Ben Bagley

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ben Bagley (b. October 18, 1933, Burlington, Vermont - d. March 21, 1998) was an American musical theatre and record producer.

Bagley moved to New York City during the early 1950s, and at age 22 he produced his first hit, The Shoestring Revue of 1955, starring (among others) Beatrice Arthur and Chita Rivera, and with songs by Charles Strouse, Lee Adams, June Carroll, and Sheldon Harnick.

His 1965 Off-Broadway revue The Decline and Fall of the Entire World as Seen Through the Eyes of Cole Porter drew on the composer's lesser-known songs. It ran for 15 months in New York, starring Kaye Ballard, Harold Lang, Bobby Short, Tammy Grimes, and Dody Goodman, among others. Following that, it ran for 13 months in San Francisco, before moving to the regional theater stage. According to Variety, the show "helped pave the way for later Broadway revues like Ain't Misbehavin' and Sophisticated Ladies, which surveyed the work of a single composer."

Shortly after his 1958 revue, Shoestring Revue in Fort Worth, Bagley was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was hospitalized until 1960. During this time of sickness and recuperation, he learned what true friendship was and what else he could do with his career.

He founded his own recording label, Painted Smiles Records, and through it produced 48 albums, the "Revisited" series, which promoted the body of work collectively referred to as Great American Songbook: songs by the likes of Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, Harold Rome, Howard Dietz & Arthur Schwartz, Frank Loesser, Noël Coward, Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, Alan Jay Lerner, and DeSylva, Brown, & Henderson, performed by some of the leading jazz and the theatrical singers of the day.

Playbill has called Bagley's liner notes for his "Revisited" albums "odd and iconoclastic." The recordings themselves are "hardly scholarly and sometimes downright unpleasant to listen to (note the antic, drowsy, caffeinated, tinny arrangements and uneven voices — a festival of sharps and flats)." However, "the discs are nonetheless embraced by fans hungry to explore old, mothballed material by extraordinary songwriters."

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