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ON THE RECORD: Maggie Flynn, and Solo Albums from Ann Hampton Callaway and Jill O'Hara
By Steven Suskin
01 Mar 2009
Two solo albums stand out among the many that have recently crossed the transom. Does anyone still have a transom? At any rate, Ann Hampton Callaway has favored us with At Last [Telarc 83665], a highly personal and highly pleasing collection of 11 songs in extended arrangements by Callaway (some with Bill Mays, some with Ted Rosenthal). Callaway is backed by a very fine group of nine musicians, featuring Mr. Rosenthal at piano and Jay Leonhart on bass, with numerous solos from the others. But it is Callaway's personal approach to the songs that makes this CD so special. My favorites on first hearings are "Comes Love" (from Yokel Boy, if you remember Yokel Boy), an arresting visit to "Spain," and that old favorite "Over the Rainbow."
Bill Mays is also present at the keyboard on Alone Together, an album from Jill O'Hara — the same Jill O'Hara who played Sheila in the original 1967 off-Broadway production of Hair (where she introduced "Good Morning Starshine"), bypassed the Broadway version for a featured role in George M!, and went on to play Fran Kubelik in the 1968 Promises, Promises (where she introduced "I'll Never Fall in Love Again"). After which she more or less disappeared from view, 40 years ago. Here she is, on a self-produced album, and she sounds quite good. Almost half the songs are by Randy Newman. The title track, though, is a show tune: Schwartz and Dietz's "Alone Together," a beauty that is given an effective rendering by Ms. O'Hara. A nice visit with a voice from the past, as they say; only this voice doesn't seem 60-odd years old.
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How did Broadway musicals sound prior to the advent of the original cast album era? How were they meant to sound? What did audiences hear when Kern, Gershwin, Youmans or Porter were standing in the back of the house? Conductor John McGlinn, who died last month at the age of 55, was dedicated to figuring it out and recreating that sound for modern audiences. A series of mid-80s concerts led to a contract with EMI and a series of recordings, beginning with Gershwin and leading to a ground-breaking 1988 three-disc reconstruction of Jerome Kern's Show Boat. This was among six such albums he made, the others being Porter's Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate, Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun, Loewe's Brigadoon, and Kern's Sitting Pretty. (McGlinn did not record a complete version of Youmans' No, No, Nanette, which was cited in his obituary in the New York Times, although he did conduct a well-recorded concert version of the show.) Most important among McGlinn's other recordings, perhaps, is "Broadway Showstoppers," which gave us major show tunes featuring their original orchestrations. Kern's "Some Girl Is on My Mind" from Sweet Adeline and "All the Things You Are" from Very Warm for May, by themselves, make convincing arguments for McGlinn's hypothesis. The conductor's quest was interrupted by the termination of his deal with EMI in 1992; while he continued to toil on his quixotic path, various roadblocks — including his sometimes less-than-diplomatic manner — prevented the completion of his several projects. But when I spoke with him last year, he nevertheless retained his love of and enthusiasm for the works of Broadway's great composers.
(Steven Suskin is author of the forthcoming "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations" (Oxford) as well as "Second Act Trouble," "Show Tunes," and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached at Ssuskin@aol.com)
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