Customer Reviews

The Golden Apple (1954 Original Broadway Cast)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Here it is about 52 years after I played first trumpet in this show which started off Broadway then went into the Alvin Theater and the on to a limited run in Washington DC for about 10 days and then.......closed. It was and is a great show and of course the limited music on the CD does not do the show full justice. The music is brilliant and the orchestrations by Hershey Kaye is outstanding. We did the album in 2 seperate recording sessions and I remember that we recorded the overture which was very challenging last during the session. It was a perfect take the first time we played it. I still enjoy the music every time I listen to it and I only hope that some young producer gets his hands on the show and says, "this is a diamond worth doing again"..

Jerome Moross and John Latouche's "The Golden Apple" is two hours of wall-to-wall music: Like Bernstein's "Candide," it's an American opera in a distinctively Broadway idiom (though unlike "Candide," it seldom calls attention to the fact). Moross's score in particular is the sort of boisterous, genre-bending work that Flaherty's work in "Ragtime" should have been: It puts popular culture from the first half of the twentieth century into a blender, adds distinctive, unpredictable modernist harmonics, and serves with wit and verve.

Which makes the OCR of "Golden Apple" all the more unfortunate. Over half the score has been cut, entire scenes are missing, the segments that remain are linked with clunky rhyming narration, and the ending reflects the hokey "Broadway" ending rather than the finale Moross and Latouche originally wrote -- and preferred.

A few pieces are performed in their entirety, or something near to it: The bluesy "Lazy Afternoon" and the touching ballad "Windflowers" are the show's best-known songs, and the Act II vaudeville numbers -- often cited as a precursor to Sondheim's "Follies" -- are well represented. For the most part, however, the cuts show: This recording makes the show seem choppy and underdeveloped, with promising musical motifs that go nowhere. Sound quality, though generally acceptable, reflects the limits of mid-'50s mono technology; ensemble numbers tend to be overmodulated with garbled lyrics. (Worse yet, the CD booklet lacks a printed libretto.)

Until some enterprising soul undertakes a 2-disc recording of the entire "Golden Apple" score, this OCR will remain the only one available.

THE GOLDEN APPLE is a musical retelling of Homer's "The Odyssey" and "The Illiad", re-set in the American Northwest at the turn of the 20th century. It first opened off-Broadway at the Phoenix Theatre in 1954, causing a sensation. It later reopened on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre, where it promptly shuttered 16 weeks later. What went wrong? How much of the magic was lost during the move to Broadway?

Judging from the original 1954 cast album, you can't tell any problems. It featured a delicious cast headed by Priscilla Gillette and also featured Stephen Douglass (DAMN YANKEES), Kaye Ballard (RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN'S CINDERELLA), Jack Whiting and Bibi Osterwald (HELLO DOLLY!). Featuring in the ensemble were Jonathan Lucas and Portia Nelson. The score was written in superb fashion by Jerome Moross and John LaTouche (CANDIDE).

The score features Kaye Ballard's now-classic rendition of "Lazy Afternoon", as well as "My Love is on the Way", "Windflowers", "Store-Bought Suit", "Circe", "Helen is Always Willing" and "The Sewing Bee".

Priscilla Gillette sings with emotion and conviction in every note. The intervening narration between the numbers is charming and delightful.

A lovely score. Highly recommended.

It really is too bad that i first encountered tis show in the pages of Not Since Carrie, Ken Mandelbaum's notorious account of the biggest flops in b'way history. This is one of those rare shows that combines a fantastic score, perfect lyrics, a brilliantly witty concept, great performances - heck, i even heard the sets were great. Yet it did not succeed. Why? As many, many people have remarked, this show was "caviar" to the audiences who could catch The Pajama Game around the corner. Yet another big disappointment came when i realized - very early on - that what i was listening to couldn't possibly be the whole score. The average track length is 1:25, every song cut down to refrain, verse, refrain. Dialogue bridges were hastily added the day of the recording to make up for the plot gaps. What a shame! I desperately want to hear the rest of this truly terrific, truly AMERICAN score. Also unfortunate - the recording, being very old, is quite tinny and harsh. This show cries out for a new recording, a new production. Even so, buy this CD - you will not be sorry. Disappoined perhaps, not sorry.

I was one of the original dancer-singers in the 1954 production, off and on Broadway. I danced to this music every night and never tired of it. There should definitely be a revivial of this musical. The score is brilliant and puts many present and recent musicals to shame.

I first acquired the LP back in 1970, and still have it--in pretty good shape, too. Despite hearing a fair number of musical shows (both Broadway and off-Broadway) over the years, The Golden Apple remains both my favorite, and my nomination for the best ever performed. It has a startling amount of creativity both in the words and music. The latter in particular was composed by a man who knew more about the styles of American popular music from roughly 1870 to 1930 than any of his academic contemporaries. The show itself deals on many levels, superficially and deeply, humorously and dead seriously, with issues that have never lost their personal importance: family and friendship, the loss of a spouse, hope, fear, lust, ambition, and the horrible sadness that accompanies the ra-ra boys urging the latest crop of soldierly sacrifices to the front. All of us can relate to this. It's a musical with a slicing wit, but a real heart.

