What You Hear Vs. What You Saw

**1/2

DO I HEAR A WALTZ?

Pasadena Playhouse production

Fynsworth Alley with Varese Sarabande

Sometimes it helps to lower expectations. Since the initial production of “Do I Hear a Waltz?” in 1965, its critics--including two of its creators, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and librettist Arthur Laurents--more or less consigned it to the scrap heap in their public comments.

So it wasn’t too surprising that the 2001 revival at the Pasadena Playhouse was better than many musical theater aficionados expected. It hardly could have been worse than they expected.

Listening to the recorded score of the Pasadena version of “Do I Hear a Waltz?,” do I hear its faults?

Yes, but they’re less apparent than they are in the theater--again, because expectations are lower for a recording than they are for a complete theatrical experience. We don’t feel we have to get so caught up in the plight of American tourist Leona Samish, who is alone in Venice and tempted to have an affair with a married stranger, if we can’t actually see her or anyone else.

Just on the basis of the music, the second half of the score by Richard Rodgers and Sondheim is about five times more interesting than the first half.

“Take the Moment” and the title song look back honorably to Rodgers’ better scores. “We’re Gonna Be All Right” and “Perfectly Lovely Couple” look forward to the jaunty-sounding but ironic lyrics of the Sondheim musicals to come. “Everybody Loves Leona,” which was cut from the original production but restored for a 2000 production in New Jersey and also used in Pasadena, looks back glancingly at Mama Rose in “Gypsy” and forward to the Elaine Stritch character in “Company.”

The Pasadena cast--led by Alyson Reed, Anthony Crivello and Carol Lawrence--sounds in character as well as in good voice, backed by Steve Orich’s 21-piece orchestra. The production’s director David Lee--better known as a co-creator of “Frasier”--wrote the informative liner notes.

**1/2

PINAFORE!

Celebration Theatre production

Belva Records

Seldom is an L.A. cast album released while the show is still playing, but that’s the case with “Pinafore!,” which opened in September at the Celebration Theatre and has been extended several times.

Before listening to the “Pinafore!” CD, I glanced at the liner notes for a recording of the original “H.M.S. Pinafore.” The operetta was the subject of “a spate of heavily adapted” American versions in its early years, I learned, but more recently, it “has proved more immune than other Gilbert and Sullivan collaborations to modernizing trends.”

Well, that was then and this is now. “Pinafore!” adapter and director Mark Savage kept most of the Sullivan score and even most of the titles of the individual songs, but he radically changed most of Gilbert’s lyrics and character names.

The ship in this version is part of the “separate but equal” gay navy set up in response to the failed “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The captain’s son is a transvestite who has successfully convinced his supposedly straight lover that he is a she. Yet the captain wants to marry his offspring off to Sen. Barney Crank of Maryland, the admiral of the gay navy.

Savage aims his darts at politically correct liberals instead of the usual right-wing targets of gay satires. Liberals are automatically accorded the same privileges in the gay navy that Englishmen were in the original, thereby making them fair game for Savage’s pen. In addition to suggesting that one ostensibly straight character is really gay, Savage also suggests the opposite about another character--which flies in the face of what happens in most dramatizations of gay issues.

On the other hand, this probably isn’t a show for people with no interest in gay culture--or indeed, with no interest in Gilbert and Sullivan. Both groups may well not understand half of the jokes.

The recording comes with a complete text of the lyrics, which makes joke-appreciation even easier than it is in the theater. And it preserves the multi-octave-spanning performance of R. Christofer Sands as the transvestite, plus the performances of the amiable Michael Gregory as the captain and Debra Lane as the secretly troubled Bitter Butterball (as opposed to the original’s Buttercup), and the occasionally forced sounds of Christopher Hall as Dick Dockstrap (as opposed to the original’s Ralph Rackstraw). Ron Snyder is the superb musical director.

***

SO FAR...

Susan Egan

Jay Productions

Susan Egan’s first solo CD is called “So Far ...” because it takes us through songs from some of the key roles she has played in her career so far. However, in her song selection, she took care not to repeat any of the numbers she previously recorded for her most famous role, Belle in “Beauty and the Beast.” So there are some less predictable but sterling choices here.

Because Egan was raised in Seal Beach and performed many of her formative roles in the Southland, the selections may be more predictable to locals than they are elsewhere. Her liner notes identify where she sang some of these, from high school choir (“Much More” from “The Fantasticks”) to post-”Beauty and the Beast” appearances with the Blank Theatre Company (“Tom” from “Hello, Again”), at the Hollywood Bowl (“A Wonderful Guy” from “South Pacific”) and at the Mark Taper Forum (“Sooner or Later,” originally from “Dick Tracy,” later from “Putting It Together”).

