Little Known Broadway

I realized that I've gotten out of the habit of posting wonderful little-known songs from little-known musicals, and so it's time to get back to that on occasion.  And this first song easily qualifies...because it didn't even make it into its show.  For reasons I have no idea, because it's my favorite song from it.

The musical is Goldilocks, which has nothing to do with the children's story.  Rather it's a spoof of the silent movie era.  (A friend who is a deep Broadway aficionado insists the title makes sense.  Perhaps it does, but I can't figure how.)  The show was produced in 1958 and has great and fascinating pedigree, though it had a short run of just 161 performances.  The music is written by one of my favorite composers, Leroy Anderson -- who wrote so many wildly-fun songs, many for the Boston Pops, like "The Syncopated Clock," "Bugler's Holiday," The Typewriter Song," "Blue Tango" and most-famously "Sleighride."  The book was jointly-written by Jean Kerr (who wrote the huge hit play, Mary, Mary, which ran for almost four years, and the book Please Don't Eat the Daisies, later made into a movie and TV show) and her husband Walter Kerr, the famous New York Times theater critic -- so highly-regarded that there is a Broadway theater named after him.  (Fun fact: the recent one-man show that Bruce Springsteen did on Broadway was at the Walter Kerr Theatre.  Additional Fun Fact: when I graduated from the School of Speech at Northwestern, our commencement speaker was fellow-alumni Walter Kerr!) And the Kerrs collaborated on the lyrics with Joan Ford. The show had a solid cast, as well -- Elaine Stritch, Don Ameche, Russell Nype (who had starred opposite Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam), and Margaret Hamilton (yes, that Margaret Hamilton who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.)  But alas, it only ran about five months.

The score is quite pleasant, though not what I'd call standout, but with a few fun songs.  But my favorite song is one cut from the show.  Perhaps the story got changed, a scene dropped, and the song just didn't fit anymore.  I don't know, but it's a lot of fun.  Fortunately, there's a series of CDs, Lost in Boston, which is a collection of songs cut from musicals during out-of-town tryouts, richly re-created.  It's fun to hear them all, but most for my taste were understandably dropped.  A few though stand out and are terrific.  And this is one of them.  It's called, "If I Can't Take It With Me," performed by Alet Oury.