The Revolving Stage

THEY SHALL HAVE MUSIC

by JOHN M. CONLY

JOHN M. CONLY is a former New York and Washington newspaperman, now on the staff of High Fidelity Magazine. “ They Shall Hare Music" is a quarterly feature in the Atlantic.

ONE of the headiest, most heetic and hazardous vocations known to civilized man is pursued on Manhattan Island in the three square miles encompassed by 59th Street on the north, 40th on the south, Eighth Avenue on the west, and Sixth on the east. This activity is variously known as “the American theatre” or “show business,” depending on who is talking. It produces such varied fare as plain-clothes delivery of G. B. Shaw’s more philosophical dramas and the bare-skinned depiction of Michael Todd’s cruder daydreams. There is nothing else like it on the North American continent.

The people involved in this calling are nearly all neurotic, like most useful twentieth-century human beings. The more affluent among them spend a good deal of time and money having their brains bubbled psychotherapeutically. The less affluent adjust without medical assistance to fourteenhour working days and the constant prospect of starvation. From star and playwright to bit player and apprentice designer, they live sacrificially. Gertrude Lawrence sang and danced three days as Anna in the musical comedy The King and I while an agonizing disease destroyed her; the fourth day she went to a hospital and, only a few days later, she died as an understudy played the role. These people believe in their medium, the living stage, and it is well for the rest of us that they do.

The motion picture and the television camera cannot serve as substitutes for the stage, simply because they roach too large a public. Even Shaw and Shakespeare, unadulterated, are too raw for seven-year-old Bobbie, let alone the mordant, ribald wit of Lorenz Hart or Tennessee W illiams. Yet it is a good thing for the thinking adult to plumb, occasionally, tho futility of a soul like Salesman Willy Loman’s or to shudder and giggle at the doings of a parcel of poisonous pals like Joey’s. At least a million persons come every year to New York, from Caribou, Maine, El Centro, California, and points between to pay $1.85 or $7.70 for a sample of the Broadway stage. Others, not too numerous, have it brought to them by road companies. As for the rest, if they want a taste, they must get it by phonograph turntable.

Luckily for them there lived, in the not too remote past, a man named Jack Kapp. Kapp, who died in 1949, was president of Decca Records. It occurred to him, in the 1930s, that much of the content and feeling of many a Broadway show could be captured on disks, and thus conveyed to stage-struck Americans unable to get to New York, or to theatergoers anxious to retain some of the thrill of performances they had seen.

Kapp’s first venture does not seem very risky now, but it did then, twelve years ago. He began with an originalcast selection of the songs in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess — not only the songs which had been extracted and promoted as hits, but the whole list, “Burial Song” and all. The album ran to four 12-inch records and spoiled five dollars. There was considerable doubt as to whether it would sell at all.

It did, although not in quantities likely to intoxicate anyone with the implications. The clinching proof of the Kapp theory was to come a little later, with the recording of a show initially entitled Away We Go. As Louis Untermeyer, poet, editor, and Decca publicist, speculates now, it would be interesting to know how Away We Go would have done under its original title. No one will ever know. Halfway in the course of its preparation, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II changed its name to Oklahoma!

Oklahoma! opened the last night of March, 1943, and it proved to be exactly what a war-worried America wanted most, next to V Day. It ran five years, wore out cast after cast, and spawned endless road companies. Tycoons, society dowagers, and account executives waged silent feuds over tickets. Kapp’s little 10inch, five-record album, complete with program leaflet, swept the nation’s record stores, soon outpacing the single disks of the show’s own hit tunes, “People Will Say We’re in Love” and “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” Pore Jud’s irreverent obsequies were intoned in living rooms from coast to coast; so were the sorrows of Ado Annie, the girl who couldn’t say no, and the salty saga of progress in Kansas City. All records for album sales were broken; Oklahoma! went well over a million and kept on selling. As a matter of fact, having been transcribed to the two new microgroove speeds (quite acceptably) in 1949, Oklahoma! even today rates as a rather crisp sales item.

In those days, Decca’s Kapp had the show-album business all to himself (Columbia had recorded some Shakespeare by Orson Welles and Maurice Evans, but these were prestige jobs) and a rather simple business it was. The recording company dealt directly with the artists. But as the Oklahoma! album’s gross rolled on toward the five-million-dollar mark, it generated ripples of cupidity. In 1947, when Decca emissaries wandered over to investigate the pot of gold at the end of Finian’s Rainbow, they found the claim already staked. The show’s producers had persuaded the singers and actors to sign over their recording rights. The producers, as middlemen, were to get 10 per cent, which, of course, would be added to the cost. Decca, revolted by this invasion of the rights of individual enterprise, not to mention the 10 per cent hike in the ante, refused to play.

