Marc Blitzstein | "I Wish It So" from Juno / 1959

my favorite broadway musical songs: “i wish it so”

by Douglas Messerli

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QGKRdUbIs8

Marc Blitzstein: Juno, 1959

Performer: Monte Amundsen

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&p=Rosemary+Clooney+I+Wish+It+so&type=E211US752G0#id=1&vid=2b0afb4376fc373b3045fefd7941b477&action=click

Marc Blitzstein: Juno, 1959

Performer: Rosemary Clooney, 1963

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDpNJgu7aWE

Marc Blitzstein: Juno, 1959

Performer: Dawn Upshaw, 1994

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yd5ga0G6Fs

Marc Blitzstein: Juno, 1959

Performer: Rebecca Lucker

 

This lovely ballad, sung quite early in Marc Blitzstein’s beautiful rendition of Sean O’Casey’s famed Irish drama, sung by the character Mary Boyle, completely reveals Blitzstein’s talents for expressing the impossible loves and frustrations within the suffering Boyle family.

     The young daughter of the long-suffering matriarch (Shirley Booth) and the ne’re-do-well father (played, surprisingly by the great film star Melvyn Douglas), is so poignant that it was been performed time and again after the original production by numerous wonderful singers—I’ve included only a few, Rosemary Clooney, Dawn Upshaw, and Rebecca Lucker, to give the reader a sense of the remarkable potentialities of this song about a girl (Monte Amundsen) who doesn’t even quite know why she is suffering the pangs of love.

 

I’ve an unrest inside me.

Oh it’s long I’ve had

such an unrest inside me

and it’s getting real bad.

     This song is a strange mix of the kind of optimist hope of love professed by Tony early in West Side Story in “Something’s Coming,” and the kind of fear of madness for what that love might bring in Stephen Sondheim’s ballad sung by Sally in his Follies, “Losing My Mind.” The young Mary is already very afraid of “the thumping inside me,” that she “think’s I’ll go mad.”

     The great American composer Blitzstein not only brought Brecht and Weill to American audiences but composed the infamous pro-union The Cradle Will Rock, that never received its proper theater production by director Orson Welles. Later he composed a notable opera, Regina based on Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes.

     Alas, his quite remarkable Juno, with a cast to die for, lasted only 16 performances on Broadway, but has been revived several times since, although never to the success the work truly deserves.

     Openly gay, Blitzstein retreated to Martinique where he died in 1964.

     I had somehow purchased an original Broadway recording of this rare work, but eventually gave it away to the drama professor at the University of Maryland, my friend, Jackson Bryer.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2017).