Cast Albums Blog

Month Archive:  January 2019

REVIEW: Follies - 2018 National Theatre


Recording Cover

A year after it was recorded, the cast album of the National Theatre’s 2017 production of Follies was finally released last week as a download, with the promise of a CD to come. Given that the production’s greatest strengths lay in the book scenes - director Dominic Cooke moved the show back towards a text that is closer to the 1971 original than the current published script, and got his cast to give an electrifying account of James Goldman’s rather heightened dialogue – a cast recording of this production, while welcome, was arguably not essential, not least because several of this production’s leads, while they gave tremendously moving performances, are (much) stronger actors than singers. Having said that, Stephen Sondheim’s score for Follies is one of the American musical theatre’s great landmarks, and a new recording is always welcome – and while it isn’t necessarily an essential purchase, those of us who loved the production, even if we had reservations about some aspects of it, have been eagerly awaiting it ever since it was announced.

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