Stuart Ross' musical comedy revue Forever Plaid, in which a vocal quartet covers many of the pre-rock pop hits of the 1950s, is based on the conceit that the singers were killed on their way to their first professional engagement, which just happened to be on the night
the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show, thus wiping their chosen form of music off the pop charts, but now they have been granted one night to come back and perform their show. That happened for the first time on May 20, 1990, at Steve McGraw's, a supper club on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and it happened again for more than 1,500 off-Broadway performances, leading to touring companies and regional productions around the world. (After all, the show was packed with hit songs, and it only took four singers, a piano, and some dinner jackets to pull off.) RCA Victor released an original cast album in November 1990, and there has even been a holiday disc, Plaid Tidings. It's not clear why the world needs another recording of the show 15 years later, except perhaps that it has taken up a permanent residence at the Gold Coast Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas and a CD makes a good souvenir for patrons. J. Gregory Davis, Bruce Ewing, Douglas Frank, Mark Perkins, and Dale Sandish (you must need five performers to give people days off), veterans of previous productions, handle themselves well, re-creating the sound of
the Four Freshmen and
the Four Aces, and applying it to a variety of '50s pop figures, good-naturedly copying
Johnnie Ray,
Tennessee Ernie Ford,
Sam Cooke,
Perry Como,
Harry Belafonte, and
Tony Bennett. They even toss in a version of
the Beatles' "She Loves You" in which "Yeah, yeah, yeah" becomes "Yessirree, Bob!" Those who own the original album probably don't need another version, but fans discovering the show for the first time in Vegas will get a good accounting of it here. ~ William Ruhlmann