The Golden Apple

The Golden Apple: Eric Myers review

Moross: The Golden Apple

How welcome this recording is—and how long overdue! Theater buffs consider The Golden Apple to be one of the great American musicals, yet it has languished in semiobscurity. Its score glistens like a jewel, but composer Jerome Moross and lyricist John Latouche never enjoyed the fame or following of Berlin, Porter, or Rodgers and Hammerstein. A critical and commercial hit when it had its premiere off-Broadway in 1954, it soon moved to Broadway, where it lasted only three and a half months. Nonetheless, it received that year’s New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical. A cast album was made, but it was inadequate, containing less than half of the work’s 135-minute sung-through score. This was, in most respects, the first true Broadway opera, with every word set to music.

There have been no Broadway revivals of The Golden Apple since its premiere; even the estimable Encores! musical-comedy repertory series at New York’s City Center hasn’t touched it. Regional revivals are infrequent, though a single concert performance was given in 2005 in upstate New York, at Bard College’s Summerscape festival. It took the Lyric Stage company in Irving, Texas, to present a full-scale revival in its 2014–15 season, and to give the work back to us in its original form—uncut, fully staged, with a cast of forty-three and an orchestra of thirty-six. Fortunately it was preserved by PS Classics on this magnificent two-CD set.

Moross and Latouche used as inspiration The Iliad and The Odyssey, setting them in America at the turn of the century. In the small town of Angel’s Roost, at the foot of Mount Olympus in Washington State, Ulysses is a returning Spanish–American War hero, Helen is a farmer’s daughter with a wandering eye, and Paris is a traveling salesman who makes his arrival by balloon. When Helen seduces Paris and allows him to carry her off, Ulysses and the Angel’s Roost menfolk take off after them. Moross and Latouche hit on musical-theater alchemy here; the music is rip-roaring, bursting-at-the-seams Americana, and Latouche’s witty, exquisitely crafted lyrics fit it like perfectly set gems. Marches, waltzes, hymns, vaudeville parodies—all are seamlessly integrated, evoking early-twentieth-century popular-music forms with an overlay of Broadway flair. The effect is irresistible.

Fortunately, Lyric Stage had a generally excellent cast to carry this off. If this is strictly local talent, it is of a remarkably high level. Best is Christopher J. Deaton as Ulysses, who wields his handsome light baritone and clear diction with masculine elegance. As his Penelope, Kristen Lassiter offers a sense of stoic nobility and an appropriately furious tirade when Ulysses finally makes his long-overdue return to her. Danielle Estes as Helen doesn’t go in for the voluptuously rich tone of Kaye Ballard’s 1954 original, but she draws a marvelously comic, often hoydenish characterization of the libidinous farmer’s daughter. As the local seeress Mother Hare, Deborah Brown is brash and funny, making the most of every line yet never pushing too much. Only James Williams as Hector lets the team down; he does not have the vocal resources to put over this brassy, galvanizing huckster, here a small-town mayor leading Ulysses and his men down the path of dissolution.

The exuberant original orchestrations by Moross and Hershy Kay are rousingly conducted by Jay Dias. And a full libretto is enclosed, including plenty of photos as well as informative essays by Jon Burlingame, Deniz Cordell and Robert Edridge-Waks. Regional opera companies should take note: if they choose to produce this neglected work, and if they do it as well as Lyric Stage, they may have a hit on their hands.

Two-disc, 135-minute recording

Lyric’s ‘The Golden Apple’ an enthralling recording from PS Classics

January 19, 2016 — Nothing can bring back the sumptuousness of the fully staged production of Lyric Stage’s The Golden Apple. You can, however, close your eyes and visualize it as the melodic glories of this 1954 Jerome Moross and John Latouche musical unfold in the first complete two-disc, 135-minute recording.

Plus, because PS Classics recorded it live from multiple performances of Lyric Stage’s cast of 43 and orchestra of 38 at Irving Arts Center in 2014, you can also hear the appreciative laughter and applause. It adds warmth to the staging directed by Stefan Novinski and conducted by Jay Dias.

This folksy, small-town setting for The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer’s tales of war and the long, difficult return home afterward, offers sharp commentary on how easy it is to get drawn into conflict and the price paid for fighting. In one prescient line from Ulysses as he tries to dissuade the march to war: “Old men always do the shouting/Young men have to do the shooting.”

