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PS Classics, the respected recording label that specializes in theatre and popular music, is releasing a CD on July 12 of a little known but legendary 1946 musical, Sweet Bye and Bye. The show, with music and lyrics by Vernon Duke ("April in Paris," "Autumn in New York") and Ogden Nash and book by S.J. Perelman and Al Hirschfeld (yes, that Al Hirschfeld, the legendary caricaturist) closed out of town. But it left behind a worthy yet forgotten score, and a legacy of anecdotes — of violence and a nervous breakdown — unique in New York theatre history.

The story, a farce, is set in 2076 and tells of a nebbish who, as the result of a time capsule from the 1939 World's Fair, inherits a candy cartel. The recording-studio cast includes Danny Burstein, Philip Chaffin, Sara Jean Ford, Telly Leung, Michele Ragusa, Graham Rowat and Jim Stanek, with Marin Mazzie (Ragtime; Passion; Kiss Me, Kate) in the leading role originated by Dolores Gray. Eric Stern is the conductor.

How and why did you choose to record Sweet Bye and Bye?

Tommy Krasker: I was working in 1986 as an archivist for the National Institute for Music Theatre, and one of my first assignments was to accompany historian Bob Kimball out to Secaucus, NJ, of all places, where about 20,000 musical theatre manuscripts had been discovered at the Warner Bros. Music Warehouse. When films had gone "talkie" in the late '20s, Warner Bros. had acquired a whole bunch of publishing houses, so that they'd have songs to use in their films. That included the publishing houses of the Gershwins, Rodgers & Hart, Cole Porter, among others. What would happen is, a show would close and all the musical components would get thrown into a carton and sent to the music publishers for storage. And suddenly, this material resurfaced in some back, back storage room at the Warner warehouse in New Jersey. It was an amazing find, and in total disarray. You'd open a packet, and there would be a flute part from one show, the violin part from another, a lyric sheet from a third show, and an early piano manuscript from a fourth. Bob and I were out there with our music theatre research books, trying to identify each manuscript, and it was like a great game of detective work!

The thing that no one really says about the Secaucus discovery is that about 90 percent of the stuff found there was junk. I know that sounds harsh, but a lot of the material was from shows by Ziegfeld or George White, or other key producers of the day, and they had staff writers who were competent but not great artists. So anytime you found something of real musical merit, that was an event. And so after weeks and weeks of "Oh, here's the flute part from the third song in the first act of Snapshots of 1921," when you kind of feel like slitting your wrists, I stumbled upon several cartons of manuscripts from a show called Sweet Bye and Bye.

Now, I'd never heard of Sweet Bye and Bye, but the music was by Vernon Duke and the lyrics by Ogden Nash — in other words, amazing pedigree — and when I looked in my musical theatre reference book, I saw that the book was by S.J. Perelman and Al Hirschfeld, so I was doubly intrigued. So I did what I wasn't supposed to do, and on my lunch break, I went to a copying machine down the hall, and copied all the manuscripts. Actually, I think that was illegal, but I'm figuring no one's going to throw me in the slammer 25 years later. Because I wanted to go home and play it all at the piano. And when I did, I was entranced. It was very much a product of the mid-'40s, the early Rodgers and Hammerstein era, but the music was so challenging and romantic and virtuosic, and the lyrics were so facile — I confess I was entranced. But of course, at that point, it was 1986, and I'd never even set foot in a recording studio. So I put the material in my piano bench, and every year or so, I'd take it out and play through it, for pure pleasure.

	S. J. Perelman

Tell me about the show and its history, and about those anecdotes — a star's suicide attempt, Perelman's attack on its leading man at the first performance.

TK: I guess it was shortly after the time that I first played through the score that I wanted to learn more about the show itself. So I went to the New York Public Library and started to research it, and the stories were incredible. I should mention that the Secaucus discovery included hundreds of manuscripts from Sweet Bye and Bye, comprising dozens of songs, in multiple versions, so it was clear that the show had gone through wild overhauls before it closed out of town, before reaching Broadway, in 1946. But looking at old Playbills and reading multiple versions of the scripts and finding newspaper clippings from the era, I started to put together the story behind the story, and it was a doozy.

