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ON THE RECORD: The New White Christmas and Chicago's Tenth Anniversary Box Set
By Steven Suskin
29 Oct 2006
This week's column discusses the cast album of Irving Berlin's White Christmas and the tenth anniversary special edition recording of the long-running revival of Chicago.
IRVING BERLIN'S WHITE CHRISTMAS [Ghostlight 7915581225]
Theatrical producers have long glanced sideways at The Nutcracker and the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, attractions that draw a built-in audience year-after-year. This sort of thing was attempted in New York with the Alan Menken-Lynn Ahrens A Christmas Carol, which ran seven Thanksgiving-Christmas seasons in the non-Broadway confines of Madison Square Garden. Somewhat successfully, although the attraction was deemed less than top grade and never blossomed into a multi-production annual.
Back in 2000, Paul Blake and his St. Louis Muny mounted a stage adaptation of Irving Berlin's 1954 motion picture "White Christmas." This is the one where a couple of ex-G.I. song-and-dance men find a couple of song-and-dance sisters and join up to do a Christmas show at a holiday inn in (unfortunately) sunny Vermont. Said inn is run by their former general, undergoing hard times. In the end, everybody kisses and sings — well, "White Christmas."
Producer Kevin McCollum (of Rent, Avenue Q, The Drowsy Chaperone and High Fidelity) devised a scheme to develop this stage version of White Christmas into an annual, multi-production, Broadway-caliber holiday attraction. With the addition of director Walter Bobbie, choreographer Randy Skinner and librettist David Ives, the new White Christmas opened at the Curran in San Francisco in November 2004. A successful launch resulted in three seasonal 2005 productions, a San Francisco repeat as well as Los Angeles and Boston companies. Two McCollum-produced productions are opening next month, in Detroit and St. Paul, with others (not produced by McCollum and company) scheduled for the West Coast (Seattle), the East Coast (Florida) and that other coast (Plymouth, England).
The stage White Christmas, which I've not seen, is by all reports a rather grand affair. This is borne out by the new CD, just released by Ghostlight. This is a traditional Broadway musical with the good, old-fashioned Broadway sound; if you enjoy cast albums of the Pajama Game, The Music Man, Mame variety, you are pretty certain to embrace White Christmas.
The songs, of course, are by Mr. All-American-White-Christmas himself, Irving Berlin. The half-dozen used in the film have been supplemented with Berlin tunes from various sources, but unobtrusively so; thankfully, no genius has come along and interpolated "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "God Bless America" or "There's No Business Like Show Business." ("White Christmas" itself was an all-time song hit long before it was chosen to build the motion picture around.) Tuneful song after tuneful song keeps coming along, like a wave on the shore. How deep is the ocean of Berlin melody?
The heroes of the stage White Christmas are the fellows in the music department. Berlin was well aware of the need to have his songs adorned by professional music men, and happy to hire the best; but he kept a stern guard against "creative" contributions. Berlin was the name on the staff paper, and Berlin is what he wanted the audience to hear. The White Christmas team has honored that legacy, giving us a Berlin show that sounds like Berlin himself was in the rehearsal hall.
Orchestrator Larry Blank dresses up the songs and makes them sparkle, threading bubbly fills and delicious counter-melodies throughout; but everything serves to support and enhance the melody. We know we're in good hands early in the overture, when Blank's drummer interrupts the holiday strings and virtually hijacks the band. What we get sounds like a combination of Don Walker's Call Me Madam (1950) and Conrad Salinger's "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) — which is precisely right for Irving Berlin's White Christmas. (Peter Myers provided additional orchestrations, scoring three of the eighteen tracks.) Bruce Pomahac, the in-house music man for the Rodgers, Hammerstein and Berlin estates, provides an unfailingly bright set of dance and vocal arrangements. This is not a revival with pre-existing arrangements, nor was there a composer in attendance; Pomahac and Blank devised the routines for St. Louis and reconfigured them for San Francisco, and they are pretty nifty. Two production numbers alone — "Blue Skies" and "I Love a Piano," both with fabulous dance arrangements — are enough to make you put White Christmas on repeat play. And "Snow" has an especially nice vocal, in the Hugh Martin vein. Musical director Rob Berman leads an energetic and altogether winning reading of the score.
The San Francisco leads — Brian d'Arcy James and Anastasia Barzee as one couple, Jeffrey Denman and Meredith Patterson as the other — recreate their performances. Mr. James, in the Bing Crosby role, does the lion's share of the singing and is thus the standout on the album. The other three do fine as well. Also on hand is the always-welcome Karen Morrow, showing everybody how to sell a song. ("Let Me Sing and I'm Happy" they give her, and Morrow spreads the happiness around.) Morrow, who is all-too-infrequently on stage nowadays, played the St. Louis and Boston engagements. She provides a lift to the CD, naturally, but no lift is necessary.
Everything sounds warm, friendly and wonderful in an all-American, Irving Berlin-kind of way. What we get is a tuneful, Broadway cast album. In an old-fashioned vein, yes; but with arrangements and orchestrations that bring them right into your living room. The cast album of White Christmas gives you songs you can hum, all right, and numbers you'll want to hear repeatedly. Continued...
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