There were horns of every shape & kind

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

06/08/61 : The Music Man - Original London Cast 

Another early 60s musical that I've never heard of - I may scoff but some of them have actually done OK for themselves this year, so let's go in with an open mind.

Yeah, I didn't mind this at all - the songs gave you a basic idea of the plot and they're all in the classic musical style of something like Anything Goes with a smattering of solo numbers shared amongst the cast and some fine chorus numbers.  Two things I could have done without were the bizarre opening number which is more of a poem than anything else and the annoying kid with the lisp - but the presence of "76 Trombones" provides adequate compensation.  It's also worth pointing out that it's only through musicals that we're getting to see any women this year and they're normally given a reasonable amount to do and often play the only sensible characters involved.

We're at #10 in the charts this week on its second week of a two week run but it actually did better than that sounds because its previous run was ten weeks with it spending three separate weeks at #8.  The top five this week were George Mitchell, South Pacific, Elvis, Barber/Bilk and Cliff and there were no new entries in the chart.  There were, however, three re-entries - none of which we've seen before so we've got a grand total of FIVE albums this week we've not yet seen (including three musicals).  However three of them aren't going to be there next week, so normal service will be resumed soon enough.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry on the album but it has a surprisingly lengthy entry on the show - surprising until you read it and realise that this show was a BIG thing (and it also jogs my memory that I've actually heard of it, but more on that later).  The show opened on Broadway in '57 and played for 1,375 performances, winning five Tony awards including Best Musical (beating West Side Story).  It opened in London in '61 (featuring a 13 year old Dennis Waterman in the cast) and played for a year and there have been multiple revivals over the years including '80 (on Broadway) featuring Dick Van Dyke and Christian Slater and '22 (also in NY) featuring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster (who was FAB-U-LOUS in Anything Goes when we saw her).  And that was where I'd heard of it because the lovely Mrs Reed looked into seeing it when she was over there (I wasn't invited - to either NY or the show!).

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" which is also what we saw with 7 Brides For 7 Brothers - it seems like old musicals mostly don't really cut through these days.  I didn't mind this though - it was nicely diverting, but didn't really have enough to drag me back to it.

30/07/61 - An album like no other
13/08/61 - A bit of a disappointment