The original off-Broadway production won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle prize for best musical, but didn’t last long on Broadway, possibly because with World War II followed by the Korean War, the country was too fatigued from conflict.

The delicious array of voices frolic in the rich sea of orchestral sound. Lovely Helen (Danielle Estes, who lends a sensuous twist to “Lazy Afternoon”) kicks off the trouble by ditching her husband, Menelaus (a funny Andy Baldwin) for a traveling salesman named Paris (dancer Hayden Clifton, invisible on the recording in his silent role).

Christopher J. Deaton’s vibrant baritone conveys a Ulysses torn between devotion and desire to explore, while Kristen Lassiter brings a sweet, strong soprano to knowing and anguished Penelope.

Lyric Stage producer Steven Jones founded the company in 1993 with the mission of developing and preserving the American musical. Here, he’s achieved his goal for posterity. The preservation of these stunning performances drew a rave from the internationally respected Opera News in December, with additional praise for the thoroughness of the printed libretto with lyrics, credits, commentary and notes.

The recording should prove particularly sweet to local audiences that have the pleasure of seeing these performers and musicians live on a regular basis in Lyric Stage shows.

The Golden Apple: Shelley Kenneavy review

First Bite In 60 Years: Lyric Stage Revives Original “The Golden Apple”

Lyric Stage in Irving is dedicated to preserving the American musical – whether that means premiering new ones or rediscovering classics. The company’s latest project is The Golden Apple – performed with the original Broadway orchestrations and the original ending.

The Golden Apple was the first Off-Broadway show in history to win the NY Drama Critics Circle’s Best Musical award. The show is a re-telling of The Iliad and The Odyssey, set in Washington State after the Spanish-American War. It opened in 1954, and after earning raves and awards, it moved to Broadway – where it closed after only four months. Perhaps it was because the producers changed the ending to something more splashy for Broadway.

Whatever the reason it closed, The Golden Apple still developed a cult following, mostly for its score, which includes the standard, “Lazy Afternoon.”

The Golden Apple was also hailed for its groundbreaking, delicate sets, designed by William and Jean Eckart. The husband-and-wife team went on to design Broadway hits like Mame – and then had a second career teaching at SMU.

Now, Lyric Stage has revived the show with the original ending and the original orchestration – which has never been done before. Susanna Moross Tarjan, daughter of the show’s composer, Jerome Moross, is excited to see a fleshed-out revival.

She says, “For me, it’s very thrilling. My father, of course, would be thrilled. There have been many productions over the years, but never one with the full complement of 43 cast members and the full 36 orchestra members. So it’s quite different and more marvelous to hear it that way than with two pianos.”

She says it’s a difficult show to produce.

“It’s a very big show. It’s really an opera – my father called it ‘an opera for Broadway.’”

In fact, it was one of the first sung-through musicals, a musical with only songs and no spoken dialogue – like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats.

Lyric Stage’s musical director and conductor Jay Dias even calls it “the great American opera.”

“Like good art it functions on so many different levels simultaneously.” Dias adds,  “And it’s extremely deep… it’s thought-provoking. And it leaves you questioning a lot of things about your own life which I think any great piece of art does.”

Director Stefan Novinski thinks Lyric Stage’s reconstructions of original Broadway musicals adds an extra dimension for audiences seeing and hearing them.

“If you can hear a show, like Lyric Stage does with the original orchestrations and the full orchestra, you’re getting it in Technicolor. And if you haven’t had a chance to hear it like that, you haven’t quite heard the original piece.”

Novinski also thinks Moross, The Golden Apple’s composer, and John Latouche, the lyricist, were ahead of their time.  Perhaps that’s why the show didn’t succeed on Broadway in a big way. Novinski points out, when Ulysses, the veteran, returns to his small town, there’s no rosy musical comedy ending.

“That’s gutsy, but that’s more honest. How does Penelope welcome Ulysses back? They say, well here it is. And they let it sit. It’s gutsy. You don’t end a musical with two people on stage! That’s it – what? And no big fancy curtain call, either. Shocking.”

