Although a laudable enterprise and one which moved from community theatre to Broadway, Runaways is an ensemble show, written by Elizabeth Swados, about children who run away from home. With no plot as such to fall back on, this show is heavily reliant on its musical pieces. Following its transfer to Broadway the show won a number of Tony’s which makes me in a serious minority as I thought the show's numbers so bad, that it felt like listening to ‘Springtime for Hitler and Germany’.

The music is repetitive and the lyrics clumsy, showing little in the way of wit or art. Half the lyrics could have been replaced with the words ‘bubble, bubble bubble’ and been none the worse for it. Part of the problem is the lack of professional singers and actors; there were only three in the cast. What should often have been strident songs of injustice often come over as a cacophony of voices, which produces a discordant whole.

The music was supposed to reflect the musical tastes of the cast. Well in 1978, I might well have recorded similar songs if all I had listened to in the last twenty years were show tunes. There isn’t a single song on the album which would have passed as a contemporary song. The ‘punk’ number, ‘Where Are Those People Who Did Hair’ sounds more like a throwback to go-go dancers than it does to the angry attitude that the title implies. The musical styles range from mambas, rumbas and sambas many other musical styles, some of which don’t end in "as" which were not in vogue among young people in 1978, unless they spent their whole life in a theatre.

The original show ran to forty-one songs, thankfully these have been paired down to fifteen for the recording.

The track listing is:

'Where Do People Go'; 'Every Now and Then'; 'Minnesota StripSong'; 'Find Me a Hero'; 'The Undiscovered Son'; 'No Lullabies for Luis'; 'We are not Strangers'; 'The Basketball Song'; 'Let Me be a Kid'; 'Revenge Song Enterprise'; 'Lullaby from Baby to Baby'; 'Sometimes'' 'Where are Those People Who Did Hair'; 'To the Dead of Family Wars'; and 'Lonesome of the Road'.

It would do no good just going on about how bad I thought the piece was. I couldn’t find a single song which wasn’t risible in some fashion, but against that it did win a whole load of Tony’s though, this was probably from others who likewise hadn’t listened to any contemporary popular music since 'Alexander’s Ragtime Band'.

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Charles Packer