On Your Toes

Did anybody elise see the 1936 oriiginal..with Bolger...His Slaughter on Tenth Avenue was a big game changer..The score was hardly recognized at the time..big cabaret standards slowly evolved including He Was Too Good to Me and Glad T o Be Unhappy.

A great Encore choice!

1936-NO 1954-NO 1983-YES.

It was a great show. Look forward to Encores.

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The score was hardly recognized at the time...

Not quite true.

Both "There's a Small Hotel" and "Glad to be Unhappy" were quickly picked up and recorded by several top bands. And "Slaughter on 10th Avenue" was a popular pops concert piece for the Boston Pops and other such orchestras for years.

The fact that the show opened prior to the making of original cast albums (the London cast did record a few highlights) meant that the score didn't travel much beyond theatre circles - few shows of that era did. The first full recording was released by Columbia Records in 1953, and it is now available from Masterworks Broadway. It's a well-sung though not terribly theatrical recording. But it DID help inspire the 1954 revival, and Decca's album of that production has theatricality to spare. Both were eclipsed by John Yap's recording of the 1983 revival.

"He Was Too Good to Me" was never part of the score of ON YOUR TOES. It was written for SIMPLE SIMON (1930) but cut from the show before opening.

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I saw the revival when I was in college. The only number I remember was Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

I agree, LaurenB.

There is a (really crappy) video of that number, which stopped the show when I saw it, on Blue Gobo. It cuts in halfway through Christine Andreas's song.
On Your Toes with dance

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Thanks Besty! It brings back great memories. (Too bad the video doesn't capture the magic that was happening on the stage.)

Yeah, it stopped the show when we saw it too. We had a really good audience - lots of energy, applause, laughter. They even gasped (a good gasp) when Dina Merrill walked on stage, because she was so pretty.

I saw the 1954 production with Zorina and Bobby Van, and, ofcourse, Elaine Stritch playing the wiseacre socialite who is involved with the ballet. Moments are still very vivid in my mind; "It's Got to Be Love"; "The Heart is Quicker than the Eye"; the terrible ballet where everything goes wrong that ends Act I, and ofcourse, the great Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, where the hero has to dance until the gunman, sitting in the box, is arrested. I think the production was directed by George Abbott, and choreographed by Balanchine, as the original was. Nevertheless, it did not run very long.

Gosh, I would have loved to have seen both Ray Bolger and Bobby Van. (I loved Lara Teeter in the role, wish I had seen him in other things.)