Frank Loesser | "I Believe in You" from How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying / 1961

 

my favorite musical theater songs: “i believe in you”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iAZsKgHK_U

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Robert Morse, 1961 (original Broadway recording)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmV74kOzK1Y

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Michele Lee, 1967 (film version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLEXE3oT3KA

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Robert Morse, 1967 (film version)

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

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Robert Morse (Tony Awards program)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyCZN0B49Yk

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Matthew Broderick, 1995 (revival)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCXVuYcXw3M

Composer: Frank Loesser

Performer: Daniel Radcliffe, 2011

 

Frank Loesser’s beautiful song from his How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying is sung twice in the 1961 Broadway production, once as a kind of love paean to the young would-be executive, former window-washer, J. Pierrepont Finch. The second time it’s sung by the now on-the-rise businessman Ponty as a love song to himself, while all around him other young executives plot his downfall with a sub-song “Gotta Get that Man,” wherein the other employees even beg the audience “Don’t let him be such a hero!”

      Only Robert Morse perfectly captured the totally self-captivated, yet utterly charming character he represented, although later Matthew Broderick and the elfin Daniel Radcliffe bravely tackled the dichotomy of a man so enchanted with himself that he is simply beautiful to watch as he stands at a sink before the mirror that reflects his charming smile—to both himself and to us. Like the secretary Rosemary Pilkington (in the original stage musical Bonnie Scot and in the movie version the glorious singer Michele Lee), we love Morse despite his obvious inability, until late in the show, to share love with anyone else. When he finally does, in the beautiful crescendo of “Rosemary” and the later all-team love-a-thon “Brotherhood of Man,” he moves on to become the Chairman of the Board of the mysterious World Wide Wicket Company.

     The young Morse, long before his drag queen days of Sugar and his one-man impersonation of Truman Capote in Tru, was as cute—in his heterosexual role as Finch in How To, that my old aunts might have expressed it—as a button, with even the great gay-oriented Carl Van Vechten putting him before the camera. In real life, Morse, was married, and had five children. But you might never know it, given his gay-winking delight with his audiences.

     As a character, he’s utterly terrified of women, including the well-endowed Hedy LaRue. And when he finally does fall for Rosemary, it is only after she has done nearly everything in the secret book of “How to Catch a Husband” to lasso him in, at the very moment she is not so sure that she wants her trophy. Still, she’s “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm,” and is absolutely ready to retire to New Rochelle, even though, ultimately the couple move into the World Wide Wicket Suite for the Chairman of the Board.

      The great composer Loesser’s songs include some very engaging pieces, including “The Company Way,” “A Secretary Is Not a Toy,” and the nearly impossible to dance, Bob Fosse’s “Coffee Break” (we’re told they simply could not recreate it for the movie). But there’s only one song you might go home humming, the smug commitment to the self so beautifully expressed in “I Believe in You.”

 

Executives:

Gotta stop that man,

I gotta stop that man cold . . .

Or he'll stop me.

Big deal, big rocket,

Thinks he has the world

In his pocket.

 

Gotta stop, gotta stop,

Gotta stop that man.

 

FINCH:

Now there you are;

Yes, there's that face,

That face that somehow I trust.

It may embarrass you to hear me say it,

But say it I must, say it I must:

 

You have the cool, clear

Eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth;

Yet there's that upturned chin

And that grin of impetuous youth.

Oh, I believe in you.

I believe in you.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2017

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (September 2017).

 

Jule Styne, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden | "The Party's Over" from Bells Are Ringing / 1956

my favorite musical theater songs: “the party’s over”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4GUiSQ0qnY

Jule Styne, Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Performer: Judy Holliday, 1956

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV5ynRFzrIM

Jule Styne, Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Performer: Doris Day, 1956

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk5H_DEkhLE

Jule Styne, Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Performer: Nat King Cole

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

Jule Styne, Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Performer: Johnny Mathis, 1960

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55uXyIcoDPg

Jule Styne, Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Performer: Judy Garland, 1962

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb0DK0P2Ak8

Jule Styne, Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Performers: Mel Torme and July Garland from her 1963 TV show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64qDs_hfyho

Jule Styne, Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Performer: Sammy Davis, Jr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNvMlcogKs0

Jule Styne, Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Performer: Shirley Bassey, 1976

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IZk7jP0LkM

Jule Styne, Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Performer: Peggy Lee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zrDA1vyiTs

Jule Styne, Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Performer: Faith Prince

I’ve always been somewhat miffed when people today call the Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green 1956 musical, “old fashioned” and “out of date,” terms abundantly used to describe its 2001 revival with Faith Prince and Marc Kurdisch. Certainly, this charmer of a work, about the great new technology of the day, the telephone and, particularly, answering services, might be easily be transformed into a piece about meeting through cellphone or Facebook encounters! People still want to find their mysterious callers or on-line admirers, which is at the heart of Bells Are Ringing.

