Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Original Broadway Cast, 2015 (Atlantic, 2CDs) From start to finish, this recording marvelously captures the vibrancy of composer-lyricist-star Lin-Manuel Miranda's groundbreaking and record-…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 07:42PM[SHARE]Thursday, December 31, 2015
Original Off-Broadway Cast, 2009 (Nonesuch/PS Classics) What started off as a coruscating musical-comedy cavalcade ended dour and dumpy with the 2008 premiere of Road Show, the final (?) inc…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:33PM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 13, 2015
George and Ira Gershwin's utterly delightful 1926 musical Oh, Kay! is the current production of Mel Miller's essential Musicals Tonight! company.
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:57PM[SHARE]Friday, October 9, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1974 (Columbia /Sony) Designed to do for the 1940s what Grease did for the 1950s, Over Here! is a supremely silly tale of romance and espionage on a cross-country tra…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:21AM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1950 (Columbia/Sony) For Out of This World, a modern-day retelling of the Amphitryon legend, Cole Porter produced a gorgeous score. Unfortunately, it was tied to an u…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:16AM[SHARE]Studio Cast, 1996 (Original Cast Records) A Richard Rodgers Award-winner and a minor Off-Broadway hit, this chamber musical by Robert Lindsey-Nassif (or Robert Nassif Lindsey, depending on h…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:50AM[SHARE]Studio Cast, 1952 (Columbia/Sony) One of musical director/conductor Lehman Engel's sturdier studio-cast efforts, this rendering of the 1936 hit by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart tries harde…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:17AM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1981 (Original Cast Records) Although the subject was ripe and the characters were fascinating, Onward Victoria was a one-performance disaster that nonetheless yielde…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:12AM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1978 (Columbia/Sony) Based on the stage farce Twentieth Century, best known as a Hollywood film starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, this 1930s spoof might hav…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 10:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, October 8, 2015
Original Broadway Cast Members, 1944 (Decca/MCA) Record companies treated Broadway musicals pretty poorly until the concept of the original cast album became firmly entrenched, so this colle…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 06:14PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1943 (Decca) This incomplete recording of composer Kurt Weill's One Touch of Venus paints a very deceptive picture of the score. While there are 17 songs in the score…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:53PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1980 (Original Cast Records) From overture to finale, One Night Stand is as dynamic a score as Jule Styne ever wrote. But Herb Gardner proved to be inept as a librett…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:42PM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1980 (Warner Bros./no CD) Beginning in the late 1970s, the theater turned a nostalgic and admiring eye on the black musicals of earlier years " the imperishable s…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:29PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1963 (RCA) 110 in the Shade is the Harvey Schmidt-Tom Jones musical based on N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker. As heard on this recording, the songs are replete with s…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:48PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1959 (Kapp/MCA) The fairy tale source material is "The Princess and the Pea," given a satirical fleshing-out. But Once Upon a Mattress was really a Cinderella show. I…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:18PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1990 (RCA) One of the strongest works to date by lyricist Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty, Once on This Island is a juicy adaptation of the Rosa Guy novel M…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:59PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1965 (RCA) This is a fabulous score. Alan Jay Lerner's lyrics are among his wittiest and most poetic, while Burton Lane's music is as melodic and moving as anything e…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:27PM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Off-Broadway Cast, 1987 (That's Entertainment/JAY) During the opening number of this musical based on Amphitryon, as the three-man chorus sings "We are the chorus / Please don't ignore us," …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:58PM[SHARE]Original London Cast, 1960 (Decca/Deram) This musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist was quite a phenomenon in its day, beginning as a modest, fringe-type production in London a…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:28AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Original Broadway Cast, 1943 (Decca) This thrilling cast album of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! score is the one, the only, the original that's credited with starting it all. The sho…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:50PM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1988 (DRG) Here is one of the most disappointing cast albums ever made in that it utterly fails to capture the hilarity of this show. Oil City Symphony was a stra…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:22PM[SHARE]Original London Cast, 1963 (Decca/Must Close Saturday) A hit in London, a flop d'estime on Broadway, and the basis of a very odd film, Oh! What a Lovely War was a show that slotted vintage W…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:00PM[SHARE]Studio Cast, 1955 (Columbia/Sony) With a score by George and Ira Gershwin, and a book by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, this 1926 lark is a tuneful jaunt through the then-familiar territory…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:47PM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1972 (Bell/no CD) After appearing in Noël Coward's last musical, The Girl Who Came to Supper, Roderick Cook compiled a revue of Coward's songs that was first p…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:54PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1958 (Columbia/DRG) For their Broadway songwriting debut, the Hollywood team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans freely adapted/the British film The Captain's Paradise an…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:44PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1969 (Aidart/DRG) No stars; not recommended. Given that numerous scores by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and Jerome Kern remain unrecorded, the existence of this alb…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:33PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1981 (Original Cast) It may have been pure folly for Donald Driver and Michael Valenti to invite comparison to The Boys from Syracuse with this modern musical retelli…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:22PM[SHARE]Monday, October 5, 2015
Broadway Cast, 1952 (Capitol/DRG/Angel) Â The first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize, Of Thee I Sing (1931) is glorious. With music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin, and a book by Geo…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:14PM[SHARE]Sunday, October 4, 2015
London Concert Cast, 1990 (EMI) Here is a rare find: a lost gem of a musical by Cole Porter that was produced in England but never on Broadway. This star-studded 1990 concert performance of …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:01PM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1993 (DRG) Can anyone blame Iibrettist-composer-lyricist Dan Goggin for not wanting to mess with the formula that made Nunsense such a success? Of course not. Sti…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:51PM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1986 (DRG) This album preserves much of the straightforward charm of the show on which author Dan Goggin would eventually build a worldwide franchise. The story o…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 11:55AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
