The musical is the subject of today's post, with the songs taken from a bootleg of the original kinescope soundtrack - my thanks to George from New York for pointing me to the Internet Archive post.
| Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz |
It's a significant score because of the composers - Dietz and Schwartz together wrote "By Myself", "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan", "Dancing in the Dark", "If There Is Someone Lovelier Than You", "Alone Together", "Something to Remember You By", "You and the Night and the Music", "I See Your Face Before Me", "Haunted Heart" and "That's Entertainment!". They also wrote many familiar songs with others.
But before we get to the music, a few words about the story. Adano is a fictional town in Sicily modeled on Licata, a disembarkation point for troops moving into occupied Italy. US Army Maj. Victor Joppolo is in charge of the town and tries to take care of the residents' needs while also facilitating the movement of troops and supplies through the area.
One of the principal concerns of the townspeople is their church bell, which had been appropriated earlier in the war to make munitions. The bell ordered their lives, and just as importantly, it represented normality to them.
Missing church bells was an issue throughout Europe. An article in the New York Times (gift link) claims that 175,000 church bells were confiscated during the war, most of them never to return. An excerpt from that article:
In a diary entry in the summer of 1943, Anne Frank wrote that she had lost all sense of time. The bells in Amsterdam’s tallest church tower, the Westertoren, right next to her own attic hiding place in a canal house, had stopped ringing.
"For a week already we’ve all been a little confused about the time, ever since our dear and precious Westertoren bell has apparently been hauled away for factory use," she wrote on Aug. 10, 1943, "and we don’t know precisely what time it is, neither day or night."
At the end of the war, many of the leftover bells ended up in so-called "bell cemeteries."
| Bell cemetery in Hamburg, 1948 |
In the television musical, the leads were Barry Sullivan as Maj. Joppolo and Anna Maria Alberghetti as Tina Tomassino, the daughter of the local head fisherman.
| Barry Sullivan and Anna Maria Alberghetti |
The musical had only five songs, if you count a reprise. The vocal star of the program is Edwin Steffe as Bellanco, one of the townspeople. It is he who carries the show's opening (and best) number, its title song. His impassioned explanation of the bell's importance, set to Schwartz' soaring melody, is memorable. Yes, there is a whiff of the stage-Italian in all the performance, but that was common back then - 1956 also was the year of The Most Happy Fella, the Frank Loesser musical. Steffe, who split his time between opera and musical theater, in fact appeared in a few Most Happy Fella productions through the years.
| Edwin Steffe |
Alberghetti, who was often on television during that time, had a pretty but small voice, which she displays in "Okay, Mister Major" and "I'm Part of You," both songs addressed to Barry Sullivan.
The score's only other number is "Fish" with indecipherable lyrics as presented by a children's chorus. The show was set in a fishing town; that's all I can tell you.
Finally there is a reprise of "A Bell for Adano."
The critics were not necessarily enthusiastic. Jack Gould of the New York Times: "Saturday night's production ... was left stranded between two theatrical forms. Mr. Schwartz and his collaborator, Howard Dietz, contributed four musical selections, none of very great melodic or lyric distinction, which were used as inserts within the play. The advantage of the musical form was not realized and the play was merely compromised and distorted by these intrusions."
I don't think Gould's grave pronouncements were warranted - although admittedly I haven't seen the show. The songs are good, and the title number is memorable. The 1950s practice of presenting original musicals was admirable. And to think that Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow would castigate television as "a vast wasteland" only a few years later.
The sound from the kinescope is adequate - better than the previous entry in this series, Junior Miss. By the way, if you downloaded my original post of that other musical, I later improved the sound. You can find it here.
LINK to A Bell for Adano