George and Ira Gershwin's 1926 musical Oh, Kay! came along 17 years before it became common for record companies to record original Broadway cast albums, so there is no such collection of its music on disc as performed by the cast led by
Gertrude Lawrence. At Columbia Records in the late '40s and ‘50s, producer Goddard Lieberson and conductor Lehman Engel recorded their own studio cast versions of such vintage shows, however, and here they take on the
Gershwin opus, hiring four singers, Barbara Ruick (seen and heard as the second lead in the film version of Carousel in 1956),
Jack Cassidy (of Broadway's Wish You Were Here and several other Columbia re-creations), Allen Case, and Roger White.
Cy Walter and Bernie Leighton provide twin piano parts in the manner of Ohman and Arden, along with an orchestra and chorus. The result is a vivid if antiseptic treatment of the music. Including the ten songs from the score, Lieberson and Engel don't disprove the notion that the show's one standard, "Someone to Watch Over Me," and its other songs that have found a life outside the theater -- "Maybe," "Clap Yo' Hands," and "Do, Do, Do" -- are the best of the score. But the other songs are good second-drawer
Gershwin and deserve to have been recorded. (While the show was in preparation, Ira Gershwin suffered appendicitis, so Howard Dietz was brought in to contribute some lyrics to "Heaven on Earth" and "Oh, Kay!") It's good that there is now an LP version of the music, even in this cut-and-dried form. In 1998, when the album was prepared for CD reissue, producer Didier C. Deutsch silently re-sequenced the tracks to be in the same order that the songs were sung on-stage; the makers of the LP had moved back "Do, Do, Do," probably to even up the time lengths on the two sides of the vinyl disc. Deutsch couldn't find any bonus tracks from the recording sessions, but he appended a recording of "Maybe" by
Mary Martin made in 1949 and 1926 solo piano performances of "Someone to Watch Over Me" and "Clap Yo' Hands" by
George Gershwin himself. ~ William Ruhlmann