Leonard Bernstein - First Recordings

THE REVUERS:  Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Alvin Hammer, John Frank, Judy Holiday, with Leonard Bernstein, piano  

1. The Joan Crawford Fan Club
2. The Girl with the Two Left Feet  

Recordings from 1940

In the late 1930s, friends Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Alvin Hammer, John Frank, and Judy Holiday formed a comedy sketch team called The Revuers.  They became very popular in the nightclub scene in the Village, eventually appearing at the Village Vanguard.  

After graduating from Harvard in 1939, Leonard Bernstein moved  to New York to look for opportunities.  During that summer he spent a good bit of his time with his old summer camp friend Adolph Green, along with Betty Comden and their comedy team, which included the as yet unknown Judy Holiday  In 1940, after his first year at Curtis and on his way to his first summer at  Tanglewood, he stopped back in New York and teamed up with the Revuers for these two sketches, The Girl with the Two Left Feat (at sendup of 1930s Hollywood} and The Joan Crawford Fan Club, which they recorded for the Musicraft label.

The Girl with the Two Left Feet is the story of a movie produced by 19th Century-Wolf and premiered at Plowman's Japanese Theater.  The sketch contains all the cliches of 1930s Hollywood: a pompous producer (Cecil Mille DeB), spoiled sex symbol (Lamarr L'Amour), a gossip columnist (Skipper Snooper) and the innocent little girl who accidentally steps in the cement in the theater's forecourt and winds up a star.

2 THE REVUERS - JOAN CRAWFORD FAN CLUB - BERNSTEIN, ET AL. - 1940

Daniel Plante