The eMusic Dozen: Great Soundtracks, Failed Musicals

When I caught one of this show's 14 Broadway performances in December 2006, it was apparent as early as Scene One that Nick Hornsby's novel High Fidelity was a lousy idea for a Broadway musical. The plot, the characters and the narrative just weren't the stuff of a great musical, and a whiny nerd record collector is no Billy Bigelow. But at the same time, I couldn't wait to get the cast album. The music, by composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Amanda Green, is really terrific. The opener, "The Last Real Record Store on Earth," is a kind of national anthem for vinyl collectors ("I get by relying on freaks who can't survive / without their Japanese import or their Zappa 45"). The band within the show, "Sonic Death Monkey," ranks with the Rutles and Spinal Tap as one of the all-time great fictitious rock groups. The score is a wonderfully realized amalgam of contemporary pop with classic Broadway pizzazz. Favorite line: "If you hate mass-market, grab your ass and park it."

During a preview for this starring vehicle for Martin Short, I sat behind one of the top New York newspaper critics who seemed to be laughing his fool head off, yet he panned the show in his review. Using a fictitious autobiographical conceit, Short and composer-lyricist Marc Shaiman savage contemporary Broadway styles, from '60s-type rock-driven Bible musicals (like Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell) and Steven Sondheim ("Married to Marty," which goofs on Company) to every modern musical -- and that's practically all of them -- that climax when "A Big Black Lady Stops the Show." Particularly funny is a sub-segment in which cast member Mary Birdsong indulges in a rather droll Judy Garland impression with two dead-on-target songs by Shaiman, "The Salesman That Got Away," and "Sitting on a Fence." The latter goofs on The Wizard of Oz as Short mimics Ray Bolger's Boston drawl while costumed as an anthropomorphic fence.

Even more than Fame Becomes Me or even The Drowsy Chaperone, this has to be the most obnoxiously self-conscious musical ever written, put together -- as it tells us over and over -- by two extreme musical comedy nerds (composer Jeff Bowen and book writer Hunter Bell) strictly for the amusement of other musical theater nerds. It's a show about two guys writing a show about two guys writing a show, and it's completely content free -- and it would be unbearable if it weren't so outrageously funny. The one track that sold me on this is "An Original Musical," in which one of the creators struggles with the idea of coming up with a new idea for a show in the form of a dialogue with a piece of blank paper -- which for some reason, answers him back in minstrel show rap dialogue that sounds like Dave Chappelle imitating Amos n' Andy. [TitleofShow] is coming to Broadway later this year, so we'll see if it becomes a hit and gets out of the "under-appreciated" category.

J. B. Priestley's 1929 novel The Good Companions is universally regarded as one of the most popular of all British properties -- having been filmed three times (1933, 1957, and 1980, the latter as a TV mini-series). The tale of a company of vaudeville style players making their way across Depression-era England would seem a natural for musical comedy, but while the show featured (not yet Dame) Judi Dench, it had a disappointingly short run in London and there's been no full-scale American production as of yet. Yet there are wonderful songs here: the hospitable "Pleasure of Your Company" (also recorded by Bing Crosby), the drinking song "Slipppin' Around the Corner," and a pair of exceptional ballads, "Darkest Before Dawn" (later recorded by Previn in a solo piano treatment) and "Little Lost Dream." The latter is included in a marvelous "demo" recording by the two composers.

Noel Coward's last full-dress musical (he wrote the book, music, and lyrics, directed it, and did everything but appear in it) ran 167 performances on Broadway (and another 252 in London), but was not considered a hit. However, Coward recorded demo versions of the songs many years before it opened on Broadway in October 1961 and, as enjoyable as the Broadway cast album is, the composer's own recordings of the songs are the ones to own. The cast album has a built-in feeling of datedness, but in the composer's own hands, the tunes become classic Sir Noel party patter pieces. In the show, "Beatnik Love Affair" seems hopelessly square, evidence that the musical comedy was completely out of touch with contemporary culture. But voiced by its composer, it's one of the hippest things I've ever heard. Coward was the Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg of his day -- only cooler.

Stephen Sondheim has only written two out-and-out pure musical comedies, and they both take place in The Ancient World: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and The Frogs. A "free adaptation" of a comedy by Aristophanes from the fifth century BC, Sondheim's Frogs was originally staged in the Yale University swimming pool in the mid-'70s. In 2004, Nathan Lane re-re-adapted the material for a limited run at Lincoln Center. Lane turned it into The Producers Go to Hades, with himself and Roger Bart as a mythological odd couple who travel to the underworld in search of the greatest playwright in history. Admittedly, that summary of the plot doesn't make it sound like a load of laughs, but the 405 BC "old" comedy material is handled with a lot of wry humor. The whole enchilada is very nearly stolen by comic John Byner as Charon, ferrying souls off to Hades and singing "Get your kicks on the River Styx" and "if you're a stiff, then get in the skiff."