The Golden Apple: Alexandra Bonifield review

Finding True Home with Lyric Stage’s “The Golden Apple”

Imagine this: An American Puccini wins a Guggenheim grant and writes an epic American musical score based on Western civilization’s most catalytic Greek myth with a wunderkind “Jules Verne” lyricist in the early 1950’s…. and you have The Golden Apple: exhilarating, stately, saucy, poignant, immersive, seductive, demanding amazing depth, scope and stamina from its artists and orchestra. It’s a soaring cornucopia evocation of a world no other American musical imagines. 43 fine singers fill the stage with color and bustle, and 36 professional musicians play its full score (first time since its 1954 Broadway run). Don’t miss the chance to experience this unique performance, running through November 2 at LYRIC STAGE in Irving. It sure no formulaic book-model Rodgers & Hammerstein-style musical, in any respect…

My parents, post-WWII transplants from lives and universities in New York City and DC, immersed themselves in the early 1950’s theatre scene in Dallas. When I, their daughter, arrived, they wasted no time in exposing me to the family passion.

By age six I knew the lyrics to every song on the forty plus Broadway show LP’s that emerged carefully from dust jackets to spin at 33 1/3 RPM on my father’s state-of-the-art stereo system, sang along with them, too. One of the shows they introduced to me, The Golden Apple, by Jerome Moross and John Latouche, seemed to hold breathless significance for my parents, gave them special joy in listening. I have never forgotten the show over the years, looked in vain for a production, a concert performance, as my life took me to the West Coast and back. Imagine my delight when I heard Lyric Stage included it in this season’s productions, presenting it with its comprehensive score fully orchestrated.

The Golden Apple, as performed by Lyric Stage, offers one of the most complicated, unique, entertaining and satisfying American musical theatre performances I’ve experienced in a long time. Sung straight through, no dialogue, no recitative, one intermission, its thirty-three musical numbers present a phenomenal challenge to cast, stage director, musical director and orchestra. Easy to see why it’s only been attempted so few times since 1954. Lyric Stage’s production, directed by Stefan Novinski, choreographed by John de los Santos and conducted/ musically directed by Lyric Stage’s resident musical director Jay Dias, rises elegantly to the challenge. The show’s convoluted, “in joke” laden story line, borrowing elements of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, but moving the action to post Spanish Civil War era rural Washington State, can confuse even the most attentive, classically educated audience member. Here’s my suggestion: let it go. Sit back and enjoy the sweeping romance, gentle humor, clever parody of Rodgers & Hammerstein “book” musicals, and the non-stop vaudevillian routines that pop out of pie contests, balloons, faux space ships and crystal balls like 1950’s stovetop Jiffy popcorn. It’s  meant to be funny. The Golden Apple’s exquisite music swells throughout Carpenter Hall as composer Jerome Moross must surely have dreamed it might, under Jay Dias’ inspired guidance. Cast singers, leads to chorus, all embrace the composer’s intentionally folksy “Americana” tone while employing their best-supported classical musical theatre vocal technique. No disappointments. Christopher J. Deaton gives his strongest performance I’ve seen yet as the straight-laced but always very human male lead Ulysses, respectfully attentive to his wife Penelope yet eager for adventure in shady Rhododendron. The richness of his voice, masculine yet full of loving warmth, wins the audience as easily as it keeps Penelope enthralled. Kristen Lassiter’s pure soprano soars up to the skies above Angel’s Roost as she reveals a Penelope with genuine longing and self-respect as much as dedication to her man off a–gander for a long, long decade.

