Friday, June 19, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1967 (United Artists/Kritzerland) No stars; not recommended. Having had an art-house film hit with Never on Sunday, writer-director Jules Dassin and the Mrs., otherwi…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:16PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1999 (Varèse Sarabande) In an introductory note, this diversion’s creator Sheridan Morley recalls that Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence acted together only t…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:07PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1964 (Mercury/Decca) With Buddy Hackett starring as a Coney Island psychic who screws up his friends’ love lives, it’s safe to say that I Had a Ball doesn’t hav…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:56PMTuesday, June 16, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1966 (RCA) A two-character musical based on the play The Fourposter by Jan de Hartog, about a long-married couple, I Do! I Do! holds a mirror up to the audience,…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:21PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1962 (Columbia/Sony) This show has gone down in history for having launched the career of Barbra Streisand, but there’s so much more here. Jerome Weidman adapted hi…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:53PMOriginal Cast, 1984 (Kilmarnock Records, 2CDs) This show flopped big-time when producer Joseph Papp transferred it to Broadway after a run at his Public Theater. Although billed as “a mode…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:15PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1961 (RCA) George S. Kaufman said that “satire is what closes on Saturday night,” but that certainly did not apply to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Tr…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:54PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1968 (RCA) The story of a misfit who, rather than committing suicide, decides to try his hand at selling stock, this show made audiences laugh for one season and is h…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:45PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1995 (RCA) This show was the brainchild of costume designer Howard Crabtree, whose outlandishly funny costumes were the real stars of the production—each outfit…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:31PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1954 (Columbia/Sony) The cast album of Harold Arlen and Truman Capote’s flop musical set in a West Indian bordello is stunning and unique; the steel drums and whist…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:59AMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1994 (Boebe) How much mediocre country music can you take if it’s terrifically well performed? That’s the barometer of how much you’ll enjoy this recording.…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:39AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1947 (RCA/Sepia) The 24-minute cast album of High Button Shoes contains only eight of the score’s 14 songs; that’s all that could fit on both sides of four 78-rpm…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:57AMFriday, June 12, 2015
Original Scarborough Cast, 1998 (Dress Circle) Welcome to the duck yard, “Where life is nice and steady / Till we’re plucked and oven-ready” and where Ida, a young mom, hatches an egg …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:58PMFilm Soundtrack, 1955 (MGM/TCM) Hubert Osborne’s Shore Leave, a dull sailors-in-port comedy from 1924, was incessantly reincarnated: as a silent movie, a Broadway musical that was filmed t…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:30PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1964 (ABC-Paramount/MCA) Noël Coward’s martini-dry farce Blithe Spirit was turned into a brassy, uptempo musical by songwriters-librettists Hugh Marrin and Timothy…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:12PMThursday, June 11, 2015
Studio Cast, 1993 (Lockett-Palmer) Ervin Drake’s score for this show doesn’t actually contain terrible songs; it’s just that they’re terrible for an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:13PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1963 (Columbia/Sony) Here is an industrial-strength musical version of the Christmas movie classic Miracle on 34th Street. Directed by its producer, Stuart Ostrow, af…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:00PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1967 (ABC-ParamountlVarèse Sarabande) Nora Johnson’s novel The World of Henry Orient and the subsequent film version that she wrote with her father, Nunnally, were…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:43PMWednesday, June 10, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1964 (RCA) If one composer’s name leaps to mind when the phrase “show tune” is used, it’s probably Jerry Herman; and if one show epitomizes Herman’s work, i…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:18PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1994 (RCA) The emergence of the “new wave” of American theater composers might be traced back to this 1994 musical, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:00PMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1998 (Atlantic) Here is a rock-music performance piece about an East German transsexual who submits to the knife out of love for an American serviceman and then e…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:40PMSunday, May 31, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1953 (RCA/Sepia) A credible case could be made that, on any given project, Jule Styne was only as good as his lyricist. Give him Sondheim and you get Gypsy; give him …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 09:41AMSaturday, May 30, 2015
Original Cast, 2002 (Columbia/Sony) George C. Wolfe’s love letter to Harlem played the legendary Apollo Theater. It was less a full-fledged musical, or even a revue, than a museum installa…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:28PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1968 (RCA) This is a charming if inconsequential cast album of a show that missed the mark onstage. The score, by John Kander and Fred Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago), lives u…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:13PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1956 (RCA) Ethel Merman’s only flop starred her as Liz Livingston, a wealthy, rough-at-the-edges widow from Philadelphia who decides to beat Grace Kelly at her own …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:55AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 1961 (DRG) “Ev’ry man, I must alert you / When seeking a lady fair / Always gravitates to virtue / Still hoping it won’t be there.” These four lines, echoing …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:46AMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 1992 (JAY) No stars; not recommended. Produced by the Vineyard Theatre, this show was much more serious — and much weaker — than composer-lyricist Bob Merrill…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:34AMOriginal Off-Broadway Cast, 2003 (Fynsworrh Alley) Fans of country-music icon Hank Williams may hesitate to buy the album of this Off-Broadway biomusical when there are so many recordings of…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:26AMFriday, May 29, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1967 (Columbia/Sony) Here’s the gimmick: The show, with a book by Arthur Laurents, takes us from a Southern plantation in 1900 to New York in the ’60s, yet the fo…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:30AMOriginal Broadway Cast, 2002 (Sony) The CD itself is gussied up to look like a Phil Spector 45, and that’s typical of the attention to detail in this lively aural document of an irresistib…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:19AMOriginal Off-Broadway and Broadway Casts, 1967/1968 (RCA, 2CDs) Many musical theater traditionalists were nonplussed when the seminal rock musical Hair was a big success Off-Broadway and the…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 09:58AM 
