LINER
NOTES FOR
DIONNE WARWICK'S ON STAGE AND IN THE
MOVIES
By
Richie Unterberger
It
wasn't rare for soul
stars of the 1960s to put out LPs that had little or nothing to do with
soul, and lots to do with supper-club jazz, Broadway, and pop. Motown
was especially notorious for this, issuing albums such as the Supremes'
The Supremes at the Copa and The Supremes Sing Rodgers & Hart,
the Temptations' In a Mellow Mood,
the Four Tops' On Broadway,
and Marvin Gaye's A Tribute to the
Great Nat King Cole. Though Motown's taken most of the flak for
this mini-genre, this tradition in fact predated the label's status as
the most successful American independent record company, as evidenced
by earlier non-Motown efforts like Sam
Cooke at the Copa and Jackie
Wilson at the Copa. Cynical historians have castigated these as
attempts by the labels and performers to achieve legitimacy with white
audiences by proving they were versatile enough to handle mainstream
pop music as well as downhome soul. The performers themselves sometimes
pointed out that they had genuine love for this sort of music,
even if it wasn't exactly what they were known for. Most likely there
is some truth to both viewpoints.
To
this list we
can add Dionne Warwick's 1967 LP On
Stage and in the Movies, recorded—like all of the albums in the
preceding paragraph—at a time when she'd already crossed over to audiences
of all colors with pop-soul hits, and could have hardly been a hotter
commercial property. It's worth pointing out, however, that several
previous Warwick albums were sprinkled with songs that did not come
from the pop-rock, R&B, or even gospel tradition. Way back in 1964
on her third album, she'd covered "People," a #5 hit for Barbara
Streisand that had originally been heard in the Broadway smash Funny Girl. From that point onward,
her albums would include at least a couple songs from the non-rock/show
tune side of things. On 1965's The
Sensitive Sound of Dionne Warwick, she'd cut "Who Can I Turn
To," which had been part of Anthony Newley's Broadway musical The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of
the Crowd, and the pop standard "Unchained Melody." The same
year, Here I Am included
"Once in a Lifetime," which had been popularized by the early-'60s
musical comedy Stop the World, I
Want to Get Off, and "I Love You Porgy," from the even more
popular musical Porgy and Bess.
On 1966's Dionne
Warwick Live at Paris, she spread her wings yet further into
show-biz territory, combining the Burt Bacharach-Hal David songs for
which she was most famous with numbers such as Cole Porter's "I Love
Paris," "C'est Si Bon" (which had been a big hit for Eartha Kitt in
1953), and "La Vie En Rose" (one of the most popular songs identified
with the Parisian singer Edith Piaf). While early 1967's Here Where There Is Love marked a
return to her usual Bacharach-David-dominated pop-soul program, it also
included Lionel Bart's "As Long As He Needs Me" from the
massively popular musical Oliver!,
as well as the pop standard "I Wish You Love," recorded in 1964 by
Marlene Dietrich (on whose Paris show Dionne had guested in one of her
first high-profile performances in late 1963) among others. So Warwick
had actually already released about an album's worth of this sort of
material prior to On Stage and in
the Movies.
On Stage and in
the Movies itself, however, was an album of nothing but this kind of material. There
wasn't a single Bacharach-David song in sight, although the pair were
credited as producers, as they were on most of her early releases. You
could still hear some of the characteristic touches of
Bacharach-David-produced Warwick records, such as gospel-tinged female
backup vocals, Latin-influenced beats and horns, and orchestral swells
of piano and percussion. On tracks like the swinging, scampering "He
Loves Me," however, you'd be hard-pressed to identify any such traits
whatsoever.
It might not have been what anyone expected of
Warwick, or Bacharach-David. But Dionne certainly embraced the style
full-on, selecting eleven tunes from some of the most renowned stage
and screen composers. George and Ira Gershwin were represented by the
standard "Summertime," recorded by innumerable artists (including
rockers like the Zombies and Big Brother & the Holding Company),
though Dionne's reading, in keeping with the tone of the entire album,
is far from rock-oriented. Irving Berlin's "Anything You Can Do," on
which Warwick duets with uncredited fellow Scepter Records soul singer
Chuck Jackson, came from the mid-1940s musical Annie Get Your Gun. Richard Rodgers
and Oscar Hammerstein were especially heavily represented, Warwick's
covers including the pair's "My Favorite Things," from The Sound of Music; "You'll Never
Walk Alone," from Carousel;
and "Something Wonderful," from The
King and I.
As for the other songs' sources, "Baubles, Bangles
and Beads" had been used in the early-'50s musical Kismet, though its melody was based
on Alexander Borodin's String
Quartet in D. "One Hand, One Heart (With These Hands)" was
co-written by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, and part of West Side Story. "The Way You Look
Tonight," penned by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, had been used way
back in 1936 for the film Swing Time,
winning an Oscar in the Best Song category. Frank Loesser's "I Believe
in You" was familiar from the then-relatively-recent Broadway musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really
Trying, and "He Loves Me" from the early-'60s musical She Loves Me, the title and lyrics
changed as appropriate for a woman-sung performance. Ira Gershwin made
another appearance in the songwriting credits with "My Ship,"
co-written with Kurt Weill for Lady
in the Dark.
It's not well remembered, as a side note, that
Warwick was entertaining some ambitions herself around this time to
cross over into acting and movies. As she disclosed to Melody Maker in June 1968, "I shall
be pretty busy this summer making my first film. It's a period piece
about slavery in the Deep South. And the working title is The Slave. I play the part of a
mistress. I'm not ill-treated at all. But I'm glad in a way to be in a
film of this type. It will show many people just how conditions
were—and are even today. Not that I take an active part in any Civil
Rights demonstrations. That's just not my nature. I am first and
foremost a singer. But that doesn't mean I don't feel strongly about
the conditions of the American Negro. Of course, I do."
Continued Warwick, "It's being shot on Louisiana,
and the stars are Stephen Boyd and Ossie Davis. Acting will be a real
challenge—a new experience. But I have had some dramatic experience. In
a way, any performer must be an actor. It's just a graduation from one
medium to another." The movie did come out in 1969, under the title
Slaves, but made little impact, and did not initiate a significant
screen career for the singer.
Nor, in fact, did On
Stage and in the Movies spark a career of note for Warwick as a
show tune diva, though the album did claw up to #169 in the pop charts
(and, rather surprisingly, make #11 in the R&B listings). Dionne
would return to accenting Bacharach-David-penned pop-soul on her next
LP, The Windows of the World.
On Stage and in the Movies
would not be her last full-length leap into non-soul-rock-related
music, however. Later in the 1960s, she would release an entire album
of gospel material, The Magic of
Believing, also reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice Music. --
Richie Unterberger
unless otherwise specified.
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