Friday, June 12, 2015
Film 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 twi…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:30PM[SHARE]Original 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 04:12PM[SHARE]Thursday, 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's Caesa…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:13PM[SHARE]Original 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 05:00PM[SHARE]Original 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 m…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:43PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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, it's Hello,…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:18PM[SHARE]Original 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, abou…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:00PM[SHARE]Original 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 04:40PM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 09:41AM[SHARE]Saturday, 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 installati…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:28PM[SHARE]Original 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 12:13PM[SHARE]Original 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 ga…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:55AM[SHARE]Original 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 W.S. Gil…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:46AM[SHARE]Original 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's e…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:34AM[SHARE]Original 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 11:26AM[SHARE]Friday, 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 four m…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:30AM[SHARE]Original 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 irresistible…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:19AM[SHARE]Original 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[SHARE]Thursday, May 28, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1959 (Columbia/Sony) From the blaring trumpets that begin the overture to the final chords of "Rose's Turn," this is a recording that grabs you and never lets go. Rep…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:32PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1950 (Decca) While subsequent recordings of Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls are superior to this one in certain respects, the performances here are definitive and rema…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 08:43PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1985 (JAY/TER) Grind, which opened during director Harold Prince's 1980s slump, was one of the most hated shows of the period. It's easy to understand why: Fay Kanin'…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 08:37PM[SHARE]In collaboration with her husband John Pizzarelli, as well as solo appearances in musical theater, in concert and cabaret, on recordings, etc., the "singers' singer" Jessica Molask…
SOURCE: BroadwayStars at 08:52AM[SHARE]Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1960 (RCA/DRG) Composer-lyricist Frank Loesser was determined never to repeat himself in his musicals. In between his operatic The Most Happy Fella and his satirical …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:15PM[SHARE]Monday, May 25, 2015
Bryan Batt, Paula West, Karen Akers, Paulo Szot, and Jay Armstrong Johnson are only some of the super-talents now playing in clubs around town.
SOURCE: BroadwayStars at 05:58PM[SHARE]Paige O'Hara, Robby Benson, Terrence Mann, and Gary Beach talk about the magic of Beauty and the Beast.
SOURCE: BroadwayStars at 05:58PM[SHARE]BroadwayStars talks with the pumped and ripped Broadway veteran who serves as Jackie Warner's co-trainer on the new Bravo TV reality series Thintervention.
SOURCE: BroadwayStars at 05:58PM[SHARE]Tenor Vittorio Grigolo, the Metropolitan Opera's newest star, is definitely ready for his close-up.
SOURCE: BroadwayStars at 05:58PM[SHARE]As a tremendously exciting new season begins at the New York City Opera, general manager and artistic director George Steel waxes enthusiastic
SOURCE: BroadwayStars at 05:58PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1972 (MGM/Polydor) Those who know Grease only from its inexplicably popular, sophomoric film version or the pumped-up, wrongheaded 1994 Broadway revisal will be surpr…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:20PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1971 (Painted Smiles/Varèse Sarabande) Even if it didn't star Barbara Cook, in resplendent voice in her last Broadway musical, this would be the most glorious cast a…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:13PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1979 (Columbia/Fynsworth Alley) This is the cheeriest musical ever written about escaping from the Nazis. Jerry Herman has dismissed the show as a mistake ("It just d…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:57PM[SHARE] 
