The Day Before Spring

I'm off to London again tomorrow - just there and back in a day! Off to see THE DAY BEFORE SPRING in Ian Marshall Fisher's Lost Musicals season at the Lilian Bayliss Theatre. Really excited about this as it's a show I've wanted to see for over 40 years!

It was one of the the earliest of musicals written by Lerner and Loewe and has only been performed once since then (in 2007 by the York Theatre Company in New York after much of the previously lost score was restored). I fell in love with Alan Jay Lerner's lyrics back when I was a teenager, which is the main reason I picked up my passion for musical theatre. (Hes one of the true great master-craftsmen in the history of lyric writing.) So getting to see and hear this lost treasure after all these years is pretty special for me.

I'll post a report on Monday.

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Updated On: 6/13/10 at 04:17 PM

The Day Before Spring concert was pure joy. As always, it was beautifully and cleverly presented by Ian Marshall Fisher. Obviously, the 1945 show is quite dated in many ways but it still shines with the brilliance of Lerner and Loewe as musical theatre creatives. The book and lyrics are lined with the sophisticated class of Lerner's wit and Loewe's music is as lush and beautifully soaring as it was to be in his later work.

And it was simply perfectly cast and beautifully performed. The cast included operatic star David Habbin, Madeleine Worrall (who played Melanie in Gone With The Wind, though I won't hold that against her LOL), Kaisa Hammarlund (Petra in ALNM at the Choc Factory and Garrick) and stage and TV veteran Harry Landis.

Scripps, there are some beautiful ballads in the score, most of which I had heard before as there are some recordings of them (such as YOU'VE NEVER CHANGED AT ALL, I LOVE YOU THIS MORNING, GOD'S GREEN WORLD and THE DAY BEFORE SPRING). But there were also a couple of brilliant comedy numbers I had never heard before, sung by the show's ingenue (Hammerlund) with vintage Lerner lyrical humour - MY LOVE IS A MARRIED MAN and A JUG OF WINE, A LOAF OF BREAD AND THOU. Plus there's a great comic act two opener - a male quartet called FRIENDS TO THE END.

The plot deals with a High School reuinion which a husband and wife attend and the wife meets up with the lover she almost ran away with ten years before (who has recently published a book called The Day Before Spring in which he recounted their love affair and the story of what might have happened if they had actually run away together). The woman becomes torn between her desire to run away with her former lover or stay with her husband. And there's a brilliantly funny end of act one scene where statues of Plato, Voltaire and Freud come alive in the woman's head as she mentally debates whether to run off or stay.

Interestingly this idea of a reunion with a heroine meeting her former lover and finding that the idyllic memories she had of him are somewhat illusory mirrors in part the plotline of Sally and Ben in Sondheim's Follies (which TDBS predates by about 25 years). And some of the psychoanalytical aspects in the show mirror ideas in Ira Gerwshwin and Kurt Weill's Lady In The Dark (and Lerner collaborated later with Weill on the show Love Life).

One other intriguing thing of note about TDBS is that it shows that Lloyd Webber is not the first musical theatre composer to steal music from himself while scoring a new musical! There are quite a few musical notes in "Spring" that later made it into My Fair Lady and more than a few notes that later surfaced in Gigi - in particular the melody of the Spring song "Where's My Wife" became pretty much note for note the melody of Gaston's Soliloquy (the preamble to the title song in "Gigi").

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Updated On: 6/14/10 at 04:27 AM

Scripps, I love Kurt Weill. I saw the Hal Prince/Arthur Kopit Weill bio Lovemusik on Broadway and absolutely loved it - such an underrated gem of a piece. Michael Cerveris was fantastic as Weill and Donna Murphy's performance as Lenya is (along with Alice Ripley in N2N) one of the two most incredible performances by an actress in a musical I've ever witnessed.

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