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| re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 06:32 pm EST 12/26/18 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - PlayWiz 05:07 pm EST 12/23/18 | |
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| Don Walker, who did most of the orchestrations, felt that the opening sequence killed the show. He did not orchestrate it, and he felt the orchestration was out of style with his work on the rest of the score. More important, he felt it reached a musical peak in volume and excitement right at the top of the show, and there was nowhere to go. What should have been the climax — when Doris and Fred kiss — came off weakly because there was no way the underscoring could match the opening. Walker also felt that they had overdone things musically trying to fill the Fisher, where the show played part of its tryout, and it needed to be undone, but he knew that was not going to happen. Walker also felt that the show did not serve Janis Paige well. |
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| re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures | |
| Posted by: Jax 03:54 am EST 12/27/18 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - AlanScott 06:32 pm EST 12/26/18 | |
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| You have to consider that he may have felt the opening sequence killed the show precisely because he wasn't asked to orchestrate it. Most people recall it as a highlight, or the highlight, of the show. Schadenfreude has been around forever. | |
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| re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 05:16 pm EST 12/27/18 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 05:14 pm EST 12/27/18 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - Jax 03:54 am EST 12/27/18 | |
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| Jax, you wrote, “You have to consider that he may have felt the opening sequence killed the show precisely because he wasn't asked to orchestrate it.” From what source are you getting this info? I’m wondering if you’ve been looking at the Here's Love section of Suskin's The Sound of Broadway Music, which I was looking at, but it doesn’t say that there. If Suskin is right, Walker did all of the opening parade sequence except the climax (the “Adeste Fidelis Finale”). Do you have different info from some other source? Walker almost surely would have been making the decisions as to who orchestrated what. By this time, he was farming out relatively little of the scores on which he was credited as orchestrator. My guess would be that he asked Elliot Lawrence to do that sequence to take some of the load off himself. Lawrence liked to orchestrate, and often had a hand in the orchestrations of the shows for which he was the musical director. During this period, Walker usually had the little-known Arnold Goland do the stuff he didn’t want to do or didn’t have time for, but in this case I would imagine that Lawrence asked to be allowed to do that stuff. My guess is that Walker then did not like what Lawrence did because he felt it was out of style with the rest of the sequence and with the rest of the show, but the others did like it. In the letter to Ostrow, it sounds like Walker himself did some of the “goosing it up” work that resulted in what he felt was a “brassy, blatant score,” and he then regretted having succumbed to what sounds like pressure to do this in order to fill the Fisher. Perhaps Michael Kidd was pushing them in that direction (hence the Phil Lang remark). Anyway, if you have different info on this, please let me know. Ostrow's remarks quoted in Suskin, if indeed you also were looking at them or are aware of them, are odd (as his remarks so often are, and in his books he gets major facts wrong). At first he seems to be saying something like "Don was right when the rest of us were wrong. We were celebrating the out-of-town reviews, but he knew something was wrong." But then he suggests that Walker was mostly upset about the erosion of his relationship with Frank Loesser. Maybe he was, but Walker was right that something was wrong, which Ostrow seems to acknowledge. And then Peter Howard is quoted. As with Ostrow, Howard starts by saying that the show should have been better. It's not clear that Howard knew specifically what Walker had written to Ostrow. I’m not sure if you’re interpreting what Howard said as suggesting that Walker was bitter because he wanted to be involved in creating the dance music for the parade sequence. But Walker would not have been involved in doing that sort of thing. He wasn’t a dance arranger. Howard often did dance arrangements and incidental underscoring, but he didn't orchestrate (or if he did occasionally dabble, he didn't do any of it this time). Walker could be a bitter guy, but in this case the points he made in his letter to Ostrow are similar to points that have been made by other people about other shows. It reminds me of two cases. First, Sheldon Harnick talking about how Tessie O'Shea's sequence in The Girl Who Came to Supper killed that show because no one wanted to go back to the story after that. Walter Kerr even said something like that in his review, while praising her sequence, although unlike Harnick, Kerr did not seem to think that the problem was that the sequence was essentially irrelevant. (It seems to me that they should have introduced her briefly in act one, but had her big sequence halfway through act two. Of course, the show would still have had big problems.) The other is something Peter Hunt has said about 1776 when it was out of town, although I'm not sure his discussion of this has been published. He said that the scene with the Continentalers shooting the ducks had to be cut because it was so exciting to the audience that everything afterward seemed dull. It's a sad rule, but an important one (and one that, according to Hunt, Jerome Robbins knew well): Sometimes the creators of a musical have to cut something that the audience seems to love because it's ultimately harmful to the show as a whole. Of course, maybe if what followed the opening sequence in Here's Love had been better, the opening sequence would have been just fine. |
