The Revisited series
Most Painted Smiles recordings, most titled ... Revisited, were anthologies of the lesser-known songs of the top Broadway musical composers and lyricists from the 1920s through the 1940s, including Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, DeSylva, Brown and Henderson, Vernon Duke, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, Yip Harburg, Jerome Kern, Alan Jay Lerner, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Arthur Schwartz, Kurt Weill and Vincent Youmans.[2][3]
The Revisited albums shared a distinctive design. Their covers displayed bright watercolors by Harvey Schmidt (better known as a composer) of showgirls in improbable and sometimes surreal costumes, often naked or nearly so above or even below the waist, on white backgrounds.[4][notes 1] Their backs were crammed with Bagley's detailed, witty, gossipy and occasionally ribald liner notes, bylined "by Ben Bagley (who is incurably insane)", and small photographs of the performers.[5]
The Revisited series featured performances by some of the leading Broadway performers of the day (Nancy Andrews, Kaye Ballard, Barbara Cook, Helen Gallagher, Dolores Gray, Tammy Grimes, Dorothy Loudon, Estelle Parsons, Anthony Perkins, Chita Rivera, Elaine Stritch), cabaret and jazz singers (Ann Hampton Callaway, Cab Calloway, Blossom Dearie, Mary Cleere Haran, Bobby Short) and many great theatre and film actors and other personalities not generally known for their singing ability, among them Ellen Burstyn, Martin Charnin, Richard Chamberlain, Phyllis Diller, Sheldon Harnick, Laurence Harvey, Katharine Hepburn, Lynn Redgrave, Rex Reed, Joan Rivers, Jerry Stiller and Gloria Swanson.[5]
Playbill called Bagley's liner notes for the Revisited albums "odd and iconoclastic" and the albums themselves "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".[6]
Production
In its first decades Painted Smiles released its recordings on vinyl. In the 1980s it began releasing CDs, and re-released many of its earlier recordings on CD (distributed by its division Battery Records).[7] Many Painted Smiles releases have been re-released, with improved sound, by Kritzerland Records.[8][9]
Painted Smiles' first logo ("Suck Lips"), used on the labels (not the jackets) of its LPs, was a pair of lipsticked lips suggestively encircling the spindle hole. Its second logo ("Serpent Siren"), used on CDs, was a nude woman, standing, holding a snake's head and tail to form a capital P, with the rest of the label's name in cursive. Both logos were designed by Jerome Hill,[10] who had put up the money to start the label.[11]
