Saturday, February 14, 2015
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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 09:56AM[SHARE]Thursday, February 12, 2015
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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:25PM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 11, 2015
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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:38PM[SHARE]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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:55PM[SHARE]Friday, February 6, 2015
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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:11PM[SHARE]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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:59PM[SHARE]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-…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:24PM[SHARE]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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:49PM[SHARE]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. …
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:25PM[SHARE]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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:06PM[SHARE]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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:38PM[SHARE]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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:56PM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 4, 2015
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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 09:08PM[SHARE]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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 07:40PM[SHARE]"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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 06:59PM[SHARE]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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 06:50PM[SHARE]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…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 05:11PM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1974 (Records & Publishing/AEI) This show dates from the mid '70s, but its heart lies more with The Boy Friend than with The Boys in the Band. The creators to…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 02:31PM[SHARE]Original London Cast, 1954 (HMV/Sepia) A pastiche of 1920s tuners with an absurd but dear book and a Sandy Wilson score packed with wonderful tunes, The Boy Friend is presented here in a cas…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:39PM[SHARE]London Cast, 1987 (First Night) This live recording of the revue Blues in the Night is a real gem. Arrangements that split the difference between jazz and theater combine with fetching p…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:27PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1944 (Decca) While the show threw off no enduring hit songs, and is seldom revived, the cast album of this Harold Arlen-E.Y. Harburg wartime hit has rarely been out o…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:10PM[SHARE]Saturday, January 31, 2015
Choreographer Randy Skinner has had hits with a number of revivals, revisals, and others shows based on pre-existing, classic material, from 42nd Street to White Christmas to the City Center…
SOURCE: BroadwayStars at 05:32PM[SHARE]Original London Cast, 1983 (Castle) This is the story of Mrs. Johnstone, a lower-class Liverpudlian whose husband deserts her, even though she's pregnant and already has seven children. Mrs.…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 04:33PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1989 (DRG) The title of this show, taken from a Fats Waller song, pretty much announces what it will be: Another revue-style look at African-American entertainment in…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 03:00PM[SHARE]Studio Cast, 1960 (Angel/Sepia) It seemed a radical idea in 1929: an operetta with believable characters, literate dialogue, first-rate lyrics, and a minimum of the coyness associated with t…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:53PM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1987 (JAY) On hearing this recording, listeners are bound to wonder why the show was not more successful. The score is filled with intricate, catchy melodies by D…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:42PM[SHARE]Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1970 (Roulette/Original Cast Records) An interesting autobiography of a fictional black playwright who is frequently angry and sometimes simply yearning, this mus…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:36PM[SHARE]World Premiere Recording, 2000 (Original Cast Records) Betty Comden and Adolph Green followed On the Town with this disappointment, a satire of the 1920s. Except for a dance sequence that ap…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:26PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1985 (MCA) Country-music songwriter Roger Miller furnished the score for this musical version of the Mark Twain classic Huckleberry Finn, and the result is a twangy B…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:18PM[SHARE]Original Broadway Cast, 1996 (Universal/Decca) Onstage, Big was a textbook example of how a top creative team with all the right intentions could destroy the charm of a beloved film. On disc…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 01:06PM[SHARE]Off Broadway Cast, 1998 (Varèse Sarabande) At a time when large-scale revues were part of the standard traffic on Broadway, Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer was a Bentley. It had great st…
SOURCE: castalbumreviews.com at 12:49PM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