Wherever she sang them, the songs reflect a wide range, and Egan’s clear timbre and winsome style are evident throughout. The album begins on an emotional high--”The Story Goes On” from “Baby,” which Egan’s notes reveal was her audition song for “Beauty and the Beast”--but the songs then take us through many other moods. The only questionable choice is one that she reveals was dictated to her by her producer, John Yap--”Just for Tonight,” from “They’re Playing Our Song,” which doesn’t add much.

“Beauty and the Beast” fans will be glad to hear that the show hasn’t been completely overlooked--Egan sings “A Change in Me,” which was added after she left the cast and after the cast album had been recorded.

*1/2

ALL OF MY LIFE HAS LED TO THIS

Louise Pitre

LML Music

Louise Pitre became a star in “Mamma Mia!” and may be nominated for a Tony Award for it. Her performance was certainly one of the best things about the ABBA musical, at least as it appeared last spring at the Shubert Theatre in Century City.

Her debut album, “All of My Life Has Led to This,” isn’t on the same level. It showcases her vocal range at its weakest as well as its strongest.

Pitre is at her best in big, passionate numbers like “The Winner Takes It All” from “Mamma Mia!,” which she performs here in French as well as in English. She makes quite a soulful production out of “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody,” of all things. She performs a couple of her own songs in French that conjure up world-weary feelings about the vulnerability of love.

But when she sings more delicate or sweeter fare, her voice is ragged. She sounds like a singer who hasn’t been able to make the transition very well from big hall to recording studio.

***

A QUIET THING

Stan Chandler and Kirsten Benton

LML Music

Here are two singers who made the transition from theater to studio exceptionally well: Stan Chandler and Kirsten Benton.

Chandler, one of the original stars of “Forever Plaid,” has become one of Southland musical theater’s most reliable leading men in recent years. Benton hasn’t achieved quite as high a profile, but she has been in a number of smaller productions.

In their liner notes for “A Quiet Thing,” they write that they discovered their voices were beautifully matched and then discovered that their personalities were too--they’re now married.

The album’s title is taken from the Kander-Ebb show tune. Pitre sings the same song on her album, but here it’s much more appropriate, for Chandler and Benton know how to tone down the belting and achieve an album that is truly a quiet thing--but also a thing that shimmers from the purity of their harmonizing.

Chandler’s high range, well known from “Forever Plaid,” here launches the album with an ethereal version of the Lennon-McCartney “I Will,” which is then blended with Benton on “Maybe I’m Amazed.”

A more ambitious combination unites Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By,” the Kander-Ebb “Sometimes a Day Goes By” and Jerry Herman’s “Time Heals Everything.”

Songs by Billy Joel, Lyle Lovett, Babbie Green and Rodgers and Hart also appear.

Brad Ellis’ amusing arrangement of “Hey There” from “The Pajama Game” reunites the four original Plaids as the doo-wop backup for Benton’s expert handling of the main melody--if there had been a female Plaid, this version of the song could have been in “Forever Plaid.”

Everything goes down smoothly, thanks in part to musical direction by Scott Harlan and orchestrations by Steve Orich. The mellow quotient is so high, it could become excessive. You almost feel as if you’ve joined the couple on their honeymoon. But the album is only 41 minutes long. The singers-producers knew when to stop.

**1/2

MY FAVORITE THINGS

Boston Pops Orchestra

RCA Victor

Richard Rodgers would have celebrated his 100th birthday in June, so you’ll hear a lot about the master melodist this year. The Boston Pops Orchestra has recorded “My Favorite Things” (release date is Wednesday), a mostly orchestral compilation of mostly familiar material, but with a few less predictable items.

Two tracks are billed as recording premieres--”March of the Clowns” from “The Nursery Ballet” and the Paul Whiteman symphonic version of “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” from “On Your Toes.” However, chances are that if you’re at least, say, 30 years old, you’ve heard the material within these selections in similar arrangements.

John Williams’ big-band arrangement of “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” jazzes up a song that’s one of the most square in the Rodgers oeuvre. Don Sebesky more conventionally arranged “Grant Avenue” and “I Have Dreamed,” the latter of which is one of the album’s three vocals, featuring the excellent Jason Danieley, best known for his role in “The Full Monty” in San Diego and New York.

The other vocals are experiments that don’t pay off: country stars Martina McBride in the album’s title song and, worse, Collin Raye in the title song from “The Sound of Music.”

Keith Lockhart is the conductor, and the orchestra sounds terrific.

*

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are already released unless otherwise noted.

*

Don Shirley is a Times staff writer.