Another production which in no way qualifies as a flop: The Rodgers and Hammerstein organization (which controls the Irving Berlin catalog) had the ingenious idea of taking the well-remembered 1954 movie musical (the top-grossing film of that year) and adapting it for the stage, supplementing the original score with a half dozen or so additional Berlin ballads. It's a movie that everyone loves even while admitting that the story is somewhat ludicrous. Although the stage show "Irving Berlin's White Christmas" has yet to play in New York, it's a honey of an original cast album, with a dozen or so classic (and lesser known) Berlin songs treated in the enduring, unselfconsciously retro Broadway style. The combination of excessive holiday sentiment and unfaltering patriotism is actually refreshing in the era of Iraq and Katrina; it's not surprising to find oneself "Counting Your Blessings" while listening to this album.

There are any number of classic original movie musicals in which the story and songs are so well-realized and well-integrated that they deserved to find a second life off Broadway -- like Meet Me in Saint Louis, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Calamity Jane. The latter began life as a mere knock-off of Annie Get Your Gun, but it came into its own on the screen thanks to knockout performances by Doris Day and Howard Keel. 40 years after the 1953 film, Calamity Jane was recorded as a full-length two-act stage show (and released as a double-disc set by Jay Records) which again benefits from two superlative performances, Debbie Shapiro (now known as Debbie Shapiro Gravitte) and Jason Howard, a bass-baritone whom Howard Keel could have been proud of, with a voice, as the title of his main solo goes, "Higher Than a Hawk (Deeper Than a Well)."

Ed Koch, who served as Mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989, often seemed more like a musical comedy character than a politician, and at the height of his unprecedented 12-year "reign," playwright Warren Leight and composer (and, this time, lyricist) Charles Strouse turned Koch's mayoral memoir into an off-Broadway musical. Listening to [i[Mayor[/i] almost 20 years after Koch left office, the show seems like a New York Post political cartoon set to music -- but there's nothing wrong with that, topical humor was a staple of the musical theater in the age before Rodgers and Hammerstein made musicals into something more like grand opera, with "classic" (meaning timeless, revivable) shows. The songs of Charles Strouse are as good as his classic scores to Bye Bye Birdie, Golden Boy, and Annie, particularly the transformation of Koch's slogan "How'm I Doin'" into a snappy song and dance.

This 1971 show has become something of a mantra for musical theater buffs -- it's a classic album of a flop show that is by its very nature, unrevivable. It can never be restaged for the same reason it bombed on Broadway: the central idea is just not funny. It's based on a 1958 play called Breath of Spring, in which elderly people, in order to protect their home, resort to a crime spree. The idea of suggesting, as late as 1971, that it was novel or unusual to see a 70-year-old individual acting like something other than an infirm old fool was more insulting (and not just to older people) than humorous. But the music and the singing are something else indeed, and both recordings of the score are thoroughly delightful. The 1971 New York cast album is better known, but this 1991 British cast recording is also well worth having, especially for the gloriously self-affirming "Yes," by the charismatic lead Dora Bryan.

With Sail Away considered unsuccessful, the next Noel Coward show to reach New York did not feature Sir Noel's own music and lyrics. Rather, he permitted the team of Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray to adapt his 1941 comedy Blithe Spirit into a musical -- and he directed the results. Where the original Blithe Spirit, a tale of a love triangle in which one of the threesome is deceased (they could have called it "Design for Dying"), was one of the all-time greatest successes of the English theater, High Spirits ran 375 performances on Broadway and a mere 94 in London. The London recording boasts the presence of Dame Cicely Courtneidge, one of the great ladies of British theater. It also has more than its fair share of memorable, even magical songs -- from the Jack Jones hit swinger, "You'd Better Love Me," to the toe-tapping "I Know Your Heart," and a couple of Coward-esque comedy patter tunes, notably "My Home Sweet Heaven."

This 1960 Jules Styne/ Betty Comden/ Adolph Green vehicle was a hit, but not a blockbuster -- and far too topical to be considered a classic. It was funny, funny, funny (as star Phil Silvers would say), but was torn from the day's headlines, being about the Senate investigations of the music business, a plot reminiscent of both The Girl Can't Help It and Bye Bye Birdie. However, this cast recording of the brief 1999 revival is outstanding, boasting major Broadway leading man Brian Stokes Mitchell and soul-calypso singer Heather Headley as the show's central couple. The score is unusually rich in terrific songs, including "Fireworks" (a variation on their "I Just Met a Girl" from Bells Are Ringing), and two parodies of the nascent rock and roll movement: "All You Need Is a Quarter" and "What's New at the Zoo," with blaring guitars and 16th-note triplets. The song you really want to hear of course is the show's one all-time standard, "Make Someone Happy."