Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s 1936 musical On Your Toes opened on Broadway seven years before Oklahoma! started the trend of recording “original cast” albums of the music from shows and 12 years before the introduction of the LP format. So, there was no cast album for it. But in 1952, as part of a series of such efforts, Columbia Records producer Goddard Lieberson assembled his own cast in a recording studio to give the music its first LP treatment. He hired new Broadway star Jack Cassidy and nightclub singer Portia Nelson, and had Lehman Engel conduct the orchestra. The result is an excellent album containing the Rodgers & Hart hits from the show — “There’s a Small Hotel” and “Glad to Be Unhappy” — along with some clever Hart lyrics for songs such as “It’s Gotta Be Love,” “The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye,” and “Too Good for the Average Man,” and, in its first full-length recording, Rodgers’ ten-minute ballet “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” Lieberson’s effort to create a catalog of cast albums of otherwise forgotten shows is to be commended, especially when they turn out to be as impressive as this On Your Toes. – William Ruhlmann
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