On January 1, 2007, the original London cast recordings to the 1956 London musicals +Cranks and +Wild Grows the Heather, both initially released by HMV Records, fell out of copyright in the U.K., allowing any label that chose to issue unlicensed versions of them. That coincidence explains this reissue of them by the Must Close Saturday Records label, even though, as annotator Adrian Wright admits, the shows were "chalk and cheese" in terms of their resemblance to each other. John Cranko, who conceived +Cranks, actually a revue rather than a book musical, was a choreographer, but he also wrote lyrics for the show's songs with composer John Addison. Yet his greatest contribution may have been in the casting of the four-hander, which featured Annie Ross, Anthony Newley, Hugh Bryant, and Gilbert Vernon. Ross was known as a jazz singer with a theatrical background, while Newley had appeared in a string of films, but never sung professionally before. It must have been the staging and the chemistry between the performers that gave the show its charm. Opening in the West End on March 1, 1956, it ran for 223 performances. Then, the entire production decamped for Broadway, where a November 26, 1956, opening led to only 40 performances. It's not surprising that the transfer across the Atlantic didn't work. The musical residue heard on the cast album reveals that Cranko occasionally aspires to the wordplay and wit of Noël Coward, but he rarely succeeds. Much of the time, the pedestrian songs rely on the engaging performances of Ross and Newley, along with Bryant, who handles the bluesy material. (Vernon, a ballet dancer, doesn't make much of an impression on the recording.) Those performances are engaging, and Newley in particular shows off a virtuosity that would stand him in good stead later in his career. But as a purely musical work, +Cranks is unmemorable.

Although +Wild Grows the Heather, a musical adaptation of J.M. Barrie's 1891 play +The Little Minister, opened in the West End on May 3, 1956, it sounded like a show from an earlier era. This wasn't only because the Scottish theme was reminiscent of +Brigadoon or because the operetta style recalled both the musicals of Rodgers & Hammerstein as well as those of Hammerstein and Kern. It represented the final work of longtime British producer/composer Jack Waller (1881-1957), who apparently constructed the score by delving into the trunk of songs he had compiled over the years working with composer Joseph Tunbridge (1886-1961), for whom it was also a last stage effort. The lyricist, Ralph Reader (1903-1982), was actually another longtime choreographer for whom this was his first attempt at writing words. The old-fashioned nature of the work may have doomed it, or it may have been the decision to cast the major roles with near-amateurs who had won a "find a star" competition, resulting in the debut of Valerie Miller. (The male lead became ill and was replaced by a professional, Bill O'Connor.) In any case, it ran only 28 performances. Nevertheless, HMV undertook a cast recording, which turns out to be charming, if odd. O'Connor and Miller's love duets, "I See Everything I Love in You" and "I Want the Stars to See You" are particularly appealing, and the rest of the score, though heavily derivative, is certainly tuneful. It's hard to imagine why the "Finale" ends with the old spiritual "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands," however. [Simultaneously with the Must Close Saturday release, Sepia Records also took advantage of the copyright law to issue an unlicensed version of Cranks, adding a batch of out of copyright Annie Ross recordings as bonus tracks.] ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide