New York, NY (Top40 Charts) PS CLASSICS will release a new studio cast recording of Cole Porter's 1943 smash hit musical, Something for the Boys. Seventy-five years after it took Broadway by storm, the full score to one of Porter's most forgotten musicals is finally preserved on disc, complete with its original orchestrations for 26 musicians - plus a marching band. The show was the fifth and final star vehicle Porter wrote for Ethel Merman, and the composer's fourth consecutive wartime hit, but what sets Something for the Boys apart from those shows was that Porter infused it with his love of swing; he celebrated the big-band sound that was at its peak of popularity, creating a rollicking score that's unique in his canon.
The original production received rapturous reviews. The New York Times hailed it as "the big, fast, glittering musical comedy for which Broadway has been waiting for a long, long time." Life proclaimed it "joyous entertainment spiced with rowdy good humor, the sort of smash-hit musical comedy that seems to turn on the lights along New York's theater district." In the New York Daily News,
Burns Mantle advised his readers, "My best advice to you this morning is that you had better run, not walk, to the nearest agency, if you can't get to the theatre, and reserve tickets for the near future." It clocked 422 performances, a sizable hit for its day, then - as befell so many shows of its era - the performance materials were discarded and ultimately lost. But in 1987, Porter historian Robert Kimball and PS Classics co-founder Tommy Krasker located the orchestrations at the now-defunct Chappell warehouse in Manhattan, allowing one of Porter's few missing musicals to finally be restored and recorded in its entirety.
The new recording of Something for the Boys features a cast of Broadway and recording veterans, including
Danny Burstein (Fiddler on the Roof, Moulin Rouge),
Elizabeth Stanley (On the Town), Andréa
Burns (In the Heights), Edward Hibbert (The Drowsy Chaperone), Sara Jean Ford (Phantom of the Opera) and PS Classics co-founder Philip Chaffin, performing to the original charts under the baton of Constantine Kitsopoulos and Greg Jarrett.
The deluxe package includes a 32-page full-color booklet with liner notes by Krasker; an essay on the original orchestrators - Hans Spialek, Don Walker, Robert Russell
Bennett and Ted Royal - by John Baxindine; a brief note from Merman historian Al F. Koenig, Jr.; a synopsis by Robert Edridge-Waks; plus complete lyrics, production photos and a two-page illustration of the original production by Al Hirschfeld.
