Albums

On Your Toes – Studio Cast Recording 1952

Listen

Synopsis

The story of On Your Toes deals with a young hoofer, the son of vaudevillians, whose mother persuades him to leave the “two-a-day” and take up serious ballet. The young man’s early efforts at the art are laughable, as when he attempts to take part in Balanchine’s version of Scheherazade. Then, a friend of the hoofer presents the troupe with a new work that tells a contemporary story through the medium of ballet, and in this the young man, the leading ballerina, and the troupe score a decided triumph. The plot of this successful ballet, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” is a satire on gangster stories. A hoofer and his girl are fleeing murderous mobsters and they take refuge in a cafe on Tenth Avenue. The gangsters catch up with the pair and they shoot the girl. The hoofer dances to elude the bullets and keeps on with increasing desperation that rises to a frenzied climax until the arrival of the police puts an end to the bandits’ careers. Like the other Broadway shows on Columbia Masterworks that were produced for records by Goddard Lieberson, this recorded performance of On Your Toes, featuring a young and extremely able cast, has the vivid excitement of an actual theatre performance.

– Taken from the original liner notes for ML 4645)

Credits

Frankie Frayne: Portia Nelson Phil Dolan III: Jack Cassidy Phil Dolan II: Robert Eckles Lil Dolan: Zamah Cunningham Peggy Porterfield: Laurel Shelby Sergei Alexandrovitch: Ray Hyson Music by Richard Rodgers; Lyrics by Lorenz Hart Chorus and Orchestra Conducted by Lehman Engel

About

There are many reasons to recall On Your Toes with warm affection, paramount among them being the fine, rollickingly satirical score of Richard Rodgers and the incisive, enormously adroit and witty lyrics of Lorenz Hart. Here, making a delightfully performed and most welcome addition to Columbia’s outstanding roster of previously unrecorded Broadway shows, are the sparkling melodies and lyrics of On Your Toes. On Your Toes, which introduced to Broadway in mid-April of 1936 a cast that included Ray Bolger, Tamara Geva and Monty Woolley, is in its way a landmark in the American theatre. It was the first of the book-show musicals to take ballet seriously, visually and musically speaking. Its plot is concerned with backstage life in a ballet troupe; and for this production, producer Dwight Deere Wiman engaged the noted choreographer George Balanchine, late of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, to create and direct two large-scale ballets. The score for one of these, the amazing “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” here is given its first full-length recording.