Cast recording
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A cast recording is a recording of a musical that is intended to document the songs as they were performed in the show and experienced by the audience. An original cast recording, as the name implies, features the voices of the show's original cast. A cast recording featuring the first cast to perform a musical in a particular venue is known, for example, as an "original Broadway cast recording" or an "original London cast recording".
Cast recordings are (almost always) studio recordings rather than live recordings. The recorded song lyrics and orchestrations are identical (or very similar to) those of the songs as performed in the theatre. Like any studio performance, the recording is of course an idealized rendering, more glossily perfect than any live performance could be, and without audible audience reaction. Nevertheless, the listener who has attended the live show expects it to be an accurate souvenir of the experience.
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[edit] History
The British were the first to make cast recordings, and they were also the first to make original London cast recordings of shows that had already opened on Broadway, but had not been recorded with their original Broadway cast. This led to the odd situation of having, for example, a 1928 recording of the London cast of Show Boat, but no recording with the actual 1927 Broadway cast, and a recording of the London cast of Sigmund Romberg's The Desert Song, but not of the 1926 Broadway cast - even though both of these shows are Broadway musicals, rather than British ones.
Prior to the development of original cast recordings, there had of course been recordings of songs from musicals, and collections of several such songs, and recordings of songs performed by cast members; but they were recordings of songs, not recordings of a musical. For example, Danny Kaye made a set of recordings of songs from Lady in the Dark. Even though Danny Kaye was a member of the cast, this was certainly not an original cast recording not merely because the arrangements and presentation were different, but because in this recording, Danny Kaye performed Gertrude Lawrence's songs! (Gertrude Lawrence did record her songs for RCA Victor.)
The first American original cast recording as we know it was an early experimental LP of program transcription of selections from The Band Wagon, a 1931 revue starring Fred and Adele Astaire.
The following year, Jack Kapp produced an album of songs from Show Boat timed to the 1932 Ziegfeld revival. This album featured Helen Morgan and Paul Robeson doing their songs from the show but used studio cast singers for the leads.
As the 1930s progressed, Liberty Music Shop in New York City made mini albums of songs from the Ethel Merman musical comedies Red Hot and Blue and Stars in Your Eyes. These were more like personality recordings, since the arrangements were not the ones heard in the theatre.
The first complete original cast albums was Marc Blitzstein's 1938 recordings of songs from The Cradle Will Rock although these were recorded with just piano accompaniment and not the show's orchestra. In 1984, the original recordings from Very Warm for May (1939) were discovered and issued on an LP.
RCA Victor had made an album of the key songs from Porgy and Bess using the theatre orchestra but featuring Met opera singers Lawrence Tibbett and Helen Jepson singing the songs. Decca riposted with another album of the same highlights sung by the actual stars of the original production, although recorded five years after the premiere. When a revival was staged in 1942, Decca issued a second album of some of the secondary songs from the opera by the revival cast and later combined these two albums onto one LP and called it the "original cast recording". Decca also issued an album of songs from the all-soldier revue This Is the Army by Irving Berlin.
Finally in 1943, came Decca's recording of Oklahoma!. The show was the biggest hit Broadway had experienced up until that time and people who could not get tickets bought the album. It would eventually sell over 1 million copies as a set of 78-rpm records, and millions more on LP and Compact Discs.
Decca soon began recording every hit musical that came along including Carmen Jones, Carousel, and Annie Get Your Gun. Soon, all the other record companies were bidding for the rights to record Broadway shows with their original casts.
Capitol recorded St. Louis Woman in 1946, and RCA Victor recorded Brigadoon in 1947. Although Decca abandoned the cast album field in the mid 1950's, Capitol and Victor actively bid for recording rights. Sometimes problems arose as when RCA Victor signed on to record the 1950 musical Call Me Madam even though the show's star, Ethel Merman was then under exclusive contact to Decca Records. This resulted in two albums of the score being released: Merman with a studio cast on her label, while the rest of the Broadway cast made an album fro RCA Victor with Dinah Shore singing the Merman role!
