Leah Windahl is an NYC-based actress, writer, and lover of all things vintage and strange.
(with a Biblical/Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Prophetic-Dream-Having touch?), and it technically could be. Grease opened Off-Broadway in February of 1972, only ten short months before CornDoggie opened Off-Off-Off-Broadway in Oregon.
The album features a then-famous JFK impersonator, Vaughn Meader, as the President himself.
Released in 1962, it became an instant success and eventually sold over seven million copies.
And, if that weren’t enough, it won the Grammy for ALBUM OF THE YEAR in 1962.
After the President’s assassination in November of 1963, the album was voluntarily pulled from the market and any unsold copies were destroyed.
Welcome to Part TWO of my very, very long discussion of the so-bad-yet-so-good musical, Bring Back Birdie.
And when I say the plot of this show is wacky, I mean that the first time that I read the synopsis on Wikipedia, I thought that someone had edited the page and added a bunch of nonsense — until I got my hands on a copy of the record and learned that this synopsis has been lifted from the back of the record verbatim.
So apparently, this is a medical-student-written musical about the professors and experiences at Westminster Medical School in 1962. Which is to say, I’m guessing I’m not going to understand ANY of this because:
It’s probably going to be a bunch of inside jokes, and not only that, it’s going to be
a bunch of inside jokes with 1960s British humor, and to top it all off
I don’t know anything about medicine.
I also found out something else, something I heavily suspected after reading the track listings.
Not double. Not triple. QUADRUPLE.
I was interested in this record when I first spotted it on e-bay for a variety of reasons:
I find these High School records to be kind of hilarious
The price was right, and mostly
This one had a really weird collage on the back.
We didn’t find any more Catholic school productions of the King and I, but we did find something. Chris pulled it out. It’s off-white with a turquoise and black illustration of a woman on its left side, and next to that it says:
A NEW RECORDING WITH THE ORIGINAL CAST OF THE CANADIAN MUSICAL COMEDY FIRST PRESENTED AT MCGILL UNIVERSITY FEBRUARY 1957:
A while ago, I was in the depths of a Goodwill in Cleveland when I found an unmarked record for 56 cents
It was strange and cheap and sort of mysterious so I knew I just HAD to have it.
