On behalf of The Concert Singers, I welcome you to our 2007 Summer Program of songs from Broadway and Hollywood musicals. We thank the session and staff and people of Covenant Presbyterian Church for making their Fellowship Hall available to us. So sit back and enjoy some great music, and ice cream, which I see some of you already are.
Israel Baline was born in Siberia in 1888, and his family came to New York in 1893. He had to work at a young age simply to survive. While working as a singing waiter, he had his first song published. His name was misspelled on the copy, but he kept the new name: Irving Berlin. You just heard There’s No Business Like Show Business, which Irving Berlin wrote for the 1946 Broadway show Annie Get Your Gun; this arrangement was by Mark Brymer. In 1946 Herb and Dorothy Fields were working on making the life of Annie Oakley into a musical comedy. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were part of the production team, and would have written the songs, but they were committed to other projects. So they turned to Irving Berlin, who was not certain if he could do it. They had asked him on a Friday, and on Monday he showed up with the songs written, both words and music. "There’s No Business Like Show Business" was almost cut, because Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't like it.
In 1960 there opened on Broadway a show partly about teenage life in 1958 with the working title of Let's Go Steady. The story was also about a famous rock star who was about to be drafted into the army (which, of course, actually happened to Elvis Presley). We now present the most delightful song from that show, which, by the bye, opened with the title Bye Bye Birdie: The Telephone Hour.
Summertime is the opening lullaby in George Gershwin's 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. The story was based on the novel by DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy, and he wrote the lyric for this song. This arrangement is by Russell Robinson.
In 1937 the Gershwins wrote the music for the film A Damsel in Distress; one of the songs from it that became popular was Nice Work If You Can Get It.
The Gershwins wrote They Can't Take That Away From Me for the 1936 film Shall We Dance. This arrangement is by Carl Strommen.
The 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle, which starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, was essentially a remake if the 1957 film An Affair to Remember, which starred Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. The 1993 film makes frequent references to the 1957 film. The featired song in the 1993 film A Wink and a Smile, with music by Marc Shaiman and lyric by Ramsey McClain. This arrangement is by John Leavitt.
In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in history. (This led San Francisco columnist Herb Caen to coin the term beatnik; other -nik words like peacenik and no-good-nik followed.) Suddenly the "Space Age" began, and the "Space Race" was on. The U. S. government began a push to emphasize math and science in schools. And young boys began to dream about becoming astronauts. In that same year, there appeared on Broadway an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein had been working on since the late 1930s, called East Side Story, and told the story of an Irish girl and a Jewish boy. But by the 1950s that plot line was considered too dated. So the story was moved to East Los Angeles, and would concern a Mexican and "Anglo" gang, but then that was deemed to exotic for New York audiences. So it was moved back to New York's Hells Kitchen district, retitled West Side Story, and the Mexican gangs became Puerto Rican. We now present two songs from that show, a medley of Something's Coming and Tonight.
At this time we are taking a break. Help yourself to more ice cream and drinks. See you in about fifteen.
In my not-so-humble opinion, if the same individual writes both the lyric and the music of a song, one or the other suffers. There have been some highly successful writers of both music and lyrics, such as Meredith Willson and Stephen Sondheim. But two unqualified exceptions to this rule are Irving Berlin and Cole Porter.
In 1926 Florenz Ziegfeld opened a show on Broadway called Betsy. Even though the songs were by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, just about everyone sensed that this was a real turkey, and the night before opening, the female lead, Belle Baker, who played Betsy, was in despair because she had no song to show off her big voice. That night Irving Berlin was called to write an appropriate song. He worked half the night, and then turned it over to an arranger. The song was interpolated into the show, and received 27 encores. The rest of the show was a flop, and closed after 39 performances. But Berlin's song, Blue Skies, lives on. Our version is arranged by Steve Zegree.
In 1942, the Austrian composer Frederick Loewe was down on his luck, and accidentally ran in to Alan Jay Lerner. They began collaborating on musical theater, and achieved their first major success with Brigadoon in 1947. Their 1951 collaboration Paint Your Wagon is better known from its 1969 film version. They reached the pinnacle of success with their adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion in 1956, called My Fair Lady. They collaborated on the film Gigi in 1958, which made Lesle Caron an international star. My Fair Lady was so successful that their next Broadway effort, Camelot, was sold out months in advance. But Camelot was no My Fair Lady, and, although it was a success, the stress of the collaboration caused Loewe to retire from theater. Lerner did talk him into writing new songs for the 1973 stage version of Gigi, and for the 1974 film The Little Prince.
