973 stories by "Michael Portantiere"
Original 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 whistle…
Original 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. Rober…
Original 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 rec…
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 contai…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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'…
