The first cast recording of the new theatre season will be Jason Robert Brown's 13, which Ghostlight Records will release online for digital download September 30. The cast is recording the show this weekend, before even previews have begun (September 16). Ghostlight will release the CD in stores later this Fall.

The long awaited premiere of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog has finally arrived. Through July 19 only, you can watch all three parts online for free. Afterward, the film will continue to be available through iTunes, with a future DVD release promised (featuring a sung DVD commentary).

Happy third birthday to Middle8.com, Australia's only CD store specializing in show music.

To celebrate, they're holding an online this Saturday and Sunday (July 12-13) where everything will be 15% off!

Reprinted from CASTRECL with permission from David L. Hobbs:

A list of New York cast albums, made for my own consumption and offered, as it was last year, in case it's of use or interest to others. Note this list only covers shows which opened during the 2007-08 eligibility years for the Tony and Lortel Awards. Off-off-B'way is not included in order to keep the list manageable. Corrections, additions and news of unpublicized demos & promos featuring New York casts are most welcome.

One might be forgiven for stumbling over the name of Adrift in Macao composer Peter Melnick -- in the liner notes, he's even quoted referring to himself as "Richard Rodgers' 'other' grandson," an oblique reference to his famed cousin Adam Guettel. It's unclear on the basis of the album whether this state of affairs will continue. While far from a major work (one could argue that all three of Guettel's scores rank with the work of Sondheim -- but let's stop inciting a family feud, shall we?), the score to this noir pastiche is an old-fashioned, light, infectious piece that will play well in regional theatre.

The lyrics, on the other hand, are entirely modern--parodies of torch songs, songs with lyrics supposedly improvised on the spot, songs about themselves--in the manner that's taken over Broadway in the last decade or so. Fortunately, slumming lyricist Christopher Durang has sufficient skill and talent to bring most of them off ("Rick's Song" is a shaky mashup of "The Song That Goes Like This" and "The Diva's Lament" from Spamalot, but "Pretty Moon Over Macao," "In a Foreign City," and "The Chase" all score).

Unfortunately, this still means it's at best a matter of taste; one wonders whether the audience that wants to hear Melnick's score is the same as the audience that wants to hear Durang's lyrics. And when it comes to the weird "Asian" numbers for "Tempura" (Orville Mendoza), one wonders how many people want to hear any of it at all.

The cast is uniformly strong: Mendoza, who has the most floppo material, manages to sparkle with natural charm. Rachel deBenedet and Alan Campbell have the rare treat of playing (with gusto) romantic leads with better and funnier songs than their comic foils; still, Michele Ragusa and Will Swenson (the latter as "Rick Shaw"; ugh) acquit themselves well.

And whatever is lacking in individual numbers, all can be forgiven when the cast breaks into the charming title song or, better, the intoxicating "Ticky Ticky Tock" finale. In fact, if there's anything that inspires confidence in the future of Melnick and Durang as a songwriting duo, it's this simple, silly, pleasingly anachronistic sing-a-long for the company.

ArkivMusic.com has begun issuing CD-Rs of an out-of-print or otherwise generally unavailable recordings. For the usual cost of a CD, they'll burn you a disc and include reproductions of the original artwork and liner notes. But unlike the bootleggers on eBay, the recordings are fully licensed from the record labels. Max Preeo hinted on CASTRECL that a major label is negotiating to use ArkivMusic to release its back catalog...