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| re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures | |
| Posted by: Jax 03:13 am EST 12/28/18 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - AlanScott 05:14 pm EST 12/27/18 | |
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| You are deeper in the weeds with this show than I have ever been. I can only offer two observations : 1. Due to the structure of the film's story, there is no way the parade sequence could have been moved or dropped. 2, For a show that was a nervous hit, Here's Love keeps being done (now as Miracle on 34th St. ), did have a national tour, AND generates a goodly number of comments here every year. It has, arguably, found more of a support base than Bajour, I had a Ball, or even High Spirits. Santa has been good to it. | |
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| re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 04:35 am EST 12/31/18 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 04:29 am EST 12/31/18 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - Jax 03:13 am EST 12/28/18 | |
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| Well, I’ve never even listened to the whole cast recording. I find much of what I have heard to be unbearable. The stuff that’s discussed in the quotes in the Suskin book does interest me, as history, not as music. It's true that the show has been done as a holiday show at various theaters over the years, but my impression, which may be wrong, is that that’s a relatively recent development, and that for a long time it was not done much. My impression is that when the title was changed to Miracle on 34th Street: The Musical, it started to get done. It's certainly true that it's been done more than I Had a Ball, which was never licensed, or Bajour, which think I was never licensed, although I'm not so sure that it's been done more than High Spirits, which has shown up a bit over the years. As for the tour, it was a short tour, only four months, and most of the venues it played were heavily sold on subscriptions. It played the three venues where the Edwin Lester-Civic Light Opera shows were then playing in California, and it played in Dallas at the State Fair Music Hall. It did well enough in the houses that were heavily sold on subscriptions (although really just passably in San Francisco), but I think that the reasons why a marginal show toured or didn’t tour may have less to do with popularity than with whether the producer was determined to make a tour happen and sometimes whether there was a cast with some drawing power interested in touring (if it’s a star show). In the case of Here’s Love, it had Meredith Willson and the source material, which made it viable case for some sort of tour, especially since it seems that Edwin Lester wanted it for his Los Angeles and San Francisco Civic Light Operas. Without that interest from Lester, I suspect there would not have been a tour. And a few years later, Willson's final show, 1491, played for Lester's Los Angeles and San Francisco Civic Light Operas, theoretically before Broadway but the reviews were dismal, and that was it. Oddly, the Here's Love tour closed just before Christmas. You’d think it would have booked some sort of Christmas run in Chicago or Boston, but perhaps no theatres were available at that time by the time they were booking the tour. I think that if Bea Lillie had been up to touring, High Spirits could have and would have toured, but she was in bad shape, although she did do a couple of short runs of the show in stock shortly after the Broadway run. High Spirits did have a London production, which Here’s Love did not get, although High Spirits was not a success in London, where it got very negative reviews. Reading reviews of Here’s Love, it does seem like it probably was better in performance than it seems to most of us on the recording. The book seems to have played reasonably well, and the supporting cast of character actors carried it along (and even the replacement character actors carried it along). I Had a Ball and Bajour were part of the strange 1964-65 season, where there was an unusual number of also-ran musicals that managed runs of six months to a year, but only one big hit. Everything else closed at a loss, although Half a Sixpence paid off due to the two touring companies. Which shows how strange the whole touring thing could be. On Broadway, the show did not do very well without Tommy Steele, but they sent out two tours without him that did well enough to help the show pay off. Here's Love did not pay off. Really, I Had a Ball and Bajour have nothing that would make them financially attractive propositions to small theatre companies, but obviously Miracle on 34th Street: The Musical does. |
