What made Youmans so successful, initially, was his melodic talent. His early songs were built on incredibly catchy — and remarkably brief — phrases. Like "Tea for Two," in which the same four-note figure is repeated again and again. (Consider the lyric: "Picture you u-/pon my knee just/tea for two and/ two for tea." That's four repetitions, and it goes on like that.) "I Want to Be Happy," also from Nanette, is based on another brief — but tuneful — phrase. Kern and Hammerstein wrote Show Boat in 1927. This had a profound effect on Youmans, both theatrically and musically. He suddenly changed his course from light and breezy musical comedies to serious musical drama. This resulted in three lugubrious failures. Rainbow, in 1928, was a tale of goldminers and fallen women and murder clearly patterned after Show Boat (with book, lyrics, and direction by Hammerstein). Great Day!, in 1929, was "a musical play of the Southland." Like Rainbow, it collapsed after four weeks. Through the Years, in 1932, shuttered after only two-and-a-half weeks. Based on the 1919 melodrama Smiling Through, it was an overproduced affair about a man who keeps the memory of his murdered bride alive in his heart. (World War One audiences were moved by the message that love endures long past death; Depression audiences apparently had bigger things to worry about.) Youmans — who saw fit to produce both Great Day! and Through the Years — was financially wrecked by the experience. His health was shot, too; in 1933 he was forced into retirement by tuberculosis, and spent much of his time in sanitariums until his death in 1946. Youmans' active career lasted only a dozen years; he left about one hundred published songs, twenty of which range from very good to brilliant.

If these three serious musicals destroyed Youmans's career, they also inspired him to significantly alter his musical style — resulting in some of the greatest theatre songs of the era, including "More Than You Know," "Without a Song," "Time on My Hands," and "Through the Years." Songs that — in the long lines and rich harmonies — are the exact opposite of his early two-step hits. Through the Years is remembered only for its title song and a second standard, "Drums in My Heart." ps classics [sic] has seen fit to unearth and reconstruct this long-lost musical, with highly impressive results.

Tommy Krasker has long been one of Broadway's top musicologists, and he has become one of the top record producers in the field. (This is the third consecutive ON THE RECORD column with a Krasker recording.) Conductor Aaron Gandy is our number one Youmans expert; he has mounted concert versions of both Rainbow and Great Day! in the last few years. As a Youmans fan, I was somewhat apprehensive when I heard that they were recording Through the Years — would the unknown material make Youmans sound bad? It turns out that Krasker and Gandy knew what they were doing in selecting this project. The score is somewhat odd, jumping back and forth between Youmans' later style (as in the title song and "You're Everywhere") and earlier, peppier melodies (like "Kinda Like You," one of those catchy syncopated tunes that gets lodged in your memory). This CD of Through the Years is unquestionably an important addition for people interested in the evolution of dramatic musical theatre.

As is typical with the albums Krasker has done for Nonesuch and ps classics, the singing and orchestral playing is top-notch. Soprano Heidi Grant Murphy does a wonderful job in the leading role, with an especially moving rendition of that remarkable title song. An habituι of the major opera houses of the world, she is quite a catch for a lowly cast album of a seventy-year-old Broadway flop. (Murphy sang Johanna in the New York Philharmonic's Sweeney Todd. Krasker, who produced that cast album, invited Murphy to this project.) Philip Chaffin plays the romantic lead, and does especially well on "Drums in My Heart." Brent Barrett brings his customarily strong presence to his songs. The juvenile and ingenue songs are charmingly performed by Hunter Foster and Jennifer Cody, the husband-and-wife team that is now among the delights of Urinetown. Gandy has restored the score, reducing the original orchestrations (by Howard Jackson, Domenico Savino, and Deems Taylor) for a twelve-piece chamber orchestra. The music sounds lovely, probably far more so than it did in the cavernous Manhattan Theatre back in 1932. (That was Hammerstein's Theatre after Arthur Hammerstein went bankrupt, now the home of David Letterman.) So it's an unexpected pleasure to finally have Through the Years on the CD shelf.

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