Thursday, July 16, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1954 (Columbia/Sony) For a primer on the state of musical comedy in the mid-1950s, look no further than here. The Pajama Game was based on notably “unmusical” sou…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:46PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1951 (RCA) A show with a magnificent score but an inferior book, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon tells of an 1853 California gold rush, the l…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:57AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1976 (RCA) Only Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim could find musical possibilities in the opening up of Japan to the West in 1853. Only Sondheim could make such a br…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:05AMOriginal London Cast, 1946 (Decca/Encore Box Office) Noël Coward’s overstuffed postwar operetta plunked a visiting diva among some missionaries on the island of Samolo. The show failed to…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:50AMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast Members, 1994 (Varèse Sarabande) “Promising” is the obvious word for Lucky Stiff, the first produced musical by composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ah…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:25AMStudio Cast, 2000 (DRG) For this musical, which was seen at the Goodspeed Opera House in 1997, librettist Sherman Yellen wrapped a yarn of romance among expat American journalists in 1927 Pa…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:10AMNew York Concert Cast, 1996 (DRG) This is a biting and funny satire of Louisiana’s byzantine politics in general, and of Huey Long in particular. Although Louisiana Purchase opened on Broa…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 09:55AMWednesday, July 15, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1949 (Decca) Lost in the Stars, by playwright Maxwell Anderson and composer Kurt Weill, deals with racial discrimination and segregation — unlikely territory for a …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:16PMOriginal Broadway and Touring Cast, 1973-74 (MGM/Decca) Sort of a “revisal” of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, though that word had not yet been coined when this show was staged, Lorelei had a…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:52PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1948 (Decca) Based on an idea by Jerome Robbins, Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’! was a broad musical comedy about a touring ballet company. It starred the incredibly gifte…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:28PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1956 (Painted Smiles) The vibrant overture on this recording tells us that we’re about to hear one of the tangiest revues of the 1950s. Ben Bagley produced the …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:26PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1982 (Geffen) Who would have thought that Roger Corman and Charles B. Griffith’s campy 1960 horror flick about a bloodthirsty plant out for world conquest would…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:53PMTuesday, 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 01:11PM 
