*

WHERE'S CHARLEY? [Must Close Saturday MCSR 3044]
Back in the glory days of the musical theatre, any number of Hollywood hitwriters trekked east to prove themselves on Broadway. A song is a song after all, they reasoned; so what's the big deal? The big deal, it turned out, is that once you give your song to a character to sing, all bets are off. Harry Warren and Jimmy Van Heusen, for example, could turn out hits by the handful in Hollywood, but back East it was no go. Even the great Johnny Mercer was never quite able to buck the trend, to his everlasting disappointment. There was a major exception to the rule. (Two, actually; but we'll get to the second in a moment.) Nobody expected much when Frank Loesser came along in 1948 with a musicalization of the old English farce, Charley's Aunt. Coming from first-time producers transplanted from Hollywood, the enterprise had a tired look to it. The wise and knowing director George Abbott gave it a suitable sheen, but Where's Charley? was rather poorly reviewed. It managed to find an audience, boosted by the performance of comedic dancer Ray Bolger, and wound up with an impressive run of 792-performances.

The surprise of Where's Charley?, though, was the score. Here was a talented, if perhaps overly clever, lyricist; he had a string of songhits, beginning with the atmospheric "The Moon of Manakoora" (from "The Hurricane") and continuing with such gems as "Heart and Soul" (with Hoagy Carmichael), "The Lady's in Love with You" (with Burton Lane), "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (with Arthur Schwartz), and "I Don't Want to Walk Without You" (with Jule Styne). Which indicated that while the man didn't write tunes, he sure knew how to pick 'em. He started writing music in the Army, when good composers were not easily at hand, and came up with some wartime hits (like "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" and "What Do You Do in the Infantry?"). Before he turned to Where's Charley?, in fact, he wrote an Oscar-winner, "Baby It's Cold Outside"; but when Loesser reached Broadway the song had only been heard at parties, performed by the composer and his then-wife. It wasn't placed in a film until 1949, in "Neptune's Daughter," and Frank didn't pick up the resulting Oscar until the spring of 1950.

So not too much was to be expected when Mr. Bolger and Mr. Abbott ushered Where's Charley? into the St. James on Oct. 11, 1948. As it turned out, the farce musical was that playhouse's main tenant between Oklahoma! and The King and I. The score had one major hit, the felicitous song-and-dance tune "Once in Love with Amy." A second song which got a good deal of play was the contrapuntal duet "Make a Miracle." This one is a great charmer, with the Victorian-era star and his girl looking forward to their future—although he sees domestic bliss while she is talking about the wonders of the 20th century. This sets Frank-the-lyricist slyly rhyming about horseless carriages that fly and breakfast cereals that explode. (Loesser's two-part device gained greater popularity in 1949 with — yes, "Baby, It's Cold Outside." And in 1950, Irving Berlin threw "You're Just in Love" in to pick up the second act of Call Me Madam, possibly at the suggestion of director Abbott who wanted a showstopper and knew how well "Make a Miracle" had played.)

All in all, this is a nifty and impressive score from a first-time visitor to Broadway — which might in part be why Frank personally championed such first-time musicals as The Pajama Game, The Music Man, and 1776. And one which perfectly positioned the composer-lyricist to write his next musical, Guys and Dolls, in 1950. Even so, poor Where's Charley? has always been relatively anonymous among the hit musicals of its time. The reasons were twofold. There was a musicians strike, preventing a cast recording of the score; and the show was so carefully sculpted around the talents of Bolger — whose wife was billed above the title as associate producer — that he seems to have been all but irreplaceable. Bolger brought the touring production back to the Broadway in 1951 for six weeks, but he was pretty much the one and only Charley. A cut-down 1974 version at the Circle in the Square, was pretty dismal (through no fault of leading man Raul Julia), and the show has been otherwise invisible hereabouts.

All of which serves as a rather lengthy preamble to the CD we here are reviewing. Nine years after Where's Charley? opened on Broadway, the show finally appeared in London. The West End production opened Feb. 20, 1958 at the Palace. Playing the title role was Norman Wisdom, a diminutive movie star with a background in variety and slapstick; not a song-and-dance man by any stretch. Wisdom had a personal following, which allowed the show to achieve a respectable 404-performance run, but he certainly didn't charm the folks in the same manner as Bolger.

Wisdom and company did favor us with a London cast recording, and fortunately so; it does not give us Where's Charley? as performed on Broadway , but at least it is a recording of the score. While the original orchestrations (from Ted Royal, supplemented during the tryout by Hans Spialek and Phil Lang) are lost, the West End group seems to be using a reduced version prepared for stock and amateur release. The charm of the originals come through somewhat, although the recording is not of the highest fidelity. At the same time, the star seems to have his own arrangement and orchestration for "Once in Love with Amy"; certainly, Bolger's crowdpleasing soft-shoe wasn't suitable for Wisdom.

This 45-minute recording has been in and out of print over the years; it was released on CD in America back in 1993, when EMI briefly gave us a series called "West End Angel." Now, Must Close Saturday — which has come to the rescue of dozens of vintage musical theatre recordings — has reissued Where's Charley?, and about time, too. This will allow a whole new generation of musical theatre fans to discover the other hit musical by the brilliant and always-surprising composer of Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella, and How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying.

Must Close Saturday has filled out the brief playing time with the cast recording of Chrysanthemum, the 1958 "melodrama in ragtime" with music by Robb Stewart and book and lyrics by Neville Phillips and Robin Chancellor. This musical, built around Pat Kirkwood — star of the original London production of Wonderful Town — and then-husband Hubert Gregg, was totally unknown to me. Turns out it has pep and snap, in the manner of Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend and Rick Besoyan's Little Mary Sunshine. It does, unfortunately, devolve into tiring triteness; they totally lose me when they take their heroine to that grand old English pub, The Skull and Chopsticks, and start singing songs about Shanghai Lil. But earlier in the score there are some fun spots, with more entendres than you can shake a chopstick at, and I am especially glad to have discovered a jolly good duet called "Is This Love?" — which I fear I will be singing to myself for weeks. Continued...