The label that would dominate the field until the late 1970s, however, was Columbia. They began by issuing an album of the 1946 revival of Show Boat followed by the original Broadway cast of Finian's Rainbow in 1947. A year later the label introduced LP records and used the format for two best sellers: Kiss Me, Kate and South Pacific, both recorded and released in 1949.
Under the leadership of Columbia's Goddard Lieberson, the label's cast recordings came to define the genre. Columbia Masterworks produced the original cast recordings of such shows as The Pajama Game, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Gypsy: A Musical Fable, and Camelot) Lieberson also recorded important shows that had failed at the box office including Candide and Anyone Can Whistle. In 1956, he recorded Frank Loesser's musical The Most Happy Fella complete on three LPs, the first time an entire Broadway show had been fully recorded.
A 1970 documentary by D. A. Pennebaker, Original Cast Album—Company gives a straightforward view of the making of a cast recording. It shows how the recording studio looks, how performers are arranged, and how the director behaves. The cast feels the pressure of delivering a definitive performance, with a degree of perfection beyond that ever required on stage, under a time limit imposed by the high cost of studio time.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s it was not uncommon for cast albums to become best sellers. My Fair Lady, The Music Man, Funny Girl, and Hello, Dolly! all reached the #1 position on the Billboard magazine best-sellers chart. As popular music split away from the traditional Tin Pan Ally song stylings of Broadway and Hollywood, and Rock music became the dominant pop culture form, show albums began selling less well. Also as radio and TV moved away from showcasing Broadway numbers the ability for a show to reach an audience beyond the traditional Broadway fans lessened.
Today few show albums even appear in the Billboard top 200, and the rare breakout hit like Wicked receive no radio airplay.
New boutique labels such as PS Classics and Ghostlight release many of the cast albums of recent Broadway hits. With the recent merger of Sony Music (formerly Columbia Records) and BMG Music (formerly RCA Victor), many older cast recordings are being deleted and the new company is in no great rush to record new shows or reissue titles from the vaults.
[edit] Technical limitations
A 10-inch 78-rpm disc could hold about 3½ minutes of music per side. A 12-inch 78-rpm could last 4½ minutes. Early albums had to severely abridge selections to fit the format. With LP cast recordings, usually released as single discs, it was not rare for compromises to be made to fit the recording within the forty-to-fifty-minute time limit. For example, reprises, or minor songs might not be included.
By the 1980s, the rise of the compact disc with its 74-minute recording capacity (which was increased to 80 minutes in the 1990s) resulted in improvements in cast recordings, which were now usually capable of including all songs, the full overture and entr’acte, and, when appropriate, lead-in dialogue to the songs.
In recent years, some cast recordings have been recorded live, but maintaining perfect quality. This is due to theaters that contain recording studios within. What is often a vibrant stage performance, however, often does not translate as such to discs and these recordings lack the heightened sparkle that leading album producers can bring to studio made cast albums.
[edit] Alternate versions
It is often the case that many cast recordings may be made for the same show. In addition to the recording of the cast of the original production, later high-profile productions may also produce cast recordings: for example, a recording by the cast of the first London production of a show that originated on Broadway, or of the first Broadway cast of a show that originated off-Broadway, or of the cast of a revival produced many decades later than the original production.
For some musicals created before cast recordings became the norm, studio cast recordings are all that exist to document the original productions' orchestrations. Such studio cast recordings have been made of many early musical comedies by the Gershwins, Vincent Youmans and Rodgers and Hart.
[edit] Terms
Original cast: the premiere or original cast of the production. (Original Broadway cast; original London cast; original Toronto cast, etc) and can include revivals as well as first productions.
