Musicarnival memories coming up roses in recordings

E17MUSICALC_12916071.JPGView full sizeAn audience inside the Musicarnival tent in Warrensville Heights watches a performance of 'Li'l Abner' in August 1959. The theater-in-the-round presented classic American musicals from 1954 to 1965 and then imported touring productions, variety shows headlined by stars and rock groups, until closing in 1975.

Curtain up!

(There wasn't one.)

Light the lights!

(There were plenty.)

You got nothing to hit but the heights!

(Make that Warrensville Heights.)

Susan Johnson, acclaimed on Broadway in Frank Loesser's "The Most Happy Fella" and other shows, sang those prime Stephen Sondheim lyrics as Rose in the 1962 production of "Gypsy" at Musicarnival, the summer musical-theater festival Cleveland impresario John L. Price Jr. ran from 1954 to 1975 under a tent next to Thistledown Race Track in, yes, Warrensville Heights.

For decades, performances of classic American musicals at Musicarnival have been distant memories for many who flocked to the theater's high-quality productions.

But now, thanks to Price's resourcefulness and meticulous work by a team of musical-theater experts, the shows Musicarnival mounted during its so-called "production years" (1954-65) soon will be available for the world to hear -- in Ohio and Connecticut.

Complete live audio recordings of more than 90 musicals and operettas presented at Musicarnival are being digitally restored during a four-year project that will make the performances available to visitors at the Cleveland Public Library and Goodspeed Musicals' Scherer Library of Musical Theatre in East Haddam, Conn., starting in January.

"It's as if we could hear recordings of Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre during Elizabethan times," says Bill Rudman, artistic director of the Cleveland-based Musical Theater Project, which the Cleveland Public Library engaged to supervise the restoration process.

"In the '50s and '60s, musical theater was the thing to do. There was an electricity in the air."

The electricity is palpable on the full-length Musicarnival recordings restored thus far and transferred to compact discs. The 1958 season -- including such beloved works as "Guys and Dolls," "Annie Get Your Gun," "Finian's Rainbow," "Show Boat" and "The Most Happy Fella" -- has been transferred, restored and edited by Rudman and recording engineer Mark Logies, who are gradually working on the other 11 seasons.

Until they began their Musicarnival journey, it wasn't clear to Rudman and Logies that the performances were listenable or transferable. For years, more than 300 fragile 7-inch reel-to-reel analog tapes of the shows sat in boxes, first at Price's home (minus climate control) and then in the John L. Price Jr. Musicarnival Archives at the Cleveland library.

Along with the tapes, the Musicarnival archives include 33,500 slides, 12,000 photographs, 32 scrapbooks and a slew of props and other materials that founder-producer Price amassed during his theater's 22 seasons in Warrensville Heights and seven in Palm Beach, Fla.

"He's always had this eye to posterity," says his eldest daughter, author Diana Price. "He never thought it through. He's just a packrat."

Aside from the treasure trove of musicals brought to life by top professionals in the field, what makes the Musicarnival story so intriguing is the fact that impresario Price -- who, at 92, lives in an area nursing home -- never let on he was taping the performances.

"Either he pushed the button or his close confidant did," says Diana Price, who appeared in several of her father's Musicarnival productions as a youngster. "The tape recorder was behind a door and hooked up to the sound system. The cast didn't know, the orchestra didn't know, the staff didn't know. It was totally illegal."

Which is partly why the tapes gathered dust for so long. To make sure authors, actors, directors, musicians, designers, stagehands and others wouldn't suddenly rush out of the copyright woodwork, project officials turned to Michael P. Price, executive producer of Goodspeed Musicals, which became a collaborator.

Diana Price calls the Goodspeed producer, who knew her father well, the "kingpin" of the project. It became reality "because of his unbridled enthusiasm," she says. "All he wanted was a set of the materials."

Goodspeed's Price -- no relation to the Cleveland family -- was happy to lend a helping hand.

"What we did was assure the library in Cleveland that this form of archival work has become an accepted practice in the field of theatrical archiving," he says.

"Everybody is nervous today about intellectual property rights, and they have a right to be, because it's very difficult with the Internet to police it. But in this kind of atmosphere, a lot of the unions we deal with will allow archival work. So we've been doing it here at Goodspeed for the last 30 years."

