Theater News

Show Music Roulette

Ready for a round of Show Music Roulette? Choose your weapons carefully!

Fredrik (Jeremy Irons) and Carl-Magnus(Marc Kudisch) in the New York City Operaproduction of A Little Night Music:It would have been wonderful if they'dduked it out with show music cylinders!(Photo © Carol Rosegg)
Fredrik (Jeremy Irons) and Carl-Magnus
(Marc Kudisch) in the New York City Opera
production of A Little Night Music:
It would have been wonderful if they’d
duked it out with show music cylinders!
(Photo © Carol Rosegg)

I had a half-hour or so to kill before heading out to see The Madwoman of Chaillot at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (which turned out to be pretty good, by the way; I predict good futures for Lindsey Anderson, Meghan Jones, Garrison Lowe, Fiona Macys, and Darcie Young). Before I left, I decided to play a game of Show Music Roulette.

You are aware of how this great American pastime works, aren’t you? It’s based on Russian Roulette — you know, the “game” that Carl-Magnus and Fredrik play at the end of A Little Night Music. You place one bullet in a revolver, spin the cylinder, put the gun up to your temple, and shoot, hoping that the bullet won’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Well, that’s much too butch for those of us whose only knowledge of guns comes from Annie Get Your Gun. Better for us to play the more benign Show Music Roulette, where you go to your cast album collection, close your eyes, and pick out a CD. You play the first cut from whatever album you happen upon. Then you select a second album and play the second cut. And so forth. What’s wonderful about Show Music Roulette is that you might 1) hear a song you love; 2) hear a song you’ve always disliked but, upon this new hearing, find that you feel differently about it; or 3) happen onto a song you’ve never heard before and discover that you like it.

All right, there is a fourth option: that you’ll hate what you hear for the first time and/or the umpteenth time. But that’s the risk you take when you play Show Music Roulette. When you reach a cut that’s unbearable to hear, the game officially ends.

Now, I know that many who play Show Music Roulette spin themselves around before they choose; but, when you’re my age, you worry terribly about falling over and breaking a hip. So I just close my eyes and run my forefinger back and forth over the albums from left to right, then back again, before abruptly stopping at one. So, on this occasion, I headed to the shelf that runs from The Adventures of Maya the Bee to Bells Are Ringing. (At times like these, I’m glad that Ankles Aweigh isn’t on CD!) And the winner was…the London cast album of The Baker’s Wife.

Ah! I was off to a good start, because the first song on that album is the lovely, swirling waltz “Chanson.” I recently did a sit-down at NYU with Stephen Schwartz and mentioned to him that those of us who were following show music in the ’70s had our severe doubts that he — the composer-lyricist of the rock-oriented Godspell, Pippin, and The Magic Show — was the right man to compose a musical set in France in the 1930s. He was highly offended that we wouldn’t think he could stretch himself, but I think we all had a point. Needless to say, though, Schwartz showed us who was boss with this lovely score, and I recalled that fact as the CD reached the lyric, “Now your whole life is different; now your whole life is new.” Schwartz demonstrated that he was capable of doing something new, and I’m rooting for his new show, Wicked, to be a big hit when it opens soon on Broadway.

I moved right along to the shelf that goes from Ben Franklin in Paris to the 1993 London cast album of Carousel. Aha! I chose the recent, two-disc set of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the legendary 1966 disaster. Luckily, the second cut was one of the better songs, “I’ve Got a Penny,” which I knew well even before this studio cast album was released a few years ago. That’s because RCA Victor, which had the rights to record the original cast album with stars Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain, had many of the label’s artists record selections from the sure-fire hit, and these were released in advance of the scheduled Broadway opening. I still have Lana Cantrell singing both the aforementioned “I’ve Got a Penny” and the song that became the title tune — after Frankie Randall, a Sinatra sound-alike, had recorded “Holly Golightly,” the original title song.

Don’t know who they are? Well maybe you’ve heard of Vic Damone, who recorded “Ciao, Compare,” and John Gary, who recorded “You’ve Never Kissed Her.” These cuts — and my memory of seeing the show in Boston — kept them alive. As you may have heard, the much-panned musical did come in and started playing previews at the Majestic; but David Merrick thought the show stunk so much that, in a rare act of nobility, he closed the thing and returned the million-dollar-plus advance to those theatergoers who had mail-ordered months earlier. But in retrospect, considering how nice the studio cast album of Breakfast at Tiffany’s turned out, I wish Merrick had let the show open so that RCA could have recorded the album. Wouldn’t you like to have heard Mary Tyler Moore sing a Broadway score?

I switched to the shelf that runs from Pins and Needles to The Scarlet Pimpernel. (You don’t have to go alphabetically in Show Music Roulette. It’s your choice.) I zipped my finger across the shelf and, where she stopped, nobody knew except me: It was The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd (1965). The third cut on that album is “A Wonderful Day Like Today.” I listened to Cyril Ritchard sing, “On a wonderful day like today / When the sky is as big as a yellow balloon / Even the sparrows are singing in tune.” Then I recalled that co-star Anthony Newley immediately followed this with a lyric sung in a minor key: “On a mis’rable day like today / When the sun is as cold as an elephant’s nose / One half of me’s freezin’, the other half’s froze.” That’s not on the album, so how was I aware of it? Because Roar — Smell (as we chummily called it) was one of the rare cast albums to be released during its tryout period, before it arrived on Broadway. By the time the show landed in Boston in April of 1965, I had incessantly listened to and memorized the heavenly disc. Thus, whenever the show differed from the album, I was very much aware of it.

Next, I moved to the shelf that begins with Scarlett — better known as Gone with the Wind in Japan — to Sophisticated Ladies. I stopped at Songs for a New World, the revue that put Jason Robert Brown on the map. Oh, was I going to hear “Just One Step”? No — that’s track three, and I was on my fourth round of Show Music Roulette. So it was “I’m Not Afraid of Anything,” a lovely yet powerful song about a wife and mother who’s moving on. But “Just One Step” — in which merchant Murray’s wife threatens to commit suicide because he won’t give her a fur coat — is one of the greatest pieces of special material I’ve ever heard. Brown characterized the woman so completely that I’ll bet this was the song that convinced Hal Prince to give him Parade.

Then I went to the shelf that runs from Mame to Nick & Nora and picked the original Broadway cast album of Meet Me in St. Louis. A second later, I realized it was a good time to head out to see The Madwoman of Chaillot.

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