Friday, September 18, 2015
Original London Cast, 1989 (Geffen, 2CDs) No stars; not recommended. As was the case with The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables, its equally cheap predecessors, Miss Saigon was brough…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:31PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1949 (Columbia/Sony) Irving Berlin's highly anticipated follow-up to Annie Get Your Gun was one of those can't-miss packages that missed. It had thick postwar nostalg…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:54AM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1970 (Project 3) "Good MORN-ing, ladies!!" Shelley Winters' entrance line in this musical biography of the Marx Brothers and their indomitable mother is brayed rather…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:48AM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1961 (RCA) Jerry Herman's first Broadway score is surely one of his best, an atmosphere-soaked tour through contemporary Israel in service of a tired soap opera plot.…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:30AM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1944 (Decca) Cole Porter, Herbert Fields, and Dorothy Fields enjoyed a long run with this silly piece of wartime escapism, but the major force behind the show was pro…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:22AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 17, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1982 (RCA) A big flop in its original Broadway production, this show boasts one of Stephen Sondheim's best scores. George Furth's book, based on a George S. Kaufman-M…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:09PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1970 (Atlantic/150 Music) Based on Stephen M. Joseph's book of the same title, The Me Nobody Knows is a collection of writings by inner-city students turned into a mu…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:05PM[SHARE]Film Soundtrack, 1944 (MGM/Rhino-Turner)Â Based on a series of stories by Sally Benson that originally appeared in The New Yorker, Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis is one of the g…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:46PM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 16, 2015
London Cast, 1985 (EMI) This production took a very charming, very old musical, gussied up the book, the score, and the arrangements, and presented it to the public as a lovely nostalgia fes…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:46PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1953 (RCA) It's hard to believe, but Rodgers and Hammerstein did have a few flops in addition to their many hits. Me and Juliet was one such failure, and the team's o…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:54PM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1985 (Harbinger) When Bye Bye Birdie exploded on Broadway in 1960, it was an announcement that a brand-new generation had arrived in just about every department. …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:44PM[SHARE]Off-Broadway Cast, 2001 (Original Cast Records) The legendary 1967 out-of-town closing performance of this show is notorious for its title character, played by one Marissa Mell, being shot b…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:09PM[SHARE]Original London Cast, 1996 (Dreamworks) By the time this latest epic from composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and lyricist Alain Boublil arrived on the scene, the serious pop-opera genre was f…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:43PM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1981 (RCA) Stephen Sondheim compilation shows have always seemed silly to me. Doesn't the appeal of his work lie largely in its specificity? The original cast alb…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:56AM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 2000 (RCA) Michael John LaChiusa turns out songs quickly " so quickly, he boasts, that he can sometimes knock off several in a day. There's nothing necessarily wrong …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:43AM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 2002 (JAY)Â Roger Rees did first-rate work as Alfie, a Dublin bus driver who revels in amateur theatricals and yearns for a male coworker, but this show was a …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:29AM[SHARE]Sunday, September 13, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1968 (RCA) "'Tis wonder that enwraps me thus, yet 'tis not madness. What a groovy lady!" And there you have the central joke of this hit Off-Broadway musical, loosely…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:18PM[SHARE]Studio Cast, 1966 (MGM/no CD) Long out of print, this recording was one of the first musical theater "concept albums." Few people seem to be aware that You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown began…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:56PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1976 (ABC/no CD) Just as The Wiz was an all-black version of The Wizard of Oz, this show might be considered an all-black version of Jesus Christ Superstar. That's tr…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:44PM[SHARE]Pasadena Playhouse Cast, 2001 (Fynsworth Alley/Ghostlight) This 1938 flop is a musical adaptation, with songs by Cole Porter and a book by Rowland Leigh, of Siegfried Geyer's By Candlelight,…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:21PM[SHARE]Original Cast, 2002 (PS Classics) Although A Year With Frog and Toad played only a short time on Broadway in 2003, previous runs at the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis (where the s…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:59PM[SHARE]Saturday, September 12, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1978 (Columbia/Masterworks Broadway) Studs Terkel's Working, the 1972 best-selling volume of interviews with Americans discussing the pros and cons of their occupatio…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:08PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1953 (Decca/MCA) Nine years after their breakthrough show, On the Town, composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green were hired on very shor…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:50AM[SHARE]Friday, September 11, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1965 (Columbia) This was an odd little show, billed as "a play with music." Columbia probably decided to record The Zulu and the Zayda because the songs were written …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:44PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1968 (Capitol) Are you sitting down? When I saw Zorba in its original Broadway production (not the horrible Anthony Quinn revival; see below), I thought it a better s…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:58AM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1996 (First Night) The talented team of librettist-lyricist John Dempsey and composer Dana P. Rowe mined the familiar terrain of Little Shop/Rocky Horror teen-nos…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:45AM[SHARE]Encores! Concert Cast, 1999 (Decca) You can always tell an overture arranged and orchestrated by Hans Spialek: The brass section announces something important, the woodwinds flutter and swoo…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:31AM[SHARE]Original Cast, 1919-20 (Smithsonian/no CD) By the time of its 13th edition, Ziegfeld's legendary beauty-and-music revue was a Broadway institution. Some historians hold that this 1919 versio…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:19AM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 2003 (PS Classics) Like the show itself, the cast recording of composer-lyricist Tim Acito's "musical fairy tale" Zanna, Don't! will probably appeal mainly to tee…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:03AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 10, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1981 (Arista/Masterworks Broadway) This is a musicalized update of the famous Hepburn-Tracy movie of the same title, with the plot changed so that it now concerns a t…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:26PM[SHARE]Film Soundtrack, 1939 (MGM/Rhino-Turner) Is it an overstatement to call MGM's The Wizard of Oz the world's most beloved film? Happily, a superb job has been done with the latest edition of t…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:55PM[SHARE] 
