Thursday, July 16, 2015
Studio Cast, 1994 (Elektra-Nonesuch) Pardon My English, the 1933 musical that had the shortest Broadway run of any Gershwin show, makes for a most entertaining recording. The wonderful s…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:16PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1999 (RCA) Composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown earned a Tony Award for his work on Parade, his first Broadway score. Although this dark musical about accused murdere…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:04PM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1960 (Kapp/Decca) This topical revue served as a calling card for a young composer-lyricist named Jerry Herman. It remains a pleasant diversion if you're in the r…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:42PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast Members, 1940 (Decca) Piggybacked onto the Decca CD issue of the Call Me Madam studio album starring Ethel Merman are four selections from Panama Hattie in their first…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:58PM[SHARE]Studio Cast, 1950 (Columbia/Sony) Joey, a small-time entertainer bent on opening his own nightclub, drops his girlfriend, Linda, to bed Vera, a rich dowager who's bonkers for him and who bac…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:16PM[SHARE]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" source …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:46PM[SHARE]Original 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 lon…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:57AM[SHARE]Original 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 11:05AM[SHARE]Original 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 10:50AM[SHARE]Original 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 Ahrens…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:25AM[SHARE]Studio 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 10:10AM[SHARE]New 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 Broadw…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 09:55AM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 Br…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:16PM[SHARE]Original 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 new…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:52PM[SHARE]Original 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 gifted Br…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:28PM[SHARE]Original 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 sh…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:26PM[SHARE]Original 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 m…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:53PM[SHARE]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 is…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 08:19PM[SHARE]Original 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 terr…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:55PM[SHARE]Original 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 03:34PM[SHARE]Original 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 that wi…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:59PM[SHARE]Film 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 Y…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:32PM[SHARE]Original 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 the …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:11PM[SHARE]Original 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 01:53PM[SHARE]Original 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 that i…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:32PM[SHARE]New 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 acco…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:14PM[SHARE]Original London Cast, 1985 (First Night/Relativity, 2CDs) Claude-Michel Schönberg ("musique") and Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel ("textes") originally created Les Misérables as what…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:59AM[SHARE]Original 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 g…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:56AM[SHARE]San 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 Louisia…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:43AM[SHARE]Off-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 underr…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:33AM[SHARE]Monday, 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 05:05PM[SHARE] 
