Life Begins At 8:40

In 1934, a Broadway year that began with a new edition of the Ziegfeld Follies--produced by Mrs. Ziegfeld, a.k.a. Billie Burke--and ended with a Rudolf Friml flop that Allan Jones had pulled out of prior to opening in New York, there were a few oddities.

Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera 4 Saints in 3 Acts played in two theaters for a total of 48 performances. Leonard Sillman's first edition of New Faces introduced Henry Fonda, Hildegarde and Imogene Coca (doing a striptease in a trenchcoat). Noel Coward's Conversation Piece introduced French opera star Yvonne Printemps to America. Ethel Merman got to star in Anything Goes, her name over the title for the first time. Following her murder trial, Libby Holman got to sing her Revenge With Music. Johann Strauss's waltzes filled the Center Theatre with Meg Mundy in the chorus of The Great Waltz.

Life Begins at 8:40, a Shubert revue, made stars out of Ray Bolger and Luella Gear, and continued the upward spiral of Frances Williams and Bert Lahr. The show was a sparkling hit, running 237 performances. The cast included Brian Donlevy, soon to be a Hollywood heavy, and Dixie Dunbar, a chorine who would also have a life in Hollywood. The show also boasted five genuine hit tunes: "Fun To Be Fooled," "Let's Take a Walk Around the Block," "You're a Builder-Upper," "Spring Fever," and "What Can You Say In a Love Song (That Hasn't Been Said Before)?"

Two of those songs were not introduced by the four stars, but by Dunbar and other supporting players. Curiously, Bolger introduced "Builder-Upper," which was recorded that year by Ethel Merman, and fifteen years later the two would make records together singing duets from another Harburg score, "Flahooley." A chorus girl, Adrienne Matzenauer, daughter of a Metropolitan Opera star, introduced a novelty number, "Shoein' the Mare," when star Frances Williams was ill, and she was kept on as a feature player for that number.

PS Classics now brings us a complete rendition of the score with original orchestrations by Hans Spialek, Robert Russell Bennett, and Don Walker, for this 1934 hit. With an enormously talented company of stage players, including Christopher Fitzgerald, Rebecca Luker, Faith Prince, Philip Chaffin, Kate Baldwin, Jessica Stone, Graham Rowat, Montego Glover, and Brad Oscar, this recording lacks only the visuals to be complete and perfect.

Prince complains mightily in two Luella Gear numbers, "I Couldn't Hold My Man" and "My Paramount-Publix-Roxy Rose." In the latter song she is a bitter star of stage prologues at movie theaters, always condemned to playing a flower. In the former, she laments that no amount of popular products including Fleischmann's Yeast, Ivory Soap, and a Maidenform girdle could help her love life. Prince is, as usual, delectable in these songs.

As her Ray Bolger counterpart, Fitzgerald attacks "You're a Builder-Upper" with his own wife, Jessica Stone, in the Dixie Dunbar part. This recording includes all of the dance variations from the original score, as does "What Can You Say in a Love Song?," which offered views of lovers in 1780, 1880, and 1934 as a first act finale. Fitzgerald also shines in "C'est La Vie" as a suicidal Frenchman, as a lisping Mayor Jimmy Walker in the finale, and as a mournful ex-lover in "I'm Not Myself."

Chaffin sings romantically and sweetly in "...Love Song?" and with Kate Baldwin in the show's biggest hit, "Fun to Be Fooled." while she makes the most of "Spring Fever." Glover swings out on "Shoein' the Mare," Oscar does his best work in the Lahr routine, "Things," and Rowat is an excellent interlocutor in the three large ensemble numbers that bracket the show.

This a joyous disc to include in the collection of the best and brightest of the Broadway beat. With so many talents at work, then and now, it's a wonder the show isn't still running someplace.