Music from 'Lady in the Dark' - But Not by Kurt Weill

The Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin-Moss Hart musical Lady in the Dark was a major hit on Broadway in 1941. Hollywood, as it usually did, made plans for a film version, and then, as it also usually did, began making changes. One of the main modifications was to toss out most of the famous score. Very little "My Ship" and "This Is New." No "Tschaikowsky" (no Danny Kaye either). "The Saga of Jenny" and "Girl of the Moment" did remain.

Paramount did add some non-Weill music to its 1944 release, however. This post concerns the few numbers from the film that came out on commercial records. It is a companion to a post on my main blog that compiles the original recordings from the Broadway Lady in the Dark.

"Suddenly It's Spring"

The most important piece of music written for the film is "Suddenly It's Spring," a wonderful song by leading tunesmiths Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen, who were most often found laboring on Bing Crosby's musicals. (They would win an Academy Award for "Swinging on a Star" from Going My Way that same year.)

Ginny Simms

Some record companies got behind "Suddenly It's Spring" - but not as many as you might think. Part of the problem was the ongoing musicians' strike, which was still in force for the biggest record labels in 1944. One company affected was Columbia; while it did record "Suddenly It's Spring" with Ginny Simms, it was with choral backing rather than orchestra. Her version is in the download. She aims to convey deep feeling, but ends up making this optimistic song ("You look at me / And suddenly it's spring") sound mournful.

One of the smaller companies that had made peace with the union also took up the song. HIT records, a budget label, enlisted Blue Barron's sweet band to record "Suddenly It's Spring" with the ever-chipper Tommy Ryan on vocals. The long-time Sammy Kaye vocalist had gone out on his own a few years before, and by 1944 was fronting the Barron ensemble for its leader, who was in uniform. On this record, you will hear Ryan introducing himself - it was common among such bands for the leader to announce the singer.

Technically, both Simms and Ryan do well by the song, which has a tricky release. I've included an aircheck by Frank Sinatra, where that great singer has trouble with the bridge on its second go-round. Nonetheless, only Sinatra's ecstatic version reveals the song's full stature. Too bad The Voice never did a commercial recording. The backing on the aircheck is almost certainly by Axel Stordahl.

"A Message for Liza"

The other music from Lady in the Dark to make it to record was, surprisingly, a bit of the movie score done by music director Robert Emmett Dolan. This music somehow came to the attention of Leopold Stokowski, who decided to record it in an August 1946 session with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, which he had founded the year before. The delightfully lush orchestral miniature is called "A Message for Liza" on the label and "Waltz" or "Glamour Waltz" in the discographies. It is probably what IMDb calls "Artist's Waltz." The orchestration is possibly by Robert Russell Bennett, who worked on the film.

Bonus Stoki silliness

I've also included the other side of the Stokowski 78, although it has nothing to do with Lady in the Dark. It is Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 1 - but wait, what is different here? Stoki has thrown out the composer's orchestration, and substituted his own, complete with prominent xylophone and wild tempo changes that would have challenged even the most adept Hungarian dance troupe. The result sounds like Liszt at his most garish - and maybe that was the idea. The whole thing somehow reminds me of the Bugs Bunny parody of Stokowski conducting at the Hollywood Bowl - minus the tenor, of course.

Most of these recordings were found amidst the huge pile of stuff that is the Internet Archive, and remastered for your listening pleasure. The Sinatra came from a long-ago bootleg.

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