Haines His Way

Judith Ridley, actress from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Jeanne Russell, child actress played Margaret on DENNIS THE MENACE tv show, now a California attorney.

Jeannie C. Riley, country singer.

Jose Ruiz - critic for reviewplays.com

James Russo - actor, Once Upon A Time In America.

The Sondheim Review, Fall 2008 [Vol. XV, No. 1]
Page 46
A SONDHEIM RARITY

Evening Primrose original soundtrack from 1966 is finally released

Review by Andrew Milner

Few long-running Broadway musicals from the mid-1960s have been as frequently recorded as the Stephen Sondheim/James Goldman 1966 made-for-television musical Evening Primrose.  Now, 40 years after its broadcast on the anthology series ABC Stage 67, and with three different versions of the four-song score available on CD, the soundtrack of the original television production starring Anthony Perkins and Charmian Carr has finally received its commercial release.

In 1966, Sondheim and Goldman briefly put aside their development of Follies to work on an adaptation of John Collier's oft-anthologized short story "Evening Primrose," which, like Follies, is set at night in an ostensibly abandoned Manhattan building.  The broadcast drew mixed reviews and mediocre Nielsen ratings, but critics have appreciated what the work foreshadowed.  The opening song "If You Can Find Me, I'm Here" anticipates Follies' equally defiant "I'm Still Here" (even maintaining several similar rhymes), and the lyric "Take me to a world where I can be alive" presages "Being Alive" from Company, Sondheim's next stage musical.

While the existing Evening Primrose recordings - on Mandy Patinkin's Dress Casual (1990), Sondheim at the Movies (1997) and The Frogs/Evening Primrose (2000) - brought the music to a broader audience, the original telecast itself is rarely seen.  Though illegal bootleg copies are known to be in circulation, the only copies publicly available for viewing (in grainy black-and-white kinescope form) are in the archives of the Paley Center for Media in New York and Los Angeles.  ABC, in the common practice of 1960s network television, erased the original color videotape production after its broadcast (a five-minute bootleg clip of "Take Me to the World" has been available on YouTube).  Sondheim said in a mid-1990s Compuserve chat that a VHS/DVD release was unlikely: "The rights are very tightly controlled by the Collier estate [...which] only gave us the television rights, and I doubt if that includes any kind of public sales of the video."  During the 1980s a limited-edition original soundtrack LP was privately produced and distributed among Sondheim's colleagues, with copies selling for as much as $1,500 on Amazon.com's auction Web site.

Kritzerland's Bruce Kimmel, who put together Sondheim at the Movies for Varese Sarabande, oversaw the re-mastering of the television soundtrack.  For those familiar with the tinny sounds from the nth-generation video bootlegs, the crisp quality of the soundtrack is invigorating, bringing out the impeccable arrangements by legendary television music director Norman Paris (with assistance from David Shire).

The disc's primary revelation is Perkins' vocal performance.  Biorgrapher Charles Winecott wrote of Perkins' Broadway singing in Greenwillow (1960), "He wasn't big enough in his delivery: it simply wasn't in his nature."  However, Perkins' thin voice translated much better in the more intimate medium of television and record, and his nervousness serves him extremely well in the role of Charles Snell, a poet who seeks refuge in a department store after hours, the first - and by no means the last - Sondheim hero to consciouslytry to cut himself off from humanity.  Perkins' voice breaking in the final verse of "Take Me to the World" is one of the album's emotional high points.

Carr, who played Liesl in the film version of The Sound of Music (which was still in movie theatres when Evening Primrose was broadcast), co-stars as Ella, the lifelong hermit with whom Charles falls in love.  If she is not quite the vocal equal of others who have sung the part, such as Bernadette Peters of Theresa McCarthy, she still brings the precise amount of innocence to "I Remember" and "When."

For the first time, Evening Primrose's incidental music has been released.  Much of it is simply a recapitulation of the existing songs (i.e., "Take Me to the World" is played over the closing credits), and the climactic chase music sounds somewhat formulaic.  But the brief dance music (played during the scene in which Charles and Ella plan to escape), scored for clarinets, is a cousin to Sondheim's incidental music to the 1960 Broadway play Invitation to a March (available on the recording Unsung Sondheim), and the piano underscoring for "You're One of Us" anticipates the music to Stavisky.  There's also a charming brief song, previously unreleased, in which Charles memorizes the closing schedule of each deparment in the store to the refrain of "If You Can Find Me, I'm Here."

If an official video release of a crystal-clear Evening Primrose remains a pipe dream for now, Kritzerland's presentation of the original soundtrack is a fulfulling substitute and an obligatory purchase for Sondheim fans.

ANDREW MILNER reviews books and CDs for the Philadelphia City Paper.

Back for a sec.

Josef Rainer, guest star on the JAKE AND THE FATMAN episode I'm watching right now!

Whew!  I haven't typed that much in quite a while.  It was good practice!  

Now back to Joe Penny, Alan Campbell, and, oh yes, William Conrad.

WBBL.

Is that still on anymore?

No, the final season aired during the 2007-2008 TV season. I'll be interested to see if it gets nominated for an Emmy for its final season. It WON the Emmy during its initial season.

Jai Rodriguez, star of ZANNA DON'T and one of the five stars of QUEER EYE.

I just read HERE that Jai Rodriguez is playing Desi Arnaz:

Four concert stagings of the new musical Dance With Me will be presented in West Hollywood July 10-13 as part of the Festival of New American Musicals.

The musical about the lives of the late Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz will cast "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" host Jai Rodriguez as the Cuban bandleader. Jim J. Bullock, the "Too Close for Comfort" star seen on Broadway in Hairspray, will also be part of the cast. Complete casting will be announced shortly.

When I first read about this, I thought that they had said who was going to play Lucy, but it's not mentioned in this article.

Good Evening!

So...  Note too all aspiring singing-actresses, and actress-singers out there:  When an audition specifies to pick a song from the 50s and/or 60s, that does NOT include Amy Winehouse!

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!


-Otherwise, it was an OK day.  Sort of slow, but paced well.

*And I really don't like playing "Son of a Preacher Man".

...When I first read about this, I thought that they had said who was going to play Lucy, but it's not mentioned in this article.

Oh, I don't know.  That Jim J. Bullock is game for just about anything!


 

Oh... And just because a song happens to have that iconic 50s-60s triplet accompaniment does not always mean it's a 50s-60s type song.

Oh... And one other thing...

Yes, you can be "older" in real life, but still pass for someone in their teens or twenties.  However, there is a difference between "passing" and "denial".





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