Profile for Pawnee Bill

The old Lieberson recording is a bit sleepy, though Kaye Ballard's numbers are terrific. Anyway, the Kitty Carlisle Decca version is very theatrical, with a cast (including Alfred Drake and Paula Laurence) that could easily have played the show if it had been produced in the 1940s instead of in 1933. And while it is good to have the complete score with the original orchestrations, this isn't one of those "big" Kern scores with a ton of songs, like Show Boat, Sweet Adeline, Music in the Air, a...

The Goddard Lieberson recording isn't the only previous Roberta. Decca issued one sometime in the 1940s with Kitty Carlisle and Alfred Drake. It's on CD as we speak.

These are ridiculously overpriced. You could bunch up any ten of them on eBay for fifteen dollars and still no one would bid.

Thanks for the update. Too bad there isn't a website we can google our way to with intel on tryout and tour casts.

I think that line is "Yet I survived!" And where did Mrs. Leslie Carter come from? Mother Goddam was played by Florence Reed.

The senior Albee, the vaudeville magnate, was the playwright's grandfather, not his father.

Hushpuppy: The CD with Susan Johnson's "Sweet Thursday" is You Can't Put Ketchup on the Moon: Broadway Flops and Roadkills 1925-1955. She also sings "Charm," from Maggie. The CD label is Rialto Recordings and it's unit no. SLRR 9201.

The 1954 Theatre de Lys recording was made a bit late in the run, so it's not exactly the "original cast"--the Mr. Peachum is a replacement. Still, this performance has a theatricality that no other Threepenny cast album has, perhaps because its performers are more from the Broadway musical world than from the spoken theatre. They're not actors, but singing actors. The Polly was to play the heroine of The Most Happy Fella, and the Lucy was appear prominently in Fiddler on the Roof and Mame. T...

The Clear Day vocal score is not a reliable guide to the show as it was presented on Broadway. It adhered at least somewhat to a revision that Lerner made for the national tour. Thus, it has a number called something like "The Marriage Contract," which starts "The father of the bride/Must free- and willingly provide..." This number wasn't in the show in New York, as I recall.

As everyone here has said, he's a great guy. But also: he's a great dancer, having worked with Fosse, Robbins, and so on. I saw him on a showcase of Going Hollywood, based on the Kaufman and Hart comedy Once in a Lifetime, and he was really charming. It's too bad the piece didn't go on to Broadway.

Bonnie & Clyde is actually very tuneful and atmospheric, and the two leads are especially good. If you're a Wildhorn fan, it truly is a must-have.

To tell the truth, I think they make a perfect odd couple. Michael is the mischievous one and Susan the serious one, so together they create an air of merry disputation that contributes to the show's vitality. They've been at this for years and everyone in the theatre wants to be on their show--Hugh Jackman, Elaine Stritch, etc. That wouldn't happen if they weren't good at what they do.

People of my acquaintance who have guested on Theater Talk over the years have nothing but good things to say about her. The general feeling is that she gives her guests a great framework in which to discuss their work. It's good for the guest, good for the guest's show (and for keeping many people employed), and good for the theatre.

Actually, the musical changed the spelling of both her names very slightly, calling her "Raffaela Ottanio," I assumed for legal reasons (though the actress was long dead by then).

Yes, Inga Swenson is in it, as Nora Bayes. It's a terrible show, though, with one of the worst scripts a backstager ever had. All clichés and no authenticity.

Gaveston: On her Carnegie Hall CD, Cook sings an earlier version of "My White Knight," and while it's just as unusual as the version they ended up with, it sounds a little more like the rest of the Music Man score. It's possible that Loesser mentored Willson in refining the number into its present state, and of course "mentored" could mean a lot of things.

Though it isn't difficult, "Wick" in the Secret Garden vocal selections gives the pianist a great workout. The accompaniment is in the form of a toccata, so you are tearing away non-stop from first measure to last. Very satisfying.

JV: Mordden's previous books on the musical concentrated on smallish subjects--musicals of a particular decade, or Rodgers and Hammerstein. This time he's tackling the entire history of the musical from The Beggar's Opera and Gilbert and Sullivan through Show Boat and The Cradle Will Rock right up to Wicked and Bonnie & Clyde. That's almost three hundred years of a theatre genre to deal with, so he had to leave out or deal lightly with some of it. I was disappointed on how little there was ab...

Previous West Side Story revivals hewed closely to the original Jerome Robbins staging. This last WSS was directed by Arthur Laurents in an attempt to claim the show for himself, so he made it as different from Robbins as possible. He couldn't arrange for new choreography, either contractually or because that would have created a scandal. But using Spanish, making quirky directorial choices, and so on were all part of the plan to invent an Arthur Laurents West Side Story. And Laurents was a w...

I liked them both, but it must be said that the Lippa version played in a single set in an off-Broadway environment while the LaChiusa was a full-fledged Broadway show using a turntable to rove cinematically through the story's "places." That in itself made it a more interesting production. Both albums are well worth hearing now that the shows themselves have closed, and you can even hear LaChiusa's director, George Wolfe, on the CD shouting, "Will everyone please go home?" The line was inven...