SEVENTH HEAVEN [Decca Broadway B0001252]
Back in the good old days, bad old musicals used to appear like clockwork every spring. The 1955 entry was Seventh Heaven, musicalized from Austin Strong's 1922 tearjerker. Street waif meets sewer cleaner, love ensues. Chico marches off to World War I, returning — blind and shell-shocked — to Diane's arms. This was, more or less, the "Love Story" of the decade. The long-running play spawned a blockbuster silent film hit in 1927, taking three Oscars at the first awards ceremony (including one for star Janet Gaynor) and providing one of those all-time song hits that you might well recognize if you heard it. "I'm in heaven when I see you smile, Diane" it goes.

By 1955, Seventh Heaven was old and tired. From today's vantage point, the show seems to have been a vanity production. The producers never produced a musical, before or since. Lyricist-librettist Stella Unger and co-librettist Victor Wolfson never wrote a musical, before or since. The leading lovers, Gloria De Haven and Ricardo Montalban, were Broadway first-timers from Hollywood. The producers hired a first-time choreographer, too. Peter Gennaro turned out all right, though.

The star of the show, for all intents and purposes, was composer Victor Young. A native of Chicago, Young (1900-1956) took a roundabout route to Broadway. Following the death of his mother, Young was abandoned by his father — an opera tenor — and sent to live with his grandfather, a tailor in Warsaw. The ten-year-old was enrolled in the Warsaw Conservatory, speedily becoming a world-class violin prodigy. (Upon his debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic, a rich benefactor presented him with a 1730 violin by Guarneri. Said violin disappeared the day after Young's death in Desert Hot Springs.)

Quantity, not quality, you might admonish, and not without reason. Young picked up an astounding 20 Oscar nominations during his life, losing them all. (He was posthumously nominated for an additional two Oscars, finally winning in 1958 for the score for "Around the World in Eighty Days.") Young received four Oscar nominations in 1940 alone. He received another four in 1941, and three in 1943. Has anyone ever set such a torrid pace? Yes, it's an honor to be nominated, but Young seemed to automatically lose. Most of his music was of the non-song variety, but several of his themes were converted to pop songs, including "My Foolish Heart," "Golden Earrings," "Written in the Wind" and "Around the World."

While writing hundreds upon hundreds of hours worth of film music, Young made a couple of tentative stabs at Broadway. A La Carte, a revue with lyrics by Edward Heyman, opened in Hollywood in 1949. The show quickly closed, but remnants were folded into the Olsen and Johnson revue Pardon Our French, which stumbled into the Broadhurst in 1950 for three months.

How and why Young came to write Seventh Heaven is lost to history, as is the reason he was matched with musical theatre amateurs. Lyricist/colibrettist Stella Unger wrote a handful of songs over the years, although I can't find much information about her. Co-librettist Victor Wolfson at least had some Broadway experience, with six plays to his credit. One of them, Excursion, was something of a hit in 1937; it was musicalized for Broadway by Burt Shevelove and Al Selden in 1951, although it capsized in Philadelphia. Month of Sundays they called it, starring Nancy Walker (with Dick Kiley in a small role).

The only theatre veteran connected with Seventh Heaven was its director, John C. Wilson. Jack Wilson had some hits in his past; longtime partner of Noel Coward, he became business manager and producer for Coward as well as Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Wilson turned director in the 1940s, with his credits including back-to-back hits Kiss Me, Kate and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But Wilson's alcohol problem was already out of control. His 11 post-Blondes shows all failed, including two especially haphazard musicals, Make a Wish and Seventh Heaven. Back in his more successful days, Wilson produced Wolfson's Excursion — which seems to explain his presence on Seventh Heaven.