The 1965 Broadway show On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, by Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the story and lyrics. As Frederick Loewe had retired in 1960 after Camelot, Lerner turned to Burton Lane to write the music, with whom he had collaborated in the 1949 film Royal Wedding. The story of the show is rather bizarre, involving psychiatry, hypnotism, smoking, ESP, and past lives. The story existed in at least three versions on stage, and was rewritten for the 1970 film. We now present the title song, as arranged by Steve Zegree.
In 1936 Bing Crosby sang the song Pennies From Heaven in the film of the same title. It was the seventh year of the great depression, and the song was a big hit.
In 1927 Hoagy Carmichael wrote a peppy jazz number called "Stardust", which, he said, was inspired by the improvisations of Bix Beiderbecke. It received moderate praise. But in 1929, he reworked the piece as a slow ballad, with a lyric by Mitchell Parish (who wrote other lyrics for tunes that had already been written such as Leroy Anderson's "Sleigh Ride"). His recording company woudn't record it because they already had a recording of that song, so he got Isham Jones's band to record it. It was a hit, and soon had over two dozen recordings. Star Dust has been called the finest love ballad ever written.
womens set
In 1918 P. G. Wodehouse wrote a song "Bill", and Jerome Kern set it to music. In 1927 Oscar Hammerstein II reworked the lyric to include it in the musical Show Boat.
Next we present another song from West Side Story. After Maria and Tony discover each other, Maria describes her feelings in I Feel Pretty.
In 1946, James Michener wrote of his experiences in World War II in a collection of short stories called Tales of the South Pacific. The book won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948, but remained relatively unknown. But Rodgers and Hammerstein, then the kings of Broadway, saw the dramatic possibilities in two of the stories, and the two had another triumph in 1949 with what Leonard Bernstein described as the greatest of American musical comedies, South Pacific. As reported in Wikipedia: In the 1954 film Men of the Fighting Lady, set in the Korean War and also based on material written by James A. Michener, there is a prologue where Michener (played in the film by Louis Calhern) is introduced to a Navy flight surgeon who comments, "Mr. Michener, I fought in the South Pacific in World War II, but I never realized how much fun it had been until I read your book!" To which Michener replies, "I never realized how much fun it was either, until Rodgers and Hammerstein set it to music!" In the song Bali Ha'i the character Bloody Mary sings to Navy Lieutenant Cable of the lures of her home island.
No doubt THE art form of the 20th century was film. The form came to its own in the 1930s with sync sound and color. And the greatest year for films was surely 1939, with such greats as Gone with the Wind, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, and The Wizard of Oz. The music for The Wizard of Oz was written by Harold Arlen, with lyrics by E. Y. "Yip" Harburg. The most famous song was almost cut, because it "slowed down the action". Fortunately it was not, and it won an oscar. Our arrangement is by Teena Chinn.
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Finally we present a medley of Cole Porter songs. Both "Anything Goes" and "You're the Top" were from the 1934 show Anything Goes. "It's De-Lovely" was originally from the 1936 show Red, Hot and Blue, which featured Ethel Merman, Jimmy Durante, and Bob Hope, and its title became the title of the recent biopic of Cole Porter. "Let's Misbehave" was from the 1928 show Paris. My Heart Belongs to Daddy is from the1938 show Leave It To Me, which introduced Mary Martin. "Be a Clown" is from the 1947 feature film The Pirate, which featured Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. "Friendship" is the best song from the 1939 show Du Barry Was a Lady; the 1943 film version featured Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and Gene Kelly. It was added to the1962 revival of Anything Goes, which is probably how it is best known. "Begin the Beguine" is from the 1935 show Jubilee. "Night and Day" is from the 1932 show Gay Divorce, which was Fred Astaire's last Broadway show; the title was controversial enough so that the 1934 film version was called The Gay Divorcee; it starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. "From This Moment On" was written for the 1950 show Out Of This World, but was cut; it was later used in the film version of Kiss Me Kate.