Search - Doris Day :: Complete Doris Day with Les Brown

DEFINITIVE!

Edward Correll | Los Angeles, CA United States | 05/02/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This two-fers album should not be missed by anyone in love with American popular music...and if it's show tunes you like, that's all the more reason to get it.
"Day In Hollywood" is a package of twelve songs from Doris' musicals and serves as a musical retrospective of her work through 1955, the period in which musicals were the mainstay of her career. Every song is among the greatest and most popular songs ever written.
Doris Day "purists" (as I am), might cavil with the program, however, for two reasons. Unbelievably, Doris' million-selling recording of the Oscar-nominated "It's Magic" from her first picture, "Romance On The High Seas" is not included here, and the title song from "Love Me Or Leave Me" appears here rather than the hit song from the film, the Oscar-nominated
"I'll Never Stop Loving You."
Two of Doris' films, "Lullaby of Broadway" and I'll See You In My Dreams," are represented by two songs in this collection causing others of Doris' films not to be recognized at all. Giving one slot to "It's Magic," I think the other should have been given to "It's A Great Feeling" whose title song, while not the biggest of hits, was nonetheless nominated for a Best-Song Oscar.
If not that, then perhaps "Young At Heart" should have been cited. That film produced no major hit for Doris, but it was an important film if only because her co-star was Frank Sinatra!
Ah, but Columbia did not ask me, did they? LOLOL
And at least three performances here: "Just One of Those Things," "Secret Love," and "Love Me Or Leave Me," belong among Doris' Best 100 Performances, IMHO. On "Show Time" Doris takes us to Broadway, and what a tour she gives us! Probably no discussion of the songs themselves is necessary. With the exceptions of "When I'm Not Near The Boy I Love" and "Ohio," all the songs are standards of the first rank.
What does need to be shouted from the hilltops is the quality of the performances. With arrangements by Axel Stordahl Doris moves into high gear fast: her performances of "I've Got the Sun In the Morning, " "I Love Paris," "People Will Say We're In Love," "They Say It's Wonderful," "A Wonderful Guy," and "On the Street Where You Live," all go on to my "Best 100 Performances" list for Doris.
These are absolutely definitive performances of these songs, the performances by which the efforts of any and every other singer are to be judged. Doris' interpretations are just quintessential.
If her singing of "The Sound of Music" doesn't quite make my personal "Best 100" list, her performance here was still nominated for a Grammy Award. Cole Porter was loud in his praise for her singing of his "I Love Paris," and when Richard Rodgers heard Doris version of "A Wonderful Guy," he threatened (humorously, I hope) not to speak to "South Pacific" director Joshua Logan ever again because he had refused to pay Doris her fee to do the film version of SP, and hired Mitzi Gaynor instead at half Doris' price! Any appreciator of American popular music owes this album to him/her-self!"