Luckily for Finian’s producers, a new customer was in the offing. Columbia, at the astute urgings of its executive vice-president, Goddard Lieberson, paid the tariff, 10 per cent and all, and recorded the show. Finian was no Oklahoma! but it was a fine, flavorsome opus, graced by Ella Logan and “How Are Things in Gloccamora?” It paid its way and then some. Decca was now out of the show-album business and Columbia was in — and it had beginner’s luck. The next year brought the eminently phonographic, naughtily witty Kiss Me Kate, still one of the best show albums extant. But it was soon overshadowed, for shortly thereafter Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! triumph was menaced by the only team which could possibly menace it — Rodgers and Hammerstein. Their offering this time, of course, was a production based on a Pulitzer Prize short-story book by James Michener, called Taies of the South Pacific.

If possible. South Pacific was even more terrific than Oklahoma! both as a show and as a record album. Indeed, owing to a law of physics which prevents two people from occupying the same theater seat at the same time, the album actually earned more than the show for the first year. Tots in knee pants went around caroling their devotion to “Bloody Mary" and trilling the assertion that there is absolutely nothing in this world like the frame of a dame. Sales apparently were completely unaffected by the fact that South Pacific was, technically, an atrocious recording, far inferior to Kiss Me Kate or, in fact, even to the ancient Decca Porgy.

Mortified at the sight of its rival reveling in these triumphs-by-default, Decca at this juncture put its helm hard over and came grimly back into the battle. At the wheel (now that Jack Kapp was gone) was Simon Rady, artist-and-repertory executive. Rady and Goddard Lieberson might be said now to share the title of dean of the show-album business. Whatever they think of each other, both are very, very good.

Rady proved this, for his part, at the time when Decca came back into the field. There was no show on Broadway which evidenced the faintest signs of becoming another Oklahoma! or South Pacific. So, simply to advertise its return to the field, Decca adopted a trio of what Rady describes as “frankly, dogs.” Two of the “dogs” were Texas, Li’l Darlin’ and Arms and the Girl.

The of dog, however, had something, despite its unhandiness on the stage and at the box office, and Rady couldn’t help seeing and feeling it. The result was that, without any commercial justification, he went ahead to make from an unsuccessful stage musical what many record fanciers consider the best show-album ever cut. This was, and is. Lost in the Stars, the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson adaptation of Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Belored Country. It is the only genuine tear-jerker among show albums. Rady was fascinated by it. The “book,” he explains (meaning the dramatic script), was faulty; on the stage the show lacked pace, but the story line, music, and lyrics were powerful. So Rady arranged for some special dialogue, out of the text, to be written as connective tissue for the musical numbers. He ignored the budget and put the stars, Todd Duncan, Inez Matthews, and Herbert Coleman (aged ten), through their songs over and over, until every possible bit of aural imagery had been exploited. It was purely a labor of love. Si Rady knew as well as anyone that a tragic racial-problem play, in musical comedy guise, could never appeal to a wide enough audience to be a smash hit. But the album did, to his great relief, pay its way. And there can be small doubt that many latter-day letters to the Sunday New York Times, fulminating against the while-supremacy policies of South African Premier Daniel Malan, came from addicts to Si Rady’s Lost in the Stars disk. Even in New York 19, not all rewards are monetary.

Jack Kapp’s dream now had come true. A good original-cast album could be counted on to sell somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter million copies. South Pacific and Oklahoma! with their million-copy sales were not representative. It may be worth noting also that neither depends particularly on Broadway appeal, both shows being essentially escapist in flavor, and neither being freighted with much satire or irony. But even the possession of a stable of smaller, solid hits like Carousel or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes became something enviable. A record company sinks about $15,000 into making a show album; if it sells 200,000 copies, at about $5 a copy, it is obvious that the profits are considerable. New companies came into the field. And new angles continued to be thought of.

One of the latter, in its first manifestation, must have solaced Decca for its long-ago trouble over the problem of the producers’ 10 per cent. As was inevitable, a set of producers conceived the idea of getting a record company to help finance a show. The show was Call Me Madam, which was to star Ethel Merman. RCA Victor was prevailed on to invest, naturally having first whack at original-cast album privileges in return. Everything was fine until, at the very last, minute, the show producers found they couldn’t produce Merman, at least for RCA Victor. She was under exclusive contract to Decca, which, wickedly but unsurprisingly, refused to relinquish her. As a result, two albums of Madam came out. Victor offered the original cast, with Dinah Shore substituting for Merman; Decca offered Merman, with Gordon Jenkins’s orchestra and a get-together group of vocalists helping out. Together, these two albums probably didn’t sell as well as a single Mermanoriginal-cast recording would have, but competition is competition. There have been other, subsequent indications that record companies are not particularly talented as angels of forthcoming Broadway shows. Of five shows partially financed in the past two years by record companies, four have folded so rapidly as to preclude publication of a record album, and the remaining one didn’t amount to much. Decca and Columbia, the dominant companies in the field, don’t dabble in this kind of thing. In fact, until a show has opened on Broadway and showed some stamina, they content themselves with an option on the recording rights. One of their rival companies, with indecent eagerness, once recorded a musical comedy during its trial run in the sticks (along Broadway, the term “sticks” does not necessarily refer to places like Caribou or El Centro: it also takes in Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia). The show died in the sticks, never even reaching Broadway, and left the recording company with some very, very surplus records. Safer, more conservative practice is to wait until the show has opened in New York and shown its impact, then record it in the first couple of weeks thereafter. This is, of course, hard on the east. Out of This World was recorded on New Year’s Day; Kiss Me Kate in a weekday session beginning at midnight; New Faces of 1952 on a Sunday.

