SUNNY
McGlinn isn’t just a scholar-conductor who knows where to find musical gold, he also knows how to restore it to first luster. McGlinn’s mine was a Secaucus, New Jersey, warehouse, a building that to music lovers is what Tut’s tomb was to Egyptologists. In 1982 crates were found there filled with lost and/or forgotten original scores by Victor Herbert, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Richard Rodgers, and Jerome Kern. McGlinn was among the first to see the trove; with tender care he gleaned from it the material that fueled Carnegie Hall’s 1985 Jerome Kern Centennial Festival, featuring the three romps Oh, Boy!, Oh, Lady! Lady!, and Zip! Goes a Million. Concert revivals followed of such Kern-els as Leave It to Jane, The Girl From Utah, She’s a Good Fellow, and The City Chap.
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The Kern comeback culminated in last year’s virtually perfect re-creation for EMI Records of Show Boat–in all its uncut glory. This exhaustive, enthralling second coming contained over three and a half hours of every song used or discarded from every version–original or revival, musical or film–of the greatest American musical; McGlinn and Kern are a marriage made in musical heaven.
Several fine numbers were cut before the Broadway debut; here they’re lovingly restored. Ironically, if anything should have been lost along the way it’s not the peppy-pretty songs, it’s the trite story line. (Thank God the Grant Park Concerts version spared us the dialogue.) The creaking Cinderella story imagines that its title character, a plucky English bareback rider in love with the dashing American war hero Tom Warren, accidentally stows away on the ship that takes him back to the states. To qualify as a citizen Sunny marries Tom’s best friend Jim, who dutifully divorces her when Tom discovers–after Sunny pretends to take a fall during a fox hunt in Dixie–that she is indeed his heart’s delight. Jim obediently falls for “Weenie,” the character singer waiting in the wings. (Interestingly, in the London version Sunny ended up in love with an Englishman.)
Rebecca Luker’s sparkling soprano perfectly fit the title role (her smile in “Who?” left its own special mark on the number). Though somewhat stiff despite his dashing looks, Brent Barrett offered sufficient romantic support as Sunny’s indecisive American lover. George Dvorsky’s ardent baritone was best in the ironic marriage number “It Won’t Mean a Thing,” while Beverly Lambert and Kim Criswell, respectively a blueblood snob and a good-time girl, performed their novelty numbers with the vigor of true vaudevillians. (Though a tad weak in the upper register, Lambert gave her “Sunshine” solo all the heartfelt pathos it deserved.) With his repeated “Meanwhile . . .” tying the tale together, Simon Green provided a smoothly arch synopsis, throwing himself as well into the pompous part of a circus owner.
