CSOTD 12/17/2022: Grab your belly, then let go

Broadway musicals and Christmas songs don’t usually go together. (Movie musicals and songs of the season are different; after all, “White Christmas,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and “Silver Bells” all came from films.)

Probably the most famous written for the stage is “We Need a Little Christmas” from the 1966 hit Mame. (In the context of the play, though, the song takes place before Thanksgiving.) But few others are part of the Christmas canon. My Christmas Song of the Day for Deccember 17 is deserving of more attention.

One of the fair-to-middling successes of the 1961-62 Broadway season was Subways Are for Sleeping, based on a 1956 article in Harper’s magazine and a 1957 book about people who, literally, slept in New York subway trains. The show opened at the St. James Theatre on December 27, 1961 and ran for 205 performances before closing.

The play received mostly negative reviews. Adding to the show’s problems was that the New York City Transit Authority refused to allow ads on its subway trains because it didn’t want to encourage the titular activity. To counteract both problems, producer David Merrick and his publicity agent Harvey Sabinson invited people with the same names as prominemt theater critics to see the play and quoted their raves in a full-page newspaper ad. Because of the deception, the ad was pulled, but not before it appeared in an early edition of the New York Herald Tribune.

In the end, Subways Are for Sleeping turned a small profit, and female lead Phyllis Newman won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Male star Orson Bean was nominated for the Featured Actor Tony but didn’t win.

The lyrics of the musical were written by Betty Comden (1917-2006) and Adolph Green (1914-2002) with music by Jule Styne (1905-94). Comden and Green were involved as either lyricists or screenwriters, or both, for many MGM movie musicals, including Singin’ in the Rain. Styne wrote songs for both film and stage, including the Oscar-winning “Three Coins in the Fountain” and the acclaimed Funny Girl.

It’s hard to say that anything from Subways Are for Sleeping is in that same rarefied air, but “Be a Santa” is pretty good. Sung in the play by Sydney Chaplin (1926-2009), it exhorts the song’s listeners to “fill the world with joy” by being like Santa Claus.

The song has never been a hit outside the play, but several notable versions were recorded. Probably in anticipation that the show would be a bigger hit than it was, both the McGuire Sisters and Percy Faith recorded entire albums of the musical in 1961, including “Be a Santa.” A later version was released in 1965 by the studio group Living Voices (the Anita Kerr Singers in disguise) on a budget RCA Camden album, The Little Drummer Boy.

More recently, it was covered on the 1994 album A Broadway Christmas, and a couple other singers have done versions.

Here’s the original cast recording:

Here’s the McGuire Sisters:

This is the instrumental by Percy Faith:

Finally, here’s the rendition by the Living Voices.