Sounds of the ’60s
As the 1960s began, the movie musical genre was in pretty good shape. Though there had been a decrease in both the quantity and quality of screen tuners during the previous decade, things took a happy turn when Gigi copped the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1959. West Side Story received that same honor in 1962, as did The Sound of Music in 1966. But even though 1968 brought us the fabulously successful Oliver! and Funny Girl, the latter part of the decade was also notable for a large number of flops, among them Doctor Dolittle, Finian’s Rainbow, Paint Your Wagon, and Star! So it’s emblematic of the decade that Bye Bye Birdie (1963) was a hit while Sweet Charity (1969) was a huge bomb. New CD editions of the soundtrack recordings of these films have just been released, Birdie by RCA and Charity by Decca.
The Birdie album has been on CD before, but the new version is preferable to the one it supplants in several respects. Whereas the previous edition had no booklet to speak of, only a skimpy insert that hawked other RCA mid-line CDs, the new one has a 12-page booklet with numerous still photos from the film — several in full color — and well written notes by Didier Deutsch. (I did catch one error: Deutsch indicates that Chita Rivera played “Rosie DeLeon” in the Broadway Birdie, but that’s the character’s name in the film version; on stage, she was Rosie Alvarez.) The actual sound quality of the CD is an improvement over the old one, and the various tracks have been transferred to disc at a much higher volume level. The only disappointment is that the heavenly choir backing up Ann-Margret (as Kim) and Bobby Rydell (as Hugo) in “One Boy” is now almost inaudible. I can’t imagine why this is so, since it doesn’t sound like any other remixing was redone, but that’s the way I hear it.
The CD has three tracks that weren’t on the first edition, but two of them are superfluous. The dueling boys/girls version of the “We Love You Conrad” ditty is cute but really didn’t need to be included here, especially since it was recorded live for the film and the change in sound quality from the studio recordings is jarring. As for the so-called “Sultans’ Ballet,” I suspect that this undistinguished dance music wasn’t written by Charles Strouse but by Johnny Green, the film’s musical supervisor and conductor. (There is a “Shriners’ Ballet” in the stage version of Birdie, but it’s not on the original cast album and every stage production I’ve seen or been in has cut it, so I’ve never heard it.) The most noteworthy if weird addition here is what’s billed as a “gym rehearsal outtake” version of “One Last Kiss,” interesting because the song is heard in an arrangement that’s very different from the two truncated versions sung in the movie by Jesse Pearson as Conrad Birdie. The performance is sloppy, presumably because it’s supposed to be a rehearsal. It would have been great to have on the new CD an extended version of “A Lot of Livin’ To Do,” which has much more spiffy dance music in the movie than on the soundtrack album cut; alas, no such bonus is to be found.
Written especially for the film by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams was the catchy title song, given such a blatantly sexy performance by Ann-Margret that even a corpse might be aroused by it. Gone from the Strouse-Adams score for the stage show are “An English Teacher,” “Normal American Boy,” “What Did I Ever See in Him?” “Baby, Talk to Me,” and “Spanish Rose” (because Rose is no longer Spanish). Oddly, although “Put on a Happy Face” had become a hit in the years since the show had opened on Broadway, some of that song’s lyrics were reworked for the movie. This includes the first two lines: “Gray skies are gonna clear up…brush off the clouds and cheer up” was changed to the arguably more prosaic “Why look so awfully tragic…smiling can work like magic.” On the other hand, the “Kids” number benefits from very funny new lines that are half spoken, half sung by Maureen Stapleton as Albert’s mother. One amusing new exchange comes when Mrs. P. insists that “I never asked for nothing” and Mr. McAfee replies, “Nothing is what you’ll get!”
As for the cast, everyone does his/her own singing, but some of the performances are controversial. A lot of people felt (and still feel) that Ann-Margret was wrong for the role of the sweet, virginal Kim McAfee, yet she sings the part very well, and the characterization can be viewed as that of a teenager trying hard to act more mature than she really is and going overboard in the process. (That happens, doesn’t it?) It’s great to have Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde repeating their Broadway roles as Albert and Mr. McAfee, respectively. As Rosie DeLeon, Janet Leigh is okay for a non-singer in her three duets (“Put on a Happy Face” and “Rosie” with Van Dyke, “One Boy” with Ann-Margret) but she’s no Chita Rivera. Finally, though Jesse Pearson is off-putting in the film — loutish and in poor physical shape, even by early 1960s standards — he’s pretty good on the record.
