ON THE RECORD: Me & Juliet, Happy Hunting and Milk and Honey Back on CD
By Steven Suskin
Me and Juliet [DRG 19115] came along at the very height of Rodgers & Hammerstein's success. South Pacific , in its fifth season, had just moved to the Broadway to make way at the Majestic for Me and Juliet ; The King and I was still reigning directly across 44th Street at the St. James. And Oklahoma! , the long-run record king which had vacated the St. James in 1948, was making a return visit to town at City Center (with an apple-cheeked Barbara Cook as Ado Annie). As it turned out, R&H had already started their descent from the musical theatre pedestal. As Brooks Atkinson opined in the Times, this musical about the making of a musical "needs work."
Subpar Rodgers & Hammerstein is Rodgers & Hammerstein nonetheless. Me and Juliet rolled along for almost a year, with an understandably monumental advance sale enough to enable this unadventurous musical to show a profit. And the score, while not in the same category as King and I , had at least something to recommend it; if this had come from a team of newcomers, the show might have created a certain amount of excitement. "No Other Love" was the song-hit of the show. It was a hit going in; Rodgers wrote the sultry tango a year earlier as a theme for the TV documentary series "Victory at Sea." Equally pleasing, as far as I'm concerned, is the incessantly charming "Marriage Type Love." There is also a nice, small-scale piano-bar tune in "That's the Way It Happens"; a paean to love affairs of the light-hearted type, called "Keep It Gay'; and "Intermission Talk," a smart, insider's look at what goes on in the lower lobby built around a dirgelike refrain lamenting that "the theatre is dying," and including capsule versions of then-current attractions. ("My love for my husband grew thinner / the first time I looked at Yul Brynner / and back in my bed on Long Island / I kept dreaming of Brynner in Thailand.")
But the whole thing is somewhat slight; the LP seems truncated, but there are in fact a mere eleven songs in the show. We get only a hint of a feeling for any of the performers. The twin leading ladies were Isabel Bigley, formerly Miss Sarah of Guys and Dolls ; and Joan McCracken, the Girl Who Fell Down in the big ballet in Oklahoma! and parlayed it into a career, with leading roles in Bloomer Girl and Billion Dollar Baby . She played a crucial part in Broadway musical history when she asked Me and Juliet director George Abbott to hire her husband to choreograph his next show, despite the fact that he had never before choreographed a show. McCracken's career went downhill from there, while Bob Fosse's work on The Pajama Game launched him into the spotlight (and toward a new wife, Gwen Verdon). Bill Hayes sang the romantic lead, Mark Dawson was the heavy; comedy came from Ray Walston (from the London company of South Pacific ) and George S. Irving (a cowman from Oklahoma! ).
If Me and Juliet was quickly forgotten, there are some songs here that you really might want to become acquainted with. I defy you to turn a cold ear toward "Marriage Type Love," for one. As for the question of whether there's anything new here for collectors who already have the prior release, the answer is yes. We get Perry Como's recording of "No Other Love," which was a chart-topping hit at the time, paired with Perry's "Keep It Gay." More to the point is a 16-minute interview between Rodgers and record producer Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records. (Me and Juliet was released by the competition, but the ravages of time and shifting catalogues has now wed RCA to Columbia.) While this track is not explained in the liner notes, it appears to have been prepared in conjunction with the 1954 LP "Richard Rodgers conducting the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York" [Columbia CL-810]. The interview seems to have been devised for radio broadcast, with built-in cues to insert tracks from the album (although on this CD we get the interview without the music). Sixteen minutes of Rodgers talking about his music; that's a bonus that you don't get with the prior releases of Me and Juliet .
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In their bright-and-breezy libretto for
Bells Are Ringing , the musical hit of the fall of 1956, Betty Comden & Adolph Green take comic aim at the notion of a song-writing dentist. This was not a figment of their fertile imaginations; the big show of the season and the chief competition to
Bells Are Ringing was, indeed, the work of a dentist-composer. (If Betty & Adolph knew that this dentist was doomed to musical comedy failure, they perhaps wouldn't have poked fun.) The drill-man's name was Harold Karr; his magnum-opus was called
Happy Hunting [DRG 19108], and if we wanted to make dentist jokes we might call the score numbingly bad. That same Mr. Atkinson called the show a "mechanical mishmash."
What Happy Hunting did have was Ethel Merman front and center, and that's more than enough to command our attention (and the attention of prospective CD buyers). This is Merman just prior to Gypsy , when she was still out there playing the comic-romantic leading lady. (Her on-stage romance with co-star Fernando Lamas was legendarily problematic; let it be said that the stars' love songs on Happy Hunting are pretty unconvincing.)
