969 stories by "Michael Portantiere"
Original Broadway Cast, 1951 (RCA/Sepia) A spiffy overture, a swell opening chorus ("The Tour Must Go On"), then out comes our heroine with an even better character-establishing number, "I W…
World Premiere Recording, 1997 (RCA) Avenue X shows how some folks in the racially divided America of the early 1960s tried to achieve peace and harmony through rock and roll. The theme is s…
Original Cast (London and Broadway), 1959 (Angel) Producer Alexander Cohen had the good sense to bring a host of newcomers to Broadway from England, among them Michael Flanders and Donald Sw…
Studio Recordings by the Original Broadway Cast, 1935 (Smithsonian/no CD) Always welcome on Broadway during the Depression was a star-packed musical revue. At Home Abroad, billed as "A Music…
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1964 (Broadway East/AEI) 0 stars, not recommended. One day, sometime in the 1980s, several boxes of the long-out-of-print LP of The Athenian Touch turned up in a …
Original Broadway Cast, 1948 (Decca) The Theatre Guild was riding the success of the still-running Oklahoma! when Armina Marshall Langner suggested that The Pursuit of Happiness, a play she …
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1968 (RCA/no CD) A young black man (Clifton Davis) and a young white woman (Carole Demas), both veterans of the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention in …
Concept Album, 1954 (Columbia/Masterworks Broadway) Based on the 1920s newspaper columns of Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel stars a cockroach. Ostensibly, the columns were the work of said …
Original Broadway Cast, 2022 (Masterworks Broadway) Meet the semi-jukebox musical: Almost Famous, based on the film about a 1970s rock band and the teen journalist William (Casey Likes) who …
Original Broadway Cast, 2012 (Backlot Music) If you love Lin-Manuel Miranda's score for In the Heights, you'll find lots of pleasures in Bring It On. This musical adaptation of a 2000 film a…
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1970 (MIO International/no CD) This version of Colette is a charming play with music. The play itself was written by Elinor Jones, then married to lyricist Tom Jo…
Original Broadway Cast, 1965 (United Artists/Kritzerland) What Robert Wright and George Forrest had previously done successfully with Grieg and Borodin, they did with Rachmaninoff in creatin…
Original London Cast, 1971 (RCA/Stage Door) The original London cast album of this Henry James adaptation is also the de facto original Broadway cast album, since the West End's two leads, H…
Original Television Cast, 1958 (Columbia/Sony) The later-in-life work of most great musical theater writers isn't up to the quality of their more youthful forays; but with the exception of h…
Original Broadway Cast, 1971 (A&R, 2LPs; no CD) Onstage, this piece by Melvin van Peebles was intensely theatrical; I was actually frightened when cast member Minnie Gentry looked straig…
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1999 (Varèse Sarabande) It's the very model of a modern chamber musical: a four-character, four-musician adaptation of a Thomas Hardy short story, here brought t…
Original Broadway Cast, 2023 (Wine & Peaches LLC) New York, New York is destined to go down in musical theater history books for its creative team, which includes the legendary composer …
Original Broadway Cast, 2023 (Masterworks Broadway)Â In 2021, the South Korean music industry earned around $773 million in revenue, a figure that has been increasing since K-pop as a gen…
Original Broadway Cast, 2023 (Concord Theatricals) Broadway musicals based on movies are nothing new, but Billy Wilder's masterpiece Some Like it Hot may hold the distinction of being the on…
Original Public Works Cast, 2022 (Concord Theatrical Recordings) The second of composer-lyricist Shaina Taub's Shakespeare adaptations for the Public Theater's Public Works program, followin…
Original Public Works Cast, 2018 (Craft Recordings) The first (and better) of Shaina Taub's pair of Shakespeare-inspired scores for the Public Theater's Public Works program, Twelfth Night m…
Original Broadway Cast, 2011 (Masterworks Broadway) If you're looking for an under-the-radar guilty pleasure album, you could do worse than Wonderland. It's the silliest and least self-impor…
Original Broadway Cast, 2012 (Masterworks Broadway) In "Just Another Day in Hollywood," the ensemble of Chaplin sings of "Stars on the rise / Stars on the fall / Stars you forget / Stars you…
Original London Cast, 1963 (Decca/Must Close Saturday) There's no question that Half A Sixpence, the musical adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel Kipps, was all about spotlighting Tommy Steel…
Studio Cast, 2021 (Polydor) O stars, not recommended. What's there to write about Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cinderella that hasn't already been written and/or said? Though this "modern twist…
