Recordings of Fred Astaire in London

Further to my previous post, I have just been speaking on the phone to Chris Ellis who did the LP reissues of this material some years ago on the World Records label. Chris is now aged 90 and living in Amsterdam but sounds sharp as a tack despite having no broadband, email or even a telephone answering machine.Without hesitation Chris said the Fred and Adele Astaire 'Funny Face' recordings were made in Columbia's studios in Petty France and came up with several reasons why it was extremely unlikely they were recorded at the Princes Theatre.

In view of this I am happy to call off my investigations and take Petty France as the recording venue.

Tonyloco

As a postscript to this thread, I should just add that there is a splendid book called "London Musical Shows on Record 1889 – 1989" by Robert Seeley and Rex Bunnett (General Gramophone Publications 1989) that lists all the recordings made by original cast members of all the musicals that were performed in London during that period of one hundred years. It is extremely informative in that within its alphabetical listing of show titles it gives the name of the theatre, the opening date and the names of the principal performers, even if they didn't actually make any recordings. It also lists the names of all the individual songs and links them to the shows they came from and lists all the performers and gives the shows they were in.

And the really important thing is that it was not until probably the 1940s that American record companies bothered to make anything remotely like 'original cast recordings' of Broadway shows whereas in the UK, such original cast recordings were made regularly as a matter of course right back from around 1900, sometimes just a few sides and sometimes an almost complete record of the entire show. In the USA, it was the big stars who recorded their hits like Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Ethel Merman, etc, and the shows as such came a very poor second whereas here it was the shows that were promoted in the sale of the records, with the result that a great deal of musical theatre history in the UK has been preserved that has actually been lost in the USA. Just imagine what the original Broadway cast recordings of the shows from the 1920s and 1930s by Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin would be like, but the closest you can get to those (apart from the 'star' recordings mentioned above) are the recordings made in London when some of those shows were staged in the West End, like those with Fred and Adele Astaire and the great romantic musicals of the 1920s like 'The Desert Song', 'Rose Marie' and 'Show Boat', recorded on stage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane with the full original chorus and orchestra.

That's a little Tonyloco historical lecturette for all you musical theatre aficionados that frequent this website. I hope you enjoyed it!

No, I have never met Rexton but of course I know who he is. My historical guru for all things relating to musical theatre is Andrew Lamb and when I had the privilege of compiling the series of CDs for Classics for Pleasure devoted to mainly studio cover recordings from the LP era of musicals pre-Oklahoma! it was Andrew who gave me invaluable help in finding and selecting the material from the back catalogue of EMI including World Records. We were all set to produce a follow-up series of recordings from 'Oklahoma!' onwards but the sales of the first series were not strong enough to justify the continuation. I mention all this because the EMI editorial department asked Rex to provide a note for one of the CDs but that's the closest I have come to meeting him.

Which reminds me that the follow-up series would have included EMI's cover versions on MfP as well as World Records and would have included the Dora Bryan covers of 'Hello Dolly' and 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' as well as Norman Wisdom's 'Where's Charley?', Inea Te Wiata (and Edwin Steff) in 'Most Happy Fella' and of course earlier things like the London cast recording of parts of 'Annie Get your Gun' (Delores Gray), 'Oklahoma' (Harold Keel), 'South Pacific (Mary Martin in 'Twin Soloquies' and the finale) and bits of 'Kiss Me, Kate'. I appreciate that much of this material has now seen the light of day on other labels but it would have given me much pleasure to have curated the series on Classics for Pleasure.

Absolutely right, Cardinal Pirelli. If only more people had snapped up the first series then the second series would have seen the light of day.

Yes, those you mention were part of the series. My favourite was the Romberg album which included the wonderful 'Desert Song' highlights which, despite some over-rich orchestrations, had a dream cast including Edmund Hockridge as the Red Shadow, June Bronhill as Margot (her 'Sabre Song' is like a thrilling operatic scena) plus Inia Te Wiata and Bruce Forsythe in supporting roles. The Kern album also has the young Shirley Bassey as a fabulous Julie in 'Show Boat' plus the original London leads in 'West Side Story' (Don McKay and Marlys Watters) as Ravenal and Magnolia and Inia Te Wiata as Joe.

Your mentioning 'The Arcadians' and 'Chu Chin Chow' reminds me that we had a lot of fun deciding which tracks to use from the original EMI and World Records albums so as not only to produce the best and most complete versions of the two shows but also to avoid too much duplication with CDs covering those shows previously issued by the pop side of EMI. I was also strongly impressed by the Novello albums and I wonder why his shows never seem to get revived these days, even by the amateurs although I could be wrong about that. EMI had also issued several outstandingly good Novello LPs but these had been licensed from the BBC and were no longer available except under a new licence which put them financially out of our reach.

The series of musicals under discussion here was a follow up to the series of Sadler's Wells albums that I had previously produced for CfP. These included various highlights from operas sung in English like 'Carmen', 'La traviata', 'Il trovatore', etc, plus some splendid Offenbach, Johann Strauss and Lehar operettas, mostly with June Bronhill, whom you may by now have gathered was one of my all-time favourite performers.

Oh, Cardinal Pirelli, you are really showing me up now! I was not aware of any musical shows by Billy Mayerl and I have to admit Tunbridge and Waller also meant nothing to me. So having now found that Mayerl's shows included 'The Millionaire Kid', 'Sporting Love' and 'Over She Goes' and the Tunbridge and Waller shows included 'Virginia', 'Dear Love', 'Silver Wings', 'For the Love of Mike', 'Tell Her the Truth', 'Yes, Madam?' and 'Please, Teacher!' I can find only one song from any of them that I actually know – 'Got a date with an angel' from 'For the Love of Mike' – so I wonder how any of them might stand up today.

From whence do you have knowledge of these shows? I presume that some of the contemporary recordings were reissued by Chris Ellis in his World Records series of historical London theatre recordings but alas I no longer have any of those LPs. It also seems to me that those shows were probably very much dependant on their original comedy stars like Laddie Cliff, Lupino Lane, Bobby Howes, Binnie Hale, etc.

As regards the earlier Edwardian shows by Monckton, Rubens, Talbot, Jones, etc, those all have wonderful scores that are very much of their time and although they may sound old-fashioned and dated to us today, I believe they have great merit (rather like the works of Gilbert and Sullivan) and I can sit at the piano and play by heart almost the entire scores of 'Our Miss Gibbs', 'The Arcadians' and 'A Country Girl'. I'm not sure what that proves, but it keeps me happy!