I found myself amazed by the proto-feminist themes running throughout the show. Who knew? Its first four musical numbers that set the tone and present the show’s exposition are all women’s songs. The show’s change and conflict catalyst is an independent bag lady-sorceress called Mother Hare (derived from Zeus’ wife-goddess Hera) played with verve, wit and sparkle by Deborah Brown. She predicts the future in a crystal ball she totes everywhere in a huge carpetbag. Men don’t discourage her, no not ever. Handsome traveling salesman (ladies’ intimates) Paris drops in to break hearts from a hot air balloon. His role in the show is that of a seducer but with a twist; he is a Fosse-style dancing mute in this Broadway show decisively built around non-stop, expressive music. Hayden Clifton’s hunky physique is a juicy sight to behold; yet he is clearly the object of women’s desire, no assertive predator, he. The high point of Act One is the show’s eighteenth number, “Lazy Afternoon”, sung by secondary female lead Helen (based on Helen of Troy, who started the Trojan war by eloping with Paris). It’s the one song that emerged from the show to become a popular jazz hit and launched Kaye Ballard’s theatre career, as well. Helen, the show’s “bad girl”, has revealed her soubrette charms and predictable ennui in the show’s opening tune “Nothing Ever Happens in Angel’s Roost”. But when statuesque, comely blonde Danielle Estes explodes into full-on assertive, seduction mode as she croons “Lazy Afternoon” to her intended lover Paris (sometimes stretched out fully prone on the floor), one feels intense heat rolling off their exchange, a heat that in no way indicates woman as submissive sex partner. Confident direction by Stefan Novinski and full engagement in the scene by both Estes and Clifton make this the most pleasurably steamy sex scene I’ve witnessed on stage all year.

In Act Two, James William’s soft shoe vaudeville-style turn performing “Hector’s Song” charms the audience in a different vein. Christopher J. Deaton’s soulful delivery of “Ulysses’ Soliloquy” near the end brings the audience back down to Earth from the hyperactive exuberance of earlier scenes to the reflective depth of emotion that floats beneath the show’s frothy madcap excess. After all, it’s love and commitment that keep civilization alive. The original show’s producers made Jerome Moross change his ending to include a big cast finale for Broadway. In the 1970’s Moross put back his ending, with Penelope and Ulysses quietly reuniting, singing the simple duet “We’ve Just Begun”. What a truthful statement for 1950’s America looking towards a bright future. What a gracious testament to hope and love’s power for today. Enjoy The Golden Apple this weekend. You won’t get the chance to experience it served up so well perhaps ever again.

The Golden Apple: Elaine Liner review

A Hit and a Myth for Golden Apple

Homer for Lyric Stage with Odyssey musical The Golden Apple.

Lyric Stage has polished up another forgotten gem of American musical theater. And what a gleaming beauty it is.

The Golden Apple retells The Iliad and The Odyssey in grand comic operatic style, its characters plunked down in 1910 in a small town on Mt. Olympus in Washington. Lyric’s sparkling production, cast with 43 of the area’s best singer-actors and a pit orchestra of 36, makes it easy to see why some aficionados of vintage musicals are obsessed with this show, an off-Broadway smash in 1954. A transfer to Broadway that same year doomed it. The Golden Apple closed after 125 performances despite rave reviews comparing it favorably to contemporary musical hit Carouseland the older Oklahoma!

It does have the sweep of those classics, though not as many memorable tunes. The only popular song to peel out of Apple was “Lazy Afternoon,” a seductive ballad recorded by Barbra Streisand early in her career.

The show’s book and lyrics by John Latouche hew closely, perhaps too loyally for 1950s audiences to parse, to Homeric legends about the Trojan War and its heroes and heroines. Penelope, played nicely at Lyric by operatic soprano Kristen Lassiter, is made into a pure-hearted small-town girl, fending off suitors by sewing a massive quilt. Her love, Ulysses (Casa Mañana star Christopher J. Deaton, in fine vocal and physical fettle), returns from the Spanish-American War only to depart again to battle big city huckster Hector (James Williams). Old Menelaus (Andy Baldwin, hilarious as always) is a leering lech who loses flirty young wife Helen (Danielle Estes) to handsome “notions” salesman Paris (Hayden Clifton, a Fosse-esque dancer whose sexy character never sings or speaks). Homer’s goddesses are translated into clucking busybodies (Janelle Lutz, Jenny Tucker, Sarah Powell, in perfect harmony). The wild-haired fortune teller (Deborah Brown) keeps whipping a crystal ball out of her knapsack to predict dire futures for them all.

It’s a massive show, one reason theaters haven’t done it, except for a few smaller-scale productions here and there, over the past six decades. Lyric’s, directed with admirable precision and brisk energy by Stefan Novinski, marks the first full-out, fully orchestrated revival since the Broadway demise of the original in 1954. Choreography by John de los Santos creates beautiful images here, as when Helen croons “Lazy Afternoon” on her back to Paris as he drags her by her outstretched ankle across the stage floor.

