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
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.
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).
