Cole Porter's 'Let's Face It!' - The Early Recordings

That's the young Danny Kaye riding in a Jeep on the Let's Face It! program cover above. He was the motive force behind Cole Porter's 1941 hit show following his breakout performance in Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark, which had its opening early that same year. Just nine months later Kaye's name appeared above the title on the Imperial Theater marquee for Let's Face It!

The exclamation point in the title was apparently optional

The book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields was basically a sitcom - three suspicious wives decide to bribe some soldiers at a nearby base to take up with them in a jealousy ploy. The soldiers' girlfriends find out. Complications (and Kaye specialties) ensue.

The cast was a starry one, at least in retrospect. The three wives were Eve Arden, Vivian Vance and Edith Meiser, two of whom became famous. (So did Arden's understudy, Carol Channing.) The soldiers' sweethearts were Nanette Fabray, Sunny O'Dea and Mary Jane Walsh, one of whom became famous (Fabray), and one of whom recorded several songs from the show (Walsh).

Edith Meiser, Vivian Vance and Eve Arden show Danny Kaye the big bucks 

As usual with the musicals of the time, there was no original cast album; however, Kaye did record three of its songs for Columbia, and Walsh did four for the Liberty Music Shop label. As far as I can tell, those four were exactly half of Walsh's total recorded output. Earlier, Columbia had engaged her for four songs from her other notable Broadway appearance, in Rodgers and Hart's Too Many Girls. That 1939 show is coming up in this series.

As was the practice back then, an original cast member's presence didn't mean they recorded the numbers they sang on stage. So for the first item in this collection, "Farming," we have recorded versions by Kaye, who did perform it on stage, and Walsh, who did not. The song was a sendup of the then-current fashion of the elite taking up the rural life, a topic that also inspired movies, an S.J. Perelman book, and latterly television's Green Acres.

Next in running order (at least here; this post covers only a minority of the show's score) is possibly the best known song in the show, "Ev'rything I Love." As the title might suggest, it's a tender song, and a good one. It was certainly the most popular with the record companies: Victor alone had four recordings of it - by Glenn Miller, Sammy Kaye, Dinah Shore and Tito Guizar. It has quite a lovely melody, and Liberty Music Shop broke the budget to bring in a chorus to support Walsh in her fine recording. In the show, Kaye and Walsh sang it in duet.

Mary Jane Walsh

Leading the orchestra in Walsh's recordings was Max Meth, who also conducted the theater performances. I don't know whether the stage orchestrations are used here, but I doubt it. In any case, the show's orchestrators were Hans Spialek, Don Walker and Ted Royal, a formidable trio.

I've added a second recording of "Ev'rything I Love" to the playlist because it includes the verse, which I hadn't heard before, and because the disc is by Buddy Clark, who makes frequent appearances around here.

Cole Porter

A contrast with the previous number is "Ace in the Hole," one of Porter's best and a song long beloved by cabaret performers. On stage, Mary Jane Walsh was joined by the other two girlfriends of the soldiers, but she does a solo on record. Her flinty performance of this cynical anthem is a great contrast to the romantic "Ev'rything I Love," as are Porter's clever lyrics:

     Maybe, as often it goes

     Your Abie may tire of his rose.

     So baby, this rule I propose:

     Always have an ace in the hole!

The next song, "You Irritate Me So," is the antithesis of Porter's famous "You're the Top." I've assigned it to the appropriately acerbic Nancy Walker, who recorded it in 1959. On the stage it was a duet between Nanette Fabray and Jack Williams. I imagine the song worked better with two singers flinging Porter's lyrics at one another, but Walker is pretty good, if you can handle Sid Bass' Space Age pop arrangement. When Let's Face It! opened, Walker was appearing a few blocks uptown in Best Foot Forward, her first Broadway role.