     This musical was also about international celebrity fashion and behavior, which seems to me as current today as it was back in 1956, given the ridiculous fashion-conscious reality shows devoted to the Kardashians and others.

     So, what’s the problem? Somebody simply needs to imagine a marvelously updated version, that re-contextualizes its wonderful songs. Maybe not “bells,” but “ring signals” and “emojis.”

    Certainly, songs such as “It’s a Perfect Relationship” is even more appropriate to today’s on-line Facebook and Instagram relationships; and “Drop That Name” just needs a little dusting off—new names and new way to drop.

     But nothing needs to be done to the heart-breaking song, when Ella Petersen believes that her magical relationship with the man of her dreams has ended because of the fibs she has told to help him in his career. “The Party’s Over,” heart-breakingly expresses it all; it’s a song that even Cinderella could have sung after running off from Prince Charming. For the “end of the affair,” a theme is so many musicals that it’s a wonder that the stage genre has ever survived (after all, it’s at the heart of Show Boat, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, Gypsy, Follies and so many musical theater works that it’s almost become a standard trope). Love generally falls apart on the Broadway stage.

      Judy Holliday’s plaintive plea should almost be seen as a placard of the musical theater genre itself—even though her relationship with pretty-boy Sydney Chaplin does, after all, end happily; he wants her all to himself!

 

The party's over

It's time to call it a day

They've burst your

Pretty balloon

And taken the moon away

 

It's time to wind up

The masquerade

Just make your mind up

The piper must be paid

 

The party's over

The candles flicker and dim

You danced and dreamed

Through the night

It seemed to be right

Just being with him

 

Now you must wake up

All dreams must end

Take off your makeup

The party's over

It's all over

My friend

 

      Holliday sings the song, sung to herself, so brilliantly that she might, metaphorically speaking, have “owned it”—until hundreds of other brilliant interpreters came along, including several male ones. What I find utterly fascinating is that Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis sang it as it was originally written, keeping the male “him” and talking about taking off “your makeup.” Singing with Garland, Mel Tormé (the two on matching motorcycles) pretended they were at the end of an all-night spree on New Year’s Eve, in which the “he” became “we.” Sammy Davis, Jr., on the other hand, given his macho role in “the Rat Pack,” turned the male designation to “her” and muttered over the “makeup” line.

     So many brilliant women singers, including Doris Day, Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, and Peggy Lee, reinterpreted the work to fit their own vocalist stylings. And who might blame them given the simple beauty of its music and lyrics?

       Old-fashioned? Well, if such great songs are out of fashion, I’m terrified for the fact.

 

Los Angeles, August 30, 2017

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

Kier Peters | The Confirmation / 2007 [University of Passau, Germany production]

kier’s secret german audience

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kier Peters The Confirmation, performed by the English Drama Group (EDG) der Universität Passau, January 25-27, 2007

 

About twice a year, I check the computer to discover what my playwright pseudonym, Kier Peters, is up to. Over the years I’ve found he’s a fairly busy person, with plays being performed by experimental theatre companies and even at dinner theatres—all of which came as a surprise to me! But in 2007 I came across an even more interesting piece of information regarding his/my plays. The entry that popped up on Goggle sounded very promising, the first sentence reading: “The main topic of conversation, even after seven days, is still The Confirmation, the American play by Kier Peters we came to Bavaria to see.”

     The blog of Frank W. Walsh went on to describe how he and his wife, after taking a long taxi ride, quickly found the train from Münich to Passau, arriving two hours later to be greeted by Josh and Jutta. Josh, a teacher at the University of Passau and the director of the English Drama Group, whisked the American couple away for lunch before taking them to Passau’s oldest movie theater, where The Confirmation was being performed. “The place reminds me of the theaters I went to throughout my childhood,” wrote Walsh. “Its concession stand serves popcorn, candy, beer if you like. You came through the doors under where the screen would have been, as in the Pheil Theater in St. Petersburg (Florida) many years ago when Central Avenue was hopping. Then you go up, past rows and rows of chairs to a wide aisle under the projection booth where you can see everything and still have plenty of room.”

     “The lights darken,” he continues. “The play begins. But it doesn’t. A four-piece band plays Klezmer music. Foot tapping and stomping.”

     “The curtain rises and an American family takes the stage. Then begins the peeling of the onion, layers of revelations. Much of it beyond me.”

