月见草 Evening Primrose (1966)

　　In 1966, Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim was offered the opportunity to write a one-hour musical for television to be broadcast on the ABC Stage 67 series. He turned to his collaborator, James Goldman, with whom h...展开e was developing a musical that would emerge later as Follies, and they adapted a James Collier short story about a poet who abandons the world to live in a New York department store. There, to his surprise, he encounters a society of people who have done the same thing over the years, among them a young woman who went to sleep in the store as a child. They fall in love, but are threatened by the store's other denizens, who fear their secret will get out. Anthony Perkins played the poet and Charmian Carr (who had been Liesl von Trapp in the previous year's film version of The Sound of Music) was the young woman. Sondheim wrote four songs and much underscoring. The songs "I'm Here" (aka "If You Can Find Me, I'm Here"), "I Remember," "When?," and "Take Me to the World" earned recordings on Sondheim albums later, but the soundtrack to the program was not released legitimately. That inspired theater buffs, who dubbed it from the videotape and pressed it up on a bootleg LP, also trading it as a tape between them. The tape runs about 45 minutes (the commercials having been deleted), and it gives a good sense of the show, with Perkins and Carr coming off well as the doomed lovers. It is not a major Sondheim work, by any means, and the songs can be found elsewhere, but for the Sondheim cult it is a treasured (and hard-to-find) rarity. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide