Reclaiming A Vital Heritage

By RICHARD CORLISS

It was a grand night for singing. Bob Dylan wrapped his angry adenoids around the Gershwin ballad Soon, and Madeline Kahn, Maureen McGovern and Julia Migenes ganged up gorgeously on Someone to Watch Over Me. Last week's gala tribute to George and Ira at the Brooklyn Academy of Music provided a pretty fine evening of dance as well, with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Harold Nicholas, Gregg Burge and the Mutt-and-Jeff tandem of Tommy Tune and Drew Barrymore finding new steps for some unforgettable old melodies. Nor would anyone think of shooting the piano players. Michael Tilson Thomas opened with Rhapsody in Blue. Later Leonard Bernstein brought a furious solemnity to Gershwin's Prelude in C-sharp Minor. And at the climax Movie Maestro Johnny Green unearthed half-century-old arrangements of Gershwin songs and made them swing like new.

Scholars and lovers of the American musical theater had other reasons to cheer when Soprano Erie Mills sang Naughty Baby, from the 1924 Gershwin show Primrose. The number, with its infectious syncopation and George's own nimble charts, was receiving its first public performance in six decades. It is part of a trove of music by Broadway's old masters -- Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Victor Herbert, Cole Porter -- discovered in 80 boxes in a Secaucus, N.J., warehouse. Now, after five years of archaeology, Historian Robert Kimball has prepared a 178-page inventory of some of the contents for the first volume of the Catalog of the American Musical, to be published in September by the National Institute for Music Theater (NIMT). "We have reclaimed a vital part of our musical heritage," Kimball boasts. "These works will now be heard in their original form."

It might be the pop-music equivalent of the excavation of ancient Troy, but the dig was just five miles from Broadway. In 1979 Henry Cohen, an executive for Warner Bros. Music, which owns publication rights to the songs, made a rough survey of the Secaucus material. "He didn't know its significance," Kimball recalls, "but he sent the list around. In 1982 he showed it to Donald Rose, a Gershwin scholar. Donald thought it was awesome and called me. In the first two boxes we found Gershwin's Pardon My English, which was presumed lost, and Cole Porter's Gay Divorce. Later I opened an envelope with Porter's name on it and found songs by him I didn't even know had existed." Further burrowing yielded the Holy Grail of show-tune scholarship: more than 175 unpublished Kern songs. "In sheer numbers and quality it's extraordinary," says H. Wiley Hitchcock, a Brooklyn College musicologist. "It's like finding Leonardo's original sketchbooks."

Until the 1940s, few Broadway scores were published in their entirety, and few composers paid much attention to posterity. "These people were writing for a vibrant commercial theater," notes John Ludwig of NIMT. "Their eyes were on the next hit." Today sharp eyes are on the past. Scholars have already plundered the Secaucus find for spirited revivals of Porter's Gay Divorce, Gershwin's Strike Up the Band and Kern's early Princess Theater musicals. This summer Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House, which in 1984 restored Kern's Leave It to Jane, will unveil a Secaucus-enhanced edition of Gershwin's Lady, Be Good! With the Broadway musical on the British dole and with revivals like 42nd Street reminding theatergoers of better days and more hummable tunes, the ghost of Broadway past is ready to come home in triumph. Now, wouldn't that be something to sing about?

With reporting by Linda Williams/New York