Douglas Sills will always be remembered and beloved by theatre lovers for his bravura performance as the star of the first incarnation of the Frank Wildhorn-Nan Knighton musical The Scarlet …
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 11:03AMTelevision Cast, 1966 (Kritzerland) Stephen Sondheim provided a brief but compelling score for this TV musical with a teleplay by James Goldman, based on a short story by John Collier. It te…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:12PMJonathan Tunick receives his Sardi's portrait. Photos by Michael Portantiere.
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 11:51AMOriginal London Cast, 2022 (Masterworks Broadway) No stars; not recommended. These days, when you hear that a beloved movie is getting turned into a musical, it sounds less like an announ…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:02PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 2008 (Ghostlight) Musical theater writers from Strouse and Adams to Pasek and Paul have tried to write musicals capturing the spirit of what it means to be a teenager…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 06:23PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 2023 (Sh-K-Boom) It took Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s musical Harmony 26 years to get to Broadway, over four times as long a period as the Comedian Harmonists …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:16PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1996 (Original Cast Records) The heyday of the intimate revue may have been decades ago, but some good ones have surfaced more recently. Consider Barry Kleinbort�…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:00PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1976 (Varese Sarabande) A stylized, three-character “silent movie opera” by composer Polly Pen and playwright Lawrence Klavan, Bed & Sofa premiered just o…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:35AMOriginal London Cast, 2000 (Telstar) Those who would type Andrew Lloyd Webber as a purveyor of lightweight poperettas may not know what to make of this tragic love story set against a backgr…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:12AMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1963 (London/no CD) This Off-Broadway oddity probably got produced because of the reputation of its composer, Irving Burgie — also known as Lord Burgess. Having…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:55AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1976 (Amherst) No stars, not recommended. This is arguably the least necessary Broadway album ever. Yes, the show was a hit (766 performances), and it served as the …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:43AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1990 (DRG) This show was a good time, but the cast recording — only 37 minutes in length — is of little help in bringing back the experience for those who saw it,…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:18PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1951 (RCA/Sepia) A spiffy overture, a swell opening chorus (“The Tour Must Go On”), then out comes our heroine with an even better character-establishing number, …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:44AMWorld Premiere Recording, 1997 (RCA) Avenue X shows how some folks in the racially divided America of the early 1960s tried to achieve peace and harmony through rock and roll. The theme is s…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:20PMOriginal Cast (London and Broadway), 1959 (Angel) Producer Alexander Cohen had the good sense to bring a host of newcomers to Broadway from England, among them Michael Flanders and Donald Sw…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:33PMStudio Recordings by the Original Broadway Cast, 1935 (Smithsonian/no CD) Always welcome on Broadway during the Depression was a star-packed musical revue. At Home Abroad, billed as “A Mus…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:31PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1964 (Broadway East/AEI) 0 stars, not recommended. One day, sometime in the 1980s, several boxes of the long-out-of-print LP of The Athenian Touch turned up in a …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:48AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1948 (Decca) The Theatre Guild was riding the success of the still-running Oklahoma! when Armina Marshall Langner suggested that The Pursuit of Happiness, a play she …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:07AMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1968 (RCA/no CD) A young black man (Clifton Davis) and a young white woman (Carole Demas), both veterans of the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention in …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:37PMConcept Album, 1954 (Columbia/Masterworks Broadway) Based on the 1920s newspaper columns of Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel stars a cockroach. Ostensibly, the columns were the work of said …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:53PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 2022 (Masterworks Broadway) Meet the semi-jukebox musical: Almost Famous, based on the film about a 1970s rock band and the teen journalist William (Casey Likes) who …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:22PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 2012 (Backlot Music) If you love Lin-Manuel Miranda’s score for In the Heights, you’ll find lots of pleasures in Bring It On. This musical adaptation of a 2000 fi…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:39PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1970 (MIO International/no CD) This version of Colette is a charming play with music. The play itself was written by Elinor Jones, then married to lyricist Tom Jo…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:58PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1965 (United Artists/Kritzerland) What Robert Wright and George Forrest had previously done successfully with Grieg and Borodin, they did with Rachmaninoff in creatin…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:26AMOriginal London Cast, 1971 (RCA/Stage Door) The original London cast album of this Henry James adaptation is also the de facto original Broadway cast album, since the West End’s two leads,…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:43AMOriginal Television Cast, 1958 (Columbia/Sony) The later-in-life work of most great musical theater writers isn’t up to the quality of their more youthful forays; but with the exception of…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 09:34AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1971 (A&R, 2LPs; no CD) Onstage, this piece by Melvin van Peebles was intensely theatrical; I was actually frightened when cast member Minnie Gentry looked straig…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 07:06PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1999 (Varèse Sarabande) It’s the very model of a modern chamber musical: a four-character, four-musician adaptation of a Thomas Hardy short story, here brought…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 06:49PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 2023 (Wine & Peaches LLC) New York, New York is destined to go down in musical theater history books for its creative team, which includes the legendary composer …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:33PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 2023 (Masterworks Broadway) In 2021, the South Korean music industry earned around $773 million in revenue, a figure that has been increasing since K-pop as a genre…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:29AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 2023 (Concord Theatricals) Broadway musicals based on movies are nothing new, but Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Some Like it Hot may hold the distinction of being the …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:06PM