Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1973 (Columbia/Sony) A Little Night Music is emblematic of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s work in that it sounds very different from his other scores and yet …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 08:19PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1962 (RCA) This album starts with one of the most exciting overtures ever and takes off from there, thanks largely to orchestrator Ralph Burns. With Cy Coleman’s te…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:55PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1959 (Capitol/Angel) Not too long after Sandy Wilson proved with The Boy Friend that audiences enjoyed spoofs of old musicals, Rick Besoyan wrote the book, music,…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:34PMOriginal Cast, 2003 (Midder Music, 2CDs) Skillfully programmed and directed by Mark Waldrop, this revue had a brief run Upstairs at Studio 54. Happily, it yielded a “live” cast album tha…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:59PMFilm Soundtrack, 1994 (Walt Disney Records) The mega-hit animated Disney movie The Lion King spawned this mega-selling soundtrack recording, which includes the Oscar-winning best song “Can…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:32PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1956 (Columbia/Sony) The cast album of this hit, faithfully adapted from Al Capp’s deep-fried comic strip, has a complicated history that’s worth telling because …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:11PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1997 (Sony) The Life opened just as Times Square was being cleaned up and turned into a tourist-friendly theme park. It captured the Best Musical prize from the Drama…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:53PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1961 (RCA/no CD) Apologies to songwriters Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, but here’s the show with arguably the worst title song in the history of Broadway — and th…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:32PMNew York Concert Cast, 1987 (Sony, 2CDs, paired with Of Thee I Sing) This performance doesn’t vary much in character from the dully dutiful reading of the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing that …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:14PMOriginal London Cast, 1985 (First Night/Relativity, 2CDs) Claude-Michel Schönberg (“musique”) and Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel (“textes”) originally created Les Misérables a…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:59AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1989 (RCA) This show did not work onstage, but some of the songs and performances on the cast album are fun. Peter Allen, though woefully miscast as a tough-guy gan…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:56AMSan Francisco Cast, 2001 (42nd Street Moon) With political satire a mainstay of 1930s musicals (the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing, Rodgers and Hart’s I’d Rather Be Right, Irving Berlin’s…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:43AMOff-Broadway Cast, 1959 (Strand/AEI) The “Princess Theater” musicals of Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse form an important chapter in musical theater history that is badly un…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:33AMMonday, July 13, 2015
Studio Cast, 1988 (Original Cast Records) No stars; not recommended. This vaguely autobiographical musical by composer-lyricist Brian Gari, with a book by Allan Knee, lasted for only 15 prev…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:05PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1970 (RCA) Three years after their debut show, Now Is the Time for All Good Men, which was studded with well-crafted lyrics and lovely ballads, composer Nancy For…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:51PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1997 (EMG) By the mid 1980s, plays about AIDS began to surface and continued to emerge thereafter, but with only a few musicals among them. Nevertheless, this one…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:26PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 2002 (Ghostlight) Although The Last 5 Years received mixed to negative reviews and closed quickly Off-Broadway in 2002, it has received many subsequent production…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:03PMOriginal Cast Recordings, 1941 (Platinum/Wave) Gertrude Lawrence had a reputation as a poor singer; Kurt Weill was quoted as saying that she had “the greatest range between C and C-sharp.�…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:44PMOriginal Broadway Cast Reconstruction, 1977 (Smithsonian/Hallmark) Here is one of the great artifacts of the American musical theater — and it’s also a great listen. One of a series of S…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:11PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1983 (RCA) Harvey Fierstein’s book for this musical closely follows Jean Poiret’s stage farce, the film version of which became a huge hit, about the chaos unleas…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:56PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1961 (Capitol/Angel) So, which Broadway composer stretched himself the most in writing a score that no one would have guessed he had in him? Jerry Herman with Dear Wo…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:46PMOff-Broadway Cast, 1998 (Slider Music) Avrom Goldfadn’s Yiddish farce The Two Kuni-Lemls is all but forgotten today. Even so, New York’s Jewish Repertory Theatre (JRT) commissioned a mus…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:58AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1938 (Joey/AEI) Boiled-down radio broadcasts of Broadway musicals were not unheard of in the 1930s, and the few that have been released commercially in subsequent dec…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:28AMOriginal Toronto/London/Broadway Cast, 1992 (First Night) Surely one of the most original and haunting musicals of the ’90s, Kiss of the Spider Woman is also one of the strangest and most …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:18AMWednesday, July 1, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1948 (Columbia/Sony) Here is Cole Porter’s greatest score — fresh, groundbreaking, and oh, so naughty. The show’s book, by Bella and Sam Spewack, has a rousing …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:02AMTuesday, June 30, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1953 (Columbia/Sony) Based on music by the Russian composer Alexander Borodin, this is the classic Arabian Nights musical. Starring the magnificent Alfred Drake as Ha…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:33AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1978 (Original Cast Records) When the charming film King of Hearts, a cult hit of the 1970s, was adapted as a big Broadway musical, it curled up and died. Don Scardin…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:21AMFriday, June 26, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1951 (Decca) Although the quality of Gertrude Lawrence’s singing as Anna Leonowens in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I was widely criticized, the effectiv…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:17PMStudio Cast, 1998 (Original Cast Records) Kelly closed on its opening night, and this latter-day studio recording shows why it was one of the biggest flops of the 1960s. Eddie Lawrence’s b…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:47PMBroadway Cast, 1961 (Columbia/DRG) Some people may think of Robert Wright and George Forrest as mere “adapters” because the team famously took the works of classical composers and massag…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:17PMOriginal London Cast, 1998 (First Night/Relativity) The good thing about this cast album, recorded live at London’s Vaudeville Theatre, is that it allows you to avoid the show’s well-mea…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:29PM 