The first act of Golden Apple sets the quaint mood of The Music Man, with polite citizens of Angel’s Roost, Washington, singing pretty songs that use funny old words like “galoot” and “jamboree.” Then Paris alights from a hot air balloon, dances like the devil around the ladies and makes off with Ado Annie-like Helen. Away go Ulysses and his crew to get Helen back from the wicked city, where the journey home is thwarted by encounters with sexy Circe (lissome dancer Lissie K. Mays) and the island Sirens, plus a couple of con men named Scylla and Charybdis, and the temptress Calypso.

Jerome Moross’ music delivers two and a half hours of a soaring, sung-through pastiche of folky chorales, operatic solos, vaudeville patter, waltzes and haunting ballads. Critics in 1954 heard influences of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, Leonard Bernstein’s Candide and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

Latouche’s lyrics aren’t as sophisticated as the melodies, rhyming “century” with “wenchery” and having soldiers lustily singing “Theodore, Theodore, the Roosevelt that we adore.” But director Novinski and musical director Jay Dias keep the musical tempos at a reasonable speed, which helps us decipher all those words in songs we’ve never heard before. The lead singers’ diction on the rapid rush of lyrics is across-the-board impeccable. (Speaking of myths, it must’ve been a Herculean task for the cast to learn all this unfamiliar music in only a few weeks of rehearsal.)

The magic of The Golden Apple lies not just in the charm of its storytelling — there’s a reason The Odyssey is still read 3,000 years on — but in the sheer size of the thing. They don’t make gigantic American musicals like this anymore on Broadway. They can’t afford to.

The Golden Apple: Nancy Churnin review

Bite into irresistible ‘Golden Apple’ at Lyric Stage

The Golden Apple has things to say about war that the country may not have been ready to hear in its 1954 Broadway debut. The moving and wickedly witty Jerome Moross and John Latouche musical opened and closed quickly one year after the end of the Korean War, a conflict that started just five years after World War II ended. By 1955, the Cold War had moved to Vietnam, a battle the U.S. would escalate in the 1960s.

At long last, the timing should be right for a war-weary nation to hear this Americanized update of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, spiced with touches of vaudeville and references to the Garden of Eden. You won’t find a better opportunity than at Lyric Stage, with its resplendent production featuring a terrific 42-person cast and 36-piece orchestra, dazzlingly conducted by Jay Dias.

Under Stefan Novinski’s insightful direction, the love story of Ulysses and Penelope, poignantly conveyed by the powerful voices of Christopher J. Deaton and Kristen Lassiter, anchors the tale.

Ulysses and the young men of the town are returning home from the Spanish-American War to Angel’s Roost, which gets an idyllic Our Town feel from the soft pastels of Jen J. Madison’s costumes and gentle watercolors of Donna Marquet’s sets.

Ulysses’ men are upset when the woman they covet, Helen (Danielle Estes), marries Menelaus (Andy Baldwin), the local sheriff. To head off trouble, Ulysses makes the men swear to protect Helen’s honor. That sets up their obligation to retrieve Helen when she skips town with Paris (Hayden Clifton), a traveling salesman.

Is it worth waging a war — or in this case, a strategem that involves political spin — to bring back a woman who wants to stay where she is? They’re not sure. They’re just happy when they win. What they don’t count on is revenge enacted by the city’s mayor, Hector Charybdis, deliciously played by James Williams, who dangles multiple temptations, including seductive Circe (rhymed with “no mercy”) to siphon off Ulysses’ company. It takes years for Ulysses to wend his way home, hoping Penelope will take him back.

Moross’ operatic sung-through score merits comparison with Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 Candide, another musical to which Latouche contributed lyrics. It elicits witty performances from Estes and Bald-win as Helen and Menelaus, the couple that starts the trouble then shrugs on the sidelines while others struggle to set things right. Brilliantly, Clifton’s wordless Paris speaks through his sensuous dancing, choreographed by John de los Santos, which proves irresistible.

“You talked me into it!” Helen says, after she croons the sultry “Lazy Afternoon” to her mute suitor. Resistance is futile when it comes to The Golden Apple, too.