Absolutely Forbidden Broadway
So, did you get the 1962 London cast album of Sail Away on Fynsworth Alley? It’s more fascinating than most London-from-Broadway discs because the orchestrations (by Wally Stott) are different from the ones (by Irwin Kostal) heard on the 1961 Broadway cast album. David Holliday, as the romantic lead, sings much better than his Broadway counterpart (James Hurst). But the real asset is that Elaine Stritch isn’t censored in her eleven o’clock number — one of Broadway’s best — “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?” On the Broadway cast album, she sings that tourists “will see Pompeii on the only day when it’s up to its…” and then a big trumpet blast interrupts her before she continues with “…in molten lava.”
The missing word, of course, is “ass” — but it’s not missing from the London recording. Either things changed radically in the eight months since Sail Away had been recorded in the U.S. or else the British were simply more permissive than American back then. I’ll bet it was the latter. On the other hand, in both the London and Broadway cast albums of Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, Anthony Newley’s Littlechap sings, “I didn’t know me elbow from me…ask anyone” in a subtle way to avoid saying the nasty word. Not until the 1978 revival cast album does Littlechap, via Sammy Davis, come right out and say that he didn’t know his elbow from his ass.
“Ass” doesn’t show up on the 1964 cast album of Davis’s previous show, Golden Boy — but that, too, wasn’t the work of a censor. In “Don’t Forget 127th Street,” as the residents of Harlem mock their turf, a couple of kids sing: “Don’t forget our glorious P.S. 42 with the 90 kids in ev’ry class. Radiators full of ice all winter through; man, oh, man, you really freeze your — mmmh,” we then hear. But that was exactly lyricist Lee Adams’ intention. He thought it’d be fun if Davis placed his hand over the lad’s mouth just in time.
Considering that “ass” was once a problem, it’s interesting to see how more profane words were once handled on cast albums. When Kapp recorded the score of Man of La Mancha in 1965, the powers-that-be censored the song “Aldonza” in two separate cases. First, “Of all the cruel bastards…” became “Of all the cruel devils…” Then the last two lines, “So please torture me now with your sweet ‘Dulcineas’ no more! I am no one, I’m nothing! I’m only Aldonza the whore!” were changed to, “So don’t reach out to me when your sweet ‘Dulcinea’ you call. I am only Aldonza! I’m no one, I’m nothing at all!”
If “bastards” was verboten on a 1965 cast album, I don’t have to tell you that it wouldn’t show up on a 1951 record. In “Meet Miss Blendo” in Top Banana, Phil Silvers said “If this doesn’t work, you bastards are out of a job” only on stage. On the cast album, “creeps” were threatened with unemployment. And of course on the original 1945 cast album of Carousel, Billy Bigelow swears — or, rather, doesn’t swear — that “no fat-bottomed, flabby-faced, pot-bellied, baggy-eyed bully will boss him around.” (“Bully” was substituted for the other “b” word.) But Billy does sing “I feel that I’m entitled to a hell of a show” in “The Highest Judge of All” on that same Decca cast album, and this might just be the first time that naughty word was put on a disc.
“Bastard” did make it onto a 1963 original cast album — except that it wasn’t a musical. Columbia guru Goddard Lieberson recorded Edward Albee’s controversial Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on four discs that were full of four-letter words. But here’s the irony: In the middle of the first act, after George infuriates Martha, we hear “You bastard!” on the disc but, in the theater, Martha actually said “You prick!” That’s where Lieberson drew the line. (He drew another one in 1956 on the Most Happy Fella album when he had Susan Johnson’s “son-of-a-bitch” in “Ooh, My Feet” interrupted by a gasp of pain.)
I learned about censorship on cast albums on my first very trip to the theater. Months before I saw My Fair Lady on Broadway, I’d been intently listening to the cast album and tapping my foot to the coda of Alfred P. Doolittle’s second song, in which the chorus concluded, “Be sure and get him to the church on time!” But on that (heavenly) July 26, 1961 afternoon at the Hellinger, I heard everyone singing, “For God’s sake, get him to the church on time.” And I nodded my 15-year old head in understanding that “for God’s sake” just wasn’t fit for polite company.