     Walsh goes on to discuss some of his favorite lines—one in particular uttered by the play’s shikker (Yiddish for a drunk) sister Blanche (speaking only Yiddish throughout the play, which the family believes to be Norwegian), who upon hearing one of her sister’s open a bottle of wine, shouts out: “Did I hear a cork?” With Josh and Jutta, evidently, this American couple “constructed tables with diagrams and arrows delineating relationships to better understand the play,” which had three sold-out performances! “Modern American theater is still alive,” declares Walsh, “—alive and well in Bavaria, Germany.”

      The very idea of my crazy American family of women survivors—Grandma, Mother, Sister, Blanche and the family intruder, Sister’s lesbian lover Carmelita—being brought to life in that small Bavarian city nestled between three rivers (the Danube, the Inn, and Ilz) at the border of the Czech Republic, amazed me! As Paul Vangelisti merrily chuckled over the phone the other day—he being one of the few individuals who love such accidental collisions of discovery and event (insidious gaps in life) as I do—“Surely this can’t really have happened, this seemingly lost American couple coming across your play in Bavaria without a clue of what it was about! And you knowing nothing of it whatsoever. You made it up. You wrote this,” he proclaimed. “No one will believe you didn’t. It’s like all the stories in your memoir!”

     “I know,” I concurred. “But you and I both realize that I didn’t fabricate a single moment of my adventure in New York with you. And I haven’t knowingly made up anything in any of these volumes to date. Things just happen to me that way. It’s my life.”

      “I think they do happen that way to many people,” Paul concluded, “only they block it out, rationalize it away or perceive no significance in the facts.”

      Yesterday, as I was about to write about this newest manifestation of my wondrously eventful life, I received an e-mail from Joshua Amrhein, outlining the details of his directorial choice and the performances of my play. Apparently, he’d first discovered my short plays, A Dog Tries to Kiss the Sky: Seven Short Plays, in City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and had thought about performing “Past Present Future Tense” or “A Dog Tries to Kiss the Sky.” “The plays…had an American kind of humor I thought, just ‘dada’ enough for my taste and approachable enough for any audience.” “Well, I wanted to see what else you’d written, and found The Confirmation. Besides really liking the story, and all things to do with grandmothers in general, I felt it was a perfect piece to do with a group mainly made up of women….” “My actors loved it,” he reports, and it beat out David Mamet’s Water Engine. Hearing his response, I could only recall the reaction of my German friend Hans-Jürgen Schadt upon reading the comedy: “I found it very sad, very sad, while my wife kept laughing out loud the whole time.” Perhaps some Germans do share the American sense of humor.

      Amrhein apologized for not trying harder to reach me—he had evidently sent an e-mail which I did not receive. I reported that my only regret for not having been told about the production—although an amateur performing fee would be appropriate (he is sending a small payment)—was that I might have flown to Passau to witness it! I was delighted by the production.

     We turned Blanche from a Yiddish speaking character, to a Polish figure, he explained, in part because we had a Polish actor playing the part. Coincidence, again, I responded: I originally wrote the part for a Polish actor I had seen in one of Mac Wellman’s plays; she was out of the country, however, during the July 1994 production of that play in New York at the Vineyard Theatre near Union Square.

     And who was that visiting American man and his wife from St. Petersburg? His grandfather, who was overjoyed that I had stumbled upon his blog and that he’d been able to be the conduit between author and director!

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2007

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).

 

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer | "Shy" from Once Upon a Mattress / 1959

my favorite musical theater songs: “shy” from once upon a mattress

by Douglas Messerli

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouL9ZMzEZ4k

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress, 1959

Performer: Carol Burnett, 1964

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vugLimIj98g

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress, 1959

Performer: Carol Burnett, 1972

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kF43Gb4wCE

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress, 1959

Performer: Sarah Jessica Parker, 1996

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY9Xp6wwPF4

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress, 1959

Performers: Jackie Hoffman, John Epperson, and many others in the Transport Groups concert production, 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-pRFSM3R5k

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress, 1959

Performer: Sutton Foster, 2024

If one ever needed a definition of irony, I might invite young students to listen to Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer’s rendition of the song “Shy” as sung by the original performer, Carol Burnett.

     Burnett brilliantly belts out her “Shy” song, proclaiming her demure behavior underneath her absolutely hurricane-like surface, literally, through Joe Layton’s wonderful choreography, blowing the members of Queen Aggravain’s medieval court off their feet. The young Winnifred (who likes her nick-name of Fred), is, of course, anything but shy. She has just swum the moat to apply for the role of princess, and is determined to find a husband, since, as she finally admits she is “shy” of a man if not naturally shy in personality.

