"If you think the elephant preposterous," he intones, "You've probably never seen a rhinos-terous." And so on. The work, written in 1886, but not published until a year after Saint-Saëns' 1921 death, has had a set of silly two-line poems added to it by Ogden Nash that characteristically fracture the language for this English version, "The Carnival of the Animals," and they are even funnier coming out of the mouth of Noël Coward in an upper-class British accent. DRG has filled out the reissue to CD length by adding a version of French composer Camille Saint-Saëns' wonderful suite "Le Carnaval des Animaux," played by Andre Kostelanetz & His Orchestra. The performers had fun with the material, which in 1957 was adapted into a Broadway musical, Shinbone Alley, featuring Bracken. Archy is something of a philosopher, and he is always trying to rehabilitate mehitabel, an alley cat who acts like one. Joe Darion (later the lyricist of Man of La Mancha) and composer George Kleinsinger adapted the stories into the musical recitation "archy and mehitabel," narrated by actor David Wayne, with Broadway star Carol Channing playing mehitabel and film star Eddie Bracken as archy "echoes of archy" added some more stories. The cockroach was named archy, and he was obsessed with a cat named mehitabel (he couldn't be expected to capitalize anything, under the circumstances). Archy, a cockroach who had been a free-verse poet in a previous life, tries to reform his friend Mehitabel, an alley cat who believes in free love.
#Archy and mehitabel series#
Don Marquis wrote a series of fanciful stories supposedly recited by a cockroach who typed them on a typewriter by jumping from key to key. With Eddie Bracken, Kelly Brown, Tammy Grimes, Michael Kermoyan. DRG Records continues to comb through the Columbia Records vaults for children's material, and this reissue combines two delightful works featuring musical theater performers that first saw release in the 1950s.
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