The following year, when I caught a Boston tryout performance of I Can Get It for You Wholesale, I heard Elliott Gould tell me “The Way Things Are”: “Never let your heart start bleeding or your conscience itch. You’ll know that you’re succeeding when you’re called a son-of-a-bitch.” When the cast album came out about a month later, the first thing I did after playing “Miss Marmelstein” (gee, that newcomer Barbra Streisand was just as good on the record as she had been in the theater!) was to check and see if Gould’s song had been softened. Indeed it had: “Never let your heart start bleeding or your conscience reel. You’ll know that you’re succeeding when you’re called all kinds of a heel.” Lieberson hadn’t changed his mind about the “S.O.B.” expression in the six years since The Most Happy Fella. (Things weren’t any different at RCA Victor, for its 1957 cast album of New Girl in Town didn’t have Gwen Verdon complain about “those vicious sons of bitches on the farm” as she did on-stage but, instead, had her ruing her “lecherous, treacherous cousins.”
A fascinating aspect of revival cast albums that were made many years after the original casters is hearing how the censorship was relaxed. As fate would have it, I got the 1960 revival cast disc of Finian’s Rainbow many years before I got the 1947 recording. So I’d become accustomed to hearing Sharon sing about “this hellish condish” in “Something Sort of Grandish,” and was surprised when I later learned that it was “swellish condish” on the original disc. And while I greatly prefer the 1949 cast album of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Carol Channing to the 1995 revival caster with KT Sullivan, I do appreciate that the latter recording offers a fuller version of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Channing didn’t get to record the following: “Some men buy, and some just sigh that to make you their bride they intend. But buyers or sighers, they’re such goddamned liars.” Sullivan did.
Frank lyrics started being recorded, of course, thanks to Hair, the musical that fittingly urged “the mind’s true liberation.” Granted, the 1968 original Broadway cast album is quite frank — “All the songs in this album have been recorded complete and unexpurgated as they are performed on the Broadway stage,” the back cover proudly proclaimed — but even the original Off-Broadway cast album, released seven months earlier in November 1967, offered the previously forbidden “tits” and “ass” (in
“Ain’t Got No”) eight years before A Chorus Line would give them to us.
Ironically enough, the first profanity to be heard on both the Off-Broadway and Broadway cast albums of Hair — “damn” — is uttered not by a hippie, as you’d expect, but by an adult (“What makes you so damn superior?”) “Damn” also shows up in 1970 on the cast album of Applause as Penny Fuller’s Eve Harrington, remembering her stern and uncaring father, growls “Damn you, Daddy!” But a demo recording that I have, on which Charles Strouse sings the score, shows that what Lee Adams originally wrote was “Screw you, Daddy!”
I could be wrong about this, but I do believe the first “damn” to be heard on a cast album was on an RCA disc — its recording of Call Me Madam. What’s interesting is that, while the label was free with that word, it did shy away from recording “goddamn.” In How to Succeed‘s “Love from a Heart of Gold,” after J.B. Biggley proclaims that he’s sentimental, Hedy La Rue agrees, “Damn it, so am I” on the disc instead of the “Goddammit, so am I” she brayed on stage in the 1961 show. Even seven years later, when the label recorded Your Own Thing — and this was months after the Off-Broadway Hair, mind you — Sebastian’s line “Then, goddammit, I’ll hum” was amended to “Then I’ll hum.”
Hey, say what you will about the quality of Whoop-up, but when MGM recorded the notorious flop way back in 1958, it left “goddamn” in both “Flattery” and “Men.” Maybe the company didn’t worry about the cuss words because it knew by the time it recorded the album, after the show’s reviews came out, that few people would be buying it.
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]