With a bunch of novices and an ineffective director, Seventh Heaven was a total loss; Jerry Robbins came in to try to fix the show, but the patient was beyond help. Surprisingly enough, the album is quite listenable, almost in spite of the material. The songs for the stars are rather dreary; think ersatz Parisian soap opera music, Hollywood style. (Montalban does exceedingly well under the circumstances, displaying immense charm.) The comedy numbers, however, are exceedingly peppy. I suppose they seemed out of place in the context of the show, but they are sure enjoyable. Sparking the action is Robert Clary, the diminutive sprite who made a splash in New Faces of 1952 and would later find fame on TV's "Hogan's Heroes."

Clary has three spots, and he makes the most of them. This fellow stands in the spotlight and sings a song called "Happy Little Crook," in which he calls himself "a sly merchant of menace, with a shy shy Shylock look." "Pick a pocket / Lift a locket / What a thrill to hock it / I'm a hap- hap- happy crook," he sings. (Crew-ook is how he pronounces it, in two syllables.) Lines like "I'm just a five and ten klepto / With a lepra-corny look" and "When my hand is in your pocket / There's no cop alive to block a / Happy little crook" make you wonder whether Sheldon Harnick was seen slinking along down Tremont Street. (Harnick, composer-lyricist of "The Boston Beguine" from New Faces, made under-the-table contributions to at least two similarly dire musicals of the period.) This lyric is almost criminally out of place for Paris, 1915, and way out of key with the rest of the score, but no matter; entertainment takes the day. Clary seems to think he's Sammy Davis at the Mocambo, and it's impossible not to be swayed.

Clary also has an inordinately cheery duet with Patricia Hammerlee, another veteran of New Faces. "Love Sneaks Up on You" is no great shakes, but it floats along on infectious harmonic underpinnings. Besides, the singers are having so much fun that it's impossible not to crack a smile. Clary even throws in his Eartha Kitt impersonation.

There are also two trios for the show's resident hookers, Hammerlee, Gerrianne Raphael, and 22-year-old Chita Rivera. (The authors tried to spice things up by making Diane a prostitute. Bring on the girls.) The songs are only so-so, but the performances leap out at you. ("If sex is bad," asks Chita, "how can it be so good?") Playing the resident madam was Beatrice Arthur, without a song to sing. She was rushed in during the tryout to replace Fifi D'Orsay (who serves as comic relief in Ted Chapin's Everything Was Possible). The CD also includes a five-minute abridgement of the dream ballet "Chico's Reverie," which sounds pretty impressive under the circumstances. This is, presumably, what movie composer Young did best.

David Terry, a record arranger with no theatre experience before or since, is credited with the orchestrations. Irv Kostal, a friend of Young's from Chicago days, is known to have come in and done extensive fixing; you can hear his touch in the livelier numbers. There is also some strong choral work from the little-known Crane Calder, who also made memorable contributions to Allegro and Plain and Fancy.

The all-but-forgotten Seventh Heaven does rate a small footnote in Broadway history. If Robbins couldn't do much to fix the show, he did draft some key players for his 1957 musical West Side Story. Peter Gennaro was invited along as co-choreographer; Chita Rivera gained stardom as Anita; and Lee Becker, Gennaro's assistant and Rivera's understudy, played the tomboy Anybodys. (Gennaro and Becker both became full-fledged choreographers in their own right, working for West Side producer Hal Prince.) Orchestrator Kostal did West Side too, although not necessarily with Robbins's involvement.

The half-dozen lively numbers help make the Seventh Heaven CD considerably more interesting than you might expect. Not a musical for the ages, this disc is fun despite itself; the outstandingly poor lyrics, oddly enough, add to our enjoyment. Unger keeps handing us rhymes like "I'm richer than Midas / I'm high as a kite is" and "for even beginners / soon find out that sin is." She also finds a quadruple rhyme in "bois," "bar," "gras de foie" and "au revoir." Montalban does especially well, using his accent to help cover the lyricist's transgressions. "So long, sweet song of Debussy," he sings. A sewer cleaner, circa 1915, who whistles Debussy? Hmmm.