Studio cast: assembled by a record company. In the early days the studio cast singers were often lesser known performers with good singing voices, usually joined by one fairly well known star. Mary Martin made a number of studio cast recordings for Columbia in the early 1950s including Babes in Arms, Girl Crazy and Anything Goes. More recent studio albums have tended to be note-complete recreations of the original orchestrations often with opera singers taking the leads such as EMI's recordings of Brigadoon and Show Boat.
Soundtracks: This term came into use in the late 1940s when MGM started releasing albums of songs from their movie musicals that were recorded directly from the soundtracks. Although these albums sold well they were marred by a flat boxy sound, as the listening environment in a huge movie palace is far different from the acoustics of a standard living room. Some soundtrack albums, such as those of Oklahoma! and Carousel, may include brief portions or even overtures that differ markedly from those in the finished film; as an example, at the end of the film Carousel, Gene Lockhart, as the town doctor, recites the opening phrase (over music) of "You'll Never Walk Alone", upon which the chorus of graduates takes up the refrain, but Shirley Jones, who plays Julie in the film, does not join in until the last few bars of the song. On the soundtrack album finale, Jones begins the song - over the same musical accompaniment heard in the film - and sings it all the way through, with the chorus seeming to join her in the song, rather than the other way around.
Occasionally, alternate takes of a musical number may be issued on a soundtrack album; an example is the song "Pore Jud is Daid" in the film Oklahoma!. The film was literally made twice in a row , first in Todd-AO, and then in Cinemascope, as it was impossible in those days to show a Todd-AO film on a standard widescreen. While the sung portions of "Pore Jud is Daid" were exactly the same as those heard in both versions of the film, the spoken passages, in which Gordon MacRae comically yet mercilessly taunts Rod Steiger about the funeral service that would be held if Steiger were to die, were not. The monophonic verrsion of the album, released first, used the soundtrack as heard in the Cinemascope release of the film. However, the film had been made in six-track stereophonic sound, which made it possible for Capitol Records to release a stereo edition of the album in 1958. This later album features that same dialogue passage as heard in the Todd-AO version of the film, and here MacRae's speech inflections are noticeably different.
In the case of the 1956 film Carousel, the song "If I Loved You" contains a spoken passage (coincidentally, also spoken by Gordon MacRae), which, like the one in Oklahoma!, actually sounds different from that heard in the film, although the dialogue is exactly the same. However, the sung portion of the song on the album was taken from the soundtrack, including a brief portion that was deleted before the film's release. (Many soundtrack albums of musicals contain songs, or portions of songs that were deleted before the films were released. In the case of Carousel, there are two songs on the soundtrack album which are not in the film; in the case of The King and I, there are three. Finian's Rainbow and Chicago each contain a song that was cut from the movie before the film was sent out to theatres.)
Still, the majority of soundtrack albums are recorded directly from the film, and are, contrary to some claims, not "recreations"; examples of albums which sound exactly like an edited version of the music to the film are the soundtrack to the classic Julie Andrews movie The Sound of Music, the soundtrack to the 1962 film The Music Man, and the soundtrack albums of Walt Disney's animated classics.
The performers who appear in Broadway shows sing the score live each night and when they make a cast album it is recorded in a studio and produced with the home listener in mind. While it is perfectly correct to call a movie soundtrack a "cast recording" since it does have the performances of the film cast, it is wrong to call a cast recording a "soundtrack".
Sometimes, the soundtrack of a film released in mono sound will be re-mixed into stereo simply to boost album sales. Such was the case with the 1966 documentary John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums, and with two soundtrack albums made from Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet. In these cases, however, the re-mixing for the album resulted in true stereo, not the fake one inflicted on so many pre-hi-fi albums which were (as the album covers boasted) "Electonically Rechanneled for Stereo".
