Alan Jay Lerner

[laughs] The show ran for three performances.

Miss Reid was also in Dance a Little Closer, which features music by Charles Strouse and book, lyrics, and direction by Alan Jay Lerner.

That show ran for one performance.

Oh no.

...

Well, I don't think I would, but I aspired to it because I fell in love with the work of Alan Jay Lerner-

Mm

... who wrote the lyrics for, well, for Camelot, for My Fair Lady-

Dubbed by Marnie Nixon.

And the casting logic is stated almost too perfectly, because Alan J. Lerner told Julie Andrews, who had originated Eliza on Broadway, that she was being passed over because they wanted a name.

That's the quote.

They wanted a name.

We're gonna listen to the one Sinatra did 14 years later, in 1961, for Come Swing with Me.

And now, with the Lerner and Loewe classic, arranged by Billy May, here's the Chairman of the Board with Almost Like Being in Love.

[upbeat music]

What a day this has been.

I could swear I was falling.

It's almost like being in love.

That was Frank Sinatra with Almost Like Being in Love, written by Lerner and Loewe, with a hard-charging chart by Billy May.

Chris, what do you think?

I'm just going to run down the calendar with you a little bit about what working on Camelot was like.

In March 1959, Alex Cohen, representing the management of the new O'Keeffe Theatre in Toronto, convinces Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Lowe to make Camelot the theatre's premier attraction by offering 100% of the box office revenue and all transportation and housing costs.

Obviously, Alex did not have a piece of the Toronto Centre.

September 25th, 1960, 65 members of the Camelot Company depart for Toronto.

Starring as Lorna is the redoubtable Agnes Moorehead, here in her second and final appearance on Radio Mystery Theater.

She was on Broadway at the time playing Aunt Alicia in Lerner and Loewe's musical, Gigi.

She would leave that production suddenly after falling ill just weeks after this episode was taped, and she died four months later at the age of 73.

Her performance in Sorry, Wrong Number is a radio milestone in a legendary career that included the stage, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, the television series Bewitched, and a famous wordless episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone.

They're in for a treat.

Alan on the text, very high-speed rail.

He says, well, in Japan, it's like buying a plane ticket here in Australia.

But don't forget, they've got 124 million people, which is true.

And it is...

It is such a gloriously written piece.

Alan Jay Lerner followed as closely as possible to George Bernard Shaw.

And so the language is fine.

Uh, all musicals of the '60s I feel like I watched a lot.

And, um, the music of this, this Lerner...

And, you know, these dodos did Gigi too, by the way.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, that's what's-

Lerner and Loewe

...

Lerner and Loewe.

[onhold music]Some selections of Lester Young recording with Oscar Peterson and his orchestra for the Mercury label and eventually released on an LP called Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio.

And we heard four selections, uh, the Ad Lib Blues, Prez's original line, then Vernon Duke's and Ira Gershwin's I Can't Get Started, Greer and Klage's Just You, Just Me, and then the, of course, masterpiece of American theater, Lerner and Loewe's Almost Like Being in Love, all performed in his great style, Lester Young.

And you're hearing this music on the Bird Prez Birthday Broadcast on radio station WKCR.

We're at 89.9 on the FM radio dial in the New York City area and streamlining around the world over the internet at wkcr.org. Glad to have you with us, and this is an annual event that perhaps some of you new to our station are discovering, and some of you old-timers may have been listening for every year for 40 or 50 years.