The musical revue Two's Company produced in 1952 amidst controversy and scandal marked Bette Davis' first appearance on the Broadway stage since she'd left for Hollywood about two decades earlier. This original cast score (which I'm sure didn't remain original much past the recording of this album) is not for the faint at heart or for those who demand perfect pitch from their leading ladies. It is however, an absolute must for Bette Davis queens…or those who are Bette batty as it were. To watch her huff, puff, sashay, strut and bulldoze her way across the silver screen (or TV screen) is one thing. To hear her do it in a Broadway musical revue is another thing, namely, a revelation. One can only imagine the startled looks on the faces of the people seated close to the stage.

The songs for the most part range from fun, funny and quaintly charming to unmemorably forgettable…that is except for when La Davis takes center stage. The first number, "Theatre Is A Lady" is the set up for a show that seems more about show tunes than a show with any kind of story. I guess that is when they add the word revue to the title. The song sounds like something Margo Channing's director/boyfriend Bill Sampson would have sung had All About Eve been a musical.

Bette's first utterance on this album is at the beginning of "Turn Me Loose On Broadway" beckoning the maestro with, "Mister conductor, if you please." She then proceeds to whack us across the head with a veritable vocal two by four. The song itself is a less than mediocre or rather, badly disguised and quite terrible take off on "Give My Regards To Broadway" in both melody and lyric but that is beside the point. Fans will bask in the essence that is Bette as she careens through this number requesting, nay, insisting to be let, "loose on old Broadway as a musical comedy girl."

The rest of the cast is fine, though in her first number, "Roundabout", Ellen Hanley sounds like she would be more at home singing in Italian or German on the stage at the Met. When one takes into account the fact that Ms. Hanley's singing was the accompaniment to the "breathtaking Nora Kaye ballets" it seems a little less out of place but I guess you had to be there. It's still a wonder that operatic styled singers are deemed well suited to musical theater when one more than suspects a voice like Mary Martin's or Chita Rivera's would get the job done better. As a listener rather than viewer, Ms. Hanley redeems herself to a degree later on with the bluesy "Haunted Hot Spot".

Peter Kelley is terrific yet he sounds more like somebody like Steve Martin lampooning a Broadway lead and the wonderful Hiram Sherman often sounds the way most musical theater performers sound when faced with a microphone in a recording situation…as if the fate of the world hangs on their every note. Still, they both deliver performances the way we expect Broadway leading men are supposed to and make me wonder why they make the hugely popular Michael Crawford sound so torpidly hackneyed. David Burns provides comic relief in addition to Bette at her unintentional best. His song "Esther" is reminiscent of a Louis Prima song and has one of the best arrangements of the whole score.

The afore mentioned Sherman rises splendidly to the Bette occasion in the two numbers they do with the chorus which are, in my opinion the best ones of the lot. In "Roll Along, Sadie" Bette portrays Sadie Thompson. My imagination reels with speculation of how she was done up for this number. In it we get to hear her shout the query, "Tip tip tappy, is everybody happy?" and voluminously rue that her character was written by Somerset Maugham instead of Anita Loos. My particular favorite is the delightfully endless Hillbilly saga "Purple Rose". These two tracks are the kind of show-stopping production numbers musical theater fans crave and are the hands down standout gems of the score.

Bette's final solo is something of a dud. One wonders whether the producers had a contractual obligation to have this less than lifeless number as the last one before the finale so that Queen Bette would be the last thing etched onto the show goer's minds. Though "Just Like A Man" has a humorous nuance (probably by way of the 'additional lyrics by Sammy Cahn' credit) it is practically a prediction of the sort of dreary, sluggish, woe-be-gone ballads she would be croaking out when she made her way into the recording studio over twenty years later for "Miss Bette Davis Sings".

Bette may be short of breath and tone deaf but she seems at times to be having fun even if she also seems throughout to have taken her performance enormously seriously, as she did every endeavor she undertook, and it is unflinchingly, unfailingly Bette, which is of course why we love her so much.

                                      - Sun PK

To see the album credits click here.