On behalf of The Concert Singers, I welcome you to our 2008 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At this time we are taking a break. Help yourself to more ice cream and drinks. See you in about fifteen.
Composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart wrote about 30 musical shows between 1919 and Hart's death in 1943. During most of that era, musicals were mostly revues and what story there was existed as an excuse for the singers and dancers to show their stuff. But in 1938 the duo wrote the first musical based on a Shakespeare play, The Boys From Syracuse, which was based on The Comedy of Errors. From that show came the songs "Falling in Love with Love" and "This Can't Be Love". The previous year they had written Babes in Arms, which included many hit songs, especially "My Funny Valentine". In the 1939 movie version, Judy Garland sang that song, which was then sung by many jazz artists in the 1950s. In 1929 the duo collaborated on Spring Is Here, from which came "With a Song in My Heart".
A song first entitled "Make Me a Star", by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, originally written for Jean Harlow, was cut from the movie it was intended for. It was reworked in 1934 as Blue Moon. This arrangement is by Ruth Artman.
A cappella singing was quite popular in the late 1950s, in a form known as doo-wop. In 1961 an interracial quintet from Pittsburgh called the Marcels recorded a cover of the song we just sang. It was a huge hit, topping both the pop and R & B charts.
The expression "once in a blue moon" has been around for awhile, without a precise meaning. So some astronomers gave it the meaning of "a second full moon occurring in the same calendar month". It just so happens that there will be a "blue moon" this month, on July 31. (The first full moon was on the 2nd.) What better to mark the event than by singing a second arrangement of Blue Moon? We now present Blue Moon, as performed by the Marcels.
Meredith Willson wrote both lyrics and music for the show The Music Man. "Till There Was You" is sung by Marion (Barbara Cook in the show, Shirley Jones in the movie) to Harold Hill (Robert Preston) at the climactic point of Act II. The song was released as a single to promote the show even before the cast album. It was covered also by Anita Bryant and Peggy Lee. The Beatles used it for their failed 1962 audition with Decca Records, but they also sang in on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and included it on the albums With the Beatles (1962) and Meet the Beatles (1964); it was the only Broadway song they ever recorded.
"Man of Constant Sorrow" is a song of uncertain origin, probably dated to 1913. The song was published by Cecil Sharp in 1918 under the title "In Old Virginny". It became famous in 1953 by the Stanley Brothers, Carter Stanley and Ralph Stanley, bluegrass musicians. It was recorded by Bob Dylan in his 1962 debut album. Later recordings included Waylon Jennings; Peter, Paul and Mary; Judy Collins; and Rod Stewart. The song was used in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, under the title "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow."
"You'll Never Walk Alone" is from the 1945 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Carousel, sung twice, first to encourage Julie after her husband commits suicide, then at Julie's daughter's graduation at the close of the show. For this reason, the song has been sung at thousands of school graduations.
"In the Still of the Night" was written by Cole Porter for the 1937 film Rosalie. A doo-wop version was recorded by Dion and the Belmonts in 1959.
In 1962 Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics to a show based on three farces from the ancient Roman playwright Plautus. The show was called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. During out of town pre-Broadway tryouts, the show was not playing well. Jerome Robbins, the choreographer and director was called in to make changes. He suspected that the audiences were not understanding what a Roman farce was about, so he demanded a new opening number. The result: "Comedy Tonight"!
In 1928 George and Ira Gershwin wrote songs for a show called East Is West, which was never published or produced. In 1930, they used one of the songs, "Embraceable You" in a new play with songs called Girl Crazy, where it was performed by Ginger Rogers in a routine choreographed by Fred Astaire. Girl Crazy was revised in 1992 with songs added from other Gershwin shows and called Crazy for You.
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