A Cantata for The Theatre
Text by William Engvick, Music by Alec Wilder
Miss Chicken Little was broadcast on CBS' Omnibus television program on December 27, 1953
Jo Sullivan as Miss Chicken Little, with Charlotte Rae and Jim Hawthorne
Recording is from a live soundstage air check acetate disc
At 7:29 the missing line is, "It was just an acorn," sung by one of the hens
The late, great wordsmith of this remarkable production, William Clark Engvick, was born on July 1, 1914, 100 years ago today. Happy birthday, Bill!
Obituary: William Engvick, Lyricist for Musicals and Popular Songs, Dies at 98
William Engvick, witty and eloquent writer of musicals from the Golden Age of Television, and lyrics for such popular songs as The Song from Moulin Rouge (Where is Your Heart), Moon and Sand and While We’re Young, died September 4, 2012 in Oakland, California following a brief illness. He was 98.
Engvick, known largely for his many collaborations with eclectic composer Alec Wilder, contributed lyrics to musical versions of Pinocchio and Hansel and Gretel, which aired nationally on NBC Television in the late 1950s, and featured music by Wilder. Some of the top Broadway talent of the day starred in these live productions, including Barbara Cook, Mickey Rooney, Fran Allison, Red Buttons and Stubby Kaye. Met opera star Rise Stevens sang Hansel and Gretel’s Evening Song (Soft Through the Woodland), a typically tender and heartfelt Engvick creation.
As a writer during the peak of the American Popular Song era, Engvick’s mellifluous words filled the mouths of many of the leading singers of the day, from Peggy Lee and Mel Torme to Marlene Dietrich and Johnnie Ray. In 1965, Frank Sinatra recorded Wilder and Engvick’s I See It Now, an autobiographical song with a memorable first stanza that helped put the lyricist’s hometown of Oakland on the map: “That year in Oakland High / When I was 17 / The grass from there to San Jose / Was high and cool and green / I see it now.”
“It was just something that I wanted to write about myself, a true memory piece. The grass really was high and cool and green,” recalled Engvick, who thought Sinatra was attracted to the “touch of seriousness” about the song, and by the line “‘loves have come and gone,’ because that’s precisely what happened to him.”
Called upon frequently by Mitch Miller, head of A&R at Columbia Records and Engvick’s friend and neighbor in Stony Point, New York, Engvick penned such popular tunes as Kiss and Run, Bonnie Blue Gal, Follow Me, All Yours, I’ll Remember Today and Make It Soon. In the last years before rock’n’roll began to dominate the musical landscape, he tirelessly churned out material for many Columbia artists, including Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Don Cherry, Liberace and Jo Stafford.
Engvick’s greatest commercial success came with The Song from Moulin Rouge (Where is Your Heart), an English rewrite of a French song introduced by Zsa Zsa Gabor in the award-winning John Huston film Moulin Rouge. Percy Faith’s recording of it, with Felicia Sanders singing Engvick's lyric, bewitched the radio airwaves throughout the summer of 1953, holding the Number One spot on the Billboard charts for 10 weeks straight. The song inspired sales of over one million copies of sheet music, and has been performed and recorded by hundreds of artists.
Many of Engvick’s assignments were, in fact, to write English words for tunes that had gained popularity in Europe sung in a foreign tongue. Engvick's version usually ended up telling a very different story from the original. “I never learned a foreign language, and didn’t want to know what the original words meant,” said Engvick. “I always started from scratch.” Among the titles he rewrote was Anna, from the movie of the same name, which had been a hit Spanish record for actress Silvana Mangano. The irresistible song about a girl who desires to dance the Bayon hit piano racks across America as a song about a heartbreaker named Anna who’s “got to be kissed.”
Engvick’s various musical collaborators included such luminaries as Cole Porter – their It’s Just Like the Good Old Days was written for Porter’s Broadway-bound musical comedy Mexican Hayride, but went unused – Les Paul, Mark Laub, Roy Kral, Bob Thompson and Edith Piaf, but Engvick said his most satisfying work had always been with Wilder.
Engvick and Wilder first met in 1939 when an agent brought Engvick’s revue Ladies and Gents to the attention of the singular composer, who declared it to be “fresh air” and quickly came up with melodies to match the captivating words. A prolific writing team was born. Over the next three decades, Wilder and Engvick wrote musicals, operas and dozens of songs, at least two of which, Moon and Sand and While We’re Young, written in the early ‘40s with Morty Palitz, remain ubiquitous jazz standards to this day.
Other well-known Engvick and Wilder songs include The Lady Sings the Blues, I Like It Here, The April Age, Who Can I Turn To? and Crazy in the Heart. Wilder, who praised Engvick as a master of the “singing line,” maintained that the writer James Thurber “became obsessed with While We’re Young and claimed it was one of the finest pieces of English writing he had ever heard.”
Although Ladies and Gents was never produced – it came tantalizingly close to a Broadway run – Engvick and Wilder did manage to stage small-scale productions of their operas The Long Way and Miss Chicken Little. The latter, a hilarious take on the classic tale of mass hysteria, was picked up by the prestigious CBS Omnibus television program, which broadcast it in December 1953 with Jo Sullivan Loesser in the title role. Engvick also wrote lyrics for Omnibus’ American premiere of Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, with music by Ottorino Respighi. Together Engvick and Wilder contributed songs to a 1955 off-Broadway production of Once Over Lightly starring Zero Mostel.
At one point Engvick and Wilder were summoned to Hollywood to write songs for the film Daddy Long Legs, but after several months of work a regime change caused the material, which Wilder characterized as being “the very best set of songs we ever wrote,” to be shelved. One of the duo’s most far-reaching and beloved collaborations was on Lullabies and Night Songs, an entrancing book of children’s songs lavishly illustrated by Maurice Sendak and published on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s. Engvick edited the book and provided lyrics to several songs.
In 1990, Jackie and Roy dedicated their CD An Alec Wilder Collection to Engvick, calling him “a terrific, intuitive man with a kind heart, gentle soul and the gift of being able to fashion meaningful, poetic lyrics to lovely, though sometimes difficult, melodies.” Engvick cited Remember, My Child, written with Wilder for Jackie, as his favorite of the many songs he composed.
The only child of Clarence and Sadie Engvick, William Clark Engvick was born in Oakland, California on July 1, 1914. Growing up in the shadow of the construction of the huge, elegant Grand Lake Theatre, which he attended on opening day, proved to be a major influence on Bill's career path. He frequently attended performances by such favorite local, soon-to-be-national acts as Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights, and quickly developed a strong interest in music and theater. As a teen he created meticulously-detailed, scale models of the stages and prosceniums of all of Oakland's large theatres.
While a student at UC Berkeley, Bill achieved some noteriety with his madcap revue In Your Hat, for which he wore many hats, including writer, director, actor, piano player and composer of music. Later in life, moving back-and-forth between Oakland and New York, Engvick always kept one foot in the theater, his first love, writing skits, directing and acting in local productions by the Gaslight Troupers and Straw Hat Revue in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the late 1940s, Engvick briefly tried his hand at radio dramas, penning scripts for CBS’ The Whistler and Silver Theatre.
More recently, Engvick wrote songs with longtime friend and Broadway actor Gordon Connell, of Hello Dolly, Big River, and Julius Monk revue fame, and authored lyrics for several new songs based on melodies sourced from Wilder’s film music and ground-breaking Octets.
Active well into his 90s, Engvick famously advised that “if you can’t write a million-dollar song, write a million songs at a dollar a try.”
by Rob Geller
