Saturday, September 23, 2023
Original 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 11:44AMThursday, September 21, 2023
World 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 03:33PMThursday, September 7, 2023
Studio 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 03:31PMFriday, August 25, 2023
Original 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 10:07AMThursday, August 24, 2023
Original 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 01:53PMSaturday, August 12, 2023
Original 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 12:58PMTuesday, August 8, 2023
Original 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 10:26AMTuesday, July 25, 2023
Original 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 11:43AMSunday, July 23, 2023
Original 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 09:34AMSaturday, July 22, 2023
Original 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 06:49PMTuesday, July 4, 2023
Original 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 02:33PMMonday, June 19, 2023
Original 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 10:29AMThursday, June 15, 2023
Original 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 03:06PMWednesday, June 7, 2023
Original Public Works Cast, 2022 (Concord Theatrical Recordings) The second of composer-lyricist Shaina Taub’s Shakespeare adaptations for the Public Theater’s Public Works program, foll…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 09:34AMOriginal Public Works Cast, 2018 (Craft Recordings) The first (and better) of Shaina Taub’s pair of Shakespeare-inspired scores for the Public Theater’s Public Works program, Twelfth Nig…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 09:20AMMonday, June 5, 2023
Original Broadway Cast, 2011 (Masterworks Broadway) If you’re looking for an under-the-radar guilty pleasure album, you could do worse than Wonderland. It’s the silliest and least self-i…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:09PMOriginal Broadway Cast, 2012 (Masterworks Broadway) In “Just Another Day in Hollywood,” the ensemble of Chaplin sings of “Stars on the rise / Stars on the fall / Stars you forget / Sta…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:58PMSaturday, June 3, 2023
Original London Cast, 1963 (Decca/Must Close Saturday) There’s no question that Half A Sixpence, the musical adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel Kipps, was all about spotlighting Tommy Ste…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:47PMWednesday, May 10, 2023
Studio Cast, 2021 (Polydor) O stars, not recommended. What’s there to write about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella that hasn’t already been written and/or said? Though this “modern…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 09:07AMFriday, May 5, 2023
Original Broadway Cast, 2023 (Masterworks Broadway) Not every musical starts its cast album with the pre-show announcement. But, for better and for worse, Shucked is not every musical. The s…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:23PMTuesday, April 11, 2023
Original London Cast, 2013 (Watertower Music) The first stage iteration of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s novel preserves only one of Le…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:16AMFilm Soundtrack, 1971 (Geffen) This slim film soundtrack — featuring six full songs by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, plus some reprises and several lovely instrumentals also credited…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:48AMMonday, April 10, 2023
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 2020 (Ghostlight) If this cast album confuses some listeners, that may be because they don’t understand the show’s central conceit, and can you blame them? …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:57PMFriday, April 7, 2023
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 2005 (JAY) Based on Sherley Anne Williams’ 1986 novel about the intertwined stories and gradual friendship of a Black woman and a white woman in the Antebellum …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:42PM 
