Reviving Judy Garland's "Merry Christmas"

In her 1949 MGM film, In the Good Old Summertime, Judy Garland sings a lovely but oft-overlooked Christmas song appropriately titled, “Merry Christmas.” Fred Spielman, who had been a prominent cabaret pianist in pre-Anschluss Vienna, wrote the music and Yale-drama alumna Janice Torré wrote the lyric — a partnership that later produced the songs for The Stingiest Man in Town, a musical version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

It was released on an MGM Records album but, to my knowledge, Judy never sang it again after she recorded it for the movie on November 16th, 1948. Perhaps the song’s passing similarity to her earlier hit, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” prevented it from becoming more widely known. Nevertheless, the arrangement had long been on my wishlist for restoration, so when Joelle Graves, the Executive Director of the Rogue Valley Symphony in Ashland, Oregon, asked me to create a holiday pops concert for them entitled A Judy Garland Christmas for December 2025, I knew the time was at hand.

"Next Year All Our Troubles Will Be Out of Sight": A Song for 2020

Although written for Judy Garland to sing in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” seems like it could have been written today. Back then, America was knee-deep in World War II, and now we’re nine months into another world-wide crisis, in many cases without even the comfort of friends and family to help us get through it. Here’s hoping that “someday soon we all will be together” and that 2021 will be much brighter than 2020. And in the meantime, Merry Christmas.

(Song by Hugh Martin & Ralph Blane; Original orchestral arrangement by Conrad Salinger; Piano arrangement by Joan Ellison based on the original orchestration.)

Life Imitates Art: A Funny Thing Happened on the Yellow Brick Road

I often wondered about people who did one-person shows — specifically, what kind of person would want to hold a 7500-word script in her head. Well, in the last year, I’ve become that person. And I’m still not much closer to understanding why someone would voluntarily do what amounts to a high-wire act without a net. Except that when it works it is really, really fun.