On the Town (Original Cast Recording 1940-1956)

"We'll catch up some other time," sing the lovers in the touching finale to On the Town, but the irony is that this show, perhaps more than any other in musical comedy history couldn't have happened at any other time than exactly when it did.

Not only is this musical the perfect reflection of just what America was like in those closing days of 1944 when, although the tide had turned in World War II, an Allied victory was still thousands of lives away, but it's also a magic instance of a wildly disparate group of people coming together at the precisely right moment to create something unique.

A satirical comedy duo, a classical composer, a ballet choreographer, a high-society designer and a veteran theatre director all found themselves flung together in a creative crucible that proved musical theatre makes much stranger bedfellows than politics ever dreamed of.

Many people hail Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1943 Oklahoma! as the show that changed the face of modern musical theatre but, in truth, that work only polished and deepened what had been begun by other productions, most notably, Showboat.

But when you look at the brassy, sassy, song-and-dance explosion that was to characterize many musicals of the second half of the Twentieth Century, you have to hail On the Town as the flashy parent of this popular form.

It all began in 1943 with a ballet called Fancy Free. Choreographer Jerome Robbins, searching for his next creative project for the New York company then called 'Ballet Theatre' (later 'American Ballet Theatre'), found himself plugging into the energy of the thousands of soldiers and sailors who would descend on Manhattan during their few days leave before going off (or returning to) the European and Pacific theatres of World War II.

At that point, nearly a third of all Hollywood movies were war-related, and even the top pop songs bore titles such as "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To", or "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition".

Robbins also was influenced by the raw, erotic energy in the sailors-on-leave paintings of Paul Cadmus and wanted to bring that to the world of ballet. He constructed a scenario and started shopping it around to established composers, all of whom turned him down.

At that point, Robbins fortunately ran into Oliver Smith, prominent set designer, society millionaire and friend of the ballet. He volunteered to design Fancy Free, and immediately introduced Robbins to the 25-year-old wunderkind of the symphonic conducting world, Leonard Bernstein.