First off, it was clear that Perelman and Hirschfeld were writing a very different show from the one Duke and Nash conceived. The show was set in the year 2076, and I think Duke and Nash were really taken with an understated theme of the show, which is, "How do you really find your way in a world of limitless possibilities?" The feeling of isolation and dislocation was, I think, a really important theme in 1946, particularly for soldiers coming home from World War II, and Duke and Nash wrote some incredibly powerful songs. The book writers, meanwhile, were writing this wild insane farce without a lot of character consistency or motivation. It was a really bad fit, and it came to roost when they started to cast. They ended up with a leading man, Gene Sheldon, who had no acting or singing experience, whose forte was comic mime. Comic mime. I still can't make sense of that decision. So right away, two of Duke and Nash's best songs had to be cut, because Sheldon couldn't sing. And as the leading lady, they ended up with a British actress, Pat Kirkwood, who might have been fine, except the third week of rehearsals, she had a nervous breakdown, by most accounts attempted suicide, and was committed to a sanitarium. The director and producer, Nat Karson, who basically had never directed or produced before, then did one incredibly right thing — he hired Dolores Gray to take over the role.

So they get to New Haven, the first place they're stopping on their way to Broadway, and Gray stops the show twice, but Sheldon is a disaster. Accordingly to several accounts, he goes out on stage, and instead of doing his lines, he starts to go into his vaudeville shtick — sewing his fingers together, all sorts of comic mime that had nothing to do with the show. He comes off stage, Perelman throws him against a wall, Sheldon hits his head on a brick, and an ambulance has to cart him off to the hospital. For the rest of that performance, the stage manager does the role, book in hand, and then for the rest of the New Haven run, the choreographer takes over the role. Then Erik Rhodes [the comic foil opposite Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the movies "The Gay Divorcee" and "Top Hat"] is hired to take over the role, but according to Duke, he can't remember a single line, and a half-dozen more songs have to get tossed. I mean, the show was a shambles, and really, the most important part of the story for me is that this gorgeous, cohesive score was cut to shreds. Songs were dropped right and left because the original leading man couldn't sing, the leading lady had a nervous breakdown, the script wasn't working — by the time the show closed in Philadelphia, I think about only 30 percent of Duke and Nash's original score remained. I don't think I've ever seen an occasion like this where a brilliant score was just left in tatters.

	Vernon Duke

What was it about the score that was so brilliant? And how did Duke and Nash get involved?

TK: I don't know much about how Duke and Nash got involved writing — it's in Duke's autobiography, "Passport to Paris" — I think they just wanted to collaborate, and began doing so in the summer of 1945. And soon after, the offer came in from Perelman and Hirschfeld to join them on Sweet Bye and Bye. I've always had a fondness for Duke's work — it's often so romantic and daring at the same time. I remember when I was working for Nonesuch Records in the 1990s, and we were looking for a new album idea for soprano Dawn Upshaw, I suggested the songs of Vernon Duke — I thought it would be a good fit, which it was, but I also just wanted to do a Vernon Duke album! Part of a producer's job on any album, of course, is to suggest material, and I think because I had such a fondness for Sweet Bye and Bye, I must have crammed that album with four or five songs from that show. I find it a fascinating score — partly an integrated score in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition, but also full of wit and whimsy. Very moving, rich material, in which the leading man's feelings of isolation — in gorgeous, soaring ballads like "Born Too Late" and "Roundabout" — are played out against a backdrop of hopefulness expressed by the rest of the cast, in the title song and the Act I closer, "Let's Be Young." And the musical literacy is insane. The curtain raiser is like nothing I'd ever heard — forget that no audience had heard anything like it in 1946, I still can't think of anything like it. When we recorded it this spring, the orchestra couldn't get over it — they said it was like Rachmaninoff meets Ives meets Bernard Herrmann!

What about Perelman and Hirschfeld? It seems a strange combination — a guy who draws caricatures of actors in Broadway shows for The New York Times suddenly deciding to write a musical?

TK: S.J. Perelman and Al Hirschfeld had been buddies for about 15 years, and I think one day, maybe over drinks, Perelman said, "Why don't we write a musical together?" It was Hirschfeld's one musical theatre libretto, and after the disastrous experience that was Sweet Bye and Bye, he vowed never again. You know, there are those shows where something seems funny on paper, but doesn't seem that funny on stage — this isn't one of them. It doesn't even seem funny on paper. This sounds awful to say, but the early draft read like a couple of good friends getting together, pouring a drink, and putting things down on paper that they think are funny, but aren't.

They set it in the year 2076, and took their cue from the time capsule that had been buried during the New York World's Fair in 1939. Their idea was, what if that time capsule was unearthed in 2076, and someone has put some candy stock in the time capsule, and over time, that stock has matured and given the guy's descendant controlling interest in a candy cartel. It was a fish-out-of-water story, where this meek tree surgeon suddenly finds himself running a big business. But the writers really couldn't settle on a tone or a satirical target; it's very haphazard and uneven, and reads more like a revue than a book musical. Here's the big irony, though. By the time the casting issues got resolved, and that was already during the final weeks of the run, the authors did do a lot of solid work on the book, and it definitely ended up in the best possible shape. The book ended up getting stronger, but the score ended up getting mutilated. Not a really good trade-off.