What a shame the funds were lacking at the last minute to record it in full...! Instead, roughly half the piece was put to disk, and a rather overly echo-y ambience added. But the performers have enormous energy and style, and the orchestra equals them. Highly recommended.

The Golden Apple is probably my favorite show and I fell in love with it while hearing side 1 of the original LP. It's great to have it on CD. The "Great News" is that today (May 1, 2001) a CD has been released containing many Jerome Moross songs that have never before been recorded. It's the cast album from a Jerome Moross revue that played at Joe's Pub at The Public Theatre in Manhattan in Feb-Mar 2000. It features Alice Ripley, Richard Muenz, Jessica Molaskey, Philip Chaffin and Jennifer Giering and can be found by searching for "Windflowers" here at amazon.com. It includes many songs from Ballet Ballads (Moross's other collaboration with John Latouche, from 1948), and the unproduced Gentlemen, Be Seated. More information on the life and work of Jerome Moross can be found at...

Truly one of the greatest and possibly the most neglected classic creations of the Golden Age of Musical Theatre. Though it would take a full, two-CD set (which the world has needed for a long time) to hear the sung-through score and experience the sweep of LaTouche's libretto, this sampling of highlights should intrique the musical theatre fan enough to make them hope for a revial. Aside from the standard "Lazy Afternoon" sung by a young Kaye Ballard the relatively unknown ballad "Windflowers" will leave one breathless. A must for any serious musical theatre collection.

Possibly the least-known "great" musical of the golden age, this one was one of the first transfers from off-Broadway to Broadway -- won all sorts of awards. The full stage show was sung from beginning to end, not, like the current Lloyd Webber shows, in endless and monotonous recitative but in real songs -- all put together to tell the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey (you know, Homer) as set in Washington state during the Spanish-American War. An odd idea, indeed, but delightful in the execution. A superb cast of once-well-known but now (perhaps) nearly forgotten performers -- many from the nightclub milieu of the period: Kaye Ballard (singing the classic ballad "Lazy Afternoon"), Portia Nelson (a sophisticated chanteuse, here playing the town school marm), Bibi Osterwald (who later made something of a career in TV), and Stephen Douglass, the original Joe Hardy in "Damn Yankees". A truly fine score, reminiscent of Copland, but with its own unique tang (music by Jerome Moross, brilliantly clever lyrics by John Latouche). One caveat: the sound is no better than it was on the original LP, a disappointment, in that RCA has, in the past, worked wonders with some of their show albums from the same period (esp. "Damn Yankees"). Still, since the LP has not been available for 20 years or so, most show collectors -- and lovers of American opera as well -- will want to add this to their collections.

I have been admiring this show since I was in knee pants -- for my money the most original musical ever to grace a Broadway stage. It was a thrill, too, to see it (once) in one of the York Theater's several (three at least, I believe) revivals. Sadly, it's a piece that never catches on. The problem seems to be getting people into the theater: "based on Homer's Iliad AND Odyssey" and "no spoken dialogue" seem to be deal breakers. Of course Andrew Lloyd Webber has made millions with his "no spoken dialogue" shows -- but they are also, quite literally, "no brainers." "The Golden Apple," though, has possibly the most brilliant set of lyrics of any show before Sondheim. Credit whiz-kid John Latouche, a wild Broadway character who wrote simply wonderful lyrics ("Cabin in the Sky" and "Candide" are among his credits) and, in a somewhat different vein, opera libretti ("The Ballad of Baby Doe"). Here, both Latouche approaches come together. Astonishingly, Moross never falls back on "arioso" or "recitative": Every song is a self-contained musical "number," -- and not only a number, but a number in a recognizable existing style -- which also advances the plot. It really is the best-integrated Broadway show ever, and should have spawned dozens of imitators. Sadly, it did not, but this recording, for many long years unavailable until RCA tardily decided to release this recording on CD, will always be there as an example to show writers. The cast was, at the time, stellar -- similar, in fact, to that of "Nine," many years later: a mingling of nightclub performers (Kaye Ballard, Portia Nelson, Bibi Osterwald -- three fabulously gifted singers), recently arrived young Broadway stars (Priscilla Gillette, late of Cole Porter's "Out of this World" and Stephen Douglass, coming off "Make a Wish" and about to land "Damn Yankees"), and one stunning Broadway veteran, Jack Whiting. The cleverly inexpensive sets (the show was the first to move to a Broadway theater from an off-Broadway run) appear from photographs to have been light, lovely and filled with imagination, and Hershy Kay's orchestrations capture beautifully the two principal strains of Moross's music, a gentle, Coplandesque lyricism and an exhilirating, buoyant but not brassy vaudevillean style. Good news -- extraordinary news, in fact: 55 years after its Broadway run, a complete vocal score has finally been published. One hopes that this wonderful work will finally be seen again in a first class production. We can dream...