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| re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures | |
| Posted by: Jax 02:11 pm EST 12/31/18 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - AlanScott 04:29 am EST 12/31/18 | |
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| In this day of searching for content and IP, known properties that can be exploited, it's not inconceivable that "Miracle on 42nd St: The Musical" will pop up on a streaming channel some future December. Someone did a live version of "A Christmas Story" last year" "Miracle"/"Here's Love" is better than that, I'd say. The nostalgic pull of the film might convince a streaming exec to thumbs up a musical version. That would drive some posters on this board mad. Happy New Year! | |
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| re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 09:10 pm EST 12/31/18 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - Jax 02:11 pm EST 12/31/18 | |
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| If I have to choose between A Christmas Story and Here's Love/Miracle on 34th Street, I choose . . . something else. :) Actually, I would watch a TV version of the latter, or at least I would try. I do hate the way these TV musicals are shot, with constant cutting, so I often find myself tuning out figuratively after a bit and sometimes literally after a while. |
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| re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures | |
| Posted by: BroadwayTonyJ 11:13 pm EST 12/31/18 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - AlanScott 09:10 pm EST 12/31/18 | |
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| This time of year I generally pull out the CD of Here's Love and listen to it again -- I'm not sure why exactly, probably just out of habit. The score is so mediocre with some of the most awkward lyrics I've ever heard. Even worse, though, is that Willson takes the Fred Gaily character (who John Payne in the '47 film made so likeable despite being kind of slick) and turns him into an unpleasant jerk (at least until the middle of Act Two). Nevertheless, I do think that "You Don't Know" and "That Man Over There" are quite good. I also like "The Bugle", "Pine Cones and Holly Berries", and Janis Paige's reprise of "Look, Little Girl". Actually she and Naismith are fine on the recording. There's a theater in the greater Chicago area that presents Here's Love during the Christmas season every 3 years -- under various titles, but never under the original one. I saw the 2010 production. The fine character actor Peter Kevoian was excellent as Mr. Macy and stopped the show with "That Man Over There". |
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| CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area | |
| Posted by: BroadwayTonyJ 07:49 pm EST 01/01/19 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - BroadwayTonyJ 11:13 pm EST 12/31/18 | |
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| My post should have read: Over the last 19 years, a Chicago area theater has done 3 productions of Here's Love during the Christmas season (in 2000, 2010, and 2018). | |
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| re: CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 09:28 pm EST 01/01/19 | |
| In reply to: CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area - BroadwayTonyJ 07:49 pm EST 01/01/19 | |
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| Your earlier post, combined with Jax’s posts, persuaded me to listen to the OBCR, including the tracks that I'd never listened to before. It is nice that Masterworks Broadway keeps these on youtube, although it’s not always easy to find the complete playlists in order. (I think I’ve figured out that you have to include a principal cast member’s name in your search, e.g., Here’s Love Janis Paige Original Broadway cast, in order to easily find the complete playlist.) Anyway, there are a few decent numbers in there, apart from "You Don't Know," and they are mostly the ones that the critics liked. I can see how "That Man Over There" and "My State" must have played well in the theatre. Even “Pine Cones and Holly Berries / It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” comes off well enough on the recording. So now I would say that not all of the score is awful, and it does seem like both “That Man Over There” and “My State” were played for a certain degree of intentional absurdity in the original production. Still, even “That Man Over There,” though a decided highlight, would have profited from less repetition in the lyric. It was surprising to me to hear how well Paul Reed sang. It probably shouldn’t have surprised me since I had at some point come across some operettas, including some Gilbert and Sullivan, among his credits. There’s a passage in it that musically makes me think of “The Ruler of the Queen’s Navy,” not that it’s identical or that it’s really anything much like a G and S patter song. Anyway, Reed comes off very well on the recording. Btw, there’s a really noticeable little flub during “My State.” I’m surprised that Goddard Lieberson chose that take (or decided to leave it at only one take). Unfortunately, some of the score remains something like unbearable to me, and Craig Stevens should have been dissuaded from sustaining any notes. :) |
