From Broadway To 52nd Street
Mr. Wonderful opened at the Broadway Theatre on March 22, 1956 and ran for 383 performances. Jerry Bock, Larry Holofcener and George David Weiss composed the music and lyrics for the musical from which emerged Too Close For Comfort to become a jazz standard.
The Story: Written specifically to showcase the talents of Sammy Davis Jr. the thin plot, focusing on entertainer Charlie Welch’s show business struggles, primarily served as a springboard for an extended version of Davis’s Las Vegas nightclub act. The cast was comprised of Sammy Davis Sr., Will Mastin, Jack Carter, Chita Rivera, Malcolm Lee Beggs and Marilyn Cooper.
Jazz History: The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the bandleaders. Key figures in developing the “big” jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw.
Swing was also dance music. It was broadcast on the radio ‘live’ nightly across America for many years especially by Hines and his Grand Terrace Cafe Orchestra broadcasting coast-to-coast from Chicago, well placed for ‘live’ time-zones. Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to ‘solo’ and improvise melodic, thematic solos, which could at times be very complex and important music.
Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax in America: white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians and black arrangers.
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