Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Friedman & Kellogg: Desperate Measures; Gershwin: Lady, Be Good!

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

My lyric theater programming for these two Summer months focuses on light-weight comic or pastoral works which I hope will compliment your laid-back, vacationtime frame of mind. And on this first Sunday in July, since it's so close to our great American national holiday, the Fourth of July, I'm proud to present two works of popular American musical comedy. First comes something absolutely contemporary: Kellogg and Friedman's Desperate Measures, which they based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. That play was designated a comedy in the First Folio edition of the Bard's printed plays, even though it has so much of tragedy in it. You heard the complete play on this program not so long ago on Sunday, February 26, 2017.

Peter Kellogg's entire script for Desperate Measures: A Musical Comedy Gone Wild is in rhymed couplets, would you believe- both the song lyrics and the spoken dialogue. Kellogg's new take on the old play is definitely comedy all the way! Composer David Friedman included in his score plenty of good ole American country music and hoe-down fiddle tunes, also waltzes and even a beguine. Kellogg has set the action in the Wild West circa 1892. A handsome young cowboy is in jail awaiting execution for killing a man in a bar fight. His sister approaches the governor of the territory for a reprieve. The gov is smitten with this novice nun and agrees to spare her brother if she sleeps with him. Everything gets pretty crazy from that point on. Desperate Measures won the Drama Desk Awards in 2018 for both lyrics and music, and was declared Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical by the Outer critics Circle that same year. The original cast recording of Desperate Measures was released in 2018 through Sony Masterworks Broadway.

Now for one of the landmark shows in the history of the American musical theater. Lady, Be Good! (1924) was the first big Broadway success for the Gershwin brothers, George and Ira. Critics raved about it and it ran longer than any Gershwin musical of the Roaring Twenties. Lady, Be Good! was the vehicle for the talents of the brother/sister performers, Fred and Adele Astaire. (Adele was actually the star of the show.) The original 1924 production also featured the strumming and warbling of Ukelele Ike. In the 1940s, however, Ukelele Ike's part was omitted and everything else about Lady, Be Good! was dumbed down almost beyond recognition to suit changing theatrical tastes. Thanks to that authority on the history of the American lyric theater, Tommy Krasker, the sprightly Gershwin megahit was restored to what it really sounded like in the Jazz Age.

In 1992, Lady, Be Good! was recorded in studio as musically complete as could be, based on the surviving performance materials. John Pizzarelli plays the ukulele and sings "Little Jazz Bird." The Astaires find their counterparts in Lara Teeter as Dick Trevor and Ann Morrison as Susie Trevor. Eric Stern conducts the pit orchestra and chorus. Elektra Nonesuch released Lady, Be Good! on a single compact disc in its Roxbury Recordings series of classic old Broadway musical comedies. In Summers past I have broadcast several other Roxbury recorded restorations of Gershwin musicals: Strike Up The Band!, Girl Crazy, Oh,Kay! and the Hollywood film music for Damsel in Distress. (By the way, it was the historically-informed stage revival of Lady, Be Good! at Connecticut's own Goodspeed Opera House in 1987 that gave Roxbury the impetus to undertake the full-scale recording project.)