Call it "the ultimate Call Me Madam." At least, that's the idea. Freed of the pesky legalities of copyright restriction by the European law that releases all recordings into the public domain after 50 years, the compilers at the Naxos label here create a composite recording of the score of
Irving Berlin's 1950 Broadway musical Call Me Madam out of selections from the original Broadway cast album, a studio cast album, a radio broadcast, and the original soundtrack of the 1953 movie. The temptation to assemble such a project is understandable. Call Me Madam starred
Ethel Merman, but when the time came to record the original Broadway cast album, it turned out that RCA Victor Records had won the rights to that album, but
Merman happened to be under exclusive contract to Decca Records. With Solomon-like illogic, the rival record labels refused to compromise, and each recorded its own album, RCA replacing
Merman with
Dinah Shore, while Decca replaced the rest of the cast. Hence, while the RCA album technically gets the designation "Original Broadway Cast," neither LP is really worthy of the name. The Naxos folks overcome the problem by blending the two discs, using the RCA tracks that don't involve the lead character and plugging in
Merman's Decca recordings when they do. Unfortunately, they don't stop there. In the world of digital editing, they can't resist stitching together a couple of tracks, with the peculiar result that, in both "Marrying for Love" and "The Best Thing for You,"
Shore gets to speak a few lines, but then
Merman swoops in and sings, as the sound mix and the musical arrangements shift radically. Perhaps the editors really hated
Dick Haymes, who sings the male lead part of Cosmo Constantine on the
Merman recording, and were determined to stick with Broadway's
Paul Lukas. Whatever their reasons, the results are bizarre. They do, however, set the stage for more cast changes, as Hollywood's
Donald O'Connor steps in for Broadway's Russell Nype more than halfway through in the second male lead role of Kenneth Gibson on "You're Just in Love." The last few tracks are, in essence, bonuses, though they are not labeled as such.
Tallulah Bankhead introduces and narrates a nearly 15-minute radio version of the show with
Merman and Nype, and the disc concludes with the two songs from the movie that
Berlin fished out of his trunk from earlier in his career, "The International Rag" and "What Chance Have I with Love?," before George Sanders, the cinema Cosmo, performs a duet medley with
Merman for the "Finale." Thus, a show with a confusing recording history gets another confusing release on disc, but at least there's plenty of
Merman. (The album cover shows neither
Merman nor
Shore, but instead a photograph of an attractive woman in a black dress and long black gloves, holding a flower and gazing at the camera with a saucy expression on her face. Maybe the cover designer didn't know that Call Madam is about a lady ambassador, and thought it was about a high-class prostitute?) ~ William Ruhlmann