Gil Hates Everything

(Pajama? Pyjama? Whatever…)

This is a musical from Three Million Years BC – er, 1954. I have the 2006 revival recording with new songs. You know how I sometimes grumble about revivals over-egging the pudding by updating the orchestrations? It doesn’t happen here that I can tell. Brilliantly, this show has a female lead called “Babe”. Other things you might like to know are that it won the Tonys for Best Musical and then for Best Revival, and it had Bob Fosse on choreo. Also, it seems it made a star of Shirley Maclaine. End of first paragraph.

The plot: dude, there’s seven paragraphs of it. There’s a pajama factory, with a new superintendent, a union, a strict boss, a time & motion guy, and about a hundred other characters. I think the factory actually makes plot. Let’s talk about the songs.

In the first half, “I’m Not At All In Love” (Babe asserts the aforementioned re the new super, while being amusingly rinsed by the backing singers) is an okay song, but there’s some wobbly stuff on either side of it. “A New Town Is A Blue Town”, “I’ll Never Be Jealous Again”… the former sounds suspiciously indebted to “Guys & Dolls” – although that could be because the singer is Harry Connick Jr, giving it an instant Sinatra vibe – and the latter sounds even more suspiciously like it features that irreplaceable musical-theatre character, the big sexy black girl. “Hey There” is a relatively famous song where the guy sings a lament into his dictaphone and then duets with himself, but on finally hearing it, I was disappointed; the ‘duet’ is mostly just him muttering “Yeah… true” in response to each thing he said earlier. Well that’s a fucking waste isn’t it? I realize that I’m talking from the POV of fifty-six years of development beyond this show, but I’m not clear on how you could have that idea at all and then execute on it so lamely. A pity.

There’s a lot of tunes in this show, which is something. Sometimes too much. “Her Is”, “Once A Year Day”… they’re both kinda bouncy, but the tune of “Once A Year Day” turns out to be difficult to set lyrics to.

But “Small Talk” is okay, and “There Once Was A Man” is actually pretty great, largely sold by the performances – this reprise is incredibly lucky to have Harry Connick Jr, who sings with a proper dynamic range and limited vibrato, and Babe is played by Kelli O’Hara, who seems to be that rare thing, A Leading Lady I Don’t Want To Stab Before She Sings Another Note. The arrangement – fast-paced, plenty of horns – also doesn’t hurt. You know, that song was excellent. I want to sing that now. Ashley!

Second act: “Steam Heat” sounds a lot like Fosse said “Oi, give me something to do”; “The World Around Us” has some bright spots in the lyrics, although it doesn’t sound thrilling to sing; “Think Of The Time I Save” illustrates the madness of the time & motion guy, and although it’s funny, it makes the character seem utterly implausible; and then there’s the big hit from the show, “Hernando’s Hideaway”, which isn’t all that much as a song-with-lyrics but is clearly there to let Fosse go berserk. “Seven And A Half Cents” is fun, although also designed to scrabble at your communist soul as you hear all these workers talk so happily about the benefits they’ll get if they work for the next ten years. (Although: if you’re adjusting lyrics for a revival, be careful how you do it… they couldn’t change the fact that they’re talking about a sum of maybe a thousand dollars, but they did feel the need to update the size of the TV set you could buy with it).

The rest of the second act just sort of takes care of the plot. But overall, I was kinda impressed. After an unpromising start, this show’s soundtrack turns out to have a fair degree of character, and although you wouldn’t take many of these songs with you to an audition, there are at least a few which have stood the test of time.

And much of the rest, on this recording at least, is made tolerable-to-good by extremely sympathetic performances from the leads. I cannot emphasise enough how good this recording sounds at those points when Connick and O’Hara are singing and it therefore doesn’t sound like run-of-the-mill musical theatre. “Musical theatre singing”, I will remind you, can annoy me very quickly. At this point I’ll draw a comparison with Bard On The Beach, as we watched the first half of “Falstaff” last week (it was dull, we left). Did no-one fucking stand still in the fifteen century? Everyone, every single character, ducked and weaved around the stage like they were afraid of snipers. The one time a character actually stood still, it was rivetingly effective. Presumably that was a deliberate effect, but it meant we got motion sickness from the rest of the show. There’s a similar trope amongst musical theatre singers. Essentially, a lot of them try too damn hard. I can’t ask you to draw a comparison between theatre and the pop singer of your arbitrary choice, because some pop singers try too hard as well (Beyonce, Christina Aguilera, etc). But I can tell you this is one of the few show recordings where I’d listen to it again because of how it sounds, not because of the strength of the material. There’s so much good listenable singing on here that it makes many other shows sound gruesomely overblown in comparison.

Random Panda awards this, hmmmm… the show itself gets six, but this recording gets eight.

(originally posted 2009)