A Sondheim rarity

Evening Primrose original soundtrack from 1966 is finally released

ew long-running Broadway musicals from the mid-1960s have been as frequently recorded as the Stephen Sondheim/Jamcs Goldman 1966 made-for-tclcvision musical Evening Primrose. Now, 40 years after its broadcast on the anthology series i\BC Stage 67, and with three different versions of the four-song score available on CD, the soundtrack of the original television production starring Anthony Perkins and Gharmian Garr has finally received its commercial release. In 1966 Sondheim and Goldman briefly put aside their development of Follies to work on an adaptation of John Collier's oft-anthologized short story "Evening Primrose," which, like Follies, is set at night in an ostensibly abandoned Manhattan building. The broadcast drew mixed reviews and mediocre Nielsen ratings, but critics have appreciated what the work foreshadowed. The opening song "If You Gan Find Me, I'm Here" anticipates Follies' equally defiant "I'm Still Here" (even maintaining several similar rhymes), and the lyric ''Take me to a world where I can be alive" presages "Being Alive" from Company, Sondheim's next stage musical. \\Tiile the existing Evening Primrose recordings on Mandy Patinkin's Dress Casual (1990), Sondheim at the Movies (1997) and The Frogs/Evening Primrose (2000) brought the music to a broader audience, the original telecast itself is rarely seen. Though illegal bootleg copies are known to be in circulation. the only copies publicly available for viewing (in grainy black-and-white kinescope form) are in the archives of the Paley Genter for Media in New York and Los Angeles. ABC, in the common practice of I960? network television, erased the original color videotape production after its broadcast (a five-minute bootleg clip of "Take Me to the World" has been available on YouTube). Sondheim said in a mid-1990s CompuServe chat that a VHS/DVD release was unlikely: "The rights are very tightly controlled by the Collier estate [... which] only gave us the television rights, and I doubt if that includes any kind of public sales of the video." During the 1980s a limited-edition original soundtrack LP was privately produced and distributed among Sondheim's colleagues, with copies selling for as much as $1,500 on Amazon.corn's auction Web site. Kritzerland's Bruce Kimmel, who put together Sondheim at the Movies for Varese Sarabande, oversaw the re-mastering of the television soundtrack. For those familiar with the tinny sounds from the nth-generation video bootlegs, the crisp quality of the soundtrack
4fiThe Sondheim Review

REVIEW BY ANDREW MILNER

is invigorating, bringing out the impeccable arrangements by legendary television music director Norman Paris (with assistance from David Shire). The disc's primary revelation is Perkins' vocal performance. Biographer Charles Wineeott wrote of Perkins' Broadway singing in Greempillow (1960), "He wasn't big enough in his delivery; it simply wasn't in his nature." However, Perkins' thin voice translated much better in the more intimate medium of television and record, and his nervousness serves him extremely well in the role of Charles Sncll, a poet who seeks refuge in a department store after hours, the first and by no means the last Sondheim hero to consciously try to cut himself off from humanity. Perkins' voice breaking in the final verse of "Take Me to the World" is one of the album's emotional high points. Garr, who played Liesl in the film version of The Sound of Music (which was still in movie theatres when Evening Primrose was broadcast). co-stars as Ella, the lifelong hermit with whom Charles falls in love. If she is not quite the vocal equal of others who have sung the part, such as Bcrnadette Peters or Theresa McCarthy, she still brings the precise amount of innocence to "I Remember" and "When."
For the first time, Evening Primrose's incidental music has been released. Mueh of it is simply a recapitulation of the existing songs (i.e., "Take Me to the World" is played over the closing credits), and the climactic chase music sounds somewhat formulaic. But the brief dance music (played during the scene in which i and Ella plan to escape), scored for clarinets. is a cousin to Sondheim's incidental music to the 1960 Broadway play /ncirorion to a ^farch (available on the recording I'nsung Sondheim}. and the piano underscoring for ~\bu"re One of Us" anticipates the music to Stavisky. There's also a charming brief song, previously unreleased. in which Charles memorizes the closing schedule of each department in the store to the refrain of "If You Can Find Me, I'm Here."

If an official video release of a crystal-clear Evening Primrose remains a pipe dream for now. Kritzerland's presentation of the original soundtrack is a fulfilling substitute and an obligatory purchase for Sondheim fans. |TSR|
ANDREW MILNER reviews books and CDs for the Philadelphia City Paper.