On the whole, the score sounds fine under the aegis of Green, who also co-wrote the orchestrations. Note that one of the highlights of the soundtrack album is a brief section of music not heard in the film: the jazzy, swinging arrangement of “A Lot of Livin’ to Do” that caps the “Opening Credits” cut.
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I’d love to be able to recommend that everyone rush out and purchase the film soundtrack album of Sweet Charity, which has just made its belated CD debut. But if I were to do that, I’d be urging you to buy a severely edited, sonically inferior recording of the movie’s score at a premium price when you can get the film itself on DVD for several dollars less — with vastly superior sound, to boot.
You really should seek out that DVD. Sweet Charity was Bob Fosse’s film directorial debut and, stylistically inconsistent though it may be, it still has much to offer the viewer. Charity Hope Valentine is a helluva role and Shirley MacLaine is just about perfect in it. The great Gwen Verdon was too old to have played the part in the movie, so it’s felicitous that such a worthy successor was found; MacLaine’s dancing is superb, her acting terrific, and even her singing voice is right on target. When I saw the film in a revival house some years ago (remember revival houses?) my companion remarked that the star’s “inability to sing” the Cy Coleman-Dorothy Fields songs was wonderfully appropriate to the role. Of course, MacLaine isn’t literally unable to sing; the point is that she sounds like a real person rather than a trained professional, and that greatly helps the verisimilitude of her performance.
Another huge plus is that John McMartin was allowed to recreate on film his Broadway performance as Oscar Lindquist. With the Charity/Oscar duet “I’m the Bravest Individual” having been cut from the movie, McMartin is left with only one song — the title number, for which Coleman composed an entirely new melody to Fields’s stage show lyrics. (Oddly, this track has McMartin singing with himself through overdubbing, and the effect is kind of weird. What were they smoking in the ’60s?) Although none of the other leads — Chita Rivera, Paula Kelly, Stubby Kaye, and Sammy Davis, Jr. — were in Sweet Charity on Broadway, all are theater veterans, and their presence in the flick and on the album is appreciated. By the way: Ricardo Montalban appears in the movie as Vittorio Vitale but, since the one song that character had on stage (“Too Many Tomorrows”) was cut from the film, Montalban is not heard on the soundtrack CD.
Now for the minuses: “My Personal Property,” written expressly for the movie, is far inferior to Charity’s character-establishing song in the stage show, “You Should See Yourself.” The latter is full of subtext which tells us that Charity will continue to serve as a doormat in the romance department because she can’t look at men objectively; in contrast, the movie song is about how much Charity loves such NYC spots as “the planetarium, the old aquarium,” and “the zoo in Central Park.” When all is said and done, “My Personal Property” has precious little to do with Charity Hope Valentine — but the number did serve MacLaine well in her subsequent concerts.
Because the contents of the new soundtrack disc haven’t been “expanded” from what was heard on the original LP, a great deal of music heard in the film is not to be found here. Missed most of all are the three terrific Cy Coleman dances contained within the Pompeii Club sequence, but there are annoying edits in nearly every song, most notably the overture, “Big Spender,” and “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This.” The sloppiest edit of all comes in “If My Friends Could See Me Now” when, after a dance break, MacLaine is suddenly singing in a different key with no preparatory modulation. As a result, she sounds off pitch for several measures until one’s ear finally adjusts to the new tonality.
Although the orchestrations for both the Broadway and film versions of Charity are credited to Ralph Burns, they’re quite different in many places. Listening to the soundtrack album, it sounds as if Burns’s original charts were used for reference but souped up, not always to good effect. Note that the movie features a vocal chorus singing wordlessly along with the orchestra in the overture and the finale, a technique that had a brief surge of popularity in the late ’60s and early ’70s (see also Promises, Promises and Company).
As indicated above, the sound quality of the soundtrack album is second- or even third-rate. In the overture, it sounds like the left channel of the master tape has deteriorated over the years, and there is also noticeable distortion in the “Rhythm of Life” cut. If the original session tapes are lost, a newly remastered and re-edited CD could have been drawn directly from the ultra-high-quality soundtrack of the film as heard on DVD.
Decca Broadway is part of the Universal Music Group, which recently announced that it would be lowering the prices of its CDs to the $10 range. Should the Sweet Charity soundtrack album eventually be included in that deal, you might want to consider buying it if only to have a copy of TheaterMania columnist Peter Filichia’s entertaining and informative notes in the accompanying booklet. But I’d still go for the DVD.