[edit] Major label cast albums
[edit] Decca
This is the label that more or less began the trend in North America. They released 78-rpm album sets of: Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, A Connecticut Yankee, One Touch of Venus, Carmen Jones, Bloomer Girl, Song of Norway, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Mister, and Lost in the Stars. Many of these were transferred to LP in 1949/1950 although sometimes songs were abridged or left out completely. The label added more titles to their cast album library in the early 1950s: Guys and Dolls, The King and I, Wonderful Town, Seventh Heaven, On Your Toes and Ankles Aweigh.
Starting in 1949 Decca re-released the best selling of these albums on LP and in the late 1950s began offer electronically enhanced for stereo editions, which sounded thin and hollow.
The label was out of the business of recording new cast albums by the end of the 1950s. Decca was bought by MCA and in the early 1970s many of these titles were re-released on the MCA label, all using the fake stereo masters.
MCA released many of their classic shows on CD in the 1990s, going back to original master discs and tapes to generate excellent sounding (and complete) remasters of the originals. When MCA and Polygram were merged into the new Universal Music Group, a new label Decca Broadway was born. Decca Broadway re-mastered and reissued virtually every cast album in the old Decca catalogue including many rare titles that had not been available in almost 50 years. Decca Broadway has also recorded recent hits including: Wicked, Monty Python's Spamalot, and Spring Awakening. Wicked, in particular has been a big seller for the label and continues to sell well. Although they are being selective about what they record, Decca Broadway plans to continue making cast albums, including the new Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein. As of October 2007 some of the slower-selling catalogue titles have been deleted, and it seems likely that as time goes on the more obscure shows will vanish from the catalogue. Collectors are advised to pick up older, more obscure titles now while they can still be found.
[edit] Capitol
Capitol recorded St. Louis Woman in 1946, mainly because lyricist Johnny Mercer was one of the label's founders. It wasn't until the 1950s, however, that the label began bidding for cast album rights. Their first few choices were generally not big hits: Flahooley, Top Banana, Three Wishes for Jamie, and the revival of Of Thee I Sing. They finally got a hit show in 1953 with Cole Porter's Can-Can, which remained in print until the end of the LP era. An even bigger hit came along in 1957 with The Music Man, which reached the #1 spot on the Billboard charts and stayed there for 12 weeks. It was also the label's first stereo cast album. They scored another bestseller in 1964 when Barbra Streisand's label Columbia Records passed on recording Funny Girl. Capitol recorded it, and became a million seller. Without a TV/radio network affiliation (such as Columbia had with CBS and RCA with NBC) Capitol sometimes had to content themselves with also ran shows. The 1960s found them with recording rights to a number of minor hits: No Strings, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Golden Boy but mostly they got flop shows: Sail Away, Kwamina, The Gay Life, Skyscraper, Walking Happy, Zorba. They did record Stephen Sondheim's Broadway debut as a composer with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but in 1971 they came under fire for refusing to record the complete score of Sondheim's Follies as a 2-LP set. The label executives complained that "cast albums don't sell" ignoring the ongoing success of Funny Girl and The Music Man and the fact that many of their shows had been outright flops. Follies was truncated to a single LP missing four songs and abridging many of the others. It would be Capitol's last original cast album.
EMI's classical division took over the Capitol Broadway cast catalogue in 1992 and reissued all 40 of the cast albums on the Broadway Angel label. The CDs were well packaged with booklets containing detailed notes and production photos. Although only a half dozen of these releases are still in print as of October 2007, most of the deleted titles have been reissued by DRG keeping the scores available for collectors.
Broadway Angel has recorded some recent shows such as: Crazy for You, Passion, The Color Purple and Curtains, the 1994 Broadway revival of Carousel, as well as the Bernadette Peters revivals of Annie Get Your Gun and Gypsy.
[edit] RCA Victor
RCA Victor entered the cast album field in 1947 with two hits and a miss: Brigadoon, High Button Shoes, and Rodgers & Hammerstein's Allegro. Brigadoon was a big seller and remains in print on CD today. High Button Shoes was a hit show but the album did not do well. RCA's budget label, Camden, reissued it on LP in 1958 and Victor re-released it in 1965. At that time they also did the first LP transfer of Allegro.
