What I Want, What I Really Really Want

Ken M. talks today about the current German incarnation of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which adopts some of the revisions made during the Broadway run but drops others. (Which is bizarre, as those revisions made it about as good as any Frank Wildhorn show can be, but whatever.)

Pimpernel has had three English cast albums by now, each with a different tunestack and none representing the version now available for licensing in America. Not recorded anywhere are the full version of "Storybook" with the chorus and dialogue (they skimped while recording the new songs for the third album) or the striking trio version of "The Riddle." And it got me thinking about the number of shows that are still crying out for good cast albums. Such as:

*Love Life. A major Kurt Weill/Alan Jay Lerner show with no cast album, ever. What?

*A Chorus Line. The one-time long-running champ has only been recorded once in English, and that recording omits two full songs (one of them just a reworking of "One," of course) and several pieces of the Montage. The last CD remastering finally put in everything that had been recorded, but it still falls substantially short. How is it possible that no one--not even the classic-happy Jay Records--has tackled this very famous score again?

*Follies. It sounds greedy to ask for new recordings of shows that have had four official albums, three of them on two CDs. But this show is probably cursed by its very concept, that you can't hold on to the past. The first album was so heavily abridged (only one full song cut, but internal cuts absolutely everywhere) that I can't even listen to it without thinking that I am, in fact, losing my mind. The concert album demonstrates Herbert Ross's remarkable arrogance in changing what was perfectly fine to begin with; the dialogue and dance music are unnecessarily different and far less satisfying. The London album keeps the songs whole and has some great performances, but now the arrogant ones are Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman, who changed just about all of the dialogue, many of the lyrics, and four complete songs. And the Paper Mill album, made so painstakingly to fill a sore and longstanding gap, was somehow not given the rights to include any dialogue at all--things like the Prelude are meaningless without emotional context. Even the complete live tape of the score fucks up; Gene Nelson blew "Buddy's Blues" so completely that the experience is ruined. God, is one more album too much to ask?

*The Golden Apple. Since the show's never been given its due as an American classic, it's never occurred to most people that the score was so incompletely preserved.

*Carnival. The London album is about twice as long as the Broadway album...and the London album is not getting reissued anytime soon. Grr. While they aren't cut to the point of incoherence, all of the songs on the Broadway album peter out almost immediately instead of continuing to a satisfying conclusion.

*The Full Monty. I'm still a little bitter that "Maid of the Mist," perhaps the best song David Yazbek wrote for the score, was cut before the opening. But I can get past that, and past the elimination of most of the dance music and small reprises--what nags at me is the appalling restructuring of "Let it Go." If there was ever a song that called for a faithful recording, this was it. An exciting finale in the theater, it ends with a pitiful little singalong for the men and the women, no suggestion of a screaming audience at all. Bleah.

*James Joyce's The Dead. Another one which wasn't recorded at all--not the loss that Love Life is, perhaps, but stunning given the kind of acclaim the show had (and that the cast included Christopher Walken, Blair Brown, and a lot of musical theatre stalwarts).

*Peter Pan. Talk about petty...but I really want a version of the Leonard Bernstein score that reinstates Peter's songs, which were cut when Jean Arthur couldn't sing them. (Such were the economics of the time that the show was then scaled down from a full musical to a play with incidental songs, and went on just as readily to huge success.)

*The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. No English recording, even though the off-Broadway production of Sheldon Harnick's translation was a major success. The French soundtrack is just not enough.

*The Wild Party. True, it was a very long recording that included all of the most important stuff (whereas Decca Broadway's next project, Seussical, cut a lot of the repetitive verse). But poor Jane Summerhays as Madeleine lost not only one of her two solos (it's reprised in the next number, and thus probably expendable), but also a verse she had in a group number. The character is fairly important in the show, but almost nothing of her part remains on the album.

Anybody have any other disgraces to contribute?