Cast Albums Blog
REVIEW: Rags - Original London Cast
It’s not impossible that somebody could spin a doctoral thesis out of picking apart all the various revisions that have been made over the years to Rags, the four-performance 1986 Broadway flop with a Charles Strouse-Stephen Schwartz score. That score, which contains a great deal of Strouse’s best music, is the reason so many people have tried to fix a show that stubbornly refuses to work; the 1987 studio recording, which features most of the Broadway production’s cast with Julia Migenes standing in for original leading lady Teresa Stratas, is one of the most glorious musical theatre albums of its decade, and gives the impression of a show that very much deserved to be a hit.
That 1987 recording, though, is the reason people approaching this new London cast recording of the most recent revised version of the show might want to manage their expectations: the show has undergone many revisions over the past three decades, and there are significant differences between the version of the score heard in the now-standard version of the show and the version represented on the studio album.
REVIEW: Songs From Inside My Locker - Robbie Rozelle, Live at Feinstein's/54 BELOW
The first line of designer/director/producer/singer Robbie Rozelle's liner notes for his debut cabaret album – "I never expected to be a performer" – might lead you to lower your expectations. There's no need: Songs From Inside My Locker – a Kickstarter-funded live recording of Rozelle's show at New York's 54 Below – is a delight. It's a brave show for Rozelle to put out there as the basis of his first solo recording – the show's backbone is Rozelle's own coming-of-age story, which inevitably means this album presents the listener with a very personal collection of songs and stories – but Rozelle is such an endearing, engaging presence that this hour or so in his company flies by.
REVIEW: The Liz Swados Project
Liz Swados was the kind of artist not easily categorized. When she died (in January, 2016), the headline of her New York Times obituary remembered her as "Creator of Socially Conscious Musicals." Although "creator" has become an over-applied term in our current moment, it is certainly apt for her: composer and lyricist, writer, director, choreographer, memoirist, filmmaker and teacher.
While none of her projects ever really penetrated pop culture consciousness to become part of the canon, Swados's impact might best be measured by the influence she had on the generation that learned from her, and by that measure, she was a giant. The presence of a number of notable writers performing on this album, including Dave Malloy, Taylor Mac, Shaina Taub, The Bengsons, Michael R. Jackson, Grace McLean, and in a poignant posthumously released track, Michael Friedman, speaks volumes about Swados's standing among her colleagues.
The Liz Swados Project offers audiences a taste of what Swados had to offer, a survey course that will surely inspire more than a few to sign up for further study. A songwriter of remarkable range, the selections here range from vaudevillian musical comedy (such as "The Red Queen" from Alice in Concert, performed with aplomb by Mac) to free verse ("Song of a Child Prostitute" from Runaways, essayed by Sophia Ann Caruso, who sang the song in the recent Encores! Off-Center production) to experimental performance ("Bird Lament," recorded by Swados herself).
REVIEW: The New Yorkers - Encores! Concert Cast
Three years after it played at New York's City Center, here's the cast recording of the Encores! Production of what, here, is billed as "Cole Porter's The New Yorkers." It's not, as the liner notes will tell you, precisely an authentic recreation of the 1930 original, but don't let that put you off: this album is an hour and five minutes of the kind of sheer pleasure you wish someone could bottle.
REVIEW: Anything Can Happen In the Theater - The Musical World of Maury Yeston
One of the delights of listening to the new cast album of Anything Can Happen in the Theater: The Musical World of Maury Yeston is realizing what a musical chameleon Maury Yeston is. Unlike say the songs of Stephen Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, or William Finn, Yeston’s music and lyrics are happily sui generis, always perfectly suited and crafted to the project at hand yet not always immediately identifiable as a “Yeston tune.” Tracks on the album (which capture this musical revue which premiered at the Triad Theater in New York in fall 2019 and then at the York Theatre Company) tend to alternate between upbeat catchy group numbers and sensuous ballads culled from both known Yeston properties like Nine and Grand Hotel (Yeston’s Tony Award-winning musical Titanic isn’t represented here), but also lesser-known projects such as In the Beginning, Death Takes a Holiday, and The Queen of Basin Street. Rounding out the revue are a number of stand-alone songs that don’t come from any specific project but which happily more than hold their own.