As the LP era dawned, Victor competed with Columbia for cast album rights. Their first LP release was Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam but because the star Ethel Merman was under contract to Decca, she was replaced on Victor's album by Dinah Shore. The album was a failure and was out of print until Red Seal reissued it in 1977. Victor did better with Paint Your Wagon, and Damn Yankees!, but had their share of flops: Seventeen, Make a Wish, Hazel Flagg, and Pipe Dream, along with minor hits Me and Juliet, Happy Hunting, New Girl in Town, Jamaica, Redhead, Take Me Along, Do Re Mi, Wildcat, and Milk and Honey.
In the 1960s Victor did better with the Tony award winners How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Hello Dolly, and Fiddler on the Roof. They hit the top of the charts with Hair in 1968. During this time it also released five of the cast albums from the Music Theatre of Lincoln Center revivals, The Merry Widow with Patricia Munsel, Show Boat with Barbara Cook, Constance Towers, Stephen Douglass, David Wayne and William Warfield, Kismet with Alfred Drake, Annie Get Your Gun with Ethel Merman, Carousel with John Raitt and The King and I with Rise Stevens and Darren McGavin.
In 1976 Thomas Sheppard left Columbia Records for RCA's Classical division and under his guidance RCA Red Seal eclipsed Columbia as the dominant label for cast albums. Sheppard recorded Sondheim's scores for Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George and Merrily We Roll Along, the 1977 Broadway revival recording of The King and I, as well as the hits Ain't Misbehavin', 42nd Street, and La Cage aux Folles.
In 1985 Sheppard staged an all-star concert to make a complete recording of Sondheim's Follies. When pre-production costs escalated, label president Jose Menendez wanted to cancel the recording. Sheppard held his ground and won the battle. The 2 LP set was a bestseller and made profit within a month of release. Early in 1986 Sheppard resigned and went to MCA.
With the rise of compact discs in the late 1980s, RCA was bought out by BMG. At this time Bill Rosenfield headed up a new label called RCA Victor to re-release the label's vast catalogue of show albums on CD and to record new shows including: Into The Woods, Jerome Robbins' Broadway, Grand Hotel, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Titanic, Steel Pier, Ragtime, Fosse, The Full Monty, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Urinetown, and Avenue Q. During this time RCA Victor also released the cast recordings for the Broadway revivals of Anything Goes (1987), Guys and Dolls (1992), Chicago (1996), Candide (1997), Cabaret (1998), The Sound of Music (1998), You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown (1999), and Man of La Mancha (2002).
Many of the older more obscure titles were deleted in 1999/2000 but the catalogue remains active. The merger between Sony and BMG in 2004 has resulted in a new label called Masterworks Broadway although at this point it is unclear as to what will happen with the extensive cast album catalogue owned by the new company.
[edit] Columbia
Columbia's first original Broadway cast album was the 1946 revival of Show Boat soon followed by an album of Finian's Rainbow. In 1948 Columbia introduced the Lp to the record market and soon offered LP editions of their 78-rpm sets. The first cast album recorded as an LP was Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, which was a big hit on records and was followed by the blockbuster Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. The producer of these albums was Goddard Lieberson who brought unquestionable taste and skill to translating a Broadway show to records. He didn’t just record the songs. It was his goal to make the album an enjoyable listening experience for home listeners who, quite often, had not even seen the shows. Recorded in an old converted church on 30th street in New York City, Columbia's albums had a lush, open, spacious sound. When stereo came along in the late 1950s, Lieberson used stereo placement to enhance the performances but avoided any gimmicks. As a result Columbia's albums of Kismet, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, and Flower Drum Song remain classics in the field.
