Cast Albums Blog

Month Archive:  August 2018

REVIEW: Jessica Vosk - Wild and Free


Recording Cover

You might not yet be familiar with the name Jessica Vosk. As a performer whose most significant credits are Fruma-Sarah in the Fiddler revival and the 20th Broadway Elphaba, she hasn't yet had the opportunity to breakout and ascend to true Broadway stardom. If we live in a just universe, her debut album, Wild and Free, would be that opportunity.

Vosk has the kind of backstory that press agents dream about: she left a successful Wall Street career in her twenties to pursue showbiz, working her way quickly up the musical theatre ladder while amassing a cult following of fans and establishing herself as a first-rate cabaret performer. Those fans rallied with remarkable speed to crowdfund this album while she was touring the country in Wicked, and now the album drops not long after she stepped into the Broadway production.

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REVIEW: Bat Out of Hell - Original London Cast


Recording Cover

Released in Canada last year to coincide with the show’s Toronto opening and only now getting a full UK release several months into the second London run, the original cast recording of Bat out of Hell: the Musical turns out to sound exactly the way you’d expect it to if, like me, you’ve yet to see the show. At twenty-one (long) tracks over two discs, the album appears to give a reasonably complete account of the show’s principal musical numbers, most of which have been lifted from Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell trilogy. Either you like Jim Steinman’s floridly grandiose, quasi-operatic brand of rock or you don’t; I do, and I was prepared to love this album, but I never quite got there. It’s never bad, but it’s also never surprising: divorced from the show’s context, you’re left with a selection of mostly familiar songs presented in arrangements which never stray too far from Steinman’s trademark sound, performed by a superb band and a cast of apparently iron-lunged singers, none of whom are as distinctive or as interesting as the people who performed the songs on the original recordings.

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