Dig These Discs :: Kitty’s Kisses - World Premiere Recording, Liz Callaway, Rebecca Luker
Spend a day with wonderful singers and bright music. Sophistication finds a new platform in this combination.
PS Classics producer Tommy Krasker has brought out three very classy new recordings that, together, encompass the best of the past present and future in his particular brand of music. Classy, and contemporary classic, is the singing of Liz Callaway on her disc, Passage of Time; new wave classy is Rebecca Luker’s "Greenwich Time; and old-style class is presented in the 1926 musical heat wave called "Kitty’s Kisses." I cannot conceive of a better way to spend a day than listening to a mix of these three recordings.
Passage of Time
Liz Callaway calls to mind the highlights of the past with this eclectic mixture of prime Beatles (Eleanor Rigby), the best of Broadway (Jule Styne, Betty Comden & Adolph Green’s "Make Something Happy" surrounding Rodgers and Hammerstein’s "Something Wonderful"), and the finest pop material (Carly Simon and Jacob Brackman’s "That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be").
The thirteen songs on her CD include unexpected delights like David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr.’s "Patterns" from the Broadway hit show "Baby." This is not a song heard often, but in Callaway’s hands it is a moving and compulsively deliberate song.
Callaway duets on the Carly Simon song with her sister, Ann Hampton Callaway, and the blending of those voices is nothing short of thrilling. Liz’s sometimes reedy lyric soprano combined with the mezzo-soprano tones of Ann’s lush voice bring more meaning to the song than is in the lyrics. Their blending of voices makes me think of Simon and her own sister, opera singer Joanna Simon. There is just that much uniqueness to the combination.
Principally a compilation of songs you know with songs you think you should know, this is a perfect album for the morning, for sharing with coffee and apple doughnuts and a sun-filled sky throwing long shadows over the vegetable garden. This is a day-starter if ever there was one, gentle and caressing and yet a motivating musical experience.
Greenwich Time
Rebecca Luker’s album, on the other hand, is a cocktail experience, designed for the late afternoon when the sun has warmed everything and a bit of "cool" is needed to finalize the day.
Her pure tone soprano voice makes the brilliant confusions of "Billions of Beautiful Boys" into a story-telling experience that reeks of lemon-scented vodka and caviar on a blini. "Remember," setting by Steve Marzullo of the poem by Christina Rossetti, adds a bit of chill to the blend and the next two songs on the CD--Maury Yeston’s "Unusual Way" and Jeff Blumenkranz and Beth Blatt’s "Lovely Lies" cement the party relationship that Luker is presenting to her attentive listeners.
The album ends with a song by John Kander that, if you haven’t had enough to drink yet, will break your heart. Entitled "Summer With You," it is a typical Kander tune with a lyric that holds back as much as it reveals. It is wistful in Luker’s voice, gentle and a reminder of things past, things lost, relationships dissolved but never-ending. This marriage of singer and song is like the perfect canapes at the best party ever. It blows away much of the day that has come before it and leaves in its wake only the echo of both the bad and the good. Luker has a classic here, a classy number for a classy dame.
Kitty’s Kisses
Kitty’s Kisses was a modest hit on the stage in 1926. A light farce with a score by Con Conrad and Gus Kahn, it had no major stars, unless you count John Boles as such--although he was still a few years away from silent film stardom and early musical film magnificence.
In a career that seemed to climax with Barbara Stanwyck’s "Stella Dallas," and Irene Dunne’s "Back Street," and then shine for a moment years later in Broadway’s "One Touch of Venus," Boles seems an unlikely divorce lawyer in a musical farce, but his light baritone probably leant a great deal of support to songs like "Whenever I Dream" and "Kitty’s Kisses," the first song a Sigmund Romberg romance and the latter a snappy, Rodgers and Hart affair. "If I can’t have Kitty’s kisses, I’ll have none..."
In pulling this show together from bits and pieces located by Tommy Krasker and Robert Kimball from various sources found in the Warner Brothers Music warehouse twenty years ago, the producer has had to sacrifice a few numbers from the original score. The loss of three songs reduces the secondary story to non-existence, and takes the character of Philip Dennison--brother of the comic--into a mere walk-on, a part played beautifully on this recording by Malcolm Gets, who only gets one song, "Bounce Me," a duet with Sally Wilfert near the end of the show.
Even so, highlights abound with the danceable tunes "Walking the Track," "Choo Choo Love," and this recording’s "Finale Ultimo," which turns out to be an interpolated number, one of Conrad’s greatest hit songs, "The Continental" in the full film-score arrangement from "The Gay Divorcee."
The cast is superb. Philip Chaffin plays the John Boles role to perfection and Rebecca Luker plays Kitty Brown wonderfully. Their voices make love through these songs and there’s nothing better than that. Victoria Clark and Danny Burstein are the comical couple whose late honeymoon is disrupted by the unanticipated presence of the title heroine. Andrea Burns as the Telephone Operator has some delicious moments as well.
For a recording no one ever expected, this is better than what might have been delivered in lesser hands than these. The artists do well by score; the orchestra sounds authentically 1920s and the liner notes and photos present a visual imagery that enlightens even the most obvious song lyrics.
With this show, the evening’s classy experience comes full circle, for after a night of dancing, what could be more perfect than considering the next morning’s encounter with Liz Callaway over coffee and starting the whole thing right over from the top.
