Ballet Ballads

• Original Broadway Production (1948)
  New York, NY
• Los Angeles Production (1950)
  Los Angeles, CA
• Off-Broadway Revival (1961)
  New York, NY
• Concert Revival (2002)

Click on the title for info on the song.

Original score

• Hear the Story of Susanna

Three experimental one-act musicals, with no dialogue, mixing song and dance to tell their stories in completely non-naturalistic ways. Major roles were generally sung by one performer and danced by another.

The first of the three sections was Susanna and the Elders, a retelling of the Biblical story.

The second was Willie the Weeper, a contemporary story of a pot addict.

The third, The Eccentricities of Davy Crockett, was a fanciful recounting of incidents from the life of Davy Crockett.

A fourth section, Riding Hood Revisited, was a contemporary take on the story of Little Red Riding Hood. It was not included in the original production as the producers thought the show would be too long with it, but it was performed in the 1961 Off-Broadway revival (replacing Susannah and the Elders).

While most of this show is sung, the majority of it is narrative in style with no individual song titles. There were none at all in the playbill for the original production. The song titles in our list come primarily from Charles Turner's Jerome Moross: an introduction and annotated worklist (2005; Music Library Association) and from recordings of individual songs on the cast recordings of Taking a Chance on Love and of a cabaret of Jerome Moross songs titled Windflowers, along with the Naxos recording of Willie the Weeper.