Michael Ladenson mourns the loss of the sermon that opened Purlie — “a sequence that is as important to that show as many of the numbers,” he wrote. Others wished those LPs would have included dialogue that opened, closed, or permeated musical moments. LVPBlues wrote, “On the Twentieth Century is a wonderful album but I wish they had recorded ‘The Indian Maiden’s Lament,’ which I find a riot. I know its very dialogue heavy, but it works well enough to come off as an aural listen.”
Peter Saxe wants Fredrick’s lead-in to “Send in the Clowns” in A Little Night Music “because the scene surrounding this song is just so beautiful.” He also mentioned “The Waltz from Nine” with the underscored dialogue, “because it’s both funny and moving. I think they have a take of this one,” he wrote, without revealing his source. “It would have made a nice alternate cut along with the other bonuses.”
Now, with the increased storage capacity of CDs, you’d think that most everyone’s dialogue needs would be satisfied. Yet Jason Flum wrote, “I’ve never understood why the eulogies for Angel on the Rent CD weren’t included. No, it’s not really music, but it would have made the recording complete. Instead of giving us the Stevie Wonder ‘Seasons of Love,’ which really isn’t all that different from the version presented at the top of Act II, I would rather have had that dialogue.”
Robert LoBiondo added, “I miss quite a bit of dialogue in The Light in the Piazza but particularly the dialogue between Margaret and Clara before ‘Fable.’ ” Mameleh opined that, “For all the times I saw The Boy from Oz, I do wish the producers had seen fit to include the admittedly dialogue-heavy ‘Sure Thing, Baby.’ It nicely bridges the gap between the struggling and the star-on-the-rise Peter Allen.” Meanwhile, Theaterbop had the most modest request: “In Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, I would have liked Joanna Gleason’s one-liner in the Act I finale.”
And here’s the thing: We might have had not only the recent ones, but the antique ones, too, according to Rob Morrison. “Perhaps one of recording history’s biggest blunders is that the technology behind the long-playing record had been in existence for more than 20 years before it was fully commercially exploited in 1948. The 33-1/3 rpm was the standard recording speed adopted for the Vitaphone ‘Sound-on-Disc’ system used by the early talking pictures in the late 1920s, before it was superseded by the optical sound-on-film systems of the early ’30s. The early radio transcription recordings of the 1930s and 1940s also utilized a speed of 33-1/3 rpm to allow up to 20 minutes of playing time per record side for pre-recorded radio programs.
“RCA Victor, in fact, released the very first long-playing records in the U.S record market as far back as 1931,” Morrison continues. “Among the first titles issued by the company were orchestral selections and song highlights of The Band Wagon, featuring original stars Fred and Adele Astaire, with 10 minutes on each side. Needless to say, the early years of the Depression were not an opportune time for Victor to expect the general public to not only abandon the long-favored 78 rpm format but also to buy expensive new record players that ran at the required rpm’s to play the new LPs, so the venture soon floundered. It was not until the prosperous post-war years of the late 1940s, when Columbia Records revived the format, that it took off commercially. But just think of all the musical theater that could have been preserved in more complete form had the LP taken off 20 years earlier.”
Still, in the responses I got — a much larger number than usual, by the way — many more people wrote in to say what songs, reprises, and dance music they’d love to hear on cast albums. I’m cataloguing their opinions, and you’ll see some of them in the near-future.
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]
