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Visiting a Room in Show
Tune Heaven
by Jason Zinoman New York Times,
June 15, 2003
Normal-looking people go a little crazy when they visit "Original
Cast Recordings," an exhibit at the New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts that traces the history of the cast album. Middle-aged
moms randomly break into song. Men in suits tap dance. Obsessive fans
graffiti the walls. And the loud show music playing on a continuous loop
adds to the sense that you're in an upscale madhouse.
So perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised when an elderly stranger
grabbed my shirt and tugged me halfway across the box-shaped room to one
of the two listening stations in the Vincent Astor Gallery at the
library at Lincoln Center. "Listen to this!" she said, with
the urgency of an E.R. nurse, shoving a pair of headphones into my
chest. It was Vivienne Segal's sultry version of "Bewitched,
Bothered and Bewildered" from a 1950 studio recording of the
Rodgers and Hart musical "Pal Joey." Describing falling in
love once again, the smoky-voiced Segal sounded like a bruised veteran
of painful affairs who,
for a moment, had regained her girlishness. At the end, the stranger
gripped my hand knowingly: "No one does that anymore. You think
Britney Spears can do that? Forget it."
All musical-theater fans -- no matter how eccentric -- will find
something to get excited about in this small collection that includes
old programs, letters, photographs, posters and albums from more than
100 years of musical-theater songs. Special attention is given to the
first original-cast recording of an entire show in 1938 (Marc
Blitzstein's "Cradle Will Rock") and the seminal contribution
of
Goddard Lieberson, the Columbia Records president and pioneering
producer of cast recordings like "South Pacific," "The
Sound of Music" and "West Side Story." There is even a
mock studio in the corner with a sheet of plexiglass in front of a
microphone and a mural of black-and-white photographs of stars working
in the studio.
The most prominent is a wonderful shot of a baby-faced Stephen Sondheim
and a tired, deadpan Ethel Merman making the album for the original
"Gypsy."
But for me, the heart of the exhibit is the music. Organized in
chronological order, the 36 songs that can be heard with earphones range
from a scratchy 1898 recording of the operetta "Robin Hood" to
the crisp production of an irritating techno tune from the current
London hit "Bombay Dreams." In between, the curator, Kevin
Winkler, covers the usual suspects (Berlin, Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter,
Sondheim, Lloyd Webber), while also sneaking in curiosities, like a
Yiddish-language "My Fair Lady."
Fans of "Gypsy" (and critics of Bernadette Peters) should not
miss Merman's driving and disdainful take on "Some People," a
demo recording made in 1959 and never used in the original-cast album.
And the one play excerpt is a true gem: Uta Hagen's ferocious
emasculation of Arthur Hill in the original "Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?" Her condescending cackle will make you wince.
Other highlights of the exhibit, which closes on Sept. 6, include
Bert Williams's lonely lament "Nobody," which manages to be
both heartbreaking and hilarious, and a version of "Ol' Man
River," sung by Paul Robeson, that, shockingly, swings. And how can
you argue with Gwen Verdon's insistent demand in "Damn
Yankees": "I'm irresistible, you fool. Give in."
"Original Cast Recordings" is an argument against the old
notion that theater is the most ephemeral of art forms. The exhibit
showcases a collection of long-lost talents who, for many, live on only
in fading memories. That may explain the passion of the elderly stranger
who accosted me. To her, an old friend had returned, and she wanted to
tell someone about it.
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