Editorial Reviews

After New York's City Center program "Encores! Great American Musicals in Concert"®, a series devoted to semi-staged performances of neglected shows, turned to the 1928 operetta The New Moon in March 2003, Ted Chapin, chairman of the advisory committee, as he says in his liner notes to this album, "discovered there had never been a full recording" of the show. Yet theater historian Kurt Gänzl wrote in his 1990 book The Blackwell Guide to the Musical Theatre on Record, "The score of The New Moon is very much better known than the show itself...." These two seemingly conflicting yet true statements can be resolved by noting that, while the "full" score has not made it to record until now, individual songs have become standards, in particular "Lover, Come Back to Me," "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise," and "Stouthearted Men." Although it was the hit of the 1928 Broadway season and quickly earned both a London production and a 1930 film adaptation, the work remains best (if not solely) remembered for the second movie version of 1940, which starred Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. No legitimate recording of any of the stage or screen versions was released, although unlicensed albums have had limited distribution. Over the years, several record companies have undertaken studio cast versions, the most complete of which was a 1963 LP containing ten tracks released by Capitol Records that featured Gordon MacRae and Dorothy Kirsten (who had appeared in a 1944 stage revival mounted by City Center). Still, amazingly, this one really is the first "full recording" of The New Moon, and it's terrific. Operetta may have fallen out of fashion by the 1930s, and the plot of the show may be, as another theater historian once put it, "involved and farfetched," but here the characterizations are strong and sincere, the singing of the main numbers by leads Christiane Noll and Rodney Gilfry is thrilling, and the infrequently heard comic material is amusing. City Center and Ghostlight Records have done a real service to musical theater fans not only by bringing this score to disc at last, but by doing it so well. William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

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