Long before its opening anywhere, naturally, a show will be scouted by record companies, to determine its possibilities as album content (and as a source of hit songs). The advice of the record-firm executive is often sought by show people, and sometimes given. Si Rady says he usually refrains, restrained by the fact that the show’s backers may have laid out something like a quarter million dollars, whereas his company will stake less than a tenth of this. But he admits such restraint is hard. At heart, he might like to direct a show or help direct one.

So would Goddard Lieberson, and the difference is that he has found a way to do so, without violating the ethical code of show-album men. As executive vice-president of Columbia, he has had considerable latitude in originating projects, and one of them has been the re-creation of Broadway shows of the past, preserving as much as possible of the original at mosphere. This notion has proved much more fruitful than the other major development in the field, the financing of shows by record companies.

Lieberson began cautiously, with a couple of 10-inch LPs featuring Mary Martin in songs from The Bandwagon and Anything Goes, both more than fifteen years old. Then, having got his hand in, he really went to work, the object of his efforts being Pal Joey, a musical contrived in 1940 by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers from a collection of short stories by John O’Hara. Joey had not fared too well on Broadway, not because it wasn’t superbly put together — it was — but because the critics and supporters of musical comedy expected idealism in their fare, and Joey offered none. It was a fair, if brutal, commentary on the current scene, its plot was peopled exclusively by heels, except for a solitary, nitwitted, ingénue. The New York Times’s Brooks Atkinson commented on it, reprovingly: “Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” But Lieberson had liked it.

He therefore sought out the show’s original star, the immensely clever singing actress Vivienne Segal. He couldn’t hire her opposite number, Gene Kelly, who had gone to Hollywood, but he did get another good dancer, Harold Lang, operating on the principle that all dancers, when they try to sing, sound like cheap hoofers, which is what Joey was. He built the rest of the cast with equal care, and he personally directed the recording. It was, incidentally, the first true high-fidelity show album made.

It did not sell on a vast, national scale, but it became popular in the homes of highbrow entrepreneurs, one of whom, sure enough, soon conceived the idea of reviving the show on Broadway. When he did so, most of Lieberson’s principals were in the cast. At this writing, it was still going great guns. The revival stimulated sales of the album anew. It also produced another mild mix-up, for the new producers of Joey had resold the original-cast recording rights, this time to Capitol. Unable to use Vivienne Segal, who had been in the Columbia recording, Capitol substituted Jane Froman, the widely idolized popular singer and plane-crash victim. A somewhat righteous artist, Miss Froman insisted on “cleaning up” some of the Joey lyrics, with results which can be described only as dreadful.

Lieberson scored again, in the same way, with Porgy and Bess, which he remade in toto with many of the original cast, promoting it, in fact, right out of the show-album and into the grand opera classification. A tremendous, white-hot production, it sparked the formation of the Porgy company which went abroad last summer to propagandize the American Way in Europe. He also reproduced in its entirety, with the scintillant aid of Noel Coward and Lily Pons, the former’s quasi-musical-comedy Conversation Piece. No one has yet decided to revive this on Broadway, but it is probably just a question of time, and of whether Noel Coward can be persuaded to play in it.

Some of the Lieberson revivals stand up under their age better than others. Two of his recent ones, for instance, are the Gershwins’ dude-ranch saga, Girl Crazy, and the RodgersHart Babes in Arms, both performed by Mary Martin and supporting singers. The tunes in Girl Crazy remain good but the show as a whole, somehow, seems dated. Babes in Arms, however, is as crisp as the day it was written. Listen, for proof, to Mardi Bayne singing “Way Out West on West End Avenue" or Mary Martin singing “The Lady Is a Tramp" or “Johnny One-Note.”The latter, incidentally, owes much of its effect to the virtuosity of the orchestra Lehman Engel has gathered for these Lieberson productions. Few actual shows ever have had such instrumentalists. Latest of “God’s creations,”as some of Goddard Licberson’s irreverent associates call his revivals, is a remake of (of all things) Oklahoma! complete with built-in connective dialogue and Nelson Eddy in the part of Curly.