Goodspeed Musicals, which has presented classic American works since 1963, possesses the second-largest collection of musical-theater materials in the country, after New York's Lincoln Center. It will add the Musicarnival collection to its more than 70,000 items.

A considerable

source Solving the rights issues was one victory for the project. Yet even after Rudman, Diana Price and Evelyn Ward, retired head of the literature department at the Cleveland Public Library, received the go-ahead for the pilot project (the 1958 season), they still had to face the possibility that the tapes might not behave. But they soon heaved sighs of relief.

"So far, the ones I've seen have been in remarkably good condition," says Logies, an owner of Arrowhead Music in Mentor and engineer for Rudman's syndicated radio show, "Footlight Parade."

A few of the early tapes are made of paper, but most are Mylar, says Logies. Although he wrestles with tapes that break easily, he's been able to splice them and transfer the performances to digital archives before the tapes disintegrate.

After Logies makes the digital transfers, he passes them on to Rudman, who fashions a compilation of the best sections from each show and writes annotations. (Fortunately, Price taped virtually every performance of each production, sometimes on two or three reels per performance.) Logies then equalizes and filters the recordings "to create the best sound from the source material," says Rudman.

The sound on the 1958 recordings is extraordinarily clear and present, even though Price taped the shows on the slowest speed. What a listener hears occasionally depends on the location of the actors on the round stage. Most of the microphones were hung from the grid that circled the stage, giving prominence to nearby performers.

Whatever it took for Price to clandestinely capture the shows, he preserved high-energy and polished performances of longtime favorites (operettas), recent Broadway hits and shows that today deserve new consideration.

Leading musicals,

experienced artists Musicarnival opened on June 25, 1954, while Price was still working as Mr. Weather-Eye on Cleveland television station WEWS, with Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!"

Over the years, he presented major works by leading figures of the day and took chances with shows of lesser stature, such as Lerner and Loewe's "Paint Your Wagon," Jerry Herman's "Milk and Honey" and Harold Rome's "Wish You Were Here" (for which he had a swimming pool built in the tent's orchestra pit).

During the production years, Price secured the first summer-stock rights to such shows as "Oklahoma!," "South Pacific" (whose 1955 cast included Juanita Hall, the original Bloody Mary) and "The Most Happy Fella."

In 1960, "West Side Story" made it to Musicarnival as directed by Gerald Freedman, who'd assisted Jerome Robbins on the original 1957 Broadway production and later would head Cleveland's Great Lakes Theater Festival, and featuring a young dancer (as Baby John) named Michael Bennett, who would go on to a stellar Broadway career as choreographer and director.

Price tended to avoid casting stars, believing they wouldn't deal well with the short Musicarnival rehearsal period. Instead, he hired Equity actors with experience as understudies or members of the road companies of certain shows.

Along with local actors, Price brought in such respected musical-theater artists as Susan Johnson (whose lustrous belt graced the title role in the inaugural season's production of "Annie Get Your Gun"), Jack Cassidy, Mark Dawson, John Reardon, George Gaynes, William Chapman, Tommy Rall, Irra Petina, Robert Rounseville, Libi Staiger and Akron native Marian Mercer.

Martyn Green, the British actor and singer admired in the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, can be heard on 1958 recordings savoring the roles of Finian in "Finian's Rainbow" and Capt. Hook in "Peter Pan." A then-unknown soprano named Beverly Sills appeared in Musicarnival productions before catapulting to national acclaim at the New York City Opera.

The theater continued with its resident stock company through 1965's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," after which Price was forced to import touring productions, variety shows headlined by stars and rock groups -- Led Zeppelin played Musicarnival in 1969 -- to fill the 2,000-plus seats.

The theater closed in 1975, partly the victim of competition from the newly built Front Row Theater in Highland Heights.

But Musicarnival lives on, thanks to the restored recordings, which include appearances by three generations of Prices. John performs in "Damn Yankees" and "Guys and Dolls." His mother and daughter Diana have bit parts in the inaugural season's "Show Boat."

And the family connection extends to John's late brother, Lt. Col. Robert "Jim" Price, whose $200,000 bequest is making the restoration of a rare and wonderful collection possible.

As Rudman puts it: "We believe no similar body of recordings exists in this country."

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