![]() ![]() It turns out the Amish have quite some lessons for the city slickers, but the reverse is also true. Plain and Fancy has two sophisticated, sparring New York lovers land in a Pennsylvania Dutch community. The show, clearly, was meant as a nostrum for Cold War jitters. But the old tunesmith could still give us the melodious ballad “All of You,” adequately sung by Viviano. Porter's gifts are waning-what obvious rhymes in “Paris Loves Lovers,” well sung by Hoty what feeble satire in “Stereophonic Sound,” sung by the company. Silk Stockings, Cole Porter's swan song (based on a superior movie, Ninotchka), informed us that Communist agents are totally comic figures yearning for the good capitalist life, and that a fierce female commissar ends up as putty in the democratic hands of a French amorist. “It's fine to be a genius, of course,” one lyric concedes but heart, shared by all of us, is a better thing yet. But even when the Senators are winning, it is through democratic team effort, in “Heart,” as rendered by the entire company: Dee Hoty, Raymond Jaramillo McLeod, Sal Viviano, Liz Larsen, Connie Pachl, Justin Bohon, Alexander Gemignani, Rak, Emily Skinner and Bryan Batt. The moral? The dullness of the Eisenhower era is to be endured with equanimity. He reneges, returns home and, resigned, watches his team lose. (Her song, “Whatever Lola Wants,” is sung too affectedly by Rachelle Rak.) Our hero can't forget his wife and the satisfactions of a staid status quo. ![]() The Devil not only makes him young and a baseball star, he also provides him with one of his hags turned into a sexpot girlfriend. A middle-aged married man almost sells his soul to the Devil to get his Washington Senators from the league's bottom to the top by defeating the Yankees. Damn Yankees is the Faust story in baseball uniform. So take the three most successful shows represented here: Damn Yankees (1,018 performances), Silk Stockings (478), and Plain and Fancy (461), and bear in mind that in the economics of that time, it took fewer performances to achieve a successful run and pay back the investors.Īt first glance, the three shows may have little in common. Or, if we were too young, what our parents were like in that year of grace, Eisenhower and middle-class America at its bourgeois best. So, besides enjoying the songs on The Broadway Musicals of 1955 as such-and many of them, remembered or forgotten, are worth hearing or rehearing-we can deduce from this disc something about the way we were in 1955, if we were old enough to count. This is what people who wrote them thought pertinent, and this is what their audiences, if the shows were hits, confirmed as relevant. Songs tell us something about a given time. By offering songs from one specific year, mostly from hit shows but also from flops (and not necessarily the best-remembered songs from those shows), the concerts fulfill a social-historical function as well. ![]() The “Broadway by the Year” series, as presented at Town Hall by Scott Siegel, serves-besides selling tickets and indulging audience nostalgia-a greater purpose. ![]()
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