Leah Windahl is an NYC-based actress, writer, and lover of all things vintage and strange.
All in Musical Reviews
(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.
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.