Quantitatively, in terms of records in print, Decca and Columbia still have the Broadway show record field almost to themselves. As autumn began, Decca had 23 LP show albums on its lists. Columbia had 19. RCA Victor had 7. Capitol had 3. A small firm, Polymusic, had one — a twodisk set of the production of Shakespeare’s Tempest, with Raymond Massey.

Columbia’s best seller is still South Pacific. Dacca’s now is Frank Loessor’s irresistible Gays and Dolls, probably the most perfect example ever written of what a Broadway show ought to be — itself being, as Loesser subtitled it, a musical fable of Broadway. Capitol’s only show album of any distinction is Top Banana, starring Phil Silvers. RCA Victor, a late starter and not too lucky in the past at show records, came through very strong this year with the rather appealing Wish You Were Here, which is a musical version of Haring Wonderful Time, and Leonard Sillman’s delightful New Faces of 1952. This review, written in part by two of the young singers, Ronny Graham and June Carroll, who also play in it, is the liveliest album since Guys and Dolls. Its musical sketch material, together with the bet ween-numbers byplay, is perfectly suited to records and has been taken down in masterly fashion by RCA Victor’s Hugo Winterhalter. Nearly every minute of it is genuinely and durably funny, top rating going either to a song based on the Lizzie Borden case, entitled “You Can’t Chop Your Papa Up in Massachusetts,” or to “Monotonous.” a long, fantastic boast of amatory conquests, sung by Eartha Kitt, a young exKatharine Dunham dancer with a voice like a concupiscent steamcalliope — it really must be heard to be believed. The album has its moments of very deep-reaching poignancy, too, notably the wedding-anniversary song, “Don’t Fall Asleep.”

New Faces’ only rival as best buy of the early 1952-53 season is something very, very different - Columbia’s two-LP recording of the Don Juan in Hell section of G. B. Shaw’s Man and Superman. Featured in this is the so-called First Drama Quartette, consisting of Charles Laughton, Agnes Moorehead, Charles Boyer, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. The Quartette performed, in New York and across the nation, seated around a table on a stage. With the Shaw words, there is no need for visual frippery. The play could almost have been written for records, as is the ease with most of the nonmusical, serious dramas which have been put on LP. Decca has made three three-disk albums: T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party; Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning; Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, all with original easts, and one single-record condensation: Judith Anderson in Robinson Jeffers’s Medea. Columbia’s most ambitious threerecord set is the Paul Robeson-José Ferrer-It a Hagen othello; its favorite one-record play is the Jean ArthurBoris Karloff version of Peter Pan. Of this whole list, at least three are easily as impressive (if not more so) on records as on the stage, where the meager action, if not very skillfully managed, distracts attention from the all-important spoken word.

Simon Rady estimates that a spoken drama, at best, sells about one quarter as well as a musical play, even a serious musical play like Porgy or Street Scene.

Only a few record buyers think they’ll want to hear The Lady’s Not for Burning more than a couple of times a year, which means that its cost per hearing is rather high. But there is a steady market for serious drama in schools, colleges, highbrow FM radio stations, and, increasingly, public libraries. The burgeoning development of the enthusiasm for highfidelity music reproducing systems in the home also has spurred interest, oddly, in nonmusical plays. This may be partly a product of a hospitality problem. The host in a hi-fi home cannot be prevented, during a party, from turning on his machine. However, no matter what piece of music he picks, some guest will try to talk above it. But Death of a Salesman will fascinate them into silence in jig time and hold them that way for nearly three hours.

Just as the development of microgroove recording and high-fidelity reproduction has made music fanciers of a lot of previously nonmusical Americans, it has also infected a good many nonshowgoers with a consuming interest in Broadway and its incontestable glamour and excitement. Anyone who is, thus far, not so afflicted but anxious to get that way can make a start by visiting a record shop and listening to some of the following selections: —

Todd Duncan singing “Thousands of Miles” in Lost in the Stars; Ted (Sport) Morgan singing “Man’s Best Friend” in Top Banana; Patricia Morison singing “I Hate Men” in Kiss Me Kate; Carol Channing singing “Little Girl from Little Rock” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; the Lyn Murray Singers singing “The Begat” in Finian’s Rainbow; Mary Martin singing “Hoops” in The Bandwagon; Sidney Armus singing “A Social Director” in Wish You Were Here; Jo Hurt singing “Zip!” in Pal Joey; William Tabbert singing “Carefully Taught” in South Pacific; William Redfield singing “They Couldn’t Compare to You” in Out of This World; Vivian Blaine singing “Adelaide’s Lament” in Guys and Dolls; Jean Darling and Jan Clayton singing “Mister Snow” in Carousel; Celeste Holm and Lee Dixon singing “All ‘er Nothin’” in Oklahoma! Take some money with you.