What we do get is one top-notch number, a mother-daughter ditty called "Mutual Admiration Society" for Ethel and Virginia Gibson (who had danced in three Jerry Robbins musicals under the name Virginia Gorski). This one takes off like a rocket, as does Merman's opening number "Gee, But It's Good to Be Here." Some of the other songs are bad laffably bad. Dr. Karr and his lyricist Matt Dubey seem to have been listening closely to their collection of still-in-print LPs. "Mr. Livingston" bears witness to twin showstoppers Mr. Berlin wrote for Ms. Merman, "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly" and "The Hostess with the Mostes' on the Ball." "A New-Fangled Tango" seems to come direct from "Hernando's Hideaway." Other items are jawdroppers, such as "If'n" and "Everyone Who's 'Who's Who'" two songs that conductor Jay Blackton seems to be rushing through in hopes of getting the show over that much faster. Those ballads ("It's Like a Beautiful Woman," "This Is What I Call Love," "The Game of Love," "This Much I Know") are pretty mirthless. Merman dropped two of them after the opening, having them replaced with new songs by Kay Thompson (which are not, naturally, included on the original cast album).
Let it be said that Blackton from Merman's Annie Get Your Gun and Call Me Madam provides some flavorful vocal arrangements. While the orchestrations on the LP are credited to Ted Royal, his work appears to have been to some extent replaced during the tryout. By the Broadway opening night, Don Walker, Red Ginzler and Joe Glover (all of whom worked on Call Me Madam ) received prominent billing. So here, despite its flaws, comes Happy Hunting back in circulation (with no changes or remastering from the prior release). All told, Merman and the rambunctiousness of the songs make Happy Hunting one of those fun '50s cast albums that you're bound to enjoy.
Far afield from Me and Juliet and Happy Hunting is Milk and Honey [DRG 19114]. Some first-time producer wandered into a Greenwich Village nightclub after hours and told the piano player he wanted him to write a musical about Israel. Theatre people being what they are, Jerry Herman said, "sure." Jerry and equally green-behind-the-ears librettist Don Appell got on El Al and took off for the land of Milk and Honey, which had become established as Israel only a dozen years earlier. Sitting down the aisle were some Jewish-American widows searching for well, I suppose what you could call exciting new adventure. And the boys had the first germ of their plot, while still on the tarmac at Idlewild.
"Shalom" is the theme song of the piece, and a pretty strong one at that. But Herman, who since Milk and Honey seems to have written nothing but scores filled with sprightly, pert melodies and energetically uplifting rhythms, felt his way along somewhat tentatively. The central characters that he and Don Appell came up with were "middle-aged," which meant something quite different in those days than it does today. The hero was 58, the heroine 37. Their dilemma: he was long-separated from his wife and felt scruples about living in sin (or whatever), in the Negev, with this comely widow. They were also both Metropolitan Opera singers, which meant some heavy singing that bordered on the sedate. Milk and Honey was a romantic operetta of sorts, picking up life whenever something interesting happened a big village dance, a bevy of musical comedy widows singing and dancing, a featured comic named Juki Arkin who served as a sparkplug (especially in the title number), a real-live goat spritzing Weede with real-live milk (unhomogenized) but they always seemed to go back to one of those old-people songs. Or at least so it seemed to me when I caught the show just after it opened, learning a valuable lesson at the age of eight: a spanking brand-new Broadway musical, with the original cast in the fresh flush of opening night, could be boring.
The songs are not "old-people songs," of course. We've heard some of them since, out of the context of the show and away from the sedate musical trappings, and they can be incredibly moving. (Go listen to "Let's Not Waste a Moment" on "Michael Feinstein Sings the Jerry Herman Songbook.") "I Will Follow You," for that matter, wasn't an old-people song even then; it was sung (and danced) by Tommy Rall, and is very effective. Molly Picon, the Yiddish theatre veteran who was 63 at the time, was ageless in 1961 and pepped up the proceedings with every yelp and grimace. Her two numbers "Chin Up Ladies," a march-time rouser for character ladies, and her "Hymn to Hymie," a soliloquial sιance set to tango tempo are as good on the album as they were on stage.
Weede seemed to be the opposite of romantic; they clearly wanted an Ezio Pinza-like presence, and he was more like Robert Tucker (if you know what I mean). Mimi Benzell was cold, to these eight-year-old eyes; and her performance, after years of listening to the cast album, has never won me over. Milk and Honey has gone down in history as the first Broadway musical to run more than a year and still lose money, which at the time seemed astonishing. As a footnote, I remember noting in the ads late in the run that Ms. Picon had moved up to second billing, with Terry Saunders a long-time Lady Thiang replacing Ms. Benzell. When I saw Picon listed second, though, I naturally assumed that she had taken over the role of the love interest. A bit of a stretch, I reasoned at eight; but I figured that Molly Picon singing those songs as the lovelorn widow could only make the show better.
One bonus track has been added, Robert Goulet singing "Shalom" (and why not?). Let me add that while the first two CDs repeat liner note material from earlier releases, Milk and Honey brings us an enlightening new interview between the composer and Kenneth Jones (who, as it happens, edits this column.) Herman relives the writing and production period of the show like "that was yesterday," and it makes interesting reading.
Me and Juliet , Happy Hunting and Milk and Honey : three far from indispensable Broadway musicals of the old school. But let me hasten to add that these are cast albums that I have listened to frequently over the years, on LP and CD. (When I first found the long out-of-print Happy Hunting , in fact, it was on extended-play 45s, in the "EP" format that RCA experimented with in the 1950s.) For the more recent generation of collectors who do not know these shows, I daresay you will find them well worth your listening time.
(Steven Suskin is author of "Second Act Trouble," "Show Tunes" and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached at Ssuskin@aol.com)
