Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer - Saratoga (1959 Original Broadway Cast)
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Harold Arlen, Johnny MercerEdition: Music CD
Format: Cast Recording
CD Release Date: 2000-06-06
Music Label: RCA Victor Broadway
Soundtracks:
- One Step, Two Step
- I'll Be Respectable
- Gettin' a Man
- Why Fight This?
- Petticoat High
- A Game of Poker
- Love Held Lightly / A Game of Poker reprise
- Saratoga: Duet
- Countin' Our Chickens
- You or No One
- The Cure
- The Man in My Life
- The Men Who Run the Country
- Goose Never Be a Peacock
- Dog Eat Dog
- The Railroad Fight
- Finale
Free Music Notes for Saratoga (1959 Original Broadway Cast)
Free Music Review: A good example of a not very good musical from the past
Hit: 4 Stars
As much as I am forever lamenting the decline of the tuneful Broadway musical, I never mean to imply that all of the oldies were necessarily goodies. Plenty of them were barely adequate and closed even before the original cast albums could hit the streets. A good case in point is revealed in the RCA Victor re-release of <Saratoga> (09026-63690-2).Its credentials are great on paper: music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, starring roles taken by Howard Keel and Carol Lawrence. And yet it closed after 80 performances, having garnered 1 favorable and 6 unfavorable reviews from the big critics in New York back then. John Chapman praised the costumes, Walter Kerr blamed the book, Richard Watts liked the first half hour, and so on. The problem seems to be that "Saratoga" looked like a period piece but did not sound like one.
"I'll be respectable" is just one in the long line of "I'm-gonna-make-it" songs and one of Keel's ballads is given a Cole Porter-ish Latin beat that is totally out of keeping with the mood, time and place of the action. Still, the score is a lot of fun and miles better than the long dry recites of recent musicals in which the composers are content to come up with one good tune and go into rehearsal, as someone wrote about "Evita." Heck, Keel can save a song as no one (but Drake, of course) can; and all in all, this CD is worth the hearing.
PS: It is possible that "Saratoga" suffered by comparison with other musicals that opened at the same time--"Gypsy," "Fiorello!" and "The Sound of Music" being the most notable.
Saratoga (1959 Original Broadway Cast) Poster
Saratoga seemed to have everything in its favor when it opened on Broadway in December 1959: a story by Edna Ferber (Show Boat), a score by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, and a cast featuring MGM musical star Howard Keel, as well as Carol Lawrence, fresh from her triumph in West Side Story. Yet the show closed after a mere 10 weeks, a victim of a cumbersome book, unwieldy locale shifts between Saratoga and New Orleans, and a score that had to be revised during tryouts by Mercer alone after Arlen fell ill. While there are no classic tunes here, it's an enjoyable 40 minutes, with Lawrence and Keel shining on numerous duets, including the love songs "Why Fight This?" and "A Game of Poker," along with some of Arlen's trademark bluesy accents, peppy ensembles, and a female duet, "Gettin' a Man," that recalls Frank Loesser's "Marry the Man Today." --David HoriuchiBroadway & Vocalists Music CDs
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