Kaye and Arden up the creek with a paddle

In the show, Danny Kaye and Eve Arden sang "Let's Not Talk About Love," but only Danny appears on the Columbia record. (Kaye and Arden had a long affair, according to Kaye biographer David Koenig, but I'm not sure when that transpired.) The song is a specialty both for Porter's clever, topical lyrics, and for Kaye, who indulges his trick of singing complex words as fast as possible. The song was an attempt to replicate his show-stopper "Tchaikowsky" in Lady in the Dark. It works fairly well.

At the time, r(h)umbas set the fashion in dance rhythms, so Porter produced one of his own - "A Little Rumba Numba." Marguerite Benton, who appeared in several Broadway musicals of the time, was the primary vocalist on stage, but did not record the piece. So I've included the contemporary disc by cabaret's Hildegarde, who handles this attractive and unfamiliar song very well. Harry Sosnik's band makes a brave attempt at the rhumba rhythms.

The final Mary Jane Walsh song is "I Hate You, Darling," which presents a typical Porter conceit - "I hate you, darling, and yet I love you so." In the show, she was joined by Kaye, Vivian Vance and James Todd, but she is solo here.

"Melody in 4F" still from Up in Arms

Perhaps surprisingly, the show included two Kaye specialty songs not written by Cole Porter. "A Fairy Tale" and "Melody in 4F" were contributed by Danny's wife Sylvia Fine working with Max Liebman. 

"Melody in 4F" is largely an auctioneer's rapid-fire spiel punctuated by words sketching the travails of the draftee - "Oh the mailman!", "Hiya, doc!" and so on, ending in "1A!" (that is, draft eligible). Much of the effect depended on Kaye's verbal acrobatics and his visual punctuations, so you may want to watch the version he did for the 1944 film Up in Arms (available here). The download includes what was probably a radio aircheck that seems to have been captured shortly after Kaye left the show, to be replaced by José Ferrer, a much different personality to be sure. Danny took Sylvia's songs with him when he decamped. The show closed a month later.

The Pierre Hotel

To complete the set, we have two instrumental medleys from William Scotty and His Cotillion Room Orchestra. The Cotillion Room is presumably the swank venue in the Pierre Hotel on Central Park East. I haven't been able to find any information on Scotty. The actual Cotillion Room bandleader at that time was probably the well-known Emil Coleman. I don't think the name on the label was a pseudonym for Coleman; as far as I can tell, that maestro did not have a recording contract at the time. It may have been the pianist or another member of the ensemble. 

The recorded selections are "Ev'rything I Love," "You Irritate Me So," "I Hate You, Darling," "Ace in the Hole" and "Farming." The polished performances are in the overripe society-band style that the Liberty Music Shop favored. (This is the musical mode that was parodied by the Glenn Miller band in "You Say the Sweetest Things, Baby," recently featured here in the Orchestra Wives recordings.)

Let's Face It! was made into a film in 1943, sans the exclamation point and most of Porter's songs. Danny Kaye became Bob Hope and Mary Jane Walsh turned into Betty Hutton, but Eve Arden remained Eve Arden. From the songs above, only "Farming" and "Let's Not Talk About Love" were retained, along with "Milk, Milk, Milk" and the title song. I don't believe that Hope or Hutton recorded anything from the score; the recording ban was still in effect for most of the year - all of it for a few of the big labels. 

Some of these same recordings were reissued by the Smithsonian in 1979, but the transfers in my set are not from that LP. The Mary Jane Walsh numbers come from my collection and most of the rest from Internet Archive. The sound from the 78s is generally quite good. 

The Smithsonian LP included detailed notes on the Let's Face It! production by Richard C. Norton, which I've included in the download. The package also includes a substantially complete souvenir program, which dates from relatively late in the show's run, after Carol Goodner had replaced Eve Arden. Finally, there are three articles from the New York Times - a story on the opening, Brooks Atkinson's rave review, and a follow-up on the production's history. The latter reads as if it was ghost-written by producer Vinton Freedley's publicist.

Let's Face It! may not be one of Porter's best known scores, but the songs are splendid - characteristic of the composer, varied and worth remembering. The performances by the leads are all you could desire.

This post is the result of a request by old friend David Federman, who wanted to hear some records by Mary Jane Walsh. More to come, David.