In 1956 Lieberson persuaded CBS to put up the entire capitalization for Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady. This ensured that Columbia got the cast album rights and that CBS held all film and TV rights to the property. The show was the biggest hit of the decade, selling out for nearly 6 years on Broadway. The original cast album reached #1 on the Billboard charts, and stayed on the charts for nine years. Because the Broadway cast had been recorded only in monaural, when the cast opened it in London Columbia re-recorded it in stereo. The label later offered the film soundtrack and a 1976 20th anniversary revival cast albums as well as recordings in French, Italian, Spanish and Hebrew.
The profits from the My Fair Lady album financed many of Columbia's subsequent original cast and classical recordings.
The label recorded Frank Loesser's near sung-through musical The Most Happy Fella, virtually complete and issued it as a 3-record set as well as a single Lp of highlights. Lieberson made sure that important scores were recorded even if the shows were not box office successes. Thanks to his foresight the original casts of Candide, Anyone Can Whistle, and Goldilocks are preserved.
Columbia recorded as many hits as they did flops - Gypsy, The Sound of Music, Bye Bye Birdie, Camelot, Sweet Charity, Mame, 1776, Cabaret, Company, A Little Night Music, and Annie.
In the 1980s the label began to withdraw from the cast album field as RCA began to dominate it. Sony bought CBS records in the late 1980s and began reissuing many older cast albums on the Sony Broadway label in 1991-94 and later the Sony Columbia Broadway Masterworks labels. The few, mainly obscure flops, that Sony chose not to reissue were farmed out to DRG and other specialty labels. As of October 2007 almost all of the Sony titles are still in point although as supplies run out the label is quietly removing slow-selling titles from the catalogue. Gone are Irving Berlin's Mr. President, Noel Coward's The Girl Who Came to Supper, and the Sondheim & Rodgers musical Do I Hear a Waltz?.
The merger between Sony and BMG in 2004 has resulted in a new label called Masterworks Broadway although at this point it is unclear as to what will happen with the extensive cast album catalogue owned by the new company.
[edit] Other labels
ABC – This label was active in the cast album field in the 1960s. It was bought by MCA and is now owned by Universal Music Group.
Disney Records - This label, owned by Disney, has recorded cast albums for the musical adaptations of their films, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Tarzan, Mary Poppins, and more recently, The Little Mermaid
DRG – Hugh Fordin's Discovery Record Group records Broadway cast albums and Cabaret performances. The label also reissues material from Capitol and Columbia.
Fynsworth Alley – Although now defunct, the label reissued some Columbia albums and recorded some solo artists.
Kapp – an MCA label now owned by Universal
Polydor – Part of the Polygram group that includes London (U.S. label for British Decca), Deutsche Grammophon and Philips. Polydor released a few show CDs under license from John Yap's TER label in UK but these were quickly deleted. Polydor also released a lot of the cast recordings from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals through the Really Useful Records label. Polygram merged with MCA to form Universal Music Group, and many of the cast recordings that Polydor has released are released in the US on the Decca Broadway label.
Geffen - Although Geffen is a pop label, it released the cast recordings for five shows of which David Geffen was an investor. It released the original off-Broadway cast recording and the film soundtrack of Little Shop of Horrors, the original Broadway cast recordings of Dreamgirls and Les Misérables, and the original Broadway cast recording of Cats. Geffen also released the London cast recordings of Cats and Miss Saigon in the USA.
PS Classic – In a few short years PS Classics has build an impressive catalogue of cast albums including Grey Gardens, A Year with Frog and Toad and the revivals of 110 In the Shade, Fiddler on the Roof, Company, Assassins, and Nine.
Sh-k-Boom & Ghostlight – Both are owned by Kurt Deutsch with Ghostlight having recently become a dominant player in the cast album field. They have released albums of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and The Drowsy Chaperone.
Varese-Sarabande – Established as a label for movie scores, they did branch out into cast albums in the 1990s recording a number of Broadway and off-Broadway shows. The label has re-organized and is now focused on film scores only. Many of the Broadway shows have been deleted.
[edit] See also
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