“Ohio”
by
Douglas Messerli
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REH9PV-z0vk
Composer: Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and
Adolph Green
Performers: Rosalind Russell and Edith Adams,
Original Broadway recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pCfW8nX1ZU
Composer: Leonard
Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green
Performers: Rosalind
Russell and Jacqueline McKeever, 1958
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji8vYs1-saw
Composers: Leonard
Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green
Performers: Bea Arthur
and June Anderson, 1991
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pCfW8nX1ZU
Composers: Leonard
Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green
Performers: Donna Murphy
and Jennifer Westfeldt, 2003
The
whining plaints of the Ohio song in Leonard Bernstein’s version of My Sister Eileen in the musical by him,
Betty Comden and Adolph Green in Wonderful
Town (1953) is one of the most emotional responses to simple homesickness
that has ever been presented on the stage. The marvelous Sherwood sisters come
to New York, like all of us did, with complete belief in the possibilities of
self-discovery and the excitement that the city had to offer, and encounter
precisely those tantalizing possibilities. Yet, of course, the challenges the
city offers—then and now, today it would be impossibly unaffordable for these
to immigrants from Ohio—create fear and confusion.
There is no better song to express those
fears than in Bernstein’s and lyricist’s Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s
plaint, “Ohio,” where the two sisters wonder why they have left their home in
Ohio to try to make it in the big city. It expresses everyone’s fear of being
in a new, impossible to perceive world, despite their needed dismissals of
their own limited past.
Bernstein puts it literally into a lovely
whine, with the “Ohio” calling out to the two gals, at the very moment they
still reject their limited lives of the past. Even if the newly constructed subways
over their heads and the open windows of their dusky basement arouse the
attentions of local carousers, they will remain, we perceive after this
heartfelt plea, to become true New Yorkers. If they doubt
their decisions about moving to Greenwich Village, we also know they have
escaped the world in which they previously felt constricted.
I finally found a copy of the original Broadway recording, and I find a good version
from the 1958 television version with Russell and Jacqueline McKeever. I saw
the 2003 revival with Donna Murphy and Jennifer Westfeldt and loved it.
Wonderful
Town has a great number of memorable songs, including “A Hundred Easy Ways
to Lose a Man,” “A Little Bit in Love,” and the infamous “Conga,” but my
favorite will always be this early sentimental plea for a world which the
sisters have now clearly abandoned:
Why,
oh why, oh why, oh
Why
did I ever leave Ohio?
Why
did I wander to find what lies yonder
When
life was so cozy at home?
Wond’ring
while I wander,
Why
did I fly?
Why
did I roam?
Oh,
why oh, why oh
Did
I leave ohio?
Maybe
I’d better go
O
-- h -- i -- o.
Maybe
I’d better go home
Los Angeles, April
11, 2018
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