Kismet [plus excerpts from various other Kismet recordings]

Baubles, bangles and B-movies.

That's the best way to describe the crazy cast of characters - onstage and off - which led to the ultimate creation of the 1953 Broadway musical known as Kismet.

Take a quixotic producer with a penchant for operetta, a composer-lyricist team adept at plundering the classical catalogue, a librettist used to Hollywood power games and a leading man anxious to score another hit.

(We won't even get into the sado-masochistic choreographer or the ambitious director with the even more ambitious wife!)

Fling them all together, shake vigorously during a tense series of out-of-town tryouts and finally open in New York during a newspaper strike.

A sure recipe for disaster, right?

Wrong. Kismet rode on to triumph, scoring 583 performances, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical and even placing a couple of tunes onto the Hit Parade.

A clear case of 'kismet' (or 'fate', in Arabic) triumphing over alllogical preconceptions.

It also goes to prove one tried-and-true axiom of musical theatre: if you've got a great score, you can be missing a lot of other things and still have a success.