It was the show that made Ethel Merman a star, Ginger Rogers a Hollywood commodity and George and Ira Gershwin a small fortune.
With beguiling tunes such as ”Embraceable You,” ”But Not for Me,”
”Bidin` My Time,” ”Boy, What Love Has Done to Me” and ”I Got Rhythm,”
how could it have failed?
Now, 60 years after the Gershwins` ”Girl Crazy” opened on Broadway, the cast album finally has arrived (on Elektra-Nonesuch/Roxbury).
The new recording represents the latest instance of a great American musical restored with the care and scholarship once reserved for opera alone. Since the immense success of John McGlinn`s definitive recording of Jerome Kern`s ”Show Boat” (1988), record labels steadily have been releasing
”complete” recordings of beloved Broadway shows.
In some ways, ”Girl Crazy” stands as the most ambitious attempt of all, for it launches a five-year campaign to bring at least five Gershwin musicals to compact disc, each restoring lost material and featuring extensive liner notes.
”I suppose we decided to start with `Girl Crazy` simply because it`s one of the Gershwins` most exciting and ebullient scores,” says Tommy Krasker, producer of the new CD and vice president of Roxbury Recordings, Inc., the company established last year by Mrs. Ira (Leonore) Gershwin to preserve the brothers` theatrical legacy.
”But, also, to be quite honest,” adds Krasker, ”we started with `Girl Crazy` because some of the other projects we`re going to do are much more complex to restore. So we thought this would be a good way to get our feet wet.”
Not that returning ”Girl Crazy” to its full, original luster was easy.
Like all of the Gershwin musicals (there are roughly two dozen), the show hailed from an era when producers didn`t keep close track of theatrical scores once a show closed. Generally, the hit numbers would be released as sheet music, while the rest of the score (including lesser-known songs, original orchestrations, dance music and the like) would be tossed aside.
By blind luck, however, in 1982 roughly 80 boxes filled with these yellowed manuscripts were uncovered in a Warner Bros. warehouse in Secaucus, N.J., the treasures including forgotten original manuscripts (and
orchestrations) from shows by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and other giants. The find made possible McGlinn`s ”Show Boat,” as well as the cycle of Gershwin restorations launched with ”Girl Crazy.”
(Since then, other, smaller discoveries have helped fuel the process.)
”Without the Secaucus material, none of this work would have been possible,” says Krasker.
”With `Girl Crazy,` for instance, thanks to Secaucus we had about 85 percent of the original material. With `Strike Up the Band` (the next show in the Gershwin restoration project, to be released in 1991) we had maybe 25 percent of the original score, mostly from Secaucus.”
Still, putting ”Girl Crazy” back together took some detective work.
By consulting original manuscripts, Krasker and company discovered that the standard Tams-Witmark piano-vocal score contained ”glaring
inaccuracies,” according to his essay in the recording`s 100-page booklet:
”Nowhere does the published piano-vocal score prove more misguided than in its account of this 284-bar number (`I Got Rhythm`). It contains no record of the now-celebrated refrain in which Ethel Merman held a `C` while the orchestra played the melody underneath.”
That was the note, however, that launched Merman`s career, her piercing top range rattling both the rafters and the critics.
”The big surprise of the evening was Ethel Merman, a young and talented songstress with a peculiar delivery, who tied the proceedings in knots,”
wrote Robert Coleman in the N.Y. Daily Mirror, covering the Oct. 14, 1930, opening at the Alvin Theatre.
”A graduate of nightclubs and motion picture theatres, this girl bids fair to become the toast of Broadway.”
Or, as Merman remembered in her autobiography, ”Merman”: ”Almost immediately, I followed `Delilah` with `I Got Rhythm,` and when I held the C note for 16 bars, an entire chorus, while the orchestra played the melody, the audience went a little crazy.” (Similarly, following the close of ”Girl Crazy” in 1931, Ginger Rogers was called out to Hollywood.)
The standard published version of ”Girl Crazy” also had smaller, though no less important errors, explains Krasker:
”Passages sung in 1930 had been mistakenly stripped of their lyrics and marked `dance,` while dance sections had been furnished with vocal lines well beyond the characters` established ranges.
”In one number (`Bronco Busters`), the lyric and the accompanying tune fell a syllable out of sync; in another (`Boy! What Loves Has Done to Me!`), they drifted two measures apart. Most of the vocal arrangements had no precedent in the Gershwin manuscripts.”
Equally grave was the loss of the sensational original orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett, who, along with Hans Spialek, represented the first rank of Broadway orchestrators (to this day, most musical theater composers do not orchestrate their shows).
Bennett`s contribution was particularly vital, for the ”Girl Crazy” pit band included no less than Red Nichols, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa, all of whom would go on to define swing-band playing.
”With this show, George Gershwin was determined to move forward-musically-with the times, which is why he used these hot-band players,”
says Krasker. ”There`s no doubt that, musically, `Girl Crazy` takes you out of the `20s, an era that really was under the influence of Jerome Kern (whose scores were rooted in European classical opera and operetta).
”In a way, `Girl Crazy` launches the era of swing band playing. Musically, it was the wave of the future.”
The show`s book, by Guy Bolton and John McGowan, was slight, chronicling the misadventures of a womanizing New York lad sent by his father to a prep school out West.
The slim plot was but an excuse for a series of vaudeville-style routines, and here is where the new recording must stray from the original:
There`s no way of knowing precisely what kind of piano improvisations Gershwin played when, on occasion, he sat at the pit band`s keyboard; nor can one duplicate the impersonations that comic Willie Howard offered in the original. To that end, the new recording aims more for the spirit of the show than the letter, with pianist Dick Hyman improvising in Gershwin`s style, and Frank Gorshin turning in various impersonations.
More important, the recording, conducted by John Mauceri, captures the exuberant spirit of the show, from idiomatic vocals by Judy Blazer and Lorna Luft (daughter of Judy Garland, who starred in the 1943 film version of ”Girl Crazy”) to the hot-jazz playing of the orchestra.
The recording`s only shortcoming, in fact, is its failure to include numbers cut from ”Girl Crazy” before its Broadway opening, including
”Gambler of the West” and ”You Can`t Unscramble Scrambled Eggs.”
Krasker says he eliminated them because ”I didn`t really feel that the cut numbers added anything to an understanding of the score.” Still, considering the thoroughness of today`s best musical theater recordings, the deleted numbers should have been included in an appendix at the end of the recording. That`s probably a small point, though, considering the recording`s accomplishment: recapturing a great Gershwin score as close to its original, opening-night form as possible.
”I`ll never forget the opening night,” recalls Frances Godowsky, Gershwin`s last surviving sibling.
”Ethel Merman created a sensation, and George thought she was terrific. In fact, she told him that someone had suggested she take music lessons, and George told her not to bother. He said she didn`t need any music lessons and shouldn`t waste her time.”
Considering how that belted ”C” must have sounded, Gershwin, as usual in matters of the theater, knew precisely what he was talking about.
