Although the Broadway musical Gypsy was the crowning achievement of
Ethel Merman's stage career, Warner Bros. Pictures, contracted to make the film adaptation, did not cast her, a travesty generally credited to Freddie Brisson, manager/husband of Rosalind Russell (and derisively known in the business as "The Lizard of Roz"). Russell had worked in musicals (notably Wonderful Town), but she had a limited vocal range that did not extend to singing songs written for
Merman. Of course, that didn't matter in Hollywood, where the singing voices that came out of any number of movie stars didn't belong to them. No surprise, then, that the second lead was given to another nonsinger, Natalie Wood. The principals were replaced, respectively, by nightclub singer
Lisa Kirk and
Marni Nixon, a professional ghost singer with many previous movie credits (or noncredits, as it were); she had just dubbed Wood in West Side Story. Onscreen, the substitutions, with Russell's and Wood's speaking voices giving way to
Kirk's and
Nixon's singing voices, could be odd. On the soundtrack album, which has less of the introductory dialogue, this is less of a problem, although the focus on the auditory makes it more obvious, for example, that Russell herself was allowed to sing "Mr. Goldstone, I Love You," while the transition from Russell to
Kirk in "Some People" is strange.
Kirk does her best to reduce that strangeness, but in doing so she undersings her songs, which is not what you look for in belters like "Everything's Coming Up Roses." (Just to add to the confusion, the weak-voiced Wood, not
Nixon, is heard on the soundtrack album;
Kirk sings "Together Wherever We Go" alone, instead of the film's trio performance; and "Rose's Turn," a mixture of
Kirk and Russell onscreen, also is sung exclusively by
Kirk.) As a result, the soundtrack to Gypsy is an unsatisfactory mishmash. ~ William Ruhlmann