Oh Captain!, based on the 1953 British film The Captain's Paradise, about a ship captain with wives in two different ports, marked the return to Broadway of the songwriting team of
Jay Livingston and
Ray Evans, who had begun their career in New York but long-since relocated to Hollywood, where they wrote Academy Award-winning songs like "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)."
José Ferrer directed and co-wrote the libretto, and
Tony Randall, in his musical-comedy debut after successes on stage, screen, and television, starred as the captain. The setting was changed from Gibraltar to London and Paris to take advantage of the French capital's notorious sexiness (the second wife was now a chanteuse), resulting in a strikingly bawdy portrayal meant to spice up the lives of the tired businessmen who frequented Broadway. Songs like "Femininity," sung by the captain's French concubine, left little to the imagination but also had considerable wit.
Randall had a good voice and was well matched with
Jacquelyn McKeever as his British wife and
Abbe Lane as his French girlfriend.
Lane proved to have a recording contract that prevented her from participating on this cast album, but singing star
Eileen Rodgers makes an excellent replacement. Paul Valentine, as a hot-blooded Latin, gives
McKeever a thrill in "We're Not Children." There may be no standards, but there are many pleasant songs, and the whole is an enjoyable, if not particularly distinguished score. After opening on February 4, 1958, Oh Captain! managed no more than five and a half months on Broadway, which is about what it deserved, but musical theater fans will enjoy the cast album (finally reissued on CD by DRG in 2002), noting, for example, the contrast between "You Don't Know Him" and the similarly themed "I Know Him So Well" from 1984's
Chess.