Kaye toasts the ensemble

'Fancy Free' and 'On the Town'

The young Leonard Bernstein

Back in February I featured an early Robert Shaw Chorale LP, which led in a roundabout way to a discussion in the comments section of the competing albums that had resulted from Leonard Bernstein's 1945 Broadway musical On the Town. I was familiar with some of the recordings but not others, so theater music experts JAC and Andy Propst were kind enough to fill me in on what I had missed.

This led to my own exploration of the two On the Town sets as well as the ballet Fancy Free, which had inspired the musical. I sourced the original recordings from needle drops on Internet Archive, and cleaned up both the music and the scans. I thought some of you might be interested in these materials as well. Here is some background on the productions and recordings.

Fancy Free

Jerome Robbins choreographed Fancy Free for the Ballet Theatre to lively and witty music by Bernstein. It opened in April 1944. Decca recorded the score in June with the composer conducting the Ballet Theatre Orchestra.

Bernstein's wonderfully quirky opening ballad "Big Stuff" is heard from a radio on stage before the three sailor-protagonists burst on the scene. It is said that Bernstein wanted Billie Holiday to record the song for the production, but didn't think he could get her, so used his sister Shirley's voice instead. But Holiday did eventually record the song, several times. The first of her four tries was in November 1944, with a band led by Toots Camarata. This version was not approved so she tried again with Camarata and a different group the following August. No luck again, so she did it again with a different ensemble in January 1946. Finally in March of that year she achieved an acceptable take with a small group that included Joe Guy and Tiny Grimes, and Decca released that version in its 78 album of Fancy Free. I've included all Holiday's recordings of the song as a bonus.

The download includes additional production photos, some from the collection of Harold Lang, who danced one of the sailor roles in the ballet, and who later became a musical comedy star himself, notably as Bill Calhoun in Kiss Me, Kate and as Joey in the hit 1952 revival of Pal Joey.

On the Town

Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, Adolph Green

The story is that Oliver Smith, who designed the Fancy Free sets, convinced Robbins and Bernstein that the scenario could be made into a successful musical. Perhaps so, but the team must have been thinking in those terms all along, because On the Town opened in December 1944 - only eight months after the Fancy Free opening. This was hardly enough time for Bernstein to compose the music, Robbins to choreograph the dances, Comden and Green to write the book, and George Abbott to cast and direct the production. But whatever its provenance, the musical was an artistic and commercial success.

As was often the case in the 1940s and on into the 50s, there was no integrated original cast album for On the Town. Instead, the principals were split between RCA Victor and Decca recording sessions, both beginning in February 1945.

Victor split the recordings between Bernstein and among young whiz, Robert Shaw. The composer conducted a studio orchestra in recordings of the ballet music. This is much different in some ways than the kinetic music that Bernstein wrote for Fancy Free; the "Lonely Town" Pas de deux is heavily indebted to Aaron Copland's Quiet City and Lincoln Portrait from a few years earlier. Regardless of its influences, the music is glorious. "Lonely Town" in particular is remarkably fine.

Rather than having individual singers assay Bernstein's songs, Victor made the unusual decision to turn the vocal music over to Shaw, who arranged the pieces for chorus and conducted those particular recordings. The result is enjoyable, while not resembling what could be heard and seen on Broadway. For that you could turn to the competing Decca recording.

For their recordings, the Decca company contracted with Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Nancy Walker of the original cast, leaving out John Battles and assigning his two big numbers ("Lonely Town" and "Lucky to Be Me") to Mary Martin, who was a Decca recording artist at the time. The musical backing varied - Lyn Murray for the opening scene and the Comden and Green numbers, Camarata for Mary Martin's songs and Leonard Joy for Nancy Walker. Martin handled the ballads well, even though Camarata's tempo is much too fast for "Lonely Town."

The download includes cleaned-up cover and label scans, the insert booklet and production stills for Fancy Free, and a January 1945 Life Magazine feature about On the Town. Vivid sound on all the recordings.

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