Theater of the Ear

Just as on Broadway, My Fair Lady is a smash hit of the record industry. On the market for nine weeks, Columbia Records had shipped some 200,000 LP recordings of the show (list price: $4.98) by the end of last week, and orders were coming in at a joyous rate of some 10,000 a day--or at about the clip of a good-selling pop single. Equally gratifying to showfolk was the advance order for two versions, single LP and big (3 LP) album, of Broadway's latest hit musical. The Most Happy Fella, which, at more than $500,000, was even bigger than My Fair Lady's had been. The figures added up to robust new evidence that the recorded

Broadway musical has come into its own as a mass-entertainment medium, as important to U.S. listeners as opera is to Italians, a kind of repertory theater of the ear.

The two albums represent the two current extremes of show styles: Lady is a descendant of Oklahoma! and South Pacific, with its pretty songs separated by plenty of action and dialogue. Fella comes from Italian opera buffa out of such frankly operatic efforts as Porgy and Bess --only 20 of its 140 minutes are filled with spoken words, a percentage which compares favorably with Mozart's Magic Flute. Putting such works on records required very special abilities, e.g., coaxing people whose first impulse is to mime and pose into playing entirely for the ear, and then creating in sound the invisible stage action and mood.

Producer of these two recordings was Columbia's new President Goddard Lieberson (TIME, Oct. u, 1954). Sitting behind the control-room glass in cotton jersey and slacks, he rolled in his chair, clutched his brow, his breast, his colleagues' arms, while demanding one take after another. His problem with Fella was simplified by the fact that the nearly continual music supplied almost all the required atmosphere, from the rowdy, Italianate folk-type songs to the entr'acte hit, Standing on the Corner, to the show's one deeply felt song, Warm All Over. Even so, there was a moment when he feared it was beginning to sound pat as a TV program, so he halted for a playback, to get everything in playing order again. The Lady recording, on the other hand, contains all the songs but little of the dramatic action with which to recreate Bernard Shaw's famed Pygmalion (on which the show is based). To suggest the belligerent action of Just You Wait, 'Enery 'Iggins, Producer Lieberson added a drum roll under Julie Andrews' vocal; for the poignance of Rex Harrison's acting during I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face, he added a solo violin playing the tune. The resulting record has an atmosphere all its own and is a delight to the ear--even if the eye must go without the show's magnificent appearance.

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