     Not a single courtier will admit to being Prince Dauntless, and whenever the Prince dares to admit that he is the one, also desperate for a wife, his imperious mother pulls him away. Winnifred takes the entire court on a whirlwind dance in order to discover the Prince’s identity, all the time denying her totally domineering personality.

    The song and the musical as a whole is so close to camp that it later was performed by a group of gay and drag performers, including John Epperson as the Queen and the wonderful David Greenspan as the King, with comedian Jackie Hoffman as Winnifred. I’ve included a selection of songs from that Transport Group’s 2013 production.

     But then, nearly everybody, including Dody Goodman, Imogene Coca, Buster Keaton, Sarah Jessica Parker, and numerous other luminaries have appeared in productions of this likeable musical, which, when first appeared Off-Broadway, was given lukewarm reviews, but was loved by audiences, allowing it to last a reasonable run of 244 performances before it was revived again and again in theater and in television productions. Tracey Ullman, performing it in 2005 on television, sang beautifully, but far more tamely than Burnett and others, almost convincing her audiences that she might really be a little shy and was just bluffing as the future Princess that couldn’t sleep.

     I saw the 1964 television version with Burnett, Elliot Gould as the Jester, and others. Bernadette Peters later appeared in a 1972 TV production as Lady Larken, along with the original cast members, Burnett, Jack Gilford, and Jane White.

     The talented composer, Mary Rodgers, daughter of one of the titans of composers, Richard Rodgers, went on to have a hit in the Off-Broadway musical The Mad Show, based on skits from Mad Magazine, and wrote Phyllis Newman's one-woman show The Madwoman of Central Park West (1979), as well as contributing, along with Stephen Sondheim, to the short-lived Judy Holliday musical, Hot Spot.

     Her son, Adam Guettel, wrote the successful score for the musical, The Light in the Piazza, and previously sang in numerous operas as a child performer before turning to compose many notable classical scores.

     Mary went on to write numerous children’s books, playing down her musical gifts, proclaiming that she had neither the talents of her father or son. But, to be honest, her crazy fairy-tale musical was one of my favorites of my youth, and her song “Shy,” I always felt, was a secret satire on her own father’s similar statement in “I Whistle a Happy Tune” from The King and I.

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2017

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (August 2017).

Bob Merrill | "Mira" from Carnival!

my favorite musical theater songs: “mira” from carnival!

by Douglas Messerli

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXwix_Iw2B8

Bob Merrill, Carnival!, 1961

Performer: Anna Maria Alberghetti, 1961

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0lex7kZSBA

Bob Merrill, Carnival!, 1961

Performer: Joni James, 1961

 

One of my very favorite joys in the early 1960s was listening to the score of Carnival!, a gentle musical based on the 1953 film Lili with Leslie Caron in the lead role. The 1961 Broadway musical, with book by Michael Stewart and music and lyrics by Bob Merrill (previously of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” [a Patti Page song] and “Mambo Italiano” [sung by Rosemary Clooney]-fame). The musical was filled with notable singers and performers, including Kaye Ballard, Jerry Orbach, Pierre Olaf, James Mitchell, and Henry Lascoe. But it was its star, young opera singer Anna Maria Alberghetti, who made it so special for me.

      Her lovely lyrical voice, particularly in the song in which introduces herself and her background, “Mira,” was such a delight that I even learned its lyrics and probably could sing along even today. But it’s the song’s utterly guileless simplicity that makes it so very special as a plea for knowing the world in which you live, with the hope, particularly, that everyone will know your name. Even chairs become something that might come to know you. It seemed to harken to another time and a peasant culture that was surely already impossible in 1961.

 I come from the town of Mira

 Beyond the bridges of St. Claire

 I guess you’ve never heard of Mira

 It’s very small but still it’s there

 They have the very greenest trees

 And skies as bright as flame

 But what I liked the best in Mira

 Is everybody knew my name

 Can you imagine that

 Can you imagine that

 Everybody knew my name

 

      The musical, which also included memorable tunes such as “Yes, My Heart” and “Love Makes the World Go Around,” was one of producer David Merrick’s many hits, running for 719 performances, with several revivals in the years since.

     I could hardly believe my luck when a traveling company decided to visit Cedar Rapids, near where I lived, to present the musical at Coe College. It was perhaps my very first professional musical viewing—although by that time I knew theater drama and musical theater better than anyone else in town. After all I had lived it through my imagination. Being somewhat a sentimentalist, I’m sure while watching it, I bawled my eyes out.

     Years later, I met Anna Maria Alberghetti at an art opening, and couldn’t resist a blushing thank you for the joys she’d given me as a young man.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2017

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (August 2017).