Theater News

Hail Carmen, Full of Grace

A long out-of-print studio recording of Carmen Jones starring Grace Bumbry gets a CD release courtesy of DRG.

Just when you were thinking that almost every significant musical theater recording of the past has already been transferred to CD, along comes another one that you had practically forgotten about. Such is the case with the London studio recording of Carmen Jones that stars the great operatic mezzo Grace Bumbry — originally released in 1962, according to DRG’s new CD reissue, or in 1967, according to the usually reliable database www.eur.com. (Consider that DRG gets the spelling of featured singer Elisabeth Welch’s name wrong as you try to decide the correct release date.)

Oddly enough, this relatively obscure recording was the one that introduced me to Carmen Jones when, some time in the early ’70s, I borrowed the Heliodor LP from the St. George Library on Staten Island. It wasn’t till years later that I got my hands on the original Broadway cast album (starring Muriel Smith, Luther Saxon, Carlotta Franzell, and Glenn Bryant) and the soundtrack recording of the 1954 film version (with Marilyn Horne and Le Vern Hutcherson dubbing the singing of Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte). Each of these has its strengths and weaknesses, but the Bumbry version is highly competitive in terms of performance and sound quality.

Carmen Jones is Oscar Hammerstein II’s Broadway musical adaptation of Georges Bizet’s enormously popular opera Carmen, re-set in a Southern American town during World War II rather than in Seville, Spain in the 1820s and written for an all-black cast. The show opened at the Broadway Theatre on December 2, 1943 in a production by Billy Rose and ran for 502 performances; the film version, directed by Otto Preminger, starred Dandridge and Belafonte as Carmen and Joe, with Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll, and Brock Peters in featured roles.

Aside from the participation of the golden-voiced Bumbry, who would go on to become one of the world’s major opera stars, the London studio album is noteworthy as the only stereo recording of Carmen Jones with a full orchestra. The original Broadway cast album is, of course, in mono. The music for the movie version was recorded in stereo and may be heard that way on DVD, but since the soundtrack album was prepared before the stereo LP era, it’s also in mono. (I believe it’s currently out of print). And though a 1991 London cast recording is in fine, modern stereo, the strong singers — including Wilhelmenia Fernandez, Damon Evans, and Gregg Baker — are accompanied by a severely reduced orchestra.

In listening to the London studio cast recording, one should bear in mind that it dates from a time when it was very difficult to find a full cast of trained black opera singers. (Imagine the even greater challenges faced by those who put together Carmen Jones on Broadway in 1943 and, for that matter, the original Porgy and Bess in 1935.) Heard in this light, the performances of George Webb as Joe, Ena Babb as Cindy Lou, and Thomas Baptiste as Husky Miller are especially impressive, even if the non-American accents of Webb and Baptise are somewhat distracting. Bumbry is a phenomenal Carmen Jones, managing to sound spontaneous and unaffected even while retaining the sumptuous vocal tone that is her trademark. And it’s a treat to hear the aforementioned Elisabeth Welch, who just recently died at age 99, having a ball in “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum” and in the “Whizzin’ Away Along the Track” ensemble.

Grace Bumbry
Grace Bumbry

Though Bizet’s Carmen orchestrations were adapted and reduced for Carmen Jones by the great Robert Russell Bennett, they retain almost all of the beauty and power of the originals. One of the major plusses of the Bumbry recording is that these orchestrations are captured in excellent stereo sound as played by a full complement of musicians under the talented conductor Kenneth Alwyn. (The recording credits “the New World Show Orchestra,” and “the Mike Sammes Singers” as the chorus.)

Carmen Jones is rarely revived, probably because Hammerstein’s attempt to recreate in writing the sounds of black American English strikes some contemporary ears as naïve and/or offensive. Present-day sensibilities notwithstanding, reissues of Carmen Jones recordings have retained the song titles as originally printed — e.g., “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum” and “Dis Flower.” This goes for the Bumbry album, which is by no means a complete recording of the score; among the many missing sections are the opening chorus and scene (“Send Along Anudder Load”), the children’s chorus “Lift ’em Up an’ Put ’em Down,” and the final chorus exalting Husky Miller (“‘Dat’s Our Man”). Also, for some strange reason, the songs that are included aren’t tracked in the order in which they appear in the show. For example, Bumbry is first heard in “Dere’s a Café on De Corner” (the equivalent of Bizet’s “Seguedilla”) rather than in her actual first number, “Dat’s Love” (Hammerstein’s version of Bizet’s “Habañera”).

It should be noted that other recordings of Carmen Jones preserve sections of the score that are not to be found here; for example, the rousing “Dat’s Our Man” chorus is heard in full on the original cast album, and the opening musical scene is on the film soundtrack disc even though it’s not in the movie itself. (I do love that opening scene, particularly the part where Cindy Lou sings the following to a group of horny soldiers: “I’m a chick that likes one rooster / Never mess around with two / That is why I must refuseter / Be more than just polite to you.” Later, she addresses one ardent admirer with the following: “I like your eyes / Your teeth are white and snowy / But when it comes to teeth and eyes / There ain’t no flies on Joey-oey!”)

As to the quality of the singing on the various recordings, all of the Carmens are terrific in their own way, while the best of the Joes is the man who created the part on Broadway: Luther Saxon. The preferred Cindy Lou is Olga James on the film soundtrack. (She and Pearl Bailey are the only two on-screen performers who do their own singing.) But, overall, the Grace Bumbry Carmen Jones is sure to delight fans of this unique musical theater piece.

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[Ed. Note: To access Marc Miller’s TheaterMania review of Decca Broadway’s recent re-release of the original Broadway cast recording of Carmen Jones, click here.]