Customer Reviews

I Can Get It For You Wholesale (1962 Original Broadway Cast)

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This CD has received lukewarm reviews from some Barbraphiles who, predictably, view the show as nothing without Streisand. This is simply not the case. First, it must remembered that reviewers should be reviewing the show as a work, not its position in Barbra Streisand's personal development. Granted, she does an excellent job with her numbers and is certainly a stand-out, particularly with her specialty, "Miss Marmelstein." However, in merely looking at Barbra's numbers, we are excluding a whole gamut of great songs, including "When Gemini Meets Capricorn" (with the brilliant lyric "Did the planets plan it" among others), "What Are They Doing To Us Now?," "A Gift Today," and "Momma, Momma, Momma." This score is great, and it is certainly a highlight of Harold Rome's career. Granted, Elliot Gould is no Bruce Yarnell (Annie Get Your Gun 1966) or Ray Middleton (AGYG 1946), but he is adequate. Again, it is a great recording. Contrary to what other reviewers have said, do NOT pre-program your CD player to skip the non-Streisand numbers. If you do, you will have missed out on a stellar score.

I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE features an energetic score by Harold Rome, but is still best-remembered for being the Broadway debut of a promising young Brooklyn belter by the name of Barbra Streisand. Streisand had been performing her act at the Bon Soir and Blue Angel clubs, but had never set foot on a Broadway stage until she landed the supporting role of Miss Yetta Tessye Marmelstein in WHOLESALE. Streisand met her future husband Elliott Gould, who played the male lead - Harry Bogen - in the show. The story is set in the New York garment district circa the late-1930s, where Harry asipres to climb to the top of the ladder of success, and doesn't care if his real friends get hurt along the way.

The rest of the cast is sensational: Bambi Linn (Dream Laurey in OKLAHOMA! on film), Marilyn Cooper (WEST SIDE STORY's original Rosalia) as Harry's love interest Ruthie, Harold Lang (the original Bill Calhoun in KISS ME KATE) and Lillian Roth (70 GIRLS 70). Standout numbers include, of course, "Miss Marmelstein", but also enjoyable are Marilyn Cooper's "Who Knows?" and "A Funny Thing Happened". Sound quality is crisp and clean. Highly-recommended.

1962 was the year I ended my high school education and started my college education, majoring in Theatre. It was also the year Babb's first musical was on Broadway. I really loved the entire show, the music was wonderful and the lyrics were to die for.
I saw the original movie on television a few weeks ago, a straight play, and thought how wonderful it could be converted into a broadway musical, and by golly, they did.
The entire cast was just great and I would recomend this CD to any musical comedy buff.
I wish Amazon would offer a spell check

Of course Barbra Streisand is the force behind this not-quite-average cast recording, but the rest of the cast isn't bad! The Overture is one of my favorites from a cast album... it ranks with GYPSY, MAME, and FUNNY GIRL. "Miss Marmelstein" is the best, and most memorable, song on the album. Other good songs are "Momma, Momma, Momma", "Eat a Little Something", and "What Are They Doing to Us Now?". I recommend this album to any Barbra fans and to DIE-HARD cast album collectors.

Streisand knocked 'em dead in 1962 with her award-winning role as Yetta Tessye Marmelstein in her first Broadway show, "I Can Get It for You Wholesale." The music, as a whole, isn't particularly memorable, but Streisand (just 19) is dazzling. Her "Miss Marmelstein" number stopped the show (and stops the CD): it's both hilarious and poignant. This is the song which introduced this greatest of talents; how could there have been any question that she would be a star?

I was working in Philadelphia when a musical by Harold Rome, based on one of the books we had all read, opened in preview for its NYC run. Major attractions were the veteran actress/singer, Lillian Roth, a bright new star, Elliot Gould and, of course, the composer of Pins and Needles. Like the book, the show was much like Rodgers and Hart's, 1940, Pal Joey, in which an entirely unlovely character, takes everyone who can help him for a ride. Gould was good, Lillian Roth lived up to our expectations, Jack Khruschen moaned a song that still reverberates in my mind ( I Am Not A Well Man), Rome created a score that fit the needs of the show and was above average in quality, but, of all memories, one stands out, the unknown girl who, just as the movies would have it, stopped the show with two of her songs. No publicity, no expectations based on word of mouth, just a youngster, none of us had ever heard of, playing Miss Marmelstein, giving a star's performance. Not until years later, when living far from Philadelphia, far from Broadway, did I learn that the bright performer knocking them dead in Funny Girl, was that girl; of course, Barbra Streisand.
So,for Streisand fans, this is a must buy, the first chance she had to put her indelible stamp on a role. For the rest of us, whether we saw her in those days or not, the Original Broadway Cast Album, is well worth the price. Why Amazon should ignore the star of the show, Elliot Gould, I know not, but he handles his songs well, as an actor, not a singer, so too do others in the cast; the melodies are good examples of the work of one of the best of the group who gave us so much good musical theater, though never to the level of their contemporaries, Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, and, Harold Arlen with such as Johnny Mercer. Then, of course, for all of us, there is Streisand in a setting shaped to her possibilities.
The price tag is right. Listen.