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| re: CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area | |
| Posted by: BroadwayTonyJ 11:36 am EST 01/04/19 | |
| In reply to: re: CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area - AlanScott 09:28 pm EST 01/01/19 | |
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| I should have mentioned that I really enjoyed Paul Reed's performance on the recording also. Regarding the score, the '63 LP listed 2 numbers on the song list that were not present on the recording: "The Plastic Alligator" and "Nothing in Common". When I saw the show in 2010, I found neither song to be memorable, but one of them was just plain God awful -- it was a patter song somewhat in the style of numbers from The Music Man -- which made it so out of place in a show about the true meaning of Christmas in a Manhattan setting. Anyway I've gotten Here's Love off my bucket list. I'll still probably listen to the CD again next year, but I am glad that the 2 unrecorded songs aren't on it. |
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| re: CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area | |
| Posted by: Alcindoro 03:18 am EST 01/05/19 | |
| In reply to: re: CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area - BroadwayTonyJ 11:36 am EST 01/04/19 | |
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| I have long nurtured a burning desire to hear "The Plastic Alligator". Well, maybe not exactly burning. Or a desire. But I've just always been curious. I was hoping when the CD came out they would have found the tapes. But, alas, no. I've also always wanted to hear "A Sense of Love and Honor" from ANYA. It's not on the LP or CD, but my copy of the LP has it listed, and there's even a timing for it. It's based on Rachmaninov's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini". You know, that beautiful melody once enamored of figure skaters everywhere. Also known by Philistines everywhere as "Love Theme from SOMEWHERE IN TIME". I'm serious. |
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| re: CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 05:00 am EST 01/08/19 | |
| In reply to: re: CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area - Alcindoro 03:18 am EST 01/05/19 | |
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| There's a good chance that "The Plastic Alligator" was not recorded. In those days, it was common for the jacket and gatefold, if there was one, with everything, including the song list, to be prepared and ready for LPs to put inside before the recording was even made. This is why several cast recordings of the period list songs that were not recorded. I'm not sure but it may be that all the recordings on which this happened were Columbias. Re Anya: This is a different case. I would think that the two songs listed were recorded. For starters, there are those timings. And it was recorded early, possibly before previews began. If you scroll down to the Trivia & History notes on the linked page, you'll see some info on this. |
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| Link | Anya cast recording |
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| re: CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area | |
| Last Edit: BroadwayTonyJ 02:15 pm EST 01/05/19 | |
| Posted by: BroadwayTonyJ 02:14 pm EST 01/05/19 | |
| In reply to: re: CORRECTION: Regarding frequency of HERE'S LOVE productions in Chicago area - Alcindoro 03:18 am EST 01/05/19 | |
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| I was 15 years old when I purchased the Here's Love LP in '63. I too was curious about "The Plastic Alligator" and "Nothing in Common". The '92 Sony Broadway CD release has the same numbers as the LP, although the liner notes refer to "Plastic Alligator" as a song of advice Shellhammer sings to his sales clerks to help them get shoppers to buy an over-stocked Christmas toy. You can find a performance of the song on YouTube from a high school production. I just watched it -- it's actually very well done, even delightful. The number is a combination of recitative and singing -- the melody is very similar to that of "That Man Over There". When I saw Here's Love some years ago, the number (performed, of course, by mature adult actors portraying sophisticated Manhattanites) came across as being pretty stupid. I think it works a lot better when you having enthusiastic high schoolers doing it. I've noticed that as early as '98 Columbia Broadway Masterworks began re-issuing much expanded releases of classic Broadway musicals on CD. Recordings of L'il Abner, House of Flowers, Anyone Can Whistle, Gypsy, South Pacific, Finian's Rainbow, Sound of Music, Cabaret, West Side Story, On the Town, Annie, A Chorus Line, and many others were re-released with material that was not on earlier CDs. To my knowledge Here's Love has never received an expanded release. Regarding Anya, Walter Willison states in the CD liner notes that the original LP jacket was printed before the show began performances and contained a number of errors (like listing songs that apparently were either cut or reworked). The song you mention is not listed on IBDB. In addition, Kritzerland's reputation for issuing never before released material on its CDs of Broadway musicals and movie soundtracks is pretty much unmatched in the industry. Most likely if it's not on the Anya CD, it doesn't exist |
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