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The Record on Broadway Musicals
| Article
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20595 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
1,779 Words |
| Author
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William Ruhlmann
William Ruhlmann is a critic based in New York. His seventh
book, The Rolling Stones, was published last September. |
Though the landscape of Broadway has changed undeniably over the last twenty-five years, one aspect of America's center for theater might have been expected to stay the same, if for no other reason than marketing: When an audience streamed out of a big Broadway musical, they could usually find, if not on sale in the lobby then at their local record stores, an original cast album recording of the songs from the hit show they'd just seen. Especially in the days between the rise of the long-playing (LP) record in the 1950s and the domination of popular music by rock 'n' roll in the 1960s, Broadway cast albums were frequently among the nation's best-sellers.
No more. If you walked out of a Broadway theater in the summer of 1992 having just seen Falsettos, Five Guys Named Moe, Jelly's Last Jam, Man of La Mancha, Miss Saigon, or The Phantom of the Opera, you would discover that no original Broadway cast album existed for any of these successful shows. Last year, The Secret Garden and The Will Rogers Follies went without Broadway cast albums from their spring openings until December. And Grand Hotel, which opened on Broadway November 12, 1989, and won five Tony Awards, did not have a cast album released until June 23, 1992--after the show had closed. In fact, it took so long for a company to decide to record Grand Hotel that the original cast had to be reassembled and actor David Carroll, who originated the crucial role of the Baron, died of AIDS at the recording session, thereby preventing the album, from being credited as an "original" cast recording.
There are a variety of reasons why the once-standard Broadway cast album has ceased to be an automatically available souvenir of a hit show. For one thing, the proliferation of imported musicals has tended to mean that while a Broadway cast album doesn't exist, a London cast album often does. Among currently running shows, this is the case for Five Guys Named Moe, Miss Saigon, and The Phantom of the Opera. In fact, each of these cast albums was available in the United States prior to its Broadway opening, thus helping to promote the show in advance.
Of the other shows without original Broadway cast albums, Man of La Mancha does have a Broadway cast album from its first run in the 1960s, though no recording of the Raul Julia--Sheena Easton revival is available; Falsettos, a combination of two earlier off-Broadway shows, has cast albums for those versions, which have been combined in a recent reissue; and Jelly's Last Jam is scheduled to be recorded. At the same time, such spring 1992 openings as Crazy for You, Guys and Dolls, and The Most Happy Fella already have cast albums in the
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