They're nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating, calculating, agitating, maddening and infuriating hags

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

23/07/61 : My Fair Lady - Original Broadway Cast 

Yes - finally!  I love the film and listen to the album reasonably frequently because the bangers bang hard - and there are a lot of them!  I'll be surprised if I think there's a better album than this in '61 so I'm totally looking forward to revisiting it.  It's also an amusing coincidence that The Music Man's leading man is Professor Harold Hill and here it's Professor Henry Higgins.

Yup - it's always a pleasure to revisit this although it was quite interesting listening to this version because I normally pick the film soundtrack which has Marni Nixon singing the Eliza Doolittle part whereas here it's Julie Andrews - as you'd expect Julie does an excellent job but it's just slightly different from versions I'm used to.  The hit rate here really is very high - I'd say that 50% of the tracks are pretty much classics.  If I had to pick top ones I'd go for "On The Street Where You Live", "Wouldn't It Be Loverly", "I Could Have Danced All Night", "With A Little Bit Of Luck" and "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man" but there's not really a poor track amongst them.   If you're not aware of this, then do check it out - but SURELY you've at least seen the film?

We're at #16 in the chart this week on its sixth week of a ten week run - which doesn't sound very impressive but it originally came out in '58 and I suspect that most people in the country already owned a copy by '61.  Its initial run was for 135 weeks, spending the first nineteen weeks at #1 and it also spent 24 weeks at #2 - all of which is slightly impressive.  The top five this week were George Mitchell, South Pacific, Elvis, Barber/Bilk and more Elvis, there was one new entry in the chart for TSOM (#12 - London cast) and there are two more albums in the chart we have yet to meet (and yes, one's a musical).

Wikipedia's entry for the album is pretty short but basically just tells us how successful it was - it was the first album to sell a million copies, got to #1 in the US in '56, '57, '58 and '59 and is one of the longest charting albums in the US at 480 weeks.  There's also a Original London Cast version which has the same principal cast members but is in stereo - that's progress for you.

The play's entry is, as expected, massive and is pretty interesting - Gabriel Pascal, an American film producer acquired the rights for several of George Bernard Shaw's plays in the mid 30s, but Shaw refused to allow Pygmalion to be made into a musical after a previous bad experience.  When Shaw died in 1950, he was no longer able to refuse permission so Pascal asked Lerner and Loewe to give it a go - but they declared it to be impossible due to the structure, mostly due to the lack of a love story (apparently Rodgers and Hammerstein also declared it to be impossible).

So Lerner and Loewe then split up and Pascal died, so that could well have been the end of it but Lerner had some further ideas and got back together with his mate to give it another go, but the only problem now was that they didn't have the rights - because they were obviously now owned by Chase Manhattan Bank.  So what did they do?  Well, they only went and spent five months writing and casting it at their own expense working on the basis that the bank would then have to go with them - and luckily for them they were right!

Noel Coward was the first choice to play Henry Higgins but turned them down and suggested Rex instead - I think Noel would have been interesting, but no Rex.  Mary Martin was the first choice for Eliza (she'd already starred in South Pacific and The Sound Of Music, so she had some history there) but she also turned them down and they went with Julie Andrews who'd been in The Boyfriend on Broadway but was relatively unknown compared to everyone else - I think it's fair to say she's gone on bigger (if not necessarily better) things.  I was somewhat surprised to see that Stanley Holloway (Alfred Doolittle) and Robert Coote (Colonel Pickering) were in the Broadway version as well as the film - I would have expected them to shoehorn in some Americans there.  And that's as far as I'm going to go because I've already written LOADS about it but I strongly recommend the entry because there's a lot in there - and that's without going anywhere near the film entry.  

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" which seems odd at first, but then I thought it probably did make sense because most people probably listen to the film soundtrack - so obviously I checked that out and got exactly the same response!  I think it's a fair enough comment though because this is, for me, far and away the best musical soundtrack of that time - it's such a good collection of intelligent and witty lyrics set to proper tunes.  In case you can't tell - I'm a fan! 

16/07/61 - Fine, but nothing to stand out
30/07/61 - An album like no other