977 stories by "Michael Portantiere"
Original Broadway Cast, 1945 (Decca) This landmark musical is not the most popular of the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon in terms of the number of productions, but it may well be the most bel…
Original Broadway Cast, 1961 (MGM/Polydor) Is there an odder Broadway musical than Carnival? Even with an all-American creative team, its sensibility " alternately sentimental, stark, and ra…
Original Broadway Cast, 1943 (Decca) It's easy to understand why Carmen Jones was such a hit on Broadway in 1943. Not only was it a novelty " an Americanized opera with an all-black cast " i…
Original Broadway Cast Members, 1980 (Original Cast Records) Picture Mamma Mia! leavened with wit, charm, and soaring melody, and you'll have some notion of this two-week 1979 flop. Both are…
Original London Cast, 1968 (Decca) No stars; not recommended. After a long period during which London produced few musicals of consequence, things picked up in the '60s. Some even called it …
Original Broadway Cast, 1946 (Decca) The well-produced CD transfer of recordings made by members of the original cast of Call Me Mister, featuring a rediscovered, extended version of compose…
Original Broadway Cast, 1956 (Columbia/Sony) This recording starts with the most exciting overture in Broadway history, and just keeps getting better after that. Leonard Bernstein's gilded s…
Original Broadway Cast, 1953 (Capitol/Angel) Although Gwen Verdon was catapulted to stardom in this pizzazz-y, Broadway-Gallic concoction, the true star of the show is Cole Porter. The great…
Original Broadway Cast, 1960 (Columbia/Sony) Composition, performance, and audio technology all came together to make this a first-rate cast recording. Although Camelot is not as highly rega…
Dinah Shore With Original Broadway Cast, 1950 (RCA/Flare) After the smash-hit Annie Get Your Gun, an Ethel Merman-Irving Berlin rematch was inevitable. In Call Me Madam, once again, a real-l…
Film Soundtrack, 1943 (Rhino-Turner) It may not have been Porgy and Bess, but Cabin in the Sky was, in 1940, a new type of all-black Broadway show. Its tale of a heaven-and-hell struggle for…
Original Broadway Cast, 1966 (Columbia/Sony) Christopher Isherwood's play I Am a Camera, set in Berlin during the rise of Hitler, had been a notable stage success, but the property entered a…
Original Broadway Cast, 1954 (Capitol/DRG) No stars; not recommended. Shirley Booth never had much luck with musicals. Witness this elegant piece of hackwork " which, at eight months, ran lo…
Off-Broadway Cast, 1967 (RCA/DRG) While this production did not achieve great success onstage, it did yield a cast album to be reckoned with. Most important, this is the only complete record…
London Cast, 1996 (Polydor) Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn cleverly reworked their 1975 flop ]eeves into this chamber-size musical chronicling the misadventures of the hapless, rich-…
Original Broadway Cast, 1960 (Columbia/Sony) Here is pure pleasure. Bye Bye Birdie, with a book by Michael Stewart, managed to satirize the Elvis Presley craze, racial prejudice, the generat…
Studio Cast, 2002 (Original Cast Records) Five city dwellers share a brownstone but only occasionally interact with one another in this show by Josh Rubins, Andrew Cadiff, and Peter Larson. …
Original Broadway Cast, 1996 (RCA) The songs aren't the main point of this brilliant revue, which uses dance to chart the history of black men in America. The hip, hip-hop survey stretches f…
Original London Cast, 2002 (Sony) This is the world's first pop-rock, English-Hindi-Punjabi stage musical " but it isn't as exotic as it sounds. Andrew Lloyd Webber produced the show, "based…
Original Australian Cast, 1998 (EMI) Peter Allen wrote only one musical " the inane Legs Diamond, still prized by connoisseurs of flops " but his life story plays itself out in this glossy s…
Original Broadway Cast, 1980 (Varèse Sarabande) No stars; not recommended. What were they thinking? Clearly unaware that Elvis had left the building, the creators of Bye Bye Birdie reunited…
Original Broadway Cast, 1947 (RCA) This is one of the most exciting cast albums of the pre-LP era. It was RCA's first stab at Broadway, and although the mono sound is antique by today's stan…
"World Premiere Cast Recording," 2000 (Original Cast Records, 2CDs) This is possibly the strangest cast album ever. The show Breakfast at Tiffany's was a notorious flop of the 1960s, undergo…
Original Broadway Cast, 1962 (Columbia/DRG) This is a swell listen with a game cast, a lively Ronny Graham-Milton Schafer score, and the sort of floppola production numbers that are more fun…
Studio Cast, 1953 (Columbia/Sony) Rodgers and Hart's 1938 adaptation of The Comedy of Errors is one of their most sublime achievements. The score, melodically and harmonically unsurpassed an…
