Cast Albums Blog

Author Archive:  sfarrow

REVIEW: The New Yorkers - Encores! Concert Cast


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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.

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REVIEW: Randy Rainbow - Hey Gurl, It's Christmas!


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It was probably inevitable that comedian/singer/YouTube phenomenon Randy Rainbow would release a Christmas recording. Rainbow is a prodigiously talented writer and performer whose sweetly vicious satirical jabs at political figures have deservedly drawn a huge internet following, and his sharply subversive video parodies are often very funny indeed.

Whether those talents, impressive as they are, sustain over the course of seven tracks is another question. There’s a great deal here that is utterly charming; even over a span of just twenty-nine minutes, though, this album is perhaps a little much when taken all at once. The thing about YouTube parodies is that we watch them in isolation – you (or at least I) watch the latest one, and then move on to something else. Seven tracks in succession, I’m afraid, gave me a sugar rush.

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REVIEW: Follies - 2018 National Theatre


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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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REVIEW: Brigadoon - 2017 New York City Center


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I should probably admit this upfront: as much as I love the score – and I really love the score – on stage, Brigadoon doesn’t do a great deal for me. I'm well aware that there are people who would probably have me arrested for saying so, but there’s something about Alan Jay Lerner’s book for the show that always feels slightly synthetic, and I am severely allergic to cutesy dancing villagers in period costumes, with or without kilts and overdone accents.

As a score, on the other hand, Brigadoon is glorious. This is some of Frederick Loewe’s loveliest music, and when it’s performed well, as it certainly is here, it is absolutely transporting, even if you usually have to look past a few dodgy ersatz-Scottish accents. The songs at the heart of this score are some of the very best you’ll find in any golden-age Broadway musical. The Love of My Life is a fine character number, Almost Like Being In Love is one of the all-time great duets, and Come To Me, Bend To Me and There But For You, Go I are simply gorgeous.

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REVIEW: King Kong -- 1961 London Cast


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You can all breathe a sigh of relief. Aside from the title, this show has absolutely nothing in common with the much-lambasted ape-puppet extravaganza that recently opened on Broadway. This King Kong was a landmark piece of theatre in apartheid-era South Africa, and is a biographical musical based on the life of heavyweight boxer Ezekiel Dlamini, whose nickname in the ring was -- yes -- King Kong. The show premiered at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg in 1959, and was produced in London in 1961. Thanks to the invaluable Stage Door Records, it's the London production's cast album we have here, packaged with selections from the original South African recording and three covers of numbers from the show.

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