For this to be Barbra's first musical I was very impressed. I never heard of the show before so I bought it out of intrest and because Barbra was in it. Her Miss Marmelstein is one of my favourite Barbra Streisand song from the early years. Over-all I was impressed by the album the whole cast are very good even Barbra's x husband Mr Elliott Gould. If you are a die hard Barbra Streisand fan you have to have this in your collection.

from the liner notes: "At the age of 22 Jerome Weidman had his first novel published, I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE, which has long been admired as one of the finest first novels of our time. F. Scott Fitzgerald paid it the accolade 'a break-through into completely new and fresh literary terrain; a turning point in the American novel.' (Of the author) Ernest Hemmingway . . . said, "He writes just a little better than anybody else that's around."

On March 22, 1962, what Weidman describes as ". . . the story of Harry Bogen, a boy who went wrong because there was nothing in the observable world around him to prove that the values by which that world functioned were wrong" would open at the Shubert Theatre with music and lyrics by Harold Rome. I ran for a disappointing 300 performances.

Set in New York's garment district of 1937, this musical is about as Jewish as any musical can be. Jewish melodies, klezmer, a bar mitzvah celebration, a Jewish mother singing "Eat a Little Something" - Harold Rome's music, in my opinion, enhances the Jewish-ness of the show better and more subtly than the score for the better-known and more-successful "Fiddler on the Roof," which would come two years later. And here's a switch: most of the cast members are actually Jewish! (Bambi Linn - who so beautifully danced "Laurie" in the movie version of "Oklahoma" was born Bambina Linnemeir in Brooklyn.)

No, Harold Rome is no Irving Berlin or Cole Porter or Stephen Sondheim, but he is a far better writer of theatre music than he is given credit for. Of the eleven reviews and musicals for which he wrote both music and lyrics, five - "Pins and Needles," "Call Me Mister," "Destry Rides Again," "I Can Get It for You Wholesale," and a remastered London cast recording of "Wish You Were Here" - are currently available on CD. Broadway cast recordings of "Fanny" and "Wish You Were Here" are going for well over $100 each on the used market; "The Zulu and the Zayda" (1965) with Ossie Davis was released only as a Columbia LP. Perhaps someone will dig up the master tapes and re-issue it. "That's the Ticket" (1948) closed out of town in Philadelphia, but a 2002 concert staging by Musicals Tonight is available on Original Cast Records.

My recommendation is to forget everything you've heard about Streisand's stealing the show and how Barbra and Elliot Gould met and married and procreated, etc. Just sit back and enjoy the show. They don't write them like this anymore.

Well, Roth, Lang, et al. certainly didn't do it - or their flagging careers - justice; nor had the earlier film adaptation made anything of a splash. Barbara Streisand and Elliot Gould, of course, went on to 'better things' (not to mention mariage and procreation) and Streisand nuts were supposedly the only people left buying the album.

The script itself is, however, sparkling; the numbers funny, sardonic, and very musical. In a way, it's hard to understand why a revival has been so long in coming.

Now you can see the full Schmalzy Pzaz in an appropriately disused warehouse in one of London's North-East-End, South-East-European enclaves.

The Arcola Theatre, Dalston (well, some prefer to say Stoke Newington - which sounds decidedly less rough) has become, in a single year, something of a Mecca for fringe-goers. It seems they have yet to put a production foot wrong. The reviews are consistently glowing.
Since hardly anyone is adequately remunerated ('profit-share' is not really an appropriate aspiration for the Arcola's big studio-stage productions whose casts are sometimes nearly as large as a capacity audience), the actors, musicians, directors, are doing it for the sheer passion of producing quality theatre: Because They Can. And well known luvvies can be spotted in the bar and auditorium most nights: "Darling, this is what the West End's dying for. Hasn't anyone put you up for a transfer?"

If anyone can pull off the revival of a quirky sixties forgotten Jewish musical about trousers, the Arcola will. Watch this space.

"I Can Get It For You Wholesale" runs from February 19th to March 10th, and costs £8 entrance - Pay Anything You Like on Tuesday nights. Box Office: 020 7503 1645.

Barbra Streisand's voice is outstanding on this album. From the voice that you hear you can tell that the Brodway play was outstanding also.