''Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?'' That was a question that the New York critic Brooks Atkinson asked his readers in his first-night review of Pal Joey, back in 1940. He was reacting to its vivid realism which repelled many at that time. His words came back to me when listening to this new recording of Stephen Sondheim's undeserved flop of 1981, based on a Kaufman and Hart comedy from the 1930s. The unlovable leading man in Merrily we roll along, a distinguished writer, has often been cited as the reason for the show's initial failure and, as if in acknowledgement of that, his story is told in reverse so that we watch the author's early years of youthful optimism with a poignant awareness of middle-age defeat. Now after a number of rewrites Sondheim and George Furth, the book writer, have once again been touching up their piece for the 1992 Haymarket Leicester production that Sondheim is quoted as saying is pretty definitive in terms of the score. This has now been recorded with the fidelity that TER brought to the Haymarket's production of West Side Story.
It deserves to do well as the performances are uniformly good, the recording crystal clear and the songs some of the most attractive in the Sondheim catalogue despite belonging to characters who are glamour cyphers no less than the show's catalyst. Sondheim's score boasts two numbers that have become standards, ''Good thing going'' and ''Not a day goes by'', and choral passages that remind us of how fine a composer of ensembles he has always been, although one of these, ''The hills of tomorrow'' has disappeared with the revisions there is an excellent new song, ''Growing up'', sung here by Louise Gold (as the Broadway singing wife of the hero), with a voice reminiscent of Dinah Shore. It's a pity that her Act 2 version of ''Good thing going'' with a tear-up accompaniment should be drowned by ersatz applause, the one misjudgement on an otherwise sound production.'